Come and Help me Hide the Body.

Disclaimer: I do not own Frozen, Fullmetal Alchemist, or an anvil.

 

Princess Anna was sick and tired of life in the royal palace of Arendelle.

Her big sister, Crown Princess Elsa, had become distant many years ago, apparently in retaliation for the most epic snowball fight in the history of ever, as far as Anna knew. At the same time as Elsa had shut herself in her room, their parents, the king and queen of Arendelle, had locked the royal palace off from the rest of the world. Anna (or any of the royal family) could only leave the palace under armed guard in a closed, stuffy carriage for the tiny nation’s Arendelle Day Parade, so she had no chance to make friends with the commoners. And the castle had operated on a skeleton staff since the gates were closed, leaving the princess with severely limited and taciturn social options. Sometimes, Anna honestly had to wonder if the royal treasury was running low.

Mostly, Anna spent her days ‘polishing’ the grand bannisters of the palace staircases (the actual polishers complained that half of them would be below code in a few years with how enthusiastically they she ‘polished’ them) or dancing with suits of armour (they weren’t great at the gavotte, and lifts could be simply disastrous). If she was feeling less active, she chatted with the palace staff (she knew all the gossip, which wasn’t much) or had tea with her parents (stiffest, most awkward meals ever, where no one ate much of anything).

Of course, no matter how social Anna might be, Elsa’s needs, wants, and whines took priority over whatever Anna’s might be. If the elder princess sent a servant down to the kitchens for something, the cooks would drop everything, even another princess (that cookie jar search had ended badly). Her parents often cut their conversations with their daughter short, claiming that Elsa needed extra lessons on ruling the nation. Well, certainly Anna also deserved those lessons, if only to spend time with her family!

When no one was around to talk to her, Anna might examine the carpeted floors of the castle (she had counted exactly how many threads were on the silk ones in the great hall) or make bets with herself on trivial castle matters (once, she won an entire chocolate bar from herself for betting that the ice in the castle refrigerator would only take two days to melt completely. The uncultured swine she was against had bet five. Five!).

Of course, Anna was perfectly aware of the cause of all of this. Elsa, the ice queen whose obvious grudge against her sister had turned the palace itself against her (sometimes, the walls closed in when she slept – she had measured it – and Elsa was the cause). To try and stop this horrible occurrence, Anna had quickly taken to trying to bridge the gap between the sisters. Every Saturday she dedicated several hours to singing in front of their old bedroom, now Elsa’s private chamber, trying to convince her to open the door and play with her.

It was on just such a Saturday morning that Anna sat cross-legged in the hallway, considering what to sing this week. Some weeks, she went with her old standby, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” but she had branched out to more original verses long ago. Not to mention that it was hardly appropriate to sing about snow in summer.

A few weeks ago, she had been so sure that “Do You Want Some Fresh-Baked Cookies?” would get Elsa out, but the day had ended with Anna, having insisted on making the cookies for her sister herself, covered in flour from head to foot, insisting that it was perfectly reasonable to mix cookie batter by standing in the bowl (and certainly less difficult that swirling a spoon through the molasses-like stuff).

Last year, following a burst of interest in boys (she had encountered a painting she had never seen before while exploring a passage, featuring a highly exposed man), Anna had sung “Don’t You Want to Have a Boyfriend?” pleading with Elsa to join her on a journey to find nice, attractive men to romance. After all, no one could stop her from leaving the palace if the crown princess went with her. The next day, a servant had handed Anna a neatly wrapped package containing a book on safe sex and a cheap magazine full of images of young men wearing very little clothing (very awkward, and many giggles were had).

After a lesson on international policy a couple of years ago (boring, and Anna didn’t see why she couldn’t have had it with Elsa), Anna had created “Do You Want to Build a Nation?” To assist with the musical number, she had assembled the palace’s suits of armour into ranks outside of Elsa’s bedroom, dressing herself in one and clanking about loudly while singing at the top of her lungs. The day had ended with Anna receiving a scolding and going to her room, where she assembled a complex and specific Settlers of Catan Board, organizing it so that the green and red teams (allied into the Ignerra Pax) had inhabited large swathes of land full of green fields and lush forests, while the blue and white teams (the Glaqua Pact) were forced to inhabit the barren mountains. The Ignerra Pax constantly assaulted the lands of the Glaqua nations for ores and clay, and traded for what they could not find with the merchant ships of a tiny, distant nation called Sealand (it was only a rock in the sea, but it was home for the Sealanders). They didn’t particularly care for Sealand, but its merchants were the only ones who ever came to Catan.

