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It's possible, Belle thinks, that she is not as patient as she assumed she was. It's only a few days since he entrusted Baelfire (Bae) to her that she finds herself asking about the boy on which the fate of worlds hang.
She wanted to let Rumplestiltskin decide to tell her on his own, but her eagerness gets the better of her. All she can see, as she sorts books and learns the database Rumplestiltskin set up for her, is a little boy with amber eyes and a sharp chin. All she can think of, alone in her tiny apartment, trying not to miss Rumplestiltskin too badly, is a young man with Rumplestiltskin's habit of tilting his head when he has the upper hand.
Bae. The name runs through her mind, through her heart, like a piece of straw transformed into sinuous gold.
(Belle's never loved someone even before she met them, but just the sound of Rumplestiltskin saying his boy's name caused her heart to expand to make room for this new inhabitant.)
And when she asks, Rumplestiltskin answers her. No more evasions. No more half-truths and skilled changes of subject. Just a smile (so painfully mixed of love and hope and terror and guilt and pride, all swirled there to make a potion as strong as True Love). A smile and more trust wrapped up in a few stories of the boy he's spent twelve or more of her lifetimes searching for.
"I will see him again," he confides in her, a whisper as they enter her library after a walk through the dusk-shadowed town. "A seer promised me. The Blue Fairy unwittingly confirmed it. And I've Seen it."
"I know you will," Belle says as she clasps her hands over his on his cane. "You'll see him again and you'll make everything right, and even if it's hard, even if it takes time, he'll forgive you."
Rumplestiltskin hangs on her words. She can hear the catch at the back of his throat as he steps closer to her, a small, instinctive move (as if he can't help but be drawn to the hope she offers him so freely). "You think so?" he asks.
In truth, Belle was just speaking aloud her own hopes. Her wishes. Her imaginings of what the future will look like. She was spinning a nice bedtime story for them both before they part ways to seek their lonely beds. She's not really sure that she meant Rumplestiltskin to take the words as a promise.
But why not?
He's searched for hundreds of years, and he's trying, and he loves (loves in a way Belle has never seen anyone else love, so unrestrainedly that all hints of self-preservation fall away, so unconditionally that even after lifetimes of hurt, he speaks of Baelfire in the same way someone else might speak of pure light, absolute goodness).
"Of course," she says confidently, and throws in an encouraging smile for good measure. "How could he not forgive you after everything you've done for him?"
A wince and the way his eyes fall away from hers remind her that Rumplestiltskin is not a man who imagines good things before bed (contingency plans, maybe, alternative routes and back-up deals and roundabout paths for when everything turns against him, worries and fears and resignation, but nothing at all to acknowledge his intentionally buried hope).
"I don't deserve his forgiveness," Rumplestiltskin admits. "I won't expect it of him."
"But—"
"No." Rumplestiltskin's hand twitches under hers. "I have to find him, Belle, and I will. But just so that I can tell him how sorry I am. Just so he knows that he's not unloved. Anything else…"
"Anything else is what I'll hope for," Belle says in a whisper, and she takes an extra step forward (the single step they've kept between them ever since she cut short a hug in an underground mine and asked for space).
(She doesn't want space anymore.)
Raising on her tiptoes, she tips her head up and kisses him. She does not care that they have been careful and cautious, that they have both become comfortable with slow and gradual, replaying their relationship on a more balanced dynamic. They have kissed only once since she left his house, a quiet kiss dropped from his lips to hers in between chapters read aloud in a quiet lilt, a whisper-soft promise that despite their tentativeness, they are moving back to a closeness she longs for.
He kissed her then. This time, she kisses him (and maybe this will be their life now, trading kisses back and forth, True Love parceled out between them, shared evenly, a gift that never stops being returned). He kisses her back, and Belle has never felt bolder or braver or more hopeful.
She thinks he feels the same—and he must, because a few days later, he tells her about his wife.
