He didn't try to fight her, not with magic, not with words. Because it was too late, with the blade already pressing into his chest, the metal forged with enough darkness to pierce bone as easily as air.
Because it was her holding the dagger.
Belle's fingers locked against her will around the hilt, unable to resist Gaston's commands filling her mind. Forbidden her own voice, she was forced to issue Gaston's words through her lips to command the Dark One's submission. It was her husband's heart he demanded. By the rules of magic, to hand it over was to renounce her claim on him.
With the father's heart in his hand, Gaston would be able to claim the child's life for his own.
At least Rumplestiltskin wouldn't live to see the full extent of how Belle had failed him.
Rumple, I'm so sorry. She met his eyes helplessly, her hand trembling with the futile effort to stop herself. Gaston wanted his rival dead and gone, the Dark One's powers transferred to Belle with no chance of her ever breaking free of Gaston's control.
Rumple said nothing. Only gasped as the tip of the dagger drew blood. His hands rose to grip her shoulders, but he didn't try to push her away. Behind the silence, his expression held only sadness that it had come to this, but no blame.
She wished she could hold this moment forever: the last time she would see her true love alive, before all hope, all love was ripped away from them by Gaston. But even as despair threatened to drown her, Rumple squeezed gently, mute touch conveying all his faith in her. She felt his presence warming her, as though he had spoken to her: The light you gave me, I return it to you.
Light. The moment stretched between them, longer than it had any right to be, but Belle was looking only at the one she loved, with no room for anything else. As long as she held his eyes with hers, she could forget her fear and anger.
Trust me, he seemed to plead. Let go.
Yes, she thought. He had caught her once before when she had fallen off a cliff. That time, he had given her wings. This time it was her soul rather than her body that fell. This time, it was her choice. With no other roads left, she would fall before she surrendered his heart.
Gaston was nothing. The daggers, forged from the chains that had once bound Prometheus, were nothing. The shadows deepened around Rumplestiltskin, and the light blazed brighter through Belle.
"What is this?!" Gaston's shout cracked across the moment, and time ran forward again. "What are you waiting for? Cut out the Dark One's heart and give it to me."
Belle felt the pressure of Gaston's grip on the dagger, felt the constraint of his command (issued a second time, then a third) trying to bend her will, but she had fallen past the point where his demands had any meaning. "No."
Without looking away from her, Rumplestiltskin lifted a hand and with a flick of his wrist summoned the dagger. Distantly, she heard a gasp of pain as if Gaston had been burned, but she didn't turn away, either, only taking a step back to pull the other dagger away from Rumple's chest. She moved to offer it back to Rumple, their hands meeting and tangling when he simultaneously did the same with the one that bore her name.
"I believe this belongs to you," Rumple said, the beginnings of a smile breaking through the darkness that suffused him.
"I want you to keep it." She saw the questions in his eyes, as many as she had. She shook her head slightly before he could ask. Later. We can talk later.
He hesitated, then nodded and swallowed. "Well, we are married, after all." Though he tried to make light of it, she could feel how his hands trembled as he tucked the dagger away in his hidden pocket. "Though I trust you'll make better use of that in the future." His eyes slanted towards the Dark One dagger.
Before she could hide it, Gaston interrupted them. "Enough sweet nothings! Aren't you forgetting something?"
"What, you, dearie?" Rumple finally tore his gaze away from Belle to sneer at Gaston. "What makes you think anyone wants to remember you?"
"This is my house," Gaston said darkly. He raised a hand and slowly closed his fingers into a fist. "This is my trap." Bars of blue-white flames shot up all around from the ritual circle marked on the floor, closing in around them.
In this place, every element answered to Gaston's will.
"Such a waste. You could have ruled by my side as my queen." Gaston shook his head at her stupidity. "Instead you and that beast will wither away to nothing, no more than fuel for the glory of my ascension!"
"And you'll rot to worse than nothing in this tomb you've built for yourself," retorted Belle, but without heat. "You'll never get your hands on our child, no matter what." That much they had won for themselves, even when their magic couldn't extend past Gaston's cage. She felt a strange serenity in the knowledge, though she could see Rumple trembling with fury, his eyes blazing with the frustrated desire to destroy their captor.
But Gaston only shrugged. "Then you can burn together. Three lives for one, that's more than enough to trade for my resurrection."
