Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon A Time or any of the characters and storylines in the show. This is just a fanwork made for fun.
WARNING: This fic is a really, really angsty one, bad things will happen as good things will to, but I'll be pulling a warning at each chapter about what kind of bad things will happen in it, so you won't read if you don't feel like to. For this one we have the mention of a child death. I will promise you guys a happy ending, though, as the title is "The Miracle" it won't fail happening sooner or later.
I know I shouldn't be starting another fic, but yet I couldn't finish the fluffy one until I had written this.
He peeked a look through the library's window, not daring to enter, but not quite bearing to spend another day without a single glance of her. She had moved permanently to the small apartment above it months ago, when their fights became too much for her already wrecked heart to take. From where he is, Gold can see that she is working with something in the old computer and he can also see the family picture that is still kept beside it, even after the said family was destroyed.
That picture was the pure image of happiness, one of the only summers they got to spend away from Storybrooke. He was out of his suits and actually wearing shorts and a blue shirt, which he wouldn't like the whole town to see, but at the time the photo was taken, Belle was so proud of their little family that he couldn't dissuade her to not display it in the library. She looked so beautiful and radiant in the picture, wearing a short yellow dress, a laugh immortalized in the paper. The little girl was wrapped up in her arms and the ten-year-old boy, hanging on his back. Whoever casted a quick glance at it would certainly say they were perfect.
Just not anymore. Now there was only him, drinking until he passed out on the back of his shop and her, working with fake smiles, her once gorgeous face, now a mask of pain that no time would ever be able to erase. He stepped away from the window, heading back to where his car was parked, seeing the two bouquets of red roses and his heart attempted to stop.
Six months ago, he had suffered a heart attack during a surgery and he would give anything to have died in that moment, because he woke up to find out not only that he was now a cripple who needed a cane to walk, but also that he had lost everything he loved the most. His pain was something that couldn't be counted, but Belle's suffering was even bigger.
For weeks, they tried to mend their marriage, to stand by each other and just overcome their loss, but then came the call from the hospital that would change everything, that would make them scream and hurt the other in a way that would live a mark forever. She gathered her things and left less than three days after that call and they hadn't talked ever since, although he knew they had been going to the same places in a daily basis. The gravestone never lacked beautiful flowers, not did the nightstand beside the small bed in the hospital.
Six months and he had never felt lonelier in his whole life, nor emptier or useless. He wished he could move on and live with this, but he couldn't, because the pain wouldn't leave his chest just as the guilt. Gold could do anything, he could take them flowers, he could watch the woman that once told him he was the love of her life through windows like the coward he was, but he couldn't fix the past and he couldn't fix his own mistake. It was all his fault.
The car had fallen of the toll bridge and wrecked the happiness they once had and it was all because of him.
Belle was already used to the machine noises, it was part of her daily routine for a long while now. She would sit in the chair beside the hospital bed and read aloud, then she would eventually cry and force herself to go the cemetery as much as it would hurt her even more. The memories of the accident were still very clear in her mind and constantly she felt the need of being soothed, but her husband's arms were no longer aid for her pain.
She loved him with all of her being, but he didn't agree with her anymore and she couldn't keep hearing his ever so insistent opinion about what should be done, so her friends and her father were the only ones she could reach for. Belle headed to the private section of the hospital that day, feeling as lifeless as she had been feeling for the past months, but for her surprise she saw something she had never witnessed before: Robert Gold was sat on her chair, holding their daughter's hand.
Freezing in place, Belle felt her heart start to beat faster, the first sign of the anxiety she had acquired ever since she woke up to the worse news of her life. The nausea followed and she forgot everything her therapist, Archie Hopper, had told her in the long hours she spent in his office, trying to mend both her heart and her mind. She held the book close to her chest trying to steady her breath at the sight of him, but it seemed impossible.
Of course, she knew he was coming there too, doctor Whale had mentioned it multiple times, but she never saw the point of it, as Gold had been the one to insist it would be better for them to simply turn off the machines that kept Sarah alive. She couldn't allow him to do it, she had read the books, she knew people rarely came out of coma, but her brain was still working, so there was hope. Belle needed this hope.
