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The Trade	By : sandyl666 Category: +1 through F > Coraline Views: 11933 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: Coraline book-verse is owned by Neil Gaiman and part of movie-verse is owned by Henry Selick, I own nothing. I make nothing whatsoever by writing and posting this on.

Chapter List
- 25
- 26
- 27
Disclaimer: I don't own Coraline or any of its plot or characters... But maybe I can lay claim to the nickname Bel. I really rather like what I've done with him. Except when he screwed up and made Coraline leave.
Chapter 26: Reverting

"Coraline!" Mel stared at her daughter with her mouth wide open, much as Wybie had, actually. She sat beside her husband's hospital bed seemingly stunned at seeing her daughter. Coraline's heart dropped for a second when she saw that look in her mother's eyes. The look that told her that her mother had given up on ever seeing Coraline again, not believing her daughter would ever return. Coraline had to remind herself that she couldn't blame the woman. Coraline had been gone for nearly nine months after all.
"Coraline!" Her father gasped and sat up, nearly tumbling out of bed as he reached for his precious daughter.
"Dad, mum!" Coraline ran into the room, ignoring the look of disapproval on the nurse's face and tackled her father. Her mother threw her own arms around her husband and child, and Coraline knew her joy at seeing her precious child again was sincere.
And now she knew how that would feel. She tried not to think of Dre.
Her father was discharged a mere week later, swinging his arms around to show his daughter he had fully recovered, knocking over the coat hanger as he did so. He caught it somewhat clumsily, though he gave his daughter a wink as if he meant it to happen. Coraline laughed at her father's antics.
Wybie, Kate and Coraline had decided on their cover story being that Coraline had escaped from the kidnapper and managed to find her way back to the town, where Wybie and Kate found her coincidentally. And that she didn't remember where was kept, as she was in such a panic to leave the place.
"And what did the kidnapper look like?" an officer asked Coraline. "Any basic description will do,"
Coraline made a quick decision as to what she would do and decided to tell them the truth. They'd never find Bel in the places they looked anyway. And even if they did, the could never catch hold of him. He was too powerful.
"He's... tall... Really tall. And kind of thin. His eyes and hair are black," She closed her eyes and without any prompting conjured up a picture of the spider. The Beldam. "His nose is long and sharp, and his lips are thin," But soft. She remembered, but wasn't about to tell the police that.
When she opened her eyes again, she could see the police nodding and jotting down the description in his notebook. "We'll keep an eye out for him," he re-assured the Joneses.
"Please do," Mel said, gripping Coraline's shoulder tightly, as if afraid her girl might be kidnapped from that very room while her parents and police were with her.
Coraline collapsed into her bed tiredly and stared up at her cracked ceiling. It was the first time she'd been in her bed since she got back. Her nights had mainly been spent at the hospital, in the couch beside her father's bed. Her father would sometimes wake up, reach out and touch her to make sure she was actually there and not a figment of his imagination.
Coraline turned onto her side and frowned. Had her bed always felt so lumpy? She turned once more onto her front and realised, yes, it always had been. She stared up at the ceiling some more, thinking back to what she, Wybie and Kate had done right after she returned.
"We need to get rid of the key," Wybie said.
Coraline's heart dropped into her stomach. She didn't know why, but she took some comfort in the key, knowing that while she had it, she still had the chance to return to the Other World and see her daughter... Some day.
It took her a while to answer. "Yeah... You're right,"
"The last time, the Beldam got the key back because his hand was in the well with it, right?" Wybie asked. "Well, I figure that he would never suspect that we'd use the same hiding place again,"
Coraline blinked. He wanted her to drop in down that deep, dark well? Her fingers tightened on the key unconsciously. "I..."
Kate seemed to notice this, and the sisterly love she had for Coraline kicked in. "What's wrong, Coraline?" she asked, placing a hand on the girl's shoulder.
