A/N: Sorry for the long delay! Life got in the way.

The lyrics referenced in this chapter are from "All the World and I," by Elana James.


The Boy Who Found Fear At Last

by Kate, Kayin, and Kira


Chapter 8

Twilight came over the Pacific and touched the edge of Australia. The Sandman floated at its edge, hurrying to reach Jack before night did.

He arrived in the Warren to see Jack already asleep, cradled in Bunny's lap and clinging to his fur with white knuckles. If his grip was too tight, no sign showed on Bunny's face. He looked very solemn and very sad.

The Sandman had a hand full of dreamsand ready as he approached the pair, realizing before Bunny spoke that it was probably needed.

"I figured it out," Bunny said, softly, so as not to wake the frost spirit still sleeping in his arms. The last of the tension on Jack's face cleared as Sandy sent a stream of dreamsand over to sweeten his dreams, his fingers relaxing their grip on Bunny's fur, but even so, Bunny didn't put him down. "Took me long enough, but I got the message."

Sandy looked at him with one of the quizzical expressions that spoke so much without a word.

"He was throwing a tantrum," Bunny said, still rocking Jack even as he drifted into dreamless, deep sleep. "Like a child. Exactly like a scared kid."

Dismay settled over Sandy's face. He lowered his hand as the last of the dreamsand did its work, waiting for Bunny to continue.

But Bunny was silent a little too long, his expression set and stoic, an expression almost, but not quite, the sort of anger that Sandy had seen Bunny hold onto before, the anger that he used when he had grief that needed to be kept at bay.

But they couldn't sit in silence forever. Sandy put his hand on Bunny's forearm, and Bunny looked up from Jack's sleeping face, just a little of the grief shining through. Tiny gold footprints walked across the space above Sandy's head. They needed to take a next step.

"Someone's got to tell the others," Bunny said. The someone, obviously Sandy, nodded, but the question still in his expression was what am I supposed to tell them? Bunny looked back at Jack, grief neatly tucked away again where it couldn't immobilize him. "Tell 'em - we knew Pitch tried to make him like a child of his. Obviously, he didn't get what he wanted...but I think he got a lot closer than we thought. Pitch tried to strip him down, do away with some of the parts that made him Jack, and I think he - got some of him after all."

He broke off and the dismay on Sandy's face deepened.

"We have to consider that we might never get those pieces back." The words left Bunny slowly, as if they weren't meant to be spoken by the Guardian of Hope.

Another brief silence followed.

Sandy touched Bunny's forearm again. He caught the rabbit's eye, to make clear his understanding of the grief Bunny was not letting himself feel.

"He was like a little brother to me," Bunny said, a thin stream of his anger at Pitch sliding through and adding a shudder to his words. "He was - he was what I needed, what I - the winter that recreated, I never even thought winter could be...all of nature needed him, just as he was, and Pitch -" he nearly choked on the awfulness of his own words. "Pitch broke him."

Was it fury or horror or grief that was thickest in his whispered snarl? The Sandman couldn't say.

He could have said, though, that this was not the only facet of grief he would see in his friends before the night was out.

It was enough grief let out in the presence of a friend for Bunnymund to lock back onto target. He had a duty to attend to. He settled, no break in his voice, hackles settling as he went on holding Jack. "So we do what works. Not what we want to work. If we're not getting our friend back, if that's just not in the cards - I can take care of a kid again. I'm not that rusty. Tell 'em that's what we might be doing. For - for however long it takes. And if it takes forever - if there's no end date -"

If there's no hope, he absolutely would not say.

"Then that's what we'll do."

It was. Sandy nodded once in agreement.

"Baby Tooth went back to the Palace," Bunny mentioned. "Y'might wanna go to Toothiana first."

Her heartbreak would have its own particular facet. Sandy and Bunny exchanged a look, already sympathetic to her.

The Sandman patted Jack's cheek, leaving a little more golden dust on his skin, and floated off to deliver the sad news.


Sandy arrived at Punjam Hy Loo shortly after Baby Tooth. She was jabbering to Tooth, who seemed confused by what she understood from the little fairy.

As soon as she spotted Sandy, Tooth fluttered over, wings humming, his expression concerned.

"Oh good, Sandy, it's you! Have you been to the warren to see Jack? Baby Tooth was trying to tell me how he is, but what she says, it - I must be understanding it wrong."

Sandy winced, looked at Baby Tooth, and back at Toothiana, still wincing his "probably not" wince.

The gravity of that settled on Tooth as she asked, "What do you mean? How bad is he?"

Sandy looked at Baby Tooth, considering how to answer. He took his time, swirling up sand to depict Jack on his knees, curled up, covering his face with his hands before collapsing to the ground. A sand Bunny hopped over and picked Jack up, cradling him like a child while sand Jack shook.

Tooth's reaction was to stare at Sandy with eyes starting to glisten with tears and then she briefly held a hand over her mouth, as she tried to control her emotions enough to ask more questions.

"Is it helping at least? Being with Bunny, and in the warren? Has he improved at all?"

A stopwatch appeared next to the sand pair and began to count time. Sandy held out his hands in a shrug. It was too soon to tell.

"I'm going to come see him," she said. "I just - I'll just need time to prepare myself."

This wasn't going to be easy to see and she was afraid she might break down - that would probably upset Jack even more.

"He's going to need us - all of us - to be strong for him and focus on helping him recover," she went on. "The last thing he needs of me getting upset seeing him like that."

Sandy reached out to touch her shoulder lightly as she came to that conclusion.

"I'm alright, Sandy."

She held her own hand to where Sandy's hand touched her shoulder, looking at him with gratitude for the comfort, but then her expression hardened, and her hands clenched at her sides, the long talon-like nails held in such a way that suggested she wanted to sink them into flesh.

"Pitch is going to pay for this. I have all the mini-fairies on the lookout for him."

It might not bring Jack back to himself, but if they could end Pitch, he could never hurt Jack like this again.

Sandy nodded in full agreement. He swirled his finger, and a little stocky North appeared, being scolded by a long-nosed hag. He had to go find the others.

Tooth nodded. "Let them know that Baby Tooth is willing to take over the Palace for me to go visit him. We should try to work out shifts. Make sure we all see him enough to help him. Bunny can let us know when he's stable enough for visitors."

With Bunny there, he wasn't going to be alone, but there were different types of alone. She knew that well enough. After her mortal friends passed away, before the Man in the Moon had come to her, she'd always had her fairies, but she'd sometimes had very little connection to the outside world. She'd sometimes spent centuries at a time in the Tooth Palace, without visiting the children, or, well, anyone.

Now that she sometimes went out into the world again, to see the children herself, to spend more time with Jack and the other Guardians, she felt connected to the world again, more than she had in centuries. That's what Jack's presence on the team had prompted them all to do, to get more directly involved in the world, to get more involved with the children again.

They needed to make sure that he didn't feel locked away and disconnected as he healed - at least until he was healthy enough to go out into the world again himself. They needed to remind him of what there was to get back to after he healed and hope against hope it'd help him heal all the faster.


Anansi didn't react to the news the way Sandy had expected him to but then he so rarely reacted to things the way anyone expected.

When Sandy had shown up outside his cave - a place the Guardians knew they couldn't just barge in on, Anansi had grabbed him by the arm.

"Come in. Quickly. I already know the news, my friend. I saw the threads and now I need to talk at you."

