Pebbles Underfoot

Belle stands uneasily in the wide, open backyard behind the bed and breakfast, surrounded by an army of little round tables all dressed in tan and accompanied by dozens of dapper little folding chairs. Just looking at the place settings, and already she feels underdressed. Mary Margaret had assured her this would be a garden party. A tiny fundraiser, just a little thing.

"Believe me, I've been where you're at. If you want them to stop talking about you, you just have to meet them with your head held high and make them stop," she'd said and then she smiled, sweet and proud as bluebirds. "Emma taught me that."

So, here she is. Not yet noon and for coastal Maine, the sky is unusually clear and golden blue, but someone has built a lattice of paper lanterns above the tables just the same. At the other end of the grass, closest to the red brick fence and the building's back entrance, people swarm with the same pitch and swell as a kicked wasps' nest.

Belle avoids them. She sucks in deep breaths through her nose like Dr. Hopper told her, but makes sure to keep her back to the trees just the same. She and Hatter always have. They are too long used to watching for mobs.

There are no mobs here, Belle reminds herself. Just Mary Margaret and her entire town full of friends.

Still, Belle's right side feels cold, her hands dangerously empty. She smooths down her borrowed skirt to give them something to do, but her skirt is not the problem, however strange the thin yellow fabric feels. She is used to walking with her hand in Hatter's, his heat a firm wall at her side. But he is lifting heavy loads of flowers for her father today. She is all on her own.

Looking around at the swell and clutch of people, Belle takes a tentative step forward. Her heart thuds in her throat at the sound of all that noise. Bravery is overrated, but bravery must be her nature now. She needs to face the town, to kill the Queen's rumors before they take root. And that means, apparently, that she must be seen now and again without her Hatter.

The springy green grass beneath her flats feels like a bear-trap waiting to spring. Belle wishes she were lifting heavy buckets full of flowers, too. But Mary Margaret had insisted—"It'll be hard, Rose, but it'll be worth it in the end. You can't let the mayor win,"—and her father had been so touched to know his daughter had friends…

The tablecloth on the table nearest her stirs without the wind to move it. Belle jumps. Her right hand goes instinctively to the red sash around her waist, to the switchblade she hid inside before she left the house this morning.

A small part of her whispers that she is being ridiculous—that, worse, she's acting crazy. But a larger part of her remembers the world before this one, the gnomes the queen sent crawling from every crack and crevice in the ground, the smell of blood thick in air full of magic, Hatter doubled over with both arms around his split stomach and Belle the only thing left standing between him and the world.

But the table cloth hikes itself up and rather than monsters, a tiny little girl clambers out. She wears her long brown hair in a braid over the shoulder of her blue party frock, already smattered with grass stains. Belle watches as she glances over at the seething crowd of people, and catching no one watching, darts across the yard and under another table.

Belle swallows, lets her hand fall from the knife hidden at her side. She feels absurdly torn between laughter and tears. Bravery is her nature. Once upon a time, she defied a monster and spat in the face of a queen.

But this, now—a happy garden party in the middle of the day—is so far beyond her tolerance she cannot even glimpse it sideways over the horizon of her fear.

Perhaps the little girl has the right idea.

Belle gathers her wits about her and crosses the grass, stoops to lift the tablecloth's hem.

"Hello," she says.

The little girl blinks back at her, alone but for the hazy outline of her imaginary friend. "Hello. Do you want to come in?"

"I would like that very much. May I?"

The girl shrugs, but Belle catches the shy, pleased smile before she turns her face away. "Alright."

Swiping a napkin off the table, she crawls in beside the girl, unfolds the ridiculously large white square and sits on it to keep from staining the back of Mary Margaret's borrowed dress.

"Thank you very much," Belle says when she's settled. She smiles, has to remember for a moment what to say. "My name's Rose. What's yours?"

"Alice." The girl cocks her head, tucks her knees to her chest. "Don't you like parties either?"

And this is easy. This is close and small and comfortable, and almost like Hatter. Belle breathes. She can do this. "Oh, no. Too many people. All that noise. They make me nervous."

Alice considers this.

"But they're grown-ups, like you," she says after a moment. "Aren't they your friends?"

"I suppose." Idly, Belle chews her lip, brushing the strands of bright green grass this way and that. "They'd like to be my friends, in any case."

"You don't want to be friends?"

"I'm not very good at being friends." She shrugs. "I've only got the one."

