Jack tries in the beginning. He spends thirty years flitting from one place to the next. His first lesson is distance. How close he can get before a careless motion brushes through him.
They don't hurt, these accidental touches but laughing them off afterward gets harder every time.
There are different towns and different people. There's always something new to see or different games to play.
Not that anyone ever notices.
He tells himself he doesn't mind, that he's having fun, but Jack never does go back to that little village that first taught him how alone he truly is.
Jack at fifty is bad. He is reckless and laughter that's really screaming.
And he just. doesn't. care.
He doesn't care when snowball fights edge the line to vicious. That some children are always left crying, while others ride high and giddy on his magic.
They still walk through him and nothing really matters.
One hundred years alone has made Jack cruel. He likes to set the wind to a screaming rage. He rides the wild stream and laughs when it whips the snow to a freezing, blinding mess.
His new favorite playmates are travelers. He learns how to flicker and flash, shaping ice into something distant and tantalizing that draws the curious into the dark.
Jack sweeps away their footprints after the first few escape back to the fireside. He plays with them, though none of them ever notice. He riles the clouds and encourages the wind to moan through the trees.
Jack likes to lead travelers astray because their curses at his wind and snow make him laugh. He likes it best when they give up, though.
The sight of them still and huddled for warmth against his chill makes him reckless. Humans are so rarely still that he can't help but draw close. Tantalizingly, agonizingly close.
Sometimes he pretends this one or that one will be different, special. Maybe they'll feel his touch or hear his words. They never do though.
So, in the end Jack always leaves them to live or die as fate decides. They're not his problem.
One day, one hundred and sixty years after his birth, Jack crumbles.
He is no longer the self that laughed when he rode the wind nor is he the self whose nips had become something more akin to hard, tearing bites.
The roiling emotions that have been with him since the beginning are quite simply gone. The hollow left behind does not ache. Funny, Jack had thought that when he reached the end of himself it would hurt.
There is nothing left to hurt.
He drifts.
Jack at two hundred is feral. Humans and human things become something lost and long ago.
He rides the wind, fast and far and hasn't touched the ground in years.
Ice follows behind him. He isn't happy or sad or lonely. He just is. He is sleet and snow and howling wind. Jack becomes the only human word he has left.
Jack, Jack, Jack...because Jack is him.
And then there is a girl.
She is young and lost and her crying draws him to her. For the first time in years uncounted Jack lets the wind whip by him.
She is small and bright and suddenly, with a strange fierce tenderness, Jack wants to make her happy. Wants to see and be seen by her.
It's the first want he's had in over thirty years. He's forgotten how consuming such things can be.
He follows her.
He is there when she's found and there as she grows from girl to woman. The modern world is beyond even the most fevered imagination of the past. Sometimes the noise and filth make him yearn for his arctic wastes.
Not that he can ever bring himself to leave.
His frost curls intricate on her window and, though she never sees him, through her he relearns joy.
On April 13, 1968 she dies. She is old and happy and her death comes in sleep. The sight of her there still and shrunken surrounded by huddled, grieving family slices down to the heart of him.
It's too soon.
It was only yesterday, surely, that she was small, bright-eyed and bursting outside on the first snow day of winter. She had only just begun to live.
Jack can feel every day of the nearly three hundred years of his existence pressing down on him.
It's too soon.
He flees.
And if a blizzard follows behind him, he never notices.
For twenty years after he feels brittle.
And yet, as much as he sometimes wants the howling wind and mindless freedom, he never turns his back on humanity.
He seeks distraction and finds it in children. They are small and bright and, even if none of them are her, they are wonderful.
He shapes himself for them. Becomes something light and playful. Snow days and snowball fights.
And if sometimes he misses air cold enough to crack or feels emptiness inside him like fire... well, Jack is getting used to that.