Writer of fanfiction, (and other things), Rumbeller, Tolkien fiend and some time teacher of many weird and often strange things (as well as a teacher IRL).
"Why do you care about comments? Don't you write for yourself?"
Do you not like the sense of community?
Do you not love the conversations that develop in the comments?
When you cook for others, do you just cook whatever you want to eat without a care for what the others think of your food?
Writing fanfiction is becoming an ungrateful hobby because readers seem to have become selfish...(not all, mind you... The few commenters I have are fucking amazing!)
You want, want, want, want, but give nothing back...
We used to be a family of sorts. Now we feel like Glovo delivery people...
Bring back community and the back and forth from before.
I see so, so many people giving up on writing... So many Subscriptions that get zero emails because the writers are disheartened.
Happy Tuesday, everyone, how are you all doing today?
I'm still chugging away at Dies Irae. After my little posting storm last weekend, I've been considering a midweek chapter as well as a weekend on - if I can make it work. I'm still ahead of myself, in terms of posting what is already in final draft, and looking at it the other day, if I stuck with only posting one chapter a week it wouldn't be completely posted until January! Even twice a week, we're looking at October. So... we'll see.
Meanwhile, I'm working on the outline drafts of the chapters I've already 'finished', whilst simultaneously still working on the rough beat drafts of the sequel. There will come a point where I'm writing something and my brain will be like, "I must make a note of that for the sequel." So, I'm doing a lot of jumping back and forth, because of course when outlining for the sequel, I'll find places where I'll think, "That came out of nowhere, I need to seed that in the first fic." So, I'll go back and tweak something.
From a writer's perspective, that has been interesting.
Aaaaaand yesterday, I came up against the usual wall that Rumbelle writer's so often face. That dreaded question. The one that keeps us all hung up for weeks and eventually gets in the way of everything.
What name to we give to Mister Gold?
So that feel free to hit me with any questions, burning or otherwise, and I shall do my best to answer them. My inbox is here
love when fanfic writers are like “I love this character” & proceed to put them through shit even God has blacklisted, baby the middle ages called they want to hear your ideas
social media has really warped our perception of creativity and hobbies. Stop doing things to post them. Just write. Just journal. Just sketch. Just read. Just annotate. Just sing. Just crochet. Just do the thing you’re going to do with the assumption no one will ever see or know you did it. Stop performing. Just enjoy it.
I understand the heart of this, and I agree that creativity doesn’t always need to be witnessed to be worthwhile. There is something deeply sacred about making privately, about writing or sketching or singing simply because your soul needs somewhere to put itself. But I also think we’ve flattened the conversation too much when we imply that sharing creativity automatically turns it into performance, or that posting your work means you’re only doing it for praise.
Humans have always shared what they make. We read poems aloud. We pass around books. We hang paintings. We sing in rooms full of people. We tell stories beside fires, at dinner tables, online, in letters, in journals someone might one day find. Art has always had a communal pulse. Sometimes posting is not about accolades at all. Sometimes it’s accountability. Sometimes it’s archive. Sometimes it’s connection. Sometimes it’s the joy of letting something you made leave your hands and find the people it was meant to find.
I have always said: create because you love it, not because you want to be loved for it. But the problem isn’t sharing; the problem is when visibility becomes the only reason you create. Enjoying your own creativity and wanting to share it with others are not opposites. Being proud of what you make is not the same thing as performing. Let people make privately. Let people make loudly. Let people be witnessed without assuming their joy is insincere.
Belle is a keeper of an ancient and sacred library. She is almost forced to leave her beloved post for marriage to Gaston. That is until the Dark One comes to her library for some lost knowledge and he makes a deal for her assistance in the library.
Here are this week’s seven sentences from everything I’ve written up to the time this post was made:
She nodded, and Gold turned to back to Belle.
“Belle,” he said, moderately softer once more. “Come with me.”
It was neither and instruction, nor was it a question, and Belle, for once, did not want it to be, as he led her to the passenger side of his car, and opened the door.
“Your jacket,” she said as she moved past him, registering his warmth as she passed closely beside him.
“Keep it,” he said, barely audible.
This is from the first draft of chapter 26 of Dies Irae, which is what I’ve been working on today. It may change before it is posted, but this is as it stands so far. Free free to ask me anything.
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, Evil Queen | Regina Mills, 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 18 - Patefacio
Letting herself back into her office, she told herself firmly that she was going home. She was only coming back for her coat. It was on the back of her chair where she’d left it this morning without really registering that was what she was doing. She had been lost in the experience of her visit to the archive when she had arrived, and had not fully occupied the space when she had passed through her office.
She had her bag with the photographs. She’d taken the time to print them between the lecture and the seminar she’d given, on automatic, earlier in the day. She had the notebook in which she’d recorded the morning’s observations, and had formulated questions she meant to ask Gold.
She had, she reminded herself for a second time, done quite enough for one day.
She put on her coat.
She crossed the room to pull the door to the inner office closed before she left, and looked at the desk.
The transcription notes were exactly where she’d left them with the working drawings of the composite characters spread across the right side. The photographs of the third register were pinned to the cork board beside the desk, and even from the distance she could see the third register's glyphs in their rows looking back at her with the inscrutability they had maintained for months.
She knew the first column’s direction now, and hesitated.
Then she slipped off her coat, stepped into the room, and sat down at the desk.
She worked methodically, which was the only true way she knew how to work. She had learned across years of fieldwork that the moment she stopped being methodical was the moment she started making the kind of errors that cost months, and she applied that discipline now with the same rigor she applied to everything else, regardless of the fact that her hands wanted to move faster than her methodology allowed.
First: the directional markers.
She began with Glyph Seven, the one that had resolved briefly that Wednesday evening, that seemed years ago now, into the arrow quality, the this way - a function rather than the shape of a direction, and applied the De Laude passage’s identification of the marker’s source system; The third component, the one she had been labeling as unknown since the beginning.
It wasn’t unknown any more.
It was a modified form of an ancient Semitic waymarker; a character used in early navigational inscriptions to indicate direction of travel - repurposed here as a reading direction marker, embedded in every composite glyph. It was invisible unless you knew to look for it as a direction rather than a phoneme or a semantic modifier.
She had been looking at it as a phoneme for months.
She looked at it as a direction now.
Glyph Seven - the unknown component, seen correctly for the first time: pointing. She checked the De Laude passage again, confirmed her direction. Downward. The first column read top to bottom. She moved to the next glyph. The marker was inverted, indicating bottom to top.
The third. Downward again.
The alternation was there, consistent and systematic. Every glyph carried its direction in the component she had been calling unknown. The inscription had been showing her the reading direction since she first photographed it. She had been looking at it for months and seeing something else.
Belle took a breath.
She turned to the transcription notes and began to read the third register correctly for the first time.
The first column assembled its meaning slowly.
She had to work character by character. The boustrophedon reading required her to track not just the composite glyph’s meaning but its column position and its direction; the left-to-right visual flow of the inscription’s surface continuously pulling her eye away from the vertical structure she was imposing on it. She had to keep redirecting. She had to keep returning to the column, following the directional marker’s instruction rather than her eye’s habit.
The first column was not long, perhaps twelve glyphs. She worked through them in forty minutes, which was fast, but the De Laude key made the composite characters significantly more tractable than they had been without it. The source systems were identifiable now. The unknown components no longer absorbed her attention.
