A/N: And yes, people, this is our last chapter of the story, and our epilogue.

Hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.

Chapter 26
Epilogue

What with all the commotion and fuss going on, she had almost forgotten that the Winter Formal was right around the corner. Like, literally.

She had spent two more days in the infirmary as their best medics healed her badly broken bones using their advanced technology and means. And then she had a few days of physiotherapy, in which she needed to get the basic blood circulation back into her limbs. During this time, she had also resumed school, though she was still off missions until her strength was back. She hadn't realized just how much she missed school until she returned to it. Her next few days consisted of juggling school, getting updated on her assignments and training with Nightwing. It was almost a breath of relief getting back to her normal life. Well, as normal as it could get.

Dick had forced her into taking private sessions with him at the Mountain. Of course, just because she was recovering, didn't mean that he was going to go easier on her. In fact, he was just pushing her harder, giving her a harder training regimen than the rest of the Team, and making her stay back for "advanced training".

"We need you in top shape as soon as possible." He always tells her. "And the only way to get back your previous coordination is with training."

Her days mostly consisted of going to school till the afternoon, coming back to work on her assignments, and then heading to the Mountain for training. Every night, she would hit the bed, too tired to dream, almost like the way it was back on Paradise Island. It almost became a routine for a week and a half, after which Dick pronounced her fit to get back on missions, and she also found out that she had caught up with all her classes, and was right on the level of the class. She had been seriously elated that day on the prospect of getting to sleep an extra couple of hours. And mostly on the prospect of getting to dream again.

It was then that she had realized, from the posters set on the notice board, that the dance was literally three days away.

Cassie seemed pretty psyched about it, even though she wasn't going to be the one who was going to the dance in the first place. Apparently, the fact that this would be Skylar's first dance was really entertaining. And according to her "we already bought the dress. Would be a shame to let it go to waste." And hence, began another three days of torture as Cassie sent her to the spa, the salon and other such places she had no idea even existed. Dick had bemusedly put up with all her complaining at whatever Cassie was making her endure, and Tim had taken it upon himself to crack jokes about it all the time, which may or may not have led to some really unwanted thoughts of how satisfying it would be to punch him in the face.

She could expect no sympathy from Alex's side as well, as he himself was scrambling around, doing last minute preparations for the setup, as well as finding clothes that would look nice on him, and finding a date. He seemed so hung up over it that she had to laugh, even though he pretended to be offended for the rest of the day.

That set her thinking about their missing friend.

She had been highly aware of his absence ever since the day she returned to school and saw his empty seat during lunch. She had missed him during her time in the infirmary, and when she wasn't preoccupied, her thoughts would all revolve around him. She realized that she missed him terribly. And she had no idea why.

She thought that she missed him because now that things were going back to normal, she maybe desired for both her best friends by her side. He had become a part of her life, despite their relatively short time together.

She couldn't handle the thought that he had really left.

She kept going over her last conversation with him. "Trust me," she had told him. In hindsight, she kicks herself for it. That sounded so lame to her right now. Why couldn't she have thought of a better thing to say to him? Granted, she didn't know that it was the last time she would ever see him, but still…she should have said something better. Or rather, she should have at least gone with the heat of the moment and kissed him, and then deal with the consequences. Yeah, she should have pulled him in for a kiss, and then said something like, "Believe in me." Yeah, that sounded good. She could see that situation having played out in so many different ways, each one better than the last. If she had gone through with at least one of them, she would have better memory of her last meeting with him. If she had done at least one of them, he would have something to remember her by.

That had become a fear for her; what if he had forgotten her? She doubted she would forget him, but what with him being immortal, maybe she wasn't the only girl on his mind?

She realized that she didn't want to be forgotten.

With the days leading up to the dance, when she had less of a workload on her head, that was when she missed him the most. At the end of the day, he was her friend. She missed having his outgoing and fun-loving presence around. She missed his pranks and jokes.

She missed him so much it hurt.