Alice nods, balances her chin on her knee. "I've only got Bit."

It takes Belle a moment before she realizes Bit is a name, not an unfortunate occurrence.

"Oh, you mean your long-eared companion?" she asks, nodding towards where the hazy outline of a vest-bedecked lagomorph looks up in surprise.

Alice's eyes shoot very wide. "You can see him!"

She should say nothing. She should smile and shrug and play coy. She should indulge the child, as adults do, in that patronizing way of the sane. And ten years from now, the child will grow up crooked and embittered. She'll miss the pixies bearing their teeth at the squirrels. She'll never see the monsters beneath the bed.

And bravery or no, that is a cruelty Belle cannot wish on this sad little stranger.

"Can you keep a secret?" she asks.

The girl nods. Belle grounds herself with fingers in the grass.

"I used to be a performer," she whispers. "Magic. It leaves a sort of residue after a while."

For a moment, neither speak. Alice seems to be thinking. At last, she plucks a dandelion. The bloom nearly fills her tiny hand.

Abruptly, Belle remembers changing dandelions into teacups and squeezes her eyes shut.

Alice's voice brings her back. "Can you do a trick?"

The thought fills her with tremors, like an avalanche of tiny stones into the pit of her stomach.

"No," Belle says. "Not without my friend."

"Your only friend?"

She nods, swallows. Takes the deep breaths Dr. Hopper told her to.

"Imagine them naked and unarmed,"Hatter had told her once. The thought makes her smile. She tries his trick, too, for good measure—at a garden party full of nudists and woefully overdressed.

"His name is Hatter," Belle says when she feels better. "He's very kind. And he's spectacular at magic shows."

"He knows magic, too?"

"Oh yes. We performed together."

"Were you good?"

"We were very good." This is a risk, but it feels… strangely good, speaking to someone who does not know her stories already, someone who nevertheless believes. "When we were young and very brave, we even tamed a phoenix."

Alice turns to better face her, her wide gray eyes alight with curiosity and awe. "What's that?"

Her heart clenches and Belle wonders, was she ever so young? Was there ever a time before her mother's funeral, before ogres and debts and mobs and deals, before magic tricks and phoenixes and singing for her supper?

"It's a bird made entirely of fire," she says, and wants to laugh at how Alice's jaw drops a little.

"There are birds like that?" she asks.

"There used to be." Belle smooths her dress down again, tucks her knees as close to her body as she can. It is not elegant, and once upon a time, her governess would have had her head for it. But today, Belle is hiding under a table at her would-be friend's garden party with a little girl barely older than her teeth. Elegance is not high on her list of priorities.

"That's wonderful," Alice decides at last. "And a little sad."

From his twitchy seat beside the table leg, Bit offers her something. A pocket watch, Belle thinks. And then, yes—when Alice takes it, it becomes real, solid, a heavy antique of burnished gold.

The girl removes a tiny key that hangs from a thin gold chain around her neck. She slots it into a hole in the back of the watch, winds it, then hands it back. When it leaves her fingers, it disappears again. Her imagined creature shakes it once, nibbles on a corner, and seems to find it satisfactory. He drops the watch back into his breast pocket and becomes a little more solid around his edges.

Bit looks like nothing so much as a very large white rabbit. He blinks at Belle with watery red eyes and she discovers rabbits, when child-size, are quite unnerving.

She focuses her attention back to little Alice instead.

"Alice is a pretty name," she says.

"I don't think so. I always wanted to be named something special. Like Amaranthine or maybe Bruce."

"Bruce?"

"Like the super hero."

Belle pulls up a clover, turns it over in her palm. She doesn't know anything about super heroes, Bruce or otherwise. Instead, she says, "I like the name Alice. My Hatter had a daughter named Alice."

"Oh," Alice blinks, cants her head to the side. "Was she your daughter, too?"

"No. Oh, no," Belle laughs to hide her nerves, sweeps fragments of grass of her pretty yellow skirt. Hatter's history runs like fire beneath her skin. The comforting weight of his secrets takes the hurt and poison out of hers. She says, "I never knew Alice."

And this new Alice nods, so solemn. She shares a glance with Bit, and for a moment she is far, far older than she has any right to be. "What happened to her?" she asks.

He lost her, Belle does not say, like we lose everyone but each other.

Instead she says, "I expect Alice lived a long and happy life, surrounded by many dozens of grandchildren." When the little girl narrows her eyes in suspicion she smiles and adds, "Hatter and I are older than we look."

