A/N: Chapter 10! Ten whole chapters! This fic is taking over my life. :1 I love this chapter, so I hope you do too! (But it's also kind of weird, so I'll forgive you if you don't. ;D)

10 (Need the Nightmares)

"You should stay here tonight," says the old troll, watching the last dregs of the aurora disappear with some trepidation. "The Nightmares won't be able to find you here."

Jack pulls his hood up over his hair, shadowing his face as he looks out across the valley, where something is moving. "Nah," he says. "I need the nightmares tonight. Maybe I'll get some clue about what's I'm getting myself into."

He bends his knees and jumps and the wind sweeps him down over the silvery slopes. There was a time, shortly after his death, when he had to call the breezes to catch him—but he has only known the Man in the Moon longer than the wind, and they have an understanding now. He only has to throw himself to its mercy and it knows not to let him fall.

Sometimes, when it is too lonely, he talks to it still, and it keens its immortality back to him.

Below him—them, if you count the wind—the valley floor writhes with the humping shapes of Nightmares. They are massive, far bigger than he's ever seen them—at least as big as elephants, and their black-violet grit is frosted with pale blue. He can't see any details, only the glimmer of ice in a pulsing gloom and their burning golden eyes.

There are hundreds of them like an army of corrupted stars, unblinking as the Nightmares gallop through the valley. They trail vicious black tentacles, always seeking, snakes in the night ready to sink their fangs into unsuspecting dreams. Jack can't help the fear that settles into his chest at the sight of the gargantuan shadows. It's always been there, an edge of terror that he cannot dull, even knowing it will make it easier for Pitch to exploit him. But watching the valley move with his hooded eyes wakes the terror from an edge to a blade, and he knows it'll lead the Nightmares right to him.

That's alright—tonight, it's what he wants.

Well, perhaps 'wants' is a strong word, for the clench in his chest, the sick fear in his stomach at the thought of one of those vast beasts noticing him, coming toward him—it's not a clear indication of desire. But it's what he intends as he slants his flight downward towards a cave half buried in the snow. It's set into a mountain far above the distorting backs of the Nightmare herd, but it still feels too close.

Jack doesn't need to sleep, but he and the Sandman have been friends for a good long while now; Jack learned how to dream years ago, how to fall asleep beneath golden stars without his ethereal body's urging.

The stars are beneath him now, racing through a tainted valley, but the principle is the same, he expects. He folds himself against the cold harsh ridges of the cave wall, tugs his hood farther over his blue eyes, wraps his ice-embroidered hoodie more tightly around himself, cradling his staff against him like a child's stuffed toy….

Sleep doesn't come easy, but it comes.

Sandy's streaking gold-dust doesn't reach Arendelle anymore, but there have always been dreams—even if not the ones that truly matter, not the sweet visions that stick with you through the day, so you almost wish you'd never woken up from them. Sandy,s good at those, and if he were here, Jack would be dreaming of Jamie on a late autumn day, an early hard snow, no school after a tough week of homework and tests where Jamie barely had time to play.

In retrospect, Jack is glad he didn't dream that, for he would not have wanted to see it ruined when the Nightmares came sniffing at his door.

Though he can't see them, he can feel them through the summer haze of his lazy, meaningless dream. There are two, and they fill the mouth of the cave like tar that has swallowed trembling tortured stars. One pushes in front of the other, causing a brief tussle, a crackling snort; the other lunges in, eager, hungry, scraping off bits of its hide on its companion as it shrinks to fit into the cave.

The Nightmares are not made of polluted Dreamsand, as they are in the future, where Pitch has been stalking Sandy for years. Instead, the particles that grate against each other as the Nightmares trot across the cave and press their noses to Jack's forehead are each intricate snowflakes in sickly shades of purple and black.

-o-

Jack knows Pitch's bad dreams can be subtle as closed doors, distant lamplight, friends who blink with too many eyes—but it is obvious when the Nightmares catch him. Between one heartbeat and the next, he falls from a dream of riding crystalline moths across a summer night with all its stars and tumbles into a stagnant grey pool. His staff is lost, somewhere—he drops to his knees, making sluggish waves in the viscous, scummy liquid as he scrabbles along the bottom in search of it. His hands meet something long, rigid, slick with algae—but when he grasps it, pulls it free of the clinging water, he finds it is only knobby bone—

In the background stands a tall figure in a black robe. His sickle drips seawater. In his other hand, he holds the ragged tail of a pallid mermaid, her tangled red hair spread like sick seaweed on the surface of the pool.

