Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN THE PREVIEW PICTURE! IT BELONGS TO HoliMeiMei ON DEVIANTART! I also do not own any of the characters. All I own is the storyline.

Hi everyone, welcome to the story! Heh, this is my first Jackunzel fanfiction, so I hope it's not bad! I feel like it's kind of cheesy, but oh well. Anyway, I am in love with this AU and really wanted to write a story about it, so I took a stab at it and mixed some modern AU in as well. Fair warning, it doesn't have much of an overarching plot…the first several chapters are just drabbles about Jack and Rapunzel growing up together and talking about their lives, and it isn't until the later chapters that REAL conflict starts to kick in! My story was originally supposed to be a oneshot, but then it got hella long and I decided to split it into chapters by age, like in JustADreamAway735's fic "Leaves in Autumn."

Also, just so you know the story is almost completely done at the moment, and I will be regularly updating every 1 or 2 weeks. But please don't refrain from following this because you think I'll abandon it or put it on hiatus, because I can assure you that that simply WON'T happen. I've put far too much time into this to not finish it!

He was 7 years old when he saw her for the first time.

The trip started out like any other. Jack knew how it worked. Every year his mother and father whisked him off to a faraway beach, a place where work and taxes and mortgage and all the other nasty-sounding things that grown-ups talk about just popped out of existence. They got to saunter through the bustling airport past the important people with big suitcases (Jack got his very own suitcase for the trip!), and wait in the place with rows and rows of chairs and huge windows until the shiny plane comes to take them through the sky. He could never get over how funny the plane looked, with its blunt beak and its metal tail feather sticking straight in the air.

The airport they landed in was always warm and humid, stuffed with visitors like them or locals desperately wanting to get away to someplace less pleasant to escape the mass of tourists. They rented a car and drove to their beach house, with its stairs leading from the sand to the patio and the stylized diamond and semicircle windows overlooking the ocean. It was too expensive, but Jack's mother had always had a taste for luxury that she refused to give up. Every night at the fancy seafood places Jack would order fish sticks from the kid's menu. He didn't think he'd ever get tired of fish sticks.

Jack knew why his parents were so insistent on coming to the beach every year, and he thought their reasons were dumb. His mother wanted to bake in the sun until she was the perfect shade of bronze, and his father was content to wallow about in the surf for hours at a time, the sun reflecting off of the water onto his pale skin and slowly turning it lobster-red. Jack could usually content himself to build sandcastles and leap around in the waves, but the sand was limper this year and his creations kept falling apart. Not to mention the water was more crowded than usual, and he couldn't ride the waves for five minutes without bumping into some stranger.

It was then that he talked his older brother James into taking him to see the nearby caves. They were over by where the sandy beach hardened into sharp stones, so they were usually deserted. James was bored too, and was not hard to convince. Being 14, it was very hard for him not to get bored during the hours spent lazing on the beach, and he was eager to have something novel to do. In the end, both of their parents decided that a teenager was old enough to look after his younger brother. Jack's mother didn't want to budge from her spot in the sun, and Jack's father was uninterested in going where the water might be any colder.

They hadn't been exploring the caves for long when Jack heard a loud spashing coming from outside. He told James he was going to go check it out, to which the teenage boy just shrugged and said to be careful. He swam out of the cave and spotted a fishing net snagged on one of the sharp rocks. It took him a moment to figure out what was trapped inside it, since the creature kept thrashing around and wrapping itself tighter and tighter in the mesh. It was a girl, about his age, with golden hair shining like sunbeams. But where her legs should be there was a long, bubblegum-colored fishtail. That certainly wasn't normal.

He watched her flail around for several seconds, eyes huge with wonder. He had never seen a real live mermaid before! His father had told him they weren't real, even though he had heard a group of girls talking at school one day about a movie they had seen where some redhead mermaid tried to win over a prince by becoming human. Every grown-up he had asked had told him they were nothing more than an old legend, but here one was, right in front of him. He grinned, thinking how cool everyone back home would think he was when he told them he had seen an actual mermaid.

