[fic: ouat]
my sin was faith
once upon a time. belle. spoilers. the girl, Belle thinks, must have gone mad in a single-room with only a single soul to speak to. ~2400 | pg13
Belle goes home, because really what choice does she have? She trudges through the woods, until the hem of her blue gown is covered in six-inches worth of mud, she sleeps in tree hollows, and eats the berries that blossom in the bushes.
She sees not a soul.
A pity that, Belle reasons, for she would have dearly liked to meet the dark-cloaked woman again. And wring her neck.
She left her father’s house a maid, trembling beside the rail-thin man whose smile made her think of bleached tombstones in a cemetery. She had trembled, thinking of her future, but hadn’t looked back. She had not dared look back.
Belle crosses drawbridge and hears the sound of creaking wooden wheels and swords clanking, but is it muted now? The colors of her youth, were they dulling? Or had they always been that way?
When she had left her father’s house she had not looked back. She stops at the castle’s door and glances over her shoulder. She feels foolish. Did she think to see him there, decked out in his mockery of refinement, hands curled in a pseudo bow?
But it was a maiden that left her father’s house, and it is a maiden that returns-if a bit worse for wear.
“Gaston is missing,” her father informs her later that night.
Belle jolts and thinks-oh. And she’s sorry, truly. Gaston had been kind, if only having little more depth than a puddle after a light rain. There hadn’t been a time in memory where she hadn’t known she would marry Gaston one day. Privately, tucked away guiltily in her heart before a madman had turned it sideways with a tittering laugh, Belle had admitted that she had breathed a sigh of relief in trading her confinement with Gaston for her confinement with Rumpelstiltskin.
Her teacup clinks against the saucer as she replaces it, and she rubs her thumb along the carefully painted pink flowers and wishes they were blue. Rumpelstiltskin. She hadn’t thought of his name, not since she had left, because it had hurt too much. She had become nothing more than survival, nothing more than her feet carrying her down the familiar path home.
Home. But is it even that anymore? Her father’s face, once so well-loved and warm, seems a stranger’s now.
“He had gone to retrieve you,” her father says, “from the beast.”
And yes, Belle thinks, there is accusation there, in the voice and in the craggy face of her father-turned-stranger.
“I’m sorry,” she says levelly. “I was locked in the dungeon or scrubbing floors my whole captivity. I didn’t see him.” But she is thinking, oddly, of the sweet scent of the rose, so tall and proud, and Rumpelstiltskin’s cattish smile-like that old tale of the wolf’s face when he had fed Red Riding Hood her grandmother’s meat.
Had he hurt Gaston? More than likely, Belle thinks. He would have, and without thought, if Gaston had made the journey to retrieve her from his grasp. She wished the thought bothered her more.
Rumors begin to persist, about her especially. She has taken up odd habits, climbing rafters in breeches (she had gone to dust the high bookshelf once, and had nearly tumbled and cracked her head. Rumpelstiltskin had insisted on a special pair of breeches fitted for her. Your crown’s a bit more valuable than Jill’s, he’d said, best be more carefully with it.) She wears hair unbound, curling free down her back without netting, she doesn’t wear shoes most days, because Rumpelstiltskin had never cared for them, had preferred to walk about barefoot on stockinged feet.
Belle only wears a corset at the harshest of persistence. She’d complained once, to him, that all the boning and stays had made it difficult for her to breath. Then you must never wear them again, he said, and it had been the first time he’d touched her. Truly touched her, one hand upon the curve of her hip.
They come for her in the dead of night, and she fights. Valiantly. Clawing for freedom, spewing all the profanities she can think of. And for a maiden, she is quick and clever with them.
And then she sees him. Her father, the stranger, watching pale and grim from the corner of the room as she’s dragged bodily out, clothed in nothing but a thin nightrail and her courage.
They take her to a tower, at the edge of her father’s kingdom.
“Rotted,” the clerics say as they chain her to the cool stone floor. “You can see it, sire. It is like a poison in her veins, blackening them, turning them rotten. If you wish to save her, we must act quickly.”
