Chapter seventeen-Chatterbox
"What?" That was all the eloquence North could gather in his state of shock that the others would understand. He was thinking a million miles an hour but it was in a garbled Russian that would have been mostly unintelligible. Tooth had fluttered to the ground, realizing that maybe, just maybe she was wrong. Jamie was peeking around Sandy, who felt the pull of someone slipping to unconsciousness from one direction and consciousness behind him. Pitch (James?) was quickly losing his grip on the waking world which, if his fight to stay awake was any indication, was bad.
"Pitch?" Jamie ventured quietly. He grunted as he pushed himself into a sitting position and what they saw shocked them silent…well more so.
"What? What is it?" He asked, noting the stunned stares from all but Bunny, who was mostly just scowling. Sandy and Tooth had touched down.
"You…look really different now." Jamie supplied. Pitch looked down at himself and found a modern-clad version of what he would have worn, faded work jeans, black boots and a black T-shirt. What could he say, he was the guardian of courage and black was slimming. He didn't ask what the rest of him looked like, just turned back to Jack and checked his temperature with a still unsteady hand. Whatever he found there caused a relieved breath that had his shoulders dropping significantly.
"He's going back to normal." He informed a still too-shocked-to-do-much North. When Pitch said that, North snapped out of his haze and checked the boy's temperature himself, relieved as Pitch was. Jack started to stir in North's arms and no one quite knew what to do.
"What happened, Pitch?" Tooth asked gently, calmly. She sounded much more likely to believe everything and Pitch turned, cautiously optimistic. Bunny felt the little rise in a desperate-type hope rising from the man and he had to shove down a feeling of pity. He finally felt his hope, not because he hadn't been paying attention before but because he had been completely devoid of it from the moment he had been conscious to detect it. Don't feel bad for 'im. He's the bloody Boogeyman and I smell a rat. He ranted again in his mind. Although watching Tooth's eyes soften started to make him wonder who he was trying to convince with that thought. Why was he having to make himself stay angry.
"I absorbed him…all that needs done now…is to trap him in the moonstone, which frankly I can't remember how we did that, or…where the spell is but…but I know it's in one of the spell books, around here. Has to be." He offered, stitch in his side from all the power he had just used making him more and more winded. Jack finally managed to pry his eyes open and opened his mouth in question only to be met with a yawn.
"Jamie?" A familiar voice cut through all the tension and had every head turning to where Jessica Bennett had sat up on the couch. She was giving the group a wide-eyed look and North noted that his center radiated from the woman who's eyes were lit up like Christmas Trees. Wonder.
"Mom!" Jamie wasted no time launching into the offered hug of his mom. She tilted her head to the side, trying to figure something out and then she just laughed. It was a friendly, tinkling laugh that had everyone smiling.
"It looks like you were right, kiddo. Remind me to never question you crazy stories, kay?" She ginned, giving him another fierce hug. Jack, who had detangled himself from North gently, with a little 'I'm good, thank you' smile was walking up to Jamie and his mom with a huge smile.
"Well, there goes all the tension." He teased lightly, nudging Jamie's arm. "Good job kiddo." He complimented and Jessica looked at him with a confused frown.
"Jack?" She asked, causing him to freeze.
"You…you can see me? I thought maybe something with the dream-sand…but…" He couldn't wrap his mind around it. She chuckled and that smile was the warmest smile he had ever seen on anyone in his long life.
"I've always been able to see you, Jack." The look on the eternal child's face made her heart melt. "It's the others that are news to me." She leaned around him and grinned. "No offense."
"None taken." Tooth chimed, dragging a chuckle from Sandy and North.
Jack was still too speechless.
"So, what did he call you, when he was absorbed?" North asked Pitch, offering him a hand up which he hesitantly accepted. Pitch frowned at nothing for a second before remembering and making an 'aha' face.
"Oh, it was my original, human name." He supplied, looking a bit better but North could tell the smaller man was using every ounce of his self-control to speak normally. He nodded thoughtfully and nodded toward a sofa.
"James Frost?" He asked as he half-limped the few steps to the couch and all but collapsed. Over on the next sofa, by the broad fireplace, Jamie, Jack and Jessica were lost in their own world. They had been talking about all the things that had happened and apologizing to Jamie for the time he spent with all of them not believing. They had scared the crap out of the boy for a while there. Just about the time they were getting into 'remember when they did that?' and snickering as they stole glances at the others North said that name and he stopped, turning with a single eyebrow hiding under his hair.
"What? Who's that?" Jack asked, using the wind to fly over to the small circle gathering, landing lightly on one foot and bouncing once before settling.
"That would be me." Pitch offered. Jack, getting a solid look at the man finally, noted quite a few things that would make that statement interesting. He had mocha brown eyes, like his sister had and like he used to, and also part of his brain registered Jamie and his mother. His hair was similarly a dark brown, like theirs. He looked like an older version of Jack as a human and suddenly he had to wonder.
"Well that's interesting." Jack commented casually as the Bennetts gathered around to join them, knowing most of the immediate danger was gone. "'Cause Frost isn't a common surname." He offered with a smirk, plopping down on the ground in the circle by the couch with his staff across his lap casually.
