Fan Fic Focus

Title: Beauty Is Only…
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Pairing: Rumplestiltskin/Belle
Timeframe: Season 1 Episode 12, but references events from the life of the series to date.
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: I don’t own them – if I did I’d treat them a whole hell of a lot better than ABC do.
Set up: Belle reflects on everything – to whom the reflection is addressed remains unspoken.

I don’t know what it was like for anyone else, when we first came to Storybrooke. I don’t really remember what it was like for me either. I simply went from one state of captivity to another, but… for a split second – one moment of clarity – I remembered before.

Then it was gone, and that clarity became my madness.

It would haunt me in my dreams – when I was able to sleep – those memories of my life before; captivity at the hands, or rather the behest, of the Queen, and before that, a life in which I knew adventure and love… yes, love. Yet, on waking, it was gone, always gone. All of it disappeared as I woke, never to return, each lost moment falling like the petals from a fading flower.

They kept me medicated, though why, when I could remember nothing of who I was, let alone who I had been, I could not say. That, too, was at the behest of the Queen, though she called herself our mayor.

Hindsight asks the question: Of what was she so afraid?

Now, years later, I know that she used me before, back in the enchanted forest, to try and divest the only one who was ever a threat to her of his power. She had played on my blossoming emotions for my captor turned… what? Were we ever friends back then? I believe so, though I don’t think we would ever have named it that. All I know, all I remembered in that split second, that fading moment, was that I loved him and was trying to return to him when she had taken me captive, intending to use me to break him another way.

Some will tell you that love is a weakness, others will name it a panacea. I will tell you – and I truly believe – that love is the only enduring power. It will break curses, and survive any spell; bring the strongest of men to tears, and fill the weakest with a strength and courage beyond compare. In fact, the only way to break the bonds of love – true love – is to break the lover themselves.

That was my reality for 28 years. I had no notion of who I was. My cursed persona was to be an empty shell. How could I love?