Chapter Text
“I’m serious, Gaston.”
“Baby, come on.”
“Don’t baby me. We broke up weeks ago.”
This conversation again. Belle practically knew it by heart at this point. He would try and pin everything on her in just a moment, and proclaim himself the one true defender of their relationship, even as it lay shattered in millions of pieces at their feet, and he kept stepping on them like the oaf he was.
“You broke up with me. I didn’t want this.”
And there it was. He was nothing if not predictable.
“I don’t care what you want. You need to leave right now,” she said calmly, folding her arms over her chest.
He shook his head, made some sort of strange sound of disbelief and asked her, “Why did you even let me in if you were just going to kick me out again?”
“Oh my God, Gaston, seriously? Because you asked to come pick up your crap! You’ve got your crap, now leave.”
Belle rarely raised her voice, but if she hadn’t spat out those words with a bit of an edge to them, they would have caught in her throat, tangled like knots, clogging up her airways and threatening to make her cry out of frustration. Gaston seemed taken aback, which was good. He stared at her for a moment, his mouth open (God, she hated that) and his eyes wide and unblinking.
“Don’t have to be a bitch about it,” he finally muttered.
“Apparently, I do. Get out.”
For a moment there, Belle thought that had done the trick. She could almost taste the freedom on her tongue and smell the fresh, Gaston-less air, but then life was rarely that easy, was it? And ex-boyfriends rarely that agreeable.
“No!” he boomed, the sudden strength of his voice making her cringe. Her poor neighbors, oh God. “I’m gonna go take a leak and then we’re going to talk this out, babe!”
“There’s nothing to talk about! And stop calling me that!”
“Yes there fucking is! Babe!”
And with that, he stomped off to her bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him, leaving her standing there with her arms no longer crossed but wrapped around her chest instead. When she noticed it, she snapped her arms back to her sides and tried to find some sort of posture that screamed ‘I’m done with your bullshit and you don’t intimidate me!’ Her fists clenched, her chin up just a little bit, her feet shoulder width apart. That felt about right. She didn’t want to shout at him, but she would if she had to. She’d almost gotten through to him, earlier, that way.
So at what point do you call the cops on your ex-boyfriend when he refuses to leave your apartment? Preferably before the neighbors call the cops on the both of you, right? God, this was awful. He was awful. She’d made plans for the night, but then she had to cancel them because Gaston absolutely insisted he had to come pick up his things tonight. Wouldn’t give her a solid reason, just told her it had to be tonight, and she folded just like she’d done throughout their relationship.
She really didn’t know what else to do, short of getting a restraining order that Gaston’s father would probably manage to get thrown out immediately. So instead of a fun night out with her busy friends, she was about to sit and listen to Gaston go on and on about how she was the woman for him, that he needed her, that he was the only man who could ever ‘handle her,’ - whatever the hell that meant - until he got tired of talking and tried to get her into bed again. Her friends were probably drunk off their faces right now, having the time of their lives.
Enough was enough. Belle was sick and tired of having to break up with him over and over again. She didn’t know how, but tonight, she would get through to him. She’d just have to talk until her throat was sore, maybe draw him a picture, too, but he was not going to keep crashing into her life like this. Not anymore.
He was jiggling the door handle now. He must have locked the bathroom without thinking. Or maybe he’d somehow forgotten the entire concept of doors and locks? Because he kept jiggling the handle, and nothing was happening.
“Do you need some help?” she asked, half hoping he couldn’t hear her through the door.
Suddenly there was a thunderous noise; an incredibly loud bang in the bathroom that almost had her wrapping her arms around herself again out of pure self-preservation instinct. It sounded a little bit like he’d slammed the medicine cabinet shut, but that was only the beginning. It was a cacophony of thuds and crashes, the sound of every tap running, and suddenly a cry that sounded like it was Gaston’s, but was just a little bit more high pitched. What the hell was he doing? Did he punch the mirror or something? Trip over the laundry basket and face planted into the medicine cabinet? And now he was rattling the handle like a madman, but the door wasn’t budging. Had he seriously locked himself in?
“What’s going on in there?” she cried.
Belle grabbed her phone and was ready to dial either an ambulance or the police, when suddenly Gaston came flying out of the bathroom, the blood drained from his face and his eyes wide, his mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish.
“Gaston, what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m getting out of here. Where’s my stuff?”
