Anna's eyes snapped open.
She was lying in her bed, the room empty, covers drawn up close to her neck. Her left leg ached with only the echo of a throb.
Perhaps it'd only been a bad dream. Anna briefly shut her eyes and prayed that it'd only been one bad, totally messed-up dream—that every terrible thing since her golden apple tree nightmare had just been extension of it. A product of her overactive imagination.
No immediate answer came.
Anna slowly pushed her blankets away, expecting a mess of bandages and blood, but all that greeted her was her own, unstained powder-blue nightdress. She pulled it up and revealed nothing more than a bare, unmarked leg. Anna ran her hands down its length, confirming that it was all still there in one piece, and then swung both her legs over the side of her bed. There was a bit of wobblyness on her left side, a seeping soreness in the muscles like she'd gotten sometimes the morning after a long run, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Ordinary.
She shoved that disconcerting feeling into the back of her head as she padded her way across the cold, palace floors. Her desk was bare; she couldn't remember if she'd left the apple there or not.
Anna didn't know exactly what she was expecting, but as she reached the nearest window and pulled aside the curtain, she gasped all the same.
Her sister's ice had completely vanished from the harbor, replaced by an armada of war ships. War ships that Arendelle had spent the last several months fighting to keep out.
All of it had been real.
All of it had been real and she was trapped here and she—
There was a creak from her bedroom door.
Anna froze. Her fingers gripped the window sill, and now—removed from the threat of crossbows and the pain and the pounding adrenaline of it all—she was scared.
"You're awake," Hans said.
That was it. No apologies, no gloating, no demands, no metaphorical twirl of the mustache… just one obvious statement of physical observation.
Anna kept quiet, her eyes locked on the ships outside, knowing that he was waiting for her response. He wanted her to say something, he wanted something he could twist to use against her.
"You told your sister I was immortal," he continued. "You barely paused to stare at what she'd done to me, her ice piercing straight through my chest. You just grabbed her hand and ran." He paused, and the silence draped over her bedroom like suffocating, tooth-rotting honey. "Which means you remember."
There was a phantom crack in her knee as she remembered falling against the cave floor, as she remembered the way he'd leant forward, holding out the glittering apple…
Anna swallowed, forcing the memories back. She kept her gaze straight as she focused on a tiny point, distant on the horizon. "You healed my leg?" she asked.
He didn't immediately respond.
"I didn't want you fainting on me again," was his eventual explanation.
Anna took a deep breath. "So you can wipe memories, heal wounds, melt my sister's ice… oh, and you can't die," she said. "Any other important powers I'm missing?"
"If this is your grand strategy to discover any secret weaknesses, it's an extremely pathetic one," Hans drawled. "I expected better from you."
"Oh, so you have expectations now?" Anna said before she could stop herself. "That's new. And here I thought I was useless at everything in your eyes."
Hans sighed. "Or play the self-pity game. That works too."
Anna bit down on her lower lip, trying not to let her temper snap. She failed.
She spun around, keeping her fists balled tight at her sides.
Hans was standing in her doorframe, wearing a jacket of deep, velvet blue trimmed with gold. A matching crown rested atop his perfectly trimmed hair. He leaned casually against the painted wood, as if invisibly barricaded from her room proper like some kind of ginger vampire. Before her heart could put any hope into that theory, he took a step forward and outstretched his arms.
"I never wanted any of this to happen," he said with just a tinge of sorrow.
Fake sorrow.
Anna narrowed her eyes. "Really."
"Believe it or not, I prefer my transfers of power to be as bloodless as possible. It's what's best for the realm."
The wisp of a metallic shing echoed in her memory and Anna was back on the fjord, two days after her sister's coronation, watching his sword descend in a terrible arc—
"What's best for the realm…" Anna repeated. "So conjuring that blizzard and killing thousands of people is your definition of bloodless?"
Hans took a deep breath. "So you remember that too."
Anna crossed her arms, waiting for him to give her an actual response.
"They were…" Hans' lips twisted, apparently struggling for right words. "…an unfortunate sacrifice."