And they'll think I'm even cooler if I talk to one! Giddy with excitement, he swam over to the struggling mix of mermaid and net. She stopped writhing around briefly to look up at him with huge green eyes, filled to the brim with fear. Feeling a wave of sympathy, Jack reached out to pull the net off the rock. The mermaid jerked away from his hand like his touch could burn her.

"Hey, don't be scared," he said. "If you stop moving for a second I'll get you out of here. I'm not gonna hurt you."

"Yes, you will!" Her voice was shrill and cutting, much more so than he expected from a pretty little mermaid girl. "My mama says all humans are bad and awful and if they ever catch a mermaid they'll…they'll take her really far away from the ocean and put her in a ararkium!"

He smirked. "You mean an aquarium?"

"So you know about them, then," she said anxiously.

He rolled his eyes. "Well duh! But they're for fish, not mermaids."

"Really? Mama said humans put us in these big tanks and then they come and stare at us all day!"

"That's dumb. That'd be like putting people in a zoo or something."

"What's a zoo?" she asked, the fear in her voice beginning to subside.

"It's where there are a bunch of animals in pens and you go and look at them," he explained as he set to work untangling the net. "It's really fun."

"Oh." Her face fell. "They must be so sad, trapped in pens all the time. Taken away from their homes."

"I asked my mom about that once," he said. "She says they're actually happy. A lot of them are born there, so they get to stay with their mom and dad. And they get fed, too. Where I live there's a zoo where you can feed the zebras. Their teeth are so dirty!"

"Ew!" The mermaid made a face. "What's a zebra?"

Jack realized he didn't know how to explain it to someone who had never seen a horse. "Well…you've seen a seahorse, right? They've got heads like seahorses, but they walk on four legs and they have black and white stripes."

"Cool!" For the first time, he saw her smile. Her eyes glittered like peridots, making her look even prettier than she already was.

"What's your name?" he asked, using a sharp rock to cut the net away from her bubblegum tail. "I'm Jack."

"Rapunzel," she said shyly, looking away.

"You're really pretty," he said nonchalantly. "And you have a lot of hair."

Rapunzel's cheeks turn bright red. "Thanks. Mama doesn't want me to cut it."

"Where is your mama?" Jack asked, trying to unknot Rapunzel's hair from the net without hurting her. "I mean, if my mama didn't want me to talk to mermaids, she wouldn't let me go someplace where there were probably mermaids. You know, there's a lot of people around here."

"She usually goes away during the day," Rapunzel explained. "She doesn't get back until sunset. I swam out father away from the house than I'm supposed to, and then the tide caught me and swept me out here, and then I got stuck in this icky human thing."

"Well, you're not stuck in the icky human thing anymore," he said triumphantly, getting the last of her long hair loose and throwing the net out onto the pointed rocks. Her green gaze flitted from him to the water, like she was considering darting away into the waves. He reached out and grabbed her wrist before she could.

"Don't leave yet! I have to show you to my brother. He'll be so impressed that I found a mermaid!"

"Is he one of the mean humans?" she asked fretfully. "Is he going to take me away so I dry up and sell all my scales?"

What has her mom been telling her? Jack wondered. He laughed and shook his head. "No, he's nice like me. We'll keep you safe from the bad humans."

Her eyes widened. "But there are bad humans?"

Jack shrugged. "Well, most grown-ups don't think mermaids are real. I don't know what they'd do if they did. But we're not going to meet any of them. My brother's nice, I promise."

"Okay," she agreed reluctantly. "But I'd be in so much trouble if Mama found out about this!"

"So you don't tell her." Jack pointed at the sky. "Look, the sun won't go down for a long time. You can get home before she does."

Rapunzel grinned, and he took her hand dragging her into the caves. "James!" he called out. "James, I found a mermaid!"

