image from measurement dot gov dot au.

being a secret agent isn't all that it's cracked up to be. things happen. people die. life sucks.

this is a terrible 4k+ drabble thingy that's not really a drabble. pretty sure typos and bad grammar too. this fic went over a total of like eight rewrites before i was happy with it /shot.

inspired by: stuffs. like idk mission impossible, maybe? or… 007: skyfall. or like. just spy things in general. also saw one or two jelsa spy fics here. haven't read them, but suddenly was like 'wanna write secret agent stuff now'.

warning: swearing. violence. very, very, very obscure mentions of suicide. post traumatic stress disorder. shitty writing that's way too purple.

notes: this is a horrible mixture of everything secret agent-y and assassin-y. truthfully, i basically made everything up; this is not, in any way, supposed to be a representation of reality. i do not take responsibility for the rushed research on spies, government espionage, or anything of that sort. i also do not take responsibility for your tears, because they will start to flow once you see the crappiness of my writing.

dedicated to: this is a gift for kuro-d, for your amazing fan art. you're the first person to do jelsa fan art for me and i love it so much.

prologue: ice cream and pieces of your heart

Death, Jack thinks, is a lot like breathing. One minute, you're drawing in oxygen, sucking in humid summer air and late night ice creams. The next, with an exhale, gentle as wind shuffling through leaves, there's a hole in the middle of your partner's chest. It leaks with something red and pink and soft, still hot to touch, while the rest of the body cools down.

Because you're alive, and then suddenly, you're not. It's as easy as breathing, and just as quick.

Bunnymund is dead. He's been dead for a while now.

final: vermillion smiles and coffee shop romances

It's been drilled into him since the start of his training: when you are with an upper-ranked agent, always show respect.

There's no point in being cocky, no value in being arrogant. In the field, there's nothing to be gained from being heroic, from shoving your teammates away and saying I'll hold them off! except perhaps, if you're lucky, getting beaten to a pulp and taken prisoner and possibly getting rescued. Or, if you're unlucky, your body might be in several large pieces, big enough to be sent back to autopsy, sewn up, and returned to your family. Or, if you're super unlucky, there will be no body at all.

It's with this kind of experience in mind that Jack dutifully salutes the director, Kristoff, and waits until the older man is seated before taking a chair himself.

"I'm assigning you a new partner," Kristoff begins bluntly. He leans back, blonde hair cleanly slicked away from his face and white dress shirt rolled up to his elbows. There's a small glint in his eyes, a knife in his grin. He looks harmless, an ordinary office worker, perhaps, but Jack has worked under him for far too long to mistake his gentleness for vulnerability.

"I haven't had a new partner since Bunny," Jack deadpans. Something is sawing through his muscles, hacking through his bones. He's tired, in ways only secret agents are tired, different from everyone else, special in their own unique snowflake way. He sighs quietly, and it's heavier than a slab of cement, colder than ice.

"I know," Kristoff says, unperturbed. "I'm assigning you another. It's been a year since Bunnymund, Jack. I've given you more than enough time to grieve."

The room is silent; Jack is a corpse breathing lifeless air.

"Her name is Elsa Queen," Kristoff continues. Jack blinks once, twice, heavy-lidded eyes moving from Kristoff's fingers to his neck to his nose.

"Elsa," Jack says softly, and the name rolls off his tongue like honey. "I haven't seen her in a while. Not since she was assigned to Italy."

"It's been three years," Kristoff nods. "But you have some history with her. We're hoping you two are compatible."

"We didn't break off on the best of terms, though," Jack says, though Kristoff would know, of course. Kristoff knows everything.

"It's okay," Kristoff shrugs. He turns to the papers on his desk and waves uncaringly for Jack to go. "These things have a way of resolving themselves."

Jack lied. It's actually only been two years and seven months since he's seen her. But he supposes it doesn't really count, seeing as he only just glimpsed her hurrying through Base that one time. He can barely remember what her face looks like.

The Elsa Queen he meets in level two, room 555, is not the Elsa Queen he remembers.

When he enters, she's standing with her back to the door. Her fair hair is wound up in bun, and she's wearing a clean, sharp-pressed blazer, a pencil skirt and black heels.

"Jack," she says quietly, turning to greet him. Her voice is lower, deep, but still womanly, quiet like the melting croons of a clarinet. "It's been a long time."

Twenty-six-year-old Elsa Queen is slender, like a willow tree. She stands tall; chin poised, blue eyes dark under long lashes. And, Jack sees with numbing surprise, there is something different about her, something that he sees only in the most seasoned of agents. The way she holds herself is unsettling, a shadow in her limbs and steel in her gaze.

