Jack Frost is not as young as he looks.

Three hundred years is a relatively small amount of time, a sliver of a fraction of a speck of eternity. But in terms of the length of human history, and more specifically the advancement of humanity itself, three hundred years is a long, long time.

Jack had seen a lot in his time as a winter spirit, a lot more than his childish trickster attitude and carefree, immature joy would suggest. He had been seen humanity at it's brightest and at it's darkest. But the darkest moments are the ones that leave scars.

The first major, large-scale event Jack witnessed was the American Revolutionary war. He watched as his town and neighboring towns divided, some remaining loyal to the British while others fought for independence. Jack was not much one for politics, but he understood the basic disagreement: the British wanted to keep control of their land and people while many of the colonists wanted to form a new country. This of course was a very simplistic view of the issue; Jack knew there were many factors, things having to do with money, resources, and power. However, Jack also knew that none of these issues justified the pain and bloodshed he witnessed, the lives cruelly taken, the families destroyed. Nothing was worth the horror Jack saw, the devastated children whose innocence died with their fathers in war.

Jack tried to stop the fighting. He tried, even though no one could see him, no one could hear him. He tried freezing the soldiers into their homes, tried burying battlefields under snow. Nothing worked. At one point, after watching one of the biggest organized battles he had seen so far, he inadvertently created a snowstorm so bad that a large army of colonists were forced to disperse. Jack was disheartened to find the soldiers only temporarily deterred, again abandoning their families, their children, to fight for a cause that they were willing to die for.

Jack was a child, and always would be. He did not think in terms of the future, of the future that the children he played with would grow up in. All that mattered to Jack was the present, and war was cruel to the present.

Over the course of his lifetime, Jack had seen countless wars, witnessed countless tragedies. He saw slaves beaten and abused, until the Civil War where so many people died. He saw World Wars I and II, all the world's superpowers fighting against each other. He saw the Cold War, children learning to hide under desks to avoid death by nuclear holocaust. Jack Frost saw things no child should ever see, things that aged him beyond the oldest mortal in the world.

Despite this, Jack still acted like a child. In order to deal with all he had seen without completely losing his mind, Jack utilized a tactic employed by humans since the beginning of consciousness: avoidance. Some people theorize that it is physically and psychologically impossible for the human brain to fully grasp the horrors of humanity. Pain and loss, death and starvation, misery and fear. All of the tragedies experienced by people, all of the major global tragedies both natural and man-made, are too vast and painful for anyone to truly comprehend. It is so much easier, so much less painful, to disassociate oneself from it. To see the emotions of others as more shallow, some groups even turning vaguely subhuman, thinking that surely others can't feel as much pain as you do, because surely they would have died from it by now, humanity would have collapsed into itself in grief by now. Horrors with such magnitude as to be incomprehensible are forgotten, pushed aside, written off as something that happened to somebody else, somewhere else, and surely is easier to cope with somewhere else, where such tragedies are surely commonplace.

Surely.

Jack learned to think himself different from the humans, hoping that this separation would make this pain hurt less. When it didn't, and when the problems of the humans became too much for a child like Jack to handle, he fled. He buried himself in the snow in Antarctica, taking a break for a bit from humanity, blocking out the pain and sorrow and heartache, but also the joy and hope and fun, too. It was these bright points, the positive emotions, that always brought Jack back. Children were forgiving and Jack had never been one to hold a grudge. He always found that, even at the worst of times, the hurt and the happiness and all the spectrum of emotions were better than apathy, better than the cold neutrality of the softly falling Arctic snow.

Jack also found humor to be fairly effective. He had heard somewhere, at some point in his three hundred years, that laughter was the best medicine. Whether that was true or not though, Jack found that he did rather enjoy laughing much more than crying. Laughing, flying, playing were all great distractions, great ways to make Jack forget and ignore and avoid. Snow days, happy children, and fun were so much better than misery. And as long as he could keep laughing and playing, Jack knew he would be alright. Because there wasn't really another choice to alright, there wasn't an alternative to forgetting and forgiving and moving on.

And if he didn't, if Jack allowed himself to think about the horrors, he would surely break.

Jack was a child. Children had fun. No matter what happened, no matter what horrible things Jack witnessed, he would always be a child. And as long as there were other children around to play with, Jack would bring light and joy and fun to them. He would guard their happiness with his life, for as long as he could and forever.