Author's Note:

This is a piece that was spawned after a conversation with Sumi-Sprite (beta and all-round legend), who mentioned that Pitch might make an interesting 'guardian' for Cupcake, given that they are both a little on the fringes in their own circles. Evidently, I couldn't let the idea go.

Genres: Friendship, fantasy

Rating: K

Characters: Cupcake, Pitch Black, Sandy, Jamie, Pippa, Monty, Caleb, Claude, OC (Mike), OC (Todd)

Pairing: N/A

Enjoy!

PART ONE
Cupcake

Chapter 1

"I'm telling you, UFOs are out there." Jamie hauled his books out of his locker and shoved the door closed with a rattling clang.

"I don't know," replied Monty as he pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose for the umpteenth time that morning. "Aliens could exist; NASA documented water ice found on Mars near the Martian equator, so it's possible. But big metal spaceships in the sky? I dunno, it's too unreal. There's a reason why you only hear about that stuff from conspiracy theorists."

"Really?" Jamie gave his fellow space enthusiast a look. "A UFO would be the most unreal thing you've ever seen?"

Titters resounded from Pippa, Caleb, and Claude, and Monty clamped his mouth shut. After ten tedious minutes their morning debate finally had a victor, with time to spare before the first bell of the day called them all into class.

"Sorry, Monty, he got you there," said Pippa with a shrug. Jamie turned to the girl next to him.

"What do you think, Cupcake?"

The stony-faced ten-year-old fiddling with a bracelet of vividly pink beads was startled out of her resolve, having tuned out of the conversation long before it reached a resolution.

"Uh…"

"UFOs. They're real, right?" Jamie prompted.

"Oh yeah. Sure, I guess," she said, though she lacked any sort of conviction. In fact, she sounded completely indifferent. Jamie frowned.

Cupcake wasn't usually one to talk much. She preferred to listen and chime in when she felt she had something worthwhile to say, but even so she was rarely distracted. All morning she had been glancing down the corridor, seemingly on edge, and for her to become so preoccupied by the students that crowded the halls of Burgess Elementary…it was odd to say the least.

"Everything okay?" Claude asked, having also noticed her odd behaviour.

With all eyes on her, Cupcake felt a blush creep into her cheeks and wanted nothing more than for their suddenly concerned expressions to evaporate into thin air. Still, these were her friends. She could tell them anything…right? She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could speak the bell sounded with a shrill peal. She bit back the words as soon as they rose to her tongue.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said, and tucked her binder adorned with stickers under her arm. "I've got to go, Ms. Norman's gonna give me a detention if I'm late again."

"Yeah, we should go too," Monty agreed, eyeing with mild apprehension the throng of kids that had spontaneously appeared in lieu of the morning rush. "Bye, Cupcake. See you at lunch." The others gave her a quick wave and bid their farewells before they disappeared around the corner.

Cupcake was alone.

Setting her jaw and tightening her grip on her binder, she marched in the opposite direction — past the AV room, and drinking fountains, and dwindling crowds milling into classrooms, and almost past…

"Well, look who it is."

The harsh voice of Mike Henderson made her stomach churn, but still she kept walking. She was soon followed by the rapid squeaking of sneakers giving chase over the linoleum floor, which caused her shoulders to tense. Two boys, even taller than she, rounded and blocked her from moving any farther.

"Where do you think you're going, Cupcake?" Todd Milton asked, a sneer on his scrawny face.

"Class. Get out of my way," she ordered through gritted teeth.

"Nuh-uh." Mike crossed his arms and stared her down. "Mr. Rogers put us on bin duty this morning, so we've got another ten minutes."

"Good, maybe you can take yourselves out with the trash," she said without missing a beat. Mike's eye slightly twitched when he could come back with nothing wittier. He threw a glare at Todd, warning him not to say anything.

"Fine," he said. "Guess you're gonna be extra late this morning."

Quicker than she could protest, he snatched the binder full of notes out of her arms and tore out the pages of scrawled homework. She only had time to watch as they slipped from his hand and fell…

Fell…

Fell…

To hit the ground in a fluttering explosion of white leaves that scattered in every direction. Tears pricked at Cupcake's eyelids, threatening to spill, but she would not cry in front of them. Instead, she let her nails dig crescent moons into her palms as she tried to find a way around. They mirrored her every step.

"Why are you doing this?" she demanded. Mike shrugged, his face full of malice.

"Because it's fun," he said.

"Hey, you know why everyone calls her 'Cupcake'?" Todd laughed to his accomplice.

"Duh, it's 'cause she eats so many of them," he jeered while he jabbed her in the stomach. Hard.

Mike Henderson never knew what hit him.

— O —

Cupcake slumped in the passenger seat of the car and slammed the door shut.

"The principal's office?!" her mother exclaimed as they pulled away from the curb. "You got sent to the principal's office? Unbelievable…"

"He started it," Cupcake said, staring listlessly out the window while the streets rolled by.

