A little late and a little short. Just a bit. Also, I'm still working on the "action" chapters.


What goes together better than cold and dark?

Those words followed Jack Frost everywhere. Weeks after the battle with Pitch, those words rang in his head every other day, making him zone out for a few seconds, which wasn't much to anyone else, but with the overactive, "can't-sit-still-for-three-seconds" Jack, it was a lifetime. He'd wonder, until something new grabbed his attention and he forgot about it again.

But it was always there.

Because he knew, deep down, that the Boogeyman was right. It was the reason that for a split second, Jack had actually considered it. Sure, he had just been rejected by the first people to actually interact with him (who were still alive at the time, anyway) in his whole three-hundred years without so much as a chance to explain himself. He could have blamed it on his raging emotions and his ever-growing despair about being left alone again, but no matter how he looked at it, he had still wondered—wondered what the world would be like with Jack Frost and Pitch Black.

Of course, his fun-loving nature had won out in the end. He knew that if he had accepted, the children would not only believe in him, but they would fear him too. And he didn't want that. All he wanted was to be believed in, to be seen while he was starting snowball fights and making snow so thick and high that the kids got out of school for a day or two. Maybe someone would even admire his work, the patterns of frost and ice that he painstakingly crafted on windows and car windshields. He didn't really it'd happen, but he hoped all the same.

He just didn't understand why those words still stuck with him longer than the time Jamie's tongue was stuck on a frozen pole. He knew that Pitch was trying to manipulate him, trying to use him to defeat the Guardians, but at the same time (the reason he never told the Guardians the whole story about their encounter), he also understood that Pitch was being truthful when he talked about being alone, and just wanting someone to actually believe in him.

He wondered what the others would say. Would they be angry, or would they understand? But he knew they couldn't understand, not really, what it was like to be alone for so long. They'd always had each other and the children had always believed in them. Jack was born alone and stayed alone for centuries, and even the other winter spirits didn't much like him when they were still around.

But Pitch understood what the Guardians didn't. He understood what it meant to really be alone, to be ignored or hated just for doing what he was made to do. Each of the Guardians had the bright, happy jobs. They weren't easy by any stretch, but they brought joy and happiness to the kids and something special. But Pitch and Jack were different. Jack was fun, but it was something he'd brought to his duty and his season on his own. Otherwise? They were needed. They were necessary. Winter came before spring, and was necessary for a chance to rest. Fear was needed to warn against danger and bad things.

It was tempting. Maybe if things had been worse, or Jack hadn't been in his element, things would have turned out differently.

But, all in all, they hadn't. Jack knew what his duty was, what he was meant to be, as the Spirit of winter and a Guardian. He wasn't a child in the normal sense of the word anymore, no matter how much he looked like one. And however Pitch had gained his powers, he had gone too far and started using them to hurt humans. That wasn't something Jack could allow, and he would never betray the other Guardians now.

So he'd put those feelings in the back of his mind and ignore them. He probably wouldn't forget, but he didn't have to face them alone. Maybe one day he'd tell the others, but for now he was content to let it be. He did have a job to do, after all.