I've never posted feedbacks to reviews for this story yet, which is quite remiss of me. So here we go, and the update is below.
.here.x – Congrats on being the first! Thanks for the compliments; I'm very glad you enjoyed it. Not sure if you are aware of the reboot, but I hope you keep reading.
Waldengarver – Thank you for joining me here as well as on Weight of Snow. I always appreciate hearing from you.
Bonafide burrito – First off, cool name. Secondly, thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I'm glad you find the writing beautiful, even though the story is a bit deep. And my life is good, though still changing and uncertain as always. There's a raw sort of beauty in a life that is unknown and unplanned. I hope you have continued to read this story, and The Weight of Snow as well.
Aniark – Your supposed lack of coherence made me smile. I also like the world I've set up. The answers to all your questions will be coming, some sooner than later. As for your comments: yes, Tim is creepy, and yes, he'll show up again later. Erotic cooking, always a plus in my opinion. Glad you are enjoying the slow unpeeling of the mysteries surrounding Anna and Elsa. I haven't seen you back since the reboot, so I hope you find this story again.
Iwantaparrot – I saw a Canadian flag by your profile, are you a fellow Canuck? It means a lot to me that you started this story so long ago and have come back to it. This story had a lot of personal meaning to me as well, I worked out a lot of issues in writing it, and I really wanted a place to share it. I'm glad it's working out as an Elsanna fic. It just means so much to me when you say it's one of your favourites. I'm very glad I have rebooted it, and I will complete it. Thank you for reading, and thank you so much for commenting. I love that you are one of my biggest fans!
L1s44p – Thanks for taking a moment to leave a comment. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I hope you are back for the reboot.
Punky32 – I'm very glad to be back with this fic. I should have kept it up last year, but it was a killer of a year. Now that my life is almost sane again, it's nice to continue sharing this story. I hope you enjoy how it unfolds.
Frank Lester – Thanks so much for leaving reviews, it is so appreciated. Even just you saying that you are seriously loving it, it means a lot. When I was first creating this story (god, so many years ago), I loved the imagery of Anna dying on the beach in Elsa's arms. That image haunted me until I wrote the story behind it. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy what's to come.
Valanthe – So you really need to know what happened to Elsa's hand, and to her throat? Just for you, this update. You're going to find out today. I hope you enjoy it.
Kurrent – I'm very impressed with the thoroughness of the review you provided to me. I understand completely what you mentioned about pacing and wordiness – I've improved as a writer since I first worked on this, and I was tempted to do some serious rewriting before putting this online. I resisted, though, because I wanted to focus on Weight of Snow and my own original novel. So this went up with a basic rewrite to be Elsanna centric. The tightrope you mentioned between vocabulary and structure, I think it gets even cleaner as the story progresses. I'm so glad that you are here for the journey with me. Thanks again for leaving the review.
Faves and follows – Thanks for joining me for this story. Please drop me a review when you can!
~11~
Now (2009)
Haley had her first brush with the paranormal when she was eleven years old.
Andalusia, Alabama was an incredibly safe place to live when she was a child. Which meant it was stuffy, boring, and extremely uninteresting. Her parents hadn't felt the need to glamorize the town with stories of grand history; they were far more interested in politics and taxes. Thus, Haley learned about hauntings from Danny.
He was descended from the rich history of the Creek Indians. In the endless boring summer of her girlhood, Haley was often found tramping far and wide of Andalusia with him, searching for burial mounds and treasures of arrowheads and pottery. She was congratulated on whatever relics she happened to bring home, but as her fascination with the occult grew, her parents tried to stamp it out. They even refused to celebrate her birthday; they held it the day before Halloween, or the day after, but never the day of.
Whatever slim hope they had of making a normal girl out of her was squashed the day she encountered her first ghost.
