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It had started with the snowmen. Somewhere around the 50 year mark of Jack’s strange, isolated existence, and he spent a whole afternoon watching a group of children play in and around a particularly large snowdrift he had left for them. Surreptitiously aiding them in their snowball fights and making sure the flurries of snow that continued to fall were just enough to ensure they had a fresh supply, without sending them back inside, Jack could feel that he was at least in some way a part of their fun.
He actually thought the children might head home soon. The light was failing and the temperature dropping. But then there was a cry that they hadn’t built a snowman yet, as though the thought had drifted to the children on the evening air. That Jack may or may not have blown some of his own wintry breath into the ear of the child who was first to call out still gives him a thrill, even as that same child’s arm passes through him.
Jack doesn’t know what it is about that snowman. He has seen children build them countless times before. Maybe it is because he helps in the building of this one more than he has before. He has previously been so intent on trying to get the children to see him he has never just given himself over to the moment of being able to help them in their fun. He helps the smallest child gather enough snow for the snowman’s head; all the others amazed that the tiny, skinny boy could possibly gather so much on his own and even have the strength to lift it into pride of place atop the body. He helps them hunt out stones to use for eyes, scuffing away the top layer of snow with his bare feet. He steps back with them to admire their hard work, a joint effort that Jack has been a part of, even if unknowingly to the rest of the gathered friends. The adults of the village eventually come searching for the children, calling them into the warm, and Jack sends them on their way with unheard calls of goodnight and promises to be there again tomorrow. He’s left alone then, with the snowman, and it’s as he’s starting into that inanimate face, that an idea clicks into place inside Jack’s mind. He doesn’t have to be completely alone. He has the ability to make his own friends.
He flies back to his lake faster than he ever has before, unable to contain his excitement. His whole body is shaking when he lands and he can’t help but let out a little yelp of delight, turning a loop in the air before landing. He gets the wind to help him bring in enough snow to cover the area, just like he has done so many times before. But for the first time he’s too impatient for it to be over to enjoy the pattern of snowflakes, or to sculpt it into crafted drifts. He rests in the top branches of a tree, his fingers curling, tensing and un-tensing around his staff, nearly dropping it once or twice in anticipation. When at long last there is enough snow for what he has planned, Jack leaps to the ground, landing gently, expertly, on the fresh white canvas below.
Jack works through the night, and the next day, completely forgetting about any plans he might have had to venture back into the nearby villages. He works long past the point where an ordinary child would have tiered, long past the point where living fingers would have been lost to frostbite. He crafts, not just one snowman, but a family of them, no, an entire silent, stationary army bordering his lake. He doesn’t rush the job, putting such care and detail into each one that when he is finished not one looks alike, and all look as though they could come alive at any moment. It would be quite the shocking sight if anyone saw it but him, this mass of snow figures circling a lake in the middle of a forest. But Jack knows he doesn’t need to worry about that. No one ever visits the place he has made his home. Stories about a kid that supposedly died there scare away the children and even most of the adults. Sheer lack of interest and the constant chill that surrounds the place keeps away the rest.
Jack stands amid his creations and is suddenly struck with stage fright. He coughs, goes to speak, feels foolish and stops. He has gone so long with no one to speak to that now he is faced with the closest thing he can get to it and he doesn’t know where to start. But then he thinks of all the things he longs to tell somebody, share with somebody and he starts again. The first, faltering hello makes him laugh at himself, but before long he is in full blown conversation with this silent audience. They don’t respond, but they don’t turn away, they don’t talk over him, and they don’t walk through him. He talks until he wears out both himself and his voice. He sleeps in the middle of the circle of the friends he has created for himself. He falls asleep happy and not feeling quite as alone as he normally does, a feeling he comes to recognise as pride swelling inside of his chest. He has done this all by himself. He doesn’t need the moon to give him friends. He can make his own.
The snowmen are not perfect of course. They have their draw backs. They cannot, for instance, fly alongside him as he spreads snow and ice. He does not have them to keep him company while he paints intricate frost patterns and settles white across the land. Even when he wraps his thin, pale, icy arms around them, they cannot hug him back.
The biggest flaw of all Jack’s new snowy friends was that they did not last. For two weeks Jack kept them, shielded them, repaired them where they began to melt or crumble. He kidded himself into thinking that they really would be there forever, constant figures and friendly faces – that he had fashioned that way himself- waiting for him at the end of the day. But then there was a storm, the wind howling across his lake, and it wouldn’t be calmed no matter how Jack screamed or yelled or cried. The wind had always helped him before but now it was destroying something so precious to him. For the first time he could understand how adults felt when the weather ruined their crops, or their homes, when they prayed to their gods for rain, or sun, or shelter from the elements. Jack would gladly have prayed for hours, days, weeks if he had any hope that it would have changed anything. But he had already spent 50 years praying for a friend with no response. He had no reason to expect anyone to spare his friends now he had made them.
