He'd give these fairies credit, they'd tolerated him today far more than he would ever have been willing to tolerate them. After an hour of sitting and waiting for them to get fed up with him enough that they'd insist he leave, he was still here, sitting in the exact same place Belle had left him with her purse and coat.

But he wasn't idle. He was sure that the fairies doing their best to avoid him would have thought he was idle, they would have had no choice in all of this but to admit that he was being the perfect gentleman and keeping to himself. But he wasn't. He was watching; waiting for his moment to strike and get Belle out of here so that Hook could work the magic he needed him to.

But if pressed to admit it, he also found himself once more in admiration of his wife. She'd learned a lot about magic in the year that he was gone; he knew that. And yet, there were times that he got to witness that knowledge in action, and each and every time, it stunned him into silence and pride in ways he'd never thought really mattered to him.

He'd watched as she flitted about the room, checking ingredients, measuring and remeasuring, doing the math in her head, using magical theory to enhance the spell they were working on and give the town its best chance at conquering the curse. The woman who had once suspiciously and fearfully eyed his own magical experiments turned out to be better at it than Regina and Zelena both. There was no doubt in his mind that if Anna was out there in the world somewhere and they found her, then this plan of hers would actually succeed.

But of course, Anna was the first problem in her calculations that arose.

Time was ticking by, preparations were made and set, and still Anna of Arendelle did not walk through that door. He was calm. He knew why she didn't, why she was missing, and why she wouldn't be showing up. But Belle and her assistants did not. And because of that, tension was rising by the minute.

"Belle…we need that hair," Mother Superior whispered to his wife, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that he wasn't listening. As if looking in the other direction meant that he wasn't using his magic to listen in on their conversation. "We can't wait too much longer for it."

"We can," Belle pressed, her tone blissfully normal as she made it clear she had no enemies in this space. "We have time left. Everything is ready once we have it. This should only take minutes to finish. We just have to be patient a little while longer. As soon as they find her, they'll bring her."

"Find her?!" Superior exclaimed, glancing over her shoulder at him again. "I thought they just had to go and get someone. You never mentioned they had to look for this person!" she muttered feverishly, her voice back to being barely audible for human ears.

"Anna…Elsa's sister, she hasn't been seen for thirty years, but we found mirror dust in her necklace; that's how we know she was affected by the curse. They're using it right now with a tracking spell to locate her. If she wasn't alive, then the tracking spell wouldn't work. They'll find her in time."

The Blue Fairy's eyes lit up as Belle spoke. Everything that she'd said was true, but there was something that Belle obviously hadn't considered in her calculations, something that he was reluctant to admit he and the Blue Fairy both saw simultaneously. And while it made the Bug obviously very happy, it sent a shiver down his own spine.

"We don't need her!" The Blue Fairy burst out.

"What?" Belle pondered.

"The necklace, you didn't mention that before either. But it had mirror dust in it, from a previously cast curse, from the Snow Queen, you're sure?"

Belle nodded.

Fuck!

"Then we don't need Anna!" Mother Superior proclaimed, glancing back not at him but at the clock. "Girls! There's been a slight change of plans! We're going to need a few more things! Get everything you can together for a magical extraction. Quickly! Hurry!"

The room, slowly dying in activity since he'd sat down, was once more brimming with energy as the Blue Fairy's Inferiors followed her instructions perfectly.

"Belle, listen to me!" she stated, putting an arm on Belle's shoulder and turning her to look her in the eye. Thankfully, she seemed to be done keeping her voice down. "I need you to locate that necklace."

"The necklace?"

"We don't need hair if we have the curse itself! So long as we're confident it was cast by the same person, it'll carry the same magical signature. But we need to move quickly. Extracting the curse will take more time than just adding a few hairs to the batch."

Belle moved to him. And for a moment he opened his mouth to confirm what the Blue Fairy was saying, assuming that was what she'd be looking for. But instead, she dug deep into the depths of her purse and freed her cell phone.

"How long will you need? To pull the dust from the necklace, how long will it take?"

"Well, it's not a matter of how fast we can pull the curse from the necklace as it is how fast we can destroy the necklace to get to the curse."

Belle froze. And his heart broke as he realized that brilliant as she was at theory, the practice of magic was still new to her, and she hadn't quite thought her way through this entire proof just yet.

And he wanted to argue with the Blue Fairy. Hell, he'd been looking to pitch a fight with her all afternoon; now more than ever, he'd have given anything to fight her on this practice convincingly! If this worked and they actually succeeded at creating a cure, then his entire plan would be burned up before it had ever really begun. There'd be no stealing magic from the fairies, only continuing night after night to piece together enough power to free himself. As much as he hated to admit it, there was a part of him that wanted and needed this curse to happen.

But his heart couldn't bear the disappointment on her face as she worked through the Blue Fairy's proposal, and her hopes were dashed.

