Author's note: I wanted to write something to celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Skin Deep", but it took me a bit longer than I planned, so here it is, a couple of weeks late...

Disclaimer: Some dialogue borrowed from canon, I do not own OUAT, yadda yadda.


It had been her idea to summon him, so Belle shouldn't have been surprised when the Dark One demanded her as his price for saving Avonlea. After all, Gaston had done much the same, negotiating for her hand in marriage to seal the alliance with Kaffmark.

Gaston was quick to stake his claim. "She's engaged to me."

"I didn't ask," the Dark One said in a sing-song voice. "I'm not looking for looove."

Not that she had ever promised love to Gaston. She wasn't even sure if he was capable of love, or if he had excised that possibility with his conversion. Radical Cybernetic Conversion Therapy was out of reach for most, but as a member of the ruling family of Kaffmark — Kaffmark being one of the more stable and prosperous frontier settlements — he could afford it. Now his cold cyborg eyes betrayed nothing of his feelings, but his stance was possessive.

Gaston placed himself between Belle and the Dark One, physically looming over the smaller man (demon, said one rumor, genetically modified parahuman, said another). His obvious size and strength, displayed in the gleaming metal of his enhanced artificial body, was a silent advertisement of his worth as the savior of Avonlea. The Dark could gain no foothold inside that armored skull.

In contrast, the Dark One danced across the room in his spiky leather and glittering scaly skin, reptilian eyes full of mirth. "I'm looking for an assistant for my... research."

"Research?" demanded her father. Maurice closed ranks with Gaston, preferring the familiar option, however distasteful, to the unknown darkness that the maybe-demon threatened. Gaston's family would only protect Avonlea long enough to extract its resources and evacuate their people to Kaffmark, thus disposing of a potential rival and consolidating its own power in one stroke. Everyone knew that, yet public opinion remained divided as to the best option. "I won't have you corrupt my daughter as you did the Evil Queen."

"You needn't worry. The terms of my summoning were clear. If the Dark enters Avonlea, it won't be my doing." The Dark One's smile dared them to challenge him.

"The Dark One never breaks a deal," Belle reminded them. She had included that stipulation to ensure that Avonlea didn't go the way of the 'lost settlement'. A generation after its fall, Misthaven and its 'Evil Queen' were still whispered about as a cautionary tale. Otherwise she wouldn't have garnered enough popular support to make her proposal feasible. "He will stop the demons from overrunning our settlement and keep them out. The people will be safe."

"The 'people'! And what about you, my girl?" Maurice slammed a fist onto the table. "What about your safety?" He glared at the demon. "What kind of research could Belle possibly assist you with?"

"Research of a... personal, and confidential, nature," said the Dark One with a suggestive smirk and rolled eye. He pointed at Belle. "It's her, or no deal."

"Get out!" Maurice pulled Belle behind him. "Leave."

"As you wish." The Dark One turned as if to go.

"No, wait!" Belle called out before they missed their chance. She hurried past her father towards the Dark One. "I will go with you."

"I forbid it!" Gaston's eyes glowed red, and everyone could feel the thrumming pressure as his weapons systems powered up.

Belle ignored him. She focused on the Dark One, whose inhuman eyes were so much more alive than Gaston's robotic gaze. "I've made my decision. In return for my personal assistance — and discretion — you will save Avonlea? My friends, my family — they will all live?"

"You have my word." And so the deal was struck. They walked out of the conference room together, his hand lightly pressing against the small of her back. They started down the corridor towards the stairwell, but never made it past the first step.

The world went dark around them. For an agonizing moment, Belle felt as if she was being wrenched inside out, the wind of nullspace ripping at her soul and abrading her thoughts. Only the touch of the Dark One's hand against her back kept her whole. Then they fell back into reality, and Belle dropped to her knees, retching blindly into the snow.


The Dark One had a name, but few dared utter it, not wanting to draw his attention. Belle had found it recorded in one of the dusty annals of Sumayan history, one of the ones written shortly after the Purge.

"Rumplestiltskin." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and whispered the name half to herself. She had known his reputation, but it was different to experience it firsthand. Who else could walk in and out of the void on the strength of his bare will and remain this human?

