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mpwrites · 2 years ago

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(flash fiction) (spoilers in tags)

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…” Rosare paused in recollection, murmuring to himself and pulling on his fingers to attach dates to events in his memory, “It has been 18 months since my last confession.”

“Why so long, my child?” asked the voice on the other side of the screen. It had a strange quality, not quite a lisp but something near it.

“I am called to go many places,” Rosare sighed. “Most happen to be far from the church’s light”

“It is no matter; you are here now. Please begin when you are ready.” The priest sounded familiar. It was possible they had met before—Rosare had sought sanctuary in this parish between hunts some time ago—but despite his infrequent visits to the confessional, he recalled the intended anonymity of the practice (as well as the universal discomfort of the creaky wooden seats inside).

“Lately, I find it hard to get out of bed. All afternoon, I lay there like a paperweight on the record of my life. The days run together like candles that have melted and melded in a puddle, impossible to scrape up.”

The priest mumbled something Rosare couldn’t make out, it almost sounded like he said, “Moody as always,” before straightening his throat and his posture. “It’s not a sin to be depressed, my child.”

“I’m *not* depressed.”

“Sulking in bed all afternoon sounds like depression to me.”

Rosare shot a burning glance at the screen, “My work usually takes place at night. So I’m in bed most of the day.” Why was he getting angry with the priest this easily? His booth-side manner left something to be desired, but still, Rosare could feel his blood starting to boil; he’d have to carve some new stakes to work out his frustration later. Still… “And I don’t sulk.”

“You were positively brooding when you lost me in Istanbul—even perched upside-down, I could tell.”

What.

Rosare threw open the screen that separated their booths, the wood making an awful screech that he felt in his teeth. But that was nothing compared to the pointy, protruding upper canines of the priest.

“Rugen! What are you doing?! The hell have you done with the priest?”

“It’s Father Rugen now, if you don’t mind.”

His pale visage remained calm in the face of his hunter, with the shit-eating grin that seemed to be another vampiric ability.

“Shut up.” Rosare desperately wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, put a hand over his head, some instinctual show of exasperation, but he overrode his instincts to keep his eyes locked on Rugen. “What do you want with this place? How are you even on holy ground?”

Father Rugen threw up his hands, “I’ve been born again! Fitting seeing as I’ve technically died.”

“But vampires don’t have souls!”

“Yeesh, that’s harsh. I’ll admit, I’m new at this, so the theology is fuzzy, but that sounds a lot like a superstition to explain the admittedly awful things a lot of vampires do.”

Rosare let his instincts take over; he had to take a break from looking at the fangs/white collar combo. “So I’m supposed to believe that you flew over here and they let you into the chu—oh criminy, you didn’t put the elders in thrall to let you in, did you?”

Presumably, Rugen would have blushed if his capillaries had any blood to show for it. He tapped his finger on the side of the booth for a moment. “Well, I did ask for forgiveness afterward.”

“Good God.”

“Hey now, none of that. I’ll give you three Hail Marys if you do that again…Wait, is that where your name comes from? Like rosary?”

Rosare let out a sigh that nearly blew off the velvet-lined wall of the confessional. “Just tell me this, how many of the necks in this parish have fang marks on them?”

“Please!” His offense was obvious. “The only blood I need is the blood of Christ.”

Rosare’s face fell in disbelief, “You can’t mean…”

And from the floor of the booth, he produced a small cup of dark red liquid and raised it, “Transubstantiation! Crazy, right?”

#writing #short fiction #flash fiction #gothic #vampire #comedy #fantasy #vampire hunter oc

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mpwrites · 2 years ago

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because it wouldn’t leave my brain as soon as the idea was planted, may I present:

The Quantum State of Adam “The Beast” Beauty-and-the-Beast

So you know how, in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the last petal of the enchanted rose will fall on the Beast’s 21st birthday? And in Be Our Guest we establish that for “ten years [they’ve] been rusting, needing so much more than dusting”?

That means Adam was 10 or 11 when the witch cursed them all to be a big furry slab of meat and various inanimate objects respectively. Yeah, turning away someone in need from your literal castle full of servants is a shitty thing to do at any age, but it does seem harsh; he was a kid!

…but he also wasn’t a kid.

Despite this frequent talking point among Disney fans, the image of Adam in the stained glass prologue is a grown-ass man, complete with crown and scepter.

And if he had been turned into the Beast as a kid, how would there be a portrait of his *adult human face* in the West Wing for him petulantly slash?

You could reasonably argue that everyone in the castle is locked in time. Chip wasn’t birthed as a teacup; he was turned into one as a kid and stayed a kid for all that time. But everyone else are inanimate objects, they wouldn’t grow or age. Adam, on the other hand, is still a living mammalian creature with no reason to be frozen in time. More than that, if he were stuck in time, *why would they be counting his birthdays*? Rose petals don’t fall in a closed time loop.

Now, we’re having a lot of fun here trying to George Lucas our way out of a plot hole in a kid’s movie about a fairy tale, but I think it’s important to remember that telling stories is hard. Making a movie, particularly an animated one, is a long process, and sometimes the years of decisions you make telling a story layer over and obscure one another.

