Remember what I said the first day about prompts and invisible ink?

When Anna was very little, one of her tutors explained that some people, who lived outside of gates and walls and even roofs, spent their entire lives becoming experts in whatever they wanted. Then they’d come back and write everything down so that the people who did have to stay inside could become experts whether they liked it or not.

It wasn’t put exactly like that, but the crux of the lesson was that doodling on the blank spots inside the books she was supposed to read was disrespectful, and she should not do it in front of people.

The other lesson was an accident.

If there was something you didn’t know about, and no one had written about it, and no one liked talking or teaching about it, if you really, really liked it, you could learn all about it all by yourself.

Anna knew she was a princess, and that was a very important job. There were only two of them in the entire kingdom, and when they were older, there would only be one of them.

But some things were simply more important.

With a firm heart and a borrowed book that had nothing but blank pages in need of doodles, Anna made her decision.

She would become an Elsa Expert.

That turned out to take a lot more waiting than she thought.

One of her books, about a bear named Mor’du, said that tracking the bear down had taken a very long time, especially because during its hibernation time, it wasn’t going anywhere or leaving anything around to track.

Anna thought Elsa hibernated more than any bear anyone had ever met.

Then she realized that that was already something there weren’t books about, and with a flourish, she dragged her green chalk across the first page.

The pages after that were much harder, but she was determined to learn.

(Her tutor said she was inattentive.

Mama and Papa listened. Anna thought Elsa would have known that she wasn’t, she was just paying attention to better things. Elsa would have said so, too, because she knew that being scolded made Anna cry. Before she went away, Elsa had been an Anna Expert.

She wrote that down, too.

Even if Elsa didn’t want to be Anna Expert anymore.)

It took a lot of watching, but years into the project, she made her first educated deduction.

Elsa, a creature of habit who rarely left her room, who was allowed to leave the table after finishing only a few of her vegetables, who everything in the garden ran away from when she left her room to hide outside, had a thing about dirt.

Anna had smiled the whole day after realizing that. She even got Elsa to smile back at her when she brought out one of Gerda’s feather dusters to use on Elsa’s chair before mealtime.

The gloves were the big clue. Papa had gotten them for Elsa–to make things easier, he had told Anna.

Anna didn’t used to think that the castle was so dirty that it could make someone’s day harder, but it did say right on page two that Elsa was very good at noticing things (like Anna sneaking onto the window cleaner’s platform to see if she could see into Elsa’s room (she couldn’t)). Someone who noticed that much probably would be very bothered by the dirt.

Anna was not someone who noticed that much, except about Elsa. She did try to talk to the maids about being extra sure to clean around her room, but for some reason, Mama and Papa thought that keeping everyone away from her room would be better.

They were probably right.

Papa maybe still knew a little more about Elsa than she did, otherwise he wouldn’t have come up with the gloves.

That made the deduction that came after Papa was gone much harder.

She hadn’t thought of it much, because Elsa being in her room was such an Elsa thing now, but then Elsa wasn’t just not coming out, she was refusing to come out.

And every awful thought she’d ever had about how her best friend had left her behind, and wondering what it was that she had done, suddenly felt utterly insignificant to the next thing she would have written down if her book had any blank pages left.

The world was horrible, sometimes.

Elsa thought it was horrible all the time.

And she didn’t want Anna’s help.

For years, Anna tried to remember that, because even if it was true, and even if, worse, the help she wanted to offer wasn’t good enough to make up for anything, letting Elsa deal with dirt and the world her way was the only thing she could think of to make things better.

And in the middle of everything was the one observation she was never sure she had the nerve to write down.

Elsa didn’t like to be touched.

There wasn’t as much evidence to back that one up. Elsa wasn’t around anyone enough to be touched at all, so who knew if she liked it or not.

The only person in the whole castle who did get a chance to touch her, as far as Anna could tell, was… Anna.

Whom Elsa avoided.

Probably because Anna could never remember not to touch her.

Among whatever other things had landed her in her room in the first place.

The dirt theory was running a little thin.

Anna really didn’t mean to forget that Elsa couldn’t stand being touched, and she wasn’t even sure how she forgot that, because every time Elsa flinched away it felt like her heart was splintering into a bazillion pieces, but it kept happening.

Some days, Elsa was Elsa. She would come down for breakfast, and it would be the person whose shoulders Anna had crawled over to see out the castle windows.

They were supposed to touch, weren’t they? Hug and kiss and clap their hands together?

Only not so much, and about the second Anna remembered that, her Elsa was gone, and the stranger she shared the castle with was back.

So. No touching. Enough with the touching.

Elsa did not like the touching.

Right.

Except for the part where Anna was wrong.

She didn’t notice at first. Her heart had been frozen over, she had been a glorified ice cube, and her memory with this one thing had always been so faulty that she was surprised Elsa hadn’t thrown a snowball at her head a dozen times over.

The thought that someone wouldn’t be interested in hugging after the days they’d had was ridiculous.

But then there were more days, and there was no flinching, and for once Anna was the frightened one because this was too close to every dream she’d ever had. Elsa wouldn’t approach her all on her own, not after so long, not yet, but her hands would twitch, and her graceful footsteps would stutter.

And Anna, for all the times her study had been interrupted, still wanted to be an expert in her field more than anything, and still was more of an expert than anyone could ever hope to be.

So she knew that the only thing to do at times like those was to dive straight into her sister’s arms and never, ever let go.