A Colder Shade of Pale

by Saphie

Chapter Three

"Jack!" Jamie called out.

Something was breaking. It was possibly Jack's bones, but it also might have been the bedside table, the plastic clothes hangers in the corner, or any number of breakable things around Jamie's room. Sam grabbed the kid and shoved him behind him as he and Dean got out their flashlights so they could actually see to fire at the thing.

Sam's mouth quirked into a disgusted expression when he saw it. It was one ugly mother. Hell, this thing was one ugly grandmother. He'd seen some ugly in his time, but this monster not only took the cake, it stole the entire bakery. Its mouth was long and droopy like it had a dislocated jaw and was filled with razor sharp teeth that reflected the light like glass or ice, like little icicles jutting out of the walls of its cavernous mouth. Its eyes were huge and covered in a gray film, and its twisted little limbs were thin and kept stretching and changing shape. Whatever shadow stuff it was made of never seemed to stand still and even the features of its disgusting little face were constantly morphing and changing, as if it was constantly spewing up new ugly faces to replace the old ones. It didn't seem to have legs unless it wanted to and then sometimes when it had them, it had too many.

They got a brief glimpse of Jack pinning it down, punching the crap out of it in a way that was honestly befitting of a Winchester, before it hissed at the light being shined on it, formed a leg in the middle of what could have arguably passed as its torso, kicked Jack off, and dove in the direction of Sam and Jamie.

Dean and Sam lined up a shot but Jack tackled the creature from behind.

"Frost, get out of the way!" Dean called out.

"Get Jamie -" Jack slammed the creature's head against the floor "- behind some salt!"

Then he stood, holding the creature tightly to himself as it desperately tried to squirm away, dragged it over to the smashed in window, and threw himself and the creature outside.

Sam and Dean turned to Jamie.

"Sam -"

"I've got Jamie, get out there," said Sam and as Dean ran out of Jamie's bedroom and stomped down the stairs, Sam snagged the can of salt that was on the ground and went about creating another salt circle in the room.

"I'm not just staying in here!" Jamie protested, picking up his baseball bat. "Jack needs help!"

"Yes, you are. That thing feeds on the belief of kids," said Sam, "and despite the twelve going on forty thing you've got going for you, guess what - you are one."

"But Jack -"

"Jack wants you to be safe. He'll stand a better chance of fighting that thing if he knows you are," Sam pointed out as he finished shuffling around Jamie, completing the circle.

"Stay here. I know we hurt him but now that we know he was trying to protect the same people we were, we'll help Jack, I promise," said Sam.

Jamie nodded, as he stood there in the center of the circle with his baseball bat, though he was clearly hesitant, and Sam turned and raced through the bedroom door, running down the stairs and out the back door.

The fight had moved away from the Bennetts' yard and to a field near a pond across the street. Sam ran across the street to find that both Jack and his brother had effectively had the snot beaten out of them already. Jack was carved up like a Christmas turkey, jagged claw-marks all over his body, his hoodie nearly completely in shreds. Between that and the beating they'd given him, Sam was amazed he was still standing, though it was clear he was barely able to. Dean was sporting a bloody nose, gashes on his face, and he was limping as he moved towards the thing, shooting it full of bullets.

"Salt repels it but it doesn't hurt it when you fire it at it," shouted Dean as Sam approached. "Sure doesn't seem to like silver bullets though."

"It's only going to hold it for a minute," Jack said critically.

"I don't see you offering any bright ideas, Captain Cold."

"Light hurts them, otherwise the few times we've managed to kill them, it was mostly by beating them so hard they couldn't stay coherent anymore. Or in Sandy's case, pumping them full of dreamsand until they explode."

"I like how this Sandy guy thinks."

"That'd probably be because you're a sicko," Jack pointed out.

"Can it, Sub-Zero."

"Fire," said Sam suddenly, as he aimed and fired while Dean reloaded. "Light hurts them, right? They can't get away from the light of a fire if they're what's burning in the middle of it."

"We should have built some flamethrowers for this," Dean grumped as he went over to the can of gas he'd carried down with him.

"It was your idea to clear the kids out and pin Jack here with silver and then just douse him," Sam said, shooting the thing over and over, making it reform every time. "You said flamethrowers and small rooms with stuffed animals and kids in them don't really mix."

Going in waving around one of their homemade flamethrowers in a situation like that had seemed a little too reckless. They'd figured that getting Jack stationary first, clearing out the kids, and then just torching the place down had been a better idea.

"It's good to know you guys consider the practical aspects of torching things around small children," Jack put in lightly.

"How are we doing this?"

"You still got the silver stakes you spiked me with?" asked Jack. He held out a bloody hand. "Gimme 'em."

"What?"

"You heard me."

Dean took them out of the pocket of his jacket where they'd been stashed and tossed them to Jack.

"Now stop firing."

Sam did since he needed to reload anyway and Jack dove in. There was another vicious scrabble, during which Jack stabbed the fearling repeatedly in the face, until he finally managed to pin the creature down with one of the silver spikes.

