Disclaimer: Descendants does not belong to me.
She made it 42 days.
She is peculiarly proud of that even years later although she does not know why. The fact that she essentially put herself into some sort of a coma when she collapsed at the end of that span of days should remove any pleasure she has in the undertaking. Maybe it is because it is the first time in her life that she ever remembers feeling like she had control over what was happening to and around her. She found other ways (likely more constructive ways) to feel that later, but that round of sleepless nights is the first time she can remember being proactive about her relationship with the Isle.
In retrospect, it was not the best of plans. Still, there is some sense of accomplishment in the fact that she made it that long in the first place. After all, Chad had initially thought that he would stay up and look after her and had made it only six hours before he had been snoring in the chair beside her bed. It had been silly (sweet but still silly of him) to try. There had been no reason for Chad to not sleep. It was good for other people (ones who weren't broken). She had learned from Chad's attempt however. Being still was the enemy when you were determined to stay awake for any great length of time.
It was much easier to stay awake when you kept moving. (It was also, she would learn to admit later, much easier to stay awake when you were not completely human.)
She had always been good at being invisible, but she mastered the art to new degrees during the nearly month and a half of her sleep strike. She flitted about the castle those first two nights before her mother came home (and then mastered the art of sneaking out of her house and across the garden without being seen in the days after). She could do all sorts of things with that kind of time on her hands and a variety of snacks went missing from the kitchens of both residences during those nights when the guards were few and people milling around were nearly nonexistent. She had seemingly endless hours to fill where she could take her time disguising full and nearly full packages of food items in the trash cans of the various rooms. She might have been avoiding seeing the children of the Isle but that did not mean that she still did not know what was happening (that was one of those things that one could never unknow after knowing). Hiding food for them was the one thing that she had always felt was within her power even after she had promised her mother that she would not do it behind her back that first time she had gotten caught. Everyone in the castle knew that missing food items were her doing even if they did not know why. Aunt Ella had items with extra durable packaging brought in just for that purpose. They let her because they knew it made her feel better, but they didn't really understand. They couldn't because they weren't feeling the things that she felt. If she did her hiding in the night, then she didn't have to deal with the looks that came along with their tolerance. She liked it better that way.
Aunt Ella had been teaching her how to sew by that point in time, but her fingers were little and not very good at it yet. Those nights gave her lots of time to practice. It turned out that her stitches weren't very even when she was tired either, but there wasn't much that she could do about that except keep working. She spent time thinking about the best way to ask if there was anyone who could teach her how to knit on one of the looms that the woman who was Uncle Henry's nanny once upon a time was always using to make scarves (because she thought she could hide those in the trash cans pretty easily and she knew of several children who slept outside an awful lot and could use the extra layers).
She had plans. She had so many plans and so much time in which to complete them when she had decided that she wasn't going to be sleeping anymore. She remembers feeling so tired that she thought she might fall over sometimes, but then she would think of something else to use to keep herself busy and it was like the tired got pushed to somewhere in the back of her head and she could pretend it wasn't there for a little bit longer.
She went through the books that her mother had brought in from different places that talked about magic she had not known existed and read through them with a dictionary close by after she was certain that her mother was too asleep to notice the sound of turning pages. She did not understand exactly what it was that the books were explaining except that it had something to do with trying to find a way to make sure that the children on the Isle were getting the food that was supposed to be getting to them and wasn't.
At some point in the afternoon of Day 42, Chad had thought fast and kicked the end table out of the way before she cracked her head on it on her way down after everything went from the spots that had been dancing in front of her eyes for days to solid black.
Her mother was angry and Aunt Ella was sad and Uncle Henry looked disappointed and Chad looked even more terrified than he had the night that he pulled her out of the pool when she woke up again three days later. She had been confused and groggy from the clutter and intensity of being immersed in everything Isle all at once again as much as the sleep deprivation. Even if she had not been, she still would not have known what to say to the people that were gathered around her. She had no idea what to say to them because she knew even through the haze that was trying to smother her thoughts that she had failed once again. Not sleeping was supposed to prevent them all from looking like that, and not sleeping had worked at that for a while. It was the end result of the not sleeping that had proven to be the problem. She felt like it would be unwise to say that to them - they were not looking very receptive.
They could not make it better any more than she could. She did not have to try very hard to look sorry (because she was sorry that she still had not found a way to make things better). She also tried very hard to not say anything that would have her bound up in a promise when the adults started to admonish her and told her that she could never do something like that again.
She hadn't been ready to concede that yet.
