QUICK NOTES:

I'm sorry, everyone, for the delay. It's simply harder to write. But I have not abandoned this story.

Revised somewhat to try to get at the elephant in the room that I've been alluding to all this time (the incident with Hans/the accident with Kristoff). Elsa hasn't entirely reconciled with the past yet, though she's made steps toward doing so in becoming more of an open ruler and sister. Making an actual friend out of Kristoff, without Anna to mediate between them, is a big deal for her. That's what I'm trying to get at, here. I'll do it better when I have a chance to rework this chapter.

I've decided to post in spite of the fact that this one is more unevenly developed than I would like. I haven't taken the time to edit like I usually do, but too much time has passed between updates. I had to publish something.

It's a fixer-upper.

A reminder that this takes place in the Victorian Era. And that Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 17

"Hang on," said Kristoff. He was calm, purposeful. Gently, he gathered the princess in his arms and rearranged her, along with her blankets, so that no part of her body came in contact with his own. Then he turned his attention back to Elsa.

"Just in case," he said evenly.

Elsa nodded. She stood and took a reluctant step forward.

"Are you sure about this?"

She was nervous. Tiny slivers of ice seemed to agitate from her fingertips like embers from a fire, and so she buried her hands in her skirt to hide them from Kristoff. He didn't appear to notice.

"Yeah," he returned. Then he shrugged and offered up a wan smile.

He wasn't as confident as he let on—Elsa could see this plainly. But she was grateful, all the same, that he was trying to affect composure in this way. She studied his face for a moment, his disheveled hair, his tired features. There was so much to say, so many regrets and apologies and pent-up admissions of guilt. And it was clear to her that they were not all for him—not really, though he was certainly deserving. Still, it was more than that. Because as she stood, now, poised to destroy this fever in him—he'd come to represent something else entirely …

Maybe this was her chance to make amends. She'd proven herself to be an adequate ruler, a more benign sister, a friendlier presence in the lives of those she ministered to and interacted with. But the past had never stopped haunting her, and so she had never quite let down her guard. Until Anna had fallen ill and she and Kristoff had become something of a team.

She wanted to be more to her people than someone who was deserving of respect and adoration, but only from a careful distance. She wanted to be more than a cherished liability.

Elsa blinked. She shook herself. She needed to focus her attention on the present, on Kristoff. Not the past, and not the future. She had to pull herself together if any of them were going to have one of those anyway.

Kristoff was watching her now, his expression pragmatic.

"It's all right," he said simply.

And she felt herself smiling back at him, her friend the rustic reindeer king—grumpy and graceless and blessedly, supremely uncomplicated. It was all right. It would be. She'd make it so.

She squared her shoulders and regarded him seriously. They were very nearly eye-level with each other now. Imposing though she could be, the queen was not a tall woman. Kristoff had enough height on him to match her gaze while seated—if he didn't slouch too much. It occurred to her that she would have to move fast if she wanted to prevent him from lashing out in her direction. The cold would be a shock, of course, and there was no way of knowing how he would respond to it this time. After all, the circumstances were completely different than they were before. For one thing, she was using the magic on him deliberately. For another, they had agreed that she would maintain her hold until she was certain it had worked on the fever. Neither of them cared to question the depth of her certainty. It was an act both blind and desperate, and they knew it.

"Sit up straight," she commanded.

She would just have to fake the mettle of a queen until she believed it was legitimately hers. After all, she'd been faking it all along, hadn't she? Keeping a polite distance from everyone else, even Anna. She and her sister had been able to repair their relationship to a certain extent, but not entirely. Not so long as Elsa was afraid to save her own family by using the magic that lay in her fingertips—magic that served as the perfect counterpoint to the fever that threatened everyone she loved.

Kristoff did as he was told. He watched her expectantly, and she felt a rush of profound tenderness for her friend. She leveled her gaze at him, willing him to understand her in the way that she had come to understand him over the course of their alliance to save Arrendelle.

"Thank you," she whispered.

