Chapter 7
Although it had taken Pascal over a week to reach the capital, he was admittedly avoiding populated areas. Villages had dogs and dogs wanted to chew on him. Plus he got lost a lot until he decided to have Flynn carry him.
The royal chameleon, on the other hand, was looking for people. Even if he came across a civilian, upon presenting himself, it would be their duty to drop whatever they were doing and bring him to the nearest guard station.
His mission was much more important than anything they could possibly be doing or would ever do in their entire lives.
Luckily enough – as the royal chameleon did not like dealing with the unwashed masses, no matter how necessary – it only took him a few days to locate the nearest royal guard squadron. Since Flynn Rider's daring escape, the entire guard had swelled across the country like angered hornets, searching for the thief, the stolen scout ship, or the battery.
The guards had set up base in the post office of a tiny village, where they bustled back and forth, shouting to one another, relaying messages, and tapping away at telegraphs. A handful of officers stood around a table where a map was spread, depicting the placements of their search parties and the general direction the stolen scout ship was headed. They argued with bristling mustaches and the pounding of fists against the table.
The chameleon let his seamlessly adapted forest camouflage fall, and replaced it with the deadly, silver sheen deserved of its worth and stature.
It didn't matter what they said or what they were planning. Their misguided searching and chaotic practices would adapt and fall into line with the chameleon's report.
It glided up the table leg and marched across the map, pushing aside troop markers and rolling pens onto the floor. In the center of the table, with the group's complete and silent attention, it stood tall, puffed out its chest, and addressed the captain.
With a brief moment of intense smugness and quick series of clicks, it rolled its recording back to the beginning and began to play.
"Hi," said a raspy voice, grainy and slightly distorted. "I'm Flynn."
The guards collectively sucked in a breath, their mustaches bristling to new extremes.
"And you are?" the recorded voice asked.
There was a pause, and then, "Rapunzel."
Flynn woke to the light of day, the bed back at normal bed height, Rapunzel sitting at her work bench, her complete concentration on her work. After a moment of debating if he should get up or not, he stretched and rolled out of bed, rubbing his head drowsily and taking a seat across from her.
"I take it your mom left."
She jumped at the sound of his voice, her head snapping up so she could blink at him with wildly magnified eyes. He was starting to get used to the sight.
"Yes. You slept very late." She pushed up her goggles and leaned back to peer into the other room and check the wall clock. "It's almost eight thirty."
"Eight thirty. Where has the day gone?"
She nodded solemnly and turned back to her work. "There's food in the kitchen. Do you need me to help you?"
"Nah. I got it."
He made no move to stand, instead watching her as she painstakingly constructed her watch face.
The photograph that she had been given to put in the inside cover was an oblong, staged portrait of a family – stern husband, placid wife, a boy, and an infant, all with blank faces and dead eyes typical of long exposure photographs. Behind them was a painted backdrop of a landscape. An artificial tree framed one side of the photograph, its branches hanging artfully above them.
Rapunzel had covered and recreated the tree out of layered paper, pulling it into the third dimension, giving it texture and life, complete with tiny, delicate leaves set against the illusion of wood grain. She mirrored it on a second oval, where she would place the clock face, so the tree seemed to spread out over both halves of the opened watch, setting the time and the family firmly into the background.
Flynn watched her take the outer most layer of a branch, and transfer the shape onto a sheet of thin metal, carving it away with painful precision. Slowly, piece by piece by piece, she built up the tree again, this time in bronze.
She bent forward as if throwing herself into her work and half hiding her progress from view, then a moment later she would lean back, straightening her shoulders as if her mother were berating her for her bad posture. Her mouth pursed and she sighed more frequently the longer he watched her. Sometimes she would pull her tools away as if she were about to throw them down on the table in frustration. Then she would glance up at him, the movement obvious, magnified by her glasses.
"You really should eat," she said at last.
"I'm not really hungry."
She didn't move for a moment, her hands hovering over her work, unsure if she wanted to continue. Her shoulders slumped and she lowered her tools in defeat, looking up at him with eyes full of embarrassment. "I'm not used to having someone watch me."
He blinked at her. "I'm making you self-conscious?"
She shifted. "A bit. You're distracting."
That was a nice ego boost, and he found himself wearing a cocky smile. He purred, a hint of his smolder showing through, "Sorry." But he wasn't really. Not at all.
His flirting was lost on her, as she was too flustered to notice, and she determinedly explained herself further. "I'm not used to- I don't know if anything I'm doing is right or- or normal. Maybe I'm doing it wrong."
"I'd have no clue if you were doing it wrong."
"Mother doesn't ever watch me like you do."
