Fic: If We Shadows Have Offended C.2
Title: If We Shadows Have Offended
Author: djarum99
Chapter: 2/5
Fandom: Once Upon a Time
Rating: This one is R to N17
Characters/Pairings: Belle/Rumpelstiltskin, Mr. Gold/Gabrielle French, Regina, Emma, Henry, citizens of FTL and Storybrooke
Disclaimer: ABC and Disney own the fairytales; I make no profit
Summary: Mr. Gold divines Regina’s secret weapon, and the battle for love begins and ends; title stolen from Mr. Shakespeare. This is beginning to look like more like four chapters than three - Rumpelstiltskin is long-winded, and I'm having fun :-)
Chapter one is here.
Belle is here, alive, wandering through his parlor with its antiques and sleeping magic, wearing wrinkled green hospital scrubs. He’s a former master of dark magic, his reputation in this world worse than all the Borgias’ combined, and he hasn’t thought further than bringing her here. Bringing her home. Fists clenching in black leather, he stands just inside the doorway, watching, struck dumb.
Belle knows what she needs, and ever after he is grateful.
“May I take a bath? I’m so cold.”
She’s an ice maiden, this woman who wears Belle’s face, not a flicker of emotion behind those wide blue eyes. Hot water makes perfect sense in his current mindless state, and he leads her up the stairs, his cane abandoned to the need to break her wintry spell. He draws a bath in the claw-foot tub, finds towels and lavender soap he’d bought because it smelled like her. From the nuns, to torture himself when he’d still thought her dead.
She waits patiently, silent, and when she lifts her arms he steps close to help her out of her shirt, loosens the drawstring of her pants, strips her bare. His hands are shaking, but he gives the act no second thought; he might be caring for a child, for Bae. She gives no sign of fear or shame, taking his arm to step into the water. Her skin is flawless, innocent of scars - shark-eyed priests, the whip, the scourge, none of that had ever happened - but he can count her ribs beneath its moon-glow, and his rage kindles fire, leads his body to betray him. He turns to the door to hide bared teeth and his arousal, but her voice calls him back. Her voice, or at least its faint echo.
“Don’t go.”
“I can’t-”
“You can. You’re afraid now, but you’re not a coward. You weren’t being a coward then, not completely. The Queen told me her secrets, and I know why you sent me away. There’s no magic here to lose.”
Water splashes faintly as she moves behind him, and he fights the urge to run, from the ghost of what she was, from the guilt of her unmarked skin.
“I’ve always been a coward, and I sent you straight to her dungeons.”
“I survived, and I forgive you. You did what you could to save us all.”
“I did it because of the future I saw in that hell-spawn’s eyes. Didn’t fancy my prospects beneath her boot heel.” There’s another reason, someone else he lost, yet another source of shame, and caring about what she might make of that is still something raw and new. He presses his palms to the paneled door, knowing that she binds him here, that he can’t leave this room.
“Belle, you don’t know what I’ve done. You should be afraid.”
“I know enough - the Queen made sure to tell me.”
More splashing, and he imagines water beading her shoulders, the pale column of her throat. The Dark One is ecstatic, screaming at him to take her, but her next pronouncement stops him cold.
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
She gives this improbable sentence a foreign lilt, a strange rolling growl, and he can’t help himself, turns back to find her...smiling. Hot water. He’ll have to add that to his grimoire.
“What?”
“John Wayne. The person I was supposed to be - here - she loved westerns.”
The smile lights her eyes once more, too briefly, she’s beautiful, so beautiful, and the fire in him pools in the depths of his heart. He takes the cloth she hands him and draws it over her back, her breasts, her face, washes away his sin. The ends of her hair trail the water’s surface and she sighs, lifting her arms to him again.
“I’d like to get out now. I have to sort it all out, sift out the lies, and I’m tired. Will you help me?”
For a moment he allows himself to believe that he can, that he is the man she needs, that thirty years might not prove too cruel for penance. He fumbles with towels, dries her hair, wraps his hands so her flesh can’t summon the enchantment that will reduce him to ash. There’s a robe he seldom uses hanging from a hook by the shower; he guides her arms through its sleeves and twists a clumsy knot in the sash. She has to gather it at her thighs to avoid tripping as he leads her through the connecting door to the bed - his. He tells himself it’s a matter of the spare rooms’ linens, of dust and long disuse.
