Synopsis:

A storybook-obsessed orphan thinks he's found a real life wizardess behind the closed gates of Arendelle. Even though her innocence is stifled, her existing is what keeps his anchored. "You used to be my confidant. Now you're her husband."

༺.❆.༻

"And this is where we bury our hearts,

between self-defeating personality disorders

and burnt bridges and midnight ramblings

embedding our memories in forsaken homes

like it is a conscious decision to shed

our wings (reptiles don't fly)"

~*"Defeathered," by intricately-ordinary

༺.❆.༻

. ❄ (i was the yesterday hiding from my tomorrow; you were the tomorrow running from your today)

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Sometimes a princess must die a thousand nights before she can grow tall enough to see her own sunrise.

"Hiding out in the library again too, huh?" He patted her head with the flat base of his palm like she was a kitten, doing what he did to all kindred spirits without childhoods. "Don't cry." Pat, pat. "Do you wanna hear a story?"

The heroes in question were redundant:

Swashbucklers.

Adventurers.

Nobles.

Rogues.

Figureheads of freedom.

Men made out of stardust.

"He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do."

And for an eight year old who couldn't, it only made her think of windows with no sunlight and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, "never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate under the weight of your own gloves."

Yet Flynnigan Rider could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do. No right; no wrong; no rules for him. He was free. Her heart was a bird and her ribs were a cage, but the man made of ink was born a phoenix. She tried to picture how it would be to live inside paragraphs of unpunctuated freedom; to rip off her tragic sub plot and strut towards the breaking dawn; to be―

"All alone in a place to call my very own," the servant boy finished with his voice strung up to its top note. "Someday, I'll be just like him. I'll make my own destiny, get my own castle, and live far, far away ― as close to the edge of the world as possible! I'll rise like the breaking dawn and catapult off cloud nine."

The girl paused, feeling the words twist in her heart like a key turning in a lock.

"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back. I don't care what they're going to say. I'll test the limits and break through."

She wiped her tears off the illustration in his book, aware that she could never plagiarize his lyrics. He, like the figureheads of freedom, possessed the confidence to shed his sheepskin and make life happen, but every wild boy had a shackled foot and a broken childhood that held him down.

She saw the leg iron when he looked at the window like an earthbound god no one ever tried to name a star after. "Tell me the story behind your eyes," whispered she.

He looked straight at her. Closing in. Closing up. Like an oyster with a pearl broken in two parts. "I don't have a story."

She frowned, making her hands into small fists on her lap. Something had clouded the constellations in his eyes ― something she had not seen, but felt. Something stowed away and guarded by a kraken in the deep blue sea of his heart.

(you wanted valuable treasure because you were no one's treasure)

The boy's body language grew timid and awkward. Goosebumps broke out across his arms as his knees knocked with the same please-don't-look-too-close that lurked between all twenty-four teeth in her twenty-four hour smiles. Part of her wanted to laugh at the scenario ― a throaty, strained laugh with disbelief and understanding coughed up together. They were pauper and princess, but they stifled self-consciousness equally. Masked weak self-esteems. Refused to tolerate any sunlight hitting the darkest, filithiest parts of the shelves in their forbidden libraries.

All she had was a three-lined script to perform a role her parents had written for her. All he had was an ink feather to rewrite a sob story that had no happy ending.

(our ink lines were smudged but we tried our best not to seep through the paper)

"Do you want to see Orion's Belt?" The boy looked at her upside down, never right-side up, just as he did all the world. "If I took you to the stars, would you make me a castle?"

She squeezed her knee with one hand while palming her tears with its sister, shaking her blonde head under the apricot fingers that clutched it. "You'd catch a cold."

He chuckled and folded his arms behind his head. "Fair enough! Then how 'bout an ice sculpture of myself? My superhuman looks were BORN to be commemorated!"

She smiled shyly.

His heart still fluttered with a giddy affection for the first ice castle he ever saw her make, which had been conceived on the night that he went poking his nose around the wings of his new workplace. "Just thought I should tell you that I never knew winter could be so beautiful till I met you, Princess," he'd told her through the keyhole of her bedroom at dawn.

His chocolaty compliment had made her red in the face on the other side of her door, prompting her to tell him to go away. Papa hadn't tutored her on how to avoid and rebuff rogue boys, not interact with them. Arendelle imported Coronan orphan boys every year on behalf of the Treaty of Våler, and this boy had been one of many assigned to Arendelle Castle. Papa said that such fledglings had fewer opportunities than other orphans as far as furturity was concerned; and thus Corona was giving them a special trade. She knew not what this "special trade" was beyond a bucketload of unpleasant tasks, but she knew that Anna had liked this boy since she was two.

Through Anna's fondness grew her own for the storyteller. It helped that being raised on medieval tales with mermaids and merlins made him swear that she was Nimue herself.

(but you and i weren't meant to be in the same plot)

"―Fitzherbert! Where'd you run off to, you no-good varmint?!"

She jumped.

He dropped his book in horror.

Wait.

...No.

