Eagle Valley, Indiana, 1995 Elsa is 42 and 15, Anna is 12
Thankfully, whatever lightning formed when Elsa traveled was cold, because her next appearance landed her inside a room filled with flammable materials. She materialized inside what looked like a storage room and wardrobe combined.
At least I won't have to scavenge something to wear, she thought, looking at the racks and racks of clothes. Most of them were outlandishly colored, and it took her a few moments to clear her head of disorientation and realize she was looking at costumes. Racks of costumes of every kind, from Victorian England to badly-made science fiction uniforms - and mostly in sizes too small for her.
After a few moments of searching, she found a reasonably modest and sensible outfit, complete with a lab coat. Once decently attired, she opened the door to peek out and get her bearings. The letters EVMS decorated many of the items nearby - bulletin boards, papers, posters.
School, she thought. One of the posters on the wall announced the Fall 1995 talent show and encouraged students to see their homeroom teachers for entry. The pieces slowly snapped together; she was in the Eagle Valley Middle School. 1995 meant that Anna would be about 12 years old if it was autumn. She grinned more broadly and walked the corridors; schools wouldn't be overly suspicious of an adult just wandering around for a few more years, when the first major school shooting would occur.
Memories flooded back; she'd attended the same school as Anna, and she swiftly remembered where everything was - the library, the computer lab, the playground. Less happy memories came along with it. Anna getting in fight after fight at school. Sometimes her parents had Elsa pick up her sister from the bus stop (the high school let out earlier) and Anna would come home surly and bruised. The few times she was willing to talk to her older sister, she'd grunt that some stupid girl had picked on her for any number of reasons, and they'd settled it on the playground.
Elsa headed for the playground, walking down the corridors, past the library, to the hilly green fields that surrounded the school. Some of the fields were conventional, like the soccer field and the baseball field, but one of the fields had some huge boulders left behind by one of the ice ages, and as a kid she'd sit on the for as long as possible during recess. She'd never really gotten along with the kids in her class, even when she was little; the kind of person who has 7 PhDs and a IQ of 267 isn't the kind of person who enjoys time with their peers.
To her surprise, her favorite boulder was occupied by 12-year old Anna, who'd just run out to the boulder field as soon as the recess bell had sounded and was now perched on one of the rocks. She was sitting cross-legged with her face in her hands, and even at a distance, Elsa could see the shaky rise and fall of her shoulders as she sobbed. Her backpack lay next to her, a book open with its pages fluttering in the cool autumn breeze.
She hurried over to the boulder and deftly climbed up the five foot tall rock; as a kid, she'd skinned her knees many a time on that rock. Anna was so lost in her sorrows that she didn't hear Elsa's arrival until the blonde put her hand gently on her shoulder.
Anna gasped. "AUGH! Oh my God, don't do that, Elsa! Wait… what?" Realization of which version of Elsa was sitting with her hit Anna like a two by four to the face. "It- how- Elsa? Like, Big Elsa?"
Her sister smirked and arched an eyebrow. "Big Elsa?"
"That's the name I started calling you in my head to separate you from my sister. I mean, I know you're my sister too, but you're the grownup version, and Grownup Elsa sounds so bogus."
"I forgot about all the terrible jargon of the 1990s," Elsa sighed. "So, what's wrong?"
Anna's shoulders slumped again, the pleasant surprise of meeting her adult sister once again vanishing. "I have a math test this afternoon, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to fail it. And it's a mid-term, which means…" her breath hitched, as she forced back tears, "… if I don't pass it, I might fail math again, and Mama and Papa will be so angry with me, and I'll be grounded for like a month, and-"
Elsa's brow furrowed. "Do you ever ask your sister for help?"
"As if!" the redhead snorted, indignation apparent on her face.
"You do know that I - and by extension your sister - am really good at math, right?"
Anna blushed. "I… uh… I have trouble talking to you. You're so cool, you're in high school while I'm stuck here in lame central. Sometimes I can't even look at you because I feel like…"
Elsa reached out and gently put a hand on Anna's shoulder, which Anna promptly covered with both her hands. "Like what, Anna?"
"Like… umm… you're too cool to even acknowledge that I exist. I mean, you've never said that to me, but… I don't know. I just… I just feel like the little sister who's hella lame and… you're like this superstar. Even here, when teachers find out I'm your little sister, they're all like 'Oh, Elsa was such an amazing student' and 'I hope you're just like her'. It's… a lot."
"Come here." Elsa hugged her little sister, brushing away her tears. She cherished the feeling of Anna in her arms, alive and whole instead of the nightmares she'd suffered for the last 20 years, her last memories of Anna right after the accident. "I promise you, no matter which version of me you're talking about, I think the world of you, Anna. I always have, and I always will."
"Really?" Anna snuffled, gracelessly wiping her nose with her palm.
"Now, about this math test… tell me about it."
Anna picked up her math textbook as though it were radioactive, thumbing through the pages. "It's about solving these equations," she bemoaned, "and I just don't get it because it's algebra and I'm a dummy."
