Disclaimer: I barely own my next dinner, much less Disney.
Love, Fairytales, and Other Tragedies
by: Evelynhunters
When she was three, before she hit Anna and before her parents died, Elsa starts noticing little wisps of blue around her. Like when she waves her arms across the air and little white and blue lines follows, or when she weaves her hand through her hair (her too white hair, unlike her father nor her mother, the servants whispered) and little clumps of snow gets stuck in them.
At first she occupies herself by dancing in a snow shower, giggling while leaving little wet foot prints around the castle. She spins around the ball room and crushes soft mounds of snow underneath her feet as she waltz to silent music with an invisible partner.
She invites maids and butlers to play with her and pouts when they all refuses (and doesn't recognize the words devil child underneath their breath). She pleads with her parents to go to the ballroom with her, tugging and dragging at their sleeves. They always refuse, though, because they already worry too much and they have to take care of her baby sister, (and she doesn't see the shame and guilt in their eyes) so she plays with her dolls and a castle she made of ice and doesn't say a word again.
She reads herself to bed now, because mommy and daddy are very busy, and Anna needs a lot of care, and "Elsa, you're a big girl now", the maid with the sad eyes tell her.
She plops herself on her bed, and she lights a candle on her nightstand. She reads Sleeping Beauty in slow and broken fragments and she feels a grin split her face as the princess and the prince kiss because who doesn't like love? and she falls asleep with the silly notion that a prince will be standing in front of her when she wakes up.
Eventually she doesn't read the story anymore. She goes back to the well-worn pages and read their happy endings and their romance and she dreams that one day I'm going to fall in love with someone who loves me back.
Elsa first actually see her baby sister five months after Anna was born. Anna babbled when she saw Elsa's white hair and pale skin. Her mom stands near by, holding Anna's hand and encouragingly coos at the smile on Anna's face.
She's confused, beyond confused, because her mom has never held Elsa like that.
She looks on with a clench in the fist at the joy and happiness on her mom's face and remembers the rejection she's faced when she was young. She feels this, this emotion she doesn't know quite yet bloom in her chest, and it makes her hot in the face. She looks into her sister's eyes and she wonders why it's so obvious that her parents don't like Elsa but they love Anna.
She finally thinks she's figured it out two hours later, alone with Anna in the cradle fast asleep with the occasionally flutter of her eyelashes. She remembers how much care their parents put into Anna as she was born and how fragile this little tiny thing with a puff of brown hair looks, and she realizes that Anna must be sick. She doesn't remember ever getting so much attention from her parents before and Elsa finally gets it because Anna must be dying and she regrets every bad thing she had ever thought about her sister.
(Elsa doesn't hear the whispers about a neglected devil child echo through the castle halls. Or maybe she did, maybe it was the same part of her that always knew Anna was perfectly healthy.)
She crawls into Anna's crib, accidentally waking Anna up in the process, and makes little swirls of ice and snow above them, dancing just out of Anna's reach. Anna grabs at them, with a tinkling laugh and a ruffled nose, and Elsa looks at her sister with a feeling that can only be called love.
(The maid finds them hours later, fast asleep and huddled next to each other.)
She plays with Anna at the dead of night because her powers are a secret and the staff can't know and she could never deny her sister anything. They build and play and slip and fall and she screams until her parents come and she doesn't know she's crying until she can taste her fear on her tongue. Her parents look around the ballroom (and it's been a long time since she's begged them to come) and she can feel something darkening in the room. She can hear her heavy breathing and the way her mom rushes to Anna but she can also feel her dad's gaze on her and her blue hands and she can see the pieces coming together in his head before he also rushes to Anna and the library.
(The servants have a field day, and as they scrap the ice (ice?) off the floor they speak in hush tones about a lonely and neglected devil child that was always mad and had finally cracked.)
The ride to the trolls is silent, and she can almost feel the weight of blame on her shoulders. Her mother cradles Anna's head in her lap, brushing her sister's hair (which now has a white streak in it) away as her father looks sternly ahead through the window. Elsa curls her arms around her body and tries not to cry as she lay her head against the glass.
The trolls are gray in color and they tell stories in red, blue, and yellow, but all Elsa remembers on the carriage ride back with her mother's and her father's stares on her back is that she can never use her powers in front of the only person in the castle that liked them again.
(Later the next day, when she moves out of her and Anna's shared bedroom, her dad singles her out to have a talk. He makes her promise to never hurt Anna with her powers ever again, and she can catch her mom out of the corner of her eye, eavesdropping. She spits the words out at him, through clenched teeth and watery eyes, and she tries not to cry when they give her a pair of gloves and leaves her alone in her new room that smells of darkness and the cold.)
