fandomtownies | The Preserve [Thursday evening]

It wasn't long before Elsa found her way out into the preserve as well. She'd left Canute behind (as much as he whined about it) and had only pulled on enough layers that people wouldn't think she was completely insane when she set foot outside.

She gave Celia a little smile as she approached, though it was a bit on the shaky side. Elsa wasn't going to back out of this, no, but that didn't mean she wasn't nervous about it.

"Good evening, Celia. I... hope you weren't waiting for too long?"

"Not at all," Celia promised her, offering what she hoped was a reassuring smile. "Though I hope it's not a bad time? We can always reschedule."

She was mostly being delicate because it was Elsa, but it wasn't as though she wouldn't understand if there were other places she'd prefer to be, considering.

"If we reschedule, I'm going to just keep ducking out of this," Elsa admitted, fidgeting a little more, wringing her hands in front of herself. "I've been terrified of what I can do for most of my life now... I can't afford to continue making excuses to not... not deal with it."

It clearly hadn't been working out for her thus far, after all.

"Well, there's no need to be afraid here, all right?" Celia said firmly, pushing away from her tree. "You won't hurt me -- promise, you really won't, because I won't let you -- and...well, look, there's already plenty of snow. You can't do any damage out here, right?"

Not that she liked thinking of Elsa's powers -- or anyone's -- in terms of damage dealt, usually, but still.

"And -- forgive me for asking, but your sister's here now, isn't she?" Celia added, softly. "I haven't had the pleasure yet, but -- all the more reason to work on this, if she's actually here."

"Anna being here is the reason I finally changed my mind," Elsa admitted, softly. "It was easy enough back home to avoid her. I could just stay in my room. But here, I don't really have that option. And I don't think anybody would really let me try, anyway."

Barry had already coaxed her out a few times, as it was.

"Even if she isn't my Anna... I can't... I can't hurt her again. I can't risk that."

"No, I certainly wouldn't let you just hide out, and I'm not alone there," Celia agreed with a quick little smile. "But you won't hurt Anna again -- you already haven't, and she's been here over a month. That's already progress, isn't it?"

Progress meaning Elsa'd been wearing her gloves and avoiding Anna, sure, but still! Progress!

"It mostly just means Barry told her not to crowd me, and I've been giving her a wide berth," Elsa replied, her smile fairly sheepish. "I'm not certain that's progress so much as a decided lack of me actively breaking anything..."

Which could be said to be the same thing, perhaps, if you had a really low bar for what constituted 'progress.'

"If it makes you feel better," Celia offered, "I break things all the time. I broke my bedroom window just yesterday."

...no need to get into how that happened. Ahem. She was kind of still working on that.

"But the nice thing about potentially breaking things here is that there's plenty of us here to help you put things back together," she added with a shrug. "But considering you'd probably like to actually see Anna from time to time -- and I'm sure she'd like to crowd you more than she's being allowed, from the sounds of it -- that should probably be, well, plan B. Anna still doesn't...know, does she?"

"Anna still doesn't know," Elsa confirmed, softly. "And I'm still afraid to tell her. The trolls made it out to be some sort of... terrible thing she could never find out about, but... they're trolls. They're not exactly well-known for their in-depth and coherent explanations."

They were fantastic at scare tactics, though, whether they knew they were or not.

"Either way... even if I can't tell her, I don't want her to be in danger from me. I don't want anyone to be."

Celia nodded, mulling that over. "Then the first step is to make you more comfortable with yourself, I think," she said, crooking a small smile. "Because it seems like one of the biggest problems is that you're afraid you're going to hurt someone, and knowing your own gifts inside and out will help immensely with control."

She caught herself, and added, "And I just want to say, up front -- if I overstep my bounds here, at all, or you don't like something I'm doing, say so? I've never...worked on this kind of thing with anyone else, and my only frame of reference is how my father taught me control, and we are absolutely not doing things that way."

She was maybe a touch more vehement than she needed to be, there, but it sort of bore vehemence.

"My father gave me a pair of gloves and told me to keep it all in," Elsa offered, softly. "I think between the two of us, we have a pretty solid basis for how not to go about this, and we can quite possibly figure out something that works from there?"