“What’s going on?” Belle demands. “What’s all this nonsense?”
The king frowns so deeply his whole face furrows into aging lines and wrinkles. “What must we do?”
“It’s like putrid flesh, my lord,” the cleric on the left, a small rabbit-faced man, says. “It must be cut or burned away. Otherwise, the whole body shall be rendered useless.”
“Stop,” Belle says, and twists against her restraints. “There’s nothing wrong with me! There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Poor girl,” the cleric on the right says, daring to stroke a hand through the tangles of her dark hair. She shakes him off with a snarl. “It’s his corruption, you see? We’re trying to cleanse you, trying to save you, drain him out of you. Drive him out of you.”
“You’re bloody fools!” Belle snaps and says, “Father, its drivel. It’s nonsense! I’m me! I’m me, don’t you see? Nothing has changed.”
But they must see the lie in her eyes. Everything has changed.
They draw her screams out of her, though she had promised herself she would not. But the knives and the fire. They make a cut, an incision along her breastbone, and rub salt-laced holy water against it and she screams then. They watch her watered blood roll down her naked chest, as if they expect it to turn black. It only browns on the stone floor beneath her. Then they cut deeper. After, they switch to fire, leaving horrid marks at the backs of her knees and where her naval ends.
She screams, and then she screams for her father. Begs him incoherently, for forgiveness (though she isn’t sure why; only that she is sorry sorry sorry because it hurts so much), for his love, for him to make the pain stop. Her father buries his face in his hands and it becomes too much for him. He leaves her with the clerics, and that is the worst of the betrayals.
Belle cries out for Rumpelstiltskin in the worst of her delirium. The fevered parts of her brain, laden with pain, think that he loves her, that surely he can feel her pain, that he will come and tear down the tower, rip apart the clerics with his magic, take her back to his castle and that the pain will end-as if he is brave enough to love her, to take her love, to be a man.
He does not come.
And in the end, he hurts her again, because the clerics are the only ones who hear her screams for him, and they look at her as if she’s something vile and twisted and decayed. They call her father back in, and Belle thinks that there are tears crusting on the weathered lines of his face, but she is too exhausted to care. She lays her battered body on the stone floor and lets its chill soothe her fiery nerves, lets their heavy voices lay over her like a blanket.
“His venom runs deep,” someone says. “Far deeper than we feared. It will be no simple exorcism, freeing her from his thrall.”
“What must we do?” She barely recognizes her father’s voice.
“Leave her here, for the time being, so she does not corrupt others. We must confer with the head cleric in another kingdom. He’s dealt with this sort of exorcism before.”
Her father’s fingers move along her naked shoulder. Belle hates him, feels the acid reaction to his touch water her mouth, but she realizes he’s saying goodbye to her. She lashes out, catching his wrist.
“Please,” she croaks. “Don’t leave me.”
He pulls his hand free, shakes it as if it burns. “I will return,” he promises.
Her father leaves her in the dark.
They unchain her just before leaving, the clerics. She is left to pace a small stone room a dizzying height from the ground. They leave her a ration of food, and advise her to portion it so she does not starve. They leave her a dress, a yellow one with a stringing sort of familiarity, but she refuses to dress, instead stands shivering and naked as they depart.
She remembers the tale of a witch-mother who locked away her daughter in a high, high tower for fear the world would snatch her away. The girl, Belle thinks, must have gone mad in a single-room with only a single soul to speak to. Was it any wonder she tossed herself at the first man who happened by? Years and years of forced solitary, that girl had to have gone mad. Three days, and Belle loses track of time, track of herself.
And then the clerics will return with the fire and the knives and the holy water, trying to bleed a false poison out of her. She realizes what they want to cut away from her, bury like afterbirth in some dead field. Her love. That is the poison that hums through her veins.
Belle stands at the window, looking out over the canopy of trees. She can’t see her father’s castle, but she imagines she can see Rumpelstiltskin’s. She imagines he’s at his spinning wheel, turning straw into gold for no real reason other than he can.
