Disclaimer: I own nothing involved in this story unless I invented it myself. This is written for fun, not for profit. All forms of feedback eagerly accepted. Concrit is loved the most, but everything is welcome.
Fandom: Rise of the Guardians
Title: In Due Time: Chapter 3: A Worse Better Life
Characters: Pitch, Jack, Guardians
Word Count: chapter: 3,201||story: 9,544
Genre: Drama||Rated: PG-13
Notes: This is mainly movie-verse, but with some elements from the book-verse.
Summary: [WIP, Pitch, Jack, Guardians] Pitch knows he would've won if he'd had Jack on his side. If there had been no Guardians to fight him. So he's going to make certain that those things are what happens. The laws of time do not allow change. But Pitch is the Nightmare King, and he makes his own laws.

Pitch hadn't said anything at all to Jack as he fiddled around with the time clock once more. That didn't mean he hadn't spoken at all, though. Jack could hear him muttering, though catching a clear sentence was almost impossible. He suspected Pitch did that on purpose, just to annoy him. He wouldn't have put anything at all past the Nightmare King after what he'd already seen.

Bunny. Jack steeled himself just at the thought. A world without Bunny wasn't a world he could imagine. For that matter, he couldn't imagine a world that didn't have the Guardians at all. He just couldn't wrap his head around it. Even spending three centuries without them paying attention to him didn't do it. He'd known they were there, even if he'd been alone.

His own future prospects if Pitch succeeded weren't that much better. Never being able to deny Pitch? Jack couldn't help but be a little glad that he hadn't had that much to eat before all of this started. It probably would have made a reappearance by now if he had.

"Let me see, where would the Cossacks be at this point," Pitch muttered, the words faintly floating toward Jack where the Spirit of Winter sat perched on a rocky outcropping in the lair. While Pitch had worked, Jack had spent his time searching for either an exit or his staff. He didn't find either one. Pitch only left this place through his shadows, which meant he didn't actually need an exit or entrance. That also meant that this was the best place to keep his stolen time machine and his kidnapped Guardian.

Jack had tried every shadow he could find, just on the off-chance that one of them might somehow hold a way back outside. All he'd done was bruise his fists and get very bored, very fast.

Now he sat himself on the outcropping and watched Pitch. If he couldn't get out of here – and as much as he hated it, he had to deal with the fact he couldn't – then the best he could do was find out what Pitch was going to do to Tooth, Sandy, and North, and stop it.

He'd figure out a way to stop what Pitch had planned for him later. When he could stop screaming internally every time the concept crossed his mind.

Cossacks. He didn't remember everything the others had mentioned about their pasts, but something about that caught on his attention. North knew Cossacks. Or was one. Or had been. Something like that. It had come up when he'd asked why North used swords, when most of the tales about him that humans knew never mentioned the fact.

"I grew up using these!" North had waved both of the sharp blades over his head. "What else would I use in battle?"

Jack refused to remind him that most stories about Santa Claus didn't involve him going into battle at all. Their forms were shaped to various degrees by the stories told about them, but those weren't the entirety of what made them. He still found himself hoping that he'd get to age a little bit more once stories about him started going around on a more regular basis. He loved kids, but being fourteen forever wasn't on his personal schedule.

All right, so Pitch was going after North next. From what little bits he could pick up, Jack sketched out that he probably wanted to make certain North never made it to Santoff Claussen in the first place, but stayed a bandit wandering the world in search of treasure. Which likely wasn't the worst fate that one could bestow, but it wasn't right for North. And Jack was determined it wouldn't happen.

Pitch straightened up, a satisfied smirk on his thin lips. "There. That should take us exactly where we need to be." He crooked a finger at Jack, who didn't move an inch, glaring at Pitch. "Life will be so much better once you've learned to do as you're told. For both of us."

Jack still didn't move. "I should warn you, I've got allergies."

"Allergies?" Sand swirled about Pitch's fingers as he gestured once more and Jack still refused to move.

"Yeah. I'm allergic to doing what you tell me to do." Jack smirked, but only for a moment. Sand lashed out toward him, wrapping around his wrists and pulling him toward Pitch.

"You'll get over it." Pitch settled Jack next to him and reached out to the clock. "Do behave yourself, Jack. There are so many things that could go wrong when you're time-traveling. You wouldn't want to hurt someone, would you? Or end up hurt yourself."

If the clock hadn't begun to send them hurtling through time, Jack knew he would've come up with the most awesome comeback to that ever, something along the lines of gladly hurting Pitch no matter what time it was. As it was, he had to concentrate to keep himself from getting dizzy as they spun through time and space. Whoever had invented this thing really needed to have test driven it themselves, in Jack's opinion. If they had, they would've improved it so it wasn't as much of a pain.

Jack noticed something was off the moment his head cleared and he began to see what was going on around him.

All right. Woods. Snow. He liked this place already. He guessed they were probably in Russia, though he couldn't have put a time to any of it.

