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Jack doesn’t remember ever having been ill before, but he’s seen enough children get sniffles and colds and viruses, and there is an echo of it in his own body.
The fatigue crawls in so slowly he hardly notices. He springs to his feet a little less. He doesn’t wheel and dive in the air as quickly or as often as before. But he’s still having about as much fun as he ever does, so there’s no point questioning it. Things shift and change all the time. He’s a spirit of nature, so he’s used to ebbs and flows.
But after a few months, it doesn’t go away. It plateaus for a while, and then instead of a flow of energy back towards him, he feels an ebbing once more. He notices that his fingers don’t grip his staff as strongly. He feels an ache in his lower body, and at night when he sleeps on tree branches, he thinks that it might be in his hips, but he can’t be sure. He’s never had a problem sleeping on hard surfaces before, and he doesn’t truly know if he has a problem with them now. There’s just…discomfort.
The children still don’t see him. That part never changes. He flits amongst them and brings them joy and follows them on the occasional trip to the hospital for broken bones or sprains, but he’s always away and off to the next town once he knows they’re okay. He refreshes their piles of snowballs and keeps their snowmen sparkling in the light of a cold, dawn sun.
It’s the way it’s supposed to be.
He’s not getting older. He knows that. He stares at himself in frost bordered panes of glass, and he sees that he looks the same as he ever does.
Perhaps his eyes are wearier, sadder, but then he could just be imagining it. Even if he’s not, there is no one to complain to.
No one who will listen, anyway.
*
‘So, here we are again, hey?’ Jack says, voice a little scratchier than it used to be. He leans with his back to the trunk of a huge mountain ash, and his legs are swinging on either side of the branch. He has to consciously remind himself to swing them, which is unusual. If he stops thinking about it, his legs go still and feel like they might be made of lead.
So he swings them. Imagines a pendulum in a grandfather clock.
He looks up at the moon through leaves that gleam black by its light.
‘I was playing with some kids today, and the weirdest thing happened,’ Jack says, turning his staff in his fingers. He gets distracted, holds the staff with one hand and holds his other hand out and clenches his fingers to make a fist and then relaxes them again. Do his knuckles hurt? That’s just…strange. ‘Uh, anyway, the strangest thing happened? This one little guy, oh he was a cutie for sure, he ran through me when I wasn’t looking, and it hurt. I mean it never feels good, but it…I mean it felt like he’d just wrapped his two tiny fists around my spine and squeezed. It…was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Totally unfun. Not cool, man. So…I know we have these great chats of ours and all, but maybe you could just help a guy out? A spirit? Whatever I am? Give me some kind of sign, yeah? Do spirits get sick?’
He can’t tell the moon how he fell to his knees and cried out and his staff fell out of his hands and spun to the ground with a soft sound as snow cushioned it. He can’t say how he went to all fours and gasped for breath and his back went into some kind of rhythmic spasm and his lungs heaved. The whole experience was horrifying, and it wasn’t like it was fun when people ran through him in the first place. Invisibility sucked, that was for sure.
He opens his mouth to say something else, to change the subject, but he can’t think of anything he hasn’t covered before.
He stares up at the moon and wonders if he should go to them, the Guardians.
But they don’t like him.
They don’t understand him.
So he doesn’t go to them.
*
It’s only two months later and Jack knows he’s sick. He knows because sometimes he coughs when it’s too cold, which doesn’t make any sense, and also cuts out an entire swathe of towns from his yearly circuits through the winter months. All those children, and he can’t even visit them anymore.
He doesn’t sleep in trees these days, or on rooftops, or on glaciers, or anywhere hard. He makes a nice little pile of the delicate, aerated snow and tucks himself inside of it and after a while it feels like the way he’s always done things, and he forgets that it used to be different.
It’s his new normal.
Sometimes animals try to join him in his fresh snow caves, and their bodies move through his, and he wakes up crying out in pain and clawing himself free and coughing and sometimes laughing and sometimes dashing ice away from his eyes. Animals never used to be such a problem, but they are now. Insects are fine, even small birds, but a big badger hurts him as much as a child.