"Yes, dearie?"

"Call me Belle." She lurched to her feet and looked around. They stood in a snow-covered field in a hollow beneath rocky peaks, the sky distorted by the shimmer of a force field that blunted the white blaze of the sun. Ahead of them was a weathered compound of some kind. "That... that's the Dark Castle?"

Everyone knew the Dark One had a hidden base somewhere in the remote mountains.

"Mmm."

As they came closer to the buildings, Belle recognized the architecture. "Is that...? That's one of the old terraforming stations!" Her voice rose in excitement at the thought of what secrets might be preserved inside, saved from the collective madness that had spurred the original colonists into an orgy of destruction. Fear of the Dark One was displaced by curiosity. This deal, whatever its drawbacks, might turn out far better than anticipated. Even if he really only wanted her for her body, as Maurice had seemed to fear, she could still learn something here. "I didn't realize any of them were still intact..."

Not only the terraforming station, but also one of its original crew had survived. They were met at the gate by the oldest cyborg Belle had ever seen. Precisely how old, she couldn't say — neither he nor the Dark One were listed in the Registry..

"Dove, this is Belle, my new research assistant." Rumplestiltskin gestured in introduction. "Dove is the chief caretaker of the Dark Castle."

Belle thought she caught a disapproving glower from the cyborg. "You don't like it being called that?"

"Superstitious nonsense," grumbled Dove, but he seemed to take the Dark One at his word about a research assistant.

The Dark One had merely been trolling Gaston with his innuendo, then. Belle could have told him it was pointless: a sense of humor was definitely one of the things Gaston had lost in the process of conversion, if he had ever possessed one to begin with.

"Ah, ah, ah." Rumplestiltskin wagged a finger. "All the remnants of the first landing were eradicated and are obligated to stay eradicated. The Dark Castle, on the other hand, is the notorious lair of the notorious evil sorcerer known as the Dark One!"

Belle suppressed a smile at the notorious evil sorcerer's theatrical streak. "I see."

"Come along. Crew quarters are in the east wing. Dove cleared out a room for you." Rumplestiltskin set off without looking back.

Belle followed, lagging behind out of curiosity. The so-called Dark Castle was in fact dimly lit, dusty and cluttered with boxes and crates and shelves everywhere, filled with machinery in various states of disassembly, cables, bolts, tools, and tattered manuals and notebooks. She picked up one of the notebooks and flipped through it, finding scrawled diagrams, messy equations, and cryptic notes. Then, seeing the Dark One vanishing down a corridor, she dropped the notebook and jogged after him. Belle hoped he didn't expect her to use pen and paper herself. Her handwriting was dreadful.

He turned a corner and pushed open another door. "Kitchen." Continued past into another building. "East wing." The rooms there were as cluttered as she had come to expect, except for the bedroom and bathroom at the end of the corridor. "Here."

It was clean, the bed made up with fresh sheets, the furniture free of dust. She checked the plumbing (functional) and the antiquated printer (ditto). The walls were a bland off-white, but there was an intricate geometric pattern of circles and triangles painted on the inside of the door.

Rumplestiltskin caught the direction of her gaze. "Mandala. Keeps the Dark from getting into your head while you're asleep..."

Belle shivered. She cleared her throat. "Right. Suppose I'll have to be careful where I take a nap, then."

"Indeed. And be careful what you eat. Don't take anything out of the kitchen." He stepped back into the hallway. "I'll see you tomorrow."


There was a spinning wheel in his office.

"It helps me think."

"Straw into gold?" Belle remembered the fairy tale.

He shook his head. "Plant fibers into thread, for the most part. There's an agricultural research facility attached to this outpost... a farm, in other words. Something of a hobby for Dove, who likes to do things the old-fashioned way."

"You're Atavists!" That explained the handwritten notebooks, though wouldn't Atavist beliefs pose a quandary for a cyborg who was intrinsically a product of advanced technology?

"A long time ago. My aunts who raised me were members of a Folkways enclave." He sighed, fidgeting with the wheel. "Hence the fanciful name they bestowed on me. We were textile specialists..." His clothes didn't look like they had come out of the printer.

