Chapter Text
It comes as an incisor: tiny, pearly white and speckled with blood. She cups the tooth in her hand and her wings beat quicksilver—she can’t deny that she’s nervous, that she senses this tooth is not quite right. It holds no memory. It pulses weakly, crumbling between her fingers.
The black sand wedged deep into the gummy root terrifies Toothiana. Her faeries chitter, hiding behind her head.
“Girls,” she whispers, “steady on. Let’s not be hasty.”
It’s been twelve years since last Toothiana saw Pitch, and in those moments, she had punched him hard enough to knock a canine out. After the Nightmares dragged Pitch howling and clawing back beneath the bed, she’d done her best to put him out of her mind. She moved on, rebuilding her depository for the children’s memories and continuing to collect them as if her existence had never been threatened, as if her guardianship remained unchallenged. Toothiana doesn’t believe in crying over spilt milk, as it were. She learns her lessons and presses forward.
But she does remember: this black sand, gritty in her palm and cold to the touch. She remembers it well.
Toothiana sinks in the air, settling on a perch and studying the tooth intently. She must be certain. She can’t alert the others for nothing. Unlike North, Toothiana doesn’t rely on her belly, and unlike Sandy, she has little experience with dream remnants. Teeth, though—yes, she knows teeth, and this tiny precious incisor, it belongs to a tiny precious Welsh girl who loves blue teddy bears and singing and canaries. She flosses, Toothiana muses, turning the fragile incisor over under her thumb. I can tell. I can see how well she takes care of her teeth. So why? Why is it ruined?
The black sand particles are few but irritating. She wills the tooth to present its memory, but nothing happens. The tooth is barren. This has never happened before. One can’t take a memory.
Even as Toothiana starts to panic, another one of her faeries appears, squeaking in alarm. Between her miniature hands, there is another tooth, fast corroding. The luminescent white is already blackening as ash.
Toothiana lunges for it, and her fear burns.
Within minutes, she begins her flight to Santoff Clausen.
They’re deep in the mountains of Tibet, so high in the atmosphere that even Jack can’t seem to catch his breath. He laughs regardless, cartwheeling barefoot through the freshly fallen snow and sending up flurries in his wake. “This is amazing!”
“Be quiet,” Bunnymund hisses at him. “You want to wake every monk and his mule for thirty miles?”
Jack slides to a stop. He pretends to consider, tapping his chin. “They might not know what to do with the Easter Bunny.”
“Too right.” Bunnymund makes a face and rubs his arms briskly, upending his fur and shifting the basket hooked on his elbow. Inside, Jack can hear the eggs rustling, moving in tiny increments as they seek earth to walk on. The weird factor about that has finally worn off. Mostly. “Not much for this part of the world, me. Believers, plenty—just not the ones interested in my googies.”
The under-populated village is shadowed by the mountain, but Jack can still glimpse the soft distant lights of its temple ahead. Up on high, the stars are bright as glass in the infinite blue and he can see for miles in every direction, without ever leaving the ground. The homes around them are silent, dark, not yet visited by the Sandman’s beautiful craftsmanship. He retraces his footprints in the snow, relishing as ever the fact that he is something solid—believed in, made physical and visible to the human eye. He can leave footprints. He can see himself in mirrors.
Bunnymund watches him.
Jack grins at him. “You look like a snow rabbit. All white fur.”
That prompts a reaction: annoyance, the scrunch of his brow. Bunnymund huffs and cradles his basket protectively, taking the lead and guiding them further into the village. “S’pose it’s better than a kangaroo,” because he will never let Jack forget that, even all these years later, “but let’s get this over with. Soon as we’re done, it’s back to the warm warren for this rabbit.”
Jack follows him. “So, why three days before Easter? Why not on Easter? Isn’t that like cheating?
“I’ve got enough to think about on Easter without worrying about Nyima Paljor, the only believer in the Easter Bunny for six hundred miles,” Bunnymund says. “It’s not cheating, it’s time management. Besides, cold as it is up here, the eggs will still be frozen by Sunday.”
“Unless he finds them before that. Then he knows you cheated.”
Bunnymund chuckles. “You’ve seen the first-time believers by now, mate. Believe me, being a little off the calendar won’t change a thing.”
Oh. Jack feels warmth spread, as delicate as his tendrils of frost, throughout his chest and throat. Yeah, he has seen them. Jamie will always be Jack’s first believer, but he’s not the only one—not anymore. The children have come to know Jack Frost’s name and he loves every moment, but especially the first time they invoke his name: reverent, awed, giving him form before their very eyes.
They stop in front of a stone home, its small rectangular windows covered in striped fabric and frame painted blue. The yard is empty and barren except for the light but insubstantial dusting of new snowfall. “Hm,” says Bunnymund. “Pretty, uh, sparse. Might have to hide ‘em inside.”
“Your plan is blowing up by the second,” Jack says.
“And you didn’t have to come.”
“What, and miss this?” Jack stretches his arms up behind his head, looking up at the sky. “Nothing’s funnier than a rabbit shooing away a herd of yaks.”
“Ha,” says Bunnymund. He thumps his foot and opens a hole beneath them.
