Chapter 9
Disclaimer: Insert (creative way of saying Disney owns various things included in this story) here.
Half an hour later
Dai could barely contain his anticipation. After nearly ten years, a human visitor had come to stay at the oshiro of his master. And not just any guest: a young woman, one who might possibly break the curse at last. If only she and the Master could be brought to love each other. Dai's head was already whirling with plans of what he might possibly do first once he was human again.
His mother told him not to be too premature, but Dai could not resist bursting out with some new hope or dream every so often as he helped her prepare the evening meal in the kitchen. And when it was declared that someone had to go to the newcomer's room and announce dinner, Dai immediately volunteered. The other servants gave him odd looks for his enthusiasm, but he shrugged them off.
As he expertly hopped through the twisting corridors of the oshiro on his stunted legs, Dai had some time to reflect. He had been in the Master's service only a month before the onset of the curse, and despite being the youngest out of all the servants he had been transformed like the others into the shape of a gnomelike onii demon. Each person's appearance was unique, but in Dai's case the curse meant a two-foot height, knobbly dark blue skin, bulging yellow eyes akin to a toad's, and only one arm. He had grown quite adept over the years at performing various unheard-of feats with his single upper appendage, such as tree climbing. His mother always scolded him for getting into such danger, but like most of her other concerns for him Dai took this as over-protectiveness. After all, he was thirteen, and old enough to make his own decisions. He had been thirteen for quite awhile now, he reminded himself with a lopsided grin, and had never lost his childlike sense of wonder at the world. Nor that independent streak that often comes with teenagehood.
He arrived at the room the Master had designated as the newcomer's, the only bedroom in the oshiro that was decorated in the European fashion. It was odd to see the wooden door, when most of the rooms were only a sliding paper wall away. He rapped on the door with his right-hand knuckles, pleased with the sound it made.
A female voice answered from inside, and for the first time Dai wished he hadn't volunteered to fetch the girl to dinner. He'd forgotten in his excitement that he did not speak her language well; ten years of sneaking looks at the Master's Dutch books and speaking it occasionally with his mother, a former geisha entertainer to the Dutch quarter, did not make up for being confronted with a native speaker.
"Dinner is ready!" he called. Or at least he hoped that's what he had said.
The door opened, and Dai looked up, and up, and up. Humans were tall. He'd forgotten. And the girl was no girl, really, she was the tallest woman Dai had ever seen. She was looking up and down the hall with a puzzled expression, as if she'd expected someone at her own level. Dai noticed that her face was blotchy and her eyes red-rimmed, as if she'd been crying. He felt a bit sorry for her. After all, everyone else in the household had had nearly ten years to get used to the repercussions of the transformation, and here she was thrust into the center of a design she knew nothing of. She had handled things admirably well so far, he thought.
He cleared his throat, and the young woman looked down and gasped. Then she smiled, and said, slowly and clearly in Dutch, "Forgive me, little friend. But are you the one sent to attend me?"
"Hai, ii desu ne," Dai answered automatically, the standard Nipponese affirmative answer.
"Ah. Well then, inform your master, little friend, that I shall not join him."
Dai leaped back in alarm. "Bad idea anger master. Why not go?"
"Onaka ga suite imasen," she replied in stunted, accented, Nipponese. But her meaning was clear.
"Not hungry? My mother will not like. She make good food. Come. Feel better when eat."
"Thank you, but no." A ghost of a smile chased across her far-away lips. "Tell your mother—and your master—gomen nasai for me." And the door closed with a gentle snap of wood on wood.
Dai was completely dumbfounded. No one had ever before refused the Master point-blank. It just wasn't done. But he had no choice. It was exceptionally disrespectful to argue with one he was serving; his mother had told him that many times before he had officially joined the household as one of the low-ranking pages. So away he hopped down the hall to inform the Master.
Dai found his mother and one of the upper servants attending the Master when he entered the lesser dining hall where the Master usually took his solitary meals when they were not brought to his room. The small onii swallowed his nerves and bowed low when the three in the room acknowledged him.
"Your…your guest…" Dai began, but then he had to stop. He had no idea how the Master would take this news. According to his friend Setsuko, the senior page who had dared to lead the young woman to her father in the dungeon using a lantern and then listen in on the conversation there, she had already had at least one conflict of wills with the Master. Setsuko's eyes had almost been glowing with admiration when he spoke of the daring in her tone, though he had not understood the words. And now here she was spurning the Master's best hospitality. Dai swallowed, and tried again. "Master, your guest wished me to inform you that…" His courage failed anew, and he faltered at the look like hot coals the Master was giving him. He took refuge in staring at the very tip of the Master's tail, and finished, "…that she is not hungry."
"What?" Dai staggered back a pace at the white-hot rage that smoked off the Master's voice. In a flash of scarlet scales, the Master was already out the door, heading in the direction Dai had just come from. Feeling that he ought to follow, Dai forced his quaking knees to move, with his mother and the other servant behind him.
By the time they arrived at the corridor where the young woman's room was located, their master had been there for several seconds already. His eyes were live coals of anger, and red-hot sparks were falling from his mouth like a waterfall. At any moment, Dai could tell, he was going to unleash a blast of flame that would disintegrate the door. And likely most of the surrounding wall as well.
"Master, please! Calm yourself!" Dai's mother Mitsuko, the chief maid, called, momentarily diverting his attention. The sparks lessened, though they still continued to fall from his mouth every few seconds.
"I have given her an ultimatum, Mitsuko-san," he hissed, his voice a barely-controlled, poisonous hiss. "Either she comes out of her room, or I will burn the door down myself and drag her there!"
"Master," interjected Sasaki-san, the head of deportment, "This humble one is very likely incorrect, but that may not be the most efficient way to accomplish your goal. Depriving her of privacy may prove…detrimental to your relationship in the future."
