A/N: My first OUAT fic! I'm quite excited—hoping to write some Captain Swan too (my other favorite couple) but after 2x11 I just HAD to write some angsty RumBelle goodness. So here it is. Enjoy it if you can, or cry over it ;) Reviews make my day!
"Who is Belle?"
That's what she had said, in a tone of horror, and pain, and worst of all—a complete lack of recognition. Where humor, love, and even anger had once burned in her eyes for him, there was now nothing but a void.
The busy blur of the hospital—all white and silver, angles and edges, with nothing dark or mysterious about it (and thus an alien environment to him)—moved about him. He could see her, through a series of glass walls…being tended to by doctors, in a state of merciful unconsciousness.
Whether the mercy was for her or for him, he scarcely knew.
Mercy for her, because it granted a temporary respite from confusion.
Mercy for him, for he did not have to look into the eyes that no longer knew him.
Him. Rumplestiltskin.
He was only Rumplestiltskin, for the moment. Not the Dark One. Not impenetrable. Not powerful. Only broken, with full eyes and an empty heart.
"She'll be alright," he heard Sheriff Swan say, beside him, with unusual softness in her tone.
He could not to bring himself to answer, for he had forgotten how. There was only one thought running through his mind.
"Who is Belle?"
Three words. It had only taken three small words to tear his world apart.
I should have killed him.
Hook. Hook, who now lay a few rooms away from his beloved Belle, being tended to despite what he had done.
Rumplestiltskin clenched his hand around the curved handle of his cane. If he had only struck downwards once more—
But then, he would have betrayed Belle. For it was she had who made him stop, who had called forth the hidden humanity within the monster, who, in loving him, had reawoken his own ability to love.
Does that not make all of this worse?
If only he could be the Dark One again instead of Rumplestiltkin, that vulnerable man. Surely the Dark One could find a way to set all of this right.
Yet he could not be overly bitter on that count, for he knew that such hope was futile.
The tragedy that had occurred—as when Milah had ceased to love him, as when he had lost Baelfire—was something that the power of the Dark One could not mend. And so he, Rumplestiltskin, man and myth, watched the slow-blossoming hope for redemption that been rising within him ever since Belle returned shatter…
Like her memories.
Like a teacup.
Like his heart.