Belle curls beneath his sheets in the middle of the mattress, and falls asleep in the space of a minute. The armchair under the room’s bay window will leave him lame by morning, but he settles in to keep watch, eyes searching her face for terrors, the taint of ogres, abominations, anything he has power to slay. When she wakes two hours later she tells him of dreams, not nightmares, of her father’s kindness, her mother’s loss, of that place where he’s the monster and she alone could see the man. She cobbles together her puzzle, and each piece brings her closer to whole. By noon she’s sleeping again and he’s stretched beside her atop the duvet, a weary dragon protecting a maiden no longer bound by frost.
He wonders if she’d have been safer, if he would, if he’d left her locked away. The curse lies in tatters, and the battle is almost upon them - Belle will be there to fight for, and he’s never felt less a coward, and never more the brave man. He’s never felt more afraid.
It’s time to saddle up.
~~
Belle waits a week to return to his bed, because he needs the time and she needs to be sure. Not of love, but her own fragile balance. She has one foot in this world and one in the old, but she lives here, at least for the time being. Every morning finds her tidying her mental landscape, tucking stray facts into their proper drawers and schooling her tongue to this world’s language. The operative lingo of computers, motor vehicles, and microwaves - necessary knowledge for the apocalypse to come, as well as for simpler things like putting food on the table and shopping for things to wear in addition to his gray cashmere robe. Not that she objected to the robe, with its faint scent of sandalwood, the musk of his skin. She wears it every night.
She has to keep her balance, and every time he touches her, thoughts swirl like bright jewels in a child’s kaleidoscope, memories fighting for alignment and pattern until they settle on those that hold him. Green-gold scales and amber eyes, Armani suits and Gucci loafers. He’d always disguised himself in finery, and here, as in his Dark Castle, he seemed to favor silk shirts. He’s different in this world, layer upon intricate layer concealing the man she knew. She knows he’s still lonely, and that here, her kiss can’t steal magic’s fire. It might mean they’ll both burn, but that’s a price she’ll gladly pay. This town, this world, still feels so very cold.
He takes her out into Storybrooke; the stores are small but much too bright, filled with people who peer around corners and point fingers at Gold’s new plaything. He’s cultivated his reputation here, again, very carefully - but she notices hints that it’s beginning to change. There’s a shop with a sign that bears his name, rents to collect, a conspiracy to join, but he makes a few calls and the other players come to them. Merchants, traders, weavers and kings, remembering their names; a change is rolling through Storybrooke, and she knows Gold is behind it, spinning the wheel, pulling the thread. Dr. Hopper comes, and the town drunk she’d once met in a tavern, a mechanic reunited with his children, a schoolteacher and banished princess, and her love who was once strong and true. Now, he’s confused, befuddled, but Gold says he’s finding his way.
“Taking his own sweet time about it. The boy always was a bit slow.” Belle lifts an eyebrow and he frowns, finds something to do in his study.
A woman appears at their door, bold and predatory, and Belle isn’t surprised when Gold whispers that she’d once prowled the night as a wolf. Ruby brings them dinner in white boxes, and winks knowingly at Belle behind Gold’s slender back. She winks back, and the she-wolf laughs, genuine and warm.
“Call me Red. I remember you,” she says, “we met once, in the woods.”
“You wore a scarlet cloak.” Belle remembers that day, too, the day she’d left him, the last moments she’d spent in sunlight before the Dark Queen took her captive; she’s glad nevertheless to meet another moonstruck traveler. Someone she’d like at her back, when the curse comes tumbling down.
When Gold leaves the house on mysterious errands he won’t share even with her, Ruby comes. She plays music on her iPod, and sometimes persuades Belle to dance. When Gold opens the door to find them laughing, hips swaying and words bright on their lips, the look in his eyes makes her think he would take her right there on his Persian rug. Hunger, heat - she wants to drink it all down, feel his fire in her bones. Brazen, for a Frontlands girl and even for Gabrielle French - but in this and certain other respects she thinks this world might hold the advantage.
