Some Assembly Required

Disclaimer: Man it's been a while, hasn't it?

It sounded to his own ears like dropping a basket of laundry.

The cushion of leaves was a large part of it, his brain told him, and the fact that it was Sally's back hitting the ground all around him instead of his skull. He expected worse, and his teeth gnashed into the thread bobbin, but it was really no worse than missing a stair. Landing on the tombstone that shattered him had hurt worse.

They were still.

The quiet cushioned them in the uncaring night air. Jack was buried, and Sally was still, deathly still.

Jack struggled in her torso. All he wanted was a little more room, just that extra inch to see anything other than the cold night sky, but his lack of a body betrayed him. If anything, he only wiggled himself deeper into the leaf littler of Sally's chest, and the realization made him despair. All that scheming and sneaking, all the ideas he put in Sally's head, and to what end? His pride? His social standing? Oh, that he could stand now...

Up Sally sat, reaching into herself to pull Jack forward and tighten the stitches against him. When she reached into his mouth for the bobbin, he obligingly spit it out into her palm. "Sally... thank you. Are you all right?" He started to fret, all of his energy coming out into his mouth. "Is everything still attached to you? Are you hurt-"

Sally put her hand over his mouth. What he would give to see her face! But the message, at least, was clear. Silence was needed. He couldn't see anything but directly in front of him, peeking out between Sally's seams, but he could watch Sally's hands pass over her limbs and patch up the burst stitches that had opened in her legs and arms. All put together, Sally stole them away into the dark, following the shrieking alarm.

Town Hall must have been a terrifying sight for Sally. As quickly as Jack spotted a citizen on the edge of his vision, Sally ducked into an alley and slowed her pace to a crawl. He encouraged her in soft whispers to keep moving. She lacked Jack's lively, bounding steps, and several times Jack found himself trying to move for her, but her soft footfalls and unassuming spirit suited her well to the shadows. She followed the citizens all the way to the front gate of the Hall before Jack started to pointedly nose her to the back door. Bless the Mayor and his absent, trusting mind; he left the door unlocked behind him.

The backstage was comfortingly quiet and isolated. Sally nudged the door open and hesitated on every step, not a soul in sight as she snuck around the tables and chairs. Jack could only keep his voice so low, but Sally caught every word, he could tell. "Just get close enough to hear what he's saying ;we don't need to be seen." He pointed his nose to the hanging curtains in the eves. "If you can see him, he can see you. Now, hide."

She patted her chest below Jack's chin in what must have been an affirmative. Quiet, tucked into a thick velvet nook, they listened.

"Citizens of Halloween!" shrieked he frazzled and panicked Mayor. "I'm declaring a state of emergency!"

A dissenting voice Jack recognized as the local werewolf growled, "Only Jack can do that."

"That's the point!" the Major rebutted. "Jack is missing! He was spirited right out of the graveyard!"

The town muttered in disapproval. Jack nearly sighed in relief. The Mayor's anxious fits were nothing new, and rarely anything the town couldn't fix with the slightest little effort. The Mayor had a sixth sense for apathy, it seemed, and he threw himself back into his panic.

"It's true! Every word! Zero's come back with proof! Look! Jack's very bones!"

Sally and Jack both gasped, and before Jack could stop her- or tell her to look himself?- Sally whipped out of her hiding place and into the wings.

There is the Mayor's hand lie Jack's missing bones, bleached white in the spotlight like little shining gems. Jack nearly screamed.

The town did.

The sudden noise startled Sally, sending her out of the wings and out through the back door. Jack's head spun for a brief moment before he could see again, and once he could, he was staring at Sally's panic-stricken eyes asking him what to do.

"I-I didn't know he had them!" Jack felt compelled to defend himself. "I thought you had found all of me!"

She flinched, and the Pumpkin King's heart dropped into the pit of his stomach, back at Finklestien's though it was.

"Nonono, I'm sorry! I didn't mean it angrily, I was making assumptions! Please, I beg of you, forgive me!"

Her expression softened, but her gaze drifted over her shoulder to the Town Hall.

"I'm not sure what to do about those..." Jack voiced his concerns while Sally worried at her lip. "Those have to be my missing ribs, and I thought we had my whole spine... I can't walk with pieces of it missing..."

Sally put him into her lap and made a circle with her hand.

With an owlish blink, he found himself at a loss for words.

Sally made the gesture again with emphasis, circling the ring her hand made with a finger before pointing at the door. Her brows were furrowing in frustration, and Jack pursed his lips in thought. A circle. A ring? The... moon? The sun- no. Around?

Jack grunted in disappointment with himself. "Sally, I promise once this is all cleared up, I will personally teach you how to speak. I am so-"

Sally shut him up with a hand over his mouth and a scowl. Ah. Perhaps he was talking too much.

Sally held up a few fingers, then lowered them one by one. Three fingers, then two, one, and then the circle-

Jack jumped. "Zero!"

