Chapter 8

Rapunzel sucked on her lip as if that would keep all the bubbling questions and desperate confusion bottled up. She kept her questions to herself and wrapped Flynn's hand (again), staying silent only because if she did so he would tell her everything. He would owe her then for giving him a moment of peace, for once more giving him the care he needed.

She didn't even rush, as he expected. She rubbed on some more salve and bandaged his palm with neat, careful movements, taking her time to do it properly. In a way he wished that she would rush. For some unfathomable reason, he dreaded having to explain it to her. He was a thief. He was wanted. He carried something dangerous and valuable and coveted by every higher power on earth. And he had brought all of that into her peaceful, creepy world.

She pulled the last knot tight, squeezing his palm with finality, and his stomach churned, his jaw clenching to keep the explanation in.

"Alright," she said, scooting onto the bed next to him in her usual spot for listening to his stories, "tell me what it is."

On the whole, it was a fairly innocuous question. Maybe if they stuck with those they could avoid anything more sticky. Maybe. Possibly.

"It's a battery."

"Battery," she repeated, nodding to show she understood.

But she didn't really. She knew the term now, but she had no idea what a battery was or what it could do, what it meant for the empire or what it meant that it was now sitting on the floor of her bedroom.

What it meant for Flynn.

"It stores power," he said. "It holds a bunch of energy, and you can take some of that energy and put it in other things, and for a while they'll have power too."

Her eyes widened, then her head snapped around towards the battery on the floor. "Really?"

"Yeah."

She hurried off the bed, to kneel down next to it and inspect it better.

"Don't touch it!"

"I'm not."

She lowered her face closer to inspect it, pushing her hair out of the way and giving Flynn a heart palpitation. It was made of some kind of mystery metal that looked like bronze swirled with silver, mixed with oil. Some people said it was forged from a meteorite, but no one really knew for sure. The metal sprawled out to either side in clunky branches and curling tendrils, seeming to simultaneously decay as if melted by heat and acid, and grow organically in spurts and lapses. It seemed alive, moving, and the knowledge that it was holding absolutely still unnerved Flynn as it did most people.

In the center, held in place by gripping fingers of metal, sat a green gemstone the size of his fist. It wasn't really an emerald. Flynn had seen plenty of those. This was different. Unearthly. The color changed as he looked at it and he had no idea if it was real, or a trick of the light or the mind.

It seemed to hum, just below the realm of human hearing.

"How does it work?" she asked.

"No idea. No one does."

She nodded, not stopping her inspection. Actually she seemed more interested, as if she could figure out exactly how it worked if she just tried hard enough. Flynn figured that if anyone could figure it out, it would be her.

"Do you think it could power a watch?"

"Probably. It powers the airships. They can't do anything without a charge."

Her head snapped up again.

"You mean the floating lights!"

Before he could answer, she jumped up again to dig through her hidden closet and pull out her projector, queuing up some film Pascal had taken on his journey with deft movements of her hands, a flick of film here, a snap of a knob there.

"Pascal is very good at reconnaissance," she said as the projector dragged itself into a roar and she flipped a lever to project the film onto the wall. "I've already looked at these while you were asleep. But he could only explain pieces."

She watched the scene for a moment, cocking her head to one side as an airship floated overhead at a strangely filmed angle, giving a view of its underbelly. It took her a moment to pull herself from yet another trance before she climbed back onto the bed to give him an expectant look. Leaning forward slightly, she said, "Airships. Start with those."

He shifted under her pointed attention, the anxiety slowly turning in his gut. "What about them?"

"How do they float like that?" She turned her attention back to the screen as the airship vanished behind a building and the scene jumped to a different vessel, this one approaching nearly head on.

"There's a heater inside that makes the air hot. Hot air rises. So, they fly."

"And that's why they glow? Because there's a fire inside?"

"Uh. Yeah. I guess." He had no idea. Most of what he knew about airships came from grammar school lessons and the diagrams he had procured for the heist. He thought for a moment about showing them to her. It would distract her for a while. He wouldn't have to explain any more. Maybe with the diagrams she would build her own airship, find a way to power it, and...

He couldn't even guess what she would do then. Go look at trees and find a band of traveling puppeteers. Conquer the continent as the dominant and only air power. Fly to a library and then never leave. Anything as long as she left home.

