Alaia Skyhawk:

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

~(-)~

Chapter 22: Tooth Fairies

Jack sat upon his perch, casually viewing the village from atop the storm pole as he waited for the children to finish their morning chores. They rushed about, trying to get them done as fast as they could so they could go play, but one boy took his time. His morning task was something no-one would see as a chore, and in fact all the other children kept glancing at him enviously.

But no one but members of that family tended the shrine. Their family were the ones who first welcomed Jack Frost to the village, the first to ask him for protection, and so they were the ones who looked after his shrine, the Bennetts.

Gavin Bennett; son of James, grandson of Thomas, great-grandson of Emily. That made him, secretly, Jack's great-great-nephew, and the eight-year-old carried that knowledge with pride as he worked.

It was the first of January 1772, and it was time to clear the sprigs out of the shrine. They'd long-since been stripped of their berries by the local birds, and Gavin was now loading the remaining twigs into a small brazier at the side of the shrine. The bottom of that brazier was filled with tinder, and this afternoon as the sun set, the villagers would light it to welcome in the new year.

It was a new tradition that had only started recently, when one of the village women had commented it seemed a waste to disrespectfully throw away what was left of their offerings to the Spirit of Winter. That was when Thomas had suggested they burn the twigs on New Year's Day, so Jack Frost could greet the new year with them.

The rest, as they say, was becoming village history.

Jack watched Gavin grabbing and moving the handfuls of twigs, and drifted down to stand on the top of the shrine.

"Want me to help you with that?"

Gavin looked at him, smiled, and then shook his head.

"It's ok, I want to do it. Besides, if you helped me, that would be cheating."

Jack laughed, and now dropped to the ground.

"All right, all right, but at least let me go get the cloth and wood-oil for you. See if you can have all those twigs in the brazier before I get back."

"Ok!"

Gavin began to rapidly grab at the twigs, while Jack glided away to James' house where a bucket sat with rags and a pottery jar of clear oil inside it. The family were conscientious with the maintenance of the shrine, keeping it oiled so it wouldn't rot. Jack had initially objected to them spending money on oil when they could have used pine-tar like they did for the cabins, but he'd been ignored. And so the shrine stood out as a pale wooden structure, unlike every other wooden building in the village which was a dark brown.

He chose to walk back to the shrine, slowly, leaving deliberate footprints in the thin covering of snow as he swung the bucket to and fro. Several villagers spotted the footprints, and the floating bucket, and smiled among themselves. They took it as a sign of his approval, that he was participating even in that small way, although he still couldn't figure out why they couldn't see him even when he was blatantly carrying a bucket which they could see.

It seemed to him that their belief that only children could see him, was probably the reason behind that, because by all other accounts they believed in him as completely as the children did and should be able to see him... Which was why he'd dubbed the phenomena, and his theories about it, 'Dumb Adult Logic'.

Jack set the bucket down when he reached the shrine. Gavin had cleared out all the twigs, and was now sweeping out stray bits of dirt and leaves that had blown inside the little structure. The pottery plaque with the picture of Jack on it, was leaning against the foot of the brazier's stand, out of the way until the cleaning was finished.

Jack swept the snow off the shrine's roof despite Gavin's protest, ensuring the surface was completely dry before the boy got started with rag and oil. Unfortunately, he really should have picked a different place to leave the bucket.

Just as Gavin had finished the oiling, the shine now immaculate and gleaming, the boy took a step back to admire his work and put his foot into said bucket. He then stumbled, lost his balance, and fell forward... face-first into the front of the shrine.

"Oww."

Jack winced at that.

"Whoops."

He helped Gavin to his feet, but the boy seemed rather distracted as he then spat something out. What landed in the boy's hand was a tooth, and when Gavin grinned Jack saw the gap where the upper canine had been.

"My tooth came out!"

Jack chuckled, and patted Gavin on the back.

"That's great. Don't forget to put it under your pillow tonight."

"I'll go do it now!"

Gavin dashed away, to tell his parents about the tooth, and Jack watched him go with his mind wandering to other thoughts. He'd seen Toothiana's 'mini-fairies' many times, although never up close. He'd always given them a respectful distance, keeping out of sight. And at Sandy's advice, from way back to the third time he'd met him, always created a lull in blizzards at the time during the night when the fairies would come. Which was just after Sandy had delivered dreams to an area, since his work kept children asleep, which in turn made it easier for the fairies to collect the teeth.

