Water and Its Effects

Most children get colds. It's a common illness, and it spreads like wildfire between them. So many find themselves find themselves in the same position under the care of concerned parents: Blankets piled up until not the slightest breeze can touch their skin, not to mention light. A cup of chicken noodle soup with some kind of secret ingredient tossed in (even though kids don't realize that love can be put in soup). Of course, friends have to be kept away to hold the contagion at bay, but no school!

These same generalities didn't apply to immortal winter sprites, unfortunately. Though North was wracking his head and library for treatments, he knew in his heart that this was no simple cold. In fact, he'd much rather that Jack be much colder than he currently was. The bundle in his arms hadn't made a sound since Aster's departure four hours ago, and though there was a cool breeze constantly in the air around him, his fever had only gotten worse. The Russian pulled another book from the shelf, thirteen feet off the ground on a sliding ladder where he kept most of his volumes on health. A shudder from the small frame reverberated through his chest, and he put the book down to sweep a wet bangs back from Jack's face. The red flush had crept down his neck, melting snow and frost from his sweatshirt and taking the elaborate designs inadvertently frozen into the shoulders with it.

It was true that the seasonal spirits required a conduit to hold their immense powers in control. Every immortal knew when Mother Nature gifted life and power into a new spirit because they almost inevitably lost control in the first moments of immortality. But losing that conduit didn't take their powers with it, nor did it turn them into a quivering pile of slush. At least, if it had, it was not in the living memory of either Ombric or North. Despite the Easter Bunny's scoffing, North had read every book in his library the moment it came into his possession. He didn't have anything close to photographic memory, but he knew exactly where each book was and the general idea of the knowledge contained within.

Yet according to his memory, there was nothing here that explained a complete meltdown—no pun intended—of a seasonal spirit's powers.

He returned another book to its place, moving from health into a section specifically discussing Mother Nature's immortals. It consisted of only five thin volumes because it was extraordinarily rare to come into contact with any of her four wards. It was common knowledge that they were constantly busy with the natural world and that they found no joy in contact with other immortals or spirits, preferring to move unseen in the aether above the clouds or communicate in their own language with the mortal animals of Earth.

It was said that the seasonals were not like other spirits. Summer was a hot head, with a terrible temper that spent most of her time running the equator racing the Sun, spewing fire and harsh words at any that dared approach her. Some guessed that in her fervor to claim recognition, she spurred wars and ignited bloodshed in her wake. Spring was deaf and mute to men immortal and mortal alike. She sang only in solitude, making flowers blossom, repairing and repainting each leaf before returning it to its branch, and drawing the new grass up from the ground with murmurs of warmer weather. Animals heeded her quiet call, returning to old pastures and waking from hibernation. Autumn was a gloomy and often depressed spirit, condemned to sit in the shadow of Summer. He was forgetful and often forgotten. Some also suggested that he was bipolar, painting over the spring and summer greens with a new pallet of colors only to rip them from their branches with a chilly breeze in sudden bursts of frustration. Summer could drive men past reason, but Autumn was unpredictably – and unknowingly – just as cruel.

And Winter. Winter was the worst of them. The oldest of the seasons, he was frozen to the core, long ago turning his own heart to an icy lump in his chest. Winter did not get angry, did not get frustrated; he simply didn't care. Under his watch, what his brother and sisters created, he destroyed. Color was scorned and replaced with a monotone white, grey and black landscape. It wasn't that he no longer cared for men, but they feared him and refused to approach anymore for fear of the consequences. Oceans froze, blood iced and life died under his reign in the coldest months of the year.

The books he had collected on the seasonal spirits were no less judgmental or unhelpful for this predicament than the rumors had been, and he put them back with a heavy sigh.

