CHAPTER 25

-Let It Snow-

Pitch had almost forgotten what it felt like.

The exhilarating taste of complete and total victory. He had come close before. Oh, so breathtakingly close, with just a tantalizing flicker of what a true sip from the golden cup of blessed triumph tasted like all but drowning him in its potency. He had come close, only to have what he so desired torn from his hands at the very last moment. Now, though? Now he remembered, and he reveled, and he triumphed. What hope did the world have now? What hope, when the Guardians lay broken at his feet alongside their allies, and his army swelled and surged about him to the beat of victory?

The answer was none.

None at all.

He stepped out onto the ice slowly, the Fearlings parting to allow him passage, drawing back from the Guardians they had beaten to the very ground. Why none of them had chosen to call their armies was beyond him, but he cared not for what madness had made them believe they would be able to match him in strength without any aid. What did it matter, in the end? They had been wrong, they had been defeated, and the signs of the taint he would eventually irreversibly sow in each and every one of them were already showing, the dark tendrils reaching along their limbs and intertwining with their very beings.

"There is no point in fighting it." He came to a halt beside North, watching with an amused smile as the big man tried to rise, and failed utterly. "It will take you all in the end, and you will serve me."

"Have you never heard the term 'pride comes before a fall'?"

Pitch turned, not bothering to muster a glower for the truly tenacious archer, who had made it to his knees, though all his companions lay prone. This one held an advantage over the others, however, for the emotion he commanded was easily one of the greater powers his adversaries' possessed, ranking right alongside belief. Love. Pitch felt his lip curl at the very thought, and it was an act of impulse that drove him to summon his scythe, the weapon cutting through the air as he bashed the blunt end against the Valentine spirit's back, knocking him flat on his face, and bringing his heel down hard on Eros' predominant hand. The Valentine Spirit squirmed, wrenching his crushed limb free, but did not give Pitch the satisfaction of uttering a sound.

"Kneel," he hissed venomously.

Rebellion burning in coal black eyes, Eros pushed himself to his knees again. "I don't kneel for beings such as you," he answered firmly. "Never again." With a monumental effort he hauled himself to his feet, standing with his legs spread apart in a stance that allowed his shaking limbs to hold him. "So I guess you'll just have to make me."

"No, Eros! Don't!"

Tooth's voice cried out in warning, but Pitch ignored her, and the other voices that added themselves to the chorus of cautions. Instead he took a slow, menacing step forward, enjoying the way his height advantage meant the Spirit of Love had to twist his head to hold the dark spirit's gaze. But Eros didn't back down, holding his ground with the misguided determination of any fool deluded by the grandeur of heroism. This was most certainly one who would not be easily subdued.

He did love a challenge.

Calling his Fearlings to himself he let them bolster his strength, feeling his physical form grow as their very essence merged with his own. His arms snaked out, seizing the archer by the shoulders, but his eyes stared beyond the defiant face before him and to the warm glow of the wholesome heart that dwelt within. A golden heart. A heart filled with love. A heart he meant to corrupt, utterly and completely.

With all his concentration, he brought his shadows to bear upon that bright glow, smothering it utterly. His physical hold on his prey allowed him to feel the moment when the archer's defenses snapped into place, when his shoulders tensed for a fight, but there was nothing a show of strength could do against an assault such as this. He allowed the darkness to batter relentlessly on the invisible shield protecting that glow from being extinguished, applying more and more force, until every fiber of his being was focused on the task. Eros crumpled before him, driven to his knees as he gasped with exertion, but his light did not waver, flickering with the same irritating tenacity as its holder so often displayed. This one was still too strong for him to conquer, but that was a hurdle easily surmounted.

Summoning his scythe again he took a step back, letting the point of the weapon tap against the archer's chest, before drawing it over his shoulder for the swing. He made his movements deliberately slow, well aware his victim could not move, and that the similarly prone Guardians could do nothing but watch. He would destroy this one first, before their very eyes, so that they would know what fate awaited them, and then he would Turn them all. One after another, until everyone who had once been an enemy stood alongside him and the Man in the Moon would be able to do nothing but watch.

