shadowhostage prompted: Forget-me-nots (and or lavender).
Firebird
Belle sits with her hands in her lap and picks at the hem of her dress, trying halfheartedly to unravel the stitches.
"Is that all you want to talk about today?" Archie asks. Idly, he taps his pen against the side of his leg and Belle wonders if it's a nervous habit.
Is he afraid to be in the same room with her, even with the two of them seated nicely in their plush leather chairs? So many people in this town are. It wouldn't surprise her to find the man she tells her secrets to one of their number.
Well, the man she tells some secrets to. Most of her secrets can only be whispered across years, between padded cells. Most come with the feeling of Hatter's spells in the dark, with the bone battering exhaustion of fighting against wards that keep them from casting, to keep them from escaping when they only—when they only need to touch.
Most secrets span a history. Many sink their roots in nightmares. And if Belle were to lean in, and whisper him a story of her life, Archie would find no peace in his bed tonight.
So instead she nods. She says simply, "Yes."
Archie accepts this with a nod of his own, but chews idly at the corner of his lip. Again, his pen taps against his knee.
"I'd like to see you again next Monday, Rose," he says at last. "I understand Mary Margaret's party was important to you last week, but I have to say, with um… circumstances such as they are, I'm not comfortable with you missing too many appointments."
And Belle does not say that once upon a time, circumstances woke her in a cold sweat to the sounds of a mob outside her and Hatter's door. That, with no way out, Hatter jumped them through a mirror, into Wonderland, right in the middle of a devastating war.
She says, "I'll try." Then smiles.
Usually a smile goes a long way to sending the good doctor relaxing into the plush back of his leather chair, but today Archie frowns. He clears his throat and shifts his vest, but his eyes are honest and warm and never leave hers.
"Last session, you mentioned Jefferson doesn't like you coming here. How's that going?"
Belle wishes she could shake her head, mime to him the answer without resorting to speech. But Archie seems to have a policy against yes and no questions. One of his head-shrinker tricks—like nothing for her fiddle with on the table, though still, still, his pen dances against his knee.
"Jefferson doesn't like doctors," she says instead. The name feels odd in her mouth. Wrong.
He is Hatter. He has always been Hatter.
And once upon a time, she was Belle, who became Mary Ann, who became Alice, who became Rose.
Archie considers her with the gaze of a man with something to sell. He says, "That's very understandable. But how do you feel, Rose?"
She doesn't, but Archie won't like that answer. And he certainly won't like to know how low her pills are growing. She takes hers by halves, but Hatter's glossy all the time, and soon she'll need another piece of paper to take down to the pharmacy. Then Archie will change her dosage, probably. Talk to her again about addiction and crutches and how the pills are only there to teach her to walk again.
She has spoken so much today. She has been so careful to say so little, and she is exhausted. Moreover, her hour is up. Belle fixes her eyes to her father's watch. She likes to wear it now. The thick steel band weighs her wrist down. It reminds her she cannot float away. That she has family here. She is not alone. Rooms are once again filled with light.
Even this room, cluttered close with so many chests of drawers and smudgy paintings on the wall. Belle traces with her eyes a photo of the harbor, a model boat.
"Rose?"
She sighs and lifts her eyes to his again. "I don't know."
Archie takes a deep breath. He's disappointed. Her happy ending doesn't suit his good vs. not sensibilities. But he is sweet and kind. He says, "Alright. That's fair. Why don't you think about that question for next time, okay?"
Belle nods. When he stands, she stands. Strange men often try to lead her through doors by pressing her shoulder or back, but Archie never touches—not unless she reaches for him first—and because she so appreciates his distance, Belle lets him guide her out into the waiting room without protest.
He stops just inside the door with her led safely into the world again. This time, he manages to smile. Something wistful. He saves these wistful smiles like candies, just for this occasion.
"And if you need anything at all—if something happens, or you just want to talk—you're more than welcome. You've still got my numbers, right?"
Belle pats the pocket of her coat.
"I keep them with me."
