Warning: Blood, fistfights, and death. Beware.

The Fourth Night

She isn't sure when her relationship with Jack changed. She only knows that it has, and for some reason, it's frightening her.

Violet perches on Jamie's windowsill and coaches him through creating bubbles of light. He's not a fire-user, not like she first thought; he's just bursting with light. Sunlight, almost. It feels and smells and tastes like sunlight, and now that he's slowly getting better control of it, he could be her own personal tanning bed and never give her cancer. She smiles and keeps these thoughts to herself. He's still frightened of his super ability, but thankfully he can use it almost the same way she uses her force fields, and that means she doesn't have to contact the government to train him.

Jack ferries her to Jamie when they both have time, and Jamie loves it. It's clear that he adores Jack, and from the way they talk, it's been a while since they've been able to spend any real time together. Usually Jack just drops Violet off and then comes back a few hours later to collect her, while Violet does her homework in the light glowing between Jamie's fingers, but sometimes he sticks around to watch, and she can feel his eyes on the pair of them as Jamie struggles with imitating the shapes she makes with her fields: a pyramid, a house, a cantering horse. She's grown much better at manipulating her fields, in the years since she was just Violet Parr, class pariah, instead of being Violet Parr, Incredigirl, and Jamie's a quick learner. Once or twice Jack makes his own little dancing figures, a ballerina, a rabbit, and sends his icy creations in an elegant spiral around the room, joining Violet's preening raven and Jamie's gamboling golden retriever.

Something about the way he watches them makes her self-conscious. Something about the way he hooks his hand around her waist to carry her now, as though his hand belongs there, makes her blush. And sometimes when she's crawling into bed half-asleep, after chatting with him the way she always does, he reaches down and brushes icy fingers across her cheek before darting away across the sky.

It makes her heart pound and keeps her from sleeping every time he does it, because she can't help but imagine those fingers in other places. Or maybe his mouth.

She knows she shouldn't be feeling like this. Jack is a Guardian. He's told her himself how old he is, how he's been eighteen for over three hundred years. There's no point, she tells herself, in crushing on a spirit that only she can see, one that will outlive her by millennia. Even when he smiles at her sidelong, like they're sharing a secret.

Especially when he smiles at her sidelong.

It's during her midterms when she sees the headlines plastered across the news—INCREDIBLES WOUNDED IN FIGHT WITH PITSLAYER—and her heart stops. She excuses herself from her afternoon classes, locks herself in the dorm bathroom, and hyperventilates for a while, calling her mother's cell phone, over and over again. There is no answer. It just makes her panic more.

She wants Jack, she thinks, as she dials Dash's phone, and then her father's, and then the home phone, and the endless dial tone winds her up into utter panic. She wants Jack with her. She needs a friend now, and she has no idea where he is, let alone if he's in her hemisphere. He mentioned something about going down to Australia for a few days, to give Perth some freak blizzard. "They're due," he'd laughed, and she'd laughed with him, and now she wasn't even breathing. She was breaking. How could she have possibly thought that leaving her family to go to college was the right thing to do?

"You're Jack's sheila, aren't you?"

Violet screams, and drops her phone. Before it clatters, a paw—a paw?—has lunged forward and caught it, and when she looks up, she has to bite her tongue in order to keep from screaming again. There is a hole in the middle of the bathroom floor, and an enormous rabbit stands before her. His ears brush against the bathroom ceiling, and his nose quivers with the scent of her tears. "Hey," he says, and offers her cell phone to her. "You can see me, can't you?"

Violet nods dumbly, and thinks of something Jack-Jack said, days and months and years ago. He's almost as tall as Daddy. And he has those…thingies. You throw them, and they come back.

There are boomerangs on the rabbit's back.

"You're the Easter Bunny," she says, and then she feels as though she's going to faint, because why now? Why, after all these years, would the Easter Bunny come to find her now? She isn't even sure if she believes in the Easter Bunny—except, clearly, she does, because she can see him—and she's definitely going to faint soon. She just knows it. She takes the phone from him, and his fur tickles her fingertips. There's a funny little quirk to his lips that might be a smile.

