So, this started out as a characters study and turned into...whatever exactly this is. I'm not sure if this deserves the rating, but I figured I'd be safe just in case.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
It is on a Tuesday evening that Belle decides to once again resume the task of organizing the library. Well, it is actually Rumpelstiltskin's alchemy lab, but that is where he keeps all of his books, and so she has dubbed it the "labrary." He owns hundreds of books, all wonderfully out of order and arranged without rhyme or reason, and she presumes that he does not need them to be organized in order to find ones that he requires, simply able to summon the tomes from their shelves by magic. She, however, does not possess such qualities and refuses to allow the room to continue existing in such a state of disarray. The task is something she has been working at for several weeks, as it is not one of her required chores, an undertaking she assumed of her own accord, and must come after those appointed to her by her master. Supper's dishes have been cleaned and put away, and thus she is free to do as she pleases.
As she treks up the spiral stairs that lead to the labrary, she pauses at the sound of his voice echoing from above. It does not surprise her, as she has found him speaking to himself on many occasions, a thing that she notices herself doing every now and then when she cleans, left on her own for hours on end. It is a habit in which lonely people engage, she concludes, and she is hesitant to disturb him. Still, there are only a couple hours of daylight remaining, and if she does not wish to read book titles by candlelight then she really must get to work now. Slowly, she starts up the steps again. Her stocking-clad feet make no sound against the wooden stairs and her presence is still unnoticed when her eyes can finally peek over the landing and peer through the slats in the railing to behold an unusual sight.
The room is empty, no sign of his alchemy equipment, no tables cluttered with assorted tools or beakers and test tubes filled with substances she can never, nor wants to, identify, no cabinet holding bottled everything she could possibly imagine. Even the rolling ladder has disappeared. All that remains is a single chair situated in the middle of the room, on which sits a young man, younger than she, arms pressed to his sides. Rumpelstiltskin, hands clasped behind his back, slowly circles him.
"I'm not going to give it to you," the boy states, jaw set and eyes determined. He twists his head and shoulders, wiggles his hands, but his arms remain motionless, as though tied to the chair by invisible rope.
"We had a deal, dearie," he snaps. "My magic beans for your cow and any stringed instruments you happened to encounter in the future."
"An instrument that you didn't say was magic." He moves his body as thought trying to rock the chair from side to side, but the piece of furniture is firmly attached to the floor.
"You never asked. You shouldn't have signed if you didn't understand the terms, but you did, see?" A contract appears in his hand, and he leans over to shove it in the lad's face, pointing at what Belle assumes is a signature. "You made your choice and you must live up to it. Now, give me my harp." He straightens up, coming to stand behind the chair, and he clamps his hands down on the boy's shoulders, nails digging in until a cry of pain echoes throughout the library.
Rumpelstiltskin is, in many ways, a snake. He is a predator, always watching his prey from the shadows; he had toyed with her father, appearing when they had moved on from a state of desperation to that of simple hopelessness, giving them no idea that he was coming, and seeming to materialize out of thin air only once he desired to be seen. Even now, as he resumes his slow circling, letting the lad fidget and squirm under his dark, unwavering gaze, it may be a trick of the fading light, but he seems to dissolve into the shadows every now and then only to appear a few feet away.
Sometimes, when Belle is reading, she will glance up from her book to catch him watching her from his place at the spinning wheel or sitting in front of the fireplace. He does not hurriedly look away when she catches him, but holds her steady gaze because, she thinks, he wants her to know that he watches her.
"No one breaks a deal with me," he sneers. His fingers twitch, and the lad stops his constant shifting, eyes widening in panic. The skin around his neck has drawn inward, or…been pushed inward, as though something is squeezing. Rumpelstiltskin's tone changes to deceivingly amiable, and he pays no mind to the boy's suffering. "Your mother is doing well, I take it? Golden eggs and whatnot letting her live in luxury? It would be terrible if something were to happen to her." His cackle fills the room for a moment, and he bares his yellow, jagged teeth in a cruel smile. "You break a deal with me, dearie, and I break everything that you cherish."
