Lee gave another nervous look around her as she and Anna sat at a table and ate their lunch. She had not seen Nathan all day, and it was starting to wear on her mind. She felt like he was watching her, and that her next lesson with him might begin without her foreknowledge and consist of something that she didn't really want to do. Every set of footsteps that passed behind her warranted a quick glance back and a very scrutinizing glare from her.

Anna was starting to take notice of Lee's nervous behavior, giving her strange looks and glancing around each time that she reacted to something nervously. She didn't see anything that would particularly set a person on edge, so she asked "Uh, Lee? Is there something wrong? Are you, like, waiting for someone or something?"

Lee turned her head at a somewhat startling speed and fixed her with a nervous glare before letting out a deep breath and thumping her head down on the table. Her voice was muffled as she spoke from this position, but she was still understandable. "I think I'm going insane." Anna raised an eyebrow and scooted her chair a bit closer, saying "Why? What's the matter? Is there anything I can do to help?" Lee shook her head, producing several unpleasant sounding squeaks from her skin on the wood. Her voice was muffled again "Nathan said that we would be doing more training today, but he hasn't show up all day. I feel like he's been watching me the whole time."

Anna nodded. She knew the feeling. Nathan seemed to take some irritating pleasure in making people paranoid. She couldn't blame him, she felt the same way when she was able to startle them, but she could blame him for being so good at it. She rubbed a hand on Lee's back comfortingly and looked around the room again. The door at the far end of the room opened and Nathan stepped through.

Anna stopped rubbing her back and started shaking Lee roughly, resulting in her making a few somewhat undignified noises before sitting back up and saying indignantly "What are you doing?" Wordlessly, Anna pointed a hand at Nathan and did her best to act nonchalant as she started to gather her food back up, preparing to leave. Lee saw what she was doing and gave her a look that was somehow both pleading and furious. This look did very little however, and it was not long before Nathan appeared from a small crowd with a plate and sat down. Anna got up and walked away, nodding to Nathan as she went.

He gave her a puzzled look as he sat down. "What's her hurry? Suppose she's got somewhere to be?" Lee shrugged, wishing that she could get up to follow her. She couldn't however, and was resigned to deal with whatever Nathan was about to pose as her as her next "lesson".

There were a few awkward minutes of silence where neither of the two said anything, Nathan simply eating his food and Lee simply dreading when he stopped. That time did come eventually, and her whole body tensed when it did. "So" Nathan said, setting his fork down and looking over at her "are you ready for today's lesson?"

Lee gave him a small nod and said "I suppose I have to be, don't I?" Nathan gave her an exasperated look and said "Oh, don't give me that. You asked me to do this so don't complain." Lee's response came quickly. She said "You didn't tell me there would be psychological torture involved! I've been scared out of my mind all say thinking that you would just pop out of a corner and throw something at me!"

Nathan's expression twisted slowly into a grin. "You really think I would do that?" he recalled when he had tried to get her to jump off of a roof. "You know what, don't answer that. Anyways, I've got something for you to do today! I'm sure that you are elated to hear that." She gave a small groan and said "Please just tell me it isn't another few hours of just combat practice."

Nathan laughed and said "No, nothing quite like that. You might hope that that was what you are doing, though. I've come up with something that should teach you to stay light on your feet in any situation." The look on Nathan's face made her nervous. If there was something that he thought she would prefer to do less than getting beaten by him, she didn't want to know what it was. Nathan shoved the plate of food away from him and stood, saying "Well, come on. Times wasting. Let's go."

Lee stood hesitantly and followed Nathan out of the room. He walked briskly, and it was difficult for her to keep up. Several times she tried to ask him where they were going, but the words simply refused to make their way out of her throat. Perhaps it was for the best, though. If she knew what she was going to she would probably not be willing to follow him at all.

It wasn't long before the pair came to an isolated hall that looked like it wasn't used very often. Across the floor were numerous shards of what looked like glass. Lee's face paled, mind racing with all the numerous possibilities of what torture Nathan could be planning for her.

She turned back to Nathan. He was watching her face with a broad smile. Lee knew that there was some trick to the whole thing, that Nathan wouldn't really have her walk over shards of glass, but even thinking about it made her skin crawl. She asked him nervously "I don't have to walk across this, right? I mean, I don't think that shredding my feet would be a very good-" Nathan cut her off by holding a hand up. When she fell silent he said "You do have to walk across it, but not barefoot. You are going to learn how to place your steps, as well as how to step lightly. Both are some of the most important things you can learn."

Lee breathed a small sigh of relief, than another thing occurred to her. "What if I fall down?" she asked in a voice that reminded her of when she had been a child. Nathan raised an eyebrow at her and said "If you fall down simply walking, than you deserve every cut you get from that fall."

Lee pouted. Just the kind of love and compassion she had been expecting form him. He held a hand out to the hall and said "Get to the other side and make as little noise as possible." Lee nodded. That was better than what she had had in mind. Nathan stepped back and fell totally silent, his arms folded and him leaning against the wall.

