The day she returned with Gold from visiting her father was the last one that she really had any hope. They had come home and without a word, he had gone and run a bath for her. She had needed it, needed to soak away the tension and the anger and the fear. So much fear. Fear like she had never experienced before in her life. Her father was young still, just 65 and this shouldn't be his time.
But the doctors had given her a bleak picture. There were always more drugs, more experiments, but the cancer was spreading fast and they weren't sure anything would halt it in its path of destruction. And so the fear settled somewhere in her belly, like a hard knot that was always threatening to steal her breath, to choke her.
Gold had made dinner that night. It was simple fare and they said little during the meal, but she was thankful for not having to do the cooking and cleaning. She wasn't sure her mind could focus that long and while nothing he made her was more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich, she was content with that much.
The days that followed that night were a blur to Belle when she looked back on them some time later. Lessons stopped. She couldn't focus and while Gold was out with the sheep every day, getting them out to the field and back, Belle just couldn't manage it.
She spent more of her days at the hospital, Bandit at her side. The pair were there so often that the nurses all welcomed her in, sometimes offered her a muffin in the morning if she looked particularly exhausted. Gold dropped her off most days. Her car had been repaired, but he knew she didn't have the focus to drive herself back and forth every day. So he got up, let the sheep out, and dropped her off at the hospital, returning when the visiting hours were up.
Her father had long since stopped refusing to see her when he wasn't feeling well. Truth be told, that was most of the time these days. They had been pumping him full of yet another course of experimental drugs. These were related to chemo but should target things a little more specifically. Gene therapy, they called it. She wasn't sure what that meant exactly.
She tried to keep a brave face on when she went to visit him, but she could see the dark circles under her eyes, could see the way he was wasting away, the way the exhaustion was starting to take him little by little.
They had tried so hard. He was supposed to beat this. He wasn't supposed to die. This was supposed to be a bump in the road, no more severe than her car needing repair or a sheep going missing. He was supposed to have surgery, have chemo, have radiation, and then get well. Go home. Live his life, another twenty years at least. She wanted, at his funeral, for people to be able to say Well at least he lived a good long life.
65 was not a good long life.
And that's all she could think of every night, every day, every time she sat down at her father's side and took his hand in hers.
"You're not sleeping," her father said one day. She looked away from him, down at her lap, anywhere but at her father. She didn't want him to see the tears, the dark circles.
Finally she responded and her voice was slightly choked. "No."
"Ah, my Belle." Her father reached out and gripped her hand as tightly as he could. Great big hands, that's what she always remembered of him. Big hands that held her up, showed her the world. Now they felt small. Her father looked small.
"Papa," she whispered.
"I'm dying, my girl," he managed to say.
"No." She didn't even know why she spoke the word. She knew it was true. Denial wouldn't get her anywhere, but still she needed that denial.
"I am," he reiterated. "Look at me, Belle." She couldn't though. And so he repeated the words, stronger, coughing on the last syllable. She finally looked up and met his eyes. Tired eyes. He was tired. And she suddenly realized what a toll this was taking on him, trying to be strong, trying to keep going.
"Oh, Papa. What am I going to do without you?" She raised his hand toward her, pressed her cheek to the back of it. "I'm not ready to…" She couldn't quite finish the sentence. She didn't want to face a time without her father in her life, when his voice will only be a distant memory, when she can't feel his hand in hers or see him smiling fondly at her. No more silly attempts at poetry, no more horribly mangled songs, no more nicknames.
"You'll go on, my girl." She saw him smile, saw the tears in his eyes and tried to fight back her own. "You've always been brave."
"I don't feel brave." She hated how small her voice sounded. Small and weak and scared.
"You are." The words ended on a cough and Belle just nodded. It was how so much of their time together went. Her father speaking of the time after, Belle denying it. Short visits. They were always short. He couldn't handle much these days and the nurses kept him sedated fairly well with morphine.
It was only three days after that conversation that her father was moved to Hospice care. They had done everything they could and when they came to him with another possibility, another experiment, her father had refused. Even the doctors hadn't been certain it would do anything for him. And so he had put his foot down and decided enough was enough.
He was going to die and he was going to do it on his own terms. If there was one thing the Frenches believed it was that no one else controlled their fates. Not some capricious god, not doctors, not anyone. And so her father chose how his life would end, kept comfortable in a bed at one of the more upscale hospice centers, attentive nurses granting his every wish.
