Chapter Text
Lead ( ♄ ) symbolizes the raw materials from which the transformation initiates at the beginning of the alchemical process. It is associated with the planet Saturn, which represents focus, dedication, and one’s sense of duty.
♄ ♄ ♄
“Varian,” Queen Arianna pleaded once more. Varian rolled his eyes. “You know this isn’t right.”
“Quiet,” Varian snapped, not bothering to look down at her from where he was hammering nails into the hulking metal frame of his nearly-complete mech.
Her Illustrious Royal Highness Queen Arianna was just as preachy and condescending as Rapunzel herself, if her incessant prattling on about morality and duty and the kindness in one’s soul was any indication. Like mother, like daughter, Varian supposed. Maybe high horses had just always run in the royal family. Not that Varian particularly cared either way, at this point; they had all shown their true colors three months ago during the blizzard. And, in King Frederic’s case, many more months than that—some nineteen years’ worth of them, now.
The scroll fragment Varian had translated spoke of an ancient force of darkness, being the black rocks, and how it could only be countered by its counterpart force of light, being the Sundrop. Varian had at first assumed the Sundrop was still the flower—the scroll even had a picture of it—but after realizing that the power of the Sundrop had been transferred? That it now resided in Rapunzel herself?
Everyone in Corona knew the story. The Queen falls deathly ill late in her pregnancy and languishes on the edge of death, the King saves her by brewing a healing tea with a petal from the Sundrop flower, the Princess is born with magical golden hair, and everyone’s happy, at least until the kidnapping.
The only problem with that?
The Sundrop flower was the only thing, according to the scroll fragment, keeping the black rocks from rampaging across the land and causing untold devastation.
Varian’s father Quirin, who was in possession of the scroll fragment at the time, likely knew that.
Quirin also would have known that the King planned to take the Sundrop flower to save his wife—everyone in Corona did.
Varian knew his father. He knew that Quirin would have warned the King about the dire consequences of removing the Sundrop flower, the destruction and pain it would inflict on the kingdom and her people.
He also knew that the King had done it anyway.
Which meant that Quirin had been cast aside and ignored.
Much like Rapunzel and the rest of Corona cast aside and ignored Varian now, in his own time of need.
Like father, like son.
Varian grit his teeth, teetering on the knife’s edge of his patience as the Queen’s voice called out again. “Please listen—”
He abruptly slid down the ladder and landed on the lab floor with a thump. “What did I just say!?” he snarled. For good measure, he pointed his hammer at her, though he wasn’t sure how threatening it actually was.
Not much, apparently, since the Queen didn’t look intimidated in the slightest. “Varian,” she said more assertively, standing and moving as close to him as her chain would allow. “This has to stop.”
Varian snorted, lowering the hammer. “Or what?”
The Queen was quiet for a moment. “Or you may end up doing something you’ll regret,” she murmured finally.
“I doubt that.”
“I don’t.”
“I—”
“Would your father be proud of what you’ve done?”
Something raw and painful and ugly knotted up in his chest at the words, something he had been trying to push away ever since he betrayed Rapunzel and stole the Sundrop flower, something that felt suspiciously like doubt, and all of a sudden Varian found he was completely out of patience for this.
“You don’t know anything about me, or my father,” Varian said, deathly quiet and icy cold. He wished his voice wasn’t shaking. “So don’t pretend like you do.”
“Var—”
“Shut up!” he screeched. He and the Queen both startled when a loud clang and the sound of crumpling metal echoed around the lab. Varian looked over at his unfinished mech and realized that he’d thrown the hammer into the uncovered internal compartment, severely damaging the delicate mechanics within. Likely beyond repair.
Varian silently stepped back to the mech and stared down blankly at the mangled remains of the timing cylinder and its surrounding gear system that would have connected to levers in the head. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then a few more, just like his father taught him, in the vain hope that it would make him feel any better.
It didn’t.
“Varian?”
The Queen’s hesitant voice grated on every last nerve Varian had like coarse-grit sandpaper, but he didn’t rise to it again. He was done humoring her feeble attempts at talking him down.
He resolutely ignored her subsequent calls for his attention as he removed the hammer and began pulling the broken timing cylinder and gears out of the compartment, laying them out on the nearby workbench. Sure enough, most of the parts weren’t salvageable, and the ones that were would require quite a bit of time to repair.
Time that he really didn’t have, he realized as the distant pounding of dozens of hoofbeats reached his ears. He bolted to the window, grimacing at the sight of the Royal Guard—or at least what was left of it after Ruddiger’s attack—rapidly bearing down on Old Corona, along with Cassandra, Fitzherbert, and some townspeople.
