i cannot believe im finally posting the first chapter! this has been my pride and joy ever since i decided to start it. shoutout to keeparecordofthewreckage for helping me plan this one out and for all your support! this all started when i messaged her and said i saw a guy playing bass that looked like eugene at a restaurant i was at. twenty four hours later, we had an AU and a story. if you know us on tumblr, this is also known as the "kohl's AU"

im very excited too see this one come to life, and i hope i am able to give it the attention it deserves! i can't promise regular updates but i am doing my best to make time for writing!

**kiera, catalina and varian are aged up a bit in this. this is only so it makes more sense that they're all in a group together! the only romance will be between eugene & rapunzel**

CHAPTER ONE

ripped jeans & new dreams

If Eugene Fitzherbert knew one thing, it was that the world was a cold, selfish bitch. She chewed you up, spit you out, and laughed at you until you were a shell of the person you thought you wanted to be. She proved you wrong, found your weaknesses, and brought you to your knees. And yet, day after day, people like him were begging for one more day on her hardened ground. Wanting to wake up just one more time; to watch the sun rise on a day filled with possibilities. Promising that this will be the day. This will be the one…

But it never is. Because that's the thing about the world. She gives you hope, gives you that one next day, but makes it just as hard as the one before. She gives as much as she takes.

Perhaps the world could be considered a masochist, getting off on watching her little inhabitants face hardship.

And Eugene was a close friend of hardship. Growing up from foster home to foster home, given up by his parents before he could even walk, raised with the wrong kids and finding the wrong, sometimes illegal, activities fun, difficult should've been his middle name. How he was still alive, he wasn't sure. He'd been through more shit in his twenty five years on earth than some people encounter in a lifetime. For some reason, this bitch of a world wanted to watch him stumble day after day.

And that's what he was doing. Stumbling blindly, trying to make something of himself. Sure, you'd think that he had the entire world at his feet and a blank slate to build a reputation on. He could be anything, right? A doctor, astronaut, or some other high paid, respectable member of society. He could've studied hard, networked with the right people, and broke the cycle. He could've made something of himself.

But he didn't. Not in that sense, at least. He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't an astronaut or a man in a suit working a nine to five job with a white picket fence and a cookie cutter wife. Those were too mundane. He wasn't interested in being a respectable member of a society that couldn't respect him in return. Fuck that. The thought of the same, boring thing over and over again terrified him. Doing the same thing with the same person and people day in and day out until you bent over and died sounded awful.

So he made sure that whatever he was doing before this cruel world decided his time was up would be worth it.

And that's where music came in.

His one constant. His purpose. The one thing he could always come back to and find stability in. A dingy, used guitar had been the one thing he had saved money for when he was younger. He'd seen it in a pawn shop in a shitty part of town one night. Begging the guy to bring the price down hadn't worked, but he did tell Eugene that he'd save it until he could afford it. It had taken months, hard work and a little bit of luck, but when he finally was able to get that thing in his hands, it was like his entire life changed.

He'd always been considered a loaner, but with that guitar in his hand, he was a loaner with a purpose.

So now, here he was, an adult, making a name of himself with a guitar and a song. Music hadn't just pulled him out of the dangerous hole he was digging himself. He had dragged a few people out with him, people he considered best friends and his only family in the world. The only people he was comfortable letting down any amount of his walls to.

It's with these people he shared the stage with, music blaring from their speakers, melodies swirling around them in time with the drums behind them. It's with them he found who he really was, and what he was worth to this cold, dead world.

It may not be much to the outside eye, but it was enough for him.

He'd met them in one of his last foster homes before he turned 18. The girls, Catalina and Kiera, were a few years younger than him. They kept to themselves and had been very standoffish, especially Kiera. And shit, Eugene was pretty sure Catalina didn't even say a word to him for at least six months. Still, he found himself drawn to them. They didn't give a fuck, and he admired that. Because neither did he. Everyone else was trying to do their best before they were thrown onto the streets at eighteen. They didn't care. How much worse could it actually get?

To the outside eye, they really weren't friends. But they were, the three of them. And it was through the girls that he met Lance.

