Belle had resumed looking through Rumple's diary entries, engrossed in the insights it held. As she read she discovered it was a book Rumple had kept as he found out more about the curse he had fallen into. Most of it was in note form, a few scribbles told of the physical changes, things she already knew about. Others held information about his abilities.
Mostly she was shown how much he had enjoyed the power he now held and in those boastful words she saw something quite different even from the man she had first met. He was so proud of his new abilities that he revelled in the suffering he caused.
There is a way to change how I look. Zoso could but I haven't found it yet. He was weak. Why change my appearance when now people know to cower in fear? They are right to be afraid. I am better than those peasants.
There were some sections where there was no legible point to the notes, he had written something as a reminder to himself, possibly as some kind of puzzle he was working on.
As she read she found parts of him she recognised. There were frequent mentions of Bae, keeping him inside, ways to protect him, people who were out to get him. That was earlier in the book and she wondered - as she looked at the frantic scribbles with side notes and footnotes scrawled around each point - how much of it was in fact paranoid illusion. She began to consider the situation from the boy's point of view.
She knew the story of how Bae had got away from him, left for a different world and Rumple had been too afraid to follow him. She suddenly understood how much losing his son had changed the man. In this book his magic was clearly everything to him and he was excited to describe the discovery of a new ability every time.
However when Belle had known him he had regretted losing Bae more than anything. She knew what he would have given for the chance to go back in time and follow Bae into whatever realm he had travelled to. Hindsight is always better than foresight. That is, until foresight is an actual magical ability.
"Oh Rumple, what a mess." She sighed and immediately startled when she looked over the top of her book to see the very man on the seat at his spinning wheel, watching her sadly.
"I'm aware." He gave a subdued impression of his usual snark and she furrowed her brow as she concentrated deeply. She carefully pinched her leg under the table, hard enough to draw a wince. (I just did this myself to see if a wince is a suitable response. It is and it still hurts. Ow, Belle!) Somewhat convinced that this was no dream, she turned her attention back to Rumple. He glanced at her hand disappearing under the table but he said nothing about it. Still, she had an intense, uncomfortable feeling he knew exactly what she had done.
"As compelling as my sad story of mistakes and regret might be, I doubt that's where you're going to find out about the knife." He said, his voice turning slightly harder, as it often did when he was trying to cover up what he was truly feeling.
She looked back at him steadily, trying to figure him out. He simply waggled his fingers at her in a motion to continue looking through the book.
"What? What am I looking for exactly?" Belle demanded, the stress of the last few days building up to cause her to bite out in frustration.
"It's been 300 years since I wrote that, I can't remember everything. Why do you think I needed you to find the book?" He countered quickly and she scowled.
"Is there more on the knife?"
I remember something about it, yes." She held back a growl at his unhelpfulness as she flicked through the pages faster, looking for a mention of magic or the blade.
She passed over a page of even more illegibly scribbled notes than the rest, embodied by angry jerks of the pen and violent stabs into the page. She could barely read most of the words, only a couple stood out, "beans", "giants" and circled at the bottom of the page was the word "fairy".
She looked up over the book surreptitiously, trying to take another sneaking look at Rumple. She felt a now familiar and no less painful wrench in her chest as she realised there was no figure sat at the wheel.
She turned her gaze back to the book dejectedly and continued skimming for useful information. From what she could see Rumple had already read all of the same books she had been using and apparently he hadn't been able to get any more relevant information from them than she had.
However, much of the notation focused on facts that were old to Belle but it occurred to her that at the time perhaps it was still all new to Rumple. She tried to picture a younger version of the man she knew, someone less certain of himself. Considering the pages she had read so far, his exploits since his transformation, Belle wondered if any trace of that man had been lost when he had taken up the power of the Dark One.
The sources she recognised began to dry up and she found information now written that seemed to be looking further into the history of the knife than she had contemplated. There was a connected line of names, like a very sad family tree but these were scribbled out after only 2-3 names, always ending with Rumple's own.
"Still nothing?" Belle jumped, her hand flying to her heart when she heard his tone cut through her concentration once again. She looked at him with fond frustration in her eyes at his pesky ways. He always did love to interrupt her during a good book. "Nothing at all useful? Not to worry if it seems too difficult. We can work out the kinks once we have an actual plan to get kinky."