His little dog wisped through the door, through Sally, and grabbed Jack by the nose and pulled!

They were the worst few seconds of his life. Zero's little needle teeth scraped his eye sockets and nose no matter how much he commanded him to heel, drop it, down Zero, no! Granted, with his face clamped over by a mouth and his own stubborn need to keep them from being discovered, Jack could barely croak the words out. For every yank from Zero (and oh did Zero's growling ever rattle his ears), Sally held and pulled. Her hands were soft and mindful of his jawbone and careful of getting her fingers too close to Zero's teeth, and to Jack's horror, her timid grip started to slip-

Jack grunted. "Zero, no!"

Sally cried, "Zero, down!"

Her words were forced, unpracticed, but loud and precise. Zero dropped Jack with a startled yelp.

They must have been a sight, Jack distantly noted. Sally with his head clutched tight to her chest. Zero staring the pair of them down in utter confusion. Silence stretched on in a pregnant pause.

Someone opened the back door, bumping Sally's back, and she broke into a run. Jack could hear a voice calling after her, the Mayor's voice, but only in a polite apology and a concerned call to come back. Zero fluttered in and out of his peripheral vision, faithfully following them back to the doctor's lab where Sally threw herself against the front door.

It was locked.

Only then did Jack and Sally hear the Doctor's voice from within, frantically calling for Sally. Jack cursed himself, not for the first time that day and not for the last he was certain, and began to apologize. "Sally, I-"

Again the hand went over his mouth, and Jack found himself stuffed back into Sally's chest. Silence.

A long wait followed. He could piece together what had happened from clues. Sally's chest seam pulled tight, and after a few hurried steps, she fell forward. Zero barked and nudged her to get off the ground, and after a few minutes of that, the Doctor came and collected her. What followed felt like hours of held breath, flinching from touches, and the doctor sparing no opportunity to berate Sally for her foolishness and clumsy nature, for failing to learn her lesson that last time she fell out the window, for her loose hand-stitching that nearly took her head off, how she attracted Jack's damned dog and now he wouldn't leave, and for anything and everything under the sun. Or at least, that's what it felt like to Jack. Hours, it felt like hours of it all.

Finally, with the slam of a door, it was quiet. He heard his bones being laid out on a table and the soft tap of Sally putting them together, and them falling whenever Zero innocently tugged on one. Sally's stitches popped one by one until she pulled him free and attached him back to most of his body. He took a long breath of the cold night air, gathered his thoughts, looked to Sally... and felt the guilt pile back into his belly at the sight.

She looked so tired. The spark of wit and life in her eyes was gone, framed by dark bags and drooping eyelids. She pulled her stitches taut with sluggish hands, barely tieing them off. Her hair was matting, her posture slumped. She bore the full weight of the day on her little shoulders, looked up at Jack, and smiled. She was trying to reassure him. What a heel he was. What a king. What a friend he had been to this treasure of a woman.

"Jack..." her little voice cracked. "It's okay."

He pulled her into a hug and held her tight.

He'd decided. Enough was enough. If she could bear this long and terrible day with him as dead weight, then... Then it was time he held up his share of the burden. A plan started to form in his mind, and while it bubbled on the back burner of his brain, he patted a calming hand against Sally's shoulder. She squeezed him. She pulled away to look at him! Her smile brightened! The leaden guilt was giving way to butterflies in his stomach!

"Sally..." He had to swallow to clear his mind. He wasn't sure where to start. "You... have a lovely voice. And learn so quickly..." He squeezed her shoulder. "All right... come tomorrow, we make another break for it."

Sally clutched at his hand and gasped in delight. Jack felt a wash of warmth over his bones at the light coming back into her eyes. Yes! He would make this right still!

He launched into the fine details of the new plan, how Sally was to sneak out of the house- NO! NO, with the ramp this time, she could open the door while Zero distracted the doctor- and retrieve his bones from Mayor with help from Zero's nose. Bless the little spirit, Zero came when Jack whistled, and now that he was mostly together, Sally was a friend instead of a thief. They plotted together, Zero on Sally's lap, Sally's face and few words contributing immeasurable ideas until the wee hours or the morning. It wasn't until she was sleeping upright in her chair that Sally finally collected Jack in her sewing basket, covered him up, and finally went to sleep in her own bed.

In his brief moment of rest, Jack dwelled on his plan. It relied on Sally, and he told her as much, and it would keep her out of the doctor's abode for hours while she and Zero searched for his missing pieces. They could be anywhere in town, from the Mayor's pockets to a safe in Town Hall to kept under the rug on his front door, for all he knew. He had complete and utter faith that she would uphold her end... and hadn't told her even a whisper of his.

By the end of this debacle, they were either going to be the tightest of friends or Sally would hate him for eternity, and Jack felt as if he deserved the latter at the moment. But by god, he was the Pumpkin King. He would be free of this terrible situation.

And so would she.