~Condemned~

Jack tumbled through the water holding to his staff desperately. He flailed in the water, failing at trying to find which way was up and which way was down. He took his best guess and recklessly swam to what he hoped was the surface. He anticipated that all the ice had cracked, or else he would be trapped underneath. He prayed that he wouldn't have to relieve the event of being entombed under the ice. History had a strange way of repeating himself.

The only thing that kept Jack from hyperventilating as he swirled under the ice was the thought of Katherine. The voices in his screamed in fear of drowning, but the screams shouting her name were louder. They pushed him hard, and he finally broke though to the surface.

He gasped for air like a singer before a high note, the pressure in his lungs releasing. But his reunion with the surface was cut short, and he was dragged under once again by the current.

When he popped back up many yards downstream he coughed out the water in his throat and screamed out, "Katherine!" with all his might. He couldn't see her anywhere due to the large pieces of ice all around him. "Katheri-" He was heaved under yet again, the word still on his lips.

He resurfaced near a large bobbing piece of ice. He took action and grabbed hold of it, pulling his torso out of the water. He pumped his legs as hard as he could to stay on it, all the while feverishly looking about for Katherine. He kicked up on the ice to get a better view. There was no sign of her around him adrift in the water along the ice chunks that dipped about like bumper cars.

Far ahead Jack's eye caught something yellow. The ice parted for a moment and revealed the lost girl floating far ahead on a small piece of ice. Her body was limply draped over it and only her torso and head were out of the water. She continued down the rapids like a frail leaf in a violent storm, her body barely staying on her small iceberg.

Jack dived into the water and immediately started treading to get to her side. She seemed so far away. He tried to keep her in his sight at all times, only breaking his gaze on her to dive around the ice.

Soon she was close enough for Jack to touch with his staff. He could see her face, pale as death, and her closed eyes. Her lips were blue. He reached out to her, but the river's pattern changed. Suddenly the vital balance Katherine had on her iceberg was tipped as she went over a large rapid. She teetered too far forward, and her body was dumped into the river headfirst.

Jack plunged into action and dove. His feet kicked and his hand searched though the water around him. He used his staff to probe around for her body. He came back up for air, but hit something hard. He pushed away from the chunk of ice above him, popping up on the left side of it. He gasped and plunged back into the water, his head spinning from the impact with the ice.

Panic started to heighten once he surfaced after his third dive. He went up, inhaled deeply, and went back down. He couldn't see a thing in the water, all he could do was try and find her with his hand and staff. It was hard to focus on his task though, his mind was fuzzy with anxiety, and his heart was pumping in dread. The chances of finding such a small girl in such a large, crazed river was low, and with time it was getting lower. How long had she been without air?

At the thought his own lungs started to ache for another breath, but he strained himself to stay under a few extra seconds. His hand brushed something that wasn't ice. He grabbed at it, pulling himself to it. It was decently heavy, and it felt like fabric. He squinted in the water and saw yellow. He could have cried in relief, but his instincts took over. He wrapped his arms around her and kicked to the surface, straining to haul both their weights though the water.

He surfaced the fourth time successful, and gasping. He blinked away the ice water in his eyes while he adjusted his grip on Katherine. He leaned backwards in the water, laying her on his chest. Her body was lifeless, just dead weight on top of him. Her head was slack and her mouth kept falling below the water line—he had to keep propping her head back up on his chest. Red streaks of hair covered her face.

Jack huffed as he strained to keep them afloat in the crazy rapids. His breath came out in puffs of fog and were lost quickly behind them as they moved with the river. After a few moments Jack saw that Katherine's foggy breath didn't follow his own.

The realization she wasn't breathing sparked him to kick harder. He pumped his legs until they felt like jelly, and even when they did he kept swimming. Katherine's head slipped back into the water and he quickly held her chin up and hugged her close. After a few more powerful kicks Jack knew he couldn't hold them up much longer, and, like an answer to prayer, he felt something sold brush under his feet. The pull of the river lessened.

