Losing Fear

“What exactly do you want, Pitch?” North snapped, swords held in his hands. Jack stood to the side, quiet for once.

He didn’t want to be doing this. Not after all that’s happened. It’s been two years since the huge fight, two years was a long time for things to change. Jack thought that things had changed. It was a foolish hope.

“What I’ve always wanted, North,” Pitch’s voice lacked the malice that it once had. It lacked the anger. All the guardians noticed this, even if they didn’t want to. They still wanted to believe that Pitch was still the same evil, horrible nightmare that he had once been. It was hard to when you saw him though.

Pitch wasn’t as strong as before, he still wasn’t believed in, making him weak and almost pitiful. Jack hadn’t realised. He hadn’t seen so much and he wished that he had.

“Pitch, stop it!” Jack snapped, pretending to hate the male just like the rest. Pitch popped up in front of them, a fake, cruel smile on his lips.

“Stop what, Jack? I just want to be believed in; I thought you’d understood that.” Pitch was hitting all the wrong buttons in the youngest guardian. While Jack wasn’t ashamed at what had transpired over the last two years, he didn’t want the guardians to think he’d been betraying him.

So he lowered his staff, much to the shock of them all.

“Stop it, Pitch,” Pitch growled, knowing very well that he wouldn’t be able to hurt the boy, like the boy wouldn’t be able to hurt him. Not while he wasn’t fighting back. It wasn’t fair that way.

“I will be back!” the man vanished into the dark, his gold eyes glowing for a moment.

“Jack, what’s going on, mate?” the pooka stepped forward, a hand on his friends shoulder. Jack shook it off, shaking his head.

“Nothing, I’ve got to go,” Jack was distracted, obvious to the other guardians as he quickly let the wind take him away.

“We have to go after him, Pitch is still out there!” Tooth worried, flying frantically around. Bunnymund and North shared a look of understanding.

“Don’t worry, Tooth,” North rested a hand on her arm “something tells me that there’s no problem.”

Jack wasn’t sure what he was doing as he headed to his lake in Burgess. Over the past two years and after multiple fights him and Pitch had become…friends, he supposed. They were acquaintances.

After one certain horrible fight, it seemed Pitch had given up. Jack had him pinned and Pitch did something nobody ever would have expected. Pitch cried. He cried.

Pitch confessed about stealing the teeth, not because of anything wrong, but because he was remembering. He was finally remembering a past he had never been able to and he wanted to know if it was real. It was pointless though.

Pitch was alive long before the tooth fairy, his teeth weren’t even there.

Jack had been shocked, for a good reason as well, yet he listened. Since then Jack had visited the Boogeyman, finding him wherever he is. It would play out the same, they’d fight and then Pitch would cry. They weren’t real tears, they were more shadows rolling down his face, but Jack understood.

Jack wasn’t believed in either. Jack hadn’t known who he was either. Jack, like Pitch, had been seen as less than nice, because of what they did to try and be believed in. Jack had lost his family as well, all he had ever cared about deep in his heart.

Jack flew to the lake he’d died in, slowly walking across the ice until he came to the part that he had broken through so long ago. He knelt down, the tiny crack showing the space. It was a part that, no matter how much the ice melted and froze again, was always marked with a crack in the shape of a crescent. It kind of looked like a crescent moon.