Title: The Past's Not Always In The Past

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Rating: PG; mild het

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.

Summary: "Is there anything else you can tell me about my powers?" Elsa asked Grandpabbie. "My fingers briefly turned blue the other day; but they didn't feel cold or numb at all." 2600w

Spoilers: Post-movie for Frozen; vague for Thor (MCU)

Notes: For earcmacfithil, for the prompt: "Frozen x Thor (MCU). Elsa's real father is Loki. Does the family ever find out? If so, what are the repercussions?" Assumes that Loki used the back ways to wander Earth-ward from time to time before the era of the MCU movies, and utilizes a bit of the unreliable narrator POV. Originally posted elsewhere on November 28, 2015.

It was Anna, inevitably, who first noticed the change in her sister's skin.

In the three years since Elsa had been crowned Queen and accidentally exposed her icy powers to every resident and visitor in the capital of Arendelle, she'd kept to the open gate policy she'd promised. But both she and Anna had spent most of their childhoods, especially the years between their parents' deaths and Elsa's coronation, completely locked away from everyone except for a loyal handful of servants and court officials. And while Anna was energized by being around a lot of people, Elsa definitely wasn't. She still spent at least half of every week withdrawn into the royal quarters, with only occasionally Anna, and- after Anna was of age and had spent at least a year courting the man, this time- Anna's fiancé for company.

Thus Anna was one of the few who ever saw Elsa close-up without her gloves. She'd gained much better control of her powers, but still tended to freeze things unintentionally when emotional, and had no desire to hurt anyone again. In their private apartments, though she was able to relax a bit more, exposing her long, pale fingers...

...which were showing a deep-sky shade of blue at her fingertips.

Anna gasped at the sight, remembering the last time she'd seen such a thing: after her sister had accidentally struck her in the heart with her magic, and she'd slowly begun to freeze to death. Near the end, when she'd stumbled out onto the ice-locked fjord in the heart of a storm in the desperate hope of finding Kristoff again, she'd looked down at her numb, shaking hands and seen her own fingers turning just that color.

Minutes later, she'd completely transformed into an ice sculpture... and only the fact that her last act had been one of true love for her sister, turning away from what she'd thought was her only chance of survival to shield Elsa from Prince Hans' blade, had saved her. But surely Elsa hadn't frozen her own heart? Not after everything. Not when they were family again, the kingdom prospering, and Elsa not forced to hide who she was anymore.

"Elsa, what's wrong?" she cried, reaching out to grasp her sister's left hand.

They were having a private family dinner that evening; Elsa's hand was curled around a glass of her favorite wine, out of her own view while she chilled it to her favorite slushy consistency. She flinched back instinctively at Anna's grab, setting down the glass, then abruptly pushed back her chair and stood as she caught a glimpse of her own hand, staggering back from the table. Her expression froze up, into the blank and distant expression Anna had hated for so long: the conceal, don't feel look.

...And just like that, the blue melted away again, leaving Elsa's fingers just as palely pink as they'd always been.

"Elsa?" Anna repeated in disbelief, following her sister to her feet, hand still hanging uselessly in the air.

Kristoff glanced between both sisters, then dropped his napkin on his plate and stood as well. "What just happened?" he asked, sounding alarmed and wary. "I thought your own magic didn't affect you?"

"I don't know," Elsa said, troubled, turning both hands palm up in front of her and staring at them with a slightly lost expression, wriggling the affected fingers with no apparent difficulty. "That's never happened before. It- I didn't feel cold."

"What did it feel like?" Anna wanted to know. "Was anything different than usual?" Now that the blue was gone, there was no other sign that Elsa was in danger, but that one moment had brought back all the fear of those disastrous events right after the coronation. She couldn't help but worry.

"No," Elsa replied, her expression troubled. "I felt... comfortable, actually. I was thinking about something special I wanted to do for your wedding; and how wonderful it is that I can be all of who I am now, more even than when I thought I was letting it all go, up in the mountains. But that isn't true, is it? Even here, I still have to be careful."

Anna exchanged an alarmed glance with her fiancé as Elsa resolutely stepped back toward the table, picking up the pair of long gloves she'd dropped by her plate and tugging them back into place over her hands.

"I'm sure... I'm sure it was nothing," Anna said hastily, hating the resigned note she could hear in her sister's voice. "Maybe it was just a trick of the light?"

