-Date Unknown,

Time Unknown-

The world was a waterfall of darkness, coated in nothing but monotones as far as the eye could see. Nothing existed outside of the small patch of land around the house that should've had a pink roof. The river gushed by, pitch dark and nearly soundless, muffled unnaturally, like liquid cotton.

Natallia sat by an open window boredly, humming a song by Weird Al as she lounged on what should've been a blood red armchair. Everything outside of her walls was a dull gray hellscape, and she knew she couldn't leave. So, she simply had to wait, hoping the horrors would pass. Perhaps today would be the day that the mysteries of her little tourist trap of a home may lure in some unsuspecting entertainment.

A dark weight slammed against her front door.

Ah, speak of the devil. This should be interesting.

But before she could rise again, she heard the closest window shatter. Bones tumbled through, and quickly scampered along to hide under one of her many flower-shaped tables on all fours. A potted plant perched atop it fell on its side. He had made himself comfortable there before she could even utter a word.

She blinked, before shrugging, and simply going along with it. She slid under the table with him.

"Hey man," she said. "Sup."

"They found me," he replied, shivering. "They found me they found me they found me they found me—"

Oh dear. Her friend seemed to be in a slight bit of a pickle.

She rose up from underneath the dirt and flowers, righted her felled white tulips, grabbed a strange mask, and made her way to the front door. She donned her disguise easily, strange antenna-like appendages and yellowed teeth that she didn't think were there before protruding from her twisted new face. She noted her fingertips were quickly turning a lime green shade, the color cascading up her arms like the scales of a color-changing chameleon.

She didn't really care.

She opened the door.

She was met with a bunny and a fox, neither of which she knew. She knew of them, though.

Before they could even begin to speak, Natallia took in a deep breath from her diaphragm, gathering up all the air she could, and bellowed at the top of her lungs.

"WHAT are you DOING in MY SWAMP?!"

Terrified, the two detectives scampered away.

A rare smile fell upon the creature's face.

Slowly, she removed the grinning mask. The green color left her arms as quickly as it came. She sighed and made her way back to her friend.

"Hey man," she said again. "They're gone."

"They found me they found me—"

"No, they didn't. The only thing they found here was a lifetime of future therapy."

"Fuck—" He gasped out, lips parting to reveal a mouthful of jelly teeth and an orange peel tongue. Orange ooze dripped from his face. "I'm going to die."

This, finally, caught Natallia's attention.

"Woaaah, siiick!" She grinned, leaning forward and poking at his jaw. "Hey, you ever wonder what you taste like? I can help you find out!"

For a brief moment, sunlight flooded through the window, and the world outside was lit up in earthy greens and sky blues. The light filled up Bones' eyes, highlighting the confusion, and then, amusement.

He let out an annoyed laugh, punching her arm gently. "Haha, be serious you clown! Come on, don't you know how to set an atmosphere?"

"What do you think I'm doing now?" Her tone lowered into something sultry as she smirked, winking. "I'm setting an atmosphere, alright. By flirting! I'm flirting with you!"

"Oh, I thought you were gonna eat me."

"Haha, nah," Natallia smiled. "That'd only kill you faster."

"Oh, right," Bones blinked. "I'm going to die, aren't I?"

The sky darkened. Everything was gray again. She remembered suddenly the hellscape she'd found herself in.

"No," she assured with widened eyes. Her heart pounded in an anxious rhythm. "No way."

"How do you know?" He whimpered. Darkness crept into the corners again. "How do you know?"

"I…" She thought for a moment, before declaring with confidence, "I don't want you to!"

A flick of light, and a splash of red colored the room.

"That's not a good reason at all, you bozo!" He barked.

"Sure it is," she smiled, clapping her hands together. "If I don't want it to happen bad enough, then it won't happen. That's how things work here. I just need to wish for it with all of my heart!"

"Oh," he blinked, shoulders untensing. "... Then we should probably get me fixed up then, huh?"

"Well, I'm afraid I'm not medically qualified for that," Natallia sighed with a shrug. "I don't know if all of the years of dental school in the world could help me fix whatever's going on there."

Bones tilted his head, jam gurgling past his lips.