Only last month, Anna had created “Do You Want to Make a Human?” The idea had been to use some sort of magic to create a replacement parent figure that would care for Anna and allow her to not pester her parents so much (they had started avoiding her after the armour fiasco). The next Monday, Anna had discovered an old alchemical text that certainly hadn’t been there before on her bookshelf, with a detailed ritual for the creation of a human (it also had a potion called the Draught of Living Death in it, not that Anna was interested). She had prudently gotten a lowly member of the cleaning staff to perform the ritual, a good decision, as they had disappeared in a flash of purple light at the conclusion of the incantation (well, not completely: Anna had found a perfectly severed arm and leg left behind). A… something had been left in the pentagram after the light faded away. Before the princess got a good look at it, it had scuttled away into a patch of deep shadow and vanished.

The next week’s song had been “Do You Want to Kill a Monster?” and Anna kept a lamp on at night these days.

Through all of her efforts, Anna still never saw her sister. As time passed, the staff had become more dedicated to Elsa and more averse to Anna’s company (she didn’t see why, as she was a perfectly good conversationalist, full of anecdotes on castle weather conditions and the state of the lint on her clothes), while she saw less and less of her parents. Sometimes, she thought she saw them walking down a hallway a ways away, but when she reached the spot where they had been, all that she could find were suspicious moving bumps behind tapestries and oddly bulky suits of armour. Overall, they spent almost all their time with Elsa, and she could walk past Elsa’s room (or, as she called it, the Chamber of Mystery) to hear her sister crying and her parents frantically comforting her more often than not. She had tried sobbing loudly on her bed in response to that, but a guard came quickly to check her over for injuries, ending that approach before it had really started.

Then she thought of it, slumped on the wall there: the sure-fire way to get Elsa out of her room and gain permanent recognition within the castle! But first she would need…

Princess Anna stumbled to her feet and sped off, grabbing the nearest lamp on her way.

 

Crown Princess Elsa sat alone in her room at around noon on a warm Saturday in summer. She had spent the morning reading a book on advanced geometry and building three-dimensional models of the book’s descriptions with some toothpicks and a ball of modelling clay. Her gloves lay in front of her boudoir, spotlessly clean and as far from the clay mess as possible, and her long blonde hair was tied back in a severe bun to keep it far from the mess on her desk.

As she reached for the modelling clay and yet again froze it with an accidental flex of her fingers, the princess sighed, leaning back in her chair. She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her fists, annoyed with herself for the unintentional outburst. She had done so well with her curse this week, too, not freezing one meal, but she couldn’t work with this stupid modelling clay!

To be perfectly honest, Elsa was feeling a little down today. Every Saturday morning since the disastrous snowman incident when they were small, her little sister Princess Anna sang a song to try and bring Elsa out of her bedroom so they could play together. While the reasons for Elsa’s distance were suitably tragic, and Elsa hated the thought of what might happen should her resolve falter and she open the door, Elsa considered the weekly serenade as a sort of ritual of sisterhood; a way for them to maintain a relationship at arms length. If she could pluck up the courage, she would join in, but Elsa knew she was a great coward, and was too scared to risk losing her will to maintain the separation should she reopen their relationship.

The princess smiled as she remembered some of Anna’s older songs. As a little girl, Anna had made up “Let’s Go On an Expotition!” after learning about the African explorers from her tutor. The king and queen had fondly explained how the tiny princess had stolen a pot from the kitchen to be her helmet, and kitted herself with a soup spoon and roasting fork for an ‘expotition’ through the secret passages of the castle.

Years later, while the sisters were learning about story structure, Elsa had heard “Would You Like Some Exposition?” through the door. For that, Elsa had taken pity on her sister and cobbled together a brief fairy tale about a lonely princess living in a locked palace, who eventually escaped the confines of court life, fleeing to the mountains, where she battled terrible monsters and magical challenges – no ice, of course – and saved her true love from the clutches of rock trolls, who spoke in honeyed words while dealing pain and suffering with terrible magic.

The song “Don’t You Want to Have a Boyfriend?” had made Elsa want to laugh. She had never considered romance as a viable part of her life; that would be Anna’s role in Arendelle’s future. Thus, she had never suspected that her little sister was growing up into a woman, one with all the needs and desires of any other woman. Though she knew her parents would not approve, she had swiftly remedied any naïveté her sister might have had with the best educational texts she could find on such matters.