"Sorry to startle you. I was down below and heard y'cryin'." He looks a bit uncomfortable when he says that. "Didn't think you'd be able to see me, but I thought I'd check in just the same."

"Down below?" she asks, because they're on the fourth floor, but he doesn't answer her question. He just watches her, ears twitching, and finally he tilts his head to the side.

"What's wrong?"

It spills out of her—her parents, the attack, the wounding. She tells him about midterms too but that's all mixed up inside and she's not sure if she can even really breathe anymore. When she runs out of words, the Easter Bunny sniffs a few times, and then makes a decision.

"C'mon," he says, and he taps the floor with one of his big feet. A hole opens up. "I c'n take you to your family."

She throws her arms around him and bursts into tears. The Easter Bunny goes terribly stiff, and stammers a few things that are pure Australian gobbledygook, and then he drops them both into the hole.

Her parents don't ask how she managed to get there so fast. They only stand with her, watching over Dash's bed. Her dad has a broken arm, and her mom is in a wheelchair, but they'll be fine. Jack-Jack was at Lucius's, and he's safe. It's Dash who hasn't woken up yet; there are bandages around his head and his feet are worn from running, but it's his torso that's the worst, covered all over with shiny burns. It makes her sick to see them. The Easter Bunny—"Y'can call me Bunnymund," he says, and she promptly starts calling him Mundie, just because she feels strange calling him Bunny—promises he'll be back to take her to Michigan again in a few hours, and then he vanishes.

She's sitting at Dash's bedside, holding his hand, when the window blows open, and Jack flies in. He doesn't seem surprised to see her. In fact, he doesn't say anything at all. He simply leans his stick against the wall and stands beside her, wraps his arms around her shoulders, and Violet squeezes him around the waist and buries her face in his hoodie. He's freezing, and she's whispering things she doesn't even understand anymore. His hand comes up to her hair.

"Vi," he says, "he'll be all right. He'll be all right, Vi."

"I should have been here, I should have been able to protect them, and now they're all hurt and I should have been here—" She's hysterical and she knows it. She's been hysterical since she saw the headlines this morning, and nothing has stopped it. Jack tangles his fingers through her hair and works the knots out of it for a while. It's only when she's shivering that he finally seems to remember how cold he is, and pulls back. Jack crouches beside her chair, puts his fingers under her chin, and tilts her head up.

She looks awful, she's sure. Swollen nose and red eyes and snot everywhere. He pulls his hoodie off, revealing a thin, baggy black shirt, and then yanks it over her head, and Violet yelps. It's frigid, but it'll adjust to her body heat soon enough. Then he wipes her tears away with his fingers. "The bunny said he brought you here."

"He heard me crying," she says, and she doesn't ask why Bunnymund was on patrol beneath her dorm while Jack was away. To be honest she doesn't even think of it. "He brought me here 'cause he heard me crying. I can't leave them again, Jack."

"If you drop out the college isn't gonna be very happy with you." His eyes are so very blue. She's fixed on them. Jack squeezes her shoulders, and then stands. "I'm gonna go talk to the rabbit. Be back in a sec."

"Jack—"

But Jack's already out the window. The door to Dash's room opens, and it's her mom, maneuvering around in her wheelchair as though she's always used one. "Violet," she says, "oh, honey," and Violet flies to her mother and buries her face in Helen's knees. Helen doesn't ask where the sweatshirt came from. Violet wonders if she can even see it.

"This isn't your fault, young lady," says Helen after a while, and Violet lifts her face. "No, don't look at me like that. We were stupid, and we were smacked for it. But this isn't your fault. Don't you dare think it would have been different if you'd been there."

"But I—"

"Sh." She settles a finger against Violet's lips. "It wouldn't have been." Her hand falls to the sleeve of Jack's hoodie, pinches it. "Who gave this to you, sweetie? A boy?"

"A friend," says Violet. Her mother can see the sweatshirt, apparently. Helen smiles as though she knows something Violet doesn't, but doesn't ask again.

"I don't know how you managed to get here so quick, sweetie, but you have classes in the morning. You need to go back to Michigan."

"I—"

"Once Dash wakes up," Helen amends. "Once Dash is awake—" and here her voice breaks, just slightly "—you'll go back to Michigan."

