If there was one thing she truly missed about her old cell, it was its closeness to the outside world.
At least down in the damp depths of the prison, she had been able to keep up with what was going on in the kingdom, if only through the occasional bits and pieces of hurriedly whispered rumours spoken on the frosty air. She'd had an idea of the people's misfortunes, and their feelings towards King Hans; she'd been able to see their faces, even if obscured by the heavy cloaks they wore around them to keep out the cold.
Up in the royal suite, however, she had little to none of that insight anymore. She now could rely only on the fuzzy observations she could make out from her high window, and—besides that—whatever state the King was in when he visited her chambers.
And he hasn't done much of that, recently.
Since his eruption at the end of their last real, sustained conversation, his visits had become even scarcer, and the ones he'd previously made in the night stopped completely.
I guess he really thought that I didn't know about them.
The look on his face had been evidence enough of that, and his shock at her questions and remarks had been palpable.
What had stayed with her the longest, though, had been the image of his crimson face, his expression permanently stained red in her memory.
He just looked so . . . embarrassed.
Had it really just been embarrassment, though?
As the days drew on and his visits grew fewer—she now received food by an unknown servant in the castle who, forbidden to see her, simply put the tray down by the door and left—she found herself questioning, more and more, her previously-held assumptions about the strange expression he'd worn that day, and how he had shouted so fervently at her.
"You don't understand at all!"
His meaning was lost on her even then, as she turned the exclamation over in her mind; still, she recalled the passion with which he had spoken with startling clarity.
And I remember my reaction.
She slowly took her gloves off, pressing her hands to her cheeks—and again, she felt that same heat as it rose up in her throat and billowed out across her skin.
What is this?
She roughly shoved the gloves back onto her hands as she contemplated the answer, though her fingers were already too warm, the heat having spread to nearly every inch of her body. She felt them sweat inside the gloves' thick interior, and though it was uncomfortable, she dared not remove them again.
Whatever it is, I don't like it.
Try as she might to thrust that hot sensation back to wherever it had come from, however, she was unable to stop its constant, fluttering pulse within her—nor was she entirely certain that she wanted to.
She dreamt that night of purple flowers blooming in the meadows of the mountains near Arendelle, their brilliant colour dazzling under the sunlight.
They were the same flowers that Anna had loved, and had brought her many times when they were children, trying to coax her older sister out of her room.
Orchids.
The scent was as real to her in the dream as if she were holding a bunch of them under her nose, and she grasped at the flowers in the green fields, gathering them up in her arms lest they disappear.
She found, however, that the further she dug herself into them, the further she felt suffocated by doing so; she coughed suddenly when the pressure on her mouth became too much, lifting herself up from the ground.
But it's not the ground anymore.
She blearily opened her eyes to discover, to her great disappointment, that the flower bed was gone—and, in fact, that it had never been there at all.
Dreaming again, it seems.
It was her feather down pillow that she had been stuffing her face into the whole time, and she slapped it away in sudden disgust, irritated that she had been woken from that pleasant respite.
But even as her senses adjusted slowly back to reality, one element of her dream world remained uncannily tangible to her.
That . . . that smell.
She lifted herself from the bed, still wearing her nightgown, and followed her nose to the window.
She had left it open the evening before to get some fresh air, just as she always did; and at first glance, there was nothing to suggest that anything had been done to it to cause the sudden change.
But that smell . . .
She peeked cautiously out through the curtains at the scene below, and her eyes widened.
People. I see people out there.
After so long spent staring out that window with nothing to look at save the endless ocean of snow and ice, it came as an unimaginable shock to her that suddenly—in the midst of this landscape, much of which remained as frozen as ever—there emerged a great number of people.
They hardly looked better than before—from her perch in the castle, she could see that many were still too thin, unkempt, and exhausted—but there was also a hint of something else in the atmosphere on the streets.
Something like hope.
She looked up at the ever-present clouds to find that, for the first time in months, she could detect the sun behind them; and when she looked down again, she saw that some of the snow and ice had melted as well, leaving pools of water in various places and opening up small boat lanes in others.
None of the melting was significant enough to allow for any kind of actual travel or communication with the world outside of Arendelle, of course, but it seemed an immeasurable improvement over the previous circumstances.
And that smell . . . what is that smell?
As her eyes darted around the square, looking for the source of the scent, it filled with more and more people, the realization that the kingdom was—if slowly—returning to normal dawning on them.
She tore her eyes away from the scene in pure resolve, and they began to examine the area closer to her, her nose determining that the source was nearer than she had previously thought.
It was at that exact moment that Hans chose to make his first appearance in many days, opening the door with some fanfare.
"Ah, you're up!"
Her body jolted upright at the sound of his voice, and she promptly shut the window completely, her cheeks pinking as she turned her startled expression towards him.
"Hans, you . . ." she began, but trailed off when she heard him sigh.
"I'm sorry to have been away," he said with a broad smile, drawing closer to her. "Times have been hard, as you know—at least, they were."
She noticed, suddenly, that one of his hands was behind his back—and, at the same time, that the same scent she had been so obsessed with finding was stronger than ever.
She looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and confusion. "What do you mean?"
It was then that Hans presented it to her: a small bouquet of wild purple orchids just beginning to bloom, a touch of frost still on their stalks.