Somehow seeing him there, unhooked from all the machines, lying in a bed in a quiet room filled with soothing music, was better. Harder in some ways, but he looked less ill in that room than he did at the hospital.
She knew it wasn't true.
She knew that he spent much of the day under the influence of the morphine they gave him to chase away the pain and anxiety, to ease his breathing. But his rest was easy and she was thankful for that much at least.
For some reason she couldn't quite fathom, Gold started to go with her. Almost every day she went, despite her car being fixed, he offered to drive her. He often stayed in the room with her, a silent presence in the corner. He didn't have to say anything. He usually didn't. And so she pretended she didn't know why he was really there.
He was there to pick up the pieces when her father passed on.
He was there because he cared.
He might pretend he didn't. He might try to play at being aloof with her, but when he didn't know she was looking, there was something in his eyes. Something deep, something soft, and yet dark at the same time. She wasn't sure she'd ever understand the man. Every time she peeled back a layer, he grabbed it out of her hands and pulled it back up over himself. But there were always holes in the layers, always little bits she could see through to the man beneath.
She wouldn't quite say he was letting her in. But she was wiggling her way in through those holes little by little, until he got used to her presence, until he got used to the layer being weakened, seen through.
"Thank you," she said on the way home one time. Her father hadn't spoken much that day, the exhaustion weighing him down. Instead, she and Gold had sat quietly, holding vigil at his bedside.
"It's no matter," Gold responded with, his voice soft.
"It is," she insisted. "You don't have to come with me." The latter she had pointed out any number of times and usually received nothing more than a shrug.
"I do." His voice was insistent.
Belle turned to him and watched him for a moment, saw the way his hands gripped the steering wheel, hard, white-knuckled. "Why?"
She could see him swallow and his eyes hardened slightly. "I don't know."
She supposed that answer had to be good enough for now.
It was the middle of one of the rare afternoons that Gold left Belle at the hospice with her father. He was usually there, somewhere in the background, always watching, always there to make sure she got home safe. He didn't even entirely understand why he did it. He just knew he had to.
And that spoke to things he wasn't entirely comfortable admitting. Not to her. Not even to himself. So instead he just ignored whatever it was that was there and got on about his day. Even if it made some small part of his cold dead heart hurt to see her watching her father slip away little by little.
He was tending to the sheep, making his careful way around the barn, when he heard a sharp bark come from Taz. He didn't even have to look up to know what the small amount of commotion was about. "What can I do for you, Mr. Nolan?" he asked before the man even made it around the corner.
"How do you do that?" David asked and Gold just smirked.
"I don't know…magic?" he offered up.
David shook his head. "You would be the evil sorcerer in a fantasy novel, wouldn't you?"
Gold gave a snort of laughter. "And you the fair prince." He said the last with a small flourish of his hand and then turned back to pouring water in the trough for his sheep. David remained quiet for a moment and Gold finally turned back to him. "Did you need something?"
"She's exhausted, you know."
He had to fight to not roll his eyes. "I'm aware of that." His voice was tight when he responded. Of course he knew that. He was the one who drove her to the hospice center every day. He was the one who brought her back, watched her crawl off to bed with dead eyes. He was the one who saw the anger she tried so very hard to hide from her father, anger that he understood. He had raged against the fates on any number of occasions, after all, desperate to get his son back, desperate to get his life back after the car accident that shattered his ankle and foot. It did no good. And he wished he could tell her that.
But he wouldn't.
He couldn't.
She would find out herself. And he was sure that day would break her.
He watched as David made some sort of annoyed noise back in his throat and ran his fingers through his hair. He knew that look all too well, had seen it any number of times. "Look, Mary Margaret called her yesterday."
"I don't need your advice," Gold cut him off with. Always well-meaning, he was sure, but David had a habit of offering advice that he really did not need.
"Too bad," David responded with and Gold was surprised by the man's smirk. David Nolan did not smirk. He was open, honest to a fault. One of the good guys that Gold could never hope to be. But here he was playing him at his own game.
Gold sighed.
And winning.
"Fine," he snapped at the other man. "But be quick about it. I have things to do."
"She needs a break."
"From me?"
David shook his head. "No. She needs a break from thinking."
"What?" Sometimes he just couldn't quite figure out how the man's brain worked. He probably didn't want to know, really. But still, it was moments like these that had him scratching his head.
"What does she do every night?" David asked, arms crossing over his chest.
