A/N: This marks the first of the seven one-shots that was SUPPOSED to be up in time for Elsanna week two weeks ago, but here I am, late as usual. Hopefully fashionably late, and with plenty of readers still around.
Anyways, welcome! This is the Slipshod Collection, a group of stories that may or may not be related to one another, starting with the seven prompts from Elsanna Week 2014. I MIGHT post Autumn Leaves here as the eighth work in the series, just because it got buried underneath everything else when I posted it and it's a little flimsy as a stand-alone piece.
But anyways, I'm sorry I've been gone. Two English classes in college is hell on the mind, and I've not had the inspiration to write. As a treat, this is the longest chapter for anything I've written in the past year. Congrats.
The Slipshod Collection
Elsanna Week 2014, Prompt 1: Cuddles
Anna slumped in defeat on the plush velvet loveseat, eyes glazed and half-lidded as she gazed at the flickering fire's tentative whisperings of presence and emptiness, the iridescent spirals of red and orange and yellow and white and grey silk journeying toward the ceiling and recoiling with sharp fear at getting too far from the smoldering logs below, and thus becoming too cold to stay alive. The little flames, so much like children and possessing a similar energy of rapturous wonder, enjoyed darting and leaping about the ashen log they called mother, playing a game of tag with fearless tendrils of joy and abandon, reaching but never quite touching, warming but never quite burning, swelling without bursting the way an embryo would grow and blossom into a child to be delivered forth from the warm security of the swollen womb, falling into waiting arms with open, sparkling eyes naïve to the dangers and fallacies of the world. Such a child could never know any harm, could never hurt anything within its own power, not even should death choose to extract the precious, newfound life from the grace of earthly blessing, and as death would be wont to leave the innocent and the fortunate to their musings and ministrations, so was the hearth content to warm the dejected, listless young woman seated a scant amount of feet away. She sighed, a sound that could make even the brightest of days swell up with a grey canopy of sad-eyed clouds and stray boiling drizzlets, the kind that were so cold they left burns upon the skin on contact, and though the sound of that quiet breath leaving her lips would have shamed the sun's powerful rays, she had no effect on the dazzling fire that sparked and popped before her like so many little capsules of gunpowder, contained explosions of mirth and pyrotechnic fantasies.
Her left leg stretched in an almost straight line from her slouched hip, the sole of her embroidered white leather-and-suede, rabbit-fur-lined boot faced toward the fire, the dainty roundness of the toe pointed skyward and skewed slightly outward. Her right leg, clad in the boot's mate and just as relaxed, bent at a ninety-degree angle and tucked beneath both her left leg and the edge of the gold-leaf-trimmed loveseat, the toe resting against the hand-knit twill area rug that sprawled across the laminated hardwood floor below, a massive phoenix-purple and jade-green crocus captured forever in the taut, dyed cotton threads riddled with knots and loops. The rug had been a rather expensive investment by the King and Queen, nearly a decade before it would see the defeated grace of a tired woman sprawled before the hearth.
One arm hung limp in her lap, hand loose and flopped across her pale, sateen-skirted legs, the gentle folds and rumples laying in distraught twists and tangles, a mess of wrinkled linen and weave. Her other arm bent down, the elbow perched on the arm of the chair, leaving her forearm to thrust upward into a half-fist that mashed against her soft, round cheek, pushing it askew on her face to match the tilt of her head on her spindly neck. A shallowly-breathing bosom, pert and petite as it was, strained and laxed against the unlaced bodice that had constrained her body earlier that day in an effort to exude an aura of pride and regal presentation.
It wasn't for lack of trying that she'd fallen into a miserable slump of freckles and sighs and downcast eyes. It was supposed to be a wonderful winter day, clear skies, fresh powder abound, the perfect day to try and do something nice for her hard-working, beloved sister. She had hoped that she could alleviate some of the queen's stress by offering a small bundle of happiness for the day, though that had all but come undone and had most certainly gone awry despite best intentions and well-meant efforts.
