10-year-old Elsa had to jump to reach the phone mounted to the wall above the kitchen counter. "Hello?"
"Elsa? Elsa! Elsa, sweetie, are you okay? Is Anna okay?"
"Hi Mama! Mama, I made snow!" Elsa gushed.
Anna was hopping with excitement, scooping snow up off the hardwood living room floor and throwing it in the air. "Mama, Elsa's an angel now!" she shouted at the phone, and Elsa heard her mother inhale sharply.
"Elsa, what is happening over there? What is Anna saying?"
Elsa giggled and said, "Anna says I'm an angel now because my hair is all white."
The line was quiet.
After a moment, Elsa continued, "And we're just playing in the snow I made. I can make snow," she repeated, just in case her mother had missed it the first time she said it.
"Elsa, I need you to be the big sister right now and listen to me. Are you listening, honey?"
"Yes, Mama," Elsa said, growing serious.
"Stay inside the house. You and Anna must stay inside. Do not go out and play with—with the snow. I'm coming home right now, okay? Can you do that for me, sweetie?"
"Yes, Mama, we'll stay inside. But Mama, I made the snow inside, so can we play with it?" Elsa asked.
Another pause.
"I'm coming home now. Stay inside."
ooooooooooooooooooooo
Elsa and Anna were making angels in the thick snow covering the living room floor when their mother opened the front door and froze in the doorway, staring at Elsa.
Anna ran to their mother, kicking up snow the whole way, and hugged her knees before tugging on her hand and pointing, saying, "Mama, we're both angels now! I made a snow angel!"
Elsa's mother continued to stare at her, and she sat up, then looked down, watching her mother through white bangs. After a long moment, her mother suddenly glanced behind her out the door before slamming it shut, then rushing to the curtains and closing them as well. She tried to turn the lights on, but when nothing happened, she flicked the switch down hard and stood staring at the wall for a moment, breathing heavily.
Even Anna was standing quietly now.
"Mama?" Elsa said, and her mother flinched. "Mama, I'm sorry I made it snow inside," she tried in her goodest voice.
Her mother finally turned around and knelt down to her, staring at her strangely. "You are Elsa," she said finally, staring at Elsa's eyes, at her face and clothes and again and again and again at her hair.
"Mommy?" Elsa was raising her arms, she wanted a hug, but ice started growing from just in front of her palms, creeping toward her mother, and her mother scrambled back and tried to stand, stumbling and slamming into the wall behind her with a loud thud before darting to Anna and grabbing her. Anna clutched her mother tightly and started to cry. Elsa's arms had followed her mother in her dash across the room, and so had the growing lengths of ice, hovering in the air.
"Elsa, stop!" her mother shouted, and the ice stopped growing toward her, but smaller icicles began to burst forth all along the existing spikes, and where Anna and Elsa had made their snow angels, a layer of ice could now be seen covering the floor. Elsa's eyes were burning and she could tell she was about to cry, and now snow was falling as well—
—and the front door opened, and Elsa's father was standing there, staring, at the ice and at her, just as her mother had done—
—and she was truly sobbing now. "DADDY!" Elsa bawled, and her father quickly closed the door and rushed to her and hugged her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. He ignored the frost growing over his clothing as he held her and told her everything would be okay and smoothed her new, platinum-blonde hair.
ooooooooooooooooooooo
When Elsa woke, it was nighttime. Anna slept in her own bed for once, across the room where their parents had laid her down. Downstairs, the lights were on and her parents were watching the small TV in the kitchen.
"Good evening, princess. Hungry?" her father asked. Her mother turned to look at her.
Elsa nodded, eyes downcast. Her mother got up and padded over to the refrigerator in her slippers, then turned back and came and hugged her tight. "I love you," she whispered.
"I love you too, Mama," Elsa said as she hugged her mother back, then pulled up a chair at the kitchen table while her mother went back to the refrigerator and her father poured her a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. The room was silent as they watched the TV; her mother even seemed to be trying to cook quietly, gently placing a pan on the stove so it wouldn't make any more noise than necessary.
"—and what we know—what we know for sure so far is, is that as far as we can tell no one was unaffected. Everyone, and this is everyone worldwide, suffered the same sensory blackout for those three-point-two seconds, simultaneously, and when they came to, there had been an actual electrical—like an electronics, or all powered machines, had had a blackout as well. The cause as yet remains unknown, so all we can do is just report what we know."
