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eirian-houpe · 2 years

Text

Inheritance

Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold

Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Mad Hatter | Jefferson

Additional Tags: Fluff and Humor, AU

Summary: Seriousness and hijinks combine when Belle simply believes she has inherited an old cottage, and a house of gold, but all is not as innocent as it seems. Written for the November Monthly Rumbelling mood board.

Inheritance

It was a thing of beauty, truly almost breathtaking, and was completely hidden at the very edge of the property, where it bordered the woodland. It astounded Belle that nowhere, not in the deed, nor the surveyors report, nowhere at all was the building listed as being a part of the estate.

When she mentioned it to the grounds keeper, he sucked his teeth and told her she was better off leaving well alone; told her the building was dangerous, but standing there in front of what seemed, essentially, to be a greenhouse, she couldn’t see anything that she would have said made it so. It was in good repair, not a single pane of glass broken. The silver birch wood that made the steps and the front porch, if it could be called such, appeared almost to have been preserved, as if frozen in time, and from within, she could see the faint glow of golden, solar powered lights coming on just as dusk fell, which was what had drawn her to the building last evening; when she had first moved into the property left to her by a relative of whom she had never heard.

The main cottage itself, although beautiful, paled by comparison. It was old though, easily two hundred years old, perhaps even three… more. The stones that made up the large cottage were worn and weathered, in places smooth to the touch. For instance, where she paused on the stoop to take one more look back at the twinkling lights through the overgrowth in the back yard with her hand resting against the stone of the open back door, beneath her hand the stone was almost silk to the touch. She imagined generations of women stopping on the same spot, looking back just the same. Why women she had no idea, but each time she thought on it, it was always a woman peering back through the gathering gloom toward those flickering lights.

As she crossed the threshold and the imagined image faded, she felt the same tingling awareness of the inside wash over her, as though she had somehow stepped through some kind of electrical field that set all of her hair on end. She rubbed both her arms as she closed the door, moved carefully across the uneven slabs of the kitchen floor and into the main room of the cottage, where for the moment she was living while the renovation of the rest of the house were taking place.

It was primitive; more like camping than actually living there. There was no power to the cottage, so she had candles and a lantern for light, and the open fireplace for warmth and for whatever cooking she couldn’t perform on her small camping stove.

The contractor had told her it would probably take months to finish work on the cottage, but she didn’t mind. One room at a time, she had told him, so before she had moved in, he and his firm had made the main room safe, sound, and almost cozy; a little island haven from the conditions around her.

With a sigh, she pulled off her boots, and placed them onto the opened pages of the newspaper just inside the living room door. She closed it behind her, shutting out the draft, and the cooler air that was beginning to seep in, then she followed the path of area rugs until she could lower herself to the folding cot which sat beside the hearth, and served as both sofa and bed with a sigh.

It had been a long day spent outside, trying to tame what passed for a garden while the contractors worked on replacing the roof in the places where age had, unlike Cleopatra, ‘withered [it].’ Her hands and her fingers ached from tugging on vines and ivy, tugging it from the outside of the house so that any repairs that needed to be made on the stone itself could be dealt with. She had more than a few broken fingernails, and the thought of that drew her to the graze on the her left hand.

Cutting down the vine was not enough. If she didn’t at least try to dig out the roots, it would just grow back again, and she would be right back at square one. She tugged the end of the vine through the bushes, like a spelunker following a line back to the entrance of the cave. All the way back to the packed dirt she tugged and pulled, until eventually she found where the plant and the ground married, and there she started digging. First she dug around it, loosely in a circle, and then as the trench she dug grew deeper, she took the soil from closer in around the vine. It was there that her trowel struck something hard in the ground, drawing the sound like a bell and sending it peeling out into the crisp afternoon air. Frowning, she stopped and - like an archaeologist now - began scraping at the dirt around the area where she had made her find.

A few moments later, she had uncovered what looked like a long, slender cairn-in-miniature buried in the space beside her home.

“What on Earth…?”

For another several minutes, she wriggled at the vine and fought with its remaining roots to free it from around where she could now see the stones that made up her curious find, and tossed it aside once it was free. Turning the trowel upside down, she rapped on the stones with the handle, and was rewarded with a hollow ringing sound. Whatever was buried there, was buried in a little chamber all of its own.

