Chapter seven

To see her face

Elsa gripped the wheel tightly at 10 and 2, and drove down the suburban road that would take them into town. "So, what would you like to do?" she asked.

Anna shrugged. "We could go to the mall," she suggested.

"That sounds good," Elsa said. She allowed her laser focus to slip only as they came to a stop at the light, waiting patiently for the zebras to cross. "We could stay there for 4 hours and 28.37 minutes, then go home for dinner."

"Or we could eat at the food court," Anna pointed out.

"Too risky," Elsa said. "Higher chance to get listeria." She took a left as the light turned green, gently tugging on the string that bound her wrist to Anna's.

"I guess," Anna said. "They have good Chinese food, though."

"Really?" Elsa asked. "I thought you liked the sub house better."

"Never really tried it before," Anna said. "But once I did, I realized-"

POW

Anna felt a jolt, to the side this time instead of from the front, and the world exploded in front of her. The left side of the car crumpled inward like a Dixie cup, and Anna was pitched through the windshield. Her face flew towards the pavement, and she blacked out.

When she regained consciousness, she felt no pain, but blood filled her vision. She looked back at the car, and her blood ran cold.

"No," she gasped. "No!"

Elsa was slumped over what was left of the dashboard, her beautiful body twisted and broken just like Mom's had been. She was twitching erratically, and her face was a pale white.

"Elsa!" Anna screamed at the top of her lungs. She ran towards her sister, but somehow grew no closer to her.

Elsa raised her head slowly, laboriously. She made eye contact with Anna, and attempted a smile. "An…na?" she rasped. She looked down at the carnage that was the rest of her body. "Oh," she said. Her head began to droop.

"Stay with me!" Anna called, tears in her eyes. She was in a full sprint, but the broken car seemed to be moving further away from her. "You said you'd stay this time! You can't do this!"

"Sor…ry," Elsa mumbled, her voice growing quieter as she faded into the void. "My…fault…"

Anna's eyes shot open. She gripped her sweat-soaked sheets with one hand, while the other clutched at her heart, beating like an outboard motor.

It was a dream. Thank fuck, it was a dream.

She sat bolt upright and swiveled her head around like an owl, hoping to more swiftly dispel her nightmare by affirming her current reality.

Yep, this is reality, all right. Note the carefully assembled piles of garbage and unwashed laundry. I wouldn't dream those up, and if this was another nightmare, all my rejection letters would be here too. So I must be awake.

One hand remained over her chest, feeling her racing heartbeat begin to slow, then stabilize at a tempo that was still assuredly above average. Her shallow breaths deepened, and she worked to push that last mental image from her mind.

Yet as she laid her head back upon the pillow, the second she closed her eyes, she saw it again – Elsa, slumped over, broken and bloody. She had to open them immediately.

Of course, it was obvious now that it had just been a nightmare, what with the zebras and the red string and everything else. But that didn't make the image of her sister, the last real family she had, breathing her last, any less vivid. Even the knowledge that she was sleeping a mere twelve feet away from her at this very moment couldn't overwrite it in her mind's eye. This wasn't the first nightmare of this type she'd had – she knew she had at least an hour or two of lying in a cold sweat ahead of her.

But this time, you're not lying in a hospital bed, and Elsa is right next to you. You want to prove to yourself that she's okay, just go over there and see it with your own eyes.

It was a silly idea just on the face of it, and she was well aware of this. The idea of explaining to Elsa that she'd just come over to see her face because she'd had a bad dream made her blush just thinking of it. But embarrassment was a preferable emotion to the one she was feeling right now. Elsa could very well be having similar nightmares to her - she'd understand. In any case, she was surely asleep right now, making any question about explaining her motives moot. If she was covert about it, she could slip in and out with Elsa being none the wiser.

She kicked off her sheets. With the steely determination of someone willfully ignoring the many flaws of their only plan, she disembarked from her bed and made her way into the hallway. She knew every nail and board in this house, so avoiding any squeaky floorboards was no issue, even in pitch black. The door, she knew, wouldn't be locked, at least not in any meaningful way. Ever since she'd discovered that every door in the house could be unlocked by simply inserting a straightened-out paperclip into the hole in the knob, the rest of the family had given up on even trying to keep her out in that manner. A simple "go away" from Elsa was all the security she needed to keep Anna at bay, so Anna wasn't surprised when she tested the handle and found it unlocked.

Delicately, she opened the door, wincing at every creak as she cracked it open. It was no brighter in the hall than the room, so it wouldn't take long at all to assess the situation. Yet it was her ears which reported back the first useful information: Elsa wasn't asleep.

She heard Elsa's deep, labored breaths, and instantly froze with fear. Immediately, she prepared an apology for her intrusion, trying to phrase her excuse in a way that seemed less idiotic than it really was. But as she took the lay of the land, new information came to light that demanded she fall silent.

She couldn't see Elsa from this angle, just the sheets on her bed. Right now, those sheets were rising and falling in a rhythmic pattern. The exact same rhythm as Elsa's breathing, come to think of it. She hadn't noticed Anna, and understandably so – she was clearly preoccupied. Anna refused to mentally process the word 'moan,' but Elsa obviously wasn't just sighing over and over again, was she?

Once she realized exactly what was going on, Anna's face turned a bright red. It was only a few seconds later that her brain registered the thought that she should probably leave, and a few more seconds still before that command was successfully relayed to the necessary limbs.

