1 — CloudxAerith.

She plants her flowers. Even a place that isn’t radiant deserves a garden in windowsills, down paths.

Her hands are marked with soil, dark along the lines of her palms.

He thinks, When did you have so many lines?

When he came home it was like magic, like, where did you come from, where have you been?Wonder why we didn’t see you at the collesium, we were there. Oh, well. Whatever. Welcome home, Cloud. Welcome home.

Now it’s all broken castles and cracked plaster.

Only the stars are the same, and he tells her so.

“But you do belong here—with us,” she says. “And that’s why we’re here, you know. To save this place.”

He knows it, but he knows: sometimes he can’t even save his soul.

She hands him the one wilted flower, because it’s still alive.

A rose for the beast.

Olette finds him bleeding in the castle’s garden, missing patches of his golden fur.

He doesn’t like to show that he feels, but he does inside, like humans do. She sees it.

She sees it in his eyes.

His claws dig into his fur, like he wants to pull the rest out—like he wants to cast aside his beast-skin and become human, too. She feels his tossing-turning anger and his ache in her own chest.

Her hands fly to grip her own hair, the brown strands tied back in a plait against the back of her neck.

She bites her lip and puts her hands in her apron pockets.

She clenches her fists inside the blue material.

Humans are the ones who attacked you, Beast. Monsters in the shapes of men.

You’re a man in the shape of a monster. That’s all.

He looks at her with eyes so pained, she wants to scream, too—to throw her head back atop a cliff and howl.

Instead, she takes his claws in her hands.

The sentient household items gather round the garden’s edges: the candlestick and the clock and the tea set and more. Mutters of ‘qu’est-ce que c’est?’ and ‘mon dieu!’ fill the air, like music, and his heart is a beating-drum base.

“Beast,” Olette whispers, “Beast, je t’aime. Je t’aime.”

She says, “When I said I wouldn’t forgive you for keeping me here? I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.”

His voice is hoarse.

He croaks out his words.

He says, “I’m a beast. You can’t love a beast.”

She says, “Isn’t this how stories go?”

She kisses him and he pulls away at first—but not for long. He’d been waiting for a Beauty. Maybe she’d always been looking for a Beast. She holds him and feels him and his gleaming fur turns to golden hair and the hand that reaches for hers is a hand of skin and this is it, she knows: the breaking of the curse.

He’s a human boy, now—with the life of a beast left behind in his eyes.

“Beast—?”

“Roxas.” He says the name like he hasn’t heard it in years. “Je m’apelle Roxas.”

She smiles. “Roxas.”

He’s a Prince once again. And she?

She’s his Princess.

Her father was a fool. He should have known. For how was she to know that of the many places in the many worlds to pick the single rose she’d asked for, he’d find the most forbidden garden of them all?

The castle was high-winding, white marble. Any wise man would know the truth of its restrictions. Only a foolish, foolish man, blinded by fatherly love and equally devoid of reason, would pick a flower from such a garden. And her duty to him, not letting him die by storybook sickness, would have her cross the castle threshold and never look again to the outside again.

People spoke of a monster living in the castle: a man turned wild by a curse.

And there he was.

His hair hung shaggy and coral-peach. His eyes were masked by the strands falling over them, but even then they looked wild. Monster-like?

But his voice was calm and tempered.

His hands were soft and human around her.

He asked, “You’re the daughter of the man who stole from me?”

Her nod was silent and stiff.

He took her arm like the stem of a flower—for that was all he knew of holding.

He led her into her marble prison.

She should not let herself get wrapped around him.

Charming, pretty girls in charming, pretty heels are charming and pretty enough to know when they’re falling in too, too deep. She knows her heart is bound to break—to be broken by this backseat boy with his sad clown ink-stain tattoos and his trouble-means-trouble breath against her neck.

And does she care?

Why, of course not.

She’s certain she doesn’t care at all, now.

In fact, he’s the uncertain one. He says it through the gold-sky light pollution fog; against the muted skyline just barely outlined through the haze. They stand under stars they can’t see. He says, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

And she says, “Why?”

She says, “Why not?”

It’s a tale as old as time, old as rhyme—the not-so-good girl and theever-so-bad boy.

Designer perfume and cheap cologne.

Platform points against canvas soles.

Beauty and the Beast.

So, as you might have already guessed, that’s all for the Beauty and the Beast contestGrey-Rain Skies is holding—I’m obviously too indecisive and overenthusiastic to just write one thing. XD;;

under the influence of:

—Rose Red by Emilie Autumn.
(Title.)

—The Rose and the Beast by Francesca Lia Block.
(Indirect inspiration to get this going.)
(“She’d been waiting for a Beast.”)

—The Shape of a Girl by Joan Macleod.
(“A girl in the shape of a monster; a monster in the shape of a girl.”)

—Beauty and the Beast from the Disney soundtrack.
(“Tale as old as time; Song as old as rhyme.”)