Of course, creating a lull in a major blizzard wouldn't be possible, but so far he'd always managed to start those during the daytime for an area, and let them run out of energy before collection time came, or he'd start them after the collection had already been done.

Jack set that thought aside, as the first of the village children to complete their chores, rushed over to where he was. He decided to spend the time waiting for the rest of the children, to entertain those who were already with him by using his newest trick. He drew birds and butterflies using frost on any flat surface he could find, and then pulled them off and brought them to life as frosty imitations of the real things.

They didn't last long, just a minute or so before they puffed into little clouds of snowflakes, but that didn't matter since the children never tired of him making them. Instead they challenged him with suggestions of all manner of weird and wonderful things, which resulted in a mixed herd of transparent horses, dogs, dragons, pixies and even a cow all floating in the air around the shrine.

He continued the game until all twelve of the current village children had gathered, and he took them to the pond for their story. Once there he sat on his staff, in the seemingly impossible way he always did by standing it vertical and perching on the crook at the top, and started to tell them the one he's picked for today.

Jack smiled as he started, inspired by the morning's little mishap.

"You've all heard of the Tooth Fairy, right?" The children all nodded. "Well let me tell you something about her that I learnt from my friend, The Sandman. It's the reason why she collects your teeth, and the teeth of all the other children in the world, when you put them under your pillows."

One of the youngest children present, a little girl just five-years-old, piped up.

"Why?! Tell us, tell us!"

Jack chuckled, and answered while the children watched him entranced by the story.

"She gathers them, because every one of your baby teeth holds some of your special childhood memories when they fall out. The Tooth Fairy collects them and keeps them safe, so that whenever you feel sad, even when you've grown up, she can help you remember those happy times. That's her special magic."

The children all murmured in awe, and Gavin prodded at the gap in his teeth.

"Will she really come and get my tooth from under my pillow tonight?"

Jack tilted his head.

"Well she collected all the other's you've lost before now, so I think the one you lost today will be picked up." He chuckled. "Although Toothiana doesn't come for the teeth herself, because she's far far too busy. Instead she has lots and lots of little tooth fairies that help her, and she tells them where to find the teeth. I've never seen one of them up close, but they're really small. Small enough to fit in my hand, and they're really fast. Blink for a moment, and they're gone."

He'd used his hands to show how small the fairies were, then flung his arms out wide turning his head as if looking for something that had vanished.

As for the children, they began to chatter excitedly, and Gavin was grinning.

"Then I'm going to stay awake and wait for the little tooth fairy to come! I want to see one."

"Me too! I'll stay up when I loose my next tooth!"

"I have a loose one now! I'll get to try in a few days!"

Jack watched them, smiling to himself and pointedly not mentioning that Sandy always made sure that children with teeth under pillows were asleep before the fairies arrived. No child could resist the pull of dreamsand when it came to give them dreams. He knew from having tried to see the Tooth Fairy when he was their age. He had lain awake waiting, drumming his fingers on his blanket to stop himself dozing off, and yet always sleep had crept up without him noticing. Every time he'd tried, he'd woken up at morning's light to find a coin under his pillow and the tooth long gone.

Story done, Jack now took the children onto the pond for ice-skating, only allowing them to play for an hour before sending them back to the village to get ready for the little ceremony at sunset.

He was just re-smoothing the grooves cut into the ice by the children's ice-skates, when Yuki and several Winter Sprites came rushing down out of the sky.

She was very excited, and started babbling before she'd even landed.

"Jack! There was a blizzard, in Japan, and some travellers were stuck in it! I led them to a cave, to shelter, and once they were safe they saw me!" She spun around on the spot, unable to contain her exuberance. "They saw me! They heard me! They saw 'Lady Yuki', and thanked me! And they're going to tell others about the spirit who saved them, too!"

Jack smiled in genuine pleasure at her success, even if he'd already been aware of her gaining a handful of believers thanks to the small boost of power he'd sensed from her a couple of hours ago. But again, she didn't know he gained strength from her believers, and even if that wasn't a secret he had to keep, he wouldn't have spoiled the moment for her.

"That's great! See? I told you it would just be a matter of time. You've started your new legend, and so long as you keep working at it, it'll spread. The other Immortals will start hearing about it too, and before long they'll all know how much they misjudged you."

