Chapter Eleven: Rainbows
In the midst of the war that raged around them the one thing that Belle had been determined to do was get an education. She wanted this even though time had ceased almost immediately after magic was restored to Storybrooke four decades ago and blood and death surrounds them.
Belle needed this even though their troops took heavy losses and never seemed to fall enough of The Queen's army, even though each night she woke to screams echoing in the dark and the broken corpses of the Blue Fairy, Grumpy, and Nova had been dumped just outside their boarders three days previously.
She craves one although she's exhausted from studying the battle plans and treating wounds that magic can't heal, from burying their dead and helping to maintain their weapons, and from practicing her own fencing and archery until her muscles shake and her vision begins to blur.
So Belle studies throughout all that.
Rumplestiltskin brings her tea in her library where she reads her texts after being relived at the infirmary, blood still staining her clothes and the smell of burnt skin and badly used magic clinging to her hair.
She takes notes and highlights passages and writes useless papers until her fingers can't move before crawling into bed beside her love, falling asleep almost before his arms tighten about her and only after the image of Red's bloodstained and arrow impaled wolf form has faded from her mind.
Tests are taken, lab hours are met, and practical knowdegle is put to use in between the True Love marriages of Pinocchio to Emma and Red to Jiminy, her lover prying the book from her hands and making her take a few hours off or carrying her to bed and pressing a kiss to her forehead after she's fallen asleep over her studies once again, the battle from which six of her friends do not return, and a magical attack that leaves the recently orphaned Hansel and Gretel dead and Belle sick with worry as Rumplestiltskin is wracked with pain as his magic goes haywire.
The day that she earns her degree as an marine biologist eight years and countless more bodies latter Rumplestiltskin gives her a paperweight, a heavy crystal rose the size of her palm.
Belle gasped in delight as the millions of small facets on the wide and obviously carefully handcrafted petals catch the rays from the sun, causing hundreds of minuscule rainbows to dance around the kitchen.
Belle smiles in childlike glee and rotates her gift, allowing the pattern of the colorful light to shift direction, the colors now spilling onto the most feared man in Storybrooke. The man who once made deals for children, owns a semi magical Pawn Shop, whom is an enemy of The Queens' and is vital to winning this war, is the creator of the darkest curse to ever exist (supposedly), and whom has no qualms about beating someone almost to death because he'd thought she had suffered harm from their hands.
The man whom now has rainbows flickering on the deep green silk of his tie and reflecting off the golden handle of his cane laying in the corner and is gazing at her with pride, delight, respect, and a hundred more emotions that Belle doesn't even try to categorize.
Belle smiles at him, knowing that her azure eyes are mirroring what are present within his own darker orbs before dropping her gaze to her rainbow rose once more.