❖ A year ago, the prospect of picking and choosing conversational partners was a laughable dream, unless one counted Sir Stuffington or Deweybelle. A duck and a cow, toys from her childhood. Not the point. At the throaty sound he made, as if to draw attention to his answer, Anna was all painfully attentive. Fingers clawed at her palms, lips tightly drawn, shoulders pointed and tight. The mystery was revealed, and it was as bad as — worse than — she had anticipated.
A sound of discomfort came from between her clamped teeth, even as she tried to fight her anger. How had he done something so selfish — oh. Right. Of course. The strawberry blonde felt a cold chill down her spine. A selfish act had lost lives. Hans had gone from trying to destroy her life, to destroying the lives of so many others. How many little girls and boys would never see their fathers again? And what of their wives, to lose their partners in a simple trip to a queen’s coronation.
A wedding had taken the lives of her parents, and countless others. Not that the wedding had enacted the ship’s destruction. A quick trip across the sea had seemed so harmless, but it lingered in Anna’s mind. An all too familiar sensation rose in her, she felt it erupt in a hiss. A near-growl, beyond any ladylike sound she’d ever allowed pass in the company of others. This wasn’t the time for propriety.
“A fire?” Anna finally articulated, tact a nonexistent term to the princess. “You’re trapped on a wooden ship at sea, and you start a fire on it? Why? To save yourself from — what?“ Anna couldn’t form any cohesive argument, too drawn into the situation at hand. "If those men aren’t found, their families… Their families!” That’s all she had to say, a tiny fist hitting the ground beside her. She covered the snap quickly, wobbling to her feet.
”At least one thing hasn’t changed since you life — you’re the same monster that I remember.”
❂ If he hadn’t been so out of practice with what he could do, he would have just kept the fire small, in the middle of the deck and contained. As much as it would have tried to spread, he could have kept it from going anywhere else. But he had no practice. Hans forced them to surface after so long of not being used, and it spread too quickly, was too powerful for him to control. And when he had been released from the cell, it was too late. The ship became an inferno and all he could think of was escaping.
The noise that came from Anna clearly voiced her displeasure with him, the anger that boiled up inside of her and was so close to spilling over. The bars may have kept her on the other side, but his words only made his sentence to be so much worse. And the moment she started to speak, his posture slumped slightly, shoulders hunched as he listened. A prince was to keep himself straight at all times. Perfect posture, stern frame, ready to fight back and take charge and show that he was not weak, but Hans wasn’t a prince anymore, having disgraced himself by his first actions, and then with this.
Taking in a deep breath when she called him a monster, Hans collected himself as much as he could, even with the thoughts of having ruined the lives of those men and their families with what he had done. He truly was a monster. There was no denying it. But if he was to be called as such, he would just show how he was even more so of one.
From the usual, grassy green his eyes were did they change, darkening to a near crimson red as he focused on the air before him. It was a bit harder with the humidity and dampness in the cell to dry it out, but he managed, and when he did, a hand raised, fingers snapping and causing enough heat to light a spark. A small flame appeared above his fingers, and as he opened his hand the flame grew ever so slightly, hovering a few inches above the skin and holding there.
“Yes. I’m a selfish monster that was only thinking of escaping, not of anyone else. I started the fire in the middle of the ship as a distraction. I thought I could contain it, hold it as it was and extinguish it while I fled.” His hand closed around the flame and it dissipated, eyes fading back to their previous color before looking at Anna.
"Whatever sentence I’m to be given, I deserve.“
