It was cold outside. The sun had set while she and Gold had taken their stroll down memory lane and now she was alone and underdressed on the opposite side of town from her apartment.
Lacey popped open her clutch, looking through the meager contents of her wallet. Just a few crumpled bills and some change. She knew there was next to nothing in her bank account. Not enough for the cab fare she would need to get home.
The idea of going back into the restaurant and asking Gold for a ride was so ridiculous it would have had her laughing if she wasn't so miserable.
She realized then there were tears on her cheeks, the biting cold wind making them feel like ice clinging to her skin. She swiped at them angrily. Gold didn't deserve her tears. Even on the off chance he was telling the truth and he had loved her, it didn't make a bit of difference now. The girl Gold loved was long gone, she was Lacey now and Lacey didn't shed tears over ex boyfriends.
She had nothing else to do, so she set off walking in the direction of her apartment. It would take her all night to get there on foot, but it was better than standing around freezing her ass off outside a ritzy restaurant.
She hadn't made it far before her teeth were chattering and her skin was starting to turn a worrying shade of blue. There was a bar up ahead on the right, the garish glow of the various signs for alcoholic beverages beckoning her like a moth to a flame. It would be warm inside. She had enough bills in her clutch to keep her in her cups for another hour at least. And maybe she could find a friend for the night, someone who lived nearby where she could crash and make her way home in the morning when it was warmer.
She swiped at the tears still leaking from her traitorous eyes and stomped inside, settling herself at the bar and ordering another whiskey. She'd made an admirable go of getting shit faced in the restaurant and she was intent on finishing the job.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd cried. Perhaps it was her mother's funeral. It certainly wasn't the day she'd left Storybrooke. She'd boarded that bus in stony-faced silence, not bothering to glance back at her hometown as it pulled away. But seeing Gold tonight, hearing him say pretty words that she knew she'd have eaten up with a spoon ten years ago had her feeling small and young. Lacey was world weary and cynical but the tender heart of Belle still beat beneath her chest, struggling to escape and consume her.
She buried it in another shot of liquor.
Belle had been weak. A naïve girl who constantly let people take from her until there was barely anything left. If she had remained Belle, she would have disappeared. Lacey had been her mother's maiden name and it was a fitting tribute to take it, to become the woman her mother had never been able to be.
Her mother had loved her father and it killed her in the end. That's all romantic love did, kill and maim and destroy. She had escaped that fate just as she escaped Gold in the early morning light after one night of passion. She'd allowed herself that, allowed herself a taste to know what she'd truly be missing. She thought it would make things hurt worse, but as that bus pulled away all she'd felt was numb.
And now it was as though all the years of buried emotion were finally welling up, wreaking havoc on her system, turning her inside out. She felt young and foolish and hopeful and broken. She felt as though she were seeing herself through Gold's eyes, seeing how she'd changed and for once it wasn't with pride. She wanted to be Belle again, to have him look at her so tenderly, to chase after her or beg her to stay. But he'd never done that, not when she was Belle and certainly not now that she'd buried her.
"Didn't get enough to drink at the restaurant?" came a cool, accented voice from behind her. A voice that had once made shivers run down her spine with its rich burr. Lacey shut her eyes against it, refusing to turn around and face him. But somewhere deep inside, somewhere she kept hidden and secret, Belle crowed that he had come for her.
He should have expected it. Belle was always good at running. For all her talk of bravery back when she was a girl, when push came to shove she would always run rather than stay and face things.
Gold sat there for a moment, watching water from the upturned vase bloom across the tablecloth until it started to dribble on to the hardwood floor below. He clenched his hands into fists, a motion he'd been making so often tonight that his knuckles were starting to ache with the strain, his short nails biting into the skin of his palms and leaving crescent shaped divots in their wake.
"Fuck it," he said after a short deliberation. He'd let her run away once before and despite the pain, he hadn't regretted it, not truly. She was better off without him, would succeed in ways she never could if she'd been tied to him and to Storybrooke. But Lacey was still a mystery, one he wanted to uncover. If he let her go now, he'd never know why she left, why she'd changed, who she'd become.