The automatons he’d already built would keep them busy for a while, and he had his goo bombs for when Rapunzel and the King inevitably tried to sneak in, but he knew deep down that it wouldn’t be enough time. Not with how long it would take to fix that level of extensive damage.
Oh, well. The mech was just for backup anyway. He probably wouldn’t even need it—Rapunzel’s Sundrop-powered unbreakable hair would surely be able to shatter the amber.
♄ ♄ ♄
Rapunzel’s hair was not able to shatter the amber.
“I wasn’t wrong,” Varian said desperately, to his father as much as himself, as he knelt by Quirin’s reaching figure. “It’s not my fault. None of it is.” He dragged his eyes over to Rapunzel and her parents, too busy with their little hug pile to even notice him, and a familiar white-hot rage blazed through his body, making him shake with the force of it.
“It’s her fault.”
Varian would have liked nothing more than to get in his mech and ruin Rapunzel’s happy ending like she’d ruined his all those months ago. But the mech was still broken, still unfinished. And, from the sound of it (and the periodic yellow-orange flashes of explosions), the Royal Guard and company were slowly but surely besting his army of automatons.
Luckily, Varian was nothing if not prepared, and so he moved on to Plan B: execute a tactical retreat and rally again another day.
He pressed his forehead against the amber, the rage draining away and leaving an empty sort of fatigue in its wake, and brought his arms around the orange monolith as best he could. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend the cool amber was instead a warm chest. Ruddiger climbed up onto his shoulders, softly chittering at him, and he took quiet comfort in the raccoon’s steady presence. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he whispered as his eyes began to burn. He hoped Quirin could hear him, somehow. “I’ll come back for you. I’ll save you one day.”
And that was a promise.
Glancing back at the blurry forms of the royal family (when had he started crying?), he stood, grabbed his staff, and silently slipped into the entrance to the underground tunnels.
♄ ♄ ♄
Eugene Fitzherbert was not having a good day.
Scratch that, he was having an awful day.
What should have been a perfectly nice day of relaxing and celebrating Rapunzel’s birthday with the Floating Lantern Festival was all too quickly becoming a nightmarish whirlwind of giant robots and giant raccoon monsters and more giant robots, and quite frankly, Eugene had been over it since breakfast.
Unfortunately, the universe never was one to care about what Eugene wanted, and so here he was, fighting for life and limb against a veritable army of (you guessed it) giant robots, courtesy of an unstable teenaged mastermind.
It would have made the fictional Flynn Rider jealous, really.
At least his idea to use the black rocks to destroy the automatons was working, though not nearly as quickly as Eugene would have liked. It wasn’t like it was all that difficult to lure or push the automatons onto the rocks, considering the whole place was absolutely littered with them, but there were just so many of the things. And if that wasn’t enough, there was also the fun additional hazard of making sure they themselves didn’t get skewered on the rocks.
Speaking of—
“Woah!” Eugene yanked Maximus’ reins to the left, barely avoiding a new cluster of black rocks that decided to spontaneously sprout up right in front of them. “That was way too close!”
Max just whinnied in response and kept up a full gallop towards the nearest automaton. When they got close, Eugene leapt off Max’s back and swung his sword down into the automaton’s back, using the blow to distract it as Max ran in from the side and kicked it into the rocks, where it was impaled and exploded shortly after in a blaze of fire.
One more down, at least a couple dozen more to go. Not great odds for their own ragtag army of a third of the Royal Guard and a bunch of civilians (and himself and Cassandra), but hey, he literally died a year ago and came back to life, not to mention his twenty years strong life of crime before that. Surviving things he really shouldn’t was kind of his thing, and he would keep right on drawing breath to spite the universe as many times as he needed to.
Eugene raised his sword high in challenge, looking around at the automatons. “Alright! Who’s next?” At the creaky sound of a door opening, he turned and saw Rapunzel and her parents hurrying out the front door of Varian’s manor house. His eyes widened in worry. She looked like she was fine at a glance, but—“Rapunzel!”
“We’re okay!” Rapunzel responded, running down the front steps of the house with Frederic and Arianna right on her heels. She rushed up to him, pulling him into a quick hug, and Pascal croaked at him in greeting from his perch on her shoulder. “Varian caught me and Dad in his goo trap and had Mom chained up. He forced me to use my hair to try to break the amber—he was feeding it into a drill—but it didn’t work,” she explained quickly, pulling him back towards the steps and away from the automatons still rampaging through Old Corona. “We all got free, but Varian ran. He’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?” Eugene exclaimed. “That kid is dangerous!” He shook his head. “We can’t just let him get away.” The last thing they needed was for the criminal alchemist to regroup and come back to ruin everyone’s day with a destructive reign of terror. Again.
