The Invisible (Jelsa)

Chapter LVI

It was nearly Christmas and Jack was restless.

He woke and walked every space of the castle. He slipped into rooms, through the shadows and remained unnoticed. He was the invisible man he had once started as, silent as a panther, calculating as a predator. But it didn't feel that way to him.

If anyone would have seen, perhaps they would have imagined it was a good-bye. He too, had he been more naive and just from the moon's embrace yesterday, would have believed in those thoughts all too much with the unrealistic hope something greater was coming. But Jack, three hundred years later, knew much better than those childish things.

No, if he had to describe his little tour around, he would say it was remembering. Recalling the spaces in the castle that were built by him and Elsa, that intersected with the new. Just like himself. Here before him stood generations much past his time, walking through the grand hall where Elsa and Anna had found each other, running down the ice-bridge to hop a train back into town to go out to restaurants, see a movie, visit friends that were not as gifted and so on. And Jack, in all his sage wisdom, watched.

First he stopped in the infirmary. There was quite the action occurring there, so his entrance was unnoticed. After four years, his school had expanded to monuments numbers. Being such, not everyone got alone. He had been informed already that morning of a nasty brawl that had started between a summer student, an fall student, and a winter student. Something about a girlfriend between friends and a justice-serving fall student who had foolishly gotten in between the two. Usually it was the spring students doing such goody-good stuff like so. The head nurse was giving the trio and earful, while a doctor bandaged them up. Jamie was buzzing around. It was rather out of the usual; not only had the winter student got hit over the head with a large stone and slightly burned, he had frozen himself, which in the all the years and all the students had never occurred. That is why Jamie was on the scene immediately.

Jamie was a fixture here now. When he was old enough to go to college, all he wanted to do was stay with Jack and the friends he had made here, as a large majority of them were still students well into their 20s. Of course when his mother had seen the pamphlets for collages in Norway, she hadn't taken it well. Firstly, it broke her heart to see her baby want to go so far away. Jamie tried to explain that he didn't want to stay in Pennsylvania, not that it wasn't great, but he wanted to explore. Secondly, money was a big issue. Until a student meekly came forward.

It was a House of Rizpah Summer student. Her father was the head of a large university, and therefore by extension in Jack's large family tree. He had been more than happy to offer Jamie a full scholarship as a thanks for what Jack had done to their family, and promised that he would excuse Jamie to continue studying genealogy and science at the academy at least once a week. After that, his mother had a hard time refusing it.

Jamie had really filled into himself, Jack mused from the back of the walls. When he'd met him, he had been much smaller than the rest of his friends, missing teeth, scrawny, and undoubtably childlike. Now...he'd grown up. He was 20 years old and puberty was a good friend of his, if he had to speak honestly. Jack wasn't blind. He saw the way the females here looked at his nephew. He was tall, thin, muscular, and had a nerdy but attractive appeal to him. Jack was proud of him, like he was his own son. He and Lila were two inseparable friends.

He slipped away and weaved into classrooms. In Lila's room, she was working with the younger students-ages ten and under whose parents that didn't carry the genes usually dumped here for the year in hopes of their child learning to control it's powers- and she was very gentle. In Ingrid's class, which she attended once a week, she was educating high students on Philosophy and Politics. So close to Christmas, it seemed none of the students were really paying close attention. He saw Tyr wandering around the castle with a muffin.