A/N: This is the finale to If the Cold Can't Stop Her. If this is the first chapter you are opening today, there was one posted before it. Please go back to Chapter 29 and then continue on.

If The Cold Can't Stop Her

By: SheAlwaysDies

*this story has content related to self harm and abuse*

The cold was offering up a memory. It wasn't using words it was just distorting the black behind Anna's eyes. Her lids were fluttering and she could feel them twitch but she could not command them to open. The cold was telling her that the only way it would let her wake up was if she accepted the little morsel of her forgotten past. It teased her with a flash of her sister's blue eyes and had already learned she was more likely to accept if it dangled some miserable memory at her. So those azure eyes were illuminated by the swell of tears in both corners. Anna, however, did not want to wake up. She turned her body and shoved her face deeper into her pillow.

The cold tried to lure her using whispers with no words. It sounded so much like Elsa and it felt so much like Elsa but it also very much wasn't. Every time Anna had an uneven breath she was reminded of the very tangible proof in the middle of the castle's foyer. Elsa was very much not with her. There was a line up all the way to the outskirts of town waiting to pay respects to the Ice King and Queen that told Anna she was very much alone.

This cold mocked her but it also caressed her. Either way it made Anna feel pitiful. More often than not she was the one letting the cold treat her however it wanted. As much as it wasn't Elsa, it was in a way and Anna was desperate. It was actually capable of making her feel good. This power had every intention of drawing pleasure. She didn't have to fall into it's trap many times to start to get more familiar with it.

Anna had decided it was one entity broken into three pieces. Whether it was a correct assumption or not, it mattered little to the Princess. She just wanted to make sense of this new type of accompanied emptiness. One of the fragments was firmly locked inside of Anna. It did all the talking and was the harshest of them all. It was what taunted her in her sleep. The other resembled a sprite and if it ever took physical form it would be fingers and palms or maybe a wagging tail. It was the only one of three that was free to come and go as it pleased and was the most familiar to Anna.

This fragment was Elsa's signature cold, the one that had been at Elsa's side throughout her life. It was the cold that Anna had used to archive her memories, that she had recollections of it throughout her life. It was the closest thing Anna had to her sister now. Before Elsa had locked herself away, Anna would have said that that cold was specifically Elsa. She knew now that it was actually of Elsa. It was once an extension of her presence and of her gaze but it was no longer tethered to the Queen. It could go as far as it wanted but it never did. It was dutifully at Anna's side even when she swatted at it or cursed it. It didn't matter that it couldn't be seen, Anna always sensed it.

The redhead often succumbed to it. She let it salve her, and caress her. It was allowed to enter her, but it was never capable of filling her. Instead it sort of coated her insides, covering up the emptiness but never occupying it. Anna wanted it to go away because she didn't want Elsa half way, she wanted all of her and this sprite was a reminder that was not an option. After it triggered her release it would squirm out of her, and find a crook in Anna's body where she might not push it away. It was particularly fond of the spot behind her knee caps. For a few minutes Anna would just feel like a void. It was fleeting though, just like the ecstasy elicited and was quickly replaced with the darkness she was settling into.

The third remnant was the most frigid of them all. Anna hadn't stepped foot out of Elsa's bedroom often because she knew it was waiting outside of her door. Anna didn't know how anyone survived within the castle walls with it's ever present icy algor. It seemed this shiver was reserved solely for the Princess. If any of the three were her big sister, the one at her door was most linked to the Queen. It steamed from the monument Elsa had crafted of herself, right from her center. It did nothing to Anna but hang in the air. That's why she was so terrified of it. It was a petrified cold. Anna hated thinking of Elsa in that state.

Anna understood the difference between her own frozen heart, and the one Elsa now wore under easily three feet of ice. Elsa had vaguely explained it to her in the garden when talking about their little brother's rose bush. It was the difference between the Great Thaw and the protective block of ice. Anna had been frozen from the inside out. True love was the abatement to any curse when it came to matters of the heart. What Elsa had done was much more purposeful. She'd placed a shield over herself, meant to preserve her for eternity. True love be damned.

Fear had frozen Anna. If she had stayed in that state everlastingly, the Princess knew she would have stayed in a state of fear until the end of time. Love had frozen Elsa. It was the only comforting thing about this entire situation. The whole Kingdom was alive with the buzz of such a tragic love story between man and wife. The redhead knew it was Elsa's intention. Anna understood the rationale but it made it that much harder to want to wake up.

It wasn't the cold that was stopping her from leaving Elsa's suites. It was a grand deterrent but Anna had absolutely no interest in joining the outside world. Her destiny was not supposed to be in Arendelle right now. She had been saying her goodbyes to the ballroom when Kristoff was suddenly pulling her aside.

