It started in a dream.
Shelving books at the library, she pushed the cart between endless rows that shaped its own world. Anxiety gnawed at the back of her mind. Water, water on the floor, the level inexorably rising. She continued, not daring to stop or look, knowing that to look was to lose herself.
Don't drown, don't drown...
The next book she reached for squirmed in her grasp, unexpectedly warm and furry.
"Mrrp!" came the yip in protest.
"Mr. Mistoffeles!" Belle released the cat, her task forgotten.
The black and white cat leaped to the top shelf and knocked down the books, staying just ahead of Belle's attempts to stop him.
Instead of falling, the books scattered through the air like a flock of birds.
The shelves began shaking, pieces coming loose and dropping into the rising flood. Their captive volumes, released, took flight. Belle waded onward, fighting the current. Water swirled around her knees and weighed down the bottom of her skirt. The end of the corridor of shelves receded in front of her — she would never reach it in time.
It was the end of the world.
The ferryman was here to collect her soul. Mysterious under a dark hood, he stood on the till of a punt, a long pole in his hands. He deftly pushed the boat to float alongside her. Then he dropped to one knee, freeing one hand to reach out to her.
The water was up to her chest and so, so cold. She clenched her chattering teeth and felt her heart beating hard as she fought to keep moving and breathing. Soon it would be over her head. She could climb on one of the bookshelves, now toppled and drifting with the current, their books all flown away — but instinct warned against being dragged down into the maelstrom that lurked at the end of that current.
Belle looked up at the hooded figure. The sight filled her with an odd sense of calm. She reached out for the proffered hand, but instead of grasping it, gave him a coin. She muttered through chattering teeth, "The ferryman's due. Am I dead, then?"
The ferryman took the coin between his fingers, seeming to examine it. Then he tossed it into the air. It never fell again. The man shook his head. He held out his hand for Belle again.
She smiled ruefully. "I guess I don't have much choice."
"Everyone has a choice," the ferryman whispered from beneath the hood. His hand didn't waver.
She made hers and clasped the offered hand. The next moment she was yanked out of the water and dumped in the boat, dripping into the bottom with the horizontal treads digging into her side. She twisted around awkwardly to sit upright. She hunched over, shivering. She wrapped her arms around her torso in a feeble attempt to warm herself.
The ferryman turned, a glint of eyes visible under the hood. Faster than the human eye could follow, he flicked the end of the pole into the air, catching a book midflight. A twist of his wrist tore a page loose. He caught the page and snagged it, letting it flutter down to land in the boat next to Belle.
She looked down warily. The paper rustled in distress, but it had fallen victim to the puddle of water in the bottom of the punt and couldn't escape. Belle uncurled enough to reach over and grab the page. This was no way to treat a work of literature! She wanted to chide the ferryman, but the page morphed in her hand into a thick wool blanket, burgundy and gold with a charming pattern of roses and serpents. The patterns sparkled with light. Belle blinked, feeling threads of warmth flowing through her. She settled the blanket over her shoulders, grateful for the comfort. Without noticeable transition, her clothes and skin were dry.
The ferryman planted the pole down once more and shoved, sending the boat gliding upstream. Then he lifted the pole, planted it in a new spot, and pushed. Then again, and again, in slow, hypnotic progress. They left the fallen bookshelves behind and approached a bridge. An archway under the bridge led into a dark, forbidding tunnel.
Belle clutched more tightly to her blanket and shrank down. The air under the arch rushed by, whooshing hollowly in the confined space. It felt as if it wanted to drag her back to the waiting maelstrom. All that protected her was the sturdy forward momentum of the punt. She raised her gaze to the ferryman. As they emerged from under the bridge into a shallow lake, light slanted down from the open sky to hint at the face under the hood.
Her head felt stuffed full of cotton, but one thing came into focus. She knew him. "Rumplestiltskin..."
"Belle, Belle, I'm so sorry." The ferryman flipped back his hood to reveal the dear, familiar face of Mr. Gold. He set down the pole and lowered himself into a crouch in front of her.
She looked at his guilty expression and said slowly, "You... you left. I had to shelve all those books by myself."
"When I left..." He dropped his gaze. "I thought you would follow."
"I thought you would stay," Belle whispered. In a drowning library? In retrospect, it seemed a foolish thought. Even the books had better places to be. "I suppose we both made our choices. How did you know when to leave?"
"Mal gave me a warning," he replied. "And a reminder that the Dark One is the last resort of desperate souls — a category which had come to encompass the entire population of several realms..."
