Face the Mirror

Disclaimer: I do not own Beauty and the Beast or its characters.

Author's Note: This is a one-shot companion to my story "Kissed by a Rose." I recommend you read that first, despite its length, but if you want to just read this, then what you need to know is that it takes place in an alternate universe from the Disney story. In it, Belle was raped by Gaston and became pregnant before arriving at the Beast's castle. Belle and the Beast learn trust and love for each other as her pregnancy progresses, and eventually everything is set right. The Beast transforms back into human form (named here Alexander, and please don't harass me about canon names), and Belle gives birth not long afterwards to a girl they decide to name Guinevere. This story takes place immediately following the birth.

"Here, Master."

The man who had once been a Beast turned to look at his maitre d'. Lumière was holding out a neatly folded set of clothes. Prince Alexander could see a pair of dark breeches not unlike the tattered ones he still wore, a loose cream-colored shirt, stockings of the same color, and a medium-blue silk vest in the pile. The restored young man started to reach out, then paused. "Are they…"

Lumière's expression was unreadable, though if he had to guess Alexander would have said the tall man was trying to hide amazement. "I believe they will fit you." At Alexander's raised eyebrow, Lumière elaborated, "I checked."

This was no casual question, as only a few hours before Alexander had been a hulking, hairy monster and his clothes had been tailored to fit his oddly-proportioned animal body. While most of the things in the castle had been restored to the way they had been before the spell, the clothes Alexander had been wearing as a Beast had not altered themselves as he transformed from monster to human. These he still wore, and not only were they far too large, but they were also ripped and bloody—remnants of his fight with the murderous Gaston over the fate of Belle and her unborn child. The fight had nearly been fatal for both, but the Beast had somehow survived his mortal wounds by means he still did not fully understand. All he remembered was trying to convey to Belle his feelings for her at the last moment, and then darkness closing in. The next thing he knew, he was waking up again, fully healed—and fully human. He could only guess Belle had professed love for him, which had broken the decade-long curse binding him to the body of a Beast.

Of Belle's love he was certain, however. They had just shared their first kiss, while their newborn daughter Guinevere cried in Belle's arms. Well, the baby was really Belle's child by Gaston, a child of rape, but there was still no doubt in Alexander's mind that the baby girl was now his.

He shook himself, reached out, and took the clothes from his maitre d'. He let everything but the shirt drop to the floor, ignoring Lumière's frustrated eye-roll at his sloppiness. He held up the shirt.

"I think this might still be too big," he commented after examining the item.

Lumière looked puzzled. "No, Master, I think this will fit you perfectly."

"But—" Alexander stopped. He'd been going to say this shirt was too large for his human form, but then he remembered something. Earlier when Mrs. Potts had put her arms around him in a hug, he had noticed that he towered over her. Before the spell, he had only been an inch or so taller than her. He frowned. Had his human form somehow grown while trapped inside the Beast's body?

The prince looked back at Lumière. The maitre d' had always been taller than nearly everyone in the household before the spell. Alexander remembered how he'd hated having to look up to anyone, particularly a servant. Now, he definitely had to tilt his chin down to meet Lumière's eyes.

"Lumière…" he said. "Am I different?"

Lumière looked, if possible, even more confused. "Of course, Master. You have improved…remarkably. The lack of hair alone is—"

"No." Alexander shook his head. "I mean, from before. Before the spell. Am I…different?"

Comprehension bloomed in the other man's dark eyes. "Ah. I see." He seemed to be about to continue to speak, but then thought better of it. "Come." Taking the shirt from his Master's unresisting hands and folding the garment neatly, he placed it on a divan and led the way over to the wall. A mirror, restored from the slivers the Beast had broken it into, hung there impassively.

Realizing what Lumière had in mind, Alexander was suddenly nervous. Not because he expected to see the Beast again when he peered into the silvered glass, but because he feared what else he might see. He had no idea what image waited when he stepped in front of the mirror.

Lumière made an inviting gesture accompanied by a slight bow. "There is nothing to fear, Master. But you must see for yourself."

