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4.
It was still too early for any visitors to come to the Library, so it was unsurprising that he'd caught her in a rare moment of self-indulgence, convinced she was alone in the warm, quiet space that was now her kingdom. She ruled alone here. Oh yes, there were frequent volunteers, helpful souls who offered their time so that she might better enjoy hers, but it was without question that between the hours of 9 and 5, Mondays through to Fridays, Storybrooke's Library might as well be called Belle's Library, for here she was Queen.
And long may she reign, Rumpelstiltskin added to himself.
The desk was usually spotless and tidy, which made the opened and apparently forgotten delivery box, trailing its paper and plastic innards across the wood something of a novelty. She was almost completely concealed behind the desk, sat in her chair and totally absorbed in the hefty tome clasped in her hands. Rumpelstiltskin took advantage of her oblivion to the outside world to observe his beloved at leisure.
Her hair was pinned back today, half-up, half-down in that familiar style from their old land. Her lavender sweater was cut in a style again very reminiscent of another place and Rumpelstiltskin mouthed the word to himself in bemusement. Peplum. Would it be long before corsetry made a reappearance in this world? Privately he hoped not. The image of Belle in her long satin gown the colour of liquid gold, shoulders bare and waist cinched in for him to circle with a glittering, black-nailed hand had not lost an ounce of its potency in all the years he'd spent without her.
When she sniffed, a forlorn, tiny little sound it broke his reverie and startled him into the discovery of tears pooling in her lovely eyes. He hurried to the desk.
"What's wrong?"
It was with a mixture of relief and adrenaline that he realized she neither jumped nor seems much affronted by his sudden appearance but simply dabbed at her eyes with a delicate finger and closed the book in her lap, bravely attempting a embarrassed smile.
"It's nothing, just something I was reading", she collected herself with a determined breath, "it was very moving"
He breathed a sigh of relief, "So I see"
He eyed the now discarded book's spine in curiosity. 1Q84. He hadn't read it, although he'd dipped into Murakami now and then over the twenty-eight non-years spent in Storybrooke. He peeked into the delivery box. Jane Eyre. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. New books. Of course she would be captivated. That first glimpse of her revealed as much, long before Maurice's goons had opened the heavy doors to find nothing waiting for them, surprised into silence by his appearance in the vacant throne behind them, that first glimpse. He didn't need to look again when he voiced his price for an end to the Ogres' destruction of the tiny kingdom.
Belle had been standing in a corner, listening carefully to the men's conversation while being clearly ignored by all others in the room. He'd never seen a woman, girl of her stature so enamoured of a text and so discreetly but interestedly informed of the ins-and-outs of a war cabinet's discussions. A heavy leather-bound book clutched to her breast like a treasured object too precious to abandon. The last time he'd seen a woman with a book in her hand his insides had burnt with a queasy solution of secret triumph and nagging unease at the carnage that would inevitably ensue. Belle provoked no such misgivings – she simply stood there, listening, her bright eyes darting between speakers, never missing a beat and never giving her involvement in the debate away. Clever girl, he'd smirked to himself then. And she was beautiful, of course, but all ladies of all courts throughout all the lands were expected to be so. He'd never seen gold look quite so alluring on a woman before, though. A prickly hue, it robbed fair-haired would-be princesses of their colour and appeared tacky on others, too obvious. On her though, his colour was rather pleasing.
"Have you actually come to borrow a book?"
Belle was raising a smiling eyebrow at him from her chair. He smiled back as guilelessly as he could, which was impressively so.
"Indeed I have. Anything you would recommend to a poorly-read pawnbroker?"
Belle shook away the laugh his words nearly induced. "You're hardly illiterate. There were more books in your library than I'd ever seen in my life", she emerged from behind the desk, suddenly wistful, "and you'd actually read all of them"
He shrugged non-committally.
"When you have centuries at your disposal, reading becomes more than an idle luxury"
"It's a good book", she replied, "I won't have it catalogued and wrapped until later today, but I could be persuaded to loan it out on a special first-preview basis"
"1Q84?"
