Chapter 9 – Never Letting Her Go
Okay, nobody panic! (You'll understand that at the end of the chapter) I'd just like to throw it out there that I'm a sucker for happy endings, sort of, so we can all just hang onto that.
WARNINGS: This chapter contains attempted suicide and a grand total of one censored swear word.
"You've got Elsa on suicide watch?" Kristoff questioned later in the day. "Isn't that over kill?" It was a poor choice of words, but Anna didn't even notice.
She was sitting at Elsa's desk, in the study, dutifully taking care of everything for the day. She gave him an annoyed look. "What would you do?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "Do you really think she'll, um . . .?"
Anna sighed. "I don't know what to think anymore. She's been fine one day, then really closed off the next. Then handling everything, then running away. Then talking, then closing herself in her room." The uncertainty of it – Elsa's emotional and mental stability – was starting to weigh Anna down.
Anna had always been able to focus on different things, to see the good, the bright side, the silver linings. She could smile at the beauty in the world; she could turn off the bad when it got too much for her. But Elsa, it seemed, could not.
Anna imagined if everything that had ever gone wrong in her life was still with her. If she carried every tragedy in her heart, she would be crushed under their massive weight.
So how was it that Elsa was still standing, bearing all that she did?
Elsa was covering the room in ice.
The guard outside the door remained tactfully silent, as she stood in the centre of her room and, with lazy swipes of her arm, encased the floor in a layer of ice, and sent it spiralling up the walls, crawling along the ceiling. It layered over everything, sculpting her room in perfect, shining ice.
She looked around herself, her feelings blank, arms dropping to her sides. Her reflection stared back at her, bouncing off every facet of ice in the room, surrounding her. She did not like what she was seeing.
All she could see was a scared little girl, trying to hide from the person she had become. There was so much she had to be, and it meant she couldn't be herself. The ice mirrored her anguish, and pointed fingers started reaching inwards, growing from the walls, aiming towards her.
"Queen Elsa?" the guard stood up, slightly alarmed at the spears that were starting to move towards her. "Is everything alright?"
"Everything's fine," she snapped, arms folding across her stomach, because what else could she say? She watched the ice, and she knew why it was so distressed, because it was who she was, and it was her thoughts, and she didn't like what she was thinking.
She bit her lower lip, tensely, and said shortly, "Get Anna."
The guard, understandably, hesitated.
"Now," she said firmly.
He nodded. "Yes, your Majesty."
Once he was gone, Elsa sent a sheet of ice across the door frame, blocking it off. She didn't want to close the door, because Anna hated closed doors, and Elsa didn't want the last thing Anna thought of her to be that she had closed the door again.
"Can you even cure something like depression?" Anna said, scrambling through the drawers in the desk, because maybe there was something helpful in one of them. "I mean, it's not like being normal kind of sick, where you just take some medicine, is it?"
"What are we looking for, again?" Kristoff asked, then sneezed because he was looking through the dusty bookshelf, at Anna's insistence. "These are mostly just boring old books on . . . something. This one isn't even in English."
"It's probably in Latin." Anna said dismissively. "But that's not important. We know what's wrong with Elsa, so we can fix it." She was trying to be cheerful, trying to be brave, but she knew that just because you knew what something was didn't mean it could be fixed.
That's okay, you can just unfreeze it.
No I can't. I don't know how.
Oh, Elsa, Anna thought. You think that way about too many things . . . She was about to add something when there was a knock at the door. "Yup?" she called out, very informally.
"Princess Anna," the guard opened the door. He gave a shallow, hurried bow. "Queen Elsa wishes to speak with you."
"What?" Anna shot to her feet. "Is she okay?"
There was a brief pause, because the question was almost impossible to answer. "Uh . . ."
"You didn't leave her alone, did you?" Anna didn't know why, but the mere thought of Elsa unsupervised sent her heart racing.
Kristoff picked up on her panic, and put a hand on her shoulder. "Anna, it's okay."
"What if it isn't?" She darted from the room, an inexplicable feeling of dread coming over her. Please, Elsa, don't do anything stupid. Their last conversation petrified her.
"Promise me you won't do anything like that again. Promise me you won't . . . try to take your own life."
"I won't make a promise I can't keep."
Anna came to a screeching halt outside Elsa's room, heart pounding and breath panting, and stared at the wall of ice in front of her. "Elsa?" she sounded hesitant, because she had no idea what lay behind the ice.
She could see nothing through the ice, no distorted movement indicating that Elsa was up and about and alive and well. "Elsa!"
Kristoff caught up to Anna, her sudden dash from the study had left him behind. "Is everything okay?"
"Break this ice down," she demanded, without explanation. She stood back, clearly expecting him to just leap through it like a battering ram.
Kristoff blinked. "Wh-"
"Now!"
"Okay," he yelped. He pushed experimentally against the ice, trying to gauge how thick it was. "Anna, we're going to need something to-"
Anna was already running, and she returned dragging a chair behind her. "Here."
"Really?" Kristoff raised an eyebrow, but he picked the chair up anyway and swung it, hard, at the barricade of ice. There was a loud splintering sound, followed by cracking, then the chair buckled in half.
The ice, however, did not have a scratch.
Anna had never wanted a flamethrower more than she did at that moment.
"Princess Anna?" Kai came jogging towards them. He handed her an axe. "Try this."
Anna handed the axe to Kristoff, and questioned Kai. "Did you expect this?"
"No. But the guard alerted me to the fact that you were running around screaming."
"So you came after her with an axe?" Kristoff grunted, hammering away with powerful blows.
Kai sent Anna a sad look. "It's how your father used to get in."
Anna stared at the wall of ice. "She used to do this . . . a lot?"
"Enough," Kai confirmed. He winced as Kristoff's axe slipped and cut into the doorframe.
