I don't own Once Upon a Time. I hope you enjoy this story - let me know if you do!
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."
-1 Corinthians 13:13
Darkness.
The queen, along with her escort of guards, had been riding through the night, a wagon designed as a cage rattling in their midst. Belle pressed herself against the bars in silent fury, eyes searching the prison cart for any means of escape. Her eyes scanned the dark shadows of the tree line for any sign of help. If only she had stayed with Mulan and Phillip...
Hours passed, and the stiffness in her spine and legs advanced with the night. She finally sank down into a corner, still mindful of any opportunity to escape. She breathed deeply, the cold night air burning her lungs, and reminded herself that there was hope.
She sat, quiet and still, only her mind hard at work. The hours crawled by, but the convoy did not stop. The queen had disappeared into a carriage some time ago and none of the guards she could see would look at her or speak to her. She realized that even if someone found her, the queen's guard would be able to resist any rescue attempts.
Keep breathing. Don't give up.
Do the brave thing and bravery will follow - that was what she had told Rumplestiltskin. She supposed yelling defiantly at the queen might be considered doing the brave thing (I will never stop fighting for him!) - she sincerely hoped bravery would follow. It had when she had decided to accept Rumplestiltskin's deal.
Her mind froze.
Rumplestiltskin.
A legion of armed guards would be nothing to him. Hope flared bright and hot inside her - she knew it wasn't hopeless. But just as quickly as a candle being suddenly extinguished in an icy gust of wind, Belle's smile fell away. Did he even know she had been captured? Perhaps not yet... but he would hear of it, surely.
Another thought sent tingles of dread crawling up her spine. Would he even care? He had sent her away.
My power means more to me than you.
She shook away the thought. Perhaps he would hear. Perhaps he would come.
Her thoughts lighted on her father next. Maybe he would get word of her imprisonment and storm the queen's castle to find her. If the castle was their destination. And if imprisonment was all the queen had in mind. Belle blanched and shivered, forcing herself away from the shadows growing in her mind.
She would not despair. There were people in this land who cared for her. They would rescue her - or she would escape.
A guard far ahead spoke for the first time all night; she heard him announcing the queen's arrival. Ignoring her stiff body's protests, Belle forced herself upright and pressed herself against the bars. A dark castle with thin spires stabbing upward was visible through the roof of tree branches above them. The moon shining down, washing it in silver-white light, made it appear like a collection of razors against the sky. Belle swallowed uneasily, and gripped the bars of the prison cart. But she would not give in to fear. Someone would find her.
Love is hope, she thought insistently.
And there were many people who loved her.
There wasn't even a flicker of light in the cell. Belle shivered and crossed her arms against the chill. The lack of light probably meant that morning had not come, but she could not say for sure because there weren't any windows. And sometimes the guards forgot to light the torches in her cell even when morning did break.
She had been in the queen's tower for a week as far as she could tell. It felt far longer than that, given how the featureless days dragged on without anything to disturb the perfect monotony. She shivered again and swung her feet over the side of her cot. The shackles around her ankles jangled harshly. She shifted, wincing as her bare feet touched the icy stone floor, and turned toward the door, invisible though it was in the dark. She stilled and listened.
Not a sound.
Probably night, then. The patrols of the tower guard usually became less frequent in the dead of night. Another shiver locked her muscles and Belle rubbed her arms, clanking her wrist shackles loudly. The noise was deafening in the pressing silence.
She lay back down after a moment, huddling into a ball to preserve as much warmth as she could. The tower was so cold - another sign that the sun had not yet risen, she thought absently. The shackles were cold as well, freezing her ankles and wrists and making her feel as if the cold would seep through her skin and freeze her to the bone. Her mind wandered to the great blazing fireplace in the great hall of the Dark Castle.
Tears suddenly burned in her eyes, and her sharp gasp echoed hollowly off the cold stone around her, magnifying her grief. She gritted her teeth and steered her mind away from the painful memories.
Think of the good things.
That was her mother's voice in her mind.
You can make anything better if you just think better of it...
Belle was trying. There wasn't much she could do about this cell or the cold... but she could remember better times. Her mind was still drawn to her days at the Dark Castle, so she let it slip back to those days. But she would not think of the final night she had spent there.