In some ways, this makes Beauty and the Beast a pretty accurate depiction of what it’s like to try to find a “definitive” version of a fairy tale that would have been altered over and over by time and the teller.

My guess is that they didn’t want Adam to be significantly older than Belle or to age Belle up to him (whether for nonsense sexism reasons or maybe legitimate demographic ones), and the curse only lasting a couple years wouldn’t have carried the same weight. In the end the job gets done either way; fairy tale’s gonna fairy tale.

It’s often a beautiful thing when you glimpse the person behind a creation, and mistakes should be part of that. Just because something has an error or inconsistency doesn’t mean you can’t like that thing or you have to focus on the piddly problems it has; how much we love this movie and how rarely this plot hole comes up is proof of that. It doesn’t matter whether Adam was a kid when he was cursed, by the end he learns to be a person who wouldn’t do that.

We don’t need every little thing to make sense or to headcanon our way out of a plot hole most of us didn’t notice.

But…there is one way that might work. I think it would go a little something like this:

The winter winds howled around the castle, just as the forest howled with its hungry creatures, filling their bellies to best the cold.

Prince Adam pushed his plate aside and wandered toward the fireplace he never lit himself. Before his plush robe could meet his plush armchair, a knock came at the door.

He looked around; if any servant had heard the door, they made no move to answer. A blustering wind blew snow up the windows, and another, more insistent knock followed.

His silence threatened, the Prince stalked down the stairs and opened the door.

At that moment, presumably in a lull from their eternal bickering, Lumiere and Cogsworth were passing the foyer when they heard their master’s voice and felt the draft of an open door.

With a look at the Prince and one at each other, they could sense their master’s mood, but curiosity gripped them.

“Please sire, once I enter, your home is large enough you’ll never see me again,” they heard over the creak of their tipped toes.

“I won’t see you again, lest I be more ill than this cold would make me.” Lumiere stifled a chuckle for his master’s barb.

“Beauty is only skin deep, as my lord must well know from his mirror, that being the only thing to reflect beauty on him.”

The servants’ eyes went wide, first that someone would speak to the Prince in this way, then with the understanding that as the voice spoke it changed—it grew younger, louder, more terrible in its confident lilt—and a flash of light knocked Prince Adam to the ground.

As they reached the end of the hall, the pair glimpsed the enchantress at their doorstep and ducked behind the swung open door. Adam’s eyes met Cogsworth’s then rose to Lumiere’s; fear and silence gripped them—and silence had never once fallen over the pair of serving men.

“For your unfeeling heart,” the witch cried, “you and your castle will be cursed…”

The wind stood still, the snowflakes held their place in the air.

“Until your twenty-first year.”

Adam hadn’t a strong grasp of numbers, but he was fairly certain he was near two decades if not past it. His fingers were locked to the floor and so unavailable for counting.

The ageless witch looked down at the chiseled young man, “Is there a problem?”

Lumiere found his voice, “Sire, listen here—more women have cursed me than they have their washboards; I know what to do.”

“Nonsense, Lumiere, there’s no such thing as curses.”

“Then what do you call that?” Lumiere cranked Cogsworth’s head to the crack in the door.

“…a witch.”

Lumiere somehow grew more smug, “With a face like yours, I’d assumed you’d met one before.”

“Lumiere!” Adam whispered, “Speak!”

The enchantress held her chin on her wand, surveying Adam on the floor, “I’ve lived for centuries, you see, so ages are difficult. You must be—what—ten, eleven years old? A decade being cursed seems sufficient.”

Adam’s confusion was wrung upon his face, but Lumiere nodded so hard his chin dug into Cogsworth’s scalp.

“Yes?” Adam said. “Oh. Yes! Oh no, my twenty-first year—so far away!”

“Very well,” the witch said, and as she wove her hands ‘round, snowflakes gathered and grew verdant until they formed a thorny stem in front of her.

“Yes, sire, well done! Now spring it back in her face,” Lumiere said, “tell her she’s been duped.”

“No, you fool,” Cogsworth clocked Lumiere in the shoulder, “she’ll just change the curse. Let her finish and leave us in peace.”

Still more snowflakes gathered to her, now sanguinating and attaching themselves to the stem until a rose floated before her; a bloom made of winter.

“I needed to know how many petals I needed,” she said.

Adam’s face had almost found relief, but it grew tense again. “How many?” he said. And the tension spread into growing discomfort as his jaw clenched and his teeth seemed to grow larger in his mouth.

“Yes,” the enchantress said, “one petal for each year. Ten years, as I said.”

Lumiere and Cogsworth didn’t see the rose fly to the tower, didn’t see the enchantress fade into the resuming snowfall or their master fold into himself in pain and anguish. Their minds were filled with the growing sensation of change in their limbs and how the castle seemed to grow around them.

“All that time…” Cogsworth said.

And it was written on his face.

#disney #beauty and the beast #fanfic #headcanon

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