A/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing! You guys are awesome! :3
~8~8~
"Sleep well, beggar?" Belle inquired in mock gentleness with a pleasant careless air as she sat in her main hall.
A wide, devilishly sinister grin etched upon her flawless features as he icy azure orbs scanned the dirty, mud caked mess of a human life standing at the far end of a wide polished oaken table. Her black strapped boots were propped up on the table moving back and forth to a rhythmic tempo only she could hear, as she peered mischievously at the ragged crippled figure.
The former spinners wiry hands were clasped tightly together before him and his head was cast down so that his straggly dirty chestnut hair curtained across his mud caked face; hiding most of his features. His gnarled crutch was under his arm supporting him in what little way it could without it being too torturous to stand in place.
He probably would have enjoyed a dry modestly warm place to sleep, even if it was a cold, hard dungeon, if he hadn't been painfully pacing, the small square cell nearly the whole night in worry and contemplation of his fate. What torment would she rain down upon him? What vile tricks would she beset him with to slowly fray and pluck the thread of sanity in his mind?
Smells of bacon and buttered bread that lay untouched before the nefarious beauty caused Rum's stomach to growl with hunger. While his body did yearn for something decent to devour he had no appetite whilst standing before the most powerful woman in the world, and in such a dire situation as well.
"N-not t-truly." Rumpelstiltskin admitted as he stammered and swallowed nervously. Beads of sticky sweat pricked at his tanned flesh and glimmered in the first rays of day like the droplets of crystal rain from the night before that now dewed the ground in sparkling gems of white.
A quiet chuckle emanated from the Dark Beauty as she absently picked at the meal of meat and bread at her leisure; ignoring the hunger flashing in his caramel eyes. "First things first, I suppose. What's your name my little beggar?" She asked with just a touch of amusement flitting the edge of her voice before taking a bite of the warm bread.
"R-Rumpelstiltskin…if it pleases your ladyship." The spinner replied faintly as he bobbed his head in a deferent small bow.
A sardonic grin, at his nervous respect, tugged at the very tips of her lips as she swallowed the bit of bread and swiped the flecking crumbs from her lush pink mouth and put her boots back unto the floor with a piercing purposeful heavy thud that made the beggar flinch in fear.
"Rumpelstiltskin." The beauty rolled the curious moniker off her tongue as if savoring it like an expensive new wine. "My that's quite a mouthful; what an intriguing but long and ridiculous name. But no, it does not 'please your ladyship' for I don't think I shall every recall something so tedious to mind." Sighing, the Dark One arose gracefully; her head shaking faintly causing her russet curls, glossy in the suns first intrepid rays, to tumble down her shoulders. "No, no I will simply have to dub you Rum for short."
The beggar fought hard not to heave a sigh of relief at her sly words and the easiness in her fair tone. If she was to give him a name then perhaps she didn't have any dastardly plans to slowly flay his skin from his lanky body or any other agony to wail mercilessly upon his flesh. "By your will, milady." He nodded timidly in acquiescence.
Perhaps there was a chance she was in a favorable mood and mayhap release him no worse for wear to limp through life along his beggarly way. It was a flitting fancy to say the least, but the thought calmed his nervously drumming heart to a milder tattoo.
"Now, this is what goings to happen." Belle stated in a poisoned sweetness like that of a viper as she traipsed around the table to the other end where the filthy cripple stood shakily upon his knobbed crutch awaiting his fate. "Since you so rudely barged into my vast estate and stole my food, and I have no doubt you would have taken anything that wasn't nailed to the floor to sell and give you a bit of coin at a market, I have decided the only way you may pay off your crimes is undoubtedly in flesh."
Flesh. The one sinister word she drawled so pleasantly nearly made his good leg give way in fright. His head shot up at a cracking speed that jarred his neck, as his maple orbs widened with stark, hot terror at the implications of death and torture at the sorceress' hands.
Belle laughed cruelly at the flagrant panic suddenly swelled up inside the mendicant, but shook her head as if reading the thought that screamed through his brain. "Calm yourself, beggar, I do not speak of torture. As amusing as the thought is, you will be more useful to me alive." Before the vexed spinner could even dare broach a question to her meaning, the deadly beauty clamped her hand about his left wrist tightly in a death grip.
Rum tried to pull away, an alarmed cry of fear erupting raggedly from his lips, but the beauty held him faster than any chain could. Her delicate, spell charged fingers glowed a faint crimson and curled over the wrist until a heat like that of a forge simmered and hissed from her grip.