Perhaps Anna should have left well enough alone and minded to her own business rather than antagonizing the chefs. Then again, Elsa had often been neglect to attend to feeding herself when she was under extensive pressure and fit to burst, so it had been a heartfelt gesture that the princess cook a small, meaningful dinner for her sister, a thick vegetable soup with squares of succulent, smoked beef marinated in the finest spices the kingdom's trade agreements had to offer. It had started well; the head chef, Jorn, had started her with cutting the beans into small strips, the length of her littlest finger from palm to second knuckle, using gentle rolling slices with the stalks held fast between trembling fingers and a wooden slicing board. Anna had been fearful at using a knife, for the last time she'd encountered one she'd watched it nearly cleave her sister's beautiful head from her pale, distraught shoulders. Granted, that knife had been a sword, but it was a sharp-edged object fashioned from forged steel and leather and carved wood, not unlike the small paring knife she held. She separated the cold green beans into manageable lengths, some longer or more diagonally-cut than others, but satisfactory enough to be used in a soup.
Next came the skinning of the carrots with a clean paring knife, slicing the dirty skin from the clean vegetable within, slow and careful strokes leaving ribbons of orange skin in the refuse bin. That had been far more nerve-wracking than the bean slicing; one false move and an entire digit could very well end up amid the orange shavings, rather than just a nail or a part of a finger. Nevertheless, she succeeded in peeling the carrots, five of them, moving right along to the potatoes three and humming with uneven breaths as she kept her fear in check.
The vegetables sliced, diced, skinned, and ready to move forward, Jorn helped to slice up a ripe red tomato, "firm as me wife's backside," he'd said with a hearty laugh. The tomato looked like little more than a pulp when he was finished, and he followed with a second. "The soup needs two 'may-toes, jus' like a woman needs four rosy cheeks." He winked at the blushing princess, though she laughed nonetheless. "Though, them cheeks not be fer cuttin' and soupin', y'hear?"
Then came the hard part: the meat. A full-sized butcher's cleaver, seven inches of iron-sharpened blade and five inches of body to hook the handle, found its way into Anna's hand. She gulped. "Take four fat strips offa tha' flank," he instructed. "Make 'em…oh, 'bout's long as them beans," he said, pointing at the green stalks that floated in the boiling water of the soup broth. Anna looked at the flank, easily as thick as her arm, and attempted to slice the meat with a rolling stroke. The chef laughed.
"Y'ain' gonna cut it like tha'. Gotta hit 'er hard, like ya killun it all over 'gain."
She blinked twice, unsure what to do. With a raised arm, she swung the knife down, smashing it through the flank and splitting a fat chunk of uncooked meat from the tenderized mother it had once been attached to, blood splattering up into her face and over her hands. She cried out in surprise and disgust.
"Cookin's a righ' messy job, missy. Y'sure y'wanna keep goin'?"
Anna responded by smashing the knife into the flank again, splitting another strip away. The chef leaned back on his heels, arms crossed, watching the determined princess hack away at the meat, splattering blood and fat across the stainless steel counter that had formerly gleamed with what commonfolk would call "spitshine cleanliness" that would reflect even the dirties of faces with crystal clarity. The red spatterings marred the polished surface, the circular buff marks from being forged and polished to reflection graining and dissipating the droplets into a mess that would take a great deal of cleaning. The chef grunted.
"Now, grab tha' smaller knife an' cut 'em up small-likes."
And Anna sliced the strips into delicate squares, little cubelets that oozed as they slumped on the cutting board, the juices filling the scores of slice marks engrained in the wood.
"Isn't this bad for the board?"
"Wha?"
"The blood...doesn't it stain the wood?"
"Soak 'er in wa'er and she does jus' fine."
Anna nodded, slicing the last of the meat into manageable chunks. The chef beamed.
"Now we gotta fry 'em up a bit before addin' 'em to th' broth."
