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It was one thing to be related to a literal force of nature. It was something else entirely to be haunted. At least, that was what Anna assumed to be happening.
It began in the portrait hall, after Anna had escorted a Flemish ambassador to her room for the night. Though late, her journey back to her own room was nothing to dread. By candlelight, there was a comfortable familiarity in a thousand faces and a million eyes that never quite noticed her, that were perfectly enraptured in lives of their own. Even dreaming, Anna remembered them. Even awake, Anna dreamed of a life swept up in their joy.
That made the shadow too human, too real. Beneath the billowing pink skirts of the woman on the swing, there materialized a dark outline with white-gloved hands outstretched. Now, the woman gazed downwards at the amorphous shape, more keen than even Anna as to its mystery.
Anna blinked. Rubbed her eyes. She even slipped haphazardly onto the chaise opposite the picture, bumping a shin on one of the couch’s legs. Still, the figure did not waver. ‘The Swing’ was changed; whatever it used to be it wasn’t now.
Whatever the figure was, it wasn’t there the next morning. Anna had asked the guard stationed across the ambassador’s room if he'd noticed anything strange, anything going bump in the night, any paintings serendipitously altered. For all his confusion, the answer was clear– nothing of the sort your majesty, should I be concerned? It took another glance down the hall to put Anna at ease, to reassure her that the painting was as it had always been. She smiled plainly, enough to comfort the untrained eye.
“It was nothing”, she answered, already grasping the ambassador’s arm and pulling her towards the council’s great office. After all, Anna’s memory had been wrong before.
That must be it, she reasoned. So what if every so often a gaze seemed to pierce her from the background of Terborch’s ‘The Dancing Couple’ or a flash of auburn hair snuck its way into Bruegel’s ‘Peasant Dance’? Anna was the only one who’d ever looked so closely. Anna was the only one who noticed. Anna, she reasoned in her internal monologue, must have been wrong.
It happened again the week after her birthday, when Elsa was still recovering from her cold and Kristoff and Olaf were busy ushering the snowgies into the mountains. Down for the count, Elsa needed the attention of the castle’s physician, chicken soup, and time off from her queen-ing. The last bit was all Anna could do and, during Elsa’s short convalescence, was something Anna was proving surprisingly competent. Tax reform and trade agreements aside, Anna knew the palace and its people inside and out. Wherever Anna faltered, she found a helping hand and welcoming embrace, her people wanting to know her as much as she wanted to help them.
That was why, when she’d seen the Official Arendelle Family Portrait, did she stutter-step, poke the arm of Amelia the Head Washer-Woman, and squealed “Do you see that?”. Anna expected Amelia to nod, to flinch, to do anything. Instead, all Amelia had managed was an embarrassed, chagrined smile and a squinty look over her glasses.
“Pardon me, your majesty, but see what?”
What, indeed. Still pictured was her perfect day, all five of them impeccably dressed and endlessly cheerful. The red string still hung from the picture’s frame, undisturbed despite the day’s chaos. All Anna could do was breathe a quiet laugh, asking Amelia to continue down and that she’d catch her later on the ‘reindeer regalia’ issue. It was only when Anna turned back to the picture that she allowed herself to gasp. There, materializing from the blue-green background, was a traveling jacket and cuffed sleeve, floating disembodied between Kristoff and herself. Tracing the line of its arm, Anna shuddered to see a gloved hand, fingertips tattered and stained, wrapped around her waist.
It hits her then that she is being haunted. Not only that, but Anna was being haunted by the last person she’d ever wanted to be haunted by.
From then on, he made himself known. Whether in the corner of her reflection or the blurred edges of her vision, Hans was everywhere. When she was in the town, he’d watch her through the windows' reflections and laugh at her attempted jokes. When she’d tripped off the edge of the pier, his smirk wavered above the waves. When she was discussing new trade routes with the council members, he’d glare at whatever unlucky fellow interrupted her. When no one else did, Hans saw her.
When no one else is around, Anna speaks to him. In the quiet of the portrait hall, she watches as he flickers across a dozen paintings, never quite fitting in and never moving quite right. Under his influence, the paintings come to life one by one, becoming the scenes she’d only imagined from her childhood. From the chaise, she leans into the wall of images, whispering words only for them to hear.
She talks about Olaf and his newfound philosophies, Kristoff and his ideas for the future, and Elsa and her hope for their kingdom. Most of all, Anna talks about what she can’t tell anyone. She talks about being alone once and being left alone again, of the dreams that nobody really understands, and that she doesn’t remember anything worth remembering. Anna tells him because she is selfish, because life has taken too much from her it cannot give back. She thinks he understands, because he was selfish too.
The news comes to Arendelle on a day like any other, from a boat like any other. Sailors from the Southern Isles Navy have docked for the respite of land, having spent too long on creaky boats and unsavory seas. It is from an Admiral Nils that Arendelle learns of the fate of Prince Hans of the Southern Isles.
Sentenced to 10 years in a Polish labor camp, Prince Hans had died one December of exhaustion and the wasting disease. He’d been denied a place in the royal cemetery, had been erased from their histories and texts. Worst of all, the King of the Isles had forbidden his name be spoken since his sentencing, leaving Hans a ghost walking. He died that December, but Hans had already been forgotten years before.
Elsa takes it diplomatically, as she takes most things. The room chills a degree or two, but her expression is implacable. It is only when Admiral Nils leaves that Elsa allows herself to sink into the throne, shaking at the revelation. At that moment, the sisters can only hold each other. Punishment, in all its forms, had been dealt. Anna wonders if it had really been justice.
