The Maladaptive Daydreamer and the Depersonalized Hero


{She dreamt. She dreamt of love. She dreamt of hazel eyes smiling at her, thing but strong arms lifting her into their embrace, and Hilda dreamt of impossible love.}

When she was seven years old, she was sent to a psychiatrist. Then to another. And another. Until finally, to many different doctors and professors, who had all given her the same diagnosis.

(She loved to write. She really did. Writing was her way of escaping the world. And dreaming. She always dreamt at three o'clock, when school ended. And she never stopped.)

Her parents were worried about her. She was always dreaming. Always in some other world of hers. And she was always different. Unsocial. An outcast. The other children had always stayed away from her and her strange expressions, because there was something about her that just made them feel overbearingly sad. They were scared.

{It wasn't her fault that the world she had dreamt up was so much better than the one she was actually in.}

In the earlier years, when she had told her parents she was sad, they had ignored her. Countless times.

"There's nothing wrong with you. Stop thinking that."

[They just couldn't accept that something could be wrong. Bad things only happened to bad people, right?]

And she was normal.

So she had cried. She had wept silently into the night, hoping that for once, someone would just believe her, and that someone could tell her that it was alright, that there was nothing wrong with her, but not because they wouldn't accept her if she wasn't. Because in the end, she wasn't important enough for others to still accept her even if there was something wrong with her.

So when no one, absolutely no one, came to save her, she decided to save herself.

Desperately trying to maintain her sanity, she created a world she was important. Where she was needed.

(Where she was loved.)

"Please save us! Please save us from this torture!"

She created a world where everything was not alright; that people were insane, and depressed, and suffering, so that there were others like her, and she put herself in the center of it. She made herself the hero. She made herself the villain. But most of all, she had made herself vulnerable. So that she could feel everything in her fantasy world and not have to experience it in real life.

In other words, a perfect world.

(She had long ago decided that Cheren and Bianca weren't her friends. Because they were scared of her, scared of her thoughts.)

"Hilda, are you alright? You seem weird lately…"

[She never bothered to answer them. In the end, they had left to play with that new kid, Hilbert, right? Just because he was normal. Normal. Normal. Was he?]

["Your daughter is a Maladaptive Daydreamer."]

A traumatized, age seven, dreamer who dreamt too much (Ideals. That what they all were. If this world wasn't as beautiful, then it would be perfect.).

{She knew she had a problem. And he did too. }

"Hey."

(They both could tell that the other had problems. Maybe that was why the two stuck together so much when they were little, and didn't talk to Bianca and Cheren much after meeting each other; mutual empathy. Pity.}

"The name's Hilbert."

{Maybe that was why they were the core of each other's problems.}

"Are you sad?"

(And Hilbert's eyes looked warmly at her, full of love, and she knew that it was all a daydream.)

["What do you mean, Professor Juniper?"]

["Maladaptive Daydreaming: a condition in which an individual excessively daydreams of fantasizes, sometimes as a psychological response to trauma or abuse. The patient can tell the difference between reality and fantasy."]

["That is our diagnosis."]

She needed a hero. He was perfect.

But he was too late.

{They both knew it.}


{He was too late. Too late to save her. And he watched himself not do anything for her, until it was too late.}

When Hilbert was seven, he moved to a small town in the south-eastern portion of Unova. It was called Nuvema Town.

He was surrounded by people all the time, because he was supposedly "cute". Boys called on him to play with them, because he was athletic (never mind the fact that he was skinny and scrawny; he could still beat everyone else to a pulp if needed), and girls wanted him to play with them because he looked like a prince (elegant and pretty; a pretty-boy).

{But he thought they were all annoying. Stupid. Annoying.}

His parents had died. {He didn't care much for them either, those alcoholics and drug-abusing bastards; thank god he wasn't on the car with them when they drank too much for their own good.}

He was always surrounded by people; only bad. So when there was one girl who always stared blankly out the window, he had taken notice of her.

["Hey, who's that girl?"]

["No one. She's weird. She's always by herself."]

He had pity. That he was sure of. He pitied those who were innocent. He pitied those who were naive.

{He hated, however, the ones that knew no hurt at all and didn't believe in emotional strength; those horrible bastards didn't know what it felt like to live lives like his. He hated them. Hated them and the life they never knew.}

So when the girl started crying under a tree, tears leaking out of her blank eyes, he had felt a need to stop playing with those kids and walked over to her.

"Hey."

She looked at him, with those blank eyes, and he knew from then on, he was a goner.

{Gone, like the shimmer which probably used to be in her eyes that he had imagined for just a split moment.}

He was too late.

[But he felt a need to protect her.]

Not wanting to leave, he wasn't startled as his body began to move by its own.

"The name's Hilbert."

"…Hilda."

[He couldn't control his body.]

"Are you sad?"

Blank eyes stared at blank eyes, both dull from the horrors of life.

{He knew the answer.}

She shook her head no.

{It wasn't possible for her to be sad if she had never experienced happiness truly.}

So he vowed to save her, because he thought that blank eyes were pretty. Pretty, like his own. And she was like a doll. Fragile and pretty. And blank eyes.

{But he knew it was already far too late.}

[He watched himself leave the girl behind.]

Through "his" eyes, he turned back to his "friends".

[He wanted to protect her. To save her. But at the moment, he had no control whatsoever over his thoughts and his actions. It was like he was watching someone else.]

He was taken to a psychiatrist when he was little.

["You're the worst son in the world, you filthy piece of retarded shit. Actually feel something for once, you ugly bastard."]

["Your son has something wrong with him. He appears to be detached from the rest of the world and from himself. It appears he is depersonalized. Depersonalization is an anomaly of self-awareness."]

["Oh, we don't care. After all, the boy is already damaged enough. Do as you want with him."]

["But sir, your son, he hears voices-"]

["-I don't care. Do as you want with this kid."]

(And at night, he looked over the scars on his body with no emotion at all. He didn't feel anything. Who needed to? His parents had given him pain when they threw the broken beer bottles at him, and he thought that if some people would never understand things like that, that he didn't need people like those. The first time Hilda had seen those scars, she had quietly slipped inside her house to get bandages, even though he said he didn't need them. It was a mutual pity. Empathy? Caring?)

He only needed Hilda. And she was the only thing that he wanted to be safe. The others could go and die.

["Your parents are dead, little boy, do you know that?"]

[Oh he knew. He just didn't care. He didn't care at all for people not like him.]

After all, he hated humans. He didn't like being "normal".


A/N

...Not much to say here. XD

Well, I have a feeling I didn't explain what was really wrong with Hilda and Hilbert in this chapter...well...I know that seven year olds normally aren't this mature or have extremely morose thoughts, but let's just call it an effect of trauma.

Hilbert experiences something called "Depersonalization Disorder", and Hilda experiences "Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder".

Maladaptive Daydreaming is a minor psychological problem, but Hilda also has trauma, detachment, inferiority problems, etc. so there's still some concern over her well-being.

Depersonalization is normally a symptom of Schizophrenia (which Hilbert has according to the first chapter, because he was ignoring the voices in his head), Bipolar Depression Disorder, is the single main reaction in "dissociative identity disorder" and "dissociative disorder not otherwise specified" things.

In other words, the two are close together because they feel others are not like them, which is kind of a detachment to the world. Yep.