Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN THE PREVIEW PICTURE! IT BELONGS TO SweetasTea ON DEVIANTART! I also do not own any of the characters. All I own is the storyline.
Word Count: 5778
AU: High School AU
UAs: None
Prompt: Fate Drives Us Together
Rapunzel made her way through the throng of people in the hall outside the school theater, trying not to be too pushy but also impatient to see the actors who had come out from backstage. It was a solid 15 minutes after the play had ended, and all of them had emerged to hug their non-theater friends and be given congratulatory flower bouquets by their parents before disappearing again to strike the stage and go to their cast party.
She clutched the You Can't Take It With You program tightly in her hand, craning her neck to try and spot the boy who played Grandpa Vanderhof. Jack Frost, wasn't it? That's what the program had said. All of the actors had done a great job, but him especially she was determined to find and tell him he did amazing. He had been her favorite by far, and his old man voice had had her in stitches.
At last, she made out a striking white head of hair. Ah, there he was! As she started to make her way towards him, she could feel sweat from her palm wetting her program.
She had to admit, she was a bit nervous that this whole exchange would be a bit awkward. After all, she had never seen or talked to Jack before tonight, so perhaps a stranger going and congratulating him would seem a bit out-of-place. Well, even so, it wasn't going to stop her from saying something.
As she got closer to him, Rapunzel stopped in her tracks and sucked in her breath. Oh. Oh god. He was attractive. The "old age" makeup had really played it down, but now that it was gone she could see that this boy was about as hot as they came.
She let out a frustrated huff. I guess that's going to make this even harder, isn't it? she thought.
Another one of the actors was just walking away from a conversation with Jack Frost, leaving him open to talk to when Rapunzel had gotten a few feet away. She took the deepest breath as was humanly possible and marched right up to him, trying with all her heart to not show how scared she was. Don't be awkward, don't be awkward…
He turned and fixed her with cerulean blue eyes that made her heart do a variety of acrobatics in her chest. Oh great, a bombshell boy who also had amazing eyes. This was not getting any easier.
"H—hi!" She hoped her voice didn't sound too shaky as she gave him the biggest smile she could manage. "Wow, you were so good up there!"
"Hey, thanks!" Jack grinned at her, and she relaxed a little. So far, so good.
"Oh my gosh, you were so funny!" Rapunzel went on. "That voice you were doing was perfect!"
He hunched over, pretending to hold a cane. "What's that? You liked the voice, little missy? Well, let me tell you all about how back in my day, we didn't just give away our hard-earned money to the government unless we knew they were gonna put it to good use! Then again, I don't think they've ever put those taxes to good use!"
At this point, Rapunzel was giggling uncontrollably. She noticed Jack was smirking triumphantly when she finally regained her composure.
"You were hilarious," she repeated. "Seriously, you had be laughing the whole play!"
He put his hand over his heart and let out a little gasp. "You are too kind, my lady! My heart can't take it!"
She laughed softly. Jack smiled and ran a hand through his white hair.
"Honestly though, Grandpa Vanderhof is so me in, like, 60 years. I'm definitely going to be that crazy old man who never pays his taxes and has a bunch of pet snakes. How much more badass can you get?"
"I don't know, it would be pretty hard." She found herself looking at his white hair as she said it. She had thought it was a wig before, but now she could see it was entirely his own. "Did you have to dye your hair for your part?" she asked.
"Yeah, they wanted me to," he replied. "It's gonna stay like this for a while, but I don't really mind. My friends tease me about it making me look super old, but I kind of like how it looks!"
"Me too!" Rapunzel agreed. She couldn't help thinking that he must have bleached his hair very thoroughly for it to look this snowy white without any of the natural color bleeding through. It was certainly striking, and matched his blue eyes perfectly, despite being a hair color that you didn't generally see on young people.
"You look like some sort of ice prince," she added.
"Really?" His eyes lit up. "Cool! Does that mean I get to freeze stuff?"
"I don't see why not!" she laughed. "I feel like it would be well within the power of an ice price to freeze stuff."
"Well, in that case…" He struck a pose, holding his hands out dramatically in front of him. "I hereby condemn you to an eternity of being a decorative ice sculpture!" he bellowed.
Rapunzel crossed her hands over her heart, gasping in mock pain. "Oh no! Please spare me, your majesty! I promise to never steal your snow cones again."
