Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me. Nor does the whole second paragraph.
Dedication: To Sara (Dictionary Ink), of course, who completely inspired this story.
Notes: Okay, I know it took forever, but SURPRISE!
Title: little prince
Summary: You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one would die for you.
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I am four, and this is one of my earliest memories. My brother, Prince David, at eleven years is a keen reader but a withdrawn soul. With servants who do not but irritate, a mother more concerned with raising her precious rose garden than her children, and a king for a father whose visits are few and far between, it is with this quiet and eccentric brother of mine with whom I spend the majority of my time. As such, much time is spent within our castle's womb: the warm library, cosy despite its size. It is where my brother's truest interests lie, and thus, where he is most at home and at peace with himself.
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' "I dare not let any one in, for the dwarfs have told me not." "Do as you please," said the old woman, "but at any rate take this pretty apple; I will make you a present of it." "No," said Snow-drop, "I dare not take it." "You silly girl!" answered the other, "what are you afraid of? do you think it is poisoned? Come! do you eat one part, and I will eat the other." Now the apple was so prepared that one side was good, though the other side was poisoned. Then Snow-drop was very much tempted to taste, for the apple looked exceedingly nice; and when she saw the old woman eat, she could refrain no longer. But she had scarcely put the piece into her mouth, when she fell down dead upon the ground. "This time nothing will save thee—" '
Adam interrupted the telling of the story with a heavy cackle. His brother knew it was coming, too, for this was the young and perhaps not-so-innocent child's favourite part of Snow-drop.
With a sigh, David inquired of him, "Do you remember what the moral of this story is?" The pause between words, now, was brief, but it existed nonetheless.
Shouting his reply (for Adam was always much louder than his sibling), it came out, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!" whilst he grinned like a scheming tiger.
Another sigh, this one with less bearing. "That was The Iliad. Try again?"
"It still stands. Snow-dropwas stupid enough to keep letting the old, ugly witch in. No wonder she died—"
"—She didn't die, in the end—"
"Fine. She almost died, not once, but THREE times! As if the freaky, red apple wasn't enough of a clue."
David had to admit that Adam was very well versed for a 4-year-old.
"The end lesson is still that love is more powerful than anything."
"And not to let strangers in your house."
"Okay, Adam, yes. That, too."
Yet, by the time I was six or so, I already had the household walking on eggshells around me. My tantrums would put Donald Duck to shame. My mother and our staff learned to avoid my wrath by simply giving me whatever I wanted, instead of choosing to actually deal with them. I was worth the queen's endless money, but not her time. This isn't to say she wasn't a good woman or sovereign, because she was, but she made an awful mother. So I went after the one thing she couldn't buy me—attention—in the best way I knew how; I tried to take away the one thing more beautiful than I: her roses.
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Adam's lower lip was jut out in a thick pout, his arms crossed tightly against his chest, and he refused to look into his mother's eyes with his own glacier-blue ones. Most importantly however, had to be his tiny, pale feet that were covered in sticky, muddy soil and numerous cuts.
"How DARE you, you insufferable, beastly, little child!" she screeched, a vein popping unflatteringly in her forehead. When Adam's stubborn ignoring of her persisted, she tried yelling louder. "I give you whatever you ask for, but nothing is ever good enough for you, is it?"
In the wide doorway, the tall, thin Lumiere took a step, looking to break up the fight, but his movement was brought to an abrupt halt. The more rotund Cogsworth had a hand on the other's arm, and he softly reminded, "It's not our place. We'd do better to help calm Prince David. Mrs. Potts has said that this fight is putting him into another one of his fits…" And so with a hesitated turn from Lumiere and a skipped heartbeat from Cogsworth, they left.
Alas, the queen's latest yelling had managed to loosen Adam's lips, opening those floodgates right up.
"Nothing's ever good enough for ME? Well take a look into that freaky, bewitched mirror of yours, for once! Your own children mean next to nothing, to you! And everyone knows you didn't even want me; I was backup, because David's turning into a loon!"
