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Chapter Text

The first time she touches him, it’s an accident. She reaches out to take away his plate (still mostly full, but she thinks it’s because he’s a light eater rather than a statement on her cooking skills) and her hand brushes his sleeve. Her breath catches in her throat, heart pounding in her ears, and only on later reflection will she realize that the leather sleeve is flimsier than it looks.

He freezes, but he is so still anyway that it’s hard to tell just exactly how angry he is. She dares to look up, to meet his gaze with her own red-rimmed eyes, and is surprised when he only tilts his head. There is a curious look to his already curious eyes, perplexity evident in the tiny wrinkles creasing his brow, and she wonders what he finds in her to be so surprising (she’s only an ordinary girl, after all, in a world full of people just like her).

After an instant, his stare grows too much for her and even though she promised herself that she would comport herself with dignity no matter what he asks of her, she finds herself gathering up his plate with a clatter and dipping an awkward curtsey. He hasn’t told her what she should call him so she doesn’t call him anything (he’s not her master even if she serves him, and he’s not a lord even if he lives in a castle, and his name holds power she doesn’t think she wants).

She feels his stare on her all the way through the door.

He gives her small things, tiny gestures, but always from a distance. He scoots a plate of food over toward her when he doesn’t think she’s eating, tosses a pillow at her from his place near the door, tells her she may read the books in her spare time only when he’s safely ensconced on his stool at his spinning wheel. There is always an excuse for the kindnesses, an off-hand comment about caretakers starving themselves to shorten their forevers, a snapped retort that her weeping grates on him, a shrug and a remark about reading a book serving to dust it better than cloths when she dares to ask him why he’s letting her touch such treasures as his small collection of books.

His wary kindness makes her bold. It makes her curious. At first, she is tempted to think he is not as dark as the stories make him seem, but he is quick to disabuse her of this notion (so quick, so vehement, that she sometimes wonders if he is putting on a show even for her). The blood on the aprons she cleans and the macabre slant to his humor, the puppets that follow her with wooden eyes and the severed hand lying on a trophy table, these remind her of the reason he is known as the Dark One and is spoken of in hushed whispers in dark corridors and over flickering fires.

But he says it is just a cup and he stares at her as if he has never seen anything quite like her, and she forgets to be terrified of him. It is easy to be brave when she is not afraid and hard to be afraid when he has given her no reason to be.

It is in a carriage, chasing down a man desperate enough to steal from Rumplestiltskin, that she first realizes he avoids physical contact. He leans close to her, closer than he has been since that first day when he escorted her from her father’s hall with an arm around her waist, and his breath tickles her cheek (it should smell foul, but it does not).

It is in a forest, staring down at a man fleeing with his wife and unborn child, that she begins to think back on all that he has done and said in her time at his castle. He is kind, but only when he can excuse it (and it had taken her only a day or two to realize that his words are his weapons and his cruelty his armor). He draws near her only when it will intimidate her, and he dances away when she stands up to him (and she thinks that maybe he is more afraid of her than she is of him). He watches her when she smiles, when she laughs, and claps his hands in glee when she reacts with the fear or shock or horror that anyone else would (as if he is testing her). He is a strange one, this Rumplestiltskin so feared by all in the land, but beast or man, he is lonely.

So she hugs him. And maybe that was her first mistake, because it is different than she thought it would be. It is almost intoxicating, to put her arms around a man who sways backward in shock. It is almost comforting, to touch someone again after this past week without any physical contact. It is almost…frightening…to feel how warm he is against the chill of the forest and to realize that he is just the right height for hugs and to belatedly notice that she has kept her hand on his chest after the hug is over.

He does not berate her or make some cutting remark that is funny despite its morbidity. Instead, he manages the hint of a smile (as if he must reach far back in his memories to remember how to even form a smile) and he follows her back to the carriage.

It is strange and not at all what she expected, but then, so is everything else involving the man to whom she traded her future. She begins to think she doesn’t mind nearly as much as she should.

“Careful,” he tells her in a sing-song voice. “If you ruin dessert, there might be a nasty surprise waiting for you when you try to sleep.”

“You didn’t even have dessert at all before I came,” she chides him with a smile. “And if you would stop sneaking up on me when I’m carrying dessert to the table, you wouldn’t have to worry about losing it.”

He narrows his eyes at her, twists his mouth in an expression that would make her laugh if she weren’t trying to keep him from realizing just how much she enjoys his presence, and wags his finger at her. “Bossy caretakers can be replaced, you know. There are plenty of kingdoms with troubles large enough to consider trading away their princesses.”

She knows he is teasing (she has learned his signs, his signals, his habits, and if he were truly angry, there would be shouting and pacing and broad gestures big enough to crowd an entire hall and purple smoke to engulf something she cares about and distract her from his unbalanced state), but she still pauses, tries to imagine the Dark Castle with someone else there, a third person to help dust and clean and bring tea to Rumplestiltskin.

It is not a pleasant image.

She likes things as they are. They have their own balance—he works in his tower or goes out on his deals while she cleans and cooks, and he spins while she reads, and in the in between moments, she can sometimes pull him into conversation and he will occasionally keep her company in the garden he now lets her stroll through on nice days. A third person would ruin all of it and make him irritable, make him withdraw once more behind his showy façade and disguising gestures. A third person would not understand why she laughs at him and dares to pour herself a cup of tea after serving him his and sits closer and closer to him when she reads.

No, she likes it the way it is, and she is glad that he is not serious about his threat.

“Yes,” she tells him, “but none of those princesses know how you take your tea.”

And she sets the platter of pie in his hands, her own brushing over his as if to make sure he has a good grip on the warm plate.

He is silent an instant, motionless, standing where she left him as she turns to pull out his chair at the table for him (he is always still after she touches him).

But when she turns back to him, he is moving again, flourishing with the plate in his hands (somehow not even coming close to dumping the pie, and she finds herself yet again admiring his grace). “Easily remedied,” he remarks, his voice sliding into the upper registers as the platter floats from his hand to alight on the table.

“Really?” Belle asks skeptically (because he is still not used to her presence after a month and he likes his solitude).

“Magic can fix the problems of the empty-headed,” Rumplestiltskin tells her in a lecturing tone, but then he softens, quiets (something Belle still can’t explain, but she loves when it happens), and there is an extra plate (for her) beside his when she reaches out to serve him a piece of the pie. “But,” he adds, “if I got a new caretaker, there’d be one less room down in the dungeons for me to use, and then I might have to curtail my activities.”

Belle knows it is wrong (she remembers the blood on the thief’s chest as he hung from chains), but she laughs anyway (because she has seen Rumplestiltskin conjure up extra rooms with only the wave of his expressive hands). “Definitely unacceptable,” she teases him, and she lets her fingers touch his again as she hands him his plate of dessert.

He stares (he always does), but Belle smiles at him, and eventually, he smiles back.

“One caretaker is enough,” he agrees, and he takes a bite of her pie and grins as if he knows a secret she doesn’t.

She grins, too, because he is her secret.

It is the incident with the curtains and the ladder and his arms that starts her experiments. He’d been there so fast, ready to catch her, but it was the startlement, the incredulity, the struck discovery written across his face (not a mask or an affectation) that really stays with her even weeks after the curtains are all opened. She remembers the soft drift of his hair against her wrist, the feel of his chest rising and falling against her, the strength of his arms supporting her—but most of all, she remembers how he stared at her (like he always does when they touch, but different, new), how he was frozen as if he couldn’t remember how to move, and then how suddenly, how awkwardly, he dropped her to her feet.

She remembers the feeling of disappointment when he let her go.

So she begins to experiment. She reaches out to touch his hand when they talk at night. She pats his shoulder when she passes him at his wheel, when she tells him good night. She brushes off the lapels of his coat when he tells her he’s leaving the castle. Quick, light touches, companionable and friendly, more and more of them as the days pass, but suddenly they no longer seem like enough.

He flinches away, at first, startled and wary, as nervous and jumpy as the beast she once thought him to be. As the days pass, as she keeps touching him, she feels his eyes on her, always, ready to back away, to disappear in a flurry, to find an excuse to leave should she grow too close to him. Just when she begins to think that she is only scaring him and that she should stop, leave him be (ignore her own rising disappointment), he stops flinching.

She touches his hand, and he tilts his head in that way of his and peers up at her. And the corners of his mouth turn up, just the slightest bit.

She pats his shoulder, and his head turns in her direction, his eyes fluttered half shut.

She brushes off his coat, and he leans, ever so minutely, into the touch.

It’s been months since she last thought him a beast, but it’s impossible to deny his resemblance to a half-wild creature, drawn to affection, starving for touch yet wary of being hurt. She imagines herself luring him in ever deeper and closer with tiny scraps, breadcrumbs to lead him from his isolation.

Strangely, it is not a comparison she likes.

He is so used to hatred, to fear, and she knows he expects betrayal (expects it so much that he kept her in a dungeon for the first couple weeks of her stay, and watched her closely after the news that her family and friends were safe from the ogres lest she try to flee), and if she touches him only to make him susceptible to her, to train him, then she will be doing to him what others have done. She will be betraying him, and her breadcrumbs of affection will lead him to a trap that will ensnare him in kindness that might destroy him.

But when she stops touching him, when she clenches her hands into fists and stays on the far side of the room and doesn’t brush past him, she feels like she’s about to come apart. She feels cut off and bereft, listless and sluggish.

And Rumplestiltskin goes quiet. Still. There are no more jokes to make her laugh, funny expressions to make her giggle, wagging fingers in her face to make her roll her eyes, quiet confessions to make her catch her breath. Instead, he hunches in on himself and he avoids her, sits at his wheel without once turning to look at her, and his voice goes flat and emotionless (or as emotionless as Rumplestiltskin’s voice can ever be), and when he does watch her, it is with such a lost, bewildered expression that Belle feels her heart writhe inside her chest.

“Rumplestiltskin,” she says one day, and she hadn’t even realized, but she’d stopped using his name when she stopped touching him, so he jumps at the sound of it.

“Yes, dearie?” he asks. His hands are busy on his wheel, but she has watched him spin for countless hours and she can easily tell there’s no gold thread emerging from the haphazard revolutions of the wheel.

She does not like him calling her ‘dearie,’ and she bites her lip in indecision before reminding herself that once, she had wanted to be brave.

“I was wondering,” she says slowly, “if you would help me.”

“With what?” There is sudden suspicion tightening his voice, and any moment he will burst into manic life, prowling toward her, an intense gleam in his eyes, and she will be nothing more than another one of the endless multitudes of people who come to him for their own purposes.

“A book,” she says hurriedly, before he can turn on her. “It’s on the very top shelf of the library and I can’t reach it.”

And it’s true, too. She has wanted to read that one tall book with the illustrations curving around the spine evident even from the floor. But more than she wants to read this book, she wants to erase the hurt at the edges of Rumplestiltskin’s eyes (wants to quiet the itching crackle in her fingertips).

“Afraid you’ll fall and no one will be there to catch you?” he asks with a slight giggle, finally turning to look at her.

She smiles to hear it, to see his eyes, to reassure the note of cautious hope in his higher tone. “Something like that. Will you get it for me?”

He stands (close, so close that Belle feels small and slight and out of breath before him), throws up a hand in the air with his other hand pointed to his elbow. “And what do I get for this chivalrous deed?”

“It’s not chivalry if you expect something in return,” she replies, knowing he will like this answer for the wordplay (his favorite pastime besides spinning).

Rumplestiltskin lets out his high-pitched laugh, but his voice is lower, almost human, when he says, “No wonder chivalry is dying!”

But he leads her to the library with his usual quick strides and he magics the book she points out into her hands. And he watches her, wary once more.

Belle smiles down at the book, flips through it to see the beautiful illustrations and the flowing language she taught herself before being betrothed to Gaston, and then she sets it on the table and steps very close to Rumplestiltskin, and she hugs him. “Thank you, Rumplestiltskin,” she murmurs with her head on his shoulder. (Once, this had been easy and natural, but now it is perilous and frightening.)

He goes stiff, just like last time. He sways away from her, just as he did before. But this time, she holds the embrace for just a second longer, and this time, she feels his hand flutter up against her waist, her shoulder blade, his fingers dancing along her spine before he finally settles it, tentatively, at the small of her back. Her heart thrums wildly against her ribs, but she feels safe and secure, and maybe she is as much of a wild animal being lured into warmth and kindness as he is.

When she pulls back, the bewilderment is still there but the hurt is gone.

That is the end of her experiments, but it is certainly not the last time she touches him.

She kissed him, and for a moment, it was perfect, and then it was not. It was beautiful and bold and she thought it was the right thing, but when he brings her a tray, to the cell where he’s consigned her, with his chipped cup and hot water steeped just as she likes it, she cannot reach out across the divide separating them no matter how she wants to. He is cold and closed off and she is frightened and hurt and maybe even angry, and touching him seems more impossible than taking the kiss back.

When he tells her to leave, she wants to cry. When he tells her he doesn’t care for her, she wants to laugh in his face. When he says nothing, when he keeps his hands so carefully clasped in front of him (a wall to make sure she does not come too close), she wants to shake him and shout at him that they were so close to having everything and now they will have nothing and that cannot be what he wants.

But he tells her to go, and as brave as she has been in the past (as brave as she tries to make herself be), she cannot bring herself to touch his hand, to caress his face, to pat his shoulder, to touch him at all.

She stands there, and a pace away, he stands there, and they are separate, broken individuals. It used to be them and us, but now it is him and her and there is no going back.

So he doesn’t call her back. And she doesn’t touch him (hug him goodbye, to hold them both until they can be reunited again).

Later, she will regret that more than anything.

There is no touch in the cell. The Queen comes in occasionally, asks her questions, taunts her, sneers at Rumplestiltskin. The one-handed man came and he did touch her, his hand brushing against her calves and her wrists as he undid her shackles. His fist left a mark on her cheek that throbbed when she pressed against it (she doesn’t know how long it lasted because there are no mirrors in this large, circular room that mocks the library tower Rumplestiltskin gave her as her own).

The days are long, the nights longer. The moon shines through the window in the ceiling and sometimes it caresses her with silver frost as she sleeps. The sun cannot reach past the grasping spires of the castle to touch her heart and thaw the ice.

She tries to remember everything about Rumplestiltskin that she can, her hand over her mouth to make sure she doesn’t utter any of it aloud where Regina or the pirate can overhear it and use it against her Dark One.

She remembers his eyes the most, giving the lie to his words, underscoring the intensity of his gestures, showing her the truths he cannot voice. She remembers the kindnesses he showed her, as if he weren’t used to having to prove himself evil and was out of practice. She remembers the hypnotic spin of his wheel, the shimmer of the gold he produces, the stiffness of his back and the curtness of his denial when she’d mentioned maybe learning to spin gold one day. She remembers the books he gave her, the extra ones that had showed up without comment or presentation, in places only she would notice them.

But she cannot remember what his hands feel like. The blankets are coarser than his hands could ever be (but his hands do have worn callouses). The blue gown she wears is softer (but the backs of his hands are smoother). The walls are too slick (but his long, black nails possess a sheen of their own). The chill of the moon is far too cold (his hands are always warm, heated and solid).

She cannot remember, and that more than the slop passing for food and the Queen’s oppressive visits and the pirate’s bruise on her cheekbone makes her break down and curl up and weep for hours (for days, maybe, or months; it’s impossible to tell).

She thought it was him who longed for touch and craved it enough to lean into every opportunity to enjoy it, but now she realizes that it is her who has grown used to it, addicted to it, who needs it.

“Rumplestiltskin,” she whispers, but there is no answering high-pitched “Yes, dearie?” or husky “Belle.” There is no tilted head and large eyes and long fingers weaving pictures in tandem with his words.

Only her.

He wraps his fingers around her shoulder (this Mr. Gold who’s supposed to protect her, who stares at her as if she’s a ghost come back to taunt him with what he cannot have), and she stares down at his hand on her. She is wearing the coat her rescuer handed her, and the hospital gown beneath that, but she swears she can feel the heat of his palm against her arm. There is a tingling all along her skin, a restless stirring in her heart, a fluttering in the pit of her stomach—and it doesn’t make sense, but neither does anything else.

When he hugs her, she feels the oddest sense of déjà vu. She wonders if she knew him, before whatever happened to see her condemned to that basement. She wonders if he hugged her often and long and if that is why she felt so empty and alone when she curled up on the ledge of her cell. She wonders if she should be frightened of the tight, clutching hold he has on her, as if he wants to pull her straight into himself and never let her go again.

But he does let her go, and there are tears in large, expressive eyes, and his long fingers are still holding onto her shoulder, and she is not afraid.

She’s been afraid so long that it seems odd not to be afraid at all. Odd and exciting, so she accompanies Mr. Gold into the woods and follows him up a faded path even when her legs grow shaky with exhaustion and her lungs burn with the clean, sharp air.

Then she stops in mid-step and she closes her eyes and she remembers who she is.

She remembers who he is.

She remembers what it feels like to be touched by him.

“Wait. Rumplestiltskin, wait,” she calls out.

And he does.

He turns, and he is all man now, all pale skin and worried creases and silver in his hair and a cane in his hand, a limp to his step—but those are his eyes. Large and worried and incredulous and scared (always so very scared, and she wishes she knew who put that fear in him) and just that little hint of hope he can never quite extinguish.

“I remember,” she tells him, but he only looks more afraid, as afraid as he looked the first time she hugged him, as hurt as he looked when she stopped touching him. “I love you,” she says, because she did not say it during all those long evenings spent at his side reading to the accompaniment of his spinning. She did not say it when she kissed him or when he shook her or when they stood on opposite sides of a cell and watched each other leave behind what could have been. She didn’t say it during all those long, cold days and nights in the Queen’s cell, afraid that saying it would give Regina something to use against Rumplestiltskin. She did not know to say it in this concrete cell, locked away so securely that even her name was denied her.

So she says it now, because she has waited long enough and because she does not like it when he looks so scared and because there is nothing else to say. They are the only words that matter.

And then a miracle happens: he hugs her. He opens his arms and she steps forward, and he wraps his arm around her and curls inward until she is surrounded on all sides by Rumplestiltskin. In all their months together, no matter how many times she touched him, no matter how much he leaned into her caresses, he never once reached out for her. But he hugs her, and there are tears in his voice when he speaks.

“Yes,” he says, and Belle is boneless with relief, giddy with delight (she hoped he would believe her, but she did not expect it). “Yes,” he says again. “And I love you, too.”

She knew he did, but she is surprised to hear him say it. Surprised and euphoric and overjoyed and relieved, and so much more that she can’t figure out right now because he is still hugging her and he cradles her cheek in his hand (and yes, how could she have forgotten this? This is what he feels like), and he is staring at her with a look he has never shown her before, something so astonishing and exhilarating that she cannot breathe, cannot move lest she wake herself and find the moon staring down at her from that circular window in the ceiling of the Queen’s cell.

He is Rumplestiltskin, though, so there is an interruption and a delay and excuses and magic pouring outward to engulf the world. But he is her Rumplestiltskin, so he turns to her and he calls her sweetheart and my darling Belle rather than ‘dearie,’ and he has his hand on her arm, on her hand, on her back, on her cheek (as if he has only just realized that he does not have to wait for her to initiate the touch). He is the Dark One, so there are questions and rage and vengeance in dark eyes and fury in the crimped lines of his mouth. But he is her Dark One, so his eyes (so human, so him) shimmer with tears and the lines around his mouth ease into an awed smile and he chooses her.

And then he kisses her, and Belle realizes that every single touch she ever gave him, every touch he has granted her, has been leading up to this.

But it is the hug, afterward, the feel of his shoulder beneath her cheek (the fabric of his clothes different, his scent changed, his skin altered, but still the form and shape she remembers from the Sherwood Forest), that convinces her she is finally, finally home, where she belongs.

Chapter Text

It’s overwhelming, the freedom to touch whenever she wants, as much as she wants. She has to be careful, has to ration the ways she will touch him because if she doesn’t, she begins to lose herself and he forgets to speak and how to move. After all her time locked away (so much more time than she thought, but that’s something else that overwhelms her if she thinks on it so she doesn’t), she is not accustomed to physical contact anymore. After centuries of being alone, Rumplestiltskin isn’t used to it either.

At first, it’s addictive. He leads her back to town with his arm around her, her hand laced in his. She finds reasons to hold his hand or touch his shoulder, his chest, his elbow, as he gives her new clothing. Then there is an interruption and a broken promise and a betrayal that stings so sharply and strikes so deeply and for a few terrible hours, she wonders if she is wrong to love him. Wrong to think there is anything more to him than what everyone else sees.

But he is right—she has been with him for only an hour and he has been without her for decades. It took weeks, months, for him to grow accustomed to seeing her in his castle, to grow comfortable with setting aside the flashy showmanship and being quiet and himself with her. It took her days, weeks, to realize that she could be his friend (more, too, but that was later) without condoning everything he did. Does.

So she goes back, and she almost cries when she sees him sitting at his spinning wheel with that same expression of hurt bewilderment. But there is more there this time—something very like bitter resignation, something like unfamiliar nobility as he tries to let her go—and it is wool he holds in his hand, not straw or gold.

When she puts her hands on his shoulders, she knows she is right. She knows he is more, and if she can ever show him that, shining back at him from the reflection of her eyes since he does not like mirrors, then he will see it, too, and eventually so will everyone else.

They do not kiss again, not then. They hug, and that is better, because their kiss was ecstasy and bliss and sheer pleasure, but she is tired and he is confused. A hug is familiar and reassuring, soft and welcoming, everything they both need then.

In fact, they hug quite a bit. It makes her want more, but it reminds her of all she has after so long a time of not having, and it is often he who initiates them, so she is happy. For a while.

He sleeps beside her. They each bear their own nightmares, and a hug in the darkness, a solid warmth in the cold night…these remind her that she is no longer locked up. That she is herself again and with him and free. She likes to fall asleep with her head on his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her, and she thinks he likes it too because he always settles himself near her and kisses her hair when she curls into him.

But he has been alone a very long time and she is new to this intimacy, so when she is half-asleep, when he begins to stir, restless and anxious, she rolls away from him, and they sleep side by side, a narrow place between them.

Touch is precious, but sometimes precious things are best when taken (and given) in moderation.

Their separation changes things for a while. He lied (and he has never lied before, preferring instead to brandish his darkness like a torch against the cold), so she left. He tried (and he is not used to trying, preferring instead to crouch in his isolation and hold his hurts and his loneliness close to himself), so she would have come back. But then her father lies, too, and he is more of a monster than she thought, and Rumplestiltskin is more of a man than anyone else thinks, and there is danger and an adventure she never wanted, so she needs time. She needs space. She needs solitude, because as much as she has pretended otherwise, her years in chains and cells have marked her.

Besides, her father would have made her forget Rumplestiltskin, and the look on Rumplestiltskin’s face when he parted her chain with the slice of his hand, when he asked her if she remembered him, is enough to convince her that such would have destroyed him. She wanted time to think, and they would have used her as a weapon against him. After all her years spent being silent, defiant in the face of the Queen’s questions, Belle refuses to be a tool used in Rumplestiltskin’s downfall.

But then…he gives her another library. He tells her the truth.

He reaches out, and he touches her.

And maybe she will be his weakness, but he is hers, so maybe it’s fair after all, and maybe she won’t inadvertently betray him and make him look afraid and resigned for someone else centuries after she is gone.

He’s walking away, and it’s the dungeon in his castle all over again (only, she’s the one sending him away as if she doesn’t care and he was brave enough to reach across this divide to caress her face), but this time can be different.

So she calls him back.

His tears convince her she did the right thing. Her own tears remind her to be careful.

“This is the only world without magic I could find,” Rumplestiltskin tells her, his voice hushed and very unlike the dealer’s voice he used so often in their old world (as low and husky as it was during the quiet evenings when he’d let slip a bit more about himself while she read). “There are many ways to travel between worlds, but very few that could bring us to a world completely devoid of magic.”

“So Baelfire is here?” she asks. They are alone in his shop, sipping tea from a silver tea set she remembers dusting in his castle, a set they never used because he preferred her chipped cup. Alone and tucked away in the back, but still, she is careful to keep her own voice hushed (careful not to betray his secrets).

His mouth tightens, but his hand does not shake as he takes a sip of his own tea. “Yes. But it hardly matters if I cannot find a way across the town line.”

“You will,” she assures him, and she places her hand over his.

His eyes smile even if his mouth does not. “Yes,” he says, looking down at her hand. “I will.”

Belle smiles back at him, refusing to take her hand away from his (she misses being able to touch him whenever she wishes). “Do you think he will like me?”

“I think he will love you,” he replies, and Rumplestiltskin does not lie.

They have hamburgers, but they are interrupted, and for a while, he is so busy she does not see him. She knows he is helping David and the small boy (and Regina, but she does not let herself think on that for long), so she pretends she does not mind. She checks that his dagger is safe in its hiding place (only once, not compulsively as she wishes, because she cannot draw attention to it) and delves into the task of cleaning up the library and readying it to open. This world has fascinating traditions, including the novel idea of opening up libraries for anyone—even the smallest child or the poorest man or the noblest woman—to borrow books and return them for someone else to enjoy. Belle is looking forward to opening this library to the town of Storybrooke and seeing everyone enjoy the gift Rumplestiltskin gave her.

When he walks in through the doors she left unlocked, late one evening, she knows he has done something bad. He is leaning heavily on his cane, and he does not meet her gaze. Instead, he looks all around at the books and the shelves and the stack of interesting novels she’s set aside for herself and the bucket of water she’s been mopping the floor with (pretending she is not there simply to make certain no one comes for his dagger). He is afraid, and she is suddenly very tired of the fear he carries with him everywhere.

It is dark out and she is cleaning and he does not speak immediately as he studies her library, so it feels almost as if they are still at the Dark Castle. Belle looks down at the rag in her hand and the tile she’s scrubbing, and she remains quiet (just as she had when he would seek her out in their old home).

“We don’t have to worry about Cora anymore,” he finally says.

Her shoulders tense at the exhausted tone of his voice, but she keeps her silence (sometimes, she thinks he only needs to hear himself, to say the words aloud, and she knows, now, that she is the only one who will listen).

Rumplestiltskin looks down at his hands, on his cane, one atop the other. “I think Sheriff Nolan might be quite unhappy with me for a while, him and his family.”

“So they’re safe then?” she asks, softly, watching him from the corner of her eye. “Snow White and her daughter are back?”

“Yes,” he says, and nothing else.

After a few moments of this, Belle sets the rag in the bucket of lukewarm water and stands to her feet. “Rumple,” she says.

He takes a deep breath and meets her gaze (as if it is a feat worthy of a knight).

“Are you all right?” she asks him. Her hands are wet, damp against her skirts, and so she rubs them against the fabric until they are dry, but she does not let him look away.

“Me?” he asks, confused. “Of course.”

“Is everyone else all right?” she presses, takes a tiny step nearer him. “Is everyone unharmed?”

“Regina will be tired and sore for a while,” he tells her, a savage gleam of satisfaction sparking in his eyes before he blinks it away.

“And you’re not hurt? We’re safe?”

“Yes,” he assures her, fierce and reassuring all at once. “No one will be able to hurt you.”

(No one will be able to use her to strike him a mortal wound, she thinks to herself.)

Belle lets out her breath in a long sigh of relief. “Good,” she proclaims. And then she takes three steps forward very quickly and rushes into his arms (opened hastily to receive her). She holds him tightly to herself, lays her cheek against his shoulder, breathes in his now-familiar scent, and lets all the worry she hadn’t admitted she’d been feeling (the fear that made her scrub until her muscles ached and made her frustrated to see answering fear in Rumplestiltskin) drain out of her, seeping away, banished at his touch as if by magic.

“I missed you,” she whispers.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, kisses her hair and her brow and her cheek (his voice choked with the weight of more days—years—than her own words carry). “I missed you, too.”

Sometimes, she realizes, words can touch a soul more deeply than even a hug.

She kissed him in the castle. He kissed her by the well. They both moved at the same time to kiss later, when she stayed with him in his house and slept at his side every night (lulled to sleep by the sound of his breathing and the feel of his hand stroking her hair). But they haven’t kissed since he lied to her by omission and she left without telling him. They’ve held hands and he’s stroked her cheek and she’s tucked her hand against his elbow, and they’ve hugged as often as she can find excuse to, but no more.

And Belle wants more.

Only…she’s not quite sure how to go about it.

There are very few moments when they can be alone and quiet. The diner means Ruby and Granny always near, ready to protect Belle from the Dark One no matter how many times she tells them she is happy with him. The streets are even more questionable, filled with people who stare askance at Rumplestiltskin smiling and holding hands with a woman, and no matter how hard she smiles or how fiercely she holds onto his hand, Rumplestiltskin grows tense and quiet and wary under their disapproving stares (or he grows angry and defiant, and that is dangerous, too).

Eventually, after a few weeks of this, Belle grows tired of it and she packs a picnic basket and takes it to his shop. He smiles when she comes through the door (smiles so wide, so bright, so real), and he watches her approach him as if she is a dream he is willing to give himself over to entirely. So she sets down the picnic basket and levers herself up on the counter between them to brush a kiss over his cheek (her heart flutters at the feel of his clean-shaven jaw, the tickle of his hair, the catch to his breath). When she settles back to her feet, she grins up at him.

“I brought lunch,” she announces (because he needs the simplest things spelled out sometimes). She begins to unpack the basket, and he stares at each item of food she retrieves as if it is more mystical than the magical artifacts crowding his shop all around them.

She is happy (elated and hopeful) and he is finally smiling openly, so of course they are interrupted. What is worse is that these people, barging in to accuse him of a murder she knows he would never commit (he’s the one who introduced her to Dr. Hopper, who told her the gentle-mannered man could help her if she still has nightmares of her cells), don’t even seem to realize that they have interrupted anything. David knows her and manages a tiny nod, but the other two (Snow White and Emma, Belle assumes) hardly give her more than a glance, and they do not listen when Rumplestiltskin speaks (as if they don’t realize that he tells the truth if only you are wise enough to listen both to what is said and what is not).

It isn’t enough, to stand by Rumplestiltskin’s side and speak in his defense (because no one else will), but it makes him catch his breath, makes his eyes smile even if his mouth does not (even if he does not quite look at her while playing his game with these others). It isn’t enough, but it is something, and he treats each something she gives him, no matter how small, as if it is more than he has ever been given before.

In return for the picnic she brought him, he reveals another piece of himself. She laughs to see him cooing over a dog, and he tells her even without being asked that he once kept sheepdogs (a treasure of a memory of the man he keeps uncovering just for her). Belle’s heart fills to overflowing, so much so that she wonders if it is possible for a heart to break from sheer happiness.

So when the others are gone, taking their accusations and their demands and their magic with them (off to hunt down Regina, and Belle cannot bring herself to care too much about that), she steps up very close to Rumplestiltskin and lets her hand trail down his tie.

“Belle?” he asks, but there is hope igniting like fireworks in his eyes.

“I love you,” she whispers. She feels as if she’s falling (it’s the first time she’s said it since walking to a well), as if there isn’t enough air in this shop (the Dark Castle compressed into one tiny building), as if his eyes could swallow her up (and maybe they can).

“My darling Belle,” he breathes, his clever fingers trickling like water down her cheeks. “I love you, too.”

She smiles, bites her lip, and then decides she does not care to wait any longer, and she slides her arms around his neck and goes on her tiptoes and kisses him.

When he kisses her back, she wonders why she waited so long.

When he leans his brow against hers and closes his eyes, soaking in the moment, she does not think she will wait so long again.

They are happy, for a while, so very happy that Belle thinks maybe she will finally be able to chase away the fear that shadows him so often (maybe he will finally be able to convince her this will not all disappear into the shadows of her cell). He calls her on the phone he gave her and he looks at the changes she makes in the library and he begins to smile back at her without hesitation, without tears in his eyes (without thinking she will never smile at him again). She visits him in his shop and helps him find a new place for their chipped cup and she no longer pauses before reaching up to leave a kiss on his cheek, the corner of his mouth, his lips (no longer blushes when she thinks of kissing him more deeply, longer, in more private places than the library or the shop).

There is sadness, too, of course, because this is real life and not one of her storybooks. When she is invited to Archie’s funeral, she isn’t sure she should go. She hardly knew the man, kind as he was, but when she asks Rumplestiltskin, he tells her to go.

“Let them know you for you,” he tells her, a flick of his fingers gesturing to the whole of the town. “Better for them to think of you as a friend than as the companion of the Dark One.”

“They can think of me as both,” she retorts, and hugs him because she can (because he wants her to).

But she is scared. Rumplestiltskin thinks her courageous, calls her his brave and beautiful Belle, but she is afraid of the funeral, with graves and tears and so much anguish in the people around her she barely knows. She will go, and she will try to give what comfort she can, but they are new people who have already formed their own opinions of her, and if she is to be brave, she needs something to be brave for.

So she invites Rumplestiltskin up to the small, comfortable apartment he gave her (and she has never paid for it, with anything, and he has never asked for it). “For dinner,” she says, “because I want to see you,” so he comes because he doesn’t like to deny her anything. Sometimes, when she finds him in the backroom of his shop or in the basement of his house, he has magic in his eyes and his hands tremble with power, but he always opens the door to her or invites her in or agrees to go out with her. And maybe he had plans for tonight (plans and hopes and obsessions all revolving around Baelfire), but he only smiles and weaves his fingers through the hand she offers him and follows her up the narrow steps to her apartment.

They eat, and he teases her until she can’t take a drink or another bite lest she choke on her laughter, and his eyes sparkle and gleam with thoughts and desires he no longer bothers to hide from her (and this trust is as precious as the tidbits of his son he entrusts to her). Eventually, they move from the dining table to the couch, his cane set aside, her hair spilling loose around her shoulders.

It is dark outside, moonlight spills past the light curtains to froth along the carpeted floor, and the light from the kitchen leaves the living room illuminated in a private, golden bubble. Belle feels, then, as if this is all there is. No Storybrooke, no funeral to attend in a few days, no scared and desperate people to accuse or stare or judge. No father to look at her as if she is already dead. Just her and Rumplestiltskin, alone in the world and world enough for the two of them.

She pulls her legs up and leans against Rumplestiltskin, and the closeness of her apartment (so strange and different from the tall shelves and vast expanse of space and maze of books that was her room in the Dark Castle) feels like home when he curls his arm around her and tips his head to rest against hers.

He’s been so good lately, been trying so hard to be honest, to tell her the things he wants to keep secret and safe, to include her in the life that for longer than she can comprehend has included only one (Baelfire, not Rumplestiltskin, because she does not think he realizes there can be a Rumplestiltskin without Baelfire). He’s been honest and forthcoming, but as she holds the flickering fear of what will come in two days hidden inside her, she realizes that she hasn’t been entirely open with him.

It’s hard, harder than she thought (and no wonder he has to work to reveal his fragile vulnerabilities), but she opens her mouth and she begins to talk, in quiet, hushed whispers, of her fear of everyone else, rushing in to maybe rend and destroy the world she has created (with just the two of them) for her and Rumplestiltskin. She admits that she is furious with her father but that she misses him. She confides in her True Love, uncovering her secrets and her nightmares and giving them over to him. Everyone else seeks to hide any weaknesses from the Dark One lest he take advantage of them, but of this, Belle is not afraid. She knows he will take her secrets and he will put them next to his own, and they will be safe there, guarded from anything and everything for all of eternity.

When her words finally run out, when her silent tears have trickled down her cheeks in the soft glow and patient darkness, she gradually realizes she is curled up on her side, Rumplestiltskin lying behind her (on his good leg), tucked between her and the back of the couch, his arm wrapped so tightly around her waist that she knows he would never let her fall. His breath is soft against her neck, warm and wispy, and when he shifts his chin to smooth her hair down away from his mouth, she lets her eyes flutter closed. This is a moment she can memorize, a memory she can keep with her forever should she ever find herself in a cell again. He is all around her, his touch all over her, and every rise and fall of his chest behind her is a miracle.

Sometimes, it’s hard to believe she isn’t dreaming this all up (curled on her bed in Regina’s cell while the moon adorns her skin with frost), imagining that she is free and lying beside a Rumplestiltskin who freely admits he loves her.

But this is real. She couldn’t make up the feel of him, the realness of him behind her, the length of his arm curved around her just so, and the details of his fingers as she plays them through her own.

He’s here and he’s real and he loves her.

Belle smiles, her tears forgotten, secrets once more put away, her heart full and fluttering. She makes to move away, to give him space, careful not to stifle him, but his arm tightens and he nudges his chin down on her shoulder, and so she subsides.

“I’m here,” he whispers, and maybe he thinks she is still raw from the confessions she poured out before him and wants to reassure her, but she doesn’t care (she isn’t raw or worried or upset at all). Because he’s here and that’s what matters.

“I’m here, too,” she replies, and she laces her fingers through his and leans her head back against him.

In the morning, when she wakes, he’s still there, and she has never felt so warm and loved (so touched) before in her whole life.

She promised him her forever, so long ago, and she thinks that for the first time, someone actually managed to get the better end of a deal with Rumplestiltskin.

She’s very glad that it was her.

He is absent the next day, but she is busy with Ruby and Leroy and a few others, all talking to her in whispers and dancing around the subject of Archie and what he meant to them. Belle gives what comfort she can, and she tells them of the compassion she’d noticed in Dr. Hopper the few times they spoke, and she convinces herself she does not notice (or mind) when she spends the next night alone and faces the morning’s funeral on her own.

When Rumplestiltskin calls her from the funeral and greets her with secretive triumph and fierce pride as she enters his shop, she spares a moment to wonder if (to hope that) it was her beside him, her trust and her faith in him and her warmth next to him that night, that made him finally realize whatever it was he was missing. But even if it was not, even if he discovered this entirely on his own, she is happy for him. Finally, he will find his son and banish some few of the nightmares that plague him. (Finally he will look at her and he will see himself as a man, a father, not a monster with a goal, and she will be a woman who loves him.)

