He kept his promise, the one he'd made to Belle and the silent one he'd made to himself. He didn't work while he was up in the cabin, though his mind spun plans with every lazy turn of his wheel. He didn't work magic, didn't make potions, didn't experiment. He just spent the time he had with Belle, enjoyed her presence, the privacy, and even the silence where their conversation about Baelfire should have been. It hadn't been the right time to tell her, not after the conversation they had that morning. But because of the deal they'd made, he realized that he didn't have to tell her, not yet. He was far from creating a potion to go over the town line, and with another weekend promised in the cabin for the next week, he promised himself that he'd make space for that conversation. And then, once they were back home, once she was settled into bed and fell asleep in his arms…it was back to work.

For the last two nights, he'd followed the same procedure, asking her to roll over so he could go to the restroom, dressing in the bathroom, then kissing her head and pushing magic into her mind to keep the dreams of Regina at bay while he worked so that she could get some sleep. He retreated to the basement, still using the outer metal doors to enter so that Belle wouldn't become suspicious of the basement door he hadn't told her about or given her access to yet. The second he entered the basement, he made sure to turn every thought he had toward his experiments, toward finding Baelfire.

Step One: he had to figure out if the Curse at the Townline reacted differently to different strengths of magic. That was easy enough to figure out but time-consuming. He managed to take some of the Curse he'd taken from the town line duplicate it safely. Once it was secure, he sat down at his wheel and began spinning thread into gold. It was simple, perhaps, but that was what he wanted. He didn't want to use various potions of varying strengths and then break them apart and figure out if different ingredients were causing the Curse to react a certain way or affect the magic. He just wanted to see the effect of a single constant source of magic with various strengths. The easiest way to do that was to spin his gold, pushing various strengths of magic in as he went.

He recorded everything in his latest Chronicles book. There was no such thing as saying that a single strand of gold possessed 50% or 10% or 90% of his magic. But he ranked every strand of gold that first night on a scale of one to five. One for the weakest magic he used, five for the strongest. Once he assigned each thread a rank, he made a note about the power of the magic he possessed, what something that strong might be used for just to give him something tangible to understand night by night instead of trying to recapture a feeling. The weakest of the golden thread he made had power sufficient to run a tracking potion, nearly nothing at all. The strongest of the golden thread he made had the power to enact A Curse of the Mind…strong, powerful stuff indeed that was.

One by one, over the course of the first night, he'd spun his magic, made his notes, and dropped a bit of each strand into a bit of the curse to see how it reacted. Magical strength certainly made a difference. The Curse held those with the weakest of magic for hardly any time, and they fell through the invisible barrier in each glass bauble with barely enough time to glow blue. Those that possessed stronger magic lingered, however, caught up in its grasp. Those strands hit the barrier, then appeared to float for a time as they glowed blue before falling to the bottom. Every strand that was somewhere in between strong and weak reacted appropriately somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

The second night, tonight, was a near repeat of the previous night, only with one added element. A "before" trial and an "after" trial. This time around, tonight, before he'd begun to spin his thread, he'd worked up a simple potion that was capable of glowing, creating a purple light when magic was added to it. Except he didn't add magic. He prepared the potion as he normally would, but without that single element, it wouldn't work properly until it had magic added. It was something he'd come up with at the shop that day after taking out a battery to fix something and then replacing it to see if it worked. In this case, his magic, the gold thread, was the battery. When he applied each strand of gold, he wanted to see how they glowed before the strand went through the Curse and then measure how it glowed after it had gone through the Curse. He was testing to see if the Curse took all magic from whatever it held in its grip or just a portion of it.

Trial after trial, he was learning something new with each attempt. The strands of magic that held neither weak nor strong magic did the worst. After being dropped into the beaker a second time, he found some traces of magic left on them, but not a lot. They were drained nearly dry by the border's magic. The thread with the strongest of magic faired about the same. It retained some magic, but not a lot. The threads that contained the weakest magic, however, when he returned it to the beakers for its final trial, he found that they were nearly untouched.