“Uh, guys? I think we have more pressing issues here!” Cassandra shouted at them from a few meters away, her sword slashing at yet another automaton and sending up a shower of sparks.
“There’s so many of them,” Rapunzel breathed, her eyes sweeping over the chaos before them as if just noticing it for the first time.
“You should have seen the headcount before we got to them,” Eugene quipped, lips twitching up in a brief smile. “We’re still working on it.”
“Right.” Rapunzel stepped forward, letting her long golden locks wash over the steps behind her, and brandished her frying pan. “Let’s do thi—”
She was interrupted by twin shrieks cutting through the air. Eugene’s head snapped around to see Frederic and Arianna struggling in the fists of an automaton.
“Mom! Dad!” Rapunzel gasped, staring at them in frozen horror.
Eugene wasted no time; he turned on his heel and sprinted towards them. Cassandra joined him halfway there, and together they let out battle cries as they brought their swords down on the automaton’s legs.
It didn’t fall over. It didn’t even move. Its five glowing green eyes turned down at them, but that was its only reaction.
“Oh, come on,” Eugene muttered. He kept slashing at the automaton anyway, over and over, careful to keep the blade away from its two hostages, but nothing was happening.
“This isn’t working!” Cassandra huffed between breaths, keeping up her own assault of the automaton’s other leg. “We’re not heavy enough to topple this thing!”
The automaton just gazed down at them, tilting its head.
Then its metal fists creaked as they began to squeeze.
Frederic cried out in pain as the horrible creaking continued. Arianna just sucked in a sharp breath, but Eugene didn’t think her silence would stay that way for very long.
“We have to get them out of there!” Eugene cried. He craned his neck, trying to spot anyone else nearby. “Max! Lance! Anyone!”
“I don’t think help is coming, Fitzherbert,” Cassandra grunted, casting her sharp eyes about. “Everyone else is blocked off by the other automatons and the rocks. I don’t think they can get through in time.”
Contrary to what Cassandra told him every other day, Eugene wasn’t stupid. He already knew that they wouldn’t be able to take down the automaton with just the two of them. Not before—
Before—
Eugene threw a wild look over his shoulder at Rapunzel, who was still standing frozen by the steps. Her terrified green eyes met his. “Rapunzel!” Eugene called, breathlessly, desperately. “We need your help!”
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t move.
Cassandra looked back at her too. “Rapunzel, please! We can’t do this alone! There’s no time!”
Rapunzel remained still.
Arianna finally matched her husband’s cries of pain within the automaton’s fist, and Eugene tried one last time. “Rapunzel!”
There was a sudden rumbling in the ground, making Eugene stumble. When he looked up, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing at first—neat lines of black rocks sprouted up from the ground from all directions, much quicker and more organized than any of the rocks before. “Uh, what’s happening?”
His question was answered soon enough when the lines of rocks all converged onto Rapunzel, growing denser and denser until they had fully surrounded and encased her.
For a moment, everything was still.
And then the world exploded.
The rocks encasing Rapunzel retracted in an instant, but countless more took their place in a flash of impossibly bright blue light, sending shockwaves of energy and rocks spreading throughout Old Corona, with the rocks brutally stabbing through each and every automaton in their path. Explosion after explosion ripped through the ruined village at the same time, booming loud as thunder and blindingly bright as lightning. Eugene threw an arm over his face as the ground beneath his feet shuddered and a wave of blistering heat washed over him—
“This thing’s about to blow!” Cassandra shouted in his ear, shoving him to the side. “You get the King, I’ll get the Queen!”
Sure enough, the automaton that had been crushing the monarchs had been impaled on a huge black rock and was sparking dangerously. It must have dropped its hostages, because they were both lying on the ground, gasping for air and clutching their chests. Eugene grabbed Frederic’s arm and threw it over his shoulder, hauling the man up to his feet and dragging him away from the twitching automaton as fast as he could while Cassandra did the same with Arianna.
And not a moment too soon; when they were a short distance away, the automaton—the last one, from the looks of it—finally exploded, nearly throwing the four of them to the ground. After steadying himself and Frederic, Eugene scanned the area for Rapunzel.
She was still standing where she had before, but now she was holding on to two black rocks at her sides. Her hair glowed a brilliant gold and waved in the air to a breeze Eugene couldn’t feel. Her eyes were tightly shut.
“Rapunzel!” Cassandra called. “We have your parents! They’re safe!”
Rapunzel’s eyes snapped open as they approached. “Oh, thank goodness,” she breathed shakily.
