Hello again!
Seven reviews in less than a day?! I've never had such instantaneous gratification on the first chapter of a story before! I feel so loved!
By some miracle of nature, I am updating the next day, which has NEVER happened. Usually, it takes me a few weeks to update, but I was so ecstatic by all of your reviews, I just had to. See, reviews have a powerful effect.
FanFicCriTicTheThird- I'm going to call you FFC3 from here on out, should you so review again. Congratulations, you were my first reviewer! This story hadn't been up for more than ten minutes, when I had emails popping up on my phone from your activity. Thanks!
TigerLilly1995- I am so glad I was able to captivate your attention, even before I have established the plot!
luna corabella and MoonGirl1155- Thanks so much!
Fluffythorne- I already texted you, so your questions were answered.
KikaKatTIOI- You guys ought to know who she is. If not, go to her profile and read her story, Before Jack Frost. It is creative and rather well thought out. I hope you see this, Kika! *cheesey hypnotic voice* Follow me and love me…
Lokirka- I'm glad you liked my OC(whom is basically me, with a different name and hair color. Are you sure we aren't long lost sisters?), I am trying very hard for her to not come across as a Mary Sue(which is why I based her off of myself, so we have the same abilities and flaws, because I'm not perfect, so she won't be, either), but that's always hard to establish in the first chapter. ONEREPUBLIC FOREVER!(Actually, Imagine Dragons is my favorite band, but OneRepublic is a VERY close second)
Willow started as the door to the coffee shop chimed, the glass swinging open to reveal the morning's first customer. A few flakes of the gently falling snow drifted through the door before it closed.
She smiled vaguely in recognition of the person whom had walked through the door. "Hey, Mia. What can I get you this morning?"
Her regular returned the smile. "Oh, just a cup of hot chocolate, but can you use that Spanish vanilla in it again? It made all the difference in the world for flavor."
"Sure thing." Willow's hands moved swiftly as she made the drink, her fingers grabbing the components automatically, following the motions of a thousand repetitions. Companionable silence hung in the shop, neither wanting to disturb, or minding, the quiet. The scent of coffee heavily perfumed the air, its hearty aroma bringing warmth with a single sniff.
Crossing to a scant-used cabinet, Willow removed a small, unmarked bottle, dripping a few drops of the deep brown liquid into the cup before snapping the plastic lid onto the Styrofoam rim. She picked up the cup, warmth seeping into her hand for a few moments, before handing the cup to Mia.
Taking a sip of the liquid, Mia sighed. "Thanks, Willow." She handed the girl a ten, but when she went to get change, Mia waved her off. "No, that's alright, sweetie, keep the change."
Willow paused. A seven-fifty tip? The hot chocolate may have been good, but not that good. "No, Mia, it's fine, I-"
"Nonsense! You haven't gotten my order wrong since you started working here when you were fifteen, and now, you'll be eighteen soon. I find that to have gone a little underappreciated from you. You're so quiet and, some days, you look like you didn't get a wink of sleep, but you never perform any less. Take it, dear, you deserve it." With that, Mia left the coffee shop, leaving Willow with the leftover money in her hands.
She stared at it for a few minutes, almost just putting it in cash register anyway, but at the last moment, she reconsidered and slipped it into her bag. Why not? The things Mia said were true, some days, well, most days, she did feel underappreciated. Enduring endless crap from her mother, having no friends and… no, it wouldn't hurt anyone. Someone was trying to do something nice for her, for a change. Why not enjoy it?
She stood behind the counter, still not having moved, still staring at the door, wondering if, maybe just maybe, she really did have a friend who cared about her.
(*)
"You can go now, Willow. See you tomorrow!" the owner with the ever-ironic name of Joe, called to her from the back of the shop.
"Thanks, Joe, see you later." she stepped out from behind the counter, shrugging into her thick jacket and pulling up the hood, before shouldering her bag and heading outside.
The icy wind danced through her hair, teasing the ends of her mahogany locks against her cheeks. The snow was falling down a bit more heavily that before, just enough to turn her cheeks and nose rosy after only a few minutes, but not enough to make her fingers numb, though they were currently buried in the jacket's deep pockets.