"I..." Coraline licked her lips. "I don't know, I guess... I might... want to see my daughter again someday," she told them honestly. "So I thought maybe I'd just hang onto the key for a bit-"
"The guy raped you, Coraline! He took advantage of you and got you pregnant with his spawn!" Wybie spat angrily. "Can you truthfully say he won't hurt you when you go back? Or try to get back the key and finish us all off?"
Coraline hesitated. A part of her feared that exactly that would happen. But the other, more romantic part liked to think that Bel could never hurt her ever again.
"No..." she said, putting the romantic part of herself out of her mind. "You're right," she whispered to Wybie.
Kate looked between her best friend and boyfriend worriedly, not liking the raising of voices and harsh words. But she said nothing.
Wybie nodded in reply, instantly calming down and partly regretting his rash words. "Come on, I'll do it," he held out his hand for the key but Coraline held it to her heart.
"No, I want to do it," she told him firmly.
Coraline felt her heart sink as she watched the key drop down the well, hearing a distant plop many seconds after.
"Bye, Dre, Bel," she whispered under her breath, but Kate and Wybie caught it, and exchanged a troubled look.
Coraline's eyes suddenly felt watery and she brushed the moistness away. She won't cry. This was her decision. She had to be brave about it, as much as she wanted to climb back down the well and retrieve the key.
"I'm okay," she told herself bravely. But she suddenly felt cold. As she reached out for her blanket, she wondered, had her bed always felt so cold? And so big?
She felt even colder when her head touched the pillow, without her usual source of heat beside her in bed.
"Bel..." she clamped a hand over her mouth, trying to force the words back into her mouth. She missed him more than she knew and it had only been a week. She shook her head, as if trying to get rid of the feelings, and drew the blankets over her head.
But she still felt as cold as ever.
She was given a month to recover from her 'ordeal' before she would be expected back at school. Everyone expected Coraline to protest violently, and insist she go to school to catch up with her studies before it was too late, but she agreed that a month to recuperate would be good.
Wybie and Kate exchanged more troubled looks.
The truth was that Coraline was so tired and weak she could barely summon the strength to fight them on that. Having been given food delicious beyond words for about nine months now, to have to go back to her father's cooking was hell. She barely slept at night, it was so difficult having to adapt back to sleeping in her own cold bed. And the worse thing was the company. She realised that during the time she had been pregnant, and even after Dre was born, she was never lonely. He was always there to talk to her and keep her company. On the contrary, she had found herself hard-pressed for privacy at times. But now...
Her parents spent their every waking hour, as always, seated in front of their computers, fingers flying across the keyboard furiously. Wybie and Kate visited frequently, but they had school and homework to attend to.
Her nights started to improve when Cat began to visit her. The first time she had seen him again, he went to her and pressed his head against her legs, purring and meowing. Her heart melted.
"I missed you too," she had told him. And then he began to spend his nights in her bed, and she felt a little better.
But still every day she visited the well, and looked down into its dark depths. They hadn't bothered to weigh down the cover of the well, finding it unlikely that it would be found by the Beldam.
That's all she did. Looked down. She did nothing else.
A month passed in the blink of an eye, and Coraline fidgeted with her uniform nervously before her full length mirror. Little had changed. Her hair was longer than it was the year before. She hadn't bothered to get it cut at all. It was now past her waist, and the tips were a little lighter blue than the rest of her hair.
She noticed that the uniform no longer hung off her awkwardly, but accentuated her now larger curves, and she had put on some weight from her pregnancy, and while she wasn't overweight, she no longer looked like a flagpole dressed in clothes.
She wondered sometimes if her mum knew. Mel would sometimes look at her body scrutinisingly, as if she suspected something, knew how childbirth could change a woman's body. But she never said anything. If something had happened during her kidnapping, she knew Coraline would tell her on her own accord when she was ready.
Except Coraline had no plans of ever revealing what happened to her. Ever.
