AN: Thanks FrozenFanatic, theBringerofWar, 23deecy, Lance58, veroniqeu, Luniverse, SonderAndLife, GhostofWintersPast, brunhe, TheElementHero, PhantomGemini, Nayal, rundownSabEr, Supremacy of Chaos, Yuiiub, Kid Iccarus, GuesT, and the other guests for their kind comments! As we've finally reached chapter ten, I'm planning on a revision/rewrite of the earlier chapters, probably taking out some of the awkward parts and filling in on things that were confusing, etc. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them behind, and if anybody has the extra time to beta the edited chapters, that'd make me super-duper happy as well. Alright, so as always...
(This is the July 2016 revised version)
Courtship of the Grad Student
Chapter 10
Friendship was a foreign concept to Anna until she met Kristoff and the gang. But now that they were good buddies, she thought she had this whole friendship thing figured out...that was...before Elsa came along.
Being friends with Kristoff and the others was easy. They had their hockey nights at Hans' dorm, the occasional lunch and movie on the weekends, and sometimes a hike up the mountains to make good use of the remaining autumn. Sure, they had their awkward moments, like all the times she kicked Kristoff off the couch, or when Rapunzel threatened to tie them all up with her hair, only to realize she had long cut it short, but none of those moments were as uncomfortable as this.
It was another day spent in the Winters Lab dark room, another day Anna found herself staring at the small, or as she liked to call it, "flimsy" back of her blonde grad student. Or maybe this thick silence was the opposite of uncomfortable - she admitted she quite enjoyed it, just watching how this seemingly frail figure could conduct herself so gracefully while flying a multichannel across a 1536-well plate as though the puny wells didn't blind her eyes (Anna could hardly handle the 384s herself). But that was what bothered her: Why was she so engrossed with watching Elsa do mundane things?
The sudden swivel of Elsa's chair alerted Anna to get back to her work. She tried her best to look professional, snapping straight up only to hit the microscope's oculars with her nose.
"Ow!" She couldn't hold back a cry. Elsa quirked an eyebrow in amusement.
"You don't need to bother pretending. I can tell you are procrastinating either way."
"I so was not procrastinating!"
"Oh yeah? Let me see."
The older girl wheeled over on her chair and dipped the oculars to her level as she continued, "Took you ten minutes and this thing is still so out of focus?"
"I..." All your fault that I couldn't concentrate all this time! "I wanted to make sure I wouldn't slam the objectives onto the slide!"
"There's enough distance between the lens and your sample to fit your entire hand! Maybe that's the problem, huh?"
Anna groaned, "The sample was misbehaving...it deserved the cold shoulder."
Elsa rolled her eyes before returning to the oculars. A couple swift turns of the coarse focus, and another couple on the fine brought the objectives up to the proper position, "And you're the one misbehaving. That sample is so obviously overstained. Did you do a proper wash?"
"I gently stroked the yeast babies with my gloved finger and rubbed it with Dawn, you know, like how they save ducks from oil spills..."
Elsa caught Anna's sarcasm and playfully shoved her in the shoulder. She giggled, proceeding to shove back with such force the blonde nearly fell off her chair.
"Somebody needs to build up a bit of body mass..." Anna chided. Elsa just shook her head.
"Well, somebody needs to be less violent."
"Fine. I concede. We should balance out our traits by horizontal gene transfer through conjugation."
Wait a second...I did not just say that.
Don't they call this...bacterial sex!?
She wanted to plummet her forehead into her hand, but that darned glove was in the way. Not that such a gesture would help at all, she thought to herself. Why the hell did those inappropriate jokes flood her mind whenever she was with Elsa? Perhaps it was how her reaction was so damned cute...
...like this! Just look at the way Elsa instinctively wanted to do another eye roll, but paused midway upon realizing the implications (she was a bit slow, but slow in an absolutely endearing manner) and flushed three shades darker than her usual snow white complexion!
Oh God. Anna knew she had a strange taste when it came to what was cute. Heck, she thought budding yeasts were next to the cutest things on Earth, well...when they budded at any rate. But she swore most people would probably agree that Elsa was the epitome of cuteness any way you looked at her. Anna was nearly dying from an overdose of Elsa's adorableness!
"Err...since your mind is obviously preoccupied with other matters...you can probably go. It'll take you forever to finish this poster alone and we'd never make it to the retreat, so I might as well just finish it up for you and submit it for printing before it's too late..." Elsa ranted, not even looking at Anna. She was already spinning down the yeast for a wash, set on taking more pictures on the microscope all by herself.