A Wednesday evening, a wolverine has him waking up screaming, Jack’s big joints throbbing in concert with the pain of it, and he’s scrambling into the shadows of a huge pine forest, looking up in betrayal at the stars. There’s no moon to glare at. He covers his mouth with his hands and goes through the mantra he’s been using for a few days now.
It’s fine. It’s okay! You’ll play with kids tomorrow. This is temporary. Spirit flu. It’s fine. It’s okay. Think of the kids. The snow. Sun through diamond dust. It’s fine. It’s okay.
Jack becomes aware of a presence in the shadows with him slowly, then all at once. A prickling at his senses resolves into him jumping into the air and holding his staff in front of himself.
It makes no sense.
No one can see him except the Guardians, and it wouldn’t be one of them.
The spirit – it has to be a spirit – is tall and forbidding and made of the dark. He is angles and a black robe and grey skin. His eyes are the gold of pyrite; a cold, bleached colour. The spirit isn’t even looking at him. Doesn’t see him. Is staring moodily out into the night. His hooked nose making his frown even more forbidding somehow.
Jack stares at him, wonders if he’s hallucinating. But no, he feels the other spirit, doesn’t he? There’s that wash of something along his skin, as though the shadows around him are pressing closer.
This guy, maybe he’s not a good guy.
He’s definitely not a Guardian.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ the spirit drawls.
Jack gasps, the sound turns into a choked cough, and then he’s bent over his staff and rubbing at his chest because this is embarrassing and was the spirit talking to him? He must have been. He must have been. Definitely a spirit then. But Jack almost never saw them, and when he did, they almost never interacted with him, or wanted to.
‘S-sorry, hey,’ Jack says. Not: are you talking to me? Not: who are you?
‘No harm done, I believe,’ the spirit says, turning to him and lifting an eyebrow. Jack does a double take, not an eyebrow, just his brow.
‘Who are you?’ Jack says. ‘I’m Jack Frost.’
‘The frost covered sweater does rather give it away,’ the spirit says.
‘And you are?’
‘Your worst nightmare,’ the spirit says, grinning at him. It’s theatrical and more than a little creepy, and Jack finds himself backing away, despite the desire in him to just…to just speak with someone.
‘Really?’ Jack says, trying for flippancy. ‘Because you don’t seem that scary.’
The shadows around him coalesce into shapes, demonic shapes, and they shriek and leap at him, and he flies backwards trying to escape them, his breath coming fast and hoarse and by the time the shadows leave him alone, stop encroaching on him, the spirit is gone. Jack doesn’t even know his name.
He tells himself he doesn’t want to know his name.
He tells himself that he’s not bad at conversations just because he hasn’t had one in such a long time.
It’s fine. It’s okay.
*
A week comes where he spends an entire day of the weekend in a sealed snow cave, curled in a ball, his staff clutched to his chest as he sleeps, sore, his chest rattling with his breaths. He has formless dreams that aren’t quite nightmares, aren’t quite anything at all, but always having him rousing and settling every hour or so.
The next week, he forces himself to spend the entire weekend awake for the children, because he needs them somehow, he knows that.
He spends Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday in a snow cave, paying for having pushed himself past the limits of his new normal.
*
A month later, he rakes a hand through his hair and several silvery strands fall out. He stares at them in his fingers and then clutches them to his chest and then stupidly he pets them onto the top of his head, like he can force them back into place and pretend the whole thing never happened.
But it scares him, badly.
He goes to the head of the Guardians, North, and the flight is gruelling for him now, but he manages. He even approaches the main entrance properly, because he doesn’t think he has energy to deal with tricking the yetis.
They bar him from entering and refuse to listen to him when he tells them it’s important, it’s an emergency.
When Jack casts his mind back, it occurs to him that maybe they don’t listen to him anymore because he’d said something similar last time. Then he’d broken in and let a whole bunch of toys loose and set a snow storm in the centre of the Workshop. A small one! Only a small one.
