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Winter's Lullaby

Elsa

It all began with a dream. No, not quite a dream. It was anything but. Because, when you have a dream, you rouse from it without either recollection of what occurred in it or who was present in it. But I woke up and I remembered all of it, every last glimpse. So it wasn't a dream. But a nightmare. Because I always remembered my nightmares. But it wasn't even that. It wasn't a nightmare, but rather a memory. A memory returning from a buried past to haunt me. I was reminded of that night. The night the ice shattered like glass and love melted into fear.

I saw faces. Faces of a familiar sight for sore eyes. Faces drawn in smiles and grins. Sketched in laughter and giggles. Shaded in fun and merriment. I recognized one face as my own. And from the sight of myself, flushed with happiness and gay with joy, I was almost unrecognizable. Almost. I recognized the other as my sister Anna's, with her auburn locks and vibrant blue painting her irises. She was caught in the air with the silk skirts of her nightgown floating behind her and her arms stretched out wide to the sides, her fingers grasping for the flight they searched for. And for a moment, she resembled a bird taking its first flight before the fall. But she wouldn't fall. She wouldn't fall.

I felt the ice bleed into my veins, it crackled in the very depths of my body and I could almost hear it. I was so cold. So cold with the ice prickling at my heart with every beat and running my palms pale and clammy. But I felt it in my fingertips. The hope in my veins, the flight in my heart, and the trust in Anna. And she wouldn't fall. She wouldn't fall because I would catch her, not because I had good hands but because I trusted not only her, but myself as well. Or so I did. Once.

It all happened too fast. It played into time too soon. In a single blink. In one breath. It all happened too fast, and I had to catch up. But I wasn't quick enough. The ice spiraled from my fingertips, but it was too little, too late. I didn't catch her. I couldn't give her the flight before the fall. I only struck her when I wanted to save her. And she fell. Her eyelids flicked shut and she fell to the floor, her limp body rolling to a halt where the snow began to freeze into ice. My feet reacted before my mind did, and all I found running a marathon through my displaced thoughts was that I was half expecting her to wake up. That her eyes would open and reveal to me the brilliant blue they shone. She would leap to her feet from where she lay in the snow and she would flash at me a brilliant grin of all her teeth. But she never did.

I sank to my knees, feeling my hands come to life around her body and the tears sting at my eyes. I cradled her face in my palms and her cheeks were still warm, still flushed the color of roses from all the different smiles her lips had been bent into only moments ago. I found my voice telling her in words that were barely above a whisper that she was okay, that I've got her, that she was going to be okay. But nothing was okay. Nothing ever would be. How did I know this? Because Anna was no longer smiling. And the silence was all the company I had left.

I was awoken by the faint tapping of melted snow against the window. My eyelids fluttered open the way only a heart beat and a butterfly's wings flit. And the first sight my vision came to focus on after momentarily taking the time to adjust to the darkness looming in my chambers was the snow falling from the ceiling. It formed a curtain around me, and I watched with a held breath as the snowflakes covered the bedspread. They matted my silver tresses flat against my forehead, and I had to twist and twine the loose strands back into my plait. And I held my breath not because I had fallen into a spell of awe, but because I couldn't breathe. I felt my chest begin to constrict under the pounding of my heart, making it too difficult to inhale and even more so to exhale.

I clutched my chest, trying to remind my lungs to function as lungs. Trying to remember how to breathe. To remind my tongue of the taste of air, and my nose of the scent of it. Finally I began to pant, almost gasping even. And although the air tasted dry and flavorless, I reckoned it was better to struggle for breath than to not find any at all.

I could still see her face when my eyes were closed, and, if anything, the image of her was even more clear as cut glass when they were open. I was sleepwalking. Treading through this endless nightmare. Her face was all I saw. Her cheeks drained of their rosy flush and were the shade of chalk. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes flecked with flakes of snow, and I kept expecting them to open. To blink. To at the very least flutter. But they remained closed. Never to be opened. She was all I saw. The thought of Anna was both a relief and a burden. A relief because I knew she was alive. A burden because I harmed her. Something I never could have convinced myself possible of. But I did. I hurt my sister. The hands I held in my lap, the hands that held and cradled her as an infant, are the same hands that inflicted imperial pain upon her. I was the reason I would never be able to look her in the eye again. The reason I would never trust neither her nor myself again. These hands were only created for destruction. I made a mess of everything.

My ears twitched when the collective murmur of voices penetrated the walls caging me in from all four corners. I untangled my legs from the knot of sheets and, upon lowering myself to the floor, I tiptoed across the room, wincing only a few times when the boards creaked from under me. I pressed against the door that separated me from the world beyond, and held my breath when the room fell silent as I listened to the commotion and tried to place the voices along with the words they spoke. But when the wall proved to be too thick to listen through, I found myself curling my fingers around the handle and twisting the door open a crack.