He waited until Eros raised his head, until their gazes met, and then he swung his weapon. A fierce shriek echoed the movement, as of an object traveling too fast for the eye to track, and the scythe's blade found its home in hard wood, blazing, blue eyes staring darkly into Pitch's own as the one wielding the staff thrust his blow aside with a single push.

The Nightmare King staggered back in shock, staring aghast at the sight now filling all his vision. Jack Frost stood before him, his spine straight, his shoulders set, and his face shining with a fierce determination where once only fear had been visible. His staff, his staff rested loosely in his hand, pointed towards the ground, sparking with life as frost patterns rippled up and down its surface. Jack himself was all but glowing, all the power he had accumulated without the staff to control it still within him, and now completely under his command.

Pitch could feel the ground spiraling away beneath him, his victory ripped from him once more, and for one, panic stricken moment that was all he could think of. He was going to lose. After all his planning, all his months of hard work and deceit and cowering in the shadows… After everything, this was how it would end? His rightful power stripped from him a second time by the one spirit who should have been standing on his side? There was a terrible, crushing feeling in his chest, as if North's full weight had come bearing down upon him, and in that moment Pitch could not think. His mind, his greatest asset, abandoned him utterly, and he could do nothing but stare mutely at his nemesis, at the spirit he had brought so very low only to see him rise to this from the ashes.

But failure was not acceptable, the voices that burned always at the back of his mind reminded him, and, with a sudden burst of wrenching anger, Pitch hauled himself from the agony of vanquishment to the blazing fury of retribution. He still had his army, the Guardians could not help, and Jack stood alone.

So be it.

He would fall alone as well.

Jack was not angry, or upset, or even afraid. He expected he should have been feeling all, or at least one of, those things, but instead he was simply calm. He knew what he was doing, what he had done, and what he had yet to do. He had not panicked when he saw Pitch trying to destroy Eros, because he had known he could make it in time. He had not been afraid when he saw the Guardians lying defeated, because he knew the only reason they had not summoned their full strength was because they knew he would come to their aid. He knew he could defeat Pitch no matter how many Fearlings the dark spirit had summoned. He knew because Jamie knew, because Jamie believed, and so Jack believed too.

He stood between Pitch and his prey with absolute surety, his hold on his staff relaxed, and his own pose deceptively mimicking that lack of tension. He had made his move, and the next step in this game was Pitch's to make. He watched the emotions flicker across his enemy's face. Shock. Defeat. Disbelief. Despair – oh, yes, he knew that one. And then anger; raw, unbridled fury that turned Pitch's face into a mask of arrant wrath.

Jack watched passively as Pitch took three steps back, raising his arms as he called all his Fearlings to him, the black shapes seeping away from the Guardians and back to their host's feet. There they pooled, until Pitch was standing on a black disk of churning darkness that resembled a pit of boiling tar. That same disk slowly reduced in size as Pitch grew and grew and grew until the shadow he cast over Jack easily blotted out the moon trying to peer through the thick clouds above. Jack met the amber, rage filled stare of his enemy for a brief second, then he smirked.

Pitch's blow would have crushed both him and Eros had Jack not seen it coming, sliding sideways across the ice and dragging Eros with him, returning the favor he had owed after his purely shameful performance during his last encounter with Pitch. He did not remain beside the Valentine spirit for long, however, using the ice to catapult himself forward, Pitch in hot pursuit, before calling out to the Wind with that part of himself that had been missing for so long and taking to the air. Pitch followed him, as Jack had known he would, all logic lost beneath the desire to destroy whatever stood in his path. With brute force, if need be. Pitch did not stop to think that Jack had the advantage in the air. That the dark clouds into which the winter spirit was darting were his own creation. And he certainly didn't stop to consider that he had just flown right into the heart of the storm.