He has snake eyes, the kind that pierce a target's heart and leave them rooted to the spot in fear. It is those eyes that she, looking over the top of her book, finds staring at her from across the room, those eyes that arrest her and seem to peer inside her to view her very thoughts and desires, that make her pulse race so hard that surely he can hear it, taste it. People flinch away from his voice, his gestures, the exaggerated everything which permeates his being; and his laugh, more natural than anything he does, is what seems to unnerve them the most. Then, when he has them exactly where he wants them, he strikes, presents a deal that they will agree to out of sheer desperation. She watched it happen in the war room, and now she is witnessing it again with this boy.
Even his manner of dress is meant to add to the effect. The dragon hide coats and vests in which he clothes himself, the leather pants that cling to him like a second skin are meant to give off that very impression, that they are a part of him, that he is even more inhuman than people already perceive him to be.
Belle, however, has come to find his movements…mesmerizing. The fluidity of his svelte figure, so nimble and lissome, the intricate footwork he incorporates into his near dance around the lad. She would be lying to herself if she said that her eyes did not stray down to his backside more often than they should, but every step he takes creates a faint, barely audible creak that immediately draws her attention. And his hands, oh she loves to watch his hands, constantly in motion, fingers fluttering. She imagines those blackened nails caressing along her jawline, down the curve of her throat, over her collarbone, and she shivers.
He brings his face within inches of the boy's, who is still trying to gasp in stolen air. "So, what'll it be?"
The lad nods his head quickly, blond bangs disheveled and obscuring his eyes. The force wrapped around his throat must have relinquished its hold, for he sucks in a loud breath and coughs. "Fine, the harp is yours," he croaks. The boy's face crumples, brave façade demolished.
Rumpelstiltskin giggles again, a wide grin splitting his face. "Wonderful. I'll be there tomorrow to collect."
The transaction complete, he casually flicks his wrist and the lad vanishes in a small cloud of violet smoke, while the rest of the furniture appears, though not exactly in the same spots she recalls them sitting. As the grin falls from his face, he drags the chair over to a desk, slides his coat off of his shoulders, which slouch imperceptibly, and hangs it on the back of the chair. A twitch of those long fingers, and a leather-bound journal appears on the desk in yet another swirl of smoke. He sits, opens the journal to a page, and begins to write, quill scratching against paper.
Certain that it is safe to appear without reproach, Belle pads up the last few steps. He jerks his head up as a floorboard creaks beneath her weight, eyes flashing for a moment until he identifies the intruder.
"Finished all your work, dearie?" he asks as he returns to his writing. His voice is not quite the falsetto he had used with the boy.
"Yes, did you redecorate?" she inquires, fetching the rolling ladder from where he conjured it back into existence. For a moment, abashment flits across his face, either because he hoped she would not notice, or he did not notice it himself. Oddly, he seems to want to keep his dealings a secret. What she cannot decide is whether he wishes to keep them a secret in general or keep them a secret from her specifically.
"I thought some change was in order," he mutters too quickly, an excuse she does not think she would have believed even if she was not privy to the truth.
Belle suppresses the urge to roll her eyes as she drags the ladder around the room to its proper spot; however, there is an obstruction. Her master's chair is in the way. He managed to position the desk right in front of the shelf she was last working on.
She gently clears her throat, at which he lifts his eyes to consider her. He raises a brow ever so slightly.
"I, um, I need to get through." She gestures toward the too-small space between the wall and the chair.
Wordlessly, he sends the desk sliding forward about a foot and scoots in, allowing her enough room to get through. As she passes behind him, he sweeps a lock of hair out of his face, and her eyes are drawn immediately to his countenance.
