After all the presents were opened, North did offer to give the twins a full tour. Bunny and Sandy ended up going with them, the latter two wanting to catch up more with the off-worlders. Tooth took some time to make sure the fairies were getting their jobs done - as per the usual. Some of them ended up playing with some elves that were trying to snatch them out of the air. When everyone had cleared out, Jack asked if I wanted to walk around.

For a second I reminded him of my fucked up ankle and he stood up and nudged the window behind him open. "There's a balcony a few feet away, it's easier to get there this way." He nodded over his shoulder and smirked at me like the smart-alec he was.

"Well, I have no sleeves and my coat is still at the table." Before I could even try to stand up and grab it, he flew over and snatched it up. He was back to me by the time I'd fully stood up.

"Mi'lady." I swatted at his arm as he snickered at me.

"Har, har. Fine, I'll go on this excursion with you." I pulled my jacket over my arms and tried to keep my balance while I grumbled to myself. "It's not like I have anything else to do while they're all off touring the workshop without me." I'd never gotten an official tour. I'd had to amble around by myself... but you know, you get to see all the cool stuff that way. After all, I'd found the kitchen in my aimless wandering and it was way too much fun to snatch food up that the Yettis weren't done cooking yet.

He helped me up onto the window sill. I swayed a little and he floated outside to give me a little more room. I called a small version of my wings and angled my way outside. I followed him to what looked like the same balcony where I'd found Sandy... but there were about a hundred balconies on this side of the Workshop alone, so I'd probably never know one way or another. Jack perched on the balcony railing as I landed and sat on the floor.

"You don't wanna sit with me?" He made a look of mock offense.

I eyed him. "My balance isn't quite up to par today. I'll stay on the safe side, thanks."

He scoffed at me, his smile giving away the fact that he wasn't mad. "Whatever." He looked out across the glacial expanse, a smile resting comfortably on his face. I watched him for a little while, half enjoying my handiwork with his new hoodie and half just happy that he looked like my best friend and not the heartbroken mess that he'd been when Jamie died. "This thing's pretty damn comfy, did you really make it?" I nodded as he turned to look at me. "I'm impressed." He gave me an honest smile for once, all sarcasm and silliness aside. "I'm surprised you even thought of this." He held out his arm, looking at the detail again. The smile slipped from his face for a second and he shot me a look. "Was I really starting to look like a hobo?"

I laughed at his question. "A little. Some of the kids in Salem had asked me if you wanted to borrow some of their clothes and I realized that your old one was almost a century old." I quirked a grin at him. "I was getting all the experience in the world with the costumes and clothes I'd been making that I thought it'd be a good challenge."

"That hoodie is probably older than you are. I got it in the 1990's. I can't believe it hasn't fallen apart by now." He twisted a little. "Seriously though, this is amazing, it's like those active wear things I've seen people running around in."

I chuckled at him again. "You're welcome, that was my intention." I watched him as he twirled his Staff expertly, testing the movement of his new shirt. "And you do realize I was born in the 90's, right?"

"So it's as old as you." He threw me another smirk which resulted in me throwing a handful of snow at him. He ducked my throw, laughing. "You call that a snowball?"

"You're over there calling me old, you're almost older than America, buddy!" He chucked a snowball at me and I held my arms up to block, not being able to dodge. "If I didn't know any better I'd say you were sensitive about your age."

He hopped off of the railing, moving to stand up and lean against it instead. "You're the one that explicitly tells everyone that you're twenty because you were almost that old when you died." He winced a little. It didn't last long and I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been looking at him when it happened.

I chose to not mention that I'd seen it. "Well it was two weeks until my birthday, I think seventy odd years makes up for it." I shrugged.

"It was a week after my birthday for me." I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I'd never known Jack's birthday because he never spoke about it or cared. I definitely didn't know that he'd died right after his birthday. "Those skates were my birthday present." He laughed humorlessly. "Go figure, huh?" He looked out at the night sky again. "A trader had passed through town before winter that year and had some on him. My sister wanted a pair, but my parents couldn't afford them. Another one came through with a bunch of pairs as soon as the roads were traversable. They thought they could surprise both of us with them for my birthday." He looked back at me with a bittersweet smile. "We'd gone skating exactly three times before that disaster happened." He looked down as he kicked at a pile of snow. "Happy birthday to me, right?" Talk about the worlds worst present. "What makes it worse is that I had a friend - a mortal who actually understood me for the first time in like, ever - and she died on my birthday."

