He couldn't do it again.

He just couldn't. He couldn't live like this, huge, ungainly, dangerous. He couldn't glimpse this twisted shape in every reflective surface, couldn't carry with him the shame of being something so hideous, couldn't be surrounded by people but all alone, a dark shape in the background of their existence.

But if he couldn't live with it... then what? What was the alternative?

He knew the answer to that. It was a place he had been more times than he cared to admit, even to himself. He wasn't there yet, but it loomed over him. The darkness of it pressed at the edges of his conscious thought.

It was worse, somehow, this time. Was that possible? Perhaps the truth was that time had dulled the memory of the pain. How could it be worse? He had Belle.

But that was it. He had more to lose.

He couldn't drag her into this hell with him. Even if he'd wanted to – and he didn't, oh how he didn't, he would shield her from any pain no matter what the cost – she could never truly understand what it was to feel like this, to be like this. Her kindness, her compassion had saved his life, but she was only human.

Only human?

He remembered feeling her there beside him on the loveseat in the room where they'd received the Enchantress. They hadn't moved for some time, and the familiar curves of her body were still pressed against him. He felt a rush of warmth, the same that always filled him when he contemplated his wife, but this time it seemed to choke him. How could he hold her, now? How could he pull her to him, feel the warm softness of her skin as her cheek brushed his, whisper that he loved her? She had fallen in love with him as a Beast, but their life together had been built with him as a prince. How quickly he had come to take her for granted.

He waited for her in their bedroom, crouching awkwardly in the corner, staring at the four-poster bed. With its flowing white curtains, it had often been their own little room within the stifling grandeur of the bedroom, a place of seclusion where, for a few blissful hours at a time, they had been alone. Those memories stung him now, soured by his monstrous form.

She entered quietly, a stack of books under one arm. She looked tired. Her hair had begun to escape its glossy knot and trickle down her back. She didn't see him immediately, busying herself with arranging the books on the nightstand, easing her way out of her complicated gown and into a white silk nightdress.

"Belle," he said, as softly as he could.

She turned. "There you are! I was worr... I was wondering where you were." She sat down on the edge of the bed and he saw that she was holding the glass ball. "What should we do with this?"

Their eyes met for a moment and each knew the other was remembering the dark, dusty wreckage of the West Wing. There had been talk, these last few years, of cleaning it up, restoring it to its former glory as the royal suite and their moving into it, but there just hadn't been the time. He glanced at the ball, then looked away. "I don't know. Just put it somewhere."

She hesitated, then leaned over and opened a drawer in the nightstand, slipping it in among the handkerchiefs and other anonymous items that nestled there. "I'll find somewhere for it tomorrow." She sat up, looking down at her husband. Love and sympathy and memories washed over the shores of her mind. She hadn't seen him like this in a long time. Not just the physical shape – the hopelessness. She got up and walked over to him, running a hand through his soft mane. "I can't believe she's done this to you again."

He'd forgotten, until then, his words to Lumière and Cogsworth in the ballroom. "It's what I deserve," he said. He'd said he didn't deserve her. It had been said in a moment of despair, when things had seemed somehow even blacker than they did now, but perhaps it was true. Belle was good and kind and wonderful, the best person he'd ever known. If he was still the selfish, cruel person he'd been the night the spell was cast, then he wasn't good enough for her.

He heard her draw a sharp breath. "Deserve it? How can you say that? It's a horrible mistake—"

He looked at her. Her skin glowed golden in the candlelight, her tousled hair illuminated like a halo around her head. Her perfection made him ache. "You heard what she said. It's because I haven't changed enough."

"That is absolutely the most-" There was a strangled silence as she wrestled with herself. She was a princess now. "That's... not true," she concluded, limply.

"It must be, or this wouldn't have happened." A certain dark clarity had struck him now. A grim satisfaction began to settle in his mind. It all made sense now. Why this had happened, why Belle wasn't happy... She loved him in spite of his faults, but that didn't make it right that they were together like this. She deserved someone as flawless as she was. And perhaps the Enchantress, or her magic, knew that.

"Are you ready to go to sleep?" she asked him, gently.

He stood up fully, towering over her. The bed seemed a long way away, an island in the ocean that stretched between them. He followed her to it hesitantly, tried to lie beside her. She began to sink into sleep almost immediately and he would have given anything to go with her. But the bed was too small, his wife as fragile as a doll beside him. Eventually, gnawed by defeat, he eased his way off the bed and curled up beside it.

"I love you," she whispered.

He stared into the darkness. The room was unfamiliar from down here. Without his usual reference points, the darkness seemed to stretch on forever. He closed his eyes and whispered back. "I love you too."

-Cough- dramabeast –cough-

Just a short one this time. I hope you don't mind, but for some reason I wanted this bit to stand alone.