It had all happened so fast. Anna felt her cheeks glow hot from knowing that Harry and Hermione, her friends, seemed to be keeping something from her.
"Concerned about whom?" Anna huffed as she sat beside the two. She glared at Harry, then glared at Hermione, challenging them to respond. They blanched and kept quiet in response, mouths agape as they exchanged worried looks.
She had had enough with secrets, with people shutting her out, with people keeping things from her...She stormed angrily off from the Gryffindors' table before any of her friends could catch her speeding towards the Slytherins.
Anna stood at the end where her older sister had been poking at her food, a noticeable space between her and the other students. It looked as though there had been an invisible wall keeping others from sitting near Elsa.
Or was it Elsa being kept away? Anna shook her head, trying to focus on what she intended to say.
"Elsa," Anna tried to say, calmly. "ELSA!" Anna growled in frustration.
The Slytherin girl looked up from her barely touched plate, jumping a bit when she finally saw Anna.
Well, Anna thought, that certainly got her attention. She sighed, trying to calm herself, trying not to explode in everything that she had kept bottled up since her sister had shut the door on her long ago.
She sat across from Elsa in the empty seat, noticing that the older girl had visibly jumped and wrung her gloved hands. Slytherins nearby began to notice that a rather brash Gryffindor girl had dared to sit amongst them.
"I can't take it anymore, Elsa," Anna pleaded, "Why don't we ever talk anymore? Why don't you ever even say hi?"
"Anna, I can't..." Elsa's breathing quickened, "Please, Anna, you have to go".
She eyed the door to the Great Hall then returned her gaze at the younger girl, in whose eyes she could see tears welling.
Anna watched as she saw Elsa get up hurriedly from the table, hurt that her sister had once again tried to run, but a flare of anger rose and propelled her to run after her.
"Just tell me what I ever did to you, Elsa, please!" Anna reached for Elsa's left hand, grabbing the glove off as she held it to her chest.
"Give me back my glove!" Elsa tried to reach for her glove, but drew back.
"What did I ever do to make you shut me out?"
The chattering in the Great Hall suddenly faded. The other students looked curiously towards the doors to the Great Hall, seeing a Slytherin and Gryffindor engaged in what they assumed would be some fight.
"Enough, Anna," Elsa wrapped her arms around herself, turning her back at the younger girl.
"Why do you shut the world out?" Anna shouted.
"I said, enough!" Anna stepped back instinctively as threatening spikes speared the air with the wave of her sister's bare hand. She froze in place, alternating glances at the spears of ice and the face of her sister. Was this what Elsa had kept from her all these years? Wandless magic?
The doors swung open; Anna broke out of her brief daze at the sight of her sister's robe billowing in the doorway.
She sprinted as fast as she could after Elsa, ignoring the din of hushed whispers and frantic chattering that had commenced after the shock of seeing the ice spew from Elsa's bare hand.
"Elsa! Wait, please!" Anna called after her older sister.
Anna had always been a fast runner, but tonight her sister had been faster. She watched as Elsa ran off to the grounds, grabbing a broom and flying off as fast as she could.
"Have a sip of this, dear."
"Thank you," Elsa answered softly, her hands shaking as she accepted the vial from Madame Pomfrey, nerves still raw from what had happened earlier.
The creeping frost on the glass made her rush to drink the potion, its liquid a comforting, though abrupt, warmth against her tongue.
As the warmth of the potion spread through her body, she felt her nerves calm, her hands beginning to still.
Madame Pomfrey sat patiently beside the girl who was still clearly upset from the incident in the Great Hall. She watched as Elsa's breaths began to slow.
"Are you feeling better now, Elsa?" the nurse said gently.
Elsa's eyes widened, her jaw hardening at some unseen perturbance as she wrung her hands.
Madame Pomfrey was about to pursue the matter further when the girl suddenly nodded and gave the nurse a weak smile. Elsa stood up abruptly and walked off hurriedly from the infirmary bed, not looking back once as she padded off.
Madame Pomfrey eyed the young Arendelle girl uneasily, feeling as though something had been missed. As though the girl had still been keeping something hidden.
