A/N: After 10,000 years...

The Boy Who Found Fear At Last

by Kieran, Kate, and Kayin

Jack sat in the snow at the North Pole for a while, letting more ice grow on him, feeling the chill sink right down into his core. The northern cold refreshed him with every crystallizing breath as he settled into this new sensation of no longer being in flux. He had spent so long feeling so deeply damaged, but the shifting pain that made him feel like a foreigner in his own soul had finally, like a rolling sea, solidified - frozen into something that, while it might still shift in the future, was stable. For now.

When the cold had recharged him like a battery, he returned to the workshop.

Bunny and North were waiting on a snowbank, talking quietly as he floated over. They silenced as he approached, wordless, and slipped immediately into North's embrace.

"I'm not fine," he announced. His frost-covered skin and ice-streaked hair didn't melt at all, even in North's big warm embrace. "But I'll get there."

North tightened his arms around Jack. "We knew it was in you," he said. "You are strong, Jack. Thank you for staying with us."

Jack squeezed North one more time, then relaxed his grip. Only then did North set him gently back on his feet.

Bunny rose up out of a crouch as Jack looked at him. "I need to go somewhere, and talk to Manny," Jack said. "Will you take me there?"

"Of course," Bunny said, "But -"

"I know it might take a while to get him to talk," Jack said, anticipating Bunny's concern. "But I'm going to wait. Will you -" he already knew the answer, but he asked anyway. "Will you watch my back while I wait? Even if it takes a long time?"

Bunny put a paw on Jack's shoulder, and managed not to draw back at the bite of icy cold emanating from Jack's frosted hoodie. "Does a koala sleep in the bush?"

They reached Burgess in a flash, and Jack sat at the edge of the pond to watch the moon rise. He couldn't see Bunny, but Jack knew he was around - far enough that he had privacy, but close enough to keep him safe. He didn't have to reassure himself of that more than once.

He waited, and the silver face of the moon rose over the trees. Jack waved to it.

"Hi," he said, waving. "New look. Still me, though."

The moon rose slowly, saying nothing

"I think it's about time you and I had a chat." The silence kept on rising. "I'm not moving from this spot until you speak to me."

The moon glowed silently. Jack waited.

"I actually mean it," he said. "I know that's hard to believe. Me. Not moving."

He settled back against the trunk of a tree, determination written on his features. More minutes passed.

"You know how much I hate sitting still. But here I am. You're not even getting out of this by waiting for a day. If you don't say a word, I'll still be here tomorrow when you rise."

The moon continued its slow movement across the sky.

"Even though all this sitting still is really boring," Jack said, sprawling finally against the tree. "Really, really boring. But I'm doing it, because we need to talk. I need you to talk to me."

The night passed. Jack didn't move. And when the silver voice finally filtered down from the atmosphere, Jack grasped at the question -

What do you want to talk about?

Finally.

Jack breathed in, holding onto his few memories of his sister, her laughter -

"Why'd you take them from me?" he asked. "Did you make that choice? To take my memories?"

The answer came, slow and faltering, uncertain in a way Jack never expected from the Man in the Moon.

I thought...you'd be less sad that way. I thought you'd be sad if you could see your sister, but not tell her you were there...

"You could have told me that," said Jack, his expression hurt. "Even if you were afraid of how sad I might be watching her, you could've given me a choice to remember or not. Now I'll never know what happened to her or my mother -"

I can show you.

Jack drew in a deep breath, suddenly fearful.

What if they'd lived in misery like Pitch had predicted? What if the rest of his sister's life had been ceaseless fear and grief? He hated the idea of seeing that - but it would gnaw at him until he knew the truth.

I owe you this, the Moon admitted. And more. Would you like me to?

"I need to know," Jack said, his voice rasping with emotion. "I need to know what happened to them."

The silence of the Moon felt like a sigh.

Then its glow expanded to fill all Jack's vision. His head rang. He slid to the base of the tree, and suddenly, even that sensation vanished from beneath him - like he was floating, without even his body to hold his consciousness, somehow everywhere at once.

The Burgess of the past grew out of the glow beneath him. Bodiless, Jack floated down to the frozen pond. A hole in the ice, surrounded by cracks, had not yet frozen over. At the shore, more ice was broken, as if someone had tried to wade into the water, but they hadn't gotten very far. The low light of sunset illuminated the ice, the frosted trees, and his sister, standing on the shore.

Her eyes were red with weeping, and even if her face hadn't been familiar, the sorrow on it would have driven Jack into sympathetic tears. But something was always missing, when he saw her in these flashes of his own memory.

There was always three hundred years of distance between the visions he saw of her, and the memories he knew he had. Having his memories back was still like knowing that someone else had a sister, long ago. All the ties of his heart to hers were as cool and slow moving as a glacier, faded by the time he'd gone without remembering who he was - who she was -

"I want them back," Jack felt, more than said, to the Man in the Moon. "I learned the memories from Tooth. Had some come back on their own. Now it's time to give them all back to me for real."

Do you really want to feel that? The Moon asked, hesitant. What you lost? It will hurt all over again.

"I did ask," Jack pointed out.

His sister on the shore sank into a crouch by the pond, and the noise that she made was so painful and wounded, bursting out of her as if she hadn't expected it. All at once, Jack knew her. To the bottom of his heart, he knew her. As well as he knew Jamie. As well as he knew any of the Guardians. If he emerged from this vision suddenly unable to speak to them, suddenly invisible and intangible to those he'd come to love as Jack Frost, it would have hurt as much as watching her - as watching Molly - cry.

Molly.

"I missed you so much," Jack choked out, suddenly, to the little shadow he'd looked for and missed for 300 years. "I didn't know it was you I missed, but I -"

His voice didn't touch her. Of course not. She was a memory, long dead - and even if he'd been there when this moment happened, so long ago, all his pleading and entreating and words of comfort wouldn't have reached her at all - she who he'd worked so hard to protect. All the things he'd taught her, the stories he'd told her, the times he'd cheered her up with a joke because he simply couldn't bear to think of her being sad when he could do something about it -

- He'd done all that, with all the devotion a mortal could muster, and yet there she'd been left, wailing at the edge of the pond because of him.

He hadn't saved her from sadness nearly as well as he'd wanted. If Jack had been in his body, he would have felt the tears building up into icicles on his cheeks, watching what the Moon had believed he had to spare Jack from, those centuries ago.

His mother suddenly shadowed the doorway of the cottage by the pond, and to his core, Jack knew her too, and wanted, suddenly, to apologise. To apologise, and beg her love and forgiveness. There was a sorrow in his heart that only his mother's comfort could erase. It had been there when he barely remembered her, but now, it had a shape that he knew. All he'd wanted was to keep his mother proud, to pave a path of happiness for Molly, and instead, he'd left them to mourning that obliterated all other feeling.

His mother picked Molly up and carried her back inside, tears rolling down her own face. She closed the door on the pond, but Jack knew that there was nothing else to be seen in that cabin that night but a woman and her daughter under the oppressive weight of pain.

The sunset faded, the moon rose over the pond, and Jack watched himself be born again.

It was beautiful to see, the Moon offered, plaintively, as Jack watched the Moon's own memories of him, alone in the world, without memory, obeying his first instinct to explore. To play.

Your nature didn't leave much room for fear, the Moon went on. I barely had to reassure you. You were joyful immediately. I was so glad.

The Jack of the Moon's memories blew away on a gust of wind, but the Jack of the present stayed watching the pond freeze over again.

"Did you know then?" Jack asked. "That I was going to be a Guardian? Was that the only reason you saved me?"

I hoped, the Moon said. But if you had proved unsuitable...I still wanted you to Be. You were such a joyful person, when you'd seen such a small bit of the world. I wanted you to see this world, and have your joy in it. This world is so wonderful. It hurt to think of you leaving it so soon.

The dawn broke over the pond, completely frozen. Molly burst out of the cabin door, and the sight of the frozen-over pond made her scream again.

Their mother chased her out, suddenly screaming herself as Molly ran onto the pond, slipping, but the thick ice that Jack had left held her this time, even as she wailed, as their mother pulled her off the pond where she'd almost died the day before all over again, wailing because she didn't know that even if the pond had been melted for them to look...

Jack's heart sunk. Even when the pond melted, there would be no body left for them to find.

