This story now has exactly 100 reviews. I'm so happy. And I feel terrible that I haven't answered most of those. Sorry. I want to say a big 'I love you' to all of you.
Everything around him was cold and dark.
Jack did not know if it was day or night. There was little difference anymore. Dark cloud blocked the sun all day and the moon all night. He was grateful for it. He did not want to look up at the Man in the Moon, to see him watching. Judging.
Without the sun, the land was dying. The crops withered and the people were hungry. And cold. This winter had been lasting for years and Jack knew spring would not come. There would be no hope, no new beginnings. No one remained to bring these things to the world.
A skinny girl shivered on the corner of a street, hugging an old doll to her chest. She looked up when he got closer, her eyes widening in fear.
This is what you wanted. To be seen. To be acknowledged. This is what you chose.
The girl dropped her doll and ran. He watched her go. She could see him, but she still would not talk to him. No one did. Or almost no one. A hand rested on his shoulder, long, narrow fingers curling around it like claws. A smooth voice repeated words he had heard a hundred times by now.
"Doesn't it feel great, Jack? They see you. They believe in you."
They fear me. He stared in the distance, at the place the little girl had run to when she saw him.
This is what you wanted.
T.T.T.T
Jack woke up with a start. Everything around him was cold and dark.
He took a few calming breath. This cold, this dark, were not threatening. The winter was ending. Spring would come soon. In the sky above, the Moon shone, so big and so bright. Its light reflected on the pristine snow, keeping the darkness at bay.
Jack rose from the spot where he had been sleeping in the snow, slowly dusting himself up as he calmed his beating heart. The nightmare, showing him what could have been, had been haunting him in the month since Pitch's defeat. Because he could not forget that, for a moment, the Nightmare King's words had tempted him.
He had not told the others what happened that day, in Antarctica, after he ruined Easter and they turned away from him. For the first time in his new life, he had a family and he did not want to lose them if they learned of what he could have done.
But it isn't what you chose. It isn't what you wanted.
He let out a shaky breath, running his hand through his hair. He would tell them, one day. When he was not so afraid of losing them.
I wrote this little story in preparation of the next chapter (or at least it should be the next chapter).