Sandy, bobbing in place and faintly glowing as he followed Anansi through the tunnel deeper into his cave could only raise an eyebrow, wondering what exactly Anansi needed to talk at him for. He floated ahead so that he was side by side with the other myth, causing a question mark to curl above his head, glowing faintly in the dark.

"You see, I am currently at an impasse," Anansi said. "When looking at my threads, I must think like myself and think outside myself all at once, and usually that allows me to figure out some measure of meaning that can help me guide the future. Right now, however... "

The tunnel opened up to a cavern that was covered wall to wall with spider-webs. Endless knots and patterns and little pictures woven into them, reweaving themselves into new shapes due to the light breeze through the cavern.

"As you can see, the near future is going to be very...complicated. And so I must talk at someone else rather than just myself."

Anansi shifted into his spider shape and climbed through the webs, carapace glittering in the golden glow that came from Sandy and the tiniest bit of moonlight that filtered down through the cave from few openings at the top.

Sandy floated up next to him, his expression mildly, curiously bewildered as he looked at the incomprehensible mass of web. Unlike his own functional pictograms, the webs were not meant to tell a story that anyone could decipher. Anansi alone understood their secret stories. He wove them, but unlike Sandy's pictograms, they did not come from him, were not his voice. He did not control them.

"It's all about the convergence of threads, that's always the knottiest part - pun so very obviously intended," said Anansi, crawling along and looking at the knots. "Untangling the truth, teasing it out when there's never any one truth at all."

Many times there were multiple truths to be found in dreams, and sometimes, none at all. Sandy bobbed closer to a particularly large snarl, looking carefully, then pointing to it as he looked at Anansi, one eyebrow highly raised.

"Yes. Yes, yes, that is a thread that I'd overlooked? See? This is why it pays to another set of eyes alongside my sets of eyes."

He crawled along, following the threads, to a larger cluster.

"Yes. Yes, it all comes down a single moment, but what moment that is or when it is, I can't say. Soon, we'll see. And after that moment will come the greatest threat the Guardians have ever faced, my friend. That much I am sure."

Sandy's expression was frankly bewildered. Pitch had smote him as close to death as any Guardian had ever come, and in his absence, wiped down their believers to only one - they had all been breaths from dying, if not for Jack.

"Yes, you see my concern?" Anansi said, hanging upside down from a tightly woven clump of web. "What threat could be greater than Pitch? And yet, see! One comes."

He opened his two front legs like arms to the whole of the webs spun around them, the many clumps and snarls tangled within. Sandy looked at them, uncomprehending, but beginning to feel a trace of real fear.

"What I am also sure of is this, that much depends on only one of us. Just one." Anansi pulled some webs this way and that to show a hidden pattern in the webs, shaped like a snowflake. "So much depends on his recovery, so much..."

Sandy's head snapped to that thread. The spritely Jack image over his head and his distraught expression said everything. Jack was important to them, his recovery was important to them, and Jack of course was important to the world - but importance could not guarantee success. Or recovery.

Over Sandy's head, sand folded in ocean waves and a woman rose out of it. Once, Yemaja had said that Jack was the winter the world needed, the winter that brought re-creation as Old Man Winter before him had not. Sandy pointed to the thread, questioning. Just how much depended on Jack's recovery after all?

"Lots," Anansi said, enigmatically, swinging from one side of the cave to the other, trailing a thread from his spinnerets. "He is connected to so much! Threats, possibilities, Pitch...others more threatening than Pitch..."

He paused, tilting at an angle on several layered webs that Sandy couldn't see, reaching out and touching one thread with one black-shelled leg. The web vibrated, and Anansi stared at the pattern its vibrations became with all eight eyes without saying a word.

The threads wound together in a thick, heavy knot, and the vibration ran away from the heavy lump of thread, spreading into many different patterns arranged about the cavern...but the heavy lump hung motionless, unaffected by the motion of the threads. Unaffecting them.

The spider drew his leg back slowly, still silent.

Sandy looked up from the webs he had been studying, noticing the silence, and was unnerved by how long Anansi had been sitting, quiet and still. He couldn't read Anansi's expressions when he was in his spider form, so was that fascination in his quietude, or fear?

Sandy floated up next to Anansi and put his hand on one black-shelled leg. The eight eyes swiveled to Sandy, and then Anansi was suddenly motion and sound again.

"Something big is coming," the spider said, but he swung away from the corner of the cavern with its hanging knot of web, to another pattern that spread like an explosion. "Something big is coming from our little Frost Spirit, but will it be for the good of the world, or for the bad? I cannot tell yet."

Sandy could hear it in his voice, if not see it in his face. Anansi was troubled. More than he had been when Sandy entered the cavern. Then, he'd had the tone of a conspiracy theorist, connecting this thread and that threads to get a picture of the whole, worried, yes, but more than that, curious.

Now, his voice trembled. It was more prominent than his curiosity. The spider was not just troubled. He was afraid.

Sandy floated next to him, a question mark and a spiderweb hovering over his head in gold sand.

"What have I seen? Oh - I am - I have told you -" Anansi's voice had become a distracted murmur. "Maybe nothing. Maybe I have seen nothing, nothing at all. Maybe -"

He broke off, but by the bitterness in his tone, "nothing" meant something different from "nothing to worry about."

"You have been alive far longer than I," Anansi admitted, to Sandy. "You have come from farther than anyone has ever travelled to be here."

It was true, but Anansi was not asking it as a question. Sandy waited patiently.

"There is no one left who knows the days of your youth, the world that was your home. And for longer than you have been a Guardian, you have been...you have Been. For longer than all of our lives put together, you have..."

The spider broke off, so much sadness in his tone that Sandy felt himself unexpectedly afraid for Anansi. He reached out, touched the spider again where his leg met his thorax, as if touching a human-shaped spirit on the shoulder.

Anansi turned eight glittering eyes on the Sandman again, asked, "How do you not die of loneliness, in those long stretches of time?"

This was not a mere question of curiosity. It was almost a plea for help.

"What would you do if all of this was taken from you? If you woke up one day, and...and this world that you had watched become, if even the Guardians were no more...how could that not break you, Sandman? How are you unbroken?"

The Sandman looked the spider in all eight eyes, brow knitted, and firmly repeated the image of the web and the question mark.

The spider told him what he had seen. And then the spider told him what that meant.

When he was done telling, Sandy still had his hands on the Guardian of Stories, but they were human shoulders he held, the better for Anansi to lean against Sandy, still and processing what the webs had told him.

"My," said Anansi eventually, lifting his forehead from the Sandman's shoulder. "We can't have two guardians breaking down at the same time, can we? Particularly not when I hardly deserve - it is hardly equal -"

Sandy kept his hand on Anansi's shoulder, his look of sympathy unchanged. Trauma was not a contest.

While he was considering how to best depict this, Anansi seemed to snap back into himself, drawing away and back to his webs.

"There may be more," he added, shifting back into his spider form, climbing up the webs. "I must pick apart every strand if I am to understand what's to come nearly well enough to help us through it. Please give our Frost Spirit my regards. You will tell me when he is ready for visitors? Ah." The spider waved a leg. "You - or the webs will."

Sandy knew someone sinking into their work, pulling it like a blanket over their head to keep out fear, when he saw it. He turned to go, but got Anansi's "Thank you," soft as a whisper through webs, before he had entirely left the cave.