She worried at her lip for a moment, eyes downcast, before looking up at Celia again.

"I suppose I should start by taking these off, then."

Tentatively, she started to pull at her gloves.

Celia watched her carefully, before gently offering, "Your father sounds like he did what he thought he had to do, but it's unfortunately not been...effective."

More like utterly crippling, by the looks of it, but...it did sound like the desperate actions of a man who loved his daughters.

"Mine broke my bones to teach me to heal them quickly," she added, her voice very quiet, and she smiled a little weakly. "That's why my control's so good -- it's had to be. I'm fairly sure there's a happy medium somewhere between the two of those options."

She kept her eyes trained on Elsa's hands as she spoke, prepared to intervene if icicles started forming in her eyelashes or something.

A little bit more frost than before seemed to creep along the branches of the nearby trees as Celia spoke. The idea of anyone, of her father hurting her in order to teach her control left Elsa feeling ill, wanting to reach for her friend and pull her close and hold her and tell her she was sorry, so sorry, that she had been treated that way.

The frost forming on the branches was exactly the reason she didn't do so.

"There must be," she agreed, with the slightest of nods. "Something that works without being..."

Cruel? Celia hardly needed Elsa to point that out, Elsa was sure.

"... Without being that," she finished, a bit lamely. "What... would you like me to do first?"

"Relax, but it's easier said than done, right?" Celia said, her smile widening a little. "Are you trying to control it right now? Because I'd like to see what your magic just does on its own, without you thinking about it."

Knowing what the magic wanted to do in moments like this, when Elsa was calm and unlikely to accidentally freeze something due to an emotional surge, was a good starting point, she thought.

"Relaxing is far more easily said than done," Elsa admitted, nodding a little. "And I am, yes. You wanted me to just let go...?"

That sounded dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

"Are you feeling afraid?" Celia checked, keeping her voice low and soothing. "Or anxious? Worried you'll hurt me? Because I promise, Elsa, you won't. I'll make sure nothing bad happens, I've got you -- and I know it's hard to relax, but just...stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about your magic, and let it just do what it wants for a moment. Think about Barry, or Canute, or the trip. We're going to Mexico. It's beautiful there, at least in my time. Just focus on something else, and let go. Maybe even close your eyes, if that'll help."

"I'm terrified," Elsa admitted, ducking her head and closing her eyes. "But if that's what you want me to do..."

She took a deep breath and just tried to relax, tried to stop holding back the powers that she'd been doing battle with all this time.

The frost on the trees nearby started to spread a little more. Under Elsa's feet, though? That was where it was really noticeable, a sheet of smooth ice creeping across the ground.

"You're doing so well," Celia said soothingly, watching intently. And just to be pre-emptive, she pushed up from the ground, letting herself hover a few inches in the air. The ice-skates before had been cute, but she didn't want to make Elsa self-conscious, or realize what was happening if she hadn't, just yet. "I'm right here, and everything's fine, and you're doing great, Elsa."

This...wasn't too bad, really. The ice wanted to spread, that much was obvious, but it wasn't as drastic as she'd feared it might be.

"Am I?" Elsa frowned a little, and bit her lip slightly. "I'm afraid to open my eyes."

The trouble with the ice spreading was that it kept spreading, crawling up the trunks of the trees that had been frosting over, thickening as it went. It didn't seem like much at first, just a slow, creeping cold. Icicles formed on the tree branches around them, and the trees started to lean.

She opened her eyes when she heard the groan of the ice on the trees struggling to carry its own weight.

... And then a moment later, she closed them tightly again and covered her eyes with her hands. She was okay, this was okay, it wasn't a problem, this was what was supposed to happen...

Celia reached out with her own magic to hold the trees upright, biting her lower lip as she carefully maintained focus. "You're doing fine," she soothed. "Elsa, you're fine. Do you want to stop? This is -- it's all right. It's just a little winter."

And there had already been a little winter, and Celia could melt the ice to thin it out, if it was needed -- just now she was pushing back at the trees, holding them in place, but she could do more. "How about you put your gloves back on for a moment and we just talk? Is that okay?"

