Summary: Belle uncovers some rather interesting photographs when clearing out the spare room ready for the baby.

Note: Someone prompted something along the lines of one of them finding the other's high school yearbook… And because I have been wanting to get a Full Monty reference into a fic ever since I first starting writing for OUAT. Over two years later, it finally happened.

Banana Bread

As soon as Belle found the shoebox, Gold knew that they weren't going to get any tidying done. They had set aside this weekend to tidy and decorate the spare room that was going to be the baby's bedroom and throw out all the old junk that had accumulated there. Whilst the pink house was full of things, it was not what one might call overly cluttered or a hoarder's paradise, except this one room to which everything not in immediate use seemed to have gravitated. Gold continued sorting through the high bookshelf as Belle settled herself on a spinning office chair that had been liberated from his previous workplace and began to nose through the photos that were in the box. It had been a sort of dumping ground for all kinds of snapshots of sentimental value over the years, pictures that had been unearthed in various placed but that had no other home. He hadn't looked in the box for years – since before he moved in – and he was trying in vain to remember some of the incriminating things that might be in there. The majority were pictures from Bae's childhood and his own younger years, and he knew it was only going to be a matter of time before he was called upon to identify someone in a picture. Sure enough, they had gone less than five minutes before Belle spoke again.

"Gold, who's this?"

Gold left the book case and made his way through the maze of boxes on the floor to Belle, who was now sitting cross-legged in the chair with the box of photographs tucked in her lap. He looked over her shoulder at the black and white portrait photo.

"That's my ma. She must be about seventeen in that picture."

"She's beautiful," Belle said. "I don't think I've seen any pictures of her so young."

Gold laughed. "She was camera-shy. Hated having her photo taken."

"She takes after your gran," Belle mused, and looked from the photograph to her husband and back again. "And you definitely take after your mum. You've got the same nose. I never noticed before."

She slid the photo back into the box and picked out another one. "Who's this?"

"That's my dad and Aunt Elvira."

Belle peered at the photo closely. "That's Aunt Elvira?"

"She is only five years old in that picture," Gold pointed out. "Naturally she looks a bit different eighty years down the line."

"I know, but I can't imagine your Aunt Elvira any younger than about sixty. I swear that she was born wearing her fluffy cardigan with a bottle of gin in one hand."

"Well, the gin maybe. I'm not so sure about the cardigan." Gold leaned on the wall beside the chair and continued looking over Belle's shoulder at the photographs. "Elvira Gold was the original wildchild, honestly. I think the only thing she didn't do was run away to join the circus. Everything that could be done within a two-mile radius of the street she grew up in, she did."

"And to think, when you first mentioned your eighty-odd-year-old maiden aunt, I thought she was just a sweet little old lady." Belle twisted around to raise an eyebrow at Gold. "She quickly put paid to that idea the first time that I met her on that trip to Glasgow two years ago when she asked me if I wanted a Rampant Rabbit for my birthday because she'd have killed for one when she was my age."

Gold was not quite sure whether to laugh or beat a hasty retreat in the opposite direction. "What did you say?"

"I said I didn't need one. I've got you." She craned her neck to kiss him.

"The next time you two meet, I think I'm going to be in a corner fearing for my life," Gold muttered. He toyed with the idea of leaving Belle with the pictures and going back over to sort out the bookcase, so that they could at least say that they had got something done that day in between getting thoroughly distracted by the annals of time, and eventually he made it back across to the shelves. There was no denying that the room needed to be cleared out, but as long as it was ready in time for their baby's arrival into the world, then they could take their time with the preparations, and they still had a good few months yet. There was the slight problem of the logistics of getting the room decorated to contend with, since both Belle and Gold had each forbidden the other from climbing any ladders. It was looking highly likely that Archie and Ruby would be roped in to paint the ceiling and the bits of the walls they couldn't reach, and the redecoration would turn into quite the epic project, especially if Ruby's artistic imagination was allowed to run away with her.