Captured by the excitement of it all, she immediately set to work trying to prize the stones apart, ignoring the cuts and scrapes she suffered along the way until a small sliver of flint embedded in one of the stones, yet to be released, all but skinned the first knuckle on her ring finger.

She tugged at the band-aid she’d wrapped around her finger once she’d cleaned the injury. It was grubby and needed changing anyway, then she cast her gaze over the offending article that had been the cause of it as she dug around in her bag for her first aid kit.

Inside the buried cairn she’d found a metal box. The box was heavy, and the metal, though rusted in places, seemed to be holding its own against the corruption of however long it had been buried in the ground. She’d tried, earlier, to open it - as soon as she’d gotten it out of the ground, as a matter of fact, but it seemed to be locked, and she didn’t have the key. Thus she had decided to wait until later, after the builders were gone, so that she could use one of their heavy tools to break open the lock.

Quickly, she went in search of what she would need, brought it back to the room - where she suddenly reminded herself she needed to light the fire she had laid that morning - set the box on its side on the hearth, and punched her way through the lock with the heavy hammer, and the sturdy Phillips screwdriver.

The light was waning, and it seemed even darker still when she slowly opened the box, so she had to pause in her endeavor to satisfy her curiosity, and light the fire and the lantern, and some of the candles until she had expelled enough of the darkness to allow her to see.

Taking a careful hold of one of the candles, she brought it over to where the box sat, almost calling for her, and - she realized - since she had opened it, there was an almost whisper weaving in and out of the spaces around her. She felt herself drawn to it; listening to it to try and make out what was being said.

Then she shook her head, considering herself a fool that was talking herself into a truly disturbing dream and if she wasn’t careful she would surely have one.

Bringing one of the candles back to the cot, she balanced it carefully on the crate that was her nightstand, before she shifted the box closer, tugging it into her lap - heedless of the dirt still clinging to the bottom of it despite her attempts to clean it - to peer inside.

The inside of the box seemed to be lined with some kind of crystal, it was white and in places some of it had crumbled a little to accumulate in the corners. She rubbed a some of it between her fingers and then sniffed it, inhaling some of the dust to leave a familiar, if surprising, taste in her mouth.

“Salt?” she said aloud, wondering who in their right mind would want to line a metal box like that with salt. She was more curious, however about whatever it was that had been set into the salt lined box, and reached - a little gingerly - for the dark shape sitting in the center of the white cradle.

No sooner had her fingers touched the object than she snatched back her hand. She had no idea what she had been expecting, but the brush of soft, silken cloth against her fingertips was not it, and the difference made her profoundly uncomfortable, so much so that it took her another several minutes to want to reach out again. This time, expecting the softness of the fabric, for such it was, she was not averse to picking up the wrapped object out of the box and setting the box aside.

She frowned then. Now that she could see it, she could tell that the fabric around the harder object within was silk, and wondered what on earth could be so precious that it must be protected in such an expensive fabric, and feeling that she must have stumbled upon a rare kind of treasure, she impulsively and quickly unfolded the silk from around the object.

The candles and the lantern guttered and from the chimney came a mournful wail as the wind blew what had become a healthy blaze almost horizontal. Then, from the door behind her came three, measured thumps, each evenly spaced, that seemed to send the fire back into its place in the hearth.

Belle’s heart lurched and then began to beat so hard she was almost deafened by it, and leaped to her feet as though to escape.

“Oh, for goodness sake, girl,” she told herself a moment later and with some irritation. “It’s just the wind!”

As though to prove it to herself she picked up the candle, walked to the door to the kitchen, and pulled it open, peering into the darkness on the other side. Seeing nothing, she took a tentative step into the kitchen, mindful of the broken floor beneath her feet, and inched toward the back door that led outside.

The sudden movement of shadow, and another almighty crash, and Belle screamed, a short, almost apologetic scream, but instead of running back into the inner room and barring the door, as she knew any sane person would, Belle stepped forward and with a choke hold on the candlestick in one hand, she raised the object from the box, which she still held, as though it were a cosh, and said as firmly as she could, “Whoever you are, you don’t scare me!” She thought she didn’t sound at all convincing and so added for good measure, “You don’t! Now… this is my home, and I won’t have some… some… country bumpkin trying to drive me out of it, so… stop playing games and go back where you belong!”

