Work Text:
cos·set
/ˈkäsət/
[ verb ]
- care for and protect in an overindulgent way.
synonyms: pamper, indulge, overindulge, mollycoddle, coddle, baby, pet, mother, nanny, nursemaid, pander to, spoon-feed, feather-bed, overparent, spoil
cosset -
It takes time for Elsa to learn that guarding is not the same as saving.
It takes no time at all for Elsa to learn that, sometimes, no matter how long or how badly you try to protect someone, they still die.
Like Anna.
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“We provide guidance,” The sound of North’s deep, resonating voice is nearly washed away by the crashing of the waves on the shore. Elsa’s tears have finally stopped, but the remnants still shine brilliantly in the pink sunrise; even the Caribbean heat is not enough to melt the trailing crystals away. “We provide tools, and Hope, and we add the power of our will to theirs, but no one has power enough to save everyone.”
Jack watches tiny diamonds fall into the sand, more useless than ever, and wonders if that’s really true.
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The Guardians tread carefully.
“Give her space,” they tell him. “Give her time to say goodbye.”
But Jack doesn’t want to give her space—he knows what space feels like, knows the shape and feel of it in his chest. Jack doesn’t know what happened to Elsa on the North Mountain top… he wasn’t there, like Tooth and Sandy were. He wasn’t there, out on the fjord when Anna’s frozen form shattered into a million pieces, but he knows enough.
But he also doesn’t know what to do. So, for once in his existence, he follows orders.
Ultimately, they assure Jack that they’re not leaving her; a Guardian is always with her, hovering somewhere nearby. The palm trees and the white sand and the blue skies make his skin crawl, so Jack is not placed on the rotation. It makes his chest clench with longing and there’s a deep-rooted fear of missing out that eats away at his newfound confidence, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t relieved, too; Jack has never seen someone else become a Guardian before. He doesn’t know what to say.
He hadn’t realized how much it hurts.
North and the others give her special watch, and take turns picking up the slack that is created from their special task force. Meanwhile, Elsa exists and endures, surely aware of her silent band of watchdogs but ever aloof, ever resigned, ever apart.
It is not long before Jack finds the best watchtowers on the island, safe from the others’ notice. He tentatively adds himself to her team.
——————————————————
“Why am I here!” Jack hears her demand of North; it’s night, the sky like tar and the ocean like fury, and he’s eavesdropping from behind a shield of leaves. “Why didn’t you just leave me be! Leave me alone!”
Jack has never seen North so gentle: his towering body is more than a hundred paces away, but the swell of his emotion is so smooth and so deeply delicate that Jack can feel it from the depths of the shadows. He knows Elsa can feel it too, even though her heart and her mind are a million miles away.
“Your Majesty,” North’s voice is full but empty. “What happened was not your fault.”
It takes years for Elsa to believe him.
——————————————————
Nearly a decade passes. Eventually, Elsa wishes for them all to resist calling her by her royal title. “I’ll have a new title now... a new duty,” she says, soft but strong, standing tall and regal in the atrium of North’s workshop. Jack is off to the side, next to Sandy, and tries not to feel out of place in what has become his second home. Ten minutes ago, he’d been joking with the elves, messing with the yetis. Then suddenly Elsa arrives hand-in-hand with Sandy and vows to take the Oath. Jack drops two fruit cakes onto the floor.
“Please,” she says. “Call me Elsa.”
The others continue to defy her wishes. After she takes the Oath and is sworn to protect the children of the world through her gifts of Healing and Acceptance, the other Guardians find their own names for her:
North calls her my little majestic snowflake, or whatever variation he thinks of that particular day. He says it whenever he thinks she won’t snowball him for it, which means that he’s snowballed quite often. The rest of the time he calls her Miss Elsa, with enough endearment to make the walls of his own workshop melt.
Bunny calls her the Snow Lass at first. It is uncomfortable for him, being around a human (and then a newborn Guardian) who has always struggled so deeply with Hope. Then one night, sometime around her eleventh year, the two of them go out to a distant corner of the French Polynesian islands and come back seven hours later with smiles and novelty character-ice cream pops from Bunny’s favorite New York City bodega. Occasionally, he’ll call her Ice-Pop and chuckles whenever she makes a face. He tucks strands of wayward hair behind her ear, or back into her braid, and calls her Elsie, and then shouts and laughs hard when she mercilessly pelts him with ice.