None of the yetis are forgiving, and they chase him away when he tries to camp outside. Jack flees from them, he’s terrified of what it might feel like if they move through his body. He’s even taken to avoiding big groups of children – the feeling of children passing through him now is agonising enough that it can disorient him for days.
He doesn’t touch his hair again, and instead of settling himself by raking his hand through his hair, he now has the nervous habit of rubbing at his chest. It aches constantly. He can no longer spin his staff for fun. His fingers are too clumsy. He’s dropped it a few times now, and he’s trying to train himself out of the habit of playing with it, in case he loses it while he’s flying through the air.
The visit to North’s Workshop is such a strain that he spends a week in a snow cave, half-dreaming about formless shapes that shout or whisper in the background, and never quite talk to him.
*
The spirit of shadows comes to him, and Jack knows that the spirit has sought him out on purpose. Jack’s not even in the shadows properly this time. He’s just resting with his knees up, his staff in his lap, and there’s a clothesline casting thin lines of shadow over him in the light of dusk.
‘You’re unwell,’ the spirit says.
‘Geez, thanks Mister,’ Jack says, his voice bitter. ‘I gosh darn wouldn’t have known it, if you hadn’t come to tell me. Should I give you a penny for all that wisdom?’
The spirit laughs, but the sound is flat and lifeless and shadows swirl around the base of his bare feet, seeking. Jack watches them. It’s repellent.
‘Hey,’ Jack says, when the spirit says nothing at all beyond his laugh, and now stares away like something has caught his attention. ‘Are you like…are you like, ah, like a spirit of the dead?’
‘No,’ the spirit says. He looks at Jack critically, his lips lift in a smirk. ‘Though I can see why you’d think I was. Perhaps I hope to be.’
‘Do you?’ Jack says, frowning.
‘Do I?’ the spirit says, mocking him.
‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘I thought I answered that,’ the spirit says.
‘Oh, yeah, because you so look like my worst nightmares,’ Jack laughs. ‘You don’t even know, buddy. Trust me.’
The spirit looks at him and his gaze is too still and his eyes are too narrowed and Jack feels something in his chest tighten and he’s certain that it’s fear. His whole body tenses, he finds himself shifting backwards, and then using the staff to push himself upright.
‘Cut it out,’ Jack says.
‘Nah,’ the spirit says lazily. ‘Do you know what you’re afraid of, Jack? Because I do. It’s not even hard to ferret out with you. It’s all there on the surface. You don’t even make me work for it.’
‘So tell me then,’ Jack says.
The spirit is suddenly right in front of him, right there, and they are very nearly chest to chest, and all Jack can see is a hooked nose and golden eyes staring down at him and he can feel the spirit and he knows then that if he reaches out, maybe his hands won’t move through him. Maybe he can touch him. It’s an ache that thunders through him and makes his hands shake and he feels bared and so, so tired.
‘Your desperation is like acid,’ the spirit says quietly, gently. Jack feels it like a blow.
‘Desperation for what?’ Jack sounds like nothing more than bravado. He’s heard little kids use exactly the same tone before bullies beat the living shit out of them.
The spirit lifts his hand and Jack flinches back, and the spirit tilts his head and smiles and there’s nothing pleasant in that expression. Jack’s flinch has pleased him. But still, he lowers his hand to Jack’s face and Jack holds utterly still because he wants to know that someone can still touch him, that it won’t hurt, and he closes his eyes and his lips part and he can feel how warm the spirit is and…
Then there is a gust of cold around him, the sound of distant laughter.
When he opens his eyes, the spirit is gone.
Jack’s held breath leaves him in a sound like a sob.
*
His hair doesn’t all fall out at once. But it begins to fall out even when Jack no longer touches it to check how it’s doing. He catches his reflection and his hair is uneven. There’s no bald patches, but it’s sparser than it was. He looks sallow.
