A/N: In an alternate universe, Jack makes a very different choice in this chapter and everything he imagines comes to pass. It was so hard not to write that alternate universe. :p
This story finally has more reviews than chapters! Thanks, all. c: I think "beyond perfection" is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's a flattering one nonetheless and I can't express my smiles with mere emotes. CCC:
25 (Heartbeat to Ice-Melt)
Jack is already running, throwing himself at Elsa as she crumples. He slips and skids across the ice-strewn floor, coming to rest just barely touching her, his sleeves raked up and his skin red from the slide. He pushes himself to his knees, running a hand through his hair—leaving streaks of drying blood, and just kneels there for a minute, inches away from Elsa.
He knows it worked, because he can feel the ice going out of him. There is no more frost at his fingertips; the tiny root systems of ice at his edges are melting into the fabric of his clothing. The staff in his hand doesn't respond to his touch, doesn't flare with the dust of a glacier in its grooves—it's just a piece of wood. His hands shake, as if there is nothing solid left inside him to hold him steady. When he reaches for Elsa, he thinks he feels his heart beat once, and something warm in his veins.
He feels sick. He barely notices when the Jacks all around the room pull out their snow-globes and take themselves back to the moments they left when their future self came calling. They think this is finished.
Elsa's crown is shattered on the ground; the shimmer is fading out of her dress, leaving it wreathes of shadow and iron without the frost to hold it together. Above them, stalactite-icicles drip as they thaw, a thick rain that chimes against the glacial debris on the floor, echoing a last symphony of ice off the walls that run like watercolor.
"An act of true love thaws a frozen heart," Jack murmurs, leaning over Elsa as he touches her shoulder. Her skin flushes; the sound of her heart beating blood back through her veins joins the symphony of deliquescent ice. She stirs, opens glazed-over eyes that narrow at the sight of him, then wrinkle with confusion.
"Jack Frost," she says, sitting up, clutching shreds of shadow to herself.
"Not anymore," he says, scooping up a handful of ice fragments and watching them do—absolutely nothing in his palm. "Just Jack." Elsa's eyes widen; one of her hands slashes across the air, but an equal amount of nothing occurs at her command.
"It's… gone?"
"I came all this way, didn't I?" Jack clenches his hand over the shards; they dig painfully into his palm, reminding him that the ice isn't his friend any longer. "Isn't that true love enough for you?" His breath catches in his throat and he doubles over, head in his hands. "It's what I was always afraid of," he whispers. He doesn't have anything left. He staved it off the whole way, the whole way, by telling himself he didn't have to do it, that he could just leave, that he wasn't going to sacrifice himself for her—and none of those were acts of true love, so he clung to the vestiges of the power the Man in the Moon gave him. But then he did it anyway. He walked into her castle and told her he loved her, and he did it knowing what would happen to him—and because he knew it, it happened, and now he has no magic left to be a Guardian. To be anything.
But he isn't dead—any more dead than he was before—and he has Elsa, and those are two advantages he didn't expect to leave here with.
He looks back up at her, and the world erupts into shadows.
The night is escaping as the ice melts around it, coiling into obfuscating fog as thick as the darkness under the earth. It shrouds Jack's vision, but the only one of his past selves who stayed—the one who has no snow-globe of his own—yells, "Watch it!"—and Jack sees it, the scythe hurtling toward them, its teeth a ravenous lace of liquid obsidian, its blade as wide as Jack is tall. It is an inevitable devouring in Pitch's pallid hands, the Nightmare King risen from the murk of his castle with his armies here in his wake.
Jack cannot avoid the blade, and he cannot get Elsa out of the way.
He screams a powerless "NO!" at the plunging blade and throws himself forward to curl across her still-cold form. Elsa, yet dressed in sable and with ink in her hair, does not even flinch as the scythe consumes them both.
Jack yells his agony, but he cannot die again. He knows, because he wishes he could, in those interminable moments when the scythe is lancing into his back and cutting through to Elsa. There is a terrible light in her eyes as the blade bites deep, like the glow around a star that has gone out long before you stop seeing it.
"I told you that you would never have her back from me, Jack Frost!" Pitch crows through the restless stomping of his Nightmare horde. In his agony, Jack pushes himself up on his hands in a futile gesture of defiance. He feels the shades writhing in his veins where the ice-water used to be, seeking his heart.
