oh to be human again

oh wow that’s fucking weird. also the Perfect excuse to write the Fucking Trash Fic starring the V I L L A G E R S  i’ve been wanting to do

“Did I have a papa, once?” Chip asks his mum. He’s not sure why, but playing with his little toy donkey—carved from wood, with little wheels for legs—has stirred something in him.

“All little boys have papas,” says Mrs. Potts absently. She is busy drying the dishes, and doesn’t look up from her saucers and plates. “Why would you think of that now?”

Chip tries to string the words together. Something like where is he now, then? Or who is he? Or why don’t we talk about him? Is he dead?

He can’t think of any of the words. His eyes go back to the donkey, and he forgets what he was asking.

Jean Potts is not dead. But sometimes, he feels he might as well be.

There is something about being a plate that feels particularly humiliating. The fact that his lovely porcelain border is striped in the same way his old hat was does nothing to diminish the embarrassment.

He didn’t even like that hat, that much. But now it’s all he is: a white plate with a striped border, and painted eyes and mouth, and nothing else besides. He wish he had thought to bring a change of clothes before encountering the old hag from the mountains.

Agathe hadn’t turned him into a plate. This curse was done by someone else entirely: a hag with corkscrew, blue-streaked hair, and a cranky nose, and a spitfire temper that doomed them all. They didn’t know her name. Just that she was malicious, and had curses to burn.

“If I had known she was like this,” argued Clothilde, newly a fishhook, “we could have bought her jam, or sommat.”

“I don’t think jam was what she wanted,” said Jean. 

The curse had been swift and brutal and ironic in its care to detail. Everyone knew what it was for: to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that Mobs Are Bad, and Hating People You Barely Know Is Bad, and Falling In Line With Tyrants Is Bad, and Being Stupid Is Bad. (the hag had really gone on quite a while before she actually cast the curse.) It was a taste of their own medicine, for acting like tools in the hands of a crazed, angry man.

That didn’t help assuage the feelings of plate, though.

Some had it worse. Alléchant Agriculteur, the local supplier of eggs, couldn’t complain at all; nobody had ever seen such an unbelievably attractive hen coop in their lives. But Forgeron Rouge, the blacksmith so beloved for his bright red cap and helpful manner, had turned into an anvil. He couldn’t move. The horses—now all just horseshoes, poor creatures—whinnied around him pitifully, and all he could do was clang in response.

The hatstands in the window tittered and sighed. They still wanted to be pretty, and here they were, with big bonnets as always, but no pretty black hair to make it worth while. They wondered if Chapeau, their brother, might find them. They wondered if Chapeau still remembered them.

He didn’t.

Sometimes—given to subtle turns of thought, as he was—Chapeau wondered how the castle was meant to survive, in a forest with no villages around. Surely that affected the local economy? Where was Cuisinier meant to buy his eggs and bread, with no farms around to supply it? Given that, where did the servants come from? They couldn’t all come straight from Paris, like Lumiere and Plumette. There had to be some village boys, with pretty mothers—milliners maybe—who could come up to the palace to find work. He had to give it some thought. There was a riddle here he needed to remember.

He didn’t. He forgot.

It was odd, at nights, when some told stories of their families. Mrs. Potts talked about her mother at length—the weaver-woman from Yorkshire, who she hadn’t seen for so long, ever since she left the country and came here. Lumiere, if pressed, will laugh and mock his father, the old man in Paris who wears spectacles and worn brown vests and who he loves so much, so complicatedly, so completely. Even Belle remembers a little of her mother, even though she died so far away.

But nobody seems to come from around the palace. There are no village boys.

Jean Potts talks to everyone. He’s found he can get around on a little rolling cart, and he thinks how proud his wife would be, if she knew that he had figured this out himself. I wonder if she ever used a trick like this! he thinks, bumping and rolling over the Villeneuve dirt. He wonders if she misses him.

He talks to Stanley. LeFou will come, says the sword engraved with sideburns. He‘ll remember me.

He talks to Clothilde. Oh, Henri, yes! Yes! Henri’s punctual. He won’t forget to come.

He talks to the paintbrush, the one that never leaves his house. I don’t know, Jean. I really don’t know. I don’t know so many things.

Your daughter…?

I don’t know, Jean.

Jean Potts’ little cart squeaks as he rolls away.

Adam finds her in the rose garden, crying over Romeo and Juliet.

“You’ve already read it,” he says gently, settling in beside her. “Surely there aren’t any surprises left?”

