meme as old as time

i know i'm not very active in the fandom anymore but i still have a lot of love for these characters. tagging me old fandom pals to see if there are any ideas @batbobsession @forr-everrmorre @im-too-obssesed @cad-enza-blog @sweetfayetanner @tinydooms @saberhilt-blog @morgaine2005 @naturepointstheway @theteaisaddictive @ticenchantedtoc @gryffindorbraids @prince-adams-japris @ anybody else i forgot to tag (some of you have moved urls so i'm not sure if i'm tagging the right blogs but we'll see)

i know i'm not very active in the fandom anymore but i still have a lot of love for these characters. tagging me old fandom pals to see if there are any ideas @batbobsession @forr-everrmorre @im-too-obssesed @cad-enza-blog @sweetfayetanner @tinydooms @saberhilt-blog @morgaine2005 @naturepointstheway @theteaisaddictive @ticenchantedtoc @gryffindorbraids @prince-adams-japris @ anybody else i forgot to tag (some of you have moved urls so i'm not sure if i'm tagging the right blogs but we'll see)

Curtain Call - Fanny and Nick (Photo by Bruce Glikas)

MIKE FAIST as RIFF in WEST SIDE STORY (2021)

moose or mongoose?

jumping off a cliff like a lemming or eating your spouse like a praying mantiss?

The Canadian Mounties or five children in a trench coat?

a squid falling on your house at incredibly high speeds or waking up surrounded by ever-increasing quantities of hall carpet?

the ocean turning into coffee or the sky turning into lemonade?

my particularly favorite brand of ice cream or that distinctively not great brand of ice cream?

“sploink” or “twingle”?

fidgeting so much your hands fall off or standing so still you start to grow moss?

good guys or bad guys?

idiots or nitwits?

banging your head against a wall or flinging a table out the window?

setting to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, or eating a quince with a runcible spoon?

i did want to write it, ive wanted to write it for years, i’ve never had the balls to write it because it was such a fabulous concept to play with. but here what the hell, why not here it is:

it’s pre-curse times and plumette gets a message from her sister, peregrine, that she NEEDS to be the godmother of her baby and thus has to haul ass to the christening. this is awesome but also fuckkkkkk because her sister lives in Sweden like FUCK thats SO far away in eighteenth century times

so she hops on a plane—an eighteenth century style plane—so that’s a rowboat—and waves goodbye to lumiere and douche canoe prince and mrs. p and all the rest, and she bippity-bops her way up to scandinavia to snack on some lutefisk and hold her first little itty-bitty niece. This being Sweden everything takes ages, like first the baby has to be born and then they have to plan the baby shower and then they have to do all this other stuff, so it’s months and months, all of which Plumette spends sending letters to Lumiere and eagerly waiting to hear back from him.

“mon cherie today the prince spent the entire day taking portraits off the wall and throwing them across the room because the painting style was apparently too ‘swishy’! And now Cogsworth has banned me from every serving him sangria at three in the morning ever again. Please be back soon mon ange, my heart cannot beat without you. Lumiere”

“mon chou today there was a fuss in the village, the prince has raised taxes again, I know, quelle horror!,  Mrs. Potts says a person can’t even afford jam anymore if you haven’t got a steady job! but i really doubt that, I mean how much does a jar of jam even cost, ten dollars? please hurry back mon amour, my breath fades so I can’t hear it, waiting for you to come into the light. Lumiere”

“mon coeur we are holding such a ball tonight! every eligible princess and countess will be there—as well as Chapeau’s little sister, we’re slipping her in with a borrowed old dress of the Queen’s—the lights will glitter and every taper will shine, but none as bright as you. Are you coming home yet? I cannot stand the waiting—I shall go quite still without you to dance with. I wait, eternally yours. Lumiere”

And then silence. Silence for a long, long time.

She writes letters, first funny— “what has happened? has Cogsworth run away with you at last?”—then alarmed, then jealous, then furious. “Why so silent, mon amour? have your hands fallen off entirely, do I count so little to your heart?” But she doesn’t get a response, even though she waits, she waits in the same place for weeks just so the letter will not miss her. but a month passes, and no note. Not even Chapeau responds, nor Cogsworth. she throws her hands in the air and stays on longer, just to show him; if he can’t bother to write, what’s a year? What’s two years?

