Rapunzel has good days. So, so many good days. She thought she had seen beauty before, and she had, but now she feels as if she is so immersed in it that she can't breathe, or maybe that breathing is all she can really manage. The forbidden flavor of the floating lamps carries over to everything she sees, but it isn't forbidden. Rapunzel keeps reminding herself that it isn't forbidden.
The need to do so will fade in time, she tries to tell herself.
She lies out on the balcony in the sunlight in the afternoons, watching her hair turn nearly golden again and savoring the feeling of sun seeping into all of her instead of just the parts that the scant beams that a small tower window can allow. "This is so much better than that drafty tower," Rapunzel tells her new lady-in-waiting as she wraps her arms around herself.
She likes to go into town, buying flowers in the market to bring back to her rooms. One time she buys paints to create a mural for her bedchamber wall and gets all the way back to the castle before she remembers she doesn't need to do that anymore. She doesn't need to create a world inside when she isn't trapped inside. However, Rapunzel can't quite bring herself to pour the jars of paint down the privy hole either, even though she's pretty sure that's the best use for them, so she peers over the edge of the blanket and watches the maids dust over them every morning when she wakes up before seven.
The thing is, she really does like to paint. Pascal purrs mournfully in her ear, because he likes the bright colors too. "What am I supposed to paint, if I can actually go outside and see it for myself?" Rapunzel asks him, but he doesn't have any answers either, apparently. She thinks Pascal has gotten shy lately; he doesn't have her hair to retreat to anymore, and neither does she have it as a protective curtain.
Even so, short hair is much easier, and Rapunzel wishes she had chopped it all off much earlier. Savagely, angrily wishes it—she had no idea that she had felt like that about how much she could have gotten rid of, and she is almost scared of how deep the anger goes at holding onto the idea so long that she had to work so hard to maintain it. That it was the only thing worthwhile about her. "This short hair is so much nicer than the long hair I had, isn't it?" she says (cheerfully, she hopes, but it's very possible it came out manically instead) to her lady's maid. "My long hair was so much work, and it got caught on everything in the tower, and oh, the split ends were terrible."
It slowly occurs to her that everyone is probably wondering why, if she's so happy, does she keep talking about the tower and her long hair and her-fake-mother-that-witch all the time? Rapunzel tries not to say so much, then, but what she knows about the outside world almost seems insufficient to stand on its own two feet in conversation.
Eugene understands. He was there. Occasionally they set up straw bales in the jousting yards and smack them around with frying pans.
And then there are the bad days. The doubts never go away, not really, and just when Rapunzel thinks she's gotten rid of them for good, she starts wondering if she's really the lost princess who came home, or if she's just some ordinary girl who coincidentally has eyes that match the queen's, just another girl with an overbearing mother. Of course it's not true, she knows that, but that's not really the point.
When she finally makes her first friends with some of the daughters of courtiers, she's so excited at knowing new people that she feels like it takes her forever to realize they don't care about her. They barely even seem to like her, in fact, and had stopped talking every time she entered the room. But they like being known as the princess's friends. It was all like Mother Gotha said, about how people were horrible and would use her. Just because Mother Gothel was a witch doesn't mean she was lying all the time. Rapunzel stays in her chambers for three days after she figures it all out, refusing her parents' invitations to dinner by pleading sickness. Eugene, who has no manners whatsoever, flings himself through her window and takes up residence wherever he can sprawl.
"After all that time stuck in the tower, are you going to spend the rest of your life in this one?" he finally asks one evening, from his seat on the windowsill.
Rapunzel sighs, and looks up from her book. "No. Yes. Probably not." She holds the page with her finger as she closes the book. "Don't ask that question like you don't know why I'm staying right here."
"So Gothel was right about one thing. People are awful, and she should know firsthand, since she kept looking in that mirror. Just because she was right doesn't make her worth listening to, Rapunzel. And it doesn't mean you should lock yourself up because she isn't here to do it for you."
Rising, she leaves her book open on the chair and goes to sit on the windowsill with Eugene. She pulls her knees up under her chin. "It wasn't always terrible in there, you know? Even when I wanted out, I was still happy, mostly. And Mother—I mean, Gothel—she always tried to get food I liked, or paint I needed, or whatever else. She cared for me. While she heaped on the guilt and always had to be the best and never let me out of that tower, and I hate, hate, hate the fact that I was happy and but now I know too much. Even though I'm a better kind of happy, mostly. But sometimes I miss having a tower where I knew I could never get hurt while I was in there. And I hate that I could miss that, too." She buries her face in her hands.
"I got out of the orphanage ten years ago, more or less," Eugene says. "I was probably old enough to leave, but it hadn't been arranged, and one day when we had been sent out for farm work I just didn't go back. And then I spent every day trying to get all the money and food I'd never had in the orphanage. Except all I spent my time doing was wanting the same things as I did while I was in the orphanage." He draws a hand away from her face, and she peers up at him. "It seems to me like there's a tower or an orphanage in your head. And you can walk away from the real place and stop being afraid of all the things that kept you there, but the one in your head you have to climb out of every day. Some days you might not make it, and that's okay. And some days the only thing that gets you out is how much you hate ever being inside and need to go tell someone about it. But eventually you'll be so in love with the world outside, even when it does have its problems, that you can't help being out in it, and you remember that you know so much better than to be afraid of the things you were told to be afraid of."
Rapunzel sniffs, loudly. "You think so?"
"You think we're the only kids who ever got locked up somehow?" He squeezes her hand. "Most people have something going on in their heads. But I know you're not going to let the things you're afraid of hold you back for long. I mean, a dastardly criminal once climbed in your window and you smacked him repeatedly with a frying pan before subjecting him to torture by chameleon tongue, so I almost feel sorry for what's probably going to happen to those horrible girls in the court."
"Watch it, Flynn Rider, you're in my window and I'll have you know I sleep with a frying pan under my mattress," Rapunzel says, but with the corner of her mouth twitching up.
"I wouldn't expect anything less," he assures her. "You ready to make another escape out of your tower?"
Rapunzel looks speculatively at the sheets on her bed. "Sheet-rope over the balcony? Then down to the beach for a bonfire."
Eugene has leapt up and is twisting sheets before she even finishes talking. "It's a start," he says.
"Yes, it is." Pascal hums at her, and nuzzles into her neck. "And maybe tomorrow I'll paint something."