Candlelight spilled into the room, and through the sliver I peered at Mother and Father, who held in his hands the ever restless Anna. I caught myself giggling at her stuborness and refusal to be lain down to rest for the night. She put up a struggle by climbing all up and down Father, tugging on anything her fingers could grasp-ears, hair, nose-and nudging anything that would catch his attention-knees, shoulders, and feet.

"Come along Anna, it's late already Love. If we don't get you to bed soon, you'll never sleep a wink." Mother cooed in her soft voice. And I thought to myself that if silk made music, it would sound like her voice.

"But I'm not tired. The sky's awake, so I'm awake!" She pouts. And I swear that if her eyes could get any bigger they would surely bulge out of their sockets.

"And you may rise as early as you wish with the crack of dawn. But as of this moment, you will scurry into bed as quickly as your little legs can carry you. You wouldn't want old Boogie Man to chase you under the covers now do you?" And scurry Anna did, into her chambers and under the covers before Father was able to utter his last word.

He chuckled to himself and followed Mother into the room where they tucked Anna snuggly in between the blankets. I watched my mother's hand come to tenderly stroke Anna's hair, and found myself cringing with a twist of my heart when her fingertips came to thread themselves into the white streak that colored Anna's auburn locks. I had to avert my eyes for a moment and force the air in and out of my lungs before I was able to breathe again. And, under my shallow respirations, the next sound I heard was Mother's voice. She sang softly, barely above a whisper. It was the chirp of a bird, smooth as a river, and everything the crack of dawn should sound like.

"Wandering child of the earth,

Do you know just how much you're worth?

You have walked this path since your birth,

You were destined for more.

There are those who will tell you you're wrong,

They will try to silence your song,

But right here is where you belong,

So don't search anymore.

You are the dawn of a new day that's waking,

A masterpiece still in the making,

The blue in an ocean of grey.

You are right where you need to be,

Poised to inspire and succeed,

You'll look back and you'll realize one day.

In your eyes there is doubt

As you try to figure it out

But that's not what life is about,

So have faith, there's a way.

Though the world may try to define you,

It can't take the light that's inside you,

So don't you dare try to hide,

Let your fear fade away.

You are the dawn of a new day that's waking,

A masterpiece still in the making,

The blue in an ocean of grey.

You are right where you need to be,

Poised to inspire and succeed,

You'll look back and you'll realize one day.

You are the dawn of a new day that's waking,

A masterpiece still in the making,

The blue in an ocean of grey,

Soon you'll find your own way."

The words spread their wings and took flight from her lips. Every letter as delicate as the shed teardrops of grey colored clouds. Every breath fragile as she whispered each syllable in between her lips. My eyelids drew closed and I felt the words leaking from my mother's lips wash over me. Listened to the story they sang softly to me. Each letter opened a door, a door to where I didn't know. It may have been nowhere, it may have been somewhere, and it could have been anywhere. But doors nonetheless, being unlocked and opened to reveal the secrets they hid and had kept silent until now.

I wanted to know their secrets. I wanted to hear them in every syllable. I could keep a secret. I always had a talent for it. I absorbed and locked the words in my heart where they would forever remain untouched. My mother's song became mine, and her words were what I wanted to fall asleep with whispering in my ears and wake up to singing in between my thoughts.

My eyelids rose and the first sight I was met with was my father. His features were erased blank, his eyes glassy and almost like hollow holes dug in his skull in the dim light. His expression was difficult to read, but he didn't allow me the chance to try before clicking the door closed.

Moments ticked by. Moments that turned into minutes, which turned into hours, until the clock could be heard striking midnight from some distant corridor in the palace. Each chime struck my heart and slammed into my chest. And I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I was so stunned my feet wouldn't budge. So petrified the air wouldn't find me. I felt the walls closing in around me, caging me in until I became so small I couldn't be seen. And if I couldn't be seen, I couldn't be heard. And if I couldn't be heard, I couldn't be felt. And if I couldn't be felt, I was nothing. Nothing more than a ghost treading through life.

With what little strength I had left after the blow, (if I ever had any at all), I carried myself across the room where the window sat. I tugged on the cuff of my sleeve and wiped the glass clean of the fog that coated it, and already the first snowflakes of what would be a long and frigid winter began to melt against it. A valley sprinkled in snow stretched across the plains of Arrendelle below. The earth glittered white with not a print to dent the fresh blanket. The treetops stood tall in the landscape, drawing and shading the background with the mountains in the distance sketching the horizon.