"She gets bored when you make watches?" That was understandable. It was pretty boring, except for the fact that she was doing it, expect for the fact that it heldher attention and therefore must be fascinating.
He didn't normally think things like that, but he was having a strange week.
She shook her head. "I meant all the time. Not just when I'm working. She doesn't ever look as interested as you do."
He didn't really know what to say to that. His life was kind of built around his disinterest, and if he was letting that slip it was bad news.
"You should go eat," she repeated. "I'm almost to a place where I can stop for a while and then we can play."
He raised an eyebrow. "Play?"
This earned him a blank stare. "What?"
"Nothing," he said, shaking his head and pushing himself to his feet. "I'll get out of your hair then."
It struck him that given the circumstances, that was kind of an odd expression.
Breakfast consisted of oatmeal, that she had kept warm in a pot over the fire. Oatmeal was never his favorite, but this looked decidedly less mushy and watery than his past experiences. He spooned some into a bowl and grabbed an apple, feeling strange to be shifting through her kitchen when she wasn't there. It was unreasonably tidy compared to her room, which made him seem even more like an intruder. The cluttered room was growing familiar in a way that he didn't particularly like.
And where did she keep her spoons?
He slumped into a chair at the table, stretching out his legs, and leaning heavily on his elbows. He ate slowly, giving her time to finish up her carving or whatever what she was doing was called. The oatmeal was actually pretty good. For oatmeal.
He pretended that he wasn't too impatient for her to finish. He pretended that he didn't care, because he didn't. It's just that it was a bit dull in the tower with no one to talk to, a bit lonely. The wind mumbled and whistled as it beat against the outside of the tower, making it feel empty, hollow.
Not really that hungry, he spent a very long time stirring the contents of his bowl and watching the wall clock tick away. Rapunzel had clearly made it herself as just beneath the clock face spun a disk holding a carved figure of a girl, her hands thrown in the air, her head titled back in gleeful laughter. She spun out of the clock on the left to run past and disappear back inside on the right, her long, blonde hair trailing behind her along with several small birds suspended on thin sticks. She ran around and around in circles, never tiring, perpetually excited.
Flynn wondered if she had ever run anywhere but to the kitchen and back.
From inside her room, her stool made a noise as she pushed it back to stand. He listened to her shuffle around, a flighty sound like the wings of a bird, then she held a mumbled conversation with Pascal that he couldn't quite make out despite how hard he strained his ears or how still he held, his mouth still full of oatmeal.
Then she gasped, a sharp, clear intake of breath full of fear and shock and pain, and Flynn was on his feet, sprinting.
She stood in front of the open closet, his discarded satchel at her feet, the battery clutched in her hands. She stared down at it, entranced, unmoving, her face bathed in green light the color of her eyes, a light that shifted like the surface of a lake, moving and breathing as if alive.
In two strides he had snatched the battery from her hands, releasing her from her trance as the twisted metal bit into his hand again, burning his skin with a soft sizzling noise. He cursed at the pain and dropped the world's most valuable object to the floor with a clunk.
"Flynn," she breathed, blinking rapidly and shaking her head to clear the lingering disorientation. Then she grasped onto the first thing that came to mind. "Your hand."
He ignored her, ignored the pain, and grabbed her own hands, his eyes dragging over them anxiously for signs of her own burn marks. But there was nothing. Just thin, smooth fingers that were cold to the touch and curved slightly in his hands.
It didn't make sense. The battery was supposed to burn anyone who wasn't royalty by blood, anyone but the queen. It didn't make sense, and he flipped through confusion, relief, and fear before landing on outrage. Outrage made sense. It went along with the throbbing in his hand.
"What were you thinking?"
"I- Pascal said he got me a present... He said it was in your bag." She nodded towards the jar of white paint set on the table as her voice weakened with fear and uncertainty. "He got it for my birthday."
"You could have been killed."
"I-"
"You just went digging through my satchel?"
"I wasn't snooping! I- I was just getting my paint."
"So send Pascal to get it for you! Don't just go sticking your hand in. That thing's dangerous!"
"How was I supposed to know that? Why did you have something that dangerous in your bag?"
"That's not the point."
"But," her eyebrows furrowed together, "what does it do? Why did it hurt you?"
"It burns anyone that touches it who is not its rightful owner. It's to keep people from stealing it," he snapped.
This only confused her further and her lips parted to ask another question, which withered and died on her tongue. As they stared at each other, he realized that he was still holding her hands, now clutched to his chest, and - just to avoid her eyes and the conclusion she'd come to at any moment – he checked them again, finding them still unblemished.
He sighed, and in a further act of bizarre softness, pressed a kiss to her knuckles and pulled her into an embrace, the pulsing sting in his hand growing in intensity.