"I meant what I said that night. Always."
Nathalie swallowed as Jack's crystal-ice eyes frantically bounded around her face, fearfully looking for any sort of anger or hurt. She would've thought that she would be angry at him for delving into her memory without permission, but really, she couldn't be. Nathalie had purposefully hidden their relationship from him for fear of the ultimate consequences, so in actuality, she deserved the transgression. Whether she liked it or not, Jack deserved to know everything there was to know about the depth of the love between them, and that they were doomed even in their second life. So, no, Nat's expression was not angry in the slightest… It was just sad- dismally, pitifully, heartbreakingly sad. Jack slowly lowered his staff to the ground, seemingly abandoning his frantic thoughts of running away.
He looked as if he were about to ask her why, but a small realization dawned on his pale features. Of course she didn't want to discuss it. Nathalie had died a brutal, horrible, unnecessary death. No one would want that memory relived. Yet, that wasn't the entire story; it was just a piece in the puzzling predicament that existed between the two spirits who couldn't be closer, but also couldn't be further apart. The soles of Nat's feet ground against the rough stone as she approached. With a guilty swallow, Jack's gaze dropped to the grass he was sitting on. Nathalie said nothing and did nothing, only eased herself down beside him and drew her legs up to her chest to dismally hug her knees.
"Why…?" the word finally breathed past the barrier of his lips, hanging in the air like the precarious ice crystals he formed on the eaves of houses. Nathalie drew in a breath before releasing it in a long, heaving sigh, closing her eyes as she tried to figure out the best way to divulge the entirety of the story.
"The previous Mother Nature told me that you and I would destroy one another, Jack." She opened her eyes to peer at him sadly. He didn't look surprised; likely, he had already figured it out himself at this point but had been desperately trying to deny it. "Hold up your hand." Jack did as bid, and Nathalie pressed her comparably smaller hand against his. Instantly, tendrils of ice began to snake across her palm and around her slender digits, patterns burning patterns across the sensitive skin; likewise, Jack's snow-white hand began to sweat and burn with pink fever. "We are polar opposites, two sides of a coin that must never face. If the two of us were to linger together for two long, we would forget ourselves and the world's balance would be disrupted… This is a measure that the Earth and the Man in the Moon set in place in order to remind us of our duty."
"That's not fair!" Instead of his hand flying away from hers, he stubbornly pushed her fingers apart to lace them together. Nathalie winced at the burning pain the ice wrought, but at the same time, she dreadfully cherished the feeling of his hand holding hers, so tightly, so insistently, like he was her lifeline. Bitter tears began to bubble up at the brim of her eyes. "It's not fair," he repeated softly. The cold was creeping up her wrist now, but Nat be damned if she were going to let go now. "I can't accept that, Nat, not after knowing it all, seeing-" The words choked in his throat as he clenched his teeth tightly. His gaze dropped down to their linked, ailing hands for a moment before meeting hers, gleaming, like sunlight reflecting on shards of gemstone ice. "There has to be a way." Nathalie wanted to believe so, too… But four hundred years of heartache and a millennium more was just too much. With a will hanging on by a thread, she forcibly pried her hand away from Jack's wrapping it in the fabric of her dress so it could recover from the freezing burns. She turned her head away, but only to spare herself the absolutely devastated look on his face.
"Neither of us may like it, but we cannot change that, Jack. The laws of nature cannot so easily be bent."
"Well, too bad, 'cuz I'm gonna bend 'em." Her mouth was open in shock as she looked at him incredulously; did he not know the forces at play? It was not such a simple matter as to declare it, but sure enough, his icy eyes were blazing with the ferocity of a thousand suns as he regarded her intently. "I mean it. I'm gonna find a way for us to be together this time. Don't give up on me, Nat." Nathalie's bottom lip wobbled precariously as an ugly sob threatened to spill out of her from the sheer amount of joy that burst inside of her at that moment. Crying out his name, she launched herself at him not caring of the pain that was to follow; she bowled him over onto his back as she threw her arms around his chest and heaved pitiful sobs into his ice-encrusted hoodie, releasing several lifetime's worth of pent-up misery and sorrow with every wracking wail.
