A/N: You guys are great!
Damn peasant, he thinks, the mud from the melting snow slowing his pace. Calling for him so late that he misses dinner and then tromping back through this mess—exhaustion is what keeps him from magicking himself home. When they have nothing to give but themselves, well, no respectable Dark One can resist a deal, although he feels filthier than usual, and it's not from rolling around in the hay or mud up to his knees.
He shouldn't imagine Belle in such a way, not when some nameless, strike that, some-named-but-otherwise-insignificant peasant requires his...attentions. He shouldn't be pretending it's her and that he can touch the softness of her skin, feel her writhing and gasping beneath him. Invites trouble, all of that, and besides, it would just take fraternization with the help too far. And to think he'd welcomed going out before, eager to leave the house and clear his head. Food and the spinning wheel sound like the perfect end to all the rot.
At last he passes the fledgling garden and comes up to the front door, scraping his boots against the edge of the steps. No place like home, he thinks with an ironic tilt of the head. Dark, silent...
"You're back!"
Why? Why, on the gods' green earth is he holding her again? With her arms around his neck? Is this a dream? Minnie flaps her wings at him and chicken-marches on her way, Bianca and Lilo close behind. No. Real. All too real.
"Sorry," Belle says, wrapping her shawl tighter around her after she releases him. "It was just so, so quiet, here, by myself."
"It's quiet every night," is his answer, although it takes several heart thumps to mutter it.
"Yes, but, I've never slept alone anywhere before and, oh, your boots!"
What the hell is all this, he feels like screeching up at the gods. His maid, in her nightgown, hair unkempt and cascading down her back, is rushing to the nearest basin to care for his boots and it's, see, he's so disoriented he can hardly find the clock...one in the morning. She returns with a damp rag in hand, kneels, and starts scrubbing his boots before he can even take them off.
"Belle."
"Sorry," she says again. "I was...it's late. I don't know what I was doing." She laughs at herself and looks at the rag as though it was a foreign rodent. "You don't want to just stand there after being gone for so long. Need I hear how it went, or are the details too gruesome?"
"Too disgusting," he says. So true.
"I was afraid you were taking someone's baby or something like that."
"That's not such a popular one anymore." He notices her shudder and it about snaps him in half. Want, so much want, and now shame. "Power is, it's an addictive thing."
"I'm sure it is," she says so flatly he can't tell if she's irritated or understanding. Or somehow both.
Well, he would not explain such a weighty concept to a measly caretaker so late at night, not without rehearsing and conjuring the best possible words to use. It was the only way anyone understood.
"Did you know wormwood is meant to symbolize absence?" she asks.
"What is this, a riddle every night before bed now? I submit to you, 'why is a raven like a writing desk?'"
"It just seems something is absent in your life. Power just seems like a costly thing."
"Yet there are those who must wield it. Your own family, for instance."
"It seems to me," she says with an inhale, "the best of those who possess power took it on with some reluctance. I should go on to bed." Forcing a smile at him, she adds, "Thank you. For the books. They're absolutely lovely."
"You're welcome."
"And I'm sure I'll think about ravens and writing desks tonight," she adds, glancing back at him once more before trotting up the stairs. Good thing, he thinks, because that's far from what he'll be thinking about tonight.