"Man, that kid's vicious," Dean remarked to his brother and Sam nodded, as Jack staggered away. Now that he knew said viciousness wasn't being directed towards children, he sounded impressed.

"Now!" Jack called out.

Dean and Sam moved forward and Dean hoisted the gas can over the creature, dumping its contents all over it. It writhed and hissed, a strange, utterly inhuman noise that sounded like wind being blown through holes in a sheet of dried human skin. (Which, incidentally, was a sound Sam had heard before. Hoooooray hunting.)

Dean put the gas tank down and got out his book of matches again.

The fearling, sensing its impending demise, suddenly did the unexpected. Its semi-amorphous body expanded like a balloon and the pressure was so great that the silver stakes ripped free, shooting into the air like corks popped from a bottle of champagne. Sam suddenly felt a sharp line of fire on his shoulder as one fwapinged past him and he fell back, crying out, holding a hand there.

Dean was a lot less lucky. Sam heard a loud "Grck!" from his brother and he went down, dropping his gun in shock and wheezing, holding his neck.

"Dean!" Sam was at his brother's side immediately, completely ignoring the blood that had started to bloom on the fabric of his jacket where the spinning stake had cut his shoulder.

Much to Sam's relief, it looked like Dean had been lucky and rather than getting impaled through the throat, he'd been hit by the blunt end of the stake. He was still able to breathe but in pain and wheezing.

The creature darted over to jump on them both and Sam raised his Beretta, but one swipe of the fearling's clawed hand knocked it right out of his hands. Then it grabbed him by the shirt, claws tearing into his skin, pulling him away from his brother and throwing him several yards away. His head slammed right into a rock and though he didn't lose consciousness, the world started tilting back and forth. Disoriented, he tried to get up, but found it difficult to even sit.

Dean held out a hand, wheezing, trying to scrabble for his gun and get up and help Sam as the monster went in for the kill.

It raised its clawed hand high to slash - only to have a pale white hand grab its arm to stop it. Jack headbutted what passed for the fearling's head from behind and dragged it off of Sam, and then he and the creature were at it again, scrabbling around in the dirt, punching and clawing at each other. Again, the fearling climbed to its feet, but now Jack was clinging to its back like some kind of pasty undead limpet, trying to keep it away from the younger Winchester.

"Dean, the matches!" he called out. "Throw me the matches!"

Despite the pain he was in, Dean managed to scrabble for them in the dirt, and then he knelt and tossed the matchbook in the winter spirit's direction. Miraculously, Jack held out one hand and caught it, and still clinging to the monster, managed to tear a match free.

"Jack, wait, what are you doing?" Sam called out, but the fearling was lunging at him again. "Don't -"

For just a moment, his eyes met the boy's and he realized that what he thought was a mistake in the making was something Jack was doing on purpose. From the look in the spirit's eyes, he could tell that Jack hadn't forgotten that he'd been doused in gasoline, too.

He could tell because of the fear there.

What Sam saw underneath that fear made him realize Jack just didn't care.

It was like seeing the face of a parent trying to save their child, or - something Sam was very familiar with - a sibling trying to protect their sibling. There was something all-consuming under the fear that was stronger than it. In those young eyes - and also very, very old eyes - Sam saw a child that could look right through the adult trappings that locked it away and see the child that Sam had been. In an instant, Sam knew Jack was willing to die to protect the child he'd been and the man that child had become.

The spirit closed his eyes, preemptively wincing, and the sound of the match striking and lighting up might as well have been a gunshot.

"NO!" Sam screamed, but the halo of fire that explosively flared up around the two of them - and Jack's resulting scream - nearly drowned out the sound.

In a last gesture of hostility, the fearling tossed Jack off of its back like a rag doll, hurling the boy like a comet into the icy pond, where he went through the ice with a sickening crack.

Then it screeched a hideous screech, starting to boil into grotesque and terrible shapes, parts of it jutting out as if trying to escape the fire that had enveloped it. More arms and legs and tentacles than Sam had ever wanted to see in one place roiled around each other in a ball of pure awfulness before it finally withered away into nothing, the last of the flames exploding into black ashes that withered away in the wind and disappeared, leaving nothing more than a patch of smoldering grass.

"Dean, he might still be alive!"

Dean was finally on his feet now, his neck clearly horribly bruised, and he helped the still-dizzy Sam up and the two of them raced over to the edge of the pond, looking out on the ice. Even if Jack was still alive and conscious, he had drowned in his past life. It was entirely possible he still didn't know how to swim.

"Stay on the shore and try to break up the ice so we can surface," said Dean, his voice still hoarse. Kicking off his boots at the edge of the pond, putting down his weapons so they weren't ruined by the water, and shrugging off his jacket, he staggered out onto the ice, feet slipping as he did it. "Ah, cold! Cold! Sonofabitch, that's cold!"

Sam grabbed a stick and started smashing up the ice as soon as Dean was far enough that breaking the ice wouldn't send him into the drink sooner than he wanted.

