My goal is to have this up on November 7th (my birthday). Then I'll have a couple days to geek out about the new Thor movie. Then I'll have to start prepping for Frozen and The Day Of The Doctor (I'm not sure which one I'm more excited about).

For Ariel and Jim, I tried to combine pieces from both their movies for how they met. Including the fork. Poor Jack…

Among The Stars

Chapter 27

"You've gotta be kidding me," Jack said – again. He looked between Jim and the red haired mermaid, whose tail had vanished when her green scales fell away to reveal legs. Jack was still trying to process that one, even now the three of them were seated at a thick slab of a wooden table in the inn's kitchen.

The mermaid, Ariel, wore the shirt Jim had taken off and offered her, and the fabric practically drowned her tiny figure. Even with the cuffs rolled back twice, the sleeves covered her hands, which were currently wrapped around the mug of hot chocolate in front of her on the table. When they'd gotten back to the inn (a wordless walk up the steps) Jack had needed to do something to calm his racing thoughts. Three mugs of hot chocolate had been the result, though the state of his thoughts hadn't improved noticeably.

"How does this happen?" Jack muttered, running his hands over his face. Someday, he hoped to understand how he always ended up in the middle of world changing events. He could never land on a planet to find the excitement was on a different continent. No, without trying he always ended up in a place at a time, just as the disaster started, and around the people the disaster was centered on.

Like now – which brought his attention back to the couple sitting across from him.

He looked through his fingers at Ariel, whose wide blue eyes wandered around the kitchen, drinking in the myriad of details around her. She fidgeted in her seat, as though she wanted to get up and explore. Jack had already had to swat her hand away from the stove while he had made the hot chocolate, when she'd reached for the flame in the burner.

Jack shook his head. "This is ridiculous."

"I don't see the problem," Jim said. "My girlfriend is a mermaid. Why is that such a big deal?"

Jack grimaced at the question, because he realized he didn't really have the answer. He wasn't sure what the problem was, only that there was one, and it wasn't going to be pretty when it came out. But riddles weren't answered, and he knew Jim wouldn't listen. "It's… complicated."

"Why?" Jim asked, tone saturated with challenge, glaring at him.

It took all Jack's self-control not to glare right back. He was pretty sure he could have stared Jim down. But at the moment he wasn't in the mood. Not with the pressure building in the back of his head. Instead, he looked back at Ariel… only to find he wasn't sure what to say.

"Ariel, right?"

She nodded. "And you're… Jack?"

"Jack Frost." Not that it mattered.

"You must be a warrior," she said, leaning toward him across the table with a child's wide eyed wonder. North would like this one…. "Are you the guard of this place?"

Jack blinked. "What?"

"Your gauntlet," she said, gesturing to it. "In Atlantica, only the royal guards wear gauntlets."

Jack looked down at the gauntlet on his left forearm. He ran his fingers over the cool metal, tracing the snowflake – the emblem of the Winter Territory –embossed on the front. In a way, it was right. The snowflake marked him as the guardian of his territory. Not that he was doing a very good job of that, thousands of light years away. "That's complicated too."

"Jim says that a lot too," she said, her nose crinkling as she turned back to her hot chocolate. Jim rolled his eyes. She was unbelievably cheerful for four o'clock in the morning. "Why is everything so complicated for humans?"

"Because we say 'complicated' when it's hard to explain," Jack said. "A lot of things are."

"I don't think so."

Jack inclined his head slightly, admitting she was right. "Or, when we don't want to explain."

"Which one is it now?"

"I don't want to explain my past," he said, tapping his gauntlet. "Why your relationship is a problem is beyond my ability. Especially this early in the morning."

"Hmm." She took a sip of her hot chocolate.

Jack rubbed his face again. Her cheerfulness was reminding him that he was already exhausted. The pain in his head was growing, which certainly didn't help the matter. She was so expressing, her face shifting with the slightest change in her mood, like a young child. It was a dizzying array.

"How old are you? Twelve?"

"I'm sixteen," she huffed.

In that huff, he saw a flash of Merida's stubbornness. Maybe it was a redhead thing.

"Right. Sixteen." Not a good age, if he remembered correctly. He seemed to recall Aster hurling the word 'brat' a lot when he'd been sixteen. It was the age of being convinced you understood the universe better than anyone else – especially anyone older than you.

