A/N: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND UGH THIS CHAPTER IS REALLY KLUTZY BUT OKAY OKAY IT'S HERE

When Dark's shadows spat the three boys out into the dungeon corridor, they landed on their butts.

"Ow…" Solitude groaned, sitting up and rubbing his head which he'd bumped on the floor when they fell. "What the frick, Death…"

There was no reply save a wheeze nearby. Blinking, Solitude stopped rubbing his head and looked around. The world was really blurry on his left side and everything was doubled, like one of his contact lenses had fallen out.

…Wait.

"Uh, guys?" he said, glancing over to the two black blob-like shapes next to him.

Neither seemed to hear. One of the blobs, the one on the ground, didn't even move.

"Dark, are you all right?" Death's voice came from the general vicinity of the second blob, who seemed to be standing up and reaching for the first blob.

"Ghhhuuuuuuuuuuuhhhh," said the first blob in reply, breathless.

"Hey, guys!" Solitude tried again. He realized he was squinting and resolved to stop. Squinting gave him headaches if he did it too much.

The second blob, Death, sighed in relief in reply to the first blob. "Just winded? You did well, though. I can't imagine what it's like, shadow-traveling with three. Good job."

A flicker of green caught Solitude's eye and he turned his head. There was a huge glittery green mass of tiny blobs behind him closest to the dungeon cell, though he couldn't really tell what it was. It almost seemed like…tooth fairies? He put his hand over his left eye and looked at them with just his right, the one that still had the contact lens in it. Yep, these were fairies. About half of them were staring at him.

"You know," he remarked to them. "I don't like being looked at."

In response the remaining half turned around and started staring at him too. He sighed mightily.

"Well Tooth, while I have your full attention," he said, laying on the sarcasm thick, "can you at least tell those two morons to listen to me?"

He noticed several of them snicker at this, but they obeyed. Away they flew and around Death's and Dark's head, twirling and dancing in graceful spirals and somehow avoiding the clumsy flails of Death's arms to get them out of his face.

"What the — " Death let out a string of words that didn't sound like English but were obviously not very clean anyway. His gaze finally landed on Solitude, who was standing with his arms crossed and one eye closed. The fairies, their job finished, then backed away.

"There," Solitude cut in before Dark could breathlessly ask what was going on. "Now that I have your attention, finally, I'd like to ask three questions: what are we doing, why am I here, and can you at least help me find my bloody contact lens?!"

It took Death only two seconds to cross the distance between him and his brother and to clamp his hand over the smaller boy's mouth before anything more could spill out, but he was two seconds too late. Solitude was normally a very soft-spoken boy but he was also the kind of person who, especially when he was frustrated or excited, forgot how loud he could get. He could be loud enough to wake the dead, and even though that was kind of why they were there, Death hadn't been planning on using Solitude to do it.

The younger boy's almond-shaped eyes turned to slits and he tried to wrestle out of Death's grip, but his older brother smoothly slipped his hand behind his neck and held him in place, hand still over his mouth.

"No really, shut up," Death said.

Frustrated and determined to annoy his brother as much as he could, Solitude hummed loudly and waved his arms in meaningless gestures. He couldn't really breathe now and he puffed out his cheeks to show Death that. Finally the older boy let go of his mouth, but only to reach up to his cheek, touch his skin underneath his left eye, and pluck free a small, transparent, rubbery object.

"Oh, it was there?" Solitude could feel his cheeks getting hot as he accepted the contact and looked at it. "Duh…"

"Yes, duh," Death rolled his amber eyes and let his brother go. Seriously, sometimes he wondered about this boy. So intelligent and yet such a ditz at the same time. He could swear Solitude was Sky's soul mate, even though they all knew that Solitude was openly uncomfortable with any kind of relationship and wasn't really "dating material". He couldn't even hold hands with anyone without twitching, blushing, sweating like a pig, making some useless point about troll romance and the quadrants, or all of the above.

Then again, so does the Author of this stupid story, so it would all balance out.

"Umm…" Solitude's awkward voice cut through Death's reminiscent silence, very conveniently proving his point and giving the Author something more to keep the story going. "Do you, by chance, have a bottle of contact solution?"

