The thrift store was narrow and lit harshly bright. She has to force herself to think properly and to breathe. Look past the white washed walls and the harsh floor.
(she is out she is out she is out she is not crazy she is out she is out)
She wanders through the aisles of tables, hands ghosting over the unwanted items. She finds a tea pot with blue flowers printed on the side, old and worn out copies of Jane Eyre, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland amongst the mostly water damaged collection of books.
In her suitcase at the hospital she already has a copy of Jane Eyre, but the copy of her own seems strange to her with its soft pages and gentle title. This copy in her hands has a cracked spine and bent pages, but she knows entirely it's her own. Not some book claimed to be her own when all she remembers is lurching forward and pavement biting into her palms.
(The night falls across her chest, and he's grasping onto her with desperate hands)
Ruby's helping, holding up novelty tea cups with a sarcastic smirk. "These are perfect, Belle. Some of these, Mickey Mouse salt and pepper shakers and maybe some wall hangings."
She wants to laugh and smile, and pretend she doesn't have a gaping hole in her mind with nothing but numbing emptiness hollowing her out.
"I think these are good," she pastes a smile in her face, but Ruby knows she isn't really into the desire to banter back and forth and misses her friend that doesn't exist anymore.
Somewhere down the line, she picks up a yellow knitted afghan that feels like sunshine and a less tacky tea cups that are remarkably plain.
Ruby handles the cashier, some long legged teenager who keeps his eyes glued to Ruby's chest. She keeps her tone icy, but the boy never really notices. She wanders through the shoe section, looking at the ones that matched and the ones that had no mate. The toes are scuffed, and look like they've been sitting on the tables forever.
They make her feel sort of sad, looking at the broken heels and the dull sandals.
"Ready to go?" Ruby calls, jingling her keys slightly as she stands in front of the door. Belle follows in suit, hands gripping her bags tightly until the plastic handles bite into her fingers.
.
Ruby leaves her alone as she stands in front of the library. Belle has the key on a chain around her neck, holding both her suitcase as well as her bags. "Gold said not to worry about opening the place up right away. Just get some rest. I'll be back later with something to eat." She smiles red, honest and open.
She's still standing there long after Ruby pulls off in her car, feel anxiety rise as she gazes long at the door. Its slow, moving forward and unlocking the door and swinging it open. She cringes at the loud creak, shivering as she steps into the dark room.
She slaps her hand weakly against the wall, searching for the light switch. She doesn't dare breathe until the lights flick on and the room is filled with light and shelves and books.
She's in awe, in a way. She drops her bags, and walks through the aisles feeling small and massive. Like she's becoming Alice, always growing and shrinking without thought. Her fingers run along the spines, feeling the ink and magic and worlds seeping through her touch.
The smell of age and dust and love is strong in the air, catching at the warped corners of the room in a way she can't explain. For a moment, she thinks she can see herself in the way the rest of the world knew her.
Brave.
That's what she feels, surging through her veins and dancing to the skittish beat of her heart.
In the end, the feeling leaves and all she is left is with some recollection of an idea and a world and herself.
.
Her apartment looks half lived in.
It's small but cozy, with large windows and bookshelves. A radio sits on the counter, and she immediately fumbles with it until all she can hear are the delicate strains of a piano and the soft cries of the violin blending together like the innocent and the victims.
Her books are still packaged tight in boxes, and she wonders what lies beneath cardboard and tape. What parts of her are sealed away, ready to be opened up and displayed? A clock is perched crooked on a self by itself, surrounded by empty picture frames that disturb her.
She wonders who she is, because she's sick of looking at empty gaps where something should be.
She opens the windows up as wide as she can make them. The curtains flutter slightly by her frenzied motions and the smoothed and relaxed breeze.
Fresh air cleanses her, sharp with freedom and clarity. The second thing she does is put the kettle on and searches a stranger's cupboards for tea. She rinses the tea pot slowly, cleaning any grime away with careful movements. Her fingers skim over the surface, examining sharply for any flaws she hadn't noticed previously.
The kettle whistles and soon she has a pot of cherry tea and she feels satisfied.
A car drives by quietly, the engine fading to the sound of drifting music. Suddenly she's on her knees and opening the boxes with great care. Books emerge slowly. Pride and Prejudice emerges from the mass of everything, with Austin's Emma pulled out right after. Poetry is nestled deep, and suddenly she is surrounded by all these scatters parts of her that she doesn't even know.
