AN: Thanks for the reviews last chapter! I hope you all had a good holiday. Another year ahead of us. We have began our descent into the finale, people. I want to say two more chapters after this one? Sounds about right.

Disclaimer: I don't own Frozen or its characters.

After her parents had made the decision to close the gates and shut the castle off from the rest of the kingdom, it was their family dinners where the reality had really sunken in for Elsa.

Not the reality that she could no longer be around her sister like before, that there needed to be a riff between them to keep Anna safe from Elsa's powers; that came when her stuff was removed from their shared bedroom.

Not the reality that her powers were a danger to everybody she cared about; that came before the gates, when she had struck Anna and nearly killed her.

It was the reality that her family was no longer whole.

After the gates, they were no longer a unit operating in flawless tandem, a team working against the pressures of being in the royal spotlight, against the expectations of having a holy image and the scrutiny that came with it, being the pinnacles of sophistication and perfection.

This realization came slowly at first, while the changes were still being made, but the moment they had sat down to share their first meal together after all was said and done, it hit like stampede of reindeer.

The dinners that they had shared in the aftermath of visiting the trolls were devoid of enjoyment. The atmosphere no longer felt warm and inviting, not even with the fireplace in full blaze. They sat staring down at their meals in silence instead of recounting their days. They used to describe every detail to each other, no matter how mundane.

Papa used to take the time to pull out each of his ladies' chair like a gentleman before taking his own. Mama would contribute to the meal by assisting in the kitchen to give each dish a personal touch. Elsa was free from her lessons and was even able to forego a manner or two because it was just them, sharing a moment in complete privacy. They would laugh when Anna spilled something on herself or literally bit off more than she could chew, leaving her unable to close her overstuffed mouth.

Elsa had loved their dinners together because for just a little while they felt like an ordinary family, instead of The Royal Family. Her parents became ordinary parents, reverting from these staples of high society into people with no worries and enduring personalities that they weren't typically permitted to show while entertaining foreign guests.

But the event of dinnertime flipped once the gates closed; all the nuances that made the event precious were gone. Her father hardly showed up, much less pull their chairs out, tied up in a meeting or shut away in his study. Her mother didn't have the will to visit the kitchen anymore and nobody talked about their day except for Anna, who was too young to understand the change or the reason behind it. She picked up on the shift, as kids do, but not the cause, so when the retelling of her day failed to draw any real smiles, she no doubt thought it was somehow her fault.

The dinners were so uncomfortable, so painful, that eventually Elsa had stopped going to them. There was no word from her parents on the matter, because they thought that keeping up appearances for an empty castle was just as pointless as she had and didn't have the heart to force her to rejoin them. Anna had taken issue with it, naturally, but after a while of no response, she too gave up trying to coax Elsa out of her room for dinner; instead, opting to bring her a tray and leave it next to her bedroom door.

After the Great Thaw, they started taking dinner in the dining hall again and they fell into a routine so fast, it was almost like they had never stopped in the first place. Mama and Papa's absence was felt, of course, deeply felt, but they were together again as sisters, and with the welcomed addition of Kristoff, dinner became a happy event once more, something to look forward to at the end of a long day of meetings and paperwork.

This time around, having dinner within the walls of a castle again felt foreign to Elsa, more than it should have. More foreign than it had when they started doing it again after fourteen years of eating alone.

She concluded that the difference was the weeks spent taking dinner in a collection of new places. Pubs, inns, ships, the homes of friendly strangers, campfires built by Logan, campfires built by her - and Logan with her every time, causing her to draw an association between him and the feelings she had experienced during the most terrifying, but also the most exciting, adventure of her life. The green walls and plum drapes weren't off-putting. They were comfortable in their own right, familiar, but the intimacy of the dining room just didn't reach that same level that sharing meals over a campfire had, even if the person whom she had shared said meals with was present.

He felt miles away, seated at the opposite end of the table.

The distance was her fault, as it always was. The guards had already brought him up and deposited him in his seat before she had arrived. She could have taken the seat to his left or to his right, to be within his orbit again, but she had purposely chosen the seat furthest from his because she couldn't handle being any closer. It forced Anna and Kristoff to take seats somewhere in the middle. Because of this, the dinner was more awkward than it would have originally been if they all sat closer.

She shouldered the guilt of how uncomfortable everybody was. Even though she wasn't the one who insisted they all have dinner together in the first place, she couldn't fault Anna for trying to bridge the gap between her and Logan. She meant well.

Still, Anna should have listened when Elsa said it wouldn't go like she imagined it would and the queen conveyed that much with a strained look when she caught her sister's eye from over the table's garish decorative centerpiece.

'This is a nightmare,' she thought, sending the words off to Anna with her expression.

The princess smiled sheepishly, raising her shoulders up to her ears in a silent apology before looking back down at the bowl of soup in front of her, gnawing on her bottom lip anxiously. Kristoff looked up from where he had been taking sips from his own bowl and glanced around the table, taking in the way Elsa was staring exasperated at Anna and the way Anna looked like she wanted to drown in her soup before his eyes trailed down the table at their guest.

Since meeting Anna and becoming a frequent inhabitant of the castle, Kristoff knew a lot about manners and high dining etiquette, which he had taken upon himself to learn because he wanted to do everything he could to look less like a uncultured mountain man and more suitable for the role of future husband to the princess, but he still had to put conscious effort into how he sat at the table, which fork and spoon to use during which course, and how to eat his food without getting it all over himself, all the while fighting the overwhelming urge to rest his elbow on the table.

Logan wasn't putting in any effort to hide his current mood. He was slumped over the table with both elbows resting on the elaborate tablecloth as he idly stirred his spoon through his otherwise untouched bowl of soup. His head was dipped and his dark hair hung in front for his face, hiding his eyes. Kristofff wasn't annoyed by this; though, perhaps a bit jealous with each passing second he was forced to keep his spine completely straight. This was just him making observations on how miserable everybody looked.

