I recently started working in hospitality, and I’ll tell you guys right now, the trope of “there was only one bed” is not as rare as you’d think in real life. A few times a week, at least, I have guys come in who are working together on projects in town or passing through who have to literally book the last room I have available for the night and lo and behold — there is only one bed, and guess what, they give each other a side-eyed look and begrudgingly take it. So write it up, it happens all the time!!!
Never let your There Was Only One Bed dreams die. I was secretly in love with my best friend for over a year when she graduated and moved to Oklahoma (like 1000 miles away) for grad school. Between that travel restrictions, we were so scared we’d never see eachother again.
At the end of summer, when Covid numbers were at a lower point, I took the risk to visit her in her new apartment and I quickly realized that, unlike when I’d spent the night at her house before, the couch wasn’t made up like a bed. She explained that since her new couch was so fancy and pink, I couldn’t possibly sleep on it, and so I needed to sleep in the bed with her. You know, out of necessity. I woke up with her snuggled around me in the middle of the night.
We’re dating now, and I genuinely think I’m going to marry her. Just the other day, though, I mentioned that if she hadn’t been weird about her fancy couch, I probably never would have like confessed my feelings. AND THEN she stood up, took the cushions off the fancy couch, UNFOLDED IT INTO A HIDE-A-BED, and said “I KNOW.”
THIS GIRL. ORCHESTRATED. BED SCARCITY. JUST SO SHE COULD MAKE THE “ONLY ONE BED” EXCUSE. Y’all when I said I just about lost my goddamn mind, I just about lost my goddamn mind. I love this sneaky bitch so much and the moral of this story is BE THE ONE BED YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.
This quote stems from the Prophecies found in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. It is a bleak, apocalyptic warning about humanity’s destructive nature. Da Vinci uses this imagery to criticize the greed, violence, and environmental exploitation brought about by mankind.
It's a condemnation of how human expansion leaves no part of the natural world untouched or unexploited.
The quote acts as a grim forecast: if human beings continue their relentless, consuming ways, they will eventually leave the earth barren and desolate.
Da Vinci wrote extensively about the cruelty of mankind, often referring to humans as "the king of beasts" because of our capacity to hunt, cage, and slaughter other animals for sport and consumption.
@hamletthedane’s tags:
#Vincent Van Gogh is crying somewhere in the after and I’m crying just thinking about that#you knew!! you saw the patterns!! there is a whole planet painted in the oils from your brush!!#TIL that the craft Juno went as close as 4000km from Jupiter’s weather surface#for context: the craft was closer to Jupiter than NYC is to LA#which is space terms is like. basically being on the planet#holy shit
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Mad Hatter | Jefferson, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Grace | Paige (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper, Knave of Hearts | Will Scarlet, Widow Lucas | Granny, Anastasia, Queen of Hearts | Cora, Blue Fairy | Mother Superior, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy
Additional Tags: AU, Angst, Violence, archeology, psychic questing, Religion, spirituality, Magic, Romance, Smut, Supernatural Elements
Summary:
A strange man confronts Doctor Belle French after one of her lectures and claims to need her help. He also claims to know that she is troubled, and can offer her protection. When events transpire that lead Belle to take up that offer, a desperate search begins to translate a series of ancient inscriptions, and Belle and her friends - both old and new - face increasing danger as they try to find answers and secure the truth before it can fall into very wrong hands, and possibly threaten every living thing in Storybrooke and beyond!
Read on AO3
Chapter 22 - Tenere Lineam
The outer door that led up to Archie’s consulting room was open at this time, and the stairs beneath her feet held the same sound as the Tuesday of her previous visit. Belle had registered their distinctive creak without registering that she had. It was a sound her brain had cataloged as familiar before it had sufficient data to justify the categorization as, archive.
She had sufficient data now.
Archie let her through the consulting room that disguised the real purpose of the building, but was no less legitimate as a profession than as archivist for The Order. It was evident that he had already been at the reading table when she came through, and that he was ready for their session. The kettle was on, and two cups were set out, and the materials were arranged with the same careful attention as before. His expression, when she smiled to see it, did the warm, slightly abashed thing that she understood was simply Archie’s face when he was pleased about something and was aware that the pleasure was visible.
“Belle,” he said, “Come, sit down.”
“Archie,” she greeted him in return.
She sat and put down her bag; took a moment to take out the translation notebook, which had grown considerable since Tuesday of the last week. Its margins were now dense with the accumulation of her annotations. She set the notebook on the table.