His absence was even felt by Alex, who was pretty unhappy about losing an amazing guy friend. It seemed like there was a lot of boy-specific talk which she couldn't do with Skylar, but even he was starting to miss Jack's presence. His very presence had brightened up the room and caused a smile on their faces. He was usually the one to start a snowball fight. He was also usually the one who'd come bearing some random joke or fact which they wouldn't understand, hence causing all three of them to laugh at the ensuing awkwardness. Yep, Jack's presence was being heavily missed by both parties, and for good reason.

Moving on was going to be hard, but she told herself that she'd do it.

The night of the dance saw her dressed up in the blue dress that Cassie had bought for her, matching that with a pair of light blue ankle strap heels that were easy to walk in. Along with that, she also wore a simple chain with a dark blue pendant and earrings with blue feathers. The navy blue thin scarf wrapped around her neck was of her own addition, since one large scar on her neck hadn't been leaving and required a scarf to cover up for the dance. Plus, she felt that it enhanced the look of the dress, which Cassie agreed with. She chose to wear her hair down, choosing to not style it or do anything fancy with it, letting it fall in loose waves around her shoulders. The only thing she wore on her head was a blue headband that left her bangs out. She had opted for little makeup, wanting nothing more than a light eyeliner and lip gloss.

Although what she had done seemed pretty pale as compared to what some of the other girls had done, going to great lengths to not do anything useful to their looks, ranging from complicated, expensive dresses to equally complicated makeup and hair. This made her roll her eyes at the lengths her fellow students would go to. And then there were those who put no effort into how they looked, looking as if they had just gotten out of bed. She admired them, but her personal preference was putting in a little effort into looking neat and nice.

She stands beside the refreshment bar, sipping on some punch as she watches the kids getting it down on the floor. While she herself had no qualms about dancing (thanks to Jack), she wasn't ready to unlearn what all she had learnt to replace it with something completely new.

"You doing okay?"

She turns her head to see Alex sidling up to her. She could admit, he had cleaned up pretty nicely. He was dressed in a white shirt with dark grey pants and a dark grey blazer, with a steel grey tie. The tie somehow enhanced his red hair, making him look older. The suit also went really well with his lean but fit physique, making him a really good sight for the eyes. Even for the dance, he had left his hair in a messy manner, letting the disheveled mess work its magic. She mused about how different he looked, so far from the normal awkward teen he was during normal times, and much more like a grown up man.

And she certainly wasn't the only one who had noticed. Ever since he had stepped into the gym, more than a few girls, even the ones who had arrived with a date, had cast at least one look in his general direction. She couldn't blame them. And she felt a strange sense of pride watching him look so…so…grown up.

She nods in answer to his question. "Yeah, I'm fine." She tells him. "How about you? Enjoying the dance?"

He smiles. "Actually, a lot." He says. "Quite a few girls have asked me for a dance. Who wouldn't enjoy that?"

She smirks. "Keep this up and you'll have quite a few angry boyfriends on your tail." She points out. "They'll probably be pretty pissed off with you stealing their girlfriends away."

He chuckles. "Hey, what can I say?" he asks, putting his arms out in a mocking display. "Nothing suits me like a suit."

"You know what would suit you?" she asks. "A smaller ego."

"Don't try to deny that you love me."

The two share a laugh and she finishes her punch, placing the empty glass on the table. She eyes the rest of the punch filled glasses, and Alex watches her reach out for another glass. "Hey, would you like to have another dance?" he asks her.

She shakes her head. "You've danced with me more than I could ask for." Over the course of the two hours she had been here, she had stayed beside the refreshment bar. Alex had no doubt seen this, and had pulled her onto the dance floor at least five times in the past hour and an additional five times for the previous hour, not caring about the song, whether it was a slow jam or a dance number. While she had mockingly protested, she felt grateful for him for being such an amazing friend, and for not letting her stay beside the punch for the whole night. She felt thankful that he was her friend, but felt like she taking up too much of his own thunder. The guy had dressed up and was looking smashingly gorgeous; he could spend his time dancing with a wide array of girls and not be tied down with his average looking best friend.

