"Never sing where anyone can hear you," their mother warned them. "It's your father's gift, but he knew how to control it. You may have it in you or you may not, but they won't understand if you do. So don't give them the chance to find out. It will only end in tears."
If only Jack had remembered his mother's words when he rose from the lake.
Jack perched on his staff in the middle of his lake, his voice ringing clear and true in the cold stillness as he sang to himself. It was a soft tune, gentle and simple and comforting, one he'd heard a woman in the village singing. It drove the silence away, for awhile at least.
He heard a branch snap, and looked over to see a pair of children looking directly at him. They could hear him, he realized suddenly with a leap of his heart. They were looking at him!
...or possibly not, their eyes looked a bit glazed. Still, they were coming towards him, reacting to his singing, so they heard him at least!
He kept singing and they kept walking slowly toward him. They came to the edge of his lake and he expected them to stop there to listen. The ice was thin now, after all, except under his perch.
...they were still coming! Up to the edge, and they walked onto the ice, not reacting to the change from solid earth to flimsy ice, not even reacting when it groaned and threatened to give out from under them. Shocked, Jack stopped singing and almost immediately they stopped walking, blinking slowly as they woke.
The ice creaked under their feet and they panicked, scrambling back to the solid ground by the edge of the lake. All three of them, human and spirit, were frozen with fear at how close they had come to a cold, watery grave before the children fled, fleeing the lake for the warm security of the village.
Did...did he do that? How did he…? He had to know, Jack realized, leaping from his staff and into the wind. He had to find out, somehow.
It was him. He'd tried it with a dozen different songs, a dozen different places, and the results were the same – humans that acted as though they could see and hear him, following him blindly or obeying his song.
He curled up on the cliff top, staring at the waves down below sightlessly. This new power...it was iterrifying/i. He wanted to see and be seen, but this...he could have drowned those kids...this was as dangerous as his blizzards!
Or maybe...maybe he could help people with it, too, like those kids he'd seen before who got lost in his blizzards, the ones he'd tried so hard to save but could only at best make more comfortable before they died. Maybe...he could lead them home, or lead help to them, or... mind whirling, he stared down at the water for hours, thinking in silence and wondering why he could do this and what he should do now.
A/N: I come with another music-based fanfiction. This one was, as is usual for my stories, a fill for the kink meme, so some of you may have seen it there. I hope someone here enjoys it.