(EDITED, just corrected typos and added details.)

First of all, I want to thank you all for the amazing support and kindness that this story has received.

Secondly, I'm so sorry this took so long. It is the final chapter per se (I plan to add a little epilogue after this), and I literally had no clue of what I wanted of this one, but a few days ago I got all weird-sad-inspired or whatever the mood that allows me to write in my style is… and I came up with a new Jelsa fanfic (Forgettable, in case you wanna check it out), and while I typed that, suddenly what I wanted of this chapter became clear. This is probably the longest chapter I've ever written.

(A warning for language… just one word, but… paranoia).

I really hope you like this. And again, thank you so very much.

The cold began to rise while she slipped away from my arms. The world around me changed and it scared me.

I kept repeating to myself how much I loved her, because it terrified me that the choice I had just made could be misunderstood as lack of love. But to be honest, I never thought that she would be the one of us who would feel that.

I love you. I love you so much.

Soon, everything around me mixed into a confusing blur. I could no longer feel her body in my arms, and my fear had grown as fast as her absence…

Was it too late to change my mind?

Yes. It was.

The fallen leaves of autumn formed a cracking surface that I liked walking on. The wind wasn't cold and wasn't warm. The afternoon was silent, peaceful.

I was early. My friends wouldn't arrive until four o'clock. I felt like walking. The whisper of the wind seemed to take me by the hand, leading me into the park covered by the red layer of dried leaves.

While I walked slowly, I looked up, down, right, left… Thinking back to that day, I think that maybe, without knowing, I was already looking, looking for her.

She was sitting on a green bench, with an opened book on her lap but the blue eyes staring at the movement of the top of the trees.

It was all of her, but I think that it was mostly those eyes that made my stop still. Without even realizing, my feet took me to the bench and I sat down at the opposite end. She went back to her reading, and it took all my might to keep my eyes away from her, but every now and then I just couldn't help it anymore. I spent like that until four o'clock and a few minutes more, and in that time, I had already memorized her features; the color of her pale skin and the way it contrasted her dark blue hoodie that fit her kind of loosely, how she played absent-mindly with her braid, the way she blinked, her scent... I even imagined how her smile was.

I got up from the bench having the feeling that that was just the begging.

The white of a ceiling and the beep of a machine monitoring my heart greeted me the moment my eyes fluttered open.

"Damn!" I intended to scream, but my voice was just a defeated whisper.

"Jack?" I recognized Hiccup's voice coming from somewhere at my left, but I was forced to ignore him by the rising pain inside.

"Damn, damn, damn, damn!" I covered my eyes with my opened palms, which soon curved into fists that I started hitting my head with.

She had said that I only needed to truly wish it and then I would live… had I? Had I actually truly wished to leave her again, to have her one more time ripped off from my arms? Taken away, just like that? Had I actually truly wished to go back… to this?

All my body hurt many different kinds of pain, and they all were new and they all were like Elsa. Hiccup tried to stop me from hitting myself, holding my wrists while I barely noticed his efforts, and the next thing I knew, he was hugging me and I was crying to his chest with an amount of energy that it wasn't possible I could have. Soon I felt myself quickly drifting back to sleep, still driven crazy about the fact that an instant ago, Elsa's voice was saying that she loved me.

Yes, right then, while waking up to a life that still I didn't wanted, while I heard Hiccup calling my mother's name, while the monitoring machine stabbed with every beep the very heart that it was there to keep alive, I could perfectly remember that what seemed moments ago I had held Elsa between my arms…

…but with time it became easier to forget.

"Elsa, Jack. Jack, this is Elsa" Rapunzel introduced.

What a small world.

I shook her hand and didn't want to let go.

"Hello, Jack." Those were the first words I ever heard her voice saying, but it suited her perfectly, and suddenly my name felt really mine just because she said it. "Nice to see you again."

Rapunzel seemed confused, but I just chuckled rubbing the back of my neck, taking the hint. My memory fluttered back to the bench, and the walk, and the wind, and her eyes.

"Yeah… nice to see you again."

Elsa…

When I was able to go home, my friends started visiting me on a daily basis. Sometimes they actually gave it a try and smiled their best smiles, asking me if I wanted to play video games or watch a movie as if nothing had happened. Sometimes they had given up before even crossing my door, and we spent hours sitting in silence, staring at the walls. Somehow, no matter what they did, it was just what I needed that day, whether it was to be treated like I was normal or to be treated like I was broken, and with their help I started to understand that I was both.

