A/N: Hey guys! I'm SO SO SO SO sorry that it's taken me so long to update this fic. I SWEAR I haven't given up on it. I do have the whole story finished but there's still so much editing and rewriting to do but life and procrastination just keep getting in the way of me being as productive as I could be. I hope you all haven't given up on me yet. I promise I'm going to keep updating this all the way 'til the end even if it takes me a long time to finish doing so. I have promised myself not to leave any more stories incomplete and I'm going to stick to that!

Also, I want to give a HUGE thanks to my awesome beta fluggerbutter for taking time out to help me make this fic as good as it can be. She works magic, you guys. For real.

Okay, I think that's enough babbling, this has taken me long enough to post. So here it is. I hope you guys like it!

Oh and while I'm here, I just wanna wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Here's to hoping I'm more productive in the coming year!

Enjoy!

FOUR

Orange and yellow flames stretched up toward the low ceilinged hallway from the iron torches lined against the walls. It was cold and damp down in the dungeon. The smell of wet soil clung viciously to the air.

Elsa felt the slight moisture on the stone walls as she leaned onto it with her palm, picking up the skirt of her long dress with her other hand and descending the stairs. She would never notice the frosted handprint she left behind.

Two eerie black shadows wobbled against the opposite wall with every step closer to and away from each torch. One of them belonged to her; the other to Prince Gregor.

Finding him alone hadn't been difficult. All she'd had to do was wait for the hour in which most people entered their first dream and everyone else arose, defeated by the beckoning night. The difficult part had been finding the resolve to do what she was going to do and carry it out.

He had been sitting in the exact spot he'd emerged from the previous night, on the same marble bench between the pine trees—eyes gazing up at the stars, hands loosely clasped on his lap—when Elsa appeared, pulling his attention away from the skies.

Just as his lips parted to verbalize the confusion on his face, Elsa spoke.

"I'll do it. But I'll need a personal and sincere apology from him if I'm going to try and spare his life. I don't think that's too much to ask for."

An agreement was immediately made to meet the following night at the same spot, at which point Gregor would lead Elsa into the dungeons where Hans would be waiting.

Elsa was certain that his apology wouldn't be sincere, but she had felt that she deserved at least something in exchange for the favor. Even if, she supposed, it meant humiliating him first. But the following morning when the sunlight finally pierced the sheer curtains of her window and lit up the back of her eyes, her gut sank. Whether Hans' apology was genuine or not suddenly mattered very little to her. Especially when it occurred to her that she would be having a private meeting that night with the man who almost murdered her and her sister.

During breakfast, Kristoff filled them in on his visit to the local town the previous afternoon, but Elsa's mind had only been half present. He had been in the middle of telling them about the scanty situations on the other side of the island when Elsa lifted her cup to her lips and no liquid slid into her mouth. Frowning, she looked into her cup and found her drink frozen solid inside.

Anna must have seen the distress on her face, because she quickly inquired as to whether or not everything was all right. Elsa forced a smile that she hoped would seem natural and replied that she had only meant to cool her drink a little and had taken it too far. Something in the slight furrow of Anna's brow told her she hadn't quite convinced her.

She had decided against telling Anna about the meeting and the apology. Even if it had been Anna's appeal that had finally convinced her to be merciful, she felt that Anna should be spared the stress of having to encounter Hans face-to-face. She had previously made it distinctly clear that she wanted as much distance from him as possible.

But as she made her way through the dark dungeons, Elsa wished her sister was there, too.

Or rather she wished she'd never had this idea to begin with.

Up ahead, at the end of the torch-lit hallway, Elsa spotted a single cell. The light from the nearby torches reached past the barred door, just enough to discern a small, dark chamber inside. A guard sat on a wooden bench beside the door, turning his attention to Elsa and Gregor as they approached.

"Good evening, Barnabas," said Gregor. "I was wondering if we could have a private word with my brother."

"With all due respect, Your Highness," said Barnabas, standing. He bowed before them before he continued. "Prince Jon is going to get suspicious of you coming here so often."

"Prince Hans is also my brother," said Gregor. "You may search me again if you like. In fact, you may search me every single night. Nothing is going to stop me from coming to see my brother."

"I didn't say I would stop you, Your Highness," said Barnabas. "Prince Jon, however…"

"Well, he needn't know that I come down here so often," said Gregor. "You know I'm just here to give Hans some company."