"This is gonna suck," said Dean as he approached the hole Jack's descent had made through the ice. Taking a deep breath and steeling himself up with a miserable expression on his face, he jumped in through the hole Jack had made.

Dean had a few regrets. More than a few, really. Mistakes he made, people he couldn't save, ways he'd let people like his father - and Sammy - down. There was something about this mistake that dug down deep. Everything that Sammy had said about wishing there was something good out there was still knocking around in the back of his head.

Turned out he was right. Maybe there was something good out there. Maybe there were things - no, people - that weren't much different from the things that went bump in the night, but actually did something good with it. Jack had been human once, and the thing of it was, even with the ice and the immortality, it seemed like he'd never stopped.

Dean still couldn't see or feel Jack in the dark water and by now, his lungs were burning and his limbs were numb, but that only meant he swam down deeper. This kid tried to protect kids, and - more importantly than anything else - had saved Sammy from getting turned into monster chow. Dean was leaving the pond with him or not at all.

There was a glint of something white off to the left, and Dean turned in the water, swam even deeper, and finally saw what he was looking for, a pale skinny body, barely visible in the black. Dean couldn't tell what kind of condition he was in (other than drowned). Wrapping an arm around him, he kicked upwards until his hand brushed against the underside of the ice. Now where the hell was the shore?

Don't panic. Not now, he told himself, keeping a lid on the fear threatening to consume him.

He heard something through the water, concussive noises that he knew had to be Sam breaking up the ice and he swam in that direction, dragging Jack along with him.

Finally, there was an open space above him and the silty mud of the shore beneath his feet and he thrust his head out of the water, gulping down fresh air with ragged breaths.

"Have you got him?" Sam asked, and Dean yanked hard, pulling Jack's head up above the surface.

With Sam's help, he managed to drag the boy to shore. Once they got him under the light of the moon, he realized, to his great misery, that they weren't so much dragging a boy to shore as the body of a boy to shore.

He wasn't breathing and there was no pulse and all the CPR in the world wasn't going to help, judging from the burns all over his body. He wasn't exactly crispy, but unless the nearest burn ward specialized in skin grafts for spirits, Dean wasn't sure where they could even get him help.

The thing that hurt even worse than knowing they screwed up was the look of regret Sammy's face when he realized that they screwed up. For once, they'd found proof there was something good out there amidst all the bad, just like Sammy was always hoping there was, and what had they done? They'd shot it full of rock salt, stabbed it, and gotten it set it on fire. Jack might have survived lighting up the Fearling if he hadn't been doused in gasoline himself. If he'd just let go and moved away, he might have been burned, but not set on fire.

"I don't know how we're going to break this to Jamie," said Sam, shaking his head.

It was right then that Jack started coughing, retching up water, making both Sam and Dean jump slightly in surprise.

"Get him on his side," said Sam, and they rolled the boy over in the recovery position.

For a minute, all he did was cough up water, and then he lay there quietly, chest rising and falling.

"Kid, you with us?" asked Dean. "Listen, we don't know what to do to help you. It's not like we can take you to a hospital."

"Just give it time," Jack rasped back.

Dean shot Sam a perplexed look but then they both saw what Jack was talking about. The burns were starting to heal over. In fact, Dean noticed, now that the blood was washed away, the wounds they'd inflicted on Jack's hands were already almost gone.

Even though he was healing, he didn't seem to be in the best shape emotionally. As he lay there on his side, he breathed in huffed, panicked breaths, his eyes squeezed shut. Tears were still managing to squeeze out.

It had to be horrifying to go through it again after having died that way once already. Dean shot Sam a look that said very clearly, 'Do that stuff with feelings that you do better than I do.'

"You're okay, Jack," Sam said quietly, getting the message, placing a hand on the boy's upper arm, where the skin looked already healed. "You're gonna be fine. Just breathe."

Finally, the boy calmed down a bit.

Dean sat there, watching as more burns disappeared.

"How are you doing that?"

"I heal fast," Jack explained, his voice still a little thick. "My skin was just having trouble healing up earlier because of the gas."

He managed to sit up now, though Sam kept a steadying hand on his shoulder where the burns had already faded. He wiped at his eyes and took a few deep breaths that seemed to calm him down. His shirt was pretty much gone now, other than a few tatters, so Dean noticed something.

"What's with the tats?"

There were tattoos on the spirit's chest in a strange script, over his heart. Dean realized after a moment that they looked a bit like the charms over the doorways of the kids.

"Sak yant," Jack answered. "Protective tattoo. It's mostly to prevent possession by demons, since we get them cheesed at us just about constantly. North knew of wicha practitioner that could figure out how to get it to stay rather than heal over."

"That's genius," said Sam. "Making an anti-possession charm permanent with a tattoo."

He and Dean shared a look. They were so hitting a tattoo parlor after this. Dean reached over to grab his boots and jackets and pull them on. The jacket he especially needed - he was shivering after that icy dip.