At night, my mom wandered the house like a ghost, occasionally opening my door and staring at me while I pretended to be asleep, just to make sure that I was still there and I was still breathing. At day, she would look at me, and smile, and say 'I love you'. And I believed her. I also trusted that she knew I loved her too, even though I never said it back.

My little sister touched me as if I was made of glass. She looked at me all the time and I saw in her eyes that she had changed after seeing things no child should ever see, like her older brother laying practically dead on the cold floor. She no longer came to my room in the middle of the night to wake me up from my nightmares, for I had stopped having them, but when I couldn't sleep and the sun was about to rise I would go to hers, to spend next to her the coldest moments of the night.

That is how my dearest people, step by step, did their best to fix me. But no one ever dared to mention it. Or to mention her. The only one who tried to make me talk about that night and the frozen lake was the psychiatrist I was sent to, but all she got from me was a fake, silent smile. If she mentioned Elsa, I would laugh because that was the best I could manage, a dead piece of laughter. So, I never talked about my suicide attempt or the forever gone girl who drove me to it.

Except for that day, almost three months after I was sent back home form the hospital. That Friday, my friends didn't come, but Anna did.

"Hello, Jack" she said.

"Anna." I couldn't hide my surprise. I pushed some clothes to the floor to make some space for her to sit next to me on my bed. "Come, have a sit, please."

She opened the curtains and then sat next to me. Our eyes locked for a long minute, and I noticed that they didn't only were like her sister's, but they were also like mine's, unmercifully changed by fate.

"So, how are you doing, Jack?"

"I'm fine. I mean, it's been hard, but I'm better now." I answered, adding a smile.

Anna chuckled.

"You are a good liar, Jack. But I'm used to lie too, just like that, so no one will know. So, how are you doing, Jack?"

"I'm trying…"

"Jack."

"Okay. I want to be trying…"

"Really?"

"No."

"That's more like it." she said with a smile that actually seemed happy. I had to wipe a tear away from my cheek, but it was no use. In a matter of seconds, I was already crying silently hiding my head behind my hands. Anna put an arm around me, and I buried my head into her shoulder, feeling for the first time since Elsa died that it was okay to show my wounds to someone.

"I'm sorry". I said after a while, and she smiled again.

"It's okay." She made a pause, as if she was trying to figure out the proper way to say what she was about to say. "You can trust me, Jack."

"I know…"

"No. Jack, please understand. You can trust me." And I understood what she meant and why she said it before dhe said it herself "Have you thought again about killing yourself?"

"Yes. But I won't."

"Just remember that you can trust me. Do you promise, Jack? I'm not here to cheer you up, or to ask you to be okay, because I think I might have an idea of what you feel since she passed away, but what I do want to ask you is to never forget that I will always want to help you."

I was speechless.

"Jack, I can't lose you." her voice was just a whisper now. "You know, my sister was my favourite person in the world. Ever since I remember I loved her more than anything. And all her life, he was never happier than she was when she was with you."

"Anna…" I felt my eyes watering again.

"I know it's selfish, but I need you. I know you loved her, Jack… and I can't explain it, but it helps me to go on just to know that you exist and that you loved her and you made her happy. And besides, I owe it to her, to keep you safe."

"Anna, I…"

She stood up.

"I know that you want to let go, or sometimes even need to let go. But don't. Please, never, ever let go. Goodbye, Jack."

The following Monday I went back to school.

Autumn vanished into winter. Our friends didn't like winter's weather, but Elsa and I loved it, and while they stayed indoors we went outside and just walked around aimlessly.

It was during that winter that we became really close. I discovered that Elsa was a person made of closed doors, but day by day, little by little, she started to let me in. On our walks, I would talk and talk and talk and it was so easy that soon I started talking about the important things. And again, day by day, little by little, she started talking too, sharing with me little pieces of who she was for me to put together.

The snowy days came and we were rarely apart. Our friends smiled at us, noticing that there was an undeniable bond holding us close. And it felt okay. If I was not physically next to her, my mind would be. We talked until really late at night and woke up still not having enough.

For Christmas she went out of town with her family and I missed her like crazy, crazier still because I noticed that the thought of she not missing me too somewhat scared me. I walked around Burgess trying to enjoy the winter and to put my nervousness aside, but even the winter remembered me of Elsa, with its coldness that was amazingly beautiful.