After all the secrets he's poured into her hands as carefully, as casually, as if they are the gold thread he magically spins and carelessly drops, Belle's learned to recognize the signs when he is imparting something that scares him to reveal. After all the moments when she's realized anew just how easy it would be to destroy this fragile thing they're building between them, she's learned how to temper her immediate reactions.
So she's not lying, after Rumplestiltskin tells her about his wife's abandonment, when she tells him that this Milah was wrong. And she's not lying, after he confesses to killing her in a moment of rage and heartbreak (after, Belle can read between the lines, years of stifled resentment), when she tells him that she cannot (will not) judge him for a crime committed long before her ancestors were little more than children. And she's telling the complete and absolute truth, after he so nervously, so earnestly promises that he would never harm her, when she replies that she knows she's safe with him.
The first time Belle met Rumplestiltskin, he promised safety to everyone she knew and loved. The first time she erred, he waved away her fear with a baffled expression (and then claimed the proof of their first shared smile as his constant table companion, chip and all). The first time she disobeyed him, he punished her by banishing a book from her hands, taking her out to see more of the world than she'd ever seen before, refusing to barter her for information he needed, and then showing mercy to the man she'd released from his castle (and giving her the first of their shared libraries, a grand gesture with excuses too paltry to hide his apology for the single book he'd taken). The first time she really opened up to him with her own secrets and dreams, he let her go of their deal so she could claim those dreams.
Even in this world, all he has done is offer her a home, a library, sanctuary and haven and protection.
Sitting next to Rumplestiltskin and hearing the tremble in his voice as he promises his protection, Belle has never believed in something more. Let the entire town warn her against him. Let her father try once more to turn her into an empty canvas free of Rumplestiltskin. None of it will make her doubt what she knows is in Rumplestiltskin's heart.
She wasn't lying. After asking for honesty from Rumplestiltskin, she can hardly give him less herself.
But.
But once he is gone. Once she is alone. Once the darkness closes around her and the loneliness presses in and the doors seem far too impenetrable…well, then, things are not nearly so clear.
Instead of imagining a dozen different variations of Baelfire, Belle can only see a woman's face. Beautiful and proud, tall and derisive. A woman in peasant's clothes (Rumplestiltskin keeps the secrets of his human self much more guarded than he does those of the Dark One, but Belle remembers the homespun, patched appearance of Baelfire's old clothes, the tattered state of the toys he still keeps in his shop) with dark hair and blue eyes.
She envisions a woman who looks a lot like herself, who dresses in blue and white, who longs to see the world and hates more than anything to be tied down. And even though she no longer trusts mirrors and keeps the one looking glass in her apartment covered, Belle can't help but squeeze her eyes shut against her reflection, so vivid in the dark and in her imagination.
Rumplestiltskin was married to Milah (and Belle knew he was married, guessed it even before he confirmed it back in the Dark Castle; it shouldn't strike any pangs through her heart; shouldn't, yet it does). He probably loved her. And he killed her. Reached out his hand and ripped out her heart and crushed it to dust.
"I love him," Belle says stubbornly. Her voice sounds tiny and childlike, a paltry defense against the night. "I knew he did terrible things. I've seen him do terrible things. But I love him."
(She wonders what that says about her.)
Belle gets up from the bed and pads over to the window, curls up against its chilly surface and looks out over the street below, down to the tiny corner visible of Rumplestiltskin's shop. Mr. Gold. She sees the name spelled out there, and it eases something inside her.
Straw isn't much on its own, flimsy and scratchy and of little value. But under Rumplestiltskin's touch, it becomes soft, tensile gold, all worth and beauty and glow. Their love (True Love, it's been proven beyond all doubt) can turn the past, too, to something so much better.
It's enough to lull her to sleep, curled up there on a chair beside the window, and the next day, when Rumplestiltskin drops by with a breakfast sandwich for them to share, Belle smiles at him.