"What'd you even do, anyway? How'd your teeth get like that?" She asked, squinting curiously at him.

"What— my mouth is the least of our worries right now!" He barked.

Natallia broke out into a huge, stupid smile. "Haha, that's what she said!"

He crossed his arms. "Not the time."

"You sure? I think it's the time. Seriously, though, what'd you actually do? Drink one too many cans of Fanta? Eat a cursed candy bar that changes everything you eat into fruit-flavored goop? Smoke orange meth?"

"What— no! Where would I even get meth around here?!"

"Walter Fruitwell Orange?"

"Get real," he huffed. "I just smoked the oranges whole. No hard drugs involved."

"I see. That makes perfect sense."

"Anyway, can you please just help me already? I'm kinda bleeding out here."

"Wait, what?" Natallia blanched. "How? Who did this to you?! I swear in the name of the holy citrus gods, if I find them—"

"It was your window, dipshit. You didn't open the door fast enough, remember?" He growled.

"Oh. Uh. Oops, sorry." She scratched the back of her neck with a hand.

"Don't worry about it, just help please."

"Right."

They made their way to the bathroom. Without much fanfare, Bones yanked a shard of glass out of his face. An orange substance leaked out, too liquidy to be more jam. Natallia suspected it was orange juice, but she didn't feel like licking him to find out.

"... Do you ever wonder about how I taste?" She asked, the question lacking the flirtatious undertones her previous taste-related musings possessed.

"Hmm… Not really," he shrugged. "You probably just taste like blood. I already know what that tastes like, so there's not much to wonder about."
"You've tasted blood?" She asked incredulously. "What are you, a vampire?"
"No, but I do floss way too hard after brushing my teeth."
"But your mouth-blood just tastes like citrus, doesn't it?"
He paused. "... Hey, yeah! You're right! Geez, now I've gotta know what you taste like!"
Despite herself, she felt her cheeks warm a bit. In order to distract herself from the feeling, she quickly replied, "Well, you get first dibs on cannibalizing me, then, kay?"

He grinned, cheeks full of goop. Orange liquid streamed from his open wound, staining his fur with renewed intensity. "Awesome."

She finally broke, bursting into horrified shudders at the sight.

"God, fuck, I hate blood…" She groaned. "I'm so glad you aren't bleeding blood right now. Just imagining what that would look like with red blood is making me feel sick."

"Isn't the fact that I've turned into an orange man a bit more frightening than the idea of me having regular red blood?" He asked with an oddly condescending note in his voice.

Natallia thought for a moment.

"... Maybe if you were a pumpkin man instead, I'd be a little more afraid."

The canine shook his head, sighing. "No way. Then you'd just come up with cutesy pumpkin nicknames for me instead," he frowned, gooey teeth visible.

"Oh, yeah, I would, huh?" Natallia realized. "... Well, I can give you orange nicknames, at least."

He hummed affirmatively. Then, Natallia got to work. She gestured vaguely behind her strange citrus friend, and compliantly, he hopped up on the bathroom counter. It was a bit too small for him to sit on comfortably. Nevertheless, he tried to stay still.

In a blink, his shirt was off. Natallia patched up his wounds, removing the glass and leaving a cute bandaid on every cut.

"... Hey, do you think if you get me some more oranges to smoke, it'll fix literally everything?"

"What? No. Those oranges are half the reason you're in this mess in the first place."

"They are?"

"Yeah. That's why Zootopia was after you."

"Oh."

A brief pause in dialogue ensued. Bandaid after bandaid after bandaid was pressed to the dog's body until his eyes started to grow hazy. Eventually, he slumped over, leaning against her.

"... Hey dude, you good?"

"I'm so scared. I'm so scared all the time."

The atmosphere shifted.

"I know," the woman whispered, paling and burying her face in the ghostly white fur of her friend's shoulder. "I know."

"I'm so scared of doing my performance. I can hardly sleep at all," her companion said.

"I know," she choked out as she clutched the warm sides of the figure tightly.

"I'm so scared of you," the person she was leaning into said. "And I'm so scared for you, too. I never used to be afraid around you like this before."

