Who: Daniel and Ella What: Daniel is a prince Where: R1 When: Immediately after transformation Warnings: God this is depressing
Ella had listened to the recordings.
She’d listened to Beauty’s cautionary words, and while she knew some of them to be true, especially as they pertained to Daniel, they didn’t make her heart ache any less. The Beast, however, did make her smile. The certainty in his tone was something she could only imagine coming from Daniel, and the plea at the end made her cry (both times she listened to it).
By the time she left the bedroom and it’s thrift store furniture, she’d wiped away her tears, and she’d tried to make herself look as presentable as she could muster.
She’d hidden in the flower shop the first night after finding out Daniel had cheated on her, and the moon had given her a reprieve the second night, but she wasn’t willing to let this conversation be delayed any longer.
With every footstep on the wood of the hall, she told herself that she would not give in. The smell of alcohol was strong, pungent and familiar, and she had to fight not to go find the bottles, wherever they were. It was cheap whiskey; the kind she was familiar with; the kind that reminded her of trailers and bruises and home. She closed her eyes, and she forced herself past the living room and kitchen, out to the balcony where every single bloom had died in the past two days.
Daniel was there, at the end of the balcony, and she knew Beauty had left him a message; she knew that she’d asked the Beast to do the same. She had no idea, however, if he’d heard them. Her footsteps, as she approached him, were soft on the concrete and Kat wound around her legs and meowed, announcing their presence.
“Hello, Daniel,” she said softly, remaining at a distance and waiting for him to turn around.
He was there sure enough, leaning in a slump against the spot against the wall where the Beast and his Beauty had fallen asleep in the sun that first day. There was a glass of clear liquid swaying gently from his loose fingers between his drawn up knees, and he’d been staring without purpose out over the garden, toward the hidden stone angels and the shards of glass buried under the rotting leaves.
He was obviously surprised that anyone at all had come to see him, and he nearly tipped over turning around to see who it was. Immediately he lifted an unconscious hand to his forehead--the hangover was going to punish him for more sudden movements. He swallowed twice against the dryness in his throat and the unshaven chin dropped a little into his chest before he replied. “Hello, beautiful.” It was not a name the way the Beast named Beauty, just like it was not quite a term of affection. It was an adjective, and he used it sometimes in various languages. Today he said it as an observation, as evenly as he could manage in a hoarse voice. One eye squinted at her through the growing light.
She smiled a little, just because she knew she looked a mess. “You have a twisted idea of what beautiful looks like,” she told him, and her tone was sad and quiet. She knew he was hungover, even though it wasn’t a state she had consciously ever seen him in. A lifetime of experience, however, meant she was familiar with all the tell-tale signs, and she was glad she had encountered him this way and not drunk. She wasn’t sure she’d have been able to do what she had to do if he’d been drunk.
“Do you remember last evening?” she asked, not moving closer, staying at a safe distance that would keep her from leaning against him or touching him. “They left us messages.”
She’d been crying. Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I remember. I haven’t looked at my computer. I have no idea how you can be up and around at this hour after a night like that.” The Beast had spent it restlessly pacing after spending hours trying to claw through the wall, and along with the fucking hangover he was sore and exhausted. Moving gingerly he dropped his weight forward against his thighs as his ankles scraped a little closer on the concrete. He turned his head to look at her steadily through the red-rimmed eyes.
“I didn’t spend the evening pacing and growling,” she said, watching him, her gaze adoring, even through exhaustion and tear-swollen eyes. “I listened to mine,” she said, taking one, small step forward. Despite the clean clothing, his skin had the smell of alcohol - that sickly, sweet scent of a day-after drunk, everything sugar touched and stale all at once. “Beauty was... blunt,” she said, “and the Beast was... apologetic and pleading.”
She took one more step forward. “Will you listen to me, if I walk the rest of the distance between us?”
Daniel didn’t need to listen to the recording to know, at least: “The Beast just called me names.”
He didn’t understand that soft gaze. Pity, perhaps? No sane man would believe he could be adored when he looked like Daniel knew he must look and felt like Daniel felt. “You can come over here if you want,” he said, in some vague confusion about why the distance should be so difficult a thing, but willing to humor her.
“Beauty left you a message,” she said, and she closed the distance between them in a very slow, very careful manner, steps small and light. Once she reached him, she sat down on the concrete in front of him. She was close enough to reach out and touch, but not close enough for her to lean against him for support. It would have been an intentional effort to soothe his curls or touch his jaw, and she kept her hands folded on her lap.
