14 (Interlude in Black)
And Pitch, still leaning over him when he comes out of the dream/nightmare/reality, says, "Tell me, Jack. If you went back, would you let her kiss you?"
"No," he says, and rolls himself to his feet. Pitch flows backwards, out of the way of Jack's furious punch, spiked with icicles across his knuckles.
"Would you," says Pitch, rising into the air on a stairway of shadow and snow, spreading his arms for the Nightmares to bar Jack's way, "tell her you loved her?"
"No." Jack launches himself into the air, rocketing past the snapping teeth of the Nightmares.
"Would you stop yourself from telling her she should… conceal, not feel… for you?"
Jack hesitates, a fraction of a second only but Pitch knows, and smiles, wide and smug; and Jack shouts, "No!" and sends another barrage of broken ice whistling toward Pitch, but the scythe reforms out of the night and he blocks every one. They hover apart from each other, frost and fuliginous ferocity roiling beneath the both of them.
"Are you seriously monologuing at me right now?" Jack demands, aiming his staff directly at the empty space where Pitch should have a heart.
"No, no, this is most definitely a dialogue."
Pitch keeps mutating in Jack's vision, flickering between a twisting shadow spitting indigo and violet and images of Jack and Elsa—good dreams conjured by golden sand and warped by Pitch's intimate knowledge of all Jack's fears. Jack wishes now he hadn't taken the Dreamsand; it warded off the parade of Elsa corpses, but now he can hardly see for the dreams in his eyes.
He shakes his head, blinking and squinting, and lunges for Pitch, who skips to the side as easily as dancing. Jack reverses in midair—and for a moment, on the top of the mountain, he can see her—at the peak between this valley and the trolls', encased in ice like a second skin, holding out a single withering white rose—
Jack plunges forward, only a few feet, hand outstretched—blink and she's gone—just one more dream in a cascade of hallucinations. Jack grits his teeth and focuses on Pitch again. Sandy's gift was supposed to protect him from the Nightmare King's manipulations, but it seems even two hundred years ago, the shadow is stronger than gold.
Rubbing sand out of his eyes, feeling the dreams slough off piece by piece, Jack finds Pitch—one, two, three Nightmare Kings, and back down to one as he violently discards the effects of the Dreamsand—and twirls his staff as he rockets forward. Each revolution conjures a crackling ball of frost, but he doesn't know why he keeps trying; Pitch's scythe slashes through the air again each time, and he sweeps forward in a wave of roiling gloom that rises over Jack like the mountain itself.
"You can't kill me," Jack says, swinging his staff up so a filigree curtain of rime arcs over his head, drifting between himself and the hungry Fearlings at Pitch's feet. "I died once. It didn't stick."
"I'm not going to kill you." Pitch shrugs, and the edges of his shadows form and re-form into nebulous faces, protean creatures with too many teeth and not enough eyes. Sable snowflakes waft between them, sinking as slowly as a drowning boy whose sister screamed overhead.
"That is Elsa's claim."
Something in Jack's chest constricts when Pitch says her name, and he almost can't breathe, can't stand to hear it on that corrupted tongue. His veil of frost spikes, throwing a thousand barbs up into the current of darkness undulating over him. The silhouetted faces distort with silent screams, perforated by white thorns. The scythe begins to reform, readying itself for Jack's assault, but Jack is ready for it; three ivory spears lance from the crook of his staff, piercing the scythe's stygian blade, and he wrenches it sideways, hurling it from Pitch's tendrilar grasp. It spirals into the night below them; the Nightmares scatter before it, then dive to catch it, while Pitch spreads his arms as if in surrender and strolls toward Jack.
