QUICK NOTES:

Look, this is a rushed job. But it's been far too long. I'm sorry.

Please stay tuned. I am going to go back to this chapter for sure and flesh it out. It's a little … unusual. Just, well, it's a more literal iteration of the story's title.

As always, Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 18

Anna was knee-deep in snow, breaking trail along a vaguely familiar line of hardscrabble spruce. She bent forward, feeling alternately chilled to the bone and heated by exertion. Drifts of an unyielding white lay before her, lovely and terrible, and as she struggled to move through them she could not escape the feeling that something—or someone—was attending her progress. It seemed to move without difficulty through the same cruel landscape that would have Anna stagger to her knees, but it hovered just beyond the periphery of her vision. Tagging along, or securing her safety—she couldn't tell which. This presence kept pace with her, but never made itself known. Like a ghost.

It didn't feel menacing, though. In fact, it seemed entirely unaware of its disembodied state. It just sort of dogged her steps in an affable way, if that was possible, unspeaking but also unceasing in its companionship.

Anna was not afraid. She stopped her dismal trudging and tugged sweat-slick strands of hair from her face.

"Where are you?" she asked the mountain.

It didn't answer.

She peered into the stillness above her, a rising mass of white against the pewter-gray sky.

Nothing.

"Elsa?" she breathed.

But it wasn't Elsa. Not this time.

An aimless wind swept the pine bows below and behind her, then. She bent her head to it and marched on, and the ghost marched with her.

She wasn't entirely sure where she was going or why she was going there. Every now and then she paused and asked the mountain to reveal its secret or clarify its purpose or acknowledge her loneliness, but it did not. So she gathered her cloak and kept going.

Time passed, though there was no way of knowing how long she'd been lumbering through the snow because the sky never changed. Sweat slipped beneath her collar, and she shivered. She needed to find warmth; conversely, she wanted to shed her stifling layers. The mountain kept its silence.

She continued this way for an hour, or a day, or several—until finally her legs buckled beneath her and she fell. She gave a convulsive sob. The snow both stung and soothed her cheeks. It seeped through her clothes, soaked her raw skin, and at once the princess felt a contradictory surge of fear and relief. She let her body go slack in the snow.

"Don't do that," said the ghost.

Anna closed her eyes. "I'm not doing anything," she replied dully.

"Right," it retorted. "That's my point."

Somewhere the wind picked up, teased the pines again. She could hear their trunks creak in the draft.

"I'm tired," she said.

"I know."

Anna frowned against the cold. "I was looking for something."

"Yes."

"Elsa?" she asked.

"You found her."

Anna sighed. "I did."

Silence. She waited for the ghost to speak, but it didn't.

"What am I doing here?" she slurred, at last, and when no response was forthcoming she opened her eyes. With difficulty, she lifted her head from her pillow of snow.

"Anna, get up," said the ghost.

A figure swam indistinctly before her. She narrowed her eyes as though peering through a veil of sleet.

"I don't want to," she murmured. "I'm comfortable."

"You have to."

That voice … it retracted into something familiar, now. Anna stirred, wiping the mingled sweat and snowmelt from her eyes. Then she smiled.

"It's you!" she said happily. "Hi."

Kristoff slouched atop a drift of snow, his legs splayed out in front of him, his mittened hands loose in his lap. He was studying the landscape below them, the forest thickening as it crowded up against the walls of Anna's city. He turned to her and smiled back.

"Are you a ghost?" she asked.

He looked away and shrugged. "I don't know," he answered vaguely. "Maybe."

Anna pushed herself up into a sitting position, deep in her well of snow, and followed his gaze. She didn't understand.

"You lost your hat," she said.

"Yeah."

A rarefied edge of remembrance. "There was a slide …" she continued quietly. "An avalanche."

Kristoff didn't answer, so she turned to him in exasperation. There was something that she needed to remember, and maybe he was here to help her—but if that was so, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. Before she could say as much, however, the words died in the air between them. Because suddenly Kristoff's features had changed. There was something spectral about his appearance now, his face narrowed, his skin drained of color, his eyes dark. In the unforgiving light of winter, he was not himself.

