Rise of the Guardians fic: Eight Going on Eighteen part 1
I have been just a bit batty about the Rise of the Guardians movie since I first saw it, so fic must happen, obviously!
This is kind of a prologue to a longer fic I have in the works. (In fact, I'm going to go ahead and merge the fics as I post them to ff.net.) I went and wrote kind of an epilogue already, so now I really have to go and write all the in-between parts!
This takes place close after the battle with Pitch at the end of the movie. I couldn’t find any official note on ages or birthdays, so I’m going with Jack being fifteen or sixteen, Jamie being eight in the movie and Sophie being three and a half.
Title: Eight Going on Eighteen 1/?
Characters: Jack Frost main
Warnings: none
Words: 3500
Summary: Jack doesn't know how to react to the welcome the other Guardians give him. Luckily it's not yet too warm for him to visit his first believer.
After three hundred years where most of his social contact consisted of one-sided conversations with people who couldn’t see or hear him, Jack was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. It wasn’t as bad as when they’d first tried to make him into a Guardian, being surrounded by elves and yetis and noise and not knowing what was going on. Yet he was still left wondering how the huge hall North had decked out for their victory celebration could seem so small. The walls seemed to close in a little more every time someone moved into his personal space.
Weirder than North’s apparently shrinking hall was the feeling that he was actually welcome there. The others weren’t just accepting his presence, but actually including him. He wasn’t used to being treated this way. He kept getting the urge to ask the Man in the Moon if this was some mistake, but he was too terrified that it was and he would lose everything.
When Phil had come up to pat him on the back he’d tried to flinch away out of habit. How many times had he been grabbed by the scruff of his neck and tossed out in the snow as he tried to sneak into the workshop? Instead, Phil had actually handed him a new toy prototype to admire.
Apparently he was now an action figure. The very idea was amazing enough that he almost neglected to insist that they take the shoes off the little model. If he never saw those glittering, curly-toed shoes again it would be too soon. It had never even occurred to him how great it would be to have the yetis on his side, and not just because they weren’t trying to throw him out anymore.
Not that he would have let them throw him out without a fight now. Sandy had been sharing the epic tale of the Guardian’s first battles with Pitch, a narration in moving storybook pictures. Jack was fascinated right up until the part when Toothiana split herself into her thousands of mini fairies and about a dozen of them had swooped in and disrupted the sand pictures as they tried to play themselves.
Once the story was interrupted, Jack hadn’t been able to contain his questions and had somehow set off what seemed like a very old argument between North and Bunnymund about chocolate eggs. Sandy just shook his head and let the story end there for the moment, favoring Jack with a wry smile that said this was normal.
Having Sandy back was reason enough to stay. The Sandman was just as much about hard work and deadlines as the other Guardians, but he had always treated Jack like more than a mere nuisance. Some nights they raced in short bursts through the sky as Sandy moved from one area to the next, and he always spared a smile and a wave when he moved on to warmer climates and left Jack behind. Jack clung to those hints of kindness, reminding himself that Sandy accepted him even before his unexpected welcome into this world. At least that friendship wasn’t impossible.
As he thought about it, the way Tooth’s mini fairies kept flocking close to him wasn’t too much of a surprise, either. She’d tried to shoo them away at first, but then he’d made the mistake of telling her he didn’t mind just this once. He guessed this was just their way of saying ‘thank you’ for letting them out of those cages.
The only problem was there were so many of them. They flew in and out of the hall in shifts, their work never ending just because the world was saved, until it felt like each one that left was replaced by two more. Jack had fairies in his hood, in his hair, in his lap, and even one up his sleeve. They were too warm to ignore, and he couldn’t move quickly without stirring them up.
North was on some kind of campaign to fatten him up, judging by the piles of cookies the jovial man kept sending his way. That left Jack with no idea how to respond. He hadn’t been in the habit of eating for a couple hundred years, to the point where he wasn’t sure he if he could anymore or if he would just make himself sick. He didn’t mind if the elves kept scurrying up-he couldn’t call it sneaking, not with all the jingling-and stealing food off his plate, since that saved him from having to find out.