Ariel bounced back quickly, her smile returning. "Where are you from?"

"Warren."

"Where's that?" she asked.

"Hand on," Jim said, at the same time. "Warren? As in the Warren?"

"Yes, the Warren," Jack said, wishing he had thought more before he'd answered. He looked back at Ariel. "I don't mean to be rude, but how do you have legs? The mermaids on Warren can't change."

"There are mermaids on your world?" she asked, face lighting up with curiosity. "I thought we were the only ones in the galaxy."

"I've heard about them on a few worlds, but not many," Jack said. "but, your legs." He made a mental note that she was easily distracted.

"We chance as soon as we dry off after we get out of the water," she said. "It's actually getting out that's hard." Her nose wrinkled again, and he realized it was an expression of dislike – for things like the word 'complicated' and trying to get in and out of the ocean with a tail.

"And you'll change back as soon as you're wet?"

Ariel nodded. "The mermaids on your world don't change?"

He shook his head. If he were more awake, he would have been tempted to splash her just to see what would happen.

"What about you two?" he asked, gesturing at them. "Do I want to know how this happened?"

Jim glanced over at Ariel, who just looked back at him wide eyed. After a moment, he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

"A few months ago I was, uh… I flew my sailor over restricted space, and the cops saw. I mean, it shouldn't be a big deal. It's an old construction site that was abandoned, or something. It's not dangerous, I guess it's just private property or something. No one got hurt, and it's not like I broke anything." There was an unspoken "this time" at the end that weighed heavy in the air.

Jack slumped in his seat, almost wishing he hadn't asked.

"I flew out over the ocean to lose the droids. Just as I started to swing back around to come home, something went wrong with the engine and I crashed into the water. I passed out, but Ariel swam me to shore."

Jack glanced at the mermaid with a glimmer of admiration. Small as she was, she didn't look strong enough to accomplish that.

"She left just as I started to come to, so I only caught a glimpse of her, so at first I thought maybe she was a dream."

And this was the part where it turned into a love story. Jack slumped a little further in his seat.

"The next day my sailor was on the beach, and I knew the tides couldn't have washed it up. I would catch glimpses of her from the corner of my eye, then I started finding things on a small ledge on the cliff down by the beach – large shells, an old fork. Then one day I found her hiding behind some rocks. The tide had gone out, but there were people on the beach so she was scared to make a run for it." Jim shrugged. "We've been meeting up on the beach for the past few months."

Jack looked at Ariel. "Why a fork?"

He had heard of some strange courtship rituals (he was still trying to figure out what the big deal about flowers was), but he was fairly sure a fork was the strangest yet.

She shrugged. "I liked it."

"You liked it," he repeated, blinking as he tried to comprehend that. "A fork?"

She nodded. "I found it in an old shipwreck, and I liked it."

"So you just left things you liked, hoping you'd get his attention?"

She nodded again.

Jack stared at her from a moment, but realized it actually made sense – in a strange way he couldn't explain. He shook his head and leaned back.

He was having a hard time seeing what the problem was. Two teenagers shouldn't be enough to warrant Eris' attention.

"We only get to see each other a couple times a week." Jim glanced out the window, to where the sun was starting to peak above the horizon. "And now she has to go back soon."

"No."

They both looked at Ariel."

"I'm not going back," she said, tone resolute.

That, Jack realized, could be a problem.

#

Jack opened the door as quietly as he could, but Hiccup still lifted his head from his pillow to look at him through heavy lidded, blurry eyes.

"Jack? What are you doing up?"

"Hoping this is a bad dream," he muttered going back over to his own bed and flopping into it. His head was throbbing, and all he wanted was to sleep and wake up to find that everything since they'd left Caledonia had been just a dream. "But I doubt it."

That would be too easy.

Rolling away from the window, he pulled the blankets over his head to block out the growing light coming through the glass.

#

"Look who finally decided to rejoin the living."

Jack glowered at Hiccup (which quickly wiped the grin off his friend's face) and practically fell into a chair at the table Hiccup and Merida were already sitting at in the inn's dining room. He was nowhere near ready to be awake, and all he wanted to do was crawl back into bed and continue to wish this was all a bad dream. He wasn't even sure why he'd gotten up, he wasn't even hungry enough to think maybe it was the thought of breakfast. Actually, the smells coming from the kitchen threatened to turn his stomach.

