Chapter 2: Among Friends
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It took several proof reads to get this chapter to a place I was satisfied with. I wasn't expecting to take a full week, and I'll make sure it never takes longer than this to get a chapter out unless I give you guys a fair warning beforehand. Chapter 3 is up next! So you guys get reading and I'll get to work!
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Flying alongside Jack, you could swear that the wind had a mind of its own. Tooth could feel the air alive with energy, tugging playfully at the plumage that grew from around her waist, or skimming along her sides like dolphins in the ocean. The whistles and rushes of the air sounded almost like laughter, and it was contagious. On her left Jack smiled and laughed as he tumbled along on an updraft, and she giggled along with him.
Before she had left Toothiana had ensured that the shifts for tonight were prepared and running smoothly. Normally she wouldn't need to say anything, but with Baby Tooth coming along as well, there was no one in command at the palace. In any other circumstance, she might be worried, but it was impossible not to have fun around Jack. Baby Tooth was in her usual spot firmly planted on Jack's right shoulder, a place that Tooth secretly envied.
The last fingers of sunlight steadily slid below the horizon, leaving the world to bask in the soft glow of the moon and the thousands of stars scattered like dust across the sky. Far below them, the city of London was drifting to sleep as the Sandman's golden streams of dreamsand snaked throughout the city like rivers of light.
Tooth remembered how she had always waited for this moment, watching the glittering tendrils spread like a lattice over the world below, working in tandem with Sandy to be sure all the children were asleep before she got to work gathering the teeth. Out here in the open, her sixth-sense was stronger than ever. Each tooth was like a golden star shimmering through wood and stone, and the buzzing in Tooth's chest seemed to make her entire body tingle. Or maybe that's Jack...
An overpowering smile took over her face and the fairy couldn't help twirling and kicking her feet in excitement. "Ooooh, they're everywhere! Calling out, look how beautiful it is! One right there! Two molars in that building on the corner! Three canines in a row down the street!" The fairy bounced up and down in the air, practically shivering in excitement.
"C'mon Jack I can hardly wait! Good luck keeping up!" Without a second thought she zipped toward the nearest house, a right-outer incisor that twinkled from beneath a little girl's pillow.
Jack barely had time to blink and sputter a surprised laugh before bolting after her. He knew that the mischievous glint in her eye was a challenge. Honestly Jack was pretty sure he stood no chance in a contest of tooth hunting against her. Though to be fair, this is precisely what Toothiana had been created to do. Fluidly Tooth phased directly through the bedroom window glass as if it were not there and hovered at the foot of the bed. While the other Guardians had fancy magical powers that could help in combat or travel, Tooth had to rely mostly on her training and considerable intelligence. Other than her legions of miniature fairies, one of the main perks of her job was the ability to pass through any clear surface as if it didn't exist.
Unlike the Queen however, Jack was not able to pass through clear surfaces, and so by the time the window creaked open Tooth was already deftly replacing the tooth with a quarter. She gave the sleeping child a warm smile before turning back to Jack with the same mischievous glint in her eyes. "Too slow, flyboy."
Jack chuckled, "Is a race what you want? Because I'll give you a race." Her smile was all the answer he needed, and suddenly the wind carried him back out the window and down the street toward the building on the corner. There was no way he'd win a race against her, well, at least not without a great deal of tomfoolery.
Tooth zipped past him in a blur of colors and laughter. She was nearly at the window of the building when Jack called up a gust of wind that blew her backward. The cyclone of air sent her tumbling through the sky as the boy slipped into the window that the fairy had targeted. In a flash he was back out in the night air and spotted Tooth frantically fixing her skewed feathers.
"Ugh! No fair!" She tried to shoot him a mean look but could barely contain her laughter. Toothiana could tell he was watching her, waiting for her next move so he could stop her with a gust of wind and have Baby Tooth lead him to the teeth. With shocking speed she darted left before he could react and was through a window. Jack almost attempted to bolt after her, but the miniature fairy of his shoulder began tugging his hood. The boy and turned and bolted after Baby Tooth as she led the way to a different house.
The pair zipped from building to building throughout the city in a flurry of cold wind, chittering wings, and snowflakes. Jack would manage to get the occasional jump on Tooth but there was really no contest. In what felt like no time at all they had covered their entire sector of the city. Tooth had designated sections of certain cities in the western hemisphere that her fairies would leave to her and Jack. Finally the pair met again when they nearly ran into each other flying over a four way intersection. Both of them looked simultaneous down the long stretch of street to their left at the final tooth in the city. In the blink of an eye they were racing at breakneck speed for the last house.
