A plot actually starts to happen here.
Anna's days are full to bursting. Job, classes, papers, and Elsa. It makes her head spin. She loves it.
She loves the way Elsa almost pouts at her in the mornings when she has to run out for a coffee and to an early lecture. It makes her stay in bed an extra ten minutes, pressing kisses along Elsa's jaw, until the girl pushes at her shoulders, breathily reminding her that they're going to be late.
It's scary sometimes, because Elsa has a retirement account and Anna still isn't sure what she's going to do after grad school. And it's absolutely terrifying when they have their first fight over whether to go out for the night. And again, when Anna wants to leave the window open to let a breeze in and Elsa accuses her of baking the apartment in sunlight. Anna shudders at the memory of it.
It's not like she's completely naïve about how relationships work. Problems happen, and Anna is ready for the big stuff. Big things Anna can handle.
Terminal illness? Summon unwavering loyalty and patience.
Sudden long-distance? Don't be stupidly jealous and call in the evenings.
Reappearance of an ex? Be respectful and polite. Get away at the first possible moment.
Cheating? Don't do it.
Elsa cheating? Bawl her eyes out. Identify what deep-seated issues are tearing apart their relationship. Address those. Rebuild trust.
Yes, Anna is quite prepared for the big stuff after two decades of rom-coms and TV dramas and real-life experience. It's the little things that scare her.
And Elsa can be unnervingly quiet. As much as she loves filling in the blanks of what Elsa is thinking (it makes her feel special), sometimes she wishes that Elsa would just spell things out for her, like: "Anna when you leave your shoes to the left of the door, it bothers me absurdly. Please leave them to the right." Which Anna could promptly do instead of having to deduce why Elsa is sulking and glaring at her boots.
But Anna finds a reserve of patience she never knew she had. These days Elsa doesn't hesitate, as though checking whether the situation is really appropriate for it, so much when she starts to say, "I love you." That bit of progress gives Anna the courage to take on the little things.
She shouldn't be here, at this nice restaurant downtown, clutching at her second glass of red wine like it's the last worthwhile thing in her life. Across from her, Anna beams, obviously thrilled to be on this date. The restaurant is a little fancier than usual, and Elsa knows that it's their one-year anniversary and that these things matter a lot to Anna, but she really shouldn't be here.
Earlier today, she nearly spilled a liter of 8-molar sodium hydroxide solution, much to her head's annoyance. Billy Collins wasn't a great comfort. Most of his poems about death were characteristically flippant. Maybe, on another day she would have been amused by the opinions of his dead dog, but her father wasn't a pet, or for that matter, a Pisces. And when she finally came across a solemn poem reflecting on his dead parents, the thought of her father, forever silent, sent the tears rushing to her ducts.
She coughed and hacked, savagely smothering the tears—she'd sworn never to cry over him again—and buried her nose in a disgruntled Marshmallow, convinced that her sniffling was a symptom of mild pet allergies rather than anything else.
Eventually, she remembered her date with Anna and hauled herself to the bathroom to rinse her face off. Now she's here, and she shouldn't be here, but Anna makes everything better, right?
Elsa tries to narrow her focus down to Anna's voice and her teal eyes and her playful smile with those movie-star teeth, but what's normally inevitable is currently impossible. Her mind drifts to the article she just read about CPR success rates for the elderly. 8% overall survival at one month. 3% of which are good outcomes. Another 3% chronic vegetative states. 2% somewhere in between.
He's not…doing good.
Kristoff called twice more that day. She let him leave another two messages.
"Hey." Anna's foot nudged hers under the table. "You awake, zombie-girl?"
Summoning a brave face, Elsa taps Anna's toes with the sole of her shoe. Years ago, she decided her family wasn't going to be part of her life anymore. She isn't going to let them ruin anything with Anna. "Barely."
"Long day?" Disappointment surfaces briefly, but disappears under a wave on concern. "We can make it a short night if you want."
Elsa nods. Anna's attentiveness sits like a ball in her throat.