He, himself, wasn't miserable, per se, but he was definitely uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to be the one to break the heavy silence.

"Are we just going to ignore how awkward this is?" he asked, not trying to be funny. "I mean, I'm okay if we are, I just wanted to make sure that's what we were doing."

"This soup is absolutely delicious," Anna said, answering his question. "The kitchen staff really outdid themselves this time, don't you think?"

The question was posed to the room with a forced smile that threatened to split her cheeks, but when the sound of silverware tapping against plates was her only response, her smile dropped and she went back to staring down into her bowl. For a moment, she thought about putting a kibosh on dinner, and probably would've been revered for it, but she held on to her resolve, doubling down, determined to break the tension and get everybody talking like the civilized human beings that they were.

"So, Logan," Anna breathed, finally addressing their guest as she smiled at him.

At his name, he lifted his head and blinked with his eyebrows raised, wordlessly acknowledging her.

"Where are you from?" she asked, figuring that the question that would be a good start; a polite and commonplace inquiry.

"You mean besides your dungeon?" he replied.

"Mmhm," she hummed brightly tone, letting his sarcasm going over her head.

She frowned and looked back towards the opposite end when she heard Elsa let out a sigh. The queen had an unimpressed look on her face as she sat with her spoon in her hand, poised over her bowl.

"Don't try to be civil with him right now, Anna," her sister told her. "He's impossible to talk to when he's in a mood like this. He doesn't have to be that way with you, none of this is your fault."

Anna opened her mouth, but Logan cut her off, his eyes rolling up at the ceiling in mock recall as he made a sound of disagreement.

"No, I distinctly remember her telling me I was under arrest before I was put in there," he said, "but you're right, it's not her fault." He turned to the princess, "I apologize for that, Anna, that was rude."

She blushed at the mentioning of what she had done to him earlier, waving off his apology with a playful scoff. "Pfft, that's okay. I totally shouldn't have-"

"I come from a far away land where backstabbing happens respectfully when one's back is turned, and not directly in the face like it's done here."

"Oh, that sounds - lovely?"

"Anna, just ignore him," Elsa insisted again, sterner this time.

"Yes, Anna, ignore me," he agreed. "It's not like I'm anyone important who would warrant respect or consideration, you know, like you would treat - what are those things called? Oh right, people."

Elsa tore her eyes from her sister and sent a glare down the table at the man. "If you have something to say to me, Logan, say it. I'm sitting right here."

"That's what you think 'right here' is, across the room?" he asked, projecting his voice to emphasize the amount of space and table literally between them. "Christ, could you have picked a seat further from mine?"

She opened her mouth to reply, but when her mind drew a blank, she looked back down at her bowl, scowling.

"And thanks for finally referring to me in the first person. My feelings were starting to get hurt at being called 'him', like I'm that socially awkward cousin who nobody talks to at the family picnic because he's stuffing shrimp into his pockets."

"This is where I always sit."

"No, it isn't"

"Don't pretend like you know everything about me."

"Your usual seat would be closer to your sister's, and obviously no, I don't know everything about you. In fact, I think this whole clusterfuck brings into question everything that I do know about you."

Anna gasped at the foul word, putting her fingers to her mouth and blushing. From where he had been quietly sipping his soup, Kristoff flinched. Sometimes the mountaineer had his slip ups, where he would accidentally walk on an expensive rug with muddy boots, or burp loudly before remembering too late where he was, but he never slipped that much.

But being used to his sometimes crass language, Elsa didn't blink.

"I chose to omit some of the facts, but I haven't told any outright lies that you haven't called out yourself."

"Shifting the blame, spoken like a true monarch."

"I'm not trying to shift the blame! I was just saying that everything wasn't a complete lie. The details may have been changed, but the events behind them, how I felt about them and how they affected me - I meant everything I said."

"This sounds like it's getting personal, should Anna and I leave?" Kristoff asked, moving to stand up from his chair.

"No."

He lowered himself back down. "Okay, just asking."

The two seethed while the other two squirmed in their seats. Kristoff was itching to bolt. He sent pleading looks to Anna across from him for them to leave and let Elsa and Logan hash things out on their own, but she didn't notice.

Anna glanced between her sister and their guest, gnawing on her lip and turning her spoon over in her fingers. There was a sudden desperation to keep the peace, bring back the smiles of the dining hall, to try again and keep trying until someone other than her said something decent. She was frustrated that Elsa and her crabby friend couldn't let things go and just appreciate that they had gotten what they had wanted; Elsa was home again. Things should be alright again, but they weren't.

There was a knot deep inside her chest that was getting tighter with every mean word exchanged. Her sister had forged a relationship with this mystery man and it was obvious that they cared about what happened to the other and their feelings, so why were they dragging this out? There were more serious things they should be focused on, like putting Arendelle back the way it was, pacifying the royal council and defending against bandits.

Can't forget about those nasty bandits, who might show up again at any time to kill them all, apparently, and these two wanted to fight about who said what, or who said nothing at all, or who forgot to mention that she was the ruling queen of a seaside kingdom? It was juvenile. There was some underlying problem there that two were refusing to address.

Maybe it was a mistake, making them face each again so soon, but she had only wanted to bring them back together since they meant something to each other. Anna didn't have to know the full story to know that much. Elsa said that they were good friends, but Anna wasn't blind. She wasn't oblivious to the fact that this grumpy lump of tattoos and sarcasm might be the person who she had wished would come into Elsa's life.