Anna let out a scoff of disbelief.
Horror crashed over with rage until she was drowning in it. God-like powers or not, Anna couldn't stand another minute in his presence. Despite verging back into "stupid decision" territory, she crossed her room, trying to storm out the door. Hans blocked her.
Obviously.
"Let me go," she demanded.
"I can't do that."
"Why not?" she asked, despite already knowing the answer. "You let the Prince Frederick of Wallonia do whatever he wanted after you conquered his kingdom."
"Prince Frederick," he said, shifting his body as she tried to dart around him, "didn't have a vengeful, fugitive sister with magic powers out only God knows where."
Anna paused and glanced up, meeting his eyes. He couldn't have just admitted…
"You mean she—?"
"Escaped? Yes. Of course…" Hans added, as her face flickered in doubt, "I could be lying. I could be filling your heart with false hope while she rots in some dungeon." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter what I say, you'll never believe me."
Anna tried studying his face for any semblance or hint of truth, but it was infuriatingly blank. Then, the corners of his lips twitched up into a smirk, and suddenly it was taking all she had to keep herself from slamming her fist into his perfect nose. With his new god-like powers, he'd shrug the injury off, leaving her hand as the only thing in pain.
Sometimes, despite the blow to her pride, it was better to retreat.
At least for now.
Anna moved back into the center of her room, grabbed the chair by her desk, spun it around to face him, and plopped down.
"So," she said, crossing her legs.
Hans leaned back against the wall. "So."
"There never was any stone."
Hans glanced up towards the ceiling like he had to seriously think about her statement. "No," he finally said. "Well, there was a stone. A perfectly ordinary stone that I scraped off the ground while faking the evidence of a sudden earthquake. I did it up a bit, of course—a sparkly bit of child's play considering the full depth of the magic I'd just gained." He took a moment to chuckle. "And you were so obsessed that I didn't touch it that you actually carried the damn thing all the way back down the mountain. About how heavy was it again? Ten pounds? Twenty?"
Anna stayed silent beneath the jabs of his mockery.
"Oh, then everyone else was just obsessed with it too," he continued. "Did you know, when Corona fell to me, the first thing they did was bundle the stone away? As long as it didn't fall into my hands, they believed they still had hope. They believed your sister would have to power to stop me.
"I let them believe. Call it one of my smaller mercies… or tortures. I guess it all depends on your personal brand of philosophy. Of course, even that grew increasingly tedious. I stopped bothering with the illusion about a week ago, curious, I guess for whatever changes it would bring. That and I hoped it'd help finally flush out the remaining rebels."
Anna swallowed, the movement painful against the rest of her stiff body. Her thoughts raced to Rapunzel and Eugene. She wanted to ask Hans about them, wanted to hear that they were still safe, but to ask now would link their names straight to any rebellion, probably just as he hoped…
Oh, who was she kidding? Their names were probably already at the top of any rebellion list he had, regardless of whatever input she gave now.
"Unfortunately, the move was less exciting than I'd hoped," Hans admitted. "I received no messages from my spies, no reports of altered behavior." He smiled again, slow and predatory. "You on the other hand… Did Corona manage to get some kind of warning to you? Did they think that someone had stolen it?"
Anna refused to give Hans the satisfaction of knowing just how much Rapunzel's note had torn at her and her sister. Instead, she thought back to the secret cavern where she and Hans had originally discovered the stone, the cavern of the golden tree. Only there'd hadn't been a tree that first—second?—time, just the stone and the equally-rough pedestal it'd been resting on…
"What happened to the tree?" Anna asked.
Hans snorted. "What? Hoping to send your sister out there? Give her the same gifts it gave me? Well, I already thought about that possible future." He raised a hand in front of his face. As he flexed his fingers, a small flame jumped into life and began to dance between them. Anna flinched, but Hans didn't seem to notice. "And I took the measures I needed to prevent it."
Anna stared at him, frowning in confusion, and then her eyes snapped wide.
Their footprints in the snow… The ash on the bottom of her boots…
"You burnt it?" she breathed, the words coming out at barely a whisper. Her heart clenched at the loss of something that old… that unearthly beautiful.