He stretched his legs down and they scraped against an uneven surface of stones. He got a good foothold in the rocks and walked them towards shore. The current tried to drag them away and Jack almost lost his footing multiple times, and slowly but surely he made his way across the rocky riverbed to shore.

Soon Jack could grab at the rocks with his hands. He turned his body towards the river. He was too weak to carry Katherine, so he flattened out his body (with her on top of him) and dragged them backwards. He panted as he heaved them onto the land, and after a few pulls he felt the rocks supporting his back. He relaxed for a moment and went limp. He groaned loudly.

He gradually put his arms around Katherine and sat up. He turned to the shoreline and got onto his knees. He stumbled his way to the shore, Katherine in his arms. He crossed the line of ice at the water edge and carefully sat Katherine onto the snow-covered rocks.

He put his ear on her chest and hovered his hand above her mouth at the same time. He couldn't feel her breath on his palm and he couldn't hear her heart. Her lips were blue. She was lifeless.

He brought his hands together and started pressing on her chest rhythmically, trying to get her heart to beat. Water sloshed out of her mouth with each press.

"Come on Katherine," Jack begged. The sight of Katherine like this, a small girl seemingly dead, horrified him. He had seen so many people die this way. She couldn't die like this too—he wouldn't let her. She couldn't already be dead.

"Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe—" He chanted with the beat of the compressions. More ice water spilled out between her lips. Jack was in hysterics.

"Breathe, breathe, breathe." He prayed, pleading to the Man in the Moon. "Please breathe, please breathe," It was getting hard for himself to breathe. Was she dead? Had he killed her?

"Oh Manny," He whispered in horror as he continued compressions on Katherine's lifeless form. It took everything he had not break down and have a complete panic attack. He had hauled a corpse out of the river. What was he going to do without her, in the middle of this wasteland? Could he continue the mission alone? What would he tell the others? What would Nightlight do?

"Oh Manny please," His voice broke with a dry sob. "Please," He begged in a breathless hiss, "Please—"

Katherine's chest pushed up against his hands. His eyes shot open, and so did hers. "Katherine!" He hollered in relief.

Katherine's unseeing eyes widened and she was pitched into a violent coughing fit. Water burbled from her mouth and her chest heaved painfully as she tried to get the water out of her lungs. Jack pulled her up against him and whispered calm reassurances. Her breathing was wet and shallow. He felt her pulse as she coughed ice water out onto his shirt—it was so weak. But it was there. How long it would stay he didn't know.

She held her hands to her chest and struggled to breathe. Vehement spasms of shivering ravaged her whole body, taxing her of energy she didn't have to spare. Jack knew that was good anyway. Hypothermia got serious when the shaking stopped, and it looked like Katherine wouldn't have the energy left to shake soon. All her energy was gone, and her warmth too, drained from the cold river. He knew he had to get her warm, and get some food in her. It was her only chance.

"The b-bag is g-g-gone," Katherine choked out. "I l-let it g-go, I cou-couldn't swim w-with—"

Jack hushed her. "Don't worry, you made the right choice. Its fine—everything is going to be absolutely fine. You're going to be okay. I…I can figure something else out." His voice was unsteady. Was he lying to himself? The bag was lost along with all their maps, the compass, food, flint and steel, warm coals, and other necessities for Katherine's survival. They were stranded in the middle of Russia, sopping wet, hungry, hopelessly lost, and running out of time. Mother Nature had told them Pitch's plan was centered on the Winter Solstice, and they had been wandering for days. The only had a few more left. He was afraid Katherine wouldn't even be alive by the solstice.

"Jack," Katherine said softly, haunted by the stony expression Jack didn't even knew he wore. His body was rigid, and his clothes were becoming stiff with ice. He was unknowingly freezing them with his cold.

"What?" He asked, lost in anxious thought.

"I'm so cold."

