frozenfractals | there's beauty and there's danger here

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jessica drew

there's beauty and there's danger here

It's supposed to be a perfectly normal morning. Elsa is supposed to wake up and go to work, sell flowers, go see her girlfriend, maybe fight a little crime. The night before was absolutely ordinary, so she has no cause to believe anything else will be true of this morning.

Except that when she wakes up, the bed seems a lot bigger than usual. For a few moments, she's not at all sure where she is, the room small and unfamiliar. Even the comforter is different. She sits up, looking around for Anna or her parents or anything she recognizes, little hands tight in her sheets. There's someone next to her, but it's not her sister. Frost skates over the fabric, her heart thumping in her chest. The frost is halfway up the wall before the chill makes her feel a little more awake, better able to take in her situation.

Darrow. Of course her sister isn't here. Of course her parents aren't. They haven't been for years. She still forgets that sometimes, ready to tell them about her day, but this is different. Somehow all of that feels far away now, as if Papa might walk in and take care of all this at any moment. But he won't, because she's not in Arendelle and he's dead, and she's about to cry.

She can barely remember how to undo the ice in the room, looking down at her hands to find them smaller than they were last night. She's smaller, swimming in the nightgown she went to sleep in. It occurs to her that she should get up and look in a mirror, or that she might be having a strange dream, but she can't seem to make herself move. What if she can't make the ice stop? What if she's too small to stop it? None of this makes any sense. After a couple minutes, she lays back down, pulling the blanket over her head and curling into a ball. Maybe if she goes back to sleep, she'll wake up normal and the ice will be gone.

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"With my lil fists of fury," Jessica said, putting up her dukes, and then pursing her lips at how tiny her dukes were. If it came down to it, she'd try, because no part of the great power thing came with a must be this tall to also have great responsibility, but she couldn't deny that she was not precisely in full fighting form.

Almost literally about half fighting form, maybe.

"I don't think I'm gonna look for trouble, though. First time ever."

Elsa pulls a face at that. "Yes," she says, "please don't." The ice around the room has started to fade away, but she knows it would only come back stronger if something happened to Jessica. Cuts and bruises are part of the job, she knows that, and she can't expect her to be safe all the time. Still, small as she is now, it could be much worse, and the idea of it terrifies Elsa. She has other friends and things she cares about here, but no one matters to her like Jessica does. "It won't last very long, will it? It's like a — a break."

"It's happened to people I know," Jessica said, and then allowed, "I think. And it lasted... I want to say a week? Not more than that. So I guess... yeah, it's a break?"

It was odd to think about. She couldn't quite remember the last time she'd taken a break. Maybe a day here or there that she didn't do much, but generally even if she didn't have shifts at whatever her current day jobs were, she had the other job.

"Well, a week isn't too long," Elsa says slowly. "I guess it's not so bad." If she can control her powers. That's the big issue for her here. If she can just figure out a way to keep them in check, she'll be fine, but that feels like a big if right now. And she's not sure how well-equipped she is to cook, for example, or if she should still be going to work. Do Darrow's child labor laws apply when you're only temporarily a child? "I guess I should call out of work... sick?"

"Or maybe... text? Email?" Jessica said, suddenly wondering at how she'd need to do the same. She had enough previous employers that would report that she was unreliable without adding to the list. "Your voice is a little... different. They might think you're a kid playing a prank. I mean, you are a kid, just not... playing a prank."

"Oh, no," Elsa says, shaking her head, "I wish it were only a prank. I'll text." She's a little worried about doing even that. Her hands are smaller now, and she's a clumsy enough texter even as an adult. Still, it has to be done. She can't go in to work like this. She's not even sure they'd let her handle the big scissors in this state.

"I hope this is an acceptable way to call in sick," Jessica said, craning her head to look around to see if she could remember where she'd left her phone. She did not exactly have the height to look around as effectively at current. "I guess if our employers were from outside maybe they'd get it. 'Oh, one of those things.' People from here, I dunno."

Elsa purses her lips, thoughtful and a little annoyed. "Does it even happen to people from here?" she asks. "That doesn't seem fair." She's never noticed it being a problem with any of her co-workers, but then, she also hasn't had to deal with it herself until now, and she's been in Darrow for years. She doesn't really want to move away from Jess at this point, but she should probably get this over with, so she scoots away to get her phone off the dresser.

"You know, I don't know," Jessica said, thoughtfully. "But I've never heard of it happening to them."

Her close friends were, generally, from elsewhere, so she couldn't say for sure, but it seemed like she would have heard about it if it had. "You're right, that's not fair. We get singled out."

"It's not our fault we're not from here," Elsa says, pouting a little, though she'd never call it that. As things that happen in this town go, honestly, being small probably isn't the worst. At least no one's trying to kill or kidnap them. Frowning, she opens her messages app and taps out a message to her boss. "It should happen the same to everyone."

"Or it shouldn't happen at all," Jessica said, sticking her arms out directly in front of her and frowning at how little they projected. "People should only wake up with their body all different if they want to wake up with their body all different."

