Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“… this thing on? Elsa, I’m not sure it’s—”

“Yes, see? We’re already recording, I think. Try speaking into the horn.”

“Oh! Right. Ahem. Greetings to all my peoples. This is Queen Anna wishing you all a very happy Yuletide. Okay, okay, now play it back!”

[break in recording]

“... like an old woman.”

“You are an old woman.”

“... seventy-nine isn’t that old.”

“Uh huh, right. Looks like there’s a couple minutes remaining on the cylinder. Would you sing something for me? I’ll accompany you, like we used to.”

“You’ll be disappointed. My voice isn’t what it used to be.”

“It’s still the most beautiful sound in the world to me.”

As much as Elsa hated to admit it, Kristoff was good at chess.

Half a bottle of cider and some ill-advised teasing had resulted in an equally ill-conceived challenge, so they’d brought out the board. She lost the first game in forty and demanded a rematch. The second game, she lost in only fifteen moves before managing to draw the third. She’d finally called it quits after losing game number seven in thirty-eight moves. Kristoff, at least, gracefully declined to gloat as she primly rose and bade him a good night. How did an ice-cutter who talked to ungulates get so good at chess, anyway? Game of kings her foot.

Lighting her way with a candle, Elsa made her way to her rooms. Anna had dismissed the servants after dinner, and so the corridors of the castle were dark and deserted. Just the way she liked it, in other words. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to put on a convincing act of being busy in case she ran into a servant she barely knew, given that she was tipsy and in her nightgown. The only sound was the creaking of the floorboards under her feet.

She was about to retire to her room when a flicker of light under the door to Anna’s apartment caught her eye. For an instant, she was alarmed and ready to burst into her sister’s room in a flurry of ice and snow, then caught herself. Her fear gave way to concern, then annoyance. She moved over and knocked on Anna’s door. A muffled, surprised yelp. “Is that you, Elsa? Come in.”

Quietly, Elsa stepped through the door, closing it behind her. Anna, wearing a pale yellow nightgown, was seated upright in her bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows, with a writing tray resting on her knees. Two open ministerial boxes sat by her side on the bed. Her sister met her with a bleary-eyed smile. “Hey. Shouldn’t you be in bed? It’s almost three.”

“Right back at you. Are you still working?”

Vaguely, Anna waved her pen in the direction of the boxes. “Just some leftover business. Sorry, was I keeping you up?”

“No, no. Kristoff was just demonstrating that he’s a chess god, apparently.”

Anna chuckled and put down her pen. “Right. He told me he plays against Sven a lot.”

“… does he win?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

Stifling a laugh, Elsa sat down on the edge of the bed. “Sorry for getting so competitive. I know tonight wasn’t very fun for you.” On her visits, she tried to make a point of not interfering with Anna’s official duties—there was no room for two queens in Arendelle—which made the evenings they got to spend together all the more precious.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll have plenty of time together, it’s only fair that you and Kristoff get to spend some time being boring together. Ow.” She rubbed the arm where Elsa had punched her. “Besides, I’ve got all this work to catch up on.”

“Three o’clock, Anna. What is all this stuff, anyway?” At random, she picked out a handful of dispatches from one of the open boxes. “Treasury appointments … honours list … commissions … Anna, half of this is just meaningless busywork. You can just sign it and be done with it.”

Her sister groaned. “Seriously? I knew I should have gone for that box first. I’ve spent the last three hours going over these county budgets from Vestberg.”

Elsa brought her legs into the bed and moved to Anna’s side, careful to keep an appropriate distance. The bed was warm and soft, and the faint lavender scent of Anna’s preferred perfume hung in the air like intoxicating pollen. She was starting to feel the cider, closed her eyes for a moment. “I usually just signed those,” she mumbled, suppressing a yawn. “Let the comptrollers at the Treasury worry about them.”

“But what if there’s some error or malfeasance? What if the comptrollers are in on it?”

“Then you’ll never find out about it from checking the accounts themselves. You just … have to trust that the civil servants are doing their job.”

“Urgh.” Frustrated, Anna dropped the budget onto her writing tray. “I guess. It just feels like I’m not doing my job properly. How did you do it? You never had to work late into the evenings.”

Elsa could not hide her smile. “Maybe that’s because I get out of bed at a godly hour.” She closed her eyes again, resting her head on the pillow nearest to Anna’s shoulder, just shy of touching her. “But also, I made a point of never working past five, no matter how much I had left on my desk. Kept me from burying myself in work.” She’d worked hard as queen, yes, but her evenings had not been hers to give to her country. They belonged to Anna. In the all too brief, blissful time between her coronation and that fateful northern expedition, scarcely a day had gone by without the sisters dining or supping together. After years of self-inflicted separation, Elsa had passed up no opportunity to spend time with her sister, whether that meant riding out, making music or simply reading quietly together. Even at the worst of times, when Anna’s proximity was like brimstone burning in her chest, an hour of torture was preferable to a second of meaningless existence without her.

Not that Anna needed to know that, of course.

“Well, I guess this can wait until tomorrow,” her sister reluctantly admitted and put away the Vestberg budget.

“Good,” Elsa mumbled into the pillow. “Now go to sleep.”