Baelfire consumes his thoughts, and it’s right, it’s natural, it’s proof of the love she knows he possesses within him, so she hates that it is she who distracts him. An attack in her library, and Rumplestiltskin comes immediately to protect her (“I’m here now,” he tells her, and she thrills at this reminder of their night spent sleeping side by side, connected so closely, so magically). A walk down the street, and he confides in her (“I took his hand,” he says, and she has to take his because here, at last, is part of the reason he still looks at her as if he cannot believe that she could love him). An argument in the remnants of his shop and the happiness they’ve been gifted with is disintegrating all around them (“This is my fault,” she admits to him, and as angry, as scared, as determined as she is, she cannot help but relax a bit at his answering look of complete incomprehension).

“Promise me,” she asks him, and maybe it is wrong of her to try to force such a concession from him, but she saw it more as a safeguard. He lost the shawl because of her, through her (she has become the weapon she tried so hard to avoid becoming), but Rumplestiltskin is a man (not a monster) who makes wrong decisions, and this…this has all the makings of the worst decision (one that will haunt and destroy him).

Rumplestiltskin secretly wants to be a hero, to be a father worthy of his son, to be the prince he thinks she deserves, and this one-handed pirate threatens all of that, in some way she can’t be sure of because she has only pieces of their story. But Belle secretly wants to be a hero, too, and there is nothing better, nothing nobler, than saving Rumplestiltskin’s quest and aiding him in his search for his son. Finding Archie alive (and the funeral she attended that morning, the tears his friends shed, all of it was for nothing, but she has never been more happy to have wasted her time) and rescuing him is a definite bonus, but still she can think only of the shawl that made Rumplestiltskin’s eyes soften and grow wistful and hopeful, some inner light burning there in a way she has sometimes feared only exists in her imagination.

When she thought he was a beast, when she held a cup of water to the lips of a man he tortured, when he was little more than an ambiguous enigma more full of mystery and questions than hope or potential for goodness, she convinced him not to kill a man (because the woman was pregnant and all he could see was Bae, she realized later). Now, standing on the deck of a ship where he once stood as a powerless man, where he once reached out his hand and tore out the heart of his wife, where he now beats a man with his cane (his crutch, and only now does she begin to think that it is his fear of helplessness, powerlessness, vulnerability that is his true crutch, not magic), she once more does her best to remind him that he is more than evil and darkness and vengeance.

“This is what he wants,” she rationalizes, because Rumplestiltskin does not like being manipulated. “There’s still good in you,” she blurts out, words so similar to what she’d told him in Sherwood Forest, because they worked then and maybe they can again. “Please…please show me I’m not wrong,” she begs him, and finally he meets her eyes, and the Dark One slides away to reveal her Rumplestiltskin staring back at her, remnants of the Dark One tangled up together with the spinner, the father, the lover.

She pauses, hesitates, breathless, motionless, afraid to move and break the spell and see him give himself over to the Dark One. The pirate is still beneath him, watching, shaken for the first time she’s known him, staring at Rumplestiltskin incredulously.

And Rumplestiltskin reaches out to her. Takes her hand. Curls his fingers around her.

Belle holds on as tightly as she can, pulls him after her, wanting nothing more than to leave this ship forever (this ship that holds too many memories of his wife, of a woman who made him afraid and nervous and resigned to never being loved, a woman he killed with his bare hands), leave the pirate and the blood on the deck and the stench of fear and pain in the hold where Archie was tied up.

Rumplestiltskin’s hand is tight in hers. He’s holding onto her. He’s touching her (his eyes avoiding her as assiduously as he once watched her, so afraid, so ashamed, so full of brimming, bitter darkness he doesn’t want her to see). He reached out for her (he is changing, is growing and evolving and learning and how can she judge him for crimes committed centuries before her birth?).

He’s touching her, and nothing is simple or absolute or clear. It’s all gray and shifting and changing, black and white fading away into shades and hues that reflect back the molten brown of her Dark One’s eyes. He’s a man here, weathered skin and worn creases and calloused hands and mangled ankle, vulnerable eyes and fragile smiles and wispy hair and delicate touches, and he is hers. Broken and twisted and full of shadows, scarred and mangled and a conscience stained with blood—but hers.

He’s the Dark One. She knows that, knew it the first time she met him, knew it when she gave her life to him. Knew it when she hugged him, trailed her hand over his, dared to caress him, kissed him, pulled him down beside her and slept at his side all night.

Rumplestiltskin, and some layers are darker than others (like a murdered wife and a world-destroying curse), but so many are more beautiful than anyone would guess (like a quest to find his son and a library given her in every world she’s lived in), and in the end, he is still hers.

She tightens her hand in his and slows her step so she can lean into him.

She pretends not to notice his stumble, or the catch in his breathing, or the tears in his eyes.

“Here we go,” he says, his hand trailing after hers, holding on as long as possible.

Belle wants to weep at that statement alone (“This is my quest, my journey,” he’d told her, still not quite accustomed to having anyone to walk at his side, but now there is a we, and that means more than any number of roses or necklaces ever could), but she must be brave. She must be strong. She will not be a weapon to hurt him, a tool to aid in his downfall, or a heavy chain holding him back. So she will not cry and she will not open her clenched fist and drag him back to her side (to safety). She will stand here and she will watch him step over this dividing line and she will wait for him to return to her (because she knows he will).

There is a moment of utter terror, when he freezes as a magic chill shimmers over him, when he turns and studies their surroundings as if he can’t quite place them (a moment when she wonders how a world without Rumplestiltskin could even be worth living in). And then he points at her, his nimble fingers marking her out as adeptly as he can summon magic, and he smiles his crooked, mischievous smile at her, and he says, “Belle.”

There is a moment, then, of sheer happiness, when she reaches out for his hand (careless of the line painted between them), when he gives it to her as naturally as if he does not need to think about it anymore. She smiles up at him, so relieved, so hopeful, so jubilant for his sake that she almost cannot breathe past the swelling of her heart. He is smiling down at her, his fingers are curled around hers, and nothing in the world can come between them (and she decides, then, that she will not go to her apartment tonight, that instead she will go home with him and lay beside him and hold him, engrave the memory on her mind for all the nights when he is gone, searching for his son).

“Oh, Belle, I so wish you were coming with me!” he exclaims, nothing of artifice or calculation in his eyes or his voice.

“As do I,” she admits. But she is proud of him (for leaving the pirate behind, for being brave, for stepping over the line) and she loves him (for holding her hand and smiling at her and wishing she could accompany him on his adventure), so she says, “But it doesn’t matter.”

He tilts his head, just the slightest bit, and for an instant, he is scaled and restless, confused and entranced by whatever it is in her that confounds him, the Dark Castle protecting them behind its ramparts and spells. “And why not?” he asks her.

I will never leave you, she wants to tell him. I will be here for you forever. I will love you forever. My heart is yours. Don’t forget me. Don’t leave me behind. I will keep your heart safe. You can trust me. I trust you.

She wants to say much, too much, so much that she is trapped in the space of a moment, the interval of a heartbeat, and his eyes contain the world within them, and his hands cradle her heart. But she has already told him all of those things, in the brush of her fingers against his, in her arms around him, in the play of her lips on his, in the way her steps fall in time with his, in her smile as she looks at him.

“Because,” she settles for saying (and it’s not enough, but it will do), “you’ll find him, and when you do, I’ll be here waiting for you when you get back.”

He has been abandoned and betrayed, her dear Dark One, and once upon a time, he never would have believed her. He would have suspected treachery, would have demanded a promise and a contract and a signature. But he is more Rumplestiltskin than Dark One now, and he has learned to reach out on his own, to stretch forth his hand and touch her. So he smiles at her (and she doesn’t mind the tears gleaming in dark eyes because these are happy tears), and he bends down to kiss her.

There is an instant of expectation, of waiting, of patient contentment. His hand is a warm, solid weight in hers, his smile real and soft and so very gentle, his eyes fluttering closed to hide the magnitude of emotions he has never been able to contain. She is chilled, but more urgently, she feels overheated, flushed, ready and oh so willing to tilt her head back and kiss him.

There is an instant of fear and pain and confusion. Terror erasing the smiles, the happiness, the trust, the future easing the worn shadows in the hollows of his face. Burning, searing pain in her shoulder, stumbling forward, into his arms as he struggles to catch her, to hold her up.

There is a flash of light, a blue shimmering. The sound of a gunshot belatedly echoing in her conscience. A splash of orange at her feet. Hands on her, warm breath against her cheek. Starbursts of pain at her back.

Then there is nothing.

Chapter Text

She is on the road. It’s night, stars almost invisibly pricking the black sky. It’s raining, a shimmer of moisture making the air waver in front of her, a haze that gives the setting an air of unreality. Her shoulder hurts, aches and burns in a way that doesn’t make any sense.

There’s a man holding her, cradling her against him. He’s shouting in her face, his hands jostling her carelessly, eyes wide and fraught with panic she doesn’t understand, and all she hears is Belle, Belle, Belle like an echo, a shadow of a memory of a dream.

“Who—?” she stammers, frightened and upset and so unbelievably confused. “Who’s Belle?”

Blood stains her shoulder, spreading out from a hole in her jacket and shirt (a jacket and shirt she doesn’t remember wearing; where is the hospital gown and the coat her rescuer gave her?), but the man (Mr. Gold, she thinks, but she can’t quite remember if she’d managed to find him on her own or if he found her) stares down at her, shocked and disbelieving and wounded, as if he’s the one who’s been shot.

There are shouts and another man behind them, a pistol in his hand (the gleam of sharp silver where a hand should be), and she is moved (cradled and sheltered as if she is infinitely precious) and then she cannot look away, cannot think, cannot even move because Mr. Gold (he’ll protect you, her rescuer had said, but he must have been wrong, or maybe it was only another delusion) is holding a ball of flame in his hand and there is death in his eyes, flickering with reflected fire.

She doesn’t have time to see anything else, to think anything else, to figure out why there is a fireball in a man’s hand or why there is a pirate with a gun, because there’s the screech of tires and the fireball disappears. But the frenzy, the panic, is still there in his eyes as he turns to her. “Belle!” he shouts, and she doesn’t know why he keeps calling her that, but it doesn’t matter. He dives at her, and there is pain and hard surfaces and dirt and mud and the stench of wet asphalt, and for one blessed instant, there is the soothing void of blackness.

It doesn’t last.

She wakes to his whisper, his murmur, and his hands are on her, and she doesn’t like it. He’s too much, all over her, everywhere, and she can’t get away from him. His hands are holding onto her arms, her legs, her shoulders (helping her up and brushing away dirt from her jacket and smoothing down her hair) and he’s kneeling in front of her (like he’s begging her, pleading with her, and she doesn’t know what he wants) and his voice never stops, going on and on, a shifting murmur of words and tones and pleas and empty reassurances in an accent that shifts pitches, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.

“Shh, shh, beautiful Belle,” he says, and that hurts even worse because he’s touching her and he’s talking to her but he doesn’t know her at all.

She just wants him to be gone. She wants the pain in her shoulder to disappear. She wants the rain and the darkness and the smoking car and the line spray-painted across the black road to all go away, and she never thought she would want to go back to her tiny little room with its grated windows and its hard ledge—but she does. At least the room is familiar and understandable and quiet and real.

She screams (because he’s still touching her with hands like burning brands—but no fire, only his skin and his touch and his voice), and he waves his hand, and for an instant, she thinks he is going to burn her with fire, cast flames at her from his palm. But instead, the pain in her shoulder vanishes, gone as if it had never been, and there is only a hole where there was once something else.

“All better, good,” he tells her, but he’s lying, because nothing is better or good now. It’s all pain and confusion and loss, and the feel of his hands on her, scorching through the chill of the rain and the flare of the scabs on her knees and palms and the din of sirens approaching.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” he says, but he’s not listening to her and he’s still touching her, and she is afraid. Of him. Of his hands. Of the fire in her blood and the surge of her heart.

He lets her back away from him, but his hand lingers on her knee, her calf. “Belle, please,” he begs, and she can’t take it anymore.

“What are you?” she screams at him, and finally, for the first time, she touches him. Affects him. Hurts him.

He backs away. There are people there, rushing toward her, engulfing her in an embrace, helping Mr. Gold to his feet, and he’s saying she doesn’t remember, she crossed a line, she’s gone, but she can’t concentrate on that. There’s a woman with her arm around her shoulders, helping her rise, asking her questions in a soft voice. There’s another woman over by a man broken on the ground, and there’s blood on her jacket still, sticky against her flesh, and there are police cars and sirens and talking, but absolutely none of it matters.

She can only see Mr. Gold. His eyes like empty voids, his hands hanging slack at his sides until the man who helped him gives him a cane, his face closed down so that the flames are gone cold as ash and bitter as poison.

Then he is gone and there are more shouts, and more yelling (“What would Belle want you to do?” but she pretends she doesn’t hear that or notice that silence falls after the question), and for a while, she is alone (abandoned, bereft, heartbroken) and there is only the soft-voiced woman lifting her up and herding her over to a car where the strange man is tugging Mr. Gold away from the broken man and making him lean against a nearby vehicle and…and…and so much more, but it turns into a shifting, swirling mass of people she doesn’t know and words she doesn’t understand and touches that don’t affect her at all.

And then the woman leaves her alone in the cold and the dark, and she huddles into herself and wraps her arms around herself—and cannot look away from Mr. Gold. Standing apart from her. Staring at her. Watching her (but all he sees is Belle, Belle, Belle), cold and hard and…and yearning.

She ducks her head and lets her hair hide her from him.

But she still sees him, seared into the backs of her eyelids.

Watching her.

Waiting.

Wanting.

And there is a fire waiting to be ignited in his eyes.

She wakes to his kiss, and if it were a story, she would remember whatever it is he wants her to remember. She would be healed and well and not fractured by a lifetime spent in a tiny little room hidden away from the world (she would be Belle), and she would smile at him (a handsome prince, with light in his eyes and kindness in his touch), and they would be happy (not broken and hurting and alone).

But it isn’t a story, and his touch burned through even her sedated dreams (lethargic and familiar), and so she screams.

She is afraid that he will summon another fireball. That he will hurt her and scare her and threaten her. She watches his hands (raised in front of him as if it is she who is dangerous), but no fireball appears, no flames or shimmer of blue that leaves her numb and unharmed (and aching with something missing).

Instead, he backs away (and his eyes hold more terror than even she feels). He apologizes (soft and quiet and anguished). And he runs away from her (all dark lines and black coat and gilded cane).

And he did hurt her. Not with fire. Not with bullets. Not with threats.

But he left. And she hurts.

“It-it’s a cup,” she tells him, because he’s looking at it as if it’s oh so much more (and if empty air can become a fireball, then maybe a cup can become something precious and valuable). “It’s…it’s damaged.”

She wants to believe him. She wants to listen to him and realize that he’s making sense and she’s just been a little out of it and she’ll know exactly who he is and why he’s here and what he wants from her (because her rescuer promised Mr. Gold would protect her, but this Mr. Gold looks at her and only wants her to disappear and cease to exist so that he can have his Belle back). She wants to be someone who can reach out and touch him and not flinch away when he lifts his hand to brush back her hair or hand her a damaged teacup.

But he tells her it’s magic, a talisman, a charm, and it will make her remember, but she already remembers (she was in her cell so long she doesn’t even have to close her eyes to imagine it around her again), and he’s not touching her anymore so she can think clearly now—and if there’s one thing she knows, it’s that she’s never been in a castle and she’s never held this teacup before and she’s not Belle (the woman who makes him almost-cry and almost-smile and almost-hope and always-hurt).

“Just look at it!” he demands, but his hand is on the cup, cradling it, holding it, protecting it, and he doesn’t care about her.

It makes her angry. It makes her sad. It makes her scared.

She’s confused (and they will come and lock her away again and even this tiny bit of freedom will be denied her).

When she throws the cup, when it shatters against the wall, she thinks that maybe it really was magic. Maybe his heart was in the cup. Maybe he’d changed his heart into the cup itself.

And now she’s broken it.

His grief hurts even more than the bullet wound she knows she didn’t imagine. His quiet apology strikes more deeply than her own confusion and pain.

He walks away.

She tells herself she is glad. (She does not look at the broken shards he leaves behind.)

He does not come back.

A woman comes and says they are friends. She brings her a book and muffins and tears and sad smiles. She does not touch her.

The nurse is here, and the hospital room she has all to herself is little different from the cell. The sedatives run their sluggish, lightning haze through her veins and the days merge one into another. The nurse touches her often, but she cannot feel it past the numb lethargy.

A man comes and tells her about magic. When he says it aloud, when he looks at her with fervent zeal in his eyes, it sounds real. It sounds like more than a delusion (but that only makes Mr. Gold’s words, and the look in his eyes, and the cup she destroyed even more difficult to remember without curling into a ball and weeping). The man tells her he believes her, but then he leaves and he does not come back, and she is alone again.

And still Mr. Gold does not come.

She begins to think that she should not have told him to go away. She begins to think he should not have chosen now to finally start listening to her.

Dr. Whale gives her a phone, one day. It’s her phone, he says. He retrieved it from her bag (the one a tall man with a badge at his belt and pity in his eyes brought her after Mr. Gold left) and he says that Mr. Gold wants to talk to her.

She wants to throw the phone (like she threw the cup) and go back to the sedatives and the book and the absence of any feeling.

But he touched her, once, and it’s been so long since she’s seen him and felt him. So she takes the phone (curled up on her side in the bed, because she is tired and her latest dose hasn’t worn off yet), and she lets Mr. Gold tell her who she is.

“You are a hero,” he tells her (and there aren’t many opportunities to be a hero in a cell, but she hears the conviction in his voice and knows he believes it), “who helped your people.” (And she is alone and has no people, only him.)

“You’re a beautiful woman,” he says (and there were no mirrors in her cell, but she remembers he called her ‘Beautiful Belle’ and he looked at her as if she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen), “who loved an ugly man.” (She remembers him kissing her, backing away, fleeing through a door, and she does not think he spends much time looking in mirrors either.)

“Really, really loved me,” he adds (and he thinks she is Belle, but she thinks it would be easy to love him even if she isn’t Belle).

“You find goodness in others, and when it’s not there, you create it,” he continues (and he’s nowhere near, not even in the same building, but he might as well be right at her side, because his words burn through her as adeptly as did his touch).

“You make me want to go back, back to the best version of me, and that never happened before.” (And it hasn’t happened this time, either, because she’s spent her life sitting on a ledge beneath a window, watching a sliver of the sky pass her by, but she wants to believe him.)

“So when you look in the mirror, and you don’t know who you are…” (And she has looked in the mirror, the tiny rectangle hanging in the bathroom, and wondered who she is.) “That’s who you are.” (She doesn’t know how he knows her, why he thinks he knows her, but she wants him to be right.)

“Thank you,” he says, and she thinks she hears him say “Belle,” but maybe not, because there is only a dial tone ringing in her ear and the sound of tears sliding down her face.

And maybe he was telling the truth (and maybe he loved her), but it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead.

Even the sedatives cannot make her stop weeping.

Even the numbness cannot erase the echo of his voice.

Even the truth of reality cannot banish the beauty of the fantasies he wove for her.

And maybe her heart was in that chipped cup, too, because it’s broken now.

She is trying to read the book the woman left for her when he knocks at the door to her room. She’s had time to think, since his phone-call (since Dr. Whale found out the nurse was giving her so many sedatives and filled the room with sharp-edged threats), time to piece together her fragmented memories. Time to realize she did not want him to die. She wants him to be alive. To be well. To come back.

And now here he is.

He smiles when he sees her, as if he can’t help himself (and she smiles, too). He hesitates at the doorway, as if he’s afraid of her (and she realizes, to her surprise, that she isn’t afraid). He apologizes for startling her, as if that is more important than whatever made him think he was going to die (and she wonders if he apologizes for fireballs and blue shimmers and kisses as much as for alarming phone-calls).

Her memories of that night, out on the black road with the rain in her face and the sirens piercing her ears and the stench of smoke in the air, are flickering and startling, unbelievable and dark, full of flashes of terror and moments of pain and a great overwhelming, swathing confusion. She remembers a man in shadows, hands that never let her be, a voice that pushed and shoved and demanded feelings and emotions and responses from her, a cane that sounded loud in the stormy air against the road (and the flash of a pirate she hasn’t seen here at the hospital). She remembers a man, black against the white of the hospital, the echoes of his desperate shout (“What’s happening? Belle? Belle!”)

But this man almost seems someone else entirely. He’s still and quiet and careful. He keeps a pace between her hospital bed and his feet, his hands draped very pointedly on the golden head of his cane. He watches her tentatively, cautiously, warily (yearningly, desperately, as if he wants to reach out and touch but doesn’t trust her not to vanish into thin air). His voice is soft and quiet and not demanding at all.

It doesn’t seem right, to smile at him and trust him and believe him and forgive him for the flames at his fingertips and the intimacy of his kiss and the imperiousness of his cup, so she asks him the same question she asks everyone she meets (except the nurse, because there is no use in tempting fate).

She asks him about magic and the healing he could conjure with a wave of his hands (but not the flames he’d summoned with rage and grief and vengeance searing in his eyes). She thinks he will lie and give her the same story everyone else does (even the doctor who made sure she could stay awake through the days), and disappointment flares heavy and cold in her stomach when he begins to mouth the same platitudes.

“Once you remember who you are,” he says, and she can’t help but stare up at him, because this is not the same script the others have followed, “it’ll all become clear.”

Fear is easy and bravery is hard, but he told her she could be a hero (she could love him), so she does her best to pretend to bravery (to build a bridge between them). “Can you help me do that? Remember who I am?”

“Only if you help me remember who I am,” he replies.

She’s useless, locked away for being dangerous or crazy or flawed, but he looks at her, and he thinks she is precious (like the cup he wanted her to look at). He thinks she is beautiful (like the woman he cared about enough to kiss). He thinks she is good (like someone he could call in his last moments). And now he wants her to help him (like she’s valuable and useful and helpful and not-broken).

A chance. A hope. A goal.

She’s been locked away, and as soon as she was freed, she found herself in the cold and dark with a hole in her body. She doesn’t know this Mr. Gold (but “he’ll protect you,” she’d been promised), but he knows her. Somehow, someway she can’t explain (but she can’t explain magic either, and he did not say she was crazy), he’s part of her past, part of her. His touch wouldn’t have stayed with her so long if he weren’t.

So she reaches out (because he won’t), to grasp hold of this chance (to test herself; to test him).

Her hand fits just so over his. Her fingers curl over his. Her warmth merges with his.

It feels right (especially when he jerks at her movement). It feels natural (especially when he stares down at their hands as if it’s more amazing than flames and healing). It feels good (especially when he looks back up at her and smiles a reverent, careful smile).

It burns and sears through her, a scorching inferno sweeping across her brittle, hollow nerve endings and making them sing and wake, stir from their slumber to cast colored sparkles across her vision as she looks into his scared, lonely, hopeful eyes.

“We can help each other,” she says, and she knows it is true.

“Yeah,” he breathes (and she thinks he wants to kiss her).

“Let’s talk to someone about getting you out of here,” he says (and she thinks she wants to kiss him). “You’ve been locked up long enough.”

She smiles up at him (her hand still on his, because now that she’s started, she doesn’t want to stop). He stares down at her (his smile still in his eyes, and even if she’s not who he wants her to be, he’s still going to help her).

She wonders how she ever could have been afraid of this man. Her rescuer. Her healer.

Her savior.

She has things to pack. They’re unfamiliar to her (all except the phone, which she handles with sentimental care), but she places them in her bag anyway.

Then a woman comes in, with a smile (open and wide and friendly and not at all like Mr. Gold’s), and she says Mr. Gold’s name. The woman, the mayor, seems…hollow and dark, something broken inside her, but still she is trying to be helpful. So she offers her a smile.

In return, the mayor hands her a tiny object. “What’s this, dear? Did you drop it?” she asks.

She didn’t, but she looks down at the matchbook anyway. Once, and then again.

And everything becomes suddenly clear.

Lacey’s not quite sure how she came to lose her memories, or why she has vague recollections of a cell, but she doesn’t care. She’s been cooped up too many days, been away from her usual haunts so long that everyone will have forgotten her. There’s an echo in her head, something about Mr. Gold, but she shrugs it away and she walks out of the hospital on her own. They can’t stop her after all—she’s fine, healthy, and she has her memory now.

Her apartment, on the rattier side of town, looks abandoned, and it’s all locked up, but she manages to pry open a grimy window and clamber in before anyone sees her in the very unflattering hospital gown and sweat pants. There’s no dust on the furniture inside, which seems odd, but Lacey lets it slide. What matters is that her wardrobe is there, sparkling and shimmery and shining with blue flashes that make her blink and raise a hand to her suddenly spinning head.

The nurses and doctors at the hospital (and a man in a dark suit with a cane at his side) would probably tell her to rest, but Lacey’s tired of resting. She feels like she’s about to explode, all the restless energy inside her seething, demanding a release, so she cuts off her hospital bracelet, jumps in the shower, dresses in the clothes that make her feel immediately more comfortable and beautiful. Her hair’s straighter than she remembers—proof that the hospital shampoo isn’t up to her standards at all—but she clips it back, and then she’s out the door and down the street to the Rabbit Hole.

This, at least, hasn’t changed. Maybe the regulars look confused at first, but she’s been gone a while and they eventually recognize her. Things have been…different…lately, and she likes being here, in a place familiar and comfortable and the same. There’s no Mr. Gold here (and maybe she asks about him, but that’s simple curiosity, no more), no strange stories about another woman (Belle, and just the memory, slanted in a Scottish accent, rings loud over the music playing in the background), no reminders of flames in a rainy night or a blue glow over a bullet-ridden shoulder (no pirates or magicians or pleading eyes that can scorch straight through her). Just soothing liquor, the steady hum of people around her, and the feel of the pool cue in her hands and the clack against the balls (erasing the discomfort brought by her accident).

But then Mr. Gold comes. And he looks at her as if she’s a stranger (as if she’s not Belle). And he stares (“Do-do you remember me?” he asks, as if he’s the sort of man who could ever be forgotten), and his hand on her arm surges through her like an electrical storm.

She plays it cool (“Guy who visited me in hospital,” she says, while the kiss he gave her and his hands on her and his disbelieving hope when they agreed to help each other run through her mind like molten silver), shrugs it off, ignores him. She pretends she doesn’t even notice when he turns his back on her and walks away. She most definitely does not watch the door to see if he returns.

She’s Lacey, independent and free, and she doesn’t need anyone (most especially an older man with a bad reputation who looks at her as if he might cry). Things are back to normal, and that means no Mr. Gold. No Belle. No magic. No hospitals.

Just her.

Just Lacey.

Mr. Gold comes back.

He stands at her side, and he talks. Just a few words, barely anything of substance at all. But she listens. She tries to overwhelm him with facts she knows he isn’t familiar with, tries to drown him out with music, tries to pretend he means nothing at all. But he follows her, and he tries again, and he stands right in front of her, and he holds out his hand (the one that gleamed with molten light beneath the flicker of flames) as if begging her.

So maybe she’s done more than casually ask about him. Maybe she’s curious and intrigued as to why he cares so much. Maybe she just feels sorry for him, this man no one loves, so lonely and desperate that he’s stooped to pretending she’s some perfect woman he’s made up.

Maybe.

Or maybe there’s something in the shifting darkness of his eyes, the sad quirk of his lips, the plea for her to look past the whispers of his ruthlessness and his power and his temper. Maybe she remembers something about a phone-call and the feel of his hands beneath hers. Maybe she’s more captivated by him than she wants to admit.

But she’s Lacey, and she loves a challenge. So she says yes.

Then she walks away (so she doesn’t have to watch him do the same).

He’s jumpy and nervous. He shifts in his seat and fumbles the menu and keeps his hands clasped in his lap. He makes half-hearted efforts at conversation and denies the rumors about him and almost breaks down when she throws out a cliché.

If this is Mr. Gold, she thinks, the rumors are blown far out of proportion.

She tries. Really, she does. But there’s no excitement here, no danger, nothing to make adrenaline shoot through her body and cause the world to explode at the corners of her eyes and the rafters to shake. There’s no spark, nothing to explain why his touch had seemed anything special earlier.

He reaches out for her, once, but instead of fire and passion and heat, she’s only splashed with sticky tea. She tries once more (for a reason she can’t explain), patting him on the shoulder as she passes him for the restroom.

But there’s nothing. No spark. No lightning. No reason to stay.

So she leaves.

Keith is pushy and arrogant and a bit smarmy, but his hand is warm when he catches her wrist, and there’s the flame of lust in his eyes, and that has to be better than tears and sad smiles and mild-mannered pawnbrokers. He’s aggressive and he slams her up against the wall and he bruises her lips, but she’s been a long time in the hospital, a long time without feeling, and this is enough to remind her she’s alive.

When Mr. Gold arrives, it’s suddenly and wholly. Lacey is surrounded by arms and lips and firm muscles, and then there is nothing, only bristling rage and horrible, terrible fury crashing from his eyes as he brandishes his cane at her would-be lover, and he crowds the alley—crowds the whole town, as if Storybrooke as a whole isn’t big enough to contain him. If he’d tried this earlier, she might have been impressed, but she’s coming down from the high of sensation, and she doesn’t like the complete cessation of the overwhelming feelings.

Keith slinks away as quickly as he came, and Lacey wants only to get away. But Mr. Gold’s hand is on her shoulder, and she doesn’t feel captivation—she feels trapped, and there’s nothing she hates more.

She doesn’t look back as she walks away.

When she finds him with Keith, the taller man who’d completely encompassed her in his hold now flat on his back on the ground and helpless, it’s as if he’s another man entirely (a third man, and that’s an awful lot of personality for one lone man to hold, layered within him). Mr. Gold towers over Keith, and there is something there, something she hadn’t seen before. There is power and charisma and danger and menace. There is unbridled passion and boundless emotion and a depth of caring so deep, so vast, that it could completely overwhelm her.

“You really are as dark as people say,” she remarks, strolling closer, lured in by the brilliance, the heat, the power of the flames.

He stares at her, his head cocked to the side, and finally, he’s not seeing Belle. Finally, he’s seeing Lacey.

She holds her breath. Wonders if he’ll leave her. If he’ll turn around and walk away. (Wonders if he cares for her at all outside of his delusions of this Belle.)

Instead, he straightens, smiles. “Darker, dearie,” he tells her (and there’s a thrill in her heart, a flutter in her stomach, at the endearment). “Much darker.”

And he turns back to his prey (on the ground and beaten because he dared touch Lacey, not Belle, not anyone else, just her).

And Lacey smiles.

It’s easy, being with Mr. Gold. It’s invigorating, being with the man everyone in town fears. It’s startling, being with a man who can’t decide if he’s a grief-stricken lover, a tender suitor, or a dangerous man. He takes her to the Rabbit Hole but demands the whole of her attention, buys her drinks but never lets her pay him with a kiss, opens the door for her but snarls when she flirts. He’s a mixture of old world charm and immediate charisma, and Lacey finds that instead of growing bored with him, she can’t keep away.

“Maybe it’s an appropriate name, after all,” Lacey muses when they stand in front of the Rabbit Hole in the morning (Mr. Gold can’t keep away from her either, if the sunrise wake-up call on the phone she was given in the hospital is any indication).

“The bar?” Mr. Gold raises an eyebrow, sharp and sardonic.

Lacey smiles a secretive smile. “Maybe,” she purrs (because she’s not about to admit to him she feels, sometimes, like a rabbit caught under the dangerous stare of a hawk).

“There are better places to spend our time,” he tells her.

“Oh?” It’s her turn to arch an eyebrow (a reflection of him, and she shouldn’t like that, but it makes his lips twitch so it’s worth it). “Like where? Not many places in town are open this early.”

“Oh, I think my shop could offer you quite a selection,” he retorts (and she’s definitely a rabbit caught, because now he’s luring her in to his lair).

“Lacey?”

Mr. Gold turns, hand taut on his cane, shoulders stiff, bristling and defensive.

Lacey gives an inviting smile to the man walking toward her (blonde and tall, and she remembers him chastising a nurse for her). He returns the smile easily.

“Whale!” Mr. Gold snaps, and Whale gives him a tiny nod. “Was there something you needed?”

“Just thought I’d come say hello. Haven’t seen you for a while, Lacey.” Whale casts a smile more suggestive than her own her way, and Mr. Gold is suddenly a graceful, lethal blur of motion that ends with the doctor flat on his back on the ground.

Lacey’s startled, but she’s also pleased.

She may be a rabbit with a hawk, but the hawk moves at her command. She may be a woman he can send away when he doesn’t want her involved in his conversations, but she’s a woman who possesses the keys he hands her (his fingers caressing her wrist).

She may be caught, but so is he.

The edge of danger (the temptation in the merest brush of his hands) only makes him all the more appealing.

“So it’s, uh…so it’s true,” she says, triumphant to have caught him in his game (scared because magic shouldn’t exist, but then, neither should this town-wide amnesia of her). “You, uh…you really can do magic.”

“I think you might want to pour yourself another drink,” he tells her (and he’s not fazed at all by this talk of magic and tears and a woman out there in danger).

Lacey lets him pour her a drink, watches him carefully. She thought his cane and his temper and his blade-sharp words were reason enough to be afraid of him, but listening to him talk of spells and deals and bad memories makes her think that there’s even more behind the universal fear of him.

And yet she’s not afraid. He speaks of magic and he pulls out potions that glitter with rainbow colors and he tells her of the curse of Dark One. But he avoids her eyes (as if afraid she will turn away) and he admits that magic drives away the people he cares about (heedless of the vulnerability he exposes to her) and he summons a glittering, expensive necklace (just for her). Magic or not, he’s still her Mr. Gold, the leash still in her hand even if he has one for her too.

She’s not afraid. Not until he touches her.

Shivers run up and down her spine as he clasps the necklace. Quakes start in the pit of her stomach and move up into her heart as he so carefully pulls her hair free of the diamonds. Lightning-limned lethargy fills her as she leans back into him.

Well and truly caught, then, she thinks, because she should be bored of him by now, should have moved on long past now, should have grown tired of his smooth steps away when she tries to caress his face or neck, his distractions when she moves to kiss him, his tendency to look at her with almost-tears when he thinks she’s not paying attention. She shouldn’t care about him…but she does.

“We can be together forever,” she tells him, tempts him, tests him (because she might as well get something from this infatuation).

But he moves back, his hands slide away, and there’s once more a gulf between them.

She hates it.

“It’s complicated,” he says, but it really isn’t. He’s hers, now, hers forever, and she will fight to keep him, even if that means getting rid of some silly boy. They belong together, darkness and fire, thunder and lightning, black shadows and blue shimmers, a study in contrasts, like calling to like.

“I thought you were a man who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way,” she challenges him.

And he pulls her back to his side (violent and abrupt, decisive and bold; the dangerous layer, the predator who can beat a man to death with a cane, coming to the fore to glitter with reflective fire in his eyes).

Together forever, she thinks, and she welcomes the flames consuming her at his proximity. Her Mr. Gold. Her sorcerer.

Her Dark One.

She doesn’t appreciate being sent away every time he wants to hold a conversation. He looks at her and he doesn’t see Belle anymore (and that’s good, she tells herself, even if it does mean there’s a hard edge to the corners of his eyes and the creases around his mouth), but he doesn’t know her entirely yet if he thinks she’ll let him push her aside whenever it pleases him.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” she says. “I can help you.”

“Can you?” He studies her, carefully, a hint of calculation in his voice. He keeps his hands on the worktable before him (he does have good drinks here, in his pawnshop, but more than that, she likes the way she’s the only one he invites into the back with him), and it’s hard to believe that such ordinary hands can produce such magical things.

“I can.” She cants her chin up in the air, gives him a sly smile. “For instance, I know that your earlier conversation with those straight arrows in here looking to save their enemy means they’re distracted right now.”

His eyes narrow, reassessing, wary (she feels a thrill to know she has the whole of his attention). “Oh?”

“Yeah.” She sidles closer, until she has to look up to keep her gaze on his eyes. Her hands slide up to his shoulders without her conscious direction. His muscles tense beneath her touch; his hands are motionless on the table. “Means they’ll be busy. So, if you decide to go look into the problem of a certain someone who might prove to be trouble for you down the road…?”

Some of his layers are exposed in front of her (just for an instant, an unguarded moment), shock and grief and loss and horror and terror, and then the shutters slide down and he’s once more her dangerous, powerful Dark One. His hands tense, one over the other, until suddenly he reaches up and grasps hold of hers, pulling them away, clasping them in front of his chest. It’s a firm hold, solid and real and alive, and Lacey lets her eyes shine with the thoughts swarming her mind.

But he steps back. Her hands fall back to her sides.

“An interesting proposition,” he murmurs.

Lacey lets out a frustrated sigh and rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m going down to the Rabbit Hole for a game or two of pool—you do what you want.”

“And will you come back?” There is a hollow note in his voice, a tiny sliver of fragility lurking in his lilting accent. He tries to hide it behind narrowed eyes and arched brow, but his hands give him away, white and stiff over his cane now.

“Maybe,” she says archly, and is rewarded by the feel of his left hand grasping hold of her waist and pulling her close to him. His breath is hot and fierce against her cheek, his hand sending tremors through her bloodstream, and she is awake and alive and on fire, and she will never tire of this feeling, this draw that makes her run her hands up his chest and back onto his shoulders (where they belong).

“Remember my reputation,” he warns her. “You don’t want to see just how dark I can be.”

“Maybe I do,” she retorts with a laugh, and it’s her turn to dance away, teasing him with what he can’t have.

She pretends she doesn’t see the way he swallows and looks away (not desire or lust; sorrow and hurt). She pretends it doesn’t bother her to turn and leave him alone in his dark room. She pretends she can really walk away from him (even if it is only for a moment, an hour).

But she knows she’ll be back. And she knows he’ll be waiting for her (for Belle).

She comes back, but Mr. Gold doesn’t. Not her Mr. Gold. Not her Dark One.

She gets back before he does (the Rabbit Hole is abandoned and silent for some reason), uses the keys he gave her and walks into the backroom. For a moment, she’s tempted to explore, but the place is dusty and boring without Mr. Gold there. She heads toward the cabinet where he keeps the liquor, but before she can get there, she hears the bell over the front door tinkle.

