A/N: Hey there!Yes, it's me again, bringing you chapter four of the not-so-hot mess that is Frost. Truth is, I like to burn your feels! Hehe. :) And if you like having your feels burned, then I hope this is the chapter for you! I was practically wetting myself when I wrote it. ;D

I can't believe I'm posting chapter four! If I'm honest, it's not the fact that I haven't written much yet - I'm currently writing chapter 9 - it's just I can't get to a computer as much as I'd like to, which sucks, but my grandma's announced she's getting a tablet so maybe she'll let me use it so I can update a little more often :) And i'm feeling really motivated. I have more reviews than I have fingers and toes - which has never happened before - and more follows and favorites than I ever imagined I would have. You guys are the best. Seriously, when I log on I'm overwhelmed by everything and I feel like crying! :')

So yeah, crying aside (cringe -_-), here's chapter four. It's kind of a songfic to The Last Time by Taylor Swift ft. Gary Lightbody, and it's in two part. Btw sorry for the constant cliffhangers. I just. Can't. Stop. Writing. Them!

Lots of Frosty love,

- Thos xx

The days trickled by like sips of salty water. Some days were spent talking to her unborn child until her throat was raw; others were spent just crying. Whatever she was doing, she would always be in shut up in her room. The kingdom had begun to wonder where their Queen was as they did not know of her impregnated state. She had been very discrete about hiding her now considerably noticeable bump when she was in public, but she'd given up on showing her face to her people. Only Anna, Kristoff and a limited amount of palace guards knew about Elsa being pregnant. Even her niece and nephew, who she used to see every day (but had recently been refusing any other human company but herself and her child's) did not know. They had simply been told that Auntie Elsa was practising for a speech and was not to be disturbed.

Subsequent to the irregularity of her day, Elsa's sleep patterns were also unstructured. She would have no recollection of the time of day when she fell asleep and woke, and as she had the curtains drawn most of the time, she wouldn't bother herself to find out. She hated looking out of her window and watching the world come alive whilst she was stuck inside her room, slowly dying inside of herself.

"Elsa, please, you have to come out of there!" Anna had tried pleading with her from the other side of her bedroom door, but it had little effect on her.

"You're gonna make yourself ill. And it's not good for the baby either! The scan is tomorrow... Why don't you just come for a walk with me through the woods? Clear your head ready for it?"

Elsa could feel herself literally freezing from the inside out.

What?

The scan couldn't be tomorrow. It couldn't. Where had all the days - the weeks - gone? They were meant to have found Jack by now. He was meant to have come back. She had it all planned out. He'd climb in through her bedroom window when she was crying; he'd dry her tears and tell her he'd heard the news. He'd hold her stomach and whisper to it and that's when he'd look up.

And you'd open your eyes into mine, and everything feels better.

It would be better; everything would be fixed. But now only a day stood between her and the scan that could determine her child's gender and everything was so horribly wrong.

"Don't you have your own children to worry about?" Elsa screeched at the door after a moment's pause. She flopped back down onto the bed as fresh, disgustingly familiar tears welled up in her eyes. All she ever did was cry nowadays, and it was both emotionally and physically draining. Her hands flew back down to her stomach, hoping to draw some comfort from her child as she waited to hear footsteps leading away from her bedroom door.

But she didn't. Instead, she heard her sister inhale deeply and begin to talk again.

"You forgot, didn't you," she sighed, her voice flat. "Look, Elsa, I can't tell you how to live your life. But you can't stay in there forever. I promise you, they're doing everything they can to find Jack... Even Kristoff's taken Sven out and gone looking for him... He hasn't returned..."

That made Elsa start. She gently sat up and padded over to the door, her cold feet creating small swirls of ice on the marble floor. She unlocked the door and opened it the smallest fraction, peering out at her sister. Anna's hair was down and framing her nervous face; her worried eyes wide and bewildered.

"Kristoff hasn't returned?"

Anna shook her head.

Elsa opened the door completely and absorbed every detail of her young sister that she could - her twitching hands, her slight weight loss, the little lines underneath her eyes that definitely weren't there before. She threw her arms open and Anna flew into them, holding her as tight as she could.

"I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," Anna reassured herself aloud after breaking away from Elsa, forcing an optimistic smile onto her face. "He's probably found Jack and is on his way home right now, but... It's just that he left on Wednesday... And-And the kids miss him."

"Wait, so that'd mean he's... He's been gone for four days...!"

Anna shrugged.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked, encasing Anna in another hug.

"You have your own problems, and it's not like he specified a time he'd be back..."

