Elsa floated down the hallway like a cloud, only brushing the floor. Every part of her was buoyed by the pure rapture of being married. Married! The word sent bells ringing in her heart. She turned and smiled at her new husband - husband! Such a lovely word - and her heart nearly burst with love and pride and victory.
He paced next to her, silent and strong, and she twined her fingers in his, binding them together. They walked side-by-side through a dream under the flicking candles that hung above them like stars in the sky. The ancient castle was transformed by light and joy to a fairy palace, and Elsa's fingers tightened around her husband's at the thought. They would rule here together, king and queen of the hidden world.
The door to their chambers was strong and old, but Rudolf pushed it open without effort. Elsa hung back when he stepped forward, and smiled when he glanced behind. She made one gesture, a graceful flip of her hand down her body, and bowed her head. She waited.
He looked at her, his gaze weighing on her like heavy silk, and for a moment doubt crept into her heart. Had he not understood? But then she felt his arms under her knees, behind her back, and her laughter mixed with the bells in her heart as he carried her across the threshold.
Elsa kept her arms around his neck when he lowered her to the floor so gently her skirts barely rustled. She pressed her face to him, feeling his warmth on her cheek, his hair on her face. She pressed a single kiss to the mighty column of his neck and withdrew, still laughing like a girl.
He looked at her with the same expression he'd worn all night, then walked to his side of the bed without a word.
Elsa fluttered around the room, touching each precious object like a butterfly gathering nectar, telling Rudolf all the history of their lovely castle. This was a painting of her ancestor. Her great-grandfather had commissioned these mirrors with frames of delicate floral silverwork. The bed was from the Empire, designed by a famous artist...she'd have to ask her father who. The endtable with the legs of gilt caryatids was from the 18th century, and the inlaid design on the top was formed of every kind of marble. Wasn't it beautiful? Wasn't it all beautiful?
Through it all, Rudolf said nothing. Every time she glanced at him - shyly, from under her lashes, boldly, with a glad heart, invitingly, with lips arranged - he sat in the same position, unmoving. He never looked up.
Elsa paused, fingers barely brushing her lips in a gesture she knew would make her look fragile and worthy of protection. Doubt had once more wormed its way into her heart.
"Rudolf?" she called, sounding girlish and hesitant and irresistible.
He grunted in reply.
She glided over to him with small steps and laid her hand on his shoulder with the delicate touch of a spider's web. His eyes shifted to it, then her. "Would you help me out of my dress?" she entreated, fingers just barely brushing the edge of his collar.
He raised his head and his gaze caught her like gravity. They stood there, frozen, until at long last he levered himself to his feet. She turned around in a perfectly-timed swirl of her skirts, lifted her veil, and bared her neck for him. Her breath caught as she felt the warmth of his fingers brush the topmost knob of her spine.
The touch continued downward, each movement simple and precise, and each one made Elsa's stomach drop further. Rudolf finished at the base of her spine and stepped away without another word or gesture. "My hair," begged Elsa impulsively, "can- can you get my hair too?"
A moment that spanned heartbeats, and then Rudolf reached for her veil. Elsa's breath left her in a trembling sigh. He placed the delicate, silver-floss confection of lace in her waiting hands, and she stared at it as he moved on to her hairpins. He pulled them out carefully, neatly, each one a dagger sliding from her heart and letting her blood flow as free as her hair.
Simple. Careful. Neat. Precise. Her new husband's hands were as cold and professional as a servant's.
A curtain of waving purple fell blurred around her and she blinked, her eyelashes fluttering in a movement that was less coquettish than desperate. She couldn't cry. Her makeup would run. She couldn't cry.
Rudolf's hand tapped her elbow and she looked automatically, only to see him holding out a fistful of pins. He put them into her hand without a word, the bobbypins and long, jeweled hairpins clattering together in a tiny, tinkling song.
Elsa dropped them on the floor.
"Don't those go somewhere?" Rudolf asked, back to his position on the bed. It was as if he had never moved at all.
Her veil followed, then the dress in a rustling waterfall of white silk. Elsa raised her head and half-glared at her husband, her back as straight and proud as when she had accepted his halting, stammering proposal. "The servants will get it," she said.
"The servants won't be here until tomorrow," he said without varying his tone. "I heard it was your grandmother's."
Elsa felt her lips narrow, her eyes grow hot - but it had been. It was impossible to get such finery anymore, not in Europe. Silk wrinkled so easily. She stooped, picked up the dress and the veil and the jeweled pins, hands shaking with humiliation, and placed them on the little marble table with the cunningly inlaid pattern.
She took a long, deep breath, and armored her heart for war. Rudolf was /hers/. She had won him fairly, the prize his love her rightful reward for victory on the battlefield of women. They had sworn to each other in front of her family, the press, and God. She had already won. She just had to make him see it.
She turned around with a sweet, girlish smile and glided back to the bed where her husband sat as if he had been there since the castle was built. She laid her hands on his shoulders, gentle, like the laying an enchantment, and leaned forward until she could see her breath stir his hair. "Rudolf," she whispered, "my husband."
