A/N: So it might be a bit longer uploading the next chapter, I am playing catch up a bit, but never fear, I will not leave you all hanging for very long I promise!

That night, Pitch took Jack to bed.

It was not the fumbling molestation of their very first night and it was not the angry, playful banter of their kitchen escapade.

There was something far more solemn in the air as Pitch lowered Jack like a babe into his bed, as if offering a condolence that could not be spoken out loud.

Jack didn't utter a word of protest. He was cold and angry at Pitch and would not even grace him with a single jibe.

Pitch felt melancholic of the silence, letting it engorge the image of self-hate he had created since coming to know the boy. He knew that he had let Jack down, unaware the boy had given him that power until it was too late.

Because in a world that is boring and repetitive, it was no wonder Jack thought Pitch came from nowhere to sweep him away from the ungratified life he knew.

He was slow in his kisses that traveled Jack's neck, down into the dip of his shirt where grey fingers worked away each coat button.

It wasn't until Jack's chest was bare and shivering that the boy looked at him.

More so than at him, into him.

Pitch had come to hate the things he felt, because they were not the same pride and glory he once held when looked upon. Instead, a sense of duty and honor surged up inside him and he had to fight to keep it at bay.

He refused to recognize it, distracting himself in warming Jack; brushing his lips down his sides and along his stomach until even in his fit, Jack could not keep himself from gasping.

Piece by piece the clothes came off, until he was just a naked boy in a cot in the middle of nowhere.

He was meaningless to the world.

Pitch should have left, right then and there, and it terrified even him, the Nightmare King, to know that he couldn't if he wanted to.

Down he crept until he took Jack in his hand and slipped his lips around the boy's straining cock.

Jack bucked and begged.

He said, "Please... Pitch. Please." all while the Shadow Man took him in, sucking and hollowing his mouth until Jack's hands were in his hair and his toes curled in utter pleasure.

When Jack came, Pitch swallowed and kissed at his belly for more, and he was concerned that nothing would ever be enough.

He left Jack the next night, to terrorize the village children.

But he came back with the morning.

He always came back.

Things were quiet for a while after their fight.

Jack would make an effort to greet Pitch when he woke, but nothing more. He would offer Pitch food although he always declined. He would say goodnight when he wrapped himself in his blankets.

If Jack had thought Pitch to be the friend he always wanted, however misconstrued, he began to think himself very wrong.

Pitch did not offer Jack friendship.

He offered company and fleeting sexual experiences and nothing else.

Jack was bitter but mainly with himself for wanting Pitch to fill the role of companion, the likes of which he had never had.

Jack had always been a well-behaved child who kept after his sister with all the love in the world, but he had never known another person on an equal level. No village child or cousin played the part well and Jack spent a good deal of his life looking for the friend he was neither below nor above. Having long given up on his childhood fantasy, the brunette accepted his role as caretaker and child and entertainer.

It seemed he was everything but a person, sometimes.

Any ideas of Pitch and Jack on level grounds died quickly, because even displaced, Jack began to recognize the look in Pitch's eyes when he saw him as a peasant hardly worthy of licking his boot.

Pitch stayed because Jack acknowledged him. He stayed because Jack let him do what he pleased with his human body.

He stayed because it was that or solitude, and if Jack knew any truth, it was that the Nightmare King loved to hear himself talk.

He talked of his greatness (something Jack himself had never known) and his ability to do whatever he pleased (except be seen, Jack added).

Pitch was not a being bound by the rules of man. He desired to take all that he wanted and even that which he did not want, merely to boast that it was his.

"Then why don't you just have sex with me?" Jack would ask the quiet halls, from which the shadows would morph into his (not so) humble guest, destroying the illusion of fear Pitch claimed to have (again, Jack hadn't seen it).

"My, are you propositioning me?" Pitch would tease in the gritty way he tended to.

"You're already stuck with me, why don't you make the most of it? And even if you don't want me, which I know you do, why not take me to say that you have?"

Pitch slipped into the ground and appeared behind him, leaning close to whisper into his ear.

"Why so eager?"

Jack spun on his heel and into Pitch's grasp, clutching his dipping robe and dragging himself closer to the Shadow Man's mouth.

"I just think that for a King, you spend a whole lot of time pleasing others and no so much yourself."

Jack was punished for his insolence by being slammed chest first into a wall, Pitch's long digits digging into his ass and stroking his insides until Jack pleaded for Pitch to just do it, to have him right there.

"No."

Pitch would say with a single shake of his head and a look that promised pain at impertinence.

He left Jack to slide onto the floor, dripping and hard and very unsatisfied. Jack refused to touch himself. He let the throb slip away with time because he knew if he attempted to alleviate it, Pitch would no doubt come to mind.

