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There’s something so sweet about the fear that comes about when a strong child runs out of strength. They can be so incredibly brave in the face of hardship, can smile and joke and dance away from thinking about their terrible situations, but everyone has a breaking point. Everyone has a limit. There are only so many failed remedies one can take before the dam finally breaks. Sickness has claws, and they can be so hard to remove, and the wounds left behind can sometimes be too much. Worse still, when those claws prove to be too embedded to extract.
Sick children are the best source of fear—but only so long as they are alive to feel it.
Pitch has no use for dead children.
However, there seems to be someone who does.
“Isn’t this a surprise,” Pitch murmurs. He stands in the shadowed doorway of an empty room, looking out over the playroom in a children’s hospital. His form is insubstantial at best, near invisible to any of the few who might still be able to see him, bolstered only by the darkness at his back and the sickly sweet tang of poorly suppressed fear in the air. It coats the children like honey, old and rotten, and tempts him nearer—a temptation he must ignore, if he has any hope of staying here longer than a moment. Florescent light has nothing on moonlight, but anything brighter than shade will harm him these days.
His gaze isn’t on the children now, though. It’s on the open doorway across the room, and the pale figure standing within it.
Jack Frost either doesn’t see him or has chosen to ignore him, because he doesn’t even spare Pitch a glance as he drifts into the room, light as the snow he creates and with a dampened sadness that both is and isn’t out of place. The Guardian of Fun, of Joy, he calls himself, and yet he feels like snowfall against a window, deafening the world into something small and lonely.
At the end of his staff, a small ball of light bounces between the curves of the hook. The soul of the child whose acute fear called Pitch here in the first place, and that of which he can no longer feel.
The dead have nothing more to fear, after all.
Jack floats around the room, above the other children’s heads, twirling his staff and causing the soul to ring with the sound of far away laughter. One last glance at the friends they made while here, one last game. Jack circles the room, once, twice, passing Pitch each time and still ignoring him. On his third go-around, he angles towards the center of the room, and, once there, whispers something too soft for Pitch to hear to the spirit in his grasp, and then twists the crook. The ball of light slips free of the wood and flies upwards, dissolving into glitter dust right before it hits the ceiling, and fading into nothing.
Pitch has seen Shepherds work before, but Jack is the only one to bring such Light to the process. It’s blinding and mesmerizing and even Pitch can feel that.
None of the children here believe in Jack, evidenced by their lack of reaction to the show he put on, and they all seem content enough in their games. Jack spares a moment to encourage the ice on the windows to creep into more interesting patterns, and then he drifts to the side of the room to watch.
The same side that Pitch is on, and close enough to him that they could touch, if either of them reached out.
Neither of them do.
“You were here for him?” Jack guesses after a long, quiet moment, though it’s less of a question and more like a statement. Angling for confirmation of something he already knows.
Pitch doesn’t answer.
“I figured,” Jack says as if he had. “Makes sense. I can’t feel it as strongly as you do, probably, but hospitals are so full of fear it doesn’t surprise me that you’d haunt them.”
“Is there a goal behind this conversation?” Pitch asks, aiming for droll and landing somewhere closer to curious. Because, after everything, he would have expected the Guardian to attack rather than talk.
“Idle curiosity,” Jack tells him. He leans back against the wall and tilts his head to peer at Pitch in his shadows. “This is the second time I’ve seen you since we defeated you. Just wondering if you were getting stronger or if you were still wiped out.”
Pitch sneers at him, teeth sharp and jagged. Jack doesn’t even blink. “Preparing to beat me down again, are you?”
“No. Just making sure you were strong enough to work again.”
Pitch stares at him, actually turns his head to look at the winter spirit head on. “…what?”
Jack doesn’t laugh or back down. He meets his gaze seriously, looking so much older than he rightfully should. “We need fear in the world,” he says, as if that isn’t the last thing Pitch ever expected a Guardian to say to him. “The others don’t agree with me, not entirely, but they’re so used to you and your evil plots that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. They hadn’t even interacted with the kids for decades until I made them. So they don’t know how important you are.”
“And you do?” Pitch asks softly, one step away from dangerous. Jack shrugs.
“I’ve seen what kids get up to when they’re brave,” he replies, and it’s not quite scorn in his voice, but something that could become it, years from now. “The world is dangerous and kids don’t always recognise that. They… do things they shouldn’t, sometimes, and they get hurt. They don’t always think of the consequences. But if they feel just a little jolt of fear beforehand…”
“…you think I protect children,” Pitch says after a long moment. And then has to stop and look away and think. Because… it’s true, isn’t it? He has no use for dead children, and sometimes a little fear is what it takes to keep them alive.
“Don’t you?”
Pitch doesn’t answer. Jack smiles as if he had.
The young man pushes away from the wall, floating inches off the floor on an impossible breeze, and drifts off towards the window. “See you later, Pitch,” he calls, and slips through the glass like it isn’t even there.
Pitch watches the children with their muted fear for a few more minutes, and then vanishes into the shadows. He has some thinking to do.