Belle shakes her head, fiercely, like a wounded animal. She cradles the book, then shoves it into his arms.

“Mercutio say something particularly poetic?”

“It’s not the story,” she chokes out. “It’s….I loved reading this book, the first time. It felt special. Like a gift.”

Adam smiles. “People love giving you books, don’t they?”

She can’t help a small smile at that. But there’s still tears in her throat, and she coughs and fights and clenches her fists against the bench.

“I miss….I miss the first time I read this book. Whenever that was. A long, long time ago.”

She watches him sift through the pages, contemplative. Something about seeing his hands—his beautiful, straight-boned human hands—makes something in her uncurl, just a little, rather like a summer rose.

“How did we meet, Adam?”

He looks up, surprised. “You know that story well enough.”

“No.” Her look is flinty. “No, I don’t.”

Her eyes stray back to his hands on the book. She remembers when they didn’t look like that—when there were claws, then, that joined with her hands, and took her away to the old windmill, where her mother’s things sat covered in dust. And there were drawings, there, too….

“Adam. How did we meet.” And a breeze touches her cheek, a breeze straight out of winter: but that cannot be possible, because it is June.

“Oh, all right, fine. Once upon a time there was a handsome prince, and he was a complete git, and he taxed someone-or-other—I don’t remember who—to fill his castle with beautiful objects, and then he was cursed (and rightly, too!); and everything was terrible. His poor staff. His poor…everybody, really.”

“And then? and then what?”

Adam shrugs. “And then you came. And I locked you in a room—because, again, git—but fortunately you’re a saint, and stayed around. And saved my life. At least twice—three times, if we’re counting the paper-cut incident.”

“Saved you from…?”

“Do you truly enjoy hearing me sing your praises? Fine, as I enjoy singing them. First from wolves, because unbelievably you were trying to run away from the git, and then from death-by-musket.”

“None of this makes sense,” Belle says through gritted teeth.

“It’s a fairytale, dear. My maître d’ was a candelabra. It’s not meant to confine itself to logic.”

“No,” hisses Belle. “Listen. I came to the castle: why? I run away from the castle: why? I come back to the sound of a musket: but why did I leave in the first place?”

Adam pulls at his hair, twists one end around a finger. “You’re fearless. You were living an adventure.”

“For no one,” says Belle. “I came from no one, and I returned to no one. It makes no sense. My whole world is this castle.”

“Thank god,” says Adam, but he doesn’t sound relieved. He sees the worry plucking away at his beloved. And, suddenly, he feels worried too.

“What is it, Plumette?” he begs. “Is it the wolves?”

Plumette doesn’t know either. She isn’t streaked by sadness. “Chapeau says all the drawers on his desk are locked. And he can’t imagine why.”

“Locked drawers with no keys? Forests full of wolves?” He can’t comprehend it. Back in Paris, they saw no sadness such as this. In Lumiere’s memory, his ma and papa thrive as bright as life, surrounded by candles and the smell of city smoke. And he knows that his darling Plumette remembers plague, and pretty palaces, and families and dancing-shoes: but never such a lost feeling as this, as if every compass points the wrong way.

He scouts around to see what is missing. Do they need another ball? A grand gala, with a feast as grand as the court?

Non, non: all the answers are incomprehensible to him. Mrs. Potts wants a plain, ordinary plate; he says she wants ordinary tea, with a stick of wild lemongrass in it, brewed on a summer stoop. Chapeau wants a small attic room, and a stack of letters that smell like lavender, and one long lace-trimmed ribbon to wind around the pages. Chip wants a particular hiding-spot in the kitchen he says he cannot find anymore: a spot beneath the corner table, though there has never been a table in the corner and Chip knows it. But he knows it was there, he knows!

And Belle. With an invention in one hand, but no power to make it go.

Lumiere, hand me the—no—the….oh, Lumiere, for god’s sake!

Every guess he makes is wrong. But she cannot tell him what part she needs to make her music-box chime.

She cannot tell him where she learned to make a music-box, either. Or why it plays the same tune, ad infinitum, breaking in the same spot every time. 

He slips out of the palace at dusk, his blue coat shrouded around him. Belle is in her library, staring around at the stacks and stacks of impossible books, trying to reconcile the only world she knows to the vision she keeps having;  a barren church, a shelf of seven books, a face she never sees.

He takes Philippe. The white horse is still his favorite.

“Don’t go alone,” says a voice behind him, and he turns. The staff, his small adopted family, stand behind him.

