QUICK NOTES:

I've been trying to resurrect this story by going back and cleaning up some of the older chapters. And I accidentally deleted this one, but I don't know any other way to edit after so much time has passed. I'm hoping that by reworking some old stuff I'll be able to get past my stupid head enough to write the last installment of this thing.

Anyway. Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 14

The queen of Arendell woke to an empty room and nearly froze the world again.

But she didn't. Instead, she closed her eyes and focused on the chill quickening in and along her arms, the palms of her hands, her tapering fingers. The magic seemed to expand within her like water swelling into its frozen state. It would not take much for her to release it into the world, as she had done once before. After all, she was frightened. Her sister had slipped away in the night, and the girl was burning as certainly as was the rest of the kingdom. And while the cold could do no harm to its queen, it could still overwhelm her if she let it.

She took a deep breath. Anna could not have gone far, not in her current state. Elsa would find her within the castle and bring her back to this room, and in the meantime she would not turn the city into a sepulcher of rime and hoarfrost.

The sensation in her fingertips receded. She could feel the air's frigidity peak and then stabilize, and a last chill current teased the curtains once before expiring. Flames sputtered back to life along the hearth. When she had composed herself as best she could, Elsa opened her eyes and noted with some satisfaction that she could no longer see her breath. She lunged for the door. There was no need to deliberate: she knew exactly where Anna would have gone, and so she hitched up her skirts and sprinted for the castle gate. Delicate stems of frost etched geometric patterns in the carpet at her feet, but they dissolved into the thread as quickly as they'd appeared. The queen was overwhelmed, this was certain. But she had learned to restrain her fear, and therefore her magic, in all instances except one.

She would not lay her hands on her sister—not for any length of time, not when she felt the power actually coursing through her fingers. Nothing could persuade her to do this, no matter what Olaf said. The very thought of freezing the princess, or any living thing, through the influence of her touch sent her into a panic that would no doubt mean the end of Arendelle forever. It had happened before, that one time, when in her despair she had caused the accident about which they never spoke. When she had just about killed a man without even touching him, and in the most hideous way possible.

Slowly.

Her magic was a bitter thing, unhurried and cruel. It idled in the hearts of those who were struck by it, poisoning the blood and glaciating the bones. It crept through every nerve ending, sank into the very marrow of a man, and all the while it moved slowly, slowly, ever slowly. Like a glacier through some strange arterial landscape. She knew this. She had witnessed it. Because after she'd ...

Well. After the accident, Kristoff was alive for a week where a man under any other circumstance would have perished within hours of nightfall. He claimed to remember none of this, and perhaps it was true. But she wasn't so sure. He must have felt it, the pain of this incremental freeze, before he fell at last into something like a hypothermic coma. Had it been a relief, to slip away like that? She would never know, but those long summer days and abbreviated nights on the mountain haunted him, she could tell. It haunted them both.

How could she have done that to him? How could she risk doing the same to Anna?

No. It did not bear thinking. She knew, now, what her magic was capable of. Hers was a preternatural cold. It was not meant to touch the fragile hearts of men. Or women, for that matter. So she didn't think about taking Anna's fever from her—didn't think that she could, with her bare hands, quell the fire that at this moment consumed her city. She wouldn't even consider the possibility that her power could be used to save her people rather than slaughter them.

The queen shuddered and suppressed a sob. She reached the stairs and turned the balustrade into a sinuous whorl of ice.

She knew her sister's heart. She knew that Anna craved freedom and friendship and the warmth of another person's touch—something that Elsa could never give her. The princess had been deprived of these things for so long, save for the parental affections of Gerda and Kai—who nevertheless kept a respectful distance from the royal daughters.

Kristoff tried to do the same, but she made it so difficult. Anna nudged and poked and elbowed him, demonstrating a ruthlessness in her behavior that Elsa hadn't quite witnessed before. She danced around him in her enthusiasm, crowded him physically and invaded his space. He'd responded with a funny mix of alarm and confusion, at first. The queen noticed, and so she'd chided her sister in the privacy of their chambers.

"Why do you tease him, Anna?"

And Anna had laughed.

"He's so easily, I don't know, bumfuzzled," she'd replied, speaking as much with her hands as with words. "He's just this huge ball of bumfuzzlement."

"Of what?"

But the princess ignored her. "It's adorable."

Elsa hadn't known how to respond to that. Adorable? Baby rabbits were adorable. Glazed ceramic models of children at play were adorable. Miniaturized furniture was adorable. But preposterously large ice harvesters with an inability to talk to strangers? Well ...

