Granny's was normally the most talkative place in town and the number one spot if you wanted to catch up on local news, tons better than The Mirror or Good Morning Storybrooke. But, in the wake of what just happened to Belle, it was deathly quiet.

Grumpy cleared his throat, looking at the place on the floor where Belle's water had broken. "Somebody better clear that up," he said. "Must be a health code violation or something. You got a mop?"

Ashley, pale faced and staring at the mess on the floor as if she were reliving a lot of bad memories (to be fair, she probably was), gave a quick nod. "I'll get it for you."

That wasn't what Grumpy meant. But, yeah, let the professional janitor and handyman do it, even if he didn't work here. Not that Grumpy really blamed Ashley. He'd cleaned up enough bathroom accidents to know how fast people vanished when those needed to be taken care of. This might not be as smelly or messy as that, but it was about ten times worse on the gross-don't-get-near-it scale when you'd seen where it came from. Nobody wanted to get near it.

Anyhow, somebody needed to deal with it, and everyone who wasn't looking kind of green looked too stunned to move.

Ashley brought out the mop. She also remembered to bring out the bucket—it was a real janitor's bucket, the kind on wheels with a built in squeezer and a bunch of cleaning supplies strapped to the side. Grumpy put on the rubber gloves (rule number one when cleaning up bodily fluids, even if they might not have magic potions still floating around in them: Always wear gloves) and checked over the cleaning supplies for something to kill germs before he got them all over the mop (the same mop they'd be using all over the floor all over the diner tonight—including in the kitchen.

You could trust Granny to deal with that, but she'd been right behind Belle when Emma and Hook hustled her out of here. Grumpy wasn't sure about the jokers left behind. Did Ashley even understand that mops sometimes needed to be cleaned, even when magic wasn't involved? Maybe he should just burn it when he was done. Better than having a biohazard all over the most popular food spot in town—a magical biohazard.

Amniotic fluid from the mother of the Dark One's baby. Who knew what that could do? Well, the Blue Fairy might (yeah, Grumpy really had to burn this mop before anyone who didn't like the parents got ahold of it). And Gold would have a good idea. . . .

Except, Gold wasn't here.

Grumpy frowned, thinking it over.

Emma and the pirate had just whizzed Belle off to have her baby because they wanted to get her somewhere safe before Gold, who they figured had sped the pregnancy up, got here (or Emma wanted to. Knowing Hook, he was just going along for the ride). Gold hadn't shown up to stop them.

In fact, Gold hadn't done things the easy way: Grab Belle and vanish in a little puff of smoke before she even went into labor.

And here was stuff from inside his wife's body lying all over the floor in the most public place in town. Grumpy might not be a wizard but he'd spent a good share of his life working in mines digging up fairy dust. He knew enough about magic to know how anyone magical felt about leaving that sort of thing lying around—and this was something that was tied to Gold's kid.

And Gold was supposed to know all about it. But, he wasn't here.

None of it added up.

Then, the fluid on the floor began to shift and glitter.

X

Too late. The Shadow arrived too late. Belle was gone.

The child was coming. Too soon, she thought, panicked, terrified. She thought of her mother and the difficult labors and miscarriages that had followed Belle's birth. She remembered the blue, mottled face of the baby brother she was not supposed to have seen before they closed him in his small, doll-sized coffin, born too soon to live.

There, on the diner floor, were the waters that had carried her child in her other self's womb. She knelt down beside it, knowing what it meant. An irony, that her world called magic and this one called science, that the unborn drowned and died in air.

Invisible tears ran down her face, falling into the water beside her without a sign or ripple. Her child would die, and she could not even give it a mother's tears.

Too soon, she thought again. Too soon.

She saw Grumpy, practical as always in the face of terrors and disasters, fetching a bucket and mop. Soon, even this sign of her child's loss would be swept away. She had never held him, never touched him, never felt his small life stirring within her before it was snuffed out.

Days ago, she could still move through glass and water. She could have entered this small pool and . . . what? Reached her son? Helped him? Saved him?

She reached out with insubstantial hands against the stillborn water of life, desperately trying to reach this piece of her curse that she had left behind.

