Three word prompt: fire, hook, slipper

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The knock rouses her. “Snuh?” she says, and sits up, hair clinging to half her face by way of the drool also smeared down her cheek. “Nnn-zhm? Who’s it? Wha’?”

Shadows shift under the door. Someone’s shuffling their feet out there in the hall, and the floorboards creak and Anna squints, waking up a little more. “Anna?” comes the whisper. “May I—”

“Oh, hey! Hey, yeah Elsa, come in, ’s’open!” Anna throws off her covers. The door groans on its hinges as she’s hunting for her slippers and in comes Elsa, hunched up thin in her nightdress, her own feet bare despite the chill. No surprise there. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself like she’s cold, though, and Anna frowns because yeah, no. She says, “Elsa? You okay?”

Elsa hovers in the doorway. A little smear of ink shows dark against her cheekbone—she’s up late always, reading books on law and the monarchy, taking notes, doing up treaties and ledgers. Probably that’s the how and the why of the ink. Her hair’s an unkempt silvery snarl and she’s chewing her lip with such fervor that it’s almost red enough to bleed. Anna stands up in hurry, seeing that. She doesn’t need slippers badly enough to wait.

“Elsa,” she says. On instinct she opens her arms and that’s it, that’s all it takes. Elsa’s across the room in a flash, folding herself into Anna’s hold. That’s fine! What’s not fine is how Elsa falls, next, how she goes to her knees, thump-thump, and throws her arms around Anna’s waist and shivers. In trying to hug her Anna gets great grasping handfuls of nothing but air.

Anna kneels. She’s strong, she’s always been strong—she could beat Papa at arm-wrestling and once she even bested Kristoff, and he looked at her open-mouthed and shocked and had to hand over the sled reins to her for a week. (She hit exactly three trees. “Saplings!” she told Kristoff.) But strength won’t help her now. One finger placed wrong seems like it might shatter Elsa, and Anna bundles her sister up carefully into her arms and says, “Hey, hey, whoa, Elsa, hey, it’s fine, you’re fine, you’re right here. I’m here too. See? I’ve got you. You’ve got me.” And Elsa does. She’s digging her fingers hard into Anna’s spine, right at the base of it where the formal court dresses always drag and itch. “Sssh,” says Anna, “ssh, we’re okay.”

It’s a lie. Elsa’s not okay and Anna’s not okay either, not seeing her sister like this and Elsa, Elsa’s so cold. Anna’s neck prickles. The spit in her mouth dries up. She remembers her own heartbeat going slushy thanks to the curse, remembers how her skin froze and frosted blue and cracked and froze again when she moved her fingers. She remembers how much it hurt. Realizes it could hurt again. But what did being scared ever get her? Especially being scared of Elsa?

“I’ve got you,” she says to Elsa a second time. It’s starting to sound like a mantra and mantras don’t ever do anything but stress people out, it’s a proven fact, Mama used to get so angry when Papa chanted stuff at her. So Anna says, “I’ve got this,” just to change it up, and glances around, and spots her coat hanging on the hook behind her door. Aha! “Yeah,” she says, “I’ve totally got this. C’mon, Elsa, up, get up, okay? Come with me.”

Ten minutes later they’re walking arm in arm across the courtyard behind the castle. It’s late fall and there’s frost on the grass, and the moon makes long black shadows across wider, bluer stretches of the immaculate lawn. Every step crunches. Anna runs her fingers over and over the sprawl of skin between Elsa’s elbow and wrist. Sometimes she curls her hand over the top of Elsa’s too, and squeezes the hard, chilled knuckles bunched up beneath the skin there.

The stars are pricks of cold fire looking down. Elsa says, “Where are we going?” when the castle’s only a dark smudge behind them. By now the courtyard’s given way to the outer gardens and the hedge maze Papa had commissioned the spring Anna turned six. The maze is in disrepair—Elsa’s had more important things to do as a new queen than tend every acre of the castle grounds—but Anna finds the entrance easily enough, and she pries aside the eager juniper switches to make enough space for two.

“We’re going in there,” she says. Elsa looks between her and the maze entrance, dubious, but Anna beams and nudges her hip into her sister’s. “Trust me, all right? It’ll be fine. I know the way.”

“The way to what?”

“You’ll see,” says Anna, and then, “hurry! I’ve got a branch wiggling up into my armpit over here, Elsa, it’s really itchy.”

