Flynn Rider glanced out his window, letting a warm breeze waft through and brush against his face. It was just a little too warm today. He couldn't tell if it was worse to be inside or outside. He knew one thing for sure the breeze kept distracting him. It would wake him up just enough to convince him that he could keep day dreaming for a second before getting back to work… but once the breeze was gone he was left with no energy to continue working. He really needed to be working.
His childhood dreams had involved fun all the time, riding all over, lots of adventure. To be sure he'd had a lot of adventure as a thief. It wasn't like he still have adventure… just of a different variety. Watching Rapunzel discover the world was like discovering the world all over again, except this time it wasn't though the eyes of an orphan, or of a young man trying to get enough money for food.
He enjoyed his life, always had since he became Flynn Rider… which was the problem. He felt, to a certain extent, schizophrenic. Around Rapunzel and Queen Catherine and basically all the towns people he was Eugene Fitzherbert, the ex-criminal who had returned the lost princess, and was now courting said princess. It was different for his job.
All kids dream about being in charge, but being in charge was difficult. Probably the hardest job in the kingdom had to be being the king. The king never got a break, he always had to think about his subjects, how the market was doing, what foreign diplomats would think, what the servants (who were terrible gossipers) would think, how his actions would affect everyone else. It seemed like exhausting work, far too exhausting for someone as laid back as Flynn was. The worst part, he supposed, was that the king was always the king. Even in his new job Flynn could stop working and go do something else. Being king was the job, one you could never stop doing. Flynn was thankful that if Rapunzel ever agreed to marry him that he wouldn't have the job of being king. When the queen was sick the king wasn't allowed to go searching for the sun flower like everyone else. When Rapunzel had been kidnapped the king had never been allowed out to search. He simply had to sit around and wait for people to come back and tell him that they couldn't find her. That there were many things the king couldn't do had simply never occurred to Flynn Rider.
Something else came with the kingship that Flynn never expected, or at least never thought about, spies. There were spies for everything, with the spy motto being that you could never have too much information. In theory that seemed fine, but that meant putting one's self in impressively dangerous situations, constantly lying, and the understanding that not even your own companions may be trust worthy. Spies were part of the underbelly of the kingdom and of politics, and knowing what he now knew Flynn was glad that he hadn't known it all before. The king had an incredibly competent spy network to the point that Flynn wondered why he hadn't been caught when capturing the crown, and why Rapunzel had never been found.
The answer was actually pretty shocking, lack of number and connections. Not that more people would have helped the lost princess case, but it definitely would have helped bring him in faster. This lack of people was one of the reasons why the king had been accepting of him. Flynn Rider was a thief, not the best thief, but he had a reputation and he had connections. News was that a young man names Eugene Fitzherbert had found the lost princess, not Flynn Rider. This had been very intentional. Flynn Rider was a member of the underbelly of society. While Maximus was doing great at cleaning up crime in the kingdom there would still always be that type. The type that liked the dishonest life were more or less perfect for spies because they were the same all over, and they didn't always stay in just one kingdom. Flynn hadn't gone away just yet, he was still in training, and training the men of the Snuggly Duckling (some of whom were more than happy to work as spies, especially if that included royal pardons for past deeds).
The persona of Flynn Rider was part of why the king had accepted him. The king, after the week of celebration, pulled Flynn aside one day to talk with him. The king made it very clear that he would not accept a thief marrying his daughter and offered Flynn another position instead: protecting his daughter. The king understood what Flynn understood: Rapunzel was a beautiful girl, who excelled with people and learning, but who may not be able to deal with the grittier side of leading. Flynn had dealt with the grit of life, and both he and the king were not willing to introduce Rapunzel to that part of life, especially not after she'd just returned. Instead Flynn was happy to take on that part of the job.
The king, of course, was not the kingdom's spy master, and Flynn probably wouldn't be either. There were just certain things you couldn't have too close to the throne. Instead the king, in a sometimes desperate need to do something good and constructive in days that seemed anything but, had learned the different spy ciphers, and would decode messages, not all messages, but enough that he was fairly well in the loop.
This would not be Flynn's area of expertise. The king was a scholar, and Flynn Rider, while knowing his letters and numbers just fine, was very much not. Instead the thief had a very particular type of skill, the ability to size up things. Thieves often didn't work alone, and even if they did they needed to be able to read people. In order to pull big jobs they also needed to be able to read situations, buildings, and landscapes; as well as desperately needing to know how to think on their feet. Flynn's particular set of skills made him good for helping to select people who they could train, as well as work in a very different field, war tactics.