Jack didn't give him time to realize his mistake, floating to the very center of the cloud mass, then reaching inside of himself, and pulling on the power that had amassed there ever since Pitch shattered his staff. The energy crackled through his limbs and along his fingertips, dancing up and down his staff, and surging through his whole body as he took a deep breath, then released it all.

"He did it," North breathed as he found his feet, his gaze fixed on the heavens even as he fought to regain his equilibrium. "Jamie did it!"

Beside him, Bunny made a choked sound that was either a laugh of relief or an attempt to express too many emotions at once. North felt much the same, watching the flashes of blue that suddenly began to pepper the black clouds above them. The fight now taking place was beyond their line of sight, but so long as that light still shone, North chose to believe that Jack was winning. That boy didn't have it in him to lose. Not when it counted.

"Shouldn't we help?" Tooth asked anxiously, switching between hovering at their side and resting on the ice, a sure sign she was not yet fully recovered. "I mean, did you guys see Pitch?"

"No," Bunny said firmly, and all three of his fellow Guardians turned to look at him in astonishment. "This is Jack's fight," the Easter Guardian elaborated, bending to help an alarmingly pale-faced Eros to his feet. Sandy was doing the same for the Groundhog, though the small creature seemed put out by the fact the Guardian of Dreams had considered it necessary. Perhaps more so by the fact Sandy was right. It was a reminder, North thought somberly, considering his own swiftly returning strength, of what a difference having believers made, even with all the weaknesses that came with such an advantage. "We have to let him finish this."

"What if he can't?" Tooth questioned, her face worried. "I have faith in Jack, Bunny, I do, but Pitch hasn't been this powerful since… since the Dark Ages! And look what he did then!"

"We can't interfere," Bunny insisted. "Those are Jack's fears up there. His insecurities. His memories. He has to beat them himself, or defeating Pitch won't mean anything at all."

What Bunny said was true, North was forced to admit, but that didn't make it any easier to stand by and do nothing. Although, his sleigh was long since gone, so, even had he not agreed with Bunny against his better judgment, most of them had no means of getting airborne regardless.

"We need to get off this ice," Chuck said suddenly, a wary eye on the horizon. "I don't know about you guys, but I have a feeling I'm not gonna want to be on this lake when those two get serious."

"Get serious?" North cast another glance at the invisible fight going on above him, then returned his stare to the Groundhog even as the motley crew began to edge their way off the center of the lake.

"You've fought a seasonal before yourselves," the Groundhog reminded him pointedly. "Do you really think that's all the weight your little whippersnapper has to throw about?" North had no answer to that, and, seeing this, the Guardian of the Seasons gave a sharp nod. "Your boy's just waiting for us to get clear, I'll bet," he said. "Once we do, all hell is going to break loose."

Jack was tearing Pitch apart one fear fueled memory at a time. The Nightmare King was throwing images at him one after the other in quick succession. The same memories he had used to cow Jack both in his lair and in that disaster's aftermath. But Pitch no longer had the string to pull that had made their influence all the more devastating, and Jack could finally, actually see.

He came face to face with Bunny's hostility, his doubt, his anger, and his distrust, and he brushed it all aside with the memory of the fact it had been Bunny who came for him in that snowy wasteland. That Bunny was the one who had found him in Pitch's lair and who had brought him back. That Bunny was the older brother he had never had and loved to annoy and he wasn't letting Pitch take that away from him.

He crashed against the accusation of his nightmares, of Tooth holding his memories from him on purpose, a dark glint to her eyes as she hid them away. He slashed through that image, replacing it with the kindness on her face and in her voice as she laid a hand on his shoulder and told him how if she had only known of this missing piece of himself she would have gladly helped him find it.

Pitch thrust Sandy's death in his face, with the determined mantra of 'your' fault at its back, and Jack batted it away with the reminder that he had been the one to reawaken the belief in children. That it had been his words and actions that had allowed Sandy to come back.

