Actual chapter 1 of my RoTG fanfiction. Mostly influenced by early Pitch Black concepts and a desire to delve more deeply into his character. I enjoy him in the movie but there is a lot more that could be said about him. Gaps for fan speculation are what fanfic is all about though!


Rise of The Guardians

Cold and Dark

Chapter 1


"It was him! I saw him!" Jack hollered until it felt like his voice could go out. The Yetis were kicking up a racket, like they were out to smash toys and not make them. Maybe they sensed something in the air, hanging around Jack. Shadows that hadn't quite been shaken off.

"Pitch? It cannot be," North declined surely. "He was taken by night mares."

"But that doesn't explain why I saw him," Jack insisted. When North got spooked everyone flew to the pole on urgent orders, yet he'd been eye-to-eye with Pitch Black and the Slavic legend considered it a trifle.

"You saw Pitch?" North seemed to challenge, staring down at him from above the immense beard. "You. See. Him?"

"Well... more or less," Jack answered. "He was there- I mean, it was him, I know it was. He attacked me."

"And so you sent him back where he come from," North surmised, turning away to bark at one of the yetis in its own gibberish language. "There is no problem."

"No, I mean, yes he disappeared, but I couldn't do anything to him," Jack fumbled. "It was Pitch, but it kinda... wasn't, as well."

"It was? It wasn't? You make no sense, Jack," North soothed. "You work too hard. Here, take a seat and drink some eggnogs."

"I'm not overworked," he protested. He didn't work in the first place – his life was ultimately stress-free. "I know it was Pitch... or some part of him." There were darker things about this, things Jack didn't want to consider; like what happened to Guardians who were forgotten. Pitch wasn't a Guardian, but then why did he disappear when children stopped believing in him like they did? Why was his destiny the same as theirs, when he was the very opposite of what they were?

"Pitch is no problem," North assured Jack heartily. "Will take him a long time to get back to power."

"That's what I thought," Jack replied, "but then how do you explain what happened?"

"Even we Guardians do not know everything about Pitch and his powers," North consoled. "You must stay alert, and if it happen again we will find answers."

"Okay." It wasn't really the answer he wanted, but he wasn't sure what the answer he wanted was.

A full explanation and safeguard to guarantee it wouldn't happen again would be nice, but even then Jack wasn't sure the rotting feeling in his gut would go away. The sight of that thing, a Pitch without being Pitch, was still burned in the back of his eyes. It hid in shadows, it loomed He didn't like it.

And it would come back. That was the only thing he had no doubt of.

The next time it happened in Germany.

Jack was in the north, dressing towns in picturesque shades of white, when something moved on one of the roofs and a torrent of snow slipped from a building to pummel over a passer-by. They were unharmed, but then more snowdrifts started knocking down from their perches, taking out pedestrians and setting off car alarms.

He could sense the interference, like a pinch of salt in water. Something was wrong about his magic, like it was being contaminated. On the edge of the village stood a forest, and it was there he noticed the shadows darken. They shifted unnaturally, drawing together as if the patchy shade of the trees was being convalesced into a single point. When it took shape Jack was flying at it as fast as the wind could carry him.

The blot ran from him, speeding across virgin ground and darting further into the forest. He pursued, zipping between trees, but they slowed him down where the shadow passed straight through. By the time he caught up they could've covered a hundred miles or so, high up the mountain slopes where snow sat several metres deep. He landed on the crust, making only the lightest indentation on top of the drift, and squared off against the shadow where it stood – if a shadow could stand.

'Run rabbit run,' the voice – his voice – said, but the figure didn't move. It was like a statue carved out of the darkest stone imaginable, so black that light poured into it and none reflected. It had no depth, no detail, just endless black. But it was his shape. The tall, elongated limbs, the poker straight posture. 'But your Guardians aren't here now, are they? What's the matter, didn't they believe you?'

"They believed me just fine," Jack retorted, but in truth North was the only one he'd shared it with. "I don't need help to deal with you." He drew his feet out and braced himself to jump in any direction. "You're weak," he accused. The resulting laugh sent birds flying from the trees around them.

