Chapter Text
At first there was only white light, a formless void in which he found himself drifting, utterly untethered from space and time. He had come back to himself with a jolt, a sudden rush of indefinable awareness and sensation causing his blue eyes to shoot open and the air to rush out of his chest in a panicked gasp. There was no way to know how long he had been like that, drifting unaware in a sea of nothingness, but now his mind, quick and clever, knew immediately what must have happened: he had died. Yes, that was it exactly. He was dead, and this white light, this emptiness, was what came after. He shook his head wryly. It was a fitting punishment, really, for a man like him: condemnation for all eternity to an afterlife as literally empty as his natural life had been figuratively so.
He had spent so many years leading a life of such wretched excess, and all of it had been a lie. He had painted and powdered, clad himself in velvet and draped himself in jewels, all so that no one would see the real face beneath, see that he was still too much the same little boy he had always been, slender and shy, with his mother’s fair hair, his mother’s blue eyes. He had thrown parties and balls that were legendary for their hedonism, veritable whirling dervishes of light and color, all so that he could hide behind the music and the dancing, could flit from partner to partner like a hummingbird, never coming to rest. For in resting there was thinking, and in thinking, there was pain.
And he had filled his bed with all comers, with courtesans, and merry widows, and opera singers, and actresses, sometimes more than one at a time. He had sought pleasure, and he had found it, and while he had not done any of them harm, had never stolen a maiden’s innocence or taken a woman against her will, neither had he ever looked at any of them as anything more than a way to warm his bed on all those long, lonely nights. They had been as much a source of decoration for his chambers as had the paintings on the walls or the elaborate candelabra that filled the space with dazzling light. He had not sought, and they had not provided, anything more than that. They had not teased him, provoked him, challenged him, had not asked him about his favorite books, or sat with him in companionable silence, each lost in their own story. They had not caused him to analyze every look, even the merest glance, for meaning, or made his heart feel as if it would beat out of his chest any time one of them placed a hand on his arm. In short, they had not been—
Belle! The thought of her now sent a sharp ache through his chest so painful that he felt as if it would tear him apart. He could still see her standing on the rooftop, a bright speck of pure white amidst the blackness of the night, could remember the wave of pure joy that had broken across him when he had realized she had come back. But why had she come back? He supposed he would never know now. He pictured her face as he had last seen it, before everything had faded to black and he had woken up here (wherever here was). Her brown eyes had been full of tears, genuine emotion written across her face. But what emotion, he wondered. Sadness, yes, that much had been evident, but also fear, he decided, and despair, and anguish, and—dare he think it?—heartbreak. Would it have been enough to break the curse? He didn’t know, and it hardly mattered now. Even were he not dead, the last petal had surely fallen by now.
He wondered what she was doing at that exact moment. Trapped in this place, cut off from everything, he had no way of knowing how much time had passed on earth. It could have been seconds, minutes, hours; there was simply no way to tell. If the last petal had fallen, then there truly was no hope, not even anyone to comfort her as she sat with his body on the floor of the West Wing tower. Somewhere in that other world, was she still holding onto his paw, clutching it in her tiny, delicate hands as she felt the life and warmth drain out of it? She would, he felt certain, stay like that until all the warmth was gone and it—he—had grown as cold as the stone floor on which he lay.
And then what? Would someone come to help her, one of the villagers, perhaps? It wasn’t likely. An image sprang to mind, as clear as if it were happening right in front of him, of Belle stumbling through his ruined castle, searching for someone, anyone, to help her bear her terrible burden. He supposed that in the end, it would have to be her father, and perhaps that priest she sometimes spoke of, who would come to her aid. They would have to bury him, that much was plain. But where? Beasts didn’t get a spot in the family crypt. Somewhere on his estate, perhaps, in the gardens where he and Belle had walked, where she had read him poetry. Yes, he would like that, to be surrounded by the beauty she had helped him to see.
But after the burial would come the rest of her life, stretching out before her, vast and empty. Would she mourn him? Or would she shut her mind to the reality of all that had happened since she first walked in the front door of the castle, so that after a while, it would seem like nothing more than a half-remembered dream, like glimpses of fragments of something more than the village life she had always known? He supposed she would one day marry, not Gaston, but perhaps someone else from her village, or someone her father would meet on one of his trips to the market town. And it was what he wished for her, truly it was. He had no desire for her to be alone, suffering as he had suffered for all those years before he had met her. He wanted her to be happy, to live the life he would now never have the chance to give her. And yet… He thought of Belle in another man’s arms, Belle tilting her face up to another man with a satisfied smile as she closed the book she had been reading from, Belle in another man’s bed, Belle with another man’s child, and he could not stop an agonized cry from escaping his throat.
It was at this exact moment that the Beast realized that he hadn’t just been drifting through the sea of nothingness; he had actually been drifting toward something. The light was no longer purely white, but was now tinged with a gold that seemed to hang in the air like a mist, and he realized with a start that there was now solid ground beneath his feet. He stood, focusing on the way the air seemed to grow hazier as it met the horizon, and though he couldn’t see it through the intense golden light, somehow he knew that there was something there, waiting, on the other side, just past his line of sight. The gates of heaven, said a voice in the back of his mind, and though he didn’t know where that voice had come from, he knew that it was right, and a bolt of fear lanced through him.
As he stood there, waiting for the judgment he was certain was imminent, he gradually became aware of a figure moving toward him through the mist. An angel? But no, it was walking toward him as any human would, not hovering on wings. As the figure drew nearer, he saw that it was a woman, small, but moving with a dignified, regal bearing that immediately marked her as aristocratic. She came closer, and when she had emerged from the golden light and he could see her clearly, the shock of it literally brought him to his knees. For he found himself looking at a face that, though he had not seen it for twenty years or more, was as familiar to him as the clear blue eyes he saw every time he looked in a mirror. “Maman?” he finally managed to say.