"What are they used for?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Lots of things. They move people around. They cart stuff places. They police the borders. Sometimes they bomb people."

"What's that?"

"Bombing? That's when they drop explosives on things."

"Why?"

"To be rude."

She looked horror struck. The mythical floating lights from her fantasies turned out to be bent on destruction, and the beautiful sight she had watched from her window every year had betrayed her, exactly the way everything outside was supposed to.

"Well- I mean- No. That was an exaggeration." Mostly. "They do it because Corona's neighbors don't particularly like them and if given an opportunity they would invade without a second thought and steal all of Corona's gold and jewels and massive amounts of fish, then force all the kids into slavery, burn all the parks, and behead the queen."

Rapunzel looked like she might faint. Her eyebrows furrowed and her distressed frown sunk further every second as her fear of the evils in the outside world grew in severity.

"If you believe all that," he added.

"Why wouldn't I believe it?"

"Because... Sometimes people say things that aren't true just to scare you into going along with them."

"Why would they do that?"

"I- I don't know. Doesn't your mom do that all the time?"

"No."

"You sure?"

She opened her mouth to argue with him, then snapped it shut in thought, her fingers picking at the lace on her cuff again.

"Look," he said, his voice taking on a clipped edge, his knee bouncing against the bedspread in hopes that he could promptly end this discussion, "Corona's neighbors don't like how the empire has so much more than they do. If given the chance they would try to take the empire down. And that scares Corona into protecting itself. Maybe they go a bit overboard. And maybe both sides of the story are exaggerated and a little skewed. So sometimes it's hard to tell who's right, or if either of them are really right."

She thought for a moment, still fingering her cuff, but with less frantic intensity. "Like... like how you think my mother is mean and she would disagree with you."

"Yeah. Except, I'm definitely right about that one."

She almost smiled.

He cleared his throat. "So. Umm. Does that answer your questions?" He hoped it would. Maybe she'd be to distressed and confused by what he'd already told her and stop her line of questioning, or at least drop it for the time being. Maybe then the bile would settle back into his stomach.

He could feel the walls coming up, growing inside his tightened muscles to block out her curiosity, to block out anything that would make him face the emptiness in his chest and the truth of what was happening to him.

She turned back to the film in thought, after a time murmuring, "They look beautiful."

It felt like a reprieve, not enough to let him relax, but enough that his stomach stopped knotting. "Yeah," he said. "They're impressive. You should see one close up."

Her eyes lit again. "What's it like?"

"Uh. Big? Really big. With lots of people running around."

"How many people?"

"Around a hundred."

"Wow! And they all fit inside?"

"Inside the gondola," he pointed vaguely at the film. "The balloon is mostly empty except for hot air."

"It must be huge!"

"Yeah."

"And why do they only show up once a year?"

"Uh. Well, the charge they get from the battery only lasts a year. So every year they have to come back and recharge."

"And they all come back to recharge on the same day."

"Yeah. The Lost Princess's birthday. They come, get recharged, show their respect by flying in circles, then head out again."

She paused for a moment, picking which of her many questions she wanted answered first. "Why don't they take the battery with them? Then they could recharge and not have to come all the way back."

"Because there's a whole bunch of airships that go to a bunch of different places and there's only one battery."

"One?"

"Yeah."

"That one?"

"Uh..." And there was the tension again. She was poking him, circling closer and closer to painfully sensitive topics, to things he couldn't admit to her, couldn't admit to himself.

"Are you the person that charges all the airships? Tell me all about it!"

He couldn't lie to her. She'd given him an easy out. One he hadn't even thought of himself. One he should be jumping on. 'Yeah, Sweetheart. The one and only airship recharger. Right here. You should be honored. Want an autograph?' He should go with that just so she wouldn't realize what he was. He should lie and become someone else, someone who didn't have his problems.

He'd done it before.

But he couldn't do it now.

"No," he said lamely. "No, I'm not."

"Oh. Are you holding it for them? Keeping it safe until next year?"

"Not really."

"Then," she shifted, anxious for him to tell her so she could stop guessing, picking up on his stress and hesitancy. She looked up at him through her eyelashes, almost shy to ask the obvious question. "Why do you have it?"