"But what I can do," he says, apparently unconcerned by the loss of his weapon—because he has ten thousand weapons waiting behind his words, because his greatest weapon is the way he knows you, the way he can see Jack getting tired though Jack does not slump, only clutches his staff a little bit tighter, breathes just a little bit harder—"and, rest assured, what I will do—"
Jack swipes another flurry of razored snow at Pitch, and the wind wobbles around him. The fragments flutter against his robe and sink uselessly into shadow. Pitch is only a foot away now, only inches; Jack starts to move, attack again no matter how futilely, but a Nightmare reaches out and grabs the back of his hoodie in its teeth, jerking him back, out of reach of its king.
"—is crush every single person who still believes in you. Do you know it will be easy, Jack? There aren't very many left." He shakes his head mournfully, making a disbelieving sound. "You haven't been very good to your friends, you know. Just think." He tilts his head back to take in the lack of stars, pondering the absent constellations. "Anna. Kristoff. Which should I widow, and which shall die of grief? Hm." He drops his burning eyes to take in Jack's reaction, the impotent thrashing, the angry determination too great for words, and smiles.
"Have I forgotten anyone?"
"Yeah," says Jack, "E—"
"But I do think," Pitch goes on, stepping lightly through the night air around Jack, as if he is on the verge of skipping, "I might be convinced to forgive them the crime of still believing in Jack Frost—"
He whirls suddenly, the hem of his robe flaring out, his teeth grown sharp and his eyes gone to fire as he leans over the captive spirit. "—should only tell me where the children are."
Jack stops struggling for a moment, and then he just laughs.
"Not a chance, Pitch," he says, and his staff lashes out.
Pitch raises one hand and catches the blow against his palm. His ashen fingers close around the wood and he rips it away, ascending and retreating. Jack shouts, reaching out; the Nightmare shakes him until he's dizzy, and the dreams overlay his vision again in brief flashes. He slumps, glaring up at Pitch through the strobing memories.
"You can break it," he says, teeth bared. "I dunno what Elsa's told you—"
"Everything," says Pitch. There's triumph there, but it's still superimposed on his disgust, his disappointment. "Everything, of course." He shrugs, the staff held loosely in one hand.
"Then you know that you've done it before." Jack grins, but the expression is feral, not a mien of mischief and glee like he usually wears. "Or will do it, I guess. And it won't stop me."
"I'm not going to break it any more than I'm going to kill you." Pitch's expression sours. "I'm going to take it, Jack Frost." The grin drops off Jack's face in an instant, frost exploding uselessly in the air around him. The Nightmare shakes him again. "I don't make the same mistake twice. Or, in this case, even once." The smile creeps back beneath Pitch's eyes, delight returning at the sight of Jack's shattered certainty.
"You're making a bigger one," the winter spirit snarls, fists clenching into barbed bursts of light. Wind rustles around him, threatening, tossing his hair and promising a storm. "You're going up against me!"
"I'm not," says Pitch thoughtfully, turning to cross the shrouded sky, folding his hands behind his back with the staff still held in one, taunting Jack with a final sight of it. "I am, quite clearly, leaving you here." A Nightmare trots up to him, hooves blurring at the edges as stray snowflakes slipped from its outline. It holds Pitch's scythe delicately between its teeth; he takes one hand from Jack's staff to run his fingers through the creature's anfractuous mane, then accepts the weapon with a fond smile.
"And Jack?" says Pitch, without turning back. The Nightmare releases him and backs away, and Jack is so surprised that he hasn't recovered enough to move by the time Pitch is whirling around, a vortex of eternal eclipse, his blade flaying the air on its arc toward Jack.
"In the meantime"—the honed edge of night tears across the space between them; Jack tries to scramble sideways, but he's too late, too slow—"you'll just have to suffer for everything you did to her!"
He watches Jack fall with disdain curling across his pallid face. "They should have burned you for treason," he says to the silent specter as it plummets for the jagged surface of the mountain. His Nightmares rise in a tsunami around him, rustling in his shadow, carrying him higher and higher, until he might touch the black aurora shimmering in the sky. "I know it's usually hanging, but perhaps, just this once, they could make an exception."