Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He is floating in the cool open sky, enveloped in its vastness. His body and his mind are levitating, far beyond the reaches of this Earth. The air cradles him within each of its infinite arms. He could be contently unaware to the world that would be passing him by. 

Jack is so tranquil… and so Jack seeks to breathe; but there's something in his way. His eyes fly open, torn from their reverie, and are met instantly with water. He tries to scream, but instead of clear resounding sound, his eyes bulge at the sight of bubbles. He looks around for something, anything, but there is nothing but water.

From what he hopes to be up, Jack finds that he's being bathed in pale bright light, showering him in a strange sense of warmth. His gaze fixes upon it, his limp form magnetically pulled towards it. With an echoing crack like a starting pistol, the previously blurry and solid sky breaks into the real air of the night sky. He slowly rises through the ice in graceful mesmerization, flakes and flurries clinging to his hair as he gains height in the air, and finally able to breathe. 

And he breathes. He breathes and he locks eyes with the moon in full clarity. His mounting panic ebbs, his body feeling unusually light. He was breathing. He was breathing, and not drowning. He had not drowned. His breath is a thick and visible cloud that surrounds him. Another freezing night.

Except he doesn’t feel ‘freezing’. Jack feels fine. There isn’t a single inch of gooseflesh upon him. He's as comfortable as can be, like he's always felt. Like he's in the throes of spring or summer. He loves the warmth of the sun, and would particularly revel in the glorious sweat of a hard day’s play. Jack’s features curl delicately into a smile.

But this ‘warmth’ is different. The full moon pours light and ‘warmth’ all over him, but Jack feels far from warm. Yet he's not cold either. Odd. 

Jack takes a decisive deep breath, and looks down, starting at seeing his form hovering inches off the surface. He gasps numbly, the sound seeming to echo in the clearing. After staring, he inhales, and gently comes down, sturdying a relaxed stance upon the previously broken ice. He feels something funny emanate from his feet, and somehow he feels… no, he knows that the ice is stronger. It is now as smooth as if it had been icing over for days, and as solid as a block from the ice house.

But hadn’t ice been brittle today? The ice beneath his bare feet had given way and he had fallen through. It was a miracle he’d been able to keep Mary from following him in within the icy depths. 

But this thought struck Jack ominously, his spine stiffening. “Icy depths…” Jack mutters, looking down at the frozen lake beneath him. He cocks his head. He had been in those icy depths… presumably since… “…today…” He looks up at the moon, eyes widening, his insides contorting. The night had been well established. He had fallen in during the day, which had to have been several hours ago.

“No…” He was fine. Jack was fine. His breathing was beating and his heart was breathing. Err, he was fine. Maybe a little out of sorts but absolutely, definitely, particularly, and quite certainly fine. 

Jack takes a step forward, slipping a little on the ice. He looks down again to keep his balance, but this time he notices a discarded staff. It twitches in tune with his toes touching it, and a coating of frost grows upon and around the point he touched in seconds. Jack inhales a soft but sharp involuntary intake of breath, like a sliver of broken glass. He kneels down, staring at it intently, and picks it up with deft hands. More frost blossoms from his fingers around the staff and upon the ice which the end touched. Jack’s eyes light up, and set to rival even the moon as he jerks back his head to look at it better. 

Tentatively, Jack touches the edge of the staff to the trunk of a nearby tree. A spiral of frost grows from it, stretching out in soft elliptical measures; it arborizes upon and upon itself, growing still more delicate and detailed in chill congruence. Jack takes some more deep breaths. The cool calm starts to crystalize into a more solid cheerfulness, and it spreads from his eyes to his mouth as it settles along all of his face. His pearly white smile seeks to compliment the scape, and his body feels like he's sledding at top speed as he stands still. This was quite the thing to be able to do, no denying that. He couldn’t do that this morning, that was for certain. 

He must keep his excitement from overflowing; he must release it in this new and most natural-feeling siphon he has ever had the dumb luck to stumble upon. He touches his staff to another tree, and a burst of beautiful frost springs forth, and with it, so does Jack across the ice, sliding his stick before him, tracing more upon more spirals of frost as he skates quickly and clumsily on his two bare feet. He whoops as what used to burn his soles frostbitten and chapped now pleasantly hugs and almost seems to mold to the shapes of his moving feet as he glides with more ease than he has ever had in his life.

He can't stay worried forever, not with all these things he can now do. So he succumbs to the joy, releasing a barrage of shouts of glee as he paints his terrain with frost. He was never much of an artist, but he now finds a cool feeling in his chest that with this staff as his brush, he's all set to change that. His laughter fills his previously empty ears with a sweetness like maple syrup, at which the thought of some delicious breakfast cakes comes to mind. Delicious breakfast cakes with his family.

The thought makes Jack want to shoot into the air to soar in satisfaction. And to his shock, he does, yelling out as he feels himself be swooped up in the large arms of the wind. He's dozens of feet in the air and above the clearing, able to see the beautiful culmination of his playful work from above. He gazes, large-eyed and open-mouthed. There are no words. His heart feels warm and full. Is it pride? Wonder? Some other otherworldly feeling he has yet to learn about?

Jack closes his eyes, but regrets it immediately. He feels the air whip past him, his yelling punctuating it, and before he could make sense of anything, his face comes into rough and repetitive contact with snowy tree branches. The swift series of being smacked subsides, and Jack manages to somehow land on a stable branch close to the ground. He grips the branch tightly with his arms and legs, working to get purchase on his state. 

He feels like he should’ve been in pain after falling into a tree, but he feels fine. His face breaks into a smile and he laughs as he shakes and brushes solid-ish slush out of his hair and ears. He clambers out of the tree, now mossy with frost, staff in hand, bare feet grabbing into the snow-covered floor as he would with grass; it is just as, if not more invigorating actually. The cold in his lungs makes him feel he can sense the shape of them; like if he closes his eyes and puts his hand out, he could mold them in the air. He feels the difference of his previously warm insides, now alight with cool and comforting frosty air. 

Jack fills his lungs and begins to walk. Some breakfast and then some sleep will do just nicely. Ma won't be the most pleased at him shirking his morning chores to sleep in, but he hopes she’ll make an exception given how he has just spent most of the night under ice. It wouldn’t be the most unreasonable request. His stick clips another tree at the trunk, frost emanating from the touch point. The flurry falls upon his ears, and his head spins to see the frost flow and organically encase the trunk.

“I must show Sister!” Jack almost shouts to the empty air, as if he were just realizing he could do that, for all of this is far too splendid to keep to merely himself. “And Ma!” He adds, and the joy sweeps him up, and he is ready for it this time, whooping as he gains altitude, arms outstretched in glorious embrace. He stabilizes, stick in hand, and soars through the air at top speed. The wind reciprocates, and holds him, and he moves with it. It is symbiotic, holding him, and he moves with it. To some extent, he feels he has some influence over it, the gust branching out cyclically under his care. He feels one with it, like it is family. He smiles as he feels the feeling he gets whenever he's home. Home by the fire, sitting by Mary and roasting anything they could skewer on a stick. Just thinking about it fills his heart to the brim.

Jack catches sight of the clearing with his home, beaming at the sight. He descends quickly, almost in tune with gravity, but plainly not, for the wind still has him. He lands clumsily on his face in the snow close to the porch. A snow-muffled chuckle rings from his throat as he brushes off the snow nibbling at his nose.

But as soon as Jack looks up at the house, intent to enter, an odd, off-putting feeling enters his stomach. An unwelcoming chill jolts down his spine as he brushes some residual snow out of his tousled hair. He nears the porch, and looks wonderingly at the black bunting adorned around the tops of it. A spot of fear takes root in the pit of his stomach, sinking and feeling heavy like wet sand, his mind demanding to know who it is for. He rushes to the door and tries the handle, but it is locked. 

“To the devil with the hour,” Jack thinks, and he raps feverishly at the door, his breathing heightening with his pulse. Something had happened, something bad, and he needs to be formidably sure of what. He needs to be here and he needs to be with his family. He must.

But no one comes to the door, and so Jack keeps hammering with persistence. After minutes, the door flies open, knocking Jack to the ground. 

“Ma!” Jack cries, relief washing over him; he could hardly care about being thrown backward by the door. 

But Jack’s mother doesn’t respond. She instead surveys the clearing frenetically with a candle in hand, and shows no sign of having heard him.

“Hello?” She calls out, her voice shaking as she shivers. "Who goes there?" She calls out, clearly attempting and failing spectacularly at projecting assertiveness. 

“Ma! It’s me!” Jack says, straightening up and coming to his feet. He brings himself face to face with her, smiling guiltily, awaiting her judgment.

But he stands face to face with her and she stares right through him. His smile was fast and now faltering. He nervously brushes himself clean, trying to keep his face stable, himself presentable. He swallows icy phlegm and he shakes himself to stave the starting panic.

“Mum?” Jack asks, his voice cracking. He stares at her faraway eyes with bated breath. His arms have no idea what to do as they hang uselessly from his shoulders. She looks around some more, the motions of her head sharp and unstable, then eventually retreats inside, her face downcast, eyes left even wider.

Jack’s insides feel like they are actively freezing over, and not in the warm and filling way.

“Mum wait!” Jack cries, the sensation in his limbs returning suddenly as he is finally able to move, but without clean instruction from himself. His form leaps upon the closing door and prevents it from closing.

“Huh?!” His mother yelps. 

But Jack pushes his way inside, his new friend of the wind helping him out by blowing the door all the way open for him.

“Great heavens above!” Jack’s mother cries, stumbling backward, and nearly dropping her chamber-stick candle.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Jack soothes, closing the door behind him and nearing toward her, panting slightly, “No need to be alarmed, I’m home now,” he says hopefully, awaiting for her reaction, his hands extended forward cautiously and comfortingly.

Jack’s mother sighs, shakes herself and puts the candle down on the table as she falls into the chair beside it. She clutches her head into her hands, her breathing becoming incredibly more pronounced, all loud and shallow. 

She starts mumbling to herself, and at first Jack can't make out the words. He stands at his semi-distance, feeling frozen again and nervously useless as he has not a single clue how to comfort her.

“You’re exhausted Beth... he's gone.”

Jack remains rooted to his spot on the threshold. His own breathing shallows and heightens in pitch as he watches his mother comfort himself. Who.. in the devil.. is she talking about? The flame of frozen, furious fear fans with audacious fervor as the painful seconds creep onward.

Move! By grace, move!

A minute or so passes, or maybe no time at all even. Then Ma stands herself up, carefully, dizzily, and turning around to head for the stairs. He wants to throw his arms out, wants to catch her, needs to hold her up and help her upstairs. The movement awakens Jack from his motionlessness yet again, but he lurches forward clumsily.

“Ma!” Jack blurts, his head starting to spin as he begins to pursue her. “Ma, it is I! Your son, Jack! I’m right here!” Jack nearly yells, desperation bleeding into his voice as messily as his ensuing scamper to follow her. He throws his arm out to grab her shoulder as she shakily takes to the stairs, but for some reason, he slips, feeling his fingers grab onto only air.

He then feels he is watching himself in slow motion. Watching himself reach for his mother. Watching his hand go right through her.

Jack now yells for real, falling backwards again, staring at his hand in horror. The pain of falling to the ground is more pronounced, his eyes bouncing around his head. He shakes and switches his gaze to his departing mother, ascending the stairs, and insanely acting like none of this was happening. She looks like a phantom in a whispy nightgown, with the candle illuminating the specter, and frosting all of her edges.

“What in God’s bones is going on?!” Jack exclaims hoarsely to the retreating figure and room at large. His mother melts away upstairs, and Jack hears a door open and close. His chest feels empty, all of his breath evacuated to elsewhere. 

“Easy,” he says to himself, his eyes falling shut, his entire body trembling violently. He grips his staff and he feels a comforting layer of frost coat the part his hand holds. Tendrils of ice creep from it, and encase his hand in a cold yet comforting glove. He holds this to his chest, despite the awkward positioning of his staff, and feels the ice soothe his racing heart. 

Jack takes dozens of deep breaths. Taking his time, he gets to his feet, holding his side where he’d fallen, and leaning on his staff for support. Without even needing to think, he shoots up, and flies up the stairs to the second landing. He knocks urgently at Mary’s door, pacing uncontrollably. He wants to swallow his heart in the anticipation, so maybe it would stop beating the violent tattoo against his trembling chest.

A minute passes and a tousled-haired Mary stands in her doorway, rubbing her eyes apprehensively. Jack feels his heart melt at the sight of her as all other thoughts are swiftly flung away. 

“Sister!” Jack cries, leaning down to hug her. “Thank goodness!”

But instead of meeting the figure of her in his arms, Jack falls forward onto his face with a thud. Jack’s face groans, feeling heavy as it is slammed and squished into the wooden floor.

“What was that?” Mary cries. Jack’s breath catches in his throat at the fear interspersed with her attempt to sound brave.

Jack’s face feels pummeled, but he nevertheless works to push himself off the ground, albeit gingerly, his head spinning. 

Where did I fall? He asks himself as he looks around with limited perspective. His thinking seems to echo. He rearranges his arms to support himself and he ventures a look up. He freezes, for he looks up at a bug’s eye view of the side of Mary’s person, and Mary actively stands, apparently unobstructed, precisely where his body is.

His stomach somersaults as he scampers up and backward, head spinning, eyes darting around confusedly, and unsteadily looking up at Mary. Jack loses the handle on his lungs yet again, all the air inside of him turning to ice. His eyes are firmly stuck to his sister, tears threatening to storm from them.

