Chapter Text
——🦷——
Tooth opens her eyes and cries knowing it was just a dream.
No, not a dream: it was neither melodious fantasies nor memories filled with smiles and laughter.
It was a nightmare: sticking to her mind like tar, filling her brain with fears that even awake she can't comprehend, because it sounds so... implausible, it sounds like a complex paragraph in a language Tooth doesn't know.
That's a lie, she does know that language, but losing one of the guardians is so hard and painful to assimilate that she doesn't.
She shouldn't make her head with what could happen, but with the memories flashing in her mind that she always remembers, she can't help it.
Her feathers ruffle, fear still not leaving her soul, planted like the most tenacious claws, threatening to destroy her.
Determined, she leaves the now named Baby Tooth in charge of her sisters. Tooth has to find him, find him to know that he is well, that he is whole, that he is breathing and not dead.
The winter air hits her full in the face, but she doesn't care, she has only one goal, and Tooth is not one to give up.
She lands carelessly, so unlike her usual elegance, her emotions too unbridled to do it properly. Tooth stands in front of the pond that all the guardians unconsciously refer to as “Jack's Lake.”
Burguess's cold shivers her body: her colorful bird-of-paradise feathers are made for sunny, warm days like a mother's embrace, not for bone-chilling, frigid nights like a winter spirit's touch.
But as she thinks about the nightmare, she doesn't mind chasing away the warm touch of the sun for cold, pale fingers.
She doesn't want her nightmare to be real, she doesn't want to lose her family. Not again, not when she is stronger and braver and not helpless and terrified.
And as her mind evokes images of Jack, his normally twinkling eyes of amusement dulled into a dull, dead stare, limp fingers on a broken shepherd's staff, Tooth knows. She has to find him now.
She looks up, searching for the winter elf with her eyes. It's easy to spot, after all it is winter: the trees are bare and the fuzzy white and blue figure with brown sticks for legs is lying carelessly in a tree.
Tooth sighs, deeply, from her nose, preparing to take flight and drag him with her to her nest.
——🦷——
—💜•🩵—
——❄️——
Jack opens his eyes with effort, the haze of drowsiness does not lift, not even when his hair stands on end as he feels two slender arms drag him by the waist.
He is almost above the clouds, and notices feathery arms that he recognizes by heart: pale hands with sky blue feathers that start at the base of the wrist, degrading to a teal blue at the elbows and ending above the shoulders in a turmeric color, almost the same as gold.
She is Toothiana, the queen of fairies, tooth fairy and guardian of childhood memories.
She is Tooth, his friend.
Jack knows she loves him, because he loves her with every bit of his soul, too.
That doesn't explain why he's being dragged like a kitten through the night sky. Jack opens his mouth with the intention of asking, but no sooner does he try to get a sound out of his dry throat than he lands in the palace of teeth. He knows this not only because he knows the place as well as he can being only a guest, but because not even waiting for him to touch the floor with his bare feet, he is bombarded by a bunch of excited mini fairies.
Baby Tooth, so recognizable by his mole and two-colored eyes, after giving Jack a welcoming peck on the cheek, flutters in front of his mother, talking so fast she doesn't even catch her breath, sounding like a jumble of onomatopoeia to an outsider like him.
Tooth, however and as always, understands her, giving her a loving smile. She squeals something that is probably praise, if Baby Tooth's lit-up face says anything.
She beams with pride, and Jack couldn't be happier for her.
He is jolted from his thoughts when Tooth's tiny hand is positioned on his shoulders to get his attention.
Jack doesn't startle. He really didn't.
“Oh, Jack!” Tooth squeaks, “I'm sorry I didn't ask before I brought you here.” She sounds apologetic, and there's something about her face that makes Jack want to hug her.
So he does.
“It's okay, Tooth.” And it is, every time he needs comfort, she's there, in glowing, captivating support. Now, she needs him, and what kind of guardian, friend would he be if he abandoned her like this?
Something sparkles in Tooth's eyes, and suddenly Jack finds himself being dragged away by a fairy half his size but, probably if not more, with three times his strength.