Elsa nods emphatically. "They shouldn't just make you do or be things," she says, even if she isn't sure who they are. "It's bullying, is what it is, pushing people around 'cause they can." It's different if people want to change and maybe they have powers that let them or something. This is just weird and unsettling and maybe dangerous.

"That's exactly what it is," Jessica said, having dropped her arms to rummage for her phone and begin tapping out her own sick day text message. She paused, though, caught up by the appropriateness of the analogy. "Getting their kicks changing everyone's bodies around. I wish I could get my hands on 'em."

Elsa nods fiercely, little brow furrowed. "Maybe someday," she says. "You never know." They'll probably never actually find out who or what is behind all this, but they can certainly dream. It just isn't right that something they've never even seen has so much control over their lives. "But I guess for now, we just gotta go with it."

She's not very good at that, though.

She hoped so, but given the lack of progress on that front so far, that someday was probably a long way off. In the meantime, Elsa was right. They just had to go with it.

She looked at her phone, where she'd just called in sick to work, and considered that with that cancelled and a hold on the superheroics while she was small... "I don't know what we do next," she said. "Do we just... be kids?"

Elsa smiles sheepishly. "I'm not even sure what that means," she admits. She spent so long not getting to do exactly that, it's hard to remember just what embracing childhood might mean. It was her own choice, she knows that; up until that point, she'd run free and wild as it was possible for a princess to be. She's the one that wanted to hide. Her parents reduced the staff, kept Anna away, but she chose to stop playing, to tuck herself away in her rooms, simply trying not to hurt anyone. She's not so sure she's any better with her magic today than she was then, but she can't just sit here, hiding, again.

Suddenly, the being kids thing didn't seem as bad. It was still an awful imposition, of course, something done to them without their permission, and that would never not be bad. But there was at least an upside to the awful imposition.

"...okay, now I do know what we do next, and it's 'be kids,'" Jessica said, bouncing to land on her knees and square her shoulders. "It is 'do all of the kid stuff we can think of.'"

Elsa considers this, gaze darting around the room, where the ice has started to retreat. It's all she can really think of, is running around with Anna when they were little, making mischief in the ballroom or sneaking into the kitchens to steal chocolates. There's no kitchen staff here to trick or cajole, but she still has her powers.

"Build a snowman?" she suggests.

In her memories of someone else's childhood -- someone else's memories, rather -- there were kid things, but there were no powers things, because for Peter of course that hadn't started until the spider-bite.

This was a rather different scenario. She hadn't considered those possibilities.

"Oh heck yes," she said, sitting bolt upright, then unfolding her legs to launch her into a small somersault that ended with her bouncing into the same sitting position, to check that, yes, she could still manage all that.

Elsa cheers and claps her hands, as delighted as ever by her girlfriend's abilities, if, perhaps, more voluble than usual. It's cool, in the colloquial sense. It's cool in the temperature sense, too, as she focuses this time on letting it snow in the room. "We need socks or something," she decides then, because she doesn't want Jessica to freeze while they're playing, so she pulls a chair over to her dresser to rummage in the top drawer.

"Right," Jessica agreed, bouncing up on to her feet again, jumping lightly on the bed -- gaining a good deal of height on each one, because lightly for her was a differently calibrated scale -- and putting her hands out to catch snowflakes in her hands. Which were just falling inside the room, it didn't get less cool.

The socks might be a big, Elsa releases as she pulls them out of her drawer, but she's not sure ice socks would be a better idea for Jessica. She's not worried for herself; the snow never harms her. But they don't need any frostbite interfering with playtime.

So she brings what she's found over to Jessica. "Will these do?"

"They'll do," Jessica said confidently, perhaps prematurely, since she was still mid-bounce on her way closer. She landed lightly and took them, lifting a leg to pull one over a foot and consider it.

Her feet were rather smaller now, it turned out. But there was a certain amount of give in the sock she could work with. "Maybe if I just..."

She rolled it up, then twisted a bit to tighten it up, then ran her finger around this clump to wrap some webbing around. It was still big, maybe, but less so, and it would stay on. She stuck out her foot to demonstrate her makeshift handiwork.

Elsa claps her hands, delighted, as the snow continues to fall around them. "Perfect!" On the floor near the bed is a rug she put down solely for decoration; now she zips past Jessica to roll it up and move it to the side, making room on the floor for their snowman. "We can make it over here. There's lots of space now."

Not to mention, the whole room seems considerably bigger now when she feels so small.

"Excellent!" Jessica said, bouncing down to the floor, then to the bed, then to the area of the floor Elsa had indicated, this time. She was small, and she was light, and she still had a vertical leap several times her height. Staying tethered to the floor appeared to be even harder than it usually was.

"Y'know, I don't think I've ever actually made a snowman?"

Peter had, but as with many elements of childhood, Jessica had skipped the whole thing and so only had it secondhand.

there's beauty and there's danger here

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