"Hell no! My poster! My work! You go finish your screen and I'll handle the colourful fluorescence imaging figure," she complained, hovering over the microfuge so she could snatch back the tube after it was done spinning. Elsa just sighed and returned to the BSC, leaving the silence hanging once more.
In the end, Anna did prepare a satisfactory sample, but Elsa still had to help with taking the actual photo. Maybe she was just inexperienced, or she was lacking in artistic sense. Yeah...art. Anna soon realized making a good scientific poster actually involved a lot of aesthetics in the figures and schematics as well as the layout of everything. It took about thirty tries and near photobleaching of her fluorophores before they managed to capture the crystal clear accumulation of their target protein on the bud necks. But wow, was it worth it! Beautiful things were just so beautiful she could look at them all day.
"I'm going to send it off if you're happy with it..." Elsa deadpanned. Anna grinned. Not like she didn't notice Elsa too staring at the final poster file with a goofy smile the past three minutes.
"Don't send it off for me, send it off because you're so happy with it."
Elsa glared but did as she was told, all the while grumbling, "I'm just happy we made it in time for it to be printed. The retreat is the day after tomorrow."
Anna draped an arm over her shoulder with a little too much force that she sent Elsa's face a precarious inch from crashing into the glass panel, "I'm excited."
"Don't be. It's a retreat. Over a long weekend. Somewhere in the middle of a forest, forced into interactions with so-called fellow members of our species over lots of alcohol and not-so-fun-or-intelligent games..."
"I signed up for the pipette-tip shooting contest! And the egg drop!"
As though proving the point that she didn't need to know that, Elsa shut her eyes and lowered her head onto the glass. Anna laughed.
"I saw your name under the epi-rockets and squirt bottle fight."
"What!?" Elsa looked up, clearly surprised, "What in the world are those?"
Anna brought her now gloveless finger over the touchscreen and lazily scrolled down the page on her ipad, reading, "Epi-rockets is a game in which you engineer a 1.5ml eppendorf tube to fly using various common materials as fuel. The one that can fly the farthest distance wins."
"Stupid..." Elsa muttered, then exhaled deeply, "But bearable."
"Squirt bottle fight is a capture the flag game in which you can shoot down the enemy using a squirt bottle filled with orange Kool-Aid kindly donated by the Dunbroch Lab."
Elsa took off her gloves just to cup her forehead, clearly not looking forward to being shot by Kool-Aid. Anna patted her back, "Hey, at least you aren't in the Fixer-Upper contest. The explanation says it's a fashion show in which contestants are dressed in creative outfits made from lab recyclables. Hans and Kristoff are on it!"
If she heard right, Elsa snorted, "I'll look forward to that."
"Hell yes! I'm looking forward to all of these! But anyways...I'd better get going, else I'd miss the last train home."
Anna busily packed her ipad away, and only when she was zipping up her bag did she notice Elsa staring at her, hands held tightly together on her lap. When their eyes met, the cold blues averted themselves slightly to stare straight at the door behind Anna instead. Anna kept training her eyes on the blonde till the older girl finally shifted a little and attempted to speak, mouth opening and closing several times as she tried.
"You look like a goldfish, Elsa..."
"I...I do not!" Elsa complained in such a hurried manner she nearly bit her tongue. It only made her blush even more, highlighting the faint freckles on her cheeks.
"Don't worry. I think it's cute," Anna kept teasing.
The widened ice orbs took in the gleaming teals for a second before she found it increasingly difficult to hold the gaze and stared down at the floor.
"I am twenty-four and you do not call twenty-four-year-olds cute."
"Yes, we do. Why not?"
"It's...I don't know...not proper!"
"Yes, Mother..." Anna muttered, picking up her bag to leave with a grin still hanging on her face.
Elsa followed her though, and just before she was out the door, she called out, "Wait!"
"What is it, Mother?"
Normally (in the presence of Anna anyway), Elsa would make an exaggerated sigh and cross her arms over her ample chest while shaking her head, but she was so embarrassed by Anna's attention now that she couldn't say what she had wanted to, "...you know...well...I mean, you should lay it off about the mother thing. I'm at best the age of your sister."
Why would that matter? I did not mean to say something stupid like that!
"Fine, Sister. Good night, Sister."