“Ma?” Mary calls out, looking around.

Jack’s breathing shakes still more as he sits there dumbstruck. The words had been in his throat, but they’d melted some, and refrozen in place. He clutches his staff, fingernails biting into his palm, all encased in more ice. A minute of this helplessness. A minute of Mary looking around the hallway. A forever-long minute where he was so terribly, dreadfully, and ironically frozen in place (again).

He watches the door close right in front of him.

“M-Mary?”

His whisper was weak, but it was all he could muster.

Jack’s breathing rises. His insides feel frostbitten. Jagged, icy spikes seem to be taking root within him, constricting his insides and tying them all together for good measure. Everything feels stuffed in an icy box. And now he cannot breathe. But after a second he can, but it isn't enough. Nothing feels like enough. What the hell was happening? He needs breath, despite it not doing him any good. He gasps for air, dropping his staff with a crumble of frost to hold his chest with both arms. He breathes even more, and loudly, unsteady gasps and whimpers interspersing themselves with his breaths. 

“Oh God…” he breathes. “Oh God…” 

Tiny spheres of ice bead from his eyes, and roll down. And they don’t stop.

Chapter Text

A small pile of frozen tears have accumulated by Jack’s head and the ground after awhile. He stares at it through his bleary eyes, dry purely because they are ice cold. He cocks his head ever so slightly and scoops up most of the pile, aimlessly letting them fall through his fingers like large and frosty grains of sand. More like beads actually; glassy, porcelain-esque, real jewel-like. Regardless, he finds the way they scatter upon the hallway floor rather comforting to his ears and other insides. 

He would whittle beads. Take hours working on a full string’s worth as a lazy afternoon would while on, making squares and circles, half moons, and the like. Mary liked stringing them into bracelets, giving them to Ma, selling them around town, and begging him to teach her how to make them herself.

“When you are older,” Jack had told her amidst such crooning pleading to reconsider.

“Come now brother, where’s the fun in that?”

“I know Mare; but this is one of the things we must listen to Ma on.”

“But whyyyyyyy?” Mary dragged her last syllable with a dramatic sigh, although it remained tinged with a disappointment Jack longed to not remember.

“Because Mary, working with sharp objects is dangerous, especially for one as young as yourself.” Jack had raised his eyebrows at how responsible he sounded. T’was unbecoming of his reputation for trouble… but not for his greater duty to be a good brother and son.

“But Pa said you’d been whittling since you were no older than I,” Mary’s voice had sloped into a whine.

Of course she had reasoned with him as such. Jack loved how sharp she was. Is.

Think no more of it Jack.

“Indeed,” Jack angled his head in agreement, patting her on the head, “but did he mention I wasn’t careful enough and ended up slicing my palm? Ma quite nearly skinned Pa alive for letting me handle the knife so soon.”

“Least you got to,” Mary grumbled (and continued to do so ever so piteously).

“Ah, please don’t sulk,” Jack pleaded gently and with a soft smile. Mary merely looked back at him with such beautifully bitter amber eyes.

“I promise, I’ll teach you when you’re at least my age.”

She furrowed her eyebrows and promptly deadpanned. “When you’re in your twenties and off getting wed *then* you’ll teach me how to whittle *beads*?”

Jack had laughed. So so raucously too. God Mary could be so funny without any effort.

“It’ll likely be sooner than then,” Jack managed to say over a fit of coughing laughs, his whole body buzzing from mirth, “but of course, I shall and I will teach you.”

Mary smiled, and Jack had too. 

“But where are you getting this ridiculous notion that I’ll be getting married any time soon?” Jack had asked, grinning wickedly and roughly tousling Mary’s hair to a cascade of her surprised giggling.

Mary’s fading laughter echoes in his mind’s ear. More beads continue to collect intermittently. But after another while, they ebb, and are no more. He brings the side of his hand to his eyes, rubbing them tiredly, frosty remnants coming off onto it like the scratchy residue that came after a long night of sleep. He exhales, his body deflating.

Jack looks around without moving his head. The childhood hallway of his has been adorned in black bunting around the tops of the walls, meaning someone had died.

Icy shards of what can be nothing other than his saliva dig themselves down his throat. It had been him. It had to have been. He had been in the frozen depths since the day. And he had come out of them in the night. Of course they were “acting” like he wasn’t there. Because he wasn’t. Because he’s not. 

But somehow, he is?

Jack’s chest tightens. The grief that had just transpired. His poor sister, his poor mother, his poor family, and his poor friends. He’d known nearly everyone in his small village, and he was gone from all of them. And yet he lay just right here on the second story landing of his home, in front of his sister’s bedroom door, for she couldn’t see him plea for her to see his presence. 

The ice is gone from his hand. With a mind of its own, his hand ventures out for his staff, fingers scrambling numbly against the wood, then clutching it tightly again. The frost emerges, encasing him from his hand up to his arm. He doesn’t need to think, he simply does it. 

He brings it back to himself, holding it close, the frost spreading over the rest of his body. Having the solid grip proves helpful, he feels his mind maybe start to settle. 

His head and the world around him frost over like cake. He feels precisely like a crumbling, egg-less cake burried in icy frosting. And all the sugar’s been switched with salt.

–

In a night on the brink of death, Jack finds himself floating among the clouds in the sea that is the sky. The deep darkness considers the merits of straining some light on the horizon, but Jack wishes it would simply stay dark. The pitch black was soothing, for he could blend into it with ease. He didn’t have to suffer from the dissonance of being seen by himself but visible to all else. He could simply be a flying pair of icy eyes, and float about in peace in the dark. Just like he should have stayed in his lake.

Jack flies like a rippling flag in the gentle wind, merely letting it carry him. His stomach doesn’t do the familiar swooping sensation like it does whenever he went sledding. He doesn’t feel any sensation really. He is only carried around in the windy quilt of the atmosphere, seeing only the insides of his eyelids, feeling only the slight brush of air against his bare skin. 

He soon comes to the surface of earth like a feather to the ground, like he used to be part of something– something alive. 

His staff remains his only tether, and it moves without his active thought. He flows toward the lakeside and then over the lake. Ice from below encases him softly, like a hollow chocolate shell over time. Pretty soon he’s drifting across the lake on a flat ellipse curved slightly inward to cradle him, but not so much as to remain bouyant. His eyes are fixed upon the clouded moon up above, the light feels like too much, his eyes starting to sting with beads. 

Jack sighs and looks away from the sky, rotating his head to rest it on his right ear and shoulder. He watches himself fiddle with his staff aimlessly, raising it up, swaying it around, and bringing it back. He feels light bounces against the edge of it as he angles it over his makeshift raft, but he swirls it around some more, feeling numbly whimsical. Jack soon raises his staff back up, but sees attatched like a large, mossy –but icy– cloth draped around the head of it.

Fitting really. His staff can be his frosty sail… on a boat of ice… headed nowhere but the lake he’d breathed last in.

For the bird of life had done away with him. 

–

Jack drifts back into consciousness some hours later. Everything around him is exactly the same as it was, apart from the day’s light that seeps through the house’s cracks. The windows’ curtains are still pulled tightly shut, and remain covered in still mourning black. 

As little as the peaking light is, it feels like a flame’s tongue against his face. An aching groan emanates deep from his throat. He would quite enjoy the pastime of hitting his head against the ground if it wasn’t so heavy.

Jack sighs, breaking his fort, then dragging himself up off the floor in slow and limp succession. Chunks of ice fall from his outer cloak and litter the ground around him. Despite standing on his own two feet and his staff for support, he still needs to lean against the wall with his forearm, putting a thin spiral of ice on it as he does. As he sidestepps the icy mess, he reaches for the door, coating the knob in frost as he mentally prepares to enter his room. Is it still his room? Mary is now its only living inhabitant after all. He quickly shakes his head.

Jack opens the door swiftly so it won’t creak, slips inside, and shuts it quietly without another thought. Mary is nowhere to be seen, and at the realization, Jack sighs. It isn’t relief, but he’s not sure what it is; for right now, he doesn’t know if he wants to be sad at the sight or at the absence of his sister. 

He instead turns, not wanting to be in or add to the emptyness, and resigns to floating down the stairs into the common area which extends to the front door and the kitchen. All of the windows are completely covered, and so at least it’s darker. Even the little mirror on the wall beside the staircase is adorned in black. The other two mirrors undoubtedly have recieved the same treatment. If they’d had a clock, it’d have been stopped. 

Although it was likely for the best that they had no clock; they’d have had to guess what time it was when he breathed his (genuine) last, and the internal disquiet resulting from the dissonance was making Jack wish to be sick. 

He surveys the rest of the room, his eyes nearly repulsed by the flaming light cloistered in the sitting area. He ambles around and finds Ma alone in her usual seat by the fire, wrapped in a patchwork quilt, and working on a sweater. Apart from the velvety crackling flames and gentle clicking of her needles, it is almost completely silent. 

Jack carefully sets his staff down by the stairwell, and softly, decisively, he steps to his mother. Her back is to him, making the approach easier on him. He places a tentative hand on the back of her chair and a tiny burst of frost attaches itself to it. With a reflexively sharp intake of breath, Jack wrenches his hand back as if the chair had burned it. He remains stock still, closes his eyes, breathes, and then sidesteps this too. 

He then stands before her, watching her knit with eyes almost as dead as him. Funny. (Not really.) Her lap is full of spilling coils of sleeves that are too much and a midsection that is far too long for any of them to wear. Jack sighs, and waves a heavy and half-hearted hand before her field of vision. 

Not even a blink.

Jack sits down on the floor at her feet, glowering tiredly up at her, his huffing foraying into thunderous grumble territory. But the anger that yearns to burn is deadened by the memory of how he used to sit before her like this when he was a little boy. He’d play with his knuckle bone toys or listen to Ma tell him stories. Pa had been there too. Mary, not just yet.

“Let this be a joke. Please,” Jack suddenly speaks, his breath gone from his throat. He ignores her lack of a response and presses on.

“Just look at me Ma. That’s all you have to do.” He takes a shallow breath, barely avoiding a stutter. He stares at his hands in front of him, pale palms facing each other, and continues his attempt to emote. He still waits for a few seconds against his better judgment, but of course his impatience is well beyond bankrupt right now. 

“Just. Look.” His stare tries to become more intense as he prays for her to give him a sign, a nod, something, anything. Just a glance, a breath in his direction, an admonishment for his flagrant disrespect and even greater impropriety than usual, literally anything to acknowledge he still exists. He still exists right? 

“Just look,” Jack whines, his thoughts doubling, tripling, mounting in indiscernable, overwhelming weight. He closes his eyes, slamming his hands onto his lap. He could feel his legs with his hands. He was solid. And if he wasn’t solid, he wouldn’t be able to touch any of the things around him. So why was he going through other people?

Holding his breath, Jack ventures his hand toward Ma’s shoulder. It hovers inches over it. Why he hesitates, he cannot be certain, because he knows that it’ll still go through; for nothing has changed. His corpse has only become colder. Why the hesitation?

… Because I’m…

He isn’t used to being afraid. Even less used to admitting it outright. Fun, not fear. However, fear has been a rather new frequent– and heartily unwelcome– occurence as of late. He needs to stop hesitating, he is only prolonging the sinking moment of reality where he is unable to pretend he’s still alive. 

One long moment, and another passes. He wishes his mother would move for him so he could just be frozen, fall in response to being faced with the truth, and just shatter. He steels himself and then pushes his hand down, hoping hopelessly through newly closed eyes that it hadn’t gone through.

But he doesn’t feel anything, no solid something stops him, meaning that it had. Jack opens his eyes and his face falls, unable to believe it until seeing it all the same. His hand is sitting, quite comfortably, and inexplicably, right in his mother’s upper arm. He fidgets his hand all around, but only making his form disappear through her up to his elbow. The sight is grotesque, and it reminds him of the slaughterhouse, but sinister, his arm’s skin wanting to peel itself off as he writhes and wills himself to withdraw. But he cannot stop; he must keep trying, no matter how much it pains him to watch his efforts be fruitless.

“Come on!” Jack cries, desperately bringing his other arm into the fray, flailing madly through Ma’s head and upper body. He flinches as he imagines actually hitting or slapping her, which is how it dreadfully almost looks, but of course he cannot, and he would never ever want to. He remains unobstructed all the same. His body is mere mist to her… and she takes absolutely no notice. For he is dead to her, and everyone else for that matter. It’s like he’s nothing to her.

No, no, no, no NO. I am NOT nothing. He thinks the affirmation savagely to himself, his ice-crusting eyes narrowing upon Ma’s slumping form. Just because he’s.. gone, just because he’s.. different, just because other people cannot see him; it doesn’t mean he’s nothing. 

He holds out his hands in front of himself again, surveying their bloodless appearance, looking tinged pale blue despite the orange firelight. He rotates and swivels his wrists mechanically, showing his appendages –his powerful hands– to himself. Jack keeps blinking as he holds them up and moves them around like a flag to the sky. He puts them together and apart, he interlaces the fingers he possesses, he gently pulls them apart like unbaked doughy latices stolen from Ma’s pies. He takes a breath and folds his arms around his chest to touch the opposite shoulders, stroking the skin down his arms, his eyes and senses spellbound. The tingling in the touchpoints on his skin almost crackle, the tips of his fingers meeting each other as his arms unfold before him again.