She backed out without a sound and closed the door, timing the louder creaks to overlap with what she insistently referred to in her head as Elsa's breaths, as opposed to that other word. She could only assume she'd gone unnoticed, so she tiptoed back to her room and buried her burning hot face into her pillow.

In a way, she had accomplished her mission. Ever helpful, Elsa had cleverly managed to remove the mental image that had been wedged in her head by replacing it with a new one. Coincidentally, this new image also centered around Elsa's body.

She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head back and forth, trying to dislodge the image. Like a spoiler for a TV show she hadn't finished, the fact that she didn't want to think about it made it all the more prominent in her mind. She hadn't even seen anything, but that only allowed her imagination to run wild.

Could you please knock it off, brain? This is so weird!

Well, on a global scale it was weird. On the scale of 'people currently living in this house,' it was right in line with the norm.

Anna sighed. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the popcorn ceiling, as if to use the random dots and lines as a Rorschach test to try and decode the thoughts swirling in her head.

Yes, there was no getting around it. As much as she'd like to just have the normal sisterly relationship she'd believed they'd had all her life, the fact was that Elsa saw her as far more than that. She viewed her in a light that would normally be reserved for…well, you know, a boyfriend or girlfriend. She was doing it right this second, no less.

Again, she felt her face burning. You don't know that for sure. Maybe she was thinking of that Mariella girl she apparently cares so much about.

Even if that were the case, though, that changed nothing in the grand scheme of things. That mental barrier that tells you that family members are off limits when it comes to the dating pool was, for whatever reason, absent from Elsa's brain. And for this reason, she had spent more than four years on the other side of the goddamn country.

Anna clenched the sheets beneath her, her grip tightening in a heartbeat. Yep, that's still the part that loses me.

It had made sense at the beginning, when she'd still been reeling from the bombshell Elsa had dropped on her way out. Give her a year or two of isolation to go and find someone new to be attracted to, someone a little less sister-y. It was a good plan, and a good place for it, and Anna had high hopes that this would settle the issue and they could go back to being regular sisters again. Those hopes had died the slow, painful death of old age, as holiday after holiday had rolled around and Elsa had returned empty-handed each time. Anna didn't fault her for that – with guilt, she acknowledged that in terms of accomplishing what she set out to do, Elsa was still leaps and bounds ahead of her. No, what she failed to forgive her for was staying over there years later, when it became clear her plan wasn't panning out like she'd hoped. Even during the pandemic, when working from home had been the only option, she'd remained in California. Why? Why couldn't she just come home and spend time with them again, before it was too…

Her vision began to blur. She wiped her tears away.

Well, that didn't matter now. What was done was done. No sense digging up the agony of the past while there was still plenty of agony in the present to sift through – not alone, anyway. Elsa was here now, and that was certainly a net positive. Just focus on that for now. She knew there were a lot of uncomfortable conversations between her and Elsa in the future, but she hardly needed to rehearse those for an eighteenth time, now, did she?

Exhaustion pulled at her eyelids. With the amount of sleep she'd gotten, it seemed she was nowhere near prepared for the sweeping shifts in emotion she'd gone through in the last few minutes. The second mental image that had assailed her that night had also been struck from her mind, and in a way, Elsa was to thank for this one as well. Her anger began to fade back into the deeper recesses of her mind where it had been incubating for the past couple years.

I still love you, Elsa. But you are going to face a hell of a reckoning for what you've put me through. Then, once that's over, maybe we can have that talk we should've had five years ago. Then…

Her eyelids closed.

Well, fucked if I know. But we'll figure it out together, like sisters should. You owe me that much.

I mean, you owe me way fucking more than that. But let's start with that one.

Elsa's eyes flitted open. Her arched back loosened, and her body fell onto the bed again. Already, the joy of her climax was fading fast, replaced instantly with the regular self-loathing that always followed.

Elsa sighed. She held up her hand in front of her face, regarding her sticky fingers with abject contempt.

You said you weren't going to do this when she was so close by, remember? But you just couldn't help yourself, it was such a good dream.

The chances were infinitesimal that she'd wake Anna – the walls were plenty thick, and she knew how to avoid making noise. That didn't stop the anxiety, of course, but that wasn't the reason she had pledged not to do it. It was the principle of the action – to be less than twelve feet away from her sister while she did…that. If Anna were to find out what she'd done, she'd be sickened, and rightfully so. She had hoped this shame would be enough to prevent her from doing it.

Well, it wasn't. And you know what happens now.

She kicked the sheets off and stepped out of bed. Moving briskly yet silently, she stepped out into the hall and entered the bathroom.

Second time I'm doing this in, what, eight hours? Well, maybe repetition will help it stick.

She had known being in the same house as Anna again would intensify her feelings, but it had spiraled out of her control far faster than she expected. To see her face every day, to be in close contact with her dear sister and experience her wonderful personality, that was accelerating her feelings far faster than she could quash them. Which meant it was her responsibility to correct it. Manually.

She shed her sweaty pajamas, which she'd of course be putting right back on after she was done. To actually get clean because of her actions tonight would be, for lack of a better word, off-message. Stepping into the shower, she felt her body tense up in anticipation of what she knew was coming.

Good. If I can train my body to associate those thoughts with this, there may be hope yet.

She looked directly up at the shower head. Then she reached out, grabbed the cold water handle, and turned it as far as it would go.