He’ll have let the castle get dusty again, Belle thinks, and her fingers curl into the stone ledge until her nails chip and shatter.
The days progress and her food ration grows thin. She dreams restlessly, of her father’s face twisting demonically, of the clerics nibbling at her legs, eating chunks of her flesh. A month, and the dreams take on a different nightmarish portion-they become a macabre salvation. She dreams of hurtling herself out the window, landing face-first on the ground far below, her limbs breaking off like a doll’s. She imagines sweet, sweet earth in her mouth, worms filling up her belly. Being buried in the woods not far from Rumpelstiltskin’s castle, the dark queen’s carriage splashing fresh rainwater onto her grave.
And the worst is when she awakens, she cannot tell if she is dead or not.
3 days and a month, she sees their horses in the distance. Carefully, she goes to the dress spread out on the bed she has never slept in. It smells stale from disuse. She carefully pulls it on, pulls the laces as tight as she can without a maid to help her.
Belle hears their feet upon the wooden stairs, her father’s hands fumbling at the lock of the door. When they step inside she sees their holy water and their knives, and candles burning brightly.
She looks at her father, at his worn, unfamiliar face. She told him once that no one could control her destiny. No one except her.
A smile curls up her mouth, and it’s almost as if they’re drawn back in time, when she had clutched at his hand and said goodbye. She lifts a thin hand to her lips and blows them a kiss. The clerics shudder as if that is enough to taint them. Belle wants to laugh, but finds has no strength for it.
Still smiling, she takes a step back, and another. And another still. Her father understands, then, and lunges for her. Too late. The backs of her burned knees hit the low stone ledge and she lets herself tumble, out of the tower.
The ground roars up to meet her; she can hear it, but odd enough, she cannot feel it when she impacts. Perhaps all that means is that she was dead long before she hit the ground.
There are strong arms holding her, and she is blissfully brought back to the time when Rumpelstiltskin had caught her as she lost her footing on the ladder. Plucked her out of the air. His arms had been thin, but strong, and she had felt the first quivering of womanhood in her stomach.
And then she remembers-Rumpelstiltskin had never come for her. She’d cried out for him, but he had never come. And these arms are big, like warm steel bands, around her aching knees and bruised shoulder.
Belle opens her eyes.
The castle is a purple-blue monolith of glass. Boot heels clink against lavish marble floors, trudging a reluctantly well-known path. The man holding her is tall, and handsome, and smells like earth and death. Furs swish at his shoulders, and a dark scruff colors his cheeks. He looks wild and wolfish, but Belle has been too often a captive to be afraid.
“Careful,” he advisors, his accent heavy and soothing. “You’ve had a tumble.”
“I’ll say,” Belle manages. “That was supposed to kill me.”
“It nearly did,” is all the man says, and kicks open a heavy wooden door. It bangs against the opposite wall.
“Are you finished with all those dramatics?” a voice demands; a snake crawls up Belle’s spine to gnaw at her neck. “Really, you couldn’t think of a better option? It’s not easy, creating a suitable body duplicate and then snatching you out of thin air before you do manage to get yourself killed. Lower her, huntsman. You must learn not to be so tender with the wounded birds.”
Stoically, the man places her on the thick black carpet. Belle manages to turn to her knees, every part of her aching and sore. Black feathers dance along the woman’s hemline and Belle lifts her head up, and up, until she can see the looping, red smirk of the black queen.
Why, Belle thinks. And then laughs, laughs until she has to press her face into the carpet and sob. Why? If Rumpelstiltskin has taught her one thing, left her with one real lesson, its why is irrelevant in the end. The true question should be why not?
Two fingers press against the underside of her chin, digging and forcing her to lift her eyes, back into the smug face of the dark woman.
“My dear Belle,” the Queen murmurs, her voice slithering up Belle’s neck and curling around her throat, locking like chain. “I think you’re quite insane.”
