"So where are your parents? Work?"

The siblings stopped what they had been doing when the words left her mouth. Olaf was moving some stuff into his room and Elsa was rummaging through a box of old photos of the two of them and hanging them up on the wall. They glanced at each other then at the girl. Anna suddenly got struck with the feeling that she had said something horribly wrong to the two of them. Olaf dropped the box of story books he was carrying and darted for his room, whimpering silently as he was plagued with bad memories. ″Our parents are baddies!″ The boy shouted, his voice obviously muffled by either blankets or pillows. Anna stood with her mouth agape and looked over to the taller girl. Elsa put down the photo she was figuring out where to hang to go over and gather the scattered books her brother had dropped. Her platinum hair fell over her shoulders, covering her reddened gauged ears, as she shook her head in what Anna thought seemed to be anger.

Or maybe… had it been pain?

"Is… is it a touchy subject?" Icy blue eyes met Anna's, making her take a step back in fear of the threatening girl lunging at her. She didn't doubt that Elsa could easily beat her up if she wanted to. Thoughts of what Kristoff had been saying to her as he drove her to the apartment whipped around in her head.

Elsa took the box and placed it next to her little brother's door so he could get it when he was ready to come back out of his room. "It's not really something we like talking about." There was a quiver in her voice that nearly broke Anna's heart. "We don't live with them anymore. It's really complicated and, honestly, it's not information that's ready to be disclosed to someone I've just met." There was a long pause while she fiddled with some rags in a box on the couch before she spoke again. "I'm sorry about him; it's a really sensitive subject… for both of us."

Anna saw something she had yet to see in the girl since they had met. She was fragile. This was the girl who, on her second day of school, shoved one of the football players she had seen picking on Anna to the ground and kicked him in his soft spot. This was the girl that shouted at the school librarian for shushing her when she was trying to have a conversation. This was the girl who wasn't afraid to speak her mind in class, no matter how much trouble it would undoubtedly get her in. In her eyes, Anna saw that the girl's fire had been extinguished by weakness.

″I'm sorry.″ Anna muttered ″I swear, if I knew that it was a sensitive subject, I wouldn't have brou—.″

″No, it's fine." Elsa held up a hand to stop the redhead from speaking anymore. "Uh… maybe we should start on that school stuff. Me and Olaf can get the rest of this stuff unpacked some other time.″

"I told you going over there was a bad idea." Kristoff scoffed when Anna finished telling him about what had happened. "The girl's bad news, Anna. She's keeping secrets from you and that's never a good thing."

"Stop, Kristoff." Anna huffed. "Elsa's not 'keeping secrets' from me, she's refraining from telling someone she hasn't even known for two full weeks about a personal part of her life. That's completely understandable."

"What if her parents are like psychos and that's in Elsa's genes? What are you going to do then? What if she like attacks you or something? She could kill you, Anna, no man I'm not driving you over there anymore, no way." Anna slapped the boy in his chest, giving him another disapproving glare. "Okay, okay how did the studying part go at least?"

"I would hardly call what we were doing 'studying.'" Kristoff took his gaze off the road for a second and quirked an eyebrow at the girl "I mean, like, she kept getting distracted with some stuff in boxes that were in grabbing range. She was listening to what I was saying, but only barely. Which is a shame because I was telling her all about Charles Darwin and I feel like she'd have been really interested in it if she had given me her full attention." She fiddled around with zippers on her bag. "I'm sure she got most of it, though."

"Elsa…" Olaf's voice whined from the other side of her door. "Elsa, can I come in?"

Part of Elsa wanted to tell her little brother to go away the way she usually would have, but she thought against it. She got up from her bed and crossed the room, opening the door enough to let the boy in.

"I like your friend." He said, clambering up on Elsa's bed and jumping up and down, obviously feeling better from earlier. "Can she come over more often? Ooh are you going to date her? I like her. I like her better than the last girl. The last one was mean to you. Anna's a nice lady, that other lady wasn't. I like Anna. Can Anna come over more often?" The words left his mouth at a rapid rate.

"Woah, woah, woah." Elsa caught Olaf mid-jump and sat him down on the edge of the bed. She went to sit down next to him. "No, Olaf, I don't think I'm going to start dating Anna. I don't think that there's a chance of that happening." A small frown bled onto the little boy's face. "She can, however, come over more often. If she wants to, that is. I'm not going to force her to."

Olaf got up and cheered, resuming jumping up and down on the bed. Elsa smiled at her little brother's gleefulness. He seemed to have completely forgotten about the little slip up earlier, which wouldn't have been a shock to Elsa. The boy always seemed to be in a good mood all the time, no matter what happened. Even the day they had moved out of their parent's house for good, she could see the boy smiling in the rearview mirror as they drove away to their new home a few towns over.

″I think you should date.″ The boy yawned his words as he finally settled down and crawled up into Elsa's bed. ″I'm sleeping in here tonight.″

AN the idea the Elsa and Olaf being emancipated was something I've been wrestling with for a while. I had an alternate path for this story that I had in the back of my head while I was trying to work with this one in case it didn't work out, but I think I've gathered enough information on emancipation and understand it well enough to be able to work with it. Thank you for reading and please tell me what you're thinking so far!