Only last month, Elsa remembered Anna singing “Do You Want to Kill a Monster?” despite the fact that she was far too old for such childish beliefs. Judging from the description lavished upon the ‘monster’ in the song, Elsa suspected that there had been a particularly large spider in the corner of Anna’s bedroom. Unfortunately, it had severely raised Elsa’s already prevalent guilt complex, being a monster herself, and she was sorry to say that the week following that song had not been easy. In spite of that, the piece had stuck with her, and she was proud of her sister’s boundless creativity.

This Saturday, for the first time in forever, though, Anna hadn’t sung. Elsa had heard her earlier, of course, sliding loudly down against the wall on the other side of the corridor and muttering ideas to herself, as was her habit. She had run off hours ago, with a gasp of excitement, and not returned. Elsa felt slightly cheated of their usual ritual, but felt guilty for that feeling immediately. Perhaps Anna’s excitement had been because someone near her age had joined the palace staff, someone Elsa had yet to hear about, and Anna was befriending them. Maybe she didn’t need to beg for her sister’s attention anymore.

Elsa quickly stifled that thought. New staff were an extreme rarity in the castle, and she would have heard about them if Anna knew of their existence. Besides, Elsa had never known Anna to give up on something she put her mind to; no matter how difficult it might be, she became more determined with each rebuttal. It was simply her way.

Quite abruptly, the princess’s thoughts were interrupted by a strange sound in the hallway. An odd, scraping sound interspersed with the footsteps of a person carrying something heavy was moving down the hall. As she thought about it, she realised that it sounded like something large and heavy was being dragged quite insistently down the hallway, just as she heard a gasp of strain, an immediate confirmation. Anna was dragging something down the hallway to her bedroom. Something quite heavy. The sudden, strange idea of Anna dragging an anvil, the default heavy object, struck without warning.

When the scrapes and footsteps reached Elsa’s door, they stopped, and there was the thump of something being dropped to the floor with a wet thud. Elsa pitied the carpet, which was probably now being soaked with whatever liquid Anna had been carrying. After a moment where Elsa sat figuratively frozen, and Anna caught her breath, the younger princess knocked on the door. “Elsa?” she called. Elsa, though she didn’t respond, smiled slightly. Her baby sister still sounded like a child, and…

Elsa’s thoughts were interrupted when Anna broke into song, then the threads of idea were dropped, stomped on, drowned, freeze-dried, and burned when she processed her sister’s words.

Anna sang:

“Come and help me hide the body!

C’mon, I know the way.

It started rotting, like, a week ago,

I think our parents know,

If they do, then we will pay!”

Elsa was, quite frankly, mortified that Anna would sing something like this, and her head sank slowly into her hands, smudging her face with half-frozen clay. She was too stunned to say a word to end the travesty before the girl continued.

“I know it’s not the ideal.

You’d prefer to be

The mastermind of this plot! 

But come and help me hide the body!

We really have to hide this body!

Elsa rose from her seat at her desk, moving in a trancelike state to her boudoir to wipe her hands on a wet towel, cleaning the modelling clay off, though she somehow forgot to wipe her face. Reaching for her gloves, she called “Anna?” into the growing silence outside.

Anna remained quiet for a moment, then gave a squeak of what sounded like fear, and Elsa snatched up her gloves. “Oh, fine. Bye!” snarled Anna through the door, and the scrape-thumping noises continued, now at a much faster, more urgent pace, moving swiftly past and on down the hall.

Elsa fairly flew to the door, and had the handle half turned before she caught herself. Anna had made things up before in her songs, she knew. It was common knowledge, of course, that there was no quest for the legendary boyfriend, and also that no monster lived in the castle, excepting possibly the one now wearing gloves, hiding behind her bedroom door. For that matter, no one could possibly think that baking cookies with one’s feet was a good idea. Anna had probably made up the song to try and instil the exact reaction in Elsa as was currently playing out. Elsa nodded to herself, carefully removing her hand from the doorknob.

But what if she hadn’t? Elsa also knew firsthand how Anna could get so caught up in her actions that she became blind to consequences or the outside world. It was not inconceivable that the lonely girl had become so desperate for Elsa’s company that she had committed a horrible crime. What if Anna had killed someone in an attempt to move Elsa’s sympathy, and it was all Elsa’s fault?

She would check outside the door, Elsa decided. The scraping noises had receded down the hall, but Anna would still be in view, far enough down the corridor that she might not hear the creak of hinges. Elsa would just peek out the door to confirm that Anna was dragging a large, soaked sack of flour or, indeed, a wet anvil, and the younger princess would never know.

Taking a deep, calming breath to still her shaking hands, Elsa smoothly gripped the doorknob and silently turned it all the way to open her door.

