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Bunnymund is older than Toothiana and there are no memories waiting for him in delicate, gleaming boxes, tucked safely away in the walls of her palace and waiting to be found, picked up and rattled.
But he is not Jack Frost. He doesn’t need the keepsake of teeth to know who he is.
He knows that as a boy he worked on a farm with his Father. In the spring he would sow seed and plant flowers, milk cattle and assist the goats in birthing their young. There was a comfort he took from the land that he did not find in people, and in the evening he would sigh and watch his breath turn to mist on the air, stand with a fist on the jut of his waist, shading his eyes from the setting sun with the flat of his hand. The world was growing larger and sometimes he watched the silhouettes of travellers move across the horizon as it faded from pink to orange to red.
(He had four brothers and one sister, and they screamed and they cried, didn’t want to work in the morning and bickered over stupid things. But their Father was old and their Mother was gone, so he fed them and dressed them, whittled simple toys for them to play with and showed his brothers how to fish and catch rabbits. He crafted his sister plain dolls with grey dresses, and sometimes, just before revealing the new present, he would take the doll and hide it behind his back, keep it from her and turn about as she darted around him, wanting to see.)
The Roman Empire crumbles and darkness leaks from the cracks it leaves behind. Ships pull into port brimming with gold and goods, sailors with stories of desecration and far away lands.
He speaks to these travellers very rarely. He works. He trades. He pays little attention to the black tales people begin to tell, huddling around fires and shrinking in on themselves, whispering of monsters that lurk in the night.
(And if he ever sees something flickering in the corner of his vision, formless shapes that vanish with the blink of an eye, he shakes himself and turns away.)
He dies in a forest fire from smoke inhalation, gasping as he watches trees burn and grass wilt into ash. His lashes flutter shut and the singe of his skin and hair, the thick scent of charred wood and the flames spilling down his throat fade away. He opens his eyes to water, a gentle curtain of rain falling over what remains of the woods, and his head is pillowed against a pile of soot.
A woman is there to greet him, kneeling close. Her eyes are leaf green and her hair is the color of cut rye or honey. She smells like river stones and sunlight, and it’s the first and last time they meet.
She says, “There wasn’t much left of you, so I took some liberties,” and tweaks his long ear.
“I thought it’d be more fitting. I hope you don’t mind.”
Jack Frost wakes to ice and snow, to the chill of old water in his lungs and barely heard whispers of his name.
Bunnymund curls his paws into dry, dead earth, blinking at the glow of a still ember-bright tree trunk that begins to hiss and smoke in the rain.
He comes alive on the first day of spring, and when he walks flowers bloom in the deep impression his wide paw-prints leave behind.
The woman offers her name instead of telling him his own.
Ostara, she says. Of the dawn.
(“I don’t believe you,” Jacks says, flicking a snowflake against Bunnymund’s twitching nose.
Bunnymund paws at his whiskers, scowls and shoves down the little burst of joy that erupts in his chest. “Now that’s a riot, coming from you.”
Jack is grinning, fingers curled loosely around his staff with the shepherd’s hook resting against the line of his neck. He kicks his feet back and forth from where he sits on North’s workbench, chuckling when an elf hops across his lap on its journey towards the other side of the table, only for it to flail and tumble over the ledge.
Bunnymund knows Jack Frost much better than he would like to. While Jack had never met Toothiana or North before the Guardians had him dragged into Santoff Claussen, Jack made a notable effort to hunt down Bunnymund once ever decade or so just to annoy him.
(“It is because you are too sensitive,” North once said, and Bunnymund had sputtered and fumed, disappeared into the ground without saying goodbye.)
Bunnymund has acknowledged Jack as being many things. He has been a trickster and irritant, an echo of laughter on the wind and the cold rush of snow tumbling over Bunnymund’s head and packing into his ears.
But he has never known Jack like this: renewed, invigorated in the way things are only after a very long, dead, sleep.
Jack says, “Well I’ve never met her.”
“‘Course not. She’s a pagan god.”
“So?”
“So she’s an old one. And you’re not much more than an ankle-biter yourself, mate.”
“Hey!” Jack jabs his finger into Bunnymund’s fur-lined chest. “I’m three hundred years old.”
Bunnymund smirks and brushes his hand away. “Like I said.”)
He learns how to shed his skin like a snake, moves from the form of a hare to lynx to a faun with each soft press of his foot against soil. He tries on wings in the shape of a sparrow, but dislikes the empty feeling it brings to his bones, how the wind so easily sweeps him up and carries him wherever it pleases.
No matter the shape he takes, his fur or feathers remain black as ash.