She didn't need to be home for another few hours, so she started off towards the forest again, hoping to finish her drawing.
She wasn't far from the tree line, when, what felt like, an entire drift of snow was unceremoniously dumped onto her head, though she nowhere near any trees and wasn't standing underneath anything. Grumbling, she shook the snow from her hooded head and dusted off her clothing. Whipping around, she glared at the white haired boy floating behind her, his shoulders shaking with laughter.
His laughter cut off when a large quantity of snow entered his mouth from the snowball that was thrown into his face. He brushed the ice from his eyes to see Willow striding into the forest, her pace just as long and even as before.
"Hey!" he flew to catch up. "I was only joking, Willow." he said, and her pace fractionally slowed.
"I know. It was a great joke. My favorite part is where you almost choked on your own snow." Sarcasm dripped from her tone like syrup, but it was teasing, though she never stopped walking. Jack landed in front of her to get her to stop.
"The pond is a good ten minutes into the woods, even with as fast as you walk. You wanna lift?" he asked, no longer teasing. He held out an alabaster hand. "I promise I won't go as fast as before."
Willow looked at his hand, and, for a moment, considered taking it, but just shook her head and continued walking.
"Suit yourself." Jack teased as he floated lazily beside her.
"Pardon me for not wanting to be pulled through the air at an unholy pace for someone whom has never even been on a airplane before, let alone be flown by a flying Winter Spirit." The retort rolled off of her tongue almost immediately, sarcasm still heavy in her tone.
"Yeah, sorry about that. I was trying to get you home, I didn't want you to get into more trouble. You didn't, did you?" curiosity hinted in his voice.
"No, the Universe was merciful enough to let my mother be asleep, so my only concern was not going into cardiac arrest from the heart attack you damn near gave me. Of which, I don't want to experience again." There was an edge to her tone that said she was ending the discussion, but Jack was not so easily swayed.
"Come on, please? I said I would be more careful! I won't let you fall, I promise, just give me one chance!" he landed in front of her, eyes pleading as he held out his hand again. "Just one chance."
Willow gave his hand a long look, before closing her eyes and exhaling out her nose.
"One chance, you'd better not screw this up, Frost." She took his icy hand, and he pulled her close, wrapping one arm around her waist as she locked her arms around his neck.
"Ready?" he asked, a playful twinkle in his ice blue eyes.
"Don't try anything crazy or stupid, and I might forgive you for this." she hissed, but, truthfully, she was a bit eager. When she wasn't rocketing across the sky against her will, it actually sounded rather exhilarating to fly.
Her heart leapt when Jack took off into the sky, though he didn't go much higher than the trees. They started moving forward, not too fast, but fast enough for the wind to pull back her hood and send her, already tangled, hair billowing in the wind.
Jack felt the initial tension in her arms ease up as they soared above the forest, her eyes wide with wonder as the trees whipped by beneath them. He glanced at her to see a smile slowly working its way across her face as she watched the bare trees blur together.
When they arrived at the pond, Willow was almost disappointed that their flight was over. It was even more thrilling that she hoped it would be.
Setting her down gently in the freshly fallen snow, Jack released his grip from around her waist and she removed her arms from around his neck.
"So, am I forgiven?" Jack asked, a mock-puppy expression plastered across his face.
She turned to him and smirked, but she couldn't hide the euphoria painted onto her delicate features. "I suppose you are, just this once."
Jack grinned and she began brushing the snow from the rock she had been sitting on the day before. As she sat down on it and began digging through her bag, Jack noticed a flash of silver from beneath her wild mess of hair. A medium sized crystal hung on a short, silver chain around her neck.
The pendant vanished from his line of vision when she leaned back against the tree, propping the sketchbook against her legs so all he could see were her black and purple converse. He drifted onto the branch above her head, perching there so he could watch her draw.
She had finished out most of the pond's finer details the day before, and was now concentrating on shading the scene in a way that kept the snow looking white, but gave it depth, as well. She was making steady progress, until she came to an area where the sun shone against the snow, and kept dabbing at the area with a kneaded eraser in frustration.
