"That's all? Just freeze part of the English Channel for a few days?" Elsa searched Kaufmann's eyes but found no sign of deceit.
"You say that as though it is so little! But yes, that is all. You won't even need to kill anyone yourself, and in return Arendelle will be left out of the war and you will have your sister back." Kaufmann said.
Elsa didn't want to believe it. She knew it would only lead to disappointment. But even just the prospect of keeping Arendelle out of the war was too good to refuse. She'd heard whispers of the atrocities committed against Poland. If even half of the rumors were true, she shuddered to think of what would happen to the citizens of Arendelle, too proud to bow their heads to their new masters. And no matter how she tried, the offer of bringing back Anna nagged at her. God forgive her, as a queen she must put her nation first and as a sister she must put Anna first.
Elsa nodded.
"Excellent!" Kaufmann beamed. "I will inform the Fuhrer and the generals. We will have a plan ready in a few weeks. In the meantime, we invite you to enjoy our hospitality in Berlin."
Elsa was not a fool. By "enjoying their hospitality" the Nazis meant to monitor her every movement. The moment they thought she would renege on their agreement, they would kill her and invade Arendelle. But what choice did she have?
"Very well. I look forward to meeting your leadership."
The British intelligence noticed the concentration of the Luftwaffe near Dunkirk and prepared for another air raid. But there was no way they could have expected a two-mile wide section of the English channel to freeze overnight, trapping the esteemed British Navy so that the battleships were as effective as toy boats. The Royal Air Force was not defeated by the German Luftwaffe, but the Germans had mustered a large enough force that the British planes were unable to bomb the German forces effectively. Thousands upon thousands of tanks and infantry of the German army swept across the channel and marched directly towards London. The British army scrambled to meet the threat, but what few forces they could scrape together in time were brushed aside by the superior German army. In the end, Britain fell faster than France did. The British royal family evacuated to Canada by plane. The once-proud Royal Navy was splintered. Some ships, lacking orders, became easy prey for German U-boats. Some managed to escape to the U.S. or Canada and others docked at the nearest colony. But it was a temporary measure because with the fall of Britain unrest began to spread in the colonies. The British colonial governments struggled to maintain order, but without support from the homeland it was only a matter of time before the British Empire completely unraveled.
"Congratulations, my friends!" Hitler said, raising a glass of champagne. "Victory is soon at hand. Soon all of Europe will belong to the Third Reich!"
The rest of the partygoers, mainly Nazi officials, followed suit. Elsa did too, reluctantly. The mood was upbeat. Goering was already drunk and even Himmler was drinking a few glasses. And why wouldn't it be? The war was going spectacularly for Germany. The Americans and Canadians were staying out of the war and the remnants of the British army stationed there were forced to do so as well for the sake of their hosts, though some were relocating to Australia. In the east, Japan was snatching up the remnants of the British and French colonies in Asia. It helped that Hitler had managed to convince the Japanese to avoid attacking the Philippines for now. It would not do to draw the Americans into the war, not when he had plans for the Soviet Union. In return for fuel resources and aid in China, the Japanese had agreed to devote more forces to fighting the Soviets. Their fall was inevitable in a war on two fronts.
But Elsa did not share her hosts' cheer. Now that she was in Germany, the extent of the war's horrors were clear. She'd heard of the internment of the Jews and gypsies, but there were rumors about killings. About genocide. Even the German citizens were not safe from the Nazis, it would seem. Arendelle was safe for now, but Kaufmann's rituals had failed. Elsa cursed herself for considering it for even a second. And every time Elsa requested transport back to Arendelle, Kaufmann would "suggest" that she stay a little longer. And Elsa had no choice but to agree, because they held all the power and she none. Discreet inquiries confirmed her suspicions that a German infantry unit still stood ready in a base just miles from Arendelle. A small one, but more than enough to crush the nearly defenseless city. She knew they would call on her power again.
"And a toast to our guest, Queen Elsa of Arendelle, who made this all possible!" Hitler toasted her.
Elsa smiled and stood to curtsy, surrounded by the applause of the Nazis.
Elsa didn't get much sleep anymore. The best she could hope for was sporadic bursts broken by nightmares. It was all she deserved.
As she had feared, the Nazis demanded she use her powers again, and each time they did more of the pretense that she was an ally and a guest fell away. Perhaps one day they would realize that they could simply keep her permanently locked up in a cell in an aircraft carrier that would ship her from one battlefield to the next.
For the most part, her assignments didn't require her to kill anyone directly. As the Russians retreated farther and farther back, waiting for the winter to destroy the enemy armies where brute force failed, Elsa was called on to dissipate blizzards and the coldest of the air currents near the armies. Sometimes she would have to assist in crossing a river or a bit of ocean. Those assignments were not so bad.
