Chapter Text
She’s created a monster.
Apparently, the lack of one post-coital conversation had been the only thing stopping Kristoff from becoming the world’s biggest brat in the bedroom. And now that they’ve had that conversation, he’s been having a ball testing limits and pushing Anna’s buttons—going slow when she says fast, soft when she says hard. Distracting her with his hands when she’s told him not to touch. So she finds ways to make him pay for it: on his own, upside-down, tied up. She tries everything she can think of, her so-called punishments (as promised) often even more enjoyable for the both of them than whatever she’d originally planned.
She’s never had quite this much fun in her life. Being with Kristoff. Being in charge.
Which is why the dream is so disorienting.
It’s hard to notice anything, at first, past how good she feels.
Even tied up as she is, hands and feet hitched fast to the four corners of the bed frame, she feels just as pinned down by pleasure as she does the restraints keeping her still and the pressure of his arm braced across her stomach as he eats her out. He’s unfairly good at this, all wicked tongue and clever mouth—but he’s teasing her, keeping his ministrations swift and feather-light. She wants more than anything to fist her hands in his hair and encourage him closer; for him to actually commit. As it is, all she can do is strain against her bindings and do her best to grind against his face—as much as he’ll let her, the way he’s holding her hips down.
She can feel him smirk against her. “Want something?” he murmurs.
She knows this trap. Admitting what she’d like him to do is just about the last way to get him to do it; there’s nothing he enjoys more than stringing her along with almosts and not-quites, always keeping her teetering just at the edge of satisfaction. It drives her crazy; she feels out of her mind with need. Still, she bites her lip and shakes her head. She can be good. She can take what he’s giving her.
“That’s my girl. You’re such a slut for it, aren’t you?”
She moans, unable to stop herself from writhing to try and get friction where she needs it.
“Good point,” he taunts, mocking her incoherence. “And to think you lay down the law around here—you sure you’ve got any thoughts at all in that pretty little head of yours?”
“Hans, please,” she begs, and he looks up at her, green eyes sparkling sharply.
“Say it again.”
“Please,” she repeats, voice thin with desire.
He blows on her overheated flesh, making her whole body jolt with unexpected sensation. How does he do that? “Please what?”
“Make me—” No. “Let me—let me come. Please.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely,” he says. And then he buries himself intently between her legs, the wiry hair of his sideburns scratching deliciously against her inner thighs, until she screams her release.
“Anna? Anna!”
Anna startles awake, unsure at first of where she is or what’s going on. She was—she’d felt—but that—
Wait, what?
Belatedly, she blinks into the realization that she’s in her own bed, naked and tangled in the sheets, panting. Kristoff’s next to her, arms over his head in a way that can’t be comfortable. None of this makes sense.
“Huh?” she manages to say, as if he could explain it to her.
“You were crying out in your sleep. Were you having a nightmare?”
It suddenly occurs to her that he’s posed like that because he’s still tied to her bedpost from the night’s earlier activities. She blanches, flustered. That’s—she can’t believe they fell asleep like that. It’s not safe! Not for his circulation, and, admittedly, not for them: though the odds are slim anyone would barge into Anna’s room without knocking, the exception to that rule is Olaf, and the last thing she wants is for him (or anyone else) to find Kristoff in such a compromising position. How could she be so careless?
You sure you’ve got any thoughts at all in that pretty little head of yours?
“Anna, seriously. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” Kristoff says, dragging her back to the here and now.
She scrambles into action. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” she babbles, finally moving to untie him. Her hands are sleep-clumsy, fingers numb with shock; it takes several tries to slip the simple knot. When it’s done, she sits back on her haunches. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Couldn’t exactly leave,” he points out mildly as he rubs at his now-freed wrists, and she winces.
“I can’t—that’s never happened before, I don’t—” But he knows that already; he’s been there with her every single time. That’s sort of the whole point.
“Sweetheart, hey,” he soothes, reaching out and bracing her shoulders with his hands. Normally she finds that move grounding; now, it makes her skin crawl. She doesn’t deserve it. The amount of concern in his eyes makes her want to shrivel up and die. “It’s fine. Nothing bad happened. Talk to me; what’s got you so spooked?” And she almost tells him—she really, almost does—but then he keeps going, and says the best worst possible thing: “It’s coming up on a year since everything happened. It’s only natural if you’re having bad dreams again.”
And he’s right; bad dreams would be natural. But this…? She’d never even had dreams like that back when she was calling Hans her true love.
What is wrong with her?
But Kristoff’s still talking, still looking at her with that painfully soft look on his face. “Was it Hans? Elsa? The ice?”
She doesn’t want to lie to him. She can’t possibly tell him the truth.
“Can we not talk about it?” she mumbles, fighting the urge to hide her face in her hands. “It’s embarrassing.” That, at least, is true enough.