“In that box by the door. What did you do to my bathroom?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Have a nice life.”
And he was gone. He didn’t even slam the door shut behind him. Did he just rip apart her bathroom out of spite? God, what a child. She supposed she had better go check out the damage, but when she peeked her head around the corner, there was absolutely nothing out of place. Nothing at all. All of her hair products were still there in front of the mirror, her toothbrush in the little cup, mouthwash and toothpaste all still where she’d left them, and the medicine cabinet mirror was still in one piece. It was cold in there, though, like he’d opened the window and then… closed it again? Something caught her eye. The mirror. It wasn’t broken, but he had written something in the steam from the hot water he seemed to have run for some reason. What did that say? Love? Leave? It didn’t even matter. She wiped the hastily scrawled letters away, clicked off the bathroom light and left the room.
He was probably just trying to unsettle her. He must have been desperate.
It was tempting to text him and demand an explanation, but knowing Gaston, he would take that as an invitation to come back. That’s probably exactly what he wanted. At least his things were gone, now. His toothbrush, his decidedly un-funny “funny” t-shirts, his awful CDs and the endless supply of Michael Bay movies he seemed to have - all of it, gone. Good. Going through the apartment earlier and tossing all of his thing in a cardboard box was eye-opening, actually. She hadn’t realized how many of his things had ended up there. It was like he’d been steadily sneaking himself in, and suddenly it all made so much sense.
For months now, she’d been feeling cramped in her own apartment. If he wasn’t there on her couch or reading over her shoulder as she typed, she’d trip over one of his socks or find his dirty dishes in the sink. And when she finally managed to break up with him (he avoided her for about a week because he knew she was fed up and was too nice a person to break up with him over the phone) there was still so much of him in her space it made her want to just throw everything out of the window.
But she didn’t want to risk hitting an innocent pedestrian with a can of Axe.
The silence was deafening, now, and for a strange few moments, Belle had absolutely no idea what to do. Cry? Laugh? Drink? She didn’t feel an impulse to do anything, really, and it was an emptiness that was a welcome change from the suffocating presence of that bathroom tornado of an ex-boyfriend of hers. It was too late to join up with her friends, now. They’d be well on their way to passing out stone cold.
So with a sigh, Belle sat down at her desk and turned on her laptop. Maybe now she could finally write something that was just for her. She’d been doing okay for herself, recently, writing those horrid ‘Ten reasons why…’, ‘The five best…’, ‘You won’t believe…’ click bait articles that made her want to roll her eyes for days. She could churn those out pretty quick, and there were always takers. Did it pain her to write them? Yes. Did it pay more than the cost of the wine she needed to get through them? Yup. So write them she did. Her job at the library was never going to be a full time thing, anyway. The town couldn’t afford full time employees, and Belle was happy to take what she could get.
The cursor blinked. And blinked. And kept blinking. But her fingers stayed hovering over the keys, absolutely refusing to produce anything at all, no matter how long she stared, or how hard she thought. Nothing.
Might as well stare at the inside of her own fridge for a bit, then. She stood there and rummaged through the depressing contents of her long neglected refrigerator and let herself shift things around with a bit more force than was strictly necessary until she noticed something that shouldn’t have been there.
A single can of beer. Nothing good; just Gaston’s favorite watered down American crap. She took it out, gave it a critical look, then with a sudden sense of entitlement, Belle opened it, took a massive gulp and kicked the fridge door shut in a series of smooth movements. Why not?
She slammed the can down next to her laptop. It tasted awful, but she was all out of wine, so this would have to do. She sighed and sat down to bravely face her empty white page and the blinking cursor once again, but the page wasn’t empty anymore.
Write
Huh? Hm. Well then, at least she’d made her word count go up exponentially without even consciously trying? She always did get a little spaced out when she hadn’t slept properly, and this whole never-ending breakup thing with Gaston meant that she hadn’t been able to do that in weeks. But with a little smile, she registered the sound of rain tapping softly against the windows and she knew that she would sleep well tonight.
Belle loved her little apartment in that old converted cannery. It was a huge brick building with quite a few tenants, and Belle’s little place was one of the smallest, but it was comfortable and cozy, and it was just in her price range. It was mostly open plan - save for the bathroom, of course - and her bed was up in the mezzanine above the kitchen area. That’s also where the rest of her books were stacked, because she’d run out of shelf space in the living area down below. It looked a little messy in daylight, but once the sun had set and Belle lit the candles and plugged in the string lights, the entire place was perfect. Just perfect.