He slipped out of the pose, looking very satisfied with the whole encounter. "Just kidding," he said. "I'm not gonna freeze you with my ice powers. You seem really cool."
Rapunzel tried to fight back the blush creeping into her cheeks, but it was no use. To hide it, she looked down at her program. Looking back up at him after a few seconds, she found herself struck with a sudden curiosity. "Hey…Jack, right?" He nodded. "It says on the program that you're a sophomore, but I'm a sophomore too, and I don't think we've ever had a single class together. Or even that I've seen you around, really. Isn't that weird?"
"Oh, I just transferred here this year," Jack explained.
Rapunzel scratched her head. "Yeah, but…it's almost the end of the year. How have I not seen you around at all for 7 months?"
"Well, it's a big school," he pointed out.
"Still kind of strange," she mused.
"Hey! Jack!"
Both of their heads turned to a girl dressed entirely in stage blacks, standing at the entrance to the theater hallway with one hand on the wall. She was glaring at Jack, fingers drumming with impatience.
"Jack, come on!" she called out. "You're gonna miss strike!"
"Okay, okay, I'm coming!" He turned back and gave Rapunzel an apologetic look. "Sorry, I have to go. But I didn't catch your name."
"Rapunzel," she replied.
"Rapunzel." He grinned widely. "I like it! Super unique." He glanced at the girl in black and then back at Rapunzel. "Anyway, I really do have to run."
She nodded, and he made a dash for the theater hallway. "Nice meeting you, Rapunzel!" he called over his shoulder.
And just like that he was gone, vanishing out of Rapunzel's life as quickly as he had entered it. She started to let out a wistful sigh, but shook her head rapidly from side to side to get rid of the urge. All she had come over to do was tell this boy he had done a good job! And she had done that, hadn't she?
And yet, as she had talked to him, she had found herself becoming quite sad that this amusing theater enthusiast was not in a single one of her classes.
Rapunzel couldn't help but feel a prickle of annoyance that she was too busy with her own extracurricular activities (choir, art club, environmental club, cheerleading, you name it) to join the theater department. Besides, even if she did, there was no guarantee Jack would be in the next play, or even work on it, she reminded herself.
She supposed that there was a chance she could run into him around school. But not having encountered him all year and not sharing any classes or extracurriculars with him…what were the odds?
Rapunzel shuffled into the lunch line, grabbing a tray and craning her neck to try and see the main entrée. The skinny boy in front of her was wearing a blue hoodie pulled up over his head. She paid no mind to him—instead opting to check her phone as the line shambled along—until he reached back and pulled his hood down, revealing a familiar shock of white hair.
"Jack!" she exclaimed.
He turned and looked at her in surprise. "Rapunzel! Fancy seeing you here."
Rapunzel barely stopped herself from giving a giddy leap of excitement, right in the middle of the school lunch line. He remembered my name!
Luckily she managed to keep her composure, instead giving him the biggest smile she could manage. "I didn't know you had this lunch," she said.
"I just switched into it," he explained. "Apparently there's been some scheduling conflict with my other lunch all semester, and the people in the office just now noticed it and moved me to this one."
"Wow." Rapunzel shook her head. "It took them 4 months to figure out you were in the wrong lunch period?"
Jack smirked. "Yeah, I guess they were too busy gossiping about all of the juicy teacher drama to worry about petty things like student schedules."
Rapunzel grabbed a pre-packaged salad and a fruit cup, and placed them on her tray. "This school, I swear!"
They scooted down to where the entrée-of-the-day was being kept in a food warmer. Jack squinted at the little plastic containers, looking very uncertain.
"Pizza pockets?" he muttered, half to himself. He turned to Rapunzel with a concerned expression. "I've never had those before."
Rapunzel grinned. "They're actually really good! For cafeteria food, anyway."
"Well, in that case, I'll take two!" He snatched up two of the plastic containers, earning him a giggle from Rapunzel and a glare from the person behind her.
They picked up cookies and paid for the meal, walking out into the cafeteria. Jack waved goodbye to Rapunzel and set out toward the window end of the cafeteria, where a boisterous pack of theater kids were engaging in an animated discussion about whether giraffes could take over the planet if they had hands with opposable thumbs on their front legs.
