Chapter 51
OMG EVERYONE! I am sooooo sorry it has taken me so long to update! I don't know what came over me! I will post another chapter this week to make up for it.
But here is this one!
This chapter was really rough to write. It's hard to wrap up a story line that could easily have been its own story on its own. Elizabeth was a really enigmatic character and was always going to be on the losing side. But I think I always liked her in her own way.
I also wanted to give their backstory a little bit. Some reason why they were they way they were together. And why it all happened the way I wrote it.
I also want to give fair warning that there is some talk of anatomy in this chapter. Specifically Adam's anatomy.
I'm still going on the original 1991 Beauty and the Beast timeline where Adam was young when he was cursed. It is just the one I have always been attached to. I want to think that as a Beast he had to make his way into humanity as best he could and that sometimes left adult things by the wayside. I also want to think that as a beast he would have repressed his sexuality quite a great deal. He was a beast and entirely uncomfortable with his body. I don't think it would have been in the forefront of his mind as much as he was just barely keeping it together for years of his life. Suddenly becoming a robust beautiful young man with a body to match would have been a game changer. And I wanted to explore that dynamic. Sorry if it makes anyone uncomfortable.
Other then that, this chapter is a crazy one and I hope you enjoy. Please review and I promise I will keep it together with getting stuff posted!
Have a great week
"Skinny Love" Birdy
And I told you to be patient,
And I told you to be fine,
And I told you to be balanced,
And I told you to be kind,
And now all your love is wasted,
Then who the hell was I?
'Cause now I'm breaking at the britches,
And at the end of all your lines.
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
And who will fall far behind?
It took a total of a week for the entire castle to be teaming with visitors. Once Maurice had been spotted traveling from Molynoux and then Adam's uncle making his way with the royal princesses, all hell finally broke loose.
Cogsworth secretly loved the frenzy of activity. The important guests and dignitaries that adorned the dinner table like a fancy Christmas tree.
Adam, on the other hand, was loath to leave his rooms. Several days of drug induced rest and he finally caught up with himself. But that didn't cure the confusion and semi-disinterest in the whole matter. It all seemed a little anti-climatic. He had yet to see her since the incident occurred; unless you count the strange dream he had when he had first awoken. He wanted to be with her so badly it was all he could do to stop himself from running down the hallway with only the skin on his back and his nose to guide him.
But he didn't. He stayed in his rooms and stared at his hands the way he had done fourteen years ago when the curse was first lifted.
It had been such a surprise, at the time, to suddenly be human. More so to be a fully grown human man then the barely grown boy-prince he had been before the curse. At the time, he could hardly look himself in the mirror for fear of seeing his father looking back at him. His hands had been so large, his chest so immense. He had been caught more than once standing in the middle of the room running his hands along the contours of his face with nothing on but a pair of breeches. How did one enter man-hood as a beast and then reconcile to suddenly being an actual man?
Adam could almost muse over the occasion when Lumiere had caught him peeking down the front of his trousers at his decidedly bigger appendage. He hadn't really given it much thought as a boy but now that he was a grown human it was odd to think of how large he had gotten. And what he was supposed to do with it. Lumiere had laughed and laughed and made some ribald joke about all the ways he was a man now but in truth Adam was still a little put off by the whole thing. At times he felt completely cheated. Everyone else that lived to adulthood took the process for granted. Living through the growth of your body and the use of it was something rather extraordinary and Adam had not been given that opportunity. Instead he had woken up fully grown with a large, long limbed body that did awfully strange things whenever she entered the room. He had been so mortified the first time it had happened that he had refused to see her for days. Luckily for him, she had caught up quickly with what was going on with him and had only been the more supportive.
Adam felt the same now. And it was the strangest thing to think that it was again her that he was hiding from. What would he say to her? He was so much the more changed as he had been before. Years on his face. A completely different life lived without her in it. How could he explain it all to her?
Dinner arrived far too soon and there were a myriad of guests awaiting his arrival. He adorned his usual costume and came down as he always had. As if nothing unusual had transpired over the course of the winter. He walked slowly as a man twice his age would and entered the dining room with as pleasing a look as he could give. Several expectant faces looked back up at him and he wasn't surprised to recognize most of them. The usual crowd looking for favor.
Then his eyes landed on her. She had her face covered again and it was all he could do not to run up to her and rip the entire thing off. She sat with her son who looked decidedly surly. Adam would have to speak to them both in private that night. When he could shake off the endless nonsense of all these other people. He gave leave for everyone to be seated and begin eating. The usual chatter filled the room. His eyes never left hers and it would seem she felt the same because she continued to ignore whatever Gabriel was saying to her and only looked at him as deeply as she had the first day he had been human. As if she had never seen anything so incredible in her entire life.
A whisper entered his ear and if he had had half her tenacity he would have ignored it. But he didn't.
"Forgive me, your Highness but..."
Adam barely flicked a cheek muscle to indicate he was listening. "But a Madam Soleil is here to see you."