“Try this,” North insisted, setting something in front of him with a thump. “Old yeti recipe. We always keep one for after Easter.”
It was quickly becoming obvious North wasn’t going to give up until he tried food again. Jack looked from the Christmas pudding in the middle of the table to the generous slice North had put in front of him. It looked like nothing so much as a cannonball studded with dried fruit, but everyone else had been praising the yetis’ cooking. How bad could it really be?
He took one bite, seared both his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and spat it out again with an intelligent protest that somehow came out sounding more like, “Hhnaangh!”
“North, what did you give him?” Tooth exclaimed. Jack could actually feel the breeze she made as she moved to hover over him in concern.
“Here, mate. Drink this and don’t choke.” The glass being pushed into his hands was at least cold, and Jack took a grateful gulp of eggnog.
North tried some of the rejected pudding, shrugged, and pronounced it, “Barely warm. I told them: No flaming pudding this time.”
If Jack wasn’t still trying to cool the inside of his mouth with eggnog, he might have been able to say, “Great, thanks for not setting my food on fire,” instead of coming out with a slightly pained gagging noise.
He was surrounded by a great cooing of concerned fairies. Someone thumped him on the back, gentle for a yeti but nearly knocking him out of his seat. North was shouting down to the end of the table about bringing over something else, but Jack didn’t care what it was because he did not want any more food. Sandy was patting comfortingly at his hand while Bunnymund pushed a fresh pitcher of eggnog his way with a command to either drink or talk but not both. Bunny actively being nice to him had to be a sign of the apocalypse.
Jack sprang to the back of his chair all in one motion, shedding mini fairies and concerned hands. The walls were closing in so fast they were going to smash into North’s long table in a moment and that was definitely going to ruin the party and why didn’t anyone else notice?
“Back in formation, ladies!” Tooth called. “No, North, give him space before you make it worse.”
Jack had no idea what she was talking about. He was too busy studying the stained glass skylights, trying to remember which one of them opened. How mad would North be if he just broke one?
Sandy was the one who saved him, using one of North’s golden plates like a gong to get their attention and rising up over the table on a cloud of his dream sand. He made a picture of a rough clock face with spinning hands and pointed up to the skylight.
“Oh, you have to get back to work already, Sandy?”
“You too, right Jack?” Tooth fluttered up beside him, deftly removing the sleeping fairy from his sleeve before he could jump away.
“Right.” Jack would have agreed with anything that meant getting out of there before someone tried to pull him back into his seat.
Sandy had the skylight open, and Jack was up and out before anyone could ask exactly what work he even had this time of year.
The sun was comfortably above the horizon, its light catching icicle highlights among the fantastic sprawl of the complex below. Jack looked down at the patterns of stained glass in red and green and frosted white, glowing from within with a much warmer light. There was still a longing rooted deep in his chest to be inside, to belong. At the same time the memory of that crushing weight of closeness still pressed into his skin.
A tornado of sand spiraled up beside him, resolving into a golden Pegasus with Sandy seated comfortably on its back. A quick tilt of his head was all the invitation Jack needed to race south, away from the polar day and into night. Maybe the wind could carry him fast enough to peel away the feeling of pressure.
As they reached the first, northernmost towns, Sandy worked at top speed to make up for lost time, but Jack couldn’t sit still even for that long. Not even when Sandy mimed at dusting off a corner of his cloud and made the silent offer that Jack was welcome to join him.
“Sorry. I guess I don’t really feel like talking today.”
He knew Sandy didn’t expect him to talk about anything, even without the signed reassurances that he pretended not to see. He felt like an idiot, and he wanted to fly until he left that feeling behind. He could outrace nightmares, so why couldn’t he leave his own failings behind?
Jack barely let his feet touch the low rooftops before he flung himself into the open arms of the wind and let it take him where it would. They flew east into the places where Sandy had already spread dreams, but beyond that Jack didn’t care.
Jack could have sworn he wasn’t guiding the wind at all, that he hadn’t asked it for anything but speed, but then the wind parted around him as if setting him at a deliberate destination.
