cynicsquest on prompted:

Prompt: Belle impresses Arthur further by proving how good a fisherwoman she is. Would love it if they both fell in the pond and it lead to a kiss (or, a kiss lead to falling in the pond).

A/N: Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of kissing coming up any time soon. It's coming eventually, but you guys are gonna have to be patient. This is the slow burn story to end all slow burn stories.

"This isn't what we were counting on for dinner, was it?" Belle whispered to Arthur.

He gave her a smile and glanced over to where Bae sat, maintaining a constant stream of chatter as he reeled his line in again to reveal nothing on it...again.

"I thought we might order a pizza, actually," he said with a soft chuckle.

"My hero," she teased, turning her attention back to the water before another thought occurred to her. "Do they deliver out here?"

"They do if you pay them enough," he said with a shrug and a smile.

They had decided to spend a day fishing, because that's what you do at cabins in the woods. Belle hadn't been fishing since she was a little girl, and Bae had never been. Bae was also physically incapable of not talking for more than sixty-seconds at a stretch, and had no real interest in actually catching anything. It was more for an excuse for father and son to spend time together than anything. Belle couldn't begrudge either of them that. And there was a rowboat! How many chances does a modern woman really have to go out in a rowboat, anyway?

"So Dad?" Bae said, looking up at Arthur as he spoke.

"Hm?"

"What's black and white and makes a lot of noise?"

Arthur looked a little stunned at Bae's odd question, but played along.

"I don't know, Bae," he finally said. "What?"

"A zebra with a drum kit!"

Belle couldn't help smiling in amusement at how stupid the joke was, and Arthur gave Bae a chuckle and a pat on the head. Bae, of course, took this as encouragement.

"What's a witch's favorite subject in school?"

"What?"

"Spelling."

"You're very clever, son," Arthur said affectionately.

Bae smiled shyly at the praise, going back to recasting his line. He seemed more interested in casting his line than in actually waiting for things to bite but that probably had something to do with his known aversion to eating fish than anything else. Plus she had to admit it was pretty fun to swing the rod around.

She cast her line out a bit further, letting the sound of Bae's jokes and Arthur's confused sounding replies fade into the background. This was nice. She could see why her dad had always liked fishing. Thoughts of her dad always left Belle a little melancholy. He'd died around the same time Bae was born, and now that she thought back on it she didn't think she'd really given herself enough time to grieve before taking on parenting. Not that she regretted her son – quite the opposite, she was thankful every day that she had him – but she wasn't really sure she'd finished mourning her father before she jumped into motherhood.

Belle sometimes wondered what her father would think about her current situation. On the one hand, anything that would have gotten his little girl out on a boat with a fishing rod in her hand would probably have been alright by him, but in a grander sense she wasn't sure.

She thought he might have disapproved of her decision to become a parent all of a sudden, but of course Bae would have won him over nearly immediately. Her papa had loved everything she ever loved, simply because it made her happy. She'd been the only child of a doting father and she had no trouble at all imagining him transferring that affection to her son as well. Bae, too, would have benefited from having a stable male influence in his life from infancy.

Oh sure, he'd done alright with coaches and such, and he had a pretty good bond with Dr. Hopper even though his visits were now sporadic at best, but it was different when it was a man who was with you because he wanted to be and not because he was paid to be. That, she decided, was the best thing about having Arthur around. He was here because he wanted to be, because he'd spent time and money to find them, because he wanted to know her son for no other reason than because Bae existed. Whether Bae really understood that or not yet, she knew that was the single best gift her child could have gotten – the knowledge that he had two parents who wanted him so much that they both went out of their way to be with him.

She was less sure of how her father would feel about Arthur, honestly. She thought he might disapprove of her having a man so much older than her hanging about, but then he'd always been a little overprotective. She hoped that (in this fantasy world in which her father was still alive) the two men might have come to terms with each other for the benefit of her son. Her papa would have wanted his grandchild to be happy and as loved as possible, and that Arthur loved Bae was as self-evident as the sun rising in the east.

The warmth of the sun and the quiet comfort of the situation had Belle drifting off a little, only to be startled awake when the rod jerked in her hands.

"Oh my gosh," she yelped as it tugged, drawing the attention of her son and his father. "I caught something!"

"Really?" Arthur seemed surprised, though that might have had more to do with Bae's constant noise than her own skill as a fisherwoman.

"Way to go, Mom!" Bae exclaimed, moving over to her and rocking the boat a little. "Reel it in! I wanna see!"

"Give her a minute, Bae," Arthur chided, wrapping his arms around the boy and holding him away from her a little so she could pull the line, but also keeping him still so he wouldn't rock the boat again.

"I've never caught anything before," Belle said breathlessly, continuing a steady pull-then-wind movement so as not to break her line. She'd really only been out fishing a handful of times before, and both of those were before she was a teenager, but she still remembered bits and pieces from her father's occasional attempts to bring her into his interests and hobbies.

"You're doing great," Arthur encouraged her. "Just keep going."

"It feels like it's probably a big one," she replied excitedly.

Bae was squirming in his father's grasp, trying to come to stand over his mother's shoulder, but she was grateful that the boy was restrained. After the fish got pulled in, they all needed to have a long talk about boat safety.

"This is so cool!" Bae chirped as Belle finally got the – disappointingly small – fish out of the water and into the boat.

"Somehow I thought it would be bigger," she said as Bae picked up the end of her line and held the fish up in front of him.

"I've never touched a live fish before," he said. "It's kind of slimy."

"That keeps them from getting parasites," Arthur explained as he took the fish and grabbed a little tool to cut the hook, freeing the fish. "Here, Bae, why don't you toss him back for your mom?"