"That's very true." An impressed tone colored Pitch's voice. "You know what that name bled out into?" He asked.
"Partly, genealogy doesn't really go back far enough to track some of them." Jack nodded.
"Well, it's really entertaining, there's a whole book on it somewhere if you can find it. It might not be in English but it's got all the original surnames and where they ended up through history. It's a spirit's book so it won't be in a library but I think I know where it is, if you're interested." He offered. Jack nodded excitedly.
"Yeah! That could be interesting, find out where our names came from and what they almost were." He chuckled. Pitch's eyes glittered with joy as the boy laughed, it was music.
"Well, I hate to break up the bloody love-fest but we have a problem, mates." Bunny's grumpier-than-usual voice cut through the laughter like a hot knife through butter.
"Bunny!" Tooth chided. Pitch, now James, held up a hand to Tooth politely.
"No, he's right. We need to get Boogey somewhere he can't do any more damage. I don't know what he can do inside an unwilling host but I'm not too keen on finding out." He defended. Bunny bristled, that wasn't the problem he had been talking about, they thought. He looked mad, but that look slowly faded as his intent mint eyes searched the calm mocha ones of Pitch. He felt a fragile hope, not unlike that of Jack's when they had met, starting to crumble as he maintained his bristled appearance. Suddenly it hit him, the absolute purity of that hope and how he was shattering it.
He deflated and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Bloody right, we don't want that nasty piece o' work runnin' 'round here again, do we mates?" He asked the group and tried to contain the smile that tugged at his face and threatened his gruff appearance when Pitch's hope slammed him like a brick wall. It was so full, so strong that he couldn't help feeling like an arse of the highest caliber for doubting him.
"Right, kangaroo." Jack smirked.
"I'm not a bloody kangaroo, Frostbite." Bunny grumbled but there was no heat in it.
"What do we do?" North asked, pulling up a chair and taking Jack's lead. Tooth fluttered onto a small armchair beside the couch and Jamie plopped down beside Pitch with his mom on his other side. Bunny sat on the floor by Jack with Sandy between him and North, completing the wall-eyed circular thing they had formed.
"A spell to pull him out of me and a spell to trap him. It doesn't have to be the moonstone but that's what we did last time and I know how to do that. Problem is it has a slight chance of letting pieces of him out." He offered a little quieter, straining.
"What are we looking for?" Tooth asked, "I'll help."
"Spell of casting, and spell of binding." He was trying not to grit his teeth and it was becoming obvious he was in pain. He shook his head and scowled at nothing, looking a bit frustrated.
"Hey, you okay?" Jack asked. Pitch shook his head out, ran a hand through his hair and blinked over at Jack for a second.
"Oh…he's just a bit of a chatterbox, that's all." He offered with a grin. Jack looked skeptical.
"He's talking?" Bunny asked, concerned.
"Yes. He does that." Pitch rolled his eyes at the entity inside him. That was a weird thought. He growled a bit in frustration, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Come on North, let's go." Tooth got up, suddenly much more urgent about the matter. North cringed when the man doubled over and nodded to Tooth.
"Right. Faster we find spell, faster he is gone from him." They could hear his boots all the way to his library and for a few moments the only sound was that of his labored breathing. Sandy frowned and tugged Jack's sleeve, knowing he would understand much quicker than the others.
"Yeah?" He asked.
Sandy set off in a blur of symbols that Jack just barely caught, indicating Pitch, a question and sleep.
"I don't know, hey, would it help you to be asleep?" Jack asked. Pitch straightened out as best he could and shook his head.
"I have to be…awake." He offered, out of breath again.
"Well, we should figure something out. We don't know how long it will be before they've got what we need." Jessica offered, watching in sympathy as Pitch tried to maintain both a grip on the ancient evil inside him and his composure. Something was going to have to give soon.
"I think I might have somethin' that'll help. You allergic to anythin', mate?" Bunny asked, completely forgetting his earlier gruffness. A shake of the head told him no and he opened a rabbit hole to his warren. "Alright, I think I have a medicated tea that'll take the edge off." He offered. As he hopped down the hole Pitch shot him a grateful look.
As he ruffled through his cabinets much more urgently than he would ever admit to later he thought about that look. A calm settled through him as he realized that their oldest enemy wasn't really even who they thought it was, and that soon they'd be rid of him. The irony of the reason that was possible didn't escape him either. When he was finished he tossed more than a few backup plans in his pouch, just in case the tea didn't do it.
"This is, by a wide margin, the least likely chain of events I can think of." He muttered with a chuckle as he raced back to the pole, again with an urgency he would deny until the day he died.
I was planning on making Bunny hate him for a very long time, but I just couldn't. Knowing who these characters are I couldn't make him so blind, but I can make him bullheaded.He really took care of that all by himself. Also please let me know how y'all feel about the treatment of the name-change. I'm trying to make it gradual, and everyone's still really shocked and maybe it's more obvious than my paranoid brain is thinking but let me know. :) There it is though! Hope you like, please let me know the good, the bad and the ugly, all that.
On another note; abroks1234- Thank you so much and I'm so happy you're enjoying reading as much as I am writing. I appreciate you.
Y'all are wonderful people! :)