Chapter 3
One definite upside to being trapped in the tower was that Rapunzel brought him breakfast in bed.
She seemed excited about it too, eager to show off her cooking skills. She had a little try that set over his lap, on which sat a plate overflowing with French toast and some sliced up strawberries. She'd made him some tea, which he ignored, and placed a tiny little vase in the corner of his tray, where she had set a single daisy made from folded paper.
She sat on the edge of the bed next to his knees, folding one of her legs up next to her. She watched him eagerly, taking note of all his little mannerisms and filing them all away. It made him uncomfortable to be observed so closely, like he was a bug under a microscope.
At least her goggles were once more perched on her forehead.
He was half way done before she could no longer contain her questions. "What do people have for breakfast outside?"
"What?"
"Other people. Normal people. What do they eat for breakfast? I can make all sorts of eggs and toast and pancakes and jellies, but I don't know if that's what most people have."
He shrugged, attempting to ignore the way the question made his spine prickle. "That seems normal enough to me."
"What do you usually like for breakfast?"
He shook his head. "I usually don't eat breakfast."
She looked at him as though he were crazy or deficient. "Why not? Breakfast is great. It's very important to eat when you first get up or you won't have the energy to start your day."
"Well, sometimes you get busy and it slips your mind. It's not all that important."
Rapunzel frowned, then ducked her head. "I guess I don't really know what it's like to stay busy."
Flynn chewed his toast more slowly in the awkward silence that descended over them, and watched as Rapunzel grew more and more agitated, picking at the ruffle on her cuff and biting her lip.
"But- Do most people not eat breakfast? Is it weird to eat breakfast? Mother said that I'm gaining weight and maybe if I stopped eating-"
She cut herself off and turned back to her hands.
Would it be worth it to get into the details with her of the complicated social structure of the outside world? There were people who could have three luxurious meals every day, then there were people like him. People who had to steal some bread and eat it on the run. He wasn't sure he wanted to admit to her that he was on the lower rungs of society. It was kind of an involved explanation and he was starting to feel full and drowsy.
Then again, some explanation was necessary to make her feel better. Not that he really cared, but it wasn't fun seeing her upset.
"Look. Who cares if you have breakfast or not? You do what you want. People who judge you for it aren't worth your time. Forget them. Not worth it."
She considered this a moment.
"And besides," he added, stuffing another fork full into his mouth and speaking around it, "this is delicious. You might convert me into a breakfast eater." Not likely, but she didn't need to know that.
She smiled at him as though she wanted to believe him, but couldn't quite do so.
"Drink your tea," she said, slipping off the bed and taking away the breakfast tray. "It'll make you feel better."
He tested it when she left the room, making a face at the odd smell and bitter taste. It made him groggy almost immediately. When she returned, she took one look at him and decided that this was a perfect time to break out her slides.
"Slides?"
"I have so many questions. I don't even know where to start."
She shoved a high backed armchair that looked as though it was too uncomfortable have ever seen someone sit on it, and was now used as yet another flat surface for Rapunzel to spread out her stuff. With the chair was out of the way, she pulled out a screwdriver, stuck it expertly between slats in the wall and hit some kind of switch, causing part of the wall to ease open with a series of clicks.
"Pascal's been bringing me pictures for years but some of them I can't make out. There've been some changes since he was outside regularly, so he doesn't really know either."
She pulled out a slide projector and heaved it across the room, shoving things on her work bench to the side to make space.
"So Pascal didn't always live here?" he asked.
"No. He came from somewhere. I don't know where. One day he just showed up and now he's my friend. He doesn't like to talk about it and I don't want to pry."
Flynn thought that that might be personifying the chameleon a bit too much, and it was probably that it either couldn't communicate where it was it was from, or it had forgotten. He gave the chameleon a look as it took a seat on his knee.
It blinked at him. There was something strange about its movements, almost as though it was slowly enlarging. He shook his head to clear it, and looked down at his tea with suspicion.
"Drink it all," Rapunzel said absently as she shuffled through about a half dozen cookie tins that were also hidden in the hollow behind her chair. She shifted her goggles down to inspect the miniscule labels she had written across the sides.
"I do want you to tell me about the floating li– the airships. I can see them from my window and I've been wondering but- Oh! Yes! This one."
She excitedly pried open a tin and rummaged around inside, holding slides up to the light until she found the right one with a triumphant grin. All business, she lit a candle inside the projector and slipped the slide into place before dimming the other lights in the room and crawling into a spot next to Flynn on the bed. Her shifting weight made his stomach churn, and he suddenly regretted eating so much toast.