He's chipped. Flawed and broken and haunted by a past of which she'll probably never know the whole. But for all that, he's hers.
So Belle doesn't hesitate to take his hand, and doesn't stop herself from kissing his cheek, and she is what she's always wanted to be.
She is brave.
Restoring the library is a full-time job and eats up most of Belle's time. She's vaguely aware that Storybrooke doesn't rest easy, that the people are nervous about some threat tied up with Regina. Honestly, she'd worry more if Rumplestiltskin cared, but his efforts are all turned toward the town line, and Belle's seen him defeat any number of threats sent his way, so she lets the wary whispers pass her by. (Rumplestiltskin has promised her his protection, and though he hasn't confessed to them, she's sure that everywhere she has a key to has been bound up in myriad protection spells to ensure no harm can come to her.)
It doesn't occur to her that everyone else thinks Rumplestiltskin should be as invested in this threat as they are until she spots him across the street from the library. A smile springs to her lips immediately, and she enjoys the bounce in her step as she heads toward him. He hasn't spotted her yet, caught up in conversation with a tall blonde man she doesn't know, and Belle allows herself just the tiniest hope that perhaps this is a friend (someone else to care for Rumplestiltskin, to reach out and assure him he is not alone).
She should have known better just from the way Rumplestiltskin is standing, all sharp edges and tight grip on the cane planted solidly between him and the man.
"If this Cora is as dangerous as they're saying, you should be worried too!"
"Dangerous for you, dearie," Rumplestiltskin says with a sneer so different to the practiced caper she grew to expect from the Dark One. It gets his point across just as well. "Not for me."
"You're not worried about what she'll do to you? I thought you said magic was stronger than science—and Cora's very good at magic."
"If you're afraid, Whale, feel free to go talk to the charming Sheriff. He's made it clear that he's in charge now."
Whale catches Rumplestiltskin's arm as he begins to turn away—Belle can't see Rumplestiltskin's face, doesn't know what flashes across his face, but an instant later, the man is falling back, one arm clasped behind his back, his expression all open terror.
"Don't touch me," Rumplestiltskin says, so cold, so harsh, as ruthless as the Dark One but with none of the gestures and flourishes she learned to see as the mask they were. (Is this a mask, too? Or is this who he really is when she's absent and the masks fall away?) "If you still feel attached to that arm, I'd find someone else to harass."
The bounce in Belle's step is gone. Her smile has vanished. The man she saw beneath their first kiss has never seemed further away.
Whale (she remembers a story, told through Rumplestiltskin's smug smirk, of a severed arm and a plea for magic) scuttles away. Any minute now, Rumplestiltskin will turn and see her.
See her blanching and trembling, arrested, uncertain (a little girl with none of the hope and the bravery and the spark he expects her to have; a nobody who looks at him the same way everyone else does and thus deserves none of his attention in return; whatever's left when the hero and the princess and the martyr are gone, leaving only one more mundane mortal in a crowd of mortals he will long outlive).
Belle swallows back everything but the barest hint of displeasure over the altercation. She makes sure that her hand doesn't shake as she reaches to touch his shoulder.
"Rumplestiltskin," she says (in a voice that doesn't tremble).
Rumplestiltskin flinches away, whirling on her with brimstone and fire in his eyes, his cane braced between them. "Listen, dearie," he's snarling, before he sees her and registers who she is.
The snarl drains out of him quicker than sands from an hourglass. She watches it happen, the way his face melts from the Dark One into the quiet spinner, a transformation she once saw happen in tangible form beside a spinning wheel.
"Belle!" he says (guilt, always so much guilt, dripping from her name).
(She can't help but wonder when he will get tired of the guilt and the shame and the need he seems to feel to hide and obfuscate and deflect her from huge parts of himself.)
(She can't help but wonder what she will do if he ever stops hiding.)