Begging, borrowing, stealing, she and Danny had taken an assortment of beads and hairs and feathers and sands to one of the mounds they had discovered at nightfall (her oblivious parents thinking she was having a sleepover at Mia's place, Mia being the type of girl they had hoped Haley would become, with the long blonde hair and the polite manners and the general disposition of a tattle-teller and a workaholic). Working more by instinct and play than any real sense of witchcraft (Haley having read up as much as she could on hoodoo and other magics of folklore), she and Danny lit their candles, released the spell, and waited.
Haley remembered the anticipation she felt at that moment, that delicious fearsome dread, the prickling of the unseen world, so close to this one, yet apart. That feeling was the two percent shift, so imperceptible at the time, so delightfully scary; the feeling that would divert her entire life to a place few people discovered and even fewer believed existed at all.
Danny called spirits haints, and said his grandmother would tan his hide if she knew what they were doing. After all, they were her feathers that had been liberated for this attempt, and her beads.
That was the last night she ever saw Danny.
He was not up and murdered by a vengeful indigenous spirit, nor was he taken ill and died of consumption for spending the night outdoors. His grandmother yanked him out of school the very next day and moved them to Texas.
Mistakenly, by fluke and accident, they had conjured a warrior spirit, who had succumbed to the yellow fever that decimated the whole region, white and native alike, in 1841. He was an enormously restless shade, and his face still bore whatever battle markings had been made there before he died.
Haley had recovered her shattered wits first and did the only thing she could think of: she trashed the protective circle they had drawn with the sand, and stomped over all the ingredients for their playful spell. The shade was released, and slid into the ground from whence he came, still yelling at them in a dead language.
From that moment on, Haley was a believer.
She could have been brilliant in school. It was evident that both she and Patricia had inherited the towering intellects of their parents. Patricia was the elder of them, and she was some shining star come down from the heavens to grace the earth. She could do no wrong. She and Mia were like peas in a pod, all small and inglorious and sheltered from reality.
By the time she hit high school, Haley was vastly sick of being compared to her older sister. Though it was never spoken in words so concise, when her parents introduced them at whatever functions they went to in their mucking high society, it often felt like she was a worm in comparison.
Haley could remember the other moment, the other tiny shift of her life that led her to places unseen. It was when she had realized that her parents may have wished they had stopped at Patricia and gotten a dog instead of Haley.
Here's our daughter, Patricia.
Here's our other daughter, Patricia's sister.
A dog would never have given them the headaches that Haley did. With dogs came choke chains and leashes.
So Haley, fiery with indignation, crushed beneath all that Patricia-weight, went to the store and bought a studded collar. She picked up a bottle of liquid midnight dye, and strangely patterned hose. She sat in a chair at the mall and had her left ear pierced three more times. That night she dyed her hair, from its somewhat shy and pretty dark blonde to that virulent black. She showed up at school in a skirt and those stockings, with her black hair, wearing that studded dog collar on her neck.
From that moment on, her name was Haley, because it was shouted at her by her parents, and it was lifted in a pedantic and coddling manner by the school counsellor, and it was hissed at her by an indignant sister.
Haley knew she had found her soul-mate when the Internet arrived. She embraced it wholeheartedly for her last year of high school. Not wanting to be measured against Patricia in any manner, she held herself back, deigning to receive a general B average when she could have been a straight A student. She wouldn't have gone any lower than B's, or else risk her future.
Research into the occult called to her, so the moment she could leave Andalusia, she did. Up to a community college in Montgomery, where she breezed through a certificate in Library Sciences and Information Technology. It was there she met her first mentor, Dr. Steve. He was a veteran investigator of the paranormal; they swapped stories late into the night.
He had her heart in his fist, and the world was glorious, for he loved her just the way she was. He loved her tu-tone hair, and her earrings, and her tattoos. She took from him everything she could learn of folklores and magics; he took her virginity in return before rejecting her as callously as anyone ever had.
Not before introducing her to a fellow paranormal specialist, Gerda Maynard, at a local workshop for enthusiasts such as they. When Haley was able to rationalize her experience with Dr. Steve, how he had used her and yet led her to Gerda, she decided she got the better bargain.
