WOW, this seemed a lot longer when I wrote it, removed-and-transferred paragraphs aside. :/

But anyway, I TOLD YOU GUYS I WASN'T GONNA LEAVE YOU HANGING FOR MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES, DIDN'T I? XD

...

JFC, I swear to the Man in the Moon, if this doesn't get tears out of at least one person, I am going to go into Rage Mode and flip a table, because I REALLY put on my angst/poignancy thick while I was writing this, and I don't do that often because I understand the emotional trauma that chapters/stories like that can cause, so at least one of you had better cry, and if you don't, you at least better have tears building up or about to come out by the time you get to the part where things get happy again, otherwise all my effort will have been for nothing and I'm gonna blow a gasket.

SO CRY AND/OR GET TEARFUL, OR I'LL SEND JACK AND ELSA TO FREEZE YOU SOLID LIKE I DID TO TORA19KAGE LAST NIGHT!

In other news, I still own nothing.

...

CRY FOR ME, I'M BEGGING YOU!


Jack raced in after her as fast as he could possibly go, and when Tooth and Sandy realized what was happening, they followed him. As soon as his feet touched the snowy ground at the bottom of the gorge, Jack was frantically searching everywhere, calling Elsa's name and sending piles of snow up against the canyon walls in his panic. "Elsa!" he called. "Elsa, where are you?! Answer me! Elsa!" Tooth and Sandy did everything they could to help until finally, after what felt like ages to Jack, Tooth called out for him. He whirled around to find Tooth and Sandy at the other end of the chasm, shimmering ice blue fabric on the ground in front of them. "Elsa!" he cried.

He went racing over as fast as his feet could carry him, not even thinking to fly in his conflicted state of worried relief. He fell to his knees beside her, throwing his staff down carelessly as he did so, and brushing a strand of hair out of her face. "Elsa," he said, "Elsa, open your eyes. It's me, Jack. Please, Elsa, open your eyes, wake up. Elsa?...Elsa...please..." She remained unresponsive, with not even a fluttering of her eyelids to show that she was aware of his presence or the touch of his hand on her cheek. He was so focused on her that he didn't even realize when Tooth and Sandy went back up to the top, leaving him alone on the snowy ground with the young queen. With one last glimmer of hope remaining, he pressed his ear up against her chest and held his breath as he listened for the steady beating of her heart.

He only heard silence.

Slowly, Jack sat up and shook his head. "No," he muttered, "no, no, no, no! Please no! Please don't let her die, not yet, not like this, please, no! Elsa! Elsa, I'm begging you, please wake up, open your eyes, do something, anything! Don't leave me, Elsa, no! Don't do this to me, I can't lose you, not like this!"

Unable to hold it back anymore, Jack let the tears that had built up in his eyes spill out onto his cheeks. He put a hand to his heart and clutched the fabric of his hoodie tightly, leaning over Elsa's lifeless body as sobs began to hitch in his throat. His hood fell forward to cover his head, but he didn't even notice, his hand falling from his chest into the snow. At the opening of the gorge, the others were forced into reluctantly leaving as the wind picked up and sheets of snow began to fall, something that they all recognized as the beginnings of a blizzard, no doubt the result of the raging emotions that Jack was experiencing at the moment from what had just happened.

Jack stayed exactly where he was, collapsing onto his side in the snow next to Elsa and drawing her up against himself. "I'm sorry!" he said over the wind. "I'm sorry, Elsa, I'm so sorry, please forgive me! This is all my fault, I should have done something, I should have kept him away from Anna, but I didn't! I failed, and I'm so sorry! I swear, I'll make him pay for this, he won't get away with it! I'm sorry, Elsa! I...I love you!"

There. He'd said it. It was useless, he knew, because she couldn't hear him the way she was, but he'd said it, nonetheless. He'd thought it would help him feel at least a tiny bit better, but it didn't. If anything, it only made him feel worse. It left him with a hollow emptiness inside that he couldn't explain and didn't particularly care to, either. He had no way of knowing if she'd already been aware of his feelings or not, left only with bits and pieces of the last few days as evidence that she probably did. He'd come close to saying it a few times recently over the last few days or so as they'd been in the process of working out the details of their plan and making sure everything was in place, but she'd always stopped him with concerns about him getting hurt due to her being mortal and him not. That was it, though. Her comments and remarks on that subject were all he had as anything even close to solid evidence that proved she knew.

