25
Three times during his lifetime he thought he was losing his mind. The first one was when he killed his predecessor with the cursed dagger, and felt the onslaught of magic that came to change his body and reshape his mind, redefining the limits of possibilities, adjusting the sense of right and wrong, revaluing his place in the universe. The second one was when he went through the final stages of building his curse, while believing Belle dead; the agony he was living through was so fierce that it obliterated parts of his consciousness, rendering him unable to tell if he was alive or dead himself. The third time was when he woke up in the enchanted town he created and, while oblivious of his real identity and circumstances of his life, still experienced strange visions of the world he made himself forget, and they were so real that he had no way of telling whenever these things indeed happened or existed only in his imagination. Each of the occasions was painful in its' own way. Each one was a fight: to know himself, to control himself, to survive. Each time his mind was turned into a mess of confusing emotions and images, and he plunged in and out of madness, clutching at things he knew to be real and important and valuable: his son, his love, his dignity. Each time was hard, but each time he felt the battle wasn't lost; each time he felt he had it in him to eventually overcome the darkness. Each time he realized he still had a mind to lose, and that assured his victory.
Now came the fourth time, and it was different. The pain was here again, and the confusion became total, but this time there was no fight. There was nothing real or important or valuable any more – nothing to hold on to. His love was deformed, his dignity lost, yet he had no mind to acknowledge that. He has given in; the darkness has won, and he surrendered.
Each time in the past he thought he was going mad. Now he knew it. The difference is subtle, but tangible. While still fighting, the brain defines the fine line between what it imagines and what it knows to be true; delusions might be strong, but they are recognized as such. When the battle is lost, delusions become reality – they shape the world to their liking, infusing it with their twisted logic. There are no two realities for a madman: the one he lives in is the only one that exists, and any doubt in it makes him furious.
He was not mad, yet: he knew the real world existed. He would emerge from the dark, self-indulgent, pain-ridden, and lustful abandonment in which he wallowed, sometimes, and glimpse it – the actual truth, the enormous horror of his thoughts and actions. Yet those glimpses did not make him stop, or even want to stop. He was irritated by intrusions; he wanted them to be over as soon as possible. He wanted back into the red mist where things were the way he shaped them, where guilt was part of the gain, and pain was part of the pleasure. He wanted the moments of truth to seize happening: they were painful and pointless. He did not fight approaching madness; he descended into it almost thankfully.
He always wanted to know how it felt – to live for himself only, to have no obligations, no duties, no moral responsibilities to anybody. He never had a chance; first, he was too weak, then he was a father, later he became a slave to his need to find redemption. He had to fight for his life, care for his child, and serve the good people of the world he despised so that he can make this world bend to his will. Now he was immortal, his son was a grown-up man, and he needed nothing from people around him, so had no reason to even talk to them, let alone help them. He owed them nothing, and asked for nothing but to be left alone with the woman who drove him mad.
He has spent a lifetime searching for her, and another lifetime longing for her. He died over her death, and woke up with her return. He lived through despair of ruining her, and he came to accept what he was given. He realized what his mistake was, back there in the past – all his life, really. He always believed he would find a woman who will save him, change him for the better, fill his life with light. But why should he? What was he to expect anything so wonderful and glorious? He was nothing, and he deserved no miracles. But still he has got himself a miracle of sorts. Why, he has got everything he ever wished for. A pitiful and ugly man, he has got himself a voluptuous beauty. A bore and a prig, he has got a woman with a ready laugh and a heart for adventure. An evil and selfish man, he has got a woman who never questioned his judgment or his rights. A loner, he has got himself a constant companion. A man eager for affection, he has got himself a woman who trembled at his slightest touch – at his look, even. A man never appreciated, he has got himself a woman who accepted him unconditionally. And she loved him. He knew it – he felt it; something bloomed in this poor lost girl when he looked at her, a glow illuminated her features, her eyes cleared and shone at him. Her love wrapped around him like a physical thing; its waves lapped at him, touching him, trying to get in – not to change him, as in the past, but to warm him.
In her own damaged and clumsy way she was trying to build their bond. It was he who sabotaged her efforts. Not out of self-defense, as in the past. God knows he did not care for survival now, after everything he's done. God knows he was not afraid to die. He would have given anything to bring her back; he would have sacrificed anything, his power and his life included, for a chance to love her. He simply did not have it in him to love her as he loved Her.
