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For a long time, Adrien had wanted all his dreams to come true.
He would have given anything to finally be able to experience the sweetness, the bliss of the dream that plagued him every night for almost half a year after his mother died.
In a way, the idea Gabriel still clung to, that Emiie had simply disappeared one morning, hurt even more. Not even because of a selfless connection like thinking he would rather be a motherless child now than knowing she could be alive and suffering somewhere, even if he had gotten to that conclusion a long time ago.
It hurt because thinking, hoping Emilie had simply disappeared meant his dream still had a chance to come true, and knowing it most likely never would.
Hope was truly a dangerous thing.
Adrien would have loved to keep his steady even a little longer.
However, his young mind plagued with dreams seemed to have understood the nature of death more than his father had.
Thanks to that, Adrien kept clinging to the sweet comfort of the visions, to the lingering fictional warmth of his mother's arms and the hopeless hope that someday, somehow, his dream would come alive. Jump out of his brain, and make his mother inhale once again.
That was only for the first few months.
As time went by, he still longed for a glimpse of hope, but the truth established itself more alive with every day that went by when Emilie’s room was as empty as ever.
As much as it hurt to let go, Adrien knew it was for the better.
Soon, even if the ache that came with grief and loss didn’t disappear, it faded, up until the point where thinking about his mother did not bring pain, but the comfort of what once was. A memory to cherish.
Adrien’s dreams were no longer the unskippable scene where he would find her again, knowing damn well that the second he woke up it would all fade away like grains of sand under the strength of a tidal wave.
Instead, he began dreaming of the present.
Of his friends. The people he had found could care about him as much as he did about them.
Of his partner. The way in which he hoped she would one day hold the same level of affection he held for her.
Of every new person in his life, even if they appeared as nothing other than an extra.
Adrien had a lot of new people to dream about. Classmates, random civilians he met as Chat Noir either simply by sight or by saving them. People he happened to see around school, teachers, cleaning staff.
A year ago, Adrien would not have even thought he would get to know enough people to put a face to everyone in a crowd during a dream.
If he were very honest, Adrien would not have exactly expected that to be his assigned nightmare. Or at least, once he was able to actually sit and process every event of the past night.
While it had terrified him at that moment, freezing him and his brain enough that his first impulse was to call for help without even considering not being heard could easily be a catch of the nightmare, he would have expected something... stronger.
A cage with bars weak enough to be broken by his cataclysm?
The fear had paralyzed him. True.
But, the more he thought about it, the more things he found that could have had an impact dozens, hundreds of times harder on him.
Sure, the cage was something, and he could not call the fact that the Lucky Charm had somehow detached the worst of the memory in his mind anything less than a miracle, a blessing.
The thing was, it was odd, rather than scary, after the Charm.
It felt like as if some sort of dense fog had been placed, an invisible barrier that made him be able to recall the nightmare as if it were someone else's. He knew for a fact he had panicked, he had frozen, he had been so shook by it even after transforming there was a pressure inside of him that threatened with making him throw up if anything that resembled those damn bars even in the slightest made an appearance.
It felt like someone else's story. Someone else's experiences.
Although, as he came up with potential fears, each one more twisted than the previous one, he was more than grateful none of those had been the one.
Nightmare akumas were definitely not on his top 5 favorite type of akumas to fight.
~(X)~
The Lucky Charm worked in mysterious ways.
Every time he had been hit by a villain's deadly ray, it became clearer. Every time he and Ladybug fought someone who proved their minds to still be relatively pure.
Though, he didn't expect the hardest one to be the life od his dreams.
As much as he was not the biggest fan of the haze that came with rough akumas, Adrien would have given anything to be able to feel that detachment to the life he had just lived.
Yet again, the Lucky Charm's magic proved to be unpredictable. Would it be because it didn't interpretate what they had just lived as something worth of detaching from? Since it was not violent? Life threatening?
In a matter of a few seconds, he had seen what could have been.
If only Monarch had given out the Miraculous, he would have gotten to live that life.
He would have been able to leave. He would have been able to thrive.
Technically, he had.
The blow that came with the realization of the illusion was harder than any fall he had experienced, with and without the suit.
~(X)~
Yet again, Adrien found himself longing for the invisible barrier. For the separation. For the unexplainable something that allowed him to remember even the worst of falls and the worst of fights as if talking about the weather.
Under almost any other circumstance, he would have managed on his own. If not have been fine, at least managed.
However, the bright white walls and the incandescent light that came out of nowhere and everywhere, occasionally flickering and messing with his vision weren’t any other circumstance.
The flashing memory of holding a lifeless Ladybug in his arms, a last attempt at caring for what he could not preserve, the epitome of the opposite of his very essence, was not any other circumstance.
Every flicker of the lights made him shiver.
As if every time they faded, it would suddenly turn to red, and a billion stone statues would crumble to dust under the wind. As if every second of light made the pictures in his mind come alive.
He was not going to wish for his night visions to come true ever again.