Chapter Text
Pitch wonders how Jack feels when he is awake. It’s been months since the last waking incident, and when he had sent his mares to investigate, they found the boy curled in a tiny alcove, tunneled through a chasm in Antarctic ice. His belly appeared bruised and Pitch was elated to learn that the sand, though its presence was exaggerated in the nightmare, had managed a corporeal form. Even dream sand did not begin so strongly.
He finds it harder and harder to part from Jack. A persistent itch flies under his skin and clouds his mind. Once he leaves the chamber, the need to return has him sweating from the effort within minutes. And when he does return, Jack nearly attacks him once he’s close enough to the bed. It’s beautiful. His life has never been so satisfying.
At this moment, the need to be near Jack has never been stronger. As he shakily instructs his meager army, he feels the attachment screaming at him until his ears are ringing from the force. It’s never been so loud.
He’s staring up from the floor, trying to gather himself after having blacked out. His hands can’t stop moving and his legs fumble to stand. The mares have mostly left and he feels fear. The connection is so stretched, it screams at him. He can’t do anything to resist it. He knows only pain, as if his organs have been ripped out of his belly and pulled between his ribs. It’s as if every sensation of being walked through has multiplied into something monstrous, and his mind zeroes in on one thing only.
Jack must be safe.
He starts to forget his form as he barrels through the cavern toward their room. Shadows fray into tendrils and his fingers elongate, darkened. His features sharpen and then collapse, until he is nothing but his fear and his pain and the doors are flung open to an empty bed. The room is silent, but for his panting, and there is no warm body to greet him with desire.
Whether the shriek comes from rage or despair, or makes no sound at all, Pitch’s existence flares into one maelstrom of anguished fury.
He can’t leave yet.
Not like this.
The Guardians would kill him on sight if he tried to retrieve him and Jack, Jack has probably gone to them. Jack has left and the sand and his companion and his one chance at anything meaningful in this desolation are gone. His form shifts into amorphous horrors, beasts which cannot weep, but his howls and panting breaths, shaking chest, all drive him further from reason.
The lifeless void, the darkness; his legacy, what had once been his comfort, is now filled with his lost joy. With hope. With Jack. He can still smell him. The mares enter the room for the first time in nearly a year and understand his fearsome growls.
They can reach the surface.
They can do what he cannot.
North found him crashed into a mountainside. The wind had beaten the snow into an unnatural storm, trying to free him. The fire is too warm and before he can move, the room dims. Panic thrusts his heart into overdrive, but as soon as he gets to his elbows, a hand pushes him gently back down. The yetis are on standby, nervous and too big in the ancient doorway.
“… tica… the chasm… fever.”
He has a fever? He can’t access his powers. He can barely keep his eyes open, the lethargy is so bad. All he wants is to sleep, but something terrible has happened. He can’t sleep. He can’t move. Perhaps he should be terrified, but he’s only frustrated; impotent. Sensing the staff in the corner, his panic calms a bit, but he’d like the energy to at least ask what was going on. If he just closed his eyes, maybe he could refocus. Maybe he could find something familiar in the darkness.
His shoulder is lightly shaken and his eyes drag slowly up to North’s stern face.
“You’ve got to stay awake, da?”
Tooth is muttering to her birds. They dart out the window and titter fearfully. She looks to North,
“They’re looking for him, but it might take a few hours.”
Jack knows when North is swearing, no matter how hard he tries to hide it. A heavy weight sinks into the bed and the furs drag him nearer to the vortex. North’s girth occupies the entire foot of the mattress, and normally Jack would find such company invigorating, but at the moment, he only feels sick. The closer North comes, the worse he feels. The other Guardian understands his pained expression and keeps a casual distance. Jack manages to get his elbow under him before his neck falls to the side of the bed, stomach searing under the force of his muscles. The more aware of the pain he becomes, the greater its impact. It keeps him awake when every fiber in his body begs him to sleep.
