YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH, PEOPLE?
well. fine. this is definitely the dumbest thing I’ve written (that is including the time I wrote Social Network/Easy A crossover crack) and you asked for this.
About three weeks after Elsa abdicates the throne to Anna, and Arendelle enters its tentative new normal, Anna starts getting… reports. Rumors and dispatches that sound more like fairy tales than official communiques from her men. Stories of a masked avenger, who rides a steed of wind and waves, who can command songs of ice and fire from the tips of her fingers, gallivanting around the countryside, righting wrongs.
Arendelle’s a small country, is the thing. And while it may have been built on lies and bones, Anna’s working on that. And in the meantime, they really don’t have a ton of… like. Crime.
What they do have, all of a sudden, is a whole lot of property damage.
“I thought the whole point of saving Arendelle from the tidal wave is that we’d. Y'know. Preserve Arendelle,” Anna grumbles, waving a piece of parchment in Elsa’s general direction after they’ve put away the Parcheesi board and Kristoff’s left to tuck Olaf in. The remains of their lobster thermidor dinner are piled by the door, waiting for a servant to pick them up. “Mattias says this is the fourth barn that’s been burned down in a week and a half.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elsa says in a breezy voice, shrugging and gazing soulfully out the window towards the middle distance. Anna doesn’t know what she’s looking at. That window just faces an inner courtyard. “But I’m glad that this mysterious hero, whomever they are, is dedicating so much of their attention to finding Mrs. Snodgrass’s stolen piglet.”
“Riiiight,” Anna sighs. “So I should go ahead and assume that this, uh. Dark Knight is some other person who controls the elements, rides a magic water horse and, oh, I don’t know, lives in a mystical cave of memory that can tell her and only her all that has ever been.”
“Sounds like that person is doing a lot of good in the world,” Elsa says lightly. “Sometimes, in order to right a wrong, you have to do a wrong-right. Gandhi said that.”
“Are we sure Gandhi said that?”
Anna pinches the bridge of her nose. “Listen. I don’t hate all of the things that the–Caped Crusader–is doing. But I’m trying to be Queen now. I don’t need an unsupervised adult woman karate chopping poor people in an ice dress.”
“I’m not–” Elsa bristles, then clears her throat. “I mean. I don’t think that’s what the masked avenger is doing.”
“Uh huh.” Anna wanders to her desk, digging out papers. “Then do you want to explain that to Mr. Hansen, who slipped on ice and broke his ankle when the masked avenger was chasing down Mrs. Nilsdottir’s runaway kitten? Or tell me what I’m supposed to say to Mr. Fisker down at the smithy about how his roof blew away because the masked avenger was trying to retrieve a balloon for the Møller children?”
When Anna turns around, Elsa is gone. Out the window, a projection of a snowflake is cast like a shadow against the clouds of the night sky.
“Good grief,” Anna groans.