She had a word.
Then two.
Then a phrase, assembled from the column’s glyphs, sitting in her translation notebook in her careful handwriting:
In this place…
She looked at it.
She turned her attention to the second column. Bottom to top. She inverted her reading direction and began tracking up the page rather than down, the boustrophedon turning as the inscription required, and worked through the second column’s glyphs with the same methodical care.
…is sealed…
In this place is sealed…
She sat back for a moment, then turned to the third column:
…what must not…
She was moving faster now, the framework bedded in, the composite characters yielding more readily as the reading method became habitual. Fourth column, then the fifth - the text assembling itself in her notebook line by line. Each column gave a short phrase, and the phrases connected into something that was becoming, with increasing clarity and increasing weight, exactly what the first and second registers had been pointing toward.
In this place is sealed what must not be spoken, what must not be named, what must not be released until the Keeping fails and the Three are assembled, and the Word is spoken complete.
She stopped writing.
She read it back, and read it again.
Then she turned the page and kept going.
The light slowly faded until the office was fully dark outside of the pool of her lamp, and Belle was still at her desk. The evening had become night without her consciously registering the transition. The transcription notes were covered in her handwriting. The third register’s text assembled itself in the translation notebook, column by column, building from the operational framing of the first lines into the identification passages that she had been approaching from outside since the beginning.
If you have read this far, you are the reader we required.
She stopped.
She read it again.
The text was addressing her directly. Not the reader in the abstract, but you… personal and precise. The inscription was closing the distance between itself and the person holding it.
She had known it was coming. The third register’s operational instruction structure had been visible in the framework before she began the correct reading. She had know the inscription contained identification material. She had been working toward it for months. However, knowing it was coming had not prepared her for it.
She set down her pen, took a moment to stand, stretch, and turn on the kettle to make tea. As she set down her cup before retaking her seat, her hand brushed her pen, beginning a slow roll toward the edge of desk. She raised her hand, at first meaning to stop it, but at the last moment, watching and listening as it rolled. She let it fall, and didn’t pick it up until after she had taken her first sip of tea.
She sat with her thoughts for a moment, with her memories, and then turned her attention back to the text.
The identification passages arrived in the order the second register had implied. The three Keepings were named, their markers described and each identification was precise, and old, and written by someone who had understood, with remarkable accuracy, what the three Keepers would look like when they arrived.
There are three wounds in the world that are one Wound. The wound in the king endures in his line. You will know the line by the Wound that does not heal, and the knowledge that precedes speaking and the memory of what has not yet been.
She wrote it down.
She looked at it, then at her pen, aware in the way that she was always aware of things that her conscious processing had not yet fully received, that she had just written something that was going to need her to fully examine it, the outer and the inner, the literal and the inferred, for longer then the evening allowed.
She thought of Gold’s cane which she had not seen since the visit to his shop, but which was, nevertheless present in the sentence she had just written in the way things were present when the inscription had just put a frame around them.
She kept writing.
There are three vessels in the world that are one Vessel. The vessel of the Blood endures in those who carry what was poured. You will know the carriers by the nature that exceeds the natural, and the instinct that precedes the reason, and the healing that should not be possible.
She wrote each word, and not just on the notebook’s page.
The nature that exceeds the natural. The instinct that precedes the reason.
She thought about the conversation of a kitchen table, about the quality of Ruby’s attention. Her seeing that happened below the register of normal observation, and the information that arrived in her without a source. She thought about the way Ruby had identified the dry cleaner by observation of a single breath, the man in the bar that she had noticed and kept to herself for days without a word to anyone. She thought about the someone else, connected to you arriving from Ruby’s mouth, and the surprise she had seen on Ruby’s face as she had spoken it.
The instinct that precedes reason.
She looked at the identification in the passage again.
She thought about quite a lot and the effect of many years of carrying something alone without language for it.
She looked at the markers: the nature that exceeds the natural. The instinct that precedes the reason. The healing that should not be possible.
She had two of the three.
Belle filed the third - the healing that should not be possible - under not yet confirmed as though she expected confirmation to arrive.
“Each in its own time,” she whispered, and kept writing.
There is one word in the world that was three Words. The Word was divided so that no single voice could speak it complete. The Keeper of the Word will know the word is incomplete by the place in the speaking where the Silence falls.
She stopped writing.
She picked up the notebook and read the three identification passages sitting in sequence in her translation: the Wound, the Blood, the Word. She felt… something that she had been approaching from the outside for months suddenly become visible from the inside.
Three people. The identification markers she had just translated, mapped without any effort of interpretation, onto three people she knew.
She set her pen down again, and remained still for many long moments.
Outside the window, the world turned about its business, yet inside her office, within the circle of her lamp, on her desk, the transcription notes were spread about a notebook that contained something that was going to change many things, she knew, even before she had finished translating it.
She kept going.
After the identification passages came the operational instructions. What must be done when the Keeping fails. The assembly of the three, the speaking of the Word complete, and then - hear the end of the third register’s text - there was one line that stopped her completely:
Do not seek to heal the Wound. The Wound is the world’s health. Preserve the Wound. That is the only instruction.
She read it three times.
The Wound is the world’s health.
Not, the Wound is necessary. Not, the Wound must be endured. the text read:
The Wound is the world’s health.
She had said to Archie that morning, when he told her the Congregation read the Wound as tragedy: It is tragic. Both things can be true, and Archie had looked at her with an expression of direct agreement and had said that both things could be true. She had filed it then as a statement about the inscription’s theology, but she understood now, in her office late at night, and with the translation in front of her that it was also about a person.
Both things can be true.
The Wound is necessary. The Wound is the world’s health. The wound causes suffering. All three true simultaneously. The inscription did not resolve the tension between them. The inscription required the tension to be held. It required someone to hold it and called this holding Keeping, and called the keeper by the name the third register had just given to her.
She thought about the motto on the card. Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. She had been thinking about it as a discipline since Sunday evening - a negation practiced rather that stated, as the refusal of the personal claim maintained across a very long time. She thought about it now as something else; as something that had shaped a person’s life, and the shape that life took when they had been holding something for long enough that the holding and the person have become indistinguishable.
Not unto us…
Not unto him.
She brought to mind Gold’s cane once more, deliberately… fully, giving the thought the complete attention of a scholar who has just been given the framework that makes the cane readable.
The Wound that does not heal.
The pen slipped from her fingers. She did not pick it up again. At eleven seventeen by her office clock she picked up her phone instead. She looked at it for a moment, and pulled up her contacts; waited a moment longer, and then in spite of the hour, she called Gold.
He answered on the second ring, not the first, which told her by way of the language of his silences and timings, which she had become aware of in their meeting, that he had been awake, and not asleep, and had waited exactly one ring before answering. She did not examine the reasons that might have been.
“I’ve broken the third register,” she said.
Her words were followed by a silence.
It was not the silence of someone that did not expect the call as much as it was the obvious silence of someone receiving information they have been waiting for, and was taking the moment they needed to process hearing it.
“Come in tomorrow. In the morning.”
“There are things in it,” she said, “that I need to ask you about directly.”
“Yes. I know.”
There was another pause, long and loaded.
“Gold?”
“Yes?”