He's aghast, shrinking down to his real height, all his intimidation fled as he searches for words (excuses, justifications, lies in the shape of half-truths). "Hey," he finally comes up with, and that does bring back a fraction of her smile. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to… If I'd known it was you, I'd never have—"
"I'm not afraid of you," she says for maybe the dozenth time.
Only…this is the first time she thinks it's a lie.
If he notices, he ignores it (Rumplestiltskin has always been as good at ignoring what he doesn't wish to see as she is at wishing away what she doesn't want to acknowledge). In fact, he softens and reaches out (and he doesn't do this often, choosing instead to wait for her to touch him, just another in their complementary game of tests and proofs), and Belle refuses to flinch away (refuses to be scared when Rumplestiltskin has always made her brave).
She laces her fingers through his to show him that she welcomes his touch, appreciates his initiative, still chooses him (to prove to herself that she is not afraid, she is not blindsided by this glimpse of the Dark One in the spinner's face she's begun taking for granted).
And she isn't afraid. She refuses to be. If she did not fear him when he was a raging beast who sneered at her tears and made a show of torturing a thief, then why should she fear him now, when the mere sight of her reduces his silver tongue to a single syllable?
She manages to convince herself that she is as bold as one of her beloved characters, as undaunted as he believes her to be, for an entire day.
But then he grants her another confession (still measuring his worth against her reactions; still intent on keeping her atop the pedestal she helped build) as they trail through her quiet library shelving books. And like she knew she eventually would, she missteps.
"Are you sorry?" she asks him.
"I want to be," he replies, the words nearly dragged out of him.
And Belle, awash in memories of a frightened man falling back before Rumplestiltskin's coldness, is too eager. Too jubilant. As hopeful as she was when a stranger on the road first called his power a curse. As impulsive as she was when she sat nearly in his lap and scarcely waited to hear his (evasive) answer about his son before she leaned forward, all her love and dreams and hopes bound up in a single move.
"Change," he says, and Belle has always thought of the word as a good thing (something different from the same expectations always required of her; something to shake up her status quo as the dutiful daughter and accepting betrothed; something that could make it possible to see the world, to be a hero, to matter). But in Rumplestiltskin's mouth, the word is transformed, alchemized into something almost repugnant.
She tries smiling, wanting to banish the strange flicker of defeat washing over him, but all her smile serves to do is make his eyes tighten in anger.
"I don't like it when you talk about change," he says, almost too quickly. A confession, she thinks, but nearly perfunctory (and for all he has been hesitant and careful and timid in sharing his secrets, he has never seemed begrudging before). As if he doesn't want to confide in her.
As if she forced it from him somehow.
But…all she did was smile.
So she smiles again. And she asks a question. And he answers (the complete unvarnished truth, a confession wrung from him against his will).
"I can't be who you want me to be," he tells her. It's not the most shocking secret he's confessed.
It is the first one she feels like she doesn't deserve.
She's not paying enough attention to the conversation. Whatever's making him confide in her (trust, her heart insists; a deal, her mind realizes), she should have waited to consider it until later. But it's too late. With a few more words, questions asked without an accompanying smile, Rumplestiltskin's setting down his book and walking away.
It makes her think of the first time they stood together in this library. Of the touch of his finger against her cheek, as delicate as if he tried to resist but couldn't, as wistful as if he expected it to be the last time he ever touched her. Of the finality in his tone when he said those two words she never wants to hear side by side again (Goodbye, Belle).
He's saying goodbye.
And, oh, she never before realized just how deep her lies went. She never knew (how could she?) just how scared she could be. The Evil Queen, princes cursed to be flaming monsters, even her father sending a thug to kidnap her and erase all her memories—nothing, nothing, compared to the conflagration erupting inside her heart at the sound of the door closing behind Rumplestiltskin. (Again.)
He looked at her, while she was thinking about smiles and secrets, and for the first time, there was disappointment in those eyes. Disappointment in her.