Lance was the same age as him, and had been the system just as long as he had. Compared to Eugene and the girls, Lance was completely different. He was charismatic, charming, and quick witted. The type of guy the three of them stood back and rolled their eyes at. But, Eugene learned quickly, Lance was using all that to his advantage. Being charming distracted people. Distracted people couldn't get him in trouble when he snuck things in, or snuck himself out. Lance hated the system just as much as they all did, he just had a more physical way of getting back at it.

Eugene had a lot of respect for him.

The four of them became a team in their own special way. They were the outcasts, the ones who hid in the dark corners and judged. Nobody fucked with them, and that was perfect for them. And once they aged out of the system, first he and Lance, followed by the girls two years later, they made a pack to stick together.

Working a bunch of odd-end jobs (both legal and a little bit not legal), they managed to rent a place that they could at least crash at night at. Eugene eventually got that guitar and the house was always filled with music. If he was awake, and he wasn't busy, he was playing. The other three liked it so much (or just got used to it since he wasn't ever going to stop), and would start to jam with him with whatever they could make noise with. After a night of jam sessions, a conversation, and a little bit of alcohol, they decided to try to make something out of it. Lance learned the drums, and the girls bass and keys. They weren't perfect, but they loved it. It was an outlet for the four of them. It gave them a name for themselves other than orphan, which is what people like to attribute to them.

One afternoon on a busy weekend in Corona, the city was celebrating some sort of holiday, something their hometown did quite often. The four of them decided to set up in the city center and play. They really weren't looking for anything other than somewhere to play that wasn't a garage or dirty alleyway, but it had gone a lot better than they thought. But when people asked them how to find their music or what their group name was, they couldn't give any of that. After a frank discussion, their adrenaline from an actual live performance still running high, they decided to take the next steps to actually making something out of this. The worst thing that could happen is nobody listened to them, and they went back to just doing it as an outlet for themselves.

Naming the group was a lot harder than any of them would've guessed. Honestly, it was the hardest part of the entire process! None of them could agree on anything. Each of them had their own ideas and reasons for them, and being how stubborn all of them were individually, nobody was willing to give up their choice. Eventually, Lance decided that they were going to draw out of a hat. With their breath held, Eugene had been chosen to pick the piece of paper out.

From that moment on, they called themselves Justified. This had been Keira's choice, and her reasoning behind it was that all the bad things that they've done in their lives so far, while not acceptable in society's eyes, in their own eyes were justified. The boy's couldn't help but agree that it had a nice ring to it, and the reasoning behind it was solid.

Once they had an identity, it was time to build a reputation. This was tough. They tried to have a social media presence, even though none of them were really good at it except Lance. They started recording some of their songs with shitty quality audio and video, but they weren't getting much traction.

Browsing the internet one night, Catalina found a listing for a battle of the bands type event a local college was putting on. First prize was $500, which was awesome in itself. But it was also a big deal between the schools in this area, and that meant a lot of people would be in the audience.

"We should do it!

"I could use that $500."

"The band could use that $500."

"Wait, wait, wait. Did you even read the whole thing?" Eugene called out, reading the listing closer. "You have to be enrolled in a school to participate. It's open to bands from wherever, you just have to be in school. We definitely aren't enrolled. Shit, only you two are young enough to even claim to be in college."

The girls sighed, throwing in the towel right then and there. Lance, though, wasn't that quick to give up.

"I know a couple people. Let me see what I can do."

A few weeks later, they found themselves at Corona University, four "seniors" with documents that said they went to a fancy, private college.

"If we win, I owe this guy $100 for this," Lance said the day he'd surprised them with a manilla packet of transcripts, school IDs and parking passes.

"Parking passes?" Eugene raised his eyebrow.

"What can I say! The guy's thorough."

Pays to know shady people, apparently. And thankfully the event was put on by drunk college students who didn't check documents very closely.

