I don't own Frozen.
Jane made her move five days after Hans's visit. It took longer than she thought to recuperate, and as many days to pin down some form of schedule.
Though the disorienting lights were always on, Jane figured that she was fed meager meals twice a day within two hour windows. Once in the morning, and once in the evening. Doctors rotated in and out to perform tests, draw blood, and issue supercilious orders concerning her abilities. They came sporadically, but usually between meal times, with the exception of the lab techs picking up her plastic tray at (Jane estimated) the end of the work day. The lights would also dim during the evening (though Jane was unsure why this particular dimming was necessary, especially if they were testing her to possibly harvest her energy). There would be no shortage of power.
Regardless, this pattern, regimented as an Army boot-camp time-table, gave her her first advantage.
Foresight. Minimal, but still present.
For when the lights dimmed, someone-doctor or security or lowly technician-traded shifts. She had heard them, strained even, to pick up on the subtle differences that heralded a shift change. The opening of a door armed with a keypad… no, a retina scanner. The smooth slide of a switch that lowered the temperature, or heightened it by mere degrees. Her instincts were sharper than they had been in months, her powers primed and eager. Jane could sense power surges in the observation booth behind the glass. She could press her back to the wall and feel the buzzing tickle of cords and junctioned telephone wires running around the studs and through the building like veins and arteries in a warm body. Her powers had been diluted, somewhat suppressed over the past few months. Dulled even, because of Anna. But without Anna to put a lid on Jane's simmering charges, Jane felt as if she could shut the entire compound down with little more than a blink.
She felt powerful. The execution needed to be faster than a brain impulse, but escape was certain, not just possible.
Jane hit the camera first. A silent streak, quick as a blink, that didn't even leave the device smoking. She had been lying on the cot with her back to the window, knowing that whoever had just come on duty would assume her asleep. Now, they would have to contend with a surveillance snafu first thing on a night shift, which Jane was hoping to exploit. She slipped her pillow under her blanket as the overhead lights yielded to her powers, blinking in epileptic-like fits.
Best get out before he calls for back up.
One flicker, and then two and three, and before her guard had even returned his attention from what she supposed was now a snowy security screen, Jane was out the door and fleeing down a corridor, white as a sheet but silent as a shadow. She didn't even blow the lights; it had been unnecessary. Just a surge, and a flicker. Understatement. Stealth. How she had always operated, before the overkill that was Anna Arrendale. Her powers sang an anthem of freedom along her nerve endings, such that the locks (both electronic and manual) had been child's play to disable. She padded deer-like down the abandoned corridor and halted at the end, avoiding two lab techs rolling a cart with a monitor and possible Geiger counter on top of it. She had fifteen more seconds, thirty tops, before an alarm sounded and they shut everything down.
Do the unexpected.
Everyone assumes an escape route is on the bottom floor. So they dig tunnels, and attempt to hide themselves in the garbage or laundry carts in all of those prison-break films. But being part-lemur has its advantages, like the ability to scale a building, harness or none, and avoid detection while doing it. She had seen windows during her transport from the first room to the next, which translated to window sills. And window sills meant foot holds, hand holds, a veritable ladder for a climber of her skill. Add the fact that she'd have a decent survey of the surroundings and the advantage of open air to fend off any attack, and the roof was her best bet.
Oh, and lightning. Jane kept forgetting she possessed a weapon faster than the speed of sound, mainly because she didn't want to use it.
She dared not linger in the hallways. They would be closed off once the alarm sounded, and ducking into foreign rooms to check for windows would waste important seconds. It had been decided: she'd have to go up to go down.
As a precaution, Jane disabled camera after camera while she sprinted through the corridors, and (hallelujah!) stumbled across a lab coat on a hook in an abandoned hallway. She wrapped it tightly around her thin, gown-clad frame and buttoned it, climbing a flight of stairs and calling an elevator only to abandon the car altogether.
Red herring.
She was in the stairwell when the overhead halogen bulbs shut down and rotating blue emergency lights whirled into activity. An alarm blared, and it reminded her of a chugging locomotive, barreling down the tracks with unstoppable force. Jane ducked into the hallway on the next floor landing and hitched herself up into the maze of air vents. She then worked her way skyward, crawling spider-like in the silvery tunnel.
It had been roughly two minutes since she broke out of her little holding room. If nothing else, time was on her side.
And yes, perhaps it wasn't wise, wasn't her preferred plan to head to the roof, but Jane didn't want to think like her past self. She couldn't play into their traps, knowing so little and fearing the worst. Jane needed to trick these people who had studied her, who knew her tactics. She didn't know them, but standard procedure for any major facility in a crisis was a total building lock-down, which would only be lifted after security completed a floor-by-floor sweep of the premises.
