(no subject)
Lullaby
2
3
4
In which we continue with some difficult stuff, have emotional whiplash, get explicated at, and have tea.
A couple of fruitless weeks later, Jack was out somewhere vaguely in Kansas or perhaps Nebraska, ushering a small storm across the plains and -- although the storm was no tornado and he wasn't entirely sure he actually was in Kansas -- humming the Wicked Witch's theme song, when he saw the shadowy rider galloping across the winds.
Oh no.
Jack dropped the storm (it was far enough along that it wouldn't go too much off the rails without him) and followed.
If it hadn't been winter, or Shin'ichi hadn't been all in blacks and deep blues, Jack would've lost him. As it was, he nearly did anyway every time the white plains were cut by a strip of dark forest, lacy with snow coating the sparse branches. Then the land gave way to a sheet of ice: a lake long since frozen over, miles long and shimmering as wind gusted ragged arcs of snow across the surface. Jack could barely keep up as Shin'ichi's horse sank to the ground, galloping hooves striking up blue sparks and chips of ice.
Just as a massive dam loomed up out of the blowing snow, Shin'ichi ducked lower over his horse's neck, and it raced back into the air. The Wind threw Jack up after them, and he caught a glimpse of horse and rider following the road, just before Shin'ichi arrowed straight into another stand of trees instead of following the road's curve.
Crap, crap, crap! Jack thought. He'd fallen behind. He'd lost--
No. He could just see the blocky shape of a house on the far side of the trees. The back side, no visible garage and a deck buried knee-deep in snow. Was this the right...?
Some strange sense of Joy hovered around the home, Jack noticed, as he carefully approached. Upstairs, far right window, and it snapped off like something had hacked right through it just as Jack peeked inside.
Just as Jack saw the woman collapsing, unconscious, atop the child on the bed.
He hit the ground hard, dry heaves making him wish he ate often enough to be violently sick, or could vomit up every drop of her pleasure, because --
Starved, beaten, molested, Kaito sang softly in his memory.
-- because --
Jack spat one last mouthful of bitter bile into the snowdrift, and, as he blinked tears from his eyes, the horse and rider galloped straight through the wall, a story above him. There were tiny football-printed toes peeking out from under Shin'ichi's oversized coat. Away. Get away from her. Get away from here. A sudden urgency gripped him. NOW!
The storm he'd left behind hit the house like an avalanche.
-0-0-0
Jack let the storm slingshot him across the next state, faster than the Wind could usually carry him, and eventually caught sight of a pale wedge high over the sparsely-lit plains on the far side of the Mississippi river. Blue fire flickered alongside it, Shin'ichi otherwise invisible against the deepening twilight; within minutes, the glider tilted, Kaito glancing over his shoulder.
One white-clad arm snapped upwards, and in a blast of silvery glitter, horse and glider vanished.
Who did Kaito think he was?!
Fine.
FINE.
Jack knew where they were going anyway.
-0-0-0
The storm had hours before it reached Burgess, and all the children were asleep, when Jack wrestled himself through the jagged crack into Pitch's lair. Snow blew in behind him, frost crackling up the walls and ice freezing all the rubble into place, as Jack marched down the tunnel branch towards Shin'ichi's side of the caverns.
Ignore the flickering shadows. Ignore the oppressive stone. Ignore the remaining sour burn in his throat. Jack had to be able to do something. He had to. He--
"Jackson Overland just what do you think you are doing?!"
His mother's voice stopped Jack in his tracks. Pitch grabbed hold of the shepherd's crook, looming over him from out of nowhere. "What are you doing here, Jack Frost?" he snarled.
Wasn't it obvious? "I--"
"Breaking into my home. Again." One gray, taloned finger jabbed at Jack's nose. "To gawk at a child like some animal in a zoo."
What blood Jack had left drained from his face. No. No no no. That wasn't. He. No.
"There." Pitch settled his hackles, his grip now steady instead of white-knuckled-furious. "Now that you're not in blind flight, that's... let's see... ah, no wonder," he purred. "Fear of living off a child molester's pleasures. My my, Jack, I thought the old man had taught you a bit more magical theory than that."