Oh he did love her – he loved her with a bleeding heart, hurting at her fragility, amazed at her stubborn vitality, charmed by her directness, touched by her devotion, driven to distraction by her generous body and easy virtue. She was probably better suited for him, now, than she ever was when she was herself. His darkness did not weight upon her heart, did not oppress or depress her; she did not torture him with reproof, silent or outspoken, as she used to. But she also did not drive him to become better, and that – Belle's ability to give him strength to suffer for his own goodness – was what she lacked and what he missed. He was a man divided within himself, and it would not do to love just one part of him. Belle understood it, even though he cursed her love away: he did wonder sometimes if that curse he put on himself when she first kissed him survived after her return. It might have been broken; it might have disappeared silently, unnoticed, in the turmoil of feelings they both went through then. He certainly did not feel himself unreachable to love as he watched her smile at him across the city border – God, it was the last time they have seen each other, as themselves... He had no way to know the fate of this curse now, for this girl did not challenge it. She loved what he showed her, but he has learned a long time ago that his perception of himself was faulty: the real he was not the man he cursed, and Belle knew it, and that made her able to connect with him even through time and space. This girl's love for him, and his for her did not connect. They reached towards each other blindly, and the treads leading from heart to heart did not join but hang in the air limply.
It might have been easier if the women he loved did not share the same body. If she looked differently, he would have been able to see her true beauty – his eyes wouldn't have been blinded by the perfection she was before. Sometimes, as she slept, he'd lay by her side, and watch her reposed face. She was herself when she slept, and it broke his heart. He longed to touch her then, to wake her up with a kiss, but he knew that the instant she'd open her eyes his Belle would be gone. There was no true love's kiss for them; his kiss would not wake his sleeping beauty, but plunge her deeper into the magic slumber. So he would just look at her, as through a dark glass, and he would weep. And then she'd wake up, and turn her eager face to him, asking for a kiss, and the real nightmare would start, for the body he always found entrancing would call to him, spreading out before him, waking his darkest, deepest needs, tempting him to forget that the soul in it was different now.
This body was irresistible to him, always, but doubly so now that the girl who owned it was completely defenseless before him. He had power over her, and power corrupts. He who once castigated himself for thinking shameful thoughts of the woman he loved could make them as real as he pleased now, and there is no man born yet who could resist such a temptation. He could have had her any way he wanted, and he did. There was no room in the house or in the shop where he hasn't had her; as they were coming home from the bar on the first night he had her in his car, on top of him. The heavy scent of sex permeated the air they breathed; every place brought on a memory – of how he watched her go up the stairs, and stopped her, and had her pressed against the banisters, without facing her once; of how she fingered his spinning wheel, curious about it, and at the sound of her question ('Why do you spin so much?') he'd lost his mind and took her on the floor; of how he'd touch her between thighs as she sat at the kitchen table in her nightdress, and she'd look at him darkly, and reach for him under the table, and they'd sit there, eyes locked and fingers moving, until a shudder would come over them; of how she'd lay naked on his bed, and he'd touch her nipples with the golden top of his cane, and she'd tremble with the cold and want, and how her eyes would close, and lips part, and he'd move the cane down, and touch her where she wanted, and she'd arch her back towards him. And every time he touched her, every time he'd moan and she'd ripple and tighten around him, he'd think: 'What if she would have liked that, too?' And his memories and his shame and his grief would explode in him and multiply his lust, and there would be no stopping him. They say that sometimes when a man comes and comes, endlessly, there is no semen left in him and he starts coming with blood. He came and came, and he wondered if that would happen to him eventually. He wondered if he would bleed out for her, physically, as his heart bled for her.
There was no contradiction between his shame and his desire, his pain and his pleasure, his guilt and his abandonment; like snakes carved on ancient stones they bit each other's tails, entwined – they fed on each other. That was the world in which he wanted to stay. That was the bloody and fleshy and lustful and terrible world, which he accepted as his own. This relentless deadly longing was his reality, the one he earned, the one he deserved, the one he hated and loved. He was a beast in love with his prey, and he devoured her even though he knew her to be poisoned. The thing he loved was killing him, and he was killing her, and the horror of it was sublime, and the joy of it final.
One would have thought that fate wouldn't make him pay for such a terrible happiness. But it did, and the moment he learned the price, it was over. Everything was over. As he stood there in the cold sun listening to the good ones announce his son's death and shamelessly asking his help in the same breath – was there nothing sacred for them? – he felt his mind clearing, and his world coming into focus. There was a glorious finality to this world – his failure was absolute. He did everything he could and destroyed everything he could for the sake of this one goal – finding his boy. And he lost him again. He was not cursed; he was damned. That was no fault of any curse, nor magic of any dagger. It was something in him that did it. Everything he ever touched was soiled. These people. This town.
