The Once and Future Kings, a rise of the guardians fanfic

Welcome to a fanfiction that I am afraid to admit is somewhat darker and more serious than the original movie, that includes a weird pairing and attempts to make Pitch the Nightmare King tug at your heartstrings by the end. Are you sure you want to continue? ...Okay.

I have much to say about this story (first and foremost is I'M SORRY MY NARUTO READERS, MY LOVE FOR THIS MOVIE IS SO POWERFUL), but I will keep most of my comments at the bottom so you may read them afterwards, under the assumption that if you like it so far, you will want to know what I have to say about it and have planned for it.

For now, I have but a little to prepare you before reading: my aim here was to create something of a slash story that builds off of how Pitch Black and Jack Frost met a few centuries in the past, and became friends. Good friends. "Bros", if you will. I wanted them to have occasionally hilarious conversations as good friends will, to say meaningful things to each other that the other will treasure and not forget. And cause a little chaos together. And things…will…escalate from there. Because I adore this pairing and…I adore fluff.

But I also adore bloodbaths, when they properly enhance a story. And one of those is coming.

If you can bear my description-heavy and occasionally long-winded writing, I do hope to, as a friend of mine says, see you at the bottom. Happy reading to you!

Recall: the year is 1860. Charles Dickens is alive and writing. Cameras have just recently been invented. Laura Ingalls Wilder will soon be born. And speech/thought patterns are more formal and elegant than they are in 2012. What a perfect excuse for me to write description-heavy ;)

When you are told the story of something black and something white

And how they clashed

Then you know just how it will end.

—Sörker Sahming-en

…

The First Day

From the beginning, The Horses bowed to him. Praised him. From the first day he appeared, he took up the office of being the creator of all ugliness that Man would dream of at night. In the first, stumbling days of his existence—maybe at the start of the current millennia—he called himself Dreamweaver, because that was his only talent and use in the wasteland he found himself in.

When he discovered the true breadth of his power and how it made the far-off mortals (later, just the Earthlings) tremble at the mention of him, made them too scared to even look him in his face, he decided to style himself Nightmare King. The name stuck.

He fashioned monsters out of shadows and smoke and shade, turned them solid and living, and they became his willing and tireless army. And at all times, he occupied himself and them by designing and drawing the nightmares of humankind, and then delivering them in invisible packages to defenseless brains. Every night—every moment, really, as it was always night somewhere on Earth—he could watch his crafts come to life, and loved it. He watched the people shoot upwards in their beds, or fear to fall asleep again, or wander for days with the memory of his work pulsing like an unclean wound in their heads.

That was acknowledgement, he thought all the time, through the Black Plague, through the overgrowth of culture in the glowing eastern countries, through the discovery of the wild Americas. He deserved that. He grew to think that, though he desired relatively little outside his scope of fear-consumption and creation, there was still next to nothing he didn't deserve to have if he happened to long for it.

Next to nothing.

Another Day

There was a child, in that huge country of war and snows in the East—"Rasia", maybe; sometimes he just didn't care to remember the names—in the most secure and luxurious of houses in the town. His father set guards outside the home every night and the villagers paid him and his money great respect. He himself loved the humans' idea of money, for how easy it was to slip past and sneer at. The man's riches meant couldn't shield him or his child from the dream they now shared tonight, fed by the terror they both secretly carried every day. He had hand-made this nightmare with thick, black threads just for them.

The father and his son simultaneously saw in their minds screaming pictures of the townspeople beating at their doors, and waving flaming sticks outside their windows. In the dream, the people were carrying the leash of a furred monster with teeth the size of a man's leg. They and their monster screamed and swore to kill the man tonight, and rip his limbs from him and throw his son into a fire and more. "Mayor Yakulov, do you hear us? Open your damned doors now! Now! We'll skewer you and kill you, you son of a bitch, your liar!"

The king grinned.

A hundred million dreams floated across the collective conscious of humans right now, but this one, he focused on and the others drifted in their operations without his notice. He watched this dream wide-eyed and recognized every bit: he'd weaved the design of the house and planted in it curling shadows and weak, weak doors that just couldn't help but yield to the enraged villagers outside it. He'd drawn the bearlike beast that would eat the child's head and drop the body into a fire, and nodded with such satisfaction—

The image disappeared into smoke. Gone. The dream, ended, and the King sat up in shock, curling his lip. The child and his father had both woken up at the same moment. They weren't even halfway to the gruesome ending! Why? What woke them?