"I know, I know," He uttered soothingly. He stroked her hair in a brotherly way, laying her head down onto his bent leg. He wanted to keep her as far away from him and his cold as he could. It broke his heart—the one thing she was asking for was the one thing he couldn't ever give anyone. Warmth.

Katherine slowly closed her eyes. Jack continued talking to reopen them, knowing he had to try and keep her conscious. "We'll get you someplace nice and warm really soon, okay? I promise. I bet we're almost to your home." He hoped he wasn't lying.

Katherine's eyes opened and wandered. They were glassy.

Jack tried to think as he stared ahead into the darkening woods. He had to be the responsible one now; Katherine was in no state of mind to be of assistance to him. The roles and been reversed and she had become the child on this journey instead of him.

He mentally went through their advantages and disadvantages, and found little chance and hope in the ratio of the two. Their bag and supplies was gone and the light of the sun straining though the clouds was getting fainter—the few hours of daylight were coming to their end. The temperature would soon plummet. There was no way he could make a fire, he never had been able to, and he couldn't give off any body heat for Katherine. She was already on the brink of the last stage of hypothermia. He had no idea what direction Santoff Claussen was or how far away they were from it. Katherine couldn't walk, and Jack felt so weak—he doubted he could carry her long. Santoff Claussen could be twice the distance they had already traveled away.

The voice of reason in Jack's mind told him Katherine didn't have a chance. He rudely told the voice where it should go, but it didn't stop nagging. Katherine was smart, and Jack hoped the voice in her head wasn't telling her the same thing.

He unclasped his cloak (something he now realized he really should had done in the river) and scraped off the ice and frost. . He tucked it around Katherine's shaking body. The fabric was wet and cold, but it would help keep in whatever body heat she still had.

Katherine shifted in his arms, her hands moved up to her throat. She was trying to take off her sopping wet gloves.

"Leave them on," Jack said. "You'll stay warmer, trust me."

Katherine persisted stubbornly and soon only had one glove. He reached for the fallen glove and tried to put it back on. Katherine swatted his hand away and fumbled with the top of her coat. Jack sighed, thinking she was trying to take that off too. He knew from experience when people got too cold their bodies would do strange things, he had seen frozen people taking off their clothes because they thought they were burning up. It was one of the later stages of hypothermia.

"No, Katherine," He said patiently. She persisted. "Katherine, stop."

Her trembling fingers drew away from her throat, a string of silver entwined between them. The necklace had somehow stayed around her neck through the crazed rapids and had two seeds left within the glass orb, and she was trying to set one free.

She fumbled with the glass bead for a moment, but her numb fingers were clumsy. Jack took if from her with gentle hands and released the second dandelion seed into the air before them. It floated cheerfully on a private breeze, bobbing about Jack's head, glowing with ethereal light.

Jack hadn't seen the first seed the night of the wolf attack; it had shot off into the dark to find the Spirit of the Forest as soon as Katherine had released it. Jack wondered why this one wasn't doing the same—they needed help now more than ever. Why wasn't the seed off in search for help?

"What is it doing?" Jack asked Katherine. Her eyes had shut again, and it took time to rouse her again. "Katherine, it's not doing anything."

Katherine looked up at the seed and muttered under her breath, her breathing still too rapid from her shaking to let her speak clearly. Jack caught a few seemingly unrelated words: "Cold, forest, no, bare, cold."

Jack hushed her soothingly but his calm act was quickly deteriorating. He became lost in his own thoughts, grasping at whatever hope they had left and trying to form it into a plan for survival. He could form no such plan.

A cold breeze passed over the river that had conceivably condemned Katherine's life. Jack shaped his body around her, protecting her from the wind that was coursing from the North. He could smell a storm between the folds of air—a scent he was trained to distinguish. The snow was inopportunely returning to him after leaving him earlier that day. He had hoped for a longer time apart from it—he had willed it away. In the end it seemed his uncontrollable emotions had brought it back like they always did.