It was both shocking and predictable at the same time. He'd seen magic like that before. It was magic that had kept the town running when they were still Cursed. He could remember being roused from the Curse far too early and using magic carefully to find Mary Margaret and David. He'd used a simple spell then, understanding that the magic it used was so small the Curse would take more energy to drain that magic and use it for itself than it would if the magic just puttered out. His discovery was good. Great even! The border magic acted like the magic that had been in Storybrooke before the Curse broke. He could work with that. Now, he just had to get to the bottom of the memories and figure out how he, a creature of strong, powerful magic, was going to convince the border that he was a creature of limited magic. And how to keep his memories. That would be key.

If he could figure out how to-

His stomach dropped as he finally wandered back into the house and the world he'd been walking through on a cloud suddenly shifted back into perspective. He'd stayed too long in the basement, gotten too entangled to look at the clock, but now he felt the later rays of dawn reaching forward to slap him back into his reality. The sun was out. It was morning. Late morning. And Belle was awake.

She sat in one of the easy chairs off the kitchen with a mug of tea in her hands, staring out the window into the sun…until he came inside. Slowly, she turned her head to look over at him and the expression he saw made his stomach clench. She wasn't happy.

"Hey," he greeted, attempting to sound cheerful even though his mouth had gone dry.

"Hi," she breathed, moving out of the armchair. His heart was racing. The Darkness inside of him was pushing down an emotion he recognized but didn't understand. Fear. Why was he afraid? He was the Dark One, and he'd been in his own basement, in his own house, working on magic while Belle slept upstairs. What was there to be afraid of? The way she moved? The way she looked at him? She wasn't happy…why did that rouse fear?

"What are you doing?" she asked, setting her tea on the counter. What had he been doing? That only made the pounding of his heart louder in his ears.

"I was, uh…going to make you breakfast!" he answered with a smile she didn't appreciate.

"No, i-in the basement! I saw you practicing magic."

He felt cold just before the numbness set in. He felt like he was hardly breathing. She'd seen him. She'd seen what he was doing, working with magic. He knew how she felt about it, knew that it was unlikely to understand; that's why he'd been hiding it from her. He hadn't told her why he needed his magic yet. He hadn't told her about Baelfire.

As he grabbed the orange juice out of the refrigerator, he used the cold to center him, to allow another thought to creep in. He was nervous that she'd caught him and was upset, but maybe it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Maybe it was good. Maybe the fact that he'd come in late, and she'd seen him could be used as a bridge. Maybe it was the perfect excuse to sit her down and finally tell her, get this weight he'd been carrying off his chest. They could make breakfast, sit at the table, and he could explain about Baelfire and why he needed magic to find him. She'd understand…wouldn't she?

"How about some breakfast?"

"No, we need to talk about this!"

Then again, maybe she wouldn't.

"It was just a couple of spells. Nothing to be concerned about."

"Okay, then be honest with me. Why did you bring magic here?"

"I've told you. Magic is power."

"Why do you need it," she stressed.

This was it. This was the moment he'd been waiting for, the natural lead-in to the conversation he'd been trying to have with her for weeks now! For Baelfire! The words were right there on the tip of his tongue. They were spoken in a voice that belonged not to a Dark One or the Seer but the small one that once belonged to a cowardly spinner. They were his own words.

But try as he may to get them out, they never came.

"Tell me!" his greatest love demanded. Their deal, the one he'd tricked her into thinking that they'd made, she meant to invoke it now. If he had any chance in convincing her that they'd made that deal, that he hadn't tricked her, then he needed to say something. A truth or a lie-anything!

He opened his mouth, hoping something might spill out for him. No sound came out. The look on her face as each quiet moment passed was too much. Fear rose inside of him, and the Dark Ones rebelled, seeing weakness in him. They reached forward and stole his words, whispered their own in his ear, things that he could tell her in place of the truth.

But nothing came. No words, no sound, no lie, no truth. He was stuck, caught between a rock and a hard place he didn't understand.

And then Belle's gaze saddened, rending his soul in two.

"You don't need power, Rumple. You need courage…to let me in."

And we made it to 2x04! Yay! About freaking time, right! I told you it was going to be a long time between our last "seen scene" in 2x01 and 2x04, but hopefully, as promised, I made the wait worth it by really growing their relationship.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Grace5231973 and Alarda, for your reviews! This scene in the show was really short, and I had a really fun time figuring out what experimenting he might have been doing the night before that could match the knowledge here so far and make what we saw on screen make sense. I hope that I accomplished that! Thank you, 4th-grade scientific method knowledge, for helping to get me through that! Peace and Happy Reading!