“Go where?” he asks. He knows they don’t have answers. There is nothing beyond these green, grim woods with all their gray-packed wolves.

“I’m going,” says Mrs. Potts.

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” says Cogsworth.

Chapeau nods, once.

“Will you leave Belle behind?” Plumette is concerned. She cannot understand the silent sorrow of the palace, but she knows acts done for love. She remembers a battle, once—though who they were battling she cannot conceive—and the last touch of her wing across Lumiere’s face.

She hands Adam a heavier coat.

The little troop rides away—Adam, Chapeau, Mrs. Potts and Chip, Cogsworth. Garderobe and Cadenza and Lumiere and Plumette stand on the palace steps and wave.

“There is nothing there for them to find,” says Maestro Cadenza. “There never was beyond those woods.”

And yet they hear a music-box, somehow.

Maurice the painter—only a paintbrush now—stares out the window of a house in Villeneuve.

It grows too late. It grows too dark. The villagers are growing silent, one by one. Alléchant won’t speak. Forgeron cannot remember what he was. The accordion in the tavern has lost her name.

Maurice hopes that she’ll remember. He hopes someone will come.

Nobody answers him. It’s too cold. Adam holds his lantern high. A downed tree seems to point the way—but beyond the tree, he sees a road.

“That can’t be right,” Mrs. Potts protests, holding her sleeping son in the crook of her saddle.

“Look,” says Cogsworth, and points to a broken music box, half-buried in mud.

Adam slips from his seat to inspect it. Cradling it in his hands, he brings it over to Chapeau. It’s battered beyond belief, but everyone can make out a shape—a shattered windmill, its sails all broken off.

Chapeau nudges open the doors. A little toy painter falls out—and a little baby, barely an inch high, tucked in the arms of her mama, sits in Adam’s hands.

“A family! Look at that, Chip, a family.” Mrs. Potts flushes with delight. “Everyone should have a papa, even little toys—” She breaks off quickly.

Chip is too sleepy to have heard a word. He nuzzles back into her shawl.

“Who could have made such a thing? Belle is the only one who knows how.” Adam turns it over.

“Could she have discarded it here, sir?” asks Cogsworth.

“No, unless she had it with her when she came—the first time….” Again, that conversation in the rose garden. I came to the castle: why? I run away from the castle: why?

“Why did Belle come to the castle?” He’s surprised when it slips past his lips. He’s more surprised when his staff have no answers.

But there is no village in this part of the woods, says another part of her, more reasonable. She holds her boy close. And then—quite suddenly—the woods end. A little-used road bends down the hill to a silent cluster of buildings.

“A clocktower,” says Cogsworth suddenly, and then stops. Everyone sits quiet behind him, not even the horses whickering.

Adam breathes out. A little town. Like Belle had said.

“Let’s go wake it up,” he says, and rides down to the village square.

Nothing moves in the marketplace. Frost creeps over the abandoned anvils, the broken swords, the plates and cups and ribbons lining empty stalls. A door hangs open here or there, but whoever lived here seems to have vanished, overnight, as quick as a thought.

Chip wakes up. “Is there a donkey?” he murmurs sleepily, seeing a half-slumped crockery stall, but he loses the idea as quick as he found it.

Everyone slides off the horses, walking through the disarray, lost.

“Too late,” says Cogsworth, staring up at the clock. It does not match his time. He tucks his pocket watch away, stepping over a bent fish-hook clawed into the ground. On second thought, he picks the fish-hook up; tucks it into his pocket too, to sit beside his watch. No point in letting the sharp old thing scratch anybody.

Chapeau picks up ribbons from the ground, and touches an old hatstand very gently.

There’s a cold wind blowing through the doors of the church, and the pages of a torn book blow, tumbleweed-style, over the steps and down to Adam’s feet.

Crumpled pages from Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio’s death.

A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. A plague o’ both your houses!

The church is empty. Chip stands alone, calling out through the dust and the blown-in snow: “Where’s all the people?”

The alter doesn’t answer him. He skips back out—past his mother holding up a plate, and scrubbing it on her skirt, and rubbing her finger along its striped-pattern rim—and finds a garden full of cabbages, still somehow green under all the winter snow. 

The door of the odd little house hangs open. Chip goes inside.

Everywhere, on every wall, across every table, are paintings of Belle. Sketches of her as a child are pinned to the walls. Vivid renderings of her, in the dress she wore the day the curse ended and everyone danced, are piled up on the floor, in a heedless mess untouched by human hands. The drawings lay so thick that Chip must shuffle through them, as if they’re autumn leaves rasping across the ground.