"Wanna talk about it?"
"No," Elsa says shortly. The grief rises thick in her throat. She coughs to clear it. "There isn't really anything to talk about." Certainly not the father who disowned her four years ago.
For once, Anna is silent.
"Hello, my name is Hans, and I'll be your server tonight. Are you ladies ready to order yet?"
"No. Sorry."
"That's alright. I'll give you a few more minutes."
Elsa hides behind her menu, avoiding Anna's gaze. She can't string the words together. Pasta. Fettuccine. Scallops. Broiled. Marinara. Sirloin. Chops. Steamed.
A hand unravels her fingers from the edge of the menu. She looks up to see Anna linking their fingers together, worry and compassion in her eyes. Elsa knows she can't keep up this façade in the face of so much gentleness. She pulls back.
The waiter returns. She pleads for more time.
Anna isn't even looking at her own menu anymore. She just stares at Elsa as though a neon sign will suddenly flash across her forehead spelling out what's wrong and what to do about it.
It's not fair, Elsa knows, for her to expect Anna to make everything okay if she doesn't tell her anything. With a deep breath, she resolves to make it through the evening without having a meltdown. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.
The waiter arrives a third time, pencil raised over his order pad. Elsa can see the exasperation in his eyes when she turns helplessly to him.
"I'll have the short ribs," Anna says. "And she'll get the shrimp scampi."
And even though Elsa has been a loser all night, Anna flies through the side orders and sends Hans packing. Elsa can sense the feebleness of her own grateful smile.
"You're really tired."
"Yeah. But it's better here with you."
She even chews and swallows some of her food at Anna's insistence. Still listless, still distracted, but the prospect of spending the night snuggled up to Anna makes everything seem manageable. She struggles and mostly succeeds in centering herself around anecdotes from Anna's childhood.
Then, she knocks over a wine glass onto the white tablecloth.
The waiter, Hans, rushes over, swearing under his breath. "Fuck. Watch what you're doing, idiot. That's—" He catches himself, remembering his place, but it's more than enough to remind Elsa of the time her father gently reprimanded her for breaking a plate and to shatter her fragile composure.
Before she can help it, she's crying and apologizing incoherently, and all the diners have swiveled in their seats to stare at the scene she's caused, and somewhere, it feels very far away, Anna is simultaneously attempting to comfort her and snarl at Hans. It's Anna who whisks her away into a taxi, who tries to clear the hair, the tears and the mucous from her crumpled face, who is so heartbreakingly, astoundingly loyal that it only makes her cry harder.
And finally, huddled in the warmth of a squishy vinyl couch, it's Anna who finds the obvious remedy to all their troubles.
"Tell me what's wrong."
When Elsa shatters in the middle of the restaurant, Anna doesn't have time to think about why. She's too busy telling the waiter to shut the fuck up. Part of her want to punch, to storm after him and scream in his face, to find exact change for their meal so that he can't get a tip. But instead she just throws some twenties on the table and coaxes a trembling Elsa to her feet. Elsa doesn't need a hero, doesn't need her to squabble with the waiter and demand to see a manager. She needs Anna to stay by her side, to help her into a taxi, and rub her back while whispering empty reassurances in her ear.
"Do you want to go home or to my place?" she tries to ask.
But Elsa is mostly incoherent, and Anna decides she better just bring Elsa home with her.
It's in the taxi that Anna allows herself to think, and thinking is dangerous. Imagination has always been Anna's gift and her downfall. What happened? Did Elsa lose her job? Get into an argument with someone? Anna doesn't think she's done anything to upset Elsa. Did something else happen to her?
I went to the doctor's office, and there was …
There was this guy who wouldn't leave me alone…
Shaking her head clear, she tangles her fingers in Elsa's hair. Elsa keeps apologizing into her shirt. Anna hushes her, trying to clean her face with the cloth. Is Elsa feeling guilty about something bigger than Anna's blouse? Suddenly she remembers how weirdly emotional Rapunzel had been on the night of their two-year anniversary when Anna presented her with a bouquet of white roses. About a month later, she noticed that Flynn was coming around to their apartment a lot more often.
