Walk in the shadows

Fear no death, all alone
Child, forget your memories
Have no conflict, hunger, please
Nor a conquest; I will atone

Leave your worries behind
The wants of the world, you'll find,
Only deliver more strife;
Needless is this strange second life
Child, I'm just trying to be kind

- "The Fourth Horseman"

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
- Oscar Wilde

The Bogeyman had been furious with all of existence when Jack came to him, eyes wide with fright. He had seen a pair of spirits in the forest. He described the palest horse that he had ever seen, the man atop it with a beguiling smile on his face. He had extended a hand to Jack, inviting him to ride with him. Jack had pulled away, his body stiff in apprehension. Terror was still radiating off of the frost sprite, tempering itself when Pitch held him close. The terror was still enough to infuriate him, awakening a bloodlust against those who had hurt his love.

The rider had stepped off his beast and run forward, slamming Jack against a tree trunk. He raised a hand - skeletal, save for the thin, translucent skin and visible, black veins on the appendage - to Jack's face and the other to his side. When he began to touch his face, Jack felt pain flare up at the contact points, making him cry out. The rider pulled away, his fingers having traces of blood on them. He seemed surprised.

"I'm just trying to help, Deva Pras-Ada."

"Who are you?" Jack was so quiet, like a midnight in the forest.

"I am Niry-A-Na." He pressed both hands now to Jack's torso and the pain came over Jack's torso. He raised his hands to Niry-A-Na's shoulders, trying to push him away. "Let me help, Pras-Ada."

"S-Stop... Hurts..."

"Kirana took you from my grasp," the spirit said, as though it was all the explanation that he needed to present. "That was not supposed to happen. I can give you this at least."

Jack heard a branch snap and he shivered in horror as another rider appeared. A woman, her skin like sunlight, stepped off of her white horse. A bow hung at her side, a quiver slung on her back.

"Jaya-Iti, come please," Niry-A-Na said. "Help me here."

"Foolish boy," Jaya-Iti chided, Jack trying to move away as she stepped towards him. "Shush. I shall conquer Kirana's devilry and you shall begin again."

She touched his face, holding his head between her warm, healthy hands, Niry-A-Na's hands pressing harder into his torso. Jack felt dizzy and nauseous, closing his eyes as he resisted the urge to vomit. His chest was burning, his body shaking to try and keep its cold inside.

"Let your Hima go, little one. Just let it go." His eyes opened at Jaya-Iti's words and he saw his sister, his mother, and even his father, tears in their warm, brown eyes. He wanted to go to them, wipe their tears...

Jack's vision went black and when he awoke, he found himself alone in the snow, the Wind wailing like her banshee sisters.

Pitch shushed Jack as he cried, holding him as he trembled violently.

"It's too warm here in the lair for you." He wrapped them both in shadows and made them both land in a cave in Antarctica. He laid Jack on the ice, surprised when Jack reaches up a hand to trace his lips, his tears making his eyes sparkle in the scarce light that the shadows let in.

"Not warm, just..." Jack leaned up to press a kiss to his lips. "Their hands were on my face and Niry-A-Na's hands... on my torso... make me forget it, please. I can't-" The terror cut him off again and Pitch recognized it.

The terror of Death.

"Ssh... Jack." He pressed a kiss to the frost spirit's lips, not taken aback when Jack just pressed harder, desperate. Pitch slipped the sweater off of him, grimacing at the site of bruises that made possessiveness run through him. He kissed and bit at each bruise, whispering. "I'll make their touch go away."

Their passion was short, Pitch only bringing Jack to orgasm, letting the pleasure take precedence over the fear in his heart. As Jack relaxed from the high, Pitch pressed his lips to his brow and then stood.

"Pitch?" Jack's voice was like a child's, curious, innocent.

"I'm going to find out more about these spirits. Niry-A-Na and Jaya-Iti, yes?"

"You didn't see it!" His terror was not as strong this time, his body finally winding down and drawing its master to rest.

"Wait here." Pitch saw Jack nod in submission, lay down more comfortably on the floor, and then go to sleep. He took the shadows with him.

Jack awoke to Toothiana pressing a cool cloth to his face, the rest of his body covered with a thick blanket, one that North had made himself. She said a warm "good morning" and told him about how Bunny found him in Antarctica, bleeding from bite marks and looking so, so much paler than normal.

"That... could just be from the bruises, Tooth..." Jack raised a hand to his face, wiping away some of the water from the cloth from his face. He inhaled deeply as it froze over his open bite marks, making them sting.

"Jack, why didn't you tell us that Pitch was hurting you?"

Fire ran through his body, his muscles ready to attack.

"Who said that it was Pitch?" Tooth glared at him.

"Bunny heard Pitch telling you to stay there, that you were unconscious and so, so hurt. Jack, I know you asked Pitch for help and you thought he was changing, but-" Jack pulled away from her and stood from the bed, pushing the thick cover aside. His back was hurting and his heart hurt, because they'd mistaken his bruises and small signs of malaise for pain and injury, rather than Pitch's possessive marks on him and being thrust a bit too hard against the wall by...

