Feeling very much on a Rise of the Guardians kick, so here we are.
To the best of my very limited knowledge, Japan does not have an analogue to Jack Frost in the sense of a seasonal spirit that brings or evokes winter. There's Yuki-Onna, of course, but she's more the disastrous consequences of bad winter weather and being unprepared for it, not a harbinger of winter itself. Since Rise of the Guardians is heavily American mythology-biased, I am making the gentle assumption that all spirits are either universal unless otherwise explicitly stated and Jack Frost is Jack Frost, and Grandfather Frost (Russia), Father Frost/Jokul Frosti (northern Europe), Frau Holle/Old Mother Frost (Germany), and any other herald-of-winter spirit associated with ice and snow across the world, or spirits only have influence in areas where humans have a cultural belief in them. So for example, Jack could be every spirit of winter in the world, except the ones in areas that don't have snow and ice, and he just uses or was given different working titles in different areas, or he is only one winter spirit among many and they all work in areas that humans believe in them. Or it could be both: a highly holiday-biased, cultural spirit like the Easter Bunny might not be universal, but someone who's a force of nature (which is universally experienced) like Jack may be.
The assumption of this fic is that now Jack has stabilized his power and belief base, he's slowly spreading his influence across the world and checking each new place to make sure there isn't a winter spirit there already, to see where he'll be needed.
Yōsei also essentially means "bewitching spirit," and is generally considered synonymous with the English fairy. Rika is using it in the modern sense, which indicates a spirit from Western folklore.
June 7th, 2020
Hinamizawa was gilded and frosted with ice, a wonderland of glittering snow and gleaming white that furred the thick pine branches and piled in enchanting heaps all along the mountainside. Rika Furude, a little girl of only nine years old, sat at her windowsill, swirling a goblet of wine in hand.
Her parents had been killed this summer, and she waited with all the quiet, weary patience of the immortal for the next summer, when Satoko would move in and she would not live in this empty shed alone.
Rika took a sip of her wine. If he kept to his usual schedule, this would be very soon.
Sure enough, a breeze, cold and icy, whisks across the yard, and she continues to gulp, seeking the warmth that spreads from her core when the alcohol hits it.
"Uh, is that wine?"
Rika looks up as she lowers her glass, and sees a strange sight.
There is a boy sprawled along a thick branch opposite her window, cheek propped up on his hand, elbow against the branch of the tree, his whole skinny body lying lengthwise along the branch. His other arm dangles down, holding something that looks a bit like a European shepherd's crook, the bark veined and glittering with ice in its every crease. His simple blue hoodie, his brown trousers bound at the ankles by string, all of it is caked with more frost, sprawling in patterns around his shoulders and dusting the folds near his feet. His hair is a pure, glimmering white, and his eyes are shocking blue.
"You're a yōsei." she says calmly, raising a single brow.
He blinks a little, like he always does. "Uh…yeah. Yeah, kid. Er, well, I am now."
The white-haired boy shifts a little, swinging his legs down to sit upright on the branch like it's the most comfortable thing in the world, clutching his staff with both hands as he idly swings his feet.
"I'm kinda new around here." he explains, like he always does. "This place has got a ton of folk spirits, so, well, you guys don't really need me. Not yet, anyway." He abruptly holds up his hands, one spread open like he's held at gunpoint as the other grips his staff. "And I, uh, I don't want to step on any toes. You guys have so many people here, I'm still trying to get names straight. Yuki, er, Yuki-chan keeps everyone in line, more or less, at least as far as the seasonals go, but, uh…"
He trails off and lowers his hands, leaning forward a little as he abruptly refocuses on what Rika is doing.
"You do know that's bad for you, right?"
"I'm aware." Rika replies flatly, swirling the wine in her glass a little. "And you are?"
"Oh!" The boy hastily stands up, then performs a sweeping, fluid, overdramatic bow atop the branch, which doesn't even quiver under his weight. Rika has good reason to believe he doesn't have any. "My name's Jack Frost. As far as Westerners are concerned, I'm the Spirit of Ice and Snow, Herald of Winter, and Guardian of Childhood Fun. And you are?"
"Rika Furude." she says. "Priestess of Furude Shrine, last daughter of the Furude branch of the Three Families, and alleged reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama."
Jack frowns a little as he straightens up from his bow, eyebrows wrinkling in an oddly birdlike expression of puzzlement.
