Okay, this chapter's short, and the first half is kind of weird and slightly awkward (I think so, at least, idk), but the second half is where the REAL Jelsa starts! *happy dance*

OH! And guess what? JACK CAME AND VISITED MY AREA! I'm out of school today because there is SNOOOOOOW OUTSIDE! :D *even happier dance* And it's rare that we get snow in my area, because I live in Texas, so this is kind of a big deal for me, so THANK YOU, JACK, I LOVE YOU EVEN MORE THAN I ALREADY DID FOR THIS! (My dog says thanks, too, this is the first time she's experienced snow, and she loves it so far, so yeah, lol)


On the other side of the portal, Jack landed on Olaf, who landed on Sven, who was on top of Kristoff, who had fallen on Anna, and beneath her, on her stomach at the bottom of the pile, was Elsa. "Guys," she said, "unless you want to end up frozen solid, I would suggest that you get off of me in the next sixty seconds." Jack let out a yelp and leapt into the air, quickly followed by everyone else, allowing Elsa to get to her feet and push her hair back from her eyes. "Thank you," she said, then frowned when she noticed that Jack was missing. She looked around for a moment, then saw him on a railing high up, perched on the balls of his feet with his staff in both hands and one elbow resting on his knee. When he realized she was watching him, he flashed a lopsided grin, and she couldn't help but smile back.

"Woah," Anna said, "Elsa, have you seen this thing?"
"That's the Globe of Belief," Jack told her from his perch. "Each one of those lights shows the location of a child who believes, and as long as those lights stay on, my friends and I will be around to keep all those little lights safe. To...well...guard them. After all, we're not called the Guardians for nothing. And—"

He cut off suddenly, his eyes fixating on a spot over the top of the Globe as his smile faded. Elsa was the first to turn around to see what he was looking at, but whatever it was, it was gone before she or any of the others could see it. It seemed to have shaken him pretty bad, though, because the very next thing he did was leap from his perch and fly to one of the higher levels of the Workshop. "Sandy, North! Guys, we've got a problem! Possibly two, I'm not totally sure yet!"

"He's flying," Kristoff said bluntly, his jaw on the floor and eyes popping out of their sockets. "How is he flying?"
"Oh, it's just something he does," Elsa said, "you'll get used to it. I'd be more worried about the giant rabbit, actually."
Anna and Kristoff looked at each other, then at Elsa. "What giant rabbit?" they asked simultaneously. Elsa pointed a finger upwards. "That giant rabbit," she said, but before either her sister or Kristoff could see what she was pointing at, Jack had returned to his perch and Bunny was nose-to-nose with Anna, making the redhead gasp in surprise and draw back slightly. "Princess Anna who loves Easter," he said. "If you're not a Believer, I'm a kangaroo."

"You are a kangaroo, kangaroo," Jack said snarkily, and Bunny shot a glare in his direction. "Anna," he said to the princess, "meet my friend E. Aster Bunnymund, a.k.a. the Easter Bunny. Hey, lookit that, he likes you! Wow, that's rare! Last time he liked someone this much, it was Sophie Bennett, which was, like, four years ago."

"Ooooooh, ankle-biter, that was so cute!" Tooth gushed as she and Baby Tooth zipped down towards Anna.
"Elsa, is this your sister?" she asked. Elsa nodded, and Tooth gasped. "Omigosh, her teeth are pretty, too!"
"Who are you guys talking to?" Kristoff asked, and everyone turned to look at him, to which he shrugged in response. "What?" he said. Jack quirked an eyebrow. "Wait, so you don't see anyone else?" he asked. Kristoff frowned questioningly. "No," he said slowly, "just you, Olaf, Sven, and the girls. Are you feeling okay? Should I be worried?" Jack burst into laughter unexpectedly. "Oh, this is great!" he said. "Wow, is this a first! Bunny, are you hearing this? Who's the one without Believers now, huh? Take that, kangaroo! Wait, wait, wait, wait. So, Kristoff, what you're saying here is that you believe in Jack Frost, but not Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or the Sandman, is that it?"

"Um, I harvest and sell ice for a living. Of course I would want to believe that Jack Frost is real."
"Oh, you don't just want to believe, you do believe, trust me on that."
"How do you know if I believe in him or not? You don't know me."
"Because you're talking to him. Hi, name's Jack Frost."