“The third register identifies the Wound-Keeper.”
He did not answer, and the long, loaded silence deepened in the way that suggested that even though he knew this moment was coming, the knowing of it was insufficient preparation for the hearing of it.
His answer, when it finally came, was very quiet.
“Yes. It does.”
“The identification markers,” she pressed, “The Wound that does not heal. The knowledge that precedes speaking,” she paused. “I wasn’t going to mention it tonight. I thought it could wait until tomorrow.”
“But?”
“But the inscription said, You are the reader we required.” Belle said, “and I thought, if it required me to read it, then the person it’s about deserves to know it’s been read.”
The silence from the other end of the phone was the most significant of all the silences that she had heard from him, which was notable, given how many she had heard from him in general.
“Tomorrow,” Gold said finally. “In the morning.”
“Yes,” Belle said.
“Get some sleep,” he said, before he ended the call.
Belle sat with the phone in her hand for a moment, then she looked at the translation notebook, and the three identification passages. She looked at the operational instructions that told not to seek to heal the Wound and that the Wound is the World’s health.
She opened the journal.
She turned to a fresh page, and began to write:
Tuesday. Third register. Correctly read.
She wrote the three identification passages in full and then looked at them for a very long time. Underneath them she wrote:
Found each other.
She underlined it twice.
Then she closed the journal and sat within the pool of light in her office, with the time approaching midnight, in the way someone would have when something enormous had just happened.
Get some sleep.
Gold’s words echoed in her mind, and she thought about the sound of his voice as he spoke. The words were entirely practical, but contained, underneath that practicality, something that was not only practical.
She noted that.
She turned off the lamp, and left the office.
She did not add much to the journal when she got home. She had written what mattered in the office. She made herself some tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to add what had occurred to her on the journey home.
He answered on the second ring. The way he told me to get some sleep felt not only practical. I told him the inscription had identified him and that the person it was about deserved to know it had been read. His answer was, ‘tomorrow, in the morning.’ His ‘yes,’ when I named the markers was… I don’t have a word for it. It was the kind of yes that someone might say if they have been known, specifically, accurately and without performance or projection, for the first time in a very long time.
I know what that feels like from the outside because it happened to Ruby in the kitchen last night. I know what it feels like because I have it from the inscription’s If you have read this far you are the reader we required.
The Wound is the World’s health. Both things can be true.
Note and monitor.
She closed the journal, sitting with the thoughts her writing had kindled in her, and thinking about what she wanted to ask Gold, and what it meant that the third register had been read, and what you are the reader we required meant for the person reading it.
She thought about the found each other that she had underlined twice.
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, Evil Queen | Regina Mills, 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 17 - Maior Intus
The building was three blocks from the bus stop where Belle caught the bus to the university, and was entirely unremarkable from the outside. There was a glass door in between the kind of narrow Victorian townhouses that Storybrooke contained in sufficient quantity that many of them had been turned into shops on their lower floor, and none attracted any particular notice. The lettering on the door said Dr. Archibald Hopper, M.D. Psychiatrist. The glass was clear, and beyond Belle could see stairs leading to an upper floor, and little else.
There was a panel beside the door which she assumed was an intercom. She considered it all for a moment, and then pressed the button. A moment later the door buzzed, and she was able to open it and go inside. With only one way to go, she climbed the stairs to the landing, and found a single door, and knocked.
She heard footsteps, and realized they were unhurried as they came toward the door, which then opened and she found herself looking at the last person she had expected, yet the only person, she understood, a fraction of a second later, she should have expected at all. She had written his name in the journal after all, and had also shared the name with Gold in conversation, but somehow, in her mind, she had expected a different man named Archie, and not this man. Her Archie.
“Doctor Hopper,” she said.
Archie looked at her with the warm, slightly abashed expression she recognized from their shared time in the library, and from the Rabbit Hole. It was the expression of a man who was entirely comfortable with most things, and mildly awkward about the specific gap between what he appeared to be, and what he was.
“Belle,” he said. “Come in. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
With a smile, she followed him into his office. The room was ordinary. It was a consulting room, with a desk, a chair and a couch - the neutral comfort of a therapeutic space. The certificates on the wall were, after all, real. Doctor Archibald Hopper, psychiatrist, had been practicing in Storybrooke for many years.
“The library is at the back,” Archie said, and she frowned in slight confusion until she noticed a second doorway, not exactly hidden, but designed so as not to disrupt the calming atmosphere of Doctor Hopper’s consulting room. He led her toward it, as she echoed his words.
“The library,” she said. “Of course.”
“You sound like you expected it.”
“I think,” Belle said, “I expected something. I’m not sure what.”
Archie smiled, waiting beside the door, and pushed his glasses back into place on his nose. “That’s usually how it goes,” he said.
He led her through the door into a hallway with a small kitchenette, and a separate bathroom on opposite sides of the corridor, and a third door at the end of the short hallway that opened into a space that bore no relationship to the building’s modest exterior. It ran the full depth of what must have been two or three knocked-together plots, with high ceilings, shelves from floor to ceiling on every wall and with the accumulated, organized and deeply loved scholarly works that Belle associated with the very best university libraries, as well as with the back room of Gold’s shop, and with nowhere else she had ever been.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Yes,” Archie said watching her face. “That’s usually the response.”
“How—?”
The building next door is also ours,” Archie explained. “And the one behind. It looks like three buildings from the outside.”
Belle turned to look at him. “How long has this been here?”
“The collection?” She watched Archie consider this with a gentle precision she sensed he brought to everything. “Longer than the building. The building was constructed around it.”
Belle looked at the shelves. The spines of texts facing outwards, and an organizational system she was already beginning to read, the associative logic of Gold’s shop present here in a much larger and more developed form.
She thought about Gold’s shop, and the objects with their histories; the associative shelving that required knowing how Gold thought to navigate.
“He organized this,” she said. Not a question.
“Over time,” Archie said, “With input from several generations of archivists.” He paused. “I’ve been here for eleven years. I’ve added perhaps a third of a shelf.” His voice held the warmth of someone who found the ratio entirely correct. “Come. Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on and we can begin.”
The kettle was on a small table between the shelves. It was the kind of practical concession to human duration that appeared in every working archive that Belle had ever used. Two chairs and a reading table had already been laid out with materials in the careful order of someone who had been preparing for this meeting with attention.
Belle sat. She looked at the materials on the table.
The De Laude text was at the top. Not the standard edition she had been working from for weeks, but a different document entirely; older, the hand pre-dating the standard, printed version by at least a century. The specific manuscript she had been trying to locate through four archives and two specialists, and that had been here, three blocks from her bus stop the entire time.
She looked at it for a very long time.
“The 1923 footnote,” she said.
“Yes,” Archie answered, settling into the other chair, and pushing up his glasses which had slipped again. “The variant reading the editor noted and couldn’t locate. He couldn’t locate it because by 1023 we had been ensuring it couldn’t be located for approximately four hundred years.”
“You removed it from the documentary record.”
“Both sides did,” Archie said. “For the same reason and to opposite ends. Neither of us wanted the substitution key in general circulation.”
“Because it unlocks the first register’s deep reading.”
“Yes,” Archie said, and then poured the tea with the unhurried movements she remembered from the Rabbit Hole, and the ease of someone for whom the present moment was always sufficient. “May I ask— you had arrived at the De Laude correspondence independently. How far had you got?”
