Trek of One Very Confused Guardian
By: Kuroi Atropos
Rating: Teen just to be safe
Warnings: Some slight (hopefully justified OOC)
Summary: Pitch curses Jack, sending him to a world where no one truly believes in magic. Shame the curse didn't count on Jimmy Kirk and the fact that belief can sometimes, in rare situations come from nothing.
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Chapter One
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He regarded the vast blackness with narrowed eyes, the only light a dim haze of blue from the quickly sputtering sparks that emanated from the gnarled staff clutched in his hands.
"I think this is only fair. You fed me to my fears, I will feed you to yours," the smarmy voice came from everywhere, making him twist in circles as he tried futilely to glimpse the Nightmare King in his realm.
There was a pounding on the stone doors separating him from the others, whose desperate shouts he could hear even over the darkly gleeful laughter that echoed around him after the mad spirit's taunt.
"Pitch!" Jack yelled.
"I hope you enjoy a world where no one believes, Jack."
The darkness swallowed him.
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Jack couldn't be sure what woke him up, but he jolted up from the blackness of unconsciousness to a shadowy night. He bolted up and on sheer instinct of knowing Pitch had been near him when he fell, Jack scrambled on the damp ground for his staff, ignoring the mud and moss that dirtied his hands as he brushed over various branches, rocks and leaves. He finally felt his staff and let out a small sigh of relief as his fingers closed around the familiar wood.
Jack took a closer look at his surroundings, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dimness of the forest around him, the bright moon barely glancing through dark branches stripped bare of their leaves.
How had he gotten here? The last thing that he remembered was the cave with Pitch and the other Guardians scrambling to reach where the Nightmare King had him trapped in an intricate design of spell work on the uneven stone floor, and then…..
Nothing. No, more like a sense of nothingness. A void.
Jack shook himself, slapping his cheeks to snap himself out of his reverie and turned around, taking a deep breath before reaching out with his senses to try and pinpoint his location.
He allowed his presence to seep into the air, feeling for the wind and the chill of – Jack yelped, snapping his senses back into himself and falling over in shock.
He couldn't feel any spiritual presence at all. No response…from anything. He had to leave here now!
"Wind! Can you hear me? I don't care where I am, carry me home, or to North or just answer me please!" He spun around, bordering on scared as not even a slight, comforting breeze came to wrap around him.
"WIND!" Jack howled, praying that the only thing that had been with him since he died wouldn't abandon him.
But…. it had.
Jack sank to his knees as he tried to think. This place, he didn't know what was happening here. What exactly had Pitch done? He'd said something about a world where no one believed, but how could he do that? How could that happen? Jack didn't understand—he didn't think he could understand. How could everything be so different?
He didn't know how long he stared at the dank ground before he looked up at the moon through the trees once again, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the Man in the Moon. He'd never directly answered Jack before, but if something had happened in that last fight with Pitch, something that made it so that Jack didn't deserve to be a Guardian or even a spirit (because what else could it be?)…he deserved an answer for that.
Jack could only glare at the bright orb for a few seconds before he cringed and looked away without even voicing the thoughts running through his head. The moon was more than silent… it almost seemed dead to his senses. Well, not really dead, but almost… and in every way that his heart told him mattered.
He couldn't put what he felt into words. He didn't know what was happening. All he knew was that somehow the Man in the Moon wasn't there, even though he could sense life in the bright orb.
As if the moon wasn't disconcerting enough on its own, the animals moving about the dense foliage didn't match what he knew either. Jack's "Hey" to an owl didn't even result in a twitch, and there was nothing spiritual in the other predators and prey that slinked through the woods. They were mindless….
Even the trees felt spiritually dead. And even with his staff, no matter how much power he poured into it, he couldn't leave patterns behind on anything.
Fighting back the worry that had knotted his stomach (that was just what Pitch wanted, for Jack to fea- NO! He would not even think the word right now!), Jack finally picked a direction and started walking. He needed to find out where he was; figure out what was happening to the world. Had Pitch finally been able to beat them all? Had he somehow reached Manny? Jack made himself stop thinking as he placed one foot in front of the other, over and over again, his staff absently tapping against various objects, just so he could confirm that yes, he was still corporeal.
After the longest walk Jack could remember taking, he stumbled out of the forest and into a clearing on a hill side.
Below him, a city spread across a valley.
Rather than a sense of relief and happiness, Jack felt the niggling sense of fear he hadn't been able to entirely control grow as he took in the obviously sleeping city, completely devoid of the trailing golden streams of Sandy's Dreamsand. Even when Sandy was busy with Guardian business, there was always Dreamsand floating in cities and towns at night, bringing the children sweet dreams.
