Sophie's house had grown still and quiet as one by one each of her family members had gone to bed. Every light was out and golden dream sand flitted through the windows, invisible to everyone who had had the privilege of growing up. Not to Piper, though. He waited outside the window and watched in the cold, nervous about even this task.

After a while, he ventured inside, up to Sophie's room where he knew the tin whistle would be. He looked over a few of the surfaces, her dresser, the table by her bed, but he couldn't seem to find it. At last he looked over to Sophie, asleep in her bed with the whistle clutched in her hand. Of course... he thought, cursing his luck. He didn't want to wake her, but he needed it back.

He tried to gently pull the whistle away, but she was holding it too tightly. Finally, he managed to pull it out of her grasp, and froze apprehensively as she made a muffled noise and shifted, on the verge of waking. But then she slumped back into sleep again and Piper dared to breathe once more.

She looked older when her face wasn't lit up with emotions. She would grow up, eventually forget how to see dream sand and stop believing in everything that made the world magical. He could stop that, steal her away from it. He had that power. But he thought of what Jack Frost had said earlier, about hurting people. It made him sad to think of her growing up and forgetting about him, but maybe it didn't make her sad. Maybe that's what she wanted. He exhaled in frustration, caught in the middle of a puzzle he didn't have the first clue how to solve. But at long last, he turned to leave.

And found himself staring at the robes of a dark figure standing before him. Piper froze, clutching the whistle so hard his knuckles turned white and he stared ahead, not daring to look up to confirm who it was. He was trembling visibly, unable to bring himself to move.

"I see you remember me," Pitch said, kneeling down to better see the fear etched out on the Pied Piper's face. "You didn't really think I was gone, did you? I've got a new prison for you, Piper." At those words, Piper stumbled clumsily backwards, tripping over himself to put distance between him and Pitch.

"Unless," Pitch said, taking a step forward just as Piper found his back against a wall. "Unless you hand over that tin whistle and the world it calls on."

"Liar!" Piper shouted, playing a tune to call a portal up. He could escape, he could leave Pitch behind and get to the Guardians. Even if he wasn't on good terms with them, they were strong, maybe even stronger than Pitch. The portal appeared and out of the corner of his eye he saw Sophie wake up, staring at him with some mix of fear and fascination. He couldn't leave her alone with Pitch...


He didn't see the scythe carved out of the shadows of the room as it swung down on him. As it connected, he was lost in a thousand nightmares of pain and death and sorrow, as though he were back in the prison, as though a thousand years was passing in an instant. He woke a few minutes later to an empty room. Pitch was gone, his tin whistle taken from his hands, and worst by far, the bed where Sophie had been lying before was empty.

The North Pole had never been tenser than it was when Jack arrived there. Tooth was talking about something with Bunny. The Sandman was on his dream cloud, his eyes closed as he kept careful watch over the dreamers of the world. If someone woke unexpected, Sandy would know it at once. Jack didn't know what to do in the meantime. He couldn't hear what Bunny and Tooth were talking about, but from their tones and expressions he had a bitter guess in the front of his mind. Shame bit into him and caused him to leave the center of the workshop before he'd even realized his feet were moving.

Toys whizzed by overhead in bright colors and whirring, strange sounds. Everywhere he looked, his gaze wandered over one incredibly thing to another. This place had awoken such a sense of wonder when he'd first stepped inside, but right now even that wasn't making it through.

He ended up in front of North's workroom and stared at the door. He could hear him working inside, probably trying to let his mind settle in these few moments where they couldn't yet do anything. After a brief hesitation, Jack knocked on the door.

"Ah, you learn to knock! Well done! Come in," North bellowed from inside. Jack opened the door and watched North's expression change, turning more serious. Apparently North had not been expecting him, which was fair. Jack hadn't expected that he would end up here.

"Jack? Come in. You do not look so well," North said, getting up from where he had been working at his desk, a half-finished ice sculpture in hand. "Tell me what is on your mind."

"A lot of things," he said. "I figure Tooth's probably told you by now..." He trailed off, looking to see if this was a confession he was going to have to make a second time. North did not look at him, focusing on the sculpture in his hand, but he did nod.

"Yes," he said. "You talked to Pitch. This is not best idea you have had."