She thought instead of warm fires and tea in chipped cups and sunlight streaming through curtainless windows. She thought of reading what she pleased from the Dark Castle's library and handing Rumplestiltskin bundles of straw when his supply ran low. She thought of Rumplestiltskin himself, his sad moods, his unexpected bursts of humor, his face as he listened intently to her stories, her thoughts...
The pain burning in her chest was far hotter than any fire, but she was still freezing in the silent cell. She tried to think again of the fire in the great hall and let the phantom flame warm her.
A sob escaped. Her memories shattered and she was alone, anguished, and so, so cold.
Why hadn't Rumplestiltskin come to rescue her? Even if he hadn't loved her... even if his words had been true (My power means more to me than you)... they had been friends.
Hadn't they?
Surely he wouldn't leave her here, alone and imprisoned. He must not know...
Do you honestly think the Dark One himself doesn't know? A waspish voice whispered tightly in her mind. Belle squeeze her eyes shut, though the absolute darkness made such a gesture pointless. He wouldn't just leave her, she reminded herself.
He wouldn't.
But the tears came anyway, their heat feeling like fire against her icy skin. She kept breathing.
Don't give up, don't give up...
A light appeared, faintly flickering through the crack under the cell door. The door swung open with a mighty creak and a guard marched in with a lit torch.
"Rise and shine," he muttered flatly, touching his torch to the one mounted on her wall. She blinked; even dim light seemed dazzling after such deep darkness. The guard swept out, his armor clanking, and swung the door shut behind him.
Belle stood and moved closer to the torch. Her chains went taut and she hovered, trying to absorb the heat and the light.
"Don't give up," she whispered to herself. It had only been a week.
There was still hope.
Six months.
That was how long she had been sitting in the wretched cell, scratching lines into the stone to mark the days.
Belle lay unmoving on her cot, staring at the rows of scratches in the flickering firelight. Her scratches were in orderly sets, grouped on the wall away from the wild scratches that must have been made by the cell's previous occupant. She had spent hours counting and recounting those marks. The prisoner had marked out at least five years. The marks were organized for the first year and began to deteriorate after that. By the fifth year the marks looked as if the prisoner had not been able to hold his hand steady. Five years...
She tried not to think about that.
She wondered again why no one had come for her. Word of her capture must not have gotten out.
Or everyone's forgotten about you.
She grimaced and pushed the thought away for the thousandth time that day. It was getting harder to keep that particular voice at bay.
She stared at the shackles around her wrists, wishing fervently and hopelessly that she had some way of removing them. She had dreamed so boldly of escape in the beginning. But they chained her like a dog with iron bolted into stone, and no amount of dreaming or hope could break that. She needed rescue. But it wasn't coming.
She was breaking inside, but lay absolutely still to keep from shifting the shackles. They were cutting into her wrists and sometimes the agony was acute. She let her mind drift away like always.
"Papa!"
She was back at home, running through the palace in the happy days before the Ogre Wars had left gaping holes in the walls and fear in everyone's hearts.
She was wearing the dress that had been her favorite when she was a small girl, the dress that she was convinced made her look like a princess. Running through the halls against her nursemaid's express command, her golden dress flew out behind her as she finally barreled into her father's arms. "Papa, I'm a princess!"
"Of course you are," he laughed as Belle's chronically slow nursemaid finally caught up. "But princesses must obey their nursemaids!"
She had pondered her reply so carefully. "Then it's a good thing you're only a knight and I'm not a REAL princess!"
Papa had laughed and nurse had scowled so much at that. Belle had soaked it all in. Home, love, family... it was the most perfect feeling she had ever known. Her nurse had, of course, carried her away after all that. But Belle remembered calling to her papa before he disappeared from sight.
"Papa, one day when I grow up, I'm going to be a real princess!"
And she remembered his reply with even more clarity.
"Castles in the sky, Belle! You're always building castles in the sky." He had laughed so warmly.
Belle returned to the present with a painful snap. She wished to be home until it hurt.
Where was her papa now? Why hadn't he come? She was going mad with all this ignorance...
