Belle wakes up the first day to the foreign sound of firm steps coming and going at the other side of her bedroom's door and a burst of noise from the patio that make her still sleepy brain jump to the conclusion that they are once again under attack. She rushes to the window with her heartbeat drumming in her ears, just to watch what seems to be the local traders bringing all kinds of food to stock the manger.
There is a lot to do, apparently.
A whole lot more than Belle had ever contemplated before. There are people chopping tinder and piling it up, people tending the gardens and sweeping floors, people tending the stables and preparing them to accommodate animals again. It seems only logical that a regular castle full of actual living people with human needs would take far more work than an empty, cursed one, but she feels like she has been taken away from her home once again.
It is mildly confusing. It is also discouragingly lonesome.
She dresses herself without any comment from the wardrobe in the room and decides to skip breakfast and head straight for the library, her library.
The castle seems to be suddenly too crowded, crowded with people that Belle doesn't recognize. She walks the known hallways, climbs the familiar steps of the main staircase, greeting people who smile at her with great familiarity even though she can't put a name to any of their faces.
Sometimes she hears a voice and the distinctive imagen of an object comes to her mind before she turns around a corner and finds a person she has never met before.
"You are here," she hears him say just after closing the library's big old doors. He sounds nervous and unsure, and so, so familiar that her heart bursts with a mixture of happiness and longing. "I thought you'd probably come here."
She turns around and doesn't immediately find him. She takes a couple of tentative steps further into the room, looks around the light and shadows of the bookshelves, and when she still doesn't see him she walks towards their usual reading spot. It wouldn't be a hard task to find him if she wanted; there are not so many places for him to hide unless he had somehow shapeshifted into a book overnight, which is — not unexpectedly — a slightly distressful thought.
"Are you hiding from me now?"
"Not hiding. Just out of plain sight."
She smiles. "Fair enough. Then I'll indulge your sudden shyness by sitting here and looking only at my book." She walks towards the armchairs and picks the book that waits for her, half-unread, on the side table.
" It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now," she begins to read out loud, " so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am." She can hear Adam's soft steps getting nearer and by the corner of her eye she sees his boots as he approaches the other armchair and sits. " Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."
He groans audibly. She can imagine the fastidious frown of his face but she doesn't look up just bites her lower lip and tries hard not to laugh."
"You have an appalling taste in romance novels."
"Says the man who seems to have already read them all," she teases. She longs to rise her gaze and look into his blue eyes. She wants to touch his face, his arms, his hands and learn him all over again while she already loves him.
"I have read them, but I didn't enjoy them."
She looks at the windows that shine reflecting the morning shine, like in a dream, like in a fairy tale. "Then what do you recommend I should read?"
"You should only read what makes you utterly, unambiguously happy," he says with evident fondness. "Even if that is a novel with a terrible plot about spoiled teeneagers fancing themselves in love and ruining everything."
His scorn makes her laugh, makes her feel warm and at home.
"Can I look at you now or are you too ashamed of your dashing princely looks?"
There is a pause, long enough so that Belle starts to get nervous.
"I know how strange it all must be to you," he starts, his voice as gentle as she has ever heard. "My only intent is to contribute to it as little as possible."
She ignores his reservations and turns her face to look at him. "I love you," she declares boldly to his familiar, intensely blue eyes. "I know it was implied in breaking the curse, but I wanted to tell you."
If she were looking for a reaction, Adam's quiet and thoughtful sigh would have most certainly not be the one she expected. This artificial calmness is almost as strange to her her as his new features, still she recognizes him in his voice, the way he carries himself, the rhythm of his breathing or the undefinable way he looks at her.
"I don't want you to feel obliged to stay."
He sounds too composed, almost sad but she has a hard time hearing it over the deafening throbbing of her own heart.
"Do you want me to go?"
He sighs again, but this time he seems to take all the oxygen in the room and when the air leaves his lungs, it does it loudly and full of quivery emotion. He takes her hand, softly, as if afraid that she will run away at the warm contact of their skins.