“Mr. Gold?” she calls, ready to invite him to share a drink with her. The curtain flutters behind her when she pushes past it, and she can feel a ghost of a breeze on her neck as she stumbles to a halt.

Mr. Gold is standing in the middle of his shop, but he’s not large and intimidating and magnetic. He’s not powerful and calculating and wickedly clever. Instead, he’s tiny and broken and wounded, and he didn’t look this old even when he had to be helped up from the dirty road by the deputy.

“Mr. Gold?” she says again (and she hates the breathy sound turning her question into a whisper).

“Belle,” she thinks he whispers, but then he looks up at her (he makes a valiant effort to gather himself, but he still looks brittle and hollow) and says instead, “Baelfire. My son. He’s…he’s dead.”

And for the first time, Lacey doesn’t know what to do.

He stands there, motionless, silent, and she thinks that if he moves, he will crumble away into dust. And all she can do is stand where she is and watch him slowly, torturously pick up the pieces of his heart and stitch them imperfectly back together in an uneven, bleeding mess.

She wishes she were anywhere else. She wishes she hadn’t come back. She wishes she didn’t care about him (this man who was supposed to be bold and dark and scintillating and who is, instead, complicated and mysterious and vulnerable).

She wishes she were Belle, so she could hold him and help him and heal him.

But she’s Lacey. So she stands there, and she wishes. It’s what she’s good at, the only thing she knows, to wish and crave and luxuriate in what she has.

Funny. It used to be enough.

“There’s nothing we can do.” His voice is calm. His hands are steady. His eyes slide away from hers. “The trigger is magical, and once it’s ignited, there’s nothing to be done.”

“I thought you were powerful!” Her own voice is a little bit shrill, and adrenaline races through her, but this adrenaline is not a good sensation. This is fear. Terror. The realization of mortality—and she doesn’t like it. “You can do anything!”

Mr. Gold watches her, and there is more heartache in that look than any one being should ever possess. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s too late.”

She watches him turn away, and anger obliterates everything else. “Would you say that if your son were still alive?” she demands. It’s a cheap shot, a low blow, and she knows it even as she says it.

She shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter. He just told her she’s going to die in a matter of minutes, and that should more than give her an excuse to lash out.

But his shoulders hunch in on themselves, armor he dons too late. He flinches, and Lacey wants to take the words back.

“I’m sorry,” he says again (and all she can see is a man kneeling on wet asphalt before her, fleeing through glass doors, coming into her hospital room and looking down at their joined hands as if at magic). “If I could save you, I would. But even if you crossed the town line again,” and he pauses to take in a shuddering breath, “you couldn’t get far enough away in time.”

“So…we’re going to die?” A sob is hiding in the back of her throat, scrabbling to get free. He was supposed to give her immortality. She was supposed to have weeks and months and years to cure him of his aversion to touch, to seduce him into hugs and kisses and touches in the dark, to fall in love with him and make him see Lacey and have that be enough. They were supposed to be together forever.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs, then firmly adds, “Lacey.”

And then he is stepping up beside her and he is pulling her into his arms, and he only holds her tighter when her tears wet the handkerchief sitting in his breast pocket. She clutches at him, holds on as desperately as if she is drowning. She wants to beg him not to leave her, but she doesn’t. Instead, she only tightens her grip on his jacket and feels the ground begin to come apart beneath their feet.

There are trees in the middle of the street, vines weaving through the shop’s exterior, and grass sprouting through the floor of the front room. The backroom, though, is an oasis (one that’s rapidly shrinking to nothing), and she stands in there with Mr. Gold and tries to ignore the fact that her world is being erased in front of her very eyes. “We’re not from this world,” Mr. Gold had explained. “The failsafe seeks to return everything to the way it was before the curse.”

She wonders if that means she’ll suddenly remember being Belle, just before the failsafe kills her (because she’s not stupid and Mr. Gold is careful to call her Lacey but sometimes he looks at her and she’s only Belle, and everyone else in town has multiple names and they don’t remember her at all, and she knows, now, that Mr. Gold isn’t the sort of man to make a woman up out of nothing). She wonders if she’ll remember loving Mr. Gold before the end. She wonders if he’ll realize that she maybe-kind-of-almost-already loves him (she wonders when she realized it, thinks it was when he took her in his arms and said her name and apologized, for the first time, to her instead of to Belle).

“Mr. Gold,” she says. She’s not quite sure why, because they’ve used up all their words and she’s used up all her tears and he’s just plain used up, going through the motions and pretending that he’s all right even though his son is gone. But she says his name anyway, because it means something. Because she needs to remind herself she’s still here.

“To the end of the world,” he says, and he pours her a drink.

A couple days ago, that would have been enough to make her laugh and tease and try to corner him so she can finally figure out whether all those reserves of emotion he conceals would erupt and overwhelm and consume her should she kiss him. Now…it doesn’t seem right.

“Come on, it’ll help numb it,” he coaxes, so she agrees, and reaches for the glass. But she’s clumsy, and the cup topples on its side (wrong and broken).

The whole world is coming apart around them, but the spilled whiskey seems like the greater crime. Especially to him.

He’s wounded and bent and brittle, but he recaptures a hint of his spirit, the rage and power she saw unleashed in that alleyway with Keith, enough to shout at her, to rend and destroy with his words, to remind her she isn’t who he wants.

“I said I’m sorry!” she tells him, and she is. She’s sorry they’re going to die, sorry she couldn’t hold him when he wanted to cry like he’d held her when she’d wept. She’s sorry she’s not the woman he wants her to be, and maybe she should be angry instead, but she can’t summon up that spark of emotion. She feels numb already (even without the liquor), as if there should be more here. More between them. More to her.

But there’s only her. Only Lacey.

Only Lacey, and a chipped cup he conjures up with far more reverence than he did the necklace she locked away in her apartment.

“That cup again,” she sighs. But it means something to him, and he avoids her touch rather than crowds her now, and she wants to know what it means (even if it only has to do with Belle). So she tries to be as brave as he thinks she is (or was) and asks, “What is it?”

It just sits there, innocent and white with a few blue accents, that damaged rim the first thing to catch the eye. It doesn’t transform into a magical potion or a weapon that can stop the earthquakes gouging through the town or some key to return everything to normal, to right.

It’s just a cup.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it, she can tell (he meets her eyes with sincerity and his hands have stopped shaking and he’s set his cane aside entirely). “Let’s not fight.”

He hands the cup to her (just like last time, only not, because he lets her pick it up and he doesn’t cradle her hands to ensure she doesn’t drop it). He picks up his own glass, taps it against hers, and Lacey watches him carefully.

She’s not stupid.

Liquor comes in many shapes and sizes, but not usually from a vial similar to many he has locked away in his cabinet.

“It’ll help numb the pain,” he’d said, and she wonders whose pain he means. His? Belle’s? Or hers?

But he’s her Dark One. He’s gentle where he should be vindictive and vulnerable where he should be ruthless and soft where he should be dark. He’s not wild and untamed and dangerous as she thought he was. But he’s Mr. Gold, and he came to visit her in the hospital, and he left her with a kiss she wishes she could repeat, and he wrapped himself up in layers he thought she would like, and he calls her Lacey even when he wants to call her Belle.

And they’re going to die, anyway.

Lacey tips back the cup, and drinks the potion.

The transformation, when it comes, is sudden and complete. One instant, she is Lacey, the next she is Belle, but with all the missing pieces filled in. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe, because what if this disappears? What if she looks to her right and sees Mr. Gold and not Rumplestiltskin?

What if he sees Lacey and not Belle?

But he takes one look at her (just one, and she remembers just one glance from him, years ago, before he pointed his finger at her and named her his price). One look, and his molten brown eyes turn liquid and his face crumples (he’s crying, and she remembers calling him back to her in a library and watching him try to hide his tears). One look, and already she’s crying, too, her very soul aching with all that has occurred and all that has happened and all she was not there for. She promised him she would be waiting when he came back.

But she wasn’t.

“Belle,” he says, and it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard (she remembers a hundred Belles, a dozen sweethearts, a handful of darlings, a scant few dearies, and too many Laceys; none of them sounded this open, this vulnerable, this needy). He’s here, and so is she—he fought for her. He didn’t give up and he came for her and he tried. He kept her close, kept her safe, kept her whole, brought her back, and she has rarely doubted his love, but she never will again.

Because he’s the one waiting for her to come back to him.

Her hands are reaching for him already. He’s warm and whole beneath her touch (he’s bleeding all over her and this pawnshop, pricked full of invisible wounds, his heart gushing out lifeblood), trembling and shaking and quivering, and he is something more than Rumplestiltskin and deeper than Mr. Gold and frailer than the Dark One.

But still hers.

“Rumple,” she tries to say, and names have power, but they are nothing next to touch. Nothing next to the feel of his lips welcoming hers, his arm encompassing her, his hand on her shoulder, his tears mixed with hers, his breath as necessary as oxygen. This is power. This is magic. This is love.

The kiss doesn’t last long enough (eternity wouldn’t be long enough; she remembers asking for it, though). But she’s still touching him, and he’s still holding her close, so it’s enough.

But not for him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says brokenly. His eyes hold all the loneliness and grief he’s been fighting off for centuries—with spinning, with planning, with deal-making, with darkness. His masks are gone, obliterated, crumbled away into nothing, and there is only a bereft father, a man, standing before her. He’s hollowed out and empty, and she’s his only lifeline, and she holds him as tightly as she can (so he doesn’t slip away from her; so she doesn’t slip away from him). “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up to die. But I needed you.”

“You lost your son,” she breathes (and she remembers a man, fierce and angry and brave, wrestling Rumplestiltskin away from a docile Dr. Whale).

He freezes. Still. Vulnerable. Oh so very fragile.

Her hand caresses a path from the top of his hair to the side of his face to his neck. Gentle. Soft. Reaffirming. (Possessive, taking back what Lacey—Regina—tried to steal from her.)

“I’m so sorry,” she says, because she didn’t even get a chance to know Baelfire and he knew only Lacey and he never got to realize his father was still there, trapped behind the vestiges of the Dark One. Rumplestiltskin came all this way for him (sent her away and almost drove her away again, all for the sake of his son), but there will never be any closure. Never be forgiveness or atonement. Never be restoration, and how can she not weep for him, for them both?

She touches him, this broken man she’s fallen in love with so many times, and she feels his heart break (and how many times can a heart break before there is nothing left but fine dust even magic can’t repair with a wave of a hand?).

There are no words for this, but she doesn’t need to heal him. She doesn’t need to make him stop grieving. She just needs to be here. To hold him. To love him. To grieve with him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

The Dark One is immortal and powerful enough to destroy an entire world, unable to be contained or bottled or caged. But Rumplestiltskin is a man with a heart and a past and a capacity for love so vast and irrevocable that she can only try to live up to it, so she is able to wrap him in her arms, keep him steady in the circle of her love, take his battered and bleeding heart and hold it safe inside her own.

“I’ve failed.” His tiny confession (false and flawed and as wrong as he can sometimes be, but so sincere it weeps for him) flutters its way inside her, writhes deep, and all she can do is turn her face into his neck (her own breath against his pulse point reminding him to keep breathing for her) and hold him harder, tighter, longer. “I’ve failed.”

More than anything, she wishes she could take his tears and his loss and his guilt and heal them, show him the man she sees in him, erase this fractured self-image of his with a brush of her lips, with no more than her mouth covering his, warmth and pressure and heat combining with the truest of loves to break his most disabling curse of all.

But she can’t.

So she holds him, and she strokes him, and she lets her tears fall on his neck, and she feels her heart beat in time with his, and she hopes with everything she has that her touch affects him as deeply as his does hers.

He conjures up a coat for her, beautiful and long and concealing—but most importantly, all Belle. Lacey’s somewhere deep inside her, Belle thinks, hidden and restrained and seeping away into the cracks. The darkest, ugliest, flimsiest parts of herself, and she does not like knowing what lies in the shadows of her own soul, even if they are fading already, muted and dimmed. But she looks at Rumplestiltskin, and she wonders if his curse simply brought out the darkest, ugliest, flimsiest parts of him, if he’s been living with them staring back at him every time he looks at his reflection for untold centuries (and maybe that’s why he hates himself, because he’s forgotten all but the wickedest facets of his character; maybe that’s why he can’t look in a mirror without cringing and turning away or shattering it into a million pieces).

“The people who triggered the failsafe have holed up at the harbor,” he says, standing there before her with the coat still in his hands, a bright splash of color against the black of his suit. “If Emma and her family have managed to stop the destruction of Storybrooke, as it seems, then I imagine that’s where they’ll be.”

Truth, in Rumplestiltskin’s case, is often about what remains unsaid, and Belle hasn’t failed to notice that ever since he gathered himself up enough to step away from her and collected his cane to walk outside (to see why they hadn’t been overtaken by the forest without magic), he’s refused to speak of anything but the royal family and what they must have done to save the remnants of their world.

There’s so much she wants to say in return. So much she wants to bring up and go through and correct (hurtful questions shouted at him in the rain while he knelt before her, so full of pain and terror; a cup hurled across the room, heedless of his own heartache; a rendezvous in an alley with a sheriff who once offered to buy her for an hour; laughing encouragement of violence and dismissive scorn of his gentleness). But he is grieving and his mask is paper-thin and she doesn’t know if she should risk him losing it again.

There’s a wall between them. A barrier that’s never been there before. The memory of being strangers. The memory of one of them being a stranger and the other one not. The memory…no, just memories. Memories standing between them so that she’s afraid to speak at all and he’s afraid to move forward and hand her the coat.

Always before, she’s been the brave one. But she’s never hurt him so badly before.

He swallows, then he sets the cane aside and steps forward (and he is oh so very brave, for her), offers her the coat. “Here,” he says softly. “If you’ll have it.”

A small smile creases her lips, because she remembers that. “Why, thank you,” she replies, and his own smile (faint, pale, an echo of a past action) emboldens her. She matches his step forward and turns so he can help her into the coat. It’s warm and soft, but it cannot compete with the feel of his hands, fingers brushing against her arms, her shoulders, as he slips the garment on her, his palms resting against her shoulders when he’s done. She leans back into him, and she’s never done this before, but it feels familiar (Lacey leaned back when he clasped a diamond necklace around her throat).

“Belle,” he whispers (her name thrums with blatant power that makes her eyes flutter shut). “I love you.”

She wants to weep. She wants to laugh. All she can do is turn and throw her arms around him and place a quick, shuddering kiss to his mouth. “I love you, Rumplestiltskin,” she replies (and this has always before been a confession, a bold move, but now it’s a reply, because he said it first). “Forever,” she adds, but that only sounds like an echo of Lacey, not of their long ago deal, so she says, “In any world, in every world, I love you.”

He doesn’t believe her (he never does). His lips quirk (his eyes still haunted) and he places a warm kiss on her brow, but he doesn’t say anything. She wants to tell him that her heart broke when a trapped and tired nobody heard his dying confession over the phone. She wants to tell him that Lacey drank the potion because she wanted to make him happy. She wants to tell him that it’s easy to love him and that she’s fallen in love with him a dozen times—a hundred, over and over again, in a Dark Castle and a stately house, in Sherwood Forest and the forest around a well, in two libraries, in a dungeon and Granny’s Diner, in his pawnshop and his carriage.

She wants to tell him she’s sorry she hurt him (sorry she became the weapon she vowed she’d never be, the chain that tied him down and distracted him from his son).

But Baelfire is gone, and that is far more important than any apology she can make.

So she smiles at him and tilts her head until he bends his own to kiss her again, lips familiar and sweet against hers (Lacey was right—the feel of him does overwhelm and consume her, and it’s all hers, for he ensured that Lacey had no part in it). “I love you,” she says again, and maybe that will be enough to cover everything else, to salve the wounds she inflicted.

His smile, this time, is a bit more real.

She wraps her hands around his elbow, clings tight, paces her steps in time with his, and it reminds her of a walk to a town line. Reminds her of a walk away from a bar on a dark evening. Memories converge and mingle, linear except in how they tangle and snarl one against another, Lacey’s self-interest clashing with Belle’s selflessness, carelessness contrasted against courage, Lacey’s hunger for excitement a dark shadow of Belle’s own thirst for adventure.

Her breath comes short and stuttered, because she doesn’t want to be Lacey, to be so insular, so wrapped up in herself that she’s heedless of the hurts and the strengths and the needs of someone else, so bold and thoughtless that she moves from one thing to the next without any forethought or planning, without common sense or integrity. It’s not her, but it must be, because she can feel those inclinations inside her now, lying in wait, ready to insinuate themselves ever more deeply into her conscious mind.

“Belle,” Rumplestiltskin says, and she’s not sure if he has something to say or if he only senses her distress and wants to reassure her he’s there.

And he is here. At her side. Head tilted toward her. A heated, solid presence walking with a tap-step-step as familiar to her as an imp’s dancing prowl once was.

“Rumple,” she replies, and she stops. They’re in a hurry, rushing to the harbor so he can find out what happened to save the town and banish the encroaching forest and return the streets and buildings to normal—but he hurries more out of habit than real curiosity, wants to know because collecting knowledge is just what he does. There’s no real urgency, no immediacy, because he’s adrift in a sea without purpose or goal or direction. Baelfire is gone, and she can see the desolation in his eyes, hear it in his voice, feel it in the desperate neediness of his every touch (needing something to hold onto, someone to hold him back). Baelfire is gone, and he has no reason to hurry, no reason to care, no reason to keep going.

When she turns to face him (keeping hold of his arm because it’s impossible to even contemplate letting go), he matches her move, action and reaction, mirror images of one another.

“Rumple,” she says again, because his name is easy and apologies are hard and they are both so close to collapsing should the wrong word escape her (wounds and scars and hurts riddle them both so full of holes that she’s afraid they will crumple and fall to the ground any second now).

She wants to tell him it will be all right (but how can she when his son is dead and they cannot change that?). She wants to convince him she truly does love him (but how can she hope to succeed when it’s taken the Queen—taken Lacey—only days to undo the decades of inroads Belle has made on his heart?). She wants to throw herself in his arms and cling to him and beg him to reassure her that the terrible things she did and said and thought as Lacey (and she hates the very name) aren’t truly part of her and that they were just cruel, clever snares planted so cunningly within her by the evil Queen (but how can she ask that of him when he tries so hard not to lie to her?).

So in the end, she can only hold onto him and step close enough so that only the starkly contrasting colors of their coats can tell where she ends and he begins (blue against black, skies and seas against shadows and starless space). In the end, she can only let out a little of what she feels, say a fraction of what she thinks.

“I didn’t…I’m not her,” she stammers. “Our cup, and magic, and it’s not the wrong people that you know,” (because out of every memory, this matters the most, that he might think her the wrong person for him to know, that he might think she does not truly care for him so long as he has his magic) “and magic isn’t what drives me away. I mean…you won’t lose me.” (An ineffectual promise, she knows, when he already has lost her, again and again and again, and for a man who’s been so deeply hurt before, a man who thinks he will always be abandoned and left behind, she is astonished and awed and amazed that he is willing to open his heart to her again.) “I do love you, Rumplestiltskin, and names don’t change that.”

“Shh, shh.” His hand comes up, between them, fingers brush against her lips, stilling her mass of unintelligible words. “Belle, sweetheart, this isn’t you. Regina did this to you. You are the woman in the hospital, who offered to help and were happy I didn’t die. You are the woman standing here, apologizing for something I should be sorry for—for not protecting you, for letting this happen. For not being able to fix it.” He looks away, but only for a second, an instant (hiding his regret, his guilt, somewhere shallow and close, an unfilled grave occupied mostly by Baelfire). Then his eyes return to hers and she does not understand how she could not have loved him immediately, at the first glimpse of these worn and haunted, tender and sweet eyes. “What happened was regrettable,” he adds, awkwardly. “But you’re here, you’re all right, that’s what matters.”

“You didn’t give up,” she tells him, and here, finally, are the right words. Benediction and forgiveness and approval all at once, and her eyes shine with fervent light as she smiles up at him. “You love me, and…you fought for me.”

The right corner of his mouth turns up slightly but it doesn’t reach his eyes (the expression he gives when he wants to smile but cannot quite remember how). “Yes, well…”

Little words that mean nothing. A message garbled and unclear. Monosyllabic words and shifting, sliding glances full of dark desires and shadowed regrets. But he’s the deal-maker, the spinner of words, the imp who can play and twist and mold them into presentations and temptations and misdirections—so that he cannot find words with her, that he cannot use them as he always does with others…that means more than pretty speeches and flowery declarations of love ever could.

They begin walking again, side by side, steps matched. The sea is audible now, waves in the distance, salt scenting the air, and then, very quietly, Rumplestiltskin says, “You were worth it. You are worth it.”

And he can find the right words after all, sometimes, at the perfect moment, the most beautiful instant (can touch her so deeply with the things he says only to her; and she remembers a phone-call and a dying confession and his constant, protective presence at Lacey’s side even while his son was in town).

Belle blinks away tears, and sets her brow to his shoulder, and knows that they will be all right (they will heal and move forward and one day not be so broken and bent and misshapen). His breath stirring her hair, the ripple of his arm tightening beneath her hand, the smile finally beginning to reach his eyes, these are more restorative than any number of magic potions or fairy wands.

“Belle,” he breathes (prayer and salvation and plea, and all of it making her heart dance shyly in her chest), and that word is the most powerful of all, for with it, he says everything she needs to hear.

Her hand slides down, and she weaves her fingers through his.

“Rumple,” she replies. And it is enough.

“You’re not coming back. Are you?” The question escapes her, and she knows the answer already, because it’s there in his eyes, in the way he avoids her gaze, in his hands fallen away from hers. It’s there in the spell he has already prepared for her, the words of goodbye he spoke so quickly, the explanations he spilled at her and David’s feet.

His son is gone, and so is he.

Belle wants to weep. She wants to scream and cry and shout and take him by the shoulders and shake him until he realizes that she needs him, she wants him, she loves him and forever is more than a word.

But his son is gone, and he is lost and desolate, and he is also brave and noble—everything she has always wanted to be; everything she has always seen in him—and how can she tie him back now when she has always refused to do so before?

She wants to run back to town, give the cloaking spell and the instructions to the first person she meets, and then rush back here. She wants to jump aboard this pirate ship that holds only bad memories and now carries the two who populate her nightmares (a Queen with a cage and a prison cell and mocking laughter; a pirate with a hook and a gun and dead vengeance in his eyes), wants to cling to Rumplestiltskin’s side and prove to him that she is here for him and she will not leave him and she can be his reason to live, to come back, to learn to smile again.

But his son is dead, and all that’s left to him is the search for atonement.

“He’s gone,” he tells her (and even now, there is a note of awful confusion, bewilderment, as if he cannot fathom an existence without his Baelfire), “and I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.”

She wants to tell him that the man who was brave enough to come rushing to Dr. Whale’s defense, the man who wrapped his arms around Rumplestiltskin (when he could have shouted at him, could have pointed a weapon at him, could have simply knocked him aside, could have done anything but chose instead to put his arms around his father) to keep him from darkness, the man who berated him for avoiding him—that man was good and whole and he would want Rumplestiltskin to live. He would not want his father to die, to leave behind everyone who still loves him and seek redemption in death.

But she remembers looking into Rumplestiltskin’s eyes when their cup lay in shards at his feet and his heart lay crumpled and bleeding in his chest. She remembers brushing past him in an alley when his shock and his grief and his bitter resignation (and of them all, she hates that look the most) were scrawled all across his features. She remembers hurting him, cutting him to ribbons and smiling at him so beguilingly all the while. She remembers desolation in his gaze and bereavement in his posture and loss consuming his soul.

So she places her hands on his shoulders (to hold onto him, to store up another memory for the coming days of loneliness, to keep him here with her for just one more fleeting moment), and she says, “I understand. But I also know that the future isn’t always what it seems.”

Once, she thought she traded away all hope of happiness in return for her family’s survival.

Once, she thought she would never see her beloved Rumplestiltskin again.

Once, she thought she had failed in her desperate desire to mean more to him than magic.

Once, she thought she was lost and alone and afraid and the only future for her was a basement cell.

Once, she thought she would be happy with lust and dark affection and the thrill of excitement.

But here she is now, and she is alive and free and with the man she loves, and she refuses to believe that this is all there is.

She has hope. She always has hope, and if there is one thing she can give him (if he can no longer trust her love, thanks to a kiss that brought no memories and a shattered cup and a flirtatious reflection of herself; if he cannot see the light, because his son broke his heart and rejected him and died all before he could make amends), it is the capacity to hope. The ability to look into the future and see more than darkness and shadows and horrors.

His son is dead, but she is still here, and she will not let him go.

She will drop her hands (in a moment, when she has summoned her strength and what bravery she has left to her), and she will walk away (so she does not have to watch him sail out of her world; as brave as he thinks she is, she has not yet been able to be the one to watch him leave), and she will do as he asked (because it is a good task, a noble goal, and he trusts her to do it and that means something), and she will wait for him (and this time, she will be there, for him, when he returns).

She will do as he wishes and stay behind.

But she will not let him go.

He’s hers. He was hers the instant she gave him her forever, the moment he first put his hand on her waist and escorted her into their future. He was hers when he did not punish her for releasing his prisoner and he smiled at her hug. He was hers when he first told her of his son and let her go free. He was hers when she came back and her kiss brought what she saw in him to the surface. He was hers when he kissed her and brought her home and gave her a second library and smiled at the picnic she made him and let her sleep curled up next him on a couch. He’s hers, and she will never give him up.

She wants to tell him all of these things (release the great, boiling surge of emotion and determination and grief seething within her, threatening to carry her away), but she can’t. There are too many words, and it will take a lifetime to say them all, and both of them are near to shattering, so in the end, she only tells him the most important thing of all.

“I will see you again,” she promises him.

And finally (so soon, so incredibly soon after all she has done to him), he remembers how to smile. A watery, weak smile shining faintly through tears. But it is a smile, and this, too, is hers, for her alone.

And he pulls her forward, and she presses toward him, and then, so very terribly late, she gives him the kiss she’s been waiting to give him since standing on opposite sides of a town line. He holds on desperately, possessively, and she matches him, move for move, thought for thought—and she is Belle, not Lacey, but they are matched anyway, dark shadows shot through with light, magic grounded to reality, space and stars next to clouds and blue skies, contrasted one against the other but so very similar, neither one possible without the other.

If she could freeze time, in that moment, with his lips so warm and insistent on hers and her form held secure and safe against his, she would. She would freeze it and she would stay there for days, for weeks, for months, long enough to memorize his every move, his every breath, his every inch of skin, his every layer.

But she is only a single ordinary woman, and eventually she has to pull away.

His brow rests against hers, for just a moment, but it is enough.

Because he’s not letting go either.

So she is strong (because he was strong enough to face Lacey, over and over again). And she is brave (because he was brave enough to keep coming for her in the hospital). And she walks away (because he walked away to find his son, but he came back, and one day, he will again).

Her shoulders shake with sobs, her cheeks are wet with tears, her heart is cracked down the middle, but she is wrapped in the coat he gave her, and there was the barest sliver of hope in his eyes when she dared to stop long enough to tell him that his son would be proud of him, and even if he is gone, he still touches her.

It’s enough, for now, until the day he returns and takes her once more into his arms.

And then, she decides, she will wrap him in her arms and she will never walk away again, because she knows only one thing for a certainty.

He’s hers.

Chapter Text

With the dwarfs’ help, Belle enacts Rumplestiltskin’s protection spell. The Blue Fairy offers her support, Ruby helps steady her wearied stumble when Belle abruptly finds herself with no purpose, and Granny invites her back for a warm dinner. She accepts, thinking she doesn’t want to be alone, but can only manage a few bites before she feels the tears rising up inside her, a tide called to fullness by Rumplestiltskin’s absence.

She misses him already, a soul-deep void sucking her dry. She misses him and she feels as if she is grieving him even before he is dead (because he will find another way, of course he will, he always does; if there is one thing she has always comforted herself with, it is his immortality), and no one around her can understand. No one else in all this town, this compressed world, mourns his absence and his coming sacrifice.

She is alone.

After thanking Granny for the dinner and Ruby for the company, after waving Grumpy back to his drinks and Anton back to his game with his new brothers, Belle heads for the library. She pulls herself slowly up the stairs to her apartment, and finds herself frozen in place at the door, staring toward the staircase that leads up to the clock tower.

She and Rumplestiltskin had planned the dagger’s hiding place together. In fact, even before their hamburger date, when the library was new and he came by with a list of repairmen for the moldy wall in the back corner, she’d asked about the tower, he’d shown her the place, and then, staring out at the town through the inverted clock face, Belle remembers how he paused and said, “There wouldn’t be a safer place.”

“What?” she asked.

“Hidden in plain sight, clear as the nose on their faces, no one would think to look here. And if they did…you would notice.”

She hadn’t known what he was talking about, until he’d explained. Not that it was the first time she’d heard of the dagger (that was in her cell in the Queen’s palace, when a pirate came to call and left her with a bruise, but even then, before she knew who Jones was, she’d known better than to tell that story to Rumplestiltskin). But it was the first time Rumplestiltskin told her about the dagger, as if, now that she knew about his son, every other secret was paltry—including the one about how to enslave him. Or kill him.

Belle had loved planning the dagger’s hiding place, suggesting misleading clues that would help highlight any would-be Dark Ones before they got anywhere near the clock tower. She and Rumplestiltskin had laughed together over their makeshift map and clumsy signs spelled out so loud and clear. He hadn’t liked her carrying a clue on her own person, but Belle insisted (she would always be his weakest point, but for once, she could use it as a good thing), and all the time, she’d been breathless, giddy, so utterly delighted that even after sneaking from his house, after nearly pushing him away entirely, he still trusted her so absolutely (maybe she didn’t know his every secret, but she knew the two most important, and both had been given her freely, voluntarily, trustingly).

And what good had any of it done? Cora had gotten the dagger anyway, and all while Belle was sitting drugged and useless in a hospital room. (He took the dagger with him to Neverland, she knows, and why shouldn’t he, when she is powerless to guard it for him? He cannot trust her anymore, not with Lacey as the shadow behind her.)

Though she’s tempted to go up and see what mess was left behind in the clock tower, Belle instead goes into her apartment. Inside, everything is as she left it so many weeks before but colder, with a brutal draft. The outfits she’d deliberated over for Archie’s funeral are still spread over her wardrobe, her bed is still rumpled, a thin layer of dust lays over her books, and there are two teacups sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch. She hadn’t been able to bear putting them away, erasing every reminder of that night Rumplestiltskin held her so close and whispered that he was there.

Belle backs up against the door and drops her keys to the floor. They aren’t even her keys. She had to go to Rumplestiltskin’s shop and find his set just so she could get home. The sight of Lacey’s purse still sitting in the backroom, the chipped cup sitting on the table where she’d placed it before Rumplestiltskin cried on her shoulder, it had nearly undone her. But this…the stale air of this tiny home he gifted her, the weeks she can tell it has been empty, the hopes she once had for this place all withered and left to be crushed underfoot…it breaks her.

Sliding down to the floor, Belle curls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, buries her face in her skirt (Lacey’s skirt) and sobs.

Her blue coat, newly conjured, smells of magic and straw and Rumple. It chokes in her throat, tears at the lump lodged there, and makes it impossible to breathe (impossible to get another whiff of that smell she already misses).

She never again wants to see Lacey’s apartment (probably conjured by the Queen, dust-free and shimmering with new magic), or remember that persona and what she did to Rumplestiltskin, but beneath the coat, Belle can feel the tight constraints of Lacey’s dress.

A sudden rush of purpose flares like fire in her veins and Belle leaps to her feet. Scrabbling at her coat, she lets it drop to the couch, and then, heedless of how it rips at her fingernails, careless of the cold, Belle twists and pries until she can strip Lacey’s dress from her. The diamond necklace, unseated, falls back against her collarbone, and Belle freezes.

The necklace. When she runs her fingers over the cold stones, she thinks of Rumplestiltskin’s expression as he conjured it out of thin air. Or rather, summoned it up. Belle used to dust this very same necklace back in the Dark Castle. In fact, she remembers nightmares, back before she’d run from his house and his bed, of him gifting it to her and putting her aside to dust just like another collected object. Instead, he gifted it to Lacey, who cooed over its expense and delighted in wearing such obvious power as an everyday accessory.

Carefully, with shaking fingers, Belle unclasps the necklace. She finds a box in the kitchen, one that used to hold teabags, and stows the necklace inside. She has no doubt that there’s some spell woven through the diamonds, protection or location or communication, but it’s for Lacey and Belle has enough gifts of her own from her Dark One.

After a shower where Belle washes away every trace of Lacey’s perfume, makeup, touch (and Rumplestiltskin’s, his last kiss, the caress of his fingers, the tears he shed onto her neck), she finds one of the nightgowns Rumplestiltskin gave her. It’s soft against her skin, but Belle hardly notices. Instead, she retrieves the blue coat, wraps it around her shoulders, and curls onto the couch. Though she presses her spine against the back of the couch and does her best to pretend that it’s Rumplestiltskin’s chest, though she tries to imagine the arms of the coat are his, she can never forget his absence.

He's gone.

He’s gone to die.

And he left her behind.

(And she can’t blame him.)

Belle weeps all night long, and in the morning, after dressing in her librarian clothes (after clasping a bracelet made of his gold thread around her wrist, one of his gifts just for Belle), she locks the apartment door behind her, takes her suitcase of clothes and books, and heads for Rumplestiltskin’s house.

(He might have left her, but she will never again leave him.)

Those first few days, all Belle has are her memories. She divides her time between the library and the shop, in one place seeking consolation and in the other searching for a solution (which is which changes from day to day, sometimes moment to moment).

At first, the townspeople come to her for answers, for solutions, for plans. They are confused about whether there are still enemies seeking to tear Storybrooke to pieces, wondering if they are going back to their old land or if they are simply going to die, curious about where their self-appointed leaders have gone. But eventually, after she clears up what she can and they begin to realize that the Dark One isn’t going to materialize from the back of the shop (as Belle finds it harder and harder each day to wash away the traces of her tears, the proof that she’s been left behind as surely as they have), when the hours turn to days and still there is no sign of any outsiders gathering at the town line, they stop coming. Stop asking questions. Stop expecting anything of her.

Like she does in every world, Belle fades into the background.

For once, she doesn’t mind. She feels faded. Half-complete. Withered and shrunk and grown so transparent that there’s hardly anything left of her.

Determinedly, she buries herself in books and pretends she’ll find something (anything) to help her (to get Rumplestiltskin back, to convince him that dying won’t help anything, to convince herself that there’s anything at all she can do to erase the darkest parts of herself so she can be as good and pure and brave as he thinks her to be).

Instead, she mostly cries. Takes notes she can’t read when she comes back to them. Shuffles back to Rumplestiltskin’s house and tries to keep his smell from dissipating as the days pile up behind her. And she remembers.

Or better yet, she tries to forget.

She remembers the Dark Castle (she tries to forget how she left it).

She remembers their reunion (she tries to forget the lies and the lack of faith).

She remembers their hamburger dates and their interrupted picnics and their evenings together (she tries to forget that he and Lacey shared chicken parmesan, that he poured her drinks in the backroom, that she laughed to see him dark and stood by and did nothing while his heart shattered).

She remembers (she forgets) and she tries to stay busy.

But none of it matters because he’s gone (forever) and their deal is no longer in effect (he promised, he promised, that all her loved ones would be safe) and there is no end in sight to her misery.

And yet, she cannot give up hope. He depends on her to always see the good. She is used to always depending on a happier result. (Lacey wouldn’t, and so Belle has to, because Lacey is not who she is.)

As the days stretch to weeks, Belle begins to believe that hope is all that is left to her.

(She tries to forget that hope is disappointed more often than it’s fulfilled.)

Even between books, Belle has plenty of time to think back on all their (oh so few) times together. Time enough and more than to replay each carefully chosen word, each breathless hey, every whispered admission and all the speechless silences. Time to relive all the touches between them. In fact, some nights, she curls up in the blue coat in his bed (or in his suit coats, though she doles these out sparingly, afraid that one day none of them will smell like him any longer and she will have nothing left to hold so close) and does nothing but remember.

His arm around her waist as he escorted her from her home to the Dark Castle (more her home than any other, his and hers all mingled and mixed together in the useful trophies and the uncovered windows, merged in the two teacups, one chipped, one whole, both matching).

The tentative, friendly touches she offered in her desperate, determined bid not to live out her forever alone and friendless.

The hugs even she never expected but which he just seemed to need (even without knowing) and that she wanted, and since he never pushed her away (never acted anything but struck and disbelieving, as if she had invented hugs for the first time in history), it became easier and easier to offer them.

Until it became too dangerous to do. Until even the merest brush of their fingers over an offered teacup left her shaking and breathless.

She remembers their first kiss, how she set it up and initiated it, but also how he leaned down, leaned in (yearning, as always) to complete it.

With him gone, maybe never to return (though he will, of course he will; even if he doesn’t believe it, she does, because that’s what he needs of her above all: to hope and believe and trust when he can’t, constrained by darkness and centuries of habit), she doesn’t care to think on how that kiss ended, or on his next scared, panicked touches (they resembled anger, of course, because that’s what he pretends to when terror wells up in him, and Belle doesn’t blame him for that—how could she, when she herself masks her fear in impulsiveness that has hurt him just as badly as his anger has her?). She doesn’t let herself ponder on the years absent of touch, of kisses, of hope and conversation and the steps of their strange, beautiful dance.

Instead, she remembers a blank girl coming into his shop with frayed hope and desperate resolve. She remembers the awe in his eyes when he saw her and the tenderness in his touch as he reached out to check that she was real. The overwhelming relief and joy as he fell into her, around her, and promised her his protection, a promise sealed with his own tears.

As Belle savors these memories (her own again, strong and vibrant and so much more than the faded remnants of Lacey), she realizes something she probably should have noticed a long time ago.

She remembers that he touched her in his shop, that he hugged her there; and even in the woods, with his name still echoing between them, he opened his arms to her and pulled her close, cupped her cheek in his warm hand and curled his fingers around her arm. At the well, he clasped her elbow, tugged her near, wrapped his arm around her while magic poured into the town and granted him a feeling of safety.