Pitch stands suddenly beside him, his chin in his hand, his elbow resting on the end of his scythe, looking fondly down at Elsa—but there is an edge of bitterness to the ashen expression. "Your true love does an annoying job of thawing frozen hearts," says Pitch, drawing his fingers along the edge of his colossal blade. "But it can't bring light to a black one."
Jack shoves himself back, rolling off Elsa to gather her into quaking arms. Atramental veins branch like cobwebs across her pale skin, curling around her eyes like the legs of the spiders that once inhabited them, stretching down her neck and collarbone and writing new jewelry along her arms. His eyes feel raw and wide, and he is shaking as if caught in one of Elsa's storms.
"Lucky for you," says Pitch, with the sort of smirk that gives lie to the words, "I can take the night away."
He closes his hand over empty air, and the blackness rushes out of Elsa like a barbed spear leaving a wound; she arches her back and cries out. "A powerless queen is no use to me, you see!" Pitch calls over the sounds of her anguish, grinning with all his teeth. Frantically, Jack hangs on to her convulsing form, running his fingers through her hair, combing back the spikes that have plastered themselves to her face with sweat. Sweat. Heat. His hands must be cold to her now. He doesn't have any ice left in his veins, but he is still dead.
The shreds of shadow crawling out of Elsa wriggle past him on the ground like fuliginous worms, but some of them seem drawn to him, strafing sideways to seep into his skin. Jack reaches out one hand, fingers bent into claws, to scrape them toward him.
Elsa goes still, her breathing ragged, her eyes closed. Jack leans over her, pressing his forehead to hers. She shivers in his grip, feverish, rejecting his wintry touch.
"Don't," he whispers hoarsely. "Don't die." But she can't make the same promise he can—he has taken the immortality she gave herself. He sacrificed his power to wipe hers away. Her palace is dissolving around her, all that she has worked for turning to water and running through her hands.
There are still no stars.
"I do wonder if she'll wake up," Pitch says thoughtfully, and Jack turns his gaze to the Nightmare King, protective fury drawing his face into a grimace of a smile. The expression hurts, as if the muscles in his face are tearing with the motion. The poison of Pitch's black scythe writhes and thrashes inside him still, begging, urging, and Jack bears his teeth as if they are fangs.
"No," Pitch ponders aloud, "better not risk it, do you think? True love is a tricky thing."
And he moves, so fast that the other Jack in the room cannot cry warning—quicker than a striking spider, his blade still with Anna's blood on it. Jack swerves to intercept, but Pitch's knife goes straight through the spirit, tearing at his substance but not his flesh. Jack grabs for him, but his resistance is immaterial. He is immaterial—Elsa falls through him, her head rebounding off the fragmented floor, her body arcing against the emptiness that holds her.
"No, no no no!" Jack cups his hands around her shoulders, but he is silent-invisible-intangible, he is nothing. "No no no no no, Elsa, no, if you die Kristoff is going to be king and you can't want that—"
Perhaps her lips curve up into the tiniest flicker of a smile—or perhaps it is just the last gasp of breath ghosting into the winter air.
Jack throws himself to his feet, whirling around to grab at Pitch Black as the Nightmare King flits back from the nightmare he has written into Jack's spirit. The whole castle shudders around them, writhing with shadows that crawl up the walls and tears chunks of ice from the already-thawing walls. Debris rains down around them; around the edges of the room, past Jacks throw up frosted shields, ducking out of the way of crashing rubble, each display of white power a stabbing reminder of what Jack Frost has last.
He has a different power inside him.
Pitch's scythe left it behind, and Elsa's escaping shadow joined it, and it throbs within him, promising, promising. Pitch can see it; he is laughing, waltzing with himself as he watches Jack struggle: Jack is invisible, Jack is powerless, Jack could finally accept his offer. Black magic instead of white. Pick up where Elsa left off.
It would change everything. Two hundred years in the future, he would fight against himself. He can see it—with the clockwork snow-globe in his pocket, he has the power of Father Time in his hands. Part of him whispers that this is the only reason Pitch is still offering a place at his side—for after all, the powerless have no use to him. Jack doesn't care. He wouldn't be powerless, if he turned back time, raised up Elsa and brought her to stand beside him in the future they ruled where their love would never die.
