Roses-A Beauty and the Beast One-shot
He had never liked flowers. They were too fragile, and seemed too innocent. But most of all they reminded him of the mother he had lost. They had been her favorite flowers-Roses I mean. They had been her true babies in his mother's life-not her growing son. But all the same she had been his mother nonetheless and most of the memories he had of her were bathed in a positive glow. He had been only eight when she died. A bout of pneumonia caught her on a brisk spring walk and she was gone within the month. His father died a week later of a 'broken heart". That was the polite term for it. The young Prince was devastated for months. He never fully returned to the child he had been. He took his sorrow out on his servants, verbally abusing them, decreasing their pay, and firing them for no reason. By the time his 11th birthday rolled around he was a full blown jerk. So on that fateful night when the crone came to his castle, he turned her away as he was used to doing. How was he supposed to know that he would transform him into this…this…Monster! What she had done to his servants was also cruel but he felt they deserved it more, after all it was THEIR fault. What she had done to him emotionally though was the worst of all. He may have actually let her into his castle if she hadn't been holding THAT flower. He couldn't bear to let a rose in. After his mother's death he'd had them all destroyed, but now that the spell was in place they were everywhere! It was like a peculiar form of torture. The napkins had a border of roses at their seams and the china was adorned with them. Roses were seen at the bottom of the poor men turned into beer mugs, under Lumiere's base, and even stamped onto the back of Babette's head...errr…wood. It was as if the witch was stamping them…marking them…claiming them as hers-Not the Beasts. Then there was the biggest embarrassment of them all. The cursed flower the witch had offered was the hourglass of his curse. He despised it so much he could imagine ripping it apart, but he knew it would be a certain death sentence if he did. So trapped in this life he stayed. Afraid of dying, afraid of changing. All because of a rose.