So there they were, warming up their guitars, drums and keys, ready to perform for their first real crowd ever. Eugene looked around at all the different groups, sizing them up. It was quite the variety of people, each group unique and diverse. Some looked grungy and rough, others looked like the popular kids had just upgraded from playing Rockband in the basement of their fraternities to playing actual instruments. Eugene couldn't help but consider the possibility that the four of them could actually pull this off and win. Granted, they weren't here to win. The money would be awesome, but they just wanted to play for an actual crowd. Even if it was just a crowd of drunk college kids.

So in his eyes, they'd basically already won.

Some of the other groups were good. They had nicer instruments than the four of them did and when they played, their music sounded more put together. These other bands all had a lot of things going for them that Justified didn't. But even with what they had in technicality, they lacked in passion.

And that was the one thing Justified did have: passion. The four of them didn't have anyone to impress, no molds to fit. They weren't trying to be somebody else or chase some specific sound. They just made sounds. Their own sounds.

So when it was the group's turn, they did what they did best and simply played.

And that's when everything changed.

No, it wasn't their big break and weeks after that they were putting out albums, playing stadiums and fending off thousands of groupies. But they had finally been heard. They were well received and having a blast playing with actual energy from a crowd to bounce off of. For the first time in their lives, they felt like rockstars. When the crowd roared after they finished, drawing out their ending on a whim as they rode the wave of adrenaline, they looked at each other with the biggest smiles on their faces. Win or lose, that had been amazing. And they wanted more.

They did gain traction, though. People asked for more, wanting to know if they played anywhere regularly and if they had anywhere to stream their music. And that's when their social media started working the way it was supposed to. And things only went up from there.

There were definite perks to striking it big with the college crowd.

They wrote more songs and played more gigs. They recorded an album the cheapest way they could and finally had music people could stream. They didn't really make money, but they weren't losing it, either. Besides, money wasn't their goal. They got to play good music with good friends, and that was the best part. But as the years went on, their reputation got bigger, and so did the crowds they played for and the stages they played on.

The particular stage they found themselves performing on this specific night wasn't anything special. It was just some no name, dark lit bar on the outskirts of town. They'd played most places in town by now, and they were quickly realizing that there was a reason this one wasn't on the list. It really wasn't their vibe.

At the end of the day, though, they got to play. And when they played, the rest of the room and building and entire world didn't matter. For that hour up under shitty lights and surrounded by the smell of booze and smoke, the only thing that mattered was the music they played. While the venue wasn't great, the band was having a fantastic night. The notes sounded just right, the voices right on harmony, and the vibe was exactly what they've been working so hard towards. Even though their audience wasn't as appreciative as some of their normal venues, this seemed to be more just for the four of them. And sometimes they needed that.

They started on their closing song, one of their more popular ones. It was loud, it was brash, and it was the four of them in a three minute melody. It was their favorite to leave it all on the stage with, burning the last of their energy and giving it their all. With the night they were having, they had to play this one.

Honestly, if Eugene thought about it too hard, it might be awkward. The four of them played like they were playing the biggest stage in the world for an audience of drunks and older men busy hiding from their wives for the night. Plus, it was a Thursday. There was nothing very metal about a Thursday night.

Still, he focused on the music. He can feel the ground shaking beneath his feet from the blaring music and his throat is raw from singing. His fingertips are sore from dancing and pressing along the strings of his guitar and his hair is in his eyes, wet from the sweat on his forehead. To anyone else, it sounds awful. Uncomfortable. But to Eugene, this is home. Music had always been home when he had no home to go to.

He looked up into the audience as he leaned forward into the mic, and that's when he saw her. She stands out to him because she doesn't fit in with the surroundings. She's standing off to the right, her back pressed up against the wall, and she has some sort of book in her hands. She's young, small, blonde and short, and he wonders if she's even old enough to be here. She probably snuck in, but she doesn't look like the type to sneak into a bar. She squints her eyes at him, glancing down at the book and back up at him. Their gazes locked, and he notices she has big eyes. Weirdly big eyes. As soon as she realized that he was staring back at her, she looked away quickly like he'd interrupted some sort of private moment. He keeps looking, though. He can't help it. He's curious. Sure, he was used to people staring at him. That was part of the job and came with the territory. But she just was…..

Different.

