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"Please, Belle, I want to come and see!"

This was one of the most difficult partings she had yet had to make, but as Belle stood on one side of the Nexus, trying to dissuade a chipped teacup from following her into the hotel, she thought that this was never something she had ever imagined happening, not even when she cast herself in her own little stories in her head. "Chip, I'm sorry, but I don't know that you can even follow me in here," she says as kindly as she can manage.

Beyond that, she'd not sure she wants to bring all the beings in the castle into the Nexus. True, most people here didn't seem like they'd mind, but a talking armoire? It definitely wasn't the kind of hotel furniture people expected, even with mad shifting doors and outer space.

"Can't I come in for a little while and meet people?" Chip asks plaintively. "I don't like it when you're not around."

Belle smiles softly as she kneels down, her dress covering her as she scoots closer to the divide so that she's half in one world and half in the other, allowing Chip to hop into the palm of her hands. She knows that he wants her to come back to the castle, but things are so different and difficult now. She thinks that maybe she could still break the curse, but she doesn't know that she'd stay and given the choice of breaking the Beast's heart and putting off the decision, she's chosen the latter because she's happy with her life.

She thinks that it makes her a coward and she's ashamed for that, too. It's even more reason to continue hiding.

Belle's so lost in her thoughts that she doesn't even notice Chip jumping in her palms, trying to get someone's attention who's passing down the hall behind her. "Hi there!" Chip cries, bubbly and delighted. "Are you from here?"

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"Well," Belle says fondly. "I'm from a small provincial town in the south of France and Chip here is close to us, but it's not really a town so much as a large castle on its own land." She gives Thea a sympathetic smile. "Maybe it just needs to be filled with the right kind of people?"

"Castle, huh? Castles are great. I saw some on a trip to Germany once," Thea says. That had been a nice family vacation. So had been the trip to Disneyland but that probably isn't something to mention to Belle and Chip.

"I don't guess there's a chance we could go see it, is there?"

"It's still there," Belle says, trying not to let the confusion and difficulty of the decision show on her face. "And I'm sure Chip would be more than happy for the company, but I'm not so sure that I should be going there. It's complicated," she says, given that she's not sure how to explain it to someone she knows, let alone someone she's just met.

"Castles usually end up that way. What with the royalty and all that noise," Thea says. She knows the story, of course, but she thinks it's a little creepy and unfair to let on that she does. If the situation were reversed, she wouldn't feel too comfortable with someone knowing her life story.

"We can just enjoy the provincial life or whatever. I'm game for anything."

"Bakery!" Chip announces gleefully and Belle is genuinely hard-pressed to argue with that. She laughs and gestures onwards with a hand, seeing as she thinks that's the best. "And maybe you can tell me about your castle," he says to Thea. "Does that mean everyone has one?"

"I don't think everyone has one," Thea says. It reminds her of Roy, inexplicably, and that twists in her chest until it gets painful. "But my family is lucky and we have one. Lucky with money, anyway. Unlucky in other ways."

Thea grins. "I have horses, you know. A whole stable full of horses. That's my favorite part about being at home, I get to ride."

While Chip might have been fascinated by the castle, Belle is far more interested now that they're speaking about horses. Her interest piqued, she perks up with a hopeful look on her face. "Really?" she asks, feeling a bit breathless and eager. "What sort of horses do you have?"

"Arabians," Thea explains. "I used to do show jumping too, until I fell once and broke my leg."

Thea remembers her father being really attentive that summer, being more affectionate than ever, but now she knows it's all because he just had cold feet about leaving them. Of course.

"I wish I had some pictures to show you. They were beautiful. My jumper's name was Jasmine."

"I'd love to have seen," Belle raves, thinking that Jasmine is truly a lovely name for a horse. "I had Philippe, but he's not a jumper so much as he's our horse for everything. Travelling and exploring and he's quite a good rescuer, too," she says, giving Chip a knowing smile considering they'd had the privilege of meeting.

"Which breed?" Thea is a little knowledgable about horses and thinks, in another life, she might have ended up a professional equestrian instead of a fuck up and a bar owner. She thinks things might have been a lot different if her father hadn't died and if Ollie hadn't disappeared.

