Chapter Text
Jack’s baseline of fear – as he likes to think of it – is a pale blue. It’s there all the time, unless he is sunk in the very deep stages of sleep. Otherwise, it is there when he is laughing, when he’s mocking someone, when he’s being a brat, when he’s dreaming, when he’s interacting with others, when he looks relaxed, when he thinks he’s relaxed.
It is so constant that at first Pitch had assumed that Jack had encountered some terribly abusive situation. And – as the Nightmare King – it had made Jack appear the easiest to exploit. That hadn’t worked out, which was probably for the best, really, because Pitch now preferred a Jack who wasn’t broken. The Nightmare King liked to break things. Shadows weren’t careful with their toys.
The pale blue of his fear was so constant that Pitch had caught himself becoming used to it, adjusting in the way Jack had clearly adjusted, simply assuming that it was a pale blue that didn’t indicate anything other than a sweet thread of colour winding its way behind his mind’s eye. It was only – now – when he focused or concentrated that he was reminded that it was constant fear.
Pitch had always processed fear as colour. Other warriors had tasted it, some had heard it in a background symphony, but Pitch found it wove through him as a tapestry, weaving across the light spectrum. Some colours were fairly standard across the board; terror almost always came through as a blazing white. The intensity of the blaze matched the intensity of the terror. But otherwise, a person’s fears were highly individual. Sandy’s low-grade fear of not reaching as many children as he wished every evening was a dim olive green. North’s fear that Jack wasn’t being honest with him – not that he was being honest with him, Jack didn’t do ‘being honest’ – was a Cassia brown, and Pitch suspected that connected to something far older. Fears that sat on the brown and grey spectrum connected to something long buried.
With most people, he had to turn his mind’s eye inward and focus on the streams of colours to pick out the fears. Unless the fear was right there and hammering at him, it was just background static. With those he knew well, the colours translated without him having to think about it.
Jack’s fear that Pitch would leave him was an icy, mint green. It was jagged and caught on his thoughts. Whenever it grew stronger, Pitch found it hard to concentrate. His mind wanted to respond, to smooth the fear down, at least get it flowing again so it wasn’t catching on every damn thing in his head. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Disturbingly sentimental, but the only thing that seemed to work as a temporary measure.
When it smoothed down though, Pitch realised that he liked it swirling inside of him. Jack’s curling fear that Pitch would abandon him was a novelty. People did not fear him leaving. For a long time, people feared his approach. And even as General, his fellow soldiers would sometimes feel bolts of apprehension, seeing him striding towards them. After all, Generals could dole out criticism and praise, and they always represented the promise of more work, of war, of putting lives on the line. There weren’t many people in the world who had feared that Pitch would leave them.
So he liked it, but only when it was soothed and flowing smoothly. Otherwise it disrupted his focus, left him turbulent as it rasped at him.
Jack’s fears were like that, he discovered. They could be soft as snow, or icicles falling hard into the centre of his brain.
He wouldn’t forget how Jack had responded to Mora’s feeding frenzy in a hurry.
The fears of others could, on occasion, split open and colonise his mind. It didn’t often happen, but when it did, he experienced someone else’s fear as his own. He had learned – over time and often in the middle of battle – the skill of asking himself, ‘Is this fear mine? Does it belong to me?’
Jack made him ask himself that question more often than was normal.
It wasn’t – after all – common for Pitch to find himself thinking, That’s too much fear. That’s an excess of terror. What happened to you?
It was very like him to assume the worst. Most people had the luxury of hiding their minds from the truth. But Pitch walked through a crowded neighbourhood and could feel the statistics in the form of fears. He knew of the murderers, the paedophiles, the torturers and their victims. He saw them going about their lives in the prisons of their minds, corrupted or broken or both, worrying about getting caught, going to jail, being killed, being hurt again. The shadows liked Earth a great deal. There was a lot to eat.
Without the shadows, though, it left Pitch soured on the human species overall. Nothing wrong with being a recluse.
