So.
This is the first time I've organized a field trip to the inside of Hans' head. Or at least this Hans. I don't own Hans. I sort of wish I did. I have a doll. Does that count?
ssg.x.
CHAPTER 15
THE WHITE DEVIL
Some say living well is the best revenge. Who lives better than a king? Sure, Hans easily could have left the palace, which had always been more like hell than home to him, thumbed his nose at his wretched family and left the Southern Isles behind him at any time. But that would have been giving them exactly what they'd always wanted. If Hans had gone that route, he'd have faded into obscurity as though he'd never existed in the first place. Not a chance. Hans needed to go big or go home.
Of course in the end he ended up going big and still going home.
It wasn't that Hans had felt intentionally misled by Anna, per say. He was surprised by how much he liked Anna initially. She was cute and funny, and Sitron – the horse he had no other choice but to leave behind in Arendelle after his arrest - had taken an immediate liking to her. His breath caught in his throat when she said those two words –
Just me.
"Just you?" he'd echoed, intrigued.
"Just me," she replied, following it with a sigh and a smile. She was smitten; there was little doubt about that. She was pretty adorable - red hair, much like his own, and a stippling of freckles on her ruddy cheeks. She could easily have passed for a Westergård. Well, except that she was kind of clumsy and talked too much. But her chattiness served his purposes well enough. With every word she spoke, she was giving him hints on what she was looking for in "the one". She was also filling him in on her frigid sister, whom he disliked from the get-go.
"If you'd hit my sister Elsa, it would be – yeesh!" Anna had explained in her funny little way after Hans apologized for knocking the wind out of her with poor Sitron.
Little did Hans know at the time that "yeesh!" would be the perfect way to describe Queen Elsa.
She was a little taller than Anna, or maybe it was just the way she carried herself. She was very beautiful. Her skin was smooth and white, as though she'd been carved from marble. Her hair had an ethereal quality to it, even pinned up as tightly as it was. It looked to be the only softness one could attribute to her. When she was still, she was very still, like a cat. He observed that she moved very little, greeting her guests with a short nod, hands clasped in front of her. Even when she walked, she moved effortlessly, gliding, sylph-like, along the floor. When Anna presented him to Elsa, he could feel her eyes stealing into him and he found it intensely unnerving. The hair at the back of his neck stood on end. He decided he had made the right choice in focusing his attention and lavishing his feigned affection on Anna. No one was going to get anywhere with the ice queen. She had too many walls up, and he hadn't the time nor the desire to scale them.
"Elsa, please! Please! I can't live like this!" Anna begged her after she refused to give their marriage her blessing.
"Then leave," came the queen's reply. At the time, Hans couldn't see the hurt in Elsa's eyes. All he saw were the characteristically unfeeling eyes of a Westergård. He couldn't see blue for red. She was no better than any one of his brothers. She'd been shutting Anna out since she was a child, and Hans certainly knew how that felt. Then Anna found someone she believed could make her happy, someone who could make her feel loved, and that callous bitch couldn't even let her have that.
Having that in common with Anna made it so much easier to be "the one".
Too easy.
He almost felt bad for taking advantage of her.
Almost.
But Elsa…
Oh, the sheer contempt he felt for her in that moment. Yes, he would enjoy killing her.
He wondered how Anna had managed to remain so good-natured and so trusting despite her lonely upbringing. How had he become so twisted, so bloodthirsty, and…?
It was because Anna had been loved. She'd been loved so dearly. She told him about her parents, told him about falling asleep and waking up in her mother's arms after a nightmare as a small child, and how her father would tell her stories about mermaids, silly kings, goblins and fickle princesses. It was everything Hans could ever have wished for growing up, and here she was wallowing in self-pity like a pig in mud because her sister stopped building snowmen with her. Resentful feelings of having been misled by Anna strengthened Hans' resolve. He left Anna to die in that room, cold and alone. He never looked back.
He didn't understand at the time that there were many different kinds of loneliness.
He understood so little back then.
Elsa was the one. The kind of one you didn't put quotation marks around. God, he hated her. Hated her and loved her - sometimes in a single heartbeat - certain, at times, that she'd bewitched him somehow. He had cruelly mocked Anna for wanting so desperately to marry him after knowing him for less than a day, and here he was now, never wanting to be without Elsa after spending less than double that amount of time with her. She was his joy. He hardly recognized it for what it was at the time because he'd experienced so little joy in his life before then.
