Chapter 35

Hello once again! So glad you are here! Has anyone told you they were glad you were here today? Because I am so glad you are here!

As always SC Guest: SO glad you liked this last chapter. It's more subtle then I had anticipated when I first started writing but I am very pleased you have been catching all the nuance.

SO! This chapter is a little bit of a filler. I had to put some time between incidences so anticipate some really interesting stuff coming up. If the flashback feels a bit random it will all make sense in the end. I wanted some time to really feel the weight of what is happening to Adam. He is basically short circuiting. I wanted it to feel like something was really happening inside him and sometimes that takes time and a whole chapter surrounding his torrid thoughts. But I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Adeline is a beautiful character that I wish I could write a whole story about.

I am having so much fun writing this and I would love to hear all about how YOU all feel about reading it. Written reviews are the true source of love in this world!

Have a great week, everyone!

"All I Want" Kodaline

All I want is nothing more
To hear you knocking at my door
'Cause if I could see your face once more
I could die a happy man I'm sure

When you said your last goodbye
I died a little bit inside
I lay in tears in bed all night
Alone without you by my side

But if you loved me
Why'd you leave me?
Take my body
Take my body
All I want is,
And all I need is
To find somebody.
I'll find somebody like you.

So you brought out the best of me,
A part of me I've never seen.
You took my soul and wiped it clean.
Our love was made for movie screens.

"How is he?" Mrs. Potts whispered in a corridor where the other heads of house had met many times over the years. It was rarely used and perfect for plotting and secret-keeping.

"Ze same." Lumiere answered with gloom in his voice.

"And no one has any idea what could have possibly brought this on?"

Everyone shook their heads. Babette had her arm around Lumiere's waist and Chip leaned against the wall in contemplation.

"I don't zink 'e 'as moved from 'is chair in two days."

"He won't eat, I'll tell you that."

Cogsworth gave Mrs. Potts an incredulous look "Eat? He won't speak! He's positively catatonic!"

"What 'appened to 'im, Cogsworz?" Babette looked anxiously at the Major Domo.

"I wish I knew. He seemed alright after rescuing Gabriel and then poof! He's beside himself!"

"Do you think something happened with the boy he was not able to tell us?"

"Or something they brought back with them?"

"Like that chest the boy had." Luis interjected as if he had been a part of the conversation the entire time.

The entire group fell silent and looked back at Luis. "What chest?" Cogsworth asked with a measure of control in his voice.

"The...the one the boy went back for. The reason he ran off. He brought back a small chest with him and His Highness asked me to take it up to his rooms before returning it to Master Gabriel."

Again no one spoke, only this time there were several mouths hanging open in surprise.

As if trying to hold back an explosion, Cogsworth gave Luis an apocalyptic expression. "And you didn't think to tell us this...two days ago!"

"Well..I..."

"What was in it?" Chip asked eagerly. Now that it was being mentioned he did vaguely remember the boy carrying something on Adam's back.

Luis shrugged his shoulders. "I didn't open it. The Master said he wanted to examine its contents before returning it himself."

"Something has happened. Something that has made him this way." Mrs. Potts said with a hand to heart. "I have never seen him like this before."

"Yes, you have." Cogsworth murmured darkly.

"When?"

"After the first spell. When that horrid enchantress finished her nasty business. His Highness laid bloody and broken in his room for days. And when he finally snapped out of it...All hell broke loose."

There was silence for a moment as everyone remembered exactly what Cogsworth was talking about.

"I think this time is different." Chip put in with a thoughtful expression.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because this time...we're not waiting for some girl to show up and rescue us." He gave a coy little smile as only Chip could. "She's already here."

Adam could not have told you want day it was. Nor the hour or the room he was in or what his own name was. He couldn't have told you anything. He was lost somewhere. His mind was a hurricane of thoughts and feelings so powerful he had become numb to them. The sun had risen and set so many times he was sure he had drifted into some other world where there was no meaning to the march of the hour. He wasn't sure how he had gotten to his chair or how the ring now lay inside his breast pocket. He wanted to hold it. To examine it and tell himself it looked nothing like the ring he had given her on their wedding day. But he couldn't feel anything. It would seem that everything that made him soft and good inside had fled and left nothing but a hard stone shell in its place.

But in his current state of mind, it would seem he had occasion to dream. Why the same thoughts kept coming to his head, he couldn't tell you. Only that, it would seem, the horror and pain of what he had found had to be passed through, before it could be passed on.