"Maybe it would help if I had some idea what I was looking for!" Belle protested, her eyes starting to ache after hours of staring at old text in books. She would have expected to be used to it by now. He had moved to stand behind her chair and now she gestured helplessly to the last section of notes she had read. "Or what half of this meant."
No individual Dark Ones
Assumed same person - Immortal
Why the secrecy?
"Oh yes, my foolish predecessors." She gave him a questioning look over her shoulder and quickly inhaled in surprise to find him leaning over her to read, so close to brushing her shoulder that she was momentarily distracted and almost forgot what he was talking about as he continued. "They were too busy being the all powerful Dark One that they thought it would be weak to reveal their original name."
"And you disagreed, I suppose." She let her tone comment on his contrary nature, while she shamelessly kept staring at the profile of his face, drinking in the sight as his eyes scanned the page in front of her.
"Well of course. I was powerful, I wanted anyone who'd ever ridiculed me or called me a coward to know it. I wanted them to know what the name Rumplestiltskin meant now." His triumphant tone shook her attention back to reality - or whatever this was – and she narrowed her eyes.
"So you terrorised them."
"No, of course not." He took his eyes from the page and turned to meet hers. "I just let them know that I could." The mocking shade to his voice didn't work on her this time and she simply stared straight back at him. He let out a small huff of disappointment and then leaned back. Belle had to stop herself swaying after him, as if pulled by his magnetism.
"What I mean is no one ever knew who the Dark One was, they assumed it was always the same person. So there is no record of how or where each one was made." He recited all of this in a singsong voice, as if it was something he had gone over many times. "And that makes tracing the origins of the knife and its power somewhat difficult."
"You were trying to find the source of the knife's power?" Belle said, the magnitude of that quest dawning on her.
"Well yes. Surely I mentioned that somewhere in there?" He said offhandedly. "Anyway, there'll be something in there that must relate to this" he widely gestured towards himself, "and get me back to normal."
His flippant approach was beginning to grate on her already strung out nerves so she wasn't surprised by the barely concealed quake of anger in her voice. "Rumple, your notes are barely legible. If you think I'm going to find a neatly explained spell with a sourced ingredients list, your memory isn't what it used to be."
"That's not what I meant. There'll be some lore. What did I say about curses?" He responded in kind to her anger.
"Rumple!" She was shocked. "I spent long enough watching you to know that there are consequences I can't even imagine if I started playing with anything like that."
"We're not playing." He said sharply.
"I want you back like you wouldn't believe..."
"Then prove it!"
"But I couldn't just do that!" She met his eyes fiercely and after briefly returning the challenge, he looked down first. Without replying, he pushed away from the table and began moving around the room. She couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was sulking.
Belle turned back to the book once more, trying to decipher the meaning behind Rumple's scrawls. When a new section caught her attention she couldn't help but query him about it.
"You tried to destroy the knife?!" When he looked up at her it suddenly clicked in her mind that he had been lurking for the past ten minutes or so. Rather than just disappearing as he had every other time, Rumple had been stalking around the room, looking through every cabinet along the walls.
"'Tried' being the operative word. I didn't make a scratch. I couldn't even work out what it was made of."
She was in the process of asking why he would want to do that when she saw the word scribbled next to the checklist of ways to destroy the knife. "Bae", she read out loud. "You thought it would make Bae come back?" Her soft question drew a calculating sideways glance before he looked away again, turning to face out of the window.
"Actually I thought if I destroyed it, it might take my power and I would never be able to get him back. That was what stopped me trying before I did something truly catastrophic." Quietly disapproving, she read on, trying not to think of what he might have used in his attempts to destroy the blade.
She turned the page and recognised the first one that she had opened the book to – the picture of the knife. This time she took in the title above the picture. 'All magic comes at a price'. This was how Rumple truly felt about the knife.
She looked over to him, now tracing his hands over the spinning wheel. She noticed that he hovered just a few centimetres above it, not making actual contact. She was too scared to contemplate on that.
Somehow, by speaking to him out loud, it was like she had found her Rumple, amidst the pages showing the man he once was. She found it much easier to tune into his train of thought and the notes were much easier to follow. After accepting the knife as his burden, his quick mind had immediately turned to ways of protecting himself, although this was where she lost him again.
"Rumple, you 'protected'…the knife?" She asked slowly, looking up. He was still there. He turned to her with that grin on his face that meant he thought he was being really clever. Belle privately thought she was probably the only one who could distinguish between his reptilian smirks.