Emma comes with Henry, listens to her son chatter at Belle’s knee of true love’s everafter - listens with discomfort, but not outright disbelief. When Henry opens the book to the page that bears her own likeness, Belle takes it gently from his hands, shakes her head, and tells him that their story isn’t finished. Not yet. Henry studies her face and Gold’s with eyes too wise for a boy of ten, and then grins like it’s Christmas morning, like he’s just been given a pony. Or something much more precious; Belle can only imagine how lost he’s been, a little boy alone with his faith.
The sheriff pulls her aside and asks if Gold’s been a gentleman, if he’s done anything to frighten her or overstepped his bounds as...guardian? Friend? Emma doesn’t seem to know, and she doesn’t seem to like that much. Belle decides to cut to the chase.
“I loved him then, and I love him now. He’s been a perfect gentleman, and frankly I’m ready for that to change.”
“You loved him - then? He’s morally, well, questionable at best, and you’ve only been out of that cell for a week. Does Dr. Hopper know about this?” Emma looks like she’s ready to haul out her handcuffs, and Belle isn’t sure if they’re for Gold or for her. She’s had quite enough of locks and keys, and anger rises, a slow steady tide.
“I know much more about him than you do, Emma Swan. Dr. Hopper knows I’m sane, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s time to listen to Henry. Time to listen to your heart. That book? It’s the truth, every word, and you know it.”
Henry is watching, and Gold, eyes calculating and wary, his arm around Belle’s waist; she can feel the tension in him mimicking the familiar hum of his magic.
“I don’t want to know it. But maybe you’re right. Heaven help us all.” Emma sinks down into a wingback chair covered in brocade that had once been curtains Belle tore down to welcome spring’s thaw. “What do we do now?”
“Now, dear Emma, we end it, and heaven’s got naught to do with that.” Gold’s voice is all sharp edges, sword blades and smashed mirrors, and for a moment Belle sees him in dragonskin, his fingers tipped in claws.
“How, exactly, does that work?” Emma takes Henry’s hand, and holds on like he might float away.
Belle feels Gold’s arm tighten, and another jagged corner snaps into place, another piece of his soul she’s never known.
“We need more time. Two days, three at the most. For Emma to truly believe, and for my son. He’s coming home.”
~~
Belle has waited a week to return to his bed, or, to be more precise, to renew their deal for forever in terms written and bound by blood. Gold has slept in a room down the hallway where he’d taken refuge since her first day here; she still sleeps between his black sheets. A week will have to be time enough, because she’s waited thirty years, because she’s still so cold, because there’s an apocalypse in the making. Because he has a son, and finally trusts her with that story.
Their guests leave and the fire falls to embers as he speaks of the man he was, and when she takes his hand she can see the forest, smell the sweat and rot of his village, feel the pain of a father whose world ground him into the mud.
“The magic, the darkness, I let it take root in my fear. Without it I’d been less than nothing. And then I let it take my boy - at least that’s what I told myself.” Sitting at his knee, she rests her head against his thigh and traces the scars beneath taut wool, feels him shudder.
“And what was true?”
“I lost him to weakness, to myself. Magic can only shape what is already there, what it finds within your soul. My power is bound to the Dark One, but magic simply...is, neither good nor evil. I welcomed the Dark One with open arms, and He’s a most persistent guest.”
“And when you took me? You were more than lonely. What was I for?”
His mouth twists, and again she sees the creature he was beneath the trappings of cool restraint.
“I’d watched you, before your father invoked my name. Your soul, it was...luminous. Human, and flawed - you have a tendency to make naïve assumptions, and you’re far too fond of meddling - but still, it shines. I thought there might be some hope of transference. And, if not, simply to possess such a thing...I’m a collector, dearie. Light and dark only exist in tandem, and they both hold sway in me.”
“But then, there was love. And my meddling.”
He doesn’t answer, and she rises to her knees between his own, cups his face. “A hopeless habit. I just can’t stop.”
When she kisses him, the second time, his eyes drift shut and his face doesn’t change, but she feels something inside of him break.
“Belle, don’t, I don’t want-” but he’s lying, pulling her against his chest, parting his lips for her questing tongue. This world’s memories instruct her in how to make him moan, scrape her teeth across the pulse in his throat, her nails across the base of his spine. Her body answers that it knows this magic, too, but she stills against him, pushes away her false past. She wants this to be real, needs this to be her, with him, needs him to understand her dilemma.