Once he opened his eyes, Jack recognized Burgess immediately, and not just the town. He had blown past the city lights to land on the roof right across from Jamie Bennet’s bedroom window. It was almost midnight, so of course that window was dark. Any of the children who believed in him would be sleeping by now. There was no point in coming here.
The moon didn’t say anything, but Jack felt it pushing on his back, staring like a disapproving father. He wasn’t acting like a Guardian, running away from his friends like that. Well, what could the moon possibly know about walls closing in? It wasn’t like the wanted to run, or to be alone, but he couldn’t push back against his new allies and he didn’t have any other coping strategies.
“Maybe I haven’t gotten enough of silence yet! Did you ever think of that?” He shouted up at the moon. At least that silent glow was one thing he wasn’t afraid to lose.
One jump from the roof and he drifted, light as a snowflake, into the shadows of the Bennet’s yard. Moonbeams slid away from him, but the wind followed him right into the dark and ruffled through his hair in a fond touch.
He scooped up a handful of the old slush that cling to the shadowy corners of the house. It wasn’t quite right for snowballs. Jack needed to blow on it just to freeze it into the right shape before pitching it at the dark window overhead.
The window stayed dark. Jack stared up at it a few seconds longer. He realized that Sandy would be somewhere around the equator by now. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or not by that.
He had turned away, ready to find somewhere else to fly, when a flashlight beam hit him like a spotlight.
“Jack!” That happy shout had a smile on his face even before he turned back to see Jamie looking down at him, flashlight in hand.
He was at the window in an instant, perching sideways on the sill as that happy face beamed up at him, brighter than any spotlight. “You came back! I didn’t think I’d ever get to see you again until winter, but you’re really here!”
“Sh,” Jack cautioned. “Don’t want to wake up the neighborhood, do you?” A second later something occurred to him and he had to ask, “Did I wake you up?”
“Um. . .” Jamie glanced back at his bed, where he had a book propped open against his pillow. “No,” he admitted in a small voice. “Am I in trouble?”
“Relax. I’m not the Guardian of bedtime. I’m just out for one last flight before summer.” Jack knew he was going to ask even before Jamie fixed wide, pleading eyes on him. “Want to come with me?”
“Yes!” Jamie dropped the flashlight and grabbed for his outstretched hand. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” It wasn’t until Jack had lifted him up to the windowsill that he asked, “Where are we going?”
“No idea.”
The wind caught them and tossed them high in the air. Jamie stared down as the town receded below them, his eyes seeking out isolated lights in the dark bulk of his sleepy neighborhood. He didn’t let out so much as a squeak of fear.
They didn’t go far, not compared to Jack’s race from the North Pole. Only a little ways out of town, into the woods that were something like home, though there wasn’t even a rim of ice left on Jack’s lake. He pulled Jamie a little closer than he might have normally, taking pains to let nothing harder than newly-unfurled leaves brush the boy while they flew.
When he found an acceptable spot, Jack hooked his staff in a treetop and swung down onto a wide branch that commanded an open view over the trees and the faint lights of the town behind them. Jamie didn’t even gasp at the abrupt stop, but even once he was sitting safely on the branch he clung to Jack’s hand with one hand and the pocket of his hoodie with the other.
“I won’t let you fall,” Jack promised.
“I know.”
The desperate grip on his hand slowly eased, allowing Jack to wind one arm around Jamie’s back, just to be safe. If he had planned it out he might have liked to take Jamie somewhere more special, maybe even back to the North Pole. All he had thought about was not wanting to be alone, even as he needed to be free.
“The moon looks so big from here.” With the single-minded wonder of a child, Jamie had apparently decided that right where they were was plenty special. He sat up, reaching toward the sky as if to catch a moonbeam in his hand.
For a long moment the only sound was the wind sighing through the branches, making them sway. The moon seemed unusually close, watching over them in silence.
“Where do you go in the summer?” Jamie asked.
“I usually cross the equator where it’s night and go up to the South Pole, then work my way north with their winter.”
“Don’t you get lonely? There isn’t anyone living at the South Pole, like Santa-North, is there?” Jamie was still stumbling over the others’ names sometimes, stuck between the stories he had been told all his life and what he had picked up actually meeting them.