Every drawing leads to the table. Abandoned gears and tools and toys fall off it; and there, in a pile of paintings so numerous and frantic and filled with so much love, sits a paintbrush. It rests on a blank sheet of paper, as if it had just begun a thought. But there’s nothing for it to say—just the curve of Belle’s eye, barely sketched, the brush dropped before it could finish the stroke.

Belle looks down at Chip from every drawing. And something creeps along the little boy’s skin.

He grabs the pile, indistinctly, snatching up a few random drawings to take back to Belle. He runs from the house, letting the door slam behind him, nearly tripping over a hen coop as he scatters from the path of the curse. He senses remorse, from the dead things; he senses passionate regret, for rage and hate and violence; and, worst of all, he senses nothing at all. Whatever felt those things is gone, and left behind drawings of a girl they never knew. Or don’t know they never knew. Or don’t know they don’t know anything at all.

Chip doesn’t tell anyone about the house. He huddles behind his mother, and stacks horseshoes silently.

“We can’t take it all,” says Mrs Potts. “But it won’t do anyone who ever lived here any good to just leave these things, in the snow and the rot and the wind.”

She slides a plate into chip’s hands. He nearly drops it.

Chip doesn’t say anything. Tears streak Chapeau’s face. He doesn’t know why.

They leave the village, and the wind howls behind them as they go; a wind from the mountains, angry and sharp-nosed and blue with rage and cold. Adam pulls his coat more snug around him. And when he looks back, the village is gone—the sleet and wind shielding it, never to be found by the world again.

“Something is wrong,” says Adam. “Something has cursed us—them—us.”

“Not us,” says Mrs. Potts. “We’re fine. We’re fine as ever we were, luv.”

But she holds her son very, very close, and the knot in her voice doesn’t sound like it believes her.

When they get back to the palace, Belle runs to meet them. And for a moment, her face framed in white roses, her face is a picture of hope: and then she sees the horses that didn’t come, and the people who aren’t there, and how all her life is tied up in the same old people she’s remembered forever. her eyes, blank, wander across the junk tied to their saddles.

“Where’d all this come from?” she asks.

“Where did we find it?” asks Adam, looking back at the staff. They shake their heads. The don’t remember. They went into the woods, and came out again.

The families stick the rubbish in the bottom of their drawers, and they forget again, and Chip keeps his crying for when his mother can’t hear him.

A year later, and tired lines frame Belle’s face, and her invention-shed lies empty, devoid of purpose. Looking for something to do—and tired of the paintings in the portrait-gallery, and all their bad-sketched lines, and her searching for a face not among all of Adam’s relatives—Belle wanders to the back of the garden, where Chip keeps a secret box among the broken garden-pots.

It smells thick of herbs, back here, thyme and dill and the sun off of tomato-leaves. Belle stretches, and sighs, and reaches down to feel the rhyme of the earth—the rich black soil reminding her of cabbages, and wooden fences, and other things she thinks she must have read about at some point or another. And then—knowing he won’t mind her peeping, knowing that the boy has been crying, hoping to do some good in a world that’s lost just a little of its scent—Belle takes the lid off the old tea-box, and sees what Chip has been sorrowing over.

Her face. Her eyes. A blotch that might be her nose. Ink and pen and pencil, all of Belle, from the time she was so little her feet would fit in the palm of a hand. Stuffed in the box, crumpled from useless hands, strokes and strokes capturing Belle’s face.

She gasps, turning over the sheaves.

The artist is a master. He never signs his name—humble, scared, running out of time, who knows the reason why—but he takes every detail seriously, like crafting up a prayer from pen and paper: the way her freckles burned her face the summer she was ten; the scar she got, just under her ear, from that time she fell off the chicken coop. She sees sketches of the boots she bought herself when she’d just turned sixteen, angles of her she never knew anyone had ever seen. The love in these pages makes her hands shake. These are records of a past she didn’t know she had.

Clutching the box, she runs to Adam—heels hitting hard against the ground as she passes Cogsworth, melancholy on the back terrace; toes skidding as she flies past Chapeau, searching out his bow from where he’d abandoned it. Adam catches her in his arms as she careens into the library, arms locked against her chest, all those precious papers held fast in her hands.