“Right, right.” More rustling of paper. “Oh, have I mentioned? Nordenskjold has been needling me with questions about the royal household for weeks. He keeps saying the castle isn’t up to scratch anymore, now that we’re putting Arendelle on the map.”

“The castle?” she echoed dumbly. It was becoming difficult to focus on what Anna was saying, so much easier to sink into the soft pillows, feel her sister’s warmth and let the sound of her voice wash over her.

“Yeah.” Absent-mindedly, Anna put her arm around Elsa’s shoulder and drew her closer. Her fingers softly brushed through her hair, and Elsa leant into the sensation like a castaway grasping for water. “He wants us to build a new, modern royal palace, in the western suburbs. You know how cramped it gets when we host foreign guests.”

“Mmhm.”

“I do like the idea of modern amenities, and it would be easier on the staff. Running water, gas lighting, central heating, like in your new house up north … we could turn the castle over to the people as a museum, perhaps. Like the Louvre in Paris.”

“’snice,” Elsa mumbled. Her skin was so very hot, burning under Anna’s gracile fingers.

“Right. It’s just, we’ve got so many memories in this castle. Some bad ones, sure, but a lot of good ones, too. This is home, you know? I feel like it just wouldn’t be the same. Like I’d be cutting myself off from mother and father. From you. Sure, it’ll be more expensive in the long run, but …”

As Anna’s words washed over her, the room around them seemed to fade away, leaving only warmth. In her mind’s eye, the darkness gave way as her wandering imagination pictured the two of them lying on some shapeless bed, the one indistinct and hazy, like a half-remembered mirror image, the other shining radiant bright, every freckle on her skin perfectly placed, every curve of her body the stroke of an old master. The slight inclination of Anna’s body towards hers, the curl of her fingers brushing through Elsa’s hair, so soft and warm.

She did not notice the image changing, nor could she have stopped it. As her mind’s eye turned now here, now there, adoring now that and now this, the other parts of the tableau lost their focus, reduced to hasty sketchwork as Elsa, dreaming, leant in to examine more closely the details she envisioned. Before she knew it, like it was the most natural thing in the world, the dream had shifted, treading once again along the well-appointed avenues and familiar paths of her mind. Now, there was no fear, no darkness. No fabric to conceal her from her adulation, no distance to temper her need.

Anna smiled, drew her closer, matching the heat of her body to hers. Let’s go to bed, she whispered, her eyes a sacred invocation. You’re exhausted. Wanna stay with me tonight? A thousand times she had heard those words, a thousand times she had raised her lips to her in sacrificial devotion, tasted the sweet breath that came forth from her mouth …

Her lips found her sister’s. How strange, the part of her still capable of rational thought observed, that it should feel so different from all the other times she had imagined this scene at the edge of waking and dreaming! Anna’s lips were soft, yes, but chapped from worrying. Hot, but bracing from the way she sucked in the air in a quiet gasp. Yielding to her touch, but resisting. Sweet and mild, yet electrifying … She imagined a gasp, an arm slung around her sister’s neck as, emboldened by the license of dreams, her tongue, heavy and stumbling like a drunkard searching the way home, slipped forth between her lips.

The universe contracted to a point, infinitesimally tiny and infinitely dense. Anna’s lips boiled the oceans and blotted out the sun. Space itself, reduced to the brush of skin on skin, wondrous meeting of dearest delight and gruelling agony. Had an hour passed since she had fallen asleep in Anna’s arms? A second? A century? Where was she? Who was she? No matter. Right now, she was God and God was with her, she was the universe, was History. Her every sense, every sensation, devoted itself to the instant, like an engraver’s needle carving memory into her skin: the chill of the room, the weight of her body upon mattress and pillows, the spasmic contortion of her limbs. The smoothness of the silk nightgown seized between her cramped fingers. The slight tickle of a strand of hair on her skin, sharp as pinpricks. The sore craving between her legs, the yearning tearing at her heart: stilled, stilled forever, drowned in one perfect instant’s eternity.

She opened her eyes.

Anna, so very close, so very real. Eyes wide open, her entire body stiff and frozen and tense, like a deer staring down the hunter’s barrel, poised to leap, paralysed by the desperate hope that being still would cause the hunter to forget it. There was no hope of that, not here, not with her.

Slowly, with all the tenderness she could muster, Elsa pressed her lips—her lips—to hers—hers. Watched, felt, challenged. There was not a twitch. She brushed the tip of her tongue against Anna’s lips, pressed together so tightly Elsa feared her jaw might shatter. Nothing. Then, softly, she placed her sister’s lower lip between her teeth and bit down, at first gentle, then hard and needy. Anna flinched, tears welled in her eyes. Not a sound had escaped her throat.

No.

It had gotten cold in Anna’s bed. A dull throbbing rose behind her brow, nauseating fear within her chest. The fire in the hearth had gone out, the floorboards and even the linens covered in a thin layer of furry frost. She withdrew her hand from Anna’s back. Removed her lips.

Anna stared at her as if she was a complete stranger. All the heat, all the blood had drained from Elsa’s face. She opened her mouth, but no sound would come out; her tongue felt heavy as lead. She swallowed. “Anna, I …”

Her sister’s voice was frail, but carefully controlled. “Stop,” she said. Wide were her eyes, plain her struggle to conceal her revulsion. “Please … please just leave.”

She never had been able to refuse her sister.