Author's Notes: Written for the lovely anon who requested five times Jack tried to show his new family he loved them and one time someone tried to tell him back. I changed the format slightly because the last scene just wasn't working, but hopefully the idea comes across, still.

Other Ways

Jack doesn't know the names of the flowers that grow in spring. When the seasons begin to change, he becomes lethargic in the heat, slow of limb and quick to tire, and so always before he has sought out cooler climes, avoided the worst of the drain and preserved his energy.

It is different in Bunny's Warren, somehow – perhaps because above the ground it is winter, even if here, far below, everything is warm and close and thick with the smell of growing things.

The pooka rolls his eyes when Jack mentions "that yellow flower," but it's not until he talks about "the fuzzy purple one, you know, the one that's like a ball," that he gets his first lesson. He learns what to call them: daffodils and tulips, scilla and allium, lilac and hyacinth and primrose. He learns how much water they need, and what type of soil, and whether the frost his touch brings will be too much for them to handle.

There are none of the little white bell-like flowers, though – the ones that poke up through the snow on the border between their seasons – and so Jack plants them. And one morning, when Bunny wakes up, it is to discover that dozens of snowdrops have infiltrated his garden.

It's a land out of a fairy tale, gold and violet, every surface delicately carved and the air always alive with the buzzing of tiny wings. Jack watches the intricate dance of productivity when he comes to the tooth place, admires the off-handed ease with which its queen directs the activity.

He sits atop the gilded rooftops, allowing his legs to dangle, and the fairies cluster about him when they come off-shift. They land on his shoulders and his knees; they burrow into his hair and perch on his staff, and Jack indulges them, charmed by their enthusiasm.

He keeps up a running conversation with Tooth between each mini crisis, between every chipped incisor or unsightly cavity. She wants to know how he's spent his day, and Jack prattles on about his new record low in Siberia, about a snowball fight in the streets of downtown Chicago, about the pristine slopes he left for the skiers at Lake Tahoe. She is busy, but she makes time for him. She is distracted, but she wants to hear what he has to say.

Every time she asks for more details, every time she enthuses over an especially clever trick, he feels like he's won the grand prize in some contest he's never known existed.

When the boy conspires with the fairies to arrange for Tooth to take a night off, it's because he wants to pay her back, even just a little, for the time he's spent here. By the expression on her face, delight and surprise both together, Jack thinks he hasn't done a bad job.

The night is full of gleaming sand and fantastical shapes, and it has been that way for as long as Jack can remember. Since a time when a glance his way was a treasure to be prized, Sandy has offered smiles. Since a time when attention was rare enough to be near-nonexistent, the forms of other people's dreams have reacted to his presence, come close to caper about him.

Now Jack knows that the small man who comes nightly atop his cloud of dreams is not too busy to disdain company on his perch. Now he knows that Sandy doesn't mind said company leaning against him, pleasantly drowsy with the effects of sleep sand. Now he knows that the dreamsmith likes off-handed comments about the glittering scene unfolding in the darkened world below. "Lemme guess – the unicorn's for Cupcake," and "That spaceship is way cooler than the one last week," and "Only five heads? C'mon, don't be stingy."

Some nights, he falls asleep here, curled up on the Sandman's cloud. And when he dreams of nothing more complicated than this, than sitting and watching the night with the first person ever to glance his way, he can always feel Sandy's eyes on him when he wakes, fond and knowing, tinged with something very like regret.

Jack still doesn't know what that look means.

Jack loves the land thick with snow where buildings rise like an improbable castle amidst the elements. He loves the warm, busy hallways inside, full of the bustle of life: yetis with arms full of toys and elves that cluster in underfoot. He loves the room that has become his room, and the cocoa that North hands him absently on the nights they sit together in the kitchen, talking late into the night. He loves the careless way the man tousles his hair.

He's not sure that there's a way to say thank you for these things. He can't find the words to describe how he feels every day he spends here: grateful and a little amazed. He doesn't know how to explain that, for three centuries, when he imagined what it was like to have a father, it was not so very different from this.

Jack says it in other ways, instead. He tells North in snow angels left on the roof and shaved ice handed out to the yetis. He tests the toys, and he stays on the Nice List, and he leaves unexpected snow octopi in the workshop to hear that belly-deep laugh. He helps decorate for Christmas, and the ornaments they hang on the branches of their evergreen are made of ice, carved between the two of them, every single one.

Jaime is a boy, and like all boys, he grows. He wants Jack there on his first day of middle school, and although summer has only just ended, Burgess has a freak off-season storm. Jack just can't tell him no.

On Jaime's graduation day, the ground is thick with snow, and the boy leaves footprints in it as he walks up to the podium to accept his diploma. It dusts his shoulders and his hair as he thanks his mother, his little sister, and a friend without whom he wouldn't be half as adventurous or brave as he is today.

Jack expects the boy to stop believing. Every time he comes home from college to visit for the holidays, the possibility looms large and ugly, a potential he hopes never comes to be. But Jaime always has a smile and a wave in greeting, always shares some new story about the mischief he's raised in the halls of his dorm. He grows into a fine young man, taller than Jack and broader across the shoulders.

The wedding comes in the dead of winter, to a reckless, impulsive young woman with black hair. Jack likes her, and Jaime is absolutely enamored. He takes the fact that the venue's garden has a waterfall as a challenge and freezes it solid, drawing wedding guest after wedding guest out into the cold to take pictures. Each time the door opens and closes again as they venture forth with exclamations about its beauty, Jack's eyes meet Jaime's through the floor-length window, triumphant and glad.

The first child is a squalling baby girl, red of face and still new, but already with a thick shock of her mother's black hair. She is born in the middle of July, but it snows anyway, long and hard and merrily, and Jack grins so hard it hurts.

Jaime ignores the doctors' protests – and his wife's fond, exhausted laughter – when he takes the baby to the window to look out at the snow.

.