"So, that's a no, then?" he asks, cocking his head to the side.

"Thank you, Alex." She says. "But I'm pretty sure there's another girl on that floor that you actually want to dance with."

"Who said I didn't want to dance with you?"

She avoids his eyes for a moment before looking back at him. "It's easy for you to be so free with the compliments, but I'm not your date for the evening. You've given me more than enough dances for the whole night, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. But I think it's time for you to have the next dances for the night with a potential partner." She gestured with her head to the few girls who had stolen a few glances at Alex. "Seems you have a few applications, Mr. West." She chuckled.

He chuckled slightly, but then his face went back to his grim expression. "I just don't feel right leaving you here alone."

"You're not." She says. "I'll find companionship soon."

"You better." He says. "Or I'm taking you on that dance floor and we're not leaving until the night is over."

She smiles at him. "Thank you, Alex." She tells him. "But it's your turn to enjoy this night."

He looks ready for a retort, but then a pretty girl, with about as minimal makeup as Skylar herself with gorgeous caramel blonde hair, wearing a simple and elegant light cream sleeveless dress with a skirt that reached her mid-thigh, passed by. Instantly, Alex stops with his mouth open, staring after her and struggling to get his words out. She then turns around and gives him a small wink as she walks into the crowd.

Skylar turns back to look at her best friend, who has the most priceless expression ever, and it makes her attempt to hold in her laughter as he gets shaken out of his trance.

"Alright." He says, looking at her. "You better be fine tonight." He looks up to catch another glimpse of the girl. "Be careful and have fun."

Saying so, he pats her on the shoulder and makes his way into the crowd. She watches him disappear and then sighs, downing her drink and getting another glass, seriously considering checking out the snack bar at the other end of the room to see if there was anything worth eating, or if all the good stuff was already gone. She then decides to have just one more glass of punch before going over to the other side.

Just before she finishes her tenth (?) glass of the night, she hears a few nearby girls chattering away about something. She rolls her eyes, thinking that it was nothing, when she turns her head and then staggers.

He was standing there, or rather making his way slowly through the crowd. He was dressed in a stark black suit, complete with black pants and a black blazer over a white shirt with a black tie. Surprisingly, the color really went well with his tan complexion and rich brown hair. Like Alex, he hadn't bothered to really try to tame his wild messy brown hair, leaving it just as she remembered it. His eyes remained the icy blue she had gotten so used to seeing. The suit fit his lean physique extremely well, she had to admit, making him look especially appetizing, and simply just accentuating his already handsome features. His smile was not helping things, just making him look that much sexier. Okay, she was running out of adjectives to describe him.

A few girls were already going after him, and she noticed that they were of the popular group, the very girls who had made so much fun of her when she first transferred last year. They draped themselves on his arms, purring and flirting with him so much that it honestly made her sick to her stomach. They had hardly glanced at him throughout the school year, and now suddenly he was the object of their affections? Just because he had come up looking super nice? It was so wrong on so many levels that she had to turn away from staring at him for a while to pretend as if she were putting her cup away.

When she looks up however, she finds herself face to face with him, and she sucks in a breath, because, well…

"Hey."

She forces a smile as his entire presence, not just his scent (which smelt like heaven, by the way), engulfs her entirely. Just having him standing so close was giving her a hard time, considering the fact that she realized that in no way at all did she ever move on. That was one thing, and now he had to come in looking so damn gorgeous…it made her legs feel kinda like jelly.

She still manages to form a sentence in her head. "Hey." She says, mentally kicking herself for not putting more effort into thinking up a better sentence.

He then smiles his devilish smile, making her feel a whole round of emotions that she had never felt before. "I realize we haven't been introduced properly." He says and he holds out his hand. "Jack Overland. It's a pleasure to finally meet you properly."