Immediately, as though at her behest, the wind that had been blowing freely into the kitchen died away, and her candle flame became steady, illuminating a path to the outside door that swung lazily back and forth on its hinges, and she could clearly see that the latch had broken.

“Damn!” she said, as much to steady her nerves as for any other reason. Then she set down the candle, and the strange object she had taken from the hidden box, crossed the room and struggled to pull a heavy packing crate across the door to keep it closed. “There,” she said with some satisfaction as she straightened herself up, and turned to head back into the main, and, she hoped, cosy room.

But as soon as she stepped into the better lit, and certainly warmer room, she let out another yelp.

There, lounging on her bed was the most peculiar creature. More goblin-like than man with scaled skin that almost twinkled in the lantern light, and long, unruly hair. His eyes, in the semi-darkness, shone like a cat’s, and he was dressed all in leather that creaked slightly as he moved.

“Well,” he said, sitting up a little more, and tossing the notebook he had been reading from onto the nearby crate. Her notebook, she realized. “That was a bit of a let down.”

She frowned, the words holding an uncomfortable familiarity for no reason she could fathom.

“Who are you?” she demanded, beginning the attempt to gather her scattered wits. “What are you doing here?”

As she spoke she brandished the object from the box as though it were a club to batter him with.

“No, never mind that,” she snapped after a moment. “I don’t know what kind of game you and your friends are playing, but I don’t have time for it, and it’s far from Halloween so whatever the deal with the costume…”

Once more she brandished the object still in her hand between the two of them as though she were going to hit him with it, and this time he unfolded from the cot, with a strange kind of grace and took a step toward her.

“Feisty little thing, aren’t you?” he teased, his voice a sing song, impish kind of voice, and reached toward the resin covered thing she held in her hand.

“Oh no you don’t!” she snapped, then added, “Get. Out—”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he clicked with his tongue, but she wasn’t for stopping.

“—Of my house!”

“Oh, this is just,” a veil of purple smoke began to wreath him at the flick of his wrist, and the voice faced into the distance as he finished, “marvelous.”

Belle held her breath for a moment, and then set down the candle and snatched up the lantern, which gave out slightly stronger light, and immediately searched the entire room - not that there was much to search behind - even while the purple mist cleared, drifting up the chimney with the smoke from the fire.

“Where did you go?” she asked the empty air.

“Outside of course!” The voice came from behind her, muffled by the glass of the windows, but it made her jump all the same when she turned around to see the cat-like eyes staring back at her through the window.

“What? How?” she asked, but a prickle of awareness - a guess at the answer crept over her. “No, that’s not possible,” she said.

“As you wish, dearie,” he sang through the glazing. “I’ll be our here when you change your mind.”

And then, even as she peered out into the darkness, she could see nothing, and no one.

“I must be dreaming,” she said after a moment, but somehow she knew it wasn’t true, wasn’t true at all. She looked around the cottage too, everything else looking strangely wrong in that moment. “I fell asleep trying to make sense of this… thing,” and she tossed the offending object onto the cot where it landed beside it’s box near the pillow, “and now I’m dreaming goodness knows what.”

She knew it was a lie.

Not dreaming, her inner voice admonished, and for some reason, it sounded remarkably like the one that had spoken to her mockingly from the other side of the window.

She huffed loudly to herself, and decided that what she really needed to ground herself was to eat, so she fished around in her supplies and pulled out a can of hearty soup. She would have preferred something home made, but that would have to wait until kitchen was renovated, and she had her own, proper cooking range.

She was right.

Once she had eaten she felt a whole lot better, if a whole lot more tired, and so she had packed away her things, wrapping the strange object back up in the silk, and setting it back into the box before banking the fire, changing for bed, and drawing the cot a little nearer to the hearth to reap the benefit of the remaining warmth through the cold of the midnight hour and beyond.

She surprised herself and managed to sleep through until morning, and couldn’t remember any of her dreams, not at all, and certainly not any that contained the strange little imp she had caught lounging on her bed, and absolutely not any that involved the kindling of a needful warmth deep in her belly.

No. Not a bit of it.

She rose and dressed - not yet able to do more than wash in a basin, and as she ate breakfast, she decided that she was going to go and investigate the little glass house at the bottom of the garden.

