check the pipes for frost — “epilogue” ;

Anonymous asked:

Hey I just wanna ask you about the epilogue of [check the pipes for frost]. Do you still plan to write one? cuz I really couldn’t forget about it, thinking about what will happen all time. Does Jack give those lovely letters to Elsa? Does Elsa invite Jack to her apartment? Do they kiss and kiss and kiss? OMG I’m so into this fanfic.

There’s a moment when Elsa isn’t sure what she’s really looking at. There’s the bagel shop: there’s the giant wall of glass, so clean it’s more a mirror than a window; the trees dotted along the sidewalk and the space between them; she’s there, in the window, holding her phone with both hands, and a half-formed sentence in an unsent text: Where are

He’s behind her.

She can see his reflection in the glass, and he’s behind her.

How many hours, days, weeks; how much agony; how much, exactly, has been leading her to this moment? A crucial, pivotal, surreal and exciting moment, longed for and yearned for and so truly beyond comprehension that she still cannot believe it’s happening, and yet the very first thing that strikes her is that he’s wearing sunglasses.

Everything about her life seems suddenly ridiculous.

He’s taller than she realized. His shoulders sweep broad and long and for some reason she’s unprepared for that fact, this figure, one that she’d actually known the measurements to (180 centimeters he’d said, just short of 6 foot) and had imagined a thousand times (even that one night in the privacy of her kitchen in which she’d held a ruler above her head while examining the hallway mirror) but had never, not once, had she actually envisioned him properly.

In less than a second she’s realized that he’s wearing jeans—the very same dirty pair that he’d complained to Sandy about not more than a few hours ago. There’s a belt with them—a black one, and in the eternity of her tiny, private moment of processing she sees that his belt is so well-worn that there’s fraying around the buckle, clear cracks in the fake leather. His shoes are basic tennis shoes, black and sensible and laceless. It suits him, that he wouldn’t want the nuisance of tying his own shoes.

The navy blue thermal shirt that he’s wearing is fitted across a broad chest, and though he’s not particularly muscular, it holds snugly against his arms. He’s holding his phone. In the direct sunlight, his hair is ever more a shocking shade of almost silver-blond.

His hair is a mess.

There’s a noise—they’re in the middle of the street, in the broad daylight, in full view of the public—and the noise is coming from him. A shout of delight, halfway towards an actual yell—he rips off his sunglasses and moves toward her so quickly she drops her phone, and in the moment before she’s swept up into a pair of arms and her feet leave the ground, she sees that her phone is still awake, her messaging app still wide open as it lies abandoned in the grass. She can’t breathe.

She’s laughing. She’s laughing into his ear and it’s—it’s absurd, that he’s here right now, and that she’s here, and that they’re here, together, in the same place at the same time after all of these months and these messages and these phone calls and these Skype sessions and is it really possible? Really? Is she dreaming?

He’s laughing into her ear. His arms are not bulky but they are long and sturdy and they lift her without any struggle, and just as she begins to worry that perhaps they are making a scene—how long has she been held aloft? how long has he been holding her?—his breathless laugh turns trembling, all soft and fragile hope and, “I can’t believe it.”

Elsa realizes her arms are around his shoulders. Her feet have left the ground completely and her legs have bent at the knee; her heels have crossed behind her, like an actress from an old film. She squeezes.

They’re spinning. Is he twirling her or has the ground begun to sway? Is the earth revolving faster? Her phone is still on the ground. She has the irrational fear that he will step on it in the same instant that she realizes that Jackson Overland smells utterly and truly delicious.

Jack stops so abruptly that the force of it all still has her swinging even as he plants his heels into the concrete. He steadies her, unbalanced and uneven and this sturdy grip upon her shoulders feels so familiar in a way that she can’t describe, that couldn’t have been learned from six mere months of written and online communication, and yet—?

I love you, she wants to say, staring at the blue sky as Jack holds her tight and she presses her right cheek into his ear. He’s letting her down gently, but his arms are trembling, and his laughter sounds breathless and wild and—

“Oh my god, you’re bleeding,” she says, looking down at the trail of blood from Jack’s index finger, dripping from the space between his first and second knuckle, which is, indeed—bleeding.

Jack looks down so quickly that he drops her the final inch towards the ground and Elsa’s heels jar horribly onto the pavement.

“Oh, shit,” Jack says, in front of the bagel shop, from inside which Elsa can now see a rather curious crowd of customers observing them as they eat their perfectly normal morning bagel sandwiches, which is absolutely mortifying.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Elsa and Jack finally meet.