Author's Note:
Eyyy someone asked in the reviews 'is this elsanna' so I thought I'd clarify for anyone else unsure:
It's a story primarily about the complex, multilayered relationship between Elsa and Anna. Any other character relationships will be temporary and not the focus of the story, mainly there to promote character growth and plot. To put it bluntly, it's not going to be some Anna-maren endgame fic lol.
At this point Anna has persistent romantic feelings for Elsa. Will Elsa return them? Time will tell...
For now, enjoy this lil plot twist *cackles evilly*
A low, quiet rumble fills the cosy little pub. Warm, dim light on wooden walls. Vines spilling out of hanging pots. Soft, faded cushions on benches. It's not a place people come for a wild night, or to get wasted. It's not even a place most people would know about if they weren't looking for it, nestled into a quiet side street on the edge of the city centre, with just a little sign to signal its existence.
Elsa is nestled comfortably into the corner seat with a yellow window beside her. It has diamond grating, reminding her of an olden style fantasy tavern. There's a fake fire in the corner, and music videos from the early 2000s playing on extremely low volume on a tv screen on the wall, creating a very safe, comforting sense of nostalgia. She flicks through her lesson plan for tomorrow, half listening as Belle and Ariel debate the pros and cons of the new university intranet interface.
'So I had a look over my class list,' Belle takes a sip of her beer, 'and guess who's in my eight-thirty am Classic Lit 101 tute?'
'Oh my god, who? Tell us!' Ariel's eyes light up as though the answer might change her life.
'Alright, calm down, Ariel. It's not a celebrity or anything.' Belle chuckles and turns to Elsa, 'Your little sister.' She makes air-quotes with her fingers as she says the last word.
'Eight-thirty?' Elsa rolls her eyes. 'She's dreaming!'
'Not an early bird?'
'Nooo.'
'Shall I reserve a spot in my four-thirty?' Belle asks.
'Wait, wait,' Aurora holds her hands up, interrupting the shared laughter, 'I'm confused…'
Belle strokes a lock of golden hair behind her ear and says softly, 'You're always confused, honey.'
Aurora doesn't take any offence to this, apparently. She's far too deep in thought, with her eyebrows furrowed, copying Belle's air-quotes, 'Why did you do this, when you said her sister?' She turns to Elsa. 'Is she not really your sister? Am I missing something?'
Elsa lets out an exasperated sigh and shoots Belle a glare, although as much as she is annoyed, she appreciates that Belle hasn't shared her private family history with anyone. Realistically, she knows it's because she's not that interesting. Other people's lives don't revolve around her. But she has spent so many years in a town where nothing stays private for long, and secrets are guarded like gold. Her parents have drilled a level of paranoia into her, a sense of shame not so easily unburdened, even all these years later. All these miles away.
'Sorry.' Belle slaps her forehead, 'I didn't mean to…'
'It's fine.' Elsa says, and turns to Aurora, not really in the mood to share this very, very long story and all the feelings that come with it. 'It's just an inside joke.'
'Well… Can you explain it to me?'
Poor Aurora. She does get left out of a lot of jokes. It's not that she isn't smart, per say, she just isn't quite fast enough to keep up with Belle's wit. Or anybody's wit. She thinks it's a compliment to be called a trophy wife. She even got it printed on a mug.
'You had to be there, babe.' Belle says, kind but dismissive.
'It's not even that funny.' Elsa is keen to drop the topic. 'Don't worry about it. So, anyway, my supervisor wrote a new textbook, and it's basically exactly the same as the old textbook, and she's charging these poor kids, like, three hundred dollars…'
But Aurora won't let it go, apparently. She pouts dramatically, leaning back in her seat with her arms crossed, which Belle apparently finds adorable, and the three of them look at her expectantly.
'You guys always leave me out of jokes because you think I'm not smart.'
'No, babe,' Belle rubs her back, 'Nobody thinks you're not smart.'
But this is an ongoing sore spot for the couple, and the topic won't be dropped, so Elsa concocts a spontaneous backup plan. Deflect the situation with a joke. 'Okay, so the truth is, my parents and I were out at the park one day and we found this little baby…' Elsa has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing when she looks at Aurora and Ariel's wide, entranced eyes. Shit, she's actually kind of drunk. This is funnier than it should be. 'And we all thought she was really cute so we just decided to keep her.'
