Kristoff was right; she tastes like summer.

She is quite certain that she has almost forgotten what the initial childish game of dare was; she is most definitely assured Anna already has. The Princess of Arendelle was never one for dwelling on the immediate past for very long.

The Princess of Arendelle was also never one for half-hearted indulgences.

Anna's eyes are firmly closed, if a little dreamily, a light flush settled on her cheeks that paints her returning copper tan a delectable pink nuance, bringing out her freckles and making Elsa wonder off-handedly if the same can be said of her own complexion as well.

She keeps her eyes partially open, three-quarters lidded, to keep the younger woman within her line of sight; as much out of a desire to savour the moment as far as she dares as it is a last-ditch grab for a fleeting sense of control, of protection: not of herself, but of her - hopefully - blissfully unaware sister in front of her.

Protecting Anna has never been an issue of inquiry - it shaped Elsa's reality for thirteen agonizing years. Still, the Queen of Arendelle is not so far ahead yet to fail to realize that having to protect her sister from herself like this would never have occurred to her even in her most fevered of miracle-mongering daydreams.

She isn't even a Queen right now; she is in her most casual of clothing, her hair falling loose and luxurious down her back and over her shoulders, brushing her neck and jawline with wayward silken bangs the sensation of which she has yet to fully familiarize herself with, but right now everything pales in comparison to the near-furnace heat of her sister's hands cradling her face, two fingers on each hand slipped behind an ear, locking the older woman in place as firmly as a metal vice while Anna's mouth remains molded onto hers, a branding iron sculpted in warmth and taste and absolute presence and a tingling train of thought that curls itself inside her chest, biting its tail over and over and over as if to distract her mind from its own careening path.

She feels her own pulse vividly; it thunders through her heart like the steel-shod hooves of charging cavalry, roars in her veins like the frigid ocean giving way to calving icebergs. She can no longer hear the faint crackle of the frost creeping out from beneath her own hands onto the wooden rail against which she braces herself, but she senses the magic bloom in her palms, stinging her fingertips with pins and needles made of snowflakes and frozen fractals begging to be let loose, and so she grasps even harder around the once-living material, its inherent heat reservoir at once an anchor and counter-weight to the burning mandala wheeling back and forth through her ribcage and abdomen, caught in a frenzied dance of mutual contention with the chill of her powers trickling up through the marrow of her arms in a desperate bid for freedom.

Protecting her sister has never been an issue of inquiry. But right here, right now, the Queen of Arendelle can admit at least to herself that protecting someone from afar and protecting someone up close - this up close - are two very different things.

And she is not quite certain if she ever wants to go back to the former.