The missing shards of her shattered family were all there again, but they wouldn't fall back into place, like a puzzle piece that was just nearly the right fit but not quite, appearing oh-so similar but different in the subtlest of ways. She hated those pieces because no matter how much she tried to find the right piece, in the end her impatience always made her force the wrong one in by hammering it with her fist, only to have it fall apart anyways despite her clumsy efforts.

"Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm having a blast right now, painfully uncomfortable or not. We haven't taken a meal in here since you were - uh, since you were gone, Elsa," she said, tripping over the semantics at the end.

'Since you left. Since you were gone. Since you were gone, kidnapped, believed never to be seen again.'

Elsa smiled at her and it looked like she was going to say something, but Anna kept going.

"I'm just happy that you're back and that everything is okay, and that we can go ahead with the wedding, as if nothing - as if everything these past months hasn't happened. I don't even care that it isn't summer anymore and we can't use the gardens. Who needs a summer wedding? Pft, not us. Summer weddings are so boring, so common, everybody has a summer wedding. Winter weddings are where it's at now. I want a winter wedding."

She continued to talk and talk, rambling, even as the others looked up from their bowls and watched her. There was stress behind the falsely enthusiastic words. Though she smiled and spoke optimistically, it looked and sounded forced enough to draw the attention of the table. They gave her a mixed bag of looks, but she ignored them as she sat there with her spoon still poised in one hand.

"We'll just change the color scheme from greens and yellows to whites and blues, change the venue to the church, serve lamb instead of fish, and we can even make extra cake, just in case the bandits come back, because they are coming back, right?" she looked at Logan who, thrown by the sudden address, only shrugged his shoulders. "That's what Elsa said, that's why there's all that security patrolling the wall and grounds."

She looked around the table with an almost manically happy smile on her face while her eyes told a contrasting story. Elsa and Kristoff stared, becoming alarmed at her behavior while Logan shifted in his seat as he sensed the onslaught of the one thing that never failed to make him uncomfortable.

"But that's okay! We can just give them cake - cake for a queen." Anna's voice cracked over the title, her eyes becoming glossy.

Feeling her disposition slip into territory she had been vehemently avoiding, she put her spoon down and her hand came up to cover her mouth, as if to physically hold back the raw emotion that threatened to spew like vomit. She tried to compose herself, swallowing back the distress that had formed a lump in her throat, making it difficult to breath, but failed as she succumbed to the stress and anxiety that she had been suppressing for too long. Having Elsa back wasn't enough to completely erase the pain of losing her in the first place and the disappointment and frustration of that finally overwhelmed her.

Her face twisted up as she pulled back her hand and squeaked out, "who can do evil when they've got a slice of cake?"

She broke out into sobs after just barely uttering the last word. She collapsed on to the table and cried loudly into her arms. Elsa and Kristoff shot up in their seats, their chairs scraping against the floor. They rushed it the princess' aid, flanking her on both sides, gripping her shoulders while chanting words of comfort and reassurance. The kitchen staff peeked their heads out of the doors that separated the kitchen from the dining hall, drawn by the noise, curious and concerned.

"It's okay, Anna!"

"Please don't be upset!"

Anna's sister and fiance attempted to console her, softly cooing at her to calm down. Logan watched the scene with a pained expression. At a loss of what to do, he opted to sit there, covertly leaning over and using his spoon to fish Anna's braid out of her chowder.

"Don't cry, Anna," Elsa pleaded, her face wracked with guilt. "Logan and I were just having a spat, we have them all the time, don't we?"

She looked at the dark-haired man and urged with a venomous expression for him to agree, but he only shrugged his shoulders again, useless. The queen scowled in disapproval and rolled her eyes before turning her attention back on Anna. She still had her head buried in her arms and was no longer sobbing uncontrollably, but Elsa could hear the muffled sounds of sniffles and whimpers.

She lowered herself into a crouch next to her sister, placing her hand on her shoulder and leaning in close to her ear, whispering: "Everything is going to be okay."

Anna's head snapped back up, forcing Elsa to rear backwards and almost lose her balance to narrowly avoid being headbutted.

"No! It isn't! I thought that when you came back, everything would feel okay again and it doesn't, it just doesn't!" She looked down at herself then, noticing the soup covering the end of her braid. "And now I've got soup in my hair!"

Sobs renewed, she pushed up from her seat and rushed past her fiance and sister, running from the room.

"Anna, come back!" Kristoff called, following her.

From where she was still crouched next Anna's vacated chair, Elsa watched them retreat and listened to their footsteps fade before slowly drawing herself back to full height with a sigh. She made her way back over to her own seat. Once she settled back down in her seat, she propped both elbows up on the table and rubbed at her forehead to ward off the creeping headache that she knew was coming on. There was a long silence before anyone said anything again.

"Geez, that almost made me cry," Logan remarked with uncomfortable mirth.

From behind her hands, Elsa's eyes snapped open again. She looked up over the table at him, unimpressed.

"Are you happy with yourself?" she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.

He pulled an exasperated frown, his eyes rolling almost up into his skull at her response as he answered in a dry tone that flatly contradicted himself. "Yes, Elsa, I'm ecstatic that I made your sister cry. Tickled pink."

She shook her head. "You're unbelievable."

"Hey, this dinner was your idea," he said defensively. "You think I wanted all this? I was looking forward to an evening sulking alone in my cell."

"It wasn't my idea, it was Anna's. She wanted us all here because she wants us to stop fighting. She wants everything to go back to the way it was..." she trailed off, looking down at her congealing soup, "but it can't, can it?"

"Not while I'm around, it can't," Logan agreed. "You should've let me leave when I wanted to, all we're doing now is just avoiding what's going to happen anyways."

"It's not just you, Logan, it's the bandits, too. They-"

"I know," he cut her off, "and I've been thinking about what I'm going to do about it."

"What you're going to do about it?" she echoed, her brow knotting with suspension.

