After the mayor took her leave, I sat on my cell bed with the chipped china cup in my hand and gazed over the designs. I ran my thumb across the edge and remembered how the chip in the cup came to be. Smiling, I shook my head and wondered how I could possibly let that woman know my real name. It will obviously cause problems for me in the future, knowing how far she is willing to go to get what she wants.
At that thought, an unwanted memory came to the surface, and I was once more shouting at the vanity mirror I usually kept covered in my home, telling her that she would never be more powerful than me. Then, in my fury of being deceived and my pain at the thought that I had actually begun to trust and believe her, I was once again shaking and yelling at Belle, only to take her to the dungeon and lock her away.
Her eyes were the color of the sky on a summer's day, the same color as the sky when the curtains were taken down for the first time ever since they were hanged. The first time I began to feel the stirrings of what I thought I had abandoned and locked away deep inside this reptilian shell of mine for good.
"You are a coward, Rumplestiltskin, and no matter how thick you make your skin that doesn't change."
"I am not a coward, dearie. It's quite simple really. My power means more to me than you."
"No…no, it doesn't. You just don't think I can love you."
Of course not. How could anyone, much less someone such as you, possibly have any kind of feelings for me? When even my own wife and son fled from me, to someplace where I can never reach them, how could I possibly be capable of being loved?
"And now you have made your choice. And you will regret it…forever. And all you have is an empty heart…and a chipped cup."
How was I to know that when she walked out of that dungeon, my castle, my life, that it would truly be the last time I ever saw her?
"He was cruel to her," she said, with that trademark smile of hers that showed how much she relished in being the bearer of bad news.
"He locked her in a tower and sent in clerics to cleanse her soul with scourges and flame. After a while she threw herself off the tower."
Then, to emphasize what she meant, and to twist the proverbial knife in deeper, as it were, the wicked queen said the last two words I would ever want to hear: "She died."
As I gripped the cup with both hands, careful not to damage the only thing I had left of her, my most precious treasure, I swore to myself that I would be the last one standing in this little war, and that the witch would pay tenfold for her role in the events that led up to Belle's death.
You will pay most dearly, Your Majesty, if it is the last thing I do…