Chapter Text
It was a Sunday in November when it started.
An innocuous, completely normal, and mundane Sunday. It had only been a couple weeks since Halloween, but it was late enough in the year that an early morning frost was not unheard of and, in fact, expected in the region around Burgess. This chilly morning was no different, nor was the sight of the lone, pale figure sitting atop a church steeple in the middle of town, head cocked as he listened to the sounds of Mass emanating from below.
Jack Frost was indulging in the memory of church services long past, ones that he’d recently started remembering with the help of Toothiana and his mortal baby teeth. Although his family had not been Catholic, he had nevertheless been tutored in Latin (among other subjects) under the guidance of his uncle, the village priest. At least, that is, before his father had gone out trapping one day and never returned.
Jack had, over the three centuries of his lonely existence prior to being made a Guardian this past spring, spent a great deal of time in libraries and classrooms during his “off-season,” seeking both knowledge to fill the long hours and, when the modern age came around, the cooler climate-controlled environs found within. Until he’d regained this set of memories, he’d always wondered why Latin had come to him as naturally as it had.
He was brought out of his reverie by the church bell suddenly ringing sharply behind him, momentarily drowning out the sounds of the Mass below. His reflexive flinch into the Wind’s embrace, away from the painfully sharp tolling, saved him from a flurry of ice shards that followed that first miss.
Spinning to identify his attacker, Jack had to immediately throw himself into a dive to dodge another flurry of ice shards, spinning and weaving through the traffic on the street outside the church, before flying high above the church in a wide arc, surveying his surroundings all the while. He was finally able to spot his opponent atop the building directly across the street from the church. Or, rather, opponents.
Icelings.
Minor spirits of the winter season that reminded him of drawings he’d seen of goblins – albeit foot-tall snow-white goblins. Jack had had a few run-ins with their ilk before, but they had simply ignored him; not that it would have mattered in the long run, as they were of rudimentary intelligence and lacked the ability to communicate in any language Jack knew. Given how much of a polyglot he’d become since his death, he had found that quite surprising the first time around.
“Nothing for it, then,” he muttered to himself, as he prepared to go on the offensive, artfully dodging another flurry of ice shards.
Swinging his staff in a wide arc, he sprayed the rooftop where the Icelings were standing with frost, making their footing slippery. Not exactly a problem for the Icelings, but when he commanded the Wind to follow that up with a heavy gust, the Icelings went sliding right off the roof and fell several stories to shatter on the pavement below.
Carefully surveying his surrounds, Jack spotted the next attack too late and would have been skewered had the Wind not taken matters into her own hands and flung him several blocks east.
“Whoa there Wind, slow down,” Jack said. “I appreciate the save, but I don’t want to bring those things anywhere near Jamie.”
The Wind whistled around him in response, reproving, celebratory, and chastened all at once.
“Come on, let’s go get them. I have an idea.”
Jack spun around in the air and shot off back the way he had come to the sound of the Wind’s ethereal battle cry.
He quickly spotted the next group making their way towards him, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Grinning, Jack commanded the Wind to knock them down the next time they jumped, before spinning to the side to dodge more shards of ice coming from a third group that had suddenly appeared. He spared a glance at the second group as they too shattered on the pavement, before turning his attention fully to the third set of attackers. Before the Icelings could fire any more projectiles, Jack twisted, turning the momentum of his dodging spiral into a swift, hawk-like dive, careening towards the Icelings before they could so much as blink.
That is, if they had had eyelids, which Jack was pretty sure they didn’t.
As he was about to crash headlong into the front of the group, he again twisted, this time with his staff held perpendicular to his body with both hands and spun like a top. His staff smashed into the assembled Icelings, shattering their fragile forms to bits. Jack spun to a skidding, three-point stop on the nearest rooftop, his staff held high in his left hand, panting from the head rush caused by the maneuver.
After catching his breath, Jack leapt into the air, flying high above Burgess to scout for any further parties of Icelings. Finding none after long minutes of searching, Jack drifted in the Wind, contemplative, trying to puzzle out the reason for the attacks. He hadn’t even seen an Iceling in a decade, which only added to his confusion, as they were terribly rare outside the poles.
