All or Nothing

Chapter

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Casual author's note: I apologize for the long wait between chapters. I work in the caring industry and I'm currently providing crisis care that has kept me exceptionally busy. Luckily I may be getting something of a break soon so more chapters more often! Woot!

…..

"I think I should inform you," Meena began, somewhat hesitantly, "that you are wasting quite a lot of money."

Elsa looked up from where she had been staring pointedly at the floor, and not Meena's spread-eagled form on the bed. Truly, she wondered how it had taken so long for Meena to speak up.

After their first encounter, things had quickly gone downhill. She had touched Meena's breasts, and felt glad of it at the time, but as soon as Meena had taken Elsa's hand to touch her lower, she pulled away, consumed by an odd sort of terror.

"I don't mind, of course," Meena continued, turning to lie on her side, stroking her hip with deliberate sultriness. "It's quite the easiest job I've had. But I fail to see what you're getting out of this."

Every meeting had gone the way of the first. Meena arrived just after midnight, shed her clothes, drank a cup or two of wine and tried to encourage Elsa to touch her. And Elsa shied away every time, as though she was afraid the contact would harm her in some way, or that she would harm the young prostitute. They would make awkward small talk, or sit in silence at opposite ends of the room, until the hour was up. Meena would put her clothes back on and leave, no more dishevelled than the state she had arrived in.

She had gotten something out of it, though. Thanks to Meena's lack of inhibitions, Elsa was now very familiar with the female form, and all of its little dips and folds and valleys. She'd never seen so much even in biology log books. There was also Meena's habit of touching herself out of boredom, so that now Elsa knew how to bring pleasure to both herself and someone else.

"Does it concern you?" Elsa asked.

Meena sat up suddenly, sat on the bed with her legs crossed and looked across at the mirror. She began piling up her hair on top of her head and frowning at her reflection.

"A little, your highness. How freely might I speak?"

"You may speak as freely as you wish."

Reaching into the pocket of the dress she had discarded on the floor, Meena retrieved a long ribbon. She deftly tied it around her hair, securing it in place. Elsa's eyes tracked the gentle rocking of her breasts as she did so.

"You're not the first shy client I've ever had," Meena shrugged. "But it is odd that you haven't shown any interest in touching me. Does my body not please you?"

"That's not it, you are very beautiful," Elsa told her truthfully.

"Thank you for sparing my vanity," Meena smiled.

The tousled updo was far more appealing to Elsa's eyes than her oddly uniform curls. She felt a fleeting twinge of longing.

"What I think," Meena began with a deep breath, "is that you desire someone else. And only that someone else."

Elsa gulped before she could stop herself, and Meena's sharp eyes caught it.

"Spot on," she laughed gently. "I did wonder why I was asked to curl my hair. It's not the first time I've been asked to stand in for someone."

"Really?" Elsa asked, and then inwardly cursed herself. She was revealing far too much to this girl.

"There are lots of people out there who want someone they can't have," Meena said breezily. "Sometimes they pay quite a lot of money to hire an excellent substitute. I once had a client who brought me his wife's dress to wear while we coupled. She was only out of the country for a month."

"So this is normal for you?"

"Quite," Meena said as she turned back to look at Elsa. "The only instruction I was given was to curl my hair. I'm sure there's more to your muse than that. She must be very beautiful."

Merida's form came unbidden to Elsa's mind, staring serenely out at the horizon from her perch in the tower.

"Yes," Elsa murmured. "She is."

"And refined? A perfect lady," Meena offered.

Elsa laughed a little to herself, as she remembered Merida sprawled out in the hallway after she crashed the bike into the wall.

"No, not at all."

"Ah, a diamond in the rough perhaps? That would make sense," Meena shrugged. "There are refined ladies everywhere, I imagine it would take someone quite extraordinary to capture your attention."

She removed the ribbon from her hair and shook it out. The uniform curls had lost their structure and sprayed out over Meena's head in a haphazard mess. For a sharp moment, there was a resemblance and it hit Elsa hard, made her pulse jump.

Meena noticed, and smiled. Her hands went to her hair again and she disrupted the curls some more.

"Better?" she asked.

"Better," Elsa agreed.

…..

Summer blew in from the east, damp and humid from the remaining moisture in the air, and Elsa realized with a start that Merida had been given sanctuary in Arendelle for a full year. Anna wanted to celebrate, but was discouraged by both Elsa and Merida, neither of whom wanted a reminder of what had driven Merida to Arendelle in the first place.

