(uploaded — 10.31.14) :: [happy halloween! wow im on a roll this month. and i got a 770 on my bio sat MUHAHAHAHA- basically im very happy today, so have urself snowboarder!elsanna ficlets that will be around 116 chapters atm...lol what am i doing with my life...also if the writing style seems different it's bc it is.] :: {playlist: "let it go/let her go"; sam tsui}
:.
I don't own Frozen. You can also find this on AO3.
about yesterday
.
.
(i)
and they did not come back,
though i waited all evening (and it was you
i waited for). though the sky turned black.
. arc 1 .
yet as i wander through the snow all alone
::
. ch1 .
anyway
—
Elsa's "one thing" — the thing that was the utter bane of her existence (or not, because she just didn't really care about it) — was that she just doesn't notice people. She was really horrible at it, in fact.
And okay, it wasn't that she actually meant to be callous or tactless; it wasn't that she couldn't, but rather, she wouldn't. Elsa lived in the spur of the moment and had always refused to dwell too long on the past and the future. Because seriously, what happened in the past was in the past and what happens in the future hasn't even happened yet, so why should she even worry about it?
In other words, Elsa thought that history was the most useless subject in the history of the planet. Humans as a species were stupid, she maintained, and they wouldn't learn from World War Two and shit like that, if...well, history itself was any indication. (Hark, the irony.) And honestly, she spent half her free time these days folded over on a soft couch, half-dead to the world with Breaking Bad blaring out of her TV speakers and while vaguely wondering when World War Three was going to begin.
Elsa had Asperger's syndrome.
...Or something. High-ended something, something, insert-psychological-jargon-here, blah, blah, blah, autism. Elsa had autism, put it that way, and maybe two people on earth knew about it. Not really the severe kind, because she could still function properly in her day-to-day life. Or maybe she was really messed up, she didn't know. But honestly, she studiously tried to avoid any of that psychological, philosophical, whatcha-ma-callit crap. She'd already done enough by letting Kristoff bully her into seeing a psychiatrist once every three weeks or so, some brunette named Belle d'Amboise that Elsa couldn't care less about.
Belle was useless.
Alright, maybe she wasn't useless, but if she wasn't then Elsa'd never paid attention to it, anyway. She wanted nothing to do with any of it: really any of that psychological, philosophical, whatcha-ma-callit crap. She just showed up to the clinic and nodded solemnly and put herself through an hour and a half of torture, because god, she wasn't sick in the head and why in the world did she even agree to be here. Although the fact that she didn't care wasn't saying much, because she strongly cared about perhaps three things in her life: snowboarding, food, and naps, in that order. (And Kristoff, of course, but he didn't really count as a...well, thing. Because he was a person, and...things. People weren't things, obviously.)
But anyway. It was more like, she couldn't care less if World War Three began under her nose, as long as she got to troop away to a mountain with the address of 49 Middle of Nowhere Drive, get away from it all, and hope like hell that she and that awesome mountain didn't get blown up by a stray nuclear warhead.
Oh, and there'd have to be a snowboard, of course. Elsa didn't really know what she'd be without snowboarding.
But honestly, most of the time, she couldn't be bothered to take mark of people's faces and names — and it was more that she's usually focused on other stuff, like how awesome of a snowboarder she was, and did everyone see that really amazing trick she just pulled in the mock competition now, or sometimes she's just really focused on how she really fucked up her tax payments for the month.
And mostly, her life was simply so packed with stuff — half of which she knew she would never get to. Slopestyle and halfpipe, although she leaned more toward the former at heart, snatched up the majority of her time. So she didn't really get how some people could actually notice and remember others; how they could get to know them just by reading their facial expressions, how they could keep track of all the people they came into contact with in the snowboarding scene. Or, you know, even in their own, little elite Winter Olympics women's slopestyle ring. If Elsa was being honest with herself, which was approximately 2.53 percent of the time, the newbies all kind of blended into one solid lump, and a few of the snowboarders squeezed in between the newer additions and the old veterans — rather like a tween stuck awkwardly between the stage of adorable kiddy and pubescent smelly teenager — had similar problems.
Although, Elsa did know pretty much all the slopestyle boarders on the Norwegian Winter Olympics team — Silje Norendal, of course, came to mind — as well as a handful of other lucky people from various disciples scattered across Scandinavia (Finland and Sweden were definitely predominant among them), and she was on actual Best Friend terms (how sparkly) with Kristoff Bjorgman, a hockey player on the Norwegian team whom she met solely due to bad luck in Pyeongchang 2018 when she accidentally rammed into him while dashing through their given hotel suite with a piping hot cup of hot chocolate held in her hands. (She got yelled at by the hockey coach for nigh upon thirty minutes for nearly burning his star player that Elsa almost missed check-in time at slopestyle.) But, well, Kristoff had turned out to be a really a great pal in the end. And she wasn't complaining about how he constantly helped out with her training and events all the time when he wasn't training and being checked into the reinforced walls of the ice rink.
