The Pills Don't Bring Sweet Dreams, a rise of the guardians fanfic

This is a fic I wrote around 5am-7am, after doing an all nighter.

I thought I'd take a break from my other fics and write something a bit obscure, because I can, and I only wrote about Sandy as a Guardian in this (although it's very vague) because I don't think the little guy gets enough love, and he really is such a sweetheart :)

Anyways, thanks to aquodox who listened to my ramblings at daft o'clock and read the first couple of paragraphs for me to see if it was interesting enough. He's a sweety too.

So please, read and review, and check out my other Rise of the Guardians fics :)

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

She would stare at the ceiling and count the specks of dust that floated across her line of vision, and she would sigh quietly as she closed her eyes and wished for sleep... wished for peaceful sleep...

The pills didn't help her fall into the peaceful slumber like it said on the side of the packet, and when she woke to those 'calming' magnolia walls, she didn't feel any calmer.

There wasn't a medicine in the world that could help her, not where she was. Oh, it wasn't about location, location, location, it was about where she was in her mind. She was diagnosed as clinically insane. Schizophrenia had gotten the better of her in childhood, and the line between fantasy and reality was a bit blurred for her. So one morning when she was nine and she woke up, she was convinced she could fly, and leapt from the window.

She'd only broken her arm and collar bone, but it was enough for her parents to send her to a special school, where they would take care of special children with special needs.

She hated that word. Special. They made it sound like you were something extraordinary, like you were the absolute bees knees, and then they stuck you in a small white room that smelled like bleach and disinfectant and they would tell every child in that room that they were special. It might have taken her a few months, but she came to realise that they were all different... but they were all labelled 'special'. If they were all special, then nobody was. It was just a word that singled them out from the crowd. They'd be taken on stupid school trips where they were forced to wear bright orange high viz vests, and they were put in the buddy system, and somehow she always ended up paired with the boy that liked to touch himself. She hated him, and one day Thirteen told her to hit him, and she did.

She got in trouble then. And before that they hadn't seen her as a problem, but when she became violent, they moved her out of the dorm room she was sharing with another schizophrenic girl and a couple of kids with downs, and she was put in her own room. This one didn't have the sleep in nurse who would take care of you in the night. This one was small, and dark, and there was one window and there was bars on it, and the door locked.

She'd only been eleven then, but because of Thirteen she was turned into a prisoner.

Thirteen was the rat that followed her. He was naughty, and told her what to do, and nothing he told her to do was good. She hated Thirteen, because no matter how many times she pointed him out to the doctors and the nurses and the therapists and the counsellors... nobody saw him but her. And there were voices she heard that didn't belong to people. They were all in her head and they told her how worthless she was and how she should have just died when she jumped from the window that morning, and then she wouldn't have punched that boy in the face when she was eleven, and she wouldn't be a prisoner now, and her parents would still love her, and she would not be labelled as clinically insane.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

Things got worse when she was sixteen. Some nights she didn't sleep at all. She would scream and bang at the walls and rattle the windowpanes, she would rip her pillow to shreds and when the medics came in to restrain her, she would try to rip them to shreds too... but they were always two big men, who grabbed her arms and ground their knuckled into her breast bone, which made her cry, and they would force her down onto the bed and tie her there, leaving her to scream and cry until her throat was scratched up raw, and she would mumbled at them as they came in again, ask for some water.

They never gave her water, they just put the needle in her arm and she felt like her whole body was made of lead, and she would fall to sleep cursing them, wishing Thirteen could jump on them and bite them and give them the plague.

After episodes like this they would up her medicine, and she felt like she wasn't really there for days on end. She'd drift in and out of consciousness, and she felt very lonely... because nobody wanted to be her friends, because she was the girl with bars on her windows, and the medicine made it hard for Thirteen to visit, and even the other voices faded into mumbles, and they sounded just as tired as her. Nobody would talk to her, and she slept a lot, but it was never a peaceful sleep. It was just a state of unconsciousness that her body put her in to cope with her exhaustion, and the shock to her system the medicine had caused.