That thought makes Anna's brain freeze, and she deliberately forces herself to quash any more conspiracy theories.
They leak through anyways. What if Elsa wants to break up with her?
Anna, I just don't think this going to work out anymore. It's not you. It's me.
She wonders why people use that line in movies anymore. Everyone can see it coming.
The cab driver glances at them through the rearview mirror. Anna glares. He coughs. "You need a tissue or anything?"
Anna regrets scowling at him and accepts the tissues, her right arm wrapped in a helplessly protective band around Elsa. Prying the tear-streaked face out of her shoulder, she dabs at it gently. Elsa shudders and gathers herself, taking the tissue from Anna's hands and wiping herself off. She leans against the backseat of the cab and stares out the window.
It gives Anna a lot of time to think.
So when Elsa confesses, in her splintered little girl voice, that her father is dying, Anna almost laughs with relief. But she doesn't, because Elsa hurt is enough to crush the humor in any situation. Instead she sets about being a good significant other. Just like the ones she's always watched playing house in the theaters.
Elsa hasn't seen her family in nearly four years. Not since that final year of college when she came clean about what she'd been doing late at night with her "best friend." The resulting fallout was rather spectacular. Her parents, old-school Midwestern Lutherans, had been shocked to say the least. Somewhere in the midst of all yelling and crying, her father had reminded her, quite calmly and blatantly, that he held the purse strings. Furious, humiliated, and powerless, but blazing with righteous indignation, Elsa had told him in an uncharacteristically graphic fashion what he could do with his money.
Then she bolted, got her first job and scraped together enough cash for her last semester of college. She scrapped her plans for medical school, determined to get on firm, sovereign footing as soon as possible. A fifth year master's program. A professor who used to work in Pfizer who knew a guy who knew an important guy who was willing to hire her. She hadn't looked back since.
Sure little-brother-Kristoff tried to call on the holidays. At first she'd even picked up. But she grew quickly impatient with his insistence that she come home and work things out. Selfishly, she'd demanded that he be "on her side" all the way or not at all.
They rarely speak anymore. She doesn't even know what his major was, though she assumes that he's graduated by now.
Her mother had tried calling too, but Elsa refused to pick up. They'd said too much that was a little too true the night of her coming out, and Elsa was done. She didn't have the energy to repair what broken. She wanted to just leave it behind. So she did.
But somehow her mother keeps finding her, wherever she moves, keeps sending her postcards and birthday presents. It's frustrating, guilt-inducing and comforting all at once.
Elsa is mostly feeling the guilt right now.
Over the phone, her brother sounds tired, relieved, and only slightly peeved. He agrees to pick her up from the airport at noon. Despite the fact that Elsa is perfectly capable of getting to the airport on her own, Anna gets up at four to accompany her.
"Moral support," Anna insists.
Elsa was never the type to believe in the value of moral support, but she can't deny how much secure she feels with the weight of Anna's skull resting against her shoulder on the subway.
"Oh God, I'm sorry," she exclaims once she wakes up enough to notice they've arrived.
"What?" Elsa can't believe her ears. She's the one who ruined Anna's dinner (and probably her entire weekend) with her melodramatics and her inability to cope in basic human relationships, yet here Anna is, apologizing to her.
"I was supposed to be comforting you, not drooling on your shoulder."
The statement is so sweet and so bashful that Elsa wants to cry and tell Anna how wonderful she's been. She wants to confess how guilt-ridden she feels for making Anna wake up early when the girl has classes and work, for letting her situation with her family devolve into something she can't handle on her own, for being so darn aloof.
She's cried enough.
Instead she just throws her arms around her girlfriend's shoulders and mumbles something that's supposed to be "I love you," and Anna looks at her like Elsa's just given her a kitten.
Anna feeds the cat.