He produced a cast-iron frying pan that weighed more than anything Anna had ever needed to lift, banging it down on the stovetop with a loud, metallic clatter and a bright, lucid flame. He tossed the meat cubes into the pan and let them sizzle, adding salt and black pepper to the marinated meat for emphasis on the infused flavor. The meat cooked with delicious aromas, falling into the boiling pot to mingle with the vegetables and spices. The chef samlped the broth, smacking his lips with hearty approval.
"Very good. Jus' a pinch o' parsley an' dinner is served."
He added the green sprig, stirring the pot generously, and handed the ladle to Anna.
"Stir tha' for a minute and then let 'er sit another few," he instructed. She dipped the scoop into the broth and began slowly drawing circles and curls in the murky depths, the aroma driving her senses wild.
She scratched her itching forehead, noting the sweat beaded there, and managed to dislodge a hair to fall precariously into the pot. She groaned, switching the ladle to her other hand, and stuck her arm into the pot to grab the hair.
What Anna had forgotten in her moment of daring victory was that the pot contained boiling water, and no matter how many vegetables or squares of meat were added to the pot, boiling water was still boiling water, and as soon as her fingers closed around the rogue hair and the red-orange tomato juices gathered and clung to her skin, this realization met her in the form of angry burns and an unrestrained scream.
She whipped her hand from the pot, hair still between her fingers, and rushed to the sink, fighting to restrain her scream of self-inflicted pain as she flooded icy water from the well onto her hands, rinsing juices and burns and hair all down the drain all at once. She sighed in relief, relishing the icy cold that soothed the blisters that had begun to form.
Unfortunately, this meant that the pot was left unattended for several minutes, long enough for the boiling water to bubble and froth past the surface and over the edge of the pot. The flames below, enjoying the savory taste of the soup mix, licked up the side of the pot and reached the handle of the ladle. Had the chef been using a metal ladle, all would have been well, save for a hot handle. However, he had chosen to use a hand-carved wooden ladle, untreated and made specifically for vegetable-beef stew like the one Anna had striven to make. The greedy flames licked and burned the handle, setting the ladle alight with a crackling blaze that caught Anna's attention; the smell of smoke was never a good sign anywhere in the castle.
When the sight of the burning ladle caught in her mind and finally registered (after taking several seconds of processing), Anna's eyes widened in horror. She scooped up water between her hands and darted back to the stove, dumping it on the ladle and extinguishing the fire. This, in turn, caused the charred remains of the handle to fracture and fall from their bond, plunging into the soup and dissipating into black ash and ruin. She turned off the stove, staring at the mess she'd made. A blistered hand, a burnt ladle, and a ruined soup mixture leered at her with taunts and jeers of failure and incompetence. Her shoulders drooped. She'd been doing so well. Tears stung angrily in her eyes as she berated herself, every other word an expletive.
She wouldn't have taken it so hard if it'd only been the dinner she'd messed up. Unfortunately, her day with the queen had been fraught with disappointment, and the snow castle she'd been helping to make that afternoon was yet another cold reminder of how she'd messed up that day.
Elsa had been more than willing to permit excessive snowfall wreak havoc in the royal garden, for it was the middle of winter and the fiery-haired young princess had wanted to build a castle out of ice and snow with her sister. Both women had set about building the masterpiece, free of magical assistance on Elsa's part, and had made a wonderful edifice that could have conceivably weathered a mild blizzard with walls and a ceiling as thick as a bear's body and twice as sturdy, packed and tamped down with care and precision. It wasn't as grand as a castle ought to be, but it was still profound and burly in its own right.
And then the snowball fight began.
Anna had started it by tossing a small glob of frozen wonder at her sister's turned back, clapping her squarely in the back of the head with a well-aimed strike. Elsa had retaliated with a volley of pelting snowballs, leaving Anna to run and duck for cover while she attempted to counter the onslaught. Unfortunately, after several futile throws against the oncoming storm, she tripped, falling face-first into the massive snow shelter's retaining wall.
