Jack had known Rapunzel for three years, seven months, and twenty-two days. Not that he was counting.
And since he had the pleasure of knowing her for such an extended period of time, he also knew that, for him, she had six different smiles.
The first kind of smile that she had was a coy, interested-but-wary sort of smile, the smile he saw on that fateful day in the bookstore. He saw glimmers of that smile responding to his sly smirks and cheeky flirtations. It would dart out from her pink lips and wide green eyes, transforming her face from innocent and unaware to maybe-I-like-you-maybe-I-don't. Her first smile only came out in full force, though, when he brazenly asked for her number... and she boldly gave it to him, her voice only squeaking slightly. She tucked her hair behind her ears and peered up at him. Jack liked the first smile.
The second kind of smile was a hesitant, polite smile, one that Jack hoped to never see again. It was a smile of regret, showing how much she wished she hadn't left the house to go on her first date with this clown who wasn't worth her time. Jack saw this smile, really just a disguised grimace, and felt so wrong. It squeezed his lungs and warned him that the owner of the smile was not the sort to be won over with forwardness and crude jokes.
The third kind of smile was much better. It crept over rosy cheeks and was the prettiest smile that Jack had ever seen. (He hadn't seen anything yet from this vernal girl.) When he pulled Rapunzel from the movie that was only halfway over—he just wanted to make snide comments about it to prove something anyway—the second, sickly smile started to transition. It became a small version of the third smile when he took her hand gently and led her off the dirty streets into the pathway of a park. When she saw the lake and the ducks and the variegated flowers clustered round benches, her face suddenly bloomed into the sweetness that was the third.
The fourth smile was a smile of reaction. Rapunzel began to like the silliness and sarcasm of Jack Frost, no matter how she protested otherwise. His bad, cheeky jokes that made her roll her eyes didn't take long to make her face crack into the fourth smile, her eyelids half-lowered and her lips tugging at the edges. Amused, comically skeptical, whatever she wanted to call it—it was a smile of adoration behind the mask of a single raised eyebrow. The fourth smile came often, for Jack liked to joke often.
The fifth smile was a smile of sheer and unadulterated excitement. She smiled with all her guards down. It was occasionally fraught with terror, like the time when Jack convinced Rapunzel to ride a roller coaster with him; then, it was an indication of the twisting and turning of her stomach, even while they were still standing in line. That was only one form of the fifth smile, though. It was also a smile of pure bliss, when she stepped off the roller coaster still dizzy with adrenalin and pulled Jack by his hoodie to her for a kiss. Her first kiss. He could feel the fifth smile melting into his own.
The sixth kind of smile was an everyday smile, but Jack didn't like it any worse for its commonness. In fact, it was his favorite smile of all six. It was the faint smell of flowers from her shampoo. It could be small, a smile peeking around the corner of her book, or it could be large, occupying her whole face as she gave him his birthday present. Sometimes she blushed. Sometimes she laughed. However it appeared on her face, in any form at all, it made Jack feel as though he would take on the world for this girl. He could leap to the roof and crow his love to the world, though usually he settled for pressing his lips to hers.
Jack had known Rapunzel for three years, seven months, and twenty-two days. Not that he was counting.
He had had the honor and joy of knowing her for so long, and he fancied that he knew the six smiles she gave him.
However, he didn't know about the seventh.
It was only once, for a fleeting moment, that Jack saw her smile the seventh smile. It was heavy with fear, her eyes wide and lips pushed up with nervous expression. The seventh was very different from the other smiles. It was a smile across a frozen pond in the dead of winter, a smile accompanied by a gasp that couldn't quite cover the cracking and creaking beneath their skate-clad feet. It was a wobbly smile fighting the frigid air in their lungs and the painful throbs of their hearts. It was different from the smile she had worn when she had asked where the ducks had gone and if Jack thought the flowers round the benches would bloom again come spring. It was a darker smile than that one.
It was her trust in him overpowering the fear, visible in that smile, that made Jack pick up the stick, hook it around Rapunzel's waist, and sling her away from the thin part of the ice.
The seventh smile was the last smile he saw before the darkness and the cold.
He knew her for exactly three years, seven months, and twenty two days.