This is a post film one-shot. I suppose one could consider this an addition to 'The Door', my other larger story, but this isn't a sequel as such. You don't need to have read it to read this. Please express what you think of this story if you wish to.
It also functions as an interlude between 'The Door' and 'Thoughts & Words' but spoils neither.
Italics are for Elsa's thoughts
Thank you and enjoy.
Elsa had slept well past noon. She had exhausted herself from the previous night's fiery events. Of course, Anna had let her.
She's so protective.
Elsa nonetheless tried to counter once she finally found the Princess in a spare moment.
"I am the Queen."
"Yes, you are. But how much good can you do when you are in your condition, Elsa?"
Anna's eyes came close to pleading.
"Elsa, you haven't eaten or drank for days. I'm actually sorta amazed you're still standing. Please, just rest. Have a day off, ill work."
"Usually that requires having a day on first."
"Oh shush. You know what I mean."
"But they probably won't let you-
"They will. I am the spare for a reason you know. I'll tell a fib."
Elsa dropped her shoulders, sighing mournfully.
"Very well."
As the runaway Queen paced away, Anna quipped "Oh but I'M the stroppy one."
Elsa smiled without turning around.
She did eat and accepted a glass of water later that day. Elsa thought she could see a tear in Kai's eyes as he left her the nourishment. She was going to have to be more open with them in the future. She had, after all, put them through a great deal.
First, I have to be open to 'them'.
The autumnal sun was beginning to sink. The sea was sparkling slightly less. As the silent, two armed clock showed, the hour was roughly 5 hours past noon. She still felt nervous about herself, but she knew, as soon as she awoke in 'her' prison, during the weekend winter, her forebears were to be confronted. Her parents. About this she felt oddly aloof.
How can I still not weep? Am I really so cold?
She left her study with her feet tense and her face itching slightly. The doorway still made her shiver at times. Finding Kai mercifully quickly, she spattered to him about going to that place and promptly left through the gardens, avoiding Anna and the servants. This latter she performed much to her own surprise.
Also, hire more staff.
The fog was faint but shrouded the hill where the rocks of the deceased King and Queen slumbered into the grass.
Stopping briefly, she noted her own discomfort at the sight. Her logical mind stayed guarded.
I have to be alert. I should bring Anna.
Her face showed her minds machinations. But she didn't need to see that it was so.
No, bad idea. She's not ready for this. I'm not ready. But I haven't got a choice.
Aware her mind was becoming too active, she decided to run towards the hill. Tiring her body would give her brain less to work with.
She hoped.
...
Elsa stood, stationary, between the two markers. Her mouth felt dry. The events of the past few days had bemoaned her conscious and befuddled her perceptions leading to this moment. No one would guess it was approaching autumn. The vast board of grass and distant trees were devoid of all bright colours.
I could speak a million words and get nowhere
She was hesitating. Her mind was sharper yet wished to make her turn away. But her gut was not having it.
She hoped she would soon fully agree.
As expected the grief simmered from her deepest visages. It was a cloak. It made every reflective activity harder to mobilise but the frost of despair regarding her parents absence and the light of memory their lives had brought her own forced her to wear the cloak with admirable stiffness. Her true cloak lay somewhere up the north mountain.
Grief doesn't end. She looked at her hands in an old reflex. But we do.
To her shame, no tears could emerge even now.
"Mama...and Papa."
She hyperventilated without a sign to warn her so. Arresting her body to stillness, she spoke weakly at first.
"I loved, still do love, you. But I have something to say. Something I guess I need to say."
Her resolve cemented.
"I won't sleep well for the rest of this life until I do."
The fog seemed to rise from the dead floor of the earth, thickening. As if to stop time, Elsa pressed her eyes towards the fog. It wound and weaved around the space Elsa and her parents markers occupied. She turned away from it, towards her Mother's stone.
She feared what she might find if she kept looking into the mist. It was now thicker than the fog.
"Mama, you were good. But you were silent. I worried over this whole day what I would ask you if I could bring you back like Lazarus. I'd ask you why you didn't do more.