"I know," she confessed as she held the body closer, her fingers digging into the bare flesh of its shoulders. "But that's a good thing, right? Before we met Bones and all the others, we never worried about ourselves at all. So that means things are getting better for us, right?"

"... Wait. Aren't I supposed to be Bones?"

Natallia paused. Imperceptibly, skin became fur in her hands again. Her eyes widened. "Oh, yeah! Oops!"

"How'd you forget who I was?!" He demanded, sitting up and looking her in the eyes. He took her by the shoulders. "You really forgot who I was while I was in the middle of me bleeding out?!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" She squeaked, chuckling nervously. "It won't happen again, I'll make sure of it!"

"It better not, or I might actually wind up dying," he huffed.

"Right," she nodded. "Don't you worry, it won't come to that. I care about you the most, so it shouldn't be very hard to keep track of you."

He blushed, an orange hue blooming across his fur. "You… You mean it?"

She nodded. "Of course."

He blushed harder. He tugged another shard of glass out of his face shyly.

The two fell into silence for a while. A sleepy feeling started to wash over Natallia. As she was patching up the last of his wounds, she began to sing under her breath.

"As cold as an old ice cream sandwich, as focused as Mr. Miyagi. You poke at your phone posting aerial photos of you and your smoothie. I can't keep on making you happy, 'cause you got issues with your daddy. I miss ramen noodles and laughing at you and your gran in home movies."

"But I wish I could show you more of yourself, I wish I could make you somebody else. But I left it way too late. Are you stuck in your own ways?"

She looked up at him, pressing the last of the band aids to his cheeks.

"I'm begging, hands, knees, please, tangerine, come on back to me. Got what I need, tangerine, do this for me. Hands, knees, please, tangerine, sugar, honey, sweet. Got what I need, tangerine…"

"... Doesn't that song not exist yet?" He asked, a bit breathless.

"Doesn't matter," she said in a whispery sigh.

The blush continued to creep down his neck. Natallia grew distracted once again, looking at his mouth.

"... I want to help you figure out how you taste," she mumbled.

He said nothing, closing his eyes and leaning in.

Their lips connected.

Natallia focused hard.

She tasted… Nothing. There was only a vague fabric smell and the phantom sensation of jelly in her mouth.

She broke the embrace, blinking. She couldn't make out his eyes anymore.

"Oh." She took a slow step back, the obvious conclusion finally clicking in her mind. "You're not real."

It all fell to darkness in an instant.


Natallia woke up in a cold sweat. She jolted upright within seconds.

After that, she didn't move an inch. Her eyes, wide and empty, stared blankly into the mattress. Her brain spun, mind racing around in wild circles. It bounded against the walls of her skull, a caged tiger, spinning and spinning and spinning in its confines. The dream echoed distantly in her memory, repeating endlessly. She dug her hands into her hair.

She recalled her dream once more from the beginning, the contents finally sinking in properly.

She let out a loud, wild laugh, choking over it as it spilled from her throat harshly.

"What the fuck," she declared aloud between gasping breaths. "Actually what the fuck was even that?!"

A feverish energy swept her up. Yesterday, if someone had asked Natallia what she thought she'd be worrying about at this hour, she would've answered confidently, and the answer would not have been this. Nevertheless, she darted to find her journal.

She picked it up. It had a brown and gold cover and a dried four-leaf clover inside.

She jotted down her dream with a glittery pink pen to make sure she wouldn't forget a single detail. No way in hell would she let herself forget what she'd just experienced.

When she finally finished, she closed the book shut, ink practically still wet. She buried her face in her hands.

"... What the fuck," she repeated again. Then, she burst out into disbelieving cackles. Her sides hurt. "What the fuck was that?! Oh man, I gotta tell everyone everything!"

She paused.

"Well, except for the real grisly stuff... And the weird stuff about whatever the hell's up with my subconscious... And all the me kissing the weird orange Dream Bones stuff..."

She paused again.

"... I'll definitely tell them he smoked oranges, though," she grinned. "Man, I knew that nap yesterday was a bad idea! What the hell."
She shook her head with an exhausted smile, sighing. She knew melatonin made her head a bit weird, but she didn't think the effects would be that strange. Still, at least her odd drug-induced dream was funny this time around.