Elsa pulled apart, a sympathetic look on her face.

"It's just Ivan... He really, really misses him... And so does Ava... And me."

"Oh Anna..."

The two sisters hugged again, and when they pulled apart, Elsa put two fingers underneath Anna's chin to bring her head up so she looked at her.

"If he's not back by dawn tomorrow, we will abandon the search for Jack and set one up for Kristoff instead. Okay?"

"No, Elsa, you can't do that! You have to find Jack and -"

"Look, wherever Jack is, he obviously doesn't want to be found. Kristoff is important to you and we're going to have him back by the end of the week or I will literally freeze time until I find him."

Anna giggled childishly, a gleam of hope in her eyes.

"Um, I don't think you can do that?"

Elsa chuckled back, raking a hand through her loose hair.

"Well I will if I have to!"

Her younger sister smiled, playing with the hemming at the top of her yellow dress.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say," she grinned. She looked down at the floor, and when she looked back up, her grin had vanished and was replaced by her best sad-puppy impression. "Will you come downstairs, Els? Just for a little while?"

Elsa sighed. Back to this again.

"I really don't know, Anna..."

"Oh come on," Anna pleaded with her sister. "Just for dinner? If it's too much, you can come back up. But everyone's missing you and I can't imagine how sick you are of just looking at these walls..."

A waver in Elsa's expression showed Anna her pleas were working. "Well, I do need to repaint the walls..."

Anna let out an excited squeal and she took her sister's comment as a leeway for her to get her out. Grabbing onto her wrist, Anna pulled Elsa out of the door and down the long, lonely, echoing corridor.

By the time they had run down the hundreds of glossy marble steps, Elsa had just about wriggled her strangled wrist out of her sister's grip.

"Anna, stop! I can't go to dinner looking like this!" she cried, breaking free from her. Anna did as her sister had asked and stopped, turning to look at her.

The troubled woman wore a silk nightgown falling down over her skinny figure which stopped at her knees. Little cotton straps held the dress up, and that was all the was. She wore no shoes, no cape, no belt or crown. She felt feverishly bare and dishevelled.

"Can't you just... Magic something up?" Anna asked, motioning with her hands. Elsa smiled.

"Quite literally," she replied.

Closing her eyes, Elsa held her hands up above her head, and Anna was aware of the temperature falling a few degrees. Before long there was a spritz of ice visible, snaking its way up from the hem of Elsa's nightgown to the very top. It was the colour of the sky, and shimmered in the pretty lighting of the palace. It expanded over her, climbing over the flesh of her arms and down over her legs. It spiralled all over her like the moon orbiting the Earth, and it glittered off every surface in such a melodic way that it lit up the whole room with a proud, bright aura.

Moments later, her work was done. No longer did a worried, tired Elsa stand before Anna. No, here was the elegant, profoundly beautiful Queen of Arendelle, ready to take on the world.

She wore a glimmering, floor-length dress with sheer white sleeves. The sleeves cut to a halt under her underarms, showing off the pure skin of her shoulders. The sleeves were attached to the main body of her dress, which started with a heart-shaped neck line and ended on the floor, delicately finishing with a lace ice trim. There was also a sheer, shining train on her dress, attached at the back, which dusted the floor.

"Do you like it?" she asked after opening her eyes. Anna squinted in thought.

"Hmm… yes, I do. But lose the cape... thingy."

"Too grand?" Elsa asked.

"Too grand," her sister agreed.

In the best part of a second, Elsa had melted the train away and it had evaporated and dispersed into the air.

"And... Ooh, wait there," Anna added. She ran up a few stairs on the staircase they'd only just climbed down, and she leant over the marble railing to reach the top of some curtains framing a pretty window.

"Watch out," Elsa instinctively called out, knowing how clumsy her little sister still was, even though she was a mother and had endured many years of teaching her children to be careful. She wasn't about to practise what she preached, though.

"I'm watching," Anna reassured her sister. She liked to think she had grown less klutzy with time, but it wasn't always the case.

She pulled a soft, silken, light-blue ribbon from around the curtain and quickly ran back down the stairs. Blowing the dust off it, she gently wrapped it around her sister's middle, twice, before tying it up in a neat bow at the back.

"There," Anna smiled, standing up straight. "You look... You look beautiful, Elsa."

"I was shooting at relatively decent, but beautiful works okay too," she laughed.

The two sisters strolled into the dining room together, where Ava and Ivan had already been seated by the nanny. They were trying their hardest to have the proper etiquette; sitting up in their best Sunday dress with their satin napkins covering their fronts, but the minute they set their eyes on their long-unseen Aunt, they flew off their chairs and hurtled across the room towards her.