Because I saw the way you looked at me through that damned door when I'd damaged the floor at night or something worse. The way you played with your crucifix when you saw me and Papa talk. You were nervous. I thought you feared me."
She looked to her feet, half-expecting a defensive reply.
"But I guess you didn't. Did you? I think you knew. You understood. In your own way, you saw a solution. Yet silent you stayed."
The Royals arms met at her chest and with them folded she raised her voice as far as her disappointment would allow. She resoundingly refused to grieve for this series of minutes.
"Why didn't you challenge him? Make him see a third way? Maybe even a second way? He saw the gift as the curse and the curse the gift.
I wonder, did you see it as a tool? As a way of making profit or commerce? Even if you had, at least then I might have found a way to USE IT!"
She stopped for a second, catching her breath and swallowing her guilt.
To harness it. Study it. Maybe even love it.
"I love you. But not your silence."
The woman exhaled, as if to fill the silence that made her point. The clutching air didn't make the next sentiment any easier to express. Controlling her breath as best she could, she straightened herself. Hoping a shade of formality would keep her speech terse, she looked to the Kings stone. The word flapped forward.
"Father"
The mist lessened alongside the brief quiet.
"You made me hideaway and for 10 of those 13 years, you locked me up."
She closed her hands tighter, ignoring her feelings and hypocrisy that resulted.
Say it.
"I came here to say that you failed. And that you were wrong."
Elsa may not have noticed, but her knees were shaking violently.
You are a bird. You have started singing. Finish your song.
"I became terrified of people because of that. Of touching them. Talking to them. Loving them. You deprived me of so much during my time behind that voiceless wood..." She shuddered. Only the fact it had been turned to ash allowed her to let the words flow now without a stutter.
"...But even you didn't realise you had deprived me of my only salvation: Love."
The mist retreated to a fog in solitary steps. Her voice felt tougher.
Her left eye twitched.
"You let the door rule me, Father. You did not mean it but you still did it. And then you turn to Anna and tell her she can't see me? Who gave you the right? She was the only one who might have helped. You know she still cares even now? And I still don't know why? The fact I don't know is sickening in itself. I can't imagine how she felt being kept away. Kept away by you."
No no, don't cry.
A solitary tear found escape on her cheek. Her whole form tensed and her circulation was threatening to be cut.
It was all stress and heat to Elsa.
"And then it happened. It all came away inside a moment. And you know what? Of. Course. It. Did." Frost was pulsing carelessly from her shoes.
"No one could take that. I was a bomb. Cannon to be fired. I was going to fly. With love I might have been a bird. But the fear was building and building over so long. I became a cannon ball. I rose, yes, then I fell. With a bang I crumbled. It is Anna who has taken my ashes and tried to help me to fly again, this time for better."
Anger took over. A strange heat dominated.
"She did that for me and in spite of you! I burned the door in spite of you!"
The fog sharply flowed away, leaving no trail. Meanwhile her ice spread and cracked towards her Fathers stone.
"You thought I was diseased, something to be cured and stopped. You left me neither key nor advice. Were it not for books, I may have had nothing and become a wall. A blank canvas without light."
She dared herself to her conclusion.
"When you died, I really thought, in those last flailing moments, you might have known how I felt."
The ice travelled up the stone and began to crack like lighting.
"Maybe you did. Maybe when the water took you, you knew what it was like to truly drown in yourself. But for you it was minutes. For me it was hours, days and then years. The only way I had a choice where you had none was...I refused to die when I could have. I only recently stopped drowning. I'm still cold and sick. But with Anna at my side, I might just recover from what you started. No one recovers from death.
Except Anna. And maybe me from yours, one day"
The ice engorged and snapped the stone in two, though it still stood. The snap slightly surprised the Queen. She suddenly felt her emotions being poured back into her head. To hide the tears from the names of the dead, she spun and strode away.
"But I still love you"
With a tense breath, Elsa finished;
"Papa"