"Uh..."

Part of him screamed to confess everything to her. She was so kind. She listened so well. He wanted her to guide him as the situation spun radically out of his control. She could comfort him the way she did when he was ill.

But she was just a girl in a tower with no knowledge of what to do next. She couldn't help him and he didn't want her to. It wasn't fair to drag her into it.

She was just a girl. But she had bent over backwards to heal him and keep him safe. And the only way he made it this far, through the trip to the capital and the theft itself, was with Pascal's companionship.

And he was just a chameleon.

Rapunzel stared at him, her eyes huge and green and confused and honest.

He could feel the wall tremble, the one he'd built to keep her out, to keep things bottled up.

He swallowed, blinking at her several times, trying to wipe away the image of her concern to replace it with the distrust he saw in the face of every other person he'd ever met.

"Flynn?" Fear crept into her voice, and she reached out slowly to touch his shoulder, to offer comfort.

The wall weakened and crumbled.

Her touch pushed him into speaking, a simple action that snowballed, growing and building, pouring out in a rush he couldn't contain.

"I have it because I stole it. I have it and I'm going to sell it to a little, fat foreign dignitary if he doesn't have his hired muscle just kill me first and take it. I destroyed the entire airship fleet and the empire is going to fall right behind it.

"I never thought I'd be able to do it. Not really. No one did. They all thought I'd die trying. They wanted me dead and I-"

He swallowed, running a hand through his hair, looking at her, pleading with her to forgive him, and to scream at him the way he screamed at himself. He begged her for one final push, for her to make him stop talking.

Her face was unreadable and he quickly pressed his eyes closed and let the rest of his confession flow, his flimsy excuse, his poor justification for his actions.

"I didn't really care if I died or not. It seemed inevitable. Refuse and I get killed. Come back empty handed and I get killed. Do it wrong and I get killed by the guards. Who even cares?"

She just stared at him, not knowing what to say, where to begin. But then there wasn't much you could say to something like that. Besides "get out of my tower, you horrible man."

He was actually surprised she'd waited this long to kick him out.

Biting her lip in uncertainty, she scooted forward ever so slightly and picked the topic with which she should have been the least concerned. "You don't care if you die?"

He shook his head slightly. "Not really."

"But-" She blinked at him, utterly baffled. "But dying is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you and you need to put it off as long as possible."

"If only that were true."

"What about your mother? She'll miss you."

He laughed, a hollow sound that echoed in the cavern of his empty, soulless heart.

She frowned. "But don't you like living?"

"Not particularly. I mean, I've done it all. I've lived it up. Had a blast. Broke the rules... After a while it gets old. It's boring and I'm done with it."

She watched him for a moment as if expecting him to suddenly laugh and say he was joking, then he'd tell her that airships were actually tubby, flying animals.

But he didn't, which just made her confusion grow into frustrated disbelief. "You can't have done it all. There's so many things to see outside. And if you've done everything then why don't you know about half the things I ask you about?"

"Hey, it's not half."

She gave him a skeptical look.

"More like a quarter. A fifth!"

She did not look convinced. "And how can you say that it's boring when you just destroyed an empire? That's not very good, Flynn, and I think you should consider giving their battery back so that all the children aren't sold into slavery, but at least it's exciting."

He stared at her a moment before declaring, "You're crazy."

She sat back in a huff. "I'm not the one trying to die and dragging everyone down with me while I'm at it. That's crazy andrude. No. You can't die because I won't let you. I'm not letting you leave."

"Excuse me? No. No no no. I don't think so."

"Why not? Do you have something important to do outside? Something worth living for?"

He rolled his eyes. "You can't keep me here, Blondie."

"Yes, I can. It's safe here. You won't be in any danger-"

"-except from your mom."

"-and you can heal, and rest, and tell me everything about outside-"

"-oh fantastic."

"-and we'll come up with a way for you to return the battery and put the empire right again-"

"-I don't think-"

"-and you won't be able to ever tell anyone where I am."

She nodded definitely, and slipped off the bed as the last of the film rolled through the projector, leaving uninterrupted light projected on the wall, the film tail flicking as it spun around and around the take-up reel. She left him completely at a loss for words.