His mother was standing right in front of him now, and from his vantage point on his knees, he was able to look directly up into her face. She looked just as he remembered her, her heart-shaped face framed by soft honey-blonde curls, her sky-blue eyes gentle and warm as they looked down at him, and he was startled to realize that they were more or less the same age now. The years that had marked him had left her unscathed. But of course they had. Why wouldn’t they? There was no time in this place. “Oh, my son,” she said, her hand coming up to cup the side of his face. “How I’ve missed you.” There was only one other person, in this or any world, who was able to touch him like that, tender and unafraid, and the realization of all that he had lost—all that he would never have—hit him anew, a crushing weight against his chest.
He was suddenly reminded, somewhat absurdly, of his boyhood, of those happy, easy days when his mother had still been alive, when he had been able to run to her for comfort from all the world’s ills. Of course, the problems had been so much simpler then: a skinned knee from falling while climbing trees in the orchard, a nursery maid who sent him to bed without a glass of warm milk. He could never have imagined anything like this, not even in his nightmares. “Oh, Maman,” he murmured sadly, relaxing into the gentle touch of her hand, a little boy lost once again. “I’ve made such a dreadful mess of everything.”
His mother’s expression was a curious mix of emotions: pity, sorrow, and something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It could have been relief, or even something akin to contentment. Everything about her radiated peace and calm, and it both comforted and distressed him in equal measure. He felt confused, as if she knew something he clearly didn’t. “My dear, sweet boy,” she said softly, fingers tracing feather-light over the fur of his cheek. “No, no, no.” Her smile grew wistful. “No,” she said again. “I think this time you’ve finally made everything right.”
He pushed himself to his feet at that, a rush of anger burning through him despite himself. “How can you say that? Look at me, look at where I am!”
She didn’t answer him, at least, not directly. Instead, she turned so she was facing away from him, looking past the horizon toward whatever it was that lay beyond the golden light. When she spoke, her voice was as matter of fact as if they had been discussing the weather, or the price of turnips, or any other one of a thousand little minutiae. “Her name suits her, don’t you think?”
“What?” he said, his anger dissipating into genuine confusion.
“Her name,” she said again, patiently, as if he were a little child. “There’s a refreshing simplicity to it. There is value, I think, in calling things what they are.”
Ah, now he understood. A smile ghosted across his features in what seemed to be his automatic reaction to even the merest suggestion of her. “A beautiful name for a beautiful woman.”
She turned to look at him then, and the smile on her face was broad and genuine. “You love her.” It was more statement than question.
He couldn’t dissemble. Not here, not with her. “I love her.” It was the first time he had spoken the words out loud to anyone, and he felt the truth of them in his bones. “More than I ever thought I could,” he added softly.
His mother came closer again and took his large paws in her own small hands, giving them a gentle squeeze. “I’m so glad. It was what I wanted most for you, and I thought—” She broke off, her voice choked, then swallowed and tried again. “I thought it might never happen.” Her smile grew sad. “I’m so sorry—sorrier than you’ll ever know—for leaving you. For leaving you with him, most of all. I knew what he was capable of, and—well, I tried to hold on for as long as I could. I’m sorry it wasn’t longer.”
He thought of his mother in her sickbed, propped up against a mass of pillows, so pale that she would have blended into the linens if it hadn’t been for her hair. He thought of the horrible coughing sound she made, of the maids who carried away the bloodstained handkerchiefs and pillowcases and nightgowns, holding them close to their chests where they thought he wouldn’t see. He thought of a long string of dinners eaten sitting at the other end of the long dining room table from his father, dinners eaten in complete silence except when the wine flowed too freely and his father would grow maudlin and angry in turns. He thought of the closest his father had ever come to exhibiting something akin to paternal affection: the visit to a Parisian whorehouse that had been his seventeenth birthday gift. He thought of the woman who had been selected for him, whose name he no longer recalled, of the way her kohl-rimmed eyes had smoldered as she had taken his hand and led him to bed. He thought of all this, and leaned down and kissed his mother gently on the forehead. “It’s alright, Maman. We all make our own choices in the end.”
“I am so happy she found you.”
He sighed. “But she came too late, Maman. Or rather, I realized too late what it all meant.”
The look she gave him was searching, appraising, as if she were trying to come to some sort of conclusion about this man her boy prince had become. “If you could see her again, if you had all the time in the world with her, what would you do?”
The words were out of his mouth before he had time to think about them. “Love her, I suppose. Never leave her side again. Show her the world. Give her a home.”
She was a little bit tearful now, and he realized with a start that so was he. “There, you see?” she said a little shakily through joyous tears. “You haven’t realized anything too late at all.”
As if on cue, a breeze began to rise up, causing the golden mist to swirl and shimmer around them. “I don’t understand,” he told her. “How can any of it not be too late?”
His mother reached up and took his face in both of her hands. “I love you, my darling boy, and I’m so glad I got to see you again. I’m so proud of the man you’ve become. But I’m afraid now it is time for you to go.”
Panic welled up within him. “Go? Go where?” After all this, to still be consigned to hell?
She pressed herself up onto her tiptoes, straining to give herself the necessary height, and kissed him on the cheek, once, twice, just as she had done when he was a little boy. “Don’t be afraid; I’ll see you again. But it won’t be for many years. You have a life to live, after all.” Stepping back, she gave him a gentle push, and there was only time for him to wonder at how the sensation of his mother’s lips against his face felt different than had that of her hand only a few moments earlier, almost as if—but no, it couldn’t be, it was all just an illusion—before he was drifting again, and then falling, and the white abyss opened up to swallow him whole.