In his spite, Jack suffered, because he had promised himself that he would not be beneath anybody.

Sometimes when Jack woke in the late of the night, he would find Pitch gone from his bedside.

The brunette would brave the cold and climb out of the promising covers to where his sister once slept.

There was a grief looming in the air and Jack could feel it tremble in his knuckles.

He sat on the unmade bed, listening for Pitch long before curling up on his side and slipping into sleep once more.

It wasn't until his breath was steady that Pitch would rise and pull the cover over him.

This happened frequently, Pitch detested to admit.

Sometimes he would brush the hair from Jack's forehead.

Sometimes he would purposely allow it to hang there, a punishment to himself for being so weak.

He could imagine the ridicule from the Man in the Moon or the Guardians should they ever hear of his tender spot for a human boy.

But how could he be blamed if they could see the glitter of Jack's lower lip? The way it sagged when he slept and barred a single peek of his wet tongue or how it would stretch into a smile more promising than an army.

It was simple really.

Pitch had two options.

He could leave... step out and walk away and never see Jack again. Wander the forests alone and watch time and the people bound by it circle around and repeat the past, a story with the same ending, just written differently.

Or he could sweep the boy up and hide him away. In a cave far from the eyes of others, the two of them could have something all of their own and not subject to the opinions of others. Pitch could keep him until...

Until...

Well, until Jack died.

And then it occurred to Pitch, Jack was going die one day.

He was going to grow up, get married, have whelps of his own, get old, and then die.

Pitch stood alone in the hall, as far away from Jack as he could force himself, and closed his eyes.

What then?

The Storm never really stopped.

It raged past the windows, sometimes as silent as death and others a screaming, vengeful creature digging its claws into the dirt. Pitch would tell Jack stories about the Dark Ages, where shadows crept in every corner and everything was pitch black.

"Pitch Black? Really?"

And Pitch would wipe the mirth from the boy's face with a well-timed swat before continuing his story.

It wasn't until Jack would ask how it all ended that Pitch would clam up and postulate that Jack was too old for bedtime stories and that he was not a babysitter.

Sometimes Jack would remind him that Pitch was the one who had insisted on telling such fables in the first place, but sometimes Jack wouldn't waste his breath.

He had an idea of how the story ended.

"Let me guess." Jack followed close behind, staring up at the slim back of Pitch's neck. "The Nightmare King met a handsome lad with which he had an incredibly romantic escapade in the winter woods."

Pitch stopped, abrupt enough for Jack to run right into him. The touch was warm and Jack might have hesitated before stepping back, regretful and again, cold.

"You sound jealous of this lad."

A soft pink dusted Jack's cheeks, and the mirth in the Nightmare King's eyes made only to worsen the blush.

"I might be. Sounds like he's having a marvelous time."

Angry, at possibly Pitch or more likely, himself, Jack retreated from the room and his own feelings.

The inconstancy of human emotion would never cease to baffle the Shadow Man.

When the storm finally passed and the odd couple were no longer confined to the cabin, Jack bounded right into the piles of snow, bare-footed. It sank under his steps up to his calves, and that only made the boy hiss with further glee.

"When they have to saw your feet off, I will leave you."

Pitch called from the doorstep, struggling to mask his amusement.

The cold did nothing to phase the boy, celebratory in his new-found freedom.

"You wouldn't leave me. You'd be too lonely." Jack called back from where he rolled, coating himself in a healthy blanket of winter.

With the wind long gone and the sun blinding through the dead trees, Pitch thought for a moment that Jack looked beautiful. His hair caught the light like a halo, but not of angels, of something Pitch would prefer.

The damned, perhaps.

How long, Pitch wondered, until Jack paid for the days they had spent together, and what would be the price?

Surely one did not return to a state of normality after courting a nightmare king. It was akin to tampering with dark forces (if Pitch were humble about it) and that never ended well.

Not for humans, who were so frail and sessile .

He wanted to warn Jack of all the negative energy he was gathering, but Jack would probably dismiss such talk as superstition.

Which says a lot about his character if he would say such a thing to Pitch Black's face.

When Jack knocked Pitch from his depreciating thoughts with a snowball, it occurred to the Shadow Man that as opposed to shutting him up, this act of war called for his company.

When had they come so far?

Jack smiled and it seemed that he had forgotten all anger with his companion. Jack smiled because he was happy, and maybe Pitch was missing something, maybe he would never understand what their bond was founded on.

Maybe he could, for once, not question it.

It might have been a show of what little faith Jack had when he turned away, prepared to stomp around like an ignored child vying for a parent's attention.

He did not anticipate the return fire that crashed into the back of his head.