With a flip of his hand and one finger—which he shouldn't need to do; why did this species half the time not function as they should!—he conjured a new image, of the child out-of-dream, in real life again. Behind him, one of the Two Horses walked on formless black hooves down the long corridor to his workplace here and waited for his attention. The king ignored him in favor of watching the child sit up in his wide, warm bed and lean towards the window on his right, looking out over the town just barely down the hill. He scrambled out of the bed, hooking a blanket on his ankle and dragging it to the floor, and staring. Staring. The father was doing the same just down the hall from his boy. It all meant this was just a waste of his time, then…no. Outside—

There was someone outside. On the rooftops. Kicking snow piles off the shingles, laughing and swinging a big stick. Pitch, the king, leaned a little closer and focused his sight more, until the figure was in full view. He knew it on sight: the winter spirit. He hadn't sighted the boy in a close to a decade, the longest interval yet by far, he realized, and so he looked very closely.

The winter spirit was and had always been a boy who looked a few years off from full growth, his body not much fuller than a twig and hair silvery-white like the cold wind. Pitch watched him in silence, wondering a little. Sometimes he saw the youth flitting in an out of areas where he himself happened to be watching a human's nightmare just like this, or occasionally as his nightmare-spying eyes flew over a land to a new destination, they spotted him exploring or romping on a corner of land that was too high or distant for man to reach. On these occasions he disappeared (or Pitch had to look away to tend to something else) in minutes or even seconds, so he rarely got a very good look. And it had been over a century since the boy's first—Jack Frost's, he ought to say—appearance. But now, with his favored dream destroyed, he thought he might as well look.

This curious thing, Jack Frost, had stopped on a dangerous slope of a high roof and stood looking around at the town with a smile that bled mischievous joy. He wore a dark tunic with a small tie on the chest, which seemed to be a change, though it was still trimmed with frosty growth around the collar and sleeve edges. And he had the same tan trousers on lanky legs and shoeless feet that he'd had for a hundred years. Not to mention he carried his oak staff still. The curved head pointed towards the sky and his hand was around its middle like he was a wise sage and not a wolfish brat causing silly mayhem. He turned around to view the other half of the town, and Pitch saw his face. A handsome face like few humans had, with so much smile and snow-smoothed skin as to make the vainer humans boil with envy. Pitch observed his hair, such a strange color, and now moving slightly with the aid of a nighttime breeze as he leaned more weight on another leg to feel it more. The boy was handsome. It only added to the image and idea of him. So very much.

It occurred to him though, that the majority of Jack Frost's "image" amounted to constant wandering and mischief, and still that was dwarfed by how it all went unnoticed. Jack suffered the fate of invisibility to both children and the grown adults and, as far as he'd seen, always had. Once, he had thrown a glass vase at a man—apparently so the man would look at him; Frost also apparently suffered occasional tantrums—but even that had passed through the man's head and the crash unregistered by observers for over a minute. It was a critically, strangely, mature thing about him: for all his annoying and pointless behavior, he understood isolation. Pitch had been curious of that hidden part of the boy, intensely or sometimes absently, for some amount of decades.

"I beg for your attention…" said the Horse behind him. Pitch rolled his eyes up in their black sockets and turned away from the grinning spirit.

"You must have something awfully important to disturb me this time of night." He said, though without real conviction. The Two Horses would freely address him by name. They were his oldest creations—the largest ones, with iron pounded into their hooves—and his favorites. They had little to fear from him.

This one was Skein, he thought. Skein and the other one looked perfectly alike and were made of the same substance, so there was only their style of speech to tell them apart by. Possible-Skein danced on his hooves for a moment like he meant to charge or even flee. "My seeking bats brought me some ugly news just now, Pitch: your recent favored dream, the one you were so fond of for the mayor's son in Moscow, it's been broken and the child does not remember it at all! And you'll never guess what's responsible for it!"

"The winter spirit, I know."

"…You do?"

"I can't exactly ignore his damned yelling and hopping all over things. He made a little noise and swept that nightmare out of existence just a minute ago. He's just there." He turned back to the viewing sphere he had summoned for the viewing of that excellent nightmare. The Horse stepped up behind him and looked around him into the sphere he'd summoned, where the incarnation of all winter was still standing proudly on his rooftop. Skein took one look and cocked his head rather dramatically. His mane of smoke fell down the left side of his neck.

"Strange little thing, he is." Skein muttered through his thick teeth. "Such a powerful conjurer of storms! But why? Why should there exist an immortal one like you whose only purpose is to trip up the others with his foolishness?"

"His purpose is to bring cold, and he does that well enough. More than well enough." He paused. "A 'powerful conjurer of storms' is right."

Skein looked up, and his goldish eyes flashed obscenely. "You could kill him, you know. It would be harder than it was with the Summer sprite, but it could be done." Remembering that woman made him laugh a little. (Her battle tactics had gone from shooting arrowshot-accurate fire missiles to shivering and bleeding in a pile of timber, insisting she was still strong and could burn him up any second. But she had looked awful, and he had won.)

"None can match up to your powers, not her and not this one. And then his annoyances would be gone! Finally!"

