Disclaimer: The characters featured in this story belong to Disney. I do not own them or any part of "Frozen". I do not own any of the other licensed media or material that is referenced throughout this fanfiction. The cover image is artwork by Brittney Lee for Barbara Jean Hicks' A Sister More Like Me (2013).

"Why won't you tell me what's wrong? I thought we were getting close again, I thought–I thought," Anna said, stepping closer.

"You should leave me alone. It's impossible."

"Wait, what are you talking about? What's wrong with you, Elsa? Why can't we be friends?"

"Because!"

There was sudden movement. Anna felt hands on either side of her face. Cold. Then lips against her own. Warm. Stunned, it took her a few seconds to realise what was happening. Before Anna could do anything, Elsa broke the kiss.

"Now you know," Elsa whispered, letting go of her.

Arendelle was a small town in every sense of the word. Its inhabitants, though big of heart, were simple people. They were the sort who'd invite their neighbours over for eggnog, the type of folk who would go to the grocery and exchange a happy "How are you" or four or more with the other shoppers. The townspeople of Arendelle wouldn't hesitate for a moment to reprimand a schoolboy for not looking both ways before crossing the street and in that same moment, press a piece of candy in his hand (if they had some) and send him on his way. They were warm, loving and friendly. But they were not without their faults.

If you weren't a regular in church, the Arendelle ladies were likely to tsk in disapproval. If you didn't visit the pubs on the weekend, the Arendelle men were likely to feel uncomfortable. There were things they considered good, proper and the norm. Anyone who did something different, well, who would know what they would do? Nobody they knew ever seemed out of place or odd or strange. Except for the mayor's daughter.

Former mayor. The townsfolk chalked up her reclusiveness to the poor dear being orphaned at such an important time in her life. After all, losing both a mother and father to a car accident at fifteen? The story was nothing short of tragic to them. Many people would lower their head with respect or have kind smiles to give the girl, if only she would ever be there to accept them.

How they wanted to help her! They felt a certain kind of loyalty toward the girl and her deceased family. After all, the very town which they called home got its namesake from her ancestors, the first family to settle on the land. The family had gained its wealth by setting up a strategic trading post for other larger towns. Business had blossomed and more and more people came to the Arendelles' Arendelle to live. Yet things tended to change as they were wont to do as the years passed by. Most of the family moved out and headed to bigger towns, cities or even across the sea. After generations of migration, eventually all that was left of the original Arendelles was a son. What a good boy he was, well-liked and kind. He had only his family's manor, passed on from Arendelle to Arendelle, but he used his popularity, benevolence and political wit to become one of the most efficient mayors the town had ever had in decades. It was very easy to love the man, his dear wife and their darling little daughter. But everything changed after the accident. Perhaps this was why the girl was the way she was.

But there were whispers, some often lost to the wind, that the girl was estranged even before that. After all, didn't the mayor and his wife remove her from school a year before? Upon her parents' death, guardianship fell onto an old married couple of neither high education nor esteem. They were relics attached to the estate: Kai the groundsman and Gerda the housekeeper. Nobody seemed able to contact a distant aunt or uncle to come care for the girl. Kai and Gerda didn't press the issue of her return to school after the incident. Despite urging from various teachers, the girl refused to re-enter the school system, choosing to remain privately tutored. Even from these tutors, people got very little information about the girl. Any attempt to engage in conversation outside of the syllabus was met with silence. The pay was good; it seemed the family had money enough to support the girl's education.

Curious mothers would sometimes ask their sons and daughters if they ever spoke to her, if she ever went about town, to the cinemas or burger joints. But nobody ever had a word to say about her. She was a mystery to them. There were only two places she visited: the public graveyard and the library. One was a trip she made once a year, the other, once a month. For a while, some boys and girls, no doubt pressured by their parents, would attempt to make conversation with her in the precious few minutes she stood outside the library waiting for Kai to bring the car around. Every one of them reported back that the girl did nothing but utter a word out of politeness, and then said nothing more.

"She's a regular ice queen," one of them said, and the name seemed to stick.

Some folks tried to get information from that Kai and Gerda, but they, like the girl, had nothing to say. They stuck to their charge of watching over the estate until she became eighteen and of age to fully inherit her family's property and finances. The pair never divulged a piece of information about the girl outside of "She's studying very hard" or "She's quite well". If anything, following the death of the Arendelles, Kai and Gerda seemed to frequent the town less and less, preferring to stay in the manor.