A line of thick, crimson liquid trailed down the carpet in front of her. There was a pool of it and a small splatter zone in front of her bedroom door.

Elsa gave an involuntary gasp and whipped her head around to gaze down the hall. The dragging noises were clearer with the door open, and Elsa saw an indistinct pale shape disappearing down an intersecting hallway, dripping more blood onto the carpeted floor.

Nervously tugging at her gloves, Elsa crept warily down the hallway, alert to any sight or sound. Under normal circumstances, she would ring a small bell attached to a rope beside her bed, which would call a servant who could go and call the guards. Unfortunately, that would bring innocents into the vicinity of a murderous young woman who they had an unfailing trust for, and give Anna time to hide evidence, though Elsa couldn’t see how the stain on the carpets was ever going to come out. Well, she could always tell people it was a row of particularly vivid red flowers. She knew, of course, that, if worst did come to worst here, gloves could be removed with ease.

The crown princess inched around the bloody corner, carefully avoiding a line of red drops on the corner of the wall that she didn’t want to know about. She raised her hands high, grabbed the base of her right glove with the fingers of her left hand, and followed the trail to the nearest room, an old, unused cupboard with no lamps in it.

She stepped inside, bracing herself to see some familiar face caught in a rictus smile and Anna staring at her across the body, only to see her baby sister, now a teenage woman, reeling with silent mirth and quite alone, pounding the far wall with a helpless fist. The trail ended in the middle of the room, with no trace of anything to make it. To the side of the room, Elsa thought she could make out an anvil.

When she made a small, choked noise of relief, Anna whirled around and burst out laughing. “HA! You believed me! You thought I’d killed someone!” she roared, clutching her sides as she doubled over with amusement.

Elsa slowly lowered her hands, shocked beyond belief and very much not amused. “Anna…” she began, but she trailed off, trying to decide which question to ask first, and never asked any at all.

“I got you! I got you good! Oh, I wish I had a mirror with me so I could show you your face!” Anna began to wheeze from laughing so hard, then keeled over, breathless, into a puddle of ‘blood,’ her red-gold hair catching the congealing scarlet liquid. Quite abruptly, she stopped laughing and stared up at her big sister, her head upside down from Elsa’s perspective. “Is that clay on your face?”

Stunned by the query, Elsa gave a slow, jerky nod, prompting Anna to continue laughing. Trying to ignore her sister’s mad cackling, but wondering whether such a thing was a common, Elsa settled on what to ask. “Anna, please, how did you do that? I saw you dragging something back here,” she said. “Please don’t tell me it was that an- Eeek!”

The ‘anvil’ had unfolded and stepped forward from the shadows. Elsa, terrifies, backed out of the room and pressed herself up against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway. “Wh- What- What is-“ she stammered incoherently, gripping the wall hanging behind her with ice-cold hands.

Anna stood up, finally regaining her composure. Her plain green dress and neat bronze hair were both stained red with what Elsa was starting to think was real blood, after a look at the creature Anna stepped forward to pat on what passed for its shoulder. “This is MAMA!” she said brightly. “I created her with that alchemy book you gave me a month ago. That was you, right? Silly, who else could it have been! Anyway, her name stands for Mystery Alchemy Mom Attempt. Great, right? I thought of it myself.” She sounded absolutely proud of herself.

MAMA, at first glance, looked to Elsa like a walking corpse. It – she? – had ashen white skin that shone in the dim light with what looked like mucous, with bulbous blue varicose veins just below the surface. It had pale, empty eyes and thin, flaking, discoloured lips over a blackened mouth, which hung open, sucking in air with rattling difficulty. None of that, though, was what truly disgusted Elsa.

Elsa’s response was due to MAMA’s horrible disfigurement. Its ribcage appeared to be reversed in its body cavity, and, as its body bent ninety degrees between the neck and the hips, she could see the lower ribs protruding through the back, moving slowly as the lungs expanded and contracted. The major support bones of its body, the collarbone and the hips, were twisted in a grotesque fashion, so that the limbs could not attain a resting position, but were constantly held at odd angles. The bones of one arm spiralled, and the other had a hand rubbed raw straight down to the bone, revealing a corrugated, broken white surface. The legs, bent out of shape with growths and malformed bones, limited its movement to a struggling shamble-hop.

In shocked silence, Elsa’s mind slowly moved past MAMA’s broken body and took in its face. Like the rest of its body, MAMA’s skull was simply wrong, suspended from a shattered and bent neck so it rested slightly back from the rest of the body. The skull was asymmetrically oval, with a nearly pointed forehead, bulbous upper jaw, and a deep depression at the back. The lower jaw attached asymmetrically as well, unable to close.