War tactics were not Flynn's greatest area of expertise, in fact that was probably his hardest area of study, but it was necessary because if not him, then Rapunzel would need to learn. The king accepted Flynn on the condition that he would protect Rapunzel. Flynn was willing to protect his beloved, especially in a capacity that not many others would ever be able to achieve. He would be very close and personal with her, and, should anyone get past the guards, would serve as the last line of defense, and would therefore need to be the best line of defense. It was his job to be sure that the lost princess would never be lost again.
The days of the week came and went and before she knew where the time had gone it was Saturday again. Rapunzel had an odd love/hate relationship with Saturdays. They were the day when she would spend time almost completely and exclusively alone with her parents. For the most part she enjoyed these days, but she spent the entire week psyching herself up for that one day.
On Sunday she would be sure that next Saturday would be great. On Monday she would feel a little nervous, but go about her day. On Tuesday she would start imagining how things could become awkward, but she'd push those images to the back of her mind. On Wednesday she would start to feel nervous as they images of awkwardness started to become images of bad things happening. On Thursday those images would get harder to ignore and she'd have to start talking herself into believing the fact that her parents really did like her and weren't simply pretending to love her like Gothel had. On Friday she'd be wishing that she started the self-pep talks days earlier and vowing to start earlier next week. On Saturday morning before she spent time with her parents she'd be so nervous she wouldn't be able to eat (which was why Eugene had suggested starting that day with breakfast with her parents.)
Once she spoke to her parents all her nerves would quickly disappear, but somehow the long weekly wait for that day simply blew her fears out of proportion. Eugene had suggested trying to spend more time with them during the week. It wasn't like she didn't try, and she did get more one on one time with her parents during the week, but all of their schedules were very busy, and it was simply impossible to spend a lot of time all together at any other point in the week.
She wanted to spend time with her parents, but one thing had become painfully clear to all of them, no matter how much time they spend together now it couldn't make up for the time lost already. Sometimes she could see it in her father's eyes. Sometimes he'd say something and then his eyes would get all distant as if he were day dreaming. She knew what it was about. Her father never got a chance to read bedtime stories to her, and marvel at her first steps, or carry her around, or sing children's songs with her. He had her few days, and then the next time he saw he again she was already an adult.
It wasn't like she didn't still need them. After losing Gothel, who'd lied to her for her entire life, Rapunzel desperately needed the assurance that she did have parents who really and truly loved her. Yet her parents had lost out on so much of her life, and since her mother had been unable to have any children after her they never got to experience the actual raising of a child. While they wouldn't have been able to spend as much time with her as a family who wasn't kept busy by royal schedules she could still tell that they keenly felt that loss. All three of them had already had that conversation anyway.
Saturdays were an odd day. They seemed to lack the structure of the other days of the week, but the always ended the same way. At the end of the day all three of them would sit together with a cup of something warm and Rapunzel's father would read to her. They were normally children's stories, as Rapunzel had missed most of them growing up, as still found wonder in the magic of the tales, but sometimes they were histories or older fantasies. Her father had a great voice for speeches and proclamations, but he also had a great voice for storytelling. Religion lessons which seemed horrible or boring on Sunday would come alive on Saturday. Her father explained in great detail about the battles in their religious texts, and how the trials of those heroes brought them through.
It had amazed Rapunzel because not all of that detail seemed to be in the religious texts she'd read until her father explained that he'd wanted to be a priest before his elder brother died and left him the throne. Rapunzel worked very hard to learn on Sundays because of those Saturday nights. She wanted to have some kind of connection to her father.
In a way it was easier to connect with her mother because of Gothel… at least she'd had a mother before. She'd never had a father. When she'd asked Gothel about her father, Mother Gothel would tell a sad tale about how her father had tried to kill Gothel, especially when she tried to get Rapunzel away from him. According to Gothel, Rapunzel's father had wanted to sell the girl, especially with the abilities of her magic hair. The story had worked on many levels, adding to Rapunzel's fear of the outside, as well as making her not want to go outside that much. That story also affected Rapunzel's relationship with her father.
King William was a kind man, one who loved his daughter very much and wanted her to love him back; but Rapunzel still wasn't completely comfortable with him. She wanted to love him, and easily accepted the love he offered her, but she still had a hard time getting Gothel's words out of her head. It was those Saturday nights though, when she'd sit by her father's chair, or sit in his lap and wrap her arms around his neck and listen to the stories he'd tell that made her feel… safe, as if she would be able to forget the stories Gothel had told. Of all the days of the week, and of all the times of the day, Rapunzel liked Saturday nights best.