Lee put a foot forward and put a small amount of weight on it. There were a few small crackling sounds as more weight was put on the pieces, but not too much. The silence in the hall was almost deafening, and seemed to amplify each little sound the glass made to almost cringing volume. She placed her other foot forward onto the glass, and was startled by the amount of sound that emanated from the small pieces as her full weight was pushed onto them. She held the foot that hadn't yet touched the floor up and balanced on the one that was already touching. Clearly she was going to need to come up with another strategy to do this, walking and hoping they didn't make any noise was not a viable option.

She brought her other foot down and tried to step only on her toes. The pieces under the small point of contact crackled, but didn't make as much noise as the flatfooted step had. Something occurred to Lee as she did this, and she said over her shoulder "Where did you get all this glass? Someone is probably going to be really mad with you."

She was too focused to turn and look at him, but she could practically hear him wave dismissively and say "First of all that would require someone know that I put it here, which no one does. Second, I didn't just take random things made of glass and smash them, these were all pieces that were about to be thrown out anyways, I just smashed them up a little more. Third, I'm not just going to leave all of this here, I'll pick it up when you're done."

There was another loud crack from beneath her, and Nathan made full use of the opportunity, saying jokingly "Which, judging by this performance, won't be for a while." Lee tried to ignore him. He was right of course, she wasn't doing very well, but he was just trying to distract her.

Her practice lasted for what felt like a very long time, and finally ended when she was able to reach the other side of the hall without making what Nathan deemed to be "too much noise". The trick, as she found out, was to step only in spots that had very little glass in them, and to never put all her weight into one spot. Even if she had to try and distribute her weight to two different places on the same foot, that was what she had to do.

Nathan congratulated her, and the first thing that she did was lean her back against the wall and slide down, pulling her leg up to examine the bottoms of her shoes. She had started to feel very nervous near the end when she had thought she felt small pinpricks on the bottom of her feet. There were several small pieces still stuck to her, now somewhat embedded in the shoe, but she was able to get them out with the use of her nails and a few hearty slams on the floor. Overall it seemed that there wasn't too much damage to the shoes, but there were without a doubt more cuts and markings than there had been before.

She looked up to find Nathan with a broom, sweeping the multitude of glass shards into a pile which he then swept into a box. He picked the box up and turned to her, giving a quizzical look and asking "What are you doing?" In response she hold one leg up towards him and gave it a brush with a finger to indicate the new damage. He rolled his eyes and said "Well, it's better than your feet, isn't it?" She couldn't disagree with that.

Nathan started to walk away, shaking the box so that the glass made a grating racket and saying loud enough to be heard over the glass "We'll meet again tomorrow for something. I'll have something else by then."

Lee was about to ask if they were going to do the combat training that she had "enjoyed" yesterday, but thought better of it. If Nathan had forgotten about it, than there was no chance she was going to remind him. The glass in the box made a few more loud noises, but they faded away as Nathan walked. She watched him go, praying the whole time that he didn't stop, turn around, and say something.

He disappeared around a corner, and Lee felt immense relief. She still had bruises from the last time she had tried to take him down. She cast another small mournful glance at her shoes before walking away from the hall and wondering what she would do now. Her mind wandered as she walked through the halls for a while before she thought of Anna again. They had had several pleasant conversations recently, and she wanted to continue talking. Anna might have been somewhat scatterbrained, but it really ended up working in her favor. It made her a nicer person overall.

Lee sort of envied her, in a weird way. She didn't necessarily want anything that she had, she just wanted to be more like her. She was so happy all the time, so lighthearted, albeit a bit airheaded at times. It was like she had some kind of natural resistance to sadness and pressure. She wished that she could have the same. Instead, however, the weight of things about to happen felt heavy on her shoulders. She wanted to help, hoping that that would relieve some of it.

It took her a few minutes to find Anna again, asking various staff around the castle if they had seen her. She finally tracked the girl to her room, and knocked on the door, hoping she wasn't interrupting anything important. The door opened, Anna standing in the doorway giving Lee a quizzical look. Lee gave her a sincere smile and said "Hi! I was just wondering it maybe you had time to talk?"

Anna responded with a smile and backed into her room, ushering Lee in as she went. She followed her, and closed the door behind her. Anna took a seat on her bed, and Lee sat in a chair across from it. "So" Anna said "what can I do for you?" Lee shrugged and said "Well… I don't really know. I'm just not really feeling too great right now. I was wondering if you might be able to cheer me up or something."

Anna got a concerned look on her face, and said "Oh, what's wrong?" Lee sighed and resettled herself in the chair. "I don't know. I just feel like there's a lot of stuff looming over us right now, and I feel like nothing good is going to come out of it. This whole war thing, it all just seems so stupid and pointless. A lot of bad things are going to happen for no reason."