The numbing chill that spread over her was nothing compared to the wrenching twisting wound that had ailed her for four hundred years. Nathalie for so long had convinced herself that it was never meant to be, that she should never approach him no matter how much she longed to, that it would be the death of them both. All it had taken was that simple declaration to send the castle she had built around her heart to shatter under the force of the bold battering ram, crumbling to pieces around her. As she fractured into pieces on top of him, Jack just whispered soothing words and lightly stroked her cascade of blonde hair, threading it with wires of ice. Though Nathalie longed to cry into him all day until she was spent, she knew neither of them could handle that, and so she settled for a few minutes. She pulled back still sniffling but trying to regain her composure, chips of ice fragmented from her frozen clothes. Jack gave her a wry, rueful smile as he lightly fanned his flushed face. They could talk all they liked about finding a way to coexist in close proximity, but it was clear that it was going to be a massive undertaking. It was then that Baby Tooth came wriggling out of his hoodie pocket, cheeping angrily that she had nearly been crushed under Nat's weight.
"I'm sorry, Baby Tooth. I didn't know you were in there," she apologized with a small giggle. The little bird creature huffed in derision but settled on her shoulder, giving her cheek a reassuring rub with her iridescent feathers. "Thank you. I feel much better now." It was true. They hadn't solved their problem in the slightest, but Nathalie felt like a massive weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The grass crunched under Jack's feet as he sat up, a frown now pervading his features.
"As much as we would like to take care of this now, there's still Pitch. He's the number-one priority."
"Right…" Incredibly, Nathalie had presently forgotten the matter of the dark man, though he had nearly succeeded in killing her only the night before. She compulsively rubbed her hands up her arms and looked down at the flowy fabric of her dress, swallowing. She had definitely underestimated Pitch. If he knew about the Earthsong, there was no telling what else he knew.
"Hey," Jack said. She felt his fingertips ghost across her cheek, leaving little sparkling ice crystals blooming like geodes on her soft skin, but he pulled away before he damaged her too much. The action accomplished its goal of gaining her attention, however, as her nervous eyes flickered upward to meet his. "Don't worry. Let's leave it to North and the others, okay? They'll find him." Nat's pessimistic dark side wanted to argue that Pitch had found her once already and escaped to boot, but the level of confidence in his gentle smile locked it into a little box and tossed the key into the raging sea. "Just… Let's just stay here and relax, all right?"
It was hard to do considering they burned each other literally each time they touched, but the temptation was still too much for Nathalie. After she nodded, he laid back into the soft springy grass with a smug grin, resting his hands behind his head with just enough room for Nathalie to nestle into the crook of his body without quite touching him. He sure was a sly boy. With a smile bordering between coyness and lasciviousness, Nathalie stretched out onto her side beside him, turning her head to rest just barely at the junction of his arm to his shoulder. Her keen green eyes did not miss the sharp inhale he took as her soft blonde hair brushed up against the sleeve of his hoodie. Though Nat ached to touch him, to flush her body against his and entwine their hands and simply savor his presence, that was a luxury not afford to her. A pauper of a love four hundred years late would have to settle with what she could obtain.
"Hey… Nat?" he asked after an eternity of comfortable silence.
"Mhmm?" Being bathed in the glowing sunlight in the small swathe of land by the rippling pond had lulled Nathalie into drowsiness. Her eyes fluttered away the encroaching sleep to see Jack peering down at her curiously.
"Could you tell me more about the Earthsong?" Ah, of course he would be curious. It wasn't like she had been given the time to elaborate, slowly turning into a Nat-cicle and all. She shifted her position such that she was lying on her back, one hand held up to tease around her locks of blonde hair while the other was pushed into the soft embrace of the sprigs of grass. Her emerald eyes mirrored the lazy clouds moseying along the sea that was the endless blue sky.