North wondered how much he had thought was wrong. Jack was nothing like what he had assumed. Upon the young spirit's creation, Sandy had immediately taken to him. He had begun replaying their meetings for North and Tooth – neither of whom had ever met a seasonal spirit – delightfully conjuring up Jack's pranks for them to laugh at. Even the children loved him before they had ever been able to see the winter spirit, as Sandy unconsciously slipped his own memories into their dreams. But the boy was also lonely, the Guardians had come to discover after Pitch's defeat. He craved the attention of the kids who still too often walked right through him without a second thought and the other immortals who still too often carried their own, biased assumptions of Winter's cruelty, both blaming him for his cold season despite his warm heart.

As a child, these vulnerabilities were even more evident and all too clear. Jack had refused to let North go when the man tried to put him back down against one of the library windows where it would be coolest, even while too warm and delirious. So North had given in, unable to go against Jack's wishes even on normal days, and had the yetis open the windows to sap some of the heat from the air. The fires had to be kept up so he wouldn't freeze as well, and he had taken to wearing his gloves inside, but the effect on Jack's health was enough that he didn't find himself minding.

North climbed back down from the ladder, settling down into a chair by the fire where his feet could thaw. On the night of the new moon, Manny would be no help. It would be at least a week before he would be able to send messages again. Ombric was long lost to time and, judging by the collection he had passed on, would have known little more than North himself on this matter. As many stories Katherine had passed on, she had never stated her own opinion on the seasonals, leading him to conclude that she had never run into one either on her travels.

The Guardian of Wonder sighed and, with a final look at the hearth, said to a sleeping Jack, "Let's head outside. Maybe being in the snow will do you some good."

Aster tapped his foot on the ground, escaping Burgess for the moment. The town was emerging into spring, but it didn't change the fact that there was still snow on the ground and the temperatures were barely above freezing. As far north as it was, that was likely considered warm for early spring, which was the reason Frostbite could dump snow there anytime he felt like it.

Not that he would be doing any snow dumping at the moment, he remembered bitterly. No, the sprite had to play around with the kids in this backwater town, completely forget that spring was coming with an unhealthy dose of rain and lose his staff in the process. He hadn't even felt the need to mention his little reaction to rain? He couldn't use the excuse that he didn't know, because the look that had crossed his face, the one that had seared itself into Aster's memory, had been of knowing exactly what was about to happen.

And fishing through the snow had gotten him nowhere. Jack's stick was hard to miss normally, and it should have been even easier today with the majority of the snow mostly-melted to a thick, ugly slush. Of course this had to be difficult.

He should have headed back to the workshop to see how the sprite was doing, but he didn't want to just abandon the search for the kid's stick. Just once before had he seen him without it, and that had been during a battle with Pitch. It had slipped from his hands, and Frosty had gone from surfing the wind to falling uncontrollably through the overcast sky. It was another sight that he didn't want to see again. Something about the stick made it important—North had called it a conduit which still sounded like an understatement—and this was the last place he had seen it.

After four hours, though, it was beginning to look hopeless. Maybe only Jack could see it when he wasn't holding on to it? No, the yetis had grabbed it from him when North had suggested carting him back to the North Pole in a sack. (Really, North? Really?) And then when he'd accidentally fallen, his stick had still been perfectly visible. So maybe one of the children had come across it earlier and taken it for safe-keeping. They'd recognize it as Jack's from a mile away, even without frost decorating the wood. But he wasn't about to go door-to-door; the anklebiters would realize that something had happened to Jack the minute they knew his stick was missing. So that was out of the question.

Knowing that his fur was beginning to freeze to his skin, he opened a tunnel back to the Warren. North would be turning his workshop into a winter wonderland if he thought it would help Jack and that wouldn't do a thing to help him. He stifled a sneeze. Damn weather. It even seeped down through his tunnels to curl around his feet. Now how was he supposed to search for that stick…?

The tooth fairies! They were practically pros at hide and seek with these kids and their teeth, getting those quarters to them even when their molars had been lost and not found by the child themselves. If they could scrounge through leaves and find the pebble-size pieces of enamel, a hooked stick should be no problem.