“Look, look!” She lays them out, panic and wonder edging into each other, as the papers tumble across the desk, and Adam has to shuffle them to see straight. “Where did he find them?”

Adam shakes his head. “We never found anyone when we went into the woods.”

“You must have. Search your memory! Who painted these things? Did you meet someone, out there in the snow?”

Adam’s hands brush across a little painted windmill—a trinket he keeps on his desk, for no real reason; where he found it he doesn’t quite know—and shakes his head. “I tried, Belle. I did try. But I would remember if we met anyone in the snow, or left anyone behind.”

She feels a gust of frost across her cheek, and turns away from it: she doesn’t want the adventure snow promises on a sunny day. She doesn’t want, right now, that great wide somewhere of the palace she leaves behind. And though the mountains call to her—curses! enchantments! a whole new story!—Belle wants to build the old one, wants to find the past drawn on this wrinkled paper by some old hand.

She finds a hill in the wood, covered thick over with late-blooming blue flowers, and sits among the tiny blue stars, papers spread around her like a sun.

The smell of snow dies away. The blue sky stretches out huge, above her, and she remembers, sharp and quick, that day she ran up this hill and threw her hands out to the horizon: I want it more than I can tell!

Looking back across the hill, she sees a blur to the south: what might be a clocktower, if the haze of the mountains weren’t so thick and hid it all in mist. She runs back to the memory: the running up the hill: the running from something: the running back to something. 

Belle, sitting in a meadow specked with flowers, closes her eyes and conjures up a spell from her own heart.

Her spell is tied up in her running brown boots; it’s tied up in love; it’s tied up in going home, in inventing that home out of the nothing scraps she has in front of her. She lays out the pieces in front of her, as someone taught her, and turns the scraps of paper—the servants’ pain—Chip’s abandoned tea box—the tears they let nobody hear—into gears and screws and tools, building up the thing no one can look at. Hands that paint, hearts that love, an old man’s blue eyes staring at her through the shadows of her home.

Belle jumps. What was that?

The paper is blowing in the wind, but it’s not the frosty wind of earlier: now she smells summer cabbages, and jam, and the dust of horses’ hooves. Gasping, she shuts her eyes tight, clutches the tools in front of her, and remembers like it is all that matters in the world.

The house with the crooked stoop. The church with its small bookshelf. The village drunk, shoved into the tiny country jail. The smell of bread wafting from someone’s house. Calls in the marketplace—the twirl of the skirts—the muddy well water, the potter’s donkey, pointed roofs pointing up to the sky. Beth. Jean. Alléchant. Clothilde. Stanley. Maurice.

The sky cracks open above her, light so bright and blinding Belle falls back, the air knocked out of her, crushing the forget-me-nots under her. The pages whip and froth and there’s a hurricane on the mountain, and the mountains moan, and the mist cries out like the death of a witch.

And when she looks up, blue eyes look back at her, and Maurice’s hands shake a little with the joy of it. 

*****

At the palace, Cogsworth finds Clothilde exploding from his waistcoat pocket, ripping it to pieces as she goes. Chapeau takes a hat off the handstand and finds his mother’s face beneath it. One moment, LeFou is standing before the fireplace, admiring the decorative swords hung above it; the next, Stanley has fallen into his arms, looking shocked as always at his good luck.

Adam meets Belle and Maurice at the gates, panting, his cravat undone. “You found him!” he calls. “You found them! You found home!”

Belle beams and hugs her father. She never wants to let him go.

That night, they hold a banquet. Lumiere and Plumette make a quick run to the village for supplies, digging around in now-sunny cupboards for forgotten jams, new-made breads, butters still golden as corn. Jean Potts won’t stop swinging Chip around, Beatrice won’t stop laughing. Villagers swarm every room, drinking coffee, holding court, finding family in every corner.

Belle sits with Maurice in the library, showing him her books, showing him passages she marked out for him when she still didn’t know who she wanted to show them to. He’s still a little shaky—still a little frightened—he, too, remembers, and he remembers falling numb, he remembers being unable to finish that last sketch. He remembers falling to the tabletop, brushes useless.

“It’s all right, papa,” she murmurs. “I remembered.”

He smiles at her. “I still don’t see how.”

She shakes her head at him. “You don’t need to see, Papa. You already saw. You put so much love into me it couldn’t help sprouting out, somehow, someday. It wasn’t me that broke the curse. It was your love.”

She hands him the sketches—all crumpled now, the ink running. He’ll have to start anew, make new ones, studying her as she runs and yells and reads. He has all the time in the world to do that, now. All the time to keep on loving her, as he always has.