North was in his workshop when Sandy arrived. He was not working, yet, though the Cossack stood before his work bench. He leaned against it with both hands flat on the wood, as if holding himself up by it.

He turned, took one look at Sandy's face and said, "Yes, my friend, I know."

The old saint took two tumblers carved from ice, set them on his workbench, and filled them with vodka.

Sandy accepted his, but nursed it before downing the contents. North held his, too, leaning against the workbench.

"Baba Yaga, she said things to me before she let me go on my way, the same things I see in your face," North said, looking into his vodka, before tossing the frosty shot back. "Jack is not well, is he?"

Sandy shook his head, his solemn acceptance matched only by his solemn sadness.

"Would he be better outside the Warren?"

Sandy shook his head no again.

"I thought as much. Most of me wants still to swoop in, bring him to workshop for a good dose of cheer, and wonder, you understand? But not the me that has come back from Baba Yaga's hut," North went on, setting his ice tumblr down as Sandy sampled his drink. "Jack is not well, and the pole is many things, but a place to recover - perhaps is not first on the list."

Not like the seat of all life was.

"Do you go to him?" North asked Sandy. "Each night?"

Sandy nodded, sipping his vodka slowly. In better times, he would make clear to North that his taste in the alcoholic kind of spirits was exquisite - but not now.

"Is the time right that I should come and visit?"

Sandy considered the idea, held out his hands in a maybe gesture.

"If you will tell me when time is right, I will wait to go then," North said.

Sandy still looked dubious. He pointed to North, shrugging. Jack might be ready to see North, but was North ready to see Jack?

"I told you, Baba Yaga - she has prepared me well. The wise old witch in the woods knows more about what Jack has gone through than any of us, I think," North suggested, stroking his beard. "I will go, and if I am sad, then I am sad for good cause." He shrugged, and reached for a snowglobe. "You will bring me word?"

Sandy nodded, drained his tumbler and put it back on the workbench. He had dreams to bring, and Jack to check in on.

North put his bottle away and leaned on his workbench again as the spirits did their work on his. The ice model of the toy helicopter that North had been working on at the height of summer when Bunny had first come to him, worried at Jack's absence, still sat on the workbench. No one had touched it in all the months he'd been gone. It was urgent now, at the start of autumn, that he finish his designs, that he have so many more ready for the final stages of the year's preparation for Christmas -

He would return to it. But for a moment he had to bow under the weight of the way the world had been when last he worked on this toy - the world that had a winter spirit that brought fun instead of fear, that had a sixth Guardian, that had a friend of his who was still whole, and now - now the whole world was a little bit more broken.

North's heart was a little more broken, too. He had to acknowledge that, let himself accept it, before he could move beyond it, and pick up his tools again in a world that was a little sadder, with a heart that was a little heavier, to put wonder into that world in defiance of the way that it had been broken.

The moment passed. He picked up his tools, went back to work, and waited for Sandy's word.


The blue paint looked almost right on the rocks and Jack felt the sorrow rising in him that it was almost, not just right, but the tears that welled up in his eyes didn't fall yet.

The two pebbles, frozen together, made the shape right enough, and he had packed mud in to give it the curve shape - Jack was an artisan in frost, not in earth, and it was lumpy, but the doll hadn't been made of ice. Had it been wood? Maybe it had been wood. But he had no knife. He'd never had a knife, never worked with one. Bunny certainly wouldn't - shouldn't - give him one. Bunny had given him paint, though, and there was earth all in the warren, and he could freeze earth together. Nothing was perfect. Nothing was ever perfect, simple, easy - nothing came with ease or joy like it had once, but this, the paint and the paper and the earth and the things around him, at least he had made these things. At least he could control them a little. Get them almost right. As almost-right as anything he made could be. I make a mess of everything -

"How's it coming there, Jack?"

Jack didn't jump, but looked up, disoriented. Bunny made a lot of noise - not loud noise, just enough so that Jack always knew where he was. Always Jack could catch a rustle in the grass, a scrape in the dirt or of chalk on stone, a snatch of humming, so that he knew Bunny was nearby, that it was Bunny, not...not anyone else. Rustling grass and chalk and a murmur here and there of songs were Bunny noises. But sometimes Jack might think the sound was coming from in front of him, but Bunny would be behind, sometimes he would look at a flower and remember the veined petals in the poisonous garden under the stars, sometimes he would think the shaking of a petal was not a dewdrop falling but the bloody, pale spiders about to climb back out -

Bunny hadn't looked up from the slate on which he was writing, and Jack reached out, setting his little earthen figure on the stone, pressed his hand into Bunny's fur, to make sure he was real. Soft and warm and an old, old familiar. From back before Jack had lost his sense of safety. Back when things still came easy. Back to that same world again, but not the same Jack.

Bunny looked up, caught Jack's eye and held it, putting his paw over Jack's hand. "Hey. C'mere, sweetheart. What's on your mind?"

He held out his arm for Jack to nestle under. Jack did, putting his arms around Bunny too tightly - if he held him tight enough, if he wasn't real, maybe he could hold on tight enough to prevent him disappearing. If everything, if the Warren that was full of the quiet of things living, not things being dead, if Bunny - who always made sure Jack knew where he was, who never snuck up on Jack - if all of this was not real, maybe he could still prevent the illusion from vanishing if he held on tight enough.

Jack shook his head into Bunny's fur. "This is real, right? I got out of the maze. You all came and got me. I froze the flowers but you're not mad."

"Yeah, it's real." That made the fourth time this week Bunny had reassured Jack of just that. "And nah I'm not mad. Remember? We talked about that."

"Okay."

When the Warren barely seemed real at least Bunny seemed realer. Jack had forgotten in the maze what soft rabbit fur felt and smelled like, but now that he was out of it he was sure his own mind couldn't fake it. He couldn't fake an accent, couldn't fake all the songs that his friend had picked up over the ages, couldn't fake comfort. The Warren had things he'd seen in the maze - flowers, sunshine, quiet, and it could have been a crazy memory, but Bunny had to be real. Bunny gave him comfort. Made him feel safe. Jack couldn't make those things for himself.

The fear waned away for now. It would come back but Bunny would still be nearby when it did. He'd promised.

Jack reached for his earthen figure and, disoriented, knocked the pot of blue paint over.

It spilled across the grass and the wail burst out of him like a thing that had been living inside his throat, waiting to come out.

Bunny dropped his chalk and hopped in front of Jack. "No, Jack, look at me. Look at me. You're all right - what is it?"

Jack just pointed to the spreading blue puddle, screaming. Nothing was easy. Nothing was ever easy. Nothing was ever easy but why couldn't he at least have this be easy? Why couldn't he just be able to remake what had burned up?

Bunny tucked Jack up in a hug, Jack's sobs muffled by his fur. "It's just paint, Jack, just paint. Calm down now. I can getcha some more."

"Nothing's ever easy!" Jack wailed, just so deeply, so thoroughly tired of how uneasy everything was.

He screamed for a while longer as Bunny started rocking him, waiting the storm out. A few flakes of snow fell on them, and Bunny watched them carefully, bundling Jack tighter into his arms as the snow stuck to the grass.

These snowfalls never managed to match the one that had brought him racing home on the autumn equinox. There was no end to the things that set Jack's tantrums off but as long as Bunny was there to console Jack through them, they never became deadly. When Jack paused to suck in a breath of air, Bunny started in on a lullaby in the quiet moment. "Ask not why the mountains rise -"

Jack kept crying, but the snow lightened, stopped, and he grew quiet as the tantrum worked its way to a close. It took three repetitions of the lullaby for Jack to entirely calm down, but eventually he was still, the snow melted, soothing himself by stroking Bunny's fur.

