AN: Another chapter that was originally a Tumblr drabble. This one was dedicated to Theobsessor (cassieisnotapie on Tumblr) because she was my very first beta reader.
Original prompt: Chwerthin ~ Laughter (at Jack's expense)
Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians or Alice: Madness Returns.
"Now, am I suppose to carry the two before I divide, or after?"
Jack looked up from the Batman comic he was flipping through and turned his head towards Jamie. The Winter Spirit lounged on top of Jamie's small bed with his bare feet hanging off the side while the recently dubbed teenager sat at his desk doing his homework. The two had been like this for almost an hour and a half now and restlessness prickled uncomfortably beneath the fabric of Jack's blue hoodie.
"How am I supposed to know?" he asked with a huff. "You know I'm terrible at math."
"Come on, Jack," Jamie said with a sigh. "I can't go outside and play with you until I finish my homework. You said you would help me!"
Jack sat up from his lazy position and crisscrossed his long legs. "I thought you needed help with English, not math. Don't you have any English or history homework you could do?"
"Nope, just math. We had a sub in English today and my history teacher doesn't assign homework very often, only review packets for unit tests. Come on, just help me so I can go outside before it gets dark."
"Why don't you use your calculator?" Jack asked, pointing at the small rectangular device next to Jamie's laptop with the crook of his staff. "Doesn't that thing basically give you the answers?"
Jamie reached over and picked up the calculator, turning it this way and that in his hands as he looked down at it with uncertainty. He only had ten more problems to do and it was tempting to just put them into the calculator and be done with them. The only thing that kept him from doing it was that they needed to show their work on each problem and his math teacher always double checked when she graded their papers. If the student didn't show how they came to get the answer they put down, then she would mark it as incorrect.
"But the directions said to not use a calculator," he mumbled, biting his lower lip.
Jack caught a glimpse of Jamie's braces peeking through his top lip and had to stifle a chuckle. The metal rims and rubber bands glued to the young boy's teeth made Jamie look really funny, like he had a mouth full of scrap metal, but Jack didn't dare say that out loud. Though Jamie had long since gotten used to having them by now, the boy had been really self-conscious when he first got them put on last summer. He was the first of his friends to get braces and he refused to smile for weeks afterwards, impressively rejecting all of Jack's attempts at making him laugh.
"Who cares what the directions say!" Jack groaned, throwing his arms up in the air. "Rules were meant to be broken! Have I taught you nothing these past few years? You're like the worst at being thirteen years old."
Jamie gave him an unimpressed look. "Well, I'm sorry that we all can't be as wild and spontaneous as you, Jack. It's not like back in your day when all you had to do was count fifty chickens in a row and you were given a degree in advance mathematics."
"I'll have you know young man, that my family herded sheep, not chickens. And it was a lot harder back then because the math teacher had only seven fingers and it made things very confusing," Jack replied with mock indignation, making Jamie laugh. He smiled at the small victory and leaned back against the bed with his arms folded behind his head. "When's the rebellious phase start for kids in this century? I think I might just hang out at the North Pole and come back when you become interesting again."
Jack was all for kids doing their homework. He had no real qualms about it because even he would acknowledge how important education was in modern times no matter how boring it could be at times, but at what expense? Spring was right around the corner and it would only be a matter of time before the weather put Jack out of commission and he would have to migrate North to colder climates until Spring and Summer had passed.
Jamie gave the calculator one last look before ultimately deciding to do the homework on his own. As he put it aside and picked his pencil back up, Jack rolled his eyes. He supposed on some small level he was secretly proud of the boy for not giving into temptation or peer pressure. He just didn't like waiting. Even immortal spirits had places to be and things to do, responsibilities they needed to maintain and Jack was more than willing to go somewhere else to further ignore said responsibilities if Jamie didn't provide adequate entertainment.
After Jamie went back to his math problems, Jack picked up his discarded comic book and resumed his lounging. It wasn't long afterwards that the sound of tiny feet pounding against hardwood floor echoed just outside the boy's bedroom and the door burst open, making both boys jump.
Two little girls came bounding into Jamie's room, chanting Jack's name in excitement. They were a flurry of color and sparkly fabric, both garbed in their matching fairy princess costumes from Halloween. Their homemade fairy wings made from old stockings and smothered in glitter glue, fluttered behind them as they ran around the room whooping and hollering like an army brigade on the march. Sophie and her best friend, Cassie, ran over to the bed and climbed up the side as fast as their short limbs would allow in a desperate attempt to get to the white-haired spirit on top. Jack laughed as the girls threw their tiny bodies into his lap. They demanded hugs and he complied, never one to deny the ladies anything.
"Hey there, lil' munchkins," Jack said as he wrapped his arms around the hyper blonde and brunette as best he could without bending their flimsy costume wings. "What are you fine ladies up to today?"
"We got a question for you, Jack!" Sophie announced loudly, her voice reaching that shrill note that only little girls could reach and dogs could hear. Abbey was probably going nuts somewhere downstairs.
"Yep, a question!" Cassie echoed.
'Please don't let it be 'Where do babies come from?' again,' Jack prayed, his eyes trailing up towards the ceiling before looking back down at the girls. He barely dodged that bullet last time. "Okay, shoot."
"Is Alice a princess?" They asked simultaneously.
He blinked at them. "A princess? No, she isn't a princess."
Cassie beamed triumphantly and pointed a finger at her friend. "See! I told you she wasn't a princess! She doesn't have a tiara, princesses always wear tiaras."
"But she's pretty like a princess," Sophie fired back. "And she wears a pretty dress, and she lives in a castle. A real life castle! Jack said so! Didn't you, Jack?"
