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[ broadcast mind; "what if" ❄ image heavy ]
"I thought this might happen." The voice is low and unassuming, but it rankles and your teeth grind, gripping your staff tightly on reflex. "They never really believed in you," says Pitch. "I was just trying to show you that. But I understand."
Furiously, a shot of ice swerves at the sole shadowy figure in the pristine tundra, smashing off a rise of black sand that veers up.
"You don't understand anything!"
"I don't understand what it's like to be cast out?" Pitch deflects your attacks but you don't care, leaping onto a frigid breeze and yelling hoarsely as you blast him with more ice. I wish I could bury you in it; I wish I could bury myself. Still, he bats aside your attempts to freeze him on the spot. There's a muffled explosion and ice shatters into dust, veiling him from view inside a muggy cloud. It's hard to breathe with your chest so constricted, wanting and deserving no one to sympathize with you, especially him. It's his fault! If he hadn't kept you down in his stupid lair then maybe ...
It's your fault, Jack. You can't shake the truth of it. You're alone and he knows it.
"To not be believed in?" finishes Pitch. Rounding on him, he stands before you unarmed (ha) and you don't immediately fire. "To long for a family?"
Wrong-footed, the staff in your hands lowers, confusion seeping into the cracks of your grief. Why would Pitch want anyone, you think, frowning, but then he goes on and something aches as you listen, losing the will to argue.
"All these years in the shadows, I thought no one else knows what this feels like ... but now I see I was wrong."
Too astonished to tell him to stop messing with your head, on some level you know he's telling the truth. You do know what it's like to be the outcast and there's nothing you've wanted more than to have someone see you. Touch you. Talk to you.
This is stupid.
Pitch nears, urgency in his coaxing, gentle voice as he reads your fears.
"We don't have to be alone, Jack. I believe in you and I know children will too."
"In me?" you wonder aloud, doubtfully. Pitch laughs.
"Yes!" His hand lays on your shoulder and it grounds you in the moment, the future he paints in the shadow of the looming model of Black Ice your fight moments ago wrought, perfectly sharp spikes curving elegantly toward the sky. "Look," purrs Pitch, "at what we can do. What goes together better than cold and dark?"
You can see your reflection in the statue as Pitch makes his case, growing more and more animated.
"We'll give them a world where everything, everything is —"
"'Pitch Black'?" you interject, already seeing where this is going.
"And Jack Frost, too. They'll believe in both of us."
No, it's on the tip of your tongue. No, they'll fear both of us and that's not what I want. Except ...
Except you've completely run out of choices, your options are exhausted. Three hundred years weigh heavily on your shoulders and the last few days with the Guardians has proved nothing but the fact you're not as holy or good as they are. You don't want to go back to being ignored. Worse still (you sigh and Pitch's eyes widen) you don't want to be the reason you're alone forever.
Silence hinges as you lower your staff and you close your eyes, answering softly.
"Alright."
The ensuing years together bring a winter that no one expects, long and harsh with even longer nights. Pitch helps to get you your believers, nightmares of icy claws scratching down windows terrifies the young and old alike until there are new fables, new traditions that spring up almost over-night: salt on the roof, that's your favorite. Pitch grins as you use the Wind to blow away the filaments and sink your staff into tiles, the shrieks of people inside causing startled laughter to bubble up when someone wails It's Jack Frost!
Jack Frost is here!
They're afraid of you, but Pitch isn't. He's surprised by just how demanding of his time you are and it always brings a pleasant echo of warmth when he finds you waiting for him in his underground lair, perched on the edge of a bridge like a tamed bird that he ruffles the hair of. You aren't and that's why, you think, that he appreciates how often you come back to his side. You want his delight to last forever, but eventually after half a century it feels like your friendship is thinning.
"For goodness's sake, Jack," he sighs one evening when you've been restlessly rifling through the books on old shelves, "why don't you go out alone?"
"It's no fun," you murmur with a shrug, tossing a book aside. His expression darkens, a flash of teeth under a curled lip. You spread your arms (sleeves have long-torn when people tried to drag you down decades ago and ice now eclipses the shredded cuffs of your old hoodie, ending your hands in claws; he probably doesn't like how easily you tear pages). "Don't you want to do something new? I'm bored."
"How can you possibly be bored when you're in the middle of whipping up a new Ice Age?"