"Who would have thought? Jack himself, finally falling and falling hard" Hiccup teased.

When she got back home, I lost no time and I went to her house.

"Are you up for another wintery walk?"

"Jack." she laughed.

But we did went on a walk that night. And the following day. And the next after that one. And the next.

By the time the snow and the winter melted away I had already, day by day, little by little, fallen completely in love with her.

The day three years had gone by since Elsa's death nobody left me alone.

I know my mother talked to my friends to make sure they would take me out so I wouldn't be just sitting around in the house, but there was no need of such precautions. I was okay. Really.

I'm not saying it was easy, but it was easier. I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I tried to fall asleep, but I couldn't. I also tried to feel sad, but that didn't work either. My breathing became uneasy.

Calm down. Calm down.

That happened to me a lot around those days. I hated it. Time was actually healing me, but I wasn't ready for the pain to stop, for the peace to return. For three years I knew nothing but my storm and her absence and if there was more to life than that, I wasn't ready for it yet.

Come on. Hurt.

But it didn't. It had already started. My worst fear… I was finally able to think about her without pain. The previous year I had done what I had done because I was scared of exactly that, that feeling beginning right there while I stared at the ceiling summoning Elsa's image without any burden.

I realized that that was it. It was my chance to choose the step that would define the rest of my life until I saw Elsa again. Right then was the moment to choose the darkness or the light. I could decide if I would learn how to let her go or to keep her as a shadow forever. What would it be, then? Light or darkness? For the rest of my life, for every day I might have left? Light or darkness?

I got up and opened up my laptop. Without even blinking, I clicked on a folder that I hadn't opened for the past three years, and from among the bunch of photos of me and Elsa that extended across the screen I selected the one I liked the most, of me and her the first time we went by the lake. I printed it.

Just when I had finished pinning it to the wall, Hiccup honked outside my window waiting for me at his car. Before rushing out, I looked again at the photo and touched Elsa's face with the tip of my fingers and smiled.

So light it is.

"Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa!" I started again.

She chuckled.

"Yes, Jack?"

"I love you."

"I love you too."

It was the first snow day of the year, and I was walking around with Elsa. That day I was really happy because it was already winter again and I couldn't help but to look back to the previous year when everything had started and to know for sure that it had been the best year of my life.

"Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa…!"

"Stop it, Jack." she laughed.

"Nope. Hey, Elsa…"

"Yes?"

"I love you." She just stopped walking and kissed me.

The touch of her lips always reminded me of the time I kissed her for the first time, sitting on the bench where I first saw her. It had been on one of the first days of spring, and she was staring at the top of the trees, just like some months before, but instead of an opened book it was our holding hands what she had resting on her lap. She had closed her eyes, and not resisting the urge I turned her head towards mine and kissed her. After a brief seconds, I felt her smiling against my lips.

A cold chill blew, and we pulled apart and I stopped remembering. She started walking again and I followed suit.

"Hey, Jack."

"Yes?"

"I love you."

My eyes widened open in the middle of the night and I sat down on my bed touching my pounding heart. The darkness around me felt thick and the air of my room even more so.

I felt the familiar knot tying itself in the middle of my throat. It asphyxiated me. The knot was cold and heavy. My hands flew towards my neck and just stayed there. I closed my eyes tightly and tried to relax. I hadn't cried for almost two years, but I still couldn't get rid of the knot that came when the tears didn't.

Not long before that night, I had started having dreams that I couldn't remember and I wouldn't precisely say they were nightmares. It was more like a feeling.

It felt like I was holding something that I loved between my arms and it was suddenly taken away from me. I could actually feel it evaporating, turning into fog and escaping from my embrace. It worried me how real this felt… and how much it reminded me of something from my past.

But then again, many things had been taken from me during the pass of my days… I should be used to it. The true is that nothing ever stays, nothing lingers.

I laid down again, my eyes feeling heavy and the terrible feeling slowly erasing itself from my arms. With heavy eyes, almost asleep, I looked to the wall where I had pinned the photo of me and Elsa to the wall, and two more photos of us, one for each year that had gone by since I pinned the first one.

Nothing ever stays.

"This is beautiful, Jack"

"I know you'd like it here."

