The Gloves Will Help
His wife's face is crumpled like so much lace, his wife burst through the door without knocking, so he knows she knows. She's clutching a rolled scrap of parchment in her left hand, she's saying his name.
"Precautions," he says. He reminds himself that it's not a filthy word.
She sobs into her palm. He's the King of Arendelle, he is her husband and Elsa's father, so he stands tall and opens his arms. She whimpers into his medal.
Elsa bows her head in front of the painting and glares at the wood inlay of her dresser. It's late, so late it's early, and she's in her own chambers. She clutches her gloveless hands against her stomach. She won't look the portrait in its eye.
What she manages to say is, "You didn't have to lock Anna away, too."
He makes his decision the day he finds Elsa sobbing in the corner, hands curled around the back of her neck, face buried in her knees. It was just a rat, he tells her, and it was, or had been. It's a grey smear on the inside of a hunk of ice by the time he finds it.
"I was scared," she says. "I didn't want to hurt it, I didn't mean to hurt it, it scared me, Papa, it ran under my door and I saw it and it startled me, it scared me, I didn't mean to, I didn't want to."
He kneels beside the corpse. The rat's eviscerated within a cluster of spikes, tiny teeth preserved in a snarl. He stares at its frozen blood and tries to pry the block off the ground, on impulse, wrapping his hand around one of the lances for leverage. It doesn't budge. "It's just a rat, sweetheart," he says, again.
But it could have been anything. He kicks through a snowdrift so that he can reach the eleven year old curled against the wall. He kneels again and encircles her in his arms and she lets him, too scared or too lonely to remember she doesn't want to be touched anymore. She's cold under his hands. Snow soaks in through his trousers.
At some point in his life he had stopped being the boy building ships in bottles and started being the man who isolated one daughter to save the other's life, the man who held his head up under a crown, the man who thought long and hard about whether he could kill his daughter to save his kingdom. He knows the answer, but could never tell his wife. Elsa doesn't raise her head from her knees, stops crying to whisper, "You should stay back, Papa. I'm sorry. Don't feel it. I won't feel it. I'll throw the body out the window once it melts."
He kisses the top of her head, says, "Good girl," thinks, I'll need to get together a sum large enough to hire a master smith's talent and discretion, thinks, Please, don't cry. His girl feels tiny and soft and cold all at the same time. He fights back a shiver.
Anna insists that crying is natural and that Elsa should do it more often, after all those years of concealing, but Elsa can't let herself go that far. She measures her breaths until they come naturally again, and even.
"I know you built the shackles, Papa."
The painting doesn't answer.
"It was smart. I'm glad you didn't execute me, that would have been smarter. But I have good news. It turns out the snow melts when I do, Papa. I just have to feel love. And I can, still. All this time, I just need to love more than I feel frightened. Maybe I would have figured it out sooner if you had been there for me."
Her pulse picks up, and she says it again. "For months she fell asleep outside my door. I heard her crying through the wood. You could have sent her and Mom to another wing of the castle. You should have brought her friends. She talks to paintings, Papa.
"She has people now, but she threw herself at a monster. She needs it Papa, needed it. I don't mind being locked away—I didn't—we thought it was the right thing. But you should have taken the time, and the love, and the-the hugs you couldn't show me and given it to her, instead."
Elsa breathes out. "It hurts," she says, and her voice quavers. She sinks onto the edge of her bed and catches her breath, feels something uncoil hot and tight within her chest. She lets herself cry.
"Why won't Elsa talk to me?" Anna asks.
He says, "I don't know." He flees to his study and pours through another story about sorcerers during an older age. It ends in fire, and the fall of a nation.
His wife doesn't touch him that night. He says nothing. In the morning, he picks out his cleanest clothes, his whitest gloves, and tours the West Wing, the rooms made of stone. He decides on one with a window. There's another, further in the building, one that's safer, but he knows Elsa loves to look outside. His hands shake when he writes the letter, but his penmanship is perfect.
We have a discrete request for a custom piece of armor.
In the morning, Elsa knocks on Anna's door and hugs the younger girl, tight. "I love you," she says, "Good morning." Anna hugs her back after a limp moment of shock. "I'm sorry about, about everything."
"Elsa?"
"I'm sorry about Papa."
Anna buries her face into the crook of Elsa's shoulder. "It's okay. I love you too."