Olaf mentions him to Anna and Kristoff just as Elsa passes by, calls him by a name—Marshmallow—and Elsa stops in her tracks when Anna laughs and Kristoff sighs.

"Who's Marshmallow?" she asks, wondering at the exasperated expression on Kristoff's face, and the gleeful one pulling her sister's lips up into a grin.

Olaf blinks at her and tilts his head. "You made him," he tells her slowly, carefully. "Remember that?"

That evening, heart thumping wildly in her chest, Elsa climbs out of the window in her study. It is strange to find herself hovering a step away from freedom and memories, but the fjord stretches out in front of her, and she takes the first step, knees trembling.

She walks across the water because to run would be cowardly. It gives her time to think, reminds her of the ice that had raced through her veins the last time her slippered feet had trod the same path. Fear and anger and hurt don't dissipate with time, she knows; like memories they remain, sometimes buried but ever present.

When her feet touch down on earth instead of ice, she looks behind her and thinks of Anna's smile and Olaf's warm hugs, her father's hand in hers, and her mother's gentle eyes, and the path across the fjord fades away.

Anna insists that the ability to manipulate ice is a gift, and Elsa has practiced using that word. Gift, gift, gift. Sometimes it still feels like a curse, sometimes things are just too hard to make sense of; thinking beyond the spiderwebbing threads of doubt and anxiety is impossible, some days, but here it's different.

Here it's nice, grand-scale, not flicking snow into Kristoff's hair to hear Anna giggle over breakfast; here she lifts and pushes and spins winding staircases that rise to the highest peaks, and it's all so simple, so easy, that the air rushes into her body and makes her feel alive.

She loves Anna and she loves Arendelle; she might even love Kristoff a little, in her own way, but her creations are beautiful and they make her feel beautiful and worthwhile in a way that she's sure she can never explain to anyone else.

With ice and snow as her medium, Elsa is a potter, a sculptor, a creator.

She is an artist, and this is her art.

She finds her mountainside palace still intact, and wonders at it.

There are still so many things about her gift that she doesn't understand, and now is not the time to find the answer. Taking a deep breath, she walks up the stairs, sidestepping the broken right-hand side.

She doesn't know what she expected to find, but when the doors open, she finds Marshmallow inside, sitting on the floor. He looks up at her appearance, and makes a face that is distinctively a smile. The first thing he does is try to get to his feet; it takes Elsa a moment to realize that he is missing part of one leg; she wonders what happened and tries not to imagine the long trek back to the palace from wherever he had ended up during the fight against Prince Hans and the others.

Almost without thinking, she waves a hand, and Marshmallow has two legs again.

He shifts, neck bending so that he can look at his new leg, and then he looks back to Elsa. His voice is a rumble as he says, slowly: "Thank you."

"You're welcome." It comes automatically. After a moment she tries, feeling awkward, "Hello, Marshmallow."

"Hello." He looks around the palace at the broken ice before his head turns back to her.

"Have you been waiting long?" she asks, feeling silly and wondering if the life she creates contains a soul, or if they are animated puppets made of snow and little more.

"I failed. I'm sorry."

"Failed?" She has no idea what he's talking about.

"I fell." He looks around the room, gaze lingering on the broken remains of the staircase. "Intruders—"

"It's okay." She doesn't know why she says it, or if it even matters. She supposes there's no use in letting one of her own creations blame himself for something that was her fault.

"You were gone," he says, and reaches up onto his head to pull something small off of it. When he holds out his hand, in the palm of it sits the crown she had thrown away. "I found this."

She doesn't know what to do with the crown except take it from him, but when she touches it, she realizes that it doesn't mean anything to her; the crown that would have meant the world to her is at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, and this one is just—is nothing but a memory she doesn't want.

"You were gone," he says again, as if that explains everything, and maybe it does.

Her own hands move away from the crown and touch his fingers, pushing them up and curling them over his palm. "Please, keep the crown," she tells him, voice soft. "I should never have created you in fear, and I'm sorry I—"

Marshmallow's voice interrupts her. "It's okay," he says, settling her crown on his head.

She smiles.

The ice palace is quiet when Elsa leaves it. The chandelier is back in place, the railings perfect again. Marshmallow watches her from the doorway.

"Are you sure?" she asks, standing at the bottom of the repaired staircase.

"Yes." He's still wearing the crown, and it's a tiny sparkle on the top of his head when the moonlight hits it. For some reason, it feels appropriate to leave him here, king of his own little castle.

"Goodbye," she tells him, and lifts her hand in a wave.

He returns the gesture, and Elsa wonders again what it means that she has the gift to create life like this, but she pushes the thought away and turns to head back down the mountain toward Arendelle.