frozenfractals | you've got to hold on when you get love and let go when you give it

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jessica drew

you've got to hold on when you get love and let go when you give it

Showing off might be a little bit childish. Striking a balance between modesty and pretending to have actual confidence has been something of a fight for Elsa for years, though, so she doesn't really care. She's been feeling more and more sure of her abilities these last few months, and that means the world. Even if she still has her doubts, she's mostly certain she knows what she's doing, which is a far cry form how she felt less than a year ago. It makes her whole life easier.

If there are two people in the world she would credit with helping her find her footing, they're Anna and Jessica. They've both seen firsthand what Elsa can do, of course. But she's been itching to show Jessica more for ages now, so when a chance arises for them to both get away for an afternoon, she takes it.

It's easier to go out at night sometimes, even if she pays for it when she gets to work on those mornings. With both of them working, though, it's the time when they're both most free. It's easier, too, to let loose on the city streets and roofs late in the evening, when it's darker and only a few people will see her and she knows it's for a good cause. She doesn't want to be always hiding in shadows, though. The sun is bright today. That's just how she wants it.

There's a cove a little way up the coast, outside of town, isolated and shielded from view by the cliffs. The beach there isn't much, but it's space enough for her to work, so she tells Jessica to meet her there. She brings a picnic lunch and a blanket to sit on (if only because it occurs to her that Jessica might get cold, even if she won't), but she keeps both off to the side, leaving as much clear space as she can. Frowning to herself, she studies the area. The ground is a bit rough with shells, kelp, and rock, but she can level it off with a layer of ice for the foundation. After that, it should be fine.

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"I told you I was going to climb all over it," she said, merrily, stretching her hands out over her head -- or under them, technically, as matters were -- towards Elsa.

"Which, actually, is making me rethink my location. I was going to say there-ish," she said, pointing at a spot partway through the room. "Sheltered but enough of a breeze, you can see outside and into this fabulous place. But now..."

She reached the double doors back to the stairs and swung smoothly down and through to perch just above it on the other side, like an ornament. "...now I'm looking at that space in the center of the dome and I'm thinking, right there."

She'd have to swoop Elsa up there, admittedly, but she'd certainly done that before, and maybe that was part of the appeal, that it wasn't just a regular spot, it was somewhere that most people wouldn't be able to get to.

Teasing aside, there's a thrill in it. Now that the buzz of creation is easing, Elsa's content just to watch her, to see Jessica so excited to explore what she's made. It makes it feel more concrete somehow. She'd been happy enough in her first ice palace, but there's something more fulfilling in seeing someone else seeing it. It makes it more real and much better. Everything she makes is an extension of herself; loving them is a little like loving her.

She hadn't even thought of placing a hammock out in that exposed space, high above the ground, somewhere she could only reach herself by making a column of ice or a ladder. Jessica has a much more elegant solution, one that makes falling not a concern even worth thinking of. She smiles, resting her hands on the railing as she looks up to the ceiling and back to Jessica. "There?" she asks, smiling. "Alright."

"Then there it is," Jessica said, remaining in place to grin back down at Elsa for an extended moment, before darting up the wall. She kicked off, caught a column and shimmied upwards. She really hadn't been kidding about the climbing. It was fascinating, the organic yet constructed nature of all of it, as well as unfailingly gorgeous, the way it caught the light.

And a little tricky. She could stick to ice, but it took a little more work, was a little more challenging to move and to land. Frankly, that added to the appeal.

But before long she was at the hole in the dome and paused, then set about spinning up a hammock, trying to keep the threads thin and delicate enough that it'd be comfortable. Lots of smaller threads, closer together, seemed the ticket. And wider than usual.

More or less satisfied, she dropped off the ceiling, tagging it with a webline halfway down to slow into a gradual descent ending with her hanging right in front of the railing where Elsa was. "Voila," she said, extending a hand.

Watching Jessica work, Elsa wonders again if that's what her process looks like to other people. It's so beautiful, so intricate and artful, and yet there's an innate grace to the work, a natural flow that makes it seem effortless. She could never do something like that, but then, maybe that's the point. Jessica can't make buildings from ice either. They have different skills, ones that happen to look good together. Certainly it fits, that delicate silk webbing hanging in the midst of all the glistening ice.

