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It was past midnight. There was a crescent moon hanging in the sky over the west gardens, just barely illuminating the patches of rhododendrons where the lanterns did not reach far enough to shine. Cassandra stepped delicately along the garden path, letting her boots crunch softly against the woodchips. She didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself, but she didn’t want to startle Rapunzel when she approached, either. If her guess was correct on why the princess was out here, that was the last thing Rapunzel needed.
Cassandra had been assigned to serve as the princess’s lady-in-waiting only three weeks ago, when the moon was still full. It was officially the worst experience of her entire life. Rapunzel was just so free-spirited . Everything she felt like doing, she did, without stopping to consider things like rules or consequences or other people’s feelings . Cassandra had heard the maids talking about how Rapunzel was overcompensating from her time in the tower; when she returned to Corona, she’d been given freedoms she had never known before, and now she was pushing the limits, seeing how far she could go. The maids theorized that possibly, she couldn’t shake the fear that someone might come along and take that freedom away, so she was making the best of it while she still could.
Personally, Cassandra thought maybe Rapunzel was just obnoxious.
Like the way she was acting now. The night guards had reported her missing about an hour ago, when they were checking her room. While it wasn’t particularly worrisome for a princess’s bedchambers to be empty on a nice, clear night like this one—especially when the two people guarding her room were that freckly idiot and the numbskull with the mustache—Rapunzel’s father was still on high alert from the whole kidnapped-as-an-infant debacle, and wouldn’t accept the captain’s insistence that there was no evidence of anyone breaking and entering. He was halfway hysterical with worry by the time Cassandra left to go look for the princess herself. The king would probably assign extra guards to Rapunzel’s room for weeks now, screwing up the entire guard schedule, just because the princess decided to take an unannounced night stroll. Free spirit or no, Rapunzel should have thought about her father before she snuck out like that.
And the thing was, Cassandra was pretty sure she would have, under normal circumstances. The princess was impulsive and flighty, sure, and she definitely struggled with understanding people sometimes, but she wasn’t actively uncaring. Quite the opposite: she cared incredibly (and annoyingly) deeply. It wouldn’t have just not occurred to Rapunzel that her father would be worried if the guards didn’t know where she was—unless Rapunzel had something big in her mind to distract her.
And really, this late at night, having something big on your mind was rarely a good thing.
Still—obnoxious.
Rapunzel was tucked away in a corner between two patches of flowers, her head on her knees, the shape of her hair barely peeking up between the blue petals of a rhododendron bush. Cassandra let out a beleaguered sigh as she approached. So it turned out she would be on sad-princess-watching-duty tonight. It was all part of the job description, she supposed. For a job she had never once asked for.
She almost wished the princess had been kidnapped instead. A heroic rescue was a lot more manageable than a late-night feelings talk.
Rapunzel glanced up when she noticed Cassandra approaching. She opened her mouth to speak, and Cassandra cut her off. “No one knows you’re out here, your highness. Besides me.”
“You don’t have to call me that,” Rapunzel said, after a pause. Her voice was strained, and Cassandra noticed her arms were shaking slightly. “Just Rapunzel is fine. Please don’t tell anyone.” She blinked, and blanched. “That I’m out here, not that my name is Rapunzel.”
Cassandra had an entire speech prepared about how idiotic it had been to run off like that without telling anyone (when Rapunzel knew how overprotective her father was!), but somehow when she opened her mouth, what slipped out instead was, “Do you want my jumper?”
Rapunzel blinked. “Uh… What?”
Cassandra hadn’t meant to say it. She had hastily put on her maroon jumper when she’d heard the guards whispering outside her room about the princess being missing, since she hadn’t had time to get dressed fully; Cass was only wearing her nightclothes underneath it. Probably not too cold and outfit for a nice June night like this one, but… embarrassing. It was bad enough already that she wasn’t wearing her lady-in-waiting attire in front of Rapunzel. She didn’t need the long lost princess to see her in a camisole.
It was just that, somewhere between the sad little hunch of Rapunzel’s shivering frame and the way her eyes were glinting warm and green in the scattered snatches of moonlight, Cassandra’s brain had entirely lost its capacity for rational thought.
“My jumper,” Cass repeated, because maybe doubling down was the best way out of this. “You look cold.”
Rapunzel glanced down at her shaking arms, with an almost surprised expression. “Oh, I’m not—I just—I kinda can’t stop shivering, sometimes. Like when I have a nightmare or something. But I’m fine! It’s just a weird thing I do.”
“Rapunzel,” Cassandra said. “Did you have a panic attack?”
