A/N: Some of you are probably confused.

Many of you came to this profile for Naruto fanfiction, and stayed for Naruto fanfiction. Many of you witnessed my assertion that I would have to back out of fanfiction for a while to work on my personal writing. So what, you may be asking yourselves, am I doing back here, and not even with a Naruto fic?

Well, it's NaNoWriMo, and I thought, while I'm working on my own writing (which is going quite well, thanks—I've just sold a story!), I might as well use this month to spill out a story that's been bothering me for… months. Almost a year. And since I can't otherwise justify writing it, a month where you're required to write quickly and NOT EDIT seemed perfect.

So, here it is: a super self-indulgent story about Jack Frost and Elsa and all these things that should or should not have been. Take it or leave it. And remember: This is NaNoWriMo, so no, you don't get to mock me for NaNoisms, typos, plot holes, or overall lack of editing. ;D See my profile to vote on how soon you see the next chapter!

Without further ado...

Love Never Bothered Me Anyway

For Stacia. Obviously.

1 (This Vacant Night)

The North Pole glitters around them as it always has, as warm and comforting as the snow outside is not. Jack walks through it as if he's inured to its bright charm, staff casually over one shoulder, drawing shimmering spirals of frost on the toys with one bored finger as he passes them. Tiny glass windows in a towering confection of a dollhouse, too recently heated and shaped, crack at the sudden cold on their surface; a yeti howls in rage; Jack shrugs, and grins, and paints new fractal scintillas on the lens of a kaleidoscope. North doesn't seem to notice. He's talking, but Jack ceased listening several minutes ago.

North rounds on him, and Jack backpedals. North roars his name—"JACK!"—and Jack hollers back, laughing—"SANTA—ha ha, your face, sorry, but you should see your expression—"

North's look of surprise furrows and he folds his massive arms over his bulging stomach. Jack has always thought this makes North look even bigger than he already is—undoubtedly why he does it. Jack tilts his head back and looks unimpressed.

"I think you are not taking your job seriously," says North.

Jack rolls his eyes, leaning back against the air as if a wall of solid cold is holding him up. "Of course I'm not taking my job seriously," he says. A glossy track blossoms out from the end of his staff; several elves go sliding away from their tasks as the floor beneath their feet turns to ice. "That's the whole point of me." The elves are now clambering over each other in an attempt to mob Jack as punishment for his offenses. None of them consider moving off the ice trail, turning the revenge plot into a jingling, squabbling cross between a slip-and-slide and a dog pile. Jack's grin doesn't anticipate North's next words.

"I wanted to say this in place where only you hear me," North says, shaking his head, "but is only way to get your attention."

"What, what, I'm listening," Jack protests, predictably ignoring him in favor of tormenting the heap of elves further.

"We need to talk about Arendelle," says North.

Jack stops.

The whole room stops. Toy production crashes to a halt as every yeti turns its attention to Jack Frost and Santa Claus. They all know. Even the elves stop scrambling and jingling and tangling multicolored lights together.

Jack's smile is gone, melted away more quickly than spring ever comes in. He looks down, away. Something sullen settles into the shadows under his eyes. Something sad crouches behind them.

"I don't want to talk about Arendelle," he says.

North looks stern. Jack tries to remember the last time he saw North looking stereotypically jolly. It is a hopeless way of distracting himself. He flicks more ice at the elves; the slick path they're stuck on branches out, taking individual elves with it. They run in place, arms outstretched, with no traction on the perfectly smooth mirror beneath their striped socks. Jack cannot even smile.

He expects the last time North looked jolly was before Arendelle.

"Take your frosty keister out of here," says North, "and do job Man in Moon gave you."

"I'm a Guardian of Childhood," Jack protests, falling backwards through his invisible support before managing to catch himself and stand up straight. "And Fun. Not a Guardian of… Grown Up Queens Who Take Everything Too Seriously."

"Some children out there probably need Guardian under rule of Grown Up Queen." North towers like a glacier, his NAUGHTY tattoo glaring down at Jack, who refuses to back up. "Arendelle has children, and they are afraid."