She smiles when Jessica drops in front of her, tapping a finger against the tip of her nose before taking her hand. "Eh, bien," she says cheerfully. "C'est beau." Now who's showing off? This part is familiar, at least, even if the rest of this is sort of new. She's used to it by now, Jessica lifting her up and spiriting her into the air. That doesn't curb the thrill of it, though, not yet. "Ready when you are."

Jessica lifted their arms and spun Elsa close enough to grip safely, and with a twist of her body set them swinging upwards, pulling at the webline, releasing, and repeating with a new one to gain height, a corkscrew upwards until the reached the top of the dome.

"Let's see," she said, trying to remember what French she had. "Um, good, that's... bow. Pretty. How much French can you speak? Say some more. Wait, first..."

She settled on the edge of the dome, trying to work out how to transfer them into the hammock, and settled for holding Elsa at the small of her back and simply extending her arm to place her over it. Benefit of being able to pick her up with one hand, she supposed.

Elsa laughs as they fly upwards, pleased as ever to find this doesn't get old for her. The exhilaration is there no matter how many times it happens, the thrill of being high in the air with nothing but Jessica's arm around her to keep her up, to keep her safe.

The hammock itself allows for something similar when she glances over the side, realizing how high up they are. It's sort of a false excitement, she thinks; there's no real danger for either of them. But maybe that's why she can enjoy it rather than panicking. She shifts to the side to make room for Jessica, tucking her legs under her. "Qu'est-ce que tu veux que je dire?" she asks, smirking a little. "I haven't practiced in ages, but it's polite to know how when the French ambassador visits or someone like that. It's nice up here."

She kicked up her legs and lightly hopped the gap between the edge of the dome and the hammock, setting it swinging some when she landed in it and nearly rolled onto Elsa.

"That was more French than I know, anyway. What do you something something. Want. Oh, 'what do you want me to say'?" she said, which was less to do with what she remembered of her limited French and more to do with educated guesswork. "It is nice up here. That's not the answer, that's just- because it is."

Because it was. The ice palace beneath and around them, and the sky right above, all in shades of blue. The sun was warm, but there was enough ice about them that it offset that, too, in just the right way. And Elsa there to enjoy it with her. To make it possible, in fact.

Gripping the side of the hammock, Elsa grins, easing carefully back to lie down. It's surprisingly comfortable, even this high up. After she gets used to it, even the swaying is pleasant, like being rocked as a baby, though she more remembers watching her mother rock Anna's crib instead.

"Teamwork," she says, beckoning for Jessica to join her. She wishes she'd had this up on the North Mountain. Even for her, sleeping on ice and snow isn't the most comfortable thing to do. Not that she'd slept much during those couple days. She'd been too nervous still, too alert to relax completely. This is much nicer, relaxation easy to come by in such good company. "The softest thing I can make is snow. I like this better."

"We do make a good team," Jessica concluded, shuffling to lie down next to her; the hammock, being a hammock, tended to favor everything sliding to the center, but she managed to find a more or less stable position, twisted half on her side so she could look at either Elsa or the sky.

"I like this a lot. I don't always- sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be spending time on things that aren't... the work," she said. Because why would she? She wasn't even really real. She was made for something. She'd seized her own destiny, so she could choose what that something was, but it was still the important thing, the purpose, wasn't it?

Except she wasn't entirely sure of that. Not that it wasn't important, but that it had to be all-consuming. If it did, she was getting increasingly worse at it.

"But this, this is- I very definitely don't feel like I should be anywhere else. It means a lot. It means the world to me."

Elsa closes her eyes, holding tight to those words. Hearing something like that, she knows she's somewhere she should be, too, and it's a heady feeling. "Me too." It's not just that, it's everything else Jessica says, that idea of somehow belonging to her job. She understands it far too well. She wouldn't say it's been bad for her, but there were times she knows it didn't help. As much as she understands that sense of obligation, it's the desire to help that she loves about Jessica, not the duty.