He sighed and shoved his hands into the pocket of his new hoodie as his words sunk in. "Wait, I died on your birthday?" He looked at me for a second before looking down again. "How come you never told me?"

"It's not something I like remembering. My birthday has always sucked so I don't like celebrating it."

We sat in silence for a second before my mouth spoke without consulting my brain. "You don't like remembering your birthday or my death?" He stiffened and I instantly facepalmed on the inside. He looked over at me, a frown on his face. "Sorry, I don't know why I said that out loud."

He turned to face me fully. "How are you so nonchalant about all of it?"

My brow furrowed in confusion. "What do you mean?"

He rolled his eyes. "Everyone else talks about their deaths like it's the last topic on their mind. You just sit there and chat about it like nothing important happened. It's like that's a day you scrapped a knee, not lost your life." He gestured towards me. "There's not even anything in your eyes that says you're beat up about it." He dropped his arm weakly. "How does it not bother you?"

I gaped at him for a second, trying to figure out how to respond. "Why are you bringing this up now? It's been the better part of a century, Jack -"

"I'm bringing it up because you died!" The ferocity in his eyes could have melted the snow around us. "And I was too late to save you, and I've been blaming my-" He sighed and pushed his hood back, raking a hand through his hair as he did. "Blaming myself this whole time while you act like it's no big deal." His jaw clenched for a second. "I kept expecting you to bring it up and chew me out on it - something, but you just swept it under the rug." He looked away.

My mind was spinning. What... did he just say? "Jack... why would you blame yourself for that? It had nothing to do with you." He didn't react. "The weather was shit and some dickwad driver ran me off the road, how is that your fault?" He clenched his jaw again and wouldn't meet my eye. "Jack?" He pinched his lips together like he was trying to physically restrain himself from answering. "Jack!"

"Because I was in love with you and you died, okay?!" I physically staggered back almost like he'd slapped me. Did he just say...? "I got there too late and I couldn't save you and I thought for sure that if I'd told you before then I could have stayed with you and been there to do something and -"

"You were..." He cut off when he heard me talking, but I barely heard myself. "In..." I blinked so fast I probably could put a hummingbird to shame. My eyes focused on him. "What?"

He ran a hand through his hair again. "I was in love with you..." He swallowed, a worried frown on his face. "I still am." He wouldn't meet my eye at first and when he did I don't think I was aware enough to realize it. Did he just say what I think he said? Did he really say that he... Loves me? I don't think anything would have shocked me more, even if he'd become a radioactive giant mutant in front of my eyes.

Of all the things I could have said then, none of them got past the fog in my brain. I think I sat there in a stupor for a good few minutes before I finally managed a response. "Huh?" Well, sort of.

Jack sighed and plopped down to the floor, arms falling into his lap. "Look I wanted to tell you, but every time I was about to something happened. First, you died and I wasn't about to settle that on your shoulders when I knew you had to adjust to being an immortal. Then I was about to tell you and you moved out."

"That's why you were so mad." I didn't realize I'd spoken out loud until he responded.

"Yep. I'm not gonna lie, I sort of felt like you were throwing me aside for a while there." He pulled his legs in and leaned back against the railing. "You just up and told me you were leaving right when I was gonna tell you that I'd been in love with you the whole time I'd known you and I just got so pissed." He tilted his head and glanced at me. "And a few months later I realized that it wasn't your fault at all and that I had no right to blame you when you didn't even know. I decided that I was gonna tell you after you got settled in at your place but that Halloween we met up with Sam and I saw you two talking to each other and I got jealous." He shot me a sheepish look.

"I know I'm not the most grown-up person and I still act like a kid sometimes. I was mad that you two were friends so I didn't want to tell you then either. But then your brother stopped believing in you and I couldn't tell you because you had to deal with that." He swallowed and looked away. "When North and the others told me about the immortals who'd disappeared and I couldn't find you I got so scared because I didn't know if you were the next one and you were fine, just sitting in Sam's living room." He shrugged. "And then you were busy and I was just happy that we were hanging out again that I didn't think I needed to tell you - that you'd figure it out. But..." He curled in on himself a little. "Earlier this year when I found out that Jamie was related to me I was so excited about it and I just wanted to get everything off my chest so I could just be happy without hiding anything and tell you, but he died..." I could see him tearing up a little and I was broken out of my daze a little, my heart going out to him. "After everything that's happened, I didn't want to keep it from you anymore."

