Thanks so much for reviewing, those who did. I really, really appreciate it.  I love Disney, and I adore the movie- but sometimes I just can't help myself. This should have a happy ending, but hey, everyone's gotta work for it right?

Chapter 2: No Man in Town Half as Manly

For what must have been the millionth time since he had made the mistake of forcing that shrew to marry him, Gaston laid in his bed and cried. Between great, gulping sobs for air he cursed her name, her beauty which used to be so like his own, and his own foolishness for not seeing that she'd be the death of him.

Eventually, Gaston's breathing slowed, his eyes red and swollen from the tears that still threatened to roll down the swell cleft in his chin and fall on a heaving bicep he was now using to drag a bottle on whiskey on the sidetable closer to his ever questing lips. Gaston and alcohol had never been too far from one another even before the marriage, now they were inseparable.

Gaston's recent crying jag was the result of spending two days in the wreckage of his wife's former home combined with the pressure of getting back and finding her not-so-mysteriously absent. He knew it had been her from the time he saw the first plume of black smoke roil down into the town from the cottage, and he had also known that he was unlikely to find her at home. She was calculating, that one.

Gaston put the mug back on the table and heaved a deep sigh. If the boys could see him now. But they didn't. Gaston was an utterly broken creature, and if he wasn't at a bar drinking through what little money he had left, he was lying in bed, letting once hulking muscles turn to around 40 pounds of fat, and just generally bemoaning his fate.

The wedding was relatively uneventful, all it took was a chilling look from the warden of the insane asylum to shut both dad and daughter up but good. The old man loved his Belle, but he also seemed to love not rotting away in a straitjacket for the rest of his life as well. Gaston didn't begrudge him that, and he had thought Belle wouldn't either, at least initially. The words exchanged between her and her father at the wedding, while guarded, harbored none of the loathing that would characterize Belle's future dealings with crazy old Maurice.

Hindsight's 20/20 though, and in his more lucid moments Gaston knew that he had driven the wedge between them, by doing something he probably shouldn't have on the honeymoon.

She refused him. Again and again. He shouldn't have been surprised. But he was, stupidly enough he was, as Gaston was a champion of rationalization and denial. After much cajoling she still wasn't amenable to it, and, as he had tried to tell himself again and again since that night, he had no other recourse. Gaston was above physically forcing the issue, but he also wasn't afraid to go back to basics. He let her know that she could go ahead and refuse, and they didn't have to do anything that night--- but first thing in the morning Maurice had a one-way ticket to the looney bin.

The words hung in the air for a moment, and the shock barely registered on Belle's face before she ran to the bathroom and closed herself in for half an hour. In the interim, Gaston, feeling just a tad guilty, drank half a bottle of champagne to drown himself for a bit, and it did the trick quite nicely.

At last Belle came out, and without a word or a glance, went to the bed- a beautiful zombie. The marriage was consummated, and when he woke up Belle was dead.

In her place was his wife, a horrible monster of a woman who sucked all of the air out of the room, regularly shattered plates against the wall and threw furniture through the window, and who could no longer be controlled with threats against her father. The morning after the honeymoon she disappeared from the house for a few hours, and when she came back let him know that a) she hated her father, and b) now that they were tied together for all of eternity, she'd teach him just how long that was.

Oh God, all this reminiscing just wanted to make Gaston drink more. Staggering out of bed, he stumbled to the liquor cabinet, conveniently only a few feet away. Gaston liked to combine his twin hobbies of drinking and lying down, so its traditionally off-kilter location suited him just fine. Opening it up, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. He picked it up and read it with eyes blurred by the drink.

Gaston-

I'm putting this where I'll know you'll find it. We're done. There's someone else. Don't cry too hard.

Belle

For a moment, Gaston sat still in shocked silence. She was leaving him. What the hell? Shouldn't it be the other way around? She was leaving him?? The best man in this whole godforsaken town? Who did she think she was? And for who? WHO?

Rage set in. A year of humiliation, of cutting remarks and hateful glances and several highly suspicious struggles with food poisoning had cut him down to half a man, and she left him for someone else?

He'd kill him. And then, maybe then, he'd just kill her too. Enough was enough, it was time to reclaim his manhood- Gaston swiftly rose to his feet, determined to defend his own honor.

He got up perhaps a bit too swiftly, however, and the whiskey hit him like a freight train. A moment passed, and then another, and then Gaston crumpled onto the floor and had a brief thought that maybe this wasn't the best time to enact his revenge before passing out.

Maybe another time.