Even after, with a slippery promise and her own clumsy bargaining, it was he who embraced her, who bent to kiss her (a kiss that brought the last slumbering bits of herself to sudden, chaotic life). He who tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow to lead her back to town, brushed her hair out of her face when he gave her new clothes. At home, an argument and a renewed promise in their wake, he was close, always reaching out, never forcing contact but seeking it nonetheless. At breakfast, over her constant questions that he answered so patiently, he was always turned toward her, always ready to reach for her.

But in later memories, in the moments she has saved until now to linger over, when he’s been gone so long and has never seemed so far away (even in the Queen’s cell, he was closer because she took comfort in knowing he was free and powerful and in control; that he could come tearing through the door at any moment), she realizes that since those early days, he’s never, not even once, reached for her first. He never gave more than he received. Never took more than she broadcast openly that she wanted to give.

So many memories (too few to store up for an entire lifetime apart, but so many more than she often thought they’d have a chance to make) of him standing in obvious disbelief as she stepped toward him (instead of away like everyone else in his life). Of his lips twitching in that oh-so-faint but oh-so-sincere smile when she took his hand or invited him close. His hands mirroring her in reaching out and his lips so patiently waiting for hers to find them (to dare kiss the monster even though she now knows there will be no True Love cure).

Even as Lacey (she skims these memories quickly, because though they make her fall even more in love with Rumplestiltskin, they make her doubt everything she has ever believed to be inherently true about herself), he was tentative, cautious until he realized that she (that warped, distorted version of herself) wanted him to reach out and take. And for all the times he pulled her close, urged her steps to match his, kept her (safe and protected) inside the circle of his own arms, he never kissed her. Never pushed any boundaries he’d thought Belle (the real, true herself buried under what she sincerely hopes was a personality written entirely by the Evil Queen) would set for them.

(Never dared test their love and find once more that she didn’t love him enough to wake her from her curse. Never risked her screaming and pushing him off her and throwing their cup against the wall. Never believed that he could be the answer to anything in her life, only the problem.)

Such reverence. Such tentativeness. Such shy, uncertain kisses that melted her heart and leave her breathless even in pale, inadequate memory. Such patience as he followed her lead in every moment, never again acting of his own desire without first checking hers.

And Belle can trace all his hesitation back to one definitive moment: standing in the mines with too many people clustered around them, all of them unabashedly watching. Adrenaline singing in her veins, fear disguised as rash decisiveness, her father with eyes free of guilt, of shame, of grief from what he knew (should have known if he knew her at all) would happen. And Rumplestiltskin reaching out (even while surrounded by people who’d be more than willing to take advantage of any vulnerability) and immediately, unhesitatingly pulling her into a hug.

And Belle…her own hands pushing him away.

He’s ever been gentle and awed with her, disbelieving that she could want him, but after that (after a final caress farewell in a new library), he took to following her lead entirely. Never initiating, never assuming, never careless with his affection because, she realizes so belatedly, he was never certain that he’d be welcome.

She’d hurt him, there in that mine when she pushed him off of her, hurt him without even knowing it, without ever realizing the extent of it, and never even thought to heal that wound once they were comfortable enough again for hamburgers and picnics and freely exchanged kisses.

Belle nearly keens aloud as she remembers their farewell on that cursed ship’s gangplank, when he stared and waited and kissed her back only when her lips were already on his.

He left thinking that each kiss is a gift she benevolently grants him. Thinking each touch she allows is a thing she decides to accept or reject moment by moment. He left to die not knowing that she needs him, craves his touch and longs for his kisses and would die without his caresses. He thinks he is living out his last days, and he left willingly to make that sacrifice, and she thought it was all because Baelfire is dead, but some of that is on her, too.

Lacey wasn’t the only one to strike him a mortal blow.

He has to live, Belle thinks with renewed determination. He has to come back, so she can convince him that she was wrong, she was reckless and rash and careless. So she can make up for it and touch him enough that he finally believes (finally knows, without a shadow of a doubt) that she loves him. For real. Forever.

Archie asks her if she misses him (as if it isn’t written so clearly across every molecule of her being), but he calls him Mr. Gold and has to speak quietly to avoid drawing anyone else’s attention.

Everyone here is happy Rumplestiltskin is gone. Oh, some of them miss the others, the royal couple and the Savior, but since the Dark One and the Evil Queen, not to mention the pirate who caused so much trouble in his brief time here, are also gone, they all seem to consider it a fair trade. Belle tries hard not to hold this against them, though she’s had to beg off the last few times Leroy wanted to spend time with her just to avoid his muttered comments.

Still, Archie is the first to ask her. The first to address the fact that she is wasting away.

Every day, Belle gets up with the dawn, wipes away the traces of her tears and her nightmares, and she gets dressed. Always an outfit Rumplestiltskin provided for her, never less than perfectly put together, because that’s what Rumplestiltskin did, all those long centuries when he was heartbroken and bereaved. He cloaked himself in power and leather, in suited armor, and he went out to do battle with the world (and only Belle was allowed to see how much that façade cost him). If he could manage not to fall apart in three hundred years, Belle can do the same for these (few, please, please just few) weeks that he is gone.

(Besides, each day, she convinces herself this will be the day he returns, and if it is, she wants him to see Belle, not a blank slate, not Lacey, not anyone but the woman who loves him well enough and true enough to break any curse he might bear.)

So she knows she looks as if she is fine. But she can’t swallow any food that makes it to her mouth (particularly hamburgers; for all she keeps ordering them to remember the happy gleam in his eye when he held up a ketchup bottle and did his best to seem romantic and harmless for her sake). She can barely even steep tea without breaking down into tears, let alone drink it.

And it scares her. Of course it does. She’s becoming translucent, faded, a mere reflection of herself (but who will show up stronger in the mirror? Belle, or Lacey?). Rumplestiltskin left her behind because he wanted her to be safe (because he would never bear to let her so close to the Evil Queen who locked her away and the pirate who used a gun he’d never fired before to erase her), and Belle is safe, but she is not well.

She can’t be well. Not without Rumplestiltskin.

“I just…I wish I was able to help him,” she says (she adds something about Henry, about the town, but it is him who fills her every waking thought).

“You’re a hero,” Archie says, and it’s everything she’s ever wanted to be and everything she isn’t.

(Lacey convinced Rumplestiltskin to beat a man to within an inch of his life, kept him from his son so that Baelfire died without his papa, convinced Rumplestiltskin to kill his own grandson.

Lacey was a villain, and parts of her are inside Belle, and now Rumplestiltskin knows it. Every time he sees her, he will see, not the hero who believes in him, but another villain convinced he can do nothing but fail to the darkest parts of himself.)

“You kept the bad guys out,” Archie tells her.

“What bad guys?” Belle asks.

And only then, with the question aired between them, does Belle realize what has been slowly fermenting inside of her.

The truth.

Rumplestiltskin doesn’t need her.

He doesn’t want her.

He left her behind because she is useless to him, because all she does is make him weak, because Belle rejected him and Lacey hurt him and his son is dead (and Belle never even got to meet Baelfire, never got to see him with her own eyes).

He left her behind with an excuse (the kind she of course would fall for; he knows, doesn’t he, just how far she will go to try to be the hero) and a farewell, and he told her not to expect him back, and only now does Belle let herself realize that he does not want to come back because there is no longer anything he wants here.

“I wasn’t on that ship because he doesn’t need me,” she tells Archie, and she’s sorry that he looks hurt (she doesn’t regret saving him, of course not, but she was only there to free him from the pirate because she was trying to save Rumplestiltskin from his darkness, never knowing that in only weeks she’d be the one pushing him darker). She’s sorry, but she’s even sorrier that she’s right.

(Rumplestiltskin loved Belle when she was innocent and bright and untouched by any bitterness. He loved her when she was hopeful and forgiving and eager to give him a second and a third and a fourth chance.

But he is ancient and for all his protestations of monstrousness, he wants to be a hero as much as she does, only hates failing even more so he convinces himself of the opposite, and Lacey-inside-Belle is too much like him, and so he cannot love her, not anymore.)

“I beg to differ, sister,” Leroy says from the door.

Belle tenses, already braced for whatever well-meaning insults the grumpy dwarf has about Rumplestiltskin, but when she turns, he is accompanied by a woman who looks, if it weren’t for her legs, like nothing so much as a mermaid.

“I came from Neverland,” she says. “Rumplestiltskin sent me.”

And all of Belle’s anger and bitterness escape like balloons up into the sky, floating higher and higher until they pop and disappear.

“He-he’s alive?” she cries.

(She didn’t realize she thought he was dead already, not when hope was all that kept her up and breathing and trying.)

“Yes,” the mermaid says, “and he wanted me to give you this.”

Belle doesn’t even care what the mermaid places into her hands. She cradles it close, holds it tenderly, caresses it with all the love buoying her up, and even from another world, Rumplestiltskin touches her with his love.

When his face appears in a golden haze, Belle nearly breaks down into sobs.

“Rumple,” she tries to say, sobs instead, and she sees her hand lifting, her fingers itching to caress his beloved face.

She feels nothing. Touches nothing.

But he’s there. He’s speaking to her.

He needs her.

And the cloaking spell was more than an excuse or diversion, she was wrong to have doubted him; he tells her the outsiders were, unknowingly to them, sent by Pan, that they are more dangerous than even he guessed. That’s enough to process on its own, but she forgets it entirely with his next words.

“I can defeat Pan—and live,” he says, and Belle is infused with light as golden as this vision of him.

He can live, if she can be the hero he needs her to be.

Her. Not Lacey. Not anyone else in town. Not another Cora or Regina or Emma. Just Belle.

The strength of their love. As if he believes in it. As if he hasn’t left her behind completely. As if, were they both back in the Enchanted Forest, he would accept her kiss now to break his curse.

Belle is filled with absolute determination. She will let nothing stand in her way—not the time it takes to find his hiding spot (keyed by their chipped cup, the talisman he’s preserved and saved and remade and cherished nearly as much as she cherishes him), not the two men who show up with a gun to try to steal Rumplestiltskin’s salvation, and not even her own compassion.

“Tell Rumple to try to save Wendy if he can,” she tells Ariel on the beach, the cold wind cutting through her. “But more than that, just…tell him to come back to me.”

It’s not what a hero would say. It’s very nearly a betrayal of what she promised John and Michael. But Belle’s fingertips burn with the urge to touch Rumplestiltskin again. Her heart longs for him in a way it didn’t even in Regina’s cell—there, she had only a glimpse of what it might be to be loved by Rumplestiltskin. Now, she knows and she will do anything to get that back.

She’s willing to do anything, but what she’s required to do is…wait. And wait some more. And some more.

Belle makes herself eat (not hamburgers; she’ll share those with him when he returns), and she cleans his shop from top to bottom. She tidies his home and unpacks her things in amongst his own. She walks the shoreline every day, watching the horizon.

Occasionally, she fancies that she can feel something: a twinge in her heart like terror. A yearning tug. Small flares of buried pain being unearthed. She tells herself it’s her imagination, but she wonders. There’s a reason they say that true love is the most powerful magic of all. Despite the realms that divide them, Belle thinks that maybe, if Rumplestiltskin finally accepts that she loves him, if she believes in him without doubts, maybe their True Love is powerful enough to transcend time and space.

But then…that means he is terrified. That he yearns for something (for her?). That his darkest, deepest nightmares are being brought out into the open.

The dwarfs occasionally keep her company. Archie walks with her, Pongo dancing around them in the waves (it reminds her of Rumplestiltskin’s delight in the dog, how gentle he was with him, the uninhibited smile he wore for the dog’s sake), and Belle finds herself telling Archie a few things.

Not about Rumplestiltskin. No, Belle knows better than to expect any confidences about the Dark One to be kept. Instead, it is her own private fears that are brought into the open for the gentle doctor.

“Lacey is…everything I never want to be,” she says beneath the roar of the surf. The horizon is gray. Empty. “But if the curse is part of us…”

“You think all those dark parts are inside you,” Archie says for her.

Belle avoids his gaze. “We are both, isn’t that what everyone says?”

“You are your cursed self,” Archie says. “I’m sure of it.”

Shrinking in on herself, Belle tries to smell the collar of her blue coat. But all she can smell is saltwater, like the brine that stained the pirate’s ship. It nearly makes her gag.

“Belle,” Archie says, and he stops so he can face her, “your cursed self was kind, and compassionate. You were afraid of Mr. Gold, but you were sad to hear he was dying. You wanted help to find yourself, but you were willing, even happy, to help him in turn. That’s who you are, who hides inside you. That’s what the curse brought out in you and who is the other half of your ‘we are both.’”

She sits with that for the rest of their walk. For the rest of the night. Until the next day, late in the afternoon, when they’re walking together again, and she finally says what she couldn’t admit to herself.

“What if Lacey’s still inside me?”

“We all have the potential for darkness inside us,” Archie says. “I’ve never told anyone this, but long ago, I was responsible for bringing down a horrible fate on an innocent couple. I’ve done everything I know to do to atone, but that doesn’t change the fact that, once, I was so weak, so afraid, so desperate, that I let somebody else pay for my mistakes. Does that change the way you see me?”

Belle stares at him, this kind man who’s done more for her than anyone else in this town. “No,” she says, resting her hand on his forearm above where he holds his umbrella. “No, of course not.”

“Then why don’t you give yourself the same grace?” he asks gently. “Anyone can be a hero one day and a villain the next. It’s the choices we make, day after day, that define us.”

Seagulls cry above them. The tide ebbs and flows. The horizon is still empty.

Belle cradles Archie’s words close in her heart and thinks of Rumplestiltskin. She thinks of the bloody aprons she’s cleaned for him. The babies he’s traded in their lavish baskets. The wife he murdered. The enemies he’s left in his wake. The bodies he’s created from lives precious to someone.

And she thinks of a cursed dagger taken up to save his son and all the other children from war. She thinks of the arrow that couldn’t miss, lodged in wood rather than heart. The babies gifted to childless couples weeping for joy. The pirate and the evil queen still alive simply because Belle asked it of him. The son he devoted his life to and loves with every molecule of his being and mourns to the point of death.

Good and evil, both together. And if Rumplestiltskin can be both those things, then maybe Belle can be too.

Maybe she can choose her True Love over the sister of two men who held her at gunpoint. Maybe she can be selfish and resent the town for their callousness toward her True Love. Maybe she can choose to be a hero for Rumplestiltskin rather than for what public opinion says is the greater good.

(And maybe, just maybe, when Rumplestiltskin looks at her, he will still see Belle rather than Lacey.)

Ariel returns, and for a few brief hours, Belle is able to forget her own plight in favor of helping Ariel. It’s because of Rumplestiltskin that they can track down Ariel’s True Love, and so Belle feels surrounded by him as they walk together to the docks and the fishing cannery. She feels buoyed up by his faith and his trust in her as she and Ariel walk from warehouse to warehouse, making their way ever closer to the sea itself. Ariel chatters on and on about how she first met Eric, how she felt so drawn to him, how he encapsulates everything she wants about this human life. And Belle listens, because she recognizes similarities in the story.

Oh, she and Rumplestiltskin were never love-at-first-sight. Their story has had so many more twists and turns than a ball and a conversation and a deal made with the wrong person. In fact, Belle thinks, their story started because she made a deal with the right person, and because she was lonely and he was afraid of forgetting the man who was a papa.

But Ariel speaks of waiting for so long to be reunited with her love, and Belle’s heart knits itself to this kindred spirit.

She’s waited, and waited, and waited some more—so long and so often that she has to believe their day will finally come.

Just like Ariel’s.

“He must really hate me,” Ariel says as she sees this man who makes her skip a step bring a knife down on a dead fish.

He doesn’t, Belle thinks when she sees the pure emotion shining from Eric’s eyes as he catches sight of Ariel.

They run to each other. They stop. They stare. And then they kiss.

Belle smiles and tries not to be too envious. She’s happy for her friend, of course she is, and as much as she’s grown to like and care for Ariel, Belle thinks she would want a bit more from her reunion with her long-lost love.

Which makes the sound from the sky, the shimmer of a magical shield reacting to something approaching, the sight of some small vessel high up in the heavens, seem like the granting of her most cherished wish.

As if, all along, she simply had to desire it enough.

(As if, during all those long empty hours in the dark, she just wasn’t wishing hard enough.)

So, no, it isn’t a wish granted. Isn’t a desire allowed by the tight-fisted fairies with good intentions and questionable follow-through.

This is all Rumplestiltskin—finding his way back to her. Fighting for her and not giving up on their story. His spell recognizing its creator and thinning itself to allow his arrival.

“He’s back!” she whispers, and only then does she truly believe it. Only then does she feel fixed in place (without Rumplestiltskin to act as her magnetic center, she has been adrift, never fixed in place).

And she runs.

The ship lands out to sea and has to sail into harbor, giving Belle just enough time to run back to the library as quickly as possible and grab the set of keys she’s been keeping in the bowl behind her desk. She found her own set, back at the hospital where Dr. Whale had made sure they were left alone, and now she can present her love with his own keys.

A proper homecoming.

(A choice she will leave in his hands: whether he truly wants her in every facet of his life or would prefer her back in the library apartment.)

Outside, she hears Grumpy shouting, his voice raised as he bellows the good news from one end of town to the other. Belle pushes her way outside and nearly stumbles straight into him.

“It’s them!” Leroy exclaims, holding her up. He looks closer to happiness, in this moment, than he has since she first met him in a bar on another world. “They’ve returned! The Jolly Roger popped out of the sky and into the sea!”

“I know!” Belle says, and then feels so dizzy that Leroy has to close his beefy hand around her bicep to keep her upright. It weights her in place. Locks her to the present. Reassures her that this is real.

“They’re just about to dock—hurry, sister!”

Archie meets her at the harbor, offers her a steadying arm, and in this way, Belle finds herself at the pier. She can’t tear her eyes from the ship and the lines being thrown out to secure it in place (it might vanish, she’s certain, if she stops looking, stops believing, even for a second).

“You knew he’d return,” Archie murmurs to her.

And she did. Didn’t she? (Or was she merely too weak to ever let herself think any differently?)

No. She did know. It’s why she sleeps in his bed, wraps herself in his coats, surrounds herself with his things, has kept his shop dusted and inventoried. If she really thought he was gone, she’d have begun (even in the smallest ways) looking for closure, preparing herself to let him go. But instead she has held on with all her strength, in every way she knows how to, and she knows she will keep doing so for as long as he needs her to.

So she doesn’t break down sobbing during the eternity it takes for the ship to dock. She doesn’t collapse in tears when she catches sight of a familiar little boy on the deck (Henry’s alive! Rumplestiltskin did it…but at what cost?). She doesn’t rattle apart in astonishment when she catches a glimpse of a man Lacey’s memories identify as Rumplestiltskin’s son (he’s alive? Did Rumple know? Does he know? He must, he must, he must be so relieved). And when, finally, Rumplestiltskin steps into view on the ramp, Belle only smiles—giddy. Joyful. Happy.

(But not relieved. Not surprised. Not anything but expectant, because he needs her faith as much as she relies on his immortality.)

In her mind’s eye, she runs to him. Throws herself into his arms. Peppers him with kisses. Surrounds him in her constant love.

But in reality, her knees are shaking and her feet are rooted in place, and all she can do is open her arms and wait for him.

He walks straight into her embrace without the slightest hesitation (without even a flicker of doubt at his reception, all his fears laid to rest).

Her smile won’t die. She wonders if this is how he felt when she walked into his shop, empty of memories but alive, and he fell into her while vowing to protect her. (And by coming back today, by surviving, he has kept that vow a hundred times over.)

Belle pets his hair—and the feel of it is better than every memory, every imagined moment. He encloses her in his wiry arms and all the lonely days and nights pale in comparison to this. She’s been dying, slowly, deprived of his touch, but with the simplest (most profound) hug, he brings her back to life. A true sorcerer.

“Belle,” he whispers into her hair, and she is (the husk of Lacey melts away; all the disparate pieces of herself are glued back into a cohesive whole at the sound of this: her name in his voice. His love in audible form). “I’m here.”

“I told you that I’d see you again.”

Her smile widens, her arms tighten around him, her hand is ever more gentle in his hair, and she could stay like this forever.

But as always, her self-conscious love is uneasy with so much open emotion (particularly in a crowd such as has gathered around them), and he tries to lighten the mood with a wry retort about always listening to her. She no more believes it than she expects it—or even wants it. It’s the moments Rumplestiltskin surprises her most that she falls ever deeper in love with him.

“Hey!”

That greeting. Of course it is that greeting that is the first word she (Belle, but Lacey too if she thinks back on it) hears from the mouth of her True Love’s son. It is a soft, wondering, nearly speechless greeting in Rumplestiltskin’s voice, but in his son’s, the word is loud, exuberant, and brave. It suits him, Belle thinks, as she turns to see Baelfire jogging up to them.

He’s alive. Alive and well, and under her hands, Rumplestiltskin doesn’t tense in preparation to flinch from some expected hurt. He’s relaxed and smiling and unsurprised that his son approaches him, and his son gives him an easy, sincere smile back.

And Belle can’t help it. Her joy bubbles up out of her. “Hey!” she exclaims, and her hand’s already moving, reaching, searching for connection (her relationship with his father grew by touch, is sustained by it, and she cannot help but want to bridge any distance between her and Baelfire with the same).

A single touch, just a simple clasp of his arm, and then she retreats, aware that though his smile doesn’t fade, Baelfire nonetheless meets her eyes a bit hesitantly, even tentatively.

He doesn’t know her. Not yet. (And what he does know of her, what he must remember seeing, is hardly the first impression Belle wanted to give him.)

Rumplestiltskin’s hand tightens on her waist as he accepts the cane his son offers him. In her giddiness, Belle hadn’t even processed the fact that his limp is gone (though she did notice, and appreciate, the leather he wears now). What she’s noticed above all (aside from the miracle that he’s alive, has escaped his undoing) is the lightness to him. As if a burden has dropped off him, shedding pressure and fear from his soul.

It's a good look on him. (So good she wishes they were alone, wishes their reunion was private, wishes that the rest of the town wouldn’t miss them for days or weeks.)

“Thank you, son,” Rumple says as he takes the cane, and Belle studies Baelfire closely.

He doesn’t flinch at the endearment. Doesn’t stiffen at the feel of his father’s stare. He does nothing but press closer to his father as Rumplestiltskin promises to use the cane not as a crutch, but as reminder of what he wants to overcome for Baelfire. For Belle.

It’s the first time Belle has ever seen real, genuine, unflinching hope in Rumplestiltskin, and she hugs him tightly. Even in her exuberance, though, she is careful not to come between him and his son, and is more than glad for that when Baelfire presses close on Rumplestiltskin’s left side.

This is everything Belle’s ever wanted. She’s never been so happy, she’s never seen her lonely love so happy, and even in Baelfire, she notices a distinct lack of that anger Lacey witnessed in him.

This is her future, she thinks as Baelfire meets her eyes from across his papa. This family, this inclusion, their three-pronged unit (a three-fold cord is not quickly broken, how often has she heard that saying, and now here they are, finally made it), and between her and his son, they will keep Rumplestiltskin from falling into fear and anger. They will surround him in love and hope and encouragement and be engulfed in return by his unending, unconditional, limitless love.

The brush of Baelfire’s hand against hers at Rumple’s back, the soft sigh Rumplestiltskin makes as he lets himself sag between them, held up by them both, the thump of her own heart flipping in her chest…it’s everything Belle’s ever wanted.

Her happy ending (that will, she vows to herself, be only a beginning), and it was worth everything (every pain, every separation, every sleepless night, every worried day) that brought them here.

Their group huddle (a family, Belle can’t help but marvel with grateful awe) is interrupted by the shifting and chatter of everyone around them. Endless reunions and greetings and gleeful celebration, and for all Belle doesn’t begrudge anyone their happiness, she wishes they’d all be happy somewhere else.

It’s Baelfire, in the end, who returns to prod Rumplestiltskin and Belle farther away from the Jolly Roger (not that Belle ever wants to see the ship again). Belle keeps her arm sternly looped through Rumplestiltskin’s elbow, staunchly refusing to let go. The feel of him is all that keeps her from floating away into nothingness.

As much as his son seems to have tried to find them a quiet space, the sheriff and his daughter make their way over to them with questions about the black sail hanging from the ship’s mast. A shadow, Belle realizes, and thinks on the reading she’s done about Neverland (thinks about a sentient island and its shadowy impersonation), and she shudders and clings tighter to Rumplestiltskin. She hopes he is right about the demon locked in that box clutched close in his hands; she hopes the Shadow is benign without the influence of Pan himself.

David and Emma fall into their own conversation, and Baelfire looks as if he’s listening even though he keeps his spot just beside his father. Belle smiles to herself and leans her head on Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder.

“Belle,” she thinks he whispers, but the moment is interrupted by Henry’s shout for his moms—and for his dad (Belle can’t begrudge Baelfire his automatic brightening at the address even as his eyes frown at the fear in Henry’s voice, talking to some tall boy). As easily as that, the others are gone and Rumplestiltskin and Belle are once more a circle of two. (But he doesn’t crumple, doesn’t break, doesn’t flinch at this distance between him and his son, and this alone is progress enough to make Belle want to dance.)

“You did it,” she says, because no one else in this town is going to. “You saved Henry.”

“It was a near thing,” he murmurs. “And in the end, it wasn’t really me at all.”

Belle tips her head once more onto his shoulder as she murmurs, “But you went. You tried. You stayed. Just like I knew you would. And you found your son—again.”

“He actually found me,” he says with a hint of amusement that covers, she can tell, a vast sea of relief. “I didn’t think he was real at first.”

“But he is.”

“He is.” His hand squeezes her arm (like he did so long ago, in the back of his shop, when she didn’t know him and he didn’t know she was alive). The touch resonates through her very soul. “And so are you.”

“You thought I wasn’t?” she asks (again, she thinks of that backroom, that disbelieving You’re alive).

“Oh, Belle…” Rumplestiltskin presses his brow against hers, and in that tiny touch, she feels his relief, his exhaustion, his lingering fear…and nightmares. “There’s so much to tell you, and I’m afraid…”

“Afraid of what?” she asks, softly, gently.

“Afraid of what you’ll think of me.”

There are too many people here. Too many eyes stealing sidelong glances while pointedly facing away. Too many distractions. (She misses the Dark Castle, the snow-covered peaks, the winding road filled with shadowy terrors and magical obstacles, the solitude he protected with only Belle herself invited in and always welcome.)

“Let’s go home,” she murmurs, but of course it isn’t that easy.

Rumplestiltskin still carries Pandora’s Box, and apparently, everyone who’d been on the ship wants to come to make absolutely certain Pan won’t be free to bother them again in their lifetimes. Belle thinks it a small price to pay, having the Box always underfoot in this sanctuary of hers and Rumplestiltskin’s, if it will just allow her some private moments with her True Love.

Perhaps Rumplestiltskin’s eyes follow after his boy, as Baelfire goes with his son to celebrate their safe homecoming at Granny’s, but his hand never leaves hers, so Belle hardly notices. She is only aware, sharply, of each person’s exit, until it is just her and her love standing there in this shop that feels like home (like the Dark Castle).

As soon as the bell tinkles to signal the last person’s exit, Belle turns into Rumplestiltskin, her arms closing around him. “Don’t leave me again,” she begs him. If he stops touching her, she will disintegrate into nothing. “Please.”

“No,” he agrees. “I can’t. You…you’re my home, Belle. You’re the only thing I wanted to come back to.”

Her tears fall then, and Belle lets them because Rumplestiltskin catches each and every one with his lips.

She’s not surprised that Rumplestiltskin doesn’t choose to leave the shop in favor of his house—her Rumple is always happier and more content when surrounded by his things rather than comfort. Besides, she doesn’t fool herself into thinking he can so easily set aside, at least mentally, the threat contained within Pandora’s Box.

She thinks, though, that he is surprised when she offers to help him change (as if she could leave now, when his kisses sing like fire through her veins and her hands itch to trace the contours of his skin).

“I love the outfit,” she adds.

“I smell like Neverland,” he says, testily, and she nearly laughs at this reminder of just how fastidious her Rumple can be.

“Okay,” she says, and then she draws her hands up to his shoulders and slides his coat down.

His eyes go wide and disbelieving (she smiles). He raises his arms to let the coat fall, but now he’s left in just a black silk shirt, unbuttoned almost as low as he wore them back in the Dark Castle, and Belle’s eyes follow the pale line of his skin. His breath catches in his throat (she giggles). Her knuckles knock up against his ribcage, his sternum, his navel, as she undoes the last few buttons on his shirt, each touch singing through her like the ring of a pure bell. She slides the shirt entirely from him, making this the most she’s ever seen of her shy True Love.

He gasps (she pants).

And then he slides her coat off her, and Belle nearly chokes on her tongue to realize that (of course) her deal-loving, bargain-driving Rumple will make this a fair exchange of items between them.

So she kisses his mouth, and then his chin, then under his jaw, then his throat, and then she paints a map of undiscovered country down over his chest and stomach (and lower).

And he returns the favor, as he would, of course (Rumplestiltskin never lets himself remain in anyone’s debt), and the shop glows gold and warm all around them, a cocoon that envelops them and melds them and makes them, finally, into something new (something all of one piece).

Belle memorizes every touch, every caress, and thinks that every brush of fingers, every tiny glancing of their hands, every hug, every kiss was leading them here, to this, and she would change not a single second of it.

Eventually, she does help him dress. He probably meant to do the same with her, but while he slept (the circles under his eyes darker than she remembers ever seeing them before), she stayed awake to watch over him (to remind herself that his return is not just a dream). He doesn’t scream, her quiet Rumple, but he whimpers. Tiny keening cries in his sleep that have her heart turning over in her chest. Though she hates to wake him, she kisses the tears that leak from his eyes, and dresses hurriedly so she can slip into the front and retrieve his son’s shawl from the safe.

The feel of it tucked up against his throat, the way she presses close against him, has him startling awake. She watches, and sees the shame flood through him.

“Shh, it’s okay,” she says, and kisses him.

He blinks and stares, and only then does she realize that she kissed him first (again) and that she still hasn’t waited for him to move toward her first so she can reassure him she wants everything he chooses to give her.

“Do you want to tell me?” she asks.

(She won’t make the same mistake she did before, in his house, standing over a basement that represented his son and all his hopes; dropping ultimatums and crawling out of windows and pushing him away while claiming to want him closer.)

This time, she waits.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says. “I want to. It’s…”

“I love you,” she tells him. (She’s told him that before, and sometimes, looking back on it, she thinks it only made him clam up tighter lest he lose that love, but she refuses to keep this truth from him, even to get him to talk.)

“And I love you.”

And he tells her. Bit by bit, piece by piece, dragged up and out of him like poison from a wound.

About a little boy with a father he loved. About a family that was only ever his burden (but he loves him anyway). About a bean, and a portal, and a Shadow, and the first deal he was ever involved with in his life.

About Neverland, and a boy-demon, and a specter with her face. His son showing up alive, and a spear at his throat, and squid ink sticky on his hand. His father offering a new start, and stealing Pandora’s Box, and locking away the little boy that had loved him so long (and still does, she can hear it in his voice, see it in the pain in his eyes).

“And then Bae let me out of the Box on the ship, and Henry was safe—Regina rescued him—and we came home.”

“And Bae knows?”

“Yes. I guess Pan must have told him. I didn’t want him to know—I never wanted him to know—but…he says he doesn’t blame me for it.”

“How could he?”

Rumplestiltskin looks at her, all uncomprehending and pained. “Because I turned into my father.”

“You’re worth ten-thousand of your father,” she says sternly, her hand over his mouth to prevent any more such heinous lies spilling from his battered, mangled heart. “Look at me, Rumple. You know I love you?”

There’s a pause (it sends a bolt of lightning through her heart), but then he nods. He brushes her cheek with the knuckles of his fingers, and she leans in closer.

“I love you,” she says for them both. “Because even when you tried to show me your worst, I saw the good in you. I saw that there’s so much more to you than the face of the Dark One.”

He closes his eyes, breathes her in. “Beautiful Belle.”

“But I would never love Pan,” she tells him. “I could spend a thousand years with him”—(No! Rumple chokes in horror)—“and I would never see anything behind the demon. There’s nothing there. You’re nothing alike.”

“There once was,” he says, “something there. He was my papa. I loved him.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

It’s not the right thing to say. She has no idea what she could have said, but these two words were a misstep. She knows because Rumple firms up his mask. Straightens in the cot. Looks for his clothes.

“I’m glad you told me,” she offers, as she helps him slide his shirt back on, as she buttons it up (armoring him against the dangers outside this shop). “I love you.”

(Still, no matter what he tells her; always and forever and never ever to stop.)

He smiles and bows to let her thread his tie over his neck. His hands fall lightly on her hips as she knots the tie (she’s been practicing with those in his bedroom, on lonely nights, waiting for him to return), and then buttons that last button and tightens the tie just right. Just so. Exactly as he always does himself.

He lets her do it. Through it all, she feels his eyes on her, and his quiet thanks feels like forgiveness for whatever misstep she made.

And then he speaks of the future (for the first time in a context outside of his son), and she tries not to be nervous, tries to be hopeful for him and to remind him his life is still yet full of potential.

And he cradles her face in his hands (tentative, even now), and chooses her (My price is her, he said once; The one where you and I are together, he says now), and Belle means to wait for him, really, she does, she wants him to be the first to kiss her—but he’s so slow, inclining down into her, and she cannot help it—she rises up on tiptoe and kisses him to seal their future in gold.

Outside the shop, his son waits for him. Baelfire’s eyes are dark in the dusk light as he studies each of them.

“Hey,” he says.

“Bae,” Rumplestiltskin says, an utterance that is a breath that is the very air in his lungs.

“I wasn’t sure where exactly to go.” Baelfire looks endearingly nervous. “Henry’s with Regina and Emma’s with her parents and I guess Granny and Ruby kept my room at the inn, but it’s busy there now. Lots of people needing a place to stay.”

“Come home,” Rumplestiltskin invites. It slips from him so easily, is voiced so quickly, that both Belle and Baelfire are stopped in their tracks. “Please, son,” Rumplestiltskin says, and Baelfire’s whole face melts into a warm smile.

“Sure, Papa. That’s kind of what I was hoping.”

So it is the three of them side by side, again, that make their way home. And Belle doesn’t even have a chance to worry that Rumplestiltskin doesn’t want her there, because he never lets go of her. He walks, sandwiched between her on his left and his son on his right, his cane making lighter taps than ever before (no weight, no burden, no crutch of magic in his wake), and Belle thinks the future really is theirs for the taking.

She’s never been happier.

They stay up late into the night, all crowded on the couch in the living room, a fire crackling in the hearth, food spread out around them. Baelfire had made only one comment about his clothes (still bearing a bloodstain from where he was shot), and Rumplestiltskin had ushered him upstairs to the shower and the bedroom arrayed with clothes and items fitting him exactly (Lacey knew nothing of that room, but Belle remembers when it was filled with toys suited for a child, and knows exactly how her love must have busied himself when not with Lacey or stalking Henry). Baelfire had emerged in time for the dinner Rumplestiltskin and Belle made (exchanging constant nudges and caresses and little touches that are the opposite of careless), and then he and Rumplestiltskin spend the rest of the evening exchanging stories of their past.

A tiny, meager lifetime, Belle thinks her father or Gaston would judge it, but oh, how it shines like gold in the retellings of father and son. They laugh over a missing sheep that threatened their survival through winter, commemorate the sheepdog they were given for free and nursed through infancy in hopes of more help to aid them through lean times, argue about how often and how well Rumplestiltskin taught and Baelfire avoided lessons on spinning.

Belle hears more in what they don’t say as well (Baelfire’s care when he mentions medicines she knows would ease bruises; Rumplestiltskin’s evasion when speaking of the other townspeople; a draft and a beggar and a dagger and a curse and a bean, all skirted around, set aside for this single evening).

“You should have seen him then, Belle,” Baelfire tells her. “Soaking wet from the rain and still insisting that he didn’t need to come in. Seemed to think it was just a spring shower despite the fact that it was fall!”

“You would never have forgiven me if we hadn’t found that stuffed bear,” Rumplestiltskin retorts. “Really, the whole thing was your fault.”

“My fault!?” Baelfire laughs with his whole body. “You’re the one who wouldn’t just wait until morning to find it once it’d dried out in the sun!”

“You would have cried all night, we both know how fixated on things you can get,” his father says, stubbornly, and Belle can’t help but laugh at them both.

“Like father, like son,” she teases them, and is gratified when neither of them tense or refute the point (Baelfire smiles; Rumple glows).

It’s late, when Rumplestiltskin rises to make sure there will be enough blankets in Baelfire’s room, and for just a few moments, it’s Belle and Baelfire alone in the room.

“You’re not who I thought you were when I first met you,” he says bluntly. “And I’m glad.”

Belle flushes and averts her eyes (even in the most unexpected moments, Lacey still haunts her). “I’m sorry about that,” she says, ashamed.

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.” Baelfire pauses before he scoots closer to her on the couch and lowers his voice. “Look, you’re not the first one who’s been stuck in the crosshairs when someone comes after him. I get it. Really. And at least he knew you loved him the whole time.”

“Did he?” she asks, suddenly desperate to know the truth of this.

Baelfire blinks at her. “Of course. You did hear that phone-call of his, right? I’ve never seen him love anyone like that.”

She laughs right in his face. “Of course you have.”

And Baelfire laughs, too, in delayed realization. “Okay. Yeah. Right. I just…” His brow furrows as he stares into the fire. “It’s going to take a while to process that, I guess. I mean…for centuries, the only thing I knew was that my father had abandoned me and that the family I found after him had let me sacrifice myself to save them. But now…”

“Now?” Belle prompts.

“Now I find out that the Darlings actually came after me and have spent all this time paying the price for it—but don’t seem to blame me at all. And Papa…he never forgot me. Never stopped trying to find me.” He looks away and rubs his eyes, as if it’s the fire that’s bothering them. “In retrospect, it makes some of the things I’ve done seem that much worse.”