Finally, she flipped the book closed and slid off of the boulder.
"What's wrong?" Jack asked, curious why he had let the drawing get the better of her.
"I don't know. I've never been able to shade snow all that well. Every time I get to an area where there is sun on it, I can't get it right. I tried just not shading it and leaving it white, but it looks weird and has too much contrast on the page, but no matter how lightly I shade it, it never looks like it has the sun on it, just another patch of snow."
She shuffled around the snow for a moment, before hopping onto the frozen surface of the pond. Jack jumped forward in alarm, fully expecting her to fall through immediately, but the ice only emitted a dull thud as her Converse' rubber soled landed on its top.
She skidded a moment, before regaining her footing. After a minute of unsteady wobbling, she managed to push herself around a bit, moving like she was wearing rollerblades. Nothing fancy, but at least she didn't fall. Jack watched her, unable to move. His sister was at the forefront of his mind though she and Willow had no resemblance whatsoever, but seeing the girl on the pond gave him a sickening sense of déjà vu.
She glanced over at Jack to see him watching her with an expression somewhere between horror and terror.
"What's wrong?" she asked, her question mirroring Jack's previous one.
"It makes me a little nervous to see you on the ice like that. What if it broke?" The nervous edge to his voice wasn't simply over concern for her safety, though that was a large chunk of it.
"Relax, I do this all the time, and it hasn't broken yet." she brushed off his warning, confident the ice would hold.
"That's what I thought, too, three hundred and twenty four years ago." he said under his breath. "Still, you never know. I would feel better if you came back onto solid ground."
"This is solid! It's been frozen for weeks!" she stomped her foot firmly on its surface several times, Jack flinching with each thud of her foot, to prove her point.
"Willow, please! Just get off the ice! I don't need a heart attack, either." he pleaded.
Grumbling, Willow made her way to the edge of the pond, the tension in Jack's shoulders slackening when she stepped onto the ground, unscathed.
"Happy now? One would think that you, of all people, would be least object to me skating on a pond I've skated on for years. If you can call pushing yourself around on boots and Converse skating." she remarked, a bite of venom in her tone, but a small part of her found it nice that he, even as a Winter Spirit, cared about her well-being.
"Yes, well, as both the Guardian of Fun and a Winter Spirit, I've seen more people fall through, what should be indestructible, ice, more times that I would care to admit." he said, though that wasn't entirely true. The only person he'd ever known to fall through the ice was himself, but it wasn't something he would ever wish on anyone. "Accidents happen."
"Okay, fine, no more ice! But if you're so worried about the ice breaking, couldn't you just freeze it over more?" she asked.
"Yes, probably, but that still won't guarantee that it will hold." Something had changed in the tone of Jack's voice. Though she wasn't quite sure what it meant, Willow backed off her tirade.
Instead, she scooped up her bag and began scaling the tree again. Her movements were swift and efficient as she climbed, her hands and feet finding the exact same places they had the day before. She had climbed the tree so many times before, she knew exactly where to grab and step to get her to the top the fastest.
She settled into a branch near the one she had sat on the day before, but this one had a snapped off stub right by her shoulder where she hung her bag. Obviously, this wasn't the first time she had sat up here, either.
Jack landed on a branch almost at her opposite, like they had been before, as she pulled her sketchbook and a pencil back out of her bag. Flipping to a blank page, she began roughly sketching out the scene in front of her. Though he didn't know it, she was drawing the landscape with Jack sitting in the branch as the focus of the piece.
He sat there for a few minutes, one leg dangling off of the branch, the other bent on the branch with his arm draped over it, gazing at the snowy forest. The only thing he would hear was the wind gently rustling the snow and the methodical scratching of a pencil of paper.
Finally, he glanced over to see Willow carefully pulling the drawing from her sketchbook, tearing down the perforated line as cleanly as she could.
"What did you draw?" he asked? She smiled coyly as she slipped the page into her bag, giving him a you'll see look.
Before he could ask, she began her swinging decent down the tree, her shoes hitting the snow on the ground with a soft crunch as she swung six feet to the ground.
