A note from Eren:
Jack Frost was in the house the morning after we saw the movie at a friend's. I honestly expected him to show up in the car on the drive home, but I guess it took a little time for his character to settle in. If this sounds completely bizarre to you, I recommend that you go read the Mairead System profile before you go any further.
In any case, we got to looking at the fan fiction that is out there, and with some tacit prompting from Mairead, Jack started to form a hypothesis about Pitch Black. I strongly advised him not to act on his idea, but he wouldn't listen. I told him, "At least tell someone where you're going." After scarcely a moment's thought he answered, "No. They'll try to stop me."
For selfish reasons (as well as genuine concern), I didn't want him to go. Jack was a new friend who acted my age, if he wasn't actually my age, and I was afraid that he might disappear back into his own world and never come back to visit. But he left when we were asleep and came back before we returned from a trip that took up all morning. I convinced him to type up his little adventure, and here we are. This is his first shot posting anything, so be nice. ^^
CHAPTER ONE: Who I Am
As Eren said, I left for my own world once the others (Eren, Levi and Vin) had fallen asleep. It was good to be back, just to confirm the fact that I could go back, and to sense the familiarity of my reality. The wind greeted me as an old friend and it was tempting to forget my purpose in coming back and spend the early morning hours in pure recreation. However, I determined not to let my idea go.
Sure, it was a little creepy going back to the fragments of that decaying old bed frame in the woods and down that lumpy, abandoned-feeling tunnel again, but I won't say I was scared. I expected some sort of resistance long before I got to the bottom, but there was nothing.
The... burrow, or hollow, or whatever other thing ending in -ow that you want to call it, was dimly lit by an inexplicable, unidentifiable, and imperceptible source. That might sound like overkill, but it's all true. The cages were still there—the ones he used to keep the fairies captive. All empty now, of course. I wondered for the first time if he had made them himself, and if so, of what?
It was too quiet down there. I walked along the floor, not wanting to fly into anything by mistake, and my footsteps had no echo. There was no hollow dripping as you would expect in a cave. Then I heard a little rush of something, like a breeze or a whisper, and turning my gaze toward the noise I saw a blur of darkness that was darker than the darkness around it. A small nightmare, I supposed.
I went further, and the tunnel got smaller. It wasn't shaped the same as the last time I was there. A small, dark door stood to my left, not quite as tall as myself. I was about to kneel to see if anything could be seen through the keyhole, when another dark little rushing came toward me from the far end of the passage and I straightened up, lifting my staff as if it were a prosthetic attachment to my arm, flicking its end out with a certain turn of the wrist I'd been perfecting. Sparks of ice few out of my staff and met the oncoming nightmare. The mist of blue shards and black soot meshed together and rained to the floor with a quiet pattering.
It was then that I heard a little sound from behind the door. It sounded not unlike a whimper. I remembered my previous notion and knelt for a moment, but the interior of the room seemed darker than the passage, and I was too impatient to wait for my vision to adjust. I got up and tried the knob.
I fully expected the door to be locked—I had tried it only as a matter of course—but it opened easily enough with a spine-tingling shriek and a groan. This noise was probably what prompted a second whimper from within the room.
I let the frost crackle out in continuous, feathery patterns through the air to dispel the dimness as I entered the room and stared a moment in confusion at my surroundings. There was a window in the far wall, but it opened on nothing. Nothing but the dirt of the lair's walls which surrounded the place. There was an old bed with worn blankets, and beside it a nightstand with an unlit lamp on it. There was a modest upright dresser painted an uninviting shade, like bottle-green that had been abused severely over many years. At the foot of the bed was a trunk that I instinctively knew should be a toy chest, and across from that was another small door that should have been a closet, open just a tiny, sinister crack. And all around the room rushed those little nightmares, the largest no more than two feet tall.
They pranced all over the bed and bucked at the dull grey curtains wafting on wind that wasn't there, paused to rear up on the toy chest or night stand and slipped in and out of the closet door with such frequency that I could not begin to guess how many of them there truly were altogether. It could be two dozen or two hundred.
