6. In Custody

The boy had been placed into a small cell with transparent walls. It was much like the one S.H.I.E.L.D. had used for Loki, except this one didn't have thousands of kilometres of empty air below it. This cell had been built inside one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s headquarters some time after the boy had broken into Stark Tower. It was guarded closely by both human and electronic eyes and devices Steve couldn't recognize. He wondered if most of the devices were a waste of money. Hadn't Tony said this boy could fool cameras?

Now the boy wasn't going to do anything for a while, though. He had been unconscious for hours after Tony had stunned him. Steve and Tony had had more than enough time to transport the kid to the location Fury had stated. Fury had let them go back to their usual business after the boy had been secured. That had been an hour ago, and for some reason Steve had found his way back to the boy's cell.

He felt sorry for the boy. The poor thing looked sickly, lost, and of course very young. Steve had seen horrible things happen to children, but it never got that much easier. Steve had to admit that he was also curious. The child had some very strange powers. Maybe Tony was right. Maybe this kid had been experimented on, much like Steve had been. Or maybe the kid was something like Thor, a godlike being. Also, the kid had claimed to have met Steve somewhere. But where? He really didn't know.

The kid's hand twitched, and he jerked into a sitting position so quickly it should have sent him right back down due to blood rushing into his head. But instead, the kid just looked around, bright blue eyes blinking owlishly and a pale hand tentatively feeling his ribcage. Once the kid realized he was relatively unharmed and that he was locked up into a cell, he sprang to his feet, eyes wide with what Steve assumed was panic.

"Hey," Steve said, "Take it easy."

An agent who had been guarding the cell muttered a few words into his microphone, but Steve mostly ignored it. Because as soon as the child settled to his feet, blue swirls bloomed all around the boy, spreading outwards in a spider web of ice. Steve stared at the floor and pressed his hand to the cell's glass wall – which probably wasn't really glass or at least not entirely so. The surface had instantly turned ice cold.

"Take it easy," Steve repeated when the frost continued to spread, already climbing up the walls, "I don't think that's a good idea..."

The boy suddenly shrieked in pain and collapsed onto his knees. The frost melted under the sudden heat that seemed to emanate from the floor. Steve could see the air near the floor wavering, and the kid scrambled backwards and curled up into a corner, hugging his knees and trying to keep his bare feet from getting into contact with the hot floor. Steve felt another sting of sympathy for the boy.

"Good. He's awake," came Fury's strong, even voice from behind Steve, "Rogers? You're still here?"

Steve just nodded. He was sure Fury had known exactly where he had been.
"Can you stop doing that?" he asked, nodding towards the heated floor, "I think he just panicked. He wasn't trying to get out."

Fury seemed to consider it for a moment and then pushed a button on some nearby device Steve couldn't recognize. The floor in the cell seemed to cool down, and the kid cautiously let his feet touch it again. He didn't uncurl from his foetal position, though. Fury knocked firmly on the glass.

"Are you listening?" he boomed.

The kid looked up hesitantly. He nodded.

"Good," Fury said, "Now how about you answer some questions for us?"

The boy watched Fury warily.
"Are you going to turn the heat back up if I won't?"

The boy's voice was a bit faint, strained from the pain. Fury crossed his arms but didn't answer, just stared. The boy huffed.
"So you will? That's real nice. Really heroic."

"The floor is there to keep a lid on those powers of yours," Fury said sternly, "It's a precaution. So don't try anything."

"Me?" the kid snapped, "You're the ones who kidnapped me for no reason!"

"You are the one who attacked Stark in his tower," Fury fired back.

The kid folded his arms over his knees.
"I guess this is exactly why it's good that adults don't usually see us," he muttered mostly to himself, "They mess everything up."

"What do you mean?" Steve couldn't help asking.

Fury glanced at Steve warningly with his good eye.
"Rogers, I think it's best if you leave the questioning to me for now. Go see that Stark isn't doing anything he shouldn't be doing."

Steve frowned, knowing full well Fury just wanted to get rid of him. But he also knew that Tony certainly wanted to know when the kid woke up. The billionaire would want to ask the kid some questions as well. If Fury let him, that is.

"Remember," Steve said before he left, "He's just a kid."

"A dangerous one," Fury reminded, "And he doesn't seem interested in cooperating with us."

"Hey, I'm right here!" the boy said indignantly.

Steve gave the kid a sad smile and then, reluctantly, went to find Tony.

"Wait, what?" Bunnymund growled, "Frostbite's been taken? How?"

Sandy conjured up sand-images and gestured with his hands so frantically that no one could exactly get what he was saying. But his little fit did seem to contain a lot of expressions of disbelief and some mild profanity.