She stared at her dream flowers in disbelief, even as he pressed the bundle into her open hands; the scent seemed to fill every corner of her waking mind.
"I . . . I don't understand," she said after a minute, unable to comprehend the sight before her. "How did you . . . how—"
"If I could explain it to you, I would," he interrupted her meandering bafflement, and she looked up at him, her eyes just as large with shock as when he had first revealed the flowers from behind his back. "But I'm afraid that I understand it just as little as anyone else does."
She blinked at the admission, unused to him so openly admitting his ignorance. Nonetheless, her eyes were drawn to his in that moment, and their gazes locked; there was an understanding between them then that neither knew what was happening, and, perhaps, even a kind of acceptance that not knowing was all right.
"Hand me those for a moment?"
She jumped a little when he spoke, but acquiesced to his request, giving him back the flowers with inquiring eyes.
He placed them on a side table near the window before returning to her, and held out his hands—which were curiously bare—to her.
"Give me your hands, Elsa."
She stared at him, perplexed.
"Why?"
He grinned a little, though the expression didn't contain any of its usual harshness.
"Just give me them," he repeated, and, though she remained sceptical of the request, she tentatively placed her gloved hands atop his.
His grin relaxed as he pressed her hands in his, holding them there for a moment; the gesture made her face turn red again.
Her expression fell soon after, however, when she felt her gloves slowly sliding off of her hands. Her heart seized up in her chest and her fingers convulsed in alarm, terrified by the sight of her bare palms being released from the fabric.
"No!" she cried suddenly, retracting her hands sharply from his, though the jerky movement merely succeeded in doing what Hans had only just attempted to:
The gloves came completely off.
She clutched her bare hands to her chest, absorbing any of the ice and snow that would have potentially been released by them onto her surroundings.
What was he thinking?
When she was sure that nothing had been seriously damaged, she glared reproachfully at him, her hands balled up into tight, throbbing fists against her heart.
"What do you think you're doing?" she asked, glowering at his exasperated expression. "Trying to get yourself killed?"
He held back, to her shock, an amused smirk at the serious question; seeing her boiling ire, he tried to answer the charge in a way that wouldn't upset her much more.
"You forget, Elsa," he began, pointing at her pulsing, bare hands, "this isn't the first time I've been around you when you weren't wearing these." He held up the discarded gloves in his hand to stress the point. "You controlled it before just fine, if I remember correctly."
She could vaguely recall waking up that first morning in the room to discover that her gloves had been removed by Hans at some point during her period of unconsciousness, and how confused she had been by the revelation.
At the time, though, she had chalked up the lack of sudden, raging ice storms following this discovery to her utterly weak state of mind and body, and his willingness to treat her without the gloves being on account of his realizing that, too.
But in that moment—with her recovered, at full strength, and with him fully aware of that fact—she simply could not understand why he would even attempt to touch her bare hands, nor how he could believe that she would be able to control whatever happened once the gloves were removed.
Hans's expression softened as he regarded hers, so full of fear, doubt, and wariness; he rested her gloves on the table beside the flowers, and gestured once more to the hands she had burrowed so deeply in her bosom.
"Give me your hands," he said again, though with none of the humour from earlier. His voice was gentler then—soothing, even.
She stared back with eyes unchanged. "No," she said firmly.
He was patient. "Just trust me."
She frowned at that.
Just "trust" you?
Her eyes narrowed guardedly. "Why should I?"
"Because I'm not afraid of you."
She froze, and her lips pressed together, unable to speak.
His green eyes were distressingly honest. "I'm not afraid of you, Elsa."
She swallowed. Somehow, his words didn't seem any more real upon repetition than they had the first time he'd uttered them.
He's . . . not afraid of me. That's what he said.
Her hands relaxed unconsciously as his remark replayed in her head, and eventually dropped down to her sides—though she was hardly aware of them doing as such.
He smiled a little at her dumbfounded stupor. "Now, will you give me your hands?"
The look she gave him then made him feel as though he had spoken in a foreign language, or, at the very least, that she hadn't heard him at all above the din of her own swirling thoughts.
He felt himself about to sigh when, to his surprise, she held them out to him—two upturned palms coloured brightly red from being pressed against her chest—though, he noticed, the hollow shock in her eyes had not yet abated.
Still, her subconscious response indicated to him that, indeed, she at least trusted him enough to proceed; and, after a moment of considering her limply outstretched hands, he placed the bouquet of orchids back in her bare hands, making sure to clasp them securely around the base so that they would not fall through her fingers.
When she finally came out of her trance long enough to realize what he had done, she looked first at the flowers—and then, slowly, back up at Hans again, her eyes softly marvelling at his features.
The look made him blush again, and he coughed to ease his discomfiture. "I just thought you should feel them without the gloves on," he said quickly, avoiding eye contact. "It's a waste, otherwise."
She felt that warm sensation creep up inside of her again as he looked away from her; and as that warmth reached up to her lips and ears and finally to her round, pale cheeks, the orchids' scent grew almost overbearing in the room.
"Thank you," she said with a smile—her first, genuine smile in so many weeks—and she rubbed her nose against the top of the flowers, awash in that powerful smell.
"Thank you," she whispered again.