"This is not good…." Jack muttered to himself. A slight breeze ruffled his hair as it arched up the hillside the way breezes did when they liked to play, so he tentatively tried calling out again. "Wind? Can you hear me? Are you okay? Can you answer me?" The wind seemed to linger around him a little, but nothing resolute, and there was no lilting laugh to the voice—no words or reaction—just a breeze.
Jack wrapped his arms around himself and his staff, hugging tightly for a moment as the loss of his greatest friend ripped at his soul before his eyes narrowed and he practically leapt down the hillside. He'd find something, anything…. He'd get Pitch for this as soon as he found the other Guardians or any of the other spirits that could at least point him in the right direction.
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Since he couldn't even conjure a wind that would carry him to a fence top, let alone to the roofs of the buildings, Jack was reduced to hunting for signs of Sandy, or any of the others, manually. He looked down every alley for a stray flower and in every window for a fluttering fairy or grain of golden sand.
By the time the sun started cresting over the horizon, Jack had gone from worried to downright terrified. Like most of the night, there had been nothing. Not even a hint of a Nightmare or anything more positive.
He himself could still barely frost a window and he only succeeded if he touched it for a long time and concentrated like he had to freeze an ocean. Ice and snow were out of the question. He'd also been forced to climb buildings by hand, foot and staff.
And the city itself…
The cars flew where he could not. There were no newspaper stands anywhere he could see, and media bars streamed across all the buildings, talking about ships that sailed the stars. He'd heard of such things, but only in the story books Jamie had on the shelves in his room.
The toys he'd seen in several windows went beyond anything even North could cook up. He'd seen a parent slip a tooth from under a pillow (leaving a small toy in its place) rather than a fairy or a mouse. And there were no vibrations of Bunny's warrens underground.
After the longest night in Jack's memory, he stared as the city came to life around him and wanted it to stop, to give him time to think, to figure out what Pitch had done.
Then, a child looking down at a glowing screen of something in his hand walked right through him, and it shook Jack to the core, devouring what little resistance to his mounting worry and fear he had left. Even with everything so different here, with no Man in the Moon, or North, or Tooth Fairy, he was still invisible. With a scream Jack flung his staff high, let loose the entirety of power inside of him, calling on all things cold with every ounce of strength he had.
Up high in the atmosphere, a weather satellite recognized a sudden shift in barometric pressure. There had been multiple strange wind patterns in its area within the past 12 hours, which (combined with this sudden phenomenon) triggered a warning to an analyst on the Lunar colony even as the shift in temperature was suppressed and the winds encouraged along their normal, planned paths.
Down below, a broken winter spirit fell to the ground as realization sunk in. He'd gotten a few flakes of snow, and then nothing. He really had lost his ice—the cold that had never ignored him the way the rest of the world did. So he sat there on the perfect sidewalk, staring at the ground and cried tears that didn't even freeze when they hit the pavement.
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112 Years Later
James T. Kirk found himself in the unusual position of pinning his Chief Engineer and main Navigator with an incredulous stare.
Normally Jim had no concerns with the experiments that his crew, especially his Senior Staff, wanted to do. However in this instance, his First Officer was looking at the two other geniuses with both eyebrows raised in Spock's Expression #12 (WTF? You are seriously lacking in common sense—or a brain—right now). He trusted his First Officer to understand the science talk that managed to escape his comprehension and give him a heads up if whatever was going on needed to be halted, and this particular Spock Expression definitely had blinking, glowing, arrows pointing at a 'Stop' sign.
It was mainly due to this almost extreme look from his first officer that he doubted the practice in trans-dimensional transport stuff (he had gotten a bit lost after they stopped talking about the actual modifications and moved into the theoretical calculations) would go off without a hitch as Scotty and Chekov had claimed.
"Scotty, you still haven't found Archer's beagle," Jim pointed out.
"Oh, aye Captain. But this might actually help! See we have this theory-"
"I can assure you that modifying an ionic field to work in conjunction with the transporters to bypass certain barriers to th-" Spock started only to actually be interrupted by Chekov.
"But Commander!" Kirk blinked while Spock re-raised the one eyebrow that had lowered as the Vulcan had transitioned into lecture mode. "We've modeled several simulations based on the instances related by The Ambassador!" Kirk sighed as Spock's eyes narrowed into Spock Expression #3 (you are this close to being nerve pinched) at the crew's capitalized moniker for the older Spock that had come through the Black Hole and the three super geniuses started off into a debate on the merits of experimenting with the transporters.
