Quirky inventor lady gets called to a mysterious and dark castle. She walks in and everything–all the chairs and drawers and tapestries–scurry away. It has been just so long since someone has been in the castle who had legs… they’re all surprised. Could this be the one they been looking for?
A beast thunders down the staircase from the upper levels. Her red cloak dramatically swirls around her cloven feet, her shoulders broad and stiff in the flickering candlelight.
Then she falls and whimpers.
The castle was not made for a beast. It was made for a dainty princess. She hasn’t been able to cook more than rice and claw-shredded vegetables and none of her servants have working fingers any more. Besides, she’s only barely able to do their most basic repairs, now that they’re furniture that moves more than it was ever meant to.
There’s no one to help comb the knots from her mane and her hands are too big and clumsy to hold a brush. She knows she looks a mess, but it’s been so long since anything has been easy that she’s finally caved and decided she needs help.
The inventor decides she must have hit her head. She turns to leave and the doors slam shut in front of her, a loud groaning creak indicating the door has barred itself.
The beast is not whimpering now. She is on all fours and raging. Her roars shake the hanging lights, dripping candle wax onto the floors. The inventor counts the dried dots of wax. This must happen often.
And so the inventor stays. Slowly but surely, they are going to make the house accessible again. Besides, it’s a test of her imagination to get all these things right. She’s excited for the challenge.
And then she happens across a rose in a glass case. There is a note scribbled across it in a short, choppy script.
“Until your 21st birthday, and the final petal’s fall, you will remain as beastly on the outside as you were on the inside. Unless you can learn to love and be loved in return.”
It’s signed with a man’s name, a curse born out of spite and the inventor suddenly understands the Beast’s rage.
And that night, after the beast learns what the inventor knows, they have a mournful dinner. It is a nicer one than the Beast has had in a long time. Chunks of stew, big bites of carrots and potatoes, a broth that’s thick and well-seasoned. Beast can only push her food around. It takes the inventor three separate meals to realize what has happened.
Beast is ashamed.
Ashamed of failing where no one else could, of her isolation, and the toll the curse has taken on her. When the inventor tentatively reminds Beast that this is not her fault, a gentle voice in the midst of a rage, there is a stunned silence.
She doesn’t see Beast for a week.
But she finds gifts. A flower, left at the dinner table. Her favorite dessert, prepared special just for her (with careful substitutions made, for the ingredients not in the castle.) A new dress laid out in front of her bedroom door, in her favorite color, with matching ribbons.
They make the inventor’s heart ache because they are so clearly apologies. Attempts to win her over, despite the Beast’s perceived inabilities.
And so the inventor returns them. She puts the dress back in Beast’s wing. She leaves the flower on a tray. She does not eat the dessert.
When Beast invites the inventor to dinner in the library, her fur and mane are freshly combed and cut and cleaned. Her clothes are cobbled together to almost fit, though the threads are less than tidy. Everything is as perfect as the inventor imagines a Beast can manage.
And they talk.
There are no flowy dresses or lovely, sad songs. There is soup and mismatched chairs and piles of books and dust everywhere. There are hushed whispers and stammering and long, awkward silences. But eventually, Beast gets the full story out.
About the man who knocked on her door, tall and bedraggled, and leering. How he leaned over her and held out a rose and asked, in a voice that already expected to get what it wanted, if he could stay for the night out of the cold. And how she said no, and he fought and argued and accused. About the parents long removed, who weren’t there to protect her.
Worst of all was the end. The story of the transformation–of a night spent in a cold sweat. A small princess, unused to even paper thin blisters of a work day, curled up in pain as her body twisted and shifted and stretched. And waking up the next morning, to find herself utterly alone, with only the creak of shifting furniture to keep her company.
Beast pauses often, her shoulders shaking. She can’t cry–there are no tears for a Beast–but she can sob, and so she does.
The inventor pauses a moment. There is so much aching still in her chest. There is an invention of a different sort, strumming itself out in her fingertips. The inventor decides to weave a different tale. She must do it quietly. Carefully. She sees the next gift–a small mirror plated in gold and carved with intricate flourishes–and accepts it. Carries it with her in her pocket. When she sees Beast out in the cold carving a path for the struggling chicks who’d hatched late in winter, she keeps that gift as well.
And when Beast smiles, hiding her face behind her large clawed hands, the Inventor pulls out her mirror and coaxes the hands away. The inventor gifts the Beast the sight of her own smile. At first, the beast turns away, those awful sobbing sounds hitching her breath, but the inventor pulls her back and places her hand gently on the beasts face.
The beast is happier, the next day and the days after. She smiles, not perfectly confident, but no longer hiding behind her claws.
The inventor works steadfast, putting together clothes for the beast, made just for her. It’s not her usual sort of work. There are no wrenches or hammers or nails. Only a thin needle, several pricks of blood on her fingertips, and a worn, scraggly bobbin of thread. It takes the inventor weeks of putting together the pieces between larger projects.
One week she widened all the doors in the castle, and sewed in the evenings when the sun had fallen too low to work by. Now her floors were filled with candlewax from where she’d held the cloth just out of flame’s reach.
The next week she’d crafted larger utensils better shaped for the beasts claws. She took the older ones and kept them to the side–in case the beast still had attachments to them or preferred them. When her hands were too cut up from splinters to continue carving combs and spoons and handle covers, she would sit at the window in the basking light of the setting sun and put together sleeves and shirt collars. And finally she’d opened up the space–broke apart the countertops in the kitchen to make a wider, lower burning oven, put together a removable cover to have more room for chopping vegetables, began to set the foundations in the gardens for comfortable paths for cloven feet to walk upon. And in the garden, by the flowers, she hemmed the cuffs and the added the buttons, and embroidered small little red birds that she had seen the Beast whispering too on nights she thought she was alone. This time, the inventor is the one who courts the Beast. Not for some curse, but because the inventor had met the Beast and embraced her work, but found a gentle soul, reaching for a hand to hold.
