The road to understanding is paved with stories
It was like stepping into a whirling kaleidoscope.
Belle couldn't see anything clearly. Images flashed by her eyes without resolving into anything comprehensible, coming in quick gusts like leaves in a storm. Lights, colors, shapes, patterns — every time she thought she recognized something, it twisted away out of focus before she could even establish its scale, whether it was large or small, near or far.
She felt nothing but air on her skin, heard nothing but air in her ears. She wondered what she was standing on, but looking down only made her dizzy. Looking back, she saw the reassuring circular swirl of the portal. She had to restrain herself from reaching out for it. She still had a job to do. But where? Even her sense of up and down was becoming confused.
"Let your heart guide you," she said under her breath. As if in response, a hint of definition, gray and darker gray, began to appear under her feet. She blinked, half-expecting it to vanish, but it persisted. She took a tentative step forward, but her foot came down in emptiness. Right. She needed a story. She remembered the book that had caused Gaston so much grief. She wished... no, that was useless. She hadn't been wrong to believe in goodness and compassion, had she? How could that be wrong? "This is the story of 'Her Handsome Hero'..."
As she began the familiar tale, rainbow-like lines of color solidified, seeming to absorb strength from her words. Belle tried walking forward, and when the path did not collapse under her, broke out into a wide smile. She could do this. She would succeed. Her voice became more confident as she continued speaking and moving forward.
By the time she finished, the portal was lost in the distance behind her, hidden by the chaotic swirl of random images that filled this realm. She paused long enough to take a sip from the waterskin. It tasted clear, neither warm nor cold, sliding down her throat with just a slight hint of enchantment. She guessed at the effects as the magic flowed through her body: refreshment and mental clarity. Her memories felt closer than ever, sharper and more detailed.
Belle launched into a new story, then another. There was no sign yet of her destination, but she hadn't expected it to be that easy, so she was not discouraged. She spoke of heroes and villains, knights and dragons, beggars and witches and evil queens, following the path of her words deeper and deeper into the alien realm.
She lost track of time. It seemed to her that she should feel hungry, yet she didn't. Nor did she feel any urge to sleep. It was only her mind that grew weary from recounting tale after tale. Only the enchanted water kept her voice from going hoarse with overuse. All the stories began to blur together. There was good, and there was evil. The hero went on a journey, overcame obstacles, acting with honor and compassion, and emerged victorious. The monsters were defeated, the king returned to his throne, the countryside set right. The princess met her prince; true love prevailed.
In the end, she didn't know how many stories she had flung out into the Land Without Stories. All that she knew was that she had come to the end of the stories she knew, yet there was nothing in sight except more chaos. No hourglass. Despair gripped her. She had come this far; how could she fail now? She clutched the waterskin, now nearly empty.
"No. I won't give up." She wracked her brains for more stories. But there were no more. She was only a mortal, and the number of books she had read in her lifetime was finite. Her lifetime... her lifetime! Belle laughed, suddenly inspired. "Once upon a time, in a little kingdom in the Enchanted Forest, there lived a girl named Belle..."
Buoyed by her new insight, she continued forward, telling the story of her own life. It was not as long as some, but by the time she told of her adventures in the Dark Castle and afterwards, all the way to her re-union with Rumplestiltskin, she realized that she now had his stories as well. And with a life that had spanned centuries, surely that would be enough for her to reach the object of her quest?
"Once upon a time, there was a motherless boy who lived with his father," began Belle. "His father was a drunkard, a coward, and a cheat, making a paltry living by using sleight of hand to trick others out of their money."
Seeing again the images that Rumple had shown her in the Netherworld, Belle wove them together into a story. She told of how the boy's father had abandoned him for eternal youth and magic, becoming Peter Pan, the cruel ruler of Neverland. The boy had been taken in by two kind-hearted spinsters. Growing up, he had vowed to be a better man, one who would love his children and never ever abandon them. In time, he had married a woman from his village. It might not have been true love, but Rumplestiltskin and Milah had been happy enough at first. He hadn't been wealthy, but his spinning earned enough for a peasant's hovel and a meagre living.
