AN: I have combined the last two prompts into one here as I was on holiday last week. Any feedback would be most welcomed (literally, anything at all - hate it? like it? ambivalent towards it?) - thanks for reading :)

Rated: MA - it's a bit smutty ;)
Pairing: Kristanna
Summary: Kristoff hears some rumours flying around the castle which send his thoughts in new directions. Meanwhile Anna is trying to find the right words to express her desires.

Disclaimer - Disney does not belong to me.

Rumours are like whispers, falling into dark spaces and curling around corners and window-ledges. They seep into the walls, like a certain smell you can't locate. They stick to you and clog your airways. The source unknown, they undulate in waves across minds and bodies and stick to the insides of eyelids late at night.

Kristoff had been living there for only a few months, and, unused to people anyway, moving into the castle was a big change. Suddenly there were people everywhere. Men appeared by his bedside every morning, to light his fire and lay out his clothes and all sorts of ridiculous things he was quite capable of doing himself. But that was palace life and it was sort of okay. The rumours were not.

He was, fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you looked at it), blessed with exceptional hearing. Fortunately had kept him alive when others might not have heard the almost-silent crack in the ice below his feet. Fortunately meant he'd heard Anna's broken whisper of his name across the winds and frozen fjord. Unfortunately was that his family were loud, like, really, really loud. Unfortunately was hearing the rumours, the whispers, low voices hidden around corners and he had to close his eyes and breathe deeply. Unfortunately was that he had to fight the urge to storm around such corners and find whatever guard or butler or kitchen-boy dared to speak such things and raise his fists to them.

It was unnerving. He was not, by nature, a violent person. He could remember only one time in his life before the castle walls that he had wanted to hit anybody – and even then he never actually did it. The idea of punching that slime-ball pleased him more than he was entirely comfortable with. The idea of hitting anybody was new, and different... but this was different. This was about Anna.

I heard she's a little firecracker

I heard she begs to have her hair pulled

I heard she takes his whole dick in her mouth

And swallows

I heard she spread her legs the first night she met him

I heard she loves it everywhere – and anywhere

She'll do anything for a bit of cock

I heard she's a filthy fucking whore in bed

And out of it

It made him sick. To hear words like that being passed around from their dirty mouths, mouths unworthy of even breathing the same air as her.

And worse was that she was completely oblivious. Worse was that she was kind and sweet and funny, and never suspected these men (if they could be called that) would ever speak of her like that. Worse was that she liked having so many people on the palace payroll, she enjoyed them being there, she was content for them to wander the halls while she slept. Worse was that it was all entirely untrue.

Worst was that – and he could only admit it to the very depths of the dark nights, alone in bed and filled with that burning curling heat – worst of all was that he almost liked it.

Picturing Anna, with all her sweetness and light, seeing her the way they talked about her, it coiled inside him deep in his gut, made him twitch and ache and flush. He hated them, and tried to hate himself for listening to the echo of them late at night, but he couldn't stop.

I would never speak about her like that though, he thought. I would never reduce her to that. I would never make her feel like anything less than a goddess if (when) I take her to bed.

His mind instantly fell to an image of Anna, flesh bared and slicked with sweat. Lips swollen with the faint bruise of fingertips lingering around her thighs and breasts and hips. In his head she is on her knees. She is on her knees on the bed and pressing her face into the covers, raising her behind in the air before him. He is standing, watching her, eyes roaming over her perfect skin. She is open and spread for him, slightly pink and glistening. He extends a fingers and gently, so gently he is barely touching her, traces it around her outer lips. He watches as she twitches and pulses for him. He hears a whimper fall from her mouth. He brings his finger to his mouth and runs it across his lower lip, his tongue darting out to capture the faint taste of her left there. In his head he presses the palm of his hand heavy onto the base of her spine. He raises the other into the air, poised, ready to-

He opened his eyes, feeling the sticky warmth of his release spattered across his stomach under the covers. The heat, the urgency, the blind and raw want was gone and he was left to clean himself up and try to ignore the shameful cold now flooding through him. He would never let her know. Never, that this was what he thought about in the dark. He would never let her know about the rumours that he both hated and craved, or all those dark things he burned to do to her innocent flesh.