That's her only real reason for being in Elsa's apartment alone, but afterwards she makes a beeline for the bed and collapses. Even though they've been dating for more than a year now, it's strange to be here without Elsa, without her shadow dancing from the bathroom, the sound of those god-awful nutrition bars that pass for her breakfast being unwrapped, her weight and her limbs on the bed next to Anna.
"Mrreow?"
Marshmallow hops cheerfully onto the bedspread. "Hey buddy. How are you?"
The mattress sinks as the cat pads cautiously around Anna's body, sniffing her fingers before turning away distastefully.
"Do you remember the first time I met you? You were on a leash. I know, I know. You probably want to forget that experience. But it was the first time I actually talked to Elsa too. And I thought she was going to be a really uptight, hyper-responsible, perfection-obsessed automaton, but then she just walked up dragging her cat on a leash, and I was totally floored, and I almost adopted a kitten that looked kind of like you—except that he had, like, brown patches in certain places and his hair was shorter. I even had a name picked out, and then I realized how ridiculous I was being."
Briefly, Anna considers what Elsa might say if she could see her lying on her bed, talking to her cat. She can't help it. She likes talking to people…animals…animate and inanimate objects.
As always, imagining Elsa is an enormous rabbit hole. What's Elsa's family like? Anna knows that Elsa's close with them anymore—which, in all honesty, isn't that unusual. Anna is lucky that her parents only took about a week to warm up to the idea of their daughter being gay when she came out in high school.
Absentmindedly, she rubs Marshmallow behind his ears, which is all it takes for him to forgive her offensive-smelling hands and push his face against her palm.
Where had Elsa said they lived? Minnesota? Were they bible-toting funeral picketers? Were they evil and abusive? Like the MacClays? Were they hillbillies? Could one technically be a hillbilly without being from southern Appalachia? Should Anna be preparing a rescue squad in case they sink they sink their homophobic claws into Elsa and never let her go?
The scene takes shape in Anna's mind before she can clamp down on it. Anna showing up in a pickup truck in…what was the name of that town? Something with a "w"? Anyways, Anna roaring into town on a pickup truck, demanding that they let Elsa go. And then a gunfight at high noon. And maybe a celebratory bonfire.
Anna can't help it if she has an active imagination.
"You'll be my main man, right, Marshmallow?"
His pink nose demands more petting and less talking.
The world starts to suck again immediately after Anna leaves. Elsa gets over it. She boards the plane. She exits the plane. She finds her younger brother waiting in the pickup area.
On the way to the hospital, they talk about their father's condition in hushed voices.
"He's only 57. How could he have a heart attack this bad?" Elsa demands. "He's not obese or at least he wasn't when…"
Kristoff peers at her from the corner of his eyes. "He hasn't been doing so well the last two years."
Elsa doesn't ask for details. Kristoff doesn't volunteer them.
He finally adds, "He's on a ventilator and an IV and everything. They don't think he's ever going to really recover. We would have taken him off, but you…we wanted to wait for you."
"Thanks," Elsa mumbles as if it's an appropriate response for the situation.
The hospital room is quiet until their mother breaks out in tears and wraps her arms around her. For a moment, Elsa doesn't know how to respond, but before she can come to a logical decision, the tears are pouring down her face again.
"Honey…" her mother whispers, but she doesn't finish the sentence.
"Can I see him?"
"Yes, of course, dear." A pause. A swallow. "We-we've missed you. You look so different."
Elsa struggles through a sad smile, shaken by how much older her mother looks. The wrinkles are deeper. Her skin is starting to sag a bit at the corners of her jaw.
It's nothing compared to her father. When she last saw him, he was lean and fit, graying slightly, but nothing if not the stern, capable man of Elsa's childhood. He's bald now. What's left of his once carefully groomed hair is lank on the pillow. His face is jowly. The ventilator inflates and deflates his mountainous chest like a rubber balloon. Elsa's afraid to touch him.
