Chapter 5
A/N. Confession time: the first three sections of this chapter are out of order for the series: they're based on "Dreamy," so they should have come before the Kathryn kidnapping, but, well, I just now thought of them and they add an element to the growing relationship between Belinda and Gold, so can we pretend I messed around with series order on purpose? If you're a Rumbeller, I think your tolerance will be rewarded. If you're not a Rumbeller, maybe you can call it dramatic license or chalk this up to the fact that it's a story in progress.
Belinda/Belle may be losing faith in him. He perceives that her defense of his behavior is growing shaky when he opens the door to the diner one morning and hears her arguing with Ruby. "He's just looking for an excuse to throw them out onto the street," Ruby's claiming (and it's true). "One day late in their rent and he'll evict them."
"Well, they did know that when they signed the lease." But Belinda can't look Ruby in the eye. She changes the subject. "We should help Leroy and Mary Margaret sell those candles. If everyone in town bought just one–"
"I have a better idea," Ruby purrs. "Nobody gives two hoots for those ugly old candles, but every man in town would pay through the nose for a kiss from a pretty girl."
Belinda sputters. "What? You're not suggesting–"
"Yup. You, me, Emma, Ashley and a kissing booth. Ten dollars a kiss."
"That's more than a hundred kisses for each of us."
"Yeah, but they'll pay up, so pucker up, sister."
"Oh, I don't–"
Ruby feigns offense. "It's for the nuns!"
At the Miners Day Celebration, there's a long line at the cotton candy booth. There's a long line at the kettle corn booth. But the line that stretches all the way past the courthouse and to the library steps is the one leading to the kissing booth. Seven ladies and two men (Whale and Hopper) have been recruited for the work, and those who, like Belinda, are wed, have refused to kiss their spouses all month long, so that the husbands will indeed pay up. Josiah, who finds the whole thing uproariously funny (though he hasn't said as much to Gold, considering the town views the landlord as the villain of the nuns' story) has been skipping his lunches to save his pennies. He has enough for five quick kisses from his wife–or one very long one.
Gold has never attended a Miners Day Celebration, or any other celebration, for that matter. But in tiny ways, he finds his habits and his way of thinking are shifting. Besides, now's a fine time to provoke Regina.
So he strolls down from his shop and just as Madame Mayor is on stage yammering about what a wonderful town they've been blessed with, Gold makes his way to the foot of the stage. Though he's small and slight, the crowd parts for him; no one will stand within arm's length. Madame Mayor is patting herself–she uses the term "our city administration"–on the back for running such a safe and clean little town, and the crowd's dead silent because they're thinking of Kathryn, and suddenly, Gold snorts. That's all, just a single snort. He leans on his cane and blinks innocently, while Regina gapes at him and a titter ripples through the audience, eventually growing into a guffaw. Regina shuffles the papers on which her speech is printed and courageously plows on, but nobody's listening any more except Sidney.
Slowly, as though totally unaware he's being watched, Gold turns his back to the stage and walks away.
As she serves him dinner, Belinda fills him in on what he missed, concluding, "and her face turned as red as her blazer. Right after you left, most of the audience wandered off to the booths, so hardly anyone was there to hear her when she finished. Sidney was the only one to applaud."
"I'd heard that same speech before. I saw no reason to waste my time listening to it again," Gold comments. "Was the event successful?"
Belinda stops stirring the hollandaise sauce. "We're five hundred dollars short," she admits. "I know the rent's due tomorrow, and I know you don't usually–"
"Ever. I don't ever." He reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket. "The hollandaise is scorching."
"Right." She turns away to rescue the sauce. When she sets a platter of halibut steaks on the table, she finds a fan of five one-hundred dollar bills where his napkin had been.
She picks up the money and holds it a moment, thinking. "You don't make charitable donations."
"No."
"Or loans."
"No."
She thinks for a moment more, then folds the money and slips it into her jeans pocket. Without hesitation she frames his face with her hands and kisses him.
