Written for the (summarized) prompt: A large part of the reason Jack didn't go completely insane after 300 years of isolation was because he traveled so much. Imagine his ability to fly isn't innate, it's in his staff. What if the staff wasn't there for him to pick up when he rose out of the ice?
Relevant information: I'm writing with the premise that when Jack's sister went running for other villagers to save her brother (and they were much too late), they buried his staff in his grave, for lack of a body. His was at the bottom of the lake, after all.
Finally, you can take this chapter as a complete story. I plan to do a second chapter skimming through the next several hundred years and maybe rewriting the events of the movie, but that may take a while.
His name was Jack Frost. He knew this because the Moon told him. It told him, when he rose from beneath the ice, gasping and scared and confused. It said that his name was Jack Frost.
The Moon did not say anything else.
The Moon never spoke to him again.
-xxx-
He was alone. He knew this because the Moon never spoke. He knew this because the villagers did not seem to see or to hear him, and when he tried to get them to notice him, they walked right through him and it hurt and they didn't even stop.
Most of all, Jack knew he was alone because he knew something was missing. Something was not right. His hands were empty and his body heavy and that was very, very not right.
-xxx-
Frost spread under his feet when he walked. Frost spread from where his hands touched the tree trunks as he passed. Snow fell.
Snow fell.
Jack's body did not want to fall. Jack's body was constantly yearning to be free of the ground, to join the snow-clouds up in the sky, to fly even higher all the way up to the Moon and demand answers, to float even a handspan above the dirt would be fine, he just needed to rise, to be light and free.
But he couldn't. Jack jumped, and the winter wind howled around him, and for an instant that felt so very right – but then he fell right back down to the earth, slipping on the ice that spread under his toes. He climbed trees next, and that was better, but it was still so wrong. He could still feel that deep tugging, that awful dark pull dragging him down, down, down, down, down, and he couldn't ever climb high enough.
-xxx-
There was a girl in the village nearby, carrying flowers. She was little and sad and Jack left the other children in an instant because they were laughing in his snow but she was lonely.
He knew loneliness, more deeply than he knew anything else, and he followed her to a small, square grassy area on the edge of town. It was filled with stones, neatly arranged in rows.
Jack crept through the gate behind her. He followed her between the stones, farther and farther towards the back of the plot, faster and faster until he was leaving her behind, dashing forward impatiently because something was calling for him, pulling him closer, whispering Jack Jack Jack
–and he stopped still. Freshly turned dirt stiffened under his feet. The stone in front of him was new. Words were carved into it, but he didn't notice them.
The girl was walking this way, crying quietly.
Everything was quiet.
Everything was very, very quiet but for the voice; that was louder now, shouting now, JACK JACK JACK
The voice was coming from under the ground. It was pulling at him, and Jack fell down to his knees. It pulled harder, demanding he join it, join it under the ground and Jack yanked himself away in a panic that tossed him right through the little girl setting flowers down in front of the stone.
Jack knew under. It was dark and cold and silent, and there was no air, there was no Moon, no children, no ice or snow, just darkness and fear, and the ground was crying his name and Jack turned and ran.
-xxx-
Running was almost better than climbing trees. Trees were stationary, stiff, and while the rough feel of wood against his fingers made Jack's heart ache for reasons he didn't understand, the wind rushing past his ears when he skipped and ran and rolled through the snow did too; and this ache was gentler, friendlier somehow.
Jack ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.
-xxx-
When he finally stopped running, Jack did not recognize his surroundings. He wandered, lost and lonely through the forest, trying to find his way back to the village. At least the children played in his snow, at least they laughed, even if they never saw him or touched him or spoke to him.
But the days and nights passed, and Jack was so lost, so far from what little he knew. His feet ached from carrying too much weight over too great a distance, his hands ached from loss of something they'd never had, his heart ached from never having anything at all, and ice spread where he walked.
He walked far.
-xxx-
The air grew warmer, the snow starting to melt. Green grass and flowers started to poke up from underneath the hard ground. It was all novel for Jack, fascinating and strange and intriguing. But it was frightening too, because the frost and cold and snow was all that had ever responded to Jack and it was all disappearing. Jack wondered if he would disappear too.
He didn't. Jack didn't melt, but he didn't feel too good either. As long as he could remember (though that was not very long) he'd always felt that awful tug, his body aching to fly up and some secret, bleeding part of him calling him down under the earth. Now that he'd left the village, the urge to go down had changed a little; it didn't want him to go down just anywhere. It wanted him to go back, to go down there, in that little patch of fresh dirt under the clean new stone in the field of other stones and for some reason the thought filled Jack with dread. He actually wanted to obey the compulsion to go up but he wasn't able, and though he could go down he was terrified of doing so.
Now, the heat brought a strange, new urge. Jack personally found the warmer weather interesting, if a little scary, but this something inside of him hated it. There was something in him that loathed nothing more than the feel of a warm breeze, and it wanted to go north. It pushed Jack in that direction even before he realized what was going on, hastened his feet and pulled deep within his chest, begging him to go farther, to go faster, he wasn't meant to be here now.
Jack Frost stumbled along, lost between up and down and now north. He didn't understand what was going on – he'd never understood what was going on, but now his heart ached in three different directions and he didn't know why. At least he could walk north, at least he could chase after the dissipating cold, but he still couldn't go up at all.
