Iron Gardenia
by Mackenzie L.
*Disclaimer: I do not own Frozen. No profit is gained from this work of fiction.
She remembers them, so vividly — her parents. She remembers how they had been, back when they were alive.
There was one particular memory she held onto, one which featured her, Anna, and their mother walking through the royal gardens one summer when she was just seven years old. Elsa hadn't had any fears of her powers back then. As a child she had so little stress in her life that there was nothing to provoke her into spilling splinters of ice at random.
Her mother wore a dress with strange patterns on it, with all the colors represented in a late summer's cornucopia. She looked so tall and graceful, walking slowly while she held the tiny hand of a four-year-old Anna. Elsa always remembered her mother's patience as being impossibly infinite. When a tantrum was thrown for no reason, the Queen always listened to find the source of the problem. She was always forgiving. Not many people were like that.
In this memory, the Queen had been consoling her youngest daughter after one of those very random tantrums. Elsa remembered watching the two of them stroll away from her, Anna sniffling along the way as they went deeper into the gardens. Elsa was left behind, for probably the first time in her childhood — as they'd trusted her to be just fine on her own. At just seven years of age, Elsa found this spontaneous dose of independence to be invigorating. She felt a little hollow, somewhat on edge, but also her heart seemed to be vibrating with the dangerous urge to do something naughty while no one was watching.
She remembered opening her hands up to the sun and seeing the frost crawling between her fingers. It sparkled so prettily, she wished someone else could be there to see it. She remembered the ache in her hands — the painful curiosity — how she just had to touch something and see what would happen...
She remembered seeing that bush in full bloom, with its pale blossoms as wide as a child's face.
So she went to pick a flower.
At that simple-minded age, she'd thought it was a rose. It was not until much later in life that she realized it hadn't been a rose, but a pure white gardenia that she had caused to wilt with one touch of her finger. The frost fled from her index finger and spread over each petal until they turned gray and drooped before her very eyes.
She cried when she realized what she had done. Kneeling down beside the wilted flower, she tried willing it to come back to life, but it was useless. When her mother and sister found her in tears, they thought it was because they had left her alone in the garden. Elsa let them believe that. She never told anyone about the wilted flower. That incident had given her a first flicker of fear surrounding her powers — but that was long before she had hurt her sister.
In the end her mother had been the one to comfort her. "I promise I will never leave you again," she'd said.
She lied.
Elsa remembers her father. He was a proud man, with a natural regality to his gait but unmatched humility in his eyes. He was like the mountains that surrounded their kingdom, constantly protecting with quiet majesty. She trusted her father above all others; everything he said was the final and absolute truth. It had to be.
She remembered how he would comfort her in the middle of the night when she had trouble sleeping. She had been used to sharing a room with her sister, but now she was too dangerous to share anything with anyone. The King would sit on her bed with her while she fell asleep if she asked for him, every night without fail. Elsa used to fear that one morning she might wake up in a cube of ice, but if he was there, that fear melted away. He wouldn't sing, and he wouldn't read her stories, he would just breathe. He would just be there, and it was enough to make her feel the world slip away. Sleep had been her only escape from the terror of her powers.
But sleep could not bring her parents back now.
She remembered what the sea had looked like that evening they left her. How it rumbled with ferocious waves, chilly pewter in color, beneath an endless slate gray sky. The waves rose so high they looked like the turrets of a watery castle in the distance.
She could imagine it — the scene of her parents' death. How the water had crashed over them, trapping them with nowhere to escape. They had suffocated, drowned, disappeared. Yes, in their final hours, her parents finally knew the pain she had felt all those years. There was no way they could conceal the raging sea, no way they could not feel the pressure of the ice cold waters bearing down on them.
It was a terrible thing to think, but Elsa thought of it often. Yet her morbid victory was overcome by a longing to see them come to some sort of peace in the wake of their demise. It was easier to imagine that they had fallen into a dreamless sleep while floating along those waves, unharmed and unafraid. They had passed into the next life with ease and grace, as they always had, and their ship surged proudly onward, framed by wings of ocean spray, taking them to heaven.
How she wished she could join them...
-}0{-
She wakes up under a blanket, and for a split second she thinks she will find her father there, breathing faithfully into the night. Or perhaps she will find her mother, stroking her hair as she hums a lullaby. But Elsa opens her eyes to find that she is not in her bed, and her parents are not here with her. She is all alone.
She knows almost instantly that she is in a prison cell, and somehow it is not surprising because her life has always felt like this.