She's willing to rediscover them though, to remake her and the rebuild this.
.
She loves ice tea.
Ruby gives her watery smile.
.
She can't sleep.
Her room is not her room.
She pushes the bed against the window, dragging the yellow afghan over top of the dark green sheets. For a brief moment, she slips her hands into the yellow blanket. All she can feel is the promise of sunshine and that fills her just enough so she stops feeling so insane.
Belle plays soft jazz, humming and stepping in circles in tune to the music. She finds her little black purse on top of the small desk in the corner, and dumps the contents onto the floor before arranging them up and analyzing them carefully.
A small pocketbook with only five phone numbers written in. A wallet with four twenty dollar bills inside. A tube of a soft peach lipstick. A small flashlight. A small, thin book of Russian poetry that's perfect for slipping into her purse. A ribbon rests near the end, but she doesn't know the words so she starts all the way at the very beginning and resolves to work her way to the ribbon and by the time morning occurs, the book is finished.
All she has left is lipstick and basic pieces of normality.
She is summed up so easily. Broken down into basic steps.
Small steps. Stepping stones. One step forward, two steps back. Always stepping forward.
That's enough for now.
.
She has to find herself, she has to become herself.
But she's a stranger.
.
She takes a dust cloth to the shelves almost immediately. Belle doesn't bother putting music on, but scrubs the floors with a cloth and bucket easily and simply. Wipes and polishes the windows. Basic movements and no thought.
It feels strange and familiar and so close to the hazed idea of memories.
It takes a while to really clean out the library. Opening windows to let in fresh air and to let the books breathe a little. It feels good, pushing away the hard emotions running through her.
The restlessness is hard. Wanderlust, she could attempt to describe it. She wants to move and feel and not be restricted by shelled up memories and a ghost of a girl that everyone looks for.
(Are you still there?)
She doesn't quite understand who exactly the ghost is. The old Belle or the emerged Belle.
It pulls at her, making her feel anxious and worried and hazed with this idea that she'll never be really her because she is really dead and gone. Nothing left but small traces.
.
She's cleaning out the history section when Gold arrives. He brings her shoes that she had apparently left in his car before the accident.
She doesn't quite understand them, the way he watches her with this burning gaze. Like he's ready to fight.
(Fight for what, she doesn't quite know.)
He asks her how she is. If she is doing alright, if she is satisfied and is she happy?
She doesn't quite answer.
He doesn't expect her to.
.
The shoes fit.
She's surprised in a way.
.
She reads Jane Eyre over and over until all she can remember is red rooms and sad little girls and being brave.
The words are sharp and soft, even without the lull of victory and heartache. She stops though, when all she feels an ache in her heart that makes her tremble and feel small. She pulls out the bag Emma had dropped off at the hospital.
A sticky note attached to a single, torn up and well-loved book.
One word alone in spiked writing makes her pause, tracing her finger beneath the letters.
Magic.
Harry Potter stares up at her with poison green eyes and a slashed forehead, and suddenly, in a lurching sort of way, she kind of gets Emma.
She spends the night wide awake discovering magic.
.
The rain falls endlessly. She wanders the streets tucked beneath an umbrella. The tulips dance for her, stretching up out of the soil and into the rain. They sway brightly back and forth and she's laughing slightly.
"Something amusing?"
Belle looks over her shoulder and towards Gold standing beneath an overhanging. He's leaning against his cane, looking strangely bright against the darkness of the rainfall.
"Just being a bit foolish," She's surprised when she smiles brightly at him. She's wearing soft peach lipstick and the shoes he brought her, tucked into a thick blue coat. She's wrapped up into fragments of herself, suffocating but trying so damn hard to be thriving against it.
His lips quirk almost into a smile. "You'll get wet, dearie."
She looks at him, tilting her umbrella slightly. "I'm managing quite fine, thank you very much."
"Still choosing your own fate, aren't we?"
She doesn't understand what he means, but she expects that the real Belle would understand and know and laugh, and so she laughs.
Tulips are dancing and he's standing there and she's laughing and suddenly despite the pouring rain, all she can taste is sunshine.
.
Running with Ruby is a disaster.
She goes running because she feels tired. Tired of being stuck. She wants to run and run, and maybe carve a new life out of the wreckage.
She collapses with an asthma attack.