If he takes a deep breath that’s too deep, his lungs protest and he coughs. He never brings anything up. It’s a dry, hacking thing, it rattles and shakes him.
The spirit finds him again during a coughing fit, and Jack sees him in the corner of his eye and wants to stop coughing because this is important, but he can’t make himself stop. He’s worried the spirit will get bored and just leave, but he doesn’t.
‘You can call me Pitch,’ the spirit says. Pitch.
‘Like tar,’ Jack says.
‘No,’ Pitch says, looking affronted, opening his mouth to keep arguing when he seems to realise that Jack is just trying to get a rise out of him.
‘I don’t like you very much,’ Jack says.
‘I’m the best you’ve got,’ Pitch says, smiling and showing teeth and dark grey gums and nothing but a maw of shadows behind that. ‘I rather find that I like being someone’s last hope.’
‘You’re full of it,’ Jack snarls, even as his breath wheezes.
‘Temper, temper,’ Pitch sing-songs. ‘You like to play with fire, don’t you? For someone who can’t have much to do with it. You’re convinced that touch might save you. You just need someone to prove you’re real.’
Save me from what?
Jack shies away from that thought.
‘Yeah,’ Jack laughs. ‘Sure. That’s what I need.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Pitch says, winking at him.
He disappears and Jack stares at the space that Pitch has left behind. He feels guilty for driving Pitch away, or…for not taking his offer seriously. Was it an offer? It probably wasn’t an offer.
Jack doesn’t need to be saved.
What could Pitch give him anyway?
Even so, Jack feels bereft.
To soothe himself, he drags his fingers over the back of his other hand over and over again.
It’s okay. It’s fine. I’m here. Just a little sick. It’ll be fine.
*
Days turn into weeks and Jack tastes his own desperation as acid in the back of his mouth. He is searching for Pitch almost as often as he seeks out children now. Truthfully, the pain of them passing through him is such a deterrent that his chest catches and his breath quickens whenever he sees children playing in the snow. It’s not excitement anymore. He remembers playfulness like a hazy dream on the horizon.
Pitch isn’t where he looks, which makes sense, because the world is vast and Jack doesn’t know how to find him and can’t travel very far or very fast anymore. He needs to stop and sleep often. He wakes up to little silvery strands of hair tickling his cheek, gleaming on the snow in front of him.
Jack resolves to be better next time. He will be polite and he will suck it up and he will just ask. That’s all there is for it.
He thinks vaguely about visiting the other Guardians, but Bunnymund loathes him, and besides, they all tend to live in such warm places, and Jack has a bad feeling about warm places. He won’t even think about what they might do to his body or health. He can’t even contemplate it without feeling his stomach drop.
He also can’t remember the last time he saw Sandy. It makes no sense. But then he sleeps so many nights away, perhaps he just keeps missing him.
After two months, Jack is truly exhausted and collapses by a stand of trees bare of their leaves and reaching spindly grey branches into the sky. He stares up at the moon and then laughs until the laughter turns into coughing, and his eyes burn and tickle with tears that start off as cold salted water and turn into ice on his cheeks.
Pitch comes to him a week later and Jack hasn’t moved much, except to surround himself with more powder soft snow.
‘Hey,’ Jack says, before Pitch can say anything. ‘Okay. You got me. You…you get it, obviously. I don’t want to play with fire. Will you just try it? Please? Will you just touch my hand or something? I just…it’s been…something’s been wrong for a really long time. I’m- I’m guessing you’re not the kind of guy to pass a message onto the Guardians and ha, I don’t think they’ll listen to me anyway. So could you just please, please touch the back of my hand or just…please?’
That’s pathetic, he knows, and if his cheeks could burn with humiliation, they would.
Pitch watches him in bemusement and then shakes his head like he doesn’t understand, because Jack needs it to not be a denial, to not be a refusal of his request. Not even a request. He’s begging.
‘Just…’ Jack holds out his hand, palm up. ‘Please?’