“Nope, just some penguins.” Jack knew he should reassure Jamie somehow. He should mention he wouldn’t be completely alone, because he would still see Sandy and Tooth, and while he might not be able to hang around North’s workshop he could probably sneak into Bunnymund’s warren. He should say he was the Guardian and it was his job to worry about Jamie, not the other way around. Instead what he ended up saying was: “But this year I can look forward to coming back here.”
“Really? Then. . . can you come back and play with me again? For my birthday. I don’t need any other birthday presents or Christmas presents or anything else for the rest of the year! Please? It’s November first so it should be cold enough, right?”
Jack couldn’t help laughing at the earnest pleading, as if he would want to stay away from one of the few people who could actually see him. “Okay, first of all: Don’t let North catch you bargaining away your Christmas presents. Second: Of course I’ll be back, and not just for your birthday if I can help it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. As long as you want to see me, I’ll always come back.” Jack ruffled Jamie’s hair with one hand the way the wind had always done for him. It was the one touch he knew the meaning of without thinking. ‘I will never let you down.’
It was well past the hours when Sandy spread his dreams over Burgess by the time he took Jamie back home. Jamie, half asleep and clingy, mumbled something to the effect that it was worth missing out on dreams tonight just to see Jack again. It was unexpectedly flattering, even if he did have to pry Jamie’s fingers from his sleeve trying to put him to bed.
Jack waited a moment, even once he knew Jamie was fully asleep, watching that peaceful little face for any sign of nightmares.
The last thing he expected was a tiny thread of golden sand to drift past him and resolve into a dream that had two figures flying circles over Jamie’s head.
“Sandy?” Jack looked back to find his friend at the window, beckoning him to come along already. “How did you find me?”
A wry smile and a raised eyebrow said it all.
“What? I only have about half a dozen kids who can actually see me. I’m allowed to have favorites.” Jack insisted as he followed, hesitating before taking a seat where the edge of Sandy’s cloud dipped down to him.
He was still surprised Sandy would go to the trouble of looking for him. If there was a crisis they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.
“Thanks,” he said after a moment. Not because he felt like Sandy was waiting for him to say something, just because a long-buried part of him thought it needed saying. “For Jamie’s dream.” He sighed, tipping his head back to watch the stars rush by overhead. It never looked like Sandy could move this quickly when he watched from the outside. “And for everything else, too,” he added after a moment.
Trails of sand mixed with the wind and tickled at his bare feet, making him laugh to himself. Even the moon got a smile. He felt calm again after seeing Jamie, Jack finally realized. Even when the kid fell asleep hanging on his arm and had to be pried off, he didn’t feel like he was being backed into a corner.
Sandy tapped his shoulder to get his attention, and when Jack looked up he found Sandy was showing the symbols he used for each of the Guardians. In unison the other four moved back, away from the snowflake Jack had come to recognize as meaning himself.
“You’re throwing me out? I can’t be a Guardian anymore?! What did I do wrong! I don’t even get a warning or something?” He knew what he’d done wrong. This had to be because he’d run off to escape being crushed, and thrown their hospitality right back in their faces. Would Jamie still believe in him if he wasn’t a Guardian? He had to! Jack was already plotting to chase a storm system over Burgess and surprise him with an early snow day for his birthday.
Sandy smacked his palm into his forehead, motioning with his other hand for Jack to shut up.
This time it was the snowflake that darted away from the group, only to be welcomed back by the others.
“Oh.” They weren’t rejecting him. They were giving him the space. “What made you decide that?”
Sandy grinned at him. The tooth that represented Toothiana shifted into a fairy, the better to scold North and Bunny until they shrunk before her. Sandy’s figure was conspicuously absent from this part.
Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or hide. He was pretty sure this meant hovering worry from Tooth next time he did run into the others. The feeling of being worried over was just as strange as being welcomed. Then again, both were just as unfamiliar as having Jamie really see at him and want to play with him, and he couldn’t seem to get enough of that.
Unfamiliar as the feelings of being taken in, being cared about, and even being believed in were, he didn’t want to give them up for anything. Somewhere in the shared silence between the sand and the moon, hope curled up in his heart that he would have time to adapt to this new life.