Gerda had been halfway through her first pregnancy at the time, at the slightly alarming age of thirty seven. Haley, who could never really learn enough tact, had asked why Gerda had waited so long.
The woman showed remarkable patience for the verbal blunderings of a girl who wore a dog collar. She explained that she and Kai had long wanted children, but that it had never worked. This baby, conceived in vitro, would be the culmination of a marriage already more than a decade long.
They had hit it off immediately. Gerda offered more than safe mentorship; she also offered Haley a job.
"It's way up north, you know," Gerda said at the conclusion of the conference. "Have you ever been to Maine?"
It could have been the Arctic, or Colombia, or even the slums of Detroit, for all that Haley cared. What she wanted, now more than ever, was to rewrite her entire life, to start fresh, from scratch.
Bath. A city huddled on the Kennebec River and tasted of the sea. It had a name of water. It would be a baptism of a sorts; she would be buried in a metaphorical stream to a new existence.
Sometimes Haley pondered those two seemingly insignificant moments. Those moments that led her to Bath, to Anna, and finally to the scene that haunted her far more than that angry ghost.
Pale, sodden Anna. Dead by the fortune teller's hand, and Haley a witness to every shocking detail.
Leading her here and now, to Breakwater Bed and Breakfast on an October day, listening to a digital recording that chronicled the horrifying end of an innocent girl's life. Haley was more practical than either Anna or Elsa; she did not waste any time blaming or defending God for the acts of mankind. Not when there was so much to see beyond the physical world, so much more to believe in.
Haley sat in her room in the inn, and the door was closed. Elsa had come to her not long ago in her bathrobe, handing Haley the recorder. She had looked flushed yet exhausted; Haley did not have to guess or even wonder what Anna and Elsa had been doing after Anna screamed herself to life.
Some things just didn't change. If they did change, it wasn't often for the better.
Like her family. The eyes of her parents were so blank now, so childlike in their jail of a care home. The eyes of her sister, so accusing, so judgmental. Poor Elsa's eyes, drowning in sorrow, weighted with millstones.
The eyes of that long dead warrior, accusing her for summoning him from the unseen world.
Listening to the recording was horrendous, as it always was. Headphones were plugged in; Haley did not make a complete transcript of the recording, but she did log every word that had significance, every word that could be traced. On her computer was a database of such work done throughout nine long years, searching for the clues that would lead them to the fortune teller.
If only they had paid more attention in the beginning, but that was the bad time. Back then, they had all thought that it would be a swift and easy puzzle to fix, for how could someone like the fortune teller disappear so completely from the world?
The bad time, when Anna stayed dead beyond dawn.
Guilt was the millstone about Haley's own neck. No matter how often they protested otherwise, some part of Haley always thought this whole mess was her fault.
This unknown girl had died hard.
Words began to pulse, those important words, standing out in Anna's trembling narration.
Obsidian. Hooded. Mirror. Black ice. Cups. Marketplace of Souls. Corn. Cows. Kilimanjaro.
One listening was all she could expend now. It was too raw, too close. Anna and Elsa needed her to be strong. She was the only one not tethered to this place by duty. She was the only one who could go out into the world and save them.
Could guilt actually kill someone? Could it actually crush with its weight?
There was a soft knock on her door, so Haley put her headphones away, rubbing her eyes, tightened and rough. "Come in," she called.
Anna stepped into the room. She looked fragile and transparent, thin and supple as a reed in the wind. She had clothed herself for the day, in comfortable yoga pants and a t-shirt. Her hair had been brushed and pulled back, accenting her high and noble cheekbones.
From the moment Anna had walked into the library, that long ago September day, Haley had known her fate would be tied with hers. It had been knowledge, not mere intuition. Anna closed the door behind her and walked several steps into Haley's room, her arms tight about her waist.
Yet she looked at Haley with immense love in her eyes, a soft and worried sort of love, that friendship to withstand all disasters kind of love, and Haley felt herself begin to lose whatever slim control she had leashed on to her feelings.
