Send me a @ and I'll generate an au from this list and make a starter [34 ] BALLET AU
One step after another, one painful step after another. The steps had to be perfect, there needed to be just the r i g h t amount of gracefulness, they had be proud, but most importantly, they had be perfect. Mistakes weren’t allowed.
Belle was the good student. She always did like she was told to do, did all the practices and trained like a mad woman. Maybe she was mad - certainly no one sane would’ve done it. But she wasn’t the best. She tried to be, but all her work was for nothing, when the one arrived.
Gillian Jones, the dark, beautiful and definitely graceful woman was the star. She made it all look so easy, like anyone could have done it. Belle knew better. Reaching that kind of perfection took years and years of practice, thousands of hours, hundreds of ruined ballet shoe pairs, and tons of pain. Belle knew it. She had been through that, too, but still she wasn’t as good as Gillian.
Belle's movements were supposed to be elegant, she was supposed to be graceful. Her movements were supposed to look easy. It wasn’t easy. It n e v e r was. Especially not now, when she constantly thought about how she wasn’t good enough. What was point of practicing like a mad person, if you weren’t the best. She could never achieve her goals when Gillian Jones was there.
She thought about it. She thought about it a lot. What would it take to actually achieve her r i g h t f u l place as the star of ballet? Belle knew the answer, didn’t dare to think it. To kill Gillian? She’d get caught, she was sure of that. Not kill, hurt? Maim her a bit, so she would never dance? She thought about it. Belle danced and thought. Not a good combination. When one dances, they pour their emotions into it. (Except Gillian never did that.)
One day, Gillian never came to the practice. Belle smiled. She danced perfectly, but the director just shrugged and said: “Yes, very good, Miss French…”, lost in his thoughts. Her anger lit fast, but that never showed on her face. What m o r e she could do? She couldn’t be as good as the damned Gillian, and she never wanted to be. She wasn’t her, but she could never be as good, and therefore she wasn’t never enough.
A hand. One hand, with five narrow fingers and perfect nails. Belle always imagined that if Gillian wouldn’t have danced, they would’ve been red. A hand which Gillian didn’t own anymore. She had lost it, in a tragic accident. And of course, Belle didn’t have anything to do with it. (Maybe she had, a man she knew had cut it off, but shhh, that’s a secret..)
Nobody wanted a broken ballet dancer. Gillian n e v e r danced anymore, but Belle did. They called her the Beauty when she was close, but behind her back, in the darkened alleys of New York, she was always the Beast.