This is kind of a prologue to a longer fic I have in the works. (In fact, I'm going to go ahead and merge the fics as I post them to ff.net.) I went and wrote kind of an epilogue already, so now I really have to go and write all the in-between parts!
This takes place close after the battle with Pitch at the end of the movie. I couldn’t find any official note on ages or birthdays, so I’m going with Jack being fifteen or sixteen, Jamie being eight in the movie and Sophie being three and a half.
Title: Eight Going on Eighteen 1/?
Characters: Jack Frost main
Warnings: none
Words: 3500
Summary: Jack doesn't know how to react to the welcome the other Guardians give him. Luckily it's not yet too warm for him to visit his first believer.
After three hundred years where most of his social contact consisted of one-sided conversations with people who couldn’t see or hear him, Jack was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. It wasn’t as bad as when they’d first tried to make him into a Guardian, being surrounded by elves and yetis and noise and not knowing what was going on. Yet he was still left wondering how the huge hall North had decked out for their victory celebration could seem so small. The walls seemed to close in a little more every time someone moved into his personal space.
Weirder than North’s apparently shrinking hall was the feeling that he was actually welcome there. The others weren’t just accepting his presence, but actually including him. He wasn’t used to being treated this way. He kept getting the urge to ask the Man in the Moon if this was some mistake, but he was too terrified that it was and he would lose everything.
When Phil had come up to pat him on the back he’d tried to flinch away out of habit. How many times had he been grabbed by the scruff of his neck and tossed out in the snow as he tried to sneak into the workshop? Instead, Phil had actually handed him a new toy prototype to admire.
Apparently he was now an action figure. The very idea was amazing enough that he almost neglected to insist that they take the shoes off the little model. If he never saw those glittering, curly-toed shoes again it would be too soon. It had never even occurred to him how great it would be to have the yetis on his side, and not just because they weren’t trying to throw him out anymore.
Not that he would have let them throw him out without a fight now. Sandy had been sharing the epic tale of the Guardian’s first battles with Pitch, a narration in moving storybook pictures. Jack was fascinated right up until the part when Toothiana split herself into her thousands of mini fairies and about a dozen of them had swooped in and disrupted the sand pictures as they tried to play themselves.
Once the story was interrupted, Jack hadn’t been able to contain his questions and had somehow set off what seemed like a very old argument between North and Bunnymund about chocolate eggs. Sandy just shook his head and let the story end there for the moment, favoring Jack with a wry smile that said this was normal.
Having Sandy back was reason enough to stay. The Sandman was just as much about hard work and deadlines as the other Guardians, but he had always treated Jack like more than a mere nuisance. Some nights they raced in short bursts through the sky as Sandy moved from one area to the next, and he always spared a smile and a wave when he moved on to warmer climates and left Jack behind. Jack clung to those hints of kindness, reminding himself that Sandy accepted him even before his unexpected welcome into this world. At least that friendship wasn’t impossible.
As he thought about it, the way Tooth’s mini fairies kept flocking close to him wasn’t too much of a surprise, either. She’d tried to shoo them away at first, but then he’d made the mistake of telling her he didn’t mind just this once. He guessed this was just their way of saying ‘thank you’ for letting them out of those cages.
The only problem was there were so many of them. They flew in and out of the hall in shifts, their work never ending just because the world was saved, until it felt like each one that left was replaced by two more. Jack had fairies in his hood, in his hair, in his lap, and even one up his sleeve. They were too warm to ignore, and he couldn’t move quickly without stirring them up.
North was on some kind of campaign to fatten him up, judging by the piles of cookies the jovial man kept sending his way. That left Jack with no idea how to respond. He hadn’t been in the habit of eating for a couple hundred years, to the point where he wasn’t sure he if he could anymore or if he would just make himself sick. He didn’t mind if the elves kept scurrying up-he couldn’t call it sneaking, not with all the jingling-and stealing food off his plate, since that saved him from having to find out.
“Try this,” North insisted, setting something in front of him with a thump. “Old yeti recipe. We always keep one for after Easter.”