It feels like admitting weakness, but Archie's face lights. And he is not a… not a beautiful man, but lately, she finds she quite likes looking at him. When he smiles, he makes a sort of magic. For a while, the whole world feels like sunshine.
"Do you? That's good. That's very good. I'm glad." Archie swings his arm to encompass the waiting room, shuffles awkwardly in the doorframe. "Well, here we are. I'll see you next Monday, Rose."
She nods—finally, finally back to yes and no—and turns to go.
But in the waiting room, the queen's boy sits with a fat leather book tight against his chest. His head pulls up to look at her—dark eyes, like the goblins in Undercroft—and he smiles. His teeth are broad and flat. Like horses' teeth, she wants to think. But Belle sees only monsters in that face.
"Rose?" Archie asks. His voice echoes miles away.
The monster child's eyes alight. It—he, it's a boy-child, a real child—grins. "Belle!"
And Belle goes very, very cold. "What did you call me?"
Archie steps out of his office entirely, fully into the waiting room. Belle wonders if this is a nervous gesture also.
She wonders who he is protecting by putting himself between her and the queen's boy.
"Henry, this is Rose French," Archie says, his voice carefully even. "Why don't you wait for me in my office? We can talk about this in a minute."
"But I think she remembers," he protests. "Like my mom. She escaped with Hatter from the dungeon—"
Oceans rise in Belle's ears. She cannot feel her fingers, she cannot feel her legs. She can only feel her father's watch weighing down her arm—she is here, she is still here—feel the strength in her jaw as she clenches tight enough to crack her own teeth.
The queen knows.
The queen knows.
But Belle can salvage this. She can save them. This is hawker's business. Mary Ann's, Alice's. Play the audience, run the show. Keep your face from the light, your back to the trees.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she breathes.
She sees everything in too-vivid colors. She sees Archie's throat bob as he swallows, as he says, "Henry, go wait inside."
"But, Archie," it—he—protests. "This is Belle. The Belle. Beauty and the Beast?"
Archie's eyes flicker to hers. He does not smile. His mouth pulls down at the corners and his eyes are brisk wind. Quickly—guilt, a hawker always knows—he looks away again. "You mean she looks like you imagined Belle? From your book?"
The queen's boy flattens him a stare. Haughty, regal, a child-goblin used to finding legions at his command. "Archie, I think Belle's ready for Operation Cobra."
Once upon a time, the queen killed her own lover with a cobra in a box.
Belle does not have her back to the trees. Her back is to the still-open door of Archie's office. The queen's boy stands between her and the chill March air outside.
If she will flee, she must fight.
"What do you want?" she keeps her voice level, but they both startle at her venom.
See, she has cobras, too. Hawkers always do.
The monster child's eyes are far older than he is. The pupils run deeper than dwarf mines and sorrow. And though Archie keeps a hand on his shoulder, the monster child shrugs it free, cracks open his book.
He comes close—and suddenly, there she is.
On the page.
She wears a yellow dress, her back to the open, hair tumbling down her shoulders in ringlets and curls. The man they called a beast then stands at her side. He is hardly taller, but his hand fills the curve between her breast and her hip. He wears a coat of dragon hide, his body angled already towards the door. Showmanship, she knows now. A magician is always ready for a swift exit.
The queen's boy turns the page, and there Belle is again, with curtains.
Again, with spells.
Again, with Hatter.
Again, with mobs and magic and fires. With their phoenix, soaring, burning, scattering its ashes between the trees, never to rise—one last funeral pyre, one last elegy.
Belle tears the book from his hands and flings it away.
"Rose—" Archie blurts and starts forward. Belle doesn't see him, can't hear him. There is only the ocean, and this monster child blocking her escape.
"Who sent you?" she snarls.
The queen's boy backs up a step, bumps into Archie. And Archie puts an arm around him, means to push him back, but goblins are hard to move. The beast recovers quickly. He darts out and down for his book, and soon, his coal black eyes return to her.
