Note: This was written for the Tangled Big Bang of Summer 2012. I know everyone has their rendition of Rapunzel and Eugene after the movie; this is mine. I'll leave a goodbye note at the end. Thanks for reading.

Rapunzel pulled away from Eugene—before he was ready to let her go—her breath coming quickly either because she was laughing again, or from being kissed.

"Eugene, I—"

Then her face did something he caught full-on because he was only a few inches away. It was as if everything that had just passed was crashing up against one another, one kicker at a time: she put a hand to the back of her head and turned to look out the window; she turned back, her eyes and mouth wide; her features moved back to surprise as she made eye contact with him again, but started to slip back toward distress as she looked down and reached out with one hand to touch the red-soaked splotch. Eugene took her wrist with his free hand to stop her.

"It doesn't hurt, Eugene?"

"Nah—"

"It might still be bleeding—"

"I don't think so."

"What if I didn't heal it completely?"

"Hey," he knocked against the spot the way he would a door, "you healed me just fine. See?" Even though it was true that nothing in his body hurt at the moment, he had to remind himself to keep cool; the chill stickiness against his knuckles and the skin underneath his shirt was surprisingly unsettling.

Though he hadn't forgotten that he was still chained to a banister, he groped for something a little lighter to bring up—something to distract her for a minute. "Where's Pascal?"

She stretched up on her knees and craned her neck around, reaching out to him when she found him toddling to her from where he had been crouching next to two parallel lengths of her hair by the window. Eugene let the wrist he held go easily when she pulled, noticing a band of color forming around it—and the other one, too, once he looked.

The cuff around his own wrist was cool, and wouldn't leave any marks on him, as he'd hardly pulled against it; but he itched again to be free of it, especially as he imagined what sort of struggle Rapunzel had put up against it that it would bruise her so quickly.

"Rapunzel?"

She pivoted back to him as she moved Pascal from her palms to her shoulder, a small sort of grin on her. "How are you even here?"

"Maximus brought me."

"He's here? But—I thought you were going to be hanged." She wrung her hands together, loosing them quickly when she realized that they weren't wrapped around anything.

Eugene cringed, recognizing already that her nervous habit of tugging at her hair might give her grief. "Uh, yeah—I was all set to be, but those punks from the Snuggly Duckling busted me out." He shrugged his shoulders. "Maximus sent for them. Who'd have thought, huh?"

Rapunzel had her fists balled up in her lap. "Eugene—oh my god—you were almost hanged. What if you'd been hanged?"

He hadn't thought of it since earlier in the day while being frog-marched to the gallows—and he didn't feel quite ready to think of it at the moment; since the thugs had shown up and freed him Rapunzel had been much higher on his list of priorities.

"Don't worry about it. I wasn't. And now I'm here." Eugene held up his cuffed wrist and raised his eyebrows, still anxious of saying anything too heavy.

But her face fell anyway.

"Oh! She had the keys, Eugene."

"Hey, hey, that's alright. You forget who you're dealing with! Do you maybe have a hairpin or a knife?"

He watched her move around the parts of the room, carefully stepping over any lengths of her severed hair, around the blood that was drying on the floor, and out of the way of any stray shards of glass. Rapunzel brought him both things he'd asked for, though she looked skeptical the whole time she watched him pick at the keyhole.

When it clicked and popped open, though, she smiled. "Huh."

Eugene tossed the cuff aside and stood up rather more hastily than he meant to. He tried to recover by meeting Rapunzel's eyes and running a casual hand through his hair. But he listed backward, his back meeting a column of the wooden banister he had just been chained to. Through the white splotches swimming before him he watched Rapunzel scramble forward, then felt her hands on his shoulders. He squinted his eyes at her, trying to find the words that were surely coming out of her moving mouth.

"—wrong, Eugene? Are you okay?"

He shook his head out and closed his eyes hard. "Not feeling so hot."

Rapunzel pulled at his shoulders, and he realized she was steering him by her grip on his vest. He opened his eyes to be more cooperative. When she gently pushed him down into a chair at a small table, he realized he'd walked across the room without looking where he was going, or what he might be stepping on.

He exhaled through his open mouth.

"How do you feel now?" She was looking at his abdomen instead of his face.

He only nodded. She looked more concerned than he liked. He watched her watch the spot on his side, tense with not knowing what she was going to do next.

She attacked him suddenly, and only swatted away his hands when he tried to push her fingers away from his shirt. The buckles of his vest were still undone, so she had pushed it right aside and started pulling his shirt out of his pants.

"Rapunzel, no, you're going to get blood on—"

She stopped, though, as soon as she was able to pull his shirt up enough to see the spot where he'd been stabbed.

