A/N- Trigger warning for mentions of suicide.

bad girl

Elsa sat in the empty classroom, a stack of test papers in front of her. Sunlight streamed in through the large windows. Raising her head wearily she glanced at the clock; it wasn't yet one 'o clock. She looked back down at the test paper, the multiple choice questions blurring into one. Which is the correct chemical formula for hydrogen? Elsa crossed a box. She had a ΒΌ chance of getting it right, didn't she?

Hans had ran out on her as soon as he they pulled up in the car park. He was going to sign Anna in, he said. When she'd tried to call after his retreating back, what do I do? the words jammed in her throat.

So she'd turned towards the school alone.

If you could call it a school. In the town where Elsa and her mother had lived, the secondary modern was a random collection buildings in various states of disrepair surrounded by a chain-link fence. Walking with her mother to the supermarket as a child, she'd always held onto her hand tighter as they passed by. To her, the school had always looked like some kind of prison, or zoo. The teenagers that yelled abuse at them and hurled coke cans as they went by seemed little better than wild animals.

In comparison, this school didn't even look like a school. If wasn't for the people hanging outside on the wall in uniform, she would have assumed it was a stately home. Fronted by a gravel circular driveway, roses wrapped round wooden trellises, mermaids lounged in fountain sat in the middle of the turning circle.

She probably would have spent the morning wandering around aimlessly, too shy to ask for help, fighting off tears, if the school secretary hadn't been waiting for her in the entrance hall.

She was dragged through a huge foyer with a glittering chandelier above her head, up the loop of a grand staircase, to the oak-cased school office, where she'd been asked to take a seat. The secretary set her up with her timetable, and proceeded to explain a great deal of things very quickly. For example: she was going to be a member of the Sixth Form, but she was also in a "vertical tutor group," called Brunel, which she'd take registration with.

"Form?" she asked, dizzied.

"Like a house," the secretary explained, and Elsa nodded in understanding, although she didn't understand at all.

There was also something called Enrichment, which sounded like a voluntary after school club, except it wasn't voluntary. Students could score merits for their form and this was a good thing. If you did extra well you received... a postcard? This was supposedly a good thing too. And she might have misheard, but Elsa was sure the secretary said misbehaviour sent you to somewhere called the waffle room. This wasn't such a good thing. The secretary was half way through explaining prefects when Elsa couldn't stand it anymore.

"I'm sorry," she blurted out. "I don't know if you know or not, but this is my first time at a school. Ever."

She was surprised when the secretary smiled at her sympathetically. "We're aware of your situation, Miss Hall. We've had many students over the years who've come to us from home education. What we do is give you some tests to find out your level of ability and fit you into classes accordingly."

'Home education.' That was one way of putting it. Elsa had a horrifying vision of sitting in a class with eleven year olds.

But what does it matter? She thought. There's no way I can fit in here anyway.

The secretary wrenched her from her depressing thoughts. "I believe you have a sister at this school. Anna Anderson?"

She started. "Yes."

"Then I'm sure Anna will give you a hand and, 'show you the ropes' as they say," the secretary said, chuckling to herself.

Elsa sat in the classroom, glancing back up at the clock. Had it stopped? It didn't seem to have moved since she'd last looked at it.

My sister? She thought to herself. The one I met yesterday? Anna was no better than a stranger. The only thing that connected them, that they had any reason to interact at all, was because her father couldn't keep it in his pants around his secretarial assistant.

I spent the last ten years living with Mum in a one-bed flat with a man from the council coming round every week to try and repossess us. When I grew out of my shoes, I cut holes in the fronts. And she, the 'legitimate' heir, hasn't wanted for anything in her life.

How can I rely on someone like that?

But to the smiling secretary Elsa had only said, "Okay."

At lunch time the bell rung and startled Elsa half to death. The school secretary returned and cheerily told her that she was welcome to eat in the refectory and meet some of the other students or go outside if she wished.

So Elsa ate the packed lunch Gerda made for her in the empty classroom, alone.

Outside the window, she watched a group of boys who'd discarded their blazers and were playing football. Elsa ate her sandwich in tiny bites; it was delicious.

Out in the corridor, she could hear a commotion.

"Miss Anderson. I've warned you a dozen times about your negligence to your uniform. Am I going to have to put you in isolation yet again?"

Elsa started. Did he say, Miss Anderson?

"Negligence? Use smaller words, Mr S. You know I suck at English," she heard Anna say. Elsa stood from her seat and moved closer to the door to hear better.

"As I've told you before Anna- if you only applied yourself to your studies-"

The dry clip of her sister's voice: "Weren't you berating me about my uniform, teach?"

A second of silence, and the aggravation of the teacher's voice: "I want you to put on your regulation shoes. And for goodness sake, sort out your skirt-"

"What's wrong with my skirt?"

"It's- well-" the teacher paused. Embarrassed, Elsa thought. "-It's too short, Anna. You're going to distract the male students from their work."

"Oh. So that's it," said Anna.

"I'm glad you understand." Relief in the teacher's voice.

"I'm sorry I've been distracting you, Mr Smith. I didn't realise," Anna said sincerely.

"Yes, I'm happy- what? No!" the teacher said, angry and flustered.

"See you later, Mr S. It's been a real laugh."

Footsteps, and Mr Smith's vanishing voice, "A-Anna! Come back here this instant."

When Elsa opened the door, the young teacher was stalking back in the other direction, red faced and embarrassed.