The world came to a standstill. He made the smallest of gasping noises and looked up at Cogsworth who nodded gravely at him. Standing up abruptly he caused several others to scramble in response, spilling soup as they came up.
"Forgive...forgive me. Please continue. I must see to..." His eyes darted to the beautiful woman sitting a few table settings down from him but he quickly looked away and allowed himself to be led out of the room to the interest of every gossip in attendance.
Lumiere saw the look on Belle's face and knew that he had no choice but to make his way over to her and her son.
"This is very good soup." She murmured into her dish as Lumiere made as if to clear her setting. It was curious to everyone watching, that the Butler himself was clearing the place of this half covered no-one.
"Merci, My lady."
"What has happened?" Her voice dropped so that Lumiere read her lips more then heard her.
"A Madam Soliel has come to see His Highness."
"Who is that?"
With a deep sigh Lumiere looked away to refrain from seeing her pain. " 'Is wife."
When Adam entered the sitting room that had belonged to the resident princess since time memorial, it was brightly lit and warm enough for a long conversation. Her back was to him and since she was covered in a warm fur he could not see anything but her outline. He cleared his throat and looked her up and down before finding his voice.
"Are you with child?"
She paused for a moment and when she turned it was Elizabeth as she had always been. Rapturous and so beautiful it hurt to look at her. Her eyes were round and warm though her posture was a cold as ice.
"I am not."
And indeed she was as slender as she always was. Adam released the air he had not realized he was holding.
"Are you relieved?" She asked
"In our present circumstances it would only complicate the situation more. So yes, I am relieved."
"Things don't seem all that complicated to me. I was watching you. You seem to have moved on quite effectively."
"Elizabeth, I can explain'-"
"Adam." She cut him off and her tone was so final he shut his mouth. "I didn't escape your banishment for an explanation."
"What have you come for?"
"To see you."
He looked around as if he couldn't believe that answer. "Well, you have seen me. Am I still found wanting? Are there any other footmen you wish to replace me with?" Where the venom in his voice had come from he wasn't sure but it was there and he couldn't change it.
"It was never about the footman."
"Then what was it about? Me? My inability to please you?"
"Yes."
Adam took a step back as if he hadn't considered that she would say such a thing. His man-hood was threatening to wither and die at her very words. He had never considered her to find him so very lacking in that category.
"Well..." He said placing a hand on the sofa. "I suppose that says everything."
"It says nothing. Take a moment and consider the idea that perhaps there isn't such an easy solution to our problems."
"I have considered it, Elizabeth, but I cannot understand why. I was not your jailer. You were not my prisoner. Why? What did I do to become so repulsive to you?"
To his surprise she sat down on the sofa with her skirts spread out before her as if they were merely having tea. "I remember the first time I met you. My father had promised me to the Prince."
"Me. He promised you to me." Adam corrected angrily.
She smiled as if he had said something funny. "It was your idea to have a masked ball in honor of the deal struck between everyone but myself."
"If you are going to rehash this story then tell it right. It was not my idea. It was Cogsworth'. And I was finally coming out of my deepest mourning. The last thing I wanted was to remarry. It was required of us both. You don't get to play the martyr here unless you include me."
She blinked once or twice but her smile never faltered. Adam stubbornly refused to sit beside her but resigned himself to leaning against the arm of the sofa all the same. "I was never the martyr. I was the bargaining chip. Can't you see that that is all I have ever been?"
"Not to me!"
"I was supposed to be engaged to you that very night and I had never met you! I was supposed to pull the mask off my face as if it all were some silly game."
"I knew it was you out in that garden. I came looking for you so you could meet me without everyone watching!"
"But you didn't tell me that, Adam!"
He stopped for a moment at her words, as the memories came flooding back of the night they had met. She was right. He had never introduced himself and she had not known who he was before he started talking to her.
"You came up to me with your smirk and your messy hair and sat down as if we were the greatest of friends."
"I don't smirk!"
She ignored him with a smirk of her own. "And you put your hand out and told me how ridiculous you thought it all was. You said if you could you would run away to fight pirates or join the gypsies. I laughed and took your hand thinking you were the man of my dreams. So handsome and rakish."
Adam again turned away from her, knowing full well how he had appeared to her that night and never having corrected her.
"You told me all these stories of the court and how incredibly stupid you thought they were and how beautiful the world was when you didn't have to appear so very refined. I never once thought you could have been the man who would later force me to live that very life you mocked."
"But you know that I do think those things! You knew that!"
"I didn't, Adam. You stole my heart that night like a thief. You put your hands in my hair and kissed me as I have never been kissed. I will never be kissed like that again. And I loved you. I wanted you and would have given you everything in that garden without ever looking back. You smiled and laughed as if it was all so funny and I loved you for it. When I was summoned to the ballroom by my father you said you would be waiting for me in the garden for that 'everything' I was promising you. I really believed you would do it. That you were my roguish rescuer from the evil Prince my father was forcing me to marry."