Her powers get worse as she grows up, and the addition of pinching gloves does not make it better. She starts slowly losing the circulations in her palms and finds herself constantly clenching her fist to get the blood flowing again. Elsa unwillingly puts the gloves on every morning and struggles to peel them off every night. She hates them with a burning passion.
But she has to do this, she slowly repeats to herself.
The gloves keep you safe.
The gloves keep Anna safe.
The gloves keep your parents safe.
So she grits her teeth and clenches her fist and she studies even more and conceal don't feel and don't let them know.
The castle is in a flurry, because her parents are leaving for the first time since she was born and she pleads with them not to go or to take her with them because she's old enough to go along. They smile at her and tells her she'll be fine but in their eyes she can see the reflection of fear and shame.
They don't want me to go, Elsa realizes, they're afraid I'll embarrass them.
(Elsa can hear the whispers through the halls, and she doesn't like what they say at all.)
And so she grits her teeth and clenches her non-feeling fist and air-kisses them goodbye and bites her lip until she's certain she can conceal how she feels.
Her parents are dead when she's eighteen, and she tries not hurt anyone.
(Wouldn't be the first time, right Elsa? echoes down the hall.)
She wraps her arms around herself and tries not to touch anything. Her control hasn't gotten better, and it's to the point where everything she touches turns to ice. She slowly rocks herself back and forth in a fatal position on the floor until her breaths turn smoky in the coldness of her room. The snowflakes are frozen and unmoving on the air, and she stares at them while her tears fall down her face.
Her parents just died and they died thinking she was a disappointment and a monster.
Uselessly, she wraps her numb arms around her for comfort, because she's so use to the cold at this point she's given up on fighting it.
She realizes she can never control her powers three months before her coronation. As soon as the gloves come off, the practice orb and the scepter in her hands are frozen solid. She drops them in despair and watches them shatter into thousands of little pieces before she backs away.
(Elsa can hear the echoes in the voices of long gone servants taunting her in her brain.)
She slowly exhales, and finds that if she holds her breath the ice spreads slower. She finds the fastest talking priest and writes the shortest coronation speech and she makes her heartbeat calmer than the silence of the castle.
She's twenty-one when she realizes Anna can leave her. Prince Hans of the southern isles, someone she met just this day, had proposed to her already, and apparently she needs to teach Anna common sense and the dangers of the outside world.
She refuses to give her blessing (they've known each other for less than a day!), and with the final huff of anger she turns and walks away like she's always done because everything she's done is to protect Anna.
Then things go wrong, so wrong, when Anna tugs her glove off and despite how much she hoped, they find out about her curse anyway.
(She can't help blaming Anna, even though she knows it's her fault.)
So she sprints out of the room with the ringing of witch and monster and devil child in her ears as she run across the sea towards the mountains where a monster belongs.
She hates her gloves, and the feeling of joy as she watches them fly across the sky is so absolutely satisfying.
Anna comes visit her after she makes her castle out of ice like the one she made when she was young. Elsa tries to make amends with Anna, because she's free now and she's happy and nothing in the world can bring her down and-
And apparently she has frozen Arendalle in an eternal winter.
(She hates it when the voice echoing through her brain is right.)
She hears the commotion outside before she finds Hans and a group of guards fighting Marshmallow.
She races upstairs, her heartbeat in her ears and her mind racing, going over the possibilities of making a carriage or wings of some sort that will help her escape. Two men with crossbows follows her up he stairs and she can hear their footsteps echo on the stairs. They aim at her, and she pleads, begs them not to kill her.
(When have her pleads ever come true?)
She makes a shield just in time , the arrow barely stuck in it. It brings a certain clarity to her brain because before this she hadn't really believed they would actually kill her. One of them says fire and the other says get her and she turns from side to side, knowing she can't stay like this forever because she will get distracted and she will die. She pins one against the wall with her spikes and pushes the other's bow away as she slowly forces him against the balcony.
I am a monster, she thinks, and you should have know better than to try and kill me.
She doesn't see Hans behind her until he shouts her name. "Do not be the monster they fear you are, Elsa!" he says, and she thinks bitterly, that's what I am.
(The voices in her mind are overwhelming.)
One of the men sent to kill her aims his bow at her again, and the last thing she remembers before blacking out is the ridiculous chandelier she made falling on top of her.