“Shane told me,” she said needlessly, since Beauty and her Beast had discussed little else the night before. She paused after the words, hesitating. She’d intended to ask why, to make it about her shortcomings (which she still thought was the case), but the recording she’d just heard made her hesitate. “I love you,” she said, eyes welling up with tears as soon as she said the words. “I want you to figure out if you could love me.”
He turned his head to watch her move and sit down so near, but he did not make a twitch in her direction. Fleetingly, he wished he’d taken at least one steadying mouthful of whiskey instead of the water. He put the glass aside, put his elbows on his knees, and tipped his head a bare few centimeters. “What did Shane say?” He wasn’t planning on denying it, he just wanted to know what the wolf said when he turned into a rabid rat.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He was angry, and he said what he said out of anger. It’s nothing that needs repeating,” she said, looking down at her hands. She hadn’t expected him to deny it. “I talked to her too,” she said with a half-hearted shrug. “She’s gorgeous. Young, but gorgeous,” she said, almost laughing at the fact that Boyd made her feel old at 23. She shook her head immediately after the thought entered it, and she looked up at him. “Will you do it?” she asked, eyes openly damp with tears which she couldn’t hold back, no matter how she tried.
Daniel only had a sigh in response for her words about Boyd. Gorgeous, yes, but that wasn’t why he had slept with her. He realized that he just needed to be needed, and he didn’t think he could measure up to what Ella wanted, deserved, asked for. Boyd was easier to answer. He looked back at the dying garden one more time.
Daniel lifted her eyes up to hers, and his tone was almost desperate. “Ella, I want you with me more than anything. I’ll give you anything you want to stay with me. I won’t even talk to anyone else if that’s what you want. Please stay.”
Her return smile was sad, and she couldn’t keep herself from reaching out and touching the rough stubble of his jaw. Ella understood, in theory, what her tale had said, that this had nothing to do with her own shortcomings - in practice, it was much harder to believe. She motioned in to the apartment, to the prison that was R1. She thought, with certainty, that he didn’t want to be alone in there again. She didn’t think it mattered much to him who was in there with him, as long as there was someone. She could understand that; the isolation. But she wanted to be more than just a warm body to him; she wanted to matter.
She had no idea how to make him understand that.
“I need-” she said, then stopped herself short. “I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun,” she quoted, as much to soothe her own nerves with the familiarity of the words as to say what she was having trouble putting into words. Her chin tilted, a little stubborn, though she was crying in earnest now. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you, and I fear you’re going to forget me the minute I walk out that door. I’m terrified,” she admitted, her hand sliding down to grip his, fingers almost painful. “But I don’t want you to settle for me, and need other women to fill the gaps I leave behind.”
She took a deep breath, tried to settle her breathing into something that made it easier to get the words out. “I need you to talk to anyone you like, and still want me more. I want you to want me, even if you can come and go from here whenever you want.”
He returned the grip and sat up a little to pull her in, forgetting that he probably was not at his most alluring, but the embrace had worked in the past and he hoped it would work again. “I do want you. I just said I did, and I meant it.” He did, too. It was obvious that he was sure he needed her there, and if her theory was true that it was just warm company, there was no sign of it when he looked up into her face. “I’m sorry about what happened, I am. It won’t happen again. Please stay.”
She let him pull her into the embrace, went into it willingly, even melted against him and put her head on his shoulder. “Why did you sleep with her?” she asked, quiet soft.
He let out a frustrated sigh. “That wasn’t what I meant to do when I went.” He paused, pushed awkwardly at skeletal leaf, and then continued, reluctantly, “I don’t know. It was just...” He trailed off. Not that it was too difficult to put into words, but that it sounded stupid when he did.
She touched gentle fingers to his curls, which were getting too long and were sleep mussed. “It was just...?” she encouraged softly.
“She’s got a lot of problems.” It wasn’t an excuse, just truth, really. “We’ve been fighting about her choices. Then she got hurt. Now her boyfriend is a goddamn menace. And... I don’t know. I was worried about her, and I felt guilty, and when I saw her she was all by herself in this stupid hotel room and...” He shrugged a little and looked away. He felt sorry for her.
She listened to his reasoning, and while it wasn’t completely what she expected, but it was close. It rang true with everything she’d learned in the past few days, and it fit with his own sudden, unexpected interest in her - and interest that had only come when she’d been vulnerable and needed him. She kissed his rough cheek, and she pressed her own, soft cheek to the stubble a moment later. “She needed you, just like I did,” she said softly. She didn’t say it was pity, though that’s exactly what it was, and her heart broke a little more with the realization. She realized Jane, if she was pitiable, would be impossible for him to resist, and she rested her forehead against his shoulder a moment.