Even as she walked over to her familiar table with her art club friends, she found herself stealing glance after glance over her shoulder, watching Jack assimilate flawlessly into the theater kids and explain why he did, in fact, believe giraffes were capable of taking over the planet with opposable thumbs.
Rapunzel romped cheerfully through the grocery store, making her way to the bakery section. It was times like these she couldn't be gladder her school had an open campus, and was only a block away from a shopping center at that. That plus her free period during 6th period came in handy when she needed to run to the store to buy some last-minute food to go along with an 8th period language arts presentation.
Her presentation was all about color symbolism in The Great Gatsby—yellow for wealth, white for innocence, green for hope—so, of course, it was only natural to buy cookies with white, yellow, and green icing to hand out to the class to accompany it. The first thing she spotted when she got to the bakery section was a towering display of every kind of Easter cookie imaginable, on which she was certain she could find cookies with the correct-colored icing.
As she plodded her way around the tall display, eyes scanning it for any sign of a plain old white, green, or yellow-frosted sugar cookie (would mostly-green egg cookies with a tiny bit of pink work, she wondered?), she caught sight of another person next to her out of the corner of her eye. They also seemed to be scouring the cookie display, almost as selectively as she was. Curiosity piqued, Rapunzel looked over—at the exact same time the other person did.
They both jumped back slightly when blue eyes met green. "Jack!" Rapunzel gasped.
"You again?" he asked teasingly.
"Yes, hi, it's me. The girl who you nearly froze with your ice prince powers." She gave him a small smile.
He smiled back, and she felt herself blushing a little. She hoped he wouldn't notice. "What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Buying cookies to give to the class for my Great Gatsby color presentation!" she explained. "I wanted to get Easter-themed, you know, for fun, but it's kind of hard to find Easter cookies with solid white, yellow, or green icing. They all have designs and whatnot."
Jack nodded, looking a bit impressed. "Wow. That's altruistic of you! I would just buy the cookies and then eat them all as soon as the presentation was over."
"Well…" She gave him a cunning grin. "I'm sure there will be a few left over."
"Still, your teacher should give you extra credit points for the massive amount of self-control it takes to not eat all the cookies you just bought," Jack said. "I'd say that's pretty impressive."
"Ah, thanks!" she said. "So what are you here for?"
He grinned sheepishly. "I, uh…I lost a bet, and now I owe the entire theater department cookies."
"Oh, no!" She regarded him sympathetically. "What was the bet?"
He ran a hand through his thick white hair. "Well…I bet my friend I could sing through the entire Hamilton soundtrack without messing up. I thought after listening to it 6 times, I would be good to go, but…spoiler alert: I wasn't."
Rapunzel laughed. "Oh, wow. I'm sorry!"
"Ah, these will do," he said, picking up a huge container of lavender rabbit-shaped cookies. "Well, I should head to the check-out line," he told her. "But good luck on your presentation!"
"Thanks!" As she watched him walk away and leaned away from the cookie mountain, she realized she had been leaning against a particularly precarious stack of containers, a barely-concealed dreamy look in her green eyes. She let out an alarmed squeak, trying unsuccessfully to reach out and grab the stack as it toppled to the floor in an ungraceful heap.
Rapunzel made her way through the school parking lot, the last of the cookies from her presentation clutched in her arms. In the end, she had decided on the simple rounded iced ones with the colored sprinkles instead of any of the fancy Easter ones.
As soon as her blue BMW came into view, she let out a small yelp of surprise when she noticed who was unlocking the car right next to it. The familiar white-haired boy looked up, and smirked when he caught sight of her.
"Wow, seriously?" he called out. "You park your car next to mine? You just can't get enough of me, can you, Blondie?"
"I did not park my car next to yours!" she retorted, giving him a steamy look. "You parked your car next to mine! I distinctly remember there not being a car in that spot when I came to school this morning." She pointed to where his white Toyota corolla was now situated.
"Besides, there's no way you got to school before me," she added, walking over and leaning up against the side of her car to talk to him. "I get here early every day for cheer practice."
"You got me there!" He held up his hands in surrender, smiling apologetically. "So how did the presentation go?"
"Great!" She beamed. "Everyone loved the cookies! And, as it turned out, I did have a few left over. You want one?"
"Hell yeah, I do!"