Jack swayed. "I... what?" What?
Pitch ducked under Jack's arm, propping him upright. "This needs tea. Come into my parlor, then."
"Spider," Jack muttered, but let Pitch drag him through a shadow -- clammy tendrils clutching unpleasantly at him -- and into a small room that looked like the Addams Family had mix-and-matched from Tim Burton's movie sets.
Pitch settled Jack onto a sofa that had clearly been converted from a coffin, a worn black with satin upholstery long since yellowed. Then he stepped over to a potbellied cast-iron stove in the corner -- which gave off heat but hardly any light -- and put a kettle on.
Jack stared blankly as Pitch returned with a tea tray (more of the iron, the pot chased with pewter-edged dragons and set over a tea light, and the cups made of china in some charcoal-on-black glaze). There were three cups, and Pitch filled all three before taking his own seat on a rocking chair that creaked alarmingly.
"... Thanks," Jack mumbled. He took one of the remaining cups, but only watched the steam curling up.
Pitch sipped at his tea. "If I," he said slowly, thoughtfully, "were to lock you up with a rapist --" Jack very nearly dropped his cup, "-- molester, rapist, let's not kid ourselves that there's that much difference -- and a steady supply of victims, you would suffer a slow, horrific, and quite agonizing death."
At Jack's stricken silence, Pitch continued, "It would be much the same as if I only had haunted houses and horror movies to live on. It's a tainted sort of sustenance, ersatz and poison." He met Jack's eyes evenly. "You and I are perhaps the only ones with such a problem, come to think of it. There is no such thing as tainted wonder -- those who explain the wonders of the universe come to marvel at the explanations -- and we've seen what occurs when I attempt to subvert dreams or memories." Something rueful ghosted over his face.
"Hope..." Pitch looked away once again. "Hope is... unassailable, in that way. Where North's wonder has no opposite, Hope is... well. Possibility. If one hopes something is true, or not as the case may be, then one has to acknowledge that you might be wrong. That spring won't come again and the crops will fail, as in 1816." After a long moment, he blinked back to himself. "But the damn rabbit's Hope also means that you know something has to change. The worse off one is, the more likely change means an improvement. Take the extreme of hopelessness, the suicidal." Pitch gestured with one long hand. "They do not? They have, somewhere, deep down, a single spark of hope that something will be worth living one more day. They make the attempt? They have that hope that not existing would be better. Quite frustrating. Your tea should be cold enough to drink by now."
Jack drank mostly on automatic.
"I'm afraid you'll always notice that sort of pleasure," Pitch said. "I didn't take much exposure to recognize the difference in my own prey, so you can probably assuage your heroic tendencies easily by icing the source. Just a suggestion."
Something tight and heavy in Jack's gut unknotted itself. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do that." He could help. He could actually, finally, do something to help.
This time he could actually taste the chamomile in the tea, a flavor that was slightly like frost-tinged apples and slightly like spring flowers. "I still can't believe you drink this stuff," Jack said, just because.
"I pretend it's the blood of my enemies," Pitch replied dryly.
Jack blew a raspberry at him, then switched his drained cup for the fresh (cold) one, and flopped back over the coffin-couch as Pitch refilled the old cup. "So you'll like this, North's throwing ten kinds of fit up at the Pole."
"Mm? Whyever for?"
"I told you about the Naughty List, right?" Pitch narrowed his eyes, and Jack hastily said, "Forget I said that. Anyway. Kaito was really ticked at them all when they met, and left behind a riddle instead of the answers North wanted about things like... well... you." Jack grinned. "And all the little details about who Shin'ichi is, how he works, all that stuff. So North's up there stomping around the Workshop, swearing in Russian and trying all sorts of different lamps on Kaito's watch."
Pitch blinked. "What, that old pocketwatch he stuck a mirror in?"
"That's the one. You ever seen the inscription?" Pitch shook his head. "It goes 'Look in the light from no yellow sun, look with the eyes from no righteous face, look for the found who know only of loss, then will I show the answers you seek'. Or something like that. They've all been stuck on the first line for nearly a month."
