They say the only thing you can't choose are you family. Well whoever made up that saying needs to be kicked in the dick, even if they're right. Why you ask? Because thanks to a ROB's dickery, my only family consists of a red tunic wearing proto-dude-bro, by the name of Gaston LeGume.

"GODDAMIT Gaston! You gave d'Arque HOW MUCH?" I roared one evening after I had thundered down the staircase from my room in the upper floor of the tavern my brother and I operated and had found out just what he'd been doing out so late.

Like usual the jackass brushed off my outrage and replied in what I'm sure he thought was a conciliatory tone, "Will you calm down Pierre, it's all part of the plan. Besides why do you care so much? None of it was your share of the tavern profits, it's all mine."

I snorted at that little joke, "Oh sure YOUR half of the profits...not like I'M the one doing all the damn work..." and it was true. Pops might have handed over the tavern to the both of us but I was the one who had to keep the place stocked and in one piece. Considering all the fights Gaston and the other village idiots had started I'm confident I could be a master furniture maker if the tavern ever went under.

My brother, never the most pleasant when his dander was up in the best of times was down right nasty tonight as he sneered at my complaints, "If I wasn't there every night being the life of the party we wouldn't be making a fraction of the money we do considering we have you as a gloomy cuss for a bartender."

I slammed the table with one fist, outraged at that accusation. I winced internally when I heard the wood crack, dammit! "I'M a Gloomy Cuss? Well forgive me for not being so full of ham I could be a Shakespearean actor like you are!"

Mentally reminding myself to go see Mr. Alard about borrowing his tools...again, I pulled up a chair across from my brother and glared at him. "And what's this about a plan? Is this about Belle turning you down again? Face it Gaston, She. Doesn't. Want. You! Get it through your thick skull!"

Beau almost laughed at that as he took a pull of his beer, "Every woman wants Gaston, they just don't always know it at first."

I chuckled myself in sheer exasperation, how was I related to such a monomaniacal lunk? "And threatening to lock her father in the loony bin's going to bring her to this revelation? I can think of so many reasons why that would end with us dying from food poisoning. Dammit, I don't want my end to be by a wronged woman, especially when I never wronged her myself."

Gaston, simply shrugged, "Well I already paid the man, can't really go rushing out behind him to ask for the money back, he might not take kindly to that...and I hear he's got the ear of some important people over in Nancy. I'm good but I'm not that good, and I know you don't want that now do you Pierre?" I clenched my fists so tight that my knuckles cracked, part of the reason I was so upset with him was besides that being a ludicrous amount of money, there was also the fact that there had been a lot of concern over Napoleon's campaign into the Holy Roman Empire. Stories were coming in that he was going up against the might of the Hapsburgs AND the damn Russians. It'd been a LONG time since I'd tried to recall what exactly the situation would be in the wake of this but even if ole' Bonny won there were going to be an ASS load of deserters scattering all over the damn place and having something to bribe them with was going to be crucial so our village, which had been able to dodge most of the shit of the past nearly twenty years due to it's obscurity and difficulty to access, doesn't finally get to experience what the rest of Europe was going through. I remembered the horror stories Gramps had told us about the Cossacks, he'd never fought them himself but he'd seen the damage those bastards had caused elsewhere. And with the Tsar fighting alongside the Hapsburgs if they won then the fucks WOULD be moving through and we'd be right in the middle of their attack line.

My family had little to less than nothing good to say about anything that had happened since '89 but we were also smart enough to realize Russians weren't going to be the restorers of the Bourbons my mother prayed for since King Louis was killed.

In the wake of that little reminder I gave up for the evening, "...no...ugh...enough I'm going to bed. I just pray this doesn't come to bite you in the backside down the road."

Gaston was actually laughing by this point, "You worry too much Pierre, just be ready to have your Sunday best for the wedding." He was silent for a moment then said, "Maybe the de Rhin sisters will look your way once me and Belle finally tie the knot, I mean there's three of them, even you have a chance with those odds."

I didn't dignify that comment with an answer I just gave him a one finger salute as I trudged up to bed. I went to sleep that night with the sound of him laughing his ass off.

I guess I should go back to the beginning. I was born in 1989 in the US of A in Atlanta Georgia, I lived in and around the Metro area for the next 26 years, then I was struck by lightning while I was walking back to my car one evening after going to the gym.

I was born again in 1784 in the Eastern part of France in the shadow of the Vosges mountains. I retained my American English though I learned French quickly enough, (thank you infant brain elasticity!) and I grew up knowing a smattering of German cuss words from the men who sold beer to my old man, though ma always washed my mouth out when she heard that sort of talk. My parents were Jacques and Marie LeGume, originally from Gascony from a long line of bean farmers. Gramps was a soldier from old Gascony who fought during the War of Polish Succession. When that conflict ended, he was part of the old Polish Pretender's guards and when he retired the old man had gifted him the money to buy a tavern for years of loyal service.