Before she did, however, she had to decide what she was going to do with the strange object she had found, and which she still had no idea what it was. She could bury it again, but what was the point in that? She had gone to so much trouble to dig it up in the first place it seemed like a complete waste of time to put it back into the ground. She could take it to someone - though she had no idea to whom - and let them figure out what it was, or…

Or she could spend some time with it, peeling off the resin, investigating what was inside, and why it was such an object would have been buried. The adventurer in her liked that option by far the better.

She returned to the contractor’s toolkit, first replacing the tools she had borrowed to open the box, and next took out a sharp knife she saw there, bringing it back to her makeshift table, and between bites of cereal, and bagel with cream cheese, she began to peel away the resin from around the…

“Dagger,” she identified, almost incredulous as she uncovered enough of her mysterious prize to be able to identify its shape. “Who in their right mind buries a dagger in a box lined with salt beside their own stoop?”

“Who indeed, dearie?”

She jumped at the sound of his voice, and the knife she was working with slipped and cut quite deeply into the side of her hand. She yelped, and grabbed a tissue from a nearby box, dropping both the dagger and the box cutter onto the top of the crate and glared at him where he stood learning casually against the mantelpiece.

“I thought I told you to get out,” she snapped, uncovering her finger before putting it into her mouth, tasting the iron on her tongue as she tried to suck away the pain.

“You did,” he agreed, with a slight jaunt in his body as he turned to face her. “But you didn’t say for how long, so I’m back.”

She grasped her injured finger in the tissue again, trying to staunch the bleeding, demanding, “Who are you anyway?”

“That would be telling,” he told her earnestly.

“And why the ridiculous costume?”

“Ridiculous?” he questioned, and then again, rolling the R the second time, “Ridiculous? How rude!”

“Rude,” she said, getting up from her seat and approaching him as threateningly as she could with her one hand in the other, a finger wrapped into tissue against the bleeding, “is coming, uninvited, into someone’s home, and scaring them to their wits end!”

She resisted, though only slight, and it was more of a shiver, filled with thoughts of her nocturnal ramblings, than resistance as he gently closed the fingers of one hand around the wrist of her injured hand and tugged it away from the other.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, somewhat disarmed.

“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t.”

She followed his gaze to the side of her finger, where the cut still oozed blood, and as she watched, holding her breath the entire time, he passed the palm of his free hand just above her finger. A mauve glow emanated from the space between their hands, and she felt the tingling warmth of it as he passed his hand over the cut.

“There,” he said as he released her, and she took a step closer as he swayed slightly away. “Much better.”

Astounded, she examined her hand, not one sign of the cut remaining, not even a stain of blood where the cut had been.

“How did you…?”

“Magic, dearie,” he said, wrinkling his nose as he said the word. “How else?”

“Who are you?” she asked again. “And don’t say it would be telling.” Then she snatched up the dagger and asked, “And how is it that everything started being strange when I gook this thing out of the box?”

“My, my, my,” he admonished. “So many questions, and not even a by your leave.”

“And why should I?” she asked, “when you’re the one trespassing?”

“Oh, but am I?” he said cryptically, moving around her to then lean down and murmur against her neck, drawing another, deeper shiver from her as his breath ghosted over her skin, “Who is the one that went digging up what doesn’t belong to her?”

“Stop it!” she protested weakly.

“What?” He sounded serious.

“That!” she demanded, and suddenly turned to face him, only to find him seemingly rooted to the ground, and looking most uncomfortable with it, caught as though in mid stride. “Not funny,” she said.

“On that, we are agreed,” he said.

“I asked you questions,” she said, and went on to add, more than a little vexed, “And since you obviously have no intention of answering them—”

“Don’t…” he tried to interrupt, gesturing almost helplessly at the dagger she held in her hand, and now brandished, pointing at the kitchen door.

“—get out, right out,” she finished anyway, adding for good measure, “and stay out!”

“Really,” he sighed, and turning on his heel, walked quite briskly to the doorway to the kitchen, and then through the kitchen, to move the crate from the outside door. Then, he went out into the yard.

Belle blinked and looked out after him, her quick mind trying to put everything together. She soon came up with a very important question. “What the hell is going on?”

She set down the dagger and went back to her bag, to pull out the paperwork and see if there was anything she missed. She shook out the contents of the file that contained all the legal documents pertaining to the cottage.

Nothing out of the ordinary leaped out of the pages that she checked one by one, down to the fine print, and grumbled when she couldn’t find even the slightest clue that might lead her to the identity of the strange little intruder, nor to the dagger that had been hidden - buried - next to the cottage.