Two seconds later, Jack stumbles into a dresser in some kid’s room—“Oh my god,” he gasps, “thanks for the warning, cottontail!”—and then he’s being shushed, which doesn’t remotely make things better. The bedroom is dark and cold, but there are tiny toys lined up on the dresser that look distinctly like they might have North’s personal touch. The bed is pushed against the corner and a child sleeps in it, his head a nest of black, his mouth open and breathing damp.
Jack quiets without being told again. He perches on top of a small writing desk, watching as Bunnymund carefully hides the eggs around the bedroom. They waddle out on their spindly legs and settle in secret places: halfway behind a bookcase, inside a pencil box, underneath an upturned shoe.
One of the eggs tries to scurry out into the hallway, but Jack is quick to scoop it up again. He deposits the egg gently in the boy’s bed, cupped in his limp hands. As soon as the kid wakes up, he’ll have his Easter Sunday.
When Jack looks up, Bunnymund is watching him again.
He shoves his hands in the pocket of his hoodie and shrugs. What?
For a moment, he thinks Bunnymund is about to say something. Instead, the rabbit shakes his head and gestures: come on then.
Jack does come and this time, he’s prepared for the hole that swallows them up and takes them back outside into the snowfall. He’s a little surprised about that—he’d expected the warren in all its bright colors and rich green foliage—but when he squints at Bunnymund, the rabbit shrugs. He says, “Thought you’d leap at the chance to leave your signature on all these windows, eh?”
Oh yeah, Jack is all about that. He smirks and rubs his hands together. “It’s about time I branched out in Tibet.”
“Go on, then. I’m gonna sit here. Freezing.”
“Great!” And he’s off, flitting from rooftop to rooftop, window to window, pressing his palms into the glass until the frost is thick and beautiful. He writes his name sometimes, nearly indecipherable in the swirls. Other times, he simply lets the snow curl around his hand to leave an unmistakable print on the third-floor window. He’s made it through a good half of the town, his laughter thin from the atmosphere but full in its joy, when the sky—
It just lights up, green and pink and gold.
Jack gapes at it. He twists around, looking for Bunnymund, and then suddenly the rabbit’s there beside him with his ears straight up in the air. “Trouble,” he says, brusque in a way he hasn’t been for a few years now. Not to Jack, anyway.
“Is that the beacon thing North talked about?”
“The gathering light? You bet.”
“So it’s bad?”
“Probably,” says Bunnymund. He makes a pained face, like he’s taken a drink of sour milk. “I mean, last time we got you.”
Jack punches him in the shoulder. He makes sure it hurts as much as an iceball to the face would, which means a lot.
(They go by tunnel. Bunnymund’s never gotten the hang of flying and Jack has come to know these earthy passageways as well as the woods of his hometown. In their wake, there grow flowers that are chilled to the touch.)
When they arrive, North is patting his stomach with his huge hands and insisting, “I feel it—in my belly.”
Above Sandman’s head, there are numerous shapes going too fast for Jack to recognize. One might be a hang glider. Or it might be a manta ray. It’s a little difficult to figure out.
“If this is about a new guardian,” Bunnymund announces, “we’re still training the last one.”
Jack thinks about punching him again, but he doesn’t.
“Jack! Bunny!” North booms. He holds his arms open to them in sincere welcome, something Jack has never quite gotten used to (these weirdoes, their easy friendship, the touching). “It is good to see you, but of course, it is not good to see you… circumstances being what they are…”
Toothiana smiles at them, flitting closer. Her faeries swoon behind her and fly a circle around Bunnymund and Jack. Which is just—weird. They’ve been doing that for a while now.
“Ladies,” Toothiana says, “let’s not be silly.”
“Hey, Tooth,” says Jack. He accepts her fond pat to the cheek, the twitch of her fingers as she resists diving into his mouth and examining his molars appreciated. He smiles at her because she’s always been kind to him, even when he hasn’t deserved it.
“Jack,” she says, and she’s not smiling anymore, “it’s awful. So awful.”
“What? What is it?” His chest tightens, heart gripped with fear in a way that draws everything else inside him together. He immediately thinks of Pitch—the black shade of nightmares, the cajoling murmur that haunts his more disturbing dreams. He thinks about losing the children’s beliefs that he’s so carefully cultivated.
Bunnymund nudges him, and Jack shudders as he comes back to himself. There’s ice crystallized across the floor around them. He makes a face. “Oops.”
“It ain’t Pitch?” Bunnymund asks, voice low. He fingers his boomerang, notching at the smooth wood. “Can’t be askin’ us for dinner—not with the aurora, mate.”
“No, I only wish.” North sighs, tugging at his beard. “Come, drink eggnog. We must speak about a new strangeness in the world.”
Sandman offers something he’s holding to Toothiana. It’s only when she accepts the meager offerings that Jack realizes they are tiny white fragments of enamel, cradled in a pile of black sand. The way she looks at him—full of hope.
He shakes his head, golden moonface sad. No.
She clutches the handful to her feathered chest. They go to drink the eggnog. Out in the sky, the moon slowly meanders its way across the clouds, on route to its zenith.