Regina never cast the curse.
.
Elsa never cried as a child.
.
Snow nearly named her Emma, but something never felt right. When she was pregnant, she was always so frigid cold. She loathed the way Emma felt on her lips, so warm and kind. This child would never be an Emma, Snow knows.
Elsa is created.
.
Snow White holds her breath and doesn't dare to hope until its Elsa's second birthday. She doesn't really understand why her step mother hadn't damned them into dismal outcomes, but she doesn't bother to go asking.
She busies herself in this new life. She is princess transformed into bandit transformed into Queen. She's no longer Mary Margaret, and she never has to go hiding in the woods relying on her own hands to keep herself safe.
Snow braids Elsa's hair in the mornings before riding with Red. She laughs with the dwarves and somewhere down the line she and Charming attempt for another child. Charming wants plenty of children, and Snow doesn't really know how to feel about this.
Maybe a child that isn't so silent and awkward wouldn't be as bad, because Snow White doesn't understand the cold stares and the silence that her daughter gives her.
They weren't ready for Elsa in the beginning, and now that they have her, they aren't quite sure what to do with her. She's quiet and patient, and she's so detached from them. As a child she radiated coldness that settled against Snow's warm body strangely, and Snow realized that she hated this child.
So Snow drifted.
She bothers less and less in the morning braiding Elsa's hair, and has a servant do it instead. She goes on a hunting trip for Elsa's fourth birthday, and she stops tucking her into bed some nights.
It's liberating, however. Snow doesn't really want to be a mother, and that she is forever in debt to a dead woman who sacrificed her own life for the sake of Charming and Snow's potential children.
Instead, they have Elsa. Frosty smiles and all. (maybe Elsa simply isn't enough.)
The world is her own however, something that she had craved for so long. No one will kill her, and she can adventure into the woods for hours and she'll always have a home to return to.
(She has three miscarriages before Charming and her stop.)
(It kills her, sometimes, to look at Elsa's face.)
.
Elsa loves winter.
Every morning she slips out of the castle and finds courtyards filled with snow and ice. Her blonde hair is soaking wet and her lips turn blue by the time the servant manage to coax Elsa out of the snow. Ice frosts her fingertips and the Cook coos at her by the stove as they try to thaw her out.
The cold doesn't bother her, though.
She longs for it.
.
Charming loves summer.
He loves the way the fields turn emerald green, and he remembers being a child and running through long grass. Flowers by the riverbank, warm waters that he spent hours in.
He tries to share summer with Elsa. Elsa smiles politely, the way a seven year shouldn't smile, and settles herself down in the shade of a tree with a book.
So he tries to goads her. He tries to get her to move and run and dance, the way all little girls should and do. He remembers the little girl from the village picking flowers with her mother, and he can't remember if Snow and Elsa had ever done so.
Eventually he wanders off.
.
Snow isn't around often, and neither is Charming.
The term mother and father sounded strange against her tongue. She can't seem to say the words in context to Snow and Charming. It leaves the two depressed and Elsa confused.
Sometimes she spends her nights pacing, trying to contain the coldness crawling up her spine. She can feel it, the way it snaps at her rage and awakens at her tears. She wants to scream and shout, but she can't. She conceals everything and simply tries to move past feelings.
.
Elsa built a snowman when she's only five with Charming. She called him Olaf, and together they shared a moment when Elsa is laughing and Charming can be the father he has always wanted.
When she is six, she made a snow monster. She called him Marshmallow, with teeth made out ice and claws that stretched towards her father.
When she is seven, they stopped playing in the snow together.
.
Snow has another child.
It's a remarkable feat, one that stuns the people of the Enchanted Forest. It's a screaming girl who howls for love, and Snow cradles the infant into her arms and laughs.
The Doctor opens the door wide, and love radiates from the King and Queen.
"Ana," she decides firmly. Charming watches and smiles, pressing his lips to Ana's forehead.
"Of course."
He spent three days carving a wardrobe himself out of the finest wood he could find. He carved in vines and roses, making the dead wood alive. He makes it so it will last. So Ana will always have it. No matter what.
.
Elsa hates Ana.
They push a bed into her room. They crowd another life into her life, and she feels suffocated. Snow offers to let Elsa hold Ana, but Elsa imagines rather holding a block of ice and dropping it. Letting it shatter.
She doesn't like the way Ana screams for attention, or the way she grabs onto Elsa's wrists. Elsa skirts around the girl in the morning and ignores her in the evenings.
She hides in the library, trying to explain her existence through old words that are bound by spines.
She's eleven when she hears her name.
"Regina's still out there." Snow whispers to Charming as they glide through the library. "She'll come back for Ana."
"What about Elsa?" Charming asks foolishly.
Why would Regina care about the spare girl?
.
Ruby gives Elsa a pair of blue gloves when she turns twelve. They're soft and warm, and Ruby gives them with love. Elsa never takes them off.
.
"Do you wanna build a snowman?" Ana climbs up on Elsa, pulling lightly at her hair.
Elsa shoves the girl down onto the floor and ignores the shrill screaming.
.
The moment she turns fifteen, she shuts herself in her room. Something had changed within her, and she's so franticly terrified of the way ice just appears out of nowhere. Snow covers her room, and she doesn't comprehend why ice is crawling up her legs and she's so simply frantic.
Charming finds her.
.
Elsa had been reading in the library, devouring old history books. Ana had gone rushing in, ripping the book away. She was pointing at the window frantically, revealing the sprawl of summer over the Enchanted Forest.
Elsa flinched back, trying to escape childish hands that battered her senseless.
"Come on Elsa, let's go outside. You never play with me anymore!" The girl shrieked at her, red hair falling over her shoulders. "Come on!"
For a second, all Elsa feels is the frozen touch of rage blossoming through her heart, and suddenly she lashes out.
Every moment of pain comes out. The hours of neglect, the years of being left behind all come roaring out.
Ana's heaped on the floor, and blood and frost is everywhere.
Charming races in, hearing the frantic scream of Elsa and the silence or Ana.
"Elsa," Snow breathes, stopping at the doorway.
The history book is at Elsa's feet and Regina's cold face is gazing out of the pages. Elsa walks out without a second thought.
.
She takes nothing but the clothes on her back and the gloves on her hands.
.
She discovers the Dwarf Mines, and creeps miles beneath the earth. Frost coats her lips and ice glazes her skin. She heads out to sea, jumping from ship to ship. She's not even sixteen, and she's killed her sister and is something so undefined.
She can make snow and ice, and she feels like she could freeze the oceans and unleash the heavens.
She meets Regina, and spends a few months under her shelter. What greater revenge is there to hide the murderer of your enemy's favourite child? Regina smirks and laughs, but there is simple warmth in her words and eyes.
Elsa longs to call her mother.
.
It's three long years.
Three long years of hiding from Charming and Snow, pretending she isn't a monster. She fears the future, and that's why she seeks out the Dark One.
She's peeling back her gloves, and begging. She has a scar on her arm from one of Snow's arrows, and she's so tired of running from Charming's men. They weren't very good parents, but they're excellent at hunting her down.
She simply wants refuge.
Refuge from the world.
Her last glimpse is of ice and snow, a blur of realities meshing together and an urn.
.
The urn breaks open.
.
I got an idea from a comment on a Buzzfeed post, saying that if, in an AU setting, that Emma would have the potential of being Elsa. I'm maybe considering a sequel of Emma and Elsa meeting each other.