Pitch actually smiled, mock-sighing as he rested his head on his free hand. "Now I truly despair of your education."
"... Well, you know, North's busy and all.."
"Lamps, you said?"
"Moonlight," Jack began ticking off on his fingers. "Starlight, firelight, candlelight, oil lamps, half a dozen different kinds of lightbulbs, light spells from pretty much every culture he's got a book for, and a bunch of different glowy plants and animals that Bunny has to fetch." He couldn't help but snicker a little. "I wish I'd had a camera when he came back with the Hawaiian squid; he was soaking wet and had tentacles coming out his ears." Which had been hilarious, with the ruffs on Bunny's face plastered to his cheeks making him look like a horse from the neck up. Hilarious until everybody else had freaked out and bundled him straight to the infirmary for a week. Turned out a wet rabbit was a dangerously hypothermic one. There'd been cuddlepiles. "Anyway. The mirror doesn't so much as flicker. Why?"
"Because the answer's quite obvious, Jack." Pitch's smile widened, teeth flashing as some smug glee welled up from him. "Basic science. One of many things fundamentalists and anti-intellectuals are terrified of. To use the light of no yellow sun, on Earth, means obviously one cannot use sunlight. However," he raised a finger, "Moonlight is reflected sunlight. Starlight is the light from thousands of stars, many of which are a match for this one. Wood, oils, and bioluminescence all rely on living or once-living things, which gained their energy from sunlight or through various and sundry food chains back to sunlight. Even magelight and electricity are too rooted in humanity, mystically speaking, to be exempt from the food chains. Therefore," the finger ticked one way, "Either one must use the bioluminescence of certain abyssal marine life -- to which I might mention that Kaito is deliciously terrified of fish and would never use that for a key, not to mention the sheer impossibility of surviving the pressure to obtain any -- or," the finger ticked in the other direction, "One must look in the mirror in... if you'll pardon the pun... pitch blackness."
Seriously? "But you can't see anything in the dark."
"That may rather be the point."
2
3
4
In which we continue with some difficult stuff, have emotional whiplash, get explicated at, and have tea.
A couple of fruitless weeks later, Jack was out somewhere vaguely in Kansas or perhaps Nebraska, ushering a small storm across the plains and -- although the storm was no tornado and he wasn't entirely sure he actually was in Kansas -- humming the Wicked Witch's theme song, when he saw the shadowy rider galloping across the winds.
Oh no.
Jack dropped the storm (it was far enough along that it wouldn't go too much off the rails without him) and followed.
If it hadn't been winter, or Shin'ichi hadn't been all in blacks and deep blues, Jack would've lost him. As it was, he nearly did anyway every time the white plains were cut by a strip of dark forest, lacy with snow coating the sparse branches. Then the land gave way to a sheet of ice: a lake long since frozen over, miles long and shimmering as wind gusted ragged arcs of snow across the surface. Jack could barely keep up as Shin'ichi's horse sank to the ground, galloping hooves striking up blue sparks and chips of ice.
Just as a massive dam loomed up out of the blowing snow, Shin'ichi ducked lower over his horse's neck, and it raced back into the air. The Wind threw Jack up after them, and he caught a glimpse of horse and rider following the road, just before Shin'ichi arrowed straight into another stand of trees instead of following the road's curve.
Crap, crap, crap! Jack thought. He'd fallen behind. He'd lost--
No. He could just see the blocky shape of a house on the far side of the trees. The back side, no visible garage and a deck buried knee-deep in snow. Was this the right...?
Some strange sense of Joy hovered around the home, Jack noticed, as he carefully approached. Upstairs, far right window, and it snapped off like something had hacked right through it just as Jack peeked inside.
Just as Jack saw the woman collapsing, unconscious, atop the child on the bed.
He hit the ground hard, dry heaves making him wish he ate often enough to be violently sick, or could vomit up every drop of her pleasure, because --
Starved, beaten, molested, Kaito sang softly in his memory.