Jack can feel the dusk settling into him: his hair blackening, dark veins running beneath the surface of his skin, ink staining the fabric of his sweatshirt. Several feet away, his staff wraps itself in shadow, little white lightning dancing over its grooves. Pitch watches with glee, his hands in triumphant fists. All Jack can think of is Elsa dead, Anna dead, the both of them returned to him, his best friend and his snow queen, and the world under the protection of their wintry night.
The power waltzes behind his eyes. Jack takes it, and it consumes him.
He doesn't feel weak and empty any longer. The night is in his bones, and it is stronger than belief. He is invisible only until Elsa stands beside him once again, ruling from the shadows that support them.
Jack pulls the snow-globe out of his pocket, holding it on one outstretched palm. Threads of fractal gloom writhe beneath the skin of his hand, around the base of the globe. It shudders as if it is more than clockwork, as if the magic in it knows how it is about to be abused.
"Elsa," Jack says aloud. Elsa Elsa Elsa Elsa. He thinks of her, of her heart encased in ice and his the same, the two of them raising snowstorms together, of commanding blizzards, of skating across the fjords gone solid at their desire.
And then he thinks about how far he came to save her from just this.
Jack looks up at Pitch with eyes that feel bruised, that feel like he hasn't slept in years—and he hasn't, but for flirting with the nightmares. And Jack smiles, the expression wild and wicked and so very smug.
"You come into a room full of me," he says, "and you kill her, you kill Elsa and you seriously expect me to join you?"
Pitch laughs. "You haven't a single snowflake left to your name, Frost." He spreads his arms wide, gesturing at Jack coated in black. "And you are so very nearly mine."
Jack narrows his eyes. "I am not."
"Not today, perhaps," Pitch agrees. "But now I know." He points at Jack, at the shadows in his hair and his eyes. "I know that you can be tempted, Jack Frost. And I have two hundred years of poor, unsuspecting Jack Frost to tempt." What goes together better than cold and dark? The memory is as potent now as it ever was, Jack before he was a Guardian, Jack when he was alone. Pitch will always try. Pitch has seen what the cold and dark can do together, and he will not give it up.
Jack points, too, at the single incarnation of himself still standing across the room. Pitch turns, tilting his head. The past Jack looks younger—not that Jack has aged since he died, but something in three centuries of loneliness has settled into his eyes. This Jack has a ferity to him, an angry and untamed look despite how pale he is about the edges—like the whole world could walk right through him. He bows ironically as the attention turns to him, spraying whirlpools of frost across the rubble from his outstretched hands. The sight of his power sends a pang of loss stabbing through his future self.
"Not unsuspecting," says the last Jack.
"I'll be ready for you, Pitch," says his self from two hundred years ago and right now, his self from all the way across the world. He wears a smirk like he was born to it, and his staff glows like a glacier with a flame inside it. The wall behind him is the only one through which the mountain slope is not visible, the force of his cold holding up the thawing castle. The floor beneath them is dripping itself away, opening holes for the detritus of winter to cascade to the halls below.
In an instant, the younger Jack swings his staff around, blasting spirals of ice toward Pitch. Pitch snarls and spins shadow across himself, but he doesn't return fire. Instead, he pivots, reaching one hand out toward the older Jack. Startled, Jack recoils, but tendrils of night are spiraling in, aiming for his outstretched palm. Before he can run, or hide it, the shadows have claimed the clockwork snow-globe, ripping it away from his feeble grip. The castle rumbles and slants; Jack goes sliding sideways, ink running out of him to trail across the ground with the ice-melt. He returns gradually to his normal color as he stumbles toward the wall, grabbing for an icicle stud to hold onto, but it breaks off in his hand. The departure of the black power aches, leaves him feeling emptier than ever. "Pitch, give it back!" he shouts over the noise of the castle's structural support giving way; the only response is Pitch's chuckling echoing through the shattered glass. The shadows are stretching upward towards the vaulted ceiling; the younger Jack runs for them, swinging his staff, but they collapse down upon him. He leaps out of the way just in time, and the night floods out of the castle, taking Pitch with it while his laughter lingers on.