Ariel rolls her eyes and shakes her head with a smile, but Aurora has evidently taken it seriously. 'Oh my god!' She cries, 'Elsa, that's kidnapping!'
Belle loses it at this point, resting her head on her arms, laughter racking her body, and her girlfriend is not impressed. Aurora slaps her shoulder, horrified, 'I can't believe you think this is funny! That girl's poor parents have probably been looking for her all these years. Did you even check missing persons? Weren't you worried about the police finding out?'
Even Ariel is beginning to chuckle at this point. Elsa takes another sip of her cider, enjoying this rare moment of being the funny one. It's unusual, she's most often touted as being too serious, too cautious, a stickler for rules and regulations who ruins all the fun.
Eventually, Aurora begins to catch on that she's being taken for a ride once again. The poor, gullible thing. 'Oh, okay, it's a joke. What a relief! I was beginning to think you were all psychopaths, I mean who just steals a baby?'
'What have I walked into?' Jane returns from the bar with a big smile, carrying two fresh jugs, full to the brim, 'Who's stealing a baby, now?'
'Elsa stole a baby!' Ariel says brightly.
'Oh, Elsa!' Jane shakes her head and tut tuts playfully, 'I know we're hitting our thirties now but there's no need to panic and resort to desperate measures. We have plenty of time for all that.'
Everybody chuckles. Everybody but Elsa whose palms are beginning to feel clammy. She clasps them around the edge of her cool glass, resisting the urge to press it against her forehead.
'Actually, it was her parents.' Aurora is delighted to be included in the joke this time around.
'And now she's in my tute.' Belle takes a sip of her beer and sits back with a satisfied smile, as though that answers everything.
'Who's in your tute?' Jane asks, still catching up, placing the jugs carefully on the table.
'Elsa's sister.' Ariel shuffles over to make room in the booth, and Jane joins her with wide eyes, intrigued.
'You mean her sister.' Aurora makes air quotes on the last word. 'Who is also not a celebrity.'
'What- Why are we doing this?' Jane holds her hands up to copy the air quotes, 'Is she actually her sister or what?'
'No, she's a soviet spy.'
'She's fifty rats in a trench-coat'
'It could just be Elsa in a wig, trying to mess with you - Check to see if they're ever in the same place twice.'
Everybody laughs at this, because apparently the bar for sophisticated humour drops significantly even for a bunch of PhD students when this many bottles of wine have been sunk. Elsa doesn't laugh, though. She can't even keep up with who is saying what. Her heart is speeding up and her cider is swirling against the edges of the glass in her shaking hands. Why won't this topic die, already?
'Somebody left her on their parents' doorstep in a guitar case.'
'She's actually a changeling but the parents liked her better than the original child so they kept her.'
'Oh, oh!' Jane winks and laughs as she speaks, 'She's actually Elsa's baby that she had in high school, and her parents did that thing, where they raise it as their own and pretend they're sisters.'
Everybody laughs except Belle who just kind of grimaces, and Elsa of course, whose stomach jumps into her throat. She feels like she might throw up, and suddenly regrets drinking so much, or drinking anything at all. She tries to force a laugh, and instead makes the most pathetic sound, like a goat trying to talk. 'That would be so… crazy…'
The laughter dries up as eyes fall onto her, one by one. Elsa's heartbeat pounds in her ears. She feels so exposed, mortified, with all this attention. It was hard enough telling Belle, in private, at two am in the kitchen over several bottles of red. But this is just… This is something else.
'Oh, my goodness.' Jane holds her hand over her mouth, gasping, 'Wait, really?'
Elsa shrugs and looks down at her hands, gripping her drink, focusing in on the beads of precipitation on the tall glass of yellow liquid. Her lack of words and Belle's tentative hand on her shoulder is answer enough.
'I'm so sorry, I- I didn't mean…' Jane fumbles over her words in that classic way of hers, reaching out for Elsa's hands then changing her mind, pulling her hands back 'Well, I thought that kind of thing only happens in soap operas. I mean you just don't seem like, well, like the type-'
'Like a little slut?' Elsa regrets the words as soon as they tumble out of her mouth. It's a horribly inappropriate thing to say, even about herself, in a progressive space like this. Terribly un-feminist. She can't help it, though. It's not the kind of stigma one lets go of so easily. Her parents never let her. They warned her, for years, that this kind of secret would ruin all her prospects at a normal life. That it would make her practically untouchable, not to mention the burden for poor Anna, and how it would destroy her to find out she was created from such sin.