Tears that felt cold in comparison to the boiling heat burning around his wrist pricked the beggar's shut eyes, though he fought to press them away. In mere moments it was over, leaving only a tingling lance of pain shooting through his arm every now and again as her hand fell away from his wrist.
"W-what did you d-do to me?" He asked anxiously as his free hand rubbed the scorched wrist that was still warm to the touch but not like the fire it had once been seconds before.
"It was only a simple spell to let others know who you belong to in the supremely unlikely event that you manage too escape the Dark Castle." Belle revealed freely with a careless shrug. "You see from this moment on your whole life belongs to me. From your crimes you do pay in flesh and blood and sweat and muscle to forever be in my thrall."
"A-a slave you mean." He concluded quietly, though it sounded very close to an awed question.
The dangerous beauty grinned nastily as she offered him a laconic nod. "You're not as dense as you seem. Of course that's what I mean! Oh but do cheer up, if you think about it this is actually much better than any other outcome you might expect. Any king or noble who would have caught you pilfering their things and traipsing about there castles would have had you drawn and quartered or fed to war hounds for your intrusion and thievery."
"But…but you can't do this!" Rum began to protest; momentarily throwing his humbleness to the wind as he found himself caught up in the throes of the shock of his fate.
He was a free man, not a conquered prisoner taken in war as a slave or a man who sold himself to a life of drudgery in hopes that it would be a better life than the one he led. Before he could get another word out a pain like a bolt of lightening rattled through his body taking him to his knees in one agonizing blow. Shocks of icy then fiery pain crisscrossed his formed and stabbed at his insides; boiling under his skin then dousing his fevered blood in a icy chill where he wasn't sure to curl up and wither in heat or shiver violently in frigid tremors that assailed his emaciated body.
Cry's for mercy exploded from his mouth as the pains engulfed his very form and stole every hard fought breath away from his burning lungs that convulsed and clenched to prevent any singular deep breath from leaving or entering his tormented figure.
Belle chuckled darkly as if reveling in the sudden lances of torment she caused upon the poor spinners form. The beauty plucked at a few stray granules of dirt under her expertly manicured nails, painted in a gaily tinged blue, as she left him there writhing in pain for a moment to get her message across.
"Rest assured, my dear beggar, I can and I will. Not only would no one step in to dispute my ownership, you can't prove you did not bargain your life to me." She retorted with a bored yawn before snapping her digits to furl back the pain.
Hard gasps dribbled out of his mouth as his limbs shook tremulously. He had never felt anything like the torment rattling through him only moments before. A part of him only wanted to kneel there and drown in the sorrow of his new lot in life or beg her to reconsider making a weak cripple a slave.
"But I thought you were renowned for your bartering! Why not make a deal with me?" He asked pitifully as the pain subsided from his flesh and drifted as smoke upon the wind.
Harsh laughter met his spattered words of protest, causing the mendicant to flinch as if expecting another wracking shock of torture. Belle merely shook her head in false pity at her new toy, her mood back to amusement in a startling eye blink. "Do you actually have anything I want? You live in penury and yet think you have something to strike a bargain to me with?"
Rumpel's head fell lower to his sunken chest at her cruel easily dealt words that lashed him like a whip; the words, no matter how vile she growled them, were correct. In order to make a deal one certainly needed to have something the other wanted and all he had was his crutch and the rags on his lanky frame; neither of which he was positive held the least bit of interest or value to her.
A sharp, all suffering sigh suddenly burst from the Dark One's lovely lips as she grabbed him by the dark brown muddy rags crusted and clinging to his body to hoist him back to his feet and jerk him from his contemplations. "On your feet you pathetic vagabond." The Dark sorceress snapped as the mendicant landed on his own two feet and yet hissed in the pain from his oddly angled leg.
If she had even noticed the mangled limb, she never said, but circled him slowly, one hand stroking her chin in thought as she spoke aloud to herself. "Very thin, scrawny but with a bit of sinew; weak I'd wager. Nothing a few hearty meals cant mend. I can't have him tracking mud so he'll need a new set of cloths and most defiantly a bath…or three to get rid of all that dirt and grime."
The former spinner kept his head bowed as he fought not to tremble each time her hand came in contact with his skin to inspect him. He had never felt so humiliated in his life standing there for her to see of he was fit enough for whatever she wanted him for. She peered and pulled and studied him as if he were not a man but some cattle or furniture she was about to purchase, filling him with embarrassment and shame all at once.