Belle thinks, with the pavement biting into her palms and the air wet and heavy around her struggling body and Ruby is screaming at her, that maybe she's losing everything all over again.
Peach lip stick. Peter Pan. Cherry tea. Black purse. Navy blue flats. Dearie.
She thinks as she struggles to breathe and cough, over and over again. Looping forward and grasping tightly. An ambulance is screaming with Ruby, bright lights flashing over her body and she wonders if she got shot again, because this looks so familiar, and he's here as well, shoving the crowd back.
Can't forget, can't ever forget.
Flats. Tea. Purse.
Belle feels like she's burning from the inside out.
.
Doctor Whale informs her it was previous damage done to her.
She feels like she's shriveling up. Caught by the past. Restricted and bound.
.
Dark basement. Illegal. Kidnapped.
Father sent her there, Mayor mocked her. Stone walls, stone floors. Metal door that never opened, walls that never broke.
She cringes as she remembers the sensation. Damp air crawling over her chest, chilling the marrow in her bones.
She's not insane.
She wills this to be true.
It has to be true.
She's grasping hold onto ideas of an identity. Trying to become and unravel the mystery that is her.
Peach. Peter. Tea. Eyre. Purse. Shoes. Gold.
She loops this through her mind constantly. Three days she shuts herself up tight in her apartment, clutching her inhaler and trying to pretend that she isn't insane.
.
"I want to be brave," she whispers as sun rises.
Insomnia's a bitch.
.
It takes time actually stepping forward outside her home. Redefining her boundaries.
It's hard to reclaim the battle, when all the men are dead and the rest are just watching for the failure to emerge.
She stills carries that little black purse, but her lip stick is different and her inhaler is tucked deep inside and there is not book with her this time.
She takes a brief walk around the block, feeling the eyes settling over her like a burden across her neck. Belle returns home shivering and forcing herself to breath. Focusing and trying and struggling.
The next day she manages two blocks, straying right up to Granny's where she dares to enter, orders a tea that she can't drink and leaves after exactly seven minutes.
After that, she doesn't dare leave the library until three days later; Gold comes to bring her lunch in a picnic basket. He speaks quietly, in the strong and firm way of his. Belle wonders why he comes, with a thermos of tomato soup, jug of iced tea and preciously cut slices of fruit. Why he comes for the ghost, the shadow and corpse.
"I'm sorry about your attack." He states blankly as they settle on the floor somewhere near the classical books.
"I'm doing alright."
He smiles at her, unsettled and relaxed. "I know, dearie."
Somehow they transform silence into words. He explains new items in his shop, and she explains her idea to paint the walls something different because the white makes her feel like she's stuck in a hospital.
"I've always been partial to blue," he said softly.
.
After he leaves, she makes an order at the hardware store. They tell her to come on over when it's ready and pick it up or if she wants, they'd deliver it to her. ("Sorry about your asthma attack, Miss. French.")
Her heart clenches as she informs them she'll be over in a bit to pick the paint up herself.
.
Lie: It's so easy to just get up and leave.
Truth: It takes her three hours to gather the courage to leave the library.
.
Three hours later, she sets off across town trying to feel brave and bold. Archie smiles at her brightly, and she lifts her hand slightly in greeting. From behind a window, Regina scowls within her home and Belle forces her stride to be strong and proud.
She resists the urge to cower, to flee and to smash the window in with her bare hands.
(she's a mixture of anger and fear, and she doesn't quite understand it all.)
The man serving her looks surprised to see the reclusive stranger standing before him, calling in her order.
She pays the money carefully, counting out the bills and handing it over to him. Belle ignores his question of whether or not she needs help, but grabs the first two buckets of paint from the counter and hefts them up properly. She informs him quite calmly that she'll be back for the rest shortly and then she's gone.
The weight of the paint makes her feel strong. It pulls at her at arms and wrists and fingers, making her wonder if she's going to stretch and stretch.
Despite this though, she walks on with her chin up and spine straight.
Gold's watching from his shop, and she smiles brightly at him.
.
(it takes seven trips to get all of the paint, but in the end the walls are painted cornflower blue and it reminds her of Gold's smile.)
.
She sleeps all through the night.
Morning comes slowly, inching through the window one sun ray at a time.
She greets it warmly with her head tilted back and all limbs stretched across her bed like a starfish. Belle imagines that she's regrowing, and it makes her laugh for some reason she doesn't quite understand.