When he was gone, she saw Anna slip stealthfully from a side corridor, peering round. She was laughing to herself.

Anna, she tried to call, but she couldn't get the word out. And Anna nipped away down the corridor.

Elsa looked back at the empty classroom and her bookbag and her half eaten sandwich, and she closed the door. She hurried after her sister.

Anna was fast. She nipped down one corridor plastered with the faces of the candidates for the student council, and she zipped down another. When Elsa turned one corner, Anna turned another. She was a comet of red hair, vanishing.

Elsa found herself in a very different part of the school than the opulence she'd seen. She was standing in a dimly lit stairwell, with metal stairs that clanged under Anna's feet overhead. For a short while, she listened, and then the noise disappeared.

Elsa climbed the stairwell, running her hand along the rough stone wall. It was calloused and marked with graffiti scratched into the rock.

CH & DL 4eva

Mr Roads sucks dick

One bit of graffiti just read: I love her.

Elsa ran her fingers over the stone, feeling the weight and memory of the words etched there. The stairwell was so different from the polished luxury of the rest of the school. Here it was raw, real.

Or maybe it just reminded her of home.

She was baffled when she reached the top of the stairwell, and they led nowhere. Anna couldn't, after all, have just vanished. Then she heard a snick sound, like the sound of a dart in a bullseye. Elsa looked up and saw the trapdoor.

Pulling down the ladder she climbed up and looked around. Inside it was dark, her eyes slowing adjusting. Elsa wrinkled her nose: it smelled like smoke.

The clock tower, Elsa realised. This had to be inside the clock tower.

She felt something whizz past her, missing her face by inches. In shock her head snapped round: embedded in the wall were several throwing knives.

"Oh shit, sorry," said Anna. Elsa saw her now, sat up against the wall, lit by the red glow on the tip of her cigarette. "...Elsa?"

Elsa's eyes fixed on the cigarette in her hand, as Anna tapped the ash from it. Anna was smoking.

She's a bad girl, she realised.

By her side were a bunch of throwing knives.

"Where did you even get those?" Elsa asked, climbing up off the ladder.

Anna shrugged, like it was nothing. "Got into the confiscation box, ages ago. Found some really interesting stuff in there."

"Like knives?"

"Like I said: interesting stuff," said Anna.

Elsa turned her attention to the wall. Her eyes adjusting to the dark now, she saw someone had drawn a chalk outline of a person. A man.

"Out of the way," said Anna.

"Huh?"

"I don't want to send you to the nurse's office on the first day, do I?"

Elsa stood back. Snick.

"Bulleye."

The knife hit the outline in the middle of the chest, where the heart would be.

"Do you smoke?" asked Anna, as she took a drag. Elsa shook her head. "Just as well," she said, parting her lips so that when she exhaled, she exhaled a ring of smoke. "It's a dirty habit."

"So why do you smoke?" Elsa said.

"Maybe I'm a dirty person," said Anna. Snick. She asked: "Could you get them for me?"

"Them?"

She inclined her head to the knives. Elsa pulled them out of the wall, with a popping sound, and handed them back to Anna. Their hands touched.

"Thanks."

Snick. Elsa sat down beside her sister, a foot or two away. "What you did in the car was really crazy," she said.

Anna grinned, like she'd just handed her a compliment. "You think so?"

"Hans was really mad."

"He'll be alright. His face was priceless, wasn't it?" Anna said.

"You like getting a reaction out of him?" It wasn't an accusation: just a question.

"Well it sounds bad when you put it that way." Snick. Another shot in the heart. She laughed like a child. "Say," said Anna, "how'd your mum die?

Elsa shifted uncomfortably. What a thing to ask. No lead up: it was like Anna just turned round and put a knife in her chest. "She killed herself."

"Wow. Bogus." Anna learnt towards her and asked with a quiet, morbid curiosity: "How'd she do it?"

She felt the knife twisting. Elsa's fingers dug tightly around her knees. "Hung herself. From the beam in the kitchen. She asked me to go to the shop, and I... when I came b-back, I-" the words shuddered to a stop. She buried her face in her knees.

That night, she'd been taken down to the police station. They'd made her go over it again and again. She walked in, calling for her mother. I'm home. I'm back. She'd walked into the kitchen to put down the shopping bags. They hadn't made it that far; they'd slipped from her hands. The police made her tell it again. Are you sure that's how it happened? But Elsa's words kept slipping away from her. The more she chased them, the more they ran. Speak up, they said.

But what good had words ever done for her?

She didn't speak for a week, after that.

"Elsa, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry."

She felt a warm hand close over her own. The feeling of touch, comfort sent a shock wave through her.

"That was really moronic of me to ask you that. Geez." Her other hand was covering her face. "I keep fucking up, even when I'm not trying. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, so... I'm sorry Elsa."

But Elsa wasn't focusing on her words, only on the warmth of her hand. Nobody had ever held her hand but her mother. Elsa squeezed it back with an intensity akin to need.

"Elsa...?"

Elsa shook her head. She didn't want to say anything.

The sound of shuffling as Anna shuftied up next to her, and then she felt an arm around her waist, Anna pressing her face to her shoulder. Little by little, Elsa relaxed, and let herself be held.

"Can I tell you a secret? When I was little, I always wanted a sister," Anna said.

A/N- If anyone can tell me what I'm paying homage to in the clock tower scene, you will officially win the internet.