mother knows best

[powershines]

Rapunzel doesn't sleep well, and she does wind up wrapped up in her hair overnight like a golden-cocooned butterfly. She's still dozing fitfully when the sun comes up.

Comments

[hisowninvention]

"Ten."

[powershines]

"And - then what did you do?"

[hisowninvention]

"Learned how to steal things. Did a lot of that. Moved around a lot, too."

[powershines]

"How'd you learn?"

[hisowninvention]

"Practice, mostly. It helped that I did all my screwing up and getting caught while I was still little and cute and half-starved."

[powershines]

"You were hungry?"

[hisowninvention]

"'Half-starved' is an exaggeration, but... they didn't feed us enough. And when I got out, well, my main sources of food were theft and the kindness of strangers. Neither one's what you'd call perfectly reliable."

[powershines]

"I don't like thinking about you being hungry."

[hisowninvention]

[powershines]

"What? You keep - smiling at me."

[hisowninvention]

"In this particular case - it's nice, that you don't like thinking about me being hungry. It makes me happy that you care about me like that. In general - I smile at you a lot because I like you a lot and when I look at you I feel like smiling."

[powershines]

"Okay."

[hisowninvention]

[powershines]

"You're doing it again," Rapunzel says, and she squirms a little, blushing.

[hisowninvention]

"Should I stop?"

[powershines]

"I - don't know. It makes me feel weird, I don't think in a bad way but it's weird."

[hisowninvention]

"Weird as in something unfamiliar, or...?"

[powershines]

"It's definitely that."

[hisowninvention]

"Okay."

[powershines]

"Maybe I'll figure it out. But I don't want to write anything down until I'm sure I have a way to do it privately. I don't think I believe that today was the only time Gothel read my notebooks."

[hisowninvention]

"Yeah, I don't believe that either. And I won't read them, but I can't speak for anybody else. Come up with a code, maybe? So you're the only one who can read it in the first place? A locked box might work too, but - well - locks can be opened in a variety of ways."

[powershines]

"I was thinking a code, yeah. The question is how to memorize it without leaving enough of it written down for someone else to figure out how to read it if they wanted to."

[hisowninvention]

He thinks about this. "Invent it with notes on how it works, write it in a lot until you're used to it, then destroy the notes? And keep them with you all the time until you do - or with me, if you're going somewhere you can't take them along easily - so nobody else can get at them?"

[powershines]

"Or I could come up with some - paragraph or poem or something that I can memorize word for word, and write that in code, and know how to refer to it."

[hisowninvention]

"That'll work too, if you can pull it off."