A/N: Hi! Just wanted to remind people that there will be one more chapter after this one. I don't know when I will post it, some RL things are happening right now, but it shouldn't be more than a week. I know a lot of people were looking forward to this chapter, so I didn't want to keep you waiting any longer.
For a brief moment, her fingertips on the knob, she braces herself for discovering all his dead wives. Then, holding her breath, she enters his chambers for the first time to find that coat. Just a room. She sighs. No corpse in sight, not even a spider. She does need to sidestep around a few shards of glass, though, underneath a circular mirror where she catches a dozen broken reflections of herself. A blanket is rumpled on the floor, fallen from where it covered it up, she thinks. Shaking her head, she opens the wardrobe and sifts through the contents, her eyebrows straightening at the coat's absence.
She scans the room and finds a chest at the foot of the bed the only logical alternative. She kneels and flips up the lock. Trinkets lay inside, the only garments a blanket or...close it, she commands herself. But the lid stays open and her eyes continue to stare. An antler, a humble assortment of wooden spoons, letters. You have to close the lid now, she thinks, but can't bring herself to do so. Instead, she unfolds the parchment of one of the letters, expecting maybe some adolescent love poem.
It is a row of crooked numerals, written in a shaky, uncertain hand, like that of a child. Unfolding the one under it reveals a backwards "B" with "A" and "E" after it. Making sure she folds them with reverence, she sets them back on some linens. She picks up a green vest, a man's, judging by the side the buttons are on, but such a small size. It had been next to a set of boots, good-sized, but to where there was still growing to do.
She's heard the stories. The Dark One is not above using unborn babies as bargaining chips, but she'd never heard about him keeping one for himself. But the alternative would mean...she doesn't like to think about it, how it's so easy to imagine him as always being the Dark One, of being here since time began, the antithesis of wizened beings on the side of good. She knows that at some point his life was different, how, she isn't sure, but he is a man, only functionally immortal, and now it seems he was a father.
She closes the chest and spies the coat out of the corner of her eye, strewn over the bed post. Now's not the time to ask about it, she decides, not tonight being so crucial for him for some reason.
She wears a small amethyst pendant with her silver gown, meant to lend strength of will, although she never believed in any of that before. Magicked onto a path, they follow it up on foot, cackling and banshee-wailing audible even from here.
"Not anxious to have the Big Bad Wolf dance with you?" he asks.
"I didn't choose this gown because it's pretty," she says, noticing amusement on his face.
Maleficent's fortress towers over them, black stone half-shrouded in a green mist. It looms over a cemetery on a rocky bluff just a few feet short of being a mountain. The path ends at a massive door with a pointed arch.
"Quite a grip you have there." She looks down at where her nails are digging into his arm. Faint tapping is all around, unseen things crawling up the castle walls, hidden in shadow. She prefers to think they are spiders, lizards, maybe, something she could see any day. He opens the door without touching it, no one there to greet them. On her tiptoes, she tries to take in the surroundings, but a thud throws her off-balance. The ground shakes. Again. And again. So steady, like footsteps, she thinks.
"Fee Fi Fo...hey! You made it!" a giant twice her height shouts, wiping some foam off his jet black beard before slumping to the ground with a loud thud. A few branches of the gnarled trees on the grounds fall.
"Great, ten feet of drunk," Maleficent mumbles before summoning up a rather hospitable grin. "Evening. Glad to see you made it. Who's this?"
"I'm Belle, er, Mistress. Daughter of King Maurice." Incredulity responds.
"Oh, the maid. Well, there's some brandy over at the table there, unless you would prefer some milk?" she asks her, widening her eyes and slowing her speech down to how an energetic mother speaks to her infant. She continues to mingle, the train of her robes sliding over the stone floors of a courtyard. Stepping around the giant, Belle's jaw drops at green and yellow lanterns strung above the festivities, a bonfire dead center, and a minor key song played by invisible musicians in the corner. They weave around everyone, mostly arrayed in black, to a long table with little impish minions chasing each other around it in glee. Ravens perched on the gargoyles' heads glare down at it all.