"'Cause all the world's in love with you,

Heaven longs to draw you nigh;

Yes all the world's in love with you,

All the world and I."

With Jack quiet and still, Bunny finished the lullaby and pressed his nose to Jack's forehead. "You wanna talk it out?" he asked, drawing back to look Jack in the eye again.

Jack didn't meet his gaze. "I wanted to finish it now," he said, of his little earthen figure, still upset but too tired out to cry about it any longer.

"I'll get you some more paint," Bunny reassured him, reaching for the figure. He turned it over, inspecting the two stones joined with clay in a curvy little shape. "What's it gonna be?"

"Doesn't matter," Jack said, leaning away from it. "It won't be right."

"Yeah, but it'll be yours. So of course it matters," Bunny said.

"It won't be right." Why had he even tried, really? When he was only an artisan of frost, a novice in everything else. "I didn't make the real one. The one before that North gave me -"

Bunny recognized the mimicry of the shape of a matryoshka doll. "Your center doll?" he asked, peering curiously.

"Pitch made me burn it," Jack said. He tried to remember. Had the flame been blue, or green when it burned in the lead? "I just...I wanted it to exist again."

Bunny wanted to throw Pitch in a pool of molten lead but now was not the time - and Jack was not the person to express this to. Instead he gathered Jack more closely into his arms.

"How about we get North to make you another?" he suggested. He wondered if this was a safe suggestion, but decided it was the right time to make it. "Would you like to go visit the pole, visit North again? I'll take you there. We can both say g'day to the old blowhard."

Jack thought back, back, frowned.

"Will I have to go in a sack?"

"What? No." Bunny waited to see if Jack was a little more disturbed by that memory than he'd originally revealed, but Jack just seemed skeptical. "Not this time. We'll take the tunnels, right, mate?" He paused, waiting for Jack's response, getting none. "You can say no. You don't have to go."

"I -" Jack's face twisted, suddenly, wracked with indecision. "I do - but - I don't - It's - the pole is so -"

The decision making was a little too much for him and Bunny watched in dismay as the frost spirit crumpled under the weight of it, his face suddenly streaming with tears.

"How about I decide then?" he suggested. Jack pressed his lips together, nodding fiercely, trying to hold in his wails. "We'll go next week," Bunny said. "How's that? You can decide in that week if you want to go or not, but if you do, we'll go then. Give you some time to prepare."

This idea calmed Jack successfully, his tears slowing, though he still stared ahead with empty, sad eyes.

"In the meantime," Bunny put his paw on Jack's shoulder. "There's more paint. I'll help you make a temporary doll, right? Baby Tooth will let North know you'd like a new one, he'll have one waiting when you decide to go. Whether that's a week from now or later."

He leaned on the later. Jack had to come to a point where he was comfortable leaving the Warren, but when and how also had to be his choice. It just had to happen.

Jack nodded. "Okay."

He waited calmly, quietly, staring sadly at the grass, while Bunny dipped up more blue paint from the river, and returned, to help him bring it to the right shade.


Tooth was the first to visit. She had been preparing to visit ever since Sandy brought her the word of Jack's breakdown on the autumn equinox.

She'd had a feeling things had not been going well. Baby Tooth had been in the Warren nearly every moment since Bunny had taken Jack there, and Tooth could feel what her tiny, childlike self felt fairly well even across a great distance. And what Baby Tooth felt in the Warren had never been great - never particularly hopeful, which was such a saddening thing in the home of the Guardian of Hope.

She had been steeling herself all that time, bolstering herself on memories of Jack, whole and healthy, to prepare to see him still broken. Still broken, but at least now in a way that they understood. Pitch had tried to break Jack down until he was dependent as a child, and then chain that child to himself -

It was a sickening, infuriating thought. It sickened and infuriated her even after she'd given the thought time to sink in, and the queen of memories longed for Pitch Black to rear even a trace of himself where one of her fairies could see. She would be there faster than her fairies could swap a tooth for a quarter, and these days, her swords never left her hips.

That Pitch continued to be silent, that her fairies saw no sign of him, only gave her blood more time to boil. She'd already had to find time to let that fury out, and if the ages without practice had made her rusty at the swords - all that fury had found an outlet in practice, and she was not rusty anymore.

She had no pity in her heart to spare for Pitch but anyone who had seen her preparing to meet him again might have.

But she put her rage - and her swords - away before she went to see Jack. She left them both at the mouth of the tunnel that lead to the warren, at the feet of the sentinel egg that guarded the door and stood by to let her through. Bunnymund was near the door when she fluttered through.

"G'day Tooth," he said, rising, putting down the slate he'd been crouched over when she came in. Tooth glanced at his work and saw, of all things, math scrawled across the stone in chalk - but this was hardly the time to be asking Bunny about new projects. "Baby Tooth said you might be by today."

"How is he?" Tooth asked, both dreading and needing the answer.

Bunny sucked in a breath, let it out in a sigh, deciding how to answer. "He's...calm today. It's a calmer day than others." He tilted his head towards a grassy knoll, where a low stone made a little cave that was still, somehow, full of the soft light that filled the warren. Tooth saw snow around the rim of the cave, icicles hanging from the overhanging stone, and the blue of Jack's sweater inside. "He's in his icebox. You picked an alright day to come and visit, as far as the days go."

Tooth started to go to him, but Bunny caught her hand first. She looked back at him, caught the concern in his eyes.

"It'll be good for him to see you, but are you - will you be all right?" Bunny asked. "It's - this has to be harder for you than the rest of us."

"Hard or not, I'm here for him," she said, softly, calmly, and Bunny let her hand go. "He needs his good memories now, more than ever."

She drifted over to where Jack was huddled in his little insulated cave, tracing his fingers across a big black stone, leaving patterns of frost.

"Hello Jack," she said, trying to conceal the break in her voice. He looked up, sharply, like a kicked animal, but the wariness on his face faded slightly - not entirely.

"Baby Tooth said you were coming," he said, and started to put out his hand, hesitating before truly reaching for her.

Tooth finished the gesture, sliding her delicate hand under Jack's larger, rougher one. The touch reassured Jack finally, and he lost his hesitance, relaxing and lifting her hand, studying her nails like he was using them to reassure himself she was real.

"You're so pretty," he said, clearly, as if this reassured him. "Even your fingernails are pretty."

"Thank you, Jack," Tooth said, but her heart was not in accepting the compliment when the way he still held himself, closed in, small, as deep in the cool cave as possible, put more fissures in her heart.

"Nothing was pretty in the maze," he said, almost conversationally. "No -" he paused, remembering. "There were pretty things. But not you. Pretty things that would turn ugly when I looked closely. But even your fingernails are pretty," he repeated. "Even your fingernails."

I shouldn't have come, Tooth thought, but she clamped down on that thought. Her heart was breaking, but Jack's heart and mind had been broken, and he needed her to forget her own sadness and be strong for a little longer.

But Jack looked up and caught sight of her face before she could school it, and his face fell.

"You're sad," he said. "I - please don't be sad -"

He dropped her hand and reached for her cheek, his fingertips brushing over her feathers, and Tooth couldn't stop a tear or two from welling up.