And then...well, that was pretty much it. Most people definitely knew her — oh, most people seemed to like her a lot, going by all the cheering she got during and after the Games, but very few of them made it onto her stunted list of people whose names she could match to given faces.
But Elsa figured that wasn't even that big of a problem. Like how many people did someone need to have as good buddy best friends, anyway? She was fine with Kristoff and that was that, even if he did have a weird infatuation with reindeer and constantly shared food with his enormous German shepherd, Sven.
But her total ineptitude at playing match the faces to the names! and the whole deal with, ugh, noticing that they have faces in the first place, was that it did make for some very delicate moments sometimes. Like that time she completely blew off and offended someone who apparently had crushed on her since they were nine — um, awkward, she still didn't know the guy's name. (But, okay, whatever. It wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even as if she really cared, or anything.)
Or, you know, it could be awkward, like now.
"God, Elsa, she won silver last year at the X Games in Aspen — slopestyle, wasn't it, she was right on the podium next to you!"
Elsa only shrugged, a gesture that radiated indifference before forking a heaping spoonful of rice into her mouth. "Well, the dazzle of my gold medal must have blinded me for ten minutes, then, because I don't seem to recall her name or her appearance at all."
"...For Christ's sake, Elsa, how conceited can you get?!" Kristoff rolls his eyes. "'The dazzle of my gold medal blinded me'? Seriously?"
Elsa flicked a grain of rice at him. "Like you were any better back at the hotel room. You wouldn't let it go for half an hour after snatching it. Rather rudely, too. From my hands."
Pause.
"My medal," she added again as an afterthought.
The hockey player huffed, "Still, that doesn't change the fact that you don't remember her. At all. Shouldn't you at least remember who the girl who nearly upset your winning streak at the X Games looked like?"
And truthfully, she probably should have. Elsa won by a narrow 0.17 point margin to that American silver medalist that Kristoff now wouldn't stop prattling on about, but Elsa just didn't notice people and she wasn't about to change her habits because of some American rookie who just happened to decently land in all her three runs and nail the last, while Elsa fumbled with a grab on her second run and then almost butt-slid her way to the financial district on the third.
"Er...no." The blonde shot him an irate look, "Oh, come on, Kristoff, can we please stop talking about her? Chances are, since she got silver in Aspen, she'll be there at the Olympics, too. I mean, Jamie Anderson just announced that Pyeongchang was her last Olympics, right? So the U.S. team's probably out looking for new blood, anyway...hmm, wait. Um. Although I mean, that Kim girl's still, like, up and ru —"
"You know, I can't even believe you." Kristoff looked as if he hadn't heard a single word she'd said past the dazzle of my gold medal blinded me and downright scandalized. "Second place, Elsa. By a zero-point-seventeen margin."
"Well, then you can not believe me enough for both of us." Elsa eyed him and went back to her food.
Kristoff didn't say anything.
Elsa, thinking that the burly blond hockey player had finally let the situation go, puffed her cheeks out in relief and glanced upward, fully intending to inform him of how he would make a great personal chef, when a large, unidentifiable projectile that could have been a hand grenade for all she knew came flying from his general vicinity and bopped her right in the nose.
"Ow!"
Elsa rubbed furiously at the bridge of her nose and glared icy blue death at Kristoff, sure that she was going to bruise within the next five minutes.
"Watch it, those buggers hurt!" She looked down in irritation at the smartphone lying face-down on her lap, "And why would you ever throw your brand new iPhone 7 at my head?!"
"Because you should at least know who you're going up against," came Kristoff's huffed response, even as Elsa snatched up the smartphone and peered angrily at its surface, and...
Oh, wow, she's...she's actually really pretty.
And thus, by the end of the day, Anna Arendelle, eighteen, U.S. Olympic snowboarding team member, silver medalist at the 2022 Aspen X Games, somehow managed to worm her way onto Elsa's exclusive list of people I have totally completely noticed and remain there, for years to come.
::
(Not all of the years were as good as the first few, though.)
(Quite the contrary.)
(this was supposed to be less than 1,000 words O_O) and so it begins. in case u havent noticed i know nothing about professional athletics, much less snowboarding. and ooc/shallow/...something elsa here isn't really...elsa. oh, you'll find out later.
i won't rly be focusing on this before artifice and nanowrimo end, but like it? hate it? tell me what you think~
all the best.
