Disclaimer: I do not own Rise of the Guardians, nor do I make any money off of this story.

If you haven't read Cold and Dark here, or Misstep on AO3, both by myself, stop. None of this will make any sense to you. This is a side story of little moments that may or may not have happened in that universe.

Chapter One: Jack gets a turn as victim of the core gun

He stalked his prey, growing ever closer, as his quarry remained innocently unaware of his approach. An ear twitched his way, and he froze, going still and silent, until the moment passed and his prey relaxed.

So close, now…

Jack sprang from his hiding spot, laughing crazily, snow clouds flooding the close-hewn tunnels of Bunny's warren, and the Pooka shouted in dismay as Jack landed and pushed off his head into a flip.

"In-every-job-that-must-be-done-there-is-an-element-of-fun," Jack recited manically, before bouncing off the walls and out of the warren, leaving snowdrifts and foot long icicles in his wake.

Bunny stood very still for a moment, as if testing out this new reality he found himself in, before trudging through the snow to a mirror.

"Aw, blimey…"

On his forehead, a good, solid 'J' of ice was frozen into his fur.

-0-

Elsewhere, Jack was already clinging to Akela's neck as she good-naturedly tried to buck him off. He climbed, slowly but surely, to her head, intending to leave his mark, but there he encountered the bane of his existence.

"Noooo," he cried, trying to rub off the 'P' of black sand left on Akela's scaly brow. "He's got you already."

"Yes," Akela agreed, amusement in the stone-on-stone roughness of her voice.

"Is he going to Eros, next?" Jack demanded, still clinging to her mud-brown scaled head, but flinging bits of frost with his emphatic, one-handed gestures.

"Yes," Akela confirmed, blinking big, yellow eyes in a reptilian smile.

"Mount Olympus is on my side, though," Jack decided, and, with a nod, the wind blasted him off Akela, throwing him haphazardly on his way.

There was no one there to hear her, but Akela gave one last, affirmative, "Yes," before submerging herself again in the muddied waters of her home.

-0-

"North! Jack Frost showed up in my Warren!" Bunny exclaimed, hopping through North's workshop, "My Warren!" A gesture of emotion too encompassing to be put into words, and Bunny continued, "I do science in there!"

"Pitch showed up here earlier, too," North mused as Bunny approached his workbench, "but he just put black 'P' on my forehead. Laughed and said something about Jack being slow."

"What are the bloody yahoos doing?"

Finally catching sight of Bunny's face, North stifled a laugh and poked the icy addition, "Looks like they are playing game."

"So Jack's core is childishness," Bunny groaned, slapping North's hand away almost absent-mindedly.

"I do not know," the bigger man shrugged, "but it seems they are having fun."

-0-

Eros was always pleased to be the center of attention.

"Now, boys," he smirked, hands out to either side as Jack and Pitch stared each other down from across the room, "There's enough of me for everyone."

Judging from the decrease in temperature and ambient lighting, neither of them was willing to share.

-0-

"Ah!" Toothiana exclaimed when a grey hand entered her vision and smacked her on the forehead, a dark blur racing past, tail of his coat flaring ridiculously as he sprinted away. She reached up and fingered the sandy addition to her crest, shrugging when it didn't appear malevolent. Still, better to get it checked out. Maybe North would know what was going on…

-0-

"Why is Pitch going along with this at all?" Bunny wondered as Toothiana wandered in, poking at her own black 'P' and murmuring to herself.

"Jack has strange effect on Pitch when he has Fearling," North hypothesized, "Is possible effect is much stronger with intensified core."

Coming back to reality, Toothiana sat on a low table, "So, why do I have stuff in my feathers?"

-0-

"Take what you want and leave," Eros complained to the battered, war-torn room, a shiny, ice 'J' emblazoned over his left eyebrow, as he lay spread-eagle on the floor, "Isn't that just like a man."

-0-

"YA-HA-HA-HOOEY!" Came from somewhere above Coinneach's cabin, a rumbling accompanying it and trailing off as it grew nearer. Despite himself, he peeked with his powers, and saw the edge of an avalanche coming to a faltering stop just outside his home.

"'M not home!" He called, rolling over and covering his ears with a pillow, but the laughter that hadn't yet died grew louder. Maude's quiet breathing as she sleepily made herself comfortable again against his back didn't falter. Coinneach went over his preparations for this particular moment in his head. His shutters were locked, his door bolted, but he felt he was forgetting something.

A thud came from his front room in response, and someone padded lightly into his bedroom. One eye came reluctantly open, and a soot covered Jack Frost loomed, disturbingly cheerfully, over his bed.

"I-learned-that-from-North!" he informed the seer in a rush.

"I hate Sundays," Coinneach moaned, and his newly woken bedmate laughed into his shoulder.

-0-

Someone else was rudely awakened that morning as well.

Groundhog's eyes snapped open at the sound of a floor plank creaking. Most of his home's floors were earthen, but he liked the added security of a floor that creaked in his bedroom. He reached his paw shakily to the side and produced a small orb of spring sunlight, illuminating the sharp teeth and glowing eyes of his second-least favorite spirit.

Pitch Black leaned in closer, his menacing form at such an unexpected moment freezing Groundhog in place, and said clearly, "Hold still."

