(no subject)
I am totally psyched to find that so many of you are also watching OUAT and I look forward to blathering about all my Rumpelstiltskin feels with you guys.
In the meantime, here's a Rumpel/Belle fic what I wrote. :)
dear and dear is their poisoned noteWhen I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches with which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm.
~Angela Carter, “The Erl-King”
As he leads her away, it occurs to her that she’s fortunate to be from a distant kingdom, where they’d only heard the vaguest of rumors about the Dealmaker. That he’s the Devil’s son, with hooves inside his boots. That his mother had kissed a frog once, foolishly taking it for a prince in disguise, and so her son was born with golden-green flesh and silt-colored eyes.
These rumors she gives no credence, but she believes the third: that anyone who accepts his services should count themselves lucky if they live long enough to regret it. She wonders whether she’s the one doing the haggling here, or the thing being haggled over. The deal is struck, he said, and though nothing is signed she knows it’s so; for as his carriage rattles along its path she feels, somehow, that she’s headed homeward. As they near the castle she peers out the window and sees people disappear behind doors, pulling their curtains tight. Here, they know him well enough to be afraid.
She wonders if Gaston would have been brave enough to do what she did. Any man can kill a beast, but to live with one? To share his table, perhaps even his bed? Only women know such courage.
She expects a ghost-haunted, spider-ridden nightmare house-a moat filled with scum and eyeless fish, blood and bile dripping from the walls and the screams of children echoing up from the cellar. Instead, the Dark Castle is an edifice like any other, though imposing enough from the outside. Inside it’s too large and dusty, and too quiet.
The dungeon proves to be another one of his jests; she spends about twenty minutes there, weeping and fuming by turns, before he lets her out. Her real room is in a far corner of the castle, comfortable enough but simple and spartan in comparison with the rest of the place, the bed dressed in crisp white sheets. It’s the only room in the castle where the sun comes in; there’s a wide window facing east, with only the finest scrim of lace covering the glass. When she realizes that, she starts to wonder if there’s more to him than meets the eye.
She was terrified of proximity, of being trapped in that place with him all day and all night. Locked up with that manic energy and strangely sinister giggle, like spinning blades wrapped in cotton candy; too close to those razor-tipped fingers, that cobblestone skin and muddy eyes like a toad’s. But most nights her only company is the dust and the trinkets and the piles of straw. He’s gone for hours or even days at a time. Comes home with scrolls of vellum, longer than she is tall, tucked under his arm. They clatter like bones as he unrolls them on the dining-room table with a delighted laugh. She hides at the top of the stairs, crouching behind the banister, and watches. She can’t read the cramped script on the paper but sometimes she can make out the signatures at the bottom, some of the most powerful names in the kingdom. When his fingertips touch the page the signatures glow red for a moment and then fade to a dusty black with a soft hissing sound, like a burning brand on flesh.
Nights when he doesn’t go out he disappears to a room far beneath the castle, where he mixes his potions and poisons. There are bubbling sounds and brimstone smells; he chuckles to himself when the concoctions come together as planned, curses when they don’t. She hopes it’s not true that he skins children but she’s pretty sure the local toads and snakes aren’t so lucky.
In her father’s kingdom some had said he was a hundred years old. Others had said a thousand. She can believe it. His eyes are like deep wells; far below the surface, strange things gibber and dance, waiting for passerby to fall in. But when he spins, the turning wheel throws shadows across his face and she sees his gaze soften. His fingers stop twitching; they pluck delicately at the bits of straw and she watches in wonder as his touch coaxes them to gold. The strands gleam as they pass through his fingertips like lovers.
Sometimes, when the pile of spun straw grows too high, cluttering up the parlor, he gathers up the shining threads with an impatient grunt and hurls the whole lot out the nearest window. By the east wall there’s a pile of gold half as wide as the castle and as high as an apple tree. She thought the locals would have stolen it all away by now, but they don’t dare approach.
***
“You will skin the children I hunt for their pelts-”
When he says it she feels her heart drop into her stomach and her fingers go slack. Her head feels hot and her hands cold, and there’s a dull roaring in her ears that masks the sound of the teacup clattering on the stone floor.
“That was a quip,” he says, vastly amused by his own joke. “Not serious.”
She hates herself, after, for believing him when he said it; it was cruel to think such things of him when he’s shown her nothing but civility. But cruel of him, too, to make a fool of her. When the cup’s chipped she assumes he’ll want her to get rid of it; only the finest things grace his cupboards and mantle and shelves. But he deliberately reaches for it when she serves tea in the evening.
His hand never brushes hers when she holds out the cup, and he always leaves a space between them, as if her touch might scorch him.
Nights when he’s out, the tea service sits perched at the far end of the dining table as if waiting for his return; some nights she sits with it, turning the wounded cup over in her hands. She wonders why he’d cherish this: a memento of her terror and disgust, her clumsiness and stupidity, of the fragile imperfection of their life together here. Who could love something so broken?
He only has two ways of entering a room. One is the uncanny manner in which he appeared in her father’s castle, silent and invisible. The other is with his usual dramatic flourish, throwing the huge wooden doors open with a deafening bang that shakes the walls and rattles the windows. It’s in the latter mood that he enters one night as she sits in silence, running her fingertip over the broken rim. She starts at the noise; the cup leaps under her hand and clatters in the saucer. The rough edge slices into her finger and a bead of blood forms. In the low light of the smoking oil lamps it looks more black than red, like a fading rose. A thin trickle of blood runs down the cup’s edge, a strange shape like a sigil. She hears him approaching and hurriedly rubs the bloodstain away with the underside of her apron.
“Tea!” He is in one of his lively moods, all flashing eyes and wiggling hands. She wonders what he’s negotiated for tonight, what souls or precious stones or strands of hair. He repeats the word in his singsong chatter-”Tea, tea, tea-tea-tea.”
She hands him the chipped cup, knowing it’s the one he’ll want. If he notices the tiny cut on her finger, he doesn’t let on. But she sees a twitch in his nostrils when he lifts the cup to his lips and she can almost swear he smells her blood, even though not a trace remains on the china.
And there’s a magic worked in that moment, though she’s not sure if it’s being cast on her or on him.
***
When she falls it feels like flying, and then he’s simply there the way he appeared on her father’s throne, out of nowhere. His arms are warm, like any man’s, and he doesn’t smell like brimstone or blood-only like the soap she uses to wash his clothes. He looks up at the light like one startled from a long sleep. His discolored flesh looks different in the sunlight, gold instead of green. She wonders what the light shows him that he hates so much he’d drive nails into the wall to stave it off.
“Thank you,” she says, and he stares at her in bewilderment-whether because of the closeness of her heartbeat to his own or simply because he has not heard a kind word in decades, she cannot tell.
He drops her hastily. “No matter,” he stammers, and backs away like a threatened animal, hands held up defensively. She realizes, then, that he fears her a thousand times worse than she could ever fear him. That he does not consider love a mystery to be uncovered, but rather a monster to be locked in a cage.
Later, after she’s kissed him, she’ll wish she’d kept that in mind.