Title: lakeside laments

Summary: And so, when the little old woman who once was a little young girl and then a beautiful woman closes her eyes for her last moment on earth, he is ready to move on. But never to forget./ / Or, Jack watches his sister grow up. One-shot.

Word Count: 882

Notes: I honestly had to stop writing this so I wouldn't cry but I cry easily and I'm tired so it's probably not that sad idk.

Sometimes Jack sees a girl by what he has come to call his lake.

He does not know who she is, but she is young, no older than ten, with long brown hair.

And she is always crying.

(He is plagued with a sense that he knows her. But that cannot be possible. He knows no one. And no one knows him.)

The first time he sees her is a month after he became what he now is.

At first, he tries to talk to her, console her, hoping that she can see him. But like all the others she lives on, while he tries to not let her ignorance break his heart.

(He wonders, not for the first time, if he is a ghost. He doesn't remember dying, but he doesn't remember living, either. He just remembers waking up.)

Instead, he sits by her on her visits. Sometimes he will ask her questions.

("What is your name?"

"Why do you come here?"

"Did you know me before?")

Sometimes, he will swear she turns towards him slightly when he does.

But she never sees him, and so he sits there with her until a year has passed and her visits grow less and less.

And one day, he follows her home.

The path is familiar, but he has never walked it before.

(The town is familiar, too, but that is expected. He has been here before, a month and a year ago, for a day. Nobody saw him, and it hurt too much to stay, not that he'll ever admit it.)

He sees the girl go to her home.

And he watches her grow up.

With every passing year, her visits to the lake grow less and less, until one day, when she is twenty years old, they stop.

She is married, and with child, and at first he believes that is why. But then she has her child, and three months afterwards she has still not visited the lake again.

She has moved on, he realizes. She has let go of what was holding her to the lake, what made her cry so often and hard as a child. She was happier than when he first found her all those years ago by the lakes shore, and while that should make him happy, it doesn't.

(It feels as though she has grown out of him, let go of him. And it doesn't make sense, and he doesn't know why it feels this way, but it does.)

So he himself moves on. He has never gone that far from the lake, but now that the girls (woman's, Emma's, his mind reminds him) visits have stopped, he feels free.

He travels.

He sees amazing sights – people of different skin colors (they cannot see him), animals larger than a house (they might see him), plants with more colors than he can imagine.

And he realizes, over time, that he can bring the winter, and control ice and snow and it is amazing.

And then he goes back to his lake.

(Because it is still his lake even after all this time.)

It has been years – decades, even – and he is afraid to go looking for the girl who sat by his lake, the girl who is now no doubt and old woman.

But he does go looking for her.

And he finds her.

Sitting in her home, her husband sitting next to her, with five young children sitting at her feet. She is older, her hair white with age, her skin wrinkled, but he can still see the young girl in her face, and yes, the sadness in her eyes.

But it is buried deep beneath the happiness, and he can tell that in the years he was gone she lived a good- no, great- no, fantastic life.

And he smiles, and he laughs, and he looks over the five children (her grandchildren) sitting at her feet .

And then he says good bye, in his head, to her, and leaves.

(But it is not good bye.)

Because, the next day, she comes down to the lake.

She is old, and he hears her coming long before he sees her, and he sees her long before she makes it to the shore.

But she makes it to the shore, and she sits there, and in that moment Jack can see the little girl he sat by for ten years, the woman he watched live.

(And he whispers to her, "How was your life?"

He does not know if she answers because she heard him or because she was planning on saying it anyway, but she answers.

And he listens to her life, and he sees her laugh, and he sees her cry, and he sits in rapt attention, for somehow this once little girl has become such an important part of his life.

She whispers, as an ending, "I wish you had got to do these things, lived a life. And I miss you, more than you will ever know." It feels like closure to him.

And so, when the little old woman who once was a little young girl and then a beautiful woman closes her eyes for her last moment on earth, he is ready to move on.

But never to forget.)