A/N: The companion piece to 'The Monsters Inside Us: Aster'. I've had it written for a million years, but I haven't been happy enough with it to post it. Still aren't but YOLO (that was ironic, okay?). There may be more in the future, depending on my inspiration.

Anyway, enjoy.

Pitch Black is all sharp edges and grating everything. He pushes and pulls and twists and does everything he can to make you break so he can find out how you work and put you together again but in all the wrong ways –malformed, dysfunctional; abnormal. He is darkness and hopelessness and fear and hate all rolled into one, and no one, spirit or human or anything in between, can hope to stay to close to him, because it is instinctual to shield yourself from some who knows every single one of your worst, most private fears with less than a glance, instinctual to fear someone who can make all of that come to life for your own private show.
Pitch Black is fear, but he is also winter.
He is ice: sharp angles and cold, hard edges, smooth and biting and drawing blood.
He is a snowstorm: darkness like night, blurry chaos and confusion and hopelessness like feeling yourself slowly freeze to death.
He is snow: soft and slow and harmless and building up until he is hard and fast and dangerous and looking at him hurts, let alone touching him or being anywhere near him.
He creates and destroys, everything in his path – food, happiness, health, life.

And Jack can't hate him.

To defeat an enemy you must first love them like you love yourself, and he destroyed Pitch. Jack destroyed Pitch because he understands him more than he wants to admit and, somewhere deep down and a dark corner of his soul, loves him for it.
Because Pitch Black is winter, and it's like looking into a mirror. No matter how much he wants to – and god does he want to – somehow Jack cannot make himself hate the Bogeyman. It would be like hating himself; and it's really too late for that because just as Pitch already hates himself, abhors the way he is a monster, so does Jack.

Jack understands.

He gets the way the Bogeyman long ago gave up the charade of pretending not to be a monster, because he wasn't fooling anyone – least of all himself. He recognises the loneliness he courts like a lover amidst the shadows that perpetually drape him. Other spirits flinch away from him simply because of who he is.

It's a mirror, a perfect parallel.

Pitch is fear.
Fear is winter.

Jack cannot hate Pitch Black, because sometimes it's hard to remember that he isn't Pitch.