And with every step he took in the direction of the cold, he could feel himself getting further and further from that terrifying little patch of earth, still calling Jack Jack Jack, making his very bones shudder from the effort of ignoring the summons.
-xxx-
Eventually, Jack reached a point where he could simply go no farther. It hurt too much, like he was tugging against a great invisible leash so hard that his collar cut deep into his throat. At least it was colder here. It wasn't quite winter again, not quite that, but the air was chilly enough to somewhat appease the third ache.
He wandered through the empty forest, never too far in any direction for that hurt too much, but nor could he stay still. Jack watched the animals: the foxes, the deer, the mice and rabbits and sometimes wolves but most of all he watched the birds. He clambered up into trees after them and carefully observed how they leapt off the branches and the air just seemed to catch them and lift them up. He tried to do it himself, but his arms weren't wings and oh, maybe that was the problem.
Jack gathered many, many leaves. He snapped little bits of bark off of trees, and wove grass and mud through all of it as he carefully, very carefully froze the whole mess together into a pair of imitation wings. It was difficult going, as Jack still wasn't sure how to control his ice yet, and if he left it alone too long, it melted – but eventually he was done. They were muddy, lumpy masses of brown and green muck frozen together awkwardly, with little twigs sticking out everywhere, and the most beautiful wings Jack had ever seen.
Climbing to the top of a tree was difficult, too, because Jack's wings couldn't fold to get past the branches like a bird's could, but he managed it.
Jack stood up on the highest branch that would hold him, spread his arms out, and jumped forward.
Instantly, he knew it wouldn't work. Something was wrong, his wings weren't catching the air at all. In fact they only pulled him down even faster, and Jack yelped in panic at the familiar tug down. He fell fast, crashing through the branches, bashing his head against the tree trunk as he tumbled end over end to the ground.
When he landed, he landed hard and heavy and hurting, his beautiful wings smashed and dripping into the dirt, and Jack lay there, bloody and broken and just aching, always aching and never knowing why.
He cried himself to sleep, and dreamed of dark deep cold scared silence.
When Jack woke up, most of his bruises and cuts were gone. He sat up, sniffling, and looked around himself. The wings had melted completely now, leaving nothing to show for all his work but a messy pile of dirty sticks and leaves and rotted grass. Jack swallowed hard, but gathered it all up and started freezing them back together.
He must have made them wrong. He'd do it better this time.
-xxx-
Time passed, and gradually the ache to go north faded away completely. Jack built countless wings, getting really quite good at it except that they never once worked. They always just seemed to yank him down faster, no matter how beautifully he crafted them. And he was lonely, lonelier than ever because there wasn't even a village to walk through him anymore, just animals going about their business. But there was some joy in that, too, and Jack watched them, played with them when they'd let him (which wasn't often), and he did all right.
At some point, he realized he felt the third ache had returned. He almost didn't recognize it at first, because it was pulling him south this time, urging him back the way he'd come so long ago, and Jack could barely breathe from the joy of it.
He stumbled at first, tripped over himself in his haste to go home, and then started running – and for a short while, every part of him was happy. Jack laughed out loud, whooped into the wind as he ran past a startled doe. He was going home! He could go back now, to his village and his lake and his children and
his grave
and Jack stopped. He had hardly noticed the time passing, days and nights flickering by as he ran and ran and ran and ran for home, but a few things had given him pause on his trip. A particularly clever snowfall; chunks of ice floating down a river; a swallow, bloody and dying in the snow. A village, much like his own.
Jack hadn't stopped there long. He'd wanted to go home, had been desperate to return to the earliest place he could remember; but he hadn't seen people in so very long. So he'd stayed for a few days, just long enough to send several people slipping crazily on thin sheets of ice, build an icicle three feet long, start an amazing snowball fight that brought huge grins to the faces of the town's children, and witness an old man dying and being buried deep in the ground.
They had filled in the hole with fresh dirt and put a stone on top of it, and Jack, unsettled, had decided it was high time he leave. While the desire to go up was never lessened, at least his other two aches were glad of his direction now, urging him on. If he tried to think about where he was going, Jack got confused, but if he just followed that yanking, he knew he'd be able to get home. So he did. He gave himself up to it completely and now he was standing over that familiar patch of dirt with a stone on it and fresh flowers too, as though Jack's lonely girl had come back again.
The thrumming inside of his chest built up to a furious tempo, raging wildly through his blood. Jack's hands reached down without his consent, fingers curling into the earth, and all the world went quiet except that JACK JACK JACK pounding in his head.
He had not looked much at the stone last time. This time, he did. It had numbers on it, and the words Beloved brother and son but Jack didn't care about any of that, he just stared at the name, his throat closing up and his hands clenching tighter and tighter into the dirt that screamed JACK JACK JACK
and the stone read: Jackson Overland Frost
and the stone was for dead people
and the grave was calling for him
and Jack Frost was invisible, intangible, alone entirely and laughing now for the pain of it, getting up and running as far as he could before the grave swallowed him whole and trapped him there in the dark cold terrifying nothing forever where no moon could ever rescue him though maybe he didn't deserve to be rescued at all
because Jack Frost was dead.