(uploaded — 10.6.14) :: [god help me this week i have like two billion tests D: and this was...ridiculously hard to write. kind of in a different style than streetlight walls, but i hope it's enjoyable all the same.] :: {playlist: "back to december"; taylor swift}

:.

I don't own Frozen. You can also find this on AO3.

Artifice

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.

(i)

there's a face we hide till the nighttime appears

and what's hiding inside

behind all our fears

is our true self locked inside the façade

chapter one :: promise

-—

part the first :: and where will we begin

Anna and Elsa, Elsa and Anna.

They need each other like oxygen.

It's certainly not an exaggeration, and it certainly is a fact.

:.

The first time Anna realizes that there may have been something wrong with Elsa, they're playing tag in the yard and everything's bright and warm and perfect.

Anna is scampering across the green grass, pockmarked with fallen red and orange leaves here and there, chasing after her elder sister as fast as her legs could carry her (which, admittedly, isn't really that fast at all). Said elder sister's teasing laugh is resounding through the air like a pair of silver bells, loud and clear and an absolutely glorious sound to behold.

The redhead huffs in strain, arms pumping by her side in exertion as she dashes after Elsa who, forever the poised little girl, suddenly manages to trip over her own feet and land in a tangled heap of cotton cloth on the ground, still laughing as Anna seizes her chance and comes jumping at the platinum blonde in a flying leap, shoving her hands onto Elsa's back.

"You're it!" she squeals, and Elsa only laughs ever the harder underneath Anna's wriggling form, the sleeves of her shirt whispering over her arms as she holds her hands up to shove Anna off of her.

Anna catches a glimpse of a faint, small bruise speckling its way up the underside of Elsa's arm and tumbles off, staring with wide eyes at the irregularity.

"What's that?" she asks, pointing at the bruise.

Elsa's smile immediately slipped down a notch, her blue eyes widening in surprise as she quickly tugged her shirtsleeves over her arms once more, pulling them to her wrists self-consciously.

"I'm fine...don't worry, Anna," Elsa smiled, wide and bright as sunshine, and she sounded so sincere that Anna couldn't help but believe her.

"Don't you worry."

"Okay," Anna agreed happily, before turning around to trip away from Elsa — "But you're still it!"

She didn't notice the flicker of darkness dart across Elsa's expression, marring her face for but a second. The heavy shadows seeping into the cracks of her smile, shoulders sagging with an invisible weight. Anna only saw the sincerity in Elsa's features still rounded with baby fat, Anna only saw a smile that could light up the whole country from New York City to San Francisco, Anna only saw her sister and her sister was all that mattered.

Was all that always mattered.

:.

Elsa is declared sick with a fever two days later and is taken to bed.

(She's still there a week later.)

:.

Three more long months slouch by and her condition only deteriorates by the day. She can feel it — this sickness — festering inside her worn body, aches and darkness creeping into every crevice of her soul she's been too tired to patch close. There are too many dark circles underneath her eyes these days, ringing them like sad little smiles. Faint mottled bruises the color of rot and death begin to plaster themselves to the pale skin of her arms and cling there like some ugly parasite, refusing to fade away.

She can feel it, and she can hear a clock ticking over her head.

Counting down the hours, minutes, seconds she has left to live.

:.

The first layer of fluffy white snow drapes itself on the ground on the thirtieth of November and Elsa is watching the flakes fall with something melancholy tucked away in blue eyes.

This is how Anna finds her, the door to her room bursting open and the redhead coming skipping in. She's already armed against the winter weather, floppy pink hat smashed on the top of her messy strawberry blonde locks and mittens yanked over her hands. She's been tussled into a bundle of thick coats, a blue-and-white scarf patterned with snowflakes wrapped snugly around her neck to tie up the entire ensemble.

"Do you want to build a snowman?" comes the immediate request. Anna has her chubby, cotton-enclosed fingers interlaced together in a plea, rocking back from her heels to her tippy-toes while her sister looks on, an expression of amusement breezing over her face before it falls away, just as quickly.