"Or something natural," Kristoff said. "If no one in your family's ever had magic like yours before, then you don't know how it's supposed to work. It can't all be ice and freezing people's hearts."

"Better safe than sorry," Elsa said, with a wan smile. "I'd rather not find out the hard way when I accidentally frostburn someone with a careless touch, or worse. I should never have let myself be careless about the gloves, not even here. Especially not here."

Kristoff sighed, throwing Anna a warm, amused look and shaking his head. "You princesses; both so dramatic. Anyone would think you were sisters, the way you both blow a single incident up into true love- or a prison sentence."

"Kristoff!" Anna objected.

"It's true! How long did you know Hans, again, before you decided he was the one for you?" He raised a good-natured, shaggy blond eyebrow. Point made, he turned back to her sister. "I'm not saying you shouldn't be careful; just not to panic, either. Why not pay another visit to Grandpabbie before borrowing trouble? If anyone knows anything about your magic that you don't, it'd be him."

Elsa's expression grew thoughtful at that; then she nodded. "You're right; after you told me about the trolls, I found the book my parents must have used to find them the first time my magic touched Anna. It said one of our ancestors was harmed by cold magic back during the Winter Wars, and the trolls were the only ones who knew how to reverse what had happened to him. If they knew that much- surely they know more?"

"I'm sure they do," Anna replied, with a grateful smile for Kristoff for the diversion. "But that can wait 'til tomorrow, can't it? We were discussing what flavor of ice cream Kristoff and I should have for our wedding reception. Oooh, do you think you could actually make some with your powers? Or maybe just shape it? Imagine ice cream snowflakes!" She deliberately sat back down in her chair, chattering away as she normally would.

"Something with chocolate, I think you were saying?" Kristoff followed her lead, picking up his fork again and casually digging back into the roast. He even took a bite of the accompanying stewed carrots that he usually left abandoned on the plate, not bothering to make his usual asides about what Sven would think of ruining his favorite vegetable that way.

"Well, that goes without saying," Elsa replied, loftily. Then she eyed her hands again, took a deep breath, and scooted her chair back to the table. "Though I think making snowflakes out of it might get a little messy!"

Nothing more about blue fingers, or Elsa's magic, was mentioned for the rest of the meal; it was almost as if nothing had happened at all. But Elsa didn't take the gloves back off that night- and in the morning, she called for two horses and Sven as soon as dawn broke over the horizon.

Anna's first and second visits to the trolls had been traumatic, though she still couldn't remember the first; everything she knew about that day came from Elsa and Kristoff's memories, blurred by the passage of years. Her third and fourth, when Kristoff had reintroduced her to his adoptive family as his actual girlfriend and then to announce their wedding, had been dramatic in a different way: full of singing and dancing and being passed from one cheerful family member full of stories about Kristoff's awkward childhood to the next. The fifth, however, unfolded differently from any of the others.

They left the horses in Sven's care just short of the stony clearing the trolls used as a gathering place, then strode in, eyeing the seemingly innocuous boulders.

"I'm Elsa of Arendelle," her sister said in her best Queenly voice, stepping forward into the center of the clearing. "I met you all once before, when I was a child, and you saved my sister. You said then that fear would be my enemy. You were right."

The trolls unrolled themselves, crowding around their small group with solemn, wide-eyed expressions. They never seemed to travel in any smaller number than the full clan; it could be a little intimidating when they weren't smiling. The one Kristoff called Grandpabbie was at the front, standing before Elsa; he gave her a formal nod of the head, one leader to another, then replied.

"Your Majesty. I did; though I fear your parents misinterpreted my advice. If I may?" The old troll took a few halting steps forward, holding out a hand.

Elsa swallowed, then tugged a glove off, staring at her still-pale fingers before laying them gently on Grandpabbie's palm. "Misinterpreted how?" she asked, warily.

"I said that you must learn to control your gifts; instead, you locked them away. But, hmm; I see that you are making progress now. Good, good; when the power flows smoothly, there are fewer eddies, fewer storms."

Elsa shivered delicately under the influence of whatever magical scan Grandpabbie was wielding; Anna had felt its touch, herself, when he had checked her over to make predictions about their future children. No chance of more ice powers in her line, he'd said, but there'd be plenty of love; she was more than okay with that.

"Is there anything else you can tell me about my powers?" Elsa asked. "I remember you asked whether I had been cursed, or born with my powers. But no one else in my family has had them; we don't know what to expect. My fingers briefly turned blue the other day; but they didn't feel cold or numb at all. And the color faded away, almost immediately, as soon as I noticed the change. Is that normal for someone born to this magic?"