“I could feel the shape of the key,” Belle said. “I knew it existed. I could see the places in the standard text where something had been removed. There was a kind of flatness in the passage that had been substituted rather than original.” She paused. “But I couldn’t read what had been substituted.”
Archie nodded slowly. “And now?”
Belle looked at the manuscript on the table.
“Now,” she said, “I’d like to.”
Belle and Archie began to work.
It was, Belle understood within the first twenty minutes, a completely different experience from working alone, or speaking with Gold. Archie was not Gold - not the compressed intensity of the back room and the lamp, and the three questions, and the things he said in doorways. Archie was something else: the Order’s institutional memory made warm and accessible. He was a man who had spent eleven years in the archive with this material and who had the gift of knowing when to guide and when to get out of the way.
Now, he got out of the way.
He sat across the reading table with his own work, something in Latin that he was annotating in the margins in the small, careful hand of a man who had been annotating things for a very long time, and he left Belle to the De laude manuscript and the substitution key, and the specific, private experience of watching the first register’s deep reading unlock.
Belle read silently for a while and then: “Preserve the Wound,” she said aloud. Not to Archie, to herself, or to the text, or to the room, which had been holding this information for a very long time and could absorb one more person receiving it. “This is the first instruction.”
Archie looked up from his annotation.
Belle was looking at the page and her expression was the one she had felt cross her face when the inscription had shifted for her the Wednesday evening previous, the one from the retrospective notebook entry, as if she held the quality of someone receiving something true and holding it carefully.
“Yes,” Archie said quietly, with a smile.
“Not find the Grail,” Belle said, “Not heal the Wound. Not, complete the quest.” She held his gaze. “Preserve the Wound. That’s the instruction. That’s all of it.”
“That’s all of it,” Archie agreed.
“And the Congregation—”
“Has been reading it as heal the Wound for centuries,” Archie said, “because they have the surface text without the key, and the surface text, read without the key suggests—” He paused. “It suggests that the Wound is the problem, and that the correct response is remedy.”
“But with the key—” Belle stopped then began again, “The Wound is the solution.” She looked at the text again. “The Foundation endures only while the Wound endures. When the Wound is healed the Foundation fails.” She sat back in her chair. “It’s been there the whole time - in the surface text. In the very passage I was working on.”
“Yes,” Archie said, and looked apologetic when she glanced at him. “The deep reading confirms what the surface text says, if you’re willing to read the surface text charitably.” A pause. “Most people aren’t. Most people read the Wound endures as tragedy rather than instruction.”
“Because it is tragic,” Belle said. “Both things can be true.”
Archie looked at her for a moment with an expression she would later describe in her notebook as: the expression of someone who has been hoping someone would say a specific thing and had just heard it.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Both things can be true.”
He returned to his annotations, and Belle returned to the manuscript.
An hour passed. The tea was replaced with fresh and outside Storybrooke’s Tuesday morning proceeded with complete ignorance to what was happening in the archive behind Doctor Hopper’s consulting room.
Somewhere in the second hour, Belle found the passage.
She knew it before she had fully processed knowing it. She recognized it before comprehension reached her. The this is the one arriving before she had read it properly. Then, she read it properly and put down her pen.
“Archie.”
He looked up.
“This passage,” she said. “The one about the Vessels: the Keeping is the Vessel, the Vessel is the Keeping, neither can be separated from the other without the loss of what is kept.” She looked at him deeply. “In the standard edition this reads as piety: a general statement about devotion.”
“Yes.”
“With the key it’s—” She stopped. She was doing the thing she did when a reading reorganized her understanding - the internal processing visible on the surface of her as a buried, but complete stillness. “It’s an identification,” she said. “It’s telling you what the three Keepings are; what they consist of. The vessel passage identifies the Blood-Keeping.”
Archie set down his pen.
“And the Wound passage,” Belle continued, “which I read three weeks ago as the first register’s central statement - preserve the Wound, this is the first instruction - that identifies the Wound-Keeping.” She frowned softly, “And the Word passage—”
“The One Word in the world that was three words,” Archie said quietly. “The Keeper of the Word will know the word is incomplete by the place in the speaking where the Silence falls.”
Belle blinked.
“That’s not in the De Laude text,” she said.
“No,” Archie said. “That’s the third register.”
“I haven’t correctly read the third register yet.”
“No,” Archie said. “You haven’t.”
A silence followed.
“But you have,” Belle said.
“We have known of the third register’s content for a long time,” Archie said carefully. “We have not had a correct reading. We have had—” he paused. “We have had Gold’s understanding for what it should say, based on the other fragments and the Order’s accumulated knowledge, which is not the same as a correct reading.”
“But it’s close.”
“It’s close,” Archie agreed.
Belle looked at the De Laude manuscript, at the Vessel passage she had just unlocked; at the years of work that had been building toward the third register’s correct reading, and that was, she understood now, almost there.
Still looking at Archie she said, “This has been here the whole time.”
“Yes,” Archie said, “Barely a stone’s throw away from where you live.”
“And the Congregation—”
“Has a version of the key,” Archie said. “Not this one. A different approach to the same lock, producing a different reading.” He paused. “Which is, in some respects, more dangerous than having no key at all.”
Belle absorbed that. She thought about the cautionary apparatus read as instruction that Gold spoke of; about centuries of sincere, motivated misreading producing the specific theological rupture that had brought them all to the point in which they currently found themselves.
She thought about preserve the Wound, this is the first instruction.
“Can I photograph the manuscript?” she asked.
“That’s why I had it ready,” Archie said.
Belle spent twenty minutes photographing every page while Archie sat with his annotations and left her to it. When she was finished she packed her bag with the care of someone who had been given something significant and was treating it accordingly. She looked at the archive one more time; at the shelves, the accumulated record, the atmosphere of a space that had been holding something important for a very, very long time.
“Archie,” she said.
He looked up.
“Thank you,” she said, “For—” she gestured at the room, at the manuscript. “All of this.”
Archie looked at her with the warm, accurate attention that had been present since the Rabbit Hole.
“He hasn’t had anyone in this room,” he said carefully, “who could receive what you’ve just received. Not in a very long time.”
Belle understood he was not talking about the archive’s scholarly resources.
“I mean the work,” Archie said awkwardly, with the exactness of someone who meant more than one thing and was not going to pretend otherwise.
“I know what you mean,” Belle said, before she left.
~~
Archie sat alone in the archive for a moment after the door closed, and looked at the manuscript, still open on the reading table. Then looked at the chair Belle had been sitting in.
He thought about what he had just said, and the expression on Belle’s face when she told him she knew what he meant - an acknowledgment without performance; receipt without deflection, and he thought… allowed himself to hope, for the first time in a long time, that it might be different now.
With a smile he returned to his annotations. He had a little longer before his next appointment in the practice, and the archive held its accumulated quite around him.
Three blocks away, in a building on an adjacent road, a man with a cane sat in a back room with a lamp and documents, and with the air of someone who had been waiting for something for a very long time, and did not yet know that the waiting was, in that morning, beginning to be over.
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, Evil Queen | Regina Mills, 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 16 - Quo Pretio?