Archie looked at it, then at her.
“You’ve been working.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s been a significant week.”
“I heard,” Archie said, “Some of it, anyway,” He poured the tea with his unhurried precision. “Gold told me the third register is broken.”
“Yes.”
“And… the morning after,” he said, with the delicacy of someone who had been told what he needed to know and was not going to press for more. “With Gold.”
“Yes,” Belle said. “That too.”
Archie handed her the cup. He looked at her for a moment with the warmth that was his specific gift. He was someone who saw people clearly and took what he saw without making it a burden on the person seen. The perfect quality for a therapist, Belle couldn’t help thinking.
“You look like someone who has discovered a significant amount of information in a short period of time and is still finding places to put it,” he said carefully.
Belle almost smiled. “That’s accurate.”
“The translation,” Archie said, “The identification passages.”
“Yes.”
“And the Wound passage.”
“Yes.”
“And the conversation with Gold.”
“Yes,” Belle paused. “And all of it in approximately seventy-two hours.”
Archie gave her an understanding, and yet concerned look. “How are you?”
It was, Belle noticed, the same question Ruby asked, a genuine inquiry rather then a social one. Archie and Ruby shared that quality, which was not surprising given that both of them were people for whom other people’s true states mattered rather than their presented states.
She considered the question honestly.
“I’m—” she stopped. She tried to find the correct word. “Processing,” she said. “Still… some of it is very—” she stopped again. “The identification passages, the three Keepings, the people in them.”
“Yes,” Archie said quietly. “I imagine that’s… considerable.”
“The Wound passage,” Belle said. “Do not seek to heal the Wound. The Wound is the world’s health.” She looked at the table. “I’ve been sitting with that since Tuesday evening. Both things being true simultaneously. The Wound causing suffering and the Wound being necessary.”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“And the Person holding it,” Belle added softly.
Archie was quiet.
“I told Gold that I thought the motto might also be a gift. Not unto us… the not-claiming, the refusal of the personal stake, that it might free him, theoretically, from having to be the point of everything.”
“What did he say?” Archie asked. He seemed genuinely curious about the answer.
“He said he hadn’t considered it in those terms,” Belle said. “He said it was something to think about.”
Archie looked at her for a moment. Something in his expression, perhaps the hint of hope - that he had been hoping for something for a long time, and that he just seen evidence that such a thing was happening, crossed his face.
He said nothing. He picked up his cup and drank his tea.
“Archie,” Belle said.
“Yes.”
“There are things you didn’t tell me last time,” she said, “things that belonged to other conversations. The Wound’s personal significance. You said that belonged to Gold. The schism’s full shape… you gave me the outline but not the interior.”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“I’ve had some of those conversations now,” Belle said, “with Gold. The Wound… he told me what it is. The duration, What the keeping means for him specifically.”
Archie’s jaw tightened though his expression didn’t change.
“He answered,” Belle said. “When I asked.”
“Yes,” Archie said, very quietly. “He would.”
“You said he was waiting to be asked,”
“I… did, yes,” Archie answered.
“He was. I could—” Belle said. “I could tell that he was. It was in the way he received the question.” She paused. “I wanted to tell you that, because you were the one who said to ask him.”
Archie looked at her with an expression that had several things in it, none of them requiring performance.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
“Now,” Belle said, “I’d like the things that belong to this conversation. The schism’s interior. What caused it. What Gold took when he left.”
Archie set down his cup.
“Yes,” he said. “All right.”
He told her carefully. She could tell, and she thought him a natural teacher in the precise sense: someone who understood that information without structure, without a place to rest, was practically useless.
She knew the schism existed. Gold had told her as much, and she knew it was theological rather than personal in it origin - though she suspected there was more to it than that. She knew also that it concerned the Wound’s function, and that the two side has reached irreconcilable positions. Gold had told her this, and from what he had told her about the Congregation’s leader, present only as the shape of someone Gold had known and believed in completely, and found, eventually, to be catastrophically wrong. Archie provided the interior of the situation that Gold had given to her.
“The schism did not happen quickly,” he said. “These things never do, when the people involved are… significant people,” he paused to settled his glasses back into place on the bridge of his nose before he concluded, “People who have built something together over a long time.”
“They were part of the same organization?” Belle asked.
