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Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 15

Kristoff was dimly aware of the royal physician moving about the room, knees crepitating as he bent to examine his charge. Someone else was scraping ash around the firebox to the right of him. Against this sound, the physician's voice was barely distinguishable. He spoke in a low tone—not to Anna, and probably not to the person who was tending, now, to the tinder and brushwood, though Kristoff was too disoriented to figure out who it was. He cracked his eyelids open a bit to see …

And the voices stopped.

"I think that perhaps we should continue this conversation elsewhere," remarked the physician.

The response was subdued; a woman's voice, but Kristoff could make out neither whom it belonged to nor what it said.

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the old man replied.

Oh, thought Kristoff. The queen, then.

That made sense.

He closed his eyes again and listened to their receding footsteps: one set heavy and deliberate, the other light and somehow insubstantial. The drawing room door creaked on its hinges, and a third set of steps—Gerda's?—hastened from the fireside to catch up to the others. Then the door closed behind them, and Kristoff was alone.

For a moment, he idled in a sort of dream state, not asleep but also not quite awake. Neither did he feel hot nor cold, thirsty nor sated, in pain nor at ease. He was simply none of these things and all of them at once. In fact, he was really only conscious of those loose physical paradoxes as they related to his current state of being—which was bumfuzzled, at best.

Bumfuzzled …

Where had that come from? It wasn't a word at all, really. In fact, it sounded like just the sort of invented prattle that Anna would come up with and then try to pass off as legitimate. Like the time she described a particularly lavish state dinner as a monumentous affair. Or the time when she snuck a piece of chocolate from the kitchens even though she'd "given it up" for Lent, and she'd announced to Kristoff that it was positively sacrilicious.

"That's not even a word," he'd remarked, unaware that Elsa had said much the same thing to the princess on more than one occasion.

"Sure it is."

"No," he said. "It isn't"

Now he opened his eyes—all the way, this time—and sat up as best he could. It appeared that he'd been dozing in an elaborately curved armchair and under several mismatched blankets. The latter were a little damp because, he observed matter-of-factly, he was a little damp. His clothes were, at any rate, and his hair. This realization caused him to shiver, and a deep chill settled upon him in spite of the room's heat.

But he didn't really care about all that, at the moment. Because he saw her, there on the couch, and she was looking at him. And everything that had happened before now resurfaced in his poor, addled head: the conversation with Olaf; the long-awaited and yet thoroughly disheartening reunion with Anna; the rain and the rain and the rain. The princess peered at him languidly, but in a way that was also strangely attentive. Watchful. As though she'd been awake for some time …

He blinked back at her, at a loss for words, so that she was the first to speak. Which is how it would have been under ordinary circumstances, anyway.

"Hi," she said.

He'd been looking right at her. It should have come as no surprise that she would say something, because Anna always had something to say. But Kristoff still startled at the sound of her voice like a deer caught by a pair of soft-pedaling hikers, and this made her smile. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, feeling slow and stupid.

"Hi," he muttered. And then, taken by a sudden effusiveness and wishing to elaborate, he added: " Um ... hi."

She regarded him without further comment, her expression raw and weary. She was pleased to see him, though. That much even Kristoff could understand. He felt pressured to speak, had so much to tell her, but of course he could think of nothing to say. Everything was so strange—vague and blurry around the edges, though he couldn't quite comprehend why. So he fidgeted in his chair a bit, looked at and away from the princess a few times, and opened his mouth in what amounted to be several false starts before he managed, eventually, to articulate a thought.

Meanwhile, Anna was studying him with an expression that managed to be both arch and affectionate at the same time. He grew more flustered. She was too quick for him, too canny even now, when her senses were no doubt dulled by the fever. There was no way he could keep up with her. Seriously, why had ever tried? How could he possibly have thought that he could make a suitable companion for this girl? Or ... woman, rather. Princess.

She understood differently, of course. And while it may have been that Anna was naive about some things ... or, well, most things, really ... she was unequivocal about this. Anna knew Kristoff. It was like one of those strange singularities that some people had, like the ability to read two pages at once, or to mentally calculate numbers up to 39 figures, or play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto Number One, flawlessly and without any musical training, upon a single hearing. Anna could interpret Kristoff's moods precisely, better than she could her own, better perhaps than he could himself. For some inexplicable reason, she just got him in the same way that he got ice. Or Sven. It was tacit and intuitive and, as far as she knew, entirely one-sided.

But it was as true as anything in her experience. And so she watched over him with a sense of kindness and tenderness and maybe something even a little bit more.

"Use your words," she teased at last, and Kristoff shot her a look.

"Were you ..." He flinched. His voice had come out thready and rough, and it made him feel small. He tried again. "Were you, uh, watching me? Just … well. Now?"

Much better.

Anna raised her eyebrows. "What?"

Her tone was off. Wary, evasive. But Kristoff, being Kristoff—and showing the incompetence of a man who'd spent the majority of his life in meaningful conversation with sentient rocks and an enabling reindeer—forged ahead with the question.

"Um, sleep?" he said, by way of clarification. "I mean, me?"

Anna seemed to comprehend his meaning in spite of this tortured syntax, and her response was to rear back against the couch with an expression of horror etched across her face. She scrunched up her nose.

"What?" she cried. "No!"

Kristoff nodded, at once embarrassed.

"Who even does that?" she went on. "That's just ... No!"

"Okay."

