The First Time in Forever

For the first time in forever, she wasn't alone.

These words hung in that invisible plane between thought and spoken word as the Snow Queen stood across from Old Man Winter, a creature as cold and wild and blue and sweet and alive as she was. Alive. As she was.

She had heard the name Jack Frost a few times over the years, but she did not pay the name any mind (just a saying) until long after she left her palace of ice and snow to travel the lands beyond her beloved Arendelle, now a crumbling ruin, nothing more than a speechless, forgotten shadow of the country it had once been. She found places even colder than her own cursed touch, and she found places as hot and colorful as her sister had once been (oh Anna, sweet Anna, who had ruled Arendelle so well after Elsa left, who had never given up on the Snow Queen, who had always believed in bright and beautiful and warm…) The Snow Queen had spent many years alone in her ice palace until she was able to move forward. Or at least to move on.

She saw him the first time not far from the land of her birth, during the Yule. It was just a glance out of the corner of her eye — a flash of blue and white and laughter and fun — but when she turned there was nobody. Nothing but the lingering sense of somebody… something… and she stayed and searched for that glimpse for many months before going on again.

As she walked the places of the world, she grew accustomed to her solitary existence. Most of her mortal life she had done everything in her power to keep others away. And then, slowly — so slowly — it was as if she had begun to fade. Everybody grew old; she did not. Everybody moved on; she remained frozen. Everybody forgot about her. Nobody would see her. She understood now that nobody could. She was alone until her existence stopped, and she did not know when — if — that might be.

As she walked the places of the world, she began to see more glimpses of that laughing frozen glance and began to take a real interest in whatever it was. She could not live without a purpose or she might go mad; and so she sought the thing or the meaning behind that flash of cold and laughter.

She chased this glimpse around the world, or so it seemed.

She did not catch sight of him fully until years and years and years later. At first, she did not make the connection between the boy standing astride the telephone lines like an acrobat, and her glimpse that she was chasing.

On a street she did not know, on a night as clear and cold as truth, under a moon as full and bright as the sun, she found herself looking up at what appeared to be a gangly teenage boy holding a shepherd's crook striding slowly across phone lines like a tight rope. And then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone, and she realized — she knew, she knew — that this was her glimpse at last, the thing she had been searching for.

She looked around wildly, thinking he might have fallen, but she caught a glimpse (like all those other times) further down the street. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she found him: stepping and jumping as sprightly as a cat across telephone poles, roofs, garbage cans, satellite dishes, moving as though he weighed nothing. His laughter drifted back toward her, carried faintly on a wind that seemed out of place. She sprung into a run.

"Wait!" she cried, trying to keep up with him, and failing miserably. "Wait! Wait! Please!"

She chased him gamely into what must have been the city center (so very strange, so very different from her childhood, and oh, how the world had changed around her frozen solitude) before she lost him. Wheezing heavily, she turned her eyes one way and then another, her loose braid finally falling into free tangles around her shoulders. A glint on a window caught her eye, but when she saw it was just streetlights glinting off frost, she looked away.

And she found him again. Crouched at a second story window, balanced with his toes on the sill, strangely inhuman and so very human at the same time. As she drew near (out of breath, hadn't run like this in centuries, hard to breathe, sides hurt) she saw him place long, delicate fingertips against the window pane, and she saw frost form there as if blossoming from his fingertips.

Adrenaline spurred her suddenly. "Hey!" she hollered, but he was too far away, perhaps, or just wasn't listening for the voice of a woman in the dead of night calling to him, or possibly he was ignoring her.

She saw the rest as if in agonizingly slow motion. He leaned back from the window, pulling his toes over into nothing. The air held him suspended there. He began to turn away.

"No!" she bawled, something like sweat or tears causing her hair to stick to her face. "Don't go! Don't go!"

In a last desperate attempt to get his attention before she collapsed from exhaustion, she flung her power wildly in his general direction, ice and snow and cold, cold air, but he was gone. She fell to her hands and knees, panting and trying not to cry from frustration. "No," she whispered, "p- please. I've never met somebody like m-me before."

"Neither have I."

Her head whipped up and around so quickly she felt pain. He was there, in front of her looking down at her, speaking to her. She scrambled to her feet, not feeling or looking like a queen, and not caring.

"Wha— who are you?" she whispered, afraid to draw near and afraid to lose him again.

"Jack Frost. You?"

"I— Elsa. I'm Elsa."

His eyes were blue like the deepest ice in Antarctica, and his mouth was a perpetual smile. Frost spread from where his bare feet touched to concrete.

And Elsa knew — finally — finally… for the first time in forever…

For the first time in forever, she wasn't alone.