“In a sense, and for a significant period, yes,” Archie confirmed. “The Order in its current form, the specific structure of it with the Keeping as its central charge, was not always as it is now.” He stood up from his chair, paced away for a moment, as if settling his own thoughts, or the information, she thought, within a framework that would be accessible to her. He returned and perched on the edge of his reading desk. “There was a time when the understanding of the Keeping was less complete; when what was known about the Wound and its function was partial.”
“And in that partial understanding—”
“Different conclusions were possible,” Archie said. “Yes. If you know the Wound causes suffering and you know the Wound has persisted across a very long time, and you do not yet fully understand what the Wound seals, the conclusion that the Wound should be remedied is not irrational. It’s wrong, but not irrational.”
“The Congregation’s position was formed when the understanding was partial.”
Archie nodded. “And when the understanding became more complete,” he said, “the Congregation did not revise its position because the position had become, by that point, conviction. As I think you know, conviction is considerably more resistant to revision than opinion.”
“True believers,” Belle said quietly.
“Yes,” Archie said, and getting up from his perch, moved his chair to the space between them where he could sit, in earnest appeal as he prepared to continue the explanation. As he moved, Belle absorbed all she had heard, and cross referenced it with what she had already noted. She thought about Cora in the library telling her that the argument was not without compassion, and that it had never been without compassion, and about Gold saying the same in a way that had cost him personally to understand.
“The schism,” she said. “When it came, what specifically caused the break?”
Archie sat back in the chair he had placed so expertly in a position to reach her.
“The full reading of the second register,” he said. “The correct reading; all three translations understood as facets of the same answer rather then competing versions. When Gold arrived at this reading it became—” he frowned, and Belle could see him searching for the right word. “—unambiguous. The Wound as seal rather than injury. The Keeping as necessity rather than cruelty.” He paused. “He shared this reading. The response was not what he hoped.”
“The other side rejected it,” Belle said.
“The other side,” Archie echoed carefully, “had invested too much in the alternative reading to receive the correction, and the alternative reading had, by that point, an institutional architecture built around it. Doctrines. Practices. A theology.” He paused again. “You cannot simply correct a theology, not when it has become the foundation of an organization and for quite a significant time.”
“So he left,” Belle said.
“After a manner of speaking,” Archie said. “Yes.”
“And he took something with him, kept something.”
Archie blinked, then leaned toward her gain. “You know about that?”
“I know there was something,” she said. “I don’t know what.”
Archie was quiet for a moment, she could feel him walking the line between what was his to give and what wasn’t.
“There are certain elements of the Keeping that require a specific…” he rearranged his glasses again, “custodial arrangement. Documents. Objects. Records that the Keeping cannot function without. When the schism happened, Gold kept the elements that were, in his assessment, essential to the correct Keeping, and that the other side would have… misused.”
“And they wanted them,” Belle said.
“They have wanted them,” Archie confirmed, “ever since.”
Belle took a moment to let that sink in, doing what she did when new information came to her - running it back through everything she knew and checking for correspondences and conflicts; finding the places where it connected to things she had already filed.
The photographs came to mind. Gold’s people entering her office to remove the one image that mattered before the Congregation could acquire it. Gold had acknowledge this when she asked him directly, and had accepted her admonishment that she would like it to be the last time he made a decision on her behalf. She knew that concession had cost him, but it was the same pattern. Gold had decided what should be kept and by whom, and for what reason, and had acted on that decision unilaterally, the decision being, as far as she could assess, correct in its outcome and complicated in its method. She would not voice it. It was not yet the right moment and Archie was not the right person to say it to. She would write it in the journal with the things she was going to ask Gold directly, in the right place, and at the right time.
She looked at the archive around her; at the shelves, the accumulated record of the Order’s keeping.
“What was taken,” she asked, “specifically?”
She watched Archie once again walking that line of what he was entitled to give and what he was not, as he in turn watched her face.
“There were documents - records specific to the Wound-Keeper’s office. They pertained to the correct understanding of the Keeping’s architecture. Materials, he believed, the Congregation would have used to construct something that looked like the right ritual but was not.” He paused. “And… objects.”
“What objects?” Belle asked. “Significant ones?”
“Yes,” Archie said, and Belle found herself thinking about the shelves in Gold’s shop, and the way the space felt as though it had absorbed a great deal across its duration. The objects with their histories, some barely registering, some with significant presence that she had noted with each visit, without a category for many.
“The cup,” she said, barely above a whister, “Third shelf in the bookcase to the left.”
