Jack doesn't come back for years and years. He thinks about visiting her sometimes – a lot, actually– but he never follows through with it. Not until he's flying aimlessly around one night, the full moon shining brightly and lighting the way for him, and he finds himself in her open window.

Upon landing, he steps inside the room before recognizing it. He's about to leave, fly away, when a frying pan comes whizzing at him out of nowhere. He lets out a startled yelp and just barely manages to duck, feeling it graze through his hair.

And so, he does the first thing that he can think of – he grabs the wrist of his attacker. It's thin, and when whoever it is lets out an indignant screech, Jack can tell that it's a girl.

"Let go of me!" she shrieks. Suddenly, she's nose-to-nose with him, and Jack can see angry, huge, olive-green eyes.

He lets go. She seems surprised, but she stumbles away, reaching for the frying pan that has fallen to the ground. Jack doesn't think about it when he freezes the pan to the floor with a harsh, "Don't even think about it, Princess."

Rapunzel looks up again, not quite scared but not completely calm, either. "What are you doing here?"

Something clicks in Jack's mind. "You can still see me."

It comes out more as a statement than a question. Rapunzel looks at him strangely. From the glow of the moonlight, Jack can see Pascal cowered on her shoulder, peeking out at him through her hair.

"You're…" she trails off as she stares at him, and Jack can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu as her voice lowers to almost a whisper. "...Jack Frost."

"And you're Rapunzel," Jack replies, leaning slightly on his cane, surveying her. She's grown. A lot. Momentarily, he's shocked, not quite sure what to say. His voice is lost in his throat for a few moments, but then he recovers enough to smoothly say, "How old are you now, fifteen?"

She doesn't look fifteen – she looks quite a bit older than that. Not much, though. If Jack had to guess, he'd say she's around eighteen now. She bristles at that, and Jack can't help but smirk because hey, pissing people off is what he does best and enjoys most. "I'm seventeen."

He was mentally one year off. "I was close," Jack argues.

She doesn't seem to care about how close he was or not. Now, her head's tilted to the side, and she's looking at him curiously. "You don't look different at all."

Jack tries to do the math in his head. She couldn't have been very old when he visited her the first time. Maybe four, or five – which means it's been twelve or thirteen years since he's seen her last. And therefore, he should look like he's thirty or so.

But he doesn't. He still looks eighteen. Just like he has for the past three hundred or so years.

"That's what happens when you're Jack Frost, Princess," Jack makes his way around her, looking around at her walls. There are more paintings now, and they're far nicer than the kid-drawings that he'd seen before. "When you're a legend, you don't grow older."

"You didn't come back," she finally finds something to murmur, and Jack hears the hurt in her voice. He winces at the tone in her voice, so he focuses his attention to something – anything – else, even more so than he had been doing before. He notices how the moon catches light onto the little dots of yellow on the walls, making it seem as if they're glowing, somehow.

"Actually, I did," he points out. "I'm here now."

"You know what I mean, Jack."

"I didn't break any promises." And it's true, because he really did never say whether or not he would return. "Did I say that I would come back?"

Rapunzel fumbles over her words a little. "Well, no, but –"

"Don't try to make me feel guilty about it, then," he snaps, ignoring as Pascal glares at him and makes a threatening gesture with his hands – claws? Paws? Well, whatever those things are called. "And get your lizard to stop looking at me like that."

Rapunzel places her hand over Pascal protectively. "He's a chameleon."

"Chameleon, lizard, skink, gecko – they're all the same thing." Jack smirks as he sees Pascal stiffen on Rapunzel's shoulder. "I was gonna guess frog."

Rapunzel narrows her eyes, and she subconsciously tosses her hair behind her shoulder, which draws Jack's attention. He follows the trail over her shoulder, seeing as it wraps around the room, winds into the shafts above their heads, and comes back down – several times. And she can still move.

"What the hell," Jack nearly whispers, and before he knew it, he was at her side, running a hand through a tiny portion of her hair. She slaps his hand, and he draws away, mouth agape in shock.

"What?" she snaps.

"What do you mean, what?" he repeats back to her, tugging on her hair lightly – not so much that she'll actually feel pain, but enough that she'll definitely be able to feel it. "Your hair."

He's kind of sputtering, stammering, stumbling over his words, and as embarrassing as it is, he can't bring himself to care because holy shit that is A LOT of hair.

"Oh," Rapunzel – wait, is she blushing? – says, suddenly softening quite a bit. Then some sort of realization seems to dawn upon her, and she steps away from him. "So that's why you're here, then?"

It's Jack's turn to be dumbfounded. "Huh?"

"My hair," she says in a scarily accurate impression of his voice. "You want my hair. Is that it? Is that why you've finally showed up again?"

He almost laughs. "Why in the world would I want your hair?"

Rapunzel blinks. "Why wouldn't you?"

"You're flattering yourself, Princess," Jack shakes his head, using his focus to create a mini-snowstorm in the palm of his hand.

"I am not-"

"I don't care about your hair," he cuts her off before she can get too out of hand. "I mean, yeah, it's pretty, and it's freakishly long, but I have no use for it. It's just…hair."

Apparently, it's not just hair, and Rapunzel gets really, really angry when you say something like that. Before long, she's spouting shit about magical healing powers and singing and Jack has half a mind to freeze her in an ice cube in order to shut her up.

"You're not making any sense," he says when she's calmed down for the most part. He half expects that to set her off again, but it doesn't. Instead, she sort of deflates, right into a puddle on her floor.

"Why are you here?" she asks, nearly whispers, and Jack pauses for a moment, wondering why the fight's suddenly drained out of her.

"I don't know," he says honestly. He even braves a step forwards, taking comfort in the fact that she doesn't shrink away. She doesn't say anything for a long, long time, and so, he takes it upon himself to break the deafening silence. "I didn't think you'd still be here."

She sighs as Pascal crawls down to her knee. "It's not like I have a choice."

"Yeah, you do." Jack argues. Rapunzel tilts her face back up to him, brushes her hair out of her eyes, and Jack is momentarily stunned by how pretty she's gotten. "You always have a choice."

That childish look of complete and utter belief flits across her face and Jack knows that she hasn't changed much from the awestruck four-year-old he met so long ago.

"Rapunzel," he continues, sitting in front of her. "What exactly is it that you want?"

She stops for a moment, blinking at him in what looks like confusion. "I don't want to stay here."

She looks up at him hopefully, and he gets the hint. "Wait, do you want me to take you?"

"Well," she murmurs, looking down at Pascal, who's shaking his head adamantly. "It's my birthday in a week. And I want to see the floating lights."

Jack smiles a little, because it reminds him a little about how obsessed she was with them before. "I'll take you."

She brightens up. "You will?"

"Do you trust me?"

Her face falls. "No, I don't."

It's a valid point, because he hasn't done anything to do anything to earn her trust. "Alright, Princess. Tell you what. I'll come back and I'll take you to go see those lights of yours."

The thought makes a small, beautiful smile appear on her face. He knows he has to keep this promise.

And he does. A couple of days before her birthday, he comes back, all smiles and ready to take her on an adventure of a lifetime. Only, he doesn't. He can't, since she's already gone.

He sees the sparkle of something underneath the floorboards. It takes him a while, but he manages to open it. And there's a tiara there, hidden in a satchel.

There's a part of him that thinks he might want to take it. It might be valuable. Ultimately, though, he puts it back and flies away.


Authoress's Note: You guys asked for another chapter, so hopefully this meets your expectations?

Reviews would be much appreciated.