Thanks so much for reading and commenting... and for coming back! The start of this chapter was written near the beginning of January 2017. Then stuff happened and I took a hiatus. I apologize. And I explain below.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: An Egg And an Igloo

An idea had been bugging me for a while: What happened to the tooth that Toothiana punched out of Pitch's mouth? It was way at the back of my mind until the topic of Pitch's new baby teeth came up, and then last night it turned kind of urgent. I was worried, so I made a trip to see Toothiana, arriving just a few hours after I had left the last time.

I was still anxious when I arrived at her place. "Tooth," I called. "I need your..." I trailed off, seeing none other than E. Aster Bunnymund sitting beside Tooth.

"'Ello, Frostbite," Bunny said. "Surprised to see me, are we?"

"Uh... a little," I said.

Tooth smiled at me. "What did you need, Jack?"

"Um..." I looked from Bunny to Tooth. "Can I talk to you alone?" I asked, rubbing the back of my neck nervously.

"You don't have to worry," she said. "North already told him everything."

"Well, ok, but... it's just about a tooth."

She immediately came alive with interest, flying up to me. "A tooth? Whose tooth?"

I lowered my voice. "Pitch's. You remember the one you punched out of his mouth? And then the nightmares chased him away..."

Her face turned a little sheepish. "Oh, yeah... that."

"Well, whatever happened to it?" When she didn't answer right away, I went on, "See, I got to thinking: I don't know if grown-up teeth work the same way, but that one might hold some bad memories, you know? And in the wrong hands, it could be used to really hurt him."

She tapped her mouth with one slender fingers. "I suppose it might," she said. "I guess I can try to find it. It would make good leverage in case he goes wrong again."

"I don't like the idea of holding something over his head," I said. "I think if anyone keeps it, it should be Pitch."

"But supposing he uses it to get those bad memories back and it turns him back how he was?"

I couldn't deny that it was a possibility. "If we never trust him with anything, he'll never become trustworthy."

Tooth's face softened a little as my words sank in. "I'll try to find it," she said. "After that... then we'll see."

She went back to Bunny, who didn't seem to have caught much of our conversation.

"Still don't trust me?" Bunny asked flippantly, though the droop of his ears made me think he might be a little miffed.

"It's not that..." I said, blushing a little because... it kind of was that.

"It's ok," he said. "Doesn't matter in the scheme of things. Here," he added casually, holding out a chocolate egg to me. "I made this for you."

"For me?" Touched, I took the egg and nibbled on it. It was rich chocolate, not ordinary milk, but not really dark enough to be called "dark chocolate," and inside was this mint cream with a hint of nutmeg or something that made it taste like eggnog. I quickly polished it off. "Oh, wow, that was so good," I exclaimed.

Bunny looked quite proud of himself.

"It was just what I like... do you have any more?"

He chuckled. "One per customer, Jackie."

I sighed with a regretful smile. "Well, thanks. I'm going to go back and... see Pitch."

"Is it true he's a little tyke now?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Bunny chuckled again. "Tell 'im hello from me, eh?"

"I will. Hey, if you want... you might come up with a chocolate for him. That would be a challenge, wouldn't it?"

At first he looked ruffled, but when I said "challenge," his demeanor changed. "I'll think about it," he said.

/'*

Pitch had pulled the covers up over his head, even though very little light made its way down to his room.

"Time to wake up, Pitch," I said.

"No. I know it's daytime," came a muffled voice from inside the mound of covers.

"Well, yeah... of course."

"Sunlight hurts. Staying here."

I remembered Pitch not being able to bear the sunlight, but I hadn't noticed it bothering him on our trip to build the snow fort. "Well, we can do something inside. Come on, get up."

"Check under the bed," he ordered.

I did. "There's really nothing there this time," I said. "Did you dream last night? Sandy sent you a good dream. I saw."

Pitch peeked out from under his covers. "Truly?"

"Yeah. Don't you remember?"

He sat up slowly. "Is that what that was?" he murmured. "I... haven't dreamed for so long..."

"I saw Bunny today, too," I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "He said to say hello to you. So, everyone knows now. They're all willing to try again. Maybe we can all be friends."

He looked away from me with a skeptical frown.

"It's possible," I insisted. "You do still want a family, don't you?"

His frown lost some of its severity, but he didn't look up. "I tried to have a family... tried lots of times. It always ended badly."

It was a very sad thing to say, and more so because I knew exactly what he meant. His wife and daughter were lost to him; then he had tried to replace family with a horde of darkling followers. Then he had tried to force me myself, Nightlight at the time, to become his fearling prince. And then Katherine his fearling princess. What happened then? I couldn't remember. Those memories were in a book not yet published. At any rate, Pitch had suffered many disappointments when it came to his family and trying to rebuild or replace it.

"If it doesn't end, it can't end badly," I said, putting my arms around him. He was stiff and uncooperative, but he didn't say anything. "I know you have every reason to worry that it won't work out. But I'm not giving up on you. Not ever again. I promise."

"Promises are easy," He mumbled. "Keeping them, not so much."

I sat up again. "Yeah, you're right. But I can't prove that you can trust me if you never try, right?"