She.
They were worried, the good ones, they were afraid to die – they wanted him to save them. Didn't they realize? He was over, and everything was over with him. They were born because he made it possible, for goodness sake. It was not unfeeling of him to let them be destroyed now. It was an act of mercy. The world he created didn't have a right to exist.
Thus felt the Dark One as he looked into the cosmic vastness of magic he possessed but couldn't, ultimately, control. But an old man, a father who lost his only child, felt differently. He felt the weight of his humanity as he never felt it in his life. His body was centuries old, and now he suddenly felt his age. It took all his will, magical and human, not to collapse there, in front of the good ones. It took all his will to walk a relatively straight line as he felt their eyes on his back. As soon as he was out of their sight, he stopped, and leaned against the wall. The sea before him glinted in the sun. The air was fresh. He stood there for several minutes, watching the day blindly, not thinking, not even feeling the pain. There was nothing – his mind was empty. He was empty. Finished.
He closed his eyes, and saw a face – a face of a girl in a blue dress, smiling at him, her eyes full of wonder and love. 'Tell me about your son', she asked. 'I have lost him. There is nothing more to tell, really', he said. How right he was. There really was nothing more to tell then. There was nothing more to tell now.
He should have let her change him, back then. He should have let her do it, and none of this would have happened. The boy would have been alive, even though far, far away from him. Far away from him is the best place for anyone he cares about. He should have let her change him, and they would have been happy. She would have been happy. She would have had a good life. And now she was gone, and she was going to die with him – all because of him, all because he did not trust her.
The thought of her made him move, again. He must see her. He must tell her… Yet what would he tell her? She wouldn't understand. She can't, because he has turned her into a soulless plaything, and used her, and dared to call it love. The way she is now, she'd try to comfort him in the way she knows best. She'd kiss him, and he would not be able to stand that.
He would never touch her again. Not after what he's done to her and with her.
He walked into his shop, and met her worried gaze; magic was happening, the earth trembled with it, and she was always aware of magic in the past, and was sensitive to it even now – perhaps that's why she accepted the truth about his powers so easily and so eagerly. He avoided her questions, and avoided her touch, and she gave him a startled, worried, hurt look. Her look – that's how she used to look at him, when he was snappish. He took her into his arms then; he embraced her and let her head rest on his shoulder. She has been through so much pain already; he wouldn't let her die rejected. What did his shame matter in the face of her discomfort?
When the dwarfs came to rummage the shop and one of them gave him the potion that might restore her memory, he had difficulty stifling hysterical laughter. Oh the final, the brilliant irony of that – he, the Dark One, was offered a cure for his true love, a cure distilled by the Fairies whom he hated by his very nature – by the very Fairy who took away his son! If ever he wanted a final proof of his failure that was it.
He had no intention to use the potion – none at all. He would not stoop so low. He always was a proud man… He was a proud man, and where did it take him?
He was talking to her of empty things, he was giving her a drink – heavens knew she had a right to one, now. She felt his distress, and she was trying so hard to please him, and he felt her love, and was touched by her feeble attempts to look brave, and he pitied her so. And suddenly, for a moment, she looked so much like herself again that he couldn't stand it anymore. It was her, it was his Belle, with her magical eyes and her brave heart and her ability to accept and forgive and believe the best; how could he not see it in her before? Everything this girl did and felt towards him was the same that She felt and did. He once told her who she is, when she did not know it. How could he let his stupid magician's pride stand in the way of her knowing herself before she died? His magic ruined him. Now was the time to be human, and humble.
He restored the cup she broke, and wished his heart could be mended just as easily. He gave her the potion, and stood holding his breath, watching her change. And as she looked into his eyes, and knew him, it all came back. Their love flared in the room – the severed parts of the bond connected with an almost visible spark. And with it, the terrifying emptiness was gone – he was filled with pain, acute and physical, of everything that happened to him, today and ever. His unhappy childhood, his failed marriage, his failed fatherhood, his failed magic – his mutilated love. He failed in everything – he couldn't even die with dignity. But then he knew already that he couldn't die without her. He learned it here, in this very room, and he wept then as he wept now, for he felt her love then as he felt it now.
She came into his arms, she held him strongly; she was whispering something sweet. He pressed her to his heart and he let his tears flow into her hair. It did not matter what they said, it did not matter how long they could stay together; he did not mind the pain. The only thing that mattered now was that he held her in his embrace, and felt recalled to life.