He grabbed his cane, jumping to his feet and throwing down enough cash to cover their whiskey before rushing out the restaurant, waving off their well-meaning waiter's inquiries.
Once he was out on the street, the frigid autumn air chasing any effects of the liquor from his mind, he wasn't sure what to do next. Belle wasn't anywhere to be seen and he had no idea what direction she'd headed in. Had she hailed a cab? Did she have a car? Or had she just fled him on foot into the night?
He heaved a sigh, heading right on a whim. The cold air made his ankle ache and he wanted nothing more than to sit down someplace warm. Instead he was out here chasing after a girl who hadn't wanted to see him for the past ten years and certainly didn't want to see him now.
He'd barely made it a block when he spotted her up ahead of him, the neon glow of a bar sign casting her in a greenish pallor. She didn't have a jacket on over her tiny dress and he had the urge to wrap her up and keep her warm, but he shook it off. As he watched she swiped at her cheeks before standing up straighter and heading in to the bar.
He snapped himself out of his stupor, following behind her and into the gloom of the bar. It smelled like cigarettes and stale beer, a far cry from the restaurant they'd been drinking in just a few minutes ago. Belle was seated on a cracked red vinyl stool at the bar, her shoulders hunched and staring down into a glass of something potent looking.
"Didn't get enough to drink at the restaurant?" he asked, approaching from behind. He could see Belle's shoulders tighten, her whole body on edge, but she didn't bother to turn around.
"You know, Gold, when a woman gets up and leaves in the middle of dinner it usually means she doesn't want to talk to you."
"Well, you've run out on me before," he replied, casting a haughty eye at the stool next to her before deigning to take a seat. "I'm not going to let you get away with that twice."
Belle let out a laugh that sounded harsh and manic to his ears. It was so different, so far removed from the musical little laugh he used to work so hard for all those years ago. He'd liked nothing better than earning her smiles and her laughter, the sound enough to warm up even his weary old bones. Now even that little trace of Belle was gone.
"As if you cared," she spat out. "All this bullshit about love? You never loved me. I was just a silly, stupid girl you took advantage of."
"I did love you," he growled back. "Not that it makes any difference now."
"You didn't follow me," she shot back. "Back then. When I left you didn't follow me."
"Of course not!" he exclaimed. He was so tired of this, the back and forth. He wanted answers, to know what happened, why she was Lacey now, why she'd buried his Belle.
"You were always better off without me. I thought I was doing you a favor by staying as far away from you as possible. But now I see you and you're not the woman you should be."
"Excuse me?" she rounded on him, finally looking at him for the first time since he'd entered the bar. "I'm exactly the woman I want to be."
Gold shook his head, not believing her for a moment. There was fear in her eyes, uncertainty.
"You were going to see the world," he said. "You were so bright. You went off to college on a scholarship and the whole town was behind you. What did we do that made you hate us? Why did you never come back?"
"Because of you!" she exclaimed, finally cracking. "I couldn't see you. Not after what happened."
It felt as though something had punched him straight through the chest, stealing his breath until he was suffocating, his entire being focused on her words.
"Did you," he rasped out, feeling faint and nauseous. "Did you feel that I…forced myself? That you couldn't say no?"
Belle rolled her eyes. "God, no. I wanted you, trust me."
His lungs opened up and he could breathe again, but it didn't make any sense.
"Then, what was the problem?" he demanded. "Was it so fucking terrible? Was I such a goddamned nightmare you couldn't even visit your father over the past decade?"
Belle snorted. "Like you give a flying fuck about my father."
"No," he agreed. "But you did. Once upon a time you loved him and your friends and you left all of that, abandoned everything, because you hated me that much? What did I do to you?"
She sniffed a little, giving a casual shrug of her shoulders that he didn't quite believe.
"Nothing," she said dismissively.
"Belle," he ground out, his teeth clenching around her name. "Lacey, whatever the fuck you want me to call you now, what did I do to you that was so bloody terrible?"
"You were married," she replied calmly, her head swinging in his direction and her eyes cold. "You took in some stupid little teenager and made her think you loved her and you were married the whole time."
