Dark! Father Gothel x Rapunzel's Mother! Reader
You remember the sickness.
And tiy remember it the way one remembers drowning, not the water itself, but the weight.
The terrible, bone deep heaviness that settled into your lungs, while he court physicians spoke in low voices outside your chamber door, and though they thought you couldn't hear them, but you caught every damning word.
'The Queen will not survive the week.'
Your husband, your wonderful, broad-shouldered, tearful wreck of a husband, refused to accept it.
You'l had watched him from your bed, barely able to turn your head, as he paced the length of your room with red-rimmed eyes and a jaw set hard enough to crack teeth.
"There are legends," he'd said, gripping your hand so tightly it was the only thing you could feel anymore. "A golden flower. Born of a single drop of sunlight. They say it can heal anything."
You had wanted to tell him that legends were for children. That he was a king, not a knight errant. And he should stay, hold you, and let you memorize his face for whatever came after.
Instead, you had whispered, "Then find it."
And because he loved you with the reckless, irrational, magnificent stubbornness that had made you fall for him, he did.
𖤓𓇢𓆸
The broth was warm.
That's what you remember most. Not the golden glow or the way the healers' hands trembled as they brought the bowl to your lips, nor the way the entire room seemed to hold its breath.
Just....warmth. Liquid sunlight pouring down your throat, flooding your veins, reaching into every dark and dying corner of your body and saying, very simply saying.
Not yet
The sickness broke like a fever dream, Color returned to your face. Strength returned to your limbs.
You sat up in bed and your husband let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, and he gathered you up in his arms and buried his face in your hair and you held him right back and...
And your hair was glowing.
Not your baby's hair. Not the child still growing safe and sound inside you , who would be born three weeks later, a healthy, screaming, beautifully ordinary little girl with her father's eyes and a wisp of brown hair.
Your own hair.
The golden light pulsed from root to tip, warm and alive, cascading over your husband's arms like a sunrise he could hold. You both stared at it, breathless, and then you laughed.
"Well," you'd said, watching the glow fade to a gentle shimmer. "That's new."
𖤓𓇢𓆸
The kingdom celebrated.
The Queen was healed! The Princess was born!
Lanterns were launched into the sky, thousands of them, a constellation of joy burning above the castle, and you stood on the balcony with your daughter in your arms and your husband's hand on the small of your back and you thought.
'This is the happiest ending anyone could ask for.'
You were right.
It was an ending.
You just didn't know whose.
Meanwhile, he watched from the treeline.
He had watched the soldiers tear his flower, his flower, his precious, centuries-kept secret from the earth like common weeds.
He had watched them carry it behind castle walls. And felt the years begin to crawl back into his skin the moment the petals disappeared from sight, and for the first time in longer than most kingdoms had existed, Gothel had felt something close to panic.
And then rage.
Cold, patient, ancient rage.
He had planned to take the child, of course. Word had spread quickly through the kingdom, the magic flower, the miraculous recovery, and the baby.
It was always the baby. The power always passed down. That was how these things worked in every story, every legend, every whispered fairy tale.
So he waited.
He had watched the castle from the shadows with dark eyes and a darker patience, hands clasped behind his back, his cloak drawn close.
He studied the guard rotations. Counted the steps from the eastern wall to the tower.
Then he was ready.
Yet the baby was born with brown hair.
Perfectly, utterly ordinary brown hair.
Gothel stared at the announcement, the criers in the square, the descriptions of the little princess, brown-haired, bright-eyed, beautiful, and something in his chest had gone very, very still.
'No.'
He had broken into the castle that same night.
Not for the child, not yet, not until he was sure but to see for himself.
The man moved through the corridors like a shadow, the guards didn't see him. The servants didn't hear him.
He found the nursery first.
The baby slept in her cradle, tiny fists curled, chest rising and falling with the untroubled rhythm of the deeply loved. He'd reached down his long fingers, and with steady hands, and lifted a single wisp of her hair.
Brown.
Just brown.
No glow, no warmth, and definitely no power.
Nothing.
Father Gothel stood there for a long moment, the baby sleeping on, oblivious, and the rage had coiled tighter in his chest because if the child didn't have the power then where is it?!
And then Gothel heard you singing.
𖤓𓇢𓆸
It came from down the hall. Your chambers. The door was cracked, just barely enough for the low, golden light to spill across the stone floor like a secret it couldn't keep.
Gothel moved toward it the way a moth moves toward a flame, and he told himself it was necessary, and logical, he was simply following the power to its source, and that was all.
He looked through the door.
And the rage went quiet.
You were sitting at your vanity, brushing your hair in long, absent strokes, humming a melody you didn't know the words to couldn't possibly know, because the words were his,
A song he had sung to a flower in a hidden glen for longer than your kingdom had a name.
But somehow you had found the tune, plucked it from whatever golden magic now lived in your blood, and you were humming it in the dark like a lullaby.
And your hair was glowing.
Every stroke of the brush sent a wave of light cascading down, gold and alive,
The years were falling off your face with each pass, not that you had many to lose, you were young, so young, and the light loved you the way it had loved the flower, completely and without reservation.
His breath caught
Gothel finally found what he was looking for.
He watched you set the brush down, as you twist your glowing hair over one shoulder and smile at your own reflection, a small, wondering smile, like you still couldn't quite believe any of this was real.
You touched a strand of gold and watched it glow and let out a little breath of amazement.
'Precious,' he thought 'You don't even know what you have.'
He pulled back from the door, and disappeared into the dark.
But he didn't leave.
𖤓𓇢𓆸
Father Gothel came back the next night.
And the next.
And the one following after.
While you didn't know you were being watched.