"No, I know," said Barnabas, keys jingling as he adjusted his pants around his waist. "I've a brother thrown in the big house, too. In for striking at work. 'Suspicious, rebellious behavior,' they called it. Wasn't really fair. Only did it when they asked him to start working double shifts with no increase in pay. You know, since Prince Jon raised taxes... businesses need to make more money to make up the deficit but don't want to spare any extra for the labor. But what do I know? When you need to eat, you need to eat."

An interested, amused look came upon Gregor's face. "Yes, of course. Well, Barnabas. I do appreciate your… understanding. I promise you we won't cause any trouble. Sorry to hear about your brother."

"I'll be around the corner in case of anything," said Barnabas, trailing away down the hall.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Gregor approached the cell. "Hans?"

Elsa lurked in the shadows, almost pressed against the opposite wall, arms crossed in front of her. She peered into the dark cell, her breath quickening.

"Hans?" Gregor repeated.

"You know," a voice answered from the depths of the cell, "Every night you come here, you call my name out as if you think I could possibly be anywhere else." The voice was bitter, familiar, and Elsa felt her skin crawl.

Hans approached the bars, only partially illuminated by torchlight. He glanced past Gregor, where Elsa stood.

"Queen Elsa!" he said. "Goodness me, do excuse my lack of manners."

He bowed with perfect form, but his gesture was tinged with mockery. Surely such niceties meant nothing to a man who had once attempted to drive a sword through her neck. Elsa glowered, her fingers digging into her upper arms.

"Your Majesty, it is an honor to have you visit my humble cell," he said, straightening once more. "I'd invite you in for tea, but I'm afraid I'm all out."

"All right, Hans," said Gregor sternly. "Remember what we spoke about last night."

"Yes, of course," Hans replied, a cynical grin stretching across his face. "The noble Queen of Arendelle has come to grant me her pardon."

At his words, Elsa realized that in all her years of struggling with an inner snowstorm, nothing had ever left her feeling quite as cold.

"Well, let's not waste any time, then," he continued. "Queen Elsa, if you'd be so kind as to approach the cell so that you may be able to see the sincerity in my eyes."

Her blood turned cold. It cut through her, just beneath her skin, rendering her almost completely breathless.

She glanced over at Gregor, who looked back at her dubiously but said nothing. Elsa squared her jaw and took a step forward. She hoped she looked braver than she felt, because this was not the moment to show weakness. She could never let Hans know how far he had infiltrated her nervous system.

She looked up at him directly and suppressed a shudder as she met his eyes.

And in the next instant, the flash of a memory whipped at her.

"I was wondering if Her Majesty would grant me the great honor of having the next dance?"

"Would Her Majesty prefer if I kneeled?"

"What?" Elsa asked, startled.

"I said—"

"No, I heard what you said," said Elsa. She cleared her throat. "That won't be necessa—"

But Hans had already dropped down to one knee.

"Queen Elsa," Hans declared. "I, Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, would hereby like to present to you my sincerest apology."

He had his eyes closed, his right hand placed at his heart. The dramatics, the flourishes—all were a sign of how little he actually cared about redeeming himself. Elsa simply wished him to be over with it so she could leave, do her part, and never have to think of him again.

"You have no idea how very sorry I am…" he opened his eyes "…that you're still alive."

Elsa's eyes widened, unsure that she had heard right, but Gregor's reprimand quickly removed all doubt.

"Hans!"

Hans pushed himself up into an upright position again and stared her down. "You wanted a sincere apology? Well, there it is. It doesn't get any more sincere than that. I'm sorry that I failed in beheading you. I'm sorry that Arendelle is still under your rule. And above all, I'm sorry that your stupid sister got in my way and that the she isn't buried six feet under the snow with you by her side."

Elsa stared at him, bewildered. The need to run was so overpowering that she was surprised she wasn't already halfway up the stairs. The only thing keeping her rooted to the spot was a bubbling heat, slowly creeping its way up to her head.

"You sicken me," said Elsa, her tone far more composed than she felt.

Hans chuckled. "Is that the best you've got? I tell you I wish you and your sister were dead and you tell me I sicken you?"

"Hans, you're ruining everything!" Gregor cried.