James swam into view and eyed Rapunzel suspiciously. He smirked, looking like he was about to tell his younger brother off, until he saw the pink tail flit out of the water. "Her name's Rapunzel," Jack added cheerily. James slapped his hand over his mouth. "Oh my god, is that—no way. She can't be real."

James reached out to touch Rapunzel's scales. She winced away, shrinking back against Jack. He gave his brother a dirty look.

"That's insane." He looked like he was about to faint. Jack reached out and grabbed his wrist to steady him. "Completely freaking insane. Where did you find her? How does no one know there are mermaids here?"

"I dunno. She was all tangled up in a fishing net." Jack shrugged. "But we can't tell mom and dad, okay? Rapunzel's real scared that other humans are gonna come after her and take her away if they find out about her. We have to keep her a secret and stuff."

"Yeah, who knows what people would do if they found out mermaids were real?" James said. "You're right. Best keep it a secret. Not that mom and dad would believe us, anyway."

Rapunzel let out a sigh of relief and smiled at Jack. "So he is one of the nice ones!"

He grinned back. "Told you!"

"So you promise not to tell anyone about me?" Rapunzel asked, looking back and forth between the two boys. They both shook their heads.

"I like being one of the only people who know about mermaids," Jack added. "It's no fun if everyone else knows, too."

"Okay, well…" Rapunzel glanced out of the entrance to the cave. "I should go home. Mama will be back soon."

"Hey, why don't you come back tomorrow?" Jack piped up. "You look like you'd be fun to play with. I'm gonna be here for a while 'cause my mom and dad lay around on the beach all day. Can we play tomorrow, James?" He looked at him pleadingly.

James shrugged nonchalantly. "Sure, why not."

Rapunzel didn't look so sure. "But, my mama—"

"You said she's gone all day," Jack insisted. "Come on! It'll be really fun! Besides, I don't have anyone else to play with besides James, and he's a boring teenager."

"Hey!" James glared at Jack, but he ignored it.

Rapunzel thought about it for a moment, and then smiled. "Okay!"

Jack bounced excitedly in the water. "Yay! Okay, see you tomorrow!"

"Bye Jack!" She waved at him before leaping up out of the water and splashing gracefully back in, swallowed up by the dark blue. A single ripple was the only evidence that she was ever there.

Rapunzel wasn't entirely sure what motivated her to come back the next day. She had no desire to rebel against her mother, overprotective as she was. She didn't know why she so readily disregarded her advice, not only swimming much farther from the house than she was allowed to into rough waters, but seeing a human. She knew the entire thing was absurd, and perhaps a little stupid. But that didn't stop her.

It must have had something to do with the fact that she was instinctively inclined to trust Jack. He certainly didn't have pointy teeth, and he had even helped her out of a situation that would've ended in disaster had her mother ever found her. He seemed benign enough, with his soft spikes of chocolate-brown hair and his big, hazelnut eyes.

And Rapunzel wasn't quick to admit it, with her mother's doting love in the mornings and evenings, but she was lonely. She was homeschooled, and her mother barely ever let her play with the few friends she had managed to scrounge up. The ache in her heart for a playmate is what kept her propelling herself through the water, heading back toward the rough tide and the sharp rocks.

She found Jack in the cave he took her into yesterday, sitting on an especially wide ledge. She asked him where his brother was, and he said he was over by the beach nearby, texting a girl on his new waterproof iPhone. He smirked, making kissy noises, and Rapunzel giggled. She asked him what an iPhone is, and he took a long time trying to explain it. After a while he gave up, and she told him it didn't matter.

All of the sudden Jack lunged into the water, grabbing out at one of Rapunzel's pink fins and grinning. Yelping, she darted away. It didn't take her long to figure out he couldn't keep up, splashing and smacking the water like a drowning cat. She slowed down so he at least had a chance of catching her, even if they both knew she was holding back. She screamed playfully as he seized her shoulders from behind, dunking her underwater. Slipping out of his grasp, she slid back up to the surface and pushed him under.