"Yes," she admitted, because admitting it a little would let enough pressure off her sadness that she could work around it. "You know what I like to do when I'm sad, Jack?"

He grinned at her hugely, a tiny, tiny bit of his old sense of humor bubbling to the surface. "Look at my teeth?"

Tooth didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She put her hands on Jack's shoulder's, looking down, shaking her head to clear - what? Sadness or humor or both maybe. She wiped her eyes. "Yes, Jack, but I like to - I like to revisit my favorite memories, too," she said.

"Oh. Okay. What are they?"

"My favorite memory from very recently," she said, "was when you and I were collecting teeth together the first time." The memory did help lift her spirits.

"You flew face first into a billboard," Jack said, "But you were okay so it was funny." His grin faltered. "You were okay right? I'm remembering that right?"

"Yes, you're remembering that right," Tooth said.

"It was so long ago." Jack suddenly looked down, rubbing his eyes. "Can't - where. Hard to remember."

It had been only a handful of years before. As good as a moment ago to Tooth. She could have walked him through that night, second by second.

So she did. All the pranks that the boys had played on each other as they helped her, everything she'd felt and seen that was wonderful and delightful, encouraging Jack all the time to pick out his own special memories of that night. Pranks she hadn't witnessed. The things he'd seen and felt that meant the most to him.

The prompting made it easier for Jack to remember and he seemed much more relaxed, much more at ease by the time they were done reminiscing. He held her hand in his, but wasn't checking it constantly as if to make sure it was real.

"What other memories help you when you feel sad, Jack?" she asked.

Jack shrugged. "Hard to remember," he said. He looked at Tooth. "You're sad. You're sad I'm like this," he said, a little note of bitterness in his voice. "I'm sad I'm like this too."

Tooth put her free hand on his cheek. "It doesn't matter," she said, calmly, though of course it did, very much. "If you're having trouble remembering, I'll come back again soon with another good memory for you," she said. "Tomorrow, even. Every day if you want."

"I want that," Jack said. "But you're sad."

"It's all right," she insisted. She smiled, put on a brave face. "No matter what happens, Jack, we have our memories and they're stronger than what's here right now. That's why I protect them."

She squeezed his hands. No matter if those memories were all she would ever have - at least she had them.

"I'm going to help you keep them. I promise."


It was noontime when the Spider crept into the Warren.

The sight of a spider the size of a horse would have sent many brave people screaming for many understandable reasons, but Jack didn't scream when he saw Anansi. He did run, though.

Bunny was meditating when he heard Jack running and cracked one eye open just in time to brace himself as Jack crashed into him, wrapping his arms tight around Bunny's waist and burying his face in Bunny's fur.

"What's the matter, something spook ya?" Bunny asked, but Jack just moaned softly and kept his face hidden. The scent of spider reached Bunny, and his confusion cleared. He spotted Anansi in time to see the spider twist into the shape of a man, and waved.

"G'day, you eight-legged bounce, what brings you 'round these parts?" he called, patting Jack on the back and waving to Anansi. His tone was light and friendly, but his expression said, "if you say anything to upset Jack, I will rip off your extra legs and beat you with them."

Anansi lifted his human hands in surrender. One held a small bag. "I come in peace, old friend! Look, I even brought a present."

"I don't want any stories," Jack whimpered, too softly for anyone without rabbit ears to hear.

Bunny patted him on the back. "Don't worry about that, Jack. Looks like you get candy instead. Am I right, Anansi?"

"Indeed you are," said Anansi, tossing the burlap sack up and down as he ambled over to Jack and Bunny. "There is a grandmother in Ghana whose candied ginger is simply paradise on Earth."

Jack had looked up just enough to watch Anansi with one blue eye, still clinging to Bunny even as his gaze locked on the candy. He hesitated, and Anansi crouched down, holding the bag out a little farther.

"Do you remember the game with the Groundhog and the Leprechaun? I heard you say candied ginger was your favorite."

Jack hadn't heard Anansi speak so gently since the spider had given him a rare, comforting story after he almost died fighting the fire-breathing Grootslang beneath Botswana.

"No tricks," the Spider promised, still in that gentle tone. "And no scary stories today. On my honor. Which, contrary to myth, I do sometimes have."

Jack was partial to candied ginger. He took the bag, slowly, and when it stayed a bag in his hand, he let go of Bunny but still leaned against him as he tugged it open and pulled out a sugared ginger piece.

"I thought I might take it to Kilimanjaro, to freeze it, but it would have started to thaw by the time I arrived," Anansi went on, as Jack lessened his lean on Bunny, who still had a paw on his shoulder. "And you are more than capable of freezing your own snacks anyway."

"He wouldn't trick you on this one," Bunny reassured him. "Candied ginger is about the only thing he always takes seriously."

"Thank you," Jack said, nibbling on a piece of candy. It was good, easily the best candied ginger he'd had in his long, long life. "It's good," he announced.

Anansi's smile was unusually reserved. "I'm glad you like it. How have you been, Jack?"

"Good," said Jack, around the candy. He continued nibbling, watching Anansi carefully, wondering what else to say. "I painted those," he finally said, pointing to sheets of paper that were drying on the grass. "And I'm painting one now."

"Do you want to go back to painting it again?" Bunny asked, patting his back.

"Yes," Jack said, like he was admitting a secret.

"You can do that," said Bunny. "You can tell him that. You don't have to wait for one of us to ask, all right Jack?"

"I don't have to," Jack repeated but the permission seemed to reassure him still. "So I can go now?"

"Yeah mate, you can go if you want."

"Okay. Buh-bye. Thanks for the candy," Jack said, picking out another piece to nibble and trotting with relief back to his art supplies.

"That was a nice gesture," Bunny said, to Anansi, watching Jack go.

"I know you expected trickery and games," said Anansi, without judgement, or resignation. "But I can see he has been tricked enough already. There is nothing that boy needs from me but a steady supply of candy."

Bunny raised an eyebrow in approval. "You took the time to think of that."

"I have been," the spider chose his words carefully, "harsh to him before he was breaking. But I am not a blind monster." He tilted his face towards Bunny, blinked, and six more eyes opened in his human face, black and staring. "You of all people should know that."

Bunny snorted, with an edge of amusement as Anansi batted his spider eyes, all of them thickly lashed. "What, should I somehow not know you well enough not to know what to expect? How exactly could I have missed that by now?"

Anansi blinked his spider eyes away with a sigh. "Will I ever get one past you, old friend?" he asked, innocently.

Bunny just snorted again, still with the edge of amusement, as he watched Jack scribbling away on his paper, popping another piece of genuine grandmother's candy into his mouth.

Another person less well acquainted with the Guardian of Hope might not have been able to interpret the twitching of his ears and the way he stood, arms crossed over his chest, as signs of deep anger. Jack wouldn't have been able to catch them, not past Bunny's calm bearing.

But the old spider did, and he said suddenly, as if out of nowhere, "You know, perhaps I will never get anything past you, but you must be aware by now, you have gotten things past yourself, trying to outthink me."

"Is that right?"

"Yes. I have a truth to tell you," Anansi said, and the word "truth" made Bunny turn his gaze away from Jack, raising his eyebrows with skepticism. "You remember when I came to see you, after the Old Man. Just before we stopped speaking for that long time -"

Bunny crossed his arms, releasing a deeply held sigh. "Is now really the time for this?" he asked, a touch of impatience in his tone.

