Disclaimer: Disney owns Frozen. J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter.
Elaboration: Almost eleven years ago, a fanfic writer called The Professional originated a story called "Harry Potter: The Lone Traveller", where Harry ended up travelling through the Multiverse. Sadly, events appear to have kept him offline for several years. dunuelos took up the concept and expanded it after making several fruitless attempts to contact The Professional for permission.
Independently of these stories, I came up with the same essential concept, but using Elsa of Frozen. As I explored the idea and potential setups, I asked various people for advice and opinions, and was informed my 'original' story concept had been done already by dunuelos. I contacted him, and he was happy for me to continue with my story. We then collaborated on a meeting between our characters.
Thanks To: KayQy for giving me Elsa's 'Lone Traveller' name.
The Winter Wayfarer's Tales.
Chapter I: Frozen Wasteland
Elsa had been three and a half when her sister Anna was born; too young to be trusted with holding the baby, but old enough to be lifted up by her father to peek over the crib and see her. In that moment, a connection was forged between the sisters, and for the next five years, they would spend every waking moment together—as much as they were allowed. They were never short of anything to do, for Elsa had been born with power over snow and ice, and as they were children, playtime involving Elsa's powers was soon their favourite thing to do.
Or it was until the night in the Great Hall of Castle Arendelle.
Against their parents' wishes, the girls snuck down to the Great Hall, where Elsa created the usual winter wonderland for Anna. This she had done hundreds of times before, and for a couple of hours, the sisters played in the snow, building a snowman and sock-skating on the iced over floor. As the final treat before insisting on bed, Elsa built a massive snow drift, and they slid down it, Anna flying off Elsa's lap and landing in another smaller snow drift.
"Catch me!"
It was their favourite game—Anna just liked seeing the snowdrifts form under her to catch her, and Elsa was willing to do anything that made Anna happy. Neither realised it, but it was a good form of training for Elsa as well.
"Hold on... gotcha!"
Anna squealed, and began to jump faster, Elsa rotating in position to keep up with Anna's movement. Her sock-clad feet didn't have enough traction on the iced over floor, however, and Elsa stumbled backwards, cracking her head against the floor. She lay on the floor, the roof going in and out of focus, the chandeliers blurring together into one and then back into two again.
"Whoo!"
Elsa bolted upright, nearly blacking out as pain shot through her head. She willed a bolt of power free to catch Anna, but the timing was all wrong. Anna crumpled unconscious to the floor, her red hair splaying out. Elsa moaned as she rolled onto hands and knees, her skin blanching as a wave of nausea rolled over her. She dragged herself over to Anna, focusing on the red blur. As hair went, the only difference between them was the colour... but Elsa had often wished that hers was red, rather than white-blonde.
The red blur shimmered, a vague white blur insinuating itself in. Elsa groaned and collapsed near Anna, her eyes focusing for a split second to see that Anna's hair now sported a white streak from skull to tip. And then blessed blackness came over her.
One moment there was nothing, and then the next, there was awareness.
Elsa opened her eyes, seeing that her father was carrying her into a clearing full of mossy rocks. By his side, her mother carried Anna. The clearing was warm, perhaps slightly more so than was normal... even so, Elsa still saw her breath coming out as frost.
"Please! Help! It's my daughter!"
Elsa squirmed out of her father's grip, standing next to him. He gave her a glare, and she flinched back, recalling all the admonishments to not play in the Great Hall at night, to be careful and only play under the supervision of either parent... she swallowed hard, watching as the mossy rocks came rolling up before revealing themselves to be trolls.
The trolls parted, allowing one to come up—an elder of some kind.
"Born with the powers or cursed?" the troll elder said.
Elsa looked up at her father, confused—the troll didn't seem to care. If her father noted anything amiss in the tone, he didn't show it.
"Born," Agdar said.
The troll elder nodded, padding over to Idunn and motioning at Anna. Idunn knelt, and the troll placed a hand on Anna's forehead before moving back.
"The younger can be healed," Again, Elsa noted the disinterest in the tone, and also the non-acknowledgement from her parents. She swallowed, fighting to keep her breathing under control. "As to the elder... power such as hers should not be left unchecked. It is naught but danger which comes from wielding power on that scale."
"Do what you must," Agdar said.
Before the troll elder had even finished speaking of Elsa, a younger troll had hurried up with a wooden box. The troll elder took the box once Agdar had granted permission, and as the younger troll melted back into the gathered crowd, the troll elder waved a hand over the box. Liquid rose from the box, shimmering silver, and it darted over to Elsa, weaving around her left hand in figure eights. She tried to pull her hand away, and the liquid formed into a band of metal around her wrist. Metal threads flowed over the back of her hand, darting up each digit and forming a cap around each tip, each cap ending in a long nail more suited to a young woman than a child.
