Cold Hands
Disclaimer: I do not own Frozen or any of the characters there within, they are property of the Walt Disney Company.
The stillness of the winter morning was punctuated by the occasional wooden groan as the Castle Arendelle shouldered a fresh white blanket of snow. A sheet of white lost its hold on the roof and tumbled past the window of the eldest princess to plop on the ground far below.
Elsa stood with her hands folded before her as she gazed out the frosted glass. The loose powder had broken off a few of the weaker icicles suspended from the overhang on descent.
The quiet settled again as Elsa studied the world outside; a land transformed in monochromatic tones of white. Grey clouds still hovered over the mountains as if admiring their work below. No animals stirred in the wonderland though she did spy a track where the fox run wound around the barren garden.
Elsa's gaze caught on the icicles again and hovered over the stumps of the ones that fell. There was a peace in the ice that Elsa found comforting, as if nature itself coaxed the grey clouds within her to stillness. The winter granted her an ease she did not feel in the other seasons. Perhaps it was because the inexplicable cold of her room was no longer as pronounced as it was in summer. Perhaps the frosted etchings on the exterior of her window mirrored the frost within. It was as if the world reminded her the harsh beauty of winter was an expected and necessary part of its cycle; and she was given leave to a delicate repose in its acceptance.
Elsa sighed, a mixture of tension and release as she wriggled her fingers in their gloves. This reminder was much more present throughout the year. Her badge of isolation; the months, the years she had spent in this room she and Anna once shared. She had read all the books on the bookshelves twice and every tome in the castle besides. She had sewn so many pillows, embroidered infinite dresses. She built chairs and tables and cabinets with her father in the space Anna's bed once was. Elsa bit her lip.
Anna.
How she missed her little sister.
Loneliness found her alone again; a wolf circling a shuddering fawn. The jaws tore her throat and the sob that became trapped there.
She shut her eyes on the tears that sprang unbidden and took a steadying breath to clear her mind of the dark thoughts agitating the swirl in her chest.
Conceal. Don't feel.
Her mother would be in shortly to begin their morning lessons. Recitations, Arendelle history, and needlework with a full tea service. It was one of the few pleasures Elsa had left. She loved her mother and father dearly and they made the time to visit with her almost weekly between their duties. The gnawing in her chest dimmed but still simmered in its permanent residence.
Don't let it show.
Elsa still feared visitations after those nights that were plagued with nightmares. Her loving parents skewered by a violent ice bloom beyond her control, the citizens of Arendelle's horrified faces petrified forever in a dreadful ice sculpture garden of frozen humanity. Anna smiling through her pain as she approached, arms wide, to embrace her estranged sister, only to freeze solid in her last step.
Elsa wrapped her arms over her abdomen.
Don't let it show.
She pressed the emotions down; bottling and banishing them to the stone in her abdomen. The place for exiled sentiment. The familiar void filled the space between and Elsa felt the hesitant traces of control restored to her.
"Don't let it show."
A piercing scream startled Elsa from her thoughts as a terrible crash shook the downstairs. She padded lightly to her door and pressed an ear to the one panel. The waterfall of reverberating metal was underscored by the gasps of the busy morning staff. They often had their work cut out for them since father had reduced their hands all those years ago. Since that day.
"Anna, I've told you not to ride your bicycle inside!" The sharp reprimand from their mother reached even the heights of Elsa's room. "That's the third time this month you've knocked over that suit of armor."
The barest of smiles tugged Elsa's lips. She could just imagine Anna lying in a tangle at the bottom of the stairs—the greaves in her lap and chest plate pinning one leg as her dented bicycle wheel still spun dizzily.
"I'm sorry, I would ride outside but it's all snowy," Anna's apology was dampened by her reasoning.
"Oh Anna, what am I going to do with you?" Their mother said as if the question had no answer. There was a brief pause.
"Oh, mother!" Anna cried to the clash of more metal. "Are you going to see Elsa?"
