A/N: Yeah, I have no idea where this came from. The other night I was reading stuff on Peter Pan and how he guides kids part of the way to death as a psychopomp so they're not afraid and then I had this crazy, crazy dream that merged it with Rise of the Guardians. When I woke up I knew I had to turn it into a fic and try really hard to make my best friend get the wibbles, so here it is.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
by Kira
She remembered the way the world was before the sky opened up. Sometimes she felt like one of the only ones who did, the way people acted afterward. She remembered the sun being bright on her face sometimes, and the air smelling clean and fresh and like all different things, rather than like rot. She remembered grass and swimming in the ocean wearing floaties and stomping on leaves in the fall, crunching them under her boots. She remembered the sound of her mother laughing. Sometimes, she got the feeling that most of the people in the world had forgotten what the laughter of their mothers sounded like.
The day the sky opened up and darkness seeped in the world, there had been a big battle. That was the part she didn't remember so well, but there were five figures at the center of it, fighting another dark figure whose face had turned into a grimace of horror when he realized what he'd done.
She remembered arms shielding her and then a voice she had known all her life screaming at her to run. So she had and after that, she had never heard that voice again. She'd run all the way home to her mother, who picked her up and kept running, and they had run ever since. They ran as the nightmare things twisted the world and drove people to madness. They ran as their fellow human beings became a greater danger than the nightmares. They ran as society broke down, and many died of plague, as the temples were built, and the sacrifices started.
They had run for such a long time, but then her mother died, leaving her all alone in a world that was emptier and bleaker than it had ever been. She'd spent many a day hiding in the skeletons of cities from the cackling cults of mad merrymakers wandering through, the ones ready to tear anyone they saw limb from limb or to drag them to the temples to spill their blood while humming their chants in twisted tongues.
Life didn't go on forever, though, especially with the way the world was now and she'd gotten sick in the end. There was one temple that hadn't fallen entirely to the dark, one small chance of mercy in an unforgiving world, that offered healing to the sick. The price paid was that some, perhaps one in one hundred, were sacrificed to a labyrinth within, that no one ever came out from. Most, driven by the drive to survive, felt it was worth the risk. It was dark - the dark at night that was darker than the dark of day - when the girl approached the temple. She stood there for ages, waiting in the long lines of sick and injured people - some of them insane - that wanted to enter the temple. The ones that came back out again, came out cured, walking tall, but with empty eyes that had a hollowness behind them.
When it was her turn, the priests evaluated her, humming things in their twisted languages, the ones that always felt like they were worming under her skin, and her heart pounded out a staccato beat as she hoped desperately that she wouldn't be chosen for the maze.
Her heart almost exploded with panic when the head priest said, "She's not one of ours."
"No!" she screamed as they grabbed her. "No, please! Please! I don't even know what you mean! I don't know what you mean, I'm no different from anyone else!"
They dragged her kicking and screaming to the back of the temple. She was too exhausted and weak to fight them because of her illness, and she could do nothing as they tossed her through an open stone door that slammed shut behind her. Weeping despondently she pounded her fists against it fruitlessly, bruising and scraping her knuckles in the process, and eventually sank down to the stony floor, her filthy hair hanging lank in her face.
So this was it. This was how her world would end, with her lost in the dark, after starving or dehydrating or being devoured by some horrible something. She supposed it was inevitable. In the chaos outside they all ate one another, anyway.
The girl picked herself up and started walking, bravely, towards what she knew must be certain death. After passing through countless hallways and turnings, until she had no idea where she was in relation to the entrance, she saw an eerie golden light from up the hall. The fear was so cloyingly thick in her throat that she thought she might throw up, but when the light turned a corner, she saw it was the figure of a little boy with wild hair, who was blurred around the edges, nearly formless.
His face was gentle and he waved a hand for her to follow him.
"How do I know you won't lead me somewhere bad?" she asked.
The boy shrugged, as if to say there was no way he could prove the contrary to her, so why worry about it anyway?
So she followed, wondering where he would lead her. There were a few complicated turnings and a hidden tunnel that she wouldn't have seen otherwise, but after just a few minutes of guiding her, the little boy suddenly disappeared, waving to her once and fading away.
Steeling herself, she carried on in the near-dark, feeling her way through each turning.
Then a violet light started to approach in the tunnels. This time, it was the vague, blurry, glowing shape of a little girl that gestured for her to follow. She moved differently than the bobbing, slow-moving shape of the golden boy, zipping from place to place, and the girl was reminded of the birds she remembered from her youth.