Violet nods and hides her face again.

It's a long wait for Dash to open his eyes. She emails her teachers (most send her notes of condolence and tell her to take all the time she needs) and then she texts her friends and her roommate, to let them know she won't be back for a while. She keeps Jack's sweatshirt. It smells like his work—like snow and winter trees—and it's soothing. Jack sits on the windowsill, swinging his staff back and forth in a circuitous rhythm that makes her sleepy. Her mother's retreated to her own hospital room, just next door; Dad's with her. She can hear the rumble of his voice through the wall.

It's nearly two AM when Dash finally stirs, and moans. Violet's up in a flash, leaning over the bed, and his eyes flicker open. God, she thinks, when he grows up he'll look just like Dad. He's short, and slender like their mother, but his face, his eyes, his hair: it's all Bob Parr. "Vi…?" he licks his lips, and tries again. "Violet?"

"Dash," she says, and tears spill over. She hits him in his uninjured shoulder, and he winces. "Dashiell Robert Parr, you scared me half to death. You…you jerk. Don't you ever do something that stupid again, you hear me? Don't you ever frighten me like this, mister. I'll break your Playstation if you do."

Jack's on his feet and peering over the bed too, and he's grinning. She hadn't realized how worried he was until she sees the relief in his face. Violet looks up and meets his eyes, beams back at him, and he reaches out to touch Dash's cheek. Dash's nose wrinkles, as though he's about to sneeze, but he doesn't see Jack. "What're you…here?"

"I came when I heard." No point in saying how she came. "What happened, Dash? Mom and Dad won't tell me."

"Don't remember," Dash says, and his voice is foggy with pain meds. Abruptly Violet realizes that she ought to summon a doctor, and when she does, they shove her out of the room and go to inform her parents. Violet makes the excuse that she's getting something from the hospital cafeteria, heads for the nearest bathroom, and then is quietly and thoroughly sick. When she comes out, Jack's leaning against the wall.

"Come on," he says. "You need fresh air."

She takes his hand, and doesn't care if people look at her funny for holding hands with the air. His fingers are chilly, but soothing, and they fit right in with hers. Their hands entwine, and it settles her heart. Jack leads them out the back door of the hospital, and up into a tree in the parking lot, where leaves have clustered so they won't be seen. Violet sits beside him, and leans her head into his shoulder.

"I checked around," says Jack. "They were fighting Pitslayer. He's new, vicious. He hires bad supers as his underlings. One of them was fast enough to keep up with Dash."

"You were there?"

"A tooth fairy was, and she saw it all." He hesitates, and then he untangles his fingers from hers, and begins to stroke her hair. Violet sinks into his shoulder with a little sigh. She doesn't want to cry anymore, but the tenderness in his touch might just bring tears to her eyes. "Pitslayer's bad, Vi. He has half a dozen supers under his control and half a dozen gangs too, and he's going to ruin Metroville, at this rate."

Something cold and hard settles in her heart, like a shard of ice. "Where is he?"

His hand stills. "Vi, you can't go there."

"Can't I?" she says, and jerks back from him. "He went after my little brother, Jack. Nobody goes after my little brothers and keeps living."

Jack looks at her, his eyes so very blue in the shade of the tree. "It's not your fault."

"The hell it isn't. I wasn't here to shield them, and now they're hurt, and I have to finish it." She knows, logically, that what would keep normal people down for weeks will only work out to a few days of the Incredibles being hurt. She knows that most supers heal faster and cleaner and stronger than normal people, even if they don't have a special ability for it. But it doesn't make it any less her responsibility. "I'm taking him out while they're down. The people here need to remember not to mess with my family."

"Violet—"

"Either you tell me where he'll be, Jack Frost, or I'll just go ask someone in the underground, and you really won't like how I'll ask."

He tells her. His eyes are hard and his jaw is clenched, but he tells her. Violet jumps down from the tree, and the landing makes her knees hurt. It's colder in Michigan than it is in Metroville, and she's been wearing her super suit for warmth. It means that she can strip and put her mask on without any difficulties. Jack floats down beside her. "Violet—"

"You can't stop me, Jack."