“If that’s what you want,” he murmurs, though she can tell he’s not thrilled about it—less because he’s curious for details, if she had to guess, and more because it’s unlike her not to share them. He glances at the grandfather clock in the corner; they’ve still got about two more hours before sunrise. “I can stay a little longer, if you’d like?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think I’ll be able to relax knowing we’ve got a time limit. Better not risk it. I—are your wrists alright?”
“Fine. Don’t worry about me,” he says, pressing a kiss to her forehead before slipping out of bed and digging around for his discarded clothes.
“I’m sorry I…” The words turn to ashes in her throat; she chokes on them. “I didn’t mean to leave you like that.”
“No harm done,” he says, before pausing at her bedroom door. The look he gives her is agonizingly fond. “Try and get some sleep.”
Well. She tries. But for the next few nights, she falls pretty short of success.
The thing is—the thing is, she has been having nightmares about Hans, lately. Proper nightmares. In truth, she never really stopped; they’d just gotten fewer and farther between for a while. The sex dreams getting mixed in are new, but they aren’t exactly a reprieve—they make her feel just as awful upon waking.
She knows—in an abstract, unconvincing sort of way—that she’s not in control of what she dreams, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If all her dreams came true or were indicative of her deepest desires, she’d live in a candy house and Olaf would be five inches tall so she could carry him around on her shoulder. But it still disturbs her. How much her body enjoys the dreams, despite her mind’s horror at the way they play out. How it’s never about just being with Hans, but about being at his mercy, every time.
(And of course, it makes sense. Hans and Kristoff couldn’t be more different—there’s no way Hans would ever let her be in charge. Not the real Hans, anyway. But when she thinks about the version of him she’d agreed to marry—the affably transparent open door, the one who made her feel seen and known, and convinced her she’d understood the core of him within two hours of their acquaintance—she can’t help but wonder what would have happened to her, to them, if Elsa let them run away together. How would he have treated her then? Would she have found a way to be happy? It’s the only explanation she has for this Venn diagram Hans of her dreams: domineering but not heartless, impish and taunting but attentive, however selfishly, to her consent and her pleasure.
And what frightens her most is that the whole scenario doesn’t feel all that farfetched, when she wakes sweat-drenched and breathless. It feels… disturbingly viable.
It feels like cheating.
Not on Kristoff, exactly, but on herself—on the person she’s become. Thinking back to those early days with Kristoff, and how much encouragement and coaching she’d needed to feel confident enough to take the reins… under Hans’s influence, she could have gone down an opposite path entirely. How far could she have walked down that road before she wasn’t herself anymore?
And worse: would she have even noticed?)
She knows what to do with the violent dreams, the ones filled with darkness and ice and betrayal; knows how to seek comfort when she’s frightened. But what does she do with this?
Maybe, she decides, the methods are the same after all. Following the regular nightmares, the trick is to remind herself of what’s real: that she’s safe, and loved, and still living. To appreciate and accept what she has.
It’s not hard, really, to appreciate and accept Kristoff. It’s certainly not hard to want him, or to find opportunities to take tiny pieces of her power back.
But the project might, admittedly, maybe be making her a little reckless.
“Anna, c’mon,” Kristoff mumbles, half-nervous and half-thrilled as she drags him by his suspenders around the back outer wall of the stable and pins him there. “Someone’s going to see us.”
“Maybe you should have considered that as a potential consequence before you broke the rule,” she counters. (She’d told Kristoff to stop playing footsie with her as he’d driven her through the market, after all. And if she’d told him that knowing it would only spur him to do the opposite; that it would get her all riled up, and give her an excuse to rile him somewhere semi-public right back as retribution… well. She’s not exactly a mystery to him, these days, and she’s certain he knew what he was signing up for.) She kisses him as she paws at his shirt. “Take this off.”
He smirks against her mouth. “Or what?”
“Or I stop,” she says simply, and he laughs and moves to shrug his suspenders off. She reaches up to halt the movement of his hands—enamored of the way his arms still at the gentle pressure of her small fingers around his massive wrists. “Not these,” she clarifies. She likes the way the suspenders give her convenient grips to manhandle him with far too much to give them up. “Just the shirt.”
He rolls his eyes but complies, swiftly unbuttoning the shirt and slipping it out from under the suspenders. “Okay, now what?”
“Hands on me, please.”
“And drop the shirt? Right next to where I muck the stalls? No way.”
“Mm, it does sound complicated. It also sounds like a you-problem, though,” she teases, yanking him down to her height with the suspenders before pressing her splayed palms eagerly against his bare chest.
“Well there’s an idea,” he murmurs, draping his shirt across her shoulders like a cape—it dwarfs her—and then using the sleeves to pull her still closer. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
It feels a little silly how much just this, just kissing, can still get to her. She loses herself in the rhythm of it, the softness of his mouth, the strength of his muscles under her hands. This is what she’s needed. All she’s ever needed, really, and a reminder of just how good she has it, to boot.
The clatter of a bucket hitting the ground and sloshing water everywhere pulls her back to reality.