He tries to speak,
“… ss… What’s happening?”
His voice is a hissing grunt. Trying to recollect the past few days has turned into a nightmare. He remembers Jamie’s, fighting with the Guardians, and sealing himself off from the pressure. What pressure? His stomach roils and he sobs, readying for dry heaves. North is beside himself. Jack can’t even support his own weight.
“Have you met any Fae, lately?”
“Did you eat something?”
Jack shakes his head and a hand works down to clutch his belly. He needs to show them the bruise. It can’t just be a wound, there’s something wrong with him, but the thought of exposing it freezes him. He’s never felt such an immense emotion so suddenly. The weight of the shame, fear, and despair crushes him back into the bed. His eyes water and he curls protectively around his stomach, and only then does the pain alleviate. He must hide it. They can’t know. Perhaps that says something of its nature.
“Jack, where were you before Antarctica?”
Controlling his breathing has never been so difficult. Slipping words in between the pang requires a level of finesse he never thought he’d learned. The pain is too familiar for him to find any comfort.
“Fighting… with Bunny. He kicked me out.”
North’s face draws into a frown,
“He has not seen you in almost a year. Do you mean Jamie?”
Jack’s at a loss. His eyes widen from the force of his pain as he tries to remember, grasping at his memory only to end in a void. All he remembers is darkness. He couldn’t have slept for a year. Guardians hardly sleep to begin with.
Tooth sees his panic and confusion and draws closer, kneeling by the bed and trying to hold his hand.
The moment she touches him, he watches his skin scorch and blacken, consumed by fire.
He screeches and finds the energy to fling himself back towards the wall with a massive thump, huddling around the wound and sobbing as he soothes the burns away. But when he looks down, the flesh is unmarred. Her panicked words float around his head, the echo of the pain making them difficult to comprehend.
She keeps her distance, this time, but the thought of the pain makes him quail. He cowers at the wall, hunched and shaking. He can’t remember anything. He wants to speak of his pain, but distrust overwhelms him. How had she hurt him so? Rubbing at the pristine flesh until it’s red, he tries to figure out his escape. The staff can be left. They wouldn’t hurt it, and he can’t seem to access his powers, anyway. The smallest intention feels like a knife sliding through his kidney. He has to minimize the pain and escape.
He must look like a caged cat. North and Tooth are wary of him and speak slowly,
“Jack, were you in Antarctica for a year?” She tries so hard to look motherly, to look caring and unconcerned. But he knows her fear. He can sense it. It gives him the courage to respond, if only with a shake of his head.
“Where did you go after the Warren?”
His mouth open and closes. He briefly registers the concept of tears as they cool his cheeks, but his existence centers around his pain, his confusion. This is all a misunderstanding. He’d been at Bunny’s only a few days before, and the Guardians don’t often speak to one another. Bunny must not have told them. His logic is enough to strengthen his voice, but the pangs in his stomach choke his words,
“Ant.. Antarctica. But it was yesterday. I was just tired. I’ve been so tired, lately,”
That piques their interest. North’s tone is gruff, dark,
“Have you had nightmares?”
He shakes his head. He can’t remember anything. Each time he falls asleep, he wakes less rested; weaker. Powers that had once come easily sputtered and snuffed out; his core has gone stagnant, unnaturally quiet. He can’t feel it around the pain.
Thinking of all this is exhausting. The pain seems alive and whips him for his exposition. He needs to escape, but can hardly get himself sitting up. Even if it was to the closet, the dark corridor, he needs a place to rest. He needs to hide himself because the heat and light and concern of his friends are all driving him mad; burning him, even. He feels like he’ll evaporate under all this pressure. Unaware of their effect on him, Tooth and North attempt to near a last time, and something in Jack roars.
He lurches across the room to the window, a blessed way out. The panes are heavy and his grip sweaty and weak. The cool breeze that greets him starts to lift him from his pain, from their company, but as he starts to crawl out the sill, acid seems to cast over his back.
