Warnings: Currently rated T for language, though liable to change in future chapters for dark imagery and mature content.
Disclaimer: I claim no copyright ownership to Rise of the Guardians or any recognizable characters depicted by DreamWorks, William Joyce, or other miscellaneous fairy tale creatures. However, the plot and original characters are my own.
"I can finally see it, now I have to believe
All those precious stories
All the world is made of faith and trust and pixie dust.
So I'll try, 'cause I finally believe
I'll try, 'cause I can see what you see."
Chapter Five
It was a wonder Max hadn't bolted down the hallway after hearing Alice's scream. She always said he slept like the dead, and from Anne's stories he'd always been a heavy sleeper. Still, in the back of Alice's mind, she wondered how he still managed to sleep through one of the biggest crises of her life.
Once Alice regained her bearings, her immediate reflex was to slam the door in the intruder's face. She did exactly that, then turned her back, leaning against the door with her arms spread eagle as she breathed heavily and tried not to panic. Someone had gotten into her house. Someone had broken into her new house after she'd only been there six days.
Something was wrong with that picture.
Aunt Liza had said she lived in a safe neighborhood. Low crime rate, never any serious news stories about the town. Alice even did her own research online. Realtor dot com was a liar. Four and a half stars her ass. She knew the price was too good to be true.
Alice's eyes darted every which way, trying to locate anything within arm range that could be used as a weapon. She settled for the mauve-colored lamp she kept at her bedside. Then she tried coming up with a game plan. She realized her phone was on the other side of the room and cursed beneath her breath. She needed to call the police, but if she stepped away from the door it'd compromise her safety. Could she dial 911 that fast before she got attacked? What if they had an actual, legitimate weapon?
Suddenly her eyes widened. There was nothing standing between the intruder and Max.
She threw the door back open, ready to barge down the hallway and break the lamp over the boy's head before he got to Max, but to her surprise he was still standing outside her bedroom door. If she had noticed a little sooner, maybe she wouldn't have collided with him and sent them both tumbling to the ground.
"What the—!"
The boy groaned as she landed on top of him, limbs flailing as she tried to push herself away whilst keeping hold of the lamp at the same time. Once she reclaimed her footing, she crouched defensively and held the lamp out as intimidatingly as she possibly could, shaking like a leaf.
"Who are you?" she tried to demand, looking about as threatening as a kitten. "What are you doing in my house?"
The boy groaned again, rubbing his porcelain-white forehead with equally pale fingers. Despite her panic, she noticed how frail and thin the boy appeared to be. She didn't allow her guard to drop, but she considered the possibility that maybe he was homeless.
He crawled onto his knees and Alice readied herself in case he tried anything funny. There was a question mark-shaped stick lying on the ground beside him that he must've dropped when they fell. She eyed it warily, wondering if he'd try to pick it up.
"Max's window was unlocked," he jabbed his thumb in the direction of the foresaid boy's room, still grimacing.
"Max's window…" Her jaw dropped and she felt rage boiling in the pit of her stomach, blood racing white hot through her veins. "You sick pervert!"
"No, wait, that's not what I—"
"What the hell is your problem? Who do you think you are?!" Alice flung the lamp at his head and he just barely dodged it with a yelp, bouncing up onto his feet and slamming into the wall closest to him as the lamp shattered where he once was.
"Are you trying to kill me with a pink lamp?"
"It's mauve, you asshole!"
She realized belatedly that she had no way to defend herself now that her only weapon was destroyed. She wasn't a fighter and not brave enough to suddenly try to be one, but she had nowhere to run. Next to her bedroom was a dead end and she had a feeling if she tried running back into her room, it'd be almost too easy for him to follow before she got the door shut again. It was probably for the best though, seeing as how she needed to keep the intruder in her line of sight in case he tried getting to Max.
The white-haired boy held out his hands again and though he'd only been trying to comfort her, she jumped back into the wall behind her anyway.
"Hey, let's just take it easy," he tried, voice lower-pitched than she would have assumed now that she allowed herself to listen. He didn't look more than sixteen or seventeen.