“MAMA does whatever I tell her to! Don’t you, sweetheart!” Anna said fondly, patting the… golem on its back. “See, she’s not a monster. All I had to do was go and find her in one of the old guest rooms, and she was more than happy to help me! Isn’t that right, MAMA?”

“That thing has survived for a month?” Elsa asked, incredulous. It looked as if it could barely breathe, much less survive. The most she would have expected of such a creation would be to raise an arm before suffocating under its own mass.

The… creature turned its body to Anna, unable to move its neck without snapping bones. “Kill me,” it groaned to Anna, lips barely reaching together to slur the guttural rasp of its voice, a sound like nails on a chalkboard.

This movement revealed its back to Elsa, who clutched a hand to her mouth and sank down the wall, feeling faint. She surmised that it was due to the protruding ribs, but the creature’s entire back was an open sore, dripping blood and pus into the makeshift loincloth it was wearing.

Anna gave it an obliviously pitying look. “Not now, MAMA. You just need to help us a bit more.” She turned to her sister and bounced to the girl’s side just as Elsa got comfortable in her familiar foetal position, tucking her head between her knees and waiting to vomit. Anna snatched up one of her big sister’s hands and dragged her to her feet. “I thought that we could play a game once I got you out of that dingy room.”

Elsa stood unsteadily, averting her eyes from MAMA. “Is that why you come along every weekend? You want to play with me?” she asked weakly. She had thought of the singing as a sort of sisterhood ritual, but Anna had never been one for considering deep meanings. After all, she had never stopped to wonder why Elsa had vanished from her life.

Anna gave her sister a mock-serious look, and gripped her by the shoulders of her day gown. “Are you sure you’ve lived in this castle, sister dear?” she asked sweetly. “Talk about dull! I spent a few months last year calculating a few thousand digits of pi, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to play, right?” By the end of her sentence, she was practically bouncing again with sheer excitement.

Though slightly wary, Elsa put on a smile and tried to ignore MAMA’s dead stare. This was her baby sister after all. No matter how much of a fixer upper their relationship was, they always had to be there for each other. “So, what do you want to, uh, play?” she said, stepping gingerly over the path of MAMA’s blood to return to the corridor where her room was.

Anna’s eyes positively glowed with glee. “We’re going to figure out where to hide a body without leaving the palace!” squealed the princess, snatching Elsa’s hands and really jumping with excitement.

This was not what Elsa had been expecting, though she didn’t know what she had been expecting after meeting MAMA. Anvil dropping class? The quest for the philosopher’s stone? “Why don’t we make cookies, or play a board game, or something?”

“Because I want to know where to hide a body,” Anna said, indignant. “That was I know where not to go when I eventually show people around the palace.” She spoke with an air of great gravity and seriousness.

Elsa relented. “Very well. Where shall we start scouting?”

Anna spun around and practically dragged her sister towards the nearest staircase, saying “The kitchen, of course,” as she went. MAMA shambled labouriously behind them, rasping even more heavily.

 

“Come and help me hide the body!

It’s an adventure through the halls.”

Anna sang to herself as she and Elsa combed the palace for good hiding places. More often than not, Anna would find the perfect place, but Elsa (big grumpy-kins always-gotta-be-right sister that she was) would immediately veto its use. So, Anna incorporated the chorus of grumpy ‘No’s into the continuation of the song.

“Maybe hide it in the garden? No.

Maybe the fridges? No.

So then the walls?

No. No. No. NO.”

Elsa had flinched when she continued the song, which was rather weird. If she was going to be offended by anything, it should be the unusually passable impression of her voice that Anna was doing.

“It’s almost like the old times.
Like the time when we

Spent all day out in the snow!”

Oh well. Maybe Elsa was still bitter about being crushed in that snowball fight.

Unfortunately, despite spending some time (at least three seconds) trying to continue the song, Anna was forced to give up and concede that she had no inspiration left. She was probably too excited about playing with her big sister again.

Behind the two princesses, MAMA struggled along, maintaining her constant mantra of “Kill. Me. Kill. Me,” with each rasping breath and painful, shuffling step (she was such a drama queen, really). Anna had no need for the pleading reminders, as she already knew how and when MAMA could get her wish.

Finally, after a long, irritating journey through a warren of passages and rooms, always trying to stay far enough ahead of MAMA to not have to listen to her constant reprimands, Anna emerged triumphantly onto a high balcony, throwing open the doors with a shout of, “Yes!”

