I feel nothing but the touch of the coldest winter, both inside and out.
My name is Jack Frost.
Nothing burns like the cold.
Winter came with its usual abrupt fury. Swirls of snow and ice danced their way through the wind, leaving everything with a sprinkling of white dust. The winter Guardian drifted his way through the skies, as light and ethereal as the flakes surrounding him. He allowed his body to plummet suddenly, face turned to the silvery glow of the moon, before catching himself on a gust of wind moments before he hit the ground. A humourless laugh escaped from between his blue lips before his mouth broke into a grin. It had become a game of his to go through the freefall; to drop from the sky with such sudden force it would surely kill him, from heights not even the most insane could imagine. He always stopped just before the fatal impact. Just in time to keep himself intact.
The sprite propelled himself into the branches of a nearby tree, leaning into the trunk, bare branches barely keeping him hidden from any wandering below on the ground. He stared up into the dark and starless sky, drunk on the exhilarating feeling of adrenaline coursing through his veins.
He never liked being alone. No. That wasn't it.
He never liked dwelling on his loneliness.
Briefly the sprite contemplated going to one of his new friends to talk, but none would be free to do so, and he still felt uncomfortable discussing the more personal things with them. North was busy with his season almost upon them. Tooth and Sandy, of course, worked every night. And the rabbit was busy preparing for Easter, despite it still being months off - he refused to have another mishap like the one last year.
Talk wasn't the word to be used, anyway. The conversation would be so much more than a talk - to tell them this, to tell them how even after becoming a Guardian, the melancholy still persisted, weighing him down and tearing at his heart. There was no word for that kind of conversation, that deep and meaningful talk of heartfelt pain.
And so the crushing feeling of loneliness descended onto him with all the finesse of a falling house brick. Blinking slowly, he pushed up the sleeves covering his arms and inspected his wrists. The skin had once been flawless, pale as the snow and smooth as the surface of a frozen lake. Now his pale flesh was marred by angry scarlet lines crisscrossing over each other in varied stages of healing. Some were deep, some barely scratched the surface, but each hurt the same. He didn't know when it had begun. He just knew that, at some point, the constant cold reminder he was alone had become too much - and pain was equal only to the frost in the way it stung.
Not wanting to continue down this road of dark thought without point, he bounced from the branches of the tree back to the sky, splattering snow down the neck of a disgruntled homeless man wandering the streets as it neared dawn. He left his staff nestled in the branches of the tree, intending to return to it later. He soared upwards, wind tossing the peppery hair from his face. The flight was almost as exhilarating as the fall, the freedom of rushing to the endless infinity of the sky, the stray thought that if you flew high enough you could reach out and pluck the stars from velvet darkness. Cold air bit his face as he surged ever higher, but he didn't care. The sound of his laughter was lost in the wind.
He hung in the air, suspended somewhere above the clouds, his gaze staring at the white mass of snow beneath him. The sprite turned suddenly, leaning backwards into nothingness, staring up at the gradually lightening sky above. His sleeves rolled back to expose his abused arms again but he felt apathetic towards the red skin and so ignored it. It was just him, and the wind, and the cold, and the neverending sky, in which the moon smiled down upon him, though it was fading along with the darkness. He closed his eyes and spread his arms wide. A deep breath, a heartbeat, and he was falling.
The Guardian's smile only widened as he fell faster than ever before, from higher than he'd ever thought to fall. Air whipped past him, harshly burning against the cuts and scars, but the pain was almost euphorically good. It lasted seconds, if not less, but quickly he felt the fall coming to its end. He pulled a gust of air from around him to cushion his body as he stopped.
His eyes snapped open as he realised, a moment too late, he hadn't stopped fast enough. His fragile body made impact with the unyielding snow with a thunderous crack.
Pain jolted through him and seemed to burn and fizz inside his bones. He gulped in a mouthful of cold air, tears stinging in his eyes, and coughed. The pain spread through his chest. He lay there, perfectly still, in silent agony for what felt like an eternity. In reality it had only been seconds - even less than the time it took to dive and smack into the ground. Darkness seemed to ebb at the corner of his eyes and mind. With a shuddering breath, he gave in to it, and was pulled into unconsciousness.
His chest rose and fell slowly. Each breath had the rattle of one's last; a small amount of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. Bruises blossomed over his neck and arms, creeping onto his face, the fast forming indicators of serious injury. He wheezed, finding it harder to suck in oxygen as his body became gradually weaker. Several cuts opened and dribbled tiny marks of red onto the crisp snow.
The sun rose over the body of the winter sprite. As the light hit, his chest stilled; with one last rattling exhalation, he was gone.
White skin mottled purple shone under the bright light. Red tracks inched their way down the arms, matched only by the red dripping from his mouth. A plethora of blue veins was visible under the nearly translucent skin of his eyelids, hidden only by the dusting of white flakes falling from the sky. Though not visible, the bones inside the dainty body were run through with a spiderweb of cracks.
The body of Jack Frost lay dead and cold under the light of the sun.