There had been a girl. That much Jack Frost was sure of. He knew she had been part of his life somehow. But he didn't know exactly what.
Musing about his life while sitting on the top of a steeple in a blizzard was most definitely not exactly where Jack had originally envisioned himself in three hundred years. In fact, Jack hadn't really envisioned himself much of anywhere at first—just eternally existing, an integral and invisible part of this world. Now, the fact was that he was a Guardian, like it or not.
Honestly, he had almost grown to like his isolation. At least then no one bothered him. But it was much, much harder looking after children if they could see you and chase you, especially if you had a habit of zooming up vertical surfaces and dodging traffic on crowded highways. More than once, Jack had been sure he would get his Guardian license (if there was such a thing) revoked for murder—but his young charges usually performed their antics without any serious injuries.
Bringing himself back to the steeple and the blizzard, Jack swung his legs slightly as he tried to remember. The teeth had brought back his past, sure, but the only memory that shone absolutely clear in his mind was the one that had led to his becoming who he was now. Every other detail was maddeningly hazy; Jack had sworn to himself that he would remember at whatever the cost—as long as it didn't put the other Guardians or any children at stake.
He had led a good life as Jack Oswald, from what he could gather. Uneventful, and at times extremely tedious, but good. Jack Frost had spent so long yearning for a family of his own, or indeed any human to realize he was there, that he had forgotten that his past life initially did not want a younger sibling. His mother's voice still rang in his ears:
"Clara. We'll call her Clara."
"But, Mother, I don't want a little sister."
"Well, Jack, she's here now. You'd best get used to her."
Smiling vaguely to himself, Jack Frost leapt to his feet and focused on balancing on the very tip of the steeple—a feat he had perfected centuries ago, and was now as easy to him as walking on water. His sister had taken up most of his past life, it seemed, but there was a girl. A girl he wasn't related to. Buried deep somewhere in his mind, the girl waited just around the corner, laughing warmly and asking him teasingly to come inside, out of the freezing weather.
The only thing he remembered was the way her golden hair curled to her chest, and the sparkle of green eyes in the cold sunlight of winter. He had seen her the morning before the fateful day he had taken Clara to the frozen lake to skate, but what she was to him still eluded him. The mystery itched at his mind like fleas in his memory.
Bored with the steeple, Jack fell freely towards the street and landed lightly as you please in fresh-fallen snow. Cold weather never bothered him, after all. Even as Jack Oswald, it seemed that winter had been his favorite season, or maybe it was only because of the bright smile of the girl he didn't remember.
Why did she make him feel so warm? Each time he tried to recall her face, only two green eyes sparkling with mirth would greet him, and—if he tried very hard—some freckles would pop into existence beneath them. Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, Jack willed himself to summon the memory forward, but only the inside of his eyelids remained visible.
Opening his eyes again, frustrated, Jack took note of where he stood. Only a few miles away lay the village in which he had begun, and—since he made a yearly pilgrimage anyway—he might as well go now, in the same dead of winter from which he had originally sprung.
"Come on, Jack, won't you come inside? It's cold!"
"No, Meredith, you come outside. It's fun!"
Meredith. Her name had been Meredith. Jack stared at the first house on the first street in the village he once called home, a map of roads unfolding in his brain. There was the blacksmith's; there was the bookshop, which he seemed to remember visiting often; and here was Meredith's house.
Eyes flicking up to the window, a smile automatically spread across Jack's face as more events fluttered into his head like lost butterflies. There she was, standing at the window, beaming down at him into the night before blowing out the candles and going to sleep. Her father, the mayor, didn't like the way she looked at him. Frowning, Jack recalled that he had prevented her from seeing him… but what was 'seeing'? Who exactly was this girl, and what did she mean to someone like him?
He had seen her after he had become Jack Frost, too. An image flickered into his mind of the cemetery by the lake: he had visited there his first week on earth, ignored by all. After a few days, it had occurred to him that perhaps he might be a ghost: the graveyard seemed like a sensible place to go.
It was on that night that he met Meredith again, though who she was he could not have known. He marveled at how familiar she seemed, yet the memory drifted just out of reach, undetectable; her green eyes were red with crying, her golden hair unkempt. But at that point, Jack had been too different to remember…
She was beautiful.
An unusually warm tear dropped to Jack's hand, startling him: he had visited the village every year afterward, and simply because Meredith had been the first to act as though he might exist—turning her head when he spoke, searching with her eyes the places where he stood—he had come to her house. She seemed flat for the first years, depressed, but eventually regained her vivacity, and Jack remembered standing outside the window, smiling at her.
Years passed, and then decades. Meredith moved houses, married, and had five children; Jack made it snow whenever they asked. And one year, when her children were grown, and some of her children's children, Jack could not find her. He searched everywhere for her, the only bright spot in a dark life, but to no avail. Eventually, it occurred to him to check the place he had first seen her.
There was a new grave, he noticed, next to the one he had sat upon as she cried before it. And on it was printed the words Meredith Gardenier.
Jack Frost buried his face in his hands. Something was missing. Something important. Walking instead of flying might help, he thought agitatedly. Absently, Jack wandered towards the place he seemed to remember living. Now, there was no house, but it still felt like home; sitting in the center of what used to be his bed, a scene burst into Jack's head.
He had been walking home after a night out, visiting his favorite place in the woods in honor of his sixteenth birthday, when Meredith had suddenly been beside him. Jack shivered as he remembered the warmth of her hand slipping into his, and the warmth that rose into his cheeks as without a word she gently halted his movement, and the warmth of her lips as she brought them up to his.
A rush of ecstatic sorrow and raw instinct seized Jack, and he inhaled sharply, closing his eyes as he let his breath out again slowly. That was what Meredith meant to him, and what he had forgotten. All these centuries, decade after decade after decade, Jack Frost had never remembered what it was to feel warm. The cold never bothered him, but he had never stopped to think of heat as anything but an annoyance. Now, he remembered with a stab of bitter happiness the ways you could be warm… as long as you weren't Jack Frost.
Eyes fluttering open again, he thought of fur blankets shared with a sister by the fireside, and hugs from a mother before being tucked in, and running in the snow laughingly with good friends. But an equally hot blush might have graced his pale cheeks as he remembered (or, perhaps more accurately, cared) for the first time how the children he looked after came to be, and how pleasantly warm it would feel to lie pressed against someone else.
Loneliness was a necessary part of being a Guardian. That much Jack Frost was sure of. He knew there had to be a good reason he couldn't find the kind of satisfaction that danced in his memory. But he didn't know exactly why.
((First Rise of the Guardians fic! I decided Jack Frost was stuck at sixteen because he looks it, and also because he's been called seventeen and fourteen and sixteen is somewhere in the middle. Also, it's my favorite/lucky number.
I just thought it would be interesting to note what would happen if he realized that he could never have any kind of romance, since no known person his age can see him. But that means having a revelation like this one about what 'romance' is in the first place.))