"Belle," he whispered, grabbing her hand so that she'd look at him. As much as he hated the Blue Fairy, this kind of news would be gentler, kinder, coming from him. "The Dark Magic in those dust particles will have bound itself to the necklace. They'll have to destroy the metal to be left with the raw material of the curse."

Her jaw went slack as she looked him over, her full attention now turned to him and no one else. "But then…h-how will Elsa find Anna?" she choked out.

The emotion in her tone told him that she didn't need him to answer that for her. She already knew.

"They won't, will they?" she confirmed before he could say it.

"They will!" The Blue Fairy breathed, suddenly tearing her hand from his grasp and reclaiming her attention. "They will find her because if we get that necklace, we'll have all the time in the world to search for her. But right now, we need that necklace. It'll take time to get to the curse, and if we get it in the next few minutes, we can make it work. I'm sorry, but it's Anna or the town."

Blunt, unfeeling bitch.

Belle hesitated. Knowing now what was in her past with Anna, he couldn't particularly say that he blamed her for that. She wanted Anna to be found, her soul would need her to be found so she could apologize and put her guilty conscious at ease. But Belle was, above all, someone who did understand what it meant to make sacrifices for the greater good, and so he wasn't surprised when she finally opened her phone and placed a call.

"David, the spell is ready, I don't suppose you know if Emma and Elsa found Anna yet?"

The pounding of her heart as she spoke told him all he needed to know about how fearful and hopeful those words made her feel.

"Soon," he heard David respond almost cheerfully, not knowing that his answer was damning. "They need a few more hours."

Hours. Minutes might have bought a bit of time and spared his plan, but hours…

Hours doomed it.

"Anna's necklace…they still have it?"

"Yeah, the tracking spell works, we just have to get through a couple of walls, and we'll be able to keep going."

Damn. The good news was that, as hard as this was for his wife, it meant that she might actually succeed in saving the town. The bad news was that his plan was very quickly slipping through his fingers as they spoke. The chances of pulling her away from this now were almost impossible. And even if he could, even if it meant he would win in the end, he wasn't sure he had the heart. Perhaps he'd lied to Hook when he said he'd always choose himself.

He kept his gaze on Belle, trying to ignore the sudden appearance of Nimue glaring at him menacingly across the room.

"Listen, I…I made a mistake," she explained almost painfully. We need that necklace. We need the mirror dust inside of it. If we use that, then we don't need Anna. We can innoculate everyone in the town and begin to distribute the cure, but it'll take a while to extract the magic from the necklace. We need it now."

"Wait a minute when you say 'extract'…?"

"That's the catch. The necklace won't survive. It'll be destroyed. But the town…everyone will be safe."

The silence from the other end of the line was heartbreaking. He felt her fear, panic, and sorrow as if they were his own...

"Don't lose heart now, Rumpelstiltskin," Nimue hissed in his ear, suddenly sitting just behind him.

Don't lose heart in his plan, she meant. But…

Without Baelfire, Belle was his heart.

"David?" she questioned sadly into the silence.

"This is the only way?" he asked, his voice nearly as low and sorrowful as her own was. He understood the measure of sacrifice just as much as she did.

She nodded. "I'm sure," she stated, even as he knew she wished she wasn't. "This is what it comes down to, we need the necklace now."

"I'll talk to Emma. She's closest to Elsa, it should be her choice," he reasoned with sad resignation before he hung up. He had a feeling he knew exactly how that conversation was going to go, exactly what was about to happen to his plan. And yet, as Belle shuffled over to him, a sad look on her face, he wasn't so sure he was upset. The possibility of making her smile again when she saved the town…it felt like his new goal.

"There was nothing you could do," he whispered, sitting forward and reaching for her hand again. "Dark Magic never plays fair; you know that better than anyone."

They both did.

She nodded but released his hand to wipe her eyes. "I, uh…I have to go check…something," she excused before moving away from him.

We've talked many times throughout this fiction about those exits that have presented themselves on the road that Rumple is headed down. One might think that the further down the road he gets the easier it would be to ignore them, but emotion isn't always that easy. I think in the past when these exits have presented themselves he's considered taking them, I think a lot of other times he's noticed them and driven right by, but in my mind this is the one time that for a brief second he finds himself in that exit lane. This is the one time when he finds himself almost committed to getting off that road in favor of making Belle happy. And it's so heartwrenching because it's almost too easy to see how it might play itself out, how he might confess and right wrongs and change. I loved the idea of putting him fully in the exit lane if only for a short period of time so he could get a taste of what might await him...before he shifts lanes and keeps on going.

Thank you, Rsbeall12, Grace5231973, OpalRose1991, and CatGold for the reviews you've left and have been leaving me. I'll be interested to hear what you think of this chapter. Nimue is certainly making more and more a nuisance of herself, isn't she? Not to mention she's become far more prominent in the last couple of fictions. It used to be Zoso who showed up and shared the burden with her. Not so anymore. What do you make of that? Peace and Happy Reading!