The cell door opened and she heard the dismal crash of a tray being dropped. She kept her eyes on the wall.
The door closed again.
Belle let herself slip back into the past.
The days passed. Weeks.
Months.
Belle tried desperately to hold onto hope, but like a flower slowly withering before the icy blast of winter, she felt her hopes dimming inside her. Her mother's voice telling her to think of the good things grew fainter, as though whatever abyss she was sinking into was swallowing even that shadow of comfort.
Think of the good things...
What good things? She was in a windowless prison and beyond any help. If anyone was even willing to help...
Sometimes when she was bored to the point of pain of staring at the walls she had already memorized and counting the scratches she had already numbered a hundred times over, she could feel a cold anger building like a hurricane in her chest. Her breath came hard and fast and she hurt all over. In those horrible moments she silently raged at her father for allowing her to walk out of the castle with the Dark One. He might have loved her, but he didn't put up much of a fight. She had always secretly suspected that his rule held first place in his heart. She raged at her papa and at her one-time fiancé Gaston for never coming to rescue her. Rumplestiltskin had liked her; perhaps he would have let her go if they had only asked, pleaded, bargained. Perhaps all of this misery could have been avoided.
If they had only cared enough.
Sometimes her rage would spread like wildfire and the flames would chew their way to Rumplestiltskin himself. Coward, she thought bitterly. He had treated her with kindness and then turned on her, believing that she had betrayed him. He had thrown her back into his wretched dungeon and then cruelly sent her away. The cold look on his face still appeared in her nightmares. (She tried not to think of just how much she preferred that former dungeon to her present one. At least Rumplestiltskin's dungeon was temporary... and there had been a glorious window.) He sent her away, making no provision against an attack from the queen. There was a whisper in the back of her mind suggesting that perhaps he had not known of the danger, but her reasonless rage always quashed it until she could no longer hear it at all.
She was fading.
Fading into darkness and anger and numbness. When she surfaced from those bleak moments, she wept to think of what her mother would think of her now. But she was so tired of fighting, so tired of not giving up.
Apathy loomed before her like a bottomless pit, welcoming her into the darkness. She wasn't sure how much longer she could hold out against it.
Or if she even wanted to.
The crisis came after a year in her cell. She lay staring at the dancing flame of her torch and felt the familiar tendrils of rage curling around her. She could almost convince herself that no one had ever loved her, that her life had always been this miserable cell and always would be...
A few tears leaked from her eyes and she allowed herself to escape in the only way she could - sleep.
She dreamed.
It was a dream she had not had in so long. Rumplestiltskin sat at his wheel spinning; she looked down on him from her perch on a ladder near the curtained windows. She had asked him some impertinent question or other, and he had replied, albeit with an uncomfortable stiffness. She couldn't remember all the details, at least not in this dreamworld, but the dream did highlight one thing: the look in his eyes when she laughed with him. He smiled warmly, looking the most human she had ever seen him, and walked nearer.
Suddenly she was sitting on the great table, quite close to Rumplestiltskin, waiting for answers to still more questions. She couldn't hear him in the dream, but she saw his closeness, his openness. She saw a smile and a rose... She suddenly found herself sitting by the spinning wheel in the evening light, leaning toward him with a kiss to break curses... but in the dream she could not feel her own nervous excitement. In the dream, all she could see was the wonder and intensity in his eyes. She drew back and saw that it was working...
She gasped and wakened before the dream took a tragic turn, and sat up, blinking away the visions. Her chained hands pressed against her mouth. He had loved her. She had always known that. It was just so easy to forget love and happiness and even truth here, alone in the dark.
He might have said terrible things, might have told her to leave, but he didn't hurt her. He would not have abandoned her to the queen. She finally knew beyond all doubt that he did not know where she was.
It was a gloriously bittersweet realization - because now she also knew that no rescue was coming.
She pushed that thought aside and dug through her memories to find more treasures to hold close to her heart. Her father always buying her new books to read, telling her stories about her mother when she cried for her as a child. Even Gaston, trying to remember what flowers she liked so he could present them to her and discreetly (or so he thought) checking the bindings of her favorite books so he could find similar ones for her. She felt a sudden glow in the center of her chest. They had loved her too.