She'd been glad to see him. Anna wasn't sure how many farewells she would have been making but she knew she owed one to Kristoff. But he hadn't let her talk. She was rambling because in all the commotion she had not given herself a moment to think about what she would say to Kristoff when parting. She just knew that he deserved it sooner rather than later.

"Anna, enough!" He'd blurted out. He was pulling her towards the gardens. She shut up because she knew she hadn't strung enough words together to even begin to say what she wanted, but he was already reeling. Something was certainly amiss. He ran a lap around the garden to make sure it was vacant before coming back to where the Princess was still standing in shock.

"Elsa just came to see me. She was really upset. I think we need to find her, something's going down." The ice harvester said. Anna laughed at him, not because it was stupid, but because his care was so endearing.

"I'm sorry," she said through her fingers. She was still riding a high from her dance with her sister. "I was just with Elsa and trust me she's fine. She's more than fine. She's the best she's ever been and that's the best segue I can come up with for something I really need to talk to you about."

Her fingers went from guarding her mouth from too big a laughter to holding back her bile. As Kristoff pulled out a folded up piece of paper and handed it to her, something cold jumped inside her and started panging on her eardrums.

"I should have given this to you earlier." Kristoff was saying. The cold was in her sinuses now, and it actually started moving everything in outwards.

"I had the journal all along, I kept this and Tarik has one too. I've made a huge mistake." Kristoff was admitting this. Anna could hear him, she could catalogue his words, she even accepted the piece of paper. But the cold had wrapped itself into her heart and it was saying something much more valuable than Kristoff's confession. She looked through the entrance back in towards the castle. There was no trace of the cold visually but she could also see the path, from which it had come, with all her other senses.

The fact that the ice burnt her hands felt like such a betrayal. Would Elsa not even give her a chance to come to this monument and sit at her feet? Did she have to be so blatant when telling her she had to move on, that there was no hope for a reunion? Did it have to be so cold that it drove Anna to have a distaste for a sensation that used to breath life into her? The stinging cold was certainly a message. It was probably Elsa's best effort to keep Anna from staring at the way she was being embraced by Tarik. The burn of the cold was warding Anna away from memorizing the way he got to be with Elsa for now and into all of history. It was keeping her from spending her life at this monument like she had wasted herself on the other side of a closed door.

Knocks on the door, lock boxes, and trays of food became Anna's everyday quickly. The rule still stood that absolutely no one was allowed to cross the threshold into Elsa's room. It was a respected enough rule that when Anna went to lock the door the first night, she discovered that it was broken. The Godsdamned door never locked. That night was the first time the cold in her head spoke to her. It offered to tell her what happened to the door and Anna was shocked that it had memories to give that weren't hers. Anna knew the warning Bulda had given her. The Princess toyed with the white in her hair for only half a second before accepting. It was just too curious to know she could be privy to life outside her consciousness.

The images and feelings she received were both terrifying and unsatisfactory. It was a storm inside of Elsa's bedroom. Elsa was so little it hurt. But at the same time, Anna didn't get to see Elsa much when she was prepubescent, and to see her diminutive body was a gorgeous gift. However, it was impossible to separate the image of young Elsa with the torment she was in. Her small body was wrapped around itself. She was in the position she took in their mother's womb with her hands over her head and her eyes squeezed shut.

Anna's mother and father were present, and they were also bracing themselves against the blowing snow. Anna could barely take in the sight of them after all the years they had spent apart. But she had widened the white in her hair for this vision so she stayed with it. The wind was so strong they could barely take a step forward. They weren't trying to get to Elsa they were trying to get to the door. The couple had to keep their bodies low to cut through the storm and their arms over their heads to protect themselves from the hail. The large pieces of ice that bombarded Elsa just dissipated when they came into contact with her. When the King reached the white door with blue hand painted flowers, he struggled with the knob. Anna's mother pushed past him and struck at it with a piece of hail the size of her own fist. They made it out unscathed but left their eldest daughter behind the closed door, alone in a storm.

The cold asked Anna if she wanted to know more. She almost said yes, because as horrid as it was, it made the Princess feel like Elsa had even more reason to want to be erased from this world. It soothed Anna's resentment. However, if Anna was going to accept these apparitions she knew she had to take them more sparingly.

The Princess had only attended one council meeting. It was to appoint Tarik's replacement. This was the only time she would have the majority say about anything concerning Arendelle. She was in the same position her sister had been in when their parents had passed away. She had forty nine percent voting power and in less than three years, on her twenty first birthday, she would gain her title of Queen and her measly one percent. Council was down a man, so when Anna nominated Kristoff, they, ever begrudgingly, did not have the numbers to refuse her.

