The Enchanted Forest, two years pre-curse

"Oh, you're alive!" Mulan rose to her feet, but the way she wobbled and the thin sheen of sweat on her forehead belied her attempts to feign that she was feeling better.

"I uh," Belle's voice faltered as she glanced to Philip standing next to her. "I defeated the Yaoguai. With a little help."

Gods, had Mulan always been so pale? She wished she'd forced the other woman to let her check her leg injury more closely. Mulan's eyes were glassy and Belle thought she might have a fever.

"Who are you?" Mulan seemed to notice Philip for the first time once Belle had glanced towards him, which just made the other woman even more nervous.

"I was the Yaoguai," Philip explained, looking back at Belle.

Mulan looked over to Belle, a confused look on her face.

"He was cursed," Belle provided, but got no further as Mulan chose that moment to swoon.

Philip lept into action, grabbing her before she was able to fall to the ground and lowering her gently to the forest floor.

"She's burning up," he said, pressing a hand to her forehead.

Belle silently cursed her luck – she had intended to begin her return to Rumpelstiltskin tonight, to face the monster that was her true love – but there was no way she could leave Mulan like this. The other woman had rescued her, after all. Belle owed her that much.

Dropping to her knees on the ground next to her friends, Belle pulled out her small knife and quickly cut open Mulan's trousers where they covered her wounded leg. It looked horrible, red and weeping and clearly infected.

"That stubborn, hard headed woman..." she muttered under her breath and Philip pretended like he didn't hear her.

"So what should we do?" Philip asked, glancing to Belle as the de facto leader of this band of misfit adventurers.

They had to get her someplace safe, that much was clear. She wasn't sure if the infection would spread so far overnight as to become deadly, but Belle also wasn't willing to risk Mulan's life to her own inexperience with medicine.

"There's a town not too far from here," she finally said. "Can you carry her?"

"I think so," Philip replied, glancing down at the small woman. "Yes, I should be able to."

Well, that was some good news at least. The town was close, but her heart ached at the realization that it was the opposite direction from the Dark Castle and home.

"I'm coming back, Rumple," she swore under her breath, flashing one last glance over her shoulder as Philip gathered Mulan in his arms.

And she would come back – no matter what, no matter how long it took, no matter what obstacles lay in her path Belle would return to her true love. She would never stop fighting for him.

Storybrooke, 1983

Lacey French had long ago decided that it was time to leave Storybrooke. She, along with her best friend Ruby Lucas, had been planning how to get out of town since they were in high school. It was almost funny how little things kept coming up to get in their way.

The original plan had been to leave right after graduation, but Lacey's mother had become sick senior year and they'd decided to postpone until after she recovered. When she had instead died, they'd postponed again. Lacey couldn't leave her father, Moe, alone and he needed help running his shop in the wake of his wife's death. By their early twenties, the girls were back on track to leave town until Ruby's grandmother had suffered a heart attack and Ruby was forced to take over the diner/bed & breakfast until Mrs. Lucas was back on her feet. By her mid-twenties, Lacey had lost count of all the ways she'd failed to leave and all the reasons for staying. It just seemed like no matter what she did, something would always stop her from getting away.

So here she was, again, at twenty-seven with the only things she had to show for her life being a lot of failed dreams, a live-in boyfriend she couldn't stand the sight of, and a fairly substantial tab at the Rabbit Hole. She knew she needed a new job, since working for her father was seasonal and would not get her her own place. She had no real qualifications besides her high school diploma, and no desire to take up customer service if she could help it (she didn't have the temperament for working with the public).

"You should be a maid." Ruby had said one day over drinks.

"Me? In a ruffly little lace hat and a white apron?"

"No, you in a normal uniform and an apron. The maid service we use at the B&B is hiring and it pays pretty good."

"But maid work? Cleaning up after strangers? I don't know if I could do that."

"Would you rather clean up after Brad forever? It would pay your bar tab at least and maybe get you into a new place."

