Hewo again, peoples,

Here it is! The moment you've been wai-ting for!

(Please tell me you sang that in Clopin's voice...?)

A WHOLE CHAPTER of the Guardians ;) There's a little bit of a retelling of events - I would've skipped a lot of it, but you know, I figured that what Jack would say about Will and Em says a lot. So yeah.

Enjoy! Again, please R&R :)

DFTBA,

doubtfulfig

The Auroras are truly beautiful, Toothiana thought as she made her way across the Northern Sky. It's too bad they're only used when there's trouble.

Her feathers glimmered with the Auroras, and for an instant, she felt just as mysteriously graceful. She always had felt that her twitchiness took away from her appearance, making her look too hollow-minded, like a hummingbird. But the Auroras were constant, moving slowly and deliberately, never making a harsh movement. They were powerful, and cold, and bold.

She wondered if Jack would notice her if she was more powerful, and cold, and bold.

"Ack, it's freezing!" Bunnymund exclaimed loudly, to no one in particular. The snow swirled around him, but never touched him. How considerate. It seemed to make room for him as he bounded through the drifts of snow, upward into his secret tunnel that opened up into North's workshop. He wondered bitterly why he never just tunnelled directly into North's office. Sure would be nice to feel my toes, he thought as his feet plowed through the powdery snow, leaving a deep trench as he bolted. I can't even see the bloody Auroras through this blasted blizzard. This had better be good.

His sand moved through the air at an unwavering pace, like a great whale in the open blue. Sandman kept his eyes to the North, where the Auroras twisted and curled in shimmering splendor. He'd always liked them. Things with gentle beauty such as this should be admired by everyone forever, in his humble opinion. He drew his hands together, urging the golden sand faster, and it swirled madly to keep up with Sandy's pace.

"Ok, North, what's happening?" Jack crouched, perched delicately on his staff. He crossed his arms, fingers drumming restlessly against the insides of his elbows.

"No telling yet." North, huge and kind of intimidating, with his tattoos and thick accent and big burly arms, hunched over his desk. His beard trailed along the papers collected there, bold black lettering splotching up the parchment.

"Come on. I was busy. There're these kids… I think they're in trouble." Jack ran his hand through his icy white hair. His wintry eyes were scrunched by his dark eyebrows. "You can't tell me you called us here because of your belly."

North didn't seem to process what Jack had said about the kids in trouble — instead, he jumped to the defence of his belly. "I feel something," he insisted loudly, making his hands into fists. "Is making me uncomfortable."

"Oh, boy," Jack murmured, pulling the staff from underneath of him. He floated gently to the ground, and padded towards North with ever silent bare feet. Past his enormous figure, Jack could see the Auroras dancing, thick bands of purple and green intertwining and unfurling simultaneously. "North, just because you had a few too many cookies, doesn't mean you have to call all of the Guardians to make you feel better." He twirled his staff with one hand and shoved his other into the pocket of his hoodie, trying not to think about the glassy eyes that had stared at him blankly only an hour before. He was just about to search for Willow and Emmett, but the Auroras had interrupted his investigation. Duty calls, he'd thought as he had adjusted his course to the North. Tearing him away from the kids who might need him more than North would.

"Is not tummyache," North muttered in return, standing straight at the sight of Sandman's cloud of gold through the glass window. "Is something bigger."

Jack spun 180º and started meandering the opposite way toward the door, trying to taunt an actual response from the Cossack. "Ok, you're not in a very good mood, so I'll just wait for you in the globe room."

"Jack."

He turned his head, and for the first time since he triggered the Auroras, North faced him, making eye contact. His rosy cheeks did nothing to dilute the distress in his usually jolly eyes, which was Jack's first real sign that something was wrong. Really wrong.

"Tell elves to make cocoa. It will be long night."

Jack nodded slowly, and made his way out of his office.

"Ok, ok," North boomed, gesturing to the Yetis to pull up the various armchairs around the balcony that made up the globe room. "I am sorry to gather you all like this, but is urgent."