"I have nothing to steal," she said stupidly. It was like a bank teller saying they didn't have any money. There was always something to steal. The cleaning crew always stole her pens at work. People were crazy. "What do you want? How long have you been standing at my door? Were you watching me change?"
"If I had known you were changing maybe I would have dropped by a little sooner." Alice flushed from head to toe and glowered fiercely at the boy, eyes ablaze with fire. Clearly she hadn't appreciated his attempt at a joke. He threw his hands up defensively. "Kidding. Look, I didn't see anything. I just came to make sure you were alright."
Alice bristled. "Wow, thank you for the concern. Are you my neighbor or something? Couldn't you have done something normal and just knocked on the door? In the morning?"
"I'm not exactly your neighbor, okay? But earlier today when you were almost hit by the truck—"
"How did you know about that?" she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Who are you?"
The boy scowled and snapped, "If you would just shut up for two seconds, that's what I'm trying to tell you. I was there this morning."
She shook her head disbelievingly. "How did you find out where I lived? Have you been stalking me all day?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he muttered beneath his breath but she heard him anyway and narrowed her eyes. That weird feeling was coming back to her. "But I know Max."
She opened her mouth and clenched her fists, ready to try and throw punches whether she could actually dish out any real damage or not. When the boy realized he only succeeded in making her angrier he held his hands up higher.
"I'm not a pervert, okay? My name's Jack," he told her and Alice pursed her lips, glaring heatedly as she tried to come up with a way to get him to stop talking. One good swing and she might be able to knock him unconscious. "I was there earlier when you almost got hit by the truck. I saved you, I pushed you out of the way. Well, I didn't actually push you since I couldn't touch you," he added offhandedly, "but the Wind was able to knock you out of the way before me. I didn't mean for it to be such a close call, by the way. I panicked and forgot that since you didn't believe in me, I couldn't make any physical contact. Luckily I remembered the Wind could."
Alice stared dumbly at him for several seconds.
It took her brain some time to catch up to what he said and she didn't know if she wanted to laugh or knock herself unconscious instead. She didn't miss the way he referred to the wind like it was a physical being that he could talk to and interact with. Her eyes flitted from left to right, wondering if a ghost was going to materialize out of thin air and called itself The Wind.
She really needed to schedule time with a therapist.
"Are you on drugs?" Alice demanded.
The boy, 'Jack', furrowed his eyebrows and pushed himself away from the wall, finally kneeling down to pick up the stick. She inched further back into her corner, trying to keep a steady distance between the two of them.
"What? No," he looked aggravated, gripping the stick tight. "You adults are too much, no one wonder we have nothing to do with you."
"I think you need to go to a hospital," said Alice. "You need an MRI or something."
"You know," he completely ignored her and looked as though he had an epiphany. "At first it didn't make sense that you could see me, but after you so gracefully slammed me into the ground," he scowled at her for this, "I think I get why. You knew something was off about the truck. You knew something pushed you out of the way because I know for a fact that right before you passed out, you looked straight at me," Jack pointed accusingly at her and she swallowed thickly. "You may not have necessarily believed in me, but you believed that something saved your life."
His words were hitting too close to home. Any other time she would have assumed he'd been following her, spying on her conversations and storing them to use as ammunition later. But she hadn't told anyone this. No one had been there when it actually happened – her and the other people nearby were the only ones who lived to tell the tale. And the truck driver, hopefully. She'd probably never see those people again, unless he was one of them.
"Is this some sort of practical joke?" she asked. "Are there hidden cameras somewhere? Was this Max's idea? Max, I swear to God—"
Jack shook his head quickly. "Max has nothing to do with this. I'm not pranking you. I was there."
"That's impossible," she snapped. "I honestly don't know who you think you are but I need you to leave my house right now or I'm going to call the police. No," she quickly backtracked, trying to sound threatening again as she jabbed a finger in his direction. "I'm calling the police right after you leave."
