He didn't go back to the shop after claiming the egg for himself. He couldn't. He had a gun, but he didn't have magic, and that meant that at the end of the day, Emma and Regina were still faster than he was. The elevator wouldn't hold Emma up for long. She'd climb out, she'd free Regina, and they'd come looking for him, for the egg. The first place they'd look would inevitably be the shop. And so that was undoubtedly the one place he could not go.

The trouble was that he needed to go into the shop. He hadn't planned as well as he thought he had. And he realized it too late.

In a perfect world, he would have removed the potion and gone up into the woods with it right then and there, avoiding Emma and Regina, keeping them firmly one step behind him. But in his planning, he'd forgotten something important. The key. He knew where it was in the shop, but before he'd left for the library he'd been so concerned, worrying about his plan to get the egg that he hadn't worried so much about what he'd do after getting it. He hadn't thought this through well enough. If he could go back, he would have thought to slip the damn thing into his pocket before going to the library, but there was no use whining over his own mistakes, not when he was closer than he'd ever been in his life. A small delay in his morning hike wouldn't be a terrible thing. In fact, it might even be helpful. The sun beginning to rise reminded him that he hadn't thought to bring a flashlight with him when he'd left either. At least this way, by the time he finally got back into the shop and got the egg open, it would be morning.

So, instead of going into the shop to fetch the key, he hid himself. In the alley on the other side of the shop, close to the back door, he stood, and he waited with the understanding that if he could manage to avoid the women when they searched the premises, then the second they were done, he could go back inside and finish what he'd started. But in the gray morning light, as he carefully concealed himself in the alley with his prize, he watched from a distance as something unexpected happened.

Emma and Regina left the library together. But they didn't cross the street to his shop. Instead, he watched as they hurried away, down the road, toward Granny's. He waited where he was, not daring to move even a little bit closer for fear it was some kind of trick. And then he saw Emma's yellow bug speed down the street away from him and his house and any inkling they might have of where he'd be.

That was unexpected.

Completely.

Egg in hand, he let himself sneak away from the back of the alley and slowly approached the street. When he looked down, Emma's bug continued to speed quickly out of view, but he was able to make out that both women were in the car. They were going in the direction of the hospital. He glanced down at the egg in his hand, took a breath, and then nodded to himself in determination.

He didn't know what was going on, but he knew not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Speeding away like that gave him at least a few minutes to get into the shop, get the key, check the potion and go. Sooner was better than later. He had to take his chance.

Inside the shop, he hobbled quickly into the back room. The sun had risen, letting bright light into the room, but he still turned on his overhead light and set the egg down on a clean velvet mat to examine it like he might any valuable antique. It was untouched. Unbreeched. Which meant that if he opened it up…

He swallowed as he reached over into a small tool kit he kept on the table. Inside one of the top draws, the golden key gleamed. A key he'd kept for twenty-eight years because Mr. Gold had always worried the moment he threw it away, its lock would reappear. Funny, it was almost as if the Curse wanted to be broken. He tried to remain calm, to still his racing heart as he inserted the key perfectly into the lock then gave it a few twists until he felt the mechanism inside click. And then he opened it…

It was perfect.

The bottle, the potion, even the felted protective covering. Everything was just as he remembered putting it in decades ago, years before Emma had ever been born, all for this moment. He could have wept with joy.

Ever so carefully, with hands as steady as he could make them, he removed the bottle from its home for these past many years and examined what was left.

It wasn't much. As he held it up to the light, he realized that was perhaps the only difference. The Curse, it seemed, had gotten to some of it, been able to use some of it as its battery, but not all of it. There wasn't a lot of it left, barely a single swallow, but if he could put it in the right place, it wouldn't matter. It was the most powerful potion in the world. It would do its job.

He flinched at the sound of the bell ringing in the front of the shop. Then paused for a second, certain that if Emma and Regina had come back, they would have called out his name. No name meant it might not be them, but there was no promise of that. Quickly he swallowed, pocketed the potion for safety, then turned his back to hide the egg and the key in a small trunk he had on the table behind him. If it was Emma and Regina, they might see him get away without the egg and search for it. That might buy him some time to-

"Excuse me, are you Mr. Gold?"