As much as Jack doesn't want to admit it, North is probably right. While he always thought eternal winter sounded perfect, eternal night doesn't have quite so many opportunities for fun. It just leaves a lot of dark spaces under beds, a lot of deep shadows reaching out grasping, unavoidable hands.

And when eternal night is ruled by a snow queen with a bitter, broken heart, he supposes any child is lucky enough to get out alive.

"And Jack," calls North. Jack—one hand curled around his crooked staff so tightly that his knuckles are whiter than his hair; the other tucked into the pocket of his hoodie, where he pretends it is not clenched into a fist tight with emotion—Jack doesn't turn back. It doesn't stop North.

"Jack," says Santa Claus, who is supposed to be jolly and kind, "we all know is your fault."

Jack sweeps his staff in an arc along the ground, calling up a gust of wind that sends toys toppling and elves soaring and yetis howling and a white-haired spirit of winter flying out into the cold.

-o-

Arendelle is empty.

It feels that way, with the night closed in like the heavy lid of some giant box, some giant cage. Jack never minded nighttime; he loves watching the Sandman's fluid golden strands falling across the black sky like shimmering seafoam cresting dark waves. But Sandy's luminous dreams are conspicuously absent here—and worse, there are no stars, not even the background aurora of the moon. The sight of the moon has always been infuriating to him, painful, but he finds he misses it suddenly. He wishes he could shout up at the omniscient Man in the Moon, demand answers like he did every night for three hundred years, yelling himself hoarse to one more distant soul who never heard him.

It wasn't fun, but it was better than this.

Jack leaves no footprints in the snow, walking down empty streets, past shuttered houses. No need to ask what happened to everyone. They fled the winter and the empty sky, leaving the kingdom if they could—and if not, retreating into homes ill-suited to staving off the dark. Behind the slammed shutters, some homes have a limning glow of desperate fires; it's not a warm or welcoming sight, like blazing hearths on Christmas day, but instead gives the houses the eerie quality of burning down from the inside. Even Jack shivers a little, and he doesn't feel the cold. There's something more than ice and snow to this winter's night.

There's fear.

Jack could have flown straight to the castle, and he almost let himself. But if he's going to be a Guardian to something, he might as well see what he's protecting.

No—he just needs to see what he's done.

He shies away from the thought, from taking responsibility—even as North's final admonition rings again and again in his bones, is your fault, and he's right, everyone knows—and sweeps himself back into the air, spiraling over faintly- smoking chimneys and iced shingles. Even if there are no stars and no moon and not even the barest glimmer of light—of hope—there is still wind, and the wind carries him in a twisting rollercoaster gust toward… home.

The castle gates are still open. Jack wonders if they have ever closed since the moment the queen promised they never would again. Now, they stand wide, presuming to welcome in any townsfolk who prefer to seek shelter beneath the vaulted ceilings of the royal residence—so much harder to heat, with all that soaring space, and so much harder to fill, but so much easier to delude yourself into thinking that the power mortared into this building will protect you from the world outside. The queen will protect us.

Ah, but the queen has done this. That's what happened to everybody.

So Jack passes nobody as he skates through the courtyard and down the entrance hall. The citizens of Arendelle don't ever think the princess will save us; sweet and caring and fun-loving as Anna is, she can't compete with the howling gale- force strength of her sister out of control. Everyone loves Anna, and no one really trusts her.

The painstakingly-painted patterns on Anna's door are pitted and cracked, as if something sharp and angry scraped through them as it hurtled down the hallway. Jack raises his hand to knock, then hesitates, musters a grin. The room next door only has an empty doorway, splintery wood hanging from the frame; it's hard to tell if it's wanton destruction by the same force that clawed at Anna's door, or purposeful damage to claim firewood from any source possible. Either way, Jack creeps through it, pushing open the window and stepping out into vacant air. He drifts backward until he reclines against the wind, hands behind his head, staff beneath him, and floats away from the empty room, toward Anna's window. The end of his staff taps casually against the glass, creating intricate whorls of feathered ice that seeps into the room and writes itself across the walls.

Anna nearly knocks him out of the air when she throws the window open, shouting, "Jack!" with a joy he doesn't deserve. Jack scrambles to avoid the swinging window-frame and lunges forward to perch on the sill. The smile that cracks the rime of frost on his pale face feels real this time. He almost can't believe how good it is to hear Anna's voice.