"I'll think about it." But even as she said it, Lacey knew Ruby was right. Pride was for people with options.

And so, Lacey found herself with what she was pretty sure counted as her first "real" job – on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she and the other maids would clean stores and public buildings, and Tuesdays and Thursdays she would clean private homes. There were only a few people in town who could afford (or needed) a maid service, and Lacey was responsible for three of them. Two were single men, one of whom she would visit on Tuesday and the other on Thursday, and both days she would be responsible for cleaning the mayor's house.

Apparently, she was being given the clients of another girl named Ashley who had gotten herself knocked up and found cleaning private homes too strenuous. Ashley would only be working in the public buildings, where the other girls could handle anything that might harm the baby.

It wasn't a bad job, really, she just wasn't sure when her life had become this. In high school, she'd had dreams. She'd even had a boyfriend who seemed on track for a football career (he had a football scholarship to the state college and everything). She sometimes wondered what life would have turned out like if George hadn't blown his knee out freshman year of college. Would he have stayed with her after her mother died, or would he have eventually left to marry one of the thousands of other, prettier, smarter girls whose fathers could afford college and who didn't lose their virginity to him in the backseat of a '69 Dodge Dart after homecoming?

George had been only her first disappointment, but he was by no means the worst. She had known Brad when she was in high school, and when she had met him again she'd thought he was The One. They'd lost touch since graduation but she had remembered him fondly and been happy when he stumbled into her at the Rabbit Hole one night. He was all blonde hair and green eyes with an easy charm and a plan for getting out of town. They went out for about eighteen months before he proposed, explaining his plan of joining the Navy and moving away with her, just like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. It was impossibly romantic.

What could possibly go wrong? With visions of Hawaii and Okinawa dancing through her head, Lacey had accepted the ring only to find out that his Navy dreams were just that – dreams. A small, shared one bedroom apartment and a few years later and Lacey had been forced to accept that this relationship was going nowhere she wanted to be. She gave back the ring and moved onto the sofa, her small savings having been too far depleted by years of cohabitation to support her on the road.

But she wouldn't think about that tonight. Tonight she would be celebrating her new job and the first step in her quest to move out of her shared apartment.

Or she would be if her father had loaned her the twenty fucking dollars so she could afford to go out tonight. She could ask Brad, but Lacey had enough pride to balk at the idea of begging him for money.

Anyway, if she asked him she'd have to start speaking to him and if she spoke to him he'd assume she wanted to fuck him and Lacey did not want to deal with Brad or his cock tonight (or ever again, actually).

"Let's just go out anyway," Ruby finally called out from behind her.

Lacey hadn't even realized that her friend had followed her as she stormed out of her father's shop, but probably should have.

"Someone will buy us drinks," Ruby continued. "Keith is always trying to get your attention."

"Keith is a sleaze," Lacey huffed, finally stopping in the middle of the street out of the realization that she had nowhere to go.

"Tom Clark, then," Ruby replied.

Lacey debated this for a minute. The pharmacist was usually good for a beer or two and a game of pool and if she said she was celebrating a new job, he might even be willing to cover her for the night if she promised to return the favor later.

Ugh, she hated this. She hated this mercenary appraisal of people who were, more or less, her friends (or at least the closest things she had besides Ruby). She never saw them except at the bar, and if they saw each other in the street would never acknowledge their shared connection. She tolerated them because she couldn't afford her lifestyle otherwise, and they paid for her drinks because she gave them the time of day under the cover of darkness in a smokey room full of near strangers.

"Alright," she finally said. "We'll go out anyway, but if Keith or Brad show up we are not taking drinks from either of them."

"Agreed," Ruby said with a relieved smile. "Come on, let's go to the diner. I'll get you a burger."

Lacey nodded, following Ruby into the diner her grandmother owned. Mrs. Lucas was friendly enough to Lacey, but she knew the older woman disapproved of Ruby's choices (and, by extension, her association with Lacey whom she perceived as being a bad influence).