"All right, but what about Dove?" Belle burned with curiosity. "Was he one of the original team stationed here? Or...? What really happened to them?"

Rumplestiltskin said without looking at her, "Long gone. He was the only one left by the time I stumbled across this place, and he was in deep hibernation mode... we made a deal."

"So you taught him to farm the 'old-fashioned way'?"

"It kept his mind off things. When we first met, he had already jettisoned most of his personal memories." After a pause, Rumplestiltskin added, "Perhaps I should have done the same."


Not all of the Dark One's 'old-fashioned' skills were as harmless as writing or spinning by hand, as Belle found out to her dismay when her tour of the compound took them to the warehouse where he kept his prisoners. She almost regretted asking him the question.

"You wondered how I ended your little siege? I told them to go, that's all." Rumplestiltskin held the heavy steel door open for her. "Most of them had the sense to listen."

She stepped warily across the threshold. At first she was enveloped in an inrush of wintry air into the warmer interior, but then the door slammed shut behind her and the clean scent of the outdoors sank under a fetid miasma. She shuddered. Worse than the smell was the sensation of a cruel darkness crawling into her soul. What is this place? Her eyes adjusted to the dimness and she saw—

"The stubborn ones I brought here."

Cages. Rows of steel-barred cubes filled the central floor of the warehouse. Most were empty, but at least a dozen were occupied. Eyes. Too many eyes staring at them, and an eerie silence.

"Wh-what are you going to do with them?" Belle stammered, clutching her hands together and bringing them up in a subconscious gesture of warding. She was beginning to sweat underneath her winter jacket, but instinct kept her fully zipped, as if a few layers of fabric could shield her from whatever horrors lurked in the shadows.

"Oh, I'll find a use for them." Then he giggled, a high-pitched mockery of childish innocence that set her teeth on edge. He opened the cage closest to them and reached inside, grabbing the prisoner by the scruff of its neck and hauling it out to present to Belle. It dropped to its knees, face tilted towards her.

She stared, having never seen a demon from such a close range before. It must have been human, once, and still retained the outline of its original shape. The torn and dirty remnants of human clothing hung from its body. A body that oozed and writhed under a skin that resolved under her gaze into a swarm of interlocking segmented larvae with too many legs. The eyes were glistening pools of oily black that opened into the void. For a moment, Belle felt the same stomach-wrenching sensation of her soul being drawn into darkness as in her unnatural journey from Avonlea to the Dark Castle.

Then it was as if a deeper shadow had fallen, a black hole to drink in all the light in the room. She felt as if she had gone blind, though she could still see clearly the scaly hand that seemed to caress the demon's face. Rumplestiltskin leaned down from behind to whisper something in its ear. A twirling flourish with his free hand. A dagger with a serpentine edge appeared between his fingers. It held a word, black letters on silver metal, but before Belle could read the word, the Dark One sliced the blade across the demon's neck faster than her eye could follow. The next moment it was bleeding out onto the floor, going limp and held up only by the Dark One's grip.

Belle gasped. She stuffed a knuckle into her mouth to stifle a scream, instinct now telling her not to draw the monster's notice. Her limbs were frozen, however much she longed to flee.

Seething with darkness, Rumplestiltskin let go of the corpse and grinned at her. "Another one for my trophy room!"

Belle couldn't breathe. She closed her eyes, but the Dark was already there, waiting with a vision of a circle of taxidermied demons surrounding her. They leered at her and shuffled forward...

This time she did scream. She snapped out of her frozen state, blinking away the vision and stumbling away in terror. Then her back hit a shelf, the rickety metal frame wobbling under the impact. Something crashed to the floor behind her, but she didn't dare turn around to look. She edged sideways, feeling for the door.

Rumplestiltskin stared at her, making no move to pursue or attack her. With a flick of his hand, the dagger vanished, and the aura of menace began to ebb. After an uneasy silence, he said in a subdued voice, "That was a quip. Not serious!"

