Chapter 9 - Picking Sides

Jack frowned as he sat on the tree by the lake. there was no way that Pitch wasn't looking for him and knowing the shade, he'd find him soon enough. Jack stared down at the lake, so this is where it all started, he'd always been drawn to the village of Burgess and that lake but he hadn't known why. This was where, three hundred years ago, a boy called Jackson Overland died. Those memories, Jack thought, should be distant by now, it had been a day since he'd seen them but over three hundred years since he lived them, he'd thought that they'd just fade to the back of his mind like distant memories ought to. He thought about what North had said, about him being chosen as a guardian for a reason but he couldn't see it. Yes, he saved his younger sister when he was alive a very long time ago, he'd sacrificed his life for hers but people do that every day. What made him so special? He tapped his staff against the tree bark, watching the frost curl around the tree, why was he meant to be a guardian? What was his centre? What good could Jack Frost possibly bring to children? A part of him actually wanted to join the guardians, to be believed in and find his place in the world but the rest of him knew that his place was at Pitch's side. He didn't need to be believed in to belong and Pitch needed him. Jack sighed to himself, his thoughts were muddled and he wasn't doing a very good job of working through them.

Easter was in a day, he supposed that he'd have to figure out who's side he was on by then. If he picked the Guardians then Pitch would be alone, again. Jack knew that he couldn't do that. Pitch had been alone for far too long before Jack came around and the teen wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he left Pitch alone again. The guardians couldn't see Pitch, not really. They just saw an evil, power hungry monster but that wasn't who Pitch was. Pitch was the boogyman, he needed fear to be believed in, that was hardly his fault, but he was more than just fear. He was a man who Jack had known for so long, a man that had taken in a lonely teenager who didn't know anything about the world that he was in. Pitch wasn't evil, he was just misunderstood. Jack laughed softly to himself at how cliché that sounded. At the same time though, Jack knew that Pitch didn't see the Guardians as they really were either. He'd only known them for a couple of days himself but he could tell that they were good people, trying to do the right thing. Jack needed more time, being neutral in all of this wasn't an option yet it was the only thing that Jack wanted to do.

The Guardians or the only person he'd ever known or thought of as family in three hundred years. Jack knew that the choice shouldn't be hard, he was loyal, there shouldn't even have been a choice in the first place, yet, the Man in the Moon had to have created him for a reason and there was so much that Pitch still hadn't told him about all of this. He needed to find out if he was actually meant to be a guardian but before he could do that, he needed to find his centre. It was hard to think that there even could be more to him than ice and snow but surely there must be.


The Nightmare stared at the boy from the shadows, she could see that he was in deep thought. The sandy horse wasn't capable of much thought itself so the concept of being lost in thoughts was hard for her to understand. She saw her master's young charge sigh to himself and she coked her head, he looked like something was worrying him. She wished that she could comfort him but she knew that she couldn't. She walked across the ice, her hooves clacking against it and she whinnied to get the boy's attention. He looked down at her and smiled.

"Hey girl," he said softly, jumping down from the tree, he placed an ice cold hand on her nose and the Nightmare pushed against it, welcoming the cold. The boy laughed to himself and she pushed against him, trying to get him to get on her back so she could take her back to her master. He seemed to think about it for a moment before getting on, she whinnied happily and began to run back to the lair. She knew that her master would be happy with her for finding him.


"Where have you been?!" Pitch asked as Jack and the Nightmare entered the lair, Jack winced at the tone and hopped off of the Nightmare's back, giving her nose one last pat before she dissipated into sand. He had meant to go straight back to the lair after leaving North's workshop but instead he'd just found himself on the tree. He supposed that subconsciously he knew he needed neutral ground to think about everything on.

"Just around," he said, turning to walk to his room, the snow would probably have started to melt by now so he'd need to fix that.

"What are you thinking?" Pitch asked, he sounded concerned. Jack sighed and turned back to him, did he really look worried enough to make Pitch worry?

