A/N: Next chapter! Woo! I don't own copyrighted stuff! Keep reading!

Nyaa!

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Chapter 13

"Stitches!"

Tooth barreled into the other female at top speed, causing Stitch Witch to spin slightly as the fairy's arms latched around her shoulders. The redhead wheezed for air. "Too… Too tight…"

"Oh! Sorry!" Tooth let her go quickly, looking apologetic.

Stitch Witch managed a laugh. "You're apologizing to me?" She held up a small bag of teeth, then tossed it to the Tooth Fairy. The gossamer being caught it and hugged the teeth to her chest with a sigh of relief. "I'm sorry about Thorn."

"Thorn? Is that… Is that your child? You do have a child? The one who's been…" Tooth's voice trailed off before she could finish the statement. She winced.

"Yeah. The one who's been attacking your fairies." Stitches nodded to the bag. "Stealing your teeth."

Tooth's large, pink eyes cast downward sadly. "He makes the children fight with each other, too." she said. "With their parents, with their friends… Are you sure…?"

Ashley quirked an eyebrow. "What?" When Tooth didn't immediately answer, the Stitch Witch's expression sobered and she straightened up. "What?" The repeat wasn't hostile, but it was clear that she already knew she wasn't going to like what the Guardian asked next.

"Are you sure Pitch didn't… tell him to do it?"

The air was quiet and cold around them. Suddenly, it also seemed much more still to Tooth. More so than the night she'd accidentally let slip about Pitch's possible involvement in the deaths of Ashley's sisters. Maybe it was because of the way the other woman's eyes had sunken into darkly-glittering moons among all of the pitch and soot around them.

"Pitch isn't a murderer, and he didn't tell Thorn to do anything." she said softly, trying to keep the ugly flicker of anger inside of her in check. It had been a long time since it had sparked, but she couldn't help it. For the first time in a millennia, she felt defensive. "Thorn's a good kid, but he's just a kid and he doesn't understand his powers."

Tooth shied back a little. She'd never noticed that the Witch had fangs. "I-I'm sorry… I didn't mean it like that…!" she tried to explain.

"Then how did you mean it?!" Stitch Witch crossed her arms tightly, subconsciously trying to hold the torrent brewing inside of her down. As a shadow of fear, it was easier to lose control of herself if she gave into something like anger. When Pitch lost himself to rage, his darkness spread everywhere, to snuff every light and dim every dream.

The thing threatening to consume her wasn't darkness.

"Well, he's… he's done a lot of bad things, for as long as we've known him! You know the kinds of things he's done – you told us that once yourself!" Tooth pointed out. "I don't want to think that he'd manipulate either of you, but – "

The nerve was struck. "He has never tried to manipulate me!" A shockwave of flames lashed out, knocking the Tooth Fairy to the rooftop tile. The hummingbird hybrid gasped and frantically tried to put out a few feathers that had begun to smolder. She quickly got back into the air as the redhead stepped towards her. The air was climbing to a sweltering heat.

Tooth stared at her with wide eyes. Stitch Witch could see the fear in them before she caught its scent and taste in the air.

The fire inside of her lessened to more of a smolder. Her scowl softened a bit.

What had she just done?

Disgust rolled through her gut. Tooth Fairy saw shame flash across her face as she turned away quickly and stepped off the edge of the rooftop. She tried to reach for her friend. "Ashley, wait!"

The Witch dropped. When Tooth darted over, Stitches was gone. She flew around the tower several times – the Tooth Fairy hated having those she cared about mad at her. After awhile, she realized that Ashley really had left. Saddened, she flew away. They could make up next time they saw each other… right?

She stopped as a deafening boom thundered behind her. Spinning around, she covered her mouth to keep from gasping, then lowered her hands to her chest as if it were the only thing keeping her heart from bursting through her feathers. The tower was now nothing but a large, collapsed pile of rubble.

It was a bad omen.

North dusted off the old list he had found gently, using a magnifying spectacle and a paintbrush to try and restore the faded letters. Even though it was a magical item, it was fragile. The names of the other children – the ones who were no longer alive – were fractured, signifying that that child had stopped believing.

By the time he finished, he frowned, removing the magnifier from his eye and setting it aside as he gazed at the finished product. There was only one clear name on the list, at the very bottom: Thorn. The rest of the small piece of parchment had parts of letters. His frown deepened as he watched, before his very own eyes, as the letter pieces moved among themselves, blurring with magic.

Giving a thoughtful hum, North stroked his beard. It was unusual, since none of his other lists did anything like this to the names, nor had they ever – only to the words 'naughty' and 'nice' that sat beside them when it wasn't yet clear how the child's deeds would add up by Christmas. If they were the names of normal children, they should have stayed broken and incomplete.

It wasn't clear whether this 'Thorn' was naughty or nice. The burly Guardian hummed again, crossing his arms. "…I need cookies. It's break time!" he said, standing as several of his elves scurried out of his way. "Move! Move with your pointy heads and jingly bells!"

Before he had exited the room a fluttering sound caught his attention, especially when one of the elves yelped. Santa Claus turned back to the desk. The list gave another shudder as the country and year named on the title sank back into the piece of paper. Then the black ink bubbled up again, giving it a different title while the parchment shrank in size and some of the blurred names disappeared.