She nodded excitedly.
"There's a lot I don't understand, but these two characters, they have such a strong bond. They don't even interact much as children, in fact the only thing they have approaching a relationship is one day when the girl suddenly holds his hand one day when they're ten years old. After that they spend twenty years apart, but they're always thinking of each other"
He smiles, touched by the admiration and affection in her voice.
"And what do they do, these two star-crossed lovers? I take it they're not prince and princess of some far-off kingdom?"
She looks at her feet, sheepish.
"Well, he works as a teacher and he's very good at it. He enjoys his work. But he also writes in his spare time and I think that's his main passion. She ah-", she worked her heel into the floor, "mainly kills people for a living"
Rumpelstiltskin glanced away, swallowed the bark of amusement that tickled the back of his throat and grinned appreciatively, "Well, there are dirty forms of work in the world and some people have to do them"
"She doesn't like it!" Belle defended her fictional heroine, "and besides, she only kills terrible people. Men who do awful things to women and children"
His expression darkened. This time it was he who found himself studying his feet.
"There are many forms of men in the world as well"
Belle eyed him with a careful look. Then she took him by the elbow and led him down past the neatly labeled rows of shelves until she found the little corner. She'd put two chairs together to make a cosy space for anyone who wanted to curl up and read in private or sit very closely with their True Love and talk of secret, heavy things. They sank into the chairs, quite snug against each other from shoulder to knee.
"There are many kinds of women in the world too", she reminded him, "and some of them are capable of more evil than others can believe"
The look in his eyes whenever she mentions Regina is something, alright. Those eyes, honey-brown and alight with intelligence and amusement and a million different endgames shifting and shuffling darken terribly. Suddenly there is a hawk in a man's form sitting beside her, round eyes ringed in gold and bottomless, unfathomable. Something deep-rooted, angry and silently simmering glitters in them and it always reminds her (not that she's ever had cause to forget) that Rumpelstiltskin is very, very dangerous.
She hadn't slept, those two nights after his confession. Not a wink, tossing and turning until morning finally arrived in the sliver between windowsill and curtain.
He'd killed his wife.
At certain points in the day she'd been certain that it would drive her to madness. Initially she'd shut herself up in her bathroom, hugging her knees on the floor and imagining that having a good cry would be a primary solution for the chaos of emotions running through her. Instead she'd found that she couldn't cry, sniffling dry sniffles and running her hands tiredly through bed-mussed hair. She'd cried before, cried for people she did not know, for soldiers and families killed and devastated by the Ogre attacks. A little girl wailing in the cobbled streets for her father while a mother with a pain-wracked face tried in vain to hush her. An old man holding his wife when a messenger brought the news that they'd hoped would not come. A young bride had thrown herself into a lake on learning her husband of a few precious weeks would not be returning to their new home and had wilfully, deliberately drowned. The long lace train of her wedding gown had dragged her to a watery death as though designed for that purpose alone. Belle had not been supposed to hear that last terrible story, but she'd always listened in on any conversations concerning the welfare of their people and their village and her need to know had come at a terrible price. She'd spent the afternoon sobbing in her room and only emerged after bathing her face several times in perishingly cold water to remove all trace of the telltale red puffiness around her eyes when it was time to greet her father.
Love did such terrible things to people it was a wonder anyone dared fall in love at all.
Tears failing her, she'd tried to create her, this woman, this wife of Rumpelstiltskin, this mother of his only and much-beloved child. She'd tried to assemble features, a voice, a face to this woman she had never met, who had left her husband and child for reasons she did not know and had yet to ask about. This woman who had paid the price for her desertion with her heart and her life was an unknown entity.
Could she not cry for this woman because of the pain she'd wrought on Rumpelstiltskin and Baelfire? Was she already guilty of judging a woman she'd never met and never would on the basis of one act that defined and ended her life? Belle had given up on that subject of analysis as soon as she'd begun.
