Some Assembly Required

Disclaimer: Own nothing, just got inspired and wrote a thing.

Jack, a master of most things, never handled embarrassment well.

A perfectionist in everything, from personal style to the execution of Halloween, Jack was near-loathe to let anyone see the work he put into that perfection. There was a sense that he had to keep up a sort of regal, kingly persona to impress the townspeople, but really he'd known them his entire life and even if he had slipped up, they would likely be the last to notice.

No, it was a sense of disappointing himself keeping him away from town in this vulnerable moment. He wanted this Halloween to be something special, and the idea of dancing along the tops of the tombstones in a dreadful twisting of ballet and balance struck him as something both ghastly and glorious! He had to try it out, perfect the routine before he presented it to the Mayor for his input- which would be an immediate affirmative but still- and leave the townspeople awestruck by his immeasurable talent.

So it was with a heavy heart, figuratively, and a sense of brokenness, literally, that Jack looked up at the night sky after slipping and shattering against a tombstone. Well. Rather embarrassing. No one was here to see it, which was good, but then there was also a lack of people around to help find his legs.

He rolled his head, after a subtle but strenuous maneuvering of his mandible, onto its bottom and got a good look at his situation. His body, at least, was still held together by his suit. But he could see, even from his low vantage point, that all of him had been shaken quite apart. Without his arms attached to his spine, his limbs wouldn't have the wherewithal to reach out and put him back together.

What a bother. That bothered feeling might have settled into dread, at some point, because while the town would inevitably gather up and search for him, it would be a long while before they did. He was prone to his little excursions into the deeper reaches of the cemetery, after all, and he always came back in one piece.

Instead, the bothered feeling settled into dread rather immediately, as he heard footsteps approaching right behind him, and he couldn't turn his head around to look.

"Hello?!" Jack called out to the feet behind him. "I wasn't expecting company today! Have you been her- woah!"

Without preamble, Jack was caught up in a pair of small hands, and in a moment of honest terror thought that one of Boogie's boys had found him in this moment. But he went up, and kept going up, farther than any of the children even stacked on top of each other, and with confusion swimming in his skull, he was turned around to a face he didn't recognize.

He knew every face. There was no such thing as a face he couldn't place to a name, and yet here one was, a lovely young corpse looking over him with large and intense eyes. Jack didn't recognize the expression at first, until it dawned on him that she didn't recognize him either, and that simply opened further questions. Then he went to shake her hand, automatically, and the reality of the situation knocked on the back of his skull like a rude visitor.

"Ah! Yes, well-" he stumbled on his words. "Good day, madam, you seem to have caught me at a bit of a disadvantage."

Face still twisted in concern, she managed the slightest of nods.

"Please, if I could get you to bring me back to Halloween Town-" Her eyes flashed with something like recognition. Ah! That must have made something click. "Yes! If you would, please, I would be very much obliged! Pardon my interrupting your-" He scanned his peripheral vision and spotted a basket of herbs hanging from her elbow. "Gardening."

He left space there, for her to speak, but nothing came out. Her face shifted, though, from dawning knowledge to... apprenhension? Her grip on him certainly changed while her fingers nervously fidgeted.

"Erm- madam? Are you all right?"

Away, somewhere behind Sally but hard to pinpoint out in the open, he heard it. Doctor Finkelstein's voice, ragged with rage, shouting "SALLY!"

She moved like a woman possessed. Jack went from her shocked expression to a mouth-and-sockets full of garden herbs, and then his rib cage and legs, then arms piled on top of him and shuffled until he was quite apart and stuffed cleanly and firmly into the bottom of the basket. He opened his mouth to speak, but a sudden shift put several of his vertebrae and his tie firmly into the hook of his jaw, and another bump dislodged it completely. Now unable to cry out, he was left to listen through the wicker as "Sally" ran- and fell, he thought, as he slammed into the wall of the basket- back to the doctor.

"Stay where I can see you!" the doctor scolded her, to Sally's silence. "Why is that so hard a request?" He made a parental noise of mortification. "Are you trying to be rid of me? An old man, confined to the cobbled paths, while your young legs try to carry you off where I cannot follow!"

He didn't allow her time to answer. Jack heard the motors of his chair whirring. "Get back to the house, I'm sure you have enough of whatever you need."

The return voyage was made in complete silence, and Jack, internally, sighed in relief. The Doctor would see to it that Jack was pieced back together down to the little bones in his ears, and this whole mess could be forgotten about in an instant. Finkelstein valued his privacy even moreso than Jack, after all. Although he had a few introductions to make, and perhaps a short discussion with the bad doctor about the difference between "being private" and "keeping people secret from the townspeople". All in a day's work for the Pumpkin King, after all.

Instead, Jack finally came back to his sight, and spotted all of him in a heap on the floor, and Sally reaching up to put him on a counter in a room he didn't recognize, and those eyes, those wide and terrified eyes, looking at him in sheer apology.

Perhaps this would take a little longer than he first anticipated.

Looking at him expectantly, Sally suddenly started and quickly reached down to the floor, coming back with his jawbone. She lifted him up just enough to slide the bone back into its proper hinge. He tested it, snapped it back into alignment with a quick wrench of his jaw, and-

"Ah- hello there." Jack felt the strongest urge to move his hands as he spoke it was almost making him ache. "Miss Sally, was it?" She nodded, and he continued. "Thank you very much for collecting me. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it-"

He was... quite struck with the effect. That face, those eyes that had been twisted in concern and that little off-center lip that she chewed on in obvious worry, all of it cleared away into unguarded surprise, and then... pure delight. He got a wide, open-mouthed, little gasp and wide smile for the barest of efforts to be cordial. And really, lost in his head he was at the moment, she was really a quite beautiful monster now that he could take a good look. That he could have such an effect on a woman he didn't know, and that seemed to not know him, struck him speechless for a moment.