He sighed in relief. It was neither Emma nor Regina's voice. Probably just some stranger out for some early shopping who hadn't taken note of the "closed" sign on his door. He probably should have locked himself in when he arrived. That was his own fault. He'd lock it on the way out.

"Yes, I am. But I'm afraid the shop's…closed…"

He turned.

The world stopped.

Heartbeat.

Breath.

Time.

Pawnshop.

Everything was gone. Obliterated.

It was gone because what he was seeing couldn't possibly be real.

"I was uh…I was told to…to find you and…tell you that Regina locked me up," the girl stuttered awkwardly with an accent and voice his ears recognized but hadn't heard in decades. His blood had chilled in his veins, and his fingers and toes were numb as he took her in. The last time he'd seen her…it had been longer than the potion had been around. Her hair was unkempt. She wore some awful hospital gown and sneakers that had to be too big for her, a coat that reeked so badly of mothballs he could smell it even from this distance.

But it didn't matter. None of those things mattered.

She was still the most beautiful thing he'd ever beheld in his very long life.

"Does…does that mean anything to you?" she questioned hopefully.

Belle.

His Belle.

But...how?

He stared at her slack-jawed, feeling slowly returning to his body. It was only then that he realized he was moving, step by step closer to where the person stood.

It was a trick. It had to be. What he was seeing wasn't real. It was magic. To see her again, like this or not, was magical, so there was no other explanation besides magic.

Except for the problem that magic still wasn't in Storybrooke. To create an illusion like that…that would require great magic. Magic this world didn't have, magic that this Curse would have swallowed up to keep itself running. If not magic, then…hallucination? A ghost?

He swallowed hard. He hesitated. His hand was shaking as he hadn't allowed it to when he uncovered the potion, and his mouth was dry. But finally, he forced himself to reach out his hand and grasp her shoulder.

He was worried, half expected that his hand would go straight through her; that he'd find she was a ghost or a trick, a person in very convincing make-up. He was afraid she'd disappear again.

But no matter how hard he squeezed, she remained in front of him, a solid, living being, looking nearly as baffled as he felt.

He felt dizzy. There was no explanation.

Except…

"You're real…"

It had to be real.

She was real.

He didn't have his magic yet to try and sense any kind of Dark Magic on her, something that would have been necessary to create what a trick as convincing as she was, but he already knew that she wasn't a lie or a trick. There was no Dark Magic this strong available during the Curse that would conjure her.

She was real. She had to be.

"You're alive."

There was no explanation for it outside of her being here, alive, living and breathing in front of him.

She wasn't a hallucination. If she were, she would have appeared before him as he knew her to be, in a blue dress with a beautiful smile and perfectly groomed hair.

She wasn't a magical illusion. If she were, then he wouldn't have been able to touch her, to squeeze her shoulder as he had.

She wasn't made of magic. There wasn't enough magic in the town, to begin with, and there also was only one person in the town that knew about her and could have had the power to conjure her. That was Regina.

But he knew it wasn't Regina.

First of all, when Belle appeared, he'd just seen Regina drive off with Emma in the opposite direction. There wouldn't have been time to access her magic and create this. Second of all…there was what she'd said. "Are you Mr. Gold," no mention of his true name. "Regina locked me up. Does that mean anything to you" because it meant nothing to her.

If Regina was going to create her from magic to torment him, there was no reason to dress her as she was and leave her with no memories of him, not a clue who he was or where she was, in a clearly Cursed state. And then there was the implication of the words she'd said. "I was told…" She'd been told to find him. Told her to tell him that Regina had locked her up. That was the nail in the coffin, though, wasn't it? She wasn't a lie or a trick. Someone had released her to get revenge. Someone had released her from someplace she'd been where she'd been…what? A chess piece? A card to play?

He didn't know who had released her, but he knew who had kept her like this all these years.

Regina.

"She did this to you?"

Regina had her. How could he have not known? How could he have been so stupid! It was Regina who had told him that she'd died all those years ago knowing he wouldn't explore it; knowing he'd believe her father was as awful as he believed; knowing that he wouldn't find her because the very woman who had told him all that was the very woman who had her locked away. From him! Probably ever since she'd left.

Where?

How?

All questions he didn't have answers to yet. She'd kept her locked up, probably in the hospital from the looks of it, after the Curse had taken effect, waiting for the right moment to play this card. But someone had gotten to her first. Who had freed her, who had told her to say that Regina had her, that he'd protect her…he didn't know. Judging by the state of her, they'd done her a great favor.