"Why would I kill him? He doesn't interfere with my work. He's just annoying."

"Pitch, he just now—"

"He doesn't usually." Pitch corrected himself. "And more importantly, I'm in no mood to waste energies hunting this brat down. The god knows he'd be elusive and quick and the distraction would cost me more time than I feel like wasting. Leave him be."

His loyal Horse bowed his head deep, swinging the gold bulbs of his eyes down and then wildly up. It looked like the movement of fireflies. Pitch had always liked it. "Then…I will be on my way. I will deliver these newest nightmares to the American south, and be back in one turn of the sun." Pitch recalled that name. It was an area of the earth whose consciousness was all caught up in slavery and morality at the moment, nearly to the point of war. He suspected the dreams Skein was delivering there would be filled with images of tyrannical masters, nooses and crowds begging for a tortured victim. The more unique ones would add touches of the devil or their parents. That wild country had some class, didn't it.

Skein turned around and trotted out much more gaily than he had come in. Pitch took a final look at his viewing sphere, and though it was fading, he was sure that Jack Frost was no longer on that or any nearby rooftop, nor in any of the streets he could immediately see. He didn't care to send the sphere looking for him, but he did wonder where the boy went. Some other street, some other town, probably, to walk on everyone's roof and kick snow on more unsuspecting heads, and throw snowstorms on them with one sporting swing of his staff. It made him grin to think of it: the pointless damage, and the youth's work, unlike himself, gawked at among the humans as they realized the killing cold was finally here.

Such a powerful conjurer of storms, Skein said. And he was struck again by how correct that was. Jack Frost lived his life romping like a wolf pup and carried powers in him that were strong and heavy as a dragon. It was not the juxtaposition he considered now, but just the power itself: the huge winds and sheets of snow he brought. He overwhelmed and buried things, turned entire landscapes to his own white kingdoms.

Jack Frost, his storms and wind and ice, were powerful. It would be so unwise to underestimate him, only to be buried under five tons of snow if he decided to have an adolescent's temper tantrum. Pitch thought about that for a long time.

He thought briefly of Skein's proposal that he eliminate this spirit the same as he had done with the spirit of summer, ninety-four years ago now. He knew he didn't want to, and so the trail of thoughts veered away from that. His thoughts veered somewhere else entirely.

Pitch gave up on pursuing the nightmare made for the mayoral pair, and instead transported himself to a town some hours away from that one. He walked through the streets tossing thoughts of war here, dreams of drowning there, and pulled his thoughts yet even further away from Skein's idea of killing Jack Frost.

He thought of meeting him. And he thought quietly, succinctly and with his eyes darting here and there, as though there was a thing around that would hear him and hiss at him. Hidden under shadow-coats, Pitch had ideas of meeting the wanderer, standing face-to-face —shocking the life out of him, probably, ah-ha—and speaking to him. What would come of that? What? Something, he thought. Later, he would summon Skein and send him on a search for Frost. If he asked why, then he'd get a length of red rope tied around his mouth. Or have his mouth wholly erased.

For many hours, he walked in streets of Russian towns delivering the same ingredients of war and drowning. Townsfolk for a hundred miles around accredited their oddly similar dreams to the work of fairies, or devils.

The Meeting Day

666

Skein was told to search—nodded heartily to the command and did not question—but returned to the lair every few days with not a trace of their target's trail each time. This lasted for five weeks. And they were eventful, annoying weeks.

He found a man on the southernmost tip of Africa who feared the creatures of the deep, and so Pitch had the most delightful fun drawing up probably this decade's best dream, with the most creative and slimy dream-sea creatures that would walk on land, knock on his door, and ask to be invited in for dinner. Some of the horses bowed to him for sheer creativity on that piece and he accepted all of that praise.

Fifty of his lesser horses fell ill from a disease of unknown origin, and just after he had recycled their bodies into fresh shade, the Fairy appeared in his lair. Why she was there, he almost didn't care about, especially since she was definitely interrupting him. He almost shot her in the torso with a solid bolt of black before she started talking.

She announced was making a worldwide trip to all the immortals she knew of and passing on news that the thunder spirit in the northern islands—Norway, Finland, one of those upper, gross fish-eating places—had been reborn. His human form had been struck down somehow and now he was a golden lion. The Fairy delivered this news so every immortal would know the new spirit on sight.

She called his own work demonic as usual, and left in a hurry. Pitch growled and sent a grey serpent to chase her part of the way up the surface, and the sound of her hitting the walls and clattering against the hanging lamps made him laugh uproariously.

But these were his memories of Jack Frost, so even events like these became blurred in favor of memories of him.