She looked back up, probably hoping he was distracted by something or someone else. But he wasn't. They lock eyes again and he swears he can see the blush pooling on her cheeks. She shuts her book, holds it close to her chest, turns and leaves.

Well. That was weird. Maybe he scared her off. Eh, it wouldn't be the first time. She didn't look like the type of girl that he normally interacted with. He didn't take it personally.

They finished their set and took their bows, waving to the few tried and true groupies up front. Eugene glances one more time around the room, seeing if Mystery Girl was anywhere to be seen, but she isn't. It wasn't like he was interested in her or anything. It was just weird. Almost like he'd imagined her there. He had seen her, and she disappeared.

Shrugging to himself, he waved once more and followed the rest of the group off.

"Fantastic set, guys!" A kid shorter than the rest of them greets them as they leave the stage, standing at the bottom of the little flight of stairs to the ground floor. This kid, Varian, was small and lanky, just a few days over eighteen, was their 'manager' of sorts. At least, that's what he always introduced himself as. Eugene thought of him more as an assistant, because he and Lance usually took care of anything on the business side of things when it came to the group. Still, Varian was a kid who had been following them since they first started out in their garage. A neighbor kid they found endearing and who fit in surprisingly well. He helped where he could, doing things when he was asked, and was still probably their biggest fan. Sometimes Eugene would look off to the side of the stage in the middle of a set and Varian would be having just as much fun as the people in the audience. They loved the little guy.

When Eugene reached the bottom of the steps, the two of them traded off the things in their hands, Eugene handing Varian his guitar and Varian giving Eugene a drink. He glanced at the bottle in his hand, raising an eyebrow.

"House specialty," Varian was quick to reassure Eugene's glance, enunciating every syllable of the word. "I know you usually get that stuff that smells like piss but the guy insisted. Said it's made in house."

"It does not smell like piss," Eugene scoffed, taking a swig and thinking about the taste. It wasn't terrible. Not his favorite, but he wasn't running to empty his stomach in a trash can. He considered that a win.

"Dunno if I'd trust thaaaaat," Lance sang, walking past the two of thtem and hanging up his own things. The girls followed behind him. "This place is a little…"

"Unique," Catalina piped up.

"Dumpy?" Eugene finished.

Lance thought for a moment, trying to figure out the best way to describe it. "...Moist?"

"Oh, god, don't describe it like that," Keira groaned. "Please not like that."

"We can all agree it's gross," Varian shrugged, passing out waters to the rest of the group as they all laughed out loud.

"Beer's not bad though," Eugene raised the bottle to the air in an imaginary toast and took another drink. "Better than the atmosphere."

Sure, it definitely wasn't the nicest place they'd played, but it paid the bills. It's not like they were playing stadiums every weekend, but at least they had private bathrooms in the back at their normal places. Here, they had to use the ones out front. Which wasn't a big deal, but the last thing Eugene wanted to do was be swarmed by people on his way to take a piss. Which, now that he thought about it…

"I'll be right back," he set down his beer. Varian gave him a thumbs up. Eugene stopped to shake the owner's hand while Lance smoozed with him and made his way to the side of the club where the restrooms were.

Why Lance had taken this place's offer up, he wasn't sure. It wasn't paying much, and there really wasn't their….crowd. Granted, some of the band's bigger followers had come out tonight and that had made it a little better. But the whole place gave off a…..pub feel. And they didn't normally play at pubs. The places they played had younger, way more attractive people. This place had a much….older crowd.

Except for Mystery Girl, who he still is pretty convinced he had imagined.

Still, as growing musicians, money was money, and exposure was exposure. They had to take what they could get. Becoming famous, rich rockstars sometimes involved playing dive bars, right?

He talked to the people around him while he waited in line, answering the questions people asked him all the time as a person in a band. Thankfully it didn't take too long and he was heading back to his group shortly there after.

"Hey!"