"Yes, me," he replied. "When I leave here, I'm going to go find them-"

"What?" she blurted.

He gave her a pointed look before repeating, slower. "I'm going to go find them and lead them away from Arendelle."

"What?" the queen replied again, this time with ire. The tablecloth beneath her palms frosted over as her powers mirrored her feelings.

"Dag wants us both, but if we separate he's going to have to chose," Logan reasoned. "Dag's strategist, remember? He knows that if he goes after one, he can't circle back and go after the other, too much time will have passed; storming your castle would give me plenty of time to disappear again and chasing me down would give you time to reinforce your defenses with support from Arendelle's allies. He's going to have to decide who he wants more."

"What if it's me?"

"It won't be. I'm going to track them down and do everything I can to make myself more appealing to the sick bastard, and once I have them focused on me, I'll lead them as far away from you and your kingdom as I can. In the meanwhile, as soon as I leave, you send word out to everybody who owes you a favor, use your powers to strengthen the kingdom's defenses and make this place a goddamn fortress, understand?"

"You're going to use yourself as bait," Elsa accused, as if that was the only part of his plan that she had registered. "What if they catch you?"

His response was said with an air of acceptance and finality.

"Then they catch me, Elsa."

She shot to her feet outraged as she exclaimed: "no!", causing her half of the table to freeze completely over while jagged spikes speared upwards, tearing the tablecloth to shreds and shattering expensive plates and wineglasses.

Pebbles of ice and crystal tumbled over to Logan's side and rolled all the way to where he sat, clanking audibly against the bowl in front of him, but he sat unfazed by her outburst. Elsa could have brought the whole room down over their heads and it wouldn't have done anything to erase the resolution in his eyes. He didn't say a word until she took her hands from the table and stopped the spread of ice.

There wasn't anything he wouldn't do to make it so she didn't have to hear all of this; he didn't like making her upset, but they had done more than arrive at a standstill. They had reached a fork in the road, two paths leading to two different destinations, two outcomes, and Logan couldn't see either of them winning if they chose to go down the same path. He wished that wasn't true, but he was a man of practicality, acting more in practice than theory, who did anything and everything to up his chances of living another day, even if he had to do something shitty in the process.

And he had the innate feeling that he was about to do just that.

He stared at the ice queen over the frigid redecoration of the table between them. "I already told you once before, Elsa, violent lives meet violent ends. I don't become an exception to that just because I made a career change. If I go out killed by that psychopath, then at least I'd die with some semblance of nobility. My death won't be meaningless, which is more than I can say for others who've lived a similar life. If I'm meant to die by the end of this, I want to go out protecting you."

He let his words hang in the air for her consideration. They settled over her heavier than the thick blanket of snow that covered the grounds outside the castle. When she showed no signs of responding, he continued.

"This all started with you, but I'm going to make it end with me. Dag only has so much firepower, and with this being your home territory, in the season of your element, you can force all of them off your land for good. You can make him retreat and never come back. Then, when it's all over things can go back to how they were, like your sister wants."

Elsa opened her mouth but stopped, closing it again as she carefully thought about what she would say next. She moved to sit down in her chair again but realized with the ice on the table she wouldn't be able to see Logan from over top. Rolling her eyes at herself, she instead shifted her weight to her other foot, bracing her hands back on the table and bowed her head as she deliberated.

After a long moment, she decided to make one last plea; a plea for his life, she thought. She had put everything aside; her kingdom, her reputation, her title, and considered the situation just as herself, coming to a conclusion that for once felt hundred percent right despite the many who would say it wasn't.

She raised her head and looked across the table once more. This time she committed herself to being honest about what she wanted.

"Anna knows that things are going to be different whether you're here or not. You propose that separating is the route we should take, but I object. You're right; this started with me, but we only got this far and accomplished so much because we did it together. It started with me, it become us, and now I want it to end with us. I'm not going to let you sacrifice your life for me, not when I think we have just as much of a chance to win if we stay together. Why is using yourself as bait our only option, why can't we sit down and discuss alternatives? Why won't you even consider staying here?"

She didn't let herself be discouraged when he didn't reply. The expression on his face didn't bode well, either, but she continued to push anyways. She knew that this was coming, that they had finally arrived at the place where they couldn't dance around the issue and there was nowhere to hide. There was no more room for that.

"What if I said that I wanted you to stay here, with me?"

Again, there was silence and the queen exhaled through her nose.

With grace, she got up from her chair and made her way around the table while Logan watched her approach with baited breath, eyeing her like an abused mutt trying to decide whether he should wag his tail or bare his teeth. She pulled out the chair on his right and sat down before there was a moment of inaction as she gathered her nerve. She reached out for his hand on the table and rested hers over top of it.

His expression didn't change, but she felt him tense underneath her palm, giving away the effect the intimate gesture had. She felt hope at the slip and smiled. There was still a chance that she could change his mind.

"I want you to stay with me, Logan."

Her declaration was enough to crush him; the sincerity behind it and what he was going to have to do next. He had tried to break this off as clean and painless as possible, hoping that she would just let him go, but now he realized that the only way she would was if he made her.

"I don't care."

Her smile dropped. "What?"

He roughly pulled his hand from underneath hers, making the blonde flinch and bring her hand back against her chest.

"I don't care what you want," he said, staring into her big blues that were wide with shock. "There's nothing you can say or do to change my mind, so don't bother. I'm going to leave and forget about you, and if you don't want these past few months to be a complete waste, you'll do the same, sugar. Go back to your gilded cage that Dag had dragged you from. Give your sister her dream wedding and move on with your life."

Elsa narrowed her eyes at him. "That's not going to work, Logan. Don't try to manipulate me into agreeing with you."

"I'm not. This is going to happen whether you like it or not, I don't need your permission, your royal highness," he told her, leaning in so that he was in her face, "I'm making this easy for you, the least you could do is show a little gratitude and leave me the fuck alone."

