7…8 Months, 1 Week, 3 Days
She liked sewing, truly she did, sitting at her sewing machine sketching out dresses and making something grand out of a simple piece of fabric…it was fun. It gave Lacey a thrill that made her feel important but they didn't need Lacey, not now. Now they needed her. And if she wanted that thrill, the same one Lacey felt sitting in front of her machine, there was only one place she could truly call her domain. She hadn't been to the library in this castle, not once. In the beginning she hadn't had the strength to even pretend to want to read a book, once he'd been gone it was just too painful, then when she'd moved in with Neal the opportunities to visit had vanish and since she'd been back in the castle she'd simply been too busy sewing to grace the fine room with her presence. But now…
After Regina had left the room, the day she'd decided to stay, the royals had asked her what she needed this time around and the answer had been simple enough.
"Books. Send the word out to everyone in the Kingdom, even the Kingdoms beyond, I want a copy of everything written about Oz from any realm and that includes the Land Without Magic."
"I don't think it works that way," Snow had muttered.
"It does," she assured them. "I've seen it done before, in Rumple's castle, items from that world are rare here but they can be found. Start with those that own book stores and ask anyone who collects rare items, I promise I'll return what they give but I need to see those books! I have to read them again, I doubt they're accurate, but they might have some small grain of truth to them that will help me put together what Zelena is doing."
"Anything else?" David asked.
She nodded. "A place to work," she smiled, knowing what she had in mind. "Show me your library." And for the first time since she arrived, her wish was fulfilled. David had taken her straight to the old library. It obviously wasn't being cleaned as regularly as the rest of the castle, secretly she didn't think anyone had used it since that first month when families had been camped out in the palace, or since the night Neal had snuck in to retrieve the map, but it was like heaven to her.
A room full of books, ladders, desks, and cozy chairs! This was what she knew! This was all she needed to know. Whether Regina liked it or not, this was where she needed to be! She was back. She was home. A librarian in her library. The smell of dust and old paper filled her nostrils and pulled a smile from her mouth each time she looked around the towering shelves. Was there anything that could possibly be better?
Yes. But given the circumstances, when she stopped to consider what was happening in her life and the options she had available to her...this was the best place she could be.
So it became her room. It became the place that she did everything, with the possible exception of dressing and sleeping, though if she was honest most nights she fell asleep in one of the chairs reading. While David and Snow worked to get the messages out to the Kingdoms that she needed books from the Land Without Magic, she worked in the library. She went down row after row of books, learning the shelving system just as well as she knew the one she'd had in Storybrooke. She knew what she was looking for but at the same time she didn't. No, she knew that she wasn't going to find a book called "The Wizard of Oz" sitting here on the shelves as she had in Storybrooke, but if their stories had existed in other realms, then why couldn't those stories exist here under different names. And, for that matter, why was it impossible to think there wouldn't be books on Oz here! This realm knew about magic! It knew about different worlds, with and without magic, that their world wasn't the only world! There was a time that travel between two different realms was possible, she was hoping someone had written about it!
She wasn't wrong. There were books. Helpful ones of every variety: Magical Realms and How to Find them, A Guide to Worlds Beyond Our Own, Fact and Myth of Unmappable Lands, Spells Curses and Portals to Magical Lands, A Collective History of Foreign Worlds, What I Learned in Oz, Leadership and People of Great Importance in Other Realms, and, the most impressive of all, The Legend of the Five Witches of Oz: The Prophecy, Their Rise, and How One Witch Destroyed it all! Yes, that was one she knew that she needed to go through!
The process of locating, reading, and researching was slow at first, it took a week before anything really happened, and even then it was more disappointment than anything. She was right, books from the Land Without Magic were rare, but they were out there, and as it turned out the people in this land that had them were more than willing to turn over anything that would help them defeat the witch…but the problem was they were willing to turn over anything that would help them defeat the witch.
"I need books about Oz, not Australia," she muttered when the third one was delivered to her by Robin.
"They're not the same place?" he questioned.
She sighed and set the travel book aside. "Not in this realm."
"Certainly seems like a magical place to me, have you looked at the pictures of some of the creatures that dwell there?" The books on Australia were only the beginning of a long line of items that made her way to her. She received books from various authors on everything from myths and wicca to vampires and movies!
"Remarkable," Robin said once looking over her shoulders. "We really are the stuff of legend in this other realm. Books are written about us."
"Yes and no," she muttered looking through them, wondering if any were going to be of help…wondering if what she really needed was in this world. "We're in the tales, the characters have our names and sometimes wisps of the lives that we lead but they're not always accurate. The villains die, the heroes are always victorious…the beauty and the beast get their happily ever after."
"So…how will reading a book from that world help you if it's untrue?" he asked. She wished she knew. She wished there was an easy answer to explain how authors in the World Without Magic knew about these other worlds how they managed to put together their stories accurately and inaccurately was a mystery to her. Baum might have been taken to Oz himself one night, or had a niece named Dorothy and wrote her stories down…it didn't matter. How he understood it all didn't matter. It just mattered that she could get something out of it.
"Because of those wisps," she insisted. "There is always a something right in each story: names, places, lovers, friends, weaknesses…anything might be the detail that helps us destroy her!"
And yet the stories never came. A couple of people sent in broomsticks and pails, they assumed to put water in, one person even sent them a small statue of a green skinned witch that Lacey recalled from an early movie. She could only shake her head and roll her eyes at each new delivery. "I ask for books about Oz and I get novelty figurines," she muttered to Ruby one evening.
"Kind of makes the books about Australia look good, right?" Ruby joked as they went through books.
She didn't have a response. The items were certainly from the Land Without Magic, rare in this land, and she was honored everyone had sent them at her request, but they simply weren't helpful! She'd nearly given up, was ready to tell them to call off the search when nearly two weeks later Grumpy came running into her room screaming. "It's here! It's here, we got it!" he stopped in front of her and with an uncharacteristic beaming smile set a tattered hardcover book in her hands. Green cover. Silly cartoonish lion on the front. Large blocked printing. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
Her jaw dropped. It had worked! "An owl brought it in. That's the one you need right?!" Grumpy pressed. She was too excited to speak! Of all the books in the Oz series this was the one she needed above all the others! Yes! This was it, this was exactly what she needed! And all she could really think to do was reach out and throw her arms around Grumpy and hug him!
This was what she needed! What she needed to read more than anything. It just mattered that she had it! This she could do. This was what she was good at.
So without further hesitation, she began her real work. She carried the book over to the desk that she'd claimed for herself, finally settled into the chair and began to read.
So, Research!Belle is here and she is one of, in my opinion, the best things that came out of the season 3B separation. Look at the difference, in 3A she doesn't know how to pour a potion over some rocks but somehow by the end of 3B she is well versed in magic, so much so that by season 4 she is making potions and the go to person for magical information. The sad truth is that she never had to really know much about magic because Rumple was always around and he was the one they went to, in his absence Belle gets to take on his role. She learns about magic, becomes well versed in it even if she can't do it on her own and what we'll see in the next few chapters is a lot of growth for her in that direction. I call this new persona Research!Belle, and she's my favorite part of writing Moments Series.
Thank you to Meredith Pechta, Agent66, Raizen Yusuke, Rumbellefan, Kathryn Claire O'Connor, Deweymay, and Skitzoeinhoven for your comments on the last chapter. I'm happy you were happy with it! I live to serve! Peace and Happy Reading!
