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"I love him. All of him. Even the parts that belong to darkness."
- Belle French, Quiet Minds

Belle absently traced the tapestry to her side as she rested on the make-shift bed at the back of the pawn shop. Sunlight was pouring through the windows, over the tables and housed baubles. It saturated his irises, making it seem as though the sun were shining through the glass of an elixir bottle rather than living organ. His gold tooth was visible beside snatches of white. Under guise of tissue.

Time pieces sounded throughout the building, steady as a series of beating hearts. All that was suspended in the glow before the white shaded window seemed to fade into translucency. He closed his eyes as he hovered above her, sealing away a thought. She moved to press her lips to his lashes and down his cheek, her hands on his chest, a shoulder.

She could feel something inside him waver, almost shatter, as if it were weakened. A weakness that as she felt it she imagined in physical form as fallen leaves; ones made to fly in circles with the wind but never allowed to stray far from where they'd fallen. Trapped as if under domed glass; the aimless flight of captured moths.

Those leaves were in his lungs, the sweet darkness of his heart. Clusters damp and black, feted and cloying as the last days of autumn. They lingered there and made him whole. Their pulp bedding the cavernous walls inside. She could feel the leaves of his make in her hands. She knew their texture as she knew the spoils of the forest.

He was still the creature of the castle. His memories were the same. His dreams then, of holding her, loving her as now. Dreams, woven and potent; cast as a spell in his room late at night as the wind passed through the branches of trees. A spell that once cast was made to reappear in the darkness when he would walk the woods alone. When he would pass lands and towns as a ghost.

Questions had been posed then of what it would be like to truly know Belle's love. To be accepted by her. To hold her in his arms. A tremor that once realized he had quickly banished.

She could never want someone like him.

Now that he knew her in all ways, none of his imaginings could ever surpass reality.

His mind was a room of dried flowers and their stems. Hay, piles of bedding. Belle. Every speck of her. Through a lens tinged with flame, the ascending pearls, he leaned toward Belle, his warm breath on her skin as he came to rest at her neck.

Even over areas he wasn't near he seemed to be, as though with an enchanted knife he'd been cut through and made many to as a phantom graze over her with spindly digits.

The man at her side stirred and sent over her a shiver of expectation. "I love you." His voice was soft as the words escaped in a whisper, colliding with her skin as if smoke. He saw her beautiful eyes flicker as his words reached her. Something dark lighting up behind them. A previously unknown door opened briefly.

Her gaze of the dead sea, the blue of glass washed ashore, wandered over the movement he was unaware of, and she blinked again, attempting to drown out what was rising to her ribs. She'd recognized the strand he'd let unravel, the drop of blood. She saw a flash of sand, bleached bones. A house that didn't belong to her, one with white lace curtains and a window seat.

Nothing else mattered. They were no longer in a room, in the building. They were in the woods, the sea, the air. They were nowhere. Belle drifted, seeing green, blue and yellow trails of light move over the reds of her eyelids, flowing onward to plains beyond sight as the stains left. Her mind shifted to the past, her incarcerations. To moments in the past, when she had purposely stared into beams of the sun, to see souls dance when she closed her eyes. She thought of her hospital cell, the bed there, the ceilings, the walls. The inability to pass time in any way other than in silence. Nothing to ease her path in the twenty-eight years of her captivity. Memories of her favorite stories were not enough to serve her. Neither were memories of the past. Only love. Only hope that it could be known in whole again, some day.

He could feel her cold fingers as they dotted over the back of his hand. She felt like ice. Like tears unshed. Taking her fingers in his own, he kissed them softly.

She was thinking. Her eyes far away, narrowed, and she was unaccountably beautiful in such moments. She could conjure notions that, despite all his age and wisdom, he would never understand. At this moment he could sense a sadness mixed with the ocher tides, eased into its lake as though a key in a mix of a potion.

She unintentionally smiled, trying to fight her memories which seemed to show through her skin as if she were glass. A glowing white-blue pain thrumming within. Forging a wall around the pulse, she pushed it aside. She was no longer that woman.

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