Then came the first Ogres War. The spinner had joined the Duke's army, eager to prove himself a hero. Instead, he had limped home with a self-inflicted wound. He had crippled himself, afraid that the battlefield would be his death. Word traveled faster than a man with a broken foot; his wife had met him with a face full of scorn. His joy at holding his newborn son was forever tainted with the knowledge that he was a coward.
As the words left her mouth, Belle stopped herself. No, there was more to it. "There was a girl, a seer. She told him that his actions on the battlefield that day would leave his son fatherless. He didn't believe her at first, but when her other predictions came true, he was convinced."
Milah had not been. As far as she was concerned, that was merely the feeble excuse of a coward. Her husband had disappointed her, dealing a fatal blow to their marriage. After that, she had sneered at his uselessness, resentment building as the months and years wore on. Belle saw in her mind's eye how even his brief moments of happiness, playing with his son, were viewed as weakness by his wife. More evidence of his cowardice. He had become a burden she was shackled to. She almost wished he had died in the war, which would have left her free.
Belle found herself appalled at Milah's heartlessness, yet she could also sympathize with being married to a man who couldn't, or wouldn't, live up to what she wanted him to be. "He ran away from the battle. That isn't what a hero does, is it?" But was that enough reason to condemn him? He wasn't a character in one of her books.
It wasn't exactly cowardice. As Belle told the story, she began to see him in a new light. Rumplestiltskin weighed the odds with great care, making his decisions based on what was most important to him. In the end, he put more value on his family than on the Duke's war or on being a hero. It took a different kind of courage to bear the shame of being branded a coward, to be despised by his entire village, including his own wife. And when his wife had been taken by the pirates, he weighed the odds again, a crippled peasant against a ship full of well-armed fighters, and retreated. He chose to return to his son rather than risk losing everything. He could only pray for his wife to forgive him.
It wasn't the fear of death that governed his actions. At his best, it was his sense of responsibility, and at his worst, his desire to control his destiny. Even in the time that Belle had known him, he had faced death willingly twice, once when it would save those he loved and once when it was only his own life at stake.
And it had not been cowardice to refuse to murder a man, especially a healer, whose loss could mean the deaths of all those patients he might someday have saved. To condemn them all for the sake of his own child would have been an act of selfishness. Milah had not cared, but Rumplestiltskin hadn't wanted his son to grow up with a murderer for a father, however futile that hope had turned out in the end.
"He did make a mistake," Belle said, now aware of the details that Rumple had left out when he initially told her that Hades had a claim on their child. "But it wasn't in making the deal to trade a second-born child who didn't exist in return for the life of the son he already had. His mistake was to try to erase the deal by killing the man who held the contract. Rumple could have renegotiated the terms with the healer, who was not an evil man. But instead he sent him to Hades, who was not nearly so generous..."
Belle shut her eyes, contemplating for a moment what might have been. Then she shook her head and continued, her words painting the next segment of her path.
"He is a murderer," Belle admitted, the judgement sounding harsher once she said it aloud. She mourned the kindhearted spinner, but that man was long gone. Blame it on fate, on his first wife (whom he had killed!), on the seer who had twisted his path with her prophecies, on his own fear — it didn't matter, in the end. "But he's hardly the only one. It doesn't mean that I can't forgive him, or that he can't become a better man."
He had tried. He had always tried. Belle took another breath, then began the story of the first Ogres War. It had dragged on for almost two decades. With each passing year, the Duke of the Frontlands had taken his recruits younger and younger. Fourteen. Baelfire had been fourteen when the Duke's knights came for him. That night, Rumplestiltskin had been desperate enough to steal a magic dagger and kill a man. In the morning, he had killed many more. And then he had gone to the battlefield.