Toothiana doesn’t call her much of anything, at least not to her directly. When the other Guardians discuss her progress and training, she refers to Elsa with her formal storybook and legend title: The Snow Queen. Then Jack goes out on one winter rotation and comes back two weeks later to find that Toothiana calls her Els and nothing else.
Sandy has many icons that he creates with his Dream sand, though the most common for their newest Guardian is inevitably an intricately beautiful snowflake. It only takes a few weeks for Jack to realize that Sandy identifies Elsa more by the powerful movement and the delicate feel of the sand than by the images themselves. One can always tell when Sandy speaks about Elsa from the way he crafts the sand together, from the way he makes the particles dance and flow. The sand is singing, Jack realizes. The sand loves her, too.
Jack calls her Elsa, if he speaks to her at all.
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“She’s not a replacement, Jack.”
He’s so floored by the abrupt declaration that he nearly falls off the banister. Jack stares at Toothiana with wide, dumbstruck eyes. “What?”
“You don’t have to worry. Just because she’s—“
“No,” Jack must put this conversation to an end, immediately. “No, I get that. Of course not. We’re—we’re totally different.”
He can tell from her reluctance that she doesn’t fully believe him. She’s too sharp, too keen, but there’s enough truth in his conviction that she doesn’t have much other choice than to take him at his word.
“As long as you know,” Tooth adds one final seal of reassurance, and kisses him on the cheek.
It makes the others worry about him a little less, apparently, which is good. Jack just wishes he’d worry less, himself.
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“North… how did Manny decide? Really?”
North does not immediately answer.
“Sometimes Hope isn’t enough. Sometimes humans need to find the strength to simply… carry on.”
“So… what? She’s just… supposed to help people survive? In pain?”
“Pain is the first symptom of Healing. And endurance is necessary step to find Acceptance. She has already helped so many to understand this.”
Jack stares out over the ice caps, thinking.
“She has a harder job than any of us,” he decides.
“Jack… you are not wrong.”
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She finds him one morning during her fourteenth year, sitting on the edge of a glacier, one knee bent and one leg dangling from over the ledge. He doesn’t realize he’d been hiding until he’s found.
He looks up at her, a standard excuse on the tip of his tongue, when he catches sight of the glint in her eye, the pillar of her stance, the crisp white tundra behind her. He hesitates.
“Do they also treat you like a child?” she demands.
Jack’s bark of laughter sounds more like a scoff, more surprise than anything else. But whatever—he’s not going to sugarcoat it. “Yes,” he answers. “But not for the same reasons as you, I think.”
For a moment, Elsa says nothing. She turns her gaze away from him, considers the horizon. “Maybe it’s something they do with all young Guardians.” It’s a question, hidden under something she must have heard before; she sounds like she’s reciting words that belong to someone else.
Jack thinks of his three centuries of roaming the world in solitude. He thinks of Elsa’s nine years under surveillance on a tropical island. He thinks about what it’s like to lose a little sister, and what it must be like to watch her die. He thinks about magic. He doesn’t answer her quickly enough.
“Anna should have been the Guardian,” Elsa whispers. “Not me.”
Jack swallows, hard.
“Manny doesn’t always explain himself,” he offers. Trust me, he thinks. I know. “Maybe you think that’s true… but I don’t believe that's really it.”
Elsa turns to him fully. It’s the first time she’s ever truly, truly looked at him. Right now, he’s not just one of the others, one of the creatures that stole her away from her life and told her a bunch of new, fancy rules about how to use her powers. Who gave her nicknames and love and support and Hope for a brighter future. She isn’t looking at another Guardian, another teammate from this crazy family she never asked for, but found anyway. He’s not Jack Frost, Bearer of Fun, Deliverer of Mischief, Guardian winter spirit.
She really sees him.
“For so long, I hated you,” Elsa whispers. Jack’s stomach drops. “I hated all of you.”
For a moment, he cannot speak. But then Jack swallows. “I understand.”
“No,” Elsa glances down to his staff, thoughtful. “You don’t have to. I was the one who didn’t understand.”
He doesn’t want to say it; doesn’t want to admit the feelings that took so long to bury in the first place—
“I resented them, too,” Jack whispers, like it’s painful to let out. They are his family now. They created him, they made him. They love him. “I resented everything they had. Together. I hated being alone.”
“And now?”
