This was inspired by a picture of some ROTG concept art Chris Appelhans put on his blog that migrated to tumblr. Link to the picture is on my profile.
Bus Crash
The Bus was stuck in the snowbank, and all things considered, Jack was pretty pleased with himself.
Winter was a… dangerous season, and he'd seen thousands of tragedies before. Devastating blizzards, lost travelers, hypothermic deaths… car crashes. Jack Frost had been followed by misery his whole life, and he was starting to accept that he was the herald of bad news.
He knew the signs of a driver losing control - he'd seen it a hundred times. Normally he fled the scene immediately, or hovered above traffic, praying no one got hurt; but this time, the car in question was a bus, packed to the brim with kids, one of whom he'd played with this morning. She'd woken up early just to play in the snow. He'd helped her litter her front yard with snow angles and snowball-sized snowmen all morning.
And there was NO way he was gonna let her, or any of them, get hurt.
So without thinking, Jack had intervened. He'd never tried to stop an accident before, and naturally, his first attempt was a bit clumsy. He was Jack Frost, after all, a boy who left a mess wherever he went - but Jack was also very experienced with snow, and he instinctively realized the bus was nothing but an oversized sled; and, as with any toboggan careening out of control, there was only one real safe solution: push it into a nice, cushy snowbank.
The first few moments after the cloud of dusty snow cleared, Jack perched on a telephone pole overlooking the catastrophe and held his breath. The wreckage was impressive; one truck pushed into the ditch, two cars about a hundred yards back who'd suffered a fender-bender, the army truck that had narrowly avoided collision with the bus—and the bus itself, sitting lopsided in the snowbank. For a brief moment of silence, nothing moved, and for a terrifying moment Jack thought he'd accidentally killed them all.
Then, a laugh.
Like that, the spell of silence was broken. The children slowly started to laugh, unexpected glee from the roller coaster they'd just gone through. The two cars down the road simultaneously stuck their heads out of their windows, eyeing the damage and fussing with cell phones. The army truck driver parked and heaved his door open, leapt out, and rushed to the bus to peer into the windows. The bus door folded open, and the driver leaned out, frazzled but fine. The military man jumped aboard the bus, hoping to help sort out the confusion.
It was a tense few minutes, but after a few minutes the adults exited the vehicle, looking only disgruntled, not panicked. Jack breathed a sigh of relief as children filed out after them until the bus was empty. Every child accounted for.
The adults slipped behind the army truck to "settle" the accident (whatever that meant). The low-voiced, serious argument was lost beneath the happy chatter of children as they flopped down into the snowbank, laughing. "That was scary!" one said. "Let's go again!"
"Y'think they'll cancel school?" another girl asked, eyes hopeful.
"Didja see how close that truck got? It almost hit us!"
"Maybe that means we got a guardian angel."
Jack smiled, swinging his legs up and under him to crouch. Everyone was okay, meaning his job here was done. He watched with amusement as, shortly after, a snowball fight broke out (One could not touch HIS perfect snow and not be enticed to PLAY with it, after all) and with a glance over his shoulder, he smirked.
"I guess you do," he told the children, and leapt off his perch into the tumbling wind.