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When Elsa was little, she had nightmares every night.
They were almost always the same, always had the same basic ending, which was Anna couldn’t be saved, Anna was gone - because of her.
Sometimes the events leading up to that finale were different. Sometimes it was simply that Anna was killed right off, that the icy blow had been hard enough to send her small body down, down, crumbling, into a position that no human being should ever hold.
Elsa would wake up from those nightmares with her pillow hard and wet and her sheets snow-stiff.
Sometimes it was that Anna didn’t die right away, and there was a false sense of hope that she’d be okay. But the journey to the trolls took impossibly long, a million years it felt, and by the time they finally reached their destination, it was much too late.
Elsa would wake up from those with icicles hanging off her ceiling, threatening and sharp, her eyes red and bolted open for the rest of the night.
But the worst ones of all were the ones where it was almost exactly like it happened in reality, except Mama and Papa never came running, never heard Elsa’s screaming, never found them in time. And Anna would turn completely cold, skin and lips crusting over, right in front of Elsa’s eyes. Right in her arms.
Elsa would wake up from those with sobs wracking her body and her room storming around her.
As fate would have it, the mornings after her worst nightmares were the ones where Anna was extra-stubborn, where she knocked even harder on her door and begged even more, just for Elsa to come out and say hello. Those were the most difficult times to stay inside her bedroom. Elsa wanted nothing more than to go and collect Anna in her arms, to make sure she was still alive and just to know she was really, truly there.
Then she would look at the frost on her walls and clamp her mouth shut tight.
-
Nightmares, Elsa is aware, can come true. Only usually, when they actually play out, they are much, much worse.
Snow swirls around her, hard and thick and falling too quickly, too hard, and she sinks to her knees. Then a shriek splits through the cold air, and there’s the sound of something shattering over something else, something solid, and Elsa looks up.
She chokes.
Because Anna is crystallized blue, mouth open in an eternal ‘o’, and Elsa sees her defensive stance and that awful princes’ fallen self and she knows. Anna is gone because of her, because she’d let her powers get the best of her, because she’d struck Anna again only this time hard and deadly, a blast to the heart.
And even though Anna could have saved herself, could have broken through all the ice and cold and warmed herself again, she hadn't. Instead she’d jumped to sacrifice herself for her sister, even though it’s Elsa’s fault she was turning to ice, even though none of this would have happened if it wasn't for that sister.
Elsa collapses her arms around the shell that used to be Anna, stares at the pieces of sword splintered across the ice, and the tears fall in too-cool rivers as she thinks It should have been me.