She sees the door first. Even in the darkness she sees it, her only means of escape. The blanket peels away from her body as she sits up, disoriented with an ominous ringing in her ears. She looks around and knows that even though she is imprisoned, she is home. She can sense it in the air, in the stability of the stones that surround her. There is an indefinable familiarity about this place, although she's sure she's never been here before. She feels the tiniest bit of relief in knowing that she is in her own castle.
But how...?
She remembers everything at once, like collecting the fibers of a dream after she has just woken up. The light from the window behind her calls to her with a scream of fleeting hope, and she rushes towards it.
An ugly cackle of chains echoes in her cell as she is tugged roughly back against her will. She gasps at the nasty weight around her hands, the stinging pain in her wrists. She looks down and sees the shackles, but once again it's as if they'd always been there. She can hardly react. After all, she deserves to be shackled.
Accepting the restriction, she cranes her neck to get a better view of what lies outside that window. She sees the fjord, looking more like an icy white painting than real life. Everything is frozen still, lifeless, and abandoned. Arendelle is barely recognizable now, fading away in a fog of snow. Bits of debris are scattered all over like the aftermath of some horrible battle, and the tilted masts of ships stretch longingly towards heaven.
As her eyes take in the haunting scene, the howling wind seems to murmur, Your fault.
"What have I done?"
Unfamiliar footsteps echo just outside her cell. At first she is afraid, but a sudden wishful hope makes her somehow believe that Anna is right behind that door. Elsa fully expects to see her sister as the door creaks open and a flickering lantern whips a leash of light in her direction.
It is not her sister holding the lantern. It is Prince Hans.
His appearance is unexpected, but at the same time so sudden that Elsa doesn't have time to be surprised. She recalls that he was one of the last people she'd seen before waking up, and even if Anna doesn't want to see her, maybe the Prince could give her some answers.
"Why did you bring me here?" she demands, every bit the Queen of ice. At the very least she can project her superiority through her voice... but it still doesn't change the fact that she is shackled to the wall.
"I couldn't just let them kill you," he says, his voice softer than she expects. He hugs himself against the cold, and she thinks it strange that a man so stately and strapping could actually shiver. For a split second she feels guilty for raising her voice at him. He is taller than she remembers, and she feels an odd surge of helplessness because of it. Right now he is a threat to her title, and she has never felt so inferior.
"But I'm a danger to Arendelle," she protests. Too late she realizes she is practically asking for death. But if she is going to die, she will need to see her sister first. "Get Anna!"
The Prince's eyes are pale and hollow. "Anna has not returned."
Sheer horror stabs Elsa at this piece of news, like a blunt blade right in the gut. She whips around to look out the window, as if Anna might miraculously appear there, camouflaged in the snow.
Her poor sister... out there in that? How could she survive?
"If you would just stop the winter," the Prince says earnestly as he comes up behind Elsa. She leans away out of instinct, threatened by his approach. "Bring back summer. Please."
She feels a tremor of something surge into her from his closeness. No man has ever been this close to her before, with the exception of her own father.
His plea hangs in the frosty air between them; his voice is so mild but still somehow has the unrestrained richness of an operatic tenor. She turns slowly to look at him and finds his green eyes probing, tender.
This is not the same man she met at her Coronation ball, he can't be. He is not the man who clutched her sister's arm and attempted to announce their engagement on the day they'd met.
This is not that man.
"Don't you see?" she hisses at him, vengeful and helpless at once. "I can't!"
His mouth moves in little quivers as he stares at her, words beating on his lips for release — words he cannot speak. She sees the dreaded dawn of realization in his eyes, his hope chipping away like flecks of forgotten emerald in the lantern.
"You have to tell them to let me go!" she begs, knowing that if Anna is gone forever, Prince Hans may be her last chance for escape.
"They fear you, Queen Elsa," he murmurs, as if this is an answer.
For a moment she pities him, the disposable messenger. "So they sent you here."
"I was not sent," he protests, sounding offended. "I came of my own will." There is an interesting determination in his stance, a spark of anger that she'd dared to think he might have been forced into visiting her. She can see a storm building in his eyes — the kind of storm with warm winds and flashing lightning — not the kind of storm she is used to.
"Your presence here is useless." Elsa shakes her head at him. "You came to convince me to do something I cannot."
At this, he looks down at her shackles, and the heat in his eyes almost seems like it could burn straight through the iron and free her. "You were born with these powers?" he whispers, awestruck.