It was quickly becoming obvious North wasn’t going to give up until he tried food again. Jack looked from the Christmas pudding in the middle of the table to the generous slice North had put in front of him. It looked like nothing so much as a cannonball studded with dried fruit, but everyone else had been praising the yetis’ cooking. How bad could it really be?
He took one bite, seared both his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and spat it out again with an intelligent protest that somehow came out sounding more like, “Hhnaangh!”
“North, what did you give him?” Tooth exclaimed. Jack could actually feel the breeze she made as she moved to hover over him in concern.
“Here, mate. Drink this and don’t choke.” The glass being pushed into his hands was at least cold, and Jack took a grateful gulp of eggnog.
North tried some of the rejected pudding, shrugged, and pronounced it, “Barely warm. I told them: No flaming pudding this time.”
If Jack wasn’t still trying to cool the inside of his mouth with eggnog, he might have been able to say, “Great, thanks for not setting my food on fire,” instead of coming out with a slightly pained gagging noise.
He was surrounded by a great cooing of concerned fairies. Someone thumped him on the back, gentle for a yeti but nearly knocking him out of his seat. North was shouting down to the end of the table about bringing over something else, but Jack didn’t care what it was because he did not want any more food. Sandy was patting comfortingly at his hand while Bunnymund pushed a fresh pitcher of eggnog his way with a command to either drink or talk but not both. Bunny actively being nice to him had to be a sign of the apocalypse.
Jack sprang to the back of his chair all in one motion, shedding mini fairies and concerned hands. The walls were closing in so fast they were going to smash into North’s long table in a moment and that was definitely going to ruin the party and why didn’t anyone else notice?
“Back in formation, ladies!” Tooth called. “No, North, give him space before you make it worse.”
Jack had no idea what she was talking about. He was too busy studying the stained glass skylights, trying to remember which one of them opened. How mad would North be if he just broke one?
Sandy was the one who saved him, using one of North’s golden plates like a gong to get their attention and rising up over the table on a cloud of his dream sand. He made a picture of a rough clock face with spinning hands and pointed up to the skylight.
“Oh, you have to get back to work already, Sandy?”
“You too, right Jack?” Tooth fluttered up beside him, deftly removing the sleeping fairy from his sleeve before he could jump away.
“Right.” Jack would have agreed with anything that meant getting out of there before someone tried to pull him back into his seat.
Sandy had the skylight open, and Jack was up and out before anyone could ask exactly what work he even had this time of year.
The sun was comfortably above the horizon, its light catching icicle highlights among the fantastic sprawl of the complex below. Jack looked down at the patterns of stained glass in red and green and frosted white, glowing from within with a much warmer light. There was still a longing rooted deep in his chest to be inside, to belong. At the same time the memory of that crushing weight of closeness still pressed into his skin.
A tornado of sand spiraled up beside him, resolving into a golden Pegasus with Sandy seated comfortably on its back. A quick tilt of his head was all the invitation Jack needed to race south, away from the polar day and into night. Maybe the wind could carry him fast enough to peel away the feeling of pressure.
As they reached the first, northernmost towns, Sandy worked at top speed to make up for lost time, but Jack couldn’t sit still even for that long. Not even when Sandy mimed at dusting off a corner of his cloud and made the silent offer that Jack was welcome to join him.
“Sorry. I guess I don’t really feel like talking today.”
He knew Sandy didn’t expect him to talk about anything, even without the signed reassurances that he pretended not to see. He felt like an idiot, and he wanted to fly until he left that feeling behind. He could outrace nightmares, so why couldn’t he leave his own failings behind?
Jack barely let his feet touch the low rooftops before he flung himself into the open arms of the wind and let it take him where it would. They flew east into the places where Sandy had already spread dreams, but beyond that Jack didn’t care.
Jack could have sworn he wasn’t guiding the wind at all, that he hadn’t asked it for anything but speed, but then the wind parted around him as if setting him at a deliberate destination.
Once he opened his eyes, Jack recognized Burgess immediately, and not just the town. He had blown past the city lights to land on the roof right across from Jamie Bennet’s bedroom window. It was almost midnight, so of course that window was dark. Any of the children who believed in him would be sleeping by now. There was no point in coming here.