A small voice called to him from the direction of the…...floor? He turned around, wiping his hands on his pants because of course this one bathroom had no working dryer. He spots the body belonging to the voice calling for him and realizes it's the same girl he had locked eyes with during their last set. Mystery Girl. The girl with the long blonde hair and journal, now pulled back into a messy bun, showing her face more clearly. And those eyes. Green. Big. Even bigger and more green now that he's looking at them up close. She's even smaller up close, too. Almost fragile. Even though Eugene was pretty sure before, now he knows that she's not the type of person that belongs in a place like this, or around anybody remotely like him.

Guess he hadn't imagined her afterall.

"Yeah?" He returned. His eyes glance down to her lap where she's closing the journal he'd seen her with earlier, sitting back against the wall and looking up at him.

"You're the guy from the stage."

"And you're the girl sitting on the floor," he responded, pointing at the ground. "The dirty floor, might I add."

She looked down, inspecting the ground beneath her feet. When she runs her finger across and nothing physical comes up, she shrugs and smiles up at him. "Eh, dirty doesn't bother me. I like dirty."

Her intention was completely innocent, but he couldn't help but snicker to himself like an immature teenager. She was so matter-of-fact, clear of any underlying intention or innuendo that it kinda caught him off guard. Made him think that she was used to sitting on dirty floors.

Weird Mystery Girl.

"Not gonna lie, Goldie," Eugene started, noting her exceptionally blonde hair, leaning back against the wall. "I've been to a lot of places. You do not look like the type of person that comes to a dump like this."

She raised an eyebrow at him, one of her hands seeking out hair that wasn't there, as if she had forgotten it was up in a bun. "And you do?"

"Touchè," he smirked. Nice comback, Mystery Girl. "But I'm getting paid to be here."

"Because you're in the band," she said as a matter of fact.

"Yep."

"You're very good! I've never seen an electric guitar played live. I've always wanted to try."

He raised an eyebrow. "Do you play?"

"Not electric, no," she fiddled with the edge of her journal. "Acoustic, yes. I mean, not like, professionally or anything. Just, in my room. Or at least, I used to."

He didn't strike him as the musical type, but who was he to judge? Go, Mystery Girl!

"Cool. You should try electric sometime."

She looked up at him, intrigued. "How different is it? Electric versus acoustic?"

Eugene shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets. "It's not much different. Just a different shape you're holding, and the sound is different."

"Ahhh. Okay, cool."

This was the part where he was supposed to flirt. This was when he would look through his lashes and lower his voice and suggest maybe he could show her a chord or two. And then she would agree, swooned by the boy in the band with the shaggy hair and they'd do everything but play his guitar.

He usually would do that. Hell, he was good at it!

But with her, that urge wasn't there, and that felt weird. He wasn't sure why, either. It's not like he had made the conscious decision to not try to woo this one into bed when he saw her. It had just….happened. Like there was a barrier around her, invisible, protecting her from shitty guys like him. Maybe it was the fact she looked like she had just come from bible school and didn't belong in any bar. Or the fact that she was sitting on the floor of said bar, oblivious to whatever disgusting substances sat beneath her. Oblivious to anything negative around her, happily doodling away in a journal at 11pm on a Thursday night.

To the naked eye, she was, well, weird. Out of place. Uncommon.

Despite that, though, nothing was pulling him away. These things he was seeing in her, while they seemed to be some sort of barrier to the perversion of his mind, weren't a barrier to his curiosity. He found her endearing. She was out of place. She was weird and uncommon. And that in itself was like a faint magnet, not very strong but enough to keep him in her vicinity.

He was never a fan of small talk. But with her, it felt a little bit bigger. She wasn't ogling over him and trying to get in his pants. She was just talking about music with him.

"What's in the journal?" Eugene pointed a foot towards said journal, changing the subject to clear the awkward silence in the air. "Writing a book? Wait, are you from the paper or something? A blog?" Shit, maybe this was good. He hoped whatever she was writing about them was good.

Mention of her journal made her blush and she tucked a loose strand of gold behind her ear. "No, no. Not a writer or anything. What's the paper?"

"Newspaper."

She laughed out, a single note. "Oh, haha. No, nothing important like that. It's, uh, art. Just some drawings."

"For like, school or something?"

She looked down, not wanting to meet his eye. "No. Just for me. For fun."

