"Alright, okay, have you guys heard the story of Jackson Overland?"

It was the weekend after Halloween, and Jack found himself back in Burgess already. A cold front had allowed him to return home early this year, bringing with him Burgess' first snowfall of the winter. And he got to watch the kids Trick-or-Treat, too. Halloween was one of Jack's favorite holidays, with all of the costumes and excitement and candy (he loved it when people left a bowl of candy out and didn't guard it; Jack visited all those houses and got tons of ridiculously small candy bars. It was awesome.) Halloween was fun; it was the good kind of scary that made life exciting. The best part of Halloween for Jack Frost of course was that it meant there were only a couple more months until winter officially began. And that was when the fun would really start.

Until then, Jack contented himself with wandering around his home town in his free time. In the years since becoming a Guardian, Jack found himself slowly becoming more widely known, even outside of Burgess. His total number of believers was still around twenty, but that was a huge step up from the zero it had been previously.

The current moment found Jack watching a group of campers, five boys that must have all been around eight or nine years old. He had seen a couple of adults crawl into the tents several minutes earlier, leaving the children sitting around a small campfire to tell scary stories.

"Aw, come on Ben, this story is so lame," one of the kids said to the boy that had originally spoken.

"Shut up, it is not!" a boy, presumably Ben, replied. Before either of the boys could bicker further, a third kid spoke up.

"Just tell the story, Ben. I haven't heard this one before."

"Okay, yeah, so there's this kid right? This kid's name is Jackson Overland. He lived here back before this town even had a name, back when the pioneers first got here and there were not buildings or electricity or anything."

Jack slowly crept closer to the campfire. Were these kids really talking about him? Was there really a story about him from when he was human?

"And this kid, Jackson Overland, he was a really big troublemaker," the boy continued. "He was always playing pranks on people and making messes and all the adults yelled at him for being irresponsible and stuff."

Yup, that was him. Jack found himself crouching between two of the logs, close enough to see the storyteller but farther than the other kids from the fire. He had never heard of a story about him. At least, not that he could remember. Before he got his memories from Tooth, Jack might not have realized this Jackson Overland was him. But he couldn't remember hearing this before…

"And then, and then one day, Jackson Overland was going to play a prank on his sister. He-"

"Wait," one of the kids said. "What was the sister's name?"

"What?" Ben asked, annoyed. "I don't know. Who cares? Anyway-"

"Come on, she must've had a name," the kid said.

"Okay, fine. Her name was Mary, alright? Mary Overland. So anyway, as I was saying, Jackson was going to play a prank on Mary. So he went out into the middle of the lake. You know the lake. The one in the middle of the forest? The haunted one. So Jackson was standing in the middle of the lake, but this was before it was haunted, right?"

Man, Jack thought, I really need to give this kid some storytelling tips. He wondered if there was any chance the haunted lake they were talking about wasn't his.

"So Jackson was standing in the middle of the lake, but it was really sunny out. It was like March or April, right at the beginning of spring, and the ice was starting to thaw. And Jack was standing on the ice, when it started to crack!" The kid, Ben, was getting really into his story, making wild hand gestures and standing on top of his log.

"And then he fell through!" Ben jumped forward, startling the other kids. "And he drowned and froze in the lake. But legend has it, he's still there. He was cursed, for his pranks and troublemaking, to haunt the lake, unseen and unheard, for the rest of forever."

Jack stared at the Ben, a sinking feeling in his chest. As if sensing his presence, the kids scooted closer to the warmth and light of the campfire. Or maybe that was just because Jack had caused the temperature to drop several degrees. Jack, blinked, bringing his powers back under control. The last thing he needed was to accidently create a snowstorm or blow out their campfire in the middle of the night.

"They say that the lake is frozen, all year round. Because ghosts are cold, you know? So the lake stays frozen, because ghosts are cold and it was frozen when Jackson died."

Alright, so maybe the lake was frozen when it shouldn't be. But that was just basic home maintenance! Jack wasn't going to let his home melt. Plus, if the lake was frozen, no more kids could fall through.

"So if you go out to the lake at anytime of the year, it will be frozen solid, and you can walk right on it. But if you do, and if you say the name 'Jackson Overland,' the ice will crack, even in the middle of winter. That's because after spending forever being ignored, Jackson got angry and started hating everybody. And if you go onto his lake, Jackson Overland will pull you down and drown you, just like he drowned." Ben trailed off there. The expressions on the other kids' faces ranged from skeptical to nervous to outright terrified.

Jack Frost himself had to admit he was kind of creeped out. The story was pretty inaccurate, as most legends are, especially in terms of the circumstances surrounding Jack's death. I wasn't playing a prank, he wanted to tell them. I was trying to save her.

What freaked Jack out the most, though, was the ending. In truth, there had been a few years about a century or two into his solitude that Jack had grown pretty bitter. He was not proud of that time, and generally liked to pretend it hadn't happened. There had been a lot of bad blizzards, a lot of accidental deaths.

Jack Frost didn't like thinking about death. Jack Frost liked fun. And so, since it was Halloween weekend, and the camping children were telling scary stories, Jack decided to have a little fun and help them out.

For months after that night, the five children would swear to anyone that Jackson Overland was there that night. They would tell everyone that would listen about the frost that appeared around the campfire, the name Jackson written in it, and the snow that started falling at the beginning of November, at their campsite alone. Some brave kids searched out and found the infamous lake that winter, and told their friends about it. It soon became common in the winter for children to dare their friends to go out onto the lake and say Jackson Overland's name. And while he had some fun with ice and snow, Jack Frost made sure that not one of the children ever fell through the ice.

The mystery of whether the lake was frozen in the summer was never solved. All the children that ventured into the forest in the summer months would find no trace of the lake, only to find it back where it had been originally the next winter. It always appeared on the same day as the year's first snowfall.

I love how there's next to no pattern with my writing. Seriously, what is consistency? Also, I love the idea of weird legends about the Guardians. For Jack, though, I could kind of see some kind of story like this getting passed around. Like, it starts as a cautionary tale to keep any other kids from falling through the lake, and then evolves over time into a scary story. And the story gets all mangled in the process, exaggerating Jack's prankster traits and forgetting his sacrifice for his sister. The evolution of stories amuse me.