It was quite the punishment for the old ice harvester. Life as a politician was likely a worse infliction compared to his wrongdoing. Yes, Anna was mad at him but she was mad at the world at this point. Kristoff had the smallest role in everything that had happened since Elsa's coronation yet his mistakes did not go forgiven by her. The more information she found about what had happened the fuller the picture she saw. To her, it felt like even the tiniest alteration could have spared Elsa. That was why she was struggling so much with Kristoff's trespass.

The Princess wasn't any step closer to forgiving herself for all her missteps, and she knew she would eventually be able to open to healing the wounds between the pair. But only days in, it was still too raw. That journal. It had taken down the strongest of loves. It was exactly why Anna couldn't bring herself to open the two folds in the piece of paper Kristoff had given her that day. She carried it around much like he did. When she was out of her bedroom it helped ward off the cold if she reached for it and rubbed it in between her fingers. She'd worn it down so much the thread of the paper sort of resembled the softness of a kerchief now. Kristoff encouraged her to read it several times. Anna hoped that all the rubbing would soon wear off the ink on the page, so when she eventually did cave, it would have already vanished. She'd tucked Elsa's marble pick into it's center and in her pocket they were a reminder of both love and pain.

The cold would not stop offering Anna those damaged blue eyes. It was ever insistent and Anna stood her ground on that memory specifically. Something about it was damning. The colour of Elsa's eyes didn't look just right. The frequency in which the cold tried to manipulate her into accepting the vision felt off putting. It was holding her hostage in her sister's bed now, and Anna knew that even though she did not want to face the day it had to be pressing this memory on her for a particular reason. It felt sinister. As if the cold would win if she looked into what it was offering her but it would also benefit from her staying in bed.

Anna groaned as she put her palms on either side of her pillow. She screamed into the fabric before pushing her weight into her hands and bringing herself to kneel on the mattress. She sat on her feet as she blinked her eyes rapidly but at some point the lids just got too heavy and her head would bob forward. She had to bring her hands to her cheeks in order to tilt her head towards the balcony. She thought that if she could stare into the daylight the sun might feed her some life.

She blinked. She blinked. She blinked. Then she saw them. She blinked. Two cabbage butterflies. They were fluttering around each other in an intricate dance. Anna had to blink again because she thought she might have fallen asleep but there they were still there. The sleep in her eyes was gone as she threw her legs over the bed and tried to near them slowly. The pair didn't seem to mind that she approached as she walked into the midday breeze. The butterflies were bouncing along the balcony and eventually started to fly back up towards the rooftop garden. Anna followed.

When she was on the summit, she was immediately drawn to her mother's rose bush. It was no longer a mystical being. It was just a rather precious rose bush planted dead in the center of desolate soil and remnants of beauty. It was just a rose bush in need of some water. Anna's throat felt as dry as it's roots. Several of the pearl petals had been shed. It wasn't an indication of ill health. Just that they needed to be cut. They would live longer in a vase with water than on the thorny stems. It was fortunate that in the days since Tarik's demise and Elsa's freeze, the days had been overcast. The plant was thirsty. What the Princess had at her disposal would have to do for now. The garden was literally littered with old and rusty instruments. A forgotten bucket had collected rain water, killed a few bugs, and helped breed mosquitoes. Anna picked it up and poured the murky water at the base of the bush. The pruning shears weren't too worn out. They were dull though, and Anna had to really hack at one of the roses to get it to come loose. She found herself smiling as she twirled it in her fingers.

Anna would need fresh supplies if she was going to put this creature into her care, she thought. And then it clicked. This rose bush was very much alive. It's leafs were taking in air. It was capable of churning the atmosphere, of basking in the sun. It was even capable of wilting. Elsa had done it. She had found the force, the power, angle and solution to thaw the rose bush. The Queen had not only found the strength but she had inherited it to her sister, the next in line to the throne.

Elsa had been pretty determined when she stated she would thaw the plant only if the circumstance was favourable to its survival. Sure, if Anna told Olaf or Kristoff that she had found the rosebush free of ice, they would say it had been Elsa's way of telling Anna she was fit to rule, and maybe that was her sister's intention. Yet, Anna read something more profound to it. It shook her to her core. The rosebush that had been put under a spell of protection could now feel the heat of the sun again.

The perfume of the petals floated into Anna's senses. The cold sprite was bouncing on the leaves of it's stems and as it rattled the rose in her hand the smell grew more powerful. The Princess ran the flower along her cheek because the tones of it's petal's were so much like Elsa's skin. The thought that blood could, somehow, flow through Elsa again had her entire body shaking. Anna thought that her hope was just bloating but it was actually sort of being reborn.