Rumpelstiltskin, on the other hand, she could consider herself versed in knowing a few things about, at least. She had seen rage on him, seen it conduct a violent dance with his body and voice, rendering him a terrifying, destructive puppet all bellowing snarls and lashing talons, half-cobra, half-tiger. She'd heard the shatter of breaking glass even from the dungeon afterwards, trembling with every brutal smash from above. She'd seen power as well, power in the aloft hand that calmly carried her back from the town boundary and oblivion defying logic and gravity. Power that opened the handcuff around her wrist with a decisive cut through air and improbability. Power in the strange, black tipped hand that swatted away Gaston's sword, a blade she knew he kept even the tiny ridge to the flat side of honed to hair-splitting sharpness. He'd swatted it away, palm to shining metal with the air of one cuffing the head of an errant child. Oh yes, she had realized in the small hours of the first morning after, she could understand how his rage could bring him to murder. She also understood, from the look on his face when he'd spat out his own name like something horrible had grown up on his tongue, tears wetting his cheeks that he regretted it and so many other things besides. She's seen two men cry in her entire life. Her father, and Rumpelstiltskin.
I went down many paths, he'd said. It had made her shiver to hear it, to think of the many dark, twisted and terrifying roads one could take, that would change you so much that the end and the means to your quest could have almost nothing in common.
"I've never had trouble believing anything of that particular female of the species", he delicately spat from behind closed teeth. Belle rubbed his arm, comforting.
"I know. I know, too", she admitted with a sideways half-smile. He looked at her questioningly with the face of a man who wants to know but thinks he cannot bear the knowledge when it comes. She rubbed his hand in hers, not sure which of them she was reassuring.
"She showed me once. The wall of hearts in her castle. I suppose she wanted to frighten me"
Rumpelstiltskin's gentle clasp on her fingers tightens to a degree just below painful.
"I'm so sorry, Belle"
She smiles at his apology. "I know the two of you have", she tries to give a reasonable name to their animosity, "a history together, and I know – well, I've figured it out for myself that to some extent," she looks right at him, "you bear some responsibility for the person that she is", his eyes narrow as he winces but does not deny, "but not all. There were stories of you, how you knew those desperate enough to call on you for help, how you somehow found those who had been pushed to the brink by life, by things they could not control," she paused for breath, "but I never heard anything that said you forced those unfortunates, that you gave them no choice. I chose". She smiled again at the memory, twenty-eight years and counting has no impact on that rare, impossible moment in time, "I chose, and you didn't push. You stated your price and I agreed to it. No-one forced my hand, no-one put a blade to my throat, no-one said 'do this or die,'" Belle stroked his hand fondly, "you yourself warned me, even as I agreed. 'It's forever, dearie', you said"
"So I did", quietly, "but the hearts? You saw?"
"Yes", Belle swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, "so many, all compartmentalized, all in little drawers like an apothecary's supplies. Catalogued. This one belonged to a beautiful princess, this one to a giant. This one to a great hunter", Belle closed her eyes as the Queen's voice resurfaced in her mind, "like a shopping list"
"Well come, come, take a look"
A smooth beckon with a white hand. Belle stood rooted to the spot, fingers itching to clasp themselves in something, her skirts, each other, fists. The Queen turned elegantly in a sweep of black velvet and lace, sleeves drawn tight about her wrists and fanning into long trails of fabric that reminded Belle of spiders' webs or the skeletal outline of trees in winter. Cold.
A smile as white and red as blood and bone.
"Come now, you're not as clueless as all that. You've lived with Rumple, after all, little housekeeper. We all know the Dark Castle isn't called that because he keeps the drapes closed"
He doesn't anymore, Belle bit back in her mind. She took a step forward. The Queen beamed approval.
"Good girl. Now I'm sure you've seen one of these before – no doubt Rumple has a little sinister side to his beloved collection," opening a drawer while looking at Belle over an arched shoulder, "so I'm not destroying any innocent ideals about your former – hmm, which was it? Master? Lover?"
