AN: Thanks Nemrut, EleHime, Nayal, Luniverse (and thank you so much for volunteering to beta revised chapters! Loves ya!), 23deecy, Supremacy of Chaos, Man of Constant Sorrow, brunhe, Lance58, GuesT, el-sana, Yuiiub, TheElementHero, PhantomGemini, GhostofWintersPast, and the guests for their kind comments. Sorry for the delay in updating. RL has been stressful and I needed time to cope. Hopefully things would die down and I'd be able to write more soon. Once again, non-flame comments are welcome. I'd appreciate feedback as well, since I'm currently revising the early chapters of this fic.
(This is the July 2016 revised version)
Courtship of the Grad Student
Chapter 11
"And you had once said I looked like a goldfish. I'm sure there is a word for this. Oh right, you must be a hypocrite!"
Elsa Snow sure was animated today. It left Anna gaping, to which she rolled her eyes before returning her attention to the road.
Elsa had offered to carpool her undergrad to their departmental retreat at the North Mountain Forestry Research Center, but their long ride had been mostly quiet this morning, not because of Elsa, but Anna's lack of response. Anna just clutched onto her fabric-print poster as though her life depended on it, refusing to take the bait to talk.
"So you're giving me the silent treatment?" Elsa asked.
"No! I just don't think I need to answer you when you're clearly teasing me!"
Elsa sighed, "You know what I mean. You want to say something. Something on your mind? A question? Ask away."
Anna swallowed a big gulp of saliva. Sure, she had questions. But she couldn't exactly blab out how she had stolen a peek at Elsa's jars of miniature paper airplanes filled with poetic writing obviously intended for a special someone to read. Her first reaction to the few pieces she read was to hurriedly refold them back to their original shapes, tossed them back into the jar, and returned the jar where it belonged. But the more she thought about it, the more...morbid she found the writing to be. Perhaps her first impression was mistaken. Perhaps it wasn't as...romantic...as originally seemed.
She was worried, and her discomfort seemed to have been noticed by Elsa.
"There's an aura of impending doom emitting from you, Anna," Elsa said, possibly jokingly but sounding far too serious for that intent. Anna sighed.
"Nothing...I'm worried about the pipette-tip shooting contest. I heard Merida from the Dunbroch Lab can shoot her tip into the back of your pipette tip in a display of precision! Imagine me missing the target by ten yards in comparison!"
"A pipette tip can't fly ten yards..." Elsa rebuked, but sighed in agreement soon after, "But you're right, Merida is a tough one. I'll face off against her in the squirt bottle capture-the-flag. At least you won't get orange Kool-Aid on your top. I've brought extras just in case."
"Any as good as what you're wearing now?"
Shit! What did I just say? I did not just admit to ogling...
Anna tried as hard as she could to tear her eyes off her vice boss' attire. It wasn't the first time she'd seen the older girl wear something other than a white coat, but still, each of those times when Elsa wore something else, Anna would be caught staring. When the blonde was not in her hide-in-a-dark-room mood, she was actually quite daring. The tight blue top under her white zip-up hoodie was casual, but flaunted her perfect...chest...and then there were those navy skinny jeans with a bit of a faded pattern down her thighs...how could you not ogle that!? Especially when they connected with them...them delicious hips.
"How do people get their license these days!?" Elsa's frustration at the morning traffic broke Anna's train of thought with a loud honk, "Was he trying to kill himself? You do not just cut into my lane like that. From my blind spot. Not even a signal. This is not a silly little reflex test at Science World, gosh!"
Anna chuckled, a little of it admittedly attributed to her relief that Elsa had been too concentrated on driving to notice how she had been checking her out a moment earlier. But most of it, though, was because Elsa's behaviour now was so natural, so ordinary compared to her previous mysterious dark-room persona. Their friendship had really bloomed since the day the door opened. Now, Anna realized, Elsa was just human like herself. Of course, Elsa was still unique in her own wonderful ways, but she was not so distant that Anna couldn't reach her and hold her in her hands. The thought of their mutual connection made her grin subconsciously.
"Now what, Anna? You still giggling over the prospect of me drowned in Kool-Aid, or my immature rambles about other drivers?"