It was Death's turn to sigh mightily and he turned away to help the still-slightly-winded Dark to his feet. "Just put it in dry. It'll still go in."

"What?" Solitude brought the contact an inch from his eye. There was a weird dry spot where it had stuck to his skin. "But it's dirty. Do you think I want to get an eye infection?"

"Shut up," Death hissed, waving Solitude away. His eyes were narrowed and darting around the hallway, almost as if he was searching for something.

"Why?" the younger boy planted his free hand on his hip as he held the contact up with the other. It was actually kind of funny, considering he was a guy and hands-on-hip didn't really have the same effect. "I'm not going to shut up unless you give me a good reason. Now shoot, or I'll keep talking. I can talk all I want; you're not the boss of me."

"I'm serious, shut up," Death pushed past Solitude and stepped slowly towards the dead end of the hallway. "He's…he's here…"

"I think…he's being serious," Dark deadpanned, still looking a little bit drowsy from the shadow-traveling.

Death shushed him too and kept peering into the darkest shadows at the end of the hallway. Suddenly, he stood straight.

Curious, the other two boys looked a bit closer. Next to them, every one of the tooth fairies had fallen silent. Even the constant humming of their wings seemed quieter, dimmer. Almost as if they feared the shadows, and the black-robed figure who emerged from them like they had created him.

His feet were bare and silent as he stepped out, closer to them. In the background behind the silence tooth fairies screamed as they realized who this was, and subsequently jumped to conclusions as to why he was here. Then they too fell silent as he turned his head and simply looked at them out from the depths of his cowled hood, before turning back to the three boys.

Dark's eyes were wide as golf balls and involuntarily took a step back and reached towards a shadow. It swirled in his fingertips and he held up the sword that formed there, ready to fight. "D…Death, what — what is it?"

But his brother didn't answer. He simply stood there, face-to-face with the thing as it came towards them. He didn't even look scared, which was surprising. There was something unplaceably, intrinsically terrifying about this hooded figure, like you couldn't even look too deeply into the shadows of the hood for fear of seeing the face underneath and shriveling into dust.

"Dark," Solitude whispered. Carefully, slowly, so as not to make more noise than he was already making, he placed one sneakered foot behind the other. "I don't know about you, but I'm going to run."

"Don't," came Death's low, quiet voice. "He's not here for us."

Then, before either of his brothers could say a word, he took two long steps forward and covered the ground between them and the black-cloaked figure.

At the same time, both stopped. For a silent eternity, they stood as he sized it up and it sized him up. One hundred fairies watched with wide eyes, none of them making even a cheep.

Then the figure drew one hand out of the folds of its cloak, reached up, and pushed back the cowl of its hood.

Don't ask the boys what he looked like, because you're going to get extremely different answers, maybe an argument. Dark would have said he was short, Death would have claimed they were the same height, and Solitude would have called him tall. Dark saw short curly red hair; Death, tangled and tousled, dusty brown; Solitude, smooth, black, cropped straight at the shoulders just like his own. Pinkish, freckled skin. No, light olive, Mediterranean! Neither; he was more South Asian than anything. Blue eyes, brown eyes, eyes blacker than madness itself.

And yet the only things they could ever agree on were the simple monk-like black cloak, the shadows before the eyes, and the eerie feeling of looking into a mirror and seeing yourself in a different world.

"Death," said the black-cloaked reflection in an emotionless, uncannily familiar voice.

The addressed party smiled. So he hadn't forgotten him.

"Death," he replied in kind.

The reflection (Death?) glanced over Death's (the other Death's?) shoulder at his two brothers. "I see you've brought guests."

"They're my brothers," said Death flatly. "Solitude — the short squinting one. Dark — the Sherlock geek."

"I can't believe that show's still running," the reflection furrowed his brow. "I'm not sure Doyle wrote that many original stories."

Dark seemed to relax at the mention of Sherlock. He shrugged, let go of his sword, and ran his fingers through his Benedict Cumberbatch-style hair. "I dunno. Not complaining, though."

The reflection smirked. "Oh, definitely not."

"Hey, did you see the one that just came out this week?"

