Notes: I've changed a number of things in this crossover. This is a parallel universe to Panem. Instead of a coal mining district, there is instead, its replacement, the ice mining district. The geography might be a little off, as since Panem and the Capitol are based in futuristic US, there wouldn't be many frozen lakes (or even fjords – I'm continents off) these icemen could mine from. "Elsa" is her male counterpart, whom I've named Elias, and Elias and Anna are not related here.
I have taken the picture I'm using from Google, and I want to give credit, but I don't know the artist. If this is your work, and you would like me to credit you or remove it, please just send me a PM. I want to draw my own male Elsa some time, but I'm so unarty and lazy. D:
The title is my homage to the song of the same name by Imagine Dragons, which I believe has some relevance. :D Happy reading!
Chapter 1: The Reaping
- may the odds be ever in your favour -
Born of cold and winter air
and mountain rain combining.
This icy force both foul and fair
has a frozen heart worth mining.
I walk through the town centre, thick snow crunching satisfyingly beneath my feet. In my arms, I grasp the cloth wrapped food bundle I had picked up from the near-empty market. The loaves had been piping hot, fresh out of the oven when I had purchased them from the bakery only minutes before, but already, faced with the biting, bitter cold of District 12, they are cooling rapidly. I grimace and clutch the bundle tighter, attempting to fit them under my thick fur coat.
It is a bad fit, and for my efforts, I am rewarded with the painful sting of the cold air on my lower torso.
"Good morning, Miss Anna."
I look up, postponing my impossible task and smile widely at the district butcher, Jarvis, a balding, middle-aged man with sallow cheeks and tired eyes. He stands in the middle of the empty pig pen which is attached directly to the back of his house, looking a little awkward, lost and out of place.
He nods absently at me, his frayed working overall draped across his shoulder like a big, off-white cape. Even from this distance, I can see the washed out browns and reds from the cattle and sheep he'd butchered, embroidered across the cloth like a macabre pattern of flowers.
I remember being scared of the butcher when I was little, the murderer – the man with the blood stained clothes – before I was deemed old enough to be truly explained the nature of the Games. Then I just realised that he was just one of us. This kindly old man, with the generations old overalls, who had to cut and slice up pigs, sheep and cows to eke a meagre living.
"Good morning, Jarvis!" I call back, hoping he could hear me.
He pauses and steps closer to the fence, leaning on it, "Good day for a reaping." He says conversationally, nodding his head at the milky dawn sky. He catches my half-hearted smile and returns a rueful one. "On your way home?"
"Yes."
"Send my respects to your mother and father. How is the laundrette doing?"
"Well enough for me to buy this." I tell him, motioning at the loaves, and this time, he cracks a genuine smile.
"That's good to hear." He says, nodding. "That's always good to hear. Well. Best hurry along now, Miss Anna. And good luck for today."
We exchange farewells and I continue on my trek home.
So cut through the heart, cold and clear.
Strike for love and strike for fear.
See the beauty, sharp and sheer split the ice apart
and break the frozen heart.
The district seems almost unnerving without the usual sound of workers returning home from a night shift on the fjords. It is customary for the icemen of the district to work primary during the night – when the air is coldest, and the ice on the surface of the fjords the thickest. During the early morning, the workers return to the district centre to stack and package the harvested ice onto large cargo carriages for transportation into the Capitol. They have the rest of the day off to return home to sleep and eat, and the process repeats again the following night. It's arduous work, and the pay is painfully low. But then, what other choice do we have?
I walk the beaten track used daily by the icemen and marvel at the thick layer of snow which has already mostly masked whatever heavy footprints there were before.
The workers are no doubt at home. Work is suspended on the day of the Reaping, and those with sons and daughters will be spending the hours with their families, likely fearfully, praying and bartering with whichever Gods they believe in to spare their children's lives for one more year. Others, ones who don't have any loved ones at risk, or ones who just simply do not care, will be treating this as a long-yearned-for one day holiday. One day, once, every year.
And that's pretty much life here in District 12 summed up. The District of icemen. We live for ice. Ice is our lifeblood – we harvest ice from the lakes and fjords which surround our district – ice which is cut with saws and handled with hooks and tongs and then painstakingly chipped and hacked into manageable sizes with the ice picks and adzes. The huge, dripping blocks are then transported to the Capitol for use as coolers for their food and perishables and for any other recreational whim of the Capitol.