"Well… It is as I said. The Earth speaks in a language long forgotten by men; it has always been so. The Earthsong is ever-present in the world where spring and summer are in session. It is her song that I use to channel her energy and create life. It is not I power I possess inherently," she explained. "In fall, the plants begin to die, and the animals hibernate and prepare for winter, yes? This is because the Earthsong dwindles. The Earth no longer speaks to that part of the world, to usher in the winter that punishes man for their transgressions." She lifted her hands to begin kneading them together. "That is why I am much weaker during the fall, and completely powerless during winter. If I cannot hear her, I cannot channel her life force. Only upon the renewal of life does she begin to sing once more, and that is when I am able to turn winter into spring."
"That's complicated. I just wave the stick and boom!, ice and snow and wind." His abrupt and simple reply made Nat her give a piggish snort in laughter. He gave her a boorish look at her uncontained amusement, then smiled despite himself. He shifted his position a bit such that he was on his side now, head propped up on an elbow; they had flipped. "Hey, Nat? What happened to your predecessor? I thought if Mother Nature dies, the Tree of Life dies, and no more passage of seasons, right?"
"It is more complicated than that. If Mother Nature bequeaths her powers to another, then her death has no effect on the Tree of Life whatsoever. In regard to the Tree of Life 'dying,' perhaps I should have used a better term- the Tree of Life cannot die, truly. It is the Earth's hand, extending forth to balance the passage of time and evolution. It can be halted by Mother Nature's untimely death and will wither, but in time it will repair itself. However, that can take centuries in real time. There would be devastating effects on the world as we know it. Even if Pitch took an axe to the tree and hacked it to splinters, in time, it would reform anew."
"Several hundreds years is plenty of time for Pitch to get up to no good," Jack grumbled bitterly. His face took on a bright hue as if he had suddenly thought of something brilliant. "Hey, Nat- if you passed on your powers to someone else, we could be together, right?" He blinked at her when she laughed wryly.
"I wish things were that simple. I would revert to an ordinary human or fade from existence, whichever I chose… But I would no longer be immortal. I would grow old, and die, just like everyone else."
"Oh." Nathalie wished against everything that the solution was that easy. One lifetime would be enough for her… But Jack would remain a teenager forever, and she could never ask him to suffer through her death a second time. It would be blissful at first, but Nathalie would not be able to cope with growing older while Jack remained the same, either. His lips poked out as his frowned deeply, wracking his brain for a solution to their present dilemma. Nathalie smiled, just staring as the gears whirled in his white-haired head. He had always been so compassionate and selfless, and it was intriguing to see him riddling out the problem for her sake as much as for the satisfaction of his own selfish ends. While he was preoccupied with his brainstorming, Nathalie boosting herself up onto his arms, face drifting up to press a light, chaste kiss onto his lips. She felt heat blaze across her face as he blushed fiercely, and startled blue eyes stared hard down into her own amused green irises.
"I apologize. You just looked so cu- Oh!" She was interrupted as he skillfully maneuvered himself on top of her, hands planted on either side of her head and knees on either side of her chest, body hovering enough centimeters above her own to prevent any of the ill side effects. His smirk was positively intoxicating. Breathless though she hadn't even moved, she combed her fingers through her disarrayed hair, now the one who had a fire alighting her face. His playful expression instantly turned to one of dire seriousness.
"I mean it, Nat. I'm gonna find a way. I'm not gonna stop 'til I do." Nathalie smiled sweetly.
"Well, I suppose it is a good thing I am patient." He grunted in laughter, that cocky smile that Nathalie found so breathtaking creeping across his face again. The arms propped on either side of her head fell down onto the elbows, bringing Jack's face close enough for his lips to envelop her own. Nat's eyes fell shut like drawn curtains, wishing to commit the feeling of those soft lips over hers to permanent memory. One day, perhaps, he would be able to kiss her without the feeling of cold fire blazing across her lips, and wouldn't have to hover over her like a puppet suspended on strings, and could allow his hands to roam freely over her body…
One day, as fate would have it, was closer than they thought…