"Eeesh…last week was horrible for me…another sort of plague in Africa. Sorry, no. Didn't get a chance."

"Totally understand. I was stuck in a prison cell and they took away my phone. Can you believe that?"

"Why would they not let you have a cellular telephone in a prison cell. I must ponder on this mystery. You know, for someone who likes Sherlock as much as you do, you can be awfully obtuse."

Instead of protesting, Dark just nodded. "Yeah, I know. But like, I was just really pissed, you know? I couldn't even text Nyx back, and now she probably thinks I'm ignoring her."

"Nyx likes it when you don't text her back," Solitude couldn't help but put in. "She thinks you talk too much."

Dark sniffed indignantly. "I do not. And — hey, how do you know she thinks I talk too much?"

"She told me the other night, you know, the night of that Mountain Dew party? Yeah, she snuck in after you'd all passed out and yeah, that was fun — "

"You did what?!" Dark's voice rose to almost a shriek and both Deaths, elder and teenager, winced. Solitude just looked extremely proud of himself. He sniffed mockingly, acting miffed.

"Relax…we just talked. Okay, maybe we kissed a couple times. Maybe passionately. Okay, really passionately. And maybe then — "

"No you didn't, Sol," Death the younger sighed, rubbing his temples.

He didn't even fight it. "No, I didn't. She wasn't even there. I just know you talk too much, that's all."

Dark visibly calmed down. His face had been going a dangerous shade of red and his fists had been clenched so tightly that Death could literally see the whites of his knuckles.

"Good," he growled, obviously trying to sound threatening. "Because if you even dare think about touching Nyx, then I swear I will — "

Solitude got this look on his face that clearly said I live with this kid and yet I still don't know what's up with him, and threw his hands into the air. "Oh for the love of the great troll Jegus…Dark, I'm just kidding! You haven't even kissed her yourself!"

"I have too!"

"Uh, nuh uh…"

A loud sigh went up from the reflection at the end of the hallway and they all turned to see him holding his forehead in his hand. He had that look on like exasperated teachers sometimes do when they catch me drawing in my notebook and tell me to stop drawing those two characters kissing and I explain that I'm not drawing the same two characters; I normally draw Amethyst and Peridot but today it's Ruby and Sapphire for variation, and yes I am paying attention, you were just saying about that lovely chromatin diagram on page 341…?

Yes, the Elder had that look on his face.

And I just used the word obtuse twice in one chapter. I feel great.

"Children!" the Elder snapped finally, getting me and the story back on track. "Can we please get back on to the topic at hand? You did not come here to argue about girls, so don't!"

The three Nightmare boys looked at him in surprise, then simultaneously blushed. Death offered up some half-hearted denial about how he had nothing to do with the conversation and Solitude muttered something about "Oh yeah, and Sherlock is on topic". Dark just coughed and concentrated his eyes on a shadow by the floor.

The Elder Death looked at each embarrassed teen, then sighed again and glanced behind him towards the wall. The Nightmare boys looked, but saw nothing except two small wisps of fog that they couldn't quite look at except out of their barest peripheral vision, so Dark thought he'd just imagined them and Solitude could barely tell the difference, what with his contact lens still being out. But Death knew better.

"He's here?" he asked his elder counterpart.

The Elder's head turned sharply and his gaze fixed on Death, like a predator assessing its prey. His chest rose and fell slightly as he breathed, which for some reason just didn't seem right. Almost like a paradox — true Death shouldn't have a heart, and so Death shouldn't breathe the living's air.

"Not exactly," the Elder replied, and explained in a lower voice.

"He's dead now, you see…and we literally just broke the news to him that he's on a different level now, and he's sort of…taking it hard. The tooth fairies nearly passed right through him. And you must know by now, he's got that martyr complex in him — he never thought there was any other way and when he found out that he's beyond physical help, he didn't want to…bring himself any lower, per se, by wanting help. So when you came…" He inhaled and glanced briefly away awkwardly. "He had one message for you, all of you. To get out of here before Pitch found you."

"But — Pitch isn't here," Solitude cut in, visibly shaken. "I would've felt him…"

"But he is." The Elder glanced over to the still-silent Mini-fairies. "You came for Takeshi, but that's part of what Pitch wanted and your brother knows that. But he's only more or less here right now, and so I'm here to tell you instead."