Jack is looking again at his outstretched hands in front of himself. He rotates them palms-up and he looks, really looks; at the slight curve of his fingers inwardly, at the delicate lines etched to his palms, at the ice blue veins that branch from his wrists and become hazy amidst white in his hands. He accepts another deep breath and he brings his hands to his face and shifts them around, from the front to the sides and around again, his eyes falling closed as he feels with his wonderous, powerful, and everlastingly capable hands that he is there. He is solid. He is something. 

He takes some minutes of this, his heartrate calming, an un-cold shiver shockwaving around his bones. He pulls his hands gently away from his face, each hand clutching its own small bounty of beads as he manages a sad and tightlipped smile, each of his closed eyes a parallel line. His brow furrows from the shaking strain. He is there. He is there. He is there.

He opens his eyes, the small hill of beads collected in his cupped hands before him. He is reminded how Ma is also still there, knitting away. He looks to her and back down again. He swallows and lets the ice fall away to scatter upon the floor. The fire crackles so loudly, he can barely hear the small impacts of ice drops on wood. He immediately concurs without question how he preferred his whittling when it came to beads. And he also would rather reserve his tears for joy, not despair in the face of his living death.

Jack shakes his head, he really needs to get out of it. The isolation is by far the most unhealthy thing for him. He isn’t alone here, despite how his mother is unfortunately oblivious to his specter form. 

Is it really unfortunate?

Jack shivers, jostling his whole body from his back like a rusty tin soldier. He wasn’t used to his mind’s voice’s lack of impulse control being a problem; wasn’t at all familiar with this foreign concept of intrusive thinking. The feeling of being trapped in his head, with no simple, tangible way to put what was bothering him to bed, to remove it from his vicinity, to do a thing and have that solve the object of his woe.

But of course, there is no one single or solitary object of his woe. It is a dozen things at least, spanning from his small and pathetic-feeling inability to cry liquid tears, to the denial of his corpse being perfectly preserved at the bottom of the lake where he’d spent every winter playing on. The lake had been a place that had been the pinnacle of his most treasured winter memories: with his friends, his father, and Mary most especially, and now a cemetary just for him.

Jack sniffs, feeling clogged in his sinuses. He wonders if his airway can frost over, if the joints can essentially “rust” over from ice, making it harder for him to move, to breathe. He wonders if that’s what is happening in this moment. 

Focus on the moment Jack. Focus on this moment. 

In this moment, he is in the common area. It is some time during the day. He cannot tell because he doesn’t know when he fell asleep and the windows are covered up. He also cannot easily deduce the time from the family’s activities because normal routines have ceased for the time being. For right now, he is with Ma, and she is knitting by the fire– which she does when she needs to keep her hands busy but has no energy for anything more vigorous. And Mary… is not here. And that’s actually a good thing, he can only focus on one other person at the moment.

The fire is there too, crackling in a way that used to be comforting to Jack, but now fills him with an intricately discomforting well in his body that he cannot quite explain. Jack ignores the faint pain on his skin, both exposed and covered, particularly more on the covered parts, the semi-distant flames hitting him like long-established sunburns. He takes a breath, closing and opening his eyes a few times.

So Ma may not be able to feel him touch her… but she could see other things.. The idea piques his interest all too lovingly, and so without thinking, Jack snatches her knitting away.

Ma yelps and her breath audibly escapes her as her gaze darts around the room in alarm. “What in the world?!” Jack flinches slightly at how shrill her shriek is.

But Jack smiles through his ice-misted tears, his hands in the air with needles in one hand and the incomplete, over-done sweater in the other. But this is short lived, and he is immediately crestfallen after the initial shock, his arms drifting down.

“Wherever did it go?” Ma cries, standing up, surveying the ground. She looks around again, stumbling almost on her own feet. She brings a hand to her head as if she has a head cold and steps through him to extend her search. Not expecting this at all, instantly, instinctually, Jack yells, drops what he’s holding, and flies back and away.

And right into the fire he goes, back first. Jack screams even louder, his rear feeling reminiscent to the few times he’d earned the ire of his father’s belt. Frost explodes from his hands and out of his direct sightline, his eyes widening and he shoots back toward the staircase, landing in a heap.

“What in the–?” Ma queries Jack’s side of the house. Jack feels embarassed for the single second he forgets she can’t see him lying on his back, his bones all banged up, and in immediate recovery for lighting his backside on fire. Ma’s surveying eyes glaze over Jack’s for a moment and he feels something sharp twist within his chest as he attempts to swallow and steady himself.

Jack continues to peer over the sparse furniture at Ma, his other insides contorting guiltily as Ma rubs her forehead, looking quite nonplussed and harried.

“There it is,” Ma soon says to herself, the exhaustion extremely apparent, and clearly too tired to question any of the just transpired events. “Oddest thing,” she adds after a pause.

Jack gingerly makes it back to his feet in a strangely quick and lightfooted manner. He surveys himself. The clothes on his back were burned, but oddly enough, his skin was untouched, not a single singe upon his ice-smooth skin. It was as if the second he’d felt the flame, he had frozen it. It stung, but barely. It was like one of those cast iron burns, or when he’d burned his tongue on soup… it’d be gone by the next day.

Jack takes a shaky breath and watches Ma shuffle out of the room, feeling no desire to follow or try again. The fire had gone out, drenching the room in a cold that suited Jack just fine, but he definitely could not let it stay that way.

“Well of course,” Jack mumbles, lethargically locating a matchbox and striking it by the fireplace, “you did freeze it out.” The lit match in his hand, however, invites a bristling, discomforting, and bordering on painfully hateful feeling. It only makes too much sense for his new disposition to have him dislike fire.

But the logs in the grate are too frozen to catch any flames and Jack groans; wasting wood was never good. He switches the iced logs with the stored mini stack kept inside for safekeeping, lights the damn match as fast as he can, and before the fire can even bloom his back is to it. The ice would melt soon enough, the more conspicuous bits that remained, he sweeps away.

He wants out of the room and off of this landing, so he scoops up his staff and scampers up the steps, remembering he could just float as he passed halfway up. He rolls his eyes at himself as he aggressively flits the remainder of the way.

He slinks into his– Mary’s room, nearly tripping over the ice he’d left behind earlier, and swiftly shuts the door behind him. He slides his back down the door and onto the floor, clutching his staff to his chest. He just has to breathe. 

He breathes for some minutes. He quickly tires of it, his anxious hands having nothing to do and the nervous energy starts to make him shake. He stands up, and floats to Mary’s side of the room, landing with a simple swoop. Her bed is in utter disarray. Jack glances over at the wardrobe they’d shared, with its doors both ajar, Mary’s clothes spilling out. He wanders over, and throws the doors completely open with their respective high-pitched creaks. 

His side of the wardrobe is almost just as he had left it. Jack stares at his clothes. So simple they are, so seemingly unimportant to keep clean and kept. But his clothes hadn’t been clean that morning. Why did Ma care to put them in there, as if he’d be there the next day to wear them? Why did it matter to Mary that they were left alone?

Because they were yours. That’s all that’s left of you.

Jack’s eyes downturn and he swallows. He doesn’t even have– he can’t even give them the kindness of a body to bury. They were left with nothing. Nothing to clutch, nothing to hold onto, nothing. His headstone, if they could get him one, would be buried with an empty box. It would ultimately be a waste of money, done only for the sake of their peace of mind, for a misguided need for some closure, and heaven knows they are struggling already.

He picks up one of his folded tunics, letting the sturdy fabric lay upon his frail-feeling fingers. The material is soft, yet it feels strange to hold. Like it feels more alive than he is. Like it used to be his. 

Jack is then struck by a strange thought, and is thus compelled to bring it to his nose and give it a sniff. He inhales the fibers, smelling the cold and clean cotton that smelled like him. But the scent felt divorced from him.

Jack pulls his cloak and shirt off his chest with a forefinger and thumb, smelling himself under them, feeling rather self-conscious of the exercise… but he recognizes quite plainly that he doesn’t smell the same. 

But Jack didn’t have a clue what he smelled like. Ice? Singed fabric?

How can you smell like ice? He thinks incredulously. He felt the urge to roll his eyes, but they feel too hollow now, too deeply set into his head to be able to move like that. He exhales through his nose.

Decay… his intrusive self posits. 

Dead. It was easy enough. He smelled dead. Smells dead. But it wasn’t a ‘bad’ smell. Just not alive. He didn’t smell alive. Not like a shirt his living self had worn. The self he’d been just yesterday.

Jack puts the tunic back, feeling silly. He puts down his staff and discards his burned clothes. His old trousers and tunic feel strange against his even paler skin, but he nevertheless pulls them on. He fumbles with the buttons, the frost he mindlessly embroiders against them getting in the way. 

He finally finishes the damn buttons, and swoops away from Mary’s mess to his lonely side of the room. But then he remembers his burned clothes, and sulks back to retrieve them, then stuffs them under his bed. Now the thing that looks wrong with his bed was how it was perfectly made. He hadn’t tousled it last night. He’d slept on the floor. More proof he was gone… and Ma hadn’t scolded him for blocking the doorway.

Jack closes his eyes, his arms falling to their sides, his staff bashing into the ground, and spewing a sprout of frost onto the floor. He adjusts his grip so that the end would stay off the floor, but it doesn’t matter a minute later when he groans drops it by his bedside. 

His bed isn’t supposed to be this tidy. It’s not any fun that way. Nor is it comfortable. Jack allows himself to fall onto his bed. It isn’t the falling he’d been accustomed to, but softer. As Jack comes down, he realizes he is floating down, and his typically rock-ish bed feels kinder and more cloud-like. 

Jack moves to his side, facing away from the sunny window. This was the comfort he’d needed. If not his mother or his sister, at least there was his bed.

Only his bed to cling to… how sad.

Chapter Text

Jack lays atop his bed with his eyes closed, unable to sleep. He’d tried going under the blankets for a full three seconds before concluding in no uncertain terms that he hated the scratchy warmth. Besides, he didn’t need it, he was now a man of frost after all. The cold was all the covers and the frost made up all bedclothes he needed now.

A cloud shifts into his musings as the moon with its slow, sweeping light pokes him bluntly in the eye. He must have turned over sometime in the dusking day.

“Let me sleep,” he mutters angrily. But something about the light speaks to him. It isn’t words, but a feeling; a serene, absent feeling of nonexistence, like a beam of the moon is actively trying to nudge him awake because it’s lonely up in the cosmos. 

Well it’s lonely down here too little beam.

He and the moon were both there, watching over it all. The only difference was that everyone could see the moon, and the moon could touch everyone beneath its reach when it came. But from the looks of it, no one could see him, and no one could touch him (or the other way around). He’d considered flying into town to test that theory, but the thought of being bombarded by the people he’d known all his life walking through him like he’d never existed –like he was nothing– kept him at bay. 

Nothing felt right anymore. Nothing feels right anymore. His body feels like it belongs still to a child, but his mind to something far older, much more ancient. It was amazing just how quickly he recognized how death had aged him, how easily he now came to the conclusion that living, that life at its best, was only for children. And he was a dead frost man of frost and ice and death and time to stop, Jack.

Jack feels a shiver course from his spine and he is unable to stop a jittery shake of his head. Like trying to clear his mind after a brain freeze. What a joke. 

Mary rustles her sheets as she turns over in rest. Jack glances over to her area of the room. He sighs and gives up on sleep. He stands up lightly and glides over to Mary like mist. Her eyes are twisted and scrunched closed, her mouth an uncomfortable and angled down-stripe. She clutches her blankets to herself tightly. It was subtle, but she was shivering. He immediately sits on her bed beside her, and goes to pick her up and huddle her for warmth. Only she doesn’t move, and his hands yet again pass through her. He’d have more success scooping up air for storage than holding his sister. Jack feels like swallowing his tongue.

She couldn’t feel him, and he couldn’t touch her. He still isn’t used to it. How could he become used to it? He pinches himself and he is solid, yet not to her. He seems to make no imprint upon her. He brings his hand mere inches away from her face, envisioning the act of stroking her hair he’d taken for granted just yesterday. 

But in these moments, her shivering heightens, her breath looking more frosty than before. Jack springs away with a flourish, remembering himself. His new very cold self. He shakes, his neck holding his head especially unsteadily. He exhales, letting himself float down and fall facedown to the floor. The entire floor grows a glassy field of grass upon what would very well now become rotted wood paneling come spring. He tries to gain purchase with his hands, pale fingers scrambling before his barely-conscious vision, but his frost accelerates in tandem with his heartbeat. 

Oh no. 

That’d freeze the room even more, make Mary even colder (and later ill). Mary needed to sleep, not to freeze. Not drown, and not die, not be sad, and not be anything bad. Not because of him. She didn’t need any of this horridness, she’d gone through enough already. More than enough had happened, she’s still going through so much. 

Jack tries to limit his contact with the floor, scuffling icily to his bed. It barely reacts to his weight, much less his disposition. But he still feels like a block of ice sinking into the stiff mattress. Small comforts. Tucking his head into his knees, and covering it with his arms, Jack groans.

He couldn’t stop any of it. And he can’t stop anything more. He can watch; he can wince; he can cry dry tears; he can twist at, pummel, and viciously tenderize his insides until he’s blue in the face and the rest of the dead come back to life; God, he could even freeze everything and whatever he comes across with no end… He has this power… he can do things nobody else he knows can do… 

But he can’t stop this. He’s still dead. This… “life–” the word itself feels clunky, unshapely, far from natural– focus Jack; regardless: he can’t partake in it.