Ice has a magic,
can't be controlled.
Stronger than one, stronger than ten,
stronger than a hundred men! Ha!
I reach my neighbourhood, and the silence is absolute. The shutters and curtains (for those who could afford that kind of luxury) to every house are drawn tightly shut. There is a pensiveness in the air, and a sense of foreboding. The people of District 12 are not outgoing at best – the coldness of our environment has somewhat rubbed off on us – but today, everyone is keeping themselves strictly to themselves. There is a tension in the air which is building up, slowly, second by second. The Reaping starts at two.
I catch sight of my home. The faded words, Arendelle Laundrette are painted onto the worn board of the shop front. Father painted it himself, some forgotten memory, long ago, before the unrelenting fierceness of the fjords of District 12 had beaten whatever artistic creativity out of him. The words are painted pink, outlined in gold and set on a peeling green background. An intricate design of a castle sits behind the words, white with blue turrets. It's beautiful.
Father had stressed over the shop front sign for days, painting in every little detail, every little brick, "I'm painting this for my little princess, am I not? And royalty needs perfection." He had told me, eyes twinkling, when I asked him why.
My father didn't initially work in the ice business. My mother always worked for the family laundrette, as well as looking after the children of ice miners. My father was a craftsman, he carved beautiful instruments, furniture and sometimes sculptures out of wood, painted them, displayed them in the window of the laundrette, and sold them to those who could afford them, which wasn't many. Sometimes I caught him giving toys to the village children, much to my mother's half-hearted, but loving disapproval.
Then the demand for ice in the Capitol rose, and mother and father's jobs proved not enough to make ends meet. Father left his job as a crafter and painter and joined the icemen, and soon, my father stopped living with us, and was replaced by a despondent shell of a man, with perpetually tired, empty eyes. Like the others, he was taken slave to the fjords.
And all for a few loaves of bread.
When I enter through the front door, the cool air sweeps in, setting the solitary wind chimes off. My mother has woken up, and from the looks of it, only recently.
"You didn't have a lie-in?" Mother smiles at me, tiredly, rubbing the remnants of sleep from her eyes.
"I thought we could eat something fresh today. For breakfast."
"My lovely daughter." She tells me, and takes me in a warm embrace. "Let's get you ready."
We go to my room, my mother sits me on a stool and brushes my hair out with a wide toothed wooden comb, which father had carved out by hand. In my hand, I hold a small mirror, which had been a gift to mother from the late wife of the district blacksmith. It's made out of hammered steel, and coated so it won't rust. Everything we own in our house has either been gifted to us, or hand crafted out of wood by my father. It sounds odd, but it doesn't look so odd. We wouldn't have been able to afford to buy anything else. He used different varieties of wood, whatever he could get his hands on at the time, from birch, mahogany, redwood, maple, plywood, to rare, expensive oak for the table.
Mother braids my orange hair into two long braids and fastens each with a dark green hairband.
"You have such lovely coloured hair." She tells me. I giggle compliantly, earning a happy laugh from her – my parents and neighbouring adults had consistently told me this with fondness, their enchantment concerning my brightly coloured hair and mysterious (and according to them, charming) blonde streak – and for the earlier years of my childhood, I believed their words to be true. But then school started, and the opposite was drummed into me.
I put on a beautiful emerald green dress with off-the-shoulder green sleeves. My reaping clothes. It has a dark green – almost black bodice, greenish gold lacing, and embellished on the front is rosemaling, a tradition that my mother's side of the family had carried along with her. My mother told me that she thinks, before Panem was formed, along with the Capitol, we were all from different parts of the world. She tells me that she think that we were from a place called Norway, which is where the rosemaling originated from. Personally, I've never heard of the place, and the name is absent from any of my school textbooks – I've checked.
The dress used to belong to mother – these are her old reaping clothes. In District 12, amongst the poorer civilians, practically everything is a hand-me-down.
"Finished." She tells me, standing up, and walking backwards to admire her work from a distance. "You look so beautiful."
"Like a princess." My dad has finally awoken, and he leans in the arched doorway from my parents' bedroom. He gives me a tired, beaten down smile and waves distractedly to the dining table. "Breakfast, anybody?"