The balcony was at the peak of one of the spires near the front of the castle, facing away from the town at its base. As there was no need for a large, defensive wall on this side, the side of the tower looked straight down into the bay and out over the sea.

Elsa trotted up the stairs and onto the balcony a few seconds later, panting slightly. She had made good time despite wearing slippers that Anna suspected had a slight heel (there was no way Elsa was this tall, big sister or no). Unfortunately, Elsa was wearing the most modest of modest day gowns, and knew how to walk and even run without the hem flaring up, so Anna could not confirm the existence or nonexistence of heels. MAMA had probably stopped at the bottom of the long staircase to this tower (she didn’t do so great on stairs), to Anna’s disappointment. Her great master plan would have to wait for another location in the castle.

“Why here?” Elsa asked curiously, gazing avidly out to sea as a slight breeze played with a few loose strands of platinum blonde hair. She had been a great sport so far, Anna thought, though she often gave MAMA odd, almost pitying looks. It was truly absurd, as MAMA was unquestioningly obedient to the younger princess (not that Elsa had to know why that was). She could ask for death all she wanted; Anna would make sure it happened at the opportune moment.

Joining her sister at the railing on the edge of the balcony to watch wisps of cloud scudding across the sky, Anna carefully considered her reason for choosing this tower in particular. “Well, no one can see what goes on up here, and it’s very difficult for anyone who doesn’t know the castle to reach. I’d say that this is the perfect spot to kill someone and toss them into the bay.” She pointed down at the perfect sapphire stillness of the blue waters below the balcony.

Elsa nodded slowly, obviously considering a rebuke (why couldn’t she just choose a place? It wasn’t like she was risking death by picking wrong). “Does the bay water move here?” Anna shook her head emphatically, remembering the long hours of a day spent on this balcony when she was younger, watching a stick bob up and down on ripples and tides, never touching the walls or floating out to sea. It was miraculous how little the water moved here. “Then a body will float to the surface and be found by someone from the city,” Elsa reasoned, taking one last, desperate look out to sea and sky (she tried to be covert, but Anna was familiar with that particular hungry gaze that looked as if you wanted to eat the view so no one else could have it) before turning away to return indoors.

Anna groaned. “You also refused to hide a body in the garden, a private chamber for royal babies that no one even cleans, and the laundry!” she whined, not mentioning the additional refusals of the latrines, kitchen, and furnace (and the guard room, and the king and queen’s bedroom, and the tiny forge they kept, where Elsa had given an anvil a highly suspicious look).

“To be fair, Anna, you were considering wrapping a body in dirty linens and hoping it would – what was your phrase – ‘wash out’?” Elsa quipped. “This just isn’t the palace for murder.” She gave an infuriatingly smug smile as she said it, like she had already known that and was playing along with a small child’s game (also, a body would absolutely wash out).

As Elsa made for the stairs, Anna burst out with the question she had always needed to ask her sister (even when she was beating away at her wallpaper with frustration at the silence in her bedroom). “Elsa,” she said, unable to stop herself, “are you having fun?”

Elsa stopped short and turned around slowly, carefully considering the question. After closing her eyes in contemplation for a moment, a small smile appeared on her lips and she said, “I always have fun when you are around, Anna.”

Smiling nervously back at her elegant big sister, Anna had to wonder what that meant. Elsa said she enjoyed Anna’s company, but if she truly did, she would have left her room long ago, rather than continue the charade of obvious hatred. After all, they said that love was an open door. So she had to be a big fat liar (not surprising, it made everything easy). Anna had to admit, though, that she was less lonely today that she had been for a long time (she was also stickier with dried blood than she had ever been before), and knew that she would never be lonely again (or covered in blood). The day had been thrilling (and bloody) so far, and would only get better.

“Where should we look next, Anna?” Elsa asked, starting down the stairs with her sister in tow.

“Ooh, I know!” gasped Anna, struck with a wave of inspiration. “Let’s look through the secret passages.”

And so they were off again, with MAMA moaning in their wake and fending off any servants they might run into. The secret passages were far too narrow and widely dispersed to properly hide anything, much less a body, though they did find a rough nest of blood-soaked rags in one of them (Elsa had to take a break then, and visit a latrine). Elsa congratulated Anna on an exceptional idea after washing her mouth out.

The dungeons (there was a jailer who knew exactly how many dead or dying bodies should be there), parapets (everyone would smell the rot), and dining hall (there was no reason given except for a single raised eyebrow) were also sequentially vetoed by the elder princess, and Anna was soon running out of ideas. Then she hit upon one; the final, perfect solution.

The princesses raced for the ladder to the roof, trying to ignore MAMA’s increasingly slobbery grunts of pain.