"Alice!" Jack barked and she jumped, quickly putting her hand down. "Stop and think for a minute, will you? How could I know everything that happened unless I was there? Remember what happened when you hit your head. I know it had to have been painful but please, just think about it. What did you see right after it happened?"
Despite her better judgment she thought back to when she hit the ground. Everything had been blurry. Half of her vision was of the black shiny asphalt that she could vividly remember being cold as ice against her cheek. Right after her head slammed into the pavement (she grimaced, her forehead throbbing beneath the gauze at the reminder) she did remember seeing something. Or rather, someone. Her eyes scanned the boy's face in front of her, eyeing him warily from head to toe. The silvery white hair, the pale skin, the blue hoodie…
"This is a hallucination," Alice surmised, murmuring to herself. "It has to be. Some sort of post-traumatic stress. I'm probably not even awake right now."
Jack looked like he wanted to scream.
"I promise you're awake. You're awake and you're talking to me. The thing that saved you. I know Max has mentioned me before. Remember that day at the park when you got hit in the head with a snowball? That was me. You called me big-headed, if I remember correctly. Hurtful, by the way," he waved his arms around as if he could physically force her to understand. "Nerdy glasses ring a bell?"
Alice's breath caught in her throat.
No. No, absolutely not. There was no way. This was not happening. She was dead and this was somehow her afterlife, trapped for eternity with Max's imaginary friend.
"Come on, Alice," Jack tried again, pressing a pale finger to his temple. "Use your imagination for once."
She was silent again, long enough that Jack inched forward a bit as if afraid she'd fallen catatonic.
"Jack," she repeated his name softly. She remembered all the times Pippa and Max mentioned a certain winter spirt with the same name, and the one time she and said spirit had a brief conversation through Max. It was all exactly as he said, down to the snowball in her hair. No one else could have known about that. She drank in his figure once more, this time a little less skeptical. "You aren't actually Jack Frost," she hesitated. "Are you?"
Jack's shoulders dropped in what could have only been described as relief. A grin washed across his face, his pale features appearing much brighter than before as he leaned against his staff.
"The one and only."
Alice felt faint again. "Oh."
Her brain whirred to life, spinning out of her control after having been placed on autopilot for so long. She didn't know what to make of the thoughts racing around inside her head, trying to find an outlet to express all the emotion she was currently feeling. There was still a very real possibility that she had gone completely insane, though.
Legs feeling weak, she slowly slid down the wall behind her. She hit the ground with a dull thud, Jack peering down at her.
"I think I need to sit down," she announced belatedly.
Jack cleared his throat and knelt down before her, carefully inching his way towards her to make sure she was comfortable with being in close proximity of him. She clenched her eyes shut instead, distracted by the throbbing in her skull.
"Is there… anything you need?" he asked, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "An aspirin or something?"
"No, just give me a minute for my head to stop spinning."
The two sat quietly for a minute or two. Alice kept her eyes closed, willing all her thoughts to quiet down while also praying that the wound beneath her bandages would stop pulsating to the beat of her heart. It only contributed to the growing feeling of unease in her stomach and she really didn't want to throw up all over the spirit of winter. For all she knew, he'd curse Burgess in retaliation and cast a never-ending blizzard on the town.
She needed to cool down. "Can you get me some ice or something?"
She couldn't believe she was asking Jack Frost, who was practically a stranger to her not to mention imaginary not ten minutes ago, to wander through her house and into her kitchen to grab some ice out of her freezer. It was like the start of a bad joke.
Jack's lopsided grin returned, though it was a bit on the softer side as she frowned at him suspiciously.
"I can do you one better," he countered.
He gently lifted his hand to her forehead and she nearly protested until the icy chill of his palm shocked her into submission. The skin of his hand cast a comforting blue glow upon her face and a sigh of content escaped her lips and before she could stop them her eyes closed again, this time with relief.
She enjoyed the coolness of his hand in silence for a couple of seconds, feeling his thumb trail back and forth along her hairline and threatening to lull her to sleep. Alice resisted and opened her eyes when the throbbing had eased to a dull ache, glancing up at the boy who continued to watch her with an unreadable look on his face.
