...

We've got forever
Slipping through our hands
We've got more time
To never understand

The Glitch Mob, The Shortest Distance

...

"Yes." Gold's face twisted. "Yes. Yes. It's me. It's me, Belle." She could hardly stand the sight of him:; his features distorted in an expression that was painful to see - both hopeful and tortured, .

He pressed his hand against his chest and closed his fingers over his sweater in a spasmodic gesture. "Oh, yes, it's me, it's me, Rumpelstiltskin. Do you really, really recognize me?"

Belle stared blankly at him. "Yes," she whispered, after a long time. "Yes, I do."

His eyes gleamed with tears;he tried to smile. "? Belle, Belle - oh, dearest, my darling Belle..." His mouth was painfully contorted. He raised a hand as if he was going to touch her, but he didn't. "You must be so confused -–" When she didn't respond, he looked away and offered her more words as if in consolation. "I never meant for it to be like this." he said. His voice was quiet, almost unrecognizable, cracked by emotion. Belle couldn't do anything but stare at him, tears running down his cheek.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Belle– For everything. So sorry, so terribly sorry."

He raised his hand for the second time and hesitantly touched her cheek. "You were right, you know... about letting you go. I have been alone – ever since."

Belle's eyes were still wide and absent. "I know." She said, in a strange, vague voice.

"Do you?" Gold stared at her with a heart-breaking expression of hope in his eyes. And he realized something wasn't going as expected. He drew back.

"Belle? Are you okay?– are you ok? Are – are you mad with me, or..."

"No... No, I'm not… I think." She frowned. She looked strange, as if she was drunk, or drugged, or in shock. "But I... I think I'd better go, now. I don't... It's not... I can't stay. I'm sorry," she added rapidly, in the same absent-minded tone, and then she turned around and started walking towards the door. The cup was still in her hands.

Gold's heart sank. "Belle?" he called, his voice unsteady. "Belle, oh, no, no no no, don't go, please... I'm sorry, I'm..."

She opened the door and left the shop.

"... Belle?" He was nearly sick. He stared disbelievingly at the door closing behind her. "No," he whispered. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no..."

I've lost her, he thought. Again.

How did it happen? How could it happen?

Regina was right: she hated him. She didn't forgive him.

She would never forgive him.

Gold tilted his head back and cried out in pain a low, wild, inhuman cry. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt such an utter, terrible desperation.

No, he was lying to himself - he remembered that. It was the time Baelfire disappeared in the magic portal and it closed above him, separating his son from him forever.

But that time, everything happened so fast that he hadn't known what to do... But this time, with Belle, he had twenty-eight years – twenty-eight years!- at his disposal. He had all the time he needed, he had forever, forever to get her to know him, to get her to love him...

For all the good it would do, he could have been given a hundred years, a million years: it wouldn't have been enough. That was the final proof - he just couldn't do it, make someone love him. Not with all the time in the world.

So much time, and he had wasted it all.

Fool. I'm just a poor, pathetic, foolish man.

Kingdoms could rise and fall, worlds could follow their paths around their suns, stars could turn cold and die. Universes could fade and disappear, he would still find no one willing to love him. In three hundred years, he had loved two people, and he let both of them slip through his fingers. In three hundred years, he had learn nothing.

Because – simple as that, just like he told Belle - no one could ever love him.

"You were right, Regina, you witch. I'm no better than you in any way. I'm a monster. Always had been, always will be."

Gold cried again, in anger this time, then he raised his cane and hit the glass cabinet with the Fabergé egg, throwing it on the floor with a terrible clash; then he smashed another display case, and then another, and another, throwing around glass slivers and china splinters, reducing the shop to a chaotic mess of broken knick-knacks and bottles and lamps and dishes.

In his rage, he recklessly put a hand on the frame of a destroyed display cabinet, and a piece of broken glass cut a deep, jagged slash on its palm. He cried in pain and anger and he stared at the blood straining from the wound, then he carelessly brushed his hand against his chest, leaving a long, dark red mark on his jumper. His cane fell from his hand and his hard breathing turned into sobbing.

Everything I loved, I lost it.

He let himself slide to the floor, between the broken glass chips; his shoulders shaking, crying restraintlessly.

He had nothing left.

He was, indeed, a monster.

And he was alone. Alone, again, forever.

...

Belle left the shop in a confused, shattered, mixed-up state of mind. She didn't know what to do. Everything had happened so fast. It was so strange, so frightening. She didn't know who she was anymore, she didn't know who anyone was anymore.