Because his body was flying on the wind, tumbling over mountains and forests and full of the joy that the Man in the Moon had admired so much, the joy that his mother and sister mourned losing. He danced on the wind, unaware as he played and fell in love with the wide, wide world, that the two people who'd loved him best were in the depths of agony.

As the world opened to him, their world diminished without him.

I was afraid you couldn't have kept your joy, seeing this, the Moon said. I wanted to give you the chance to see other, wonderful things, before showing you this. I didn't want sorrow to be your first memory as Jack Frost.

Jack just watched as the sorrow he'd missed progressed before him.

The Moon fell into silence, and didn't withhold moments as he played out the history for Jack. And Jack, keeping still for the longest he'd ever felt himself sit in his life, watched all the months of their mourning play out, as spring thawed the pond and they, again, found no body to bury. Molly lapsed into a misery that seemed to last the whole summer. Other children came to entreat her to play with them, but she sat by the pond, holding her knees against her chest, for hours at a time. Their mother came and went from the cottage, hard at work keeping her daughter fed, her eyes shadowed with sadness and exhaustion. She might not have been sleeping. She found time to go and sit next to Molly, most evenings, and they held each other, and often cried. Sometimes, they talked.

Mostly, Molly apologized to their mother. Over and over.

Their mother assured her, there was nothing she had done that she needed to apologize for. Over and over.

They passed the summer, and slowly, slowly, each began to feel something that was not pain.

Fall came, and Molly spent less time sitting by the pond. She went with her friends more, smiled more, and their mother did the same. Not until winter did they show another sign of their deep loss, when during the first snowfall, Molly, outside, felt a snowflake touch her nose, and something in that cold touch made her bend over weeping again.

Her mother was there, in a moment, to catch Molly's shoulders, and lift her to her feet. Molly wailed into her mother's sleeve, wordless in grief.

Their mother bundled her up. "Is it the snow? Did it remind you of Jack again?"

Molly nodded into her mother's sleeve, still sobbing, and tears glistened at the corner of their mother's eyes as well.

"Molly, darling."

Their mother had always been so soft and kind to them. There were people in the village who'd thought she was too soft, that she'd let her son play too much, that she'd let her daughter be too free, but Jack wanted to bless those freedoms and the love their mother had given them.

"Do you know what I think of, when I miss Jack the most?" his mother asked, quiet against Molly's sobs, as the snow fell on them.

"No," Molly said, but she took her face out of her mother's sleeve to look up at her.

Jack and Molly's mother stroked her daughter's hair.

"I was angry for a long time, after your brother died," she said. "Not at you - or at him - or even the ice for not holding him. I was angry that in this world, a child as good and kind and loving as our Jack can die, while others who -" she cut off, the bitterness threading into her words. "God save me, but I still do not know why it is that good children must die in accidents, while cruel people live on without any trouble and spread unhappiness in the world."

It was a poison that, clearly, she needed to expel from her system, to anyone - even her own child - and perhaps there was no one in her village safe to speak such doubts to.

"But in time," she said, stroking Molly's hair still, "I thought - that there is no point in thinking over those doubts, and coming back again and again to that anger. It changes nothing. And it hurts me to hold such feelings in my soul. And what do you think your brother would say, if he knew I carried pain and anger around in my heart?"

"He would tell you not to be sad," Molly supplied. "He would tell you a joke, and make you laugh."

"He would," their mother agreed. "I know he would. I miss the jokes he cannot tell me every day. But wherever he is - if he looks down on us, and sees our sadness, I think he understands that we are sad because we loved him. But I also think that if there is fairness to the world, then in death, your brother is still having fun."

"I am," Jack wanted to tell them. "Maybe not like you thought I was, but I am -"

"And in that case," his mother went on, "Then for us to go on thinking about him with anger, and sadness, and pain - if he feels what we do, we are lessening his joy. I do not want that. I want him to be happy in his eternal rest." she stroked Molly's hair. "So when I miss him now, when I feel myself becoming angry, or sad . . . I turn my thoughts to how much I love him. I would have him feel my love instead of my pain. Wouldn't you?"

Molly sniffled, nodded, and stared back down at the ground. "I love him a lot," she agreed.

"So do I."

"I miss him a lot," she repeated.

"And each time you miss him, that is an opportunity to think of your love again," their mother reminded her. "In time, maybe we will be able to think of love before we think of pain."

They held each other, and the sadness clearly was not wiped away.

But standing in the snow, Molly and her mother and the love they still had in reserve for Jack, wherever he was, finally, across the centuries, reached him.

Their lives went on, and though Molly only ever skated at the edges of the pond, she did skate on the pond again. Their lives went on in the quiet, predictable way of lives of the time. Molly grew up, married one of the boys she'd known from childhood. They lived in the cottage, took care of his and Molly's mother as she aged, and had children -

Even disembodied, Jack felt his heart jump as Molly sat beside the pond with her first baby. His nephew. Then, in years, her second son, while his young nephew played, running and tumbling and making his mother laugh, sticking his face in his baby brother's face to make the baby laugh as well -

She told her children so many stories, and so many of the stories were about -

"- your Uncle Jack always used to climb that same tree," Molly told her youngest, ten feet up the oak tree outside the pond, "and he taught me how to get down. Do you want to know the secret -?"

"No!" the child shouted. "I'll do it myself!"

Jack laughed as the kid struggled his way down the oak. "Hey kiddo," he put in, unable to stop himself, "all you have to do is climb to the end of the branch. It'll sag right down and let you jump to the ground." He chuckled. "Or you can keep trying to get down the trunk, and - yup, take a tumble. Walk it off, I got that same bruise five times."

Molly picked up her howling child and, chuckling, walked him over to the edge of the pond to get the tears out of his system.

"Your Uncle Jack got that same bruise at least five times," she said, and Jack let out a burst of laughter.

"Mama?" the child, tearful, asked. "Is Uncle Jack still in the pond?"

"What?" Molly asked. "Why ever would you ask that?"

"Is he down there, all bones? Does he see us when we skate on the pond in the winter?"

"Nothing in the world could have kept your uncle in one place for any length of time, not even death," Molly said, with such certainty, as if she were telling her son something as simple as "it isn't raining right now."

"How do you know?"

"Because -" Molly said, casting around for something she could give a child as proof - "Because I can still hear him, sometimes," she said, conspiratorially, whispering to her son. "But only in winter. He loved the winter," she said, as her son's eyes grew wide. "It was his favorite season. Snowballs and ice skating and sledding and - even the way the winter wind would howl during a storm, and toss the snowflakes around. Sometimes, I swear I can hear his laughter when those winter winds are whistling by."

When winter came again, and Molly was at the pond once more, playing with her children, a wind whistled through the trees, tossing snow from the branches of a pine, and her younger son shouted.

"Listen, Mama! Uncle Jack is laughing!"

"So he is!" Molly agreed.

So he was. Jack saw his younger self, dancing by on the wind. He was overjoyed to see he still had been a part of the lives of his sister and her children, even past death.

The remainder of the winter was for stories. "Put on your hat," Molly said, as she bundled her sons up and gently pinched their noses, as Jack had once done to her. "Or Uncle Jack will nip your nose with frost."

The boys shouted laughter, and covered their noses with their mittened hands. Those stories spread between the children. They spread, and began - well, just enough for his name to go on.

"It came from her," Jack whispered. "She started it."

That was what Jamie's mom had said to Jamie, to get him to bundle up. And it was that phrase that had made him guess that Jack was in the room. His sister had made it so Jack was eventually believed in. Seen.

His mother and his sister never stopped sharing stories. His name never ceased to be spoken in their house.

"I still wonder what he'd have done with the rest of his life," his mother said one day, as she and Molly sat with their drop spindles outside on a sunny day. "He had so much energy and his spirit was so wholly unique. I used to tell him he couldn't have fun all the time, but I think he would have found a way to make most anything fun for him...anything he set his mind to doing, anyway. He was made to do something in this world - but what was it? Tailoring, milling, something entirely new? I cannot think of it."

"I wish I knew," said Molly. She let out a long breath. "Do you know what rends my heart, even today?"

Their mother looked up from her spinning to attend to Molly's rent heart.

"It's the memories I never thought to preserve," Molly said. "Because I always thought I would be able to make more. There are so many times that he made me laugh, so many silly things he did that I would love to remember today, that I would have loved to have had even right after he died, but I hadn't committed them to memory because I never thought that they'd end." Molly sighed. "All my best memories had him in them. But those were all the memories I could get. I thought I'd get more."