Stories reach him of forest sprites, troublesome creatures known for mischief and tricks. He meets a few taking on the forms of young colts. They gallop around him, telling stories of how they’ve misled travelers into the dark and left them there, sitting back and laughing as the night closed in around them.
Bunnymund tries it, once, with a young boy that he coaxes into the forest with flickering lights. But when the child realizes that he’s lost, stubs his toe against the root of a tree and begins to cry, something fowl curls low in Bunnymund’s stomach and he loses all taste for these kinds of games.
He shrinks down into the form of a rabbit, hopping across the boy’s path, and lets the child follow his cottontail home.
He meets North when he is still calling himself Nicholas. Bunnymund knows the stories, has heard descriptions of an old man appearing in taverns, wrapped in threadbare robes with a heavy walking cane at his side. Vikings mistake him for Odin and begin spreading rumours of a God wandering across the land, speaking to strangers on the nature of happiness and offering gifts from a sack he carries if they’re worthy enough to possess them.
Bunnymund finds his camp by accident but doesn’t turn away when he stumbles across it. He slinks up to Nicholas as a rabbit, snatching food from the pouch he keeps at his side and eating it from between his paws next to him. Nicholas seems neither surprised nor angry, lighting up a pipe and narrowing his eyes at Bunnymund from behind a haze of smoke.
Bunnymund cants his head and twitches his nose.
Nicholas laughs. “Aye, I’m sure you’re plenty innocent. Come now, change into something else. Let’s have a talk.
And it’s then that Nicholas gives Bunnymund the name that will stick, when he warps into something that is not quite human and he fails to completely shrug off the fur and paws.
(There are sprites that take on more decayed forms when they try this, hunched over and vile little creatures with claws for fingers and gleaming, yellow eyes.
Bunnymund wants to stay away from that and thinks of Ostara as he changes, her touch skimming along the fur of his ear.)
(Jack says, “Tell me something.”
Bunnymund is busy clearing out new space in the warren. He pokes his head up from a tunnel, shaking dirt and dust from his coat like a dog.
“Tell you what?”
Jack is not helping. He’s sitting on a tree stump, legs crossed, carving lines into the ground with the end of his staff. Bunnymund recognizes a crude sketch of himself in the dirt, of Sandy’s round form and the stretch of Toothiana’s wings.
“I don’t know, something interesting. About the Guardians. You’ve know each other forever, right?”
Bunnymund snorts and says, “Not that long.”
He retreats back into the earth.)
The next time they see each other Nicholas laughs and claps Bunnymund’s shoulder like they are old friends reuniting after years apart. Which is, really, only partly true.
“Bunny!” Nick booms, throwing out his arms.
“You,” Bunnymund says, eyeing him.
Russia has named Nicholas a Patron saint, and he’s adopted the language and culture in return. His brown cloak has been replaced by a thick red jacket, his walking stick with a silver sword. He no longer stands with a hunch to his shoulders, doesn’t move with a slow shuffle of his feet. He seems both stronger and older, revitalized yet worn. His hair is completely white now and there are lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, stretching thinly across his brow that hadn’t been there before.
“Things are always changing, my friend,” Nicholas tells him, crouching down and pulling a flask out from beneath the flap of his coat. Bunnymund is caught between shapes again, a wolf with a cut tail, ears that are too long and taper off at a point. Nicholas uncorks the flask with his teeth and rummages through his sack until he finds a shallow bowl. He fills it with wine and pushes it beneath Bunnymund’s nose.
“It’s already happening. The dark is beginning to wane. And we grow more important each passing year.”
“Uh huh,” Bunnymund says, sniffing at the bowl. He drinks, and the wine is chilled against his tongue but warm in his throat.
“You are sceptical.”
“Just unconcerned.”
“Of course.” Nick lifts his flask to his lips. “I have met him.”
“Who?”
“Pitch Black.”
Bunnymund flops onto the ground. “And?”
“That is all you have to say? ’And’? You have heard the stories, I am sure.”
“Not all stories are true.”
Nicholas stares at him. Bunnymund drinks more wine.
Nicholas says, “Man in moon thinks the world has had enough fear. But Pitch… he will not stand down so easily. I have asked. I have offered to help him find a new way, and he has refused me.”
And Nicholas looks at him then. Bunnymund thinks that he has eyes that should belong to a younger man, bright and blue and brimming with something that is not quite hope (Bunnymund knows hope, he knows it in the smell of damp soil and the rising sun, the days stretching out as winter melts into spring) but not terribly far from it.
“I want to be able to call on you, if I must.”
“Call on me for what?”
“Our time is coming. Your time is coming.”