Elsa began the summer on a bad note. Hiring a prostitute had not solved her problem, indeed if anything it had made her feel more hopeless than ever. Days were filled with trade papers and writs from nobles and endless, endless paperwork. Nights were filled with feverish dreams of bare female flesh that sucked her in and swallowed her whole as she sank her hands into it.

Miserably, she raked through her memories for something good, something happy to sustain her, but it did nothing. She'd been an unhappy, lonely child as she was an unhappy, lonely adult.

Anna tried her best to bring Elsa out of her malaise, but only succeeded in making her feel worse for bringing distress to her sister. In the end she had to quite pointedly, and more harshly than she meant to, tell Anna to leave her be. Merida noticed too, but unlike Anna she recognized that Elsa needed to be left in peace to work things out herself, and Elsa was grateful for it.

One night, well past midnight as the castle slept, Elsa paced from room to room, unable and unwilling to sleep. This happened to her often in summer; the heat somewhat disrupting her internal chemistry in some fashion. She found herself idly strolling around the table in the small dining chamber where Anna, Kristoff and Merida had eaten supper without her.

A small glimmer, caught in a shaft of moonlight, grabbed her attention. It was a single strand of hair. Merida's hair. That in itself wasn't unusual. Merida's hair was so thick she left traces of herself anywhere she spent a lot of time. She could easily lose as much hair as Elsa possessed on her entire head and not even notice. It wasn't so strange. And yet….

Merida's childhood had been a happy one, as far as Elsa had heard. What harm to live someone else's happiness, for just a moment? She'd never know.

Before she could even think it through properly, she'd made her way to the memory book's chamber and was dropping the hair into an open page.

One happy memory, she whispered to herself in her mind. One happy memory, that's all I want.

Hr surroundings dissolved and reformed, placing her in a large chamber full of wooden furniture and tapestries of elaborate knotwork. Every surface was covered with scrolls, boxes and odd instruments that looked scientific. Elsa was so caught up looking at the instruments that she barely noticed the man in the corner until he moved.

She blinked, unsure if she was seeing him correctly. The man was clearly an eastern traveller, from Myohen or perhaps even Dionhae. He was dressed in painted silk, his long straight black hair and beard tied in complicated knots. He was peering into a glass instrument, tapping out some sort of pattern on a scroll full of neat eastern-language characters. Elsa wondered if she'd somehow gotten the hair she'd found confused for someone else's, until the door of the chamber opened and Merida stumbled in.

Elsa laughed, for this younger, much smaller Merida was struggling to carry a book that was easily half her size. Her tousled head just peeked out over the book's bindings, but she made it as far as halfway across the room before she toppled over and the man at the window took notice.

"Princess," he addressed her half-admonishingly, taking the book and helping her up. "I did not hear you come in."

"I need you to read me this book," she chirruped back.

"Can not your mother read books for you? I have many studies…" the man said in thickly-accented, rather broken Gaelic.

"She's busy with the babies. So you have to do it," Merida told him imperiously, followed by a sheepish smile. "Please?"

"Well, you return my book to me, so I suppose is good trade," the man shrugged, inviting her to sit with him on a low bench. Elsa stepped over to look at the book over their shoulders.

It was indeed an eastern book, full of the strange letters that had plagued Elsa's studies at fifteen. Here and there she recognised the characters for house and wind and fire. But the words were merely a dull companion to the book's real content; page upon page of bright, stunning imagery. The man leafed through the pages until Merida stopped him at one particular picture.

"That one! I want you to read that one!" she begged him, hopping in her seat with excitement.

"Is very good story, but very sad," the man told her. "Make many little girls cry. I think if I make princess cry king put me in prison, yes?"

"I won't cry," Merida huffed, folding her stubby little arms.

"Very good. I will remember this when I am in prison, so cold, how brave princess is. It will warm my heart."

He chuckled to show he wasn't serious, and Merida laughed with him. Elsa smiled to see their warmth.

"In beginning, there is men on earth and men on moon," the eastern man began, tracing the letters with his finger. "Moon is cold and dark, and there is no water there. When the moon is fat, the men of the moon fly to earth to wash their bodies. They have wings, very big and very bright, made of fire. They must take wings off to wash. Then they fly home."

The illustration showed a flock of these winged people, just tiny dots of light, floating from the moon to the earth. Merida pressed her face close to the page to see them up close, until the man turned to the next page.

"The moon has many beautiful maidens, but Lua was most beautiful of all. Her mother bathed for a year and a day in light of moon while she was growing inside her. Her wings were so bright they rivalled the stars."

Lua. The name of Merida's falcon.