She moved back away from him, physically recoiling as he drove his words home with deliberate cruelness. Her eyes searched his cold expression and hard hazel gaze for proof that he was only putting on an act, but she found nothing. There was no warmth, no guilt or remorse for pushing her hand away and cursing in her face. Her chest tightened and her breathing hitched. Wisps of frost drifted up from her clenched fists like smoke as her eyes stung with the threat of tears.

She had opened herself to him and he had heartlessly rejected her.

"Fine!" she snapped, standing from her chair with enough force to knock it to the ground. "If you're going to get yourself killed no matter what I say, Logan, then go. Leave."

As she stormed off from the table, Logan's gaze shifted from where she had just been sitting and fixated on the arrangement of porcelain in front of him, void of emotion.

"Don't let the gates hit you on the way out!" she shouted over her shoulder as she reached the entrance of the dining hall.

"Don't worry, I won't!" he shouted back for added effect, no real anger or fire behind it, just said to fuel hers.

"Great!"

"Great!"

Olaf appeared in the doorway just as Elsa disappeared into it.

"Fantastic!" he shouted with excitement, clapping his twigs together and laughing. "Why are we yelling?"

Without even a glance of acknowledgement, the queen marched past him. He turned his head but kept his body stationary until it was on backwards as he watched Elsa leave. He pursed his mouth while his head slowly rotated back into place before taking a look around the dining hall and seeing the state it was in. He frowned in confusion, but once he noticed Logan still sitting at the table, his face brightened and his mouth dropped open in a smile. Despite the man's body language screaming not to be approached, Olaf started towards him with a bounce in his step.

"Oh hello, it's you again!" he greeted.

Logan didn't acknowledge him, either. He only slumped further into his chair, visibly miserable as he reached for the nearest bottle of alcohol, using his teeth to pull the cork out and then spitting it out over the side of his chair and pouring into the glass all the way up to the brim.

Instead of analyzing and agonizing over what he had just done to the person he had grown to care about the most in the world, the ex-bandit put his mind on mute as he prepared himself for an evening of downing the entire bottle of Nordic wine. He planned to get blackout drunk tonight and then leaving hungover the next morning.

"You look like you could use a hug," Olaf beamed.

He raised his twig arms out in the universal gesture for an embrace but stopped abruptly when Logan replied over the rim of his chute with:

"Come any closer and you're going into the fireplace."

The snowman dropped his arms and took a few steps back as two castle guards entered the dining room from the kitchen entrance. At the sound of the swinging doors, Logan looked up from where he was reading the posh label on the bottle of wine and turned, throwing a bored look behind his chair at the uniformed men who stood like statues. He waited, blinking listlessly as he waited for them to drag him back to the dungeon.

"Isn't there something useful you toy soldiers could be doing right now?" he asked mockingly when they hadn't moved. When they still didn't move, he got annoyed and scowled at them. "What the hell are you looking at?"

In lieu of a response, the guard on the right rolled up the sleeve of his coat, exposing his forearm. Logan's eyes widened just a fraction at what the gesture exposed before they became half-lidded once again with apathy.

"Great," he grumbled in contempt turning to face forward in his chair, rolling his eyes.

He downed the remaining contents of his glass in one swallow and put it back on the table before looking over at Olaf who was still in the room.

"Run along, little snowman."

He picked up his fork from the embroidered napkin it neatly sat upon and stood from his chair.

~O~

Elsa sat in her study, hunched over her desk with stacks of paperwork surrounding her. What was once a chore was now serving as a distraction. The sharp tip of her quill scratched audibly as she mumbled irritably under her breath. When she found that she was too upset to seek out Anna, the queen opted to sealing herself off in her study instead, hellbent on drowning herself in parchments.

The state of her desk was different from how she had left it; Anna must have used it while she was gone and had developed her own way of keeping the documents organized. Whatever system that was was lost on her, though, so Elsa had to spend an extra fifteen minutes just getting everything back the way she preferred it. She appreciated the effort from her sister, but she had always been particularly picky about her desk and how she kept everything.

Of course, skewed papers wasn't the real problem, but it kept her still-lit temper focused on something other than what happened.

She wrote until her hand and wrist screamed for a break. She would write until the pain became absolutely unbearable and then she would drop the quill as if it burned her. She would pull her hand back, shaking it in the air as she breathed heavy in frustration. Each time she did it, she visibly relaxed at the release of pressure, but it would only last a minute before her thoughts crept back in and her quill was in her hand once more. It was a torturous cycle she put herself through just so she could avoid thinking about Logan.

Elsa was intimately familiar with isolation and suffering, particularly of the silent type, but she had never before felt this, like she had been forced backwards on to the edge of a cliff and left to teeter there, on the very tip of her toes, her arms pinwheeling to gain back her balance. She was used to feeling untethered, but Logan was the one who pushed her out there. She wasn't used to that.

Usually, it was Logan who pulled her back on to solid ground, settling her equilibrium - not causing such imbalance in the first place.

She would call him her rock if it wasn't so cliche; the term was more suited for Anna, anyways. She didn't know what Logan was, but she knew he was something just as equally vital. Something she couldn't live without now that she knew the stability it could bring her.

Not realizing it, her hand had ceased in its angry scribbles as her mind trailed off into a grim fantasy - nay, premonition, that racked down her spine and stole the air from her lungs. A vision of Logan being chased down in the dark by a ravenous pack of beasts, the deafening crack and flash of a pistol being fired, shooting him in the back and bringing him down into the mud like a mighty buck in the crux of hunting season.

The tip of Elsa's quill pierced through the parchment paper and dug into the wood beneath it. It started to bend, threatening to break with the pressure she was putting on it while she was too caught up in the images playing in her head to notice.