"One of my fairies saw it all," Toothiana explained when the Guardians had mostly recovered from their shock, "She was flying over Chicago when she saw Jack get knocked down by two men in funny suits."

"What do you mean by funny suits?" North asked, "You did not mention that before."

"I think it means that Mr. Stark got to him," Toothiana said miserably, "Maybe he brought those agents he works with into it as well."

North curled his large hands into fists in silent anger. His bushy eyebrows furrowed.

"Where did they take 'im?" Bunnymund asked, cracking his knuckles, "We need to bust 'im out!"

"She couldn't follow them all the way," Toothiana said, "So I don't really know."

"And," North pointed out quietly, "Even though we want to, we cannot just march in and get him back. Gets complicated."

"Why not?" Bunnymund's fur bristled, "They just found out 'bout us and already crossed the line! They took one of us!"

Sandy hung his head, conjuring up a few images out of dreamsand.

"Exactly!" North pointed at Sandy, "Something like... Shield? Was it? Something like them are worst when it comes to mixing with us."

"But they protect people too," Toothiana pointed out, "In their own way. Maybe there's some way to negotiate with them."

"Are too paranoid," North said, crossing his tattooed arms, "Would see us as threat. Maybe already do. We need to find good way to go with this."

"There's another thing," Toothiana said, "I think Pitch might have been in the area as well. My fairy had a feeling he was close, but he was gone before she could find him."

The Guardians exchanged worried glances. As if things weren't already bad enough. Sandy made a snowflake and then a picture of a map. Toothiana nodded. It indeed would be best to just find Jack first. And pray to the Moon that they would find him fast.

"The kid is awake," Steve informed Tony when he found him. However, it turned out Tony already knew. The billionaire was looking at a small screen in the corner of a room. On the screen Steve could see video feed of the room with the kid's cell. Fury was there, interrogating empty air. The kid was nowhere to be seen. So Tony really had been right; the boy could fool cameras.

"I hijacked one of Fury's cameras," Tony said absently when Steve looked at him questioningly, "Fury's fault; he said I could hang out in this room."

"I doubt that is what he meant," Steve pointed out, but didn't say more on the subject. It wouldn't change anything anyway.

"It looks funny, doesn't it?" Tony said without any indication he had heard Steve, "All I can hear are the questions. The kid can fool the mikes too. I wonder how he does that."

"What would be your guess?" Steve asked, because he had quickly learned that Tony usually had a theory about everything he "wondered".

Tony shrugged his shoulders.
"I think he might not be as tangible as we think he is. Or alternatively, he has natural tendency to emit the most sophisticated and specific interference I've ever seen. You seem to be attached to the kid, by the way. What? Some sort of kinship? You were in a block of ice for decades and Peter Pan over there is a freezer with legs."

"He's a kid," Steve said impatiently, "I really don't see how this is so bad that we have to start torturing children, super-powered or no."

"Well, I guess you have a point there... hey!"

The computer screen had gone black. Tony sighed.
"Damn. Fury must have switched off the cameras."

"There's something he knows that we don't," Steve stated.

Tony nodded.
"There's always something Fury knows that we don't."

After getting rid of Rogers, Fury told the guard to leave as well. He knew they were treading on very precarious ground with this kid, on ground that involved very closely guarded secret findings he wasn't ready to share before he had a bit more information. Once Fury was alone, he leaned forward towards the reinforced glass.

The kid was still sitting in the corner, looking deceptively vulnerable. He could almost have passed for a normal teenager. Almost. But there were a lot of things just off about him. The deathly pale, frosted over skin. The white hair that was frozen into spikes at some parts. The eyes that reminded Fury an awful lot of Loki. And of course the fact that the kid's body temperature was far below normal.

"Who are you?" Fury asked. The question felt almost odd on his tongue. He usually always knew who people were.

The kid looked up at him.
"I didn't want any trouble, okay?"

"I didn't ask you that."

"I was just going through Chicago to visit a friend. Last time I checked that wasn't a crime."

"The name."

The kid sighed and looked at his knees.
"I'm Jack Frost."

That was most likely a code name. And a fitting one at that.

"Who do you work for?" Fury asked without giving the kid a break.

"What?" Frost looked almost amused, "Why do you think I'm working for someone?"

Fury turned to switch off the cameras and then took a step towards the cell, his face almost touching the glass and glared at Frost. Very threateningly.
"We have known about you for a long time."

Well, that was stretching the truth a bit. They did know something about the energies, but this boy didn't need to know exactly how little they knew. Frost's eyes widened.
"About me?"