It's not a kissing-booth kiss. It's not a lover's kiss. And though it lasts longer than it should, it's nowhere near enough for him, but he keeps his hands in his lap and his lips closed because she is still the wife of his only friend–and that's the only reason he holds back.
When she draws away, her pupils are dilated and he has to look away, to the halibut, to catch his breath.
"I'll. . .pay you the other forty-nine later," she says, busying herself at the stove.
He won't put her in a compromising position. He's seen in her eyes what–or rather, who–he needed to see, for now. "Not necessary. That was. . . value for the money." He offers her an easy way out: "I believe there's some sorbet in the freezer that will go well with our dinner." He rises and digs around in the freezer, allowing the blast of cold air to cool his overheated face.
Belinda says she's proud of him for what he did for Mary Margaret. The whole town's talking about his generosity in defending the teacher without requiring payment. It stuns them (makes some of them suspicious, he knows).
He will have to tell Belle the truth, when the curse breaks: inform her that he's the bastard who put Mary Margaret in jail to begin with; even worse, he's a kidnapper. These crimes are, sad to say, just another day at the office for the Dark One, although this time his motive was unselfish: to prevent Regina from launching a direct attack on Snow. Now that it's all over, Storybrooke has one highly frustrated and vulnerable mayor, one less sham marriage, one reunited pair of True Loves, and a mother and daughter whose bond of trust has been tested and proven unbreakable.
Isn't that worth a few days of an abduction and a false murder rap? Belle will say no, but it was the only plan he could come up with on such short notice, once he realized Regina was on the verge of attacking Mary Margaret.
Still, he's pretty sure Belle won't see it that way. Alone at night in his study, he writes out his explanation on his legal pad. It goes through a dozen revisions and he still can't make it sound justifiable in terms Belle would accept.
He comes to understand why: his relationship with Belle is the only relationship he's had in centuries that isn't about power. In the very beginning, he tried to make it so, but he found he couldn't scare her with dungeons and morbid jokes; and then he found he couldn't bring himself to harm her, even a little, just enough to prove he was her master. It wasn't long after that that he realized he didn't want to be.
Perhaps, he decides after the thirteenth try at writing his apology, the confessions can wait. Once the curse is broken, there will be so much else to deal with. After he has Bae back, after the situation with Dove is worked out, after Adelena is born. . . and raised. . .and has a few children of her own. . .someday when he and Belle are warming their old bones in the afternoon sun, rocking on their porch in their creaky rocking chairs, someday when Belle's hearing aid isn't working right, he'll take her hand and confess to all his crimes. If she has any inclinations then about leaving him, he'll hide her walker.
He keeps staring at her belly. There isn't much to stare at, yet, but he stares whenever she's preoccupied with something else. He's captivated by the realization that a human being resides in there, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake, sometimes sucking her thumb, and, he presumes, often thinking (about what? About the world she came from before she was sent to this one? Is Adelena taking in impressions of the world through her mother? Or has she been on this earth before and is she remembering?).
The creation of a human being is, he thinks, the ultimate magic; childbirth is the original portal jump.
Belle catches him sometimes, but his staring doesn't make her uncomfortable; the amazement on his face amuses her. He explains to her in hesitant phrases that he is a father to a child he's long been separated from; she's curious, of course, but doesn't press for details and when he adds that he doesn't know where his son resides these days, she doesn't do the Belle thing–doesn't prod him to search. In this life, Belle/Belinda is a bit more circumspect, a bit more patient with people's failings than she was in the days of the Dark Castle. Belle of the Marshlands was a puller, hauling Rumplestiltskin away from evil impulses; Belinda of Storybrooke is a nudger, directing people in indirect ways. He thinks Rumplestiltskin needed to be pulled, but Gold needs to be nudged.
In any case, he needs her in his life, even if she is carrying another man's baby. Both of those thoughts have taken some getting used to. It was only after Regina had declared Belle dead that Rumplestiltskin admitted to himself that Belle was exactly what he had been looking for without ever realizing he was looking: someone who would rekindle his faith in powers bigger than magic, who would restore his ability to give rather than just deal. Someone who would make him want to be human again, and then help him find the path back to his humanity.