“You didn’t know,” she says (and thinks of Archie on the beach, Pongo sniffing at her hands, a hole in her heart). “You have to give yourself grace, Baelfire. You were hurt, and hurt…well, it always finds a way out somewhere else.”

“Yeah.” Baelfire’s inhale shudders, but he manages a smile for her nonetheless. “I’ll try. I just hope some others have your capacity for forgiveness.”

“She will,” Belle says (hopes she is telling the truth) and smiles at Baelfire’s blush (as if she’d been blind to the way he was always inclined toward Emma on the docks earlier).

The sound of Rumplestiltskin approaching has them both looking to the door. But just before her love returns, his son reaches out and clasps her arm. A quick, almost embarrassed touch, clumsy and unsure—and so beautiful it takes her breath away.

“I’m glad Papa has you, Belle.”

“I’m so glad I have him,” she replies, and they both smile at the sight of Rumplestiltskin entering the room.

He blinks and nearly takes a step back before smiling uncertainly, and Baelfire hugs him good night and Belle leads him to the bedroom and kisses him until she has that smile of his branded over every inch of her skin.

Chapter Text

It’s the three of them again in the morning, sharing breakfast, learning to be comfortable with this new dynamic (Belle remembers how little she wanted a third person in the Dark Castle to throw them both off, and thinks that the future really is full of surprises because now she’d have it no other way), and then heading for the shop.

Baelfire asks questions about things displayed—or rather, the homelier, humbler things behind the things on display. He seems nervous and uncomfortable around magic, but he’s trying and Rumplestiltskin clearly appreciates the attempt. Belle smiles and stays quiet in an attempt to let them have their time alone (but she won’t leave, she can’t, not so soon after she’s gotten him back).

Eventually, Baelfire sees the time and says he has to be somewhere for lunch. Rumplestiltskin shoos him off with an impressive show of unconcern. Belle smiles and moves to stand at his side.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

He frowns at her. “What?”

“Letting him out of your sight.” She tilts her head. “Giving him space.”

“Oh.” Rumplestiltskin looks down at the elixir slowly being brought to a boil. “I can’t cage him. I’ve tried that before.”

“Well, I do feel flattered now,” she teases. “You’ve tried everything with me that you did with him.” She won’t let him look wounded or hurt, not now, not when she’s so happy and wants him to stop flagellating himself with their past. “Keeping me close, making a deal with me, listening when I ask you to do something, thinking you don’t deserve my love…letting me go, sending me away, thinking me lost forever. And I found you just like he did you, and you proved yourself to us both, even though we both took a while to believe you. And now you’ve learned to trust us to come back to you.”

“Belle,” he says. “That’s not…”

“I feel honored,” she tells him. “I don’t think I could be in any better company.”

He looks at her as if he’s never seen anything like her (bewildered and entranced and awed and disbelieving all at once), so Belle really has no choice but to throw her arms around him and kiss him until the elixir is finished.

Later that day, standing at the town line she really, really hates, Belle wishes she were back outside Granny’s waiting for Rumplestiltskin to finish talking to David and Snow White. She’d thought, then, that that would be the hardest part of the day, seeing Baelfire sitting alone at a booth, obviously waiting for someone and just as obviously resigned to being alone. At that moment, she’d seriously thought about hunting Emma Swan down and forcing her to learn right ways to deal with a good man (forcing her to think about her own actions before driving a repentant hurt Lost Boy out of her life forever).

Now, Belle would give anything to be able to go back to that moment. To not be here, staring at that orange line that haunted her amnesiac nightmares (that still startles her out of restless sleep whenever she dreams of it).

Rumplestiltskin is shaking. He argues with Emma about who should cross the town line (the shawl is safe around his neck, she reminds herself for the hundredth time), but Belle knows the truth.

He’s shaking.

When Emma had ambushed them outside the shop and implied that she wanted Pan dead rather than confined indefinitely (when Rumplestiltskin listened and seemed interested), Belle had thought she might need to intervene. Rumplestiltskin still loves his father, she knows he does, and killing him would scar him for life, no matter that the last thing he’d seen Pan do was trick him and coldheartedly consign his son to a terrible prison. She’d thought of Hook, and her last time setting foot on the Jolly Roger, and taking Rumplestiltskin’s hand to lead him away from murder—and she’d feared history was repeating itself.

But now…

Now, at the town line where he lost Belle (because he’d taken mercy on the pirate), pretending to the others that he wants to face his father and considers killing him…now, she can feel the terrified tremors shaking through him.

(It was bravado, earlier, and she should have known that. She knows him, and for Rumplestiltskin, murder is never the ultimate goal.)

As soon as Emma has hold of the Box, red smoke pouring out of it, Belle yanks Rumplestiltskin safely back with her. One step, two, three, and he keeps his body in front of her (protecting her), but it’s Belle’s hand on his shoulder and his elbow that prevent him from moving even a single step forward.

He won’t leave her (to face danger; to be an unwitting hero yet again). She won’t let him. She’ll die before she lets his father inflict another scar on his tender heart.

So she doesn’t care that Rumplestiltskin implores Emma to shoot the tall, fair-haired boy that emerges from Pandora’s Box. She says not one word to gainsay his (supposedly) murderous demands as Emma hesitates and wavers and finally puts her gun away. Instead, she focuses all her attention on holding Rumplestiltskin upright. On masking the tremors that grow larger and more obvious the longer the moment stretches. On helping him seem unaffected and blasé as the boy steps across the line (Henry, and she thinks of the boy who helped her clean the library, who chattered to her about Beauty and the Beast, who she once—as Lacey—told Rumple to kill, who was captured and isolated and manipulated and tricked into nearly giving his own life, and who has been, apparently, locked away in one of history’s most fearsome prisons for the last couple days).

Rumplestiltskin apologizes to Henry, who accepts and forgives so easily that the bulk of his genes must come from Baelfire rather than Emma, but the whole time Rumplestiltskin’s grip on Belle’s hand is so tight she can feel the bones creaking against one another. She makes no word of protest and waits until the others are hugging this familiar boy in a stranger’s body to whisper, “I’m here, Rumple. You’re safe.”

But he isn’t (Pan is loose and free and Rumplestiltskin spoke to him and Baelfire hugged him and Belle feels sick for them all). He isn’t safe, and Rumplestiltskin shakes and shakes and shakes until she is the only thing holding him together at all.

Another curse is on its way (to sweep her memories away yet again? to turn her into something yet different again? to separate them and destroy her irretrievably?). Now, Rumplestiltskin is helping hold Belle together too. For a brief moment, before Baelfire sets off to retrieve the Black Fairy’s wand and Rumplestiltskin and Belle head for the shop, they three stand together.

“Be safe, son,” Rumplestiltskin says (a wealth of emotion behind the three words).

“You too,” Baelfire says, and then he’s gone.

Belle holds onto Rumplestiltskin’s hand and tries to remember every time this group of people has succeeded in doing the impossible. Tomorrow, this will all be over and she and Rumplestiltskin will be safe at home (she’ll tell him about her fears over Lacey and he’ll tell her his hopes for the future and Baelfire will join them for dinner while she counsels him to patience and faith and Rumplestiltskin hugs him).

Rumplestiltskin insists on stopping at the house to retrieve a spellbook from the basement. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” he murmurs to her. “You stay up here. Make sure no one snoops where they shouldn’t.”

Belle smiles in relief (she hates the basement, even knowing that the magic down there was compiled for Baelfire’s sake) and gestures for Snow and Emma to remain on the porch.

“You can come in, Henry,” she says.

It’s strange. This boy looks nothing like the Henry she knows, but there’s something in his expression, something wise and soft and young. It changes the form he’s in entirely, she imagines, because she knows that otherwise, this lean, fair-haired boy is the object of Rumplestiltskin’s worst nightmares (even now, he can barely stand to look at him).

Belle pulls the boy into the kitchen and pours him a glass of orange juice. “I’m sorry this has happened to you,” she says.

Henry studies the glass in his hands (or rather, she imagines he studies his hands, so different to his own). “It’ll be okay. We’ll fix it.”

“Not that.” Belle shakes her head. “I mean, yes, of course. Rumple would never let anything happen to you, and nor would your father. But I meant that I’m sorry you were stuck in that Box.”

The color drains from Henry’s face and the glass goes tumbling down end over end. The shattering of glass rings through the house and there’s a clamor from the front door where Emma and Snow try to rush in but discover the protection spells Rumplestiltskin keeps on the house.

“I’m sorry!” Henry blurts, and despite the horror living in his eyes, he’s all little boy as he stares at the orange liquid stained over Belle’s coat and skirt.

“It’s fine.” She shrugs off the coat. “Here.” She hands him the carton so he can pour himself another glass. “I know you probably don’t want to think about whatever it is you saw in that Box. But you should think about getting it out somewhere. Write it down, maybe, or…” She pauses, the racket from the front door growing louder. “Or you could talk to Rumple, after all this is over. He was in there too. He might be able to understand better than anyone else could.”

“Okay.” Henry’s smile is a little wider, and there’s a touch more color in his cheeks. “Thanks, Belle.” He’s taller than her now, which makes it a bit disconcerting when his smile turns mischievous. “I’m guessing soon I’ll be able to call you Grandma too, huh?”

“Quiet, you,” she says with a laugh and a swat at his arm (anything to distract from the color flooding her cheeks and the urgent want kindling in her belly). “Why don’t you go reassure your mom and real grandmother that you’re fine while I change into something clean.”

He laughs, and even in this unfamiliar voice, it warms Belle’s heart to hear it.

Maybe he will yet come through this relatively unscathed.

Not wanting to distract Rumplestiltskin from the spell he needs to study, Belle keeps as many people in the front of the shop with her as she can. She’s dressed in the first clothes she could find—the outfit from the day before, still spread out all across the bedroom floor (and she didn’t miss the heat in Rumplestiltskin’s eyes when he registered the change)—and they smell of straw and magic and Rumple, giving her the strength she needs to let him out of her sight for a few moments.

But as soon as she has an excuse, she rushes into the back, her arm wrapped around Henry (who’s seemed to grow more nervous as the minutes tick by).

Finally, Baelfire is back, wand in hand, and she relaxes a bit as she sees some fear ease out of Rumplestiltskin at the sight of his boy.

Of course, it all comes roaring back when Henry lays back on the cot and Rumplestiltskin lifts the wand over his body. Belle wishes she could step forward and wrap her arm around him and tell him it’s okay to be scared (to be nervous, to be hurt, to be conflicted).

But that’s not what Rumplestiltskin needs from her right now. He needs her steadfast faith. He needs her reassuring presence. He needs her to let him appear unafraid, unchecked. Powerful. In command of the situation.

A sudden impulse to ensure that the magic-dampening cuff is tight on Henry’s (Pan’s) wrist nearly overwhelms her. Baelfire grasps her reaching hand, and together, they watch, breathless and taut with tension, as Rumplestiltskin casts the spell.

Henry begins to shake on the bed.

No one moves to touch him. To contain him.

(Who is he? Belle’s not sure at the moment. Beloved son or demon monster? Until she knows, she won’t touch him.)

Rumplestiltskin holds to his calm by a fingernail. She and Baelfire can tell, but no one else, she thinks. And soon, the boy falls still.

It’s worked.

Henry’s safely back in his own body, somewhere in town, and now, lying unconscious on the very cot where Belle undressed him the day before, Rumplestiltskin’s father lies at his mercy.

Belle wishes she were surprised when Rumplestiltskin makes no move to go help find Henry. She wishes she could do something to help him when she asks him if he’s not coming. Daringly, she reaches out and clasps her hand around his wrist, and that’s when she feels it.

He’s no longer shaking.

(He’s not afraid anymore.)

There is a world, somewhere, in which Belle allows Rumplestiltskin’s courage to propel her from the shop (toward a small boy with the weight of worlds on his shoulders and both his heart and a prophecy affecting his fate all unknowing). In which she and Baelfire observe Rumplestiltskin’s newfound calmness and both walk trustingly away, leaving him alone in his shop with the monster of his childhood (the demon who only days previous had him imprisoned in a Box filled with the worst things in all of the realms).

There is a world where Belle and Baelfire were both part of the frozen entourage out on Main Street, and where they were both completely trapped in place, helpless to whatever horrible scheme Pan has in mind for them (he claims not to care about his son, to want nothing to do with him, but his every move is aimed at where it would hurt Rumplestiltskin the most, so Belle knows without a doubt that Pan would have focused in on Baelfire and her).

There is a world where Rumplestiltskin, alone, thinking he had faced the worst of his temptations, faced his father down and heard, alone, all the vitriol the monster (Malcolm, really, the poison he spewed; none of it could be excused on Neverland and what it had helped make him) shoveled into his son. A world where Rumplestiltskin had no one behind him at all when Pan slammed the cuff over his own wrist, threw him into the wall, kicked him down again while he scrabbled on the floor.

There is a world (an awful, terrible world) where Belle would know nothing of Rumplestiltskin’s plight until he appeared on Main Street to pull his father away from the family that loves him. Until he was standing there, facing down Peter Pan (alone, for all intents and purposes), and she knows her True Love: she knows the desperation he would have felt with that cuff on his wrist (divorcing him from the only thing he believed gave him agency and worth). She knows the horrible worst-case scenarios his mind would have gone to.

But she also knows, oh she knows, the hope that Rumplestiltskin never seems to realize he carries under that pessimism, the cleverness of his beautiful, dangerous mind, the determined bravery he always finds when it’s his loved ones on the line.

So there is a world, somewhere, in which Rumplestiltskin called his shadow back to him, took his dagger in hand, and stabbed a hole through both Pan’s heart and his own. There is a world in which Belle would have seen him die and vanish, eaten up by the magic that has kept him alive through all the centuries to make it to her and his son. There is a world in which she would have crumpled (helpless and anchorless and with a hole in her heart) to the ground and wept while Baelfire stared in uncomprehending horror. There is a world in which Regina’s desire to be a hero worthy of Henry, Emma’s obsessive drive to never be separated from her son, Baelfire’s deep-seated belief that everyone he cares about would be better off without him near, and the Nolans’ fanatical intent on being heroes worthy of always sacrificing for the greater good…it all would have culminated, Belle is sure, in them standing at the (nightmarish, horrific, hated) town line to say goodbye and once more rip families apart, this time forever.

Perhaps Leroy would have helped her up from the unforgiving ground if he’d come to shout about bad news. Perhaps Archie would have stood with Belle there at the town line, offering what comfort and support he could when Rumplestiltskin was no longer alive to give color and shape and purpose to her life. But no matter. She still would have been alone. Baelfire might have looked for her, but he’d have watched his grandfather torture, his father die, the woman he loved give up on him, and now would face his own son being separated from him by worlds (the Stiltskin men, she thinks, might actually be cursed), and it is Belle who should go up to him, should wrap him in her arms, should help bear him up.

But how would she have the strength? How could she bear the touch of him, the feel of him, the look of him, the sound of his voice, when all it would do is remind her of the man she’d never see again?

So they would both stand alone. They would both be taken back to the world from which they came. And they would both be completely and utterly alone, the sole mourners of the man who saved them all.

Rumplestiltskin—the man they’d left in the shop with Pan because he wanted to be a hero. The man they should have told, should have reminded, was already a hero and didn’t need to prove it or to change himself…or to sacrifice his own life for some prophecy Belle would be happy to never hear of again. The man they would both spend the rest of their lives missing.

But that world, that terrifying, calamitous world, is not this one. That world would have to be one where Belle has learned no lessons, has remained unchanged by her time spent merging her life with her True Love’s, has pretended to be unaffected by everything that has befallen her in life (every fate she has chosen and stood by for herself).

Here, Belle clasps her True Love’s wrist—and feels that he is solid, unmoving, brave—and she thinks: stay or go?

And the Belle of the old world, young and naïve and idealistic and so badly wanting to be a hero, would have smiled at him in encouragement (like she kissed him, once, without asking) and given him leave to try to transform himself into something other than himself.

But the Belle of this world isn’t that young woman, barely out of girlhood, navigating life as it is in books rather than the reality she’s been so sheltered from. Belle has grown and learned and developed—and she remembers the consequences of wishing a different fate on the one she loves (shouting and shaking and shackles—and the look of betrayal in those wide and wondering eyes, turning them cold and closed to her). She remembers the long years trapped in a prison cell, in a room under the hospital, rudderless and drifting and alone.

Belle has been an amnesiac looking for protection (and finding it in a man whose strength is not found alone but in the ones he loves). She’s been a newly reclaimed princess struggling to adapt to a new world (and to expectations and pressures that she only later realized were mostly coming from herself), and she remembers the ramifications of going it alone (a dark mine, pushing his arms away, hurting him without even realizing how badly). She’s been a woman learning exactly what it means to love a man as unique and mysterious and layered as Rumplestiltskin, and she’s been figuring out how to be his equal, how to complement him without holding him back, how to support him without pushing him away, how to help him without weakening him.

And she’s been amnesiac all over again, afraid of magic and trapped behind walls she insisted on herself (screaming at a kiss and throwing a cup and breaking down over a phone-call, and she remembers what it’s like to always feel afraid, to never feel enough—just as Rumplestiltskin has felt for nearly all his life). She’s been Lacey, cold and callous and a detriment to him, and she knows, now, how it feels to be the villain and to not care (more, to revel in the freedom this gave her, the independence she felt not caring what others thought of her, the power to choose her own way—just like the Dark One makes Rumplestiltskin feel).

And she has been alone, facing life without her heart, trying to stay strong, to remain above it all, to keep going, day after day (even when everything that makes life worthwhile has been ripped from her—and this is what Baelfire’s father has felt for centuries). She has had to come to terms with who she is, with what reality is, and with exactly how much of her naivete, how much of her idealism, she is prepared to trade away in return for a full and equal life with her True Love.

Unchecked bravery brought the touch of helplessness to her life (she could not change Rumplestiltskin’s mind; she could not escape the Queen’s cells).

Unfiltered honesty and the demand for his in return left them both wilting under the heavy hand of pressure their young relationship couldn’t yet withstand (he could not trust her on cue; she could not learn patience in a day).

Erased memories made her feel a prisoner even of her own mind, unable to trust her own eyes, and his every touch had burned her until she’d isolated herself, and being alone was never the right solution (she needed his faith in her; he needed her trust in him).

Implanted memories taught her a bit of how Rumplestiltskin views the world, hazed through the fog of the Dark One’s curse, and empathy joined with understanding to bring her out the other side more capable of meeting him where he is rather than demanding he come to her (she needed, she thinks, this lesson that anyone can make wrong choices but that doing so doesn’t make them irredeemable).

Being alone these past weeks, wondering if she’d ever see Rumplestiltskin again, was the last touch she needed, the final lesson, to realize that they can each survive on their own (she can put up a façade; he can conjure up visions of her), but they are better, stronger, happier together.

Belle may be stubborn, but she has always been a good student (particularly in her own, self-taught choice of subjects).

“I’ll stay with you,” Belle decides. No one else even looks back over their shoulders, already gone. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

“Belle, you’re worried about the boy. You should—”

“I’m not leaving you.” She meets his gaze, unflinching. “Forever, remember?”

Rumplestiltskin’s face softens. The hint of a smile touches his mouth.

“Should I stay?” Baelfire asks, and Belle has never been prouder of a near-stranger than she is now. His son is out there, his own nightmare lying on that bed, his reconciliation with his father so new and fragile…but Baelfire offers anyway.

“No, son.” Rumplestiltskin reaches out and cups Baelfire’s cheek. “You should be with Henry. Go. We’ll be fine. I’ll take care of Pan.”

His son’s eyes narrow, but Baelfire has learned his own lessons of pragmatism and anger (of pain and regret), so he asks no further questions. When he turns, Belle nudges Rumplestiltskin with a pointed look. He hesitates less than a second before stepping forward.

“Bae, wait.” Rumplestiltskin picks something up from his worktable and offers it to Baelfire. “I know you hate magic, but… We’ve been separated so many times already. I was…I was hoping you’d wear this.”

“What is it?” Baelfire asks, and for all the skepticism in his voice, he steps closer to his father. Belle knows exactly what Rumplestiltskin’s holding—a scarf, woven of gray and yellow and red. He worked on it last night, when he thought she’d fallen asleep, and when she’d murmured a sleepy question, he’d said only that it was for his son.

“It’s a shawl. Wearing it will give you some measure of defense against any magical attacks. And…” Rumplestiltskin hesitates. He claims honesty is not a strong suit for him, but Belle doesn’t believe him anymore, not when he admits, “And when you’re wearing it—and only then—I’ll be able to find you. No matter what realm you fall into.”

There is silence for so long that Belle finds herself throwing a nervous look Pan’s way to make sure he hasn’t woken.

“Only when I wear it?” Baelfire asks.

“Yes. I promise.”

“Okay. Just for now, maybe. Until things settle.”

Rumplestiltskin actually sags with the force of his relief. “Thank you, son.”

“Sure, Papa.” Carefully, as if knowing how much this trust means to his papa, Baelfire takes the scarf and arranges it around his shoulders. “You think you could make one for Henry?”

Belle smiles to herself, and turns to watch Pan (letting the two have their moment of forgiveness and trust in privacy).

“Belle,” Rumplestiltskin says, “I think you should wait in the front. Pan is…”

“Manipulative?” she says when he trails off. “Okay, but I’ll be listening, and I’ll be just a few steps away if you need me.”

He seems surprised by her easy agreement. “Thank you.”

“I don’t want to be a weakness for you,” she explains. “It’s just hard, sometimes…to know that the most I can do is stand back and wait.”

“Beautiful Belle.” He smiles at her. “Always such a hero.”

The words could have sounded like a sneer (she has many childhood memories of such condescending comments thrown her way), but in his voice, with that look in his eyes, it is all admiration and awe.

“You deserve a hero,” she tells him. “Someone to help you. I wish there’d been others. It took you so long to meet me.”

His finger taps her nose in such a fond gesture she nearly shakes apart with her affection for him. “A crack about my age? Is that what we’ve come to?”

“I’m glad you’re so old,” she replies, and wraps her arms around him (hoping she’s as much an anchor for him as he is for her). “If you weren’t, we’d never have met.”

He blinks, as if struck by the thought, and his arms tighten around her waist. “I might not have begrudged the centuries so much if I knew you were waiting.”

It’s such a romantic sentiment that Belle smiles and kisses him. Not as thoroughly as she’d like (his unconscious father is lying on a cot across the room), but deeply enough that they’re both a bit out of breath when she pulls back.

“I’ll be in front if you need me,” she says. “You’re not alone, Rumple.”

“Stay out of sight,” he reiterates. “Pan already knows about you, but I don’t want to give him any ideas.”

And because Rumple’s already been hurt too badly, endured too much, Belle steps into the front room and lets the curtain conceal her presence—but not before squeezing Rumple’s hand in hers to allow them both a tender touch to linger in their absence.

The next few moments are some of the worst of Belle’s life (though not without competition, sadly). It takes every ounce of her strength to stay in place and keep her defiant protectiveness bottled up as Pan flays Rumplestiltskin with his awful words. The crash of her poor, brave Rumple’s body being thrown across the room has Belle searching around for any weapon she can use on the boy-demon.

She finds a vial of dust that will turn any living thing to stone, a wand she might be able to use with the force of her fury, and a heavy bookend shaped like a gnome that she can throw if all else fails. Before she can make use of any of it, however, she hears Pan’s voice drop. He hisses something Belle can’t hear, then the backdoor opens, and he’s gone. The last of her restraint vanishes and she doesn’t even take the time to ensure he’s truly gone before she’s flying into the backroom, dropping her accumulated weapons to the floor at the sight of Rumple lying helpless on the floor.

His eyes are big and wet and hurting. There’s blood on his lip, and bruises are surely layered under his suit, but it’s the black cuff around his wrist that takes up the bulk of Belle’s attention. That—and the sword laying so close to Rumple’s other hand.

A father who’d swing a hammer into his ankle for sake of a son he’d never seen would, she imagines, find it child’s play to consider cutting off his own limb to ensure his worst nightmare doesn’t harm that same son.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to.

“I’m here,” she says, and pretends not to see him flinch at the sound of her voice. “It’s okay, Rumple. I’ll get it off of you.”

She’s kneeling at his side, reaching for his hand, fingers burning to yank the cuff off her True Love (so many shackles tailored to him, really, the dagger and this cuff and his father and the darkness embedded deep inside him, and none of this is fair), when he pulls his wrist protectively against his side.

“No,” he says. And then again, louder, when she gapes at him. “No. He’ll feel it, if I reach for my magic. He’ll come back to find out how I got out of it. He’ll find you. And then he’ll…”

“You’ll protect me.”

“No.” He shakes his head and just keeps shaking it, his voice fracturing into a dozen pieces. “No, I’ve never been able to stop him. Not really. He’s always won.”

“Rumple—”

“You can’t. Please.” Rumple looks straight at her and Belle catches her breath at the sheer emotion flooding through his eyes. He’s afraid. More afraid, she thinks, than she’s ever seen him. And Belle could be strong for him, could grab his hand and pull the cuff free and tell him that he doesn’t need an excuse to keep him from being the hero he truly is inside.

(Just like in the old world, that long ago day, when she kissed him without asking and took his choice from him and told him she thought he needed to be someone different for them to be together.)

(Just like in the mines, beneath their feet, when she pushed him away from her and told him that she never wanted to see him again and expected him to change according to her will.)

(Just like Lacey, pushing and compelling and seducing and twisting him to her wishes, her wants, her desires.)

Belle holds her hands up so he can see them and then, very carefully, places them in her lap. (She decided a long time ago, even before they fell in love, that she would not tame him, would not cow him, would not domesticate him and trap him with her love.)

So she chooses not to touch.

Some tiny tension seeps out of his taut frame.

“I have a plan,” Rumplestiltskin says. “I know how to stop him before he hurts anyone else.”

“Tell me what to do,” Belle says.

So he does, and as much as she wants to argue, wants to insist there’s another way, instead, Belle chooses to trust him.

They reach the backside of the library in time to see Pan freeze the whole group of heroes in the middle of the street.

“Look at you all—a captive audience,” Pan says. “I could play with you like a pack of dolls, couldn’t I? But I think I’ll start with—” He breaks off and looks at each of them, as if counting. “Well, well, well, looks like one of the collection is missing.”

And he looks down the street, toward Mr. Gold’s shop. Belle’s stomach tightens into a knot as she realizes Rumple was right: he would have known if she’d taken the cuff off Rumple’s wrist. He’d have known and he’d have snatched her up and then it would have been Rumple facing his father alone, with the lives of everyone he loves on the line.

“You’ll have only a brief moment to make your move,” Rumplestiltskin reminds her. He’s moving stiffly, and his hand keeps making a reaching motion, as if searching for his cane, but he’s upright and moving and his face is a stern mask (she recognizes it even without the scales and dragon eyes).

Belle clasps his reaching hand in hers (memorizes the familiar feel of his spinner’s callus and tiny scars from acidic potions) and nods up at him. “I can do this,” she says. “I promise.”

“Beautiful Belle,” he says, just like before, only this time, there is an undercurrent of fear to his tone. “Always so brave.”

“I am when I’m fighting for the one I love,” she says, then reconsiders and corrects herself, “The ones I love. Baelfire’s out there too.”

A fierce, almost overwhelming emotion surges through Rumplestiltskin’s eyes, and he pulls her unexpectedly into his embrace. Lowers his head. Kisses her.

(Freely. Unexpectedly. Of his own volition. And maybe he’s still afraid, maybe he thinks this is the end and he has nothing left to lose, but the last few times he thought that, he still didn’t dare make the first move, so this is growth and change and everything Belle’s wanted.)

Belle hugs him as tight as she can, twines her tongue around his, memorizes the taste and the smell and the feel of him—and then they let go.

They separate.

And Rumple steps out into the street to face his father alone.

The shadow arrives faster than Belle expected. She’s riveted on the scene across from her, on Rumplestiltskin saying what sounds suspiciously like a goodbye to his son and Pan mocking him, when she feels the tap at her shoulder. She turns and finds herself face to face with Rumple’s shadow.

A black cut-out shaped exactly like her True Love. A piece of him, here before her, with no features to discern in his inky shape, but still something so bashful and diffident about the way he offers her the dagger.

“Thank you,” Belle says, and takes it.

It’s not the first time she’s touched the dagger (that was when they were hiding it, when he was tinkering with the clock needle and asked her to pass it to him, a nonchalant show of trust that had his hand shaking and kept her eyes sparkling for days). It is the first time she’s held it so purposely. She hopes that Rumplestiltskin, if he can feel that someone holds this cursed dagger (holds his soul in her hands), he knows that it’s her. She hopes he can feel how delicately, how preciously, she holds the trust he is placing in her.

The shadow regards her, and in the tilt of its black head, she can see his terror and his worry and his love.

“It’s okay,” Belle tells him. “I’m going to keep it safe. But…here. This is for you.”

Slowly, the shadow reaches for the knife she holds out. Rumplestiltskin had retrieved it from a stand among a dozen other knives back in his shop, and it bumped awkwardly against her leg in her coat pocket on the way down the street to her current position. There’s nothing special about the silver blade, really, except for the fact that it’s curved as sinuously as the Dark One’s dagger.

Without magic, Rumplestiltskin couldn’t place a glamor over it, but he said that was better. Pan would have detected illusion more readily than reality.

“Thank you,” Belle says again as she lets her hand brush against the shadow’s. It feels cold, but not otherworldly so. Just as if her skin has passed into shade. Still, it’s a piece of Rumplestiltskin and she’ll take what she can get. “Be careful,” she adds, and though she can’t explain how, she’s sure the shadow smiles at her.

“There’s one thing you’re forgetting,” Rumplestiltskin tells Pan, and both Belle and the shadow turn back to the altercation in the street.

“And what is that?” Pan asks, all scornful impatience.

Behind Belle, Rumplestiltskin’s shadow rises into the air—and then, at Rumple’s raised hand, swoops down from the sky itself to hand him the (innocent, misleading) knife.

Belle’s already running. She left her heels behind in the shop in favor of flat-heeled shoes that Rumplestiltskin unearthed from some shelf filled with random, future-useful items, and it takes her no time at all to cross the street and reach Baelfire’s side.

No time at all, but she still hears Pan’s cry as Rumplestiltskin pulls him into an imprisoning hug and stabs him in the back. Pan’s belief in the darkness (the importance) of that dagger will last but a mere moment.

“Baelfire,” Belle says—and she grabs his hand.

“It will be enough,” Rumplestiltskin told her, once and then again and again and again, as they both craved whatever reassurance they could find. “The scarf will keep him from fully falling under Pan’s spell. With the dagger in your hand, you’ll be able to pull him completely free.”

And she does.

Baelfire staggers as he finds himself able to move again. He blinks and starts looking behind him, to Henry or Emma, but Belle’s already wrapping his fingers around the dagger, entrusting Rumplestiltskin’s soul (his future) to his son.

“You have to save him,” she says. “You’re the only one who can.”

(Well. She supposes Henry could as well, but Henry’s only a child and too young to have such a heavy burden placed on him.)

Behind her, she can hear Pan negotiating, cajoling, commanding the son he beat black and blue just moments earlier.

“I don’t want this!” Baelfire tries to shake the dagger off, his face full of contempt, but Belle expected such and she has her hand wrapped tightly around his.

“It has to be you. You have to stop the cycle. You have to stab Pan with this dagger.”

“Belle—”

“Now, Baelfire! You’re his only chance!” And Belle shoves Baelfire toward the two figures bound together by steel and history—and blood. The same blood that runs in Bae’s veins.

“Please, Baelfire,” she says, her words falling atop one another she speaks them so fast. “Pan’s power is his only because he sacrificed Rumple—the only thing that can break that connection is another sacrifice made with the same blood. You have to be the one to bridge the gap.”

There’s more. Of course there is (magic is never simple), but Baelfire doesn’t need anything more. Something Pan says has the blood draining from Rumplestiltskin’s face—Pan’s pulling away, the wound healing around the magic-less knife—and Baelfire’s there. One instant, he was beside her, staring in horror. The next, he’s there, come up on Pan from behind, his eyes fixed on his papa.

The dagger makes no noise as it sinks into Pan’s back. It does, however, make a noise when it scrapes against Rumplestiltskin’s breastbone. Baelfire cries out in horror, but Rumplestiltskin reaches out and yanks his son closer—steps into the blade.

A blood sacrifice. A power imbalance. And Rumplestiltskin’s, for the first time in centuries, is the only Shadow between him and Pan—Neverland’s is trapped and helpless, unable to exert the power needed to preserve Pan’s immortality.

A shimmer of gold engulfs the trio, and Belle blinks to see Pan’s youthful appearance transform into that of an older, ordinary-looking man. A part of her mind catalogs everything she can about this unknown, but there’s nothing in him she can find redeeming. Nothing that reminds her of Rumplestiltskin (she was right, when she told him that there was nothing of him in Pan, nothing redeemable in his heart), especially when he begins to beg.

“Papa!” Baelfire shouts. He’s tugging at his own hand, trying to draw the dagger out of his father’s flesh.

But Rumplestiltskin clasps his son’s wrist and keeps the three of them tangled up in a vicious circle. “It’s okay, son. It’s okay. It’s time I finally kept my promise to you. I said that if I ever found a way, I’d take it—and this is it.”

“No. No, Papa, not like this. This can’t be the end!”

“Oh, Bae. I’m a villain. And villains don’t get happy endings.”

“Papa! You’re not! You’re not!”

But though Baelfire tugs and pulls, the Dark One’s strength is still enough to keep the dagger embedded in his own chest. And finally, his jaw clenched, Baelfire wraps his arm around Pan—no, around Malcolm—to clasp hold of Rumplestiltskin’s other arm in a pseudo-hug.

Pan’s still begging, and Belle wishes she were surprised by the tender way with which Rumplestiltskin whispers something to his own father. In front of them all, vulnerable and exposed in the very way he hates, he kisses his father’s brow—a touch so tender, so raw, so achingly genuine, that it rips a hole in Belle’s heart.

But the love between Rumple and Pan is hardly True, and even before Rumplestiltskin can draw back, a pillar of gold engulfs the trio, swallows them up, immolates them in blood magic and fulfilled prophecy.

The pillar dissipates. The sky above them turns black. And both Rumplestiltskin and Baelfire vanish in a burst of magical smoke.

Belle screams as Malcolm’s body thuds to the ground with a heavy tremor, his staring eyes fixed on the skies he once flew through. His chest is bloody and mangled, but there’s no sign of that singular dagger Baelfire had stabbed into his heart.

“Rumple!” Belle shrieks, rushing forward as the others behind her are freed from the immobilization spell. “Rumple, no!”

She can’t feel him. She can’t sense him anywhere. Even the vague sense she had of him when he was in Neverland is gone. She’s alone.

Anchorless and weightless and heartless, Belle collapses to the cold street and keens the name of her True Love—once, twice, thrice—but he doesn’t come.

He’s gone.

The others pull the scroll bearing Rumplestiltskin’s curse (for his son, all for his son, but Baelfire’s gone somewhere she can’t follow, no matter how Henry demands that Emma and Regina find him and bring him back) from Malcolm’s corpse. Regina studies it for little more than a moment before her heart visibly breaks in front of them all. Belle wouldn’t care at all, but she can’t breathe without feeling the shattered shards of her own heart scraping against the inside of her chest so she can’t help but pity the Evil Queen.

She does, however, let her revelation about their world ending spiral over her head. How can she be expected to care about being sent back to their old world when there’s nothing left for her in either world?

Rumple didn’t tell her this would happen. He spent the walk down the street speaking of blood magic and old deals and prophecies that mislead more than enlighten, and the whole time (all the while she was holding onto him with every bit of her strength), he spoke not one word about being eradicated from existence.

He couldn’t have known, she thinks. He couldn’t. He never would have let Baelfire be a part of it if he’d known that his son would be eradicated too.

Which means…which means there must be an alternative.

Blood magic. Why did he spend so much time telling her about the same blood magic that they’d already been speaking of the last couple days, since his return, with Pandora’s Box and the hiding place in the shop and Henry being able to get into Regina’s vault?

Blood magic. Rumplestiltskin never would have let Baelfire endanger himself, not when he has his own son to be there for. If there’s one thing no one can deny about Rumplestiltskin, it is his fixation on parenthood.

“Henry,” Belle murmurs, and then, at the sound of that name (at the feeling of hope flooding back inside her), she leaps to her feet. “Henry!” she exclaims. “It has to be you! He said it could only be Baelfire, but the whole time he knew—it’s you too. You’re his undoing.”

“Belle, I know you’ve just been through a lot, but—”

Belle brushes Snow White aside and steps as close to Henry as his bristling mothers will allow. “You have to call them back, Henry. Rumple knew you’d do it for Baelfire—of course you would, he’s your father—but you can call them both back. They’re both related to you by blood. You can anchor them.”

“Haven’t you been listening to anything we just said?” Regina retorts. “We don’t have time for this—and Henry has to leave Storybrooke before it’s too late.”

“Does he?” Belle refuses to let her fear show as she meets Regina’s glare. “Or would there be a loophole Rumple could find? If he were here.”

“I can call Dad back?” Henry asks from behind Emma. “He’s not dead?”

“You just have to believe,” Belle says (and she’s hoping, she’s wishing, she doesn’t know anything, but then, this is the Truest Believer standing in front of her, bound by blood ties and family history and love to her small family). “Please, Henry. The prophecy Rumple was so afraid of said you’d be his undoing—but prophecy can mean anything. Maybe it’s his dissolution that you undo. Or his sacrifice. Or anything about these past few moments.”

She’ll take Pan back. She’ll take the earthquakes tremoring underneath their feet, and the massing stormclouds flickering with potent magic that’s coalescing over Storybrooke, and the threat of another curse—so long as Rumplestiltskin and his son are both back with her. Together, they can face anything.

“Henry, this could be dangerous. We have barely enough time to get you to the town line and to safety as it is.” Regina looks at Emma. “You have to get him out of here. You have to take him to safety.”

“No,” Emma says. “I’m staying with you guys.”