Their Master opened his mouth to snarl a reply, and then thought for a moment. "You may be right. Very well, I will try again." Whereupon he said something else to his prisoner in Dutch. Dai, listening intently, caught the word "dinner," but that was the limit of his understanding. He understood her reply easily enough, however, for she repeated her earlier Nipponese words: "Onaka ga suite imasen."
"Onegaishimasu?" the Master said, almost in an undertone. Dai could tell from Sasaki-san's expression that it had taken all his effort not to gasp aloud. The Master had voiced a humble form of 'please', one from an underling to a superior asking a favor. Though it had been spoken in an almost sulky manner, it was the first time any of the listening servants had heard their master use such a term.
But the young woman, gaijin that she was, could not possibly understand the implications of what had just taken place. She was as polite and firm as ever in her Dutch response, and Dai understood it to mean "Thank you all the same, but I would rather not."
The reaction to this pronouncement was immediate on the Nipponese side of the door. The Master's golden crest snapped open with startling speed, a sign that he was furious. Though he did not blow fire, as he might well have, his words in Dutch were almost indistinguishable from the roar escaping his lips. The oshiro walls shook with its force, but nothing would make that single, stubborn wooden door open.
"She shall starve if she so desires, unless she bows to my wishes. Feed her nothing, do not entertain her! The stiffest punishment to any who disobey these instructions!" the Beast hissed at last through bared teeth. Then he vanished down the corridor towards his own suite with a clash of claws on wood.
The servants looked at one another helplessly out of their large eyes. "Jyaa, that did not go well," Dai's mother admitted after a moment. "I will attempt to reason with her. Dai, you may come with me if you wish. Sasaki-san, go to the kitchen and inform the rest of the household of the situation."
"As you say, Mitsuko-san." Sasaki-san departed with a bow.
"Come, Dai," his mother said after the deportment master was out of sight. "We shall see what can be done." She tapped gently on the door with her knuckles.
Trailing sparks freely, the Beast stormed across the nightingale floor. The doors to his suite flew open with a resounding bang that rattled the age-worn frames.
"I don't understand it!" the Beast roared. As a human, he had been in the habit of talking to himself when frustrated, but had broken it quickly upon the transformation. The sound of his own growling, raspy voice had been enough in those days to send him back into deep depression at what had become of his life. But now, so furious he could scarcely see straight, he reverted to his old ways without thinking.
"How could I have humbled myself in such a way? And for what? To have myself spurned in front of the servants? Had she no idea of the honor being done her? I should never have made that bargain. I should have thrown her in the dungeon with her father, were it not for my own foolish weakness." He sighed, and slowly the sparks ceased at last. After a moment or two of glancing about the room rather helplessly, he glided over to Nightingale, taking the katana down from it place on the wall. The rose at the haft looked more faded and forlorn than ever. The Beast turned the blade over, to the side that was still mirror-bright and unmarked by etched thorns, and examined his own hideous, scarlet-scaled countenance reflected back.
Closing his eyes and inhaling deeply, he thought about the girl. She'd awakened such a strange mix of emotions in him: he had never felt so angry as he had when standing outside her door. But why? What was so inherently terrible about refusing to eat with him? Was it because she had done so in front of three of his servants, who owed him unquestioning allegiance?
In his heart of hearts, he had to admit to himself the true reason: her outright rejection of his hospitality had wounded him deeply. And most confusing of all his feelings at the moment, he also had to admit that in spite of every instinct and action to the contrary, he liked her. Just the tiniest fraction! Not only because she had the ability to break his curse, which at the moment looked doubtful, but there was something about her spirit in facing him down at every turn that he found fascinating. It made her avoidance of him all the more frustrating.
Opening his eyes, he breathed a fine mist over the unmarked side of his katana. He'd discovered this aspect of Nightingale's enchantment purely by accident not long after the transformation, but it had proved to be quite useful occasionally. "I wish to see the girl," he commanded the blade.
Immediately, the beaded mist on the sword's cold steel vanished, and he saw reflected an image of the room he had given his guest. She was seated on the European-style bed, knees drawn tight to her chest. He could see that she was still angry by the stiffness of her posture.
Mitsuko-san and her son were in the room as well. "Why not go to supper and give second chance?" Mitsuko-san was saying in her polite, kindly way. Her friendly voice always sounded odd coming from her grotesque figure, even as soft and echoic as the quality was coming from somewhere inside the sword. "May find that he is not what he appears," she added.
The girl, however, was not to be placated. "'Second chance?'" she repeated coldly. "How many chances does he deserve? I've lost everything that was important to me today because of his cruelty: my only family, my hopes of ever returning home to Brussels, my freedom! Are those things to be put so lightly aside that I must give up even more simply for the pleasure of dining with my enemy? No, I shall be content if I never set eyes on him again!"
Each bitter word of his captive's was like a knife shoved between the Beast's ribs. Clenching his teeth, he made himself look away from the scene and replace Nightingale on the wall. He traced the fading rose again with a claw.
"I am truly without hope," he said aloud, his voice so low that it was barely audible, even in the silent room, "I shall never be anything to her than the creature who took her away from her father. I'll never be free. And how much longer can I live with the torment of a hope I was never meant to have?" Despite the darkness, the Beast slid from his suite to take a solitary walk in the gardens.
Author's note: I decided to take a leap of faith and introduce Dai, who is the relative equivalent of Chip, and make the latest confrontation between Belle and the Beast from his POV. It also gave me the chance to introduce some of the servants, who may or may not be as important as they are in the movie. I haven't decided how much of their perspective I want to add. However, for all you Chip fans out there, Dai at least will definitely figure into the story later!
Cheers,
SamoaPhoenix9