"Yes," Elsa could hear her mother on the stairs.
"Would you…would you tell Elsa that I miss her?"
Elsa pressed against her door wishing she could melt through the barrier separating them.
"Of course, dearheart. Now I expect that suit back on its stand before I come back."
"Hey Alfons!" Anna shouted and Elsa shook her head. Alfons was a member of the maintenance staff and the youngest princess kept him running from exploded bread dough in the kitchens to shattered telescopes in the observatory. The king and queen promised a better behaved daughter to the heads of the exhausted workforce.
"Not this time, Anna," Elsa murmured to herself.
"No. You broke it, Anna, you fix it," the queen said and carried on up the stairs to Anna's groan.
"Yes, mother."
The fifth stair before the landing always creaked. Elsa heard it and knew her mother was a moment away. She crossed her room in long strides and straightened her hair, her dress, her gloves.
"Elsa, may I come in?"
"You may enter."
When the queen entered, Elsa stood regally beside her window. She curtsied to her mother.
"Good morning, Elsa," the queen shut the door behind her.
"Good morning, mother."
"As I'm sure you've heard, your sister sends her regards," the queen's kind smile broadened at Elsa's chuckle. Her mother glanced about the room and gestured toward the fireplace stoked with four logs and fresh tinder. "May I?"
Elsa nodded and watched her mother pick up the piece of flint and iron left on the corner of the hearth. A few strikes and the sparks nibbled happily on the tinder before their hunger rose to consume the pine wedges. "I must speak with your father about sealing that window again." The queen's eyes traced the frosted wooden frame.
"The cold doesn't bother me," Elsa said.
"Yes, I know, dearheart." The queen moved to her usual chair beside the hearth. "Shall we begin?"
Elsa flawlessly recited the house oaths and accurately answered every review question her mother posed from their last lesson regarding Helmer the Helm's raids in neighboring provinces. They had switched to the lighter history of the mountain folk in the surrounding valleys for today's lessons. They had once occupied the North Mountain when the face was granite and its foothills green. The legend went an angry troll called on the gods to chase a thieving mountaineer from the mountain and they answered by shrouding the peak in eternal snow. Elsa had read about the story somewhere, but she enjoyed hearing her mother tell it as she worked steadily at a satin stitch that would become the blond forelock of a proud draft horse.
Elsa continued to work at her needlepoint even as the tea service arrived and her mother set aside her books. The queen prepared both her cup and her daughter's and had drunk nearly all of her share when Elsa tightened her last knot.
"There," Elsa set down her needle and held up the piece for her mother to see, "it's finished."
The queen set her teacup and saucer on the service and reached out to inspect it.
The embroidery project the queen had set her daughter to required three of the five stitches she had taught her. She placed her hand over her heart. The threaded image featured Anna sitting astride a half-rearing draft horse, her braided hair and cloak flying over the flanks of the stallion. The image was simple but beautifully detailed in the gold threads of the horse's mane and tail, the lazy daisies on the border of Anna's pink cloak, the green French knots of Anna's eyes.
"I messed up a bit on the hooves," Elsa admitted, hugging her arms to her abdomen.
"It's beautiful, Elsa," her mother breathed, brushing her fingertips over the stitches.
"Would you…would you give it to Anna?"
The queen looked around at her daughter.
"Would you like to give it to her?" She asked softly. Elsa averted her gaze.
"I couldn't."
"Oh, Elsa," the queen reached one hand to cup her daughter's cheek but Elsa jumped back out of reach. Her mother withdrew minutely, but Elsa saw a change there, a firmness settle under the distress. The queen placed the embroidery beside the tea service and stood, her eyes never leaving her daughter's. She stepped forward and Elsa backed into the window sill.
"Please mother, don't. Don't touch me."
But the queen did not stop her careful advance. Elsa pressed her back as hard as she could into the chilled window, her gloved hands raised in surrender, but the placating gesture did nothing to dissuade the queen. The clouds within Elsa whipped into a vicious, swirling gale. Her mother's eyes glistened in the grey light as her arms raised, reaching for Elsa's face.