"Right," was about all Belle could manage. She turned around, needing a distraction. A mug rolled at the touch of her foot. That must have been what fell. She crouched down to pick it up, only then noticing the chip on its rim. Oh shit. What if that was his favorite coffee mug? She imagined him slitting her throat as casually as he had done to the demon. She shuddered, forcing herself to straighten, her legs shaky as she turned back and showed him the mug. "I'm... uh, I'm so sorry, but it's chipped. You can barely see it!"

Rumplestiltskin stared back at her. At last, he shrugged. "It's just a cup."

Belle breathed again.


Not a trophy. Meat.

Belle almost emptied her stomach again when she found out. She stared at her bowl of stew in horror.

"No, no, no. Nothing but vat-grown proteins in your bowl, dearie," Rumplestiltskin was quick to assure her.

"But you said..."

"I am a monster, and must feed as monsters do."

She swallowed, trying to ignore the churning in her gut as she listened to Rumplestiltskin explain. He bore a taint of the void. At some point (who knew how long ago?) he had let the Dark in and it had changed him, just as it had changed the demons that assailed the human settlements. He was a demon, and in order to survive in this world, he needed to drain the — soul, he said, but that was an imprecise translation — life essence from a sapient organic lifeform. The lesser evil was the best he could hope for: better another demon than an innocent human.

"Are you sure you haven't been eating the cleaning robots? This place is awfully dusty," Belle said at last, trying to lighten the mood.

He smiled faintly. "Cheeky little thing, aren't you?" But the corners of his eyes relaxed, a barely perceptible relief behind the smirk — that she hadn't run away screaming? She wondered suddenly how many research assistants he had hired before her, but didn't ask, not now, when it would sound like an accusation.


Forbidden research. It didn't take her long to figure that much out.

"If Earthgov finds out what you're doing..." The New Earth Central Authority was the human government. Their support was vital to the survival of the outer settlements, which was why Avonlea had been in such desperate straits when Earthgov had decided to cut their losses and stop pouring resources into a lost cause.

"Earthgov!" Rumplestiltskin scoffed. "They know nothing. None of those imbeciles have even laid eyes on Earth."

Not even from a galaxy away, she thought. The location was lost, deliberately erased to keep the Dark from retracing their route back to their home system. But from the way he spoke— "And you have?"

He fell silent then, turning away, but not before she caught a glimpse of sorrow in his eyes.

So it was true. He was that old, and born under the light of a different sun.

"Never mind that." He fumbled in a desk drawer. "Give me your arm."

He was old enough that the data crystals he used were incompatible with modern standards. How lonely that must be, she thought with a pang, to live long enough to see your world forgotten. No wonder Dove had chosen to live only in the present.

Belle stretched her left hand onto his desk, palm upward. With her other hand, she opened the panel on her wrist to expose the data port implanted inside.

His black-clawed fingers on her skin were gentle, his movements precise as he installed the modified code.

When he was done, she caught his hand and smiled. "Thanks."

His eyes went wide and startled. Then he hopped back, fingers twisting awkwardly against themselves after she loosed her grip. "Yes, well, you'd hardly be any use otherwise, dearie!"


At first he only trusted her far enough to have her check his calculations in bits and pieces carefully stripped of context. It was one thing to guess that his research was forbidden, but that wasn't the same as being able to report specific transgressions to Earthgov.

"This is stupid. I can help you. I want to help." The last sentence slipped out with more feeling than Belle had intended, but it was true. The prickly, skittish Dark One had grown on her, and even more so the rather quiet, shy man she glimpsed behind the mask.

"Why?"

"I just do." Belle knew that whatever he was trying to do, it was far more than an intellectual exercise. It was something important enough that he had forsaken his Atavist roots and spent years — centuries — teaching himself advanced mathematics and engineering in painstaking, careful steps. She had caught him in moments of heartwrenching stillness, staring unseeing at a page in his notebook, pen forgotten between his fingers. "You saved Avonlea."

He grunted in derision. "A deal."

"In which I promised my discretion," she reminded him.

He turned away without answering, and Belle sighed, returning to collating data from what seemed to be some kind of computer simulation.

A week later, he relented, though he pretended it was all his own idea. Bit by bit, the direction of his research became clearer to Belle.