“Oh, no,” Rapunzel said, waving her off, and it would’ve sounded cheery if her teeth weren’t visibly chattering. “I mean, I freaked out a little bit when I woke up, because I couldn’t breathe and I thought I was dying, but I’m fine now. Totally not dying! Which is great! I’m doing so much better.”
Cassandra frowned. She couldn’t actually read Rapunzel’s expression, since what little light was coming from the moon and the garden’s lanterns was also being filtered through layers of leaves and petals. But she had a pretty good idea what the princess’s trying-to-be-happy face looked like, and it wasn’t hard to imagine it on her now. She made the executive decision that Rapunzel looked so pathetic right now, even someone who hated her—like Cassandra did, obviously—would be obligated to offer her help. She tugged the jumper off and tossed it to the princess.
Rapunzel’s teeth-chattering didn’t stop completely when she pulled it on over her dress, but having the jumper seemed to ground her a little, at least. She relaxed back a bit, looking up at Cassandra and nodding in thanks. Cassandra managed to grind out a “Don’t mention it”.
Apparently it had occurred to not one of the guards that a girl who had grown up locked in a lonely tower her entire life would seek out an open garden under the stars for comfort. Claustrophobia. Personally, Cassandra could relate. She’d always felt cramped in small houses and cottages, preferring to be out training in the forest.
“Do you ever have nightmares?” Rapunzel asked a moment later, unprompted.
“Don’t try to distract me with small talk,” Cassandra said, frowning. “You really do need to go back to the castle, your hi—Rapunzel,” she corrected herself. “The king thinks you’ve been kidnapped, and my dad is halfway ready to fire Stan and Pete for letting you slip off like that...You did slip off, right? You’re out here on purpose?”
Rapunzel looked wounded. “Of course! I told Pascal to let people know where I was! Did he not…?”
“Rapunzel,” Cassandra said impatiently. “He’s a chameleon. He doesn’t talk. He just gestures vaguely and makes distressed chirps.”
Rapunzel’s frowny face was so exaggerated, Cassandra could make it out even in the dark. Cass let out an unexpected bark of a laugh, and for a moment, Rapunzel looked startled and pleased at her. She giggled too, a beat later, with a dumb (warm) look in her eyes.
It was starting to look increasingly likely that Cassandra wasn’t going to be able to get through this conversation without saying something stupid.
“Anyway,” the princess said finally, “answer my question and then I’ll head back up? I’m just… I’m not quite ready to be up there, in that room so high up. With those walls…”
Cassandra looked off, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. “I used to. Have nightmares, I mean. When I was little. I always just slept in my dad’s room if I got scared. He made me feel safe.” She wrinkled her nose, making a face. “But don’t go telling anyone that, okay? I don’t need Fitzherbert holding something like that over my head.”
“Alright,” Rapunzel said, and the shaking wasn’t gone yet, but her voice was starting to sound more amused than distressed. “I think it’s cute, though! Poor baby Cass, looking for her dad.”
“Yeah, well, I grew out of that habit pretty fast,” Cassandra said. “I love my dad, but he’s not the most touchy-feely guy. And at a certain point, you gotta grow up. Sometimes it’s easier to face your fears, until eventually you’re not scared of anything anymore.”
“Can you really do that?”
“Hmm?”
“Not be scared of anything.”
“Well, I’m doing a pretty good job so far,” Cassandra said.
If Rapunzel noticed the annoyance creeping into her tone, she didn’t say anything. “There must be something you’re scared of.”
Cassandra looked at her, and pointedly did not bring up the tight knot of worry she had felt form in her chest just an hour or so earlier, when she’d heard the princess had slipped off. Walls that felt like they were pressing down on you, rules that felt like they were too controlling, a castle that never quite felt like a home—those were worries that Cassandra and Rapunzel shared, and part of the reason why Cassandra had found her so easily. The relatively wide open west gardens were where Cassanda went when she was feeling claustrophobic, although she typically spent her time there training instead of huddled between two bushes. But she didn’t need Rapunzel to know that. Rapunzel didn’t need to know that there was anything they shared.
So instead, Cassandra cleared her throat and said, “No. Not anymore.”
They fell silent, and Cass allowed herself just a moment to look at Rapunzel, even as hard to make out in the dark as she was. Cass could see the glint of green eyes in the moonlight, the freckles across her cheeks, the jumper pulled sloppily over her pale blue nightdress.