And he can no longer protect Mary from it.

Jack may have been fine with dying if it were only him. He would likely have no qualms with dying if he had no one to live for. He had felt touched by the heavens with his understanding –which he had become newly conscious of with his impending adulthood (“What are you going to do with your life when you’re not gallavanting through the woods in your bare feet Jack?”)–  that his life’s purpose was bringing fun and joy to his family and friends. (Amidst his duty to be a good brother and son of course. He could never forget that.) But if he couldn’t do any of that, if he couldn’t be touched, seen, or just understood as being alive in death, then what was the point of anything? He needed to be seen, heard, loved, lived with, or at least acknowledged. He was unknown now. Worse, he was dead. Is dead. Is he anything? Or has he been permanently locked in what was? 

And ultimately he would be forgotten. After awhile, he’d be gone from memory. Jack swallowed some crunchy frost that had collected like moss in his stiff throat, situated with an even stiffer neck. 

What was he even to do with himself from now on? He’s dead, and his family can’t see him. He can’t do his chores, unless he felt like frightening the absolute dickens out of his mother with a helpful ghost in the house.

But as Jack thinks of this, he angles his head in serious consideration. Could he do that? Or would his family want to move? His mother wasn’t the most superstitious, but she wouldn’t not notice things being done around the house, regardless of the invisible entity. And she hadn’t exactly been jumping for joy at his stupid stunt earlier.

Despite himself, Jack creeps out and downstairs with extra light and frosty feet. He’d expected to see something to do in the kitchen, but it’s a woeful sight. Two lone dishes lay discarded upon the table, with hardly any crumbs upon them. Jack looks at the picked over supply in the cupboards, a dull blow striking him in his stomach. It was winter, and there already was not a lot of food, even at the start of the season. Ma had started rationing them a few weeks ago. There were some alright amounts of grains, fruits, and potatoes, but there was hardly any meat, just some spare salted rabbit from last week. In fact, the last time Jack had been treated to some fresh venison, it had been during the week of his birthday a couple months ago. 

Hunting had been his job. And that, that still is something he could do. He just wouldn’t bring the game inside. He’d pose it as an anonymous gift. Anyone in the town could be perceived of having done it. The town takes care of itself and each other. 

Except when it doesn’t. While used to kids dying, no one still quite knows what to do. Nor what to say. Sure, they’ll do and say things. But it would never be enough. Any attempt at filling the grave space he’d left would be dirt down a drain. Until eventually the breath readjusts to having to circulate that way. Just like with his father when he died. 

Jack retrieves his father’s bow and sheath of arrows. His father had been gone for years, they were in fact his long enough to be called his own, yet he still referred to them his father’s. Whose would they become next? Would Mary call them ‘Jack’s’ decades after he’d been gone? Would they go to a second husband for Ma now that she’d likely have to remarry without him there? 

Jack’s face furrows and lines itself darkly. If Ma did remarry, Mary would likely have new siblings, whether they were step or half. He’s faced with a sour mixture of envy and relief. As much as it hurt to contemplate, it would be genuinely good for his family to grow and move forward. Even if that family’s purpose was ultimately to replace him. Even if that family would never know him. God, this was complicated.  

Then the dimension of more time slunk in to complicate it further. Would it one day become Mary’s husband’s or son’s bow? Another blow to his stomach. Mary was going to grow up…. without him. 

To Mary, he would be absent for her entire growing up. He’d be absent on all her birthdays, bad days, days at the fair, days at the lake, days spent doing nothing but chores, and.. her wedding day. 

After Dad died, he had promised her that he would walk her down the aisle. Jack feels numb. More numb. Her husband, child, or children would never know him. His only family, would eventually have her own family, and Jack wouldn’t be part of it. Jack feels his mind sag at the thought of his nieces and nephews, years from now, but with no fun uncle that was him. But even more so at the thought that one day, he’d have them. Or at least been able to. If he’d lived. 

He opens a stubborn window, ducking under the cloistering fabrics, and jumps through to the outside, staff, arrows, and bow in hand. He closes it tightly behind him; he would not be responsible for his family freezing to death this winter, not on top of everything else. 

Jack treads even lighter than he’d ever done in life. His new disposition made it easier than breathing. Well, possibly, everything could be construed as easier than breathing right now. Ironically, he had drowned, and he was starting to register just how salty he was about it. But it was easy nonetheless. 

He pauses his step, looking down behind him. He stares at what were undoubtedly his footprints. Strange how no one could see him, and yet the world still responded to his tread, powder-light as it was. He blinks and considers how disembodied footprints would be recieved by any old bystander. He sighs and shrugs, resigned to the trail. He considers flying, but he’s never hunted by air (obviously), and he doesn’t want to startle the game with an inevitable crash landing.

He walks and he wonders. To the outside, lantern-wielding observer, was all they could see of him the cloudy trail that flew from his throat? And mere simple footprints that would be covered within the hour? Is this all he was? Mere impenetrable yet somehow selectively solid specter?

The surroundings around him rustle, and Jack stops, neck on a swivel, eyes on surveillance. His hands and arms take action on instinct, putting down his staff, and preparing his bow with no need for express instruction. In stance, Jack pulls his hand enmeshed with an arrow on the string to his cheek, his breath held just as tensely. 

And there it is in front of him. It had never been so easy for him before to find a buck. A buck of all things. A literal, actual, blessed buck. He had only seen one all winter, and he’d lost it. It seemed he was entitled to some luck at least. He stands ready for minutes with his arrow upon it, the deer just grazing, calm as can be. Can the buck not see him either?

Jack ventures as near as he dares, bow still and solidly drawn. The shot was so easy, he could’ve taken it with his eyes closed and still hit his mark. 

Why doesn’t he?

Jack takes his eyes off of the buck for the first time in minutes, glancing over at his hands around the bow. He gapes at the frosty glove that had woven itself all around his hand around the center of the bow’s limb in his concentration, frosted over and together. He’d forgotten his hand now did that. 

The string slips from his hand, his aim askew. The arrow flies toward his mark, but not for the kill, grazing its lower leg, and planting itself aside in the snow. And flees, the deer swiftly does.

With his numb spare hand, Jack pulls the bow out of his frosted one with a crumbling crunch. Icy pieces fall to the ground, from the wooden body and his hollow-feeling fingers. He centers his focus upon this extension of his limb, this foreign, frost covered thing. He flexes his fingers, further flakes of frost falling away. Each of his fingernails are detailed in pretty little powderings of frost, stretching over the nail, and reaching over to hold each finger in spindly little spirals. 

He relegates the bow to his back, and turns back for his staff. He steps inexactly into his previous footsteps, lengthening the prints where his heels had once dug into. He returns his staff to his hands, and his breath lightens, a funny feeling of inexplicable cool warmth spreading through his fingers. He brings the staff to his side, it standing on the ground with him, dwarfing him by about a foot. He breathes, closing his eyes, and steps with his staff. He collects his arrow, pausing only for a moment at the subtlest tinge of scarlet upon it, and brings it home to its sheath. 

There was no telling how far the buck had gotten. The disturbed and scattered snow was dotted sparsely with coins of blood, but as Jack looks farther and farther away from the origin, the tracks lessen immensely. He retakes his task of tracking, stepping and stalking parallel to the tracks, his eyes obsessively darting from each red drop to the next. 

It isn’t until the sun starts to rise when the buck reenters his sights. It is immediately discernible with its lightly reddened limb amongst the pale contrast of snow. 

Let’s try this again.

Jack slowly fills his chest, squatting down on tiptoes to set his staff down and ready his next shot. The cold air embraces his insides, and he feels his head begin to calm and clear. 

He situates his arrow, and pulls the bowstring back, his arm stretching satisfactorily behind him. The arrow is on the buck.

Stop thinking about it.

He closes his eyes, and whistles the sharp hunter’s note his father taught him, letting the arrow fly. The cry that pierces the air tells him that his aim had been true, and all the tension in his bones starts to dissolve. 

He switches again from bow to staff, the warmth returning to the hand that held it. It travels from the limb inward to his chest and his stomach. He was mildly glad to not have to feel so cold. 

Jack drags the buck by its antlers, but he wasn’t getting very far, the dead weight digging stubbornly into the snow. He looks around at all the trees and snow, trying to see if there’s anything he can use. But these woods are as bare as his kitchen, he needs to get creative or grow a bunch of bulging muscles in the next minute. Like a super strong man of comically large proportions that he’d only heard stories about. The quippy thought feels so odd and out of place. It feels un-right, incomplete, hardly a joke, like his old self is trying to force its way through the fog of his newfound despondence in a sad attempt to get him to smile at life.

That’s not what you have anymore.

He does his best to abandon the thought, to draw his attention to the task at hand. As Jack readjusts his grip on the antlers to better hold his staff, a frosty trail behind him grabs his eye, interestingly starting from where he’d shot the deer. 

He realizes his staff is resting simply in his deft hand, and looks up at the sky, thinly streaked with branches and cloudy pink, almost soft orange in some places. He angles his head up at it, the curiousity nibbling at him like a bunny.

“Wind?”

Dramatically, and in immediate response, the wind sweeps him right up.

“WHOOAAHHH!” Jack yells, the buck pulling hard against his arm as he takes to the sky. In seconds though, the wind picks up the slack. Jack and the deer hurtle through the sky, rushing past snowflakes and flurries as they fly atop the wind in organic harmony. 

Quickly and somehow gaining his footing where there was none to be gained, Jack yells with an almost questioning pitch, “Take me home!” 

And take him home, the wind does. His eyes fall closed, the swooping sensation in his stomach washing over him, and in almost no time, the wind deposits him and the buck face-first into a fluffy snowbank with a floomp.

He pulls his face out of the snow, blinking away flurries, and sitting himself up on his elbows. He lets out a chuckle as he brushes snow out of his hair and ears, and makes it to his feet. He pulls the buck out of the bank, and drags it the short way to his home, leaving some way away from the door.

Jack exhales at the sight of the deer for his family, his knuckles on his hips, stick tightly in hand and traversing by his side. Ma and Mary shouldn’t be asleep for much longer. He’d be able to see them find their surprise, and hopefully see some of their stress slacken. They’d have a wonderful dinner tonight, and it’d be because of him. Jack shuts his eyes, lips stretched parallel to his lids, smiling sadly and tightly. A lone icy bead falls from his face. Of course.

Jack turns on his heel and ventures back into the woods. He strolls in no particular direction, allowing his staff to drag delicately behind him, spreading a pretty trail of frost as he steps. He stops when he finds what he’d been wanting to find, but was not expressly looking for. 

The little mournful flowers that very nearly blend in with the snow are beautiful to behold. Named for their snowy color and bell shape, these snowbells would be loved by his mother and sister. They always wanted flowers in the house, but there wouldn’t be any usually until spring when they were in abundance. 

Jack gently picks seven snowbells from the snow, freezing the stems together as he carefully clasps a fist around the baby bouquet. Jack gasps, afraid he’d crushed them somehow. He touches three tentative fingers to the petals of the snowbells. Frost blooms across and kisses them tenderly. Jack could only watch, his mouth slightly ajar. 

He holds the snowbells to his chest, feeling the frosty flowers tickle his cheek as he begins to walk back. His heart beats against his bell-filled hand, softly and strongly. He was back home in a blink of an eye with a quick hop up and float down. Back by the buck. 

Jack kneels by the buck’s side, smiling softly at it. He puts the snowbells next to it in a pretty pile, and steps back to appreciate the effect. Food and flowers. For Ma and Mary. Jack closes his eyes and smiles in such a sadly contented way. He’d done good for them. He’d done right by them. As best as he could. 

Jack sits with his legs crossed in the snow a few feet from his display. They couldn’t see him, so he may as well have a good view. After awhile, Jack lays down, and stretches his limbs out, mindlessly making a snow angel.

Was that was he was? Some sort of snow angel? An angel of ice and snow?

It admittedly wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But Jack couldn’t kid himself on what he’d rather be.

After some time, snow falls lightly upon Jack’s face. He blinks, and takes to watching the flurries float down upon him. They land like cold feathers, him half-heartedly considering jumping up and shaking them away like ants. 

Soon after, the front door of his house swings open, Mary striding out with the water buckets. Jack sits up, his breath bated. His heart swells with satisfaction as he sees the precise moment she lays eyes upon the gift. Mary stops in her tracks, eyes widening, jaw hanging slightly ajar. Jack chuckles. He did that exact same thing. His face even looked like hers when he did. 

Almost as if we’re related. Jack chuckles again, but a rueful tinge tars the feeling. 

Mary had discarded the pails and ran inside, and in no time at all, she and their mother were out there by the buck, both wearing equal expressions of astonishment.

“There isn’t a note,” Mary says to Ma, “but they did leave these,” and she picks up the snowbells to show to her. Ma takes them, handling them as if she expected them to dissolve between her wiry fingers. Tears form on her face as she holds the baby bouquet to her heart, then pulls Mary to her to hold. Jack feels his chest constrict, his throat tighten, and he wills himself to feel.

“Whoever did this is very kind,” Ma says– in that wise voice that Jack felt drawn to heed, even in death, “we must do good to remember that we are supported by our neighbors. And we must be thankful of how our town takes care of us when we’re in need.”

Jack was crying too. He watches the pair pull the buck to the backyard, his vision misty with sleet-like tears. 

“It’s so cold out here,” Mary says, grunting with effort, “that there’s frost all over the antlers.”

