A/N: I stole the title of this chapter right off an episode of Buffy and I am not sorry.
This gets… a little bit grisly, sooooo
28 (Conversations with Dead People)
Anna coughs.
Jack doesn't even lift his head. It's the fourth time he's had this nightmare. Maybe the fifth. He doesn't know if he's been down here minutes or hours or days. It could be years—maybe Pitch has spread the blackout zone across the whole world by now. Jack's pretty sure Pitch would occasionally come back to his lair to gloat about this if it were the case, but maybe Jack's wrong. Or maybe Pitch is here, sending him the same nightmare over and over again. Giving Anna back, giving his powers back, taking them away again.
"You could at least shake things up a bit," he mutters to his knees. "Let me see Elsa instead."
That would undoubtedly be worse, he thinks. Seeing her, holding her, telling her the things he failed to say—then having her ripped away. He'd rather be stuck in a cycle with Anna.
"Jack?"
Elsa sits up in front of him, and Jack bites down on his tongue so hard it bleeds, to stop the tears from choking him. He's not going to cry. He's not going to give Pitch the satisfaction.
"Ah. Ow. What happened?"
He can't stop himself from peeking up at her, just to see her bangs fall across her face, the vulnerability in her eyes. She's wearing the ice dress from the first day they met. Frost glitters in her hair, spirals outward from the hole in her chest. Ragged sequins of ice flake off the edge of the wound as she brushes her hand across it.
"Pitch stabbed me?" The expression in her eyes is one of surprised betrayal, and that alone is agony to Jack. That she loved Pitch enough that it was possible for him to betray her. That she trusted him enough. "Am I still bleeding?"
"No," says Jack, voice muffled in his knees once again. "You're dead."
"Come on, Jack, where's your sense of humor?"
"I lost it. Somewhere between losing my staff for the third time and losing everyone I care about. You know me. Just can't keep track of anything."
She laughs and leans down to tear scintillant scraps off the hem of her dress. They crackle and chime in distress. "Aren't you going to help me bandage my wounded heart?"
"No," he says. "Do it yourself."
The facsimile of his queen crawls over to him and lays a hand on his shoulder. "But Jack," she says, "I believe in you." Her palm comes away bright with frost. His frost.
"What difference does that make?" he snaps. "You're dead."
"So are you." Pitch shows behind her eyes; her own skull shows behind her smile. "Alone again, Jack?"
Jack lets out an echoing cry of frenzy, turning to ram his staff against the walls of his prison. It resounds off the metal with a clang like a church bell. He grits his teeth and pants, then looks down at the wood in his hand.
"Wait, what?"
As soon as he questions it, the staff turns black, and swells into a wriggling, long-armed Fearling, slick and slimy in his hand. He growls his disgust and flings it away from him; it slithers between the ornate scrollwork on the cage bars and vanishes into the dark.
Elsa coughs.
-o-
After the third time he has watched Elsa rot away before him, Jack starts talking to her.
He knows exactly why: it's a symptom of the loneliness. He's been here before, silent and invisible and desperate for anyone to listen to him. Used to be that anyone ended up himself, but now it's his own worst nightmares come home to roost.
But he tells her the things he forgot to say, or would have said when they'd gone home to Arendelle. "I figured out your center," he finds himself saying conversationally to an Elsa with her clothing in graveyard tatters and her eyes windows to an abyss. His rotting queen pauses and cocks her head, and she manages to look sad without any eyes to convey the expression. To his surprise, they fade back in as he watches, pale cyan looking at him with a smile that has no mirth.
"Cold," she says, looking down at her fingertips, which are frosted blue. "We always knew that." A bitterness steals into her tone. "Cold and dark."
"Nah," Jack says, leaning his head back against the bars. "Freedom."
She looks startled. "What?"
"Cold was the price of your freedom. Remember?"
Elsa laughs; the sound grates over decaying vocal cords. "How could I forget?"
Jack nods, pretending he's not looking at her, but he is. "You did everything to be free, didn't you?"
"And it never worked," she says. "I'm alone again, Jack."
-o-
At the end of the dream, when his magic comes back even though it shouldn't, he stops questioning it, and the dream stops ending. Instead, he builds up sculptures against the bars of the cage, Elsa's hands on his, the two of them carving art out of cold air. Corkscrew icicles spiral out of the low ceiling; sparkling cascades of snowflakes chime and sing on a nonexistent breeze. He pretends that the belief of a dead girl can give him back the magic that he gave up to kill her. He pretends her laughter is real, not a mockery written into his head by Pitch's Nightmares. Sometimes Anna is there, too, and in the cramped space, where there is hardly room for Jack alone to turn around, the three of them build snowmen and snowwomen and snow-dogs and -cats and anything they can think of.
Elsa, her finger-bones showing through the pale flesh of her outstretched hand, weaves Olaf out of the air. He leaps forward with glee, shouting his greetings. Anna grabs his tiny stick arms and dances a circle with him.