"Oh," he said, his voice small.
"Yeah," she agreed. "Cora, your lovely wife. She called me, let me know just what kind of man I was dealing with."
"Belle, it wasn't…" but she didn't let him finish. Her fury was rising now, her cheeks pink and her blue eyes as hard as chips of ice.
"I always knew it wouldn't last," she said with a shake of her head. "If anything your wife did me a favor, steeled my resolve that might have slipped otherwise. I knew you'd hurt me. The moment you fell asleep I knew I'd made a terrible mistake because it was always going to end one way, with me chewed up and spit out and dying miserable in that godforsaken town. I just didn't think I'd be chewed up and spit out quite that quickly."
Gold shook his head, the picture becoming clear now. Cora had spent the bulk of their six year marriage in Europe. He hadn't seen her in years by the time Belle came along. But of course she'd have found out, found some way to destroy any shred of happiness he managed to scrape up in this life. Once he'd managed to track her down and get her to sign the divorce papers once and for all, he'd left Storybrooke and the watchful eye of his erstwhile stepdaughter.
"So you left and never returned," he said flatly. "I suppose I never realized you were quite so selfish. Lacey suits you."
"You were a married man who fucked an eighteen year old girl, and I'm selfish?" she asked disbelievingly.
"Rather than talk to me about it, clarify things, stop to think for one moment why you'd never seen this supposed wife of mine in Storybrooke, you just left. You didn't leave because of Cora. You left because you wanted to."
"Yeah," Belle agreed, her acquiescence so unexpected that his anger burned off in favor of surprise. "Cora made it easier to leave, but I was always going to. If I had let myself love you, I'd never have left Storybrooke. I would have stayed in that town and it would have eaten me up until there was nothing left the way it did my mother."
"And instead you're living it up in the city?" he said mockingly, gesturing at the shit hole bar they found themselves in. "Is this all you hoped for when you left? This is the great adventure you were craving?"
"It's been ten years, Gold," she scoffed. "I haven't been here the whole time."
"What a stunning achievement for you," he bit back.
"I went to college," she said. "Turns out no matter how smart or driven you are it doesn't help if there are no jobs in your field. So I scraped up what I could and I traveled. I worked when I could, stayed put when I couldn't afford to move on. I saw the Great Wall of China and the Eiffel Tower and Chichen Itza. And when I ran out of money I came back here and had myself a drink. I think I've earned that right. I certainly don't have to justify my life choices to you just because I didn't stay behind in Storybrooke to be your whore."
She'd done it then, gone to all the places Belle had dreamed of, had spoken so animatedly about whilst pointing out the photos of all the landmarks she wanted to see in her travel books.
"You did have your adventure," he said almost reverently. And yet she was still dissatisfied.
Belle shrugged. "Turns out adventure is overrated," she said. "No matter where you go in the world, you're still you."
He frowned.
"Did you think you wouldn't be? Is that why you became Lacey?"
Belle downed the contents of her glass, setting it back on the bar and tapping the rim to signal the bartender that she'd like another.
"Belle is weak," she said bitterly, as though she was talking about someone else, someone who had failed her as much as he had. "Belle couldn't handle the realities of the world she found outside of her hometown. But Lacey gets the job done."
She turned to look at him again. "So there's your big sob story. I had to protect myself because no one else ever could."
He shook his head. He couldn't accept that.
"Belle was anything but weak," he said fiercely. "Belle was everything."
Belle looked at him appraisingly, swallowing hard as her eyes flicked over him. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was being taken apart piece by piece; that Lacey was searching him for weaknesses she could exploit in a way she only could have learned from him.
"You still married?" she asked, turning on her stool so she was reclining against the bar.
"No," Gold said, his nose wrinkled up in disgust. "I wouldn't have been then if I'd been able to find Cora to send the divorce papers. It was a technicality."
Belle nodded, seemingly lost in thought. A moment later, she'd propelled herself into his arms, and he wasn't sure if he was kissing Belle French for the first time in a decade, or kissing Lacey for the first time ever. When she captured his bottom lip between her own, tugging on it playfully, he decided it didn't matter.