The monsters that would haunt his nightmares. The Pains, he remembered his mother calling them.

He looked for his sweater, spotting it on a shelf, and hastily moved to put it on.

"Jack!" Tooth cried out, wincing as he hissed in pain at the bruises. "Stay here! I don't know what you're planning but-"

Jack turned on her.

"Why don't you trust me?!" he cried. "I'm not doing anything wrong! I haven't ruined anything on purpose since that Easter years ago!" His voice was cracking and his chest felt as though a brick of lead was inside of it. His body was aching. He remembered getting a fever as a child, his fever that made them leave the village he had been born in and make their way to the forest, settling near a pond... His back had hurt then what his entire body was feeling now, and it was increased one-hundred fold.

He tilted over, making contact with the floor. Jack saw Tooth run over to him, North coming through the door with a sick bowl that he had thought the boy would need. Jack reached out to North. North set it on the floor in front of Jack, rubbing his back as Jack pushed himself up and vomited into it. Black filled the bowl, the acrid taste of acid tainting his mouth.

"Jack, what is going on?" North asked, more to the air, as the youngest Guardian emptied his stomach into the bowl.

Pitch came back to an empty cave, no trace of his lover in sight...

Pitch looked around, slightly smiling at the possibility that perhaps his Jack was feeling better and moving. However, when he saw the springtime flower sprouting from the cold ground, he knew that the Pooka had been here... and had taken his love away.

His chest filled with an agonizing fury. He had found very little on the riders, only that they "were the Pains of Humanity" as some of the forest fey had said, pride at their knowledge filling their bodies. He comes back to find Jack taken away. He couldn't lose anything else. He wouldn't lose anyone else.

When Jack had calmed down, his stomach finally settled, he noticed that the building was not as warm as before. He started to shiver, wanting the familiar coolness to return.

"Jack." He looked up to see Bunnymund and Sandy standing in the doorway. Sandy came forward, the golden man pressing a hand to Jack's forehead. A bit of sand made its way to his eyes and he felt himself relax a bit.

The Pooka stayed back for a while, shocked at Jack's illness. He looked like children from the colonies, children who had to watch their homes burn to keep the plague from spreading.

"B-Bunny?" The Sandman stepped away as Jack struggled to stand to address the Pooka, pale hands gripping tightly to North's arms. The star-coloured man spotted blood at the corners of Jack's eyes and feared that his friend may be moving further and further from them. "What… doing there?"

"Your scent never goes to the South. Winter is taken care of by other spirits in the South…"

"Pitch was… helping…" Jack closed his eyes at the sudden wave of nausea and Bunny's slight outburst.

"You're bleeding, Jack. You're vomiting blood, from what Tooth's told me." He quieted at Jack's tears, red with the blood that mixed in with them.

"I've had… before. I'll be… fine." Jack clutched his stomach, a whimper escaping him.

"Was it Pitch, Jack?" North's voice was so much like his father's. Why was everything so… cold?

"What was…" He closed his eyes and-

"Jack! Stay awake!"

"... scared..." Jack opened his eyes one last time and saw Jaya-Iti and Niry-A-Na standing behind Bunnymund. They followed him as the Pooka came closer, the Guardians making no indication of noticing them. Jack whimpered in pain, blood still coming down his face.

Niry-A-Na extended a hand to him.

Come, Pras-Ada... Come home.

Jack did not see the skeletal man any-more.

"Papa..." he uttered, barely a whisper, extending out a hand to Bunny's side and reaching out, for some kind of salvation.

Pitch emerged from a shadow on one of the production floors of the Workshop. He had gone through the Warren and its tunnels, had gone in the shadows of Punjam Hy-Loo... The last place to search was North's workshop. The Island of Sleepy Sands wouldn't be a place for the Guardians to take Jack - too warm.

Jack's room was cool, like how Pitch knew the boy liked it. It was nice and dark. The scent of blood made its way to Pitch's nose and he balked at its smell, hoping to anyone that could hear him - the healing spirits in the West or the East, even those of his home world! - that Jack hadn't been the one hurting.

The Moon was trying to shine through the clouds and windows, though very few moonbeams were actually making it through. Pitch looked up at the Man in the Moon and wondered how he could have let harm, such terrible harm, come to hiss unique creation. Jack had been the only one that he had had direct action in creating, the other Guardians having their abilities long before they were aware of the Månen tsar. As he gazed up, he saw a moonbeam come through and take the shape of a man, a small man with a kind and warm expression.

"Pitchiner," the glowing, mist-formed man said, his voice like the twinkling of bells.

"Man in the Moon."

"Please," the moon man said. "Call me Kiran. Others call me by other titles, but you may call me thus." He made his way to Jack's bed and his glowing form showed how badly Jack was looking. His face no longer had the faintest of pinks gracing it, his face more like that of a cadaver's. His breathing was shallow and his face looked pained, even in unconsciousness.

"Why did you leave him alone? Why are you here now?" Pitch asked, wanting to ask what Jack never could before.