“I wanted you, then, when I wasn’t sure what wanting meant. And, I remember falling in love with a boy I met in AP English. I remember...but I know it never happened. You need to know this is my first time, and I need to make this ours.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be. You don’t know what I’ll have to do, before the curse is finished.”
Firelight glitters in his eyes and the room beyond lies in darkness; she can feel the power in him, midnight and sun in cobweb harness, vying for control. She holds her breath as the walls drop away and she’s back in the castle, in that cold dungeon cell where he’d lied for redemption, lied to her to save them both. She knows he still has the white china cup, believes she’s always lived in his heart.
“You’re wrong. Love has a sister. Her name is Faith, and she can kick some magic ass. Choose, Rumpelstiltskin. Choose me.”
He doesn’t move, remains frozen above her for so long she dreads his answer, and then his hands are on her, gripping her shoulders, forcing her upward to find his mouth. There are words, between each of his kisses, soft enchantments against her flesh, wards against the darkness beyond the four walls of the room. He hasn’t lost all sorcery - her clothes disappear, her shirt in a flurry of buttons scattered across the parquet floor, her jeans at his urging as she stands weaving on her feet. She starts to protest when he bats her hands from his collar, looses speech when he lifts his head to her breasts.
He’s found magic untouched by the curse, in the relentless silk glide of his tongue, his touch, in the sweet coil of heat twisting deep within her that tightens at his command. Down, and down, until he finds the fire's source, parts her thighs to taste her. She buries her hands in his hair, and the feel of it, like warm summer rain, sends her reeling beneath his onslaught. Falling, to land in an awkward huddle halfway between the couch and floor.
“Shhh, love, hush, it’s alright, you’re alright,” and she knows he’s afraid that she isn’t, that the tears on her face are from doubt or pain, or worse still, from regret.
Her body is still throbbing, pulsing strong where she wants him to be, and she doesn’t know how a woman expresses such things no matter which world she was born to. She opts for action, since speech has fled and she’s found uncommon strength in her hands.
His shirt’s buttons join hers on the floor.
Eyes half-lidded but fixed on her face he lets her take the lead, and she pushes him back to the cushions, fumbles with his belt.
“Help me.”
“At your order, milady.”
He grins, baring wolf’s teeth and glinting gold, but freezes when breath fails her at first sight of his scars. A snaking purple line twists from flank to knee, evenly spaced hollows forming a crescent at each side, the mark of monstrous fangs. When he tries to struggle upright, her first touch keeps him in place, fingertips followed by her lips and tongue, tracing the path of his shame.
“Gods, Belle,” and he sounds like he’s drowning, tangling his fists in her hair for salvation when she takes him in her mouth. He pulls her back hard enough to make her wince, lifts her up and over until she straddles him, slick, open, and he’s hard against her, waiting.
“I’m going to hurt you, nothing for it. This way you have control.”
The rasp and want in his voice tells her he’s lost all but shreds of his own, and the power is heady, a wildfire burn - an echo of what he must have felt, when magic blazed inside him. Kissing him again, slow and deep, she lowers herself to take him in, uses the sound she tears from the back of his throat to dim the bright flare of her pain.
She doesn’t find it again, that new ecstasy he drew forth with his mouth, but she can feel the way of it in her body’s searching, the design for what they can build. It’s enough, this first time, to watch him fall apart. His hands shake as they guide her awkward rhythm, but he allows her to set the pace, gives her time and lets her take him. It’s enough, to see the hope in his eyes, to feel his heat spill inside her when he tenses and grants its release.
By my blood I summon the sun...
A memory, or his stolen whisper...it makes no difference, the fire is real and hers and theirs, and finally, the cold is banished. Boneless and warm, blissfully warm, she takes his hand to climb the stairs and bring him back to his bed. He nudges her first into the bathroom, the shower, and it’s a blur of water spray and languid kisses, the rough pull of the towel as he dries her skin. He’s allowing himself happiness, and she clings to every moment, until she’s in his arms beneath silk sheets and exhaustion draws her down.
Tomorrow, they’ll face his demons. Tomorrow, they’ll start a war. Faith had better be ready, and come packing her biggest gun.
