Hi! So, I apologise for chapters 7 and 8. I was in a pretty bad mood - I've been having family problems, I guess I just wrote it all out. (Hint: they're pretty big family issues, leaving me in Australia for at least the next month - this isn't how I'd planned my first visit). Yeah, so nobody in my family died, but maybe I was annoyed at them so I wrote a metaphor for killing them off? I don't regret Anna's death, though. There's a lot to write about it. I don't own Frozen.
Elsa felt that she'd been dried up. Lying next to Anna's still body, she should be crying her eyes out, turning the room into one solid ice cube, accidentally injuring anyone within a five mile radius. But any water she'd had in her body had already been cried out or turned into freezing whiteness already, and she was all spent. Elsa couldn't even cry any more.
All she could do was lie there, wishing to swap places with her baby sister.
Why, oh why, did Elsa ruin everything she touched? Snow games with Anna as a baby. She'd made a beautiful palace, which had partially been destroyed by the same ice power that built it. For all she knew, Elsa herself had caused the storms that had sunk her parents' ship the night they'd died. Now she'd managed to ruin something as simple and childish as April Fools Day. Something that was meant to be filled with laughter and jokes and sheepish eye-rolling had lead to a palace almost being destroyed, six good people becoming unemployed and the destruction of a beautiful soul, long before her time was up.
Elsa closed her eyes and tried to block everything out. She nearly missed the door bursting open, and the heavy footsteps entirely slipped her radar. Elsa kept her eyes shut and waited for the person to leave.
"Anna! Elsa!" The voice was another blow to Elsa's heart. She caused so much pain - she'd ruined this, too. Anna and Kristoff's relationship had been one of the best things that had ever happened to Anna, and probably Kristoff too. So naturally, Elsa had come along and wrecked it.
She was despicable.
"She's dead, Kristoff." Elsa could have been dead too if he hadn't seen her mouth move.
"What happened?" choked the young man.
"She was trying to make me laugh. I got scared, and then angry, and then the whole room was full of this blue light, I'd never had that much power, and then I looked around and she was dead."
Kristoff didn't know how to comfort her. What do you say to a person who has just lost the remainder of their family and it might be their own fault?
Elsa continued, her expression remaining collected, her eyes still closed, her voice still steady.
"I didn't mean for it, Kristoff." Oh, Elsa. Of course you didn't. She's your sister! "I called the doctor. And the guards. They tried to bring her back, but it didn't work." Elsa, poor girl, it's okay. It'll be alright. "She's dead. The doctor told me. And it's my fault."
Finally Kristoff recognised the lack of emotion in Elsa's voice. She had given up, she was resigned, and she was hopeless. He had to say something, anything, to distract her from whatever you call this, even though he was crumbling on the inside too.
"Elsa, how did they try to bring her back?"
"They did CPR." The same dead, flat tone. "Twice. Two different ways."
"Well is the doctor any good?"
"The best. I thought. But he isn't a magician. Even he can't bring back the dead."
"Maybe she's not dead."
Finally, Elsa looked up. Her eyes opened and she gazed at Kristoff. "She doesn't have a heartbeat," Elsa told him quietly. "No pulse, no breathing, to response. She's gone, she really is, and it's ...it's my - m-my f-f-fault..." Finally Elsa broke into sobs, and Kristoff broke with her, and they clutched at each other for comfort over Anna's broken body on the floor.
It was almost half an hour later when they realised. Elsa's little voice inside her head had been yelling at her, my fault my fault my fault my fault, and eventually she'd started saying it out loud and then yelled at herself to shut up, and thrown her head in her hands, telling herself that she was impossible. Kristoff overheard. "Hey, nothing's impossible," he told her.
"Yes it is."
"Of all people, you aren't the one who should be saying that things are impossible. You're the girl who can make snow appear out of her hands and build a palace with her will power. You are the definition of impossible."
"What about you? You have a reindeer called Sven, and you have sort-of an adopted brother, Olaf the living snowman, and you grew up with a family of magical talking rocks."
They stared at each other.
"You know, Elsa, about those magical rocks... I've seen them bring back dead birds. I've seen them save hunting prey. I've seen them cure death."
"Could we..."
"Anything, for her."
"For Anna," Elsa agreed. And so they both wordlessly stood and prepared to travel.
Kristoff lifted Anna's still form into the back of the sleigh. Elsa swept her cloak over her shoulder and scrambled up next to her sister, throwing a bag of supplies to her other side. Kristoff looped a rope around Anna's wrist, strung it in front of Elsa, and lashed it to the other side of the sleigh. Then, not wasting a second, he vaulted into the 'cockpit' and they tore out of the stables like a bolt of lightning.
Kristoff liked to think that Sven was fast, but he knew that Elsa was propelling them along.
...
Elsa was alarmed as they tore through the city. Just this morning she'd cantered through here with Phantom, waving to the occasional subject and enjoying springtime. It was still spring, but going on midwinter. Icicles seemed to be popping from random places - corners, fences, people's hats. It was only as she took in a man struggling to remove a particularly nasty icicle from his shoulder that Elsa realised that Kristoff had also been impaled in several different places.
"Hey, Kristoff, why are you full of ice?"
"Oh, you couldn't get through the halls without being stabbed. Otherwise I would've been there half an hour ago."
"Oh." Elsa had thought she wasn't using her magic at all. "Are you alright?"
"Fine. You were clearly pretty upset. I wondered what might have happened that would make icicles pop up from the seat of the chair I was sitting on..." Kristoff trailed off delicately. Elsa laughed for the first time since... no. Never mind.
They passed familiar landmarks as dusk fell. Elsa, though tense and terribly upset, grew slightly bored. With one hand, she casually blasted a torrent of icy wind, the other hand creating wind-chimes from delicate droplets of crystal ice. Elsa smiled - Anna had always loved her wind chimes. There was still one in her room from when Anna had been eight - Elsa had made the chimes and given them to her parents to give to Anna for Christmas.
Elsa listened to the tinkling chimes, humming vaguely, when something caught her eye. Elsa glanced over sideways as Anna's chest rose and fell, just once.
Elsa nearly fell out of the sleigh.
She watched Anna for a few minutes, but the princess didn't stir again.
It happened, though, Elsa assured herself. It did.