China was warm, and up in the clouds where Tooth camped out in her magnificent palace it was even warmer this time of year. His fur practically bristled at the climate change.

The little fairies were busy as ever, zipping in and out of the open structure, around the towers and through high archways to collect, deliver and store the little white (and not-so-white) memories. The chipped paint and crumbling bridges had been quickly restored in the days following Easter, a date that most of the Guardians would love to forget. Aster had helped with the more delicate repainting for months afterwards. The tooth fairies had gone in pairs to collect the teeth during that time, the fear of capture still lingering in their small heads while life returned to normal. In the middle of the rush of small bodies and bright feathers hovered Toothiana, their queen, mentor and mother, alight with happiness as her fairies showed off the prettiest, shiniest teeth with the utmost pride.

Tooth was clearly busy with football getting into full swing across the exuberant children of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, so he simply tapped one of the off-duty fairies resting in a weeping willow by the pond. The golden plume crowning her forehead made him suspect that this one was Baby Tooth, one of Jack's many tiny fangirls. She opened one eye with a yawn, then the other as she realized who had woken her. She gave a small, inquisitive squeak. It was rare that one of other Guardians spoke to one of Tooth's fairies when they could talk directly to their queen.

"Baby Tooth?"

She nodded. It wasn't her name, but she adored it as she did her real one. Jack had given it to her, and that made her feel very special indeed. Even Toothiana had started addressing her with Jack's nickname.

"I need yer help. Jack's in trouble," he stopped her with a finger as she made to get up and inform her queen, "an' Tooth's busy. It isn' big. We jus' need ta find 'is staff."

The instinct to rush off to Tooth was still there, but she resisted. The kangaroo Guardian was right. Her queen was busy, and it wouldn't take many to locate the winter staff. She squeaked out another question: Where?

"Burgess. I' couldn't've left th' city, and th' snow's meltin', so there isn' many places for i' ta hide."

Burgess wasn't a big place, even by tooth fairy standards. She'd been there quite a few times for many of the kids there. Sometimes when Jack visited to give them a snow day closer to the fall or spring months, she accidentally ran in to him and stayed to chat. She knew that she wasn't the only one who did, but she didn't just sit out of sight and drool at his teeth. Okay, maybe she had once…or twice…but that didn't mean that she couldn't talk to him too. Most of the other fairies couldn't make that claim, but she didn't hold it over them…too often.

She quickly returned to the crux of the situation. Searching Burgess wouldn't take more than two or three fairies half a dozen minutes to search if they all started in different places. Holding up a small finger, she twittered that she would need a moment to grab a couple fairies before they left.

Aster nodded. The fairies had little tact and even less patience, so he knew that when she asked for a moment, she used the term in all seriousness. Baby Tooth was hardly gone before returning with a pair of fairies in tow, two white plumes on both foreheads marking them as twins and centuries older than most of their siblings. Baby Tooth, showing a glimmer of intelligence, had grabbed two of her elders knowing that they wouldn't be as likely to blab to their sisters about their little adventure.

"Y' ready?" They nodded, and he reopened his tunnel, letting them fly through before jumping in. Immediately upon entering Burgess, and refreezing Aster's feet, Baby Tooth pulled out a small cloak. (Where had that been stored?) Something about the patterning along the shoulders and fringes reminded him of another, very similar design that he had seen recently. "Did Fros'bite make that for ya?" The little blush that spread like wildfire across her face as she quickly shook her head confirmed his guess. "It's pretty. 'm sure he'd be 'appy to see ya wearin' it." A little smile crept across her cheeks until she shook her head with an impatient squeak. "Alrigh, I'll see ya buggers in a few minutes."

The instant that last word had left his lips, the three had darted off in a blur of color. He shook his head. Jack would have his stick back before he never knew that he'd left it behind. Aster sneezed again. Damn weather was getting to him. He couldn't wait for spring to take hold.

