Sorry I haven't uploaded anything for a few days. The past few days have been kind of hard, and this chapter's been giving me trouble, so I hope it's passable for you guys. I'll try to write up the next chapter by tonight or tomorrow if I have enough energy and inspiration to do so. We shall see. I already have a pretty good idea of where this story will end though. :)

Anyway, hope you enjoy the chapter!

Disclaimer: Too bored to come up with something stupid to say here, so I'll just say that I don't own Rise of the Guardians. (That still feels weird, I'm sorry.)

The first thing Jamie saw when he arrived home was his little sister jumping around in slush puddles. There was nothing strange about that, except that there were slush puddles to jump into in the midst of December. Sophie was so carefree about it that part of him wondered if perhaps he was just overreacting to things. His mom always enjoyed reminding him that he had a tendency to overreact to things, and he was getting to the age where he was starting to wonder if maybe she might be right about that.

"Pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty," said Sophie as she jumped from one pile of slush to the next. Jamie couldn't fathom what she found so pretty about slush puddles. He knew Mom certainly wasn't going to think it was so pretty when Sophie went inside all sopping wet like she was getting, not to mention that the slush was a bit muddy and Sophie's little blue overalls were quickly becoming something less than blue. He shielded his library items under his coat and headed to the front door.

"Fai-ry pret-ty, fai-ry pret-ty!" Jamie jerked his head around and looked at his sister. What had she just said? Had she said something about a fairy? He carefully set his things down on the porch and went to join Sophie, hoping he could do it without getting too soaked, since he didn't feel like changing before dinner.

"Did you see a fairy, Sophie?"

"Fairy! Fairy! Fairy!" Sophie jumped up and down in front of Jamie, then turned and started dancing around him like a little ballerina. That wasn't much help. He needed her to focus so he could actually get the answers to his questions.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and knelt down to her level. "Sophie, look at me. Did you see a fairy?"

"Uh huh. She's pretty!"

"I know she is," said Jamie, who really hoped they were both talking about the same fairy. If there was someone else besides the tooth fairy who was likely to pay a visit to the Bennett house, then he had yet to hear about it. Though even if it had been the tooth fairy, she could have just been visiting on a routine mission. Jamie looked hard at Sophie and said, "Did you lose a tooth, Sophie?"

"Mm-mmm." She shook her head so hard her hair flicked into Jamie's face and made him sneeze.

"But you saw the tooth fairy. Here at the house?"

"Uh huh." Sophie started bouncing on the balls of her feet. Her energy was really hard to contain, it seemed. Even at Jamie's age, when adults all claimed he had too much energy, he couldn't understand where she got all her energy from.

"Well, do you know what she wanted?"

"Uh-uh." Sophie shook her head. Jamie sighed. Pity Sophie didn't know how to ask the right questions, or even how to understand the answers that were given.

"Aw man!" Jamie rolled his eyes and huffed. Why didn't someone make this easy for him? "Did she tell you where she was going?" As expected, Sophie shook her head. It was pointless. His sister had seen the tooth fairy, which proved that something really was going on and he wasn't just overreacting, but he had no way to tell what was going on from his sister. Sophie was just too young to understand these things.

He let Sophie go and continue romping through the slush piles, and he gathered up his things from the porch and went into the house and ran to his room. If there was any chance that anything was left for him to find, it would be in his room. None of the Guardians would have trusted anyone else in the house.

After throwing his things over a chair, he spun around, looking everywhere in the room for anything out of place. If the tooth fairy had been here, she probably would have left at least one thing out of place, even though he couldn't see anything wrong. "Hello? Is anyone here?" he called to the air, but got no response.

Jamie sat on his bed in a frump. He wanted to know what was going on, but no one was helping him understand what to do, even though he was trying his best. This was maddening. Why wouldn't anyone tell him anything? Something was definitely going on. He wasn't too young to understand. Couldn't people see that?

He flopped down on his bed, when he heard a strange crunch. That was really weird. He rolled over to his side, and the crunching repeated. It was reacting to the shift in his body weight. He must have laid on top of something. If that was the case, he needed to sit up and find it, so he sat up, but the crunching noise stopped as soon as he did. He bounced up and down in bed a few times, but the crunching noise eluded him. Where had it gone?

In frustration, he flopped back down on the bed, and promptly heard the crunch again. That was it! This was the tooth fairy, right? Where would she leave anything that she wanted no one but the kid to find? Under their pillow, of course! Jamie pulled up his pillow, and sure enough, there was a little envelope underneath it with his name spelled out in elegant script.