She laughs again, unable to resist. She may just be, at that.
once upon a time. belle. spoilers. the girl, Belle thinks, must have gone mad in a single-room with only a single soul to speak to. ~2400 | pg13
Belle goes home, because really what choice does she have? She trudges through the woods, until the hem of her blue gown is covered in six-inches worth of mud, she sleeps in tree hollows, and eats the berries that blossom in the bushes.
She sees not a soul.
A pity that, Belle reasons, for she would have dearly liked to meet the dark-cloaked woman again. And wring her neck.
She left her father’s house a maid, trembling beside the rail-thin man whose smile made her think of bleached tombstones in a cemetery. She had trembled, thinking of her future, but hadn’t looked back. She had not dared look back.
Belle crosses drawbridge and hears the sound of creaking wooden wheels and swords clanking, but is it muted now? The colors of her youth, were they dulling? Or had they always been that way?
When she had left her father’s house she had not looked back. She stops at the castle’s door and glances over her shoulder. She feels foolish. Did she think to see him there, decked out in his mockery of refinement, hands curled in a pseudo bow?
But it was a maiden that left her father’s house, and it is a maiden that returns-if a bit worse for wear.
“Gaston is missing,” her father informs her later that night.
Belle jolts and thinks-oh. And she’s sorry, truly. Gaston had been kind, if only having little more depth than a puddle after a light rain. There hadn’t been a time in memory where she hadn’t known she would marry Gaston one day. Privately, tucked away guiltily in her heart before a madman had turned it sideways with a tittering laugh, Belle had admitted that she had breathed a sigh of relief in trading her confinement with Gaston for her confinement with Rumpelstiltskin.
Her teacup clinks against the saucer as she replaces it, and she rubs her thumb along the carefully painted pink flowers and wishes they were blue. Rumpelstiltskin. She hadn’t thought of his name, not since she had left, because it had hurt too much. She had become nothing more than survival, nothing more than her feet carrying her down the familiar path home.
Home. But is it even that anymore? Her father’s face, once so well-loved and warm, seems a stranger’s now.
“He had gone to retrieve you,” her father says, “from the beast.”
And yes, Belle thinks, there is accusation there, in the voice and in the craggy face of her father-turned-stranger.
“I’m sorry,” she says levelly. “I was locked in the dungeon or scrubbing floors my whole captivity. I didn’t see him.” But she is thinking, oddly, of the sweet scent of the rose, so tall and proud, and Rumpelstiltskin’s cattish smile-like that old tale of the wolf’s face when he had fed Red Riding Hood her grandmother’s meat.
Had he hurt Gaston? More than likely, Belle thinks. He would have, and without thought, if Gaston had made the journey to retrieve her from his grasp. She wished the thought bothered her more.
Rumors begin to persist, about her especially. She has taken up odd habits, climbing rafters in breeches (she had gone to dust the high bookshelf once, and had nearly tumbled and cracked her head. Rumpelstiltskin had insisted on a special pair of breeches fitted for her. Your crown’s a bit more valuable than Jill’s, he’d said, best be more carefully with it.) She wears hair unbound, curling free down her back without netting, she doesn’t wear shoes most days, because Rumpelstiltskin had never cared for them, had preferred to walk about barefoot on stockinged feet.
Belle only wears a corset at the harshest of persistence. She’d complained once, to him, that all the boning and stays had made it difficult for her to breath. Then you must never wear them again, he said, and it had been the first time he’d touched her. Truly touched her, one hand upon the curve of her hip.
They come for her in the dead of night, and she fights. Valiantly. Clawing for freedom, spewing all the profanities she can think of. And for a maiden, she is quick and clever with them.
And then she sees him. Her father, the stranger, watching pale and grim from the corner of the room as she’s dragged bodily out, clothed in nothing but a thin nightrail and her courage.
They take her to a tower, at the edge of her father’s kingdom.
“Rotted,” the clerics say as they chain her to the cool stone floor. “You can see it, sire. It is like a poison in her veins, blackening them, turning them rotten. If you wish to save her, we must act quickly.”