"You know, what?" said Elsa, shaking through her contained admixture of nerves and rage. She leaned in, letting fear drive her, and grasped the bars of his cell door to look him dead in the eyes. "I hope you do get to live. I hope you get to live a long life, so that you can rot away in this cell slowly. Alone."

She made to walk away but his hand was around her wrist before she could move.

Elsa gasped, the previous rage she felt quickly dissipating, a cold rush coming over her as she beheld the white knuckles that wrapped around her wrist.

"Hans!" Gregor shouted, stepping in. "Let her go!"

"You could do it, you know," said Hans, speaking down to her, his voice menacing, his words slithering out like snakes. He pressed her palm to his chest. "You could end it right now. Take your revenge, Queen Elsa. You don't even need to blink."

"Let me go," she said. She had meant to sound firm, but her voice came out in a whisper. She struggled against his grasp, her eyes fixed to the hand on his chest.

"Look at you," he said. "So much power in a single fingertip and you're shaking like a leaf. Prove yourself! Freeze my heart the way you once did your sister's!"

Gregor was in a panic. "Enough, Hans!"

Elsa closed her eyes. "Please," she said weakly. The cold was coming, rushing through her veins, building up inside her. Her heart was pounding and with every quick breath the rush seemed less and less repressible.

A light flickered out of the corner of her eye and darkness engulfed them. Elsa twisted her neck to look: the torch on the wall had gone out. Snow fell in flurries about the hall now; a sheet of ice extended from beneath her feet across the floor. The only remaining light came from the one burning torch several feet away.

"Queen Elsa—please—try to calm down," Gregor pleaded.

"What on earth is going on here?" Barnabas had rejoined them, alerted by the commotion.

"It's all right, Barnabas," said Gregor softly. "Just don't make any sudden moves."

Elsa squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out the harsh voices of the three men around her and focusing on her own breath.

Breathe, she urged herself. Just breathe.

A persistent tapping on the palm of her hand caught her attention. In all her agitation, she had assumed it was own heartbeat, rippling throughout her body. But it beat desperately against her palm rather than from within it, and with far more speed than the pounding inside her own chest.

Elsa's eyes flew open. That wasn't her heart. It was his.

It occurred to her then that no one's heart beat so irrationally when they were sure of what they were doing. Her own certainly never had.

She looked up and met the piercing eyes between the bars. At first glance, loathing seemed to stitch together every line of Hans' young face. But there was something—perhaps the slight twitch of an eyebrow, the almost undetectable quiver of a muscle near his lips, the dull glow of a dying light behind his eyes—that told her there was more than just hatred behind his face… something almost human, almost vulnerable, but almost perfectly concealed.

Suddenly, she was no longer looking into the gaze of a murderer but at the red, tear-rimmed eyes of a frightened boy, hiding in a shadowed garden.

Elsa's eyes opened wide in surprise, her facial muscles relaxing, her mouth falling slightly agape. Although she remained unaware, the flurries around them ceased their descent, the layer of ice on the floor slowly receding.

This time the fear she saw in Hans was palpable. Whatever he saw in her face caused him to loosen his grip on her wrist and take a step back, withdrawing farther into the darkness.

She was so transfixed by the vision that it took her a moment to realize she was free to slip away from his grasp. When she did, her previously numbed flight instincts kicked in and she shrank back, pulling her arm into her chest. She glanced at the concerned faces of Gregor and Barnabas before finally pushing past them and hurrying out of the dungeons, into the night.

Elsa didn't slow down, and she didn't glance back, even as she heard Gregor calling out for her. Once she was far enough from the dungeons, she buried herself into the bristly branches of a pine tree and waited.

Not long after, she heard Gregor's voice echoing into the night skies, looking for her. Elsa held her breath until she heard his footsteps fade away.

What she wanted more than anything at that moment was to run back to her bedroom and remain there, possibly for the rest of her stay in the Southern Isles. Yet she found that her feet were moving without premeditation to the garden where she had met Gregor the first night.

At first, a slight hesitation marked her steps. A fist clutched to her chest urged her to turn back. But soon her pace quickened, both her arms lifting her skirts off the ground to free her movements. The memory of Hans' eyes went with her, flashing in her mind over and over again like the relentless repeat of a chamber song.