"Oh, Molly."

"Oh, Molly," Jack echoed his mother.

"That hurt for the longest time," Molly said, "I knew I would have more best memories, but it hurt so much to know that he would never be in another one. But do you remember when you told me, every time I felt sad over him, to think of how much I loved him, instead?"

It seemed like so long even to Jack, in the stream of retold time, but he did remember. So did their mother.

"I began to think of him, not when I was sad, or because something reminded me of him, but simply because I was having fun. Every time I did, I knew he would be glad that I was having it. It helped. And truly, it means that I have never stopped making good memories with him."

It seemed love and sadness were all Jack, disembodied, was composed of, then. Love, sadness, and gratitude -

"He will still be in all of the best memories I ever have, if every time I have fun, or feel joy, I think of how glad he must be that I am. Thinking of that has made all my memories stronger. It means that his death was not the end of the joy he brought to my life. I think he would like that. She paused. "I think he does like it, wherever he is."

Somehow, it was this that made Jack's heart overflow.

"You don't know how right you are," he said. "I wish I could have told you."

The Moon let him see all of his mother's life, and after she passed on, all of Molly's - both of them dying surrounded by loved ones, sent off at the end of fulfilled lives, so complete that Jack understood why the Moon, that could preserve him, hadn't felt the need to keep them around. By the time they passed, they both had so many others who had gone ahead to welcome them to - to -

To wherever it was that the dead went, that Jack had not gone.

The recorded time dissipated before his disembodied eyes. Jack felt the tree against his back again, and woke to a pond frozen beneath the same predawn light that he had called the moon under.

His cheeks were heavy with frozen tears.

I meant to bring you back to see them before this, the Moon told him. I meant to. But the years go by so fast...

"So fast compared to what?" Jack asked.

Just...fast, said the Moon. Too fast for me. When I thought again that it was time to bring you to them...it was already too late.

Jack sat silently, waiting for the Moon to go on.

You had asked me when they were still in mourning, and I didn't want you to...so I waited a little longer, but it wasn't...little for them. And you were asking - but I was afraid of what you would say, if I told you you'd had a family, and I'd lost your chance to see them again. I was afraid you'd never forgive me. I can...never forgive myself for that.

"No," Jack agreed.

What had been done was wrong in many ways.

But it had been done.

How long would he have stayed in the village, haunting them, before his own nature led him on to see the beautiful world? The mountains under snow, the ocean in a storm with waves as high as mountains, the unparalleled blue of glaciers under a clouded sky - would he have been able to love them as wholly as he had, if he had known what he was leaving behind?

Yes, he believed, the belief welling up from his center. But it would have taken him so long. But he'd have done it...in time. And he'd had all that time to work with. He would have felt this grief and worked through it so long ago. He'd still have flown on the wind with glee, and taken in the tallest mountain with joy. In time.

Which way would have been better?

He weighed the balance, and the balance...no longer mattered.

"But I can forgive you," Jack said. "You gave me a gift. A gift I love." he paused. "I could come up with a dozen ways you could have given it that would have been better - but it wouldn't change that you gave me a gift. Or that some of the things you did hurt me. I don't want to be mad at you for giving me all... all this. I just want you to understand which parts hurt."

I'm sorry, the Moon said again. Somehow, that silvery, insubstantial voice had a quavery edge, like a child about to burst into tears, barely holding them back.

"A kid would think like that," Jack said, suddenly thinking he understood. "You've been doing your best and avoiding the consequences when the best thing you could think to do doesn't work out perfectly. Manny -"

How long was a moon a child? How did a moon become a Someone that could grant power and life? Jack inhaled, suddenly more curious than ever, feeling that he was on the precipice of something, of some deep understanding he'd overlooked before now. "Are you a kid?"

No, said the Moon, like a child. He paused. And yes.

"Where'd you come from?"

The Moon hesitated before its glow filled Jack's eyes again. Within the glow grew a picture he was surprised to recognize -

That's the world Pitch was from, he realized, as a glittering golden city filled his vision. "The Golden Age worlds," he cut in. "I saw them!"

You did? The Moon sounded surprised, and hopeful. The vision of the city shifted, as Jack realized he was looking down at the city through someone's eyes - Manny's eyes - as the child the Moon had once been turned from the view of the city below to a towering, palatial building, with a lengthy skyscraping dock on which the child stood.

"In the Maze," Jack clarified. "I saw where Pitch came from in visions there."

Oh. The Moon sounded more subdued.

"Yeah," Jack agreed. "It was pretty awful. But go on."

These memories were not as crisp and clear as the visions Jack had seen in the maze, or even as clear as the ones the Moon had shown him of the life he'd left behind. These memories were so much more ancient than his, he realized, and the Maze with its power to torment wasn't the same as someone recalling their own better times when, just like Molly, they hadn't thought to preserve each memory as if it were precious, irreplaceable, and limited -

So the figure of the man and woman that the child Manny ran to were fuzzy around the edges, the features unclear, but just their stance and bearing impressed upon Jack the awareness that this was a mother and a father and they were not only loving, and fun, but regal and kind and respected - by their son, and likely by others.

They taught me right, Manny said, the memory suddenly, searingly clear, for just a moment. They prepared me for my responsibilities. They taught me to embrace my destiny, not to be afraid of it.

The man lifted Manny up, as how much the Moon missed his father and mother rose up and overwhelmed him, spilling into Jack. The emperor turned with Manny to look at the end of the dock, to the enormous -

ENORMOUS -

- ship tethered there. Jack only knew it was a spaceship because Manny's perception filtered that information to him. It blocked out the sky, curving like a planet, silver and glittering like crystal, something geologic, like it had been grown inside a planet instead of forged by the hands of the living. It was so much more beautiful than the ships the soldiers had flown. Those military vessels had seemed comfortable and inviting, even if there was a clean spartanness about them - this ship was a luxury yacht for the stars.

It was the Moon. The Moon before eons of impacts from asteroids and space dust collected by gravity pockmarked and layered its surface. Before it circled the earth, it had been a ship fit for a prince of the universe.

He remembered from the maze, Pitch - Kozmotis - talking to his friend Jem Breen. Eons ago, it felt like, but his memories of the maze were sharper for how traumatic they were.

"Well, you can thank Tsar Lunar personally for that. Last class he designed before his son was born and he made that monstrosity that was in the news."

"It was a monstrosity, I saw a picture, it was enormous. All to run off and explore the universe with his family - which is insane, really."

"Well, if you were going out there in the big, bad universe to see all the wonders in it and had your family with you, you wouldn't be taking them in an economy-sized ship, would you? Not with the fearlings out there. It's supposed to be impossible to break into."

"Let's hope it doesn't break down near a planet or the poor sods living on it will mistake it for a moon."

"In the maze, I saw Pitch talking about the ship, back before he was Pitch, anyway. You were the son of the Tsar. Like some kind of prince."

I was, Manny supplied. I was the prince. He offered up the information not with pride or humility. Just as a fact, tinged with distant sorrow. He didn't need to have been a prince to mourn the world that had been lost, but that had been his station when he lost it, as the king and queen, emperor and empress, whoever they were, carried him onto the ship that Jack somehow knew would take him to the cold and lonely Moon he was now, never to see that glittering world and its golden people ever again.

He watched as Manny aged, small round face often pressed to the windows of the great ship. Manny the child had a shock of golden hair that matched the gold dusting his cheeks. Said cheeks were still slightly round with the baby fat of childhood when the worst happened.

In a flash the ship was flying through space, the stars streaks outside the portholes, black cracks fissuring out from craters as room after room in the Moon Ship was locked off by slamming safety doors, and Manny ran deeper and deeper through the corridors of the ship, alarms screaming around them. The memories jumped from moment to moment in the chaos of battle and panic. Angry voices of invaders. Manny's mother and father screaming to him to go to get to the core, and terrible snatches of Pitch's familiar voice issuing silky threats. Jack shuddered as the ship did too, as explosions ended screams and the streak of stars outside slowed, until Manny, golden faced, terrified - young, maybe 12 or 13 at most - reached the clearest part of his memory of that awful attack. Face streaked with tears, body in pain, he wrenched open the door to a small, circular room that pulsed with the silver magic of the ship, where a core of wavering light pulsated. There was something wrong with the light, it flickered like it was dying.