Tugging gently at a bit of Jessica's shirt, she shakes her head. "I felt the same way," she says. Lying close to her like this, it's impossible to miss how beautiful Jessica is, or how much she wants her to be happy. "I thought I was going to be queen and that was it. No other life for me, no future, just Arendelle and my duty. I thought that's how it was supposed to be. But it's not. You've helped me figure that out. You deserve more."

"I don't know if I'm at 'deserve,'" Jessica said, eyes down for a second, drawn by the tug on her shirt. She rested her hand on Elsa's, absently drawing circles on the back with her fingertips. "I'm still working up to 'will accept.'"

She looked back up at Elsa's face, tracking across it, the close-up detail, the things you could miss from a distance. Those freckles, for one. She wondered if that was symbolic, related, but with a squirm in her stomach thought that maybe she was just reaching for reasons to stare. "You definitely do, though."

"I'm still working up to that," Elsa says, quietly wry. She's much better at believing it now, but she won't pretend now that it's a constant, not with Jessica. There are still times when it's a struggle to believe she deserves that kind of independence or freedom, times when she hardly believes she deserves anything at all, let alone happiness. But those times are so much rarer now, and that's what matters. She's weathered them before, all on her own. Now, at least, she has company in the storm.

There's a tension in her limbs, no matter how relaxed she is, that's become familiar of late, forever frozen in the process of moving closer. She's aware she's being watched, but of course she is. They're facing each other, of course Jessica's looking at her. Even so, between that and the conversation at hand, she feels awfully vulnerable. It's silly, though, she reminds herself. This has been a big gesture, but it's been a well-received one, too. There's no need for self-consciousness.

"As long as you'll accept it. I'm not letting you just disappear into the work, whether you like it or not."

"Oh, you won't, will you?" Jessica said, lifting her hand to find the end of Elsa's braid and tweak it gently. Then it sort of stayed there. On its own. Except there was only so long she could sell herself on that. She had a tendency, sometimes, of watching her own thoughts, of thinking about how she was thinking, the inevitable consequence of having someone else's memories in her head, of having started out from those memories. Sometimes it was still tricky, to figure out where a certain feeling came from, although to a point she'd decided it didn't matter. Feeling was feeling.

But she was pretty sure the line of internal code she'd developed that went IF see Elsa THEN touch Elsa was entirely her. She didn't want to rewrite it, so to speak, but she was increasingly worried she wanted to add lines. That wasn't for her, and even if it was-

Well, except that was the matter under discussion.

"I won't," Elsa says, firm, though she's smiling through it. "Queen's orders." Her position may not mean anything here, except sometimes to her, but it's easy to poke fun at herself. Serious as she is about the subject, she doesn't want to get too heavy when the point of coming here was to have a nice, quiet time together, a peaceful, fun day for Jessica.

She's not sure if this counts as fun exactly and it's hard to qualify it as peaceful when there's a strange flip-flopping feeling in her stomach, but it's nice, at least. That much is incontestable. She's aware of the way Jessica's touching her hair, but it's a pleasant sort of awareness, like it's somehow unsettling and comforting all at the same time. It isn't as if she's thought much about lying around together like this, but she suspects she will now, the kind of memory she finds soothing when she needs help coming down from the panic. Even if those don't happen nearly as much anymore.

"As my queen commands, then," Jessica said, trying for serious and failing miserably, face crinkling around her attempt to keep her lips out of a smile. She did a better job on the delivery, though, she thought it was the precise right level of playful, even as some aspects of the phrasing might have touched on the fringes of ideas she was dancing around.

Or lying in one place staring at, which did make the dancing harder.

"Really, ordering less work, that's unconventional royalty. Out of the box thinking. You're clearly very good at it."

"I am," laughs Elsa. "See? I was born for the job." She grins, brow raising briefly at her little joke. At least for the moment, she believes Jessica means it, which is reassuring. Maybe there will be times Elsa has to convince her, but then, that's true of both of them. They all have fears and concerns, irrational or otherwise, they have to be talked down from sometimes. They'll just have to do that for each other.