They're wrong, Elsa tells herself. It's not the nineteen-fifties. The world doesn't work how they think it does, in their little wacko fundamentalist bubble. But still, the indisputable authority of her father, the spiritual head of the household, lingers in her bones. His sharp voice in all its finality echoes in her heart.
'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' Belle holds up her hands, with sharp authority in her voice, as though they're a tute group full of silly students, 'Nobody is using the S word.'
'Um… Elsa just did, though?' Aurora says, but Belle ignores her, continuing.
'Especially not about a teenager.'
'Wait, wait, wait.' Ariel holds up her hands, silencing everyone. 'I thought I was the only mother in the group! Oh my goodness, this is so exciting, we have to swap birth stories! Melody was two weeks late and they had to induce me, I had seventeen stitches! Did you have an epidural? I swore I wasn't going to, I wanted to go all natural, but then I caved at the last minute-'
'No! enough!' Elsa slams her fist down on the sticky table. She didn't mean to snap, but she can't do this. Not now, maybe not ever. All this talk of stitches and epidurals, and the memories of blood and foetal heart monitors and fluorescent lights and adults looking down at her with a mixture of pity and disgust. 'I'm not a mother, Ariel. I never will be.'
It's poor Aurora who breaks the awkward silence, timidly, confused again, 'So… Elsa… didn't have a baby?'
'No, honey, she did.' Belle rubs her shoulder, whispering in clipped words.
'Oh…' Aurora smiles sweetly, 'Congratulations!'
That one little word is the one that breaks her. Because throughout all the nine months of vomiting, back pain, blinding terror, and then the sweat, blood and tears of bringing a new life into the world, and even once the perfect child was born, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, and a little button nose, not once did anyone tell Elsa, congratulations. She received no flowers, no cards, teddy-bears or pink balloons with it's a girl written on them, like she spied in other women's suites. Not even a simple "well done," or "good job, kid."
No, there was only quiet relief that it was finally over, as her parents lifted the strange, scrunched up creature from her chest just as soon as the nurse had placed her down there. They could all finally go back to being a normal family, no longer having to hide their daughter away like some kind of grotesque monster. A dirty, shameful secret.
Elsa never complained though. She was a good girl, throughout it all, beginning at her new school in a new town. Pretending like nothing ever happened. Getting on with it.
Tears prick at the corners of her eyes, but Elsa blinks them back and excuses herself. She wobbles a little, having drank more than she realised, apparently, and steps out into the bustle of the night. Feeling far too fragile for public transport, she calls herself an Uber and manages not to cry the whole way home. Only a few lonely tears drip down her cheek, and she wipes them away hastily.
'Are you alright, ma'am?' The driver asks in a thick accent she doesn't recognise.
'Yeah, thanks.' Elsa wipes her watery eyes as she exits the car, feeling her make-up smudge as she does. 'I um… I had a baby.'
The man's eyes look over her, confused, probably looking for said baby. Nonetheless, he says, 'Congratulations.'
Elsa stumbles into her house feeling oddly alone. Usually she likes living alone, but tonight it feels too quiet. The corners of her lounge and kitchen are dark and hollow, like something is missing. She pulls a box from under her bed, and flips through an album of yellowed photos.
Her tears fall with a plop onto the plastic coating, as she rubs her thumb over a particularly staged one of herself, in her school uniform, holding tiny Anna wrapped up tight like a burrito, with a shock of orange hair poking out the top.
Her mother's words play in her head like a broken record. Careful. What are you doing? Pass her over, now. The tight mouth and wavering voice. So afraid. So stern. As though Elsa was such a stupid, reckless, careless child that she couldn't even be trusted to put a bootie on a foot. As though she might just throw the baby out the window or something. Or worse, she might enjoy it too much. Might get too attached. Too bonded. And then they would all be in trouble.
How she longed with all her aching heart to bathe and wrap and feed and cuddle her child, to sing her to sleep, to keep her close, all the time. Instead she watched like a sullen dog watches the dinner table, wishing for scraps of people-food, until it is finally chastised and sent to bed hungry and alone. Unworthy and ashamed. She thinks of calling Anna, now, just to hear her sweet voice. But it's Friday night and the girl - an adult now, and god, that hurts - is probably out having fun with her cool new friends. So she doesn't. Instead she just goes to bed alone like a sullen dog.