Jack so often found more amusement in the snow that anyone else could have ever managed. Give him a pile of it, and the sprite could conjure up forts, snowball fights, sledding hills, snowmen, and any number of childhood delights, not even counting snow days.

Today it seemed to do just as much good for his health as it would usually do for his good humor. The flakes seemed to adhere to his skin and hoodie as much as they did other snowflakes. His cheeks were more pink than red now and the ends of his hair had just begun to freeze back together as they were prone to do. The wind whipped through his hair, evidently intending to elicit some laughter from him, but he was still mostly prone in the Russian's large arms. His mere presence outside should have triggered a light snowfall, particularly so far north where there was always some kind of cloud cover present, but it did not.

That did not bode well. He hoped Aster would return soon with the staff, though something told him that the situation would not be resolved so easily. Either his belly was sensing ill portents or a lack of sugary sweets.

Until then, he continued to roll snow with his free hand into balls at his side, stacking them into little snowmen with the small sprite laid quietly in his elbow. A couple of the elves were donating their hats to the cause and snatching up small rocks for the eyes and mouth. They weren't always too bright, but occasionally they showed a spark of understanding. Well…when they knew how to make faces, anyway. A yeti had brought out a bag of baby carrots to stick noses on the small white faces. A few times, Jack had opened his eyes and looked intently at the little men. The wind would take his attention away for a moment, but his gaze would be on his snowy creations within a couple seconds. They captivated him, and that was reason enough to continue making them. These weren't flying trains, but wonder didn't always require elaboration. It was what he loved most about children.

One of the elves wasn't in the mood for snowmen, evidently, and settled down by North's booted foot with a huff. His friends were all out here, but it was cold and wet and there were no cookies to snack on.

North looked up from his snowball in surprise as Jack reached across his lap for the bell of his helper's cap, tugging on it to get the elf's attention. The elf turned with a huff that wordlessly said, "What do you want?" Instead of verbalizing an answer, the winter sprite blew what appeared to be a sparkling snowflake into his face. The Russian watched on in surprise as the little elf tried to resist the smile that suddenly came to his face. A small laugh escaped, followed quickly by another. His feelings towards being outside suddenly did a 180-degree turn as he quickly molded together a snowball and tossed it at an oblivious friend. The two giggled, their caps jingling. A new enthusiasm for winter swept through the group, even enrapturing the yeti crouched outside with them.

The yeti had a distinct advantage in the snowball fight that ensued, with the ability to dump piles of snow over the giggly groups of elves, but the pointy, jingling heads emerged only to laugh harder than ever. They, of course, had a certain advantage in numbers, and though they had little to no idea of the term planning, they occasionally managed to knock over the yeti by throwing all of their snowballs somewhat-simultaneously. The yeti barked out a laugh when the little elves swarmed him, swatting them off to regain dominance.

The moon was just emerging from its new phase, barely visible as a crescent of light, but it glimmered in good humor.

"Man in Moon choose well his guardians," North chuckled. "Once a Guardian of Fun, always a Guardian of Fun." Jack met his eyes with a little too much innocence to be convincing. He might have been sick, but he was still Jack inside and out.

A tall, furry form appeared a distance away, bending down to approach quickly on all fours. North moved to stand up, but by the time he was upright, it was evident that the figure was none other than E. Aster Bunnymund. "Bunny! What is news?"

"I go' nothin', North," he sighed. "Baby Tooth an' a couple a' otha fairies went out wi' me, under Tooth's nose. We look'd all over." The Pooka held up his palms in a placating manner. "It wasn' anywhere i' town." His legs shuddered in the extraordinary cold of the North Pole. Still he managed to bend down to examine the child hanging from North's arm, a small grin on his flushed cheeks. "An' 'ere's the l'il anklebiter 'imself. How're ya feelin'?"

