Summary: Everything is lost down the tide, but the sea's return offers a new life. A fresh, clean start.
Author's Note: How do you guys think Iseult and Lionel sound as names for the Queen and King respectively, with Ariana as Rapunzel's birth name? I was trying to think of names that weren't too outlandish.
Disclaimer: I don't own Tangled.

Rapunzel, that's what the young thief calls her. Rapunzel, that's what the child answers to, the only name she knows now and the only one she answers to. When he calls her by the name he gave her he receives only a blank stare and a perplexed twist of the thin pink lips. Her father succumbs to moroseness watching her laugh and joke with the thief—who is welcome in the home of King Lionel and Queen Iseult for bringing their daughter back—seemingly without a care in the world.

Funny. Yes, very funny. Lionel has often felt these dark shadows put their hands on his shoulders, in all the long years that his daughter was lost beyond sight and recall. Never did he think he would have to battle them now that she is home.

This is a different girl from what his daughter would have been, if she was raised by her parents—her true parents. That much Lionel can be reasonably certain of.

Her name had been Ariana, and she had been the apple of her parents' eyes. She had had the most vibrant shimmering gold hair and piercing green eyes. Just like Iseult's, Lionel had thought then, and he still thinks it now. That's the only thing he can see of his daughter in the girl who has taken her place.

Her hair is nothing. Children born with hair as fair as the sun often end up have it darken to red or brown before they leave childhood. And if anything this makes her (for the life of him Lionel can't decide whether to call her Ariana or Rapunzel, not now) resemblance to Iseult even more uncanny, even if her hair is shorter and more raggedly cut than Lionel has had occasion to see on most men.

Lionel is willing to believe that this girl is his daughter; he's more than willing to believe it. She's the right age, still looks just as much like her mother, and he's just so tired of deceivers and having his heart broken every time he sees a fair-haired girl with green eyes among the city. He's so tired of lighting the lanterns every year for a girl who could be dead, for a girl whom he had long since given up hope of ever seeing again.

But she's so… otherworldly. She's so fey (skin so pale that it barely seems to have ever been touched by the sun), like a changeling child (so unworldly, so uncanny), a child of the faeries sent to replace his daughter, and if he were a little more cynical about this whole thing he could believe that.

He could believe it, but no. She's his flesh and blood, there's no mistaking it. But it's nearly impossible to see any traces of Ariana in this girl.

For eighteen years, Lionel has wondered, and prayed. For eighteen years, he has lit the lanterns every year at sundown. For twelve of those eighteen years he has had no hope of ever seeing Ariana again and the lighting of the lanterns has just been a hollow tradition capable of bringing nothing but agony.

Lionel has no idea of Iseult still believed that their daughter was ever going to come home. It was one of those things they simply didn't talk about, one of those things that was left in a permanent state of silence. She may have; Iseult's always been more persistent, more steadfast than him. Her faith doesn't falter as easily as his. But after eighteen years, there surely must have been something starting to crack within her. She doesn't show it as, far beneath the balcony, she links arms with her daughter and smiles conspiratorially with both the child and the thief. Iseult can still feel her youth even if Lionel feels like an old man. She can still let everything fall into place without fail, seamlessly.

Now, his daughter has come home. Finally, she is home. Except Lionel feels as though he has been given a stranger back.

No, not a stranger. Just a new, different, unfamiliar daughter, who smiles sweetly at him, giggles and laughs and says "I love you" (those words, he never thought those words could ring so sweetly and cause so much anguish at the same time) like she's been saying it to him her entire life but always holds herself back just a little bit. A daughter who doesn't know how to act around him. And a father who doesn't know how to act around his daughter.

Is this Ariana? No.

Ariana by now would have been a creature of the palace, exposed day after day to corruption and beauty alike. She would have known how to hold a room, how to charm and smile more deftly for one than for another, how to be regal, how to navigate the halls of power.

Rapunzel doesn't even know where the halls of power are. Her smiles are equal on all. She has had little to no contact with the outside world from where she was taken and as such she is… She's a total innocent. Lionel isn't sure that that's such a bad thing. This child is unspoiled, not yet jaded. She is still capable of seeing only sunlight when looking on the world, still capable of saying that the good outweighs the bad. Her heart is still pure.

Lionel has not had much to hope for in the last eighteen years.

All his and Iseult's attempts to have another child to put balm on their raw hearts and their aching souls have failed. All end in miscarriages, bloody and vile and incessant on their minds, and eventually the physicians overcome their fear of royal wrath and tell the plain truth: the birth that nearly killed Iseult has rendered her incapable of carrying a child to term. They tell them that she can not risk attempting to carry another child, and that another miscarriage will likely end in her death.

There have been too many deceivers to count. Too many girls with long fair hair claiming to be the lost Princess Ariana, and every time Lionel's keen eyes have been able to spot out flaws. Too old, too young. Some might have blue eyes (curse that old stereotype, curse the belief that every golden-haired girl's eyes must be blue), and others might have moles that Ariana did not have or not have moles that Ariana had. So many have lacked the little mole on the nape of her neck near the protrusion of bone. So many have been false.

And all Lionel's dreams have served him ill. He wakes up with tears in his eyes and a knowing look in Iseult's, and they say nothing. As ever, they never speak of their daughter, and the rift that has opened up grows wider every year, even if harsh words are never passed and blame is never cast. Maybe they'll speak now and maybe they won't, but Lionel isn't sure that they will ever return to the happiness they had before joy was stolen away by a thief in the night.

Lionel doesn't have to say anything now, or hear anything from his wife to know the truth.

Ariana is dead. She died the night a dark-cloaked woman stole her from her crib. That life has died within the form of his daughter and Lionel knows he will never see it again.

But… But there is still Rapunzel. And Lionel, who is not much given to hope, not after eighteen years of lighting lanterns and never having so much as a sign, wonders if maybe…

If maybe Rapunzel can fill Ariana's place. He knows she can, if he will just let her, and let go of the daughter that was lost.

—Everything is lost down the pitiless tide, and there is no getting it back.

But the sea's return offers a new life. A fresh, clean start. A break with the past, the end of old heartaches and the start of new, tentative ventures.

That is what Lionel has been looking for, for eighteen years, as much as he has searched for his daughter.—