She doesn't merit him with an answer. The words would freeze on her tongue anyway. She looks away from him, squeezes her eyes shut, and just listens to him breathe for a very long while.
Just the way she would listen to her father breathe before she fell asleep.
Her soul is going to wither away in here, just like that flower she had sentenced to wither all those years ago. Just like her sweet, innocent Anna — the most precious flower of all...
Elsa feels the tears freeze in the beds of her eyes. She opens her mouth to speak, and the voice of her nine-year-old self comes out. "I need my sister."
She didn't mean to say it out loud, but the Prince's reaction is instantaneous and unexpected.
He touches her. On her elbow. His touch is light and hesitant, but it's still more than she's felt in years.
"All we can do now is pray that Anna will return to us unharmed," he says.
Elsa suppresses the pang of doom in her stomach. "And if she doesn't... I will be to blame."
"Elsa..."
Her eyes turn up at him, shocked. He has failed to address her as Queen. It is improper, but he doesn't seem to care... and she finds that she doesn't care either. Why should it matter when they are discussing matters of life and death? Why should it matter when they are the only two people in this dungeon?
"Your sister went after you out of love," he continues gently. "Anna knew in her heart that you would never intentionally hurt her. She was insistent, even when I tried to discourage her from going."
Elsa turns away to face the bleak scene outside her window again. "Anna was wrong about me!" she chokes. "And now everyone knows the truth. They have all seen the monster that I am."
"They believe that," Prince Hans emphasizes, his words slow and meaningful. She can't help but turn back around. His insistence shines before her like a lit candle in the distance — a promise of warmth and love on a cold, lonely night. "But I do not believe you are a monster, Elsa." He pauses, perhaps waiting for her to react. "Do you?"
Her mind goes blank from the combination of the question and his nearness. Reality stings her when she meets his searching green eyes. Everything about his face is so honest and handsome and real and near and so hard to ignore. This close, his chest completely blocks out her view of the rest of the room. This close she notices that the tiny wrinkle of worry in his forehead has never disappeared since he walked into her cell. This close, his long, delicate eyelashes look copper in the lantern's glow.
"I don't want to be a monster," she confesses, quivering and desperate.
"You don't have to be. Not if you don't believe it."
She is entranced by the way their voices mingle in the dark silence, by the way he speaks in such a caressing tone, inviting her the way the cello invites the violin to follow it through tunnels of melody.
At the Coronation Ball he had been just another face. When he came bursting into her ice palace with his sword and his men, he was just another frightened fighter, trying to put her in her place.
But something had given her pause in that moment when he'd appeared behind her, just as she was about to kill her intruders. She remembered the way he had shouted at her, his melodious voice carrying a forthright warning through her icy fortress. Don't be the monster they fear you are!
No matter how she'd tried to ignore them, his words had resonated with her, and they'd continued to echo in her mind since then. They held more truth to them than the words of her father, she thought. Conceal, don't feel.
Somehow she has roped this unsuspecting Prince of the Southern Isles into her blizzard of inner warfare. But he stands his ground. He fights back with words of wisdom, and he is brave enough to say them — no, shout them — right to her face.
Just like Anna...
Right now he looks bewildered and vulnerable in the dreary light of this cold dungeon; with cygnet flesh and Celtic green eyes, he is stunning. He has told her that he does not think she is a monster, and he is standing so close to her that she sort of has to believe him.
The shackles around her hands rattle in warning as her frost penetrates the iron. She wants to scream but the look in his eyes makes it impossible to move, let alone utter a sound. Over her shackles he places his hands — they are pink and chapped from the cold, but still strong — and the ice melts beneath his palms.
Elsa watches in wonder as the frost particles vanish from sight. She feels the cold retreat within her, and the quiet fire coming from his hands chases the cold back through the labyrinth of her veins. Everything seems to be going in reverse — except for their proximity.
He raises one hand and touches her chin lightly, the way he might tease a smile from a small child. As the warmth of his hand flows through her again, she can feel the ice of her powers trying to fight back. How dare this man invade my cold with his heat? How dare he force all this hope and life and fullness into my empty sorrow?
How dare he? He belongs to Anna, and Anna is gone, and Anna may never be coming back. He wants Anna. Doesn't he?
How dare he.
But as Hans inches closer, Elsa can feel her powers more intimately than ever before. They have curled up somewhere deep within her, like the snakes of Medusa, hiding from the Prince and his humble heat. For however brief a time, those powers have been put to rest in a way she has never managed before. The ringing in her ears finally shuts off, and nothing but sweet, solemn silence is left behind.