Born of cold and winter air
and mountain rain combining.
This icy force both foul and fair
has a frozen heart worth mining.
We arrive a little late, and miss off the beginning of the mayor's speech. It's no large loss, as it's the exact same every year – the story of the Capitol and the forming of the Districts, as well as the creation of the Hunger Games. We join the crowds lining up just outside the overflowing town centre, and watch the Reaping on large screens as it's televised to the Capitol.
A number of Peacekeepers line the outskirts of the crowd, and our late coming catches the eye of one man, who saunters over and grips me roughly by the arm, narrowing his eyes.
"Name and age?"
"Ow, you're hurting-"
"Name and age?"
"Anna Arendelle, I'm sixteen."
"Well, Miss Arendelle, don't you know the penalty for absence during a Reaping?"
"Yes, I do, and I'm sorry, but we didn't miss-"
My mother cuts in, apologetically. "Officer, I'm so sorry, it's not my daughter's fault, we just left the house a little late, it's all on us – sir-"
"Save your breath."
I am dragged further into the crowd, and I find myself thrust into a roped area, filled with other sixteens from the District. A few of them spare me a glance, but most of them have their eyes plastered on the screen in front of us.
The cameras are currently focussed on Lumnia Marionette, Distrct 12's flashy new escort, with her upturned snakeskin lips, heavily made up yellow cat eyes and intricately threaded wine red hair, piled on the top of her head to imitate flowers. She's clad in thick, expensive looking furs, ones which I do not recognise. She's strange and freakish-looking, but honestly, so is every other escort in our district history. When she catches her own face on screen, she beams widely, oblivious to the gloomy atmosphere and gives a little wave.
The cameras then pan out to the entire stage, an old thing, held together by rusty nails and erected outside the foreboding Justice Building. On the stage, there are five chairs, four of them occupied – (the empty one belonging to the major), filled by Lumnia and District 12's three surviving victors, of which I only vaguely recognise one: the youngest, and most recent victor, Kristoff Bjorgman; a grim faced, blonde haired young man who had only been a year older than me in school. He was reaped for the 90th Hunger Games, aged thirteen, and won out of seemingly sheer luck.
The cameras pan in on his face fleetingly, and Kristoff's eyes briefly flicker upwards at the screens, before returning to the major who is finishing his speech.
"And now, let me introduce our District escort. This is her first year with us, and I hope it will become the first of many. Lumnia Marionette."
Lumnia splits a smile and practically bounces up to the podium. She shuts her eyes and breathes in, her eyes shifting almost hypnotically beneath her closed lids. "What a pleasure. What a – pleasure – it is to be here." She opens her eyes and stares, looking pleased at the perplexed crowd beneath her.
"They've sent their biggest nutter this time." Mutters somebody beside me.
"It's so cold, but I can tell I'm going to love it here. District 12. Lovely." She beams at us. "Now."
It's time for the drawing. Two large glass bowls sit at the very front of the stage, one for the boys and one for the girls, each filled to the brim with tiny paper slips, and each slip with a name carefully inscribed on it in tall, curly writing. Four of those slips belong to me.
Lumnia dips her hand into the first bowl, and I'm guessing it's the girls' bowl – it's always been customary this way – and twirls her fingers round and round, dragging out the process as long as she can. She reaches her hand right to the very bottom and finally, her fingers close on a single paper slip.
The entire crowd has gone silent, and I'm sure the pounding heartbeat I hear in my ear can't just be my own. It's too loud, too brash and too irregular. My mouth has gone dry and I tell myself that it can't be me. What's four out of thousands? Nothing. It's unlikely. But not impossible.
Somebody next to me is whispering something under their breath, almost unintelligibly, and all I can make out is, "No, no, no, no, no –"
"Hah," she smiles widely at us, finally, holding the slip of paper up, in the air, sandwiched between her index and middle finger, "Lovely. Our female tribute will be –" she pauses, unfolding the slip and squinting at the words as though having some difficulty with the name. Her cat eyes catch a gleam from the recording lights of the cameras as her brow relaxes and she comes out with a smile that would make the Cheshire cat proud.
"Our female tribute will be – Anna Arendelle."