Chapter 3
Author: djarum99
Chapter: 2/5
Fandom: Once Upon a Time
Rating: This one is R to N17
Characters/Pairings: Belle/Rumpelstiltskin, Mr. Gold/Gabrielle French, Regina, Emma, Henry, citizens of FTL and Storybrooke
Disclaimer: ABC and Disney own the fairytales; I make no profit
Summary: Mr. Gold divines Regina’s secret weapon, and the battle for love begins and ends; title stolen from Mr. Shakespeare. This is beginning to look like more like four chapters than three - Rumpelstiltskin is long-winded, and I'm having fun :-)
Chapter one is here.
Belle is here, alive, wandering through his parlor with its antiques and sleeping magic, wearing wrinkled green hospital scrubs. He’s a former master of dark magic, his reputation in this world worse than all the Borgias’ combined, and he hasn’t thought further than bringing her here. Bringing her home. Fists clenching in black leather, he stands just inside the doorway, watching, struck dumb.
Belle knows what she needs, and ever after he is grateful.
“May I take a bath? I’m so cold.”
She’s an ice maiden, this woman who wears Belle’s face, not a flicker of emotion behind those wide blue eyes. Hot water makes perfect sense in his current mindless state, and he leads her up the stairs, his cane abandoned to the need to break her wintry spell. He draws a bath in the claw-foot tub, finds towels and lavender soap he’d bought because it smelled like her. From the nuns, to torture himself when he’d still thought her dead.
She waits patiently, silent, and when she lifts her arms he steps close to help her out of her shirt, loosens the drawstring of her pants, strips her bare. His hands are shaking, but he gives the act no second thought; he might be caring for a child, for Bae. She gives no sign of fear or shame, taking his arm to step into the water. Her skin is flawless, innocent of scars - shark-eyed priests, the whip, the scourge, none of that had ever happened - but he can count her ribs beneath its moon-glow, and his rage kindles fire, leads his body to betray him. He turns to the door to hide bared teeth and his arousal, but her voice calls him back. Her voice, or at least its faint echo.
“Don’t go.”
“I can’t-”
“You can. You’re afraid now, but you’re not a coward. You weren’t being a coward then, not completely. The Queen told me her secrets, and I know why you sent me away. There’s no magic here to lose.”
Water splashes faintly as she moves behind him, and he fights the urge to run, from the ghost of what she was, from the guilt of her unmarked skin.
“I’ve always been a coward, and I sent you straight to her dungeons.”
“I survived, and I forgive you. You did what you could to save us all.”
“I did it because of the future I saw in that hell-spawn’s eyes. Didn’t fancy my prospects beneath her boot heel.” There’s another reason, someone else he lost, yet another source of shame, and caring about what she might make of that is still something raw and new. He presses his palms to the paneled door, knowing that she binds him here, that he can’t leave this room.
“Belle, you don’t know what I’ve done. You should be afraid.”
“I know enough - the Queen made sure to tell me.”
More splashing, and he imagines water beading her shoulders, the pale column of her throat. The Dark One is ecstatic, screaming at him to take her, but her next pronouncement stops him cold.
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
She gives this improbable sentence a foreign lilt, a strange rolling growl, and he can’t help himself, turns back to find her...smiling. Hot water. He’ll have to add that to his grimoire.
“What?”
“John Wayne. The person I was supposed to be - here - she loved westerns.”
The smile lights her eyes once more, too briefly, she’s beautiful, so beautiful, and the fire in him pools in the depths of his heart. He takes the cloth she hands him and draws it over her back, her breasts, her face, washes away his sin. The ends of her hair trail the water’s surface and she sighs, lifting her arms to him again.
“I’d like to get out now. I have to sort it all out, sift out the lies, and I’m tired. Will you help me?”
For a moment he allows himself to believe that he can, that he is the man she needs, that thirty years might not prove too cruel for penance. He fumbles with towels, dries her hair, wraps his hands so her flesh can’t summon the enchantment that will reduce him to ash. There’s a robe he seldom uses hanging from a hook by the shower; he guides her arms through its sleeves and twists a clumsy knot in the sash. She has to gather it at her thighs to avoid tripping as he leads her through the connecting door to the bed - his. He tells himself it’s a matter of the spare rooms’ linens, of dust and long disuse.