"I want you to be able to choose freely," he says, his voice trembling slightly.
Belle has read her fair share of romance novels but she had never read such a beautiful, blatant declaration of love. She smiles, so broadly that her cheeks almost hurt, and turns her hand to entangle her fingers with his.
"I most definitely love you," she murmurs, but the words get lost as she leans over the armchair and kisses his soft, tender, human lips.
It bothers Belle how quickly changes become the new normal. The people from Villeneuve and other nearby villages suddenly remember the castle and its cursed inhabitants and just as suddenly, they choose to forget they almost tore to pieces their loved ones.
She looks at Miss Potts, walking cheerfully to the village with her husband in her arm and Belle wonders if a bad memory equals a clear conscience.
"They all seem to have forgotten Gaston," she says with just the tiniest bit of irritation.
His body was retrieved and taken care of without a fuss, discarded in a nondescript, anonymous tomb somewhere in the vicinities. None of his many followers have dared to go pay their respect, none of his many admirers dare to even utter his name.
Adam stops his task, which currently consists on maneuvering a big empty barrell as Belle works in the mechanism to make it spin on a controlled axis. He looks at her confused, with his sleeves and the legs of his pants rolled up as they both work barefoot in the castle's little pond and washing stones.
"And that distresses you?" His face reflects his puzzlement with the same quirks he used to before the curse was broken and Belle's skin tingles lightly. It always does whenever her body remembers how fond she is of him and not just how handsome he is now.
"They all seem to have forgotten they followed him in trying to kill you," she says with conviction. "And you seem to have forgotten it too." There is a difference between forgiveness and a blank slate that Belle feels is being completely overlooked. " That distresses me."
Adam resumes his task with the barrell, choosing to look elsewhere instead of at her. "They thought they were protecting themselves, and protecting you." His voice is calm and matter-of-factly but that is not how she remembers it all happening. "Sometimes a good memory is unforgivable." He deadpans.
"They acted like beasts," she says, angered. "Like bloodlust ignorants."
There is a sense of injustice that makes her tighten a screw with more strength that it is needed.
"That is why your plan to lend books from the library to the villagers is brilliant."
They have talked about that and about trying to encourage the villages to open up the school for girls too, like in Paris. They have also discussed other plans, the mechanical improvements she has designed, the places she would like to visit, the cities he would like to show her. Adam never sneer at her or her ideas, doesn't look at her like she is talking in another language or thinks her funny. He talks to her, ask her questions, points to the books he thinks she might find useful to her interests.
He is her true partner (he would be mortified if she even dared to think of using the term "soulmate") and she loves him deeply and dearly for that.
"Aren't you even a little mad?" she asks.
Adam shrugs, his golden hair shining with the movement. "I'm trying to be better than I was. Better than my father was." She finishes with the mechanism and Adam releases the barrel and it spins as it should. "I'd like to think that I've learned my lesson," he says with a content smile in his face as he contemplates their work.
"And what lesson do you think I should learn?" she asks with as much flirtation as she knows how to use without sounding completely ridiculous — which is not much, judging by Adam's raised eyebrow.
She kicks water in his direction and waits for the unexpected rain to catch on him before starting running towards the garden, laughing so hard she can barely keep up.
"Oh, I'll teach you a lesson alright!"
He runs after her. His guffaws don't seem to slow him down although they do startle the gardener. He takes her in his arms and makes them both roll on the grass, barefoot, unconcerned and happy.
The open ball is a success. Villagers come and enjoy themselves as foreigners from beyond their province arrive to pay their respects and renew relationships with the revived household.
Belle dances, and dances, and dances.
Her feet don't hurt nearly as much as they should given the little rest she has given them and her smile only falters when she catches the wet eyes of his father looking at her in that particular way that she knows means he is remembering her mother.
Fearless, he had said.