“I want you, I love you, I adore you. I think you’re amazingly brilliant, witty, sarcastic and impossible,” she said softly. She leaned back, and she cupped his cheeks with soft hands, and she looked into those hungover, blood-shot blue eyes. "I know you, and I know that I want you," she said, pausing a moment and kissing his lips in a way that was desperate and taking. "I need you to know you, and to figure out if you want me."
She put her fingers to his lips. "Don't try to tell me you know, because you don't, sweetheart."
“If I think I know and you know I don’t, then... then I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.” Daniel didn’t understand how he could be all these wonderful things but not truthful at the same time. But then, he corrected himself silently, he as the one that had done the cheating. He certainly had not been planning on informing Ella. His head hurt. Why was he having this conversation if she was going to leave anyway? Yesterday he had been prepared to just let her go.
She had quietly waited for some declaration or reassurance that did not come, and she kissed him once more when it didn’t. “How about fighting for it, Daniel?” she asked, crawling off his lap and standing. “If you want me back, it’s something you have to go after. I care about you too much to just be someone you keep around because she’s here. Prove to me that I’m not just another Ain, or another Jane, or another woman you sleep with because they need you to. Prove to me I’m something you want.” She took a shaky, deep breath. “Get sober, and write something, and don’t ignore me when I ask you for things over and over. Being with someone, having someone, it’s about more than a warm body and not being alone.” She was sobbing now, more so with every word. “Find out my father’s name, my mother’s name, when I first met my sister, how I paid my way through college. Care enough to find out. Let me find out the same things about you.” Her last, deep breath was so shuddering that it shook her entire frame. “Leave this apartment and still want me, even with a whole world full of gorgeous women who want to get you in their bed.”
She went quiet then, worn out from the words. “Come back for me,” she said softly, a begging and pleading thing.
Tired and frustrated, Daniel pushed up to his feet too. “You want too much from me. You knew what I was when you came up here and stayed, and now you want me to be someone else. I told you I don’t write any more, and I told you I wanted you. I’m sorry I’m not the same person I was, and I’m sorry I’m not willing to tear people apart for you the way the rest of this building seems to enjoy. We live in a fucking fairy tale every month, Ella. The rest of the time this is what I am. You think I don’t care who you are? Do you care who I am? You want to go on the internet and do some more research on who everyone else thinks I am? You go right ahead. Or, you know, maybe we could just have a fucking conversation about it, and you can tell me all about how you and that bitch grew up together.”
He put a hand out, caught himself against the wall, and looked out at the garden again. “You should have left it the way it was.”
“This is not what you are,” she said with certainty. “I didn’t do any research on the internet; I didn’t need to,” she insisted. “I know nothing about your past, because I didn’t care about that. I liked your words, and then I liked you. Because you talked to me, and we discussed things, and you cared about my opinion. Then you stopped. Don’t accuse me of wanting to change you, Daniel, not when you did it first,” she said openly. “And Vaughn and I didn’t grow up together, but you would know that if you listened to me, or if you read anything I gave you to read.” She nodded once, hurt and dejected despite the movement. “And you’re just getting angry and blaming it on me, because you don’t want to try. Because trying is hard, and trying is scary, and trying is something you don’t do.” She shook her head then, slowly. “You’ve never told me you wanted me, Daniel. Never once. Not really.”
When she stepped back, it was reluctantly. “I didn’t hurt you; you hurt me. You can’t make this my fault. You can win me back, if you care enough to. And if you don’t try, then that proves it, doesn’t it?”
He did not pursue her. That was the whole point, his refusal to pursue. She wanted him to pursue her and he never had to pursue anything at all, even if he really wanted to try. “I didn’t say it was your fault. And I just did say I wanted you, maybe I don’t write because I don’t want to write, and if you just talked to me then maybe you wouldn’t keep expecting sonnets.” Daniel let out a breath. “I am sorry I hurt you, but I’m not going to turn into a shining knight overnight for you. Not even you.”
“I tried to talk. I don’t want sonnets, and I don’t want a shining knight, Daniel. I just want you,” she said with a sad, dejected shrug. “And for you to want me the same way.” She sounded broken and hopeless, and she tried to shrug again and failed. “I-” She started to say she didn’t realize he’d disliked her as much as he’d just indicated, but she didn’t bother. She could barely see through the tears when she turned around, and her shoulders were shaking with sobs by the time she walked through the sliding glass doors and into R1.