"Yes," Anansi affirmed, and paused. The pause gave Bunny time not to protest, and to shrug his shoulders in as close as Anansi was going to get to a 'Go on.' "You remember what I said, when I came to see you in this place -" he paused, casting his eyes around the green, growing Warren, his tone lilting as it grew into a story. "When it was so bare, with you the only life left in it?"

"Of course I remember." Bunny cut in. He looked directly at Anansi for the first time. A fierce ember, old, that had yet never died, was in his gaze. "Did you lie to me? When you said you didn't know what was coming?"

"No," Anansi said, frank, unruffled. "No, I did not lie. I even told you a truth. But it was not all of the truth."

"Then tell me all of the truth."

"You asked me," Anansi went on, in his storytelling lilt. "If I had foreseen that Old Man Winter would try to put an end to spring forever. You asked, without asking, if I had known that everyone you called your family, everyone you loved, was going to die. And I told you I had foreseen that there would be an Occasion and that you would rise to it."

Anansi paused for effect.

"Get on with it, you eight-legged bounce."

"You always ruin my timing," Anansi sniffed. "You could say I did lie," he admitted. "I did not foresee an Occasion. I foresaw many."

Bunny looked away from the spider, saying nothing.

"You know," Anansi went on, musing - "It is a strange twist of fate. We have given our lives to the children, all six of us, and yet of the six of us, only you and I ever had children ourselves." Anansi glanced at him as he went on. "And I am the only one who was granted time with his."

Bunny's only response was to sigh out deeply, brushing a paw over his face, hiding his eyes only a moment before smoothing back the fur over his forehead and down one long ear. Anansi looked back at Jack as he said nothing.

"But I could not do this," he admitted, clicking his teeth together like pincers, so softly that only rabbit ears could hear. "My children came to me for jokes. I gave them lessons, not comfort. I never nursed a child back from an edge, much less one this perilous. I could not do this," he repeated. He turned to Bunny. "And I did not foresee it - just as I didn't foresee the Old Man's plans. Just as I have not foreseen all of the great victories you have been responsible for against the evil that creeps in the dark - but my friend, do you know, since the time when you were young and I was less old, when you were still mortal and your friends still called you by your name, I have always believed that you would rise to many occasions. This story is still fragile but it is so much stronger now than it was a very short time ago." Anansi looked long over Jack again. "For once, my friend, I believe I am the one who can bring you hope."

Bunny was silent for so long that Anansi huffed impatiently.

"You might say 'thank you, o Great and Wise Anansi,'" the Great and Wise Anansi prompted. "Especially now that I am remembering why we did not speak for so long." He crossed his arms, pouting. "You were so mean to me."

Bunny snorted at Anansi's sudden, injured petulance. "You'll have to find it in your heart - spiders have hearts, right? - to forgive me. I was having a very bad day." He laughed again, as if he'd been infected by humor.

"Ah, you were," Anansi admitted, his petulance fading. "And you knew my reputation for half-truths, even then."

Bunny snorted. "And let me guess, you never found it in your heart to forgive me for it."

"Worse," Anansi said, crossing his own arms peevishly. "I found it in my heart to admire you."

Bunny glanced at him, his smirk betraying just a little bit that he was touched.

"Even as you grew so very boring," Anansi went on. Bunny punched him lightly.

"I mean it, though," the spider went on, rubbing his arm. "We tore so many fools up one side and down the other - I would be lying if I said I didn't miss that. But this -" Anansi shrugged at Bunny. At the Warren. Vaguely at Jack. "This is more important. And I'm glad you're around to help him through it. No one lives who knows better than you how to turn suffering into strength."

Bunny sighed, as if exhaling the last of their conversation.

"Right then," he said. "Since you're in a truthful mood - I've got a question. About a story a lot older than me."

"A lot of stories are older than you," Anansi responded, without commitment.

"It's about the Light of Eos," Bunny said, and he gestured vaguely at the whole of the warren. The diffuse light that illuminated it softly beamed on the greenery, warm and gentle as ever, beaming from the plants themselves. "Just - tell me, if there was a story going about it now, what would it say - ?"

He trailed off, as if uncertain just how specific his question could, or should be.

"Oh, that story," Anansi said, following Bunny's glance around the Warren. "Now that is an old story indeed, a long time in the setting up - one which I am not even close to knowing the end of."

He paused, for dramatic effect.

"But I think I say a bit of how its next chapter goes. It begins with an idea -" the Spider's eyes had grown distant. "That suggests a weapon."

Bunny nodded.

"Good to hear," he said, looking at Jack, glad that the frost spirit had not heard.


When Anansi had gone, Bunny returned to the section of the Warren that functioned as his workshop to finish an experiment.

Jack's easel was set up nearby, but the frost spirit had never over the weeks in the Warren taken interest in the work Bunny was doing on the wide, flat stone that made his workfloor, by the bubbling hot springs and the steam vents that gave him heat when he needed them. Usually, when Bunny was at work, this part of the Warren was rich with the smell of chocolate and caramel and confectionary wonders only the most imaginative children could dream of, but sometimes, as now, the smell from the workspace was not heavenly. Today, the only smell came from a few pine branches, burning with a bright, small flame on the wide flat stone. Strange symbols surrounded the little fire, inscribed in chalk chipped straight from the Warren's walls. The corner of the stone was covered with more chalkmarks - spell circles and calculations, scrawled notes and sketched illustrations that, for days, had been of no interest to Jack.

Bunny had pored over them constantly when Jack was occupied - but now, he was painting.

The eggshell was as detailed and ornate as any egg he'd ever hand-painted to be the jewel of the year's egghunt. However, the colors he'd brewed to paint it were dark evergreen and bright, burning fire - not the soothing floral palette which the Warren produced without influence. He painted the burning evergreen over an eggshell that had been carved, almost too shallowly for the eyes to see, with symbols and patterns much reflected in the chalk notes scrawled across the stone.

When the eggshell was done, he hopped over to the burning pine branches and looked over the chalk notes surrounding it, and, with a cautious glance at Jack - the boy was still absorbed in his crayon drawing - began muttering in a language that none but him had spoken in a thousand years.

The light left the fire in a flickering stream, feeling its way straight to the tiny hole drilled in the small end of the eggshell. It coiled inside the shell like an animal curling into a burrow, and as the last gleam of light vanished inside, Bunny pressed his thumb over it and reached for the sealing wax he used to cap his egg bombs. Over this, he laid a piece of thick, dark leaf, adhering to the sealing wax and blending into the evergreen paint that bloomed into fire on the egg's surface.

The wax held, and he lifted the egg for inspection. Deep inside, past the layers of paint and the carved eggshell, yes - a spot of brightness glowed, illuminating the shell gently from within. in front of him, the pine branches still burned. But now the fire danced with no light.

With a sinking sensation he observed the flickering, near-invisible shimmer that remained of the fire. It smoked and danced as usual, but the only indication that it burned was the smoke and heat and the blackening of the pine. It set his teeth on edge. A dry tinder burning with this same lightless fire would be nearly invisible.

Not the weapon he wanted - but a byproduct weapon of the one he'd just invented, which could hurt a lot more people than the weapon he'd wanted in the first place.

He swept a waiting pile of dirt over the lightless fire and stamped it down thoroughly, to make sure it was truly banked, then opened a tunnel beneath the whole pile. With another glance at Jack to make sure he was still playing, he dropped the egg down the tunnel, and observed the flash of light in the dark as all of the fire's light burst free of the broken shell in a single blast.

