Chapter Text
When Elsa turned twelve years old the spirits did not bestow on her the name of her soulmate. Instead, small diamonds inscribed themselves into the base of her left wrist and ice wound itself around her entire body in protest.
She’d stayed like that for hours, curled into a ball in the center of her bed and run cold fingers over the diamonds like she could somehow turn them into something legible, something meaningful, something that could give her hope. The golden crystals had just stared back at her and, eventually, her mother had to pour hot water over her head to get the ice to thaw enough to touch her.
There were only two types of soulmarks and everyone knew them. There were the ones that told you the name of the one person in your life you’d always be able to trust, and the ones that marked you for what you were: alone.
The first type was the widely accepted version, the one that women cooed over and men showed off with pride, the one that people wrote books and poetry and songs about. It was the type that filled people with hope and tales of true love's kiss.
The second type was rarely spoken of, slipped between quiet mouths and under breaths like a curse of the damned. It was the mark of the wicked, and those who bore them hid them underneath sleeves and armbands. Anything to keep the judging eyes away.
To tell the difference was simple: the first were names written in the hand of who they belonged to, sometimes elegant and graceful and other times crumpled and smushed together.
The second were pictures. Immovable, impassable, meaningless pictures. Just like the diamonds inscribed in Elsa’s wrist.
She started wearing gloves the morning after her twelfth birthday.
~
When Anna turned twelve the castle was a bustle of activity that Elsa had not seen since they closed the gates. Maids and castle-servers rushed from room to room in gaggles of life, talking and laughing and exchanging stories as the young princess mooned over the black smudge that had presented itself on her wrist.
To Elsa, it looked like someone had poured an entire inkwell over her sister’s wrist, but everyone else insisted it was a name.
“It starts with a K!” Anna had squealed that morning, loud enough to startle Elsa into freezing her entire room into a miniature ice-rink and knock her father directly off of his feet.
Despite that, no one had been able to make out what it said. It was certain that it started with a k- the letter was printed so boldly that Elsa was certain it could be seen from the top of the North Mountain- but any letter after that was a complete mystery. It was like the writer had only bothered to learn the first letter of his name and made up the rest.
However, it was enough. Anna had a soulmate. Someone that she’d meet at some point in her life and would be able to tell her what that godawful signature meant. Anna was blessed, she was excited, she was normal.
She knew that her parents probably didn’t mean it, but she saw the look of relief that passed over their faces after confirming their younger daughter’s signature for themselves. Elsa had never been normal, that much was obvious with the fact she could shoot Ice out of herself if she sneezed too hard, but she knew that the fact she was soulmate-less weighed on them just as much, if not more, than her ice did.
Anna would find someone, it was written on her skin.
Elsa’s wrist burned and she locked herself in her room with little more than a soft congratulation. Ice was already creeping past her ankles.
~
Elsa was eighteen and her parents were dead.
The news came long after they died, she knew that. Weeks at the least, months was more likely. Their ship was due to return two months after they left and it never did, all they could do was assume the worst and with each passing day with still no ship in sight that reality became more and more clear.
Anna held out hope-- of course she did she was the human embodiment of sunshine and stubbornness-- for a good three months after they were due to return.
Elsa’s hope had died with her sister’s memories of her magic.
They had a burial, a stupid, ceremonious thing considering there was nothing to bury, and Elsa shut the world out as tightly as she could. Anna tried to come to her, tried to comfort her, to say something to her, to draw support and give it in return.
“We only have each other,” she’d whispered from the other side of her bedroom door, and Elsa wanted to grab the girl by her shoulders and shake her until she was sick.
“I have no one!” she wanted to scream because, well, she didn’t. With their parents gone-- the only people in the world who understood the constant stress she was under, the only people in the world besides a group of goddamn trolls in the mountains who knew about her powers-- she was alone.
She was alone, and she would always be alone.
Her world was a blanket of ice and snow and cold. A numbing, chilling, biting cold that would’ve killed her if she were able to feel it.
All she could feel was the throbbing pain of the diamonds inscribed into her wrist.
~
Anna was eighteen and presenting a man with Red-hair and horrifying mutton-chops to her, her arm wound around his like it belonged there. She was grinning, lips spread wide enough to make her concerned about the muscles in her cheeks, and wouldn’t stop bouncing on the tips of her toes.
“Elsa! Meet Prince Kyle Hans of the Southern Isles!” She squealed, red-faced and shrill. Kyle’s eye twitched slightly at the volume, but otherwise, he remained composed and cordial. “He’s my soulmate!”
Elsa’s heart dropped down to her toes. The ice she’d been restraining the entire night crept into her chest to take its place.
“What?”
“It is an honor to meet you, Queen Elsa,” Hans bowed appropriately and took her hand before she could fully process the gesture, kissing the back of it.