"Lua plucked her wings from her back and left them on the riverbank as she washed. There was a king with a hungry eye, he watched the moon maidens wash and he wanted one for his bride. He took Lua's wings from riverbank, for hers were biggest and brightest and best."

Though his Gaelic was awkward in places and shot through with the odd intonations of his own native tongue, he was a masterful storyteller. Merida (and Elsa behind her) stared at the book, transfixed.

"Lua tried to find her wings as her sisters flew away from her. They could not stay to help her, for if they did their wings would burn away. Lua cried an ocean as they all left her."

The picture showed a woman, naked and white, crouched over on a riverbank weeping, trying to cover herself with her hair. A lump formed in Elsa's throat despite herself; the artist had conveyed the despair so keenly that it felt real.

"The king made himself known, he told her he heard her cries and took pity on her. He would make her his wife and protect her for all her days."

"He's a liar," Merida said, scowling comically at the book. "She shouldn't marry him."

"But she did, because she was alone and frightened and he was very kind to her."

Merida huffed and kicked the bench with childish disgruntlement.

"She was happy," the man continued, trying to placate her. "She gave the king four children, two boys and two girls. But when the moon was fat, she would weep for she missed her home. One day, the children played in an empty chamber and they knocked a….what is this thing?"

The man stopped to point out a detail in one of the pictures.

"A trunk?" Merida offered.

"Yes, a trunk, yes," he nodded. "Inside the trunk was the moon maiden's wings. Her daughters brought the wings to her, to say Look, mother, how beautiful these wings are, what wonderful bird did they belong to? And Lua knew she had been tricked. She put her children to bed, kissed them goodbye, and she put her wings back on to fly to the moon, to her home."

The picture on the next page was breathtaking; Lua in full flight across the night sky, her brilliant wings casting light all around them.

"But Lua missed her beloved children, and she could no longer return to earth, for if she did her wings would burn away. So once a year, after six fat moons, she flies over earth looking for her children. And so it has been for a thousand years."

"Six fat moons, that's tomorrow," Merida declared.

"Yes, it is."

"I heard you talking about it."

"Ah, so that's why you took my book?"

"Yeah," Merida didn't even bother denying it. "When is she going to fly?"

"Day after tomorrow," the man told her. "But will be very late. You will be in bed."

"I won't," Merida huffed, hopping down from the bench. "I'll stay up. I want to see her."

"You'll have to go to tallest point in castle. She will fly very far away from here."

"I'll go on the roof of the tower."

"You will be careful, yes?"

"Yes. I never fall."

As soon as the words were said, the room dissolved away and Elsa found herself in a forest, lit only by the beams of the almost full moon. Merida was ahead of her, running over paths only she was able to see, unmindful of brambles and thorns and rocks in her way. Elsa's line of vision followed her; she was half-wearing a woollen dress over a cotton nightgown and only one shoe.

Evidently she had fallen asleep, and unwilling to let the opportunity pass to see Lua herself, she was tracking her down.

She stopped at a tree, sized it up for a moment and clambered up with astonishing speed. Her knees were a scraped mess, her hands no better, there were thorns and leaves and other detritus caught in her hair, but it didn't matter to her at all, judging from the look on her face when she reached the top branch of the tree to find her target. She lit up, mouth gaping and eyes huge.

Elsa turned to see what Merida was seeing, and her own mouth dropped open.

It was a comet, of course it was.

But it was so close, so brilliant. Close enough to see, if you were looking, the shape of a woman outlined in the tendrils of pale fire, her trailing hair and her gently swaying limbs, her expression serene. Her wings reached to the sky and gracefully dipped towards the earth.

"Over here! I'm over here!"

Elsa looked back and, alarmingly, saw Merida's tiny frame balanced on the very tip of the tallest branch, half-jumping and waving furiously at the comet. But she couldn't help laughing at the sight of the little girl trying to get the attention of a celestial body.

It may have been a trick of the light, or some form of optical illusion, but it seemed like Lua turned slightly and opened her eyes. Elsa could even discern a smile on the pale face. Merida noticed it too, she abruptly stopped jumping and waving and settled for standing in a pleased daze.

"Wow," Elsa heard her murmur, before the tree branch cracked and Merida fell out of the tree. The vision fell with her, leaving the echo of a surprised yelp. Elsa was suddenly back in the chamber, alone, looking at the empty pages of the book. She left the chamber hurriedly, and without thinking made her way to the tower where Merida spent most of her time.

Lua was there, in her aviary. She woke as Elsa approached and shrieked a greeting to her, looking her over for food. Elsa reached in and stroked her feathers absently, thinking back on her namesake with a light heart. It was a borrowed happiness, but a happiness nonetheless.

