4I do not own the show or any of the characters. This one-shot should be very short. And maybe a bit old. I don't know. It's my first one for Once Upon a Time. It's just sort of a reflection on season 1, episode twelve. Nothing special. I hope you like it. Please review.
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It was done and finished. She was gone. As they all must go.
He pretended that he could still hear her footsteps as she left the small dungeon space, but no. His head knew that by this time she would have already left his home and faded down the road that wound through the forest.
His head knew what his heart didn't.
Gone. She couldn't love him, nobody could love him. Maybe you could look past the hideous face and see a heart of gold lying on the other side, but he didn't have one. So she was gone.
Afterwards he spun all night, never stopping or resting. The gold piled at his feet, shimmering and splendid. He didn't care, so long as the wheel continued to move, but even then there was sometimes little comfort in that. The curtains would have to go back up. The world would once again be covered in darkness.
She came back. But she betrayed you. She didn't know. It doesn't matter.
He warred with himself all night. Which basically meant that he always lost.
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After Regina left, after the cold, indifferent clacking of her boots had ceased to ring across the floor, he cried. There was precious little in his world left to cry about, but he cried long and hard over the girl with the ocean eyes, the girl who had nourished souls without even trying, a girl who showed things mercy even when it was undeserved.
You're a coward, Rumpelstiltskin. He played the scene of her leaving the dungeon over and over in his mind. Go after her. He yelled it at his past self every single time. You don't know what you're doing, what will happen. Go after her.
Of course, he never did.
She wasn't just gone. She was dead. And all that was left was his empty, barren heart and a chipped cup.
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Rumple felt the pass of years, although not the same as others did. Normal people celebrated them, or griped about them, and even cried because eventually they realized that time passed too quickly out of their hands. You look back and there were so many things you wanted to do with your life. So many things you wanted to say.
Not Rumple. Rumple just felt the years. He marked Bae's birthday, and he marked the day the news came about Belle, but other than that time flowed along ceaselessly. On nights that he was honest with himself, it flowed along unbearably. But for some reason he wanted to continue living, no matter how pitiful his excuses for doing so might be.
But if there was one thing you could say for Rumpelstiltskin, it was that he never forgot. He was a man who was moved and ruled by impulses and passions, a man that let wounds in his heart remain raw and gaping. Which meant the hatred for those who had wronged him still burned and tore viciously at his soul, that his guilt over his son still nagged and ate at him day and night, and that his loss of Belle always remained present and searing.
Why he bothered to live that way was anybodies guess, but he did. Perhaps at this point he saw it as the only way to live. As the only way to even feel alive.
On especially lonely and depressing nights, when he hated himself more than anything else in the world, he wrote over and over on a piece of paper: Belle French is Dead and Gone. And nothing can ever change it.