So.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me. I do still hope you enjoy this chapter. I kind of hope my personal shit doesn't seep in there and ruin it for you.

Take good care and thanks for reading.

ssg.x.

CHAPTER 21
THIRTEEN GLIDING PRINCIPLES

Elsa's hand was wrapped carefully in Hans', buried beneath several inches of snow. He was holding on as though the simple act of letting go would be enough to lose her completely. In a way she found it comforting – it meant that he had given whatever his plan was a little more thought than his "I'm just going to stand here and wait for the roof to cave in on me" plan from days ago.

He was afraid. His child-like arrogance would keep him from admitting it to her, but with his back still against hers, she could feel him trembling, and she knew from personal experience that it wasn't because of the cold. And so when he squeezed her hand, she squeezed back with all her might. She was afraid, too.

"You could escape, you know," Elsa offered. "I could tell everyone that you…or I…Maybe I faint, or I…I don't know…Something happens to me. I look the other way and you…you slip away. You vanish –"

"Elsa," Hans interjected calmly.

"No, listen," she said, crawling around his body through the snow so she could sit in front of him and look him in the eyes. "You could escape. You could take Sitron with you. Anna has taken very good care of him since you…" The faint smile on his face when she mentioned his horse's name gave her hope that he might reconsider his decision. Her eyes welled with tears. "So you see, you wouldn't be alone. You'd have Sitron back. He could take you far away from here, away from your family and this curse I placed on you –"

Hans took hold of her arms, but she shook him off of her. "Hans, you don't have to do this. You don't have to –"

"Elsa, please," he said insistently, reaching for her again. "Please stop."

"No!" Elsa cried standing and crossing the room, her shoes and the hem of her dress making a mess of the perfect blanket of snow that surrounded them. "My guards will take you away, and then what? A trial?" she asked. "I'm not like you, Hans. I can't lie the way you can. And I don't mean that to be cruel. It's just a fact. I can't pretend that you and I never…" she pressed her lips together and looked away.

Hans got to his feet. He took a few steps towards her but she held her hand up, signaling for him to stay back. "I can't pretend I never loved you," she said brokenly. "You would expect me to choose between having you executed or locked away for the rest of your life? To stand in front of the people I'll surely grow to resent one day and publicly hand you your fate, never letting the world know that in doing so I'd be sentencing myself to a similar one?"

"Hey," Hans chuckled gently, closing the distance between them and pulling her close to him. "Don't be so dramatic. Not that I'm not flattered by the outpouring of emotion. I've never…" Hans paused. Elsa felt his Adam's apple leap against the crown of her head. "I've never really had that before. It's nice."

Elsa raised her arms and held him, sniffling into his jacket.

"More than nice," Hans revised.

"You're accusing me of being dramatic after you careened into Arendelle in the middle of the night like a red tornado and threatened to freeze everything in sight if I didn't talk to you?" Elsa couldn't help but smile. "I had to have the palace completely evacuated. Poor Kristoff probably had to chain Anna between two stone pillars somewhere to keep her from marching in here ahead of me and tearing you apart."

"She did mention something earlier about wanting to rip off my limbs," Hans mused. "She really does hate me, doesn't she?"

Elsa smirked, wiping away her tears with the sleeve of her dress. "I couldn't count that high on the scale."

"She has that in common with my brothers. What a shame she's taken." Hans said, crossing the room and sitting on one of the wooden benches against the wall.

Elsa smiled. "Granted, Kristoff is no Prince Mouth-Breather or Prince Picks-His-Nose-and-Eats-It, but he's very good to Anna. He loves her a great deal, and she absolutely adores him."

"You're happy for her?" Hans asked, reaching into the snow to unearth a book lying at his feet. He held it in front of him, seeming lost in thought. Or maybe time.

"Of course I'm happy for her! What kind of a question is that?" Elsa laughed incredulously. "She's my sister. I want nothing more than for her to be happy."

Elsa slowly approached the bench he sat on. She lowered herself beside him. "Hans?"

"Hm?"

"You told me your family hated you because you blackmailed them. But that was a lie, wasn't it?"

"Elsa, I can't –"

"Hans, I know that when it comes to lying you can't seem to help yourself. I know that. I don't like it, but I'm willing to take the good with the...um…less than good…if you at least try to be honest with me," she implored.

He slumped back in his seat and sighed. "Elsa, there were reasons I didn't argue with you when you were going on and on about what a rotten child I was, and how my parents were trying to contain my predisposition towards evil, blah, blah, blah."