How could you? The castle was safe. The kingdom was at peace. Your daughter was healthy and your husband was happy and the magic in your hair was a secret kept close, known only to the King, the court physician, and two trusted advisors who'd been sworn to silence on pain of treason.
You only let your hair down at night, alone, in your chambers, with the door locked and the curtains drawn.
You had brush it and feel the warmth spread through you like sunlight through water, and you would hum that strange melody that lived somewhere behind your ribs, and for a few quiet minutes the world was golden and simple and good.
Honestly, You didn't know that the lock on your balcony door was nothing to a man who had four centuries to learn patience.
You didn't know that he stood in the shadow of your curtains, close enough to touch you, and watched the light play across your face and learned the rhythm of your breathing and memorized the exact way your lashes fanned across your cheeks when you closed your eyes.
This was inconvenient.
This was not the plan he placed for what he is about to do.
He was supposed to take the flower's power and disappear.
That was how this worked. He'd done it for centuries, simple, clean, uncomplicated. The flower sat in its glen and he sang and the years fell away and that was enough.
But you were not a flower.
In truth, he had stopped thinking about the power three nights ago.
For once, He admired something more then immortality and you.
And that is the way you talked to yourself while you braided your hair for bed, little muttered commentaries on your day, on the council meeting that ran long, on the way your daughter had grabbed your finger and held on with surprising strength, and you would say "she gets that from her father, the stubborn thing," with such nude adoration in your voice that something inside him would twist so hard he thought it might snap.
You alive and real in a way that the flower had never been, and Gothel understood with the clarity of a man watching his own execution that he was not going to be able to walk away from this.
Not now.
Not ever.
𖤓𓇢𓆸
It was the seventh night when he made his decision.
You were sitting on the edge of your bed, your glowing hair pooled around you like a golden sea, and you were talking to your sleeping daughter in the cradle beside you, soft, sweet nonsense, the kind of things mothers say when they think no one is listening.
"You're going to be so loved," you whispered, stroking one tiny cheek with your fingertip.
"You already are. You have no idea. Your father's already planning your first birthday and you're three weeks old, the man is absolutely hopeless-"
You broke off with a quiet laugh, and in the shadows behind your curtain, Gothel closed his eyes and pressed his fist against his chest and thought, very calmly that he needs to have you.
And in the eighth night, you wake up to a hand over your mouth.
Not rough, that's the first thing you register, in the half-second before the panic hits.
The palm pressed against your lips is firm but almost gentle, and there's a voice in the dark above you, low and soothing.
"Shh, shh, shh. Easy, now. Easy."
Your eyes fly open.
Moonlight cuts through the gap in the curtains and catches a face , sharp cheekbones, grey eyes, a mouth curved into something that's almost a smile but not quite.
He's beautiful in the way that exotic things are beautiful.
The stranger is leaning over your bed.
"There she is," he murmurs, and his dark eyes trace your face with an intensity that steals the breath he hasn't already taken. "Good morning, my flower. I'm going to need you to be very quiet for me."
But you bite his hand.
He hisses, yanks back, and you scream or you try to.
Gothel was faster.
The cloth is over your nose before the sound leaves your throat, filled with the strong smell of herbs.
You thrash, grab at his wrist, and your hair blazes gold in the dark, lighting up the chamber like a struck match, and you see his face clearly for the first time.
He's staring at your hair.
No, he's staring at you.
And the expression on his face is not one you've ever seen directed at you before.
"Beautiful," he breathes, and his free hand comes up to catch a strand of your glowing hair between his fingers. He cradles it like it's something holy.
"Every bit as beautiful as I knew you would be."
Your vision swims, the cloth is doing its work, your limbs are going heavy, your thoughts scattering like startled birds, and you fight it, but he shushes you again, so gently.
His fingers slide from your hair to your cheek and brush the tears away with a tenderness that makes your stomach turn.
"Don't fight it, darling," he whispers. "You'll only hurt yourself, and I cannot have that."
You try to reach for the bell pull, for the dagger under your pillow.
But your arm falls, boneless, and he catches your hand before it hits the mattress and brings it to his lips and presses a kiss to your knuckles and holds it there, eyes closed, breathing you in.
"I have watched you," he says against your skin, casual, conversational, like he's telling you about the weather. "Every night for a week, I've stood right there." he nods toward the curtain
"and watched you brush your hair and sing my song and I thought, how poetic, the flower becomes a woman."
"I was going to take the child," he continues, and your blood goes cold at the mention of Repunzel.
Yet he shakes his head before the new wave of panic can crest. "But the power didn't pass to her. It stayed in you. And I'll admit, I was frustrated. At first."
"Then I watched you," he says. "And I wasn't frustrated anymore."
Your eyelids are so heavy. The room is fading at the edges, moonlight going soft and dark. You can still see him, just barely, a shadow leaning over you with your hand pressed to his cheek now, cradling it like something precious and breakable.
"Your king will search for you," Gothel mocks. "They always do. They will send soldiers and scouts and they will comb every forest and field and they will never. Find. You."
He lifts you from the bed.
You weigh nothing to him. He carries you, one arm under your knees, one behind your back, your glowing hair spilling over his arm in a river of gold, and he looks down at you with those dark, dark eyes and the smile is gone now, replaced by something raw and absolute.
"I have kept a flower alive for four hundred years," he says quietly. "Imagine what I will do for you."
The last thing you see before the darkness takes you is the open balcony door. The night sky beyond it.
The thousands of lanterns that still hang from every eave and window in the kingdom, strung up in celebration of your recovery, and of your daughter's birth.
They look, you think dimly, like tiny suns.
And then the dark swallows everything, and you feel him pull you closer, and his heartbeat is steady against your cheek, and the last thing you hear is his voice, low and warm and terribly.
"I have got you, my beautiful flower."