When he looked up at me the look on his face pleaded that I not hold the secret against him. My head was still spinning around the fact that he was in love with me and I'd never noticed. So instead of focusing on that, I decided to move to the part of all this that I could wrap my mind around. "That doesn't explain why you blamed yourself for me dying. There's nothing you could have done even if you were there."

He sighed again. "Because I'd just found someone that I cared about a lot and you were gone. It wasn't fair."

He locked eyes with me and he just looked so heartbroken about it that I couldn't hold in my comment. "How did you know?"

"You know how the winds like carrying voices around?" I nodded, remembering that they were the whole reason I'd be able to become friends with Jack to begin with. "I was halfway to the Pole when I heard you calling my name..." He squinted painfully. "You just sounded so hurt and I knew something bad had happened. I turned around midair and had them take me straight to you. When I got there..." He paused for a minute and cleared his throat. "I saw your car and I couldn't even think straight for a minute... You weren't breathing and I didn't know what to do. I pulled you out and when I realized..." He laughed humorlessly again. "I started screaming at Manny to turn you into an immortal. Almost an hour of very colorful screaming at that -"

"I remember." I couldn't help the little bit of a smile that crept across my face when I thought of how Jack had stood up for me, even then. Of course, now I knew why he'd stood up for me.

"You what?" I looked up to see Jack utterly confused.

Shit. I forgot that I'd never told him that I knew about his pleading with Manny. "I remember. All of it. Dying, when you got there, you yelling at Manny, Manny talking back, ... being dead. I never forgot."

"You knew I'd asked Manny to bring you back?" I nodded a little. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I figured that if you ever brought it up, I'd tell you, but you never did. I didn't think it was important." I shrugged a little. "Apparently I'm not the only one who was hiding things." That's not the only thing you're hiding, though. Yeah, now was not the time to bring up Pitch.

"I told you, I wanted to tell you earlier but the time never felt right." He shifted around a little, grabbing his Staff and wringing his hands around it. "I mean, how do you tell your best friend that you love them when they don't see you the same way?"

I opened my mouth, about to respond, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked over my shoulder and after a second where it took for me to realize what I was seeing, my blood ran cold. "Tooth." I caught a glimpse of her face as she turned to hurry away from us and what I saw made me scramble up, despite the sharp pain that laced through my ankle. "Tooth!" I ran after her, gritting my teeth as I called my wings to catch up. "Tooth, wait!"

It took a few minutes before I managed to catch her, but when I did she avoided making eye contact with me. Not a single one of her fairies was around us, either because she'd sent them away or because they hadn't accompanied her. "Tooth it's not - I didn't..." I saw her wince and my stomach dropped. "How long were you standing there?" Her face pinched and she didn't need to say anything for me to know that she knew exactly what Jack had told me. "I didn't know -"

She finally met my eye and the smile on her face was so forced that it looked like someone had photoshopped her face together. "I'm so happy for the two of you." I could hear the way her voice cracked on some of the words and my heart sank. Her smile wobbled a little and she turned away. "Merry Christmas." I could hear the betrayal in her voice as she started to fly off.

"Tooth!" I took a step to follow her and pain shot up my leg again. I swore and dropped to my knee, rubbing my ankle gingerly and feeling like absolute shit. Of all people, why did she have to be the one that overheard us?

I felt the cold behind me a moment before I heard Jack land softly. "What happened?"

"Tooth heard us is what happened." I carefully stood up and leaned against the wall. I looked after where she disappeared to for a moment before I looked back at Jack.

"Okay?" He shook his head a little.

"What do you mean 'okay'?" I flung my arm after her. "Tooth just overheard you say that you were in love with me!"

He held his hands up and took half a step back. "And that's a problem because?"

I stared at him like he was missing half his brain. "Because she's had a crush on you since before she met you! All this time I've been rooting for her and boosting her confidence because I didn't realize what was going on with you. I told her that we were platonic and that she had a chance with you. Now she walks up and hears all that?" I glared at him. "Do you realize how that makes all this look? How bad she has to feel now?"

He waved his hands around, his eyes bugging. "How was I supposed to know?" I dropped my face into one of my hands, sighing deeply. Tonight had started out so perfect and had now gotten so out of hand. "So... what do we do?"

"Well, now I go back and wait for the twins. You can do whatever you want." I moved to walk past him and he grabbed my arm.

"That's not what I meant." His eyes burned mine. "What do we do? Now?" He looked away uncomfortably for half a second. "Now that you know."

