Day 63: Germaine Street (Morning)

[lighthearted]

Sora was glad that he'd had the chance to check up with a club member first thing in the morning, and while that in itself helped his mood, he couldn't muster up quite the same amount of energy as he normally did when he was feeling under the weather like this. Eating would have done him some good, but he still didn't have the appetite for it, and so he was still carrying his brown bag with him as he exited the bus and bid farewell to Kratos.

Doyleton looked the same as it always did, except this time it wasn't blanketed with snow. While Sora had enjoyed that the last time, he was glad there hadn't been a repeat this time around. Not when he was already feeling ill.

With his energy levels at such a low, it was hard to figure out where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. Maybe he should spend his day looking for gifts for friends again? Riku might want something, although Sora was sort of at a loss for what to buy him. The cold air felt good on his feverish face for the moment, but he realized that was probably going to change pretty soon.

He flipped through his coupons, but they were the same as always and didn't give him much of an idea of what to do with his day. He'd never had a massage before, but with how his body felt kind of achy and tired, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea...

[For Tsubaki.]

Comments

[brokensmolder]

Eugene was many things, but he wasn't dense. As a thief, he had a remarkable eye for detail; in fact, his whole profession revolved around it. That and a sense of subtlety. And quick fingers...and really good timing, and...

...Regardless, even despite the drugs he noticed right away when Rapunzel stiffened and hesitated ever so slightly. There was a distance in her voice that hadn't been there before--

Oh. The Mother thing.

He raised a highly skeptical eyebrow--just because it was different, it didn't mean he had to accept it--and looked for a reason to change the subject. And, suddenly, he saw something that had been staring him in the face for an hour. So much for those powers of observation he had just been priding himself on.

"Your hair." It was halfway between a statement and a question; a kind of strangled oath from someone utterly perplexed at a new and sudden mildly world-changing realization.

He'd seen it earlier, of course, but it had failed to register until now. Rapunzel's hair should have been short and spiky and brown; it was the last thing he'd really seen before he...died. Or fell into an exceptionally deep sleep. He really wasn't sure anymore. Either way, it was something he had latched onto before everything went black. Even though it had meant his (near?) certain demise, cutting Rapunzel's hair had freed her from her mother. Seeing it long and blonde again seemed so wrong after all that.

But not even remotely long enough. Rapunzel's hair ended somewhere around her knees. Somehow she was missing about sixty-five feet of hair...but if it had been lopped off, wouldn't it be brown? Wasn't that how it worked?

[hairraising]

Rather than an answer to the things she was telling him, Eugene gave Rapunzel an entirely different reaction, which threw her off somewhat. "My— Huh? What about my...?"

Her head craned back over her shoulder, and she realized what he must have meant.

That... was going to take some doing to explain. Doing that she was not very confident in just yet, either.

"Oh my gosh, right, we haven't even gotten to any of— Wow, it's such a long story, and I'm not even sure I know all of it. Are you sure you want to hear it right now? I mean, you're still recovering from the drugs and stuff, right? You don't want to hear some long and complicated idea about what might have happened to me when I don't even know if it's true or not," she rambled in place of giving any meaningful explanation. "I mean, I just kind of woke up this way. I didn't see how it happened either."

[brokensmolder]

"But isn't it supposed to turn brown when it's cut?" Eugene frowned. "That's what happened with the whole--" he mimed his cutting of Rapunzel's hair with a mirror shard "--thing."

He knew it had worked that way before. Eugene had been so weak he could barely hold his eyes open at that point, but he'd heard it. He'd heard Rapunzel's mother age, then fall out the window, and then...nothing. And then Rapunzel was there, trying to heal him without her magic hair-powers, and...yes.

Eugene was quite sure that was how it was supposed to work.

Rapunzel was rambling again. He thought it was adorable, the way she did that...but he was getting a headache. The ground still pitched and rolled with every step they took, and another one of those horseless carriages was driving past them (though this one, thankfully, didn't explode).

"We'll just chalk it up to this place," he said pragmatically, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. And then: "...Can we find a place to sit down?"