The moon didn’t say anything, but Jack felt it pushing on his back, staring like a disapproving father. He wasn’t acting like a Guardian, running away from his friends like that. Well, what could the moon possibly know about walls closing in? It wasn’t like the wanted to run, or to be alone, but he couldn’t push back against his new allies and he didn’t have any other coping strategies.
“Maybe I haven’t gotten enough of silence yet! Did you ever think of that?” He shouted up at the moon. At least that silent glow was one thing he wasn’t afraid to lose.
One jump from the roof and he drifted, light as a snowflake, into the shadows of the Bennet’s yard. Moonbeams slid away from him, but the wind followed him right into the dark and ruffled through his hair in a fond touch.
He scooped up a handful of the old slush that cling to the shadowy corners of the house. It wasn’t quite right for snowballs. Jack needed to blow on it just to freeze it into the right shape before pitching it at the dark window overhead.
The window stayed dark. Jack stared up at it a few seconds longer. He realized that Sandy would be somewhere around the equator by now. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or not by that.
He had turned away, ready to find somewhere else to fly, when a flashlight beam hit him like a spotlight.
“Jack!” That happy shout had a smile on his face even before he turned back to see Jamie looking down at him, flashlight in hand.
He was at the window in an instant, perching sideways on the sill as that happy face beamed up at him, brighter than any spotlight. “You came back! I didn’t think I’d ever get to see you again until winter, but you’re really here!”
“Sh,” Jack cautioned. “Don’t want to wake up the neighborhood, do you?” A second later something occurred to him and he had to ask, “Did I wake you up?”
“Um. . .” Jamie glanced back at his bed, where he had a book propped open against his pillow. “No,” he admitted in a small voice. “Am I in trouble?”
“Relax. I’m not the Guardian of bedtime. I’m just out for one last flight before summer.” Jack knew he was going to ask even before Jamie fixed wide, pleading eyes on him. “Want to come with me?”
“Yes!” Jamie dropped the flashlight and grabbed for his outstretched hand. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” It wasn’t until Jack had lifted him up to the windowsill that he asked, “Where are we going?”
“No idea.”
The wind caught them and tossed them high in the air. Jamie stared down as the town receded below them, his eyes seeking out isolated lights in the dark bulk of his sleepy neighborhood. He didn’t let out so much as a squeak of fear.
They didn’t go far, not compared to Jack’s race from the North Pole. Only a little ways out of town, into the woods that were something like home, though there wasn’t even a rim of ice left on Jack’s lake. He pulled Jamie a little closer than he might have normally, taking pains to let nothing harder than newly-unfurled leaves brush the boy while they flew.
When he found an acceptable spot, Jack hooked his staff in a treetop and swung down onto a wide branch that commanded an open view over the trees and the faint lights of the town behind them. Jamie didn’t even gasp at the abrupt stop, but even once he was sitting safely on the branch he clung to Jack’s hand with one hand and the pocket of his hoodie with the other.
“I won’t let you fall,” Jack promised.
“I know.”
The desperate grip on his hand slowly eased, allowing Jack to wind one arm around Jamie’s back, just to be safe. If he had planned it out he might have liked to take Jamie somewhere more special, maybe even back to the North Pole. All he had thought about was not wanting to be alone, even as he needed to be free.
“The moon looks so big from here.” With the single-minded wonder of a child, Jamie had apparently decided that right where they were was plenty special. He sat up, reaching toward the sky as if to catch a moonbeam in his hand.
For a long moment the only sound was the wind sighing through the branches, making them sway. The moon seemed unusually close, watching over them in silence.
“Where do you go in the summer?” Jamie asked.
“I usually cross the equator where it’s night and go up to the South Pole, then work my way north with their winter.”
“Don’t you get lonely? There isn’t anyone living at the South Pole, like Santa-North, is there?” Jamie was still stumbling over the others’ names sometimes, stuck between the stories he had been told all his life and what he had picked up actually meeting them.