She had come to know the Slytherin girl well over the past few years, learning of these episodes that struck her from time to time. That she came in today with her breath running ragged, her pale left hand noticeably bare without its usual glove, caused the nurse to linger on this unease she now felt about Elsa.
These days, the nurse considered, it seemed as though the episodes been more and more frequent. Elsa had come to the infirmary at least twice every week, maybe even thrice that last week.
Something, the nurse realised, was very, very wrong.
The sensation of her nerves being electrified, of every internal organ seeming to disagree with her, faded as she headed hurriedly back to the Slytherin dormitories. In its stead, the feeling of heaviness began to settle deep into her skin.
The hallways were deserted and lit only by enchanted torches that dimmed late at night. Only the ghosts would roam at this hour. But even they would know, from the slump in the girl's shoulders and the way her eyes averted any direct gazes, that she was in no state to speak.
There was cold comfort in knowing this, that it would be unlikely for anyone who knew Elsa to see her now, not in the spell she'd been in those past few weeks...no, she corrected herself, it had been months. Months of knowing that people wanted to do nothing with her, of feeling apart from everyone.
There was a bubble that kept everyone else connected, all those groups of laughing (was it directed at her?), chattering students, with her standing far outside of it even as she passed them.
She wrapped her arms around herself and slowed her pace, repeating to herself a silent litany that had stayed with her for as long as she had been...cursed.
Conceal, don't feel. What there was left to feel? In the beginning, there had only been feelings she had struggled to bottle in, ice she fought to hold back from spewing out at every direction.
But now, left with only hollowness from within, the ice still threatened to burst forth from her with no relenting, threatening everything, everyone around.
She remembered the icy spikes that blasted forth violently from the ground like spears, the cold glare of fear in everyone's eyes.
She could feel now the heaviness that followed after every tense session in class, feeling like a strange creature ogled at by all her peers.
Perhaps she imagined it, but since the incident with the boggart two years before, people had treated her as though she had been the heir of Slytherin herself. And now, after what happened, what will they all think?
It seemed as though there were condemning eyes stabbing at her whenever she was in their periphery. It sounded as if every harsh whisper uttered in her earshot was meant to call her out for what she was, what she really was.
They would not have been wrong to do so. It would, Elsa convinced herself, be better this way, to be kept at arms' length from all who knew her. She herself had wanted this, after all. She had been deliberately avoiding her friends, giving them only cursory greetings as she passed them in the hallways.
Nobody would be hurt, she had repeated to herself over and over again in these months. Only her. Nothing more.
Suddenly, something cold brush past her.
Elsa peered at the dark for signs of a shadowy figure, but there were no dementors in sight, only the sounds of her own breathing growing shallower, and the slow clack of her heels meeting the ground. She had hoped to see them around instead of knowing that the dark that gripped her was only air.
She turned towards a window and saw a faded version of herself glancing back in the pane. There were dark circles around her eyes, too black to belong to somebody so young.
Smile, she prodded herself sardonically, remembering the Westerguard boy's thinly veiled scorn as he said, maybe people would actually like you, then.
The face in the pane would not obey. Elsa could no longer remember what it felt like to smile genuinely.
Past the ghostly image of herself, she spotted the Gryffindor tower; Elsa put her left hand at its place in the glass, rime spreading rapidly from her hand. She didn't care, she couldn't care anymore that spikes of ice formed on the glass.
Anna. A quick blast of ice; that was all it took to nearly kill her younger sister, beloved, dearest Anna. Little Anna, her small body cold as death as she lay in Elsa's arms. She couldn't stop it. Her mind would never let her forget what it was that she had done so many years ago.
"You won't be hurt anymore, Anna. Not by me."
Monster. Even her sleep brought no respite from what haunted her when awake. A version of herself, wicked grin on its face, taunted her relentlessly in the dreams that assaulted her in slumber. Monster, monster..
Something clawed at Elsa's stomach and pulled her to walk deeper into the dark.
It had been such effort to keep it all in, and now, there was nothing left.
"I'm the problem," she whispered, "and I can't be fixed."
Not now. The cold creeped at her skin. Not ever.
Only one thing to bring relief.