So…this chapter was pretty hard. It's really tough to make extended scenes of introspection and internal monologue engaging in text, even if it's describing events that'll be important to the overall story. But I think finally got it, so…yeah.
Next chapter might finally come out faster, since I'm pretty much done with school for the semester, but don't hold me to that. I'll try, but no promises.
Chapter Two: Golden Dreams
The North wind greeted Jack as an old friend and, from that moment, the night became a blur of indulgence, exhilaration, and bliss. He whooped. He dove. He laughed and danced among the clouds, working them into flurries that scattered snow across four time zones. A sudden cold snap seized the continent, bringing with it mild storms and a bare inch of snow.
Jack wanted more. He wanted ponds made solid for skating, inch-thick drifts in every yard, ice sculptures and snowball fights, the welcoming creak of a frozen river. But he had to hold back. Those were the rules.
Still, he had his fun, swiping an abandoned sled and dusting the northern towns with frost. His hours of freedom flew by much too fast. Finally, he came down off the high of his own excitement and found himself back in Burgess.
Burgess meant something to Jack, though he wasn't entirely sure what. It wasn't home. He had a home. But, eventually, Burgess always drew him back. Maybe it was the lake, tucked away in its woods, the site of his earliest memory. Maybe it was the town, grown from the first village he'd ever seen and absolutely beautiful when covered with snow. Maybe it was the people, the generations of children he'd watched grow up time and time again. Jack didn't know. He doubted that he ever would.
By the time he arrived, it was dark and late and cold. His appearance made it colder, scattering the streets with frost and icing puddles in the gutters. A light snow started up soon after, adding a few more flakes to the meager layer that covered the quiet roofs.
Jack drifted through the town, listening to the silence of his falling snow and trying not to feel alone. Through the windows of the Realm – which tended to borrow their views at random from places outside – he'd often seen the streets busting with people at the height of the day, children running around with their friends while parents went to work and cars rumbled through the roads. But he'd never actually been there, in the crowd. Pitch would never allow it.
Instead, the only streets he knew were these empty ones, silenced by the snow, without a soul to be found. He let the wind fade a moment, listening to his own footsteps. His frost reflected the orange glow of the streetlamps, so the entire town seemed to shimmer in the night.
Jack shivered. Not from the cold. He was never cold. He called the wind again, scattering the newly-fallen snow in his flight to rooftops and windowsills, peering in to see how the city's children had changed in the months since his last visit. As always, they were all in bed and fast asleep, giving him time to examine each of their faces in detail, committing them to memory. He liked to think that they enjoyed his snow – he always found remnants of their games come nighttime, so it seemed a decent guess – and imagining them with their sleds and their snowball fights made the waiting easier.
His last stop on the usual circuit around town was the Bennett house. His favorite. It wasn't just that Sophie was adorable or that Jamie was a boundless believer in all things magic and wonderful. Jack knew this family. He'd watched their mom grow up here, winter to winter, and their grandfather as well. They'd been around as long as or longer than any family in town. With so much changing in the months or years between his visits, that consistency was like a lifeline, keeping him grounded in time.
Jack swung from windowsill to windowsill, peering into the Bennett children's rooms. Sophie brought a smile to his face – gosh, but she'd gotten so big – which only grew wider when he alighted on Jaime's sill and saw just how many new posters he'd managed to fill the room with since his last visit. He had aliens and yetis – not just "Big-Foot," but actual yetis, like the kind Santa kept around for all his grunt work! – and statues of fairies and dragons and superheroes and all sorts of wonderful things.
This was the other reason Jack loved the Bennett house best of all. During the dark months, when he could get out earlier and stay around later, he would come straight here just so he listen to the stories Jaime told his little sister before they went to bed. They didn't make as much sense as the ones mothers told their children, they tended to ramble on and include plot-points from nowhere, and Jack loved them. He loved the way Sophie's face lit up with each new twist; loved how excited Jaime got, bouncing on his bed; loved how sled-rides turned to flights of fancy and snowball fights into wars for survival.
He'd half-hoped that he might catch one of those stories tonight, but it was much too late. Jaime was already fast asleep. Jack sat in the window, his hand braced against the glass, painting frost on the window as an excuse to spend just a little more time watching over him. Perhaps, he lingered a little too long – the ice gave a tremendous crack under his hand, like a tree branch snapping, that startled Jaime awake.
