I have gotten several requests from people for something dark and angsty. More so than usual, I mean. That's what this is. The idea has actually been in my head since the beginning, but I didn't think I was going to use it. But if it's what the readers want...

Warning: contains self harm and blood. If that's not your thing you can skip this chapter.

Sleep was not to Jack what it was to many others. Sleep was something that had to be done every now and then in order to keep up his energy, but he would much rather be doing something else. Sleep was boring in comparison to flying or making snow or being in snowball fights. And Jack, like any other child, couldn't stand to be bored.

But just because he needed to sleep didn't mean he had to sleep for very long; Jack could go for days on just a few hours of sleep. As far as he knew, all spirits could. So he usually just found a sturdy tree or a soft snow drift, took a good nap, and continued on with his business. Because of this, Jack rarely dreamed; he didn't allow himself to get deep enough into the stages of sleep.

It had not been this way in his early years. Back then Jack would sleep in the same pattern as the humans: go to sleep when the sun set and wake up when it rose. Back then he would dream all the time, wonderful dreams in which he had everything he longed for. But then he would wake up and realize that his dreams were just that- only dreams. And the hollow feeling they left behind was almost worse than the nightmares. For there had been plenty of those back then too, horrible, gut-wrenching nightmares where he woke up screaming and trembling. So Jack had trained himself not to sleep too deeply, lest he fall back into the arms of the terrible nightmares or the deceptively happy dreams.

But now things in his life were changing- changing for the better. He knew that, if he tried, he could sleep as long and as deeply as he wanted without any of those past worries. North had even offered him a room in the Pole: a circular, spacious bedroom with a four poster bed and huge bay windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and provided easy access to the snowy landscape outside. But Jack had turned it down, preferring to stick to his old sleep patterns. They say it takes three weeks to form a habit and three weeks to break one, but after nearly three hundred years of sleeping whenever and wherever he wanted he couldn't imagine it any other way.

Tonight he had returned to sleep in Burgess, or more specifically the trees that ringed his lake. With a yawn he leaned his head back against the trunk, but felt an uncomfortable knot on the wood. When he looked back at it he realized that it wasn't just a weird growth, but rather scar tissue that had obviously been there for a long time. He touched it gently, swallowing hard as a memory he had unsuccessfully tried to repress came to the forefront of his mind.

The date was March 14, 1888. It was a day that would go down in history, though not for anything good. It was the day one of the worst blizzards ever recorded ended, but not before covering good part of New England and Canada in over four feet of snow and more or less paralyzing the entire region.

Jack sat in the tree, biting his lip hard as the damage reports he had overheard and read ran through his head.

Snow drifts as high as 52 feet… Electricity lost, telephone and telegraph system destroyed… People are stranded in their homes, and it is unknown when they will be able to emerge again… Over three hundred fatalities and counting… Two hundred ships lost in the storm, at least one hundred seamen dead… Millions of dollars in property lost… Extremely high winds… Even worse than the Schoolhouse Blizzard, which two months ago killed 235 people, including about 47 children…

So many dead, so many suffering, all because of him. It was his fault there were children who after today would never smile again, men on the ships who would never sail home to their families, women who would never hold their babies close to them again. He was a monster. He was a murderer.

Tears rolling down his face, Jack formed a long, jagged piece of ice in his hand.

Those people were not the ones who should be hurting. He was the one who should be hurting. He was the one who should be bearing all their pain, their frozen bodies and broken hearts.

He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and pressed the sharp part of the ice against his arm.

He deserved to suffer. He deserved to bleed and scream and cry. He deserved it, after what he had done to those innocent people.

He took a shuddering breath and sharply pulled on the knife of ice, ripping open his skin.

The pain was sharp and instantaneous, and Jack couldn't help but cry out. The blood dripped fast and hot down his arm, but he didn't look away. He made himself watch, did it because he had to, to make up for what he had done. This was his penance for what he had done.

With a shaking hand he lifted the knife from his skin and moved it to another part of his arm. Another sharp jerk of the knife, another fresh stream of blood. He was gasping for air now, his lungs refusing to draw breath from a combination of grief and pain and self-hatred.

Another cut, another scream.

He was sobbing now, the tears falling thick and fast from his face and mixing with the blood. But he didn't wipe them away, because each tear was payment for the people he had killed. But no amount of tears could bring them back, could undo what he had done.

Another cut, this one closer to his wrist and bleeding even more than the others.

You have to stop, some reasonable voice in the back of his mind warned him. You're going to kill yourself.

Maybe he deserved to die. Maybe that would somehow be sufficient payment for his unforgivable acts. Maybe he should just let himself bleed, his life leaking away into the snow. Maybe the world would be better off without him.

Could he die, though? Was it possible? He looked up at the moon, the one who had cursed him with this deadly power that did nothing but hurt, nothing but kill.

"Th-This is because of y-you," he gasped, staring up at the white orb that hung in the black sky. "This is y-your fault!" he screamed.

The moon didn't answer, and Jack almost laughed. Of course it wouldn't answer. Maybe, all this time, he had been wrong. Maybe the moon really was just a big, lifeless hunk of rock floating millions of miles away in space. Maybe he was a just a freak of nature, an accident. Maybe he really was completely alone.

His forearm was completely covered in blood now; he could barely even see his pale skin underneath all the red. But it still wasn't enough. The horrible, aching, feeling that was building up inside him wouldn't go away. So he rolled up the sleeve on his other arm and pressed the knife to the unblemished skin, sliding it quickly away and opening up another red mouth in his flesh that screamed in agony. And another. And another. And another.

His entire body was trembling with pain and sobs, and with a final scream that was a combination of pain, sadness, anger, and hatred, he drove the knife deep into the trunk of the tree. It shattered in his hand, cutting his skin even more. But he didn't care. The gash in the tree began oozing sap, dripping down the bark like blood, or like tears.

Jack drew his knees up to his chest and buried his head in his bloodied arms, shaking and crying. His blood dripped down onto the snow below, startlingly crimson against the pure white that shone in the light of the always-watching, never-caring moon.

Jack pulled his hand away from the scar quickly as if it had burned him, the memory sharp and crisp in his mind as if it had happened only yesterday. He hesitated, and then rolled up the sleeves of his hoodie, half-expecting to see his arms torn and raw and bleeding. But they were as they normally were, healthy and white and untouched. There weren't even any scars; those had disappeared within a day. Because of his advanced healing properties, it was as if the incident had never happened at all.

Jack had heard somewhere that when people underwent a tragic experience, their mind would try and erase or blur the details of the event in order to try and heal them. That was not an option for Jack; he could remember every tear that fell, every twinge of pain, every drop of blood. He couldn't forget, so the only thing he could do was try and bury it underneath all his other memories. And even that could only do so much.

Jack shivered as he stood up and jumped off from the branch, taking to the sky. He would not be sleeping there tonight, not in the dark when such a sinister thing lurked in his mind.

Maybe he would take North up on his offer after all.

To any cutters out there: Please don't do it. I'm not going to pretend I know what you're feeling. No one knows that but you. But I can tell you that cutting doesn't help, it only hurts. It hurts you, it hurts your loved ones, it hurts everyone involved. I firmly believe that your life should be about finding what makes you happy and sticking with it. And no matter what crap is happening in your life right now, know that "this too shall pass."