Nullspace. The Dark. Stardrive technology. A reconstruction of the voyage of the colony ship — the voyage that had been brutally interrupted by humanity's first encounter with the demons. Something had happened to him on that voyage, Belle knew. The Dark had touched him, changed him. The darkness that weighed so heavily on him... she had heard the self-loathing in his voice when he spoke of himself as a monster, seen the expression on his face after he had frightened her.

He's trying to find his way out of the Dark. She didn't dare ask, and he didn't say, but it was the obvious conclusion. It was thought impossible, but Rumplestiltskin was a determined man. Paranoid and secretive, but determined. Belle had realized early on that she was his first research assistant. No wonder his progress was so slow, if he had been working alone all these years.

"Not alone," he corrected her when she remarked on it. Apparently, there was at least one engineer mad enough to help the Dark One and wise enough to hold his tongue. Just as well, considering Belle had no training at all in anything 'hands-on' (was even considered clumsy by her peers!). She was proficient in mathematics and coding, and had an amateur enthusiasm for history, but in her previous life, everything had been manufactured and kept in working order by maintenance robots and automated factories.

"So, how is it I've never seen him around?"

"We had a bit of a disagreement," Rumplestiltskin grumbled. "He'll come around, always does in the end."


Spring came, and passed into summer. Belle spent more of her time outside. Lonely as the Dark Castle was, the surroundings were stunningly beautiful, with dramatic peaks in the distance and colorful fields, meadows, and woods close by. Dove, taciturn as ever, tended to the fields and the small collection of livestock he had apparently bred over the years. Inside the Dark One's boundaries, no other demon dared trouble them.

Belle picked wild flowers and brought them inside, using a glass flask as a vase and arranging it on the kitchen table. The kitchen with its attached dining area, spacious enough to serve an entire station's crew but now only used by two (three, on the days that Dove cooked) people, had become something of a lounge where they lingered long after their meals were cleared away.

It was there that Rumplestiltskin gifted her with a white blouse and blue linen dress. He affected a nonchalant air when she thanked him. "Just keeping up the skills my aunties taught me..."

As if it was nothing, as if it meant nothing. Every thread was spun and woven and dyed by hand. She could only imagine the hours of meticulous labor he had put into it, never mind the years required to master such skills. Once upon a time every piece of clothing had been made this way, through methods passed down through the generations. "They must have been remarkable women."

He sat on the edge of the table, watching her from the corner of his eyes. "They were the kindest people I ever knew. I always wanted to be just like them." His fingers twisted in his lap. "But fate has a vile sense of humor."

Belle hopped onto the table next to him, keeping only a minimum of distance between them. By now she had an instinct for how close she could get before he fled. "Hmm."

"They raised me to be a pacifist, you know. The Folkways creed tells us that we can achieve peace without artificial coercion."

"Human history would suggest otherwise," mused Belle.

"You're a student of history, are you?"

"I like to read."

He chuckled. "Yes, I've noticed."

However isolated they were in the Dark Castle, Rumplestiltskin still maintained a line to the human world, although only through several anonymizing nodes, under well-masked aliases and deep encryption. As long as Belle didn't break the confidentiality clause of their deal, she was free to download whatever books she wanted from the net. Sometimes Rumplestiltskin even offered up his personal recommendations, in a shy, oblique way that kept up a thin layer of plausible deniability.


Summer gave way to fall, fall to winter, and then it had been a full year at the Dark Castle. The second spring after her arrival, Belle claimed a section of the grounds for her own small garden, borrowing seeds from Dove's collection to plant flowers, herbs, and a few vegetables. The beans were a success, the squash less so, falling victim to an insect pest. Rumplestiltskin laughed and congratulated her when she waved her handful of knobbly beans under his nose, but refused to use his dark powers to wreak vengeance on the squash-killers.

"Wouldn't want to unbalance the ecosystem," he told her loftily. "You'll just have to take care of it by hand, the old-fashioned way."

Well. She knew that, really, and had no real desire to unleash an unnatural darkness into the food supply. It was only that she was squeamish about touching small wriggly things.

