Jack Frost is tired.
Tired of chasing fluttering shadows and dancing golden dreams. Of running fast, dangerously so, until he's thrown into the thrilling echo of nothing as the air itself wraps around him.
Tired of drowning out the silence with ringing peels of children's laughter, lighting his dark world until he slips into their path. Of clutching his sides and sucking in air, trying to ignore the stabbing pain and wrongness of it all.
Tired of peering into windows, squinted cerulean eyes trying to see past the flaking frost patterns his every breath creates. Of running his pale, thin fingers across blossomed bluebells and dandelions, watching with cold, morbid fascination as they froze and grew brittle.
Tired of basking in the cruel, indifferent moonlight, his thin frame blanketed by falling snow. Of desperately whispering into the reddened, unhearing ears of the homeless, trying to apologize for the biting chill.
Tired of unheard tears falling past his widened lids, slowly crawling down his pasty rounded cheeks until they curved across his lips and chin, dribbling down his nose. Of watching those unfreezing tears dissolve before they touched the ground, leaving only a whisper of frost.
Tired of sleepless nights melting into sleepless days as he pulls at his silver locks, and chews on his chapped lip, and taps bare feet, and curls his toes, and claws his familiar yet unfamiliar face that was all wrong because he was far too pale for someone who knows nothing, for someone born of winter.
He's tired of being forgotten, a ghost, the shudder up your spine. With feet moving soundlessly across terrain's of ice, snow, dirt, grass, and frost. It was inescapable, that frost. Crawling and blooming it spread with every movement he made, each flutter of an eye. The cold didn't bother him, he was the cold. It was the damned sound. The gentle scraping when silence screamed as the fern-like ice grew.
He was tired because even in slumber he couldn't escape that sound.
Maybe if he took a breath, a deep, steadying one, it would all be okay.
Maybe if he believed and wished enough the sounds would return, pouring over the now fallen silent tremor in his voice.
Maybe if he smiled enough, laughed enough, and played enough he'd forget to exist, and would melt alongside the snowmen with the springtime dawn.
Maybe if he believed enough and wished enough he wouldn't exist, and the child born of winter would die of summer.
Maybe he'd stop asking one day, stop drifting on the winds back with the lull of depression and start living. He would be grounded, trapped, but alive. And as he gazes at his reflection in the glassy pond he imagines the wrongness slipping away, being replaced by flushed cheeks and tanned skin and dark hair and eyes that didn't stare coldly back at him.
Albeit his belief doesn't matter, his wishes don't matter, and his features remain wrong because he is born of winter.
And Winter is tired.
So that was a one shot I just spat out after watching Rise of the Guardians of the thousandth time. So for any mistakes, I've been stressed lately. I had a point when I started this, a concept I wanted to convey, but as I wrote I forgot what it was...