“Nope, just some penguins.” Jack knew he should reassure Jamie somehow. He should mention he wouldn’t be completely alone, because he would still see Sandy and Tooth, and while he might not be able to hang around North’s workshop he could probably sneak into Bunnymund’s warren. He should say he was the Guardian and it was his job to worry about Jamie, not the other way around. Instead what he ended up saying was: “But this year I can look forward to coming back here.”
“Really? Then. . . can you come back and play with me again? For my birthday. I don’t need any other birthday presents or Christmas presents or anything else for the rest of the year! Please? It’s November first so it should be cold enough, right?”
Jack couldn’t help laughing at the earnest pleading, as if he would want to stay away from one of the few people who could actually see him. “Okay, first of all: Don’t let North catch you bargaining away your Christmas presents. Second: Of course I’ll be back, and not just for your birthday if I can help it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. As long as you want to see me, I’ll always come back.” Jack ruffled Jamie’s hair with one hand the way the wind had always done for him. It was the one touch he knew the meaning of without thinking. ‘I will never let you down.’
It was well past the hours when Sandy spread his dreams over Burgess by the time he took Jamie back home. Jamie, half asleep and clingy, mumbled something to the effect that it was worth missing out on dreams tonight just to see Jack again. It was unexpectedly flattering, even if he did have to pry Jamie’s fingers from his sleeve trying to put him to bed.
Jack waited a moment, even once he knew Jamie was fully asleep, watching that peaceful little face for any sign of nightmares.
The last thing he expected was a tiny thread of golden sand to drift past him and resolve into a dream that had two figures flying circles over Jamie’s head.
“Sandy?” Jack looked back to find his friend at the window, beckoning him to come along already. “How did you find me?”
A wry smile and a raised eyebrow said it all.
“What? I only have about half a dozen kids who can actually see me. I’m allowed to have favorites.” Jack insisted as he followed, hesitating before taking a seat where the edge of Sandy’s cloud dipped down to him.
He was still surprised Sandy would go to the trouble of looking for him. If there was a crisis they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.
“Thanks,” he said after a moment. Not because he felt like Sandy was waiting for him to say something, just because a long-buried part of him thought it needed saying. “For Jamie’s dream.” He sighed, tipping his head back to watch the stars rush by overhead. It never looked like Sandy could move this quickly when he watched from the outside. “And for everything else, too,” he added after a moment.
Trails of sand mixed with the wind and tickled at his bare feet, making him laugh to himself. Even the moon got a smile. He felt calm again after seeing Jamie, Jack finally realized. Even when the kid fell asleep hanging on his arm and had to be pried off, he didn’t feel like he was being backed into a corner.
Sandy tapped his shoulder to get his attention, and when Jack looked up he found Sandy was showing the symbols he used for each of the Guardians. In unison the other four moved back, away from the snowflake Jack had come to recognize as meaning himself.
“You’re throwing me out? I can’t be a Guardian anymore?! What did I do wrong! I don’t even get a warning or something?” He knew what he’d done wrong. This had to be because he’d run off to escape being crushed, and thrown their hospitality right back in their faces. Would Jamie still believe in him if he wasn’t a Guardian? He had to! Jack was already plotting to chase a storm system over Burgess and surprise him with an early snow day for his birthday.
Sandy smacked his palm into his forehead, motioning with his other hand for Jack to shut up.
This time it was the snowflake that darted away from the group, only to be welcomed back by the others.
“Oh.” They weren’t rejecting him. They were giving him the space. “What made you decide that?”
Sandy grinned at him. The tooth that represented Toothiana shifted into a fairy, the better to scold North and Bunny until they shrunk before her. Sandy’s figure was conspicuously absent from this part.
Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or hide. He was pretty sure this meant hovering worry from Tooth next time he did run into the others. The feeling of being worried over was just as strange as being welcomed. Then again, both were just as unfamiliar as having Jamie really see at him and want to play with him, and he couldn’t seem to get enough of that.
Unfamiliar as the feelings of being taken in, being cared about, and even being believed in were, he didn’t want to give them up for anything. Somewhere in the shared silence between the sand and the moon, hope curled up in his heart that he would have time to adapt to this new life.