Secret of Frost and Moon

Conference

Alaia Skyhawk: Well, I'm back home from my holiday and will be back at work tomorrow, but at least I've had the fun of doing this chapter to distract me from the woes of heading back to the grindstone.

Enjoy :)

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.

~(-)~

Chapter 41: Conference

So far it had been a fairly typical year, with fairly typical weather patterns. And that was a certain relief for Jack as he made his rounds of North America. It had been a tough decade or so, things were at last returning to normal, and Dig was finally getting the chance to signal an 'early spring'.

And he was quite the up-and-coming Legend now, with 'Groundhog Day' being celebrated over a large area. That had it's downside, there were too many 'pet' groundhogs now, kept by towns for the purpose of divining the start of spring, for him to get round all of them in such a short span of time. Yet ironically it didn't seem to matter if or not the proxies got the predictions right.

That is, so long as some of the proxies got it right, belief in Dig didn't waver in the slightest. It was a fact Jack and the others had made sure didn't get spread about, because there were plenty of Legend Immortals out there that would have been put out that the childlike Groundhog didn't have to work all that hard to keep his believers.

But, to get back to the point, it was February 2nd 1901, and Groundhog Day yet again seemed to have gone without a hitch. Darting around, watching Dig shoving his mortal cousins out of their burrows, was certainly more entertaining than the other big event taking place today.

Jack disliked attending funerals, unless they were for core members of the Bennett Family, so Queen Victoria's state funeral held little importance for him. He'd used to watch the funerals of rulers out of some slightly morbid curiosity, but didn't bother these days.

He'd given up a lot of his old habits from his early days, and focused on things that were more important to him. Like visiting his family.

Jack flew to Burgess, to the current house owned by the head of the family, and slipped in through the attic window. The tiny room beyond it, was his, and was predominantly bare apart from numerous small drawings and paintings of him in frames on the walls. There was also a set of shelves, filled with various wooden and pottery figurines of him, a couple of lace agate ones, and there was a stand in the corner with the leather-bound family tree resting on it.

Jack went over and opened it, reading through the most recent entries. He then closed the book with a sigh, and moved to the wooden pallet in the corner. He'd made it clear a long time ago he didn't need blankets or a mattress. They'd only freeze if he slept on them, unless he took the effort to pull in his powers, and end up damp and mildewed when they thawed after he left.

He lay down, his gaze wandering over the collection of pictures and figurines. A small space that celebrated his existence, here in a modest town that was the one place in the entire world where he was believed in. His expression turned solemn, and bleak. He didn't like to admit it, but even with his sister's descendants, his family, he felt lonely at times. The Guardian in him, mourning the fact he couldn't truly protect the children of the world, not while he remained so restricted.

Jack frowned, thinking about it. He wanted so much to go and confide in the rest of the Guardians, to tell them, because he believed they could keep him secret from Pitch... But then he admitted to himself that, if they knew, he'd visit them to talk and that would draw attention and questions that he couldn't risk. He even had to avoid publicly crossing paths with Sandy too often, usually restricting it to twice a year, maybe three, and almost always during the months of the Southern Winter... The time when he was at his loneliest, and therefore most bored. The time when Pitch would expect the Spirit of Winter to go looking for entertainment.