“Ack!” Jack squeaked as the Wind flung him a few miles to the north, just barely dodging a huge ball of ice that went sailing through where he’d been moments before.
“The hell…?” Jack murmured, coming to rest atop a tall evergreen tree and staring back the way he’d come. He spotted a large, mostly white figure rapidly closing the distance. It took him a few seconds to figure out what, or rather, who, it was.
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Frost!” The ogre-like behemoth bellowed, “Jack Frost! I told you’d I’d be back again someday!”
Jack launched himself from the treetop, spinning in a graceful spiral higher into the sky, pausing in the open air and staring down at his fast approaching adversary.
“Frosty!” Jack shouted back, “What do you want, you lumbering bag of graupel?”
Frosty the Snowman – or Snowgre, as his kind were more properly know – snarled back, “Your head!”
The snowgre promptly launched himself skyward, hurtling towards Jack as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Jack performed a flipping maneuver, dodging the creature’s enormous hands by mere inches. Jack spun in place, his momentum causing him to glide away from the snowgre as it descended.
“You’re not still mad about the ‘Silk Hat’ incident, are you?” Jack jeered, “The children loved it!”
Frosty hit the ground like a meteor, gouging a trough several dozen feet long through dirt and snow before he snagged a tree, halting his slide. That very tree was subsequently ripped from the ground and thrown at Jack, who barely had time to register the projectile before it clipped him, knocking him to the ground.
“I’d have eaten them that day if you hadn’t hit me with that ‘happy snowball’ crap of yours!” Frosty roared as he charged.
Actually, it had been more a ‘happy snow-boulder,’ come to think of it, but Jack had only been protecting the children. He hadn’t expected the monster to turn into a singing and dancing buffoon. It had inadvertently turned into one of his better pranks, although he was having second thoughts about that now and why was he still on the ground?!
Jack clambered to his feet and managed to just barely flit out of the way of the snowgre.
“Ha—”
Jack’s taunt was cut short by a backhanded swing that sent him careening across the landscape, bouncing ass over teakettle for several dozen yards before he was able to plant his staff, gain control of the momentum, and flip into the air.
He couldn’t get very high off the ground, however, as he was trapped within a huge thicket of trees, but there was enough room for him to dodge Frosty’s next projectile tree trunk, which crashed into the tree he’d been hovering in front of only moments before with bone-shattering force.
Waving his staff before him to fend off splinters and larger chunks of wood, Jack had just enough time to notice the charging brute and formulate a counter-attack. Throwing his hand out, Jack created a thin sheet of black ice, nearly invisible to the naked eye unless you knew where to look.
Frosty didn’t.
“Aaaarrrgghhh!” Frosty hollered as he went lurching forward in an out-of-control slide, suddenly unable to find purchase, before crashing head first into a tree, his head piercing straight through the thick trunk.
Unfortunately for the tree, it couldn’t take the force of the impact and was promptly uprooted, allowing the snowgre to continue his impromptu flight into the debris field that had once been another tree and Frosty’s most recent projectile. Jack winced as he watched Frosty collide with the ground and get buried in the shattered remains of the three trees.
Jack quickly froze over the debris, trapping Frosty within. Only part of a shoulder and his head were visible above the mess, and the snowgre appeared quite battered and bruised, blood trickling from a gash in the snowgre’s forehead, making a mess of the right side of his face.
Jack gently landed several feet outside the now-frozen snowgre’s improvised prison, yelping in pain as his left foot touched the ground and falling to his knees, which didn’t appreciate the impact either. Carefully repositioning himself onto his rear, Jack took stock of his injuries.
“Let’s see…one injured—probably sprained—foot, cuts, bruises, and—Ouch!” Jack yelped, wincing as he touched his tender right cheek, where Frosty’s backhanded swing had connected.
“One black eye, coming right up.”
Icing over his various cuts in lieu of bandages, Jack called the Wind to pick him up. She complied, gently lifting him from the ground with great care.
“Frost! Let me out of here!” Frosty bellowed, causing Jack to wince from the volume. That snowgre had a set of lungs.
“I think…not,” Jack replied sassily, before a thought struck him. “Do you know why a bunch of Icelings attacked me earlier?”