Belle curls beneath his sheets in the middle of the mattress, and falls asleep in the space of a minute. The armchair under the room’s bay window will leave him lame by morning, but he settles in to keep watch, eyes searching her face for terrors, the taint of ogres, abominations, anything he has power to slay. When she wakes two hours later she tells him of dreams, not nightmares, of her father’s kindness, her mother’s loss, of that place where he’s the monster and she alone could see the man. She cobbles together her puzzle, and each piece brings her closer to whole. By noon she’s sleeping again and he’s stretched beside her atop the duvet, a weary dragon protecting a maiden no longer bound by frost.
He wonders if she’d have been safer, if he would, if he’d left her locked away. The curse lies in tatters, and the battle is almost upon them - Belle will be there to fight for, and he’s never felt less a coward, and never more the brave man. He’s never felt more afraid.
It’s time to saddle up.
~~
Belle waits a week to return to his bed, because he needs the time and she needs to be sure. Not of love, but her own fragile balance. She has one foot in this world and one in the old, but she lives here, at least for the time being. Every morning finds her tidying her mental landscape, tucking stray facts into their proper drawers and schooling her tongue to this world’s language. The operative lingo of computers, motor vehicles, and microwaves - necessary knowledge for the apocalypse to come, as well as for simpler things like putting food on the table and shopping for things to wear in addition to his gray cashmere robe. Not that she objected to the robe, with its faint scent of sandalwood, the musk of his skin. She wears it every night.
She has to keep her balance, and every time he touches her, thoughts swirl like bright jewels in a child’s kaleidoscope, memories fighting for alignment and pattern until they settle on those that hold him. Green-gold scales and amber eyes, Armani suits and Gucci loafers. He’d always disguised himself in finery, and here, as in his Dark Castle, he seemed to favor silk shirts. He’s different in this world, layer upon intricate layer concealing the man she knew. She knows he’s still lonely, and that here, her kiss can’t steal magic’s fire. It might mean they’ll both burn, but that’s a price she’ll gladly pay. This town, this world, still feels so very cold.
He takes her out into Storybrooke; the stores are small but much too bright, filled with people who peer around corners and point fingers at Gold’s new plaything. He’s cultivated his reputation here, again, very carefully - but she notices hints that it’s beginning to change. There’s a shop with a sign that bears his name, rents to collect, a conspiracy to join, but he makes a few calls and the other players come to them. Merchants, traders, weavers and kings, remembering their names; a change is rolling through Storybrooke, and she knows Gold is behind it, spinning the wheel, pulling the thread. Dr. Hopper comes, and the town drunk she’d once met in a tavern, a mechanic reunited with his children, a schoolteacher and banished princess, and her love who was once strong and true. Now, he’s confused, befuddled, but Gold says he’s finding his way.
“Taking his own sweet time about it. The boy always was a bit slow.” Belle lifts an eyebrow and he frowns, finds something to do in his study.
A woman appears at their door, bold and predatory, and Belle isn’t surprised when Gold whispers that she’d once prowled the night as a wolf. Ruby brings them dinner in white boxes, and winks knowingly at Belle behind Gold’s slender back. She winks back, and the she-wolf laughs, genuine and warm.
“Call me Red. I remember you,” she says, “we met once, in the woods.”
“You wore a scarlet cloak.” Belle remembers that day, too, the day she’d left him, the last moments she’d spent in sunlight before the Dark Queen took her captive; she’s glad nevertheless to meet another moonstruck traveler. Someone she’d like at her back, when the curse comes tumbling down.
When Gold leaves the house on mysterious errands he won’t share even with her, Ruby comes. She plays music on her iPod, and sometimes persuades Belle to dance. When Gold opens the door to find them laughing, hips swaying and words bright on their lips, the look in his eyes makes her think he would take her right there on his Persian rug. Hunger, heat - she wants to drink it all down, feel his fire in her bones. Brazen, for a Frontlands girl and even for Gabrielle French - but in this and certain other respects she thinks this world might hold the advantage.