Jack did remake the snowmen, once he had calmed down from seeing his first batch destroyed. He only ever built one or two at a time after that. They were easier to keep and protect in smaller numbers. If he was away from his lake for a long period of time, he would make them wherever he happened to be so he still had someone to aim his conversation at, leaving them as slightly puzzling gifts for the children who lived nearby.
It’s probably about 80 years again since the first batch of Snowmen when Jack comes across a child playing alone in the newly fallen snow. Jack had been thinking about getting back to his lake, and his latest silent friend waiting for him. He’d figured out a new way to sculpt them, with a tree behind them to build against, so that when he laid down, there was enough solid snow for him to rest his head upon the space that would have been their lap, if they were real. He found he slept better that way. But all thought of his return home left Jack when he found that child playing. Jack would always make time for children, especially when they were alone. He floated down and landed beside the boy with a cheerful ‘Hey there, little guy’. The child, of course, paid him no attention and went back to making patterns in the snow with his fingers. Jack laughed.
“You’re going to get cold there, kiddo.” He thought about wrapping his hands around the child’s but knew that would just make him colder.
“You’re right!” Said the little boy, suddenly stopping.
It was such a shock that Jack nearly fell over. He had spoken, and the child had spoken back. For two glorious, beautiful moments, Jack thought that the child had heard him. But then the child spoke again. A cry of ‘good idea!’ to a suggestion Jack hadn’t made. In fact, he hadn’t heard anyone say anything. Maybe he had just been so shell-shocked by the child responding to him that he hadn’t noticed someone else come up the hill to where they sat. But, looking around, Jack realised they were still alone. He also realised, with a heart that felt like led, that the child was not looking at him. He was, in fact, looking a good foot and a half to the left of Jack, where there was nothing but air. Perhaps, Jack reasoned, there was someone there but invisible to him, and visible to this child. He passed his arms through space, waiting for the touch of fabric or skin against his fingertips, but to no avail. To Jack’s utter bewilderment, the child called ‘Come on then!’ to no one and ran to the top of the hill.
Jack followed, but at a distance. The child continued to chatter away a one-sided conversation to the empty space around him as he snapped a branch from an overhanging tree and used that to carve the patterns instead. Occasionally the child would wait for a response, and nod as though he heard one. Other times he would laugh at, or comment upon a statement he had clearly heard, but which had not been spoken. Jack was reminded of the way he spoke to his snowmen. Jack watched the child play, and talk, and laugh, and let an idea lodge inside his brain.
On the way back to the lake that evening Jack tried it out. HE felt ludicrous at first, directing his questions aloud to the air with no figure to aim them at. He kept loosing track of where his ‘friend’ was supposed to be. But he can see this working. He doesn’t go back to his lake that night. He floats from rooftops to tree branches and shouts at his friend to keep up. He spreads ice over rivers and icicles to the underside of bridges and laughs as he pictures his friend skating towards him, and hanging next to him in the cold winter night.
Just like with the snowmen he sticks at it, and in turn it sticks to him.
Some lonely children have invisible friends, and Jack Frost is the loneliest of them all. This is what happens when the invisible boy created an invisible friend.
Jack likes to picture his friend as a boy his own age. He’s not sure why as he has seen over the years that girls can be every bit as fun and brave as boys, and not at all as fragile as some adults would believe. But no, his friend is a boy, of that he is sure. They fly together and play together and spread their frosty work together and everything is more fun than it once was. So what if Jack does still sometimes get lonely? So what if he does sometimes wish he didn’t have to have one-sided conversations all of the time? It’s what he’s got and it’s what he gets used to.
He doesn’t name his friend although he knows plenty of children to name their imaginary friends. He just can’t bring himself to do so. At first Jack didn’t name him because he was too self-conscious about what he was doing, too wary of making a wrong move and breaking the spell he had cast over himself. Then he got involved and emotionally invested and it was suddenly too late to come up with a name. He couldn’t think of a single name good enough for his new friend. That didn’t get in Jack’s way. He talked to his friend and sometimes he could swear he heard his responses. He’d laugh and the wind would blow past and it was as though his friend was laughing with him. At night, Jack would curl up and wrap his arms around himself. With his eyes shut, he can let himself believe it is his friend hugging him. When things get rough, and Jack is particularly lonely, when a child has walked through him, or an act of his nature cursed as a nuisance, a hindrance or worse, a danger, a threat, Jack closes his fist tightly, holding hands with nothing.