He slowly raised his head once more, as he always did when she called, and his eyes trapped her as strongly as when she had first seen them. The tie between them was a bond as strong as blood, a bond that couldn't be broken. Elsa's smile widened. She leaned further down, letting her slip's straps slide off her shoulders.
"Am I not beautiful?" she said with voice as soft as spring.
"You are," he replied.
She stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. "The most beautiful woman in the world?"
His gaze stayed fixed. "I haven't seen every woman in the world."
"But the most beautiful of the ones you have seen?" she pouted, not put off by his hairsplitting.
"I suppose."
She took another step closer, sliding between his knees. "Am I not accomplished? I can sing-"
"Like a bird," he agreed.
"-dance-"
"Like a fairy."
"-and play the piano," she finished, so close now his chin rested just below her breasts. His beard pricked the delicate skin of her stomach, and she thrilled at it.
"You can do all those things," Rudolf said, his voice rumbling through Elsa's body.
"And," she said, relishing each word of her finishing blow, "I'm rich. All of this," she swept her arm out to envelop the castle, the grounds, the stocks and bonds, the entire empire of the Stroheims, "will be mine. Ours." She pushed at his shoulders and he fell back on the bed; she lifted herself to lay on top of him face to face, her delicate, sculpted hands curling around his head, her long, smooth legs wrapped around his waist, clinging to her husband like a hunter's snare. "It's wonderful, isn't it? The most perfect woman in the world and she's yours, darling, my husband, all yours."
Rudolf made no reply. He just looked up at her, his gaze a shackle around her heart.
No. Not at her. Past her. Past the castle, past the grounds, past everything the Stroheim family held.
The only one her husband saw was that woman.
The armour around Elsa's heart, eaten by doubt, finally crumbled under a cold, rushing tide of rage.
"Why?" Elsa choked, the rage overflowing to fall as tears from her eyes, "Why her? She's nothing compared to me! I'm rich, beautiful, accomplished - why do you still love her?"
Her tears dripped on Rudolf's face, tracking black lines down his cheeks. He silently lifted a hand to brush her hair back behind her ear, but nothing more. His gaze still went right through her like she wasn't even there.
It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. She had been the one to pick Rudolf out of the crowd that day. She had been the one to point him out to her father, saying "he's going to win, I know it". And she had been right! Her Rudolf had conquered like a hero from a fairy tale, defeating all the other fighters to win the hand of the beautiful princess. But when she'd come out to offer her hand in marriage, he was already lifting another woman to the stage. A woman with a plain hairstyle and minimal makeup, in dowdy, working clothes and holding a squirming baby. And her Rudolf had looked at that woman like he should've been looking at Elsa!
The cold humiliation had etched itself into her heart under the bright stagelights, and on that day, in that very moment, Elsa had sworn that she'd have her hero. No matter what it took.
And she had! She'd won! She'd bent the power of the Stroheim family to her will, and that other woman had given in! Maria Howard had collapsed into filthy, trembling fear when Elsa had brought her assassins to bear; all she could do was shake and cling to her baby when Elsa's man had gently placed the gun to her forehead. Elsa had been there. Elsa had watched. And when Rudolf came rushing in, huge and strong and powerful, Maria had withdrawn. She'd knelt there on the bare linoleum floor and begged for a divorce. Elsa had won her marriage proposal from Rudolf's own lips that very moment.
So why was her husband still looking past her to Maria Howard? It was the same way he'd looked at the tournament and at her victory: gazing right past Elsa to the pathetic, common woman she'd defeated!
"Why?" Elsa asked again, voice cracking and horrible. "She- she works! Not even for much money! You were trapped in that awful little flat- and she, she doesn't know anyone, or have any manners, or- And, and you married me!"
"I did," Rudolf agreed, calm and flat as ever. He hadn't raised his voice all evening. "You have my hand, and my body, Elsa. But a man's heart remains his own." And it will never be yours went unspoken, but she could hear it all the same.
Elsa collapsed to his chest, tears flowing without restraint. He didn't raise one hand to comfort her.
"I should write a new Fatal Fury fanfic, I haven't done that for awhile. And it should definitely be about characters no one has heard of, using canon that was only mentioned in an untranslated book from the 90s."
I make the best decisions.
Anyway yes, the situation described in this fic, with Elsa deciding she was going to threaten a married couple until they divorced and the man agreed to marry her, is accurate according to The Mysteries of Fatal Fury, a book written by the Southtown Neighborhood Association and the Gamest Editorial Department. Elsa turns to alcohol when she realises Rudolf will never love her and after she drinks herself to death Wolfgang kills his dad. Then you all know what happens to Geese.
I could not find a single source for "von Stroheim" in any of my books. She's just Elsa Stroheim, and after marriage her name presumably changes to Elsa Krauser.
Title shamelessly borrowed from the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin because god I'm lazy.