Manny turned to see black cracks fissuring towards the door and black clouds billowing, pale, furious eyes in the dark coming closer, slammed the door shut and pulled the handle to firmly lock it. Pitch slammed into the door once, twice, again, but no cracks issued - nothing even shook in the solid core room - but Manny still stepped back.

Losing - losing altitude, said a weak voice from the glowing core, whispery and dusty, similar to Manny's current voice but different. I am sorry, young master, I am dying. You must try to reach an escape pod. And hope.

"But Ship, even if I can get away, the planet we're crashing into. Doesn't it have life?"

Yes. There is a primitive species. But sentient...growing. If they were to survive...they might one day become like you. Like those of the golden age worlds.

"But if you fall into the planet, they'll all die, before they ever had a chance."

Yes. But my mind...fading. So much damage. Being overwritten. Nightmares. Only the will of...of living beings could withstand.

"But you are alive, Ship. As alive as anyone."

Organic beings then. So complex, in ways different...different than my own. So many layers.

"There has to be something I can do, something we can do to save the planet. Even if I could get out of the core room, I won't just run away." He raised his chin. "I am the son of the emperor and empress. I have a responsibility to anyone that needs help."

My mind...weak. Yours...organic. Not as corruptible. Can...replace.

"I can take your place?"

A death, of sorts. And eternal life, at the same time. I'm afraid..not reversible. You might grow in...some ways. But never change completely. Trapped in some ways of thinking. Forever

The boy's eyes closed tight and a fresh round of tears trickled down his face, as he considered the life he was giving up, and the future he'd never have. And yet, despite his obvious sorrow, he said:

"How? What do I need to do?"

Step into...core. Body...destroyed. Mind will overwrite my own.

"Good bye, Ship. Thank you for watching over us for so long. I'm sorry. I wish I could save you, too."

No sorrow...sweet prince. Always kind. Do not want...to harm beings below. Thank you for doing...what I cannot.

He couldn't do it stepping forward, was clearly too afraid to walk straight into it. Instead, Manny stepped back, falling, until the core enveloped him. His screaming, as his body was destroyed, was drowned out by the whistles and sirens that went off during the transition.

The ship was silent after that, and Jack felt the energy that expelled Pitch from the battered Moonship. Manny's eyes were suddenly not limited to his body, as he perceived what the ship did, as the magic of the moonship enveloped and protected him. One last burst of fuel righted the moonship in stable orbit around the Earth, blue and green and sparkling. The trail of darkness that marked Pitch's path showed the Nightmare King's fall to Earth, striking a small golden ship on the way down -

The moon and the man in it - the child in it - settled into orbit and watched the Earth become enlivened.

I have seen so much, Manny explained, as the Earth changed beneath his vision in sped-up time, for Jack's benefit. So much of it is beautiful. So I'm not sad to be like this - he hesitated. Not often sad.

I'm old, but I'm not old, the Moon explained. I'm wise...but not wise in all ways. I know a lot, because I've seen everything. But I'll never grow anymore than I have. The Man in the Moon - the Boy in the Moon? - paused before he went on. You will change easier than I can. You can grow in your afterlife. I hope you can grow and be comfortable even after all that you've been through. I had hoped, by letting you start your new life carefree, without responsibility or grief, that you might find a happiness I never could.

Jack thought about how hard it was for him to change, how long it had taken him to pass through the pain he still felt after the maze, and imagined that change coming with even more difficulty. Manny had made mistakes, but he'd made them isolated, circling the earth, stuck forever in a moment of immaturity with a grief that would never totally fade.

"I understand you did your best," he said, with more compassion than he'd felt before. "But you know, you could ask the adults in your life for guidance," he said, humor creeping in. "I may be only 300 years old, but I'm still higher on the maturity and judgement pecking order than you."

Eternally 17, but with the ability to change, to Manny's unchanging eternal 12 or 13.

No, Manny argued. I am your protector. I was born to protect my world, and this is my world. My father and mother taught me my destiny. You are young and I am old, even if I'll never be any older. It's the job of the old to protect the young -

"It's our job as adults to protect all children," Jack cut in, "That includes you, now that I know the truth. You don't get excluded just because you gave us the job."

It isn't the same -

"No, it's not," Jack agreed. "But don't you wonder, if you'd asked the other Guardians when you saved me, what they would have said about my memories? Don't you think they could have at least given you advice to help you make your choice?"

Manny hesitated a long time before answering, They would have given it, if I'd asked. He said it like he was only now realizing it, like a child looking back on mistakes they'd made while wholly overwhelmed with the events unfolding in front of them.

It was like asking a child who'd filled a washing machine with dish soap why they hadn't asked for help before the bubbles filled the laundry room and the hallway and the bathroom and their bedroom, and watching the child look at their feet and shrug and admit "I dunno."

"You lost one family," Jack said, gently. "We've all lost one family. You don't have to circle us like an outsider, just because you've done that longer than any of us have been alive."

Won't that disappoint them? Manny asked, hesitantly. When they know that I don't know everything will turn out all right? They ask me for guidance - they all asked me for guidance when things were bad, and I didn't know what to say, except that things would be all right. I didn't know they would be all right, but they have been so far, but if I say the wrong thing won't they be so angry with me -? Don't they need someone to rely on to know -?

"Don't you need someone?" Jack asked. "You've been all alone up there for so long. It must seem like just a moment ago that you asked us all to work for you."

It does.

Jack smiled. "See how easy it is to ask? Maybe I'm speaking for all the others here but I don't think they'll mind. You can guide us, but we can guide you back." He paused, in the moon's silence. "Does that make you feel better about asking?"

Yes,the Boy in the Moon said, after a while.

"You saved us all in one way or another," Jack pointed out. "We can all help each other figure out the best way to do the right thing from now on. You don't have to be alone up there forever just because you've been alone a long time."

The Moon might have been on the verge of tears that moons could not cry.

"And for the record," Jack added, as the moon touched the horizon, "I am glad you let me stay in this life. I do love this world. I do love this way of living." He sighed out, thinking of how long it had been since he'd felt able to say that. "I'm not going to leave it."

Good, said the Moon, with relief so palpable it brought tears to Jack's eyes. Good.

The moon slipped below the horizon, and Jack startled at a sound from the bush.

It was Bunny, emerging out of the brush with plenty of noise to warn of his arrival. "Didja get what you came for?" he asked, kneeling by Jack's side.

Jack wondered again how he would cope if he'd woken up by this same pond and none of the Guardians saw him, if he had to watch another family wonder where he'd gone, and search for him, and never find him, and move on missing him, while he struggled, powerless, to make certain they knew that he was still there, that he loved them -

He threw his arms around Bunny, needing so much just then to embrace a loved one. Since he could.

"That was a quick talk you and Manny had," Bunny said, sounding slightly uncertain, hugging Jack back.

"It wasn't quick actually," Jack said, drawing back, breaking icicle tears off his face. He half-laughed, half-sobbed. "It really wasn't."

"Is that a happy laugh, or -"

Bunny's ears pricked up and he looked away from the pond before Jack heard anything.

"Company's coming," Bunny announced, looking past where Jack's mother and sister used to have their home, down the path the children of the present used to come to the pond.

"Who?"

"You ready to see Jamie yet, or do we need to get out of here?" Bunny asked.

Jack brushed more ice from his cheeks, his heart jumping in his chest.

"Give us a little space please," he said. "It's about time."

"You got it," Bunny agreed, and checked the path one more time before loping off.

Jamie emerged over the ridge to the path, saw Jack sitting by the pond, and the boy's eyes grew wide as the full moon.

Jack waved to him, and Jamie bolted down the path.

"You're here!" Jamie yelled, repeated it all the way until he'd collided with Jack. "You're here! You're here, you're back -

"I am," Jack agreed, feeling the boy shiver as Jack's new, colder atmosphere chilled him.

"You're colder now," Jamie said, frost from Jack's hoodie brushed off onto his hair. The boy's eyes were wide with concern. "Is that permanent? Are you hurt?"

"Hey, hey, colder hands maybe, but I've still got a warm heart, I swear," Jack said, but his voice choked up a little at Jamie's concern.

Once upon a time he'd believed he had no one who cared at all about him, and now he had so many people who cared so much - now he'd had so many people who cared so much, even when he believed he was alone.