"She has dinner and retreats to her room. How do I know what she does up there?" He knew. Of course he knew. She read. She cried. Sometimes he heard the muffled cries and stood outside her door, one hand ready to knock, before retreating in frustration. He had no idea what to do with a crying woman and certainly not when the strongest woman he'd ever met broke down. And so he retreated as well, finding himself listening to the likes of Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez. Composer from the twentieth century whose harsh music chased away his own anger, took his rage and turned it into sound, something external.
"Exactly," David said and the smirk on his face told Gold exactly how proud of his little bit of advice the man was.
"Exactly?"
David nodded. "She spends the whole night thinking…"
"Reading," Gold pointed out. "She reads." Different worlds, different lives. Reading was as much an escape as anything else. He should know that. He had often escaped into the dark worlds of Welsh, Satre, or even Kafka. He suspected Belle's reading was not quite so dark and likely more of an escape than those moments were for him.
David just shook his head. "A night out, Gold. Just think about it." And then he turned and walked off.
Gold wanted to shout at him, demand that he come back, tell him to never ever show his face in his barn again.
But he knew the truth.
He knew the damned man was right. Belle was shrinking more and more into herself. He could see it. He was almost sure her father could see it. A few of the times he had been there with her, with her father, the man had given him a knowing look, a small nod.
He wanted him to take care of her, to make sure his little girl had someone there for her.
And he was his choice. No one in their right mind would choose Tavish Gold to look after their daughter when they were gone. The courts hadn't trusted him to look after his own son, after all, had instead given custody over to a teary-eyed Milah and her new paramour. And it wasn't even a case of "the woman always wins these things" as his lawyer had insisted on. No, he knew the truth. They had taken one look at the solitary Gold, living out on his sheep farm, and refused to believe he could ever be a good father.
He wasn't good for Belle either, her father's seeming trust in him entirely misplaced.
There had been many times, far too many times, really, when he had been kicked while he was already down. Abandoned by his father, abandoned by his wife, both with harsh words and sometimes harsh hands.
He wasn't good for anyone. Except his sheep and his dogs and his lonely little farm.
He picked her up right on time, as he did every day that he left her there. Belle had actually been surprised when he dropped her off and told her there were things he had to take care of. He was still shut down and sometimes it seemed he was even more so the more time he spent with her at the hospital. He often came in with a grim look about his face, lines around his mouth that she hadn't seen before.
They were always quiet on their way back, whether or not he had been there all day with her. She never knew what to say. A simple thank you was probably not enough. And he always seemed somewhat awkward about the whole thing.
He wasn't used to caring.
And she was sure he cared about her.
He could have sent her to the hospital on her own. He could have docked her pay. He could have allowed her father to die in the worst of hospice care or in the hospital. But he didn't. He paid for it all behind her back, acted like it was nothing. And perhaps the money was nothing to him. But it was the fact that he did it, the fact that he cared enough to even do it on his own.
There was something there. Even if he wasn't ready to admit it.
Or at least she thought he wasn't.
When they arrived at the house and he opened the door for her, as he so often did, she started to head upstairs. It was their nightly ritual. A quiet ride home and a parting of ways. They had said less to each other in the past few weeks than they had the entire time before.
But this time he stopped her with a gentle hand on her wrist. She turned back, eyebrows up and just gave him a look. She didn't need to say anything else, after all.
He gave her a sheepish look and for a moment a strange look passed over his face. "Goodnight, Miss French."
She cocked her head slightly to the side, watched him. "Goodnight Gold."
When he released her and she turned to leave, he spoke again. "Wait."
"Yes?" She said as she glanced back over her shoulder.
He said nothing for a moment, just stood with one hand on his cane, the other making strange patterns across the banister he was holding onto. "Tomorrow night," he started to say, but then the words seemed to catch in his throat.
Belle just nodded and gave him time to speak. Whatever he had to say wasn't easy for him, that much was obvious, and she felt her heart sink just a little bit.
He took a deep breath and met her eyes. "I think we should go out somewhere." And then his eyes slid away from hers and Belle felt the breath go out of her.
"Like on a date?" Gold's head shot up and she realized she might have over-stepped her bounds there a bit, might have made an assumption. "Or…not…"
"Yes," he said quickly and she watched as the hand on the banister gripped it tightly, knuckles slightly white. "Yes, exactly." The words were firmer that time, though his eyes slid away from hers, and Belle found herself smiling.
She reached out a hand, cupped his cheek briefly. "I'd like that." She left him there then, retreating to her room as she did most nights. She just had a feeling that he needed the time alone. That bit of bravery was sure to cost him.
She just hoped he didn't second guess himself come morning.