She leaned back in her chair, satisfied. Then, she stole a glance at her calendar.

-March 5th,

2017-

She looked at it for a long moment, mind still weighed down with the last lingering traces of sleep. Her eyes traced over the date, then over the huge slash through the scribbled text of the day before. Her gaze flicked back to the current date, lingering. Then, she scanned over the next six days, all highlighted in bright pink and adorned with cutesy doodles.

It wasn't until she registered the distant sound of bustling people in the town's square that she remembered why it was all important.

She jolted, eyes widening.

"OH, SHIT!" She yelped, scrambling to get ready. She threw on her clothes, a black and white polka-dot shirt, black jeans, and a bright red raincoat, cursing all-the-while. Sun streamed through the windows, reflecting off of the rubber. She practically leaped downstairs, muttering a continual stream of, "oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck—"

She stopped at the doorway, taking in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders.
"Here we go!" She called.
And with that, she opened the door.

A/N: Well. There's the obligatory dream chapter. Hope that was fun.

The song included in this chapter is Tangerine by Glass Animals. Full credit to them for that!

This one was hard to write and harder to proofread, for obvious reasons, lmao. I... Don't know what to say about it, or where most of this came from, honestly. It took a lot of inspiration from the original version, but I tried to make it, uh. Distinct. Hopefully it was funny? And not TOO incoherent while still feeling strange and jarring? I don't know much about dream symbolism, or what any of this might mean through that lens, but I hope it provided some insight into Natallia's subconscious nonetheless. She's, uh. Yeah. Don't read TOO much into it, but this definitely says some things about her brain. This was incredibly strange, and silly, and weirdly depressing, and I sincerely hope you all enjoyed it.

I also really emphasized an old staple of the original version of this fic, that being reference humor. Since I largely wrote the original back in middle school, I relied on reference humor a LOT, without really understanding how to use it effectively. I still don't, really, but I hope it at least fits in slightly better here in this weird dream chapter rather than just sprinkled about randomly and without purpose in every other sentence. Even though, to be fair, it IS sort of just sprinkled in randomly and without purpose here, too. But in my defense, that's just how dreams are, so it's somewhat justified, hopefully. Regardless, it was a decently fun change of pace writing-wise. Anyway, for every reference to a random bit of media I included here that you spot, you get one point, and whoever finds the most gets to be proud of themselves. There isn't any other prize. Bonus points if you catch something I didn't intend/remember about. Have fun.

Hopefully this all felt worthwhile to read. I worry that a dream chapter like this can feel like it adds nothing to the plot, and that it's just a waste of time. Not that the other chapters have been too plot-heavy, but still. And after the delay in uploading this chapter, which I'll discuss more later, well. I worry that this was, like. An annoying change of pace. Hopefully it wasn't. Even still, because of that general worry of mine, I figured this chapter needed a little extra something. That's why I decided to add a small glimpse back into 2017! Shocking! I decided that that'd be a feature of every dream chapter, so they'd be a bit more spicy. That's half of the reason I decided to add timestamps at the start of each chapter, honestly, lmao. The timeline is a bit tough to keep track of for me (the document on that looks slightly nightmarish, didn't organize it great), but I hope it makes sense to you all so far. Regardless, I hope this glimpse into the "future" has helped build intrigue, and has helped to shed a bit of light on the events of the prologue.

Anyway, on a more serious note, you might've noticed that this chapter is VERY late. As I suspected, school's been BUSY, but I didn't realize just how busy I'd be. This was supposed to be up last week at the latest, but here we are, unfortunately. My apologies about that. In light of that, I'm officially dropping the upload rate to once a month. The next chapter should be up somewhere around October 14th. It's unfortunate, but I've gotta prioritize school. That said, I don't plan on dropping this fic, and I'm still very excited to share it with you all. Please do bear with me, and thank you for your support! :)

I'll see you all again with Chapter 7, or Chapter 8 counting the prologue (which I don't), I guess. Look forward to another dream chapter in six more months, lmao. That one's prewritten already, and let's just say it's a bit more narratively coherent than this one. Note that this doesn't mean it'll be less strange. I'll leave it at that.

Thanks for reading, as always! :D