"Well..." Anna's voice trailed off, "Both are quite cute in my opinion."
"Cute..." Elsa snorted, replying flatly, "You seem to enjoy my embarrassment..."
"Don't we all enjoy seeing that from our bosses?"
"And your boss is Brad, not me. Our boss. And he's off dancing with a garland of Hawaiian flowers over his bare belly while we're here suffering a trip to a dank forest on a good long weekend."
"I do agree it would be fun seeing Dr. Winters in a dress of recyclables," Anna answered. Elsa shook her head a little with a teasing smile on her face.
"Naive, My Dear. Naive," she muttered, "Profs didn't get their PhDs for nothing. They're skilled masters of manipulation. They will invent some excuse to miss out the morning games which they know would turn out as an annual lab slave revolt. Fergus Dunbroch is the only one dumb enough to get a faceful of pie every year. It has evolved into a tradition. You won't miss it."
And indeed, when they pulled up to the driveway of the campground at North Mountain, the ritual had already started. The big man sidling down the parking lot, chased by students with cream pies, was undoubtedly Fergus himself. His wife/lab manager, Elinor, was holding her fingers to her forehead in exasperation while his famed undergrad, Merida, laughed so loudly her voice echoed down the valley.
Elsa parked by Eugene Fitzherbert's car. He was driving Rapunzel and some other Corona Lab members who would undoubtedly tag along with them seeing as they were assigned the same building as the Winters and Dunbroch Labs. By the time they made it uphill on the pebble path and up the stairs leading to their two-storey wooden cabin, they had spotted Hans, Kristoff, Gerda, and Kai. Kristoff tossed a key in Anna's direction.
"Your room. Upstairs, 203. Has a big queen-sized bed facing a lake view. It's fabulous, I assure you."
"So it's a double?" She asked, catching the key. There weren't any clear room assignments, each lab being allocated a single room per staff and a double between every two students. She glanced between Gerda and Elsa, the latter turned a little away to hide a quickly reddening face.
"I don't mind sharing a room with you, Anna," Gerda said much to Elsa's shock. The blonde snapped back in their direction and opened her mouth to speak loudly, or so she intended anyway. She found herself barely able to raise her voice above a mouse's squeak.
"I...don't mind either. I mean...Gerda is a staff member...so the single room is hers, really..."
"Even though Brad would room with somebody else every year to give you your personal space?" Hans made a snide little comment under his breath. His limes briefly met Elsa's blues, but their staring contest was quickly interrupted by Anna wrapping an arm around Elsa's to pull her into the cabin.
"Great! Let's check out our room then!"
Elsa was too weak to protest. She swore her legs turned into jelly.
Anna was likewise not immune to the embarrassment of their current situation. In fact, she made sure she stared straight ahead as they ascended the stairs to the second floor so that Elsa would not see how her face was burning - the reason for which she'd rather not know. Okay, so she did admit to Elsa being the most adorable little...kitten, sleeping in a little curled up ball and all, and Anna couldn't say she didn't look forward to seeing such a spectacle again. It was, however, most inappropriate to blush like a mad idiot because of this, which was exactly what she was doing now.
Luckily, the awkwardness of spending quality alone-time in the room was eased by the beauty that met them when they opened the door. It wasn't a large room by any means, just big enough to fit the bed and two bedside cabinets with matching lamps atop of each. A door on the side led to a bathroom with a standing shower. But yes, just as Kristoff had said, the view was amazing - the wide windows looked out to blue waters so clear it was like a mirror reflecting the green conifers on the shore; there was a small pier leading off from the coast, beside which several canoes were kept. Anna pointed excitedly towards them.
"You think we can go canoeing?" Anna asked. Elsa shrugged.
"Well, I suppose we could during free time later today. First, though, we have to survive the Lab Olympics and your poster session."
"Darn..." she muttered playfully. Elsa just chuckled.
"Hey, I'm the one having to give a twenty-minute talk tomorrow. Who has it worse?"
And so they set off for the Lab Olympics. Fergus took the place of the missing department head, Brad, as host of this year's retreat. Standing proudly at his cardboard podium, face still white with cream pie, he waved his giant hand to silence the crowd.
