So...I figured I would keep uploading new chapters to AB, while editing it...? I know, probably not the greatest idea.

Reminder for those of you who have the read the Guardian books: Nightlight, MiM and Pitch's backstory happens along a slightly different timeline than the canon books timeline, in order to kind of combine the book timeline with the ROTG timeline .


Chapter 28: Pawns on the Battlefield

Limbo

Bunny and Jack approached the former Nightmare King, and Bunny realized that Pitch wasn't exactly waking up. It was more like he was talking in his sleep. His breathing was ragged, irregular, and tears were running down his face.

"Is he…crying?" Bunny asked, looking beside him at Jack for confirmation that they were seeing the same thing.

"Yep," Jack replied. He seemed to understand something about Pitch that Bunny didn't, for he had no problem crouching down next to the unconscious spirit and wiping his tears away. At his touch the tears crystalized and rolled into the center his palm, where they began to transform into something resembling a dagger's blade. Jack closed his eyes and clenched the hand holding Pitch's tears into a fist for a moment before throwing the tears into the white light around them. The tears sank into the light and disappeared.

If Bunny hadn't believed Jack had been Nightlight before, seeing the tears form a dagger in his hand banished any doubt from his mind. Nightlight had famously crafted a diamond dagger from the tears of the infant Man in the Moon and stabbed Pitch in the heart, ending the Second War of the Dream Pirates many millennia ago.

As Pitch continued muttering sentence fragments in his unconscious state, Bunny hesitantly asked, "Do you...remember what happened to you? After you fought him at the end of the Golden Age?"

Jack shrugged, standing up and facing Bunny again. His eyes became amber answered, "Bits and pieces. I know I've been here before—" Jack gestured with one hand at the empty space around them, "—But I don't remember dying. Not that time at least. I'm not sure I fully did until Death found me wandering around here and took me to her domain."

"Death? She's real? I mean, I've always heard stories about her, but I thought no one had ever seen her," Bunny said, wondering just how much Jack knew about the immortal spirit world now that he remembered being Nightlight.

Jack nodded. "She brought me here. Or at least, she brought this part of me here." He replied.

"Oh, so that's who that woman was. I hope you're about to explain what you mean by all of that, because my patience for mysteries and riddles is really starting to run dry."

Jack half-smiled sheepishly. "Sorry," he said, "I'll try to get straight to the point then. I just recently found out that I was Nightlight in a past life, and I can remember parts of that. But I think…When Hell used my magic to bring Dark back to life, and then they used me to bring Chaos back, I got a little, uh, fragmented."

"Fragmented?"

"Yes."

"The only strange things going on with you are the color of your eyes, and the fact that you're more serious than I remember. Your eyes do actually keep changing between amber and blue, but you don't look fragmented to me, Jack."

Jack looked down at Pitch again, and said "Do you know the story of how Pitch became the Nightmare King?"

Bunny nodded. He knew the gist of it, but didn't care to dwell on it for long. It was easier to deal with Pitch that way.

Jack continued. "So then you know that Pitch Black used to be a General that fought for the Man in the Moon's parents, the Lunanoff's. He used to be human, kind, a good father and husband. Then he lost his family to the dark entities called fearlings, and later, in his grief, he was taken over by the fearlings."

"I know those parts, about the fearlings and that he fought for House Lunanoff. Doesn't mean I trust him to be anything remotely good now though. We've both seen him do too much for that, right?" Bunny was getting an uncomfortable feeling about where this conversation was headed, but Jack pushed onward.

"Bunny, in the stories you know about Pitch, he was possessed by fearlings. Just like what happened to me with Chaos. Immortal souls don't die like mortals do. I think that's part of why we're all stuck here, or at least me and Pitch. The way the fearlings or Chaos take over another immortal—"

After a moment, Bunny understood what Jack was desperately trying to say. " –fragments you soul? Like, your actual soul is in multiple places right now? And you're telling me the same thing happened to Pitch thousands of years ago?"

Jack nodded.

Bunny gaped at him. Now there were even more issues that he never signed up to deal with in the afterlife! "How do you know all of this, out of the blue?" Bunny asked.

"I think…I have gone through all of this before. Or, rather Nightlight did." Jack said, making a face when he stumbled over how to talk about himself—and his past self.

"So what do we do now?" Bunny wondered. He hoped that the wolf-creatures wouldn't come back anytime soon.

"We wait for Pitch to wake up. I have some questions for him." Jack sat down beside the former Nightmare King again, leaning slightly against his upright staff.

When it became clear that he had no other real choice in the matter, Bunny joined Jack in sitting next to Pitch.