The only type of cookie that Rapunzel had left over were the ones with white frosting, which, she couldn't help but notice, went perfectly with Jack's hair. She opened up the cookie container and plucked one out, tossing it to Jack. He caught it neatly in both hands and took an overenthusiastic bite out of it.
As she watched him munch happily on the cookie, she found herself struck with a sudden curiosity. "Jack, can I ask you something?"
"Sure," he said through a mouthful of cookie.
"What's your natural hair color?"
"Brown," he told her.
"Really?" Her eyes glinted with sudden excitement. "No way! Mine too!"
He swallowed his bite of sugar cookie and looked at her in surprise. "Wait, you dye your hair? But it looks so natural!"
"Really? Awww, thanks!" She curled a few strands of golden hair around her finger, looking down at it. She had gone to extra pains to make it look authentic, and she was glad it seemed to be working.
"My mother's always going on about how much she loves blonde hair and how good it would look on me, so I thought it would make her really happy if I dyed it!" she added enthusiastically as Jack took another bite of the cookie.
"Oh." He paused mid-chew.
Rapunzel's eyes widened in concern. "What is it?"
He paused. "It's just…you should dye your hair because you want to, not because your mom goads you into it."
She gave him a puzzled look. "She didn't goad me. I did it on my own."
"Yeah, but it sounds like you did it mainly for her," he pointed out. "You should dye your hair for you."
Rapunzel hated to admit it, but there was some truth to what he said. "Well…I do like it blonde…" she mumbled, fiddling with the ends of her hair again.
Jack smiled. "As long as you like it!"
He opened up the front door of his car and slid into the driver's seat. "I should be heading home," he told her. "But thanks for the cookie!"
"Oh, sure thing, no problem!" She waved shyly as he closed the door. He waved back, shooting her one last friendly grin before turning the keys in the ignition and looking over his shoulder as he backed out of the parking place. Rapunzel started to circle around to the driver's seat of her own car, but she found her eyes glued to the white Toyota corolla as it pulled out of the parking lot. She watched it as it drove down the street, not taking her eyes off until it had turned a corner and passed out of sight.
"I'd like to rent out a computer for the period, please." Rapunzel slid her student ID over the library desk. The librarian looked up from her computer, giving the blonde girl a disparaging look through her slanted half-moon glasses.
"Very well," she growled, her voice like sandpaper. She snatched up the ID card and pulled out a number card reading 18, sliding it across the desk to Rapunzel.
Rapunzel made her way over to where the rentable computers were lined up in neat rows, letting out a resigned sigh. She wasn't much looking forward to spending her off-hour working on her Congress of Vienna research paper, but her after-school time was booked with art club and choir and hopefully, when she finally got home, a nap. So what choice did she really have?
She looked down at her card and weaved her way through the rows until she found Computer 18. When she saw who was sitting at Computer 17, she almost laughed out loud. Okay, this was getting ridiculous.
"Hi again," she said, slipping into the seat next to Jack.
He turned and smirked at her, raising his eyebrows. "Are you stalking me?" he asked.
Rapunzel bristled, feeling suddenly defensive. "No!" she retorted, practically shoving her number card in his face. "This is the one the librarian assigned me to, see?"
He regarded the card for a bit and then nodded thoughtfully. Jack knew as well as anyone else that the librarian's word on rented computers was law.
"Well, then I guess this can be chalked up to weird coincidence," he decided.
"I know, right?" she laughed. "Like every time I turn a corner, there you are!"
"And every time I turn a corner, there you are," he replied, smirking. "But hey…as long as you're here…" He glanced over at the librarian's desk. "Don't tell Mrs. Stick-Up-Her-Ass over there what I've really been doing when you turn your card in, okay?"
She glanced over at his screen to see the entire thing taken up by one of the many well-rendered medieval villages of World of Warcraft. "What are you doing?" she gasped. "That sign says the computers are to be used for school work only and that you can't game!" She pointed at the laminated sign on the wall that read in all caps: NO GAMING. COMPUTERS ARE TO BE USED FOR SCHOOL WORK ONLY.
"I know," he replied, simpering. "So can you keep a secret, Punzel?"
Rapunzel sighed. She supposed Jack was well within his rights to use his free period to do whatever he pleased, even if what he chose to do was cutting into extremely valuable homework time. And if she was honest with herself, she could never tattle on him, especially after he gave her that cute nickname.
"All right. Your secret's safe with me."
