Uh so this chapter is short but at least I like it. Yes?

Guys, can you believe it's February already? Yikes. *casually braces self for all the Valentines inanity* *denies it's because she's single and none of the cute boys will talk to her even if she was interested in dating again* Bitter? Me? Never. Completely outside my personality range. |D

ANYWAY. You guys. I keep saying it over and over, but you are amazing. I love you. You make me so happy. I may have had rooibos tea and that's why I'm running off at the mouth (keyboard?) here, but I mean every word. *tosses heart-shaped confetti*

Onward!

If the universe felt like being kind, Jack thought, it could have at least given him a grace period as long as it took the snow to melt.

But he had given up a long time ago on the universe being particularly nice to him about anything. The snow hardly turned to slush in the streets and already every TV and radio broadcasted the numbers. Dead, injured, sickened by damp and mold and below-freezing temperatures. Damage by flooding, collapsed roofs, fallen tree limbs. Jack moved westward to escape the snow, but it followed him like a shadow. Families in Seal Beach, California were glued to coverage of the Easter blizzard in its aftermath as their Reading, Pennsylvania counterparts suffered through it. Jack wanted to ball his fists and pound on every living room window and scream at them all to stop it, stop watching what he had done. Let it die into just another bad dream...

A nightmare. The realization sat ice-cold along his spinal cord and he shuddered convulsively. He'd screwed up; he brought this hell on the continent. What on earth had happened? Why couldn't he just remember already?

Jack gnashed his teeth and punched a nearby palm tree, its top lush with verdant green fronds. So unlike the snow-bridled firs in the wake of the blizzard...

Jack retched, doubling over. But he had never felt so empty in his life. Beads of ice fell from his mouth, and that was all.

Try getting off the Naughty List with that crowning his head...

Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, recenter himself, Jack used the trunk of the palm tree to push himself back up. He knew the families in the near houses were watching and praying and discussing about the East Coast. He felt it pressing in on him from all sides – his fault. And they didn't know it was him, and that was sort of good. But they attributed it to Old Man Winter and that was bad. And if Bunnymund hated him now, surely everyone else did; surely they would want absolutely nothing to do with him, anymore...

And Pitch Black knew, and even worse he knew why…

But Jack Frost didn't want to know. He was too... too scared, too weak. He couldn't face it, didn't want to.

Raising his eyes to the clean azure slate above him, he swallowed thickly. The shame kept rising like bile in his throat but he already knew there was nothing to bring up, to resolve the urge to be violently sick. What he wouldn't give now to just disappear...

The thought latched hold to him and he all but grinned manically at its simplicity. He had a feeling that someone might look for him; he didn't want to be found. He could hide. His stomach wrung into knots when he realized he'd have to head back east after all, but once he got there... He knew he could remain hidden from sight and seeking, indefinitely, with the Wind on his side. So he squared his shoulders and the Wind carried him up and away. To home again.

–

Landing in Burgess brought no comfort, this time. The snow piled high as ever and tree branches creaked ominously overhead. Jack was only just in time to stop a breaking bough from falling onto a young teen trudging with groceries through the deep snow. It landed just feet behind him. The more Jack looked around, the more he saw rehashings of the same basic story – black windows in the twilight hours, stranded cars, walkways littered with fallen branches. Even front-wheel drive was useless until the sweepers could manage to clear the streets. Burgess wouldn't have power again for days...

No laughter rang through the air. No sound of children at all.

Jack felt sick again.

The seriousness of the adults had passed on to the young ones, and now the back yards and park were vacant. Burgess felt so empty without kids tearing around the streets. It felt like a ghost town.

I did this, Jack thought, falling against a swaying light pole in shock. Somehow he doubted he would ever be able to get over this... Never, in his life... And how the children must be crying in fear... Because of him. It was too much.

Never again. No matter what. Never again.

–

Jack only came out at night during the new moon. For the first time in his life, he did not want a single soul to see him, not even a child.

He always saw auroras of golden sand when he emerged, more than he'd ever encountered in one place. The Sandman, working overtime to comfort the town's children in this darkness. Whenever Jack ventured anywhere his blizzard had touched, he saw the same thing: curtains of dream sand showering down from the inky sky, funneling into blank windows and wrapping around little troubled minds. Watching it all happen, Jack wished he could do so much to help – to make up for what he had done. But the blizzard, the mysteries surrounding it, the fear and the sickening aftermath, had taken all the fun out of snow days. Even making an innocuous snowball felt like handling something toxic. He dropped it like it actually was poison and lurched his feet away from the snow drift, riding on the Wind the rest of the night.

Even after the snow melted, Jack kept to nighttime wandering, staying under cover of total darkness. He brought no more snow of his own, that season. He sensed the shifts in the wind that meant snow falling in the southern hemisphere, but he had nothing to do with it. Old Man Winter, again, maintaining the natural order of things while Jack Frost was AWOL. But nobody seemed to be looking for him. And for once, that was what he wanted.

Eventually Jack just slept. Ordinarily he didn't need to. But waiting for the new moon every month was tedious. By summer, Jack would merely shift his position and close his eyes once more. Seasons happened just fine without him. Winter had it covered, he knew; no one would care, really. He wouldn't be missed.

–

"Hey. Hey! Oi, you lazybones, wake up!"

A soft warm something smacked into his face and Jack blinked awake – regretting the blinking immediately at the immense sting. As it turned out, that something had been a clod of dirt, and it had broken all over his eyes and nose.

"Argh! Geez," Jack snarled, rubbing his watering eyes with his sleeve, "What was that for?" Tears working to flush away the rest, Jack blinked and fuzzily managed to spot what – or rather, who – woke him up.

Just visible in the pre-dawn light, a large furry rodent impatiently tapped his hind foot, forelegs crossed over his broad chest.