The unwelcome wind carried the obstinate dandelion seed away from them, pushing it to the forest. The seed danced through the bare trees ahead and stopped motionless in the air, despite the wind still coursing around it. Was there no help nearby for it to find? Were they beyond help?

Jack's breathing grew nearly as rapid as Katherine's as the weight of the situation overwhelmed his senses. The fear and anxiety he had been trying to keep suppressed bubbled up, and his whole body tensed as the floodgates broke free. He had been forced to stay on his toes for Katherine's benefit the whole duration of the journey—but the energy it took to hold up the barriers on his emotions had been spent in the river. The cold seeped out of him, he couldn't hold onto it anymore. It left him in short bursts, covering everything around him in frost. He didn't notice he had lost his grip on his powers until Katherine's whole upper body was covered in ivory cold frost. The white painted even her eyelashes closed.

When Jack tore his eyes from the forest his surprise and shock at seeing Katherine covered in his handiwork brought a sharp yelp and another release of frost. The second layer thickened the first, spreading it further.

Before Jack could release another burst of cold he scrambled away from Katherine, leaving her lifeless body alone on the wet stone. He stood and stepped away from her, his eyes bugging out of their sockets. His breaths came out in wheezes as the panic and guilt overcame him. He knew he had condemned her fate to death, as it seemed he had already done for so many of his other friends. First there had been Snow, and then Nightlight, and now Katherine was fading away from him. Were the Guardians next? Was Jamie? Was he himself, next? Would he himself go mad over the death of his friends and become a reclusive, destructive winter spirit, roaming Russia for a magical town that he and his dead friend could never find?

Jack's eyes misted over at the horrible thoughts and Katherine's shaking form began to blur. He stood motionless; his legs strong and locked beneath him in order to support the quaking mess above them. Never in his three hundred years of existence had he felt so alone, and so guilty. He knew Katherine's life was in his hands, but he also knew if he took her into his hands she would freeze to death at such a close proximity to his anxious cold. He knew the Guardians were relying on him and Katherine to infiltrate Pitch's plan, but he knew Katherine could never get there with him, and he couldn't bear to leave her to die. Would he have to? Would he have to let her freeze and her body become lost to the wilderness?

He knew he couldn't, and he wouldn't. But what else was there to do?

Jack sniffed and tried to clear his eyes. "I don't-" He said, choking on his words. "I don't know what to do." He repeated himself over and over, each time getting louder and more desperate. His hands worked up into his hair, tugging and ripping as he spoke in an emotionless voice. He was beyond feeling, and beyond grief and guilt. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do."

Quickly the phrase became less a sentence and more of a muttered chant, the words blending and changing in such a way that a bystander would have thought Jack a true madman. He paced about on the rocks with his hands entwined in his hair, his staff forgotten on the ground. The river edge behind him started to freeze, and pulses of cold from Jack's chest covered everything in a 5 foot radius in frost, including himself. Snow started to fall from the clouds and seep into Katherine's soaking clothes.

The girl struggled to open her eyes as her body functions shut down from the cold. She faced the empty forest, her back turned to Jack. Thinking he had left her for dead she called out to the woods desperately, but her voice was barely a whisper. "Jack!" She tried to call, her body convulsing on the word. "Jack! Jack!"

Immediately Jack was crouched on the ground in front of her wiping at his eyes. "It's okay, It's okay," He said soothingly, hushing her like a child. "I'm right here with you. I'm not going to leave you. I promise."

"Oh Jack," She whispered, tears leaking down her ice-cold cheeks. "I'm scared." Her frail body was going to sleep—Jack knew it. He could feel the cold claiming it. He himself had first-person experience with hypothermia. Her muscles were tightening, immobile, giving up. You could see in her eyes she wasn't all there. Without her clever mind and extensive knowledge reflecting in her stone grey eyes she looked so young. Jack's breath hitched and he brought up his hand to silence himself at the sight of her fading before him. She was so young.