Like the boy, the violet girl guided her through a section of the maze and disappeared, fading away like she'd never been there at all.
As she walked, the girl became less and less afraid. When the little boy in red showed up, gamboling to and fro with a skip to his step, her pulse had nearly gone back down to normal. By the time she ran into the last figure, she was calmer than she'd ever been since the nightmares came and the world had ended.
The fact that the little green figure was the glowing, vague shape of a rabbit, didn't deter her. In fact, it was a comfort to see a cute, little animal like that again, when most of them were gone, and rabbits had always been her favorite animals. The rabbit hopped to and fro, playfully, leading her through the last few complicated turnings.
As all this happened, she barely noticed the changes that were happening to her. Only now, near the end, did she see that her flesh had become less weathered. Her lungs were clearer and her teeth were starting to feel strange in her mouth. She was now closer to the ground than she'd been because her legs had become stubbier.
Walking through one more opening, she looked down at herself, panicked, and said, "Am I shrinking?"
"In a way," said an echoing voice ahead of her.
She looked up to see a wide entrance where none should be, two glass doors that had been thrown open to a night sky full of stars. There were curtains billowing lightly in a breeze that came from nowhere and it smelled clean in a way the air hadn't smelled in a very, very long time.
Standing in front of it was another glowing figure like the others, another blurred boy, with an aura all in blue. He looked more like the idea of a boy than the actual thing and he was holding a jagged staff that looked a bit like a shepherd's crook.
"I don't understand," the girl said.
"You're getting younger," said the boy. "They all do. It's sort of like the inside becomes the outside before the end and all the layers that were added on since the world ended are sloughed off. Everyone becomes new."
"What are you?" she asked, as the world continued to get bigger and simpler.
"We probably don't look the same anymore, do we. It's hard enough for us to be seen, even in here. Let me try to focus."
There was a moment the boy was quiet and then the dull, dim shape that he was got bigger and sharpened into focus.
She found herself staring at a boy that was in his teens and a possibly a little small for his age. His legs were skinny and he was wearing a blue hoodie, etched around the edges with frost and battered, tattered pants that were tied up with strips of leather at the bottom.
His white hair caught the light of the stars and his blue eyes were as kind as his smile.
"Is that better?"
"I...I know you," she said, getting less and less alarmed at how high-pitched her voice was getting.
"You all do. Every one of you that comes through here. That's why the priests rejected you. It was our last little trick, the last thing we could do when we lost. Creating this place and making them think it was a bad thing to force people into. Giving the people who still had innocence inside them a way out. It's not the escape we wish we could give you but it's the best we can do."
His eyes welled up with tears as he looked at her and for some reason she got the sense it was because of something more than what he was saying. He wouldn't take his eyes off her.
"It was the least we could do for you all, when we failed you, when we couldn't stop Pitch from letting the nightmares outside the edges in where they shouldn't be. Even he didn't know it would end like this."
The boy wiped at his eyes with his sleeve.
"I'm sorry it's this kind of end, but I've flown close enough to it to know it's something bright. It's better than this world at least."
"It's an end?" she asked him, looking at her shrinking hands.
The boy nodded.
"It's the only way out?"
"It's been the only way out since we lost," said the boy. "It's just less painful going this way, through the maze, guided by us. It's less frightening. We wanted to make it easier for some of you if we could."
"Do I have to go alone?" she asked, her voice full of fear.
"No," he said, kneeling down and taking her hand in his own. "No, that's why we're even here. I'll be with you right up to the very end. I promise it'll be fun flying up to the stars."
"What's your name?" the girl asked, walking with him towards the open window, hand in hand, relishing the sight of stars she hadn't seen since she was a child.
"Jack," said the boy. "Jack Frost."
"That name's familiar," she said slowly, pushing her jaggedly cut blonde hair out of her face. "You're all really familiar."
"We probably are to you especially," said Jack and the two of them slowly floated into the air beyond the window, into a night sky she knew she was never going to be able to turn back from.
She kicked off from the floor with her stubby little legs and for the first time in what felt like forever, she felt joy.
"Wheee!" she said happily, leaving all the years and her worries and pain behind her.
"Come on, Sophie," said Jack, a sad smile on his face. His voice trembled as he said, "See the stars?"
"Stars!" she replied happily.
"It's the second one on the right and straight on 'til morning," Jack said with just as much warmth as sadness. "And Jamie's waiting."