He was beginning to regret this decision he'd made about the girl.

When he'd first come up with this plan, he'd thought it would be fine. He'd get the princess away from her father and be able to watch her as he deciphered her role in the future. In return, he'd get his home cleaned. It seemed like it was foolproof. And yet here he was again gritting his teeth and rubbing his forehead because she was giving him a headache. She did that a lot.

His first mistake had been in assuming she'd be a maid, and he soon saw the error of that assumption. She was "the help", and as such, he'd given her run of the castle, remembering that he'd never seemed to have a problem with any of his previous little helpers. But then she wasn't a typical maid. She wasn't trained for it like all the others. They had all been born and raised to be quiet and demur, to keep to themselves and to keep to the status they'd been born to. Belle had not. She'd been raised among maids, and so she'd learned early to ignore the servants, and it showed. She turned up everywhere and anywhere he didn't want her. In one of her first days, she'd stumbled into his tower while he'd been there. He'd been working on a delicate potion, one that required precision when she'd let out a small gasp and began to apologize profusely for walking in on him. He'd dropped what he had in his hand, the vial below exploded, the table caught fire, he'd grown angry with her, and before he knew it he was screaming at her to get out!

He'd meant the tower. But the moment she opened the main door, he'd realized that he'd made a mistake in frightening her and met her just before she got to the property line.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," he'd exclaimed before she could leave.

She sniffled when she turned to face him, not because she'd been crying, but rather more likely that she'd caught a cold. It was Fall in the village below, which meant it was practically Winter up here, and she still had no cloak. She must have been freezing.

"You told me to get out!"

"Of the tower. But you made a deal, dearie, one that lasts forever unless broken by me. These walls have protection spells all around them. Try to leave or run away, dearie, and the consequences could be…fatal!" he laughed, expecting her fact to fall or her spirits to dash. But they didn't, at least they didn't appear to.

"I wasn't trying to run away," she fought back a second later. "I would never do that! I'm well aware of why I'm here and for how long. Haven't you ever just needed a moment to breathe?"

"Plenty of air inside the castle grounds," he pointed out, though he was startled to find that he didn't find a hint of a false claim in her words. Either she had been telling the truth about her intentions, or she was a very well-trained liar. A moment later, he used his magic to get them back inside and told her to get back to work, assuming that she'd learned her lesson about his private spaces.

It turned out he was really very poor at making assumptions where the girl was concerned.

She did her chores, some of them better than others. She was a terrible cook and mediocre at dusting, but she knew how to change the sheets on a bed just fine. Laundry was less than adequate, he determined one morning when he realized she'd stained a shirt. He could have roared and screamed at her, but that would have meant interacting with her once again, and he was determined to avoid interactions unless absolutely necessary. He simply put his vest on over it and remembered that he didn't have to waste time or energy on it himself now.

When she wasn't doing her chores, she explored the castle constantly, day in and day out. If it weren't for the fact that he locked her in the dungeon every night, he had no doubt that she would be exploring night in and night out too! She went places that he'd rather her not go, and seemed to study things he'd rather her not study. He felt like his hackles were always up around her. A silent alarm in the back of his head went off every time she entered his room, or even Baelfire's old room. He had to convince himself every time that it was acceptable if she was only doing laundry or changing sheets. She had a bad habit of stumbling upon him in his upper tower, which was causing him to look over his shoulder every other minute. And the day that he felt a shiver crawl up his spine, an indication she was not where she was supposed to be again, he'd had it.

"Careful!" he cried loudly, sneaking up behind her. She jumped about a mile in the air and let out a gasp as she covered her mouth then her chest. "That vault has no doors for a reason," he warned, catching her staring down the hallway to an arch without a door. "Only Dark Magic dwells in this castle dearie, if you're not careful, you might just regret getting too close!"

He was trying to scare her, he was good enough to admit it. The problem was that she never seemed to be frightened, not the way he wanted her too. He yelled, he snuck up on her, he laughed at the most inappropriate of times and yet time and time again she just ignored him, turned on her heel, put her nose in the air, and stomped off.

He supposed that had been when the real problems started, or at least that was when he'd had to admit that those issues they'd had in the beginning were not really "problems" at all. It was after that incident that things changed. And he meant that literally. She stopped exploring so much and began to let herself into the empty tower across from his more and more. Often times, when he tracked her down with his crystal ball, when things got too quiet, he found her at the tower's window, looking down over the little village. Daydreaming. What did he expect when he had a princess for a maid?

She seemed overwhelmed. Sometimes too overwhelmed. He was beginning to notice she made stupid decisions when she was overwhelmed. The day she'd burst into his tower and nearly ran off the grounds had only been the beginning of it. One afternoon, after he'd been working all day and she'd been unusually busy moving about the castle, he came into the great room, and his jaw nearly dropped to the floor at what he saw.

She'd moved the furniture!

No! Not just any bit of furniture, his wheel! The wheel he liked to spin at when he wanted to get away from working in the tower, the wheel he used to spin thread. The wheel he'd taken from his aunt's home. It and the platform he kept it upon were halfway across the room!

"Why is my wheel over here?!" he demanded, breaking a silence that had lasted between them for days now.

