Omphalos (Hiccelsa)

Chapter 39

Ophelia ran her fingers through the steaming bath-water. She rested it in her palm and raised it above the level, watching it drip through her fingers. She never much preferred the scalding temperatures she had the bath at before, but now...well, everything was different.

She sunk so low so that her nose was a hair's length away from the surface, and she watched in mild fascination as the water sputtered and skittered away from where her exhaling made little rings.

She placed her palms on top of the surface of the water, and closed her eyes, recalling Elsa's practice of breathing. The water around her cracked and turned to a thin sheet of ice, freezing the temperature within seconds, and locking around her arms. She eyed her progress with a hint of pleasure, nodding happily. With a flick of her wrist, she tried to unfreeze it, but water splashed all over the bathroom.

She sighed; she was pretty much finished with her bath anyway.

Getting up, she used a warm fluffy towel waiting for her to mop up the water. She didn't dare try to freeze it...that would be risky, and even after four months in this new body, it felt odd.

And while she was still the same Ophelia, or she liked to think she was, it was in a way a new body. Everything was different, from her perceptions to her sense of balance. Some day, the happier ones, she felt light as the fresh snow. On days she was upset, it felt as though something inside of her was weighing her down in a way she'd never experienced, like tightly packed snow in a storm. She now understood the way it dragged Elsa down all those years ago, sending her into depression. If it weren't for so many people in her life, good people, she might be there too.

She wrapped a fresh towel around herself. In Berk, they bathed perhaps once in a blue moon, if you were a clean freak, and here she had to remind herself of the 'proper court instructions' of keeping in good hygiene.

Odin-God-no, Odin...there were so many rules.

Calder was waiting outside the door, which in any other sort of moment would have been creepy, but she was grateful. He was her constant rock these months, providing her with a shoulder to cry on, a person to rant to, and an unmoving presence of her old life, or her other life...oh, it was all so confusing.

He'd come with her to Arendelle and stayed with her, of course. Kristoff had been more than relieved to learn they were dating, since he'd been the one to see Calder carry her off during the fight. She still had the knife wound from Unn...some of the strongest magic couldn't make that disappear, she supposed.

More than that, the reminder that she literally died, if only for a total of exactly 38 seconds, was hard to wrap her mind around. She was lucky, this was a second chance at life, and she was so grateful. She missed Isis a lot, mostly because she felt the kind dragon's presence in her mind, and she saw Calder look sad when no one was looking. Isis had loved him enough to sacrifice herself so she could live...how could she dishonor that by being an idiot about the rest of, hopefully, a very long life?

"How was your bath?" He asked, rubbing at his neck. Anna's attempts to get him to bathe as frequently as Ophelia did were unsuccessful. He said he enjoyed the thin layer of dirt from Berk that remained on his skin, like a leather jacket of protection in pure, natural form. Kristoff had to remind his wife he'd slept with a reindeer and trolls most of his life, and it had taken almost eight years to adjust to the bathing schedule. It was a thing of comfort, he claimed, that within a couple years, it would be home like it was to Ophelia.

And Ophelia didn't say a word when her father said that.

Home? That was a loaded word if she ever heard one.

On one hand, she enjoyed re-connecting with her real parents and living life here. She wasn't overjoyed in the luxuries, but they were neat additions. But there were times this place still felt as foreign as Berk did when she first came. She knew Anna and Kristoff wanted her to recall alt he things she did here as a child; where she slept, the toys she played with, the halls she wrote on with ink and fingers. If she were being truthful, often she just nodded and smiled, but in reality...she didn't remember it at all. She had been painfully young, and sometimes she thought perhaps she was remembering something concrete, but it was like trying to capture smoke. She wasn't sure if she was pretending so hard that she pretended to recall or made up things, of it was real memories.