"Haven't met anybody like that here yet. What does Oyashiro do?"
"Oyashiro-sama is the local deity." Rika explains, and he "ah"s softly, just like he always does.
"That explains it." Jack Frost says to himself, nodding slowly. "Local. Not a nature spirit? Nothing to do with the seasons?"
Rika shakes her head.
"Yeah, I wouldn't have met 'em. I'm still working out if someone else does my job here or not, and I figured, hey!" He sweeps his arm out at the glittering, picturesque landscape with a wild, lazy grin. "Best way to do that is to do the job myself, right? Looks cool, huh?"
He bends his legs and jumps, and an abrupt blast of icy air carries him until he is perched on the windowsill right next to Rika, turning to point excitedly with his staff down the mountain slopes. From this close proximity, the temperature around them plummets, even as Rika curls around the fragile bubble of alcohol-infused warmth at her core, legs scrunching up closer to her chest. Frost crystals creep outwards from his bare feet where they are carelessly braced against the sharp divots of the window frame, uncaring of physical discomfort, and Rika's breath is clouding the air even more sharply as she sees more feathery patterns creep down the glass in his proximity.
"You wanna go out and play? I promise we won't wake anyone up."
"There's no one to wake up." Rika says, and watches his shoulders tense, just like always.
"…oh." Jack Frost says as looks at her slowly, just like always. In his inhumanly keen blue eyes, there is a quick flicker of guilt: his expressions are always as clear as crystal, so fluid and easily to read. Everything he thinks rises up in those expressive eyes, and Rika hates it as much as she envies it. "Uh, here."
He reaches out, and Rika sighs a little as his free hand gently cups around her goblet of wine, frost-flowers blooming downwards on the glass as the deep red liquid freezes solid. Jack gently tugs it out of Rika's hands, and she lets him, watching as he hooks his staff around the lip of her window and leans back into her room, his slender frame stretching with weightless impossibility as he contorted to reach out and, upside-down, set the glass on a table, before pulling himself back to sit upright.
Jack Frost looks at her again, and those deep blue eyes are utterly without guile or patronization.
"You wanna talk about it?"
Mechanically, Rika does. She tells him about her dead parents, her despair, her resignation, and Jack Frost listens with a furrowed brow as he always does. She has always wondered why this always seems like the first time to him, the first winter of 1981, when in nearly every cycle so far, she has stayed up this one particular winter's night and waited for Jack Frost to sweep through by chance in his whirlwind patrol of the region.
Its just as annoying, in different ways, as it is with her friends. She can't count the times she's told him her problem and he's promised to fix it, to talk to North, to Father Time, to anyone, and she can't count the times she's woken up in a new fragment and waited –in vain– for his news. Jack Frost would come a winter's night, drawn to her belief, and he would see her with new eyes every time, and he would not even know her.
But he can understand. At least Rika can speak with others: Jack Frost lived 300 years as a voiceless ghost, and even now, children can only rarely see him. On the evenings they meet, Rika and he talk about things, and a strange, brief bond grows between them before Rika dies two years later and the whole world is turned back to the beginning. They are eternal, and unlike Rika, Jack Frost does not have a promised end. He will go on, forever, because he is winter now, and winter cannot be killed.
That is something he explains to her, in one fragment. How he and the other spirits were now part of the natural world, immortals in truth instead of reincarnating as she was. They would persist, forever, in one form or another.
He explains, they could be bound, as his archnemesis turned begrudging-ally Pitch Black had once been bound, fixed in the bowels of the earth by a dagger made of crystalized tears thrust through his heart for countless centuries before humans had even evolved.
They could be subsumed, he explains, as the Sandman was enveloped by Pitch Black in his mad grab for power.
They could be forgotten, he explains with a shiver, forgotten completely by humans and slowly by their fellow spirits, until they became a voiceless, invisible ghost even to their own kind.
But die –no. No, they could not die.
Faint, flickering, and fading as it may be, Rika does have a light, an end at the end of her tunnel. Jack Frost would endure forever, and the weight of those oncoming centuries, millennium sinks his shoulders down sometimes when they talk, when she explains the weight of her own time and his eyes turn towards the future.
Theirs is an odd sort of friendship, but it is a friendship built on mutual experiences and shared suffering, and that is why Rika indulges in this conversation cycle after cycle, even though she had long ago decided that there would be no help from the spirits of childhood.
11.18 AM, USA Central Time