The rain would be lovely to listen to up in her bed on the mezzanine in a bit, after she’d given this one more try. She backspaced until the word was gone and watched the cursor blink a few more times before putting her fingers to the keys again and again until letters became words, became sentences and grew into paragraphs. Bit by bit.
It was only when the eye strain became too difficult to ignore that Belle stopped typing. She scrolled up, and down, and up again, checked the word count and beamed at the screen. She’d written over a thousand words in - she checked the little clock in the corner - less than an hour. It wasn’t necessarily the speed at which she’d written this thing that made her smile like that, because she’d gotten the hang of those blog posts and bullet point articles ages ago and could write those at the speed of light, but rather the fact that there were now over one thousand words that belonged to her. Just her. Not some website. Not some blog. And it was a start.
A start to what? She wasn’t sure, exactly. She’d started writing about a little girl trying to fall asleep at night, but the shadows kept changing into monstrous shapes, and instead of being scared, she was intrigued and couldn’t still her whirring mind and close her eyes to get some rest. A children’s book, maybe? Maybe. That would be nice.
But now her eyes were stinging and she was yawning and stretching in her chair, and it became glaringly obvious that Belle needed to get herself to bed. Or maybe just read a few more pages in that book she started reading last night; that way she could enjoy the sound of the rain a bit more. She would hop into her pajamas and read in bed. Yes, that seemed like the perfect compromise.
Just as she closed her laptop, the sky outside cracked open and flooded the room with a bright white flash of light. Not too long after, she heard a deep rumbling sound in the distance, and she smiled to herself. A little stormy weather as she read her mystery novel - how fitting! She’d left her pajamas in the bathroom that morning, so that’s where she got dressed for bed, and as she stood in front of the mirror and brushed her teeth furiously in an attempt to get the taste of that awful beer out of her mouth, the clouds outside the window clashed and battled loudly up above, the storm having blown nearer at a dizzying speed.
The lightning flashed brighter and more frequent, the thunder roared louder and longer. It was getting to be just a little bit intimidating, but Belle still didn’t really mind. It was cathartic, in a way; all of that elemental fury. The rain was pouring down with no sign of stopping, and a good deluge of nearly biblical proportions was exactly what she needed. Maybe that would finally wash away the last traces of Gaston.
And right as she closed the bathroom door behind her and turned off the main lights in the living area, it happened - so quick she almost missed it: a sudden brightness in the corner of her eye. She turned, blinked and saw a white, bluish outline of a see-through person; shoulders, arms, a head, and a face, right next to the window. A face with a strong nose and wide eyes, staring right at her, and then it was gone before the next rumble of thunder demanded to be heard. It could just as well have been a flash of lightning reflected off of… God, off of anything. That, and her overactive imagination. Definitely just that.
Belle hadn’t been sleeping all that well, either. She’d read about sleep deprivation, and how it could trigger hallucinations and things like that. Mostly auditory, but still… It would have explained the face, which was really quite detailed for a momentary trick of the eye.
Those eyes had seemed just as surprised as hers.
But that was ridiculous. See, Belle was a well read woman. She read anything and everything; be it silly romance novels, mysteries, horror, the classics, the newspaper, the back of a box of cereal, scientific articles and popular books on physics, trashy magazines - just anything, really. So while she absolutely loved the thought of the supernatural as a fictional subject, she knew very well that that’s just what it was. A fictional subject. She knew how the mind could play tricks on itself. Matrixing, pareidolia, that sort of stuff. Belle was just enough of a romantic to have an interest in these things, and just enough of a skeptic not to get carried away by them.
Which is why she was absolutely sure she just needed some sleep.
Belle shook her head and made her way up to the mezzanine, and she had to grasp the steps and hold on for dear life when a sudden loud bang from the apartment below startled her so bad she almost tumbled off the stairs. Jesus Christ, that was some horrible timing. Someone must have dropped something. That’s what it was.
And her heart was only beating faster because her neighbor had startled her. That’s all. And she didn’t want to read anymore because she was more tired than she’d thought. Definitely. And she pulled the covers up over her head because it was chilly all of the sudden.
Not because she was freaked out.
Because Belle had not just seen a ghost.