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Nightmares weren’t uncommon for the Spirit of Winter, far from it. But they had gotten more frequent after Jack had become a Guardian. Now that there were people that could leave him.
Jack’s nightmares after he became a Guardian were always about the same thing: the others would leave and he would be forced to be all alone again. The how and why changed every time but at its core it was the same.
Sometimes the other Guardians straight up ignored him, telling him to go away and stop bothering them. Other times they couldn’t hear him; That one stung but it was nowhere near as bad as the one that recurred the most. as the worst one was.
The one that hurt most was the one where the others not only ignored and shut him out of their spaces because they were fed up with his pranks. Part of the pain was because it was the most realistic of them all.
After he woke up from those nightmares, he had to travel to Antarctica otherwise he risked possibly killing some humans with how utterly intense the snow storm he accidentally created was. That storm resulted from his emotions taking control of his powers. Jack had learnt his lesson after what had happened on Easter Sunday, 1968.
Even with the possibility that those nighmares highlighted, Jack did not stop pulling pranks on the other Guardians. There’s no way that he would let his fears get in the way of perfectly good opportunities to prank someone.
After all, he did hold the record for North’s Naughty List. Unless it required him to hurt anyone or do particularly destructive, he sought to keep it.
It was a month away from the two-year anniversary of Pitch’s defeat and Jack officially being a Guardian. The spirit had chosen Bunnymund to annoy today, only MiM knows why.
Jack wasn’t doing anything that was particularly bad nor destructive. He wasn’t smashing any eggs or anything like that. All he was doing was messing with the paint designs slightly. Everything he was doing was reversible, but Bunnymund didn’t see that, all he could see was that the Guardian of Joy was messing up his work two weeks away from Easter.
“I think you’re purposefully annoyin’ us so we’d leave ya alone,” the pookah commented as he covered an egg in pastel blue paint, “Is our company that irritatin’?”
It had no heat behind it, more of a light-hearted jab. Bunnymund wasn’t even paying attention to what he was saying. But Jack hadn’t realised any of that, he had taken it at face-value.
Did they really think that he was playing pranks and such to get them to leave him alone? Was that really what they thought? He didn’t mean for it to be taken that way at all!
Ice (ha, the irony!) settled in his stomach.
Was his worst nightmare really going to come true? So soon too?
An invisible iron band had taken hold of his neck and squeezed.
Jack stopped chasing — terrorising, rather — some of the unpainted eggs, called for the Wind, and left the Warren.
He didn’t remember calling for Wind but he must have done so, otherwise she wouldn’t be carrying him back to his pond right now.
The next few days, eventually becoming weeks, Jack avoids Bunnymund. It’s not intentional, not exactly. He can’t bring himself to bother the pookah. Not even something as small as a jumpscare. The fear that his worst nightmares might just happen is all too fresh.
What if he annoys Bunny too much more then he really will leave him alone and get the others to do so as well?
Ironically, while he was avoiding Bunnymund, Jack hung around the other three more than he had been before that day in the Warren. Even as they were busy or tried to shoo him away, he continued to stay.
There’s a decrease in pranks although, of course, they didn’t stop completely. He’s got a record to keep. Even then. there are few that have the possibility of escalating into a big argument or feud.
A part of him hopes that none of them have noticed they all have. Just because he was bering paranoid cautious didn’t mean that anything was wrong.
Jack pulled the least pranks on Sanderson. The Sandman didn’t really know why, it wasn’t like they were at-odds or anything.
So when something was off, when Jack started to decrease the number of pranks he pulled, Sanderson noticed immediately.
The next time the Spirit of Winter pranked him, he watched. Subtly, of course.
The prank itself was nothing too harmful, simply a slight annoyance.
As he watched Jack in the aftermath of the latter’s most recent prank. The Guardian of Dreams saw something on that pale face that he had never seen before, even when they had been fighting Pitch, fear. Jack was afraid of something. But what?
It’s only there for a brief moment, disappearing as quickly as it appeared. As soon as Sanderson had reacted to what he had done. Interesting…
Over the next few days, the answer to his question became obvious. Painfully obvious.
The night of the two-year anniversary of Pitch’s defeat, almost all of the Guardians stay the night at the North Pole. Except Toothiana, who had to work every night.
North had given the two others guest rooms for the night, he had offered one to Jack as well but the spirit had declined it. Jack, once again, chose the rafters of the workshop instead.
As Jack had slept up in the rafters a handful of times before and had yet to fall off once, North didn’t think too much of it.
He had yet to fall off the rafters, that was about to change tonight.
North had been up late working on bringing a toy concept he had thought of to fruition. The Guardian of Joy was seemingly fast asleep in the rafters overhead. Although he was much noisier tonight than he had ever been before.
North’s heart almost leapt through his chest. One moment he was working on a toy, and the next moment he heard a sound like a sharp inhale of breath and suddenly something — someone rather — was falling almost exactly on top of his head. There was only one person that it could be; Only one person had been up above him: Jack.
Who had been asleep only minutes ago. Jack had slept on the rafterns and had, until now, never fallen off of them. So what had been different this time?
It took them a combined total of almost three months for them to realize that not only was Jack afraid of something but what he was afraid of too. He was afraid of being all alone again.
His fear was partly their fault, they had known about his existence and ignored him.
“We were busy, there’s nothin’ wrong with that,” Bunnymund attempted to reason.
“Even then, none of us — not even myself — were so busy that we had to completely ignore him for three-hundred years ,” Toothiana pointed out.
In hindsight, they should have kept a better eye on the door.
“You didn’t know I should have been one of you and the other Seasonal Spirits knew that I didn’t really belong with them either,” Jack told them.
The sound of the Spirit of Winter’s voice made everyone in the room look up in surprise. None of them had expected him to show up here. Which was foolish, really.