"How old?"

"I'll be fifty-eight next May. I believe Hatter's turning sixty in the fall."

The little girl nods. "That makes sense," she says, though it does not, not really, not without this lunatic curse for backdrop and scenery.

Bit taps his watch. Alice frowns, purses her lips. "It's almost noon," she says, and seems to regret it. "I have to go."

Belle smiles, though she does not, not at all, want to go back into the world above, where the people are not naked and very well could be armed.

"Alright," she says. "It was nice speaking to you."

The girl pauses, one tiny hand lifting up the hem of the tablecloth. "Will I see you again?"

And she is honest, because she is probably insane and crazy people tend to tell the truth. "I don't know."

"I'd like to see your phoenix."

Belle shakes her head. This hurts. Her mouth tastes bitter with moldering regret. "Our phoenix flew away. A long time ago."

"Why?"

"We tried to hold on too tightly."

Again, that ancient look from eyes far and above too young. "Well, you won't do that again," Alice says, and before Belle can ask her what she means by that, Bit leaps out from under the cloth and his unimaginary girl scampers after him.

One day I hope to have a daughter like you, Belle thinks, and smiles, though the sharpened corners hurt. Gingerly, she ducks her head and tries to climb from under the table as elegantly as a fully grown woman can.

"I'll admit," she hears a too, too familiar accent say, "this is not where I'd have expected to run into you again."

No.

Belle's jaw clenches. Her right hand draws taught, searching for the fingers that are not in hers. But Hatter is not here. Hatter is not here for the first time in twenty-eight years and bravery is her nature now—she will have to fight her own battles today.

Belle turns.

Rumpelstiltskin stands at the other side of the table. How long has he been standing there? How much has he heard?

His suit coat bulges over his left arm—vaguely, she remembers hearing bones snap, the second ambulance that came to take him away while Emma put a blanket over her shoulders and Hatter whispered stories to calm her down.

Otherwise, he is mostly unchanged. Some swelling in his jaw, bruises still darkening his face.

She's been told his name is Mr. Gold now, but she does not believe it.

"What do you want," her voice is flat. It is not a question.

He breathes, as if even this is more opening than he expected. Gold shifts forward, moves his weight for a moment onto his bad knee, but Belle sidles left, keeps the table between them and one hand on the knife hidden at her side.

He stills as if he has been stuck. She knows the look. It was appropriate before, but hardly now.

"I want to apologize, Miss French," he murmurs, his voice so sweet and pained and low. "It seems we've started out on an… extremely bad foot, as it were."

"You attacked my father." She wonders, should she draw her knife? Should she call for Mary Margaret? No doubt someone friendly is close-by.

But Gold only nods, once, and does not meet her eyes. When he speaks, she can almost see the gap where his gold tooth used to be. "Yes."

Belle sucks in a deep breath through her nose. Her back is not to the woods.

"Abducted him at gunpoint."

Her back is to the Bed and Breakfast. She will have to edge around him to get out.

"Yes." Gold touches his fingers briefly to his jaw, almost smiles. "You made your feelings on the matter abundantly clear."

Abruptly, she realizes. He expects something from her.

Belle thinks she might be shaking. The whole world is making a terrible din. She can't feel her arms. This is… too much. She loved this man once. She loved him enough to try to save him. Him. And he is not the same. She remembers golden scales and claws and bitter smiles, and the acidic twist of his mouth is the same, but his eyes are all wrong—all human—and it is too much.

Doctor Hopper gave her tiny blue pills for this, but as far as she remembers, they are in Hatter's front coat pocket.

"Well, then," she manages, because she is brave, or was once, and cannot seem to remember how to extricate herself from these kinds of situations. "Go on."

Gold breathes. A deep, shattering breath that must hurt—Emma said she cracked more of his ribs than he cracked her father's—but he seems lighter for it. The sun plays on his face and he looks human. He looks human. This man, this sorcerer who would not lift a finger to save her from the queen, even knowing he was the only thing that made her a target.

All those mobs because of him. Those hungry nights because of him. All the fear and despair and endless running because of him. Escaping from the dungeon, finally, after twenty eight years and knowing better—knowing better but still wanting to see him. Finding a safe place, only to find him in it, beating her father with his cane.

And Gold stands in the sun with his pretty name and his lie of a face, and he smiles, tight-lipped so as not to flash a missing tooth, and he says, "It's… a complicated story. Put simply, he stole something of great value from me. I very much wanted it back."

