Hans shivered in his cell, always shivered. Always looked out at the castle square and saw the celebration below inside the pocket of winter, encased in ice, and bordered in summer heat. That heat never seemed to reach him – only the cold, and so he always shivered.

He was a prisoner of his own betrayal, merely held in Arendelle. His sentence was indefinite, from the very mouth of the queen, three hellish syllables that carved in stone the rest of his life. He was not simply to be imprisoned. He was to be forgotten. Nobody deigned to protest his sentence, either; even his family had not cared to contact their thirteenth son and brother. He had not been lying, after all, when he said he was scarcely visible to his brothers.

His eyes wandered to Anna, who pulled a string of laughing children along the ice. He hated her. Hated her more than he had hated anyone before. She cost him everything. Hans' cold heart loathed her warmth and love, and more than that… he was jealous of the way Elsa loved her.

When had he fallen in love with Elsa? Maybe it was when he had been pulled from the harbor and her ice, sharp and brittle as quartz, crawled up his arms and legs in an imprisoning cocoon that would not shatter until his knees hit his cell floor; maybe when she had sentenced him, voice a frigid curse that wrapped around his throat. Maybe somewhere else in between – between her cruel, soft beauty, her punishing grace, her iron soul.

How callously fair life was. He had pulled the heartstrings of another person for his own gain, and now he had fallen for Elsa from afar, from his prison cell. Of course she would never love him as well. He deserved that, he supposed. But that did not make his chest, his mouth, his hands ache any less for her.

But he supposed, since Elsa so possessed his mind, it was just as well she might imprison his body.