He locked eyes with each boy, and somehow all of them at once.

"Get the hell out of here right now, and don't come back for him."

Something extremely dangerous flashed across Death the younger's face at that moment and he took one step forward, covering the ground between him and his namesake in a heartbeat. The spectators half expected his hand to shoot up and grab the Elder by the collar, but he just spoke. Simple, calm, blank in tone.

"I came here to bring my little brother back to life and that is what I am going to do, Pitch or no. So hand him over, and we'll get going as soon as you allow."

Death swore he saw the Elder's eyebrow twitch, but other than that he remained impassive.

"I'm sorry," he replied in a rather pleasant voice. "But I'm afraid Takeshi wasn't the only one to warn me of this."

"Death?" Solitude cut in, sounding more than a bit nervous. "Wh…what's he talking about?"

"You know," the Elder smiled. "The Man in the Moon."

A pang of something — not quite fear, not hatred either…dread, that was it — touched Death's heart at that moment. He stepped back, suddenly feeling very small in the shadow of the Elder. Oh sure, he was technically on the Guardians' side now (for the moment, he assumed), but old habits die hard and Pitch hadn't kept them in the dark about the guy in the sky. "M…the Man in the Moon…warned…"

"Oh yes," the Elder crowed, waving a hand seemingly to dismiss the nearby tooth fairies, who didn't look all too happy with that. "Told me of all this. Gave me strict orders to wait here and make sure you didn't do anything stupid, like bringing him back to life on your own. Even Demir — sorry, Solitude — even you would have failed. It takes a lot of belief to push me back, and even with all of you combined you're not up to the task. Too much fear."

Death didn't realize he was gritting his teeth until he tried to speak again. The last few weeks had been…interesting, to say the least — so many childish emotions coming back to him in whispers and drops, with each bit of light he saw in the Guardians' eyes and his brother's sacrifice. He hadn't particularly known what to make of it — he'd pushed the thoughts aside, like he normally did. But this was new, this was dark, this was everything he normally felt composed into one and more…and he couldn't ignore it. It demanded embracing, acting, speaking. Anger.

"I'm not afraid of you."

The Elder's mouth stretched into a small, thin smile and he turned away, towards the wall. "True. But don't deny it — you are afraid of something."

Each of the three boys felt the same thing — the feeling like a cold stone in their stomachs.

"I'm not Pitch — I don't know, but I do feel it. I can feel, you know. I see it in the eclipses of your hearts, the shadows before your eyes — I've felt it all, anything there is to fear, you're not alone there." His voice had grown low, almost melancholic. "I recognize fear, and I see your fight. But once I'm here for you, then there's nothing you can do. This isn't your fight, boys."

Death's fingers clenched into fists, but almost as if reading his mind, the Elder continued.

"Not against me, at least," he said, turning around and pointing. "That shadow over there — that's who the enemy is."

Death wasn't so keen to believe him, but Solitude and Dark caught the darting shadow out of their peripheral vision and spun around just in time to catch it. A gasp escaped Dark's mouth and he instinctively reached to the darkness for a sword, but just as he did, the shadows jerked themselves away from his hands and refused to obey.

They grew and crept up the walls, taking on a body and arms and a head — clearly Pitch. What little light there seemed to be left in the dungeons was stolen away as some strange grey fog seemed to spill from the cracks in the ceiling towards the ground, swirling around their ankles and tickling their spines with trailing ice-cold fingertips. And tooth fairies (the boys had almost forgotten about them) screamed in terror and anger one word: NO!

"I thought we'd be able to avoid unpleasant confrontations," said an eerily familiar voice, echoing on the stone walls and seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the voice of Father, the boys realized, but at the same time…not. Father as they knew him was frazzled, exhausted, irritated. This man sounded like he knew exactly what he was doing, and was certain of the outcome.

"I don't want to accidentally hurt you, after all. And…well, I have seen you boys fight. You're positively…terrifying."

