Hans closed his eyes and listened to the ship breathe beneath him, his head tipped back against the coarse wooden wall. It had been a few hours since the ship had left Arendelle, but the humiliation was still fresh and burned in him like a live, writhing thing, all elbows and knees. When the initial rage had been swept away by a tide of panic, he had felt almost catatonic with emotion, too paralyzed to even react to the insults hurled at him as people passed by on the deck. For what seemed like an eternity he was almost certain that Gunter was standing over him and listing his faults in alphabetical order, starting with arrogant and ending somewhere around pissant (at this point he had started tuning him out as he usually did) and then slowly, but surely, the blissful, terrible calm enveloped him.
Now he sat and took stock of the situation he had landed himself in by being careless enough to leave Anna unattended before making certain she was dead. God, how he cringed to remember his giddy reveal of the plan, the details of which he had spent many a sleepless night going over before this!- a rare trip to a kingdom with eligible princesses. How his brothers had smirked behind their beer tankards when his parents had appointed him with the task of traveling to far off Arendelle, a kingdom barely anyone had heard of that was offered as a kind of consolation prize, the kind given to the 13th in line whose only other prospect was a morganatic marriage to some wretched Noble's daughter. Even knowing it could potentially mean the chance of him becoming a king didn't worry them; that's how little they believed in his ability to do much of anything. Just thinking of them made Hans anger flare and his fingers clench; the thought of their sly, knowing faces put his perfect white teeth on edge.
Then concentrate on getting out of here, he reminded himself.
There was still a few weeks time until they reached the Isles, time enough to formulate a plan of escape and slip into another town where he could just as easily don the persona of an amnesiac prince (what woman could resist?) as he could the facade of a mysterious stranger with a shadowy past and a heart of gold. Any number of disguises were available to him; any amount of charm and wit at the ready. All his life had been a lesson in learning how to talk his way into and out of everything, and something as inconsequential as the attempted murder of two princesses wasn't about to stop him now.
Behind his head the ship breathed with him, and for the first time since he'd stepped aboard he smiled, elated.