That a future version of Spock kept butting into Federation Politics and Sciences had to be one of the worst kept secrets Jim had ever seen since his attempts at hiding his less than legal mischief as a kid. The older man had little to no compunction when it came to meddling with the Universe he found himself in, especially while it concerned the Senior Staff of the Enterprise and several of the frankly weird dangers they'd apparently run into in the man's original Universe.
Kirk felt fairly sure some things wouldn't happen due to the altered world they found themselves in, but he knew several things seemed to be unavoidable. From a challenge standpoint he couldn't be sure if he was happy about most likely missing the Borg and Dominion or not.
Still some of the crazier stuff, like mirror universes, had frankly fascinated all of them, especially with the possibilities raised by Nero's intervention alone.
This interest in alternate realities was, for the most part, a good thing, and they'd had some great successes in using slightly modified com signals to help speed communications, but Jim was, well, leery to say the least about them doing anything with the transporters.
"-and see! We have this built up which shows-" Kirk focused back on the conversation to watch as Scotty plopped the device he'd been fiddling with on the Captain's desk. Kirk poked at it with a stylus, running the shape through all the designs that had crossed his desk and after coming up blank, he had to interrupt.
"Scotty, I thought that we agreed you wouldn't actually build any prototypes until I signed off on them after that thing with the pink trees." The Scotsman flushed a little, and Chekov laughed as he remembered the incident that had Scotty hiding in the Jeffries Tubes for weeks from a bunch of the science department and one pissed off helmsman.
"Well, Captain, this isn't a prototype exactly…. This little thing isn't compatible with any of the ships systems, we didn't even want to bother you and the Commander if we couldn't even generate the type of Ion field we needed, since Ion technology is something we haven't played with much."
"Da, Captain! Not a prototype since it will not be used with the transporters for testing at all!" Chekov said cheerfully.
Jim sighed and poked the device with his stylus again, only to have Spock actually slap it away with Expression #2 (you're acting idiotic again, Captain) on his face. "Until we can verify the safety of the device, Captain, I would advise against jostling the unit unnecessarily."
"If it wasn't stable, Scotty and Chekov wouldn't be slinging it around, right guys?" Jim smiled up past his First Officer at the two who nodded emphatically.
"Oh, aye, Lad!" Scotty smiled, "we would nae wanna risk the Commander lynching us if anything happened to you, sir."
Jim felt the urge to drag his hand over his face, refusing to look at his First Officer.
"Okay. If this doesn't work with the transporters, what exactly does it do?"
"Well, basically it'll generate a type Ion field that'll let us modify certain beam types through it and if that works, we can try it on the transporters! On its own it doesn't really impact anything, see!" Before Kirk or Spock could say or do anything, Scotty pressed a button on the machine and a high pitched whine drowned out everything in his ready room, startling him into jumping back from his desk and knocking his chair over.
"Hey, watch it Jimmy!" A young voice came from behind him. Kirk spun, banging into his desk as Spock and the others started, his first officer going so far as to grab his shoulder and yank him bodily over the desk with his more than human strength. Pads and various office toys scattered to the floor from the force of him being dragged through them, and he kicked out to help push himself the rest of the way off the desk to stand beside Spock, ignoring the pain in his hip where it had connected with the edge of his desk.
Leaning in the corner, glaring down at Jim's fallen chair with a half-annoyed, half- worried expression, was an outline of a thin, humanoid figure. It slowly filled in before their eyes, gaining color as if the figure was having its transparency adjusted on a screen. Even after it filled out, the character appeared to be deathly pale, like a corpse frozen in the cold of space given life. It had the form of a human teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen at the oldest, with ice white hair. It dressed in rough-hewn pants with twine wrapped around the bottoms holding the fabric tight against its legs, well up from dainty, bare feet, and a blue hoodie with nearly glowing metallic silver threads shot through it in the shape of stylized frost patterns and snowflakes.
Kirk blinked, recognizing a feeling of familiarity that solidified when the figure glanced up, and blue eyes a few shades icier than his own orbs looked on his rather blindly. Kirk spun to glare at his Chief Engineer and Navigator. "Damn it, Scotty! How did this stupid machine get inside my head?"
The two human geniuses looked torn between shrinking back from Kirk's unusual ire and jumping in front of him to protect him from the mysterious new stranger.
"Captain?" Spock asked, almost tentatively. Kirk eyed his First Officer who had yet to look away from the teen, but he knew the Vulcan enough to tell that Spock was itching to call Security.
"Spock, meet Jack Frost, my childhood imaginary friend."
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End Chapter One
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Um yeah... Not sure - please let me know if this is worth continuing.