The beam of a full moon rested on the shoulders of the kingdom, it was painted in every shade of silver and the sky behind it in every tone of black. And it intrigued me that something as bright as light and something as dark as night could be so close, yet so far. The line between the two colors was so thin yet so thick at the same time. And I was afraid it was a line that existed in us all. And that it was up to us which side of it we wished to be on. As for me, I didn't know anymore. I didn't know. The colors were so much apart of each other that they had merged to create grey in me and I was suddenly not so sure. And I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

I was so lost in this endless ocean of thoughts deep in depth that I didn't become aware of my parents' presence until their hands had come to rest on each of my shoulders. But I didn't feel them. All ten of their fingers, I didn't feel any of them. Their touch went right through my skin, and I didn't feel them. I was no longer here. I was no longer theirs. I was no longer Elsa. I didn't know what I was. And I was too afraid to find out.

"Elsa, I know this isn't easy for you," He faltered, trying to appear as if he was collecting his thoughts but he was not trying to remember what he was intending to say so much as running out of words to console me. "But I promise everything will improve for the better... You'll see."

They each kissed me on either side of my temple and left the room just as quietly as they had entered. And just as they left me to drown in the restless sea of my mind, they left the last of Father's words to wash over me. But they didn't wash over me. They didn't wash over me because I couldn't hear them anymore. They washed through me instead. And I felt the their full weight bear down on me as I crumpled to the floor with my last sight between the tears pooling in my eyes before drifting off to sleep being the moon hanging over me, and I swear that I caught a tear stray from his round edge. And I thought to myself that if sorrow was a color, it would be painted the ominous shade of blue his eyes seemed to deepen into - sad with no end to the color.

Jack

Jack Frost.
That was my name.

How did I know this?
The moon told me so.
It was all he had ever told me.

Those were the first and last words he ever spoke to me.
And he never uttered a sound before or since.
At least nothing but the silence.

So I had to be either foolish or mad to think that he would answer my words now. Or possibly even both... But here I was nonetheless. Hiding in plain sight high up in the treetops. My feet dangled on either side of the limb I sat on, leaving all ten of my toes easy to spot from this height. Easy. But not easy enough. I had mastered the art of hiding. Of losing oneself to what was plain in sight. I was too good a hider with no seeker to find me. Ready or not, here I come. Here I come, ready or not.

His silence was especially deafening tonight. So loud I couldn't hear myself think. So suffocating I couldn't breathe. Did he do so intentionally? Was he trying to tell me something that no words could explain through the silence? Who really lay up there? Who was the Man in the Moon? Was I being tested? Was he trying to break me one way or another? Because it was working. Enough was enough.

The wind's teeth sharpened to its bite with the furl of my hands and all ten of my fingers. A blizzard rose up from the earth and swallowed all that lay in its path, leaving nothing but choas in its wake. And I thought it would swallow the sky if it could. The earth shook in my mind, rattling my bones and buckling my knees underneath me. And it was too much. It was all too much.

The anger rose in me. I felt it seeping into my veins when the scream bulged at the back of my throat. The anger became too hot to handle and the ice too cold to touch. And the scream, this song that I had found in a voiceless bird rendered speechless, as too much to swallow. The cry slipped from my mouth before I could even consider choking it back. But perhaps I didn't want to. Perhaps I was tired of choking it back. Of swallowing the emotions swirling inside me, and taming the storm brewing just underneath my skin. Perhaps I simply wished to be heard for once. To be seen. To be felt.

My mouth fell shut, my cries reduced to silence. The wind carried on, the blizzard dissipating. My fists unfurled into open palms, absorbing what little energy I had left after the storm. But the anger was still there. Still remained where I felt it most. Constantly. He was there constantly. And my glare deepened at him, at the man who hid all too well behind the glow of the moon. Ready or not, here I come. Here I come, ready or not.

I lowered myself to the earth, digging my toes deep into the slush of what would be a long and bitter winter. I would make sure of it. I could promise that. As long as I had been alone, as cold as my heart had been for as long as I could remember, as bitter as I had grown. With a little touch of frost of course. I yanked my hood over my head and took the first step of what would be a long journey. Because I figured I may as well blindly roam the earth in plain sight and see all there was to see while bringing the season of winter along for the ride. Because I was Jack Frost. Forever to wander the world aimlessly as an embodiment of season. As nothing but a silent whisper in the winds of winter. As no more than a ghost wandering through life.

But enough was enough was enough was enough.

The song I used is an original song on youtube by adrisaurus. And if you like music that digs deep and breaks your heart in a thousand different beautiful ways, I suggest you go listen to it now;)