He thinks she wants to change him, to drive the curse away.
Or is this you? he asked her during those moments she does her best never to think about. Is this you being the hero and killing the beast?
He thinks she doesn't really love him.
And she let him walk away thinking that. She didn't stop him, didn't invite him for hamburgers, didn't do anything but watch as he exited her life.
And this time, there are no hamburgers to bring him back to her.
He doesn't come back. He doesn't call her. The fear grows and grows and grows until Belle leaves the sanctuary he gifted her and dares to approach the shop. The shop where she first saw him again (before she knew him). Where he held her tight and gave her clothes that fit perfectly (conjuring up newly restored memories of another haven, another room full of clothes that fit only one person, another store carefully preserved for a future he can't quite believe will ever be realized). Where she came back to him and saw that chipped cup sitting at his elbow as he spun regular wool.
The shop she hasn't set foot in since that night.
Her heart pounds in her chest, her throat, even her fingertips as she pulls the door open (using one of the keys he gifted her, a just in case she never imagined). A bell rings overhead.
The shop is empty.
She remembers the last time he disappeared after slamming a door between them. She remembers a cold cell she'd all but forgotten and a tea set that appeared on the floor and the frightening emptiness in his eyes as he told her to go. She'd known that he loved her, that he was just afraid of her, but it didn't matter. He still sent her away and she still ended up alone and aching and apart from him, and what if this is just the past repeating itself?
What if he has consigned her to his past (just another secret to eventually gift someone else who dares to reach out to him)? Left her to her sanctuary and the protection spells he wove so ably around her? Given up on her as just a pale replica of the wife he hated so much that he had to turn her heart into a facsimile of what she'd done to his.
Belle can break his heart with no more than a few words. But he breaks her heart through silence. By choosing to withhold his words from her (the endearments and the quiet heys and the secrets he gives her so timidly, so bravely). By deciding she is better off without him and shutting her out (splitting their fates in two).
In only an instant (or in multiple instants, moments building and layering one atop another until the burden of expectation finally broke him), she has disappointed him. She has hurt him (without even meaning to, but that is almost worse) and as she sets her feet in the direction of his house, she is terrified that when he looks at her, when he sees her standing in his doorway, he will see only his long-dead wife.
She does not want him to change, not really, just wants him to be happy and whole (wants the heartbreak gone from his eyes, wants him to shine with love and happiness and to stop flinching away from good things in anticipation of it being taken away), but maybe she's never told him that. Maybe he doesn't know that.
(Maybe she's been so busy coveting his carefully guarded secrets that she forgot to trade them for something equal in value.)
When he doesn't answer his front door, she puts his keys away and pads around to the back yard, where the entrance to the basement lies tucked in a dark corner.
Her fear is so strong she almost cannot breathe as she knocks at the door. She's fairly certain the key he gave her will open the door, but she doesn't want to force her way inside his safe spaces. She wants him to want her there (and maybe it's easier to want adventure; maybe being a hero is so much more attainable than what she really, truly wants: to be loved and to accept that love without flinching).
Her truth is that she is afraid of him (of his ability to shut himself away behind deep, dark walls). Her truth is that she wants to be brave (and he is the only one who's ever believed she is, given her so many opportunities to be better and stronger and more). Her truth is that she loves him more than anything else (and the town, her library, her life, is too large, too hollow, too lonely without him).
The door opens.
"Belle," he says (not dearie, not a slammed door; her name).
"Rumplestiltskin," she says (because she knows him, she knew him even before he started paying her in secrets).
And he lets her back in.
"Don't keep shutting me out," she begs him after paying back some of the debt she owes him (secrets of her own spilled out at his feet, so many of them bound up in him and what he means to her).
"I won't," he promises, and as easily as that, her fear vanishes.
Rumplestiltskin is many things, but if there is one thing that is consistent in every story, every dealing, every interaction with him, it is that he keeps his promises.