The queen continued to picture Logan alone, bleeding out with hooded figures slowly gathering around him, ignoring his wet coughs and gurgles as blood fled his lungs. Approaching from the side, the crunching of dead leaves and snow under boots, a shadow sucked up what little moonlight shown through the tree tops. The gnarled face of Dag was the last thing Logan saw before the bandit leader raised the pistol in his hand, leveling it with the dying man's face, and pulled the trigger.

Her quill snapping loudly in the stark quiet study mimicked the fatal gunshot echoing in her head. Elsa physically reeled out of the nightmare. She gasped with something akin to pain as her hands came up to cover her eyes while the temperature in the room plummeted enough to extinguish the roaring fireplace on the other side of the room in one gust of cold air.

As her study became shrouded in blue moonlight coming in from the windows, Elsa collapsed further into her chair, her hands still covering her eyes. The heels of her palms dug into her sockets as she doubled over into her lap, shaking her head.

"No, stop it," she pleaded with herself. 'Why? Why must he be so stubborn!'

Her heart was hammering in her chest and her head pounded to the beat as she tried to purge her mind.

She took a moment to collect herself before eventually drawing herself to her feet. With an exhausted sigh that spoke volumes of her internal struggles, she moved around her desk towards the smoldering fireplace. She grabbed the box of matches sitting on the mantle and used the hearth of the fireplace to ignite one, lazily tossing it before adding a fresh log and grabbing the nearby steel poker.

After stoking the fire back to life, she walked back to her desk and reclaimed her seat with another sigh, one more melancholy than distressed. She scooted forward while opening a drawer and fishing out a replacement quill from the seemingly bottomless supply she kept on hand. This wasn't the first time she destroyed her writing tool in a fit of unbridled emotion and it wouldn't be the last.

The sound of scribbling filled the room again as she hunkered back over her paperwork.

Just as she settled back into a routine of approving checks and cross-outs of rejection, the rattling of the study door handle broke her concentration. Her eyes flickered up for just a second to see the door push open and something short and white come in before focusing back on her work.

Humming cheerfully, Olaf looked around the study. When he saw the queen sitting at her desk, his distinctive, bucktoothed smile graced his snowy face.

"There you are, Elsa, I've got something super important to tell you!"

"Not now, Olaf, please," she begged, mumbling down at her papers, tired. "I have a lot of work to catch up on and I need to be alone."

The snowman had been skipping his way towards the queen's desk still with an opened-mouth smile despite her request, but when he saw how twisted up her face was with so many nasty emotions, he slowed to a shuffle.

"Hey, what's wrong?" he asked, frowning.

"Nothing," she replied in frustration so conspicuous that even Olaf picked up on it.

"Are you sure?" he pressed.

Her fingers pinched the quill hard, her irritation flaring anew. "Yes, I'm sure."

"Are you positive?"

"Yes, Olaf, I'm positive." It took everything in her not to shout as she finally raised her head, wondering, not for the first time, how in the heck she gave him the ability to talk and if she could somehow reverse it. "Now could you please leave my study?"

There was a long silence as Olaf stood by Elsa's desk, listening to her scribbling hard enough to pierce through the parchment again and scratch the table. His usually bright disposition left like Anna's had earlier and was replaced with a deep concern that caused a deep crease between his brows. He shuffled closer.

"Are you sad because your new friend is gone?" he asked, his tone uncharacteristically serious.

Elsa's head snapped up from the parchment.

"Logan's gone?" She stood from her chair suddenly, as if she was about to run out after him and catch him before he could step past the gates. "What - He left already, he's gone?"

She stared at Olaf, desperate for him to answer but fearful of the confirmation. Biting his lip in apprehension, he slowly nodded his head.

Logan was gone, she realized, stricken. Off on a suicide mission to save Arendelle from Dag and his bandits. Elsa's breath lodged in her throat as the knowledge that she would never see him again shook her to her core.

Her hand came up to cover her mouth as her mind replayed their appalling last words to each other. The pain that erupted in her chest radiated all the way down to her kneecaps, making them buckle. She collapsed into her chair, her elbows on her thighs with her face buried in her hands. Tears fell freely from her eyes as she cried into her palms, devastated.

When Olaf saw her crestfallen reaction, he hugged her legs and rested his head on her lap. He stroked his twig arm over the skirt of her dress in an effort to calm her, even though it didn't feel comfortable in the slightest and left snags in the fabric. They stayed like that until her cries quieted.

"I'm sorry, Elsa," he mumbled with his cheek pressed into her knee.

She sniffled and wiped at her eyes, taking in a breath before resting a hand on the top of his head.

"It's okay," she said, sniffling again, "it's the way it was meant to be."

She hadn't meant that at all, but even in the presence of her own creation, the queen found it hard to completely let her inhibitions go and express her sadness in full without shame, instead storing it away inside her to resurface later when she was alone in her room. She petted Olaf's head with reassurance until he finally released her legs. He lifted his head to look up at her.

"If it makes you feel any better, I saw him leave and it really looked like he didn't want to go," he offered.

Elsa let out a wet snort and sniffled as she used her thumb to wipe underneath her eyes again and gave him a sad smile. "Thanks, Olaf. I appreciate you saying that and I hope you're right."

"Yeah, those men didn't look like they were giving him much of a choice."

For a moment she hadn't really heard what he had said and had only given a soft hum of acknowledgement, staring off at something unseen on the other side of the room, but then it repeated in her head and she processed what he had actually said.

"Wait, what?" she frowned, blinking away the last of her tears. "What men?"

She looked down at the snowman, but the subject had reached the end of his short attention span and he had already branched off on an entirely unrelated tangent; she had to wave her hand in his face to get him to stop and refocus.