"Oh no, you do not get to use that tone with me. You punched him, according to the phone call I just received not half an hour ago."

"Because he poked me!"

"So, you go and hit him?! Honey, I have told you so many times, you can't overreact like this. It's going to get you in serious trouble! You're lucky Mr. Randal only chose to suspend you for the rest of the day."

"But what am I supposed to do, Mom? It's not fair!" she cried. "Everyday it's like this. They keep picking on me and I've told them to stop, but they don't listen. They never listen!"

The car slowed and came to a stop when they pulled over to the side of the street. Her mother was silent for a moment. Cupcake waited for the world to come crashing down.

"Everyday?" her mother asked quietly.

That wasn't the reaction Cupcake had been expecting. She threw her mother an uncertain glance, then gave a sharp nod.

"How long has this been happening?"

"About a week. Maybe two," she answered stiffly.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Cupcake shrugged. "Didn't want to worry you again," she mumbled.

Her mother breathed a long sigh and pushed back her hair. "Well, beating up this Mike kid has done the opposite of that," she said, to which Cupcake grimaced.

"Are you mad?" she asked. Her mother shook her head.

"No, I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed. Honey, it's important you tell me these things so we can figure out a way to fix them. I can't help if you don't talk to me. Do those friends you told me about — Pippa, Jamie and the rest — do they know?"

Cupcake shook her head and fiddled with the hem of her skirt. "No. It always happens after the bell, when they've already gone. I think Mike and Todd do that on purpose. They like to make me late. And make fun of me."

Her mother nodded, and Cupcake noticed her hand was gripping the steering wheel. But when her mother turned to face her, the smile she wore was significantly kinder.

"Then maybe the first thing to do is tell them."

— O —

After a grilled cheese sandwich, Cupcake was sent up to her room to do homework for the rest of the evening. She was still in trouble, though at least now her mother understood why she had 'acted out'. She didn't mind; it was worth having been able to deck that annoying leech square in his smug face.

Now she was lying in bed. Her stuffed unicorn was tucked under her arm while she waited for the Sandman's golden dreams to light the inky night. She usually liked to watch them stream across the sky through her window for the brief few minutes before she drifted off to sleep.

Only, tonight she had a feeling his dreams wouldn't be enough to silence the thoughts clattering around her head.

"The first thing to do is tell them…"

Tell her friends that the two most popular boys in fourth grade were picking on her, when there were rumours no doubt flying that she had thrown the first punch; rumours that she had knocked Mike Henderson unconscious with blood streaming out of his nose, while a distraught Todd Milton ran for help. Cupcake shifted and tried to ignore the way her stomach was tying itself in knots. The pinky hue of the wall she faced was darkened to a gloomy mauve by her own restless shadow.

Would they believe her? It wasn't as though they had been her friends for very long. Since just before Easter, really. Sure Jamie, Pippa, Claude, Caleb and Monty were all nice. They tried to make her feel included, tried to make her forget she was slightly older and had been the last to join their group. But Cupcake knew, after what happened at her last school, that friends seemed to vanish very quickly after the school bullies decided you were the latest punching bag.

And Mike and Todd had already made their decision, hadn't they?

The thought of facing those boys again sent an icy chill through her. After what happened that day, their daily ambushes would only become more aggressive, as would their jeers about how strange she was compared to the rest of Burgess Elementary. Her mother had always advised that 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,' but those boys knew as well as she did that words had the power to leave their own scars.

No way, Mike and Todd had once told her. No way could her friends actually want to be friends with her. She was the unicorn freak, adopted into a group of marginally lesser freaks. Admittedly though, Pippa was sort of cool, as were Caleb and Claude. They would be the first to up and leave, followed closely by Monty. Though if all else failed, at least Jamie Bennet was insane enough to keep her around.

Or maybe not even Jamie.

Maybe that's all he saw her as, too. The not-so-girly girl, all alone, lost in a big school, only asked to play out of pity. Certainly, the others must have thought so. They must have realised at some point that she was not one of them.

But maybe she never had been.

Maybe the adventure they had shared over Easter was just a dream. A figment of her imagination's wishful thinking. It never happened. There was no such thing as Santa Clause, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, or Jack Frost, or the Sandman. They were fantasies too ridiculous to be real. And were she to ask her friends if they had sledded through the town with a flying boy past their bedtimes on a school night, they wouldn't just laugh, they would side with Mike and Todd and shun her as the social pariah she inevitably always became and the ground would open its gaping maw to swallow her whole while they looked on and mocked the pitiful girl who still beli—

Cupcake jolted awake with a yelp and sat bolt upright. Her heart hammered away in her chest, it almost hurt for how hard it was beating.

It was a dream.

Just a dream. It wasn't real. That's what she told herself as she took deep, albeit ragged breaths and tried to calm down.

"Just a dream," she whispered. "Just a dream. Just a…"

"I think the word you're looking for is nightmare," said a voice in the dark.