Hello everyone, I know it's been a long time, but here is a new chapter! I'm very curious to hear what people think of the turn of events.

XII

Belle heard him before she saw him.

She had crept through the dark castle, like a waif in her white nightgown and soundless on her bare feet, with the smooth, cool steel of the dagger clutched in one fist. She had gone first to the Master's bedroom, study and the library and found them empty, with a mixture of relief and disappointment. But now, slowly approaching the half-open dining room door, she could hear the soft, familiar creaking of the spinning wheel on the other side and knew that the period of reprieve was over. She thought she heard his voice and stopped, holding her breath to listen. Who could he be speaking to? She had never heard him speak to anyone but her. His voice was too low for her to make out the words, however, and fell silent – until it suddenly rang out clearly: "Do come in, dearie, it's drafty in the corridor."

All throughout the night she had racked her brain on how to accomplish the feat ahead of her – how to kill the Master. It would have to be fast; it would have to be one sure and determined thrust to the heart; she must not waver.

Belle tightened her grip on the long dagger, concealed in the folds of her gown, as with the other hand she slowly pushed open the door and advanced into the dining room. It was empty apart from the Master, who sat on the stool by his spinning wheel, which had been moved back to its old place in the corner. He looked as if he hadn't slept that night either, with his waistcoat unbuttoned and dark smudges under his eyes. Yet he seemed at peace, somehow; she could see the relaxation in his shoulders and the mild way he looked up at her as she slowly came closer.

"Spinning, this early in the morning?" she asked, straining to sound natural. The spinning wheel was in the way, she realized, she would have to edge around it without him noticing.

He sighed, running one finger over the golden thread suspended between the wheel and the spool. "I thought I might as well make it easier for you to find me," he said without looking up. "I could just see you having to search the entire Dark Castle, with that dagger in your hand."

The silence that followed was heavy. Belle felt her own breath catch in her throat.

"What?"

"Don't pretend to be stupid, Belle."

"I don't know what –"

"I said, don't pretend to be stupid, Belle!" His voice rose alarmingly. "It's too late in the game for these lies," he said as he reared up unexpectedly, stepped out behind the spinning wheel…

Belle's body seemed to move separately from her mind. She had no memory of having raised her hand – and yet there was the dagger, the point poised against the centre of his chest. She pushed, just a little, and a vividly crimson stain bloomed on the Master's shirt around the dagger's point. The blade truly was sharp; it would not take much strength to push through to his heart, she knew. It could be done in an instant.

"Stop," she snapped, "don't take another step."

He stood stock still. His moment of anger seemed to have flared up and died down again; mostly he just looked wary.

"I think you know why I have to do this."

He nodded.

"You don't seem very surprised."

"I'm not."

"How did you know?" Belle asked. Her breathing was heavy but her hand on the dagger was steady.

"I've known since that Midwinter's Feast. Since I saw that cut in your hand, really. You're still bound by our deal, after all, to be preserved exactly as you were the day I brought you here. The only thing that could injure you was the only thing that could injure me, so I knew you'd found the dagger. And there was only one person who could have told you about that."

"You've known since the Midwinter's Feast?" Belle repeated incredulously.

He shrugged. "I assumed you would wait until it was summer again; that kind of sentimental full-circle thing would appeal to you."

"Then why didn't you stop me?" Belle's hand on the dagger tightened and the bright stain on his shirt grew, inching downwards. If the Master noticed he gave no sign of it, never once glancing down at his injury. For what seemed an eternity he seemed to struggle to find the right words before shrugging again, almost helplessly. "Because I have known for a long time that there is no justice in my walking this earth still; that I should have joined those I let die in misery in the afterlife, wherever that is, where all men are equals. So I decided to leave the decision to the only person who could make it, and the person whose forgiveness I need most."