Well now he was curious. Who comes to draw for fun at a bar? But before he could ask, she was getting to her feet, sensing that that was his next question and desperately not wanting to answer it. "I've gotta go."

"Oh," her hurriedness threw him off guard. "See ya. Hope you, uh, enjoyed the show."

It sounded like she mumbled something, but she was gone as quick as she had left when they locked eyes on stage earlier.

"This place is weird," he murmured to himself, shaking his head and heading back to behind the stage.

Things were mostly packed up when he got back, and Lance wasn't about to let Eugene live that one down. "About time you showed up to help!"

Eugene rolled his eyes. "I had to piss."

Catalina, busy fiddling with her keyboard as she packed it away, didn't even look up. "He was talking to some girl. I saw it."

"Shoooooocker," Kiera said with fake surprise.

Lance put a hand to his chest. "Gah! You lied to me, Eugene?"

"And she was sitting on the floor," Catalina continued, scrunching up her nose at the thought. "Braver than me. I don't want to know what this floor has seen."

"Especially outside the bathroom!"

"Would you two shut up?" Eugene rolls his eyes, finding his beer from earlier and polishing it off. "I want to go home. We've got a big weekend."

They were playing one of their bigger gigs this weekend. It was a place they regularly played, but it was going to be Lance's birthday, so they expected a lot more people to attend. For some reason, everyone seemed to just love Lance. He's the one that brought the crowds in. He had that kind of draw.

"Maybe if you didn't spend so much time talking to girls on the floor…."

The group chirped each other back and forth as they finished packing up. It was a common dynamic between them; Eugene being harped on by the girl's and Lance always siding (dramatically) with them. Varian was just happy when he could get a good one in that got the entire group laughing. And it was usually about Eugene and his interactions with the people that follow them. He always swore he'd never date a groupie, and he had followed that promise so far.

But that didn't mean they didn't tease him about it, and he wasn't one to pass up a conversation or two with a pretty face.

A wordless conversation, that was.

While they were loading up the van out back in the dark, he was keeping watch of the equipment while they went to double check everything was gone. It was eerily quiet, the only noise the wind coming off the water and the electric buzzing noise of the street lamp above his head. He was busy looking down at his phone, going through the messages he'd missed over the course of the evening.

"Pssssst."

Eugene's head shot up, looking around. He swore he heard someone trying to get his attention. When he didn't see anyone, he shrugged and went back to what he was doing. Whoever it was must've been trying to get a hold of someone else.

"I said psssssst."

His head shot up again. No, that was definitely for him. The group still hadn't come back outside, though, and he didn't see anyone when he looked around.

Was he going crazy? What the hell had been in that special house beer he was given?

He heard something get knocked over, and his gaze followed the sound over to a dumpster. What was a pile of cardboard beside it was now on the ground, scattered. Scrambling to pick up the mess they'd made, he can barely make out the figure in the dim light. All he noticed was the long, golden hair (back out of its messy bun, now) that he'd seen earlier.

"Floor girl, what's up?" Eugene raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms. "You scared me."

"Sorry! Shoot, hold on," she tried to push the cardboard back up so it wouldn't fall, but was failing to do so. Eugene couldn't help but chuckle and goes to help, kicking it good with his foot to make sure it was wedged up against the dumpster and not falling back down.

"Thanks," Mystery Girl mumbled, brushing her hair behind her ears. She was still holding tight to that damn book.

"You know, you could've just said my name instead of trying to get my attention this way," he raised an eyebrow. "Did you need something?"

She's embarrassed now, the blush so strong on her cheeks he swears he can feel the heat through the cool summer night. "No, no. I shouldn't have….nevermind. I'm sorry-"

"Nooo, nope. Not this time," he stepped closer to her, holding up his hands. "You left before I could even get your name earlier."

Granted, he hadn't really cared about getting her name. He really was just more curious about what the hell was in that journal. Not that it really mattered. It wasn't his business, after all. She was just….mysterious. And he liked mysteries. Plus, he wasn't used to this kind of response to his presence.

"Well," her eyes looked everywhere but where his own were. "It's definitely not floor girl."

