Chapter Text
01. The party don’t start ‘til I walk in
One of the perks of being an immortal teenager without a chaperone was that Jack could cause as much trouble as he wanted to without being scolded. With great power came great responsibility, and Jack was responsible for a lot of crazy shit. He was always careful because it wasn’t fun when someone got hurt, but wreaking havoc in broad daylight was his favorite pastime. Slipping pedestrians into each other on the sidewalks, changing the expressions on snowmen, creating awesome snow days for squealing kids, it was all in a days’ work.
It would have been worth it, too, if just one person could have said ‘thank you’.
02. Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Spring is an unhappy affair. The ground has warmed enough to till the soil for planting, and it goes unspoken that the ground must be broken for another reason. They stand in a half-circle around the grave and Jack’s absence is noticeable, a heavy weight across their shoulders that seeps into their spines and infects their bodies. Jack’s sister presses flowers into the soft dirt mound and Jack’s mother wraps a scarf around the cross, and Jack’s father is a strong man but he leaves tears at the altar when the priest leads them in prayer. Someday grass will grow over the grave and someday they will follow him beyond.
(Someday Jack will remember watching his own funeral and he will cry like his father once did.)
03. I miss the scratch of your unshaven face on my cheek
You cannot hold onto anything that wants to leave, so Jamie let Jack go when the Guardian realized that Jamie was growing up. It was a stupid mistake and when they meet years later, Jamie a college student and finally on even ground with Jack, they laugh even as they kiss. It’s a sort of love that transcends any human relationship and while Jamie grows ever older, his young eighteen year old face sharpening and maturing through 20, 25, 30, Jack is forever eighteen. Jamie lies under thick layers of blankets and Jack rests over the sheets, barely touching them, but their hands are clasped tightly together while Sandy sends them golden hearts for their dreams.
Time for an immortal passes by far too quickly and Jack wakes up one morning to the sound of wet coughing and the hiss of an oxygen tank. He holds Jamie through sickness and health and knows that there isn’t much time left for them. There is a shadow of a little boy imprinted into his brain and wherever he looks the boy is there, running further and further away from him until he’s just a floater in Jack’s eye, the Last Light and the First Light all at once and Jack thinks ‘so this is what heartbreak is’.
Jamie never stops believing but he does start to forget, so when Jack visits him for the last time the little old man on the hospice bed gives him a bemused smile and says, “I didn’t think angels wore hoodies.”
Jack laughs and Jamie laughs and his final moments are filled with the joy that Jack’s powers bring. The laughter fades quietly and the heart monitor goes flat and then it’s just Jack in that little room, because Jamie has finally gone someplace where Jack can’t follow.
The nurses don’t figure out where the pearlescent hailstones came from, but when they melt they smell like saline.
04. Sometimes you don’t die quick just like you wish you’d done
It’s 1892 and Jack is in London, standing in the St. Pancras tube station as he watches one of the relatively new electric trains pick up its passengers and leave. He had looked at the schedule and the next train wasn’t stopping here. He hesitates for just a moment, then gingerly floats down onto the tracks.
He’s seen people do this before. They waited for the train that wouldn’t stop, and they would leap onto the tracks. Their last vision was of an incoming light barreling through the tunnel. It was an easy way out, because this way the light would come to them and the journey to the other life was instantaneous.
He envies their quick deaths.
He is two centuries too old and the train barreling towards him won’t slam on the brakes like it would for a real human being. Jack spreads his arms wide and wonders what the impact will feel like.
There is no impact.
He hadn’t been expecting one, not really. The train passes through him and it feels like someone is breathing into his ribcage. It’s unpleasant and disappointing, and when the train has gone by Jack lowers his arms. He sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, holds it, then exhales a foggy cloud. He imagines that the fog is filled with his anger, and that none of it is left inside him. As his breath dissipates, so does his fury.
His anguish is a wailing gust and a woman shrieks with laughter as his scream picks up her hat and tosses it down the platform. Jack disappears from the station and for the rest of the week the stations are closed as one of the worst snow storms London has ever seen covers the train tracks with frost.
05. Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body
He is a ghost who leaves no footprints behind him although the snow is to his knees and his feet are bare. He skims along frosted rooftops, pressing hard, but ghosts’ toes make no impression.
Someday, Jack Frost promises himself, he will leave tracks wherever he goes.
(Three centuries will pass before he realizes he already has.)