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When he later recounted this tale, Rumplestiltskin could not say why he was in the dining room that night. It was not a room he frequented, being a menacing recluse on a mountain. But he was there, and so transpired an infinitesimal moment that changed his life.
All he remembered was the feeling that something was there—that his soul tugged him toward a faint, distinct thing he could not name. Too translucent to have a color, but he knew it to be blue. It read like magic but spoke to his heart.
Safe.
Rumplestiltskin slowly walked toward the head of the table, footfalls silent as he listened. Moonlight stretched in, slanted and silver, over the sleek length of dark mahogany. It caught the sconces, the statues, the face of the clock. The shadows kept the faces of the tapestries.
He stopped, peering down his nose at a crooked chair.
He heard a breath catch and realized the thing he could not name was not Belle, but her aura.
A young aura, new and binding, drawing his magic to it like sunlight to summer leaves, like memory to longing. A metaphysical manifestation, nothing short of ordained.
He had always sensed Belle, in his way. The way a man attuned to the object of his desire was otherworldly. But auras drank from deeper wells.
It would only grow stronger.
Rumplestiltskin pulled out the chair and knelt.
Found Belle lying on her back, staring into the nothingness above her. There was a listlessness to her he didn't like, a tearful hiccup, and a tight swallow. Given recent events, he feared that she was sleepwalking, but she was painfully present, wherever her mind was.
The image was too beautiful to interrupt—and too bizarre not to.
"Are you cleaning the undersides of tables now?" he asked, twisting his head under and up to see. "I must say, I like the initiative."
Belle didn't take the bait. She wasn't ignoring him, just not answering.
She sniffed, looking away, toward the windows. Her eyes were raw from a hard cry, leaving red blotches on her neck and chest. Her fingers idly traced the edge of her bodice, nails bitten to the bed.
Rumplestiltskin almost left then. He believed, at the time, he should have, knowing how vulnerable and guarded he'd felt when Belle found him remembering Bae several months past now. There was a pluck of annoyance, like she'd gone out of her way to inconvenience him with her grief, even though she'd hidden herself under a table in a dark room he hardly used.
But the phenomenon of a surfacing aura captivated him. It was not a thing easily acquired, and so, not a thing a soul easily forgot. But he felt that, if he left then, it might die, and he'd never sense it again. It was too precious to abandon.
"Well?" he bristled. "Are you going to tell me why in all the realms you're lying under my dining table?"
Belle swallowed. Her voice was rough, strained.
"This is the day my mother died."
Rumplestiltskin's eyes shifted. This explained nothing.
"You know, we have a chapel for this sort of thing," he said.
"I know, I just…" She wiped her tears and inhaled sharply, forcing as much out as she could before another sob caught in her throat. "I didn't want to talk about it out loud and be overheard when I just need to be with her," she said. "I know it's absurd, but the last place we were together was under a table, and…"
She deflated with a stuttery sigh. Her lip wrinkled, and her voice broke.
"She saved me, and… And I can still feel her clutching me to her, like it's the realest thing. I can feel the wrinkles in her sleeves, the—the little bows?" She swallowed, waving an invisible line up and down her torso. "On her bodice. The big one got folded over between us."
A familiar ache rose in Rumplestiltskin's chest. His stomach soured, hardening to stone.
He remembered his last moments with Bae like that: every detail permanently burned into his mind's eye. The dirt slipping into his boot as he fought to clamber away from the portal, the squeak of Baelfire's voice as he screamed.
You promised!
It stole his breath away.
He tensed, steeling himself against the emotional descent he knew was coming when Belle's sob broke through, bringing him back to the present. If they were feeling the same thing right now, he had no idea how to make it better, but he desperately wanted to.
He'd abandoned his son and lived.
Her mother clung to her daughter and died.
How was any of it fair?
"I'm sorry," Belle whined as she squeezed her eyes shut. "You must think I'm mad."
Rumplestiltskin looked at her for a long moment. He didn't know what Belle needed, but he knew he couldn't leave.
Not long ago, he would have. He would have mocked her, acted aloof, said something clever behind closed doors, gone about his business "unbothered." Because it was safer establishing what she wasn't than acknowledging what she was.
But he couldn't now. Not like this.
The coward in him begged, begged for him not to do this, that he couldn't be whatever she needed him to be, and even if he could, she wouldn't want it anyway, coming from him—
But he couldn't.