"I'm keeping that one," he heard Belle say behind him. "I need as many pictures of you in a kilt as possible to prove that you are actually Scottish." There was a pause. "Your mum really was tiny."

There was another pause, broken only by the slip of glossy photograph paper being moved around, and then suddenly Belle burst out laughing.

"Oh my word! Oh, Gold, you look so young in this picture! How old are you?"

Brow furrowed Gold turned back to face her and she spun the chair round so that he could see the photo. He sighed when he recognised it, and sighed again on realising that Liz must have kept it and somehow it had ended up in with his things when they moved, because there was no way on earth that he would have willingly kept it.

"I was twenty," he groaned. "Dear me, of all the pictures to find."

Belle flipped it over and looked at it again. "You look like a stripper," she observed casually. "A really cheap one."

"Well, that was sort of the point."

Belle raised an eyebrow.

"Now I'm intrigued."

Gold sighed again. "It was my final year at university. I was a broke student. And a law student, and we're second only to the medicine students in the amount we'll drink and the things we'll agree to do when we're drunk."

"Now I'm very intrigued."

Gold came over and perched on the arm of the chair beside her.

"My flatmate's girlfriend wanted to take her best friend to the Chippendales for her twenty-first. Alas, she was also a broke law student just like myself and she couldn't afford it. So, she offered to pay one very brave young man in beer and whiskey for a month as a substitute."

"And you accepted her offer?"

"There was a month's worth of alcohol on the line, Belle, of course I accepted her offer. In the long run," Gold mused, "it would probably have been cheaper for her to go to the show."

Belle leaned back in the chair and held up the photograph, and a sly smile crept over her face. It was a smile that Gold had long since recognised as meaning 'I've had a fantastic idea and I think we're both going to enjoy the results'.

"Have you still got the outfit?" she asked.

Gold snorted. "Over thirty years later?"

Belle shrugged.

"Well, I know your magpie-like tendency to hold on to items of sentimental value." She gestured around the room. "We're sitting in evidence of it."

Gold shook his head. "No, it was hired. It had to go back the next day."

"That's a shame."

Belle returned her attention to the box of photos.

"I wonder if there are any taken slightly later on in the proceedings?" she asked.

"No. Definitely and absolutely not. That's the only one in existence and I don't quite know how it slipped through the net. I'm going to burn it."

"You're going to do nothing of the sort." Belle held the picture close to her chest, then went one further and stuffed it down the front of her blouse into her bra. "It really is a crying shame; I'd have paid good money to see that." She grinned. "How far did you go?"

"There was a month's worth of whiskey on the line, Belle, it was practically a matter of life and death."

"That hasn't answered the question." Belle folded her arms, her expression utterly wicked, and Gold laughed.

"Why is it so important? You, my dear, have seen all I have to offer on numerous occasions."

"Yes but there's a difference between taking all your clothes off in front of your wife and doing it in front of a bunch of drunk university finalists. Which is why I'm asking. Did you go all the way?"

Gold matched her grin, which was becoming worryingly lecherous, and he leaned in to whisper in her ear:

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

Belle bit her lip, tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair.

"I don't suppose," she said eventually, "that there is any chance of a repeat performance?"

Gold raised one eyebrow. "Would you be willing to pay me in wine and whiskey for a month?"

"Considering that we already have a lot of wine and whiskey in the house, and I'm not going to be drinking any of it for the foreseeable future, I can't see that this is going to be a problem," Belle pointed out.

Gold sighed. He was fifty years old. Nearly fifty-one.

But the audience was comprised only of Belle, and she was wearing that little smirk that made him weak at the already-weak knees.

"Oh, go on then," he muttered. "Since we're not getting anything done in here anyway."

Belle grinned and slipped off the chair, pulling him along in the direction of their bedroom, and Gold smiled. Perhaps this wasn't quite such a bad idea after all.