"C'mon, let me see!" he said, drifting down to the ground.
"Nope, not yet."
"Well, will you at least tell me what you were talking about yesterday? You said I wasn't the first person that you could see that no one else cold. Who else have you seen? You also said you came here to get away from… someone, but you never said who. Can I ask what you meant about those things?" he leaned against his staff, as he talked, her expression immediately becoming guarded as soon as he asked his first question, and the second one didn't lighten it up any.
"Um, they aren't things I really like to bring up. I hadn't meant to say that, though I'm rather surprised you caught it." she mumbled, starting off through the forest again, though at a more reasonable speed.
Her eyes stayed locked straight ahead, unwavering stubborn-ness lacing her gaze.
Seeing her expression, Jack said, "You're not going to say anything, are you. At least not for a very long time."
"Nope."
Still drifting alongside her, Jack glanced into the sky to see the sun chasing the horizon.
"Will you at least let me take you home? You'll be there in under five minutes, verses thirty in the cold."
"I'll be cold either way, especially with the wind in my face." Her eyes never left the trees in front of her.
"True, but you'll be out of the cold faster and home faster if I fly you."
"Well, yay for me." she murmured.
"You'll be late again if I don't."
Willow slowed to a stop and sighed again. "Fine. However, if you try anything stupid, I will make you regret it in ways that you would have never thought a human girl could achieve." Her words were cold enough they made Jack want to shiver. Worse, he believed her.
Her arms locked around his neck once more and his arm tightened around her slender waist as he leapt into the dusk sky, moving into the low clouds.
He watched her once more as her eyes took in the rushing city lights beneath them, though they were too high up to be seen this late in the day.
Her jacket fluttered in the chilly wind, allowing occasional glimpse at her Angels&Airwaves T-shirt.
He set her down gently in the snow of her backyard behind the cover of the enormous oaks.
"Thanks, Jack. Maybe my mother won't be quite so pissed if I am actually home on time." She slipped her arms from his neck, but the note of dread in her voice made it clear she didn't want to be there.
Jack watched as her shoes quietly crunched through the snow, until the back door clicked softly behind her. After a few minutes, he turned to leave, but hadn't gotten higher than the trees when he heard yelling inside the house.
Alarmed, he begins circling her house I search of its source, until he saw Willow and, presumably, her mother arguing in that he assumed was Willow's room.
"I don't give a shit where you were or what time you got here! I didn't tell you that you could go anywhere!" her mother shouted, though her words were slurred.
"I don't see why it matters! I was only at the park for a little while after I left work!" Willow's protests were not anywhere near the level of her mother's banshee screams, but her hands shook violently from the anger she was trying so desperately to control.
"You don't need to be wasting your life at that damn park, you should be here, taking care of the person who raised you." her mother sneered.
Willow anger snapped. "I AM NOT THE ONE WHO LIVES MY LIFE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE NEXT BOTTLE, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SAY I'M THE ONE WASTING THEIR LIFE! I WILL NOT CATER YOU AND YOU DO NOT TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" her words hung in the air for a split second, her mother's face the epitome of lividity.
Jack's grip almost snapped his staff in two when her mother backhanded her across the face with every ounce of strength she could muster in her drunken state.
Willow's head jerked sharply to the side under the force of the impact and the hit the floor with a low thud.
"That'll teach you to back mouth your mother, you ungrateful little bitch." Her mother staggered from her room, grabbing the whiskey bottle Jack had not noticed before and clutching it in her fist. Willow flinched when the door rattled from the force it was slammed with. Jack saw her sit up, though still hunched against the wall, but now her cheek was visible. Though she had only been struck moments ago, her check was already mottled purple and black, except for the red gash across it that slowly seeped blood.
Upon seeing her check, he gritted his teeth so hard, Tooth would never forgive him, and flew to her window. He tapped on it gently and, after a moment, Willow looked over with a dull glance, the previous sparkle in her green-gray eyes long gone. She shifted a moment, before rising to her feet and unlocking the window. He breezed into the room without a sound, at least until he started talking, though only Willow would hear him.