'Weak, am I?' It was a challenge. The shadow moved an arm, which stretched and turned into a scythe, then swung out at Jack. He dropped into the snow, right under the drift, cutting through the white until he was underneath where Pitch stood. He blasted ice in all directions, raising up on a pillar of jagged peaks and icicles. He trapped a part of the shadow as it lurched out of the way, but what was caught merely pulled from the body like bubblegum, stretching and then separating. Part of something black and horrible was left trapped in the ice, and where they'd mixed the edges were sharper, the spikes more vicious.

Jack's defence became an attack against himself when he blasted another frigid wind against Pitch. He pushed out a wall of ice, but where Pitch's body ought to have been pierced, black ice turned and shot daggers at him instead. Pitch was forcing his own medium against him, until he was dodging icicles as a swipe of the scythe shattered the structure and sent jagged points flying. Jack knew instinctively that this ice would hurt him.

"Okay, you want a fight?!" Jack bellowed, pushing the hail back with a blast of air. "Fine!" He spiralled upwards and drew the wind after him, whipping up a tornado of snow from the ground until he moved in his own private blizzard. He was stronger now than he'd ever been, and it was showing.

Then he glanced down and saw black. Like ink spinning down a drain, a wisp of darkness fed into his tornado and raised itself up in the frothing fury. He leapt from the twister with the knowledge that if it'd reached him he would be trapped, but the wind kept spinning, the black climbing higher and higher.

A dark, ominous laugh echoed around the forest clearing, as darkness took over the whirlwind like it was always meant to be something terrible. At the head of the swirl pits of light looked almost like a skull, floating where there might have been a face. This time, Jack was afraid.

'That's right,' it cooed. 'Be afraid. You know so little, Frost.' And then with a final gust everything vanished. As if Pitch had simply blown away. The only remainder was a marbled black spot in the ground, as if volcanic rock had been melted deep into it.

With a gasp that felt like part of him had been ripped away, Jack fell to his knees and blew a puff of ice crystals into the air, grasping at his chest and wondering how he could feel so out of breath. Fighting wasn't meant to tire him like this – it was draining, as it was for all of them to use magic heavily, but this was exhaustion. Fatigue, like he was still human and had been on a marathon.

"Something's wrong," he panted, looking at the spot of darkness and wondering what it meant. "Something's really wrong."

"And it was here, he was here, but he was some kind of insane whirlwind demon monster with a skull and he turned my ice against me and he laughed and said there was so much I didn't know, and it was here, right here!" Jack ranted, pointing again and again at the spot Pitch had left the world in, where now only a pure snowfall settled. He'd scraped back the dust to show Sandy the dark glass that'd been left, but it had vanished overnight, leaving nothing but dull earth and frost from his own fingertips.

Sandy looked at the ground, bent over and put his ear to it, tapped it, and then picked himself up and formed a big question mark over his head.

"I know it doesn't make sense, but something's going on," Jack insisted. "You've been around almost as long as him, right Sandy?"

A furious shake of his head sent particles of golden sand fluttering off into the air around Sandman's ears.

"What? But I thought-"

An image of Pitch appeared up top, and alongside a shining replica of the moon. They swirled around one another, and only after a few revolutions did a wide-eyed baby Sandman appear by their sides.

"You mean it was just them at the start?" Sandman nodded, then turned back down and felt at the ground. It was nothing. He straightened and gave a shrug. Something occurred to him, and the sand reformed to the shapes of Pitch and Jack, then another flourish and a question mark again.

"I don't know why he's following me," Jack professed. "Maybe he thinks-" he cut himself off. He hadn't told the other Guardians about how Pitch had approached him offering a deal. It hadn't seemed important, but now he wondered. "I don't know," he conceded glumly, and Sandy seemed pensive. A question mark popped up once more, followed by another, then another, then a whole little hoard of them bouncing up and down.

"I don't know what any of it means," Jack murmured. "That's why I thought... maybe someone else could, well, never mind." He'd wasted Sandman's time with this. There was nothing he could do, just like North. They hadn't seen Pitch, they only had Jack's word that he was even here.

"You better get back to work, right?" Jack offered, and Sandy gave an acquiescing shrug. He rose up on a golden cloud and took off across the sky, leaving Jack behind with his doubts.