Author's Note: This is a different type of story from anything I've written for this fandom before. I haven't seen many straight-up Gothic horror fics for Tangled, and I'm planning to have this done by Halloween as a treat.

This story probably qualifies as a crossover with a particular piece by H. P. Lovecraft, although all the characters are from Tangled, the setting is in the environs of the Snuggly Duckling, and the setup is an alternate timeline in which Eugene stole the crown years earlier (before he got involved with the Stabbingtons), got away, and did not have to hide in the tower. The plot, however,will be similar to Lovecraft's story.

Content Warnings: This will be a pretty dark story and will contain horror elements in later chapters, but the rating of M is primarily because I have some smut planned for our couple.

Disclaimer: Tangled belongs to Disney. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward belongs to the estate of H. P. Lovecraft. I'm just having not-for-profit fun with them.

Within These Walls

Chapter One: A Prequel and a Result

The status of the village of Amwald, or Bywood, was always a bit unclear to its inhabitants. With no mayor, no municipal authorities of its own, and the most prominent buildings being the Snuggly Duckling tavern and the long-abandoned manor house, Amwald would seem to be under direct authority of the State of Corona, and yes, the State could indeed send its knights to the forest and the forest village when the occasion warranted. However, villagers did not possess ballot rights within the kingdom, and it was a rare occasion when the State actually saw fit to dispatch the guard, reserving them, it would seem, for the most egregious crimes against the Crown. For the most part, the State left the little village to its own devices. This policy of negligence allowed a flourishing trade in bootleg tax-free liquor—facilitated by the Snuggly Duckling—to develop, which the Crown surely knew of, but with which it did not interfere. Because the authorities rarely pursued a chase into the forest or Amwald itself, the village became a known hideout for petty criminals of all sorts, a situation which they regarded as a thoroughly acceptable trade-off for not having voting rights on municipal bond issues and taxes.

One instance when Corona did send the knights to Amwald was when the royal crown of the lost princess was stolen. It was hopeless, as the Captain himself had known—the thief had stolen it right out from under the guards' noses, climbed up the rope he had strung, and escaped through the roof without anyone even catching a glimpse of him—but they had to at least attempt to run him down, and the disreputable village was the only place anyone could suggest as a starting place. Unfortunately for them, they did not gain a clue as to his identity, nor had any especially suspicious person even been seen rushing through town—although they had their hunches, they could not prove them—and there was no choice but to report back to the monarchs with their negative report, as the regiment had all expected.

What was not expected was the King and Queen's reaction to the theft. Fourteen years ago, when the princess herself had been kidnapped by a gnarled old woman that the monarchs had only seen in a half-awake state, they had suffered terribly, as would be expected of parents, but they had managed to continue ruling through their grief, holding fast to the belief that their daughter was yet alive and would be returned to them someday. With the theft of the crown, and nary a suggestion of where the thief might be, they fell into a paralyzing despair, as if the loss of this last artifact reminding them of her existence had brought about the loss of their faith in her survival and hope for her return. They stopped mingling with their people. They stopped having their regular meetings with the representatives of the merchants' guilds and the Captain of the Guard. They stopped writing legislation. They stopped being aware of current civil and criminal affairs that should have required the dispatch of the guard, to the point that it became unsafe even on the island itself for people to walk about after dark. In effect, they stopped governing, buried and subsumed in their own grief.

The people of Corona did not know what to do at first. They had long loved their monarchs, sympathetic as the King and Queen were to enlightened views and friendly and kindly as they were as human beings. They did not want to call for their beloved king to step down, but eventually they realized, led by the Captain of the Guard and the head of the Guild, that they had no choice if they wanted to maintain their own security as a nation. At last, a year after the theft of the crown, a council was held to address the growing problems.

The monarchs almost seemed to welcome the plea to either resume governing or step down and let municipal authorities take on the task. Perhaps they had regarded it as an opening to do what they wanted to do anyway, but could not do on their own, out of some still-surviving sense of duty. Whatever the cause might be, they abdicated authority willingly and peacefully. They moved as far from the island capital as they could while still remaining within the authority of the State, building a fine house on the border, far closer to Amwald than the city of Corona. They became, simply, Everard and Sophia von Korona. There, everyone supposed, they would nurse their grief in private. Corona itself transitioned to become a free municipality with elected officials.

For two years after that, no one either in Corona, Amwald, or the rural territories heard a whisper about the lost princess, the crown, or any of the top suspects in the theft. Then, suddenly, a piece of news started to spread like wildfire, beginning in Amwald. The old stone manor house in the village, which had been abandoned ever since its owners—the Corvinus family, formerly of Hungary—had apparently died out four hundred years ago, had been purchased by a young bachelor named Fitzherbert. This in itself was strange enough, but what really set lips moving was the rumor that this "Fitzherbert" person was none other than Flynn Rider, who was suspected in quite a few petty thefts from three to four years ago, as well as the theft of the crown, but none since then. If he was indeed the same person, the warrants for his arrest had been withdrawn by the new municipal government, which had more pressing and violent crimes than three-year-old petty theft to deal with in the wake of the royals' abandonment of responsibility. There was no legal barrier to Rider's purchase of the manor house—but the few upright and principled villagers thought it little more than brazenly thumbing his nose at everyone for him to come back and settle in the old Corvinus house after he had, most likely, single-handedly brought down the monarchy and destroyed the little remaining peace of the beloved royal family. The fact that he could make such a purchase—and, it became immediately evident, fund the restoration and modernization of the house—seemed to be clear evidence that he was the thief of the lost princess's crown. The crown, it would seem, was permanently lost, sold and probably taken apart by criminal black-marketeers.

Still, Rider—for the young man made no attempt to dispel the rumors about his identity, and almost seemed to welcome them, the way he grinned arrogantly about it whenever he heard them—continued with his project. Eschewing the same upright villagers who also shunned him, he chose to mix with the majority criminal element of the village instead, hiring regulars from the Snuggly Duckling to work on his house. Large ruffians going by the names or nicknames of Vladamir, Big Nose, and Hookhand did carpentry work and heavy labor. Ruffians going by the nicknames of Bruiser and Killer created a lot of the drapery and linens for the house. A ruffian named Gunther helped pick out and move in new furniture into the rooms that Rider/Fitzherbert intended to use. Then, once Rider was moved in, Gunther continued to come in periodically and, apparently, act as a housekeeper. A ruffian named Attila evidently served as his cook, going by the place around midday and preparing a meal that was meant to serve as luncheon and dinner. However, Rider himself lived alone in the house, doing nothing, it would seem, but going to the pub (from which he usually did not return until the late night, after, it was thought, filthy scuffles with local Amwald wenches in the inn) and occasionally to the island city (from which he usually returned with books or goods of some sort). He did not thieve from villagers. However he had come by his money—and everyone in Amwald, upright or ruffian, agreed that it had been no honest way—Rider did not seem to be a threat to the community, such as it was. Within a year after his purchase of the Corvinus house, four years after the theft of the crown, people in Amwald finally stopped gossiping about him. After all, when it came down to it, he fit in with the community perfectly.