Work Text:
“He didn’t mean it, dear,” Mrs. Potts coos, her warm, doting voice as gentle as always. A soft, tiny bandage over a gaping problem, as if saying that it was an accident absolved him, as if the teapot were hoping that were all it took to make this better. Belle knew better than to argue with her. No matter what she said in protest, Mrs. Potts would have another useless platitude, slathered thick in the honeyed matronly voice Belle was starting to truly despise. She wasn’t allowed to have breakdowns in peace in this place. Always she was followed by a parade of prying silverware and household goods, refusing to leave her be, panicked in their calcified porcelain brains by any sign of emotional distress. She assumed it was a product of abuse, that when they lived with a raging beast it was of paramount importance to shut down any spirals before they ended with a room destroyed or worse, some servant object bent and thrown or shattered. They had gone from being powerless in class and status to being barely animate, minimizing damage was all they really knew. Belle understood it, but it didn’t make her situation easier. She swallowed her resentment and gave Mrs. Potts the best weak smile she could muster.
“I know,” she said, her attempt at demure acceptance falling flat. “I’ll be alright.” Satisfied, the tea cart rolled away and left Belle in blessed solitude.
She was naked, standing in front of the stupidly ornate full-length mirror in her bedroom. Her smooth, milky skin, once the envious dream of a whole town of budding young men, was blooming with deep purple bruises. They ringed her waist, her thighs, her upper arms and wrists, darker where her spriglike limbs were thin and baby fat provided no cushion for the grind of her bones where he gripped her. They softened into yellow at the edges, frequent enough that they never quite disappeared, just melted into one another like a slowly changing watercolor on the canvas of her skin. That was normal. She had grown used to all her new colors, the bruising, the dark circles under her sleepless eyes, the chapped red of her nipples where his sandpaper tongue had laved across them in possessiveness and passion. But this…this was untenable.
Four uneven lines, angry maroon and scabbing brown, tore down her front in parallel slashes of rage. A fifth, his thumb, skipped deep and angrily off to the side. She saw the trajectory of his hand all over again as she looked at them, as if the ghost of it was still forever clawing through her, over and over in an arc she hadn’t predicted, couldn’t have stopped. She was, she realized as she looked at herself, exactly the same as his west wing portrait. Torn remnants of a thing that was once beautiful, now just a reminder of how far the once glorious and elegant have fallen. She was just another thing he owned, she thought, bile churning in her stomach, another thing he bought because it was beautiful and ruined because he didn’t know how to value it. A testament to a moody, spoiled prince who breaks things when it suits him.
Belle traced her fingers over the jagged ridges, healing slowly and sloppily for lack of care, the touches of infection in them warm beneath the surface. She winced. They felt like fire. Even with what little medical knowledge she had she knew they would scar, badly, pink and raised and shiny. Some small, petty part of her hoped that he would feel a twinge whenever he saw them, some guilt bubbling in the rotting depths of him at having destroyed so thoroughly the perfection he had made himself drunk on, hoped that the shame of it would prick at him each time he felt the unevenness through her clothes or watched her stiffly bend against the protests of her knotted abdominal muscles. But it was a small part, and realistically she knew making him angry each time he saw her naked would only make this worse. She looked at the length of her body and forced away the notions of how much worse it could be, how much of herself was still thankfully whole, and how easily his long glass-sharp claws or powerful teeth could take that from her.
Belle turned away from the mirror and began the process of dressing herself, gingerly lowering her layers of dress onto her aching torso so as not to tear the fragile knitting that her body had already done. She sat on the edge of her bed, considering the path her life had taken. She was trapped in a gilded cage, frequently ravaged, kept like a pet. But then, of course, she supposed the girls in the village were in the same boat. She knew the men kept their wives at home, weighed them down with child and chores, and she had no delusions that the boys she used to know never beat their wives. The women in her town had no hope of escape, or divorce, or their own income, or adventure. And she herself was hardly burdened with the drudgery of their daily lives. She never cooked, nor cleaned, never stoked her own fire or brewed her own tea or scrubbed her own laundry. She had time to wander the enclosed grounds, to read at her leisure in the library. She had a feather bed of her own and shoes without holes and ate fine foods she didn’t have to grow or scavenge.
She knew she should consider herself lucky. But she thought of the village women, throwing their arms around their husbands’ necks and plastering their cheeks with kisses as they returned from a hunt with a fat goose in tow. She thought of them bathing their babies in washbasins, their chubby arms gleaming with well water and tallow soap in the sunshine reaching for their mothers and giggling joyously. She thought of their morning walks to market with the other wives, sharing gossip, trading chunks of brown bread from their apron pockets as their children waddled behind like ducklings. Belle shuddered to think what thing might be borne inside her of the beast’s visits to her chamber, but it had been long enough now that her fear of birthing such a wretched thing had passed. It didn’t seem they were compatible in that way, which she supposed was a blessing.
She wrung her hands in her lap. She had all the comforts she could want (save of course for his savage tradition of splitting her open by candlelight semi-regularly, but hadn’t she even begun to enjoy that? Hadn’t it in fact been her own reckless abandon and rising, rocking, screaming fervor that had driven him to the dangerous frenzy that left her in her current state?) but she lacked the one thing the village girls had in spades. Love. Companionship. She was surrounded and badgered and hounded and doted upon but she was always, in the truest way, alone.
Belle had always looked down her nose at such sentiment, the idea that romance was a need like food or water, at the silly girls who would weep and wail at not being married. She had her father and it had always been enough, and she truly believed she would be happy with her books, accepting but not requiring the possibility that she might meet a man who matched her wits and made her laugh and she could share a home with. But now she had all the books she could want, and she found herself craving connection, mourning the cold and soulless nature of her dalliances with her captor. She needed to be heard, to be understood, to share an experience or even just an emotion with anyone, anyone but herself in this place. The furniture she lived with could hardly be counted as friends, their only reaction to her seemed to be cautious comforting, as though keeping her docile and contented was the extent of their investment in her. She supposed it was.
Belle’s nose wrinkled. Was she going to resign herself to that? Being an empty, gently smiling prop in this house? A doll on which he takes out his vicious needs and violent frustrations? Was she going to allow herself to be a silly village girl, weeping that no one loves her? Would she sink herself into the fantasy of her novels, studiously ignoring the reality of her life until she withers? Or would she adapt, and take control, as she had in the beginning? He had nearly broken her, she realized. The girl who had shouted him down two months ago would never have allowed herself to sink into self-pity this way. She had never simply accepted her circumstances, had never laid down for the strong to overtake her. He had quieted that inside her, he had forced her to retreat within herself until the fire she carried in her heart had dwindled from a raging hearth to a guttering candle. She stood, suddenly furious at herself. No more. If she needed companionship, she would make it. She would force the servants in this place to talk to her until the dust cleared from their wooden skulls and they remembered they used to be people with thoughts. If she needed love, she would make that too. She would dig for the best parts of the beast like gold in river silt if she had to, and she would silence the worst of him if it meant bridling him like a willful horse and dragging him into civility. She would shape her own world. She would write her own story. She would not let the world happen to her. She would happen to the world.
Her armoire awoke with a long, dramatic yawn, creaking out its drawers in a massive, arcing stretch.
“Oh! Daaarling, you’re already dressed. I’m so sorry, I overslept..”
Belle turned to the hulking thing with a smile that was wide and not forced at all.
“No no, you have perfect timing. I need something lovely. I’ll be having dinner with the master tonight. Make it special.”