Don't Wake Me

Word Count: 567

Prompts: Seeking Solace – I'm Not Awake Yet – Island Oasis

Summary: Spoilers for chapter 34. When it's you I'm dreaming of, I don't want to wake up.

The only solace Echo ever got was from her dreams. It didn't mean that nighttime was her favorite time, because she didn't always get to sleep at night, for whatever reasons reaching from Vincent-sama visiting her room in the night or missions given to her for her to complete in the dark.

Dreams were the only places were she'd feel peace and sometimes 'happiness'. But that aspect didn't quite come alive until she met Oz.

She would see him in her dreams. He would take her hand and lead her along the pathways of the garden or island, depending on what her mind had decided to offer to her at the time that she was dreaming.

He would talk to her. Only stopping to take a breath now and then, but she didn't mind, she liked listening to the timbre of his voice. She felt that she would learn so much about him until she would wake up, only to remember that it was unreal and whatever the person talked to her about in her dreams couldn't truly be Oz's personality.

At one point, when she walked along with him in her dreams, she would start knowing that it wasn't real, and it left a weight of disappointment in her stomach, because it started to become hard to lose herself in her only oasis.

Even so, she never wanted to wake up from it. She could fool herself as long as need be.

But it always happened. The sunlight streaming through her window would wake her. Vincent-sama would wake her. The chattering of Noise in her head would wake her.

It always appeared that she couldn't stay asleep long enough when she would see Oz in her dreams. Something always seemed to interrupt the dreams faster than they would when she used to dream of other things.

Sometimes they would feel so vivid and authentic, that she would sometimes awaken herself with a jolt, momentarily stuck in a daze and she had to take the time to become re-aware of her surroundings. To remember what bed she was in and whose room she had ended up in that night.

She hated waking up in that way, because it was nigh impossible for her to fall back asleep. All she could do was close her eyes and remember things that they had talked about before they, too, slipped away, as the memories of dreams so often do.

Or sometimes, she would lie awake in her bed, not quite yet awake to the real world, and think about the feather that she had tucked away into the back of her drawer, away from Vincent-sama's prying eyes.

The feather was something that she would allow herself to look at, or sometimes never to even think about unless she knew that Noise was sound asleep. Otherwise, there was the chance that Noise would tattle about the location of the only item that she possessed from Oz.

No matter the absurdity of the thoughts; she would like to start truly having conversations with Oz, to learn his real personality, to know him. To walk along with him for real, just him and her. To never leave the dream come true.

But since she believed that a time like that would never come, she just had to find solace in her dreams.

Because the dreams were as good as they would ever get.