"Uhhh...yaeh, so...waelcome...to tha aennual Maecrobiologae und Aemmunologae Lab Gaemes..." he stared at his wife, who was holding up the back of an old poster with his speech written on top. Craning his head forward, he squinted for the words, "Laet's...show our...aenthusaesm for science...oh, forgaet it Elinor. Wut science? Wae're haere to kick each otha's arses so laet's jus git on with it!"
He picked up the nearest empty plastic jug from the lab recyclables pile and waved it upwards. At this, the big, rounded grad student from his lab, MacGuffin, nodded and jammed his finger onto the left-click key of his laptop connected to the loudspeakers set nearby. They were immediately bombarded with a familiar strum and majestic cries of strings that sent the crowd roaring.
"What was that?" Elsa asked, quirking an eyebrow above the noise. Anna looked at her incredulously, as though accusing her of not understanding this in-joke.
To answer her confusion, Fergus' voice thundered, "In tha gaeme uf thrones, ya win or ya...well, nobody's dying haere, so wuteva. Now laet's faight fur tha most uncomfurtable chaeir aen all Arendelle, forged from a thousand vaenquished saerological paipettes unda tha breath uf tha graetest glue gun aen historae!"
Elsa held her head in her hand. Gosh...not that TV show again...
There was a certain enmity between the Dunbroch and Winters Lab by the time of the final event - the egg drop. Well, between the two redheads, Merida and Anna anyway.
It all started with the homemade rockets game, in which Elinor of the Dunbroch Lab had a really good lead over the others with her heated water and dry ice rocket. Then Elsa came along and beat her with a two stage rocket, staggered by the different chemistries between the stages, one with dry ice, the other with vinegar and baking soda.
Well, Merida admitted her lab's defeat, but claimed that "A Dunbroch mus alwaeys raepay 'er debts". She went on to win the tip-shooting contest and then sprayed Elsa with a faceful of orange Kool-Aid during capture the flag.
"You just had to aim for the face!?" Anna snapped at the younger shrugging redhead as she helped wipe Elsa's face clean with a towel. Elsa was so embarrassed by her gentle attention that she did nothing to interrupt their argument.
"Ae wus tryin' not to dirteh 'er clothes!" Merida complained. They dueled with their gazes until the Recyclables Fashion Show forced them off the field.
Anna left a last glare, "The Winters are coming..."
So by the time of the egg drop, Anna could care less about whether their team was successful, so long as the Dunbroch Team represented by their lab's triplet high-schoolers, Harris, Hubert, and Hamish, lost.
The triplets worked with Merida over the last Spring Break on their science fair project. Seeing as they were an engineering lab, the triplets designed an electric car for the project, which gained notorious fame after Merida carried it with her on her barehanded climb to the top of the campus clock tower, a plan originally devised by the three. So, expecting the triplets to be any less mischievous than the undergrad would be a kiss of death.
They rigged the egg drop for a win. They boiled the damn eggs they were supposed to drop - there was absolutely no chance of them breaking over the two-storey fall. Anna knew though. Anna knew.
"For the night is dark and full of Anna," she said to Hans and Kristoff, her fellow teammates. Hans managed a chuckle, while Kristoff just snorted a retort.
"It's day, Miss."
"Anyways, I propose we forget about our egg and just break theirs. They're ahead of us on the drop."
"A typical stupid idea from you, Anna," Kristoff snapped again.
"Sounds interesting!" Hans ignored him and expressed his support.
"What? Because you're the embodiment of evil?"
Anna didn't bother listening to them. She was already starting to assemble their device.
"Tada!" She announced, "Meet my Needle!"
"You named this...this thing!?" Kristoff gawked upon a single glance of their egg-drop set-up.
"Every good egg-drop project needs a name."
"And why is the name Needle then? Aside from you fangirling over Arya Stark? It's a damn log! Now where the hell did you get that!?"
"Six logs. From the fireplace. Can't you see the way they're tied together in a long shape to specifically penetrate any baggage holding the Dunbroch cooked egg?"
"I think it'd be more appropriately named as Hammer," Hans couldn't help himself. Kristoff gave him a rare, knowing glance that said - I feel you, bro.
So when it came the Winters Lab's turn to drop their egg, Elsa could only stare in shock at Anna hulling the logs over the balcony.