Rumplestiltskin left now and then to make his deals. She avoided him on the days he came back with prisoners, having no desire to witness any more of his butchery. But other times he brought home rare treasures, or crates of broken machinery scavenged from a junkyard, or a box filled with rocks. Sometimes she understood the purpose of an acquisition; other times it remained a mystery (possibly even to himself). Sometimes he brought little gifts for Belle — food from her favorite restaurants, or the latest street gossip from Avonlea, or from the capital.

Belle was in one of the base's abundance of workshops sorting through the latest batch of junk when she found an antique hand mirror at the bottom of a crate.

"A wonder it wasn't broken," she muttered to herself, admiring the decorative metalwork. If it wasn't a modern reproduction, it could be a family heirloom from old Earth! She found it strange that Rumplestiltskin would want such a thing, unless he had simply taken the lot without checking the contents in detail. She supposed that was why he had assigned her to look through the crates and update the inventory. "Maybe he'll let me keep it."

The Dark One had an aversion to reflective surfaces. The only actual mirror in the Dark Castle, as far as she knew, was the one in her bathroom. Sometimes she tried to tell him he wasn't as ugly as he thought he was, but he never believed her. She hoped eventually to show him by her own actions that she was not repulsed. Not even afraid, not really. She had witnessed his gift for violence first-hand — he had made a point of showing her — but she had also seen that he was more than the darkness, despite the name he took for himself.

Well, if he didn't want to look in the mirror, she would just do her best to reflect his best self back at him. She turned the mirror in her hands this way and that, examining the details.

A stray beam of light from a tiny window high on the outside wall hit the mirror and bounced at a wild angle to sweep over an interior wall. The motion of the light revealed a faint discontinuity that Belle had never noticed before.

"That's odd..." Belle stood up, dropping the mirror on a workbench before heading to check the wall. It turned out that the metal panels included a section of cabinets with magnetic locks, probably controlled by the old station AI. She had come across similar cabinets elsewhere, but with the original AI now defunct, Rumplestiltskin used an override to open them. By the look of it, these had not been used in decades or even longer. But it seemed entropy took its toll — one of the panels hung slightly ajar, which was the discontinuity that had caught Belle's eye.

Drawn irresistibly by curiosity to peek inside, Belle touched the panel gingerly, pulling it properly open. Inside the cabinet, a neatly folded cloth lay on the bottom, while on the middle shelf rested a plastic tray that held three data crystals.

The cloth was faded and threadbare from use, fragile. She examined it carefully before replacing it in the cabinet. It was small, perhaps a scarf? Or— "A baby blanket?"

Rumplestiltskin had never mentioned a child, so who had this belonged to? Had it been made for him as a baby? By his beloved aunts, at a guess. A sentimental gesture to keep it so long and so carefully preserved. But why hidden away? Was he that ashamed to remember the innocent boy he must once have been? The thought made her ache for him.

Her eyes turned to the data crystals. She knew she shouldn't pry, and yet... she wondered what they held, why they were hidden away with his baby blanket.

Then another thought occurred to her. What if Rumplestiltskin had removed some of his own memories, just as Dove had, only more selectively? And what if those memories held the answers he was looking for? Only he could never see it, because he had forgotten that he had done this to himself, and thereafter spent years going around in mental circles.

Belle's lips parted in a gasp of excitement, seized by the conviction that she had guessed right. "That's it!"

She could help him find his way back to the man beneath the darkness. A way out of the misery he was trapped in, burdened by so much self-hatred. She began to turn, to find him and tell him. Then she paused, her hand on the edge of the cabinet. No, she should check first, make sure, before she gave him false hope.

She felt a twinge of guilt as she picked up a crystal at random. I'm just trying to help him, she told herself, trying not to think about just why she was so determined to help him. It was more than the deal, more than saving Avonlea. She shook the thought away, focusing on the crystal. She plugged it into her wrist port. Just as she began the download, she heard familiar footsteps approaching. Rumplestiltskin had a way of 'coincidentally' crossing paths with her throughout the day, a habit she found amusing and endearing, but now a trifle inconvenient. She hastily yanked out the crystal, hoping he wouldn't notice.