Belle blinked. What did that have to do with anything?
Rumple shook his head. "I once devised a curse that would rip the world apart, all to find my son. Nothing less could save us now. I saw it, then. What I had to do, before it was too late."
"You could have explained!"
"I didn't have time!"
They stared at each other.
Finally, he confessed, "In the heat of the moment, I forgot that I couldn't just drag you along as if you were still my maid. Nowadays, when you dig in your heels, there's no moving you against your will."
Except of course someone had. In the back of her mind, she knew it. Something had happened to her. Something not her choice, but suffered as a consequence of her choice. "It was a trap. That's what you mean. I didn't move; the ground simply dropped out from under me..."
"It was a trap," he agreed. "Everyone was caught inside the story."
"Is that where we are, now?" Belle looked around at the expanse of water. The reflection of the sky dazzled the eye so that she couldn't focus on the shore or what lay beyond. "What is this place?"
"This is the Lake of Ten Thousand Memories," he told her.
She knew with unfathomable certainty that there was no such place in the waking world. "Then that means... this is a dream?"
He nodded. "Inside a dream, a dream awakes: where falls the sand of Morpheus?"
"What?" Unable to parse the sentence into anything that made sense, Belle wondered if she had misheard.
Rumple repeated himself, then added, "It's a prophecy. Mine, not Merlin's."
"I don't understand." Belle closed her eyes. If this was a dream, was Rumple really here? Was it because it was a dream that she couldn't see properly? Yet she felt in her heart this was her true love before her.
"It's because you're asleep. For me, it's spinning. For you, books. The important thing is the chain linking the names together."
Belle heard the plash of something being dipped into the water and opened her eyes.
Rumple held a porcelain tea cup to her. "Drink this. It may help."
She eyed it dubiously. "It's chipped..."
"You can hardly see it," he returned gravely, as if they were secret agents exchanging code phrases.
Ah well. Maybe the significance would be clearer after she drank. She took the cup and emptied it into her mouth. For a moment she let it sit as she contemplated its muddy, swampy flavor. Then she shrugged mentally and swallowed.
The lake vanished.
They stood at the side of the highway outside Storybrooke. Sunlight broke sporadically through the bare branches of the trees, low in a sky shedding thin flurries of snow.
"I broke through to the Land Without Magic," Rumple said. "Outside the town line, where the Author couldn't control the story."
Belle followed him as he hobbled through the forest, bracing himself on one tree, then the next, until he found a suitable stick to walk with. "What happened to Storybrooke?"
He limped back towards the highway. "The town is gone. The story changed. What you have to understand is that none of us, not even added together, could equal the magic he had claimed for himself. Dark One or lame spinner, I couldn't face that."
"So you ran away." She kept her tone light, but there was an inexplicable undertow of grief that complicated the meaning behind her words. Why this feeling of regret?
Rumple chuckled wryly and eyed his walking stick. "In a manner of speaking. But you know I'm a coward."
"A coward with a plan. Or a prophecy." Belle sighed, seeing in her mind's eye a vivid image of Rumplestiltskin stabbing himself and his father, dying to save his loved ones. "I don't think you're actually a coward. It's only that you save your acts of bravery for when it counts."
"You think I'm a man who makes wrong choices." He stopped and caught her gaze. He had a familiar self-deprecating smile on his lips, that made light of the guilt and self-loathing constantly threatening to consume him. "You told me so yourself."
"After knowing you for about an hour," she said with a straight face. It was a joke meant as a reassurance: neither of them was perfect, both of them could make mistakes. She forgave him, she loved him, she needed him. And these days she knew him better, understanding more of the reasons behind his choices. "It's possible my judgement was too hasty."
His expression eased, breath puffing out in an amused snort. "We may laugh about it someday. But right or wrong, these are the choices we made..."
It was a long, weary walk to the diner down the road.
"From here, I was able to catch a bus to Boston." The diner was now a busy airport. "And from there an airplane to London."
"London? Why London?" Belle took the changes in stride, understanding that in a dream, past and present could mix freely. What she was seeing was somewhere between possession and re-enactment.
"So I could take a train to Wales." The scene shifted again. In a hotel room, Rumple browsed through a tourist guide to Wales. "In this world, The Dream of Rhonabwy was a medieval Welsh tale."
"Merlin said he put him under a sleeping curse." The memory bubbled up when Rumple mentioned the name.