She wonders if he thinks her fearless too. It would not be a very accurate compliment, she is full of fears but she tries to avoid them giving her too much pause. She is scared of loneliness and not being a good person; she is scared of an unchanging life, she is scared losing herself in too much change.
Maybe her mother was fearless but she is far from it.
She climbs the stairs to her room with Adam by her arm, warm and solid as she leans part of her weight on him and slows their pace. Visitors have all either gone home or retired into their rooms, and the biggest part of the mess made during the festivity has already been cleaned up while they took a walk around the gardens under the moonlight.
"I think the ball went rather well," he says with just the tiniest hint of surprise as they arrive to the door of her bedroom.
"Did you expect otherwise?"
He moves in front of her, taking her hands in his. "Maybe not expecting it," he says rolling his eyes almost comically, "but dreading it a little with a healthy amount of anxiety."
Belle finds his distress quite endearing. He is a prince after all, quite charming and rich which grants him the good graces of mostly everyone just by default. She laughs softly and he tightens his grip affectionately. "Don't laugh at me. My last ball ended rather abruptly and unexpectedly."
Adam makes a face, baring his teeth and frowning in such an exaggerated way that she can only laugh harder and louder until he leans in and effectively shuts her up with a kiss that is soft and sweet, and way too short.
"Goodnight," he bids her, and Belle enters her room with a sense of unnamed frustration that makes her hands and feet run cold.
She gets in her bed and tries to sleep for the better part of an hour only managing to disarray the linens. She is too restless for sleep, her feet still uncomfortably cold while under the same roof and not far from her, Adam is sleeping and warm. Always so warm.
She makes up her mind and goes out of her room with her head high but without a candle. She owns her choices but she has come to find that she likes the castle more when it is late at night and underlit, it feels more like home.
Belle navigates the complicated hallway and narrow stairs of the west wing and when she arrives to Adam's bedroom she opens the door carefully and climbs into his bed without a second thought, scouting over until she can embrace his middle and lean her head over his chest.
He stirs minimally, sighs and kisses the top of her head without opening his eyes.
It's not the first time she does this, although all the previous times it was already morning when she would put her cold feet on his naked calves to wake him up.
"As much as I enjoy your company, I don't think your father would be too pleased to find you here," he murmurs against her temple.
"He would probably just shrug and proclaim me fearless," she cringes a little at the term. "Or maybe he would be outraged and demand that you marry me immediately. I've read it is quite the trick to catch a prince."
Adam gets very still. In the darkness of the night she couldn't make up his features even if she tried but his warmth and his smell are comforting and arousing. Her feet are no longer cold and she suspects she is blushing.
"You wish to marry me?" he asks. His tone doesn't leave room for mistakes, he is not proposing but genuinely wondering.
"Is that so surprising?"
"Well, I kept you prisoner and attempted to terrorize you for a considerable amount of time, so yes, I keep waiting for you to regain your senses about this whole situation and leave."
"I could have escaped after the wolf attack, when you were still weak and abed." She couldn't have, she has always been certain of this. "I could have escaped a hundred times after that. I wasn't as much of a prisoner as you think I was."
"Then why did you stay?"
She furrows her nose in his nightshirt. "At first, I wanted for you to acknowledge that I was free, that I was right and you were wrong." Her voice is soft but it almost echoes in the silent darkness. "Then I wanted to live an adventure. After that this place just felt like home."
"It is home," he says firmly, "for as long as you want it to be."
They are seated by the river, with their feet almost hurting from the cold temperature of the water, silently hearing the fishes splash as they try to swim against the current and reading.
"I am afraid to end up like my father," Adam states, like an afterthought but meant only for her ears, "spoiled, mean and tyrannic."
Belle lifts up her gaze from the pages of the book and stares at the running water for a couple of seconds.
"I am afraid to end up like my father too," she realizes almost surprisingly. "Trapped in a memory and longing for a partner."
He fills her bedroom with roses and proposes to her that very night.