"Almost," Kristoff said. A few more blows, and the ice shattered.
Anna shoved him aside, and clambered over the wreckage.
The room was unrecognizable, a cavern of thick ice reaching from all corners of the room. Pillars blocked her view, mounds of snow made it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her. Anna felt completely disorientated, there was no possible way to tell which way would lead her to Elsa, and the ice reflected and refracted and distorted everything in an impossible maze. Anna tried to take a step forward, but the space which looked unoccupied was blocked by a transparent sheet of ice, and she nearly walked straight into it.
She cautiously edged around it, keeping her hands in front of her to help guide her. Another step into the room, and the ice groaned and grew, new spikes crossing into her path, blocking off the door again. The ground changed and shook underneath her; she grappled with the spikes around her for balance.
This was what the inside of Elsa looked like, Anna realised. Dangerous and pointed, and twisting and confusing. Trapping itself. It was a nightmare, with terrifying echoes and shudders.
Anna swallowed hard, taking another tentative step forwards. She had to find Elsa, somewhere in this maze that changed around her, blocked off paths that had been open, closed off areas she had stepped into.
She kept moving, slowly.
Elsa was sitting very still, eyes half closed, listening to the ice morph around her. It was wild and unsettled, groaning with every beat of her heart. This was worse than it had been on the North Mountain, the pointed icicles weren't just reaching in towards her, they branched off and made jagged and lethal blades everywhere.
She knew that only a minute or so had passed, but the ice had gone completely out of control as soon as she had covered the door, and she was now trapped where she sat, knees to her chest, occasionally checking where the ice was going. A few spikes were pressing against her, nudging painfully against her skin, but she didn't mind.
She wasn't really paying attention to them.
She was paying more attention to the icicle in her hand, studying the sharp edge, changing it from a cone to a blade. She gripped it tightly, the cold edges dug into her skin. The tip was sharp and thin, because, she knew, thin blades didn't hurt as much.
She turned her other hand palm up, drew the tip of the blade softly against the skin of her wrist, not cutting, just pressing, just getting a feel for it. The ice around her creaked, grew, changed. Her hands were steady; there was no hesitation in her movements, no doubt at all.
She let the tip of the blade rest on her wrist again.
Elsa's room wasn't that big, but Anna felt like it had gone on forever. She was afraid to call out, in case Elsa got a fright and did something stupid. Or, worse, in case she didn't receive an answer because . . .
Anna punched at a drift of snow, irritated by it. She caught a glimpse of movement reflected around her, and the ice pressed in a bit closer, nearly trapped her. She squeezed to a more open area, sliding easily against the icy walls, and then she could see Elsa.
Well, sort of. She could see a reflection of Elsa. Dozens of them, all around her, which meant that the real Elsa had to be somewhere nearby, and she was fine because she was sitting up and-
Anna saw the position Elsa's hands were in, and she felt her heart drop. The blood rushed from her head, everything felt numb, and then there was a burning fear in her chest, a sudden weakness in her knees. "No," she whispered, looking around desperately for a gap, for a way to reach Elsa before-
The very tip of the blade pierced skin, Elsa let out a tiny whimper, because it hurt, but then the blood started flowing and she paused, watching it. Bright, crimson red against the pale cream of her skin. It was warm.
"Elsa, don't!" Anna slipped, it was bound to happen sometime, and landed half on top of Elsa. She didn't care, she grappled to get hold of Elsa's hands, ignoring the stinging that started in the palm of her hand, because she had grabbed the blade where it was touching Elsa's wrist.
Elsa jerked, instinctively trying to get away from contact, because she was dangerous and cold and – she felt the blade meet her arm again, slicing deeply into flesh.
Anna was talking, shouting, but Elsa was staring at her arm, at the little cut on her wrist that was still dripping, and at the new, massive gash about halfway to her elbow that was a diagonal crimson line for one heartbeat, and then began gushing blood.
It ran down her skin in a spider web, but Elsa's mindless observation was interrupted by Anna grabbing her arm in both her hands, holding tightly, still shouting something.
"What are you doing?" Elsa whispered, still watching the blood, and she missed the completely incredulous look Anna gave her because, really, that should be Anna's question.
"Stopping you from being a complete idiot, you dumb f***!" Anna was furious, and terrified, and she didn't know what she was feeling, and the sheer volume of her emotions made her forget politeness and propriety.
"But . . ." Elsa tried to pull her arm free from Anna's vice grip.
"Don't you dare move! I swear to god, Elsa, I will smash your head into the ice until you are freakin' unconscious if you so much as blink!" If possible, Anna's hold on Elsa's arm tightened.
Elsa winced, squeezing her eyes closed. She could still feel the blood moving, dripping, and the ice around them was still changing. It was a lot of blood, she realised, and she noticed that her arm was a bit numb, and the world a bit hazy.
Anna's yelling seemed very far away – Elsa could hear a few choice words she didn't think she would ever hear her sister use – and Elsa let herself slump against the ice, eyes remaining closed. It would have been peaceful if not for Anna's continued blasphemy, and Elsa felt a little flicker of irritation towards her, but then it was over powered by the knowledge that the word seemed very far away and soothing.
The ice was cool, and familiar. She was happy to let it hold her up, because she couldn't hold herself up any more.
Kristoff and Kai followed the sounds of Anna's unbelievable litany through the ever changing maze of Elsa's room, and on seeing the sheer volume of blood spreading across the ice, Kai immediately turned and ran as best he could from the room, hollering for help.
Anna turned a face as white as the snow around them to Kristoff. Her hands were numb, Elsa was cold and still, but she refused to let go, stubbornly believing that she was lessening the flow of blood.
"I'm not letting go," she said, her voice a hoarse ghost of a whisper. "I'm never letting her go again."