Emma comes with Henry, listens to her son chatter at Belle’s knee of true love’s everafter - listens with discomfort, but not outright disbelief. When Henry opens the book to the page that bears her own likeness, Belle takes it gently from his hands, shakes her head, and tells him that their story isn’t finished. Not yet. Henry studies her face and Gold’s with eyes too wise for a boy of ten, and then grins like it’s Christmas morning, like he’s just been given a pony. Or something much more precious; Belle can only imagine how lost he’s been, a little boy alone with his faith.
The sheriff pulls her aside and asks if Gold’s been a gentleman, if he’s done anything to frighten her or overstepped his bounds as...guardian? Friend? Emma doesn’t seem to know, and she doesn’t seem to like that much. Belle decides to cut to the chase.
“I loved him then, and I love him now. He’s been a perfect gentleman, and frankly I’m ready for that to change.”
“You loved him - then? He’s morally, well, questionable at best, and you’ve only been out of that cell for a week. Does Dr. Hopper know about this?” Emma looks like she’s ready to haul out her handcuffs, and Belle isn’t sure if they’re for Gold or for her. She’s had quite enough of locks and keys, and anger rises, a slow steady tide.
“I know much more about him than you do, Emma Swan. Dr. Hopper knows I’m sane, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s time to listen to Henry. Time to listen to your heart. That book? It’s the truth, every word, and you know it.”
Henry is watching, and Gold, eyes calculating and wary, his arm around Belle’s waist; she can feel the tension in him mimicking the familiar hum of his magic.
“I don’t want to know it. But maybe you’re right. Heaven help us all.” Emma sinks down into a wingback chair covered in brocade that had once been curtains Belle tore down to welcome spring’s thaw. “What do we do now?”
“Now, dear Emma, we end it, and heaven’s got naught to do with that.” Gold’s voice is all sharp edges, sword blades and smashed mirrors, and for a moment Belle sees him in dragonskin, his fingers tipped in claws.
“How, exactly, does that work?” Emma takes Henry’s hand, and holds on like he might float away.
Belle feels Gold’s arm tighten, and another jagged corner snaps into place, another piece of his soul she’s never known.
“We need more time. Two days, three at the most. For Emma to truly believe, and for my son. He’s coming home.”
~~
Belle has waited a week to return to his bed, or, to be more precise, to renew their deal for forever in terms written and bound by blood. Gold has slept in a room down the hallway where he’d taken refuge since her first day here; she still sleeps between his black sheets. A week will have to be time enough, because she’s waited thirty years, because she’s still so cold, because there’s an apocalypse in the making. Because he has a son, and finally trusts her with that story.
Their guests leave and the fire falls to embers as he speaks of the man he was, and when she takes his hand she can see the forest, smell the sweat and rot of his village, feel the pain of a father whose world ground him into the mud.
“The magic, the darkness, I let it take root in my fear. Without it I’d been less than nothing. And then I let it take my boy - at least that’s what I told myself.” Sitting at his knee, she rests her head against his thigh and traces the scars beneath taut wool, feels him shudder.
“And what was true?”
“I lost him to weakness, to myself. Magic can only shape what is already there, what it finds within your soul. My power is bound to the Dark One, but magic simply...is, neither good nor evil. I welcomed the Dark One with open arms, and He’s a most persistent guest.”
“And when you took me? You were more than lonely. What was I for?”
His mouth twists, and again she sees the creature he was beneath the trappings of cool restraint.
“I’d watched you, before your father invoked my name. Your soul, it was...luminous. Human, and flawed - you have a tendency to make naïve assumptions, and you’re far too fond of meddling - but still, it shines. I thought there might be some hope of transference. And, if not, simply to possess such a thing...I’m a collector, dearie. Light and dark only exist in tandem, and they both hold sway in me.”
“But then, there was love. And my meddling.”
He doesn’t answer, and she rises to her knees between his own, cups his face. “A hopeless habit. I just can’t stop.”
When she kisses him, the second time, his eyes drift shut and his face doesn’t change, but she feels something inside of him break.
“Belle, don’t, I don’t want-” but he’s lying, pulling her against his chest, parting his lips for her questing tongue. This world’s memories instruct her in how to make him moan, scrape her teeth across the pulse in his throat, her nails across the base of his spine. Her body answers that it knows this magic, too, but she stills against him, pushes away her false past. She wants this to be real, needs this to be her, with him, needs him to understand her dilemma.