Yuki was still beaming in elation, and she flung herself at Jack to hug him tightly.

"And it's all thanks to you! Thank you so much!"

She continued along that thread, chattering into his hair, and Jack glanced at one of the sprites in a clear and silent 'help me!'

The sprites all clumped round to hug her too, a distraction which got her to let go of Jack. She then picked one of them up, hugged it, and swept up into the air.

"I'm going to go tell Cernunnos!"

A couple of the sprites stayed behind as she flew off at a truly remarkable pace, clearly a little worn out by her excitement. Jack shared that sentiment, and chuckled as he and the sprites all slumped down into a snowdrift to relax.

White resting, he thought about the tooth fairies some more. While it was true he'd had no chance of seeing them as a child, because of Sandy, that wasn't the case anymore...

Grinning to himself, he decided then and there to play the "See the Tooth Fairy" game that very night.

Sunset came, and with it the little ceremony of burning the twigs from the shrine. The fire in the brazier, as small as it was, warmed the villagers gathered around it at the end of this first day of the new year. It 'warmed' Jack too, their thoughts of him as he sat atop the storm pole, and when the fire at last burned out shortly after sunset, he followed Gavin and his parents back to their home.

He came inside, in the guise of wanting to spend some quiet time with them, which was true. But when the hour came for them to go to sleep, Jack offered to tell Gavin and bedtime story.

Once the parents were asleep, which was shortly before Sandy's dreamsand was due to arrive, Jack stationed a sprite outside each window and the door. He then settled himself in the chair beside Gavin's bed, and there he waited and watched as dreamsand soon came in through the shutters and became a dream about being awake to see a tooth fairy come.

Jack chuckled at the irony of that dream, when Gavin's valiant effort to stay awake failed in moments, since it was as close as the boy was going to get. But at least he'd be able to tell the child about the fairy in the morning, which should prevent too much disappointment at not being awake to see her.

About fifteen minutes after the dreamsand had come, Jack heard sprite-chatter outside. There was a little bit of a scuffle, like the sprites jumping up and down excitedly, and then the shutter on the window closest to Gavin's bed opened a little and something flitted in.

It's a tooth fairy, and Jack at last got a close look at one. He'd seen hummingbirds during some exploration of mountain regions in South America, and apart from a human-like shape, and a human-like face with a long nose like a hummingbird's beak, that is exactly what the fairy looked like.

She was clutching a copper coin, and facing the gap in the shutters she squeaked out something that sounded like it was a reprimand at the sprites. She then brought a tiny finger to her mouth and made a definite 'shush' noise.

She turned to head for Gavin's bed, and stopped in her tracks when she saw Jack sat in the chair beside it, watching her. She then almost dropped her coin, scrambled to regain her grip on it, and Jack laughed softly before lifting the end of Gavin's pillow to reveal the tooth under it.

"I think you're here for this. Don't worry, I'm allowed to be in here. Gavin is descended from my mortal sister." He inclined his head to the other end of the cabin, where a small screen partitioned off the bed where James and his wife were. "Those two are heavy sleepers, so you needn't worry they'll wake up. Go on, take the tooth."

The fairy remained understandably wary, staring at him with violet eyes. She fluttered closer, edging around him, and then he smiled at her in reassurance and her wary stare became an entranced gape.

She flew right up to his face, startling him, and then peered at his very white teeth. And then she let out a breathy squeak of awe, her eyes wide, and Jack laughed again.

"Ah, yeah, my teeth are really white. Something to do with being the Spirit of Winter, I think. My sister always joked that they were as white as freshly fallen snow."

The fairy continued to stare at his teeth, then noticed he was still watching her, and she blushed before quickly fluttering to the nearby pillow which he still had lifted. She put down the coin and picked up the tooth, blushing again when he smiled at her once more, and then in a flitter of embarrassment she shot out the window and was gone.

Outside, she heard Jack's chuckle as she left, and zipped up above the clouds to make her trip back to Asia and the Tooth Palace. It was a long way, and would have taken her almost five hours since America was the opposite side of the world from the Palace. But there was a shortcut in place for the fairies to use, a portal-tunnel created for Tooth by Bunnymund. It allowed the tooth fairies to reach Northern America via an entrance about two miles from the Tooth Palace.