She seems to remember she's supposed to be angry with him and fixes a stern expression on her face. It reminds him of North, without any of the actually intimidating qualities. "Jackson Overland Frost," she says grumpily.

"Hey," he says, "not fair. I can't shout your full name back at you."

"Sure you can." She steps to the side, letting him alight on the carpet and closing the window behind him. Despite the blazing fire, she is already shivering from those few moments letting in the cold.

"Not without sounding like a herald announcing you at a ball." He affects a snobbish, deep voice, lifting his nose into the air. "Princess Anna of Arendelle! It doesn't sound cranky at all."

She giggles, and he walks around the edges of the room, trailing fingers and frost along the wall. She's alone in here. "Where are the servants?" he asks. "You can't be the only one still in the castle."

"No, they're doing… servant-y things?" She returns to the fire, sitting so close to it that he's afraid it might catch her clothes aflame. "They made me stay here." She scoffs. "Like they can tell me what to do! I'm a princess!"

"But you're here," he points out.

"…I'm cold," she admits.

Jack nods, not looking at her. The servants might be out, collecting more firewood—though he expects the kingdom is running low by now—or preparing vast quantities of hot soup, but she still shouldn't be alone.

"Where's Kristoff?"

Anna drapes her arm across her forehead, swooning dramatically back onto her chaise-lounge. "We broke up," she announces mournfully, eyes closed in an expression of utmost tragedy.

"Again?" says Jack.

"It'll be over soon," says Anna, without opening her eyes. "We just needed time. You know. To see other people."

Jack's eyes flicker around the empty room, amused. "And are you?"

She opens her eyes and sits up. "Am I what?"

"Seeing other people?"

"Oh. I'm. Uh. Seeing you. Right now. There you are. I'm seeing you, with my eyes."

Jack laughs, leaning against the wall beside the hearth. He doesn't like how cold he's getting, not when it shouldn't be affecting him at all, but he doesn't stand close enough to the fire to make it obvious that he's trying to garner some of its warmth for himself. No need to let Anna know that even a spirit of winter can't take this hiemal night. "Sorry, Anna. I'm—"

"I know, I know." She sighs loudly. "Taken."

He freezes, for a moment, startled, his smile turning brittle. He recovers quickly, flipping himself away from the wall, upwards, and turning several airborne loop-the-loops. "Not taken," he assures her, although she does not look assured. "Footloose and fancy- free." He lands on the chaise next to her, ruffling her hair with a toss of icy wind that makes her shiver. "Anyway, you need to stop learning how relationships work from romance novels."

Anna throws herself backwards again, arms spread, gazing tragically at the ceiling. "When you're shut up in a palace for years with no one to talk to, there isn't anyone else to learn it from, Jack." She exhales with an excess of exasperated melodrama. "And besides, it's not like Elsa knows anything about romance—"

This time even Anna notices the way his smile fades, the way the air between them grows sharp and hard, like a fortress of icicles and memory. The silence is agonizing, and when the window crashes back open in a lament of frost and storm- wind, Jack doesn't know if he did it or if it was the howl of the encroaching night.

"Jack," says Anna, suddenly on the verge of tears, her teeth chattering—Jack wishes hugging her would do anything, would tell her how their friendship means almost as much to him as her sister's, would make her even an iota warmer than she is now; but without a human body with hot, pulsing blood instead of frost, only the eldest daughter of Arendelle ever felt his hugs as comfort. "Jack, you have to do something."

He settles into a seat on the chaise, his back to Anna, wrists draped over his knees, staff rolling into the crook where his shoulder met his neck. Frost fills in the dimpled fabric of the chaise-lounge, the nooks in the carpet where his feet touch. He watches it, trying to remember when it was fun, when he delighted in the making of it. Only minutes ago, he sent it racing across Anna's room with a satisfied pleasure, creating each tooth and branch of ice to be unique. Now it's just a haphazard reminder of all the things he can't hide.

"That's why I'm here," he says, and the wind keens through the castle in hyperborean response.