There were things Hans wanted to tell her about himself. He wasn't made entirely of lies and secrets. He studied ornithology as a hobby, could take apart a pocket watch and put it back together in an impressively short amount of time, and poured over plays by Adam Oehlenschläger and John Webster. As a child, he often dreamed of becoming an actor. He would assign roles to his collection of Kriegsspiel miniatures, and have them act out the plays he wrote, sometimes under his bed late at night, and sometimes on the windowsill. As he got older, he began making more and more use of the full-length mirror in his bedroom, reciting monologues and poetry, and singing folksongs to the audience his reflection offered him. When Hans was finally brave enough, he let his grandfather sit in on his performances. His grandfather would clap, his eyes sparkling, skin crinkling as he broke out into the widest smile. He told Hans he had a gift.
"Your gift for deception is what will save you," he had said to him.
Deception? Is that all acting was? Where was the art in that?
His grandfather, observing the puzzled look on the teenaged boy's face, elaborated, but all it served to do was confuse him more. "No matter what happens, no matter how they mistreat you, never let them see. Never let them know they've hurt you, my boy. Learn the part, memorize the lines, wear the costumes and, if you fumble, keep going. It's your only hope for survival once I'm gone."
Gone? He'd wondered. Gone where?
Less than a year later, his grandfather passed away, and Hans very quickly unravelled the mystery behind his grandfather's cryptic warning. All these years, his grandfather had been his breakwater. Once he was gone, Hans had to abide the brunt of his family's wrath alone.
He learned the part. He memorized the lines. He wore the costumes. The one thing he never did, though, was fumble. He was Prince Hans Lind Westergård of the Southern Isles - the handsome, charming thirteenth son of King Enoch and Queen Alma. Like his brothers before him, he had excellent leadership skills, was an accomplished swordsman, and showed great promise as a military strategist. He returned all his books of poetry, plays, and scientific studies to the palace library, then threw out all his notes and sketches. Because no one would be around any longer to protect the boy he once was, Hans had to pack him up and put him away, too. At least until he could find somewhere safe for the two of them.
Elsa was that somewhere.
Elsa was his someone.
He never got to kiss her goodbye.
She had taken him inside her again and again, her legs wrapped tightly around his hips, her hand over his heart – over the mark on his chest that, as far as he was concerned, made him hers. It was like a second heart beating inside of him, making him even more acutely aware of the presence of the first, pumping a foreign element through his veins that left him starved for more. His body was a conduit for so many different things in those moments that he swiftly lost track of what was what. Love, sex, Elsa, and Elsa's powers – it was almost too much to bear, one heart or two. He could see nothing but bright, blinding white beyond the electric blue of her eyes.
When he was seventeen, he discovered John Wilmot after coming across a collection of his works in the library. The book didn't look much different from any of the other hundreds of books the massive room housed. What caught Hans' attention was the book's spine, which was cracked very conspicuously in three different places. This could only mean one thing – his brothers had found something (or three things in this case) in the book of great interest. When he pulled the book off the shelf, it fell open to the filthiest poem Hans had ever laid eyes on. There were quite a few words in it that he'd never heard or seen before, but they stirred something in him still. The shortest words had the biggest effect on him (double entendre intended) – particularly those that began with 'c' and 'f'.
He'd never had as much of an interest in women as his brothers had demonstrated. He figured that would be something that would come with age. His passion was stirred by his hobbies and interests, and the only things he really lusted after as he matured were his freedom and his family's blood in equal measure.
But he wanted to do things to Elsa, say things to Elsa - some of which started with 'c' and 'f'. As he became increasingly aroused, his head filled with words and pictures he was sure would turn her a whiter shade of pale. Once he was fully-sheathed inside her, however, his mind went blank. All he could see was Elsa. The only word he knew was Elsa.
He wished he could have lasted longer. He was sure if he had a little more time to…um…practice, he'd have eventually gotten better at it. He'd always been a fast learner. It was just that the whole thing had been so unexpected. Not just the sex - all of it. He didn't think he'd come to care for her as much as he did. He didn't think she'd ever want anything to do with him, outside of freezing his severed head to keep it fresh just long enough to get it home to display on a pike on the palace grounds, that is.
Now they were right back where they started. Except this time he was in love with her.
So, in reality, this was far, far worse.
He'd lied to her so many times, both before and after he had tried to kill her. And just when she'd admitted there was a chance that she may one day forgive him for his misdeeds, he had to start lying to her again. Elsa was getting too close to his family's secrets, and the only chance he had of ensuring that she was returned to Arendelle unharmed was to convince his parents that she was no threat to the royal family. She couldn't know anything. She had no way of knowing that breaking her heart would be last on the list of terrible things another Westergård could do to her. And if anything happened to her…
He couldn't think about that now. He had to focus.
This would have to be his best performance yet - the performance of a lifetime.
Fitting, he thought wryly, as it was also going to be his last.