Belle kept her gaze on her husband. "Let him bluster." She had seen through it — Gaston couldn't touch them, but he was afraid, which was why he had locked them away like dangerous beasts.
Gaston laughed shortly. A heavy spear materialized in his hand. "See this? It's already tasted the blood of one Dark One — what was the name? Gorgon the so-called Invincible? Not so invincible in the end. But still a much more impressive specimen than a stunted imp."
"If you find pigs impressive," Rumple snarled at Gaston. "Try us, and they'll be picking fragments of your teeth from the floor tiles for centuries to come."
Gaston scowled and jabbed the spear through the bars of the cage, but the Dark One caught the tip easily in his fingertips. A wave of dark magic surged up from the blade, reducing the spear to ashes. But it could reach no further than that, not while they were inside the cage, and not even Gaston would be stupid enough to poke the beast with his bare hands. Seething at the apparent stalemate, Gaston vanished in a billow of red smoke.
Belle let out her breath a moment later, when Gaston didn't immediately return. She and Rumple stared at each other in silence. She opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, she flung her arms around her husband.
"Belle," he murmured, then leaned into the embrace, letting some of the darkness ebb away at her touch. "What... how... what happened?"
Everything. Belle tried to organize her memories as she began to explain haltingly how the Apprentice had bound her to the dagger, and how she had come to Tartarus. She told him of their journey to Mulctowne, the people she had met, and what she had learned from them.
"Bae..."
"...is as safe as he could be in the lands of the dead," Belle reassured him. "What about you? How did... how did you come to be here?"
He told her.
After their respective tales were done, they clung in silence to each other, digesting the knowledge.
"We have to get out of here," Belle whispered at last. "We have to warn them..." There were other living people in Tartarus. Some of them had magic, and a Titan was surely more than a match for Gaston, but Gaston was, as he boasted, a hunter with a hunter's instincts. If he stalked and struck from ambush, he could capture his prey and bring them here to this realm where his power was near absolute.
Rumple growled in response, but even his magic wasn't even able to rattle the bars of the cage. "Much as I hate to admit it, the oaf knows how to build a prison..."
"Nothing is unbreakable." Belle added her magic to his, but it still wasn't enough.
"Given time." Rumple shook his head at her to desist. "More time than we can afford." He caught her hand in his own and let her slump against him again. "Luckily, not all of me is foolish enough to walk open-eyed into a trap. Sometimes it pays to be a coward."
Belle straightened at his words, hope blossoming. She looked into his face, saw a smugness he couldn't quite conceal. "What?"
Rumple's grin promised murder. "Any minute now..."
Suddenly time didn't feel as burdensome. "Rumple, what did you do?"
He held up a finger to his lips.
Then.
The house shook. Starting with a barely perceptible vibration, then gaining exponentially in strength as it spread through the walls, the floor, the very reality of Gaston's domain.
Rumplestiltskin lifted a hand, the threads of destruction converging around him. The cage shattered, broken from the outside.
A roar of outrage: Gaston, his dreams of conquest melting before his eyes, was back. He seized the shards of his domain in his fists, shaping it into heavy armor and a poleaxe, instruments of divine power.
"Ah, a brave knight to slay the beast?" Rumple stepped forward to shield Belle. She stepped back in turn, knowing that the darkness craved violence as much as the light longed for tranquility.
The battle was fiercely fought on both sides, yet as it dragged on, the Dark One whittled away at the would-be god, shearing away his divinity one fragment at a time.
Fragments which Belle collected and contained in a sphere of light that grew brighter as Gaston's shade dimmed.
And when it was done, when the Dark One had worn his foe down to a bare name, when even the name was swallowed by darkness, when the house was gone and they stood on a barren plain in Tartarus, Belle looked up to find that they were not alone.
It wasn't that they were unfriendly or cruel to him. In life they had been his fellow countrymen, and in death...
This was his future. Baelfire couldn't help but find that unsettling. It was one thing when he was on the move with Emma and Lily, all his thoughts focused on finding a way back home. But now, waiting here in the town of the dead for the others to return with some news or plan of action, the thought crept up on him that someday, this would be his home.
The shades that had once been human, were no longer. They had breathed too long the air of Tartarus. They weren't flesh and blood of earth, but something other. Baelfire shivered. There was a bite to the wind here that was worse than Neverland. A weight that made time itself a torment. Would it have been better to have stayed in Neverland and taken his chances with Pan's games?
