s
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The wind is cold and quiet company but Jack does enough talking for the both of them. It might whistle through his bones and know every one of his thrumming, drumming heartbeats like an old friend, but still he spins it the tall tales that it must have heard innumerable times; he sings to it, talks to it, and laughs when it whips and rustles the villagers, like he's in on a joke. But whenever he reaches out, lifts his palm to a heavy breeze, the illusion that it's someone breathing against him doesn't hold, and he finds that even if he's a child of the wind and storm and even if they know him so well, his parents are strangers to him. Their whispers always rock him to sleep but the hum is different each night that he manages to remember, and he doesn't want to think that maybe his first wind left him a long time ago.
x
When he takes his first deep breath, cold white plumes form and whip off the winter hats of children down below. He's immediately incensed and excited when he discovers that he can billow skirt hems with a snap of his fingers and kick mounds of autumn leaves into spire-high spirals that swirl up to the stars by clapping his hands together. Jack glides through a marketplace and advertisement papers trail him through the streets, and people stop and stare and point and when he rips his hands through the air, the merchandise slides off the vendor shelves, lifted by powder white flurries and scatter with sharp clangs. Patterned tarps tear away from their posts and flutter over the crowd with a simple wave of his pallid hand.
The wind and ice intermingling with every shift of his fingers become his greatest escape, his fresh drink of freedom, his last fleeting connection to the people that are blind to him (everybody). Until one night he stands on a frost-laced rooftop and cries with such pathetic desperation, in futile hopes that someone will tell him to knock it off, that the air flees him and storms the village instead.
He's too afraid to cry at the funerals they hold in the sunburnt morning.