Eugene’s eyes widened as the ground began to shake again, and he glared down at the earth as if it had personally offended him. “Oh, come on! What now?” He watched, still holding on to Frederic, as the black rocks slowly rotated to face a single direction. In their wake, one more wave of rocks raced toward the border wall of Corona, and Eugene jumped when they smashed through it, throwing chunks of stone everywhere. When the dust cleared, there was a massive gap in the wall. Some of the rocks laid themselves flat on the ground, forming a path leading out beyond the wall, beyond Corona.
Rapunzel stared at the path, eyes wide, before letting go of the rocks at her sides and promptly collapsing.
“Rapunzel!” Eugene was already moving as she dropped, catching her with the arm that wasn’t supporting Frederic and awkwardly lowering her to the ground as Pascal let out a high-pitched croak of alarm. For a horribly long moment she didn’t stir, and Eugene’s heart seized in his chest. “...Blondie?”
Her eyes fluttered open. She looked up at him and, to Eugene’s surprise but certainly not disappointment, pressed a kiss to his lips. “Hi,” she said softly.
Eugene let out a slightly hysterical chuckle in sheer relief. “We have got to start finding better ways to spend your birthdays.”
Rapunzel smiled at him, radiant as the sun. Eugene couldn’t help but grin back.
“I hate to interrupt such a touching moment,” Cassandra said, not sounding particularly sorry, “but we should really do something about Varian.”
“That boy cannot be allowed to escape,” Frederic growled as he extricated himself from Eugene’s grasp. “He is far too dangerous.”
“Did he leave through the front door?” Rapunzel asked, standing and brushing off her dress. “Did either of you see him?”
Eugene and Cassandra both shook their heads. “I didn’t see him, but I wasn’t really looking either. I was kind of busy trying to not die,” Cassandra said drily, holding out an arm for Owl to perch on when he fluttered down.
“Same here, Sunshine,” Eugene offered. “He may have left that way, but we were all too busy fighting for our lives to notice if he did.”
“It’s also possible he left through the underground tunnels,” Arianna added quietly, “since one of the entrances is in his lab.”
“So he’s either in the tunnels or in Old Corona somewhere,” Eugene finished. “We’ll just have to split up and check both.”
Rapunzel nodded. “Dad, can you have the Royal Guard and townspeople look around Old Corona? Eugene, Cassandra, and I will check the tunnels.”
“Absolutely not,” Frederic said immediately. “Three people may not be enough to stay safe if you find him. You will take half of the guards with you.”
Rapunzel sighed. “Dad...”
“That won’t work,” Cassandra cut in. “If too many people crowd the tunnels, it’ll be too loud and he’ll be alerted to our presence. Sound carries a lot in there.”
“Besides,” Eugene added, crossing his arms, “there are only so many ways the tunnels can go. We’ll need more people looking around Old Corona—it’s a much larger area that’s much easier to hide in. But if it makes you feel better, we’ll bring Lance.” As soon as he could find him, anyway.
“Frederic,” Arianna said, gently but firmly, touching Frederic’s arm. “Rapunzel just saved us all. She can handle herself, as can her friends.” Her tone left no room for argument.
Frederic looked like he wanted to argue anyway, but after a staredown with Arianna and then Rapunzel, he just sighed. “Bring Strongbow,” was all he said before turning to the guards and townspeople beginning to trickle in from around Old Corona and barking orders at them to search the entire village and its outskirts for Varian. Cassandra sent Owl to also scout around the village and alert them or the Guard if he spotted the alchemist.
“You heard the man,” Eugene said, spinning around slowly and surveying the arriving people, eyes flitting about in search of a familiar bald head and red vest. “Let’s find Lance and get going.”
“Well we’d better find him quick, because Varian already has a big headstart on us that’s just getting bigger by the minute,” Cassandra muttered. “Assuming he’s even in the tunnels at all. For all we know, he could be hiding out in an abandoned house or the woods or something.”
“Maybe,” Rapunzel murmured, though she didn’t sound convinced. “But I don’t think so. I think he’s probably in the tunnels.”
“Lance!” Eugene called when he spotted his friend riding Maximus. “Over here!” When Lance had Max trot over, Eugene quickly explained the situation to him. Lance just nodded, his face uncharacteristically serious as he dismounted Max and handed the horse’s reins over to Stan.
“We’ll find him,” Lance said quietly.
Eugene looked at him strangely for a brief moment before shaking it off; it had been a weird day for everyone. “Right, well, the sooner we head off, the better. Let’s go.”
He wouldn’t let that kid hurt his family ever again.