And he's not looking at her with disappointment or fear or blankness. He looks at her (the most ordinary thing in this basement of marvels) as if she is beautiful and wonderful and magical, and she doesn't ever want to lose that. She could love others—strong men with classic good looks on their side and compassion in their hearts—but none of them would look at her as if she were their entire world (the only world, amidst all the realms he's visited, that matters). None of them would love her so much that everything else pales in comparison. They would not hold her with trembling hands and kiss her with the desperation of a man who thinks he will never taste her again.
Only Rumplestiltskin does that, and so he is the one she loves.
As hard as that sometimes is, he is always, always worth it.
It's difficult to remember that he doesn't necessarily want to tell her the truths secreted away inside him when every day he gives them to her so carefully, so earnestly (as if he knows that she will protect them as well as he protects her). In fact, she's so glad that he's giving her another chance that she forgets about the smiles in the library (or rather, she wishes away the knowledge; there will be time later to face it).
He takes her to Granny's and shares dinner with her in public without tensing and growing extra quiet. Belle realized she could fall in love with him the first time he made her laugh, felt herself trip toward the edge when he gave her a library with a flimsy excuse, felt herself teetering when he caught her up in his arms and blinked at her as if she were as radiant as the sunlight, courted the possibilities when she asked him about his son.
She chose to love him wholeheartedly when she chose to return to him, decided he was worth it when she decided to leave Phillip and Mulan to go back to the Dark Castle, refused to repent of the decision no matter how much Regina mocked her or how painfully the pirate who broke into her cell hit her, and knew the decision was the best one she'd ever made when he turned on a forest footpath and told her he loved her too.
But sitting across from him at Granny's while people openly stare and Ruby tries not to hover too obviously and Granny needles him—knowing that he is there simply to make her happy…it's enough to make her eyes burn (though she blinks the tears away before they can fall, knowing Rumplestiltskin would misunderstand the source of them). Enough to cushion the blow when he tells her that she is the third woman in his life (she never realized how jealous a person she could be).
They walk through the dusk, a well-worn path that Belle can't actually describe since she always walks it paying more attention to Rumplestiltskin than to her surroundings.
He tells her that his wife was happy until he came back from war alive (Belle tries not to hate someone she will never know). He tells her that several decades before Belle was born, he taught his magic to a woman that he also offered his heart to, a woman he would have married and had children with, a woman who ripped out her own heart rather than share that life with him (she tries not to imagine what he lived like after that, what he did in retaliation, how he survived when she above all knows how tender, how vulnerable, his heart is).
Belle is silent for a long time (she's trying not to recall if she smiled at him before he began whispering these secrets to her).
"Belle?" he asks, a bit nervously.
But what can she say? She wants to ask more about his wife (wants to ask if Milah looked like her, if he sees Milah in her, if he's already planning what he will do when she leaves in favor of adventure). She burns to ask about this second woman whose name he can't even speak (bitter shadows in his eyes and poisonous pain lurking at the corners of his mouth as he ekes out the confession word by word), but he takes her hand without prompting. He smiles at her, so tender and soft and disbelieving, and Belle wants to be brave, but she doesn't want to ruin this.
The past is the past, and one day he may tell her more about both these women who've left their scars on him, but not tonight. Tonight is for them, for walking together, for secret smiles and soft touches and daring kisses.
"I love you," she tells him, and snuggles close in order to feel every inch of him melting against her.
(Tonight she will not be brave, but she will be happy, and she deems it a fair trade.)
"Cora," he whispers another night, safe in her library with a book shared between their laps. "She only loved my power. My darkness."
Belle nudges her hand up against his on the open page, gives him privacy by not looking up from black ink.
"But even the Dark One wasn't enough for her."
"Rumple," Belle says. She feels so inept, so clumsy, not sure at all what he needs from her, what he wants in return for these secrets. (She feels, suddenly, very nervous, because Cora is the woman everyone in town is afraid of, which means she's still alive, she could be here, now, another woman who matters to Rumplestiltskin.)