Needless to say, the argument raged on for a little while before Adam was sent to his room without dinner. There he sat in said room, in the castle's West Wing, brooding with nothing but his rage and all of those gifts he'd received over time—things he'd never truly loved. He broke every single one of them that was actually breakable, leaving his bedroom looking as if a stampede of wildebeest had torn through it.
After that, Adam always referred to his own mother simply as his 'father's consort', unless it was to her face. Even speaking to her, however, became a rare occurrence of itself.
Now, let me just say, there has always been something off about the wolves that roam out in the Black Forest surrounding our castle—as if they never have enough deer to hunt, or somewhere in their history, one of their ancestors had found a mate in Chernabog. They were vicious, had a bottomless appetite, and held no fear whatsoever.
As children, we'd always been warned against venturing out into the forest for fear of them, but my first one-no-one encounter was one I wish I could forget.
It's been thirteen years.
I had tried to run away; and while the consequence became unforgettable, the pathetic part is that my reason for the attempt was so menial that I can't even remember what it was anymore.
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The look of determination that his face wore was so common that it was almost his default setting. Nothing was going to stop him, this time; nothing was going to scare him, either. He'd planned for several long hours, stuffing a small pack chock full of cheese and bread, which he'd then tied to a long, thin branch and had thrown it over his shoulder. He looked akin to a badly prepared pilgrim.
Not that he knew where he was headed, but that never really mattered, did it? He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and he would arrive somewhere. Somewhere that wasn't home. And, as the grass was always greener on the other side, all would be well. He was a Prince, and he was handsome; what house along his trail wouldn't take him in?
Caught deep in narcissistic thoughts as he proceeded onwards through densely packed trees, the crackling of some branches broke him back into reality. Adam froze on the spot and his eyes shot around towards where he'd heard the sound come from.
He was Adam, and he was fearless, he repeated in his own head. The low, rumbling growl he heard next made him doubt that, though. By the time he caught the sight of glinting eyes, he had already dropped the pack from the stick slung over his shoulder and was holding it out in front of him as if he were king Arthur, and his stick a magnificent sabre, newly drawn from stone. But then there was a second pair, and then four… Previously unheard of, he gulped.
"Stay back!" he warned. Had the stalking wolves been hyenas instead, they would have laughed at how gutless the boy's cry came out.
Several things happened next that were so in sync and fast that it was barely comprehensible, especially in Adam's rising panic: the wolves lunged, and Adam was knocked from his feet, but not by them : something—someone—else lunged then, too. It was that thing, that sixteen-year-old boy, who was now the one being attacked as he acted as a shield for his younger brother.
Because of David, I made it out nigh unscathed, and because of me, all of the best doctors in the country raced in, quick as they could, to attempt to get the heir's innards back inside his body where they belonged. Even the King managed to make a trip out. They were all, however, too late. To be fair, I don't even know what they could have done, had they been there immediately; it looked like David's torso had met with the jaws of a (non-vegetarian) great white.
I never ran away again.
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"Hey kiddo, don't feel guilty," David whispered weakly on the last day of his life. "I never wanted to be a king, anyway. This is better. Being a street rat would have been better. But I will miss you."
The queen cried into the king's arms, Mrs. Potts and Cogsworth (who, in the way that Lumiere and Adam could almost be considered 'close', had become so with David) cried into Lumiere's, and Adam cried alone in his room, making sure that no others saw his weakness.
I had barely just entered an age-range with double digits when my mother said some words to me that I've never since forgotten. She was angry because, while I'd been born to become a king if my late brother couldn't rise to it, I had never been properly raised to be one.
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"Start taking some responsibility, young man! You're slacking off in your studies, and with every day you behave less and less like a civilized human being, and more and more like a wretched little beast!"
Adam had noticed by now how much she adored calling him that—likely because it proved so effective; with each subsequent use, it got that much deeper under his skin.
"In case you haven't noticed, your highness, I'm the least BEASTLY looking thing within these tall walls! What, with me Herculean face, it's a mystery someone like YOU spawned me at all!"
She drew her finger like a sword, the tip of her sharp nail an infinitesimal distance from the edge of his button nose. In a hiss, his mother said to him like a threat, "You are beautiful, but you are empty. You are no king; no one would die for you."