"We have known about this energy you use to create your ice," Fury elaborated grudgingly, "We have had findings, sightings of them for years, but we haven't been able to pinpoint the source. You have been very discreet about it. Up until recently. Until Burgess."

That struck a cord with the kid. His eyes widened slightly before he masked his surprise. But Fury had glimpsed enough to know the kid was well aware of what he was talking about.
"You know about that," he stated, "Strange sightings, mostly dismissed as kids' stories. But on certain Easter Sunday we caught sight of so much of your... signatures, that we started to think there had to be something behind it. Manhattan has just confirmed it."
He folded his arms.
"And you are not alone."

"You seem awfully sure about that," Frost scoffed, but Fury knew he had been right. There was a clear desire to protect someone behind Frost's words. The kid tried to hide it, but failed rather miserably.

"I am sure," Fury said, "And you'd better be sure that if we find your group to be a threat to the people, we will waste no time bringing them down."

"We'd threaten you?" Frost blurted out, confirming Fury's suspicions of there being a group, "We have never done anything like that!"

"Well, we can't be sure about that, can we?" Fury said, "You are very elusive. We aren't taking any chances. That's why we need to know what we are dealing with."

"You don't have to deal with anything," the kid said, "All you need to know is that Burgess and the Manhattan-thing weren't anything dangerous."

"What was it, then?"

"We're the Guardians. It was us defending people."

Defending? If that really was true, the whole thing was going towards the best case scenario. However, that was just the kid's words against solid proof of the kid breaking into Stark's tower. It was a place any criminal or terrorist would dream of getting into. That and the kid seemed to contradict himself a lot with his answers. If there was something people needed to be defended from, then how come it wasn't dangerous?

"What do you mean by that?" Fury asked.

"Look," Frost said firmly, "I've already said more than enough. I want to get out of here now, please."

Frost finally stood up to his full height, which to be fair wasn't all that impressive. Ice curled under the kid's bare feet, and Fury prepared to press the precaution button just in case. He hadn't been sure if the intensely heated floor would be as effective against the strange ice powers as they would have liked, but it did seem to function well in such a small space. And while the kid had apparently been very resistant to most physical damage, high temperatures seemed to bother him quite a lot. It made sense, considering the kid's unusual properties.

"Who or what are you defending people from?" Fury asked.

Frost looked a bit uneasy. He bit his lip and looked at Fury almost apologetically.
"No one you need to think about."

Fury let out a sigh. The kid had been surprisingly cooperative up until this point.

"You do realize you can't get out without giving us proper answers," he said to the kid.

Frost clenched his hands into fists.
"Okay, how do I put this..." he seemed to be debating something with himself. Fury waited patiently, and after a long silence the kid finally continued, "There are five of us, and we're a bit different from you. We could be called spirits, and it takes belief to actually see us. We've been around longer than you know, and we've never meant any harm. We're just here to protect people."

"And who are the others?"

The kid had that inner struggle again before he answered:
"Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Sandman."

The kid fell silent again and didn't say anything more, not for a long while. What he had just said seemed very far-fetched. Then again, Fury had seen many far-fetched things in his life. It was clear this group of "spirits" did exist, and they seemed to take their identities after children's stories and holiday mascots. That was... not threatening at all, but maybe that was exactly the point.

"If your group really is defending people," Fury said finally, "That means we might be working for similar goals."

"No," the boy said immediately, "I know where you're going with this. Look, I know what you guys do and for the most part it's great. I mean, that thing with the aliens last year was brilliantly handled. It really was. But..."
He sighed.
"What you do is different from what we do. The Guardians are not meant to fight in your wars. Not directly. Really, it would just be best if you left us alone."

When Frost spoke, he looked right at Fury, and Fury could see the kid knew S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't possibly leave these Guardians alone. If they did, they wouldn't be doing their job right.

Jack lay on his side at the back of the small cell. He didn't really know what he should do. He knew he had to get out. He could most likely pull it off too, but if he did, things would get ugly. He would have to fight his way out, and then these people would surely want to hunt him down out of self-defence. And if he stayed, the Guardians would get worried. Maybe they already were. He knew his companions wouldn't take kindly to having one of their own taken. The whole thing was very quickly getting out of hand.

The whole mess was probably Jack's own fault. He should have been more discreet about retrieving the teeth. But how was he supposed to know Stark's devices would actually detect him? That had never happened before as far as he remembered. Somehow he had always thought the Guardians to be something human technology would never touch unless they wanted it to. But even after being discovered, Jack could have acted a bit more diplomatically about it. Although, he supposed, being caught breaking into the tower of a billionaire who probably had tons of super-modern weapons in there was an easy way to not make a good first impression. Well, that couldn't really be helped. Not any more.