North's condemning 'you were with Pitch?' washed over him like the damp mist of a storm-cloud, and he let it, replacing its chill touch with the warmth in the big Guardian's eyes as he laid a hand on Jack's shoulder and told him he firmly believed he could never turn into something as dark and twisted as Pitch had become.

'No one would have noticed…' collided with the sight of the seasonals and their watcher closing ranks around him, and the soft reassurance in the eyes of a spirit he had only just met as Eros took his arm and did his utmost to keep him from harm.

'You did this…' and the dreadful image that went with it was utterly obliterated by Jamie's trusting expression, and the warm hand that had so selflessly touched his own despite the risks.

Pitch was shrinking before his eyes as each of his Fearlings was confronted, defeated, and destroyed, and so the Nightmare King drew on the darker memories. On the deepest and vilest nightmares his powers could conjure. Jack faced them head on, crashing into the dark illusion of his sister's grief following his death, and wielding his own, reaffirmed convictions against the power of Pitch's shadows.

He had made the decision to save his sister. That hadn't been Pitch's doing, it had been his choice. If she had suffered for that he was sorry, but, given the chance, he would do exactly the same thing again, because she was better off alive and grieving with the chance of healing than she was at the bottom of those icy waters, her young life cut so cruelly short. He was her older brother, and he had sworn always to protect her, and he had. So he let that memory glide past him, whispering an apology to her tear streaked face, yet knowing whatever grief she had felt had surely passed eventually. Pitch had been defeated, he could not have haunted one little girl as long as he claimed he had, for he had been battling the Guardians fiercely at that time.

Pitch had lied.

Jack had saved his sister.

And he was proud of it.

The last Fearling was stripped away, and Jack finally faced just his enemy, his staff still crackling in his hands as he faced Pitch squarely across the swirling mass of storm clouds raining snow on the lake below. The Nightmare King appeared undaunted by the slow whittling away of his army, still enlarged, though to a lesser degree, by the shadows he had absorbed. Still too consumed by anger to even consider reason. Jack braced himself, waiting for the taunting comments that were sure to come, but was taken wholly by surprise when Pitch chose to launch himself forward instead, dark tendrils snapping through the air in an attempt to seize their prey. Jack dodged deftly, the Wind at his back, guiding him to safety even when he was not sure which way was up and which was down. Pitch was not at all dissuaded by Jack's ability to evade him, and the attacks continued one after another, even when he used the clouds for cover.

Spinning along the bottom of the cloudbank, Jack's eyes traced the surface of the lake, confirming the fact his distraction had allowed the others to get to relative safety. Once certain that the Guardians and those who had helped them were no longer in the line of fire he darted back up through the clouds, twirling as he exited their misty substance and leaving a curled trail in his wake. His trajectory had brought him right in front of Pitch, and blue eyes met amber in a searing collision of color.

"Now, it's my turn," he said levelly. "Let's revisit the past, shall we?"

He seized a hold of the Nightmare King, pushing Pitch right through the cloud of Nightmare Sand on which he was floating and driving them both towards the frozen lake below. The Wind whirled around him, snow on its back that created a funnel for them to fall through, and which drove back the dark tendrils of shadow that tried to seize a hold of him as they fell. There was nothing to impede their path as they raced towards the frozen water below, and their impact drove them right through the thick layer of ice, cracked shards swirling through the water around them as they sunk towards the bottom. The water was pitch black beneath, only the bright glow of Jack's staff illuminating the darkness, and Pitch's very form all but invisible in the gloom.

Jack released his adversary as soon as his feet touched the bottom, tightening his grip on his staff as he surged for the surface, freezing the water as he went, his eyes fixed on the moon breaking through the cloud cover above. He had almost made it to the top, the liquid freezing all around him so that for a moment he was half afraid it would solidify faster than he could outrun it, but a moment later his head broke the surface. He had just enough time to let out a whoop of triumph before a vice closed about his ankle and hauled him back below, the ice closing with fatal finality above his head.