Author's note: I posted this once before, but it needed some work. It still does. Desperately. If anyone would be willing to help me out by offering some beta reading services, I would greatly appreciate it.
I do not own the characters of OUAT or the show itself. I make no money by writing fanfiction.
…
Curses, Cups, and Courage
He had desperately wanted the Queen to be lying.
He had listened as much as he could. He had tried to filter through the cries for help, the anguish and the fear that would summon him. He pushed through and around every voice, trying to find Belle's, trying to determine what it would sound like if she screamed. He tried to track her flickering glow in all the world of gusting shadows, but he couldn't do it, and the shadows came back to swallow his heart again.
Rumplestilstkin was good at torturing himself. He often wondered if, on those days right after throwing her out, when he had shut himself away, refused to hear the voices, refused to deal, refused to speak or step out of his private world with just his spinning wheel, if she had called out to him in agony, begged for him to help her, or perhaps just whispered his name in a soft goodbye that he would always imagine but never hear.
He imagined having left his mind open just enough to have heard her in the usual cacophony. He imagined her pulling free of one of her captors or of her binds, stumbling to the edge of the window and whispering his name with what energy she had left before falling. He imagined catching her like he had when she fell from his window, cradling her to him and whisking her away, back…
'She needs…a home..?'
But he wasn't the hero. He was the beast who took the maiden, and then left her to die.
He had searched.
He had flickered in and out of random locations around her father's kingdom. He dared not go into the castle or he would likely have gutted each member of the court, saving Maurice's death for last so that if he was forced to imagine Belle's screams his entire life, he would at least have her father's screams to keep him company, too.
From one rooftop he had noticed a tower. The windows were boarded.
He had flitted invisibly and in disguise among the townspeople to try and find information, but each time the Princess came up in discussion, every person fell into a somber silence, some removing their hats and others offering a tentative smile and a change of subject.
His heart sank, but still he had searched.
He scoured the cemetery belonging to the royal family. He paced in front of each row of tombstones, reading even long obscured inscriptions and searching the same ones again and again for a sign of her name or her recent death, finally kicking over the stone of a Queen Deirdra with an enraged howl.
He had sat with a cloak covering him in a shabby little lean-to pub. He ordered their most poisonous rot-gut. With claws digging slowly through the rotting wood of his small table, he imagined storming the castle, rattling it with all his powers and demanding answers, demanding every gruesome detail and then…
Just as the sun was setting, a barmaid left for the day, calling back to the owner of the pub that she would be visiting the Princess's Stone.
He was gone as if he had never disturbed the place at all, two gold pieces left on the table.
The imp had followed the barmaid away from the village and through the woods by leaping silently from branch to branch. She led him to a clearing hidden by willows. He waited, crouched in the shadows above with heart hammering in his ears as she took some moments, assumedly paying her respects, before departing back towards the village.
Rumplestiltskin, ever the coward, kept to the cover of the leaves until he could no longer hear the woman's footsteps. He leapt down from the trees, stumbled, and then very slowly sank to his knees.
At the center of the clearing there was a gravestone made of solid marble, with roses carved onto either side of the engraved words.
Trembling, the dark one had crawled closer, then reached out to trace his clawed fingertips over the engraved 'Belle.'
He couldn't control his expression, his breathing. He sat closer, his hand moving over the stone as if by its own initiative.
'Beloved Daughter. Kind Princess. Savior of the Kingdom. Stolen by a beast.'
His hand clenched into a fist at the last word, but all his rage melted away, leaving him shaking.
'Now you've made your choice. And you're going to regret it, forever.'
His expression crumbled in agony, and he clenched his fingers in the freshly disturbed dirt. He held it tightly in his hands, as if it could substitute as some part of her to hold on to.
He sucked in air like a dying man and looked at the stone again, tracing her engraved name with his mind's eye before swallowing to try and bring moisture back to his throat and finally croaking her name "Belle…" His throat closed around the reverent whisper and he rocked himself forward until his forehead touched the earth at the base of her marker.
He let the rest of his body sink down onto the dirt, his knees unable to hold him as he crumpled numbly onto the ground. The Dark One listened, and he listened, but as usual, the dead didn't speak to him. He swallowed, tried to ignore the sand paper feeling of his throat, then tried to fill the silence.
"H-here you are…I…s-searched…but…"
Rumplestiltskin closed his eyes and hot tears slid down his face and into the dirt beneath his cheek. He breathed raggedly, sharp gasps and quivering breaths. He imagined how he must look, the most powerful Sorcerer in the world, the Dark One who had heard many a plea from many a desperate soul, who never imagined that he would ever again be crumpled in a pile of despair without any sense of pride.
He gasped in a breath and pushed himself up until his face at least wasn't in the dirt. He rested his forehead on the ice cool marble, closed his eyes, but pulled away when he realized that the touch of the cold stone would never sooth him when all he wanted was her warmth.
He had looked down at the base of the gravestone, then around him, and saw remnants of dried flowers. He realized with shame that he had nothing to bring the beautiful princess whose grave he had gone crawling to. He had brought nothing to honor her or her memory, just his empty heart.
The shame burned in him.
He could summon any flower in the kingdom, make vines of any bloom grow around the stone, but it seemed like a hollow gesture when he thought back on the one rose he had given her and his treatment of her afterwards. Without conscious thought, or perhaps without any thought at all, he held out his hand before him and summoned his dagger.
With a sweeping gesture of his hand, he removed four feet of dirt from the grave, and was then frozen in indecision by the idea that perhaps he should uncover her casket…look inside, and see if she was actually there…but the word "beast" on her tombstone stopped him, filling him with burning shame once again and a sickening dread at the idea of seeing a mangled corpse in his mind every time he thought of his beautiful Belle.
He couldn't justify leaving the dagger there, placing it reverently in the dirt over where her heart would be, then packing the soil over it with his hands instead of using his magic again. He knew with everything that was coherent inside that he could be making a mistake.
But as he sat in front of the stone with her name engraved in it, the last sign of her he had in the world other than the chipped cup and his heart torn ragged, Rumplestiltskin began to talk to someone who would never hear him about a story that he had promised her.
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell someone about Bea. All the loneliness that he had ignored before taking her crushed down on him, and instead of telling the cold stone in front of him about the long story of his son and becoming the Dark One, he instead said that when he found his son, Bea…a brave boy that Belle would have admired much more than the coward kneeling and whispering brokenly at her grave…someday, somehow, he would bring his boy to that spot. He would visit her, and he would tell his son a story about the one person in the world who could teach him about love again, and about courage. When that day came, Rumpelstiltskin would take the dagger back, he would hand it to his boy, and he would give up his power.
Or so he promised a stone in soft whispers before it became too dark to see the engraving of her name.