Jack recoiled, cursing under his breath. But Jaime didn't look to the window, so the frost spirit breathed a sigh of relief. No running. He wouldn't be caught. He wouldn't be seen.
Jaime propped himself up on one elbow, fluffed his pillow, and plopped back down with his arms buried under his head. He muttered something unintelligible and was asleep again in seconds, never noticing the little speck of white that tumbled from under the cushion as he resettled.
The little white thing – a tooth – dropped unceremoniously off the bed and onto the hardwood floor, bouncing twice before coming to a rest on the rug. Jack stared at it, curiosity swelling in his chest. He'd never actually seen a child's tooth up close before, though he knew Pitch to be fascinated by them. If he turned his head, he thought he caught sight of something gold sparking deep within the enamel. What could it be?
Without thinking, Jack pushed open the (surprisingly unlocked) window and slipped silently into the room, crouching so he wouldn't cast a shadow over the sleeping boy. His fingers curled around the tooth, bringing it into his palms and into the light.
The glow he'd seen before was gone, leaving a tiny nub of enamel like a hailstone that would never melt. Jack turned it over in his hands, careful that it never left his palms, searching for the secret. Tooth Fairy treasured these little pieces, he knew that much. Pitch also thought them worth collecting; his Fearlings often gathered the ones that had been lost by careless children or thrown out by non-believers. Jack thought it had something to do with memories, but he'd never been entirely sure.
He wanted it, he wanted to know. He glanced between the nub in his hand and Jaime, whose breathing had returned to the soft sighs of deep sleep. Silent as a snowflake, Jack approached the bed, drawing a pair of ice-cold quarters from the pocket of his hood. He'd found them on the sidewalk two cities over, thought he might scrounge up enough for one of those sugary machine-drinks that made his toes tingle. This was a better trade. He clicked them together, tarnishing the metal with frost, and slipped them under Jaime's pillow. The tooth took their place with him.
At the window, dawned on him: he'd given Jaime a gift. Sure, it was just some coins for a tooth and sure, he'd attribute it to the Tooth Fairy before any connection got made to Jack. But still. Still. He'd given a present. Everything that present brought, the happiness, the joy – that came from him. From Jack Frost.
Jack hesitated on the sill, his staff braced against the floor. Guilt plucked at his heartstrings. Pitch always said that gifts spoiled children. He called it a form of lying, promising that the world would be grateful if only they were good when that couldn't be further from the truth. That was the Guardians' way.
But, Jack reasoned, if you thought about it, it wasn't really a gift. It was a trade, and a fair deal. A tooth for two coins, no different than if he'd used them in a machine. And besides, now he could give the tooth to Pitch, to add to his collection.
The rational banished Jack's guilt, allowing excitement to flood into its place. He leapt from the windowsill into the arms of the wind and rode it high into the air, until the entire precious city of Burgess unfolded beneath him. He summoned the clouds and stirred them up inside, changing the flurries to an all-out storm that blanketed the city and its forest in beautiful white.
When Jack floated down again, it was on the outskirts of a newly-covered winter wonderland. His head spun, giddy with exhaustion, the good kind that comes from a job well done. Perhaps it was still too early in the year. He'd used up a bit too much energy. He needed a rest.
He picked out a tree on the edge of town and settled into his branches, keeping an eye on the horizon and an ear on the clock tower in the city square. He had only a few hours until dawn and so much more he wanted to do, but he could take a moment, just to relax and enjoy his city of ice and snow. Just a few minutes, to catch his second wind. Then he would move on.
That's what he believed as he stretched out on the branch. But by the time the bell chimed the four o'clock hour, Jack Frost was asleep.
At a quarter to five, the Sandman arrived in Burgess.
The little town wasn't always the last on his list. He liked to rotate through the time zones, bringing different dreams to different children at different times each night, and he wasn't always on-site to administer them. But tonight, Burgess's turn was up for his last in-person stop in the region, and so he settled on his golden cloud and spread the dreams on the glistening streams.
He had not been expecting the snow. It was only mid-October, and already the town was covered in several inches of the stuff, reflecting the light of his dreams. Sandman had always liked snow, where it wasn't a danger. It kept the world so quiet. So he crafted dreams of ice-giants and snowball wars, of figure-skating competitions and dancing with snowflakes, and scattered them to the children to prepare for their surprise.