Elsa still felt ashamed that she hadn't given him the chance to respond to her accusations before completely shutting him down. She felt a little sick to her stomach revisiting it, but she felt that she owed it to him to listen to him just then.

"I'm trying to protect you," he explained earnestly, "And I'm doing a rather terrible job at it so far, I know –"

"You're trying to do too many things at once. Let me help you. I know I can occasionally come off as a nervous thing, but I'm strong. Much stronger than all the lip-biting and hand-wringing might suggest," Elsa said, placing a hand over his.

"The truth is that I can't really blame my brothers for their treatment of me. I mean not entirely. They just follow my parents' lead. More so Alma's than my father's. People expect different things from a man than a woman, I guess. A king can get away with withholding fatherly affection. He's a king, after all, and it's expected that he bring up strong, independent sons who will one day rule over their own kingdoms. Rulers are ruled by nothing and no one, and that goes for their emotions, too. But people expect women to be more...nurturing, I guess. Alma was anything but nurturing, at least when it came to me."

Hans closed his eyes.

"My father is the monster. Alma is merely a…" his voice trailed off. Elsa watched him expectantly. Surely that wasn't the end of the story. Minutes passed and Elsa finally spoke.

"Alma is your stepmother," she said, finally noticing that he only ever referred to the queen by her first name. Hans nodded.

"Yes. It's not why she hates me so much, though. There are plenty of people out there who marry into families with children and love them as though they were their own."

"Then what happened?" she asked, though halfway through the question, she realized exactly what the problem was. "Oh…" she whispered.

"Yes. My father strayed, to put it delicately. Elsa, I'm not comfortable telling you all this. It isn't really conducive to keeping you safe," he said. "It was no small task convincing my parents that you didn't know anything."

"I don't know anything," Elsa pointed out.

"You know that, and I know that. But my parents…Well, I'm sure this may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but they have some trust issues when it comes to the baby of the family," he teased.

"You don't say," she replied.

"I had to give them a secret for a secret. Why do you think I had to tell them I suspected you might be pregnant?" Hans asked, smirking. "For kicks?"

"Wishful thinking?" Elsa offered, grinning.

"Please," he said, turning his nose up at her.

"So if anyone asks, I'll play dumb."

"I thought you said you weren't very good at lying," he remarked. Elsa shrugged her shoulders.

"I can learn. You can teach me."

Hans smiled sadly, reaching for Elsa. He swept some of her hair off her face and tucked it carefully behind her ear. "I'm afraid there won't be any time for that."

Elsa leaned into his light touch. "You're forgetting something. How could your parents get anywhere near me now? Yes, trapped in that room I was at their mercy, and at the mercy of whatever spell was cast on that room to keep me from escaping. But out here I'm literally in my element. I have miles and miles of natural resources at my fingertips – mountains, trees, lakes..." Elsa exclaimed, gesturing all around herself enthusiastically. "I'm the powerful one now. If anyone is going to need protecting, it's going to be them."

Hans raised his eyebrows, looking pleased to see her getting her back up, but for whatever reason, trying his best not to show it by sinking his teeth into his bottom lip.

"My father..." Hans began hesitantly, "…he…um…"

He wasn't talking fast enough for her. She needed him to fill her in on everything so she could convince him that it was all going to be okay. Whatever it was, it was all going to be okay. It had to be, because she knew that if she had to put Hans to death or try to live out the rest of her life with him locked up in a cell carved out of a hole in the ground mere miles away for the rest of his life, the emotional strain would cause her to freeze every living thing on the planet.

Hans fidgeted with the cuffs of his shirt, then the buttons on his jacket.

"My father has taken a…liking to you."

Elsa laughed nervously. "A liking to me? What does that mean? Isn't that a good thing? I mean being liked is a good thing, isn't it?"

"Christ, no. It's not a good thing," he sighed, frustrated.

"Please, Hans. You can't send me into a battle blindfolded," she pleaded gently but unrelentingly.

"Elsa…"

"Yes?"

Hans wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, cupped the back of her head. He kissed her softly, chastely, and she folded into him. Her first thought was that he was kissing her to shut her up, to avoid answering her questions. But there was something about the way he was holding her, something about the kiss itself. It felt as though he was kissing her goodbye, and it frightened her. The bench beneath them crackled as the electric blue threads of the freeze traveled against the grain of the wood. When their lips parted, he pulled away from her completely and stood up. He turned his back to her.

"I lied earlier when I said my father strayed. I lied to you again."

