Note: Whilst helping me out with a couple of bits on 'Carrot Cake', my editor and second-opinion-giver KittyMama213 made a couple of epilogue suggestions. They didn't make the final cut, but here's one of them in a fully-fleshed out form.
Note2: I'm trying to be as chronological as I can in the order of these one-shots, but sometimes I'll skip back and forth in time. This chapter takes place prior to the previous two, and indeed prior to the 'Carrot Cake' epilogue.
Summary: Gold invites Belle for dinner and she sees his house for the first time.
Cheesecake
"Why pink?"
"It was that colour when I bought it and I haven't got round to doing anything about it. It's probably protected by some kind of listing anyway."
"Why did you buy a pink house to start with?"
"Because, as with everything, my dear, it's what's on the inside that counts."
Belle was standing in the middle of Gold's driveway, staring up at the pink building in front of her. Its owner was leaning in his front doorframe, failing to keep a straight face on seeing her reaction to the colour of his home.
"If you don't stop gawping and come inside soon, I'll have to leave you out there to check that I'm not burning the kitchen down with my culinary skills."
"All right, all right, I'm coming in."
To be honest, Belle was slightly nervous about setting foot in Gold's house. Not because she was scared of him, but because she was acutely aware of her surroundings. Before, whenever they had met, they had been either in a domain Belle was familiar with – the café – or on neutral ground. Gold's home was his alone, a place he felt safe and relaxed in, and he was allowing her into it too. Becoming a comfortable part of someone else's private life was a marker of trust; Gold had willingly removed a barrier of social convention between them and was laying out his entire life for her scrutiny. Belle felt a certain responsibility to be on her best behaviour. She made her way towards the front door, and Gold stepped back to let her inside, closing the door after her.
"You have so much…" Belle began, looking around the hall and up the stairs.
"Junk?" Gold supplied helpfully. "I live in a pawnbroker's paradise."
Belle peered at the china on the hall windowsill.
"Were you an antiques dealer in a former life or something?" she asked.
"Probably. Either that or a magpie." He took Belle's coat and hung it over the banister. "Would you like to see the rest of the house, or are you content to stay exploring the hall?"
Belle smiled.
"Well, as long as you're not in danger of burning the house down, I'd love a tour."
"It'll be fine," Gold said airily. "Follow me, my intrepid fellow traveller."
Belle wondered if 'it'll be fine' was always Gold's maxim when it came to cooking, but she said nothing. He'd been taking care of himself for at least fifteen years and was still here to tell the tale, after all. She was still thinking about cooking when they entered the living room and it took her a few seconds to realise what she was looking at.
"Is that a tiger?" she asked.
"Yes," said Gold, as if having a near life-size plush tiger in the centre of one's living room was entirely commonplace.
"Why?"
"Why is it a tiger? Or why is there a tiger in the living room?"
"The latter."
"Well, I won it on Blackpool Pier a very long time ago, and I use it as a footstool."
Belle gave him an incredulous look that hopefully asked why without having to repeat herself.
Gold shrugged.
"Why not?"
Belle glanced around the room; she was fairly certain that she could spend about three hours in there asking after every little trinket, but Gold was standing patiently in the doorway and she realised that her guided tour of his home wasn't intended to be quite that in depth just yet. She ducked out of the room and let him lead her through the rest of the house quickly, just giving her enough of a look into each room for her to uncover its secrets and whirl through a myriad of questions – mainly 'what's that?' and 'where did that come from?' – that a laughing Gold promised to answer in due course
She was, however, rendered completely speechless by the main bathroom, and spent several seconds staring in open-mouthed wonder at the antique clawfoot tub.
"That's the most beautiful bathtub I have ever seen," Belle murmured eventually.
"Glad you like it," Gold replied. She could tell he was holding back a laugh, even if she couldn't see his face. "I think it's beautiful too, and I shall keep it until I am too old and creaky to get in and out of it anymore."