 

“Does MAMA really have to come up here with us?” Elsa asked quietly, peering around the blue-slated flat roof of the palace. Even though she knew the exit to the roof was designed to not be visible from the ground, having open air on all sides made her feel exposed and endangered.

Anna took a pause from heaving her creation up through the hatch, wiping her brow. “Oh yes,” she insisted. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate my forethought later.”

Elsa was deeply disquieted by MAMA’s existence. She hadn’t truly believed that the alchemical book would really work, having tried a binding ritual upon herself when she purchased the text. If anything, that had made her powers more dangerous. So she had given the book to Anna after she had sung “Do You Want to Make a Human?” having found a recipe for what was called a ‘homunculus’ near the end of the book, just before a description of the legendary philosopher’s stone.

Her hope had been that a brief fascination with alchemy would alleviate some of Anna’s chronic boredom, not that any of it would really work. Did this make her responsible for this pitiable, hopeless creature that Anna was helping onto the roof now? Was it her duty to euthanize the creature that begged only for death? How did the thing even know to wear a loincloth, and was there anything worth covering underneath?

No, that was Anna’s responsibility, she decided, as she was the creator or instigator, and she seemed to know what she was doing with her creature.

“See, this is perfect!” Anna squealed, gesturing to the edge of the roof. “Nothing could survive that fall, and the river flows past on this side, meaning that the body wouldn’t be found until it was far out to sea.”

Elsa had to admit that her little sister was right. This side of the royal palace looked across the river and into the mountains, and the river’s flow, while sluggish this close to the sea, was enough to remove the evidence before it could be found. There was a single problem, though. “Isn’t there a shore down there?”

Anna made a ‘really?’ gesture to the sky. “Like it really matters. What difference could it make?” she guffawed. “This is obviously the perfect place to hide a body.”

“It does matter,” insisted Elsa. This was her first interaction with Anna in years, so she had to bear it out to the bitter end. “A shoreline could make this the very worst place to dispose of a body, as it’s very difficult to get up here without being spotted,” they had made it by sending servants running with MAMA, “and there are no windows a person might fall out of on this side of the castle.” A stiff gust of wind caught in the back of her skirt, and Elsa nearly overbalanced on the slick tiles, letting out a tiny ‘eep’ of panic.

Anna gave a comically heavy sigh. “Fine. If you want to be so specific, check.” She sounded long-suffering, as if the two sisters had arguments like this on a daily basis. To Elsa, it already seemed as if no gap had formed in their relationship, no matter how much she was painfully aware of the cloth of her gloves whenever they touched.

Very carefully, clutching her skirts with gloves soaked in nervous sweat, Elsa edged to the border of the roof, leaning very slightly over the edge for a good view of the palace foundation. The granite blocks of the palace plunged into the river, which was so deep and full of silt that there was no way to see the bottom. It looked very dangerous and highly deadly, a sheer drop of at least a hundred feet.

“You’re right, Anna,” Elsa admitted, irrationally proud of her sister for finding the perfect murder location. “This is a good place. Now let’s go inside before we catch co-“

As seemed to be habit today, she was interrupted by Anna. “Good,” the princess said in a toneless voice. Elsa turned to face her sister, whose face was set in a grim frown. Something was amiss.

“MAMA, now!” roared Anna. Before Elsa could so much as think about moving, the warped creation scuttled across the roof, surprisingly agile when on four limbs rather than two, and barrelled into Elsa at waist height. Already on the edge of the roof, the crown princess teetered momentarily, MAMA gripping her chest with all four of its grotesquely deformed limbs, before she toppled over the edge of the roof with a wail.

Tumbling head over heels, Elsa reached out on pure instinct and somehow grasped a gutter a few inches below the roof’s edge. As she stopped abruptly, MAMA lost its grip on the princess’s midriff, beginning to fall before miraculously catching itself by landing, froglike, on a window ledge the width of a finger about ten feet below. Elsa saw it slowly turn its head to stare up at her before she swivelled her body and reached desperately to grab the gutter with both hands.

Elsa hung there, her fingers sliding in her gloves with every passing second, scarcely daring to breathe. She was still far above the dark, frigid waters below – not a survivable fall.

Her hands, busily and irritatingly dousing her gloves with panicked sweat, slipped suddenly so Elsa was holding on with only her fingertips, and a hiss escaped from the princess. Now, when her icy curse might be useful, she had to be wearing her gloves! If only she could freeze the sweat, she would fall no further.