She stares at his hand for a moment while her scrambled mind puts together just what was going on. It takes her a few seconds to realize that he was saying the same words he had said to her the first time they had been officially introduced. It was a moment she dearly remembered; after all, it was the time she had finally met the one person who would capture her heart in such a way. She also realizes what he's trying to say, what with his hand stretched out like that and with the same introduction he had used when they first met. He was asking her for a fresh start, a clean slate, a new way to take their relationship.

She wasn't so sure what to say to that. Was she willing to really start over and maybe become serious with him? Was she ready to risk giving her heart to someone else, and risk them not handling it with enough care? Was she ready for that kind of emotional instability, where she thought with her heart instead of her head?

Then she recalled what she would always tell him when he would try to bring up the topic of their relationship. "Let's not worry about it and just enjoy our time together."

She decides to take the plunge.

She holds out her hand. "Skylar Grayson. The pleasure's all mine."

He smiles so widely you'd think that she had just handed him a Grammy or something. She musters up the courage to ask him, finally. "Jack, what-"

He cuts her off before she can say anything, and then she realizes why. Over on the dance floor, back in reality she tells herself, the first few bars of Lifehouse's "You and Me" were staring to play, signaling the start of another slow dance. She closes her eyes and listens as the band's lead singer starts to sing the first couple of lines of the song.

"What day is it, and in what month? This clock never seemed so alive…"

Jack holds his hand out to her in perfect gentlemanly fashion. "Would you like to dance with me?"

She nods, putting her hand in his. "Definitely."

She doesn't miss the glares and stares from the popular girls who had been trying to get Jack's attention less than five minutes ago. She fights the urge to turn back and smirk at them, and instead focuses on the guy leading her into a good place on the dance floor. As they go forward, she looks around, and finds Alex, dancing with the blonde he had gone after. The redhead made eye contact with her, and then saw who was leading her onto the gym floor. His mouth drops open for a second and he mouth the question "Is that…?" in her direction. She can't help but get a wide smile on her face as she mouths back "I'll tell you later."

Finding a clearing amongst the mass of bodies, Jack then turns to face her, and she becomes very aware of the fact that he was at least a head taller than her. But then he slowly pulls her toward him, and she feels like he was doing it on purpose, giving her a sense of security. She has a flashback to the Winter Festival, when he had guided her the same way. But this time, she seemed to instinctively know what to do, so he wouldn't have to be her coach all over again. She sees his hands going to her arms, so as to guide her, but then she moved them of her accord, putting them around his neck and bringing herself closer to him. Smiling, he then puts his hand on her hips, not putting too much pressure, yet still holding them in place.

"Follow my lead." He whispers to her.

She nods as he slowly guides them in tune to the music, bringing his head down so that they were touching foreheads. That intimate gesture itself seemed to tell her everything she wanted to know about his feelings. Looked like Dick was right; separation just intensified feelings. Spending a week and a half without his company had left her starved for his companionship. And now he was here, but she had no idea for how much longer. Should she just consume as much of him as she could? Or should she take it as slow as he was taking it with her? Should she let time decide, or should she be the judge?

He gives a small laugh. "I can hear the wheels spinning in your head, Skylar." He says. "You probably have a lot to ask me. Well, shoot."

It seemed that that was all she needed. She felt herself relax as she begins to start going through the hundreds and hundreds of questions rolling through her mind. She finally settles on one. Well, it wasn't exactly a question, more of what she had thought. As she waited for a few more moments, her urge to open her mouth grew. She needed to say it. She needed to see what he would say. She needed to know whether this was the last time she would ever see him.

"I…I thought you left." She says, finding her voice choked up.

He takes a deep breath. "I know." He softly says. "I'm sorry. I was supposed to leave originally." He tells her. "But then I realized that I couldn't leave."

"Why?" she asks, keeping her voice low so that only he could hear her.