The touch it jolted through, an electrical current, painful, deadly. She opened her mouth, wanting to scream, but no words came out. She could only speak with stolen phrases, and there are none for this moment.

The water reached out for her, grabbed her—

Devoured her.

X

Grumpy jumped back, holding the mop like a quarterstaff (it was a light wood, probably pine, that would snap at the first blow. Seriously, why couldn't they make these out of something solid, like oak?) as the stuff on the floor began to move.

OK, that was bad.

It rose up—or something rose out of it. It was like a fountain but, watching it bubble up off the tiled floor, Grumpy thought of whales he'd seen off the coast, spouting out the old air as they drew in the fresh and new.

And, then, there was a woman, soaked through and shivering in the center of Granny's. Not just any woman, either. It was Belle. And it wasn't just water covering her. Blood, sticky and half-dried and was mixed in with it.

"Belle? What are you doing here?"

She looked up at him, practically choking on the things she wanted to say—he could see the words bubbling up in her eyes the way water had bubbled up on the floor. She looked at him, struggling to speak, gagging on her own silence.

"Where—" she gasped, "Where are you going, where have you been?"

"Uh . . . what?"

She shook her head frustrated. Something had happened to her hair. Beneath the streaks of blood, it had turned white. That can't be good.

"I—I—I'm not lost." Her eyes bored through him, begging him to understand. "To be lost, you have to know where you're supposed to be. And I don't even know that."

Belle's gone mental. "OK, sure, Not lost. I get it. Not lost is good."

Frustrated, she grabbed his arm. "How know you that I cannot speak? . . . . I am wearied of these borrowed letters."

"Belle—"

"Listen!" she said. "Don't listen to me. Listen!" Again, she seemed to desperately search for what to say—for anything to say. "What she threatened she did. Echo only repeats the last of what is spoken and returns the words she hears."

Belle's lost it.

Grumpy could have broken free from her easily enough—he spent hours a day putting his pickax through diamond and stone. But, the desperation in Belle's eyes held him. Those weren't crazy-woman eyes. He thought of Henry, back in the day, desperately trying to get someone—anyone—to understand what was wrong with the town.

O this is the creature that has never been.

The weird quote, the weird way it was given to him—the weird way they'd been told how to free his brother—it all clicked.

"You can't talk, can you?" he asked. "Just with quotes and stuff."

Belle nodded. "Echo," she said. "It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own." Her grip tightened on his arm. "This exposed child, where is he? Doth he live?"

"Huh? Oh, you mean your baby? He's all right. I mean, somebody magicked you, made time go fast, and all that, but it'll be OK. And you're in labor . . . Uh, except you're not. What are you doing here?"

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . . . The hero with a thousand faces. . . . How can we stand face to face till we have faces?"

"I didn't get any of that. But . . . Oh. There are two of you? Like Regina and the other Regina? Like Jekyll and Hyde?"

She looked at him like she was drowning and Grumpy had thrown her a lifeline. She nodded eagerly.

The only question was, was she Good Belle or Bad Belle?

She'd given him the same line the invisible, phone-calls-only Belle had given him about the creature that wasn't. And that Belle was the reason his bother wasn't a tree anymore.

"OK," Grumpy said. "Get in my truck. We're getting out of here."

Ashley stepped forward uncertainly. "Grumpy, who is she? What are you doing?"

"She's Belle," Grumpy said. He tossed Ashley the mop. "Sorry, you better clean up the mess yourself. We've got to get out of here."

X

Note on Quotes:

Belle went a little quote happy in this one.

Once again, we have Rilke's "This Is the Creature."

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Oates.

I cheated on the "I'm not lost" quote. I found it but I couldn't find where it's supposed to have come from.

"How know you that I cannot speak? I am wearied of these borrowed letters" from Cyrano de Bergerac.

"Listen. Don't listen to ME, listen," from The Last Unicorn again.

The line about Echo is from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The line about the exposed child is from Ion by Euripides.

"Two Roads Diverged in Yellow Wood" by Frost.

"Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Campbell.

"How can we stand face to face till we have faces?" from Till We Have Faces by Lewis.

If I missed any, let me know.