Please can I have a fic where Agathe gets amnesia? -singing anon
The first thing Belle notices when she wakes up are the snowflakes against the windowsill.
It’s June, she thinks. How I love a snowy June morning. Hot cocoa, curled up in the library, maybe a snowball fight later among the June roses….
She wakes up, and kicks Adam, and he finds himself sprawling across the frosty floor.
“Adam, Adam! How hairy you look!”
He checks his hands. “No I don’t. You’re delusional, darling.”
“Am I?” Belle looks at him. A mood—half disappointment, half pride—flickers over her face. “Oh. You’re just the same. But then—what the….”
“Has this floor always had a bit of a snowdrift in it?”
“So it’s not just me! It is snowing, isn’t it? Snowing in June? But the curse isn’t back, you look all clean shaven and normal…”
“I always count on you to be a paragon of affection, my dear.” He kisses her on the head. “I’ll grow the beard soon. Anyway, why the snow? You haven’t been spell-booking again, have you?”
“Mrs Potts hid the spell book so I’d stop.” Belle kicks out of bed and goes to the window. “And even if I could, I wouldn’t—oh, my—holy—”
Adam paws to the window, and sees why Belle can’t speak.
Part of the palace is covered in frost: his summer flowers caked in snow, a small blizzard raging over Mrs Potts’ herbs. Yet the far lawn is in deepest autumn—trees that never lived there shedding golden russet leaves onto the browning ground—and the gate hangs open, yawning, covered in trailing daffodils that should have died in May.
“That’s not quite right, is it?”
“The wood, Adam, look to the wood.”
The forest is raging—buzzing with moths, and fleeting into colors of the rainbow, and sparking up into flames that never quite alight. He sees the leaves all turn black, then blue, then the red of spilled blood. He sees wolves pacing, changing their face with every step, becoming lions and rabbits and gold-teethed fawns with all the prompting of a blink. The paths into the wood all twist and turn aside, and he sees the trees growing, and blooming, and turning into wooded walls.
“Get your cape. We have an adventure ahead of us, Belle.”
“I’ve already got mine on. You get yours, lazybones, and I’ll go rattle up the horses.” She’s already halfway down the stairs—her course brown boots clomping down freshly scrubbed marble—and Adam can’t help but grin.
Magic. He doesn’t like spells, and curses, and things that smell of singed fur and clawing bones—but a quest with Belle is more than he can resist.
“Look, all the magic is coming from the center of the wood.”
“I hope you’re riding in front, Belle. I don’t want to be charged with a stray spell.”
“Think it’s time for another one of us to be the beast for a change?”
“You’ve got to be kidding, you’ve been one for years.”
Belle smacks his knee and hides her smile and urges Philippe forward. Now that they’re in the wood, she sees small details, evidence of magic, that weren’t visible from her window: wildflowers turned to pure gold, and patches of moss singing folk songs, and birds who speak Latin and preach Mass. And beyond that, more and more monstrosities: logs that show doors to other worlds, and creatures with three legs and five eyes watching from the shadows, and a sense that the wood is no longer a wood but a jungle—a desert—a cavern that yawns onto something dark and gold and blinking with eyes.
When they reach the hollow in the center of the wood, Belle feels her heart shudder to a stop. It’s calm, here, and the magic is little; a rustling in the branches, a gentle silver rain, but nothing to compare with blood and wolves and shining leaves. And the dead tree in the center, tipped up on its side like a windblown birds nest, is calm as it ever was.
And Belle knows it ever was. She knows this tree.
She’s off her horse in a moment, fleeing over to it in her rough brown boots, calling out. “Agathe! Agathe! Are you all right? Are you in there?”
Adam follows, slower. He sees snakes creeping off the branches, only a few yards beyond the silent tree. He sees the grass hissing out golden sparks.
