Invisible
People who never, ever, leave their rooms... He has seen plenty of those; many of them he visits regularly. They harbor all sorts of fears in their weak, cowardly minds, from the typical to the most ridiculously warped, paranoid fantasies. They are, thus, a perpetual source of vital energy.
This one is an oasis to him, available even in his times of need. But this girl, this child, she is far too young to be just another one of them. She just should not be—she doesn't even have to think of careers, jobs, bills, long-term relationships, nor any of the things that keep older people preoccupied and dark under the eyes.
And yet, the Boogieman observes, she carries herself with the exact same apathetic hopelessness, her face displaying identical disinterest in life.
He doesn't even need to intervene, to watch the horrors scatter through her dreams, following the same usual patterns. Not that he can—this girl has never been told about him. But she has numberless tormentors of her own roaming her subconscious, which helps him all the same.
And Sanderson can't do a single measly thing about it.
He's seen him try—he tries night and day to give the kid good, comforting dreams. Being a Guardian, he actually does get to have an influence over her dreams, even though she is not aware of his existence. (Such an altruistic fool.) However, the closest he gets to his objective is a pure white spaceship with just a bed and an odd man in black—perhaps brought from some still untouched corner of her wretched psyche—standing in front of a piano, and even that simple dream, escaping his control, meets its own sorrowful end each time.
Anything else the little girl seems to block out. The monsters are carved onto her heart like the hurtful memories they possibly hint at, and they cannot let through anything but the pain dragged along by reality.
She does not care about Christmas, does not celebrate Easter, has never put a tooth under her pillow nor glanced at the snow with little more than exhausted melancholy.
She has no wonder, no hope, no encouraging memories to look back to, nor the faintest interest in having fun for the sake of it—it is all long gone and forgotten. She knows only the echoes from the past reverberating around her whenever she willingly revisits her dreamscapes.
And when she decides she has had enough of this abstract reminiscing, there will be nothing for the Guardians or the Nightmare King to do to stop her fall.
But that, Pitch irritatedly forces his last traces of humanity to admit, is really none of his business.
::End::
First version: 12:44 01/02/13
Second version: 4:06 03/28/13
Posted on a whim because even though English isn't my first language and this is unbeta'd I need to have something RotG-related in my profile. And also because I'm a die-hard YN lover. Feel free to hate me if this sucks.