Hardly a year had passed when tragedy chose to strike again. My mother's foolishness and kind-heartedness proved to be her end.
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With the slightest invitation, the door burst open, pushed by the thunderstorm's wind. It opened to two men who were shivering, looking waterlogged and worn down to the bone. With them, they had a small caravan that seemed just as rattled by the weather as they were. They asked for a place to stay the night, until the storm passed, to which the queen gave a certain, "Be our guests."
"You are too kind, mademoiselle."
"Oh, it's nothing at all. Cogsworth, if you could set these gentlemen up in the guest room in the East Wing?"
"C-certainly, your highness!" At this, the two travellers exchanged a look, one that everyone seemed to miss—everyone but Adam, watching from behind a large suit of armour. He'd already decided that this was a very bad idea.
That night, Adam lay in his bed wide-awake, his ears perking at every creak or squeak they picked up on. And then came the crash. And another, after that, like the sound of a kitchen in an earthquake, it was metal hitting the marble, and Adam wasn't the only one who jumped out of bed. But he, along with all of the servants who heard it, had a longer way to go than the queen, and it was she he got to the scene of the crime first, and then became that scene.
Rattled by their clumsiness and the fact that they were caught red-handed attempting to steal many of the gold and silver artefacts the castle held, the visiting mens' first reaction became getting rid of that witness before anyone else saw them.
Wearing a grin as full of holes and malice as Blackbeard's, the one man came at her with a Chambriard knife and slid it through her throat as though she were one of Sweeney Todd's victims. With all the blood that projectiled out, she was lucky to be dead before she hit the ground. Booming, jogging steps swiftly followed the thud that came as she did so, as the entire household drew nearer.
Once more, the two exchanged a glance, also sharing a, "Zut, c'est le time to go, Claude," and then, "Bien sûr, Frollo."
They had to be chased out, but with their head start, weapons, and element of surprise (as the others discovered the queen's body), there wasn't a hope in Hades of them being caught. The pair ended up leaving their treasures behind, but to them escape was, appropriately, of a higher priority.
With this loss so soon after David's early passing, the whole castle fell into a melancholy. It was something that, again, Adam wasn't willing to let show; so, it was then that he truly started his reign of torment. Except, he didn't drift towards ordering his servants around—it was very much the opposite. The only thing they had left to do, what kept them from total boredom and purposelessness, was to clean up after Adam's increasingly frequent tantrums.
With both mom and David dead, my father's rare trips-in stopped altogether. The next and last visit I received from nobility at the castle came after the witch transformed and disfigured me. Those who came had only made the trip because my father had passed, and they'd come to collect their new king.
In the end, they wound up leaving me in peace, with the firm belief that the castle had become haunted; I must have been killed by whatever spirits had taken up residence there. The throne would be given to my cousin Louis XIII de Rémy, and the only real change that would take place would be the changing of the messengers' smock and tights (after, you know, I truly gave them a fright).
After them, the next visitor I got was Maurice, and the rest is history.
Now I'm twenty-two, a changed, while new, man, and most importantly, I'm in love. I felt the need to write my own story down so that I could get it out of my head; give me the room to close that chapter of my life and start this one anew. And boy, am I ever excited to go live it.
–Adam
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She sees him hunched over a desk, sitting in the sunlight that beamed in through the floor-to-ceiling window. With an overwhelming curiosity, Belle steps towards him, managing to do so more quietly than a hunting lioness. Even so, she knows he has to be in a deep concentration by the time she reaches him, fore she isn't yet noticed.
With her eyes moving to look over his shoulder, she can't help but to start taking in the many, fairly messy words he's written down upon the page of parchment. As such a practiced reader, she's soon at the end.
Eyebrows furrowed, Belle reaches down and sets a hand upon her Prince's chest; there, she feels his heart jump at the realization that someone is there with him. Her hand slides down to his own, larger one, takes hold of it, and then tugs encouragingly. Eased to his feet, Adam's brought further until he's in the kind of embrace with his wife that could evolved into a waltz.
She makes it known that one thing in particular stuck out from what she'd just read, when she says, "I would die for you."
Then, they kiss and finally get their Happily Ever After.
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The End.