Toothiana had called it out from a mile away. "Left premolar! Third floor up! Last house on the street!" Late night traffic blew past on the streets below them in a streak of lights and sound. Their constant laughs drifted on the wind behind them as Jack continually tried to gust Tooth out of the way. The Queen dove and ran into him with a playful shove. "Oh no you don't!" Finally, with the building mere feet in front of them Jack reached deep within himself pulled a wall of air and snow up in front of the fairy, blasting her backward and straight into him.
"Uh-oof!" Was all he had time to say before the two were sent spinning through the air completely out of control. They landed on a building across the street, both still laughing and too dizzy to move. Toothiana blinked to clear the stars from her eyes and found herself gazing down at Jack beneath her. His hair was a ruffled mess, as were her feathers, and she burst into laughter again. A few minutes passed that way before she finally caught her breath and it hit home that she was straddled on top of Jack. He gazed smugly up at her and she quickly floated several feet up into the air, trying to hide her blush while fixing her feathers for what may have been the millionth time since the night began.
Jack coughed and sat up, still smiling. "Sorry about that, I guess I got carried away." That adorable smirk was still on his face and Tooth felt her own face heat up even more."No, no, that's alright we both did." Finally satisfied with her feathers, the fairy looked back up and fixed Jack with an 'I'm okay' smile.
Before either of them could say any more, a flurry of honking and shouting emanated from the street below. The pair's eyes grew wide as they dashed to the edge of the apartment building. In the streets below a massive snowdrift had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and it was completely blocking the street in front of the building they had been racing toward. People were climbing from their cars that were nearly buried in snow and gazing bewildered at the sky.
"Oops..." Was all Jack could manage. Tooth nodded in agreement, a bit dumbstruck by how much power Jack could use simply by accident. Before she could respond, a light fluttering sound drifted to her ears and they spotted Baby Tooth zipping out of the house with the final tooth in hand. Jack opened his teeth bag and the fairy dropped it in. They had both brought along a bag to carry the teeth that they collected, and while Jack and Baby Tooth had tried their hardest, Tooth's bag was still almost twice the size of their own. Toothiana shook her fist and joked accusingly. "You little traitor." They both laughed again and the Queen rubbed her cheeks that ached from smiling so much.
Rubbing the back of his neck, Jack's eyes dropped to the ground and he shifted uncomfortably. "We should probably get out of here."
"Yeah, the fairies will have gotten all the other teeth in the city by now." Seeing that Jack was a bit embarrassed with the mayhem he had caused, she put a hand on his shoulder and gave him an encouraging look. This wasn't that different from the troublemaking he usually caused, but when it could potentially mess up Tooth's job… It was different. "Don't worry about it, nobody got hurt. Besides, the night is still young and we've got two more continents to worry about in our shift!"
It was true; the tooth fairy shifts were split up according to eastern and western hemispheres. The first shift covered Australia, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Eastern Africa while second shift covered Western Europe, Western Africa, and the Americas as night swept across the globe. This meant there was a slight overlap in shifts where first shift had yet to return from the field and second shift was leaving, which left very few fairies at the palace and was usually when Toothiana caught a bit of sleep.
Today was not a usual day however, and that meant she had a shift just like all the other fairies. The sectors her and Jack had taken were quite a bit larger than the other fairies, but that was because they could each carry more than one tooth at a time.
Sitting on that London rooftop, the few stars that peeked through the city's lights glimmered distantly, and the moon's soft glow bathed them both in pale light. Even in this darkness, Jack's perfect teeth glinted as his brilliant smile returned. Tooth resisted the incredible urge to pull his mouth open and examine them. "I guess you're right. Where's the next stop then?"
"Your hometown, where else?" Tooth dazzled Jack with a winning smile before twirling excitedly and zipping up into the night sky. The boy shook his head and drifted up after her. It was hard to believe someone so energetic had been locked up in her palace all this time.
Soon the north atlantic ocean was blurring past beneath them, accompanied by the soft whispering of the tide and fresh salty fragrance of the ocean breeze. Out of the corner of her eye Tooth saw that Baby Tooth had fallen asleep inside of Jack's hood. That slacker, but can I really blame her? If she had the opportunity to be carefree like the mini-fairy, to sleep on Jack's shoulder and feel him so close to her... Tooth banished the thought, it was no time for daydreaming.