He took in a long, steadying breath. "Yeah?" He finally answered, trying to think of a good response to reassure her. He shook his head in defeat, "I'm… I'm scared too. But I'm not going to leave you. I'll be right here." He wrapped his fingers around her hand and squeezed it to solidify the statement. Her glove became hard under his skin as the water in it froze, freezing her hand with it.

She took in a sharp breath of pain and he quickly withdrew, his nimble feet backing away from her slightly. Her eyes closed, and Jack let his head fall into his hands, cradling himself back and forth. The powers he had were out of his control now. He couldn't touch her, let alone keep her warm. was he supposed to get her home to Santoff Claussen?

He used his staff to pull himself up onto his shaking, weary legs, distancing himself from her even more. Her shivering was stopping, slowing. It wouldn't be long now before her heart did the same. He didn't want to quicken the process—but he wondered if it was cruel of him to let her freeze slowly to death when he could end it all so quickly.

He looked away from Katherine, dashing the thought. He looked out into the woods before them, the bare trees scratching the grey sky. This would be a beautiful resting place for her, he thought, especially in the spring. The branches would stretch over her soul and the stream would talk to her. It was a beautiful grave.

Between the trees floated the lone dandelion seed, glowing brilliantly. It danced, casting light on the snow. It would dash away and then draw forward, beaconing him. Jack took a few steps forward, testing it. The seed glided off through the trees, away from him, then stopped, waiting. It was leading him to something. Hopefully it was Santoff Claussen. His heart lifted. There was hope that he could finish the quest, even if he had to do it on his own. He could find out how to save Snow from Pitch, and stop whatever plans he had.

Subconsciously he took another step forward, lost in thought. Katherine stirred behind him, her face resting on the stone.

"Jack?" She called out to him. Jack's body went rigid and all his desire to leave Katherine disappeared. Her voice sounded remarkably like his sister's had.

He rushed back to her side, apologizing madly. He tried to get his emotions under control so he could comfort her, smooth down her hair—but he didn't trust himself. "I'm here, I'm here," He assured her. "I'm not going to leave you."

"Jack?" She said again, her eyes lost and unfocused, looking right through him. A tear streaked down her pale cheek. The snow was falling steadily around them now, and it seemed her anxiety was heightening. "I never wanted to tell you."

"Tell me what?" He asked softly. "You can tell me anything."

"Where we're going," She said slowly, "It's not my real home. It's my adoptive home. Ombric, the man we're going to see, isn't really my father." She burst into tears—weak, listless tears.

Jack tried to soothe her but it was difficult to without touching her. "It's okay, it's okay," He cooed next to her, hugging his knees to his chest. He wondered if he was trying to comfort her or himself with the words. Her distress was making him upset as well, and the quickening snowfall around them was a testament of it.

"I never—I never even really got to meet my parents," She coughed out between breaths. "They died in a snowstorm."

Jack's heavy heart became empty and hollow in his chest. He didn't want to hear anymore, but she continued.

"Pitch knew this was my biggest fear," She continued. "And now it's actually happening. It's all actually happening."

The terror in her face broke him he had to look away. He started shaking, much harder than she was now shaking. She took a deep breath.

"I'm going to die out here just like them."

Jack's eyes focused back on Katherine. She had closed her eyes. Jack tried to imagine her sprit resting here as he had before, and he couldn't. He wouldn't let her.

"No," He said loudly. "No you wont."

Right then on the bank of that cursed river in the middle of Siberia, something in Jack changed. Maybe a sliver of ice broke and allowed something to flow, maybe something thawed, maybe something froze. But something changed.

His mind cleared and he stepped away from his emotions, snapping the bond that tied them and his powers. He felt in control of himself—more in control than he ever had been before. He didn't feel afraid of himself.

Quickly he took Katherine up into his arms, stumbling to a standing position. He didn't have to check to make sure he wasn't freezing her—he knew he wasn't. He was in control, and he wasn't going to let himself hurt her.

Then with indolent, trembling legs he ran into the forest after the light of the seed, the wind at his back guiding him and his small guide to sanctuary.