His Nightmare Queen (Pitch Black x Reader)

17: Mingling

Idk how I make these chapters so long anymore, just roll with it I guess. Don't hurt me for the spice at the end~

"If you say it took you years to get the hang of it, I don't see how I'd be able to figure it out in one night."

"But that doesn't mean it will kill you to try it now, does it?"

You scoff at the Nightmare King in response. There was an ache in your feet from the hours of walking you had been doing tonight paired with the soreness in your shoulders from yesterday's sword-wielding. Yet here you were, being dragged against your will through the shadows while unseen by any passers among the streets, throughout apartment buildings, or within houses among the nighttime dark.

This was your first evening of having Pitch teach you his ways, that is, while not counting your first time at sword practice from yesterday. His hand remained wrapped around your wrist to keep you from stumbling out of the shadows and into a town you were unfamiliar with, or worse, ending up unaccompanied by him while technically trespassing into someone's home in the middle of the night. Still, letting him teach you the basics of the nightmare sand against working dream sand was better than spending another anxiety-filled night in the lair consisting of you peeking one eye open every few minutes to watch out for threats entering the bedroom (which at this point was becoming just as much yours as it was Pitch's).

You could just do without the tampering of your sleep schedule.

"It's almost four A.M.," you pointed out with a groan. "Can we please be done yet?" You tossed your head back in a childish lazy manner in order to further gain the king's attention. When he looked back at you from over his shoulder, he at least showed a smirk of amusement at the tone of your overexaggerated whining.

"This will be the last one, then we may make our way," he stated.

The night had been filled with various unsuccessful attempts at your hand in nightmare-making. Instead of turning in for some sleep, Pitch had taken you with him through the darkness in order to not leave you alone in the lair and for you to oversee, and even make a few attempts at, the art of dream-polluting. It felt odd to you at first thought, disturbing the slumber of those you didn't know who resided in a suburban area you had never visited. However, even you knew that not ever having bad dreams was far more strange than having one every now and then, and it began to feel more of a natural occurrence. You reminding yourself that everyone gets nightmares, that everyone has had that strange vision giving them something to talk about in the morning or even inspiring them tactics of precaution to keep them away from dangers that may strike them as terrifying, let you feel that the event was more normal than you originally thought. And the idea of you potentially being the one giving those nightmares to other humans much like you felt almost priding in a way.

The problem was, you being a mortal human just as the rest of these sleeping citizens in the night made the process about a hundred times harder for you. House after house, flat after flat, Pitch led you through the shadows and quietly into carefully chosen bedrooms - which for you would be typically housed by either one adult or one child while their one or two parents remained in separate rooms to ensure you wouldn't be seen by residents once you stepped out of the shadowed corners. Even with Pitch wanting to be seen more often, him being an immortal spirit still brought him many advantages over you. Other than his common invisibility, one of those advantages was the many decades of practice he had to master the sands.

When it came to you, each time he snuck you silently into another child's or young adult's room where they lay asleep facing away from you, poking your finger into the dancing golden sands that swirled above their heads caused nothing. Sandman's magic would spread around your touch and then mend back together into its previous form once you pulled away as if it had never been disturbed in the first place. You would sigh and try again multiple times over, casting glances over to Pitch at your side as if urging him to just do it himself so the two of you could get back to the lair already. A few times you'd voluntarily wrap your fingers around his thin hand to see if maybe by chance there would be some sort of transfer or influence of magic that could happen between the two of you. But every time that failed, he'd eventually sense the height of your frustrations in each location and give in by either pressing his fingertips into the dream to darken it himself or pouring some black sand into your palm for you to sprinkle into the golden grains yourself so you two could move on.