And his head still felt as though it would split apart. The clatter of cutlery on ceramic plates, and the buzz of conversation from the other tables was no helping in the slightest.

"You okay?" Hiccup asked.

Jack pushed aside the plate in front of him, shook his head, then rested his head on his forearms.

"Was I dreaming, or did you come in at four in the morning?"

"I wish you were dreaming," Jack muttered. He picked up the fork, turning it over in his fingers as he tried to figure out why anyone in their right mind could find the thing fascinating.

"What were ya doin' at—"

Merida stopped, and all three of them looked over as a small figure came toward them. Well, Hiccup and Merida looked. Jack glanced at the red head just long enough to see who it was, then buried his face in his arms. There went any last hope of it being a dream. Not that he'd had much.

"Here you go, Jack." She set a glad of water on the table beside him. Her voice was insanely cheerful, stabbing into his head like a spike.

"Thanks, Ariel," he sighed (because he had a feeling that ignoring all Toothiana's lessons about courtesy would just make his headache worse at the moment). He lifted his head so he could take a long drink, in hopes that maybe his headache was induced by dehydration. The ice water slid down, cooling the inside of his throat so fast a shiver rippled up his spine.

"Can I get you something to eat?" she asked.

He glanced over, and saw she wore a white apron over a simple blue dress she had gotten from somewhere. Somehow, she had gotten the waitress position Sarah had mentioned the day before. Well, there went that idea for getting Merida off the ship.

"I don't care," he said, in response to her question. He pressed his wrist to the bridge of his nose, in hopes of easing some of the pressure behind his eyes.

"O-okay." She nodded and went back to the kitchen.

"How'd ya know her name?" Merida asked, clearly suspicious.

"She's Jim's girlfriend," he said. "And they're the reason my head feels like it's about to explode. Why do I always end up involved?"

Hiccup and Merida didn't answer, just looked down at their plates.

Jack buried his face again – the sunlight coming through the windows was starting to hurt his eyes. The only thing that could make this morning worse was if Eris showed up to 'check on his progress' as she said, as though she were some kind of supervisor. Thankfully, she couldn't enter a planet's atmosphere, so he was safe from that.

"So that's the mermaid?" Merida asked suddenly, her voice low enough it wouldn't carry beyond their table.

Jack nodded as best he could without lifting his head from his arms.

"If she's a mermaid, where's her tail?"

"They change, apparently," he said. "I couldn't sleep last night so I went for a walk, and found them on the beach. So, I'm guessing they're the 'forbidden love' Eris mentioned."

"What's so forbidden?" Hiccup asked.

"If I knew, maybe my head wouldn't hurt so bad," was all Jack could say. He couldn't even bring himself to apologize for the edge in his voice.

"I'll be right back," Merida said suddenly after a moment.

Jack cracked his eyes open to watch her stand up and walk away, but once she left his line of vision he didn't know where she went, and he closed his eyes again.

They were silent, save for the sound of Hiccup eating – Jack couldn't have moved if he wanted to. And he couldn't even find the will to want to. Not when his head felt as though it would shatter if he moved it too much. And it went like that for an hour or two – that was how it felt to Jack, at least. Though in reality it was just a couple minutes.

"You're not dying, are you?" Hiccup asked.

"I don't think so," Jack said. "My head just hurts."

"You sure?"

"No." That was a bit of an exaggeration. But he could barely move, and the pain was so much he couldn't imagine it ever abating.

"I have to go check on the ship," Hiccup said.

Jack waved a hand, gesturing him for him to go. "Have fun."

"Are you gonna be okay?"

Jack groaned noncommittally.

"Call me if you need help, okay?"

He waved his hand again. Talking was taking too much energy that he didn't have.

With his eyes still closed, he heard Hiccup hesitate for a minute, but eventually he walked away, footsteps receding. And Jack was left alone in the half full dining room, with nothing but the thoughts in his pounding head to keep him company. Not very good company, either. Idly he wondered where Merida had gone, more because he kind of wanted her to come back than because he was worried she might get in trouble. Having her there would be better than sitting alone, even if they didn't say anything.

