"Okay. I want to do my thinking now."

"Okay."

Off he goes to his own guest room.

The guards let her close the door when she's in the room alone, after they've checked the window and peeked in the closet and taken up posts outside this door.

Rapunzel croons softly rather than light a candle; her hair is plenty of light to see by.

She debates what to write in her new code. The song for her hair is memorable but obvious. Eventually she goes with a mishmash: alternating lines from that with lines from lyrics she's written and poems she's memorized, marking the changes between each with subtle wobbles in the first letter of each line.

And then she does light a candle, because she has too much thinking to do to put her code through its growing pains right this minute. And she wants to be able to burn it when she's through.

Gothel probably read everything. She wanted to manipulate Rapunzel and Rapunzel wrote her a manual. How many times did she have some small dissatisfaction with her relationship with her "mother" only for Gothel to "come around" or have an "idea" that was too welcome to be suspicious? How much of the exact story Rapunzel got about the outside world was custom-made for her - if she'd had worse self-esteem or less of a self-preservation instinct or if she'd been smarter about gleaning facts from her tightly controlled supply of books what would she have been told, instead of, "most people aren't nice like you, they're cruel and greedy"?

Rolan knows a lot about people just from watching them.

Has she been writing a manual for him too?

She's a princess - that much is clear now - and the fairy tales were very positive on marrying princesses being a reward for rescuing them. That she needed rescuing from Gothel she no longer doubts. She thinks if Gothel stole into this room past the guards and tried to wheedle her away she might laugh in her face. Gothel was "protecting" her from little girls who want to braid her hair and crowds that ecstatically scream her lost name. From all the paper she wants and so much space to move around that she feels like she's lost her own edges.

That Rolan's motives for rescuing her are as pure as he claims - this she does doubt.

And feel like an ungrateful wicked child for doing it. He has been so perfectly and so unremittingly nice. He has led her and protected her and she hasn't seen anything he's said contradicted.

Gothel could go a couple days without saying anything readily contradictable either.

What does he want? There's plenty of candidates. He's benefited from her hair twice now. He's getting to stay in the palace, tolerated by her parents, just because she can relax around him, and if she wanted to marry him he'd say yes, and then he'd be a prince. King one day, if something happened to her parents that she didn't get the chance to heal. He wants to - things. He has just admitted that. He's already getting pardons for various things which are strictly speaking against the law. She's been funneling him more good fortune and opportunities than she'd realized, when she sits down and looks at them.

And maybe he really does love her and want to help her no matter what and she thought Gothel did too.

Rapunzel has no discernment to speak of.

She cannot trust herself, about anyone. Rolan's only the start; what about her parents? They may literally be her parents, where Gothel was only pretending, but what if their gentleness is temporary and when she's more wedged, would have a harder time escaping unrecognized, is weighed down by responsibility and expectation -

Can she ever start having confidence in her ability to sort people safe and dangerous? What will she have to learn and how in the name of all the paper lanterns in the world is she supposed to learn it starting from worse than nothing, starting from practice at being gullible and easily manipulated and sheeplike-trusting -

And what is she feeling about Rolan anyway, she's suspicious of the wanting to things on top of a heap of other concerns but maybe she can write that off if it's both ways? That seems commonsensical, at first glance. Unless there's some way to deliberately induce it in other people, which trick she doesn't know because she was raised alone in a tower by -

She swallows, composes herself, switches to a pen with a less breakable nib.

It's not that she doesn't trust Rolan, it's that she doesn't trust herself to trust him and her defaults have been torn to shreds. Gothel wasn't wrong about literally everything. Rapunzel did not emerge from the tower speaking in antonyms and expecting men to have eight legs like spiders and wearing shoes on her ears. She cannot simply reverse everything she was taught. She was taught that people can't be counted on, as a general rule, that they want things for themselves first and only, that they're dangerous and callous - how did Rolan learn to win fights against two armed thugs, anyway? They were jointly four times his size and on their guard and now one's dead. He literally killed someone.

For her, yes, this time, but how much practice did his speed imply?

But she likes him, likes that she can ask him any question, likes the hugs when she wants them and the way he smiles at her and how it makes her go all squidgy.

But maybe that's why he's doing it. Maybe he can smile like that whenever he cares to.

She doesn't know. How is she supposed to know?

Maybe she just needs to meet more people. As many more people as she can. Check them all against each other. That Gothel certainly never allowed, so maybe it's solid, or at least hard to fake. She will get a music teacher. She will see if she can make friends with the housekeeper. She will get acquainted with her parents. She will learn the guards' names. She will see about visiting a hospital and healing everyone in it and she will talk to patients and doctors. Maybe the guards will catch Gothel and she can see what Gothel has to say with all her pretenses collapsed around her.

She's dizzy just thinking about it. So many people, so many strangers.

She wishes she could just start with Rolan and be safe that way until she was ready, safe to her own agitated paranoia's satisfaction, because he's comfortable and easy and helpful and maybe that's exactly what he wants her to think.

If she's too suspicious of him - if he catches on with his odd interpersonal insight some signal she might broadcast without even realizing - will he be offended? Leave? Gothel wanted to be trusted, became upset when Rapunzel wouldn't take her word for things; does he have the same mechanism in him somewhere?

All this effort and at the end all she'll have is something ordinary people seem to get for free.

Rapunzel copies her conclusions into code.

She folds up the plain-written pages, sets them on fire, and leaves them to burn themselves out in the candle's dish.

She takes all the flowers out of her hair, but leaves it in its braid, because there's a massive heap of blankets in this bed and she has no need to share them.

She squirms under the covers.

She closes her eyes.

She doesn't go to sleep anything resembling right away.