"Olaf, what men?" she asked again, her tone more argent.

"What what men?" he replied.

Her nostrils flared and she clutched her hands in silent frustration as she cursed Olaf's cluelessness, as benevolent as it was, before asking again and forcing herself to go slower. "You said that there were men with Logan. What men? Who were they?"

Olaf hummed in thought, his eyes rolling up and dancing over the ceiling while Elsa screamed inside her head.

"Oh, right! Those men!" he laughed, nodding, "they were guards."

"But I dismissed the dungeon guards when I left the dining hall, they left with me. You saw them on your way in, didn't you?"

"Yep, I saw them," he nodded again. "These were different ones, these guards came from the kitchen."

That didn't sound right, Elsa thought. The pair tasked with guard- keeping an eye on Logan were the only ones in the castle. The rest were either out on the wall or patrolling the grounds, there shouldn't have been any inside, not wandering the kitchen of all places.

"They started fighting, so I left," Olaf continued.

"Fighting!?" she repeated shrilly with her eyes gaping.

"Yeah, so I left...Hey! That's the important thing that I wanted to tell you! Remember when I said that? I thought I should let you know, but I forgot all about it when I saw you-"

Elsa launched out of her chair and dashed from her study before the snowman could finish. She ran with her dress gathered in her hands and her heels muted against the carpeted hallways. Castle staff roaming about turned and watched as their queen ran by them. As she made a beeline for the dining hall, ahead from an intersecting hallway, Kai appeared. His face open with alarm as he saw the young woman barreling towards him.

"Your majesty!" he called.

He held his gloved hands up to coax her to a stop, but she charged past him, shouting as she went:

"There's been an intrusion in the castle, alert the guards!"

Her command rang through the hall, but she didn't look back to see if he followed it. She navigated the rest of the path to the dining hall, throwing her body hard against the door leading inside. Her hands touched the wood first and when she pushed inside, they left behind icy hand prints.

When she entered the room, she gasped, bringing her hands up to her mouth. The dining hall, where she had just been not even an hour ago, was a mess. There were blatant signs of a violent struggle. The tablecloth that had already been ruined by Elsa was now completely pulled off the table, laying on the floor filled with holes and stained with food, wine and the melted ice from her outburst while broken plates and silverware littered the room. Chairs were turned over and the table was pushed back out of place by almost five feet, leaving long scratches along the ground.

Hiking her dress higher and carefully sidestepping the broken glass, Elsa made her way around the table and over to the end where Logan had been sitting. The tablecloth was piled there, next to his chair. When the queen saw the red stain splashed across the white fabric, she nearly fainted with the lack of air in her lungs. Fear gripped them so tight, she felt lightheaded. Her hands shaking, she leaned down to pick up the cloth and held it out open in front of her, confirming that it was indeed blood that streaked it.

Even more disconcerting, there were also droplets of blood dribbled on the floor that made a trail towards the kitchen doors.

Dropping the cloth, Elsa followed the trail with dread weighing heavily in her stomach, her hands drawn up under her chin. Just outside the doors was a bent and bloodied fork laying in a small puddle of more blood. Her stomach lurched at the dark liquid and her hand came up to her mouth in disgust and horror. There was no way to tell who the blood belonged to and she was afraid that it keep be Logan's. The thought spurred her into the kitchen where the path of destruction continued with pots and pans scattered on the floor, but it was empty.

She looked over the area, her hands coming up to bury themselves in her hair and her chest heaving as she tried to get her bearings and make sense of the crime scene she stood in.

"Elsa!"

Hearing her name, the queen rushed back out of the kitchen, pushing open the swinging doors to see Kristoff. He was panting hard as if he had ran all the way from the other side of the castle - perhaps he had. He stared down at the shambles with panicked eyes, mirroring Elsa just minutes before, but when he heard the doors and saw her, he stumbled over, crushing glass under his boots.

"Elsa!" he called again. He tried to say something else, but he was too out of breath, it came out an incomprehensible string of gasps. He doubled over with his hands resting on bent knees, taking in mouthfuls of air.

Elsa moved to meet him halfway. "Kristoff! There's someone in the castle! Olaf said he saw-"

"Anna's gone!" he finally gasped out, cutting her off.

"What?" she reeled, horrified. "What do you mean Anna's gone?"

"She's gone, I can't find her!" He exclaimed. "After she left dinner, I found in her room. I sat with her until she calmed down and we just talked for while but then I left to use the little mountaineer's room. I wasn't gone five minutes, but when I came back she wasn't there."

"You checked everywhere?" Elsa asked, The library, the gallery, the attic?"

"I checked everywhere. I telling you, she's gone!"

"Did you check my room?" she tried again, desperate to think of somewhere that he might've overlooked. After Elsa had left the dining hall, she went straight for her study, not even giving her bedroom a glance. There was a chance Anna could be in there waiting for her, she thought. She hoped this was just an overreaction on Kristoff's part - that in the wake of Elsa's abduction and return, the man had just become paranoid, but he shook his head, claiming that he had checked the queen's bedroom.

"She wasn't there," he reported, his expression grim as he stared Elsa's hard in the eye before saying: "but it looks like someone else had been there. The door wasn't latched all the way and I found this sticking out of one of the posts on your bed."

Kristoff reached into his tunic and pulled out a small bundle. She took it without a word, her heart pounding as the mysterious object settled into her palm. Without even having to unwrap it, Elsa knew what it was just by the weight and familiar feel of it resting in her hand.

It was her dagger. The one she had no idea where and when she had lost, and it was wrapped in a piece of dark blue fabric; she didn't recognize what was until she unwrapped it and held it up. It was a piece of her cloak, she discovered, staring down at the filthy material bewildered. The original one that Tobias had given her, that got swept away in the river her and Logan had jumped into escaping the apple orchard. She had thought the thing had been beyond any sort of recovery, lost forever.

