all_inclusive | (no subject)

"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?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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.

"Oh, that's an understatement," Thea says, sighing a little. Is she really unloading on a Disney princess? Still, it's nice to have someone completely removed from the situation to talk to and Belle's pretty comforting. It's nice. It's really, really nice.

"Lots of crime, lots of corruption."

"I don't think we had much crime apart from the occasional theft of a sheep, here and there," Belle says, giving her a smile that says that she hadn't really spent much time worrying about it. "I'd hate to live somewhere that was so rife with crime."

"You learn to live with it," Thea explains. "Which doesn't make it easier but it makes you used to it and horrible things don't surprise you anymore. I just want to make it better, you know? But it's hard to renew a city once it's started spiraling down into decay. It's hard to make something beautiful again when people have ignored it long enough to let it go into disrepair."

"I suppose so," Belle says, rather disappointed if that's the case. She likes to have a lot of hope and faith in the world, but it seems like that's not the case when it comes to this. She peers to the side and sees that Chip seems to have fallen asleep. "It's worth it to keep fighting, though, for those we love."