She ran all the way down the pebbled path, like she had meant to her first night there, and stood before the tall iron fence that cut off the castle grounds from the lake and the woods beyond. Off to the side, the hovering branches of a yew tree blocked out the moonlight. But it was the rose bushes lining the fence that interested Elsa most.

She kneeled, and with an outstretched arm pushed the branches of the bushes aside. Anyone else in her place would have seen only the ends of the iron fence piercing the ground and the stretch of grass that eventually led to the edge of the lake.

What Elsa saw, however, was a piece of forgotten childhood.

Her memory hadn't been a dream or some trick of her imagination after all. She had been here before. When or why or how was far too much for her mind to recollect; there were too many years between the memory that was now resurfacing and the present moment to see it all with fresh eyes. But she was certain that she had knelt here once before in this same spot, had pushed the same rose bush aside when her arm had been only half the length of what it was now, and had found on the other side an auburn-haired boy, not much older than her, crying into his knees.

He had looked up, startled—frightened even—at having been found out. Those green eyes past the bars were unmistakable. She saw that his fear had been instantly cut short and replaced with curiosity at the gleaming rose in her hand. It differed from those on the bushes: this one was made of ice.

His old fear had transferred to her and she had run, tossing the ice rose aside in the hopes that it would be lost.

Elsa sat back, legs folded beneath her, pressing her fingers to her eyes and hoping she might be able to find something more in the darkness behind them.

A pair of solid roses made of gold. Mounds of white snow and a vertical strip of white light in an absolute darkness. But none of that made sense. Nothing really did, anymore. The memory had run its length and Elsa could do no more than sigh and stare up at the stars that blinked down upon her between the branches of the tree.

There was a disquiet inside her that would not subside, triggered by something in Hans' eyes, in the memory of him as a child. It was similar to what she had felt after leaving the hearing with Anna, but this feeling was stronger, a restlessness that possessed and created a war within her. Try as she might to suppress it, ignore it, she understood its cause: it was the clash of her brain and heart, as one tried to explain and the other stubbornly refused to understand.

Perhaps it was a self-defense mechanism. Automatic or self-imposed, she felt it was for the best to cut her senses and her instincts off, never let them wander too far. Who knew what lied behind those closed doors of her heart, what would happen if she opened them and finally tried to understand?

"I was wondering if Her Majesty would grant me the great honor of having the next dance?"

He had bowed in the same perfect form as he had only moments ago in his cell. Naturally, that night he had been better kept—clean shaven in his crisp white naval suit. To a young woman who had only ever known the male presence of her father, his direct approach had been staggering and mortifying in a strangely exhilarating way.

"Thank you, but I don't dance."

She had turned her gaze back upon the crowd as genteelly as she could, hoping not to seem rude, feigning interest in the festivity before her. His gaze lingering on the side of her face seemed to burn.

"Surely Her Majesty is simply being modest. I daresay it would be a great tragedy if she didn't dance at her own coronation."

She caught his smile from the corner of her eye and her heart gave an awkward thump.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not to insist," she had said, turning her eyes back upon him, her voice acquiring that tone of finality she had perfected over the years. "I don't dance. Not now. Not later. Not ever."

Her acid tone had been borne not of annoyance, but of fear. Fear that if pushed far enough she might actually say yes to those sparkling eyes, that charming smile. Of course it wouldn't seem that way to him. It never did to anyone.

If she had wounded his pride, he hardly showed it. After a short pause, he added with a slight bow of his head, "I'm sorry if I've offended you, Your Majesty. Please enjoy the rest of your evening."

He had turned and walked away, leaving Elsa rattled for some time after by the undesired, plaguing visions of a universe in which she could have accepted his offer. The visions were quickly put to rest when she spotted him later that night, swaying along with the crowd, her sister in his arms.

There was no point in reliving that memory now, except perhaps to bring herself shame. And yet it played on inside her mind, without permission, without restraint—her brain's own method of chastising her. Watch yourself be wooed by this monster in disguise. Feel your soul stir then immediately crash as you remember there was never any honesty in his eyes.

But that was a lie. She had seen honesty in his eyes. She had seen it in the tears that spilled down that boy's face so many years ago. She had seen it again in the fear in his eyes behind those metal bars tonight.

Most of all she had felt it, in the frantic beating of his pleading heart.

And no one better than Elsa knew: a face could conceal a million truths, but hearts never lied.