Just talk would you? Don't make things weird. "Flying out here under the night sky, the smells and sounds of the world all around us, it's so beautiful..." The fairy spread her arms, gesturing to the wide world around them as she turned fully to look at Jack, stars twinkling in her eyes. "Sometimes I almost envy you, you know." Frost looked at her with an incredulous expression. "You, the Queen of the Tooth Fairies, envy me? Why do you say that?"
"Being able to wander through all this beauty, no direction, no urgent jobs to get to..." Tooth truly loved her job, and nothing could ever change that, but sometimes she wondered what it would be like to not have something to worry about every hour of every day. After all, it's always night somewhere, and that means there's always teeth to be collected.
"But you love teeth. And you could just have a shift like all the other fairies, why'd you stop doing that?" Jack was genuinely curious. He knew little of the exact history of any of the guardians, and the Tooth Fairy was especially obscure.
"I love my job, and I love all the teeth... Eventually there just got to be so many teeth to collect and fairies to collect them that someone had to be in charge at the palace. That was almost four and a half centuries ago." Below them Tooth saw a pair of dolphins skimming through the waves, twirling and touching as they raced side by side. She stared at the couple of playful creatures as she spoke on.
"I didn't really mind all that much. I had taken the thrill of being on the job for granted, I see that now. Even then though, I don't think I ever would've left the palace were it not for you..." Tooth looked back up from the creatures to Jack. An occasional snowflake drifted along on the wind beside him as they flew. She looked away as a flush of heat came to her face. "You brought back the fun, not just for the children, but for all the other guardians as well. We were all too focused on the job to realize we should be enjoying ourselves."
"Hah, well I guess you're welcome then." Jack chuckled lightly and pointed ahead as the ocean racing past beneath them gave way to land. "Looks like we're almost at stop number two."
Wet springtime air left a shimmering coat on the grass as they touched down side by side on the half-frozen pond that Jack had come to call home. It was here that he had drowned over three hundred years ago. Where the moon had taken him from the doorstep of death and made him into Jack Frost. A spider's web glimmered with dew in the crook of a tree overlooking the lake, little pinpoints of its multiple eyes burning through the calm night. Tooth shuttered and directed her focus on Jack. There were few things in this world fairies didn't delight in, but they almost universally hated spiders.
Jack's white hair shone like the frost on the grass. An absent smile on his face as he stared up at the moon. How can one face have so many different smiles? Tooth tilted her head curiously and Jack saw her out of the corner of his eye, he turned his smile to her. "You know, this past month has been the first time in three hundred years that I didn't hate the Man in the Moon for making me Jack Frost… I just wanna say thank you."
Toothiana was unsure what to say, hating the Man in the Moon seemed so outlandish to her. Without thinking she reached out and draped her arms around the winter spirit, pulling him into a hug. After a moment of shock, he hugged her back, tilting his head down into her feathers and feeling the tall plumes on her forehead tickle his face. As the boy inhaled he smelled the flowery aroma of the fairy's feathers. Tooth was more than a full head shorter than Jack, and she breathed deeply as her slender arms squeezed his frame. He smelled like winter, if winter had a smell that is. This is nice...
A few moments of silence drifted between them with nothing but whispers of night to interrupt the peace. In a moment of panic Tooth realized she may have overstepped her bounds and quickly pulled away. What was that? What am I doing? She ignored the rapid beating of her heart, "No, thank you for coming Jack, no one should be forced to be alone for so long." Swirls of ice kicked up from the surface of the frozen lake as she floated up to his eye level. "Now let's get to work, shall we?"
The night was serene and for the thousandth time Tooth was reminded how much she had missed her days of hunting teeth below the stars. Drifting from house to house, Toothiana led the way as they wound through the neighborhood. Wisps of her breath curled in the cold air each time the fairy exhaled. The cold didn't bother her through her feathers, it even felt refreshing. It almost feels the same as giving Jack a hug. Almost.
Attempting to drown her nerves, the Queen chattered continuously about collecting teeth and how the past four hundred years of her life had been organized, pausing only to slip through a window and exchange a tooth. Jack listened intently and Tooth realized this was the longest a single person had ever talked to him; she also realized how much she missed talking to someone other than her fairies. There was no doubt that she loved her girls, but they often knew what she was thinking before she said it, which made conversation a bit hard. "You know how much I missed getting out of the palace." She sighed and slipped through a window, unlatching it from the inside for Jack.
Jack laughed softly as the window creaked open and he stepped carefully over the windowsill. Delicate ferns patterns of frost swirled over the glass where Jack's hand touched it. "Of course, but I should really be thanking you. I'd be back to drifting the world alone if you hadn't invited me. That means a lot..."