But even deeper, behind her small puffs of air, beneath a stone-hard chest of ribs and clay muscles and blood vessels that run with acid, Elsa Queen's heart beats in a dead, jolting waltz. In the purple bruises under her eyes, in the way her shoulders sag like deflated balloons, in the two years and seven months since he's seen her, something inside her has fractured into two.

She has death in her face now, kisses of jaundice and ivory in her cheeks and blood on her lips. Elsa, standing next to him with legs wrapped in prisoner's chains and twig-thin wrists in cuffs, has changed.

She's just like him.

"Elsa," Jack replies. Her name passes unblocked between them. "It's nice to see you again."

The greeting flies out of his mouth, perches between them and erects itself high into a wall with the two agents on either side.

She smiles a vermillion smile, and it's nothing but bared teeth.

They are handed their mission in a small manila folder. Five days. Go undercover into Pitch Black's criminal enterprise. Get information. Kill Pitch Black.

(And at the same time, tear a piece of your soul away and let the Reaper invade every crack you've carelessly left open.)

The streets of New York City inhale car fumes and billboard signs and the six o'clock evening rush. There's coolness in the air, the first sprinkles of winter in the wind and night sky. Elsa finds herself in step with a stranger with sharp cheekbones and a pair of glittering blue eyes and a dagger clutched in a fist that's been broken six times.

"Saw you the other day," Jack says between a cancer stick, because to them a second means an hour and one hundred years is actually three minutes and thirty one months is just a blink of an eye in a world that's streaming by so fast Jack isn't even sure when he hit eighteen or twenty or twenty-six.

"Me too," Elsa says quietly. She exhales, and a little of her sanity is lost in the atmosphere. "Sorry, I didn't stop to say hello."

"It's fine."

Because hello means nothing, and goodbye means everything. Love dissolves into apathy, and hatred is just another word for motivation.

"How's Bunny?" Elsa asks casually, and Jack isn't prepared for the sting that shoots through his body.

"Dead," Jack says shortly. He blows a smoke ring into the air.

"Oh, I'm sorry." Elsa studies a mannequin behind a display glass, and Jack momentarily marvels at how similar they are.

"I've gotten over it." Jack's voice is terribly even, and he sees Elsa flinch. "It's been a year."

They stop, dithering in the middle of the sidewalk as people hurry all around them, because in their world, time is a racing car that leaves billows of dust behind. And it's also just like honey, slow when it needs to be fast, fast when it needs to be slow. For Jack and Elsa, time hasn't moved on yet, still stuck in the moments from two years and seven months ago, three years ago, one billion million years ago.

"I have to go," Elsa says finally, when the moon has finally risen in the sky, and it droops like a pearl hanging on an invisible string. "I'll see you tomorrow, Jack."

"Yeah," Jack says numbly, when Elsa's retreating figure disappears around the corner. He crushes the cigarette under his foot.

Day one and two and three of the mission go according to plan. Jack and Elsa pose as a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Frost, who are supportive benefactors to Pitch Black's drug kingdom.

And then comes Day Four. And that's when it all goes wrong.

Pitch Black is a cunning motherfucker. Spies everywhere, moles and rats and two-timing bastards that serve his every need. It's almost too easy for him to sniff out liars, and Jack and Elsa were too thoughtless, underestimating the crime lord in a moment of blindness, and now they're stuck in a hole with no way out.

To add salt into their wound, they haven't actually even seen Pitch's face yet. All negotiations from the previous three days were headed by his second in command, a Nightmare with no name.

"So," the Nightmare says silkily from his place at one end of the warehouse. Jack and Elsa had been jumped just as they were entering Pitch's hideout, and even they couldn't take down thirty odd criminals, all with bulky builds and an unfortunate skill in martial arts. "I ask once again: who sent you?"

Jack stays resolutely silent, and the Nightmare makes a noise of annoyance. A thug huffs and stumps over, dragging Jack's chair so that he is face to face with Elsa. Elsa looks a little worse for wear, chains cutting into her toothpick wrists, bruising them purple. The left side of her face is a mixture of black and blue. In contrast, Jack is clean, chains tied tight but not tight enough to hurt, no wounds or injuries or anything of that sort.

"I will make you watch me hurt her," the Nightmare says quietly. The man is as cold-blooded as any murderer Jack has come across, smiling features all twisted up in bloodlust and sadistic pleasure.

"Do it," Jack says, just as softly. Elsa just stares at him with dead eyes, and she shows no reaction to his answer.

They escape because Toothiana comes in as backup after an alarm sounded when the two dropped off the grid. But she comes a little bit late, and Elsa is left with a punctured kidney and a permanent scar that slashes across her face in a horrendous disfigurement, a sign of their failure.

Jack spends sleepless nights replaying her screams for months on end.

If the previous mission wasn't a mark of their incompatibility, then the next one is.

Gather intelligence. Take Hans into custody. Do not kill him.