But Jack didn’t quite fit. He didn’t read like a rape or abuse victim, and yet, sometimes there were glimpses of it. He didn’t feel like someone who had been tortured, and yet, at certain times, he could have sworn...
Pitch only knew of one way to get to the bottom of something, outside of simply picking up knowledge from strands of colour. So he pushed. He found varying ways to elicit answers to the questions that pressed unabated. What is this? Why are you feeling this way? What is this colour that I’m getting from you, that I can’t identify? Where do your fears come from? What lurks in your past? How come that event didn’t disturb you at all, but that one has left a crack in your soul? Why?
In this, he also wanted to understand what was happening to himself.
He had some clarity now. He knew that the consequences of isolation and solitary confinement had worked a damage that was irreparable. In a thousand years time, Jack would still be waking up from nightmares, or having encounters with people that would touch on the wound of being unseen for so long. Nothing to be done about that.
Perhaps, if Jack had remembered his previous life, it wouldn’t have injured him so terribly. Pitch had spent a long time unseen also; but then, he’d not been in his right mind, and the shadows had been there, and in the background had been the plucking, insistent knowledge that there was something more that he couldn’t quite remember. So his damage was not the same quality of damage.
And he knew more about Jack’s history. A satyr. Great. Jack didn’t think of it as rape, and it probably hadn’t been. But there would have been no affection, nothing beyond basic preparation and vigorous fucking and...if Pitch thought about it for too long, he caught his fingernails scraping down the centre of his palm. A satyr should never be someone’s first experience.
And the others? Jack hadn’t elaborated. But there had been winding, twisting threads of fear there. Not rape, Jack had insisted, not that. What then? More violence? Yes. And the sense of utter worthlessness upon realising that you only had one thing that people wanted, and once they’d had it they didn’t want it again? Yes. How was that even possible? That conversation had been difficult. He hadn’t realised how hard he was leaning on Jack. The colours had muddied inside of him and he’d just wanted them separate and clean and he wanted to attach them to events, to knowledge. A known fear was far easier to relegate into background static, than one without a story attached to it.
At least he could trust Jack to disengage when he felt trapped. Jack was no stranger to his own fight or flight instincts. And even if he was geared a little too heavily towards flight, at least he could access them.
In other areas, Jack’s fear was nowhere near where it should have been. Augus would destroy Jack if he got his hands on him. Pitch had seen that look on his face. Jack was just the kind of bold-but-frightened upstart that Augus would enjoy compelling into hideous acts. Pitch was still tossing up whether to ratchet up Jack’s fear of Augus so that it was accurate. As it stood, Jack’s fear of Augus was a small, trifling thing. A background concern. For some reason, he still didn’t take Augus seriously. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t seen him as a waterhorse, or because he hadn’t seen him rip someone to pieces, or maybe because Augus was so polite that Jack simply hadn’t caught the undertones. Honestly, Jack, you’re a naive idiot at the best of times.
His fear of the Nain Rouge was proportionate. It gave him the impetus to hide when she was present, and the instinct to flee whenever he thought she might be too close. Pitch didn’t like feeling Jack’s fear of the Nain Rouge, but he was grateful that it was there. It lent self-preservation. It meant that Pitch didn’t have to keep such a close eye on him when she was present. Jack kept a very close eye on himself, when she was present.
Fear was useful.
Then there were the things that Jack didn’t even bother with. Jack really hadn’t feared him a great deal, even when he had been the Nightmare King and comfortable with destroying a person from the inside out. Jack accepted physical violence with an ease that was genuine. He’d been thrown around by the Nightmare King, fallen from the sky, pitched across the room when he’d discovered the locket, and his general reaction after shaking himself off was, ‘I’m fine, what’s next?’ He had a carelessness with his body that drifted somewhere between acceptance of his invulnerability as spirit, and a reckless attitude born of not seeing the point of his own existence.
It was the things that Jack didn’t fear, sometimes, that sent a bell-like vibration of pain throughout his being.