That's when he got his second surprise for the evening. Inexplicably, one of his streams arched towards the woods on the edge of town, beyond the houses where no child should have slept. Was there someone alone out there, cold and lost among the trees? The guardian in Sandman bristled with concern, and he floated off to investigate.
What he found was a teenage boy, lounging in a tree, fast asleep. At first, Sandman thought he might have been a runaway, what with his too-big clothes and bare feet, a gray hood masking him from view. He might have been lost to the darkness if it hadn't been for the sand. But then Sandman caught a glimpse of the boy's hair, far too white to belong to such a young man, and drew close enough that he could feel the aura of cold that radiated from the sleeping form. And then there was the odd staff he carried, the shepherd's crook caught in the crook of his right arm, its antique wood coated with the same frost that collected on his shoulders and sleeves.
The boy, Sandman realized, was like him: an immortal, a legend, a myth. A winter sprite, perhaps, though one with considerably more substance than the flickering beings he'd seen before. And Sandman was quite certain that he hadn't seen the boy before.
But he was here now, child-like enough to draw in the dreams, and clearly in need of a good one. Sandman, not know what the boy would favor, crafted a bit of sand into the raw potential of imagination and sent it merrily into the boy's mind, lingering nearby to see what it created.
The boy stirred only slightly as the dream took hold, shifting the staff closer to his body like a security blanket or teddy bear. Sandy leaned in eagerly to see what he created. Spirits' dreams were fascinating things and wonderful inspiration for those he sent to children. He watched the sand condense into a laughing figure flying on the wind, soon joined by another, and another. They were children, playing with the wind.
But the dream had barely taken form before it began to change. It started with the heart of the flying boy, black sand crawling from its chest like a living creature, consuming the golden dream-sand and swallowing the little dream-figure from the inside out.
Horrified, the Sandman tried to stop it, throwing in more sand, more imagination and dreams, but it too was only consumed. Soon the entire beautiful, oh-so-brief dream had been devoured, leaving nothing but a raging beast of black sand with eyes that blazed like flame.
Sandman recoiled, hands cupped over his mouth. He'd never seen his dreams change, not like this. This, this was twisted and evil, an infection that ate away at the core of goodness that powered his sand. The teen squirmed, clutching the staff as though it could protect him, biting his lip to muffle cries of fear. Still tethered to his mind, the dark creature snarled at Sandman, puffs of black sand bursting from his nose.
The Sandman lunged, ducked under the beast's hoof, and shook the sleeper with all his might. With a gasp, the boy-spirit woke, his hood falling back to reveal the full head of frost-white hair. The beast that preyed on him shrieked and, freed from its bonds, galloped off into the night. Sandman tried to give chase, but the monster was too fast, vanishing into the shadows.
Sandman huffed in frustration before turning back to the boy-spirit, his hands lingering on the frosted arm, assuring the other that he was not alone.
The teen clutched his staff up as though expecting a fight, his eyes darting wildly until they finally landed on the glowing golden hands. He followed the arms up to Sandman's face, yelped, yanked away, and fell out of his tree. He hooked the staff on a lower branch and flung himself away from the tree-trunk, his heels sliding into a pile of snow and fallen leaves. He held his staff at the ready, shoulders hunched, toes curled, back to the wall of trees like a cornered animal, as though he were Sandman's prey.
Baffled by this reaction, Sandman bobbed to the ground like a soap bubble, floating on a cloud of gold several feet from the startled teen. He waved to the boy, offering his friendliest smile. When the other spirit didn't immediately flee, Sandy held up a hand in an 'okay' sign and tilted his head, a question mark flickering in the air.
The boy narrowed his ice-blue eyes, brows furling in confusion. "I…what? You don't talk?"
Sandman shook his head, making note of how the boy's grip trembled on his staff. He made the signs again, his expression twisting in concern.
This time, the boy understood. "I, uh. Yeah," he said, lowering the staff ever so slightly. "I'm fine. I'm not…I'm fine."
He did not relax, but his arms went a bit slack, lowering the staff from its defensive bar. Sandman took that as permission to drift a few feet closer. He pointed to himself and smiled again, forming two images in rapid succession: first a pile of sand, then a humanoid form.
