She hears it slam and finds the door shut as she skids to a halt in front of Elsa's childhood room.
Elsa is fast.
Anna raises a hand to knock and instantly feels like she is 5 years old again, staring up at this same door. She's gotten over it, she tells herself, she knows she has, but it sure doesn't feel like she has. God. She's taller now but it feels just as large and imposing and somehow she cannot bring herself to bring her knuckles down to the wood. It's really that simple, just knock. She's not an idiot.
A gentle hand on her elbow, a soft whisper in her ear, Anna jerks up to meet Gerda's eyes.
"Your Highness," Gerda says, "Her Majesty has never locked her door."
Anna feels the air leave her lungs as if someone physically punched her, leans forward and thump, connects with the door.
The whimpers from inside the room stop abruptly.
"M-Mama?"
The word burns all the way down Anna's spine, crawls into her heart and squeezes it, wrings it out. She does not have the time to think too much. Elsa needs her and Elsa needs her now.
Her hand drifts down to the doorknob and she turns it with trembling fingers. The door swings open smoothly and she takes a step into the room.
"You're not Mama," Elsa's voice comes, "and you are not a-"
Elsa is a tiny figure in the middle of the purple sheets of the four poster, not a single light lit in this room that has not been used for two years but the moonlight sets her blonde hair ablaze as she hugs herself in a too-big outfit with ungloved hands.
Her tiny red-rimmed eyes widen, she scrambles away from Anna and every movement she makes feels like Anna's heart is being frozen all over again and by the gods it hurts.
"No," Elsa whimpers, cowering by the headboard, hands turned in on themselves as the crackle of rime and a dusting of ice forms on her bed, "no, no, no, get away from me, I-"
Anna watches as Elsa's gaze sweeps over the freezing bedspread, as her small bare feet kick in their hurry to take her further away, sees the helplessness claw at her heart. She can't stop it, Anna realizes, she can't stop it because she doesn't know how.
"Elsa," Anna says, "Elsa, it's just me, Anna."
She braces herself for the 'Go away, Anna' that she can hear echoing inside of her head but it does not come.
"A-Anna?" Elsa sounds the syllables out hesitantly, almost reverently.
Anna nods.
"But you're so, so, so big," Elsa says, confusion washing over her features. Anna notices that the ice is no longer growing.
"You were even bigger just a few hours ago," Anna finds herself saying. Oh wait. Should she have said that? Well, it's true. No point hiding anything from Elsa. No story would make sense. The truth barely makes sense. Not that she even really knows what the truth is right now.
"Me?" Elsa's eyes are practically dinner plates at this point, "Bigger?"
"Well, not that much bigger like sideways, but you are taller, and you are my older sister so I guess it makes sense?"
"B-But that's- I'm ten."
"Ten," Anna breathes. Well, ten and eight aren't all that different and it's not like Anna was around to watch Elsa grow up, so she cannot be blamed for not knowing. That hurts. Ow. The knowledge hits Anna across the head as she takes in the already sharpening features of a face that she barely saw. They have the same nose. Just, smaller. Their eyes are a different color but just a little.
"You're not seven," Elsa says, "You can't have drunk that much milk. I drink my milk too."
Anna is torn between laughing and crying at the pout that forms itself on the face of her sister. By the gods, she's missed this Elsa, it'd been easy to push that aside once they'd overcome the Great Freeze together, to push those thoughts and those days down into a corner once she had her sister back but god she missed Elsa so much as a child and as a teen and to see the small figure just looking straight back at her without running away, Anna's heart feels like it just might burst.
Elsa's pout starts to turn into a frown.
"I'm twenty," Anna says before the silence becomes too much.
"Twenty?" Elsa's voice drops into a hushed whisper, her eyes hungrily roaming over Anna's face, searching.
Anna nods.
"How?" Elsa asks, but she looks down at her hands all the same as if answering her own question.
Anna wishes she had a better answer, wishes she could direct Elsa's thoughts away from her own powers, but she has no answers, can only shrug, "I don't know, sweetheart."
Elsa flinches at the word, a puff of snow appears on her hands and her gaze jerks up to meet Anna's eyes.
For a moment, Anna's breath is taken entirely away by the fear that swims around in that too-young face, by the sheer terror and disgust that lives in her eyes and sinks into the corners of her mouth. She wants so badly to take that away, wants to wipe that look off and make sure it never comes back again.
"It's not- I-"
"I know," Anna takes a few swift steps forward before Elsa can react, scooping the younger girl into an embrace, "Elsa darling, I know. It's ok. You won't hurt me."
Elsa flinches at the first contact and now she trembles in her arms and she tries to pull away but Anna just hugs her fiercely with the pent up fear and longing of their entire childhoods.
"You won't hurt me," she whispers into Elsa's hair, "you won't."
It is a few heartbeats before a small pair of hands reaches up around her to hug her back and it is Anna's tears that fall onto the bed now that the sheer force of her sister's love is all too clear to her.
"You're crying," Elsa breathes, her voice catching, "Why are you crying?"
"I missed you," Anna lets the words stumble out of her mouth, "I missed you a lot, Elsa."
Elsa falls silent for a beat.
Then, so quiet she almost didn't catch it, Anna hears, "I miss you too, Anna."
