To Be Like the Guardians

Part 1: The Plan, Chapter 1: The Voices

Mallory Bennett woke up to voices in his head, and they were not his own.

His eyes flew open as the sounds interrupted him from his sleep, the little pests. The locations of the injuries he had obtained from the fight with Pitch all that time ago- which were on his palm, arm, and leg- vibrated as if they were going to split open, as if there was something that lay beneath his skin.

Mallory sat up from his bed in the warm dark room, a desk near his nightstand and a closet opposite his bed, a dresser opposite the desk, all made of hickory wood. He clenched and unclenched his shaking hand, willing the feeling to go away. But no, it never went away until the voices ended.

"There is no cure," they whispered to him, the sound quiet yet powerful and frightening in the otherwise-silence. "You have to protect your children another way."

Mallory shook his head as if he could fling the words from his mind. He got out of bed, walked over to his desk, and turned on the lamp. The warm light illuminated the documents Whisper had translated for him, a high stack that cast a shadow on the surface of the desk. He opened to the first page yet again, but it didn't matter. He could recite the whole thing by memory now, turn the letters into a play, the words having been burned into his brain.

"You're no smarter than the Guardians. How could you come up with something that they haven't thought of before? There are quicker and easier ways to defend little Jamie and Sophie like we've told you."

"They're not so little anymore," Mallory muttered under his breath. He began trying to read amidst the chorusing voices shaking and distracting him. Maybe, this time, the 287th time, he would catch something he hadn't before.

"Who are you kidding? What could you have possibly missed?"

"Shut up."

"We are only trying to help."

"Yes, because irritating me is very helpful." Mallory didn't mention how much they scared him, the voices and the tremors. He knew they probably had something to do with the fight with Pitch six years ago, but when he had asked the Guardians about it, they didn't know what it was. Whisper, when he had asked her, had said that she could sense some sort of darkness in him, but she couldn't tell what. What was still there? He tried to concentrate on the translated documents.

"Children often find correction irritating." And now the voices were insulting him.

"Shut up." Mallory struggled to focus on the paper in front of him, but it was impossible with the voices continuing to speak. Even Haven and Whisper had looked through the whole book and found nothing, even Fiona. But he didn't want to believe that the malicious voices were right.

"This trial, we..." he read aloud, trying and failing to drown out the continued noise. He closed his eyes and moaned.

"If you listened to us, you wouldn't have this problem."

"I'm not listening to anything related to Pitch."

"Suit yourself."

Mallory breathed a sigh of relief as his body stopped tingling and the voices went away. He no longer felt like he had to prove to them that he could still create a harmless Fearling cure, so he glanced at the digital clock next to his bed. 2:30 a.m. That left five more hours until he had to get up for work the next morning.

His subconscious didn't want him to sleep, though. It wanted him to stay up and defend himself against the voices. It didn't feel comfortable sleeping.

But it didn't matter what his subconscious wanted; he needed to be well-rested for work. He owed Matt, Haven, and the others for hiring him for such a high position in the L.E.R. He earned enough money that he could fly to see his kids in Pennsylvania every week. The L.E.R. deserved someone who could work well.

Besides, the voices weren't threatening him or anything. They just made it hard to think sometimes and told him to kill Pitch, all for the sake of his kids. Sure, he had tried to do it once, but that didn't mean he wanted to do it again. And it didn't make sense that corruption wanted him to kill him anyway. Maybe the corruption inside of Mallory came from something else? But no, it had to have come from Pitch. There was no other explanation since it was he who had done the damage. It was just...strange.

Mallory nearly jumped as he caught sight of a shadow moving out of the corner of his eye. It had just been his own, however. But six years still wasn't enough to convince his subconscious that it wasn't Pitch. It was a miracle that Mallory could sleep with the lights off at all.

The blond man returned his focus to the documents in front of him. Who was he kidding? How could he find a cure when he had read the papers hundreds of times already? There were enough pages that he had thought he would be able to find something, but it was much more difficult than he had assumed. Fiona had been able to find a few weapon ideas from it, though- but only four out of the maybe 300 trials, and only because she fixed three of them. North had given the L.E.R. weapons, too- swords, but they were no Fearling cure.

The wind howling outside made the hair on his neck stand on end. He couldn't give up on a cure. Not now, when his kids were in danger more than ever. Many people had begun being attacked by Fearlings and Nightmares, and these incidents had only increased over the last few years, although his kids hadn't specifically been targeted yet. If Pitch was still weak, he was certainly returning to power, if he and his minions had any correlation at all.

Mallory crept over to the window and peeked through the blinds. The street outside was barren aside from shadows and dim lampposts. There were no Fearlings, Nightmares, or possessed men. Mallory forced himself back into his bed and nearly gasped when his past injured areas began to quiver again.

"We could tell you when they're near, if you would let us." If there was one thing that unnerved Mallory about the voices, it was that they knew his thoughts.

Don't talk to me, he thought. Go away.

There was no chance he would be sleeping now. Maybe he shouldn't have joined the L.E.R. and should've stayed distant from danger. However, the organization provided him with weapons to defend his kids with and would give him resources for any cures he wanted to try. Besides, not joining the L.E.R. wouldn't have undone the cuts Pitch put on his body.

"The offer is always there, Bennett." And then the vibrating dissolved into nothing once more.

Mallory walked back over to his bed and lay down, the light from his lamp still on. He wasn't going to be turning it off tonight. He pulled his covers over himself and closed his eyes, the words from the documents still clearly visible in his head. Honestly, he could just give the papers back to Whisper, and he would have no problem writing everything down himself from memory. But Whisper didn't have much of a use for it aside from his own, and he had a feeling that even if she looked at it as many times as he had, she still wouldn't find a cure. Maybe nobody could. No, no, there had to be a way. Haven had made a cure once with the materials found in the cave, so there had to be another one out there, a safer one.

Mallory tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept on being plagued with fears and a gnawing sense of hopelessness. What if he never found a cure, and Pitch turned his kids into Fearlings? There were no more Pravitas Crystals or curing orbs left.

If only there was a way to assuage his fears, keep his kids protected forever. He knew that killing Pitch would do that, but he didn't want to kill a man who was evil only because he had been possessed in a time of weakness. Mallory wasn't willing to go that far again. Now that he knew Pitch wasn't in the right mind (Haven had told him so), and especially because of the voices and Pitch's threat, Mallory didn't want to try to commit murder.

"You could send someone else after him."

He grabbed the arm that tingled, squeezing it to try to make it stop. Tomorrow was going to be a long, tired day. The voices just wouldn't leave him alone.