“Sorry!” Niklas, one of the stable boys, yelps from the doorway. His face is bright red; his hands still hover in the air as though he hasn’t quite realized he dropped his pail. “Sorry, so sorry, Highness, I’ll—” Niklas turns around and bolts, leaving the discovered duo blinking and embarrassed in his wake.
They last three seconds before breaking into hysterical, nervous laughter.
“Okay. That one was my fault,” Anna admits through her shrill giggles. “I’ll go talk to him before he ends up telling half the castle."
“Would he?” Kristoff asks, nose wrinkling. “Nikki’s a good kid; he never struck me as a gossip.”
“No, he’s no gossip. He’ll just ask everyone for advice on how he could have handled it better, because he wants to be discreet—”
“—and the story will get around all the same,” Kristoff finishes, catching on. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Right.”
Anna apologetically pecks him on the cheek, lighting up when, as it always does, it brings a mystified little smile to his face. “Thanks for playing anyway, handsome,” she sighs, shrugging his shirt off and hanging it back to him. “Maybe next time.”
“Is that a promise or a threat?” he calls after her as she walks away, hips swaying teasingly, and she ducks her head to hide her grin.
That’s better.
After tracking Niklas down and explaining everything to him (though, looking back on her elaborate, somewhat-convoluted metaphor about how butterflies are happy even though they’re silent, she may not have been as clear as she’d intended), she ends up playing hide-and-seek with Olaf for almost an hour. He’s better at hiding than anyone followed by a perpetual storm cloud has a right to be, and her search during round three brings her past Elsa’s open office door on the second floor.
“You haven’t seen Olaf, have you?” Anna asks, sticking her head in, but something about the way Elsa’s posed by the window gives her pause, even as Elsa shakes her head. At first Anna thinks it’s the wistfulness in Elsa’s expression, but then she realizes it’s the outfit: Elsa’s wearing their mother’s old scarf, wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Which wouldn’t be weird, just novel, except for the part where it’s July. Anna blinks. “Elsa, are you… cold?”
“Huh? No. Just thinking,” Elsa murmurs, reflexively tightening her fists where they’re gripping the scarf before catching herself, taking a deep breath, and letting it slip from her shoulders so she can fold it carefully. It’s pretty classic Elsa behavior, only now that Anna’s thinking about it for more than about three seconds, she can’t believe how dense she’s been. If the looming anniversary of Elsa’s coronation has been weighing on Anna this much, how could Elsa not be torturing herself over it?
Anna steps into the room fully, closing the door only most of the way behind her—not wanting Elsa to feel trapped. “Whatcha thinking about?”
A shadow of a smile steals over Elsa’s face. “What new excuses I can make for why my kid sister keeps getting caught debauching our Ice Master and Deliverer.”
Anna cringes. So much for the butterfly thing. “Nikki blabbed, huh?”
The tucked-in, private smile Elsa’d been hiding turns into a full-on smirk. “Nikki? I was talking about Gemma and Prudence,” she laughs, referring to two notoriously-chatty women on Gerda’s staff. “They had quite a lot to say about Kristoff’s—” Anna turns bright red in anticipation of whatever body part is about to come out of Elsa’s mouth; to her relief, it’s “—back.”
Anna swallows past her chagrin, because she knows full well that Elsa’s deflecting the initial question. “Well at least they have taste. But seriously, what were you thinking about?” She nods towards the chaise longue in the corner, taking a seat and patting the cushion beside her. “Crazy to think it’s been almost a year, huh? Since everything?”
Elsa perches delicately on the edge of the chaise, then reaches up to tug on a lock of Anna’s hair—the one that had been white for most of her life. “Has it been on your mind, lately?”
Deflecting again. “No more than yours,” Anna says stubbornly, and Elsa huffs out a defeated little breath Anna generously labels a laugh.
“Alright, alright. I suppose it would be strange if I weren’t thinking about it, right?”
Anna grins, relieved to have gotten through the necessary song and dance of convincing Elsa she’s allowed to state her feelings out loud so quickly. “Exactly.” She looks around the room. “You don’t seem to be brainstorming anymore,” she notes, pride winding itself into her voice.
Elsa grimaces. “You should see my bedroom.”
Oops. Spoke too soon. “You could have told me. Have you… been losing control a lot?”
“No, not—well. Not when I’m awake. Only when I dream,” Elsa admits, trying to play it off with a shrug.
Anna bites the inside of her lip, not sure how she’ll answer if Elsa turns this one back on her: “What do you dream about?”
The temperature in the room dips along with Elsa’s expression. “You can imagine, I’m sure. Running away. Making it winter again. What would have happened if you hadn’t… if the magic hadn’t…”
Anna drops her hand atop Elsa’s where it’s resting on the couch, squeezing her fingers. “I’m alright,” she murmurs, reminding herself just as much as her sister. “And you’re doing a great job. You know that, don’t you? Arendelle’s thriving. The people love you. We love you.”