Once the sinister beauty was satisfied with her thorough assessment of her new trinket the vile sorceress took a smooth step back and stood in front of him, a large smile etched across her features. "You'll do perfectly. Now as for your duties, you will serve me my meals clean the castle, make any little repairs here and there, and tidy up the estate ground until it doesn't look so beastly." She stated in a chipper tone. Then, like a threatening storm cloud drifting over the sun, the sunny mood vanished into a black shadow as her azure eyes pierced him like twin pools of blue flame. "Do you have a problem with any of that, beggar?"
Rum shook his head dutifully, if not a touch frantic with the motion, knowing full well what kind of pain she could bestow upon has form if he dared protest. If there was one thing the spinner was learning at an alarming rate it was that the Dark One had a hair trigger temper that changed as easily as the breeze on the open waters. "No problem. I-I understand, mistress."
Quite suddenly, the beauty lifted his chin in one hand so that his warm maple eyes met with her shards of icy blue. With a smooth flourish of her hand, the beauty knocked aside the veil of straggly dirty chestnut hair from his mud stained features, almost gently it seemed, to get a truly good look at him and to inspect his dirty face. "Hmm, not wonderful, but surely not terrible to look at. Once you're cleaned up and out of your rags, there might actually be a decent looking man under the lice and the muck. I think…yes you'll do adequately." She murmured to herself thoughtfully.
"Do what?" Rum dared ask, his voice strained and cracked with her being so near and unable to escape her grip unless she willed it so.
"You shall also warm my bed when I'm in the mood for it, of course." The vile beauty replied matter-of-factly like it should have been the most obvious thing in the realms as she swiped her hands clean of the flecks of dried mud.
A faint nervous spatter of a paltry laugh that departed as quickly as it came, fell pathetically from the spinners lips as he turned his eyes down to her polished boots, unable to keep his gaze locked to his betters.
Surely that had to be a jest of some sort from the nefarious beauty? A quip at least meant to perhaps banish away some of the terror that had built up within as he learned of his fate?
"Do you think I'm joking?" Belle snarled, taking away any frail touch of humor Rum possessed. " When I am in the mood for you will be at my side. I will bed you whether you damn well like it or not and don't think for a second I can't make you do anything I want."
How could she possibly mean those words! Rum pondered, flabbergasted that she would even consider to take him to her bed. Just the thought disgusted him and caused his insides to roil angrily with gall and bile. It wasn't that he abhorred women. No, he was indeed attracted to the female persuasion, but no matter how pretty she might be the fact that the woman in front of him was the notorious Dark One simply made him shrink at the thought of coupling with her.
She might have been lovely on the outside, but she was pure unabashed darkness festering on the cold inside, that somehow seemed to permeate and slime and scale over the loveliness where all he felt was revulsion and nausea when he looked at her flawless features that peered back at him with a startlingly indigo intensity.
There had always been tales told of the beautiful Dark One's sickly gorgeousness that was compared to a black wilting rose or the beauty of a corpse of a young woman found at the bottom of an icy river still in the bloom of life caught in an eternal pallid sleep. Disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing as some of the bards who dared utter tales of her deadly venomous grandeur put it.
Rum only nodded dully at her words and the dangerous glint in her cobalt orbs that warned him more than any pain ever could not to dare speak another word about it.
Clapping her hands together once in glee the pressing danger that was there not a split second before banished back to what might have been considered happiness. For the second time, the spinner noticed her moods came and went with an all too ready ease that caused him to go rigid in fear. "Well then, come on I'll show you to your sleeping arrangements."
"I-I won't be sleeping in the dungeons, Mistress?" Rum inquired, confused as he limped as fast as he could behind her.
The beauty chuckled faintly as she turned down a long dark corridor void of any light, save a small guttering flame nestled in a scone that seemed to be suffocated by the blackness that the spinner remembered from the night before that led to the grounds.
"Heavens no, the dungeons are three miles below the castle foundation in the Abyssal Caverns. If you could even find your way through the twisted maw of darkness I'm not certain you could escape every ravenous creature prowling the blackness of that labyrinth." She waved her delicate hand dismissingly at him as she fluttered her fingers to allow the main gate to swing open revealing a bright cheery world of morning after a hard storm.
Not a single threatening cloud dotted the endless expanse of light blue as the sun slowly crawled to its domain high in the azure firmament. The hazy golden rays showered down upon the vast estate making the drops of rain from the night before glimmer like diamonds upon the leaves and intricate spider web that laced the branches and blades of grass so that the whole expanse was alit with faceted jewels bedecked upon the earth.
Rum might have stopped to stare and loose himself in the beauty had his attention not been more focused on his new, extremely volatile mistress who paid the glorious morning little heed.
