which are you

Her mother had taken out her hair flower by flower, unraveling the vines, letting the mass drop foot by foot to the floor. Rapunzel had nearly overbalanced twice going up the stairs to her room, jerking her head forward too hard to compensate for a weight no longer there.

Mother had said, cool disapproval in her voice, I'll make dinner today, Rapunzel. You sit up there and think about what you did.

Pascal was a comforting weight on her stomach. On her bed, Rapunzel stared up at the ceiling and thought about what she'd done. Her legs were still sore and scratched from a shortcut through brambles. Her hand hurt from clutching the scarf into a ball in her fist.

… she needed to paint.

.

Smells were starting to waft up from downstairs –bread, pie crust, soup.

Rapunzel sat on the floor, panting, containers strewn around her, paint chest upended. Pascal was perched on the canopy over the bed, looking down at her with nervous, questing flicks of his tongue.

Under the circumstances, Rapunzel thought she deserved to throw something, but most of the containers were homemade and would shatter against the wall. She could hurl her mirror to the floor, but then she'd have to clean that up too.

She ended up throwing the scarf, but it only snagged in the air and fluttered back down to her feet. Then she picked it up and hid it under her pillow, and then spent the next fifteen minutes gathering her paints back up, setting the chest upright, stacking the containers back inside neatly.

Then she flopped down onto her bed and screamed into her pillow, kicking her covers, ripping at hair that refused to yield, that could never be pulled out by the roots no matter how hard she or anyone else yanked. She could cut it, couldn't she, she could use her chopping knife downstairs and sneak it up past Mother and saw away at it until the sunlight fell away and she was left with hair as brown as Flynn's and now she was sick, she felt sick.

She swung herself from her bed again.

.

She reviewed the scene again and again, at different angles and from different heights and in different colors. Flynn's back steadily getting further away. The tight belly of the sails as they pulled the boat towards the city.

Then she thought about the way she'd scratched and bit at the two men, enough to make Mother regard her with alarm after it was over. For a moment, looking back at her, Rapunzel had thought how easy it would be to walk away. To stand the men back up again and deliver a knee to their stomachs and drive her fist into their necks and wrap her hair around them and squeeze and squeeze and show her mother that she could take care of herself after all, because that's what Flynn would want her to do.

Then she'd thought, Flynn, and just like that, everything had dissolved. She'd clung to her mother and sobbed because the adventure was gone anyway. The lights were gone and Flynn was gone and the need to be strong was gone. If Flynn had had any second thoughts, they'd probably disappeared when she'd seen Rapunzel going after the men's throats like a wild animal.

All things considered, she probably would have done the same thing in Flynn's place.

.

She paced from one end of the wall to the other and then back again, and for the first time in her life they suddenly pressed in and it was too dark and she couldn't see.

She bit down on her fist and dropped into a crouch right where she was, rocking on her heels, squeezing her eyes shut, until her hair was shining and the walls gradually pushed themselves apart again, settling back into the shadows where they belonged.

I'm sorry, she told her hair, burying her face into the still-glowing strands. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

.

She took out her paints again. On her canvas she mixed blue with green and green back with blue, but couldn't quite manage to get the color of Flynn's vest. She tried again, recalling the shine on the water in the dam, and ran into the same problem. Only one of the blues came close to matching the lake at dusk, and none of them matched the eyes of the shy girl who had helped put flowers in her hair.

She went through her supply, dabbing here and blending there, and came to the realization that no matter how hard she tried, nothing was going to look right ever again. If she had greens, they were the greens she'd modeled after the greens outside her window, not the greens she'd seen in the heart of the woods. There wasn't anything golden enough to match the sunlit canyon or warm enough to describe the campfire or bright enough to replace the bells.

Her legs were cramping up. She stood from her stool and cleaned up, replaced her supplies, and flopped back down on her bed again. The ceiling arched endlessly above her, spiraling in on itself pattern by pattern.

She felt Pascal slide in against her neck. She cocked her head a little, rubbing her cheek against his pebbly back, not taking her eyes away.

Her ceiling had been one of the hardest things to get to in the tower, lacking easy access to the apex. It had taken her two years of on-and-off work just to finish the dome. Once a wall was completed, she never revised it; she'd been staring at these same designs for years.

On the other hand her heart was suddenly thudding and her scalp was prickling, and suddenly, suddenly, Rapunzel remembered that she hadn't just painted the lanterns in the living area. She'd painted the deep blue background and the spaces between them, and that was the reason they'd seemed bright, wasn't it. Not because of the yellow paint, but because of what was behind them, and—

Pascal made a questioning noise. Rapunzel could barely breathe. Not shifting her gaze, she reached behind her, under her pillow. She tugged, and the scarf slid out.

She held it up against the ceiling, took it away, and held it up again.

Under the rush of blood in her ears, she heard the faint jangling of bells.

Rapunzel sat up.

.

As it turned out, the ornament in Flynn's satchel was designed to go on the head.