Jelsa (4): There are things which never change

Her white braid stood out from the multitude. In the past, I would have flown towards her and surprised her by appearing in front of her, like I knew she loved me to. But I could no longer do that. Not here, at least. I threw myself towards the zebra crossing without even checking whether the lights were green for me, consequently having to dodge a car which just by chance didn’t run over me. I worked my way through the crowd which, even though they could finally see me, their routine seemed to absorb them so much that they appeared to be blind.
“Elsa!” I cried
She stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk, her hands hidden inside her blue jacket’s pockets in order to pretend to feel as cold as the rest of the humans. She did overact sometimes…
“Hello, Jack” she smiled.
There was something in her enormous blue eyes, which occupied almost half her face and her immensely black eyelashes, which contrasted with the tone of her skin, that stopped me from taking my eyes away from her. She was so beautiful. And, if that were the only thing…
I managed to forget what I was about to say and it was Elsa who had to wake me from my absorption.
“How are you?” she resumed her step, expecting me to follow her. I did, of course.
“Fine” I answered “… How about you?”
She waited a few seconds before answering, probably considering whether she should tell me everything or keep it to herself.
“Fine”, she answered at last.
I smiled to myself. There are things which never change.
I reached out towards her hand, and she let me hold it while we walked. When our skin touched, our powers, so repressed nowadays, flourished. It resembled a faint tingling, amusing but powerful. It somehow seemed to have a life of its own and yet, at the same time, it was inseparable from us, as Elsa had once described it. It didn’t matter how much time went by, it didn’t matter whether people stopped believing in us or in our magic. It didn’t even matter whether we stopped using it for years, as we once committed ourselves to do: as long as we were alive, our magic would be there too. And it seems that that meant a lot of time.
Elsa softened her grip on my hand, afraid, but she allowed her fingers, soft and sweet, to caress my palm.
These moments were so small compared to the glorious ones that we once lived. Elsa played with my fingers, creating tiny snowflakes before they could even be seen. The objective was not to contemplate them, but rather to feel them. Even though this was incomparable to how letting the snow flow from our fingers to cover a whole mountain or to build a delicate and immaculate castle of ice felt, the blood boiled in the same way. For us, it was something as essential as breathing, something as magical as being able to contemplate the seabed without drowning, something as unique as ourselves. But it was banned.
“Jack, I miss those times”, she finally confessed, “I wish they could come back. I wish it with all my strength. I wish we could be together again in the iced mountain, with or without a palace, I don’t care. But in a place where we can be free and use our powers without fear, like before. Where we reached the goals for which we were once created, Jack!” the tone of her voice had gone up and she needed to make a pause in order to compose herself. Once she had calmed down, she said, with an overwhelming sadness and honesty, “I loved to fly with you, Jack”
She smiled that sad smile which, along with countless other things, has managed to keep me by her side for more than a thousand years.
I stroke her cheek and left my hand there. She blushed slightly. I wanted to tell her that I felt the same way, that I felt exactly the same way. That it killed me not to be as free as before. That only now had I learnt how to hate my powers, now that they burnt my veins, roaring for the life I could not give them. That I hated having to abhor myself for pretending who I wasn’t: a normal guy.
I wanted to tell her that I adored flying with her, too. I adored decorating a whole forest with hoarfrost; surprising ourselves each day by surpassing the limits of our power; being able to leave our footprint, a frozen snowflake, in every citizen’s window whether it was winter or summer, and that everyone knew it had been us and felt happy for it.
However, there was no point in me telling her all that. Because she knew as well as me that we both felt the same way… and that it wasn’t in our hands to change our destiny. Instead, I preferred to tell her the only thing that was true and that I didn’t want her to ever forget:
“Elsa, I love you. That hasn’t changed.” Her eyes watered. To her surprise, I bent towards her and left a fleeting kiss on her jaw, from where a snowflake, as unique as every one of them, sprouted. I caught it between my fingers, where it wouldn’t melt, and showed it to her, smiling triumphantly.
For a brief second, she smiled too. It still worked. And I knew that it always would. But I had forgotten that she was The Snow Queen, after all.