"Uhhh…" came Jack's genius response. "She does, but she's still not a princess."
It was hard to say if it the Red/Blue Kingdom was actually Alice's castle since it originally belonged to the Red Queen, but at the same time the kingdom was part of Wonderland and Alice owned Wonderland which extended to all domains and territories within it. He wasn't quite sure how all that worked yet. Wonderland as a whole was just an ambiguous grey area that boiled down to a lot of complexities that were left to be desired.
"Actually," Jamie spoke up from his desk. "Technically, Alice is a princess. She's the ruler of Wonderland and she isn't married, so at least by fairytale standards, that makes her a real princess."
Sophie keened with glee while Cassie pouted, but it quickly disappeared when she realized that they knew a real life princess. Jack shot a glare at the boy.
"Please, don't encourage them."
"I'm just saying."
"Shut up and do your homework, brace-face."
The two girls bounced on the bed as they chattered rapidly to each other like a couple of Tooth's mini fairies. Jack had to fight to keep his spot on the bed, nearly being tossed off by all the enthusiastic bouncing until he got a good hold on the headboard behind him. They jumped around his legs and more than once stepped on him. It didn't hurt because they didn't weigh all that much, even when combined, but he still curled his legs closer towards his body so they were out of stomping range of the amateur river dance Sophie and Cassie were doing on Jamie's bed. The winter spirit exchanged a glance with the boy across the room and laughed at his sister's hyperactive behavior. Someone in Sophie's kindergarten class must have had a birthday or something and brought cupcakes to school, causing a sugar rush in both girls. Jamie's mom never allowed Sophie to have sweets so early in the afternoon.
Cassie stopped her bed-to-ceiling bouncing long enough to plop down next to Jack with a breathy giggle and asked, "if Alice got married, would that make her a queen?"
Jack leaned back on the headboard and tucked his arms behind his head, pursing his lips in thought before shrugging. "That's usually how it goes, but I doubt that'll ever happen."
"Why not?" Sophie asked, her green eyes wide and cute with her messy blonde hair flying up around her ears as she continued to bounce on the bed. It was only when Jamie told her stop from where he was still working on his homework, that the little girl finally gave the bed springs a break. She flopped down in a manner similar to her friend and crawled her way up the bed until she was seated next to Cassie. It was a tight fit, having all three of them sitting next to each other like they were. The blonde was practically hanging off the side. Jack did his best to scoot over an inch or two to give her a little more space.
"Because guardians don't get married," he shrugged again, honestly not sure if that was true or not. He knew that none of the guardians were currently married, but that wasn't to say that they weren't allowed to, or that there weren't any marriages within the spirit community as a whole. There were potentially dozens of different answers to Sophie's one question because of those implications alone without the further complication of Alice's personality and general unpleasantness adding to it, so he decided to go with the least confusing one. "And there aren't any princes in Wonderland for her to marry."
"Not every princess has to marry a prince," Sophie said matter-of-factly. "That's not what happened in the movie we saw yesterday at Sarah's house."
"Yeah! Princess Buttercup married a pirate!" Cassie added. "Not that ugly, mean prince she was supposed to marry. He turned out to be the bad guy!"
"Okay, okay," Jack surrendered. "Maybe not all princesses marry a prince, but that's not really the point. Alice isn't going to marry anyone."
"Why not?" Sophie asked again.
'Because I seriously doubt there's a man on this planet who could survive being married to Alice Liddell,' Jack thought bitterly, but said out loud: "I don't know. I guess nobody's ever asked her before."
"Oh, that's sad," Sophie mumbled.
Both girls seemed genuinely saddened by the news as their shoulders slumped and Jack could practically feel their excitement deflate through the fabric of his hoodie. The disappointment that followed only lasted a second before Sophie let out a loud gasp, her face lighting up like the sun once again as a proverbial light bulb appeared above her blonde head. She turned to the Winter spirit.
"Jack! I just had a super great idea! Do you wanna hear it?"
"Why not?" he laughed, humoring the bubbly girl. "Go for it."
She clapped her hands and then pointed a finger at him. "You should marry Alice!"
"What?" Jack choked, losing his grip on the headboard and nearly falling off the side of the bed. From across the room, he could hear Jamie laughing his head off. Cassie agreed with Sophie and they both smiled brightly at him. He straightened back up and stared at the girls with a gaping expression on his pale face. "Wha- that's insane! Where did you get an idea like that?"
"You obviously love her!" Cassie gushed. "You're always together and you're the same age!"
Oh yeah, he forgot how little girls and their logic worked. He was a boy, Alice was a girl, they were the same age (kinda), and whenever the girls saw Jack, Alice was usually with him. So in the minds of six-year-olds, they were compatible enough for marriage.
He spent the next hour trying to convince the girls, with no help from Jamie, that he and Alice were nothing like Flynn and Rapunzel, and that they weren't going to get married, ride off into the sunset and have tons of babies. Nor would they rule over Wonderland together as king and queen (if that ended up being the case, he would gladly welcome a revolution if things went South, which they inevitably would because it was Wonderland). He should have figured the argument was doomed from the get-go, though. A pointless endeavor, really. Their version of Alice and Jack's relationship was much more romantic than the truth, and at the end of the day that's all little girls cared about.
Jack decided to let Sophie and Cassie have their fantasy. He only prayed to the Man in the Moon that they would never bring up the conversation again, especially if it was in front of Alice.
AN: Scorpio Respect Points for anyone who can guess what movie the girls were referring to. And no, not the obvious Tangled reference!
Don't forget to review, please!
~Scorpiofreak~