Belle twisted and looked over her shoulder at him, before glancing back at the tub. It was amply proportioned, and would definitely take more than one person…
She blushed involuntarily and ducked back out of the room to follow Gold back down the stairs and into the kitchen, leaning on the table to watch him as he worked and she told him about her day. He'd hooked his cane on the worktop to have both hands free, and Belle noted the way he moved without it, the way he leaned and balanced his weight, the way his limping gait became more pronounced when he walked a few steps. It was only when he glanced at her, head cocked on one side, that she realised she'd tailed off talking.
"I'm all right," he said, tapping the flat of his kitchen knife against his bad knee. "It doesn't generally give me any more pain like this, I can walk without it, I'm just more unsteady."
At that moment, they were interrupted by the oven timer beeping before Belle could find out any more.
The meal was nothing extravagant, chicken in a lemon sauce with vegetables, but it was well-cooked and tasted good, and that was what was important in Belle's eyes, and she let Gold do the talking as she enjoyed her food. By the time he had finished telling her the latest chapter in the ongoing saga that was Regina and Sid's on-again-off-again relationship (apparently Jefferson had found them entwined in his consulting room that morning and had had to take the rest of the day off to recover), they'd both finished eating and were watching the candles on the dining table burning down.
"Shall we move to the living room for dessert?" Gold asked. "You can test out the tiger."
Belle laughed. "I'd love to." She slipped the two empty plates together as Gold stood and leant over the table to snuff out the candles. A thought swept across her mind unbidden and made her giggle again. Gold raised a questioning eyebrow.
"Just a silly thought," she explained.
"Now I'm intrigued, dearie," he purred. "The silly thoughts are always the most interesting."
"All right then. I was thinking about your tie catching fire."
"I'm not wearing a tie," Gold said. "Dear me, has it really got to the stage where you've seen me wearing one so often you start imagining them?"
Belle shook her head with a smile and stayed staring after Gold's back after he left the room with the plates. She liked him looking like this, because she knew she was generally the only one who got to see him in his shirtsleeves and open collar, his off-duty uniform, so to speak. This relaxed, softer Gold was hers, as opposed to the exquisitely tailored Gold whom she shared with the rest of the world. Idly she wondered what he looked like in his pyjamas, and indeed, what he looked like out of them. She'd imagined often enough when she'd written her little flights of fancy, but now she actually knew him, and knew that the day when she could find out for certain was definitely coming, her daydreaming was infinitely more satisfying.
She pushed the thought aside with an embarrassed little cough before she could get too carried away, and she went to find Gold in the kitchen.
"I'm afraid my expertise don't stretch too far," he said, indicating the plastic dividers he was peeling away from a couple of slices of cheesecake. "Supermarket's finest."
"I'm sure it'll be lovely," Belle reassured him. She took up one of the bowls without a word; she knew he wanted to be a gentleman and wait on her but when he only had one hand free, she might as well save him a trip back to the kitchen.
Gold picked up his own bowl and she followed him into the living room. He gestured towards the sofa with a little bow.
"Do take a seat, dear lady, for your tiger awaits."
Belle nearly bent double with laughter and had to swallow hard to compose herself to sit primly on one side of the sofa. Gold scooted the tiger across the floor towards her with his cane and she kicked her shoes off to rest her feet on it, neatly crossing her ankles. She waited for Gold to sit down beside her, stretching his right leg out but keeping his other bent, and they began to eat by mutual consent.
Presently Belle twisted round and looked at the bookcase beside her, scanning through the titles, but she found her attention drawn to the picture frame on top. She tilted her head on one side to get a better look.
"Is that Bae?" she asked.
Gold followed her eyeline and nodded. He reached across, taking the frame off the shelf and passing it to her.
"It was taken at St Mary's Stadium on his thirteenth birthday. It was pouring with rain and Southampton lost but we had a good time nonetheless."
Belle laughed and studied the picture, a boy in a red and white football shirt grinning from ear to ear. That Bae was Gold's son there could be no doubt; his dark eyes could've been a mirror for his father's. She glanced up to find Gold watching her, his expression unreadable.
"He looks a lot like you," she said simply, and replaced the frame on top of the bookcase.