So unexpectedly, Jack bursts out laughing; laughter which shifts all too easily into more crying. He sits with his legs crossed by his snow angel, watching his mother and sister disappear behind the house with at least a month of dinner. Probably more, factoring out what he’d eat. Jack stiffens. 

Without him, they’d probably be able to go back to eating three meals a day. Jack stands up, feeling sick. How can he feel sick in death? This was hardly fair.

“None of this is fair,” Jack mumbles agonizingly, standing up. The frosty features that fly from his staff and the balls of his feet are spiky and jagged, rather than smooth or spirally, as he stomps in no decided direction, just away from his house. 

Soon though, stomping loses its charm, and Jack takes to the sky with a furious leap, shooting through the air, faster than an arrow, and far more intent upon destroying something. Anything really. Or maybe just nothing. 

Too quickly, rage flying loses its appeal too, (the wind may have swept it away) and Jack just drops out of the sky, letting himself fall and be guided down by the wind. He is back in the woods, lying in a snowbank like a pile of leaves, staring hopelessly at the sky, the day becoming more pronounced. 

Jack wants to scream, to yell, to rage, to cry, to hurt, and the list goes on and repeats itself until the indistinguishable anguish are words no more.

Jack wants a round million things right now. To not be dead for one, to not be so cold, to be able to be near his own sister without giving her a cold, or to be even able to just hold her. He longs to sleep, he aches for some food, he could also do with a river bath, but also could’ve been fine with none of that at all. 

He buries the small child that wants to be in his mother’s arms. 

He wants for his mother and sister to be able see him, hear him, hold him. He wants to hold their grief for himself, and freeze it all away as he held and consoled them. Consoled them for his dying. Comforted them through their unimaginable loss. Their loss of him. Of he, the deceased. 

Part of him protests at confirming his state. But he has to accept this. This is what adults do. 

Jack had been so close to becoming the adult. So close to being actually responsible for taking care of them. He was going to get a job, so Ma wouldn’t have to work two so they could all get by. But all of that was gone, all of that had changed… He was gone… and he had changed.

Jack wanted to badly to be alive again. But he also wanted to understand how he was here if he had died. He’d thought hell would’ve been more fiery and brimstone heavy. Not ice fucking cold. … a strange word he’s only heard a handful of times. It feels potent and blazing to think about, and part of him likes it. 

Strangely, stupidly, and insanely enough, to burn would be such a relief. Jack wasn’t even sure he’d be able to. Just some warmth to hold against his constant state of death that was him being so cold. He felt beholding a fire wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to actually hold it. 

It had been an entire day, and not a single drop of sweat beaded his forehead. Sure it was cold, but his body had the annoying habit of sweating underneath all his winter layers, yet his face, fingers, and feet would be freezing. And there’d always be sweat that crept up upon his back.

But not now. Not anymore. Jack’s tunic no longer stuck to him. If it were looser, he could probably make a sport of flying out of it. 

Jack curls up in the snowbank, the snow shifting with him. It was comforting enough. But he wants to reject it, reject the coldness, reject the damned ice which took him from this world, yet had the audacity to bring him back and able to control it. How cruel. If the world gave this much of a damn about him, why the hell didn’t it intervene before he fell?

Jack swallows a fluffy ball of spit he’d collected over the minutes. It goes down like candy, and he sighs at the thought of that special summer sweetness.

He’s tired, yet again. Had hunting really taken that much out of him? And wasn’t one of the things about being dead was that one did not need sleep?

But Jack doesn’t care enough to really think about it. He has nothing better to do. He’d done his only doable chores. He’d visited his mother and sister. He’d watched some small relief wash over them. But now he couldn’t do anymore. And he couldn’t watch anymore. He couldn’t imagine having to watch their entire lives happen, and only being able to just watch. And freeze.

But really… what else would he do with his li–…. 

What else would he do with himself?

Jack soon drifts into sleep, staff clutched in hand, icy blanket encasing him once again. But not before filling the indent of the snow where his head lay full of more icy beads from his eyes. They just seem to leak out. 

His house is on fire. Ma and Mary are screaming and crying. Jack rushes in to save them. He pulls them out. He clutches them, relieved he’d gotten them out. They push him away. 

“DEMON!” Ma shouts.

“DEMON!” Mary echoes.

“DEMON,” they both scream at him. 

There are more people around, all faceless, all indistinguishable. “Demon,” they all whisper in echoing tandem. “Demon,” everyone darkly murmurs, over and over and over again. 

The town circles around the front of his blazing house. Ma and Mary dissipate into the crowd and he feels himself be coralled by the mass. He tries to jump and fly away, but he can’t. He looks down at the staff in his hand and it’s on fire. He steps backward to evade the grabbing hands but he slips on something wet, smelling horribly of iron among the snow.

He rotates his neck down to see he’s lying in his snow angel of earlier, reshappened injuriously by the scuffle, now an indented puddle all red. The imprint in the snow somehow has eyes and they bore into Jack’s gaze. 

Then Mary, is back in his face, eyes blazing red, her arms held high over her head. There is something in them Jack cannot see, the sun blinding him from his place on the ground among his snowy demon.

Jack sees the boulder for barely a second, before it rains down upon him amidst the sea that repeatedly chants “DEMON,” in his ear. 

Jack screams a blood-curdling scream, jolting violently awake. He looks around him, but there was nothing solid around. He yells, looking around desperately, seeing nothing but blue. He flails his limbs, but there is no footing to be had. He yelps, looking all over, tumbling a bit on seemingly nothing, and then finally down below. He’s in the sky. Again. 

Jack exhales, deflating, and floating down. More tears come down with him. 

He settles back down on his snowbank, considering the staff in his hand. He then throws the thing as far as he could, he doesn’t know where.

Jack lays back down, curling up some more, holding his legs to his chest. Angrily, sadly, in distress, whatever word, Jack takes armfuls of snow, and spreads them all over him, intent to be buried. He was dead, it is only prudent. 

After covering his head with a particularly rough slap of snow, Jack pulls his arms beneath his snowy enclosure back to his side, curls up, and goes back to sleep, feeling like he has nothing. 

...

But he did have proof of something. He was in fact there. It was just that no one could see him. They could in fact “feel” him, feel and see the secondary effects of him. But still they couldn’t feel him. Not in the conventional sense. Not in the way he wanted. Needed.

…

To hell with all of that.

Chapter Text

“Jack!” He hears Mary shout from above. Part of his head quirks, angling acutely to the side as he squints. However, the sensation against his eyes and skin is strange, albeit familiar. 

Something muffles her voice, softening everything around him. Numbly, he could feel the spikes on every inch of his body. Bitter, freezing, fathomless cold stabs at every bit of skin it can get its teeth on. Water rushes to fill Jack’s body and lungs, the ice weighing him down, bringing him to the bottom.

The light is shining down from above. He can just barely see Mary’s silhouette looming over him, seeming to be doing something he can’t quite make out. 

Something then pokes him square in the forehead, lightly bouncing off, echoing against his skull. Even through bleary, watery eyes upon his shaking head, he gains sight upon the staff. He reaches for it, his fingers scrambling over the bristly wood in the water, and grasps it. 

The second he does this, Jack shoots up, his head breaking the water’s surface, him landing in a heap back on the ice.

“–MY GOD! JACK!” Mary screams, her voice painfully accented by a sharp and high-pitched ringing.

Jack, foggy and waterlogged, makes out her blurry form shaking violently over him. His surroundings tumble even more dangerously around him, not from lack of air, but from those small yet strong arms that jerkily pull him to the snowbank. The sun’s flare blares against his vision, the ringing sound a defiant dull sting, the brightness overcoming his sense for several seconds.

He falls face first into the bank, staff still clutched in hand like a lifeline. It wouldn’t be so strange if the rest of his body wasn’t so limp. Mary shakes him again, making everything spin even more. He might just very well be sick, and violently at that. Jack coughes, water spitting and flying out of his mouth, freezing on impact with the air, landing like blown glass trinkets that disappear in the snow. 

Mary’s brown eyes are swimming before him. He looks at her blearily, only able to be vaguely aware of her intense panic. 

No please….. he thinks wearily. Don’t worry.. don’t be scared.. it’s alright..

“Jack! I’m so sorry!” Mary cries. Her face is tinged scarlet with cold, with eyes made to match with tears and redness. “I tried to reach you with the stick, but I dropped it! I’m so sorry! I didn’t know what to do! You just fell in! You fell in! I–”

But Mary’s voice breaks like the ice had, and she collapses in her own pool of tears beside him.

“Shhhh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Jack soothes, pulling his mind back to Earth and Mary into his arms. “It’s okay… I’m okay… I’ve got you.”

Mary continues to shake, blubbering with tears. “I’m so so sorry,” she wails. “I’m so sorry!”

Jack brings a hand to Mary’s head, holding it tightly from the back, and bringing it to rest on his shoulder. He holds his arms around her tightly, shushing her as he did with their old horse, whispering to her softly that they were both okay. 

Mary’s form evenually relaxes, the tears and cries ebbing away, finally clotting. She sniffs loudly, and Jack brings his hand to hold her face instead, tilting it up to look into his eyes. 

“I’m right here Mare,” Jack consoles.

“Y-y-y-you c-could have d-d-died,” Mary sobs, her body shaking in what seemed to be in tune with her words. 

“But I didn’t Mare,” he soothes still more. “It’s okay, I didn’t die.”

Mary smiles weakly, gripping him all the more tightly.

Jack chuckles warmly. “Hey, we had fun today, didn’t we?” He asks in that bright rhetorical voice that’s almost guaranteed to raise spirits, “I’m almost certain I promised you that we would.”

Mary giggles, likely against her will, as she continues to shake. Jack solidifies his grip around her. He would not be the one to let go. 

But soon, Jack wonders if it were something different from that. Quite plainly, and he’s shocked he hadn’t noticed it before, the sound of her chattering teeth like a cascading waterfall of pebbles enters his comprehension. He hastens to roughly swipe his hands up and down her arms and back, cursing himself internally. 

“Let’s get you inside,” Jack says, moving to stand them both up, but Mary refuses, making herself into as much deadweight as possible.

“It’s nothing,” Mary protests weakly.

“Nonsense, sister, you’re absolutely freezing.”

 “We must get you inside if anything,” Mary argues, a whine edging her voice. It drags her down and she clings to his form like the little toddler he still remembers her as; the one he promised that he would always keep safe. 

“Up. Come on now, up,” he instructs with warm firmness, like fried dough. He actually could do with and feels like some of that. He could eat, but it doesn’t feel overly important. Syrupy softness pulses through his arms as he holds onto Mary, his voice as he speaks sweetness into her crying mind, and his breath as his form sits living and breathing. And all that calms the pair of them better than sleep in the warm spring evenings after days full of school, picnics, and play.

Mary sighs. “Alright. Let’s go, before you catch a cold.”

Jack unfolds his bones and straightens out, shaking the rust out of his joints and stretching with Mary’s limp form over his shoulders. He stands and holds the pair of them up with ease.

Jack ignores the strange feeling he had in regard to her words of him being cold, and runs to get them home. He barely registers the icy rocks tearing against his feet in stride. 

“You two are home early,” Ma says with her casual verve, “I’ve only just started dinner. Would you– Good heavens!” Ma shrieks, only just noticing her frozen children. 

“It’s nothing to worry about Ma, we’re just a bit cold.”

“Jack’s lying, he fell in the lake.”

Ma blanches, whiter than the snow. “What?!”

Jack sighs. “Mary and I were at the lake, and the ice was thin. I fell in, but I made it out. It’s not anything worth worrying about,” Jack pleads with as much authority he can muster, depositing Mary by the fire. 

“Over here you,” Ma orders, growling, as Jack sheepishly closes the distance. Ma brings Jack down into a chair, and begins to vigorously tousle his hair, flakes and chunks of ice falling out.

“Ma, it’s fine,” Jack interjects, shirking away, “really.” Besides, the ice being combed away felt wrong to him somehow. 

“Nonsense,” she asserts, “Mary, bring down some extra blankets and socks at once.” 

As Mary scampers to comply, Ma pulls Jack to his feet and takes him to the fire, seating them both down. With Jack closer to the fire, Ma vigorously rubs his shoulders and arms up and down, intent to pack his body back with warmth. Jack decides he ought not to protest, and rubs his hands together as she did this so as to look helpful. This is despite the way the warmth is making his skin itch and crawl.

Mary comes back down, and Ma beckons her to cover Jack as well.

“Give Jack those socks,” Ma bosses. “And you,” she points at Jack with an angry finger, “you shall put those on your feet. I will not be having you walk around with frostbitten feet because you haven’t the sense to not walk around barefooted in the bloody snow.” 

Ma’s beady gaze makes Jack quake, and he does as instructed, even though the socks are akin to tree bark. He doesn’t know why, but the air, the fire, and the way his mother and sister flit and work around him just feels so cloying. A queasy sense of unease begins to more apparently worm its way within him. 

Ma has Mary take over the task of warming Jack up, returning to dinner. But soon after that, Ma calls Mary to help her with it, leaving Jack alone by the fire. 

The time seems to melt; as does Jack. He can’t quite place it, but he feels like he is unmistakably, and quite close to literally melting. He’s never liked socks, but these thick and wooly ones are itching up a storm, with a sticky sweaty deposit to match. Sweat?