He ended the war with a truce. It wasn't only the human children he saved, but also the ogre children. As the Dark One, he could have slaughtered them all, but he hadn't. Even as a monster, he had shown more mercy than the human warlords might have wished.
If he had stopped there, he might have been hailed as a hero. But he hadn't.
He had hurt too many people, until even his own son couldn't recognize his father anymore. Given a chance to start over, Rumplestiltskin had instead chosen his power as the Dark One and lost his child to the Land Without Magic. It was a mistake he regretted for the rest of his life. For the next three centuries, he had devoted himself to finding Baelfire, no matter what it took. He created a curse powerful enough to tear the world asunder and shaped a villain ruthless enough to cast that curse.
"That was his darkest deed," said Belle. "Thousands of lives ripped away and trapped in a foreign land without memory or time. All of this, in order to see his son again."
Then she remembered another scene she had witnessed. "The first time he thought he had found Baelfire, that was one of the happiest moments of his life. Thinking that they could be reconciled at last, he even dug up his dagger and gave it to his son to destroy."
Belle sighed. "But... it was all a trick. It wasn't his son at all, but someone wanting to control him in order to use his power. No wonder that he clung to it even more tightly after that."
She paused and peered forward, but saw no lessening of the chaos. How much further could the hourglass be hidden? She took a sip of water, then continued with a story about the puppets that had haunted first the Dark Castle, then the Storybrooke pawn shop.
In her role as caretaker in the castle, Belle had dusted them dutifully, suppressing her instinctive revulsion. Their sad, bulging eyes exuded horror. She had been afraid to ask. But now she knew. Her voice faltered briefly as she remembered the visions revealed in the dark mirrors of the netherworld. Rumplestiltskin hadn't kept them around for any magical purposes. They were only puppets, once innocent people, victims of one of his potions. A deal gone awry. He kept them out of guilt. They reminded him that Dark One or not, seer or not, he was fallible.
He had intended the potion for another pair of targets, ones he had hated for a long time. They reminded him too much of his own father: swindlers, thieves, liars, cheats. They treated their own son with a contempt that dredged up all of Rumplestiltskin's memories of abuse and abandonment. His father was now out of reach in Neverland, too powerful for even the Dark One to fight, but these two... ah, how he burned to kill them.
Except he had rules now, a self-imposed code that limited the harm he did.
You hurt people all the time. That was one of the last things his son had told him before he lost him. So Rumplestiltskin had done his best to rein in the darkness, restricting his aggression to those that directly threatened him, stole from him, or broke a deal. Otherwise he left others free to accept or refuse his deals, to do harm or to refrain. And these two thieving puppeteers were oh so careful never to steal from him, never to cheat him, never to cross him.
When their son Jiminy had appealed to him, Rumplestiltskin had seen his chance and taken it, finding grim irony in making literal puppets of the vile couple who manipulated their own child like a marionette. But the deal had backfired. The puppeteers were too clever, their son too honest, and the price had been paid by two innocents. Another child, Geppetto, was left orphaned.
Before Rumplestiltskin could intervene, Reul Ghorm, the Blue Fairy, had stepped in. Her help, as usual, came too late. The fairies were the patrons of the noble houses, and their attention was focused on those they deemed important. They had not helped Morraine or any of the other commoners drafted to die in the Ogres War. The Blue Fairy had only answered Baelfire because of his link to the Dark One, and it was the same for the puppeteers' boy. She didn't deign to help Jiminy free himself until after Geppetto's parents were dead.
"Rumple always did try to help people," said Belle, a little hoarsely. She took a tiny sip of water, knowing that less than a mouthful remained. "Since he never asks for gold, his price is as easy or as hard to meet as he chooses. It makes no difference whether he deals with a king or a beggar. If he didn't have such a dreadful reputation, there'd be no end of people queuing up on his doorstep. I think he tried to scare them away on purpose. Because it's true that magic does come with a cost, and it's rarely what you think it is."