Belle knew it was going to happen before it did. Call it mother's intuition, call it a premonition, call it a lifetime of experience leading up to the moment that Bae stood up, leaned over the edge of the boat, and the fish wriggled – startling Bae and causing him to drop the fish and recoil, which set the boat rocking too hard to be stopped before it capsized, sending all three of them into the lake.

They all came up about the same time, Belle clinging to the edge of the boat and Bae clinging to his mother while Arthur tread water nearby.

"Well," she said to Arthur as she brushed her hair back from her face. "I realize now we may have forgotten to give Bae a proper lecture about why one should be careful about standing in a boat."

"You could be right," he replied. "My mistake."

"Both of us," she said simply, giving Bae a little squeeze before guiding him to the side of the boat. "But I don't think he's going to do that again in any case, are you?"

Bae shook his head, looking a little shellshocked at his new situation.

"So that's settled, then," she winked at Arthur. "I believe someone promised me pizza?"

After his little temper tantrum of the night before, Arthur actually found that accepting he was in love with Belle made socializing with her easier. He wasn't going to expect anything from her – in fact, he had no intention of ever revealing to her that his feelings were anything besides platonic – but sitting in the living room with her and Bae and telling childhood stories while all three were still damp from showering and eating pizza in sweatpants and pajamas suddenly didn't feel like an impossible task. He loved her. She could eat a surprising amount of pizza, and he now knew that she put her hair up in a bun when it was damp so that it would be wavy when it dried, but he loved her. He'd been in love before, and it had ended disastrously each time. But he could love her from afar, and as long as she didn't know his heart might just be safe.

Belle really was beautiful, too, even with the slight sunburn she'd developed over the course of the trip. Her eyes would light up as she spoke, and she'd smile this odd little smile as she relayed stories of Bae's early life (which he always pretended to be embarrassed by, but the way he smiled when their attention was on him belied his desperate need to be the focus of their relationship). It made him feel whole again to be with them, and now he knew why Belle was such an integral part of his happiness. It all made sense, and now that the mystery of why he needed her was gone it was like this stress he'd been under had finally been relieved and he could focus entirely on his family.

He was so caught up in being in love with her that he didn't notice she'd stopped talking right away, until he realized she was staring very intently at the floor about six inches away from his foot. Glancing down, he saw there was a spider skittering across the floor. It suddenly paused, before turning and moving about a foot towards Belle before she yelped and jumped onto the back of the sofa.

"Bae, get your feet off the floor," she said, alarm rising in her voice as Bae tucked his feet up onto his chair.

"It's just a little spider," Gold looked over at Belle. Somehow it had never occurred to her she would have more than one phobia – or that spiders would be the thing that got her climbing up a chair.

Whatever her retort would have been was lost as the spider made another run towards her, causing her to shriek and fall off her perch onto the floor behind the couch.

Bae failed to stifle a giggle in his hands, and it was all Gold could do not to burst into laughter as she stood up and shot her son a death glare.

"For God's sake Belle, you're Australian," he chuckled as he went to find a cup and a piece of paper.

"And I moved to New England," she spat at him. "We have been over this!"

He wasn't sure she'd ever stop surprising him. She could face near drowning with aplomb, but an arachnid (which, he desperately wanted to point out, wasn't even of the venomous variety) had her practically climbing the walls in desperation to get away from it. She watched him intently as he flipped an empty glass down over top of the spider and slipped a paper plate underneath it.

"Bae, can you get the door?"

Bae hopped up, running to open the front door for his father and watching as he unceremoniously deposited the bug into the bushes next to the porch.

"Alright," he called back as he walked back into the house with the cup and plate still in his hand. "You're safe, he's outside where he can't hurt anybody..."

He'd been about to continue, but Belle nearly knocked him over as she ran over and wrapped her arms around him tight. He looked around in confusion, but Bae just gave him a sympathetic smirk and grabbed another piece of pizza out of the box.

"Thank you so much," she gushed. "I hate – hate – spiders!"

"Belle, it's fine," he wanted to hug her tight and smell her hair but his hands were full and that would be creepy anyway, so instead he sort of placed his arms around her back and let her continue her hugging. "It wasn't even a dangerous spider. It was just a regular little house spider."

"I still hate them," her voice was mumbled some by his shirt. He was trying valiantly not to feel some masculine pride at having vanquished the threat to the princess, but was failing miserably.

"Regardless," he finally said, stepping back a little bit to give his ego room to settle. "It's fine. If you really want to thank me..." his mind went strange places and he quickly changed statements. "You don't have to thank me."

She seemed to consider for a moment, before popping up on tiptoes and kissing him on the cheek again like she had at the sink when he realized he loved her. He wasn't sure what she meant by that, but she smiled at him like he'd saved her from a dragon and took the cup and plate from him to return to the kitchen.

"She always gets like that around spiders," Bae explained once she was out of the room. "I just ignore her now, unless she pays me to kill them for her. It's safer that way."

"How in the world did she survive before you were old enough to kill them?"

He shrugged.

"One time when I was kind of little she gave me a hand vacuum and told me she'd buy me any toy I wanted if I got a spider out of the sink. I got a pretty cool LEGO kit."

By now, Belle had returned from the kitchen and put on a mock-offended face.

"Bailey Neal French, are you telling stories about me?"

"Are you saying he's a liar?" Gold teased, taking a sip of his drink.

"I would never bribe a child!" Belle said in a huff. "It was an incentive, that's different."

"Clearly."

Bae scowled at his mom, but she didn't seem to mind. She was looking at Gold still. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about being cast as the hero in this, but he didn't think he'd ever get sick of her looking at him that way. He could be content like this, he decided. Just the three of them. Nothing inappropriate, very little touching, but so much love it was palpable. It was all he ever wanted again.