She moves the arm she's half laying on so her hand is near Jessica's, stretching out a finger to graze her palm. "Besides, if you worked all the time, I couldn't make you castles. Where's the fun in that?"

The finger on her palm was relaxing, but also somehow not, as if there was an undercurrent to the placid calm, a frisson radiating out from it. It made her not want to move; it made her want to move, she just wasn't sure which direction.

She grinned, at the joke, and the sentiment both. The possibility of future castles. "You'd have to make them on top of buildings. Crime scenes. It'd be very confusing for the police."

Elsa nods, tracing circles against Jessica's wrist, expression bright with amusement. "I can freeze the evidence into the walls," she says. "Then it can't go anywhere. Of course, they'd have to defrost it before they could do anything with it."

The nights she spends running around the city are some of her favorites. It's the one thing she can do outside of the apartment where she's always sure of herself. So she has some moments where she's not certain what she's doing, but that all encompassing fear of getting it wrong ebbs. It may not be so bad anymore, but it wakes up in unfamiliar or claustrophobic circumstances a lot of the time. Up on those roofs or dashing through the street, she doesn't know what's coming but she's not afraid of it. Not with Jessica there like a beacon in the fog.

"Cops standing around with hairdryers," Jessica said, smiling at the idea, among other things to smile about, just then. "Slamming a big block of ice down on the exhibit table in the courtroom."

She'd thought, once or twice, about whether she should just join the cops, replace her SHIELD cachet with a badge. Be official, again. But aside from not knowing that the power structures in the city were worth trusting-

(Not that SHIELD had been a sterling beacon of ethics, to be fair)

-they probably looked less favorably on encouraging vigilantism, and Jessica didn't intend to stop any of that. Especially in this particular case.

Giggling, Elsa ducks her head a little, bangs falling in her eyes. She huffs out a breath, trying to blow it away. Movement doesn't seem like much of an option right now, not when she's so comfortable where she is. It feels like budging too much might disturb this strange, restless peace.

"It might make things a bit messy," she says. "All the evidence melting onto their documents. I guess I'd better avoid that."

She smiled wider, and tried to ignore the itch in her fingers to brush Elsa's hair into place for her. Except, no, that'd be fine, that was an ordinary thing to do. Was it? Wasn't it? She was having a hard time with working out where it was.

Sometimes not actually having the experience of growing up as a girl really makes it awkward.

Well, no. Circumstances aside, I think that's mostly dumb ol' me.

"She guesses," she said. "So, no working all the time, or all the legal documents get wet. Clear chain of events. Totally inevitable."

"Exactly." Elsa nods once, firm. "You wouldn't want to make all that extra work for the layers and police, so... Coincidentally that frees up more time for you to hang out with me." Not that they don't spend time together, of course. She's teasing, mostly. With the mask, without it, it's all still Jessica. That's what matters. But it's more fun if Jessica isn't working herself into exhaustion, worrying about everyone else without stopping to think about herself. "It's amazing how that works out."

"Her hidden agenda revealed!" Jessica crowed, although not too loudly. There wasn't exactly anyone around to be disturbed if she was, sure, but she didn't want to put so much energy into it she broke the moment, the stillness, if it proved to be that fragile.

But then, it was a very well-constructed ice castle, and her webs were strong, so what was she worried about? But then, it wasn't the tangible elements that she found delicate.

"A ploy all along. I'm onto you now, queenie."

Elsa lets out a little yelp, quiet and playful, ducking her head to hide her face. "Oh, no, you've figured out my evil scheme," she says. When she lifts her head again, though, she's shifted closer, which is completely unnecessary, since Jessica's made a very nice hammock. It's not like there isn't room. It's just the natural outcome of lowering her head and her body sort of compensating for that motion, is all.

She could draw further back again, but that seems silly, so she stays put, gazing fondly at Jessica. "My extremely circuitous evil scheme to keep you from overworking yourself." Working too hard has always been her thing. It's strange, in a nice sort of way, to want to keep someone else from it. It forces her to look at her own efforts and be mindful of her time. Not that she especially needs to. Anna is perfectly capable of dragging her away from her work when need be.

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you've got to hold on when you get love and let go when you give it

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