He blinks. She breathes. She can hear his heart pounding — and it sounds bold and daring enough to argue with the howling wind outside.
He looks at her lips, his eyes greener than the leaves of that poor gardenia she killed. She shakes her head.
I don't want to hurt you.
But he kisses her anyway.
His mouth is tender and loose, inviting her in. Taste, he seems to say, and she obeys. He is a gentleman with an entirely ungentlemanly heat to offer. All through this long kiss he never pushes, never invades, but just opens his mouth wider and softer, drawing her in at the pace she wishes to set.
She feels his tongue at the gate of her mouth, begging to be let in. Like so many times in her life, she is faced once again with this daunting task of opening a gate...
She wars with it for no more than an instant before submitting. He has implored her, in a way so unassuming and so unexpected, and she has only ever refused everyone else in her life... so she accepts him. He gives a great shudder, and the long warm length of his tongue slips into her mouth, like the flesh of a fruit when squeezed free from the rind. It is a sensation she thinks she's forgotten from her childhood, but with it comes bursts of sweet memories that awaken a long lost appetite.
Her soul is not withering any more. Instead it blooms back to life in one striking second, and as the Prince's arms surround her, and his hands hold tightly to her back, her soul wavers and shakes like a wind-swept flower inside of her.
After all these years, Elsa thinks, she finally has the power to watch that wilted gardenia come back to life.
It doesn't make any sense. She barely knows him, and he only knows her as the cold-hearted ice Queen who may or may not have killed his fiancée. What happened between now and then to cause such a turn of events?
It makes no sense, yet it feels so right. Like they are supposed to be this way.
She wishes she could cling to him the way he clings to her, but her hands are still bound between their bodies, wrapped in iron casts. Her frustration builds until she can only kiss him harder, and he cannot do anything about her imprisonment — he can only move his lips against hers and hold her ever tighter. She tugs on her shackles in a useless attempt to break free, and the sound of her chains rings out like a climaxing orchestra in the dungeon.
He ignores her struggle — not in an impugning way, but in a peaceful way. As if he is so lost in bliss that he cannot be bothered by the fact that she is chained to the wall. The pressure of his kiss is hot, violent, terrifying — yet wholesome all the same. He is a one man anarchy, trampling all that has ever controlled her. She starts to think that maybe her struggle isn't worth it. If she surrenders herself now, maybe he can carry her the rest of the way through this.
At long last he pulls away, because she has no control left within her to do anything else. He is breathing hard, exhausted. The lightning storm in his eyes has passed, leaving behind a turbulent green sea. His face is pink, but his fingers are blue. He has the perfect, inebriated look of a man who has just committed a crime in the name of love.
Elsa cannot feel her powers anymore. It is intoxicating.
She wants to ask him why, Why? Why would he do this? Why now? What could have possessed him? What about Anna?
She thinks he can see the questions churning in her eyes, and that is why he looks down.
"You are not wicked, Elsa," he says, so quietly she thinks she just imagined it.
"I put ice in my sister's heart," she challenges. Her voice is too quiet, just like his. Maybe they had kissed so deeply that they had swallowed each other's voices.
"But there is no ice in your heart," he says.
She glares at him in teary-eyed frustration, wringing her hands. "You have to leave, Prince Hans. Or you could be next."
He stands proud, ignoring her warning. "I am in no danger here."
"You cannot be sure of that," she says gravely. "I have no control over these powers. There's no telling who or what I might destroy next."
"I am not afraid of you, Elsa," he says, with that heroic heat glowing in his eyes. "I can save you."
For some reason, his words make her panic. That little voice whispers in the back of her head, What about Anna?
Elsa wants to fall to her knees and sob.
"You cannot save me from myself," she says instead.
He is resolute. "Perhaps not. But I can try."
He wants to be her savior. But why?
She is baffled by his interest in her, this determination and assuredness that came out of nowhere. He makes her feel warmer than she's ever felt before, and it seems to suffocate her like a blanket. She wonders if his heat could be just as dangerous as her cold...
"All I ask is that you help me escape this dungeon," Elsa says. "Please... We must find my sister before it's too late."
He looks at her once, and in his eyes she can see that he is acknowledging their kiss. He never mentions it out loud. And neither does she. It feels like a sin.
"I will do what I can."
He picks up the lantern and leaves her cell, taking his warmth with him.
Elsa may never see her parents again. She may never even see Anna again.
She should feel certain that he will return...
But she doesn't.