"Merlin hid Rhonabwy." Rumple took a sheaf of folded papers from inside his jacket. He peeled one sheet out and inserted it into the tourist guide. When nothing happened, he added a second sheet. Red light rippled out over the book, the illustrations and text writhing into new shapes, consuming the loose pages in the process.
"But this is a land without magic," said Belle, startled.
"Unless you bring it with you. The Author's powers are directly linked to the Dreamer. Tug on that link..." Rumple picked up the altered guidebook and paged through it. He nodded at whatever he found. "And the way becomes clear. Gwynedd. Merlin hid him in Gwynedd."
The stone chamber reminded her of Maleficent's cavern under the library. An electric camping lantern acquired somewhere along the way shed a cold, white light around them. A man lay supine on what looked like a bier draped with a white cloth. His clothes looked rich but frail with age, in a style befitting a twelfth century nobleman. The man inside the clothes looked yet frailer, shrunken and ancient, gray hair and beard fading to near-colorless white at the roots.
"It wasn't a curse. It was a spell cast with pixie dust." Rumple held the lantern over the man's head and bent forward for a closer look. "No ordinary magic could wake him, not even true love's kiss."
"Wait, what?" Belle pulled at Rumple's arm to get him away from the sleeper. "You can't wake him! That would destroy our reality!"
Rumple gave her a dark look. "According to Merlin."
"Because it happened before and he witnessed it!" argued Belle.
"Centuries ago. The realms may shake, but they have too much momentum now to disperse into the ether." He made it sound convincing, but Belle had her doubts. What evidence did he have? "Only the newest model, the Inquisitor's dream, will be sloughed off."
"What if you're wrong?"
"You forget. This already happened." Rumple set lamp and guidebook on the floor, then took out the remaining pages they had taken from Isaac. "A few dregs of power left here. Enough to use as a leader thread..." Behind him, his shadow stretched out to form the silhouette of a spinning wheel on the cavern wall.
"You said not even true love could wake him."
"But there's something more powerful." His hands twirled to form his trademark flourish. "Death!"
Belle gasped. "You killed him?"
Rumple met her eyes somberly. "He longs for it, as a younger man might long for a lover's embrace. He's lived centuries past his time, trapped in this hell."
Trapped, unable to move, alone in the dark for hundreds of years. She wouldn't wish that on anyone. "His soul will be freed?"
"I opened a door." Rumple arranged one of the Author's pages over Rhonabwy's heart. He closed his eyes, brows drawn in concentration. The paper seemed to burn with a golden light. It dissolved and sank into the sleeper's chest.
One more barely perceptible breath, then nothing. A face already pale, with skin as thin and fragile as tissue paper, lost its last tint of blood.
"Rumple!" Belle groped blindly in a dark void. It swallowed her cry and gave nothing back. Then she felt a jolt, as if she taken a step and found the ground suddenly lower than expected. She staggered forward half a step before she caught herself. "Rumple? Where are you?"
The air changed. The feel of the space around her took on a long-lost familiarity. She closed her eyes. If she was here, then he was...
There. Belle shuffled forward and to the right. Her hand landed on a shoulder. It had to be him. She opened her eyes. Dim light revealed the outlines of the great hall of the Dark Castle. Here was the spinning wheel, where Rumplestiltskin had once spent so many of his idle hours, and where he sat once again.
He froze under her touch. Without looking at her, he whispered, "Belle? Is that really you?"
She added another hand, closing the distance between them to grip him more securely. "Am I still dreaming?"
"Ah," he breathed. He turned under her touch to face her. "You're here. Don't let go."
"I won't," she promised. She felt him press the pentacle coin into her palm.
"Thank you for your trust." He shifted back to operate the spinning wheel.
Belle slipped the coin into its extradimentional pocket, grateful for its help in bringing them back together. "What's happening?"
"Tiberius is trying to hold onto his little kingdom." Rumple began moving again, the creak of the wheel underlining his explanation. "I'm spinning to remember. Names, places, so many souls..."
A single soul was as lost and vulnerable as a piece of straw, light enough to be swept away in a stray wind. But twisted together, they became something stronger. Strong enough to pull the imprisoned souls free from the Inquisitor's grasp.
Belle could see them in the void, tiny stars linked together, one name to another. "We need to tell them they can go home."
"They'll listen to you," he said optimistically. "Your light can penetrate even the most closed-off hearts."
She tried to believe in herself at least half as much as Rumple did. She kept her hands on him, channeling her magic into his, relaying their message to the thread of souls.
Remember.
Remember home.