"Oh my..." she muttered before it slammed down onto its counterpart from the Dunbroch Lab.
Well, it did work in the end. The two labs' representatives for the Recyclables Fashion Show were penalized into keeping their outfits on for the rest of the day, not that that would have anything to do with Anna. She grinned.
The final winners of the Polystyrene Throne went to the Shizuru Fujino Lab.
This poster session was probably the cheapest Elsa had ever attended. First off, it wasn't held in a conference hall, but in the lunch room. There weren't even poster boards, so everybody taped their posters on the walls with an unfortunate few having to manage on the windows when space filled up. Anna was one of them, having been tricked by the Dunbroch triplets into fighting for smoked salmon instead of setting up her poster. Well, they got their revenge, so Merida, whose display was on the adjacent wall, seemed to have declared truce with her.
"Eva bin ta one of theis thin's?" Merida asked over a bite of blueberry pie. Anna swallowed her mouthful of cheese before answering.
"First time. You?"
"Aye. Mae first too. Yur co-author's ae grad student yur workin' fur?"
"Yeah. Elsa Snow."
"Oh, I 'eard uf hur. Pretteh laedy o'er thaere with them hair uf whaite gold und aeyes uf blue aice? Shae haunts tha buildin', eh? Heh heh."
It was without doubt that Elsa drew attention wherever she went, partially because of the vampire rumours surrounding her, but mostly because she really was physically attractive. And equally without doubt, she was uncomfortable with the attention. Unlike the times when she was giving out presentations, when people were immersed in her science, the bonding events of this retreat felt too personal. This poster session was just one of them. As her submission was chosen for a talk tomorrow, she did not need to present a poster, and thus was left to wander around today. The expectation would be that she chatted with the presenters and looked for collaboration chances. But instead, she found herself lingering at the edge of the crowds, sipping on champagne in hopes of dulling her nervousness.
In all honesty, she would rather just stand by Anna's display, but not only would that be bad etiquette, seeing as she was a co-author so what could she learn about the project anyway, it would also give Anna a chance to rely on her, which was not the purpose of this exercise here.
Anna needed the feedback from others to improve her knowledge, clarify the ideas she was investigating. With improvement, she could write a better abstract next time, maybe get a talk at the next local conference or even win an award. That would boost her resume up for the travel grant application, and of course, for her future career.
But what of Elsa's own career? She had an impressive publication record, five first-author papers in major journals already. Many people didn't have anything close even after they graduated. Elsa could probably write up her thesis now, get her degree, and have half a dozen small universities offer her a faculty position. She knew, and she knew Brad Winters knew this as well, that even if she chose to do this, she wouldn't get very far from there onward. Maybe she'd rot away as a lecturer for some basic immunology course for the rest of her life, which while offering her the easy way out, was not exactly her ultimate career goal. But what did she want to do? How could she accomplish this? Those were questions that troubled her, and perhaps those were her only reasons for staying here.
She sighed. She was such a coward. Look at Hans Southern over there, mingling with the Weselton Lab over talks of microfluidic devices that he knew nothing about. Elsa never quite liked him even during their adolescence, always looking for power, even among a group of orphans in a care home. But she admitted, he was a good leader. An entitled little bastard, yes, but he understood people, knew how to use them. It wasn't that Elsa wanted to use people - she just wanted to be less scared of them, less scared of herself.
And more than anything else, she wanted to know Anna, and to let Anna know her. But she didn't know where to start.
What she intended as stealing a glance at the younger girl turned into a hungry skim over her radiant strawberry blonde hair and lush teal eyes as lively as the forests around them. When Anna returned her gaze, Elsa wanted to look away, but her mind was still distracted by the natural beauty emanating from the youthful countenance.
"Hey, Anna, Ae think yur grad student is lookin yur waey," Merida commented, only to notice that Anna had already turned her attention that way. She laughed. "Ae think tha waey you look at'er aend shae look at you is rael cute. Yaeh, about as cute as whaen you waiped Kool-Aeid off 'er pretteh face."
"What?" Anna turned around, surprised. Merida grinned.
"Cute liek gud 'ole Fergus aend our daer Elinor. Ae approve." She held her thumb up. Anna slapped it lightly.