Bunnymund frowns. His time comes each year when grass peeks through the snow and trees blossom and bare fruit. It comes when he scampers through the forest, ice and slush on his paws, rushing by plants knowing that they will grow more quickly now thanks to his presence, buds springing free from the topsoil beneath the tips of his claws as he runs.
And if there is something missing, something that makes Bunnymund’s bones feel hollowed out and his skin chaffed raw, like there’s ash in his lungs and he can’t breathe around the fire in his throat, it’s no business of Nicholas’.
Nicholas drains his flask. “Do not answer now. Consider. But come, it is time for a trip.”
“Oh?” Bunnymund had been planning on ruining a certain farmer’s crops after this, one who had over-hunted his little square of land. But he scrambles to his feet anyways. “Where to?”
“The North Pole, of course.”
Bunnymund’s ears flatten against his skull. “What? Why?”
“How should I say… I am looking for the right place. Perhaps you should begin searching, too.”
Nicholas gives himself a new name. He gathers large, furry creatures to him and starts constructing a fortress and Bunnymund is only there to see part of it. Nicholas says that the edges of the world called to him to make a home, and while Bunnymind had scoffed at the time he begins to feel it beneath his skin, an itch, the urge to sink into the earth and search.
So he burrows, knits himself tunnels from continent to continent with a magic that he isn’t even aware of until he departs from the poles and pokes his head out from beneath a rock in Ireland.
He returns, again and again, to Australia, half in love with the heat of it, the dry dusty ground and the lush foliage that grows in the north-east. The soil is old, nearly sterile in places, but Bunnymund circles through the outback and watches the strange assortment of animals, admires the way things can survive on so little sometimes.
He picks up the accent to make fun of North’s, and somehow, it just sticks.
It’s there that he meets the Sandman. He already knows of him by reputation, has seen the weave of his golden dreams night after night and heard stories of one of the Ancients being birthed by a fallen star.
(North says the Moon called him here. Bunnymund knows North is usually right about these kind of things, but pretended not to believe him anyways.)
There is a night when dreams don’t branch out from the sky and Sandy floats down on a giant sea-turtle instead, waving to Bunnymund from the air just as the turtle vanishes into a burst of light.
“Taking a break?” Bunnymund says as a greeting. He’s a wallaby, at the time.
Sandy holds up his hand and tilts it back and forth. Kind of?
The Sandman crafts himself a rocking-chair out of dust and tilts his head towards Bunnymund, arching a yellow eyebrow. He points at the sky just as a shooting star passes by above them.
“Well, how ‘bout that?” Bunnymund says, and hunkers down beside him.
The moon whispers hello, and the fur across Bunnymund’s shoulders is bleached grey.
One day, Toothiana will ask him, “What did he tell you?”
And Bunnymund will think: That great old St. North has vouched for me. That the scale has tipped, and that the fear he finds coiling into his very core and nipping away at his lungs like smoke or ash will be there to stay if balance isn’t restored.
And Bunnymund will say: “That we had some work to do.”
The first time the guardians join together, they lose.
The Boogeyman leads them over hills and mountains, through the woods and to the very edge of a ravine, introducing himself with a bow and oh, please, call me Pitch. The pleasure’s mine. Shadows roll from his body like the tide against the shore, and he is tall and cackling, bloated with belief and fear. He sneers at North when he tells him enough and melts into the dark when Sandy knits his dust into chains.
Pitch appears behind Bunnymund and plants his heel into the centre of his back.
“You all seem to be under the impression that you have some sort of power over me. Well, allow me to set the record straight.”
He kicks Bunnymund off the cliff.
It’s Toothiana that catches him.
She darts by Pitch, making him stumble, and tucks her wings in close to her body as she falls through the sky, digs her fingers into the scruff of Bunnymund’s neck and slows his fall more than she stops it.
They hit the ground, skidding against stone and grit.
Far above them, Pitch shrieks with laughter.
When North tells the story to Jack, he says that Pitch vanished in a puff of smoke (he tucks his fingers into his fists and flicks them outwards. Poof.) and that Bunnymund disappeared afterwards to sulk and lick his wounds.
(Jack is, maybe, a good enough friend now to try and smother his laugh. Across the workshop, Bunnymund still hears, and bristles.)
North doesn’t tell a lie, but he neglects to mention that maybe it’s the thing that saved them.
When Bunnymund hides away, digs deep enough, he finds a meadow hidden beneath the shell of the earth, speckled with short bushes and moss covered rocks. And he knows, instantly, this is it, this is what he’s been looking for, a place that is utterly his own and has been waiting for him all this time.