And what about Emma? Would she escape by virtue of her royal blood, or would she be damned by her association with the son of the Dark One?
Baelfire shook off the thought. The world was full of terrible things, but things could change. The ogres war had been an inevitability in his youth, until his father had ended it and brought the children home. They had paid a price, but that was something they both understood a little better these days. Even now, after everything that had happened, the boy's faith in his father still glimmered at the bottom of his heart.
It was the waiting that got to him. In a land of the dead, there was no clear enemy to fight, nor even the endless ordinary tasks that a life was woven from. By the nature of the realm, even those who were not dead were held in suspension. He envied Emma and Lily, who had gone off with Maleficent to pursue some magical solution or other.
"You'll wear a groove in the floor." Marceline, who had been watching him pace the confines of the town hall, gestured at him to join her where she sat with the Old Wife and Hyan Luize. "Come, have some tea." She poured another cup and offered it to him.
Baelfire sighed and nodded. The dead drank their memories from empty cups, but they had conjured something with more substance out of consideration for their guests. "Thank you, Lady Marceline." He forced a smile at the two shades, trying not to let their appearance disturb him. If this had been one of Pan's fireside tales of horror, they would have been hungry ghosts trying to trap him in the underworld with food or drink — but he knew they meant well. Life outside the stories was better and worse, both at once.
"Take heart," Hyan Luize said, seeming to sense something of his dismay. "Where there's life, there's hope... even in the land of the dead."
Baelfire scoffed, but he drank the tea anyway. All through his childhood, Papa had always comforted him with a cup of tea even when they had very little else. Now he felt guilty for wishing that his father was here with them. But instead of Rumplestiltskin miraculously showing up in Mulctowne, Belle vanished.
Taken, insisted Prometheus.
So then there was a mad flurry of activity, as the Titan claimed to be able to track her, and everyone else rushed after him to rescue Bae's stepmother. Another mad trek across the hellscape, then what looked from the distance to be a storm of magic, twisted in on itself like a cyclone. Even from here, he could hear the roaring of the wind where it scoured the ground beneath into a flattened, barren plain. Others converged on the same point from other directions, mutually coming to an unspoken agreement to stop at what might be considered a safe distance.
By the time he had a chance to stop and catch his breath, Baelfire didn't know what he was seeing. Far too many faces he didn't know — blood-drenched shades and demons — and two that he did know, but now doubted what he saw. Standing, facing each other in the eye of the storm—
"Papa?" Bae whispered, seized by fear of drawing their attention. "Belle?" His stomach lurched at a too-vivid memory of the morning his father had returned after killing Zoso. The Dark One, barely recognizable as Rumplestiltskin, had filled the air with the same suffocating terror that he felt now. And out of everyone on the plain, only Belle seemed untouched by that darkness. As if a light shone on her alone, a cold, alien light that rendered her almost unrecognizable.
Together they wrought magic that seemed as if it could tear the world apart, sparing neither living nor dead. The Dark One's eyes glowed with power, exulting in the destruction.
No. No, his father had changed. He was better now. This couldn't be his father. Bae remembered the nightmare vision of the Wood Beyond, where a gathering of doppelgangers had threatened them all with annihilation.
"It's not him," Baelfire muttered. "My father is safe in the lands of the living. This must be one of the ones killed in the battle..."
"No, you know better than that, silly boy." A short, slight figure had circled around the storm from the other side and now sidled up to Baelfire, shooting him a wan grin. His piping, child-like voice slithered adroitly through the noise to reach Baelfire's ear.
Baelfire recognized the elf with a start. "It's you! I don't understand. What... what happened to you? Are you dead?"
The elf, Otterskin, shook his head. "I am myself, and hope to keep it so."
"Papa owes you a favor," Bae remembered. "Wait. Did you make him come here? Did you do something to him, to make him..." He couldn't finish. He stared at the Dark One as another horrifying possibility occurred to him. "And Belle... are you the one who..."
"Perish the thought!" Otterskin cut him off. "If I had that kind of power, would I need to deal for a favor? The Titan, on the other hand..."
The Titan! Prometheus broke away from the crowd gathered on the perimeter, striding straight into the magical storm. Where the wind bit into him, sparks flew, but the Titan was more durable than any mortal creature. His voice shook the ground, penetrating the clamor of the storm. "Enough! Remember yourselves."