I just stared at him for a moment. "I don't know, Jack. You just dropped this on me five minutes ago, and you expect me to instantly have a game plan figured out?" He let go of my arm, his face falling. "I don't even know how to react yet, let alone what to do next."

"But... Story -"

"I have to get Ain and Aldebaran home and I have to worry about my fucking injury -" I stumbled a little from the said problem and he caught me. I righted myself and looked back at him. "I have other shit to deal with right now, okay? And before I even think about what any of that means for us, you need to apologize to Tooth."

He jerked back a little. "What? Why?"

"Because she's spent all this time thinking you didn't like anyone else, and you need to tell her that you didn't realize she liked you." I looked hard at him. "You have to tell her that I didn't know and apologize for all of it. I will not lose a friend over this." I turned and limped down the hallway, using the wall as a crutch. When I made it back to the fireplace, everyone was still awol so I gathered up my things and used a snowglobe to send all of our - the twins and mine - presents back to the treehouse. No way was I gonna be able to carry back a papermaker on my own. Right about when I was done, the group walked back in, all of them laughing while Sandy blushed faintly and smiled shyly at Ain. "Did you guys have fun?"

"The workshop is incredible!" Ain's eyes were shining with excitement and wonder whereas Aldebaran was perfectly at ease and looked relaxed for once, instead of stiff.

"It really is something." He broke from the group and glanced around noticing that our gifts were gone.

"I already sent them back to the Treehouse." He sort of nodded in response.

North laughed loudly and walked over to pat Aldebaran on his shoulder, making him stagger as he did. "Aldie here almost tripped over elves under boot so many times I asked if Yetti should carry him."

Aldebaran squinted at him. "It was only twice."

Bunny chuckled from where he stood near the fire. "Ya gotta learn to be light on your feet here, mate."

Sandy floated up a little. 'Or learn to float.' He chuckled silently.

Ain giggled lightly before she shivered a little and rubbed at her arms. "It's getting quite late, isn't it? Should we be heading back?"

"That's what I was thinking." I lifted my bag onto my shoulder. "You two ready to go?" The two of them nodded and I pulled another globe out of my pocket. "Oh, hey, we're still good on globes for now, but in about a week or so we're gonna need some more, North."

He waved it off. "Is no problem."

I smiled at him and chucked our snow globe home in front of me, the twins following closely as we moved back to the Treehouse, ending up right next to the pile that was our presents. "You guys can take them with you now if you want or wait til tomorrow, either way works for me -" My sentence was cut off by a massive yawn. "I'm gonna go crash upstairs. There should be enough food to last you the next week, so let me try and sleep off my dumb mistake from earlier. It'll probably be the day after tomorrow when I wake up so if you use the library try not to be loud." I yawned again and turned around to head up the stairs.

"What do you want us to do with your presents?" Ain had picked up the pouch of Dream Sand that Sandy had given her and was reaching for the chocolate egg from Bunny.

I waved it off. "Just leave them there until I wake up, I'll move them then." Another yawn made me shudder a little. "Good night, guys."

"Good night, Story." Aldebaran laid their borrowed sweaters across the back of the couch.

"I hope you feel better when you wake up." Ain gave me an encouraging smile as I disappeared up the stairs. It was so nice to be sleeping in my own bed again. As nice as my stint back at the Sanctuary had been - and rewarding with how Jack had turned out after the fact - my bed was mine, and therefore far more comfortable. As I collapsed onto my mattress, fully clothed, I thought about that lovely little announcement from Jack earlier and sighed. What am I gonna do? ... What's gonna happen?

-

When I woke up, it was to a room that felt like a freezer. I blearily opened my eyes, blinking rapidly as I tried to figure out just why my room in California was so damn cold. I focused on the ceiling, noticing the patterns of frost that curled in through my windows and from the doorway. My frown matched my eyebrows as I stood up. My ankle was very faintly sore, just enough to notice but not enough to be a hindrance, so there was at least some good news. I changed real quick before heading upstairs where I found the Spirit of Winter perched on the railing of my roof.

Frost was creeping out from where he sat, intimately focused on something I couldn't see. He'd definitely been sitting there for a long time, otherwise, the cold wouldn't have hit my bedroom. "Jack, you're freezing my tree." He looked up so fast that he fell off the railing. I rolled my eyes as he drifted back up, an apologetic look on his face. He reined in his powers and the frost melted before my eyes.