That was how the morning went, chasing and dunking and hiding and sneaking up on each other. By the time it was lunchtime, both were exhausted. Rapunzel glanced anxiously out at the rippling water and mumbled that it was time for her to go home.

"Okay. But I had fun today!" Jack said, grinning.

She looked at him hopefully. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

She shot him one last smile before diving out of sight, leaving Jack with a hollow feeling. It took him a moment to recognize it as disappointment.

Tomorrow, he reminded himself, swimming off to find James.

Jack noticed that every day Rapunzel stayed a little longer. At first she was paranoid, always fretting about what her mother would do if she ever caught her out here. She only stayed for the mornings, darting away as soon as Jack and James left for lunch. But one day he thought she left, only to find her sitting patiently on their ledge when he returned from eating his corn dog. After that she grew more and more daring, sometimes not leaving until the sun was sinking into the saltwater, drowning in the shimmering golden waves.

Their playing was always rowdy and boisterous, neither of them having any adults nearby to tell them to settle down. Much of what they did was the same as what they had done the first day they played. Chasing, dunking, spashing, diving, pushing, giggling. But often they would weave a plot in. One would be the valiant hero, either running from the villain or chasing him down so justice could be served. The other would be the ruthless villain who was either fleeing like a dirty coward or trying to catch the hero so the scumbag could execute some nasty plan involving world domination and the hero and all his friends becoming sniveling slaves. Sometimes James would join in their games, but it was rare, seeing as no self-respecting 14-year-old would be caught dead playing with a couple of 7-year-olds.

Sometimes they would take breaks when they got too tired, and were content to sit on the ledge and talk. Rapunzel told Jack some of the stories her mother had told her, mermaid fairy tales about mermaids saving sailors, only to be betrayed by them later and be captured and taken away from the sea ("And the moral of that story, Raunzel, is never trust a human!"). But, of course, they always escaped back into the sea and found a nice merman, living happily ever after. Jack rambled on and on about comic books and superhero movies.

One day Rapunzel asked Jack what was on his swim trunks, and her told her it was Spiderman, the coolest superhero ever. "He can shoot spiderwebs out of his fingers and swing from buildings and stuff!" he told her excitedly.

Rapunzel wrinkled her nose. "That's gross."

"No, but he's so cool!" Jack insisted. "He's not actually a spider or anything. And he fights bad guys. Plus, he's got a girlfriend."

Rapunzel's green eyes lit up with interest. "Oh?"

Jack grinned. "Yeah, her name's Gwen and she's really pretty and she looks kinda like you. Hey, I have an idea!"

"What's that?"

"I can be Spiderman and you can be Gwen and I can save you from the Green Goblin!"

Rapunzel looked confused. "But who's gonna be the Green Goblin?"

Jack shrugged. James was in a bad mood today and had made it quite clear earlier that he was not in the mood for doing anything other than chaperoning. "No one has to be the Green Goblin. We can just pretend he's there."

Rapunzel had no idea who the Green Goblin was supposed to be, but she simply smiled and said, "Okay!" She could ask about him later.

"Help!" she screeched. She latched on to the ledge with her fingertips, pretending she was dangling off of it. "He's gonna push me off this cliff! I'm gonna die! Get away from me, you monster!" Rapunzel reached up and swiped at the open air where the invisible Green Goblin was.

"I'll save you, Gwen!" Jack splashed through the water and clambered up onto the ledge. "Pew pew!" He pretended to shoot webs out of his fingers, circling them so it looked like he was wrapping the foe in spider thread. He crawled closer and started aiming punch after punch at the Green Goblin. "Take that! And that! Nobody messes with Spiderman's girlfriend!"

"Lemme help!" Rapunzel suddenly felt annoyed at seeing Jack get all the glory. She pulled herself up onto the ledge beside him and pummeled her tiny fists into the air.