An evil looking smile was creeping up the Pooka's fuzzy face, twisting the dusty marks on his ashen forehead. A long hind leg reached up to scratch behind his ear. It was still numb from the bloody snow he'd trudged through only a few moments ago, so he held it up to the fireplace crackling between the two grand windows. The black outside was looming, only interrupted by the swirling bits of white. "What, mate? You feel it in your belly?" Bunny asked with a twinge of sarcasm.

"WHY is this such hard concept for you people?" North asked defeatedly, lifting his hands and sinking his butt into a red armchair. Shaking his head, he muttered grumpily to himself in Russian and planted his face in his huge hand.

"Uh, no thanks, Phil, I'm good," Jack murmured to the eager Yeti, bouncing around behind the uncomfortable looking armchair he had pulled up behind him. As Jack leapt up onto his staff, planted his butt, and dangled his legs, Phil deflated.

"North, what is it?" Tooth implored concernedly. Her wings stopped fluttering and she dropped into a particularly fluffy armchair.

"It is Pitch." His eyebrows, dark and thick, raised in seriousness. His wide eyes were filled with something other than wonder. "He is up to something, something worse than last time."

"Come on, mate." Bunny hopped as a Yeti pushed a chair under his airborne behind, and he sank into it easily. "We took care of 'im. He's gone, taken by his own fear."

"You can never kill fear, Bunny." North's glare was incredibly harsh, for such a normally jovial man, and the bags under his eyes showed how uncharacteristically weary he was. "Anyway, I have asked Man in Moon to look into it, and I expect he will answer in day or two."

"Unbelievable," Jack snorted, shaking his head at North's nonchalant mention of talking to Man in the Moon. "This would have been handy for me, like, 300 years ago."

North held up his hand up to silence Jack before he really got going. "Handy or not, we must remain vigilant," he murmured. "The children, I fear, are in danger once again."

"Then we'll do all we can to make sure they stay safe," Tooth said reassuringly, placing a dainty hand on North's expansive mitt. He gave her a small smile under his beard, but it didn't reach up to his eyes. They remained dark and downcast.

"Heyheyhey," Bunny thumped his foot on the leather cushion, his eyes locked on the skylight above their heads. "Forget a day or two, Moonie's dropping in now."

Jack lifted his feet slightly, wiggling his toes, and straightened up slowly. He always did that when curiosity got the best of him. The wandering thoughts of the slumped body against the wall back in Alberta dissipated. He'd never seen the Man in the Moon actually communicate. He'd only ever heard his name come from that pearlescent orb of light.

He had expected something loud, something obvious, but when has the Moon ever been anything but silent? The white light cut through the stark black night, muffled a bit by the snow busily whirling around. Through the glass roofs, still boasting the bluey-green leftovers from the Auroras, the Moon's rays filtered down, sharpening at an angle that struck the circle at the centre of the floor. Responding obediently, the Moonstone pulled itself from its hiding place in the ground. The light hit the Moonstone in a way that sent it sprawling throughout the rest of the room. It was a gentle thing, the moonlight, just a sort of crystalline glow spread through the room. But, within the stone, sharp shadows depicted a clear silhouette.

"Pitch." Jack touched the floor with his feet, lithely dropping from his perch.

"The belly is never wrong!" North exclaimed, exasperated, but no one was listening, so he just sat forward on his chair, as did the rest of the Guardians. Jack's eyes narrowed as he observed his friends' reactions to the Moon's news: Sandy's face was set like stone — after all, he had more reason than most to despise the Bogeyman — and Tooth's violet eyes darkened as her hands balled into delicate little fists. Baby Tooth was twitching around violently, twittering, and Bunny just sat there, paws twitching, Jack could only assume, for his boomerangs, which were strapped to his back as per usual.

"What is he doing?" Jack asked the Moon, craning his neck to look up. He expected the Moon to ignore him, to wait for someone else to ask, as it always had, but to his surprise, an image formed above the stone, a sort of hologram of moonlight. It shimmered, like static, before it formed fully: the shape of a human. Shadows, silhouettes of spiky hair and narrow shoulders slinked across her figure.

Jack shook his head slightly, not understanding. "It's a girl."

"Not just a girl," Tooth murmured uneasily. Her wings were quivering. "A teenager."

"Ok, so?" Jack shrugged, crossing his arms around his staff.