Once, my mom had brought me and my sister to this lake. I hadn't returned there, but it looked just the same. The winter was gone and the spring was blooming in the form of tiny flowers that colored the valley here and there. I stayed behind while Elsa approached to the edge of the lake, watching how the tall grass almost reached beyond her knees and some butterflies skipped about.

It all seemed like a dream.

When she was at the edge I ran towards her and the two of us fell into the lake.

"JACK!" she screamed at me wanting to sound angry, but her own laughter betrayed her.

"What's up, Elsa? Don't you know how to have a little fun?"

"That's what you think, uh?" and suddenly, she started splashing me with water, laughing and screaming at me.

I captured the moment as if I was watching it in slow motion. Her bright smile, strands of her hair escaping from her soaked braid, her eyes as blue as the waters and her presence as warm as the spring around us… she didn't act that way often, but that was who she actually was. Elsa was always so careful and guarded, prisoner between her self inflicted walls… but she had let me in, and I had sworn someday I'd get her out.

The sun was high in the sky, and we were sitting between the flowers in the middle of the valley, letting the warmth to dry us up.

"Smile, Elsa!" I said, raising my phone's camera in front of us.

"Stop it, Jack!" she said, hiding her face behind her hands.

"Come on, kiddo. Just smile."

She dropped her hands and I took the photo before she could hide again.

"Let me see it." Elsa asked.

"Nope." I said blocking my phone and shoving it inside the chest pocket of my shirt.

"Jack! Let me see" she ordered.

"No way!" I said standing up. "If you want this phone you'll have to take it from my dead cold fingers!"

I started running away from the valley, inside the forest. Below those trees it was a little bit darker and the only sound was the one made by the birds until Elsa's laughter running after me came along.

I stopped suddenly when I came to a tree that was taller and thickest than the rest, and it seemed that the other trees respected it because not one grew nearby, which allowed more light to slip between the tops and to illuminate the grass. It was beautiful.

Elsa arrived and hugged my neck.

"Look at this" I whispered because I thought that no voice would fit there.

"Wow." was all she could said. She walked ahead until she could touch the big tree. I walked to her and put my hand over hers. Our fingers intertwined.

We lost track of time talking under that tree. The moon's light was white and the night's air warm.

Before we went away, I looked back to the tree and I knew that we would return there many times in the future. That place had made us feel safe. There we could last forever.

After two months of living in the new city I had finally unpacked the last box. It contained old coffee mugs, and I put them in their proper place in the kitchen of the new apartment that still looked so empty that I couldn't think of it as my home.

That was supposed to be a new beginning, a fresh start with no burdens from my messy past. Nothing was supposed to follow me there from Burgess, no car wreck, no funeral, no frozen lake, no hospital, nothing…

But it had turned out that I couldn't leave everything behind.

I walked to my room and I opened the closet. I kneeled down and I found the old shoe box that I had thrown there the moment I first walked into this new life, the one that contained all my photos of Elsa. I had printed them after I signed the contract for this apartment, then I had put them in the shoe box and hadn't opened it again until then. I opened the last one of the drawers and from below everything else I got the leather photo album that my mom gave so I could fill it with pictures of my days at this city.

I got scissors, glue, and I sat down on the floor, next to my bed. I placed all the pictures in front of me so I could see them all. I opened the album and ripped off the first page where my mom had written a few words that I never read, and got to work. When I closed the album again it was full of her, of us, and our happy past together that now seemed make believed.

I went to the kitchen and got the box of the coffee mugs. Back in my room, I put a pillow inside the box, and then I put the photo album. Above it all, I placed the old blue hoodie that I used to wear all the time when I was younger and she was around, the one that used to be hers. I closed the box and carefully put it below my bed knowing that if everything went right in this new city, I would never need to open it again.

I came closer to the window and looked at the lights of the city. It was so different from Burgess, where you could see the stars every night. It was early but I decided to go to bed, because the next day I had a date with a girl from work. She was nice, pretty, and funny, and perhaps I was ready.

I was ready.

I covered my head with the blankets. In this city the winter was colder and I didn't like it. Shivering a little I fell asleep above the closed box that contained everything that still remained from Elsa.

And from me.

It was one of the last days of summer. The last months had been really dry and hot, but under the shadow of our tree the breeze blew fresh.

Elsa was telling me a story from way back into her past, when her little sister got really sick and almost died. Luckily she made it alive, but all of it seemed like a shadow that still was hanging over her.

