Summary: She will always be hers.
Author's Note: Alright, here's my interpretation of Gothel's feelings for Rapunzel.
Disclaimer: I don't own Tangled.
She is mine, now and forever; she belongs to me alone. They thought to steal the sun from me and now I reclaim it.
They shall never have her again.
Gothel saw her sun die in one night at the hand of a mortal king, and to avenge the loss of her own immortality she took that which he put her sun into. You dare toy with me, mortal King? Do you dare take something precious from me? Never mind that he had no idea of who she was. Never mind that this king was desperate for any means to save the life of his wife and child. Never mind that this king had never heard of a woman named Gothel. This did not come close to absolving him of his crimes and if he wished to pry an eye out of Gothel's skull she would repay him in kind.
Know this, mortal King: If you take something precious from me, I will take something precious from you, and you shall never have it again.
Of course, spiriting away the princess of Corona had not been Gothel's original intention. Let the King keep his child. All she wanted was a lock of the child's miraculous hair; surely this would be enough to maintain her immortality.
Well, that wasn't all of it.
After taking a lock of the princess's hair, Gothel had another destination in mind and her ornate dagger to complete the task. Let the child live, but creep to the royal bedchamber and leave a present for the King. Let him wake up the next morning and find his wife lying next to him, cold and pale, her throat opened in a wide hideous crimson grin and her eyes open and glazed like polished stone. He took Gothel's only love. Now let her take his.
But that wasn't going to happen. When Gothel took her scissors and snipped away a lock of the princess's warm gold hair, it turned cold and brown in her grasp. She watched in horror as the magic left it and dissipated into the air. No, this can't be happening. No, this can't be real. Nonono, not this; don't leave me like this!
Her panic quickly gave way to a feverish plan claiming dominance in her mind. Gothel swept the child into her arms and darted back the way she came. She made eye contact with the King and Queen in the last moment before escaping, and the dark sneer of a smirk was clear in her glass gray eyes.
This worked just as well. If Gothel could not have her immortality through a lock of hair she might as well take the entire fey child with her and have the otherworldly creature for her own use. And what better way to cause anguish to the thieves, anyway?
It was only when she returned to her tower that Gothel realized that it wasn't so simple as that.
The tower was a relic from an older day and an older kingdom now lost to living memory, all that was left of a once-mighty fortress. What had once been a city of wooden houses had been entirely reclaimed by nature, except for this one tower. Gothel had always loved it, for it stretched towards the sky and this made the tower ideal for stargazing and astronomy. No one but Gothel knew it was there, and to hide from those who tore Corona apart searching for their lost princess, it was ideal.
However, what this meant was that Gothel was the only one who could hear the princess crying.
The princess cried. She sobbed, she wailed, she screamed. Gothel fed her—work as a midwife during her earlier years taught her how to take care of children even if she had never had any of her own—and this caused the child's cries to abate only for a moment, or a few minutes at best.
Her wails grated on Gothel's ears, caused to erupt the most violent of pains in her head. Surely there is another way to obtain the magic of the flower; surely I don't have to endure this. Gothel cast a furious eye at the girl and wondered if she shouldn't have just cut the child's throat and taken the head back to the tower instead of the body intact. If the princess's hair was still attached to her scalp then surely the magic would remain.
Then, when Gothel held her for the first time in a manner unrelated to the extraction of magic to smooth out the lines on her face, the girl's cries ceased altogether, and she slept peacefully for the first time since Gothel had stolen her away from her parents' castle.
Gothel looked down into sleepy green eyes and felt a strange warmth bloom in her breast. Her face softened and she smiled, laying the girl down onto the pallet that served as a makeshift crib.
Perhaps this wasn't so bad after all.
It was then that Gothel realized that she would have to give the princess a new name.
The name the King and Queen had given this girl was Ariana. A lovely name for a princess—Gothel snorted at the irony of the name meaning "silver"—but utterly unsuitable for a daughter of Gothel the immortal wise woman. Ariana was too conspicuous; the entire kingdom was alight searching for a girl named Ariana.
But what to call her? Gothel went through many names: Bridget, Gwen, Mary, Rose. Eleanor, Helen, Sarah, Rachel. Eileen, Shannon, Chloe, Lily. All those and more Gothel went through, but none of the names seemed to fit this fey child with her supernatural golden hair and her eyes as green as summer itself.