-- because --
Jack spat one last mouthful of bitter bile into the snowdrift, and, as he blinked tears from his eyes, the horse and rider galloped straight through the wall, a story above him. There were tiny football-printed toes peeking out from under Shin'ichi's oversized coat. Away. Get away from her. Get away from here. A sudden urgency gripped him. NOW!
The storm he'd left behind hit the house like an avalanche.
-0-0-0
Jack let the storm slingshot him across the next state, faster than the Wind could usually carry him, and eventually caught sight of a pale wedge high over the sparsely-lit plains on the far side of the Mississippi river. Blue fire flickered alongside it, Shin'ichi otherwise invisible against the deepening twilight; within minutes, the glider tilted, Kaito glancing over his shoulder.
One white-clad arm snapped upwards, and in a blast of silvery glitter, horse and glider vanished.
Who did Kaito think he was?!
Fine.
FINE.
Jack knew where they were going anyway.
-0-0-0
The storm had hours before it reached Burgess, and all the children were asleep, when Jack wrestled himself through the jagged crack into Pitch's lair. Snow blew in behind him, frost crackling up the walls and ice freezing all the rubble into place, as Jack marched down the tunnel branch towards Shin'ichi's side of the caverns.
Ignore the flickering shadows. Ignore the oppressive stone. Ignore the remaining sour burn in his throat. Jack had to be able to do something. He had to. He--
"Jackson Overland just what do you think you are doing?!"
His mother's voice stopped Jack in his tracks. Pitch grabbed hold of the shepherd's crook, looming over him from out of nowhere. "What are you doing here, Jack Frost?" he snarled.
Wasn't it obvious? "I--"
"Breaking into my home. Again." One gray, taloned finger jabbed at Jack's nose. "To gawk at a child like some animal in a zoo."
What blood Jack had left drained from his face. No. No no no. That wasn't. He. No.
"There." Pitch settled his hackles, his grip now steady instead of white-knuckled-furious. "Now that you're not in blind flight, that's... let's see... ah, no wonder," he purred. "Fear of living off a child molester's pleasures. My my, Jack, I thought the old man had taught you a bit more magical theory than that."
Jack swayed. "I... what?" What?
Pitch ducked under Jack's arm, propping him upright. "This needs tea. Come into my parlor, then."
"Spider," Jack muttered, but let Pitch drag him through a shadow -- clammy tendrils clutching unpleasantly at him -- and into a small room that looked like the Addams Family had mix-and-matched from Tim Burton's movie sets.
Pitch settled Jack onto a sofa that had clearly been converted from a coffin, a worn black with satin upholstery long since yellowed. Then he stepped over to a potbellied cast-iron stove in the corner -- which gave off heat but hardly any light -- and put a kettle on.
Jack stared blankly as Pitch returned with a tea tray (more of the iron, the pot chased with pewter-edged dragons and set over a tea light, and the cups made of china in some charcoal-on-black glaze). There were three cups, and Pitch filled all three before taking his own seat on a rocking chair that creaked alarmingly.
"... Thanks," Jack mumbled. He took one of the remaining cups, but only watched the steam curling up.
Pitch sipped at his tea. "If I," he said slowly, thoughtfully, "were to lock you up with a rapist --" Jack very nearly dropped his cup, "-- molester, rapist, let's not kid ourselves that there's that much difference -- and a steady supply of victims, you would suffer a slow, horrific, and quite agonizing death."
At Jack's stricken silence, Pitch continued, "It would be much the same as if I only had haunted houses and horror movies to live on. It's a tainted sort of sustenance, ersatz and poison." He met Jack's eyes evenly. "You and I are perhaps the only ones with such a problem, come to think of it. There is no such thing as tainted wonder -- those who explain the wonders of the universe come to marvel at the explanations -- and we've seen what occurs when I attempt to subvert dreams or memories." Something rueful ghosted over his face.