Elsa was quiet. She was too worried just then to make a joke to mask her disappointment as she normally would whenever he admitted to lying to her. Hans clasped his hands behind his back, a posture he usually adopted when he was about to do or say something cocky. But this time she noticed that his knuckles were white and sharp as teeth.

"My brothers were told that my mother was a young woman named Hansa. She tended to all the fireplaces in the east wing of the palace. The story was that one morning Hansa purposely lingered too long in one of my father's dens. She seduced him and…"

Hans' arms dropped to his sides. Elsa couldn't see his face, and she wasn't sure she wanted to. Her head was swimming.

"Alma, of course, had no choice but to take my father at his word. It wasn't his fault he became victim to a crafty little whore, after all. Men have urges and as queen Alma couldn't make herself available to my father every single time his 'urges' got the better of him. It was all a case of bad timing. So Alma forgave my father his indiscretion and, being the kind-hearted woman that she was, generously offered to raise her husband's bastard child as if he were her own. Then mere hours after Hansa gave birth, they dragged her down to the bowels of the palace and had her executed."

"Hans," Elsa breathed. She stood from the bench and reached for his hand, but it was Hans this time who squared his shoulders to alert her to the fact that he didn't want to be touched.

"I'm not finished," he said stonily.

"I'm sorry," she replied softly, returning reluctantly to her spot on the bench and folding her hands in her lap. "Please continue."

"So my brothers and I grew up believing my mother was an evil, manipulative sex pixie who tried to single-handedly destroy the royal family. There was a time when I thought that was a perfectly valid reason for their lousy treatment of me, and there was a time when I thought I didn't deserve any better."

Hans walked across the room and sat on the bench opposite Elsa's. He stared down at the snow between his boots.

"My grandfather is the only reason I'm standing here today. He saved my life. He's one of the only people I've ever known who's never lied to me. He was the only person I ever totally trusted. He told me about my mother. My real mother."

"Hansa?" Elsa asked. Hans still wouldn't look at her. She wasn't emotionally equipped for any of this. Her immediate instinct had been to hold him, to stroke his hair and tell him he could trust her. But then she remembered that she was still keeping a secret from him. A secret that still had the potential to kill him.

God, how would she ever be able to tell him the truth now?

"Hansa was not my mother. She was some poor innocent who had no family to miss her or ask after her when she vanished, set up as a decoy to protect my father. My real mother's name was Cilia."

Wait, what?

"I don't underst—"

"My mother's name is – or was, rather - Cilia. Actually, her full name was Cilia Isá Engström Westergård."

Elsa's eyes narrowed. "Westergård?" she murmured. "That would mean –"

"It means that one of my brothers has no idea that his father raped his wife," Hans bit out. He looked down at his hand, noticing he was still holding the book he'd found in the snow. He hurled it towards the rose window at the other end of the library.

Elsa shuddered, groaning her disgust. Mistaking her revulsion as being aimed at him, Hans abruptly leapt to his feet, flinging an arm out to his side to create a path in the snow. Elsa stumbled through the drifts Hans sent in her direction, not easy to do in mules and a floor-length dress, and had to practically throw her entire body between Hans and the doors to stop him from leaving.

"Where are you going?" she asked breathlessly. Hans ran a shaking hand through his hair and across his stubbled jaw, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling in an effort to avoid looking her in the eye. He held his other hand out in front of him with the intention of melting the ice Elsa had applied to the locks to keep people from entering the library during their "hostage negotiations". Employing Hans' earlier trick, but managing to do him one better, she sealed his wrists together. Before he could break free, she quickly slipped beneath his locked hands and into his arms, grasping him tightly around his waist and clutching at the fabric of his jacket.

"Stop it," she said in as authoritative a voice as she could muster under the circumstances. "Hans, please -"

She tucked his head beneath her chin and squeezed him hard as though she were trying to wring the shame and grief from his rigid body. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that if whatever darkness was inside him, whatever ugliness he'd been harbouring was brought out into the open, she could free him. She could save him from freezing himself to death.

To her relief, and the heartbreak that tainted it, Hans' entire body finally slackened against hers. His knees buckled and the sheer weight of his anguish pulled him to the ground, taking Elsa along with him. Tears streamed down the length of his fair and lightly freckled face. She kissed his forehead and the tears became harmless, glinting snowflakes that dispersed with a soft breeze summoned by a flourish of her fingers.

If only she could just as effortlessly banish the ache in the heart that beat inside them both, she mourned.