It wasn’t until, in frustration, she was about to throw the papers back into the folder, and the folder into the envelope in which they had been delivered that she found it; a small sliver of paper that fluttered, like a snowflake, down to the floor at her feet.

She bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up, her head swam, and the strangely written script with it. She watched as the letters wavered and changed, rearranging themselves before her eyes until she could, at last, read the words.

Yf thou relesen him fram his scrin, swa fyndeth se giedd uppan se tramet. folga to se hus of golde, ac thider geheiran se an, stan cald.

Belle blinked, and the symbols on the paper returned to their original form, unrecognizable as words in English at all.

Not knowing what else to do, she peered at the paper again, trying to see a pattern, trying to see if there was anything she could recognize, or remember from the words she had read when she could read it, which brought her to another thought - one she’d been trying to ignore since the first time the stranger had disappeared.

Magic.

The disappearance, he way the letters on the page had shifted and changed, the language - it all pointed to the one fact that was fast becoming inescapable. There was something entirely strange going on, and it all had to do with the buried dagger.

Returning to the crate where she had left the box cutter, she sat down on the bed and began to carefully slice and peel at the resin covering the handle, the hilt and finally the blade. It wasn’t clean by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, but at least she could see the beautiful markings, and more importantly the name on the fluted blade.

Rumplestiltskin

She whispered the name to herself as she ran her fingers across the letters on the blade. A strange, but grand kind of name, like something out of a traditional tale or something of the like. She read the word again, speaking normally this time. Could it be some kind of - and she felt foolish even thinking it - magic word.

She tried a third time, then cried out a startled little cry of surprise when the purple smoke swirled in the middle of the room, but the man in the center was nebulous at best; nebulous and looking irritated.

“Well make your mind up,” he snapped, his voice nasal and high pitched. “In or out, I can’t be both, dearie.”

“I told you to stay out,” she said.

“Yes,” he sang, more than a little mocking, “and then ye called me in.”

She looked between him and the name on the dagger and back again, before she said. “Your name is Rumplestiltskin.”

“Yes,” he sang again, just the same as the first time. “I know that.”

“Then I…”

She trailed off and pointed behind her toward the door, and then looked back at him.

“Yes,” he said a third time. “For goodness sake, will you make a decision. It’s terribly draughty with all this,” and he gestured at the purple smoke wreathing his semi faded form, “magic swirling around inside.”

“Magic,” she said, and he gestured again at the seething mass, gathering speed in its movement.

“Whenever you’re ready!” he prompted.

“What… oh… um…” she stood straighter and announced, “Rumplestlitskin, you may enter.”

Almost at once the smoke coalesced and he stood there, brushing off his leather coat as if it were filthy with dust.

“A bit formal,” he wrinkled his nose, “but it works all the same. So… wha’d’you want?”

To um… to understand,” she answered, “what’s going on.”

He clucked his tongue and began pacing back and forth in front of her, as though preparing to give some kind of lecture. “Well, you see,” he started after a moment.

“No,” she said, “Not from the beginning, just…” she took a breath, and then let it out and asked, “Why was this dagger buried in my garden? Who put it there, and why, when I dug it up, did you suddenly appear and everything got—?”

“Real?” he offered.

“I was going to say ‘weird’,” she corrected, drawing another frown from his face.

“The Dark One Dagger was buried in you—”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “Dark one?”

“Yes, Dark One,” he answered. “Namely me, and it was buried out there because—”

“Are you dangerous?” she asked.

“What?”

“Because you’re the Dark One. Are you dangerous and is that why the dagger was buried in the yard?”

“Do you want to hear the story,” he grumbled, “or are you going to keep interrupting?”

“Sorry,” she said, and she moved to sit down and set the dagger on the packing crate, watching as he eyed it almost warily, or perhaps hungrily. She couldn’t tell which because his eyes were so strange to her. “Go on.”

“Out there… buried, because they…” she opened her mouth to ask who they were, but he raised a finger, and wagged it from side to side. “Ah ah ah!” he admonished. “They buried it because they thought it was a way to keep me… trapped.”

“But why did they want to trap you,” Belle interrupted, and the little man rolled his eyes, although this time, instead of getting irritated with her interruption, he said, “A very good question, dearie. I never did anything wrong,” he sighed, and then quite obviously correcting himself said, “Actually, I lie… and to answer your earlier question, Yes. I am. Very.”