Anna looked away, shaken. She hugged her knees and felt the cold cutting into her damp clothes. For a while, she said nothing. Then—

"What happened to you?" she whispered.

She felt him turn to look at her. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing happened to me."

Anna stared at the distant fjords. Kristoff's appearance frightened her. She felt dizzy and confused, and she did not want to see the ghost that had replaced her friend.

"You were freezing," she said. She felt hot tears stinging her eyes. "You were going to die."

He didn't respond right away. Anna risked a glance in his direction, and he was Kristoff again—simple and strong and sitting there next to her with a matter-of-fact expression on his face.

"I didn't," he said simply.

The princess smiled through her tears. She wanted to throw her arms around him, prove to herself that he was real, but then she felt a wave of nauseating heat sweep through her body. She had the sudden desire to peel off her mittens, her hat, her cloak. She should lie down on the mountain and sleep. Maybe forever.

"Don't," said Kristoff.

Anna sniffed. The tears burned her frost-nipped cheeks.

"I'm tired," she cried.

Kristoff was silent for a moment.

"Hang on," he murmured. His voice sounded far away, suddenly, as though he was speaking from a great distance—as though he wasn't even here, sitting atop the snow, high up on the North Mountain. "Just in case …"

Anna shook her head in confusion. "What?"

A gust of wind, more forceful than the last, came through and kicked up fresh clouds of loose snow. Anna narrowed her eyes, but her vision was obscured by the squall.

"It's all right," she heard him say.

"Kristoff?" demanded Anna. "Are you there?"

A phantom of his words, unintelligible now, scattered in the wind. Anna lifted a hand to shield her eyes against the sudden onslaught.

"Kristoff!"

"Yeah."

The wind coiled tightly around her, and with it a strange whisper that wasn't Kristoff's. Anna thought she recognized the husk of a familiar accent.

"Sit up straight."

She obeyed without even thinking. "Who's there?"

No response.

"Hello?" she cried. "Kristoff?"

"Oh, God," breathed the new voice. It whispered along the mountain's flanks, mimicking the sound of an expiring wind. Susurrations of "I'm sorry!I'm sorry!I'm sorry!" swept over the ridge of weightless, moistureless snow.

"Kristoff …" said Anna. He didn't answer. Why didn't he answer?

"Are you hurt?" asked the new voice, resonating and deflecting in the unalloyed air. Anna nodded.

"Cold," she whispered. And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the tempest came to a stop.

"I'm still alive," said Kristoff suddenly. He sat before her, again, as though he had never left. "I'm still here."

Anna closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. Her lungs burned.

"You're not a ghost," she stated.

Kristoff shook his head.

"You didn't die."

"No," he said quietly. "I didn't."

Anna wiped her eyes with the back of a soggy mitten. She sniffled inelegantly. Why, though? The thought of closing her eyes and letting the fever take her … it was so tempting. Why hadn't Kristoff surrendered to the mountain during those terrible long days in her sister's palace of ice? Why hadn't he given himself up to the cold as she was drawn, now, to give herself up to this awful, searing heat?

He watched her, his ears tipped with pink in the wind. He didn't seem to mind. He was waiting for her to remember.

And in that moment, as the ragged clouds above them parted to reveal a splinter of night sky, she did. The recollection bloomed in her mind, unfolding like a pale flower in a frozen landscape, and it emerged with such perfect clarity that it took her breath away.

"I found you," she said softly. "I brought you home."

"That's right." His voice barely a whisper now, carried away on the wind. He followed the spindrift with his eyes, tracking its flight back to Arrendelle and the fjords below. Then he, too, was gone, leaving behind him a presence. A memory. A ghost.

Home, thought Anna. She gazed down at her picturesque city and watched as the bank of heavy clouds disintegrated into torn fragments, each briefly illuminated against a backdrop of stars before vanishing into the firmament. The settling wind carried with it a handful of frozen particles and a last scattering of words:

"I think it worked …"

And then the world erupted in a forceful explosion of cold.