He lay there beside her in the snow, holding her against his chest and cradling her head in one hand, burying his face in her soft hair and letting his tears fall, his silver-white hair covered by his hood as the blizzard continued to rage and howl all around them. For the first time in his three hundred and seventeen years as the Spirit of Winter, Jack Frost knew what it meant to feel numb. Not because of the cold; never because of the cold. That was a numbness that he would never feel again, a sensation that he had no memory of and would never have to endure again on any level of intensity or harshness. This was a different kind of numbness altogether, emotional rather than physical, caused by the grief in his heart rather than the nerve endings in his body. He felt as if he couldn't move and would never be able to again. His joints felt stiff, and he no longer felt the beating of his own heart, convinced that it had stopped beating altogether and that this time, he was gone for good and that not even the Man in the Moon would be able to bring him back. He wouldn't care if the snow just built up and buried him forever along with Elsa and his staff, and he thought he would actually prefer it if that did happen. It wouldn't kill him, of course, since freezing to death and hypothermia were no longer possible for him being what he was, but he could at least stay there beneath a mound of snow where nobody would ever be able find him so he could just lay there and suffer in peace, and at least be with the girl he loved so that her beauty would be preserved forever by the cold.

But the storm didn't bury him, nor did it bury Elsa or his staff. Instead, it began to die down after what seemed to him like a lifetime until it had become no more than a gentle fall of soft, powdery snow, the blizzard leaving them both covered in a thin layer that was at the same time thick enough that, if someone were to look down into the gorge and see them, it looked as if someone had lightly sprinkled them with powdered sugar, their bodies leaving an outlined depression in the snow around them. As the snow continued to fall, Jack's eyes slowly began to close, and he welcomed the darkness like an old friend, letting it surround him in the hopes that it would take him to Elsa.

He didn't know how long he had been there when he opened his eyes again. Time had lost all meaning for him as soon as he'd seen her jump from the cliff, eventually coming to a complete standstill when he'd turned and seen her on the ground in front of his friends. All he knew was that when his eyes had closed earlier, it had been sometime in the mid-afternoon, and that when he opened them, he saw the stars above their heads. His eyes, still red from crying, roved across the night sky until they landed on the full moon. It seemed smaller and farther off than he remembered, then he thought that perhaps it was keeping its distance from him in shame. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew it was irrational to think that sort of thing for even a second when it came to MiM, who so rarely interacted or bothered communicating with his own creations, but Jack didn't care. His thoughts were foggy and his mind was numb with grief, and all he really knew for certain was that he needed someone or something to direct his anger at in Pitch's absence, and why not the Moon? He had, after all, done it for three hundred years prior to meeting Elsa, and just because his motives for doing so were different, he saw no reason why he shouldn't resort back to his old habits. So he continued to lay there, still holding Elsa as he directed hateful thoughts at the mysterious being who had made him what he was all those years ago, not knowing what else to do with himself.

Eventually, the wheels in his head began to slowly and reluctantly turn again, and he realized that Pitch would have been able to come back out when nightfall came, and that as much as he didn't want to leave her, he had to keep the promise he'd made to Elsa to get revenge on the King of Nightmares for what he'd done. So with a physically painful ache in his heart, he sat up just enough to lay Elsa down flat on her back, pushing those beautiful strands of hair back the way she'd always had them in life and laying her braid out over her shoulder flat and smooth. He straightened out her dress and cape, then folded her hands across her middle, hesitating for only a brief moment before using his powers to form a rose out of crystalline ice and placing it beneath her hands to keep it in place. He placed one last kiss on her lips, then picked up his staff and unwillingly forced himself to turn his back on her as it began to snow again, not bothering to lower his hood.

He put a bit of distance between himself and Elsa, then sighed heavily, feeling tears beginning to well up in his eyes again. He blinked them away and was just about to take off into the sky when suddenly, the moonlight seemed to grow brighter. He looked up, raising an arm to shield his eyes as they followed the beam of light, tracking it behind himself to...

...Elsa.