"Yes, as far as looks were concerned there was never any doubt he was mine. Temperament, though… Liz always used say he'd inherited her good points and my bad ones."
Belle shifted a little closer to him on the sofa.
"Should I be worried about these hereditary bad points of yours?" she asked.
Gold grinned. "Short temper, a lawyer's innate ability to bend the truth…" he began.
"Good at lying, you mean."
"Now, that's not what I said. Technically."
"Yes, I know you thrive on technicalities." Belle paused. "So, Bae was going to be an excellent one to follow in the family profession then?"
"God no." Gold shook his head with a laugh. "No, being a lawyer was the last thing he wanted to do. He couldn't sit still – and I swear he didn't get that from either of us. If the career as a professional footballer didn't work out, he wanted to be a fireman."
Belle smiled and turned her attention back to her cheesecake.
"Did you always want to be a solicitor?" she asked after a while.
"I wanted to be everything under the sun, up to and including Prime Minister. But once I started studying law then yes, I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life. What about you?"
"Well, didn't intend being a waitress my whole life. When I was really little I wanted to keep camels."
Gold looked at her.
"Why camels?"
Belle tapped her toes on the tiger's head. "Why not?"
"True, true."
They lapsed into silence.
"Librarian," Belle said eventually. "I wanted to be a librarian. I love books, and my attempts to write them didn't go to plan, but I knew I wanted to work with them."
"You still could," Gold said. Belle looked at him sharply but he was in earnest. "There's nothing stopping you."
"Really?"
"Says the woman who one day decided to move a hundred miles south to start a new life. If you can do that, you can do anything. Applying to the library should be a piece of cake in comparison."
Belle laughed. "Well, Astrid always said that you can do anything as long as you can dream it, and I believe that if you do the brave thing, bravery will follow."
"Well then." Gold took her empty bowl. "I see no reason why you couldn't be a librarian if you wanted to."
He smiled, and Belle smiled back, and somehow they managed to fall into a kiss without either really being sure who initiated it.
"Coffee?" Gold asked once he'd broken away.
Belle nodded. "Please."
He got up and left the room, and Belle made to follow and help, but she was distracted by the mantelpiece, which was playing host to a rather familiar chipped teacup. She shook her head in despair at the memory and let her gaze wander over the rest of the trinkets whose origins she would hopefully learn in due course. Coming to the end of the mantel, she found a small picture frame with an sepia photograph in it, a very old portrait style. She looked at the woman in the frame, trying to establish any familial likeness.
Presently a coffee cup appeared in her eyeline.
"Thank you." She took the cup and continued to look over the mantelpiece. "Gold…"
"Hang on."
She heard him leave the room and return a few moments later, and he came up alongside her holding his own coffee cup.
"Yes?"
Belle nodded towards the photograph. "She's beautiful. Who is she?"
Gold failed to hide a smile in his cup.
"That's my grandmother. I never actually knew her, but from all accounts she was a very beautiful and remarkable woman in many ways. It's the only sepia photograph I own, which is the main reason why I keep it. Like I said, she'd died before I was born."
"How old is it?"
"It's from nineteen-eighteen."
Belle could tell that there was a story behind this woman; that her tale had far more to be told even if Gold had never met her.
"What's her name?" she asked.
Gold smiled at a private joke. "The Battleaxe."
Belle frowned. "She doesn't look like a battleaxe."
"She's only sixteen in that picture," Gold pointed out. "By the time she'd moved to Scotland and married off her only daughter to a ne'er do well shipbuilder, she wasn't quite as sweetness and light as she is there."
Belle looked at Gold's grandmother for a while, wanting to ask the story but at the same time wanting to keep the mystery, think up a tale for herself as her imagination was so often keen to do. She went back over to the sofa and resettled her feet on the tiger.
"You're right, it does make a good footstool."
"Told you so."
Belle sipped her coffee, glancing occasionally at the photographs whose stories she'd been told. One day she'd really know the people behind the glass, just as Gold would come into her house and know the stories of her family. But there'd be plenty of time for that in the future. For now, they were content to just learn about each other.