“Come with me to my nest.” It doesn't cross Jack's mind to argue.
A couple of flutters and they're both in what Jack assumes is Tooth's room. A column below and hidden among the other more ostentatious columns where Jack knows teeth, bounties and such are stored. It is more quaint and homey than bright and childlike. He admires her, in awe, and Tooth, to a lesser extent, too.
(Because she doesn't usually sleep...or do anything but work—Jack should probably do an intervention, he's sure Baby Tooth would join in without thinking about it, and if he smiles a little, maybe Baby Tooth's sisters will agree too—so, Jack assumes, she probably doesn't really pay attention to where she sleeps. He can't judge, after all, he sleeps wherever. He's just that cool.)
Amidst the spaciousness of the room is a large nest, which unlike all the other surfaces reflecting the magenta, sapphire and green colors of the various glass and crystals, glows with the natural light of Mt. Huangshan.
The nest is made of hard, tough materials, an interweaving of gemstones as gleaming as the entire palace and dark branches dotted with colorful flowers and slender leaves.
Gently, Tooth rests him in the nest, and once inside, Jack notices the thin, soft web of silk wrapping the inside of the nest. Tooth, as quickly as he left it went out, presumably to close off the surroundings with the silk curtains, if the sudden shadow and the various but small patches of light are any indication.
A light breeze—perhaps caused by the weather or the flutterings of so many mini-fairies, Jack doesn't know—enters the room, making him shiver.
Because Jack doesn't like the cold, not because he feels it, not really, after all he is the physical embodiment of winter but....
When he is in the limbo of sleep and awakening, the cold reminds him of loneliness.
He's already had 300 years of it, he doesn't need more.
But as if Tooth had read his thoughts, she snuggles with him in the nest. Even though between the two of them they occupy hopefully a third of the nest, it feels...contained, small.
A few loose tips from the branches dig into his arms, and the gemstones aren't exactly soft, not with his skin dry from the cold and thin from a lifetime of starvation.
But Tooth? She's soft, warm and fluffy. The vexils of her colorful feathers tickle his exposed skin, and her sharp but strangely human nose sinks into his hair, her snorts gently ruffling the nest he calls hair.
Her small feet are in his lap, and her knees dig into his side gently. She melts into Jack as if they are the same being.
And Jack feels his eyelids dropping heavy; the sleep that hadn't quite dispersed before returning with force, pulling him into a world of sandy dreams filled with jumping dolphins and playful birds.
And just like that he falls asleep, face buried in feathers and sharp but welcoming limbs, like a mother's embrace.
——❄️——
—🩵•💜—
——🦷——
Tooth is pulled back to reality by the slight tingling in her face. Without opening her eyes, she tries to wake up.
She is jolted awake when, as she tries to move her neck, her joints protest, angry at her for sleeping in such a hunched position.
Arms, thin and cold, clutch her tightly, protesting the movement and bringing her back to the world of the living. And with it, refreshing memories of everything she did the night before.
Tooth, more awake than ever, stifles an embarrassed groan in her hands.
She brought Jack into her nest as if he was a teddy bear, how embarrassing!
Jack must be so...
Jack is here.
And he looks at her, sleepily. His long, dark lashes fluttering in his crystalline eyes clouded with fatigue. He's not really present, she realizes, amused.
“...Tooth?” he asks, voice dry and hoarse, sleep digging its claws into his vocal cords.
“...Yes, Sweet Tooth?” she makes sure her voice is soft. While she would have to be at work by now, another hour or two of sleep won't affect Jack.
(Neither will it affect her, but she ignores that.)
“You're warm,” he murmurs, snuggling back against Tooth, trying to return to the dream world.
In response, Tooth just snorts, delighted, and lets herself snuggle into his nest.
Mmmm, she thinks, as pleased as she is sore. Jack is a good stuffed animal,-a very nice one, she defends herself to the incredulous gaze of one of her girls,-and, though her joints are crushed, the tarry nightmares dared not loom at the edges of her mind.
It's the best night's sleep Tooth has had in years.
... She'll let the other guardians know.
Eventually, for now, she's happy to melt back into her son.
——❄️——