Author's Note: Thanks for bearing with me until now to get to this point, and my apologies for the delayed delivery. I'm having a very busy real life at the minute, so expect new chapter releases to be slightly more delayed than usual. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. You guys are swell.
There’s lovely fanart by fantasyofcarrie on Tumblr of the pink dress Elsa wears in this chapter. Check it out: http://fantasyofcarrie.tumblr.com/post/83439601163/in-which-i-decided-to-shamelessly-draw-this-from
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Hans wasn't sure how the Queen had managed it—and indeed, he might even have been fairly impressed by her behind-the-scenes finagling of every minute detail related to the ball, were he not keenly aware of the fact that he was merely a pawn in her great scheme.
Always have to be "Lord of the Castle," don't you, Mother?
He had been standing fairly inconspicuously in the corner of the ballroom furthest from the entrance for over twenty minutes by then, flanked on both sides by guardsmen, but he had hardly raised so much as an eyebrow of suspicion in all that time.
At first he had been surprised by the lack of attention, since he was certain that the courtiers all knew about his coming back on account of Queen Elsa's very public request. As the minutes slowly passed, however, he wondered if they were actually aware that he was already there.
She did come and fetch me at some godforsaken hour of the night, after all, he reasoned, frowning.
Though it was the most plausible explanation, he still found it strange that the only person who paused for any length of time at the sight of him was a courtier by the name of . . . Sir Nicklaus? Nikolai? He shrugged to himself, having forgotten such useless information long ago.
Everyone else passed by without sparing him so much as a glance; or, if they did, it was only a curious one, noticing the guards by him, before they looked away again, moving on to the dancing, or the food, or the wine—and he had never wanted a drink so much in his entire life as he did in that moment, standing and waiting, endlessly waiting, and for what?
He still wasn't sure.
I suppose they don't recognise me, he mused, thinking of the tawny colour his skin had taken on with a grim smirk. It didn't help that he had come into the ballroom through a back door unused by the general court, and that he stood in the corner furthest from the action—and, moreover, that he was done up in the guise of a palace servant (a posh one, he noted, glancing at his gloves and black suit, but a servant nonetheless).
Even the guards by him—a dead giveaway otherwise, he thought, that he might be an untrustworthy character—were not so close as to raise such fears, their distance suggesting that they could have been doing anything, not just watching him.
And so his green eyes latched resentfully onto the front of the ballroom, where the Queen's and King's thrones sat, empty and awaiting their arrival.
You wanted it this way, didn't you?
It seemed to be a pattern with the Queen, when he thought on it: the manner in which he had been stripped of his titles and tossed out of the palace a year ago, practically thrown onto the ship to Vollan, all without ceremony or a grand, public flogging; the sudden, quiet retrieval from exile, done in the dark of night with a small ship and only Her Majesty's most trusted guardsmen; and this surreptitious, almost silent reinsertion of the traitor prince back into the court, disguised as a lowly servant and thus going unobserved by everyone around him.
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Winter's End
Fanfiction[Frozen; Hans x Elsa.] A year has passed since she lifted the curse of eternal winter, but Elsa—still feeling that some matters have been left unresolved—decides to finally pay a diplomatic visit to the Southern Isles. Notorious for its powerful Que...