"Sorry." He smiled sheepishly at me. "I didn't realize it was that bad."

I watched him for a second, still half asleep. "What are you doing here, Jack?"

"I uh, I" He pointed over his shoulder. "I apologized to Tooth. She took it better than I thought." He grimaced. "Baby Tooth won't look at me though." I blinked in surprise. I hadn't expected him to make the trip so quickly. "Soo..." He looked at me expectantly.

"Jack, you do realize that I've been asleep since Christmas, right?" I crossed my arms. "What day even is it?"

"Wednesday." Huh, I've been asleep for two days. "Did you get a chance to think about it?"

My mouth gaped a little. "What part of 'asleep' did you not hear? No, I haven't had a chance to think about it. Not unless you count 'what am I gonna do, what's gonna happen' right before I fell asleep."

He tried to hide his crestfallen look by glancing over his shoulder and setting down his Staff. I still caught it though. "Well, for starters, you could tell me how you feel."

I blinked. "I -" I hesitated. I'd started to say that I didn't care, but that's obviously not what he meant. Not to mention that if I said that, he'd probably get mad. "You're my best friend, you always have been. I've never thought of you any differently, so hearing you say... that... I don't know." I rubbed my arms, less because I was cold and more because I was uncomfortable.

"Can you try to think of me differently?" He had both of his hands in his pockets and even though he was standing up straight, he looked like he was curled in on himself.

I stared at him for a few minutes before I answered. "I don't want things to change between us."

He moved over to me, grasping my arms as he did. "They won't, not if you don't want them to." There was barely concealed excitement on his face that bordered on crazed. "I won't do anything stupid."

"That's not what I mean." I leaned back, breaking free of him. "I mean I don't want you to get mad at me if I..." I looked away, I couldn't see his face when I said what I was about to say. "If I don't love you back." I took a breath, trying to steel myself against my empathy for a moment. "I don't want you to resent me because if you do I'm afraid to lose you." I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, hoping that he'd get it. "I told you... I won't lose a friend over this."

He was speechless for a minute. He was trying to come up with something, that was for sure - his mouth was gaping like a fish. "What if... What if I swear to stay your best friend no matter what?" He walked over to me again. "I don't wanna lose you either. If you really don't... If nothing changes for you then I'll go back to how things were before I said anything. Okay?" His eyes pleaded that I give him this.

I watched his face as I considered his deal. "You get a year. A year of me honestly trying." His eyes lit up and the smile that ripped across his face was ecstatic. "When the year's up, I decide what happens from then on. If my feelings for you don't change then you have to swear that you'll go back... and if they do change then... we'll figure things out from there -"

He picked me up in a hug, swinging me around while he whooped. "Yes! Whatever you want!" He set me down, still grinning from ear to ear.

"Not so fast, there's one more condition."

He shook his head, still smiling. "Anything."

"You can't tell anyone. People like Tooth that already know or are directly involved, sure, but you can't run around telling everyone we know. Alright?"

"Deal." His smile was one of the happiest I'd ever seen on him. So why am I not happy to see it? "Anything you say."

"Jack, you have to promise me that I will not lose my best friend." I stared him down. Something in my expression must have gotten through to him how serious I was. "I told Korri a long time ago that if there were no immortals in this world that I cared about, then I'd have never been able to be an immortal, myself." His eyebrows flew together like magnets. "You were the first person I cared about in this new world of mine, the first person who cared about me. I've known you almost my whole life, and if everything went to shit because of this and I didn't have my best friend anymore then I don't know if I could survive in this world." I swallowed hard. "An immortal life is a lonely one without someone there who can give a shit every now and then." I looked down. "You're one of those people for me, Jack. If I lost what I have with you, now, I'd be the one that was lost."

The longer he stared at me, the more he started understanding how scared this whole thing made me. I could see the empathy and distress in his eyes. "Story, I -" He grabbed my hands, running his fingers over the backs as he stared at them instead of my eyes. "I would never want you to go through what I did those first three hundred years of my life." He clenched his teeth as he winced. "I give you my word as a Guardian, a Spirit of the Seasons, and as your best friend, that you will never be alone. No matter what happens with us, or anyone else." He looked up and reached his hand up to my face, running his thumb across my cheek. "You will never lose yourself if it's in my power to stop it." He gave me a smile. "And you'll definitely never lose me. This I swear."

