In the beginning, Elsa doesn't talk much, but she reads everything.
Anna can remember late nights of their childhood, when Elsa would sit wrapped in blankets against the cold, one bare hand sticking out of her cocoon and holding a book, squinting in the semi-darkness and protesting, always, when told to go to bed.
If she was voracious then, she is insatiable now: pages fall like cities beneath her fingertips.
One afternoon Kristoff appears on their doorstep with a little box and a smile, and spends the whole rest of the day showing Elsa how to plug the Kindle into Anna's SHIELD issue laptop and fill it up with books from the library, from Amazon, from Project Gutenberg.
"This was nice of you," Anna says quietly. They're standing next to each other leaning over the little half counter that separates her small apartment kitchen from the living area, hands wrapped around too-hot mugs of reheated coffee, watching Elsa hunch with single-minded focus over the glowing blue screen, punching letters enthusiastically into the keyboard.
"I mean, we tried the library, but it's a bit of a walk still." And it's crowded and it scares her, she doesn't say. But Kristoff nods like he knows, and she smiles, because he usually does. "And the hand doesn't do so well with paper," she adds as an afterthought, wincing at the memory of shredded paper and Elsa's howls.
"Buttons are good," Kristoff agrees in an undertone, and bumps his shoulder into hers. "What does she like to read, anyway?"
Anna considers. Then answers "Everything."
In retrospect, Anna thinks it might not have been the smartest idea to suggest the great Russian novelists right off the bat, but she was aiming for familiar, and Elsa still spends half of her time muttering to herself in Russian, and writing the grocery lists in some bizarre jumble of English and Cyrillic.
That said, Crime and Punishment was a really, really bad idea.
"You are a fucking idiot, Rogers," Natasha hisses from over Elsa's shoulder. She's been murmuring soothing words and rubbing her back for the last half hour, after finally coaxing Elsa out of the locked bathroom. "You could have at least given her some Pushkin, I swear to god." Anna sort of shrugs, helpless, and goes to make a pot of coffee.
The Grapes of Wrath doesn't go over well either.
"IT WAS ON THE LIST!" Elsa screeches, the Kindle abandoned on the floor. "WHY WAS IT ON THE LIST?"
Anna rescues the Kindle, sits Elsa down on the couch, and opens up the laptop to find that her sister has been working her way through a Goodreads list of 'Best 20th Century Fiction'. She scrolls down the page a bit, past 1984 and The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and A Clockwork Orange.
"I have an idea," she announces, closing out of the page. "Let's see what Kristoff recommends; he knows more of the new stuff."
Kristoff recommends Harry Potter and, somewhat incongruously, Nancy Drew.
"There's a lot of…really sad fiction these days," he says, when Anna quirks a face at him and mouths 'new?'. "I just can't see Elsa having a good time reading The Hunger Games."
Anna's read them; she agrees. Instead of commenting, she picks up the book on the top of the stack Kristoff brought with him.
"We had these, I think, when we were little," Anna says, fingers tracing the blue letters on the pale yellow spine. "I can't believe they still make them." He'd brought a stack of them over, a small tower of hardback covers screen-printed with Nancy's face, weathered and worn where they'd been palmed over and over by eager readers. Kristoff said he'd found them in a $1 bin next to a bodega in his neighborhood; Anna picks at the green price sticker with her fingernail, and watches Elsa hesitantly thumb through a copy of The Spider Sapphire Mystery.
"Some things stick around, if they're good enough," Kristoff grins. "It's not all 'sands through the hourglass', you know."
"What?"
When fantasy and science fiction, the Star Wars novelizations, and a considerable chunk of Neil Gaiman's and Ursula Le Guin's canon has fallen under Elsa's appetite for fiction, she moves on to science and technology.
Elsa has always been interested in space and astronomy, and so scrambles for anything and everything she can find on the subject; it's almost entirely after their time, and Anna finds herself swept along in her enthusiasm, googling images from the Hubble telescope and watching Netflix documentaries on the planets at night.