Jack squirmed in the grip of the Cossack, loosing his limbs so that he could dangle two scrawny arms over one of North's. His bare feet dangled freely in the air, barely skimming against North's broad chest when they shifted with the wind. "Better," the boy decided after a moment of thinking, "'cos I got to come outside! Wind doesn't like indoors, 'cos you've gotta use inside manners or adults get unhappy," he concluded, punctuating with a wild arm gesture.

Aster shifted to get blood flowing back in his legs. Not every immortal could spend their life in cold, barren winterlands. "You're bored?"

"Nah. I got you guys."

North let out a huge, happy chortle, dragging Jack against his chest in a hug as the boy weakly protested the manhandling. It wasn't everyday that one could get confirmations like that willingly from the winter sprite. The ones that did escape, he kept close to his heart.

"Plus, this snow is awesome! It's not the crunchy, half-ice spring stuff or the wet, mushy fall stuff." Jack would normally have used only the most elegant terms to describe the snow, phrases like 'compact', 'lightly coalesced', 'imprudent', or another word that he must have heard in passing from a private, New England boarding school. More a child than the Guardians had ever seen, his word choice was much more…elementary. "It's so fluffy!" Even Aster thought it was a little cute the way that he reached out to lift clusters of snowy flakes from the air. On his long, pale digits, the snow didn't melt. His hair might as well have been camouflage for the shy, frail frozen crystals, for they slipped right through to tuck in and hide away. The twinkle of the snow had returned to his eyes as he took in the epic elf and yeti snow fight ensuing all across his immediate surroundings. A half smile crept all too naturally across his face.

"North," Aster muttered urgently as the Russian kept a giggling sprite from falling face first from his grasp into the bank, "incomin'."

He turned just in time to catch a flurry of motion before Tooth was aflutter right in front of him, her sight for the small child in his arms alone. A bundle of nervous energy as always and a mothering personality at heart, Jack's change seemed to have torn her between being absolutely captivated by the young boy and worried over a fellow Guardian's sudden deterioration back into childhood. Starting over her previous wordless exclamation, and resisting the urge to steal the cuteness away from North, she conceded, "So it's true. He really is a child again." When North nodded, she brushed the bangs out of his eyes.

Jack tore his eyes from the winter battle as he felt the warm touch. "Tooth!" he cried cheerfully. "Look, I made a snowman!" As she told him that it was the best one she had ever seen, the blinding smile that he gave her might have caused snow blindness, but definitely made her heart skip a beat at those perfectly molded enamel and that unbelievable white had a shine that she could almost see her reflection in and what an incredibly shaped canine with just the right curvature with a delicate point to—focus, Tooth! A shake of her head put priorities back in order and at the forefront of her mind. Only Jack and his sparkling,straight,unchipped,perfect teeth could distract her so thoroughly. Oh my, there she went again. It was a miracle that she got anything done when he visited the Tooth Palace when Asia began to feel the creeping cold that signalled late autumn.

"Did one of yer fairies tell ya? About Fros'bite, I mean."

There was that little bit too that wondered her. Clearly Baby Tooth had known, because she had left early to assist Aster yet never mentioned it until her admittance on their journey to the Arctic. Her fairies were so sweet, letting her finish work during such a busy season rather than immediately telling her, but really, there were things she would rather know and worry over than be late to offer help. "No, I had a visitor who needed directions. How is it that I seem to be the last one to know about this?"

Aster and North exchanged a look, both knowing that they were completely out of their depths. "It was just… Tooth, we know how busy you are, you and Sandy, and between the two of us we thought we could pull something together…"

"Wait, wait. You haven't even told Sandy? He'll be so torn up that he wasn't included in helping one of his best friends because you thought he might be a little busy!"

They looked guiltily at their feet, saved only at the very last moment. "Pretty fairy," a soft voice murmured. Their eyes dropped to the young sprite perched on North's knee, chin perched up on two small fists.

"What did you say?" she asked almost at a whisper, as if even a decibel louder would burst his eardrums.

