AN: Inspired by the song 'Youth' by Daughter. There are some words/phrases taken directly from the lyrics of the song, which of course I do not own. And obviously Frozen belongs to Disney. Thanks for reading! :)
She wonders whether her emptiness matches his. Matches what flitted through his head in those final moments and that's all they have now. Shadows of empty spaces. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be warm and full of thoughts and laughs and love. How did she get to be here, and he was gone?
First love. Only love. That sickening facade doesn't count. From the perfect start with the perfect face and voice and dance and song. Regret chills her blood, that she could have ever spent a second in his company, when there were people like him in the world, and they had had so little time. Not enough, it wasn't enough and now…
She is just a silhouette. It is incomprehensible to still be breathing, heaving through corrupted lungs. She sees her people from the balcony, the lucky ones, the ones that haven't withered and died in the cold. Their faces hard, their breath in the air around them. And even though she's dead now too, frozen into the ground prematurely with blue skin and blue heart, the cold sweeps up from the grave in icy tendrils that cover this land. The winter won't stop. Arendelle shivers perpetually, a lost and broken land, and she can't bring herself to care. This isn't how it was supposed to be.
Memories of the wild youth trickle through her veins instead of blood. An impossible journey through a frozen landscape. Wolves snarl, their pelts matted with cold, and give chase. He doesn't hesitate, his boot in the beast's chest, he saves her. That moment when he slides his arm under her knees so easily, not caring that she was the princess, not caring for rules or respect. His warm glove slides up her skirt under her thigh and he throws her from the sled, and she sees it now, his utter selflessness. He threw her onto his best chance of survival without a second thought, and managed to survive anyway. And got up, and kept going with her, kept saving her from the cold. He found them shelter, he built her a fire, and she can still feel his touch on the back of her thighs and attributes her rosy cheeks to the heat of the flames in the snow. Little glances. He snores. He used to snore. A little rumbling rolling across the cold ground and wrapping itself in her chest. She snuggles closer to him, not caring that she was the princess (when had she ever cared about that?) and in sleep he wrapped his arm around her. Deliciously heavy and warm pressed around her hips. In the daylight she wakes and he's awake and looking at her, and his cheeks flush when she catches his eye. She can almost feel him still pressed right up against her like they were in the dark.
And then there are the visions of their futures. Their future. She chases it in dreams. There should have been long kisses and sunlit days with laughs and gentle touches. Warm bodies in the long afternoons pressed together in secluded corners of the mountains. Nights of his lips against her neck, legs tangled and panted gasps. Hands joined and, not caring that she was the princess, her name would have been Anna Bjorgman. They should have had years to learn the delicate intricacies held in each other's skin. Years in which to grow together. A family – children with his eyes and smiles.
But when she opens her eyes in the here and now there is none of that. He would die before he got there. Somewhere out on the fjord, where the ice cracked and the water slipped through broken shards of it, deathly cold and deadly… Somewhere out there in the blizzard of piercing hail like knife-blades, somewhere the ice slipped from under him. One boot first, perhaps, gloves grappling with the wind and finding nothing solid there, and the other boot follows. Water so terrible and angry and it just… takes. It would have been over in seconds, and yet it would have felt like forever. Frightened eyes, open mouth and the water just rushing in and pulling him under and then that warm loving man was gone under the ice with no way back up. Lungs heavy, head filling with blackness, and so cold. One moment she was looking for him, she saw the sword, she saw her sister and imagined her head on the ice, dripping with blood. She made her choice and she never saw where he went. Somewhere in the in-between of being so cold and scared, and then not, he was gone. Her screams ripped her throat when she saw the empty shape of him, and the darkened dangerous water, and the broken ice. It is that broken ice and angry water overlapping the sides that swim in her mind, like pictures branded there.
And you caused it. She whispers, voice never the same, she whispers to him through steel bars. She slips her skin over his, disgust clinging to her every pore and she hates him, she hates him so much that she burns. Bile rises in her throat and stings and she pushes it with her tongue onto his eyelids. You caused it, she breathes into his ear, thinking of the cold blue body under a gravestone. Thighs sweat-slicked and apart around him. Delicate fingers scratch down his arms and leave hideous scars. He doesn't speak. He tried years ago, and she had cut out his tongue and left him to bleed to death, and was sickened when he didn't. She slips her skin over his and sets fire to her insides. You caused it, she says to herself.
She's lost it all. She exists like a diseased black hole because he is gone, and her sister is dead, and the sky is a snowstorm. In silent moments in the dark she hears his voice "don't worry about me" and it breaks her all over again. She is forever missing him.