kaciart:slightlypsychicparade:kaciart:YepI went thereIt took less than a day for Jack to return to t

kaciart:slightlypsychicparade:kaciart:YepI went thereIt took less than a day for Jack to return to the lake. Watching people and not being able to talk to them was worse than being all alone, and he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Occasionally a villager or two would come near. They’d fall very silent as soon as they saw the frozen waters and hurry past on their way to wherever.It wasn’t until several weeks later that the girl appeared. She headed straight for his home, but stopped several paces away. There was something in her face then. Jack thought she might have twisted her ankle or hurt herself somehow because her face was awash with agony. After a few uncertain moments, she turned around and went back home. He’d followed her, both curious and worried for her health. Her stiff strides brought her quickly to a small home in the village where she shut the door behind her and almost immediately began to cry. Jack thought about going inside. The girl couldn’t see him, after all. But what comfort could he offer her?She came back three days later. This time she managed to get close enough to touch the frozen surface of the lake before she burst into tears. She cried an awful lot, he’d learned. It was about the only thing he’d learned, idly following the girl off and on over the past few days. The other villagers spoke in hushed tones when she came near, and were always careful to be especially nice to her. She never smiled. It was driving Jack crazy.He followed her back to the village that day, and when she wandered close to a group of other children, he threw the first snowball. It was a spectacular battle, and the joy of it was infectious. He’d caught the ghost of a smile grace the girl’s lips when she landed a snowball directly in the face of an older boy. For a while he’d thought her frown had been banished, but afterwards her somber demeanor had rapidly reasserted itself.It became sort of a game for Jack, finding any way he could to taunt a grin from the morose child. His successes were few, but worthwhile. Every now and then she’d bring gifts to his lake. There didn’t seem to be any real pattern to her visits. Mostly she’d just pick up plants or small object that caught her attention and leave them on the ice. In the spring, when the snow melted away, she began to bring flowers and toss them into the water. She would stay and watch them sink then go home. Sometimes she cried, but that was becoming less frequent. Jack felt on some level that the gifts must be for him, but then he would remind himself that no one knew him, and that the lake wasn’t really his lake after all.There was a day in mid-summer when another girl tripped in such a spectacular way that she managed to douse herself with the water she had been carrying. She’d actually burst out into a fit of laughter at that, but the next week she buried herself beneath the covers of her bed and refused to come out all day. Her parents had been annoyed, but they left her alone, saying little about why. No one seemed to want to talk about why she was so sad all the time. Jack had heard the word ‘brother’ whispered often enough to know who the gifts must be for, but he had never learned just how she became an only child.Come winter her tears returned with renewed force. She once left gifts at the lake six days in a row, but eventually tired of it. A little under a year from the day he first saw her, the girl’s parents came with her to the lake. They sat together for hours huddled under a blanket, crying and holding each other close. Jack had felt more alone than on that night he’d awoken to a world that couldn’t hear or see him. It had been too uncomfortable to watch, so he flew away and distracted himself by tripping people on ice that hadn’t been under their feet moments before.He wasn’t sure when the girl stopped leaving her presents. Sometimes he thought it might have been one day in the third summer, but then he’d think that it must have been the fifth spring because the winter before she’d left the most beautiful woven bracelet out on the ice. Whenever it was, there was a point that the gifts stopped coming. She smiled more often now, but there was still a delicate quiet about the girl. Every once in a blue moon she would burst into tears for no reason at all, but it was far more likely that she’d be laughing softly at some joke a friend had told.There was nothing particularly special about that night at the end of November when Jack decided to leave. He was sitting on a roof, freezing someone’s window shut when it occurred to him that there was nothing keeping him rooted to the village. Certainly no one would miss him. Not even the sad little girl (who wasn’t so little anymore) needed him to make her smile anymore. So that was it.Years later, when the pull of ‘home’ became irresistible he’d returned to find the crying girl with a crying baby in her arms. He’d made it snow for that baby, just as he did the day Jamie was born.Makes you wonder if - when he regained his memories - would he realise VERY belatedly that he had been trailing his mourning sister.This was really poignant and heartwrenching little piece. That not only had he saved her life, but in the aftermath of his death he continued to help unknown to either of them.Ugh beautiful! Thank you for writing this! -- source link

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