Hans closed his fist and looked directly at Anna. "I wasn't going to let myself become part of a pantheon."
A biting chill slid up her back and she had to force herself to keep eye contact with him. Anna firmly told herself that if he'd really wanted her dead, he would've done it ages ago. He would've murdered her on the way back from the cave. He wouldn't have healed her leg, instead letting it bleed out and out and out…
She uncrossed her legs, placing both feet firmly on the floor.
"If you've had these powers this whole time, why didn't you just conquer the world outright?" she asked. "We could've sent all of our armies against you at the same time and we still wouldn't have been able to stop you."
Hans sighed. "Oh Anna… as much as I appreciate the compliment, that's where you fail to understand. Like I said, I never wanted any of this to happen." He swept his hand in a wide arc, seemingly at the furnishings of her bedroom, but Anna knew it was directed towards the ships and soldiers and general chaos outside. "Only an idiot wants to be a conquerer, to toss and turn sleepless in the dark, surrounded by nightmares of which lingering loyalists are waiting to stab them in the back."
"Funny," Anna bit out. "I wouldn't have thought the threat of stabbing was such a pressing concern for you anymore."
Hans grinned, and Anna immediately regretted speaking. She was letting herself get pulled back into their old, easily flowing campfire banter—nasty on the surface but cleansed by a somewhat light-hearted current underneath. Hans didn't deserve even a speck of light from her. Not anymore.
At the same time, Anna's only other effective option was silence, and—as always—she didn't know if she was even capable of maintaining that. Especially not while she still wanted answers.
"The point is," Hans said. "I want citizens who love me… Or at least citizens who don't cower at the sight of me like I'm the latest incarnation of the devil."
He paused as if waiting on another snarky response.
"And in that I think I've been successful," he continued as though there hadn't been the slightest gap between the two sentences. "You saw them at the wedding, didn't you? The way all the courtiers practically flocked to my side, desperate to catch my eye. I am… their radiant sun."
"Only because they don't know about the foul, black shadow skulking underneath," Anna blurted out before mentally slapping herself.
Hans waved his hand dismissively. "A minor thing, really. Especially when compared to my other virtues."
"Virtues."
"Sure. I'm rich, I'm handsome, I rule ten separate kingdoms…" He glanced up, counting fingers on one hand. "Or I suppose, eleven, now that Arendelle's been added to mix." He looked at Anna. "You will tell my new subjects to submit peacefully, won't you? Like I said, I hate unnecessary bloodshed."
Anna started, her mind still trapped back on his earlier words, staggered at just how far Hans had been able to claw his way through society. In every kingdom but Arendelle, he'd managed to paint himself as the victim, as a savior. He basked in their saintly perceptions of him like some kind of mountain stream that had the power to wash all the nastiness of his actual soul away.
If that happened, she thought, would there even be anything left?
She tried to remember the number of people that had surrounded him at Frederick's wedding. It'd been a massive crowd, men pressing together as well as women. There'd been old and young, married and unmarried…
Anna took a deep breath. "What did you do to Princess Josephine?" she asked. "The truth."
"Do?" Hans said, scoffing. "I didn't do anything."
"If you honestly expect me to believe for one second that she died of natural causes after everything you just admitted—"
"She did die of natural causes though," he said, and his voice was so full of conviction that, for a moment, Anna almost considered the poss— "Drowning is a natural cause. It's as natural as freezing to death, starvation,"—his head tilted left and right as he listed each cause—"the plague…"
Anna's stomach flipped. She couldn't remember eating any food in the past couples days, but it threatened to come up all the same. She crumpled in her chair, burying her face in her hands.
"We were on the same ship," Hans continued as though nothing was wrong, "caught out at sea in the same storm… It's not my fault she didn't have the abilities in her to survive a full week out there, exposed to the cold and the salt and the wind."
Tears were welling in Anna's eyes, blurring what was left of her vision, and despite screaming at herself to not let herself cry in front of him, she didn't have the power to stop them.