It is on a visit to the trolls that Anna finally pieces it together. Grand Pabbie pulls her aside, away from the hustle and bustle of journeying-back and welcoming-home, to tell her just why Hans has been haunting her all this time.
“You remember someone”, he says, brow already furrowed. “Someone who’d never been known their whole life”.
It’s a bit of an understatement, but Anna realizes it's true. At Elsa’s coronation all those years ago, she’d danced with a love that never truly died. On that fjord so long ago, Anna had faced a frozen heart and realized its true owner. Just yesterday, she’d spoken him into existence, calling Hans to a dusty corner of the library as she read aloud her favorite fairytale while he acted each character’s voice best he could from a hand mirror.
“I guess I do”, is all Anna can say. “But why is he haunting me?”
Grand Pabbie shakes his head, resigning and contemplative. “Haunting and remembering are the same. He belongs nowhere else”
For all Hans had been searching, he’d never found his own place. For all his searching, he’d only found her. But to belong to Anna, who’d wondered her whole life if she’d belonged to anyone? It’s almost a joke, so Anna huffs out a laugh at the thought. Spending so much time with a silent conversationalist seemed to do that to her.
Grand Pabbie only looks at her, then draws her into a warm embrace. Well, as warm as granite and moss can possibly be. There are no mirrors here, no way that Hans can hear her or see her. There is no way for Anna to look at him, bring him back to life.
Belatedly, Anna wonders if Hans, for all his reflecting, knows her too.
She doesn’t tell anyone, but Anna learns to paint again. Elsa may have been the master architect, but she had always been the dreamer, the doodler, the artist. She sets up lessons in the town square, commissions new artists to bring burgeoning techniques to Arendelle, and pours her official stipend into Arendelle’s arts and theatre schools. Anna keeps her own work tucked away, painting in rooms without windows, mirrors, or even a wash basin. She paints a million pictures of the things she loves, things she hates, and things that can only be real in daydreams and fairytales. Her gallery is hers and hers alone, not for judgement nor prying eyes.
In a few months, Anna brings a palm-sized canvas to the portrait gallery, where she knows Hans best enjoys himself. It’s awkward, but he dances there un-paired, in step with music she cannot hear with a crowd she will never touch. He pauses at her footsteps and casually walks to the edge of the frame, sliding a chair across the floor as a guitarist flourishes from his seat. She presents the canvas to him, drawing back the handkerchief with slow deliberation.
It’s him in a lavishly furnished room, with all the amenities that can be afforded a prince, maybe even an emperor. Hans draws himself up, standing in evident shock. Then, quick as a rabbit, he jumps. The painting behind him settles back to its earlier scene, no longer enlivened. Instead, the canvas Anna holds in her hand springs to life as the record player spins and a breeze drifts in, trailing gauzy curtains across the room. In the field outside, a palomino horse with a distinctly striped mane whinnies.
“You don’t need me anymore”, she tells him, trying to keep the tears out of her voice. “You’re free now”.
The world she’d created has everything he’d ever need, everything he’d ever wanted. The miniature castle in the distance is beautiful and welcoming, the crown atop the room’s bed brilliant and iridescent. She sees Hans stop, struck with the weight of her generosity. In a moment, he reaches out to her, pressing his hand into the paint that separated them. Anna presses a fingertip to the same spot before repeating what she’d told him.
When Hans turns away, Anna can’t watch any longer. She squeezes her eyes shut, reciting the Lord’s prayer twice before allowing herself to open her eyes again. He’s gone and the room is empty. Satisfied, Anna frames the painting at last, letting her fingers trail across the custom gold-leaf frame. It’s a beautiful picture. It’s the only one that Anna lets the world see, hanging it delicately by her favorite reading corner.
Hans doesn’t return, but Anna lets herself stay. She still reads there, sometimes aloud as she used to. Hans never returns to the room, but Anna can see the edges of the painting flicker at times, alive with something mere brushstrokes cannot convey. She hopes that wherever he is, he is happy.
It’s a random attack one day, after years of civil unrest. A mob, angry at the state of the country, at a woman regent, and at sudden record setting winters, storms the castle. They set off to the library, determined to burn Arendelle’s archives and erase its history with the Northuldra. They make it, setting fire to all there was.
Everything else Anna can spare, anything else they can take. She breaks free from Kristoff, a blind dash into the flaming maw of the used-to-be library to her reading nook, where the painting still hangs. She reaches it and pulls it down from the wall, but she’s down too, already choking on smoke and ash. Then, she feels him.
Blanketed in static, he presses her face into his shoulder and starts to sprint towards the doors. Buffeted by falling books and ceiling beams, he falls, taking the brunt of the impact into his opposite arm. Struggling the last few feet, he pushes Anna back into the cool, crisp air outside. A guard catches her, staring in shock at the figure already disappearing into the flames.
At long last, Hans is here. She pushes herself off the guard, holding out a shaking hand. Finally, Hans steps towards her, into her arms. At long last, he kisses her. It’s enough to end a thousand droughts, burn a thousand suns, harvest a thousand crops. It’s enough that he’s here.
Hans wipes away a tear Anna hadn’t realized she’d shed. In his arms, he tells her what she’d known deep down, what she wanted to hear her whole life. With that, he's gone.
“Thank you”.
There is nothing left to save and no man left to remember. Anna, in her act of true love, had finally set him free.