Chapter Summary: At 26, it's true that Jamie's gotten older, but he still appreciates a snow day every now and then.

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Snow Day

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Jamie now watches the weather with the keen eye of a scientist. He's always aware of the shifting clouds and streaming cool fronts, and today's grey winter sky presses down from above him like a low, tight ceiling, the kind that makes him feel cramped and tense.

Snow days are few and far in between, though. Jamie knows this because in the three years he's been teaching, he's seen only a handful. He laughs to himself about how simple it once seemed when he was a student in school, but as an adult teacher, he recognizes things have to be just right for the miracle snow day to emerge: the administrators have to feel more threatened by low attendance rates and lawsuits over slick ice and frozen pipes than by the prospect of slipping away from the required number of yearly school days.

It doesn't happen often. Last winter, he had to bundle himself up against one of the coldest days on record; to his chagrin, only an inch of snow had fallen and schools opened regardless. Jamie gave Jack an earful over that one. In the meantime, the school's few snow days are reserved for serious weather.

But he watches the weather still, and a part of him knows it's coming.

"The Powers That Be haven't sent the official text yet," says Ms. Grells over lunch, "but all of the Hill County schools are closed. With any luck, Cabinwood County schools will follow."

All of the primary teachers sit at the staff table in the chilly cafeteria, keeping one eye on their rowdy little students as they watch the snow fall from the wide-set windows. "I could use the extra time to go over the curriculum maps for next semester," admits Mrs. Myers, brushing frizzy grey hair out of her face.

"God, I hope we don't get the snow day," complains Mr. Serro gruffly through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Why not?" Jamie asks in surprise. He has been waiting excitedly for the verdict all day, thinking that it would be nice to see a certain frost spirit again before the weather grows warm.

"If all the schools are closed, I have to put up with my own beast offspring all day," he jokes easily, dragging a napkin over his mouth. "Better to be in school than trapped at home with my five monsters. I'm gonna have to make a beer run…"

Jamie, however, is looking forward to a child-free day. He gets the text through the teacher text alert system near the end of the day: All Cabinwood County school campuses will be closed on Friday, February 7th due to a forecast of heavy ice and snow. Please stay tuned for further developments and updates regarding school closures.

He has enough control to keep from shouting in happiness, though his students certainly do when he tells them the news, and he knows better than to be offended by that.

"But you are still going to have that quiz on Monday on measuring weight and length," he warns them. They grumble irritably, but he leads them in the one-minute-party that they traditionally do as a celebration before the weekend, and it's hard to be angry while dancing and cheering for sixty seconds straight. Jamie can't help but adore them for their wide grins after that, and most of them even remember to wish him a good weekend as he walks up and down the sidewalk on carpool duty to watch them clamber into their warm cars and speed off.

Knowing that Jack is likely busy with preparations for the storm, Jamie spends another two hours in his empty classroom. The windows always leak in heavy precipitation, so he covers the computers with plastic and unplugs all of the electronics in case of storm surges. He tidies the rest of the classroom and spends an hour adjusting next week's lessons to keep up with his curriculum plan. Then he bundles himself up, waves to the evening janitor, and heads home.

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"No, I won't be off of work tomorrow," Pippa says regretfully over the phone. "They're trying to get as many nurses to come in as possible—this weather's going to be a nightmare."

Jamie has to strain to hear her over the wind rattling past the window of his apartment, but he can just make out the low tension of stress in her voice. The dull, ambient background noises of the hospital don't help much either. "I figured as much," he replies. "I guess you'll have your hands full."

"Tell me about it." He listens to her laugh as he rubs his sore feet. "I've already done three x-rays in the past hour for people who've fallen and slipped on ice, and there's a crowd in the emergency room still waiting on Dr. Winston to come in."

Jamie stretches out on his armchair and throws a blanket over himself, wishing he had better heat in his apartment. "Not like the guy you had in last week, I hope?" he asked absently. "The one who spent the entire time complaining about how the radiation was going to make him a target for terrorists or something?"

"Oh, no, it was Nazis, by the end," Pippa says conversationally. "He thought he was going to be abducted right there in the room."

"Even better." Jamie laughs. "Anyway, I guess that means I'll just wait to see you on Saturday."

Pippa hesitates for a beat. "Actually, I picked up the weekend shifts. Sorry, Jamie—they really need people here, and I could really use the money—"

"To get a better car, I know," Jamie says, swallowing a bit of disappointment, though he knows it's for the best. "I'd feel better if you had something besides that death trap to drive, anyway."