But her parents step forward to assure her that she should go, that they want her to have a good life, that she can be free of them and the choices they’ve made of her life, and Belle wants to scream at them. She wants to shake them all until they realize exactly how blind they’re all being. Rumplestiltskin wrote this curse, knows every in and out, and sending someone away from them isn’t always the solution (sometimes holding on, fighting for the ones you love, is more important than letting them go and planning to find them later).

Surprisingly, it’s Emma who holds firm against them all.

“No,” she says again. “I’m not going to do the same thing to Neal that he did to me. I’m not running away, okay? Not if there’s a chance.”

“You think I can do this?” Henry asks her, and for all his wisdom, there’s a little boy in his eyes as he looks up at the mother he idealizes so strongly.

Emma pauses (Belle feels sick to her stomach) and then she bends down so she can be eye-level with her son. “I think you can do anything you believe you can, Henry,” she says. “And we’re not going to lose Neal, not like this, not again. So believe, kid, okay? Believe the way I can’t. Believe that Neal’s out there still and that he wants to be here—because he’d never choose to leave you. Not knowingly.”

“And Rumple,” Belle cuts in. “Please, Henry. He went to Neverland to save you even thinking he’d die doing it. He just sacrificed more than I can tell you to save us all from Pan. He’d be here in an instant if he could.”

“Mom?” But it’s Regina Henry’s looking to, and for just an instant, sheer icy terror floods through Belle’s veins.

Regina blinks back her tears. Looks at this son Rumplestiltskin gave her, standing in the town he taught her how to build, alive because he taught her magic and set her down this path. And she says, “You can do it, Henry. You can save them both. I know you can.”

And he does.

One moment, Belle is standing in the cold, oblivious to their encroaching danger. She is alone, and every breath scrapes through her throat, every heartbeat is so painful it leaves a tiny bruise behind. Her hands are empty and there’s no elbow to hold onto, no hand to reach for, no awed and wondering eyes to stare at her slightest touch.

Henry squeezes his eyes shut and steps away from his family, looking toward the place where his father and grandfather so recently stood.

And the next moment, Belle can breathe again. Her heart beats quietly—though rapidly—in her chest, each thrum of her blood a reminder that she lives. And there, in the street ahead of her, held upright by the strong arms of his son, Rumplestiltskin stands. There’s no smoke, no surge of magic, just belief and love—and the magic of a remarkable boy.

“Rumple!” she cries, her voice overshadowed by Emma and Henry’s shouts for Baelfire. Belle doesn’t begrudge them their relief (she’d shout his name and hug him too if she didn’t think it might be a bit too much for the man so used to living on his own), simply rushes forward and only narrowly avoids slamming too hard into her True Love, heedless of the sticky blood stained across the whole front of his suit.

He pulls her tight to him, half-leaning on her, his lips pressed tight against her temple, and she can feel the tremors surging through him. Can feel the feverish heat of him. Can feel the imprint of his dagger hidden between them (not embedded in his flesh, just tucked in his pocket, either by magic or by his son in whatever formless void they’d been consigned to). She can feel him, and if she’s ever taken that for granted before, she never will again.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispers into his hair. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Belle,” he breathes back, and she waits for some quip, some evasive remark, but gets only his shuddering breaths, the imprints of his fingerprints into her back as he presses her even tighter against him.

“I love you,” she tells him (in case he needs the reminder; in case the world needs the reminder that he is not expendable, not replaceable, not forgettable).

“Belle,” he says again, a breath like a prayer—like a reminder. And this is familiar, isn’t it? Back when he’d thought (for decades) that he’d lost her, that he’d never see her again, but she’d come walking into his shop, asking for his protection for the second time. And he’d given it as freely as before (wanting only her presence, willingly offered), and she’d remembered herself, and they’d gone back to his house. He’d needed reminders then, too, frequently, that she was real, she was alive, she was with him. His hand, reaching out (so tentatively!) to touch, to verify her solidity.

It had broken her heart then, but now it sends her effervescent with joy. Because he’s here, alive, with her, and she needs the reminder, the proof, as much as he does.

“I love you,” she says again, burying her hands in his hair to keep him as close as he seems to want her, and vows to keep saying it as often as he needs her to.

Of course, Storybrooke is no more eager to allow Belle her moments with Rumplestiltskin now than it ever has been. Leroy arrives with his dark news of the coming curse-clouds, Regina reiterates the price she has to pay for the curse’s rise and fall, and David and Snow seem to fold in on themselves as they realize there’s no longer time to get Emma and Henry across the town line to safety.

Which means Henry, this brave boy who just reunited her with her True Love, will be left all alone.

“There might be another way,” Rumplestiltskin says, and Belle doesn’t even try to restrain her bright smile.

She knew it! Of course her clever and cunning True Love will have the solution.

“It’s not ideal,” he warns, his eyes locked on Baelfire. “And it will not be easy. But there is a way to bring Henry over to our land.”

“What is it?” Henry asks. “Please! I want to go!” His voice lowers. “I don’t want to be left behind.”

Emma and Regina’s arms tighten around him from separate sides.

“Please, Papa,” Baelfire says. He meets his father’s gaze with a determined look. “Just spit it out. I won’t be mad, I promise.”

Whatever happened between them, Belle thinks, there is a new, deeper level of understanding there, like a golden cord keeping them unified.

“Pandora’s Box,” says Rumplestiltskin as simply and neutrally as she’s ever heard him speak. “Placing the boy in it will ensure he is a part of the curse’s framework—and our old world.”

“You still have it?” Emma asks.

“Of course.” Rumplestiltskin finally looks away from Baelfire, but this time, he looks straight at Henry, who is visibly shaking. “But the Box, as I’m sure you recall, is filled with the worst things any world has to offer. It is…” A shadow passes across his face. “It will be a nightmare for you. Again.”

Henry’s face is tight and pale (and Belle remembers that glass of orange juice falling from nerveless hands to stain her dress), but he firms his jaw in a very familiar manner. “I can face it,” he says. “I survived it before. I don’t want to be left alone.”

“There are nightmares in there!” Regina asserts defensively. “He can’t—”

“I’ve faced nightmares before,” Henry says, and straightens his spine.

“These will be…” Rumplestiltskin’s muscles are corded tight beneath Belle’s hands. “Extreme,” he finishes tightly.

“I don’t care. I want to come.”

“Papa.” Baelfire steps away from his son. “Is…is there any way that I can go in with him this time? Would we be able to stay together?”

Rumplestiltskin’s pause is slight, but Belle knows both she and his son register it. (He could have lied, surely wants to lie, but instead, he chooses the truth.) “Ordinarily, I would say no,” he finally answers. “But Henry’s belief and your stubbornness…yes, Bae, I think you could stay with him.”

“Then I’m going too,” Baelfire says. “Okay, buddy? I’ll be right there with you the whole time. Whatever happens in there…you can show me the ropes. Okay? We’ll get through it together. It won’t be for long. And then Papa will let us out and—”

“Actually,” Rumplestiltskin interrupts. “I think the Savior should take the Box. She’ll release you as soon as we’re deposited on the other side.”

Baelfire looks confused, and he opens his mouth to ask a question, but Emma derails him when she clasps his hand tightly in her own. “I’ll do it,” she says. “I won’t leave you in there an instant longer than necessary.”

“Rumple,” Belle says quietly. “Why—”

“What about the price?” Regina asks. “If Henry comes with us, then I’ll see him over there. The price will…” She frowns, her eyes conflicted. “It will fall on him instead. He’ll lose his memories of me—of everything. He won’t know why he’s there—”

“The child should never pay for the mistakes of the parent,” Rumplestiltskin says, and for all Regina flinches as if this is a dig, his eyes are locked on Baelfire. “So he won’t pay this price, Regina—you will.”

Regina straightens, swallows, and nods her head. “Okay. What do I have to do?”

Sometimes, Belle forgets that Regina and her husband had a full history together before she ever entered the scene. But now, seeing how Regina looks so trustingly at Rumplestiltskin, ready to listen to whatever he has to say, she realizes all over again that her True Love is this woman’s mentor and teacher. And she sees Regina as the young, innocent woman she must have once been, before tragedy and wrong choices and the thirst for revenge.

It's not a welcome revelation, not now, as Rumplestiltskin tells Regina that she’ll have to forget Henry.

“You’ll be there, together, in one world,” he says. “But you won’t be able to remember him.”

“But…” Regina’s chin trembles. “He’s the reason I’m trying to be good.”

“A child isn’t responsible for our decisions,” Rumplestiltskin says. “That shouldn’t be his burden. You have to choose the right thing on your own.”

“But if I don’t remember Henry, how much else will I forget? I’ll be evil again.”

Belle closes her eyes to Regina and Rumplestiltskin’s conversation—Emma’s protests, and Snow’s questions and Henry’s reassurances—and just leans her head on Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder. If she were a harsher person, she might think it strangely fitting that the woman who took her memories of her True Love to prove a point must now sacrifice her own memories of love (and it does occur to her), but Belle shrugs the comparison aside.

This has nothing to do with her. Not really. Regina and Henry—and Emma and her parents and probably Baelfire—will have to decide how they proceed from here. Belle’s main concern is Rumplestiltskin…and the fact that every moment, he leans more heavily against her. Oh, he’s skilled enough to do it in such a way that she doubts anyone else notices, and Belle herself makes sure she bears up under it without flinching, but there’s a growing fear in her breast as they keep talking and talking and talking.

(A fear about his dagger, and the way it pierced him, and the fact that the dagger is now in his pocket, but maybe it wasn’t always, and maybe his healing doesn’t work on wounds made with the cursed blade, and she wishes they were alone so she could peel his layers off and check to make sure he’s not bleeding out while standing so casually and presenting a picture of strength and control.)

Eventually (not soon enough), the conversation resolves itself. Mainly, she thinks, because they run out of time.

“If you’d do the honors, sweetheart,” Rumple murmurs, offering her his wrist. The reminder of the cuff, still wrapped there like a heavy shackle, has Belle’s breath catching in her throat like a fishhook.

Finally, for the first time since an ill-timed kiss, it is her turn to save him.

“Of course,” she says. It takes her only two tries to figure out how to unwind the cuff, and though she longs to throw it far from her, Belle instead slips it into her pocket (no need to tempt anyone around with this means of controlling or at least neutralizing the Dark One).

Rumplestiltskin offers her a soft smile, then he holds out his hand, palm-up, and Pandora’s Box shimmers into existence.

“Keep your hope alive,” he advises Henry after the boy’s been hugged and kissed and reassured a dozen times by his large family. “Hope is the only thing strong enough to stand against everything else contained in this prison.”

“Okay,” Henry says bravely. Belle manages a smile for him, and reaches out to clasp his shoulder (she will never be able to pay him back for what he’s done for her, believing her family back into existence). But Baelfire, she hugs with one arm (not stepping away from Rumple because she’s not sure he can stand on his own), part of a three-way hug she wishes they could hold forever, until this world is reformed into their old.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispers, and then takes a tiny step back to allow Rumplestiltskin a last few words with his son.

“I wish I could spare you this, Bae,” Rumplestiltskin says. “You’ve already endured so many horrible things. Pandora’s Box—”

“You endured it for us,” Baelfire reminds him. “And so has Henry. It’s my turn now. It’s okay, Papa. I’ll be okay. I can’t leave Henry, not again.”

Rumplestiltskin smiles through his tears. “I know. I’m so proud of you, son.”

Baelfire hugs him fiercely, almost violently. “Me too, Papa,” he says, and then he steps back. “Let’s get this over with.”

Belle weaves her fingers through Rumple’s as soon as he’s finished opening the Box, and she holds him together as a red mist envelops Baelfire and Henry. The Box clicks closed, the jewel glowing scarlet.

“Emma,” Rumplestiltskin says as he offers her the Box. “You could escape this world if you wished, as you escaped the curse. If you wish to come with us, you must fix your thoughts on everything you want in the world you choose. If you don’t, you risk being left behind yourself.”

“I won’t let that happen.” Emma clasps the Box close and looks at her parents. “Everything I love is going to be in that other world. I’m not about to think of anything else.”

The clouds descend from the skies toward the ground. Green lightning flickers out in all directions. Purple smoke races ahead of the dark stormhead.

“Belle.” Regina’s voice is tiny. Scared. Heartbroken. (If Belle were the vengeful type, she’d revel in it; instead, she pities it.)

Rumplestiltskin narrows his eyes at the Queen, his hand coming up to hold onto the one she has looped through his elbow. Belle can feel the tension threaded through his every muscle. “What could you possibly have to say to her?”

“It’s okay,” Belle murmurs (out of habit more than anything; she has no desire, in these last few moments when he might be bleeding out and they’re about to be separated again, to speak to the Evil Queen).

“That cuff…” Regina holds up a hand, and at first, Belle thinks she means to stem whatever protest they might have ready. Only belatedly does she realize the Queen is offering her wrist up. “Please,” she says, the word tugged through gritted teeth. Not anger or shame; just her last attempt to ward off the tears already slipping free of her fluttering eyes. “I won’t remember the reasons I have to be good. And if I’m not alone when we return…” She firms her chin and straightens her spine, and for the first time, Belle realizes how much strength the Evil Queen (the girl-child inside her, the bereaved lover, the unhappy wife) holds within her. Not just evil, or a thirst for vengeance, or stubbornness—but actual, real strength. “If I have my magic, I’ll never stop long enough to listen to whatever Henry or…or anyone…might tell me.”

Belle chances a glance to Rumple, but he’s impassive. Leaving it up to her, she realizes. Her chance for the revenge she thwarted him on obtaining from the woman who was responsible for so much pain and misunderstanding between them.

And there are two different responses in Belle’s mind, two different flavors sitting on her tongue.

The sharp, lemony taste of Did you know, all those times looking in on me in my cold, lonely cell, that one day I’d be locking a shackle around your wrist?

And the softer, honey-sweet taste of A wise decision from a woman who’s learned to be a mother.

Belle says neither of them. Anything she says is completely irrelevant. Regina is already mourning her son (herself) and Belle is only an incidental part of her story.

Instead, she withdraws the cuff from her pocket and places it, gently as she can, around the Queen’s wrist. “You can do this,” she murmurs, not because she thinks Regina cares about her opinion, but because her True Love is very good at projecting (she wants him to know that no matter the villain, Belle believes in redemption).

“I’m sorry,” Regina says back, just as quietly.

Belle’s eyes fly up to her, but Regina averts her gaze, sees her son watching her, waiting for her attention, and Belle is forgotten.

(No matter. Belle heard it. She understands.)

“My darling Belle,” Rumple says, his hand tightening around hers. “So eager to forgive monsters their crimes against you.”

“Some are far easier than others,” she says, and is rewarded by the sight of his soft smile (strained around the edges; but there).

“Rumple,” she murmurs while everyone around her is distracted. “Why didn’t you keep the Box?”

“Because,” he says, turning into her until they can pretend they are alone in the world (back in the Dark Castle, wrapped in solitude enough to learn to be brave in reaching out to each other), “if I’m right, the curse is going to dump us all back precisely where we were when we were taken.”

Belle’s heart trips up into her throat. “I’m going to be locked in the Queen’s cell again?”

“No. Oh, my darling Belle, no, I promised you that you would never be trapped by her again. No. You are going to wear this.” He slips from his finger the ring he’s worn the entire time she’s known him in this Land Without Magic and slides it onto her thumb. “It will prevent anything from trapping you—a cell, a cage, a prison, a world…distance.”

“And where will you be?” she asks as she adjusts to the weight of the ring (the magnitude of this gift: freedom in tangible form). “Where were you when the curse was cast?”

He closes his eyes and leans his brow against hers. “In a prison underground, deep beneath the palace of King James and Queen Snow.”

“What?!”

“Shh, shh, beautiful Belle. I left myself a way out, last time, but I’m afraid it’s already been used by someone else. So I’ll be waiting for a hero to come save me.”

Something warm and beautiful and poignantly painful twists inside her chest. “I’ll come as soon as I can,” she vows. “I won’t let anything stop me.”

“I’ll wait for you,” he promises (and he’s never believed, fully, in her love, she knows, but now he’s trying, he’s being brave for her).

“I won’t be long,” she says, a promise to reward his own, and then she drops her voice to a whisper and says, “Rumple, you’re all right, aren’t you? The wound from your dagger…?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and she has no time to tell if he’s lying or not because the curse descends on them.

“I love you,” Rumplestiltskin tells her.

“I love you too,” she says, and in her final moments, she kisses him (and hopes True Love is as powerful as she believes it to be).

Chapter Text

The sight of the Queen’s tower cell, materializing into place around her, is like a scene transposed straight out of her nightmares. Belle forms her hand into a fist, the metal of Rumplestiltskin’s ring biting into her palm, and clutches her other hand over it. Terror threatens to keep her here, but Belle refuses to give into it. Rumplestiltskin promised her she would not be trapped here, and she trusts him over whatever magic the Evil Queen has left behind.

Without bothering to let the long memories of those (seemingly) endless years fully assault her, Belle squeezes her eyes shut and visualizes the Dark Castle, the Great Hall with the spinning wheel and the table and the one lonely chair. A shiver passes over her, something tugs at her, a sharp yank of resistance, there’s a burst of air that smells of straw and gold, and then she’s staggering and catching onto a table to keep to her feet.

A familiar table. She made it! She’s at the Dark Castle. Her heart recognizes it instantly, despite the clear signs of ruin and habitation. Whoever used to live here seems to be gone, and Belle takes the time to look around for a bit and think what she might need to pack before wishing herself to Rumplestiltskin’s side. Impulsiveness is a trait woven tightly through her, but she’s been with Rumplestiltskin too long not to have learned a bit of careful planning.

So. First, packing some necessities. Second, finding Baelfire. Third, rescuing Rumplestiltskin.

Belle has a bag packed with everything she thinks might be helpful (food, water, gold spools, a few healing potions and protective amulets, some books that might come in handy) by the time she makes it to her room. For all the ruin and mess and leftover detritus proving people have camped out here in the last three decades, there’s no sign of decay or human presence down this hall. And still that doesn’t prepare her for just how pristine her room looks when she enters it.

Just pushing open the door releases the scent of her perfume (gifted her by Rumplestiltskin with a blatant lack of acknowledgement on his part, just a wave of his hand and a quip). There’s no trace of dust or mold, and everything inside is exactly as she left it: the books on her bedside table, bookmarks still poking up out of the pages. Her nightgown folded at the foot of the bed. A slump in the covers where she’d been too much in a hurry to get down to Rumplestiltskin to make the bed properly. Her brush at the vanity, flowers in a vase, still as fresh as when she picked them.

A stasis spell (just like the one left on the room he prepared for Bae), strong enough to have survived the Dark Curse and whatever mayhem that came after.

“Oh, Rumple,” she says softly. He loves so permanently (so hopelessly) and it twists her heart with compassion at the same time as it leaves her feeling nearly weightless with the giddy reminder that he’s chosen to gift that love to her.

Suddenly, she’s desperate to see Rumplestiltskin, urgency making her antsy as she thinks of him waiting for her, trusting in her to come get him. It seems like agony to take the time to change from the navy-blue shift she’s wearing to her blue work dress, good enough for traveling in. She finds a sturdy pair of shoes, throws a few extra changes of clothes in the bag (Rumplestiltskin gifted her so many, all beautiful, all fitted exactly to her, all made by his own hand), as well as her brush, some ribbons, the perfume, and a book with a single blossom from the saved flowers pressed inside. Then she grabs her extra cloak, abandoned when she left the Dark Castle, and she’s reaching for the ring on her thumb.

Once more, though, she forces herself to take an extra moment—just long enough to race down the halls to Baelfire’s room, where she adds to her pack a few items she thinks Rumplestiltskin might want to give his son should they not make it back right away. A quick stop at the library for the reading shawl draped over the back of the sofa (she missed this shawl, when languishing in her cells; missed the feeling of being surrounded in Rumplestiltskin’s care for her), and then finally her mad dash ends.

Alone, she stands in the middle of the library he gave her (in return for a single hug and a moment of trust; so much in exchange for so little). It hits her then. She’s back. She’s here, in this place she’s thought (for so many different reasons) that she’d never see again. And soon, maybe within the day depending on Baelfire, she’ll be back, this time with Rumplestiltskin. (She’s back, but she still doesn’t plan on sleeping in her own bed, or in this sofa in her library, or anywhere but in the room she’s never yet seen, the bed that smells of him, his arms wrapped so tightly around her she can’t tell where the divide is between them).

There’s one more thing she should retrieve. If everything was returned, then…

She searches the kitchen and can’t find it. Looks in the treasure vaults she can reach but has no more luck. But then, almost by accident, nearly giving up, she finds the cup. It’s sitting on a plinth in the main hall, given a place of importance. If it hadn’t been safely in Storybrooke these past several decades, it would have been destroyed by any of the squatters that took shelter here. But since it must have returned with the undoing of the Dark Curse (since Rumplestiltskin would have spelled it to always be kept in a safe place), there the chipped cup sits. Belle takes it up, wraps it in her reading shawl, and tucks it carefully in her pack.

And just like that, her earlier impatience comes back, multiplied times ten, and she’s almost filled her mind with Rumplestiltskin before she recalls herself to what he’d want her to do first.

Biting her lip, Belle caresses the ring on her thumb (ignores the wailing cry in her heart) and thinks of Baelfire. Henry. Emma.

The Dark Castle shimmers and disappears. She blinks and looks around to get her bearings. The throne room is so burned and dilapidated, opened to the elements from the gaping hole in the ceiling, that it’s nearly unrecognizable.

“Belle!”

She spins and comes face to face with Baelfire, disentangling himself from Emma and Henry (both of whom seem extra reluctant to let him go) to rush toward her. They’re all still dressed in the clothing from Storybrooke (Bae in Rumple’s magical shawl), making some tiny doubt in Belle’s mind dry up and wither to nothing.

“Where’s Papa? Have you found him?”

“He’d never forgive me if I didn’t check on you first,” she says, reaching out to squeeze his arm, still a bit too bashful to try for a real hug. “You’re okay? You and Henry are—”

“We’re okay.” Baelfire looks over at his shoulder to exchange a weighted glance with Henry. “It worked. The scarf helped, too. That’s what matters. And Emma let us out as soon as she could.”

“Yeah.” Emma frowns distastefully at Pandora’s Box, held tightly in that hand that isn’t holding onto Henry. She seems happy to be rid of it when Belle snatches it away from her to shove into the bottom of her bag (she won’t leave it in sight for anyone to get any ideas about when she retrieves Rumpelstiltskin from his prison cell).

“We’re all safe,” Baelfire says. “So we should find Papa, yeah?”

“I guess I should find my parents too.” Emma looks around her as if to get her bearings.

Baelfire smiles at her. “Never thought you’d be able to say that, did you?”

She rolls her eyes (but looks secretly pleased). “Definitely not while in some fairytale land.”

“Hey. It’s okay.” Baelfire steps away from Belle and closer to Emma. “You’ve been here before. It’ll be a piece of cake now.”

“Yeah!” Henry chirps, beginning to look excited. “You can show me the ropes.”

Baelfire and Emma both look at their son, their eyes so full of pride that Belle feels a bit out of place. Her longing for Rumplestiltskin, already strong, reaches a fever-pitch.

Emma’s the first to recall herself to the moment. “I guess this is the palace I’ve been to with Mary Margaret, but where would they have ended up—”

“Geppetto’s workshop,” Henry interjects. “That’s where they were when the Curse took them. Gramps had just put you in the wardrobe before getting stabbed, and Grandma was trying to wake him up, and Mom was there to—” He cuts himself off, frowning, and shrinks in on himself. “Well. They should all be there.”

Belle has barely opened her mouth to excuse herself from that search when the doors to the throne room, already half in shambles, crumble to the floor at the collision of something from outside. “Emma!” Together, Snow White and Prince (King? Was there a coronation while she was locked up?) David shove their way into the chambers, Snow in a maternity nightdress looking more crimson than the white it was originally, David in a tattered shirt in much the same condition. They engulf Emma (and Henry) in a group hug that Baelfire only narrowly manages to skip out of in time. Behind them, escorted by Leroy and Doc, rope keeping her hands (one cuffed) bound together, comes Regina.

The place is getting too crowded for Belle, and Rumplestiltskin is waiting for her.

“We should go,” she murmurs to Baelfire. “Before they all start thinking about ways to make Rumple as ‘safe’ as Regina.”

His face clouds, and Baelfire gives a sharp nod. “Yeah. Any idea where he is?”

“He’s locked up,” she says. “He said it’s a prison cell under the palace.”

“Okay.” Baelfire’s eyes narrow in a look of repressed anger that emphasizes his resemblance to his father. “How do we get down to it?”

“I don’t know,” Belle says. “But we’ll find it.”

Of course, like most things in her life, it’s not that easy. The ring refuses to transport her any closer to Rumplestiltskin. There’s too much fairy dust around, too many wards placed around his dungeon, and so Belle and Baelfire are reduced to trying to ask for help. But even that is derailed almost immediately.

First, Henry almost has a panic attack at the sight of something that only Baelfire seems able to calm him from (something that reminds them of Pandora’s Box, Belle assumes, and her heart hurts for them), then Emma refuses to move until her parents tell her what’s going on with Regina, and then more people have found them: Ruby and Granny, wanting to know where they should set up to feed everyone and if there’s food enough and what will they do about the refugees starting to arrive from all around the countryside. Then the dwarfs, sent out to survey what they could, return with a trio escorted by their own honor guards. Belle doesn’t want to be distracted from her circumspect search, but the sight of Phillip and Mulan draws her attention.

Turns out, the Enchanted Forest hasn’t been easy since the Dark Curse was cast, and whatever Snow and Emma knew about it, Belle and quite a few others hadn’t been filled in on. The ogres are nearby; Phillip and Mulan had tried to distract them, once they realized that there were people showing up all over, but still, injured start pouring in. Belle cannot, in good conscience, just ignore them, and soon, she and Baelfire are entrenched in finding places for people to sleep, bandages and medicines, and running messages back and forth between the de facto leaders and the fairies trying to work enough healing magic to keep the wounded alive.

It's only the caress of sunlight over Belle’s face that has her realizing it’s been nearly a full day since they’ve arrived and she’s no closer to finding Rumplestiltskin. Still, at least now enough of Phillip and Aurora’s people have arrived to help ease the burden, and David has ridden out with Mulan to see what they can do to drive the ogres away.

Belle searches through the ruined palace for any sign of Snow or Leroy or even Archie, sure that they will be able to tell her how to get down to underground dungeons, but Ruby finds her first. She wraps her arm around Belle, tugs her to a quiet chair in the kitchen, puts a warm cup of tea in her hands, and the next thing Belle knows, she’s waking six hours later with a start (chased from sleep by a nightmare of Rumplestiltskin buried alive, his dagger in his chest, his voice choked silent by dirt filling his mouth). Ruby’s found her own bed by then, but Granny takes (disapproving) pity on Belle and delivers her to the council chambers where a clearly exhausted Snow is conferring with an equally exhausted (and much bloodier) David, while Emma sits in a corner watching (like a protective hawk) as Henry tries to talk to a still-bound Regina.

Baelfire is nowhere in sight, but Belle can’t wait any longer.

“Excuse me,” she says. She has thoughts of giving a slight curtsey, but despite the rest she’s just gotten, her knees wobble at even the thought of any undue strain. “Rumple’s been waiting for me to find him. I promised I would. I just…I need you to tell me how to get down to his cell.”

Snow and David exchange a look, but it’s the Blue Fairy who steps forward. “Child,” she says, her voice so sweet and soft that it brings to mind long-worn memories of Belle’s own mother, caring for her while she was sick or soothing her when she woke from a nightmare. “There is much danger facing us in our return to this land. Our magic is depleted taking care of the injured and dying, as well as setting up magical wards to keep the ogres from encroaching here. I’m afraid adding the Dark One to that mix—the same monster who is responsible for this Dark Curse in the first place—would be a dangerous path to go down.”

Belle narrows her eyes. She’s aware (it’s hardly possible to be around him for longer than a day and not know) that Rumplestiltskin loathes the fairies, particularly the head of their order. It was only a day (or two? Time is blurring together in her mind) since he was pleased to hear of her death, and Belle remembers chastising him, cautioning him to diplomacy, patience, empathy.

Funny. Belle can’t find any herself without him standing at her side.

“Rumple saved all of us,” Belle says as loudly as her anger and tight voice will let her. Everyone in the chambers falls silent and look her way, but for once, she doesn’t mind the attention. In fact, she wants it. “He almost died saving all of Storybrooke from Peter Pan. He stopped the second Curse and helped bring everyone here safely.” She casts a look toward Henry and doesn’t miss the way the Charmings all draw closer together. Even Regina looks vaguely protective. “He doesn’t deserve to be left, forgotten and abandoned, in some prison cell.”

“I know you think he’s changed,” the Blue Fairy says. “But that was in the Land Without Magic. Here, in our world, his curse will have him fully under its thrall. Whatever good you thought you saw in him has been swallowed up again.”

“And what about me?” Baelfire’s voice from behind her almost has Belle sagging in relief (it’s a terrible feeling, standing alone for what’s right against the rest of the world; a little support goes a long way). “You once told me I was the light inside him that kept him good. Well, I’m here, and so is Belle, and together, we can help Papa.”

“Besides,” Belle adds, “I saw good in him before the Dark Curse ever took us to another land. He’s not fully controlled by his curse.”

“If he’s not, that would be worse,” the Blue Fairy replies. “Because that means that every dark and evil thing he’s been a part of, he’s chosen willingly.”

“Rumplestiltskin is not a monster,” Belle says hotly, her hands curling into fists. “But even if he were, he deserves a second chance, just like everyone else.”

“That’s true,” David says, but surprisingly, it’s Snow who takes a step away, already shaking her head.

“He manipulated me into killing Cora,” she says. Regina blurts out a startled question but is quickly hushed by Henry. “You don’t know what he said when I asked him…” Swallowing, Snow pales and raises her chin in the air. “No. I’m sorry, Belle, Neal, but I don’t think he’s as good as you want to believe.”

“He faced Pan!” Baelfire snaps. “He let me go so he could save Henry! And he didn’t manipulate you into doing anything—you chose to kill Cora of your own free will!”

Snow looks like he slapped her, and David is immediately at her side, his expression forbidding as he wraps his arm around her. Regina’s own expression is thunderous, but she’s looking at Snow, not Belle or Baelfire.

Belle feels her heart thumping in her throat, lodged there so she can’t quite get a full breath. “You can’t leave him alone down there!” she begs. “That’s not…that’s not what heroes do. Why is he even down there? What did he do that you’d—”

“He tried to steal Ella’s baby,” Granny interjects, but surprisingly, it’s Emma who says, “I don’t think he did actually. I mean, can’t he see the future? We know he wanted to be locked up, and anyway, he wanted to make a deal with me in Storybrooke. I owed him a favor in return for Ashley’s kid, and he asked me to help him find his son. That’s all he wanted, isn’t it? To find his son?”

The chambers fall silent.

Emma draws herself up, her hands on her hips. “Well? He has him now, right? Neal’s here, and he’s got Belle too. So whatever…evil…” Her nose scrunches up. “…you think he’s done…he doesn’t really have a reason to do it anymore, does he?”

“No,” Belle says. Her voice echoes across the large round table in the center of the room. “He just wants to be with the people he loves. Please. If Regina can walk free, if Hook can be allowed to go without a trial, then why can’t Rumple? He’s the only reason any of us are even here.”

“I agree,” Emma says, and suddenly, she’s shoulder to shoulder with Baelfire, facing her parents down. And Henry’s joining her, his face narrowed with resolve, and even Regina looks like she might try to join them if not for the dwarfs standing between her and the Charmings.

“Emma, you don’t know what he’s like here—”

“I don’t care,” Emma says over her mother. “I don’t know what anyone’s like here. But I do remember the last time we were here—remember? When we were willing to do whatever it took to get back to the people we loved. We sure didn’t leave them better off here than when we came, but I didn’t lose a single night’s sleep over it. Did you? So it’s kind of hard to think that we’re any better than Gold, not when everything he did was just to get back to his kid.”

David has to hold Snow up as she gasps. “They’re not the same things at all,” he says. “Emma, you have to know that—”

“I’m really good at finding people,” she says. “It’s kind of the only thing I’m probably good at here in this weird place. So help me or not, but I’m going to find him.” She turns her back on her parents and looks straight at Baelfire. “I promise, Neal. I’ve been in that cell before. I’m going to help you.”

His eyes are softer than Belle’s ever seen them. She thinks his hands are trembling, one twisted in the shawl still around his neck, the other half-reaching out toward Emma. “Thank you.”

When she leads the way out of the council chambers, Belle’s right behind her, a half-step behind Baelfire, and Henry right on her heels.

It doesn’t take more than a minute for Snow and David to catch up.

The lower they descend, the more Belle’s skin crawls. She’s never been overly fond of caves or dark spaces, but ever since the asylum in Storybrooke, she’s hated going underground. Even the basement in Rumplestiltskin’s house, filled with all the things that should have reminded her pleasantly of the Dark Castle, had been too much for her to face.

But Rumplestiltskin needs her. He’s been waiting and waiting and waiting (it’s been over two days since they were swept back to this land), and she knows his hope, knows his trust in good things, how tenuous and fragile it is.

(He probably thinks she’s forgotten about him. Probably thinks Baelfire has written him off again. He’s probably been busy convincing himself that he deserves every dark and tragic thing that happens to him.)

Belle snatches the torch up before Baelfire can, needing something in her hands to hold onto while her fingertips burn for the feel of Rumple’s awed stare, soft and real beneath her touch. Emma let them come down alone, not wanting Henry to go down into the creepy tunnels and knowing he’d follow if they were to all leave him, so it’s just Belle and Baelfire together. She thinks it’s better that way (Rumplestiltskin doesn’t like an audience during his most vulnerable moments). It took them hours for the dwarfs to finally unearth the way down here, and twice that to find the key to the cell waiting below, and Belle herself is tired of everyone else (everyone but Bae).

The smell of mold, and rot, and something sharp enough to sting her nostrils grows stronger as they descend. Cobwebs reach down from the low roof, stones trip her up from beneath, and a couple times, Baelfire has to move piles of rubble to allow them to continue. Which means that even though multiple people clearly remembered that Rumplestiltskin was down here, no one’s come to check on him (there was so much blood, hidden in the dark colors of his shirt and suit coat), to feed him (he’s already skinny, wasted away after his trip to Neverland), to give him water (he’s immortal, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel the lack of basic necessities, just that he endures them without end), to allow him even the most basic human dignity.

Tears are hot and salty on her lips and Belle uses her free hand to dash them away so she can see where she’s going. This type of place isn’t supposed to exist in the palaces of just and fair rulers. In her beloved books, this kind of setting would be where the Evil Queen kept her prisoners (but much as she loathes and detests her cell, Belle remembers a window where fresh air flowed, the moonlight shone down, the sunlight caressed her, and trays of bland and tasteless food were delivered twice a day).

Rats skitter away in the shadows, tiny insects crawl in shadows Belle refuses to scrutinize too closely, and the smell gets worse, putrid and bad enough to gag her.

“I hate this,” Baelfire says bluntly, and Belle half-laughs, half-sobs, and reaches out (her fear of rejection less than her fear of isolation) to loop her hand through his elbow.

“Me too. I can’t believe he stayed here.”

“When he didn’t have to,” Baelfire adds. “Before. He could have left at any time.”

“No,” she says. “He couldn’t.”

They both know the truth of that because they both know Rumplestiltskin (his love is the strongest part of him).

“There,” Baelfire says. “Didn’t Leroy say his cell was at the very end of the tunnel, past the last gate? That’s got to be last gate. Or at least, the only one I’ve seen.”

Belle clenches her teeth lest they chatter as a pit opens in her stomach. There are strange echoes here, and that’s probably why she can hear an eerie keening noise, threaded through with snatches of what might be a lullaby…or a scream. Surely it’s just the contortion of sound in these strange tunnels. It can’t be Rumplestiltskin. It wouldn’t be.

(But he’s hurt. And frightened. And alone, abandoned like his worst fear. And it took her so long to get here.)

Finally, they turn the last bend and see the bars covering the end of the tunnel. It’s dark beyond, and even her torch only scatters the darkness in strange, fractured shapes. At first, she doesn’t see him. Her eyes search the cell, but at the height she thinks he’d be standing, or even sitting. She doesn’t think to look to the ground where jagged pebbles and multi-legged insects are lurking—not until she hears a low, pained groan.

The sight of him, crumpled in a heap of thin limbs and stained leathers, wrings a gasp from deep in her throat and Baelfire nearly stumbles. They only narrowly hold each other up.

“Rumple!” she cries, and she tears away from Baelfire, drops the torch to burn, weakly, against the stone, as she reaches through the bars toward him. With the light this low, she can see his eyes reflecting back the torchlight, but it doesn’t make any sense.

He looks human. Like Mr. Gold. Like he’s still in the Land Without Magic. It must be the cell (riven in fairy dust to separate him from his magic), but that means he won’t have been able to conjure himself any aid (any food, or healing potions, or Sight of her and Baelfire trying to get to him).

She strains against the bars but can’t quite reach him, and she’s crying now, begging Baelfire to open the door and let him out. She has the ring with her. As soon as she’s at his side and they’re out of these dust-laden tunnels, as soon as she’s surrounded him in as much of her embrace as possible, she’ll wish them back to the Dark Castle (far away from rulers who can call themselves good while keeping such a dank torture chamber like this). She’ll take him to his room, or better yet, hers since she doubts he placed a stasis spell over his own, and she’ll wrap him in blankets and make him soup and tea and she’ll reassure him a thousand times, ten thousand times, that she loves him, she’ll never leave him again, she’ll stay with him forever. She won’t care if she’s always the one to kiss him first or reach out first; it’s a small price to pay to be with him, to have him safe and sound, to keep him well and whole and with her.

Baelfire curses as he fights with the rusty lock and the key Ruby had to sniff out for them, buried in some old guard-chamber beneath the moldering skeleton of someone still holding a board down across the entrance to these tunnels. “Don’t worry, Papa, I’ll get it. We’ll get you out of there, I promise.”