Jack drops the bones and scrambles backward, but he slips on the slimy ground, hits his elbows, the back of his head, keeps falling—

He is spread-eagled in the darkness, manacles clamped around his wrists and ankles like teeth. His sweatshirt is gone, his skin bare to a chill even he can feel. Shades creep in around him, rustling outlines, indistinct tatters of fear. He can see the sickly surface of the grey water far above him, like the face of the moon eaten by putrefying disease, like a mirror rippling with oil and the rotting face it shows is his.

The scratchy hiss and flare of a match lighting tears back the shadow. Jack doesn't mean to fight his bonds—he came here on purpose, to see what he was facing—but it's not in his nature to be still. It's not in his nature to be trapped.

It's not in his nature to lie quiet with Elsa in danger before him.

She stands pale beside him, her lips sewn shut with tarlike threads, a lit black candle in her grasp. Inky wax runs over her white fingers, hardening into swollen onyx icicles that hang from her hands. She is draped in veils of indigo and violet and black, and she is smiling through her scar-encrusted gag.

"Elsa!" Jack croaks. He twists on the slab of cold that holds him, kicking—he feels something in his knee pop—the chains sink into his wrists and slice, and his blood is the same dirty water as the ceiling. A noise of mingled pain and frustration claws its way out of him and he can't deny there's fear, he can't even hide it—

Elsa leans over him, veils slithering over his arms, his chest, across his throat. One hand settles on his grimace to quiet hi; the other sets the candle on the flesh over his sternum.

The wicks burns blue; the wax runs across his chest and down into his heart, his lungs, writing black branches into his veins; Jack shouts incoherently—

—and sits outside of himself, knees to his chest, hood pulled up over his hair, watching a poisoned version of the girl he loves while she watches the cold flame burn into a dream version of himself. Pitch steps free of the shadow, tossing something away from him—Jack glimpses the fraying edge of a mermaid's finned tail—Pitch wipes his hand on the front of his robe, and Jack knows this is Pitch himself, not merely a nightmare-driven hallucination. Pitch is here, in his head, and Jack's impotence makes him wild. Frost ferns explode out from the space where he sits, a white-webbed mandala radiating across the darkness. Pitch drops him an amused smile, knowing exactly what he's doing to Jack, knowing exactly what Jack's afraid of. Just like he always did—always will.

"You'll not have her back from me, you know," Pitch says. Lazily. Triumphantly. Like he's bought her from herself and he, the Nightmare King, has nothing to fear from his possessions. Once he's paid for them, they will not rebel.

Jack thinks of a hundred retorts at once; they spiral out of him into the mandala, sending it spinning wider into the unnatural night. Instead of speaking any of them aloud, Jack puts his head down on his knees and says, "I don't think that's what I'm coming for."

-o-

The nightmare dissolves in a slow mist that fills the spectral space, and Jack awakens with so much fury that he jolts his head against the stone wall upon flinging himself from sleep. The movement is painfully reminiscent of hitting his head on the algae-slick floor of the grey dreaming pool. "Useless," he growls, his staff sliding out of his grip and rolling across the floor.

"Useless!" His fist slams into the stone, accompanying the second shout with a flaring pain. He suffered the Nightmares' kiss for nothing, he learned nothing, he gained nothing—

Except he saw Elsa's face again. And, staring into the shadows that cling to the cave ceiling almost as thickly as they cling to the sky outside, he realizes he would have given up everything, sold himself piece by piece, for only that.

-o-

Jack caught Pitch in the castle shadows in the weeks following Elsa's disastrous coronation and triumphant return. Nights make him restless, moonless nights especially so—but summer nights of the new moon are the worst, the oppressive heat making him feel useless and restive. He always whispered chill winds down the castle corridors as he wandered them, passing Elsa's door, Anna's door, the doors to empty rooms, the doors to only gloom and ghosts. This place needed more people—more children.

The door to the former king and queen's bedroom never opened, keeping its dusty regret hidden behind painted wood. Jack walked past it, like he did every night, pacing the corridors, keeping himself away from cold beds and sleeping royalty. He kept asking himself why he wanted to stay. He kept coming up empty.

He kept not leaving.