"You're welcome to join me, if you like," he told her, leaning back in his chair.
Rapunzel regarded the quaint, wooden buildings on his screen, a beautiful, intriguing-looking forest sprawling out in the background. She had to admit, whatever video game quest he was doing looked far more interesting than her essay.
"I can't," she forced herself to say. "I have to write a paper about the Congress of Vienna."
"Oooooh." Jack grimaced. "That sounds like actual torture. Sucks for you!"
"I'm sure it won't be that bad." She tried to sound confident of the fact, although she knew with almost unwavering certainty that Jack was entirely correct, and that she sat upon a throne of lies.
"Sounds like the sort of thing that—" Jack started.
"Shhhhhh!" The hiss reverberated around the library, and both of them spun around to find the librarian glowering at them from her desk. Jack hurried to cover up his screen, which luckily she didn't seem to notice.
When she finally lowered her death glare, Jack looked back at Rapunzel, giving her a shrug and an apologetic smile before turning back to World of Warcraft. Letting out a deflated huff, Rapunzel opened up the Internet and set to work investigating all about what had to be the most boring peace conference in all of European history.
The tech lab was quiet and empty, just as it often was during 7th period. With no technology studies class in there for Mrs. Stevenson to teach, the only people in the lab were the kids who had off-periods catching up on projects. Such was exactly what Rapunzel was doing. She was finally finishing the graphic design project that had been giving her headaches for weeks, and she couldn't be happier that she was the only student in the lab at the moment. And nothing, she told herself, nothing was going to break her concentration as she plowed through the rest of this.
She was about half an hour into putting a stylized rainbow paint-blot border around her poster when the door to the tech lab swung open. Despite trying to stay focused, her curiosity got the better of her and she looked up.
Rapunzel recognized the short, slender form of Hiccup Haddock who was, as usual, wearing some sort of Dungeons and Dragons shirt and unnecessarily tight-fitting jeans. Hiccup was a good school friend of hers, and they had a fair amount of classes together. He wasn't in the same tech class with her, but she figured he was in one of the other periods. Upon seeing her, he gave her a friendly wave, which she returned with a smile.
"Hey!" he greeted her. "What are you working on?"
"Graphic design poster," she replied. "It's trying to encourage people to adopt dogs and cats from shelters. It's been taking forever because shading the puppies and kittens was super hard, but now I'm finally finishing up!"
"That's great!" Hiccup said.
"How about you?" she asked. "What are you working on?"
"Oh, my partner and I are going to work on our animation project," he replied. He glanced over his shoulder, looking a bit anxious. "Well…when he gets here, anyway. I told him to meet me down here at 1:00, but I was waiting outside the lab for like 10 minutes and he's not here yet."
He rolled his eyes, and Rapunzel shook her head sympathetically. "Some people!" she said.
The sound of loud footsteps echoed in the hallway, and both of them looked toward the door. A second later Jack Frost burst through the door, panting like he had been running at top speed.
"Hic! I made it!" he puffed.
"Yeah, only 10 minutes late!" Hiccup snapped.
Rapunzel looked at Jack, shaking her head in amusement. Of course. Of course in the completely empty tech lab on a slow day like Thursday, the partner of the only other person to show up besides Rapunzel was Jack Frost. She found she wasn't even surprised by their highly coincidental encounters anymore. Now it seemed more as though she was contractually obligated to run into him at least once a day.
Well…not that she minded.
Coincidence was certainly an odd thing. The more she thought about it, the funnier it was that she would keep crossing paths with the same damn kid in a school with 1,000 students per grade.
"Ah, give me a break, I had to finish my World of Warcraft quest!" He pulled a Nestle crunch bar out of his backpack pocket and noisily opened it, taking an enormous bite off of the end. "And buy this crunch bar." Hiccup, for his part, glared daggers at him.
It was then that Jack finally seemed to take notice of Rapunzel. He waved at her with his crunch bar.
"Hi, Rapunzel. Long time no see!" he called out.
Rapunzel laughed. "Yeah, it's been too long, hasn't it? We should catch up!"
Hiccup's expression briefly changed to puzzlement, like he thought it was odd that the two of them knew each other. It quickly changed back to annoyance, and he grabbed Jack by the arm and practically yanked him away.