“What’s going on?” Belle demands. “What’s all this nonsense?”
The king frowns so deeply his whole face furrows into aging lines and wrinkles. “What must we do?”
“It’s like putrid flesh, my lord,” the cleric on the left, a small rabbit-faced man, says. “It must be cut or burned away. Otherwise, the whole body shall be rendered useless.”
“Stop,” Belle says, and twists against her restraints. “There’s nothing wrong with me! There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Poor girl,” the cleric on the right says, daring to stroke a hand through the tangles of her dark hair. She shakes him off with a snarl. “It’s his corruption, you see? We’re trying to cleanse you, trying to save you, drain him out of you. Drive him out of you.”
“You’re bloody fools!” Belle snaps and says, “Father, its drivel. It’s nonsense! I’m me! I’m me, don’t you see? Nothing has changed.”
But they must see the lie in her eyes. Everything has changed.
They draw her screams out of her, though she had promised herself she would not. But the knives and the fire. They make a cut, an incision along her breastbone, and rub salt-laced holy water against it and she screams then. They watch her watered blood roll down her naked chest, as if they expect it to turn black. It only browns on the stone floor beneath her. Then they cut deeper. After, they switch to fire, leaving horrid marks at the backs of her knees and where her naval ends.
She screams, and then she screams for her father. Begs him incoherently, for forgiveness (though she isn’t sure why; only that she is sorry sorry sorry because it hurts so much), for his love, for him to make the pain stop. Her father buries his face in his hands and it becomes too much for him. He leaves her with the clerics, and that is the worst of the betrayals.
Belle cries out for Rumpelstiltskin in the worst of her delirium. The fevered parts of her brain, laden with pain, think that he loves her, that surely he can feel her pain, that he will come and tear down the tower, rip apart the clerics with his magic, take her back to his castle and that the pain will end-as if he is brave enough to love her, to take her love, to be a man.
He does not come.
And in the end, he hurts her again, because the clerics are the only ones who hear her screams for him, and they look at her as if she’s something vile and twisted and decayed. They call her father back in, and Belle thinks that there are tears crusting on the weathered lines of his face, but she is too exhausted to care. She lays her battered body on the stone floor and lets its chill soothe her fiery nerves, lets their heavy voices lay over her like a blanket.
“His venom runs deep,” someone says. “Far deeper than we feared. It will be no simple exorcism, freeing her from his thrall.”
“What must we do?” She barely recognizes her father’s voice.
“Leave her here, for the time being, so she does not corrupt others. We must confer with the head cleric in another kingdom. He’s dealt with this sort of exorcism before.”
Her father’s fingers move along her naked shoulder. Belle hates him, feels the acid reaction to his touch water her mouth, but she realizes he’s saying goodbye to her. She lashes out, catching his wrist.
“Please,” she croaks. “Don’t leave me.”
He pulls his hand free, shakes it as if it burns. “I will return,” he promises.
Her father leaves her in the dark.
They unchain her just before leaving, the clerics. She is left to pace a small stone room a dizzying height from the ground. They leave her a ration of food, and advise her to portion it so she does not starve. They leave her a dress, a yellow one with a stringing sort of familiarity, but she refuses to dress, instead stands shivering and naked as they depart.
She remembers the tale of a witch-mother who locked away her daughter in a high, high tower for fear the world would snatch her away. The girl, Belle thinks, must have gone mad in a single-room with only a single soul to speak to. Was it any wonder she tossed herself at the first man who happened by? Years and years of forced solitary, that girl had to have gone mad. Three days, and Belle loses track of time, track of herself.
And then the clerics will return with the fire and the knives and the holy water, trying to bleed a false poison out of her. She realizes what they want to cut away from her, bury like afterbirth in some dead field. Her love. That is the poison that hums through her veins.
Belle stands at the window, looking out over the canopy of trees. She can’t see her father’s castle, but she imagines she can see Rumpelstiltskin’s. She imagines he’s at his spinning wheel, turning straw into gold for no real reason other than he can.