‘No,’ Pitch says then, smiling cruelly. ‘Maybe I like you being on the hook. It’s been a long time since someone other than a child has begged me for something. And I cannot ever remember a time when someone has begged me to touch them. Usually they’re all begging me to go away.’
Jack stares at him. Who is this spirit? This worst nightmare? What children are begging him to go away? What is he doing to them?
He knows then that the right thing to do, ethically, is to reject this being outright. To just…avoid him, to repudiate.
But he keeps his arm stretched out and his hand is shaking and his eyes are wet and he’s begged.
‘Pitch,’ Jack says, his voice trembling.
‘Aw,’ Pitch says, his voice taking on that dramatic edge that Jack knows to hate now. ‘Aw, look at you, pining for little ol’ me.’
‘Just once,’ Jack begs. ‘I’ll be in your debt.’
Jack hates himself then. It’s just another pain amongst the myriad in his chest.
‘Maybe,’ Pitch says, and Jack’s heart leaps and then plummets off some precipice when Pitch begins to disappear.
‘Please don’t go!’ Jack shouts. ‘Please! I’m dying!’
Jack claps a hand over his mouth, and Pitch becomes corporeal once more and stares at him.
It’s a revelation. A knowledge he’s had inside himself for a while, but never looked at directly. A shadow behind him, but not exposed to his gaze until now.
He’s dying.
Oh god.
He’s saying it all out loud, an entire stream of consciousness that he can’t stop because he’s still stuck frozen in a place of horror at his own admission.
‘Oh god, please, Pitch, can’t you just please help me. Please? I’ll do anything. If you just…I know you can. I felt your warmth. I haven’t felt body warmth in so long. Please. I know you’re not a good guy and I don’t care and I know you probably enjoy that but please, I just want anything, it doesn’t have to be much, it doesn’t have to be much, I promise.’
He’s still talking when Pitch only rolls his eyes and starts to fade away once more.
‘Pitch, damn it, please! Pitch! I swear to god, why won’t you just-’
Pitch is gone, and Jack can’t cry, because the first sob causes another coughing fit, and he spends the next hour trying to calm himself down because he’s so scared of that horrible, shredding pain in his chest.
*
He never really recovers properly, after that.
He doesn’t move beyond the boundaries of the forest and he doesn’t try to fly anymore. He stays curled in a snow cave most of the time, concentrates on keeping his breathing steady and even and hates that if he stops thinking about breathing, his breaths come shallow and weaker, as though even they are fading away.
The staff he clutches to his body like children clutch at dolls and security blankets.
Something very like his life flashes before his eyes, except he remembers a farm and a farmhouse and a girl with walnut brown hair and a cheery, youthful laugh that feels like family and none of it makes any sense. He remembers waking up in the lake. Darkness and the moon. He remembers stupid things, like the freckles on one particular kid in Alaska, and how they’d crept up either side of his forehead and looked like starbursts on his light brown skin, and the way he’d laughed and laughed every time he got hit with a snowball, even before Jack’s magic ever found them.
He sleeps, he half-dreams, he strokes his hand with his other hand and knows that it’s not enough. His bones ache. He can tune most of the pain out. It’s the breathing that worries him. It’s hard to do. It’s never something he’s had to think about before.
*
Pitch returns during an afternoon as Jack is watching the last rays of the sun, a glorious sunset of clouds lined red and gold. Jack turns his head and looks at him, but otherwise, can’t manage a great deal more. He hasn’t picked up his staff in a few days. Every now and then he brushes it with stiff fingers.
‘Hey,’ Jack says.
‘I’ve never seen a spirit die before,’ Pitch says idly. ‘I didn’t know it could happen.’
Jack nods, winces, says nothing. He remains convinced that he will find a way to stop it. He just needs one more good day. If he rests enough, gets decent enough sleep, he’ll make the yetis listen to him. They’ll have to now. Once they see the state he’s in, they’ll let him see North, and North will know what to do.
‘You’ll do anything I want?’ Pitch says.
