I know this is sort of random (and my first ROTG fanfic), but this was a one-shot that needed to be written down. I had this fairly random image in my head and the plot bunnies pounced. But anyway, enjoys!
Jack was drawing.
Yes, that is the opening to our story: Jack was drawing.
No it may not be the longest or most descriptive opening to a story ever and looks more like something a five-year-old would write - heck, Sophie Bennett could probably write a story with a more interesting opening than that - but it is indeed the opening to our story.
But bottom line is: Jack was drawing.
Now surprisingly, unknown to the rest of the world besides a select few, this was not an uncommon sight. In fact, for North, it was getting increasingly too common once again for his liking, and he was starting to wish Jack would go back to being a claustrophobic, hyperactive mischief-maker that would spontaneously implode if he had to stay inside for more than an hour.
The trouble had started when the white-haired teenager that, according to Bunny at least, "probably weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet" had approached Jamie one evening and announced that - as it was the beginning of June in Burgess - he was bored. Nowhere needed snow and it was kinda hard to start a snow-day when the entire East Coast was experiencing its hottest weather in over a century (apparently it was some sort of revenge from the summer spirits after Jack had 'accidentally' flooded the whole Atlantic seaboard from Maine to South Carolina with more snow than anyone knew what to do with the previous winter - or at least that was what Jamie could distinguish from the full-on rant he received from the rather ticked-off winter spirit at the start of the heat wave) so he was searching for literally anything to relieve his boredom because one thing the Guardian of Fun hated was the inability to have fun. Jamie had calmly explained he was in the middle of studying for his school exams and couldn't play with him - plus the temperature would probably give Jamie heat stroke if he so much as walked out the front door - so in order to help his dear friend he give him a tin of coloured pencils.
It was a decision that North swore - if he was not a guardian of children - he wanted to throttle Jamie for.
With nothing to do until the unbearable heat receded, Jack had headed back to Santoff Claussen and proceeded to test out his new pencils. He'd never really felt the urge to sit down and use a pencil and paper before and was surprised to find it was actually a good way to pass the time. And the Guardians were relieved because it kept Jack out of their hair for a while and allowed them to focus on their daily tasks.
Unfortunately, that was when the bliss ended. Because when Jamie had give Jack a tin of pencils, he'd forgotten to supply him with a rubber. And so Jack - in a bout of pure naïvety - had come to the conclusion once you made the slightest mistake on a piece of paper, that piece of paper was henceforth ruined.
Rainforests, I feel for you.
So by about early-July, North had noticed his paper supply was dropping and this lead to several problems with toy production. What problems were irrelevant - the only important matter was that Christmas was quite possibly under threat and Jack was the apparent cause of it. So North had decided Jack's paper-wasting spree had to come to an end. But, rather than have to face the most likely furious teen if he was denied something he enjoyed, North decided to intervene in a way that would mean Jack would (hopefully) not suspect him. So when Jack's coloured pencils mysteriously disappeared and were replaced with a pack of Crayola crayons, the winter spirit was disappointed and maybe a little upset but not suspicious.
Two weeks later, another tenth of the Amazon rainforest was in the Pole's recycle bin.
With North gritting his teeth and unable to receive faxes from suppliers, Jack's Crayola crayons also mysteriously vanished and were replaced by huge chunky chalks that primary-school kids use to write on plastic blackboard-easels to announce: 'Welcome to my lemonade stand!' and only came in five different colours.
Another week later, a whole batch of new sketch books made by the yetis chose to conveniently vanish too - but not to the same place as Jack's various drawing articles.
With North now tearing his hair out from beneath his Russian hat, Jack's kindergarten chalks grew legs and walked somewhere far, far away. But this time, there was no replacement drawing tools for the spirit of winter who spent the next eight days searching for his chalks before going into a slight depression.
Another fortnight later, Christmas production was declared officially three days behind schedule.
With North now tearing out his beard too, the Guardian of Wonder went to visit some of his fellow Guardians. When encouraged to talk, Tooth admitted that 'maybe' she'd given Jack a box of artist's drawing pencils if he allowed her to examine his 'beautiful' teeth fully. Just maybe.
North quickly came to the conclusion Jack had sunk to a whole new level of desperation. Either that or he was in a particularly generous mood that day, but North wanted to bet it was the first option. So the Russian resigned himself to the fact Jack Frost would not be deterred and he could only hope the boy would find another hobby soon before production came to complete grinding halt.
Fortunately, he did only about a month after the incident. Unfortunately, it was really not that much better.
North had always known Jack was a very smart kid. Which is why he regretted ever showing him his ice-sculptured railway track, which was now complete with a small town in the centre and a castle. Jack had been amazed by the architecture and had decided after that day sculpting was going to be his new boredom-reliever (as it appeared the spirits of summer were not willing to lower the temperature to a bearable level at any point during the holidays).
And it wasn't as if North could stop him from creating ice, now could he?
After blitzing through North's rather extensive library and examining North's railway track like he was planning on dissecting it or something, Jack had begun work on some small projects of his own: models of castles, villages and the occasional animal he saw around Burgess forest. By September, he had created a play-set town made completely out of ice and complete with little figures and interiors for the elves to play with - which quickly made Jack their number-one favourite person. Unfortunately, someone had left the heating on overnight and the whole thing had melted by the morning, leaving a rather large pool of water on the carpet. And while this might've ticked off the elves a bit, it didn't discourage Jack in his effort to be as successful as Michelangelo.