For a moment, in the shop, with the cup in her hands, she felt the desperate, aching desire to throw her arms around Gold's neck and to kiss him, to kiss his desperate mouth and ease his terrible pain, saying that she loved him, that everything was forgiven – but he wasn't really Gold, was he? He wasn't the man she knew, or at least she thought she knew. He was Rumpelstiltskin: a man she had once loved, too, a very long time ago. Or, at least, part of him was.

He was both of them, and it was all so strange, so crazy, so unbelievable...

He was Mr. Gold: the man who had been a constant in her life; the man who had always been so kind to her; the elegant, well-mannered man she had a terrible crush on.

The man she had grown to know and love.

And he was Rumpelstiltskin, the Dark One: the manic, sad imp with the scaly skin and wide eyes who took her away from her family and her friends and kept her locked in a dungeon. The strange, lonely creature with the odd laughter and hidden melancholy. Another man that she had come to love, in a different way, in a different world.

Yes, she loved them both – with the same intensity – but they were not the same person. She needed to understand who he was, what he was.

Just like her.

Because - who was she, really? The naive teenage girl who was supposed to attend high school – or the blue blood, fearless princess who was ready both to marry a man she did not love and to sacrifice her own freedom for the sake of her country?

And who was her father? A king? Or the near-bankrupt florist?

Who was she, if all her memories were a fraud, if her childhood, her whole life had been nothing but an illusion? Because, in this world, she had never been a child, she never sat on Gold's lap as everyone had been telling her; she never really went to school - she only attended the same high school class year after year after year: the only thing she had been doing was repeating the same actions again and again and again, for twenty-eight years.

When the curse hit them, everybody had been transported from their world to this one, and for twenty-eight years - twenty-eight years – they had remained unchanged, always the same, forgetting it one day after another, remembering nothing but what the Queen allowed them to remember. All their memories were a hoax, their lives a play in which everyone was both actor and spectator, a reverse charade designed was to never offer a resolution.

Twenty-eight years.

Twenty-eight years, and everything she knew, everything she loved - was a lie.

Her father, Leroy, Gold, everybody...

But oh, it was all so confusing, her head hurt so badly... How could she stay in the shop, how could she answer his questions, how could she take the right decisions - when she didn't even know who she was? When her head was spinning like crazy and she felt dizzy and unsteady and her heart ached for two different men, or maybe just one who was the sum of the two? How could she?

She had to get out of this place, she had to get away from him.

Not forever, oh, no. She was going to go back to him, that was sure, because no matter who he was – the imp or the shop owner, the Dark One or the coward, the sorcerer, the murderer, the saviour, the loner, the father, the good, the evil, the man – she loved him.

She just had to make up her mind.

She wandered around the town for a while, then entered the diner.

Ruby was leaning over the bar, telling some funny story to a couple of young guys, her eyes gleaming with amusement. "... so I told Granny 'Oh, you really think I can't do something for you just out of kindness, for once?', and her face was like 'no, I don't' – you guys know what kind of face I'm talking about. And then I acted, like, really offended and hurt and everything for, like, half an hour, and she was still suspicious, but I must have been more persuasive than I thought, because at some point she got really ashamed of herself, you see. And in the end she even apologized to me."

She paused, smiled maliciously and leaned even more. "And then I told her about what I'd done with the car." Everyone burst into laughter, and Ruby suddenly noticed Belle standing by the door. She gave her one of her wide red smiles. "Oh, hi sugar. How are you doing? Come and drink something with me and the boys."

But Belle was already out of the door. She thought being in a crowded place would have made her feel better, or at least less alienated, but it had been a mistake: she couldn't stay there.

All those people: she couldn't even look at them without feeling somehow guilty, somehow ashamed for what she knew . She felt like she was lying to them, pretending to be someone she was not.

Because she wasn't a schoolgirl anymore – she was a grown-up woman, an aristocrat, who had been through many adventures - through love, and pain, through war and confinement and loss.

No, she just could not bring herself to talk to them, to any of those people - still mercifully unaware of their past, their fate, their imprisonment in a world they didn't belong to.

Even though it was the last thing she wanted to do, she went home.

The sky was getting dark when she opened the front door.

"Hello?" she called.

She heard a clatter of pots and her father's voice. "In the kitchen, honey."

Moe leaned over and saw her. "Hey, sweetheart. Are you okay?"

Belle took a deep breath and looked at him. "Father, I have to tell you something. And - if you believe me - I think that you're not going to like what I'll say."