"I just am!" you snap, and frost crackles across the floor, jutting out from behind your head. It gives cause for concern, apparently, and Pitch leaves his desk to stand before you — still so tall and pensive, but now he's stronger than he used to be with bright eyes and less gray in his hair — as his hands cup the sides of your head.
A cold crown.
"What is this," he says to himself, following it around to the spikes protruding in front of your ears. Amusement dances at the corners of his lips. "Finally taking the title literally, 'Winter Prince'?" Golden eyes catch blue, snagging in place, and he lets the touch fall when he sees how hungry you still are for contact. The icy crown is sharp enough to draw blood, after all, and you've never been very good at staying still for long. "Jack."
"Take me to the workshop."
"What? No."
"I'm not going to stay here and watch you write all night," you snap derisively. "You haven't made a real storm with me in weeks."
The shadows darken as Pitch's ire grows. "I'm busy," he says with great self-control. He probably wants to tack on a whole lot more.
"You can't be too busy for me." The words stick in your throat.
"I assure you, I can."
The indignant smash of your staff sends a jolt of shock through both of you, your temper something wild and vicious like a hailstorm (outside, one begins). For a long moment you stare at one another, a wall of inch-thick ice now covering his entire bookcase. He watches you like you're a rabid creature as you walk bare-footed to close the new distance he's put between you, suddenly terrified he's going to back away again; he does not. Of course he doesn't. Pitch stands his ground warily, reading you like any one of those books.
"Take me there," you insist, immeasurably grateful when he doesn't flinch as your hand snatches his own. "Please," comes out strained and soft. He's learned so much about you these past fifty years that his own weaknesses haven't gone unnoticed; he's the only person you do waste enough time to focus on, these days. It annoys him to be implored from the heart, so you do it whenever you want something that you can't take.
Shadows shift as he transports you both, and the world it seems grows dimmer in the wreckage of North's old home. Destroyed, the colors have faded with time since the defeat of the Guardians. Beams have rotted and fallen through and there's a silence that cloys mournfully to the once-magnificent hubbub of wonder that you wander ahead of Pitch. He lingers behind, coming to a halt when you see something small and shiny-red in the dull splinters. A tiny wooden baby, barely bigger than your little finger, with wide blue eyes.
Something catches in your throat that you haven't felt in years but it's welcome, it fractures the ice around your heart. It hurts so that you don't realize you're on the verge of a panic attack until your back hits something soft and arms wrap around you securely, a chin digging into white hair.
"Jack," Pitch says quietly, over the sound of heaving, would-be sobs. You screw your eyes shut and shake your head, listing forward. He keeps you upright. Everything's going to be the same as ever, nothing will change. You're the one who destroyed this, it's all on you and you can never, ever take back your mistakes. This is the worst place you could have come, why you're allowed to be around anyone is beyond you. Pitch should just use his shadows to —
"Jack," he hushes, loyal as a brother. "Jack, let's go home."
Home triggers a wounded noise somewhere lost inside your chest. His robe is soft and thick when you turn into it, crushing the little doll to nothing so you can fist your hand in dark material instead. A long-fingered hand strokes your hair, soothing the abortive shuddering that locks you rigid as ice, afraid of too much to put into words, a dull pain blossoming behind your eyes. It's impossible to cry when you're so, so cold.
"I'm sorry," you say in a small voice after several minutes spent greedily soaking up the sensation of behind cared for, feeling Pitch nod above. "About getting angry. I'm sorry."
"I don't mind," Pitch replies, which you think is a lie but if it keeps him wrapped around you like a veil from the world then let him.
"Can we go somewhere else tonight?"
It's a strange request and it shows in the way he tilts a curious look down at you. Ordinarily you'd take to the winds and cause havoc in a different country to pass the time, as he suggested. It's been a while since your dual storms wracked the globe. You don't know why he seems so surprised by how badly you want him around when he's all you've got, your other half. Cold and dark.
"Germany?" he finally suggests, prompting a small smile that has him snorting fondly when you look up. A thumb toys with the ice cemented around your skull. "The old forests, perhaps."
"Those are my favorite."
"I know." His hand pats you on the head and your inner tempest calms, forehead pressing into his coat as he sighs. "I know, Jack."
The workshop dissolves into nothing, and you hold onto the shadows with a grip like death.
(OOC: Taking the mods' prompt for this BCM, everything after Jack agrees to go with Pitch is AU, What If. Images and music provided to help set the scene, Pitch written under the approving eye of our own amazing Boogeyman!)
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