Within fractions of a second from thinking this, Elsa’s hands were coated in glorious cold, and she saw tendrils of frost reaching through the woven surface of her gloves. She calmed slightly, her mind slowing as the panic ran down, and considered her options. If her powers could even reach through her gloves the tiniest bit, she could stick one hand to the gutter and use it as leverage to pull herself up, though she had no certainty that she was strong enough to.

Staring up at the threads of ice, hope rushing through her body, Elsa noticed a female figure come into view, framed by the sun high in the sky behind her.

“Just let it go, Elsa,” Anna said soothingly, leaning down fearlessly to pry the fingers of one of Elsa’s hands from the now freezing metal. “Oh dear, your hands are cold,” she gasped rubbing the fingers between her own hands. “We can’t have that, can we? I just want you to be comfortable, dear, so very close to your death. Your fingers and much more will be freezing very soon, not least of which is your solid frozen heart, if you still have one after abandoning me.”

She let go of the hand she was holding, and it dropped to Elsa’s side, pain flaring as it went numb. The other hand loosened slightly, almost sympathetically, and Elsa hissed in fear.

Rallying her bravado, Elsa chose to stare straight up at her erstwhile sister, whose face and hair were still flecked with MAMA’s blood. “You think I have a frozen heart?” she hissed. “You are the truly frozen one here, Anna.”

Anna smiled benignly, as if she had received a compliment, before she stood up again. Raising her foot, she said, “Goodbye, princess,” the picture of mild sweetness. Then she stamped down hard on the glove still gripping the gutter.

Muscles spasming in pain, Elsa lost her grip. Her hand slipped from the glove with a slight crackling feeling as the ice broke, and she fell like an anvil, reaching in vain for her sister with her bare hand until she made unceremonious contact with MAMA on her way past the window.

 

Anna watched her sister fall, crashing into MAMA on her way down. The two girls fell together, Elsa on top of MAMA, until they went under the surface of the river together, disappearing into the depths with a huge splash. As Elsa had said, no one could survive that, and the current would take them far from here before anyone realised the princess was missing (except Anna, and she didn’t really count, did she).

Had she had the time and forethought, she really should have been able to produce a more poetic execution for her foolish sister. Perhaps tying an anvil to her and throwing her in, or burying her alive in a huge pile of snowballs. Or stowing her away on a boat to a tiny nation far away called Sealand.

Now, she considered, walking leisurely across the roof to the hatch, she would have the attention she deserved. The palace gates would open, sympathy for the distraught younger princess (far too young to experience such tragedy) would pour in, and the king and queen would love her as their only remaining daughter as they lovingly raised her to be queen.

It was almost worthy of a song. In fact, Anna was struck with inspiration (she was on a roll with inspiring herself today), and sang to the cold rising wind.

“Thanks, you helped me hide a body.

Too bad it turned out to be yours.

So sleep well with the fishes there,

I doubt our parents care.

I’ll take what’s ours!”

(She laughed with fierce joy there)

“The queenship, all attention here.

The king, queen, and staff

All will be loyal to me! 

Because you helped me hide a body.

Because you helped me hide your body.”

Anna hummed the last few notes happily to herself as she descended back into the palace, where the alarm would soon be raised concerning the missing princess. And where would she be? She could hurry down to the kitchens to make cookies again, or hide away in her room with what had been Elsa’s alchemy book. She could even go and play with the anvil in the forge.

Yes, she decided, she would say that she had spent all day poring over the book, having forgotten what day of the week it was in her excitement. If a servant should refute her (more than enough of them spotted MAMA and her this morning), well, there had to be a ritual to erase memory or cause pain somewhere in there (preferably pain, as memories made it obvious that someone had shut their trap).

 

Deep in the river, Elsa floated at an equilibrium, stunned and angry.

MAMA had hit the water just below Elsa, and had broken the surface tension of the water so Elsa had survived the impact, though she thought her tailbone might never be the same again. Her hand, freed from its glove and magic dampener, had drawn a hollow cylinder of ice through the water, which Elsa had stuck in her mouth and blown through to prevent herself from drowning.

The water around her was swiftly cooling under her influence, and Elsa marvelled at the power she wielded. No longer was it a curse; in fact, it would have been better to rid the world of Anna when they were children. Next time, there would be no hesitation.

And there would be a next time, Elsa was sure. She would wait, grow stronger, and return to take revenge for this breach of trust.

It was time for the gloves to come off.

Imprint

Publication Date: 08-03-2014

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
Dedicated to someone I choose to refer to as the Fangirl, a good friend of mine who introduced me to "Do You Want to Hide a Body?" the inspiration for this oneshot.