I might post the original version of the sledge-run scene later for my records before I throw away the discarded pages, but I'm too short of sleep to type that now. So here, with a rewritten sledge run and minus all references to mittens, gloves and other hand coverings, is the second half of "Familiar". The whole story comes out at 7,502 words, which is amazingly accurate to my '15 pages @ 500 words/page' manuscript estimate — funny how things do average out.

Chapter 2 — Tomorrow for Amends

She stood alone. Alone and high up on the side of North Mountain, in an Arendelle where great black ships moved on the sea and a long bridge lay like a collar across the fjord and chimneys rose in places they should not... and where no-one knew her, or had cared enough to come.

Had Elsa come up here, year after year, in search of solitude? Had she set her arms around her sister’s ice-cold form and whispered her sorrows into ears that could not hear? Had she knelt and begged Anna to answer, just once, to give her some sign, some hope, some chance to make all right again? Had she known that only her death could set Anna free, and that the long years held them hopelessly apart?

I normally just go back and incorporate edits silently into all the various copies of a story -- but this one got changed so much (and I made the edits on my word-processor document, meaning that I don't have an original manuscript copy) that I'm reluctant to overwrite the earlier version; there are a couple of bits in there that I was sorry to lose. ( snip edits )

(And worryingly, I had an idea for another AU fic, in which Elsa fails to lift the curse and Anna remains an ice statue until her sister's natural death, sixty years later... I really don't want to end up writing a whole series of "Frozen" fanfics, and certainly not ones centred on Hans and Anna's questionable relationship; it's just too embarrassing!)

The Opportunist

Bonus paragraph: the extra paragraph of manuscript that was written for the opening and then deleted again because it was just too long. ( Read more... )