The snowgre’s attempts to free himself stilled as he stared at Jack, before belting out a raucous laugh, which quickly turned into a wheezy coughing fit. The crash must have cracked a few ribs. Served the beast right.
“I really don’t like being laughed at when I don’t even know the punch line yet,” Jack growled.
“You’ve been made a Guardian. That’s upset the balance of power. It’s open season on you now,” Frosty smugly replied once he got his breath under control, but the effort of speaking quickly devolved into another coughing fit.
Jack stilled completely, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car at Frosty’s pronouncement.
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
A thousand times shit. No, a million.
When Jack was able to bring himself to speak again, he tentatively asked, fearing he already knew the answer, “Who’s out to get me?”
Frosty laughed hoarsely.
“Everyone.”
Shit shit shit.
Suddenly, the crashing sound of trees falling and the grunting bellows of more snowgres could be heard. Jack was surrounded.
Fucking damn it.
This is going to hurt, Jack thought as he threw himself straight up, into the woven evergreen branches above his head.
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Having finally managed to lose the snowgres after many hours of pursuit and intermittent battles, and now thoroughly lost, Jack found a small babbling stream and gratefully hovered above its surface, drinking handfuls of the cold, crisp water as quickly as he could as he thought about his plight.
Open season.
That was bad. Very bad.
“Open season” was a sort of ritualized free-for-all smack-down that occurred amongst the spirits of winter whenever one of them “rocked the boat” and upset the power balance. The spirits at the top of the food chain did not like contenders for their positions and ruthlessly ordered the lesser spirits to attack the wayward spirit until it was either pounded into submission (usually to death) or they bested all the minions. That’s when the big shots started showing up to teach the upstart a lesson. It almost always ended in death for the upstart.
Of course, if they managed to hold their own against the big boys, they were granted a higher position within the “court” of winter as befitting their newfound prowess.
The Icelings had just been the opening salvo. The brute squad back there had been the first real assault. If Jack remembered the pecking order correctly, the next attackers would be—
A twig snapped in the forest.
Oh god fucking damn it.
Jack threw himself into the air, trying to escape, but a hand grabbed his left foot – of course it would be the injured one – and flung Jack bodily across the clearing. Jack twisted in midair, narrowly missing the tree that he had no doubt been intended to hit, and spun to face his attacker.
Fuck.
A Wendigo.
Cannibalistic once-human spirits, Wendigos were tall, emaciated creatures that hunted the northern forests for stray, fearful humans to consume. Always hungry, they would begin eating their prey immediately, usually—especially—while it was still alive.
Jack hated fighting these monstrosities, but at least he’d beaten a couple before, though those had been hard fights. And he was already injured.
Fuck.
“Easy now,” Jack began, slowly drifting backwards.
The Wendigo roared and charged.
Damn it.
Jack planted his staff on the ground and, with his good foot, flipped up onto the crook and launched himself straight up. He was fast enough to dodge the grasping hands. He was not fast enough to dodge the claws.
Jack shouted in pain as three long gashes ran diagonally across his right thigh, rending the fabric of his deer-hide pants. The toughened leather absorbed some of the blow, but he still began bleeding profusely. Quickly flash freezing the surface of his skin to slow the bleeding, Jack spun in the air and swung. The crook of his staff smacked the Wendigo in the face right as it spun to attack him again, sending it stumbling backwards with a snarl and an arc of blood spraying from its mouth.
And a fang.
Oh goodie. One less pointy thing to stab me with, Jack thought, before an idea struck him. He grinned evilly.
Jack snagged the four-inch long fang out of the air and, before the Wendigo could recover from the previous blow, stabbed the creature in the eye with its own fang.
It didn’t like that.
It really didn’t like that.
The Wendigo bellowed in agony, flailing half-blind in Jack’s general direction. Its wild swing connected and sent Jack flying across the clearing again. This time he wasn’t quite as lucky and clipped a tree, bouncing off it and landing in the stream, which quickly turned a pinkish-purple with his blood.
Jack lay there for all of two seconds, hysterically thinking to himself, ‘At least my wounds are clean,’ before heaving himself to his feet—“Ow!”—and launching himself skyward with his one kind-of-good leg—“Ow, ow, ow!” —leaving the injured monstrosity behind, it’s rage-fueled, agonized bellows echoing for miles.