The walk from Gold’s shop to Ruby’s home, an apartment right behind Granny’s Bed and Breakfast, was not a long one, and was one that Belle could make in her sleep if she had to. In fact, by the time she reached Ruby’s, she imagined that the tea would be ready to drink.
The short alley way leading to the door was shadowy, but not usually in an kind of way that held menace despite the fact that nine times out of ten the street lamp half way along was on the fritz as Ruby liked to put it. Perhaps it was the lingering tension from her meeting with Gold, but the moment Belle stepped into the alley way, she felt something… off. Not wrong exactly, just different.
She huffed a little to herself, and shook her head - imagination - she chided herself for allowing such a flight of fancy. She was about to ring the bell when she became aware of him; not from sight, and not immediately, but in the way the atmosphere of the alleyway around the door felt even more unsettled. Different the way a place feels when it contains someone who has been trained to be undetectable, and almost was.
She turned.
The figure was standing at the edge of building’s light. He was not in shadow exactly; not the theatrical shadow-dwelling of someone in a b-movie reel, but at the boundary of the light where its quality changes. He was, she realized, standing in the exact position of someone who was not trying to be invisible, but neither was he trying to be seen.
They looked at each other for a moment.
“You could have rung the bell,” Belle said.
“I wasn’t sure of my welcome,” Jefferson answered.
She thought then, and would later note the thought, that this was the most honest thing she had yet heard him say.
“Come up,” she said. “Ruby will want to meet you properly.”
Jefferson looked at her for a moment longer with an expression on his face that suggested to her that he was assessing the situation and found it contained more variables than he expected.
He said, “I imagine she will.”
Ruby opened the door before Belle actually rang. Belle guessed she had been watching from the window because it was what she always did when she was waiting for her. It was a habit so established that neither of them had ever remarked on it. As she opened the door, her eyes went immediately past Belle to Jefferson.
The look that passed over Ruby’s face was brief, and held several things at once. Recognition, though Belle suspected not of Jefferson himself, but of the type of man he was, which her instincts had been cataloging since before she had a name for what her instincts do. Assessment, something that was not quite wariness and not quite readiness, but which lived in the space between them.
Then Ruby stepped back from the door and said, in a way that told Belle she was choosing to be deliberately neutral, “Come in.” Not come in both of you. Not Welcome, just come in extended to both of them by implication, but directed at mostly Jefferson.
~~
Ruby’s kitchen, late at night, held the quality of all kitchens at such a time, the intimacy of a space used for living rather than performing. The washing up from dinner was still on the counter, waiting to be washed, the kettle that had been boiled already. It showed the comfortable disorder of a space that wasn’t expecting ‘guests.’
Jefferson, who was always reading rooms, read this one from the doorway before he entered it. He would not rearrange his relationship to the space, nor attempt to manage it, and certainly not impose a quality of control on it that it didn’t invite.
He entered it with the deliberate care of someone who understood that they were on someone else’s ground.
~~
Ruby was already at the kettle with her back to the room, but her attention was not, Belle knew, and had always known, the way Ruby could pay attention to an entire room while appearing to pay attention to nothing but what her hands were doing.
Belle sat in her chair; the chair that was always hers at Ruby’s kitchen table. She put down her bag, and put the notebook on the table. She didn’t open it, just placed it there the way someone places something that has been with them all evening and that they’re not quite ready to put away.
Jefferson remained standing. He was just inside the doorway between the kitchen and the small hallway. He didn’t appear to be hesitating, and Belle guessed he was simply not assuming an invitation that hadn’t been offered.
Ruby turned from the kettle. She looked at him, then at the empty chair across from Belle. Belle knew that the chair was, in the geography of the kitchen, the ‘visitor’s’ chair. It was not Belle’s chair, neither was it Ruby’s, and was therefore, by elimination, and for now at least, his.
“Sit down,” Ruby said.
Jefferson sat.
~~
Ruby returned to making the tea. She put a mug in front of Belle and one in front of Jefferson before she saw in her own chair, the one at the head of the small table as Belle gave her account of the evening she had spent in Gold’s company. Not quite everything, but most things as she had promised, and Ruby listened to it all in the way she always did - especially with her friend.
And yet, through it all, She had been looking at Jefferson. She had been looking at him since he sat down; not in a rude way, that was never her way, simply looking, holding the other half of her attention in the way that most people don’t or cannot.
In Jefferson, she saw something she couldn’t label, something below the register of a normal person’s observation, and it provided her with information she could neither explain, or figure out where it came from, but had learned, over the years, to trust absolutely.
She sensed in Jefferson something old. Not old in the way of someone who has lived a long time, though he held that quality too, but instead she had the sense of someone who had been doing something difficult for long enough that it had reorganized them completely, on an almost cellular level. Jefferson was something old in a different way, historical, almost, something that has been in the world for longer than his current form suggested.
In him she felt something fractured. Not broken, because he was clearly functioning, and with a capability that she could feel from across the table. She felt almost as if he carried the internal geography of something that had been damaged and repaired, and damaged and repaired, and damaged and repaired, until the damage became structural rather than incidental. It made her think of the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold, where the cracks became the decoration, and the fracture history became the object’s most significant feature.
In Jefferson, she also sensed something that was watching her back.
That observation she found the most interesting - that Jefferson was reading her while she read him. He did it in a way that wasn’t defensive, the way most people watch when they feel observed, but with a genuine kind of attention that had recognized something and was trying to understand what he recognized.
She held his gaze, and he held hers.
Belle’s account came to an end, a pause in deciding what she would say next.
“You were in Edinburgh,” Ruby said.
~~
Belle looked at Ruby, then at Jefferson as the atmosphere at the table became very sharp.
Jefferson looked at Ruby and didn’t look away. He didn’t adjust his expression or his posture, or do any of the things Belle saw when people had been caught doing something. He simply remained more still than he was, which was already very still.
“The coat,” Ruby explained. “Different dry cleaner. Not local.” She tilted her head fractionally and took in a breath. “Edinburgh, I think,” she said again. “The particular chemical they use. It’s distinct. I’ve smelled it before.”
She paused, and as Ruby, Belle waited for a response. None came.
“When were you in Edinburgh?” Ruby asked.
Belle watch as Jefferson continued to look at Ruby. She could almost feel him assessing, recalibrating, determining what the question meant for the situation and for what should come next.
“Friday,” he said at last. “I came back Sunday.”
“Long way to go,” Ruby said.
“Yes,” Jefferson said.
“For the weekend?”
“Work,” Jefferson said.
Ruby nodded. Only once. It was the nod she gave when she had registered an answer and was filing it somewhere other than the ‘discard’ pile. She picked up her mug and drank from it.
Jefferson watched her do so.
“How did you know it was Edinburgh, specifically,” he asked, “Rather than just Scotland, or somewhere else with a similar—”
“I’ve been there,” she interrupted. “Three years ago. I remember the smell.”
“Most people don’t.”
“No,” Ruby agreed, “They don’t.”
Belle thought she recognized a change in Jefferson then, not wariness, nor threat assessment, but something more precise than either. He seemed as if he had just encountered an unexpected variable, and was trying to determine its nature rather than its danger.
She glanced at her friend, and saw the same expression reflected on Ruby’s face.