"Because of you and Alex." He says. "The two of you made me feel human after almost 300 years. I never knew how much I missed being a human, until I met you two. And after everything…well, I just couldn't leave." He looks up at her. "I realized that what I most wanted was to be human again, even if it was for a short time."

"So, what did you do?" she asks.

"I went to the Man in the Moon." He says. "I asked him to make me human again, for a short while. I wanted to experience life. I wanted to regain that feeling of being alive."

"And…?"

"He surprised me." She raises her eyebrow. "Apparently, the reason he sent me down to you guys was to feel human again. He had been counting on me asking him to make me human again." He pauses to take a breath and she patiently waits for him. "He's given me a temporary life. I can be human for a short period of time, sometime till my late twenties or mid-thirties, I'm not sure. But that was more than I had expected."

She fights to put down the emotions threatening to clog up her throat. "So now…"

"I'm here to stay." He tells her. "At least for a while."

She doesn't resist the smile that pulls at the corners of her lips after that. "Wait…can you still-"

"-be Jack Frost?" he completes. "Yeah. I can switch between my winter spirit and human personalities. If I have to work with snow, then I'll have to be Jack Frost. However, my human body will still age up just like everybody else's."

"So…" she pauses for a moment, looking down to hide her enormous smile. "What does this mean? For us, I mean? Where do we go from here?"

"I don't know." He says. "But I do know one thing; thinking too much about it could leave us in a very awkward position." She blushes when she realizes that he was quoting something she had once told him. "So, I suggest we don't think about it, and just simply take it as it comes."

She laughs, and feels a sense of relief settle in her heart. Despite all the questions rolling around, the questions that needed to be asked and the things that needed talking about, she got the sense that somehow, everything would work out just fine. Somehow, they would all be alright.

They continue to dance to the song's chorus, which she sings to herself in her head. "Cause it's you and me, and all of the people and I don't know why, I can't keep my eyes off of you…"

She begins to feel his icy blue gaze on her, and even though she had caught him doing that so many times, she still couldn't get used to it. She notices that his gazes have been getting bolder. Before, she would find him accidentally staring at her, quite innocent, actually. But now, his gazes seemed to stare into her very being, and she felt like she was being stripped down, all her secrets and thoughts out in the open. She felt like she was completely exposed in his eyes.

"You're staring." She points out.

"I know." He says.

She doesn't know why, but she suddenly feels the urge to do something. So, she leans up and embraces him, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck. He complies with a soft smile, pulling her close and they simply hold each other, reveling in the presence, company and comfort of the other. For her, this was the best thing. She had never felt so secure in her whole life.

"Will you always be there?" she asks him.

"Yes." He says. "I'll always be there, even if you can't see me. I promise; I'll be your Guardian Angel."

She finally lets the tears she had been holding back fall, and she tucks her face into the crook of his neck, feeling so happy to finally let it out. She felt so happy and so contended. She wished this would never end.

"What day is it, and in what month? This clock never seemed so alive."

A/N: Yep, extra-long epilogue, because I felt like you guys deserved it (and also because I was too lazy to split it up into two more chapters). In a previous chapter, I had made a mention to the school dance, and it might not seem so important, but it is an important part of the story; the time when Jack and Skylar finally reconnect. Writing this was the best part of the entire thing, because I had this very scene in my mind when I had begun to write this story. And now, here you have it, finally!

This isn't going to be the end of Jack and Skylar's story, because I have a sequel in mind. Even though in this scenario I don't really do sequels (when the story seems to be over), but this idea has been gnawing at me for days and I've begun to put it down. It can just be seen as another story in their life, mainly because I've thoroughly enjoyed playing with these two characters. I will do my best to make the sequel seem like a, well, like a sequel. Like a continuation of the story, rather than a forced entry to squeeze out some more views or reviews. And just so you're prepared, the next story will pick up on elements from the Guardians of Childhood books.

Hope you've enjoyed reading this story as much as I had writing it.

Please leave a review if you liked it.