"Anna, let's switch for a bit," Elsa called to the girl trudging behind her.

"I'm… good… I've got this…" Anna was horribly out of breath and covered in sweat. They'd been walking for a good half hour in Arendelle's summer heat. No manmade paths ran through this part of the forest as people rarely came by here.

Shit… why am I… so out of shape? Anna wondered, forgetting that her weekly exercise regimen consisted of scrolling through Netflix till she passed out. The backpack she was carrying wasn't doing her any favors either, but she had insisted that since it was mostly her stuff in there, she would be the one responsible for it. We have to be getting close, right?

She took out her phone to check what the GPS had to say, but as soon as she took her eyes off where she was walking, she managed to trip over a large rock and fell down with a loud yelp.

"Owww." Anna rubbed the arm she used to break her fall. Blood was seeping from a fresh gash. She must've cut it on a branch or something. The forest floor was still damp from yesterday's downpour, and she could feel her shorts becoming soaked.

"Anna!" Elsa, blue eyes filled with worry, rushed over to where the redhead was lying on the ground. "Are you okay? Oh no… your arm."

"It's okay, I… nnngh… just fell," Anna groaned. "Why does pain have to hurt so much?"

"Oh Anna," Elsa said. Upon closer inspection, the cut thankfully didn't seem to be too deep. "Do you have anything in your pack, like Neosporin?"

"Uh, I think so. Check the main compartment."

Elsa unzipped the backpack, peered inside, and discovered within the lost treasures of Babylon; an umbrella, a few bottles of water, a romance novel, an abacus, granola bars, pepper spray, loose underwear, a hammer, a camera, and a ladle, just to name a few things. What the hell was Anna planning to do with all this?

"The first aid stuff should be in a plastic bag," Anna said. "Here, let me get it – it's like an episode of Hoarders in there." She turned around to reach inside the backpack, but Elsa stopped her with a stern glare.

"Just sit still… found it."

Holy hell… bossy Elsa is relevant to my interests, Anna thought, somehow feeling hotter than before. The pain in her arm was fading, replaced pleasantly by a light tingling as Elsa applied disinfectant to her cut with a Q-tip. Maybe it was worth being as coordinated as a beheaded guinea pig just to have Elsa take care of her like this.

"Thanks," Anna said, giving the blonde a kiss on the cheek. "For saving my life."

Elsa flushed at the surprise attack. "Drama queen." She stuck a Band-Aid over the cut.

"No, seriously, I think I saw some vultures circling around," Anna insisted.

"Is that so? In that case, I want a more fitting reward…"

Before Anna could protest, Elsa's lips were on her own. Even in this heat – or perhaps because of it – she was hungry for contact.

"But I'm all sweaty and gross," Anna breathed when she pulled away.

"Don't care."

"Well, I care." Anna straightened her posture. "I need to, er, maintain my aura of sophisticated grace."

Elsa tried to stifle a giggle, but failed, provoking an indignant look from Anna.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence." The redhead stuck her tongue out. "Sooo, now that we're out here and fully invested in this… I think it would be a good time to mention that I have no idea where we are."

Question marks danced over Elsa's head.

"My phone's out of batteries," Anna said, offering an awkward grin as an apology. "That means we're pretty much going blind now, so… um, want a granola bar?"

Elsa, lost for an appropriate reaction, quietly accepted a Chewy bar, and the two ate in silence. Sunlight fell through the forest canopy like strands of golden hair.

"Sorry… I have a useless phone," the blonde finally mumbled a while later. She had stubbornly held onto her flip phone long after they had gone out of fashion, never seeing the need for anything fancy. She hardly used the thing anyway.

"What? Oh, no Elsa – it's totally my fault," Anna assured her. "I was an idiot and forgot to charge it before we left."

"But-"

"Nope. The last thing I'm going to do is let you feel bad for my mistakes. Besides, we're still okay." She flashed a sadness-proof smile and gave a thumbs up. "Team Elsanna is invincible!"

Elsa blinked. "Elsanna?"

"Yeah, I just combined our names together. I thought it was kind of neat how they flow into each other… what do you think?" Anna had a hopeful look on her face.

"I guess…"

"C'mon, it's like Brangelina, or Bennifer."

"Okay, then what about… 'Anna' and 'manatee'… Annatee?" Elsa offered.

Anna's eyes widened. "That. Is. Genius. We need to make that a thing like right now."

Elsa was giggling again. They were lost in the woods without so much as a compass to guide them, but somehow it didn't seem to matter so much anymore.

Somewhat reluctantly, the two resumed their journey, the minutes multiplying their fatigue, the lack of direction slowly eroding their moods, but just as they were about to give up and turn around, Elsa noticed something peculiar ahead.

"Hey, do you… see that?"

Anna looked to where the blonde was pointing. Two hundred feet or so in the distance, the trees seemed to be covered in a heavy fog. "Huh? Did we reach the other side already?"

"There's no way." Elsa shook her head. "It would take hours to get through this forest at our pace. I don't know what that is, but it seems… unnatural. Do you think…?"

The redhead nodded. "Only one way to find out."

