A short fic teaser (completely unrelated to all the other one's I've started... whoops)

Nancy is five by the time she realizes that the monsters in her dreams are vastly different and far worse than the ones all the other kids are scared of. They are scared of the ghost stories their older siblings told them, or of the creatures on TV. They worry about monsters under the bed, or in their closets, like Sulley from that new movie, Monsters Inc. Sulley isn’t even scary. Sulley is kind and he helps little girls like her. Sulley has a face. Sulley doesn’t leave parents dead on the floor, bleeding from the eyes with their limbs broken and horribly misshapen. He doesn’t steal and eat best friends. He doesn’t even make little girls bleed. 

She tries to ask her parents about it, but all she gets in return are horrified looks and questions about babysitters watching bad movies. They don’t believe her when she says she’s never seen a movie like that. Her older brother Nathan and her never see their old babysitter again. It makes her sad. Abby had been really nice.

Nancy is six the first time she hears the word PTSD. The nice therapist lady had just been playing dolls with her before asking her parents to join them in the room to talk. She doesn’t understand what it means, but it makes her parents freak out and start arguing with the lady. They claim that it makes no sense, that nothing has ever happened to her to cause that level of trauma. The lady tries to calm them down, telling them she understands, but that it’s something that would explain her breakdowns when confronted with fireworks or guns. It would explain her night terrors and how frequently she woke her family up with screams. It would even explain some of her tantrums where no one could get through to her, or her moments of dissociation.

Nancy doesn’t understand most of the conversation, but she does figure out that something is wrong with her that none of the adults know how to deal with... She learns quickly that numb quiet makes people happier, so she learns how to mask it behind a smile and a lie. Adults seem to like telling her to smile.

...