Elsa’s mouth twists, pleased and trying not to show it. “I know. It’s just…” She sighs. “Some days it feels less like that’s true because I’ve succeeded, and more like I’ve gotten away with something and everyone is just… temporarily letting me. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Anna winces in understanding. She’s had it, too—the feeling like she’ll wake up one morning and the universe will go Wait, were you under the impression you could have nice things? Sorry, I just hadn’t gotten to you yet. There were back-ups in the office, you know how it is. All this was a loaner; didn’t you read the paperwork before you signed?
Resisting the urge to repeat herself, she tries a slightly different tack: “I’m always around, if you want to get this stuff off your chest. It’s not good to keep it all bottled up.”
“I don’t,” Elsa says—then, off Anna’s incredulous face, laughs and points behind her with her thumb. “I don’t. I tell Papa.”
Anna startles—she can’t remember the last time Elsa called their father Papa in her hearing, and the familiarity of it is discordant in her ear. She looks over her shoulder, at the large coronation portrait of Agnarr that dominates the eastern wall, and… look. She’s pretty much the last person to tell anyone that talking to paintings isn’t an effective therapy technique, and she loves their father, she does, but she can’t help the way her nose wrinkles. “You tell Mr. Conceal-Don’t-Feel up there how you feel?”
“Be fair,” Elsa chides mildly, though Anna thinks her statement of literal fact was, uh, pretty fair. “And, yes. I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the advice he gave me—about the things he actually said, versus the things I let myself hear. So much of it was… I frightened myself. I was so certain that I was dangerous that I didn’t understand him when he was kind; I didn’t trust that he could have possibly meant it, so I twisted his words until they suited my worldview better. He wasn’t perfect, I know he wasn’t, but… he wasn’t my jailer, Anna. I was. In the ways it really mattered. He… he asked me so many questions, then. I’m trying to answer them honestly now.”
Unbidden, the memory of catching her father begging Runeard’s portrait in the gallery for parenting advice springs to mind—and with it, countless memories of jabbering at the paintings for hours as a child, with no other company to talk to. She feels a sharp ache in her heart at the thought of so many generations of her family feeling so lost without one another.
“Does it help?” she asks. “With the nightmares?”
Elsa nudges her with her shoulder. “Well, it’s no waking up in the arms of my true love, I suppose, but yes. It helps.”
Anna blushes, both at the innuendo and at the implicit comparison of their respective hang-ups. Here Elsa’s been wrestling with real dilemmas, about—about leadership, and identity, and their past—and all Anna’s been able to focus on are the hypothetical implications of a love triangle she was never really in. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she sniffs, trying to save face.
“That’s odd, because half the staff certainly does.”
“Okay, okay! I get it. I haven’t exactly been living up to my birthday bargain to you.”
Elsa’s expression softens. “I don’t say it to be cruel. I do wish you’d be careful, but—what you and Kristoff have, it’s precious. It means a lot to me.”
Anna stares at her shoes, ears burning. “Yeah? And what do we have, exactly?”
Elsa takes her time before answering. “I… I’d like to think you have each other, I suppose. An understanding. Maybe that sounds silly. But looking back on the year we’ve had…” Elsa reaches for her hands and squeezes them. “To see you go from ready to settle for the first option that came along, to actually settled, growing into yourself as you are… I’m so proud of you. Of both of you. And when I see you together, it helps me remember what’s possible. That you did find someone special, when you were actually ready for it.”
Tears swim in Anna’s eyes; she blinks them away quickly. She knows Elsa intended it to be a compliment and nothing more, but—she can’t unhear the longing, the hope for a different future, in her sister’s voice. “Elsa…”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. You asked.”
“I just—I wish—” Elsa’s never been like Anna; has never been prone to flights of fancy or addicted to fairy tale romance. Anna knows that; knows that was Elsa’s nature even before she cut herself off from other people on purpose. But you don’t say a thing like that unless you’d like someone of your own, and you’ve had to develop your patience. Unless you think about it all the time.
A reminder that things take time, Elsa had said, when she’d given Kristoff their grandfather’s watch.
Elsa smiles, her soft, sad smile, and nods. “It’s only been a year. I mean—” She laughs, looking around the room, at all the work she has to do. “I can’t believe it’s been only a year, and it’s been the longest year of my life, but. It’s not very long, is it?”
Anna thinks of the long stretch of years with Elsa behind closed doors; of the fact that she can still recall the precise pattern of hazel that haloed Hans’s pupils, despite not having locked eyes with him in twelve months.
“Not very long at all,” she agrees. She’s about to say more when Olaf’s voice drifts down the hallway and through the open door.
“Anna? Did you forget whose turn it was? I’m supposed to be hiding, not you!” Then, as an aside to what she can only imagine is one of the suits of armor lining the halls. “She’s so silly like that.”
“In here, Olaf! You’re right, I lost track of our game,” she says, grinning at Elsa as they stifle their giggles.
The conversation sticks with her.
