Sometimes she notices shapes in the frost. They are never intentional, or at least not consciously so, and sometimes they mean nothing and couldn't even be described as patterns, exactly. But sometimes she notices them, regardless. Like suddenly spotting a unicorn riding a seal in the clouds or a laughing face in the leaves of a tree, only more personal somehow, because this is the ice that she made, from her own body, from her own mind.
She sees swirls like severed rose heads and spikes like the sharp and harmless teeth of a puppy. She sees the edges of teardrops and the corners of smiles. She wants to show it to Anna, sometimes (always), to ask what she finds there and remember and tease her about it. She wants to share it between them, because it's real and close and important, and because she misses her voice so much.
"Do you want to build a snowman…"
It's not really a question anymore. Elsa can hear Anna's voice fade as she walks away before she's even finished asking.
Sometimes she traces the shapes with her fingertips, but her gloved hands leave no marks and her gloveless hands only make the ice thicker. Sometimes she wonders how a power that creates so much can be so destructive.
But that is a wrongheaded line of thought, she knows. Her power is evil, unnatural, monstrous. It is to be denied, hidden, suppressed. The only thing it creates is pain and hurt and misery. And even if she wonders, even if she questions why a thing so evil feels so right, there is always, always, reliable and haunting as clockwork, that voice on the other side of the door, asking that same terrible question every time; a warning, a reminder.
"Do you want to build a snowman?"
.
When she doesn't read, about legislation and agriculture and economics, she writes, about laws and schedules and taxes. And when she doesn't do that, she does things she isn't allowed.
She blew on a cockroach, once, until it spread its wings encrusted with ice and flew away like a sparkling butterfly. She tapped her fingers on the windowsill until the tapping turned to clanging and she learned not to tap things, ever. She whispered words that curled like smoke and had to be careful, so careful, to make them dissipate and not let them drop in hard, sharp bunches.
She does it all inside her room, where no one can see and no one can be hurt, and it makes her so hollow with giddiness for a moment before she remembers her guilt and her shame. But when she does, and cloaks herself in them snugly, hopelessly, just as she should, it feels like suddenly she cannot separate the ice from the guilt and then both are impossible to tuck away.
"Fear will be your enemy," she remembers being told. But they must have been wrong. Her enemy is much simpler and more familiar than that, because her enemy is just herself.
.
She doesn't speak to herself, because she doesn't speak at all most of the time. But she does wonder about things.
She wonders what size shoes Anna is wearing, because she's been growing but it seems so long since Elsa's even seen her feet. She wonders if Anna still plays with dolls and climbs on inadvisable things and rates the palace guards by the impressiveness of their moustaches.
She wonders, idly and purposelessly, like all wondering must be done, and she tells herself stories about it and then tells herself to stop because it is childish and dangerous and it makes her feel almost entitled. And Anna's adventures are now and forever her own, and so are her delight and her disappointment and her big and little aches, and Elsa's entitled to none of it, none, not even to the telling.
But Anna still tells her. When she sits behind the door, whose every groove she must have already memorized, Elsa is certain, because Elsa herself has learned its every quirk on the other side. Anna sits there and tells her things, and not the things she wants to know; no, she sits there and tells her everything she doesn't want to hear.
"I found a cricket today, but I couldn't catch it. I think I forgot how. You taught me a lot of stuff that's easy to forget, Elsa, do you know that? You should remind me."
A rustle of clothes and the squeak of boots on marble. The shadow under the door squirms and evens.
"I did dance, though. You never even taught me how to dance, but, maybe that's why I remember."
A sigh.
"Do you want to build a…"
Elsa completes the sentence in her head, once, twice, a thousand times, compulsively and urgently and frantically like frost. Anna's footsteps down the corridor aren't reassuring or even disappointing; they are as familiar and predictable as the unfinished question that preceded them.
The pain is every bit as familiar and predictable, too.
