Elsa had a poor imagination.
Oh, she could conjure up elaborate palaces of ice and an entire army of snow people and each would be different than the last—that was different, that was something that was hers and hers alone, and she was unsurprised that the ice that burst forth from her fingertips when she was creating was as different each time as every single snowflake that fell from the sky—
But the fact remained that there were a lot of things Elsa had never done, there was only so much you could do when you kept to your room, and some things—well, she couldn’t so much as imagine doing them.
Dancing, for one. At her coronation, it had seemed shamefully easy to excuse herself. I don’t dance; she had never learned, unless you counted leaping across her room in an attempt to recreate the graceful moves of ballet dancers she’d admired as a child. She’d seen Weselton dance, too, and maybe that would have counted in his book, but Elsa wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. Even now, when she was learning to dance from various tutors, she was shy, and it was the done thing to wear gloves at a ball, and Elsa was embarrassed not to know any of the dances here.
It’s warmer than I thought, quipped a voice in her head, light and loving. Anna: how she longed for her little sister at her side right now.
The air that rushed into her lungs when she slipped out onto the balcony was light as a cloud, cool as a drink of water. The Queen of Arendelle hadn’t realized how stifling the ballroom felt until now; she breathed as deeply as her corset allowed, like a fish that’d been flopping weakly on land, and felt her very veins tingle with the relief of cold.
That was before she saw her. The immaculate dress, the hair that reminded Elsa of her sister, the ring on one hand that shone in the light from indoors.
”Your Highness—!” Elsa swiftly curtsied. “I congratulated you earlier, but I didn’t get to say how sorry I was that I missed your wedding.”
Marriage, that was another thing that Elsa could not imagine.