Rumplestiltskin's hand grips hers, suddenly. "I'm glad," he says, fierce and defiant and bristling with power so much greater than his magic. "Glad because…if she hadn't thrown me away, I would never have dealt for you. I would never have known you."
His eyes are dark, sparking with life and love and light he can't see (the pupil in the eye of a brilliant light and all he sees is his own darkness, not the illumination he casts), as he stares at her, refusing to look away. This is not a secret he's reluctant to give. This is a truth he has emblazoned over his very being.
"Then I'm glad too," Belle says. "I hate that she hurt you, but I'm so, so glad that you dealt for me."
The time for being slow and tentative has passed. Belle doesn't want space, hasn't wanted it for a long time. On the contrary, she wants all the space between them to vanish.
The book drops unheeded to the floor, and Rumplestiltskin lets her turn him into her embrace, bends to meet her, and melts into her when she brings her mouth to his. He's given her the world in four corners and she gave him her heart in two hamburgers and why are they still pretending that this isn't where they both belong?
This is the world that she's always longed to see, the depths of it there in his eyes, the breadth of it in his arms wrapping around hers, the heights of it in the feel of his mouth moving over hers as he deepens the kiss, the wonder and mystery of it in that he dares to risk his heart again.
All that he has suffered, all that he has endured, and yet still he took a chance on her. He still tries, even after countless heartbreaks and painful rejections. He still fell in love with her, and how can anything else (any gesture, any mistake, any secret) ever compare to the magnitude of that?
His capacity for love astonishes her. His trust awes her. His kisses daze her.
Rumplestiltskin is, Belle thinks, an adventure like no other.
She tries, tries so hard. Tries with the books of this world she devours and the hours spent dusting shelves and familiarizing herself with this world's library systems. Tries by chanting Baelfire's name in her head and picturing a hundred variations of a boy with Rumplestiltskin's eyes and nose and chin. Tries by finding new ways to spend time with Rumplestiltskin, focusing all her attention on him, learning him.
Everything she tries only makes it worse.
Every book she reads reminds her that she wants to see the world and have adventures. Every time she imagines Bae, she sees him with blue eyes and a small nose and a rounded chin, gifts not from his father but from his mother. And seeing Rumplestiltskin, watching him weave stories for her and spark magic from his every move, she cannot help but picture him young and innocent and in love—and thus, can't help but picture a woman at his side (can't help but wonder about the women who, she assumes, saw him in similarly unguarded moments, happy and shy and funny).
It's eating her alive.
Time, she thinks, to be brave. Even if she doesn't like the answers, at least they will be out in the open. At least she will know if Rumplestiltskin fears her (and what she might become).
"Did you love her?" she blurts out (the only way she can grab hold of bravery, in this moment, to attack it without giving herself time to retreat). "Your wife. Did you ever love her…before?"
"Why do you ask?" he says after a long moment.
She should tell him. She knows she should. He's been brave for her (even if it's just fulfilling the requirements of some deal). She should be brave for him.
But then he will flinch away. He will think she is afraid of him (and it will take her weeks, maybe months, maybe decades, to convince him otherwise).
And there is another way to learn what she wants without confessing anything herself…
Before she can think better of it, Belle begins to smile. It's a deal, and that means if she pays for it, then the answers belong to her. She's sparing him this way, sidestepping any need to let him know how uneasy she is about the confessions he's already shared with her.
But…but if he doesn't want to tell her, then she doesn't really want to know. If he doesn't choose her (choose trust and hope and love), then what point is any of this at all?
If she's willing to force information out of him, to take his privacy and his own choices away, then she does not deserve his trust.
He gives her so much. Always, continually, over and over again, he gives her his heart. He gives her books and freedom and space and kisses and whatever she wants, whenever she wants. All he has kept from her is his secrets, and even that, he ekes out past all the walls and buttresses and moats he's long since erected around his heart.
