Tricked Out | Nightmare Before Christmas

Chapter 29: Rebirth

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November 29

Town Hall

3 am

It started, Jack felt, rather unassumingly.

He'd put the human to work in the study with him, going through all his ancient scrolls and books he'd been meaning to read but had instead cluttered the house to such an extent Ivy had spent a night amusing herself by never once touching Jack's hardwood floor, leaping from book to book with extraordinary balance and gauge of distance.

"It's like your obstacle courses!" She'd explained with a grin as she balanced on the spine of a book. Jack was thankful that her pain seemed to have diminished in the past week- the time she'd spend gritting her teeth and writhing on the couch even as she attempted to distract herself had brought up too many distant, painful memories of his wife, his mother, all the woman he'd loved who'd come and gone...

"Just kill me," she'd groaned one night, sweat on her brow as she held her knees to her chest with one hand, the nails of her other destroying his upholstery. He'd utterly refused to let her suffer alone in the small upstairs room, to the point of (carefully, humans were so fragile) slinging the human over his shoulder and bringing her to the study couch despite her protests. "I'll probably end up down here, anyway. You'd see me soon."

"Not yet," he'd replied, bones grinding with discomfort at the thought of her completely losing all traces of her humanity- watching her memory fade was painful enough as it was.

But that was beside the point. The point was that they'd spent many nights like this, with only the sound of Jack's muttering and Ivy's soft breaths filling the room, the pumpkin king politely ignoring the way her eyes would hungrily scan the text before slipping the documents into their designated positions.

One particular night, Jack had been struggling with a deadbolt on a box that had been serving as a coaster for a clump of cacti (which Ivy had hotly protested handling). He jiggled the lock over and over again, searching for some keyhole, even offering a few Latin chants as bribery, ignoring how Ivy's eye twitched.

"Will you either open the thing or leave it!" She finally snapped, hands curling over reported supernatural sightings from Ireland she was pretending not to read. "I'd think somebody like you would know all about lock breaking."

"That constitutes as a general undead skill here," he responded mildly. "But this particular lock is adamantly sticky, and I haven't my usual tools."

"Why don't you go get them?"

Jack waved a hand towards an enormous pile in the manor's hall.

Ivy gave a grunt of acknowledgment but dropped the records, padding over to Jack in near silence to examine the box. Her eyes narrowed and her fingers twitched as Jack watched her mind eagerly sort through the new puzzle. Her brown eyes lit up as her lips parted in an open-mouthed grin. "I may be able to help, actually!"

She scrambled back to her designated chair, unzipping her jacket pocket and rummaging around the contents before withdrawing a flimsy plastic card.

She knelt by the box once more, tongue trapped between her teeth in concentration. "Hold it steady and bring that light closer," she ordered. "This works on my door at home, we might as well give it a shot!"

Ivy slid the card under the deadbolt, holding her breath as she wiggled and lifted it against the bold. After a few minutes of "c'mon!" and "jetzt... jetzt..." the bolt relented and lifted free. She whooped and dropped the card in favor of snatching the box, rushing to a nearby table and flinging the lid open to reveal-