Jane fought through her fatigue, becoming just the faintest bit winded from her exertion in the tiny vents. She figured she had at least ten minutes before any security team could mobilize, and another twenty if she continued unspotted and the team swept the building from the bottom up. By the time they reached the roof, she'd be at least two miles away on foot. Jane had the night for cover, and adrenaline to fuel her speed, and more than anything… desperation.
Hell hath no fury like lightning ready to burst.
She saw techs and men in rumpled suits and loose ties scrambling along the blue-lit corridors through the grates of the vents. Twenty feet above her, the shaft brightened and cut left at a right angle, hopefully signaling the end of her ascent. Jane could take fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds to catch her breath and give her body a reprieve.
Bright white light trickled through the grate ten feet from the terminus of the shaft. Jane was eager to bypass the top floor, but the scene playing out through the grate stopped her cold. Her bones were shivering, and her muscles wailing, and her head was mourning something she couldn't quite identify. She was jittery, as if over caffeinated, and nauseous, like she had just suffered some severe head trauma.
But not from electricity.
The image of Anna, healthy and safe, dressed in normal day-clothes with a mega-watt smile on her face was the mental photograph she had repeatedly conjured to sustain her over the past three weeks. To convince herself not to give up, to keep from surrendering not just to WGT, but to depression, to the what ifs. Anna was the reason she wouldn't accept the possibility that overheard conversations were real, why she held staunchly to the belief that drugs belied the truth and manipulated the hazy shapes she had seen while heavily medicated.
Because Anna was there, with her feet propped up on a fucking ottoman and an amber-filled glass in her hand. The drink had condensated, and there was a water ring on the desk table beside Anna, as if she'd been there a while. Just lounging.
The room was an office, austere and suave, without near the pretense that Frollo's had conveyed in Amsterdam. Instead of dark, classic cherry woods and musty books, the space before her was composed of sleek lines, glass panels, and monochromatic furniture. Hans was there, skinny tie drooping over his chest, a matching glass tumbler in his left hand. Situated behind the desk in a revolving, high-backed leather chair, he looked the picture of ease. The alarms blaring at him from floors below didn't seem to unsettle him or Anna.
Jane locked out her knees and pressed harder against the walls of the vent, the better to prop her body against the sides. She could move to the horizontal vent and peek from the grate at the other side of the room, but didn't want to chance leaving her direct escape route just because she was disconcerted by the duo's composure. Her muscles screamed under the strain, but it was no different than holding a yoga pose for a sustained amount of time. At least that's what she told herself while Anna was close enough to touch.
"Once we square away this fiasco, do you think we could head back into the city?" Anna asked, throwing the rest of her drink back.
Jane felt a familiar burn in the rear of her esophagus.
"You're assuming they'll get her back."
"I already told you, it's the elevator shafts. She rides on top of the cars, and climbs the cables if they're stationary. Check there," Anna said, and Jane felt the weight of a bus crushing her humerus, her tibia, her skull and metatarsals, and all the bones in between. Because she did ride the tops of elevators, and occasionally climbed the cables. Though the vents were her preferred avenues of infiltration and escape, and Anna knew that, which confused Jane even more.
"I told you, that's how we slipped you in Vegas," Anna chuckled. The woman seemed eager to reveal sensitive information to Hans.
Anna! How could you—
"And if she gets out?" Hans asked, nursing his drink.
"How many times have we been through this?" Anna huffed, and rose from her chair.
And Jane should really just go. Eavesdropping wasn't part of the plan, and speed, yes speed, was the only advantage she had if she didn't want to kill someone. And she didn't, truly. Jane just wanted to be left alone. She was coming back for Anna, after she studied the building, after she put a legitimate procedure in place, unlike this hasty, ill-managed retreat.
Jane was coming back for Anna, wasn't she?
Anna, who Jane believed was locked away in a confined room, just like she had been for weeks. Anna, in her white gown with bags under her eyes and light lost in her face. Anna, who they were torturing to get Jane to comply. Anna, whose agonized screams she had heard over the intercom. And Anna, who loved her, who wanted her, and oh god, why is she perched on his desk like some fucking ornamental paperweight?!
"If she gets out—" Anna began, plucking Hans's glass from his hand and setting it aside, "—then you use me. We can tape my screams again like we did the last time. Then put me on the phone, let me cry a little to her, and by the time she gets back here, they'll have another batch of that saline serum whatever that kept her so loopy for the first week or so. You just need to mix up another dart of that sedative you used on us in Louisiana so we can capture her."
Tape her screams? Like the last time?
…
…
…
Pain.
Nothing like a beating from ex-Marines, nor was it like slamming hard enough into the gritty cement that she dislocated her shoulder. But it was her heart, and it was breaking in an airshaft fifteen stories high with every word that Anna uttered.