As it turns out, Skein was never able to find him. It was near the end of those weeks that Galt, the second of the Two Horses, approached him. Behind his huge black mane, his eyes were showing faint shades of green. This had happened four times in five hundred years. Pitch gasped at the sight of that color, and tossed away the seven thousand nightmares he held in his hands to let them drift away on the air. And he waited. Impatiently.

It took him hours—days, perhaps, he hated it but it didn't matter—for Galt to lift his head through the vision his brain was suffering behind the green-eyed glow. He eventually did pull his head up and whisper: "I am seeing…the c-…city…Venice, it is. I am sure. The winter boy isss…there. Five days from now." He breathed in, and exhaled rust-colored smoke. "I thought that youuu…would want to. Know. Hghh—" Galt collapsed on the ground and dissolved into formless, heavy shadows.

Pitch helped the weak creature re-form itself into a vaguely equine shape and left.

The Meeting Day

This next time he was out in the humans' world in the city that Galt had instructed him to go to, called Venice. The cold season was coming to this part of the world and everyone's breath came out in uneven puffs of white fog, even his. He walked leisurely, wondering at the small chance that someone on the street would sense his presence and cast their eyes up and down the street looking for him. Some rare humans did retain the capacity to sense when the bringer of all fearful things was close enough to look at them.

About once every thirty years, a person would see him. When this happened, Pitch left all the nightmare designing and delivery to his army, and made it his full business to follow this person and eat up their never-ending screams and wide eyes. It was the most delicious treat to see, and consume. Humans would liken it to vacation, he thought with a scornful laugh, only because they would not be able to understand how he would liken it to dessert instead.

Today, no such person was out and about, though a pregnant woman did whip her head around to look in his general direction. She ran screeching to her mate like a wolf was at her heels. Pitch pretended to bow, and smiled. He still had pointed fangs in those older days, and showed them, carefully ignoring the fact that no one could see them anyhow.

He turned the corner off the busiest street, passing through dozens and dozens of the mortals. He knew his destination was close now. The humans' numbers thinned out down this street, and then further as it ended, intersecting a final cobbled street that ran parallel to a river. The town continued across the river, which itself looked cold and empty but for one lone boat about ready to pass underneath the long bridge connecting the two sides. And on the edge of this stone bridge rested the winter boy, in his preferred crouching position and all his weight held on the front of his feet. He held his staff downward-pointing and watched the curved head pass meaninglessly through the head of the boat driver. His shirt had changed again to a dark-blue tunic, somewhat thicker for winter wear (as though he needed such a thing) though the area round the neckhole, and the edges of its sleeves, were fringed with frost like always.

Pitch was a few stones' throws away from him, but Frost did not notice. And he did not yet approach. And there was a perfectly good shadow on his left to hide in, but he wasn't yet so pathetically nervous, at all, that he would be reduced to peering at a lesser immortal from shadows like a defenseless bug. But now that he was here and the harbinger of storms was within his range, he thought (very late in the process, he hissed internally): what was the purpose of this meeting, this visit? His plan was to probe the boy's head by his words, judge from actions and phrases what a threat he was, what a useful thing he could be later, and why he chose to spend his life the way he did. None of those answers felt satisfactory now. Something untrue rang here. There was—there was a grayish blob on the cobblestone suddenly.

A reptilian head that had seeped up out of the stone and reformed, like water running in reverse. It was one of his own creations, staring at him. Pitch crushed its head.

'I'm afraid,' he thought as the thing's form faded to dust. 'Afraid! Me!' That could be the only reason. Only if he himself felt fear would his own wool-brained monsters creep up to him like this. They smelled that fear. And stupid though they were, that much was undeniable of them. Something about this boy or the idea of confronting him here scared him. But letting that foolish fear overtake him now would be absurd. He walked forward.

He walked in the most casual gait towards that bridge, and when he was some ten or eleven steps shy of touching it, Jack Frost looked up. First his eyes drifted up as though he expected yet another townsperson to come strolling by and missing him, but in the next breath his eyes contracted—his entire slender body contracted, the king noticed, and tried not to produce a laugh—and he steadied himself with one hand against the bridge surface. He knew instantly that the man coming towards him now was looking at him. In response the boy stood, slowly, watching like a deer watched a wolf. He backed away: one step, two and nearly three. His staff was upright now and both hands were on it, holding it more or less diagonal across his torso. By the god, he was afraid now, maybe even recognizing him like the humans would, Pitch could smell it.

Pitch stopped about ten steps from him. And said hello.

For the first second or so, there was no reply. Then mental faculties appeared in him again and his eyes scrunched into a light, confused squint. His pose then eased slightly. "Hello," he said back, in a wondering voice. A…happy voice. His eyes were growing wider, his hands dropping down the staff. Pitch saw a movement of his mouth and throat that had to be a swift, breathless exclamation. He took a single step forward. "Are you…talking to me? Can you see me?"

