"Elsa."
She smiled faintly at the familiar voice, its dulcet, warm tone comforting her.
"Anna . . . Anna, is that you?" she murmured back, and absently she worried that her question had not been heard, since she could hardly make out the sound of her own speech.
A soft giggle was her reply. "Yes, Elsa, it's me."
She could just make out the faint outline of her sister's strawberry-blonde covered head, her signature braid laid across her right shoulder. The sun rose behind that fair girl's face and illuminated her figure amongst the other familiar sights in her older sister's bedchambers, unchanged from years past.
Her smile widened at the sight, and she gripped Anna's hand tightly.
"Oh, Anna; I've had such terrible dreams . . ."
"Elsa . . ."
Her brow furrowed as Anna's voice suddenly changed, and a concerned look cast itself over her normally cheerful features.
"Elsa."
She shifted uncomfortably on the bed below at the second repetition of her name, and the picture of Anna by her side became blurry and uneven.
"Elsa."
Finally, her eyes opened fully, convinced that she would find her sister there; but as the figure by her side came into clearer focus, her expression dropped.
"You're awake."
It was, without a doubt, Hans's face that hovered over hers, and Hans's face that had shown such a curiously worried look—though, she noticed suddenly, the setting in which she found herself was much changed from before.
Her brows rose in bewilderment, and she instinctively tried to rise from the bed in alarm.
"Don't move," he warned her, though he needn't have; she moaned in pain from the attempt and fell back just as quickly as she had risen.
Even so, her hands automatically moved to her neck, which was wrapped in what felt like a fresh layer of gauze. She touched the material—softly, she had thought—but apparently, not softly enough.
"Don't touch it," he gently pressed her hand, placing it back at her side. "It might start bleeding again if you do."
Her head swam at the thought that he should be so concerned for her well-being—and, what's more, that he should be looking after her in what appeared to be her parents' former bedroom.
She hazily tried to remember how she had gotten there, pressing a hand to her throbbing temple. To her surprise, she found the hand bare; her head turned to her side, where she found the other equally stripped.
Anxious at this discovery, she pressed it to her chest, and stared at him with blue eyes that struggled to focus.
"How . . . you . . . why are you . . ."
She trailed off for a moment as a memory suddenly struck her, the weight of it making her heart drop to her stomach.
"You—you killed that guard, didn't you?"
His expression darkened at the question. "I did," he replied bluntly.
When she stared back at him in dull surprise, he frowned. "He would have killed you if I hadn't stepped in."
She shook her head slightly, though it felt like trying to shift a ton of lead. "No," she said quietly, "he would've let them do it."
He glanced out the window, but his expression was unchanged from before. "Well, whichever way he would've done it is of no concern to me," he said firmly. "All that matters is that he doesn't pose a threat anymore."
YOU ARE READING
The North Wind
Fanfiction[Frozen; Alternate Ending; Hans x Elsa.] "If they knew you were still alive, they would never stop hunting you," he told her bluntly. "As long as you're here, you're safe from them." Elsa's stare turned hard and bitter at these words; and yet his da...