Part of her was waiting for the rational section of her brain to flicker back to life and force her to run the other way. Because in the moment, she felt strangely… not afraid. Her guard was still up, but she no longer felt the need to try and harm him in some way. He didn't seem all that dangerous, though sneaking in through children's windows at night made that observation debatable. But from what she could see, the only thing she really needed to worry about was his snark. And her own sanity, of course.
"If you're real," Alice began carefully. "Does that mean everything else is, too? All the fairytales we grew up with?"
"Every single one," Jack nodded, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he continued to kneel at her eye level.
She furrowed her brows. "Then why are we told they're not? Why does everyone say they're just children's stories?"
"Because they're adults," Jack stated. That had been the answer to a lot of her questions lately. Because you're a grown up, Pippa had said. You're an adult, Max said. As if it were a bad thing. Not like she could help growing up. "Adults don't like to believe in something that isn't scientifically proven as fact. They have to see it with their eyes, it has to be rational," Jack rolled his own eyes at this.
"Well I mean, that is the point of your eyes. To make you see," said Alice.
Jack gave her a pointed look. "Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't there."
Alice couldn't exactly disagree with him. It was selfish to assume that Earth was the only planet to home living organisms, and arrogant to believe that humans were the only intelligent lifeform in the universe. Which meant one would have to be extremely narrow-minded to believe that there was only one plane of existence. There were millions upon millions of documented sightings of otherworldly beings – ghosts, shadow people, etc. Hell, you could turn on the TV at any time and there'd be at least one show playing on the paranormal or extraterrestrial. It wasn't so impractical to assume that fairytale creatures weren't just myths.
"Grown-ups don't want to believe in something they can't explain," Jack continued, the temperature of his palm dropping ever so slightly as he spoke. "They pretend to believe in it until their kid's old enough and then they get sick of pretending, so they tell them none of it's real. Kind of a drag I guess, but it's not like it bothers us at all. We want as little to do with them as they do us." He smirked, "Our existences don't depend on their beliefs."
"It's kind of like that saying, 'If you show a caveman technology, he'll think it was magic. But if you show a modern man magic, he'll think it was technology,'" she quoted. She couldn't remember where she heard it but it couldn't have been more true. "Over time, people just kind of evolve with lesser open minds."
Jack smiled crookedly, making him seem a lot younger than he was. "Ain't that the truth."
Alice relaxed a bit against his hand, exhaling slowly.
"So, Jack Frost," she said quietly. He raised his eyebrow again. "You think my glasses are nerdy."
It was more of a statement than an actual accusation. Jack seemed taken aback, as if it were the last thing he expected her to say. Then he chuckled and shrugged an innocent shoulder.
"What can I say, you look like you should have your nose buried in a book."
"That's a bit of a cinematical stereotype, don't you think?" Alice asked, eyes narrowed and once again trying to discern if she should be offended or not.
Jack shrugged again, seemingly enjoying the somewhat lighthearted nature the conversation took as his fingertips dug playfully into her scalp, careful not to press into the wound and hurt her.
"I have a lot of time on my hands and it's easy to get into the movies for free when no one can see you," he waggled his eyebrows mischievously. "Not teasing you though, like I said the other day," he continued. Alice couldn't believe he had actually been talking to her. Vicariously through Max, anyway. "They look nice."
She decided to accept the compliment while she was ahead. "You also said I smell like candy canes."
Jack appeared sheepish, though not enough so to where he refused to admit it. She felt the cold radiate off of him in waves, and she idly wondered if that was his way of blushing. She felt proud to have embarrassed him, if that were the case. She'd been on the receiving end of embarrassment enough by him.
"I didn't actually expect Max to tell you that," he admitted. "It was just something I noticed."
"Well," she huffed out something akin to a laugh. "It's peppermint leaves that you smelled. It's in my shampoo. I don't actually carry around candy canes in my pockets."
"That's too bad," he hummed, lips quirking. "I like candy canes."
Edited 12/21/20
