*EDIT* This story's currently on hold due to the new Guardians of Childhood book. New chapters will begin soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.
[Author's Notes: This is being uploaded out of peer pressure, so I apologize now for any issues it may have. It started as a study of my headcanon!Pitch and turned into...this. The chapters will be short. Sorry for that. Also, it takes place after the events of RoTG and borrows heavily from The Guardians of Childhood series. I feel I should also mention that it's definitely inspired by Lindzzz's Things That Were on Archive Of Our Own. I apologize now for any similarities between the two.
Okay, that should be it.
I hope you enjoy! Reviews are always welcome, but flames will be removed.]
Pitch Black did not dream.
Well, more accurately, he refused to. He stayed awake at all hours of every day, spending the sunlit halves sulking in the darkest corners of the dank cave he'd come to call home, glaring out at the dimly lit craggy walls. It wasn't that he couldn't find sleep, or that its call wasn't appealing to him. It was the dreams that it brought that drove him away from slumber's sweet embrace. The few times he had succumbed to unconsciousness in the millenium he could remember, the images that played across his eyelids had filled him with such...torment. He couldn't explain it. It was a sadness and an anger and a longing and a fear. The emotions didn't surprise him; he felt them rather regularly (sadness for his solitude, anger at his opposers, longing for recognition, and fear of disappearance), but the dreams themselves confused him to no end.
They were always the same: A small cluster of glittering butterflies that he would chase relentlessly through the impenetrable blackness. That was it. A few golden skippers just out of reach, their tiny graceful wings roaring in the maddening silence. On rare occasions, another sound joined the rhythmic flapping; the call of a young girl, a soft cry of "daddy". A voice he knew but didn't know why. It would wake the Boogeyman with a start and leave him shaking with a heartache he couldn't explain.
It made him uneasy, as if his skin didn't fit right; like it had shrunk during his sleeping spell. The protruding angles of his face seemed sharper, the hollows deeper, the hair jagged, uneven teeth that lined his jaws felt more out of place than normal, and their points were painful to the touch. He felt wrong. It infuriated him. He would tear out of his imprisonment and bring a batch of unusually horrid dreams to any children he could. Only after he had efficiently pulled sobs and screams from those young lips did Pitch feel like himself; dark and terrifying, dangerous and cocky. He could stand that. It put balance back in his feet and slowed his racing heart.
He could no longer do that, though. Ever since his humiliating defeat by his own creations, he spent even more time buried deep in his caverns. Bringing attention to himself would only make that hot, angry embarrassment new and fresh again. He couldn't afford to go about shattering Sanderson's dreams without risking his own dignity. So underground he stayed, hissing at the small trickle of sunlight that seeped into his abode as if it had personally offended him. And he stayed awake for fear of the butterflies and the little girl and the skin that didn't fit.