"Anna said you killed him," Jack says to Elsa, watching the awkward but enthusiastic waltz around their tiny confines.
"As much as you can kill a snowman, I suppose."
"Why though?"
Elsa stretches out her fingers and dissolves Olaf back to his glittering components. "I created life," she says. "I took it away." She looks at Jack, and her smile is so wide it splits her skin. "So I could be alone again, Jack."
-o-
"Ah. Ow. What happened?"
Jack has stopped answering this question. He doesn't like this part.
"Did Pitch stab me?"
Silently, he urges her to get on with it, to get to the good part. The fun part.
"He wouldn't have done that," Elsa whispers, tear tracks burning down her cheeks. "He loves me."
Nausea rises in Jack's throat and he bangs his fist against the bars. "No," he says. "No way."
Elsa glares at him through her tears. "Pitch always let me be free." She presses her hands over the hole where her heart should be and looks pleadingly at Jack.
"This is the worst nightmare ever," he moans, banging his head against his knees. "Wake up, wake up, wake up."
"Will he come back?" Elsa implores. "I don't want to be alone again, Jack."
-o-
And sometimes they aren't his dreams.
He stands on the edges of them and they're memories—Elsa's, or Pitch's, things Jack shouldn't know. Doesn't want to see. Elsa isn't dead, or rotting, but it's almost worse. Once he crouches in the web of her black chandelier and he can almost feel how much she hates him:
"Where is he where is he where is he?" She mutters it like a chant, over and over, punctuated by sounds of smoldering anger. "Ugh! Where is he?"
She paces circles around the snowflake in the floor, frosted cape slithering across the ice like dead leaves. Deep below the surface of the floor, incarnadine veins lace the ice, pulsing as if they run with blood. The center of the snowflake is still marred by a blot of sickly rust-color and the smudgy trail of footprints leading away from it. It reminds her constantly of Jack. Of how, months ago, he lay here bleeding beneath the ruins of her chandelier.
If only it had killed him.
Her fist clenches; the black crystals hanging from her twisted bracelets clink and chime; serrated snowflakes erupt from between her fingers. She wishes she could remove the stains, but the castle has glazed over them in her absence. Blood runs deep in the architecture of her palace now.
"Where is he!"
"Elsa. Hush now."
Elsa flings a bolt of ice toward Pitch without even looking. He folds into the shadows beneath him and rises up on the other side of the room; the bolt shatters against an archway.
"Don't condescend me," Elsa snaps. Pitch rolls his eyes.
"You are letting an inconsequential factor turn you into a—" Pitch gestures sharply, trying to find the word. "A state of complete disarray. He's Jack Frost!" He throws his hands into the air. "He's practically invisible! Well—" Pitch smiles, folding his hands behind his back again and sauntering toward the balcony. "By now I expect he is invisible. Poor Jack. How that must burn."
"Burning's not on my agenda." Elsa stands beside him on the balcony, which hangs out over the abyss. Its railing is an elaborate scrollwork of wrought-iron and black glass, and it reaches into the darkness as if intending to stretch all the way across the void.
She curls her fingers into fists at her sides, and rime loops up her arms like gloves. "Where did he go? I felt him in the storm. Was it too much for him?"
Pitch leans his elbows on the balcony railing, rolling his eyes again. "He came here to die. What does it matter where he succeeds?"
"It matters!" She slams her hand into the railing and it splinters. Pitch loses his balance and nearly topples forward before he catches himself. "It matters because I want to look him in the eye and cut his throat."
A dagger of ice glitters out of nowhere and into her hand. Pitch chuckles, resting against an unbroken expanse of railing and spreading his hands wide.
"Elsa," he says, "tell me. Are you happy?"
"Happy?" She turns her face to his. "I'm Queen. And everyone is afraid of me."
Pitch tilts his head back, smiling, as if this is music to his ears. "And this is what you wanted, is it not? What—" He falls backward into the gloom over the balcony's edge and reappears in Elsa's shadow. "—we wanted."
"Yes."
"And you are here only because of Jack Frost! You should be thanking him. I know I am!" Pitch throws out his hands again. "Why, it would have been so much more difficult to coax you from your castle if he had not compounded your fear"—he reaches out to run one pallid finger down the side of her face—"with your hate." His hands fold behind his back again, and he retreats a step in order to bow to her. "Undoubtedly, we should be greeting him with milk and cookies. Perhaps it would make him feel more at home. Why are you still so angry with him?"
Elsa pivots away again, stepping forward to stand in the gap in the balcony rail, teetering on the edge of the void. "Because it hurts," she says quietly, furiously, something black glittering behind her eyes where no one can see it. "Because it still hurts."
("Jack? Ow. What happened? Thank you. Thank you. It still hurts. It hurts being alone again.")