Belle frowned, and watched the two with the attention she usually reserved for her archaeological work. She said nothing, but she understood, with the instinct of someone who had known Ruby for a long time, and had spent the last several days learning to understand what she had seen in Jefferson, that something was happening between them that did not need her assistance or interference.
She picked up her mug and drank her tea.
~~
“What else,” Jefferson asked.
Ruby blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”
“What else do you notice,” he said, “that most people don’t.”
He wasn’t deflecting, and it wasn’t an attempt to move the conversation away from the Edinburgh question. He was asking directly, a directness that attempted to name something rather than navigate around it.
Ruby was quiet for a moment and he let it be.
She set down her mug and gave him her full attention - the way she saw with a seeing that happened below the register of normal observation. It was a quality he suspected she had been managing and minimizing, and working around since she was much younger and had never been directly asked about it by someone like him. Someone who appeared to already know the answer.
“Quite a lot,” she told him at last.
“I thought so,” he said
The stillness settled over them, and included Belle, like a boundary, almost; a shield.
“You knew. Before tonight,” Ruby accused, without animosity, he knew, simply a statement of fact.
“Gold knew,” he said, “which means I knew.”
“How long?”
“Since before I approached Belle in the lecture hall,” Jefferson said. “Before we made contact with Belle you were already… known to us. Not as a threat. As a… consideration.”
“A consideration,” Ruby echoed.
“A person,” Jefferson said with the slight correction of someone who had chosen the wrong word and wanted the right one on the record, “whose situation we were aware of and had decided to leave undisturbed.”
“Until it became disturbed,” Ruby said.
“Until it became necessary to—” He stopped. He took the time to select his words with the care he brought to things that mattered. “Until the situation changed in a way that made the leaving undisturbed… less kind than the alternative.”
He felt Ruby’s eyes on him for a long moment before she asked, “What do you see? When you look at me?”
He remained quiet, mirroring what Ruby did just a moment before - deciding whether to answer the direct question with the direct answer, or to manage it, or to find the diplomatic path that gave something without giving everything.
He gave her everything.
“Someone who has been carrying something alone for a very long time,” he said. “Someone who is very good at it, who has had to be.” He paused. “Someone whose… capabilities… exceed what she was told were possible and has been exceeding them since before she had the language to name them. Someone who has been making sense of that alone, with insufficient information, for—” he stopped, then finished, “For longer than was fair.”
The kitchen fell to silence, but spoke to Jefferson none the less. It told him that Belle was looking at her mug; that Ruby was looking at him with an expression that had several layers that she was not attempting to manage or minimize. She had the expression of someone who had been seen. Specifically and accurately seen, without performance or projection, and was in the process of feeling the emotion of having been seen, which was different from understanding or accepting it, or any of the things that would come after.
Just receiving. He knew it took a moment.
“What am I?” she said, quietly. Not what do you think I am? nor what does Gold think I am? The question underneath all the questions. The very question she had been carrying since she was a teen and her hands did something they shouldn’t have been able to do and she looked at them afterward the way Belle looked at the character in position four; like someone who could not account for what they were seeing and would not pretend otherwise.
Jefferson held her steady.
“That,” he said, “is the conversation you should have with Gold. With me in the room, if you’d like. But with Gold.”
Ruby considered.
“Soon,” she said.
“Soon,” Jefferson agreed. “I’ll arrange it.”
After a moment Ruby said, “He’s known about me for a long time.”
“Yes.”
“And he left me alone.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Jefferson looked at her. “Because it wasn’t the right time,” he said. “And because you were safe. And because Gold—” He paused to select the right words. “Gold protects what the Keeping requires. Sometimes that means leaving things undisturbed until the disturbance is necessary.”
“That sounds like something someone says to make inaction sound principled,” Ruby said.
“Yes,” Jefferson said and nodded. “It does.” He paused. “It’s also true.”
Ruby met his gaze.
“I’ll decide that,” she said, “after I’ve spoken to Gold.”
Jefferson said. “That’s fair.”
The conversation ended in the way that two people, who have reached the edge of what the conversation could do were acknowledging without trying to cross the edge of it.
Ruby picked up her mug and drank her tea.
Jefferson did likewise.
Belle, who had been very quiet for a person who was present in the room said, “Well.”
Ruby looked at her.
“That was—” Belle began, then stopped, appearing to be searching for the word.
“Yes,” Ruby supplied. “It was.”
Jefferson looked between them. He knew that something in his expression was not quite the fractional recalibration of his usual responses, it was something that was slightly less managed than that. It held the evidence of a man who had just done something that demanded a price, and was in the immediate aftermath of having done it.
Ruby saw, and he knew she noted it without naming it.
She would do so later. He somehow knew.
~~
Ruby spent a few more moments settling the previous exchange settle within her, acknowledging, adjusting. There was, she understood then, far more to everything that had been happening than she had realized - and she had realized that it had been significant.
“The man in the bar,” she said. “The evening after the lecture hall…”
“What?” Belle frowned at her in confusion, and Ruby turned her way just a little.
“There was a man at the Rabbit Hole,” she said. “At our girls night out. I looked toward the back door and there was… something. I didn’t know what, so I didn’t mention it; didn’t tell you.” She looked back at Jefferson then. “Was that yours?”
Jefferson held her gaze. “No,” he said.
His simple answer sat between them with the implication clear enough to pucker Ruby’s skin. Not much did that.
She nodded slowly as she said slowly, “Theirs.”
“Most likely.”
Ruby looked at Belle then, and without doubt told her, “They were watching before Jefferson came to you.”
“Yes,” Jefferson confirmed.
~~
“How long before?” Belle asked, even as Jefferson’s words from their first meeting echoed in her memory.
“There are powers in this world, Doctor French, who have no regard for the living, nor respect for the dead. I suspect you know the type, if not the very ones of whom I speak.”
“That’s one of the things we’re trying to establish,” Jefferson said, his voice superimposing over the top of the memory.
“But long,” Ruby said. It was not a question.
“Long.” Jefferson agreed.
Belle reached for her notebook, opened it, and looked at the diagram she had drawn, taking comfort from her work in a moment that had left her unsettled, though she knew she should have expected it. She looked at the dotted line she had drawn between the funding circle and the dig site, at the unconfirmed notation, and the follow up she had written beside it, but hadn’t followed up yet.
“The funding for the dig,” she said quietly, talking to herself as much as to either of the others, and she remembered the dark haired man with the barely there goatee and his ridiculous suit jacket worn for… what? Respectability? Appearance?
“Turkey,” she said. “It goes back further than the inscription. They were watching before I found it.” She looked at Jefferson then. “Or they arranged for me to find it.”
Jefferson said nothing. His silence was, by now, a language Belle was learning to read.
“They arranged it,” she said with a nod to herself.
“That’s Gold’s current assessment,” Jefferson said carefully. “It isn’t confirmed.”
“But it’s his assessment.”
“Yes.”
Belle looked at the diagram again, and the dotted line, the unconfirmed written there. She took her pen and crossed out unconfirmed, then wrote beside it: Gold’s assessment. Probably.
Then she closed the notebook again.
Belle glanced at the clock, surprised at how little time seemed to have passed in what had felt like a substantial conversation. She confirmed what her eyes were telling her by lifting her mug to her lips and taking another drink of her tea. Still warm.
