Secret of Frost and Moon

Shadows

Alaia Skyhawk: And the next arc begins! We're moving into the juicy bits of my plotting now!

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

And a shout-out to VanRah on Deviantart, for letting me use their awesome picture of Jack Frost as the new cover for this story! Seriously, go check out their page!

~(-)~

Chapter 30: Shadows

"I still think this is stupid, and messy, and illogical, and... and..."

"Not regimented and ruled with an iron fist? I hate to break it to you, Ariko, but Nature is unpredictable and chaotic by well, nature. No force of nature can be ruled by a force of man, and it won't be held to a leash made of human concepts. That's why Mother Nature wants us working this way from now on."

"...I still think this is stupid."

Ariko sat there, glaring at him and pouting. A person could be forgiven for thinking that this was the first Winter/Spring transition that the two of them had worked on together, but in fact it had been ten years since Mother Nature had told her to switch to the new methods, and this was their nineteenth transition.

Ariko had been well and truly knocked off her high-horse, but it seemed that even after a decade she was still sulking about it. And she always made a point of seeking out Jack, when the winds told her he was on his last bit of winter work before going back to the Winter Sanctuary. She did it in an obvious attempt to annoy him.

Jack kept his back to her, rolling his eyes as he ushered away the clouds he'd used for one last brief blizzard over Patagonia. Ariko had gone from being a general annoyance, haughty and self-superior, to acting like a petulant child whenever they crossed paths. She didn't treat Achieng that way, he knew that from speaking to the Spirit of Summer. No, Ariko blamed him for all these changes, which to give her credit he was the one responsible, but she simply refused to accept that this change had been for the best.

The clouds sent on their way, Jack sighed and shook his head. Speaking without turning to face her.

"You know, you glaring daggers at my back at every opportunity may have been cute a first, but now you're really starting to look like a spoiled brat. If you keep acting like a child with tantrum issues, then I'm going to start treating you like one."

He glanced over his shoulder at her, in time to see a flicker of conflict in her expression. She was determined to keep voicing her objections, but part of her didn't want to prove him right. That part was her pride, and it was the same thing he'd exploited to bring Oisin and Achieng around. They'd just been far less stubborn about it.

She flew off without another word, still pouting, and Jack let out a sigh of relief once she was gone. Southern Winter was over, and he had three and a half weeks before the first preliminary parts of Northern Winter would require his attention around the Arctic Circle.

He arrived back at the Winter Sanctuary to find Yuki playing games with the sprites, who she had shooed back home in line with Jack's expected time of return. He waved to her as he passed, petting a couple of the sprites that came to dance in greeting around his ankles, and then headed into the Ice Palace to go take a nap.

The numerals above his bed caught his attention when he went to it, his mind reading the numbers and words as he remained in thoughtful silence. Twenty-third of August 1811... In three months, three weeks, and two days, it would be exactly one-hundred years since he had died and become Jack Frost.

Jack slumped into the snow on his bed, not particularly looking forward to that anniversary. He tended to try and ignore the date of his death, December the sixteenth, each year. Not because he didn't like remembering saving his sister, but because he preferred not to think about the memories of what happened after... The cold and the dark, the desperate need to breathe, and the terror of being trapped under the ice. Those memories didn't cause him problems in the sense of him locking up when faced with them. Being trapped under ice no longer held any fear at all for him, since he couldn't become trapped anymore and he was incapable of drowning. He just didn't see the point in reliving it every year for some unnecessary purpose of posterity.