"...Not today, Anna," Elsa murmurs, tearing her eyes away from the hazy swirls of snow whisking through the air outside to gaze at her sister instead. "But...you go for it." She smiles wanly around a halo of blonde curls. "I'll be...watching you."

Anna doesn't look as happy as Elsa wishes she could be, and she offers her little sister one last reassurance:

"I'll be fine, Anna. I promise."

(The heap of promises she doesn't know if she'll be able to keep are piling higher and higher by the day.)

Elsa briefly squeezes Anna into a reassuring hug, then lets her go.

Because anything longer, she quietly reasons, would be seen as a gesture of farewell.

Good-bye, Olaf.

Good-bye, world.

Good-bye, Anna.

Good-bye.

Anna hesitates for a moment or two, then grins toothily back and decides to accept the apparent truth in her sister's words. She rushes out of the room in a storm of delighted shouts and heavy coats flapping in the tailwind.

Because Elsa has never let her down.

(Not yet.)

:.

It wasn't until three hours later and a worried shout from Father that Anna realizes that Elsa is also an excellent liar.

:.

(Of course, she had always known of Elsa's condition — mother and father had never kept that a secret from her, and Anna knows it herself — but she didn't quite know that it was fatal until the pure and untainted truth snapped right in her face, in the form of white stick fingers and a dead sister.)

:.

Elsa is admitted to the hospital two hours later, bedridden, her pale skin turned even paler and bruises pockmarking the length of her arms. Clear plastic tubes snake in and out underneath her skin, attached to an IV drip, attached to her thin lifeline anchoring her to the living world.

She doesn't speak much the following days, if at all, much too tired to really do anything but stare off into the distance, blue eyes cloudy and vague. Open, yet seeing nothing. But she always manages to conjure up a weak grin when Anna comes bouncing into her ward, pigtails flying and limbs akimbo before she sat herself on the chair that had been all but bolted to the floor next to the platinum blonde's bed.

"You're gonna be alright!" Anna cheers every time she visits Elsa, ever the faithful and trusting, while her older sister listens patiently, her smile a shadow of what it used to be. "The doctors are going to cure you from being sick and then you can come home and we can build Olaf again next winter!"

Elsa only laughs quietly, the sound more of a desperate wheeze for oxygen than anything, before she folds Anna's hands into her own chilly ones.

"Yes...we will," she breathes.

She promises.

Promises that are already broken and null before they leave her mouth, each of them stabbing deeper and deeper into her heart. Vessels made of lies, blood made of molten lead.

But she can't stop herself, because Anna deserves to hope. She deserves to believe.

Elsa deserves to believe, but she can't.

Not when she can see Death looming in every corner, built of the pale shadows that stretch across the wall of the ward during twilight. Silently standing sentinel, every moment of every day.

I can see you.

I am coming for you.

But Elsa only holds her little sister's chubby little fingers even tighter and makes her promises quietly.

"We will."

"We will."

"We will."

:.

Death's form grows ever the more solid as the night wears on.

-—

part the second :: you'll be alright

Two weeks later at one in the morning, Elsa opens a pair of half-lidded eyes to her mother's tear-stricken gaze.

Her father and Anna are noticeably absent.

"...Mama?" she rasps, instinctively reaching up with her arms, turned thin and defined as brittle sticks.

"Oh — Elsa —"

Elsa's labored breathing bleeds shallow and superficial huffs of air into the fabric of her mother's dress shirt as she instinctively opens her arms to accept her mother's embrace, and she thinks she can feel the tears seeping through the shadowed cracks between their interlocked arms.

"Wh...what's the prognosis?" Elsa whispers.

As if she didn't know already. As if she needed the doctors to make it official. As if the Reaper hadn't been trailing behind on her whispering steps of wind for a month and a half, his black cloak whipping around her with promises of death — drawing ever nearer with every passing second. Shattering her desperate promises with his scythe, slashing through her dreams as if they were made of mist.

And she's just so tired.

