A/N: We're at more chapters than reviews again. :p Have I lost your attention? Haven't heard from anybody in a while! Well, there are only three chapters left after this, so we only have three more days together! I hope someone's enjoyed the ride. :D

29 (Stuttering Through the Dark)

Jack wakes up again with Anna's hand on his shoulder this time, as if he has missed the start of the nightmare. She's shaking him; his head flops from side to side a few times before he jerks back to awareness.

"Ow. What happened?" he asks, and frowns.

"That Pitch freak stabbed me." Anna bends her elbow up behind her, poking gingerly at the hole in her back, and winces. Disgusted, Jack pulls his hood up and sticks his hands in his pocket. "Still haven't figured out what happened to you though. I couldn't wake you. I tried everything! Not that there's much to try here. It's not like I have a bucket of cold water or anything."

Jack rubs at the grains of sand in his pocket and says slowly, "You're off-script."

"I'm… wait, what?"

He shrugs, catching the stray sand under his fingernails, and then leaps to his feet. "It was a hint!" he says loudly.

"Um… nope, still in the 'wait, what?' line," says Anna.

Jack practically turns his hoodie pocket inside out, trying to dig the remainders of Sandy's gift out of his seams. A few golden grains drop into his palm, dull and almost invisible in the grey light. But then, Jack knows all about being invisible.

He closes his fist over the remnants of the Dreamsand and starts to pace. One of his feet goes out from under him and he stumbles. Momentarily bewildered, he drops his gaze to see what threw his balance off.

Frost flowers, vines of glacier-blue, branching thorns and root systems, spiral out from the place where he was sitting. They tangle together in frantic whorls, as if he had been hemorrhaging ice in his sleep.

Jack sighs and flips his hand through his hair. "How can I have my powers back?" he says dully, dutifully. "That doesn't make any sense." Might as well end another one. Maybe he'll get Elsa again on the next round, and the three of them can build a snowman, and he can forget that he's not supposed to be grateful for the nightmares.

"I dunno," says Anna, examining the frost patterns closely. "You were doing that in your sleep. Pretty weird, huh. Were you dreaming?"

Jack stares at her.

"You… believe in me?" he says tentatively. She scrunches up her face.

"I can see you, does that count? I guess that must count. I know you're real. If you're not real I'm kind of not sure what happened to Arendelle. Since it's your fault and all."

Hesitantly, Jack reaches out to touch her. He isn't even sure why. She looks at him askance and waves her hand in front of his face.

"Hellooo? Jack? You're acting a lit-tle weird."

Jack remembers the Dreamsand fragments in his hand. There are hardly any left—not enough to last. But maybe enough to show him the difference between the nightmares and reality. He rubs them into his eyes, wincing.

Anna makes a face. She doesn't disappear. She doesn't start to rot.

"Are you… real?" Jack asks.

"Um. Yeeeeees?"

"But you're dead," he says.

"Well that's not very nice!"

Jack puts his head in his hands. His eyes burn with sand in the corners, blinding him to the nightmares. What he can see is real or memory. This is a true dream. Stop them.

Jack drops his hands and laughs. It feels like waking up. "You're real," he tells Anna.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I already said that."

"You're real and I could kiss you!" He laughs again, dragging his hand along the bars of the cage and leaving glittering trails behind. Anna makes another face.

"I think you'd better save that for Elsa."

Jack stops, smile faltering. The Dreamsand seizes on the memory, and it swims before his eyes, one more dream in a string of them: Elsa leans over to kiss him where he sprawls on the cold floor of the cage. It hits him like a blow from his own staff that he doesn't have the memory of a single real kiss. Only dreams and regrets.

"Maybe true love's kiss'll wake her up," he mutters.

"Well duh, isn't that what you came all this way for?"

I came all this way, didn't I?

Jack shakes his head, then realizes she might take it for a negative and says, "Yeah. But we gotta take out Pitch, first."

Anna reaches out one arm and rattles pointlessly at the bars of the cage. "Still stuck, Jack."

Jack grins at her, the sparkle in his eyes definitely not grateful tears, because all his desperate regret has been moping enough without crying, too. But Anna's here, this time, not just another corpse on the nightmare assembly line. She's here, and she believes, and he has magic again, at least a little.

"Thanks, Sandy," Jack whispers, to the little Star Captain who used to send dreams to makes wishes come true. Even if there are no stars in here, there is a dusting of sand, and Jack wonders if the Sandman knew, when he gave Jack that little pouch of Dreamsand. If he knew it would let him reach in through the blackout zone and send Jack the dream he needed while he was drowning in nightmares.

"My name's Anna, remember? Wow. No way are we going to be able to beat Pitch." Cringing, she starts tearing strips off the hem of her dress, awkwardly tying them around herself. "I'm practically an invalid here, and you're obviously a crazy person now. Those cage bars are looking pret-ty sturdy."

Jack steps forward and helps Anna arrange the makeshift bandages. The motion throbs with painful familiarity, faint frost shimmering over the fabric, and for a minute he's sure she's going to rot away from him again.

She doesn't, though, and his lips turn up, and he hugs her. He can't help it. He needs the reminder that they're both real.