After flying west from the village for an hour, she reached that tunnel and darted through it, coming out in the warm and humid air around the Tooth Palace. Nearby were the other tunnels, that led to Africa, Europe, and Southern America, because otherwise even Toothiana's vast number of fairies would struggle to reach all the teeth each night.

The tooth fairy arrived back at the Tooth Palace, flying among the gilded and jewelled spires that hung from the inside of the hollow mountain. She deposited the tooth she carried into Gavin's box, which had magically come down out of storage in the North American Spire when his tooth had fallen out. Within view of there, at the heart of the palace, Toothiana hovered at the centre of a mass of fairies flying up past her carrying coins of many kinds for many countries.

She was rattling off locations of teeth, and weather warnings from the handful of fairies who were coming in and out on weather-watch. She didn't really need to tell them where the teeth were, since all the mini-fairies were once a part of her and sensed where the teeth were for themselves. But still, she kept everyone coordinated and working together smoothly, and also made sure that each shift of fairies got to rest. After all, they were very small and had to fly a very long way every day.

The little fairy, job done for the day, fluttered to her usual perch in the trees that topped the floating mountain the palace was inside of. Up there, the two thousand or so other fairies from her shift were also settling down for a nap. It was once she was settled there, that her thoughts turned to the very pretty teeth of Jack Frost.

She sighed dreamily, picturing them, and that sound caught the attention of the other fairies near her. They fluttered over, chirping out a query, and within minutes the air was filled with much squeaking as she described Jack's teeth and his smile to the others.

~(-)~

The following night in the village, Jack was skating around his pond when he heard the distinct sound of tooth fairy wings. He looked up to the sky to see several fairies heading in his direction, and waved to them cheerfully when they came down to hover in front of him.

The fairy from last night was with them, and he smiled.

"Hey there! Did you come to tell me that Gavin's tooth is all safe and sound at the Tooth Palace?"

There was a moment of silence, as all the fairies gawked at his teeth, before the one he was speaking to shook herself to alert and nodded. She buzzed up to his face, cheerfully confirming that the tooth was safe, and then she pointed to the other fairies who were with her.

Jack chuckled.

"You brought some others to say hello, huh?" He raised his eyebrows in a wry expression. "You wanted to show them my teeth, didn't you?" The fairy looked away from him, pretending innocence, and he laughed. "Ok, you can all look, since you like my teeth so much."

The moment the invitation was given, all of the little group of fairies clustered around his face and took it in turns to get a closer look at his impossibly perfect teeth. One or two of them actually swooned in awe, and Jack was admittedly fighting not to laugh at their reactions. The 'See the Tooth Fairy' game, had now become the 'Tooth fairies come see Jack Frost's teeth' game.

He might have let them keep looking for a bit longer, but then a breeze brushed past and whispered in his ear, causing him to frown slightly and tilt his head to listen. He then looked at the fairies and shrugged apologetically.

"Sorry, ladies, I have to go. Duty calls, and I think yours is probably calling too. Don't get into trouble with Toothiana for being late, because of me, ok?"

He flew away, and the fairies hastened off to collect the teeth they'd been sent to the region to gather.

~(-)~

Over the remaining weeks of Northern Winter, a bit of discrete shuffling started to happen at the Tooth Palace. Fairies who hadn't seen Jack's teeth yet, swapped places with the fairies in the shift that did the time-zone the village was in, who had. This swapping continued further the following Northern Winter, until outside of Tooth's knowledge, several hundred of her tens of thousands of mini-fairies had swapped into that shift and out of it again after getting to see Jack, and many more fairies were eagerly waiting for a chance to do the same.

One day, near the start of Northern Winter for the third year after that first meeting between the Spirit of Winter and a tooth fairy, Tooth finally noticed something was going on. There was an unusual amount of gossiping and swooning going on among her fairies, along with a general air of excitement as Northern Winter drew near.

Tooth, during a rare moment she went down to her garden to rest, sat and mulled over it as she daintily dipped her feet in the pond. While she acknowledged that all the fairies started out as smaller copies of herself, they had all since developed personalities of their own along with their own separate memories. They were autonomous of her now, meaning it was more like having thousands of little daughters, for that was what they had become to her. Yet at the same time it was still like watching herself doing something she wasn't sure why she was doing. The gossiping and blushing were an obvious sign of a distraction, one that was spreading through all of them very rapidly.