There was something wrong with Hans.
Something fundamentally wrong.
The worst part was that she'd known it was coming and she'd still denied it. Even as she'd raced back to Arendelle with Kristoff and Sven, desperate to warn her sister; even as she'd remembered Hans' confession in the cave about the blizzard, the blizzard he had caused; even knowing the further chaos he'd be able to create now as a… as a… as someone with god-like powers, there'd still been a tiny, stupid—so stupid—part of her that had clung to the naive possibility that at least some of the disasters of the past two years had been plain cruel chance.
He wanted to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
Said the man who'd carelessly slaughtered thousands.
But hey. Apparently that was all okay in his book because people had to actually know about his crimes for them to actually matter, and no one did.
No one but her.
Anna's breath caught. The room was silent.
"What if I refuse?" she asked quietly, not looking up from her hands.
"Refuse what?"
"What if I refuse to play this game of yours?" she lifted her head, painfully conscious of the puffy redness that must've ringed her eyes. "What if I refuse to help Arendelle bend its knee?"
Hans didn't look half as perturbed as she would've hoped. "It'd be regrettable," he admitted. "But nothing I wouldn't be able to work around."
"So, that means what? You'll lock me up in the palace? Toss me in the dungeons?"
"Dungeons?" he said with a small laugh. "Anna, I'm not that heartless. A general palace house-arrest will be more than suitable—well…" A shiver ran up her spine at the way he dragged the syllable out. "Obviously, it wouldn't necessarily be this palace."
Anna stared at him, fighting to keep her breaths steady and even.
"Come on, Anna. You didn't think I'd be stupid as that, did you?" Hans shook his head as he pushed himself off the wall. "You've spent the majority of your life here. You know each room, each and every hidden corridor." His eyes flicked towards the surrounding walls, and he frowned. "You have friends here—helpful, irritating hands begging to scratch their way out of the stonework… No, you'll be coming back to Weideland with me."
"As your hostage," Anna spat out.
"Hostage? Oh, nothing that crude." He held out his arms in a welcoming gesture. "You'd be my esteemed guest."
Anna glared back; it was an appalling cliché line, even for someone like him.
"You see, Anna… you," Hans continued airily, like she was somehow enraptured instead of disgusted by his every word, "are going to be the key that unlocks the glorious united future of our two kingdoms."
He extended one of his hands towards her, palm up, smiling like he actually expected her to take it. Like he expected her to agree to even a single step of his twisted dance after everything he'd just done to her. To her sister. To her kingdom.
To the world.
Anna stood and approached him, keeping her hands clasped tightly together within the folds of her dress to avoid even the smallest chance of them brushing against his own.
"I think I've already given you my answer regarding that," she managed to say calmly. "And since you don't seem to remember, I guess I'll just have to repeat it."
His face betrayed nothing of whatever emotions lurked underneath, assuming he actually had any. His eyes remained clear but hard. Anna leaned in closer and closer until she risked feeling his breath hot against her face.
And paused.
"Over my dead body," she whispered.
They remained like statues in the center of her bedroom, eyes locked with one another, the occasional lip muscle twitching in the silence. Anna waited for Hans to make the next move, more than conscious of the fact that his next words could very well be along the lines of "that could be arranged."
Suddenly he smirked.
Giving her a nod so slight Anna thought might've imagined it, he turned and took his leave. As her bedroom door swung shut behind him, its hollow thud echoed disconcertingly, dropping like a stone against the ripples of dread in her chest.
A/N: Phew! I think that's one of the longest dialogue-only scenes I've ever written, but I think the build-up justified it. From here on out, it's turtles Hans/Anna all the way down. Well, dark!Hans/Anna, but hey. I'm a villain shipper for a reason.
Unfortunately the end of Act Three does mean the end of my regularly scheduled chapters. I will come back with Act Four once I finish the next draft of the original novel I'm writing (tentatively planned for early February?). Until then, I'll be posting small snippets of original notes, timelines, Hans' brother character sheets, etc over at my tumblr.
Thanks to everyone for being such awesome readers!