The lake is a sheet of flawless black glass, tucked away in a mountain valley where the stars feel close enough to touch. Jack hasn't just frozen the water; he’s woven it into a masterpiece. Under your skates, the surface is as smooth as silk, glowing with a soft, ethereal bioluminescence that pulses whenever Jack’s hand brushes yours.
He’s showing off, gliding backward with an effortless, predatory grace, his silver hair windswept and his eyes bright with a boyish, infectious joy. For a few hours, the weight of being a Guardian is gone. He’s just Jack, and you’re just the girl who holds his heart across two lifetimes.
"Keep up, Slowpoke!" he calls out, a wicked grin flashing as he spins, sending a spray of glittering ice crystals into the air.
You laugh, pushing off with your blades to catch him. "Some of us don't have the North Wind doing the heavy lifting, Frost!"
You reach for him, and for a second, it’s perfect. Your fingers lock, his cold palm a familiar comfort against your skin.
He pulls you into a tight spin, the world blurring into a kaleidoscope of dark pines and white peaks. But as he swings you around, the ice beneath you gives a sharp, echoing crack. It’s just a hairline fracture—nothing Jack couldn't fix in a heartbeat—but the sound reverberates through the valley like a gunshot.
Jack’s entire body goes rigid. The playful light in his eyes doesn't just dim; it vanishes, replaced by a hollow, terrifying blankness. His grip on your hands tightens until it’s almost painful, and for a heartbeat, he isn't in the mountains anymore.
He’s back on that pond three hundred years ago. He’s looking at a sister’s terrified face. He’s feeling the freezing water rush up to swallow his lungs.
The temperature around you plummets. The air turns brittle, and the ice beneath your feet begins to crawl with jagged, frantic frost patterns that look like frozen screams.
"Jack?" you whisper, your breath coming in a sharp plume of white. "Jack, look at me."
He doesn't hear you. He’s staring down at the crack in the ice, his breathing coming in ragged, shallow gasps that hitch in his chest.
His Staff of Winter is vibrating in his other hand, thin veins of blue light pulsing through the wood as his subconscious magic reacts to his trauma.
"It's thin," he rasps, his voice sounding small—like the boy he was before the Moon ever spoke to him. "It’s breaking. You have to get off. You have to jump..."
He’s seeing your face, but he’s calling out to a ghost. The raw, primal fear radiating off him is enough to make the very trees shiver.
You let go of one of his hands and cup his face, your palms glowing with the warm, amber hum of your magic. You force him to meet your gaze, anchoring him in the now. "Jack. Look at me. It’s me. It’s not then. I’m safe. We are safe."
Slowly, the frantic silver in his eyes begins to settle. He blinks, the mountain valley coming back into focus. He looks down at your hands on his face, then at the solid, frozen lake beneath you. The jagged frost patterns he’d unleashed begin to soften, smoothing back into the glass-like surface.
He collapses forward, burying his face in the crook of your neck, his body trembling with a cold that has nothing to do with the weather. He clings to you with a desperate, possessive strength, his fingers digging into the fabric of your coat.
"I lost you once," he chokes out, his voice muffled against your skin, raw and stripped of all his usual bravado. "I died and I lost everything. I can’t... I can’t hear that sound and not think it’s happening again."