Chapter Text
It had been seventy-three years.
Seventy-three years since the dazzling feeling had hit him, nearly made him sob with relief, nearly made him die from joy. So long a time and yet it seemed cruelly brief when he pitted it against all the time he still had left. How many millennia would he see pass, empty of the boy who had first dared to believe in him? How many children would be born between now and the end of time, unable to see him because they did not share in the same magic, because their lives had no room for fun, because they would not, could not, try as hard as the small boy having a heart to heart with a stuffed rabbit once had?
Jack turned on his side; around him the wasted plains of the South Pole crackled with the frigidity of his grief. Melancholy called forward cloud fronts, swirling brushstrokes of grey and white stabbed quickly through the atmosphere, murdering all blue in the same way that he wished to murder time, to murder mortality and its fleeting nature.
Jack had known, having seen many deaths within the span of nearly four centuries. He had been on edge, frantic, rarely leaving Burgess. The scientists and environmentalists in other parts of the world had made a fuss about the lateness of winter, and while North had hounded him to do his duties as a guardian, it had been only once and softly, without real weight behind the words. Tooth and Sandy afforded him tentative hugs, and sometimes, gold infused dreams, though he slept little in the final days. Aster simply looked at Jack with hollow eyes, communicating without words. He knew what it was like to feel the bite of absence, to watch a mortal close to the heart as they withered.
Sophie had not outlived her brother.
Jamie had asked to be taken outside one grey day no more than a week ago. There he had faded silently with a smile on his wrinkled face, fingers tracing shaky swirls in the frost on the back of Jack's unseen hand.
Seventy-three years and then some - Jamie had lived a good life, a joyous life, a life that had given Jack meaning in an eternity of purposelessness - all summed up in an hour long service. He had very nearly screamed then and there, nearly called down a tempest of ice and rage to bury, tear at, and reject the finality of it all. Instead he'd taken off like a coward, sending sleet and hail crashing in his wake, burying the world beneath him with everything he could not bear to feel.
But Jack felt it nonetheless, oh god how he felt it now.
He writhed in the snow, curled tighter into his knees, wished away the choking sensation creaking in his bones. He held his breath, stifling the roar that was want to erupt and literally tear his heart from his chest, rending it, mangling it and making a mess of his insides. Through rivulets of solidified tears Jack spotted a sliver of clear sky, the clouds around it darkening by the moment. The moon hovered in the unblemished space, silently, always stoic, like some damn secret keeper. Jack twitched as a moonbeam hit him, stroked his face in a way that elicited nothing less than insanity from the eternal boy. Jack lost it. His desperately crafted control unraveling like a nicked sweater.
"DON'T YOU TOUCH ME!" he shrieked with the fury of a thousand winds. Jack flung himself to his feet, gathered every ounce of anguish he could muster and whirled his staff in circles high above his head. The tempest came now, swirling dark and furious, hail and snow plummeting from the sky, heavy like stone tears.
Jack staggered. He ached, sick with the memory of Jamie. He needed to be rid of it. He needed to expel the chaos within him until the depths of his soul became empty. He must, lest his immortal heart break. Jack forced all he felt into his staff until the gnarled wood was straining with magic and emotion, crackling, fit to snap. Jack whipped his staff in a wide arc, scraping through tundra and pulling up asymmetric spears all around his feet. Jack targeted the moon, creating a raging wave of sharpened, bitter ice, of grief, pain, and exhaustion before sending it careening towards the opening in the clouds. He wanted to massacre the moon, he wanted to deface the sky, he wanted to chase down death with frost and wrest Jamie from under its power.
He followed his assault with a feral scream, the howl of a maddened wolf. Snow filled his mouth as the blizzard raged, the mountains groaned in dismayed protests and the clouds swallowed the moon before the ice could.
He wailed. The cry blew over the vastness of the Antarctic before being muted, swept up, and erased by the ice and wind.
Forlorn. Alone. Sad, sad, sad.
Jack teetered, drained of everything, hollowed out, his body the same as brittle ice. He fell away, backwards, sinking into the powder, eyes frozen over by tears that would not cease. Jack stared blankly upwards, wishing that his body too could die and rot. Silently he lay, still and motionless as a corps, as still as Jamie's corpse. Jack let the storm cover him, layer by layer, for hours, days, and months until Jack lost any notion of time. Until his consciousness was muffled beneath 183 centimeters of frozen white, crystalline snow. Snow as hollow and dead-like as the empty guardian housed within its frost-riddled embrace.