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I.
It all starts with one little boy who knows his name.
Then a caught glimpse of a tall pale figure quick against the night—a little girl with sun freckles unwilling to fade in winter, a boy with glasses that fog whenever Jack laughs at him—and once one small group of children in Michigan know him, the rest of the state is soon to follow. His legend spreads throughout the Midwest and New England, to the Atlantic and Canada. He nips at your nose, the gap-toothed boys in Nevada say. He rides on the back of your sleds so that you can fly, the girls whisper desk to desk in Georgia.
Given a few years, Jack Frost is a name in all households across the North and South Americas and certain regions of Europe. It’s only a matter of time before he takes the globe in whole. When snow falls in the odd months of spring, fast on Easter’s tail, everyone says it’s Jack Frost causing mischief—and they’d be right. Nothing’s more fun than putting a bee in Bunnymund’s bonnet.
Well, they’re right about everything except the sleds. Jack doesn’t have to be touching anybody’s sled to make it fly, after all, and he’s not invisible anymore. He enjoys being the flash of light and ice that someone sees out of the corner of their eye. That pale, delicate spider web on the window pane shaped like a hand. A disembodied laugh—joy crystallized into sound—that may or may not be the wind.
The children believe, and Jack feels warm for the first time in 300 years.
II.
“But what do we do now?” Jack stresses, hopping from worktable to worktable, ignoring the whines of the Yeti. The wood cracks and freezes beneath his toes. He has never felt so amazing in his whole life. This feeling, it’s a feeling that burns under his skin and grows.
Bunnymund shrugs. “What we always do.”
“Yeah, but what do we always do.”
“When we aren’t protecting the ankle-biters, we’re making sure they keep believin’ in us,” he says, fingering his boomerang. He arches an eyebrow at Jack, one ear folding back. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, mate.”
Jack makes a face. He watches the backs of the other guardians as they walk ahead: the sheen of colors on Tooth’s wings, the thick red velvet of North’s coat as it swings around his boots, and the gold glitter of the newly awakened. The bustle of the Yeti and elves working around them is a low din and he thinks, Swingin’ with the big boys now. Wow. Jack Frost, who knew?
“Boring,” he says.
Bunnymund snorts. “I’m sure you’ll find a way to make a game out of it.”
III.
They give him a coat. It’s long, silver-blue and lined with rich swathes of fur at the neck and cuffs, and across its surface are patterns that are as old as the existence of bone and blood. When Jack strokes the textures, he can hear the Moon itself in their workings.
“What is this?” he asks.
North pats his belly, pleased. “We have made you coat! You are a guardian now, Jack. Children will speak of your image for generations.”
“He means we can’t have you lookin’ like a mangy homeless bludger,” says Bunnymund.
“What,” says Jack. “Excuse me?”
Bunnymund points at his hoodie. “That thing won’t get you put down in legend.”
Jack huffs and picks at his hoodie. “Whatever. I like what I wear. I don’t have to look old like all of you guys to make an impression, you know.” He puts it on just for show, anyway, not because he’s curious or anything—and when it envelopes him, he squawks and pulls at the fabric. “It’s huge!”
“Yes! You will grow into it,” North booms proudly. He crosses his tattooed arms over his chest, puffing up like a blowfish.
“Oh,” says Tooth, muffling a giggle.
“Uh, I haven’t grown an inch for 300 years,” Jack tells them. He tugs at the fur lining at the cuffs, the tufts of soft brown and grey. “Hey, is this stuff…?”
“Fake,” snaps Bunnymund.
IV.
He wears the coat sometimes. It’s not because he gets cold or because it looks badass in an old-fashioned way. It’s not even because it’s his first real gift, aside from the stick that saved his sister’s life and gives him the ability to fly through starlight.
No. Jack can feel it, that’s all: the moon embracing him, saying we are the same, you and I, cold and alone.
(But Jack is not either of those things anymore.)
V.
The following Easter, he drops a blizzard on top of Iowa.
As he slides from street to street, he can hear Bunnymund cursing his name and thumping his foot against the pavement. Holes open and shut all across town, secret tunnels for secret passage, and Jack does his best to play the game. He laughs, and he runs, and he opens his arms to the sky.
He even lets Bunnymund catch him, only for a minute. A minute is long enough to smash a snowball in between those furry ears and whoop.
He relives the excitement of the chase for days after: the way his heart leapt higher than his body could contain, the crunch of rabbit’s feet on snow, and how he couldn’t seem to catch his breath when Bunnymund finally seized him by surprise and buried them both in a snow drift. But even though Jack remembers being deep in the embrace of the ice, fur pressing in from all sides, it’s strange that he doesn’t remember the look on Bunnymund’s face. Everything had blurred together and he couldn’t stop laughing, not for the life of him.
In true form, Jack disappears afterward and gets spun up in the wind, higher and higher.
VI.