For pity's sake, Pitch fed him another little bit of wonder. "Of course I can, you're right there."

Then the boy was filled with wonder, too. He breathed out harshly again, face sprouting a massive smile. His hands on the staff were writhing on it. "You mean that. You see me!" He closed the distance between them further till they were close enough for proper speech, and hovered, like a most desperate or hungering animal, at that spot. "I'm, I'm Jack. Sorry if I'm, eh, acting foolish, this has never happened in my life, for a hundred and forty-eight years, I mean it—"

"I know, I've seen people ignoring you and passing right through you." The king assured him. He wasn't entirely sure how Jack would take this revelation, but for now, he couldn't afford to care, so hurried on with it. "They can't see you leaping around or causing snow storms, speaking directly to their faces or throwing things at their windows! I understand that would become so tiresome after a long time." Oh, that face was too much. "Or hurtful. Yes, it must hurt quite a lot."

Jack's face did not collapse into surprise as he had mostly expected. It froze in a cool kind of curiosity. And that, too, made him curious. "How do you know about any of the things I do?" Jack said quietly. "And who are you?"

It had been so long since anyone asked that. Pitch choked his sudden, little desire to preen in front of the boy. "I'm Pitch Black, and I'm not here to kill you or assault you, boy." He said. "I know about what you do on a given day because your wild escapades to nowhere occasionally pass through spheres of vision where I'm watching the humans. There are times I'm trying to do my work and can't avoid your noise and chaos if I tried. So yes, I've seen you more than once. Racing down a town road sometimes, or felling trees on a mountaintop, or whisking around like a fly caught indoors."

The boy digested this, and Pitch watched his face to gain an idea of his thoughts. Right now, he was showing off his ability to express emotions and not particularly much intelligence. By the god, his emotions were obvious as a barn fire on his face. He watched them all. But for safety's sake, he quietly crafted up a new nightmare stallion in his mind, ready to form and strike its hooves into this boy's face if he still proved to be a suddenly aggressive or suddenly intelligent problem.

In the next breath, the winter spirit exhaled and tapped the end of his staff on the ground. With that staff in hand, he did look a small fraction more threatening. "So you're the first person I ever get to interact with, and…you're like me, aren't you? You're some kind of inhuman…" He looked the king squarely and almost defiantly in the eye, but fumbled hopelessly for words.

"I'm an immortal just like you. And, well, I thought it's only fitting that the first person to interact with you is one of your own."

"…I don't think you should call me one of your own."

The atmosphere around the two became noticeably quieter.

Jack stood unmoving like a lithe little sage while Pitch started to covertly pull his nightmare steed to life.

"I think I should," the king told him in a darkening tone. "Given that no other person on this planet would be able to call you 'their own.' Only another immortal can even look at you, Jack Frost, and if no other one has even decided you're worth looking at in a century and a half, you should be grateful I'm even extending my hand to you." That struck him, for sure. He had such wide, terrified eyes now. Pitch added a final touch to it: "So much for a little kindness. If you want to be left alone, fine. I'll leave you be."

"No! No," Jack gasped. His hand came up and grasped Pitch's sleeve. He stilled at the sudden grab and so did the boy—his thin hand was more than a little cold to the touch and for some reason he hadn't anticipated that. He waited, thinking in a sudden silence that in so many centuries of this same life, no person had ever touched him. He shook from it, just for an instant, and then Jack Frost took over that. After all, they both shared that same truth, but this boy was far less schooled in masking his emotions. The embarrassment, the fear of something so new and unheeded, erupted expressions and minute gestures all over him.

But he did not let go. Pitch let him stand there holding his sleeve and shaking. And his head was bowed slightly, eyes hidden by layers of white hair. "I'm sorry. I'm just not…used to being talked to. I felt suspicious, was all; I'm sorry that I was. You said you know how people ignore me…"

He waited an extra moment, letting the spirit's emotions tumble over yet again. "It's all right, Jack." He lowered his arm. The boy kept his clasp on the king's sleeve till it fell out of his reach.

Now they were at a silence. Pitch had no care to fill it himself. Jack would say something eventually. So desperate for some piece of social interaction of any type and tone, even with a being that radiated danger and dark like a flame radiated heat. What a human trait that was—but wait, he was about to speak now.

"I, uh…" He laughed once, nervously, with ones of his odd little smiles, "Well, this is awkward. I do want to ask you things, anything, you're the first person on this entire planet who could speak to me a-and I have no idea what to say!"

Pitch shrugged. "Anything that comes to mind, then. At the least, I can answer better those humans who pass right through you."

"Then the people." Jack said instantly, and with a jolt. "I want to understand what's wrong with me, or with them. No one ever has seen me, Pitch Black."

"Pitch." He offered instead.