"Nothing," he said, Pitch rose an eyebrow, or the place one would be if he had any, and patiently waited for Jack to talk. "I just-" He began, stopping himself before he said something he'd regret, "why were you in my memories Pitch?" Jack wasn't really expecting a serious response from the man but it was one of the many questions that were scratching at his brain.

"Because I was curious," Pitch said after a moment. Jack was confused, why did every answer he got just generate more questions? "I was curious because you believed in me but didn't fear me. You were special." Jack felt that there was more to it than that but he knew enough not to push the subject, that was already more of an answer than he'd been expecting.

"Who am I?" Jack asked, more to himself than to Pitch.

Pitch narrowed his eyes and frowned at Jack. "What happened at the pole?" He asked.

"Nothing major," Jack said, "North just spoke to me about some things."

"What things?" Pitch asked, suspicion in his voice but no hostility. Jack shrugged.

"What it means to be a Guardian," he said since that was more or less what North had seemed to be talking about. Pitch just nodded to himself. Jack frowned and looked at the globe in the centre of the room. Every light that was on it was a child who believed in the Guardians and there were a lot of lights, Jack knew that Pitch was planning something for Easter but the shade hadn't told him anything about what, if it all went well though, then this time tomorrow there would be a lot less lights on that globe. He'd never really concerned himself with that or what it would do to the Guardians but now after actually meeting them, he wasn't sure how he felt about it all. None of them knew what it was like not to be believed in and that was a loneliness that Jack didn't want any of them to have to suffer.

"Do you think you're a Guardian?" Pitch asked after a moment, the question caught Jack off guard.

"I- I don't know," the teen said. He wished that he would just find the answer to that question already though. "Do you?"

"I've always thought that that was Lunar's purpose for creating you," Pitch replied cooly. Jack just stared at him. He didn't know how to respond to that but it explained so much. Why he wasn't allowed out when the moon was out, why he wasn't allowed to be seen by the Guardians. Jack opened his mouth with every intention of asking why Pitch had never told him but no words came out. "I was just trying to protect you!" Pitch said, "at least until you were old enough to be able to make your own decisions."

"Were you ever going to tell me?!" Jack asked, anger radiating from him, Pitch had lied to him for centuries.

"I was hoping it wouldn't come up," the nightmare king admitted.

Jack was more confused than ever. Pitch thought that he was meant to be a Guardian all this time and hadn't told him. Why? To protect him? Jack could protect himself. To keep him to himself? That seemed more likely and, if Jack was in a calmer state of mind, he might have seen that that was because Pitch was lonely, so lonely, and that the one person who had believed in him in centuries had died and then come back as an immortal spirit like himself, it would only have made sense for Pitch to do everything he could not to lose him again. As it was, Jack wasn't in a calm state of mind and didn't see that. All he saw was how selfish it was of Pitch to steal him away and hide him from the world. The boy stormed off into his room, unintentionally letting a snowstorm follow him down the corridors in his anger. He covered his room in thick snowfall.

Eventually the storm, and his emotions, calmed down. He was able to think everything over and see what he couldn't before. The Nightmare king had always kept secrets from Jack and he'd always been fine with that before, what made this one different?

He couldn't say that Pitch was on the moral highground but he'd never really been able to say that so it really shouldn't have surprised him. He knew that he shouldn't be mad at Pitch for not telling him, he'd just needed a friend, someone he could talk to and ease his loneliness.

The clock was ticking ever closer to Easter, if he hadn't already, Pitch was soon going to go ahead with whatever that plan of his was. Let him. Jack thought to himself, it wasn't like he had any real ties to the Guardians, so what if the Man in the Moon said that he was meant to be one, it wasn't as if he, or the Guardians, were ever there for him, Pitch was and always had been. He just needed to trust that he knew what he was doing.