.
("I love what you've done with the place, dearie.")
.
She doesn't quite understand why she feels like she just wants to throw her hands up in the air and allow her body to just cave in.
Belle isn't quite the Belle she should be.
She had a father that gave her away, prey to a woman that wanted her buried into nothing and victimized by a man that had a gun.
She wonders what she would say, what she would think. Would she have arranged her personal library like this, or would she have done it differently? Did she cook well, or was she just as abysmal?
Belle's a stranger to her own identity, and she can't think of anything sadder.
.
She's engulfed Jane Eyre.
Great Gatsby.
Emma.
Cummings.
Plath.
Harry Potter.
Peter Pan.
Dickens.
Green Gables.
Belle thinks, just for a moment, that if she were to cut herself, she'd only bleed words and ink.
.
Gold watches her constantly. He drops off a bag of books for her to read, and she devours the hard lines of Anne Sexton, and for a second imagines that the words are real, appearing like magic in cigarette smoke and angry lines.
She's alright, she imagines. She can walk the streets proud and hard, change her lipstick and dissolve into new books, and she'll be alright.
It's this idea that really morphs her into herself.
.
Hook walks the streets, and she's standing right in front of him and she ignores the rising terror and the desire to reach for her inhaler so she can breathe.
There's this brief moment that lapses so quickly that she can't quite grasp a hold of it.
Belle doesn't understand why her hand hurts like so, and why Hook's stumbled backwards. Emma and Ruby are pushing her back, snapping at the man so loudly she can't hear what they say. Her knuckles feel bruised, and her hand has that dull ache one receives after punching someone so horribly awful but yet effective.
Gold is luring her away with silent eyes and hard silence while the girls (her friends) deal with Hook, Ruby ready to tear out the pirate's heart.
"You need to work on your punches, love," he informs her as he opens the door to his shop and gestures her in. the shop itself is dim and cluttered and so powerfully magical it takes her breath away. Dust lines the shelves and displays and all she really wants to do is take the feather dusters and clean the shop top to bottom.
"Love?" She finds herself asking before she can stop herself. She remembers the picture on her nightstand, the two of them together. How much this must hurt him, the moment she fought against him.
He pauses, looking at her with grey eyes. "Forgive me, dearie. Slip of the tongue."
"I don't believe I really mind," she whispers, suddenly feeling small but so safe.
.
"Is it alright if I call you sometime?"
"Always,"
.
She opens the library one sunny Wednesday morning at exactly 9:30, armed with a cup of tea and her battered up copy of Jane Eyre clutched in her hands. Her one hand is bruised, and the other one fisted.
She will be brave.
She's perched
Regina's the first to walk through the doors. Her heels strike against the floor like anger and bitterness, and all Belle can taste is lighting and poison.
"I love what you've done with the place," she smirks at Belle.
Just like that, she leaves.
.
She manages to last the entire day, shutting down the building at the exact closing hour. She chases out the two children who were playing in some corner and dusts down the shelves quickly. Books are shelved and she scans the area for any sign of disorder.
He knocks on the door with both sharpness and hesitancy.
She allows him in, stepping quietly over the threshold of books and silent little corners.
"I understand the Mayor visited you early today." He announces, his voice filled with worlds and subtle power.
"She left fairly quick."
She feels like Alice shrinking. Her cheeks feel warm, and she keeps her eyes glued to the floor.
"Was the rest of the day a success?"
She smiled. "It wasn't bad."
He has a basket of sushi and iced tea, and they find themselves sprawled out amongst the history textbooks on a checkered blanket. His back is rigid against a shelf, hands fiddling with his cane. Belle is cross-legged, laughing and feeling whole and real.
Suddenly, they're kissing. His hand is light on the back of her neck, pulling closer and closer and all she can taste is love and metaphors.
.
It's like she's really just opened up her eyes for the first time.
Borders and angry pasts and frightening futures. Saviors and monsters, and everything in between.
.
(I love you)
.
True love's kiss could break any sort of curse. If he ever had any doubt before, they were long gone now.
They were together, sprawled out on the afghan that feels like sunshine and laughing and tasting magic.
Everything is no longer in pieces, but rather pieced.
.
He doesn't let go of her, and she doesn't dare stop grasping at his hands.
.
(And I you, dearie.)