They continued carefully, the thick air brushing their skin with moisture. As they approached the edge of the fog, Elsa felt the soil beneath her feet take on a strange yet familiar unevenness, as if something was buried just beneath the surface. She jumped slightly as an arm looped through her own.

"Anna?"

Anna was clinging to her as if she were a lifebuoy in the middle of the ocean. "Just k-keep walking." Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

So they continued onward as one 4-legged being. As they stepped into the fog, there was a brief moment where nothing was visible, so dense was the mist. Then, it came into view – the outline of an enormous tree, its trunk easily ten times the width of the surrounding pine trees. It was surprisingly short for its size, but its branches, and there must have been hundreds of them, reached well past what seemed physically or biologically possible.

"Oh my god…" Anna spoke in a hushed tone. "Is this a dream?"

Approaching the tree, Elsa could see that the bark was colored a ghostly gray. She placed a hand on the trunk and immediately recoiled; it was ice cold.

"Do you think this that, um, Iggsicle thing?" Anna asked, still attached to Elsa's side.

"You mean Yggdrasil?" Elsa corrected. "It fits the description, but… Yggdrasil isn't real. It's just something from the stories."

"This doesn't look real."

"Right, but… I don't know. I don't know anything anymore." The blonde shivered.

Anna unlatched her arm and started walking around the base of the tree. "Why would my parents have a map to this in their room?"

"Assuming this is what we're looking for." Elsa, for reasons she could no longer rationalize, was still skeptical.

"It has to be." Desperation was creeping into Anna's voice. They wanted me to find this. This has to be it… but what am I supposed to do now? "Christ, how old is this thing anyway? It looks ancient."

They spent nearly an hour trying to decipher the mystery that was this giant tower of wood and leaves, from studying the patterns of the bark to Anna's failed attempt at climbing it, but they came up empty-handed as to why exactly they were making such a fuss about a tree, even obscenely oversized as it was. When they finally decided to return home, Anna snapped a few pictures with her camera before leaving the forest way they came in.

It took a fair bit longer to get out than it did to get in, owing to their compromised sense of direction, but they eventually found their way back to the car. As they drove off, the trees seemed to close up behind them, concealing their footsteps within.

"Someone's mummified the toilet seat," Anna remarked as she returned to her seat at the table. They were in a diner somewhere along the road between the lake and the city. The trip had taken them well into the late afternoon, and a few granola bars weren't nearly enough to stave off the wrath of hunger scorned.

Elsa made a disgusted face, but quickly recomposed herself when the waitress came around.

"Are we ready to order?" the brown-haired woman chirped. Her nametag read "Belle."

"Uh, yeah," Anna said, picking up her menu. "I'll have a deluxe pancake platter and a chocolate malt."

"Veggie burger… and a chocolate malt for me too." Elsa accepted the mental high-five that Anna tried to give her.

"Alrighty, I'll be right out with your shakes."

"Oh," Anna stopped the waitress. "Can I also get a thing of peanut butter?"

The waitress gave her an odd look and a wary "Sure" before taking their menus and disappearing into the kitchen. When they were alone again, Anna's lips twisted into a mischievous smile.

"And what are you so pleased about, might I ask?" Elsa looked mildly amused.

"Ohhh, just wondering…"

"What?"

"Do you think that we look like we're… together to other people?"

Elsa wasn't expecting this. "Um, probably not. I think we look like friends? Maybe sisters at best."

"Well, what if I leaned over this table and kissed you right now?" Anna's eyes glinted.

"What?!" Elsa nervously looked around the diner to find that there was a nonzero number of people seated at tables nearby, and one family directly across the aisle from them. "Don't do that…"

Silence.

"I'm serious, Anna." Elsa was holding the specials menu up as a shield.

Fuck, she's too cute, Anna thought. I can't do this. "Fine, fine… I'll just talk dirty to this ketchup bottle."

"Here you guys go," Belle said cheerfully, returning from the kitchen with their milkshakes. With a wink, she set the glasses down on the table. "Enjoy, you two lovebirds."

Score.

They settled into a comfortable silence as they sipped their drinks through oversized straws, exhausted from walking all afternoon. Anna instinctively pulled out her phone. Yep, still dead. Looking back at Elsa, who was currently waging an epic battle with brain freeze, she remembered yesterday, lying in the backseat of her Volvo, waiting out the rain. She liked small spaces; they were good for when she didn't want to move her limbs at all, or for Elsa to just casually mention that she had never known her own birth parents.

It wasn't entirely out of context – she had just been answering Anna's questions about her childhood – but Anna was still unprepared to hear it. And as horrible as it seemed, she felt their bond deepen, as if they were two specks of dust orbiting the same sunspeck in the same pocket universe where shitty things happened to good people.

"Thanks for coming with me today," she said quietly, breaking the silence.

Elsa, half-done with her malt, looked like she was about to fall asleep.

First, I want to apologize for the huge delay. I was kind of unhappy with how the last chapter turned out, so I needed to take a bit more time with this one. Who knows if it helped any, though.

Second, thanks to Keiko, exDerelict, pensversusswords, dontaskidontknow and of course GhostOfWintersPast for being amazing.