Then the most important part clicked in his mind: Pitch wasn't there with him.

Jack leaped to his feet and checked every corner of the clearing he found himself in, poking into every shadow cast by the trees and rocks. He didn't know if that would do anything to Pitch, but he figured it couldn't hurt. Nothing happened at all.

Something went wrong with the transport? Pitch was probably around here somewhere, and likely looking for North. And he'd end up looking for Jack once he'd finished changing North's past. Which meant only one thing to the Guardian of Fun, who hadn't had a single good time since seeing Pitch back at the workshop.

He had to find North first and somehow warn him not to trust anything that didn't lead him to Santoff Claussen. And do it in a way that still left him with his head and all of his arms and legs properly attached.

Pitch liked to laugh, when matters were going his way. Right now, everything was doing exactly that, so he really, truly wanted to laugh. Unfortunately, that might well have tipped his hand, so he held it all inside.

He would get a chance to do it, once this particular trip was over with.

Jack kept swearing he'd never do anything to help Pitch. Pitch was going to make certain that he did, even if he didn't know when he did it.

Jack hurried through the woods, missing his staff and the wind all over again. The wind did blow here, but without his staff, he couldn't fly. He still had control of the ice and snow, and he zipped over a frozen river without even noticing it. But flying remained the province of the wind, and he needed his staff to do that.

He hadn't seen a single sign of any Cossacks, nor anyone else for that matter. The closest he'd come was a thin trail of smoke in the sky, and a quick dart to the side showed him that was from a small village, not from the kind of camp that wandering warriors might make. He didn't bother going down there; he'd been passed through by enough children in his time, and he doubted there would be anyone down there who'd believe in Jack Frost anyway. He needed to find North, not get walked through.

Without his staff and the wind, he wasn't as fast as he was used to being, but he still managed to cover a great deal of ground before a familiar type of cry hit his ears. He stopped where he was, looking around.

"That can't be right." It couldn't be; it didn't make any sense.

But then it came again, and Jack knew he couldn't just keep going, not without looking into this. He was a Guardian; if he heard a baby's cry, he was going to find out what the problem was.

It didn't take much longer for him to track down the child, and he stared for a moment or two, not quite certain if he believed what he heard, much less saw.

There, tucked up under a bush and wrapped in a tattered red blanket, was a baby. He could only be a few months old, and whatever else he had, he had a set of powerful lungs, as his cries echoed all over. Sooner or later, some hungry predator would come see what the noise was all about, and that would be the end of this.

Well, not on Jack Frost's watch! He'd never had a problem interacting with small children, such as babies and toddlers. He didn't know why it was, but most of them only started to look through him around the time they began to be able to comprehend legends and myths. When they didn't hear about him, he guessed, they stopped being aware of him.

He put that thought aside quickly and picked up the baby. That little village would do nicely for a new home, he decided. The wind tossed several good smells toward him as he drew closer to it again, one of which reminded him of his old home. Their next door neighbor had been the village baker, and everything that came out of her oven smelled just this side of heaven. This one here seemed cut from the same cloth.

Jack looked down at the baby in his arms, who had calmed down during Jack's quick run through the forest. Don't know who you're going to be, but it's better than being a snack for something large and hungry. He settled the child down on the baker's doorstep, then took two steps back, scooped up a double handful of snow, and slammed two of his best snowballs on the door.

He couldn't be seen, so he didn't move an inch as the door creaked open, and a young girl of perhaps thirteen looked outside. She blinked at the sight of the child on the doorstep, then looked back over her shoulder, calling out in a language Jack understood, but only after thinking hard about it.

"Mama! There's a baby out here!"

Another woman, her skirts and apron dotted with flour, came to the door, and Jack watched with pride as they picked up the baby and brought him inside. He wasn't ashamed at all to dart over to one of the windows and listen in to them taking care of the new arrival, and talking about how there hadn't been any signs of who left him there at all.

Good luck, kiddo. Jack smiled, reassured that he'd done something right at least, and headed back to where he'd been when he first heard the child. He needed to pick up his search for North, and hope that he could find his friend before Pitch did.

He'd no more set foot back in the forest before a far too familiar laugh began to echo all around him. He stumbled to a halt; if he'd had his staff, he would've pointed it all around, just to cover all of his bases. As it was, he turned in every direction.

"I know you're there, Pitch."

"I've been here all this time, Jack. Watching you. Watching you do exactly what I wanted you to do."

Jack seldom got cold chills. But Pitch was very good at giving them to him. "What do you mean?"

Something tugged at his attention and he looked down to see his shadow stretching out before him. Rising up from it was...Pitch!?

No wonder I couldn't find him! He really was there! Oh, Jack would've given so much for his staff and the chance to unleash some frozen hell on the Nightmare King at that moment. As it was, he could only snatch up snow for another snowball, and he was too angry to even think about putting some of his special joy magic into it.

"Oh, can't you tell?" Pitch laughed, avoiding the snowball with practiced ease. "You just delivered Nicholas St. North to his new home."