Elsa fights the sleep, Anna can feel it in the way Elsa's head nuzzles into her shoulder whenever she tries to keep her eyes open, but she succumbs and falls asleep within minutes of Anna's hands gently patting her back. Small hands relax, a light chin rests gently on Anna's shoulder. Poor thing must truly have been exhausted because she hadn't even needed to sing Mother's lullaby to lull her to sleep.
She shifts them both down, just lies there drinking in the small angular features of her little big sister and a pang of something that hurts shoots through her before she smooths it away, holds on a little tighter the way Mother always used to hold on to her.
Elsa shifts a little, turns her face further into Anna's shoulder and Anna can feel her heart melting.
Anna would happily be her pillow till morning, the next day, forever, if it means she can forever keep the look of peace, the tiny upturns of the corners of her mouth, the way her ungloved hands clench themselves around the shawl that covers them both.
But there is a dead man to think about in the throne room, perhaps melted now, and she has to see to it that a possible diplomatic incident is averted, that- is this how Elsa feels?
She doesn't know if that is how Elsa used to feel but she knows that she has to do something before the next morning so she gently peels little Elsa off of her, lifts little arms, tucks the child in under the blanket, leaves the shawl tucked in under Elsa's chin, watches as she shifts a little in a sleep, reaching out a little and it is all she can do to not reach back and pull those small hands in hers and whisper away her fears.
Elsa settles into the pillows with a soft huff of air, chest rising and falling gently with each breath and Anna just honestly wants her to be happy.
She slides out the door with one backward glance. The rays of moonlight cast criss-crossing shadows of the window frame onto the bed. She will be right back. They will fix this together. Somehow.
"Your Highness," comes Kai's voice as Anna exits the room, "how is Her Majesty?"
Oh what a question.
"She's asleep," Anna says, sighs, "Kai, she's-"
"If you'd pardon me," Kai says, "I am aware of Her Majesty's… condition."
He pauses, puts his hands together, looks down, then back up at her and Anna is reminded that this is a man who has known everything and been powerless to do anything.
"Is she," he wrings his hands, "well?"
Anna pats him gently on the shoulder.
"She will be. Now, we have some work to do."
Kai nods, straightens himself up, "I had some of the staff clear that out earlier."
Anna turns to him.
"Melted about an hour ago," Kai says.
"Ah. And-"
"They are, naturally, sworn to secrecy. Though I did mention that he'd attempted to attack Her Majesty and I do believe they might have accidentally dropped him more than once."
Anna winces, "Thank you, Kai."
"Just doing my job, Your Highness."
Kai takes in her slightly rumpled dress, frowns, "Your Highness, I can have a bath drawn for you."
Anna yawns and stretches, only now noticing a light pounding in her head, "That would be divine."
Kai smiles.
Anna pops a square of chocolate into her mouth, lets it melt on her tongue as she sinks into the cushions of her study chair. Kai is wonderful and though the hour is quite late, the hot water has kneaded the tenseness out of her shoulders.
It's not like Elsa hasn't been sick before. There is precedent, the Council will take on most of the day-to-day duties, they would collect the important decisions and Elsa would take a look at them in the evening. Anna supposes that since Elsa is, well, even more indisposed than usual, that she, the heir, would be the one taking a look at these in the evening.
Which is probably the easy part.
The harder part is figuring out how to get her big sister back.
For all that it has been intensely cathartic to see that Elsa had definitely loved her all this time, they cannot go on like this forever. Not even just for Arendelle, not just for the kingdom, but for Elsa.
Anna knows that she owes it to Elsa, past, present, future, to find a way to bring her back. There has to be a way to bring her back. To be honest, she doesn't even know what happened and it's really not like she can march up to little Elsa and ask her to recount whatever happened.
Anna winces at the memory of the dead man.
Yeah, that's not happening. That should stay dead and hopefully those memories stay dead as well. She- oh god.
Anna rockets up from her seat, starts to pace.
She had been assuming all this time that it had been Queen Elsa, well, big Elsa who had been the one to kill the man but what if it had been the little- no. No, little Elsa could not have killed someone, she would not have, but her powers are less controlled, aren't they?
Anna's hands tangle through her hair. Think, Anna, think.
Did it look like little Elsa might have killed him?
She looked, well, she looked- Anna's never known what ten-year-old Elsa was like so she honestly cannot tell what kind of fear that was that she had seen in those widened eyes.
Anna groans and slumps back into the chair.
Ok. Back to the facts.
She killed him. Anna shakes that thought out of her head.
One. She was only knocked out for at most a few minutes, probably closer to a minute. She knows this because people who get knocked out and stay down for longer than a few minutes on the practice grounds very rarely stand up afterwards and she definitely got up.
Two. The door was not frozen shut. She brings back the memory - Elsa crumpled on the floor in a starburst of ice, the fear, the way she'd scrambled from the room leaving a trail of frost in her wake and...
Well, that's all the non-obvious facts she has.
The obvious ones like a man is dead and Elsa is little are there too but there is no explanation for that besides magic and as Anna is impossibly, incredibly aware, she knows nothing about magic.
She'll just have to go ask someone who knows then.
Anna sits up, tugs her robe around her.
The ear-splitting crash of what must be half the castle's windows smashing at once comes echoing down the corridor and for the second time in less than a day, Anna is flying down the halls to Elsa's room.