OhMyGosh
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Ya'll are too kind! Thank you all sooo much for reading!
So without further ado, here's Chapter 5
Belle stepped out of the tub and placed her hands confidently on her round, naked hips.
Her mouth quirked into a half smile as she watched her words sink in.
Little did she know that once upon a time another woman had sliced Rumpelstiltskin with words not very unlike the one's she had just used.
But it stung Rumpelstiltskin a million times more hearing it come from Belle's beautiful mouth than from Milah's feculent one.
And once again Belle saw through him like he was invisible...like he was nothing.
It was always easy for him to serve contemptibleness, but when it was on his own plate, Rumpelstiltskin found it much too difficult to swallow.
He glared hatefully back at those humorless cold eyes set in that seraphic face and felt pure rage boil inside of him.
His hands balled into fists at his sides, so tightly that he wasn't even aware in the slightest that his nails were cutting through his callused palms and eerie black-green blood had begun streaming down his knuckles and dripped slowly onto the rug.
Belle glanced to his hands and back up to his stormy golden eyes.
"What's the matter Dark One?" she smirked, "have I hurt your feelings?"
She was challenging him, and as always, he would accept.
Rumpelstiltskin stalked towards her with fire in his eyes.
Belle stood painfully stiff as he pressed one bleeding palm to her cheek and forcibly pushed her face to look away from him; staining her creamy skin.
"Get out of my sight." He hissed slowly.
They were shoulder to shoulder for what seemed like hours, neither daring to breathe before the other, and the metallic tang of his blood had begun to sneak itself between Belle's lips when, suddenly, he wrenched his hand away from her face and wailed.
"I said get out of my sight before I-" he stopped mid-statement and flung the heavy copper tub against the wall in one blinding motion, so hard it cracked the stones, and Belle looked down at her bare feet as her dirty bathwater flooded the floor underneath them.
Belle knew he only done it to keep his hands from her neck.
"Get. Out. Now." He growled.
But Belle had never been one to run.
So, with august deliberateness, she turned and walked out.
When she was alone in the confines of her old chambers, Belle wept openly and bitterly.
She cursed herself for her impudent tongue, she cursed Rumpelstiltskin for being a coward, and she hated herself for loving him so unconditionally.
She knew no matter what he done to her or what he said, she would always love him and she would always forgive him.
Because it means True Love.
Belle curled into herself and cried into the blue silk pillow. Why did she come back? He had rejected her once already, broken her heart, and spit on it.
Why torture herself with dreams that will never come true?
"Rumplestilskin…" she sobbed and hid her swollen face behind her hands.
Her décolletage was splotched with red and pink where she had become hysterical and her eyes burned.
She had wrapped in her white silk dressing gown that she had found, along with all of her old clothes, in her dressing room just as she left it.
In fact, her whole room was just as she had left it.
As if she had just gone to the market and would be back before dusk.
All of her gowns were lined up perfectly arraigned in her dressing room and all of her shoes sat directly underneath their matching frocks.
Belle had not done that, nor had she lit the fire that she just now noticed raging in the fireplace.
She turned over and her heart leapt into her throat, on the opposite pillow lay a red rose, a faint dusting of gold floated down onto the pillow case, and a ribbon the color of her eyes was tied around the long stem. Belle carefully picked it up and sniffed it.
"Coward."