She took a slow breath and relaxed into the cold, cupping her hands loosely before her. She saw that Kristoff swallowed nervously, in spite of himself, but he stayed put. She allowed the magic to collect in the hollow of her hands, and without giving Kristoff a chance to recoil from her touch, she brought her fingers to his temples.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then his eyes widened. He shut them tight and his skin grew pale. He tried to turn away from her, but there was no strength in the movement. Elsa looked at him apologetically, tried to hold his gaze in order to offer him some assurance that this would all be over soon. But he kept his eyes closed.

She wanted to end it. Her magic was a terrible thing, twisted and cruel, and in confronting it head-on in this way, witnessing its effect on Kristoff as she had failed to do the last time, she began to doubt their foolish, reckless plan. But she did not let go. She rebuffed those uncertainties with all of the discipline she had once used to rebuff her sister. It took tremendous self-control, refusing to let the fear overwhelm her. If she were to control the magic, though, she needed to keep that fear at bay. Otherwise, they would be right back where they were that day on North Mountain. Which meant that she wouldn't just destroy Kristoff's fever—she would destroy Kristoff.

The thought wormed its way into her consciousness, then, and she wrenched her hands away from him before she could do any more harm. This was a terrible idea. What was she thinking? Breathing heavily, she staggered back and stared at her friend.

His eyes were open.

"Kristoff?" she ventured.

But he just stared back at her without seeing, apparently in shock. Hastily, she pulled on her gloves and waved a tentative hand in front of his face. She grasped his shoulder and shook him a little. He was cold to the touch. She could tell—she could feel it. She, who was immune to the sensation, could feel that Kristoff was cold.

"Oh, God," she gasped, bringing her hands to her heart as though someone had struck her there. What had she done?

Is this how it had happened before? When she'd lashed out with her magic and pierced the boy in the heart? She didn't remember. She'd fled before she could suffer the consequences of what she had done to him. That task had been left to Anna.

"I'm sorry!" she cried now. She reached for him again. She needed him to hear this—because they didn't talk about it. They never did. Not since the first time, anyway, when they'd stood by the waterfront and she'd tried to apologize for leaving him to die alone on that mountain.

He hadn't wanted to hear it, back then. He'd been uncomfortable. He'd been confused.

"You don't need to do this," he'd said, followed by the startled afterthought: "Um, Your Majesty ..."

He'd had no idea how to speak to her. Anna wasn't with him at the time, and it was the first occasion he'd ever had to suffer an audience with the queen without anyone present to guide him through the ordeal. Elsa could see how miserable it made him. She'd tried to smile reassuringly, but her efforts were weakened by her own brand of misery.

"Just Elsa, Kristoff," she'd said, attempting without much success to make eye contact with him.

"Right. OK"

They'd fallen silent. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun had washed the city in broad strokes of deepening, rose-colored light. Kristoff's eyes strayed to the mountains. They, too, were painted in the soft, saturated tones of summer. Elsa followed his gaze and took in the alpenglow.

"Will you go back to work?" she'd asked, and then immediately berated herself for doing so. It was a stupid question. She bit her lip and turned away, averting her eyes to the harbor.

"I don't think so," he'd said. There was no accusation in his voice when he added, "Not this season."

It was a generous response, though sincere, and Elsa nodded. Of course there was no way he'd be resilient enough to handle the work this summer—not having lost so much of his strength to the accident and its aftermath. He was much thinner than he had been, for one thing. He'd been incapable of eating or drinking sufficiently, at first, or of doing a great deal of anything besides sleeping ...

Elsa hadn't wanted to intrude on his recovery, then, and Gerta—speaking for society at large, apparently—had reminded her that it was not seemly for a woman of station to linger in a man's private chambers. But neither did the queen want to wait too long to say what she needed to say. Because apologizing to the people of Arrendelle was not enough. Elsa knew this, and Kristoff dreaded it.

Thus, a week or two had passed by the time the queen and her guest had found themselves in their current predicament. It was only recently that the doctor had permitted him to walk about the castle grounds, and so she'd asked him to meet her "that-evening-if-it wasn't-too-much-trouble."

"I don't know how to make this right," she'd said to him, in the end, something in her voice breaking down, the detachment that she had been trained to uphold as queen but that did not come naturally to her. She felt so terrible, so perverse, and she was afraid she might cry.

Kristoff had turned to her, then, alarmed.