At the last word, the Nightmare King himself seemed to rise from the floor in a swirl of sand and shadows. Screams spiraled into the air with a raise of his hand and as the Nightmares formed at a flick of the fingers Pitch turned around to face his sons. There was a grin on his face and in his eclipse eyes and it was that of a carnivore's, ready to feed from the fear of his victims.

And then, among all the drama and shadows, Solitude facepalmed.

"Oh for Signless's sake, Dad!" he cried. "Not this again!"

'Dad' froze instantly. A very confused and small-sounding "what?" fell out of his mouth.

Interestingly enough, Death the Elder seemed the most confused by this reaction. "What do you mean… 'again'?" he cut in, his brow furrowing.

Solitude made a strange stirring movement in the air with his hands before just dropping them at his sides helplessly. "I mean…this," he pointed right at Pitch, who was still frozen in his tracks with his mouth hanging half-open. "He gives nearly the same performance every single time someone wants to talk back, or fight, or whatever. Come on guys, you know what I'm talking about."

He sent pointed glances at his two brothers, who at first looked about as confused as Pitch and the Elder. Death was giving him the "bro you have officially been playing too many video games; you need sleep" look and seemed about two seconds away from opening his big mouth and ruining everything. So Solitude took it into his own hands before he could.

"You know," he forced, trying his hardest to mask every bit of fear within him. It wasn't that he was a bad liar, per se — just a bad liar around Pitch, who had a knack for seeing the true motive behind anything you might say. "Like, one time in particular. It was a couple years ago I think. I was, what, fourteen?"

Subtle hints, cough cough for emphasis, the thought ran through Solitude's head and he tried his hardest to project it towards his still-very-confused brothers. Telepathy had never really been his thing, truth to be told. It required a close connection of wills and psyches and a bunch of other stuff he'd never felt the need to remember, because none of those were his things anyway. It was only now that he wished he had at least paid a little attention. Fourteen. Who is fourteen right now. Come on guys, get with it…

Whether it be actual psychic powers, Death's own capacity for reading subtle body language, or just a twist of fate that put the pieces together in the older boy's head — something seemed to click, and he nodded in understanding. "Oh yes. The first Mountain Dew incident?"

Mountain Dew. So he got it. Solitude nodded and grinned. "Yup."

"This is preposterous," Pitch cut in disdainfully. "I don't ever recall an incident like that, and for the record, I never give the 'same performance', or whatever — in fact I have no idea what you're talking about when you say I have done it again — "

"Exactamente, señor!" Solitude exclaimed in badly accented Spanish and pumped his fist in the air. Death nodded with him and elbowed Dark in the ribs, eliciting an indignant "ow" from the boy but still getting his point across. Dark still didn't know what was going, or why his brothers were acting so happy about something that he was positive never happened, and for whatever reason he didn't understand the message to just play along with it.

Even Pitch looked a little alarmed when Dark started guffawing so loudly that it'd put Nicholas St. North to shame.

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON."

Everyone stared at Dark for a long time because everything's such a mess now that even the author doesn't know how to get them out of it. But in the cell with Unknown's dead body, the tooth fairies all braced themselves for the climactic stalemate break that they knew was about to come.

"But what?" the author asks, lifting her head out of her arms where she'd been lamenting the purpose of her life, the pointlessness of this story, and the shame of self-insertion, because she is not Andrew Hussie and inserting herself into a story is the one thing she does not want to do, ever. Unless of course it's a non-serious story. But since this is a semi-serious story, she most definitely does not want to be here. The only reason she is here is to experiment talking about herself in the third person and to draw this story out as long as possible, so as to reap maximum reviews and dominate the world through mass readership.

Totally.

"Really guys. Help me out here. I'm a moron."

So the tooth fairies, sighing and facepalming in a clear message that said Dark, you're more hopeless than the Nightmare Child Dark, whispered their different ideas into her ear. She could continue with Solitude's ruse and just cover up Dark's annoying interjection, which would take up a lot of pointless dialogue that she didn't seem happy to write but WOULD round off the really clever dialogue-hinting trick she'd come up with while in the shower, as usual. Or she could just get it over with and pop the balloon while she was still holding the pin.