Elsa smiles. Just a bitty little smile, more like a smi-, and she says, “Sorry,” and steps into the maze. Anna crashes in behind her. She trips over a root and nearly goes sprawling, but Elsa seizes her arm and steadies her and they stand like that for a while, squinting at each other in the dark.

When Anna played in the maze as a child, it was always during the day and the gardeners kept the whole thing tidy. It’s been years since this place saw the smallest set of shears, though, that’s obvious. Anna can’t see much of the sky when she looks up. Moonlight filters eerily in between the spots where the hedges have grown together, and Elsa says, “Anna? I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

“Yeah, it’s creepy. I know. But don’t give up yet!” She squeezes Elsa’s hand again. Elsa squeezes hers back.

Anna starts down the righthand path, drawing Elsa close alongside her. Every few steps one of them trips or runs into a piece of the hedge that’s gotten too wild to stay in its trellis, and every few steps it’s Anna saying, “Oops!” or Elsa huffing out weary, reluctant giggles and pulling sticks out of her hair. They turn a corner, and one more—it’s not a big maze. Anna says, “Okay, here,” and pulls Elsa through a break in the hedges she memorized years ago.

They step together into the middle of the maze. There’s a bench and a rosebush, the latter covered in frosted blooms that will be gone given another week. The grass is high and ragged but there’s still a visible path through most of it: ruts from the wheels of a bicycle.

“This was your place,” Elsa realizes. They’ve made it to the bench. Anna sits down and pats the spot next to her, and Elsa gingerly settles too. “You came here a lot.”

“Only all the time! Like, every day. I loved it. But you know…” Anna tugs Elsa’s elbow. “It always looked best in the snow.”

Elsa’s smile is bigger this time. “Did it?”

“Oh yeah. Do you think you could maybe…?” But Elsa’s already weaving her hands, threading the magic through her fingers and out again in little licks of bright, bright blue. The frost of the grass thickens to a glaze, and white flakes start a slow, steady drift from above. Soon the clearing’s carpeted.

Anna folds her arms around Elsa and nuzzles into her, watching the snowfall. She doesn’t miss how tightly Elsa takes hold of her in turn, much less has she forgotten where they were less than half an hour ago—and why.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says. She has to say it. Against her, Elsa shudders. She shakes her head.

“I dreamed you were dead,” says Elsa. “Again. I—Anna, I killed you once, it was me—”

“It was magic.” Like the snow now, falling harder. “It was an accident. And if it ever happens again”—because it could—“we know how to fix it, and everything will be fine.”

Elsa’s hands fist in Anna’s coat. She leans back and there are tears standing in her eyes, and a tremble rattles up through her and she wrenches out, “But I lost you.”

Anna remembers reaching up to stop the sword. Remembers Hans and his snarling, triumphant face: remembers hating him. Remembers how slippery her feet felt on the ice. She doesn’t know if she remembers dying—she doesn’t know if she ever really died. But she remembers the dark and the cold, a little, and she thinks maybe she knows what it’s like to be lost.

She looks at Elsa. Elsa stares back, her fingers hooked into the fabric of the coat, pulling. When she blinks the tears in her eyes spill down her face, and Anna reaches up to wipe them away.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, you’re right. You did—you lost me, I was gone. But,” she says, “we got lucky and I’m back, and you’re back, Elsa, because you were gone too, you know that?” She’s not angry. Sometimes she was—at the closed door—but she’s not anymore. Leaning up into her, Anna kisses Elsa’s collar, her throat, her cheek and says, “For years we didn’t have each other, but we do now, so hey. The bad dreams? Kick those in the butt, Elsa, they’re just dreams. This is what we have.” She motions to the clearing, the rosebush dusted ivory, to the bench and how they’re sitting on it. “This is what’s real, right here. We’re here. You and me. It’s always going to be you and me now. Right?”

Elsa nods desperately. “You and me, right here,” she says, like she wants to believe it but can’t quite yet, and her face crumples in on itself. “Anna—”

“Ssssh.” The snow comes down in a pale furious rush. It’s not okay. Anna holds Elsa through it all, through the heaviest drifts and it’s so, so cold and it’s not okay, but maybe someday it might be, and Anna says, “Sssh, Elsa, sssh. I’m here.”