With each passing moment he was feeling more pathetic.

He was just starting to wonder why he didn't pick up the pieces of himself and go upstairs, and crawl back into bed. It was an appealing prospect. But when his brain sent out the suggesting, his limbs sent the message back along with a refusal.

Something landed on the table harder than he would have liked, the vibrations passing through the table and to his brain.

"Ow."

"Drink this – it'll help," Merida said.

Jack cracked his eyes open to look at the mug she had just put down. From this angle, all he could see was delicate wafts of steam rising above the lip of the mug, before dissipating into the air. He started at that for a moment, transfixed by the movement of the steam, before he looked at Merida. Her expression reminded him a little of Toothiana whenever she had given him some kind of medicine. Though Merida lacked Toothiana's motherly nature.

"What is it?" he asked warily. He didn't feel like going to all the effort of lifting his head off the table only to find out she'd poisoned him.

"Tea," she said. "My mum makes it for my dad whenever he drinks too much."

"I do not have a hangover," he snapped, a little offended.

"It'll still help."

Jack continued to stare at it, debating if he wanted to drink it or not. He was leaning toward not.

"Ah, stop bein' such a babby," she said, with a roll of her eyes. "I didn't poison it, if that's what you're afraid of."

That was enough to make him lift his head carefully from the table and pick up the mug. He took a cautious sniff and wrinkled his nose at the thick, bitter scent that met him. But Merida was watching him, a challenge in her quirked eyebrows, and he wasn't about to back down from that. He took a cautious sip, careful not to take too much of the hot liquid into his mouth.

He was glad, because the herbal bitterness set every taste bud on his tongue on edge, and it took a considerable amount of willpower to swallow it, rather than spit it back out. Even once it was down, he had to cough to clear the passage ways in his throat.

"Are you sure that's not poison?"

"Quite yer whinin'," Merida said, but she chuckled as she resumed her seat.

Jack looked into the mug of dark brown liquid, and took a deep breath as he braced himself to take another sip. It was still bitter, but this time he was ready, so it was bearable. "What is it?"

"Not sure," she admitted. "My mum mixes it herself. I took some when I was gettin' ready to leave."

Nodding, he took another drink. Still awful, but it had a floral aftertaste that wasn't so bad.

"Can I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Why did you leave?" he asked, leaning against the back of his chair, now that his head was already off the table, and would have to stay that way to finish the tea. Once it was done, he would go back to bad. Whatever disaster would happen, it would either wake him up, or wait until he was rested. "I mean, I get the whole 'you didn't want to get married' thing – I don't really blame you for that. Couldn't you just have told your parents?"

"My mum wouldn't listen," she sighed. "She hasn't listened t' me in a long time. She's been too busy tellin' me what I can and can't do. 'A princess does this, a princess does not do that' – it feels like that's all she does: criticize what I'm not doin' right. And I don't do anythin' right accordin' t' her. And she's more concerned with the kingdom than she is with me. I'm just her pawn in makin' sure we have peace."

Jack wanted to say he doubted that… but he didn't want to risk starting a fight.

"It's all about my responsibilities – and all I want is my freedom. I don't understand why that's so bad."

Jack paused with the mug next to his mouth. "I can understand that, actually."

That was exactly why he had left Warren – because he didn't want to accept his responsibilities as a Governor. Now, though, he wished he had just accepted it and done what he was supposed to. Accepting responsibility didn't seem so bad now, compared to where he was. He certainly wouldn't have this headache if he were still on Warren.

Absently he took a sip of tea, and immediately wished he hadn't. His throat constricted at the taste, and tried to cough it back up.

"Can I add honey or something?" he asked, looking over at Merida.

She shook her head.

"You're torturing me, aren't you?"

She smirked. And the expression was so similar to the one he would wear if their positions were reversed… so he decided to just go along with it. He did wish he had his powers, though, he could have cooled the beverage so the torture wouldn't have to be drawn out in small sips, rather than a few quick gulps.

If any of you have ever taken Chinese herbal medicine, you can imagine what that tea tastes like… But, yeah. I had a horrible headache when I started working on this chapter, so it transferred onto poor Jack. I needed a way to torture him. Upping the stakes, and all that.