…..

Her lightened mood persisted through the week, so that even Meena remarked upon it on their next meeting.

"It makes a nice change," she shrugged as she kicked her dress away. "I do prefer clients to come to me with glad hearts. But I am curious."

"I'm sure you are," Elsa replied blithely, sitting across from the bed and pouring wine into two cups.

Meena took one of the cups and lay on her front on the bed, idly caressing her calf with her foot.

"Could it be that your lady friend is behind your bright disposition? If it was so, I would be very happy for you."

"Yes, in a manner of speaking. Maybe not the way you imagine."

Meena laughed and ruffled her hair in a way that made Elsa's stomach do little jumps.

"Fine, keep your secrets. You could tell me, you know. Whores are very good at keeping secrets. But I can't make you tell me, and I won't."

Elsa could not have said what she intended to do when she posed her question to Meena. Perhaps she had wanted to subject her to the same probing she was facing. Or perhaps she had simply wanted to get the subject away from Merida. She was starting to realize how acutely she had forced herself into Merida's personal thoughts and it was beginning to make her feel uncomfortable.

"And what of you, Miss Meena?" she began, teasing. "What secrets do you have?"

Meena laughed again, sat up to display her nude body to better effect, knees spread wide, arms arching over her head to push her breasts out.

"I have no secrets," she told Elsa, shimmying flirtatiously. "Where on earth do you think I'd keep them?"

"What of your family? What do they think of your lack of secrets?"

Meena's face didn't drop its smile, but her eyes betrayed a wariness. She dropped to lie on her side again.

"I'd think they would pay it no mind," she shrugged, taking a sip of wine.

"Do they know of your occupation?" Elsa probed further, now intrigued.

Meena laughed again, but it was tinged with bitterness.

"Why should it matter? Nobody is born a whore, and I should think no-one imagines their daughter to be one unless they are a monster."

"Well, why did you become…what you are?" Elsa couldn't bring herself to say the word.

Meena fixed her with a hard look. There was no anger in it, curiously enough, just a raw sort of pain.

"Do you know Erstely? It's a small village. Near Reinemont," Meena asked.

Elsa shook her head. She had never heard of it.

"No matter, it's gone now. I lived there, with my family. My parents were farmers, so were my brothers. My sisters married other farmers. It was all frightfully dull. Then Sangonelle went to war, and the army invaded Erstely on the way for supplies."

Elsa wanted her to stop, she could tell where this was going, but it was far too late.

"They took my father's livestock and his grain. When he objected, they killed him," Meena continued. "My brothers objected to that, so they killed them too. And then my mother objected, and you can guess what happened. Everyone who objected was killed. I was hiding in the butcher shed with my youngest brother, so we survived. But there was nothing left of Erstely, so we had to leave."

She took a gulp of wine, and smiled with satisfaction at Elsa's ashen face.

"We joined the camp followers. Wherever there's an army, there's followers. But my brother was quite a sickly boy, he always got the best of our food to keep him strong, and medicine when we could afford it. I didn't have good food, or medicine. All I had was the clothes I was wearing, and what was under them. Thankfully there's many a good officer that will trade food and medicine for a fresh young body."

"I'm so sorry," Elsa mumbled.

"It wasn't your doing," Meena shrugged. "It got me what I wanted, and they were quite kind to me when they could have been cruel. I can't begrudge them. By the time we reached Arendelle my virtue was well and truly gone, but I decided to carry on as I had. I don't like scrubbing floors, and farm work bores me, and I quite like coupling. Why not be a whore?"

"You sold your virtue to save your brother, that's very noble," said Elsa, hoping to salvage the conversation somehow.

"My brother never made it to Arendelle," Meena laughed without humour. "He died not even a week after we left Erstely. I sold my virtue for nothing."

Elsa clutched the arms of her chair, wanting to cry and scream at the same time, and she couldn't have said why.

"Do you feel sorry for me, your highness?" Meena asked, lacing her question with a touch of cruelty. "I wouldn't. There's not a person in Arendelle who could have looked at me when I arrived here and declared that I wasn't a virgin. I could have found work. I chose to be a whore. I like being naked with men and women, I like getting pleasure and giving pleasure back. I like the money it brings me, and I like the fine houses I am brought to, and I especially like the gifts they give me."

She rose to her feet again to stand directly in front of Elsa. She plunged her fingers into her hair and ruffled it fiercely, a look of defiant pride on her face. She smiled with satisfaction as Elsa blushed and looked away, because the resemblance to Merida was never clearer than at that moment.

"Don't waste your pity on me," she growled low. "Feel sorry for yourself."