She opened her mouth to respond with fierce retort but the glowing, small thing in that otherwise beautiful hand keeps her jaw open and her silence betrays her. Such a small thing, it looks so vulnerable and alive, faintly pulsating in the Queen's white fingers, an unearthly red and pink and light, as if some sort of energy hums away inside. Then Belle remembers what it is and nausea sweeps through her. A tucked-away childhood memory of the butcher dissecting a carcass into the different cuts of meat. The unrequired organs slipping away secretly, wetly into a dark bucket. The neighbourhood dogs yapping approval later in the afternoon and she'd run home as fast as small legs could carry her, hands over her ears and hungry until the next day as the evening's roast dinner could not be faced. This too is an organ, but someone requires it still.
Wrong. Wrong.
The Queen's smile is slow and smug. She flicks a fingertip in Belle's direction and pulled by an invisible jerk both hands tug upwards, palms cupped as if asking forgiveness and then she tips, tips her hand over and that small, lonely thing is in her hands now, still warm and vaguely wet, too smooth to belong to anything alive and breathing. There is no choice between letting go and holding on, Magic holds her hands in a powerless limbo and Belle finds herself breathing hard and fast, shallow breaths to delay tears and the dry heaving of her empty and repulsed stomach.
"Oh, you hadn't seen one? I would've thought he'd have let you dust them, or something"
"He doesn't have these", she managed between gulps, "I've seen the collection"
The Queen eyes her with sympathy.
"Oh sweet girl. I'm a terrible hostess, lying to you like that. Of course he doesn't keep hearts. He crushes them straight after taking. Like this"
Those red-nailed fingers are warm over hers and pushing shut and Belle tries, tries so hard against the force of Magic and the human strength crushing her fingers shut like a clam. For a split-second she imagines irritation flickers over the Queen's countenance at her resistance but then her palms are closed together and the small, beating thing between them drifts, ashes and dust through her closed fingers. She stares at the remnants trickling to the marble floor in silent horror.
"I like to think he enjoys it", her captor muses, idly pushing the drawer closed behind her and removing the seal, tearing it up between her fingers. For days afterwards Belle would wonder what was written on the tiny scroll. What name, whose title, what image reconciled the ashes on the floor to a person, an animal, a life.
"He has a talent for destruction. The swift and the prolonged. Evil always does"
Belle wiped shaking hands on her skirts. He asks if I'll accept roses. He says he'll get used to daylight and open windows.
"I don't think he's that simple to define"
The silence as the Queen regards her in the light of her statement is near deafening. Belle wonders if her heart will take the place of the one just destroyed.
"I can see why he chose you. I won't kill you just yet. You've earned a few – years grace with that. But little girl, you have no idea who Rumpelstiltskin is. What he does. What he's capable of", the last part she smiles a glittering, pearl-white smile into as if confiding a lewd secret, "Just between us girls. There's no better teacher, no harder taskmaster, no dealmaker more ruthless or exacting. No insanity more knowing. And no Dark One darker than dear old Rumpelstiltskin. And I would know"
Beauty is a terrible thing, Belle decides as the Queen brings her face close to hers to croon the last few words softly. That face is ravishing, dark eyes, arching brows, smooth skin and perfect teeth behind impossibly red lips. She can't explain the how or why but the Queen's loveliness is so terrifying, so much more horrid than Rumpelstiltskin's odd eyes and reptilian countenance. There's something so blatantly dishonest about the Queen's beautiful face Belle's brain practically bursts with liar, liar.
At least Rumpelstiltskin wore his scales on the outside.
She whips them both out of the dreadful room with a hiss of Magic. The doors tone booming behind them with deep finality. She puts an arm around Belle's shoulder, confidential, friendly.
"My condolences. I can't speak from experience, but it must be difficult knowing the one you love doesn't feel quite the same. Ah, but then his attachment to his collection is only material. I'll say this for you; you're certainly the prettiest thing he's ever owned. Shame it wasn't True Love for him too. A curse is so very hard to live with, but then I suppose what's a little discomfort when you have immortality?"