"I know who you are," said the boy, taking a slight step back. "You're the Sandman. Right?"
Sandman nodded. Then, he pointed to the boy and another question mark appeared over his head.
"You want my name?" The boy hesitated, tightening the grip on his staff. His eyes darted around them and, for a moment, Sandy was afraid he'd take off like a frightened rabbit. He didn't calm, exactly, but he did mutter, "It's um. It's Jack. Jack Frost."
Jack Frost. Sandman committed the name to memory, bobbing further into the air on the flush of excitement he always got when meeting new immortals. Their world was already so large and so empty that every new life that appeared brought ripples of excitement, whether they be good or bad.
He kept his distance so Jack would feel more comfortable and began asking questions, flashing through his symbols at a leisurely pace so the boy could keep up. Jack frowned, puzzling over the views of snowflakes, icicles, and the Burgess town hall.
"Did I do that?" he translated, correctly. When Sandman nodded, he sighed. "Yeah, I did. It's what I do. See?"
He let the end of his staff drop. It bounced off the hard ground and sprayed a nearby bush with frost. Sandy clapped his hands and rolled with silent laughter, kicking his feet in delight. A boy who made snow! The children would love that.
At first, Jack Frost seemed surprised by the attention his talent earned. When it registered that he wasn't being mocked, that he had earned genuine praise, his features softened and warmed. A brief smile, bright as dawn's light on fresh snow, crawled across his face.
An instantly later, it was gone. He bristled again, grasped his staff in both hands, and turned his back on Sandman quick as he could."Look," he said, "no offense, but I really shouldn't be here. I should have left hours ago and, and I need to…I need to go."
He kicked off the ground, riding a burst of wind into the air. Sandy, exclamation points dancing over his head, flew after him. He caught the frost-teen's arm before he could get too far, pulling him back down to the roof of a nearby shop.
Jack groaned, trying and failing to shake the hand off his arm. "What? What do you want?"
Sandy pulled him down for a better view and tried to explain what had happened. He showed the boy in his tree, his sleeping face, his dancing dreams. When they changed, he had to morph the monster into something even fiercer than before, to make up for his lack of black sand. He held the beast out to Jack, imploring him without words, before letting the monster dissolve through his hands as he waited for an answer.
Jack groaned, ruffling a hand through his white hair. "What, you tried to give me dreams, is that it? That's real nice of you, Mister Sandman, but it doesn't work for me. Okay? I don't dream."
Sandman gave a start, a cloud of sand flying off him in all directions. Didn't dream? Didn't dream? He'd never heard of such a horrid thing. Without dreams, what was there to comfort the boy in long nights? Where were the flights of fancy, the long-awaited rests, the wonder?
The shock must have registered in his entire being, because Jack laughed, though his tone held little humor. "Relax, little man, it's not the big a deal. Lots of people don't dream. Right?" He didn't sound entirely certain about that. His eyes trailed again to the hand holding onto his sleeve and he seemed to hesitate a moment before shaking it off. "Are we done here?"
Sandman shook his head, tugging at the boy's sleeve. He flashed more symbols – a house, a guiding star, a question mark, the moon – but it seemed that Jack Frost had lost interest in what the stranger had to say. He pulled his arm roughly out of Sandman's grasp and broke away, yanking the hood back over his hair.
"We're done. No more. I have to go. Just forget you ever saw me."
Sandman waved his arms in protest, grasping again for the boy's arm. Jack whirled around, his staff flying. The high curve of its crook stopped a hair's breadth from Sandy's throat, bringing the golden man up short.
"I'm warning you," he said. "Don't follow me. If you do, it…it won't be good. So just don't, okay?"
Sandy raised his hands in surrender and nodded his understanding. Jack retreated a few steps without turning around, then spun on his heel and leapt off the rooftop. Sandy raced to the edge, only to watch as the boy caught the wind and flew off into the night, vanishing like a silver star.
The Sandman stood alone, thoughtfully rubbing his chin. Such a strange boy, this Jack Frost, but what truly worried him was the thing born from his dream. Where had it come from? What was its purpose? Where had it gone?
There was no time to wonder now. There was a schedule to keep, time zones to visit, children to gift with dreams. There was work to be done and no time to worry over oddities now. So Sandy filed the memory away for another time and took to his route, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach that told him something had begun this night. Something he would come to regret.