The people of Arendelle sometimes talked but then they would go on with their lives, busying with this or that or finding other topics that would pass for an evening's gossip. Besides, maybe it was best to leave that poor girl alone ("She's had a rough life, she's quiet, let her be, she'll warm up on her own eventually"). And so, time went on without the happy townspeople of Arendelle bothering or bothering about Elsa.

The Arendelle Manor, though small compared to the ones found in magazines about grand houses or mansions, was still quite lovely. The grey shingled roof showed its age and the dull cream paint on the columns revealed that little care was given to the estate, but its stateliness could not be questioned, and its isolation from the rest of the town gave it a certain allure. The manor was perched atop a hill so that anyone looking out from the second storey would be able to see the entire town. Surrounding the estate was tall black-iron fencing set on a cobblestone base. Only a dedicated trespasser or burglar would attempt to climb over its spearheaded tops. Visible from the front, it seemed the fence worked its way around the manor until the western and eastern sides met at the front gates. Leading from the gates to the manor was a well-kept driveway. There were clear signs that the foliage around the estate was still well-maintained, though it seemed any major work that needed to be done to the manor had been forgone.

While the front seemed almost imposing, the back of the estate was rather inviting. Those ever given the chance to visit the manor could attest to the beauty of the grassy slope leading to a lake below and after that, the woods. During colder winters, the mayor would leave the front gates open and invite the townspeople to come skate when the lake froze over. Of course, it had been years since the Arendelle estate had any company. There'd be no ice skating, no more fishing, no couples sneaking off to the woods to share a quick kiss, no infatuated girls plucking flowers in summer or boys throwing snowballs during winter, no loud little children tumbling down the hillside or old ladies having picnics by the lakeside. Everything had ended with the accident. There was no way into the grounds.

"Except for right here," said Anna, on her knees and digging through the snow around the fence's grillwork. After a minute of exertion, she found what she had been looking for: a broken part of the cobblestone base. There was evidence of a hole big enough for a medium-built man to wiggle through, though not without some effort. The deep snow seemed have blocked up most of it.

"I don't know how I feel about trying to fit through there," Kristoff said, looking down at his broad body. He pointed to the iron above the hole, "And I especially don't know how I feel about hitting my head on this thing. What about my snowboard?"

"Just keep low. If you help me dig this snow out, you'll fit easy. Just suck it in a little. And that thing? It's a flat piece of wood," she said, pointing to the snowboard he was holding as though it were a baby.

"It's a Burton! You have no idea how much allowance I had to save to buy this!" he responded, indignant and almost offended by her obliviousness. "I'm not going to let it get scuffed up with you trying to force it through there."

Anna rolled her eyes.

"It'll fit. Just help me clear the snow. Come on, we don't want to lose sunlight."

"Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, what if someone catches us? Haven't your parents ever told you not to go breaking and entering?" he asked, propping the board up against the fencing.

"Kristoff, trust me, nobody will know," Anna assured him. She stood up again, dusted the snow off her clothes, and pointed to the manor. "Look at the place. What do you see?"

He contemplated for a moment, then replied drily, "A place with a lot of windows that an angry homeowner can point their shotgun through and pretend it's duck season."

"Thank goodness it's wabbit season, then. Look at the windows again," Anna huffed, her warm breath condensing in the cold air.

Sure enough, the boy observed that nearly all were either boarded up or had thick curtains behind them. There was one bare window near the front, but no light came from it. The place nearly looked abandoned.

Anna dropped to her knees again and started shovelling the snow. Kristoff followed, scooping the snow away much in sync with Anna's motions. In the few months that he'd known the girl, he knew when to give up and just go with it.

"Unless they have X-Ray vision, nobody is seeing us. Besides, there's no car in the driveway, so nobody's here," she explained. Suddenly, she furrowed her eyebrows. "Well, except maybe her."

"Her?"

"Elsa Arendelle," Anna breathed, scraping more handfuls of ice away.

"Who is that? Does she go to our school?"

"No."

"Elsa… Arendelle… Wait!" Kristoff exclaimed, his expression one of growing realisation.

Anna made a face. She was fairly certain she knew what he thinking. It was all anybody at their high school thought anyway.

"This is the lair of an evil snow witch!" he exaggerated in spooky voice.

"Don't call her that."