"I am sorry, Jamie," she adds, ignoring his feeble attempt at a joke. "I'd much rather see you on Saturday. You won't stay home and plan lessons all day, will you? You've been working nonstop all week; you're going to kill yourself—"

"Don't worry, I won't," Jamie replies, suddenly cheery again as he remembers the cause of his good fortune to have a day off. "I'm actually going to see a friend."

"A friend?" Pippa asks curiously, knowing that Jamie has only a handful of close friends that he sees regularly. "Who?"

"Oh, you don't know him. I met him a long time ago, but he's moved away since. He'll be in town this weekend, though."

"What a weekend to come in!" Pippa exclaims, and Jamie frowns, backtracking.

"Oh, well, he doesn't always have much choice, you know—he travels for work, I mean. He's some sort of pilot, and his plane's being grounded for the snowstorm…"

They chat for a few more minutes until Pippa is pulled away for another set of x-rays, but not before she makes him promise that he really won't spend all of tomorrow working.

After he sets down the phone, Jamie settles in the armchair and pulls the blanket close around him. The wind is still rattling past the ancient window, but it's a comforting noise, and the falling snow is mesmerizing. He alternates between watching the window and watching television, a luxury he almost never has time for.

Most weeks, Jamie is exhausted by Friday afternoon. Upon arriving home from work, he typically takes a second to throw his bag and shoes down before collapsing on the couch in what Pippa has affectionately termed "Faceplant Friday." Today might be Thursday, but it is no different: as soon as Jamie allows himself to relax, he's out like a light, head back limply in the armchair and the television still flickering.

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He wakes the next morning because he is freezing, and Jack's grinning face is the first thing he sees.

"Jamie, wake up! Wake up! I think this might be the best one I've ever done—well, in Burgess, anyway. Luckily Mother Nature asked for a heavy Northern Winter this year. Just look at those snowdrifts, you can barely even—why are you closing your eyes again?"

"You think every snow is the best one you've ever done, Jack. And for some reason, I thought I was going to have a nice, quiet, child-free snow day," Jamie replies through a yawn, though he smiles after to let Jack know he doesn't mean it. "And will you close the window, for God's sake?"

"No idea why you thought that," he hears Jack mutter, and he feels the frost spirit settle on the arm of his chair, ignoring his last statement. Jamie knows he prefers to feel his wind. "And besides, you're the child between us, anyway."

It would be hard to say that if you didn't know them, though. Jamie sits up and opens his eyes, and Jack is the same as he always is: pale, bright, energetic, with blue eyes and a shock of white hair that still doesn't make him look a day older than seventeen. Jamie, on the other hand, has grown tall and lanky in his twenty-six years. His dark brown hair is trimmed shorter than the wild mop he had in his youth, and though he is clean-shaven, the strong angles to his chin would make it difficult for anyone to consider him younger than his best friend.

Jack grows irritable under the attention, and he pushes Jamie toward the open window. A few snowflakes drift lazily onto his clothes. "What are you staring at? C'mon, Jamie, take a look!"

After he blearily rubs his eyes, Jamie has to admit that the Guardian has certainly outdone himself. Slick icicles cover every inch of the bare trees that line the road, and the thin layer of snow beneath them is untouched. Every window on the street is covered in Jack's customary swirls of fern frost, and Jamie wonders how long it took him to do it all.

"We'll have to get in and out quick," Jack adds, gazing contentedly at his work. "It's only a break in the storm—I'll have to start it up again sometime this evening."

"Start it up again?" Jamie asks, blinking. "This isn't all?"

"Like I said, Mother Nature made the plans," Jack argues. "I'm just following orders. Between you and me, though, I think we should stop at a grocery on the way back so you can pick up some food before things start back up," he adds seriously, turning away from the window to fold his arms across his chest. "But you'll have the rest of the weekend to do your lesson plans and everything, since you'll probably be stuck inside 'till Monday. You weren't planning to start working on them today, were you?" Jack asks, glancing at the papers strewn from Jamie's open bag. "It's supposed to be a day off, and you already work too much."

Jamie doesn't say how much he sounds like Pippa. "I wasn't going to work," he counters. "I was hoping you'd come visit."

The frost spirit looks pleased at that. "Either way, are you coming down or not? You're not too old to come play yet, are you?"

Jamie jabs him with his elbow. "Are you kidding? I can still put up a decent fight—or did you forget last year?"

"We'll see about that, Bennett!" Jack grins, suddenly playful once more. He darts out of the window in a graceful movement that Jamie has trouble following. He points threateningly at Jamie as he flits away. "Meet you in the park. You've got fifteenminutes!"

"Fifteen—are you kidding me?" Jamie grumbles after him, but he obediently shoves the window down and throws on his coat.