Jack stood there quietly an extra moment. "Pitch. For decades, I've tried every day to make people understand that I'm here but they won't. I know you know that…but I don't understand why. Do you know? Do you have any idea?"

'Look at you, you should see yourself,' Pitch thought with a grin within his own mind. 'How you beg for these answers, how you claw about for a good truth. You precious thing.' This thought neatly stored away, he told the boy: "You can't be seen because you're an immortal. The only way for one of us to be seen by the people is for us to be believed in. People need to have the same faith in your existence as they do that the sun will come up tomorrow, or you will be absolutely hidden."

So there was his answer, decades in the making. Jack Frost's face was unmoving. And nearly terrified. "B-but how can that be? Really, how can that even…how can any immortal make a human believe in them if they can't see them? They won't notice anything I do! I can push them down with wind, I can scream, shove all their possessions to the floor and shatter glass and they just…are possessed to think it's the wind! Or the family cat, or they don't see the damage at all! And I can throw a snowball at children and it'll hit them and they just…run through me. Like I'm nothing…so…so how is it done?"

'Remember when you asked those questions yourself? …Of course.'

"I couldn't tell you. I used to be seen by the people, years ago." Seen, very much remembered and sometimes respected, he could not forget this. "And I'm just as invisible as you now. I don't have any magical answer."

Jack's face fell a small fraction, and he exhaled quickly in disbelief. "You, too?"

"Me, too." He said in a growl. They shared a look of understanding, wherein Jack Frost was no rampaging adolescent, and he was no fallen king. He had known they were both like this, both living in a silent, unpopulated plane of the world for no reason at all and they hated it. And they could see and speak to each other now. It made him calm to know this, and to see that same knowledge growing in Jack Frost's eyes, too but only for a moment. Old fury came bubbling up through it, burning that connection, and he hated that, too.

"But unlike you, I had the acknowledgement once." He burst out, and showed his fangs, and the boy saw them. "People knew who I was with one look. They could feel me coming toward them. I could rule their whole mind. And I still do! I still manage that, at least, even though they've cast me out of their sight." The winter sprite was taking one tentative, perhaps unconscious step forward, and the spot his toes touched grew tiny strips of ice around it.

"How did you lose it? Did the humans change somehow?"

Change. Of course. They changed and made him a fallen king. He had to laugh once. "Yes, they changed, Jack. They became ignorant. The world is moving forward into an age of science and reason—which, for god's sake, almost never comes to humans!—and anything that doesn't fit under that umbrella is just idiocy and children's fancy. Bad dreams are 'foolish children's games', despite the fact that they can take root and destroy whole minds, change human perceptions in any day and age, and yet…" He was practically pacing now, wasn't he? He was. He had to stop, nearly came to shoving a black spike in the ground in front of him to stop his own motion. With his head bowed, there was nothing to look at but blank stone and his own feet. And his hands felt weak suddenly, shamefully weak.

Jack Frost was in front of him now. Looking up at him. The colored iris in his eyes was faintly shaped like a snowflake.

"Are you the spirit of nightmares?"

"I'm the King of Nightmares, Jack." Pitch said. In the boy's ice-blue eyes there was recognition of that. He felt the blackness of him like anyone else could. "That is what I do, what I like. It's my own calling." It was a glorious calling, and a vicious one, and a powerful one. He would always remember the long-gone dream of the islander man who would have killed his children in the night, had he not dreamed the devil would burn him for it. "I draw up ugly dreams like paint on canvas and deliver them to whatever human brain across the world I feel like throwing them at. And though every day men will brush off my work and walk through me like air, I know my creations will stay in their minds and not be forgotten. That's my way." That's my lot in life.

Jack tapped his fingers on the staff briefly. "That's sad. To have your creations seen and never you. " He paused, and they both waited patiently. "It's insulting, isn't it?

His mouth turned downwards into a frown. Just enough. Just…a little. "I don't particularly like it. But that's the way it is."

"I'm sorry."

"…"

"Now that I've seen you, I won't ignore you, Pitch. For whatever that's worth."

"…Thank you."

That is worth very much, Jack Frost…it, you—

A half dozen people trotted gaily through them both; Jack went silent at their arrival and Pitch waited for him to say something to him again. Once the humans had passed, instead of speaking, he looked around and tapped the end of his staff on the bridge surface, as though he were impatient. And yet, he wore a smile, one that the king had seen a few times before as he observed Jack Frost traversing the world. The trickster smile, that was it. There was a very genuine excitement when Jack met his eyes for a moment and then dashed behind him.

He clambered swiftly on to the stone siding of the bridge, crouching with one hand supporting him against the very edge of the stone, and the other lazily holding the staff out ahead of him. It was a pose he'd seen several times before. He held it for a good ten seconds.

"Am I supposed to be waiting for something?"