"You see, mate," Bunny explained, shifting his weight from foot to foot, "teenagers are out of our reach. They're children who stop believing. They're basically adults."

Jack rocked back on his feet, gesturing imploringly to the image of the girl. "Well, if he has a hold of her, that means she can see him, and that means she believes. And if she believes, it's our job to protect her, whether or not she's a teenager. Right?" He pressed his hands to his chest, running them along the crisp frost accumulated on the front of his hoodie.

"Of course, Jack," Tooth said soothingly. Sandy nodded, cracking his knuckles audibly, which brought a wry smile to Bunny's face. "But you realize what Pitch is trying to imply, right? He's going beyond the minds of the children." She lifted from her seat, floating closer to the Moonstone.

"He's going after the whole world now." North stood, joining Jack next to the girl's figure. Long curls fell over her face, which was splashed with freckles. Her thin frame was hunched, as if against a wall. Jack joined North, reaching out to touch the image. He flicked his fingers, and the girl responded by spinning, as if on a turntable, so everyone could see her face and the jeans and T-shirt that were so ripped, so violently torn, they were basically nonexistent.

Then something clicked, making his eyebrows go slack. He didn't recognize her before. Not without that fierce flicker in her eyes, in reality, that he'd seen earlier. The girl in the image just looked dead, eyes glazed over and blank.

"Wait… Wait, that's Willow."

Jack flicked his eyes toward North, who returned the gaze evenly. He crossed his arms over his heaving chest.

"You know her?" Tooth asked. Her wings involuntarily beat faster, lifting her a few inches higher off of the ground.

Jack nodded violently, hair flopping down into his eyes. He stared at the figure. "I met her and her brother today."

"Well?" Bunny hopped out of his seat, anxiously awaiting an explanation. His ears lay flat against the top of his head.

"Ah…" Jack ran a hand down the back of his head. He didn't know how to explain. Where do you start with something like this?

A big hand thumped down on Jack's shoulder, almost buckling his knees. The thick golden rings encircling its thumb dug kind of uncomfortably into his collarbone. North's voice was gentle, though his hand was not. "What happened, Jack?"

Jack's mouth set into a thin line. He plopped down into the chair Phil had left there for him, like the Yeti knew he'd need it eventually, and passed a hand over his eyes. "I was just goofing around. I was working on a snow day, and, you know, it takes more than a few drifts of snow to make schools in Alberta to close during the winter."

Bunny scoffed. He knew only too well how those rednecks stood up against the cold. Despite Jack's numerous attempts to freeze over Easter there, kids would be out there in their puffy little snowsuits, digging eggs from under snowdrifts.

"I was blowing snow and ice and everything all day. I saw her then. At first, she didn't catch my eye. She was just one among the crowd of teachers and parents and students. There were so many kids, and so many adults just asking to be humiliated…" Jack's mouth lifted cheekily at the thought of their professional stuff and their professional postures sprawling frantically as they tried to gain balance on a skiff of ice. "Anyways, it was her hat and her brother that made me stop to look. It was a ski hat, with little felted eyes and a nose and little pointy ears poking up from the top, to make her head look like an owl. It was completely dorky. No one else had anything like that. Just boring black and kids running around with your typical ski jacket and pants thing. But she was individual, and alone, and... honestly didn't seem to care.

"And her brother, Emmett. I'd watched him in school before. He was the wild card. He was always coming up with new ideas that no one really seemed to care about. I mean, he would play around outside with the other kids, but he didn't seem…" Jack shrugged. "I don't know. He wasn't really into it.

"He was clipping along towards her so fast I knew he'd slip or something, but instead, Willow did. All she did was turn." Jack wondered vaguely how anyone could be so klutzy. Just a swivel of her feet sent her straggling. But he just said, "I caught her before she hit her butt, though."

"So what, mate? Doesn't sound like trouble to me." Bunny crouched before Jack's seat on all fours, like a true rabbit. A gangly, angular, humanesque rabbit.

Jack ignored Bunny's annoying comments and pressed on. "I followed her to work. I mean," he laughed loosely, "it's hard to ignore a hat like that. I went in after her - it was a really weird mix of boring office supplies and awesome-looking toys - and I didn't think she'd see me, so I just yapped away. I was just joking around. I didn't think she'd actually hear me."