What they need, Anna thinks, is a reset. Something that will get all of them out of dwelling in the past and into remembering everything that’s so great about their present; a celebration of how far they’ve come. And wouldn’t you know it, but Arendellian tradition actually acknowledges exactly this—it’s been customary for generations to throw a First Year’s Ball. She and Elsa had decided mutually after the spring summit not to bother, but now she’s thinking maybe her ancestors had the right idea after all. They could all use a good time about now.
Unfortunately, she happens to live with not one but two hopeless introverts. What to do, when the people you most want to elevate are happier when their feet are firmly on the ground?
Especially when they’d probably have a really good time if they just got over themselves?
So digs in her heels, and presses her luck.
“Another ball? I don’t know, Anna…” Elsa sighs, and Anna puts on her most convincing grin over breakfast.
“It’s tradition! The reigning monarch always throws a First Year’s Ball. And it doesn’t have to be a whole ‘nother international hoopla—”
Hoopla? Elsa mouths at Kristoff, lips tilting up in a smirk. He guffaws; Anna sticks her tongue out at her.
“—It can just be a casual thing. We can open up the castle to the villagers, play some music. It’ll be intimate. Homey. Maybe get a local band—ooh, Kristoff could play lute—”
“Kristoff will do no such thing,” Kristoff informs them, not even bothering to look up from his pancakes.
“—and we’d have a good time! Why does nobody in this castle but me want to have a good time?” Anna pouts.
“I want to have a good time!” Olaf pipes up.
“Thank you, Olaf,” Anna says, high-fiving him. (Or—is it a high-four, when it’s Olaf?)
“It’s just so much to-do over nothing,” Elsa insists. “I don’t need all of that attention on me, when all I’ve done is manage to stay alive, unmarried and out of war for a year.”
Anna sees an opening, and she takes it. “Well it wouldn’t be on you,” she says, like it’s obvious.
Elsa narrows her eyes—sensing, surely, that Anna is springing a trap but not quite able to tell what it is. “Alright, I’ll bite. It wouldn’t?”
“Of course not. That would be a pretty rude way to spend Olaf’s first birthday.”
Olaf’s resulting delighted gasp is loud enough that Kai pokes his head into the dining room, to make sure no one’s fallen to the ground in pain. “For me?!” Olaf squeals.
“Yeah, buddy. Unless Elsa doesn’t want to…” Anna can’t quite wipe the triumphant grin off her face. It’s a rotten way to win an argument, she knows, but—well. No one’s losing, really, when they throw a party if she wins. Right?
“Okay, okay,” Elsa says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “But a small party! Intimate!”
Anna can work with that.
Kristoff’s got to hand it to Anna—a lot of people at this party seem genuinely interested in making sure Olaf is enjoying his birthday. For every townsperson who’s clearly here for the decadence or the free food, there’s two or three who make a point to converse with the snowman, or to let him play games with their kids. It may not be the quiet evening in Elsa’d been angling for, but it is significantly less pretentious than the summit had been.
Of course, the downside to finally throwing a ball in the great hall that’s intended for the common folk of Arendelle is that people know him here. And they keep wanting to, like. Talk to him. He’s only barely escaped a twenty minute (twenty minute!) conversation with the Angstroms about the renovations they’re planning to make to their sitting room when old Mr. Falk catches Kristoff’s eye across the ballroom. Eager to avoid an endless chat about mealworms, or what fertilizer is best, Kristoff veers left—away from the refreshments table and towards Anna, where she’s teaching Olaf and the kids some sort of skip-rope rhyme.
“Do you want to dance?” he asks. He’s probably being rude interrupting like this, but desperate times…
Her eyes bug out—“Wait, me? You’re asking me?”—then narrow suspiciously. She cocks her head to the side. “You? You’re asking me?”
“Clock’s ticking, Princess,” he grumbles, wiggling his fingers in invitation, and she grabs his hand as though he’ll snatch it away if she waits one more second.
“Yes! Definitely yes,” she says, dragging him onto the ballroom floor.
The song is up-tempo, and it takes Kristoff a moment to figure out where his feet are supposed to be going. Anna is resplendent, though, flushed and laughing even as she trips over herself trying to fix his mistakes. Or—no, he was supposed to go left then, not her. He’s sure of it.
“Since when are you Mr. Dance Pants?” she asks, crossing behind him and then taking his hand to catch up with the missed choreography.
He tries on a grin. “Trying to be a better boyfriend. Remember?”
“Sure, maybe,” she snorts, seeing right through him. “Or maybe you just wanted an excuse to get away from all these perfectly nice people wanting to make perfectly nice small talk with you.”
“It’s not ‘small’ once you pass the fifteen minute mark,” he grumbles, lifting her up, twisting, and putting her back down in time with the music. She stumbles more than usual finding her feet.
“You know, I think it’s all a front. This whole antisocial thing. I don’t buy it. So many people like you! You totally like them right back. Admit it.”
“Just how much wine have you had?” he asks, rolling his eyes.
“None,” she says, cagily.