He could not walk away.
Rumplestiltskin swallowed. Hung his head.
"Perhaps not as mad as you think."
And that tender aura beckoned him closer.
He resisted for a heartbeat, as if it were a trick, but he hadn't the strength in his heart to be suspicious right now. His walls had been breached, and he needed to lie down.
"Scoot."
Belle furrowed her brow. She blinked as he lowered his other knee to the floor and ducked in, under the table.
"Go on!" he said, waving her aside. "Make room!"
Belle did so, eyeing Rumplestiltskin as he turned to lay with his feet in the opposite direction. His head settled next to hers, ankles crossed and hands clasped on his stomach. He plunged his gaze into the table above, jaw clenched and eyes darting, as if waiting for something to happen.
When Belle's eyes returned to the underside of the table, he let out the breath he'd been holding.
Her aura brushed the side of his face.
In another life, they were young lovers lying under the stars, blissfully naïve and brazenly mortal. Vowing that the gods themselves could never tear them asunder. How he'd win the heart of a princess as a lowly spinner, he couldn't say, but that guy was having much better luck than the Dark One.
Though there was something to be said for the intimacy of quietly grieving in the dark.
They lay in that silence for a time, acclimating to the weight of trust that came from such prolonged proximity. Wrapped in that rare peace, he felt the warmth in the space between their heads. Their breathing synced. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been with someone like this. Or if he ever had.
Spinner Rumple would say something comforting to Princess Belle, lying under those stars. Something he thought was inelegant but poignant once her kind smile blossomed. He could see the purple-white petals of moonflowers glowing around her, feel the shape of her knuckles on his lips as he kissed the back of her hand.
What a fool.
What an arrogant, gloating bastard—
"I think she would have liked you."
Rumplestiltskin made a face, back under the table again.
"Your mother?" he asked.
"Yes." Belle's smile was small; she was clearly searching for something to break the silence, as he had been.
Rumplestiltskin obliged her with a huff. The idea.
"The beast who took her daughter?"
"The man who gave her a library."
"Mm." For some reason, a smile threatened. "She was a romantic, then."
Belle chuckled. "Terribly."
Rumplestiltskin propped himself up on his elbow at that, clasping his hands. He thought back to the day of their deal, wondering how it might have gone differently if her mother had been there. He raised his eyebrows; the thought of two headstrong women negotiating for the survival of that sorry little kingdom softly amused him.
Belle felt her stomach flutter when he looked at her, his features sharp and sculpted by the shadows. It wasn't the tenderness in his eyes so much as the fact that she was on her back looking up at him, the air still and somber, threaded with invisible stars.
He averted his gaze as if he sensed it, too, and she pushed herself up to sit, drawing her knees to her chest.
"I imagine she would have tried to take your place," Rumplestiltskin said.
"Of course, she would," Belle said. "She's my mother." She bit her lip, tracing a swirl in the carpet's pattern with her finger as she shuddered from a residual sob. "Would she have succeeded?"
His voice softened to something like reverence.
"Not a chance," he whispered.
He'd decided on Belle the moment he saw her. He saw no one else in that room.
To his surprise, Belle's admonishing grin came across a little more flattered than reprimanding. When her eyes fell to his chest, her brow flinched, and her hand rose from the darkness between them, gently pulling the neck of his shirt aside.
Rumplestiltskin froze, studying her face as her finger followed the thin gold chain to the tiny teardrop pendant and its oblong pearl. But instead of panic came that curious calm. It cradled them in this strange haven—as if his still wearing the necklace six months after she gave it to him wasn't the damning admission he believed it was.
Like there was nothing and everything to hide.
Belle carefully picked the pendant up off his chest, smoothing her thumb over the pearl.
The way her smile ached made him swallow uncomfortably.
"This belonged to her," he realized.
"Yes," Belle said. But when he reached to remove it: "No! No, don't take it off. Please."
"It's yours." He should have given it back to her months ago.
Belle shook her head, sniffling as she folded her legs to scoot closer.
"And I want you to have it," she said, pressing the pearl to his sternum. "That's why I gave it to you."
"Belle…" This didn't feel entirely appropriate all of a sudden. The paralyzing warmth of her fingertips, this little place nobody knew they were in. The calm was caving.
"Please," she said again. She removed her hand, holding his gaze. "It's safe right where it is. And she deserves that. If I'm safe with you, then so is she."
Oh, that wasn't fair.