Elsa wakes up and realize with a start that she's in the dungeons of the castle, her castle. She tries to run at the window, but finds that she's chained to the wall in handcuffs that cover her entire hand.
But something feels off about them to her, because at most she had been gone three or four days, and there was not way that they could've been made them that fast. She also knew Anna would never do this to her, never mean to keep her as nothing more than a prisoner. Hans doesn't have the authority and she herself hadn't order them to be made. It must have been her parent, she reasoned. But why would you make metal handcuffs that cover the entire hand unless...
Unless you have a daughter that can't control what turns to ice when she touches it.
(Lovely. The voices in her head have a field day, and as she tugs on the handcuffs they shout in elated tones about a monster with dead parents who hated her.)
She stretches as far as she can to the window and sees the port frozen solid, with ships tilted and still.
(Look at what you've done, the voices in her head whisper.)
Hans walks into the room with a lost expression. He looks hesitant, and she doesn't blame him for feeling that way. People have done a lot worse in her presence. "Stops this winter, Elsa," he pleads, begging her.
(When have her pleads ever come true?)
Didn't he know the reason she ran away is because she can't?
And she tells him the truth. The honest truth that she can not, not because she will not, but she can not stop the winter. She couldn't stop hurting Anna, she couldn't stop killing her parents, and she couldn't stop this winter.
He leaves, and she can feel her hopes slipping away with him until she hears the whining of the metal and realizes that it's covered in ice. She breaks them off and runs away because that's the only way she knows how to live. She lives by being alone.
She had almost escaped when Hans finds her trudging through the snow to tells her that she killed Anna. How she had frozen Anna's heart (the one thing you promised not to do, Elsa) and how he wasn't fast enough for true love's kiss. He taunts her with the memories of Anna and all she can think about is how she failed in keeping her promise, her only promise worth keeping to her parents.
(Look Elsa, you've killed another one. Are you happy how?)
She falls to the ground, and the world is like her room again five years ago when her parents died. The snowflakes become still in the air and she can feel the tears rolling down her cheeks again, burning a trail behind on her face. Her sister is dead. Because of her. Because she was weak and didn't learn fast enough and why why why couldn't she have controlled it?
She hears a familiar voice behind her and she hears the familiar sound of ice against metal before she turns, looking at what seems to be an almost exact ice sculpture of Anna. And the troll's warning comes back into her head.
(The heart is not easily changed, Elsa, her mind reminds her.)
Anna had sacrificed herself to save her and turned into an ice statue. Elsa stands before her sister, her hands trying to cup Anna's cheek, but she doesn't feel living human flesh. She feels hard, cold, actual ice and she pleads with Anna, to fate, to god if there was one that had cursed her and she pleads with anything out there to bring Anna back.
(When have her pleads ever come true?
Ironic, the only person who she never wanted touch is now the only person she could.)
She hugs Anna for the first time in what feels like a lifetime and she hopes, beyond hope that Anna can hear her and know how sorry she is. Elsa whispers her secrets and her losses and her effort and her tries and her apologies and her regret and her shame and everything the voices in her head repeating. She tells Anna her reasons for isolating her, her regrets for not letting her in, her shame at not being able to control her curse faster, her apologies she had made to give to Anna, her failed tries to control her powers.
She's not sure if they made it past her throat, though. She can only hear sobs and blubbers and she hopes that Anna can hear her thoughts where ever she is now.
Slowly, little by little, what was cold hard ice turns to warm skin and flesh and Elsa heard the gasps of everyone near her before she looks up because her pleads never come true and fairytales aren't real and miracles don't happen and-
She gasps, because Anna is real and human again.
"An act of true love," an awed voice whispers behind her.
She hugs Anna tighter than she had before and smiles a bit wider when she can feel Anna hugging her back because this is her sister, and she loves Anna and Anna loves her back.
The fault within being a monster, she realizes, is that it is a terribly lonely thing. She looks at her kingdom, an heirloom of her parents, and Anna, a gift of her parents. Beside Anna is Kristoff, the man who loves Anna.
And this time it's love, because they've known each other more than a day (still less than a week!) and he hasn't proposed yet.
(The voices in her head are still there, but she realizes the whine in their tone and the desperation in their notice. She learns to ignore them.)
She thinks, with the warm air tingling at her skin, that she doesn't want to be a monster or alone ever again.
AN/ so I watched frozen and read a bunch of fanfiction and I realized that I really wanted to write angst from Elsa's point of view. Thanks for reading! Point out any editing that needs to be done in the comments! Or comment if you feel like I should be told what a fabulous story that was ;) and favorite, too. Don't forget to favorite below!