Fragmented

 I don't usually write fan fiction, but after Once Upon a Time's Episode "The Outsider" in the middle of Season 2, poor hospitalized Belle was whispering to me all through the night, and she wouldn't stop until I put this one-shot down on paper. I hope you enjoy my one (and only, maybe?) fan fiction, and you can find more links to creative Once Upon a Time fan fiction and fan art on Once Upon a Fan.




The girl huddled in the bed, knees up to her chin, and found her confinement in the hospital room dismaying but familiar. She took slight comfort in this familiarity because she had no other.  She briefly thought she might like a story to contrast the bare sterility of her surroundings, but she wasn’t sure.  Perhaps she would be more content to sit folded up like a closed book.  Eyes shut, she measured each of her exhales like a slash on a wall.
*****
            A feathery touch across her lips drew her gently from sleep. The kiss spread the warmth of a hearth throughout her limbs, and she knew that when she opened her eyes she would be home.  But the man in the suit loomed in front of her, brown eyes wide with tremulous hope.  Black wings of fear unfurled and beat frantically against the girl’s mind, and in that instant she saw dark feathers spring from his coat, this beast who could wield fire in his hand.  She shoved him away, the fear gouting from her in a cacophony of madness; it was only when her voice was spent that she heard his apologies, saw the shocked sadness in his eyes as he practically threw himself from the room, and realized that his suit was just a well-tailored suit.
*****
            It was the emotion in his eyes that moved her to grudgingly allow him entry in the morning.  He pushed a cup into her hands, urging her to focus.  It’s just a cup, she said, and with those words a dark sense of déjà vu rustled the wings in her mind.  Then he spoke of impossible, fairy tale things, and the panicked drum of wings drowned out his voice and her reason.  In a gust of frustrated fear she sent his cup flying to the wall.  Just go away, she demanded shrilly, and chanced a sideways glance up at him.  His expression was as shattered as the cup.  He turned to her, eyes stunned and unfocused.  Hot shame rose in her cheeks, and she folded herself up again, barely hearing his choked apology, and staring down at the bedsheets as he limped out the door.  She curled up, blanket to her nose, and shook and shook for hours.  When her nerves finally stopped humming enough that she could stand, she shuffled on numbed feet to the end of the bed to look at the destroyed cup.  Now she realized his insistence had been fueled by desperation, and it suddenly felt wrong that she had caused him such misery when blinded by her selfish fear.  It was not like her to display such lack of empathy.  Was it?  She picked up a shard of the cup.
            The nurse appeared in the doorway.  I…this cup broke, the girl replied to the nurse’s query.  The man in the suit said it would help me remember, she continued.  Tell me, have I lost my memory?  The nurse shooed her back to bed with such a pitying look that the girl knew the answer.  After checking her blood pressure, the nurse gently reprimanded her.  She needed to calm down and rest.
            The girl looked at the shard in her hand.  It was painted with a delicate vein of blue.  She held it in her palm and compared it to the blue webwork in her own wrist.  An orderly came in to clean up, sweeping the floor, emptying the waste bin.  Fragmented, the girl thought.  What I know of myself is this fragment, and the rest of my life has been swept away.  She traced the blue line with her fingertip, over and over, until drowsiness pressed on her.  As she sank down, an overwhelming compulsion tugged at her to tuck the shard under her pillow.  Suspicious alarm made her drop it instead into the night table drawer.
            On the precipice of sleep she heard a ticking, rattling sound, a familiar sound.  Moving towards it she saw a spinning wheel turning, gleaming with light from the rich oiled wood and glints of gold thread.  The figure sitting at it was blurred, but she was not afraid.  She watched the wheel and listened to its slow clockwork creak and felt at home.  A thought unbidden came: He used it to forget.  Can I use it to remember?  The sound led her into a long, deep sleep.
*****
            The next morning the girl had no recollection of the spinning wheel.  But the wings of fear had dissolved, leaving her mind calm, and she was ready to listen reasonably when the doctor and a girl in a red shirt came in to talk with her.  They told her that her name was Belle.
            When they left, she rubbed the shard of the cup between her fingers, waiting.  But the man in the suit did not come back that day. 
 

   All images from my Once Upon a Time Pinterest Board