"Hey." Elsa squeezed her sister's shoulder. "You're not a dummy. Tell me what you don't get, okay?"
"Any of it! It's all numbers and letters and it doesn't make any sense. It's a big jumble. Like look at this," she gestured angrily at the page, her auburn hair whipping around, "11x - 5 = 3x + 3. What am I supposed to do with that? I feel so stupid, Elsa!"
Her older sister pursed her lips. "Algebra… it's like organizing things, like cleaning up a little. This example is a mess, isn't it?" Anna nodded vigorously. "And it's a mess because it's all out of sorts. What it's asking you to do is to help it get organized, to help it get balanced out. Algebra comes from the Arabic language, originally, and it means restoring broken pieces."
Anna looked at her sister, obviously confused. "I still don't get it."
"What's the first thing you do when you put together a jigsaw puzzle, Anna?"
"Um… besides look at the picture? I guess… sort out all the pieces and find the corners and straight edges."
"Right. And we do that because…?"
Anna scratched her head. "Because it's easier to put the puzzle together when we know what certain pieces are?"
"Right. The straight edges and the corners are the pieces we know, and everything else are the pieces we don't know. Now," Elsa gestured at the equation, "there are pieces we know and pieces we don't know. So what you need to do is organize them just the same. You put the pieces you know in one pile - on one side of the equation, and the pieces you don't know on the other side."
Anna's eyes widened and her jaw went slack as she looked at the page, her eyes scanning back and forth over the equation as though she'd never seen it before. The autumn breeze blew her hair, letting the sunlight illuminate each strand as though it were finely spun coppper. A smile slowly tugged at the corners of her mouth. "So… I move the pieces that are only numbers to one side… and I move the pieces that are letters to the other side…"
She grabbed a pencil out of her Clueless-themed backpack and scribbled into her math notebook. "So… I end up with 8x = 8… which means x equals 1. Oh my God, Elsa! I get it! I get it! It makes sense now! It's all just pieces I have to move around! Oh my God, thank you!" She wrapped her adult sister in a bone-crushing hug, shaking with glee. "Why - why doesn't anyone TEACH it this way? I've felt so dumb looking at it, it never made sense until now!"
Both sisters shared gleeful laughter in the warm sun for a few moments. Anna lay back on the rock, staring up at the clear blue sky. "I wish you could teach me."
"I can't, but the version of me that's here with you all the time can, Anna, and I promise you, she'd be happy to help her sister. As for why the school doesn't teach that way, it's complicated, but a big part is that teachers don't have a big enough view of the world."
"What do you mean?"
Elsa smiled, losing herself in the past for a moment. From very young, she was a prodigy, learning to read at barely a year old and able to do calculus by age 5. Her present-day self was 15 years old, which meant she'd be graduating from high school in a year and going to MIT shortly thereafter.
Dark memories rushed into her mind, knowing what would come next. In just 9 years, Anna would die, and Elsa would lose herself for a decade, drowning herself in schoolwork to hide the pain. She'd always been told from early on that she was brilliant, a once-in-a-generation genius; after Anna's death, she questioned what any of it meant if she couldn't save her sister. Eventually she'd end up with seven doctoral degrees, in music, medicine, quantum physics, archaeology, chemistry, astronomy, and ancient languages - all to drown out the soul-crushing sorrow she felt from Anna's death.
"Elsa?" the 12-year old's voice interrupted her waking nightmare.
"Sorry, I uh- I was just remembering something," she cleared her throat. "The world is a pretty big place, and some teachers are better than others at bringing examples from the world into their explanations. That's what I meant." She smiled and tousled Anna's coppery locks.
In the distance, the recess bell rang, calling the students back to class. Elsa looked at her little sister with nostalgic tears welling in her eyes. "You all set, Anna Banana?" she asked, using her sister's nickname.
Anna rolled her eyes. "Didn't I ever tell you I hated that nickname?" she said, suppressing a grin as she haphazardly tossed her stuff into her backpack.
"Many times, but I can't help myself, even now," she smiled back. "Shoo, go to class, and show that test what Anna Beckett can do."
Anna ran off, her Clueless backpack bouncing as she sprinted for the school's doors. Elsa looked down at the rock and gasped; Anna had accidentally left her prized Sony MiniDisc player behind in her haste to make it back to class. Elsa gathered it up quickly, feeling the familiar heft of the device, and started to walk it back to the school when an idea struck her. She turned around, sat back down on her favorite boulder, checked the battery level and flipped the disc to write mode, and hit record.
Elsa opened the door to the family home, putting the spare key back under the fake rock. She had about an hour before anyone would be home; their parents worked late, and the school bus wouldn't drop off the kids for a while.
Nostalgia flooded her senses. Everything about this place felt wonderful. Hints of cookies Iduna had baked recently. The faint smell of ash in the fireplace for keeping cold nights at bay. She smiled at the silly artwork on the walls over the years, though at second glance, they didn't look as she remembered. Her drawings were always precise, usually some kind of architecture or star chart.