They kill him. It's an accident. Hans almost slices Jack's head off, Elsa aims and shoots. Straight through the brain, and once more through the heart.

They are yelled at. Taken off the field for a psychology report and because they're just generally useless pieces of shit, though Kristoff is too nice to say so.

Elsa gets lost in nightmares that include watching Jack die right before her eyes, head rolling off as the body slumps to the ground.

In response to these nightmares, Elsa downs bottle after bottle of alcohol, because it makes her forget, and that's all she ever wants.

"Do you ever wonder," Jack croaks, "about what we'd be like if we'd met not as agents, but as normal people in a normal world?"

"Define normal," Elsa murmurs back. They lie spread-eagle on the ground of the training room, both soaked in perspiration and gasping for breath.

"Like, if we were highschool friends," Jack says wistfully. "Or maybe even childhood playmates. Or if you were a florist and I met you in a flower shop. Or if I bumped into you at our local café. I'd like that."

"That's a lot of 'if's," Elsa says dryly. She rolls onto her side, back facing Jack. "There's no use thinking about it. This is who we are, and we can't change it."

"No," Jack agrees. He touches Elsa's shoulder gently, turning her back to him. "But it's still nice to wish."

Elsa wriggles away, but Jack's hand clasps gently around her.

"Don't look at me," Elsa says softly, and she tries to turn her head away.

"Why?"

"I don't want you look at me up close," Elsa says, and then she's choking back her words. "I'm ugly."

It's very quiet, now. Like time as stopped, or perhaps it's going so fast that they've lost track.

"You're not ugly," Jack says, and he traces the scar, still pink and healing, from its tip at her temple, fingers gentle across her right cheekbone, down to her lips, and then finally to the scar's end, at her left jaw. "You're beau–"

"Don't," Elsa says, and she's blinking away tears, but they still leak horizontally, dripping onto the mat. "Just–don't."

A strong arm pulls her closer to him, and they lie as if they're in bed, the mat a mattress, with nonexistent pillows and a blanket of silence.

"You're beautiful," Jack repeats firmly. "Still beautiful. You're always been beautiful. Scar, or no scar."

And Jack presses light butterfly kisses all down the wound, and Elsa just closes her eyes and breathes, sunshine and orange and cinnamon.

"I loved you," Elsa says into his palm. "Before I was sent to Italy, I loved you."

"I loved you too," Jack says, and his lips quirk up with her eyes fly open.

"Then why," Elsa almost hisses, "did you push me away?"

There's a quiet intake of breath. "Because," Jack says, voice raw and thin, "I couldn't love you."

And Elsa can't be angry with him, because she knows exactly what he means.

One night, at three in the morning, Jack wakes up shouting. He's calling Elsa before his mind is fully comprehensive, and he's mumbling something into the receiver and he can't remember what he says, just that Elsa is saying, "I'll be there soon, just hang on."

Elsa arrives with a hammering at the door and he opens it up, red-faced, shirt sticking to his skin with sweat, and Elsa is standing there in her day clothes, smelling of alcohol and flushed with anxiety. In this light, the scar on her face seems to be even bigger, even uglier, more terrifying. But Jack barely sees it, because he's accepted it as a part of her now.

"Are you okay?" Elsa asks frantically, checking him once over.

He's about to say yes, but then he finds himself shaking his head, and a broken "no" stumbles past his lips.

He drags Elsa in, locks the door, because no one can see his moment of weakness except her. He buries his head into her shoulder and draws her close and breathes her familiar scent in.

"It's okay," Elsa whispers, and she smells like cheap wine and flowers. She locks her arms around his waist, rests her cheek on his bowed head. "It's okay."

Jack doesn't remember what goes on in the next half hour. Just that he's crying like he hasn't cried since he was five, saying nonsensical things like "Bunny's death was my fault" and "I wish I died as well" and "he was my best friend" and Elsa just lets him soak her shirt, running light fingers through his hair and saying "it's okay, it's okay, it's okay" as if it were a healing mantra.

And in a way, Jack is dead as well, shot in the chest, leaking something red and pink and fleshy, blood and organs and the remains of childhood innocence. In a way, the other agents found his body right next to Bunnymund's, and if he squints hard enough, he can see the chalk outline of his corpse like in those old-fashioned crime scenes. In a way, he's buried right next to his partner in the cemetery down the west side of the city. In a way, Jack is a heart pumping in a waltz under a stone-hard chest of ribs and clay muscles and blood vessels that run with acid.

(And he wouldn't mind being dead, if it would take the pain out of living.)

"You shouldn't drink so much," Jack says quietly, two and a half hours later, when the sun is just peeking above the horizon of skyscrapers. "I didn't know you were that much of an alcoholic."

"I didn't know you go through a pack of cigarettes a day," Elsa says without missing a beat.