Flowers begin to burst from the ground next to the sandy riverbed, and when they bloom he finds eggs hiding beneath their cream coloured petals. He smirks and plucks them free, curiously tapping one open to see what’s inside.
Runny, clear membrane, and a sunshine-yellow yolk.
He piles the eggs into a basket knitted from wheat, and leaves a half dozen outside a house in Germany with a Mother and two young, hungry, children huddled inside.
The next day, when the Mother lifts the little square cloth draped over the basket, the snow begins to melt, and the dark clouds over her house seem to linger a little less.
Children start leaving out their caps and bonnets, expecting a treat in the morning, and Bunnymund provides. The eggs the flowers bloom are sometimes fresh and sometimes not eggs at all but rich, sweet chocolate wrapped in a soft shell. He begins to paint the ones that spring from the ground hard-boiled, crushing flowers and grass into wide basins for the dye.
He leaves something sweet and bright for each child to hunt for, and hides away in the bushes, waiting for morning so he can see their faces when they discover his little gifts.
A girl catches a glimpse of his bright tail and cries out. Bunnymund jumps back into a tunnel, smiling.
And in the end, it’s as simple as that. Stories travel and grow on their own. North crafts toys and Tooth collects memories trapped away in small, white teeth. Sandy weaves his golden dreams, and the night is just as dark as it’s always been, but people seem to forget that there was ever something to be afraid of.
The next time Pitch greets them he is spitting up black bile and clawing at the ground as twisted vines coil around his ankles, dragging him away and beneath the barren frame of a long forgotten bed.
(Bunnymund paws at the soil. Rich and fertile, soaked long ago with something that makes the taste of iron rise in the back of his throat).
Pitch screams, and Bunnymind thinks of his laughter, the wide stretch of his mouth and the narrowed slit of his eyes.
Sandy knocks his shoulder against Bunnymund’s knee when he shudders.
It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt, either.
“Heard something about you being a mouse over here,” Bunnymund says when he bumps into Toothiana in Paris. It’s the first time he’s seen her in nearly a century.
She laughs behind her hand and flutters around him, wings beating like a fly’s. “You look more like a mouse than I do, Bunny.”
“Hey.” Bunnymund frowns, but it’s difficult to be irritated when she smiles and takes his wrist, turns his arm this way and that and compliments his gauntlets.
(“They’re new.”
“I can tell!”)
In France, the story goes that the tooth fairy got her start by assisting a queen. She hid beneath the pillow of her cruel and wretched husband, knocking teeth from his mouth as he slept.
(In Bunnymund’s defence, she had been a mouse in the tale.)
Toothiana has large, kind eyes and feathers that gleam green and gold as she flits into the moonlight. Bunnymund looks at her and remembers the way she fell through the sky after him, the firm strength of her fingers digging into his neck and how she darted around Pitch without turning back.
He lifts an eyebrow, and thinks it’d be a mistake to underestimate her.
(years later when Tooth lifts up her chin and knocks a molar from Pitch’s mouth, Bunnymund wants to throw his head back and laugh. Later, he will say to her: “Never did break the habit, did you?” And Tooth will flush and look pleased with herself, smile at him sweetly and say, hush).
“Is this how you are, now?” She asks, gesturing. Bunnymund looks down at himself and shrugs.
Toothiana says, “North told me you stopped changing.”
Bunnymund scoffs. “North thinks he’s smarter than he is. Just easier to dig like this, that’s all.”
The fur at his throat has turned white. Toothiana doesn’t mention it.
Jack Frost stands in the snow with his hands on his hips, grinning at Bunnymund.
“Well, well,” he says. “Look who it is.”
Bunnymund blinks at him, slowly, and then thumps his foot against the ground. Jack’s grin turns sharp as he drags his staff forward, covering the entrance of Bunnymund’s tunnel with a thick sheet of ice.
The fur along Bunnymund’s spine bristles. “Oi!”
Jack laughs, delighted, before darting forward and sliding across the ice. “I wasn’t sure if I would be fast enough!”
“Well, congratulations. What do you want?”
Jack spins around, facing him, scratching the back of his finger against his chin.
“Hmm. You’d think the Easter Bunny would be more friendly.”
“The Easter Bunny is on a bit of a tight schedule right now. Are you- are you following me?”
“Now why would I do that?”
“A fine question.” Bunnymund crosses his arms. “I’m sure that this is a complete coincidence, given that Easter’s only a week away.”
Jack’s eyes light up and he leans forward, shifting more weight to his staff. “Really? That close?”
“Like you didn’t know.”