"I was hurting a lot more than I am now," he explained. "And hurting that much changed me, so much that - now you can see it on the outside. But I don't want you to be sad about that," he said, as Jamie's eyes welled up with tears. "Sometimes - sometimes terrible things do happen, that change you. But I don't feel like I'm not the same person I was before. I feel like the same person, but with...more layers."

"You said you're still hurting," Jamie pointed out.

"I did," Jack agreed. "I am. It's...going to be a while before I'm not. But I'm going to get there," he said, with a confidence he wouldn't have felt a few days ago. He put his hands on Jamie's shoulders, rather than holding his hands, so he wouldn't give the little boy a chill. "I know I'm going to because I have so many people who are helping me get better. Like you."

"You can change all you want, but I'll still be your friend," Jamie agreed. "I'll never stop believing in you, even if I never see -"

"Let's not go there," Jack interrupted. "I'll always be around to see you again."

He made the promise, thinking of the moment he'd almost given in and faded. He made the promise, knowing it might not always be easy. He made the promise because he knew it might not always be easy.

"But you're growing up, you know," Jack pointed out.

"Not anytime soon!" Jamie protested.

"Yeah, but - I just want you to know, we know that Believers don't hold onto us forever, and that's okay. If you ever stop believing, it's all right."

"I don't think I could forget you if I tried," Jamie pointed out. "It would be like not believing my sister exists."

He hugged Jack, cold and all, and Jack felt choked up again.

It was a strange kind of pain, this powerful affection, the hurt that came from love. It was a hurt he wouldn't have given up. He had so many years and joys before him, even as Jamie grew, the joys of watching his friend live a good life, even if Jamie ever did stop believing in him.

The loss would be bitter. But the joys would be just as real, and there would be more of them. By contrast, Jamie could only forget him once.

The bitterness of what was to come, and the sweetness of the present, filled him. Once they'd been reversed - the bitterness of the present so hard to overcome even for the promise of the sweetness of the future. But one did not stop being real just because the other eclipsed them. There was a peace in that thought that he could feel now.

Winter came and went. A lot more unexpected snow days persisted into the new grown spring, but the snow fell gently, melted quickly, and fed the flowers and grass that had been only beginning to grow before the snow fell. As if spring and winter traveled together, leaving the world greener in their shared footprints. It was a month before Easter that Jack, watching Bunny furiously practicing his brushstrokes on a pile of leaves, finally took a snowglobe out of the pocket of his hoodie and spoke up.

"So, North gave me this," he said, conversationally, "For when I want to go out. So I'll have a way out if I ever get caught anywhere again -"

"Go out?" Bunny asked, both ears perking up at this new thread of conversation, that Jack hadn't ever brought up before.

"Yeah, by myself." Jack said. He turned the snowglobe in his hands. "I think I'm just about ready."

"Really?" Bunny bit back on his own surprise. "Well that's - that's good, mate. Where're you gonna go?"

"I dunno yet," said Jack. "But I've got the snowglobe, and I've got this, too -"

Bunny looked with disbelief and surprise at the object Jack pulled out of his pants pocket. "Where the blue blazes did you get a cell phone?"

"Jamie gave it to me," Jack said, with a chuckle. "And before you ask - he has strict instructions to get in touch with you guys by using the snowglobe North gave him or asking the mini-fairies that keep an eye on him for help instead of mounting a rescue mission himself, and I have no idea where he got it. I'm worried we introduced him to a life of crime, that one time we had him fence that flower -"

"It's not fencing if I grow those orchids the old-fashioned way," Bunny insisted, again.

"Anyway I've got my escape route, and my communication device in case something happens to my globe - so, I guess I'm...almost as ready as I'll ever be," Jack said. "Just...can I come back here, when I'm done?" a trace of a frown crossed his face. "I still - when I'm not here, I don't really have a home to come back to." He shifted. "North has the Pole, you have the Warren, Tooth has her palace, Anansi has his cave, and Sandy - he's at home in the clouds, I guess, but I don't think I can wander like I used to. With nowhere safe to come back to."

Some things from his old life were still lost to him. Maybe forever. At least for now.

But when he glanced at Bunny again, Bunny was nodding with approval.

"Well I was thinking," he said. "And I had an idea." He waved Jack over to a curtain of moss covering a low cave. "Come look at this."

He pushed the moss aside. A tunnel of bare rock delved into the earth, farther down than Jack had ever gone into the warren. Despite the lack of greenery, the tunnel was still suffused with the glow of the rest of the warren, the sunlight that seemed to come from within the very walls.

"Come check it out," Bunny invited, dropping down into the tunnel, hanging onto some of the ledges to wait for Jack to follow.

He did, descending into the glowing space down, down. The tunnel twisted, spiralled like a slide not yet smoothed out, the loops suggesting a wild, delighted ride into the earth until suddenly the tunnel opened up -

This cavern had never been occupied. No carvings touched the walls, and only the faintest covering of moss had had time to grow on the hills and slopes in the illuminated stone cavern. Evergreen trees grew in the valleys where the slopes met, thick and tall with dark green. The walls streamed with trickling water, darkening the stone

The air was cooler than in the rest of the warren, cool enough that it only needed that last magical push to freeze.

"The basalt's thick here," Bunny said, "Good insulation. I asked Terra if she could open it up. I figured, if you were gonna spend all this time in spring's home, might be better if you had your own space nearby to freeze."

This place hadn't existed when the Warren was populated by many. It was new, and empty -

"Think you can do anything with it?" Bunny asked, looking at Jack.

Jack looked back at him, wordless for a moment with too much gratitude. Jack held out his hand, and the seeping water began to freeze. The water continued seeping, and Jack controlled his cold, kept it freezing lower so that water fell, layer after layer, building up a wall of glittering, flowing ice. Icefalls thick enough to climb tumbled in streams of glittering blue from the walls. Jack kept going, chilling the roof and the walls so that they grew layers of frost. The water flowing beneath the icefalls filled the air with dampness for him to pull from, and when he looked at Bunny and saw his breath condensing into a white cloud in the chilled air, Jack really went to town.

An ice slide here - a tumbling hill of snow there - icicles glittered and caught the warren's sunlight, turning the ice into shades of gold and glittering blue. Stalactites of ice descended from the ceiling and scattered rainbows over the snow, collecting in the condensed frost in the air. The light of the Warren bent in ways too beautiful not to marvel at. Every beam illuminated the ice sculptures, their elegant swirls and dramatic swoops, highlighting what was lovely and unique about each of them.

Jack gaped in delight at his - his new place. His home beneath his friend's home. His home, in a place that had once almost been destroyed by winter - accepting him, illuminating him like he was as beautiful and as life-giving as spring.

"You're really letting me move into your basement?" Jack asked, suddenly struck by the joke. "That must really grate you, it's like having your deadbeat kid brother move back in after he really should have been out getting his own place."

But Bunny looked bewildered, as he tried to puzzle out the joke. "Why would I not want my own kid brother living in my home?" he asked.

Jack thought of the ages it had been since any families lived in - or under - the Warren.

He hugged Bunny, fiercely grateful. Bunny chuckled, patting Jack's shoulder. "Anyway, if you're gonna be messing up the place, might as well contain the mess to the basement."

"It's the best mess I ever saw," Jack said, looking at the slides, the sledding snow, the rainbows winding through the mist and fog and glittering ice.

"I've seen worse," Bunny agreed.

It was wonderful. It was humbling. To be so welcome in this place that a winter spirit before him had tried so hard to destroy, that he was welcome to make his home there.

"Hey, wanna come sledding with me?" he asked, struck, wanting to test out his new homefield.

"What else would I wanna do now?" Bunny asked, with a chuckle.

They tore up layer after layer of freshly-laid powder under the unchanging dawn. Jack spun ice slides around the cavern, laid sledding trails, and showed Bunny the wrong side of every snowball fight. Time passed without being markable in the ice cave, but even so, Jack eventually felt the urge for wind on his face, and knew Bunny had work to get back to.

"I can't wait to come back to this place," he said, sitting on a snowhill pink with alpenglow, laughing as Bunny scratched snow out of his fur. "But you can't come back to a place unless you leave it first." He took a deep breath. "I'm going out." He took a deeper breath. "Alone."

Bunny pulled his hind leg back from his ear. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," Jack said, a little too fast. Then - "Yes. Yeah. I have my snowglobe, I have...I have my head together, and I have a home to come home to." He nodded. "It's time and I want to."

