Bad news: School's started again. And I am going to die.
Good news: Barring some very minor edits that may still need to happen as I proofread before posting, this story is done. In other words, super-long delays aren't happening (or they shouldn't; you have my permission to yell at me if I go more than like two weeks).
Bad news: Just warning you now - Feelings. Like, ALL of them. (I mean even more than you've been having already.)
Good news cos I'm just so excited about it: There will very more than likely be a follow-up to this (not necessarily a sequel - I don't think there's enough content but you never know, I could get inspired). Elaborating further would mean spoilers. Sooooo don't you fret. Feelings will get better. Eventually - I have no idea when I'd get to it and I don't even know where I'd start anyway...
That said - This chapter really didn't want to be written OR edited. But here it is. I hope you like it well enough.
Sometimes over the years that followed, Jack heard snatches of conversation about curious incidents that from long experience he knew had to be Super-related. He always tried to track down the sites of these incidents, but by the time he got anywhere it was always too late. Nothing definitive ever came up, either. No force fields or invisible little girls. The Parr's were a family of ghosts.
The more the seasons – and the years – went by, the further Jack's hopes fell. The longer he took to find Violet, the more likely it became that she might forget him. That thought always brought a bone-deep fear to him. He knew the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy and the rest dealt with losing believers all the time, but they always had more children coming in to make up for it. Jack had only had one believer and now he was in real danger of losing her. He could never cope with that.
So he clung recklessly to the hope that even if it took another ten years, she would still believe in him when he saw her again. She had to. Jack didn't want to face the alternative. He had no idea how he could ever handle it.
He wrapped up yet another fruitless winter, and moved on.
–
It was fully April. Jack didn't intend to do much here, but he didn't want to go south again just yet. Washington was still chilly enough that he was comfortable, so he flitted amongst Silverdale and Olympia, preferring the Sound and Peninsula to the Basin east of the Cascades. A random dusting of snow south of the capital stirred up the farm kids, and he laughed and had a splattery snowball fight with them before it grew dark. And he drifted to the local tavern to listen in on the radio and the old fogies talking about how America's youth was going insane.
"Did you hear about this thing in New York City?" an older gentleman said, slapping the newspaper in front of him.
"What's that?"
"This Omnidroid thing." Jack paused at the odd word. An inebriated college-aged boy stumbled through him; he barely flinched. "Seems a bunch of Supers came in and 'saved the city from certain destruction.'"
"Imagine that: Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl getting in the family way. Is that Frozone, too?"
Jack stilled again, an old urgency making his hair stand on end. That was a name he hadn't thought about in a long time, but for once he was sure it was important. He whisked over to the table, staring over the men's shoulders at the grainy photograph. It was a bit of a wide shot, but... Elastigirl looked more familiar to him now than she should have.
She and Mr. Incredible were flanked by two kids, a dark-haired girl who'd evidently grown a lot in a short amount of time, and her blond brother on the eve of adolescence.
There was a strange tightness in Jack's head, like he should know something about the people in this photograph.
He took another look at Elastigirl and his only thought was Mom. But that made no sense, because he-
::Do you know Frozone?::
The question ghosted from the depths of his memory on a little girl's voice, and suddenly everything went from running too slow to racing faster than he could keep up.
The daughter in the photograph – that had to be her!
And it had really been that long – Violet was in her teens, now. Jack leaned forward to skim the article for details, but then the page turned. He growled in frustration and iced the top of the man's drink.
New York.
That was a start. He could get there in just a couple of hours. Maybe they would all still be talking about it and he would hear something about where all these Supers lived. Unlikely. But maybe.
Maybe was just as good as a "yes."
A new flame of resolve burning in him, Jack rushed outside, the Wind catching him up before the door had even clinked shut behind him.
As he flew, Jack tried to concentrate on the future meeting, everything he wanted from it. He tried to ignore the past eight years and what that could mean. No matter what, he wanted the last eight winters not to matter; he wanted him and Violet to pick up from where they'd left off – she would just be older, that's all. She would still be Violet on the inside, the little girl who believed in wishes on stars and lonely frost spirits. For how irrational the hope was, Jack held onto it strongly just as he had all this time. He needed that little girl to still exist. (If he found Violet and she was completely different, could he even reconcile the change?)
New York City ran up below him in the pre-dawn light. Lights clustered on Broadway, Times Square. He knew this city well. Didn't have a clue where to begin looking. A newsstand was a good start.