(And somehow, he is not surprised when later, as he finally descends to the same town square to enjoy the pleasant buzz of children squealing and digging in the snow to find their colored prizes, there is an egg unlike any other waiting where the impression of their bodies has been left behind. The egg is painted a pale blue with a soft snowflake peppering its top.
Jack picks it up and cups it between his hands. “Cool,” he says. One touch and the egg is frozen solid, and he tucks it in his hoodie’s pocket for safekeeping.)
VII.
Jamie grows older before his eyes, but the kid never stops believing. Jack recognizes that one day, he’ll be watching through the window as Jamie tells his own babies about the night Jack Frost appeared in his bedroom. Over the years, Jack will gain Peter Pan qualities that are not entirely untrue, but perhaps the work of a selective memory, and all of Jamie’s children will believe him but perhaps not forever.
This is something Jack comes to accept and embrace about being a guardian. Eventually, children will cast off their childhood beliefs and dreams; however, cloven to their private wishes for the future will be those very same feelings, the feelings that comprise of the cores of the guardians. And somewhere in there, is Jack.
“Yeah, ‘cause even adults need a good time,” Jack remarks to North, munching on an apple. He likes to visit the big guy sometimes. See how the operations are going. Hang out. Talk about immortality—you know, no big deal.
“Everyone needs jubilance,” corrects North.
“I give kids snow days,” Jack reminds him.
North beams, stroking his beard. He probably believes in Jack more than is healthy, but god help him, Jack can’t get enough of that. He calls it jubilance, Tooth says Jack is felicity, and the Sandman, when asked, crafts a gold-spun image of a pile of leaves being blown and scattered to an invisible force, breathtaking and immense.
VIII.
Bunnymund hasn’t got much to say on the definition of Jack Frost’s core. “You’re a heap of trouble,” he grumbles, brushing frost out of his fur.
“Accurate!” Jack cheers.
“Oh, come off it. Do I need to be making provisions for blizzard weather in Puerto Rico next year?”
Clicking his tongue, Jack pretends to consider. He rubs the back of his neck. “Aw, I dunno. I suppose I could give you a break.”
“You’ve got no idea the work that goes into Easter!” Bunnymund shouts, his long arms throwing up to the ceiling. “Do you know how many eggs need to be painstakingly guided down those tunnels?! Did you see those eggs?”
They bicker every time they see one another. It’s more often than it ought to be—in the olden days, Bunnymund says they rarely saw one another, too busy with their duties to bother with the other guardians. But that’s what got them into the mess with Pitch: inattention. Now, they’ve rediscovered their love of working directly with the children but also with each other, and it’s not uncommon for Tooth to flit her way over to the warren, or for Jack to come and steal some of North’s cookies. And as for Bunnymund, well, Jack considers it a challenge to track the rabbit. Sort of like a hunt, only without the nasty ending.
In time, Bunnymund reluctantly finds Jack to ask if he’d like to come to whatever isolated part of the planet he’s burrowing toward—places where there are new colors, different ways of viewing beauty, flowers that have no names. These scavenger hunts are fun in a way Jack can’t define. He watches Bunnymund press yellow bluebells into a large tome, watches him cup a brand new color in between his paws as if it might change any second. He learns Easter lore: the deep, earthbound laws of rebirth and deliverance and renewal.
Once, Bunnymund lets Jack name a new color. “Go on,” he says, “give it a burl. We’ll add it to the sunset colors for the spring.”
“Seriously? Yes!” Jack eagerly presses his fingers into the rich shade, unknown until this moment, and he closes his eyes. He says a word.
The word, Bunnymund assures him, is good.
IX.
“Oh sweetheart,” Tooth says when she sees him. She brushes off his shoulders and tries to hide her smile behind her fingers.
“What?” Jack looks around, then down at himself. “What?”
“We mustn’t be sorry, girls,” she says to her fairies with cheer. “Look at how his teeth are even more luminescent now!”
“Coo oo getchu han oof mah mouf,” says Jack.
“Oops, sorry, sorry,” she says, releasing him. The drove of fairies flitting behind her sag and wail.
(Weird. But Jack has to admit, the next time he checks himself out in the mirror, he does look—brighter.)
X.
In another ten years, Jack Frost will be known across the wide expanse of the world. They will put his name into song. They will make jokes about him. They will draw pictures and put his likeness up on the icebox. He will appear mysteriously in Moscow one day and Bangkok the next, with a brief appearance in upper Michigan to check on his first believer.
None of the stories will say Jack cannot decide between a hoodie and a coat. They will not say he has broken into the Santoff Clausen because the purple-frosted cookies are his favorites. They never mention that, if you should wish to find Jack Frost, you ought to look first to the wintery woods and second to the warm warrens beneath the earth, deep into the soil and dark until you smell daffodils and tulips, until you hear him laughing throughout every tunnel.
Winter tends to linger on into Easter, these days. Jack is a believer in new beginnings.