A small flash, but so bright, a few minutes worth of light in a single instant. A flashbomb made from a light that had been burning longer would have an intensity far greater.

Bunny had never had so many mixed feelings about an experiment being such a success.

He stood, stamping the tunnel closed on the remains of his work, and twirled the chalk in his fingers, sighing as he looked up at the Warren around him in thought, when a sudden command caught his attention.

"Wait."

The word, spoken in two voices, halted him still as a statue.

He turned around. Two land formations that had not been there a moment ago stood at the edge of his worktable - a spire of rock and a mound of soil. The rock formation had erupted through the grass in the Warren, striated in layers from ochre gold to deep brick red, as if it had been building up for thousands and thousands of years. Its shape curved upwards, smooth and flowing, as if the wind had been shaping it for a hundred thousand more.

Beside the spire, the mound of rich black soil bloomed with vines and flowers. They grew richer, thicker, fuller by the second, yet still the black depths of the soil they grew in was visible.

Bunny knelt before both of them, his expression resigned. "All right, I know this looks like a bad idea, but I have good reasons."

"It looks as though you're capturing light as a tool for force," spoke the black mound in a voice as lush as the greenery growing from her. "Can you really be thinking to use the Light of Eos as a weapon?"

"She was never one for violence." The red rock spire's voice rumbled the ground faintly beneath his feet. "What do you think making a weapon of her remains will accomplish?"

"Pitch Black needs to die," Bunny cut in, still kneeling respectfully, with the hesitance of one speaking to his superiors - and prepared to defy them, but hoping not to have to do it. "He's gotten too dangerous and if Eos' light can help -"

"What makes you think it will? I must have evidence. Making this weapon will be like plucking a leaf from a tree that will never grow back," the black mound warned. "The world is already less rich without her. If you do this, your reason must justify making it that less richer."

"Who is Pitch Black again?" said the rock spire, in a subdued thrum, as if she were whispering to the black mound.

"The Nightmare King," Bunny explained. "He's out of control, and he travels by shadows."

"Oh, him," the rock spire responded. "The one who crashed with the Sandman."

"That's the one."

"I never liked him."

"If Eos' light can slow him down long enough, I need to try -"

"You have duties to the world, not just the children who live on it," the red rock said, her voice grown suddenly stern. "I may not like your enemy, but your duty does not include throwing the light of the world away on a personal grudge."

The black mound, too, spoke with astonished sorrow. "Have you considered what Eos would have thought of the last of her beloved followers making a weapon of her remains?"

"We have not restricted you from much, but this is dangerously close to a desecration."

Their accusations touched a nerve - one that made Bunny drop his gaze to the ground, gritting his teeth. But he rallied, standing up from his kneel with his expression set.

"It's not only personal. Pitch Black woke up Old Man Winter," he said, "Not the first time, but recently. He gambled the world to get someone he wanted." He paused, his next justification grating on his pride. "And he almost killed me, a few years back. He had all the kids but one not believing in all the Guardians. I don't think for a minute he woulda let me live after the others' faded, if Jack hadn't done for him." He paused. "I know - hurting him wouldn't have been Eos' first choice, but this isn't his first chance. We've had to defeat him too many times, and the cost has already been too high. Each time we haven't done 'im in, he's done worse than before."

He trailed off, but the silence from the visiting deities spoke volumes as to the strength of his argument.

"He almost killed you?" the black mound spoke with a note of concern.

"And you have shown him mercy since?" the rock spire added, her tone dry.

He'd convinced them. Bunny relaxed. "You see what I'm getting at. He's too dangerous to let live anymore. But I don't know if we can kill him by the usual means - "

"Even so, Eos was not warlike," the black mound said. "Your only suspicion her light might harm him is based on his shadowy nature."

"Bunny, am I hallucinating now?" Jack suddenly said from behind the pooka, sounding more than a little alarmed. He was clinging to his staff as he leaned against it, as if trying to keep a better grip on reality by keeping a tight grip on it. "The dirt is talking."

The tension in the Warren shifted as all three speakers turned their attention on Jack. Something in the air made it clear that the faceless earth formations were, in their way, looking right at him.

"Why is he here?" asked the black mound, her tone curious, not accusing. "You let him in?" her tone suggested, not that she disagreed, but that she hadn't expected it.

Jack had lost much of his ability to read tone, though. He gripped his staff more tightly. "Bunny, tell her I don't have to leave. I don't have to leave, right?"

Bunny loped over immediately to reassure Jack, his manner all at once casual and good humored. "Ah, nobody's sayin' that." He put his hand against Jack's face, smiling to comfort the boy. Jack didn't smile back, but he leaned into the touch like an animal seeking comfort. Bunny glanced back at the earth formations. "Look, ah, all due respect, he's having enough trouble reading people right now when they have faces. D'you think you could -"

"Of course."

"Just a moment."

The black mound of soil compressed, piece by piece, the vines upon her weaving into loose robes around the shape of a woman. Vines fell from her head like dreadlocks, flowers blooming in them to ornament her, pink and white and yellow stark against her green robes and skin as black as the soil that she had been a moment ago.

The rock spire cracked, pieces shearing off until it too took the shape of a woman, her dark skin smeared with red dust, her body thick with muscle like rolling hills. She reached up to smooth the last of the crags from her complexion, leaving white dust from the limestone that her hands had been on her bare scalp in a bright handprint.

Both women stood tall and dark, and there was something in their faces that suggested relation - and immense, uncountable age.

"Oh, okay," Jack said distantly, as if a talking rock and talking dirt made much more sense when they could turn into people.

Bunny gestured, respectfully towards the earth women. "Jack, these are the Mothers. Gaia," He nodded to the former black mound of soil, "and Terra." He nodded to the painted woman who had been a rock. "You know them. Mother Nature and Grand-Mother Earth."

Jack waved in the half-hearted way children do when they don't feel well and other things are better distractions from it than what they're doing at the moment, then pushed his hand through his hair, which was more unkempt than ever.

"Bunny, I broke my purple crayon," he said to the pooka, sounding absolutely devastated over the fact. "I sat on it."

The Mothers exchanged a glance with their newly human faces. Terra spoke, again whispering to her daughter. "What is a crayon?"

Gaia shrugged.

"Ah, no worries," said Bunny, patting Jack on the back. "I'll get you a new one in a tic. Can y'wait that long?"

"But my picture -" Jack protested, his voice growing waterier. "If I don't have the purple, it won't be right and I want - it was going - almost done -"

Gaia and Terra, now that they had faces, were of course easier to read, and they both looked bewildered. Gaia's expression was particularly concerned.

She stepped past her mother, flowers growing in her wake. "This isn't the first time we've met," she said, to Jack. "Do you remember? It was not very long ago - maybe a hundred years or so. I wore this face. Much poison had been dumped into a river and we saw each other as I tried to purify it - you froze it in place, and I was too hurried to thank you. Do you remember that? I do."

A hundred years or so ago, to Jack, now seemed much longer ago since his time in the dark. He shook his head wordlessly, then leaned into Bunny, hiding his face insecurely in the rabbit's fur.

Bunny tucked his arm around Jack's shoulder, gently, patting him on the back. Mother Nature gave him a questioning look, and he met her gaze. "He's ah...recovering from something," Bunny said, not wanting to mention Pitch where Jack could hear. "I've been taking care of him. Some days're better than others."