Belle is brave, and bravery should not make her violent, but nevertheless, she wants to take his cane again. She wants to smash his fucking face in.

"My papa is not a thief."

Gold tips his head. "Have you asked him? I think you'll find otherwise."

"What did he take, then?" she demands. He doesn't immediately answer and Belle wants to strike him. It worries her. She is not usually so violent, but then, she does not usually find herself without Hatter, across a rickety garden table from one of the queen's best men. "Well? What was worth breaking his ribs for?"

She sees him swallow. His throat bobs. His eyes dart down, away, then up to hers.

"A teacup. It was… chipped a long time ago, by someone I loved very much and it's all I have left of—"

"No." This is too much. This is too goddamned much. Belle's fingers clench on the back of a chair, but she can't feel them. She's suspended in a storm cloud—she feels nothing but cold, hears nothing but wind roaring in her ears. "How dare you. How dare you."

"What do you mean? Dearie, it's true—"

"Fuck you, it's true. Why? Why would you do this? What kind of sick pleasure do you get out of this? Is this some sort of deal? Some sort of bargain you have with the queen, is that it?"

He leans back as if struck. Then, bizarrely, his face brightens. He steps forward, eyes wide and urgent. "What did you say?"

Belle claps a hand over her mouth. Late—far too late. They'll lock her up again, with reason this time. The world here is full of machines and cars and things that fly that are not birds, and people don't have queens or magic here.

"Belle—"

Belle. Her name is Rose here. Only Hatter calls her Belle.

"Don't," she snarls. "Don't pretend. You don't get to pretend. Not after what you did."

And after all he did, the liar, the traitor, the beast—he has the gall to stand there and look at her with hope in his eyes. "Belle, if I'd have known, I swear I'd have found you."

"No," she whispers. Once again, faced with him, it is her only coherent thought.

"You and your magician—I thought… I didn't realize. Belle, I thought you'd died."

"You're a liar."

"I'm not, I swear." He smiles. Despite the missing tooth, he dares to risk a smile. "Belle, dearie, you remember. When have you ever known me to lie?"

Belle feels the world slipping beneath her feet. Once upon a time, she kissed this man and his curse receded. True love, she'd thought then, but true love should never feel like this.

She swallows. She can't breathe. She is breathing far too fast.

Her head swims. The world stutters. Nearing, nearing, the crowd laughs like hyenas on the prowl. Soon they will close in. Soon they will call her a devil's whore, demand a show for her life, and she can't do magic. She can't cast a spell without Hatter and Hatter isn't here. Hatter is lifting flowers for her father on the other side of town.

And Daddy was so happy knowing she'd found such a nice young man, but they are not young or nice and she needs Hatter—needs Hatter with his dozen different switchblades and hidden razor knives. Needs Hatter with his spells that hurt, with his glances that speak words, with his memories of their shared fire bird.

Hatter is safe. Hatter is safe. Hatter is safe, but Hatter is not here.

"Belle, please," Rumpelstiltskin's voice breaks through her haze, three decades too late. Suddenly he is nearer. Her vision is a blur—she can't breathe—she sees only the bright purple of his pocket square. He whispers, "You were right. I'm a coward. And I'm so, so sorry. I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you."

Belle shakes her head. She cannot speak. Her cheeks are wet again.

"Let me try a bit of bravery now, eh?" he whispers, sounding like himself, looking a lie. "I kept the cup because I love you, Belle. I never stopped."

And Belle realizes something.

She is not brave. Not here.

When Gold lifts a hand to touch her, his fingers barely stirring the hairs on the back of her arms, Belle bolts. She hears the crowd alight. Startled questions burst into the air like crows. Soon, they will follow. They will chase. They will call her a witch, a heathen, a beast. They will pursue her with fire until they smoke out her den and she and Hatter will have to run again.

Belle staggers. Her bloody shoes are not made for running so she kicks them off and leaves them behind, two red ballet flats cockeyed in the bright green grass.

Behind her, Belle hears Emma snarl, "Goddamn it, Gold. What part of no contact did you not understand?"

But she runs. Despite the pebbles underfoot, she sprints through the garden and into the woods, and Belle does not stop. Not to turn, and certainly not to look.

"If you wake up tomorrow, and I am not there?" Hatter had told her once, another world ago, "Don't look for me. Just run. As fast as you can, mutton—go."