"Yes, thank you Tom. Tom Azucar, reporting from the field. And of course, speaking of the blackout, we have this video clip, already famous worldwide, if we can get that up on the screen. Yes, so, what we're seeing here is the tarmac at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago earlier today, just seconds after the blackout, and if you look in the upper right-hand corner, the baggage handler there, he'll look up and jump—flies—and it takes a moment for the cameraman to find him, but there he is, flying and catching a business jet that had lost power during the blackout and setting it down on the runway. And then he just—you can see him just standing there and staring at his hands a moment, and then he looks up and he's off again."
"Now, obviously, this could all be, it could be CGI or something, and on any other day that's all it'd be, just a dumb hoax—"
"Right, on any other day—but—"
"But that's, that might come to be, in history, be the video, but it's not the only video. We're getting them, we've been getting them all afternoon and into the evening, and our sister stations, and every other network, people doing the most fantastic, that is to say, supernatural, things…"
"Yeah, and so, at a certain point, you just have to say to yourself, 'Isn't this just the way the world is, now?' The world definitely wasn't like this yesterday, but all evidence seems to point to that world having changed, changed to the one we're in now."
"Yeah, that's exactly it. August 18, 1998: the day the world changed."
"Absolutely. And now, speaking of changing, on a potentially more somber note, I'm just getting word that the Whi—"
Elsa's father turned off the TV. The kitchen was quiet for a moment, and then he said, softly, "I was getting coffee when the blackout hit. When I came out of it, I was on the floor. Spilled coffee all over my hand," and he showed Elsa his left hand, still a little red.
"Oh! Papa, are you okay?" she asked.
He smiled at her. "It hurt earlier, but now it's just a little tender."
Elsa nodded, satisfied. Her mother brought over a plate of sandwich halves and they dug in.
Elsa's father spoke again, "Do you remember the blackout too? When everything went dark?"
Elsa nodded. "I was watching TV. Anna was—she was running around." Elsa fidgeted a bit, then said, "She wasn't really that sick too, she just wanted to stay home with me."
Elsa's mother was smiling fondly. "Oh, she wasn't that sick after all? Well, she'll be in trouble later." At Elsa's sudden look of guilty, wide-eyed panic, she laughed, and added, "But just a little. There's nothing wrong with loving your sister too much."
Elsa's father was smiling faintly too. "So, Anna was running, and then…?"
"Oh, so she was running and then there was the blackout and she was on the floor, 'cause she fell in the blackout, and she was rubbing her face and starting to cry, and I knew I needed to get ice for her face but I couldn't leave her alone and I didn't know what to do and—and I started to panic," Elsa said, lowering her eyes briefly, before rushing on, "and I just wanted to make her happy and take care of her, and I thought of how much she liked the snow, and snow is cold so—" Elsa broke off, then hung her head, continuing in a quieter voice, "so I made some snow."
It was quiet for a moment, and then her father spoke up, softly, "'So you made some snow.' So your sister wouldn't hurt, so she wouldn't cry." He stared at her a second, and then his smile was coming back, "You made some snow?"
Elsa squirmed a little in her seat. "I made some snow, and then I made a lot more."
Her mother pulled her into a one-armed hug. "I think you killed the TV, sweetie." At another worried Oh! from Elsa, she gave her daughter another squeeze. "But there's nothing wrong with helping your sister. We'll get a new TV for the living room on the weekend." She eyed her daughter. "Which means you can't make snow inside the house anymore, okay?"
"You shouldn't make snow outside, either," Elsa's father said. "Elsa, this is really important. The snow you make, it's not… usual. And people don't like unusual things. They might be mean to you."
Elsa's mouth felt dry and too full of half-chewed sandwich, and she drank half of her water all at once. When she was done, she held the glass in both hands, staring into it. "I can't make my snow anymore?" she asked in a small voice.
Her father hesitated a moment before he said, "Honey, you're different now. Your hair is different, and your snow is really different, and… it just isn't safe. Until we know what this is, you should keep it hidden."
"But the man on TV is different, and he—he caught a plane! He did good, so people will like him, and I'm good… And they said on TV there's more, so lots of special people doing lots of good things isn't bad…" Elsa didn't know what to say, didn't know how to explain that the amazing things that she and others could do—they weren't wrong, and not doing them wasn't right.
Elsa's father was eyeing her glass and the solid block of ice within it as they heard the tiniest pop. He gingerly grabbed the glass with five fingers around the rim and lifted it out of her hands, bringing it over the table and toward the surface before letting it fall the last half-inch, and the glass exploded around the cylinder of ice inside.