But the combat assignments took a heavy toll on her, Stalingrad perhaps the worst of all. Her ice golems were ideally suited to urban warfare since they were more mobile than tanks and she could make them small enough to traverse narrow streets. These were a far cry from Marshmallow. Elsa made them in human form from the strongest ice using, ironically, her hatred for the Nazis as fuel. They were ruthlessly efficient, each possessing a small shard of Elsa's magic that allowed them to repair themselves as they incurred damage. But these shards also gave Elsa an awareness in the back of her mind of the slaughter they perpetrated. And meanwhile Arendelle was still safe. Elsa didn't know whether it was worth it anymore.
The Nazi dream of world domination was not laughable now. They controlled all of Europe now if their puppets in Italy and the victorious fascist faction in Spain were counted. The Germans and Japanese expanded aggressively, avoiding the more contested regions as they consolidated their power by seizing the virtually undefended countries of Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia. For now the Japanese left the western region of China alone, content with holding the more populous, richer coastal regions. The Kuomintang had resigned itself to attempting to maintain control over the western region while the Communist Party made token attempts to lash out at the Japanese. But the leadership of both groups knew there was no hope for China.
The British Raj in India was relatively well-entrenched compared to the other colonies. Its airforce and navy were meager without Soviet or American assistance and the Japanese could have bombed them into submission, but that would have been costly. A land invasion was deemed too costly as well since the Raj still had millions of infantry conscripts. The Japanese high command decided instead to smuggle weapons and money to the more violent revolutionary movements in the country, which had grown after Britain fell. Anyone could see that Gandhi's nonviolent approach would be ineffective against a colonial government that didn't have to answer to sympathetic citizens at home. It was only a matter of time until a civil war began there and Japan would be waiting to either intervene directly or set up a puppet government.
In the meantime, Japan slowly ground down the remnants of the British forces in Australia. Some of the navy and airforce from Britain had moved there, but the country simply did not have the infrastructure in place to produce enough war material to compete, especially as Japan began to make full use of its colonies' natural resources.
In the Americas, alarm spread as the consequences of nonintervention began to become clear. The U.S. and Canada led a delegation to form a treaty between all the countries of the Americas against the foreign threat. It was too late to intervene now, but at the very least they hoped to prevent fascism from spreading to their homes.
One night, Elsa woke up from a nightmare to find a Soviet assassin leaning over her, about to slit her throat with a knife. Elsa summoned a wall of ice around her instinctively, and guards burst into her room, dragged the assassin away, and beat him to death right in front of her. Elsa threw up afterwards. She should have let him do it.
The only thing that kept Elsa sane was working with the resistance. They had noticed her inquiries into the concentration camps that now spread all across Europe and sent an agent working as a maid. Elsa fed them what scraps of information she could, smuggled on discarded napkins thrown in the trash in pictographic code that looked like innocent drawings. Even this, though, was no clear-cut good. It was extraordinarily risky and several agents were caught by the SS in the process of getting close to Elsa. They must have claimed that they had been attempting to kill Elsa even under torture because the Nazis never suspected her of wrongdoing. And what were the results, anyway? Elsa knew that an empire as large and quickly expanded as the Germans' would collapse under its own weight eventually, but the resistance was too small and under-equipped to make significant progress, and in the meantime millions upon millions died.
Australia fell. The Soviet Union fell. India succumbed to civil war and the Japanese set up their puppet government.
In 1945 the U.S. developed nuclear weapons. Without missiles or clear aerial superiority over their enemies, there was no way to deliver them, so they lay unused in their canisters. Germany's nuclear weapons program, underfunded and understaffed in comparison, was completed by 1950. Their missile technology, developed from the V2 rocket, was advanced enough that seemingly innocuous German ships a few thousand miles away from American shores were able to nuke the major coastal cities and military bases. Japan seized Hawaii simultaneously and a two-front invasion by Germany and Japan began. As the Germans advanced, both they and the Americans made liberal use of nuclear weapons. Both sides took enormous casualties as the country became a wasteland, but America had more to lose as the Germans targeted civilian population centers and infrastructure while the Americans could only deliver nukes to concentrations of the German and Japanese militaries, which quickly adapted by spreading out their forces. The ash cloaked the sky of the entire world for months. When it finally cleared, the remnants of the American forces had been eliminated, and the other countries of the Americas would be quick to follow.
"You may now kiss the bride." The priest ordained.
Hitler did so, and Elsa tried not let her revulsion show as his moustache scratched her and the crowd cheered. Hitler so valued both her Aryan blood and her magic that he insisted that his children have it too, divorcing his wife to marry Elsa.
The only silver lining was that this put Elsa in a unique position to influence the government and its future leaders. She would have to be careful, to maintain the safety of the Arendelle she had sacrificed so much to protect. But there was also opportunity here, and Elsa knew she had to take it no matter how much it cost her.