Her mother only sobs harder. "Elsa — please don't —"

"Mama...please...just say it...," and her voice is not that of an ten-year-old girl's, but an old woman at eighty. A voice, frail and worn with weariness, finality, acceptance.

It feels like eternity, a passage of time that outlasts the age of the earth, when her mother finally murmurs into white-blonde hair, "It's fatal."

Elsa only nods serenely, her blue eyes calm and clear. Bony stick fingers closing around her mother's in a squeeze, with all the strength she could muster.

She would probably be crying too, by this point.

(If only she had the energy to do so.)

:.

When mother and father had woken and subsequently trundled Anna into the car at five thirty in the morning to take her to the hospital, they hadn't explained anything. She squinted at them through sleep-blurred eyes and remembered thinking that something was not quite right about her parents' stiff expressions, but she was so tired and she wanted to sleep. So she demanded of them a sleep-deprived seven-year-old's explanation: It's so early! Why did you wake me up?!

Her parents simply told her that they needed to go to the hospital.

Needless to say, Anna didn't respond well to that; then they told her they needed to see Elsa, and that snapped her eyes open, bright and alert, and she let her mother drape a cotton jacket over her shoulders without further comment.

By the time the garage door closes, the sky is already bleeding vermillion and peach into the sky when they pulled out of the driveway, speckled wisps of purple clouds dashing across the heavens. There blows a quiet, early morning breeze and Anna sticks her left hand out the window to greet the rattling gale, chattering happily away — not quite completely understanding the gravitas that the situation called for. Her parents force out short, broken laughs and make stilted conversation with their youngest daughter, but as they approach ever closer to the hospital, they fall silent, and nothing Anna does can puncture the suddenly stifling atmosphere within the small automobile.

So they make the rest of the ride in suffocating silence, the sound of slamming car doors and clicking locks and a soft whirr of the automatic glass sliding doors leading into the hospital filtering into Anna's ears.

They tell her to go in alone — "why don't you go and talk to your sister for a few minutes by yourself, alright?" — while they headed over to the doctors' offices. Anna happily bounds into Elsa's cubicle, greeting the lump on the bed as energetically as she has always done.

But Elsa barely even moves at the sound strawberry blonde's tinkling voice this time, the faintest rustle of sterilized white cotton the only indication she has even noticed Anna coming in at all.

Anna's smile drops down by a full notch as she registers Elsa's less than enthusiastic response, but nevertheless she scampers over to the chair waiting by the edge of Elsa's bed, immediately taking the proffered hand dangling off the edge of the white mattress.

She notices with a start that Elsa herself has deteriorated since the last time she visited, only two days ago — now so skinny and pale that if not for the multicolored bruises interlacing a deadly mosaic of patterns up her arms, Anna doesn't think she would be able to immediately distinguish her sister from the bed.

"Elsa?" she asks again, the enthusiasm clearly draining out of her voice as quickly as rain spills down a gutter.

A crack of brilliant blue appears amidst all the sterile white. Sick as she may have been, Elsa's eyes never completely lost their spark: they were certainly duller, but still just as beautiful as Anna had ever seen them.

"...Anna," comes the quiet acknowledgment, and the redhead ignores the ragged hoarseness that had leeched into her sister's voice. Ignores the wavering quality of it, ignores the fact that Elsa is so very clearly dying, because she still hangs onto whatever strands of hope there are. Still believes, somehow, against all odds, that her sister will make it out of her sickness alive.

"Are you okay?" Anna immediately fires off, and Elsa can't help but weakly chuckle at the redundancy of the question, because she's clearly not "okay," and she may never be again.

"I'll scrape by," she smiles, and inclines her head the tiniest bit to the right. "How...are you doing?"

"Tired," Anna grumbles, interlocking her arms on the edge of Elsa's bed to form her own pillow. The platinum blonde wheezes out another laugh at her little sister's antics.

"I am, too," she agrees placidly, and puts her hand next to Anna's.