Boots clomping against the wooden floor, North walked over to pick the list up. The name Morose had appeared at the top, effectively changing the list from one for a country to one for a family. He had a few of these lists, in the cases of large families in which aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers all shared a home, and therefore many cousins were under the same roof, or the rare case of a couple who had simply earned themselves a large brood. It wasn't normal for such a list to have so few names on it.

Slowly, the year came back as well, now showing the list applied to the upcoming Christmas.

"I see." North said to no one in particular, fascinated by the spectacle. It answered several questions he had in terms that he understood completely – even the scrambled, incomplete names on the list.

When Pitch returned to his underground lair, he was immediately aware that something within it was amiss. His first thought went to his family. He swept over to the ledge near his globe, checking on the bed several flights below. Thorn was dozing peacefully, oblivious to anything that might be wrong. Silvery yellow eyes darted around for Ashley before the man set out to find her.

He scaled several staircases, checking the dark corners and undersides, walking along walls that twisted unnaturally, and peering down tunnels. He hoped she hadn't gone to the surface. He crossed a bridge that led to more tunnels, but stopped abruptly when he walked straight into a current of warm air. It stood out, considering the rest of his domain was naturally cool.

Pitch's shadow swept over the railing and he stood on the underside of it, looming over where the Witch was curled up in the same upside-down manner, hugging her knees to her chest as she glared 'down' at the cave ceiling. A tight frown pursed his lips. "You went up there."

"I went up there." she replied flatly. He saw her fingers clench for a moment. When she spoke next, her voice was a little thicker: "I wish I hadn't."

He narrowed his eyes – not so much at her, but because he could already guess why she was in pain. "I wish you wouldn't trust them so easily." Pitch said, kneeling next to her. His hand rested between her shoulders, ignoring the heat that was rolling off of her. As he started to make a small circle, he felt the warmth dying down quickly. His expression softened and he lifted her chin. "What happened?"

"I attacked Tooth. I was trying to return the teeth that Thorn had taken, and…" Ashley let out a tense sigh, shaking her head. "When she told me that Thorn made children fight with each other, she accused you of putting him up to it. I couldn't listen to it."

A bitter taste filled Pitch's mouth and he grimaced his disdain. "Because you thought I might have?" he asked expectantly.

"Because I know you didn't, and I wasn't going to let her say that you did." Her glare hardened a bit, and the heat she was giving off spiked for a moment, like he'd thrown a log on a fire. When her eyes met his again, however, the look had softened into something more insecure. "You're capable of anything. That doesn't mean you'll do anything. You're not some mindless monster who slaughters things unnecessarily – you have purpose. If there was no fear in their world, those children wouldn't survive two seconds as adults because they wouldn't be able to take how hard life really is once we all grow up."

He went rigid for a moment, unsure of how to respond. It was the first time that anyone had so much as insinuated that what he controlled was important to children. Pitch wasn't sure that he could see it the same way, but it certainly explained why she would be so naïve as to try to maintain an alliance with the forces that worked against him.

"I'm not a Guardian," he said firmly, "and neither are you."

"The Moon raised us both. Besides, regardless of whether or not I was pregnant, I would have died trying to protect a child. It would have been an unborn child, or even a child that I only thought was there, but I was still trying to protect it." Her eyebrows knitted upward almost desperately. "You're a smart man. I told you that I might have news in another couple of weeks."

Pitch gazed at her steadily. He knew exactly what she was asking him to say. It was just like when she'd told him how her sisters died. "I was trying to protect you. I was trying to protect us." he told her. "The possibility that I could lose my own child didn't occur to me at the time."

It was a lie.

Ashley's desperate expression fell and she lowered her head, which leaned to rest on his shoulder. Pitch sighed. "I'm sorry. We are what we are."

She nodded quietly. He prayed she wasn't in tears again – he couldn't tell from the current angle. They were silent for awhile, until she spoke up out of the blue: "I don't like children being afraid of me."

"I know you don't."

"But maybe I've been wrong about something." she continued. "I know that children need to be scared now and then. They need something to overcome. But maybe… Maybe a lot of little scares isn't the way to go about it. Not all the time, anyway. Maybe, sometimes, they need a really good scare to keep them in check when they do something wrong."

Pitch recalled Thorn's careful way of navigating houses in search of specific children to target. Then he realized that the only other time she'd had such a hard time speaking was when they were mortal, and she had admitted that she may have been wrong about him. A private smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. "What are you saying, my dear?"

"I don't like children being afraid of me… but I love scaring them." Stitch Witch looked up at him, gray eyes an eclipse of bright silver now, as his did when he felt the urge to use his powers.

The smile widened, and he pressed his lips to her forehead gingerly, causing her to scoot a little closer into his hold. "I was wondering when you would start to get hungry." Pitch helped her to her feet, holding Ashley's hands in his own as they stood on the bridge underside. He ran a thumb over a seam that wrapped around her wrist. "Let's go get our son, and we can all have a little family outing."

=^o.o^=

...Yeay!

Nyaa!