“Jack!” she reproached me “They can see us, can’t you remember?”
I followed the stare that she cast over the humans who surrounded us, too immersed in their lives to pay us any attention. Only one or two of them looked occasionally at our unique colour of hair but, apart from that, we went unnoticed.
“What?” my smile grew bigger “It’s winter.” I came closer to her and whispered, playfully, in her ear “…Our season”
Her lips curved upwards, too.
It is true that, if we had been living in another era, I would have immediately created a gigantic snowball, thrown it to her, and generated an epic snowball fight which would have inevitably ended in a marathon of kisses. Yes, I did miss those times. I yearned for them too. But immortality has a price. And it’s the simple fact of having to adapt yourself to the way of life which seems too normal for mortals to even question themselves why are they living in such a way.
And, right now, magic was banned. Even more than it was at my times, which is no mean achievement… We were all trapped in a ridiculous circle in which everybody wanted to believe in it but, even if they had it right under their noses, they wouldn’t dare calling it by its name: “magic”.
I looked at Elsa.
I understood her. It was only her first eternity alone. Well, she wasn’t alone; she would never be. She had me. Still, not even I, with all my petting, with all my support, could fill the emptiness that the loss of her entire family and friends had supposed. Unlike her, they had not been born with extraordinary powers.
It is true that I had never had to live through something like that. But I didn’t have anybody beside me who could understand me, either. Well, I didn’t have anybody. Full stop. And I spent 300 years of my second life struggling between insanity and sanity. In the end, I remained in the middle.
Suddenly, Elsa made a gesture that caught me off guard. She held my hand in hers and kissed the tips of my fingers. I’ve got to admit that I blushed. But she didn’t stop there. Her lips went through my arm, my shoulder, my neck… I was now the one who felt with the moral obligation to remind her that we were in a public place, but my willpower wasn’t as strong as hers. When she kissed my cheek, I held her face with both my hands. A desire even more vigorous than the magic that united us expanded our souls to the point where our ribs hurt. Arrived at this point, there were no words, in any language, which could describe what we felt.
Elsa let her lips touch mine. I softly propelled myself towards her, wishing that these moments never saw an end. The bond that united us whispered in our minds, “I am enamoured of you” in the most beautiful of languages: ours. The one that was only heard when fire and ice met. It was unpronounceable, impossible to write down; but perhaps those are the words which best describe it. “I am enamoured of you”.
“Jack…”
Elsa’s hands ran now at a higher speed through my hair, and I knew that it wasn’t me who was going to stop her. I gave up and, ignoring the incredulous looks of our viewers, I raised the Snow Queen in my arms and, still kissing her, carried her to a backwater.
Once we got there, where nobody could see us, I accumulated all my strength and rage and struck a powerful footstep against the floor. We took off at such a high speed that it is impossible that a human eye could have even caught a glimpse of us.
Elsa distanced herself from me a second in feeling the scourge of the wind and let out a surprised squeal as she held on even tighter to my neck with both her arms.
I laughed as I had ever done in too long a time. I held her firmly and crossed the sky as fleeting as a shooting star. Elsa was still surprised and wondered whether she should reprove me or let herself go. For once, she chose the second option. She joined my laughter first shamefacedly but, as she regained her breath, she allowed her laughs to bring back the life that time and the world had stolen from her. I loved her with all my heart.
“I love you, Elsa” I told her, “I LOVE YOU!” I shouted with all the power of my lungs like any lover would have loved to do but little actually end up doing.
She continued to laugh and held on to me no longer with fear, but with tenderness. She bashed a powerful kiss on my lips and whispered, even though nobody could hear us from this distance to the floor, “And I love you, Jack Frost.”
I kissed her and let my feet expel thick and exquisite snow behind me without being conscious that, in this zone of the Earth, it was very unusual for it to snow with such power and quantity in this or any other season of the year.
But we had had enough. We had allowed humans to live their joyful lives, blind from reality. Now, even though we became isolated from humankind, we were going to live our happiness.

We did not know the strength that our united powers could have once they were freed after so much silence.