Lying there on the floor, heedless of what chooses to crawl over or under her, Belle can’t rip her eyes from Rumplestiltskin. He looks so small here, so utterly frail and breakable. There’s blood on his temples, matting his lank hair, and his cheekbones are so gaunt she nearly weeps, but worst of all is the way his hands just lie there in the dirt—no fidgeting or gesturing or moving at all. She’s never seen him so depleted. So utterly defeated (not even in the backroom of his shop, when Lacey disappeared so Belle could wake up, and he told her his son was dead).

“Oh, Rumple,” she whispers, and this, finally, seems to rouse him. He actually turns his face away from the light, a sharp sigh making his lips bleed with the movement.

“Why are you always so sad?” he asks, his voice cracked and low but so real she almost cries. “Why can’t you just once, just for novelty’s sake, be happy to be here? Couldn’t you ever fake being glad to have loved me, even if just for a moment?”

The injustice, the sheer absurdity, of the question (the accusation?) has her mouth falling open. “Rumple! I do love you.”

How can he think she doesn’t? No, she knew he would, it took her so long, he trusted her to come for him and she delayed and allowed distractions and had to ask for help and—

“It’s Bae’s birthday,” Rumplestiltskin whispers.

“Is it?” She looks up at Baelfire, but he looks as surprised as she does, and merely shrugs before redoubling his struggle with the rusty lock. He’s scraped out a tiny anthill’s worth of dust and flaking, rusty metal shavings from the lock just so he can try to fit the key inside again.

“Rumple, please,” Belle says. “We’re here to get you out. We both love you and we came as soon as we could and Bae’s going to get the door open and we can go home, okay?”

Rumplestiltskin only lays there, impassive, unmoving. She can’t even see his chest moving anymore.

“Rumple!”

“Papa!” Bae shouts.

That has Rumplestiltskin shooting up in a heartbeat. There are audible cracks and pops when he moves, something that she thinks is dried blood tearing free from his chest, and Belle is nearly wild, all but throwing herself against the door as he calls for his son.

But he never once looks up at Baelfire. He screams for him and drags himself painfully across the dirt, but he doesn’t look up at all, not even when Baelfire shouts that he’s here, then curses and throws his whole bodyweight against the key.

Something creaks and then the door’s open and Baelfire’s nearly fallen inside the cell, Belle right beside him, both of them tripping and flailing as they try to reach Rumplestiltskin.

Who still doesn’t seem to see them. There’s fresh blood gleaming over his brows, making him blink as it drips into his vision. “Bae!” he calls, weakly, pitifully, turning Belle’s heart to a black, burning coal.

“Papa!” Baelfire reaches him first, his hand closing around Rumplestiltskin’s arm as he helps him, almost bodily lifting him up to stand him upright. “Papa, what’s wrong? I’m right here. Why can’t you see me? Emma let me out and Belle found me and we searched until we found your cell. Come with me. We’ll get you somewhere safe.”

“Please, Rumple,” Belle says. Her hands are clenching and releasing against her skirt as she fights the urge to pull him into her. He needs his son, of course he does, she’s always known that (or near enough to always as to make no difference, really), and she wouldn’t separate them for the world. But she needs him. She needs to feel him. To know he’s going to be okay (no matter what it’s starting to look like).

“Please,” she says again. “You need…you need food. And water. And is that blood? Still? Are you still hurt? I thought your magic would heal it.”

(She thought he’d be magical, here. The door is open, the cell unlocked, but he still looks like this mishmash of Mr. Gold and Rumplestiltskin, all frail human and dark leathers.)

“Maybe it’s the cell? Isn’t it supposed to dampen his magic?” Baelfire wonders aloud, his own eyes taking in the same things Belle can’t stop seeing.

“Bae!” Rumplestiltskin shouts again.

He looks right through Baelfire. His eyes are wild, searching desperately, his fingers rubbing against each other nearly frantically as he looks for the son that’s kneeling right beside him.

This doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t anything he warned her would happen. He’d told her only that he’d be trapped in a cell, not that he’d…that he’d…be…

Insane.

She makes herself think the word. Makes herself confront it.

“Papa!” Baelfire is the closest to frazzled she think she’s ever seen him. Even coming out of Pandora’s Box didn’t leave him looking this shaken. “I’m right here!”

But Rumplestiltskin squeezes his eyes shut and turns away, and there are tears making lighter tracks through the blood trickling down his cheeks.

Belle sets one hand on Bae’s shoulder and with the other reaches out to take Rumplestiltskin’s. “Rumple?” she says, gently.

(He’s not used to gentleness. It always shakes him from whatever mania or fixation has hold of him.)

Beneath her touch, he goes as still as a statue. This time she’s sure: he’s not even breathing. Until he opens his eyes, his eyes locking straight onto hers.

“Rumple,” she says, and smiles through her tears. Because it’s him. He smells of vile things (pus and blood and waste and deprivation) and he looks worse than she’s ever seen him and she fears for the state of his mind (and for his magic, if this is a glamour he’s not even aware he’s casting over himself, trying to avoid the reality of his surroundings or wish himself back to Storybrooke with her and his son), and his hand is a thin collection of delicate bones under her fingertips.

But he’s alive, and he’s hers (he’s staring at her in that way he has for so long, that awed and wondering, marveling disbelief).

“Belle?” It’s definitely a question, as if he can’t believe that she’s really there. But he’s seeing her. He is, for the first time, fully cognizant of her presence.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him. If only he tells her, she’ll fix it. She’ll do whatever she has to in order to make him better, to comfort him, to open his eyes to the reality of his son so close to hand.

His breath catches in his throat in the smallest sob she’s ever heard from a living thing (it breaks her burning heart into several jagged shards inside her too-small chest). “I failed,” he says (just like he did before, when Lacey was fading and Belle reemerging). “I failed. I’ll never find Bae. I’ll never see him again. Everything I did was for nothing.”

She can’t breathe. Baelfire is staring at his papa, eyes wide and skin bleaching of color, but Belle can’t even think properly to decipher this newest mystery.

“Rumple…what are you talking about?” She wishes she could understand him, could see past whatever madness is hazing him. But for the first time, she looks at him and finds herself at a loss. “You found your son. In Storybrooke, remember? You went to Manhattan with Emma and Henry and you found him. He found you again in Neverland. And he’s right here.” She touches Baelfire’s shoulder, trying to draw Rumplestiltskin’s fixated attention to him, but to no avail. He continues staring at her. “Can’t you see him, Rumple? Don’t you remember?”

And Rumplestiltskin smiles. Mockingly. Scornfully. In that way he did for just the first couple days of their acquaintanceship (before he started staring and puzzling and marveling and smiling a real smile). “You’re so mad,” he tells her. “Belle may have fancied herself in love with a beast, but she wasn’t crazy. What kind of trick is this?”

Belle finally knows why Baelfire can’t stop looking so gutted. The lack of recognition in Rumplestiltskin’s eyes, that absence of love at the sight of her, is so painful, so debilitating that she can’t speak.

“Papa,” Baelfire interrupts. “Why don’t you remember? What happened to you?”

A snarl reshapes Rumplestiltskin’s face, but for just an instant, he looks at Baelfire (he sees him even if he doesn’t recognize him). “I was born,” he growls. “And I can’t die.”

And then he collapses in on himself, and there’s so much blood, so much anguish in his broken sobs, that Belle and Baelfire together can’t hold him up. Instead, they all huddle in a heap in the middle of this horrible cell, and Belle finds herself sobbing too.

He trusted her to save him.

(She failed.)

Though they worry over his wounds, in the end, Baelfire slings his papa over his shoulders, and Belle hurries ahead of him with the torch to light his way. It takes far too long to get back to air and light, away from the foulness of that horrible cell, and Belle’s eyes are cold, her jaw clenched, when she faces the Charmings and demands a wing of the palace for themselves.

(A hero wouldn’t. A hero would think of others, and set her own needs aside, and measure the worth of people in the value of their actions. Belle is so incredibly tired of being a hero.)

“There are so many wounded,” Snow tries to say, but Belle keeps her tone perfectly even when she says, “And you think they’ll want to share a hall with the Dark One?”

The Charmings are hanging back themselves, after all. They won’t get close enough to see that beneath the dirt and muck and blood, Rumple’s skin is as clear as it was in Storybrooke. In Neverland. In Manhattan. (They won’t risk recognizing in the broken remains of her lover their own culpability, their own neglect, their own sins.)

“Yes,” David says while Snow is still deliberating. He looks at his wife and says, softly, “The west wing. It’s small and private. And Gold needs it.”

If Snow doesn’t like it, Belle doesn’t care. She pauses only long enough to make sure Rumple is still unconscious, that Baelfire is still good with his slight weight, and then they hurry after David to the west wing. It’s dusty and dark, every window covered in curtains, most of the rooms acting as storage, but Belle finds a large set of chambers with a fireplace, a bed, and a window (and an identical set across the hall for his son) and leads Baelfire into it. She drags a chair in from another room, helps Baelfire lay Rumple carefully in its plush embrace, and then together they strip the room of everything that’s dirty, clean the walls and hearth and beat the bed clean. Belle hunts down clean linens from Ruby, returns, and makes the bed while Baelfire washes his father in hot water Ariel brings in with Phillip’s help and Aurora’s direction (the princess herself is too heavily pregnant to lift anything herself, but she lights the fire for them and speaks softly to Baelfire and smiles so warmly at Phillip that Belle can’t help but warm to her).

By the time Belle remembers (far too late) the healing potions in her bag, everyone else is gone (after asking if they should summon one of the overworked healers; apparently no one can find Dr. Whale) and Baelfire has his papa dressed in clean pajamas and is moving him to the bed.

“Wait!” Belle blurts at a sudden thought. “I have—”

She’s so frustrated with herself, so incredibly flustered, that she can’t find words and instead dumps her pack on the floor and roots through it for the vials she wrapped in a purple nightgown. Her reading shawl, bundled up around its precious cargo, nearly goes rolling free. Belle snatches for it and places it on the chair where Rumple had been moments earlier. Safe (she hopes).

“What are those?” Baelfire asks suspiciously as she unearths the vials.

“Healing potions,” she says shortly, almost sharply. “They should help.”

She hopes. Though she doesn’t know why he’s not healing on his own. Why his immortality and his curse haven’t kicked in to stop the bleeding in his forehead and mend his bones together and clean the rot from the stab wound in his chest.

Baelfire looks away, clearly nauseated by the sight, when Belle pulls back the laces on Rumplestiltskin’s shirt and unwinds the bandage they’d just placed so carefully. She’s not an expert in healing potions, but she helped Rumple mix a fair few of them, and she made sure she’d grabbed the most all-purpose of the bunch, so she wastes no time in deliberating before she pours the one glowing red over his chest. The one that has a golden sheen she soaks into a handkerchief and lays over his brow. The third, a dark blue so deep it reminds her of the mermaid shoals Ariel’s told her about, she dabs heavily over his ribs.

After Baelfire ties the bandage back around Rumplestiltskin’s chest, he laces his shirt up again and carefully piles blankets over him. “There’s a draft in here,” he says defensively at Belle’s look (though she appreciates his care and was in no way questioning it). “The palace is made of stone and glass. The wind’s going to whip straight through.”

Belle tries to smile and says only, “I’ll make sure the fire is stoked.”

Tears drip from her cheeks to her knuckles before being dried by the flames. Belle pokes at the burning logs and tries to bite the tears back. Rumplestiltskin doesn’t need her to cry; he needs her to be brave and smart and strong.

“Belle?” Tentatively, Baelfire comes up behind her. He sits in one of the two chairs that have somehow materialized here by the hearth, and his hand is a welcome weight for all its awkwardness when he slowly pats her shoulder. “You okay?”

“Why isn’t he healing?”

“Maybe the potions take a bit of time to work?”

“No.” She shakes her head impatiently. “I mean…why isn’t his magic healing him? Why does he look…normal?”

Baelfire’s silent for a long moment. “You think…” He takes a deep breath, none too steadily. “What do you think?”

“I think his magic must be more depleted than it’s ever been before,” she says unhappily. “I think whatever he did to help us all return here safely, to keep me safe, took more out of him than he could spare after facing Pan.”

(Facing his father, she thinks. The one he loved no matter what kind of anger or ruthlessness he tried to pretend to around him.)

“But he’ll…he’ll bounce back. Right?”

Belle closes her eyes, shudders once, then turns to look at Baelfire with a smile. “Of course,” she says with a certainty she only wishes she could feel. “He’s immortal, after all. There’s only one thing that can kill him. We just…we just need to be patient.”

“And keep him safe from everyone else,” Baelfire says grimly.

“Yeah.” Belle’s shoulders fall with exhaustion. “And that.”

They’re quiet a moment, the crackle of flames lulling her to what might be sleep if she weren’t so intent on any noise that might drift over from the bed.

It’s Baelfire that breaks it, softly, his voice so quiet it sounds more like a child’s than a man’s.

“Why couldn’t he see me?” he asks. “Why didn’t he know I was there?”

I don’t know. The words sit there in her mouth like sores, ready to pop and spill over with pus that would poison him.

All she can do is rise up on her knees and pull him into a hug (they’re not terribly close yet, maybe; maybe she’s overstepping; but they both need a hug and they both love Rumplestiltskin and they’re each the only thing the other has right now). Baelfire hugs her back just as strongly, just as quickly, and Belle breathes him in and can’t imagine that Rumplestiltskin won’t be all right.

(He’ll be okay. He has to be. He just got his son back. He told her he chose her. Of course he’ll be okay.)

(But…when?)

Belle has shared a bed with Rumplestiltskin for much longer than is proper (though chastely for much longer than she’d imagined they would wait), and she knows he often wakes from night terrors. Not in the way of a child screaming and ready for comfort. Not as an adolescent shamed and still craving reassurance. Not as a man who expects to be heard and listened to and given grace.

No, he wakes from them silent. Alone. Makes no noise. Reaches for no comfort. Drags himself from the torment that is his bed of sleep and turns himself instead to work and schemes and the loneliness that has dogged him so long he’s convinced himself it’s the way he’s happiest.

So it’s the screams that scare Belle the most. The rasping, keening sobs that burst from his throat and leave his eyes darting glassily about the room while she tries to still his writhing body long enough to reassure him the nightmare’s over.

Except…it’s not. Not really. Not when Baelfire tries to help and Rumplestiltskin’s gaze slides right past him as he moans for his long-lost son.

It’s exhausting, grueling in a way she’s not used to, and eventually, when their strength runs out, Belle shoos Baelfire to his own bed (his father’s been quiet long enough to make them both think that maybe he’ll find rest for longer than a few moments at a time), then finds herself drooping lower and lower over the edge of the bed herself. In her exhaustion, she can’t quite remember the severity of the wound in his chest, can’t deny the warmth and softness of the bed, and before she can talk herself out of it, Belle finds herself crawling under the covers and pressing herself close against his side.

“Milah?” he murmurs, drowsily, and something contracts like a vise in Belle’s heart.

“No,” she says. “It’s Belle.”

“Belle,” he breathes, then nothing more for long enough that Belle slips into sleep only to be roused by his sudden jerky movements.

“Bae!” he tries to shout. Only the barest whisper emerges from his strained throat (Belle’s glad for it, glad that Baelfire won’t hear it across the hall and will get some sleep). Before he can do more than wriggle in the covers, Belle slings a leg over his and rests her arm (gently, so gently) across his chest.

“Shh,” she whispers. “I’m here, Rumple. I’m right here with you. It’s okay.”

He falls still. There’s a pause. He draws breath (Belle’s heart stills at the expectation of hearing his wife’s name fall from his lips).

“Belle?” he asks, and hot tears brim over her eyelids to soak into his shirt.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I’m here. I’m not leaving you. I’ll never leave you again, okay?”

A huff of breath escapes his mouth. “You say that now,” he croaks. “But you’ll leave. You always leave.”

“I’m not Milah,” she snaps (exhaustion saps her kindness; heartbreak drains her patience). “I’m not Cora. I’m me, Belle.”

Slowly, almost wonderingly, Rumple raises his hands to play the tips of her ears through his spinner fingers. “You always leave,” he says again. “From the beginning, I’ve been the beast in your story. When you’re reminded of that, you’ll leave again.”

The injustice of the accusation stings.

(The truth of it burns.)

“I do leave sometimes,” she forces herself to admit, the crackle of the flames pinning her words to this close, tired reality. “But you, Rumple…you never believe in me. You never trust me.”

(The lie in her words tastes like the cold metal of a dagger.)

The truth of them puts steel in her voice.

“How can I?” he asks on a sigh. “Even when I was man, I wouldn’t have deserved you.”

“You are a man,” she insists, and for this familiar refrain, she finds the strength to prop herself up on an elbow and stare down at him. He doesn’t meet her eyes, choosing instead to stare at the ends of her hair he twirls between his knuckles, backlit by the fire. “Rumple, please, listen to me. You are a man. You’re the man I love.”

“And the beast?” His gaze flicks to her and then away again before she can pin him down. “Do you love the beast too? Or just the idea of saving him?”

Her breath catches like tiny hairpins in her throat, pulling and tugging and pinching in all the wrong places.

Rumple slips back into a feverish sleep.

All Belle can do, then, is lay her head on his shoulder, feel his heartbeat pulse against her wrist, and realize that she’s never felt farther removed from him.

Nurturing Rumplestiltskin back to health is a long process. The healing potions are used up long before the wound in his chest scabs over. Baelfire seems endlessly patient as he bathes and dresses his father, lifting and carrying him from bed to chair and then chair to bed in a rotation that nearly makes Belle want to scream with the seeming uselessness of it all (she doesn’t, though; of course not; both Rumple and Baelfire need her). He remains dry-eyed as his papa continues to be oblivious to his presence, and for all that Rumple calls for Bae as if he isn’t there, his son talks to him in an even, steady tone that never falters.

Belle wishes she had the same fortitude, but it grates on her: the times he doesn’t see her. The moments he clearly refuses to let himself reach for her. The doubt that shades his voice when he deigns to speak to her. It’s so much more than he gives Baelfire, and yet so much less than she needs that sometimes she has to go out in the hall, let the wall prop her upright, and sob into the reading shawl he wove her several lifetimes ago.

Still, for all her shortcomings (for all the ways he makes this so hard), Belle refuses to give up on him. It’s a labor of love, and Belle has never shunned hard work, and if it’s hard to be thought a figment of his imagination, it’s easy to care for him in ways she’s always wished he’d allow her to.

She washes his hair in a basin, his shoulders reclined against her thighs, her fingers patiently working through each knot and mat. Baelfire suggests cutting off the whole tangled mess and starting over again, but Belle thinks back to Storybrooke, to the mornings they spent together, to the mass of hair products he kept in the bathroom (she thinks of her first days at his house, the kindness he exuded as he helped her care for her own hair, brushing carefully through until she felt clean and human again), and she shakes her head and spends hours lathering clove-scented soaps through the knots.

When Baelfire sits him in the chair to give him some respite from the bed, Belle hurries through changing the linens as quickly as possible so she can sit at his feet, lean her cheek against his knee, and let him run his hand so softly (so disbelievingly) through her own hair. Sometimes, he’ll whisper her name in just that way he does, sometimes, that awed shock as if he’s viewing a miracle, and Belle will feel her patience and resolve doubling and doubling again until she can face yet another day of this limbo.

It gets worse before it gets better. As the rest of his wounds vanish, the gash in his chest turns hot and feverish and he slides into delirium. His raspy voice descends into illegibility, and even Baelfire’s even-tempered mask slips askew as they fight to keep him cool, draping endless cool cloths over his hot flesh. Eventually, Belle gits her teeth (risks the possibility of him thinking she’s abandoned him yet again) and uses the ring he gave her to return to the Dark Castle. There, she scoops up every healing potion he has, packs any spellbook she can find that mentions mending magic, and wishes herself back to his sickroom. Together, she and Baelfire pour the potions down his throat, bathe his wound in the salves, and pore over the spellbooks (as if magic will come simply by wishing for it).

But in the end, much as logic might tell her different, Belle thinks it’s the chipped cup that does it. Because in unpacking everything she grabbed from their home, she unwraps the teacup and, in a fit of whimsy, sets it on the endtable beside the bed.

The fever dies. The wound scabs over. Baelfire is tugged away by Henry and Emma for a late meal away from the suffocating waiting in this room, and Belle is left alone to search the books for anything that will help (if she grabbed a few books about visions and delusions and invisibility, well, it’s too early to raise Baelfire’s hopes for a quick solution or an easily undone curse).

And that’s when Rumple wakes.

Belle nearly keels over at the clear-eyed look on his face. The directness of his gaze. The clearness of his voice. The reading shawl falls from her shoulders as easily as the book spills out of her nerveless hands. She moves entirely on instinct in his direction and takes his hand simply because she cannot bear not to.

Touch. It’s such a simple thing, so easily undervalued, so quickly evaded, so desperately necessary. She’s touched him endlessly while he was feverish, bathed him and held onto him and brushed his hair and wrapped herself around his body to keep him still during his nightmares.

But now…now, his hand squeezes hers in reply. His fingertips move against her knuckles, feeling and learning and savoring the feel of hers.

Belle nearly bursts into tears.

There’s a part of her brain intent on his words, on telling him what’s happened to him in his delirium, on asking him what he remembers, what he knows, what he thinks is real, on assuaging his own concerns and answering his slow questions.

But the whole time, there’s also a large part of her (her heart, she thinks) that is wholly intent on the feel of her hand swallowed in his. After so long, after everything that’s happened, it’s nice to not be the only one holding onto the bond between them.

(I choose the one where you and I are together, he said, but he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, he would have let himself die with Pan, he let them be separated without explaining, he always, always lets her go.)

Of course, it’s hard to savor his touch as much as she wishes when it becomes clear that he doesn’t remember anything about Storybrooke. As far as his mind remembers, Regina never succeeded in casting the Dark Curse, they never made it to the Land Without Magic…he never found his son.

Belle tries her best to tell him what happened—she tries not to overwhelm him with details, but this is Rumplestiltskin and it’s always the tiniest details that have concerned him, so she also tries not to be too general in her description.

Not that it matters. He doesn’t believe her. (He never believes in her.)

“I think,” she says as she pushes past her exhaustion to face the worry that’s been gnawing at her beneath the immediacy of his physical state. “I think you chose not to tell us what the full price of the magic was. I think you sacrificed more than just your life. I think maybe, like the Evil Queen, you had to give up your memories. Do you think that’s right?”

His fingers caress hers, his eyes trace her features, even dropping from her face to stare at her figure, backlit by the flames, and for the first time in days, Belle’s aware of herself (aware she’s wearing only a nightgown, she’s alone with the man she loves). “I think you’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “I wish you were still alive. I wish you were real.”

Frustration overwhelms her. The weight of these past days seems to suffocate her as she bows beneath the weight. From somewhere, she finds yet more tears as she begs him to believe her, to listen to her (to for once, just one time, choose her over his own plans and schemes and understanding).

“I want you to be happy,” is all he says. “No more sadness. I’d get rid of it forever if I could.”

“You can,” she says, resisting the urge to shake him. “Just believe me, and I promise you, we won’t be sad anymore.”

“I can’t,” he says.

Just that.

The truth, unvarnished by any of his pretty misdirections, his clever evasions.

He can’t believe her. He loves her, but only as a man loves a pretty story—he will never claim it as his own. Never fight for it. Never choose it over his own cruel reality.

“You can,” she grits out.

And then he tells her the other truth (the one she’s known, subconsciously, since she saw him without scales and reptilian pupils in his cell, since she’s had to use her own feeble methods to heal his supposedly immortal flesh).

“I can’t do any magic. Not anything. I’m nothing, Belle. I’m not the Dark One anymore. This is just me. Dark. And alone. And powerless. I’m less than dust.”

(And after all, maybe it’s not her he can’t believe in, but himself.)

Baelfire finds her curled up in a ball in a corner of the hall outside Rumplestiltskin’s room.

“Belle?” he asks, but she doesn’t move. If she raises her head, he’ll see the mess of tears on her cheeks. “Belle, are you okay? What’s wrong?” A spike of panic fractures his voice. “Is it Papa? Is he—”

“He’s fine,” she manages to get out between the shield of her arms clasped over her knees. “He’s…he’s better. I mean, he was awake and aware, and he’s not feverish anymore.”

“Really?” His sigh of relief is almost explosive. “That’s amazing! Isn’t it?”

“It is.” But still she can’t lift her head. Can’t make herself uncurl from the tight knot she’s folded herself into trying to keep the pain from splitting her into a thousand pieces.

“So…” Baelfire pauses before asking, “So what’s wrong?”

“He thinks he’s imagining me,” she sobs, her tears apparently never-ending. “He thinks he’s still in that awful cell and he’s making all of this up because I died after being tortured for knowing him and you died alone and abandoned in another world. He’s…he’s so…so…so stubborn! He won’t listen to me! He won’t for one second believe that anything I say is the truth! And he looks at me like he never would have expected anything different to happen! And I just…I just…I hate that after everything we’ve been through, he won’t ever believe that I’m really love him—that I’ll never stop loving him!”

It's a mess of words (of problems) that really aren’t Baelfire’s to worry about, but somehow they burst out of her, and poor Baelfire is the one left blinking and stammering at the shards of her heart scattered on the floor at his feet.

Belle hides her face in the crook of her elbow and sobs (like she wouldn’t in a cell, Rumplestiltskin’s or Regina’s; like she refused to when Lacey was banished and she remained to pick up the pieces of her fragmented psyche; like she couldn’t when left behind while the man she loved most in the world went to Neverland on a suicide mission).

Gradually, she realizes that Baelfire’s sat beside her, cross-legged, leaning against the wall, a solid presence ensuring she isn’t alone.

“I’m sorry,” she tries to say, but he shakes his head and (almost shyly) wraps his arm around her shoulders.

“I get it,” he says. “Or at least, I think I do. The thing is…” He trails off, and Belle can’t help but hold her breath hoping he’ll finish what he wants to say. “The thing is,” and he turns to meet her waterlogged stare, “I don’t think Papa would have been able to believe that you could love him even back when he was just a spinner without the curse. I always thought it was Mom who made him think that, but…now I think it was Pan.”

Pan. Of course. Rumplestiltskin was just an innocent little boy once, craving love and reassurance and approval, and instead Malcolm had traded him for a monster. Knowing he’d essentially done the same for his son, even if to save him rather than be rid of him, must have shredded his soul even more than the curse did. And Cora hadn’t helped heal any wound left behind by Milah, poisoning whatever trust he’d still been able to scrape together.

Belle knew all that, or at least had known enough scraps of it to piece it together. But still…it hurt to be judged by the actions of people who’d all had their claws in Rumple’s heart even before she was born.

It hurt that she could never be enough for him.

“I wish I could say it would get better,” Baelfire says lowly. “But I don’t think it ever will, not all the way.”

“You could use a little help on the comforting front,” she says with a stab at humor.

Baelfire does her the kindness of a tiny smile before continuing. “Look, I know this has been really hard. Trust me, I get it. And I hope Papa does learn to trust that we’ll both be here for him. I think he will. Even just in the little bit of time we had between Neverland and…that mess on Main Street…well, I think he was trying. He let me go about my life without having to keep tabs on me. He offered me that protection scarf instead of tricking me—or forcing me—into wearing it. And he believed in you, Belle, I know he did. You should have heard the things he told me about you on the Jolly Roger coming back to Storybrooke. He knew you’d be there waiting for him. He knew you still loved him. He even knew you’d forgive him whatever that whole thing was with Pan’s shadow. And I think you know how big all that is for him. So I think he is learning. I think he was figuring it out, even if it was kind of slow.”

“Yeah.” Belle closes her eyes to better remember those few, sunshiny days (how quickly she forgot them; how long ago they already seem). “He said he chose me, did you know that? He wanted to be with me for the rest of our lives.”

“So.” With a tiny smile that reminds her almost painfully of his father’s, Baelfire nudges her shoulder with his own. “I guess the question’s really…can you accept him even with his fear? ‘Cause that’s what it all comes down to, right? You don’t love someone for who they’re going to turn into—you love someone ‘cause of who they are. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, they’ll become the best version of themselves because we give them the safe place to be themselves and for that to be enough. But none of us are ever going to get any better if the person’s who’s supposed to love us best doesn’t want us the way we are.”

Belle thinks of a spinning wheel. A kiss. A hero’s hope to save a man crushed beneath a monster.

She thinks of a pawnshop and her judgment and Rumplestiltskin’s quick, sarcastic comment about how little she knew him…his utter disbelief that she came back to him.

“You sound like you’re talking from experience,” she says. She’s been utterly intent on Rumplestiltskin, but that hasn’t made her oblivious to the times Emma knocks at the door to share a whispered conversation with Baelfire before he’ll ask Belle if it’s okay if he leaves for a while.

“Maybe,” Baelfire says. “I’m not claiming to be any sort of expert, but I do know that if Emma and I ever do work out…it’ll be because we’ve both seen the worst in each other. She knows the worst thing I’ve ever done, and if she does choose to try to love me again, at least she’ll know what she’s getting.”

“Hey.” Belle nudges his shoulder back and smiles through the lump in her throat. “I don’t think she’ll have to try too hard.”

(In fact, she thinks the Savior might already be there, but better to let the two of them figure it out between them.)

“Yeah?”

Belle leans her head against his rounded shoulder, suddenly tired. Her tears are gone; she feels drained and hollow, cleaned out and ready to begin again at trying. “Yeah. It sure didn’t take very long for me to love you.”

His quick inhalation alerts her to what she’s said, but Belle’s not sorry for it. She does love him. She’s loved him since Rumple first admitted there was a son, when he told her his name and everything he did for him, when he left to find him and came back with him, when he wept in her arms for the loss of his boy and left to go save the thing Baelfire loves most. Actually getting to know him has cemented her love in place, and he’s made it so easy to grow that love, but yes, Belle loves Baelfire simply because Rumplestiltskin does.

“You’re easy too,” Baelfire says quietly, and it is such a balm to her wounded heart that Belle changes her mind instantly.

“You’re amazing at comforting people,” she tells him, and Baelfire laughs, and they sit there together for a while more before going back into the room to face a man who doesn’t believe in them.

Rumplestiltskin slowly regains his strength, able to stay awake for longer and longer periods, and even able to rise unsteadily and limp his way over to the chair and then back to the bed (limp because he’s weak, not because his ankle is still damaged, and the difference confuses Belle). He listens to the stories she tells him of Storybrooke, though he makes it very clear that he views them as just that: stories.

The only thing that sets him back is the sight of Baelfire, at least on the rare occasions he doesn’t ignore him entirely.

It's usually when he’s weakest, the most exhausted, that Rumple will actually seem to notice his son, and then he’ll grow pinched and cranky. He snaps over the smallest thing, throws his plate into the fire, nearly breaks his wrist stumbling back from his own son and stumbling, only narrowly catching himself on his hand.

Baelfire’s expression grows more and more forbidding, Rumple grows quieter, and Belle grows so desperate she waits until Rumple’s sleeping deeply and then ghosts through the palace in search of the one person who might have answers (the person Belle wants to see the least).

Regina is being kept in rich chambers that suit the Queen she once was, but the guards on the doors, the birds outside the windows, and the black cuff on her wrist betray her true status here.

“What do you want?” Regina sneers when Belle’s allowed in by Tom, who still remembers her fondly as a mischievous Lacey despite his own memories being healed at the same time as hers.

“I’m here to talk about Rumplestiltskin.”

It’s dangerous, Belle knows, because the last time she trusted anything Regina said about Rumple, she kissed her True Love and nearly destroyed his heart. But whatever’s happening to him is magical in nature and the books Belle’s retrieved, little by little, from the Dark Castle aren’t providing her the answers she needs.

“Boring,” the Queen declares. “I’d rather talk about this cuff that dampens my magic.”

“I’m not going to remove it for you,” Belle says steadily. “I gave it to you because you asked me to, and I think if you had all your memories, you would still want to wear it.”

“How convenient for you,” Regina drawls icily. She turns her face to the window and for long moments, there is a silence that feels very nearly familiar (how many times did the Evil Queen come to stare at Belle, saying nothing, just reassuring herself that she had a bargaining chip to play on her mentor?).

“Fine!” Regina snaps eventually. “What about dear old Rumple?”

“He doesn’t remember either,” she says. “I don’t know how much Henry’s told you, but Rumplestiltskin wanted to go to the Land Without Magic to find—”

“Yes, I’m aware he was using me the entire time.” Narrowing her eyes, the Queen studies Belle so intently that chills rise along her skin. “Let me guess, he can’t remember his son either?”

“How did you know?”

Regina rolls her eyes. “I’m not an idiot. He’s the one who wrote the Dark Curse. Unraveling it might have rebounded on me, but he had a part to play. Besides, the way we all came back so safely? Not really a concern of his while he was here, I assure you. So manipulating that probably took a price of his own.”

“The memories of his son?”

“The reason he wrote the Dark Curse.” Regina waves a hand indolently. “Just a guess. But he did take his role as teacher pretty seriously.”

Despite herself, curiosity swells within her. “You…were his student?”

“His protégé,” the Queen says with some glee (as if she thinks Belle will believe whatever insinuations she hopes to inspire).

“So you’ve known him since you were young?”

The glee vanishes, leaving a strange solemnity in its place. “Yes,” Regina replies. She looks away. “He led me down this path, you know. Told me exactly what I needed to get me just so far and no farther. Led me like a child on a trail of breadcrumbs until the Dark Curse seemed my only option.”

“I’m sorry,” Belle offers (she almost means it).

The moment of vulnerability ends as quickly as it began. “Yes, well, I asked him to teach me. I wanted revenge. And every time he warned me where the path would lead, I ignored him. So don’t think I’m nothing but his puppet. I chose to become the Evil Queen.”

Belle stares at her, this proud and lonely woman who’s lost more than she knows, and she feels a strange compassion for her. “I know,” she finally says. “But I’m sorry you had to lose your memories of Henry. Your love for him is true, Regina, and powerful enough to break curses, I think.”

“But not avert the price of magic,” she says, so quietly Belle almost doesn’t hear her.

Belle turns to go, but Regina stops her.

“Belle,” she says (Belle thinks that it might be the first time the Queen has ever called her by name rather than some derogative term). “Magic doesn’t take well to being goaded. If you want Rumple to recover quickly, maybe don’t keep dangling the thing he’s not allowed in front of him.”

Baelfire scoffs at the instruction and mutters dire imprecations under his breath.

“We need to be careful with him,” Belle says (softly, because she knows what she’s asking of him).

“I’m not going to abandon him!” Baelfire snaps. “Maybe he’s not allowed to remember me, but there’s a part of him that knows I’m there and I’m not going to leave him thinking that I don’t care about him anymore.”

“I know,” Belle says, and she does. “But maybe we should be more prudent with how we space out your time with him.”

It kills him, she can tell, but eventually, Baelfire agrees.

(For the first time, Belle’s glad to be considered a figment of Rumple’s imagination rather than the thing he loves most.)

“How’s it going?” Ruby asks when handing over a tray of food whipped up by Granny.

“Some progress,” she says.

“Do you have everything you need?” David asks when they meet in passing, the King unbuckling blood-stained armor and Belle carrying a load of fresh blankets.

“More than enough,” she says.

“Any idea how much longer you’ll be here?” Snow asks via a bird messenger that taps at the window.

“Until we’re ready to travel,” Belle says, and lets Rumple’s messenger dove drive the bird away from any spying it might like to do.

“You’re still here?” Leroy asks with a disgruntled huff when she’s carrying a tureen of soup and a basket of bread from the kitchens to the west wing.

“How’s Astrid?” she asks, and the dwarf stomps hastily away.

“You all right?” Emma asks, a bit distractedly, her gaze flitting about on the search for Baelfire who’s with Henry in the stables.

“We’re managing,” Belle says, more than she’s offered to anyone else. There’s a part of her still hopeful that one day, this woman will be part of her family. “I was thinking that I might try letting him walk around a bit. You don’t think anyone will disturb us, do you?”

“I think everyone avoids the west wing once they heard that Gold was here,” Emma says as bluntly as she does everything.

“You think he’s ready?” she asks Baelfire.

“We can’t keep him locked up in one room forever,” he replies.

With that as permission (with David and Snow’s assurances that the west wing will continue to be blocked off to everyone else), Belle coaxes Rumplestiltskin into a foray outside their chambers. He goes only when she promises him that no one will see his slow, tottering steps.

At first, he holds onto the wall as he goes. Belle hovers next to him, her hands reached out in offering (in terror that he’ll fall without her near enough to catch him), but gradually, he straightens, steps a bit more confidently, lets his hand fall from the stability of the wall. He still wavers on certain steps, still has to pause and let the wall bear him up while he catches his breath, but there is hope, here, and Belle swallows it eagerly.

She even more avidly treasures the tiny moments where, unsteady, his hand reaches for hers. Occasionally, his fingertips graze hers. Once, he grips her hand, squeezes once while actually meeting her eyes, before letting the touch fall away. Belle cradles her tingling hand close to her side and dares to hope for more.

And then Henry appears out of nowhere, Baelfire right behind him, and Rumplestiltskin casts a look filled with betrayal in Belle’s direction.

Stung and guilty, she chides Henry and nearly snarls at Baelfire, bristling like a cat as she tries to keep herself between them and Rumple. Which makes it all the more bewildering when Rumplestiltskin steps out from behind her and begins speaking directly to Henry. In fact, he invites Henry to tell him about the Land Without Magic (invites when with Belle he only endures). The unfairness of it is enough to take her breath away if Baelfire weren’t following at a slight distance, his eyes wistful and yearning as he watches his father and son speak in a way he’s been denied.

All of Belle’s outrage is instantly doused.

“I’m sorry,” she offers Baelfire, and if he thinks she means for her sharp words, then she will not disabuse him.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, but the corners of his eyes are pinched tight as he watches his papa.

Abruptly determined, Belle takes advantage of Rumplestiltskin’s searching hand (for the wall, she knows, not her) and sets it in her elbow. Then, with her free hand, she reaches for Baelfire’s. It’s not much, not everything he needs, but at least for these few moments, in this small way, there is a connection between Baelfire and his papa.