"Yeah, well, the last thing the world needs is for Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy to get possessed by demons, right?" said Jack. "And I don't even wanna think about what would happen if it was possible for them to possess Sandman."

Jack wiped at his face and then pushed a hand back through what was left of his hair.

"This better grow back," he said warningly to the Winchesters.

If he was fussing over his hair, Dean figured he'd probably be fine.

"Jack, are you okay?" a voice called out and there was Jamie, struggling to walk over to them.

He was struggling because he was using a hula hoop as a barrier between him and the world.

"Jamie, I told you to stay inside the salt circle," said Sam.

"Technically, I did," said Jamie, nodding towards the hula hoop.

He was telling the truth. It was a rush job, but it looked like he'd used some kind of glue, maybe superglue, to cover the hula hoop with an unbroken ring of salt. He'd even attached straps to go over his shoulders, the bits attached to the hula hop covered with salt, so that he could wear the hoop with the ring of salt unbroken.

Jack couldn't help but laugh at the sight of it.

"Is he always like this?" asked Sam.

"All the time," said Jack, climbing to his feet. His steps were all stumbling, shaky ones, but he walked over to Jamie. "You can put that down. The fearling's gone."

Jamie shrugged off the straps and dropped the hula hoop, immediately running over to the winter spirit, throwing his arms around him. Jack hugged him back tightly.

"Are you okay? You're burned," Jamie said, pulling away just enough to look him over.

"I wouldn't say no to napping for a few days but I'm okay. This should heal up soon enough."

"We should get the pieces of your staff so you can fix it up. I saw them outside, but I didn't think I could carry them and the hula hoop at the same time."

"I don't know if I have the juice for that right now," said Jack, "but I need to keep it from getting broken even worse."

"It would be such a pity if it was," said a menacing voice behind them all, and there was a sudden snap of wood.

Jack didn't scream this time. After getting as hurt as he had, with the getting shot and beaten and stabbed and burned, it seemed as if he'd hit his limit on the screaming. Instead, his eyes rolled back in his head, a strange strangled noise erupted from somewhere deep in his chest, and he went limp in Jamie's arms, his knees giving out under him, dragging Jamie down with him.

"Jack!"

Dean and Sam turned to see a dark figure standing there, holding the pieces of Jack's staff. They were now broken even worse than they had been, a fragment of one still in one of the man's hands.

His skin was grey, his eyes were a beady yellow that coaxed the deepest instinctive hatred from the depths of Dean's soul, and the way he moved seemed almost liquid. He seemed half-melted into the darkness around them.

Dean quickly gathered up his weapons.

"Dean, I think that's the demon. The one we lost the trail of. It fits the description."

"A demon? Don't insult me," said the man. "I'm no demon. I'm not bound to the limitations and loyalties they are. They're practically insects in their mindlessness. There's an art to what I do."

"Pitch," Jamie snarled, where he knelt next to Jack, holding onto him tightly.

"You again," said the man, Pitch, rolling his eyes just slightly. "Is there ever a time you're not going to be underfoot?"

"Is there ever a time you're not going to be a jerk so that we have to kick your butt?"

"You know him?" asked Sam and Jamie nodded.

"Pitch Black. Also known as the Bogeyman - and The Nightmare King, when he's feeling extra full of himself. He's the same kind of being the Guardians are, except instead of helping kids, he feeds of their fear. He's the Guardians' enemy."

"You sent the fearling," Jack croaked, where he leaned his head against Jamie's shoulder, with only his eyes directed at Pitch. "Those kids are dead because of you."

"I didn't send it, Jack. I can't control the fearlings - not yet. But when it showed up in this world, I may have offered it guidance and pointed it in the right direction. It would have killed children regardless of what I did - so why not in Burgess?"

Dean suddenly swung his shotgun up to aim at the man, but he disappeared into the shadows. His voice came to them from the dark, from every direction at once. Shadows in the shape of the spirit circled around them.

"Ah ah ah. There will be none of that, Mr. Winchester. That's not why you're here, after all."

"You set this whole thing up somehow, didn't you," Sam said slowly, figuring it out. It couldn't be coincidence that they and Jack were enemies of Pitch and that they'd all wound up turning against each other. "We were tracking you. You did this to put us off your trail."

"Give the man a prize!" Pitch said, his tone jovial. "It was easy enough turning the children's fear of the unknown into fear of Jack - just a few whispers in their ears. Arranging a distraction for the other Guardians in Budapest was easy enough, and after that, all it took was leaving the right newspaper with the right headline near your table in the diner. I knew either you'd be the end of him, he'd be the end of you in the course of defending himself, or maybe, just maybe, I'd be lucky enough to have you kill each other. Either way, I'd be down at least one enemy. You have my deepest gratitude in that respect, by the way. Thank you for softening him up and leaving him defenseless. You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this."

Another snapping noise sounded out from the shadows. His body going rigid, his back arching, Jack let out a pitiful whimper, a mewling sound like one a child would make when they were inconsolable. Pulling away from Jamie, he curled in a pained ball on the ground.