Her laugh echoes off the walls and inside her head when she is returned again to her cell.
Belle bit her lip hard all the way back to the dungeon. One singular fact kept her feet going, one step and then another. One truth the Queen didn't seem to know.
It was working. True Love can break any curse.
He is silent the whole way through her retelling of her tale, his hand gripping hers tightly. It shakes when she gets to the part about the heart disintegrating between her hands, fury and despair swirling in his wide eyes.
"Tell me", she asks, "tell me about her, and other things. You can. Tell me when you want to, or when you think you should, or when you feel ready"
"There's a lot to tell", he reflects, ruefully watching their fingers interlock, "and none of it pleasant. But, I'll try. I will, Belle. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. So ask, when you want to. I'll tell, if I can"
She smiles for him again, pleased beyond measure.
"It's because you told me, you know. You told me the terrible thing you did. For someone who's spent all his life being a coward", her voice is gentle over the damning word, "you showed a lot of courage that day. That weighed up quite in your favour, once I'd sat down and thought about it properly"
His face erupts into amazement and gratitude and then he's leaning in, desperate and longing, moving to kiss her, his hand reaching up to stroke her cheek. She places a soft push against his chest in refusal and he stops, realizing the impropriety of what he'd been about to do.
"You have recently confessed to murder, a kiss will have a wait a bit longer", she admonishes, "It's only Tuesday"
Three days until she can taste a hamburger and declare their tentative, beginning-all-over-again relationship in public.
"I'm sorry", he apologizes, ashamed, dare she say it, even embarrassed, "it's just-"
he gazes at her wonderingly, "you make me hopeful. Hopeful for so many things. Things I haven't had and haven't been"
"Thank you", she blushes delicately. No-one compliments quite like him. She recalls Gaston's stiff recitations of other people's praise of beauty and giggles. She'll take Rumpelstiltskin's soft, urgent apologies over any gilded verse of romantic cliché any day. They mean something.
He takes 1Q84 with him, waiting patiently as she wraps the cover in protective film and slowly, methodically (computers will take a little more time and practice) prints a label for it.
When she locks up that evening she remembers the nightmares. The ones where she'd be once again in her dungeons, alone and frightened of what the next day would bring. The ones where she wakes up in a hospital gown and padded walls greet her hello, her only visitor a beautiful woman who looks in through the small slot in the door and says nothing but whose visits leave her shaking and sleepless. Then there's one where she wakes as if from a deep sleep and finds her hands holding a heart again, only this time it isn't just her and the Queen in that mausoleum of love and life, but Rumpelstiltskin too, leaning heavily on the wall of hearts, one long fingered hand clutching wearily at his chest, eyes wide and locked on hers.
"Look after it dearie", he whispers in a death-rattle of his normal whimsical song, "I only have the one"
She'd sit bolt upright, gasping. Those first few nights in a bed that isn't bolted to the wall are unsteady and he never asks but simply understands. Looking to her left she'd find him stirring. He is a light sleeper. One murmur from her in the wake of the nightmares and he's already half-awake, limbs unwinding into movement, consciousness, offering shelter for her to curl into. This time she's dumb with fear and horror and he simply pulls her gently down beside him again, folding both arms around her, tucking her head under his chin where she can feel his sleep disheveled hair tickling against her brow. He wraps his legs around her lower body, even though the injured one must hurt him, cocooning her in warm, protective limbs.
She thinks back to Regina calling her another item in his collection. Possession cannot be denied, she admits, turning the key in the library's lock and testing the door once more, just in case. He has so much of her already. So many firsts, her love among them. In a way he does own her heart. But possession goes both ways, she decides, walking home, and it needn't be so horrifying or one-sided.
"Take care of it", she'd warned as he took the book from the counter, "I won't have dog-eared pages or tea stains coming back to me. There are fines for that"
He salutes her, book in hand, "You have my word"
It's maybe her overactive imagination, but she swears there's a spring in his step as he leaves. So pleased over one borrowed book. He's the one who gave her a library.