"Since then, I've been scared of losing the people I love the most… That's why I don't like getting close to people."

"Then what about me?" I teased.

She laughed.

"You? I don't know... You came out of nowhere."

"I'm irresistible." I joked.

"Yeah. I was helpless." She answered between smiles.

"But seriously," I changed the tone of my voice "I'm so grateful, Elsa, that you managed to love me anyway."

"What can I say? You are irresistible." She mocked, before changing her tone of voice just like I just had. "Some times, I even fear that I could lose you."

"Me? No way. I will always be by your side." I said

"That's really nice, Jack." she smiled, touched. "But who knows what will happen? Fate's a mystery, you know."

By all answer I got up, getting my knife out of the outer bag of my backpack. I carved her name and then mine by the very bottom of our tree. She was standing behind me, following silently the movements of my hand.

"See?" I said standing up when I was done. "Now it is a promise."

Ever since she moved in with me I started getting nightmares again, like the ones I didn't had since I was a teenager.

I got up from bed, trying not to wake her up. I wandered around the apartment that even with her living in it still didn't feel like home.

But isn't that what love does? Make you feel at home?

The floor was cold against my bare feet. Thinking about it, the apartment was always cold. It had been cold at summer, and it was cold then at winter, and it had been that way for the past years.

I stopped in front of the window and I just stared outside, wishing I was out there…

Isn't this love supposed to make me feel at home?

I tried to remember what I used to think of love back when I was young and it seemed like the most indestructible force before life proved me wrong. Now I had a much more realistic expectation of love.

Love wasn't supposed to be magic. It was supposed to make the loneliness seem like gone. It was supposed to give me someone to fix and someone who fixed me back. It was about finding someone who could understand my past and not care about it. Yes, love wasn't supposed to be a miracle, or a light, or a dream, or an adventure. It was just this…

Just this… and while I wondered from where had I gotten a different idea, a snowflake dropped weightlessly to the ground outside my window. And another, and another. The first snow of the winter.

"Jack, honey, come back to bed." her voice echoed through the hall.

I smiled to the snowy night and turned around.

"I'm coming."

"You are beautiful." Elsa said to my sister after she finished fixing her hair into a braid just like her own.

"Am I pretty, Jack?" she asked me.

"Of curse you are." I said picking her up and spinning her around the living room.

I put her down and she dizzily went to sit down next to Elsa on the floor. There they were, the two girls I loved the most.

Suddenly, Elsa took a package from her bag and put it in my sister's hand. She whispered something to her ear and my sister nodded and got up.

She gave it to me and told me to open it. It was a blue hoodie that felt soft to the touch, one I knew all to well for Elsa wore it all the time. She actually was wearing it the day I saw her for the first time.

"Elsa says that she wishes you a happy winter and that she is glad she ever met you."

"Could you give Elsa this?" I said to my sister while hugging her.

"Of course!" she answered, and then she ran to Elsa who was already waiting for her with arms wide open.

I realized I could stay like that forever.

"I love you" she mouthed over my sisters shoulder.

Yes, forever.

My wedding was the next day.

The next day.

My wedding was the next day.

I still didn't believe it.

I remember little of that night, my mind was uneasy and so are my memories. But it was already late at night and I hadn't slept one bit. In a few hours the sun would rise and then it would be a fact. I would be locking all my old doors. Forever.

I got out of bed and I didn't care if I woke her up or not. An urge had risen in my heart like a furious wave and I couldn't ignore it. I turned on the light of the studio and frantically looked for a pen and some paper. I sat down at my desk and just wrote without even knowing what words came out at the other end of my pen.

I needed to explore and to capture all that could be left behind my doors before I closed them for good. The paper was enough of a witness of all the things that I needed to say before I lost my chance. I allowed the wounds that all those years I had been learning how to ignore to hurt me once again, and to be open, and to bleed.

Elsa.

For that night, I could remember her face again, I could feel her touch again. For that night, she was more than the forgotten memory that I had transformed her into. For as long as my pen was in touch with the paper I remembered that she wasn't gone, not really, not for as long as I was alive and her name meant something to me.

And it did meant something. It meant so much and it always would.

I folded the papers carefully and put them inside an envelope. I wrote on it "Yours, Forever."