Anna's drawings used to be relatively poor cartoons, somewhat clumsily drawn. These cartoons looked… better. More lifelike, more realistic; she saw a woman riding a horse with a bow and arrow, an American Indian princess, and some other fairy tale characters.
Elsa puzzled over this revelation. Anna was clearly a better artist now, but her experiment shouldn't be able to change time. The past should be in the past - quantum mechanics principles said it was impossible to change the past, that time would always enforce self consistency.
She walked up the beige carpeted stairs to the second floor and found Anna's bedroom at the end of the hall. Sneaking in, she looked around in shock. Posters of actors like Alicia Silverstone and Nicole Kidman graced the walls, along with all sorts of drawings. This wasn't the sister she remembered at all. At 12 she remembered Anna listening to grunge and rap, perpetually angry at the world and blasting her music as loud as she could.
Elsa carefully left the Minidisc player on Anna's desk and closed the door to her room gently. Just as she turned around, she froze. Standing at the end of the hallway was the one person who wasn't supposed to be here.
"Hello, Elsa. Or is it Doctor Arendelle?"
Elsa couldn't deny it; in this time period, she was 15 years old and was clearly the same person that had been at Anna's birth. Her heart raced, looking at her mother, dressed as she always was around the house in a royal purple robe. Words stuck in her throat; she attempted to swallow, but couldn't breathe. Finally, she composed herself, nervously straightened the lab coat she'd borrowed from the school dressing room, and looked her mother in the eye.
"Hi Mama. I imagine… you have some questions."
Iduna smiled softly, her brown eyes still radiating the kindness and warmth of a parent who hasn't yet lost a child. "I do, though fewer then you might imagine. You are my daughter, yes?"
Elsa nodded. "I am."
"How old are you now?"
"Forty-two years old."
"Mmm. Six years older than me. When does Anna die?"
Elsa froze, slack jawed, staring at her mother. "How- how did you- how COULD you know that?" she sputtered after recovering.
Iduna smiled. "Motherly instincts. You love your sister. Even now, when you're only 15 years old, you love your sister so much, and she loves you. When you were little, you would say such adorable things like 'true love defies the laws of physics' to her. And you take such good care of her. Once you turned 10, you practically acted like a second mother to her. Which means you wouldn't be here, doing exactly what you said as a toddler, unless she was in mortal danger. Now when, Elsa?"
"Nine years from now. Drunk driver," she said, her shoulders sagging. "I… I invented time traveling so I could see her again one last time and apologize to her. I said… some very harsh things to her, and those were the last words I ever said."
Iduna closed the distance and hugged Elsa tightly just as her resolve broke, sobs heaving her chest. "There, there. It's all right, Elsa." She chuckled briefly as she soothed her adult daughter. "Remember what I always tell you, no matter what age you are?"
"Let… let it go," Elsa smiled through the tears.
Moments passed in silence, Elsa relaxing in her mother's arms, when Iduna spoke softly. "Can you change it? Stop her from dying?"
Elsa shook her head, a couple remaining slowly moving down her cheeks. "I- I don't think so. Quantum physicists discovered years ago that the past automatically corrects itself. I can travel back and see what was, but I have no impact on it. This-" she stepped away from her mother's embrace for a moment to gesture around, "-is immutable, and I can't change it, no matter how much I want to. And believe me, I want to so badly."
"So you did all this just for…?"
"Peace of mind. A final goodbye, a proper one. Knowing that to me, my last words to Anna will be kind and loving instead of filled with anger and spite," Elsa hung her head in shame once more.
Iduna embraced her daughter again. "You're a good sister, Elsa, no matter what happened. You always have been, and you always will be. Are you going to wait for her to come home?"
"If I can. I don't seem to have very much control over when I appear and disappear." She looked down at her hands and felt a familiar tingling. "Actually… it would appear I'm not going to be able to stay. Would you tell Anna I love her for me?"
A soft smile graced Iduna's face as she cupped Elsa's cheek. "Of course. I'll tell you the same, too, when you get home. You both deserve all the love in the world. And Elsa?"
Elsa looked up.
"Thank you for saving her."
Blue lightning crawled over Elsa's body as she stared at her mother in confusion. Saving Anna wasn't possible; she'd done years of research understanding closed timelike curves, testing function after function. Just as she opened her mouth to respond, time renewed its grasp on her and she vanished in a flash of white light.
Iduna picked up the abandoned clothes and grinned, folding them carefully. Elsa had always been a strong-minded child, and clearly had made a life of doing the impossible. If anyone could save Anna from her fate, she knew it would be her elder daughter.
Author's Notes
Elsa is so hell bent on the idea that time is fixed, like a movie you rewatch. For someone so smart, she's missing some pretty obvious stuff. One might think she was a little… clueless.
Eagle-eyed observers who read the first few chapters of this story will notice I've retconned the location of the story from the fictional town of Elk Ridge, Indiana to Eagle Valley, Indiana. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why.
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