"What was that?!" he cried angrily.
"That was my mother. Don't worry about it, I'm fine." her low voice was a dull as her eyes, tears beginning to form.
"Does she do that all the time? Willow, that woman is beating you! Do you have any idea how wrong that is? Report her!" Jack's ranting was met with another few minute of silence, before she finally answered. For the first time, he understood what she escaped from at the pond.
"Yes, I know, but if I report her, I'll end up in foster care and I don't want that. I would rather endure this for three more months than be stuck as another State Ward. After I'm eighteen, I can leave this hellhole." her blank mask wavered when her tears flowed into the gash, salt stinging the raw flesh.
"At least let me clean up you face. It's going to get infected if I don't and, honestly, I don't think you care enough right now to do it yourself. Do you have a first-aid kit in here?" he asked as two rivulets of blood began to run down from the cut. She pointed to the top-left drawer of her battered desk, the only drawer that wasn't secured with a combination padlock. He opened the drawer to see the only thing in it was a good-sized first-aid kit.
He carried the cracked plastic box to her bed where Willow was now seated. He opened the box to find it partially full of various Band-Aids, wraps, gauze and cleaning ointments. The box seemed to have a little bit of everything, which was both good and bad. Good, because Jack had what he needed, but bad by the sad fact that she would need to have these kinds of things in her room.
Pulling out an alcohol pad, he began to clean the blood from her cheek, which was beginning to swell, but the pad quickly became saturated with the crimson liquid. Removing another, he began to clean the actual gash, yet she never even flinched when the burning chemicals touched the ragged wound.
She sat quietly as Jack cleaned the cut on her face. When he went to smooth the bandage across her face, a small sigh of relief escaped her lips.
"What's wrong, did I hurt you?" he asked, jerking his hand back.
"No, actually your hand felt kind of nice, because it's so cold." she whispered. Jack reached up again and stroked her face oh-so-carefully with his thumb. Willow closed her eyes and leaned into his hand, its cold numbing the pain.
He stayed with her through most of the night, until she was nearly delirious, from lack of sleep. Jack slipped out her window, promising he would return and keep an eye on her.
"Sandy!" he called out into the inky night. Not thirty seconds later, the little golden Guardian descended on a shimmering stingray.
"Can you take care of this one? She's had a… rough day." Jack's hand clenched on his staff again as Sandy peered into the window. His eyes widened at the sight of her cheek, images of a fist connecting with her face swirling above his head.
"Yeah, to put it mildly." he murmured.
He watched as Sandy sent a stream of dreamsand into her room, more than Jack had ever seen him place on one person at once. Nodding in satisfaction, he saluted to Jack and disappeared into the night sky.
Jack watched as the overload of dreamsand swirled to life above her head, mostly of scenic landscapes she had no doubt drawn, but also ones of Jack in the tree at the pond and Jack flying her over the forest. Quite a bit of her flying, actually.
Jack smiled just a bit, knowing she could escape in her dreams, too.
Ugh, that was a long chapter. Don't get used to it, because now I feel like I have carpal-tunnel. I also PROBABLY won't update this fast again, but miracles happen. Occasionally.
I always wanted to fly. I would have accepted the offer, too, Willow. When I was little(and sometimes now, even), I wished I was dragons-like wings on my back so I could fly. (I have a drawing floating around my room somewhere. Maybe I'll re-do it and post it on my DA so you guys know what I mean.)
Yes, if you do your math, 324 is correct. Since this is eight years after Pitch, and I have Jack aged at 17(as well as Willow, though anyone who was paying attention would know that), that would place him at 324 years old, also assuming that the Pitch thing occurred exactly three hundred years after Jack became a Winter Spirit, which is unlikely, but I think it's less confusing that way. Plus, everybody else uses that, too.
Also, regarding her clothes, if you ever decide you don't believe me, email me at silvergoddess666(it's a gmail, it won't let me post the rest. check my beta profile if you have to.) , and I will send you a picture of them, with me holding up a sign that says "I am Luminesrya, not a Mary Sue" that covers my face. As I'm sure you can tell, I've never done that before, or anything.