The fairy's cheeks reddened a bit, though she was certain Jack couldn't see in the low light. "Thank the Man in the Moon for that, he's the one who chose you to be a Guardian…" The boy waved his hand toward the moon dismissively. "Maybe he did, but you're the only one who invited me anywhere. He would've left me to myself."
A faint clicking sound kept Tooth from answering and she dove for the open closet as the child's room filled with light. Jack was caught by surprise and blinked rapidly to adjust to the bright light. Tooth watched from her perch on a shelf high in the closet as Jack froze in place, an awake child looking directly at him. Through him, she realized. As the kid slowly scanned the room looking for whatever had woken him up, Jack realized it as well. Suddenly the child hopped out of bed and walked to his closet, and directly through Jack. Tooth winced as the spirit stumbled, but she remained still until the kid left the room.
Fluttering back to the floor, Tooth quickly zipped to the bed and exchanged a gift for the tooth before checking on Jack. Being phased through is an unpleasant feeling, like having the air knocked from your lungs. "You okay Jack?"
He nodded and she tugged on his sleeve as Baby Tooth crawled out from beneath his hood yawning. "Alright well then let's get out of here." Tooth led him back out the window and the three of them flew down the street.
Steadily cheerie air returned and Tooth kept jabbering on about everything under the sun, with occasional input from Baby Tooth. Though they were more cautious when collecting teeth than previously.
Hunting seemed secondary to talking to Jack, though he rarely responded. An occasional joke or story came to mind that he would tell, but three hundred years alone creates a habit for silence that becomes hard to break. After they were finished with their stop in North America, it was time for their final sector in Santiago, Chile.
Tooth was rather fond of South America. The landscape reminded her a lot of the area around her palace, but even more beautiful. The atmosphere could change from tropical jungle to mountainous grassland as seamlessly as her feathers changed from blue to green. As they passed over the equator, Tooth could tell that the heat was getting to Jack, and so they flew higher where the atmosphere was colder until they reached their destination.
Gathering teeth throughout the apartments of the city proved blessedly uneventful. Finally, with the final tooth exchanged and bagged, they set down their heavy sacks on the roof of a highrise. Sunrise was nearly upon them, and bands of brilliant radiance stretched across the mountains to the east.
Toothiana's eyes glimmered in the pinkish orange light. She was stunned by the beauty, no matter how many times she saw it. Rings of light seemed to be drawing the mountains up into a warm, colorful embrace. The contrast of icy peaks against the rising sun crisscrossed the city in golden light and blue-black shadows.
Feet dangling in the wind, they sat on the end of a tall skyscraper planted firmly on the jagged line between light and shadow. Tooth felt a soft movement, and looked down to see she was holding Jack's hand. The ghostly pale of his skin and blue-grey of his jacket contrasted against the sky blue and deep green of her feathers. She pulled her hand away, a bit too quickly, and folded her hands nervously in her lap.
Baby Tooth was still transfixed on the sunset. The Queen's palm tingled like it had been dipped in ice water, or set on fire. Or both?
"This was nice, right?" She wasn't sure whether it was a statement or a question. I swear, every day you have less control of your emotions. Get yourself together!
"Yeah, it was. So we'll do this again next week, right?" Jack grinned at her and his teeth glinted in the sun as it crested the horizon. "I mean… It's up to you…"
In a moment of weakness Toothiana nearly reached out and tried to touch his teeth. God they're so… "Perfect…" She stuttered and quickly corrected herself as she realized she had said that aloud. "I mean… Yes! Of course! It would be good for both of us. Sorry, your teeth hypnotized me for a moment."
Jack chuckled and treated her to a toothy dazzling smile that nearly made Baby Tooth faint. They both burst into laughter as the tiny fairy collected herself.
Suddenly Tooth's laugh became a massive yawn; she hadn't realized just how exhausting the night had been. "Well the sun is up, I should be getting these teeth back to the palace to be sorted." Jack nodded, knowing better than to offer help. When it came to managing teeth, Queen Toothiana demanded to oversee every step of the process.
Baby Tooth made a theatrical display of her sadness that she had slept through nearly the entire night, but made to follow Tooth home nevertheless.
The fairy remembered something at the last moment, and called over her shoulder at Jack. "Oh! And no need to tell the others about this right? Something tells me Bunnymund wouldn't exactly approve…" Even from the opposite side of the building, Tooth could see Jack's smile as he called back.
"Especially not Bunnymund."
Thank you again for reading chapter two! If you think it can/should be improved, have advice, or just liked it, please tell me so!