She reaches for his hand anyways. Here's the man who taught her that talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words and don't ever let anyone compromise you, Elsa, be proud of yourself. They share more than blond hair and pale skin. It's his inflexible pride that Elsa dresses herself in every morning, his self-sacrificing stoicism that colors her sense of honor, his silence in the face of indignity that taught her what it meant to be strong.
Elsa loves him. It wasn't something they ever said much in her family. In fact, Elsa always felt a little anxious when it was voiced aloud because that meant that something monumental was on the brink of occurrence. But it was irrefutably there.
Like when Elsa won the state science fair and her father spent hours talking to her about microbial infections over ice cream at the Chatterbox Cafe. Or when Kristoff and her mother burst through the front door, arms loaded with toilet paper and napkins, laughing all over themselves, because of the huge sale at Dock Mart. Or when her father swung her mother round and round, dancing at the church social. And Elsa knows she sold them all short when she stopped answering their phone calls, when she decided that they couldn't possibly understand what she was going through, when she deemed their love fraudulent and tyrannical.
They tried to call her back to them, but talk was cheap, and Elsa couldn't stand the idea of being bought.
"He wanted you to be a doctor, like him. It upset horribly him when he heard you weren't going to medical school," her mother mentions softly.
"Not like I did it to tick him off."
"You didn't?" The surprise in her mother's voice cuts like a knife.
"Do you think she ever had a crush on someone? You know, as a teenager?"
"What?" Merida blinks at Anna in utter confusion.
"Elsa. Do you think she had a crush in high school?" Anna clarifies, pensively swirling her melting ice cream sundae around and around. The image of Elsa ducking behind her locker door to hide a blush is too precious to surrender, but the idea that those cheeks might color for some faceless old flame who could possibly be talking to Elsa right that second is so palpable it ruins Anna's appetite.
Shrugging, Merida sips at her lemonade. "Probably. Why?"
"Do you think she'll see her while she's back there?"
"It seems highly unlikely unless the crush is living at home. Maybe she'll see the girl's parents."
"Elsa hasn't called me yet."
Merida resists the urge to probe deeper into Anna's psyche…for all of ten seconds. "Are you worried that Elsa is going to leave you for a former Midwestern high school cheerleader?"
Anna makes a noise. She refuses to classify said noise as affirmative or negative. People are allowed to make noises, right?
"What movie were you watching last night?"
"Nothing."
"Right."
Why does Merida have to sound so skeptical?
"Why don't you trust her?"
Taken aback, Anna drops her spoon. "I trust her. Of course I trust her."
"Then why don't you trust this relationship?"
"Of course I trust this relationship," Anna insists indignantly. "Wait. What does that even mean?"
"Then why are you so worried?"
"I'm not worried."
"Yes, you are. Look, Anna, if you want this relationship to work, you have accept that you will aren't going to spend every waking moment of your lives joined at the hip—despite all your best efforts to chain Elsa to you and bring her in for show and tell."
"Show and tell?"
"You practically posed her in front of my parents."
"Your parents can be intimidating."
"Whatever. We're off topic. The point is you need to stop worrying about Elsa and start helping me figure out how to attach a piñata to Bertha's bannister.
"Duct tape. And how can I not worry? She hasn't called."
"Her father's sick, Anna!" Merida interjects. "You're not the only person in her life that matters. It's not like your love story is the only plotline in her life. She's a full person. She has a family, work, friends. You're just a part of it. I know you want to be the biggest part. I know you get caught up in the epic romance, but ultimately, you have to acknowledge that there are other things that both of you need to deal with—for instance, planning Bertha's bewildering birthday bash."
"You're never allowed to use alliteration again."
"Well, come stop me, Authoritarian Anna, if you can quit second-guessing your girlfriend long enough to do anything else. God, are you really worried that Elsa is cheating on you?"
"No." Anna deflates dramatically. She doesn't want Elsa to become the object of her paranoia. "Well. I would get it, you know. High school crushes are difficult to let go of."
"Don't drag Rapunzel into this," Merida admonishes. "The only way Elsa is going to turn into Rapunzel is if you treat her like she is."