Also curious, Eugene looked down at himself.

There was only a little bit of dried blood, most of it stuck to the fabric of his shirt or in stiff little bunches in the hair on his skin. The place where the wound itself had been wasn't hard to find, even though it was completely closed up; a thin line, though dark, marked the point where the blade of the knife pierced him.

Eugene didn't like it. Eugene wished Rapunzel would stop looking at it. Even Pascal had ventured along Rapunzel's arm to get a closer look.

"That's never happened before." Her fingers felt cool and feathery as she touched the mark and the skin around it tentatively.

"What hasn't?"

She pulled his hand to her, turning it so she could see his open palm. "Scars. Any time I used my hair to heal myself or—it was always completely fixed. Like your hand." She rubbed her thumb across his palm.

"You didn't have your hair this time."

She shook her head, not looking at him.

"And it was pretty serious, you know."

She prodded his skin with her fingers. "Does this hurt?"

"No! But stop, it tickles."

She looked up at him, and was smiling. That's more like it.

"I think I'm just crashing. I didn't sleep last night. And I don't remember the last time I ate."

"Cupcakes yesterday?"

"God, probably."

"I didn't sleep last night either."

"No?"

"We walked all night."

Eugene nodded, thinking that her mother had a lot of nerve marching her all the way back to their tower in the middle of the night. She must have wanted to get Rapunzel back in hand as soon as possible. Naturally, he cringed from the macabre, but the thought of her body splayed out on the ground outside was strangely satisfying to him.

Rapunzel was holding onto his hand with both of hers, but she was staring blankly over his shoulder, in the direction of the widow. "I want to leave now."

Understandable. "Sure." He liked that she squeezed his hand before getting up from the chair she was sitting in, but was uneasy about how preoccupied she seemed. He was starting to think he'd rather she'd fly off the handle and have a breakdown. That would be normal, right?

"I'm going to pack some things." She set Pascal on the table in front of Eugene and tip-toed across the floor into a room off the wall.

Eugene and Pascal regarded each other. Eugene took stock of the little guy, and supposed by the way Pascal's eyeballs were darting up and down that the same thing was being done to him.

He didn't look so bad, especially considering he had gotten a swift kick in the gut with that woman's boot. At least Eugene thought he remembered seeing that happen.

Pascal apparently grew bored of looking at him, and bent his squat legs to settle down on his belly. He closed his eyes, seemingly asleep.

A hollow ache in his stomach grew but didn't make a sound, reminding him that he needed food. He stood up slowly, allowing himself to hold onto the back of the chair since Rapunzel wasn't watching him. Though not about to pass out, he still felt a little dizzy as he approached the surfaces of the kitchen area.

By the time Rapunzel emerged from the room with a floppy-looking leather sack slung over her shoulder, Eugene had found some raw parsnips and a plate of slightly hardened cookies to munch on, and had set the few apples he found aside to take down for Maximus.

"What'cha got there?"

She was skipping over area of floor with blood and glass over it, so she didn't answer until she was already running up the stairs. "Just some things I need."

Eugene was a little too concerned with the cookies he was polishing off and the cup of water he had poured for himself at the sink's pump to ask any questions. But when she returned, her face was serious enough to bring him back to reality. She placed the sack on the table in front of her and sat down.

"These cookies are stupendous."

"I made them a few days ago—they're probably not that good anymore."

Eugene ate another one to emphasize his approval.

"Eugene… I need to know why—"

He nodded for her to continue.

"Well— what did you do to deserve to be hanged?"

"Ah." Eugene put down his cookie. "In Corona or… in general?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I've only been in Corona for a few years. Before that I lived—uh—worked all over."

"Like where?" The Rapunzel he'd been with in the days before appeared then, all wide eyes and curiosity. Then she remembered: "Wait—how about… in general."

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before beginning. "Well, you know about the crown. I did that a few days ago. That's the biggest thing, and it was supposed to be the last job I did in Corona. But before that it goes something like 'smuggling, forgery, looting, poaching, brigandage, perjury, depravity, vandalism, arson, impersonating Royal military officers and a clergyman, ransacking, and theft.'"

It was hard for him to keep every bit of pride out of his voice; reciting his litany of crimes was something he usually got off on. Well—something that Flynn usually got off on. He had to remember to that to Rapunzel, now, he was Eugene.

"I don't know what some of those things are."

"I'll explain them all if you want."

"I'd like that. Not right now, though." She made to grab that strand of hair that hung by her face, balling her fists up instead when she realized again that it wasn't there anymore. "Just tell me: have you ever killed anyone?"

"No."

"Okay. Have you ever hurt anyone?"

"Yes."