Tooth crossed her arms indignantly and frowned. "Great!" she said. "So I can't even carry on a conversation with this guy?! But he's so pretty!" Everyone who could hear her laughed loudly, and because he was standing so close to Anna, Kristoff jumped, startled by the sound. "What?! What's so funny?!" he asked, looking around at everyone that he could see in search of an answer. "My friend Tooth thinks you're pretty," Jack told him. "Toothiana, that is. You would have heard of her as the Tooth Fairy. She's upset that she can't talk to you because you don't believe in her, that's all. Hey, Tooth, how does his mouth look?"
"It. Looks. Amazing! Elsa, Anna, one of you has to ask him what kind of floss he uses, I mean, wow!"

"Hey, Kristoff, what kind of floss do you use for your teeth?" Anna asked. He raised an eyebrow. "Um, I don't?" he said. Tooth blinked and seemed about to speak, but instead, she let out a yelp and clutched her ankle, then looked down to find that Olaf was holding one of her golden feathers. When he realized she was watching him, the snowman looked up and smiled, dropping the feather as he spread his arms out. "Hi! I'm Olaf, and I like warm hugs!" he said brightly. Tooth blinked and looked from him to her ankle, then smiled. "Aw, he's so cute!" she said. "It's okay about the feather, little guy, you can keep it! My name's Toothiana, but you can call me Tooth. Oh, and this is Baby Tooth! Aww, look, she likes your carrot!"

Kristoff stared in obvious confusion and concern as Olaf laughed and grabbed at his nose, not knowing that Baby Tooth was going up and down the length of it and tickling the snowman. Sven grunted and shoved his nose into Kristoff's elbow. "What?" the blonde asked. Sven gave him a look, and Kristoff sighed, then put on his reindeer voice. "'You're being weird.' I'm being weird? Please, Sven, you guys are the ones talking to imaginary people, you're the weird ones, knock it off! 'But Kristoff—'"

Jack burst into laughter. "Are you talking to yourself down there?"
"Uh—Wha—No. I'm talking to Sven. Duh. You guys are talking to yourselves."
From where he hovered beside Jack, Sandy crossed his arms indignantly and frowned as if to say that he took offense at this. "Hey," Jack said to him, "take it easy, buddy. He can't see you, remember?"
"What is this problem, Jack?" North asked, and the Winter Spirit's face darkened somewhat as he pointed to a spot just above the Globe. "I could have sworn I saw black sand right there," he said, "and earlier, when Elsa and I were out on the fjord in Arendelle with Kristoff and Anna, I thought I felt...something. Something close to that...unexplainable sense of darkness that's always there when he's around, you know? And the weird thing about that is that I only felt it when the ice started to crack when this Hans guy was trying to get to us. I dunno, North, I just...I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that something's about to happen. I don't know what, but something...something big. Bigger than all of us in this room put together, and...bigger than last time, as impossible as that sounds."

"OW, SOMETHING'S PULLING MY HAIR!" Kristoff shouted, and everyone turned to look at him. "That would be Baby Tooth," Jack said slowly, then turned back to North. "Anyway, like I was saying, I've just...I've got a really bad feeling, North. I don't think it's safe for them to go back to Arendelle. Any of them. Especially Elsa. Anna said that Hans said that he would 'stage a little accident' for Elsa, and..." He trailed off into a sigh, shaking his head before taking off from his perch. He landed beside Elsa and held a hand out to her. "Come on, princess," he said, "let's go start your first lesson, shall we?"

"I won't touch you, Jack. I don't want to hurt you," Elsa said. Wordlessly, Jack held his staff out to Anna, who hesitated for a moment before taking it from him. Jack then turned back to Elsa and gently took hold of one of her wrists, then placed the palm of his other hand against hers. "I'm cold, too," he said, "remember?"

Everyone became strangely transfixed on the pair as Elsa slowly lifted her other hand to place it against Jack's. "You're cold, too," she murmured, and he nodded. "Yeah," he said softly. "We can be cold together, princess. You just have to let me help you learn how." Their fingers locked together. "No flying?" she asked. He shook his head. "No flying. Just snow and frost and ice and you and me and my staff." After a moment, Elsa nodded slowly. "Okay," she said quietly. Jack turned to Anna, who handed him back his staff. "We'll be outside if anybody needs us," he said, and then he led Elsa by the hand from the room.