I didn't remember much of him except for the memory of a Big man with a long white beard and blue eyes who had a thousand and one stories to tell me and my brother about his time in the army.

Pops was much like him save he never had the instinct for being a soldier, being perfectly happy as a Inn Keep. He was a jovial man always ready to tell a story or hear one and we did well with the constant trade coming in and out of the area. Think a big black bearded Santa Clause or a Robert Baratheon who was not a drunken-jackass and you have a pretty good image of him.

Mama was the daughter of an old friend of gramps, they were even from the same village back in Gascony and managed to stick together and survive the war. Where pops was a gentle giant, Mom was a smaller and much more aggressive woman with an eye to making her two sons become something important. She kept a letter of recommendation written by the old Polish pretender and given to her father for later use in case a son of his ever wished to serve in the army. Being the eldest of six daughters put paid to that but she still believed that we could use it ourselves when the time came. She was a loving mother but she was also demanding, she insisted that we become the manliest men to ever manly and tried to do so by introducing us to some of the soldiers who knew both our grandfathers and learning how to fight from them, my brother took to it like a duck to water...me ...eh I tried but I honestly preferred working in the tavern with pops.

Mom constantly tried to get me to work with the soldiers but I'd figured out when I was and I had no intention of freezing my balls off in Russia for a dumpy Corsican if a Spanish Hildalgo didn't slit my throat one dark night or I wasn't skewered by a cranky blonde British man with a Yorkshire accent on some God-forsaken battlefield. So while I did as was asked I did so without much gusto.

Gaston on the other hand was everything that Mama could have asked for in a fighting man. Big, brave, aggressive, and had a mean streak a mile wide in a fight, (which I learned to my detriment many, MANY times.) He could shoot a bird out of the sky by the time he was ten and when he was 16 he'd become the biggest man in the village...except me.

Then there was me, Pierre LeGume, officially the little brother, even if I was another three inches taller than him and fifty pounds heavier. When we were little the two of us were like peas in a pod, the only difference being Beau always wore a red tunic while I wore a blue one. As we grew older we became more and more different, I took more and more after pops, even grew my beard out (as best I could) while Beau looked like something off of one of those Harlequin romance novels much to my eternal aggravation as we grew older.

Other than getting beat on by cranky old veterans and my twin brother, my life in this new world didn't have too much excitement, which I was grateful for considering the bullshit that was going to come my way.

There were only two major incidents that stuck out in my mind before...current events.

One was when me and Gaston were eleven. One night there was this pounding at the door to the tavern. Pops had answered the door and a few strangers in dark cloaks had stepped in. I never saw their features but the big sack of pre-Revolution gold coins were enough for pops to never comment on their origins or purpose. They had stayed in a back room for a single night, then were gone before dawn the next day. I remember waking up Gaston to watch them ride out of town, they were gone too fast but I remember how one of them seemed tiny compared to the others and sick if how he was flopping around in the arms of one of the riders was any hint.

They were heading into the mountains the last I saw them and since it had been so long ago that such a correlation had mattered to me I'd thought nothing of it.

The other major even was when we were about sixteen we had some of the first people to move into the village in a long time. An engineer/inventor from Paris, apparently he and his daughter had been bouncing around France for years after the Versailles court collapsed and when his original living of making overly complex toys for court was no longer viable, he'd decided to look for a more practical use for his contraptions. A mission that hadn't worked well for the man whenever it was known he'd been part of the Bourbon court even remotely. He'd finally landed here and was determined to find something practical, if overly complex in my opinion, to sell to someone and make a living off of it. Otherwise he worked as a tinker/farrier/handyman. Eccentric fella but a brilliant master of his work...even if all the explosions coming from his basement finally scoured much of the goodwill our village, which had a surprising amount of Bourbon/Hapsburg supporters among them, even if they'd never been dumb enough to try and rise for them, had for someone who'd been close to the old King.

It wasn't Mr. Maurice that had sent a chill up my spine, it was his pretty brunette daughter, Belle, with her blue motif to all her clothing and an avid love of books. I now knew for a fact that ROB hadn't just stuck me in turn of the 19th century France for laughs he'd fucking stuck me in the world of Beauty and the Beast...one connected to a much wider world...as memories of old movies from another life ago began flashing back to the fore I had realized just who that small figure in the black cloak had been all those years ago. That prince up in that castle wasn't just any prince, that was Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and the Bourbon claimant to the Kingdom of France...fuuuuuucccckkkk!