Jack looked up at the moon again, but quickly turned back to Elsa after doing so. Throwing one last glance in the moon's direction, he turned and began slowly moving back in the direction he'd come from. The closer he got to her, the brighter the glow seemed, until he was all but forced to stop several feet from her and look away, closing his eyes as he shielded them with his arm. After a moment, he opened his eyes to a level of brightness no higher than on any other night. He slowly lowered his arm. "...Elsa?" he said, fighting to keep his hopes from getting up out of a near-petrifying fear of having his grief come crashing back down on him in even more overwhelming amounts than before. He stayed where he was, his feet rooted to the ground. Then he saw her finger twitch. His eyes widened, watching in overwhelmed relief as she began to stir, one hand going to lay against the ground as she pushed herself into a sitting position, the rose of ice going to rest in her lap as her other hand went up to her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut.

"Elsa!"

All thought gone from his mind, Jack threw his staff aside for the second time that night and rushed over to her, falling to his knees beside her as he threw his arms around her tearfully. "Elsa, you're alive! Thank goodness, I thought I'd lost you forever!" he cried. Elsa returned his hug a bit hesitantly, obviously confused as to what exactly was going on. "Jack," she said, "what...what's going on, where are we? I don't..."
"How do you feel?" Jack asked, pulling back to look at her with concern in his eyes. "Like I got hit in the head with an iceball, but otherwise, I'm fine," she said. "Why, what happened? Should I be worried?"

"How much do you remember?"
"Pitch...Kristoff got hurt..." She gasped. "Anna!"
"Anna's okay, I promise. Tooth saved her. Right as you threw yourself off the cliff, unfortunately. Tooth and Sandy found you, but it...it was too late. Everyone else left hours ago because I...kind of made a blizzard without meaning to because I...I couldn't...You were gone, Elsa. You were dead, I listened and your heart wasn't beating. I don't even know how long it's been, I just know that I stayed down here because I couldn't stand to leave you, not yet. I couldn't believe you were actually gone. The Man in the Moon brought you back, just like he did to me, but I just wish he'd done it sooner because I was numb, Elsa, I was completely numb, I just wanted to lay there with you and let the snow bury us both because I couldn't believe I'd lost you, I didn't want to believe it, I still don't, because I just...I love you, Elsa."

Her shoulders fell as her breath came out in a cloud between them, a smile gracing her features. "I know," she said, "I love you, too." Jack smiled, then cupped her face in his hand and kissed her. She kissed him back, and the longer they stayed like that, the more snow started to fall and the more the wind picked up until they were surrounded by a small blizzard that ended when Jack suddenly pulled away with wide eyes and began laughing as he pushed his hood back. "What is it?" Elsa asked with a giggle in her voice. "What's so funny?"

Jack took her hands in his and rose to his feet, pulling her up with him. He grabbed his staff, using it to gesture dramatically towards the moon. "Manny brought you back," he said, "that means that you're like me now, you're immortal! You're a Guardian now, Elsa!"

She blinked, then broke into a grin and laughed. "I am, aren't I?" She gasped, one hand flying over her mouth. "But...I don't know my center," she said. Jack threw his arms out to the sides. "Who cares?!" he said laughingly. "We've got all the time in the world to figure it out, and in the meantime, we don't have to worry about either of us getting old and dying like we did before!" Elsa considered this, then smiled. "You're right," she said. Jack grinned, his feet lifting up from the ground in his excitement and happiness. "Of course I'm right!" he said, and Elsa laughed. The sound made Jack's smile widen as he grabbed his staff and put it behind his head, gripping both ends of it. "Come on, princess," he said, holding out a hand to her. "We should probably go back and show everyone that you're not quite dead yet." Elsa smirked, crossing her arms as she lifted an eyebrow. "And what exactly do you have in mind for after that?" she asked.

He flashed a lopsided grin. "Easy," he said, "we track down Pitch and kick ourselves some serious Boogeyman butt."
Elsa put her hand in his. "I like the way you think, Frost," she said. Jack chuckled as he lifted her up and held her against himself with an arm around her waist. Elsa put her arms around his neck and he held his staff in his other hand. The pair exchanged grins with each other, then Jack kissed Elsa's forehead. "Up, up, and away," he said, and with that, he flew off towards the North Pole with Elsa pressed securely against himself and her hand on his chest.


I TOLD YOU I'D TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING!

btw, did anyone catch the Monty Python reference in the next-to-last paragraph there? If you've ever seen Spamalot, you'll probably recognize it from one of the first few songs in the show, but anybody who's seen The Holy Grail movie should also recognize it, too.

Anyway, I shall leave you with this so I can go get dressed to go to my grandma's house for birthday cake and presents!

SEE YA 'ROUND!