No no no no no no

no no no no no no

no no no no no no

Behind her stood sprigs of ice that sparkled on the wall like evil trees. The boy before her trembled like a ghost in a shell. Fear hijacked her body and threw her across the library, guiding her through "Mythology & Science Fiction." Elsa passed bookcases of parallel universes where melodramas like these ended with "happily ever after" in big, cursive letters. Two hours of sobbing against fantasy novels and there were no fairy godmothers to cry into. Papa's guards shouted left and right as they searched the halls while she sat behind the "Angst & Tragedy" aisle with her face in her knees.

"If I were you, I wouldn't hide in the macabre." A nervous chuckle reached her ear. "Edgar Allan Poe will always give you papercuts."

Elsa gasped and backed into a bookshelf. Avalanches of gothic romance rained down, snowing her under "Jane Eyre" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." She tried to protect her head with her arms, but her sorcery did a better job by conjuring an awning of icicles. The princess's shivering state kept her from looking up at the masterpiece above her. She whimpered and hiccuped with her slimy nose tucked between her knees, fingers still gripping the flaxen mop atop her head.

"Elsa?"

She could feel his fear.

"Elsa, look at me."

Fear for her.

...Fear for her?

"I want you to gimme your hand right now―"

"NO!" Her wail was a firecracker.

Eugene's hand snapped back.

"Don't touch me!"

Eugene's hand lowered, trembling...

"Pl-Please..." Sniffle. "I..."

Am a curse.

(and you didn't have enough ink to rewrite that)

"I'll hurt you."

Eugene's pupils breathed fear. Pity. Empathy. He had the look of a boy who didn't know what was happening to his brain as he watched hers decay. She covered her face with her palms to shut him out, weeping because she could not be Lady of the Lake anymore.

"You? Hurt me?" Eugene joked, trying to make himself feel better. "Princess, you couldn't hurt a fly if you tr―"

Elsa almost screamed against her hands, "Go away!"

Eugene went mute.

"I'm just trying to protect you!"

"..."

She waited for him to abandon her because she deserved to be abandoned. She prayed for him to never corner her again because she could kill him like she had almost killed Anna. She prepared herself to go back to his pallet in the servant quarters and―

"Well," his voice murmured as it hugged her, "then you'd be the first."

Elsa's fingers separated from their sisters.

"But thank you."

Tears dropped off her cheeks like pearls as she lifted her face. Despite all his goosebumps and shaking hands, he stared at her with a smile that seemed to hurt his own heart.

(all those years of being alone made it impossible for you to leave me alone)

He patted her head with the flat base of his palm like she was a kitten, and she let him pat it because she was lost in the reflection that gazed back at her from his cookie dough eyes. The girl she saw in them was not a girl, but an enchantress ― a beautiful, breathtaking enchantress enrobed in blue frost and confidence.

"Your magic just has a bit of a cold today, that's all," he proposed timidly. "Merlin had to practice before he got good, you know. All the magic-makers get wizard's block every now and then. I'll bet even Nimue―"

"―No!" Elsa ripped away from his sunset touch, holding her hands against her chest. "I'm not her! I'm―..."

A monster.

(and that burning sunrise in your hands couldn't thaw my frozen forevers)

Elsa pressed her temple against the bookcase and curled her arms around herself. "Please...just go away."

An anvil of silence dropped between them.

"You know, Princess..." He paused to stand up, still skittish. "I honestly don't have all that much in me to like,"―he sounded afraid of his own voice―"but I've always liked you."

An absurd plot twist.

"...Why?"

An absurd moment of weakness and disbelief.

"Because you're like the wizardesses in all those stories―"

(i was a plot hole in my own story)

"―with powers that make you unlike anyone else in the whole wide world...but for some reason, you don't like yourself that much, either." Ended with an absurd, nervous laugh. "Imagine that?"

"..."

And with that, he let her be. Sunrise climbed the mountains, blazing through the library and melting Elsa's glaciers. She wiped her nose as she sniffled, smiling. Weakly. Tearfully. Painfully.

(i was never a fairy tale)

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❄ (but i was the book you never put down...)

༺.❆.༻

I'll make two pairs of cardboard wings,

one for you and one for me,

so that one day when we get old we can fly to the sun

and make sky castles to live in forever...

~*"Sky Castles," by intricately-ordinary

❆ Author's Note

This is a gift fic. The Quivering Pens was not something I wanted to recommend to the young requester (if only for its ideologically sensitive content), so I decapitated one of its predominant themes and smithed its own AU for her to enjoy. The setting was meant to be told like a memory being revisited. After this one-shot, "Bookstruck" was asked to be serial. I never had that in mind, but it happened.

To clarify, even though I like it unsaid:

If you've read Frozen's supplementary books, you'll know that Elsa didn't stay in her room throughout her childhood. The book "A Sister Like Me" (and Anna confirms it in Frozen as well) depicts Elsa walking around the castle and frequenting several areas. She anxiously ignored Anna the entire time, who trailed behind her in an effort to get her attention before stopping altogether. In this one-shot, she's sulking in the back of her father's library because she needed a book to cheer her up, but she found a book thief instead. She's also eight and gloveless here, so she hasn't reached the stage where her powers are overreactive.

The interaction that Eug has here with Elsa is similar to the dynamic she allowed between herself and her parents: emotionally distant, but physically accessible, due to them knowing about her powers before she realizes that she can hurt them by accident, too.