Disclaimer: I don't own Frozen or any of its characters.
Elsa had always been a fragile child.
She was born a month earlier than she was due, and was whisked away by doctors before her parents could ever hold her. They all wondered why she was so cold. She lay in her sheltered bassinet, all untouched porcelain and delicate blonde wisps that curled into the brightest blue eyes. Her parents stood beyond the glass, rigid, but together, bonded only by their one precious thing.
Their little Elsa.
As Elsa grew, she witnessed the growing resentment between her parents. At first, she was hidden away. It was her nanny's comforting warm hands that covered her ears, that drew her close, that shielded her from seeing and hearing her mother's viciousness and her papa's emptiness. The older she grew, the harder it was to quench her thirst for knowing. She stood quietly by the stairs as her parents argued over breakfast, across a too-big table in a too-big home for just three people to be living in.
Elsa never understood why her papa never came home sometimes. Elsa never understood why she never grew to find comfort in her mother's fleeting forms of affection.
Elsa, as the ice crept around the banister of the staircase, wondered if they were afraid.