Sunflower | N. Mikaelson

VI

Rapunzel had asked Damon not to come the next day as she told him she needed some time to relax by herself, and she was grateful she did. Despite loving Damon's company and finding it harder every day to function without him, Rapunzel didn't feel like she could cope with Damon's look of fury or pity when he looked at her, only seeing the bruises her mother inflicted on her.

Due to being physically unable to lie, Rapunzel had become skillful at evading the truth, for which she was eternally grateful. She phrased what she said so people assumed one thing when it wasn't true. This came in handy with her conversation with Damon, as he assumed her mother was already long gone and wouldn't be back for a while, but the truth is she was going to be there for the next week, and when Damon came, that was the one day when her mother was gathering things from the forest such as ingredients for meals.

Rapunzel didn't want Damon to worry about her, and it was obvious he wasn't completely at ease after finding out her mother hit her, and Rapunzel did not like worrying people, so she asked him not to come the next day so she could relax. Her mother had gone out quickly to get more hazelnuts as she didn't bring back enough the previous day to make soup for the two of them. Hazelnut soup, Rapunzel's favorite dinner of her mother's. Though her all-time favorite food was the pansy salad she makes, which was a basic salad with pansy flowers (as they were edible) and a special dressing that she would never reveal the recipe to.

For as long as Rapunzel could remember, she had a fascination with flowers, and that's not just the casual "they're pretty" Interest that most people have, but the "I need to know everything about them" interest in flowers. In fact, if you looked at Rapunzel's "library" (which was just one shelf unit of books) around seventy percent of them were books about flowers. By now she had memorized most of them, so knew pretty much everything about most types of flowers. She loved them do much that she vowed, if she ever could live outside the tower, she would have a large flower garden filled with all the flowers she could grow.

Whenever she returned, Rapunzel's mother would bring her a new book and more often than not, it would be about flowers. Her other books in her collection were Shakespeare and "common knowledge" books her mother wanted her to have. Previously, her mother had brought home other books such as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen books, but Rapunzel fell in love with Shakespeare, and could practically recite the plays by memory.

A lot of Rapunzel's time was dedicated to reading and rereading her books before she met Damon, in fact it took up around forty percent of it. The other sixty percent was divided into three other things: baking/cooking, painting, and cleaning. Ever since she found out how to make dinners with the ingredients her mother gave her, Rapunzel had been obsessed with cooking and baking, finding out recipes to make new things, but all her recipes were original as she had never asked her mother for a cookbook as it wasn't necessary.

And Rapunzel loved to paint. She loved the way her brush would glide along the paper or canvas, and she loved the result of her painting. And paints were so easy for her to obtain paint, as while some paint sets were from her mother as birthday gifts, most of her paints she made herself from flowers, ash, eggshells, anything natural she could find to make paint. That's why it was always satisfying when she made a painting from her own paint, as it was all original.

However, as she couldn't go outside, Rapunzel relied on her mother to bring her these ingredients, and as an in case of emergencies, she always kept a stash in her room which Rapunzel was forbidden to enter. But Rapunzel needed new paints, and her mother would be out for a while scavenging for hazelnuts, so what's the harm if she never finds out?

Word count: 711