-0-

"Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, Sandy!" A familiar voice called from behind, gaining speed and volume until the bluish blur smacked into his golden cloud. Instinctively, Sandy caught the frost spirit with a tendril of sand, and dangled him over the cloud with a stern look.

He knew his once-friend was incapacitated by North's invention, and he wouldn't be capturing him today, but was that really cause to run headlong into his sand? As a light scold, Sandy formed the image of a gentleman allowing another to pass by. Pointedly without crashing into them.

He hadn't noticed that Jack had been exuding ice from practically every pore, and the sprite slipped free into a round off, landing on his feet in front of Sanderson and babbling, "If-you-are-to-be-a-gentleman-as-I-suppose-you'll-be." A moment later, Jack had traced his 'J' and jump-frogged over Sanderson's form, dropping below the edge of the cloud before the wind caught him, bringing back to Sandy the frenetic ending, "You'll-neither-laugh-nor-smile-for-the-tickling-of-the-knee!"

The winter spirit was gone but it couldn't be helped; Sandy's lips curved into a reluctant smile.

-0-

A wild-haired Iele pouted to herself as she sat by the slumbering forms of six other girls, all similar in coloration and face. She knew, just knew, she was being left out of something fun. But, she had to guard her sisters… The Iele stared at the ground in front of her was if it were to blame.

Some time later, a dark foot stepped into her field of vision, and her eyes traced up the thin figure before her, eyes lighting up as her sadness fell away.

"Jack just keeps getting slower," Pitch snickered, tracing a 'P' on her forehead more gently than he had for his other victims and vanishing.

She stared at the empty space for a moment before punching the air and cheering, "I'm part of the game!"

-0-

All over the world, spirits received unsolicited and unwanted facial accessories, sometimes with a babbled rhyme and maniacal laughter lingering in the air, and sometimes accompanied by a foreboding dimming of the lights. No matter how big, small, reclusive, outgoing, famous, or infamous one was, every active spirit on earth received an iced 'J' or a sandy 'P' emblazoned on their forehead.

Father Time didn't seem to notice his icy addition, but Nature's temper had been notably irked by her darkened letter. One specific woman accepted her iced 'J' with a secretive smile, on the condition Jack leave her crocodiles be; they didn't like the cold very much.

Still most spirits figured out very quickly what was happening, accepting the game being played with sighs of resignation or began fighting back to the best of their abilities.

By the end of the week, what no one could figure out was where their new graffiti artists had holed up.

-0-

Jack and Pitch sat, legs akimbo before them like children, on the floor of North's workshop in front of the globe. They were listing their victims, keeping score on their fingers and eventually the floor in the form of tiny ice stalagmites and shadow bubbles.

When Pitch's side began to look like gelatinous bubblewrap and Jack's, a bed of needles, the Guardians finally stumbled upon their uninvited guests. The two looked up in unison when North cleared his throat, but returned to their listing once they'd visually identified the source of the noise.

"Kali's mine," Pitch continued, "And the one brother of hers with the eyes."

A wrinkled nose as Jack protested, "I thought I got the eyes guy."

"You got the Greek eyes guy," Pitch corrected, and Jack nodded, conceding the point, but still almost vibrating in place.

"Did I count him already?" he asked, finger poised to make another little ice spike, and Pitch shook his head slowly.

"No, I don't think so."

"Put down Kali and her brother before we forget," Jack suggested, and two more little bubbles of shadow eased out of the shade beneath the globe to butt up against the others.

Bunny cracked first, "What are you doing here?"

"Counting!" Jack exclaimed, hands twitching in his lap before he clasped them together.

"People kept interrupting us, though," Pitch elaborated, looking a little shaky, himself, now that Bunny was close enough to see it.

"Then I remembered no one ever visits you!" Jack continued, grinning as guilelessly as if he'd just told them they'd won the lottery, and bouncing his clasped hands against the floor.

As Sandy laughed silently to himself, North opened his mouth to say something, though he didn't know what, and a pair of elves skidded through Jack and Pitch's tally marks, squishing, shattering, and scattering the tokens across the floor.

The two larger interlopers stared at the mess, and turned to each other.

"I didn't think of that," Pitch admitted as the two oblivious elves rolled around, biting and scratching in their unrelated fight. A wave of slush smacked into the two elves, who shrieked, and bore them away. "I didn't think of that, either."

"That's okay," Jack comforted, standing up before pulling Pitch to his feet, "The point of a game is to have fun, anyway." The Boogeyman nodded, and Jack fished a Fearling out of his front pocket, putting it on his head, instead. Bunnymund's agitation was oddly smothered at the sight.

"You know, the angry people interrupting your counting may be on our side," he informed the two before they could get sucked back into their own little world again, the beginnings of a smile tugging at one side of his lips.

"I do want this stuff out of my feathers," Toothiana confirmed with a playful glare.

"Little revenge could be fun," North grinned and Sandy's smile grew mischievous.

Pitch and Jack looked from Guardian to Guardian with wide eyes, and suddenly, manic giggles jittered out from the two.

Leaping onto Pitch's back like a spider monkey, Jack declared, "You'll never catch us alive!" to Pitch's echoed, "Never!" They leapt into the globe's shadow, Pitch traveling through the connecting shadows and stepping out of the gloom about the edges of the hall into the stretch of light. In a second, his long legs were working overtime as Jack laughed nearly hysterically from his back, the Guardians grinning and hot on their tail.