Hans tugged on Anna's hand and she slipped in between his legs and hell, Jane was positive she was going to vomit right there in the middle of the shaft if something didn't break soon.
"I told you, you should have let me visit her at least once this week, just so she wouldn't get desperate," Anna said. "And now look what it got you."
"And I told you Weselton wanted to see how tightly he could wind her. Her emissions are progressing, each day she releases just a little more power."
"Yeah, but that's what killed your other one, wasn't it?"
Other one?
"No, drugging the bastard stupid and then hooking him up without the surge filter killed him. The doc thought he wouldn't burn him out, but the kid was basically powering the supercomputers here, breaking ciphers that should've taken centuries to decode. All that effort, at that speed, with that kind of power 24/7? Weselton wasn't going to chance it with Elsa."
Elsa… who… Elsa?
Her head throbbed, and pain ebbed and squashed her grey matter in steady time, like the resilient ticks of a metronome.
"And now I bet he doesn't even know where she is," Anna said. "Which means you'll have to talk him down from his spaz-attack and we'll miss our dinner reservation… again, Hans."
"He's batshit but he's also a genius. So what if he needs to be coddled every once in a while?" Hans asked. "He's delivered before, and he'll do it again."
"You'd probably trim his mustachioed nose hairs if he asked you to."
"Anna."
Hearing Hans say Anna's name, in reprimand, as if he had the right to it… twisted the dagger currently protruding from Jane's rib cage.
"Well, maybe not you," Anna quickly amended. "But you'd find someone faster than you can say 'payday'."
"We do what we have to," Hans intoned. "To get what we want."
"Don't I know it," Anna said, and stared cryptically at the man in his desk chair.
Jane ignored the cramp in her forearms and ran through scenario after scenario that ended with Anna drinking alongside Hans in a WGT office. Try as she might, nothing came, and dead test subjects and mustache-twirling men and a name, Elsa, pressed upon her like stacked freight containers on a loaded ocean carrier. Her mind was buoyant, swimming in uncertainties, but the weight of something (betrayal) froze her in place in the shaft.
Her saving grace was the office phone.
"Hello…?" Hans mumbled. "Yes, I can come down… Just… Security's swept all the way up to five, right?... And still no sign?... Dammit, okay, I'm coming." Hans ran a hand over his head and stomped toward the coat rack at the entrance to the room.
"Duty calls?" Anna singsonged, leaning back on his desk.
"I swear to God, Anna, if she gets out of here—"
"I really don't think she'll get out of here. But if she does, you're not going to lose her," Anna said. Jane watched Anna cross over to Hans and straighten his tie. She brushed his shoulders of imaginary lint, and let her hands travel down his arms to interlock with his fingers. Anna met his eyes and delivered a winsome grin. "You have me, remember? As long as you have me, you have her."
"And do I?" Hans grumbled, temper held at bay by a trained composure. "Have you?"
"I don't suppose you'll ever know," Anna said, and rose to tiptoes to press her face intimately against Hans's scruffy cheek.
Jane's stomach lurched like the recoil of a bungee cord.
"But I'll do everything I can to keep proving that you do," Anna vowed.
Hans stared down at Anna, possibly caring, possibly calculating. Jane could no longer hazard a guess at motivations between those two.
"Let me go see if I can find your sister. If she's as hard to keep tabs on as you are, this could take all night.
What the— SISTER?
"We could always invite her to family dinner. Assuming they drug her again. She's not the best conversationalist," Anna smirked.
Hans placed a possessive hand at her waist and held there silently, then departed. There could have been a mite of tenderness in his gaze toward Anna, but Jane was too furious to waste precious brain cells on such a grotesque thought. And sister? Did they think she and Anna were—
Related?
Anna wasn't idle. She darted back to Hans's desk and got to work on his computer, typing with all the finesse of a hippo and the speed of a tortoise. And Jane couldn't believe she'd ever fallen for this woman, that she was currently the main attraction at some scientific side show circus, shoved into this tight space because Anna had played her like a fiddle and manipulated her every step of the—
Wait.
No, oh no, she's… she's doing it for me? I'm wrong, she's… it's a double cross, it has to be!
Jane zapped the computer Anna was working on. Her bolts were tight and tinsel-thin, a vector of light with no origin and then a blank monitor. Her power grew in parallels with her torment.
"What the—fuck!" Anna said, slapping the side of the computer.
Jane zapped the lights and slipped through the grate, prepping for a confrontation that would likely end her. Because if Anna didn't love her any more, if she had to go back to a lonely skyscraper and hate herself all over again… then what was the point?
I just think it's about time to say thank you for reading and reviewing considering everything I put you guys through. My gratitude knows no bounds!