"I don't even know," she admits with a slightly amazed laugh that all this time, she'd never really cared to ask. "He's always just been Philippe to me, though I imagine there's a bit of a mish mash as far as his genetics go. He served the purpose we needed. He took us where we had to go and made sure we arrived, no matter the weather. I miss him all the time," she confesses.

"I miss Jasmine too," Thea says, her own smile a little wistful at the memories of racing and jumping and even just brushing her down in her stall at the end of the day. She had always taken incredible care with her horse and missed the companionship they'd shared.

"I wonder if there's somewhere to go riding in the hotel? It wouldn't be our horses but it would be horses and I would love to go riding again. It's been entirely too long since I had the time to be able to go."

"Well, there's the stables," Belle says, lighting up now that she gets to talk about her work. "I spend a day or two there every week and while it isn't Philippe or your Jasmine, it really is a wonderful thing to spend time in a place that feels so safe." Her smile grows even broader as she thinks of taking a new friend there. "I'd love to go riding with you!"

"Me too?" Chip asks hopefully.

"Only if we find a very small horse," Belle teases, even though she knows he won't be able to join them.

"You can ride in one of our saddlebags," Thea says, wanting to include Chip if she can. It just seems wrong not to, knowing that he's just a little boy deep down and it's not his fault he got cursed.

"You can hang on in there, right?"

"We'll make sure he's good and secured," Belle says, stomach fluttering with the potential that he might not be so securely fastened. She'd hate for him to get hurt or lost. "It's been ages since I've last rode, though. You might have to put up with me being a bit slow!"

"Me too, it's been forever." Thea isn't going to act like she's some champion rider anymore when she barely ever goes out to the stables now. Besides, this is a Disney princess and she's not going to go showing her up. It's not her style.

"We'll have to ease into it."

"Definitely, and maybe we could find our way through one of the doors. There's a lot of them that have horses and I've been dying to explore some of them," she says, starting to ramp up into a breathless patter because she loves how she's not restricted anymore. "Where are you from originally, Thea?"

"Starling City," she explains. "It's uh, not like where you're from. Or the Nexus. It's a lot more dangerous."

It's much nicer not to be worried about which of her relatives is going to die on any given day but the lack of excitement in the Nexus has started to grate. Can someone get addicted to thrills? Thea hopes not. The last thing she wants is to end up wearing a mask and going all vigilante for kicks.

"I think a hotel with magical doors is actually kind of calm compared to the alternative."

"I like it," Belle admits, keeping Chip close by and an eye on him. "Before I got to the hotel, I was trapped on an island. It was limited and while I'll never regret the people I met there, I always yearned for something more. Being in the hotel and having access to home and all the wonderful worlds beyond is more than I ever could have asked for."

"You have no idea how many people I know that have been trapped on an island," Thea says, laughing. It's not a happy laugh. It's the kind of laugh that's full of irony because seriously, trapped on an island seems to be the blanket excuse given to her by everyone who has ever abandoned her.

"Let me guess, you got trained as a ninja assassin while you were there?"

"What?" Belle asks with a laugh, shaking her head in disbelief. "No. No, I invented a few minor things and got married," she says, tilting her head to the side in curiosity, because she's never really heard of becoming a ninja assassin on an island. "Is there an island out there that does that sort of thing?"

"Uh, sorry, wrong island. And yeah, my brother...he had a kind of island deserting type thing going on," Thea explains. "We thought he was dead and he wasn't, it's really complicated. I have bad history with islands."

"This one was fairly tame, if you discounted weird events, but seeing as the hotel seems to have imported them into their own rooms, I'm not sure that I upgraded into anything normal," she admits, and the way she speaks about it makes her sound absolutely thrilled. "I never coped well with normal," she says fondly, to Chip.

"Sometimes a little normal is good," Thea says. "It's nice to have a break from weirdness all day every day but...I don't know. I like safe better than normal, maybe that's how I should look at it."

"Are things unsafe, then, in Starling City?" she asks, with an edge of concern in her voice. It's not as if Belle can truly change anything, but she thinks that she can offer a sympathetic shoulder of friendship, if nothing else.