She got used to the new meds though, and Thirteen came back, cursing something rotten. He would whisper horrible things into her ears at night to keep her awake, and she would cry for sleep then, for anything, because even nightmares weren't as bad as what he would say to her, and deep down she knew only she could see him and that it was her mind making him up, and she'd try to reassure herself with that, but it only made her feel worse, because then every hateful word Thirteen whispered to her was something she thought of herself, and she hated herself just that little bit more.

So the nurses gave her the pills to help her sleep, and they promised her they would bring her sweet dreams... and they lied.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

When she turned eighteen, she was moved into a different home, her parents wanted nothing to do with her, because once the doctors prescribed her aripiprazole, she was past the normal level of schizophrenia. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and acute depression... she didn't blame them, and she never questioned their motived because if she had the choice, she wouldn't want anything to do with herself either.

At twenty the nightmares started, and before she'd had them she'd wished for them, to escape Thirteen and the other voices, but those in her head when she was asleep were worse. Those voices all had faces, and they were all people she knew. Her parents, the doctors, the nurses, the other special people. They were all saying such horrible things that she knew were true. And in the middle was a tall, dark man, and he would watch her scream as the medics tied her to the bed while everyone said hurtful, hateful things to her, and he would laugh.

And she would wake up screaming, her arms and legs stiff and rigid by her side, and she thought she was tied down but she wasn't, and she'd lie there crying.

These nightmares carried on for five years, and it was at twenty five when they upped her sleeping medication to try and get her to sleep, but not get to REM sleep, so she wouldn't have nightmares, but no matter what the doctors did to try and make her nights peaceful, she always had the nightmares...

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

When she was twenty six, she'd had enough. She'd ignored Thirteen for a whole month and been as good as she could be, and the doctors and nurses told her she was doing very well and they believed the medication was doing it's job now. She'd still have nightmares, but that was something they realised they couldn't help. They started letting her out of her room, and she asked if she could join in the recreational time with the others in the yard. They were allowed to roam about there, and though there was always someone on duty, they were more able to mingle, do whatever they liked, within reason of course.

She'd watched as the woman on duty went to get a cup of tea from her work mate, and quickly she snatched a length of twine from the washing line and stuffed it up her jumper, walking back inside saying she;d had enough of being outside, and she was taken back to her room. She hid the twine under her mattress, and that night when it came to lights out, she got it out again, and tied it to the highest bar she could reach on the windows, and she formed a loop at the bottom large enough for her to get her head through. She ignored Thirteen screaming at her, hushed him, because she didn't want him to raise the alarm, and slowly she climbed up onto her chair, and slipped the hoop around her neck. She paused, looking out to the sky for a moment, pressing her face in between the bars so it seemed like they didn't exist any more, and the moon didn't have thick metal lines through it, breaking it into two halves of a circle. It was big, and beautiful, and she breathed softly and fogged the glass up, before she turned back to look at the room closing her eyes and ignoring the voices in her head as she kicked the chair out from under her feet, and the twine tightened around her throat.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

She'd tried to bring the peace herself, but the bang from the chair brought the night guard running, and he looking into her room before banging the door open and rushing to her, sounding the alarm as he pulled her down, resuscitating her.

She was moved again, into a room with one window, and bars on the outside this time, so she couldn't hurt herself. There was only a bed, no chair, no desk... and the guard came around every half hour to make sure she was okay. She lay there at night looking out of the window, counting the stars and waiting for sleep to come around so the nightmares would start again. Because she didn't have sweet dreams. The bottle lied. The nurses lied. The medicine didn't help.