"It's Dag," she said, still staring down at the dagger and cloth. "It's the bandits."

"You think they took Anna?" he asked, his face wrecked with worry for his fiance. He looked around the dining hall again, noticing the bloodied tablecloth for the first time. "What happened here, where's that guy?"

"He's missing, too," she revealed as her fingers closed around the dagger. She brought her clenched hand up and pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead and closed her eyes, thinking deeply. "I don't understand, there are guards all over the place, posted at every entrance. How did they get in?"

"You think they scaled the walls?" Kristoff suggested, his tone implying that he already knew how unlikely that was but was at a loss.

Elsa shook her head. "No, they would've been seen from the wall."

"There has to be an opening then, a weak spot somewhere that the guards didn't think of where they could've snuck in. Does the castle have some sort of secret back entrance, you know, in case of an invasion or something?"

She waved that away, frustrated. "No, no, no, nothing like that."

"Well, they didn't tunnel their way in," he replied, scratching at the back of his head. "I think we would've noticed a gaping hole on the grounds somewhere."

"Hole," Elsa echoed thoughtfully, feeling a faint twinge of something at the word. It was fleeting, but she chased it. It took a moment of hard consideration before inspiration finally struck her like a bolt of lightening, making her gasp. "Oh my g - hole!"

Kristoff stared her. "What?"

"I know how they got in," she proclaimed, almost sounding excited that she had figured it out. She gathered her dress in her hands again and gestured for the man to follow her. "Come on!"

She took off out of the dining hall before he could say anything else, running back through the halls with Kristoff following not far behind her as the queen set their destination for the castle dungeon.

When the door leading to it came into view, she felt another shot of feat rip through her when she saw that it was wide open. She didn't stop to wait for Kristoff as she reached the entrance and started descending the stairs, only taking enough caution to avoid tripping in her heels and breaking her head open on the hard stone steps.

Past the temporary holding cells for minor offenders, past where Logan had been kept, in the furthest recesses of the castle dungeon, there was a long hallway of closed-in rooms. This was where the convicted criminals were put, who Arendelle had none currently and very rarely ever did. It was there that Elsa had been imprisoned for treason after her ice castle had been seized by Prince Hans' and his men, two years earlier.

She ran to the door of the cell she was kept in and pulled on it, praying it was locked tight as she had ordered it to be and that it wouldn't yield, but it opened with ease; it wasn't even latched.

The heavy wooden door opened with an ominous creak to reveal the gaping hole that she had tore out of the side of the castle with her powers. The shackles that had encased her hands were still laying broken open on the ground, as she had left them.

Elsa had never ordered the damage to be fixed. After the thaw, the resources needed to close the hole up couldn't be spared. The unnatural change in weather had done other, more serious damage throughout the Arendelle, she had to prioritize. Instead, the queen had ordered the room to be closed off, never to be opened again. There was a lot about that room she didn't like thinking about.

She didn't like thinking about how a pair of specialized, whole hand-encompassing shackles just her size ended up in their dungeon, or about how unlikely it would have been that Hans had the time and forethought to have them installed, running concurrently with his evil plot that mostly had to be improvised once he decided to focus his charm on the younger sister instead of the older.

She didn't like thinking about who put them there so she decided just to repress it all. It was her way of closing the book on another painful memory. She remembered thinking it wasn't all that important to fix, anyways. It was in a spot that couldn't be seen from a distance and wasn't accessible unless the fjord was frozen over.

But if someone were to carefully comb the perimeter along the walls after a huge blizzard, looking for a way in...

God, she was so stupid!

Elsa ran over to the ice-jagged mouth of the enormous hole, peering out over the wide expanse of solid fjord. Her eyes scoured the land for any signs of movement before looking down at the ground just outside the hole. There were several fresh boot prints stamped into the otherwise untouched snow, embedded deep alongside long drag marks. The trail led out on to the fjord further than what she was able to see.

The evidence was all right there.

While Elsa and the others had been worried about how they would get through an awkward dinner together, the enemy made their move. While Anna was crying and getting soup in her hair, the bandits were scouring the outer wall for a way in.

While Elsa and Logan were screaming at each other, they were sneaking through the halls, killing any poor soul who accidentally came across them and God knew who else to get their hands on those guard uniforms.

While Elsa was venting over paperwork and Kristoff was off on a bathroom break, Anna was dragged from her room, possibly bound and gagged or, dare she think it, incapacitated, for no one reported screams.

They had invaded without raising a single alarm, bypassing every Arendelle guard by slipping through the cracks like the insects they were. The bandits had gotten into the castle right under their noses and had left just silently as they had entered, taking their ex-comrade and another royal with them.

Worse yet, it was Elsa's fault for giving them that opening.

There was no denying it, Anna and Logan had been abducted. Looking at the marks in the snow, one was clearly dragged while the other was either carried or forced to walk.

Behind her, she heard Kristoff finally reach the dungeon room, gripping the sides of the doorway for support and panting with air that clouded from the cold. He saw Elsa standing next to the giant hole.

"What? When the heck did this happen?"

Elsa didn't reply, only stared out over the fjord as her fingers tightened around her ornate dagger still held in her hand.

Without looking back, she suddenly sprinted out of the dungeon from the makeshift entrance that she had foolishly created and out on to the fjord, ignoring Kristoff's yells for her to stop.

AN: Wow, this one was an angsty one, wasn't it? Those always make me nervous to write because I'm worried that everyone will sound out of character. At least I was finally able to get this out for you guys. Make sure to let me know what you thought of the new chapter! I'm always interested in hearing your opinions.

Now that we're in the final descent, what are you guys most excited about seeing in the final battle and the finale? Let me know in a review.

~Scorpiofreak~