The words clanged loudly inside him, tumbling down through the old, rusted parts of him.
Rumplestiltskin warred with himself about raising another objection. He wanted to say no, but he couldn't find the breath. It was one thing to carry Belle's favor, but the memory of her mother? The damn thing weighed a ton now.
But wouldn't he shoulder the world for her?
Hadn't being her human shield earned him this favor in the first place?
He was Spinner Rumple once. Isn't that what he would do, coward though he was? He had earned her heart, so a favor was hardly a tall order.
"I don't expect you to constantly wear it, of course," Belle said. That he was wearing it now had her rather flustered, honestly. Had he never taken it off, or had he repeatedly chosen to wear it? She didn't know which made her dizzier.
"Just keep it safe?" she asked. "For me?"
She knew that was asking a lot of the Dark One—that kindness.
But Rumplestiltskin?
He nodded smally.
He said, "The deal is struck."
Belle's shoulders collapsed with a relieved smile. She touched his arm, beholden.
"Thank you."
Rumplestiltskin looked away first, his sigh transitionary as Belle's touch receded and she wrapped her arms around herself. He let his arm dangle on his pitched knee as he wet his lips, like he didn't know how to say what came next. Belle held her breath when his eyes found her, yellow and deep in the dark.
"This was more romantic in theory."
Her brow pinched as she blinked. "What?"
Rumplestiltskin winced.
"Remind me to enchant the floor next time we do this," he said, shifting his weight. "My hip is numb."
Belle laughed. Her feet were fuzzy from sitting crisscrossed.
"Let's go," she said.
Rumplestiltskin scooted out with a grunt. The air was cooler out here, silky and alkaline. Like his dining room had become a cave that was too big and unfamiliar to be alone in.
He turned around, crouched, and held out his hand.
Belle felt a skip in her chest.
He'd never so much as offered his hand when they got out of a carriage.
She took it.
And though Rumplestiltskin still couldn't see it, her aura felt bluer now.
He held his hand low and strong as she used it to push herself up, then lifted it when she rose from her knees to steady her.
"Thank you," she said.
Whether this was an act of kindness or a shift in chivalry remained to be seen. But she had a feeling, as she often did.
Then, the man who gave her a library offered his arm.
"Come."
It was smaller than Belle expected, maybe half the size of her chambers. A place of quiet, intimate rite and reflection beneath a vaulted ceiling and a carved rose window. The stone was weathered and uneven, the tapestries were faded, and the candles were cold. Neglect had aged it, had marred the once-bright lattice of etched tiles beneath the threadbare carpet leading to the altar.
Belle had never been in here.
Perhaps that was why it felt more sacred than its upkeep suggested.
Rumplestiltskin raised his hand. The candles in the aumbries between the worn tapestries bloomed to life, inviting her forward. Belle looked at Rumplestiltskin, now a ward of her mother's memory as much as her, and, feeling the responsibility of that mantle upon him, he accompanied her to the altar.
She lit a candle in the center. Rumplestiltskin passed his hand over it.
A faint shimmer settled in the small, swaying flame, eternalizing it.
Belle's hand imperceptibly tensed on his arm.
He glanced at her—and away when he saw the shine of her eyes.
When he later recounted this tale—when he pinpointed that life-changing, infinitesimal moment—this wasn't the night they lit a candle for her mother or the night he first sensed Belle's aura.
It was the night he crawled under a table.
The night they lay in the quiet together, for no other reason but to do so.
He would always point to another story first as a defining moment in what was to come in their story: the week-long argument that ended in a snowball fight, the ball in Andalasia, the terrifying ordeal with the Sandman's umbrella.
Each was an important chapter.
Each, vital to what they became.
But they were all anchored to this night.
They all owed their weight to this uncommon moment of empathy. And he would never have known such empathy, if not for Belle.
If not for the warmth of her breath, steady on his arm, caught somewhere between a sob and a sigh.
She turned her face into his sleeve as they watched her mother's flame. Rumplestiltskin's gaze was inexplicably affixed to it, entranced by how tall and still it stood. Regal, resilient, and untouchable, even in death. His expression softened.
"I think I would have liked her, too," he murmured.
He felt Belle smile. "What makes you say that?"
"I know you. And you're nothing like your father, thank the gods."
She shook with silent laughter.
Pressed closer.
"Thank you, Rumplestiltskin."
"You're welcome."