"Come on!" he grunted. "We've only got 45 minutes, and we need to figure out how to make that gate swing open and the tigers escape from the pen! And you're not even supposed to be eating food in here!" He swatted at Jack's crunch bar, but he managed to pull the chocolate away just in time.
"We're making an animated short where all the animals escape from the zoo and then take over the city," Jack explained, holding the crunch bar high over his head as the shorter boy continuously tried to snatch it.
"Oh, cool!" Rapunzel said. "I'm just doing a poster with puppies and kittens."
"Sounds like fun! We should probably get to work, though." Jack glanced down to where Hiccup was still hopping around trying to get his crunch bar. "Ah, relax, Hiccup. Mrs. Stevenson isn't even here today! And the sub couldn't care less about enforcing the rules. Come on, let's go animate some zoo pandemonium!"
As they walked over and sat at nearby adjacent computers, Rapunzel tried to direct her attention back to her poster. But the more she tried to focus on airbrushing her border into perfection, the more she found her gaze straying over to Jack. Eventually she lost track of how many times her eyes strayed to him, and she could only hope his attention was fully directed to his zoo clip and his crunch bar instead of on the borderline creepy blonde girl staring at him from across the room.
Who's gonna win this game?
Mil-ton Mus-tangs!
Who will bring them all to shame?
Mil-ton Mus-tangs!
The school fight song reverberated around the gym, mixing with the echoing bouncing of the basketball on the wooden floor as Rapunzel handed the woman at the concession stand a wad of cash. She scooped an enormous mass of popcorn into one of the red-and-white striped "small" bags and slid it over the counter to Rapunzel. Picking it up, she started to trot cheerfully back to her seat, humming along to the song as she went.
She was rounding the corner of an elevated stack of bleachers when she found herself colliding sharply with another human being, sending them both toppling to the ground and half of Rapunzel's popcorn scattering across the concrete floor (that's all right, there was no way she could eat that much on her own anyway).
When she saw who it was, she burst into a full-out laugh despite the pain radiating through her body. The irony of the situation was no longer only mildly amusing. Here was Jack Frost again, at a basketball game of all places (did theater kids ever go to sporting events? Rapunzel had always gotten the impression they didn't), and of course, of all the places he could have been sitting at this basketball game, it was in a place close enough to her seat so that they could bump into each other once again—literally this time.
"Sorry about your popcorn," Jack started, but Rapunzel took no notice. After a few moments he joined in her laughter, and for what felt a long time they sat on the floor, surrounded by spilled popcorn, still smarting from the fall, and laughing their asses off. Several odd looks by passersby later, Jack inquired what the hell they were laughing about.
"You!" Rapunzel burst out. "It's like I can't go more than a day without spontaneously running into you somewhere, and our school has over 4,000 students. What are the odds?"
"Well…" Jack scratched his chin, looking deep in thought before turning and giving her the smirk that had become so familiar. "You could be stalking me, of course. That's the most logical explanation."
Rapunzel crossed her arms. "Ha! Nice try, but I happen to be here for my friend." To demonstrate, she stood up and waved down at Merida Dunbroch on the court, currently standing on the sidelines waiting to be subbed in. Jack stood up in time to see Merida wave back, and also earned himself a sour look and a middle finger from the red-haired girl. He stuck his tongue out in response.
Rapunzel gave him a puzzled look. "You know Merida?"
"Yeah, she's in my Spanish class," he replied. "She doesn't like me very much because I call her la perra con el pelo ardiente."
Rapunzel frowned. "Well, that's not very nice!"
Jack shrugged. "Well, she calls me el pendejo con el pelo helado, so it all evens out in the end."
Rapunzel glanced back down at Merida, who was still glowering at Jack and shot him not one, but two middle fingers simultaneously. He shot them right back, lifting his hands up slightly higher to establish dominance.
"So clearly you're not here for her," Rapunzel ventured. "So why are you here, then? I didn't think theater kids liked sports. How do I know you're not stalking me?"
"Nice try Blondie, but I too have a reason to spend an hour sitting in this stuffy gym watching a bunch of over-competitive girls bounce around a rubber melon," Jack replied confidently. "You see, Mr. Felder is my gym teacher, and he also happens to be the girls' basketball coach. He told us he'd give us extra credit if we came to the basketball game, so here I am! Believe me, I need all the extra credit I can get in that class, Punzel."