"No, nothing like that I'm afraid. Instead you'll be sleeping in the stables in the stall right next to Brimstone's." She finished as the vile Dark One gave him a vague motion for him to follow.
"Brimstone?" The slave asked curiously as he limped stalwartly through the sordid mud and filth.
The beauty didn't deem to reply, but sauntered down the winding pathway that led to the stables, her boots never even touching the coppery red tinged mud that disturbingly reminded the beggar of the blood stained ground in the ogre wars that had turned the dust and dirt to mud with the gut churning amount of blood spilt.
The dark thoughts of those days, whipped with out clemency in his mind causing pain to bloom across his face as the images of hacked and dismembered bodies strewn far and wide and grievously injured warriors laying in dark red pools of their own blood and muck screaming for the pain to end resurfaced in his head. Thankfully, the scenes of long ago fell away as quickly as they came once the beauty reached the stables.
The rather small building was crafted of the same drab gray stone that was layered upon the fortified castle, and yet stood aloof from the castle with only the small dirt, now mostly mud, path they had trekked connecting the two buildings.
It was simple, but expertly built like the Dark Castle and even had some carving upon the stone that was worked to look like a galloping herd of horses racing with the wind all along the base work. There was beauty to be had even for a stable, yet the spinner still had to wondered why it was crafted of stone that would make it cold in the winter and not wood, as his new mistress opened the thick oaken doors with dark iron bands across it that seemed fit more for a dungeon than a simple stable.
As the cripple scurried inside after his owner, his mind still pondering about a slew of odd things just from the small walk from the castle to the stables, it became quite frighteningly clear why things were set up the way they were.
Brimstone was an aptly named…what might have been considered in some hellish fashion a horse. The beast towered over the pair with at least another torso taller than the spinner, and had hard flecked eyes of the darkest iciest night ever to fall upon the realms. Its mane and tail seemed to be made of spidery wisps of blackness incarnate and despair spun by some sinister arachnid that flitted about with each stamp of his grooved hooves that burned like the embers of a fire, and shake of its massive body. His thick coarse coat was the color of a moonless starless night that threatened the presence of a disease ridden death and from its large flaring nostrils churned foul black smoke as if a fire was alight in its belly.
"This is Brimstone." Belle stated obviously, her voice laced thickly with pride as she patted its nose tenderly. "He's faster than the winds of a gale and stronger than 70 men."
Walking over to the empty stall beside the beast torn from some nightmare and stolen from some vicious devil the beauty kicked at the little door to the bare bit of space. "You'll sleep there. You'll also feed Brimstone his daily charcoal before you come to the Dark Castle to begin your chores." She ordered as if the horse was not the stuff of terrors come to life.
The mendicants chestnut orbs never left the horse that stared at him murderously with the chips of black ice it called eyes. A part of him was beginning to wish she had chosen him to sleep in the dungeon.
"Now you will have a fresh set of clothes and you may wash yourself in the spare trough in the back of the stables" She continued no paying any mind to the wariness and poignant fear her new slave exuded.
With a sigh, as if she had been forgetting something irksome, the beauty turned back to face the cripple; her arms crossed as she peered at him. "Oh and I suppose I'll just have to fix that mangled little leg of yours so everything you do won't take forever."
With a snap of her delicate fingers a crimson haze encircled his bum leg that had been useless for over 15 years. The spinner watched amazed as he felt the twisted flesh and sinew and muscles all going back into its rightful place and snapping back in line like a wound had never been there to begin with. And for the first time in those long, long, years, he felt no pain streaking up and down his limb.
A thin, modestly satisfied, smile wafted across Belle's pink lips as she nodded at her work. "Good. Now you'll start cleaning this mess of a stable and if you finish before noon you may have lunch. Now get to work."
With that she turned upon her heel and lazily traipsed out of the stables, leaving the shocked spinner numb in place as he flexed his restored limb.
No more limp, no more pain, no more Rumpelstiltskin the worthless cowardly war cripple who got his just desserts by running from a battle.
His shaking calloused hand smoothed across the flesh and squeezed the muscle tightly beneath; feeling the ligaments and tendons come to life as his nails dug into the skin.
The scars that were, ugly and brown and upraised and thick still decorated his appendage as guilty proof of his cowardice, but what did it matter when he could use it once more!
He wanted to thank her, even though healing him was mostly for her own gain; thank her until his voice was hoarse and he had no breath to exert out of his body. His head turned back to the stable doors just quick enough to see the last flitting strands of his mistress' amber honey tresses disappear as he massaged his healed leg in awe. A small grateful smile bloomed upon his face as a sigh pierced his lips and he prepared for his first day at forever.