Disclaimer: Not mine.
When the nightmares drag him away, his own screams echo in his ears. The darkness wraps around him, tugging and yanking, ripping him apart and hollowing him out. His screams ripple through the pulsing chaos of fear, feeding the nightmares as they trample his weakened body. His hoarse voice chokes until the sound dies, but the screams have long drowned out the world, and all he knows is his raw, wretched voice ringing through the murky depths of his shredded mind.
It never ends. It will never end.
But then a blast of cold comes from nowhere.
Someone shouts, but he barely hears it over the sound of the screams in his head.
A harsh wind pushes against him, and he's already so tightly curled in on himself that all he can do is tremble.
Another shout. Not as loud this time.
He opens his eyes.
Something bright and cold bursts out from above him. The light hurts his eyes, but he can still see as it slashes through the seething mass of nightmares and fearlings surrounding him.
Another burst of ice and they scatter, leaving him alone, a mere lump trembling on the ground. (How pitiful, something small inside of him says.)
A voice, soft and concerned, nearly penetrates the fear engulfing his mind, but it's too far away.
It asks a question, and suddenly he has to get away. He can't handle this. He's not safe. He's never safe. He will never be safe.
He runs.
(He used to be better than this.)
He flees into the shadows, darting here and there, narrowly dodging nightmares and fearlings and moonlight. He runs.
He runs and runs, and the fear and terror is all he knows. It rules him. (Irony's a bitch, a bitter little voice whispers in the back of his head.)
But then he sees it. A tiny little light, bright enough for him to see but dim enough to bear. A nightlight. A believer.
At last he can breathe.
He's in a small, dark walk-in closet, surrounded by stuffed animals and hangers with tiny little dresses on them. The door is cracked open. He takes a shuddering breath and peeks out.
A little girl lies sleeping in bed, long brown hair spread across her pillow. Golden dreamsand dances above her head, shifting into a little girl as he watches. The little dreamgirl skips along a river, lifting up tiny rocks and clapping her hands together when she finds something interesting. A tall male figure follows her, and she shows him what she's found, dancing circles around him as he looks at it.
Pitch withdraws and sinks to the floor, gathering himself. He recognizes her, but he doesn't know from where. He breathes in deeply. He's weak and tired, but something about being in the presence of his last believer steadies him and quiets the screams inside his head.
He sits there in her presence until tendrils of sunlight start to creep across her bedroom floor. He peeks out of the closet, as if to reassure himself of her existence, and sees her still sleeping peacefully. He quietly shuts the door and closes his weary eyes, then sinks back into the deepest shadows of the tiny closet.
It's time for him to rest, and this will do (for now).
He wakes in the middle of the next night tired and completely unrested. He's fading and fading fast. He needs to act.
He needs to create some fear. Fear other than his own.
He peeks out of the closet and sees the little girl's silhouette covered by blankets. He frowns at the little nightlight on the wall by the bottom of the bed. It's annoying. He ought to turn the bloody thing off. He glides over and reaches for it, only to pause in realization.
There is no dreamsand floating over the figure in the bed. He leans over the girl, figuring that a waking scare will be even better than the fear of a dream. He starts to tug the sheet back and feels the fear in the room mount. He feels it in his bones, and it's beautiful. He pulls the sheet back to reveal a head of messy hair followed by-
stuffed animals.
The figure in the bed is made up of stuffed animals.
What in the world-
Something tugs on his sleeve.
He jerks back, ready to flee into the shadows once more. He can't afford to be caught by a nightmare or fearling in the open like this. He's too weak
"Pitch Black?"
He looks down and freezes.
The little girl looks up at him with wide, curious eyes. He remembers her now. The little sister of Jack's favorite little brat. She's older than he remembers her, though. By about a year or even two, perhaps.
Has it really been that long? (Has it really been that short?)
She tugs at his sleeve again, but he doesn't know what to do. There's something unidentifiable prickling in the back of his mind that he can't quite figure out. (He doesn't want to figure it out.)
"You're Pitch Black," she says. "I remember."
She picks up his hand to examine it in the dim light, and he wants to yank it away, but he can't. Her skin is warm and soft, and it doesn't hurt. (It's supposed to hurt, isn't it?)
"Can I paint your nails?"
Pitch's hand twitches, but he doesn't yank it away like he thinks he should. "Wha- no, you can't paint my nails!" He snaps.