Only Belle could change him. He needed her then and his need hasn't lessened. He needs her for the small things, he's thinking as he opens yet another can of slop and stands over the sink to eat yet another meal alone. And just as before, he needs her for the big things, for though he now looks human on the outside, he's still a jumble on the inside and he needs her to help him sort himself out.
But there's the other half of the deal: she's carrying another man's baby. If he could ignore two words of those five, he'd have no problem. If that baby were his, or if somehow, by some tremendous act of magic, that baby had been Belle's alone, he admits to himself he'd be over the moon. He'd gladly give Adelena his name, his home, his wealth, his love.
But in the Enchanted Forest, men seldom were so generous with children not of their blood. That was especially true of the nobility, but even in the peasant class, where Rumple had spent the first forty-five years of his life, and where it was common for women to be widowed early and to remarry, it was uncommon for the stepfather to adopt his new wife's children. Certainly, stepfathers took full advantage of the extra labor that an additional pair of hands, however small, could perform, but seldom did they accord stepchildren the same rights as natural children. Not even–and this had always angered Rumple–the right to call their mother's husband "papa."
Many of the old ways of thinking remained in Gold. In this particular case, Storybrooke had offered no alternative to encourage a man to change his way of thinking, for no one had ever married here, and until Alexandria, no one had ever been born here.
As Gold eats over his sink night after night, staring at Belinda's empty chair and counting the days until Monday or Wednesday, he concludes that he will be the trailblazer, Storybrooke's first stepfather. He needs and loves Belle, and as he watches her body change in shape and hue, he remembers how his life changed when Bae arrived in it–every moment with Bae, he remembers. Oh, and he has so much more to give a child now–not just the money, though that certainly matters: the money will buy him time with the baby. He can close the shop, which doesn't turn a profit anyway; his family can live quite comfortably off the rental properties he owns. Hell, they could live nicely just off the interest from his bank accounts. He could retire, spend his days at home, taking care of and teaching and loving his family.
His family. His wife and his child. When he thinks in those terms, he's over the moon. But. . .Dove's ex-wife, Dove's child. He must think in those terms. Josiah has rights too. The child has the right to know its natural father, and not just legal rights. If Gold were to drive Josiah away, the child would hate Gold. Gold knows that for sure; he is so much wiser about people than Rumplestiltskin ever was.
He's already lost the love of a son; he can't bear the prospect of losing a second child, or watching the pride in Belle's eyes when she looks at him turn to shame for his selfishness.
There is an opportunity here, the dealer inside him points out. A chance for all three adults to parent this baby, if they can forgo possessiveness and old ways of thinking. They have a big advantage: they're standing on the solid ground of friendship.
There are only two questions that remain to be answered: can Belle and Josiah forgive him and learn to trust him again when they learn the part he played in the curse? And can Rumplestiltskin, his posessiveness a defense mechanism against the pain of repeated abandonments, trust that this baby's heart will have room for two fathers?
As he ponders this question, still staring at Belle's empty chair, he realizes what the question implies, and he admits it to himself: he wants this baby to love him, unconditionally, as Belle does. He wants to love this baby, unreservedly, as he loved Bae. He thinks he can.
When he comes home on Monday night to coq au vin and Beethoven on the CD player and a humming Belle, he imagines a high chair parked between his chair and Belle's. He imagines strained peas and stewed apricots and stained bibs and tiny rubber spoons. He imagines babbling undercutting Belle's humming. He imagines himself planting a kiss atop a fuzzy head and being rewarded with "da."
It doesn't matter, not really, if Adelena's last name is Dove, or if she has Dove's nose, or if she calls him "da" too. This is what Gold knows, but sometimes as he stares at Belle's baby bump, what he feels is less noble. In this world and the previous one, he was, after all, a grasping, greedy creature. He's going to need nudges and pushes from both the ladies in his life, if he's going to do things right this time.