"Once Upon a Time" belongs to ABC, Disney and whoever else can lay claim to it. I'm not one of them.
Author's notes at the end.
Chapter One: Rags
Belle had been Rumpelstiltskin's captive for three weeks when it happened the first time. She found a streak of blood in the pantaloons she wore to bed during her waking visit to the privy. "Oh, no," she half-whispered, half-groaned. "No no no no no…"
Dashing back to her cell, she pulled one of the blue dresses he'd given her hastily over her head. (He'd given her two, so she'd have something to wear while one was in the laundry.) Yanking the laces tight, she stepped into her shoes and took off for the kitchen, trying to hurry without looking like she was hurrying.
Pulling open the broom closet in the far corner of the kitchen, she sank to her knees and began digging through the bag of rags that was kept there. She selected a number that were relatively clean and in comparably good shape before flitting back through the dining room to the privy in the middle of the wing.
Belle was boundlessly grateful for the inside privies in the Dark One's castle. There had been one in her father's castle as well, but it was in a fairly public area and had a tendency to stink the whole building up during warmer months, so most of the time she had used the outside ones. There was at least one in every wing here, including one fairly close to her cell, and the odor in all of them somehow stayed fairly low; Belle suspected her magical captor had a spell or potion or something to accomplish that. On top of everything, it made cleaning them fairly painless.
Pulling her pantaloons back around her knees, Belle pondered just how to handle this. Back home, she had underthings specifically for "her time of the moon" that had a pocket sewn into the crotch. She'd slip a neatly rolled and bound (and always pristine white) bundle of cotton wool prepared by the laundry maids into the pocket and replaced it as necessary. That would generally keep her from staining her clothing and allow her to carry on with most of her activities. But then, she hadn't been scrubbing floors and doing laundry then either...
Folding a couple of the rags this way and that, she finally came up with a dressing that she thought would stay put and still absorb most of the discharge. She pulled her pantaloons back snugly around her waist and did her best to go about her day. She was a bit more careful about how she moved, and every visit to the privy found her experimenting with new ways to fold the rags, but she managed to get along fairly well. Her petticoats and dress stayed clean, even if her pantaloons did not. And if Rumpelstiltskin noticed any change in her activities, he didn't say anything, which he was wont to do if he saw something amiss.
The period seemed to pass as usual, and by the time Belle felt comfortable removing the rags from her clothing, she had the routine down to a science. She'd figured a good way to fold and place the clothes, and had found a small burlap pouch to put the soiled ones into.
And then, laundry day came.
Belle was still very new to doing laundry. She understood the basic concept: put the clothing into the water and soap, scrub away any noticeable stains, wring most of the water out and then hang it to dry. What she'd been unprepared for was how physical and sometimes frustrating the task was. Her clothing and the table linens were fairly easy. (She did not wash her Master's clothes; she again suspected he kept those clean with magic. Which was good; he wore a lot of leather and she really had no idea how to care for that.) The rags she used to clean with proved a bit harder as they could be quite dirty and often required rather a lot of scrubbing to get them reasonably clean. And then there were the sheets...
Belle had no sheets as she slept on a pile of straw. The Master, however, must have had a humongous bed if the size of his sheets were anything to go by. She didn't know; the sheets just appeared with her laundry. She was not even allowed in the wing where his bedroom was, much less in the room itself.
Once wet, the sheets were very heavy and very hard to deal with, much less scrub. Thankfully, they never seemed terribly soiled, so she just dunked them in the water, added a few drops of perfume, as he requested, and pulled them from the tub. She then spent a good half an hour getting soaking wet as she formed the huge pieces of cloth into a snake and twisted and twisted and twisted as she did her best to wring them out.
On this day, she left her sack of rags to the very end, thinking the blood in the water may stain the rest of the laundry. She was unprepared for the odor it emitted as she emptied it, but it dissipated quickly as everything sank under the water.
She then set about scrubbing. She scrubbed those rags harder than she'd ever scrubbed anything. She added more soap to the water. She scrubbed them with the bar of soap. While the reddish-brown stains faded, there was no way those rags were ever going to be white again.
Finally, near exhaustion, she gave up. As long as they were absorbent, she figured, it really didn't matter how white they were. She'd set these rags aside for just this purpose and not worry about it beyond that.