It was easy enough to have the Wind gust down the street and dislodge the papers. The one he picked up still covered the Omnidroid, but this had more to say on the issue of Supers being allowed to come out of hiding vis–à–vis Frozone and the family group dubbed "the Incredibles." Jack scoured the articles for clues where to find any of them.
He kicked himself now for not keeping better tabs on Frozone – Lucius – when the boy was growing up. If any kid could believe in him, he would have thought a child Super with similar abilities could buy a being who painted frost on the windows. It would help to know where he was now.
The thing about secret identities, though: the secret wasn't widely shared.
At a loss, Jack dropped the paper in a wastebasket and loitered on the street corner, hand fisted in his pocket. The most he could hope for was Lady Luck to smile on him for a change.
The Man in the Moon could suck it.
Jack thrust his hands into his hair, wracking his memory for anything he could possibly use as a lead. Nothing came to him. His heart raced more and suddenly he couldn't think at all.
There was the possibility that Violet's family needed to move again. If that was the case, he didn't have much time before he lost track of them again.
Why did he have to be invisible? Things would be so much easier if he could just ask someone...
A tiny thought of the Guardians flickered in the corner of his mind. He batted it away like a gnat. Why should they do anything for him? The most he'd ever done was blow them off for being too serious – not behavior that inspired favors down the line.
Besides, that felt like bringing too many people to the party. Violet had always belonged to him, in his mind. Maybe she had believed in the others, but he was the only one he wanted her to see. That was final.
"Argh," he grated out deadpan. The streets filled with people as rush-hour approached. The longer he stood there and over-thought it, the more impossible it seemed. Thousands upon thousands of people lived in the city alone, and low-quality pictures of people in masks helped only so much. Jack wasn't good at tracking people, following trails of clues.
He really didn't want to bring the Guardians into this, but...
Hold on.
A tall, lean black man hailing a taxi on the opposite corner moved in such a distinct way it grabbed Jack's attention before he even realized it. The way he swirled his fingers around while talking to the taxi driver stuck out at him, but he rather recognized it on a little boy in suburban Minneapolis about to show off to his friends.
Louie Best... But his momma called him Lucius!
It popped into his head like a streetlight bursting.
"Are you serious?" Jack blurted, directing it skyward, or wherever Lady Luck lived; she'd all but kissed him on the mouth! An unshakeable grin snapped across his face and he tailed the cab easily, continuing to follow Lucius the rest of the day – to the grocery store, to his apartment, cooking dinner with his wife.
After dinner, Lucius drove into the suburbs, parking at the end of a freshly-charred driveway. Jack wondered at it; but the man who answered the doorbell was unmistakably Mr. Incredible under the sport coat and tie and the ash was forgotten.
Jack nearly fell out of the Wind, heart thrumming. Just like that, he'd done it?
…He'd really done it!
He'd found her!
Jack rushed to the door, halted on the welcome mat.
There she was.
Black hair past her shoulders, bowed over a teen magazine, back to him.
And now he couldn't do it; he couldn't go into the house, tap her shoulder, and ask if she'd missed him. Despite the number of times he'd pored over it that way in his imagination, it really was not that simple.
The front door closed between them.
He wanted her alone. That would be best. They wouldn't be disturbed.
He would wait until she retired to her room.
Jack backed away, unsure if he bounced with excitement or quivered with nerves. Every inch ached, but he could deal with this. Waiting a few more hours, however long it took. She was worth it.
But he didn't even have to wait ten minutes. Violet rose from the couch, said something to her mother, and left for the far side of the house. Jack bounded over the roof to the back yard, tracking her through the windows until she came to her bedroom. Dark curtains veiled the windows but he could see her with the remaining sunlight. Probably she couldn't see him the same way.
Smirking, Jack formed a snowball and chucked it hard at the window. Violet's silhouette jumped, and in seconds her face appeared between the parted curtains.
Jack laughed and waved, spreading his arms out as if to say "Ta-da!"
The elation he expected on her face never came. Violet quickly scanned the yard, then left. Jack dropped his arms. She just stayed in her room. He hurled another snowball, loose flakes splattering across the glass. Violet came to the window again, this time looking angry.
Her eyes never landed on him.
Despair slicked down his spine like ice-water.
She didn't see him.
Violet didn't see him.
His throat swelled and Jack crumpled to the ground, staff falling away from him, gripping his chest.
If Violet couldn't see him anymore, that... that meant –
He clamped his eyes shut, stoppered his ears as if he could block out his own thoughts.
– Violet didn't believe in him.
A pained sound, like a deer struck by a car, grated out of his throat. How? How could she stop believing, how could she forget? Him, them? He didn't even know how he had her belief the first time. She had merely looked at him and said his name. Nothing magical about it. And she seemed immune to his magic now...