"No," Elsa begged, "please don't!"
The princess' hands dropped to grip at the sill behind her where patches of spiked ice sprouted. The storm had risen to a fever pitch so violent Elsa felt her chest might explode. She fought fiercely to contain the raging blizzard so cold it seared every last inch of her body, but she was losing ground as the fear overwhelmed her in its mounting drift. The image of her mother impaled on her ice flashed through her mind.
"I'll hurt you!" Elsa whimpered.
The queen stood before her, hands outstretched, and Elsa squeezed her eyes shut as she turned her head away.
A hand cupped her face.
Elsa clutched the sill and the ice sprouts shot higher, whispering its climb up the glass.
The warm palm gently turned Elsa's head to face forward where a second hand cupped her other cheek. Elsa opened her eyes a crack, sucking in deep agonized breaths.
Tears streaked down her mother's cheeks. She spoke so softly, Elsa almost could not hear her over the crackling spread of ice over the wall at her back.
"Not being able to touch you, to hold you, to hug you when you need it most hurts me more than anything in this world, Elsa." The queen looked deeply into her daughter's moist eyes. The sorrow Elsa saw there sent an icy lance through her heart. She slumped against the window; hopeful in her hopelessness, whole yet wounded, wanting nothing more than to return her mother's fragile love even as the tempest within forbade it. Tears streamed from her eyes.
Even then her mother did not let her go.
The warmth went out of her mother's hands, replaced instead by an unsettling cold.
Elsa came back to herself.
She wrenched free and spun away, restoring precious space between them. She gripped her arms to her, condemning them, and stared across the room through her swimming vision.
The queen's hands remained cupped in their frosted state, dappled in a patchwork of identical snowflakes. Her mother looked from her frozen hands to the cornered Elsa hunched on the far side of her room. Guilt consumed Elsa more fully than her loneliness ever had and the strain ran directly to the buried stone that contained that night. Anna's darkest night.
"You…you can't touch me!" Elsa sobbed. The queen shook her head, hands raised again in nothing but compassion.
"Elsa…I—"
The storm broiled over. "NO! GET OUT!"
Elsa thrust an arm at her feet and a barricade of sharp ice spikes exploded between them. The queen jumped back, brought to her senses at last. She gazed so forlornly at her daughter Elsa felt her heart might burst. She wished it would and save her the misery throbbing through her entire being.
Elsa watched on her side of the spikes as her mother struggled to pick up the embroidered design of Anna on horseback in her frozen hands. She studied the work.
"Anna misses you," her mother whispered, "and so do I."
She pressed the embroidery to her breast, gave Elsa a final mournful look, and slipped out the door.
Elsa sank to the floor in a fit of sobs beside her frozen blockade, broken.
First Anna. Now her mother.
Conceal. Don't feel.
"So do I."
Author's Note: Uhh, Merry Christmas? That came out a bit sadder than I'd meant it to be, I'm sorry! I felt compelled to write a bit about Elsa's life in the castle while her parents are still around. I don't think they shut Elsa out completely. I mean, Elsa had to 'learn' how to act and walk and speak like a royal and who else to better teach her than her queen mother? It just sort of makes sense to me. I also felt Anna's love might have soured a bit over the years if the sisters hadn't kept 'in touch' through some roundabout means. I figure some contact here and there, however sparse, underscores the fact they got along so well at the coronation celebration.
What agony it must be for a mother to be unable to touch her daughter, especially when the latter is upset. I guess Elsa's "I need a hug, really" moment didn't go so well. I tried to breeze over some details to keep the story moving. We already know Elsa is a lonely shut in, I decided against exhaustive reflection to keep the story moving. If I've made you smile and be sad over the course of the story, my work here is done.
Let me know how I've wrecked your Christmas!
Blackfire 18