Now that he’s mostly recovered, Belle treasures the nights. He grows weary so quickly, now, but he also seems more open when it’s just the two of them (when he’s tired and his armor grows too heavy to wear every piece of it). She sets out his nightclothes and busies herself with the fire until he’s changed, then takes his willing hands and helps him into bed, allowed to fuss over him and the placement of the blankets, the plushness of the pillows, to her heart’s content (she thinks he loves the novelty of being fussed over).

For some reason, it’s important to her that she not just immediately settle into bed with him. Not because he’s tired so early in the evening, but because she wants him to see her researching the problem, trying to find a solution (one day, she believes with all her heart, he will remember his son, and he will want to know that they didn’t leave Baelfire alone outside; he will want to know that she continued the quest for him when he could not).

More, though, this is when he is most open to hearing about the life he’s forgotten. She tries to be honest, tries not to sugarcoat anything, but more than that, for all that she can only tell him the events through her perspective, she knows this is his story she’s giving back to him too, and she tries her best to see things through his point of view.

It’s eye-opening in more than one way—not just because of what she realizes on her own, but because of the truths Rumplestiltskin will let slip.

One night, she tries to tell him how badly she messed up, pushing him away in those mines in front of everyone and then never going back and amending that, but he shrugs it all aside so easily.

Of course. In Rumple’s eyes, it is always him who is at fault. Always him who is responsible for any terrible thing, who deserves the consequences of any choice. Always him who must be abandoned, must change, must become someone or something different to have any chance of any mark of grace.

“I pushed you away,” he says. “When I was upset. I pushed you away and sent you out into the world and you died because of it. But in this tale of yours, you were still brave enough to trust me again. To reach out on your own.”

As if he didn’t rectify that. As if he didn’t apologize and beg forgiveness and make up for it a hundred times over in Storybrooke.

But he doesn’t remember that. (She’s not sure it would make a difference even if he did.)

“I don’t think it’s your fault,” he says over her attempts to clarify.

In his eyes, she begins to realize, nothing will ever be her fault. And what kind of relationship is that?

Belle slides her fingers between his, smiles at his shy glance (she doesn’t want him to think she’s upset), and tells him, “We’re very different people, Rumple. I think we have different metrics to judge ourselves by. I had less than three decades of experience—or lack thereof—to decide whether to give you grace and to relearn trust. You have three centuries. Besides, I think we both know that as much as your distrust has hurt us, my impulsive nature has done just as much damage.”

He has no answer to that (she doesn’t expect one). She only hopes the words stay with him so that he can internalize them bit by bit

Though she pretends to be looking through another spellbook, instead Belle calls to mind the memory of him kissing her—of his own free will, of his own volition, confidently, knowing that she wanted him to and that he would not be turned away. Beautiful Belle, always so brave, he told her just before inclining to her without hesitation. She hasn’t felt brave since seeing him wasting away in a dark cell, but there are many types of bravery, and she thinks this is one: to remember the good times for him when he cannot.

He loves her. He does trust her, or he did, and he will again (she vows she will be worthy of it, will earn it a second time).

Until then, (if he can learn to trust) she can be patient.

“Can I see him?” Baelfire begs her the next morning. Regina’s warning dances in her mind, but how can Belle turn him away from his own father?

It’s a mistake.

Rumplestiltskin grows cold. He never looks in Baelfire’s direction, never acknowledges his presence, but his shoulders grow stiff, his eyes turn so aloof, and he speaks with a bite to his words. He sets aside his breakfast scarcely touched, and when Belle tries to cajole him into eating more, he tries to stand too quickly and ends up overturning the entire tray.

“I’ll get it, Papa,” Baelfire says, already kneeling, and Rumplestiltskin kicks the tray out of his hands.

An accident, Belle tells herself, but Baelfire clearly doesn’t believe so. The hurt in his eyes begins to frost over, headed toward anger, and Rumplestiltskin is shrinking in on himself, growing sterner, nastier (the way he does when he’s most afraid).

“Rumple,” Belle says over whatever Baelfire is opening his mouth to say. “Let’s go for a walk, okay? I’ll tell you another story.”

“I grow tired of these stories,” he says, but when she takes his hand, he allows himself to be coaxed outside. Baelfire leaves the upset tray and walks on Rumplestiltskin’s other side, a good two feet between them.

“I’m going to tell you a story Baelfire told me,” she says, daring a bit more anger, and sure enough, Rumplestiltskin tries to yank his hand from hers. She lets him, but then loops her hand through the crook of his elbow. He’s still weak enough to need some support, and this way, he can lean on her but still pretend to himself that he’s walking on his own.

“A long time ago,” she begins, giving him a mischievous smile, “much longer than I care to think on, you were a spinner with a small herd of sheep. A shepherd, really, and little Baelfire loved nothing more than to help his dog herd the sheep. You all went out to a pasture where the sheep enjoyed good grazing and you and Baelfire played in the autumn sunshine. Your dog kept one eye on the flock and the other on Baelfire, ensuring none of your precious charges wandered. Unfortunately, even the dog wasn’t keeping an eye on little Bae’s precious stuffed bear and without knowing it, he was left behind in the meadow.”

“How do you know this?” Rumplestiltskin asks. There’s a ragged edge to his voice.

Belle tightens her fingers against his arm and chances a smile at Baelfire, looking far too pensive.

“That night, after supper, Bae looked all over for his bear but couldn’t find him anywhere. You said you’d go look for the little thing, but it was growing dark outside and there were clouds massing in the skies promising rain. Bae insisted on accompanying you, so you bundled him up in the warmest clothes you could, gave him some leather to hold over his head, and off you went back to the pasture. The skies opened up on the way there and you were soaked to the bone, but still you searched high and low, hither and thither, refusing to give up on the little bear no matter how much the odds were stacked against you. Bae even begged you to give it up and go home with him, but you refused to leave the little bear abandoned alone.”

“Belle,” Rumple insists. “How do you know this? I never told you about this.”

“Finally,” Belle continues, “just when you might have keeled over from the cold, your dog found the little bear tucked underneath a rock. You plucked it forth and wrapped it in the end of your shawl and hurried back to your little boy, a conquering hero. Bae cheered and hugged you, wet as you were, and then you had to hurry him back home. Bae insisted on getting you warm, but first you placed the little bear in front of the fire to dry, then you and Bae bathed in water warmed by the hearth and dressed in the softest, warmest clothes you could find. Bae snuggled right up against you and vowed to warm you all the way through until you begged to feel a cool breeze again, and you laughed and said you’d both be sleeping there to the height of summer’s eve then.”

Rumplestiltskin has come to a halt in the middle of the hall. Baelfire stares at him with wide, wanting eyes. “Stop,” Rumple says. “Please…just stop.”

“Why?” Belle asks (she’s not sure he’s really talking to her, though). “It’s such a sweet story. You were willing to do anything to help your boy. And he knew that, Rumple. He knows that. You searched for him just as avidly, as hopelessly, as unfailingly, as you did his little stuffed bear.”

“I failed,” Rumplestiltskin said. “I failed him.”

“No, you didn’t,” Baelfire blurts, and suddenly he’s there, right beside Rumple, and he’s reaching, a little boy look in his eyes, his arms are closing around his papa in a hug, and Rumple…he just stands there.

He doesn’t fight it.

He doesn’t give into it.

He doesn’t acknowledge it at all.

Bae buries his face in his father’s shoulder, and Belle pretends not to see his shoulders shaking, and the whole time, Rumplestiltskin simply…stands there.

He says nothing when Baelfire finally pulls back. Just turns and walks back to the room. He sits in the chair beside the fire, stares at the lapping flames while Belle tidies the mess from breakfast, and says nothing when Baelfire excuses himself for his daily riding lessons with Henry.

“Rumple?” she asks.

“How did you know that story?” he asks again.

“I told you, Baelfire told it to me. After Neverland, when we were all together, safe at home, you both told me stories about your life together.”

“You can’t know that story.”

“Rumple—”

“Don’t you see?” He looks right at her. “This is just more proof that you’re not real. And now my mind can’t even keep it all straight.”

And he refuses to speak to her for the rest of the day.

Belle tries to be strong, but by that evening, she’s desperate for him to acknowledge her (no wonder Baelfire is breaking beneath the weight of his disregard). She’d hoped the story would help him realize Bae is really there, but all it’s done is make him doubt her more, and she’s terrified that he’ll stop acknowledging her the way he has his son.

For all she tries to keep to routine, he doesn’t even seem to hear the story about Storybrooke she starts to tell (about the hamburgers they shared a dozen times, always interrupted mid-meal), and he doesn’t watch her pull out her research materials. Her pulse rushing in her ears, Belle gives up on the book (it’s so dense with magical minutiae that she can barely understand it anyway) and readies herself for bed as quickly as possible. She’s more than half afraid that he’ll push her out of the bed, but she crawls under the covers anyway.

He does nothing.

He doesn’t fight it. Don’t acknowledge her.

Fear nearly strangles her. Belle lays her head on his shoulder and brushes a kiss over his throat.

Something snaps inside him. Or that’s what it feels like anyway. He curls around her and buries his hand in her hair, his scarred ankle brushing against hers, a touch so full of trust that she melts into him.

“Rumple,” she breathes. He’s so close, his scent enveloping her, his arms embracing her, his heart only a few breastbones removed from hers. And yet…

“I miss you,” she whispers. It’s so true it nearly chokes her. “I just…I can’t find any answers. You’d know how to fix this right away.” She squeezes her eyes tightly shut. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? You just…didn’t tell us.” (Didn’t tell her. Because she wouldn’t have let him give it all up. She would have demanded they find another way.) “Oh, Rumple.”

The feel of him stirring beneath her has her going stiff (he’s going to push her away), but he only wraps both his arms around her and shifts so that she’s lying almost completely on top of him. “Belle,” he says.

(As if he knows her. As if he knows she’s truly here. In his nightmares, she’s real.)

“Shh,” she tries to soothe him through her tears. “It’s okay. It’s all right. I’m here, Rumple.”

But he’s not asleep.

“Not forever,” he says.

She’s here, but she won’t be forever, and for an immortal, that has to be terrifying. Even more so for an immortal who’s lost as much as Rumplestiltskin.

But Belle’s already promised him forever. She can’t do anything more.

It’s physically painful to extricate himself from his hold just far enough so she can meet his scared eyes. “Please,” she begs. “Please tell me how to make you believe that I’m real.”

His hand is infinitely gentle as he caresses her hair. His words are like a gut punch with a fist-sized boulder. “You’re dead, Belle. You died, and it’s my fault. This, all this, is just my guilt and my desperation.”

Her fingers tangle in his nightshirt. “How can you believe that? I am right here. Please, Rumple, please, you can touch me, you can feel me, you can smell me and see me. What else can I do to convince you?”

“I saw you before,” he says, and for a moment, she has no idea what he’s talking about. “Before the cell. Before everything. As soon as I heard that you died, I started seeing you. Sometimes you were that princess who traded herself to me for the lives of her people. You told me you loved me. You scorned me for betraying your trust. You taunted me, making the whole castle smell like you but only letting me see your skirts as you turned a corner and vanished.”

The thought of him chasing a vision for months (as she imagined him sweeping through her locked cell-door and scooping her up and taking her to freedom) breaks her heart in two.

“It’s okay,” he assures her in response to her grief (as if anything can be okay again). “I was used to it. I’ve seen Bae for centuries. Sometimes just a wee little thing. Sometimes the boy I…the boy I…I lost.”

“What about a grown man? Have you ever seen him grown?”

(Have you seen him watching you, waiting for you, missing you, wanting you?)

“No. Of course not.” He’s too defensive. Or maybe she’s just too hopeful.

“If we were in another world

“If we were in another world, if you were to find your way back to me…I wouldn’t believe it. I’d only think it just another vision of you.”

Belle’s broken heart flies into her throat even as her hand flies to cradle his cheek. “Oh, Rumple, you never even said!”

His eyes are as bewildered now as when she walked into the backroom of his shop and asked if he were Mr. Gold. “You did doubt me. You did! When I walked into your shop, you saw me and you were so scared. Or shocked. Or something. You stumbled over to me and touched my shoulder before you did anything else. You even mentioned then, like it was surprising, that I was real.”

He doesn’t seem nearly as thunderstruck as she feels. “I still wouldn’t have believed it,” he says evenly. “I don’t believe it now and I can touch you.”

But he’d brought magic into the world then. And he’d kept touching her. Over and over again, reaching out, clasping her hand, wrapping his arm around her…constantly verifying that she was really there.

She hadn’t noticed because she’d been doing the same. Because…because he didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve and she’d been too overwhelmed herself to look beyond the surface level for him.

“Maybe you asked the magic if I was real,” she suggests.

He only snorts. “Magic lies. I probably didn’t believe you were real for weeks.”

Until when? Until she crawled out of a window and ran away from him? Until she waited for eyes on them before rejecting his touch and his presence and his lies?

But…

“It hasn’t been that long,” she says (despite all feelings to the contrary). “Maybe in a while more, you’ll start to believe in me again.”

Patience. She’s learned it over and over again but still not good enough.

Rumplestiltskin has never believed in unabashed hope, though.

“I was succeeding in this pretty little tale of yours,” he snorts. “It’s easier to think miracles are real when you’re used to accomplishing them. But here, in reality? I didn’t succeed at anything. I’m just too scared to face the rest of my alone.”

It’s a risk. It feels like they’re sitting beside a spinning wheel and he can’t understand how (why) she’s there and she’s too focused on the end result she wants to notice the warning signs.

(But he needs her to be brave and she needs him, right now, to be hopeful.)

“What if…” She hesitates, hopes she’s doing the right thing. (At least she’s asking, this time.) “What if I kissed you?”

“You think this is a curse?” He all but sneers before dropping a compliment so simply, so nonchalantly, that she falls in love with him all over again. “I would think any world or life that has you alive in it would be a blessing, not a curse that can be broken.”

“I think we have True Love,” she says (and he does, too, she knows, because her ill-judged kiss melted the scales off his face for an instant of hope and potential), “and it’s the most powerful thing in any world. And if I were to kiss you, you’d feel it. You can’t have True Love with just yourself, no matter how long the hallucinations have lasted. So if you felt it…would you believe in it?”

“Love kills,” he says derisively (there’s terror in his eyes). “Love misleads and warms and then withers into nothing.” (But this is Rumplestiltskin. “Whatever you and I might have once had…I killed that too.” (The times he is most afraid are also the times he hopes the strongest.)

“But you didn’t,” she says. “And I can prove it to you. If you want me to.”

“You didn’t ask last time,” he points out.”

“Like I said, I’m impulsive. But I’m learning.”

He may be arguing, but his arm is tight around her waist and his hand caresses her lips as if already imagining where he wants to kiss her.

“Belle,” he says.

“I’m here,” she replies (that’s what it all boils down to, after all, doesn’t it?)

“Kiss me,” he breathes. “Let’s see if it works.”

But he doesn’t wait for her to grant his wish. Instead, he leans up and claims the kiss himself.

Rumplestiltskin falls off the bed. His expression is all astonishment, so much so she can’t help but laugh even as she scrambles to his side (the kiss was too short, scarcely more than a touch of their lips, a brush of their tongues, and she wants more).

“Belle?” he asks, and it’s as if the first time he’s seen her in years and years.

“Yes,” she gasps, “yes, it’s me, Rumple, I’m here, I’m alive, I’m real, I’m right here.”

He says her name, over and over, and she can’t help but put her hand over his lips, tracing the feel of her name in his mouth. She wants to taste it. She wants to gulp it down and swallow it deep and let it take root inside her.

“I’m here, I’m here,” she’s saying. “I love you.”

“Belle. Beautiful Belle.”

She loves when he says that (she’s never cared about the looks others see when they look at her, but when it’s him? Oh, she cares).

“Belle,” he keeps saying, and she keeps promising him she’s here, and it’s so many words, so much time being wasted when his mouth is right there and hers is longing for him and there’s a big, comfortable bed just behind them.

She’s a millimeter from kissing him when she realizes that her name is slipping out of him between huge gulps of air and he’s actually shaking in place, his whole body wavering as if he might pass out.

“I can’t breathe,” he says, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem that they’re a second away from falling into bed together—instead, he’s a second away from actually losing consciousness.

“Baelfire!” she shouts, once, twice, again, trying to hold Rumple up as he sags backward, still gasping for air, his eyes locked on her.

Baelfire bursts through the doors and takes in the sight of them. Before she can do more than try to explain that he’s suffered a huge shock, Baelfire’s already there, propping his father up and telling him to breathe when he does. Rumplestiltskin never looks away from Belle, but bit by bit, he models his breathing after the exaggerated breaths Baelfire makes for him.

She tries to explain, tries to tell Baelfire that he’s not sick, not relapsing (it’s not another nightmare), but that things are actually better now, but as soon as Rumplestiltskin is breathing again, he gasps out, “You were dead.”

“But I’m not!” she cries. “I’ve been alive the whole time!” Once again, for the dozenth time, she runs through how she was alive the entire time, that she was never dead, that Regina’s a liar, that he found his son (the very son holding him upright and ensuring he keeps breathing).

“Stop,” Rumplestiltskin says, and Belle almost screams with frustration. Their love is True and Bae’s right here and they can solve all of this right here, right now. They could have their happy ending if only she can get through to him, and of course she can, it’s True Love and it’s powerful enough to banish her fear!

“Please believe me! Please! Bae’s right here! He’s holding onto you. He’s sleeping in the room across the hall. He misses you. Can’t you see him? Can’t you hear him? Please, Rumple, please see him!”

“Stop!” Rumple screams, and he covers his ears with his hands, yanking Baelfire’s grip with the force of the movement. “Just stop! Stop! Stop! My son is gone! He’s gone forever! I can never get to him! He hates me! He doesn’t want to see me! Or maybe he’s dead! Maybe he’s been dead all along! Maybe the Blue Fairy lied, or maybe the ogres got him, maybe the—”

“Okay,” she blurts, halting the stream of terrors that must dog him constantly. Her hands shake as she reaches for him. “Okay, I’m sorry, Rumple, I’m sorry, shh, it’s okay, I’m sorry.”

(Too impulsive. She forgot patience and reverted back to her own impatience, and how can she blame Rumple for not being able to fight past his fear when she can’t get past her own character flaw?)

Baelfire meets her eyes from his place on Rumple’s right, propping him up in exactly the same way as Belle supports him on his right. She hopes he can see the apology in her eyes. Rumplestiltskin wraps his arms around her and she feels the tickle of his shuddering breaths along her neck.

“It’s okay,” Baelfire tells her. “He doesn’t have to see me. I know it’s magic’s fault, not his. Just…maybe let him know I don’t hate him. I don’t want him thinking that, not after Neverland. Not ever again.”

“Okay,” she says. Not breaking Baelfire’s gaze, she says, “Your son doesn’t hate you, Rumple.”

“I’ve never hated him,” Baelfire says. “I mean, sure, I was furious with him, but…I forgave him. Okay? He already told me how sorry he was. He told me that he loves me.”

“He’s never hated you,” Belle relays to Rumple. “He was angry, but he’s forgiven you. He knows you’re sorry and that you love him. He misses you.”

Baelfire turns his head (his vulnerability too exposed).

“How can you know that?” Rumplestiltskin asks her (there’s a thread of hope there, though, one she recognizes).

Belle smiles at him. “Because,” she says, “he told me so.”

And for the first time, Rumplestiltskin doesn’t scoff or turn aside. For the first time, she thinks he’s actually really considering this.

So she throws her arms around him (reminder that she’s real, she’s really here, she means what she says), and holds onto him for all she’s worth.

Over the next couple days, Rumple is exceptionally quiet. He listens to everything she tells him, his expression thoughtful, his fingers working one against the other. Belle leaves to hunt down something (a spinning wheel or wool or knitting needles, something to keep his ever-fidgeting hands busy), and returns just in time to see Regina being escorted away. She frowns, but Baelfire’s inside and she knows he wouldn’t let anything happen to his father.

When she enters the room, Rumple looks up and smiles to see her. Baelfire stands by the hearth, his hands fiddling with the ends of the scarf he still wears. Smiling back at Rumple, Belle offers him the basket of knitting she swiped from Granny (the old woman hates the chore and won’t look for it too assiduously). It’s something to keep his hands occupied anyway, and as Belle’s learned, busy hands mean a working mind where Rumple’s concerned.

He won’t (or maybe isn’t allowed to) believe her about his son. But he’s so incredibly clever and understands the price of magic better than anyone. It won’t take him long to think it all through.

She watches him all day (marveling at the dexterity of his hands, how good he is at drawing forth good, useful things from the simplest of starting points), but he doesn’t bring up his son. That night, she burns to press him, but counsels herself (for the thousandth time) to patience and lets him ready for bed in companionable quiet.

“Pan’s dead?” is all he asks. (She and Baelfire together told him the whole story of Neverland and everything after it the day after their kiss. It was hard, more difficult than she’d expected, but she’s glad he knows.)

“Yes,” she says. “And never coming back.”

“No,” he says contemplatively. “Dead is dead.”

But he doesn’t sound happy.

This man, she thinks. He loves even when it isn’t deserved.

“I’m glad,” she makes herself say. Perhaps he will be angry with her, but she can’t apologize for thinking good riddance to the corpse of his father.

“It is good,” he says (not like he believes it; more like he’s trying to convince himself).

“He didn’t deserve your love,” she says, then bites her lip, afraid she’s said too much.

Rumple only smiles sadly at her. “Perhaps. But as the recipient of love I don’t deserve, I can’t judge him too harshly.”

Belle hesitates, then blurts, “If it’s me you’re referring to, then you do deserve my love. You probably deserve better, but I’m too selfish to wish it for you.”

His smile turns sincere very suddenly. “By all means, then, be as selfish as you know how,” he says, far too indulgently to really be taking her seriously. Belle doesn’t mind, though, because that seems as tacit a permission as she needs to fall into the bed beside him and pull his mouth down against hers.

He’s a beat behind in responding (reminding her to be patient with him), though no less enthusiastic for the slight pause. His hands feel like magic all their own as they slide from her shoulders to her hips to her throat. She presses herself down against him and opens her mouth wide to his, eliciting such an enticing sound from his throat that she nearly moans as her legs straddle his waist. The feel of him against her, hot and solid, is familiar and invigorating.

“Rumple,” she keens, her mouth falling open too wide to continue the kiss. He directs his wet lips down along her cheek, her throat, one hand spanning her waist, the other creeping up her thigh beneath her nightgown.

A shudder works its way through her as her hands scrabble to find the laces of his nightshirt, but she feels the instant he falls still. A cry of dismay is nearly wrenched from her as his hands retreat to the safer area of her waist and shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she tries to say, but the look in his eyes stops her.

“Not like this,” he says. “I’m only half a man. I can’t…”

Closing her eyes, Belle takes a deep breath, another, another (remembers how patient he was with her in Storybrooke). Slowly, regretting each inch of touch lost, she falls off of his body and splays to his side, only her hand remaining on his chest—over the fabric of his nightshirt so as not to tempt herself too much.

“I’m fine with waiting until you’re ready,” she says softly. “But…you should know that…in Storybrooke…”

His mouth purses, a warning sign she reads in time to fall silent.

“It sounds like everything happened over there,” he says, almost bitterly.

“Not everything,” she says, and can’t help the way she feels the empty space on her left ring finger.

“I wish I could remember,” he growls.

He rolls away and settles into a sullen silence, but Belle’s struck speechless and motionless.

She’s fairly certain (most of the time) that he believes her now, but he’s never betrayed any indication that he has accepted the truth so fully.

Remember, he said. He wants to remember. Not believe. Not imagine.

Remember.

It’s like a promise, and Belle slides up behind Rumple and molds her curves to the bend of his spine, clasping him tightly around the waist.

“I believe in you,” she whispers, and feels the trip of his startled heartbeat against the palm of her hand.

Her hands are full with a tea tray, her mind is busy on a dozen mundane concerns, so that it takes her a moment, upon slipping through the half-open door into their chambers, to realize that Rumplestiltskin is hugging his son. There are tears on his face, his shoulders are shaking, his whole frame trembling, but she knows from experience that nothing short of Baelfire’s own wishes would break the strength of the hold he has embraced around his boy.

Gladness breaks over her like a sunrise, and she wastes no time in setting down the tea things (nearly chipping a few more cups to match the one placed so carefully at their bedside) and drifting near enough to be pulled into the hug, first by Rumple and then by Baelfire.

“It was the prophecy,” Baelfire explains shortly. “The undoing. Some kind of price the magic demanded. But I kissed him, and…”

Of course. She should have known, should have guessed, but then…maybe these things happen for a reason. True Love Kisses can’t just be contrived and formulaic; they have to come from the heart, at the right time, in the right moment.

And Rumplestiltskin is so happy. He shivers with his happiness, and Belle can’t help but burrow closer to him in her desperate desire to be a part of that happiness. The feel of his hand clutching a fist-full of her dress to keep her close is enough to spill the tears over her own eyes, which Baelfire teases her for despite his own misty state.

A family, she thinks. This is her family. She’s always hoped, always wished, but only now does it occur to her that it’s actually happened. They’re a family. She’s as integral a part as any of the other two; they’ve fully accepted her (they want her).

The recognition of it nearly knocks her back a step. Rumple’s hand curling along her hip grounds her, an anchor that fixes her in place (where she belongs).

Too soon, Baelfire draws back, saying something about food, something else about stretching their legs and a picnic, and Belle must say the appropriate things, but she can’t really bring herself to look away from Rumplestiltskin (his beaming eyes, his shy smile, his hands, finally fallen still where they rest against her). Only the thought that he’s still too thin has her able to pull away at all and hunt down a picnic basket, a blanket, finger foods they can eat while staring at each other and reminding themselves of their happy ending.

Baelfire leads them to a shaded grassy area under a tree’s wide branches. Henry found them on the way and seems equally interested in both the food and his grandfather’s reclaimed memories (the Truest Believer doesn’t seem surprised at all, and Belle wonders at just how many forgotten lives this boy’s heart can bring back to them). Belle’s glad when Emma (ever so coincidentally) joins them. As much as she thrills to think that Baelfire will get his own happy ending (to see his happiness replace that resigned sadness back in Granny’s when he waited endlessly for Emma to join him), Belle’s selfishly glad for Emma’s presence because it means that Rumplestiltskin fades slightly into the background. Leaning back against the tree, he lets her rest her head on his shoulder, his arms looping around her waist, his cheek pressed ever so softly against her hair.

“I love you,” she says (he needs the reminder as much as she needs the release of being able to speak this heartfelt truth).

“I love you too,” he murmurs. And then, a long moment later, as they both contentedly watch Baelfire and Emma’s awkward, sincere flirting, he whispers, “Is this real?”

She lays her hand over his heart. “It is.”

“I don’t deserve this.”

For once, she decides not to argue with him. Instead, she says, “I don’t care,” and slips her fingers beneath the laces of his shirt to trace tender designs over his chest. His pulse thrums wildly in her ears, a vibration that travels through her cheek, and Belle presses her smile against the side of his throat, and lets him relax into her at his own pace.

(It doesn’t take long.)

Belle chooses to tidy the basket away herself, leaving Rumple and Baelfire to have a few moments to themselves. She lingers in the hallway outside the room until the murmurs of their voices die down, then she waits a moment longer before pushing into the room and seeing them once more hugging. This time, it’s Baelfire who is slower to let go and Rumplestiltskin who seems more indulgent as he soothes his son and then beckons Belle over to share the couch in front of the fire with him.

And then it’s just like those few, happy days before the end of Storybrooke. As if they’re still in that big, too-full, too-empty house that was Mr. Gold’s, they sit together and drink tea and talk and talk and talk. It’s more than Belle ever really dreamed could be hers. Back in her father’s fortress, an arranged marriage with all the stilted politeness and formal interplays that accompanied that was all she had to look forward to. As the caretaker of the Dark Castle, she had wispy hopes and unformed dreams of a young boy and an aloof, mysterious master who came in and out of her life at his own whims. In her cells, she dreamed of escape and freedom and adventure, but most often, she was alone in those wistful imaginings. And in Storybrooke, she was just as lost and bumbling and uncertain as Rumplestiltskin himself, not quite sure how to find her place at his side, or even what that place might look like.

Only now, with Bae here too, can Belle really see the future the three of them (and Henry and Emma and even Emma’s parents) can work toward. This, this, is what she wants.

A lifetime with Rumplestiltskin to love and Baelfire to half-befriend, half-mother, and extended family to get to know and accustom herself to.

Not quite the heroic adventures she always imagined, but she’s so happy and relieved and hopeful that she doesn’t mind setting aside the girlish ideal for the grown-up reality.

Baelfire hugs her good night (“Call me Bae,” he tells her with a roll of his eyes and a half-awkward shrug. “Might as well now that this is home.”) and the door shuts behind him.

But Belle doesn’t get a chance to wonder if Rumplestiltskin will need reminding of what’s reality and what’s not (if he’ll want to kiss her or simply lie beside her), because as soon as they’re alone, he’s already reaching for her. He doesn’t wait for her to step into him, doesn’t pause to see if she’ll incline up into him, doesn’t tense at the first touch of their lips as if he half-expects her to repudiate him.

No, he pulls her into him and kisses her as if he’s never once doubted the strength of her love (as if he still chooses the future where they’re together). He drags her (oh so willingly) into the bedroom and lets his body weight fall atop her, sinking her deep into the mattress, and plays his lips and tongue over hers until she melts like hot, molten gold.

Every touch they’ve ever shared, every time their fingers have brushed, their hands clasped, their arms embraced, their feet tiptoed toward each other, seems only the foreplay, the practice sessions, to bring them to this point. Rumplestiltskin traces every inch of her skin, tastes every hidden inch, slides his flesh along every tingling point of her own flesh that screams for him, and even in the tiny, pivotal moment where he seems to turn shy, he doesn’t retreat. Instead, he locks his eyes with hers, and Belle wouldn’t change anything at all in her life if this is where she’s ended up. She’d live it all a hundred more times, a thousand, just to ensure that they end up here, together, his voice so hoarse and tender as he shudders against her.

She says his name, over and over, hoping she grounds him like he does her with the fingers that caress magic over her sweating skin, her wet lips, her cascading hair. Their room is dark and close, the windows covered, the fire nearly forgotten, but when his hand bands low against her hip, the other so gentle on her face as he tilts her face up into an open-mouthed, hot-breathed kiss, when he jolts and groans, Belle feels the eclipse of the sun over her whole world. Brightness bathes her in warm sunshine, like curtains falling away and her heart clicking into place, and she whines and cries and keens—and holds on.

“Beautiful Belle,” he calls her, so close to her she can’t divorce them from each other, can’t even remember that there is a difference between his flesh and hers. “I love you.”

And how can she help but lean up and drop a kiss to those trembling lips? How can she do anything but fall in love with him all over again?

“I love you too,” she says, and knows, for the first time, that he absolutely and completely believes her.

All night long, they touch and love and plan. He doesn’t make caveats or conditions, doesn’t try to lower her hopes or temper her expectations, doesn’t undersell himself or doubt that it’s him she truly wants.

Instead, he talks about the Dark Castle and everything that awaits them there. He tells her the ring he gave her is hers forever (and slides it from her right thumb onto her left ring finger, where it miraculously fits as if made for it) and her freedom is hers, any adventure she wants available to her at an instant’s notice.

Their conversation isn’t linear, isn’t unbroken and continuous. It’s a word here, a wish there, a question and an answer, a long hour or two spent moving and kissing and knocking the covers to the floor over and over again before once more starting either where they left off or somewhere else altogether.

He’s worried, he tells her (of course he is, her dear, nervous love), that he won’t be able to protect her and Bae, that they will be taken from him, that he is useless.

And for the first time, she doesn’t perceive this as the desperate, baseless fear she always thought it to be before. She’s seen his enemies come one right after the other, hasn’t she? And she’s felt the force of his love, the strength of his caring protection, the price of his selfless devotion.

But she’s not worried. Not when the merest brush of his hand over her lips, her breast, her waist, has magic coiling up around them. Not when there’s only the merest hint of a scar in his chest, after less than a month from its infliction. Not when he can make lightning crackle under her skin with the slightest brush of his mouth over hers.

“You are magic,” she tells him, and thinks he spins it from the air itself.

“No,” he says, and he’s sliding her under him, enveloping every bit of her in every bit of him. “From you, I think. From…”

“Love,” she says, giddily, and she lets him fully blanket her so that together, they can experiment in just how much love they can make together.

It’s the touch of his fingertips, feather-light on her cheek, ticklish even, that rouses Belle from her reverie. Blinking, she looks away from the tidied, newly empty room where they’ve spent so many weeks (where so much sorrow, so much love, has been lived out) and meets Rumplestiltskin’s eyes. The smile he wears is small, little more than the suggestion of curves at either end—but so real. She can’t help but reach up and feel the smile against her own fingertips. He stares but doesn’t startle (doesn’t flinch in expectation of pain to come).

She’s never seen him so happy.

“Ready, my darling Belle?” he asks. His hand slides down her arm, caresses her wrist, then envelops her hand, their fingers intertwining. His touch is familiar, that comforting fidget of his now playing against her knuckle, reminding them both of the ring he slid onto her lift ring finger.

“This feels familiar,” she says with a sly smile as she steps close to him. With her free hand, she clasps his wrist above their joined hands, looking up at him through her lashes.

The merest flicker of insecurity darts through Rumple’s eyes (engrained habit, she thinks, more than real fear). She doesn’t hold it against him. After all, she herself is having a hard time believing they’re actually here, together, facing a future happier than has seemed possible for them since she first met him.

“The beast come to steal away the kind maiden to his isolated lair?” Rumple asks.

Belle’s feet edge up against his, a quiet tap that makes her smile (or maybe it’s the scent of him filling her nostrils, or the way he dips his head until his brow rests against hers, or the feel of his hand tightening around hers, or the memory of how late, how entangled, they stayed the night before, or any of a hundred different reasons, all good).

“I was thinking, actually, of the day we met, when the powerful sorcerer not only came to save my family and friends, but also whisked me away to a life of adventure…and love.”

His face, impossibly, softens. There are no scales, no armor, no mask: only her True Love. “I like this story,” he murmurs. “Especially the way you tell it.”

“Well, you wrote it.”

He snorts. “I wouldn’t have the imagination—or the audacity. All the best twists came from you.”

Her laughter breaks the moment entirely and she brings her arms up to lock her wrists behind his neck. “Says the man who brought an entire land to a whole new world. Don’t pretend you don’t throw in enough plot twists of your own, Rumple.”

“Well…” His breath tickles her cheek, so close she can’t help but tilt her face up to his. “You think you’ll still be happy if things are a bit more settled from now on?”

(There’s a whisper there of Milah, a shadow of Cora, a breath released from the crippled spinner that watched everyone leave him for bigger, more exciting things. Belle doesn’t mind it, because in the end, that spinner came to her as exactly the person she could love better than any other.)

“I think I’m already happier than I’ve ever been.” Belle caresses his weather cheek with the backs of her fingers, letting him feel the cool metal of the ring she refuses to part with. “You’re my adventure, Rumple, and trust me, you are more than exciting enough for me. I can’t wait to keep solving your mysteries for the rest of our lives.”

The kiss he presses (so quick, so casual) against her moth delights her in a way she could never put into words.

“You did promise me forever,” he reminds her, silky and sly and gleeful.

“And I’d never break a deal with you,” she murmurs, then presses her own kiss to his mouth (much more thorough, not nearly so quick).

“Never?” he asks, his fingers playing with the lace around her bodice.

“Never,” she vows, and this time, even distracted by his kiss, she thinks home and feels the ground shift beneath their feet. It’s a while before she bothers opening her eyes, but she’s not surprised to see their emptied room replaced by the Great Hall in his Dark Castle. It’s been cleaned up, tidied, the table shined and the broken glass removed. Baelfire came early, along with Emma and Henry (Emma claiming to need some space from the demands of her new status as princess of the land, and Henry because he clearly has some matchmaking plans in store for his maybe-estranged parents) and some other volunteers Belle trusted, and they’ve clearly been hard at work in the intervening week.

“Home sweet home,” she says with satisfaction, and belatedly realizes that Rumple is studying her face closely. Of course he is, her sweet nervous fiancé, always so worried that he’s a bad memory for her, that their story was a nightmare rather than a dream, that she will turn into another of the specters that haunt him. She smiles and kisses him again, just because (to settle the fear in his eyes that she refuses to draw attention to; it will only shame him). “I think I might make dinner,” she announces.

Rumple’s eyes widen, his smile almost mocking. “So eager to return to your duties?”

“I think I was getting quite good at it by the end,” she defends herself (assures him she views her memories of this place fondly).

“You were,” he says. “I think you could get good at anything you set your mind to.”

“You’ve clearly never seen me try to draw before,” she says with a laugh.

“Papa?” The call comes from outside the hall, down the corridor leading to the bedchambers (including the one Rumple kept for his son). “Is that you?”

The roll of his eyes can’t disguise the joyful shine emanating from Rumple’s face. “You’d better hope it’s me and not an ogre!” he calls back, and Belle muffles her giggles against his waistcoat.

“Hey, what do you know about some red rose kept under a glass case back here? Is that important?”

“Don’t touch that!” Rumple yells in the direction of his son, already striding toward the door. “Honestly, have you never outgrown getting into everything that’s dangerous for you?”

He’s nearly to the door when Rumplestiltskin stops, looks back at her, reaches out his hand. “You coming, darling?”

Belle can’t help but remember the shattered ruins of her former home, the way the Dark One pointed a finger straight at her (yanking her from obscurity into heroics). Or this Great Hall, dark and cloistered and still strange to her, when she’d served him an undercooked meal and accidentally brushed his wrist while reaching for his plate. She remembers how terrified she was, but also how curious, and she smiles to recall the look on his face, all bewilderment and wariness (and interest, she knows now, more familiar with his micro-expressions).

How far they’ve come, from there to here, him holding his hand out and sure she’ll take it. His ring on her finger. Their future intertwined. The warmth of his kisses still coursing through her veins.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere else,” she tells him.

And slides her hand into his.

The End