They'd done him a great favor.

He wanted to know everything.

"I was told you'd protect me…"

Her hesitant words forced him out of his brain and back into what was right in front of him.

Right in front of him…

Just as she'd been once before! Before he'd…

Oh, he'd had the opportunity to prevent this, to protect her once before. He'd given it up, and now this…this was all his fault.

Not again. Never again.

"Oh, yes," he choked. And without giving himself permission, he did the one thing he'd never done in their time together. He flung himself at her, pulled her into his arms, and held her against his chest. "Yes, I'll protect you!"

He wept with overwhelming joy. Because she was real. Because she was alive. Because she was here. He'd never let anything happen to her again!

This time he wasn't going to let her go.

But suddenly, he felt her go stiff against him, felt her push and step away, not out of his grasp but just enough to break his embrace.

"I'm…I'm sorry. Do…do I know you?" she questioned, squinting at him confused and hopefully all at once again.

Suddenly he recognized what had just happened in a most uncomfortable way. They'd been here before, several times, when the tables had been turned. How many times had she hugged him in the Enchanted Forest? How many times had she reached out in joy and thrown her arms around him? And how often had he stood there stiff as a board? Uncomfortable? Unsure of where to put his hands or how to respond because he didn't know what she was to him?

Every time.

He'd denied her every single fucking time.

He had to fix it. He had to fix it now, and it all started with the potion in his pocket.

"No," he whispered, trying to give her a gentle and reassuring smile. Everything she knew about him was based on these moments. For now. "But you will."

He wanted to know everything. He wanted her to know everything. He wanted to stay and hold her, stare at her, memorize the features he hadn't seen in decades, have a moment he'd only dreamed about. But not now. His heart had stopped when he'd seen her, but he was suddenly ever aware of a clock ticking behind him. Time had started again.

Regina and Emma had driven away, but he had no assurance they wouldn't come back. He wanted to be long gone by the time that happened.

He brushed his hand over his pocket again, making sure he had what he needed. Then on instinct reached for her hand to guide her out with him.

But she pulled it free. She dug her heels in, stubborn as ever, just as he remembered her.

"Come with me," he muttered before placing a hand on her back instead. She obeyed his touch and followed him back out into the shop. "There's something we have to do, but everything…everything will be clear soon enough. I promise, I'll answer all your questions soon."

It was unfair of him to ask that he trust her so soon. But it had to be done. They had to go. He was so close to succeeding. He could make this work. He could protect her and finish this plan.

He had to.

Belle's back! Yay! What a shock and surprise that I'm sure everyone has been waiting three long months for. This chapter was hard to write because I wanted to do it justice. I wanted time to feel in this moment as though it didn't exist. I used lots of single word and sentence paragraphs to slow us down in the reading. I also tried hard to make it still a very Rumple moment, though. There are times that he finally starts thinking again and then gets on a roll before tripping over a detail. Even with the world stopped, his mind still thinks through every last detail, distrusting what he sees until he can safely conclude that she's not a dream or a trick or anything like that, but rather that she is real. Belle only really features in this chapter and two others in this fiction (the last two, of course), but this was my favorite by far. And, of course, if you are looking to do a side-by-side read, this chapter can be found, from Belle's perspective, in Moments Seen and Unseen.

Thank you, Grace, for your review on the previous chapter. I know Belle is the highlight here, but I hope you'll approve of the framing as well, particularly its start. I had to find some space in this chapter to waste a little bit of time since it's clear that it's dark when Emma frees Regina, brighter when Jefferson frees Belle, and the sun has obviously risen in this chapter. When I first wrote Rumple going back into the shop, I had my own little "wait...why wouldn't he just take the key with him? He doesn't know Henry is going to get sicker. He would expect Emma and Regina to search there for him first." At first, I thought about him hiding in his car, but something about him potentially having to crouch down to be unseen was undignified for Mr. Gold, plus when I thought it through from Rumple's POV if they spotted him and he drove off, what's to stop Emma from getting into her car and following. So yeah, hanging out in the back alley won, and really...isn't it just so Rumple to emerge quietly from the shadows and get up to something sneaky? More Rumbelle for you tomorrow! Peace and Happy Reading!