Moments pass, and Jack reflexively cleared the throat that was scattered into seven pieces on the floor. "Thank you. But, back to business, Sally; I must be brought to the doctor."

Gone was the smile, and instead Sally shook her head with such passion that her long red hair fluffed and rolled out behind her, and Jack scowled in confusion.

"No? What do you mean 'no'?"

Sally shook her head again, "no", and ducked to the floor to start collecting his bones. He followed her as best he could, squirming and wriggling to keep her in sight whenever she disappeared from his peripheral vision. "I'm sorry, but I'm not understanding the motivation behind this. Miss Sally, are you embarrassed that you found me in such a state? Because I assure you, you have no reason to feel such a way. It was entirely my fault."

He was nudged to the side, and a messy pile of all of his spine took his place. Sally scooped up the remaining bones and bits of him and dropped them noisily into a basket just out of Jack's sight, only knowing it was a basket because it made the same wicker crunch he had heard when Sally had collected him the first time. Part of him was rather unnerved that she had so brazenly picked through his suit to find all of them. "Miss Sally?"

She didn't respond, instead rifling through the pieces of his back and spreading them out over the counter. Every one laid out, easily visible, none touching each other. Sally looked over the bones, nodding in approval, and started running her hands over her scalp.

Jack was transfixed a moment. Her hands methodically ran through her hair, then began on her chin before traveling back along her jaw. Her hair pulled back along her arms as she mapped out the outline of her neck and collarbone, then back up to her head.

Finally, she took to the vertebrae and started sorting them, smallest to largest, and Jack broke out of his stupor and realized she was trying to put him back together herself. "Ah- Miss Sally, I appreciate the concern very much, but..."

She stopped to watch him as he spoke, and he was struck with a thought. "Sally, I'm sorry, I'm sure I've talked your ear off quite enough today. How are you?"

Silence met him, and he was quite certain it would. Not a shy silence, either. A complete one.

"Sally..." he chanced. "Do you speak?"

She shook her head. "no."

"Ah. Well, this does make conversing a little one-sided, doesn't it?" She pursed her lips, and Jack sheepishly smiled. "Sorry, slip of the tongue. Ah- introductions, yes. My name is Jack. Jack Skellington. Pleasure to meet you."

With a distracted but polite nod, Sally went back to sorting bones.

Jack swallowed to clear his mind.

"I hate to sound unappreciative, but I believe the doctor could do this much faster. It would leave you free to do whatever you need to do around the house."

She shook her head again, her smile giving way to a frown, before getting back into her task.

He swallowed again.

Was normal conversation this difficult? Had he gotten so used to an instant wave of adulation, so used to it that he couldn't speak without it?

Oh dear, this was a dilemma.

"SALLY!"

This time, he was braced for the shuffle. Somewhat. He was still gathered up with all his backbone in a hurry, bones knocking against bones, as Sally swept him up in a panic. What he wasn't prepared for was Sally tossing him full-force into a cast-iron cauldron and filling his ears with deafening ringing.

"-was that racket?!" was the noise he finally came back to. "It SOUNDS like an empty pot! I expect my dinner on time, and I find you down here daydreaming! I will give you half an hour extra, and no more, Sally!"

A door slammed above him, and when Sally picked him back up, she was wracked with guilty from her hands to her feet. Even through the buzz in his ears, he could see that, and he wished again that he had his hands so he could put them on her shoulders. "No apologies necessary, Sally, I understand completely." She smoothed her hand over his skull, perhaps saying 'thank you' where words couldn't or perhaps checking for injuries, he wasn't invested in figuring out the motivations like he was before. "I think I understand completely, anyway."

She put him down, and he explained himself aloud for her to hear. She traveled back and forth from the cauldron, returning his spine to its place on the kitchen counter. "Trying to keep us both out of trouble, are you? The doctor doesn't seem the type to listen to explanations, and you're not exactly in a position to give them..." She nodded frequently, and Jack took this to mean he was hitting the points with steady accuracy. "And I suppose my reassembly will have to wait until you get dinner done?"

She nodded again, opening up the drawers below him and the cupboard above to pull ingredients out.

"C'est la mort, I suppose," Jack bemoaned in his schoolboy French. "I can at least keep you good company while you cook. And I appreciate yours very much, I must say again." Sally gave a little smile at that. "After all, without you here, I would have no-body."

Sally snuffled a laugh and hid it in the side of a jar.

Such was their conversation for the next half-hour, Jack making small talk and little jokes as Sally busily threw together a thin, but serviceable broth for Doctor Finkelstein's dinner. She sorted through what bones she could in her spare minutes, but after a few straight minutes of trying, even Jack had no clue of what went where and in what order.

Eventually, when the soup was nearly finished, Sally deposited all the bones in the little basket and took up Jack's suit. She ruffled and fluffed and wrinkled it into a cushion all while Jack flinched and wondered how long it would take to iron out, bunched up the crumpled mess of his clothes into the corner of the cupboard, and placed Jack's head into the hastily made nest.

"Ah- oh dear- erm- 'bedtime', I suppose."

Sally gave him a mournful nod, her constant glances to the top of the room's sizeable ramp telling Jack that she was expecting the doctor, and soon. He sighed.

"Goodnight for now, Sally," he told her. "But as soon as you can tomorrow, come fetch me. If you're dead-set on assembling me yourself, then we're going to need a guide."

She nodded again, this time with her face set in determination, and when Jack gave her a grin, she returned it in force. "Right! I'll hold you to that, Sally. We're together in this, aren't we?" She nodded once, sharp and focused. "Right! Good night then. And see you in the morning."

She patted the top of his head gently and shut him inside the cupboard, and eventually out of force of will, Jack found himself asleep.