The whimpering started up again, quieter. Like the inexplicable light outside, the source of the whimpering was also unknown. It sounded like a child, the which case would confirm my theory (the reason I went down there in the first place), but there seemed to be no one in the room. I lifted my staff and took aim.
Quickly, I turned the frolicking herd of nightmares into a panicking stampede. The room was illuminated in flashes of sparks like the night sky on the fourth of July. Those that escaped took refuge in the closet or poured out of the closed window or scuttled under the bed. When the room was clear I went in further, listening hard.
The sound was not coming from the closet, but from under the bed. It made so much sense that I actually rolled my eyes at my own slowness.
"Pitch," I said breathlessly. I got no answer, so I went closer to the bed and tried again. "It's OK, Pitch. It's me, Jack. I want to help you." I lifted the edge of the blankets and had to brace myself to keep from recoiling or making a panicked sound of my own. There, indeed, was a dark-haired child clad in black and curled up in an absolute ball with half the escaped nightmares parading around him, all of them nipping or kicking their heels up at him. They were small, but they looked like they'd come from a place ruled by the cruelest monsters, of which they were the most cruel of all, where compassion was unknown, or if known, unwanted.
I drew in a shaky breath, readying my staff again, and as I did so, the indulgent party under the bed came to a close. The nightmares turned their attention from the child to me, and I knew I couldn't hesitate anymore.
I won't detail the destruction of these nightmares. Suffice it to say there were some moments when I realized I had underestimated them due to their size, and even feared once or twice that they would get the better of me. And just when I felt confident again, reinforcements arrived fresh from the closet and nearly overwhelmed me all over again. But at last my breath and pulse were the only little rushings in the room.
"Pitch," I said between panting, lifting up the covers again. "They're gone."
The child finally answered me, and I knew my theory was correct: even though the tone was higher and less... well, evil... the accent and cadence made it clear that this was what Pitch Black had been reduced to when children stopped believing in him.
"They'll come back," he said. "Go away."
"I'm not gonna go away," I said. "I'm not scared of them."
"They're not after you."
"You shouldn't be scared either—they're yours. Your... darkness." I grimaced. It wasn't a very cheerful pep talk.
"Go away," he repeated.
I reached over gingerly, hoping not to startle him, located a skinny wrist in the vicinity of his shins, and took hold.
Either I did startle him, or he simply reacted much more violently than either of us was prepared for. He rolled away from me, still in his ball, and growled "Let go!" very fiercely. He'd probably have a sore throat for a while after that.
He was out of my grip again, but I didn't pursue. "Listen, I have an idea."
He let go of his legs and put his hands over his ears. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he spat. "Go away!"
"Well, it's because of what you said to me..." He didn't move his hands, but I was pretty sure he was listening anyway. "You were lonely. You wanted friends, right? A family?"
The child Pitch scrunched his eyes shut in an unattractive scowl.
"I was wondering, who were you before you were the Boogeyman?"
He shook his head.
"The Guardians were all someone before they were Guardians... so, I figured you must have been someone, too."
"No one."
"I don't believe you. Even if you didn't remember before, you stole all the teeth. Yours must have been in there, too. You must have found out who you were."
Pitch shook his head stubbornly. "Don't want to know," he said quietly, eyes still shut.
I was a bit at a loss. "Really? Why... why wouldn't you want to know? I was dying to know!"
With another feral growl, Pitch came a bit more uncoiled and flung something at me.
I could see it was another nightmare, barely the size of a kitten. I raised my staff to defend myself, but before it ever reached me it swerved, front hooves showering ash as the hindquarters skittered around like the pencil in a compass. It renewed its charge on Pitch, who curled into his ball again with renewed whimpering. I managed to destroy the nightmare before it could touch him.
"I'm not here to hurt you, Pitch. I want to help," I tried again. "Why don't you want to know who you were?"
He drew in a shaky breath and I leaned forward, sure that I might miss whatever he said next if I didn't give him my full attention. I was glad that I did, because he spoke in a whisper.
"Because of who I am."
To be continued! Probably very soon. I hope. Comments and questions are welcome! ~Jack