"Well, you know what," she announced, "it's just a first draft that's never gonna be rewritten cuz this is a freaking FANFICTION and will never be published and hence doesn't need more than the FIVE ZILLION DRAFTS IT'S ALREADY GONE THROUGH, and we're all gonna die anyway because life is short and I am human, so WHAT'S THE POINT."

And so she reached through the fourth wall, slapped all three Nightmare boys in the face at once, and left them to their own devices.

They all seemed really stunned at first, not just because a girl had just appeared out of thin air and vanished but also because her slaps actually hurt and because suddenly, they knew what to do. It was like they'd been standing on the ice rink called Blatant Stupidity and someone just shattered the ice with a sledgehammer, letting them splash into the cold waters of Okay We Actually Have An Idea Of What To Do Now. It wasn't pleasant at first, but they were awake now instead of shivering and slipping on the ice. First they exchanged confused glances, then nodded a few times, and all smiled. Solitude even put his contact lens back in.

"Yeah, I like that idea better," he drawled, taking on the author's stupid accent. "As our American author likes to say…whatever."

And that was when he shot forward and tackled the Nightmare King.

XXXXXXXXX

I suppose that I should now be writing about Unknown right now — what was he thinking? What was he saying? How many times did he facepalm and wish he was dead, only to realize that he actually was?

Well, I suppose I'll tell you the truth. As I was writing that last part, I was doing no more than sitting in my pajamas on the couch, eating lasagna and watching Star Wars Rebels reruns for the heck of it. I felt no compulsion to do such a thing at the time and as of now, at ten o'clock on a Wednesday night, I feel even less compulsion, if you can have less than none. Which as of now, I do. Shall I come back in some untold time, delete this passage and amend the former statements with a detailed, well-written selection of Unknown's Point of View rather than this pathetic insertion of my own personal thoughts? Possibly. Will I now? Most definitely not. Have I, a week since writing it? No, I have only added to the spiel. The spiel will stay, I have decided. And — as I write possibly three months after it was founded — may only grow longer with the passage of time.

But so, the Reader seems to want at least something, and so I shall appease you with the best I have. Do not expect much, for Unknown was in fact doing very little at the time.

More specifically, he was unconscious.

XXXXXXXXX

This is when you, as the intelligent reader, ask the appropriate question — "how on earth can our protagonist be unconscious IF HE'S ALREADY DEAD?"

The answer, in fact, is not as you might think. The Elder simply had to turn around and slap the youngest ghost upside the head so hard that he flipped head over heels and crashed onto the ground. By the time the three Nightmare boys showed up, which was a second later, the ghost of Takeshi Itou was out cold and Red was yelling at the Grim Reaper. He glared at her in an attempt to silence her, but she just slapped him in the face and kept yelling at him more.

"You're cute when you're mad," he told her with a perfectly straight face.

That was when she found herself speechless, and that was about when the Elder turned away and began talking to the other three Nightmare Kids.

By the time the action broke out, though, Red was fine.

She was furious — with the Elder especially. But she was also a very logical person and knew, just from experience, that now was probably not the best time to let her emotions rule. The Elder was trying to help Takeshi, wasn't he? There was still so much that she didn't know about Death, even after having passed through his arms once before, but what she was sure of was the fact that if possible, he'd stop at nothing to help a child. They had so much left and if one slipped from his arms, flew away like a bird, he wouldn't protest. That was something she'd never tell him that she knew, though she reasoned that her mere refrain from sticking her head into his current plan was evidence enough.

Red had a general idea as to what the green-eyed Nightmare boy was getting at with his plan, but she also knew that it wouldn't work. So she felt a bit justified when the Author headdesked right through the fourth wall and wailed failure, because it meant she was right again.

Then again, she mused to herself as she watched the author slap the three moron Nightmare boys into sensibility, smirking a bit as she did because oh, how often she'd wished she could do the same to her husband's three moron advisers, I'm often right.

That statement in itself was right, too. But since Red's life was spent in a male-dominated, feudalist society where her brains could have been equivalent to a bowl of oatmeal and still been put to the same use than if they scored more IQ points than Leonardo Da Vinci himself, her powers of logic had never been put to their proper use.

Until today.