She doesn’t make it quite two years; her heart throbs with missing him, despite her anger, despite her hurt. she gets on the boat, waves goodbye to little Plume nestled safe in Peregrine’s arms, and arrives back in France so, so long after she left.

The ride to Villeneuve is long. She breathes in the heady air, enjoying France’s roses; she forgot how much she missed this sort of spring! she cannot wait to be home, and hug them all close again. she can make peace with lumiere at last. perhaps some other accident prevented him sending her letters.

villeneuve looks disused, when she hops off the carriage; the taxes must have gone up again, she thinks, but doesn’t worry all too much. She doesn’t like riding, so she walks through the woods, ordering for her luggage to be left at the tavern to be called for later. She’s surprised how overgrown the ordinary road to the palace is. She’s surprised how the people in Villeneuve looked at her.

She’s extremely surprised when she starts walking through snow.

Her little satin slippers are drenched by the time she gets to the palace, and her hair is slipping out of her little summer straw hat, and she’s clutching her arms to keep from freezing in the gray, deep snow. Her teeth chatter as she climbs up the steps. Her little hand can barely push open the door.

She sinks in, with relief, and leaps up again when she realizes the marble is covered in a thin, deadly mirror of ice. The tapers are not lit. Not a sound comes out of the silent hall, but faraway up the stairs she thinks she hears a low, long grumble, like someone pushing a heavy chair across a stone-paved floor.

“Hello?” she calls. “Hello?”

Have they all left? Is it the plague again? she wonders. She tip-toes in, calling, and picks up a candle on the table to light her way. Into the drawing room, into the music room. A new harpsichord in the corner. The dining room sits empty, cobwebs on the chairs.

“Is anyone here left for me?”

“Mon amour,” whispers a voice, too too close, and the candelabra burns scathing in her hand.

she leaps back, clutching her hand, the candle on the floor righting itself and dusting itself off and murmuring soothing nothings, like she stepped on its foot at a ball or accidentally stole a sip from its wine glass instead of hers. It is talking, quite ordinarily, and calling in other furniture, and a hulking harpsicord is coming in and a squeaking tea tray and a hatstand with hammers for hands, and they gather round Plumette to gape and stare and cut off her escape, they don’t stop from crowding toward her until she screams “Lumiere, help!” and then it’s very, very silent in the dining room.

“Mon ange? You do not recognize me?” says the candle from the floor, and she comes close to fainting and then she is, the last thing she sees before falling into the swoon being Lumiere’s face, too little and too close, blazing gold, with hard yellow eyes creased in concern.

she wakes to cold, her hands draped in water, somebody kind laying a cool, wet handkerchief across her face. she relaxes, for a moment, then remembers the nightmare. the yellow eyes, where blue should be. the voice in the last place she expected it.

“look at me slow, now, dearie,” says Mrs. Potts, just beyond where she can see her. Another cold compress is laid on her hands. “I turned away from mirrors plenty of times before I got used to it. Slow, now, and breathe in—in through the mouth and out through the nose, that’s the way I used to tell Chip to do it.”

She looks, slowly, and then realizes turning slowly only adds to the horror of it, and she looks quick and bites back the scream before Mrs. Potts can quite pretend she hasn’t heard it. They both recover, fast, and look away. Mrs. Potts busies herself pouring hot water into a dish, and nudging the dish to Plumette’s fingertips until she can smell the lavender wafting gently up.

“Soothing,” Mrs. Potts murmurs, but Plumette notices she doesn’t look at her again.

It takes a long time to explain it. They all do it, in stages—Mrs. Potts, and then Cogsworth, so funny with his little clock face staring up at her, Cuisinier with a rattle and bang and Chapeau with tidy words, sparse but clean, painting a picture of the hag’s hand stretching toward them, the spell hovering on her fingertips. But Lumiere does not come to explain. He does not want to frighten her. He does not want to cause the pain.

Only when she can look at them evenly does she let him come in. He comes slowly, shyly, and her heart breaks—her Lumiere, shy! Her Lumiere, heavy and slow, his golden feet dragging him along, his candles barely flickering. He’s hot and ashamed and brave, looking her up in the face, love pouring out of him as he whispers, “you have not changed a day.”

they are frightened to show her the Beast, but they have to; he knows she’s there, his was the deep and wounded growl she heard from the first, echoing down the halls from his hiding place behind the stairs. She thinks she will be terrified, but then she sees him and oh!

the prince is terrified of her—of seeing his face reflected in the eyes of someone who knew him in his pride. terrified of seeing that someone shriek and run away in fear.