Something in Elsa’s body physically shrunk away.
“Hello…?” she mumbled softly, still trying to compute that Anna had managed to meet her soulmate on the one day that the gates were open.
“We’ve come to ask for your blessing," Anna whispered conspiratorially.
Elsa’s gut did a somersault.
“Pardon?”
“We’re getting married!” Anna and Hans said together like they’d rehearsed it on the way here.
Her brows furrowed. No, that wasn’t possible. She’d seen that signature it was not one that someone born of nobility-- especially not a son of the Southern Isles, one of the biggest kingdoms this side of Europe-- would have. Much less one named Kyle. Kyle? The name wasn’t even long enough to be Anna's signature.
“Anna, can I talk to you for a moment, in private?” she asked, trying her best to sound in control of the situation, but if the crack of her voice after 'moment' was anything to go by she hadn’t exactly succeeded. Unfortunately, Anna didn’t take the hint.
“What… no... No. If you have something to say to me, you can say it to the both of us.” She puffed out her chest, straightening to her full height, still a few centimeters shorter than herself. Elsa’s stomach was still trying to recover from Hans’s unprompted kiss on her hand, this sudden display of stubbornness wasn’t helping.
“Fine,” she huffed through gritted teeth, “you can’t marry a man you just met.”
Anna stared at her like she’d just told her the sky was green.
“We’re soulmates, Elsa!” She protested and Elsa fought down a sudden (unhelpful, unwarranted, and unfair) pang of jealousy.
“Soulmate or not,” she growled, teeth getting progressively tighter together. “You need time to build a relationship with someone, that can’t happen in just one night.”
“How would you know?!” Anna snapped, taking a step forward and into her space. “All you ever do is shut people out! You talk all high-and-mighty, but you know less about building relationships than I do.”
The words would hurt more if Elsa didn’t already know them to be true.
“Anna. You are being hasty and careless.” the words pushed past her lips and she might as well have punched her sister in the face from the way her expression contorted at the words. Ice was beginning to form beneath her feet, she needed to act quickly. “That’s enough for tonight, close the gates.”
Guards and servants began ushering civilians out the door, but Anna moved quicker than any of them could. She lunged, grabbing her hand in an attempt to stop her, but her glove just came away.
Elsa’s entire body shrunk, narrowed, concentrated into that one point of skin, unleashed to the air for the first time in years without her express permission.
“Elsa, please I can’t live like this!” Anna’s voice was far away and murky, she could barely hear her words.
“Then leave.” Her mouth moved without her permission. All her concentration zeroed in on keeping the building blizzard inside.
“What are you so afraid of-”
“Enough, Anna.” She had to get out of there, now.
“No! You’ve ignored me for thirteen years, you can stick around for one minu-”
“I said, ENOUGH!”
It was only later, locked in her palace of ice she’d created herself, she realized the hand Anna had freed from its cloth prison was the one with the diamonds inscribed in its wrist.
~
Anna thawed, and so did Arendale. It was a miracle, really. ‘An act of True Love’ was a concept often reserved for soulmates and soulmates alone. (The fact that Anna’s actual soulmate, a kind young icer named Kristoff, was present for the affair did not escape her.) It had worked with only her sisterly act of desperation and that was a testament to itself.
It was also a testament to what Elsa was. Soulmate-less, and open for the entire world to see. If she were to put the gloves back on she’d just feel ridiculous and if she were to wear a wrist covering of any sort she felt it would serve the same purpose. She was done with hiding, it had done her no good in the past and she was certain it would do her no good in the future.
She was the queen and after all the havoc she’d caused during her coronation, she felt the obligation to at least be honest with her people.
Of course, that meant being honest with Anna as well.
They’d already established an open-door policy with each other, (It was a must if she were honest. Just the idea of closing a door on Anna ever again made chills run down her spine and something heavy settle in the pit of her stomach.) but this was something that required more than an open door. It required an open heart, and that was something that Elsa wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to fully offer to her sister.
Anna, for her part, was very patient about the whole thing. She waited at least two weeks before bringing it up and, when she finally did, waited for Elsa’s response with all the patience and grace that their mother had tried to teach her over the years.
“So um… I noticed your… arm…” she still hadn’t learned how to be subtle though.
Elsa chuckled fondly and finished signing the report she’d been reading over from the chief of infrastructure. Turns out a random cold spell in the middle of what was supposed to be Arendale’s warm season could do a lot of damage.
“I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”
Anna flushed slightly.
“Am I that predictable?”
“You’ve always been curious.” Elsa settled her quill back in its inkwell and turned to face her sister. She was always struck with how much like their mother Anna looked, and today was no exception. She’d even selected a purple dress remarkably similar to their mother’s preferred attire.