She didn't know the first thing about the sort of attachment that Anna was developing for Kristoff. She understood love to be something she felt for her sister, for her people, for the mountains and fjords of her homeland. It was familial and affectionate and protective, sometimes ferociously so. But it certainly wasn't ...

"Bumfuzzled? Is that a word?"

…

…

...

...

"Maybe."

Anna had said this entirely without embarrassment, back then, because talking about Kristoff as though he were an overgrown puppy was far easier than talking about Kristoff in any other way. But things were different now. Anna was lonesome and afraid, and she needed a friend. So she would be trying to get to him. Elsa was sure of it.

And Elsa was right.

She found them in one of the forerooms that lay adjacent to the palace entryway. Of course, she'd been aiming for the door itself until she detected movement and sound coming from another place entirely. Low voices and slippery tracks of rainwater led her there.

It was a modest room, furnished with darkly stained and upholstered pieces in a palette of olive and fawn. Someone had stoked the fire—probably Gerda, who dithered about the place, anxiously directing those members of the staff who were well enough to tend to the princess. The woman had amassed a small hoard of blankets and was using them to swaddle both Anna and Kristoff to the point of suffocation.

They were soaked to the skin, those two. Anna lay curled on her side on a chaise beside the hearth, alternately shivering and pushing against her blankets. Someone had helped her out of her drenched clothes and into a clean nightgown. Her hair was damp with rainwater and perspiration, though Gerda had tenderly plaited it in the way she'd done when Anna was a child. Her skin was flushed; a sheen of sweat lay thinly across her cheekbones.

Kristoff watched her with dark eyes in the fluctuating light of the fire. His expression was dull and unreadable. He'd carried Anna this far, out of the storm and into the castle, but though she was a slip of a girl she was still a full-grown human being at twenty—or very nearly so. And Kristoff's strength had been ebbing long before he'd set foot in that courtyard and its developing squall. Gerda discovered them at the back door—two half-drowned children (because no self-preserving adult would behave with such complete lack of sense). She'd shepherded them into the nearest room with an active fire in the grate, and Kristoff had laid the princess gingerly on a couch before collapsing, exhausted, in the chair that was offered to him.

Now the air of the room was filled with an unwholesome stillness. For the briefest moment, Elsa wanted to turn away from it. But then she moved, her eyes making brief contact with the housemistress before turning to land on her sister. Kristoff saw this and attempted to stand, but she shook her head at him. It was neither the time nor the place to observe formalities. He understood and made no further acknowledgement of her presence, just turned his head and closed his eyes.

Anna was sleeping. Her expression was troubled, and she made fitful movements beneath her coverings. She seemed to murmur without producing sound—as if she were speaking to someone dear, someone close. It reminded the queen of those times that had been lost to them, before Anna's memories had been taken and altered, when the girls shared a room and whispered to each other long into the winter night. Now, Elsa knelt beside her sister and reached for her hand. When she saw that her own were feathered with frost, however, and she stopped herself.

No one spoke. The queen could not find her voice.

"Your Majesty," ventured Gerda. She wrung her hands. "Thank goodness you're here ..."

Elsa acknowledged her kindly, but remained silent for some time. Calm down, she instructed herself. You can handle this. She allowed these words to resonate in her mind before speaking again, and by the time she was ready to do so the pulse of her magic had become more or less manageable.

"Have you sent for the physician?" she asked at length. Her hands convulsed and so she fisted them in her lap.

"Yes, ma'am."

Elsa's eyes shifted toward Kristoff.

"Perhaps you can find him some dry clothes?" she suggested quietly. It was necessary, of course. But it was also a silent dismissal.

Gerda nodded and excused herself.

Somewhere, a clock ticked its metronomic pulse in the shadows. And the three companions—each perhaps thinking or dreaming that the others were all they had in the world—waited for the physician to arrive. Anna, murmuring restively; Kristoff, sleeping in spite of his best efforts to stay alert for her; and Elsa, the queen of the realm, fighting tears as she crouched beside her feverish, foolish sister.

Stupid girl, she thought, though it wasn't entirely clear whether she meant Anna or herself.

A few tears slipped past her best defenses, then. They ran cold tracks down her colder cheeks, but she no longer tried to restrain them. She leaned forward and held Anna's hand until the magic in her own grew to be too much. Then she returned it softly to the blanket and bowed her head.

This may be a little rough around the edges. I've actually been going back and developing and editing previous chapters, so this one will probably get a similar treatment at some point.