"I don't need you to approve!"
"Of course, of course, so long as tha Laeb Vaempaire 'aerself approves is all gud."
Merida gave her a little shove in the direction of Elsa, and when Anna turned around to give her a questioning look, Merida just winked. Gosh, the whole world was against her! Kristoff, Rapunzel, and now Merida!?
"Umm...so..." Anna began when she reached Elsa, "How are you liking the posters so far?"
"They're...well...nice." - Not that she had read any of them in detail! She was too shy to move too close to the presenter, and her mind wasn't there anyway!
"Seems like the session is dying down," Anna commented again. Elsa just nodded.
"People probably want to focus on eating lunch. Others are starting their free time early."
"Maybe we should too?"
There was begging in Anna's eyes. Clearly she wanted to get to the canoes sooner, or maybe she just couldn't stand another sight of her new archrival, Merida. Either way, Elsa was a poor judge when it came to these things.
So she just nodded her approval, all the while wondering if she would've done so had she not taken the sip of champagne. Elsa didn't know a day would come when she would inwardly tell herself science be damned unless it was her chemistry with a certain beautiful ginger. Against her common sense, she smiled.
Anna did a great job today, and she was right, the session was already dying down. Whoever was interested in their project would already have visited. They both deserve a break from all the idiots in the room.
So she let herself be happily towed along by Anna to the storage room where they picked their lifejackets and paddles. They then ran down the hilly dirt path to the pier and together heaved a canoe into the water, splashing each other with sprays of water.
"You did not have to be so violent, Anna!" Elsa complained. She half-cursed Merida for having ruined her sky-blue top in today's earlier contest, leaving her with a white one on currently. Any more of this and she might as well have worn a transparent plastic bag instead.
"Oh, just get on, my Snow Queen. You won't melt from a little water."
"I'm...not..." she muttered, trying so hard not to look at the way Anna puffed out her bosom in an encouraging gesture. After a precarious step that rocked their canoe dangerously from side to side, Elsa managed a safe landing onto her own seat.
"Oh, you Silly Thing! You aren't supposed to face me!" Anna laughed. At this, Elsa's face grew even hotter. I was so absorbed in her that...that I...that I got on the canoe the wrong way!?
"Look," Anna continued, still giggling, "I have no problem with staring at you for the next hour - the beautiful lake and mountain valley are bonuses."
Anna didn't know if she said this because Elsa's embarrassment at her implication was so adorable, or because making Elsa more embarrassed would make herself seem less embarrassing.
The effect was not what she had expected though. Just when she was about to complain about Elsa's attempt to turn around, seeing as she really did buy the creative idea of rowing face-to-face, they lost their balance and the canoe flipped, dumping them both into the lake a bare inch from dock.
Anna popped up first, her lifejacket eagerly floating. Elsa then managed to get out from under the canoe with some struggle and popped up next to her.
"Oh my goodness, you're drenched!" Anna laughed, pointing at the tangles of wet platinum mixed with chips of wood and grass that Elsa was desperately trying to pry from her face. Anna grabbed onto the edge of the pier and hulled herself up, then helped drag Elsa out of the water.
"And you aren't?" Elsa complained, finally having plastered her hair to the side instead. She opened her eyes, blues shining through.
Only then did Anna notice their distance.
It was the first time they were so close she could see her own reflection on the ice shards.
Entranced, she reached forward to brush her fingers through Elsa's wet blonde strands. They slipped through her hands like a narrow waterfall between her delicate fingers.
And Elsa didn't seem to mind.
Encouraged, she moved her hands onto Elsa's arms, pale peach showing through the sleeves that clung to her shapely figure. Anna moved closer, her hands lower - when she spoke, she could feel her breath deflected back at herself from Elsa's skin.
"You hurt? Anywhere?" She asked. Elsa shook her head lightly, and for a very brief, split-second, their noses touched from the movement.
But both of them seemed to have felt it.
Oblivious of everything else, Anna watched a water drop escape Elsa's bangs to drip onto her eyelid. When it fluttered close, the droplet slipped down in a shimmering trail between the high cheek and nose to the top of those thin lips now a flaming red.
Anna closed her eyes.
End of Chapter 11