Maybe he was too late...
No, a little voice said, stubbornly. He had spent too much effort in futile scouting to just throw in the towel over a little setback like this. People stopped believing in things only to reclaim that belief later all the time, right? Certainly that was common enough Jack could hope for it here?
Opening his eyes, he looked up at the curtained windows. At the snow cast over the glass, that he made. He was still real; he was still here. All he had to do was remind Violet that he wasn't just an expression after all. Somehow. He frowned, jaw set. Jack had no clue where to start; only what he had been doing for 260 years – not that any of that had worked.
Rather, it hadn't worked on children who never believed from the start. Violet Parr, though... That seed of belief had been planted in her already. Maybe it hadn't sprouted in years, but it was still there; dormant, waiting for the right kind of sunlight and nurturing spring to coax it back out of the ground.
Cautiously, Jack let a hopeful little smile pull at his mouth. Things weren't so lost after all. The whole situation could still be turned around. He just needed to get a little creative, change his tactics, adapt. Violet wasn't a child anymore; she simply wasn't so receptive to a snowball from the blue, was all. A teenager with all the internal mess that implied needed more than a child's pastime to restore her faith in anything. And as painful and troubling as that realization was, Jack took comfort in it because at least now he had a place to start.
Straightening to his feet and picking up his staff, Jack walked up to the window and peered in as well as he could. Violet sat at her desk, posture bent; she was writing something. Homework, or journaling – Jack couldn't tell from here. He craned his neck to see as much of her room as possible. The walls were white; the bedspread a stark black-and-white paisley interspersed with florals. Books still cluttered her bookshelf, and a few posters of boy bands embellished the walls.
The typical adolescent girl, Jack couldn't help thinking – buried in music and her own thoughts. He would have to follow her around for at least a day or two to get a fuller picture, though. With this limited view, Violet was still the six-year-old wallflower to him – but eight years had gone by, and that was plenty of time for a young girl to change.
Touching a corner of the window pane, Jack spread a thin sheen of frost from his finger for just a second, listening to the light crackling as it fanned out several inches from its origin. Jack didn't cover the whole window, but he left enough as a hint. Maybe it would melt before Violet could see it, but it made him feel better to leave a token behind. His eyes fixed on her dark head on the opposite side from her window. Lifting his hand away from the glass, he leaned closer and whispered, "I'll come back." His breath left no fog on the window. Backing away, he bid the Wind carry him up. He would find other places to wait out the night. And then he would get her belief back to him, whatever it took.
–
Jack followed her from the door that morning to the waiting school bus. He flew up and perched on top of the bus, hooking his fingers into the soldered join behind the front escape hatch, with the crook of the staff curled securely over his shoulder – more fun to ride on the roof. Snow drifted down midway through the ride, continuing to fall in tiny flakes after the bus pulled in front of the local junior high school. Jack leaned over the door while the students filed out until he spotted Violet. Quiet as snowfall he floated down to walk at the side of her, noting her scarlet headband. He wondered if she was still so shy anymore after all – whether she was beyond taking comfort in private fantasies like a winter spirit named Jack Frost. He guided a snowflake onto the tip of her nose.
Violet discussed annoying younger siblings with a friend until the warning bell rang for first period. Jack followed her inside the building, tracking her to her chemistry class. He kept the snow going, knowing at this point classes couldn't be cancelled, and it was too late in the year for him to really do anything, anyway. He could only do parlor tricks, so to speak, but maybe that would be enough. Gratuitous snowballs certainly did not fit the bill.
Violet ate lunch with a small group, stayed mostly on the sidelines for dodgeball in PE, and carefully threw a small vase together in art class. Jack liked her style; the finished product (ready for its first firing once it had dried, of course) reminded him vaguely of the Sandman's dream factory. He couldn't say how; but he couldn't accept that it was just coincidence, latching too tightly onto the hope instead. Anything to stave off the curdling doubt in his belly that he could do anything to fix this the way he wanted. If he couldn't get Violet to believe again, that was just the natural order of things; but sucks to the natural order – he defied anyone to try to tell him this wasn't something worth fighting for.
The snowfall intensified as the day wore on. Violet walked down the block with her friend to the arcade and Jack pushed snowflakes toward her at every turn. She seemed to barely notice them at all, chatting as casually with her friend as if her face wasn't getting bombarded. Jack waited impatiently at the window outside, watching her drink a rootbeer float (this time of year?) with her friend and talk about who knew what. He kept painting the window with frost ferns, layer upon layer of them until she was no longer visible through the opaque ice. Her gaze never lingered – his actions once again passed off as a weather phenomenon.