Jack’s eyes widen, a breathlessness that is excitement for a change, clamours in his lungs and his mouth drops open on his weak, fast breaths.
Yes, he will do anything. He can deal with ethics later. He will do anything.
He nods and leans forward and reaches out his hand, and Pitch looks at him, considering, and Jack remembers that he once had dignity but…
Well he never had much.
‘Anything?’ Pitch said, sounding even more dangerous than he usually did.
‘Uh huh,’ Jack says, his voice rough.
‘I have always wondered what it might be like, to be someone’s saviour,’ Pitch says, walking forwards and looking pleased with himself.
Jack watches Pitch’s hand descend towards his and feels his heart flutter like a butterfly and hope leap with a quickness inside of him, pebbles skipping across a lake, hope bouncing inside of him.
Pitch’s hand is so close, and he’s not stopping, not hesitating, and Jack’s lips crack when he smiles and-
-Pitch’s hand passes through his.
The pain is immediate, horror falling like an avalanche on top of it. Jack keens weakly in agony, his chest is too tired to manage much more than a weak burst of coughing, he’s down on his forearms in the snow and Pitch is standing over him and when Jack blindly reaches out for Pitch’s feet, pain stabs at him. A cruel, vicious pain.
When his head clears, Pitch is still there looking…not sad, exactly. Perhaps just confused.
‘I waited too long,’ Pitch said. Then his expression clears and he shrugs. ‘Oh well, it’s not like I’ve ever done this before. I suppose I know for next time. If there’s ever going to be a next time.’
Pitch is already fading away. He’s leaving. He’s leaving Jack alone.
Jack knows that whatever he’s facing, he’s not strong enough to face it alone. He’s had too much of it, too many years of it, he will go mad. His mind already is collapsing in upon itself, he’s already given away his dignity and his integrity and he has very little left to give.
‘Pitch, can you…please, please get a message to the Guardians for me? Just…just one. Please?’
‘Given how I feel about the Guardians, I think not,’ Pitch says, his voice already echoing in the shadows around him, already fading.
A wash of terror that has his bladder and bowels loosening. There is nothing in his body to spill, so he doesn’t soil himself.
‘No…please! Don’t leave me like this! Pass a message to the Guardians! Anything! Please!’
Then nothing but weak coughing, the wind soughing through bare branches. The coughing doesn’t last long, the wind dies down. The forest is still.
*
They are passing through a forest in springtime, tracking the notorious Pitch Black, trying to stop him from infesting the dreams of children and turning them into pure nightmare. It’s been a gruelling few months, and they thought they were making headway but Pitch is too strong, and the Guardians have never faced anything quite like him.
Bunnymund follows behind the others, bringing up the rear, his boomerang out even though it’s probably overkill because it’s too sunny for shadows to be much of a threat.
His eyes catch a shape on the ground and he pauses.
‘Oi, hold up a tick,’ he says, almost to himself. The other Guardians pause, North strides back with the kind of confidence of someone who knows how to wield sabres and laugh at the dark.
‘What is it, Bunnymund?’ North says. ‘What are you seeing? Is it a clue?’
‘Nah, not really,’ Bunnymund says. He holds up two pieces of wood. It was clearly once a shepherd’s crook, now covered in moss. It’s curved in a specific way. It’s…almost familiar. ‘Do any of you recognise this?’
Sandy shakes his head, question marks appearing in gold above his spiked hair. Toothiana squints at the wood and then lifts her fingers in a shrug.
It’s North who takes one of the pieces of wood out of Bunnymund’s paws and hums thoughtfully, deeply, turning the curved section of wood and examining it from every angle. But after a minute, he also shakes his head and his bushy eyebrows lift.
‘It is being only shepherd’s crook,’ North says. ‘And it is not helpful to us in finding Pitch.’
‘Yeah,’ Bunnymund says, he drops the wood to the ground as North does the same. ‘You’re right. Come on then. Let’s get a move on.’
They leave the two pieces of staff behind them, and never give them another thought.