Make this last forever, he thinks. As he thinks it, he knows it won’t happen—memories fade, minutes pass, girls grow up and fall in love. But this moment was here, he had it. He made it. Somehow, he had made a daughter who could outlast a memory. He didn’t know such a thing was possible.

The whole world was possible, now, the whole world was alive with baking bread and home. Somewhere, Chip was calling. Chapeau’s sisters wanted paintings, portraits. Adam was wondering if Maurice could put a little toy painter back into the windmill he keeps on his desk. The windows were open, and the light was coming in.

Why stick to a moment, when all of life is right there in front of you?

Maurice kisses Belle’s forehead, and steps forward into life.

this fresh demon from hell.

a nightmare from the abyss of my subconscious.

this one dragged cogsworth into it because it couldnt live through torment by itself

this one has come through the dark side and decided to embrace its starring role in my least understood sex dreams

what. the. hell.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY OF THESE

oh my god no this one is an actual disney thing isn’t it

IT IS AND IT’S TERRIBLE.

i was just wondering if you had any more headcannons for her (with cadenza, with belle 😉, or just anything fun cause it’s lacking for my fav lady)

sorry i'm so late on this! thank you for reading all those fics, that made me so happy

have a new mini fic

"What do they mean they didn't know? How did they not know." Madame de Garderobe is at her leisure in her new salon, a room Adam promised her beside the garden with giant spreading windows and doors that she can, thank god, now walk through. She doesn't ever stay in one place for very long—she can't bear to be shut up, she always wants to travel and see new things—but when she's in the palace, she curls up here. And now here she is, with sheaves of newspapers spread around her, one magazine dangling from her fingertips.

Belle wrinkles her nose and flicks through the papers. All the headlines are heralding the return of the great Garderobe!, the announcements of her new world tour, declarations she'll be singing Medea in the newest piece by Vivaldi. All good news, for certain divas. But only new good news.

"Magic's tricky, madame. I mean, you could ask how an entire village forgot we had a prince living next door. Where did our taxes go? Our whole government operation should have been—"

"Taxes. I am above taxes." Madame is getting a little operatic with it. "Government! I do not speak of government. I speak of the soul. The world forgot my performance in Medici? They spoke not of how I tore the very being from Cleopatra and sang the King to tears! Mozart wrote a new opera and he did not call for me? He spurned me? In my torment!"

"In your torment as a closet. I don't think you could have made the engagement even if he'd tried."

"I could sing as a HATBOX. I could sing as a COINPURSE," rings out the diva, and the whole palace hears it. "Magic! Magic taking me from the lives of the people! They did not say, why do we not hear from the Muse today? Where has the beautiful lady gone? You tell me they forgot me?"

"It was part of the curse!"

"It WAS the curse. A wardrobe I can be! A has-been I will not."

"But you're not a has-been!" Belle holds out the papers. The Sun has decided Garderobe is both pregnant and holding George III hostage in a sunny resort in Ibiza; it figures. "You're more of a been, is-being, than ever! The people are so happy to remember you again."

"Hmph." Garderobe pairs an orange with a stiletto, haughty, but contemplating. "So in all those years, so many years of being stuffed away like so many costumes, in the mold and the dust of the rooms upstairs....they simply did not think of me? Not good, not bad, simply....they could not? They did not feel the light go out?"

"No, of course not. Do you think Lumiere's family never wrote to him just because? Do you think Mr. Potts stayed in the village without his wife or son for fun? Everyone forgot everyone who was here. Even if they were beloved. Even if they were needed."

"What a terrible spell," says the diva, and Belle wants to laugh: the prince as a monster is fine! The great lady not debuting Eurydice, this will not do. But she understands, too: Madame de Garderobe's whole life has been given to dark rooms full of clapping hands. What is the worth of a life if it disappears so quickly? What sort of legacy is a singer whose voice remains trapped in the room?

"We must think of a new magic," Madame de Garderobe decides, shifting away the papers, moving to the window to stare at the gardens. "A new magic so I may never be forgotten! So a voice can go on singing, if darkness or death should put it out."

"Well," says Belle, "I've been doing a little experiment with a thing I call a record-player. It's not quite magic, but it's more dependable."

I can't really say I think 1991 Mrs. Potts would be the same. I think she has a few medicinal teas, but not ones she's made herself. She knows how to prep them, how to safely use them, all that, but she doesn't make them herself.