Hello. How are doing? I have a new chapter here for you. Lets get on with it shall we?
-Whovian123
Everything is sore, far sorer than should be possible for the living. Am I still one of the living? Last I checked I was willing to die, but I also wasn't. I fought to live. I killed to live. Too much rushes back all at once and I groan in to the silence around me.
My groan stirs up a flurry of motion and several fast whispers. I cannot focus on the words. I try to open my eyes, seeing feels strange, as if I have spent too much time refusing to look and now that I am, my eyes have forgotten what it is too focus. Shapes seem too uncertain and the lighting is low and flickering.
I shut my eyes, blocking the world from my reality.
"Elsa?" A timid, almost scared voice asks from my left.
"Anna?" I groan back, able to speak, and think, well enough to know it is her and respond in kind. I hear a relieved laugh and several, far calmer, whispers. "Where am I? I can't remember anything after…" I trail away. The tips of my fingers tingle and the muscles in my chest pull tight against my heart.
"You're in your room." My mother's voice tells me. "Honey, nothing in here is going to hurt you. I promise." She sounds better than she did before. I can still hear the weary mumble of an ex-prisoner in her voice, but she does sound better.
"How long has it been?" I do not try to count the hours, not yet able to bear the thought of sight.
"You slept straight through the day." She coos soft and sweet as she has ever been. "The doctor wrapped what he could find, he said you seemed to be fine, aside from the surface wounds." Her voice, morphs for a moment, strains as she discusses my injuries. "He said it is all a matter of you getting strength back." Her voice loses all of its strained quality, and reverts back to the soft mothering tone that I crave. "How do you feel?"
"I'm afraid to open my eyes." I confess.
"Why?" Anna asks from somewhere to my side.
"Because… I... seeing… will make it... real." I try to find a word for the feeling of dread that rests heavy on the idea of opening my eyes. When I open them I will have to face the repercussions of the months past. When I take in the faces around me I will have to talk about Hans, what he has done, to me and my country, and we will have to discuss our obvious security issue. Then the matter of Hanses body and the moral implications that come along with doing anything but sending it back home to the Southern Isles.
I do not want to deal with the world and the worries that come along with it. I want to exist in this bubble, this space between problems. I want to be able to love my family before I march off in to council meetings, and launch wide spread investigations in to all my guard and the armies of Arendelle. I want to take several moments and breathe without the bricks weighing against my chest.
Politics will be a charged and tense game to play when the Southern Isles receive word of Hanses death. They cared not for the Thirteenth Prince in life, but in death he shall be a martyr. Political relations with them have been apprehensive since I made the rash decision to cut all trade with them, the death of their royal will bring with it a wave of hate and many kinds of threats.
I clench my fist and burry my nails deep in to my palm as I think of Hans. Confliction bounds through my soul, taking what I thought was concrete fact and flipping it so drastically as to change all I knew, and to give me a headache even before I have opened my eyes.
To my horror I start to cry.
I do not want to cry, not here, not now, not ever. I want to be stronger than this. I do not want a foul man's death to bring tears to my eyes. I want to be heartless. I turn in to myself, curling up around my stomach, hoping for more strength.
There is none to be found. Instead the tears come faster, it as if a damn has been broken and all of my worries and sorrows that have built up are steaming through my eyes and down my face, leaving me gasping for air and clawing at my chest.
Anna and my mother coo around me. Telling me that it is all ok now, explaining that it is over, and that the dead cannot haunt me. They are fools, it is not over, and it will never be over. The dead can haunt far more fiercely than the living and I will have a reminder of this patch of life every time I look to my child.
My body shakes and retches at the turmoil. With each heaving sob numbness sets in, more and more my body goes bank. I do not know if it is my brain deciding not to feel, but I hope it is. I plead with the world to turn my pain away and let me drift thoughtlessly though life. I cannot manage more pain, more hate.
I do not know how I manage it, but I stop weeping. Crying is not necessary now; I can do it some other time, when I am alone. I soon begin to panic for another set of reasons. The guests, the castle, and all the fire damage will need to be dealt with. My country is in a terrible economic state if I am to believe what I have been told over the last few months. I will have to explain to the nation why I married Hans, and then why I killed him. Will they accept my excuses? Will there be revolt once they hear my desperate struggle for a family.
I beg and plead for answers to everything in rapid-fire, and utterly nonsense, questions. "Where is Hanses body? Are their angry guests at the door? Have the citizens been informed of anything?" I voice rises in pitch as I begin to panic, still resisting the urge to open my eyes.
"Honey," my mother's voice explains, "I ran this country with your father for quite a while, I can manage it for one day."
I sink in to the bed, content with that. She is a monarch like no other, my mother, she understands people far better than I ever well. Leaving the country in her care does not worry me, she can have it back indefinitely if she so desires. Through from the weary undertone tainting her voice I doubt she will take me up on the offer.