"Much energy is needed to revive someone from the dead, to pull him away from what Destiny has chosen for him." Kiran wiped at Jack's face, seeing blood stains at the corner of the frost spirits eyes. "He's ill, a human illness having taken root."

"He isn't human any-more..." Pitch muttered. "Or perhaps-"

A sound came from the outside of the room. Kiran stepped away from Jack.

"I will watch over him from above. Please tell him that I regret my inability to be with him. All I can do now is wait for the energy to communicate with him to return to me." Pitch would have struck the moon man if he had truly thought that it would help, but he remembered that this man, this orphaned creature, was young compared to him - orphaned by Pitch himself! - and only had so much power of belief at his disposal.

"I will, Kiran."

The moonbeam mist disappeared and Pitch hissed as light came in from the hallway, the Guardians standing in the doorway.

He lunged at Jack's frail form and let the shadows engulf them, not able to stop their teleportation as the last Pooka grabbed at his coat.

Jack opened his eyes, surprised that he was outside and in the snow. Hadn't he been with his family before?

He saw a Night Mare standing in front of him, her stance protective, like his mother's when a wolf had gotten onto their land. She had her teeth bared, looking menacing. As he pushed himself up, Jack could see Pitch swinging his scythe at one of the Guardians... Bunny. The Workshop was a faint beam of light in the distance.

"What's going on?" he whispered to the Wind, listening to her soft echoes of how Bunny had found him in the cave and had assumed the worst. This is what her brother, the Southern Wind, had said; the Wind also began relaying information of her own, of how the Guardians were trying to take care of him, but they kept saying that Pitch was the one that hurt him, the reason he vomited blood and was in such pain.

The Night Mare protested him moving up to kneel in the snow, but Jack knew he had stop the fight going on in front of him, only yards away.

"Pitch!" His call made him cough, blood escaping his lips and decorating the corners of his lips. The Bogeyman turned around and Bunnymund saw his chance, jumped on the shadow man and tackling him to the ground.

"Stay away from us, from Jack!" A boomerang was raised high and the Wind blew with all her might, sending it out of Bunnymund's grasp. Pitch pushed the Pooka away and chuckled darkly.

"I have no quarrel with you this time, rabbit. I'm only here for Jack," Pitch explained. He began to walk towards Jack, who smiled up at him and reached out pale arms to his lover.

"Pitch..."

"It's all right, Jack." Pitch knelt, his legs becoming cold from the snow and frost, and embraced Jack tightly.

"Niry-A-Na-"

Pitch hushed him, combing his fingers through the other's white, silky hair. "We'll find out what this is all about... The Man in the Moon came to see you."

Jack shivered in his grasp.

"What did he say?"

"He is sorry for not coming to see you. It took too much energy to bring you back to life and he was left without means of communication." Pitch felt Jack curl closer against him. "Now all he can do is wait to grow stronger, and to talk to you."

Jack felt heat in his throat, sadness in this throat. "He didn't want to leave me alone?"

"No, Jack," Pitch whispered. "He didn't."

Pitch paid no mind to Jack's gasp, thinking that it was his sobbing at the discovery that his Creator, his father,

did love him. The soft crunching of footsteps on the snow behind him were ignored by Pitch.

It was only when Jack used his remaining strength to turn them around and when he heard his Night Mare scream in rage and fear and despair, did Pitch realise that Bunnymund had gotten up and was coming over slowly, an old blade in his paw. Jack had noticed and had taken the blade himself, the metal buried to its hilt. Pitch looked up at Bunnymund, whose green eyes were filled with horror - a feeling that Pitch felt that he deserved, but not at this cost - but were soon filled with rage.

"You throw your lot with him, Jack?"

Jack, resting his head on Pitch's shoulder, nodded weakly. Blood escaped his mouth and his breathing was raspy. "Yes, Bunny... I lo-"

Silence filled the air, the Wind as silent as her master.

"Jack?" Pitch whispered softly, inquiring. He raised Jack's face to his.

Blue eyes gazed at nothing.

The Bogeyman raised his fingers, lowering Jack's eyelids. He laid Jack in the snow and raised himself to look at Bunnymund.

"Did he really deserve this, rabbit?" The Pooka growled at him. Tears were at the corners of the Pooka's eyes.

"You didn't deserve him."

"I don't. Neither do you." Whether he meant the Pooka himself or the Guardians as a whole, Pitch couldn't answer that to himself. He felt rage and terror and spite and his soul was burning.

He was all alone again.

As Pitch let the shadows grow around him, claws appearing where there had only been fingers before, fangs where teeth had always resided, Bunnymund readied his knives again.

In the distance, behind an evergreen tree, Niry-A-Na stood smiling.

"Looks like I have more work to do," he chuckled. He looked up at the moon. "This is what happens when you interfere, Kirana."

The moonbeams that made their way to Earth for the rest of that night did their work mournfully, regretting their kindred spirit's death.

Devany: Hi, guys. I just wanted to thank those who are reading the series "Lark and Nightingale" and I would just like to ask for reviews. I really would appreciate any feedback and criticism (positive and negative). It would really help me grow as a writer and it could help with the 7th part of the series onward.

Thank you again!