He took another gulp of his tea to try to ease the nausea, and focused on her slide.
The sepia tone image projected against the wall depicted a street performer – a man in a top hat and a cape with a curling mustache. He stood next to an unhappy alpaca decked out in silks and bells. They were set up on a busy street corner, probably charging people for a ride or a photograph.
"Alright," she said, a hint of a challenge in her tone. "What is that?"
"It's an alpaca."
"What's that?"
"It's kind of like a llama."
This earned him a blank stare.
"It's like a sheep with a longer neck."
Blank stare.
"You don't know what a sheep is?"
"No."
"It's an animal… All fuzzy… Lives on a farm?"
"Farm?"
"Oh good grief."
"Hold on! Let me write this down or I'm going to start forgetting things."
She scrambled forward eagerly and after a moment of rummaging, produced a pad of paper from the mess on her desk. Shoving an ink well into his hand, she prepared her fountain pen and wrote a neat list - Alpaca, llama, sheep, farm – then looked up at him expectantly.
"Start with farm."
Flynn groaned, then carefully explained that some animals were useful for some reason or another, and when they were you had to keep them somewhere so they didn't wander away from you and get lost. Farms were usually out in the country where they had more space, so seeing an alpaca in town was strange.
She was riveted with this explanation, asking long strings of clarifying questions and making analogies that didn't really make sense to him, but they made her brighten so much that he didn't correct her.
He found himself talking a great deal, his explanations rolling around without ever going anywhere, dragging up more of her questions with each aimless piece of information he spat out. He had no idea why he was going along with this. It wasn't that he was trying to be helpful or because he owed her. For some reason, he just wasn't able to stop talking.
He told her about how some animals gave milk, and she looked disgusted at this revelation. He told her that some animals gave eggs, which she already knew everything about, and she briefly got them off track as she rattled off a list of things she knew about eggs. Then he explained that some animals were eaten, and then had to explain that, yeah, maybe he had left out a few breakfast foods that she didn't know about, and then comment that she would have been better off if instead of a random person to teach her, Pascal had brought her some bacon.
While he talked, she worked absently at putting up her hair, as if she needed something to do with her fingers or she would go mad. Artillery loop after artillery loop passed through her hands, and his attention on the more minor details of livestock was diverted towards awe and disgust at how insanely long her hair was.
There was no way her hair was that long. He must be drugged again.
He told her about sheep and alpacas and she made a face, unwilling to believe that people would actually use an animal's hair in their clothes.
"Look at it," she said, gesturing to the slide. "It's all dirty."
"I'm sure they wash it." He said, rubbing at the kinks that had popped up in his neck. "They get it clean and smelling like flowers and everything before they make anything out of it."
"But-" She looked down at her knotted hair, as if imagining what it would look like as a sweater.
She shuddered and hopped up abruptly to switch slides.
She then quizzed him about a woman in an evening gown, explaining that it was the most beautiful dress she'd ever seen and she couldn't figure out how the bustle worked. Flynn was not the person to ask about this, and she mostly talked to herself, working through the problem while drawing diagrams of folding fabric. It sounded like she had had this one sided conversation multiple times over the years.
He found the way her pen moved across the page hypnotizing.
Then she asked about a police officer on a motor bike, and with a yawn, Flynn told her how police officers chased after criminals, threw them in jail, and then puffed around with their heads inflated. She was impressed and confused that there were people outside who regularly made an attempt to put a stop to the cruel actions of ruffians and thugs, and he had to set her straight that the police were a bunch of jerks. This seemed more reasonable to her, and she nodded in understanding before telling him that she was really asking about the motorbike.
Did he think she could make one? If she moved some furniture around she might have room for it. How fast did it go? How quickly could it turn? Would it leave tracks on the floor?
His words began to slur and his head swum. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes closed, finding it hard to open them again. The pain in his side had dulled and spread to an ache that consumed most of his chest.
Explaining this crap to her was more draining than it should have been.
He trailed off mid sentence without noticing he had done so and a worry line appeared between Rapunzel's eyebrows.
"You don't look good," she said.
"What?"
"You're pale."
"Am not," he muttered, not bothering to open his eyes and scowl at her, or even lift his head from its place propped against the wall. It wasn't a comfortable position, but he was too tired to try to find something better.
She slid her goggles back down, clicking one magnifying lens into place, and leaning towards him. "I'm pretty sure you are."