No one had abandoned her. The only one responsible for her imprisonment was the queen. She felt both heavier and lighter at the thought.
For the first time in this long year, Belle felt almost as thought a window had been cut into her cell at last and sunlight was spilling through.
Think of the good things...
She had treasure troves of memories and truths.
And, best of all, she had hope for the future.
She sat up, took a slow, deep breath... and believed.
Belle believed that this would all pass. She believed that her mother had loved her and her father loved her and Rumplestiltskin loved her. She believed it so strongly that when a man with a hook in the place his left hand should be burst into her cell, bearing hope of rescue and news of Rumplestiltskin's treachery together, she knew better than to believe him.
She believed so strongly that when the frightened shouts of the prison guards woke her one day, and purple plumes of smoke crawled under her cell door, she breathed in the tangy smell of magic and was relieved that something was happening at last. The smoke swelled and engulfed her, and as she grew dizzy and felt herself being pulled away, she could not help but hope that maybe she was going somewhere better.
She sat in muddled silence for a long time. She wasn't sure how long she stayed in her cell - there were no scratches and no way to make any - but she was very glad to have a window. She floated, detached from everything until the door opened and a man rushed in.
"My name is Jefferson," he said, and told her to find Mr. Gold.
She didn't understand, but she was sure that finding Mr. Gold would be so much better than sitting in the room forever, so she nodded and did what he said.
She found Mr. Gold and still didn't understand, but his tears and his embrace made her sure she had made the right decision. He said something about needing to do something, and she followed him into the forest without question.
And then, suddenly, like a mighty wind sweeping away a mighty fog, she remembered.
"Rumplestiltskin, wait!"
Because it was him ahead of her. It was Rumplestiltskin who had embraced her and wept to see her and taken her with him.
He did love her. But she already knew that.
She stepped toward him, struck by the look of uncertainty and even fear on his face. She was awed that she possessed the power to make the Dark One uneasy, but she did not savor his pain. She put a swift end to all that.
"I love you," she said, her tears barely contained.
When he embraced her and said "I love you, too," Belle shut her eyes.
She was free. No more cells, no more darkness and doubt.
Only so very many good things to think of.
She couldn't remember much. Just hazy images of a claustrophobic room with bars and then the road in the woods with the pain burning through her shoulder. She remembered fire blazing in the Man's hand, but she tried not to think about that.
She didn't understand.
She clutched at her thin blankets as the sad Man she did not know left the room. The room was quiet and deserted now. The machines beside her beeped rhythmically. Her eyes wandered to the porcelain shards lying near the wall at the foot of her bed. Confusion warred with fear in her battered mind.
She didn't understand.
Strange words about magic and castles and teacups whirled through her mind, chaotic and incomprehensible. But she couldn't shake them off or toss them away; they would not be so easily dismissed. The images settled inside her like moths drawn to a dormant flame, and she shivered, wishing she could just remember.
She felt a strange desolation creeping into her chest. She felt empty and bereft, as though the strange Man who talked of magic had taken a vital piece of her with him when he had limped away. She didn't understand it at all. Tears pricked her eyes and she stared numbly.
She stared for a long time before a patch of light outside the glass wall of her room caught her attention. There was a window out there. Suddenly, as though the warmth of the sun had somehow followed her into the room, she felt a tiny glow begin somewhere in her chest.
Don't give up, she thought to herself.
And she felt a sense of peace from somewhere deep inside. She didn't understand it, but then, she didn't understand anything. She smiled a little and let that patch of light warm her even across the distance. There was hope, she was sure. Even if she wasn't sure why.
She rested her aching head against the pillows and lay still. After a moment, she felt herself slipping into sleep.
In her hazy mind, she heard a voice drift toward her as though from a great distance. When you find something worth fighting for, you never give up...
Never give up.
She started and the half-dream vanished. She sighed and rolled toward the glass wall, pulling the blankets around her. She blinked slowly and began to drift away again. The puddle of sunlight on the floor gleamed at her as she shut her heavy eyes.
The sun was coming up.
"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."
-Oscar Wilde
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