"Yes, something," Jack said. He had barely turned his head as he answered, but the light of his usual mischief in his eyes was hard to ignore. Pitch stood by him and waited. He was curious now. Jack was surely about to make a—

On the west side of the river, a barrel exploded in a bear-sized blast of white snowy bits, making townsfolk shriek and yelp. They dashed away, barreled into one another, and an older gentleman fell into the river, splashing like a tortured fish and spewing Italian cries of horror. It made a light smirk crop up on Pitch's face.

Only a moment later, Jack whisked off the side of the bridge and walked few steps down to the west side. He pulled his staff back, paused, and swung it in a massive downward arc. Pitch knew what was coming the moment before, and since Jack was not looking, he braced himself and made the thinnest shield of black around him, just in case there was damage. When Jack swung the staff down, the wind was instantly propelled forward like an unleashed cavalry. It charged down streets and against building walls and roared. Windows were shattered and glass rained into the cobblestone streets. Barrels, market stands and some of the men were knocked off their foundations and toppled over. And when it began to weaken, a sheen of white was on nearly every surface in their sight. Nothing was spared.

('Such a powerful conjurer of storms!')

The Italian cries of shock started up again.

Jack turned around, with such laughter in his eyes. "Smile, Pitch!" he said, and pointed his staff at the king's head. He dodged, just quickly enough, and avoided a streak of dusty blue that iced a villager's front door across the bridge.

Pitch stared at him, befuddled indeed. "What are you doing, Jack?" he asked, though he had the smallest idea.

The boy came closer. "I said 'smile' and I meant it. You look like you need it. And," he slapped the staff over his back again, clapping softly against his shoulder. "well I thought that…I was hoping that as a king of nightmares, you might feel happy with a little bit of chaos!" The next little bit of chaos erupted out of him: he jumped up in the air, clear backwards, landing horizontally with his soles against his staff that floated above. It twisted to the side and shot a stream of coldness again.

"Little acrobat," Pitch said with a grin and without thought. And then he laughed once, freely and easily. Skein or Galt would have shrieked to see it. "Well, of course I do. It's just that my chaos happens almost entirely in a person's mind."

"Oh," Jack said, as though he hadn't guessed that at all. "Thennn, since you can't bring your kind up into the real world, I'll just make enough for us both. It'll be fun, you watch!" Jack started to float away again and aimed his staff double-handed at a bakery he'd already frozen over. Apparently he thought none of Pitch's work could appear in the real world, and he was either a fool or outright pretending if he said that. But pretending was a game, and so the king decided that was what he was likely doing. Trying to lure him into proving he could provide a physical, visible challenge for Jack's powers. Trying to lure him into a game of some chaos-making.

The idea was surprisingly attractive. He wanted to play the game. Jack Frost was floating above him and so obviously waiting for him to join him. How many ages…since someone had waited for him?

Jack had only remained pointing his staff at the defenseless bakery for the length of a few heartbeats. In the next, Pitch stopped him with a wispy, charcoal-colored rope extending from his shadowy sleeves, wrapping it swiftly around the neck of the staff, and pulling. Now they faced each other, and the winter spirit was hung in motion instead of floating in his carefree manner.

"When did I say I didn't have any powers in the physical world?" he said. Under his feet, shadows were creeping out from the edges of the bridge and solidifying under him. He commanded them with a thought to rise up. He reveled in Jack's outright amazed face as he, too, floated up the height of a tree and then hovered next to the sprite on his dark platform. "But you must have known that. Much as you look like an adolescent imbecile, I don't think you are. Mostly."

"Hnn, thanks." Jack laughed. He balanced himself on one arm till the staff was underneath him, and he stood with the soles of his feet on it.

"So we're starting a game of who can upset the most citizens here, is that it?"

Another smile. Now the emotion bleeding from it was hope. "…If you want to."

"I do." He pulled another length of blackness out from his sleeve till it was a little ball he rolled in the air between his palms, first black fire and then two skulls and then a silver fan. "I'm actually glad you asked."

"I'm glad you talked to me." Jack replied. The trickster smile melted, and there was something awfully pure beneath. Pitch stared. "I can't tell you how meaningful that is. And I do mean to keep my promise in never ignoring you. No need to worry about that again."

His words struck him a little and hurt him, yet Pitch only gave him a pleased smile in return for what he felt. "You're welcome. I'm thankful to meet you, too. I'm a little fond of you already, Jack. You're much better company than my damn horses."

He cocked his head a little, muttering perhaps to himself: "You keep horses? How—"

One snap of his finger, or half of that, drew up one of the many horses from the air beside him. Jack made the throatiest, surprised gasp and zipped backwards on his floating staff, shielding himself with an arm from the kicking, whinnying thing. Perfectly good reason, too, this one's hooves were weirdly sharp. (Had he meant to do that while making it?)