"Violet," he says again, and when she turns to him, he takes her chin in his fingers, leans forward, and presses his mouth to hers. He's terribly cold, but she tucks herself into him anyway. Her mouth opens, and she strokes his tongue with her own. She'll never admit it, but she's imagined this since the night she met him.

She pulls away first. Jack reaches up, runs his fingers through her hair.

"I'm going with you," he says, and she nods. To be honest, she never expected anything else.

Pitslayer's true to his name. The entrance to the hide-out is in a storm drain. Jack freezes the chicken-wire that spreads across it, and then breaks through it with one sharp kick. Inside it smells of rot and death, and she has to fight to keep herself from taking his hand as they walk. She is leading, because she knows what she's doing. The most Jack has ever done in a fight between supers is when he helped her back near EMU, when the Animal Thieves were ganging up on her and he tripped a few. "Follow my orders, Jack," she says, and she feels rather than sees him nod. "If he has supers with him, they've probably already noticed us. They'll just be waiting for us to make a move."

"What's your plan?"

Violet doesn't want to say she has no plan. She doesn't want to say that she's just in it for the revenge. She tosses her hair back out of her face and wished she'd managed to get around to having it trimmed. "They'll rush us. We'll need to take them out one by one. If they can hurt my parents, if they can get Dash—" she swallows hard. "One by one, Jack."

"They won't see me," he says. "I'll take them out easier than you."

"Fine," she says. She doesn't want them to be separated, but he's right. They don't believe in Jack Frost. They wouldn't see him even if he was nose to nose with them, waggling his tongue and poking out their eyes. "But I'm following you."

She stands aside and lets him fly past her, and she has to run to keep up.

Jack's good. She has to give him that. The first man they come across nearly screams at the sight of her, but before he can make a sound Jack has struck him on the back of the head with his shepherd's staff. The guard's eyes roll up into his head and he drops, and Violet drags him back into the sewer and shuts the door with a clang. "I wish I could make you invisible," Jack says, because nothing will pick up his voice, either, and she nods before following her instincts and turning right down the hall. Her dad's right handed, and he's always the one who leads in new places. Of course they would go right.

It's a weave of tunnels, like the Underminer's hideaway; everything is made of dirt and stone. She peers around the corner, and makes a soundless force field around the next man she sees. She could leave him there to suffocate, if she wants. She sincerely considers it.

Then she makes a fist, and presses on his windpipe until he's knocked out. She leaves him on the floor.

There are marks now. She can see Dash's scuff marks on the floor and traces them with gloved fingers. There are burns, too, in the walls, roasting the dirt. She can smell singed human hair, and thinks of the black streaks in Dash's blonde bangs before clenching her fists. Jack is beside her. She puts a skin-tight violet shield around herself, ignoring the luminescence of it, and takes two steps forward.

Fire explodes around her. It's only her shield that keeps her from being crisped. Behind her, Jack lets out a yell of shock, but she ignores him. She takes a few hopping steps, ignoring the heat, and then she runs at him. She sees a flare of surprised orange eyes and a flash of brown skin before she's lashed out with a field-enhanced fist, and knocks him into the wall. She hears his nose snap, hears him moan. Jack is behind her, saying her name, but she ignores him. Violet balls her hands tight, seizes the man with a field, and lifts him, slamming him into a wall. Then she punches him again, and though his teeth dig deep into her knuckles, and blood drips from her fingers, she does not care. She seizes him by the throat, sees the terror in his eyes.

"You never," she says, "touch my brother again," and then she has thrown him, the field snapping away from him just in time for his headlong crash into the far wall. She knows the field has enhanced her strength, knows that she would never be able to do that, normally, but she is heaving as though she has just run a mile. The super is crumpled on the ground, and she thinks she might have snapped his neck.

She has killed a man and she finds that she does not care.

"Vi," says Jack, and his eyes are wide and horrified.

"If you can't handle it," she snaps, "get out, Frost."

His mouth tightens. "Pitslayer is further in," he says, and they walk together.