"No! I mean..." Just say the truth, Elsa! Why are you such a damn coward when it comes to expressing your sorry self!? "I'm...ugh...it's my responsibility...no, I don't mean you are just a responsibility, but you know...I think...I'm concerned..."
"What?" Anna looked confused at her incomprehensible string of words, "Okay. Serious. I'm fine with whatever you'd want to say, Elsa, so please just say it. In my face. I won't mind."
Now that Anna had devoted her full serious attention to Elsa, the pressure was even more overwhelming. Elsa imagined herself standing at the top of a podium being crowned Queen in front of a large audience. She was so positively sure she'd screw up in some ridiculous way like freezing the sceptre and accidentally snapping it like a twig.
What an imagery, even when she deemed herself a realist by all measures.
But Anna was patient enough to wait for her internal struggle to die down. Finally, Elsa took a deep breath and blabbed, "It'd be dangerous for you to take the train at this hour I think you should just stay on campus I know you'd probably be fine on your own but why don't you just think of it as helping me get back to my dorm safely?"
If the joke were real and they were sisters in some parallel universe, then their nervous rambling must be hereditary.
"If I understood correctly...did you just..."
Elsa didn't wait for her to finish, taking her hand, throwing down her own lab coat before pulling both of them out the room and locking the door behind her. "You will not take the train this late at night...ever again."
Anna nodded rigidly, a little surprised, but interestingly almost elated at this protectiveness. Well, yes, they did have a superior/subordinate relationship at work, and their friendship shared a similar senior/junior dynamic that was at times even sisterly in nature, but this blatant concern Elsa was showing tonight...it warmed her up a little on the inside.
"So you're letting me stay at your dorm room tonight?"
The delayed reaction set in and Elsa was redder than ever, "Well...if...you'd like...or...I don't know...you can stay in the library instead, as long as you're safe."
Anna snorted, "It's not finals week. Who'd want to stay overnight in a library!? You have cable TV? I'd love to watch the rerun for tonight's game I missed."
Anna's steps felt so light as they descended the stairs leading out the building into the darkness. The full moon dangled as a centerpiece in the skies, shining a softer white compared to the fluorescent tubes they had in the lab. Under the wash of this natural glow, Elsa's skin and hair seemed to merge into one, ethereal marble tinted in majestic night blue. That usual coldness she emitted was all gone. She looked young and lively, the eyes that always mirrored ice shards reflected Anna's image like a warm, summer pond. It was at this moment that Anna realized her heart was skipping alongside her steps. What was this sensation? It was late autumn yet why did it seem like her body and mind were stuck in mid March, desperately yearning for spring to come?
"What's wrong, Anna?"
"I don't know..." she muttered absentmindedly before even registering what was said, "...err...the way! I don't know the way!"
"It's the same building as Hans' place. That's where all the grad student dorms are located."
"Oh? Really? Then..." this awkwardness was killing her, "I'll race you there!"
She darted away in escape, leaving a not-so-athletically-inclined grad student trailing after her. Serves her right, Anna thought. This was payback for last time when Elsa ran off after her colloquium presentation. By the time they reached the dorm building, Elsa was bent over, trying to catch her breath while Anna hammered her hand on Elsa's "flimsy" back.
"You...are...killing me..." Elsa managed to cough out the words between gasps for oxygen. Anna withdrew.
"Whoops! Sorry. Bad habit I caught from Kristoff."
Elsa frowned, but it was impossible to tell if she were just being playful or if she were really upset. Whatever. Even if she were upset, she'd have to bear with it. She was at the mercy of Anna, being no longer capable of making it up the stairs to the third floor unassisted.
"Here, give me that," Anna pulled off the bag slung over Elsa's shoulder and propped it on her own, "And your hand."
Too tired to complain, the blonde lazily lifted her right arm and Anna flung it around her neck and started half-hulling her vice boss up the stairs. Crescent Bay, home of the grad students, was one of the older residences on campus - a condominium-styled, salmon-coloured brick building complex overlooking the bay after which it was named. Compared to undergrad residences, where there were only a selection of crammed one-bedroom units or the horrid six-bedroom shared suites, Crescent Bay offered single-occupant furnished studios, such as Hans' place, or the more "luxurious" two-floored one-bedroom private suite, such as Elsa's. Once Anna managed to drag Elsa up the third floor and made their way down the hall to the actual unit, she realized exactly what it meant to have good grades and win multiple scholarships. This place didn't charge over a thousand bucks a month for nothing. It was hugely more spacious than where Hans lived, that was for sure.
