AN: This is AU, dark. I wanted to take a serious look of the idea of no fairy tale endings which I think means a lot more than we think it does. Please do check out the musical selections with each chapter.
Never After
Prologue
À la fenêtre recélant le santal vieux est la sainte pale.
At the window concealing old sandalwood is the pale saint.
-Sainte by Ravel
Her bare foot dangles out of the sandalwood windowsill, as an autumn breeze tip-toes down the column of her neck to flirt with the folded corners of her paperback. She shivers, her fingers pressing down the page.
Once upon a time.
She often sits here on the second floor of the library, which is less of a floor and more of a indoor terrace made of windows, faded murals and books that very few people want to read. Comparative mythology is most certainly not in vogue.
She's not even really reading the book in her hand either. She doesn't have to. Know one myth and you know them all. Villain thwarted, killed, redeemed—kissed by true love. Happy endings or tragic catharsis, either way there are solutions. That's why people love fairy tales. They would give anything for an ending that makes sense, happy or otherwise. She would at least. In fact, she almost did. When there's a black hole in your chest and it eats every dream you feed it until you don't have any left, you tend to want to die.
She looks down from the window. It's impossible to see the ground below, because this corner of Storybrook doesn't have well lit streets. The library is a new addition to town. Her mouth turns in a way her father would call "touched." Even before her quirks grew cancerous Belle was never quite normal, and there's only one kind of person who looks at a fall with fondness.
One who has jumped.
It's one of the last things she remembers before being locked up, walking past her passed out father on the couch on her way to the bridge, not caring as the tips of her blue slippers got soaked through with wet autumn. She didn't even look down before she pushed off the ledge, because she never really cared for how things appeared to be.
She should have though. Maybe then she would have realized what a fool she was to think she could defeat gravity by falling.