His brow furrows at the sound of his own voice. (So that's what it sounds like when he's not screaming. How about that.)
The girl pouts. "Are you sure?"
Pitch sighs, sounding put upon. "Absolutely."
The girl drops his hand with a huff. "Fine, then you can't sleep in my closet anymore."
Pitch purses his lips and rubs his hand, trying to ignore the small feeling of loss. "I'm the Boogeyman, little girl. I'll sleep in any closet I like, thank you very much."
The girl smirks. "Not if I leave the light on all day."
Pitch glares at her. "Leave the light on, and you'll have nightmares every night for the rest of your life."
The girl's lower lip trembles; her shoulders sag; tears well up in her eyes, threatening to spill over.
Guilt suddenly weighs heavily on Pitch's shoulders. (Guilt? What the hell is this? He hasn't felt this for ages. Literally ages.) He looks up at the ceiling and shakes his head, then looks down again. "Fine," he says.
The girl's eyes light up, and she starts to say something.
Pitch holds up a finger. "But just this once," he warns.
The girl bites back a smile, barely able to contain her glee.
It's then that Pitch notices the moonlight spilling through her open window, lighting up the girl's face and barely touching the bottom of Pitch's robes. Pitch glares at the moon. (Shut up, he thinks.)
With his gaze turned away from the little girl, he doesn't notice as the girl does a tiny little fist pump behind his back.
Living in the little girl's closet is almost as bad being surrounded by nightmares that want to make him as terrified as possible.
(That's a complete lie.)
She paints his nails just like she promised.
She plays with his hair. (She's not a fan of the gel.)
She thinks he's wearing a dress. (It's a robe, damnit! A robe of terror!)
And she thinks he has "pretty eyes".
He's sitting on the ground, bemoaning his fate, and she's got her hands all over his face. Poking at his nose, asking why he's gray ("Because I live in the shadows; it's like camouflage," he tries to explain), and peering into his eyes.
"They're shiny," she says.
"They glow," she says.
"They're like baby suns!" she says.
Pitch just rolls his eyes, and she giggles. (She's secretly mocking him, isn't she?)
Her fingers are warm and soft against his face, and he feels like he's known this feeling before. (He doesn't allow himself to think about it. He never does.)
Slowly gathering his strength, Pitch stays with the little girl for a year before asking her name.
It's midday, and Pitch is fast asleep in the dark closet when she comes running in, slamming the door behind her without even turning on the light. Startled awake, Pitch watches her as she slides down the wall, huge, gasping sobs ripping out of her unevenly.
He waits awkwardly, not knowing what to do or say. So he stays silent until she calms down a little and spots his golden eyes watching her from the darkness. (He still doesn't know why he doesn't creep her out more.)
"P-pitch," she chokes out, trembling hands trying to wipe away the tears streaming down her cheeks, but her outburst just brings on a new onslaught of tears.
Pitch swallows and gathers up his nerves. He pulls himself out from his usual hiding place beneath the bottom shelves and tentatively slides to the floor beside her. He finds her hand and grasps it.
She squeezes his hand so hard that it hurts. And somehow, as if he's done this before, he knows what to do next.
He pulls his hand away from her grasp, and she lets him go with a sad little whimper that makes him hate himself. But then he wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in towards him. "Come here," he says, and she curls into his chest.
He doesn't know how long he holds her, but the silence seems to stretch on for ages, only broken by her sobs. He pets her hair, muttering nonsensical reassurances he knows he has no right to say (but it's not as if he can stop himself).
At last her sobs die down and turn into uneven, shuddering breaths, and Pitch muses, "I never did ask for your name."
The little girl huffs weakly. "Sophie. It-it's Sophie."
Pitch squeezes his arms around her for a brief moment. "Sophie," he murmurs. "Sophie, I can't predict the future, so I won't tell you it's all going to be all right. But Sophie, I'll always be here for you. Always."
Sophie hugs him a little tighter in response. "Promise?"
"I promise," Pitch whispers.
Sophie has nightmares every night for the rest of that week.
"Why are you doing this to me?" She asks Pitch after waking up the second night, and something inside of him breaks a little.
"They're not mine, and they're not from my nightmares or fearlings," he tells her as he sits beside her in the closet. "They're all your own," he says, and she hides her face in his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," he says, petting her hair. "I'm so sorry."