Archie went very still.
“I’ve been drawn to it since my first visit,” Belle said. “I stop when I pass it. I've been stopping, and not stopping, trying not to look too long because I can’t account for why it pulls at me.” She looked up at Archie. “Ruby paused beside it too. She told me.”
“Yes,” Archie said very quietly.
“It’s one of them,” Belle said. “One of the objects.”
“It is,” he said slowly, “perhaps one of the most significant ones.”
She thought about the cup. Ceramic, old, the glaze worn at the rim with age and handling, it’s shape entirely functional; made to be held rather than displayed, sitting among other objects that were also old, and also ceramic and having no label and no obvious distinction from its neighbors.
And she thought a word, a name that was a recognition of something she had already known without knowing she knew it, and which she was not yet ready to speak. Instead she said, “And the Congregation—”
“Wants it back,” Archie finished. “They believe it was taken from them at the schism and that Gold had no right to remove it.”
“Did he?”
Archie was quiet for a long time before he said, “That’s a question that depends significantly on who you ask.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I think,” Archie said carefully, “that Gold took it because the alternative was the Congregation using it for the wrong purpose, in the wrong ritual, with the wrong understanding of what it is,” He paused. “I think he was right about what they would have done with it. I think the correctness of his assessment does not fully resolve the question of whether the taking was his to do.”
Belle looked at him. “You’ve thought about this for a long time.”
“Years, yes.” Archie said.
“And you still haven’t resolved it.”
“No, I haven’t.” Archie said, then paused. “I don’t think it resolves. I think it is one of the things that is held rather than settled.”
Belle brought to mind the inscription The Wound is the world’s health. Do not seek to heal the Wound. Preserve the Wound. This is the only instruction. The specific theology of holding the tension rather than resolving it. Both things true simultaneously.
“He… keeps it on a shelf,” she said, “In the middle of the shop. Not hidden. Not protected by anything visible.”
“No,” Archie said.
“It’s safest when it’s ordinary,” Belle realized slowly. “The Congregation has been looking for something significant for centuries. The cup is the least significant-looking object in the room.”
“Yes,” Archie said. “That is… precisely right.”
“He’s been hiding it in plain sight.”
“For a very long time. Yes,” Archie said.
Belle sat with the revelation; the cup on its shelf, the pull of it that she had been feelings since the first visit. The Word-Keeper’s perception of it which the inscription had identified as the specific quality of awareness that the Word-Keeper would have in the cup’s presence. The place in the speaking where the silence falls, and the cup, which was the silence made physical. The thing that had poured what had been poured and was still carrying the residue of that pouring.
She had been shown what she was since before she understood she was being shown anything.
“When Gold and I have the conversation about what he took and why, the cup will be part of it,” she said.
“Yes it will,” Archie agreed.
“Is he ready for that conversation?”
Archie looked at her with the warm expression that was his when he was most certain about something.
“He has been ready,” he said, “for considerably longer than he knows.”
Belle looked from the man to the archive around him. The accumulated record, the selves holding their centuries of careful scholarship, and about Gold in the back room of his shop, with the lamp, and the cup, and the distance between them. Not far in physical terms, but the distance the cup represented: the schism, the taking, the centuries of holding it in ordinary view while the Congregation searched…
…found each other… Underlined twice.
She thought about the Word-Keeper, drawn to the cup; The Vessel pausing beside it. The Wound-Keeper keeping it.
The three Keepings, not as abstract theology, but as three specific people in a small Maine town, assembled around an object and moving toward a moment the inscription had been waiting for since it was placed in the wrong geology, in Turkey, by someone who understood that the right reader would eventually find it.
She took out her journal and wrote:
The cup. Gold’s shop. Kept in plain sight. The Congregation has been looking for something significant. The cup is the least significant-looking object in the room.
Gold kept it at the schism. Correct in his assessment of what they would have done with it. Whether the keeping was his to do, Archie has been sitting with this for years and had not resolved it. It does not resolve. It is held rather than settled.
Both things can be true.
She looked at what she had written then added:
The Word-Keeper drawn to it since the first visit. The Vessel paused beside it. The Wound-Keeper keeping it.
The three Keepings around the cup without knowing that is what they are.
Not yet.
She closed the journal and looked at Archie.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“It was yours to know,” he said. “When you were ready.”
“Was I ready the first time I came?”
Archie appeared to consider this. She trusted he would do so with the precision he brought to things that mattered.