During these months of living with him, Belle has grown accustomed to her employer's unique appearance, even come to appreciate it. One must get close, which no one wishes to do, to behold (enjoy?) the full effect of his shining, reptilian scales. Up close, he is enthralling. He does not glitter. No, that would be silly. Rather, his skin has a dull sheen to it, which she finds delightful when he shifts and the ebbing sunlight strikes him at just the right angle. She discovers herself wanting to brush her fingertips over the faintest dusting of gold that coats his scales. They are a snake's scales, so tiny, overlapping flawlessly with a green-grey-gold marbled effect like that of granite. If she scratched hard enough, she wonders, would his scales flake off, and would gold dust come away beneath her fingernails?
Belle starts up the ladder, back in its proper place, though it should not be behind the desk, which is certainly not where it belongs. She pauses after a few rungs to look over his shoulder; the journal he is bent over seems to be a register of sorts, in which he is furiously scribbling who-knows-what in a small, cramped script that she cannot decipher at this distance. She makes her way up the rest of the ladder and sets about moving around heavy tomes, setting some in a pile on the top rung and swapping them out for others on the shelves now and then.
The manic scratching of his quill stops, he leans back in the chair, and he rubs a hand over his face. He unfastens the top two buttons of his vest. There is a subtle lethargy about him; perhaps the magic tires him more than he cares to admit.
Belle lets go of the ladder with one hand and leans forward as far as possible without losing her balance. She stares at the exposed patch of his chest, trying to view more than the fabric allows, and she wonders, not for the first time, exactly how much of his lean frame is covered by those scales. His palms are bare, simply calloused, which she knows from brief touches, so different from the slightly rough, though not unpleasantly so, texture of knuckles brushed when passing a cup. Such clothes on any ordinary man would leave so little to the imagination, but he is another matter entirely. Rumpelstiltskin is a man, but he is anything but ordinary; he is a mystery. To peel away the layers of leather vest and silk shirt, and press her palms to what lies beneath, another shudder passes through her that reaches her toes. Do the scales increase in size, change color, become lighter or darker…softer? Not that she knows what they feel like, except for those on his hands. She wonders if, should she happen to fall from the ladder, he would to catch her, hold her in those wiry arms and let her rest her cheek against his chest. No, he is in no position to do so, would not be able to react quickly enough, and she does not favor the idea of breaking herself into pieces on the floor. She pushes aside the idea, for now.
Rumpelstiltskin licks his lips. If not for the fact that she has spoken with him, watched him speak, she would consider the idea of his having a forked tongue, which was indeed a rumor she had heard, entirely plausible. He licks his finger before turning a page in the journal and jerks his head up when a thick tome slams to the floor beside him. He swivels around to look up at Belle, whose hands are tightly gripping the ladder and whose cheeks are ablaze. No, he certainly would not have reacted quick enough to catch her. She mutters a jumbled excuse of losing her footing, deciding to leave out the part that she lost said footing because she was imagining that tongue caressing the shell of her ear, leaving a trail of saliva over her navel.
She thinks that other people must find him frightening. He is practically a rumor, a name that is spoken in hushed tones like a forbidden secret. To finally witness this man, with such stories circulating in mind, and his abnormal appearance, mixed with the discomforting panache that he so easily displays, one cannot be blamed for initially finding him unsettling. She admits that though she never feared him, she did originally share some of those thoughts, but no longer is that the case. It is all a performance, she can tell, one that he incorporates into his private life to an extent. When he is spinning at the wheel, however, the act strips away, and the showman becomes…just a man. Others may insist upon the contrary, but she sees beneath the scales; well, not literally, would that not be something? Even now, with no one to impress, because he has no interest in impressing her, he uncoils himself, leaning back in the chair and throwing his head back to stare up at her.
"Enjoying the view, dearie?" he asks, folding his hands over his stomach. His scales are ruddy in the twilight that glints off the expanse of his neck, skin stretched and taut, and dips into the hollow of his throat. She would like to follow that twilight with her tongue.
She swallows, feels that the heat creeping along her cheeks is not abating in the least. "Not at all. Your handwriting is too small and messy to read from up here. You should write bigger, that way I can discover all of your secrets." She smiles. She knows she is a terrible liar.