Gaia looked back at Terra, the glance between them ripe with understanding.

Terra crossed her powerful arms in the background as Gaia knelt before Jack again. "I am happy to see you again," she said, her tone grown coaxing and motherly. "It's not many winter spirits with hearts warm enough to be welcome in my home."

"This is Bunny's home," Jack said, removing his face from Bunny's fur long enough to deliver the correction.

He kept a sliver of blue eye on her, though, after he'd nestled back into Bunny's fur, so he saw her smile gently.

"Bunnymund is the protector of spring and this is where spring was born," she explained. "Who do you think gave birth to it?"

That question struck Jack, enough that he gave Gaia his full gaze. "You?" he suggested.

"That's right," she said, warmly, smiling in a way that called to mind the memory of Yemaja. And, deeper down, Jackson Overland's mother. "And all life on this world was born from spring. Jack Frost - are you ice and moonlight given a soul or are you descended from me?"

"I was human," Jack said slowly. "But then I died. But I saved my sister so the Man in the Moon brought me back like this."

"Did he now?" Gaia looked at her mother. "I had no idea he could do that."

"The Man in the Moon is young but his power is great," Terra mused, curiosity cracking crows' feet around the corners of her eyes.

"Have you liked being Jack Frost?" Gaia went on, turning back to Jack.

Jack opened his mouth to answer and found that he didn't have an answer. Not one that came easily, anyway.

On the one hand, he had died that day in the pond and if not for his second life, there was so much he would have missed out on. He never would have met Bunny and the other Guardians. He never would have danced on the winter wind or brought joy to children with every snow day or watched countless sunrises and sunsets over nearly every inch of the world. He would have never met Jamie and been believed in.

What kind of life was one where you died young and never got to see the salt flats in Uyuni, Bolivia after it rained? Or the snow-dusted mountains of the Alps? Or the view of Paris from the very top of the Eiffel Tower at night?

On the other hand, he'd suffered through three hundred years of agonizing loneliness and confusion. And then there had been the maze -

"I don't know," Jack said carefully. "I used to, even when I was alone, but now I'm not so sure. But I'm trying to like it again."

She crouched before him, her immense height easily meeting his eyes at a crouch, resting her chin in her hand. "I hope you enjoy it again soon," she murmured. Her eyes glanced over his face, like she was only just now recognizing his features, as if he were someone she had met a long time ago - longer than the day at the river - and was just now recollecting. "May I ask you another question, Jack? Or do you want to go back to your art?"

"I can answer another question," said Jack. His urgency to return to his art was perhaps not totally doused, but he seemed not to find it as pressing now that he'd begun speaking to Gaia.

"Did you like being human?"

This one was easier to answer. Jack nodded.

"Sometimes it was hard, but I had my mom and my sister and we used to play all the time. Me and my sister. Winter was always my favorite because we'd go ice skating, but I really liked the spring, too." He seemed to want her to know that he held all that she had done in high regard. "My sister always wanted me to help her make chains of flowers for her hair."

"I'm glad to hear that. I know living isn't always easy for mortals." Her eyes were soft and kind. "I see it all the time. I saw it with you," she said, her gaze confident as she looked at his face, as if she had finally placed him. "With your sister. And with your mother. Forgive me for not recognizing you for your mortal face sooner, Jack. I don't always remember right away, but I never forget the faces of my children."

Jack was quiet for a little while, before finally asking. "So...so even if I hadn't become Jack Frost, I still would've mattered?"

"Of course," she said, mildly surprised that it was a question. "You did matter. The world was richer for having you in it - and it's even richer now, with you immortal in it."

Jack could only smile at that, in a way that suggested he was out of practice. Then awkwardly, he leaned towards her and lightly butted his head against her shoulder, hoping to get a hug without starting one. When she wrapped her arms around him, vines tightening comfortingly, he relaxed into it and wrapped his arms around her.

"Thank you for making all the nature in the world, it's really nice."

"Thank you for being the winter the world needs," she said, tucking him into her arms and pressing her cheek against his forehead. "My nature would not do nearly so well without you."

While Jack was tucked in Gaia's hug, Bunny had darted off, fast as he could. He was back as Jack looked for him.

"Here ya' go, mate, found that crayon after all."

"Oh. Thanks." Jack took the crayon, inspecting it for a moment. His smile was satisfied. "I have to go finish my picture now or I might not get it right," he said, untangling himself from Gaia's vines, as she gathered them up to release him. "But thanks for coming to visit."

"It was my pleasure," Gaia said. She reached to pat him on the head, but stopped midway, seeing Bunny frantically waving a "no" sign at her behind Jack. She paused for a brief second, before putting her hand on Jack's shoulder instead. "I hope I see you around the world soon."

"Yeah, maybe," he said with a noncommittal shrug before dashing off to his easel.

They waited in silence for several moments, before they were sure he was too far to hear them

Grandmother Earth broke the silence, her eyes narrowed. "He -" she pointed after Jack, who had tottered away to scribble furiously on his drawing, so furiously and intently that he looked as if he'd break the crayon again - "tricked Old Man Winter into taking the Enkidu Oath?"

"Stonkered him fairly at the challenges of winter," Bunny corrected, touched with pride at the memory. "And gathered the shards of the Snow Queen's mirror after. He's -" he paused, correcting himself. "He was like a brother to me."

"And Pitch Black did this to him?" said Gaia, the motherly concern gone from her eyes - replaced by the sternest, quietest, most maternal of rage, like the whisper of wind that comes before a hurricane.

"Got it in one," Bunny growled.

"He was brave, when last I saw him," said Gaia, "Sure of himself. He brought the winter spring needed to flourish." The vines growing as her hair curled tightly. "Eos would have loved him."

"She would have," Bunny agreed, his growl gone. His voice had softened almost beneath the point of hearing.

"She would weep to see him now," Gaia said.

"Kill Pitch Black," Terra pronounced, blunt as an avalanche.

"I need no more convincing," agreed Gaia.

Bunny did not react to the news with enthusiasm.

"I'm not gonna throw it around carelessly," he said, once again thinking of the weapon to be made. "I only want to make one."

"Then you use it right," Terra said. "When he is as close to defeated as you can get him without striking a final blow. And when that final blow can be struck -"

"Only then," Gaia insisted. "But only then, don't hesitate."

"He has been a blight on my soil since he fell here with the Sandman," Terra pronounced. "There is a place for fear in this world, but he has overstepped himself every chance he gets. "

"While there is life, there will always be someone to take up a burden laid down," Gaia murmured. "Perhaps his successor will be one more appropriate to the role. As Jack was more appropriate for winter than the old man."

She watched after Jack a moment longer before inhaling deeply.

"I must go now," she said. "A hurricane is brewing off Cote D'Ivoire. If I don't temper it, your work will be harder this year."

Bunny bent the knee, bowing in farewell, suddenly formal. "Thank you, Mother. I wish the circumstances were better, but it's an honor t'see you again."

"I wish they were, too," Gaia said. Because Bunny was looking at the grass, and not at Gaia, he didn't see her look of slight uncertainty, or see her reach her hand out as if to give him a comforting touch. She pulled it back as Bunny rose, all business, to repeat the bow and the honorific to Terra.

The Mothers sank back into the soil.

Bunny took an unpainted egg from the nearest blooming flower and returned to his work, carving with his claws first a great circle for the sun in the shell of the egg.