For many of them, it was Storybrooke. The Dark Castle became the cluttered back room of the pawnshop. By the dark light of the void, she saw through the walls to the street beyond. Past shops and houses to water and forest. She followed the line of the road to the edge of town.
Welcome to Storybrooke read the sign. But on the other side of the sign, the road dwindled to a dirt track. And beyond that...
"That's not the Land Without Magic!"
"No," Rumple confirmed. "The town — and the magic of the Dark Curse that sustained it — was recreated in the Enchanted Forest."
Belle saw more stars flung across the void to settle in Oz, in Wonderland, in Camelot — all their realms of story. "And Tiberius?"
The wheel stopped. Rumple twisted around to hand her a book. "He invested too much of himself in the story. He can't or won't escape."
Belle flipped through it, then shut it again quickly. She put it on an antique dresser that happened to be the closest available surface, not wanting to touch it any longer than she had to. "Bound between the covers of a book..."
"The last magical storybook," said Rumple.
"Everyone else broke free? They're all here?"
"Some took refuge in the Wood Beyond." Rumple paused, not quite looking at her. "But some..."
Belle tensed, not daring to breathe. Her chest tightened.
"Our lives were freed from that twisted story, but some things..." Rumple's voice became even lower. She had to strain to hear him. "The path may change, but the end remains the same. Dead is dead."
Dead. A wave of dizziness overtook her. Everything went dark and distant.
"Belle!"
And she woke up. She opened her eyes and sat up with a gasp. Rumple was there to catch her. He must have carried her to the bed in the back of the pawn shop. The memories came back to her in a rush. "He killed my father..."
"I know." Rumple let her cling to him, wrapping his own arms around her. "I'm so sorry."
It was shocking to her that she had forgotten. In the dream, she had felt that her father was close, present but just out of sight. Now she realized it had been an illusion generated by the remnants of his crushed heart in her bloodstream. She shuddered, sorting out the false memories from the real ones. "I wanted to kill him myself, but then, when we talked, I don't know. I thought, I thought maybe things between us could get better. But then..."
"Shh, it's all right." Rumple rubbed her back soothingly.
"And now he's dead, and it's my fault." She sniffled, her eyes filling up with tears. She had tried to play hero again, but all she had managed to do was to get her father killed.
"No, no, it was Tiberius," said Rumple viciously. Then his voice softened, "You were trying to help. Don't blame yourself for the Inquisitor's evil."
She knew he was right, that she wasn't responsible for other people's choices. She was only responsible for her own. But her father still died, caught in the intersection of her choice and the Inquisitor's. "It's my fault that his evil targeted my father."
"You did what you thought was right."
"But..." What if her thought was mistaken? Or if it was the right thing, at the wrong time? If only—
Whatever self-recrimination was on the tip of her tongue was cut short by the sound of the bell ringing in the front of the shop, followed by a shout of, "Gold! You in here?"
"Regina," sighed Rumple. "You can stay here. I'll deal with her."
"Where's my son?" Regina demanded, her voice easily penetrating past the curtain. "What have you done?"
"Henry is fine. He's with his other mother," Rumple gave his answers softly. "They are currently enjoying the hospitality of my, uh, step-grandmother-in-law."
"Your what!?"
Belle wiped her face, composing herself as she half-listened to Rumple's cryptic and evasive explanations. She forced herself to her feet. He was too fond of winding everyone up, doing nothing to endear himself to the rest of the townsfolk. She should at least try to smooth things over. She heard the bell jangle again.
"Gold!" "Crocodile!" This time it was David and Hook. "What the hell is going on?"
Belle groaned under her breath. She steeled herself and marched out to stand next to Rumple behind the counter. "Look, it's complicated. We'll tell you what we know at the town meeting."
Everyone turned to stare at her.
"What town meeting?" David asked, speaking for the rest.
Belle pasted a smile on her face. "Well, a world-ending apocalypse is worth a town meeting, don't you think? But don't worry. I think we're past the worst of it now."
More stares, and a smirk from Rumple. "Excellent suggestion, sweetheart."
So much for not winding people up. Belle mentally slapped herself. Her husband's penchant for toying with words was rubbing off on her. She wanted to laugh hysterically, but was afraid she would burst into tears again.
Luckily, the others agreed to the town meeting, and Rumple was able to shoo them back out the door to organize said meeting. Once they were gone, he turned to Belle, clasping her by the arms and studying her face. "Are you all right?"
Belle let her smile drop. She sighed, "I will be. It's the shock. I just... I just need some time."
Time healed all wounds. Wasn't what they said? But whether it healed or not, in this realm, it moved onward.