The quiet that had settled around them, each of them taking a cue from her and sipping at their own tea, was that of people who had covered significant ground together and were in the territory that followed it.
She looked at Ruby and saw that she was looking at Jefferson with an expression that Belle knew. She saw it often on Ruby’s face when she couldn’t account for a thought that had occurred to her, like a sideways assessment of information that had arrived without a clear source.
She was about to comment on it when Ruby spoke, not quite to Jefferson, and not to Belle either, but as though she was thinking aloud, rather than making a statement.
“There’s someone else.”
Belle felt Jefferson go very still, before he slowly lowered his mug to the table.
Ruby frowned slightly, deepening the expression that Belle had just noted - the frown of someone who knew something but had no way to interpret the thought.
“Someone connected to you. Not… here, but—” Ruby stopped. She looked at Jefferson directly and said, “I don’t know what that means.”
He didn’t move, nor speak.
“Is that—” Ruby began, then stopped again. “I’m sorry. I don’t always know what I’m—”
“No,” Jefferson interrupted quietly. “Don’t apologize.”
A moment of silence again, punctuated by the slight tap of Ruby’s mug settling on the table.
“It’s nothing to be concerned about,” Jefferson continued. It was not quite an answer, and Belle watched Ruby’s expression tell him that she knew it was not quite an answer.
“All right,” Ruby said, and picked up her tea again.
Belle filed the moment. She knew it was significant, and for a moment that she couldn’t explain, it sent her thoughts to the inscription’s third register. She noted that too, and connected it to Jefferson who, she thought, knew something he was not saying. That was not an unexpected supposition about the man.
She also recognized that Ruby’s acceptance of Jefferson’s non-answer was a reflection of receiving non-answers all of her life.
Ruby stood, and Belle looked up at her.
Ruby gathered the empty mugs with the practiced air of someone who has been clearing tables since she was old enough to reach them, and without any particular ceremony or announcement, carried them to the sink.
After a moment Jefferson rose too. He crossed to the sink and, without being asked, took up a position beside, and slightly behind, Ruby, as if he was waiting to be useful rather than assuming he would be. When Ruby turned on the tap, he held out a hand ready for the first mug.
Ruby looked at his hand for a moment, then washed a mug and handed it to him.
Belle witnessed this small exchanged with the same level of attention she had been giving everything in the kitchen and then, recognizing the atmosphere in that moment, of two people finding the beginning of a working arrangement, gathered her notebook, and her bag and said, with the ease of much practice in removing herself from spaces when Ruby needed them, said, “I’ll just—” she gestured vaguely at the hallway. “Two minutes.”
Neither of the others said anything. Neither of them needed to.
~~
Ruby washed. Jefferson dried. He’d found the dish towel on its hook without her telling him where it was. Ruby noted that without commenting on it as they fell into an ordinary companionable rhythm of washing the dishes, which was not, Ruby was entirely aware, ordinary at all.
Without looking at him, and without preamble, she asked, “How long ago?”
Jefferson stilled. It was the kind of stillness that Ruby recognized as the body’s response to being read more accurately than it had prepared for.
“Eight years,” he said.
Ruby nodded, the expression of someone receiving confirmation of information that she had already partly worked out. She kept her hands moving, proceeding with the quiet domesticity of washing up, while their conversation, and the atmosphere in the room shifted around it.
“’I’ve… kept it to myself because I don’t understand it well enough to explain it.”
“Which you haven’t managed yet.”
“No,” he said.
Ruby paused and looked at the sink. “Was it the work?”
Jefferson’s silence was its own answer, but then he answered anyway.
“Yes,” he said.
Ruby nodded again. It was a different nod this time, heavier, carrying the weight of her own understanding, and the knowledge that her understanding could not make anything easier, now would anything she could say.
“And yet, you stayed,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because leaving would mean—?”
“Because leaving would mean she died for something I walked away from.” The sentence arrived with the flatness of something said so many times in the dark that it had worn smooth. “I’m aware that’s not entirely rational.”
“It’s entirely rational,” Ruby said. “It’s just also terrible.”
Jefferson looked at her.
She felt his gaze but didn’t look at him. She was looking at the water running over her hands, trying to keep her face matter of fact, as though she had said something unremarkable. She knew she hadn’t. What she had said was true, rather than kind, and the truth was the only thing worth saying. She understood that Jefferson would be aware that this was not a skill most people had, and that she had used it on him twice in the last several minutes.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
They stood at the sink. The last of the dishes were done. Neither of them moved away.
“Eight years,” Ruby said. Not a question, just the number, spoken into the room.
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
Ruby looked at the water still running in the sink and turned it off, then she took the towel from Jefferson and dried her hands before looking at him.
“I’ve been carrying something since I was thirteen,” she said. “What I am. Whatever that is. What my hands can do that other people’s can’t. What I know before I should know it.” She paused. “Sixteen years, mostly alone. Granny knows some of it. Belle knows some of it. Nobody has known all of it.”
Jefferson remained very still, as if he were loathe to disturb the moment.
“Tonight,” Ruby said, “is the first time someone has asked me directly what I notice; what I carry.” She held his gaze. “You asked because you already knew the shape of the answer.”
“Yes.”
“That’s—” she shopped. She was not a woman who reached for easy words, and she was not going to reach for them now. “That mattered,” she said instead.
“Yes,” Jefferson answered. “I thought it might.”
A silence. Jefferson looked away and then Ruby said, “Whatever you’re carrying, the eight years, what the work cost you - what you’re still working out how to carry… you don’t have to keep doing that alone.”
Jefferson looked at her.
“I’m not saying that because of tonight,” Ruby added. “I’m saying it because I know what sixteen years of alone costs, and eight years is— It adds up faster than sixteen, because you know what you had before.”
Jefferson was quiet for a long moment. As Ruby watched, something moved in his face that wasn’t the fractional recalibration, she had noticed, of his usual responses, but something that had been held for eight years in the specific discipline of a man who had decided that holding was what the situation required of him.
“Yes,” he said very quietly. “It does.”
Ruby nodded. She was not going to dress up the truth. She placed the towel on the counter beside where Jefferson had placed the mugs.
“Earlier,” she said, “at the table.”
Jefferson’s jaw tightened, barely.
“The someone else,” she said, “connected to you.” She paused. “Are they safe?”
“Yes,” Jefferson said, adding a minute concession as he confirmed, “She’s safe.”
“Good,” Ruby said, and didn’t ask anything more. She knew Jefferson would recognize that. Would understand that she asked the one question that mattered rather than all the questions that were available. He had been prepared, she knew, if pressed, to deflect. She hadn’t pressed. Her expression told that was enough for tonight.
“When you’re ready,” she said a moment later, “To carry it differently—”
She left it there, without specifying what it was or what differently would look like, or even what she was offering. She was simply leaving the door open and was not going to push through it, but was making sure that Jefferson could see it was there.
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Remarkable,” he said at last.
The word hovered between them in the kitchen. Then Ruby looked at him, then looked away, at the window, at the town outside of it, at some middle distance that was her own. Her almost-smile came and went.
“Go home, Jefferson,” she said.
Jefferson drew in a breath, then began to move. He picked up his coat from the back of the chair. He put it on, the Edinburgh dry cleaner, the particular chemical smell noticed for the first time. He was at the kitchen door when he paused, and turned partially as if he had just thought of something, or rather, had decided, at that moment, to give something he hadn’t previously decided to give.
