Outside The Portalocity Office, Monday Morning

[glacial_queen]

When Karla had fallen asleep last night, she and Elsa had been clinging together right outside the train station, waiting for the train that would take them away from this terrible place forever. Karla had just murdered someone to keep her sister safe, the first person to ever die by her hands, though those same hands had lit plenty of fires in the years before.

Waking up, Karla discovered she was still curled up around Elsa, cuddling the girl protectively. The train station had gone back to being Portalocity, Karla's hands were plenty bloody on their own, and as for that murder victim...

*Mother Night, Warren! Tell me you're okay!*

She wasn't entirely certain how his healing factor worked, but being tied up in a rug and tossed to the bottom of the ocean couldn't have been good for anyone.

Once she'd gotten the affirmative from Warren (the grumpy affirmative, but he was alive and that was what mattered), Karla focused on rousing the sleeping girl next to her. She'd never met Elsa before this insane weekend, but from the way their histories had meshed, there was a lot Karla wanted to talk to her about.

"Hey there," she said softly, shaking Elsa's shoulder. "Wake up sleepyhead. There are better places to nap then in the middle of town."

Some of those places probably had coffee, too.

[For the two mentioned and modded please!]

Comments

[iceolatedqueen.livejournal.com]

"The first harmless one that didn't involve being a mother to a teenage son," Elsa offered. "Or suddenly being adept at crochet for no apparent reason. I do know better than to be too terribly concerned about anything that happened, at least."

She really could have gone without the bordello part, though.

[glacial_queen]

Karla could have gone without it being her fiancé who had put them there.

And, judging it had been long enough for Elsa to put her guard down, she asked, "Have we talked in circles enough for us to start going back to your powers now?"

[iceolatedqueen.livejournal.com]

Oh, Karla, you sneaky woman.

Elsa blinked up at that, another moment of panic twisting jagged peaks of ice through her psychic scent, ones that could very well have been real, were she not wearing the gloves that Barry had made for her.

"Back to-- We haven't really-- I mean..."

Stammer a little more, Elsa. Go on.

[glacial_queen]

"Would you feel better if I gave you a demonstration of some of what I can do?" Karla asked. "Just so you know I'm not going to run in terror from your ice?"

Because, yeah, definitely ice now.

"That's why you wear those gloves, isn't it? To keep yourself from accidentally using your power."

[iceolatedqueen.livejournal.com]

Karla was very good at this. Whatever 'this' was. Elsa immediately stopped stammering, pulling her hands to her breast and curling in on herself a little.

"They work," she said, a little defensively. "They're the first thing in a long time to actually work."

[glacial_queen]

Karla was a Black Widow-Healer-Queen. Damn right she was good at this.

"No, darling," she chided gently. "They're a crutch. But that won't always help you. Eventually something will happen and you won't know how to deal with it because you've become dependent upon your gloves."

[iceolatedqueen.livejournal.com]

Her gloves, her mantra, her isolation...

"I won't let it happen," Elsa replied, softly. "It doesn't have to happen if I don't get close enough to people to let it."

[glacial_queen]

"And what if someone attacks you?" Karla asked, looking at Elsa like she was a student who hadn't prepared adequately for a lesson. "You're going to be a Queen, darling. Unless your world is some kind of magic utopia, there are people in it who will see you as a stumbling block to power and wealth. What then? Are you going to die because you couldn't defend yourself? Or run the risk of hurting an innocent bystander because you couldn't control yourself? What if you get sick? Feverish? What if you hallucinate something? What if you go mad? Can you guarantee that none of these things will happen? Can you? Are you willing to bet the safety of you sister, your staff, your subjects on that?"

[iceolatedqueen.livejournal.com]

Elsa shrank away from Karla at that as though she'd been burned.

"I'm trying. I don't want to hurt anybody again! And people here, they've tried to help, I'm accepting help from people who offer, now! But it's too big for me, it's too much! I can't ever be sure it's enough!"

This was a mistake. Waking up today had been a mistake.