"How 'bout you can the melodramatic monologuing, and show yourself, you ugly mother -" Dean called out.

"Oh, I think not," Pitch interrupted him. "I know what you'd do to me if I did. You're a man ruled by fear and people who are ruled by fear are absolutely desperate to pretend they can assert their will on the world. You want to break me to prove that to yourself and don't even realize how broken that makes you."

"You don't know me," Dean snarled.

"Yes, I do. You're Dean Winchester. I've known you since you were a child. Of all the children that feared I might be lurking under their beds, you and Sam were always my favorites - because you knew that something might actually be there."

"Like hell you were hanging around under our beds. Not with -"

"Not with all the precautions you took to keep out the dark and protect your baby brother? The little traps, the salt, the weapons?" said Pitch, and the expression on Dean's face fell before he could stop it. "Not with dear daddy always there to protect you? ...Oh wait. He wasn't there, was he."

Dean and Sam both turned around, trying to pin down where the voice was echoing out from the shadows. Dean couldn't stop a stricken expression from showing on his face.

This clown had to be lying. He had to. Okay, so he'd messed up the one time with the shtriga, and Sammy had let things in the one time when he was hoping Santa was real, but he'd never let anything near him. Protecting Sammy had been - still was - his job and there was no way he was letting himself get convinced that sort of darkness was threaded back all the way into his childhood.

But the eyebrow-less wonder just wouldn't stop talking.

"It all fell on you to keep your brother safe. For the most part, you managed, but there was one way you couldn't, one place where you couldn't protect him and where you couldn't protect yourself." Pitch took a pause as if to savor the moment. "Your nightmares. Oh, the fear you both gave me to work with. You couldn't possibly understand the hope that it gave me - that after centuries of no longer being believed in, there might be children that would start believing again, that would fear me the way they should - as something real. If Jack had killed you to save his own life, I think I might have been upset to see you go. I'm glad it turned out this way instead."

Another snap of wood rang out from the shadows. A pitiful noise crawled out of Jack's throat like a living thing, a quiet broken sob that somehow sounded louder than the snap of wood that had provoked it.

"But I'm getting off subject. Don't think I've forgotten you, Jack."

Things suddenly surged out of the shadows from all directions, causing Dean to instinctually shoot at one of them. It exploded in a turbid puff of glittering black sand. The rest of them pranced around them, neighing, and Dean saw that they were monsters in the shape of skeletal horses, their eyes glowing a sinister yellow, their bodies morphing and streaming along like ink through water.

Dean and Sam instinctually tried to circle around Jamie and Jack, but several of the nightmare horses reared up between them, purposefully separating them.

Slamming one in the head with the butt of his shotgun to move it slightly to the side so he could shoot it without accidentally hitting the boys, Dean saw Jamie through the ring of nightmare creatures, valiantly defending the fallen frost spirit. Somehow, whenever he touched one of the creatures, usually with a punch or a vicious slap, they would suddenly burst into a cloud of harmless golden dust. Dean tried it himself by punching one of them on the muzzle but it just recoiled and turned back to him, letting out an outraged whinny. Whatever it was that Jamie was doing wasn't something he could replicate.

Even then, what Jamie was doing wasn't enough. Even as the horses exploded into golden dust around him, more rose up in waves, surrounding him and Jack.

"Sam!" Dean called out as he fought his way through the wall, trying to get to Jamie and Jack.

"I know!" Sam called out, shooting one of the horses through the head and surging forward, too.

Jamie was losing and all Jack could do as he lay on the ground was curse himself for his own weakness. He tried to dig down deep for any hidden stores of strength that were left but after the beatings he'd taken tonight, near-drowning, getting set on fire, and the shivering weakness that came from the pain of having his staff broken, he could barely move.

Back when he'd been younger, when he'd been alive, he remembered a neighbor helping his horse deliver a foal that was sickly. Jack had watched it try to stand again and again, shivering and shaking with every attempt, before finally just...giving up.

He didn't want to give up like that.

He thought he didn't want to give up.

But it had been a rough few years. Heck, it'd been a rough life at times.

Right now, as the darkness swirled around him and the nightmares loomed, as he lay on the ground, body aching, head pounding, his skin still raw, he was having trouble caring about getting up again.

The problem was that he'd had to do it too many times now. The other problem was that no matter how many times he did it, sometimes it just wasn't enough. In the end, there were still small caskets being lowered into the ground, even if what he'd done had ensured there would be less of them.

When he'd been human, he hadn't known the world was as dark as it was, other than knowing the normal small tragedies of colonial life. When he'd first become a spirit, young and carefree, he'd gotten glimpses of the dark, and sometimes faced horrible things that had thought he was easy pickins because he was alone, but he'd managed to mostly laugh his way through life. Now, after becoming a Guardian, after four years of fighting Pitch and even worse things that hid in the dark and preyed on children, it was getting harder and harder to see all that wonder North still claimed existed in the world.

Now, he got hurt again and again.

