Page 65 of Beau and the Beast

"Then by all means, go ahead," Wolfram said. "By the end of this, you'll know everything about me. I don't expect any secret to stay that way for long."

Beau nodded and then spent a moment in silence, maybe deciding how to ask his question.

"In the wing where your staff lives, there's a room across from mine that's empty. Everything inside is... wrecked. And I know that you were the one who did it," Beau said. "Why?"

Wolfram took a deep breath. He'd hoped that his staff would empty the ruined room out by now, or at the very least that Beau wouldn't have explored the place thoroughly enough to find it. It was a wretched reminder of the fact that Wolfram wasn't always as in control as he wished to be.

"I sleepwalk," he said after a deep breath. "In fact, that's how your brother managed to get photo proof of me."

Wolfram had never stopped to consider the fact that if he didn't sleepwalk, he would've never met Beau. Perhaps he shouldn't be too hard on himself for the new habit.

"It started a few months ago and got progressively worse. The staff had suggestions about what we could do—locking my doors from the outside at night, drugging me into a stupor—but so far they've let me keep my freedom. But... I walked into that room one night a few weeks before you came and what you see in there now is the result of my sleepwalking."

"But you've never hurt anyone in your sleep?" Beau asked, his eyes wide.

"No, of course not," Wolfram said. "Some part of me is still there, when it happens. Or at least I think so. Why else would I have chosen an uninhabited room? There's still a logical part of me present, even when I give into it."

Beau nodded.

"And you don't remember anything when you wake up?"

"I remember some of it," Wolfram said. "There's a piece of me that's aware of what I'm doing. There's... after the transformation with the curse, things changed for me, Beau."

Wolfram puffed an ironic laugh through his nose, realizing a moment too late how lame the statement was when considering the enormity of his transformation.

"What I mean is that it wasn't just my appearance that changed. I got all of these animal pieces that I'd never had before and it happened in my head, too. Suddenly I could smell things that I'd never been aware of, I could see in the dark, and I had instincts that pulled me in directions I'd never known before."

"That makes sense," Beau said. "I should've guessed it with the way your diet is. Of course there would be more that got changed than what I see on the surface."

Wolfram nodded. "I fought it all for years. The new senses were streams of data that I thought I could simply choose to ignore. I wouldn't open my eyes in the dark, would ignore the smells as if they stank, and would tamp down the instincts like they were unproductive and intrusive thoughts."

He took a deep breath. Wolfram realized he was swishing his tail behind himself in an anxious habit. He stopped to snake it in front of his body, catching it in between his hands to smooth the tuft of dark hair at the end and hold it still.

"But the longer I've been like this, the less I've been able to keep it in check," he admitted finally. He hadn't told anyone on the staff that he'd struggled with the instincts, with the draw to become more than just a man with normal senses. "I think that's why I started sleepwalking. If I won't let the animal parts of myself in while I'm awake, they start to come out when I'm sleeping."

"What are the impulses?"

"To escape, to use my body differently, to take all of the hatred and rage I've felt about this curse and channel it so that it's not inside of me anymore—to push it all out through claws and teeth."

To claim you like you were some thing that I could own,Wolfram finished silently in his head.

Beau sat in silence, his expression inscrutable.

"It's an ugly thing about me," Wolfram said, "but it's the truth."

"I don't think it's ugly," Beau said quickly. "If I were in your position, I would scream and cry and do all of the things that you did in that room. I would want the whole world to pay for what had happened to me."

"The world doesn't deserve to pay. I'm the only one who's responsible for this fate."

"You know what I mean," Beau said, narrowing his eyes at Wolfram. "It's not that anyone is responsible for it. It's that… impulse of emotion with nowhere to let it out. When you want to be a child and throw yourself on the ground and pound your fists and scream because things didn't turn out the way they ought to for you."

Wolfram smiled sadly and nodded.

"I hadn't thought about it but I suppose you know very well what it feels like to have an unfair fate," Wolfram said.

"Intimately. I don't sleepwalk, but I have nightmares—about the fire—pretty often. They're awful and I wake up alone and crying and mad at the whole world."

"You've had them since you've arrived here?"

---