After I placed the letter on top of the leather photo album inside the box I thought I'd never open again I went back to sleep begging to myself not to ever forget the meaning of her name, because, most of all, for me it meant the only thing that make me hold on to a past that I didn't wanted anymore.

"Will you really love my forever, Jack?" she asked while she caressed the letter of our carved names.

"I promise."

"Good." she smiled.

"Aren't you going to say you promise to love me forever?" I said, chuckling.

"No. But I promise I'll always want you to be happy."

"Then love me forever."

"Forever?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Forever."

"Look, daddy! Look!"

"That's my girl!"

My little princess hopped towards me and I lifted her up into the air. She laughed and the sound was the best music I had heard.

"Look out, dad!" said little Jack, throwing a baseball at me.

"Woah, there. Easy, kiddo."

The grass of our garden was covered by white snow, and the children played restlessly with the toys they had found earlier under the Christmas tree. I went to sit on the stairs of the porch, looking at them playing so unharmed, so free…

…and for the first time in twenty-three years, I felt happy in winter.

"I don't know, Hiccup. I really think this could be for good."

"What can I say, man? I don't know how you manage to get even happier every day. And that's Elsa's fault, that's for sure."

"It is." I smiled.

"And Punz says that Elsa has changed for the better ever since she met you."

"Really?"

"Yup. She says she's also happier. Happier than ever before."

"See? I tell you, I really think this could be for good."

"So what, are you going to marry her and have kids and all?" he joked.

"Of course not. Or at least not now… but don't you see it happening someday, man? Be honest with me, Hiccup. You know me better than anyone. Can you picture me without her?"

He actually took his time to think about it.

"No, Jack." he laughed. "I can't picture you without Elsa."

I signed the papers and just like that it was done. I was divorced.

I returned to the old apartment from my youth. I never sold it or anything, and that was a great convenience at the time being. The basic furniture was there since the week before, and the only thing I brought with me was the old box that contained a past that I could barely think of as mine. That was why all the memories inside it were so precious.

I walked into my old room to find only a naked bed. That was all that I had, that and my stupid box. The place never seemed lonelier. I threw the box angrily across the room, its content falling apart everywhere.

"You promised you would always want me to be happy!" I screamed at the tops of my lungs.

I went to the photo album and kicked it to the wall. It flew and landed open, an old photo of Elsa and my little sister together flying out. I took the photo in my hands and tore it in half, and then tore a whole page of the album and turned all the photos to pieces.

"Does this seems like happiness to you?"

When I was tearing up the fifth or sixth page I started crying over what I've done.

"It's not your fault…" I whispered to all the pieces of her face. I tried to put them together, but it was no use.

I cried myself to sleep and woke up among the pieces of a love that in spite of all my will just wouldn't stay in the past.

January was cold that year, but Elsa and I managed to convince our friends to come with us to downtown, just to hang out and be young and careless for a while. It was one of the funniest days of that winter. The sun had came up since morning and kept the air almost warm.

We sat in a café for hours. I remembered that that day we all talked about the future, and about our big plans. Life was like an open field before us, and we were a few steps away from getting into it and claim it ours to explore and conquer.

I still remember the naïve sense of possibility that we all shared. The world seemed to be in our hands, waiting for us to transform it into whatever we wanted it to be. I sat next to Elsa all the time, our fingers intertwined. I'd occasionally would take her hand to my lips and kiss it, as a way to tell her that I wanted her in my future. I was thrilled about the open field, about our world, and about the girl next to me who would be there with me when we took our first step into the unknown abysm of fate.

When the night fell, Hiccup offered me and Merida a ride home, and Rapunzel offered Elsa the same.

I remember how Hiccup had already started the engine when I stopped him.

"Wait, Hiccup! Just, a sec. I forgot something."

I ran towards Rapunzel's car waving my arms. She sawed me and pulled over.

I knocked the copilot's window and Elsa put down the glass smiling at me.

"Jack, wh…?" I interrupted her with a kiss.

"I had forgotten that." she laughed, and I took her head between my hands. "I love you, okay?"

"I know so." she laughed again. "I love you too, Jack."

I saw the car growing smaller in the distance and then walked back to Hiccup's car, larger than life.

I had all I wanted; the future, the energy, the possibilities, and most of all, the love of my life loved me too.

Knowing that, nothing could ever go wrong.

How much time could I possibly have left? I couldn't take the agony anymore.