"Jack!" Jamie was screaming his name and he could see him surrounded by streams of gold sand, but the night-mares kept pushing in, separating them now. "Jack!"

Jack felt like he was hearing it from underwater. Trying one last time to get up, he managed to get into a sitting position, but standing - let alone fighting - wasn't happening anytime soon.

"You had your chance, Jack," came Pitch's voice low in his ear, and Jack turned to see that somehow he'd melted out of the shadows to crouch there, next to him.

Before he had a chance to react, the Nightmare King backhanded him across the face, sending him sprawling. Night-mares sprang forth in a wave from behind him and surged forward, dragging Jack along the ground. He cried out as he felt gravel and twigs scrape against the already raw skin of his back and sides, and then the night-mares morphed into tendrils of black sand that kept him pinned to the ground, exposed. The next thing he saw was Pitch towering over him, the shattered remnants of Jack's staff in his hands.

"You could have joined me. I could have even helped you protect them, Jack. The children. Even better than your fellow Guardians do. We could have ruled the world side by side, and the fear that we would have inspired in the children would have made us strong enough to face all comers, be they from heaven, hell, or the empty spaces in between. It would have been such a small price for them to pay, don't you think?"

"No, it would've been taking everything from them. There's no point in keeping them alive if all it means is they'll be alive and miserable."

"Look at the world we live in! Look at all there is to fear! They need what I bring them. With so many things to be afraid, they need fear."

Jack's eyes flickered over to Dean and Sam, trying to fight the darkness, any of their attempts to physically harm the night-mares with their own hands the way Jamie was doing proving to be utterly futile. If what Pitch had said about them as children was true, as boys, the two hunters had probably been the kind of kids that had set bear-traps to prevent North from showing up or put out a giant bug-zapper to take out the mini-fairies when they came for their teeth.

That was where fear got you. At least, that was where Pitch's kind of fear got you.

It shouldn't have been that way for them.

Meanwhile, Jamie, though he was afraid, was turning the night-mares back to harmless golden dream sand like he had the Midas touch. It wasn't that he was never scared, it was that he never let it stop him from living his life.

The world was dangerous, and sometimes it was good to be afraid, but it was only worth living in if you could still feel joy, if you weren't alwaysliving in fear.

"The kind of fear that keeps them alive and what you bring them are not the same thing," Jack said and even though his voice was weak, his resolve was strong. "They don't deserve to just live, they deserve a better world."

"I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't miss these meandering, little philosophical talks of ours, Jack," said Pitch, throwing the remains of Jack's staff to the ground. He formed his scythe in his hands. "But it's time we finally got to the -"

"If you pun and say 'point,' then after you kill me, I'm going to find a way to haunt you," Jack said, cutting him off.

"I wasn't going to - oh shut up."

Incensed over being called on it, his expression vicious, he raised the scythe up high. Distantly, Jack heard Jamie screaming his name.

He closed his eyes tight.

Pitch declared dramatically, "I can't say it hasn't been fu - zrghnftgh."

He opened his eyes again to see Pitch convulsing where he stood, the scythe still held up high over his head. Then the scythe dissolved and Pitch fell over sideways in an utterly undignified sprawl of limbs. There was something sticking in his back, little electrodes that were attached to long wires, which were attached to a little gun held in Dean's hands. It looked like he'd managed to fire it through a gap between two of the nightmares, who whinnied in rage after they saw what had happened to Pitch and charged him, making him drop the tazer.

Shaking, Pitch tried to sit up, but his efforts were stymied by Jamie, who kicked him in the face and gathered up the shards of Jack's staff, bringing them over to him. The moment he set them down, he touched the tendrils of nightmare sand entangling Jack and they dissolved into dreamsand.

The night-mares quickly swarmed around Pitch, dragging him into the safety of the shadows. The removal of some of them from the fight finally allowed Dean and Sam to join Jamie and Jack and they quickly took their place providing them cover.

"Jamie, how do we take this guy out? You two know him better than we do," Sam said. "We've never dealt with anything like him and Jack before."

"He's strong enough to take on all the Guardians at once," said Jamie, arranging the pieces of his staff in front of Jack. "The only one of us that stands a chance against him is Jack."

Jamie helped Jack sit up. "C'mon, you need to put your staff back together."

More night-mares were surging out of the shadows, surrounding them.

"Jamie, I can't - I -" Jack could barely sit up. He had to lean against Jamie's shoulder just to stay upright.

His fingers still scrabbled weakly for the closest remnants of his staff but he knew he couldn't do this. He knew he had nothing left in him.

"Jack," said Jamie. "The fearling fed on belief. It fed on the belief of kids and you're a kid, too. You were fighting it hand to hand, it was touching you, leeching away the belief kids have in you and probably the belief you have in yourself. You can do this. You've fought through worse before, I've seen it."

"M' too tired. I'm sorry -"

"That was a nice little trick, Mr. Winchester, but tricks won't help you anymore."

Pitch's laughter started echoing from the shadows again, building up into a rising crescendo that carried almost as much force as the roiling waves of night-mares the two hunters were trying to stave off.