Anna opened her arms and Haley stepped into them. The embrace was tender and heart wrenching. In her mind, Haley could still hear the agony in Anna's recorded voice as she had spoken of the girl's murder.
Into Anna's collarbone, the downy scent of her clothing, Haley asked, "Does it hurt to die, Anna?"
Anna stroked her hair and whispered, "Yes."
Then (1999)
A long to-do list yellowed in the barn where nobody had taken it down. In the years since it had been written, Elsa had looked at it a dozen or more times without really noticing it. It was the last thing her father had written with his own hands, and her broken family had since been loathe to do away with it, as useless as it was.
Floating near the middle of the page had been a handwritten reminder to replace the fence posts at the far south edge of the marsh. Alkaline salt from the bog had been creeping up those posts, rotting them from the inside out until they were only hollow mockeries of their former selves.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Elsa was dying.
The frost crept over her legs with the slow caress of a lover as the hours passed, and she tried not to imagine her toes turning black with bite. The body of her recently dead horse was cooling rapidly in the frosty air. Once upon a time, her name had been Snowbelle. That was before.
Now she was just a dead horse, an ornament, a thing; her front legs broken along with her neck, freezing mud splashed on her belly and legs.
It was New Years Eve.
Elsa wondered what else had been on that list that yellowed in the barn. She remembered her father's hope of finally keeping the deer away from their newly planted trees by wrapping them in chicken wire. The latch to the sheep pen had been broken when he had written the list; Kristoff had since repaired it.
It was usually at that point that Elsa forced her mind elsewhere; down other paths that would lead to somewhat happier places, softened memories, perhaps, of childhood and Christmas and her filly Snowbelle.
These were all things to think about as she lay as still as she could, enveloped nearly completely in the remnants of the barbed wire fence, a prettily wrapped Christmas thing. Try as she might, she could not stop thinking about the accident itself, meanly calculating all the ways in which she might have survived, had circumstances been only slightly different.
Might.
It had been an unusually warm day, yet Elsa had still dressed for the changeable Maine elements. She set out alone; Kristoff and Paddy had tooled off to Augusta for the day, and most likely for the night as well, leaving her at home with her silent mother. They would watch the Big Apple fall in Times Square, the chanting of the thousands of people celebrating the dawning of a new millennium (hopefully without the killer computer viruses that would cause the apocalypse), and her mother would cry and Elsa would think about the way Anna had put the ring on her hand.
She couldn't stay indoors.
The outdoors was too stunning, calling to her, so she told her mom she would be going for a ride. She saddled up Snowbelle and started on a familiar path; too familiar, it seems, for she had not been paying attention. An hour into her ride she had been thinking of something (someone!) else, and then several things happened at once.
She had needed to touch Snowbelle, to connect with her horse and the beauty of the moment, so she had taken off her gloves; she wrapped the reins in her left hand as she patted Snowbelle on the neck. She had been such a playful filly, who loved eating apples and carrots and the occasional snow cone. Her muzzle was the softest velvet imaginable; her whiskers tickled Elsa's chin.
A crow had burst quite suddenly from where it had been pecking at some carrion or another, and a raucous cry had erupted from its beak.
Snowbelle usually had more sense; she was a mare now, six years old, and not one to spook at a bird. But the crow had been too close, and too surprising in its protest.
Maybe God just wanted all her family dead.
They had plunged into the marsh, she had only one hand on the reins.
A submerged log, under the icy surface and hidden in muddy water.
And air, and sky, and rotted fence posts.
Barbed wire.
Her legs were numb.
Two of the posts had snapped when she was hurled into it by her suddenly dying horse; Elsa had been thrown as Snowbelle went down. Now strands of barbed wire pierced her neck. If she held herself very still, they wouldn't press even further into her skin, her jugular. The pain had receded only slightly from the firebrand of the accident itself. She could deal with the adhesions forming on her legs, the massive bruising. She had been thrown by a horse before.