Checking to see that they were not looking at him, Jack swiftly pulls the socks off, and stuffs them into his pockets, hiding his bare feet under his thighs. As he spreads his toes out and around underneath his seated position, Jack feels a modicum better. But he still feels as though he’s wearing the fire rather than sitting by it. He fidgets absentmindedly, wriggles in his seat, and folds and unfolds his fingers around each other and close-by fabrics. He couldn’t possibly tell how much, but some time passes. He spends it watching his Ma and Mary work around the kitchen from a growing distance.

He ought to be fine shirking off the three blankets, it had been some time. He’s warm now. Too warm. Sickeningly warm. Actually, no use in beating around the burning bush, he was blazing, the heat holding and twisting his insides askew, and spilling out at his every pore. Jack has no idea how he’s able to so calmly hold himself still and together, because this sincerely feels akin to dying. 

“Dinner’s ready Jack,” Mary calls across the small room. Is that an echo?

Immediately and obediently, Jack stands up and walks to the table, detouring at the coatrack by the door to hang his soaking cloak. He’d have stripped to his drawers if it were dignified.

“It is very fortunate that I happened to be making stew,” Ma proclaims after saying grace, passing over the water pitcher to Jack. “Be sure to drink up my dear.”

Jack nods as he accepts it and goes to fill his cup. But after a few seconds of holding the tilted jug over his empty glass, Jack looks at the objects in his hands quizzically. His eyebrows skate upward at the frozen block of water, barely just tapered off at the edge of the rimmed spout. It looks somehow, like it had frozen just before it was to leave the jug, but the freezing had prevented that.

How had it frozen so fast? But never mind that, an uncertain and unexpected spade of guilt digs through his stomach, and Jack rushes to put the pitcher down, trying not to look too suspicious. Thankfully, Ma and Mary were each tucking into their own stews, and hadn’t been looking at something as arbitrary as Jack pouring a glass of water. Or more accurately, failing to. 

Jack turns his attention to his own stew, wondering when and what he had eaten last. He inhales the aroma of the soft carrots, corn, and potatoes, with a couple small chunks of rabbit amidst a mostly water and salt broth. Jack couldn’t help but smile, his eyes lightly closed. This is what dinner smelled like. But as Jack takes a spoonful, intent to swallow, he chokes. As if he’d swallowed a red-hot coal stone, the stew burns a smoldering pathway down his throat. Jack hacks and coughs, and could swear he felt steam exit through his airway.

“Jack!” Ma and Mary each cry, one after the other. Jack reaches for his cup to take a drink, but only remembered as he pushed it to his urgently waiting lips that it was empty. Ma notices this, and hastens for the jug, but stopping in her tracks as she undoubtedly saw the same thing Jack had.

“The strangest thing…!?” Ma trails off, squinting at the frozen pitcher like an interesting, brightly colored flower, nonexistent in the winter.

Jack continues to cough, trying to stop it, his throat so scorched. Ma abandons the pitcher and dashes to his side to pound his back. But of course, he isn’t choking, he’s burning, so this only aggravates his senses.

“Here!” Mary cries, nearly throwing her cup at him. Jack takes it, and rushes to gulp it down. The water was halfway down his throat when he felt the most curious sensation spread through it and himself. The water went ice cold, and flowing like sleet, rushing down like a river. Although it had been lukewarm water, it came as if it were fresh from the lake. And as this river flows, the scorching subsides, and Jack could breathe peacefully again with a final flurry of coughs.

“You always have to give us all a turn,” Ma says, still standing, holding her heaving chest with one hand and Jack in the other.

“Of course Ma,” he answers resolutely, trying to muster a wink he knows she won’t see from behind.

I’ll sleep soundly when there’s a day you’re not getting into trouble.” Ma gives him a side squeeze and resumes her seat, stirring her bowl with her spoon. Mary’s spoon clinks against her bowl as she continues to eat as well, eyeing Jack wonderingly.

“Only because life would be so boring,” Jack says, shoving on a wicked grin.

Ma scoffs, but Jack could make out a brief and reluctant smile. “Eat your dinner. Before it gets cold.”

Jack continues to smirk, but heeds her, picking up his spoon. His eyebrows furrow at the sight of the entire contents frozen in bowl-shape around it.

Before Jack could put it back, Ma interrupts his flummoxed train of thought.

“What in tarnation?” 

Jack’s eyes widen, looking at Ma guiltily, half-heartedly putting down his block of stew before her eyes.

“Don’t know how that got so cold so quickly,” Ma says, almost to herself. She stares at the bowl, then at Jack, and at the bowl again. She looks like she’s trying to decipher if this is another one of his tricks. “I’ll heat that up for you,” Ma announces, as Jack resignedly lifts his bowl to hand it to her. She plucks it from his grasp and Jack can’t miss the light and needle-like gasp that escapes Ma’s lips as her hand brushes against his.

“Christ Jack, your hands are freezing,” Ma scolds. “Go back by the fire.”

But Jack doesn’t move. Mary looks at Jack pointedly while Ma’s back is turned to the stove, silently urging him to obey. Jack ignores her, staring dully forward.

A few minutes later, Ma turns over her shoulder, about to return to the table with Jack’s bowl of freshly warmed stew. “Jack!” she exclaims. “Go sit by the fire.”

“I’m not cold,” Jack says quietly.

“Speak up.” Ma returns to the table, placing the bowl before him.

“I’m not cold Ma,” Jack repeats, focusing on the floor. He can feel Ma hovering next to him, taking his limp form into her standing arms. He wishes she wouldn’t.

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s the middle of winter.” She brings a hand to his forehead and he feels her stiffen.

“I’m serious Ma, I’m fine. I’m plenty warm.”

Ma immediately stops dead from her task of massaging warmth into Jack. She takes a hand that burns around his face and tilts it up to face hers. Her face had gone white. He’d have wilted beneath her gaze had the feeling in his extremities hadn’t just left him from the incessant warmth.

“Let’s get you to bed Jack,” she says quietly, very clearly trying to sound calm, “I’ll follow you up.”

“I’m not ill,” Jack protests, batting her away. 

“I shall be the judge of that,” Ma says forcefully, taking her son by the arm and heading toward the stairs.

“No!” Jack yelps, jolting away from her.

“Jackson William Overland Junior,” Ma thunders, “you–”

“No Ma! I’m not ill!” Jack cries out, wrenching his arm away from her. Mary let out a light gasp.

“Jack, I am your mother, thou shall listen to me!”

“Ma…” Mary speaks.

“No, you don’t understand, I feel fine,” Jack bites back.

“Ma,” Mary repeats.

“Jack, thou cannot have fun all of the time, and this is far from funny. Now, if you know what is good for you, you will stop being so obstinate and get your backside in your bed now.”

“Ma!” Mary nearly shouts. 

“What?!” Ma yells, her patience spent. 

Mary points a shaking finger at the floor where Jack stood, her breath bated. As Ma looks tentatively down, Jack glances there too, also wondering what Mary was referring to. 

He freezes when he sees it, his breath catching. Large, jagged, and angsty spirals of thick frost surround his stance, spreading outward from him for several yards, under the table, and even toward the house’s walls. It was unmistakable.

“Jack…” Ma speaks unsteadily. 

Jack looks back up at her, wordlessly, eyes open as much and as largely as they could be. He feels a burgeoning wetness around his eyes that feels wrong.

Ma’s stance shifts subtly, sharpening, eyes narrowing.

“Ma?” Jack asks, his voice cracking– like the ice that had killed him and was going to kill him again.

“You…” She speaks quietly… venomously… dangerously, as if waiting for the tension to mount in his chest as the seconds drag by. “What has thou done to my son?”

“What? Ma, I am your son!” Jack cries, trying to keep himself steady. He tries backing away, but finds that he can’t wrench either of his feet from the floor. Frost had rooted him to his spot, and fresh panic courses through his veins. 

“Demon… thou art a liar…”

He could only lean away from the menacing figure that was his mother, brandishing her dinner knife in plain sight, and something else held awkwardly behind her back.

“Thou hast already taken mine husband,” Ma speaks in a low voice, “I shan’t let thou taketh mine son.”

“Ma, no! I don’t know exactly what this is, but I promise it’s not like that!” Jack cries, knowing exactly what’s coming. He tugs at and resists the pull of his own ice, but to no avail, the only way he’d be able to move is if that knife came down and severed his foot at the ankle. 

His gaze darts back up to his mother and his chest tightens, as if his ice is creeping up his legs and torso. He looks down amidst holding his hands up and chokes on his breath as he sees that he’s right. Frozen to the spot and his gaze fixed upon his looming mother, his position freezes and tightens still further.

“Ma, please, put the knife down. I can explain!” He coughs and a few snowflakes are unceremoniously expelled. Ma’s eyes narrow as her pursuing form is stopped for just a second. He hears Mary start to say something to Ma, her voice full of fear. He can’t make out her words, and this inability disarms him even more than he thought possible.

“Don’t listen to it dearest, it’s not him,” Ma says to Mary, forcibly and utterly devoid of feeling. 

He tries to ignore the anxious stabbing in his stomach that isn’t the knife in his mother’s hand. He breathes faster, his whole body tightening, the ice around him growing taller and faster by the second, focusing on the sharp blade and sharper eyes. His focus, however, is the farthest thing from focused, and his gaze darts around the room: the comically frozen pitcher, Mary cowering in the corner, the strewn chairs around the disordered table, his stew that he knows he’ll never eat, even if he was able. Then back to his mother, advancing on him like a wolf, his own ice clasping at his neck in strings, something small and sharp growing in his own hand. 

He tries wrenching again at his stance, his limbs barely listening to him, the timing extremely off between his mental orders and resulting actions. In the longest seconds, he finally breaks somewhat free of the icy webs that criss-cross loosely around his figure. With his left foot, he gains purchase on the ground, and uses it to break away from the initial anchor of the frost, still wearing most of his ice like chainmail. A lot of it falls away in chunks as he scuttles back. Ice still bites into him from all over –particularly his hand??– as his heart hammers in his chest that breathes too fast for any entertainment of the idea of calm.

“Shhhhhh,” Ma says strangely, soothingly, drawing incisively closer to him as Jack has no other option but to back into the wall. Further frightened frost feathers out and away from his fingers: one hand loose, jaggedly frosting over the door, and extending over the ceiling; the other hand clenched, readying, growing something in his senseless grasp. Ma yelps, watching the frightening ice blossom before her very eyes, but holds her ground. 

“Worry not Jack…. I shan’t let them take thou.”

Jack’s whole body seizes, and something sharp in his right fist squeezes against his pliant palm. He feels the skin break, the smell of iron rushes forth, the thing sharpening. He half wonders what's happening, but he has no time.

“Wait! Ma!” 

CLANG rings his skull, as the empty stew pot falls upon him.

He crumples, and a small, handle-less knife of frost in his unconscious bleeding hand is revealed as all of him goes slack. He falls into blackness, his brain bouncing around his skull, feeling cold and sick. 

Then Jack steps outside of his body, stands away, his head bowed and arms cradling himself as he joins in staring at his doppelgänger. He’s frozen, staring, hearing the screaming muffled, seeing himself in reverse, he closes his eyes as the high ringing returns. 

Seconds barely pass and the Jack that was lying on the ground is nose to nose with him without explanation, his mind’s eye flinging itself open. He gasps with a violent jolt as the demon angles his head with an icy stare. And this time he knows it is a demon because he knows that his own eyes are brown. The blue eyes sear into his own and he’s distracted for critical seconds. He’s about to demand why the demon wears his face when he hears a tiny grunt of frightened effort from behind, and the second CLANG from Mary rains down upon him.

Jack’s eyes shoot open, and he’s all too suddenly aware of his true surroundings. As if he were breaking out of a barrel, he busts open the snowy packing all around him, splattering snow everywhere. His head on a broken swivel, and looking around feverishly, he tries to locate Ma, yelling for her.

But seconds pass with no Ma, or Mary and he realizes what had happened; what was in fact the ‘truth.’ Jack’s breathing, deep from sleep, goes rigid, sharp and serrated like his frost. Without warning, thought, or any plan of doing so, Jack punches the snowy remains in front of him, groaning. 

But yet another pain tugs at him –a sharp, metallic one– one concentrated in his hand. His sight floats to it and his insides contort. He blinks and stares at the redness that sparsely encases the blade of frost –wide as a sword and short as a broken dagger– in his numb hand. It shakes, and so does he. He slowly rotates his wrist, letting the scarlet-tinged damager fall the small distance to the ground. 

He shakes some more, staring at his hand. What the absolute hell had he just done while he was sleeping?

Agony tugs viciously at his throat as he tries to verbalize just how much he hurts. His groan revs into a yell across the air, and before he knows it, he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. 

He screams and he screams until he could feel a modicum of that burning feeling down his throat he’d remembered. It had been from the time he hadn’t blown on his soup when Ma had specifically told him to. His tongue and throat had ached rawly for days. But that feeling of burning is gone. Only cold could fill him up. Hollow, polarizing, freezing cold. 

But before the feeling of burning feels fully extinct, part of his hand regains some feeling, a piece of the numbness falling away. His hand sears and burns from the jagged ice that had grown and dug into it, and he realizes the total effect as he stares at it again, the cries cascading still through the hollow cavern of his throat.

No. No no no, this is wrong. His hand burns, but not in the way he's used to things burning. It hurts on principle, and hurts even more because it hurts incorrectly. He shoves his affected hand into the snow and covers it with a translucent, glove-like layer that he freezes into shape without even thinking. He shakes some more, feels himself compress his bones into themselves, clutches his arms to himself. His neck bobbles and any steady flow of sense stops.