"On purpose?"

"Well, yeah, Rapunzel. People don't usually just stand aside while you try to…uh… do some of the things I do."

She looked at him like she was sizing him up, and it made him feel very uncomfortable. What happened to her just being happy he was alive? Hadn't she stopped being suspicious of him when he'd agreed to escort her out of her tower?

"I mean, you saw me the other day with your frying pan, didn't you?"

"Yeah—that was pretty good."

The compliment made him look down at the table, and he only thought of cap. He supposed that sort of reaction was a consequence of allowing himself to act like Eugene again.

"Are these…things… something you're going to keep doing?"

"I decided yesterday that I was going to stop." He reached out for her hand, and it relaxed inside his as he gave it a gentle squeeze.

"Good. Because I want to take you somewhere with me, and I don't think any of those things will be allowed there."

"Where are we going?"

Pascal clung to Rapunzel's shoulder and watched Eugene, who was following them into the hole in the floor.

The sharp spiral staircase it led to was full of dust and spiders.

"I haven't been down here in years."

"Really?" Eugene ended dumbly; he was about to ask a whether her mother—or, Gothel, rather, as she apparently was not her mother—climbed her hair every time she came and left. Maybe sometime in the future he'd ask her about the woman who raised her. Then again— I might be following Rapunzel straight to a gallows.

But it didn't matter; he'd already decided to go wherever she wanted to go, regardless of what it meant for him. If she wanted to go far away to the place he was wanted least, he'd get them there; if she wanted to meet the King and the Queen of Corona, he'd follow.

"If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. We can go away. But I have to know."

Eugene guiltily hoped she was wrong. He knew what it was like to want a family of one's own, a place to belong—but he felt like he might be able to create something like that for her. There was so much she didn't know, and he knew a lot; I could take care of you.

"You might want to duck your head up here, Eugene—I think I just felt a spider web brush my forehead."

"Maybe you should have sent Pascal ahead of us. He could have cleared the place out."

"Actually, I think he's more partial to sweets."

Of course he was. Eugene paused for just a second to adjust his grip on the hanging planters he had in his arms. He couldn't even carry her sack for her because she was concerned about her plants.

"They'll die if I leave them here alone."

They were to be planted outside. At least they'd have a fighting chance, she said.

"Eugene?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you ever seen a dead body before?"

He had no idea how close they must be to the bottom of the staircase, but she was clearly already thinking about what she'd find on the ground.

"Yeah, I have."

"I found a dead bird on my windowsill once. I was afraid to touch it."

"Sounds normal. Most people don't like—uh—dead things."

"I don't know what to—"

"The thing to remember about anything that's dead is that it can't hurt you."

Eugene could see Rapunzel's outline coming slowly into focus a few steps ahead of him. The plant she had in her arms was rustling over one of her shoulders, and Pascal was looking back at him from the other.

"I'll tell you what," Eugene edged around Rapunzel, who had stopped at the stairwell's exit, "I'll go first." He set his planters down, and took the one from Rapunzel's arms so that he could take her hand. It was the first time he'd held it, but she offered it to him without hesitation.

She stayed about a step behind him as he led them around the circumference of the tower. He wasn't sure what they'd do—or what Rapunzel would want to do—with the body once they found it, but it wasn't like they could get out of the valley without her having to see it.

He stopped when he saw the edge of the black cloak appear around the curve of stone they'd followed.

"Do you want me to go look first?"

He had to look back at her because she only nodded, and was keeping her eyes on the ground at her feet anyway.

Maximus came to meet Eugene at the crumpled robe from the direction of the stream. He looked up to the window then down to the robe and cocked his head. What happened up there?

"It's okay, Rapunzel's fine." He nodded his head behind him, and Max summarily trotted off to her.

It was probably better that she be distracted. He could at least cover up the face—

If he could find it.

"What the hell…?"

Eugene peeled the edges of the robes away, finding the red of the dress utterly flattened. He prodded the fabric with his fingers, causing a thin veil of powder to rise up from them. Standing up quickly, he turned his head away; he didn't want to breathe any of it in.

The dull sound of hoof falls on grass behind him told him that Maximus had come back—with Rapunzel clutching his mane and neck, he found when he looked.

He held out is hand again. "It's okay."

She took it again, her eyes staying focused on his all the while.

"It's alright to look, trust me."

She stepped up close beside him.

He switched the hand he was using to hold hers so he could put his arm around her shoulders.

"I don't understand. Where is she?"

"There's nothing left."

Rapunzel gently pulled away from Eugene to kneel next to Gothel's clothes, to press her hands against the body and sleeves of the dress, to see for herself that all that was left of her captor and mother was dust.