Once, a long time ago. He had been twenty-four. He remembered how his birthday had come and gone and no one had celebrated because the search for the Princess was still continuing forth as if she had only gone missing the day before. Two years he had searched for her. Two long years he had agonized over the hope that they would find her. They had found the broken carriage and several bodies of servants who had gone down with her, but never her. They had never been able to find her body or any sign that she had existed. This alone kept Adam in a constant state of frenzy.

It was a few days after his missed twenty-fourth birthday that his Heads of House had found him in the cartography room. He had been pouring over a map of the river that had taken his beloved wife. It was there that Cogsworth, Lumiere, and Mrs. Potts had told him, in their bravest voices that it was time. It was time for him to say the words that would end his suffering. If only to give him some way to come back to them and be their Prince again.

The anger that had erupted from him that day had been reminiscent of his time as a beast. He threw himself into it like a man running toward a burning building. He had torn maps and books off the shelves, smashed every chair and heaved a desk so hard against the wall that it had ripped itself asunder as if made of ash. In that whole time he had not admitted it. His fingers broken with large cuts across his hands and arms, they had bandaged him up and allowed him to finally come to terms with his grief. What could have been days afterwards he had found himself wandering the library, believing that if he just looked around one more stack of books he would see her peeking out through the shelves at him. He never did find her. What he did find was a cold rear end from sitting on the floor and sore painful fingers that couldn't lift a page. That was where another she had found him.

She came around the corner and was so startled to see the Prince just sitting on the floor with a pile of books in his bandaged hands that all she could do was stop and stare.

"Forgive me, your Highness!" She gave a startled bow.

Adam gazed at her as if finally finding recognition in a world he no longer understood.

"It's you." he murmured and set his books down to reveal bloody bandages with reopened wounds underneath.

"Oh, Your Highness! Your hands! Allow me to call your man!" The woman turned to go and Adam reached out for her. "I know you..."

She stopped and turned back to him and nodded her head. "Yes, sire. They call me Adeline. I was the princess's abigail."

Adam swallowed and nodded as if he now remembered. "What do you do now?"

She paused as if unsure of what to say. "I am not currently enjoying an occupation, My Prince."

He looked down at the floor and then back up with her. "You could sit with me. That could be an occupation, if you wish."

Without questioning it, the young woman gently arranged her skirts and sat down next to Adam on the floor of the library. He looked around himself in confusion and then back at her. "I was trying to read a book...but I seem to have done something to my hands. She used to read to me...every day..." He glared a little at himself. "I can read to myself, I don't need her to do it... I just..."

Adeline calmly took a book from his stack and nodded her head. "I understand, Your Highness."

"There doesn't seem to be anyone left who does..."

"I am here...and I do." Came her soft and kind reply. And so, there on the floor, Adeline read to the Prince from every book he requested. She read until her voice was horse and the floor brought a chill into her bones. Sometime, as the night was waning away he interrupted her.

"What is she like?"

"Who, My Prince?"

"Belle." He murmured reverently.

"I think you would know much more then I would, Your Highness."

"Would I? I think I am forgetting her."

That was the saddest thing that Adeline had ever heard and she put on a brave smile before continuing. "She was the most wonderful person I have ever known. She was graceful and sincere. Always honest and compassionate at the same time. I would have liked to have been more like her."

Adeline had gone into a reverie and had not noticed the expression on the Prince's face as she described his beautiful wife.

"Was?"

Adeline stopped realizing her folly and looked at him in despair. She had only vaguely heard of the incident in the cartography room and did not know the extent of the Prince's pain.

"Sire, I did not mean-"

"Because it is a was, isn't it?"

"I-"

"Because...my wife...is dead..." It all came out in a hushed whisper and to Adeline's sorrow she watched as several tears streamed down Adam's face.

"Belle died that night. She is dead, she is dead, she is dead..." He murmured in a solemn voice. He didn't crumple or fall apart but in his heart he knew he had said something he would never be able to take back.

Adeline held his hand that night as he repeated those words more times then either of them could count. She had stayed with him until he could finally manage to put one foot in front of the other without slipping back into the darkness where Belle could possibly still be alive. She was kind to him and never flinched when he forced himself to say the words over and over again.

It was so strange to Adam that in this time when the world had turned upside down he would think of that lovely girl in the library and what she had done for him. How she had stayed. That was the first time he had been able to admit it. Made himself believe that the words were true.

And yet...here was Adam. He sat in a chair in the West Wing with a ring in his breast pocket that told him the truth. Told him that if he had just searched a little longer, waited and looked a little harder he would have found her. That the words he had spoken in the library were a lie and that the truth had been hiding from him in plain sight. And he could not bare it. He could not bare the loss and the pain of it. He didn't feel he deserved for it to pass on because...he couldn't bear to pass through it. And so he sat without moving and dreamed of long ago dreams.