Anna gently placed the rose on the stone bench. She pulled out the page of her sister's journal and before opening it laid the marble pick next to the thorny flower. She closed her eyes and tried to get to even breaths, to silence her anticipation before she would let herself read what was written. The cold in her mind was suddenly offering the sound of a quill hesitantly penning the words. Anna relented and folded the page back up. She placed it on the bench and let her mind wander to the bedroom below her, where most of the memories she received of Elsa were based.

The blonde's bangs were long. They covered the view of the blue eyes Anna indulged her focus on when shown images of her sister. Her face was mature, but not quite the face that Anna had once made love to. It was fuller, rounder, even though her cheeks were sort of hollow, as if perhaps she hadn't been eating.

Elsa was tapping the pen on her lips, nervously. Anna could tell she had already decided what she was going to write and was willing herself to put it down on page. Her face contorted and she looked like she might break into a wailing cry, but instead, with a surge of energy, pushed the pen down and started writing. Her face never changed it's expression, her eyes barely opened. Still the words came out in straight ordered lines.

Anna watched as letters turned into words and words turned into a poem.

Maybe she can brave the cold,

maybe, even survive it.

If it raptures her, devours in its bite

she doesn't need a heart,

Mine is here, hers to take.

Could she be the answer, in place of cause,

if the cold can't stop her?

Anna started to cry as she saw the teenage Elsa drop her pen and slam the journal shut without so much as looking at the words. She pushed herself away from the book, and that action pushed the specter out of Anna's grasp as well.

The cold, Anna thought. Anna had always loved the cold. She had recently tolerated falling into her creek in the middle of a storm, in her coronation gown even, and was still able to command her body through feet of snow. The third fragment of cold was waiting for Anna outside her bedroom. It was unbearable but so was the loss of her sister. So why was it crippling her now?

Elsa hadn't taken anything with her when she had gone but it felt like she had left a few choice things behind for Anna. Aside from the obvious, like the crown, the rosebush and the less glaring, the marble pick and her love letter, even the white in Anna's red hair, Elsa had left her trust in Anna. Elsa had left the cold behind. It was fractured, broken into vastly different pieces but Anna had missed one vital part about the three fragments. They were all strikingly powerful. Their greatest similarity was their vested interest in Anna.

The Princess wasn't sure if she was meant to bring the three together again or if she could make each one their own whole unit, but she knew she had to try to piece them together somehow. Anna had all the love she needed to trigger the thaw. Perchance she could manipulate the colds. Even if Anna could become half as powerful as Elsa, she could one day be the Snow Queen. She could conjure that power to melt down the ice that encapsulated the Ice Queen.

Her path was decided. The Princess let in the cold that had been knocking at the door. It reached her fervently with a paralyzing chill. She stretched her arm out and opened the palm of her hand. The sprite swirled around her fingers before making it's bed in the cracks of her skin. Lastly, Anna asked the cold deeply embedded in her head to tell her the story about what was behind her sister's sad blue eyes.

The End.

So it is. Thank you for taking part in this. I really needed this adventure. I hope to continue writing for you. I appreciate you all in every level which you participated. Just following along means the world and interacting with you through reviews was pretty awesome too. Feel free to review or PM me if you want a response. Your farewells are below.

Goodbye for now.

Anon (review on chapter 17): You reviewed one of the heavier chapters with Anna and Kristoff. Hi, if you made it to the end. Our family motto here is consent is an enthusiastic YES. Thank you for your kind critique. I've been writing a long time but have never really shared my work, so things like that are not only morale boosters but make me feel like I've been actually doing something worthwhile the last month and a half.

Guest (review chapter 28) or Happy with Kristoff POV: I really hope the wait was worth it. Fingers Crossed!

Alucards-woman: Thanks for the encouragement earlier on. I really appreciate it and I enjoy that you have been around and up to date. You've made my first time doing this a really positive experience. I hope to see you on the next one.

MortisVenom, the MortisVenom: MIDNA! I've never felt so guilty as I did for having distrusted her the entire game! But yes, clap your hands for that ending. I know I didn't reach that caliber cause, come on, endings are the hardest part and that was just a really incredible game. I'm super glad you came along for the ride because you've been a voice in my ear this entire time. And if I am writing when I get your review in I stop mid sentence to do my response (I can blame you for losing a couple trains of thought but I can also be thankful to you for the other ways I've steered things) I really liked your advice on the last review but more than that I agree with the philosophy of balance, (thxgreyjedi). Sorry it's not the Happy Ending you wanted but maybe it's a least a Hopeful Ending because those are my favourite kind. xx

Signing off now,

shealways