Even before the fight broke out she could sense the tension building, just in the forced way Solitude spoke, the way Death the Younger shifted his weight to his good leg (Red knew for a fact that the boy had badly sprained his left ankle at age eleven and it had never been the same again — he always fought with his weight on his right foot). Dark still didn't seem like he knew what was going on but then again, from all she knew about these kids from lurking in the shadows, idly watching them train when she didn't have anything better to do (which she never did, as she was dead), she figured that this was rather normal for him. Still, he seemed to sense a fraction of what she was sensing, as his black gaze darted restlessly and his fingers tensed into tight claws. Pitch's eyes were narrowed and his shoulders set back slightly, shadows creeping at his feet menacingly; and on the other side of the Nightmare boys' wall, the Elder was doing the same. The tooth fairies' constant twittering had dimmed into a dimmer, more nervous buzz. Even the way they arranged themselves into a group much resembled battle formation.

And then the room exploded.

Things happened so fast after that only an ADHD demigod or a hyperobservant ghost could have processed everything before it was over. Solitude took a single, bounding step forward and summoned a deadly nightmare sand spear to his upraised hand even before he hit the ground, following the lunge quickly with a swift downward swipe that Pitch only barely dodged. The Nightmare King's eyes bulged in alarm as he realized the undeniable — his son wasn't kidding — and nearly got his nose taken off by the jagged, barbed point of a spear.

"Go!" Solitude yelled back to Dark, who was running towards them with a sword in hand. "I'll be fine, just get Unknown!"

Dark tried to protest out of confusion, but Solitude just told him to shut up. Then he went back to wrestling with his dad, who had created a similar spear and was no longer holding back. This wasn't practice time anymore.

Meanwhile, the Younger turned on the Elder, grabbing a fistful of his monk's cloak and pulling him so close that their noses were nearly touching. It would probably be hyperbole to say that the Younger was anywhere close to a shade of furious as he had still not yet entirely grasped the human concept of emotion, but he definitely did not look happy.

"You," he said, his voice still as level and reasonable as ever, "are coming with me."

In one swift, powerful movement, the Younger Death literally threw the Elder across the room. Red only had a second to move — which she used — before the Grim Reaper slammed into the wall right next to her.

"Smooth," she commented, but he ignored her. She figured she'd have retribution for that later though.

Across the room, Solitude wasn't having much luck against his father. The Nightmare King was just too fast, too powerful. But dozens of shades of emotions flashed across his face with every move he made, varying from confusion to fury to horror. It almost seemed like he was warring with himself, because sometimes he'd just jerk forward and come on all at once, seemingly eager to end the battle once and for all — to add another body to the pile. But then he'd stumble backwards in shock, staring horrified into Solitude's eyes.

"What…have you done?" he whispered once, before pouncing forward and knocking the spear from his Eighth Child's hands.

The Younger Death took the Elder by the collar again and began literally dragging him towards Dark, who was holding Unknown's body bridal-style. "Sol, any time you're willing to go is fine," the Younger called, as his younger brother was being literally thrown around the room by Pitch's Nightmares.

"Oh — ow! — YEAH!" With some difficulty, Solitude grabbed the Nightmare's mane, flung himself over its back and kicked Pitch in the stomach before landing on the ground. Another Nightmare nabbed him by the ankle and began dragging him the other direction, back towards Pitch. "LITTLE HELP OVER HERE?"

The imaginary dramatic music in the background faded away and everyone just looked at Pitch and Solitude and the million Nightmares, wrestling in a methodless, mad ball of sand. There was absolutely no reason for any of this to have been happening, besides that the author dropped off during this part, left the story for 6 months, and came back neither knowing nor caring what the context here is.

"WELL THEN, YOU KNOW WHAT?" Solitude pulled his hands free and raised them above his head, scowling a scowl that itself was enough to make the Nightmares actually flinch. "FUCK THIS!"

And he clapped his hands and yelled something in Latin and the rabble exploded, giving him, Death the Younger, Death the Elder, Dark, Unknown's body, the gazillion tooth fairies, and Unknown's ghost enough distraction to shadow-sprint the heck outta there.

I was right, you know, Red the ghost called down to the smoking, semiconscious body of Pitch Black.

He flipped her the bird.