Years pass, but less painfully than they did before.
Then the Guardians come for Jack, because the Man in The Moon told them to. For the first time ever Jack is with other people, other beings, who can see him, and talk to him and touch him without passing through him. He knows he doesn’t belong with them, knows he will soon be cast aside once the trouble with Pitch is over, but he is too busy enjoying these wonderful moments of completeness to worry about that. He does not forget his friend, who has been with him for so long, but Jack is so busy with the Guardians and Pitch that he doesn’t have the time to talk to him like he used to. In the few moments he does get alone, Jack apologises, and says things will soon be back to normal, just the two of them.
It takes Jack time to realise that is not going to happen, that he’s with the Guardians for good.
After he’s helped defeat Pitch, after he’s regained his memories and after Jamie has seen him and he’s had his first hug in 300 years, Jack has had to establish a new ‘normal’ for himself. He doesn’t cast aside his old friend. Far from it. He is now just one of many friends he has. He jibes at Bunny and he can see his friend doing so too. He kisses Tooth, once, to see what it’s like, and his friend is the only one to see, and therefore both the only one who teases him and the only one he can tell what it was like to.
North walks in on Jack once in one of the rooms of his workshop, to find him chattering away with no one, not even one of the elves, there. Jack stops as soon as he sees North standing there but he’s already seen plenty. Not that he mentions it though. He simply tells Jack that there are fresh cookies waiting to be tasted and pats him on the shoulder as they go to do just that.
Another time, Jack is staring vacantly for too long, crafting his friend’s response to something Bunny has just said, and Sandy taps him on the arm. The guardian of dreams forms a question mark above his head and Jack smiles and says he’s fine. Sandy makes the shape of the question mark again, along with that of a thermometer, asking if Jack is sick. Jack laughs and again states that he is just fine.
There must be more times that Jack isn’t aware of because those two alone are surely not enough to warrant the intervention the Guardians stage. They sit Jack down and say they are worried. Tooth cuts in and says no, worried isn’t the right word. They’re simply not understanding, and they’d like to. The others nod their agreement. Jack says he’s fine, just like before. He says there’s nothing wrong, but even as he says it he realises how stupid it is to say there is nothing wrong when you can’t even bring yourself to talk about it.
So he tells them.
When he’s done he’s breathing hard and there’s a pain in his chest that hasn’t been there in months.
He waits for the laughter that doesn’t come.
He waits for Bunny to call him stupid or a baby or mad, but he doesn’t. When Jack looks at him, he sees a look of pain on his friend’s face that doesn’t belong there and that he never wants to see there again. And Bunny’s not the only one.
Tooth isn’t crying but she looks like she might be about to.
North just looks shamed, as though something terrible has happened and it’s his fault, but Jack can’t figure out what.
Eventually one of them breaks the silence and Jack is so far gone inside himself that he can’t remember who it is that says that they understand and that they are sorry. Jack’s the one who doesn’t understand now and he tells them so, tells them there’s nothing to be sorry for. North explains that they’re sorry that Jack had to go through that, and that he had to resort to making an invisible friend. Bunny asks how he kept it up for so long. Jack says that it was easy; really, he simply did what he needed to.
“And what about now?” asks Tooth. “Do you need to now?”
It takes Jack a long time to come to the conclusion that no, he doesn’t need to.
He has real friends now. He has believers, children who know who he is and what he is and that can see him and the number is growing by the day. He is a guardian now. He has a purpose. He has people who can actually wrap their arms around him and he can rest his head against them and hear their heart beating. He doesn’t need to fantasise their responses, because they come of their own accord. Jack realises all this, and knows it is time to let go. But he also comes to the realisation that he doesn’t know how to do that.
The Guardians all help. North crafts the figure, a tiny, intricate ice boy, so small it fits into the palm of Jack’s hand. They all go together to Jack’s lake and Sandy helps him pick out just the right spot, and Bunny helps jack to dig a hole in which to place the tiny figure. Tooth places a feather fallen for one of her wings over it like a blanket. As Jack is refilling the hole, Tooth explains that just because they are doing this, doesn’t mean Jack has to cut off all of his memories of his first friend. He can keep the good ones. This is just putting to rest the bad ones and the past with it. If he ever needs to, Jack can come back here, to be close to his friend, and his friend will be waiting. The others’ let her do the talking. Memory is, after all, her speciality.
Afterwards they go back to North’s place, and Jack flies on ahead for a little while. The wind blows against his cheeks and he thinks he feels a hand brush his cheeks, wiping away tears that he didn’t know would be there. He thinks that that touch is a goodbye. And he does cry, but not for very long.