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Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 9

The princess was frustrated. All of her efforts to slip past the castle guardsmen and out into the open air had been hindered by poor timing, misplaced footholds, and overloud associates of the snowy persuasion. Really, she had rotten luck.

Little news reached her from the outside world these days. She had been told that the city was in crisis, that Elsa—who was apparently immune to the heat of the fever—spent her every waking moment amongst the people or shut away with men who were educated in such matters, and that a number of staff and even some members of the Queen's council had shown signs of infection. Now Anna was limited to her quarters, where she counted her steps and alternately seethed at and longed for her sister. She was in a prison, both literally and metaphorically, and all she could do to while away the hours of her solitary confinement was worry, and worry, and worry.

At least she had Olaf.

"I can't stand this any longer," she declared, to no one in particular. She was lying upside-down on her bed in a woeful sort of delirium.

The snowman nodded sagely.

"You're lying down," he returned. "Smart thinking."

Anna clutched a fistful of hair and began splitting its ragged ends. Over a month had passed since Elsa first closed the palace gates. A month! And now Anna had been ordered to stay in her room, and she found herself driven to distraction by dread and boredom and loneliness. She'd lost count of the days. Her little scheme to find Kristoff had been a welcome diversion, true, but she and the snowman had been thwarted at every turn. So she merely sprawled about the room, lethargic and despondent, and thought about all the people for whom she was afraid. And whom she missed.

Sometimes she practiced mountaineering knots with the decorative tassels she'd pulled down from her window dressing.

She thought a lot about Kristoff.

Like, he had really long fingers, for example. Not the slender, tapered fingers of an aristocrat; Kristoff had working man's hands, for sure. But he also had these long fingers that would have given him an enviable reach on the grand piano in the palace ballroom—if he'd known at all how to play.

Which he didn't.

Most of the people she'd been introduced to in "polite" society were able to do things like play the piano, or lob a tennis ball, or perfect the habit of drinking without becoming indiscreetly drunk.

To amuse herself, Anna started imagining her rustic friend in all sorts of contradictory venues. Kristoff, holding a fragile porcelain teacup in those broad, long-fingered hands. Kristoff, engaging in a pretentious conversation about social welfare. Kristoff, admiring—admiring!—a topiary in the palace gardens … She snorted. The first time she'd gone for a walk with him in those gardens, he'd stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of one.

"What's that?" he'd asked.

"What?"

"That."

Anna had followed his gaze toward a dense bay laurel that was cultivated to resemble some sort of fanciful scepter. Or … something.

"It's a tree."

Kristoff had looked appalled. "That is not a tree."

"Sure it is."

"No, it's not."

She'd sighed and crossed her arms and turned to him exasperatedly.

"Fine," she'd retorted. "It's a shrubbery."

"A shrubbery?"

"Yes"

"What's a shrubbery?"

"It's this!" she'd cried, gesturing wildly at the topiary. "This is a shrubbery. Designed by a master shrubber, I'm sure."

He'd just stared at her blankly until she sighed.

"A shrubbery is, well, it's a kind of tree."

"Trees don't grow like that."

"Well, no," she'd allowed. "They trim them to look like that."

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who trims them to look like that?"

"Oh!" She'd rolled her eyes to mask her confusion. "The gardeners, probably."

He'd fallen silent for a moment, studying the strange living sculpture.

"Don't you think it's kind of weird?"

"I don't know," she'd said, shrugging disinterestedly. "I guess?"

And he'd simply shaken his head. "You don't design trees," he'd murmured, then leveled a final glance at the tree-topiary-shrubbery. "It's not supposed to be like that."

Now, lying wrong-side-up on her bed, the princess scoffed loudly to the room at large—though she didn't expect Olaf to understand. The point was that each of these scenarios proved so ludicrous—so wildly uncharacteristic of the mountain man she knew—that the thought of him entertaining any such behavior made her laugh.

But her laughter was as much humorless as it was otherwise, because she was suddenly stricken with an uncomfortable thought: What would court life do to Kristoff?

Everything she appreciated about him had to do with the fact that he could never in a million years tolerate the kind of person she'd just imagined. The kind of person she'd been surrounded by—on a daily basis—during the long months of the harvest season. The months he'd left her behind in order to find work and solitude in the mountains.

"He must hate it here," she murmured.

"Maybe a little," agreed Olaf.

Anna hadn't expected a response, of course, and she sat up abruptly. Truth be told, she'd rather forgotten about him. And anyway—

"How did you know who I was talking about?"

The snowman, who'd inverted his head over a plush ottoman to view the world from her perspective, righted himself and peered at her as though it was obvious.

"Who else would it be?"

There was a pause. Anna released her grip on the split ends of her hair and proceeded to chew on them instead. She gazed pensively at the little creature.

"Kristoff," she clarified, asking the question without articulating it as such.

"Well, yeah," said Olaf.

"Why would you think—" Anna felt dizzy, probably from lying for so long upside-down. She should probably stop doing that. But— "Why would you assume I was talking about him?"

Olaf shrugged in the way that only an oddly-proportioned snow golem could.

"You don't really talk about anyone else, do you? Unless it's the queen, and I'm fairly certain Elsa's a she." He chortled at his own joke, then finished it unnecessarily. "Not a he."

The princess felt suddenly defensive.

"I talk about other people," she insisted. "Don't I?"

Olaf just looked at her; she hastened to change the subject.

"So he does, though," she murmured. "Hate it here?"

"Hate is such a strong word ..." equivocated the snowman.

"Olaf—"

"Would you prefer that he loved it?" he countered, blinking at her guilelessly. "Would you rather Kristoff become just like all the other gentlemen at court?"

Though Olaf, being Olaf, had asked the question entirely without subtext, Anna couldn't help but recognize the wisdom of his words. In fact, she could see the point of them even if he couldn't. And the point was this: if Kristoff didn't dislike the courtly life as much as he did, maybe Anna wouldn't be as ... attached ... to him as much as she was.

Was that right?

She shook her head in answer to Olaf's question. Kristoff wouldn't be Kristoff if he were capable of admiring topiary. He wasn't supposed to be like that.

And yet, Anna had pressured him to stay the winter in Arendelle a year ago, and he had done it. He'd been anxious, uncomfortable, out-of-place—but she had asked him, and he had done it.

Why?

"I should let him go," she said quietly. "I should let him go home. It's not fair ..."

She waited for Olaf to remind her that the ice master was a grown man. That he could leave whenever he chose. That Anna wasn't making him do anything he didn't want to do.

But the snowman said nothing.