#*rapunzel

I love you unequivocally for this

this is such a big word for me right now you have no idea, i’m exhausted

Hmm, I’d say I’m more turquoise than green, but I guess I’ll take it. Heh, thanks, Punz!

It’s time to run.

Kovu calls up to Rapunzel’s tower, and it’s only now that he realises it’s 3 in the morning, a completely inappropriate time to be calling up to a girl at the base of her tower.

He’s expecting her to be his salvation, and why he’s so sure she can be that Kovu isn’t even certain. There’s something about Rapunzel, certainly, something that was evident from the moment he met her, a bright and brilliant and healing force within her, something that had never been present before in his life. 

They are both tactile people, touch-starved, craving contact. She starts holding his hand, he starts pulling her into his chest.  And he is impressed when she becomes better able to defend herself against the words he throws at her like knives, becomes so good that she's able to juggle them like a circus act, just another of her several hundred hobbies. But, in the end, he’s still not sure why he thinks she’ll be able to help him, and maybe it’s selfish for him to be heaping all of this expectation on her, expectation that she’ll change the course of his life and keep it from spiralling into the shithole that it seemed to constantly orbit.

But he does it anyway, and wonders (hopes) that she’ll come through.

It’s time to run.

He yells and yells and yells, the desperation in his voice getting keener and more evident with each repetition of her name until finally, finally, a confused and groggy voice calls back down to him.

“Kovu?”

He climbs up along the wall of the tower, no longer fearing the sticky end he’d meet at the bottom if he lost grip, not like he once had.

“What’s wrong?”

He licks his lips nervously, because this is the moment of truth, and if this girl abandons him now then Kovu will have no one. No one to lead him out of the dark.

“Everything.” And I need you to leave with me, I need you to take me far away from here because I can’t do it alone, I’ve never been able to do anything alone with her, constantly looking over my shoulder and digging into it with nails sharpened to a point and whispering ambitions (her ambitions not my own) into my ear like a slowly dripping line of poison. If she’s gone, what am I? What am I without the people in my life telling me who I am? (you’re the future King you’re a killer you’ll be our salvation you’ll be their ruin.) I need you to remind me that there’s a me that exists out of all of that. And I know you’re ready to leave too, I can see the determination glowing fiercely in your eyes when you look at the lanterns painted on your wall, acrylics on stone. You’re ready to leave too.

It’s time to run.

It doesn’t come out like that, in fact Kovu barely gets out more than a few words but somehow they manage to convey a lot more.

When Rapunzel says “Yes,” a hesistant “Yes” but a “Yes” nevertheless, Kovu breathes a half-gasp of surprise, half-sigh of relief like he’s just narrowly avoided an oncoming train, because he knows he’ll be crushed if her answer is anything else.

He finally gets up from where he’s positioned, half-kneeling on Rapunzel’s floor, and decides. If he didn’t leave now he was never going to be free, he was never going to stop the pages of his mother’s story flipping, the one she'd written him into, blood on stone. He wanted to be in someone else’s story.

Hers.