Elsa nodded. Nodded and made a grab at her gloves, pulling them on before she could lapse into panic and then taking a few desperate breaths to try to calm down.

Her hands were shaking.

"It doesn't look bad," she said, almost too softly to be heard. "It doesn't look bad, but it always gets worse. It creeps up walls, it hangs in the air. It... it gets into people's heads."

That last one, that was the worst one.

"Gets into people's heads?" Celia prodded, gently, trying not to look overly curious. "Do you mean what you said about Anna's memories? And...no, it doesn't look bad, but it wants out. That's clear, and we've known it. Your magic wants to be used. It's a matter of...channelling it, I think."

"I..." Elsa was wringing her hands in front of herself, now. "I mean that that's what nearly killed her, when we were little. A burst of my power struck her head. She still has a streak of white in her hair, where she was hit."

She stared downward, at the sheet of ice under her feet.

"How would I channel this?"

"By staying calm," Celia replied quietly, but firmly, as she looked to Elsa's wringing hands. "You're stronger than your power is, and at this point it's just a game of teaching your magic that -- that it has to follow your will, just like how your brain and your emotions do."

She offered a tiny smile, shrugging a shoulder. "And channeling it means just finding a productive outlet. Like the fractal patterns you made for me before. Something to stretch it so it doesn't manifest so strongly when your emotions are high, and something that'll get you used to using it again, rather than fighting it."

Celia stretched a hand out to those still-bending trees, giving them a little shake to clear some of the ice. "I thought Anna fell," she added, a slightly apologetic note in her voice. "I didn't realize it was head trauma in a more direct sense of the word."

Elsa nodded a little, eyes turning downward again.

"We were playing," she explained. "One of the games we would play... She'd tell me to catch her, and then jump from pile of snow to pile of snow as I made them. But she was going too quickly for me to keep up, and I slipped and fell and threw out my hand hoping to give her something to land on. It hit her, instead."

So Anna had fallen, on top of being smacked upside the head with magic ice.

"If... if you're certain that making more patterns will help, I might start doing more of that."

"I'm not certain," Celia admitted. "But I think it'll...help? Just doing things that you know you're good at, things that help you exercise control over it, you know? Pretty things usually help me -- I like making glass, or changing my dresses, things like that."

She worried her lower lip, thoughtful, before venturing, "What happened with your Ethics baby?"

She had her guesses -- that it probably wasn't just Canute who'd gotten to it -- but she wanted to ask Elsa.

"...."

Elsa ducked her head a little and blushed a furious pink at the mention of the Ethics baby. She already felt more than a little small, given Obi-Wan's insinuation that she didn't care enough about her studies and that's why the baby had been in such rough shape. Admitting how she'd messed up didn't help matters in the least.

"I was changing for the day," she admitted. "I didn't have my gloves on, and this pollen had just started and my focus was everywhere, and it screeched, all out of nowhere. I jumped."

She'd done more than jump, really.

"I was just curious," Celia said gently, holding out a hand. "I mean, I'm the last to judge on that front -- I nearly dismantled mine, except I knew they'd be able to tell. But I figured there was...more to it, given how you were responding to the questioning."

The way her nose wrinkled might have indicated how little she'd thought of how that class had gone, but Eleanor seemed to have covered that well enough the other day.

"Your reflexes seem to be good, at least," she offered, trying to find a silver lining. "As a defense or a way to protect yourself, your magic's absolutely dead useful. I mean, yes, it was meant to be a baby, but let's set that aside for now because I think it was a stupid exercise, anyway -- it startled you, and you responded quickly. That's better than a lot of us, that kind of instinctive reaction. That's a good thing, even if it's made things messy before."

"I suppose if my goal was surviving and not living, it would be good," Elsa allowed, looking down at her hands, and then at the one that Celia was holding out. "But I can't imagine... what if it had been a real baby?"

Then presumably she wouldn't have been taking care of it alone. But that was beside the point.

"There are a few occasions where reacting first might be useful on the island. Or even back in Arendelle, once I take the throne. But considering how jumpy I can be on a good day, it just worries me more, that my instinct is to lash out at what startles me."

The Preserve [Thursday evening]

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