"How long're you planning to be gone?"

"I don't know," Jack said, "but - maybe half a day?"

"I'll look for you if I don't see you by then," Bunny agreed.

Jack thought of leaving home - thought of coming back to his home - thought of having his friends, his family all looking out for him. It was so good to feel comfort again, to know that no matter what happened between now and the next comforting time, he would feel it again. Bunny was still brushing melting snow out of his fur when Jack hugged him. The way Bunny hugged him back had almost become automatic, but he squeezed Jack a little tighter.

"Be careful," he said, paw still on Jack's back as Jack drew away. "Keep an eye out. If anything happens -"

"I know, I'll use the snowglobe, I'll call Jamie," Jack said, smiling Bunny's concern away. "Are you also going to tell me to wear a sweater, mom?"

Bunny snorted.

"If you need to wear a sweater, we're all in trouble," he said. "Go cause somebody some problems."

Jack floated to his ice cave's entrance. "That's a direct order," he said. "I heard it!"

"But not too many problems," Bunny called, leaping up the tunnel after him, back into the Warren.

He let Jack go on ahead, down the tunnel that lead to the surface of North America. When the last cool breeze had swept down the tunnel after Jack, he let out a long breath, exhaling relief. Finally alone with his worries abated, for a moment, Bunny crouched on the grass in the Warren and closed his eyes, just inhaling, exhaling relief.

Jack was probably fine.

There had been so much time there when it looked like he never could be again. But he was probably fine now. A few sobs overtook him for a moment. Just a few, impossible to hold back. Because the call had been too close. He had a lot of his own built-up strain to inhale and exhale out just then, but when he'd calmed his mind, and breathed enough of the warm air, and felt enough of the warm light permeating his home -

He got back to work.

He took an empty eggshell out of his bandolier. The surface was incised with the grooves he'd been carefully etching into it for weeks, the sunburst patterns and sigils more carefully thought out than anything he'd ever designed, more powerful magic than he'd ever felt the need to construct. He capped the bottom hole in the emptied shell with beeswax and a black flower petal, leaving one hole at the top open. He turned the unpainted eggshell in his paws, claws clicking slightly on the surface.

"I'm sorry."

He hadn't even begun and he felt the need to say it already, to someone who wasn't even alive to hear him.

What even happened, when a goddess died? Would she even want his apology? When humans barely even spoke her name anymore, when their name for the festival they'd begun for her sounded less like her name now, and so much more like the one he no longer needed...?

And here he was, about to use the most tangible thing left of her as a weapon.

The smell of the richest loam filled his nostrils, and he recognized that he wasn't alone in the Warren again.

"Am I early?" asked Gaia.

"I didn't know you wanted to watch," he said, quietly.

"I don't," she said. She paused. "But we gave you our support."

Eos had been the Mothers' equal, and no other was theirs. Theirs was the only permission he could have ever counted on receiving, and yet, even having it, he felt the need to justify -

"I heard it straight from the Old Man," he said. Old Man Winter had taunted him all the time they fought in the Himalayas, and he'd said so much that was horrible. Horrible things had a way of imprinting on the memory despite one's wishes, despite Tooth's work.

"I wish I'd seen all your faces, all those fluffy little fools, the moment you felt her light go out. I wish you'd been there when I pulled back that golden hair and slit that glittering throat. The light just fell out of her. I bet you would have cried! It would have been hilarious -!"

"He killed her himself." He gritted his teeth. "Before he came for this place."

The Old Man's laughter had been so triumphant. As if destroying a light that illuminated without burning was a victory, and not an unthinkable devastation -

"What did he kill her with?" Gaia asked. The question was so clinical but she had seen so much more of life and death than anything else, besides her mother.

"Carved ice, what else?" Bunny said, shrugging. "Does it matter?"

Gaia surprised him by snorting. "Yes, because that couldn't be it. No ice would have killed Eos."

"What?"

"You might as well try to knock the sun out of the sky by throwing a rock at it," Gaia said, almost patiently, with all the security of absolute certainty. "Old Man Winter could have cursed every icicle with every ounce of his power and it still would have melted as soon as it pierced her skin. He risked himself more than her by exposing himself to that light. She was the sun itself walking on the earth - nothing could endure her unshielded light except the wicks she forged in your peoples' souls. Do you understand what that means?"

She fixed him with her most meaningful gaze.

"I don't follow."

She paused, and when she spoke again, it was with real confusion. "You gave the Old Man the Oath," she said. "You were going to walk away and let Old Man Winter live. The one who nearly killed the world, killed everyone you could call your people, even killed Eos." There was real confusion in her voice. "He did all that, and you showed him mercy. But Pitch Black harms the Frost Spirit, and you want to use the Light of Eos to kill him. Why?"

"He was toothless," Bunny said. "There wasn't a need. He was under Oath, Jack had taken him down, there was no point in killing him anymore. It wouldn't have brought any of them back." He snorted. "And obviously it didn't." He paused. "Pitch, though."

"Pitch," Gaia echoed.

"He woke the old man up. He knew he was gambling the whole world and he still did it. That's –" he paused. "When the Old Man was down...there'd been enough death on his account. Just then, I didn't want there to be another."

"But you intend to kill Pitch Black now."

He ran a paw over his ear, smoothing the fur down.

"Jack took something that I thought could only bring death and sorrow and made it into something that gave life," he said. "He made something the world needed and Pitch tried to break him and remake him into something he wanted. I'll never let that happen."

The force of his sudden anger surprised even him, but Gaia just shrugged.

"I understand," she said, Pitch Black's threatened death rolling off her shoulders. "But you should have killed the Old Man. It would have been wiser. If he hadn't died by the oath, I would advise you to go and kill him now, honorable or not," she said. "I might even order you. Do you understand why?"

"Because he was just as guilty," Bunny said, shrugging. "I know. But it was Jack's fight and he'd won –"

"No. Because he never told you how Eos died," Gaia said. "He bragged about everything else, didn't he?"

Bunny paused as it hit him. The old man hadn't bragged about that – just in case.

Gaia's vines curled in tight coils as she spoke. "Nothing in the Old Man's power could have killed Eos, but all the same she is dead. It must have been something out of his power that killed her. But he didn't tell you what it was."

Maybe it was a weapon, maybe it was a ritual, but the old man knew about it, and under the Enkidu Oath, unable to use his powers for direct evil, could still have shared that power with someone else who'd like to use it on -

On me.

The old man had been saving it. An ace up his sleeve, something that could kill a living ray of sunlight – or a Guardian who still had the last of that celestial fire, enlightening his soul.

"Who knows you must not die?" Gaia asked. "Who have you told?"

"No one," he said. "No one knows. I swear. No one but you and Terra. If the kids stop believing and I have to hide -"

"You must," she insisted. "There can be no more of this -" she gestured to, well, all of him - "if the children stop believing in you. Her Enlightenment will keep you alive without power, but you must remain alive. The light that goes out if you die will -"

"I know!" It burst out of him, disrespectful, but sons, unfortunately, sometimes disrespected their mothers.

The light that goes out with you will dim the sun. All life on this world will die.

There were some things it was better not to say aloud, even in the privacy of his and the Mother's own home.

"You don't have to keep reminding me! What do you think I think about every time I remember when Pitch almost killed the others and left me powerless -"

Bunny cut off, breathing heavily. Gaia waited, with her eternity of patience.

There's something that can kill me, and take the world with it. Something I don't know about. But something someone found out about a long, long time ago.

"It's quite a mystery," he said, in a light tone he didn't feel.

"Indeed," Gaia added. "I wish she were still here," she said, a tinge of loneliness in her voice. "And you know, I think even though she was not one to fight, if she knew your frost spirit, she might even help you make this weapon."

Some guilt he hadn't yet let go of faded at that, but the new worry from Gaia's council was lodging in his heart for a long stay. Krampus had told them others who despised the Guardians were out there, tiring of hiding in the dark. He'd talked about everything they stood for, crumbling to dust.

Who was it, waiting in the dark, knowing things he didn't, ready to watch him crumble - and kill whatever else died with him?

He felt the Mother depart, and he resigned himself, lifting the eggshell.

"I am plucking a leaf that will never regrow," he acknowledged. "I don't pluck it lightly, and I will not spend it in vain."