“The man in the bar,” he said, “That Friday. If you remember anything more specific—”
“I’ll tell you,” Ruby said.
“Thank you.”
He left, and Ruby listened. She heard the apartment door, his feet on the stairs, the building’s outer door and then nothing.
She stood at the kitchen sink for a moment. She looked at the place where he had been standing. She thought about the shape of what wasn’t there, her mother’s shape. The shape of the one Jefferson had lost; another person she would never know, whose name had not even been given tonight and that she didn’t need, because she had felt the shape of her absence in the way Jefferson carried himself, and talked about ‘she’ who was safe… and in the way he said, I’m still working out how to carry it.
She thought about remarkable, and what it had cost him to say it, and the way he said it, and had accepting her telling him to go home, which was, she knew, the behavior of a man who knew what he had just allowed and was choosing to limit what came next.
She understood that. She had spent sixteen years limiting what came next.
She turned out the kitchen light and went to find Belle.
~~
Belle was in the hallway, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs that led to Ruby’s upstairs. The notebook was open on her knees. She wasn’t writing in it. She was looking at the diagram with the pen in her hand, held above the page without touching it.
Ruby sat down on the step beside her.
“He lost someone,” Ruby said. “In the work.”
Belle frowned. “How do you know?”
“He told me.” Ruby explained, “and that he stayed because otherwise she would have died for something he walked away from.”
Belle looked at her, then she looked at the notebook again, at the diagram, at Jefferson’s circle, small, precise, and placed slightly apart from the others which she had done without deciding to, and hadn’t changed.
“His wife,” she said quietly. It was not entirely a question.
Ruby met her gaze. “He didn’t say that.”
“No,” Belle said, “but that’s the shape of it—” She stopped. She thought about Sunday’s notebook entry. Something specific, and long-standing, and heavy. The cost of it paid in something you cannot get back. She thought about her death being for something he walked away from, filtered through Ruby’s account. “The shape of it fits.”
“Yes,” Ruby agreed. “I think so too.”
A silence.
“There’s someone else,” Ruby said, “The someone connected to him. A her. He confirmed that much and no more.”
“Safe.”
“He said yes.”
Belle looked at the diagram, at Jefferson’s circle again, and moved her pen to hold it over the page. She thought about the third register, the thought that had arrived when Ruby’s someone else had landed in the kitchen, and the nature of the connection she had felt between that moment and the inscription’s identification of the three Keepings. She couldn’t account for the connection yet. She filed it.
She lowered the pen without writing.
“Some things,” she said, “need to go in their own time.”
“Yes,” Ruby said. “They do.”
They sat on the step together for a moment. Two people who have known each other long enough to sit in silence without needing it to be filled.
“Belle,” Ruby said some time later.
Belle looked at her.
“It’s already started,” Ruby said. “Whatever this is. It’s not coming. It’s already here.”
Looking at her friend, Belle considered Gold’s shop and the lamp, and her questions, and the mutual obligation. She was drawn to the thought that her encounter with the second mirror was perfectly synchronized, and of Gold’s question that had reached her in the middle of the shop while she was walking away.
She thought about the other notebook, which she was starting to think of as a journal, that began on Thursday with the Wound, and continued through to Sunday with Monday is soon enough and arriving here on Tuesday - no, Monday still, just past midnight - with Ruby on a staircase, and Jefferson’s circle in the diagram; the dotted line crossed out and Gold’s assessment. Probably written beside it.
She thought about the inscription’s If you have read this far you are the reader we required.
“Yes,” she said. “I think it has.”
“Are you all right.”
Belle considered that with the honesty the question, and Ruby’s asking of it, deserved. She realized her hand had not shaken once tonight. Not in Gold’s shop, not on the pavement outside it, not here, at Ruby’s apartment.
“Yes,” she said, and meant it, which both surprised her slightly, and didn’t.
“All right,” Ruby said. “It’s late. Go home.”
~~
Belle walked with slow, measured steps from the building’s outer door and along the alleyway; the street lamp still flickering, the darkness there familiar rather than threatening.
She stood for a moment realizing that familiarity was shifting even as she waited, turning over the second register’s third translation in her mind, with the corrected verb form running underneath it, now: Three who keep and one who is kept and the Keeping and the kept are not separable though they have been concealed as separate.
It brought to mind Ruby in the kitchen, and Jefferson at the boundary of the light, and Gold in the back room with the lamp and the documents, and the pen he finally picked up toward the end of their time together.
Three people who exist outside of the normal register of things, she thought, Assembled in the space of one evening. Connected to each other and to the inscription, and to the Wound that the Keeping maintains, and the Silence that the Wound protects.
Concealed as separate.
She thought about that, and began to walk home.
The town around her maintained its indifference, the Maine night doing what it did. The streets she had been walking since she arrived in Storybrooke familiar under her feet, ordinary in the way that things are ordinary when the have absorbed enough of your life that they no longer require attention.
She thought about work. She was always thinking about work.
She thought about the De Laude text and the first vertical column; her assertion I’ll be careful and I know from Gold. She thought about the third register’s operational instructions waiting for the correct reading, and what they would say when she reached them.
She thought about, found each other traced over in ink.
She turned her key in her lock and went inside. She did not open the notebook again that night.
She was asleep before one o’clock.
~~
And in Gold shop, the lamp in the back room still on, the documents still on the table, Gold sat with the pen held in his hand.
He wasn’t thinking about the mission.
He was thinking about a woman who wrote a name she had no source for in a notebook at midnight, and documented it honestly because her notebook was for things that were real, even when they couldn’t be accounted for.
He was thinking about found each other which he didn’t know she had written, but which he would have recognized, if he had known, as the correct reading.
He set the pen down.
He turned off the lamp.
The shop settled in the dark. The objects with their histories; the mirror at the door. The cup on its shelf in the middle of the room.
Patient.
It had always been patient.
The long wait was nearly over.
Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
For those of you who are fans of Dies Irae I have two special announcements today.
As a special this weekend, extra chapters are being posted.
There will be a SEQUEL!
How did this come about, I hear you ask, well, for number one I found myself with some additional time for writing and editing, and figured that I would reward (or should that be offer relief) to those of you that wait each week for the next chapter to drop.
Number to is... well for a writer, the more annoying (but happy-annoying) aspect of fic writing. Along with writing and editing in the extra time I had, I also spent a long time on the second part of my process that I kind of call 'outline drafting' - where I take the outline for a chapter, and draft beat by beat what happens, and add in some of the dialogue, all of which becomes the first draft, and gets cleaned up in edit. I can tell you that I finished the outline draft of all chapters in the fic, and, as I was coming to a close my "possum" said, "Wouldn't this be great for a sequel"
It actually came out more like, "That fic was tame, how about we write something with REAL bite." - you have been warned, and I'll double down on that warning and tell you up front, there WILL be a major character death in the sequel.
I've been spending many hours multitasking - watching Youtube, and outlining, among other things, and I'm just now surfacing to take a break from "virtually" torturing Belle, and Gold, and Jefferson most of all...
Feel free to ask any questions you'd like. My inbox is here.
blakekathryn
stormborns
theartofmadeline
areudirty
yousharknotpass
janainaart