Elsa stilled at once, tilting her head.
The troll elder gestured at Anna, and Idunn knelt once more, allowing the troll to place a hand on Anna's forehead. "Do you wish the younger safe, or merely healed?"
"Safe, of course," Idunn said.
"The memories of the younger will have to be modified, if indeed you wish her safe," the troll elder said. "She must not remember, lest she..."
"My husband has said to do what you must," Idunn said, not letting the troll finish. "We only want our daughters to be safe."
Friday, July 26th, 1839.
Sven skidded to a halt, Kristoff somersaulting over Sven's antlers.
"Grand Pabbie, I bring news!" he said, his voice rising to a shout. "The binding on the Princess turned Queen has been released!"
The trolls sprung out of their usual rock-like formations, a general hubbub filling the air. Pabbie descended from the dais, looking at Kristoff with hard eyes. Kristoff met his gaze, his eyes no less hard.
"You are certain of this, Kristoff?"
"You said as long as the binding remained, she was controlled," Kristoff said. He pointed out past the boundaries of the Valley of the Living Rock. "Does that look controlled to you!?"
As one, the trolls looked to where Kristoff pointed, silence falling. A winter storm howled outside their magical boundaries, ice spiralling up trees, snow blanketing the ground. The demarcation between the outside world and their valley was stark: dark winter clouds coming to an abrupt stop where clear summer skies began. As the trolls observed the sky, greying clouds began to form above them.
"That's not possible," Kristoff said.
"Oh, I assure you it is very possible," a voice said, cold and feminine.
As Kristoff and the trolls whirled to face the speaker, a thick glaze of ice coated the ground, sealing around feet—and in some cases, hands—that rested on the ground. Kristoff tried to yank his feet up, and began to topple forward. Ice rose up around him, keeping him in the toppling forward pose, but also preventing him from completing the fall.
"I was a child who caused an accident," Elsa said, stepping forth, ice and snow swirling around her hands. "I am sure you saw that when you modified Anna's memories, Pabbie. Yet you allowed me to walk from this place without fixing the damage you had caused."
"There was no damage," Pabbie said. "A threat was contained, no more."
"You profess ignorance of the binding you used?"
"What do you want me to say, Queen?"
Elsa stopped, flinging one hand into the sky, where darker clouds began to gather. She closed her fist, and the distinct crack of rocks shattering echoed from around the valley, the sound sharp like thunder. The sky blacked out as the storm rolled in, and snow began to plummet down. Turning her attention back to Pabbie, Elsa dropped her hands to her sides, taking a deep breath.
"Was it your plan to keep Anna and I separated?"
Pabbie stood still for a few seconds before he nodded. "Your power was and is a threat—not only to us, but to your people as well. There were other options that could've bound your power, though that was the one available. I didn't want to use it, due to its weakness, but nor would I let you leave unbound. I took what steps I could in hopes that the weakness would never come to fruition." He glanced around the snow laden valley. "You see that it was wise, what I did."
"You doomed us all, you fool." Elsa shook her head. "The binding chained my power away, true; however, it also chained my heart away, and the resulting thirteen years of distance and rejection was not enough to break Anna's love for me." She closed her eyes. "When the binding was released, following my coronation... the power raged out of control. It took me until I reached outside your valley to reassert the mastery over it I had as a child."
There was silence, as queen and troll stared at each other.
"I didn't even have time to tell Anna I loved her," Elsa said, bringing her hands up in front of her, staring at them. "The world is a frozen wasteland now; the people turned to ice." Elsa pressed her hands together, her chest rising and falling as she breathed. "Such is the fate you have brought upon your people, Pabbie."
When it was done, Elsa fell to the icy ground, trembling with grief and exhaustion. She didn't seem able to make any coherent thoughts, beyond a keening for her lost sister, and when blackness washed over her, she welcomed it.
A blue light shimmered in the air, and a man with messy black hair and green eyes appeared. Taking a moment to observe his surroundings, he saw he was in a non-descript room. Two couches sat with a coffee table between them, and a young woman was lying on one. Her white-blonde hair was in utter disarray; her clothes were a simple blue dress and heels. Etched into her skin were lines upon lines of what appeared to be runes. Harry Potter took a seat on the other couch, and tried to tap into his minor aspect of Knowledge as this was a situation unfamiliar to him.
Along with a general sense of what was going on, he also heard his Boss's voice whispering as though the wind was talking...
"Elsa is where you were when you first began traveling. She's made a contract with Vár, though she's not aware of having done so. I thought you might like to advise her, for she's at the start of her Travels. Before you explain too much, ask yourself, 'Is she ready for the truth'?"