Before the difficult little thing could disappear, Jamie grabbed it and held it close to his chest so he could ensure that it wouldn't get away from him again. After replacing his pillow, he tore the envelope open and pulled out the little slip of paper inside it. It took a couple moments for his fumbling fingers to manage to open the piece of paper so he could read it, but he eventually managed to make it cooperate.

Upon reading the message though, he sighed and looked to the heavens, as though someone were standing by and listening. "Why won't you just tell me what's going on? I want to know now."

He placed the letter on his bed, and it slid off the bed and fell down next to his feet, where it fell open. It read, "Go to bed early tonight."

Why did Jack have to be such an idiot when he was younger? He didn't want to have to be the one to deal with the nutcase now. One wasn't supposed to have to deal with themselves when they got older. That was why time travel wasn't possible for most people, because it wasn't natural to have Older You come back to straighten out Younger You. He wished someone else would just take care of the stupid, but no one else even knew he was here except Tannie, and she was powerless against him. He might kill her before he realized his own strength.

"Hey, you!" Jack shouted into the storm, but he didn't get any response. The storm had gotten incredibly thick in the space of just a few minutes. If it got any worse, it might start tearing houses apart, and he didn't want to think of what that could mean for the people he cared about in this time and place. He dove down into the thick of the storm and looked left and right, trying to find the center of the storm. Find the center, and you find stupid Jack.

There was one thing older Jack knew that younger Jack didn't know, and that was that Jack Frost didn't control the wind. The wind just cooperates much of the time because it liked Jack, but young Jack couldn't understand what the wind was doing. Older Jack could use this to his advantage.

"Wind, take me to the center."

Windy fingers grabbed him, and he circled Burgess several times at the mercy of the wind until it zeroed in on where the storm originated from. Having achieved its purpose, it released its grip and dropped Jack from the sky, where he flailed as he fell to the ground. The wind had a nasty habit of being flaky like that. Jack suspected it thought it was being funny by picking people up and dropping them like that. At least it couldn't hurt him with it.

Jack landed on his back with an, "Oomph!"

The other Jack spun in his perch and thrust his staff out as though it was some sort of weapon. "Who goes there?"

Older Jack sat up slowly and brushed the snow out of his hair. He picked up his own staff and pointed it back at his double. "Put down the staff, dude. I'm better at using this thing than you are."

The other Jack backed off slightly, but continued to hold his staff in front of him defensively. The dummy. After three hundred years, Jack had learned that you really don't want to mess with someone with a lot more skill than you. It never ended well. But this guy still was under the delusion that he could take on an expert. Smart, Jack, real smart.

The dummy wasn't going to stop on his own, so Jack pushed himself up to a standing position again, and once again pointed his staff at the young Jack. "You gotta calm down, you dummy! You're going to hurt a lot of innocent people!"

"Why does no one acknowledge my existence?" Young Jack pulled at his hair and screeched into the wind. "Why do you see me now?"

Jack rolled his eyes. This was just idiotic. Had he really been this bad when he was this age? He smacked his younger self on the back. Hard. "Because I'm you, stupid! I'm from three hundred years into your future."

Younger Jack seethed and rounded on Jack, waving his staff threateningly, though Jack wasn't entirely sure whether he should find this guy all that threatening with his pitiful skill with snow and ice. "What is this devilry you speak of? Be you a wizard, or a sorceror? Mayhaps a necromancer, as you commune with the dead."

The first reaction Jack had to this was to slap his hand across his mouth to prevent his giggles from going too hysterical. This guy was really too much, and he found that despite his precautions, he went hysterical anyway. Jack rolled around on the ground, paralyzed from laughter. He hadn't really talked like this at one point, had he? Someone was just going to show up in a few minutes to say it was all a joke, right? Surely, once he had become Jack Frost, he had stopped being such a dork.

He cracked an eye open to check on his double, who happened to be staring at him incredulously. That wasn't the look of someone who was merely playing a prank. Nope, this guy was dead serious in his speech. That launched Jack into another fit of giggles accompanied by a bit of headbanging in time with his saying, "No. No. No. I didn't act like this. I didn't!"

"The devil has overcome you with lunacy." Looking at his younger double again and seeing the straight face on the boy forced Jack to acknowledge that yes, he really had acted like this in the past, whether he wanted to admit it or not. And talked like this. In fact, he sounded a bit dorkier to his own ears than his sister and his mother combined, and that took skill. Young Jack was extremely skilled at being a dork.