"It's not the cheating I'm scared of," Anna confesses. "It's everything else. Like when we get into an argument about the dishes. I just think that maybe we're fundamentally incompatible and nothing we do can really fix that, and regardless of whether there's a Flynn involved—wait, would you be Flynn now?—anyways maybe we're doomed to a long, slow spiral of death where neither of us is willing to acknowledge how far things have actually deteriorated until a catastrophic event forces us to realize that we've come to despise each other."
"Again, I ask. What movie were you watching last night?"
Once Anna starts jabbering, she can't stop. "I wasn't—I'm just worried. Because sometimes Elsa just doesn't say anything. And I need her to say something, so I can figure out what's going on. Usually I can pull it out of her, and I don't mind teasing it out of her. But right now, she's out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm dying to call her, but I don't want to intrude. Sometimes I just want her to be the one to call me so I can be sure that yes, she wants this as much as I do and that no, I'm not deluding myself into thinking we're soulmates when really she doesn't feel the same way. "
"She'll call."
"Elsa!"
Anna's voice from the other end of the line drags the smile out of the sludgy depths of Elsa's lips.
"Hey." She winces at the chasm her tired greeting leaves. "How are you?" she tries, hoping that she at least sounds halfway human.
"I'm good. Everything is well. I mean—the other way around. You know what I mean," Anna babbles. Elsa leans into that burble of noise, eyes drifting closed. "How are you?"
"Tired."
"Everything's alright though? I don't have to save you from crazy hillbillies, do I?"
"Hillbillies? Anna, I'm from the Minnesota, not West Virginia." Lying in her childhood bedroom, clutching the phone to her ear, chuckling softly so she won't have to introduce her girlfriend to her family over the phone, Elsa feels like she's in high school again. Except she never had a girlfriend—or a boyfriend—in high school.
It was weird to walk into her parents'…her mother's house. No, it wasn't weird at first. It was oddly natural. Without even thinking about it, she kicked off her shoes and stacked them in the rack, setting her bag down in the foyer like she'd just returned from a long trip. She was fully prepared to slog up the stairs and slump on her twin mattress.
"Would you like some coffee or tea?"
That's all it took to jolt her back into reality, her mother asking her whether she wanted a drink, like Elsa was some sort of guest.
"When are you coming home?" Anna asks, reminding Elsa that yes, she has a home, and it's not this place, no matter how familiar the sky blue bed sheets are against her back.
"I'm going to stay for the funeral. It's in a few days. They were…already preparing for it…before I got here.
"Oh. Wait—is he? Did your father—"
"We let him go," Elsa says before Anna can trip over her own tongue anymore. Her fingers dig into the bedspread.
"I'm sorry. Are you okay?"
Reflexively, Elsa snaps, "Of course."
Silence on the other end.
She groans to herself. Even now that her father lying in some corner of the funeral home, Elsa can't bury the defensive rage that bubbles up into her throat at any mention of her relationship with him.
"I'm sorry. I'm just tired."
"It's okay." Anna is unusually quiet. "I miss you."
"You too." Now Elsa should ask something like "How's Marshmallow?" or "Is work okay?", but the mere idea of summoning more words up from the swamp in her chest is exhausting. "I have to go."
"Okay. Bye."
"Bye."
"I love you."
Of course Elsa should have expected it, but the simple statement startles her so much, she doesn't react for another thirty seconds, and by then she's already hung up.
She stares stupidly at her phone for several minutes, wondering if she should call Anna back again and make it count.
The next (and last) chapter is basically written. I just have to go over it to make sure it doesn't suck. Somehow is nice little one-shot turned into a forty+ page story. I had an entire arc planned out about Elsa's ex-girlfriend, but it was already so long, and I decided enough with the ex-girlfriend drama. Anna and Rapunzel are plenty. It might turn into one-shot fodder. I swear that would stay a one shot.
I apologize for any and all errors. I got about five hours of sleep (I'm one of those people who needs eight) and I just spent the first half of my morning fixing my computer.