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It's probably because of Jack that Jamie has a reputation for being so good with children. He spends all day in the same park where he spent his days in childhood, pretending he's young enough to still be doing this. To any outsider, it will probably look like he is either a very crazy or very caring teacher.

In spite of the weather warnings, there is a decent-sized crowd of assorted children ranging from toddlers to teens, as Jack always manages to scramble up enough believers for any such event. Some of Jamie's students are there, and (because first graders are still young enough to hero-worship their teachers) they rush over enthusiastically to give him tight hugs and ask to be on his team. The snowball fight breaks out soon after, and Jamie finds himself defending his little mob of snot-nosed kids from the opposing team.

"Watch," he teaches them, kneeling in the snow, "you have to throw higher now, because it's so windy." He flings a perfect snowball, which soars through the air to hit its target, a bulky teen who is hurriedly rebuilding part of their fallen fort.

Hailey Gruenig, a little redheaded girl who is one of his most unduly dramatic students, attempts a similar throw, but it falls a bit short. "Close—keep going, though."

He and Paul Pearson, his bespectacled little math whiz, manage to dig a decent trench for their fort just in time for Jack to flurry by and restock their snowballs. "Sweet throw!" Jack crows when Hailey knocks over a girl on the opposing team with hers. She beams at him.

"Mr. Bennett just taught me! I threw it really, really hard in the wind!"

Their small victories eventually crumble when soft-spoken Remi Broussard manages to convince all of them, including Jamie, to ambush the other team, resulting in a crushing defeat in which they are very nearly buried in the other team's snowballs (and Jamie has the suspicion that Jack might not only have tipped their opponents off, but that he might also have managed to slip an inordinate amount of snow down the back of Jamie's jacket while he was half-buried).

The fun only ends when Jack calls it off. The cloud cover, which has never truly left, begins to press down from above, darkening the skies into a thick blanket of grey. "Tell your parents to bundle up and stay in for the weekend," Jack reminds them all as they wave and wander off. Hailey blows him a little kiss, which he dutifully catches, grinning, as he turns back to Jamie.

They reach the grocery just in time for the first snowflakes to begin falling. By this time, the light from the corner store is bright against the dark skies above. Jamie doesn't waste any time gathering a small pack of bottled water and some extra batteries, as well as a few cans of various fruits and soups and some extra rock salt. As he steps into line behind all of the other worried last-minute shoppers, a sinking feeling blooms in the pit of his stomach.

He joins Jack outside the store. The frost spirit is staring determinedly at the massing storm clouds above, and it takes Jamie two tries to get his attention.

"How hard do you think it will be to get around tomorrow?" he asks Jack quietly as they head to put his supplies in his car.

Jack's eyes go distant in the way they often do when he considers his coming work. "Over a foot of additional snow," he says slowly. "Strong winds. Probably blackouts downtown near the weakened power lines. Why?"

"Just thinking about Pippa," Jamie remarks, feeling the car rumble to life as he starts the ignition. Jack used to tease him about Pippa when they'd first started dating at the start of last year, but the frost spirit does not joke now. He must catch the worry in Jamie's voice and the restless tapping of his legs. "She's downtown at Burgess Regional Hospital. And her car—well, it's a piece of crap, to be honest. Remember it, that old blue Honda?"

Jack nods sagely. "It'll be alright. She's probably in one of the safest spots—they'll have better generators there than anyone else in the city, so she can stay there at the hospital. Even overnight, if she needs to."

A weight lifts off Jamie's chest. "But still—"

"—and I'll keep an eye out for her," Jack adds, smiling, before Jamie can even ask. "Don't worry, Jamie. Pippa will be fine."

Jack rides with him back to his apartment to see him safely home in the growing storm, but his mind is clearly elsewhere. He stares out of the window the entire time, clutching his staff, and Jamie knows better than to try and talk to him when he is like this. As soon as the car pulls up to Jamie's assigned parking spot, Jack flies out of the door. "Stay home," he tells Jamie firmly. "I'll see you on the other side."

He is gone in a flurry of snow before Jamie can respond.

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The storm howls around Jamie's apartment that evening and all of the next day, and he has to pull blankets out of the storage boxes in his closet just to keep warm. The lights flicker two or three times, but the power never goes out completely, which means that he can do his lesson plans in front of the television.

When it finally stops that evening, everything outside Jamie's apartment is covered in white, and the snow is so thick that if Jamie wasn't familiar with the view outside his window, he might have had a hard time differentiating between cars, bushes, and trash cans that lay under the dusting of snow.