Ah. Suddenly, the ruddy cheeks and sloppy dance moves make a lot more sense. “Okay, how much not-wine have you had?”
“I was playing Tap Out with Lars and Aleks and some of the guys,” she says, which still doesn’t answer his question, but that’s quite suddenly the least of his problems.
Kristoff trips, missing several beats in the dance. “You what?”
“It’s a drinking game! You—”
“I know the rules of Tap Out, Anna, I just…” What might they have said to her? How long was she with them? What if they told her—? “Ow!” Kristoff yelps, dragged out of his panic spiral by the press of Anna’s high heel into his toes as she accidentally steps on his foot.
“Oops! Sorry.”
“You are drunk,” he realizes, marveling. Should he be annoyed about that? He’s not really sure what the protocol is, here, but he finds he’s too relieved to scold her. A drunk Anna is probably less likely to remember whatever unsavory details the boys might have told her over ale.
She narrows her eyes at his word choice. “I held my own,” she sniffs, raising her chin in defiance.
Despite himself, he feels a smile pulling at his cheeks. “That means you lost.”
“I came in second.”
“There’s no second in Tap Out.”
“Whatever. It didn’t even work, anyway,” she grumbles, and he misses another step.
“What do you mean?”
“I was trying to get Aleks to tell me the story of when you got arrested, but he wouldn’t do it.”
There it is. Kristoff searches the room until he finds his friend, unsurprised to see Aleks has been keeping an eye on them. He’s barely suppressing his grin, which means their terrible dancing must be even more noticeable than Kristoff realized. He shoots Aleks a grateful look; Aleks gives a barely-there nod and then goes back to his conversation with the shorter Arneson brother.
Anna mistimes a turn and crashes into Kristoff’s chest; he takes her hand and pulls her away from the other dancers and back into the crowd. “Okay, maybe we’ll save the dancing for next time.”
Anna frowns, crestfallen. “There’s never a next time.”
He fails to turn his laugh into a cough. “If I know one thing about you, it’s that you’ll make sure there’s a next time,” he teases.
She hums in agreement, not denying it. “I am persistent,” she allows lightly.
He guffaws. “Don’t I know it. That why you’re interrogating Aleks instead of just asking me whatever’s on your mind?”
“Pff. Like you’d tell me. It is you we’re talking about, right? The guy I had to push and nag just for you to admit you wanted something I already knew you wanted?”
It takes Kristoff probably longer than it should to un-twist that verbal pretzel and realize she’s talking about their sex life; by the time he’s started blushing, she’s already deep into her rant:
“—not like I like rooting around for gossip about you, but you’re like a—a—”
Kristoff does his best to hide his smile, waiting in rueful anticipation for her to decide what he’s like. “Yes?”
“—a pistachio! And your shell is barely open on one side, because you don’t want people to know what good stuff you’ve got in there, so I’ve got to pry and pry and use the shell of some other pistachio to get through to you—”
“Wait, am I also this other pistachio, or is that you?”
“That’s not the—” Anna stomps a foot, frustrated. “You’re not listening. Don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He opens his mouth to respond, but a tap on his shoulder interrupts his train of thought.
“Kristoff, I need you to pick me up!”
Kristoff turns around to find Olaf standing behind him, left arm held aloft in his right hand to get the height needed to reach Kristoff’s shoulder. It’s a sight so simultaneously adorable and grotesque he completely forgets what they were talking about. “What?”
“I’m telling everyone the story of my birth, but I’m not tall enough to be Marshmallow; I need you to pick me up. For the veritas.” Before Kristoff can answer, Olaf’s gasping, clutching his cheeks with his intact and displaced hands in horror. “That means it’s almost Marshmallow’s birthday, too! I hadn’t realized. We have to go up for a visit!”
“One thing at a time, maybe. Where am I lifting you?”
“Over here; c’mon!” Olaf says, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to where an expectant crowd of children is waiting; Olaf’s set up a kind of improvised amphitheater on the stairs.
“And why do I have to be the one to lift you?”
“You’re the only one tall enough! Otherwise my audience can’t understand the true stakes.”
Figuring playing along is the fastest way to be allowed to return to his evening, Kristoff lets Olaf position and articulate him like a doll: first hoisting Olaf high in the air so he can be Marshmallow, then imitating Marshmallow himself and chasing Olaf as Olaf plays himself, Kristoff, Anna, and Sven, then being ‘the cliff’ as Olaf repeatedly climbs up his back and then jumps down from his shoulder to show how far they all fell off the North Mountain. When Olaf then goes into an embarrassingly-accurate recreation of Kristoff putting his foot in his mouth over Anna’s whitening hair, Kristoff takes his leave, fleeing before he has to watch the next bit.
When he catches sight of Anna, she’s deep in conversation with her sister, a flute of champagne in her hand and an inscrutable look on her face.
“Come lay down with me,” Kristoff offers, unsurprised when Anna dances out of his grip instead of leaning into him.
