QUICK NOTES:

In which Anna has her Beatrice moment! But instead of being comical and ironic and all Much Ado About Nothing, her epiphany is bittersweet and sad. Sorry.

I've noticed, though this was not at all planned, that I seem to be rather fixated on the idea of memory here. Throughout the whole damn story, actually. Not sure what this means, but apparently I seem to think that these characters can only come to understand themselves in a retrospective way. Maybe because all three of them have such profoundly lonesome beginnings? Because, seriously. They do.

As always—or at least, lately—this will see revisions in the future. And Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 20

Arendelle Castle had an impressive library. As a child, Anna would wander into it—or pedal her bicycle there, as was often the case—to distract herself from her loneliness. Often she would retreat to this place, not so much to read as to dwell in the company of what must have been an infinity of words. That's how it seemed to her, anyway: the stodgy air was full of potential. There must have been thousands of unuttered words in that room, just waiting to be given a voice.

She liked it there.

Now it was filled with the diffuse light of winter, a darkly luminescent, feeble sort of grey that lingered—unchanging—from morning to premature night. Outside, the snow continued to fall.

Anna reclined in a heavily stuffed, heavily brocaded chair in a corner by the window. In her hands she held a mug of warm tea, which she sipped out of habit rather than need. She had created for herself a small nest of clean blankets and a large stack of books that she had no intention of reading. Instead, she leaned her head against the back of the chair and listened to the storm outside. She had never felt quite so tired in her life, except for maybe that one time when she'd driven Kristoff's sleigh down from the North Mountain.

He'd gone to get some rest—hours ago, she supposed—but Anna wasn't sleepy. At least, not at the moment. She had too much to think about.

Early that morning—or what approximated to morning in those latitudes—Elsa left the palace with big boots, bare hands, and a gaggle of physicians in tow. She would not return again until late in the evening. Thus she had continued every day since she'd cured Anna of the fever, and though the people of Arendelle were many—and though they were quite dispersed throughout the kingdom—she would continue to work tirelessly until every last one of them was made safe.

The queen would see to it that this was so.

Anna gazed, without really seeing, out the window. When she was a little girl, she'd loved these blustery days every bit as much as she'd loved this library. On the other side of the casement, separated from her by a thin, transparent plane, a storm would thunder and rage and obliterate the world around her. She'd feel safe and warm in her room, leaning her elbows on whatever furniture was available and imagining herself in a burrow of powdery snowdust the next morning. If only her parents would let her go outside, which they rarely did in winter. Queen Idun would look at her worriedly if she so much as loitered too long by the window, though the child never discovered why …

How differently she felt now. It wasn't that she feared the squall or the snow, or even the cold. But she dreaded the return of loneliness that recent experience had stirred in her. Now, winter had come to represent—if not bereavement, then the very real threat of it. After all, it was in the midst of winter (unnatural though it may have been) that she had nearly lost her sister for a second time. And in a way that would have been—really and truly—irreversible.

Anna shuddered. Gifted though she was in the way of exuberant chatter, she had no words to express the cruelty of what Hans had done. Or almost done. Because, for the briefest of moments, Elsa had returned to her. And in the process, quite by accident, Anna had discovered Kristoff. And she could never, ever, ever go back to the way things were before.

Ever.

Hans would have systematically taken that away from her: first, by condemning her sister to the gallows, and then by leaving her friend to a harrowing, horrible fate. Anna understood, now, that he would have appropriated everything that belonged to her. And in the process, he would have stolen everyone she loved ...

A sudden gust outside the window sent a flurry of particles against the glass. Anna hugged her knees and, without realizing it, held her breath until the horror of what might have been subsided. Then, moving slowly and still feeling weakened by recent events, she propped the teacup on her stack of books and closed her eyes.

She had never really been in the habit of despairing. Even in the past, roaming the empty palace as that fragile, lonely little girl, she'd been relentlessly hopeful. She'd knock on her sister's door, fully expecting that this time—this time—the sequestered princess would emerge.