"Are you kidding?" he says, skipping over to the cage door, twirling his finger in the air, drawing corkscrews of frost. "I've got Princess Anna of Arendelle, who isn't afraid of the King of Nightmares." He presses his hand against the lock; pale thorns leap out across the metal, creeping inside, forming the teeth of a jagged key. The lock clicks and he shoves the door open with both hands.

"And you've got Jack Frost," he says, and grins. "Who rules the winter again." He turns to Anna and holds out a hand.

"Yep, we're pretty much set," Anna says, curtsying awkwardly and flouncing forward to accept it. "Definitely not going to die."

"That's the spirit," says Jack, and reminds the wind who he is as they leap into the open air.

-o-

They plummet ten feet from their prison before Jack manages to catch them on a sluggish breeze. Anna screams. Jack rolls his eyes and pulls them upward, but it's a long way from the center of the earth to the peak of the North Mountain. They stutter higher, staying close to the wall so Jack can cling to the chasm's uneven surfaces, breathing heavily, searching the darkness above them for some hint of the sky.

"Believe harder," he gasps to Anna, who's pressed against the dark stone as if trying to merge with it.

"You're not exactly inspiring confidence here! Ow." She grits her teeth, and her grip on the black outcropping slackens. "I'm pretty sure I just started bleeding again. Aaaaand yep that was blood. That's definitely blood trickling down my back."

Jack swings down toward her, one hand clutching a narrow ledge. Anna is trying to pretend it's not really bothering her, but the set of her teeth and the tears at the corners of her eyes tells him that she's barely holding on through the pain. He hesitates, then brushes his fingers across the night-edged wound and its frayed, grimy bandages. A tiny knot of frost blossoms over the jagged hole; the spreading stain of black blood congeals and freezes. Anna gasps and shivers, and then her brow furrows in determination.

"Thanks," she says, nodding and holding out a hand to him, nearly slipping off the side of the cliff. "Can we get out of here now?"

Jack drops from the wall and scoops her up, arm around her shoulders. She makes a distressed sound and thumps her fist against his chest, knocking the wind out of him. But he doesn't let go, just launches them upward again, Anna protesting, "Hey! Not cool, Jack! I can fly by myself! Well. I mean I can't. But I definitely don't need your help. Except I kind of—but seriously—!"

"Shut up," he says, head tilted back, and he wonders if it's unfair that he's imagining his arms around Elsa instead.

-o-

"Look! That's the sky! Probably. I mean it actually looks the same as all this goopy black fog and the stars are all still gone so it might not be but I'm pretty sure that's the sky."

"Yeah, Anna, that's the sky," Jack says through gritted teeth. He feels like he has gravel in his eyes and mud for bones, but the abyss opens up above them and he can taste the fresh mountain air again. The flavor of winter and the savor of snow urge him higher out of the dark.

They wobble; Anna shrieks, although their flight path has never been steady, and he would expect she's gotten used to this by now. Perhaps the touch of melodrama is just her way of keeping him awake. Or maybe it's just Anna. Jack's hand shoots out, dropping Anna's legs; she throws her arms around his neck, nearly choking him, and he lets go of her entirely to clamp his fingers on the rough brink of the chasm. Anna makes a lot of alarmed noises, but she doesn't kick or thrash, and Jack appreciates this immensely.

"Climb up," he grates.

"Wait, what?"

"Look, I'm not—" strong enough. He stops; he doesn't want to say it. He has to believe, too, or else it's just Anna, and she's not enough to defeat Pitch Black, no matter how fearless she is. "I can't pull us both up right now, so you're gonna have to go first."

She grumbles and kicks out her feet to brace herself against the wall, still attached to Jack's neck, then stretches out one mittened hand to grasp a jag in the side of the cliff. Jack drops one hand off the edge to catch her as she lets go of him entirely—both of them nearly plunge back into the nightmarish fugue of Pitch's lair—and then she shimmies up over the stone lip, muttering encouragements to herself the whole while. Jack hangs there for a moment, breathing a sigh of relief, then hauls himself up after her.

The two of them lay face-up in the snow, spread-eagled, taking in the sky. It isn't much, but it's wide, and Jack breathes it in, letting it wash away the claustrophobia of vaulted ruins and tiny prisons. Beside him, Anna gets bored of lying still and makes a half-hearted snow angel without changing position. Jack chuckles and follows suit, only when he flips to his feet—Anna clambers up, trampling her angel's dress—his snow seraph has a full set of feathery wings and a trailing skirt longer than he is tall.

"Show-off," Anna says. Jack bows.

"Okay, so how do we find—hey." Anna has turned around, and her eyes widen, and she stares at the crumbling ruin of her sister's palace. There isn't much left—just a dripping foundation and black rubble, and something dark hunched in the center.

"What—what happened?" Anna is too stunned to move for a moment, and then she rounds on Jack. "Jack Frost, you better tell me this—this instant—what happened or I'll—I'll—I'm gonna—ooooh, I'm gonna—"

"Let me know when you've come up with a good enough threat," Jack says, wishing he had his staff so he could prop it on his shoulder.

"There isn't a good enough threat," she concludes, folding her arms and lifting her nose. "But whatever I do, it's gonna hurt."

Jack smiles wearily. "It already does," he says, and gestures toward the wreckage. "Elsa—"

Before he can finish, the hunched black shape in the castle ruin unfolds itself and stands up.