He has a guitar (not quite a lute, but better-sounding, and easier on the eyes—a modern instrument for modern times), and while his voice is nothing special to listen to, he does consider himself in possession of a fair way of words, if he does say so himself. At the orphanage, when all the smaller children had gone to bed and the nuns had retreated to the convent for the night, he would stuff pillows under the covers of his bunk and hide underneath with a candle and a quill pen stolen from the director's office, and he would write. He would write, scrawling in messy handwriting with sloppy, haphazard punctuation and inkblots spattered across the pages of his leather-bound journal, staining his hands with spots and smudges of black. In the mornings they frowned upon his fantasies, saddling him with such chores as cleaning and tutoring and looking after the young ones; night was his escape, his opportunity to let the words that swirled in his mind on a constant loop each day filter from him through the nib of a pen.
If Ryan had been able to amount to anything—had any sort of talent in any shape or form, really—it would have been in his words. Even now, when he lies in his makeshift forest shelter in the trees under the cover of darkness, he contemplates the words, and wonders whether he could have put them to use.
But it is a useless thought, an idle fantasy. There is no money in music anymore, no profit in poetry—not since the kingdom of Summerlin turned its attention to business and trade, making its fortune through the sales and exchange of luxury goods and abundant crops. Music became a useless frivolity, a banal, inconsequential way to pass the time; with traders came books, far more convenient and significantly less of a nuisance. As Ryan has no desire to test out his sea legs, and other people continue to be an everlasting, ever-confounding mystery he prefers not to puzzle out, the merchant life is not for him.
Given his considerable lack of business savvy, and with the absence of any of those desirable connections (familial or otherwise) which would grant him a sizeable fortune, Ryan is left with only one option—one way to turn a real profit. Granted, it's very much outside the law, and on occasion has left him with injuries that might not have otherwise been sustained, had he been more careful, but it works.
idek how i came up with this but anyway ryden tangled au everyone!!
ryan is flynn (our ever-so-cynical orphaned thief), zack and brent are the stabbington brothers (those two dudes he betrays in the beginning after stealing the crown), brendon is rapunzel (except, like, instead of having magic hair, his voice itself is magic--it can heal wounds and sickness and slow time to an agonizing crawl), idk who gothel is we can make her an oc or something.
it plays out much like the movie except instead of corona the kingdom is summerlin (it's too perfect of a name) and instead of being the king and queen's firstborn brendon is their youngest. other than that it's like the movie but with more snark and, y'know, more ryden.
i should probably have more done on this but i get distracted easily.
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