"...Ah, hey," Elsa speaks again after a long pause. "Did I ever teach you the secrets of winning a snowball fight?"

Anna blinks up at her. "No. How d'you do that?"

"Don't fight it," Elsa says simply. "You have to surrender before it begins...otherwise, you may get hurt."

Anna doesn't see how this would help her win such a snowball fight — didn't surrendering mean giving up?

(And maybe it's her overactive imagination, but she thinks that the wisps of morning clouds outside are now flying by in dark shades of gray.)

She voices her thoughts — "I don't get it. Doesn't that mean you'll lose the snowball fight?"

Elsa's lips quirk up into a smile. "No."

Anna's lip juts out rebelliously. "Giving up sounds like the easy way out."

Silence had never sounded so loud.

"...No," Elsa finally murmurs, leaden and resigned on labored breath. "It never is."

Her words are still hanging in the air like something heavy when the doors to the ward are swinging open and a nurse comes bustling in, her brown eyes sympathetic and smile caring.

"Come on, honey — your parents are waiting."

Anna sighs, disgruntled, but she gives Elsa's hand one last squeeze before skipping over to the nurse.

"...Wait..."

Elsa's voice races weakly through the air as if it's made of molasses, thick and slow and heavy.

Anna turns instinctively, squirming from underneath the nurse's grasp.

"...I love you, Anna."

:.

The scream is torn out of her throat at one-thirteen p.m., December twentieth.

"What do you mean, 'Elsa might die tomorrow?!'"

Silence.

Broken:

"...Papa...my birthday is tomorrow..."

:.

Elsa Arendelle dies precisely on Monday, December the twenty-first, 2078, 7:49 a.m., and all Anna remembers thinking is that it had been much too pretty of a day for Elsa to die.

Her death still haunts Anna, plays in her head like a movie — a horrible movie indeed, but one with razor sharp quality and sound. She can still remember the stench of antiseptic tainting the room with its sharp, bitter tang. The feeling of Elsa's frightfully bony arm underneath her fingers, the wan skin papery and dry, stretched taut over sharp angles and knobby protrusions.

It had been frightfully quick. The doctors had disconnected the IV drips. A few wires. The heart monitor by Elsa's bed grows flat and wails shrilly.

She watches when her sister takes in a shuddering breath, one eye cracking open.

(I'm sorry.)

Anna thinks she hears the thunderous sound of a thousand and one promises shattering into pieces onto the ground when Elsa lets the breath out.

She doesn't move again.

:.

Mama's hand immediately flies to her mouth.

Papa's jaw works on something stiff.

Anna bawls.

-—

part the third :: the living dead

Her birthdays have become bittersweet occasions, marking both the day she had been born and the day Elsa had died. And when it snows, Anna will take one look out of her window and burst out into tears — god, every single time — because it only reminds her of the jarring fact that Elsa broke her promises.

("We'll be together, forever and ever.")

("I promise.)

("We can build a snowman another time together, Anna.")

("I promise.)

("I'll be alright, Anna.")

("I promise.)

Every single fucking one of them.

:.

There are times when Anna will lie in bed and cry silent rivers of tears, all of them only ending up staining her pillowcase into something unrecognizable by the end of the night.

And there will be other times when she throws the pillow across the room, fury and rage overtaking her senses, because you lied to me, Elsa.

You lied to me. You said you would come back. You promised.

And you never came back, Elsa. Why?

And then there will still be more times when Anna stares at the wall for nigh upon two hours, eyes glassy and blank and unthinking. Filled with everything and nothing.

Empty, because she doesn't even know what to feel anymore.

But slowly, gradually, Anna picks up the shards and shattered bits and puts them together with shaking hands, careful not to cut herself on any jagged ends. She goes to elementary school and makes some new friends and develops a raging passion for anything chocolate.

The trail of broken promises that Elsa had left behind when she died, however, never strays far from her mind.

:.

Her carefully reconstructed world cracks into pieces anew on her eighteenth birthday, and this time around, Anna isn't quite as sure she can pick them back up.