He’ll have let the castle get dusty again, Belle thinks, and her fingers curl into the stone ledge until her nails chip and shatter.
The days progress and her food ration grows thin. She dreams restlessly, of her father’s face twisting demonically, of the clerics nibbling at her legs, eating chunks of her flesh. A month, and the dreams take on a different nightmarish portion-they become a macabre salvation. She dreams of hurtling herself out the window, landing face-first on the ground far below, her limbs breaking off like a doll’s. She imagines sweet, sweet earth in her mouth, worms filling up her belly. Being buried in the woods not far from Rumpelstiltskin’s castle, the dark queen’s carriage splashing fresh rainwater onto her grave.
And the worst is when she awakens, she cannot tell if she is dead or not.
3 days and a month, she sees their horses in the distance. Carefully, she goes to the dress spread out on the bed she has never slept in. It smells stale from disuse. She carefully pulls it on, pulls the laces as tight as she can without a maid to help her.
Belle hears their feet upon the wooden stairs, her father’s hands fumbling at the lock of the door. When they step inside she sees their holy water and their knives, and candles burning brightly.
She looks at her father, at his worn, unfamiliar face. She told him once that no one could control her destiny. No one except her.
A smile curls up her mouth, and it’s almost as if they’re drawn back in time, when she had clutched at his hand and said goodbye. She lifts a thin hand to her lips and blows them a kiss. The clerics shudder as if that is enough to taint them. Belle wants to laugh, but finds has no strength for it.
Still smiling, she takes a step back, and another. And another still. Her father understands, then, and lunges for her. Too late. The backs of her burned knees hit the low stone ledge and she lets herself tumble, out of the tower.
The ground roars up to meet her; she can hear it, but odd enough, she cannot feel it when she impacts. Perhaps all that means is that she was dead long before she hit the ground.
There are strong arms holding her, and she is blissfully brought back to the time when Rumpelstiltskin had caught her as she lost her footing on the ladder. Plucked her out of the air. His arms had been thin, but strong, and she had felt the first quivering of womanhood in her stomach.
And then she remembers-Rumpelstiltskin had never come for her. She’d cried out for him, but he had never come. And these arms are big, like warm steel bands, around her aching knees and bruised shoulder.
Belle opens her eyes.
The castle is a purple-blue monolith of glass. Boot heels clink against lavish marble floors, trudging a reluctantly well-known path. The man holding her is tall, and handsome, and smells like earth and death. Furs swish at his shoulders, and a dark scruff colors his cheeks. He looks wild and wolfish, but Belle has been too often a captive to be afraid.
“Careful,” he advisors, his accent heavy and soothing. “You’ve had a tumble.”
“I’ll say,” Belle manages. “That was supposed to kill me.”
“It nearly did,” is all the man says, and kicks open a heavy wooden door. It bangs against the opposite wall.
“Are you finished with all those dramatics?” a voice demands; a snake crawls up Belle’s spine to gnaw at her neck. “Really, you couldn’t think of a better option? It’s not easy, creating a suitable body duplicate and then snatching you out of thin air before you do manage to get yourself killed. Lower her, huntsman. You must learn not to be so tender with the wounded birds.”
Stoically, the man places her on the thick black carpet. Belle manages to turn to her knees, every part of her aching and sore. Black feathers dance along the woman’s hemline and Belle lifts her head up, and up, until she can see the looping, red smirk of the black queen.
Why, Belle thinks. And then laughs, laughs until she has to press her face into the carpet and sob. Why? If Rumpelstiltskin has taught her one thing, left her with one real lesson, its why is irrelevant in the end. The true question should be why not?
Two fingers press against the underside of her chin, digging and forcing her to lift her eyes, back into the smug face of the dark woman.
“My dear Belle,” the Queen murmurs, her voice slithering up Belle’s neck and curling around her throat, locking like chain. “I think you’re quite insane.”
She laughs again, unable to resist. She may just be, at that.