"Have you gotten any sleep?" I ask, finally daring to open my eyes and take in the world. The room is dark, and familiar. The curtains are drawn back, letting beams of crystal moonlight grace the floor. Anna looks largely herself, aside from a thick bandage on her upper arm and a small scab on her cheek bone, she seems to have avoided injury.
My mother is a little worse for wear, her eyes have heavy circles weighing underneath them, and what remains of her right arm is shorter than I remember it being, and bandaged so thickly that it resembles a club far more than an arm.
"No." She answers, unconcerned with herself.
"You need to sleep." I insist. "You're in a state, please; get some sleep before you hurt yourself. I didn't do all of this so that you could run yourself in to the ground because you refused to sleep."
She looks vaguely ashamed, and wholly scared. "Elsa, when you spend four years in prison, what kind of dreams do you think a person has?"
I hold my tongue. I do not have something to say that will make that better. I cannot help her to forget the horrors of imprisonment, the memory of losing her husband, or the pain of a half arm. She does not ask me for kind words, we have moved beyond trying to tell each other that we need not worry. There is much to worry of, the only concession in our worry is that we may worry together, and together we many triumph.
I look away from her and deeper in to the room. There is a mass, a mass that is breathing in slow, calculated, and shallow breaths. "Kasper?" I ask, wondering why he is here, and furthermore, why he is sheltered in shadows.
He nods, chancing a step forward, looking horribly nervous. "How do you feel?"
"Not terribly well."
He shifts, still noticeably nervous. He looks to my mother and to Anna, seeking reassurance. "He-You- You really are going to have a baby?" He blurts out, looking nowhere but my eyes.
"Yes," I stare back at him, nearly ashamed, and a little bit scared, "I am."
"You're going to make a wonderful mother." He chances a half smile, looking down to my stomach and then back to my eyes.
I feel at sting in the back of my eyes, the sting of tears trying to return. "Thank you. It's frightening, to a degree. I never thought much about children and now I have to tackle parenthood alone." I confess to the room.
"Elsa," Anna sighs, "You are not alone. I will keep telling you until you finally listen and understand that you have a family that refuses to let you go it alone."
I smile at Anna. "I know, but it takes a while to force yourself in to the team mindset. For a long while I was alone." I try to explain why my gut reaction is to always feel as if I have to deal with my problems alone. Why when I hurt I turn inward to endure instead of outward to express.
Though, I suppose maybe I never was as alone as I thought. Surly Anna would never have run from me if I had decided one day, in a fit of lunacy, to venture from the safe haven of my room and in to the halls of the castle. I regret that I never did dare try to break free from the confines I had given myself. It took a disastrous coronation to keep me from concealment.
I wiggle about in my bed, trying it sit up but soon finding that moving sparks a cascading pain all through my body, peaking in my mangled shoulder, and my burns. I let out an instinctual hiss and brace my body. Anna, my mother, and Kasper are all quick to reprimand me for being so careless and remind me that the country is fine and I can take the next little while to recuperate.
I submit.
My mother settles in to a chair, her skin pale and her eyes drooping with the fatigue of no sleep and past horrors. With her follows Kasper who also seems to be fighting the early stages of tiredness. The moment he sits down his eyes fall shut and his head slumps to the side. Anna decides, as there are no more chairs in my sparse room due to the infrequency with which I play host to guest, that she must crawl in to bed with me. I welcome her presence, the weight at my side. Something to remind me that nightmares are false and that the world can hold the wonder of a dream.
I am not waiting, stranded in my room, hoping for my powers to either consume me whole, or leave me be. I am living with them; they are as part of me as breathing, and I love them just as much. I do not have a family that cowers in fear when I am near; they protect me and fight for me. I am safe, and I am whole.
Though in the minutes before I fall asleep, that moment in which you know you are gone, but you can still see the world, I remember his face; cold, bitterly so, and fighting to slaughter me. I see him, standing in the ballroom, silhouetted by the moon light, pools of crystalline light draped around his feet.
I fall away in to dreams with my heart hammering and my eyes rushing about in panic. He will haunt me, he will haunt as fiercely as any ghost ever could. He dances behind my eyelids and settles in to the forefront of my mind and decides that he shall make a new home there.
Did you like it? Let me know with a review!
I'll have a new chapter up for you on the 25th.
-Whovian123
Iceleaf13: Thank you for reviewing... Sorry...
Guest: Thank you so much. I can't wait to write more.
csi-cameron: Thank you. Me neither.
Aggregate Dragon: Thank you so much. Nicely reviewed. ;)
bexmad: Thank you. Don't worry, Elsa is a strong one.
Phill: Thank you. It's always bittersweet getting caught up.