"Nope," said Jack, standing up at last and brushing off his clothes in an attempt to regain a tiny bit of dignity, "I'm just looney all on my own. Sanity is boring." The other Jack merely quirked an eyebrow as though trying to translate that thought into some other language. What was so difficult to understand about sanity being dull?

"What are you trying to say?" he said, and Older Jack laughed. This guy really was hoping for a translation. He'd forgotten what it had been like back when English was new to him, and it was so strange to see it smacked up against him once more. It was no problem though. He still spoke Norwegian just fine.

"Dei galne har mange morosame stunder som den vettige ikkje har."

A cough from Younger Jack, and he said, "It does not mean I wish to join you in your insanity."

Older Jack merely shrugged. He had told his younger self that the maniacs have many funny hours that the sane guy does not have. It was a strange old saying from Norway. Not everyone understood his ways, and he didn't expect them to, though he knew that Younger Jack would eventually see his way somehow, since that was exactly what had happened. "Dei galnaste seier sannast."

Younger Jack's knuckles tightened around his staff, and Jack almost thought that they had turned slightly whiter from the pressure, if that was possible. His skin was almost white as it was, which made that hard to achieve. Perhaps the guy didn't like being told that the craziest speak most truly. Younger Jack was clearly under some extreme stress, especially since the blizzard began to pick up even stronger. This was not good. He had to stop delaying and actually do something about this.

"Stop it! Calm down before you hurt somebody!" The other Jack wasn't listening at all. This didn't leave him much choice. "Sorry, dude," he said, "But you asked for it."

He raised his staff and sent a wave of ice through it, pummeling Young Jack until he fell to the ground and dropped his staff, which made the storm stop almost instantaneously. That was a huge relief. Now to deal with the idiot who was frozen in the ice. Perhaps this was the reason Jack didn't remember this encounter at all, since he'd had to get forcefully frozen through it all. He shook his head and clicked his tongue sadly. It was really a pity that this idiot was him. He didn't want to think that badly of himself, but he was being forced to confront the fact that he was once an idiot.

Jack threw his staff over his shoulder and began to walk away. "I'll send someone to you to melt the ice. Until then, think long and hard about what you really want to say to me so you don't panic next time you run into me, okay?" Of course, there was no response, since Jack's victim was imprisoned in the ice, but Jack knew he had heard. Somehow he vaguely remembered a reprimand like that in his past, but he brushed it out of his mind. It wasn't very pleasant to think about.

"What a weird family," said Jamie's dad as he looked through some of the articles that Jamie had collected on his research trip. "What kind of Norwegian family would name their son Jackson?"

Was Jamie expected to try and answer that question? He didn't know the answer to it if he was expected to answer it. All he knew was what Jack's name was, not why he got it. The best he could offer his father was a shrug, and so he did.

Jamie's mother then walked in and chuckled as she set down a plate of snacks before the two hungry men. Jamie wholeheartedly grabbed himself a muffin and started tearing into it, even as his father absently grabbed himself a cookie without taking his eyes off the article he was reading.

"I'm sure his family was just excited about moving to America and gave him a name that would blend in better here," said his mom.

"Then why did they name his sister 'Taaan-juh'?" said Jamie. "I've never even heard of that name!"

"Yes, you have, Jamie," said his father, who put the paper down for a moment to look at his son. "It's not pronounced 'Taaan-juh', it's pronounced 'Tahn-ya'. You have a cousin with that name."

"But it's spelled differently," Jamie protested.

"Doesn't matter," said his father, going straight back to looking at the article. "It's a common name from a lot of countries, but they all spell it differently. They probably just gave her a familiar name after they moved because they were homesick."

Well, if nothing else, at least his dad had taught him how to pronounce Tanja so he wouldn't look stupid whenever Jack came back, if he came back. Jamie's gut lurched when he allowed himself to think that vile thought, and he mentally kicked himself for even permitting such a thought into his head. Of course Jack would come back. The other Guardians wouldn't allow him to be gone long. They worked together, and the Tooth Fairy had apparently already noticed that something was strange, as she had scheduled a meeting with him later that night. This problem would be fixed very soon, and everything would be back to normal.

Jamie's mother sat down at the dining room table and smiled at Jamie, who smiled back nervously, wondering if she was going to expect any sort of weird explanation for why he was doing this project besides what he had told the teacher.