"Jesus, Agnarr!" Elsa's mother exclaimed, bustling off to the closet and emerging with broom and dustpan. "Elsa, stay in your seat and don't touch the glass."
Elsa's father hadn't looked away from Elsa the whole time, had watched her eyes follow the glass, widen when it shattered; had seen the way her hands darted to the edges of her seat and gripped it hard; how frost spread out from her palms to cover the whole chair and now her nightgown was stuck, frozen to it. "Elsa," he said firmly, and she looked from her seat to him, wide-eyed and gasping. "Elsa, it's okay. Just calm down." His voice became gentle, "Breathe. Just calm down and everything will be okay."
Their gazes remained locked, and her father kept repeating his instructions to calm down and breathe and assurances that everything would be fine in the same soothing voice, all while her mother swept up the broken glass on the floor and table, tsking and alternating glares at her husband with unreadable looks at Elsa. Finally, Elsa's breathing evened and slowed and she was able to loosen the ice holding her to the chair.
"Elsa," her father began, "these powers aren't just dangerous because people might be afraid of you; they're dangerous because they're dangerous. You could hurt someone: yourself, or me, or your mama, or Anna, or one of your friends from school…"
Elsa's face was pointed at the table as she watched her father through her bangs. "I don't want to hurt anyone," she said in a tiny voice.
Her father's expression hardened. "Then you need to hide these powers. And Elsa, when your emotions are strong, when you're surprised or scared, they come out, right? Like with the chair, and earlier, when I came home, right?"
Elsa nodded.
"So you can't let yourself feel. It's the only way to be safe. Hide, and stay in control. Conceal it, don't feel it."
Elsa was quiet a long moment. "Conceal it, don't feel it. Okay. Okay, Papa." She smiled a tight-lipped smile. "I'll be good."
He reached out and gingerly patted her head, then smoothed her hair back when nothing happened. "I know you will." He brought his hand down a little and let the backs of his fingers rest on her forehead. "You're not warm at all anymore. Are you feeling better?"
"Oh!" she chirped, "I forgot I was sick!" Her brow wrinkled as she thought hard for a moment. "I must've got better after the blackout."
If her father hadn't been touching her, she wouldn't have felt him flinch.
ooooooooooooooooooooo
(The audience appears just as shocked as Snow Queen herself)
What? No, I don't hate my parents; how can you even ask me that? Look, those were scary times, and must especially have been so for those who were all grown up and had thought that they had known the shape of the world. The day of the Event, we watched an eighteen-year-old airport employee become a superhero. The very next day, we got our first supervillain. In a week, that airport employee was Atlas, and in a month, he was founding your Chicago Sentinels; meanwhile, entire countries were falling apart into war, war, war. This was before we knew what triggered breakthroughs, or what the types were, or even that there were types; before we knew if we might not all wake up the next day, or maybe have a second blackout, a de-powering Event, and the world would be normal again.
And if the powers stayed? To which paranormal dystopia in our popular culture should my parents have looked for guidance? Should they have feared government agents coming to take me away, to experiment on me or press me into military service as a sixty pound weapon of mass destruction? Should they have feared me? Should they have dragged me into the street and burned me as a witch? Because let us not forget, all of those things happened.
(Snow Queen chews on her bottom lip for a moment, eyes on the ground as she considers)
Of course training would have been ideal, but I might as well wish my breakthrough had occurred a year later, or five—not only was there no DSA, but as far as I know, I was the first cryokinetic breakthrough—and the only A-class until Frostitute, nearly four years later, at least in the US—we're not exactly common. Simply said, there was no one to teach me, even had there been anyone around to trust enough to ask.
(Snow Queen sighs, then turns and raises an eyebrow at Jack Frost)
You had it easy.
(The host and audience laugh; Jack Frost smirks and fires back with, "I had something easy," waggling his eyebrows suggestively; "Oh, hush," Snow Queen replies, flicking a finger at him and shooting a snowball no larger than a marble at his chest; when the studio has quieted down, Snow Queen appears to have regained her pensive mood)
My parents were just trying to keep us safe, from an unenviable position. And…
(She smiles a little sadly at the audience and gives a slight shrug)
They weren't exactly wrong, after all, were they?
ooooooooooooooooooooo
AN: Tangled and Frozen are Disney, while How to Train Your Dragon and Rise of the Guardians are Dreamworks (::heartbreak::). The setting is from Marion G. Harmon's Wearing the Cape series, self-published on Amazon. "Original" character names are auto-generated by Scrivener, poorly-conceived puns, or beer =P
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