"It's okay. We're the good guys. But you—Belle, this is so important—you have to find Mr. Gold. Emma coming here was the first key to breaking the curse, but you're the second and—"
She feels herself shaking only by the chattering in the waves.
"No. No."
"Henry—" Archie tries again, but crickets are never especially loud.
Goblins eat crickets. Goblins eat everything. And the boy beast is still smiling, flat-toothed and hungry.
He says, "Look, I know it's a lot to take in, and okay, he did hurt your dad. But he had a reason! He thought your father locked you up. Well, actually, I'm pretty sure he thought you were dead, but he's your true love. You should—"
"What do you know about it?" she shouts. She wants a whirlwind. She wants a flame. She wants her firebird back again. Belle bears her teeth, grabs the child-beast by the collar and hisses low, "You tell the queen to go fuck herself."
Archie is already moving to separate them, his hands on Belle's, though she has let the boy go. And he stops. He stops and stares at her, open mouthed.
"Rose," voice low, urgent, "who do you mean, the queen?"
"See, I told you!" the boy monster crows. "I told you she remembers. Belle, you remember Fairytale Land!"
Fairytales? Fairytales? And the goblin's eyes glitter. He wants this. He taints this. How dare he reach inside and touch parts of her that hurt the most? How dare he take them, eat them, steal them for his own?
And what did his mother make him from, Belle wonders. When she created him, did she do it with mud and stone? With bile and toadskin and hate? How did she make this golem child, this monstrous beast?
"Fairytales?" her voice barely croaks. It rattles like a bitter peach pit in her throat. Her fingers clench so tight into fists that half-moons carve into her palms. "There's no such thing."
Once upon a time, Belle watched a phoenix die.
She turns her back, though everything in her body screams to keep to the trees. Let them have her weakness. Let them take her, if they can.
She shoves the door open. Venetian blinds break beneath her hands.
Belle strides out, into the street and away.
When she gets home, she finds forget-me-nots and lavender waiting for her on her doorstep.
For remembrance. And distrust.
No note, but the flowers say enough.
Belle takes them inside. She kicks her shoes off at the kitchen door, lays the flowers on the table and means to put the kettle on. But somehow, somewhere along the way, she crumples. Her back to the cabinets, she slumps on the kitchen floor with her arms tight around her ankles, and tries to remember how to breathe.
Once upon a time, she used to be so brave. But how can she do this? How can she do this anymore? She is a broken clown, a wind-up tin soldier with a craven heart. She is damaged. She is wrong. She forgets what it's like to know her own name.
Belle. Mary Ann. Alice. Rose.
Sophie. Magrat. Hermione. Perdita.
Medea. Willow. Morgana. Moss.
Agnes. Gytha. Sycorax. Sybel.
Who?
Belle curls on the tile and sobs. Her father's watch is not near heavy enough.
And hours later, when Hatter and her father come home, she is still there. Hatter pulls her up, into his chest, and he carries her up the stairs to their room. He holds her. He holds her. Because he is real. Because he is here. Because he is still him, though he has worn as many names and faces as any man can hold.
He holds her and rocks, but he doesn't say anything because there is nothing to say.
That night, Belle wakes from lonely dark to lonely dark. She reaches out a hand, gropes the mattress to either side, but somehow she has fallen into the divot in the middle and Hatter is not here.
Blindly, she stabs in the dark until the bedside lamp flickers on. Finding her slippers, she pads into the hall. But the bathroom light is dark. The whole house is dark.
Hatter isn't here.
With the practice of a thousand quick exits, Belle dresses swift and silent in the middling dark. In under five minutes, she stands in the street under a waning moon.
And the van is still parked out front, so Belle ignores it. She turns like a child with her arms out wide until she catches the scent of Hatter's magic and sets off after it, following where it leads. This is an old game, an old desperation, breaking mobs apart to reconvene later.
Belle always could follow him by the scent of his spells in the dark.
As far as these things go, it's not hard. Belle pulls her father's borrowed coat tighter around her shoulders. She stoops her head against the high March wind and follows. She hunts.