Worse, he kept not doing his job, not creeping in to wake Elsa—or even Anna—in the quiet hours of the dark, to haul them giggling through hiemal wonderlands they built together. He was supposed to be their Guardian, rewriting their sequestered childhoods into arctic revels. In the daylight, it was easy, but at night he was afraid.

The second time he walked past that perpetually silent door, he saw the shadows waver beneath it.

Jack stopped, hesitated. And then, staff held out in front of him, he reached forward and pressed his hand against the wood. It creaked, exhaled dust, and swung inward, unlatched already, and Jack already knew who he was going to find.

Pitch loomed just inside, undoubtedly hoping for a jump from whomever opened the door on his hideaway. Jack just leaned forward on his staff, meeting the tall shadow's aurous eyes with nonchalant defiance. Pitch lifted a brow, and the Fearlings crept out from beneath the hem of his robe, swarming over each other like a pit of black snakes on the dusty bedroom floor.

"You can see me," said Pitch, and he looked pleased at the knowledge. "Who are you?"

His eyes fell on the lightning-sphere of crackling ice gathering about Jack's free fist, the frost flowers uncurling across the grooved surface of his staff. "Ah," said the Nightmare King, "you're Jack Frost, aren't you? I've heard of you. You're not one of those sniveling, saccharine Guardians, are you?"

The defiant yes was on Jack's lips before he could think about it, but he bit it back. It's easier to fight someone if you're invisible—and the Pitch of this century didn't know about the war of belief where Jack refused to be his prince. He hadn't yet seen his Nightmares explode into white ice and revenge, hadn't watched Jack rally the children against him or stand with the Guardians in their moments of weakness. Today, two hundred years ago, Jack was a nonentity to Pitch Black, and despite the fury that inspired, he let the ice in his grasp dissolve into a gasp of cold air. Pitch was good at sneak attacks and subtlety; maybe Jack could try the same. Maybe Pitch would lower his guard.

"No," Jack said, with as much scorn as he could muster. "What do I need with those stuffed shirts? They're all grown-ups."

"Mm. Yes." Pitch swept around, the Fearlings writhing in his wake like a mourning train. "So I can count on you not to interfere?"

"Depends," said Jack, curling his arm around his staff and watching the shadows that painted the walls in this room, stretching out curling tentacles, fluttering hints of wings. The portraits on the walls watched him with hooded eyes that blinked looked away and sometimes smiled sinister smiles with teeth that had never been painted in.

"But Jack," said Pitch, sitting down on the once-majestic four-poster bed, whose curtains hung limp with neglect and whose quilts were coated with a layer of grime that Pitch's touch did not disturb. "Everyone here is a grown-up."

Jack's fist clenched more tightly, but he forced himself to uncurl his fingers and lean casually against the doorframe. "You should really just go," he said. "I don't know why you're here—"

"I expect you do," Pitch said lazily.

"Elsa's not afraid anymore. And no one else is afraid of her, either!"

"Ah, Jack," said Pitch expansively, lying back on the bed, his arms thrown wide, an expression of sick pleasure spreading across his pallid face, "wouldn't that be so nice if it were true?" Jack could just see the gloom in the corners of the canopy twisting into sharp terrible shapes above Pitch's spread-eagled form. "For you, I mean. For me, well. I like it better this way."

Frost collected on the doorframe where Jack touched it, spreading upward in elaborate lace edges. "You won't get her," he said, and he couldn't stop the snarl in his words. Pitch sat up again, rising to approach the doorway. He leaned over the silver-haired spirit, faces almost touching, and smiled with all of his teeth.

"Jack," he said softly, his voice almost sympathetic, poisoned honey on a razor blade, "what adult fears you have. Worrying you'll fall in love with her. How tragic. Well." He straightened, shrugging with his hands thrown wide. "You know what they say. 'True love thaws a frozen heart.' I hope you don't miss your ice powers too much."

Jack whipped his staff around, lashing out, but Pitch had already dissolved, he and his Fearlings coming back together in the far dark corners of the room. Only his burning eyes remained visible, and the veiled shifting of the Fearlings at his feet.

"You know, if you simply… let me have her, you wouldn't have to worry about all that inconvenient drivel. Stay neutral. Let winter run its course, and there will be no thaw."

The room was empty again, silent again. Jack started to back out, and Pitch's voice sounded once more, right beside him:

"Besides, I do believe she would be happy with me. We're both monsters, after all."

Jack whirled around, staff bursting with assailing icicles, but there was no one there to fight.