Every pore on his body flares with blistering heat. Millions of needles spike him from all sides and he goes limp and quiet under the assault. His eyes are wide and flushed with terror. North surrounds him and tries to gather him into his arms, but Jack finds one last reserve of energy and flings himself out of the embrace, scrabbling out the window before he could contemplate the drop. But it couldn’t matter. Nothing is more painful than what he had just been forced to endure.
The rush of wind around him cools his boiling flesh, but the ground is fast approaching. He should have gathered the staff after all. Though, he doesn’t have to worry about that. Somehow he knows he won’t die; that whatever this pain is, it’s determined to keep him breathing.
The ground stops, but he can’t feel the wind that must be holding him.
Rather, he feels something soft and warm, pulling him up the side of the fortress. Sand. Dream sand. The glare of gold off the tiny dunes is nearly blinding, yet the way his limbs sink into it is comforting; familiar. It draws him up to a terrace where North and Tooth are waiting, and the pain begins throbbing once more.
Sandy recognizes his whines and keeps him suspended on the cloud, just out of reach of the other two, and silently asks what has happened.
Something is clearly wrong. He nearly drops Jack at the realization, pulling his dream sand close from the threat. He can feel its slow pollution.
He’s seen nightmares trotting through the countryside, wild and unbridled, but he hasn’t felt such a potent energy in several years. It intends to consume him. For Jack’s own good, he drops him into a snow bank a few yards from North, releasing his whips to scour the mountain, but the moment he loses contact with the boy’s flesh, he can see it, and his stomach drops out from the dread.
There, where Jack’s neck and legs had touched him, black grains swirl anxiously among gold. He reconverts most of them, but sequesters a small pile to show to Tooth and North. This could not bode well.
“JACK!” Their unison screams drag his whips to the edge of the terrace, where Jack has tried to climb over the ledge. The boy’s shrieking cries pierce their skulls as North yanks him back, but no soothing words will help him. Finally surrendering to his screams, North carries him inside and drops him in the bed, locking the door once everyone has joined them.
“Tooth, cabinet. Front of window. I get door.”
She sets to work pushing and Sandy helps, his worry deepening. Jack has been trying to kill himself, in essence. And there is nothing they can do to stop him but cage him.
With Jack quarantined, Sandy makes to leave, but North shakes his head and pats a chair across from where Jack lies panting. Sandy makes eye contact for a moment, and the boy’s glare is so powerful, he nearly stumbles in midair. Only one other person has openly showed such animosity. With Jack’s own wildness, the fury turns his Fae appearance feral. It sends a chill down Sandy’s spine. Within a second, Jack has curled back in on himself with an almost soundless whine, but the hatred has burned quite clearly into his mind.
With that thought fresh, he exposes the new black sand, incubated in his own glass. He pours it onto the table and sighs from relief at the separation. Eager as he is to reclaim this missing part of himself, that Jack had the ability to steal it is a thousand times more sinister.
“Pitch.” North murmurs, and Tooth’s expression is grave.
“Could he have gotten out so soon?”
Sandy shakes his head. He hadn’t felt the Nightmare King’s presence since he’d been sealed in the cavern. Though, that says little of other possibilities.
“I do not like this. Pitch cannot do this. Is something else.”
Sandy’s exasperation builds. He mimes his owns methods of communicating, of sending messages and emotions through Jack’s dreams. Tooth’s hand covers her mouth, but North only huffs,
“He has been gone for year,”
“He was sleeping. And we didn’t see much of him, before that.”
North quiets at her interjection, then lowers his head.
“… We let this happen. Can we do nothing?”
Sandy mimes to keep him awake for as long as possible. Tooth flutters nervously,
“Forever? He has to sleep, eventually, and he’s barely conscious as is!”
