Prologue
"Y-You're not coming back, are you…"
He did not answer her. He didn't have to.
The words hung between them, severing them off from everything. The docks, their current company, the pressing urgency of the departure, the pain of loss both shared and private- everything. It all fell away. For a hollow heartbeat there was nothing in the world, in any world, but them, those horrific words, and the sickening sensation of freefall.
He was trapped, they both knew this; bound and strained between the threads of fate and the ties of blood. "… I must save him. I must do this to honor Baelfire. He's gone. And I didn't even get the chance to say goodbye-"
She broke. Breath choked; her heart tore and caught, like him, somewhere in that horrific in-between. Oh, to be selfish just this once. Just once to love the man for all his cowardice, and loath his righteous heart; if picking vice before virtues would but keep him in her arms.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. To hide. To run. To rend her hair. To hold him. Touch him. Beg him. To grieve. To burn. To grovel, implore on hands and knees that he might stay. That he go. That she not be left alone again! To break. To laugh. To strike him. To strike all of them. To make him take it back. Gods, make him take it all back. To make him see how deeply he was hurting her, even when he did the right thing!
"I understand." She said. And she did. Truly, truly she did, even if she wished she couldn't. "But I also know that the future isn't always what it seems."
Because fate could not be so cruel, so unforgiving, so unfair, as to deliver them unto each other once again only to rip them apart. It was a tidal dance they knew all too well, brief moments to savor bookended by eons apart. And that this should be the end- mere hours back in her own skin and she was losing him again. It was just too much.
An iron vice closed about her heart and in the next moment she was in his arms, her lips seeking his with a desperate resolve. As though her mouth could draw from him in wordless worship the venom fate had cast.
I will see you again.
She wasn't sure she'd said it- if it had been said at all. But it was true. It had to be.
It wasn't a promise, not really. Nor was it an oath, a hope, or even a wish. It was a curse- a powerful beam of magic penned in the heart and sealed between lips and tongue and breath. Five words that cut through them both in the worst way, threading them together even as everything around them crumbled to dust. She loved him, all of him, for everything he had help make her and everything they would become. Surely such a curse could only bare love's moniker? So Belle cast her spell in the only magic she knew how to wield; the most powerful magic there was to be had.
And like all magic, it too would enact a price. But what won't the heart pay to simply beat again?