"I needed to sweep," she explained with a shrug of her shoulders, as if it were nothing.

He had to take several steadying breathes to make it through the next few seconds. He'd had the entire evening planned out. A good evening. After her questionable dinner, he'd intended to lock her in her dungeon room and spin, but the thought of spinning on his wheel when it was out of place…

It was fine. It would be fine. She said she'd needed to sweep and so he'd let her sleep. That would last a day at best. He could live for that long.

He tried not to let her see how off-putting it was to him, but he had made a rather loud noise on his way back out of the room and skipped dinner that night.

He'd been on edge the rest of the night. From the moment he locked her away to the moment he released her, all he'd imagined was that wonderful moment when he arrived downstairs to dinner and found his wheel in the place that he liked it, could spin for a few hours of peace, then get back to work once the girl was locked away!

But the next day, nothing happened as it should have. And when he came down just before dinner to make sure that it was all as it should be, he had to clench his jaw tight just so he didn't pick something up and break it. Throwing the fraudulent grail across the room and shattering some windows was looking like a good idea. Probably because he could actually see the fucking windows!

"What did you do?!" he growled as he looked around. His wheel wasn't where it belonged, the curtains were open to the windows and the valley below, and now there was this…thing! A couch that he knew he'd seen in another room somewhere in this place! She'd dragged it from wherever it had been into this room and it now sit in the place that his wheel was supposed to be sitting.

"Cleaned, what you told me to do," she answered shortly. Defiantly!

He didn't know what the colors red and green made when mixed together, but she was about to find out because he felt all the blood rush to his face in anger.

"Why did you have to open the curtains?!"

She looked as though he'd struck her. Her jaw dropped, she shook her head in shock. She sneered, outright sneered in his direction. What the hell was she doing? What did she think she was doing?! This wasn't her castle, this wasn't her palace! It was his home! His things! His curtains! She was his help! And so far, all she was doing was being anything but helpful! She was a nuisance, her father was probably glad to be rid of her!

Oh no! No, no, no, he had to put a stop to this kind of behavior right now! Those curtains hadn't been opened since Bae was here, and they wouldn't be opened again until he was back! If he'd wanted their light, he'd have opened them himself!

He needed to do something. His fingers were starting to go numb, he realized, from clenching them too tightly. He could have thrown something at her. If he didn't do something soon, he probably would. His wheel. It was in the wrong place, but it was there. And there was fresh straw for him to spin as well. Maybe the fact that it was in the wrong place was good. Maybe then it would allow him to continue to fume while calming down so he didn't change his mind and kill her.

"This all goes back the way it was…tomorrow!" he hollered at her over his shoulder as he sat down. "The curtains get closed, the wheel goes back to where I like it, and you'll have to find somewhere else to put that…thing!"

That was his mantra all throughout dinner. Tomorrow the curtains closed, the wheel was righted, the couch was gone. Tomorrow the curtains closed, the wheel was righted, the couch was gone. Tomorrow he curtains closed, the wheel was righted, the couch was gone.

He repeated it over and over and over to himself throughout dinner. When she set his plate down before him so hard that it rattled, he repeated it. When he ate whatever the dish in front of him was supposed to be and wanted to gag, he repeated it. When he locked her in her dungeon cell, and she glared at him, he repeated it. All throughout the night, as he sat at his wheel and didn't bother getting work down, he repeated it. Over and over and over.

He could set things right himself. He knew he could. With a flick of his wrist, the curtains would close, his wheel would be where he liked it, and that couch would be nothing but wood for the fires he burned. He could do it. But he wanted her to. She was the reason it was like this, she was the reason there was so much upset in his life, and he wanted her to be the one to have to make it right again. It was a fair punishment. Right along with his mantra he began to add images, to watch her face fall as she pulled each curtain shut once more and drenched the place in shadows. He watched as she huffed and puffed and dragged the wheel, platform, and stool, back over to the corner and got it right to where it was. He imagined the look on her face as she shut the door to some room that fancy couch of hers ended up in. Maybe for effect, he'd seal that room off for good, make sure she couldn't get into it ever again. Maybe that would teach her a lesson.

Those words and images, they were good enough to keep him calm throughout the night, until it was near morning.

Just after the sun began to rise, which he noticed for the first time in probably a century because of the damn open curtains, he became aware of a new noise in the hall he hadn't heard before but was quick to identify. It was sobbing. Someone, somewhere, was crying. Well, damn. There were two of them in the castle, and it certainly wasn't him who was crying. That only left the perfect little princess in the downstairs dungeon. Good. Served her right to be upset.

He tried to ignore it, to go back to repeating his words and imagining his good thoughts, but it was nearly impossible. It was ridiculous. Impossible even! She was all the way in the dungeons, so far from him that a normal human shouldn't have been able to hear the sounds of her sobs. But he could. Probably because he was the Dark the One and not a normal human. They echoed inside of his mind so that she may as well be standing before him weeping. And why each one of those sobs felt like they were echoing not off the stone walls of the castle but inside the depths of his soul was beyond him.