He gave a minute shrug. "I guess."

"So," I said, rubbing my hands together, "What do you want to do?"

He thought for a moment and then said, "I want you to build an igloo around the bed at the entrance to my lair."

I laughed. "I can probably do that... Why?"

"To keep more of the light out."

I sobered. "OK... but it's already so dark down here."

"I can use firelight." He peeked up at me. "And... you."

My smile came back. "Sure. I'll even bring you a nightlight for when I'm not here. Would you like that?"

Reluctantly, he nodded.

"Cool. So, I'll go start on your igloo. It's going to melt, of course, because it's not cold enough up there... but I'll try to build it so it'll last a while, and I'll ask the North Wind to keep some cold air on it."

"Fine." He got out of bed and pulled his fairy-feather jacket on over his romper instead of changing.

He followed me most of the way to the entrance, but once we were in sight of the circle of sunlight shining down from the surface, he stopped. "You go ahead," he said. "I'll stay here."

"All right."

I went ahead and got to work on the igloo, but I frequently sent a little gust of wind down laden with large snowflakes. I sneaked down to have a look at him after a while and saw him trying to catch the snowflakes in the air. I grinned and went back up to finish my work. So far, so good. Next, I decided I should ask Jamie to help me introduce Pitch to some more kids. It was time to get some believers back.

I left off writing there, fully intending to pick it up again right away. But things were both busy and melancholy in this world, the one where I'm writing. You see, we were fast approaching an important Anniversary: the reason Levi came here in the first place.

Levi has written about this incident elsewhere, so I'll make it brief. Last year, January 12, I believe, a friend of Mairead's died. The next night she had a very stressful experience she couldn't handle, so Levi came to this world to help her. Eren followed a couple of days later. This year, Mairead became more and more sad as the day approached, and we all felt it.

The night of the 12th, we lit a candle and all of us said a few words to this friend, even though we never knew her personally. There were many tears shed. The depression lasted a long, long time. Mairead didn't really start to come out of it until the approach of another nerdy event. This same event last year was the one the others wrote about in the piece titled "Attack Con Titan." So there was a lot of excitement in preparing for that. Alexander, aka "Sasha", came back for a while, and we have another new friend: Jack from Jack And the Cuckoo Clock Heart. To differentiate, the others sometimes call me Frost now, and sometimes call him "Jack M." because he has taken his surrogate mother's name as his last name, Madeleine. Sometimes, when Eren is speaking to us both, he just says "Jacks."

Sasha stayed through Jack's birthday (which happened to fall on Easter this year), and he left the next night, I think.

We're preparing to change residence as well, so there has been a lot of stress over that. And don't get me started on Tax Season. Mairead has a huge irrational fear of doing her taxes. Still, she bravely determined to get them done by the end of February. Eh... I think it was more like early or mid-March. But that's still sooner than usual, I gather.

We haven't moved yet; we're not entirely sure where we're going. But we're going in like two months. That doesn't seem like enough time to move. It's so scary I'm not going to talk about it anymore right now. I just wanted to give you some explanation, because it has been far, far too long since I posted. I'm going to gather my thoughts, reread what I wrote and try to catch you up on what went on in the other world during this time.

You see, even though I haven't been writing, that's because of everything going on here. I have still been very active in going back and forth between worlds, so there's a lot to tell. So, this is Aprill 22... We'll see how long it takes me to actually get this up.

News before I go on: Expected publication date for my book (the novel about me, I mean) is October third. That's over five months away! I don't know how I'll stand it. I wish I could manipulate time here and jump ahead... but things don't work that way in this world. Anyway, we're considering pre-ordering it to make sure we don't have to wait. We just need to get moved to our new address before we do that. The book is reasonably priced, too.

I've re-read all that I wrote to remind myself of what I've told already and where I left off. The igloo was a lot of fun. As soon as the sun went down, I got Pitch to come up and sit in it with me, and then we started building other things out of snow: snow bunnies and horses and we made a snowman to look like North, complete with a plate of cookies. It was very warm, though, so it all started melting pretty quickly. I had to keep re-freezing everything. Finally, he told me to just let it melt. He seemed sorry to see it go, but he also seemed like he had had a good time.

"Before I go, will you let me see your teeth?" I asked with a disarming smile.

He looked annoyed, but he said, "Fine," and opened his mouth.

"Smile so I can get a good look."

"Uh-uh," he said, mouth still hanging open. He peeled his lips back in a sort of grimace; that was as good as I was going to get.

They were definitely baby teeth. I smiled. "OK, you can close. Are any of them loose?"

"Mm..." He started moving his tongue around, feeling his teeth. "Mayve thith one," he lisped, fingertip on one of his lower front teeth. "Not much though."

"Cool. Well... I'm gonna get going. Do you want me to take you back down?"

He seemed to consider for a moment, but then he crossed his arms. "No. I can go by myself."

"All right." I ruffled his hair before he could stop me. "Good night."

He huffed and ran his hands through his hair. "Night," he muttered.

I hope the next one won't take me as long, but the will to write is a tricky and sometimes elusive thing. I'm sure it will help if I hear from you, though. 3 ~Jack