“You were ready to receive the De Laude text,” he answered. “You were ready to begin the framework.” He paused. “The cup required the framework to be further along before it could be properly received. It needed you to have read the third register and to have had the conversation with Gold about the Wound.” He paused again. “And to have understood what the three Keepings are and who is in them.”
“And now I have.” Belle said.
“And now you have.” Archie agreed.
“The framework builds in the correct order,” Belle said. “It was not quite a question.
“Always,” Archie said. “When it’s allowed to.”
Belle examined him for a moment. “Who decides the order?”
Archie looked back at her with warmth and the mild abashedness of someone who had an answer they were going to give without making too much of giving it.
“Mostly Gold,” he said. “In this instance—” He gave himself a moment to consider his words. “In this instance, I think the inscription has had some input.”
Belle almost smiled.
“I think so too,” she said, then out of the blue asked, "One more thing."
"Yes."
"The Rabbit Hole," she said. "The night of my girls' night out. You said someone suggested you should try it.”
Archie looked mildly embarrased, confirming her thoughts.
“Jefferson,” she said.
“Yes,” Archie said.
“He sent you.”
“He suggested,” Archie said. There’s a distinction.”
“Is there?”
"Jefferson suggests, Gold instructs. The distinction is meaningful in practice even when the outcome is similar."
Belle looked at him. "Was it Gold's idea originally?"
"I believe," Archie said carefully, "that the idea originated with Gold's assessment of the situation and was communicated to Jefferson who implemented it in the way Jefferson implements things, with the minimum necessary… action."
"So Gold decided I should know you," Belle said. "Before I knew I needed to."
"Yes," Archie said. "That would be consistent with Gold's methodology."
Belle absorbed this. She thought about the structure and intention that had been running underneath her life since before she was aware of it. The lecture hall. The card. The almost-sighting in the café. The Rabbit Hole. Each piece of ground prepared before she knew there was ground to be prepared.
She thought about eight years and a scholarship and a dig site in Turkey.
She thought about the inscription came to me written in the margin of the translation notebook, and about, found each other underlined twice.
"He sent you to meet me," she said. "Before I had the appointment. Before the library. Before any of it."
"Yes," Archie said.
"Why?"
"I think," Archie said, "you should ask him that."
"Yes," she said. "I think I should."
She added it to the list of things she was going to ask Gold when the time was right. The list was growing.
Knowing that their time was at an end, at least for the moment, she began to pack her bag, but there was still something nagging at her, something deep, like a thorn inside.
"Archie?"
"Yes."
"Do you think that the discipline, not unto us… do you think it can coexist with…something else? Something that is, specifically, unto the person practicing it?"
Archie looked over at her once more with the full quality of his attention.
"I think," he said carefully, "that the discipline was never intended to exclude everything personal. I think it was intended to prevent the personal from distorting the Keeping. The two things are,” he paused, “Well, the two things are not the same."
Belle bit her lip.
"I think," Archie continued, as if he had been thinking about that for many years and had arrived at a considered position, "that the correct reading of not unto us is not not unto me. The motto is plural. It addresses the Order. It speaks to the collective refusal of personal glory. It does not…" he paused, then began again, "It does not, as I read it, require the individual to refuse everything."
Belle looked up at him.
"That is a very specific reading."
"It is the reading," Archie said, with the mildness of someone completely confident in their position, "that I believe is correct."
"Have you shared this reading with Gold?"
"Many times," Archie said, with a sigh. "Over the years."
"And?"
"And Gold," Archie said, "is a more literal reader than I am, in certain respects."
Belle looked at him for a long moment.
"Perhaps," she said, "he needs a different reader."
Archie's expression did the thing it did when he was most pleased: warm, slightly abashed, entirely genuine.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think he does."
Belle picked up her bag.
She went out into the Friday morning.
She walked back to the university thinking about the discipline applied to everything and not unto us is plural, and he needs a different reader and the way Archie had said it like someone who had been waiting years to say it to exactly the right person.
She took out the journal and wrote… still walking:
Archie's reading of the motto: plural, not singular. The Order collectively refuses glory. The individual is not required to refuse everything.
He has shared this reading with Gold.
Gold is a more literal reader.
Perhaps he needs a different reader.
She looked at what she'd written and then wrote underneath it, in the smallest handwriting:
yousharknotpass
gummygunk
pixelskylines
gracieabrams
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