Jack dissolves to his knees, his lungs spent. The tears follow, well prepared from their countless rehearsals from the past days. Jack shakes his head fervently, eyes scrunched so tightly closed they hurt, clutching his head in his icy hands. He’s practically willing liquid tears to materialize, begging for there to be no beads, but despite his head being a veritable blizzard, he is given neither. He feels it spin in slowed motion, and he tries to vocalize again but his insides are too dry, too frozen. The almost-deep scratch on his hand is barely bloody, the iron frozen at the skin beneath his makeshift glove. But a light burn stokes beneath his skin as his bones jostle within himself all the same. 

As he tries sleeping again, through Jack’s dizzy, tired mind, he wonders how he could he still dream if he was dead.

Another part dwells on that burning sensation. The small, desperate, starved parts of him brood, centering with too much ease upon his palm amidst his aching body. There are too many thoughts. Too many sensations. The parts freeze mid-thought, unable to reach everything, unable to fully formulate.

They’re stuck on figuring out if and why he almost feels relief as his consciousness goes astray. 

Chapter Text

It’s too quiet in this room. For this many people, absolutely, far too quiet. 

If they could see him, they’d see Jack hanging up in the rafters, twiddling awkwardly with his staff in his left hand, doing all he can to keep his mind from wandering beneath himself. Not much of a point in trying though. The murmuring sea ripples numbly as little tokens: moments, memories, and fragments of Jack are passed all around. And unbeknownst to them, the greatest token lingers just above them, as casual as a canary up in a hopeless mine. 

He knows it is happening: the grievings being exchanged like greetings, carrying the despondence of goodbyes –everlasting goodbyes– all damned to be repeated forever more… until he was forgotten at least. And despite it all, he can’t escape the creeping feeling of intrusion. But even so, Jack wants these tokens for his own. He wishes he could feel them like the collection of coins in the wishing well, standing as the bastion of hope and belief of the future days. 

But as it turned out, the well had been poisoned. Those dreams of the future lay dead and gone from the living eye. They instead washed over and weighed him down. Rather than a beautifully humble space of these tokens, they were adversely all piled upon him: enveloping, crushing, burying. They’re going to bury him. Well, a box meant for him at the very least. 

All he feels able to stablely look at is up, where he feels there isn’t enough air. Better than at his frost-gloved hand he can’t stand to look at.

Mayhaps he wasn’t so casual after all.

The field of pale black down below is a strange sight indeed. Everyone in their Sunday best. On a Tuesday of all days. But stranger to see everyone he’d known, everyone who’d ever known him, all crowded and cloistered together in one big room. (That wasn’t for divine services.) Absolute strangest to see all the neighborhood kids, particularly the teenaged boys he’d frequented in company, absolutely silent. They were almost never silent, he’d always made sure of that.

Jack had come with the best of intentions. He’d wanted to be there for his family and friends in their “time of need,” as his Ma would call it. Holy God he misses her so much as he stares right at her. And Mary. None of them could possibly know that he’s above them the way that he is. Of course they all believe he’ll always be with them in spirit, that he is in fact with them. But definitely not in the way he is right now– only almost corporeal. 

Maybe this –this simple hanging in the rafters– is making their belief of him being there in spirit honest. Oh good Lord, it’s too early for this grieving blend of existentialism, is the thought upon his mind as he considers this.

This has to still be his living mind trying to have control of the situation. He’s physically dead. He has no such ability. It’s dreadfully ironic, the things he can do now, all of which dull in comparison to simply just being seen. This “power” he has, it merely polarizes him.

Jack wants to be instantly anywhere else. Back under the ice is an idea. But he doesn’t want to just abandon his own service, that feels wrong. He feels he has to at least stick around, despite there being no real consequences if he doesn’t. Funnily enough, everyone believes without a shadow of a doubt that he’s in the casket. (Or at least is supposed to be.) His attendance is the only one they are doubtlessly convinced in. At the very least, it is silent, making the times in which he closes his eyes feel so close to relief. 

His eyes impulsively dart down as they did every now and then, and yet again he catches his mother and sister at the center of the sea of black. They both look as deathly and beleaguered as he feels, shaking and holding hands after gloved hands, it seems, speaking ceaseless murmured thank-you’s. 

But Jack just can’t watch. He looks back up at the ceiling, only a couple of feet above his head. He’d really picked a cozy spot; it tents him in ever-so-nicely without leading him to feel too suffocated. He could maybe try sleeping here. But the idea is immediately dashed as the last week of “dreams” briefly surface in his mind’s eye, and he gives an involuntary shiver of his neck, his eyes twitching. 

Thought shivering was a thing of the past now? He thinks dryly.

Jack sighs, fixing his eyes firmly on the rafter roofing right in front of him. Sitting so still like this feels abundantly unnatural, and if Jack were less exhausted, he’d be absolutely restless. But just his body perhaps. His mind is still trying to break free. Christ this is boring. Jack would usually start joking around, lighting them all up with something snarky, a bright thing, anything funny. 

They’ll walk right through you now. Jack closes his eyes, muscles in his face over-tense yet again, and he tilts his head up and away from the ground. He holds his arms around himself, breathing hard against his tightening grip. Where had this voice that talks to him in the second person come from?

“Damn it,” Jack whispers. He’s not sure why he’s bothering to be quiet, it’s not like anyone can hear him. It hurts, thinking like that. It hurts, the pain. It feels so much more pronounced in this form somehow. How can he feel pain, if he holds a body that no one can register? Is the ability for him to feel his self an edict upon how inhuman he is? Is this state an emphasis of the evils of his demons, which he now seems to have become?

He still wants to move, but somehow, still, he’s so tired. The prospect of moving himself feels parallel to attempting to transplant a lake. Where the hell has his energy gone?

His energy used to be as captivating and encompassing as wildfire. He’d spread his wings and take in anyone who wanted to be beside him. But the fire had gone out. Was all he’d left a charred and now frozen home in his wake?

He rolls over somehow, staff in hand, and he floats down like a single leaf from a tree. He’s too stiff to be floppy, too stuck to be frantic. Jack winces, falling through three respective people in the same spot which he now occupied on the floor. But the people stay right through him. He sits there with unbated breath, with three people standing where he is. He is sitting in three people. Or, no, he’s not there. They’re there. Jack “isn’t.” He’s dead. They’re not. Jack can’t ignore it. 

“Oh damn..” He breathes shallowly. He scampers to a sitting position and scrambles on his knees to the wall and the corner. He feels frost creep up his spine at the corner’s apex. It was subtle, and hopefully easily ignored. His damn staff, which he noticed rested tip down on the ground, was spreading its spindly spirals like ghostly fingerprints. Subtle they were, still they were too much. It was also probably cold enough in here as it is, he thought. He tries not to think about how disconnected he’s quickly becoming from the living, particularly the things they can see, do, withstand.

Aggravated, and now feeling particularly moody, Jack shoots up, and dashes through the air. The subsequent “energy” that courses through him feels like corrugated rust– sludge in his system. He goes through people, feeling dull blows to his chest through each one, until he makes it to his casket. He lands right on top of it, legs crossed, staff held intentionally in his non-dominant hand, (coincidentally the hand of the devil) not touching anything else. He is the center of the room. This room was prepared specially for him. These people are there for him.

Why? He can’t help but intrinsically ask himself.

Don’t be ridiculous. They loved you. The inner voice that sounds like his mother says.

If they loved me, they’d see me. They look harder. They’d ‘know.’ They’d try. They wouldn’t ignore me. They wouldn’t leave me alone.  

Jack sighs again, burying his head in his knees. He wishes he’d stop this pathetic pouting. He was and is dead and gone. And there wasn’t a single thing to be done about it. There was nothing any of these people could know or do to change anything. His neck gave a twinge and he looked back up, looking around at the room at large. The room full of people who are supposed to be there for him. 

How could they leave me alone like this?

They’re not, my darling boy. He could almost hear his mother whisper in his ear. If he disoriented himself enough, perhaps he could bring his mind to the last time she tucked him into bed, read to him a story, and then blew out the night’s candle. A story of note, ironically, right now at least, he remembers most distinctively, was of Old Man Winter. 

This was dreadful. Is dreadful. Here he sits, on his own –empty– resting box, in the center of a room with all of his family and friends. And here he wishes he were all alone instead. Then at least he wouldn’t have to see what they all looked like without him. He wouldn’t have to be forced to witness the truth that was any and all living life without him. He could pretend something foolish and pedestrian like he was out of town and he’d be back with special little toys and purchases from the neighboring city; he could have easily been on a simple out-of-town market trip, one just like his father used to go on. And he could believe the lie that he’d be back soon. It was so beautiful, and so fragile, and for some time, he could believe it. He could close his eyes and outstretch his hand, reach to the end of his grasp, quake with concentration, will his life to be true.

Until such a time where the rug is pulled. The wool is snatched. The ice is broken. And he has in fact fallen. His force to live feels too late. Is too late. Why couldn’t he swim up? How hadn’t he? What had stopped him?

Jack feels like he’s about to choke, but he just can’t, at the sight of Ma some feet away. Just mere feet away. He could reach his arm out and have it go right through her. The longing encases every part of him that can feel in this moment. 

“I tried,” he chokes out unexpectedly. He expects the room to jump at his sudden proclamation. His gaze is fixed upon both Ma and Mary, his arms are limp, his gaze falls unwillingly to his injured hand. Mechanically, he turns his head away to the other side of the floor, papered with shoed feet. “I promise, Ma… Mary…. I tried. I tried to swim up.” He feels like tears should come to his defense. …He has none. 

“Christ, I’m sorry. ….I- I didn’t want this. …I didn’t give up…. I tried.”

He feels chasms in between his lone statements. The absence, the disconnection, the emptiness. It and the words indiscriminately. It’s all the same, it’s all excruciating. He feels like a madman rambling. Man? He can’t stop the snide thought. More like boy. He wants to coil his arms around himself, but he feels too weak to hold anything, let alone himself.

Jack may have been the “man” of the house for years now. But he’d never fully forgotten, especially now, that he was still just a kid. And he always would be now and apparently forever. 

Jack lays down on his coffin like a bed, letting the arm with his staff hang off of it limply. He would sleep here. Sleep and stay right here until he was buried. If he were dead, then he wanted to be really, actually, truly dead. All the frost that suddenly came in upon the top be damned. 

Just let me be. He thinks savagely.

He rolls more over to his side, his shoulder hedging oddly against his torso, his face resting uncomfortably against the hard wood. But he stays still, for his blood and bones are frozen, and his gaze upon Mary even more so as she swims into view.

“You said…” Jack mutters, his whisper trailing off, a lone flake of a “tear” falling away. A compact cough wrenches its way through, the pent-up discomfort apparent. He clears his throat, his head and neck shaking as he holds his stare. Jack sniffs, more beads rolling onto his casket. He’d point a cursory finger if he could. Then he realizes he doesn’t know who he’d point to.

“You said you’d believe in me…” 

––––—

Jack doesn’t know where this idea of “belief” came from. It had simply been a thing he’d said. Coincidentally, right before what should have been the end. The words of belief, of feel, of faith.. the words float around his mind like independent, yet interlocking mantras in slowed, hymn-like melodies. The concept of the word strikes a chord somewhere within, but he can’t for the death of him figure out why.

He doesn’t understand what the words are saying to him.

Jack ended up not being buried with his casket. The second the pallbearers had lifted it (and him), he’d tumbled right off, with an unexpected thud, met with sparse intakes of breath. But it was overlooked for the most part, and brushed off as part of the wind outside.

The gathering space is empty now. The candles and lanterns are all out. Jack lays motionless upon the hard wood floor he’d fallen upon. The temperature had dropped even further in the past hours since sunset. But instead of fluffy pattering that was invisible to the ear, Jack’s ears are instead met with the frequent and fervent spattering of hail upon the roof. It’s regular, rhythmic, but slightly annoying. The sleeting hail had to be at least the size of berries, they were loud enough. But they shouldn’t cause too much property damage. Or more importantly actually, crop damage. 

It’s winter, you dolt, there are no crops. Get it together Jack. All this dead and frozen rubbish is toying with you.

Despite the solid air of exhaustion, he yearns to breathe. He curls up in his solitary spot, bringing his legs to his chest. With no intentional thought at all, he can feel the frost swiftly embroider itself around him. From his fingers to his feet, and even his face. Frosty snow between his toes, and and ice licking his hands. Fabulous frost grows over him, securing him gently to his spot, even putting a light layer over his eyelids, freezing them shut like eggshells. 

And somehow, some way, in some strange and unusual way, this feels like home. This blanketing of frost that embraces him, fits him, loves him… it feels like… like home. Like this is his own little home, and it’s all his.

But it isn’t the home like he’d always known. It isn’t warm, it’s cold. But now cold feels warming, comforting. How would he get used to that?

Jack sighs and stands up, his snowy armor crunching and falling away. His eyelids in particular make protest at their loss of the soft ice upon them. Jack shakes it off, wanting to see through his human eyes, surveying the room blankly, yet again. Promptly turning around, and staff interlaced between his fingers, he ambles out. The sensation of walking, of putting weight on his standing frame, of moving and not being in the same place as before and keeping on going– he feels wrong. Inorganic, roving, exposed: he wants to stop, keep going, be stopped, or helped to go on, he doesn’t know. 