He does trust her. Even if only through a deal—deals are his life-blood and maybe it is the only way he can bring himself to risk the pain of heartbreak again. Who is she to take that away from him (to take advantage of him)?
Belle looks away, her smile evaporated before it can fully form. (No wonder she reads about heroes rather than lives out adventures). "I just think about her sometimes."
She didn't smile, but he answers her anyway (the shame almost deafens her to his answer, so freely given). "I think I could have loved her. But there was very little opportunity."
"Why?"
(She imagines a day, far away but still too near, when someone asks him about the princess who became his caretaker. Did you love her? they will ask him, and he will say, Maybe I could have, but she was not who I thought she was.)
"She wanted to be free to explore the world," he says. "She did not want to be married, and before that could change, if it would, I went to war. And then she was ashamed, and then there was a baby, and she felt trapped. And…she couldn't love me so she left."
The world shakes around her. She clings to his arm for balance, for stability (for proof that he is still with her, still content to let her hang onto him).
"But she gave me Bae," he finally says. "I could have loved her for that if nothing else."
Then he looks down at her as if he has not just described her.
Milah wanted (Belle wants) to see the world. Milah wanted (Belle wants) Rumplestiltskin to be brave, to be the hero she saw (Belle sees) in him. Milah was afraid (Belle is afraid) of being trapped, forced stagnant and stale into a single place, constrained, locked up in the dark, forgotten and neglected.
He tells her that Milah is exactly who she imagined, and Belle is suddenly terrified. She has the same faults and flaws as his wife (the woman who lied and ran away and blamed him and sacrificed her son and her husband for selfish desires), and what if she is fated to hurt Rumplestiltskin in the same way? Already she is contemplating taking advantage of him, forcing him into a corner without even warning him. What if she, too, leaves him one day? What if she sneaks away because she cannot bear to look into his ancient, profoundly hopeful eyes and see that hope burn and die? What if her own desire to be brave means one day betraying him?
"Is that…is that why you let me go when I said I wanted to see the world? Did you think I would leave you anyway?"
(The past tense of her question soothes her; allows her to pretend that the future is safe.)
"You came back," he says simply.
It isn't enough. She came back because she loves him, because she never meant to leave him for good (because she couldn't imagine her life without him).
It isn't enough, not nearly enough to save him from her. But when she tries to tell him (to warn him), he turns to face her, his silvered hair haloed by light above him.
"I love you, Belle," he tells her, forcefully, his eyes beacons of light in the darkness, his hand so warm and steady in hers. "You and Bae are the only things I have ever loved. I wouldn't hurt you, Belle. Never. I promise. I couldn't."
He has already hurt her more deeply than any other (by sending her away, by lying to her, by walking away), but she has hurt him too. She has made him think that he's not good enough, and she's left him, and she's disappointed him. She's already hurt him and still he stands here and says, for the first time since she moved out of his home, that he loves her.
They have given each other their hearts. Deal or no deal, she realizes, that means they can each destroy the other. It comes with love, and she is still afraid that he will leave her behind in his frantic bid to protect her, that he will be able to live without her even though she cannot live without him.
She is afraid that she will hurt him yet more deeply—but then, he's afraid of the same thing.
I decide my own fate, she thinks. And she chooses him.
He chooses her.
"I know," she promises him, and there in his eyes, ringed in light, is her reflection. Fearless. Confident. Brave.
He does not look at her and see Milah. He looks at her and sees Belle.
(She is Belle. She is his. She will not walk away from him, never, never, never.)
"I wasn't worried about that, Rumplestiltskin, really," she assures him. "I'm not afraid of you, not like that."
They are both afraid, and always have been. But for the first time, she realizes that it doesn't matter. Together, they can be brave. Together, they can risk yet more hurt and reap the rewards in the meantime.
Together, they can be better.