Swallowing hard, Alexander took the last step.

The blue eyes—the only familiar feature in the mirror—widened in shock.

"This is…me?" he asked, and the face there mouthed the words along with him. He glanced at Lumière helplessly.

"What a difference ten years makes, no?" Lumière said with a grin. "You were barely more than a boy when the spell was cast. And now, well…you see for yourself. Today, as I'm sure I don't need to remind you, is your twenty-fifth birthday. You are a young man, and you appear exactly so. Surely you did not expect that you would be fourteen again when the curse was finally lifted?"

"Well, no, but…I didn't expect…I didn't think…" Alexander trailed off. He stepped closer to the mirror, turning his head this way and that.

The face belonged to a stranger. When he had last seen it, it had been hollow-eyed and bony, with sharp angles to the cheeks, chin, and eyebrows, and a blade of a nose. A child's face on the verge of growing into something else. Homely, he had overheard one of the female servants whisper. Now everything was different. The boniness had vanished. This face still had strong lines, but they had changed so that he no longer looked miserable and angry. Which, he supposed, was accurate. He no longer felt miserable and angry all the time as he had in the years leading up to the transformation. He was indeed tall—he topped Lumière by several inches—and quite muscular, from what he could see through his shirt. Not as powerful as the Beast, but evidently still strong.

It was as if the spell had given him yet another new body. He was no longer the Beast inside or out. But he wasn't the human he had been, either.

He tilted his head sideways a little. No, this face wasn't entirely new. Amidst the changes were some familiar features. The straight, proud nose. The heavy eyebrows that could easily knit together into stormclouds. The shade of hair, a combination of his father's blond and his mother's lustrous red-brown. And the eyes, of course, the only thing that had remained the same no matter what form he wore. Eyes whose color he now shared by some miraculous twist of nature with his daughter, Gwen.

Gwen. Belle. Even in the mirror, he could see his face soften as he thought of them.

He turned back to look at Lumière. "I…no wonder Cogsworth didn't recognize me at first."

The maitre d' nodded. "You are different, Master. You have changed a great deal."

"But you haven't," Alexander said, voicing something that he realized only now had been bothering him since the castle's restoration. "You look exactly as I remember."

"Really?" Lumière joined the young man in peering at the mirror. He, too, turned his head left and right as he examined his face. He pulled at the corners of his eyes, looking for wrinkles. He flashed a cheeky grin at the mirror, and Alexander suppressed an eye roll and an impatient growl.

"It appears you are right," Lumière admitted after a minute of close examination. "I don't think I have aged one day."

"Why?" asked Alexander. "Why am I ten years older and you're not?"

"I cannot say, Master." The former candelabra shrugged, spreading his arms apart. "Who can guess why spells work the way they do? Perhaps it is because you were made of flesh and blood, despite your changed appearance, unlike the rest of us." He put a hand to his chest and sighed happily. "I must say, it is a blessing to feel a heart beating again."

Alexander had no idea what to say to this. Bad as being a monster had been, at least he had a beating heart and breathing lungs. He had never stopped to consider what life without those things would be like for the servants.

Lumière saw his expression. "Mon Dieu, Master, this is no bad thing. I feel as if I've been given a new lease on life. And I will certainly live ten years longer than I would have otherwise, to make up for these ten years missed."

This made Alexander feel considerably less guilty. Still, he felt compelled to say, "I'm sorry, Lumière."

"Bah," Lumière said with a wave of his hand. "As I said, this is no bad thing. The spell is broken, we are all well, and I have ten more years to court Babette! I could ask for no more. Speaking of which," he added with a sideways glance, "I should go check on her…and Cogsworth of course. The household will be assembled in the throne room to hear the announcement of the birth of Belle's enfant petite whenever you are ready."

He left. Alexander toyed with the idea of ducking back into the bedroom to see Belle and Gwen again, but Mrs. Potts had sounded very firm when she said mother and child needed rest. He did not like to tangle with the motherly former teapot; at her most firm she could be quite intimidating.

