#amanintime

Λ(tlantis)

▏This gentleman wasn't wearing any pants. ▕

    Even after the accident, Elsa had not been afraid of the ocean.

   How could she be? It was her birth right, more than the crown was. Up to the day of her parents' death, she expected her mother and father to walk out and announce their pregnancy and the eventual birth of a bouncing baby boy, there to take the place of a throne she was only to inherit by default.

   But water did not make her fingers shake. It didn't make her knees weak. When she stood at the edge of the fjord, time after time, or stared at it from the windows of her house, she never felt sick.

   Nor did she on the ship.

   There was a part of her that remembered quotes from two great men, men she'd been forced to read many times as a child, and men she'd enjoyed reading: speaking how "Cowards die many times before their deaths" and "We must neither cowardly nor rash but courageous." Standing on the bow of a ship, breathing in the salt soaked air and attempting to dissuade the thoughts that swirled like the black, inky water beneath her, Elsa attempted to remind herself that there was nothing waiting for her back in Arendelle.

   Anna had Kristoff. Anna had a whole new life... a whole, new, better life. that didn't involve her. 

   Running away wasn't cowardice. 

   It was bravery.

   It was... better.

   The last night that Elsa would spend on the ship felt like every other night had. It didn't taste of death, didn't rock with finality. The sky drizzled lightly, and the long stretch of land that was continually in their sight yawned on, without a care to them, yet the ship never docked. Elsa hadn't asked why – she'd changed ships multiple times, and the language of the people on this ship was foreign to her. Though it was better to her to be so far from home, where none could report to her obviously anxious sister about the whereabouts of her paled face.

   And then it happened.

   Her few crewmates were screaming in terror, rushing to the deck, pulling large crates with them with wild looks of hope on their suddenly stricken faces. Elsa pulled herself to her feet, slowly, unsure if she should follow – nearly all the others on the ship, save for her, worked here. But finally her feet took her to the deck. 

   They'd crashed into something – the language did not permit much – but it was obvious by the way the ship shook and tilted that it did not have much longer on its own two legs. Elsa's own knees felt weak at the prospect, and her mind went back to what she had just thought – how she wasn't afraid of the water, how it was her birthright, as she uselessly gripped hold of the side ship's railing, slick with the soft, cool rain that she felt slowly coating her own skin and the floor boards beneath her. 

   Despite the gloves, the shoes, the dress, ice seeped out of her like the anxiety stirred below her skin. It was a fear that froze her heart like none other had, one that made everything burn quietly and made the figures of the people in front of her turn into lines, blurs, distant images rather than humans she knew she should help. All she could hear was her own internal voice, wondering if this was what her parents had sounded like, had felt like, had looked like, in their final moments aboard a ship. 

   All she could wonder was why it had been them... and not her. 

   She supposed it was her turn, now.

   Behind her blurring eyes, she hardly saw the ship glaze in an icy sheen intermixed with the light rain, could hardly feel herself breathe, move, as a distant part of her mind decided her immobility was helping nothing and no one and she moved forward, numbly and dizzily, to help one of the sailors who struggled underneath a crate – yet they all moved backwards from her, now, staring in fear, hands held out, speaking to her in words she couldn't comprehend. 

   “I won't hurt you," she promised, her words swallowed by the rushing of the water beneath her and above her, the crackling of ice all around her. Elsa's violet stained clothes felt as if they weighed hundreds of pounds against her skin, her hair depositing water directly into her blinking eyes. "Please, I – I'm sorry." 

   But she understood. First, to lose their ship from water... and then, to glance and see it being taken from a member of their own crew.

   They came towards her. Not with swords, but with their hands, and their glares, and their steady footsteps, and it was so much more threatening, somehow, then with actual weapons, because she had no idea what the sky soaked sailors planned to do, and Elsa backed up and up until she felt the hand rail of the ship ease into her back and pink her there and there was no escape, none, and behind them, the integrity of the ship still failing, crackling, fading from beneath their own feet... 

   Someone shoved her.

   For many moments, Elsa was aware of nothing more than the hands that were on her shoulders and her own, rarely slipping feet. 

   And suddenly she was tumbling over the edge towards the waters below, her hands fumbling and failing in a large blackness of no shape or feeling other than terror – and when she hit the water, she hit it with a smack, not a splash. 

   It may have been moments, it may have been hours later that Elsa's eyes flitted open to see the ship, in the distance, her back aching with a searing throb that was somehow dull and distant at the same time. Her breath was catching in her lungs uncomfortably... nothing felt right... and even as Elsa wished to rise, assess the damage, figure out how she was still alive, she knew her body still needed rest. A heartbeat rustled beneath her, one that caused her half open, gloved hand to twitch, and all at once Elsa knew that it was ice, and not water, that had caught her in its arms, and she was safe. 

   For one of the only times in her life, safe with ice.

Once as a very little girl, Mulan had run away from home. Raised in the safety of her family's compound, with little reason to visit the fields, she had just reached the age when it was beginning to occur to her that there was more of the world to see than either compound or fields. And oh, how little Mulan was curious to see it! It was easy, one morning when she was supposed to be feeding the chickens, to slip out into the shady woods that bordered the Hua farm.

    By noon, Mulan's enthusiasm had dimmed somewhat. Though the novelty of the situation had kept her occupied, she had met no one and was moreover beginning to be hungry. When Mulan decided to find her way home, she became hopelessly lost and bewildered. Her baba had found her wandering, and Mulan was taken home and smacked and confined to the compound for a month--and she was very glad to be there, after the terrors of the vast forest. It was later that her parents thought perhaps she had better spend a little more time in the village.

    She could well remember how frightened she'd been, but now Mulan almost smiled to think of it. In comparison to this forest, the woods of her childhood seemed like an elegant and well-ordered garden. As a little girl she'd feared the tall straight pines and thickets of bamboo in Sichuan--the daughter of a prosperous farmer, she'd innocently imagined that all plants grew in straight lines--but this would have sent the child she'd been into paroxysms of terror.

    It was hard to tell where the trees ended and where flowers, vines, all sorts of crawling tendriled plants began; she saw immediately that it would be difficult to ride into the woods, and Khan might stumble and hurt himself. It was no hotter here than Juexizhen in the height of summer, but Mulan wiped beads of sweat from her face with the corner of her sleeve as she dismounted. A swift pat sent the warhorse ambling back to the ship.

    In this green behemoth, Mulan felt like a very little girl again, but there was nothing she could do about it except press onward until she found him.

Elsa looked at the interestingly dressed man and curtsied. "Hello, I'm Queen Elsa, and you are?"