Jack watches them from North’s bed, barely able to comprehend the words as they spike his conscious over and over again. The pain is not as consuming with their distance, but that itching he’s felt, that’s gnawed gashes into his belly from constant irritation, peaks in him and begs that he return to the dream sand. If not that, then rest. This whole evening has driven him half-dead from exertion. If he could only sleep, then the pain would leave. He closes his eyes and feels it ebb beneath his flesh with the tide of his blood. The darkness of the room, the lack of fire and covered windows, lull him into the pull of the current. It massages his skin, as though thin fingers are working the strain from his flesh. His body sinks into the mattress as the darkness grows and his muscles lose all strength.
He senses something familiar, though he can’t quite place it, and feels himself descending toward it. If only the voices would quiet, he might find some peace; might find what he’s missing.
That’s it, Jack. You’re so good,
Those words.
He’s stunned by the wave of revulsion that overcomes him. It’s beyond the influence of the pain. He turns onto his side and heaves, instantly gaining the attention of his friends.
The need to escape returns in full, but their faces instead inspire yearning, and he clutches desperately at Tooth’s feathers. His thoughts are being ripped in too many directions at once. He can barely feel the hands on his face and the pounding in his head deafens any pleading voices.
But he speaks the words he’s been begging for the past year, unaware that this will be the first time he’s made a sound.
“Get… it… out!”
He’s rewarded with their confusion and his own unfathomable pain, but he’s remembered those words at least and clings to them as the last hold on his sanity. He feels more than sees the nightmare sand creep under the door to the balcony outside, and succumbs to the weight of his fear.
Somehow, Pitch manages the energy and the form to scream at this new half-formed nightmare, this latest addition to his misery.
“YOU NEARLY HAD HIM. JUST FIVE SECONDS AND THIS WHOLE THING WOULD HAVE BEEN OVER.”
He rips her apart and feels his strength grow as she disperses amongst the rest of his sand.
Just a hair more convincing, if he’d given it more time, perhaps this plan would have succeeded. He can feel himself growing sloppier. His thoughts increasingly consist not of language and reason, but pure instinct and emotion. Nearing the sealed entrances to the cavern, he spies more impurities in his desperation. More weaknesses in the Earth’s crust. If he could keep to the shadows, above ground... His time is running out. If Jack had managed to tell them anything, had any lucidity in his dozing, he could have revealed the whole thing. Pitch would never know. His world is in shambles.
Jack is most likely being closely guarded. He wanders from shadow to shadow at lightning speeds, winding his amorphous body around the pillars and darting up to glance at the cracks in the ceiling. It’s his own version of pacing. Once, when he was pacing their chamber, Jack had called tiredly from the bed,
“You look like a caged cat.”
His hands close around an imaginary waist. Jack’s thinner than air but not nearly as empty. Elegant fingers that had rested on a cool cheek, held open pale thighs, are now elongated and cruel. He can’t touch Jack without hurting him. Perhaps he never could, and that shouldn’t be terrifying in the slightest; should be some grand confirmation of his existence and place in the world. He is the Boogeyman. This form is second nature, but he can still picture Jack recoiling in disgust, trying to fight the many nebulous limbs clawing him forcibly back into bed. This is the only place where he can have more. Where he can keep Jack’s memories subdued and live the life that wasn’t intended for him.
It is his nature as much to take as it is to frighten. Nothing has been given him in this life except this despair. He might have earned it, but that only makes it more toxic. By all rights, he never “earned” Jack. He simply took. And he will take again.
This prison can easily be broken. It’s the issue of moonlight on the surface, of fairies or dreamsand spying him. He manages a corporeal form, the edges of his body fading like ink as he glares up at one long fissure, a scant thread of sunlight shining through. His eyes glow with it; defiant. Hunger for fear is different; makes him leaner; more cunning. Now, he just feels tossed into the storm. A spirit can go without a lot of things, but that does not mean it’s meant to.