"And with whom will you share these secrets?" He knows she is lying. She knows that he knows. She wonders if he knows that she knows that he knows; she is certain that he does. Yet, with all of this knowing, she tries to lie anyway. Unlike him, she looks away when caught staring.
"No one. That's the whole point of secrets. They're secret," she whispers the last bit, one hand shielding the side of her mouth conspiratorially. The laugh in her throat burns to ash. It is a joke, and yet…it is not.
This is her little secret. She witnesses the beauty that this man possesses, one that nobody else does. All the more for her, then. She read once in a book that some creatures use their exteriors to make themselves highly conspicuous to potential predators, so that they are noticed, remembered, and then avoided. He all but exudes an air of darkness, pure magic, a warning that clearly states Look, but do not touch, which is exactly what she longs to do, a desire that she must keep locked away and swallow the key lest it break free and have its way with her. He repulses most, unnerves the rest, and goes about his deeds with a smile, a laugh, and a spring in his step that only increases their misgivings. In this way, he repels people, and they avoid approaching him until they become so desperate that their only other option is to lie down and die; and in the end, even if that which he offers saves them, they shall still pay dearly.
Her father paid in kin. She does not require much, except for perhaps the odd smidgen of companionship, which really is good for two lonely people to have now and then, and for which she pays dearly every time. She pays in stifled moans and wanton touches carried out by her own too-smooth hands at night, trying to extinguish a blazing heat that she never knew before living here. She had found novels that explored more raunchy subjects, witnessed touches stolen between members of the court, heard stories of passionate broom closet trysts, and before her engagement listened to tales of how Gaston had set many a woman's heart and lower parts aflame. Her betrothed would surely be jealous to discover that he never stirred any such sensations within her, while this man, this so-called beast, sitting beneath her awakens time and time again a deep longing to rub skin against scales, feel him pressing against her inner folds, and curl into his embrace. It is a primal need brought on by a primal sort of beauty. Alone in bed, she builds and builds that heat until she barely slides over the edge and softly tumbles back to earth, and it is not what she wants at all. She wants to be thrust into oblivion and shattered. She wants him to break her into fragments, piece her back together, and shatter her anew.
Belle is no stranger to snakes, happening upon them in the garden sometimes, watching them slither amongst the flowers, even finding the odd bit of shed snakeskin here and there. Does he perhaps shed his scales as well, peeling away dull, dry ones to reveal smooth, shining plates brimming with color? No, that is taking things a bit too far, she decides. Still, she wants to rake her nails down his back – she concludes that they must cover a great deal of him – and feel his scales give way beneath her ministrations, and tumble down her fingers in a shower of gold.
She imagines a forked tongue flicking out against her thundering pulse, hidden fangs puncturing where shoulder meets the column of her throat. She draws nearer with every encounter so that her eyes may drink in the sight of his captivating features, but she is no fool. She remains fully aware of the danger, that he is a predator, and that no one, not even she, is exempt from the category of prey. That previous display of dominance, not meant for her eyes, is only a reminder of the venom he carries, the intensity of the being she serves. Still, she needs a hobby, and organizing dusty tomes is not holding her interest nearly as much as the idea of dallying with danger.
Rumpelstiltskin simply sits there, watching, seeing all these thoughts flash across her eyes. Neither he nor Belle moves, each taking in the inverted view of one other. She feels as though he is reading her as easily as he reads the ancient tomes in the labrary. Speaking of books…
"Pass me that book?" She gestures toward where the tome still lies on the floor; or, where she thinks it lies, as she has yet to look away. Be brave, a tiny voice chants in the back of her head. He twists his body, slides from the chair, and sweeps the book into his hand, never tearing his eyes away from hers. He climbs a rung or two, offers the book for her to take. As her hand cradles its spine, her fingertips rest on his knuckles. He does not immediately relinquish his hold, the corners of his mouth twitching.
Her breath hitches.
He must know.
After all, she is a terrible liar.
Hope you enjoyed :)