She doesn't sleep at all the third night. She sits on the closet floor beside Pitch, leaning her head on his shoulder. She stares into space blankly, as if all the emotions have been drained out of her.
Pitch expects silence, as usual for the last few days, but after a while she starts talking. "My dad," she whispers, eyes closed.
Silence stretches between them as he waits for her to continue, and it lasts for so long that he starts to wonder if she's changed her mind. But then, "He's… he was a soldier," she says, and Pitch tightens his arm around her. He knows what comes next. (But he doesn't want to think about why he knows.)
"He was supposed to come back in two months and five days."
That's the last thing she says to Pitch.
That's the last thing she says to Pitch for a long time.
Pitch was never going to give her nightmares. She believes in him, and that's all he needs.
But as the months pass on, her tears fade and something in her heart starts to harden.
Pitch knows where this is going. (He doesn't ask why he knows.)
Sophie stops caring. She pushes away her friends. She pushes away Jamie. She pushes away her mother. And she starts to get reckless. Pitch listens as her mother talks to Sophie, as she pleads for her daughter to stop getting into fights and urges Sophie to try harder in school. Pitch listens as her mother's pleading turns to shouting, and he comforts the girl when she cries on his shoulder.
If anything, this is only benefitting Pitch. Sophie pushes everyone away, but she leans more and more on him, and he gets stronger every day. (Soon, he'll have enough power to start putting his plans into action once more.)
But when he looks down at Sophie, clinging to him like a lifeline, a bruise on her cheek, he wonders if it's worth it.
(It's not.)
That night when Sophie sleeps, golden sand swirls above her head, forming the shape of a man and a young girl. The little girl leaps into his open arms. The man spins her around and around, and Pitch knows this is one of the few happy moments Sophie will have for a long time.
So he ruins it.
(He has to.)
The job done, he disappears into the shadows of her closet one final time.
(He knows what he has to do now.)
All over the world, children start having bad dreams again. Not enough dreams to break their belief or to ruin their happiness, but enough to keep them safe.
Pitch checks up on Sophie every once and a while to make sure his abandonment hasn't made things worse, and he sees that slowly, ever so slowly, she starts to open herself up to the world again. She starts to rediscover how to be happy.
(His heart feels like it's weighted down with lead.)
Several years later when he's checking up on her, Pitch sees a stray nightmare snorting by her bedside.
Without a thought he leaps out of the shadows and fights it off with a sword of nightmare-sand. He slashes at it over and over, and on the third stroke it bursts into sparkling black dust, almost like ashes. He waves a hand, and the glittering black sand swirls around and sinks into the folds of his robe.
The door slams open, a switch flicks on, and Pitch is surrounded by harsh light.
"Pitch," Jack Frost says, aiming his staff at the Boogeyman. "Get away from her."
"Jack?" says a sleepy voice from behind the spirit. Jamie, now much older than Pitch remembers him, looks over Jack's shoulder. "What're you doing here? I thought you were gonna give us a snowday in a week, not tomorrow. And why're you in Sophie's bedroom?"
"Just checking up on you guys," Jack says without looking away from Pitch. "And apparently for good reason. The Boogeyman's in your sister's room."
Pitch warily holds up his hands in submission. "Easy, Jack, I come in peace," Pitch says, unable to hold back a smirk.
Jack scowls and takes a step forward.
Pitch takes a step back, searching for the nearest shadow to escape into.
"The Boogeyman?" says a new, bewildered voice. Sophie.
Pitch looks away from the girl in the bed. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, so he doesn't even notice the confusion on Jack's face.
The bedsprings creak. Footsteps pad on the floor. "Pitch?" Sophie asks quietly, and Pitch doesn't want to see her face when she's not able to see him.
(He left her, and it's his fault that she can't see him. It's what he wanted, isn't it?)
Something tugs on his sleeve.
He opens his eyes in astonishment and looks down. "Sophie?"
Sophie, older now, smiles up at him and wraps her arms around him in a tight hug. "I missed you," she says into his robes.
A smile tugs at Pitch's lips as he hesitantly returns the hug. He can barely breathe, but somehow he manages to say, "I missed you, too."
It's then that he starts to remember who he used to be.
The pain and the guilt and the sadness eat away at him worse than the fear of the nightmares and fearlings ever did, but in the end, he will be all right, because he has Sophie, Jamie, and Jack to help him through it.