One night she comes home later than usual to the little door to their miniature porch propped open with a kitchen chair, the night air cooling the living room and ruffling the pages of a magazine on the coffee table.
"Elsa?"
"I'm out here," a voice calls. Elsa has mastered the ability to shout softly, which Anna always finds strange – her voice will carry, but like a whisper that only she can hear.
'Out here' is apparently on the roof. Anna joins her after a moment spent puzzling how she'd managed to hoist herself up that high on her own before remembering yeah, metal arm, super strength, and swings herself up too.
Elsa is wrapped in a quilt, and she lifts up one side so Anna can snuggle in next to her under the blanket, buffered from the chill in the October evening.
"I can't believe," she starts, then pauses to clear her throat. "I can't believe there's so much out there, sometimes."
Anna's not sure if she means space or space monsters – she remembers the gaping hole in the sky, the screams of the Chitauri soldiers, the flash of a red and gold suit against inky black and the blinking silver stars. When she doesn't reply, Elsa grunts and waves one hand out from the blanket, looking for a moment so familiar that it hurts.
"They built everything to discover it, and then they covered it up with…with smoke, and streetlamps."
When they were very small, the Milky Way was clear and bright in the southern sky, brilliant and twined with the greens and purples of the aurora. If she'd known about gods and monsters then, she might have imagined one blowing glitter from their palm, sprinkling the heavens with starlight. Tonight Anna strains, but it's no use – even if she knew where to look, she couldn't see it, and the thought brings a lump unexpectedly into her throat.
"Hey," Elsa says roughly, shouldering her under the quilt. "You can still see the Big Dipper, look."
It's inevitable that Elsa would move eventually to the collection of modern history that Anna has collected. Anna hasn't read many of them in months or years even; when she notices the bare spot on her bookshelf, her first thought is that she really should dust more often. And then, oh no.
Anna doesn't see her for a week, and would wonder if Elsa was even in the apartment at all (she has demonstrated proficiency in slipping out of windows that would rival Natasha) if it weren't for the muffled keening she can almost hear through their shared wall.
There isn't anything she can do for that kind of hurt, so when she blinks awake at 2AM for no reason than the faintest movement in the next bedroom, she presses one palm against the beige textured wall, the other fisted in her bedspread, and prays.
She hasn't prayed in years, and hardly knows what it feels like any more, but her cheeks are wet and her heart is sore and it feels like the right thing to do.
Elsa discovers the Sunday Comics, Calvin and Hobbes, and water balloons, all in that order.
"This is fantastic," she says, watching with rapt attention as a red and green missile explodes on the street beneath their balcony.
Anna smiles, and drops her own balloon; it shatters, fragments of ice and blue plastic spreading with a surprisingly loud crack against the asphalt.
Elsa grins at her, and wiggles her fingers.
Sometime in the spring, Anna is sitting cross-legged on the couch, half watching Kristoff channel flip past the dozens of sports networks and soap operas. On the other side of the room, Elsa is lounging in her favorite chair – it had been Anna's favorite chair once, but Elsa had gravitated toward it immediately – she spent so many days ensconced there with a stack of books and a blanket that Anna now has a hard time looking at it without seeing the shadow of her sister there, one metal finger curling around a lock of blonde hair, chewing on her lip, eyes flashing as she reads.
When she sits there now, she can even smell the traces of Elsa's cucumber scented shampoo.
She's there now, left hand gently cradling the beaten red leather case of her Kindle, thumb quietly advancing the pages, and right hand dangling an apple over the armrest, forgotten after one bite.
"There isn't anything good on," Kristoff pronounces, clicking off the TV with the remote and tossing it half-heartedly onto the rug. "500 channels and nothing to watch."
Elsa looks up, expression clear and calm, and says quietly, "You could always read a book."