Anna felt like she was going crazy. She couldn't stop thinking about Kristoff – his body in particular. Predominantly a certain part of his body coupled with a certain part (parts) of hers.

She didn't even have words for what she wanted him to do to her. She was no stranger to the phrases 'laying with a man' or 'making love', but they just didn't feel enough. She wanted him to... devour her. To consume. For his skin to burn against hers until she couldn't take any more, and then for it not to stop. She wanted nails to leave scarlet lines across her breasts, teeth to press to her thighs and leave their imprint in a semi-permanent brand of 'you are mine'. She could hardly breathe under the weight of want.

She was sure, having combed meticulously through every book on the subject she could find, that the words she needed for this extended far beyond simply 'laying with' Kristoff.

Of course, she wanted that. She wanted to make love to him, in warm afternoon sunlight with kisses and laughter, but those weren't the thoughts that kept her awake in the dark. Those weren't the thoughts that ached and burned under her skin and made her tingle – thoughts that made her slide her hand down between her legs and stroke herself, finding that little place that felt so good and stroking and rubbing. Faster, harder, to climaxes that moaned from her mouth and clutched at the bed-sheets with toes and fingertips.

Those thoughts seemed to haunt every waking moment now too. A great deal of her blushes and flustered gestures these days were because her mind was entranced in ideas that she just knew she could never voice.

How, she thought, how could these lips put words to that? Virgin lips of the still-only-18-year-old, still very much innocent princess. It was absurd. Even the notion of going to Kristoff's room, or inviting him into hers, under cover of darkness was utterly absurd. It just couldn't happen. Not yet, anyway. Soon though, perhaps? It could be soon...

It had to be. She didn't think she could stand not knowing his body for much longer. Having it pressed up against her with nothing to separate them, moving together and feeling his... his... – she couldn't even think the word without blushing – with him inside her. She imagined how it would feel, tried to gain some grasp of the sensation with her own fingers but it never felt enough.

Their kisses were getting longer and more, much more, intense. It was harder now to pull away, to stop herself from clutching at him and trying to draw him closer. She had taken to fisting her fingers in his hair, to letting her hands roam across his shoulders and down his chest, around his waist and up his back as though mapping the planes of his body and committing them to memory.

She wanted more, and she knew (hoped) that he wanted more from her too. It seemed that way. He was always the one to end their kisses now, although he did at least have the good grace to look pained at doing so. He was as breathless as she was, eyes closed and trying to regain some semblance of reality – or that was how it seemed to her anyway. Lately, since she had been pressing closer and closer, she had felt something hard against her, something that made her thighs clench and quiver. It made her heavy with warmth and wanting and she couldn't put words to it but she wanted it.

"So, do you think you've been good enough?"

She nods, biting her lip, looking up at him through damp eyelashes. Her knees are aching against the wooden floor, her feet tingling from being sat back on them, thighs apart and waiting. Her hands are tied behind her back.

He steps forward, nudges the inside of each knee with the tip of his boot, and murmurs "wider".

A little whimper falls from her lips and she forces her hips forward, and legs even further apart. Tiny beads of sweat gleam on her skin – who knew staying still could be so much hard work? Her muscles are screaming. She feels the air cool against her, exposed to him as much as her kneeling position allows.

His fingertips trace over her eyelids, down her cheek, his thumb brushes across her lower lip and she darts her tongue out to taste just the barest trace of his skin.

"Don't move."

He walks behind her, away from her, and she ...

wakes up. Alone in the dark, twisted in the covers and legs wrapped around a spare cushion. It had to be soon, innocence be damned. She was going crazy.