Jack gaped at Pitch and Pitch smiled in a way that promised many horrible things, each in a handful of snow.

The two went to war and each lost and gained something in the white afternoon.

Jack proved to have far superior aim but Pitch was not above slipping through shadows to get the drop on the brunette.

Pitch might even confess to having had fun, if Jack twisted his arm hard enough.

Jack however, appeared to have been touched by felicity. The traces of anger that sank into his face smoothed out and even when the two of them grew tired, Jack rested against Pitch's shoulder without aggravated commentary.

"I believe I was the victor this time around." Said Pitch, looking down at the mop of brown hair pressed against him.

It was as if he had forgotten how to feign disinterest.

"A victory through underhanded, cheap-shots, perhaps." Jack laughed, pressing impossibly further against Pitch and the warm promise of his breath. He had come to realize the most important thing and he kept it close to his rapid heart.

Jack gained a knowledge that he had previously tried to convince himself was not important.

Desperate to brag about having one-up, he peeled his face from Pitch's robe and met his eyes.

"But I think my reward is greater."

Pitch rose a quizzical brow, swatting away the ice that clung to Jack's hair. He used the moment as an excuse to brush it aside, wasted, for it fell right back over his forehead as soon as Pitch had drawn his hand back.

"And what is that, Jack?"

"I know now that you lied to me."

"I lie a lot, Jack." Pitch scolded, searching for an answer in his eyes of hot rum. "You are going to have to be more specific."

Jack shook his head and laughed, the birds singing in spring held nothing over such a chime.

"No, I don't."

Jack didn't waste his time falling asleep in his own bed. He went right to Pippa's and drifted off with his hand dangling over the side.

Pitch found himself staring at it, from his little home under the mattress.

He only brushed his own against it twice the entire night.

Pitch would accept his small victories.

On a chilly morning, Pitch rhetorically asked Jack how he could see him if he feared nothing.

Jack confessed that he always felt fear when he did dangerous things, but was never afraid.

After all, "What is fun without a touch of fear?"

Pitch would then ask Jack if he believed in him.

"Seeing is believing, isn't it?"

Jack had found himself wound in Pitch's arms, the two of them crushed together on Jack's mattress. The Nightmare King smelled of fresh ash and smoke; the boy inhaled him like a narcotic and refused to leave the bed.

Instead, they basked in the stream of sunlight that touched the covers from the window and drank it desperately. With December well underway, such little pleasantries were more and more difficult to come by.

"Perhaps for humans, that is the case."

The fingers trailing through Jack's hair calmed him, kept him still. They were a reassuring graze and he was grateful for it, as he was all of the small gestures of compassion Pitch offered despite his uncertainty.

"What about other spirits, then? Wouldn't you believe in something you saw and spoke to?"

"That is dependent upon how believed in the spirit is by humans."

Jack frowned and brought himself closer to Pitch, pressing his bare skin into the man's robe. It felt like a finer silk than any he'd ever known. Clenched in his fingers, Jack thought that he could very well be dreaming, dreaming of ever idle banter and angry tilt.

It made so much more sense than the Boogeyman cradling him close.

"So if human's don't believe in a spirit, other spirits can't either?"

"Not exactly."

Pitch hummed to himself for a moment, considering how to explain their nature.

"I myself would be a good example." He began tentatively, "Once a strong and powerful spirit, the less I was believed in, the weaker I became. The other spirits watched me dwindle like a candle having run it's course." His tone grew clipped and Jack found himself placing a placating hand on Pitch's jaw.

"But the spirits knew I existed, they could see me easily. I have since, run into smaller spirits of less popularity that have gone on not seeing me. If the people of the world still believed in my existence the way they once had, I would never go unseen."

Jack nodded slowly, unsure if he was following.

"Then, how did the Guardians see you when you first came into existence? They could not have known of you."

The streak of sun on the blanket diminished, swallowed by a sea of clouds.

"Actually... I came first."

Jack grimaced as the streak vanished entirely, leaving the room as cold as any other. He sorted through what Pitch had told him, and after a moment of trying to get his bearings on it, decided it was much too complicated. He finally chose to respond with

"I think that's awful."

"What aspect?"

Pitch drawled.

"Every one. Something's existence should not be dependent upon the thoughts of others."

Jack said 'something' but Pitch swore he heard his own name in his words, warm and passionate and housing a quiet fire.

"Existence should be determined by what you make of yourself, what you mean to yourself. Living a life based around meeting the standards of others? It seems more of a curse."

Pitch didn't like the answers Jack came up with, they challenged a great deal of what he had come to accept as truth.

Now, even the Nightmare King did not know what it meant to believe.