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Ban sleeps more than almost any other member of the Seven Deadly Sins, though the reason is not due to any laziness nor from the sheer amount of alcohol he consumes almost daily, much to popular belief. No, the reason for Ban’s frequent bouts of sleep is because his dreams are the only place where Elaine is alive and well before his eyes, just as he’d always picture her to be. She had been practically bursting with life when they met…. In the former bandit’s dreams, the guardian fairy of the Fountain of Youth is alive and thriving, her golden eyes as radiant as the sun itself and her smile as devastatingly bright as the plants in her devoted care. In his dreams, he manages to tear himself away from Elaine’s side, impossible as it would have been in their gruesome reality, before that dreadfully fateful day when the Red Demon had come to destroy the forest. Elaine was thus able to use the water from the Fountain of Youth to heal herself as Ban had originally intended in the real world, restoring her precious life amongst the forest’s destruction.
True, in those dreams without Ban there to help fight the Red Demon, the forest would suffer tremendous losses, but at least its beautiful, genuine, and kindhearted guardian would survive past the attack since she did not kiss the water from the Fountain of Youth into a wretch of a bandit’s mouth, urging him to stay alive. That had been one of the gravest mistakes in his tormented reality, one he has vowed as the Fox Sin of Greed to try and rectify in his quest to resurrect Elaine. In those dreams, Ban has his one form of escape from a world without Elaine’s innocence, grace, intelligence, and beauty. In sleep, he returns to the Fairy King’s Forest after earning enough money to take Elaine around the kingdom of Brittania on the tour he had promised her she’d experience to sample all the different ales from his collection book. She relishes in being alive, happy, and smiling by his side through it all.
When Ban dreams of Elaine, their first kiss is everything he has fantasized it could have been, his large hand cupping protectively behind the back of Elaine’s head, a silent vow to always protect her as he gently conveys all his passion brimming and burning just beneath the surface. When Ban dreams of Elaine, their first kiss isn’t one of forced circumstances, to save the other’s life as they both lie bleeding out in the Fairy King’s Forest. In every fantasy Ban manages to dream up, he steals Elaine away from the forest just as he promised, taking her with him across the continent and beyond on his vast travels. In every fantasy Ban manages to dream up, Elaine is wholly and irrevocably his, never to be parted from the Fox Sin of Greed's side again. Waking from such dreams to a world without her is agony.