Adam bit his lip painfully and would have thrashed around like the beast he was if he thought it would help. But it wouldn't. Her words hurt because they were all true. He had known the lies he never admitted to her and that there was nothing in their marriage they hadn't touched.
"When I saw you standing on the dais next to my father I thought it was some kind of cruel trick. I had planned to refuse the Prince and run away to the gardens to follow you everywhere. But there you were. One in the same and there was no way out of it after that."
"If you never once loved me...If you despised me so much...why?!" Adam finished, clutching his fingers to his lapels.
"Because I loved him!"
"Then you loved me! That has always been me!"
"No, Adam, no." And to his surprise she was standing and her hands were on his shoulders as if she were holding him together. "This is who you are. You are Adam. You can't help but be royal and regal and beautiful in all your pain and beauty. But I never wanted that. I never wanted to be your Princess. I wanted to be your sordid lover. Your partner in crime. I wanted to run away and find adventure and passion and all the disrepute in the world that you promised me."
Adam blinked several times seeing all the beauty and ugliness she longed for. But she was right. In the end he was too much like his mother. Too much like his father. Too much like Belle. He couldn't be a sordid lover or a thief or a monster. Anymore then she could be the ultimate love of his life. It just wasn't the way they were made.
"You used me..." He whispered thickly. "Those months ago in my study…. You used me as if I were nothing more than a common whore."
"And you should despise me for it. I thought if I could bring out the monster that lives inside you I could love you as much as you love me."
Adam's breath caught in his chest and he met her eyes with very real fear. She ran a soft hand through his hair and gave him a half smile. "You may keep your secrets to yourself but don't believe that you can't be found out. If one knows where to look."
"H-How?"
"You kept your silence about this our entire marriage. Others, in this castle, did not."
"I wanted to tell you so many times….."
"You were right not to….I never would have understood. I would have always been looking for that other half of you when you were with me, inside my bed. Even though…deep down…I think I've always known you were more then the man you pretended to be. Though, it was not quite as I believed."
Adam felt his gut coil and fill with the familure shame of the animal that lived inside him and made him not quite man, but not quite beast. The same red-hot shame that made him incapable of ever telling her the truth no matter how he had loved her.
"I'm sorry…." He whispered, unable to look her in the eye.
"Don't worry about it." Her soft reply felt like a caress. "I think I understand now why she was your one and only. The only one who could have lived with that truth you hide."
"I love you, Elizabeth."
"Tell me, if she had come back to you, somehow. If she had miraculously returned to you. Who would you have chosen?"
"I made a promise to you. I keep my promises. I would have chosen you."
"And that is why you and I can never be together. If it had been me and the man I fell in love with from the garden returned to me… I never would have kept my promise."
Adam felt his throat close and he turned his face away from her as a solitary tear streaked down his cheek.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I deceived you. But I do love you, despite everything."
She ran a tender hand along his wet cheeks and he barely breathed as she kissed them on each side. "I'm not. I'm not sorry for any of it."
"What do you want me to do? How are we to fix this?"
"I may not have that man I loved from the garden but I still have his promises. I am going with him in my heart to those places he told me about."
"How? You are my wife, here!" Adam looked at her for the first time in several moments with frustration coloring his face.
"That is where you and your obnoxiously loyal advisers come to help."
He looked at her with grave suspicion. "What do you mean?"
"They must believe it, Adam. Everyone must believe without doubt that I am dead."
He looked about himself as if to call upon answers from heaven. "How am I to accomplish that?! There are those who still believe Belle is alive. To this day!"
"You will find a way. You always do."
"And if I cannot?!" He would find a way to refuse her. He would do that for his daughters.
"You have a week. I will stay in the village and wait for the bells. If you are not clever enough to find a way to end this horrible existence in farce, then I will do it for you. You will have no choice but to try me for treason and make our children bastards."
It felt like she was kicking him in the stomach. "You would force me to kill you?"
"I would. If it means being free, I will."
He attempted to catch his breath, feeling as if he was being torn apart. "And what of Rosamund and Isabelle!? What of our children? What am I to tell them when they ask me why their mother was torn from them?!"
She touched his hands and face as if they were still lovers. "Tell them...tell them that their mother loved them as much she could. Even if it was never enough. Tell them that she did what she could to give them their best chance."
For the first time in their entire conversation her voice broke and Adam could only look at her face with obvious agony. Taking her roughly in his arms he kissed her. He kissed her as he once had in the garden, as he had that night in the study. He kissed her as he had before he banished her. Their entire love summed up in a series of kisses that always meant farewell. Kisses from two people who could not be more right and wrong for each other at the same time.
She gave him a watery smile as she touched his face once more and then stepped back, pulling her hood over her face and vanished from the room without another word to leave him with.
He sat down on the sofa and wished, more than anything, that he even wanted for her to come back.