Elsa wouldn't look at her left hand, even if she were able to. By the enormous gouts of pain, the most unmanning sort of pain that makes you want to just endlessly weep and beg for any sort of release, she had realized that the reins had claimed as prisoner the last two fingers of her left hand, wrapped as they had been in the rugged leather. They had been pulled entirely from their sockets until they hung by only blood vessels and ligaments. When the posts snapped as she was thrown into the fence, the barbed wire had whipped around her just once, just enough to truss her up like a spider's fly.
Really, what were the odds?
She could not call for help, or wiggle her freezing toes, or attempt in the barest way to escape. The rusted wire had pierced her clothing as well as her skin. To move would be to die, for the barb was in her neck.
She found she was glad that Snowbelle had not landed on her legs, breaking them like matchsticks. She was glad that the ice had not broken underneath her, to land her in freezing mud and water and condemn her to a much faster death.
Time in this marsh passed like a kidney stone, ruptured and violent.
She was glad that God lived, because it meant she could get good and angry at Him. It was apparently not enough to take her father away, and leave her mother wilted and forlorn. But what could Elsa possibly have done to merit a demise as painful as this?
After her father had died, she found only two ways of relieving her towering anguish and guilt - riding and writing. All her work before his untimely demise had been shallow and limiting; no sense of depth or wonder or even ordinary magic. It was quite unfair that she should discover her genius after his death. Her first two novels, written in a single year, had not been accepted, but her third one was. She didn't tell anyone what she had accomplished. No one could discover her. Her first name was never used, not in school, not at home, only in the most special of occasions. Asanna Elsa. Cannon was her mother's maiden name.
Her agent had been surprised at the use of a pen name, but had not questioned Elsa's motives.
Elsa only knew that she had to protect herself. Writing was equal to freedom; in anonymity, Elsa could express every part of her soul, shielded by her pen name. If anyone should ever discover her, they could use what they had learned of her to attack her, to render her useless and despairing. Besides, once she shared this one thing, could she keep everything else hidden?
Even the changing tide in her heart? Her longing for teal eyes and strawberry hair?
Guilt was arsenic in her veins, for which there was no antidote, so she stayed quiet.
Eight months ago she had submitted her second manuscript; it would be on bookshelves in March. Her current project was the most taxing thing she'd ever attempted; the hours of unending research and contemplation leading her on a journey of incredible taste and beauty. Now it would never be finished.
The sun was beginning to abandon her to the great maw of white night. There would be no rescue; Kristoff and Paddy weren't home, and her mother didn't ride anymore.
Elsa was scared.
She could see her toes, jutting out there, but she couldn't feel them. All she could feel was the moistness of her blood on her neck from where the barb cut her, and the all consuming fire of her left hand, mangled and raw. Try as she might to distil her world to no sensation at all, she could not deny four things: she was in agony, she was freezing to death, and she was bleeding to death, internally and externally.
The fourth she daren't mention, save as a shy whisper in the darkest and safest corner of her mind.
She wouldn't have a chance to see what kissing Anna felt like.
Eerie stillness, broken occasionally by the shriek of a crow. Elsa wondered if it was the same one, and wished she could rain curses upon it. But it was dangerous to breathe, let alone attempt to speak.
So many small decisions, putting her just here, just now.
She should have gone to Augusta with her brothers. She should have stayed indoors with her mother. She should have stayed clear of the marsh and its rotting posts.
She should have known what her father would do.
There had been only one other time in her life that Elsa wished she could turn back the clock and recapture those pivotal moments of time. (Orange, he didn't wear orange.) But today had been such a glorious day for a ride, so deceptively warm and clear. It would be a rite of passage, as Elsa attempted to lay down the burdens of her past which had constricted her as much as this rusted wire, and embrace the unwritten future of a new millennium.
Too long a hypocrite, afraid of the opinions of others, especially her brothers.
The brave may not live forever, but the timid do not live at all.
Now the millennium would fade, and she would fade with it.
An army of tears advanced up her throat and she tried to block them. Crying could shake her, and the barb could insinuate even further into her neck, lacerating her throat.