"Okay, that makes sense." She nodded, satisfied with his explanation. "So…if you're not stalking me and I'm not stalking you, then I guess we really can blame this all on crazy coincidence." She looked at him and shook her head, smiling in wonder. "Wow. This is seriously nuts. I met you like a week ago, and now you're popping up literally everywhere!"
Jack shrugged. "Well, it's not that nuts. I mean, we do go to the same school."
"Yeah, but I'd never seen you at all this year, and then all the sudden I see you 6 times in 1 week? Don't tell me you don't think that's a little strange!"
"Well…" Jack gave her a cunning grin, and started to lean in until his face was just an inch or two away from hers. Rapunzel's eyes widened with alarm, her cheeks burning.
He leaned still closer until their mouths were only about a centimeter apart. "Maybe it's fate," he purred in her face. In response, she continued to stare at him in shock.
After a few tense seconds, he burst out laughing, pulling away from her face and holding his ribs from guffawing so hard. "Oh my god, I'm just kidding!" he wheezed in between laughs. "Like I would ever believe in that bullshit. You should've seen your face!"
"Yeah, yeah, very funny," Rapunzel huffed. As relieved as she was the encounter had not gone further, she had to admit she was a bit disappointed as well.
"Hey sorry, I was just messing with you." He smiled apologetically, seeming to catch on to the fact that he had actually upset her a little bit. "Anyway, if I'm inevitably going to keep encountering you, I might as well get to know you. Are you here by yourself?"
"Yeah, actually," Rapunzel admitted. "The friends I was coming with cancelled on me last-minute, but I had already promised Merida I'd come and watch her play."
"Ah, sorry about that," Jack said sympathetically. "But you know, I'm here by myself too. You could come and sit with me, if you like. And…" His eyes glinted mischievously. "I bought a whole bunch of snacks, so I can help compensate for all that popcorn of yours I just spilled."
She beamed. "Really? That—that'd be great, actually!"
"Perfect! This way, then." She followed him in front of the court and up the bleachers to where an enormous stash of cotton candy, pretzels, hot dogs, nachos, sodas, and yes, popcorn was situated, big enough to take the place of a whole other person. Jack gestured proudly to the massive quantity of food, and with an excited squeal, Rapunzel sat down beside it.
And thus was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And perhaps, given enough time, something even better than that.
Damn, another long one! Shit, I need to stop writing novels for these things XD Eh, not gonna complain though, because this one was especially fun to write! I finally got to put my headcanon that Jack would be a hardcore theater kid to good use, although you wouldn't imagine how much of a pain in the ass it was to find a role in a play that I felt was something Jack would enjoy playing AND was an elderly character, hence Jack having to dye his hair white for the part. You can imagine when I came across a crazy grandpa who didn't believe in taxes and kept pet snakes, it felt like a godsend! Also, a bit of theater terminology: In case you didn't know, a "strike" is when the cast and crews of a show take down the set and put all the props away after closing night. Lol I'm sure not all of my readers are as big of theater nerds as I am XD Then again, maybe I'm just being a condescending asshole and literally everyone knows what a strike is…BUT IN ANY CASE, IF YOU HAPPENED TO NOT KNOW, BOOM, NOW YOU KNOW.
Ah, writing this made me a bit nostalgic for my own high school days, especially considering Jack and his interactions with Rapunzel in this are based in part on the interactions between me and my own high school crush (before he turned into kind of an ass, anyway). And I too was in tech studies, had to write about the congress of Vienna, and had to do presentations on The Great Gatsby XD I was in the theater department as well, and I can 1000% confirm that giraffes taking over the world with opposable thumbs is EXACTLY what theater kids talk about. I also included the modern-day equivalent of Mother Gothel being obsessed with Rapunzel's blonde hair, and it not actually being her natural hair color.
Originally I wasn't going to include Hiccup and Merida, but they fit so nicely into the tech room and basketball game scenes that I was like "eh, why not?" Also, if you're wondering, the name Milton High School was chosen completely at random. Okay, not completely—I just thought Milton Mustangs was catchy, and it fit perfectly into the spirit song I made up XD
TOMORROW: She's been in love with him since she was six, but she's in for a rude awakening when she finds out her parents never intended to let her fulfill her childhood marriage promise to him. When she is faced with a difficult choice, she realizes that sometimes you have to make painful sacrifices for those who matter the most.