"Yeah, I got that in the end," he muttered. "Sorry that I went behind you guys like that."

"Is okay so long as you learn from it," North said, chiseling out a smooth surface over the ice sculpture and then running a hand along it to brush away the excess. "Is not easy, learning to be a Guardian. There is good reason why Man on Moon picks so carefully. Everyone has problem starting out, something that makes it difficult to protect children of the world."

"Really? What was yours?" Jack asked, looking around the room at the half-formed ideas carved into the ice around him.

"I had to learn to listen," North explained, setting the ice sculpture down for a moment and leaning against his desk to face Jack.

"I wouldn't have expected that," Jack admitted. North had been there to listen to him any time he'd needed it. He'd taken for granted that that was part of his character from the beginning.

"Is still problem sometimes, still something I must watch," North went on. "Before I was Guardian, I meet elves and yeti. They are well-meaning, but maybe not sharpest or most creative. So I tell them 'paint this red', 'put beams here'. I get used to talking, I forget how to listen. Then I meet Sandy. And this man cannot speak. But he has more to say than I will ever know. And to know any of it, to understand any of it, I have to listen. Very carefully. So it comes to this: what is trouble for you?"

Jack stared at the ground, thinking carefully about the answer. He had gone behind them to Pitch because he didn't like the plan. He tended to think on his own, he tended to act on his own. He could pretend all of that was because he was used to acting by himself, but if he was perfectly honest that wasn't true.

"I was on my own for a long time," Jack said at last. "No one really relied on me, and I didn't rely on anyone else. I'm used to working by myself."

"You cannot stand guard over the world by yourself," North warned.

"No, I can't. I have to trust other people to help me," he admitted. "I just... need to learn how to do that."

"I tell you who is good at trusting people, Jack," North said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger as he thought, then pointing to Jack as he revealed the answer. "Tooth."

Jack paused and considered that. He remembered how many times Tooth had thought the best of him, even after he'd let her down. He nodded slowly, still watching the floor, but his mind feeling a little clearer now. He wasn't completely lost in the woods, there was someone he could learn from at least.

A thud against the door snapped both of them out of their conversation and when Jack opened it, Bunny was standing there, looking very concerned.

"We've got a problem."

"What is it?" demanded North, hand on his sword as he hurried towards the door. "Sandy?"

"I'll explain on the way, come on!" Bunny exclaimed, running on all fours back to the main room. Jack flew next to him, careful to dodge the piles of toys scattered haphazardly over the workshop. North ran just behind them, hurrying to keep up.

"Sand fell away, we were about to go after it, but then the globe starts going weird. Lights started going out, more than usual," Bunny explained.

"How many?" asked Jack.

"A dozen or so, but that's not the worst of it. The last bit of dreamsand that Sandy got from the kid, it had an image over it. She saw something she couldn't have seen." As he finished explaining, they arrived in the main room, where Tooth and Sandy were waiting anxiously.

"What did you see?" North asked Sandy. The Sandman stared gravely at them all and with a flick of his hand, formed an image of Pitch in the air.

"That's impossible..." whispered Tooth.

"Where did the sand fall away from?" Jack asked. The Sandman stared starkly ahead and the image above him changed to a house that Jack knew all too well and then an image of Sophie, with her fairy wings, hopping around in the dreamsand. Jack's eyes cheated over to Bunny, whose expression was more war-like than he had ever seen it.

"We start there then," North asserted, pulling the snowglobe from his pocket and tossing it into the air. Bunny's usual hesitation at North's method of transport was gone. He leapt through the portal before anyone else had had a chance to move. The others followed quickly after into a familiar old battlegroud: Burgess.

/O hi! Look at that, I'm still alive!

Sorry for the hiatus, and thanks to those of you who stuck with me through it. I promise I'll have more chapters up soon. I'm too close to the end not to finish this story.

This was a difficult chapter, I think in part because it's just been too long and I've fallen a bit out of character. The scene with North and Jack ended up being a spontaneous inclusion because I realized there would be no way for Piper to go get the Guardians if he had gotten his flute stolen. And I didn't want to shift over to the North Pole just to have them go "Oh look! A thing! Let's go!"

Any rate, thanks again for all the follows and reviews. I look forward to finishing this out and I'm glad to see that people are reading it and commenting. Every one is appreciated./