No, instead North had nearly had a heart attack when he woke up one morning and peered out of his window to find Jack outside, making a full-scale ice model of Colditz. With the general shape and exterior complete and ready to be hollowed out for an interior, the ice model had looked so frighteningly real that North had raced outside in his pjyamas - complete with reindeer slippers on his feet - and encouraged Jack to stop work on the project at least until winter as the castle would 'soon melt in the heat of summer'. Thankfully Jack had been at work for over 24 hours and was too tired to argue or even to notice it was almost Halloween and not summer, so he'd disbanded his freakishly accurate Colditz model and gone back to bed - and unknowingly reminded North to keep a closer eye on the kid from now on.
Though North actually did hit his head off of his work desk when that winter Jack had decided Colditz just wasn't exciting enough and instead had moved on to recreating the Golden Gate Bridge. With no reasonable argument against it, North had just had to sit and watch as, in less than a week, Jack had made a fully-functional suspension bridge made completely out of ice over the gorge outside Santoff Claussen. But indeed it was so useful for the yeti delivery men that came and went that it remained in place even after the winter had ended - even if Jack had to strengthen it now and again when temperatures peaked.
So when North found Jack drawing up plans to recreate what looked like Disneyland Castle the following May, he wasn't sure whether to be impressed or wince and wonder if Jack was trying to get the workshop discovered by anyone who spotted his works of art. Because believe you me - they're very hard to miss.
North couldn't help but think Jack really had too much spare time on his hands these days.
"New project?" he inquired.
"Sorta" Jack didn't look up from the paper, curled up in a blue-painted wooden chair so his sketch was only inches away from his face. Yeah, because that wasn't going to make him go cross-eyed or anything. "Tooth asked if I could make a sculpture of her castle for her. I just need to work out how thick the ice has to be to stop it from melting for a few weeks until have time to go back and restore it."
Yup, way too much free time.
"It not...to scale, no?" North inquired, now rather worried.
"Oh, no" Jack answered, still not looking up from the sketches and equations on the paper, spinning a black pencil idly between his fingers. "Just a small one."
Inwardly, North breathed a sigh of relief. "I don't suppose Bunny asked for anything, did he?"
Jack snorted, rolling his icy eyes. "Are you kidding me? Like that overgrown kangaroo would ask me for anything! I wanna bet he was the one who stole all those pencils and chalks in the first place! Jamie nearly threw a fit when I couldn't return his pencils!"
North swallowed nervously and made a mental reminder to warn Bunny that Jack may think he had a reason to exert revenge on him so to not take any future attempted-beating-ups too personally.
"Vell...I leave you to it" North decided, about to leave the room that Jack had claimed as his own in Santoff Claussen. That was until Jack snapped his head up and asked:
"Why am I always a bad guy?"
North frowned and turned around to look at him again. "Vhat?"
Jack had uncurled himself, his bare feet on the floor now, and turned in his seat to look at North. "In books. And movies. Why am I always the bad guy?"
"Dah!" North grimaced. He had been hoping to avoid having this conversation, but he supposed it was inevitable at some point.
"I mean, these books - these Rainbow Magic ones" Jack explained further "There's, like, a hundred of them and they all have me as the bad guy. Except for some reason I'm an old guy who commands an army of useless goblins and seeks to destroy all the faires." At the strange look North gave him upon speaking the words 'Rainbow Magic', he sighed and almost groaned. "Jamie was teaching me to read. He took some books from Sophie's room."
"I see" North merely nodded. He'd been around Jack long enough to know he wasn't done talking yet and if he said more than that the winter spirit would feel like he was cutting him off.
"And then I checked out some movies, and it was no better!" Jack was under full steam now - his familiar frustrated and angry look plastered on his face "I mean, one time I was a snowman! A dead snowman at that! And then that one where I was trying to steal your snow-globe that travelled back in time! and then turned the North Pole into an amusement park! And of course I love the idea I'm always some old geezer! No wonder the kids didn't believe in me! I wouldn't either! I wouldn't what something like that to be real!"
"Vee hav all suffered at de hands of fiction, Jack" North informed him "You should've seen de movie about Bunny. Tooth's vas no better. And then there vas me."
Jack wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, I know. You're always so soft! What are they trying to make you out to be?! A teddy bear?!" Then he frowned. "So why are there no movies about Sandy?"
"Eh? Oh, he eez de lucky one" was North's answer - quite simply because he didn't know the answer to the question either. But Sandy was lucky in that respect. No way for him to be mocked.
"Uh-huh" Jack nodded, turning back around in his seat so his back was to North at the door again. Then he added in a mumble so North couldn't hear: "No wonder Pitch thought I would be a good ally if the humans perceive me that way."
Awkwardly to say the least, North shuffled towards the door some more. "...I leave you to carry on, Jack."
Jack gave a very absentminded nod and North took that as a cue to leave. Which he did, before Jack found anymore things to discuss that the boy deemed frustrating.
The door closing noisily behind North, Jack returned to his paper, his eyes scanning over the sketchy drawing and messily-written equations that before made sense - before he was interrupted that was. Now he was starting to realised what Jamie meant about his handwriting.
Gritting his teeth with frustration, he muttered: "Get it together Jack. I can totally make sense of this. Of course I can."
Half-an-hour later and with no success on decoding what once make perfect sense, Jack finally blew up his frustration by freezing a couple of elves who in reality had only come to innocently bring him some cookies. So in the end Jamie never got his pencils back, Jack had to redo all of his previous workings for that project and North found himself finding some fiction portrayals of Jack frighteningly accurate as he tried to thaw out the most recently iced elves courtesy of Mr Frost himself.
Well, at least the summer spirits got their revenge. So someone's happy.