-o-
"Some people are worth melting for," pipes up the snowman with a skull for a head.
"Shut up, Olaf," says Jack, glaring determinedly past him into the darkness.
"You're just not one of them," says Olaf, while a raven-shaped Fearling pecks at his nose. "I guess that's why you're alone again, Jack."
-o-
"SHUT UP!" Jack roars at the darkness, but there isn't anyone to hear.
-o-
"Going to while away your life in dreams, Jack?"
He sits with his arm around her; they're playing tic-tac-toe in loopy frost patterns on the cage floor. She's snowflakes, he's x's made of pale twisting thorns.
"I don't exactly have anything else to do down here."
She pauses before adding her snowflake to the tic-tac-toe grid. Pinching two fingers together, she raises them into the air, trailing a ribbon of sand that trickles down into pale gold-dust. "Leave," she suggests.
Jack shrugs, drawing frost flowers onto the ceiling above them. "Can't," he says. "I don't have any powers."
Pieces of Elsa begin flaking away, but this time, she just looks frustrated beneath the decay. Jack smiles wryly at her. "This might suck, but at least it's not boring," he says. He laces his fingers with hers, and the feel of skin peeling off the bones makes him want to throw up everything he hasn't eaten in—oh, it must be centuries now. The bile nearly chokes him, but he doesn't let go.
"At least I'm not alone again."
-o-
For a while, Jack dreams of drowning.
He dreams of the utter shock of hitting the icy water, a paralytic to his entire system. He can't move, he's trapped beneath the surface, he's trapped and he just wants to move—and then there was the thrashing, the way the water frothed around him, the searing in his chest, the panic, the choking. He didn't think he remembered this is in such great detail, but wherever it is buried in the snowbanks of his mind, the Nightmares have dredged it up to torment him. Fear clutches at the edges of his vision, blurring it towards a starry black; he beats himself against the solid wall of cold, the ice-water cage.
And then the calm slips over him. It is, perhaps, even more terrifying than the thrashing panic, because he doesn't want to move. He doesn't need to move. He need only let the water take him until the moon raises him up.
In the dream, the moon doesn't raise him up.
In the dream, he sinks lower and lower, clothes billowing out around him, kelp tangling in his silver hair, eyes wide open to watch the empty night close in above. He can't remember what it's like to be anything but still, a statue sinking to the bottom of the sea, a trickle of gold sand floating
When Jack chokes himself awake, Anna is sitting up next to him, looking groggy. "Jack? Ah. Ow. What happened?"
Jack can't answer, because his lungs are full of seawater and he doesn't even have the air to breathe.
-o-
Elsa leans over to kiss him where he sprawls on the cold floor of the cage. He imagines they are in a vast field, with nothing but glittering hills of virgin snow for miles and miles, and the wind whispers its blessing over them both.
-o-
Or he stands invisible on an expanse of mountain plain, and the Nightmare army arrayed before him has nothing on the nightmares parading through his head. They are barely visible against the lightless sky, but by the glow of their eyes, he can see their king and queen. Elsa sits atop a Nightmare that is more blue than black, its tainted snowflake-skin shifting like a gentle snowfall. She is draped in shades of violet and black, with a silver halo of her hair and her hems; snowflakes dance behind her in a perpetual wind, like a snow-globe that never runs out of flitter. Pitch is seated beside her on midnight made manifest in equine form, nothing visible but the pallid blot of his face against the mountain sky.
Jack tucks his hands into his pocket, rubbing his fingers on the gritty remnants of Sandy's long-ago gift and stares grimly at the Queen of the Cold and Dark with her King of Nightmares. Elsa looks out to where he stands, as if she can see him—although he isn't there, not if this is her memory or Pitch's; Jack is as invisible as if he doesn't exist (alone again, Jack). In his nightmare, she meets his eyes, and from the back of her steed she leans over and kisses the Nightmare King.
Jack gags. "Ow. What happened?" asks a voice beside him. He turns to see Elsa, smiling wryly, hands clasped in front of her, her cheekbones visible through the curling skin of her face.
"He's so old," says Jack, sounding nauseated. Elsa arcs an eyebrow.
"Three hundred," she says, pointing at Jack, "and some."
"Yeah, but he's about a thousand."
Elsa pauses, then smiles. "Older than that," she says.
"That's revolting," says Jack. Elsa raises one hand into the air, skin sloughing off and falling as snow. He looks away, but she grabs his wrist with her other skeletal hand.
"Look," she says, as the army of Nightmares kicks into a gallop, bearing down on the two of them. A flurry of frost spirals in her palm down into a trickle of sand. "This is a true dream. Stop them."
"What?" says Jack, flinging out his hand to gesture at the stampede of bad dreams and blackness. "Stop that? It already happened. And I don't have any powers."
"Stop them," she says, spinning sand into the air like stars, "or you'll always be alone again, Jack."