Cassandra could admit, even if only to herself, that she sometimes liked to think about what would have happened if she had been the one to rescue Rapunzel from her tower. She supposed the best word for it would probably be daydreaming , but she didn’t particularly like that label. Dreaming was for people with sad, lonely lives who had nothing better to do. Dreaming was something she didn’t have time for. All Cassandra wanted—all she had ever wanted, really—was to join the guard and make her father proud, and that wasn’t the kind of goal that required daydreaming. It required practice, commitment, and willpower.
But she had to admit, even just to herself, that what she was doing was pretty close to dreaming.
It was just that it had almost been real. Rapunzel had marked the secret entrance to the valley where the tower stood in Cassandra’s maps, and she knew she'd passed by that place before, when she was out scouting by herself. If she had stayed out a bit longer, if she had gone down a different path, if she had looked a little bit closer at that mossy overhang, it would have been her who had discovered the tower, not Eugene. It would have been her who had rescued the lost princess. Which would be great, of course, because then her dad really would have to make her a guard. If the king was willing to pardon Eugene’s crimes just for rescuing his daughter, who knows what she could have gotten out of it?
But a secret part of her just found the idea of meeting Rapunzel in a different context enticing. If Rapunzel wasn’t threatening the guard schedule and disrupting Cassandra's career just by being there, could Cass have grown to like her? Maybe if she had a completely clean slate, with none of the poor first impressions or lady-in-waiting nonsense, she could have even noticed how pretty Rapunzel was. Because she really was beautiful, in a perky, flowery kind of way. When Cassandra was feeling sentimental, she allowed herself to think of the girl as sunshine personified.
And if Rapunzel had gotten to know Cassandra in a different context—if she was the first person Rapunzel had ever met outside of the tower—would she have fallen in love with Cassandra instead of Eugene? Rapunzel had told her the sappy story of Fitzherbert and the boat on the night with the lanterns, where it had felt like anything was possible. Would that have happened with her and Cassandra, instead? Would the lantern light over the city make everything feel hazy and magical and unreal?
Would they have kissed?
But she couldn’t daydream forever. Some important lady-in-waiting duty would come up sooner or later, or Rapunzel would burst in with a crazy story about how they needed to find a rich nobleman’s lost peacock before sundown, and the daydream would slip to the back of Cassandra’s mind.
Which was okay, she supposed. Really, she couldn’t ask for anything else. That version of Rapunzel—that idealized version, that she’d been building up in her head—was nothing like the real one, anyway. The real one was flaky, and made mistakes, and snuck out into the gardens when she should have known better, and was overall a huge pain in Cassandra’s ass.
The real one was dating someone else.
Without warning, Cassandra felt herself blurt out, “I’m afraid I’m deluded.”
Rapunzel looked up sharply and suddenly, like she had forgotten what they were talking about. How long has they been sitting there in silence? A sudden nervousness seemed to grip Cass. But there was a curious tilt to Rapunzel’s chin when she looked up, so Cassandra barreled on anyway.
“I—I change my mind a lot,” Cassandra admitted. “But I’m always so convinced I’m right, even when looking back, I know I wasn’t. And I’m afraid I’m going to make the wrong choice a lot, because of that. I’m afraid I don’t really know what to do at all.”
Cassandra couldn’t be certain, but she was pretty sure Rapunzel had started smiling at her. “Oh, Cass,” she said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of that. I trust you know what to do. You’re brave and you’re strong and you’re intelligent and you’re committed and of course you’ll always do the right thing!”
Right, Cassandra thought, feeling her cheeks burn with annoyance. Because she could trust this silly optimistic flower child she’d met only three weeks ago to make a fair assessment of her character. She had no clue why Rapunzel thought that would help.
“You’re just super… real,” Rapunzel finished. “Very forthright, you know?”
“Whatever you say, princess,” Cassandra said, getting to her feet. “You feeling a bit better about the walls now?”
She extended a hand out, meaning to help the princess up, but Rapunzel took it and didn’t let go, even once she was fully standing.
”I do now,” Rapunzel said, squeezing her hand gently. “Thank you.”
And it was nighttime, and everything felt like a weird, disjointed dream, so it was probably safe not to tug away from her grip, or loudly insist they weren’t friends and this wasn’t personal. Rapunzel already knew they weren’t friends.
So they could just walk back to the castle together as not-friends, and not talk about it tomorrow, and everything would be fine. Nothing would have to change. Cassandra wouldn’t have to deal with the princess and her stupid smiley eyes any more than usual, even if she had made a minor screwup with the jumper thing.
Still, what with the way Rapunzel was tightly clutching her hand like she couldn’t care less about personal space, and the way she had sounded when she said I trust you —it felt like something had changed, was all.