The incantation rhymed in a language no human had ever spoken, and a fire burned in the grooves he'd carved into the shell. They seared his paws, but he gritted his teeth and kept hold. The light, the eternal, dawn-warm glow that shone from the walls, from the ground, from every leaf and flower and tree and mote of dust, that never changed or wavered - flickered horribly, darkened, dimmed.

In the center of the eggshell, a glow bloomed, grew, and he capped it fast with wax and the black petal of a hollyhock.

The wax and petal held, and the light warmed the Warren again.

No one but him could see the way it had dimmed, forever. Only slightly. But it had.

The egg, though, too bright for mortal eyes to look directly at, still called for attention. He wrapped it in black petals, then clay, then painted it the most innocuous blue that anyone had ever seen an egg painted, and put it in his bandolier next to his heart.

He fought back the urge to apologise again, thought of Jack's frost-glittering, ice-teared face, and held it back.

"You'd have loved him," he said to the diminished light. "I do."

He dashed out of the Warren to begin his search for Pitch Black.

The Nightmare King sat on his throne in the maze. His own weapons could not be easily employed against him. He knew the way in, as he knew the way out - hard to reach, but there, in his grasp, in a time that would come -

His time in the maze would end. The maze itself whispered it in his ear.

It will end. It will all end.

Something whispered it in his ear, anyway. Something that, for all his mastery of the horrors in the maze, he couldn't name.

He leaned on the arm of his throne, and waited in his fury.

The image of Jack as Pitch had found him, covered with dust and empty-eyed from the effects of the Maze, played through his mind again. The way the dust covered his blue hoodie until it was nearly a starry black.

"You know nothing of a father's love!"

He clenched his jaw and growled as he remembered all that work he'd put in, the waiting he'd done as the Maze stripped away Jack's illusions and showed him the lie that kindness without force behind it was. All that he'd done to give the boy an understanding better equipped to meet the truth of the cold, angry, entropic world they shared, and the young stupid Cossack had the gall to insult his knowledge -

"A good father knows when to let his children go!"

He had been the best kind of father. He had been the kind that did not lie to his son. And those interfering, self-important fools stole his child away.

The hollowness gnawed at him. He remembered Jack in his black armor - no, his soot-blackened hoodie -

If he closed his eyes he could see the armor he could have made for the corpse-pale boy, armor to inhabit a world of horrors in. But when he pictured Jack in it, the white-haired boy looked so thin, so young -

His hand in his pocket grasped something he didn't remember picking up - not recently, anyway, and yet, there it was -

He drew out the locket.

His fingers itched to throw it away, and yet he didn't. The question of why he had it still lurked, unanswered, at the back of his mind.

He'd felt the locket before. He knew without having to look at it what butterfly-winged traceries etched the gold. But when he tried to remember what was inside -

He hated the urge that rose up in him to open it. He hated that urge, hated the way it felt like something foreign, something outside his own will, trying to overtake his and move his own hands, take over his own body -

Pitch slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair. He hated surprises. He hated things half-known to him. If he knew the outside of the locket, he should know the inside. He should know why he itched to keep it in his pocket without having to open the cursed thing -

The thing is not the curse. The curse is not remembering.

The thought rose up in him and must have been his own. Not a whisper from some other source. It came to him in his voice, after all.

The feeling that came with it was...soothing. A fingerprint's worth of cool relief on his anger, burned away so quick that only the memory remained. The novelty of something he hadn't felt in-

"It will protect you."

"How long?"

The images faded as fast as they flashed through his mind.

Pitch had only the memory that he had seen a child, glowing with light that cast off such terrifying shadows, and had been about to answer her -

He couldn't say what he had been about to answer her any more than he could say what the child had even looked like. But the memory had carried traces of that cool relief, twisted with the agony of fear that felt so good to see in others. It softened the edges of the gnawing hollowness. It left a little less room for the fear that was intolerable when it was his, and not his to cause.

Room for something other than his fury.

He put the locket on. There was no concealing it, on its child-sized chain, under his dark robes, but with the locket on, his fingers were at rest on the arm of his throne again. The urge to open it subsided, just enough, as long as it was around his neck.

From far, far away, the Nightmare King was watched. He was watched across the border between worlds, by the only thing that glowed in the dark, swirling mass where fear, bodiless and nameless, was born, and waited -

The woman in golden armor pressed her long fingers against the veil between the worlds. She filled her lungs and shouted across the void.

"It will end," she shouted. Her shout faded to a whisper by the time it reached his ears.

The nightmares without form swirled around her. When they crossed her vision they tried to form shapes - eyes and claws growing momentarily from the black, tumorous mass, but she dismissed them as if she'd barely seen them at all.

Her golden, glittering armor protected her. They couldn't invade her mind, or change her heart. She could close her eyes, and take respite in her own private dark. But her own private dark didn't let her see her way out, distant as that hope was. And even with her eyes open, it had been so many years since the fearlings had taken a form she hadn't already seen before.

The Nightmare King's fingers loosened on the locket. The woman in golden armor drew her fingers down the window, and took in another deep breath. It had taken her so long to find even one window, and longer still to learn to control that window, to make it show her what she wanted to see.

But she'd had eons. There wasn't a lot that couldn't be accomplished in that time. Work done on that scale of time made success inevitable.

She'd grown through the ages - in her way. She'd become like the myths of the world via sheer proximity to Earth, taken on a new form like Pitch and lived well beyond the years she should have had. She'd grown and she'd grown up.

With myths, the outside often changed to reflect the inside. What was inside her had undergone...extremes through the millenia, teetering often on the brink of despair and somehow always wobbling back in the other direction. But for the last few hundred years, something had solidified. The world had changed, and in watching how it changed, how it'd grown brighter due to the Guardians, she had grown stronger. Her golden armor now gleamed, as if it was almost solid, etched with curling designs that looked like suns and moons. She had no mirror here but she wondered how alike they might have looked now if he had stayed the same, with her now armored the way he used to be.

Those centuries of learning to direct the window had shown her so much of the world that had made her wise. Wise enough to know when to change her tack.

He had kept the locket away from himself, locked in its box, for ages upon ages, but now with him keeping it close at hand...

"Open it," she wished, at the top of her lungs. "Open the locket. Open the locket. Open it. Open -"

He did not open the locket. But he toyed with it, more and more.

"I can forgive you," her howl reached him as a whisper. "I can teach you to forgive yourself."

He did not move from his place in the throne. But he did not let the locket fall from his hand, either.

In the darkness of the Fearling dimension, through the border between worlds, surrounded by nightmares without form, Rashena watched, armored in the gold of her amulet. Protected - for as long as her father loved her.

A little hope was still hope. And she still had it.

The children of south Georgia enjoyed their unexpected snow day, this late in March, of all times for Georgia to be beset with a snow day. Jack had monitored the roads for car crashes, conscious after all these years of the havoc that his fun could wreak, but all the businesses he covered with snow kept their employees home. So many parents streamed out of houses on this unexpected day off to play with their children.

Jack filled an entire park with laughter, appearing in flashes between snow hills and frost-covered trees to the children who knew his name and his legend, this far away and this long after his sister had begun to spread it. Their delight recharged his soul as much as the cold at the North Pole had. Jack was so absorbed in the fun that he even forgot to check in with the Guardians when he'd said he would, but a mini-fairy on her way to Gatlinburg found him making snow angels with a family of five brothers and two sisters and promised to pass his whereabouts to her sisters. Bunny tracked him down in Dahlonega by scent before a mini-fairy could find him, and Jack remade his plans to come home...sometime.

His family checking in on him was a whole other joy, and right up to sunset, Jack and the children were still playing, still absorbed in the glittering cold delight of his snow day. The tired children streamed off their various paths to their various homes, and after Jack helped a pair of little girls who'd wandered a bit too much back to their house, he alighted atop a lamppost to watch the sunset.

The glittering pink quiet reminded him of alpenglow in his home - his home - that he had to return to, and his eyes welled up as the buoyant joy filled him with so much that there was nowhere for it to escape but through his tears. The sun slipped below the horizon, leaving the eastern sky the deepest, clearest blue over the trees, the western brilliant with orange and coral-lined clouds. Jack watched the last of the light fade, and let the sorrow in him live right alongside his joy.