“Alright, ask away,” she prompted, receiving a small smile from her sister, but it was tempered with nerves. She hoped that their relationship would improve given time and honesty and Anna would no longer look so unsure of herself when alone in a room with her, but time was proving to be a slow process at the least.
“Uh… well, uhm… can I… see it?” She wrung her hands together, the right crossing over the left and trailing the thumb over the dark black smudge on her left wrist.
Elsa forced down a chill of sadness that threatened to fill the room if she didn’t, and outstretched her hand, to show her sister the golden diamonds that had been there for nine years. Anna paused, just for a second but long enough for Elsa to wonder if it was such a good idea to display her status so openly, then she took the hand in both of hers to bring the mark up to her face for inspection.
Elsa was loathe to admit it, but it had been years since she’d allowed another human being to touch her. Sure, she’d hugged Anna before this exact moment, but she was still getting used to the fact that she could touch her sister without fearing that she’d turn into an Anna shaped popsicle every time she did.
It still made her feel like it was something sacred, something that should be saved for special occasions or as shows of gratitude, but Anna gave physical affection so freely… not for the first time she wondered just how different her and Anna’s relationships with their parents were. (and just how much of that was their fault and how much of that was hers.)
“It’s so…”
“Simple, I know,” Elsa tried for humor, though it wasn’t her strong suit and she doubted it ever would be.
Anna shook her head, though a smile did curl her lips slightly.
“No, I just… it looks hand-drawn.”
Elsa frowned, glancing down at the symbols like they might’ve somehow changed over the course of nine years. She saw none, just empty gold crystals staring back at her.
“It does?” She questioned.
Anna nodded, carefully tracing each diamond with her index finger.
“Well, maybe drawn isn’t the right word. It looks a little more like… stitching, maybe? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Yes, well people without soulmates aren’t exactly common, Anna,” She said flippantly.
The corners of Anna’s mouth pulled downwards and her eyes slid up to meet hers.
“Soulmate or no soulmate, you’re still my sister.” Her grip moved from her wrist to hold her fingers down into her palm. “This doesn’t change that.”
For the first time since it appeared, Elsa’s wrist didn’t feel like another weight to carry around her already strained neck.
~
Three years later Kristoff came to her with a nervous smile on his face and hands clasped in front of his chest like he was trying to physically hold himself together. He asked for her blessing and Elsa laughed so hard she started ‘flurrying,’ as Anna had taken to affectionately calling it.
“Kristoff, you’ve had my blessing since we met,” she managed to splutter out after a good few minutes of laughter, though the convulsions had yet to fully leave her and tears started streaming down her face not too long ago.
Kristoff was her sister’s true soulmate and, truth be told, she would’ve been able to tell that without seeing either of their soulmarks. Anna’s stubbornness was matched step for step with Kristoff’s patience and his silly relationship with his reindeer wasn’t any stranger than Anna’s kinship with Olaf.
(Elsa nearly had a stroke when she realized that she was apparently capable of creating sentient life with snow, though at this point it was kind of old news. The fact she could create sentient life with sneezing, on the other hand, was another matter entirely and one she didn’t want to examine too closely.)
Seeing the mark itself emblazoned on Kristoff’s wrist was nothing more than a confirmation of what she already knew, but it was a reassuring one. Hans, the bastard, had tried to fake her sister’s signature across his wrist before his downfall. Evidently, he was like her, soulmate-less, but a different kind of soulmate-less: soulless. Born with no marks at all, wrists bare and open, he had taken matters into his own hands when he saw the opportunity to inherit what was never his and had scrawled Anna’s name upon his wrist before their first meeting. It was a good imitation if she were honest, but it had failed to encapsulate Anna’s frantic hand. Anna’s signature had never been as neat as was proper for a princess: small and pressed together with little space between each letter like she was afraid she’d run out of room.
That was the signature tucked in the crook of Kristoff’s wrist, small and safe from prying eyes. That was the signature she felt safe leaving her sister in the hands of. So when Kristoff came to her asking for her blessing she offered the back of her right arm with little more than a grin and a teasing ‘you hurt her, I kill you,’ that held absolutely none of the malice it was supposed to.
That night she looked at the mark drawn across the back of her right wrist and traced Kristoff’s signature with cold fingertips. He was her family now, she knew that- had known that since he and Anna started seriously dating- but seeing his signature plastered across her skin in ceremonious ink was something she was never sure she’d get to see. But, well, she was the head of their house now, and she would have to partake in all of the traditions that came with it.
It was strange, she decided, that after all this time she’d finally get to see a real name on her body, and it wasn’t even one that belonged to her.
She fell asleep that night with her left wrist tucked against her heart.
~
Three months later she wakes up with a haunting song on the breeze and a burning in her left wrist.