Really, the fact that he’s gotten her as far as her bedroom should be seen as a victory. Even after their guests had left, convincing Anna to come upstairs and call it a night had taken everything short of bribery. Sleepy, morose, and puckish in turn, she’s resisted any suggestion to relax or take it easy. And he’s—annoyed, and endeared, and annoyed at how endeared he is right back.
“Gotta catch me, first,” she teases.
Easy enough. “Don’t play games you’ll lose,” he advises her, crossing the room in three easy strides and taking her up into his arms. “Settle down.”
He runs a finger down her forehead and nose, and she goes slightly cross-eyed and limp trying to watch him do it, blinking slowly. “Hey, that’s… that’s cheating,” she mumbles, voice hazy, and he strokes down her face again. Her brow crinkles in frustration under his fingertip. “Stoppit.”
“…Red?” he asks, uncertain whether or not he’s actually pissing her off. He’s not really used to drunk Anna.
“No, just. Rude,” she grumbles, pouting. Her expression then brightens. “Hey, that rhymes!”
What? “No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, okay, not rhymes, but. The thing. The other thing.”
“Oh, the other thing,” he repeats indulgently, like he’s totally enlightened now. On the off chance that she’s completely lost track of the conversation, he tries again: “C’mon, lay down with me.”
“M’not tired.”
He gives her a saucy grin and tries a different tactic. “Since when do you have to be tired to lay down with me?”
“Mm, touché,” she allows, rocking onto her tiptoes in order to kiss him. He smiles into it against his better judgment, enjoying the way her arms drift up to wrap around his neck; the way she leans into him. It’s wild to think that they’re just a few hours out from the official one year mark of knowing each other—the impossible girl in the ridiculous dress who did nothing but get in his way now drowsy and affectionate in his arms. Unthinkable, still. “C’mon,” she goads, nipping at his bottom lip. “Kiss me like you mean it.”
But you’re drunk, he mentally protests, sighing without meaning to. “How about we play a different game,” he says instead. “The King Commands.”
She narrows her eyes playfully. “Kristoff in charge, huh? Alright, you might as well get a turn. Everyone else has.” He doesn’t know what that means, but she leans in and interrupts before he can ask: “Do I get kisses if I win?”
He kisses the tip of her nose. “Let’s see how you do. The King commands you to drink a glass of water.”
“Okay, Mom,” Anna grouses, but she nevertheless trots over to her side table and pours herself a glass, downing it in one go. “Good?”
“I guess. Unless you’re still thirsty?”
“I wasn’t even thirsty the first time. I’m just a good sport.”
“Uh huh.”
“And what does my liege require next?”
Despite himself, a tingle runs down his back at this role reversal—it’s strange to be on this side of their dynamic, for once. “The King commands you to get into your pajamas.”
“Will you help me?” she asks, lifting her hair and turning her back to him. He nods, stepping into her space to assist with the complicated hooks and ties of her dress. She moves heavily with the push and pull of his hands, dead on her feet, but turns in his arms when he’s gotten her down to her shift and starts working on his buttons in return.
“Pajamas,” he reminds her firmly, and she sticks her tongue out but lifts her shift over her head in a fluid motion before going to her dresser and digging around. The weight of the anniversary hits him all over again as he watches the slide of her shoulder blades against her back muscles as she rummages. They were the first part of her—or adult-her, anyway—he’d been acquainted with, her back to him as he’d entered Oaken’s. And now she’s casually nude in front of him, like it’s nothing.
She throws on a nightgown and returns to him, reaching for his shirt once more.
“Anna—hey, c’mon, we shouldn’t—”
“You didn’t say ‘The King commands,’” she reminds him softly. She meets his gaze—and though her cheeks are pink and her eyes a little glassy, the look in them is completely serious. “No funny business, I just…” She bites her lip, stretching her palm over his chest. “Unless the King commands me not to?”
He swallows and shakes his head, allowing her to strip him of everything but his drawers and undershirt with sloppy, gentle hands. She stops herself there without him asking her to, looking up at him for another order.
“Kristoff?”
“I…” He’s overwhelmed. Mustering a helpless smile, he taps at his own cheek in a silent request. She grins and rises onto her tiptoes, kissing him there before falling back to her heels with a click of her teeth and a frustrated groan, realizing she complied without his saying the code word.
“That was a rotten trick. I take that kiss back, stinker.”
He squeezes her hands in apology. “The King requests that you come outside with him,” Kristoff says, nodding towards the balcony. “If her Highness is amenable.” She follows without a fuss, a look on her face he can’t quite read.
“Whoa,” Anna murmurs, bracing herself against the stone balustrade once they make it outside and she gets a sense of how high up they are. “Dizzy.”
“Yeah, I bet. You don’t normally…” He trails off, not sure how to broach the issue. Who is he to say she shouldn’t drink on Olaf’s birthday? “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head, then cradles it in her hands, looking at little green with regret at the lateral movement. He steps to stand next to her, looking out into the night.