Jack paved the sidewalk with patches of ice, drew swirling ferns on the windows as she passed them by. She only slipped and had to grab her friend's arm to keep her feet under her, and never glanced at his artwork.
Jack grew more frantic, his ice patches haphazardly placed and ferns less refined, the further it sank in that nothing was working.
But something had to work eventually; something needed to work. More than anything he needed her to look at him and see that he had been there all along, that he still remembered her, that they were still friends.
But she got into her mother's car having never fixed her eyes on him, never saying his name, never giving any indication that Jack Frost still existed as a real person in the back of her mind.
He followed Helen's car home, falling behind as he trailed her to the front door. Still nothing. No glances around even after a last desperate snowflake on her nose, shouting her name just as he had been calling the whole time. It never occurred to her that the myriad minor weather events had a very specific reason.
Jack stared at the closed door. He leaned weakly onto the Wind and it carried him to her window without him asking. She sat at her desk, writing, again. Like nothing unusual had happened that day at all.
He fell heavily against his staff when his knees gave without warning. Pain flared into his chest, burning up his neck and he wanted to be sick.
He'd lost her.
…He'd promised never to forget her, and now she'd forgotten about him. Them. The snow and skating and his (broken) promise he'd come back every time.
His head hurt. His chest hurt. Breathing hurt and thinking hurt and the hurt and anger felt too big inside of him. Throat tightening, he tried his snowballs again, and she turned but she didn't come. Nothing. He was nothing.
He wasn't real anymore.
He was just an expression again.
"Why?" he screamed at the Moon, daring now to show his face in the evening light. The sound of his voice scared him. "How could you! All I wanted was... Was it really too much to ask? To keep?"
He glared down at the ground, unseeing. Fists clenched, ice sparking out of his staff.
"I hate you," he seethed venomously, rage boiling high. And he was horrified that it wasn't all at the Moon…
Yet he whirled and slapped his palms on the window pane, yelling. "You were supposed to remember me! You liked me; I was your friend!" I loved you!
Her blue eyes stared past him, mouth set in a frown. She was so beautiful and he would never get a chance to tell her that. Heat trailed down to his jaw and Jack realized he was crying, too fast for the tears to freeze. His vision blurred, and Violet's fuzzy image whipped the curtains closed and she walked away. He thumped his fists on the sill, doubling over with his mouth open in a silent roar of anguish. He was too hot and too cold and too stiff and too boneless all at once and the ice swelled inside him like a bomb-
He heaved himself away from the window and launched into the sky, dark clouds already gathering above him. He halted in the middle of it, snow spiraling around him. Tiny crystals danced along his sweater and skin; and the Wind ripped at his hair and clothes, trying to pull him back down.
"I don't care anymore!" he shouted, "I don't care what anyone has to say!" He called more moisture and flakes spun thickly into the air. His agitation spread further and further out. Soon he couldn't even feel the edge of the storm anymore, it stretched so wide. And still the energy roiling inside him felt ready to blast his body apart. If he couldn't pour it all out...
The Wind protested, buffeting him to and fro to jar sense back into him, but it cared too much to just drop him – that would have ended everything. Jack drove on, pushing the limits of his reach. When he at last felt too thin, he gripped the sky and searched to the bottom of the well within him, to the source of the ice. Too much; everything he still felt was too much and he kept saturating the clouds with all of it. His jaw clenched on his scream as the cold and snow and ice ripped out of him like shards of glass; he felt like he was breaking, shattering to pieces and the only cure was this.
He commanded snow.
Lots and lots and lots of snow.
It bolted down from the clouds. It fell like hail, wiped out his view of the ground in seconds. Over half the continent it came down, drowning light and noise.
Jack's skin felt numb and the Wind begged him to stop it, stop it right now. He didn't listen. There was nothing anyone or anything could do. This was the only option. He needed to do this or else he was certain he would...
Jack grew dizzy. He faltered, and panicking he stretched his fingers out for the edges of the storm to reel it in, but they were too far away. It carried on and on and he knew it would. He felt sick again, feverish.
He dropped several feet, nearly losing his hold on his staff. Fear gripped his mind and it crippled him. He tried to steel his courage, his strength, climb back up, but he only plummeted faster, Wind keening around him. The world looked darker and darker the closer he came to earth. And then it became pitch black.
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"I am so sorry, Jack Frost."
It gets better. Trust me.