Especially when what he used was dark magic, magic fueled by anger and hate.
"Why?" Belle couldn't help asking the question again. "Why couldn't he use light magic instead?"
She saw again the young pretender, the miller's daughter who had the audacity to bluff her way into the king's ballroom. Saw how she had been caught and humiliated, locked away in a tower until she could spin straw into gold. Through the dark mirror's memories, she felt Rumplestiltskin's pity and anger on the girl's behalf.
The world was full of injustice. Kings and queens could burn a whole village on a whim; commoners had no protection but the goodwill of their rulers. Children could be ripped from their parents and sent to die on the battlefield. The people who had power drew lines and assigned labels as they pleased: coward, peasant, cripple, monster, beast, crocodile, miller's daughter, Dark One, villain, slave, weapon. If he didn't feel anger, he would drown under the weight of all their contempt. It was anger that drove change, for better or worse. Darkness was tempered by light, as he well knew, but at its base, his power was born from rage. In Cora, he had recognized the same rage.
As she told Cora's story, Belle found herself wondering what would have happened if the miller's daughter's ambition had been a shade weaker and her love a shade stronger. Would Cora and Rumple have found true love? If they had borne a daughter together, would he have trained her to cast the Dark Curse? She had never met Cora herself, but Belle saw, in Rumple's memories, the poisonous woman she had become after marrying into the aristocracy.
"Dark magic consumed her soul," concluded Belle. "And in the end it was dark magic that killed her." Would that be Rumple's fate? He had nearly died once, his heart blackened to its core. The Apprentice had drained that corruption away, but Rumple had taken it back. Could he really balance darkness and light now? Cora had been selfish, but Rumplestiltskin had originally wanted to wield his power for good. Perhaps anger was sometimes justified.
Her mouth parched, Belle shook out the last drops of water from the waterskin and swallowed them. What story remained for her to tell? Only their more recent past, which she had avoided so far, as it was all so painful. But perhaps there was no avoiding it. She spoke of Zelena and what had befallen in the aftermath of her schemes. Then of marriage and betrayal, exile and return. After a moment of hope that he was free of the darkness, she had found her husband again in the Underworld only to learn the truth.
She had told him she couldn't condone his darkness, yet that was a lie, wasn't it? Speaking of it now, she remembered that there was a part of herself she had suppressed until now, when the enchanted water brought all her memories to the surface.
"There was a time when I wanted him to be dark," she admitted. "When I was Lacey." She wasn't Lacey, she refused to be Lacey, and she had buried her Cursed identity in the bottom of her mind out of shame — but it was no use. She couldn't deny that part of herself reveled in darkness. Perhaps everyone (except for those magically purged of it) had that somewhere inside themselves. Belle had tried to lock it away, because it wasn't heroic, and she had tried all her life to be a Hero. And then she had wanted her True Love to be a Hero, too.
"But he isn't, is he? He never dealt in labels: those were always words other people threw at him. He deals in names. Names are what he knows." Belle thought through the implications, wincing at the memory of herself calling him "coward". How that must have stung, coming from someone he loved. "A name unique to each individual, in all their faults and glory."
At first she didn't notice that her eyes had focused on the same point ahead of her for the last thirty seconds. Then she realized that there was an edge, a fixed image of some kind in the midst of the chaos. Her breath caught — could it be? She forced herself to continue.
"And that's why I'm here. Not to be a hero, or to save a villain, but because I love someone, and he needs my help." She closed her eyes, taking another step forward. She swallowed, then whispered, hoping it would suffice, "Rumplestiltskin."
When she opened her eyes again, the edges had coalesced into a floating shape just under a foot high and a few inches around.
Belle reached out automatically. Her fingers closed on the first solid object she had seen since she had walked through the portal. She looked down at what she held: a white frame, carved out of something as smooth and hard as ivory, enclosing a pair of glass cones joined at the points, half filled with black sand. The Hourglass of Chronos. She had found it at last.