It was one night when she woke in a cold sweat did she notice there was something different about her room. Though the tears were streaming down her face, she turned her head slightly to the side and saw a strange little man in the corner of her room, looking very concerned. She was shocked, and wanted to scream for help, but he was perhaps the most beautiful man she'd ever seen, so she stayed quiet. She was quite aware that her body had become used to the aripiprazole, so her mind was creating more and more things for her to see, and the line between imagination and reality was becoming thinner and less visible, and everything seemed so blurred that it was all becoming a mess. This man could be her imagination too, could be her mind playing tricks on her, but she didn't mind, because never in her life had her mind made something so beautiful to look at.

Slowly he'd come over to her bed and he seemed to float through the air, up off the floor and onto the mattress, sitting there before he took her hand and smiled a little.

She felt sleepy, and though she didn't want to go to sleep again and have another nightmare, she felt like she had to close her eyes, and it felt different. Her body didn't feel heavy like it always did with the pills, instead she felt light as air, and she smiled a little as the little man carried her off into the most wonderful dreams, and she was flying again.

She soared high in the sky, and woke slowly in the morning, no sign of the little man, just the magnolia walls that were supposed to calm her, but she was calm already. She was in a good mood that day, spoke calmly to the doctors who were assessing her over whether they should put her medicine up again, or move her down to a lower dosage of medication. She seemed so unusually calm in the office that the doctors decided to keep her on the medication she was on now, and see how she was for a period of one week. If she stayed placid then they would reduce her medication, if she started becoming agitated again then they would up it yet again.

That night she crawled into bed, and she lay there waiting for sleep to come for her, but she just didn't feel tired. It took a lot of tossing and turning, but eventually she found a comfortable spot on her side and closed her eyes, sighing, waiting for nightmares...

She always expected nightmares. Although the previous nights' sleep had been lovely, she suspected it was just a one off, that the beautiful man she'd seen was just a one time treat. She closed her eyes slowly, and in the time it took her to blink, the man was back. She looked at him properly, smiling slightly.

He was only short, and probably came up to her waist. He had the brightest, glittering gold robe on, his hair was spiked up so he looked like a cross between a punk rocker and someone with really bad bed head... but it didn't make him look wild. He looked incredibly relaxed, and his golden amber eyes only affirmed that demeanour. He smiled back at her, and like the night before rose up through the air and landed upon her bed. He sat there for a moment, quietly, before he reached out and stroked her hair gently, soothing her, and she felt her eyes close of their own accord, and felt him slide his hand into hers, and she was dreaming again.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

He came every night, and sometimes she'd stay awake for a small while, and they would just look at one another... neither would say a word and nothing more needed to be done other than them holding hands and sharing smiles. She was happy in the fact that there was some kindness in her life, a friend, and though she still couldn't be sure if he was real or imaginary, she didn't mind. He kept her safe and happy at night, and that was all she needed. She never learned his name, she never asked, and she never cared to, because she didn't need to.

Because of her sudden calm nature, the way she was suddenly always relaxed and how she seemed to take everything in her stride, she had her medicine dosage reduced once, and then again, and then again. Her bipolar disorder could simply be kept under control with therapy, and she happily told all the doctors how she could no longer see Thirteen, like he had vanished, like her mind wasn't capable of manifesting something so negative any more.

They kept her in the mental hospital though, because she was still schizophrenic, and if they let her out into the world, she may not take her medication and revert back to her old self. She understood their reasoning, and she stayed in the hospital, but took more joy in walking about the gardens, having recreational time with other patients who were in there for similar reasons. She would laugh with the medics who had once locked her up, and she seemed almost normal... except she still heard voices, and occasionally would act upon the commands they gave her. She would rip her room to shreds again and would sit crying in the corner, to be strapped up to a bed again where she would lie quietly.

The pills didn't help her fall into the peaceful slumber like it said on the side of the packet, and those 'calming' magnolia walls didn't make her feel any calmer.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

But she felt him slip his hand into hers and she looked and saw him smiling calmly at her, and she found she was able to smile back, and squeeze his hand in thanks. And her eyes would close slowly, and the dreams would come.

The pills didn't bring the sweet dreams as the nurse promised.

But he did.