It wouldn't have been so bad, had she not skimped on building the retaining wall (as an impatient young woman was wont to do), and so when she fell through the powder and brought two-thirds of the poorly-reinforced wall down with her, the remainder of the edifice cracked and crumbled, plummeting to the floor below and burying her under four feet of packed snow. She wiggled free in time to see her sister asking if all was well, and when she offered the blonde a thum jutted into the air with a weak, meaningless smile, the queen replied with news that she was required at a meeting to begin immediately for the discussion of hydration and sanitation of the city. Anna watched her sister go, wishing she wouldn't have been so stupid as to knock the building over so that they had something they could say they'd done together.
But this bad day turned horrible turned unbearable started with a bad morning to spiral deliriously out of control, a morning on which Anna had decided it would be an idea to procure two trays of breakfast from the kitchen and bring them up to Elsa's room so that they might enjoy a meal together. She'd paid painstaking attention to the way everything was arranged on each tray, even down to the way the bubbles in the coffee were scattered around the edge of the caffeinated meniscus. Up two flights of stairs to the top floor, a twisted knob, Anna was almost home-free.
Except for the unsuspected rumple in the rug spread over the bedroom floor.
Normally Elsa's room was immaculate at all times, which of course allowed Anna the grace of complaining at the fault in the rug, were she at liberty to provide suitable outburst. Instead, her foot caught on the snag, pitching her forward with two trays in her hands, each with plates of fresh flapjacks; cups of imported maple syrup, strawberry jam, and melted butter; slices of toast; cooked strips of bacon and links of sausage; fresh fried potato strips; eggs both poached and scrambled for preference; and steaming mugs of coffee, all of which existed in two-fold on the stainless steel trays, all falling to the floor in a jumbled, cacophonic explosion of noise and color and mess. The rug immediately began soaking up the coffee, jam, syrup, and butter while the oils from the potatoes and meats began to drip into the stitching.
It wouldn't have been a terrible ordeal, had Elsa been there to witness it. As it was, when Anna finally gathered everything back onto the plates, blushing and apologizing profusely for the mess that she promised to clean up, she finally laid eyes on the bed, noting the well-made comforter and fluffed pillows that had long since been abandoned. Even with her best effort to wake up early (and indeed, she'd been up before the sun had risen), she still hadn't bested Elsa. Shame and embarrassment left her feeling moody for the remainder of the morning, and with the consequent destruction of the ice fortress and the ruined dinner that had been disdainfully poured in the trash with a note of apology written for the queen, left sitting on her chair in the empty dining hall as Anna fled with barely-retrained tears suspended across her eyes.
And so at the end of the night, when the grandfather clock was chiming half-past eleven from the dark corner of the sitting room, Anna stared with quiet resignation at the wispy flames in the hearth, green skirts limp, black bodice askew, hair jumbled, eyes full of regret. She wished she could do the day over again, that she would be granted a new opportunity to try and grace her sister with thoughtful gestures to slowly work them both up to the eventual confession that would certainly follow. Anna didn't even know what she would do about confessing, just that she would bite the blade and do it even if it amounted to nothing and estranged them more than they'd been for the past thirteen years. Anna could handle that. She'd been alone much of her life; being alone again wouldn't be so terrible to imagine or act out.
An arm reached over the back of the couch and startled the musing red-head, a mug of steaming wonder floating down to meet her waiting hands.
"Hot chocolate?" a suave voice asked.
She reached tentatively for the cup, pulling it to her lips and taking a grateful draught as she sprawled across the loveseat. Her sister sat down, a similar cup in her small, pale hands, hair unkempt, eyes bloodshot, purple circlets across her high cheek bones. Anna continued to stare at the fire despite catching the telltale details of a sleepless night in her peripheral vision.
"You didn't even make it to bed last night," Anna observed.
Elsa chuckled. "The clock sounded three last night and I was still reading the latest trade agreement from our dear English neighbors to the south. After that, I don't remember until it struck six, and then I was dragged into another meeting."
"You were free this afternoon..." Anna chimed in a small voice.
"For long enough to see my wonderful sister and play in the snow until my next meeting," the queen replied. "Today has been an extremely long day."