"No wonder you don't mind me staying the night. You have like...a living room! And a dining room!"
"All houses have that, Anna..."
"But this is a dorm! Dorms don't count as houses!"
"And this isn't a house, obviously. It's a miniature mimic of one."
"Heck, I can't even afford one of those stuffy single bedrooms, let alone this!"
As they plopped down on the sleek black sofa and Anna proceeded to turn on the TV, Elsa looked at her with interest.
"Why not rent a room in the shared suites then, if you want to live on campus?"
"I wanted to...I didn't even need my parents to pay, I was gonna use my student loans, but they wouldn't let me."
"Why?"
"They're...well...overprotective," Anna didn't seem to want to elaborate, but eventually did continue when she loosened up while watching the game, "If they had it their way, I'd be living at home. But I'm from a small town so I had to move out for college, and college is...like...the proper thing to do after high school according to them. So I did, but they made sure I was really living alone. No bad roommates. No boyfriends. No nothing but study, because that's why I'm supposedly here. They'd rather pay for my rent than let me live with roommates - it's ridiculous. I feel bad though, so I picked a dingy basement suite in the middle of nowhere instead, and I convinced them to at least let me pay for my own living expenses with the loans."
She trailed off while her attention shifted fully to the game where their home team player stole the puck and single-handedly brought it across the opponents' blue line. Eased by the way Anna was paying her no heed, Elsa mumbled...
"...everybody has a hard story somewhere along the way, it seems..."
But Anna caught the remark and turned to Elsa, who looked away and pretended to watch the game even when she couldn't find the cursed puck. What was so interesting about this game anyway? All she saw were big grown men chasing a small black object with curved sticks, on skates!? She didn't get it. She just couldn't get it.
And Anna knew it. She knew Elsa wasn't actually watching the game. She was probably feeling uncomfortable because of what Anna had just blurted out. Damn it. Who was her to be complaining about her parents, who were a little annoying sometimes but did really love her, and were there for her all throughout her life? From what little she heard occasionally from Hans and Kristoff, she knew they were both orphans...and Elsa was as well. She must've been a bitch to bring this up!
But if she apologized now...wouldn't it hurt even more?
Silence. Awkward silence. Anna hoped against all odds that somebody, anybody, even the opposing team would score a goal at this moment to break the tension...
"And Morris brings the puck across the blue line, passes to Smith. Smith...back to Morris...to Hastings...Shoots! ...but deflected wide..."
Anna sighed to the narration. Maybe she shouldn't keep relying on luck. She should actually try to come to know Elsa better by her own effort. She scratched her redhead messy, braids half-hanging there, half tossed out of the orderly plaits. "So um...Elsa? You ever played hockey..."
Turning, she noticed Elsa curled up against the armrest, eyes closed, showing only the lush, dark lashes. It was so tempting to run the back of her hand across those supple cheeks, but Anna managed to catch herself. No, she isn't a baby cousin. She is your damned supervisor! Sure, we're friends, but you don't go stroke a friend's cheek when she's asleep. Gosh, what the hell were you thinking, Anna?
She decided to focus on the fact that Elsa must be very uncomfortable with her neck bent at a weird angle. To sleep without even eating dinner first...she must've been really tired. Anna nudged gently at her shoulders to wake her up, "Elsa...I know you're tired, but if you want to sleep, you should go back to your room..."
Elsa moaned groggily, but allowed herself to be pulled up by her arm. Anna once again hulled her up another flight of stairs to the bedroom on the second level. It was small, minimally furnished just like the rest of the dorm. Anna placed the blonde on the single-bed and tugged her beneath the white comforter.
Just when she was about to turn and go back downstairs to watch the game, she noticed the only source of colour in this room of grey tones. Snapple jars, empty of their previous contents, were stacked in a pyramid on the bedside table, vibrant from thousands and thousands of small origami objects that formed layers and layers of every shade of green, blue, and purple she had ever seen. Were they cranes? Anna stole a glance over to Elsa where she still lay sleeping deeply, then shifted back to the jars. Unable to resist her overwhelming curiosity, she opened the top one and fished out a paper construction from within.
Only then did she notice the colour came from pencil crayons, drawing very intricate snowflake designs on one side of the paper. The other side was plain white save for short lines of writing in barely legible small print.
"Are you flying in the skies? Is it cold up there? I hope it's warm; let the sun graze your wings"
She read from the origami piece, not a crane, but a very small paper airplane.
End of Chapter 10