Chapter Text
Attending the same university as her sister and living together in the apartment their parents owned was a double edged sword. On one hand, they didn’t have to pay rent nor room up with strangers. On the other, they always had each other, and that was exactly what was starting to drive Elsa mad.
Anna’s continuous pacing through their living space—her room, then the hallway, then the kitchen—started to grate at her nerves. At first, it seemed like something that she could just ignore from the confine of her own room. And soon enough, she had to close her door to gently signal to Anna that she shouldn’t make loops around the small table in the middle. Not that it stopped her initially.
Anna was nervous—no, not just nervous, but a straight menace—ever since taking that exam, and Elsa still couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. She tried to put herself in her place for the hundredth time. In the end, she went to classes and seemed to have studied for it. True, she wasn’t a straight A student, but she generally had good marks, and—did she just slam the fridge door again?!
Elsa slumped in her chair and sighed through her nose, cupping her face in front of her monitor. She let her elbows slide on the table and push the keyboard further away, mentally resigning from submitting her project early. She massaged her temples in an effort to calm down. Nothing would get done if Anna continued behaving like a rabid animal. Absolutely nothing.
It took just one innocent trip to the bathroom to wash her lush hair a few days prior and Anna had already gnawed through her favorite pen (“it was right there and it was pink and I just couldn’t—“), which was why they were all now locked in her drawer. Elsa still mourned the loss, and the urge to retroactively slap her sister increased each time she morosely twirled it between her fingers, remembering through just how many exams it had carried her. In case anyone needed Anna’s tooth imprints—and they were sharp, she had to admit after inspecting it while Anna was in the shower—Elsa had just the thing. She found herself wishing that Anna tasted the ink.
She still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that anyone, let alone her sister, would give such an explanation. It was pink, she recalled her saying, mulling it over in the dark under her blue blanket in the dark later, wide-eyed and deeply disturbed. She had come to see Anna in a different light since she moved in, but this... She quietly locked her room that night. That was two days ago, and she decided to keep her door locked even during the day. The pen-biter would have to knock.
The only thing Elsa explicitly requested when Anna moved in with her at the start of the school year was simple: to let her be. She had to study—“yes, Anna, actually study”—as a software engineering degree wouldn’t complete itself on its own, and Elsa had two more years to go. Anna agreed, and it had all started innocently enough.
Yes, she could bring in her soaps, shower gels and scents because “how can you only use a bar of soap and… a dandruff shampoo?” Elsa had shrugged and stifled laughter with her hand at Anna’s horrified expression (“we have to bring you into the civilized world, right now!” her sister had declared, gesturing), but she had to stifle a scream when she sleepily bumped into something oily and hard in the washroom that very night. Something else rattled as she turned, then fell and brought along its friends that all descended on her feet like a thundering herd. That night, Elsa learned that Anna liked to keep her shampoos barely closed.
And no, Anna wasn’t allowed to cook. Not anymore, and with no exceptions. Elsa didn’t want to scrub the chandelier ever again, just because the oil sizzled menacingly. And Anna holding the ladder made her recite prayers more than once.
Okay, Anna is allowed to hog the shower when she pleases. She is also allowed to play music in her own room. But Elsa needs her sleep, so please, no late night singing. Apparently, she had been unclear, and one time she had to explicitly stifle an attempt at recreating Chopin’s Funeral March with pens wrapped in toilet paper, drumming against the edge of the table in the middle of the night. Barging in so hard that posters on the other wall moved, taking in the situation with a horrifically frightened Anna, whose hair was wrapped in a towel, Elsa couldn’t find it in herself to be as mad as she wanted to. At least she tried to muffle it.
Over time, they had worked out a comfortable system. And until this dreaded exam, the most memorable event was when Elsa squirted air out of her medical shampoo on New Year’s eve. Naked, wet and with an itchy scalp, she sweetly invited Anna in and perpetually screamed bloody murder for using it up and not telling her to replenish it in time. This time, she blamed her hair, saying that it fell into her eyes and she couldn’t see what shampoo she was—
That fell apart under Elsa’s furious gaze, water dripping from her wet bangs and down her nose.
Elsa blushed and quietly laughed, shaking her head minutely at the memory. The way Anna gulped was still funny. She would never have admitted it, but that was over the top from her. At least she got a buzzed Anna to willingly offer everything she had to calm her down, even her black chocolate truffle stash, and she stayed mad for just a little bit longer to enjoy the show. She didn’t have it in her to send her to the pharmacy in a blizzard, so off Anna went to the farthest market that stocked it the next day. Perhaps the— the chewing was nothing more but an act of justice by the universe. A push and pull, with Elsa getting the brunt of this time around.
Aside from that, things were going fine. Just fine. Until this exam, at least.
Elsa sighed, then stilled, realizing that the apartment grew very quiet. She frowned and lifted her head, acutely aware of the lack of thumping, jumping and loud finger-gnawing (“om-nom-nom-nom— okay, I’ll stop!”) her sister usually exuded. She looked up at the clock on the upper shelf above the monitor, noticing that it was just past three in the afternoon. Which was usually Anna’s time for lunch.
An abrupt loud slam coming from the kitchen made her heart lodge up in her throat. Forgetting her thoughts about cohabitation with a maniac, Elsa disentangled herself from the chair and unlocked her door in a jiffy, envisioning the worst possible outcome of having to take Anna to a hospital because of God knows what—