Jamie readjusted his grip on the frost spirit, helping him sit up straighter. His eyes flicked over to the wall of night-mares now surging around them in the kind of whirlpool that ancient Greeks would have thought was the mouth of a sea monster. They caught Jack's gaze.

"Jack," he said, quietly, sincerely. "I'm scared."

There was faith in the gaze Jamie gave Jack. There was always faith in the gaze he gave Jack. He had faith in the fact that all he had to tell Jack was that he was afraid and he knew it was enough for the Guardian to fix it -

No. He knew it was enough for the boy who might as well be his big brother to fix it.

The thing was...it was enough.

Jack lunged forward, putting both hands on the largest broken pieces of his staff. The night-mares suddenly pulled away, streaming in the direction they'd last heard Pitch's voice come from, but it was more like the deceptive withdrawal of the sea before a tsunami than an actual reprieve. A wave of shadows rose up to a height higher than the nearby houses, looming up over them. Both Dean and Sam lowered their guns, staring up at a kind of darkness they'd never faced before.

"Come on, come on..." Jack muttered, as the tiniest little blue sparks danced to life at the ends of each broken piece of his staff. Frost from his hands curled in elegant curlicues over the wood, pulling the broken pieces together.

Pitch laughed even louder as the wave crashed down.

Sam could barely breathe as he looked at the wave of nightmares about to crash down on them, all twisting shapes and kicking hooves morphing together.

"Sammy..." Sam heard his brother say as he took his place at his side, obvious love in his voice.

"I know, Dean," he said. "I know."

There really wasn't anything else to say, was there?

"...You just Han Soloed me," Dean said with faux disappointment, and Sam couldn't help but laugh, even as darkness blotted out the stars.

Then, instead of the dark, blue light blotted out everything, briefly blinding Sam. The thin, high shrieking of a blizzard at its worst filled the air, and Sam blinked the afterimages away to see Jack standing in front of them, his repaired staff raised, the end of it braced against the dirt. Jamie was helping hold Jack upright as the light filled the entire field.

When it finally died down, the air was freezing cold and filled with the crisp sounds of ice and snow settling, and frozen black sand drifted down harmlessly, blanketing the field.

In the midsts of that uncanny snow stood Pitch, now looking slightly nervous.

"Now, Jack, there's no reason to take this persona -"

He was cut off by Jack firing another wall of cold energy directly at him, causing him to slam through several frozen trees, until he was pinned against a large boulder at the edge of the pond.

Jack just kept pouring the ice on. When he finally stopped, in the light of the moon, Sam saw that the nightmare spirit was frozen solid against the rock, his face stuck in an expression of surprise.

Sam looked over at Dean, whose eyebrows were raised.

"...Kid really was holding back with us, huh," said Dean.

Jack fell to his knees, half in Jamie's embrace, utterly spent.

"Told you," Jamie said to Jack and even though the frost spirit looked like he was teetering on the edge of consciousness, he smirked back. "I told you you could do it."

"You're just lucky I had my Wheaties this morn -" The sound of splintering ice filled the field and Jack and Jamie looked over to where Pitch was encased in the ice with twin expressions of horror "- nngh."

The noise was just as panicked as it was inarticulate.

Shadow sand was spreading from Pitch's hands, causing the ice to splinter and all at once, it shattered and cascading down to the ground, freeing the Nightmare King. He started marching forward, a scythe forming again in his hands and Jack struggled to face him again but even with Jamie's help, he couldn't get on his feet and was too weak to raise his staff.

"That might have worked last year, Jack, but in case you haven't noticed, the world's changing, Jack. With what's coming, there's so much more to fear and you know how all that fear makes me strong. There's nothing that can protect the two of you now."

Sam nodded to Dean and the two of them ran in front of the boys, blocking the Nightmare King's way.

"Especially not you two," Pitch said, with an eyeroll as he surged forward, using his scythe to knock away Sam and Dean's guns so that the rounds they fired went wide and slamming them both in the face with a wave of nightmare sand so that they fell in front of the boys.

"It's time to end this!"

He stepped forward, raising his scythe -

- and before it fell, the Easter Bunny leaped over the heads of all four young men, tucking into a roll as he landed, and hopped up to kick Pitch in the stomach, sending him sprawling backwards.

"The fu - " Dean started to say, but Sam saw him drop into a bewildered silence that echoed his own when a figure flew in, a blur of green and blue and whizzing wings, somehow slashing at Pitch's scythe in a way that made it shatter into a cloud of harmless black sand.

Before he could even strike back, a tendril of glittering gold whipped down from above, firmly latching around Pitch's ankle, yanking his feet out from under him. His dress fell down over his head as he was hurled up into the air - where a little golden man with wild, wavy hair was floating on a cloud - and dragged back down again and slammed into the ground.

Multiple times.

The little man floated down to land behind Pitch, his expression ferocious, whips held in each hand.