Jack doesn't answer, and they just stare at one another with the coffee table acting as a wall between them. They don't begrudge each other for their vices, because their sort of lifestyle needs a medium in which to cope. For Jack, he smokes. For Elsa, she drinks.

(It's fucked up life they lead, because there's no glory in blood.)

Their next mission ends their career, marking them as agents who've taken such a downward spiral that it'd just be easier on both them and the agency to take them off fieldwork. Neither is very regretful to leave.

But they don't leave unscathed. A bomb triggered at the wrong time results in Jack losing his hearing and sight in his left side, and a torture session has the nerves in his last three fingers of his left hand dead.

"It was a mistake to put you two together," Kristoff sighs.

Jack and Elsa sit side by side together, and it's a stark difference to the Jack and Elsa one year ago. One year ago, they were clean, emotionless, but willing to work. Now, they're a patchwork of battle scars and exhaustion, and they've teetered over the edge too many times to be scared of a little authority.

Cigarette smoke drifts through the room, and Jack raises an eyebrow, daring Kristoff to protest. The director doesn't, just acknowledges it with a bare flicker of the eyes.

He goes through the necessary information, their files, paperwork, their new identity.

"You can start afresh, begin a new life," Kristoff says. It's a lie, like all the people in their profession are wont to say. You never start afresh, just cover up your old skeletons and hope no one looks in the closet. "I wish you both the best of luck."

They leave, not as celebrated heroes, but just as two individuals weighed down by a burden so great, it's a wonder their knees haven't buckled yet.

(But it's okay. Time heals all wounds. Or, at least, it should.)

Six months later finds Jack at a small coffee shop that he happened upon by chance. It's cozy, cushions everywhere and crushed beans gentle on the palate. He goes up to the counter, eyes fixed on the menu.

"Hey, can I have a caramel–" Jack begins, and then his eyes fall on the woman behind the counter. "Elsa?"

Elsa stares at him, mouth slightly agape. She dressed in the worker's uniform, hair up in a frazzled bun. She wears makeup now, not to make herself look more professional, but to accentuate her beauty. Her scar, though faded, still scratches it's way across her face. But it's easily brushed aside, because she has never looked so breathtaking before.

"Um, actually, my name is Gerda," she says, face colouring. "And it's nice to see you… Kai."

"Ah, uh, yeah," Jack says, and he smiles slightly. Kristoff had given them such old-fashioned names. "Just a caramel macchiato, please."

"Of course," Elsa says, and she throws him a smile that lights up her face.

"Also," Jack whispers, "when does your shift end?"

"Three," Elsa says, and clears her throat when her manager looks her way. "That'll be four fifty, please."

Death, Jack thinks, is a lot like breathing. One minute, you're drawing in oxygen, sucking in humid summer air and late night ice creams. The next, with an exhale, gentle as wind shuffling through leaves, there's a hole in the middle of your partner's chest. It leaks with something red and pink and soft, still hot to touch, while the rest of the body cools down.

Because you're alive, and then suddenly, you're not. It's as easy as breathing, and just as quick.

But then, life is also a lot like smiling. One minute, you're in the worst of moods, because your bus comes late, or you spill a drink down your shirt, or your partner dies before your eyes. But then something happens (a woman appears, white hair and blue eyes and soft hands) and suddenly, your day isn't so bad anymore. Suddenly, you're smiling, and you can't even remember why you were sad.

Time heals all wounds. It's not necessarily true. Jack still wakes up with Bunnymund bleeding all over him, still remembers the cry that Sandy emits just before his neck is sliced.

But when he wakes up this time, Elsa is curled up next to him, warm and reassuring and there. And while life is certainly not as perfect as the movies suggest, he's alive and happy, and that must count for something, at least.

author's note:

kai and gerda are the original main characters of the story the snow queen, which frozen based itself upon. they are both also characters in the film, but shh.

this was basically to prove to everyone that yes, i can write jelsa stories with happy endings and no plot twist, thank you very much. nah, kidding (sort of). i wrote this for kuro-d hahaha.

idk this is just a thing it dun really have no plotline? omg but i think i have a thing with suicide or something. this is sending a bad message. no, being alive is great it gives you a chance to pick yourself up m'kay? jack sort of thought of suicide, and his life was the shits, but he didn't commit suicide and look, he ended up sort of happy with the love of his life, so just stay strong and persevere on. (plus he got his coffee shop romance after all.)

kuro-d i hope you like it i know it's probably nothing like you expected, but this is all i can do to portray my thanks (i'm sorry it's shitty) and i love your art, really. it's sah pretty! thank you again for your fan art ^_^v

edit: 24 March 2014

KURO-D DID FAN ART FOR THIS STORY LINK ON MY PROFILE PAGE IMA CRY!