"Of course. If there's one thing that can kill me, it becomes top of my priorities." He was still smiling and she rolled her eyes at him, making him elaborate. "Well, I just made it invisible."
She looked hard at him, trying to figure out the joke. "No…you didn't." She glanced at the knife on the table in front of her.
"To magic, dearie. It can't be summoned so to get it, someone has to pluck it from my hands." He flourished and the beaming arrogance of it made Belle laugh before the smile dropped from her face just as quickly, shifting instead to a dumbstruck expression.
"Rumple, that's it!" He cocked an eyebrow, intrigued but clearly not comprehending the answer she had just grasped. "You blocked the knife from magic, so it's here and you're…wherever you really are. If you're trying to come back and this is the connection you need to do it, then all I have to do is reverse whatever magic you have on it!"
She looked at him, waiting for the reaction. He stood staring at her, as if frozen mid-comeback. It took a moment of this until his mind caught up with his mouth and then a single giggling laugh came from him and he steepled his fingers together under his chin.
"Now that might just about do it." He said, flicking his hands to point back at Belle. She laughed at his ridiculous understatement. She clapped her hands together and the joyful grin lit up her face, splitting her cheeks in two. She jumped in the air and did a little twirl, suddenly feeling lighter than she had in days.
She ran over to Rumple, only just remembering when she was feet away that she couldn't throw her arms around him, as her instincts told her to do. She wanted to fall into his arms and lean into him, wrapping around him so tightly they both wondered if she would ever let go.
Instead she put her hands out towards him slowly, concentrating. She traced them up over the shape of his arms, down the front of his chest, always keeping the almost tangible void between her skin and him. He reached out as if to grab on to her elbow but stopped just shy of contact. It worked to hold her still though and she looked up to meet his eyes.
"Thank you, Belle." His gaze softened and the sincere tone his voice had taken on caused a lump in her throat. "I love you so much, you know that." She nodded, not able to say anything for her sudden fear that her voice might crack. She felt tears pricking at her eyes and she tried as hard as she could to stop them welling up. "You're the only one who could ever do this for me, the only one who really cares."
At this she pulled away from his hands hovering over her arms and fixed him with a watery glare. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course people care."
"And why would they? What have I ever done for them that they would be sorry to see gone?"
"You saved them! You sacrificed your life for them!" Belle protested but the combination of emotions meant that she lost her battle to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks. This betrayal of her useless emotions only added to her frustration.
"And who do you imagine even knows that version of what happened."
"What other version is there?"
"One where the big bad villain didn't play the saviour? People like their views very black and white." Rumple was far too calm about this while she was just about biting her cheek to keep herself from crying out at him in her aggravation.
"But enough of us saw what happened. They'll have told everyone what really happened."
"Did you see them do that? I thought they came back and started celebrating immediately?" Rumple was being harsh. Casting about in her head for an argument, Belle couldn't make any more of a retort than a simple "No," breathed out before he continued.
"I can't imagine that 'Rumplestiltskin is dead' wasn't chanted more than a few times." He was taunting her cruelly now and she couldn't understand it.
"Stop it!"
"They don't need me Belle. They're happier I'm gone and it's just the truth."
"When I get you back I'll make sure they know what you did. They'll all know who they owe their freedom to." She tried to deny that part of the reason she was so angry was due to the nagging feeling that what Rumple was saying could actually be true. There were people out there who genuinely didn't like him at all and she was aware that many of them probably had good reason not to. "This is such a mess. Why are we even arguing?"
Rumple took a moment to consider his reply and she couldn't tell by his expression whether he was going to keep fighting or try to smooth things over. However, just at that moment the sound of knocking echoed through the hallway and around their room. Belle jumped at the unexpected intrusion into their little world. Rumple turned to look sharply at the source of the noise.
Regretfully, Belle stepped away from Rumple again and turned towards the door. Hastily she wiped at her eyes, hoping that she wouldn't have great red circles to expose that she had been crying. She tried to push the argument from her head but she still felt jittery as she jogged down the steps to the entrance hall, mind and limbs buzzing with energy that wanted to be let out.
All of that faded away when she pulled the great wooden door open to reveal Neal standing in front of the castle.
Apologies for the delay - I had a rather large project i was working on. However I am back now for a weeks holiday and hope to get a couple more chapters banged out pretty sharpish.
Thanks again for reviews, follows, views. They give me motivation, they give me courage. Hey, they even motivated me to get on with my coursework so i could get back to this.
Thank you