Perhaps this wasn't the best of ideas after all. Maybe he should make other arrangements for her, maybe send her to Regina as a maid and let her staff take care of her, train her, turn her into what a proper maid should be. He was sure that there she'd make it all of three days before that fire of hers was smothered. Maybe then he could get some work done. Or maybe…maybe…it was hard to think of maybes when she kept crying like that!

Finally, he felt something inside of him snap and was off like lightning, heading for the dungeons. In his mind, the Seer had never had a personality, not like the Dark Ones he shared his brain with. She gave him visions and riddles on occasion, but she never seemed to address him, his situations, his emotions, his thoughts, not like the others did. And yet suddenly for the first time, she did. She brought him to a standstill on the stairs just before he got to her dungeon when her words, breathy soft echoed through his head.

Don't kill her, she's important.

Why? Why was she important?! If the Seer were more than just a voice, a power in his head, he would have decided to kill her in that moment instead of the maid. Why was she important?! If she would just tell him, give him a vision, issue one of those riddles he hated so that he might get some kind of idea then he wouldn't need to keep her so close, he could make proper arrangements for her, and he wouldn't feel the need to kill her!

The Seer was silent. No vision. No words. There was only the sound of sobs coming loud and clear from the dungeon before him. But now he felt calm. Or at least more than he had a few seconds ago. "She's important." It was amazing the effect those words could have on him. Three seconds ago, he might have killed her out of sheer insanity. Now he didn't have it in him to murder her, but he couldn't let her just continue to cry and go on the way she was either.

"When you so eagerly agreed to come and work for me…" he declared, opening her cell room door. Like a picture, she'd been on the little cot, curled into a ball, sobbing, with the blanket held close to her. The moment he walked in the door, she attempted to roll off quickly and pretend as if she wasn't falling apart. As if her face wasn't swollen enough to give it away, her chest was heaving like she couldn't get enough air in. She was a terrible actress. Fortunately, he found that he was rather skilled at acting. "I assumed you wouldn't miss your family quite so much."

Yes. That was it. Pretend it was that she missed her family. Pretend it was her time of the month. Pretend she'd stubbed a toe or had a headache or anything that wasn't directly related to yesterday.

She was a terrible actress, but she knew how to take the bait, at least.

"I made my sacrifice for them, of course, I miss them, you beast!" she shouted back, using the excuse that he had provided her. Who knew, women were complicated, maybe it really was part of it.

"Yes, yes, of course, but the crying must stop!" he insisted. "Night after night, it's making it very difficult for me to spin! I do my best thinking then!"

Her response was silence. She stared at him with an open mouth and a runny nose and fiery eyes. She wanted to hit him. He could tell just by the way she was staring at him that she'd be content if she could take a swing. But she wouldn't. They both knew that she wouldn't, she was far too proper for anything like that. And soon enough, like a proper lady would, she turned away from him. She would have been taught to do it because her face was a mess, but he had the feeling it was more to do with the fact that she just didn't want to look at him anymore. Brave girl. He hated to admit that, but there weren't many who would turn their backs on him. And if she was daring enough to do that, then what made him think she was going to stop crying just because he told her to?

Did she really cry night after night? He'd taken a guess at that, he truly didn't know. But the way she reacted made him think that maybe she did. In that case…

Into his hand, he summoned a pillow, white with tassels, something soft and luxurious, something she might have had in her other life.

"Perhaps this'll help?" he tempted.

She turned back and looked at what he presented her with. "For me?"

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes at her. Who else would it be for?

"Not quite so beastly now, am I?" he said as he tossed it her and turned to leave.

"Thank you!" she called after him, her tone sour and filled anything other than gratefulness. "Perhaps now I can actually get some sleep!"

"No, no, no," he argued, turning around. Stupid girl! He'd never met someone so unnerving! From brave to stupid in only a few seconds was exceptional! This might have actually been a somewhat decent interaction if she hadn't chosen to lace it with such a malice filled comment!

"It's not to help you sleep," he corrected. "It's to muffle the crying so that I can get back to work!"

He braced himself for a comment. He prepared himself to withstand another verbal tongue lashing and was determined to give it right back to her…until he felt something. An alarm was raised somewhere in the back of his head, and it wasn't because of the woman in front of him. Someone was in the castle. Someone who didn't belong.


Here we find ourselves in the 2x19 episode which is a bit of a conundrum for me. While I do stand by my assertion that this fiction begins to pick up in this chapter (no longer purposefully slow), the chapters for this episode seem to go on and on and on. Ironic right. This episode seemed to have so little Rumbelle, but when you really break down Rumple's role in it then it's a lot longer than it appears. Plus, you'll note later, I threw in part of the 2x20 episode as well. It fit in perfectly and besides that I wanted to avoid at all costs getting into a blocked form of one episode, then another, then another. I wanted this fiction to breathe and the story to seem free. Sometimes that means episodes will cross over. You'll see how it works soon.

Thank you MissAmanda, Jennifer Baratta, and Grace5231973 for your reviews on the last chapter! Much appreciated! Up next we will continue to dive into 2x19 and find out who is breaking into Rumple's castle. Gee...I wonder...who ever could it be?! Peace and Happy Reading!