But even so, despite of all their arguments over the machines, when she looked at him now, she could see the phantom of the brilliant father he once was. It could be one of those occasions in which she would walk inside the little girl's bedroom and see him talking softly to her until she fell asleep, closing those bright blue eyes and drowning into slumber with a tiny smile still on her lips. However, Belle knew that if she came closer she wouldn't see the joy on his face, because he was holding the small hand of a girl that was almost lifeless by now.
Sarah used to be the cleverest four-year-old in this world, she spoke so eloquently that sometimes Belle would feel jealous about the way she could use words even in her young age. Her face was now blank as paper, the lack of sunlight making her look too pale. It was heart-breaking to see her this way, even more because whenever she stopped to pay attention at how flaccid and cold her body was now, Belle went back to the moment she last held Bae.
The doctors needed to pull her away from him as she screamed, tossed and turned, cursing God and the fate to have taken him this way. He was twelve, he had a lot to live and yet, there was a gravestone with his name in the cemetery now. She could remember Robert watching the whole scene in a corner of the room, his shoulders shaking and the tears falling from his eyes. Life had been cruel with them.
Gathering some courage, Belle took the few needed steps to the door and pushed it open, making Gold look back at her, his eyes wide and startled. He immediately stood up, leaning heavily on his cane.
"I – I'm sorry. I didn't know you would come today," he said in a cold voice.
That was all that was left for them: coldness. Belle didn't even know if their broken, bruised hearts were still capable of loving anymore. She walked towards the bed without giving him much attention and pressed a kiss to Sarah's cold brow, her beloved little girl who seemed to be frozen in time for half a year.
"Whale said her last blood test results didn't come well, he wants to meet with us again if you ever want to reconsider…"
His voice died when he received a deadly glare from Belle. No one was going to touch her baby without her consent, she knew what Whale thought and she knew very well what Gold thought but she wasn't any interested in their opinion, as long as Sarah's heart kept beating, she wouldn't be declared dead. No, she had felt the pain of burying Bae, she wouldn't go through this again, even if nights reading at the hospital was everything she had left.
"I'm not going. He can keep doing all exams he wants to try to prove me that keeping her alive is a waste of time, but I won't give up. You can stop paying the hospital bills if you want to, the money I make in the library shall afford any costs."
Gold shook his head. He knew he deserved her bitterness but he would never be ready to hear his once sweet wife sound this harsh.
"I don't care for the money we are wasting with this, I don't have anything else to use it with. Everything I earned my whole life was for you and the children and now…"
"Now we pay hospital bills," Belle finished, wiping the corners of her eyes. "I know."
She opened the book she had brought on her lap, not wanting to keep on with this conversation for any other second and thinking that Robert would take this as his cue to leave, however, he kept standing there in the same place, staring at her as if he couldn't move himself to leave.
"Do you want me to bring you something to eat?" He asked her. "You look way too skinny."
Oh, he would be surprised with the amount of weight she actually lost, but Belle wasn't going to say it aloud, she just wanted him to go away and let her stare at her daughter's beautiful face, wondering if someday she would her bubbly laugh again.
"I want to be alone," she answered. "Please."
There was a nod, but she didn't really see it, she only heard the soft noises his cane made in consonance with the sounds coming from the heart monitor in which Sarah was connected, until it stopped, Gold holding himself by the door for another moment.
"I'll visit Bae in case you want to know."
"Why would I?" Belle inquired and this time her voice sounded teary and broke and all it could be after the last six months. "You were the one who said I shouldn't be suffering. He wasn't mine, right?"
Robert swallowed hard, his free hand gripping at the doorknob and twisting it as he left the hospital room. But there it was, said in the air, another of his biggest mistakes. Belle bent down hiding her face on the white sheets that covered Sarah's abdomen and sobbing against them, because it would be needed a miracle to fix what was already so broken.
Author's Note: I'm sorry for any writing mistakes, English is not my first language.
Share your thoughts about this fic with me, if you want to.