"Anna?"

Her father's voice drifts up the stairs a mere moment before the man does himself, rapping gently on the strawberry blonde's door before allowing himself in.

She is soon smothered by soft cloth and strong grips and a warm hug, allowing herself to be enveloped by the reassuring, familiar circle of her father's arms.

"Happy eighteenth birthday, my girl," he whispers before pulling back, adoration and love clearly gleaming in his eyes, yet interwoven tightly together with sadness.

Anna reaches back for another hug and rests the side of her head on her father's shoulder, closing her eyes and breathing in the calming scent of cedar and smoke that always seemed to cling to him.

"Ah...I have someth...someone...I would like you to meet."

He pulls back from her a second time and steps out of the room.

Anna blinks.

A woman with blonde hair replaces him, sidling across the floors on feet that make no sound.

Anna blinks again.

Because she doesn't quite dare to believe.

"...Elsa?" she chokes.

The platinum blonde doesn't even blink at Anna, and this is what she finds most disconcerting of all: this person, this thing, she shows absolutely no emotion at all. Tranquil blue eyes boring into Anna's own, a ghostly pink slash of a mouth superimposed over snowy skin, hands folded loosely behind her back.

"That is what...he has called me, yes," the woman finally says, her eyes flickering to the side momentarily.

(no)

(nonononono)

Eleven years of checked emotion — anger sadness fear sorrow confusion fury ELSA — suddenly come roaring out in a great tidal wave, punching Anna in the chest and sending her reeling, staggering back step after step until her thighs hit the edge of her bed and sending her tumbling onto her mattress. She's breathing fast, heavily, because Elsa's dead and she's not supposed to be here and what in the world did Papa do?!

"N-no — who are you?" the redhead manages to whisper, blurry tears spilling through the cracks in her trembling voice. And inside, her emotions are fighting a war with each other — tumultuous, wailing, crying up a storm, because you look like Elsa and Elsa died thirteen years ago and you're not Elsa and but no you look like Elsa and elsaelsaelsaelsaelsa —

Anna's breathing even more shallowly now, not quite sure what to think — quick, superficial breaths being drawn in and huffed out at quite the rapid pace, leaving no time for air to even be taken in. Her whole world, collapsing into rubble, smoking shambles and pieces around her feet.

"...I am...Elsa," the blonde murmurs, and if Anna didn't know any better, she'd say that the woman sounded unconvinced. "The one...you call your...sister."

She says this blankly.

Lifelessly.

Robotically.

Her words hit Anna in the chest like something harsh, peeling back the layers of her skin and bright red flesh, past slivers of white rib bones made of ivory and dragging out a heart stitched together with childish patches of scar tissue and broken promises.

"You're not my sister," she breathes, words clipped and run ragged with anger and sluggish with leaden finality.

The woman doesn't respond to the barb. She merely takes a step forward that looks as though it is the exact same length as all the steps she had taken previously.

"I promised," the woman says quietly.

("I'll be fine, Anna. I promise.")

Anna staggers backwards into her room before she even knows where her feet are carrying her, and the door slams shut with a sickening crack, rattling against the wooden frame.

"Don't ever say that," and even though she knew that this thing standing right outside her room couldn't hear her, she whispered. A whisper filled with renewed anguish, shattered dreams and broken-glass hearts.

Darkness darting across her expression. Shadows slipping into the cracks of her grimace, shoulders sinking with an invisible weight.

"— Don't ever say that," she chokes, a little louder this time.

There's a pause.

Then the muffled sound resonates across the floor; a soft thud of footsteps, melting away.

Don't ever promise me anything, ever again.

Ever. Ever. Ever.

i hope this wasn't too fast-paced D: things will be explained next chapter! AND I PROMISE IT WILL GET BETTER SOON (by soon i mean by the end and by the end i mean...idk. it'll be slightly longer than streetlight walls i think).



if you're interested in any potential stories i may have coming up, go on my tumblr (astrarisks) and add: /plot-bunnies after the main url.

all the best.