"Rumple!" Belle turned with a smile. "I wanted to ask you—" Then the smile and the words died in her throat, withering under the furious glare on the Dark One's face. Shocked, she dropped the data crystal back into the tray and turned fully towards him. "No, wait..."

"You. What are you doing?" His voice was as harsh as she had ever heard it. "How did you open that?"

"I found it that way." She shrank back as he took a step closer. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pried, but—"

He stopped. He glanced around, as if something had caught his eye. Then his gaze stopped on the mirror on the table. He picked it up, a snarl twisting his face. "You're working for her!"

"What? Who?"

"The queen! The Evil Queen!" He hurled the mirror at her. Belle flinched, feeling the impact as it crashed into the closed panel next to her. "How did she get to you?"

"She, she didn't." Belle struggled to understand. Where was all this coming from? "Listen, I was trying to help you, I—"

He stalked towards her, spitting more accusations, his voice soft and deadly. "She sent you to spy on me. I should have known it was too good to be true. I should have known it was all a trick! Finding out my weaknesses... is this you being a hero, destroying the beast?"

"I wouldn't! You must know that, deep down." She met his gaze as bravely as she could, seeking the man under the raging storm of darkness. She had to make him believe. She opened her mouth again, words rushing out before she could take them back, "I would never hurt you. I love you!"

Rumplestiltskin froze. His eyes went wide and vulnerable. A heartbeat of silence. Then all the pain and anger came crashing back into his face. "Shut up!"

"No, wait!" Belle felt his fingers dig claw-like into her arms. "Why won't you believe me?"

His voice rose to a shout, shaking her with the force of his denial. "Because no one, no one could ever, ever love me!"

Darkness closed in around her. The Dark One shoved her into the void, and she felt herself hurtling through the nauseating nothingness of nullspace. When light returned to the world, Rumplestiltskin was nowhere to be seen. Belle fell to her knees on grass and dirt and leaves rather than the smooth cold cement of the Dark Castle workshop. She tilted her head up to squint at the unfiltered glare of the sky, blinking back tears.

She sat there in utter shock. She had no idea where she even was. It felt like a dream. A nightmare. Except that the antique hand mirror had landed on the ground next to her. She picked it up in a daze, shaking the shards of broken glass out of the frame. Then she hissed in sudden loathing and flung it away as hard as she could. Was it really the Evil Queen's mirror? Belle didn't know, but she didn't want it near her. She scooted away in the opposite direction, sitting down again in the sheltered shade under the slanting side of a large boulder.

Oh, Rumple. She didn't understand his accusations. There was a history there that Belle didn't know. More secrets. She let out a sobbing breath and hugged her legs, dropping her head to rest against her knees. She hoped after he had time to calm down, Rumplestiltskin would realize his mistake and come back for her. She would stay here and wait — if she wandered off, he might not be able to find her even if he wanted to.

What if he doesn't?

As the minutes ticked into hours, the thought grew heavier in her mind. What if he truly hated her, or worse, didn't care about her at all? What if he talked himself into removing herself from his memories? What if demons found her first and killed her? Belle shivered, suddenly cold. This was the first time she had been out beyond the walls, in the world outside the settlements or the Dark Castle. All her life she had known how dangerous it was outside, and even inside. Demons had nearly destroyed Avonlea.

She wasn't even armed. At least she was wearing her work clothes, not the dress that Rumple had given her: if she had to make a run for it, there was less chance of something snagging on a rock or a branch. She wondered sadly if her dress would be hidden away in another cabinet, or perhaps Rumple would incinerate his own handiwork in his anger at her betrayal.

Don't think that way! she admonished herself. There was no use feeling sorry for herself.

She had betrayed him, poking into things she had no right to. I'm sorry.

But when night fell, and there was no sign of Rumplestiltskin (not even after she had tried calling his name out loud until she was afraid of what other attention she might attract), she let the stolen memories percolate into her consciousness. They were fragmented and incomplete, due to the download being cut off unexpectedly, but they were his, just as she had guessed.

If he's abandoned me to die out here, at least I can die with half a clue, she thought resentfully.


Next up: Belle sticks her head in the pensieve and views "Rumple's worst memory", LOL.