Belle stared at him for a very long time, and he stared right back. She prickled all over under his scrutiny and could almost feel him trying to read her mind, neither of them willing to be the first one to break eye contact until with a flourish of his hand he burst, unable to stand the silence any longer.

“All right!” he danced the words out of his mouth, “To them! I’m dangerous to them, and why shouldn’t I be? They obfuscate their actions with pretty words, and all the while they are hurting others, promising them things they want, empty promises because they can’t do what they say.” There was a good deal of irritation in his words. “Their interference tears families apart, and they have the nerve to call me evil! To say that I cause suffering and pain. To banish me and…”

He continued with his rant, on and on a litany of protest against lies and injustice, and she tuned out his words, running through her mind all that she had ‘suffered’ at his hands. But for a little fright, that had made her cut herself… she could think of very little, and he had healed that injury. All bark, and no bite, she thought. At least for me.

That thought led her to another. If that was the truth of him, then what about those that had trapped him here, and whose words she had read on the paper tucked in with her papers, and how was it that the dagger she had found seemed to be the key to controlling him.

“Rumplestiltskin,” she interrupted his tirade, mid flow, and he broke off abruptly, his pacing also coming to a halt. He turned to her.

“Yes?” he asked.

“What about this?” she said as she held out the paper to him. He stepped closer and peered at it.

“I can’t read that?” he said with distaste.

“Why not?” she frowned and peered at it again herself, wondering if it had faded from the paper, or in some other way had been rendered illegible. “It’s magic, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” he hedged, “but… it’s a type of magic I can’t read. It doesn’t mix well with mine.”

“Oh, I see.” She didn’t.

“Well?” he asked after another moment. “What does it say? Just because I can’t read it, doesn’t mean I can’t help you make sense of it…”

“But I only read it once,” she said. “When I first picked it up, and I can’t reme—”

He reached out, stepping closer as she shied a little away, and then stilled as he gave one quick tap on her forehead with his clawed finger. She felt her whole body go slack as her eyes unfocused, and only kept to her feet because she reached out and clasped his shoulder and felt his arms go around her, rekindling that strange feeling of…

“Yf thou relesen him fram his scrin, swa fyndeth se giedd uppan se tramet. folga to se hus of golde, ac thider geheiran se an, stan cald.”

…She blushed as she realized she was still in his arms, but more so when she admitted that she hadn’t moved away, and nor had he, in his turn, released her.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, knowing she would have likely fallen if he had not held her up. “Thank you.”

“It’s… no matter,” he answered awkwardly, and straightened his leather vest as he stepped back.

“I’d better…” she looked around for her notebook, “write it down, before I forget.”

“No need,” he told her, and she found herself troubled by another strange feeling of deja vu. “I’ll remember it.”

“But what does it mean?” she asked, “I don’t understand a word of it… nor how I could read it in the first place.”

“Well as you pointed out,” he said with that wrinkle in his nose that she found strangely endearing. “It is magic.” He waved his hand at the paper then as he added, “As for that… a bit before your time, I expect.”

“You’re talking in riddles,” she accused softly.

“And famous for it,” he teased. Then more seriously added, “What I mean is… that language is hundreds of year old, so… unless you’re older than you look it’s no surprise you don’t understand.”

“But you do?”

“Oh, yes,” he said.

“And will you tell me?” she felt as though she were pulling thorns from cactus one by one.

He tilted his head to one side. “For a price,” he said.

“What would you have of me?” she said without hesitation, eager to know the meaning of the words, no matter the consequences.

“Your… help,” he said slowly, and a warning danced along her spine that he meant another word entirely than ‘help.’

“And if I don’t agree to your price?” she demanded.

He shrugged, and then turned full circle with his arms outstretched, “Well, then you’re stuck with me.” As if to prove his point he went to sit down again on her cot, and put his booted feet up onto one of the crates she was using as a table.

Strangely though, that didn’t at all seem to be much of a hardship.

“All right,” she said, and slapped the side of his feet until he took them from the crate, “I’ll help you.”

He leaped to his feet, shivering with apparent delight, and with a look of glee on his face, giggled, “Deal.”

Another shiver caught her in awareness of ‘before’, but at his animated reaction to her agreement, she couldn’t help but giggle in return. She sobered quickly and asked, “So what does it say?”