Just past the boarded-up library, she spots Hatter skipping around the corner. He sees her. His face lights. He catches her around the waist, lifts her up and spins until they're dizzy. Until, laughing, he must set her down again or bloody them both against the sharp corner of a looming post office box.
When she catches her breath, Belle grins at him through the streetlights. "And where were you tonight, Jefferson?"
Hatter laughs. "Child's play," he says and pulls a domino out of his pocket to drop into her hand.
Six dots, three dots. Belle turns it over, but the little hunk of ivory remains unchanged.
"I don't understand."
When Hatter smiles, his teeth catch the streetlights.
"Hunting jabberwocks, my dear."
As Belle brushes her teeth over the sink with sunlight streaming over her shoulder, Hatter creeps up behind her and drops a battered lavender top hat on her head. She spits out suds, rinses her mouth and cannot stop smiling.
She murmurs, "Look at this old thing."
When Belle takes it off and turns it over, the top lid falls open, the little hinge and clasp that should have held it long rusted through. But the other compartments lift and close just as they're supposed to. She even finds, deep inside the secret of a secret, an ancient little vial marked: Mushrooms (left, right, up).
Belle closes it all up back again and pulls the musty, fraying thing back over her ears.
"Where did you possibly find this?" she asks, half laughing.
And it must be a good morning because Hatter isn't glossy, not at all.
He grins. "Pawnshop. Maybe it's a dragon, not a jabberwock. Your beast's got quite the hoard."
Archie would want her to be worried. But then, there's so much of so many worlds that Archie has never seen.
Belle chooses to be happy. She is wearing Hatter's old top hat—and that means they're neither of them insane. So today, she picks a lavender sundress to match her history. And her father smiles when he sees her padding down the stairs at Hatter's side.
"You're looking quite dapper this morning, my dear," he greets, eyes warm over his coffee.
And Belle smiles, because one day, her father will know Mary Anne. He will know Alice and Sybel, Magrat and Willow. One day, she will tell him what it felt like to fly on the back of a phoenix. One day, she will show him a spell.
One day, she'll be better.
But today, Hatter grins. His gray eyes are bright with sunlight. "Just like old times," he says and offers her his elbow.
Comfort in an old, resumed routine, Belle smiles and takes his arm.
"Yes," she says. "Old times, indeed, m'lord."
And because it is Tuesday, because she is alright, because she is Belle and Rose and everyone else, they all go to the shop together, her and Hatter and her father, hand in arm in hand.
When Gold slams open the door to the shop an hour later, singed and vicious, Belle jumps, but thinks she should not be surprised. Nor is she surprised to watch as he flings three broken dominos to the ground at Hatter's feet.
He is throwing the gauntlet, Belle understands.
"Think yourself a wizard, boy," Gold snarls, all sharpened teeth and nasty spells. "Taking party tricks to a dragon's den?"
Magic seethes around him. Her father flinches at her side, but Belle barely notices. She's picking out the sneaky spells arching over his fingers—the kinds that turn ex-lovers into roses, that spin nooses out of gold—and Belle doesn't think.
She can't do this anymore.
She won't.
With a wild blast, she shouts a word older than the world, and shoves Rumpelstiltskin back with a party trick of her own. A whistle for the wind and a single instant later, Belle plants herself in front of Hatter. And her whole body screams, no!
"You leave him alone," she snarls, bristling and aching and the spells could tear her apart, except, once upon a time, she spoke with dragons. She tamed these words. "Rumpelstiltskin, you turn around and walk away."
For the barest edge of a second, Gold's eyes soften. He looks at her in pride, the bastard. But then his gaze catches on the hat she wears, and suddenly, his face is a warpath made of ice.
"A family of thieves, it seems." He smiles, all teeth. "I should have known."
And this is too fucking much.
Something snaps—deep in her dungeons, in the pit of her heart—and Belle goes up in flames.
Fire seethes around her head, down her arms, through her eyes and fingers. She stands in the middle of her father's flower shop with teeth bared, with wings of blistering heat. And Hatter reaches for her hand, but she does not take it.