The breeze this day was warm and fragrant. Belle thanked her lucky stars for that; her soaked frock was quickly drying as she hung the wet laundry on some lines strung between the castle and what she presumed to be the stable, though she'd never seen any horses. She was nearly done, struggling with the final sheet, when she heard his call.
"Oh here you are, Dearie! It's time for tea and you're late."
There was a friendly trill in his high-pitched voice; Belle had quickly learned that when he spoke in this tone that there was no need to be frightened of him. Which was good, because she was in no mood to have to tiptoe around him.
"I'm finishing your...laundry," she grunted as she hefted the last sheet over the line.
"I can see that," she heard his reply, lost somewhere in the hanging items. "You seem to be gaining this skill rather quickly," he said, sounding almost playful. "Good, good, good..."
He continued to mutter gleefully to himself, and Belle could hear his boots crunching closer to her on the cobblestones as she fished some clothespins from the pocket in her apron.
But then the footsteps stopped. Belle looked over her shoulder to see if he was standing by her, but still couldn't see him. "What's this now?" The manic tone in his voice had ebbed. Belle felt the line bounce as something was pulled from it and then he was suddenly by her side.
"This is blood," he accused her, waving a handful of her "personal" rags in her face. "And if I'm not mistaken," he paused to take a long sniff of the scraps of cloth, "it's your blood. Did you injure yourself?" There was still a hard edge of implication in his tone, but his eyes had softened to almost a look of worry. "That must have been quite some wound to need so many bandages. What happened?" He paused, an odd look crossing his face. "We mustn't have any pain or danger to keep you from doing your duties!" he finally added, as if needing to find an excuse for his concern.
"It wasn't a wound!" Belle snapped, snatching at the rags only to have him pull them away. "It was..." She swallowed, feeling embarrassment rise in her cheeks. This was not a topic that proper ladies talked about. "It was..." she lowered her voice and looked away. "...my monthly bleeding."
"Oh..." Rumpelstiltskin sounded almost disappointed and dropped the rags back into her hands. "I hadn't thought about that."
"Neither had I, quite frankly," she answered, now more disgruntled than embarrassed.
"I thought ladies of your stature took to their beds when that happened," he said, now more curious than misgiving. It was faint, but the friendly tone had returned to his voice.
Relaxed a bit by the softening of his demeanor, Belle looked back up into his face. "Some do," she replied as she recalled her maiden aunt. "But I always found that unnecessary, not to mention boring. Believe it or not, even I can only read so much."
Rumpelstiltskin threw his head back and laughed merrily. "That is hard to believe. Well, do what you must," he waved her off, turning on a heel and taking a couple of long strides back towards the castle.
He hadn't gotten very far when he stopped suddenly. Belle watched him as his fingers twitched before he spun back around and practically skipped to her side. "The next time this happens," he said almost conspiratorially, "save me a couple of those. Moon blood has some...interesting magical properties."
Unsure how to respond to that, Belle simply nodded.
Rumpelstiltskin grinned at her. "Thank you, Dearie. And to make things a bit easier for you..." He waved his hands in the direction of the still hanging rags. They changed shape, as did the few in her hands, into soft, plump little pillows with strings attached to them to tie around her waist.
"Thank you," Belle whispered, turning them over in her hands.
He smiled at her again, this time more softly and friendly. "No problem, Dearie." He turned to go again, this time calling over his shoulder as he went. "Now hurry up with the laundry. I'm still in need of my tea!"
Oh dear, here we go. For those of you still waiting for the next chapter of my Teen Titans fic "Falling II: The Curse of the Bat," first off, no, I'm not abandoning it! In fact, I hope to have the next chapter up over Christmas; it's nearly done. My muse, however, decided this was more interesting at the moment...
I honestly don't know where this came from. I've been a fan of OUAT since the beginning, and I count Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" among probably my top three favorite movies of all time. That said, it never was something that sparked the creative juices. And then, last weekend for some strange reason, I had the urge to read some RumBelle fic. Spent most of the weekend doing it, and the next thing I know, bits and pieces of this thing started showing up in my brain. "Okay," I thought, "I'll fire off a one-shot and get back to my other projects." Yeah, well... "Falling" started off as a one-shot too. It's over 200,000 words now...
So, this will be a bit longer than a one-shot. How long? I'm not sure. But I think this will be an interesting take on this. It will be mostly in-canon, though I think it's going to take a left turn towards the end. So, read and review, and I hope to get this out of my system fairly quickly, but, as usual, I can't promise anything...