"I think it's wonderful that you're doing this project," said Jamie's mom. "I've been worrying about your grades a little bit, but if you do a good job on this report, those grades should be taken care of."

Yep, that was his mom. Always worried about stupid things like grades rather than noticing that her kids were talking to invisible characters from their fairytale books. Some of his friends' parents were starting to get worried about their kids being so "out of touch with reality" as they said, but he didn't think his mom had even noticed yet. He hoped it stayed that way for a while.

"I've always been intrigued by the history of Overland Lake," continued his mom. "That's really creepy that that poor boy just disappeared without a trace. Did you know that they never found his body?"

Jamie had figured that, since he knew where that body had gone to, but he wasn't about to tell his mom that the body was never found because it had been brought back to life and turned into a fairy that makes it snow, so he just shrugged and pretended not to be interested. "It's a big lake."

"Not really," said his father, looking up from his reading again. "It shouldn't have been too hard for them to find a body in Overland Lake, even back then when they didn't have our modern technology. Bodies float, you know?"

That sounded disgusting. It reminded him of his dead goldfish that he'd had to flush down the toilet last year, and he thought the job of taking care of it had been extremely gross. He didn't want to think of Jack ever being that gross, but he couldn't picture it, even if he tried. Jack just wasn't a gross guy. He was fun, and he had cool hair.

Then Jamie's mother chuckled in a strangely gleeful way, and Jamie snapped his attention to her nervously. What was going on with her? His mom blinked her eyes a couple times, and it looked like a light had flickered on inside them. Something about this conversation must have excited her, but he couldn't say what it was.

"There are some amusing ghost stories revolving around that lake."

Ah, that was what it was. His mom couldn't resist a good ghost story. It was where he had inherited his love of the paranormal. He really hoped that his mom hadn't chosen to live in Burgess rather than her hometown simply because her husband's hometown was filled with ghost stories, but he wouldn't have been surprised if that had been the case. His mom was kind of loopy when it came to a good ghost story.

"Would any of them help Jamie's project?" said his dad.

"Hmmm, let's see." Jamie's mom rubbed at her chin a moment in thought, and Jamie gulped. He was going to be subjected to ghost stories now, wasn't he? It wasn't like he had anything against ghost stories. He enjoyed them just as much as the next guy-so long as the next guy enjoyed ghost stories, but his mom enjoyed them a little too much. He could be stuck here for hours at this rate.

"I don't know if all the stories are about the Overland boy or not, but most of them take place around the lake. There was a story about one girl who was down by the lake one October before the first snow fell, and she heard something big fall onto the ground behind her. When she turned around to look, there was nothing there, but the ground was freezing over from the point where she had thought she'd heard something fall."

Jamie's eyes opened wide at the story. That had to have been Jack. Who else could it have been? He leaned forward eagerly. "So what happened?"

"I heard she ran all the way home to get away from the frost, but the frost chased her there. When she got indoors, it didn't hurt her, but the entire town was covered in snow the next morning."

"Sounds like someone had a lively imagination," said Jamie's dad.

The comment had made Jamie uneasy, since he wasn't sure what his dad would say of him talking to Jack if he ever found out, but it just made his mom start laughing. Yep, Mom was strange. There was just no denying it. "It's a ghost story, Henry. You don't analyze a ghost story."

Jamie's dad grumbled and went back to his reading. It amazed Jamie that his dad could find that much worthy of being read in the materials Jamie had brought home, since the stuff that was particularly about Jack was very limited, but his dad just kept reading and reading and reading. And Jamie's mom was suddenly seeming a lot more interesting to Jamie.

"Do you have any more stories like that?" asked Jamie.

"I do," she said, "but we're about to have dinner. How about I help you with your homework afterward, hon?"

Jamie did a melodramatic sigh, but accepted the conditions of her storytelling. He wouldn't have to wait too long for her stories, and she had information that he would have a hard time finding elsewhere. It was worth the wait. He hoped. Maybe if he was lucky, there'd be something in her stories that would provide an obvious link between Jackson Overland and Jack Frost. Then he could write an even better report about him.

Though if he were honest with himself, that wasn't actually what he wanted to find out from his mom. There was something nagging at the back of his mind that he couldn't explain. Perhaps it seemed a little farfetched, but he couldn't help but try.

He hoped his mom's stories would give him a clue as to what had happened to Jack.

There you go. Hope you liked. :) As always, feel free to comment or ask questions or whatever, as it helps me to know what you're thinking about and what I need to make clear in this story. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the next chapter. Thanks for reading, and take care!