Coins of hail assault his head and shoulders, and Jack winces as he brings his arms to cover his head. He looks up despite himself and sees the cloying blanket of steely gray overhead.

How could I forget? 

Jack rolls his eyes and shakes his head, huffing as he strides to a thickly branched tree. Its trunk is well situated with fluffy snow, where Jack lays himself down within it like a bed, and curls up against it, the snow providing a soft mattress-like surface. It even supports his curled knees, keeping them angled just above the rest of himself, holding him at an extremely comforting angle. 

He feels like sleeping again, and this is as good a place as any. 

Being dead, it seemed, that if he wanted to sleep, all he had to do was close his eyes. He could now only hear and feel his breath, matching perfectly against the backdrop of the whistling wind. Icy bullets of his own design weave their way through, striking nearly everything in their path. His thicket keeps it from raining fire upon his sedated figure, despite him having some reservations of doing so.

He is walking through the forest, with Mary right beside him. He can’t feel the snow under his feet, and glances down to see he has on the mountain shoes he’s hardly ever worn. His feet feel choked, constrained. He can’t wiggle his toes as he likes, can’t feel the curl of his pedal bones into the snowy earth, can’t feel his body and soul connect to the snow. His bundled up attire is stifling, the creeping senation of something down the horizon enters his bones, and his entire frame tenses as his all of his hair stands tall.

Neither of them say anything. They are intent on their destination, wherever it is. Mary leads the way. He feels shadowy, following a living angel outlined in the golden sunlight that avoids him so pointedly. The contrast sickens him from his most hideous insides, where a proverbial hand twists his guts to its pleasure.

After some time, they stop. The scene before them blossoms from mist to reveal they are at the lake, still frozen over. But as Jack blinks, the ice and snow begin to dissolve, the lake cracking and becoming noisy in how its water now flows. The blades of grass break free from their icy encasing, these green needles unfurl and wave around bottoms of his shoes– but he longs to feel them playfully pinch around the soles of his feet instead. 

As if God himself, or some other force beyond nature waves an omniscient hand over the clearing, everything melts into warm, sparkling verdant.

Jack feels extremely out of place with this sudden shift in the scenery to greenery. He remains in full winter-wear, the thick cotton and wool pushing him down into the ground. The coats and cloaks seem to be multiplying around his form, coiling still tighter around his chest and neck. His hands lose feeling, disconnecting in sensation from the rest of him with how strained his sleeves become. But no matter how much he struggles and tries, the layers don’t budge, are they sewn into his skin? He realizes a second later that he does not wish to know. 

Another figure materializes with the melt, as if he’s sprung from the ground like a sunflower. There is a man now behind him, and he overtakes him in pace with humiliating ease. An older, blank-faced man, much taller than Jack, prompting him to gasp sharply with a rigid swivel of his neck. Another look tells Jack that the newcomer is speckled with a youthful beard, individual hairs scattered like grain upon a field that was his otherwise featureless face. But he can’t forget the eyes: bright green, piercing, and full of unmistakable life. 

As Jack follows diagonally, floating ahead of this new man coming to step in tune with Mary, his gut gives a wrench at the sight of a strong smile that Jack couldn’t dream of imitating as of now. The longer he looks, the more the face comes into clearer focus. He comes to remind Jack of Father, but with a newer, more adventurous zeal. 

Mary has shot up in the coming of spring, nearly meeting his own height. Her winter clothes have melted away –unlike his– and she wears a faded turquoise floor-length day dress with a worn apron. She has done away with a bonnet, her longer hair waving like a runaway flag in the tree-rustling wind. She looks even more beautiful, like their Mother. What is this?

Jack now walks/floats backwards, suddenly free from all fabric-related impediments, watching the man and his now-grown sister stroll along the meadow together. Mary’s hand at some point had crept into the stranger’s, and she now pulls at his arm gently as she leads him through where Jack happens to be standing and to the lake behind them.

Gentle as it is, Mary and the man don’t go through Jack like he expects. The pair feel solid as stone as they push him to the ground. He gives a resounding yelp, tumbling down into the bank of the lake. They give no notice of recognizing that Jack had been there, pushed aside, or fallen before them with his outer layer dusted with muddy dirt.

Jack makes it off his back and somewhat steadily upon his knees. He looks up at Mary and her apparent suitor gazing upon the lake before them in the distance. Mary appears mournful, her companion solemnly curious. The frowns and creased eyes lash dully upon Jack’s chest, his mouth falling slightly open. His eyes could never be wide enough to see this vision. 

“This is where my brother saved me,” Mary speaks, her voice echoing, sounding so mature like their Mother’s. “I was a small girl, and the ice was thin… I would’ve fallen in if it weren’t for Jack.” She adds ruefully. The echoing continues its subtle assault upon him.

Jack swallows, and it’s like he’s trying to stomach cotton. He doesn’t want to think of himself, his bones, his actual real bones lying upon the floor of this lake. That’s where his physical body is in fact. It has to be. Jack shudders. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want for his body to be there– immovably, permanently, forever there. 

It’s getting far too hot, the realized memory of sweat creeps in bulk along the sides of his brows and temples. 

How can he still feel sweat if he isn’t even sure if he could still make it? No matter. With another vain effort, he pulls off a bunch of outer layers with a surprised little shout. Pushed by this success, he wrenches his shoes off and throws them into the lake with a vengeance. He feels somewhat lighter at least, although his chest still feels compressed in a rotting barrel.

He remains seated along the lakeside, eyes fixed on Mary. Tears are being wiped away gently from her face by a hankerchief in her companion’s hand. She sinks further into his arms and clasps at his shoulder with a large sigh. They stand, swaying slightly with the branches. 

After some minutes, Mary detatches herself from this hold, accepting the cloth and dabbing at her eyes. A glimmer in the sun catches Jack’s eye upon Mary’s left hand as she pulls her fiancé into a tight hug. 

Ants start to crawl upon and around his ankles. Jack hops into the air, remaining there suspended as he beats away the itchy bits of fire biting at him. He remains mesmerized upon the scene before him. The vision simultaneously relieves and pains him. He doesn’t want for Mary to ever need that type of comfort. Doesn’t want for her to still be weighed down by her grief for him years later. Doesn’t want to be absent from the family, unable to know or be known by his brother-in-law. And…. 

At least Mary would, or could find some version of happiness. Maybe. Hopefully. At the very least, it’s not impossible. Even if it would lack his light and life. 

Jack floats back to the ground, his neck cranes down and his arms curl around his torso. He stands right in front of the embracing pair, just eyeing them ever so pensively. He stands in the position of the priest. A weak smile nearly tugs at the corners of his face, but his eyes are too frozen to feel or execute it. He looks at the pair, really looks at them. Mary has a flower tucked behind her ear, no doubt from her fiancé. And the man in question himself has his chin resting upon Mary’s shoulder, his face angled delicately around her neck. Jack surveys, and sees how he has his eyes closed, and wears a contented smile. 

Jack closes his eyes too, opening them soon again. He swallows the sickly warm liquid in his throat.

“Take care sister…” he whispers, the sound lost in the wind, but he knows what he said. He turns to the man, taking a breath. “And you… you take good care of her.” 

He refuses to say please. He is telling him. He better take care of her God damn it. Because he can’t. But Jack can tell he need not glower so much. Mary’s (hypothetical) fiancé has a kind face, and an even kinder smile. He also has hands very clearly sculpted by hard labor, but they look able to hold his sister as if she were made of porcelain. This here is a good man, the best protector he could ever hope for her to have if he himself couldn’t be that for her. 

He turns away slowly, his staff tapping against the ground unexpectedly. The scene shifts again, the sun growing dimmer, falling out of a clouded noon, and the lake falls frozen again. Mary and her partner, having aged more, are now accompanied by a small boy in tow, and a little girl nestled in her father’s arms. Jack’s heart sinks into his stomach. The little boy looks so much like him and Mary’s husband. He has his same brown eyes, the family eyes. And Mary’s daughter.. she looks just as he remembered Mary when she was a toddler too. Only her eyes are speckled with green, like how he felt his eyes were right now.

“Don’t go on the ice when it’s weak son,” Mary says, eerily sounding too much like Ma. “We don’t want you falling in.”

Jack steps out backward onto the ice, and it firms under each of his footfalls. The little boy smiles broadly despite his mother’s warning to be careful; he heeds her though, remaining a good distance away from the lake. He runs joyously through the snow, his parents and sister some ways away, watching him as Jack also does. Mary’s elbow links with her husband’s free one, their daughter is held easily in one burly arm. His sister’s his niece’s laugh echoes around the lake, eyes fixed on her older brother prancing around, making sillouettes and faces, and chuckling at the effect he’s having.

Jack’s blinking quickens the longer he watches. He feels a tightness in his sinuses telling him he needs to sneeze but also can’t catch it no matter how much he waits for it. A bead falls from his eye as he stands at a distant face-to-face with his nephew, who he could have easily mistaken for his own younger self apart from the subtle differences put forth by his brother-in-law. He swiftly elects to emphasize the influence of his brother-in-law upon his nephew, for he can’t, he could never damn him in association with himself, with loss, premature death, and an icy imortal curse atop all else.

He turns his back to his sister and her ideated future family; he can’t look at it anymore. He steps into the center of the lake, looking forward, eyes fixed upon the thicket in front of him. They are able to be so happy.. so well-off… just fine.. without him. But that wasn’t even it. This is how it should have been with Mary and himself. Father should have been alive, he and mother should have been watching them, they should have all been together, they should have never been on the ice, they should have kept that, should have saved that… 

Bored with oblivion, unable to summon any more energy to be angry, and drowning out the muffled sounds of speech and laughter, he glances downwards. His heart stops as his face hardens into a gaze.

His frozen skeleton shines from beneath the transparent ice. And somehow it smiles at him.

With a jolt and a gasp, Jack is awake, hailing snow flying all around and over him, the wind now howling, ice bullets quietly shrieking.

“Auggghoww!!!” Jack’s moan scrambles into a scream, his hand flying to his cheek, barely missing the spike that had grazed him. Jack’s breath catches in a gasp as scarlet colors his vision, tinging his fingers in bright, unmistakeable blood. Wait a God damn second…

“If I’m dead, why the hell do I bleed?!” Jack yells to the forest at large. Jack doubles over, his knees and elbows securing his crouch in the snow, his left hand scrambling to bring a handful of snow to his cut face, groaning as it burns. It burns like his right hand had, but worse. His trembling focus moves down, his hands circling his face apprehensively, his scarred hand falling away and under his vision. The more he stares, the more it shakes, the icy scar unmistakable. 

He pushes the snow deeper onto his face, presses his hurt hand even harder into the plushy ice. 

Amidst his heaving chest, a relieved moan, with a mind of its own, escapes from Jack’s lips. Goddamn does this hurt. But his heartbeat soon slows, the flaming scratch dying into a dull sting. 

“Good snow,” Jack breathes, “goooood snow.” He exhales, breathing exclusively from his mouth. His arm needs to stretch, and he swipes the snow off his cheek with a flourishing movement, exposing it to the air. Jack winces as the graze flashes his brain with another quick burn.

Jack looks around, puzzlement fixing itself amidst his features. It had just been hailing barely a couple minutes ago. The spikes, spades, and jagged chunks of ice that had been cyclically darting through the air like mosquitos now litter the ground like weeds. 

“Strange,” Jack mutters, nonplussed, albeit grateful that the storming had ceased. Jack sighs, and slumps against the tree, his stare traveling to the heavens, all still obscured by clouds as now flurry-soft snow fell like leaves.

His vision was just another bad and tense dream. 

I wouldn’t call it a “dream."

But it’s also not as terrifying as a nightmare. 

Was it?

This was mere discomfort and a lack of positivity. Jack works to convince himself. Discomfort at its dreamiest finest. “Dream” would have to do. Nightmare feels too dramatic. 

Why am I quibbling over word meanings and implications? 

…

What is this doing to me?

The question cries the salty tears he can’t in its own asking. His breath hitches at the realization: the fact that all of this is doing something to him. It’s all so un-fun; so unlike him. Jack’s face goes glassy, sensation fleeing his body as he can only sit motionlessly. He waits numbly for the beads to fall, to collect, to let him scoop up and hold his pain.

But there aren’t any beads. For the first time in ages, he feels the liquid tears slide down his face. Jack exhales, smiling weakly with his eyes half shut. How much he’s missed having wet tears. He rubs his eyes with his hands, but they are dry. As they foray onto his lower face, he feels the wetness. As he brings his hands back to see, Jack’s face sours and hardens as a gasp dies in his throat.

There aren’t any beads. Only bad dreams. Only ice. Only blood. 

Why didn’t the blood freeze like his tears?

Warm blood, practically hot in comparison to his skin shines in stark contrast of his pale skin. He knows he still has to have blood, it only makes sense. But like in the way that household insects and arachnids were only shown having blood when savagely squashed, it seemed a similar mechanism had to be employed in proving his ‘life’ in his death.

He feels dry all over, sandpapery, like flour is caked in his hands but the sticky syrupy blood adds a whole nother flavor of hell to the mix. He doubles over, looking away from all of himself, burying his face and lunging his shoulder into the snow. He wracks his body, making the sounds that come with crying. He may also be kicking, punching, or hitting at the snow; but he feels so alien from himself and his body that he just can't tell. But he does know how he tries to cry, the dry and pathetic scrunch to his face that gifts him with a fiery ache.

He knows it’s no use, that there won’t be any tears like how he wants. 

He supposes it’ll have to do for now.