Jack couldn't pale all that much either. But again, Pitch did a very good job of making that happen. "What?"

"Just what I said, Jack." Pitch strolled closer to him, hands tucked behind his back. "A band of Cossacks is meant to travel this way in an hour or so. They would have taken the poor abandoned child in, starting him on his way to becoming a great bandit king." Pitch turned up his lip for a heartbeat, before his most dangerous slasher smile twisted across his features. "But now he will be a simple village baker. Assuming he doesn't die somewhere along the way of some random disease or in a war, because he has no idea of how to fight."

Every word Pitch spoke struck Jack like a physical blow. That was why Pitch had hidden in his shadow: he'd known Jack would go looking for North and would not be able to resist a wailing child or giving it to a good home.

And while North being a baker wouldn't be a bad life for him, it wasn't the right life.

Pitch's fingers traced lightly down the side of Jack's cheek, touching where a cold tear froze there. "We have another place to go now."

Jack said nothing at all, shaking. He wanted to run back, to take the child from the bakers and put him back where he could be found. But his limbs wouldn't move at all, and he had no idea if that were Pitch's doing or not. Regardless, shadows pulled him in close, and he couldn't bring himself to resist, not now. He'd done something horrible and there was no way to change it back.

Pitch had never seen Jack cry before. He liked the sight of it, all truth told. Perhaps now the boy would be more willing to listen when he was told. If not, Pitch had many more lessons in mind, which he would administer either once the other Guardians were no more, or before.

He thought that was the best way to phrase it. He wasn't used to time travel and how it could twist sentences into verbal pretzels.

For now, he drew Jack close to himself, as once again the power of the clock reached out and wrapped around them, sending them tumbling through time and space until they reached the next location.

Two Guardians down, one hardly able to lift his own head up right now, and two to go. He'd given a great deal of thought for how to deal with Toothiana and Sandy. Sandy especially would be difficult, for more reasons than he wanted to consider at the moment.

But he would still do it. The siren song of having no actual Guardians to fight him enticed him far too much to do otherwise. He really felt that he should've done this much sooner. Granted, he wouldn't have had any idea of how powerful Jack Frost could be as an ally if he had, which would've probably ended up causing him trouble eventually without the boy on a proper leash.

The mental image of that certainly appealed to him, be it a leash of words or something physical. He would have to think that one over for a while and see if it were worth the trouble.

At the moment Jack didn't seem to care enough about resisting for Pitch to bother with it. He remained silent and withdrawn, eyes half-closed as the world realigned around them. Pitch wondered if that was because of the issues of traveling in time or if he were still internally beating himself up over having played into Pitch's hands.

No matter. In due time, the boy would be his anyway. And at the moment, he had something else that he needed to do.

"Jack." He tapped on the boy's forehead to get his attention, doing so over and over until Jack opened tear-reddened eyes and looked at him. "We've arrived."

Jack said nothing at all, but his eyes did shift around, taking in the shadowy alleyway they'd landed in. Pitch smiled at the hints of confusion glimmering in his expression. He could hardly wait to have three centuries to mold and teach him. It had been so long since he'd had someone he could train like a...

Focus, he reminded himself. He couldn't let himself get sidetracked.

"We're in the Far East. A certain child has been born and is about to be sold to a rich master."

Jack drew in a stuttering breath, more clarity and sense showing now. That was good; Pitch liked someone he could combat wits with, not a mindless minion. Just because he planned to remove Jack's ability to deny him didn't mean he didn't enjoy a good verbal sparring now and then.

"What are you talking about?" Really, Pitch wondered if the boy hadn't ever heard any of the tales of the other Guardians. But so be it. At least he would tell Jack the truth, unlike their sanitized tales of their past. He doubted North had ever mentioned all of the people he'd robbed or Bunny told a tale of how arrogant and self-centered he'd always been.

"This slave, Haroom, will grow up to sire Toothiana. Or would have. As it is, I think I have a much better idea."

He'd considered many options for this, ranging from buying the child himself and raising him until he could make the child a Fearling to arranging for a sudden and inexplicable death in later life, before a certain hunt began. But now a new, brilliant idea gleamed in his mind, and he decided on that one right away. It was much better than trying to tend to a messy human child could ever be, and he'd already killed Bunnymund. Pitch didn't like copying himself.

"Do I want to know or is it going to make me sick?" Jack pushed himself to his feet, resting the fingers of one hand on the sandstone wall to one side of them. He didn't look at his best, but Pitch decided some of that could be chalked up to the heat being more than he especially liked. The boy was the Spirit of Winter, even if his powers weren't at their peak without his staff.

"I don't know, Jack." Pitch smiled, indicating for the boy to come along with him. Oh, this was going to be absolutely rich, and the best part was that it would take almost no effort at all for him to do. A few carefully chosen words and that was all that it would take. "How do you feel about eunuchs?"

To Be Continued