So as the sun began to fade, Elsa allowed herself to think of red-blonde hair, and tomato caprese salad, the sizzle of lamb and the smooth labneh. She had given Anna a Claddagh ring, and some part of her had hoped that Anna wouldn't have known the potential significance of the gift.
Some part of her had prayed for it to turn out exactly as it had.
A favourite memory now, to lock in the precious Anna-box of her mind, of the girl placing that ring on her right hand, the heart pointing to Elsa.
As a writer, Elsa knew that sometimes words weren't necessary at all to convey language. There had been a universe of meaning in that simple action.
A universe of future that would now never come to be. All those stars would die, and her potential happiness with Anna with them.
The sun continued to dip, and the mocking breeze began to steal whatever breath she could manage, mugging the last of her strength. The unfaithful sun, running away, was just an accomplice to this raping of her by the wind and cold. She would cry if she dared.
Elsa had waited too long to live her life the way she deserved to.
Here, in her last moments, Elsa allowed herself to think fulsomely on the woman who had completely captivated her heart, laying seige her body and soul with her divine attentions. The past two months had taken on an unknown magic, blissful surprises and delights awaiting her at random moments. It wasn't just the food that Anna prepared; it was also the expression on Anna's face when she thought Elsa wasn't looking. Elsa had begun to imagine conversations with Anna, ending with easy familiarity and tense expectations. In those conversations, she would discover why Anna sometimes looked so sad. She would discover why Anna was in Bath, and alone. She would find out why Anna's scent had slowly changed from hamburger grease to cloves and other spices.
Those treacherous tears began marching again, and her throat thickened in pain and remorse.
If God would let her plea for another chance, she would promise to do better this time. Not to hesitate, or convince herself that she was no good, unworthy of love and attention. If God would give her just one more chance, she wouldn't mess it up.
Pain was receding, and that was not a good sign. It meant her body was freezing. Dying.
Would Anna miss her? Would Anna cry upon hearing of her unfortunate demise, that strange fate that led Elsa to be encapsulated in a prison of barbed wire and snow? Would Anna ever be able to look at barbed wire again without knowing that Elsa had died in them?
She wished she had touched Anna's hair. She wished she had hugged her. She wanted to drink hot chocolate with her, and watch the boats competing with each other in majesty and grace on the Kennebec River.
And now, and only just now, a sliver of time away from death, did Elsa allow herself to imagine what it would feel like to kiss Anna. What ecstasy lived in those lips of hers, what gentle pressure would she use?
This desire, desire for a woman's lips, hidden so deeply and so long. For two months now Anna had begun the excavation, searching for this treasure that was Elsa and her love, a gift just waiting for the right archaeologist to discover and bring it to light.
Steam no longer rose from Snowbelle's body.
It was over. Why had she never kissed Anna when she had the chance? Could the fear of her family's reaction, or the perceived reaction of her God, have been the only thing that would have stopped her? Or was she still deluding herself that Anna's attentions were anything more than mere friendship?
The heart of the Claddagh ring. Open to Elsa.
Elsa had been a coward.
A new sound now, muzzy and indistinct in the fading of her consciousness. The slap of reins, the crunching of ice underfoot, the blowing and general exhaustion of another horse ridden mercilessly through the iron water and mud.
Her name was screamed. Her whole name.
It was hard to keep her eyes open, to keep breathing. From a distance, the advancing person looked like her father, come to her through the shadows of the unseen world.
It was God, in the form of Kristoff.
He didn't have wire cutters. From the corner of her eye she watched him fumble out a Swiss Army Knife, the one Paddy had just given him for Christmas. He looked like a man skating on the brink of panic. She wished she could tell him to calm down; if he jostled her the wrong way, the barb would cut deeper into her throat.
His fingers trembled. When he cut the wire near her throat, she convinced herself not to cough. It took time for the blade to cut through all the rusted wires.
When he was finally finished, he picked her up, inadvertently pressing her shattered and sundered hand, and Elsa fainted.
A/N: See you next time! I'm in Berlin for the next few days, so the update will be on Thursday. Give that review box some love!