“Now… it’s different. I haven’t forgotten, but I don’t have to think about those centuries anymore, or whatever… came before it. I look to the future now.”
Elsa pauses. Considers him differently. “You’re the only one who doesn’t treat me like I’m something fragile.”
Jack swallows. Is afraid to say anything, because he doesn’t know how to explain that fragile is not quite the word for it, doesn’t know how to share the word precious.
“The others know how powerful you are,” Jack tells her. “But just because we are strong on our own doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t let others support us. Just because they show you how much they care about you doesn’t mean that they think any less of your strength.”
Elsa watches him speak, watches the way his mouth forms the words. It makes him incredibly nervous.
“How long did it take you to believe that?” Elsa asks him, fascination and Wonder and skepticism in one. “To start showing them you care?”
Helplessly, Jack shrugs. His staff bounces off his shin. “Maybe I had the opposite problem. Maybe I was always too ready to show how much I cared, even when nobody seemed to return the feeling.”
The way Elsa is looking at him makes him want to jump from his skin; it’s like she sees right through him, no place to hide. He doesn’t want it to stop, doesn’t want her to forget about him or this moment, but he doesn’t know how to move forward from this sensation that he’s trapped inside.
“Do you resent me too?” she asks, which is the last question he’d ever expect to hear. His mouth flounders open, protest on his tongue, but he can’t press out the words.
“Why would I?” he asks instead, to stall.
Elsa levels him with a look. “You don’t need to shelter me the way the others do. If you did, I would understand.”
A new, terrifying thought occurs to him. “Do you still resent me?”
For a moment, neither of them say anything.
Slowly, gracefully, ever the Queen, Elsa lowers herself onto the ledge beside him. Jack’s eyes can’t help but flick to the sight of her little blue shoes, dangling in the wind. How extraordinarily out of place they both are. How bizarre.
“You’re the only one I trust to be completely honest with me,” she tells him, plainly, like she hasn’t just written out the declaration to his new reason for existing, like she hasn’t just unearthed a secret contract that Jack signed inside his heart fourteen years ago on a dark beach when no one else was looking. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to really find the space to hear you.”
Jack doesn’t know what to say. “There’s no manual to becoming a Guardian,” he shrugs, uncomfortable and embarrassed and desperately afraid that she will leave too soon. “If there was, we probably wouldn’t read it.”
Elsa smiles, just a little. His whole body tingles, a forgotten phantom memory of what it means to blush.
“We’re allies,” she states. “We protect each other.”
Jack scratches the back of his head. So formal, she is, even now. It makes him self-conscious. “We’re teammates. We help each other out. Even when it sometimes feels like the others don’t trust you to stand on your own, just—be patient with them. I think they’re learning how to be mentors the same way we’re learning how to let others take care of us, for a change.” He’s so out of it that it takes him a while to realize that Elsa is staring at him. Alarmed, he asks, “What?”
Elsa is still smiling. His unease does not dissipate. “Do you let others take care of you, Jack?”
He fidgets horribly. He gets the sense that he’s being teased, but for once, he’s not sure what to do about it. “You mean do I let them mollycoddle me? No way,” he huffs, then grins. “Sure beats being patronized though.”
He knows that she’s laughing at him; he can see it in her eyes. For some reason, it doesn’t bother him so much. Are you having fun? he wonders.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you find your Healing,” she says suddenly. Jack is aghast.
“You have, though,” he blurts, then falters when he sees her eyes widen. “I mean—what I mean is—the Healing never really stops, right?” He’s blathering now. “Isn’t that the point? We never really grow out of the need to take care of ourselves. That’s why it’s so important. The work never finishes. It’s forever.”
The wind curls through them. He wants to know what she is thinking. He wants to ask her if she is cold. He wants to know if she realizes that he would already do anything for her.
“Thank you, Jack,” she whispers. “I know this can’t have been easy for your either. But I think I’d like to have an ally… a real one. I already have plenty of Guardians,” she tells him. “I think what I’d really like is a friend.”
He can’t tell her. He can’t reveal the promise he made to himself—to her—over a decade ago on a moonlit beach in the Caribbean. What he really feels. One day, he thinks. One day, he’ll tell her the truth.
He considers his next step towards the future, and tells himself that he’s being neither too cautious nor too careless; he’s finding the balance in between. She’s not the only one I’m protecting, he thinks, and tucks away his heart.
“I can be a friend,” he whispers back, and seals it with a grin.