"You weren't exaggerating," she breathes, accepting some punch. Red, but cranberry judging by the smell. Not blood. Brandy and other spirits are the worst idea possible on a night like this, she decides. "Everyone is here." A few transparent sheets float overhead. Sheets with faces. Sheets that moan.
"Not everyone," he says with a mix of pride and scorn. His voice pulls her away from staring the unknown right in the face. "Some are so consumed with their revenge they just can't take a night off. You know what we call those people, dearie?" She shakes her head. "I don't know either. I was hoping you could come up with something."
She laughs, but it's cut short by a tap on her shoulder. A sickly, skeletal figure with horns poking through purplish robes stands right next to her, its face a shriveled skull.
"Belle, the Horned King," Rumpelstiltskin says, his hand out as if it were any old introduction.
"Pleased to meet you." It takes a slow speed to keep her voice from shaking.
"Would you care to dance?" the Horned King asks in a raspy voice. Her nose twitches, a musty, unwashed odor emanating from him.
"Of course she would." And her master, her great protector, ushers her forward with a hand on her backbone. "Enjoy yourself, dearie. That's what I said earlier if you'll remember."
Yes, try to look like you're having fun. She gives her partner a smile and takes his long, talon-like hands. No different than any other dance partner. And this is supposed to be a night when they are having fun, too, no plotting or anything of the kind.
"How do you see?" she asks him, peering into his sockets.
"I have eyes, deep-set ones. Behold." They glow a faint red with tiny black pupils. She's sorry she asked.
"That's amazing. I've never seen anyone do that before."
"If only they could find what I so desperately seek," he sighs with such a melancholy tone, she expects trouble.
"Well, tonight's about enjoying one's self," she says quickly, jerking just enough to pull his focus back into the dance. "And you dance divinely."
Many of them don't seem to like her, or at least don't know what to think of her, but at least they're cordial. Her "plus one" is never more than an arm's length from her now, although he spends most of the party chatting with the others, fishing for what he wants, she knows. The trolls keep to themselves, off in a corner exchanging bones, femur-length ones. One of the many hooded figures sets down his scythe in favor of a violin. The minor chord alone reminds her of many an All Hallows' Eve. Zig, zig, zig—she finds herself swaying, slightly, to the ever-building melody. White skeletons pass through the gloom, running and leaping in their shrouds.
At last she can feel him near her, feel his attention on her. It feels like it's been ages. She scoffs at herself for missing someone who had never really been gone.
"Did you find out what you needed?" she asks.
"That and more." He sounds so pleased with himself.
"Then we can go home?"
"Home?" They share the same stillness as they did the day she fell from the ladder, such guarded optimism on both their parts she knows one of them will break it. "You're ready to go so soon, with this rousing tune playing?"
She has no time to answer, for he's whirling her around in a dizzying frenzy, joining other dancers in time with the manic, celebratory music. It's so surreal she is sure everyone would appear to be spinning around no matter what the composition. It heightens, percussion and violin at full climax, and she laughs and whoops with the others, swept up in the macabre splendor. She considers kissing him. She longs to kiss him. She longs for him and has done so for longer than she's realized. A veil has fallen and she feels stark naked. A wave of calm washes over her as she gazes at him as if for the first time Panting from the dance and her epiphany, she locks eyes with him.
"I..." She gulps, the applause and subsequent pause before another song letting her know the moment has passed and once again, she is the bumbling girl at a party in which she has no place. "I'm so glad you know how to dance now."
A/N: The Horned King is a character from The Black Cauldron or The Chronicles of Prydain if you're more familiar with that. His appearance is based on the former only because I have not yet read the series, which I've heard is a lot better than the movie. Yeah, hope you got the same "Night on Bald Mountain" meets "Mos Eisley Cantina" vibe I had when writing it. Really boss Halloween party if you ask me. The music near the end of the chapter I had imagined is "Danse Macabre," so if you want to listen to that while reading, it might enhance the mood. The poem it is based on really made the chapter come together and I put a few lines into the text, such as the "white skeletons" descriptor and "the veil has fallen."