XIII
The sky hung low and purple-bruised overhead as Belle ran along the winding forest trail. Even if she had not known about the Dark Curse, the sense that the world was out of sorts was palpable. Although it was still morning the sky was darkening over the tree tops and the forest on either side was almost deserted, with the occasional sudden flash of movement of a frantic animal – a deer, a pair of birds whose shadow flickered across Belle's upturned face, a long column of ants scurrying in the roadside. The leaves were rustling frantically and her cloak flew out behind her as if even the wind was fleeing, pushed on by something massive and dark coming up behind the mountains, and trying to drag Belle with it, screaming Go back, go back, go back! Belle was the only living creature in these mountains rushing towards the Dark Curse, as fast as her feet would carry her.
She thought back to her long descent into the cold darkness that was the well – if she had not been under the Master's magical protection still, she would have surely drowned , going down down down, increasingly worried that she had been wrong. It had only been the realization that there was nothing to go back to the surface for that had made her continue, until she finally glimpsed a faint, white light below her. It had grown larger and brighter until her hands brushed against twigs and leaves, and, with a last strenuous effort of by then exhausted arms, she had pulled – and found herself lying panting but completely dry under some juniper bushes, by the edge of a small clearing in the woods. As she had hoped, Regina had not had the time or care to destroy the secret passageway she had arranged for Belle, when she still thought she would have emerged with the Master's heart to sacrifice.
Peering up through the trees Belle had seen the garden wall looming over her and bolted from it. The sight of this side of the garden wall was something she had prayed and wished for for so many years, ever since she arrived at the Dark Castle centuries ago. This was the first time that she breathed real outside air; the first time there was no wall around her; she found the freedom almost dizzying.
She found a rocky path that trailed between the trees, up the steep hill and, gathering her skirts together, she started to climb. After an hour the first fear of being discovered by the Master and taken back to the castle began to fade, and she slowed down her pace a little, breathing heavily. The voices in her head raced on at the same speed, however.
"I decided to leave the decision to the only person who could make it, and the person whose forgiveness I need most…"
"Oh, you fool, you sweet little fool..."
"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."
"He 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…."
"What were the chances that I would meet you? That I would find a companion that I could love so much?"
"Or were you just too much of a coward to look me in the face while you tore my heart out?"
Belle roughly wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"I don't want to be with you in the other world. 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…."
Her last words to the Master, she realized, had been Let go of me.
The Dark Castle lay in a small, enclosed valley in the mountains, and Belle had been climbing one of the densely forested hillsides for several hours when she finally burst out of the trees onto a steep meadow. She didn't stop until she was in the middle, a tiny figure with nowhere to hide and nowhere to shelter. Out of breath, she turned around to look down – there, far below, was the Dark Castle, the towers and roofs and walls she knew so well, enclosed in its garden wall. There was the snow globe where she had been lonely and had been in love, where she had swam and ice-skated, drunk tea and too much cognac, lived a lifetime and yet seen only one autumn, one winter, one spring and one summer. But now she was out in the real world; and soon she would be in the next world.
Everything had gone completely still around her. There were no more straggling animals, and even the wind had gone completely flat. In that she recognized that the last minutes had now truly come.
"I will see you in the next world," she said out loud, eyes fixed on the three windows that she knew to be the dining room's. While she had been climbing the hillside there had been no time to feel anxiety, but her voice wavered just a little now. "But we won't be bound by our deal. You'll have to win me over with love this time – you'll have to be good and kind and earn it. If you have truly changed you'll do it, and if you are the beast everyone said you were, I will at last be free from you. I think-"
As she spoke she had glanced over her shoulder, and what she saw made her break off and gasp. Just as she looked a massive, dark-blue cloud had risen over the hillside like a dark sunrise, seeming to rear up towards the sky – and then it poured over the crest of the hill and into the valley, close to the ground like a half-liquid, rolling quickly and unstoppably towards her.
Belle took a useless step back, trying to compose herself. The timing, she knew, would determine her life now; she had to break the deal in the only way she could just before the curse swept over her, so that she would be in the land without magic before the magic of the broken deal could cause her to crumble to centuries-old dust. If she was a second too early, she would never make it to the other side. But it was a risk she had decided to take.
The wall of dark, impregnable smoke raced down the steep field now, enveloping everything it touched. There was nothing upright in the meadow except for her, a single small figure in the path of the Curse. Belle clenched her fists by her sides.
Now or never.
"Rumpelstiltskin," she said. "Your name is Rumpelstiltskin." And then the Curse was on her, engulfing her from head to foot in cloying, utter darkness.
She repeated his name like a mantra while the terrifying sensation of being torn apart and crumbling to dust tormented her at the same time. Rumpelstiltskin Rumpelstiltskin Rumpelstiltskinrumpelstiltskinrumpelstiltskin. She could feel her body drying up, curving in on itself like a dying flower and her feet and fingers trickling away to nothing, but at the same time she felt an overwhelming pulling sensation, so strong it seemed to drag her out of her own crumbling body. A terrific roaring filled her ears so that she couldn't hear herself shouting his name but just felt her lips move, and when the black smoke filled her lungs so that she couldn't speak she still thought it over and over again: Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin, Rum…
Rumpelstiltskin knew that a deal had been broken the moment it happened.
He had holed up in his study like a miser with his hoard, reclining in an old arm chair with his hands behind his head. It was only appropriate, he had thought, to spend his last hours in this world surrounded by his collection of memories and trophies, to let the faces pass through his memory one by one. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, maids and peasants, good and evil – but the one face that kept returning, unbidden, was Belle's; the coppery hair, the fair skin, and especially those blue eyes, bright with incredulity and fury when Regina – damn her black heart – had spilled that last secret he had so intently clung to. He had set out the tea set in the dining room at some point and considered going to get her, but decided against it; she would be spending her final hours in the library or the gardens, he assumed, hating him.
For a long time now he had privately entertained the notion that, if he lived to see the coming of the Curse, the two of them would have been in this study together; that perhaps she would have grabbed his hand and looked at him with a mixture of excitement and affection.
But that would have to wait until all this unpleasantness had been wiped from her memory, he had thought to himself, and returned to his study without having tasted his tea.
"Hope your son will make you proud in the next world," he said to the two dolls suspended from the wall, and "Ahoy, matey," waving at Killian Jones's disembodied hand, set upon a high shelf. But these little quips, which usually amused him, meant nothing now. He settled back in his chair, closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers – when suddenly he felt the change. There was a cool emptiness by his side, as if someone he had held in a close embrace for a long time had suddenly vanished.
It took him no more than a heartbeat to realize what had happened, who had vanished. For one moment he was frozen in horror. Then he leaped from his chair and stormed into the dining room where, with one sweep of his arm, he resurrected the mirror. "You evil soul! This was you!" he roared, shaking with anger. "You turned her against me!" But there was only his own reflection, more hideous than ever because his face was contorted in fury – of course, Regina would be otherwise occupied right now, be at the scene of Snow and Charming's misery.
Through the windows he saw the massive storm cloud of the Curse – his curse, which he had awaited for so long and now dreaded – which had already seeped down the hillsides into the valley and was advancing rapidly on the outer walls of his Castle.
A cold hand closed around his heart as the realization hit him that Belle would not only not be holding his hand when he traveled to the next world – he would leave her behind as a trickle of dust, somewhere in the Dark Castle. There was not even time left to look for her remains.
Behind him on the table there was the discarded tea set, grown cold and still. With a final roar of fury and, more than anything, anguish, he seized the chipped tea cup off the table and cradled it close to his chest as the world he had shared with Belle disintegrated around him. It will always remind me of the fact that I owe you.