Those days, forced into bed, I thought about Elsa more than ever and I wonderer how did I ever managed to stop thinking about her. I wondered if Elsa had suffered the way I was suffering before dying.

Did she felt alone? Did she get time to remember that the last words I said to her were 'I love you'? Did she get time to think of me?

Perhaps to die like she had died, out of the sudden, was better than this. Better than having time to regret everything you ever did wrong, better than getting to wish I had being happier… On the other hand, this way I got the time to say goodbye.

My daughter and my boy were next to my bed all the time and even my ex-wife came to visit once or twice.

My sister had come earlier that week, but couldn't stay because she had her own baby girl to take care of. She looked at me from the door before even daring to come inside, and when she did she just took my hand. Was it possible that I still saw in her the little girl that used to have that same gesture towards me when I was more broken than ever? She was a full grown woman now, but for me she was just like she was back then. Did I ever say to her that I was grateful? Did I ever tell her that the grip of her tiny hand helped me get through the night?

"Thank you." I said just in case. "For everything."

She kissed my forehead and swore that it was okay, that I had nothing to be thankful for…

While she walked out the door I wished she also could remember me as the old Jack, the one who I was long before Elsa died, the Jack who took care of her before she had to take care of me…

Hiccup had come the day before. He walked right to my bed and hugged me while I cried into his chest just like I had that day when I woke up at the hospital…

Hiccup had always, always been there for me. Looking back at the storm my life had beem, I can't not remember him there, standing next to me like the storm was also his. I wished I had been a better friend to him, and I said 'thank you' over and over again as if that could make it up for a lifetime of unconditional friendship.

We stayed like that for hours, and when he got up and said "See you next Friday, man.", we both knew that he was lying.

That morning, my son and I were alone for her sister was taking a shower.

"Listen, son." I said with the little energy still in my voice. "There's something I want you to do when I'm gone."

"Whatever you want, dad."

"Good. There is a box below my bed. When I pass I want you to burn it… but first, take out the letter that's inside. I need you to take it somewhere and leave it there. The address is written on a pink paper in the left drawer of my desk."

"Okay, dad. It'll be done."

"Was I a good father, son?" I asked with tears streaming down my cheeks.

"Dad…" my son said. "You have flaws like every human, but no one has ever love my or my sister more than you, and that has always being enough and will be enough even after you leave."

"Really? You won't forget me, kiddo?"

"Never, dad. Never. Never."

Hiccup dropped me at home and I walked directly to the couch. I fell asleep without noticing it, smelling Elsa's scent from the hoodie, although I wore it so much that it was almost gone. When the ring of my phone woke me up the night had already fallen.

I looked at the screen before answering…

"Hiccup, hey, what's up? Miss me already?"

"Jack! Merida called… She… she said that Rapunzel and Elsa were in a car accident. I'm on my way to the hospital, but man… it was bad, real bad. Punz is okay, but Elsa…just hurry, man. Hurry up…"

I knew my moment was close when everything around me vanished and everything seemed to be made of light.

Elsa was there. Not her memory, but her. The real her. I could sense it was her. She opened her hand before me for me to take, and when I did, I noticed that my hand was the one of my old self, the seventeen years old Jack. I touched my body and I understood that all of me had changed back.

"I remember now, Elsa." I said, suddenly aware of everything; the memory of our love fresh like it was new, like it was never gone. And also the last time I was with her, when she saved me once more and made me go back to life.

"Do you regret it, Jack?"

"No."

"Can't you remember all the pain that you suffered ever since I last saw you?"

"I can. But it was worth it."

"Jack…" she smiled. "You are ready. Welcome, Jack. Welcome to forever."

A great an invisible sea of peace washed me and cleaned every single one of my wounds. My past finally stopped being a burden, and my life suddenly made sense. Elsa smiled at me, and I realized I would go through a thousand lifetimes like the one I just left behind just to be with her like this again and to see that smile ever day.

Elsa took my hand again, and we vanished into that moment of pure happiness, finally able to stay like that for the rest of eternity.

"Do you want to see something, Elsa? Look this way."

Together we watched my son, who was fulfilling his old man's dying wish. He spotted our tree and he pinned the closed envelope of my letter right below our carved names that more than fifty years later were higher.

And so, in that place that for us had meant 'always', our names and my letter would read through time:

Elsa and Jack.

Yours, forever.