Chapter Text
He has gone decades without saying more words than he has fingers. Communicating with the Wind doesn't count because it's less talking and more meaning, he doesn't use his voice box for it and, really, it's more automatic than anything – as thoughtless as blinking (not breathing, because he doesn't need to do that anymore – not that he can hope to break the habit of a lifetime).
His voice is hoarse and ugly when he does speak, but it doesn't matter because nobody cares. Every spirit he's ever crossed paths with (well, save perhaps one or two purely apathetic individuals) has hurled abuse at him, physical or mental – not so much the former these days, he's far too canny and quick for that, and the latter is no longer like barbed wire in his heart; he's long since accepted their words as truth, and the pain is dull and faint but ever-present.
It's only in the last few decades that he's really started using his voice, but whether that's an improvement on his silence is debatable; he speaks to anyone and everything, making up for all those years of words gone unsaid. He talks to himself, chats with oblivious passers-by, inquires after rocks and trees, and once had a lengthy conversation with a brick wall-
He doesn't know when exactly he decided to talk, but these days he finds it hard to stop.
It's been particularly difficult this past year or so, trying to remember that not only can people see him now, but hear him too. Before, there wasn't a creature in the world that could care less about Jack Frost's mental well-being, but now all eyes were on him and he's discovered that he does not like it one bit. Sometimes he has to disappear for a few days and hole up in the Antarctic somewhere, just so he can let out all the words he'd been holding back, like a dam holding back the flood. He doesn't want the others to think him insane, he doesn't want their help. He believes there's only so much you can do for a person who's been talking to himself for over three centuries, and none of it would make him happy. So he vanishes every now and then; sometimes he lasts a month, sometimes just a week, but however long he strays from the southernmost continent, the penguins are always happy to see him – or maybe they're irritated, or sad, or uninterested; it's hard to judge the expressions of creatures with beaks. The rest of the Guardians just pass it off as Jack being Jack, their flighty, childish shepherd of winter. He preferred it to them believing him unhinged, or at least moreso than any spirit has a right to be.
It was hardest when he was talking to Jamie and his precious handful of believers. He just wanted to tell them everything about everything he had ever learned in all his three hundred-odd years, from when he'd first met the Wind or that time he'd single-handedly prevented the French from invading Russia, to last Tuesday when he'd brought Europe to a standstill or that morning when he'd espied a rare bird. It was almost painful to have to rein in his wandering tongue, almost as painful as holding back a blizzard; it was a not-quite-agony, the sort of hurt that laid on the periphery of feeling, not an ache or a pain or an injury or even a discomfort, but absolute torture nonetheless. Worse than feeling the urge to move, to run, to fly while locked in a titanium box at the bottom of the ocean and knowing there's no hope of satisfaction. He felt bad about spending so little time with the kids – barely a few hours a week in winter, and none at all the rest of the year – but really it was necessary; if he didn't want the Guardians to know about his psychosis, he definitely doesn't want to inform a group of preteens.
He wants neither their pity, nor their sympathy; he just wants them to treat him like a real person, like no-one ever has before.
He doesn't need their help because he's coping perfectly well, thank you, even if he has more than once conversed with his own two feet.