"'Sit February already?" Jack asked blearily.

"Nope. September," the Groundhog reported, clicking his teeth. Groaning like one who'd accidentally overslept into the afternoon, Jack pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, rising stiffly into a sitting position. "Where ya been, kid?"

"What, you miss me? I've been right here." His smile died quickly. He remembered why he'd slept.

"Don't get cute. Frost, you've got some explaining to do, you know. No one's caught hair or flake of you for months. Not since that big ol'-"

"Please don't," Jack interjected, practically whining. The old rodent's black eyes softened.

"Shoot, kid. Didn't mean to mean anything by it. You shocked us. Bunnymund didn't let go of it for ages."

"I said... Just... I don't want to think about it." Sighing, Jack looked away from the Groundhog for shame. He didn't expect Beau to understand any more than Bunny had.

"What even happened there? Hey, you're supposed to listen to me when I figure out how much longer you can do your 'snow days' and ferns on the windows. Don't you think I have a right to know why you thought that whiting out half the continent in April was necessary?" Beau tilted his head when Jack nodded sullenly. "And please tell me at the end that you're not planning on an encore performance. I got a reputation, you know. Kids paint me by numbers, now."

Good for you, Jack thought dryly. The Groundhog didn't get more than a five-minute spot on the news once a year, and yet children believed in him for deciding how long winter lasted, more than they believed in Jack Frost who actually helped bring that winter to them. He schooled his expression into something more agreeable before fixing his eyes back on the Groundhog, who was a little easier to see now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. "I don't remember why it happened."

"Bull."

"It's the same as I told Bunny, and it's the truth. I honestly can't remember." And somehow his wide blue eyes were just earnest enough that Beau couldn't bring himself to call Jack a liar.

"I don't know how you can forget why you'd do a thing like that. How hard'd ya hit your head after you fell?"

Jack winced. "You know about that part?"

The Groundhog merely shrugged. "Kinda hard to miss. The Wind was inconsolable until you finally woke up."

The slightest draft ghosted into the cave, as if to illustrate his point. It brushed Jack's hair from his eyes and he grimaced mournfully.

"I didn't hit my head, though, I don't think. I just... woke up and Bunny was yelling at me about the blizzard. I couldn't even remember making it. I was just really tired and... spacey."

"Spacey?" The Groundhog repeated, the second syllable coming as a whistle through his buckteeth. Jack shrugged, the details surfacing like disturbed silt from the bottom of a lake, murky and blurred at the edges. While Jack had insisted several times that he couldn't remember the reason for the storm, he'd never actually felt like he'd forgotten something until that moment. But now he took a second look, at those inexplicable moments of frantic energy that something was missing, that strange déjà vu when he passed over an elementary school playground in his nighttime flights, his suddenly increased desperation that a child see him. His lips pursed together in a tight line and his fingers twisted in the hem of his sweatshirt the more disturbed and agitated he became.

"Hey, kiddo; don't break something. I ain't really that mad at ya, alright? Just worried about ya a little."

"Really?" Jack asked skeptically, snapping to. "But what about-"

"Don't tell no one I said anything about it, though. Got a rep, right? Bunnymund wouldn't let me hear the end of it."

"Sure," Jack mumbled, feeling off-balance and not certain what he was agreeing with. But his fingers relaxed their tight hold on his shirt and he flexed them out further to stretch.

"Don't disappear like that again. Old Man Winter, he don't like working full-time so much. Yeah?"

"Yeah," Jack repeated, nodding automatically. The Groundhog's lips curled into something that could have been a sneer as much as a smile, and he shuffled over to the entrance of the tunnel he'd come by.

"Well," he said, lowering himself in, "Ya missed the bus on the south this year, Frosty, but I expect to see your footprints all over from now on. Got it?"

"Sure," Jack said, again responding on auto-pilot. His head still spun with fragments of memory and emotion, so much he barely noticed when the Groundhog vanished into the earth and his tunnel melded over with only a snowdrop to show anything supernatural had been there. For a long while Jack stared at it, brow furrowed.

All he had been able to think about regarding the blizzard was the human aspect: the death toll, the damage to houses and lives, how thousands of families lost power and fled to poorly-supplied shelters while the rest of the country sent relief packages by air.

Bunny called it a mess – Jack's mess.

The Groundhog, though... he was worried about Jack himself. Worried about the fact that he hadn't carried on like always despite the fact. Was that what he was supposed to do after something like this? Go on pretending nothing was wrong even though he'd so irrevocably screwed up? How could he? All he ever tried to do was make kids smile and laugh, and have fun despite the cold and dark of winter. That blizzard... did the exact opposite.

He shuddered, curling down around himself. The fact that that was all in him... scared him still. He didn't want to know where he'd found the power to do that. Didn't want it to be hidden, dormant; he wanted it gone. There was no reason he needed that much power over ice and snow. He didn't need that much power for a snow day.

The Groundhog expected Jack's full participation this winter.

Curling more tightly around his knees, Jack closed his eyes to doze back into a fitful sleep.

He'd better not count on it.

So among other things I remembered today's Groundhog Day. So, naturally, I couldn't not post a chapter with Beau in it. I totally didn't plan it; it just worked out that way. :3 (Does six more weeks of winter mean we'll finally get some freaking snow around here? JAHHCK, WARE R U? I know, careful what you wish for - apologies to everyone stuck in Polar Vortex Mark 2 and not enjoying it.)

I must get back to homeworking (all the homework, homework for life), BUT I shall leave you off with a little tease that I, personally, adore the next chapter. I hope you will, too.

Take care, everyone!

(With my sincerest apologies to Broncos fans and people who don't generally care (like me), I couldn't call myself a proper Washingtonian if I didn't at least say this - GO SEAHAWKS!)