"Please don't," he'd said. His eyes flashed to the hills and back, and she saw him struggle with the idea of having to comfort the queen. He licked his lips nervously. "I don't need you to. I mean ... wait. I mean, there's nothing to make right."

Elsa wrung her hands. She nodded at the ground. This was going all wrong.

"Thank you," she'd said. She expected him to excuse himself and retreat from this horrible travesty of a confession at once. He didn't want her to apologize; he just wanted to go home. He would probably remain as far from the city as he possibly could, from now on, and Elsa felt a pang of regret for her sister. Once again, Anna would be deprived of an actual, genuine friendship, and it would be Elsa's fault.

But he was still standing there, all awkward and … tall. Looking at her strangely.

Had he finally summoned the nerve to tell her off? He certainly had a right to. She steeled herself for a tongue-lashing that never came.

"Hey," he said kindly. Elsa looked up from her feet. "It's not your fault," he continued, his voice serious and soft. "It's not, Your Majesty. It's just ... not."

And that was that. The whole damned business was locked away in a vault of polite avoidance, and Elsa and Kristoff went about the matter of ruling and recuperating, and of handling Anna between them. Elsa made Kristoff her official "Ice Master and Deliverer," and Kristoff called the queen "Your Majesty" in spite of the pleasantness that existed when they were, all three of them, in each other's company.

Until now. Because while Arrendelle was plagued by a blistering heat rather than a punishing freeze, and while Anna was no longer able to divert them from the millstone of the past, the two had grown together, in the way that friends do. And Elsa had ruined it like she always did.

"I'm sorry," she said again. It wasn't enough. It never would be.

But then Kristoff blinked—once, twice, several times more—and shot her a piercing, concentrated look. Elsa brought a hand to her mouth and suppressed a cry of relief.

"Kristoff …" she began, but it was a question.

He didn't answer. Why didn't he answer?

"Are you OK?" she breathed. She examined him fretfully. He looked all right, in spite of the pallor of his skin and the general haggardness that seemed to befall all those who'd been affected by the fever.

But what if she'd gone too far?

Kristoff was moving, though. He brought a hand to his head and finally spoke. "I don't know ..." he said roughly.

Elsa sank to the table, relieved at the sound of his voice. He was conscious, capable of movement, and relatively coherent.

"Are you hurt?" she asked gently.

He shook his head, winced a little, and she understood. Headache.

"I'm sorry."

An arch look, as if to tell the queen to shut up already. It was not something she would have expected from him some months ago, but now it was familiar and reassuring. She felt better.

"OK," she said, relenting. "But, otherwise …" Gesturing vaguely. "Um … How do you feel?"

Silence. Then—

"Cold."

They considered this … Kristoff feeling cold might be a sign that his fever had, indeed, been broken and his temperature was beginning to regulate normally again. In other words, he was cold because Elsa had made him so. But a chill might also simply be a symptom of the fever, itself; in which case, he was cold because the fever made him so.

Either way, at that moment he was suddenly taken by a fresh wave of exhaustion, and he slumped back against the couch. Elsa reached out and draped one of Gerda's many blankets over him.

"I'm still alive," he murmured.

"What?"

"You didn't freeze me, Elsa," he said. "I'm still here."

Elsa sat back against the table. She stole a glance at her sister, curled up on the far end of the sofa. Then she turned her gaze back to Kristoff. He was pale, true, but this was perhaps an improvement considering the unnatural flush of Anna's skin, the apathy in her limbs. And there was something else, too ... something in his eyes ...

He narrowed them at her now, as though suspicious of whatever it was that she'd been thinking, and she saw it. They were sharp. Keen. Fully alive in a way that she hadn't quite seen in them in the last few days.

"I think it worked," she said breathlessly.

He regarded her for a moment, and then nodded in a wondering sort of way, slowly and cautiously, as though wary of getting his hopes up.

"Can I—?" Elsa asked.

She made a hesitant gesture in his direction. The magic had subsided in her fingers by now. If Kristoff were still overly warm or overly cold, she would know it.

He opened his mouth to respond but she didn't wait to hear what he had to say. She needed to act quickly if this thing had worked—really and truly worked. Her sister counted on it, Kai counted on it; the city of Arendelle counted on it. So she pressed her hand against his forehead, briefly, as she had done with Anna once before.

It was cool.