Notes - Set in the same AU-verse as Courage to the Sticking Place, just way, way earlier in the timeline.
(written for Jessica988 on Tumblr, who gave me the prompt.)
If Thomas could do it, she could do it too. He was, what, eight years old at the most?
Anna tugged at the shoulder of her cardigan, and glanced quickly down both ends of the long hallway. The building was utterly and completely quiet, with nothing more than the faint flickering of a dying bulb in the stairwell to break the stillness.
She'd stepped out to get the mail, but that chore had been forgotten the moment she spied it propped up against the doorframe of apartment 221A, blue wheels glittering and Sonic the Hedgehog grinning out from the deckplate.
Thomas was surely in bed at this hour.
She nudged the skateboard experimentally with her toe, and it rolled slowly a few feet to her left, surprisingly quiet on the old wood flooring.
Okay then.
One foot up. Two. Steady.
It wobbled and she tensed, crouched next to the wall, fingers brushing the faded wallpaper on one side as she learned her balance.
"Ah HA," she whispered. "And push!"
(It went pretty well - all the way to stairs anyway, which she probably should have seen coming.)
Through the large windows, a traffic light blinked yellow against the night sky, an orange-ish tint in the blackness, stars obscured by the haze of city lights and the electric hum of the hospital. A small smattering of people yawned and shifted uncomfortably in cheap waiting room furniture, idly flipped through magazines and tried not to disappear against the muted blue paint (carefully selected, Anna suspected, to match the pattern of the plasticine upholstery on the chairs).
A large clock on the wall inched slowly through the hour, the soft mechanical ticks somehow louder than the murmur of strangers talking quietly into cell phones or to the chipper looking woman behind the reception desk.
"So, this might take a little explaining," Anna said, twining her fingers together and grinning weakly.
"Try me."
Kristoff leaned heavily against the wall with one shoulder, scrubbed his free hand through his hair and gave her a very pointed look.
His hair stood on end, a sure indication that he hadn't washed in a while; between the unkempt hair, unshaven cheeks, the bags under his eyes, and the way he was staring at her (eyes intent and entirely focused) he looked positively wild.
Also tired.
She was pretty sure there was a measure of irritation in there too, somewhere under the sleep deprivation.
After all, this was the emergency room and it was 3 in the morning; it wasn't exactly date material, no matter how you tried to swing it.
"Well first off, I promise this isn't as bad as it looks."
"You're in a cast."
"It's a brace, not a cast." Anna pointed to the stiff black boot on her left foot. "Look – velcro! I can take it off when I need to."
Kristoff sighed, stood a little straighter and crossed his arms.
"Anna, what I really want to know is why: why are you in a cast – brace, whatever –why did you callme, where is Elsa, what were you doing – " he broke off, eyes wandering to some point over her shoulder, but flicking quickly back to her face, which she could feel growing hot with embarrassment.
One of the straps on her new boot was coming loose – she undid the velco carefully, cringing against the noise, then patted it down into place while biting her tongue to keep from crying.
"Elsa is gone for the weekend," she said quietly, once she trusted her voice again. "She's visiting a friend.
"Aaaand it was my third day with no one in the apartment, and it was really boring, and I couldn't sleep because I ate like, a LOT of candy, because, like I said, I was bored."
Kristoff snorted, and opened his mouth to reply, but shut it again when she shot him a look.
"One of the neighbor boys left their skateboard out in the hall, and I thought I'd try it out." She shrugged, and gestured listlessly at her leg.
Whatever shot they'd given her when she first came in was wearing off, the dull throbbing creeping up again from her ankle. It itched.
"Gerda gave me ride in."
"Gerda your landlady?"
"Yeah."
"So let me get this straight," Kristoff said, a glimmer of his usual good humor finally edging into his voice. "Elsa went out of town, you went on a candy bender and broke your ankle trying to skateboard down the hall of your apartment complex in the middle of the night."
Anna winced and shrugged again, and began easing herself out of the squat plastic chair.
"And you called me," he finished, stepping over to help her up. Under her elbows his hands were warm and coarse, they covered most of her upper arms besides. It was hard not to lean into him.
"Yes."
"Well, I'm glad you did," he said, bending one arm down to scoop up her purse. The other had snaked around her waist, holding her firmly against his own body. Anna sighed deeply; she could take the pressure off her own leg this way, and didn't have wobble on her crutches.
Plus he smelled nice.
"You're my…friend/boyfriend…thing. Person." She cringed. "Sorry. I just…thought of you first."
Kristoff stilled, halting their slow progress, and stared down at her.
"Boyfriend person?"
The look he was giving her was somewhere between amused and confused; the corners of his lips were twitching. After a breath (she could feel him inhale, being pressed against him as she was) he sighed, and stepped forward again, resuming their strange shuffle toward the exit. Anna clung to Kristoff's left side, limping heavily and trailing a pair of crutches, her oversized purse swinging on his right shoulder, jingling and thumping against their backs with every other step.
(This night was just going SO well.)
"I didn't think you thought of me that way," he said finally, when the glass doors had swung shut behind them and they began to make their way through the parking lot.
"What?" Anna stopped dead (they were never going to get home at this rate), and craned her neck to look him in the eye. His face was shadowed against the yellow light of the street lamps, but she could tell he was smiling – nervously even, an expression she wasn't used to seeing from him.
Kristoff, who tended to show up at Elsa's ice cream parlor whenever she had a shift (but never ate anything except the occasional single scoop of French vanilla); Kristoff, who brought her coffee at the University library just because; Kristoff, who made her laugh with stories of his (many) younger siblings, Kristoff, who always answered her texts, no matter when she sent them.
Including, apparently, at 2AM on Sundays when he'd very clearly been asleep.
"You never said anything."
Anna felt her face growing warm again, and hoped he couldn't see in the dim light. It was true, shehadn't, not technically, but – wasn't it obvious?
"I meant to." She whispered. (His face was rather close, and they were standing, she realized, very very tightly together.)
"Boyfriend person," he repeated, and there: a grin spread over his features, a real one, the first of the evening, and he started to laugh. "Anna, I do not honestly know what to say."
"You can kiss me," she said, heart thumping madly, and Kristoff stopped laughing abruptly.
The crutches clattered to the pavement when he brought his other arm around her, cupped her face and drew her up, up…
(It was a good kiss. A very good kiss.)
It got even better when he practically threw her into the front seat of his truck, tossed the crutches into the bed and drove them to iHop, because somehow, improbably, even though her ankle was killing, and it was the middle of the night and someone was going to have to explain the whole thing to Elsa eventually – the whole fiasco turned out to be date material after all.