"Okay," Jack said, "first, I want you to tell me everything you can about your powers. The more I know, the easier it'll be to help you."
"Not much, honestly," Elsa replied. "I mean, there's what I told you about what happened when Anna and I were children. The leader of the trolls, he said that my power would only grow, and that there's beauty in it, but also danger, and that fear would be my enemy. He told me that I couldn't let it control me, I had to learn to control it. My father said that he was sure I could learn, and he said that he and Mother would protect me, and they did. Like you guessed last week, that's why they closed the gates. They minimized the staff and limited my contact with others as much as possible, including Anna. She and I used to share a bedroom, but after what happened, I moved into a different one down the hall. That was where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence, behind the closed door of my room. One day, my father brought me a pair of gloves and told me they would help, and they did. That was when I started wearing them all the time. That was when I started telling myself, 'Conceal, don't feel.' I've spent all these years pushing Anna away to protect her because I didn't want her getting hurt again. Emotion influences it, like I said earlier."
"And you don't have an object or anything that you can channel it with?" Jack asked.

"I...I don't think I understand what you mean," Elsa said.
"Well, take me for example. My staff is a conduit of my power. Originally, I thought it was the source, but it's not, it's just something that I use to help me with it. The power itself is inside of me, and the staff is, shall we say, a conductor of sorts that lets me channel it. Like, the last time we faced Pitch, he kidnapped Baby Tooth at one point and I followed them to Antarctica to save her. He managed to get a hold of my staff by threatening to kill Baby Tooth if I didn't give it to him, and he snapped it in half, and I was left at the bottom of a crevice with the broken halves, Baby Tooth, and my Memory Box, which I'm sure you'll learn all about from Tooth later. Anyway, like I said, I was down there with only Baby Tooth for company, and this was before I realized that the staff was only a conduit and not the actual source of my power, but I figured it out when I was able to repair it just by the force of sheer will. But you don't have anything like that, do you?"

Elsa shook her head and held her hands up, palms facing him. "No," she said, "just my bare hands and my emotions." Jack grew thoughtful for a moment or so, then his eyes moved towards the ground, then back up to Elsa. "Relax," he said, "and clear your mind. Just focus on me, and see if you can do what I do." He waited for her to respond, but when she only stood there watching him, he laid his staff down in the snow and took a single step forward. When his foot touched the ground, there wasn't even time for a print to appear in the snow before ice spread out in all directions with beautiful swirling patterns. It formed the shape of a snowflake, with Jack's bare foot in the center of it, and then he turned to look at Elsa. "Think you can do that, princess?" he asked. She looked at his creation, then took a deep breath and closed her eyes before placing one foot in front of herself. When she opened her eyes, she gasped lightly. "I did it," she said quietly.

Jack smiled at her. "I knew you could," he said. "Now, you see how that point on yours and this one on mine are facing each other? I want you to walk to the end of your point, then come over here to mine, and see if you can connect them as you walk. Make it into a path." Elsa nodded, then went to the end of her point, took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and closed her eyes again before taking the first step onto the snow, ice moving outwards from her foot and towards Jack's snowflake. She moved slowly, and Jack stood watching her the entire time. There was a sudden gust of wind, and even though it only lasted for a brief moment or two, time seemed to slow down for him. Flurries of snow were sent up around her as the skirt of her dress swirled around her ankles and her cape flared out behind her, the loose strands of platinum blonde hair that she kept swept back on top of her head getting lifted up momentarily before one of them came down to hang at the side of her face.

That was when it really hit him for the first time just how beautiful this girl was.

As she began moving more towards the center of the snowflake where he stood, he picked up his staff, then reached out and put a hand on her arm, making her stop and open her eyes, then turn around to look at her work as she brushed the rogue strand of hair back into place. She looked at him, a small but hopeful smile on her face. "Now," he said, "we're just gonna walk. We're just gonna walk around this mountain, and we're gonna leave a path of ice behind ourselves so we know where we've been already and don't end up retracing our steps until we're ready to come back. And we're gonna make things as we go, little snow sculptures and stuff. That's it. No stress, no fear, no pressure, no nothing. Just you and me, walking around this mountain, playing with the snow and leaving behind a trail of ice, totally relaxed. Sound good?" Elsa nodded and took the hand he held out to her, letting him lead since this was her first time on the mountain and he was already familiar with it.

While they walked, Jack began asking her a little more about herself and what her life had been like growing up, and Elsa slowly began to warm up to the conversation a little more with each of his questions before finally turning it around and putting him in the spotlight as the topic. He told her that his sister's name had been Clara, and that she'd been eight at the time Jack had fallen through the ice. And the more they talked and got to know each other, the more Jack's inexplicable need to be near her grew. He began to think that maybe it wasn't just because she was like him, maybe it was something more. But he still couldn't figure out what. And Elsa, for her part, just began to trust him more and more until she began to feel that same need for closeness.