Pitch cowered now, crawling back towards the pond, trying to get away from the three figures advancing upon him. Sam saw the blurring green and blue figure resolve into the form of a beautiful young woman all covered in feathers, the crest on her head flaring in a way that suggested future violence was forthcoming.

Now that they weren't moving, Sam saw that all three figures looked haggard, feathers and fur ruffled and ragged, sand sifting and shifting in ways that seemed unnatural - as unnatural as they could for a man made of sand anyway.

"If this is about Budapest..." Pitch started nervously, getting up and trying to run.

He ran right into the massive chest of a man that was taller than even Sam, dressed all in red furs. He looked as worse for wear as his comrades, the fur of his clothes singed in a few places, a chunk of his beard missing and still growing back in. He didn't look quite as furious as the others but his violent intent was made clear by the way he grabbed Pitch by the collar and lifted him right off the ground.

"Is partly about Budapest, yes," he said in a thick Russian accent. "But is mostly about how we keep running into each other this way. This goes much farther now than being on naughty list, Pitch."

'Naughty list'...?

Hadn't Jack and Jamie said Santa was Russian?

Sam reached over and smacked Dean in the stomach, not realizing he was doing it with all the excitement of a small child that's seen something really, really cool.

"Dean," he said in a hushed voice. "Dean. I think that's Santa."

"Yeah, that's great, Sammy, kinda busy trying to wrap my head around Harvey and Tinker Bell here."

Pitch broke away from Santa and managed to scoot past the other myth-people in a terrified crab-crawl. They turned as one to advance on him.

"Now now, let's not do anything rash -"

"Rash?" interrupted the giant anthropomorphic rabbit, jabbing a boomerang in Pitch's direction viciously. "You want to know what's rash? Locking kids in a school with a flock of valravn. Only wait, that wasn't thoughtless on your part, was it? You just thought they were worth the sacrifice if it meant it caught our attention. You've got space to sell between your ears if you think we're letting it go this time."

"They were just valravn, nothing you couldn't handle," Pitch insisted, backing away.

"We barely got those kids out alive!" snarled what could only be the Tooth Fairy, her hands held in a way that made her manicured nails look more like talons.

The little man made of sand raised one finger to tsk tsk.

"This time is not like other times, Pitch," said Santa, pointing a sword Pitch's way. (Since when did Santa carry swords?)

"You mean like the times I got away?" said Pitch with a sudden toothy grin. "I'm afraid it is."

Black sand suddenly formed an explosive cloud around him, almost like a smoke bomb. The little man whipped his sand whips out, the Bunny threw his boomerang, and Santa and the Tooth Fairy surged forward to attack but the cloud dissipated, revealing that Pitch was already long gone.

The four of them - the ones Jamie and Jack had called the Guardians - all looked around frantically, eventually stamping the ground or clenching their fists in their disappointment.

"We'll find him," said the Easter Bunny. "He's been getting reckless. Trying to make his power grab before he gets muscled out of the way by the demons. And even if we don't get him, they will, at least, so they'll be the only things we have to reckon with."

The Tooth Fairy looked over towards Sam and Dean - and the two boys behind them - and suddenly cried out, "Jack!"

Zipping over like a shot, she dropped on her knees in the dirt next to Jack and Jamie and wrapped her arms around the frost spirit.

"Jack, are you alright?"

"I'll be okay," Jack said faintly.

She reached a hand for Jamie's shoulder.

"Jamie, are you hurt?"

"I'm okay, Tooth. Jack got the worst of it."

The other three walked - and in the case of the man who could only be the Sandman, floated - towards them.

"Did Pitch do this to him?" North asked, eyes wide.

"Some of it," Jamie answered, as Tooth gathered Jack up in her arms. Jamie held onto his staff for safe-keeping. "The fearling did some of it, too. The rest..."

"Who did the rest?" asked Bunny, eyes narrowed, then flicking over to the two hunters suspiciously.

Jamie jerked his thumb towards Sam and Dean.

"These two idiots," Jamie answered.

"Uuuuh..." Sam said, climbing to his feet as several very angry-looking spirits advanced on him and Dean.

Dean stood up as well, shifting awkwardly, an equally awkward smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. When North stopped, arms folded crossly in front of him, his sleeves shifted enough that Sam could see tattoos there. Dean saw them, too, and he pointed, still awkwardly.

"Nice tats," he said with a slight shrug, in his trying-to-break-the-ice voice.

Santa looked at his tattoos, where one of the designs shifted to letters in a language Sam probably still couldn't have read even if he'd gotten a better look at it. It looked too alien. The bearded giant sighed and looked back at the two brothers.

"Of course it is Winchesters," he said, raising a bushy eyebrow.

To Sam's great bewilderment, the other Guardians all gaped and then let out various noises of aggravation - and familiarity. The Sandman even rolled his eyes.

"I guess we ruddy well should have known it was just practice back then -" said the Bunny, gesturing angrily in their direction with a boomerang. He turned to look at them, frowning, hopping in place slightly in his agitation. "- and that you two would grow up to be just like your dad."