She decided to tap into the more recent memories of her fairies, not a small feat given how many of them there were. Normally she would look at the memories of only one or two, when they'd seen something they needed to show her, but this was more wide-scale than that.

Tooth moved from the pond's edge, and instead sat on another rock nearby and closed her eyes. She reached her mind towards the thousands of little threads of magic that connected her and the fairies together, and through those she touched all those bright little minds in search of that which had gotten them so excited.

What she got was not what she had prepared herself for.

In moments she was bombarded by thousands of different images of Jack Frost, smiling with moonlight glinting off teeth that were dazzlingly white. She also got thousands of very close-up views of those perfect teeth, and that combined with the influx of memories of his charming greetings, and even a few instances of him entertaining the fairies with a short game of tag, made her heart race.

Tooth's face went bright pink, her violet eyes were wide, and the feathers on her head fluffed out to the point they were practically standing on end. In the meantime, her reaction to those images and memories rebounded out through all her fairies, everywhere, and literally caused all fifty-something thousand of them to swoon like teenage girls smitten over by an attractive boy... In her curiosity to find out what had made a moderately small percentage of her fairies distracted, she'd just inadvertently imprinted those images and that 'distraction' onto every single one of them.

Tooth, a little flustered, shook herself from her stupor and began to use her hands to flatten all her feathers in a belated attempt to compose herself. She then passed a mental command to all her fairies, a firm one. They could swap in and out of that shift if they wanted to, but they were not allowed to detour to see Jack the way they had been doing. They'd only see him if they crossed his path by chance, but a chance was enough that she knew her fairies would be taking turns with each other in that shift every Northern Winter for decades, and perhaps even centuries to come. All in the hopes of seeing Jack Frost's very pretty teeth.

Tooth fluttered up off her rock, still rather pink in the face, and returned to the pond in some distant hope that having her feet in the cool water would help cool the flush from her face as well. But it still seemed that every time her mind started to wander, it wandered in the direction of the memories she had seen of a very pretty smile.

Distancing herself from those daydreams became easier with each passing day, helped by throwing herself into her work and focusing on that. By the time Northern Spring came, and then Easter had passed, she headed to the annual meeting of the Guardians completely composed and focused on the task at hand.

That lasted all of about ten minutes once the meeting began, with the first point on the agenda North had prepared, being news of the growing legend of 'Lady Yuki', formerly called Yuki-onna.

The Russian folded his arms across his chest as he talked of her, rather serious.

"I've seen her couple of times since she became Lieutenant of Winter, and I have to say... We misjudged her very badly. All she needed was someone to help her find footing, and give her support." He held up a hand with four fingers raised. "She has been on Nice List four times since she became Lady Yuki... Although Jack Frost has been on Naughty List five times in same number of years. Always for same thing; his pranks involving children and snow, or adults and snow or ice."

Bunny shook his head, his tone holding a hint of sarcasm.

"Makes you wonder how she can be on the Nice List, with him as her role-model. Right, Tooth?"

Off to the side, Tooth wasn't really listening, and hadn't been since Jack Frost was mentioned. No, she'd gone quiet with a dreamy little smile on her face, which she hastily cleared when she realised she was being talked to.

She coughed into a hand, and turned her attention to her fellow Guardians.

"Sorry, I was just relaying tooth locations to my fairies. What was it you just said?"

Bunny repeated his remark, to which Tooth just shrugged and pointed out that Yuki was a completely different personality from Jack, so that she could be on the Nice List so much shouldn't be that surprising.

The meeting progressed, with each of them making their yearly report of their activities and things they may or may not have noticed as being odd or unusual, of which this year there was none. Tooth managed to keep her attention on the meeting by blanking out all thoughts of Jack, but by the time she was heading back to the Tooth Palace, there was one little thing she knew she shared with her fairies.

She really wanted to see Jack's teeth for herself, someday.

~(-)~

Alaia Skyhawk: There you have it, the source of Tooth's obsession with Jack's teeth, hehehehe :)

And yeah, I've pegged the number of mini-fairies at 50k. I did a bit of guess-timating as to how many teeth per day there would be by the time the story gets to 2012. At 50k fairies, that's enough that they each would be collecting about five teeth per day, which is realistic. At this point in the story, 1775, they're averaging about one tooth each per day.