Belle finds her, sprawled on her side, sleeping apparently, though she breathes faster than she ought. A broken chair, split on its side, showing all Belle needs to know. “She’s fallen, she’s hurt herself. Adam, help me get her up on your horse. I know, I know, I wouldn’t ask you if I could, but now’s not a time to be afraid—we need to keep her safe.”
Adam bites back all the fright dancing on his tongue, the way his hands flinch away from touching the witch who cursed him. He doesn’t want to touch the magic; it reeks of danger, it brings back all the sense of breaking bones. But he would do anything for Belle…so he reaches down, and scoops up the creature who cast him in darkness for ten years, and turned his servants into wood and brass, and set a snowy curse all about his home. He feels her fragile bones. He’s shocked to feel how cool her cheeks are.
“Hurry.” Belle is already readying her saddle, preparing to hold the Enchantress up on the ride back. “I’ll get some of her herbs—I don’t know what’s what, but maybe she can tell us what to heal her with when we wake up. And there’s always Pere Robert.”
“Absolutely not.” Cogsworth is about to break a vein. “In the upstairs room? The good upstairs room? No! Can we keep her in, I don’t know, the shed?”
“Do you want to get cursed twice?” Lumiere is scraping things off the pantry shelf, unable to make up his mind what to put on the invalid’s tray. “What do you think, mon ami? Chocolate? Coffee? Toffees?”
“Don’t go in there! Have you seen the state of the garden? Four states of weather all at once, and the back labyrinth has a whale in it. She’s clearly gone around the bend, as we used to say.”
“I think I’ll take one tray of oranges and tea,” says Lumiere, his brow furrowed, “and maybe another with the coffee—merde, why are these trays so small?! I’m barely fitting the vase of peonies. Give us a hand?”
“It’s no thanks to her that I have hands.”
“Go on, Cogsworth, she won’t hurt you.” Plumette comes up, feather soft, and smiles at her loves. “She’s sleeping, now; she looks quite harmless. She’s even got a bit of jam smudged on her face.”
“Jam! I knew I was forgetting something. You’re an angel, Plumette. Cheer up, Cogs! Maybe her spells will be a good thing. Perhaps she’ll make me more overpoweringly handsome than I already am.”
“God help us,” whispers Cogsworth, and picks up a tray to take upstairs.
Belle sits beside the bed. Plumette peeps over Lumiere’s shoulder at the figure on the bed. The beggar woman sleeps, restlessly, and magic sparks from her cold fingers, drifting to the window in curls of smoke.
“She woke up once,” says Belle, “and I spoke to her, and she didn’t know me. She didn’t remember bread or jam, or Villeneuve, or any name I knew her by, and she didn’t know of her home in the woods.”
Cogsworth sighs, and ticks, and coughs up a small gear he hides in his pocket.
“Does she know there’s gold dust seeping from her fingertips?” Lumiere goes to hold her hands—thoughtlessly, lovingly, rubbing his against hers as if to warm them. “Maybe she overdid herself with magic.”
“No. I don’t know if she even knows what magic is, anymore. I think that’s why everything is strange—she can’t remember to hold back. She doesn’t realize she’s the one letting all this happen.” Out the window, a passing cloud turns into fifteen milkmaids, who descend to earth with a thump. Nobody notices.
“Have you called Pere Robert?”
“I don’t know if he’ll come—the message came back covered all over with feathers, and before I could read it, it turned into a black-eyed dove and flew away.” Belle gets up, and paces, and throws her hands in the air. “I’m out of my league. I can fix things that tick and whirr, and I can heal a broken arm, but I don’t know how to heal magic.”
“It’ll be all right.” Plumette takes Belle’s head onto her shoulder, and strokes her hair and holds her hands. “We’ll fix her up, the way we would any other human—for she is human, isn’t she, or was once? Maybe chicken soup and sandwiches will still work on her.”
Belle sighs, and pats Plumette’s hands, and goes to take a scramble in the library. I must fix this, she thinks, I must fix this for my friend Agathe.
[stopping here to let my friend @theteaisaddictive take over—we’re gonna try to write this together🔥 ]