"Coraline!" Her father called and with a sigh, Coraline hefted her back pack over her shoulders, her shoulders drooping as if it weighed a tonne. With one last look around her room, she left, out of its familiar comfort and onto school.
She chomped on a piece of hastily peanut-buttered toast as her father drove her to the school, seeming quite happy. And why not? He had gotten his daughter back. And she seemed whole and unhurt. Appearance-wise, anyway.
She said a simple goodbye to him, ignoring all his advice on telling the teacher if she had to go to the toilet, and to raise her hand if she had to ask a question.
"Coraline," Kate called, smiling. Coraline frowned. The girl no longer seemed to tackle her with her boundless energy. Instead, she seemed to regard her cautiously, as if afraid that any careless action she made might break Coraline into pieces.
Kate wasn't the only one.
"Hey Jones, if you need some tutoring just tell me, alright? I'll whip you back into shape in no time," Wybie told Coraline when he met up with her and Kate.
"You haven't kissed your girlfriend good morning, Wybie," Coraline pointed out.
"Oh, yeah," Wybie said, and briefly greeted Kate before chattering about random things to Coraline. Coraline listened but couldn't shake off the feeling that Kate was radiating hostility at her.
The whole school acted differently too. People whispered and pointed her out like she was the new attraction at the zoo. A random guy a year above her whistled lecherously after her.
And while she had studied quite a bit with Bel, the fact of the matter is that towards the later months of her pregnancy, and after Dre was born, she no longer had time to study, nor did she want to. So while she had studied enough to be able to stay in her year, her placement in her year had dropped from being the first to second last.
She was absolutely exhausted by the time she got home, and she swore that if she got one more pitying look thrown in her direction she'd slap it off their faces.
Bel stared out his window into the darkness. He had been doing that a lot lately. He couldn't sleep a wink. His every sleeping moment was haunted by his beloved bluenette. He wanted her to come back.
"Coraline... I'm dying without you," he muttered, pressing his palms against his eyes in frustration. Something leaped up beside him onto the window sill. His eyes narrowed in further frustration as he recognised the dark creature.
"You know, if you only told her you did it because you loved her, she might have stayed." Cat said, shrugging his shoulders slightly and licking a paw.
"She knows I love her!" Bel yelled back, agitated at Cat's obvious enjoyment at his pain.
Cat lifted his head from his paw and stared straight into Bel's button eyes. "Does she? Have you ever told her?" Cat asked. "Have you ever said the words 'I love you'?"
"I-" Bel cut off his retort abruptly, thinking hard. Had those words ever passed his lips? They had to have. His mind ran over the last nine months, then five years before that. "I haven't," he said dumbly, wide-eyed at that realisation. "I've never.. I've never told her that I love her,"
"I thought so," Cat said haughtily, with a chastising sigh.
Bel glared at the black-furred creature. "But she knows! She's told me that she knows."
"Woman are peculiar creatures," Cat said, rolling his eyes. "They need to be constantly reassured that you're not playing around with them. Which, by the way, wasn't helped by the way you tried to persuade her to stay,"
Bel growled and lunged forward at the creature. Cat leapt away smoothly, and landed on Bel's other side.
"She's suffering without you," Cat told him quietly, and all the anger drained out of Bel abruptly. "She can't sleep well. And she keeps saying your name, and your little girl's. Both while she's asleep and when she's awake,"
Bel was frozen, unable to move. She was suffering? Somehow, he had managed to convince himself that she was happy beyond belief to be back in her world, and this thought both comforted and hurt him. But if she was suffering... He had to get her back.
"But then again, we're still in the early days. Humans tend to have very short memories. She may just forget all about you soon enough. After all, why would she even bother to remember a stupid spider like you who couldn't even tell her he loved her,"
Bel hissed angrily, and was about to tackle Cat and throw him out of his realm when Dre started crying, having awakened from a nightmare, causing Bel to look back inside the room at her squirming form.
When he turned around again, Cat was gone.
- 25
- 26
- 27
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The Trade