“Well, I don’t exactly have a calendar on me.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Hey, just trying to keep you on your toes, Cottontail.”
Bunnymund tries very hard to not grit his teeth, to smother down the twitching irritation rising in his chest. Toothiana thinks Jack Frost sounds like a very lonely boy, and has asked Bunnymund, more than once, to remember that he’s still just a child.
(“He’s trouble,” Bunnymund said.
Toothiana smiled. “We all probably were, once.”)
“Can’t find anyone else to do that for?” He asks. Jack shrugs.
“I barely ever see anyone else who can actually, you know, see me too.”
Bunnymund snorts. “Well, lucky them.”
And at that Jack falls silent, the line of his shoulders turning stiff as his jaw tightens. Frost spills from his finger as they clench around his staff, and his eyes flicker down to the new ice beneath his thin, white feet.
Bunnymund watches as Jack leaps into the air and lets the wind sweep him away
On Sunday there are no sudden temperature drops followed freak snowfalls or cold winds. The day is bright and warm, and Bunnymund doesn’t think for a moment about Jack Frost.
He doesn’t.
(Jack knows the spark of Bunnymund’s temper and the way his fur fluffs up at the back of his neck when Jack steps too close and the chill of his breath becomes a little much. He knows that Bunnymund dislikes the cold and yet still hates and loves the warmer places of the Earth for reasons that he doesn’t say. Jack knows that when he tags along to Australia, Bunnymund will sigh and peer at him out of the corner of his eye for the entire trip, watching as Jack wilts in the humidity. Eventually, Bunnymund will suggest a visit to the poles, and Jack will act surprised and Bunnymund will snort so he doesn’t laugh, tapping open a tunnel beneath them.
Because while Bunnymund can be bitter and Bunnymund can be snide and cruel, if asked Jack would be able to explain that there is still a pocket of warmth that exists in him for smaller things like children or flowers or birds.)
The year after he becomes a guardian, Jack doesn’t quite ruin Easter.
He arrives in Canada just as Bunnymund emerges from the ground, sending a gust of cold wind straight into his face and dumping a heap of wet slush over his head.
Jack freezes the pond and slicks the ground with frost, laughing as Bunnymund shakes the snow from his ears and curses, mumbles on about eggs and chilled feet as he watches Jack soar across the park.
Jack makes sure to leave behind a gift: an apple tree in full bloom, untouched by the cold. The children marvel and laugh and carefully lay their baskets of eggs at the base of the tree before climbing up into its branches. Petals fall like snow over their shoulders, catching against their coats and in their hair.
There is small, secret place in the warren that is not alive. Bunnymund makes no effort to hide it away, and it remains unknown only because he doesn’t exactly include it on the tour.
It surprises him not at all that Jack manages to stumble across it.
“What’s this about?” Jack asks.
Bunnymund shrugs. He watches as Jack kneels, drawing two fingers along the charred ground. They come away black and heavy with ash.
Jack looks at him and lifts his eyebrows. “Left the oven on?”
“It was like this when I found it,” Bunnymund says, because it’s true and because he knows it will make Jack snicker.
“Couldn’t you fix it?”
Bunnymund paws at the ground, humming softly in his throat.
“Soil’s no good.”
“That doesn’t matter when it comes to you. Not really.”
Bunnymund doesn’t answer. He isn’t sure how to explain it, that the warren is a gift and this charred land and dead tree, the needles of brown grass still rooted in the soil, they are what serve as his reminders. Life and change and renewal are not guaranteed, and maybe this is only way he knows hope can exist, in the small and simple possibilities of there being more to come.
Jack straightens, his mouth curving into a small, strangely shy, smile as he glances away.
“Would you mind if I—” he waves his hand at the ground, the withered oak in the distance.
Bunnymund sniffs and crosses his arms. “You’ll do what you like, anyways.”
“Not true,” Jack says. “But I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jack steps forward. He skims his fingers along the trunk of the tree and ice blossoms over the old, cracked wood. The ash dusting the ground is tinted white and blue and when Bunnymund scratches his nails against it the chill creeps up through his fur. Snowflakes blink into the air, and it’s no different, really, because the land is still dead and the tree is still a useless, rotting hunk of wood. But Jack lifts up his chin and smiles at his work, laughs and turns towards Bunnymund, proud of the bright blanket he’s thrown over the decay.
(And Bunnymund understands that there is a beauty in finality, and that Jack knows these things better than he does.)
“Well?” Jack says.
Bunnymund looks away from the snow, nudging his shoulder against Jack’s.
“Guess it can stay,” he says.
Jack pushes back, lightly, friendly, and they turn towards the warren together.