"You keep horses," Jack chuckled, lowering his arm. "Is—is it made of smoke? It looks so strange! What is it, really?"

"Just something I drew, I suppose." He twirled his long fingers around its spine, pulling more and more smoky ribbons from it. "It's 'art' if you want to joke around."

"Oh, I've already got five or so jokes for the ribbon things floating off its rump." Jack leaned forward towards the shadow-horse's shoulders. "But the rest of it does look really…really realistically-shaped. Is it meant to have racehorse legs?

(And how many ages since someone complimented what I make?)

"As opposed to what?"

"Uhm…" He leaned backwards again. "Big horses. The…eh, Clydesdales and the like. Draft horses, that's it."

Pitch laughed aloud. "They have thoroughbred legs because they cost me less energy and matter to make. I make them for essentially one reason, and it's this." He grabbed the horse by a handful of its spiraling smoke-ribbons, and heaved. Like a machine it propelled forward, shrinking as it dashed through the air, and slipped through a cottage window. He and Jack waited together only another second before a woman inside shrieked an unpleasant Italian phrase he knew and recognized from minutes before. Jack covered his face slightly and laughed. Pitch watched his morphing emotional visage a moment longer before motioning for his black platform to move away, more towards the center of town. "Hmph. Positively shameless language in this town today."

Jack followed. "Wh—? What'd she say? Pitch!"

Jack followed, and he waited for him.

It was a long, windy, unlucky day in Venice.

My first note above all is that this fanfic appeared in my mind when I heard a certain song. I visualized a certain…dramatic scene when I heard it, which became the basis for this story. When the time comes, I'll display the song's name and beg at least a few of you to listen to that song while imagining/re-reading that scene, because only then will you truly feel it the way I want it to be felt.

~Anyway~

Goddammmit here I go inserting my slash-yaoi-ness into a film made for nine-year-olds. You all may blame Tumblr, which showed me a single, shall we say PG-13 picture of Jack and Pitch together and ignited a fierce love for this pairing, and so here's the result. I'm fully aware that many fanart/fanworks centering around these two involve either the two grabbing/attacking each other (with or without the gratuitous sexual tension) or Pitch standing ominously or manipulatively near Jack, the two having formed The Team of Evil. Sadly, what I like even more is the less realistic, somewhat…happier (?) idea that Pitch Black and Jack Frost could have actually been friends and cared for each other's well-being. The idea of domination/manipulation in any setting or fandom just doesn't typically appeal to me that much. So here I go writing their story my own way. It does make me nervous to do so.

Nervousness aside, I frigging adore the movie and have been suffering the Powerful RotG Feels Disease for about a month now (it has successfully toned down my love of Naruto that's gone on unendingly for about seven years, not sure if good.). I saw the movie's midnight premiere with my fellow Jack fangirl cousin, and a few hours after posting this I'll see it a sixth time with two of my friends, and you can bet my Tumblr is chock-full of pleas for fellow fans to re-view it and support its box office sales that were botched by Twilight and Skyfall, and get the sequel its creators wanted for it, that we want for it. So my shortened PSA message is go see the movie again and help its financial cause! We CAN save it!

~Other, Detailed Notes You Don't Really Need to Read~

1) One thing that infuriated me about this first chapter is that I couldn't get the dialogue the way I wanted it...I wanted the two to discuss something other than their existence and causing humans trouble. Something, anything. Friends talk about random things and get enjoyment and meaning out of it, but it just. Didn't. Work. I excuse myself with the idea that, as completely unsocialized people trying to make good impressions on the other, they weren't quite acting like themselves anyway. For example I don't think Jack would just trash a city willy-nilly; I'd say he was a little crazed with joy at making a friend and wanted to impress him, and would for a little while give minimal thought to the people he might have hurt.

2) I started writing this about November 18th. My narrative begins in Russia, as you saw; how in the hell was I to know the film would, too? I didn't mean to "copy" the movie in that way, but I don't feel like changing it, either.

3) I was also very shaky and nervous on how I was presenting Pitch. Did I want him to want Jack's friendship, or just want to probe his brain and manipulate him, and be surprised at how he made a friend from the encounter? I'm not sure which I really did. It is safe to say that Pitch is already somewhat entranced with him, what with all these details about Jack's behavior and appearance he keeps noticing (that's not just my Jack fangirl writing style, Pitch really is looking at all of that eheheh). Well, they say it's a good thing when a character does things the writer doesn't want or expect them to do. Fear not, he will become...attached...soon enough. Very much. Like omg.

4) On that note, I amused myself by having Pitch think Jack is a powerful but aimless airhead who could be fooled quite easily; Jack actually already tricked him once and he didn't even notice! (did you?)

5) ...Why do you think, as the summary says, Jack does not remember any of this?

...Bye off to the theater now whooo

Ta...Storm