The next super they meet is a water wielder, like Lucius with no freezing capabilities. She knocks him out and shoves him into a closet, with a pair of ice handcuffs from Jack. They wander the maze for a while. Eventually Violet notices tiny arrows cut into the walls, which she swears were not there before; she follows them, and if Jack realizes that she's suddenly turning sure and clear when before she was debating at every intersection, he says nothing. This is Underminer's old home, she realizes, when she finds a mole tunnel with her boots. There are babies inside. She ignores them. Moles have done nothing to her.

She feels like a blade, oversharpened and bloodthirsty. She wonders if she's frightening anyone but herself.

Pitslayer is tall, thin, and gaunt. Privately she thinks he looks like Dracula. He sits on a throne made of metal, watches her as she comes into his room. "Ah," he says, "the missing Incredible," and around the walls lurk his minions. There are dozens of them. Only a few are supers, she thinks. The other supers she found had little patches on their sleeves, tiny snake-like S's, and there are only a few of those that she can see. "All alone, I believe."

"She's not alone," says Jack, but nobody hears him. Violet tosses her hair back.

"You hurt my family," she says, and around her the crowd shifts. Jack is at her back, and she reaches back, squeezes his fingers lightly. To Pitslayer it looks as though she is clenching her hand into a light fist. "My brother's gonna scar because of you."

"A pity you'll have to be sent back to him in boxes," says PItslayer, and he lifts a hand. But Jack has seized her by the back of her super suit, and taken off, and when the thugs go rushing for her, she is no longer there. They bang their heads together and retreat with a moan.

Violet does not say thank you. She creates a field-board for herself, a hoverboard that will never leave her feet, and she spins. One of the supers can fly, and he's in the air after her, but the others are groundbound. "Take care of them," she shouts, and points at the ground. Jack's smile is wicked.

"Aye aye."

And then she is tangling with the flying super and she can no longer see Jack.

He's some sort of half-bird. His claws dig into her belly, and Violet gasps. Blood wells up around the tears in her super suit. She flickers invisible, ducks, and throws her arms around his waist, tearing out feathers. The birdman screeches, and claws at her back, but she has a tight hold now, and when she blasts off with her hoverboard she slams him into the stone ceiling, and he lets out a pathetic cry. When she punches him in the face, flicking back to visibility so he can see her hatred, he is terrified. She has never been so powerful. She thinks that gymnastics might actually be making her stronger.

Below, Pitslayer is on his feet, shouting orders. He can't see Jack, though, and that makes Jack more dangerous than Violet. Cronies are slipping and sliding and banging heads and breaking limbs, and it's all because he's turned the floor into an ice rink, and none of them have skates. "Find him," Pitslayer shouts, "find the other super," and Violet laughs to herself as she slams the birdman's head up into the stalactite again, because they will never, ever find Jack.

She dives for PItslayer.

She doesn't know PItslayer, too, is a super.

He's so fast. His hand is at her throat before she can block him. Violet chokes. This, she thinks, this must be the one who held Dash down while they burned him. They'll have matching bruises on their throats. The thought is vague. Violet lashes out with her feet, but she doesn't hit him. He's grown—she can't tell what he is, only that he has razor-sharp teeth and yellow eyes and there's fur bristling against his jaw. "Well," he says, "you're no better than your brother."

Violet screams and reaches out, and he isn't prepared for when she sends spikes of force field from her fingers into his eyes.

Pitslayer shrieks. She can see blood running down his cheeks, but by then he's dropped her, and Jack is at her side. He writhes. She wants to kill him, she thinks, watching Pitslayer twist on the floor of his throne room. She wants him dead. But she's choking and hacking and she can't quite manage it. Jack has an arm around her shoulders. "Vi," he says, "Vi, I can't take them all. Vi, we have to go."

Violet puts up a force field around the throne, around her and Jack and Pitslayer, and she steps out of Jack's grip. She stands over PItslayer, and pins him to the floor with a field. He can't see her, but he turns his head towards her anyway.

"Kill me," he says. "Finish it."

Violet wants to. She does. But all she can think to do is ball her hand into a fist, and punch him in the face.

She turns back to Jack.

"Get me out of here, Jack," she says. And then the pain from her gut wound catches up to her, and all she can do is faint.

Jack catches her before she hits the ground.

A/N:

One more chapter.