"I mean, noooooo sir." She pulled an errant strand of hair from her cheek and gestured vaguely. "Not me. No way."

"Right. I know. I was just ..."

He'd said the wrong thing. Of course he'd said the wrong thing. And now he'd gone and affronted the princess. He wanted to drop his head in his hands.

Anna, though, continued to splutter through her objections until, finally, she ran out of steam. Then it was her turn to feel embarrassed.

She'd protested too much, hadn't she? Any fool could see it. She'd gone and done something weird. Like, again. And she'd dug in her heels and made Kristoff uncomfortable, which, in her defense, was an easy thing to do. But she'd just kept going, on and on, asserting and reasserting the fact that she was not in any way engaging in any sort of weird behavior. Which, of course, she was.

But Anna was a terrible liar.

They avoided each other's eyes for a beat or two. Anna traced an invisible pattern on the sofa and huffed mightily. Then she turned her head and murmured something that Kristoff couldn't hear.

He frowned. "What?"

She murmured again, but he just shook his head. Anna sighed.

"Yes," she hissed. "Maybe. A little."

He didn't respond immediately. Instead, he just crossed his arms, feeling vindicated.

"That's ... kind of creepy," he said at last.

She snorted, and the familiar sound pinched his heart cruelly. It was so crude, coming from her. So unbecoming of a princess. But it was also … endearing. Sweet, somehow. Like she couldn't be bothered to appear as anything but herself around him. Which was how it always was with her.

Except now she was sick. He could see it beneath the flush of her skin.

"There's not anything else to do," she countered. Then she smiled, and it was impish and familiar and just so normal. "You're entertaining," she said. "Didn't Sven ever tell you? You talk in your sleep."

He would have blushed if he weren't already running a temperature. Instead, he looked at his feet, the moulded ceiling, the various decorative knickknacks along the mantlepiece—as though these things were of the remotest interest to him. As though they were just infinitely fascinating.

"What, uh … what did I say?" he asked, affecting a casual tone. Not that it mattered or anything.

She laughed and ignored the question. He tried to smile back—he really did—but she looked so small, in spite of her grin, ensnared in all those blankets like some fragile animal. It troubled him to see her like that, and he felt a reflexive tightening in the back of his throat.

Anna noticed. She narrowed her eyes.

"Are you all right?" she demanded.

And he just stared at her.

"Don't worry about me," he said finally. He felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. How could she even ask him that?

They fell silent. Outside, the rain continued to batter the window casings. It was turning to sleet, now, and periodically the wind drove it hard against the glass. Soon, the snow would come. They were on the brink of winter, after all, and the temperature was dropping precipitously. Unless, of course, it was the queen …

Suddenly, Anna tensed. She inhaled sharply through her teeth and screwed her eyes shut. Kristoff wrestled with his own blankets and rose clumsily to his feet. The room pitched once and then righted itself.

"What is it?" he snapped. His voice was unexpectedly harsh.

Anna didn't answer. She was holding her breath. Some deep and abiding hurt was seizing her from within, and Kristoff began to panic. He moved toward her and then faltered, glancing at the door. He should get help ...

"Don't!" Anna cried. She reached for him.

But Kristoff didn't know what was wrong, couldn't imagine what she was feeling—not yet anyway—and so he had no idea how he could make her better.

"What can I do?" he whispered, but she just buried her face in the pillow.

He had never felt so helpless—not when he'd found himself short of rope at the top of a two hundred foot cliff, not when he'd broken through ice into frigid water, not even when he'd felt the very snow beneath his feet shudder and slide out from under him. He hadn't enough experience with people to know how to care for them in times like this. As a child, growing up in the clean mountain air, Kristoff had hardly ever fallen ill. And he was fairly certain that the methods of doctoring favored by your average human being were far, far different from those employed by the trolls.

So he just stood there, his arms hanging loosely—uselessly—at his sides, paralyzed by his fear for her.

Until she let out a slow breath. And another. She opened her eyes and uttered a shaky sigh.

"Can you—" she began. She moved beneath the blankets, shifting her position on the sofa. "Can you sit with me? Um, here?"

Kristoff blinked at her. It occurred to him that he, too, had been holding his breath, so he let it out and waited for his head to clear. Anna was looking at him expectantly.

"Yeah," he muttered, leaning down to help her make room for him. He supported her weight with a hand on each shoulder, holding her carefully, afraid she might break. "Of course."

Then he sat on the end and she settled against him, her head tucked in against the crook of his shoulder. His hand hovered above her for a moment—he didn't know where to put it—before finally coming to rest above her waist. Lightly. Awkwardly. He tried to give her a reassuring pat on the hip, which just came off wrong. So he settled for holding her in his own, tentative way. Like she was a wounded bird.

She was warm, though, really warm. Hot even. He closed his eyes and willed Elsa to come back—with or without the physician. He knew she hadn't gone far. They were just outside the room, in fact, their feet casting shadows beneath the crack of the door. So he waited—impatiently—because it had become clear to him that no doctor could save the princess.

But Elsa could. Elsa could do it.

Beside him, Anna stirred. "Kristoff?"

He twitched at the sound of her voice, then tried to relax for her. She was breathing evenly, now, against his side.

"Yeah?"

She didn't say anything, at first, so that Kristoff assumed she'd fallen back to sleep again. He took a deep breath and tried to find a more comfortable position for himself without disturbing her.

But then, in a whisper, she said, "I love you, too."