"I wasn't sure. You left before I could actually ask."

She looked up at him and couldn't help the tiny smile on her lips. "It's Rapunzel."

He can't help but raise his eyebrow. "Like the-"

"Yeah, like the fairytale," she mumbled, answering his question before he could even ask, and he realized she probably gets that a lot.

He motions to his own hair. "Well, you do have the right hair for it, huh?"

She doesn't answer him, instead biting her lip and looking away at something far off. Ok, maybe not the best response.

"Well, Rapunzel," he started, ducking his head to her eye level and giving her a soft smile because she was closing up and he really wanted to know why the hell she was hiding behind a dumpster and trying to get his attention. "What did you need that required you to secretly get my attention?"

She looked up, her gaze meeting his, indecisiveness clearly playing across her features. She chewed at her bottom lip with larger than average front teeth. They were cute.

Why was he so curious? Why did he need to know?

Then, it hits him, remembering being in this same sort of situation before. "Ohhh, did you want an autograph or a picture of something? I know we aren't much but we do love that and I'd love to-"

"Your hands," she blurted out.

W...what?

"My hands…?"

"I'mjusttryingtodrawsomethingandIneedapictuerofthem-"

Her words rushed together as she spits out the question before her brain can regret it and take them back.

"What-"

She takes a big, deep breath, and opens her journal to a page of a black pencil drawing of him.

Well, mostly him. It's an up close shot, but he's missing his hands.

"Woah, you drew this? This is way more than 'just drawings' like you told me earlier." It was impressive that she had managed to do this in the dim light of the room and while he was moving around and playing. "This is awesome, Blondie."

"Oh! T-Thanks," her voice was quiet and she blushed under his breathless, genuine admiration. "I saw that you had a tattoo and I really couldn't make out what it was and it was bothering me because I knew the picture wouldn't be right if I didn't get it and…..."

She looked up at him, closing the book and holding it close to her chest. "I know it's weird but I figured I would at least ask."

She took a deep breath, her eyes trying very hard not to meet his. "I know it's weird and you can say no but….can I take a picture of it?"

Well, it wasn't the weirdest picture request he'd gotten asked for by a fan.

"Sure."

When he agreed, her shoulders lifted and her demeanor immediately changed from shy and embarrassed to perky and excited. Eugene held out his arm and turned it so she could get a good look. Pulling out her phone, she pressed a button and the backlight flipped on so she could get a good look at it. It was an abstract-like take on an electric guitar, running down the side of his forearm. It was one of his first ones, gotten illegally from a friend in the back of a shitty tattoo shop years ago. It had hurt like a bitch, but he loved it regardless. The black lines were faded and dull and honestly, he usually forgot it was even there. But it was one of his favorites, regardless.

"Woah, I've never seen a tattoo in person," she breathed, mesmerized.

What? What rock had she been living under she'd never seen a tattoo before? On anyone?

"Did it hurt?" She asked him, reaching out to trace the design with her finger. Then, as soon as she realized she was doing more than what he had agreed to, she pulled her hand quickly back and fumbled to take the picture. "Sorry."

"It's okay, no biggie." Must be super sheltered. Just another layer of mystery to this odd girl.

The flash lit up between them and as soon as she checked to make sure she had what she needed, she shoved her phone back in her pocket and left before he could even blink, yelling back a quick thank you as she quickly walked away.

The whole exchange had happened so quickly that he was left standing there confused, arm falling to his side.

"You ready to go, Fitzherbert?" Kiera's voice pulled him back to the current, and he looked back where she and the others were standing. "We're hungry and most places close at midnight so hurry the hell up."

"Uh, yeah," he gave them a hesitant thumbs up, moving to join them in the van.

He looked back over his shoulder before he hopped in, wondering what the hell had just happened. Wondering why he cared so damn much, wondering why she had left so suddenly, and wondering if he'd ever see her again.

With her track record tonight, he didn't doubt it. She seemed to appear just as quick as she disappeared.

Honestly, he was looking forward to another encounter with this mysterious, quirky girl named Rapunzel. Hair blonde and long, just like the fairytale.

-lazf