I could see the resolve in his eyes. I knew that he was telling me the truth and that he'd go to hell and back to keep that promise. That's the kind of person Jack was. He was the one person that I could count on - to the end of time - to never leave me, that's part of why I'd let myself get so close to him. My only problem now was if I'd see him the same way once all this was over. I held up the hand he'd freed earlier. "Shake on it?" He glanced down at my hand before his lips quirked into an amused smile. "One year, then I - we decide what happens."

He grabbed my hand, still smiling at me. "You give an honest try and we stay friends regardless." With that, we were shaking on a deal I'd have never expected in my life. "It's a deal." He just sat there, smiling at me for a little while, the silence broken by the breeze rustling through the treetops. "So? What do we do now?"

"Well, I don't know about you, but I'm starving. I haven't eaten in two days and my presents are still piled in the living room." I turned to head down the stairs, Jack following me. "Do the twins know you're here?"

He shrugged. "I haven't seen them and I've been here since yesterday. I thought they might be in Santoff Claussen."

"They've been staying there a lot. I think they'll move out soon, thank god. I love them, I do, but they are annoying as hell sometimes." I stumbled a bit, mentally, realizing that I'd just said the 'L' word out loud after the conversation we'd just had. I tried not to let it show on my face. I refused to let the knowledge that Jack had feelings - very strong ones at that - for me make us awkward and strained. I didn't want it to change things between us. I knew he'd uphold his end, I just had to make sure that my mind didn't sabotage me now, as well.

"What's Santoff Claussen like?" We'd made it downstairs and Jack hesitated once he saw the mess that was my presents left heaped in my living room. He didn't mention it, though. "I've been wanting to go and visit, but I don't know where it is and I feel weird just dropping in."

"It's the weirdest town you'll ever see." I gave him a grin over my shoulder as I strode into the kitchen, looking for a snack for my now growling stomach. "Pod treehouses, gizmos flying and hopping left and right, Big Root in the center of it all like the Globe is for the Workshop. And everyone could see me, that was by far the weirdest part until I got used to it." I saw Jack stiffen up a little out of the corner of my eye. "What?"

"Everyone could see you? Like, they believed in you?" I glanced at his face, seeing his eyes bugging out. "Even the adults?"

I nodded. "It's something to do with Big Root and Ombric being there, it makes everyone born and bred in the town natural believers. Big Root, itself is one of the coolest things there, though. I've explored almost every nook and cranny of it by now and it's incredible. I can see where North got his ideas of how to spread wonder from."

Jack smiled a little, eyes still wide. "Is it really that amazing?"

I nodded again. "More. Not to mention that Katherine had a mini treehouse in the boughs of Big Root that made me almost instantly realize that Manny was trying to make me her replacement-" I cut myself off, eyes widening as I realized that I'd said that out loud. I hadn't planned on telling anyone what I'd suspected about Manny's intentions, and especially not Jack. "Shit." I breathed the word more than I said it. Unless Manny ever told us that this had actually been his plan, I wasn't gonna share it with a soul. But of course, my mouth had other ideas.

"What are you talking about?" I looked over at Jack and winced. I could see in the way his brows were set that he wasn't exactly happy with the news.

"Katherine was Mother Goose. She was a purveyor of stories - specifically those that involved her fellow Guardians. She was best friends with a silver-haired immortal child and was always retelling the adventures she'd been in to others. Hell, she even had a treehouse and brown hair." I shrugged a little. "Sound familiar?"

"That doesn't mean that you were replacing -"

"Manny re-uses legends all the time. Korri, Anubis, that Bob Marley looking hippie that hangs around Legends,... me. If there's still need for an immortal in the world, whether they're still here or not is irrelevant. He'll find someone to fill the void." I shrugged again and turned back to my snack prep. "Maybe I was just a harder replacement to find."

"Story, you don't really believe you're replacing Mother Goose, do you?" I didn't respond, assuming my silence would be answer enough. He moved closer to me and stared until he caught my eye. "So you're both storytellers. So what? You are not anyone's two-point-o."

"Even Ombric saw the resemblance during the first conversation I ever had with him."

"And he said I look like my grandfather. That doesn't mean I'm him. Just because you're similar to her, doesn't mean you're supposed to be her. You're you, and I don't think anyone would have it any other way." He smiled at me. I realized that he was reaching for my hand when his fingers hit mine, and even though my eyes jerked down I forced myself to accept his touch. I'd promised to try. When I met his eye again I caught him smiling even more. "I know I wouldn't."