Jack curled up into a tighter ball. He wasn't feeling well. Being cooped up in a small space for long went against his nature. He was a nature spirit. He was supposed to be outside. And he was supposed to have his staff with him at all times. He didn't know where it had fallen or if someone had found it. All he knew was that there was a hollow feeling in his chest, like he was missing a piece of himself. Stark's blast had charred the staff a bit too, and that added a dull, burning ache into the mix as well.

They had brought him something to eat and drink. They had pushed them in through some needlessly complicated system that allowed them to put things into the cell without really opening up an escape route for anything human-sized. Of course, one of the guards was there ready to push the floor-heating button if Jack tried anything. He hadn't. After that man – Fury – had left, Jack had lain down and didn't bother moving from that spot. He mostly just focused on keeping his natural coldness from frosting the floor and making someone think he was "trying something".

How many people exactly could see him here? Jack wasn't sure, but he was fairly certain not many. The two people taking turns guarding him certainly could, as could Fury and Stark and that Rogers-guy. Maybe Stark had showed them whatever he had seen on the cameras to make them believe. Maybe they all believed after that Fury-guy had told them that there was a potentially dangerous boy with frost powers they needed to keep detained. Or maybe they all just still believed in fairy tales. Jack found that last one unlikely. Well, now they did, thanks to him, whether they thought about it that way or not. These people were paranoid. That easily made them believe in things they couldn't see, especially if said things could be dangerous. That was why Jack hadn't brought up Pitch, even though he knew it would have helped his case. The Boogeyman certainly didn't need any believers this soon after his downfall. Especially not among these people. Adult belief was different from that of a child. It didn't fuel spirits quite as well, but for Pitch it would no doubt be a fantastic opportunity. Paranoia was a type of fear, after all.

Fury stood in front of his screens, his arms crossed firmly in front of him. On the screens there was feed from some of the cameras pointed at Frost's cell. Most of them displayed an empty room. The only one that showed anything more was through Stark's energy-filter. In that Fury could see a blue silhouette curled up into a ball on the floor of the cell. It hadn't moved for hours after Fury had left the kid. Well, if "kid" was the correct word for the being they had in custody. Throughout the interrogation, Fury had had a feeling he had been talking to someone much older than what the kid seemed to be. He would have to ask about that later. But for now he had decided to let Frost be for a while, to let him think about if stubbornness really was the right way to go. Frost was withholding a lot of information from them, and despite claiming his group protected people, he had refused to tell what it was they were protecting people from. Fury took it as a sign that the kid was either lying about the nature of the group or that what these Guardians protected people from was something incredibly secret. There was still much they didn't know. Like how exactly this kid had come to be.

They had conducted a very basic medical examination for Frost when he had been brought in. It had simply declared that the kid shouldn't have been alive. His blood was barely running and his heartbeat was sluggish. His extremities should have fallen off a long time ago due to the cold, but there wasn't even any signs of frostbite on him. And there didn't seem to be any traces of anything foreign, no chemicals or nanomachines in his system either. It was as if the kid had simply born to be that way. Then there was the staff Fury had confiscated from Stark. Apparently it belonged to the kid, and the kid had used it to shoot ice. It was just a piece of old, dead wood to them and their scanners. It probably required the kid to work. The kid might very well be some sort of spirit-creature just like he had said.

"What are we going to do about this?" asked agent Hill from where she sat beside Fury.

Fury didn't answer for a while. After briefly informing all available Avengers of a group of four potentially super-powered beings being out there, he had told Stark to look for energy signatures at least somewhat matching the kid's. It was probably a wild goose chase, and Stark would likely tire of it quickly and come up with a better way of tracking these Guardians down. However, Fury was rather sure the Guardians would now be far less careful. After all, they probably wanted their young member back. Unless they just didn't care. Fury would give it a few days, but then they would need to change their tactics.

Author's Note: Glxblt you have no idea how many times I've had to rewrite that interrogation scene! Hopefully I finally got it down more or less okay...

So I was away for the weekend and when I got back the review-count had hit 98! At first I thought I might wait until it got all the way to 100 just because, but then I got this AMAZING review from Mmmmmmm-Chicken and that made me so happy I decided to post this now. That review wasn't even for this story, but for my other story, called "Battle"! But since Mmmmmmm-Chicken told in the review that they'd be following this too I'm thanking them for those lovely words here. So, thank you!

And of course thank you to everyone else who has reviewed too!

Also, since things are finally starting to get going, I can post longer chapters! Yay!