Sorry that slow updates are slow. This fic is still very much alive, I promise! There will be at least several more chapters and a fulfilling (hopefully) climax.

3. Reunion

There was a strange feeling in the air. Elsa felt that if she moved too suddenly, she might throw off sparks. It made her restless, and pacing didn't help, so she settled for squirming in the window sill and drumming her fingers incessantly.

Far off - or it could have been only a couple thicknesses of wall away - she heard Olaf's raised voice. That darn snowman, now she was going to have to explain yet again that let's be alone together just didn't work, off you go now, bye-bye. You didn't talk to Olaf, you talked at him, and hoped that some of what you said survived unscathed.

Sometimes she wondered if she should make him a friend to jabber with, but he seemed content enough. Plus, the thought of another Olaf made her cringe, laugh, and sigh all at the same time.

"Elsa!" He was right on the other side of the entryway now, she could see his distorted image through the ice. Three, two, one...

"Elsa! Look what I found!"

She gasped.

Olaf's little twiglike fingers were currently clamped around a human ankle, which was, thankfully, attached to the rest of a body. The body itself was kicking around in a lively fashion. This was understandable since Olaf had dragged it up two flights of stairs.

"Tell your thug to let me go!" it protested in a voice muffled by the shirt pulled over its head.

"My nose got kicked out," said Olaf thickly, handing her the carrot. Elsa replaced it gently in his face.

"You can let him go now," she instructed. Olaf loosened his vicelike grasp. His find sat up and pulled the hoodie back down.

"Hi, Jack," Elsa said when the shock of silver-white hair popped into view.

"Ok, now make him gimme back me staff."

Olaf was successfully hiding behind his back one foot of a six-foot staff. "Olaf," said Elsa.

Olaf didn't move a muscle, so to speak. "He tried to blast me with that," he grumbled.

"Shut up, snowball. You were fine," Jack pointed out, forcefully ripping the staff out of his clutches.

"Yep. That surprised him a lot!" Olaf told Elsa. "He was even more surprised when I tackled him, like this - "

He dove for Jack's knees and met six feet of solid wood coming the other way with a resounding thwack.

"Nice try, carrotcake. I can take you anytime."

Elsa decided to break this up while they were still circling each other like wolves. "So!" she said, clapping her hands. "It's good to see you too, Jack."

"Oh, yeah!" Jack appeared to notice her for the first time. "Queeeen Elsa," he sang out in a deep voice, curtsying for her benefit."

"Winter Prince," she replied, tipping him a salute.

"You remembered!" he exclaimed in delight.

"Of course I did. It's not as if I get that many visitors, you know." She spoke lightly to hide just how glad she was to see him again.

"My bad." Jack quieted for a moment, looking around. "One thing, though. What I remember is, didn't you used to live in that castle over there?" He pointed at Castle Arendelle, visible as a gray cluster of towers set into the hill. "And also, I'm pretty sure that this wasn't here the last time I came by." He spread his arms to show that by "this," he meant the glittering ice palace in which they currently stood.

"It wasn't." Elsa let just a touch of smugness enter her voice.

Jack rapped a pillar with his staff. "How long'd it take you to build this place?"

"A few hours," lied Elsa, because "five minutes" sounded too much like boasting.

He whirled on her. "What!?"

It had started with Olaf. When Elsa had proved unwilling to romp around Castle Arendelle with him, he took to exploring the town. This, in turn, had forced her to lay down some ground rules.

"Stay outside. Closed doors stay closed. you can go sledding off rooftops for all I care, but don't go inside the houses."

"Why not?" he prodded.

Elsa sighed. "Because the inside belongs to someone else," she said.

"But you're the queen. Doesn't this whole place belong to you?"

"Yes. And that includes you, which means you have to do what I say."

Of course, no one lived in houses. But they had, once. The past citizens of Arendelle had left most of their belongings behind when they fled the cold. Behind shop-window glass, dressmakers' dummies stood fully clothed and loaves of bread stayed perfectly preserved. Ordinary people's houses had their wooden shutters tightly closed, but Elsa knew that behind the thin slats were lives interrupted, in the form of half-burned logs, chairs pulled partway out, dirty dishes still in the bucket.

The insides were the only places the frost hadn't touched. Deep inside her heart, Elsa knew that they had to stay that way.

It was time to move house.

The ice palace was her solution to living in a dead city. Wishing to stay close to Arendelle, but also not wanting to disturb the town even more than she already had, Elsa's eye had fallen upon the wide, flat expanse of the frozen bay. It looked like a blank canvas. She decided to fill it up.

From there, she may have gotten slightly carried away. Ice was easy, easy to direct and easy to shape. All she had to do was tell the ice what she wanted, and it arced through the air like a living thing. She was pretty sure that the more spectacular staircases would be impossible to build with normal methods.

Jack tilted his head back to gaze at the chandelier, which resembled a vaguely lethal, six-petaled flower. "That's your ice, all right. Man, I wish the wind wasn't such a punk, otherwise..."

After staring longingly upwards for a few more seconds, Jack took off to explore. Elsa, who knew the castle like the back of her hand or any other decent body part you cared to name, enjoyed hearing his shouts of excitement as he discovered its features. For a while she could see him flitting from chamber to chamber; then the many thicknesses of ice distorted his image until it was just a dark blur flickering from one wing to the next.

Something crashed, and the sound echoed dully through the entire castle. Jack trotted into view on the floor above. "Sorry," he said sheepishly. "I might have broken something back there. Nothing major. Definitely not by running into it."

Repairing the damage took only a moment. "See, no harm done," Elsa said, adding a flourish of inlaid flowers to her design.

Jack ran his hands over the now-flawless ice. "Pretty slick. So what else have you done?"

"Pardon?"

"I mean, you didn't just stop at the castle, did you?... oh, no. Tell me you didn't raise an entire freaking castle and then run out of juice."

She didn't know what he meant. After Jack had explained the expression, she assured him that she was fine, as evidenced by the recent repair work.

"Well then, what are you waiting for?"

He has plans. Oh yes, he does.