"Three hundred years," she said, "it's...incredible. I could barely stand sixteen years of solitude, I can't imagine how you did it, Jack."
"I'm not saying it was easy," he told her, making a snowman roughly Olaf's size with a wave of his hand, "because it wasn't. Far from it, actually. I used to get so mad and frustrated with the Man in the Moon, I would look up at night and practically beg him for some kind of help. I'd ask him to tell me if I was doing something wrong, saying how I'd tried everything to be seen by someone, but nothing ever worked. I'd basically demand for him to tell me why it was he'd put me there, put me here. Because like I said, all he ever told me was my name. I was on my own after that. It was...frustrating, to say the least, and sometimes I'd just get so fed up with it all and come close to tears because I was just so alone and confused." He paused and seemed to think about something for a moment. "Elsa, can I ask you something?"

"Sure, what is it?"
"Why is it you believe?"
"In just you, or all of you?"
"I don't know. Either. Both."

"Well, I believe in everyone else because it's hard not to when you live with someone who's as much of a child at heart as Anna is. But you...I don't really know, to be honest. I guess that it's because...I heard stories about you growing up, and there just has always been a part of me that's wanted to believe that you were out there somewhere. I mean, think about it, Jack, if you were a kid with the power to create and control ice, and you had no idea why or how you had them, and you'd been told stories about a guy with the same powers as you, wouldn't you want to believe in him? I remember that when I was younger, sometimes when I couldn't sleep at night, I would sit by my window, especially during the winter when it was snowing, and I would imagine what you were like, and I would imagine what it would be like to meet you and talk to you. To have someone who understood."

Jack stopped walking and turned to face her, putting a hand on her shoulder. "And now you can stop imagining," he said. She smiled and nodded. "Now I can stop," she agreed. They stood there like that for another moment or so, and Jack's hand slowly made its way from her shoulder to her cheek with both of them barely even realizing it until the next thing either of them knew, his lips were against her cheek.

After a moment, he drew back slowly and they stared at each other with their pairs of nearly identical blue eyes. Jack blinked and looked away. "I...I'm sorry," he said, "that was unca—" He broke off in surprise when she suddenly leaned forward and returned the kiss, though hers only lasted for a brief second before she pulled back and looked down, blushing lightly. "It's getting dark," she said quietly after a moment. "We should start heading back." Before Jack had any time to respond, she had turned and was making her way back along the trail of ice they had left, her cape trailing lightly across the patterned surface behind her and glittering softly in the dying sunlight. Jack stayed behind for a moment, just watching her as she walked.

He lightly touched his fingertips to the place she had kissed, feeling a dull tingling sensation on the surface of his skin where her lips had been.

He smiled faintly, then began following her back.


*whispers* Psst! Hey, Jack, Elsa, guess what? You know why you guys wanna be near each other?

BECAUSE YOU'RE FALLING IN LUUUUUUUUURV, THAT'S WHY! XD

But in all seriousness, I'm going to try and have the next chapter with a better developed plot and stuff, so it might take longer to get up than the others have so far, just fyi.

And yes, Kristoff is on the border of Believer and non-believer! See, the way I figure it, like he said himself in the movie, ice is his life, so if you were him, don't you think you'd wanna believe in Jack, too? But the others, he's kind of grown out of believing in them. But then Anna, like Elsa said, is such a child at heart, that she's never stopped believing, so she can see them. Olaf is Olaf, so he would have to be a Believer, and since Sven is a reindeer, he's able to see them regardless of belief or the lack thereof, because remember, in RoTG, Jamie's Greyhound Abby is able to see Bunny, so from there it's logical to assume that most if not all animals can see them, and that would, of course, include Sven.

So yeah. That's my logic on the whole belief vs. non-belief thing for everybody. Don't worry, though, Kristoff will come around eventually, though it will take some heavy persuasion, especially from Sven's part. n_n

Oh, and the bit about Jack being "cold, too" is an idea I got from the picture I used for this story's cover image! If you look at the zoomed in version, you might be able to see that there are words on it, them talking, and it's Elsa saying, "You're cold, too" to which Jack responds with a simple, "Yeah." I thought that and their pose in the picture could be worked in for a cute moment, so there you have it. :)

'Til next time!