You allow the guilt to pull you under only when your lips are placed upon her temple, at the place where white-gold hair meets pale skin. But it grabs ahold of you unwarranted at other, inconvenient times: As you catch sight of the blue of her eyes. As the nightmares take her and, sweating and shivering and sobbing all at once, she teeters dangerously at the precipice of sleep. As you forcefully ignore the haunted expression she wears when she thinks no one is watching.
(You know that pain too well; hide the bitterness, the weariness, the regret, the fear behind a mask and march on.)
Anna, naïve as she is, is convinced, but the ice guy (let's pretend he isn't everything she deserves and more while you are worthless) still glares pickaxes through you and you feel too vulnerable around him, too exposed. You're a liar. You're filth. You're disgusting. Muddied snow at the edge of a crystalline fjord. No one raised you to be like this.
No one raised you at all.
And that is envy's trump card. No one cared, no one, not until you were so damn close to making something of yourself. Now it is happening all over again except this time you will have your happy ending; you have planned too meticulously, waited too patiently, made choices too shrewdly for your work to go to waste. There is trust to be built from the ground up and there is Kristoff, but daggers are daggers and they run through noble men with as much ease as they do the wicked.
What do you have to lose?
So you still dance her around empty ballrooms, let her fall to bad dreams in your arms. You smile when you see her under pretense, clearly, pretense—quickened heartbeats only press against your chest because your humanity betrays you and lets terror seep slowly from your broken veins. (The sickness washing over you when you see her curl up inside herself and stay silent for days, that is—nothing.) Don't get cocky and your strength is unmatched; roles reversed in this chess game, she is weak, the faltering king.
And upon this cracking board of ice and fire, you are the queen who can take a thousand steps, kill a hundred men and never weaken.
Soon the sun will light upon this frozen wasteland and you will rise triumphant. You push down the thought of the rose that will bloom upon her breast and stain her skin, the red running in screaming rivers from your feet into the snow.