He realized that he needed to talk to North again, as he identified that sorrow and joy together, running hand in hand so deep in him that he knew -

He'd changed, added more layers, inside and out. Deep inside the fun that had once been the core of him, something had crystalized that hadn't been solid yet before.

A new Center.

North would want to mark the occasion. North would want to replace the doll he'd burned at Pitch's order with something that fit him - and his inner Joy that nothing could kill - better now.

Under the dark evening sky, the Guardian of Joy alighted on a wind that took him east. He had so many more joys to experience, and to share. He flew across the Atlantic, away from the sunset, towards the new morning.

His flight across the ocean, across continents and mountains, was cause for whooping celebration, and to think again of Molly and his mother, the sorrow they'd lived when he first crossed these oceans and continents without knowing how they suffered.

They'd been sorrowing so deeply while he was only just bewildered, leaving the first village where no one could see him, arriving in yet another, but as he'd gone from one village to another - he'd flown right into the sunrise, and been dazzled all over by the way the morning filled up the night. He hadn't even known what a morning was then. Or a sunrise.

Other people couldn't remember the first time they'd ever seen a sunrise, and he could. It had been so, so glorious -

And the list of glorious things never ended. The first time he flew across the ocean. The first mountain he climbed. The first blizzard that hurled him through the air lighter than a bird, freer than any boy who had ever lived, and he had thrown himself with so much glee into each of these wonderful things. He had loved the freedom of his power without even having to remember a time when he couldn't fly, a time when cold hurt, a time when he could only dream of mountains and oceans and a life skyborne with so little hope that he would ever, ever see them.

Molly and his mother would have had their own mingled sorrow and joy if they'd known. All that he was seeing, all that he was doing, all that delighted and thrilled him, they would have been glad of - even as they missed him.

The wind carried him over the Himalayas and into the sunrise, as brilliant and dazzling all these centuries since the first time he remembered seeing it.

Jack alighted on a mountain peak to watch the day fill up the sky,

Beneath the pain and sorrow that he'd wandered through in the Maze, beneath everything that had been done to him, he still had everything he had ever done. He still had the sunrises he'd flown into. He had pain and suffering alongside it now - like looking at himself through a new lens -

But that was okay.

This is who I am now, he thought, as the cold winter wind filled him once again with his own element. Myself, but...a little more.

Maybe some of the "more" was pain, but there were other things besides.

He thought of the loved ones he had to see again. He thought of the loved ones he'd had, who he would never forget now, no matter how long he lived on after they did.

And when the dawn had filled the sky with glorious light and color, the boy who'd found fear flew west, to watch the day break all over again.

Authors' Notes

Author's note from Juliet:

We spent a lot of time in this series exploring pain, grief, and recovery, subjects personal and important to all of us. The amount of reviews we've gotten from people who were moved by those themes affirmed a lot of what we set out to do when writing The Boy Who Found Fear at Last. I want to thank everyone who let us know when we achieved our goal of speaking meaningfully to pain.

Between the time we finished the 9th and 10th chapter of this story, my nephew drowned in a boating accident. The death of someone I still think of as a child I love hurt in ways I didn't predict. A lot of that pain made it into this chapter. I didn't want to have as much to say regarding the death of a beloved relative as I did, but having a place in a story to put those feelings helped me process it. If some of the pain I've written feels familiar to you, I hope it's at least comforting to feel it with someone else.

Grief changes you in unexpected ways. Sometimes it's inevitable to be changed by pain. But to be changed is not to be diminished, and needing help is the most natural consequence of pain, physical or emotional or otherwise.

All of the dark times that Kieran and I went through taught us to reach for our loved ones in particular, and to reach out in general. If you're struggling, please reach out. If you are in pain, attend to yourself as you would attend to a loved one feeling whatever it is you feel, and ask for help. If you are taking risks, re-examine them. You are irreplaceable and precious. The world would be diminished without you in it.

I'm still grieving someone irreplaceable and precious, so this is a present truth in my mind.

Beyond the events of this season, writing The Guardian of Screwing Up series improved my life in a lot of ways I didn't expect, and I would not have continued writing it if our readers hadn't given us so much reason to keep on. The Frost Spirit and the Honey Tree was the first full story I was ever involved in completing. The King of Cold Mountain reinforced my confidence that I could finish writing a whole book, and shortly after it was done, I completed the first draft of an original novel.

Kieran and I are currently cowriting an original story, and I am querying agents for the 2 YA scifi and fantasy books I've written. We hope you'll consider following us into our original writing, and that our original stories will be able to inspire the same satisfaction that you've been kind enough to let us know you felt in reviews. To keep up with our writing, you can follow us both on tumblr, where she's guardianofscrewingup and I'm themightyglamazon. Kaylin is also on tumblr as tumbleboutit.

While you can probably still see the foreshadowing of more stories set in this universe, unfortunately it's unlikely we're going to write anymore just given that we're both trying to get our original stuff out there in the world and do our day jobs. I hope the questions we've left unanswered don't bother our readers too much. I've had a great time exploring the world of the Guardians, and part of me doesn't want to shut the door on getting around to some of those answers.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for reviewing. My life is richer for having shared this story with you, and I mean that in the sincerest, corniest way possible.

Author's Note from Kieran (aka Kira):

Back when we first wrote this story, it was during the height of RotG's popularity. By now, understandably, things have diminished to a trickle. If you're one of the few that have peeked in, or checked back in, thanks for sticking with us. Sorry it took us the better part of a decade bringing this thing to a wrap.

Seconding a lot of what Juliet said. Over the years we've had a lot of people send asks or pp or review the fics we wrote and say how they - especially TBWFFAL - spoke to them in a time of pain, or when they were trying to help a loved one deal with some kind of pain or grief. I started the series right after I moved away from home, where there was a lot of abuse happening to my mother, me, and my sibs at the hands of my father.

Where learning to process and move on from grief over a sudden loss was the sentiment Juliet worked into the story, moving on from the toxicity of an abuser was what I was drawing from.. I believe there are many types of grief, one type is loss of a loved one or loss of a potential future with them, but another is grief over lost self. Sometimes after trauma you must grieve your old self, who will never exist again. Or you have to grieve for the person you could've been without trauma, who will never come to be. Sometimes those forms of grief might be the person grieving themselves, but other times, it's loved ones wishing they could get their old loved one "back."

But certain traumas mean they cannot be the person they were, or cannot be the person they and others might have hoped they'd become. There are instead the realities of what they are and what they can be post-trauma. Anything they become in the future can be - must be - built on that. Even so, there still is room for healing and a future in time, as someone who can still have joy in the world and who can still bring joy to the world. It just may be a different future, and a different self, than they would have otherwise been. Grief over this lost self is worth a few tears, but it must not be treated as if it's the end.

These things: abuse, grief over loss, grief over loss of self, are all things we want to write meaningful things about in our original writing. To sometimes be told "your writing helped me through a dark time" or "this story helped me navigate helping a friend with their dark time" is one of the most meaningful things you can hear about your writing and striking those notes with just a fanfic definitely encouraged us to try to do it in our original writing.

To all the readers who let us know we made you feel things, thanks for the encouragement. It nudged us along on our path towards authordom. In the time since GOSU started, I've gotten my masters in writing and have a novella and most of a book finished that just need some last bits of work. Juliet is done writing several books. Juliet and I cowriting a book. Kaylin, our other cowriter (who didn't join us much for TBWFFAL but was a huge participant in writing some of other stories in the GOSU series like King of Cold Mountain) and I are writing a book about supervillain kids in a supervillain school that deals heavily with similar themes of grief, abuse, struggles with sense of self, and loss. This may just be a fic series but the intensity of the feedback we got from it definitely launched us forward towards authorly futures.

Like Juliet, I wish we could finish the whole series but 8 years is a very long time, especially when it's bridging the distance between your mid twenties to your early thirties. Having the energy to perform Normal Adult Life with a full time job, and to finish a book series, is hard enough when it's 1 or 2 original series.

Basically, I'm old now and I get tired. Juliet and Kaylin would protest they're only a tiny bit younger but I'm the salty one and containing this much salt just hastens mummification. Regardless, there's unfortunately not enough time in the day.

Plus, with all the fans of this series being scattered across the four winds to other fandoms in that time, it seems far better to try creating new things they might someday love, too. But those of you that stuck with it, thanks for joining us on the ride. You were always a joy to write for. With our original writing, maybe in time we'll be lucky enough to see some of you again.