"Come on Gwen, help me throw him into the water." Both of them hoisted up the villain and threw him as far as they could, imagining the heavy splash as he hit the dark water deep in the cave.

"Yay, we won!" Rapunzel bounced on her tail excitedly. "So…now what?"

"Now you go, 'You saved me! You were so brave!' and smother me in kisses," Jack said, imitating a high-pitched girl's voice.

Rapunzel's cheeks grew bright red, and her eyes widened in worry. "Do I have to kiss you?"

Jack shook his head. "Nah. I'm not allowed to kiss any girls yet, Zellie. My mom says I can't kiss any girls until I'm 13."

Rapunzel giggled, liking the new nickname. She looked at him for several seconds, realizing she was actually curious to see what it would be like to kiss a boy.

And for once she did something impulsive, without thinking. Without over-analyzing. She grabbed his face and planted a kiss on his cheek. His face grew pink, and he looked away.

"I'm not going to smother you," she teased. "That's all you get."

Before she knew what was happening, he had leaned over and given her a small peck on the cheek in return. "Don't tell my mom," he said.

"She doesn't believe in mermaids," she reminded him.

Jack wasn't sure how to tell Rapunzel he was leaving on his last day at the beach. She didn't think he was going to stay forever, did she? He wouldn't have minded to. But unfortunately the beach vacation always came to an end, and Jack and his family boarded a plane back to Burgess and left the shimmering sea behind for another year.

"Hey, Zellie," he greeted Rapunzel when he found her sitting in their usual meeting spot on the ledge.

"Hi, Jack!" she said. "What are we gonna do today?"

"I dunno yet," he replied. "But uh…there's something I gotta tell you."

She looked worried. "What?"

"I have to go tomorrow. Back to where I live."

"Oh." Her face fell. "I thought you lived here. Are you ever coming back?"

"In a year," he replied. "My parents only take me to this beach in the summer, for three weeks. Then we go home in a big metal airplane."

"Oh!" Her eyes lit up with understanding. "The gray things that fly through the sky and make that funny noise. I knew they weren't birds!"

"Yes, those." He nodded. "I have to ride one back to the town I live in."

"I wish you could stay," she said sadly.

"Me too. But I'll be back next year!" he added hastily. "Around the same time. June 14. Do mermaids have calendars?"

She rolled her eyes. "Of course, duh!"

He grinned. "Well, then you know when I'll be back!"

At the end of the day, she wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug as he was saying goodbye to her. "Bye Jack! I had a lot of fun playing with you."

At first he was put off by the sudden affectionate gesture, but slowly hugged her back. "Bye Rapunzel. Thanks for playing with me."

She leaned back, and gave him a serious look, her big green eyes brimming with anxiety. "Promise you'll come back and play with me next year?"

Jack smiled. "Yeah. Promise."

"And promise you won't tell anyone about me?"

"Promise. I like other people not knowing, remember?"

"Uh-huh." She wrapped him in another hug before splashing down into the water. "Well…see you next year. I'm gonna miss you."

"I'll miss you too," he told her. Then, without another word, she slipped under the waves as swiftly as she always did. He stared at the spot where she had vanished for several seconds, already feeling lonely.

So here's Age 7! This was the first time trying to write from a little kid's perspective, so my apologies if I epically failed at it. For some reason I can totally see Jack being obsessed with superheroes and comic books as a kid. So whoop whoop, we get a triple crossover when he and Rapunzel play Spiderman! Also, before you give yourself a headache trying to figure out what CGI movie James is from, let me inform you that I made him up for the sole purpose of chaperoning Jack at the caves. Because let's be honest, no parents would let their 7-year-old kid go off by himself! And Rapunzel's nickname is "Zellie" because Punzie is overused. I saw him calling her Zellie in this one fic I read a while back…and I liked that, so I stole it XD