Anna nodded. "I agree. Elsa agrees to. No one really wants there to be a war. I think Elsa said that she was going to send Nathan to do something about it. I don't really want to think about what he might do about it." Anna's expression changed to one slightly sadder and she said "It's just such a shame that the king of the Southern Isles won't see reason. Elsa has tried to talk him down, but he has just ignored her every time. I don't know why he can't just see that we aren't doing any harm over here. All because my sister was born different than everyone else, he thinks that she is nothing but evil!"

Lee was slightly taken aback by the girl's outburst. She didn't know what to say. It was obvious that Anna was pretty on-edge about this issue. She replied weakly "Yea, right." Anna's eyes widened as she seemed to realize that she had just reacted quite violently. She immediately put a hand to her mouth and said "Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to… uh… anything else you wanted to talk about?"

Lee shifted in her seat, now finding herself uncomfortable. "How are you learning your powers?" she asked in a desperate attempt to make things a little less awkward between the two. Anna looked glad for the opportunity and said "Oh, it's going great! I've gotten a lot better control, and I can do way more stuff than I could at first! The only thing that I've had trouble with so far though is speed. I can't really just make things happen like Elsa does, I have to focus a lot more on it." Lee nodded. She had noticed the increase in Anna's abilities.

Silence filled the room for several seconds before being broken by Anna, who asked "What do you think of Nathan?" Lee raised an eyebrow at her, and she clarified "I mean as a person, you know, what kind of person you think he is? I know that you haven't really known him for very long, but neither me nor Elsa have seen him while he's… "working". What is he like?"

Thinking back to that time made Lee's spine tingle. It seemed like so long ago, and she had been such a different person. She shook her head and focused of the question. "He was… it was weird. At first he was really persuasive and adaptive, just sort of rolling with the punches. He fooled me into thinking that he wanted to join Gothel so that I would take him to her. I don't know exactly what happened after that, but it must have been pretty big, because it wasn't long before Gothel had to run out of the tower she had been living in with a pretty big stab wound in her ribs. I don't know exactly what happened, but there were a lot of powerful followers of Gothel up in that tower, and none of them came back out."

Anna nodded. That was pretty close to what she had been expecting to hear; quick, deceptive, and more than a little bit mysterious. She still had a kind of morbid curiosity tough, and decided to keep asking. "Didn't he catch you after she got out of the tower?" Lee nodded, and Anna asked "What did he do then? Obviously he didn't do anything too bad, but how did he change?"

Lee thought back to that event and found the memories more than willing to resurface with utmost clarity. "It was scary. He was like a totally different person. He grabbed me and started shouting, asking me questions, and I was sure he was going to kill me. When he started dragging me back to Corona on a horse I was terrified. Than we got to the docks, and we saw the ship that Gothel used to attack you, and something changed again. He went from being in a rage to staying quiet. I didn't know him at that point, but I could tell that he was coming up with a plan. He put a knife to my throat and said that he wanted to kill me, but dropped me. Then he just… disappeared. And not like he normally does, I mean he was just gone. I guess he got back here somehow before Gothel did, because I hear that he was a pretty big part in that defense."

Anna nodded "He was. I wasn't really involved with that discussion, but I think that the whole plan for Else to freeze the fjord again was his idea. When he came up and found Elsa… neither of them really told me what happened, but the room was pretty busted up. Elsa killed Gothel, and as soon as he knew that she was alright, he was out of the room, attacking Gothel's people again. From what I heard from a few of the soldiers who saw it, there wasn't much of a fight. Apparently he just covered them in shadow so that no one could see anything and jumped right into the middle of them. When the shadow disappeared he was walking away from a pile of bodies, covered in blood."

The hair on the back of Lee's neck stood up, and she thought to herself that this talk was resembling the retelling of ghost stories around a fire. "So how did you meet him? I mean, I know how he just kind of showed up, but how did you personally meet him?"

Anna looked down for a moment, thinking, before looking up and saying "It had to have been when…no, no I'm sure that I saw him before that. It… was… in the courtyard. It had to be." She nodded to herself than said "The courtyard was frozen over into a skating rink, and I saw him just walking across the ice no problem. That's something I could never do, and something that I hadn't seen many other people before either. I went over to complement him, but Elsa pulled me away before we could really talk." She scratched her head, seeming to just realize something before saying "He was really awkward with me, like he didn't know what to say. He might not have known that I was the princess, but I don't think that that should have surprised him all that much."

Lee felt a small grin creep across her face as she said "Maybe he liked you." in a semi-joking voice. Anna snickered and said "Oh, of course. Head over heels for me." The two laughed.

They talked for a long time. How long, Lee lost track. When finally she left the Princess's room she felt that some of the weight was lifted from her. She started to walk the halls again, looking for something new to do. Her mind wandered to her practice bout with Nathan again as one of the muscles in her back started to ache again. She thought of where she might be able to get a practice blade. She was going to do her best to not make it so easy for Nathan the next time.

Author's Thing:

I know that time between new chapters is increasing, but cut me a break, I wrote a chapter for that RWBY thing I've been doing that was like 7,000 words long.

So just, uh, regular routine. Thanks for reading and stuff.