This free burger was going to come with a lot of passive-aggressive barbs about everything from her clothing to her living situation. It was okay, though. Lacey didn't really care what people thought of her anymore. She'd done enough caring for one lifetime and if people thought poorly of her for how she chose to live her life then there was nothing she could do about that anymore. A reputation was easier to acquire than it was to lose, and Lacey certainly had a reputation around town.

"Look at you two," Mrs. Lucas' voice rang out from behind the counter as they walked through the door. "All dolled up."

"Lacey got a new job," Ruby said cheerfully as they approached the counter. "I said I'd buy her lunch to celebrate."

"This job wouldn't be on a street corner, would it?"

"I'm cleaning houses, actually," Lacey said with all the dignity she could muster as she hopped up onto a stool.

"Well good for you," Mrs. Lucas replied, writing out the girls' usual orders and hanging them up on the little clips the cooks used in the kitchen. "When do you start?"

"Tomorrow morning," Lacey said, trying to sound as disinterested as possible. She'd found it served her better to pretend like she cared about nothing when discussing her life with anyone else, she was only ever disappointed with their opinions.

"Well, good luck to you," Mrs. Lucas said as she walked off to take the orders of a group that had walked in.

"Don't listen to her," Ruby said softly once her grandmother was out of earshot. "She just thinks we go out too much, and that's her way of trying to get us to stop."

Lacey said nothing, she knew why Ruby's grandmother said those things to them, and the truth was she didn't say anything that everyone else wasn't already saying behind their backs. At least Mrs. Lucas had the grace to give the girls a chance to defend themselves.

She had nearly gotten over the earlier insinuations when she felt a prickling at the back of her neck as though someone was watching her. She'd really had enough of this for the day, so perhaps she reacted with a bit more temper than usual when she spied the same old man who had stared at her so intensely at her father's shop sitting in a booth nearby, his eyes still fixed on her.

She couldn't help but feel a little relieved seeing him; she was desperate for someone to unleash all the day's anger at and if he thought she was the sort of girl to play coy when some old bastard made eyes at her like a piece of meat he had another thing coming.

"Lacey, where are you going?" Ruby whispered as Lacey climbed off her seat and began walking towards the guy. "Lacey, no!"

Lacey ignored her friend's attempts to call her back, storming over and placing both hands on his table to look down on him – a delightful novelty for her.

"Are you following me?" she demanded.

He was briefly shocked, as though not realizing she might actually have a spine, but recovered quickly.

"If you'll remember, dearie," he said in a perfectly calm voice, "I was at your father's shop before you were. And I was here first, too. If anything, you're following me."

"Yes, well I'm not the one staring at you behind your back am I?"

He shrugged in the most irritating fashion she'd ever seen, shuffling his menu as though it wasn't worth looking if he had to look her in the eye.

She snatched the menu out of his hand and slammed it down.

"My apologies, Miss French," he finally replied, folding his hands on the table in front of him. "You've caught me. I looked at a person in a public place. Shall we involve the sheriff? I'm sure there must be a law on the books somewhere about seeing the same woman twice in a day."

"You're a bastard," she hissed at him. She would have continued, but Mrs. Lucas had rushed over as soon as she noticed the confrontation to push a wad of bills at the man.

"Lacey," she scolded her as though she were a child and Lacey felt her face flush with anger. "Stop bothering Mr. Gold."

"Oh no bother at all, Mrs. Lucas," the man identified as Mr. Gold said in a cold voice. "Miss French and I were just having a simple conversation. We're done now, aren't we dearie?"

Lacey narrowed her eyes at him, she knew of Mr. Gold, of course. He owned half the damn town, after all, how could she not know him? That didn't mean he owned her though, dammit.

"Just about," she said as easily as she could, reaching out and swatting his glass of water into his lap. "Now we're done."

To his credit, Mr. Gold never said a word against her as he mopped the spill up off his pants, nor did he insist Mrs. Lucas kick her and Ruby out.

A small victory was still a victory, and Lacey was willing to take whatever she could get.