Who: Belle and Michael Carpenter What: Belle decided to give up her job because of the council's treatment of others. She's having feelings about this. When: Sunday morning Where: St. Michael's Rating: Probably low?
To say making the decision not to register had been difficult would have been greatly understating things. If it had only been about having to take charity from others, Belle wouldn't have struggled near as much. But she'd been free. She'd been able to read whatever she wanted, go wherever she wanted. For a few short weeks, it had felt like all the walls in her life had fallen down.
But when they'd started making those demands--demands Belle thought they should have made from the very start if they didn't want to seem suspect--it was like being grabbed by Claude and thrown back into that tower all over again. The injections had been one thing; Belle had done her reading on those, and while the concepts around 'germs' and 'viruses' were stll foreign, she'd believed that had truly been for the good of all. But then asking for people's blood, 'guardians' the children didn't truly know forcing them, taking away all choice just because of something as arbitrary as age when some of them were more mature than those many times older...
She would have liked to have been able to say she'd decided the moment Lydia had said her guardians had forced her to register that she'd decided to take a stand. But she hadn't. She'd been--well, a coward. For a time, her own freedom had been too precious, after all those years of darkness and isolation. But the longer it went on, the more people spoke amongst themselves--some of them saying the council was more benevolent than Belle believed, the more people got hurt and the more she imagined what might happen if Rumple were to ever arrive....
That had been the thought that, a few days before, had finally decided things for her. Imagining what they might do to him and what he might do in return. The memory of that man hitting her in the head for not telling him how to kill the man she loved was still too fresh, after all. She could only imagine how many people here might want him caged or worse.
And while walking out of first home that had been hers and a job she adored might not have been the tallest stand, it was better than doing absolutely nothing.
But here, in this building for a God that didn't feel at all like the ones that had breathed life into her world and feeling nearly as alone as she had in that stone prison, it was difficult to remember that this was the brave thing. Perhaps, if the man who had finally inspired her to do the right things were here, it would have been easier to--to truly take action, to walk into where the Council met and tell them that it wasn't just the monsters and mages who thought they were overstepping their bounds.
As it was, all she was managing to do was leafing through the book that apparently told the stories of the religion of this place, hoping that even if it wasn't her faith, the words alone might help her find her courage again--so intently focused on trying to distract herself that she didn't notice anyone coming near her.