Belle steps forward and forces Rumpelstiltskin back instead.
"You're the only thief," she says and her voice is mountain-even. The peach pit has burned to ash. "I won't let you come in here, in my father's business, and calls us thieves after what you did."
Three decades have passed since she read the stories of this particular monster's face, but Belle thinks she sees fury there, shock, and despite himself, she knows Rumpelstiltskin is intrigued.
He smiles, though even from this distance, her heat chars the edges of his silk tie.
"Oh, and pray tell what was that, dearie?"
Too much. Too much. Belle breaks. She blasts him backwards with a gout of flame he barely blocks in time.
She screams, "You sold us to the Queen! You son of a bitch, you sold us!"
And as Rumpelstiltskin staggers through the glass double doors, he has the gall to look shocked.
"What?"
But Belle is gone. She forces him back by striding forward. Flames lick at her jaw with every inhaled breath. Her hair tangles into a halo of living thorns and somewhere behind her, Hatter's hat falls to the floor.
"What? What do you mean what?" her voice cracks the siding. The ground trembles beneath her feet. Too many dragon words, too old, not meant for everyday speech.
And they are on the street now, Gold with his back to a car—his car—and here and there, people peer out of their windows to watch.
"We were careful!" she shouts. The clock tower chimes the hour, though the hour is new and wrong. "Never the same town for more than a night. Never a show in decent light. New faces, new names, new clothes at least once a week. She couldn't have found us. Not without help, you bastard. Not without you!"
Pain scores the lines of Gold's face. He looks as though he is struggling to breathe, his broken arm fisted into his stomach.
Belle tells herself it is the heat. Because it cannot be regret. It cannot be.
"You think I…?" His eyes—human, though he is not human—say, no, please no. Helooks as though another blow will shatter him. "Belle, I would never."
"Really. You would never?" He is lying. He is lying because he must be lying, and Belle smiles. She forces her lips away from her teeth, and she can see her grin reflected back in the tinted windows of the car he leans against. It is the smile of a woman who fights beside dragons. "Then how is it you had Hatter's old top hat? He wore it the day we were taken."
Gold shakes his head. He coughs, though there is no smoke. Only heat—heat enough to sear two footprints into the sidewalk upon which she stands.
"I won it in deal—" he starts.
Belle snaps, "Oh, I'll bet you did," and lifts a hand. She means to strike him, to burn that godawful grief clean off.
She hears her father shouting. She hears Hatter calling her name. She hears the stuttering rabbit-fast heartbeats of all the people up and down the street.
She hears nothing at all.
She hears only the man in front of her, pleading.
"Belle," he licks his lips, choosing his words like jacks. "I would never see you come to any harm. You know that. Whatever the queen did to you, you must know that."
A spell he meant to cast dies and droops from his fingers. Instead of boiling outward, his magic coils away from him like steam, twines into her flames. And Belle burns. She burns.
"So were you in it to kill Hatter, then?" she demands. "Because I know you watched us. I felt your eyes in every town."
"Not mine, you didn't." Gold pushes off the car. Despite the heat, he limps forward. Maybe to touch her. Maybe to lead her through another door like the men who grab her shoulders. "I was told you died. Threw yourself off the tower in which your father imprisoned you. You want to know why I came after him the way I did? That's why. Because I thought he'd killed you."
Belle does not move. She stands with her shoulders thrown back and stares him down as her flames catch on the sleeves of his coat. He smothers them without a thought. Again and again, even as his gray pinstripes blacken and flake away. And Belle used to know the way he looked when he lied. By those old tells, this new story sounds like truth.
But who knows now, with his human face, his suits and his limp? His whole body is a lie.
"Who told you?" she asks him. It is a simple question.
"Belle—"
"Who told you?" It is the only question.
Gold cannot meet her eyes. He turns his head away. "The Queen."
A truth.
"You stay the hell away from me," she snarls. And he protests. From the sidewalk, he protests.
But Belle turns her back on him—let him kill her if he can—and returns to Hatter's side.