"I heard people talking about it before, but I didn't take it seriously. So then it is true! I hear she turns everything she touches into frost."

"Don't make fun of her!" Anna said, tossing a handful of snow at Kristoff's face.

"All right, all right – no need to be so defensive!" he spluttered. "It's a joke. What's up with you? Your face is turning red."

"Look, I just don't want to talk about this, okay?"

"Uh…"

"Just drop it, Kristoff. Now do you want to check out this slope or not?"

With that, Kristoff and Anna continued their digging, with Anna being a little more aggressive, he noticed. He was hopeful that he didn't piss her off entirely. After all, she was the only friend he'd made since his family moved here. It was a bit of an adjustment settling into a place during the summer, but once it started snowing, he felt at home again. If this promised hillside was anything worth skating down, he'd bring Sven along for a turn. The dog did love the snow as much as he did, surprisingly.

After a few more minutes of digging, their handfuls started coming up with flecks of dirt. They reached the ground. Anna was right – it was big enough for him to fit through.

"What's with this hole anyway? You'd think they'd fix it," Kristoff wondered aloud. "I mean, they must be loaded."

"I'll go through first."

Elsa rubbed her eyes. This was the fifth book she'd started for the day, but her interest just wasn't holding. She closed it in defeat, piling it on the neat stack of the other leisurely failures.

Bored, she decided to check the window to see if Kai and Gerda were any closer to returning. Over the years, she had learned how to calculate (based on how slowly Kai drove and the distance between the base of the hill and the top where the manor was situated) how quickly it would take them to pull up to the front gates depending on their visible location. If they passed the tree stump, it would take 15 seconds. If they were at the base of the hill and were turning off the main road, it would take 58 seconds. She could estimate based on the kind of weather too when to give or take the seconds (cold and wet, slower, hot and humid, faster). If there was one thing Kai was, it was that he was absolutely consistent with his driving.

They had made a run to the town to get some more groceries, and Elsa found herself alone as she often did. Her books were good company when she was able to sink into one and find somewhere far away to visit or some new theory to learn about. She couldn't decide if she liked fiction or non-fiction better; each offered her something the other didn't. Encyclopaedias were endlessly informative, and she loved nothing more than picking a letter and pouring over every piece of information she could find about everything "L" or "Q". But then fiction taught her about the world in ways non-fiction couldn't. She learned about people and personalities, ironies in life, the same-old, same-old, and ways to express things she never even felt before.

A month ago, she had stumbled across a single copy of a book about two girls from New Zealand who were in love. Elsa knew that it was extremely rare that such a book could be found in the library but finding it made her heart race. Touching it caused her hands to shake. She didn't borrow it. She couldn't borrow it. These kinds of books were the ones she had to read in the library, trying to take in as much of it as she could before Kai's scheduled arrival to carry her back home. Since she only visited the library monthly, she'd have to leave right wherever she stopped, and hope to the heavens that when she returned a month later, it'd still be there, waiting for her to pour over its pages in secret. She would always remember right where she had finished the last time. Once or twice, she was filled with absolute dread or panic when she would arrive at the library, make a beeline to the sacred shelf, and find the book missing. Who would borrow it? Who else would read something like this? Were there people… no, there couldn't be. And shame on them for borrowing it and letting the librarian know what kinds of books they were reading. These things were meant to be concealed.

Elsa had ten days to go until her next visit. She had just finished reading of a physical moment shared between the two girls in the book. Needless to say, it had her face flushed when reading it. Her mind kept wandering to the words, to the exact font of their intimacy. It stirred something inside of her, and she felt scared because it had felt… good.

Shaking her thoughts from fiction, she looked through the window only to see two people by the front gates. One was standing, holding a snowboard while talking to a bended figure that appeared to be tossing handfuls of snow behind them.

What are those two doing?

She wasn't unused to people showing up at her front gates, but they normally came to look at the manor and hang around a bit. Sometimes couples came to take photographs of it. But it seemed that her home had gotten the reputation of being haunted, as she had in the past seen young boys come in groups and then run off leaving the often slower, more frightened ones stumbling behind them trying to get away from the Arendelle Manor and whatever horrors awaited inside.

It wasn't until the second figure stood up that Elsa realised who it was. From afar, there was no mistaking her. Elsa's heart started pounding in the same way it did whenever she found one of those rare books. It started pounding in the same way it did three years ago whenever she was around the redheaded girl now standing in front her home.

Anna.