Chapter Text
There is a locket tucked beneath his collar and it’s clamped shut by a dent just over the clasp. He has never been able to open it, and though it is useless and dulled by age, he has never taken it off. He keeps it hidden and it is a small weight against his chest, cold and lifeless and somehow more meaningful than any of his nightmares could ever be.
He has no idea where it is from, who gave it to him, or why he has it. But it remains nonetheless.
Sometimes when the voices in his head are too loud to bear, he pulls out the tarnished metal and rubs his thumb across the hard surface. It doesn’t quiet the screaming (the girl the nightmares the thousands of nightmares), but it grounds him when the noise is too much. It’s a little pathetic that he has relied on a little trinket over the countless years, but the locket still shines where he has rubbed it constantly and he wonders if maybe, someday, he will be able to finally prise it open and see what secrets are kept within it.
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He does not sleep because he does not dream. He has nightmares of things that should not frighten him—blood and tears and screaming voices, having no control of his body as it marches forward into fire, fur beneath his fingernails and between his teeth—but it isn’t as though he needs to sleep anyway. It just passes the time. And since the end of the Dark Ages, there has been plenty of time on his hands. The fearlings gnash their teeth at him, braying and tossing their heads as they prepare to close in on him and feed on his fear (no faith no belief no memories nothing).
Jack snarls at them and they are forced back, because he is the king of fear and they must obey him.
He has been this way for as long as he can remember. Black veins and shadowed cloak and amber eyes, a wraith in the night with demons at his beck and call. It’s been eternity. Certainly long before this place was created, and there is something wrong with the world that he resides in. He knows there are other planets (he has destroyed and devoured many of them) but this one has sucked him dry and left him a shade of who he was. He’d been powerful, once, but exile on Earth has ruined him. He is bitter (but some part of him is glad and he can’t explain why). Of course there is still fear, there is always fear, but they don’t fear him and that is such a change from the old days, the end of the Golden Age when he first came into being and everyone knew his name.
They called him many things back then. Some of them seemed to know him—but it was strange that they might think that, when he had been so newly formed and his name is not Jackson. He is a conglomeration of shadows and nightmares and monsters that hunger to snuff out of the light (all of the little lights on the globe every last little believer).
I am Legion, he thinks, amused. The devil has nothing on him, although possessions and hauntings were never really up his alley. That requires a large time commitment to a single person, and Jack only does that when he feels there is enough potential in his victim. A certain few authors and musicians were a testament to his...dedication.
But it had been years since he’d felt strong enough to take on a task of that undertaking. Belief in him had been waning, was shrivelling, and something buried beneath the monsters in his head is beginning to surface.
A small voice, a little girl, who calls out his name with such desperation that he should be taking pleasure in her terror. But she calls and cries, and all Jack wants to do is find her and pull her into himself so that she won’t sound so alone.
I am here, little girl, I am here I am here I am here just please come find me
She never answers, of course. She isn’t real, just as he himself isn't real. ‘Jack’ is a creation of nightmares and he is no one without them.
He is a monster.
He knows this because the fearlings told him so.