"Blue skin?" Grandpabbie blurted, clasping her fingers more tightly, then running the palm of his other hand over their backs. "Your magic has always felt strange; like nothing we've seen since the Winter Wars. But natural to you. There are very few ways that can happen; even fewer, since it was obvious that you are your parents' true child. Do you know if they invoked the traditional blessings at your birth?"

Anna sucked in a breath; she knew what that question meant. Arendelle's sovereigns were no different from those of many of the other small European nations in that they'd taken on the official forms of the Roman church to protect their people from economic isolation and other pressures; but they had a Gothi as well as a bishop among their advisors, and a small sacred grove within the castle's bounds in addition to the chapel. Anna remembered seeing her parents take her sister out there several times during their childhood; she'd been jealous at the time, wondering why they included Elsa so much more than they did her, but she understood better now.

Elsa paused a long moment, then nodded, slowly. "If you mean, did they raise the hammer over me? Yes, they did; for both Anna and I. But..." She bit her lip, thinking. "I remember... they mentioned once that they'd asked special blessings before my mother became pregnant with me, because several years had passed since their wedding without any children. She said that perhaps they should only have given the traditional drops to Loki to ward off his tricks, rather than offering him a toast greater than any of the others, in hopes that his craftiness would help where the others' blessings hadn't."

"Oooh," several of the trolls said all at once: an echo of acknowledgement.

Anna shivered at the sound; Kristoff stepped closer, wrapping an arm around her as they continued to listen.

Grandpabbie nodded, slowly. "Then it is his magic we sense; you are his daughter as much as you are the daughter of Konung Agthar and Drottning Ithun. But he gifted you not with his powers of trickery and illusion, but the ice of his people's greatest enemy."

Kristoff gasped, realizing before Anna did what Grandpabbie meant; his arm tightened around Anna. "The giants."

Elsa paled, pulling her bare hand back from Grandpabbie's grasp and staring at it again, a horrified expression on her face. "I'm... then I really am a danger..."

Grandpabbie shook his head at her. "We remember the Jótnar, we trolls; we remember their blue skin and the frozen breath of their army."

"Brrrr," the gathered trolls put in, in counterpoint.

"Odin showed them what's what!" a lone, excitable troll added, shaking a fist in the air; he was quickly shushed by his fellows.

Grandpabbie continued, ignoring the byplay. "But Loki stole the instrument of their wickedness and blessed you with its beauty. The power is only what you make of it! You have seen what happens when you wield it in fear or anger. But when you wield it with love, the beauty wins over the danger. I told your parents that when you were a child; you must now decide whether to believe it yourself."

Elsa swallowed convulsively, then glanced at Anna, and took a deep, fortifying breath. "I do. I mean, I will. I'll do whatever I have to do to master control; I never want to hurt my sister- or anyone else- ever again."

"Good," Grandpabbie nodded, satisfied, then broke into a grin. "Then may I suggest you start with an offering of thanks? You may be surprised at the results."

Around them, the trolls broke into an impromptu song about praise and recognition; Anna tuned it out, knowing it meant the advice was over, and ducked out of Kristoff's hold to throw her arms around her sister.

"Anna..." Elsa stiffened, holding her ungloved hand as far from her sister as possible. "You heard what he said; what if I..."

"What if you what?" Anna scoffed. "You're my sister! You've got this."

"I'd listen to her, if I were you," Kristoff put in. "She's the most sensible one out of all of us; you know it's true."

"Oh, I don't know, Sven's pretty even keeled, too," Elsa replied in a slightly watery tone of voice, sniffing into Anna's shoulder.

"I'll be sure and tell him you said that," Kristoff chuckled in amusement.

He did, too, when they finally said farewell to the trolls and headed back to the castle. Sven's response, relayed through Kristoff as usual, surprised another laugh out of the Queen; Anna finally let herself relax again at the sound, letting go her regret for bringing the blue skin to Elsa's attention in the first place.

And when a few days later, Anna glanced out toward the sacred grove and saw a tall green-clad man with long, dark hair walking with her sister, ice crystals dancing around his fingers... she took a deep breath, then smiled, and let that go as well.

Love was a force powerful and strange, that was for sure; but she had all the proof she'd ever need that it wasn't now, and never would be, anything to fear.

-x-