"Me." Belle felt her shoulders hitch violently as a strange sound drew from her, half sob and half moan. At the same time, a furtive motion caught her eye and she turned her head wildly – it was her own reflection in the large mirror, uncovered for the first time. In merciless detail, as if through the eyes of a bystander, she could see the slender form of a man, arms hanging defenselessly by his sides even as the front of his shirt was soaked in blood, his head angled dejectedly down. And in front of him the young girl in white, the arm holding the dagger shaking violently now, her face ashen and her face wet with tears. It was only when Belle touched her cheek with her free hand that she realized she was crying and slowly, very slowly, she drew back the dagger and pushed it almost roughly into his hand.

"You'll have to bury it somewhere safe, because I can't," she said. "I do know, in my head, that if there is anyone who doesn't deserve a storybook ending and a clean slate it's you, and there would be justice in killing you now to start afresh with the life you took away from me. But I can't. I can't deny you the chance to make things right in this world, not when there's a chance you truly want to change."

His expression was unreadable as they stood motionless, face-to-face. It was then that Belle registered movement from the corner of her eye, and she realized that they were not alone in the room after all, and who the Master had been talking to when she was in the corridor. With one hand she tore the shell necklace from her neck and flung it at the mirror where it collided hard, shell fragments flying, and slid down to the floor. Regina looked unfazed, gazing into the dining room with hard, dark eyes.

"Oh, you fool," she said, her voice almost caressing. "You sweet little fool."

"Our plan is off, Regina." Belle wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "We're going to have to make do in this world, trying to be happy – if you really try, I'm sure you'll find you can be happy."

"Oh, I can," said Regina. "But not here. I'll be going to the next world even if it means I have to leave behind my father to do it."

"Regina –"

"I suppose my mistake was relying on a well-mannered daddy's girl like you," Regina cut her off, the tone of her voice pensive but her eyes hard as stone. "I really did mean you well, you know – I can sympathize with young girls who become the victim of men's politics. But my mistake was assuming you had some grit, some backbone! That there is a limit to what people can do to you before you start to fight back. But no, you happily scrubbed his floors after he abandoned you, for years at a time, and let everyone you ever knew crumble to dust in their graves without letting you see even one of them alive just one last time. You weren't even brave enough not to love him."

"I wasn't vindictive enough not to love him. Because everyone deserves another chance if they are really, truly sorry – and he was willing to have his heart cut out to do penance. Because people see the world differently when they love-"

Regina laughed. "Oh dear, when they love," she said. "Maybe my mistake was not to tell you that little nugget of truth – how he came to fall in love with you."

The Master, who had stood quietly beside Belle all this time, suddenly jerked upright. "Don't," he said in a low voice but Regina ignored him, eyes fixed only on Belle.

"Did you ever wonder why he brought you to this hell-hole? Or did you just believe that, after all these centuries, he would suddenly need a housekeeper so desperately? That someone with all that magic at his fingertips would need a human being to keep his castle clean?"

"He was lonely-" started Belle, but uncertainty bloomed darkly in her heart when the Master remained silent and Regina shook her head, smiling.

"My dear, at the time he had come close to perfecting the Dark Curse – the one that would let him pursue his long-lost son to a world without magic. The only ingredient that was missing was the heart of the thing you love most – where to get such a heart when you love nothing and no one? That is why he agreed to help a troubled duke in exchange for his daughter – young, sweet, and so pretty in her golden dress. And hoped that, as the centuries went by and she found herself with not a soul in the world for companionship but him, he would grow to love her, so that he could cut her sweet beating heart out one day and feed it to the Curse, to discard her as he would discard everything in this world. The tragedy is, of course, that somehow he really did grow to love you, but that he had underestimated his own cowardice." Regina's eyes, gleaming with cruel amusement, shifted to the Master, who stood frozen like a statue. "Once a coward, always a coward, isn't that right? The only reason she's alive now is because you were too cowardly to kill her once you loved her! Admit it now, why don't you? She's already proven she'll forgive anything."

"Shut up!" The Master's hand flashed. For a split second more, Belle saw Regina's face, the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile that was both malicious and strangely sad. Then the mirror dissolved into a million shimmering pieces that fell, tinkling, to the ground beneath the empty wooden frame and the room grew very quiet.