It wasn't long before Jack found himself in his tree again and not too long after that that he began to see the light of Sandy 's golden sand stream through the village. From where he was, he couldn't see any of the actual streams and every instinct in his body was telling him to go back to the lair. Pitch had trained him well. He felt himself laugh at that thought but it sounded wrong, cold and careless. He saw no reason to go back to the lair, the Guardians already knew that he existed and he couldn't care less about the Man in the Moon seeing him. A part of him wished that he'd never met Pitch because surely, the weight of being alone for centuries would have been better than the feeling that no matter what he did he'd be betraying someone or other.

Jack jumped off the tree branch and the wind took him to Burgess. He landed on the roof of one of the houses and looked at Sandy 's dream sand, he even reached out a hand to touch one of the streams, stopping himself just before he made contact. He instead sat down on the roof and tilted his head back to watch the streams as they passed over him. They really were a beautiful sight.

Jack found himself thinking about Pitch's Nightmares because, really, they were beautiful too but in a different, darker way. It was hard to think that something as purely good as the dream sand could be corrupted into the nightmare sand but Jack realised that he shouldn't be surprised that it retained it's beauty. Sandy and Pitch were opposites, at least in terms of their abilities. The sandman and the boogyman, one brings dreams and the other brings nightmares.

Pitch used to tell Jack stories, of a time where he was believed in and feared, a time before the Guardians had come in and taken that all away from him. Jack wondered what sort of person Pitch had been before he was the boogyman, because surely he must have been someone. After thousands of years of living alone, Jack wouldn't have been surprised if the shade had lost all of his humanity but he clearly hadn't. Pitch was caring, in his own way, and his only real goal was to be believed in, to not be alone, and that didn't sound unreasonable to Jack. Despite that, Jack knew that he was going about it the wrong way, making the guardians lose their believers wouldn't necessarily make Pitch gain any. He supposed that he had a unique perspective, having never been believed in himself, he didn't know what it felt like to have any human notice him.

He sighed in defeat and jumped off the roof, the wind catching him as he fell and making him hover outside a window. Looking in, Jack could see figures made of dream sand playing over a boy's head as he slept. Jack recognised the boy as one of the children who would play around his lake, closer to the woods and smiled softly to himself.

Was being believed in worth it? Worth all the fear that Pitch put into the world? Jack longed to be seen but what would he do if he ever was? Would the believers fear him too?

The questions raced around Jack's head and he wished he knew the answers to any of them. He turned away from the boy's window, away from the town, and the wind took him back to his lake.

As the sun began to rise, Jack wondered if doing nothing to even try to stop Pitch was the same as siding with him. Jack supposed that it was but it was far too late to change his mind, he could only hope that the guardians noticed his absence in whatever was going on and didn't hold it against him. That at least had been the plan until he saw a Nightmare staring at him from the edge of the forest. His curiosity got the better of him and he went to see what she wanted.

Within moments of climbing on her back, she took him into the shadows, Jack always hated traveling through shadows but he couldn't fault it for it's speed. Less than a minute must have passed before he found himself in a tunnel. It was like nothing Jack had ever seen before, grass and Moss clung to every surface and there were giant egg shaped statues every now and then, leaning against the walls. The floor was littered with brightly coloured eggshells and had a fine dusting of black sand. Jack hopped off of the horse and poked one of the broken eggs with his staff, it gained a thin coating of frost but nothing else happened, Jack didn't know what he'd expected.

"Why did you bring me here?" he asked, turning back to the horse who just nudged him with her nose. He hadn't known what Pitch's plan had been but he at least knew not to underestimate him. He walked down the tunnel until he got to an exit, he looked back at the horse with a small smile, somewhat relieved for her company. Jack took a deep breath, he didn't know why the Nightmare had taken him to these tunnels but he knew that there was a big chance of either the Guardians or Pitch being on the other side of that exit. He didn't know which he was more apprehensive about. Letting out his breath he walked out of the tunnel.


Hey readers, I'm wondering if I should completely re-write the first 7 chapters of this story since I feel that the gap in time from chapter 7 to chapter 8 shows in my writing. Thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

I have no idea where I'm going with this story but I'm hoping I'll figure it out soon enough.

Anyway, I hope you guys liked this chapter!

Ebil