Anna chose not to comment. Compared to the meetings and strain Elsa undoubtedly faced each and every day, the princess's day had been rather simple and unimportant. She almost felt better that her failures had gone somewhat unnoticed.
"I spoke with a maid after my first meeting," Elsa said.
So much for unnoticed.
"She told me she found stains on my rug. Looked like someone spilled syrup or bacon grease. Not just one helping, but two. I found that interesting. I asked the butler if he'd been about and he said that you'd offered to bring breakfast to my room."
Anna sunk lower into the chair. "I spilled on your rug."
"And then you knocked over the snow shelter we made," the blonde continued. "You just...tripped and fell like normal, but the thing fell on top of you like things normally do."
Anna sighed, looking away. "I'm such a klutz."
"I thought that was the end of it, but then I found out that my dinner was ill-prepared. I found a note written in messy handwriting that said my scheduled dinner would be substituted with something else more to my satisfaction. And while it was most certainly to my satisfaction, it wasn't the stew I'd been looking forward to."
"I set the stew on fire," Anna mumbled, placing her unfinished mug of liquid wonder on the coffee table to her right.
"What on earth has gotten into you, Anna?"
More angry tears pricked the princess. She sniffled, gaze focused on the fire.
"I...I wanted to bring you breakfast so we could eat together. You're always so busy and I'm not, so...so I just wanted to do something nice for you. But then I tripped over your rug and dumped all of the food on the floor and apologized and cleaned most of it up, but...but you weren't there anyways. Then I thought we could play in the snow, and I broke the snow castle because I'm a klutz. I'm so...so stupid. And I didn't let it go; I thought...that I'd make your stew, and I did everything that Jorn said to do, but then my hair got in the pot and I tried to get it out but the broth burned my hand so I rinsed it off and the pot boiled over and the stove set the ladle on fire and it's all my fault, Elsa. I wanted to do something nice for you and I messed everything up and it's all my fault."
An arm draped its way over Anna's slumped shoulders, dragging her upright. Elsa snuggled up to her sister, laying her blonde head on the younger girl's lap, feet curled up on the couch with the rest of her lithe, limp body.
"Oh, Anna," the queen sighed. "I'm sorry."
Anna blinked. "Sorry? You didn't mess everything up."
"But you tried so hard for me, and I wasn't even appreciative. I just thought you were screwing around like normal, but...to think you wanted to do this all for me, it's just so...so wonderful."
"I stained your rug, ruined our fort, and destroyed your dinner."
"But you didn't mean to."
Anna sighed. "No, I didn't. But I just...I wanted to show you."
"To show me?"
"Yeah. To show you that I'm...that I'm not just a screw-up."
"Anna, no. No, no, no."
The queen sat up, holding her sister's chin in gentle hands. "You're not a screw-up. You're not a failure. You're not a spare button or an unused horseshoe."
She gulped. "Y-you heard that?"
"All of it and more. I may have been in my room, but I always listened for your voice."
Anna blushed. Elsa smiled.
"I'm sorry I ruined dinner."
"The fact that you even considered making dinner for me is wonderful, Anna. I tasted the broth despite the chef's warning. It...was a bit ashy," she admitted, looking away with a pensive gaze fixed on nothing. "It was ashy. But I could taste the vegetables, and that meat...my God, I don't think I've ever tasted something that succulent."
"Jorn marinated it," Anna muttered.
"But you brought it all together. For me. That..." Elsa looked down, suddenly shy. "Thank you, Anna. Even if it went wrong...it's a wonderful thought, and that's enough for me."
Anna drew her sister in for a tight hug, the crackle of the fire lending a chorus of warmth and delight to the atmosphere, and both women finally felt relaxed after a long, stressful day, wrapped in each other as they dozed off into dreamland.
Happy endings and fluff. Two things I usually can't stand. Even so, I don't want to leave these two high and dry. Not yet. There'll be plenty enough time for my...malevolence...to pervade the text. Anyways, I love you all, my gentle snowflakes, and I'll hopefully be back within the week to post Prompt 2: First Kiss! ~Kyttin