Belle wasn't sure why she even asked, when she already knew the answer. "Is it true? Did you take me here just to kill me after you had grown to love me?" Perhaps it was hope.

"You know it's true," he said, idly picking up the spool of gold thread and setting it down again. "Most of what comes out of Regina's mouth is a lie, and yet the truths she tells are far more devastating. But that is something that happened years ago," he said earnestly. "Of all the centuries that I have been on this earth, the hundreds of thousands of people who have come and gone in the blink of an eye, who I never cared for and forgot – what were the chances that I would meet you? That I would find a companion that I could love so much? That's the reason I gave the curse to the only person in the world who wanted it as much as I did, and would make the sacrifice instead, giving us a chance to be together."

"Did you?" she said, her voice cracking as it rose. "Or were you just too much of a coward to look me in the face when you tore my heart out? Maybe it was more your style to just let me crumble, like that…like that rose you gave me. But now you didn't even have to do that; you're letting someone else do the dirty work for you. You're letting Regina kill her father, a kind old man who never harmed anyone, for your benefit. And you're not doing anything to stop her."

"There's no point," he sighed, "Regina doesn't tarry when she's made a decision. Her father might be dead as we speak, and otherwise he will be in the next few minutes. The curse will be upon the Dark Castle within a few hours, and in the next world we can truly be together. Magic is what is keeping us together and keeping us apart."

"But I don't want to be with you in the other world," she said. "Not like this – not because our deal will continue to bind us together. You wouldn't have to atone for anything, you wouldn't have to shoulder responsibility – you don't deserve forgiveness purely by merit of me forgetting everything you did to me! Not when the only reason you wanted to love me was so you could kill me for your own purposes."

"I'm afraid you won't have a choice," he said and seized both her upper arms with renewed urgency, but she refused to return his gaze. "The Curse is coming, Belle and there's nothing we can do but wait."

"Let go of me."

He did. "I will go to my study to wait there," he said. "You can join me there later, if you want. Even if you don't, we'll see each other again in the next world. I'm sorry that you're angry now, but take comfort from the fact that it will only be for a few hours."

Belle sat in silence for a long time on the stool by the spinning wheel, head bowed. If the Master had seen her, he might have assumed that she was dejectedly awaiting the Dark Curse, perhaps treasuring for the last time what memories she had of Gaston, of her father, of the castle where she grew up. But in fact, the moment she had heard the door of his study close behind him at the end of the corridor her thoughts had started racing and a plan was quickly forming. Finally, she stood up and searched among the shards of mirror glass for the shell necklace – but as she feared it was truly wrecked, with nothing remaining but ragged shreds of dry grass and crushed shells that fell apart between her fingers. Which meant she saw only one possibility open to her, and she would risk it, even though it was uncertain. For it seemed to Belle that the only choice she had ever gotten to make in her life was to make the deal with the Master. From that moment, she had been his helpless play thing, and when Regina had come into her life she had turned out to be as much of a puppeteer as he was. But this puppet was about to cut her strings, and she would make her decision now.

In her bedroom she retrieved her cloak and, without taking anything else or even looking back, she continued on to the cellar. She did not take a moment to mentally say good-bye to the bedroom, to the gardens, to the library; did not pause outside his study room to soundlessly mouth farewell. Instead, she descended without hesitation to the deepest, darkest place in the castle – the cellar beneath the kitchen.

In the gloom she could make out the well easily, its ancient edges of rough stone and the bucket on its rope and pulley. Peering over the edge, she could see the gleam of the water below: pitch black, smooth and bottomless. She swung her legs over and, sitting on the edge with her feet just inches above the water's surface, the old story came to her mind of the Wishing Well that echoed wishes it fulfilled. "Set me free," she said out loud and pushed herself off the edge. She could just hear the soft echo of her own voice before the smooth, dark coolness closed over her head.