"I'm fine. What's in this tea, anyway?"
"Opium."
He peeled open one eye to stare at her and her green, bug eyes, magnified to different sizes, and seeming to glow in the shadows.
"You gave me a narcotic?"
She smiled at him. "It helps with the pain, right? It makes you happy and sleepy, like you're floating."
"You speak from experience?" The sentence was difficult to pronounce and he made a note to use smaller words to not look like a fool. Much smaller words. And no verbs.
"My mother has me drink it sometimes. When I'm in a state and making her hair turn grey with my behavior."
"Huh?"
"She thinks I don't know where she hides it, but I do. She's not very subtle. She says that she won't tell me where she keeps it because if I take too much I'll become an addict and she raised me better than that and she's not feeding my habit." She frowned in contemplation. "She says I'm weak for taking it, but she's always the one that gives it to me in the first place. Weird, huh?"
"Uh…"
"I'm sorry. You really should be resting. I have to do chores now anyway. You take a nap and we'll talk more later. Alright?"
He stared at her, not able to focus on much besides the color of her hair - a nice color.
She smiled and slipped off the bed, fluffing his pillow and easing him back down, blowing out the candle in the projector and leaving him in the dark with a bitter taste in his mouth.
He woke briefly to the humming sound of a sewing machine, a thick, black contraption that had taken the place of the slide projector. Rapunzel sat up straight from her work, pulled Flynn's shirt off her desk, and inspected a seam on the inside of his sleeve before bending again and resuming the whirring noise of the machine, causing him to sink back into sleep.
There was a voice, soft, but high pitched as though trying to keep the words quiet but still letting a manic fear creep in.
"Why did you bring him here, Pascal? What are we going to do with him?... How are we going to keep him hidden? She'll know. She'll find out and-… And what happens when he gets better? What then? We just let him go?... No. You did such a good job. We were doing fine without him… Yes, he knows. But every question he answers brings up four more! I don't know how to-… Oh, Pascal. What are we going to do?"
And then there was pain. It grew steadily, building and swelling until it was unbearable. He clenched his teeth and hissed with every inhale, grabbing at his side and squeezing, contorting his flesh to push the pain away and force all the muscles back into the right place.
"Flynn? Flynn? Shh, it's alright. Drink this."
She pressed the rim of a teacup against his lips and he pulled away, taking hold of her wrist and pushing it back.
"No," he growled. Releasing his control of his vocal cords enough to tell her that much also allowed a piteous groan and a series of pants to escape. His grip on her weakened as he fought to control himself again.
"It'll make the pain go away. Please just drink it. You need it."
Swallowing down the pressure rising up from his chest to his brain, he took a deep, shuttering breath and fortified himself to open his eyes and glare at her. The room was dark and her hair was loose and her arms were bare. She wore a thin, cotton nightdress and a look of deepest concern.
"No more drugs," he said, pressing as much rationality and force into the words as he could. "They get me muddled and I'm in a strange place with strange people. Rapunzel, I can't deal with it anymore."
She met his eyes in a battle of who could be more stubborn.
"You'd rather be in pain?"
She had no idea. "I'd rather be in pain."
For a moment she looked like she might cry.
Then she swallowed and placed the steaming teacup on the table. "I'm putting this right here. Whenever you want it, just say so."
He sighed, squeezing his eyes closed again and setting his jaw once more.
After a moment's hesitation, she climbed over him, the movement of the mattress causing his stomach to rebel. Then she slipped under the blanket and molded herself against him, careful not to press against his injuries. She pried his hands free of his side and took them into one of her own, letting him squeeze her fingers through waves of pain without complaint.
She tucked her free hand around his shoulder in a strange embrace and rested her cheek against his hair, holding him as he started to shiver.
"One time, there were the most beautiful flowers growing in the clearing," she said, her voice soothing and calm, lyrical as a song. "I could just barely see them from the window. They were white with a bright red starburst in the middle. It looked like someone had dropped a splot of paint on them and the color spread and seeped through all the flower's veins. It looked like the color was growing and one day the flowers would be completely red."
She stroked her thumb over his knuckles, and he tried to hold back the pain enough to not break her fingers. He needed to ride it out, ignore it, and think about something else. Something like how embarrassed he was for her to see him like this, or how he must look like the least sexy person on earth having her pressed so close without the capacity to make a move on her. He should think about how she smelled like soap.
He thought about how the sound of her voice seeped into his mind like a blot of red color staining little, white flowers as she told her story and murmured "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."