“If you released him from his cage, so find the words upon the page. Follow to the house of gold and there obey the one, stone cold.” He chanted the words in a strange, sing song voice, then added, “Stupid fairy magic! Why does it always have to rhyme?”

She frowned in thought, and then the sudden image of her little glass house came to mind. When all the lights came on the glow from inside of there could be considered to look like gold. The rest of it made little sense though.

“Well you certainly did that,” he said, making a grand gesture of exclamation, his finger pointing to the ceiling as he went on, “There I was, minding my own business in a dank, dark cell…” he trailed of and then interrupting himself added, “You know, you’d expect people like the Charmings to have far cleaner dungeons.”

“You were locked up?”

“Of course I was locked up!” he turned to her then, and said, “And you released me…”

“…when I found the box with the dagger inside,” she finished his sentence. “But then… if they locked you up, and I released you, whatever they want me to do next is not likely to be a benefit to you, is it?”

“I imagine not,” he agreed.

“So what happens if I just… don’t do as the paper says? You’re released, so you could just go on your way—”

“Ah… you see… I…”

“There’s more to this story, isn’t there?” Belle surmised, and moving to the cot, sat down and crossed her legs. “I think you had better tell me everything.”

“Everything?” he echoed.

“Everything. From the very beginning.”

With a sigh, and another wave of his hand, he sat himself down on a large wooden box he conjured out of nowhere, sitting cross legged, just a little above the level of Belle’s head.

The telling of his tale took many hours and was filled with interruptions as Belle asked questions and made comments such as, “She said that?” and “How could she do that?” and “But you were only trying to save your son.” As far as she could tell it was a true accounting of everything that had led up to the point at which they found themselves. He wasn’t entirely innocent, she could see that, but he was far from a monster and farther still from ‘evil’ as he’d said the nebulous ‘they’ - though she assumed they were the fairies whose magic he had denigrated when he translated the words to her - had painted him. If anything, the one that had by far caused the greater harm, at least to his family, was the one he’d called “Reul Ghorm” which he alternatively called a gnat, and whom Belle found herself wanting to give a piece of her mind for pitting a child against his father.

“So, because of all of this, you lost him,” Belle restated her understanding of what had happened when Baelfire fell through the portal without his father.

“Yes,” he said simply, softly and mournful. “I was too much of a coward to follow him there and so he’s lost to me.”

The tone of his voice, the look on his face; in his eyes, twisted a knot in her heart. She wasn’t a mother - though she hoped to be one day - but she couldn’t imagine how it felt to lose a child.

One thing occurred to her then, however, and she frowned in consternation before she said, “You told me that your son was trying to take you both to a world without magic, because your magic wouldn’t work there. Your magic works here, and this is a world without magic.”

He shook his head. “My magic works here because the dagger is here,” he said. “It was… summoned here, by your ancestor, who tied it to the inherent power of this land, and then she it would seem, buried it in a salt line box… I presume at the behest of that miserable fairy. I can imagine it came as quite a shock to them, to find I might have found… a loophole to their imprisonment in a magic-leeching cage.”

Belle sat, considering everything for quite some time, before she said, “I think - perhaps - it’s time you and I paid a visit to the ‘House of Gold.’

When they left the cottage, dusk had fallen so by the time they reached the glass house at the property’s edge, it truly was a house of gold they were walking toward.

Belle found, surprisingly, that she had the heavy weight of trepidation in her belly as she mounted the steps up to the white porch, and reached for the handle to the glass house. The words of the grounds keeper rang in her ears.

”You’d be better off leaving well alone, miss,” he said.

She shook her head and reached for the handle, but as her fingers grasped the smoothness of the ivory sheath of it, her little imp caught hold of her arm and whispered harshly, “Wait!”

“What?” she hissed back.

“There’s magic here,” he said. “I can feel it.”

“Fairy magic?” she asked and he shook his head.

“Like the magic of my cell,” he said.

“Then I’ll be careful,” she said and pulled open the door, turning back to him as she added, “Maybe you should wait out here… in case—”

Dark One…

The voice sent a knife edge of ice trailing down Belle’s spine. She wasn’t one easily spooked, but the events of the last few days had surely taken their toll.

…I see you have enslaved another with your trickery.

Belle bristled, the mocking tone and the implication that she wasn’t exactly where she was of her own free will irritated her beyond reason.

