Author's note: Thanks everyone for the support. I appreciate the encouraging reviews, although I would like to say that I don't mind constructive criticism, either. And if any beta readers could help me out with this project and with future projects, I would appreciate it.

I don't own the show or the characters. I just occasionally dance with them in my head.

Yes, I'm crazy.

…..

Chapter 2

The wheel couldn't help him.

Nothing could help him forget when his shoulders still burned where she had touched him, the first human contact he had had without violence in decades. He couldn't think of much else when he closed his eyes and could still feel the ground shift beneath his feet when she had kissed him. And each time he opened his eyes again, her chipped cup was waiting on the pedestal across the room from his spinning wheel.

She had sat with him at the wheel. It was there that everything had almost changed.

Except, he was still a monster. He was still the ultimate power in the land. He was still on his quest.

He was still alone.

What he didn't expect out of being alone was the aching void that the owner of the chipped cup had left in him, a great gaping, singed space in him to rival the absence of his son.

He didn't expect her to be gone forever.

'He was cruel to her.'

Rumplestiltskin shut his eyes, but knew the cup would be waiting for him. He knew that he deserved the punishment of seeing it every day.

'He sent in clerics to cleanse her soul with scourges and flaying…'

Her blue eyes had shimmered like oceans at him as he had sent her away, his hand held up resolutely, a finger pointed to the door.

'My power means more to me-'

"NO!"

He shouted to the dark.

It was always dark.

He wouldn't crack open the curtains to allow a pale comparison of the light that she had cast with her presence. He wanted no false hope to tell him that she was in the castle somewhere, perhaps making a mess in the kitchen, sneaking into the library or dusting down some corridor she aught not to be in.

She was dead.

Dead.

The word cracked through his mind like an explosion. And when it faded, it left nothing but a hollow ache.

"She's…dead." He said it, a whisper, trying to align the fact to his reality.

He stayed at his spinning wheel, huddled among the shadows with his hands hung over his knees. He looked down at them, curling the fingers to hide the thick black claws from his view.

…

'Do the brave thing, and bravery will follow.'

Belle sighed as she examined both directions of the road outside the tavern and inn she had spent two weeks in, earning a small room and meals by cleaning. The night before she had met another soul longing as desperately as she was, and for the same reason. He was called Dreamy, and he was in love when he shouldn't be, and just as hopelessly blind about it as anyone else.

She had given Dreamy advice to seek out his love and take a chance that it might work, that it might be all the wonderful things Belle herself had briefly dreamt it could be when she was confident she could break an ancient curse and find the heart of a man who had tried so hard to lose himself to evil.

Belle peered south down the road, the direction that could eventually lead her back to her father's kingdom, somewhere she knew she would always be welcome. The road was smooth and worn enough to see. She turned the other way to look north, and eyed a road mostly overgrown and that sloped up rocky ridges with sparse trees. The way she had come from weeks ago. The way back to the Dark Castle.

'Do the brave thing, and bravery will follow.'

Why did she want to go back? What could she possibly have to say to the man who believed himself a monster and did everything he could to prove it to her?

'Love is layered. Love is a mystery to be uncovered.'

But was the mystery worth risking herself?

She grimaced, took a step towards the south, but stopped. She bit her lip, chewed at it. The sunlight streaming through the trees onto the grass made her think of shimmering skin and fathomless eyes.

She turned back, took a step towards the North, towards the rocky ground and the impending deep shadows waiting in the distance, and her heart clenched. She thought of Dreamy and the wonder on his face, the lost expression, half way between despair and elation, and she thought, yet again, of him. The way he peered at her through the spokes of his wheel and the string as if he had been holding it taught the entire time she'd been away. The tentative joy restrained in a neutral expression with a grin threatening the corners of his lips and eyes.

'I'm not unhappy…'

She thought of the cautious wonder on his face when she took the string from his hand and sat beside him.

Belle sighed, shook her shoulders, then straightened them. Her gaze became steely, a challenge to the shadows in her path as she trudged resolutely towards the north. "This is stupid. I know it must be. But the worst he'll probably do is just throw me out again."

The huntsman watched the girl stumble up the harsher path from the woods. He was undetected by his prey.

He felt a searing heat in his pocket, and with jaw clenched he pulled a small, square, plain glass mirror from the pocket and looked down at the perfectly polished appearance of the fair but evil Queen.

"She's heading back to Rumplestiltskin's lair. Do you want me to take her?"

The Queen grinned back at him from the small dingy mirror. "Heading back, you say? Well, that's interesting…no, let the little trollop crawl back to her master if she so chooses. My magic should keep her presence hidden until she arrives at his castle. I have a bigger task for you. It seems that dear Rumple has been careless about where he's last hidden something very, very precious. I want you to find it and retrieve it."

"An object?"

"Yes…" Her smile widened, all white teeth and bold red lipstick. "A dagger."