"Hope..." Pitch looked away once again. "Hope is... unassailable, in that way. Where North's wonder has no opposite, Hope is... well. Possibility. If one hopes something is true, or not as the case may be, then one has to acknowledge that you might be wrong. That spring won't come again and the crops will fail, as in 1816." After a long moment, he blinked back to himself. "But the damn rabbit's Hope also means that you know something has to change. The worse off one is, the more likely change means an improvement. Take the extreme of hopelessness, the suicidal." Pitch gestured with one long hand. "They do not? They have, somewhere, deep down, a single spark of hope that something will be worth living one more day. They make the attempt? They have that hope that not existing would be better. Quite frustrating. Your tea should be cold enough to drink by now."
Jack drank mostly on automatic.
"I'm afraid you'll always notice that sort of pleasure," Pitch said. "I didn't take much exposure to recognize the difference in my own prey, so you can probably assuage your heroic tendencies easily by icing the source. Just a suggestion."
Something tight and heavy in Jack's gut unknotted itself. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do that." He could help. He could actually, finally, do something to help.
This time he could actually taste the chamomile in the tea, a flavor that was slightly like frost-tinged apples and slightly like spring flowers. "I still can't believe you drink this stuff," Jack said, just because.
"I pretend it's the blood of my enemies," Pitch replied dryly.
Jack blew a raspberry at him, then switched his drained cup for the fresh (cold) one, and flopped back over the coffin-couch as Pitch refilled the old cup. "So you'll like this, North's throwing ten kinds of fit up at the Pole."
"Mm? Whyever for?"
"I told you about the Naughty List, right?" Pitch narrowed his eyes, and Jack hastily said, "Forget I said that. Anyway. Kaito was really ticked at them all when they met, and left behind a riddle instead of the answers North wanted about things like... well... you." Jack grinned. "And all the little details about who Shin'ichi is, how he works, all that stuff. So North's up there stomping around the Workshop, swearing in Russian and trying all sorts of different lamps on Kaito's watch."
Pitch blinked. "What, that old pocketwatch he stuck a mirror in?"
"That's the one. You ever seen the inscription?" Pitch shook his head. "It goes 'Look in the light from no yellow sun, look with the eyes from no righteous face, look for the found who know only of loss, then will I show the answers you seek'. Or something like that. They've all been stuck on the first line for nearly a month."
Pitch actually smiled, mock-sighing as he rested his head on his free hand. "Now I truly despair of your education."
"... Well, you know, North's busy and all.."
"Lamps, you said?"
"Moonlight," Jack began ticking off on his fingers. "Starlight, firelight, candlelight, oil lamps, half a dozen different kinds of lightbulbs, light spells from pretty much every culture he's got a book for, and a bunch of different glowy plants and animals that Bunny has to fetch." He couldn't help but snicker a little. "I wish I'd had a camera when he came back with the Hawaiian squid; he was soaking wet and had tentacles coming out his ears." Which had been hilarious, with the ruffs on Bunny's face plastered to his cheeks making him look like a horse from the neck up. Hilarious until everybody else had freaked out and bundled him straight to the infirmary for a week. Turned out a wet rabbit was a dangerously hypothermic one. There'd been cuddlepiles. "Anyway. The mirror doesn't so much as flicker. Why?"
"Because the answer's quite obvious, Jack." Pitch's smile widened, teeth flashing as some smug glee welled up from him. "Basic science. One of many things fundamentalists and anti-intellectuals are terrified of. To use the light of no yellow sun, on Earth, means obviously one cannot use sunlight. However," he raised a finger, "Moonlight is reflected sunlight. Starlight is the light from thousands of stars, many of which are a match for this one. Wood, oils, and bioluminescence all rely on living or once-living things, which gained their energy from sunlight or through various and sundry food chains back to sunlight. Even magelight and electricity are too rooted in humanity, mystically speaking, to be exempt from the food chains. Therefore," the finger ticked one way, "Either one must use the bioluminescence of certain abyssal marine life -- to which I might mention that Kaito is deliciously terrified of fish and would never use that for a key, not to mention the sheer impossibility of surviving the pressure to obtain any -- or," the finger ticked in the other direction, "One must look in the mirror in... if you'll pardon the pun... pitch blackness."
Seriously? "But you can't see anything in the dark."
"That may rather be the point."