“No one decides my fate but me!” she called out in response. “I haven’t been tricked, or forced to do anything, especially not by Rumplestiltskin. He’s been nothing but honest, and he’s told me everything.”

Oh, dear girl…

“I’m not a child!” As she argued, the air around her began to darken as though clouds were gathering, and on her skin she could feel the prickle of electricity.

…how little you understand.

“I understand enough,” she said, took a step forward. “Enough to know a lie when I hear one, and this is a lie. All of it. You did this, not him.”

She turned around to try and point at Rumplestiltskin, but behind her, where the doorway had been was now a featureless wall of gray, and the doorway looked as though it had been constructed of metal, not of white wood and glass.

She turned back in the direction from which the voice had come and accused softly, “See. Another lie!”

Turning again to gesture back at the grayness behind her, she gasped as the beautiful glass and wood was back, with the dark shape of Rumplestiltskin peering at her from outside.

There was something she had to remember. Something she was doing, she was sure of it, but the confusion of everything pushed it from her mind, so she pushed forward, feeling loss and sadness… fear sweep over her the further into the glass house she went.

All you had to do was forget…

The light was all wrong, coming as if from a single source behind her, not from above, nor golden any more as it should have been.

…all you ever had to do was forget. I’m sparing you a lifetime of pain and misery.

The voice had resolved to something familiar. Familiar and hated. Why? She was certain she’d never heard it before.

“No,” Belle whispered, then louder, the words coming from somewhere deeper inside of her than she could reach. “I’ll fight for him. I’ll never stop fighting for him.”

All you had to do was…

Belle’s eyes flew open. She hadn’t even remembered closing them. She looked down at herself, at her disheveled state, her tangled hair, broken fingernails. Digging in the garden will do that.

The walls, when she looked up were featureless blocks of gray again, and the doorway, now open, was filled with the presence of a tall man, all in white. In his hand he held a shabby pink jacket. The other extended toward where she lay on a hard, vinyl covered slab, little better than she’d had to sleep on in Regina’s dungeon.

Wait! Dungeon… Regina…?

She began to wonder if the voice she’d heard had cast some kind of spell over her. Hadn’t Rumplestiltskin said he’d felt magic here? She blinked, a long, slow blink. Willing it all to go away, but when she opened her eyes it was all still there. All the same only this time it felt right. It felt real.

“Come with me,” the man said. His voice was a command, and held the hard edge of anger, but his touch, when she took his hand, was gentle. The hand of a father.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?” Where am I? What’s going on? A hundred hundred questions went through her mind. Where was the voice from the glass house? Where was the wall plaque she had so briefly seen… a young woman, reaching out from the stone.

ac thider geheiran se an, stan cald.

She was cold. She hadn’t realized until the warm of his hands settled on her upper arms as he leaned down to look at her in earnest and told her his name, as though it should mean something to her. Should I, then, obey myself?

She looked up at him in raw confusion, then just as earnestly he said, “And I need your help to do something that I can’t.” She frowned. “There’s a man, his name is Mister Gold…”

…House of Gold…

Everything began to fall into place.

“Find him. All you have to do is tell him where you’ve been…”

All you had to do was forget.

“…and that Regina locked you up.”

That name again. Regina. It made her colder still just to think the name and for a moment the confusion began to overwhelm her. She shook her head.

“What?” she said, the word coming out like it was conjured of her uncertainty.

“It’s very important. Mister Gold’s gonna protect you,” he said, his voice alive with urgency. “But you have to tell him that Regina locked you up.” He nodded then, as did she, finding strength in his words, in the feeling of rightness of it all. “He’s gonna know what to do. You understand?”

She nodded again, and more confident this time, repeated his instructions, not knowing how she knew the truth, but knowing that the truth was she could trust this man’s words - and after, she knew she could trust Mister Gold.

With a final nod, she took the jacket that the stranger - no, not a stranger, she knew his name, after all - had given to her and slipped it on over her drab hospital clothes; followed him quietly out of the basement, past the bustle and out of the building. He pointed for her, to show her the way to go, then melted away into the shadows as though he had never been there.

She knew he had, and she also knew that now, she was free, but…

She couldn’t help but wonder what had become of her Rumplestiltskin.

#rumbelle #fluff #humor #a monthly rumbelling november 2021 #a monthly rumbelling

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