“I wanted you, then, when I wasn’t sure what wanting meant. And, I remember falling in love with a boy I met in AP English. I remember...but I know it never happened. You need to know this is my first time, and I need to make this ours.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be. You don’t know what I’ll have to do, before the curse is finished.”
Firelight glitters in his eyes and the room beyond lies in darkness; she can feel the power in him, midnight and sun in cobweb harness, vying for control. She holds her breath as the walls drop away and she’s back in the castle, in that cold dungeon cell where he’d lied for redemption, lied to her to save them both. She knows he still has the white china cup, believes she’s always lived in his heart.
“You’re wrong. Love has a sister. Her name is Faith, and she can kick some magic ass. Choose, Rumpelstiltskin. Choose me.”
He doesn’t move, remains frozen above her for so long she dreads his answer, and then his hands are on her, gripping her shoulders, forcing her upward to find his mouth. There are words, between each of his kisses, soft enchantments against her flesh, wards against the darkness beyond the four walls of the room. He hasn’t lost all sorcery - her clothes disappear, her shirt in a flurry of buttons scattered across the parquet floor, her jeans at his urging as she stands weaving on her feet. She starts to protest when he bats her hands from his collar, looses speech when he lifts his head to her breasts.
He’s found magic untouched by the curse, in the relentless silk glide of his tongue, his touch, in the sweet coil of heat twisting deep within her that tightens at his command. Down, and down, until he finds the fire's source, parts her thighs to taste her. She buries her hands in his hair, and the feel of it, like warm summer rain, sends her reeling beneath his onslaught. Falling, to land in an awkward huddle halfway between the couch and floor.
“Shhh, love, hush, it’s alright, you’re alright,” and she knows he’s afraid that she isn’t, that the tears on her face are from doubt or pain, or worse still, from regret.
Her body is still throbbing, pulsing strong where she wants him to be, and she doesn’t know how a woman expresses such things no matter which world she was born to. She opts for action, since speech has fled and she’s found uncommon strength in her hands.
His shirt’s buttons join hers on the floor.
Eyes half-lidded but fixed on her face he lets her take the lead, and she pushes him back to the cushions, fumbles with his belt.
“Help me.”
“At your order, milady.”
He grins, baring wolf’s teeth and glinting gold, but freezes when breath fails her at first sight of his scars. A snaking purple line twists from flank to knee, evenly spaced hollows forming a crescent at each side, the mark of monstrous fangs. When he tries to struggle upright, her first touch keeps him in place, fingertips followed by her lips and tongue, tracing the path of his shame.
“Gods, Belle,” and he sounds like he’s drowning, tangling his fists in her hair for salvation when she takes him in her mouth. He pulls her back hard enough to make her wince, lifts her up and over until she straddles him, slick, open, and he’s hard against her, waiting.
“I’m going to hurt you, nothing for it. This way you have control.”
The rasp and want in his voice tells her he’s lost all but shreds of his own, and the power is heady, a wildfire burn - an echo of what he must have felt, when magic blazed inside him. Kissing him again, slow and deep, she lowers herself to take him in, uses the sound she tears from the back of his throat to dim the bright flare of her pain.
She doesn’t find it again, that new ecstasy he drew forth with his mouth, but she can feel the way of it in her body’s searching, the design for what they can build. It’s enough, this first time, to watch him fall apart. His hands shake as they guide her awkward rhythm, but he allows her to set the pace, gives her time and lets her take him. It’s enough, to see the hope in his eyes, to feel his heat spill inside her when he tenses and grants its release.
By my blood I summon the sun...
A memory, or his stolen whisper...it makes no difference, the fire is real and hers and theirs, and finally, the cold is banished. Boneless and warm, blissfully warm, she takes his hand to climb the stairs and bring him back to his bed. He nudges her first into the bathroom, the shower, and it’s a blur of water spray and languid kisses, the rough pull of the towel as he dries her skin. He’s allowing himself happiness, and she clings to every moment, until she’s in his arms beneath silk sheets and exhaustion draws her down.
Tomorrow, they’ll face his demons. Tomorrow, they’ll start a war. Faith had better be ready, and come packing her biggest gun.
Chapter 3