Before he could contemplate his Boss's words, the woman opened her eyes. There was a semblance of life there, even if it was dulled to the point of instinctive reaction, and she took up a sitting position, her bearing regal. She noted Harry, folding her hands in her lap. "I am called Elsa. I am Queen of Arendelle, and by extension, Norway," Elsa said politely—in her own way.
"I'm Harry Potter. I am called, in many times and places, the Lone Traveler." Elsa regarded him with dispassion. "Do you believe in magic?" Harry said. At Elsa's nod, he went on. "In my world I belonged to a subset of humanity who could use magic. When I had won the war which waged among my people but lost everything due to the actions of those left, I tried to do a ritual to go back and fix it. Instead, I ended up as a dimensional traveler, helping versions of my world and worlds I could only dream of."
Elsa's visitor cocked his head. "Since we're both here, I'm guessing you have become displaced yourself."
A swirl of frost curved over Elsa's hand before she willed it away. "Perhaps I was the madman in the end," she said. "I was born with cryokinetic power, and I used it often as a child when playing with my younger sister. One night, there was an accident—I froze her head. My parents sought help from trolls, but they were distrustful of humans at best, and outright hated us at worst. Their help came in the form of binding my power. Thirteen years later, Anna released the binding." Elsa swallowed. "The world was a frozen wasteland before I could control my power."
"Everyone died?"
"No. The trolls lived in a valley untouched by winter," Elsa said. "I brought to them the same fate they had brought on everyone else." She paused. "Sometimes I feel guilty and sometimes I feel justified. But still, now I am alone."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "I think less madman—or madwoman as the case may be—and more someone who did what you thought was proper under the circumstances. It was your Free Will to act as you did. And since you've not been sent on some eternal punishment, it's likely that the powers that be didn't feel you deserved such. But, I think you're now a Traveler. Like me."
At Elsa's blank look, Harry gave her the simplest explanation of the Multiverse concept that he was capable of, choosing a couple of Potter universes he'd been to as illustrations. In the end, Elsa nodded.
"You have done this before, you said. Do you have advice?"
Harry grinned; glad she'd brought it up and not him. "First? Be yourself. Be the best you that you think you can be—according to what you think is right. You will find that you will end up in places that need a little help or in places where much must be done. But you have to decide what you will do in such circumstances. For me, it's sometimes just a little advice. Sometimes a bit of my power applied at a convenient moment. And sometimes—I have to go as far as I can. Application of your power is according to your will and your own limitations."
Harry paused and smiled. "You're probably going to end up at times in worlds where you have a dimensional alternate. I've found it very handy to have a different name for those times so as not to confuse the people when you don't want to tell your dimensional alternate who you are. For example, I use Gary Seven—a name from a television story that I liked as a child—for an alternate name when I am hiding who I am." He noted Elsa's face was blank once more. "What year was it where you were?"
"1839."
"...right, you didn't have television back then." Harry thought back to a recent Travel; he'd met a girl going to a cinema to take their Star Wars challenge (all seven films, plus Rogue One, and if they stayed awake for the whole thing, the cinema gave them free movies for life). With the help of a little magic, the girl had won the challenge, and had been especially excited about two female characters: Rey, of The Force Awakens, and Jyn Erso, of Rogue One. He shrugged. "You could use Rey Erso."
"Is that also from your television stories?"
Harry shook his head with a smile. "They're from separate universes that I've actually visited, but my universe considered them to be fictional, as do plenty of other universes. Usually people were a fan of one or the other."
"Rey Erso." Elsa smiled a little. "Thank you."
Harry paused. "This is something that you must be aware of: You will find places where you are considered a fictional character. You will find places where exist all of those things that you ever imagined as stories or heard from minstrels or others. It is best to take each place for itself and not what it looks like. I've found versions of myself who were evil and versions of those I considered enemies that were good. You must keep an open mind."
Harry felt the call, and frowned. He felt he hadn't told her much, though My and Ry, or even Vár appeared to feel she had been told what she needed. "It appears I'm being called away now," he said. "You'll find that happens a lot: You'll appear near the place or people where you can make a difference. Once that difference has been made, you'll move on. And often you won't know exactly why you were there. Just remember: You being you can and will make a difference—never fear."
Elsa nodded, watching as Harry disappeared into blue light, phoenix song wafting around. The song was one of encouragement and adventure and Elsa felt life and strength returning to her as she listened.
It resonated within her, evoking a sense of liberation and acceptance, and she tilted her head, trying to recall where she had heard it before. Flurries of ice and snow wreathed around her hands as she listened; the song meant something to her, of that she was certain... but try as she might, she was unable to recall a place or time.
The song faded, and Elsa let it go, rising from the couch. The ice and snow around her hands shot up her arms, surrounding her entire form in seconds. A crack of ice thundered, and Elsa was no longer there.