And then, nearly two years ago, she did! Elsa had come of age; she could no longer hide from her people. Arendelle was having its renaissance: the gates were thrown open, the salad plates were retrieved from wherever they'd been packed away, and for the first time in forever, Anna was not alone.

It was like a dream …

Until it wasn't. Suddenly the winter came, followed by the accident on the mountain and the incident that followed. And then Anna—cheerful, optimistic Anna—started to lose hope. It happened that night after confronting her sister, when the princess stood again in the halls of Arendelle, and her solitude loomed before her like a sentence.

She'd held fast to Kristoff's hand, back then, after they'd come down from the mountain. They were in that small, stuffy room. Gerda had gone to fetch something or other, Pabbie hadn't arrived yet, and Anna had just had her heart broken by that sociopath from the Southern Isles.

She was, in that moment, lonelier than she'd ever been since the death of her parents.

So Anna had stood, bedraggled and barefooted, at a careful distance from him, her candid, credulous little heart still raw from Hans's betrayal. She'd needed someone to comfort her, and her parents, sister, and so-called true-love were—all of them—gone.

But the fact remained that she was not alone. Not technically, anyway.

Kristoff was there.

She'd watched him dully for a moment, then inched closer. For some reason, she'd felt shy. Timid. It made very little sense, really. They'd just spent several days bickering their way through the mountains together. They'd even shared the same carrot!

Also? He was asleep.

But that wasn't quite right, either. He wasn't just asleep. This was something else, and it made Anna feel, suddenly, that she might cry.

She'd edged closer still, and waited. And then, reassured that she wouldn't wake him but confoundingly distraught by the same insight, she'd reached for his hand.

It was buried under all those blankets, of course, but when her fingers slipped around his wrist—the good one, fortunately—she'd felt a shock of bitterness so profound that she let go at once. For a long time, she'd stared at him, wide-eyed and short of breath. This was what her sister was capable of? This was the secret that kept Elsa hidden for so many years? Because what Anna had felt was not just a chill: it was a deep and unfathomable cold, and it filled her with dread.

She'd wept for Elsa's suffering. And for her own loss. Things would go back to the way they were before. The queen would withdraw to her state rooms and govern behind closed doors, and Anna would wander the palace alone.

So the princess fell, at last, into despair.

She'd stood in that dismal room for a long time. Unmoving. Benumbed by grief. She knew that her sister would be safe from Hans's indictment now that they had proof of his treachery. She would find Elsa in the morning and bring her home, where the latter would preside over the kingdom from her place of confinement. Elsa would be saved, but for what kind of life?

And then there was Kristoff, who wouldn't be saved at all. Anna had gazed at him for a moment, and she'd felt a strange, aching sort of void in the pit of her chest. It was vaguely familiar, though only later would she recognize it for what it was. She had felt it once before, of course, when she'd lost her parents—whom she'd loved with all her heart.

On impulse, and before she could lose her nerve, Anna had bent forward and touched her lips to Kristoff's hair. She'd been aiming for his cheek, but as she wasn't accustomed to kissing people—and as she'd closed her eyes to do so in that moment—she'd misjudged the distance between them and her lips landed lightly in the neighborhood of his temple.

It was brief, and it was sad, but Anna did not regret it. Resolutely, she'd smeared a hand over her eyes and under her nose, and then she'd sniffed and straightened her posture. This time, she would hold onto him in spite of—or rather, because of—the cold. So she'd wrapped her right hand around his left and covered them both with the blankets. And then she'd willed herself to maintain her grasp until the chill took her breath away, and even then she'd kept her fingers tightly curled around his.

Eventually, though, the ice in Kristoff's blood had gotten to be too much for her, and with a gasp of pain she'd released her hold and cradled her burning palm to her chest. He hadn't responded, and so she'd simply fallen to watching him breath until exhaustion took her, and then she'd curled up on top of the covers next to him and gone to sleep.

Pabbie would find them this way in the morning, but it wouldn't be until months later—as Anna dozed in the library after another, very different ordeal—that she would fully comprehend what all of this meant.