"Ah, hey, you two!" she laughed as her niece and nephew hugged her legs. Her arms snaked around their backs as she tried to crouch down, pulling them tighter.

Moments later their embrace fell away, and the Queen asked the twins to step back so she could take a proper look at them.

Wow. Have they grown? she thought to herself. They seemed to have matured so much more since she had last seen them. She had to remind herself they were only five.

Ava's soft strawberry-blonde hair was tied up in bunches either side of her head. She wore a silky navy-blue dress with a black jacket and black tights. Her tiny little feet were covered by soft, satiny blue shoes. As always, her golden-brown eyes shone out inquisitively, studying her aunt in the same way her aunt was studying her.

Ivan looked quite the little man and a spitting image of his father in a long-sleeved light-blue shirt with a navy waistcoat over the top. He wore dark blue jeans and black hobnailed boots. The only thing that really gave away his true messy and adventurous nature was his mop of blonde hair that sat on his head like an unruly tiger's mane.

"You two look so much... Older!" she remarked, smiling at them both.

"That's 'cause you've been sitting in your room for, like, ever!" Ivan groaned. Elsa chuckled, but Anna, desperate to remain tactful about the situation, grabbed Ivan by the shoulders and steered him towards the table.

Elsa was about to stand up when Ava delicately placed one ear to her stomach.

"Do you think the baby can hear me?" she whispered. Elsa's eyes widened in utter shock.

"What?" she breathed, trying to steady herself as she almost fell onto the floor in surprise. "How... Who told you?"

"No one. I worked it out for myself," Ava told Elsa proudly. "You're not fat, so I knew it was a baby. I heard you speaking to it the other day. It is a baby, right?"

Elsa was astounded. Not horrified or desperate to falsely correct her, but just astounded. Either she'd done an absolutely awful job of hiding it all, or her five-year-old niece was a very clever girl. Maybe it was both.

"Yes, it is a baby," Elsa told her quietly. She watched Ava's face light up with delight. "But we mustn't tell anyone. Not yet. It's a surprise, and we don't want to spoil it. So no telling anyone at skating class, not even Jorgie, okay?"

Ava nodded, in complete agreement. Usually, she would protest at not being able to tell her sixth-bestest friend something (after Ivan, Anna, Kristoff, Elsa and Jack), but she sensed her aunt meant business so she agreed.

"Good girl," Elsa whispered, and kissed her softly on the top of the head.

"Are you guys gonna have some dinner or what?" Anna called over from the dining table.

"Come on," Elsa smiled to Ava, and stood up, taking her by the hand and leading her over to the table.

Dinner was somewhat surprisingly normal. They each took turns to partake in mediocre and occasionally obscure conversation - How was your day? Is your cold any better? What did you get up to today? Are you enjoying your food? When was the last time you saw an apple fall in the orchards behind the palace? Do you need a new toothbrush?

And round and round. It wasn't that Elsa didn't like this semi-informal conversation; no, she actually enjoyed it, but her mind kept swinging back and forth through all her current dilemmas and it made it hard to concentrate on anything.

"I think I need to practise my ice-chopping," Ivan wondered aloud, splitting his slice of baguette in half as the crumbs went flying all over him. "I haven't practised since before Daddy left."

"And I think you need to practise not making bread crumbs go everywhere," his mother mused, leaning across the table to wipe the crumbs off his face.

"When will Daddy be back, Mommy?" Ava enquired. Anna sighed.

"Soon, sweetie. He's just gone to get Uncle Jack and then -"

"Yeah, but like, how many days or hours or seconds?" Ivan impatiently interrupted.

"Well, I'm not sure for certain, but definitely very s -"

Anna broke off, her attention suddenly fixed on her sister. At the end of the table, Elsa was standing, her eyes wide and her lips parted, physically shaking as she looked out of the window to their right.

"Elsa? Is... Everything okay?" Anna asked nervously.

Elsa stood completely rigid, in a bewildered and shocked daze. Her insides were knotting up and releasing themselves every nanosecond, and it was painful to breath. She didn't even want to let herself look at it, for the nauseatingly sharp fear that it wasn't what she thought, hoped and willed it to be, but somehow she couldn't drag her eyes away from it.

Anna came to the conclusion that Elsa was definitely fixated on something out of the window, but as she followed the direction of her sister's eyes, she realised she was wrong.

Elsa wasn't looking at something outside of the window. She was looking at something on the window.

There it was, in all its deathly cold, shimmering glory.

Frost.