It appeared he had no choice. He went back to where he had left the clothes on the floor, and the divan where Lumière had folded the shirt. He bent and picked up the shirt.

In a moment of unusual amusement he shook his head at it. Lumière was right. Things had changed in the past decade. Ten years ago, Alexander would never have considered putting on his clothes himself, nor would Lumière have dared to leave him alone to do so. Thinking back, Alexander was not certain he'd known how to put on his own clothes before the curse. Someone had always been there to do it for him his whole life. Dressing himself was a skill he'd had to learn after the spell, as most of the servants did not have the dexterity or the size to do everything required. Lumière still picked out his clothes, particularly recently when he had begun wearing more than breeches and a cloak again, but putting things on had become the wearer's responsibility. Thus, Lumière took it as a matter of course now that Alexander would—and could—make himself reasonably presentable and come downstairs without problems.

Accordingly, Alexander removed his old Beast-sized clothing, feeling that as he did so he was stripping the last vestiges of his former life away. These clothes he left carefully draped over a chair.

Maybe later when he had some time to himself he'd burn them. Or throw them over the edge of the causeway so they could rot with Gaston.

It felt good to put on fresh clothes, even if he did fumble somewhat with the buttons and ties. His fingers were a lot smaller and he no longer had sharp claws to contend with, which was nice, but the difference made him clumsy.

He was almost stumped with the footwear. As a Beast he'd worn neither shoes nor stockings. However, he was able to puzzle the stockings out based on their shape. They could go nowhere else but his feet, and only with the heel facing down. It took some pulling and twisting, but eventually he was successful.

Lumière had left a pair of shoes out as well. Alexander eyed them dubiously. He knew he was supposed to wear them, but they looked so…uncomfortable. Finally he decided to carry them down to the throne room and put them on at the last minute. Cogsworth and Lumière could scold him if they wished, but he was going to ease into this new life as slowly as he could. And he had a feeling him walking around the castle in stocking feet would make an amusing story to tell Belle later. She cared about Cogsworth and Lumière's rules for proper behavior as little as he did sometimes. Just the thought of her smiling at him brought a smile to his own face.

Should he comb his hair? No, he decided. Suddenly he wanted to just go running out and shout to the world that Belle loved him, and he loved her, and they had a beautiful daughter. There was no time to wait. Full of energy, he sprang up and made for the door, shoes in one hand.

He did pause in the hallway to glance at another restored mirror. The strange face smiled back at him. It still didn't look familiar. Maybe it never would. Maybe he would always look in a mirror and be surprised by what he saw. Or maybe it would only take some time before he was used to seeing a tall, chiseled man in the mirror, not a scrawny boy or a hulking monster.

Belle didn't seem to care. She had known it was him, even after the transformation when she was half-conscious in the pains of childbirth.

"It is you," she had said.

If Belle could get used to a monster and then accept him as a man, then surely he could get used to looking like a man. It didn't seem as hard, somehow.

Alexander squared his shoulders and continued down the West Wing hall, managing to look and feel dignified despite carrying his shoes dangling from one hand. He tried not to ruin it by imagining Cogsworth and Lumière's expressions when he met them.

Author's Note, part 2: I have a few plot bunnies still kicking around from "Kissed by a Rose." This is one of them. Alexander mentions in the final chapter that he "doesn't recognize his own face anymore," which made me wonder about the first time he looked in the mirror as a human. How much he's changed would suddenly hit him in a new way.

The whole thing about the servants aging vs. the prince aging came out of a discussion on the Bittersweet and Strange forum, where we tossed around different theories about whether the servants age during the curse—or whether the prince does, the twenty-first year thing aside. After all, in the opening scenes of stained glass he looks like an adult. We aired a lot of ideas (up to and including time manipulation theories), and this was one I liked that fits with my own altered timeline of the curse stretching from the prince's ages of fourteen to twenty-five rather than eleven to twenty-one.

Again, please, please don't bug me about Alexander's name. Or at least read my explanation in "Kissed by a Rose" or "All Along" first.

Hope you enjoyed,

SamoaPhoenix9