The sky is a rich, star-speckled navy, the sun having only set a little while ago. A warm breezes dances over the serene fjord, bringing with it the scent of moss from the docks, the salt of the ocean, and the tulips dotting the hills. The lighthouse casts its beam with reassuring regularity over the white sails of harbored ships.
Arendelle. Home.
“It was like this last year. The night she ran,” Anna says quietly, surveying the reflection of the moon on the water. “Warm, like this. Until it wasn’t.” She laughs a little, but it sounds odd. Hollow. “I told Hans, actually, I remember—”
He reaches for her. “Sweetheart…”
She shrugs him off and points down to a spot on the grounds. “We were just there. In the garden. I told him how this was my favorite kind of weather—when it stays warm after sundown, even as the days get shorter again. Like the earth’s trying to give me just a little bit more summer.” She hugs her own elbows, bitter. “He told me it was his favorite, too. That a few weeks after the solstice every year there’s a day when the sun sets just right over the Southern Isles so that, if you’re on a ship on the easternmost edge of the archipelago, you can see it touch every island’s shore as it goes down. He said he was missing it, being in Arendelle for the coronation, but that I was a sight so beautiful he really didn’t miss it at all. He said—he said he’d take me next year. Or. This year.” She scoffs, looking down at her feet. “I still don’t know if any of that is true. About the sun, I mean. Obviously the rest was just…” She shakes her head.
He has no idea what to say to that. “Is that why you…?”
“I didn’t mean to drink so much,” she admits miserably. “It’s just—I was looking at everyone, and thinking about how far we’ve come in a year. And I was chatting with the guys, and Aleks mentioned something about how lager is your favorite. And I thought, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know lager was your favorite. And I thought about how I could have made a list of Hans’ favorite everything, after one night of knowing him, and how sometimes it feels like I’m still getting to know you. And I love that, I love getting to know you, and I know he was tricking me anyway, but then it just got all tangled in my head, and… and if lager was your favorite, then I guess…” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. It’s stupid.”
He feels his chest constrict—not because of how wrong she is, but because she’s right. He trusts Anna more than he’s ever trusted anyone, and he’s still so careful about what he lets her know. It’s not… it’s nothing personal, he just… “It’s not stupid. But I’m not him.”
It’s just as well that his words are inadequate, because they fall on deaf ears—he can tell just by looking that Anna’s starting to spiral into a panic attack, chest heaving with shallow breaths.
“I know that, and I know you, and I know I know you, but sometimes I look at you and I think of all these things I don’t know and—”
“Anna—”
“—and I can’t stop dreaming about him, all the time—”
“I know, the nightmares, you told me—”
“But I didn’t! I didn’t. I—” She swallows, trembling. “Oh, I. I don’t feel so good,” she says in a tiny voice, and that’s all the warning he gets before he’s grabbing for her as she heaves over the balcony railing, emptying her stomach.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you,” he says over and over, as he smooths her hair back from her face and lifts it away from her neck. “Let it out.”
“…I’m sorry,” she says again, when the spasms have mostly passed. He makes a mental note to make sure she drinks another glass of water.
“It’s been a weird night; it happens.”
“I should tell Kai. Someone’s gonna have to clean that up…”
“I’ll take care of it. Do you wanna go back inside?”
She shakes her head again where it’s still cradled on her arms, pulling her hair through his loose grip as she does so. “In a minute. Breeze is good.”
He rubs uselessly at her back, feeling pulled in about a million directions. He’s familiar with so many versions of Anna, but never this one. Where to even begin, telling her about all the things he’s still held back? How to trust it won’t change how she sees him, no matter how much he knows she’d try not to let it? What even would be the point of saying anything now, when the chances of her remembering any of this seem to be dwindling rapidly? “I love you,” he eventually settles on—a safe truth.
She snorts. “You picked a real prize.”
“Yeah. I did.”
Anna sniffles a little at that. “It’s just… I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy before. I think that’s what freaked me out. Like it’s a trap or something. That’s messed up, right?”
“Hey, you and me both. I feel like that all the time.”
She wipes at her cheeks and finally turns to look at him, blue eyes crystalline with tears. “You do?”
“Um, yeah. Kinda.”
“I hate that. We should talk about that.”
“We should. Maybe another night, though,” he reasons, gesturing vaguely at… everything. She blushes and nods.
After a few more minutes she agrees to head back inside, washing up and rinsing her mouth before finally, finally crawling into bed. She reaches for him, then; he shakes his head and stays on his feet, brushing her bangs back from her eyes.
“Shh. Head down and eyes closed, hellion.”
“If I do, will you stay?”
“I can’t tonight. Gotta talk to Kai, remember? But you need to get some sleep.”
She frowns, even as exhaustion clearly weighs her down. “Maybe I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute.”
“Thank you. Goodnight, Anna.”
“Mmhmm. G’nigh…” she mumbles, curling up into a ball and drifting off.
He stares at her a long time before he can bring himself to get dressed again and leave the room.