She reaches out and strokes the matted fur. “Do you know,” she says to him, “you have blonde hairs here, right in the pattern of the sun blaze I used to paint on you for special occasions.”

“I tried to do it myself that night,” he rumbles, the sound coming from deep in his chest through what sounds like miles of hair and thorn and tusks and teeth. “I didn’t do as good a job as you do, though.”

She brushes the fur with her hand and smiles at him, the curls descending down her cheeks, her battered straw hat still trickling snow.

She stays with them for days before they mention anything about her choice. She busies herself with tidying, in attempting to bring order to the darkness—“If only one of you could fly, we could get that dust out of the topmost chandelier,” she complains—and spends time with Lumiere, tentatively finding him out again, catching herself laughing at his bizarre jokes. She almost thinks he’s really there when he comes into a room behind her, and she looks up to the wall and sees that human-sized shadow drawing up....and then the disappointment when she turns, and he’s only there in soul, so tiny behind her she has to crouch to catch his face.

But the days cannot wear on forever, and soon she notes the looks the servants give her, and one night as she climbs up to bed she hears the stark sounds of an argument ringing up from the kitchen below. The next day, they corner her—much as they did her first day, but now she knows the names to match the faces, even the new ones she never knew before, like kind Madame de Garderobe and finicky Mr. Cadenza.

“Why so serious?” she teases Cogsworth. His hands tic-tic gloomily across his face, and his eyes search the room, and her eyes follow. Lumiere isn’t here. Cadenza paces near the door.

“It’s just...well, we don’t know how long it’s been on the outside,” says Mrs. Potts. “But here inside the palace, we’ve kept careful track of the days, and it’s been like to ten years. Not quite, you understand, but it’s been ten years almost to the dot. And we’re not figuring she’s ever going to come.”

“Who?”

“In the curse, when she laid the curse, the witch mentioned true love for the Prince,” says Cogsworth. “Reckoning, I suppose, that a parade of eligible young ladies would come lining up to the palace every morning looking to play croquet with the unfortunate Master. Well, there hasn’t been a one. Not even enough to invite in for a glass of water and a game of piquet. And if it goes on much longer like this I don’t fancy we shan’t become antiques.”

“What do you mean, antiques?”

“Never mind about that now, dear.” Mrs. Potts nudges Cogsworth aside and went on. “What he’s trying to get at, I think, is that we’re worried there won’t be anyone for the Prince. No young ladies have really stopped by once it snowed.”

“And if it goes on like this,” moans Cadenza, “I will never see my wife again. The spell will be complete. I’ll go kaput, coda, to resting beat; the symphony ends, no one applauds. The rose sits in silence. The diva, likewise.”

“This is—what will happen to all of you?”

“We’ll fade,” says Chapeau. “We don’t know what that’s like, exactly; it’s not quite death, but it isn’t living.”

“And why are you telling me this? So I can go get help?”

“There isn’t time,” says Mrs. Potts, gently. “There’s only a few petals left on the rose. We need...we need you to do something else.”

And then Plumette realizes why Lumiere isn’t allowed in the room.

She lies in her bed that night, cradled in the spot in the mattress where he used to sleep—his slippers still sit right next to the bed, covered in cobwebs, the gold brocade barely blinking out from the dust. She stuck her foot in one of them when she first arrived, but took it out in a hurry; the webs felt cold on her toes.

I have to fall in love with the Beast. She could hear them telling it to her, over and over, and she’d retold herself the same story so many times she could hear it in each of their voices, whether or not they had truly said so. “If you don’t fall in love with him, dear, Chip will remain a cup forever. My dear, that is my son.” “You’re the only eligible young lady we’ve had, Plumette, though I doubt the Prince will care much for your rank; but we can scrape up a baronetcy for you, it shouldn’t be too difficult, and then add some ranks and qualifications once you’ve married—” “Plumette, I know it’s hard. But help isn’t coming anytime soon. You’re the only hope we have.”

Fall in love with the Beast. Fall in love with the Prince. Fall in love not to love him, but to save every friend that had ever counted for her, every person who had ever treated her as family. Fall in love, and not with Lumiere.