It had been ten days since Elsa had been found on a trail in the foothills, and still there were no clues as to who had attacked her.
"Are you sure you can't remember anything?" Anna prodded yet again, picking a rose from a bush within the castle grounds.
"Anna, I've told you over and over that I can't remember anything." She flinched. "Not anything important, anyway. Nothing that would help to figure out who...who did this." She gestured weakly at herself. Elsa was parked in a slant of sunlight that had managed to peek through the closed gates, while Anna wandered aimlessly through the Royal Gardens. Elsa had in fact been the one to suggest a visit to the gardens, because the sunlight helped to warm her bones, though only slightly. Either way, it was better than being cooped in the drafty castle.
Anna, Kristoff, and the servants had helped move her belongings into a room on the first floor, which, granted, had taken nearly all three days. When one is cooped inside a bedroom their whole life, they manage to bring every necessity they could want into the one room. Elsa had thrown a mild fit at having to be moved to a first-floor room before Anna raced over to calm her down, not wanting to risk another accident like the one in the scullery. Anna had seen Elsa come too close to death twice in the last week, and she didn't know if her heart could manage a third. Anna had promised the older sibling she would move downstairs as well so as to be closer, and if she wanted, she would even move into the same bedroom. Elsa had agreed readily to it, though she admitted that if Anna needed her own space she would understand.
Elsa squinted at the closed gates, standing tall and foreboding. Like a cage, she thought, a spark of fire in her heart. She breathed in a hitched breath and turned her gaze back to her sister. Anna looked up from a flower she'd been picking, and Elsa smiled lightly at the redhead standing under the pergola.
"What are we going to do, then?" Anna asked quietly, her voice taking on a more somber tone. "What are we going to do if we can't find the person who attacked you? The guards I- we-'ve sent out haven't found any clues, and you don't remember anything about your attacker. Are we just...going to stay locked in here forever?" Anna dropped the rose she'd been holding, a thousand-yard stare directed toward the gates. She walked slowly toward her sister. Still observing the great wooden doors she said, "I mean, if that's what we must do, then I understand." She took her sister's cool hand and held it carefully.
Elsa shook her head and tugged gently on Anna's hand to draw her gaze toward her. Anna knelt down so she was face-to-face with the gaunt queen. "No. I have never been in favor of a closed-door policy. Not when I was a child, and not now. They will be open again. In fact, Anna, if you wanted to open them now I would have no problem with it. I hate to see you suffer because of me."
"This isn't your fault though," the younger stated.
"I know," Elsa conceded. She drew her hand back from Anna's and leaned against the chair. "What I'm trying to say is, I'm not scared. If whoever did this to me, if he or she really wants to kill me, I don't think they'll have a problem getting through the gates, closed or otherwise."
"Don't say that."
Elsa sighed. "It's just true." She closed her paper-thin eyelids. The skin under her eyes was waxy and purple-hued. She opened them again and smiled ruefully. "This is going to sound very vain, but if I couldn't stop whoever did this to me, I don't think a wall and some guards on top of a bastion will deter them. Despite that, I'm not even sure that they intended to kill me."
Anna sat on the cobblestones and tilted her head to see her sister. "What makes you think that?" she asked, puzzled.
Elsa closed her eyes once again and was silent for a minute. Finally she said, "Well, I'm still here, aren't I? I was at their mercy, and for some reason they let me go."
"I don't know about that," Anna argued, "You looked pretty close to dead when I showed up. I don't think they intended to let you live at all."
"Then what about the scar?" Elsa fired back. "It healed in less than one day. Why go to the trouble to heal it at all unless they wanted me alive?"
"Maybe they didn't heal it," Anna said quietly, the realization stunning her. "Maybe your powers healed you somehow."
"I don't know, Anna." Elsa shrugged her shoulders slightly, grimacing at the maneuver. "All I know is that I'll be very glad when this is all over and I can go back to taking care of duties, and walking, and joking with Olaf-"
Elsa's faintly beating heart plummeted and became a rock in her bowels. What little air her lungs had managed to procure deflated like a balloon.
Oh, god...
Elsa's face was frozen, mouth still half formed around the name. Her eyelids fluttered quickly but her eyes stayed glued on the plant she'd been looking at while talking.
"Oh my gosh, Olaf!" Anna exclaimed. "I completely forgot. I've been so busy taking care of you; I haven't even seen him lately. I'm sorry, Elsa, I need to go find him and tell him what happened." The bustle of Anna's dress was already whooshing by Elsa's wheelchair before she'd even finished speaking. "I'll be back in a moment!" she called over her shoulder.
Oh, god.
Elsa's hands started shaking on the armrests of the wheelchair and she started to hyperventilate.
A low buzz filled her ear.
She wheeled herself backwards frantically and pivoted the chair. She couldn't make it move fast enough; her hands kept slipping on the wheels. She managed to enter the front door without anyone noticing.
She was unseen on the way to her first-level bedroom.
Elsa rammed into the door to her new bedroom, the brakes of the chair the last thing on her mind. She wrenched the door open and drew herself inside, locking the door behind her.
No, no, no, he's fine you know he's fine he has to be fine of course he's fine, don't be stupid, Elsa.
The shades were still drawn so the room was dark. But that was alright, Elsa liked the dark and could handle the dark, at least this type of darkness.
She realized she was muttering unintelligibly into shaking hands that were steadily moving toward her scalp, pushing her hair out of the way.
"Focus, focus," she whispered.
She brandished her right palm.
Empty. Empty.
"No, no, no, come on, focus." She shook her hand painfully and said hurriedly, "It's fine, you're fine, he's fine."
She concentrated and brandished her right palm again.
Nothing.
There was no rush of feeling in her veins, no drop in temperature in the room.
"Come on! Work!" She screamed as she clenched her left palm, desperate for anything to happen.
Stillness.
Oh Anna, Anna, you're so naive. You think he's still around the castle. Or waiting outside the gates. Oh, Anna.
Elsa forced herself to stand, knocking over the wheelchair in her haste. "Standing will help, standing will help."
She closed her eyes and bit her lip and furrowed her brow, desperately trying to draw anything from within her up to her extremities. Even the smallest granule of frost would please her, because then it would serve as a sign that she wasn't too weak to produce her powers. If she saw a granule of frost, that would mean there was hope for it to come back. Hope that Olaf was still alive. Somewhere, there had to be a reservoir of power in her that would have kept Olaf alive, surely. He was as tied to her soul as she was to his. But then... That meant there was no hope, because Elsa was barely managing to keep herself alive as it was. How could she keep another being alive?
As she brandished her arms a last time, a wail of grief ripped through her soul, because she already knew what the outcome would be. She fell to the floor.
Nothing. There was nothing.
Elsa could feel the missing part of him in her bloodstream. Or rather, she could feel the absence. She had no energy to spare for another; her bloodstream was greedy enough as it was, struggling with the privilege of air and nutrients. There was no cold power left to rush alongside the essentials.
Elsa turned on the thing closest to her, the wheelchair, and shoved it weakly. It thudded against the door, a wheel still spinning. She found herself swaying and staggering around the room, ripping things from their place, breaking objects. A great mirror shattered under her fist and she fell heartbroken onto the shard-littered floor.