Jack will be completely worn out after this, Jamie thinks, realizing that it is only now that the frost spirit has really managed to outdo himself.

A vibration nearly startles him into dropping his hot coffee. The clamor rattles the silence of the room, the odd quiet in which the snow outside seems to swallow everything up, and he lunges for his cell phone.

It's Pippa. "Hey," he says, quashing his worry as he presses the phone to his ear. "How's your shift going?"

"It's not," she replies. "I'm at home."

"At home? But—"

"We were actually overstaffed," she explains before he can ask. "So they let some of us either stay in or head out this morning before things got too bad. And you know I don't live so far away—"

"So you left? In your car?"

He can hear Pippa's grimace. "I knew you'd say that," she says after a moment. "But there wasn't too much snow on the ground then, and even with the storm…Jamie, you wouldn't believe it if you hadn't been there, but it was almost like the snow just stopped when I came out. The whole way home, I expected to have to drive slow and squint, you know, like you have to in a blizzard. But it was crystal clear. Snow was falling everywhere else, but I don't think a single snowflake fell anywhere near my car."

Jamie is quiet when she has finished. A smile stretches across his face. Apparently he has been silent for too long, because Pippa's voice is uncertain when she speaks next. "It really wasn't so bad, Jamie. You worry too much, you know."

"No," Jamie replies quickly. "I'm sure you're right. I mean, I wish you'd have called, but still—sounds like you had a guardian angel or something…"

Pippa is all too eager to let the subject drop. They make tentative plans to meet as soon as possible once the roads are safe, and Jamie lets his exhausted girlfriend hang up to crawl into bed.

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Pippa is not the only one who's exhausted. That afternoon, as Jamie watches the snowplows scurry along the streets below, a gust of wind at his back warns him of Jack's arrival. The frost spirit pulls himself in through the side window and half-collapses on the floor. Jamie patiently draws the blanket around himself and leans over to shove the window down, but he leaves it cracked just enough for Jack's wind to whisper through.

"Busy day?" Jamie asks mildly, helping Jack to his feet. His friend is much colder than usual, which often happens when he strains himself. Usually, Jamie barely registers a slight chill to Jack's skin.

"Busy week," Jack counters, allowing Jamie to push him into the armchair. "The end part might not've been so hard if it weren't for your girlfriend," he adds pointedly. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to build up a good updraft-downdraft system when you're also basically trying to hold an umbrella over this one car driving like five miles an hour?"

"Pretty hard?" Jamie answers, amused, as he settles on his secondhand coffee table.

"Almost impossible!" Jack shouts dramatically, slapping his palms to his forehead as though to emphasize his words. He shakes his head at Jamie, adding seriously, "Your girlfriend's crazy."

Pippa only becomes "your girlfriend" when Jack is irritated about something. "Tell me about it," Jamie agrees, then freezes. "But don't tell her I said that, you know?"

Jack shoots him a look.

"Right, not that you would. And thanks anyway, Jack—I mean it. It helped a lot knowing you were there to look after her."

"No sweat," Jack replies, shrugging off the gratitude. "I wouldn't have let anything happen to her anyway. I mean, it's Pippa." He yawns widely. "Anyway, I've got a while before I'm supposed to be working over in China, and you owe me a good nap. Mind if I crash here?"

Without waiting for an answer, the frost spirit stretches out sideways so his feet dangle to one side of the armchair. Jamie is struck by the difference in their sizes: it has been ages since Jamie has been able to comfortably do something like that, long and lanky as he has become. For the smaller Guardian, though, the chair is the perfect size. Jack's eyes are beginning to settle closed as Jamie watches, and Jamie feels a momentary burst of affection for his longtime friend.

"Go to sleep, Jack," Jamie orders, moving Jack's staff to rest against the wall and out of the way. "Take as long as you need." He begins clearing all of the papers left over from his time spent planning lessons, and a thought occurs to him. "You know, Jack…" he begins slowly, and the frost spirit blearily opens his eyes. "I know it's a lot of work for you and all, but I think I really needed that snow day."

Jack closes his eyes again, but he's grinning. "I know, you idiot," he replies simply. "You're welcome."

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A/N: Should I have put up a warning for fluff? Anyway, I figured a little bit of fun was needed after those last two chapters. Plus, it's kind of fun to think about how Jamie starts to see snow days as he grows older. After all, does anyone get too old to appreciate a good snow day? :)

Special thanks to Drakonflight, who had the idea of Jamie telling people that Jack's a pilot. It certainly explains why his best friend is MIA so often...

As always, please review to let me know what you liked or didn't like. Constructive criticism is always appreciated!

Thanks for reading,

ket