Then, Gothel spied at the base of the tower rapunzel plants snaking their way up the tower, purple blossoms swaying gently in the breeze, their perfume imbuing the air with a sort of magic radiance.
Rapunzel. She'd call her Rapunzel.
That was the death of Ariana, Princess of Corona, and the birth of Rapunzel, only daughter of reclusive Mother Gothel. Born again, Rapunzel had nothing of her former life except her birthday, and that only because Gothel felt that it would deal no harm to let Ariana's birthday be Rapunzel's as well.
She is mine, mine to hold. A beautiful girl with her life-giving hair, mine forever and for always. My Rapunzel. Not Ariana of Corona. My Rapunzel. My precious one.
Gothel made sure the child would always be hers and never belong to anyone else.
Rapunzel was never allowed to leave the tower, not for a day nor even a moment. After all, there were so many dangers in the outside world, so many people who might see Rapunzel and wish to steal her away for their own. If that was so, God only knew what would happen to Rapunzel, God only knew the way she would be used when they saw her fantastical hair. Gothel didn't think she could bear a reality without her daughter's laugh or the sweet feeling of youth putting the darkness back in her curls.
Gothel coddled her daughter, brought her everything she could ever need or want—cloth for fine dresses, paints, and thread to practice sewing, embroidery, knitting, anything to fill the long hours when Gothel has to leave her by herself.
What Gothel could never understand, though, was that Rapunzel wanted more than anything to do what Gothel had told her she could never do: leave the tower. It was those damned lanterns, Gothel knew; ghosts of a past that should have died haunted them both from beyond the grave.
On her birthday Rapunzel stole to the window in the late hours of the night to watch the lanterns pass by. The lights, she called them, pointing to them with a finger that was chubby in childhood and graceful in adolescence. She wanted to see them so badly, and Gothel had to grow more stern and more forbidding with each passing year to dissuade her daughter. She even frightened her once or twice, and afterwards Gothel would sweep Rapunzel in her arms and say Sorry, sorry, over and over again, but I don't want to lose you. They would take you and use you like a common whore, work you again and again until you were drained dry and useless. They'd make a husk out of you, a mockery of life, dirty and foul. I don't ever want to see you like that. I don't want to lose you.
No matter. Rapunzel loved her mother. She would do anything Gothel asked her to do and she was so thoroughly hers that she could not even begin to envision a life without her mother in it. The thought of disobedience never seriously crossed Rapunzel's mind and Gothel knew that Rapunzel would never leave her. Rapunzel had no idea what to do without her mother; she never even contemplated a day in which she would be independent of Gothel, and that was how Gothel preferred it.
Rapunzel lived only for Mother. Her summer eyes lit up only for Mother. Her song was only for Mother. Her life-giving hair was only for Mother. She loved Mother more than anyone in the world, and Gothel was content.
Gothel loved her girl. She loved her best out of everyone who had ever lived, loved her better than the two who had made her girl and she knew, knew deep in her heart that she had raised Rapunzel better than those two distant fairy tale people ever could.
Gothel loved her girl. And she knew Rapunzel would always be hers. Gothel made sure of that.
-0-0-0-
Gothel could feel her body caving and curling into ash as she fell. She had expected such a thing to evoke agony, but instead it was painless. Painless, but still terrifying. A great yawning void was opening up before Gothel's eyes. There was only blackness in front of her, and behind, she knew who was watching.
Death had long waited to snare Its most elusive quarry. For centuries, Gothel had cheated Death, had narrowly avoided It, had taunted It and spat in Its face. As such, Death had no great love for her and she could only imagine Its unholy joy as It caught her at last.
Eyes as gray as the sea, finally calm after a long storm, narrowed as she stared up at the window growing smaller and smaller at the moment.
Her body hit ground and shattered into a thousand pieces of ash. Gothel could feel Death snatching her soul even as her body began to scatter to the wind. The ghost of a sneer of triumph caressed now-nonexistent lips.
Laugh, mortal King. Laugh, mortal Queen. Laugh, thief. Laugh at your victory. Laugh at what you think you've gained.
I've still won.
Rapunzel will always be mine. Even if I die, she will still be mine. Nothing can ever make her be yours. No matter what you do, she will always belong to me and me alone. I made sure of that.