Note: one-shot for Kristoff Week that uses all 7 prompts, based on the Michelangelo quotes
"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
- Ice is his life.
Every experience in his life formed him; carved him into who he's supposed to be. Sometimes it chipped away with death and loss and pain, but other times it freed him one piece at a time.
With love. With family. -
He was born in winter, in the midst of a storm, one of the worst in years. A polar low, the fishermen called it, fearing their sudden appearance and fierceness. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, though muffled through the snow, and when the heavens split apart with thunder and lightning, so did his mother.
They named him Kristoff to bear the sacrifice his mother had given him.
He doesn't remember how he ended up in the orphanage but he wasn't there long anyway, sent off young to apprentice a trade, and as fate would have it, they were ice harvesters.
"Let 'him take care of the runt!" they'd said, and so he met Sven. He mucked the stalls, replaced the hay, and hauled the water. He learned the harnesses, names of the tools, how to pack a sleigh, and a year later, they finally let him onto the ice.
He loved it.
The men sang, deep and rumbly, and he felt music in the ice as the saws carried rhythm up through his feet and into his legs and into his bones. Kristoff never quite got the hang of how smoothly they gripped the ice, pushed it and hoisted it. But Sven was with him and between the two of them, they made it work.
And then one day he stumbled upon ice where it shouldn't've have been and followed it to a clearing and his world shifted again.
The sky was awake with lights dancing overhead, but all he could see were rocks. Rocks that were alive and talking to him, and suddenly his world was bigger than a barn and Sven.
It led him to a family. To dozens of cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. To a mother. He loved it there. For the first time he had a place to call home. A family to call his. They taught him the language of the earth, about crystals and magic and love.
But the world is bigger than the heart of the mountain and Kristoff can't survive on lichen soup and roots alone, so he rejoined the men to learn their trade and make it his own.
He learned much from the harvesters; how to trap game and tie knots, how to shape ice and pull it. They taught him how to survive where air is thin and food is scarce. He became surefooted, and over the years his muscles grew thick and his body strong.
He wasn't sure if he followed the ice or ice followed him. But while he stumbled upon it that night as a boy, afterwards, they were intertwined.
Rough rope always slid familiar against his calluses: safety and leverage in his hands. Tools swung from his waist, supplies at his back, and the comfort of their weight anchored him to the earth. But eventually he found new things to tie him to the earth, and for the first time he found himself anchored to people. He finally understood the language of the earth - its heart.
She chipped away at him in that annoying, pestering way, until he knew he'd never be complete without her. It started with a trust fall when she knew he'd catch her though he didn't even know it himself.
And that horrible day on the fjords, when he watched, helplessly too far away, as his heart froze right along with Anna. But the moment she thawed, he never felt cold again.
-The castle shaped him.-
Things took some getting used to: people respecting his opinion, for one. Asking him questions and listening to his answers as if he were significant. He learned to be careful with how he responded to things because one time he'd said he liked both the red and blue, and ended up getting two separate tailored outfits.
He had to re-learn how to walk quietly. Kristoff knew how to tread over branches and leaves without making a noise, but the creaks of the castle floorboards were entirely, (and unfairly) inconsistent. It took him months to find a safe path between his quarters and Anna's, and he swore Elsa had a sixth sense about where he was stepping because she showed up around every corner and behind every door (and seriously, did she live in every room?).
Sleeping was different. Eating was different. He had no idea that sleeping and eating could have rules.
He learned, eventually, but never in his life had he felt more challenged than facing this first five course dinner with a myriad of cutlery.
-Elsa shaped him.-
Kristoff was familiar with letters, enough to know how to write his name, record prices and records of the ice and transactions.
But words had a flow and smoothness he never mastered - there was never any need.
But a few months into his new life in the castle, need presented itself. He was able to fool Anna with quick thinking, timing, and excuses, but Elsa noticed the patterns of his panic and the way he'd sigh in relief when Anna would finally turn away.
But Elsa always saw. She'd come to him later, so gently, asking in a way that made it seem like teaching him to read was somehow doing a favor to her.
They'd sit for hours in the library- her patiently teaching him the way words fit together, how they sounded and spelled, having him trace her graceful, sloping letters until they became smooth and rounded and ink no longer splattered at his clumsy, awkward attempts. They sounded things out together, Kristoff feeling like a child despite Elsa never treating him like one. Her, always encouraging, lit up even at the slightest improvement. "Thats excellent, Kristoff," she'd say, and he'd blush, a stupid, small, proud thing, under her warm smile.
He saw the piles of documents that peeked out from the desk, but she never so much as looked at them once when they were together. Her world was only the two of them, and he doesn't understand how someone so small can seem so big; can make him feel so big.
-Anna shaped him.-
She finally got him to sing for her.
It didn't take much, really.
They'd been curled up together in his cabin by the fire on a weekend away in the mountains; her, naked, lazily draped across his chest. Anna's fingers absentmindedly ran down his skin, down his stomach and up again, and he shivered under her chaste touch as a breeze gently blew in through the window. He'd pulled the covers up across her back to keep her warm, drawing circles on her shoulder, and after a few moments starting humming under his breath.
"That's nice," she'd said, breath tickling the hairs on his chest.
"Hm?"
"That melody. You really do have a lovely voice."
His hands faltered for a moment on her back and he blushed, grateful she couldn't see his face.
A shy smile, a nudge from her foot against his knee, patient eyes and a supportive smile later, he relented. "Don't make a thing out of it," he'd said as he leaned over to pull the lute out from beneath the bed.
She bit her tongue and beamed, eyes sparkling with mirth, "What thing, there's no 'thing,'" she'd said, innocent and teasing.
Singing in front of the fire became their Thing.
Until the children were born, of course, and then lullabies were everywhere.
-Their children shaped him-
Like Kristoff, their firstborn came in winter, but a very mild one despite the light flurries that gently fell indoors during Anna's labor.
She took her time coming, like Anna when she was born, but their daughter was worth every painful hour. She was perfect. And when he held her for the first time, he knew everything was different.
Their second was a summer child, and the third and fourth? Well. By the time the last one came, they had a full chorus, each kid ready to sing to their newest, youngest sibling just as their parents had done for them. The image of all of them softly singing around the littlest Arendelle Prince's crib- Anna's tiny hand wrapped around his side, their oldest daughter on her tiptoes behind her little brother and sister, with Elsa harmonizing quietly behind them - is probably the one he'll remember most fondly in his old age.
They took frequent trips up to the heart of the mountain so the kids could spend time with their cousins and other relatives. Bulda doted on her grandchildren ceaselessly, even as they quickly grew too big for her arms and started to lift her up.
And every time they headed back down to the castle, they passed the everlasting, glittering monument Elsa made. She'd shown it to them as a wedding present, the place where their lives first intertwined all those years ago, saying it would always mark their way home, whether they were coming or going in either direction.
Ice brought him home; brought them all home.
He is Kristoff, and ice was his life.