"She did?" Tooth's voice was a sort of inhalation, like a gasp.

Jack nodded, raising his eyebrows. "I was just as surprised as you. But I followed her home. She tried to attack me with a lamp, and she looked like she knew what she was doing."

Bunny chuckled. "I'd'a loved to be in her shoes."

"It was weird. She believed, obviously, but she didn't know who I was. But as soon as I said it, she just accepted it. She didn't get into denial, or try to clobber me out of the window. She just…"

North's eyes met Sandy's. If anyone would understand this, it was the Guardian of Dreams. But the little man's eyes reflected his own confusion, and he shrugged with a question mark floating above his head.

North's dark eyebrows almost melded together as he crossed his arms. "So what happened, Jack?"

"Emmett came into the room. I think he thought I broke in to hurt Willow or…" Jack shook his head, confused. "I don't know. But he seemed set on saving her." Poor little guy. "Of course, when I introduced myself, he was fine — I promised him a snowball fight," he remembered with a smile, "but when I hopped out the window, I just sat there under the sill, listening. He'd had a nightmare. Something about… Something about his dad, or something." Jack's hand filtered through his hair absently. "But Willow sat and told him a story. One about a boy who could fly.

"I went back to work, then, on that snow. I mean, now I promised Emmett a snow day, I had to deliver," he said with a soft chuckle. "But when I went back, there were sirens and policemen and everything. Willow and Emmett weren't anywhere, and there was…" Jack's eyelids flitted a little, trying to think of anything, anything besides that blank stare, or that tinny smell of blood. "There was a body. In Willow's room."

"Waddya mean?" Bunny sat up a bit straighter. The room seemed to tense — Sandy floated up a few inches, North's eyebrows lifted and froze, and the flutter of Tooth's wings slowed, lowering her to the ground gently.

"I mean it was dead." A hand lifted to Tooth's mouth with a little gasp. Jack had to swallow. "His head was smashed in. It looked like… Like Willow'd used her lamp to do it."

There was a second of stunned silence, of wide eyes and sidelong glances. Then Jack jerked a bit, realizing how twisted that made Willow sound, and he started backtracking quickly. "No, no! He had a pocketknife. He must've done something terrible for her to have to do something like that. I mean, she didn't clobber me, and I was the stranger busting into her room."

"Why…" North said slowly with a sort of disgusted twist of his lip, "would she ki-… Why would she do something like that to her own father?"

"I don't know. All I know is, she's out there, and so is Emmett, and Pitch is doing who-knows-what, and it's our duty to help them." His jaw set, and he looked past the faces of his fellow Guardians to the Moonstone. "That's all I need to know," Jack said decidedly, using his staff like a pole vault to lift himself toward the window. "Bunny, you coming?"

"What, mate?"

"You coming?" Pushing on the glass with his back, he sat on the sill until the pane popped open. The cold air welcomed Jack's bare foot as he slung it over the sill. "You too, Sandy? We don't have time to waste."

"Hold up, there, Frostbite." Bunny stepped forward, speaking in a calming sort of tone. His paw shook a little as he held it out. "We don't know where this girl is, mate. We need to come up with a plan, don' we?" He looked to Tooth, who nodded strongly in agreeance.

Exasperated, Jack looked past Bunny to the Sandman. "Sandy?"

Sandman's glance bounced from Jack to Bunnymund to North. He rocked on his feet anxiously, and all he came up with was a question mark, shimmering above his head.

Jack nodded, smirking in disbelief. "Fine. Fine, you guys stay here, and try and figure out what Pitch is up to." He let a breath of wind lift him from the sill, allowing him to hover just outside. "I'm going to save them."

"Now, Jack, just wait one moment -" North began, but Jack cut him off.

"You don't understand, North!" he exploded, snow swirling violently around his grim face. North's words caught in his throat, his hand stopped in midair at Jack's sharp words. "You don't get it! They're trapped, they're afraid, and there's no one there to help them. I know what that is." He nodded curtly at the four pairs of wide eyes. He tried to ignore Tooth's teary ones, and said, "Summon me once you know something."

And he was gone, one snowflake among many.