"Pretty fairy," he repeated with a small smile. "You frowned and looked sad and your face got all scrunched up," which he tried to mimic to little avail, "because of mistakes. But mistakes are past, and now is now which means you should be smiling, like before. You look pretty when you smile." Jack frowned as if the thought process had been hard to work through and he wasn't sure if it had come out correctly.

Tooth's hands flew up to her mouth. "Jack, that was…" But the sentence wouldn't complete itself in her mind or out loud, because it was something that she would have never have expected to hear from the teenager. At the same time, she automatically knew that it was very much a Jack thought, from the unfettered honesty to the immediate forgiveness of past mistakes. So many wrongs had been done against the young sprite since his birth as an immortal out of irritation at his own mistakes and immature actions, but he so easily looked past all of them in the childish hope for a better, happier future. Only as a child was it so easy to see in him, as the seriousness quickly dropped as snow began to fall.

"Look, Tooth! More snow!" He stretched out to catch the first of the flakes on his finger, toppling into a pile of snow as North forgot to heed his safety. Aster extracted the laughing sprite from the drift by his leg, which further amused Jack to no end. "I'm upside down! Tooth! Tooth look! Didja see that!"

It didn't even take one of Jack's instinctually made snowflakes to pull a laugh from behind her hands, a smile rapidly taking over her face. Aster rolled his eyes at his antics, but propped the boy on his shoulders as he cried, "Up! Up!" "Don' be freezin' anythin' up there, mate, ya hear?"

North grinned at the scene, instructing one of the yetis not being pelted with snowballs and jingling hats to grab him a camera from the lower levels. He might as well take advantage of this moment for blackmail against his Easter rival, not to mention his own personal scrapbook. Then he stumbled back into the previous conversation that Jack had wonderfully intervened in, the one where Aster and himself were about to get their asses handed to them on a golden platter because Tooth had been notified by a stranger about… Wait, a stranger? Who needed directions?

"Tooth. Tooth!" Her distraction by the innocent scene was almost painful to disturb. "Your stranger, who was it?"

"Oh." She responded dazedly, forcibly pulling herself from the haze of carefree peace that Jack had conjured from the starry winter night. "That person... She was right behind me before we crossed the Arctic, but I think I may have sped up or she slowed down. But it took me by surprise, because you know how little contact we get with the other elementals, especially—"

A voice that spoke of a gentle wind gracing the petal of a flower called out quietly, but with the firmness that a beam of sunlight caressing the skin caries after crossing out of a cold shadow. It sung without the crack of experienced age or careless youth, but rather as the blossoming of potential into the sweet fruit of the future. It held the love of a mother, a sister, a childhood love and the strongest bonds that kinship could forge, the pure emotion that could only be conveyed by the pure-hearted singer for there are not words in any language that have ever existed or ever will that can try to describe the intangible feeling. "Winter Frost," it called, and the words shouldn't have hummed with such warmth in the freezing embrace of winter, but they did. In the light snow flurry, the form was barely visible beyond the flash of soft pink and gentle yellow.

Jack perked up at the voice, but lay back almost reluctantly against Aster's ears. (He knew the kangaroo bristled at that, thinking he was about to ice his long and overly sensitive ears; he hardly noticed it at the time.) Even as a child, he instantly recognized the voice. As winter incarnate, it resonated with familiarity in his still heart, setting his hair to stand on end and coursing adrenaline through him (or would have, if it still could). His very bones rattled, yet it was merely as recognition of a connection binding them closer than blood or friendship.

"Spring Butterfly," he answered in a deep halting voice not his own.

A/N: Yeah, quick update… *sigh* I had the first 90% done before getting completely stuck in the transition. So, three weeks later than expected, hope you guys liked this sugary piece of tooth-rotting fluff. More fluff to follow.

Oh, and Aster may just get shrunk down to his adorable chibi form soon…*giggle*