Kittens in the Dark

He paused to empty the cooled contents of his failed attempts, dumping the gold and brown fluids into the bucket at his feet. Then he put clean tubes in place of the soiled ones, ready to receive the hotter fluids that were scattered around him. It took great care and precision to lift the hot glass and tip the brew into a cooler container. Any slip could cause quite the disaster. Rumple bent low, eyeing the placement of the beaker before tipping it ever so slightly and letting the yellow liquid dribble into the cooler vial.

“I’ve brought more ginger.” Belle’s voice burst into Rumple’s consciousness, in a space that felt as if she were practically on top of him. With a yelp of surprise, Rumple jerked back, knocking the vials. Some broke, some simply tipped over, but the warmer beaker he was holding crashed against the edge of the table, shattering and splashing the contents across Rumple’s hips and down his front.

The heat pierced his clothing, spread across his groin, and reminded him why he had wanted to be alone for this work in the first place.

“Belle!” The cry that escaped him as he looked down at himself wasn’t a chastisement, only a frustration. Then, worried, he immediately ran his eyes over her. “Did it splash you?”

“Rumple,” she giggled before removing her apron and using it to help blot at his pants. “It’s only tea. It isn’t as though anything here is actually dangerous.”

His eyes narrowed of their own accord while his hand flew out to indicate the work he’d been doing. “These liquids are boiling! Whether they are potions or tea, you still…” Rumple’s voice caught in his throat as he looked at Belle, standing politely while his temper raged. The sight of her calmed his fears. He reached to take her hand in apology for his anger and finished softly. “You still could have been injured.”

His wife pouted playfully while she returned to her attempts at patting him dry. “I did call through the doorway, you know.”

Rumple turned to look toward the back garden and blinked. “You did?”

“I did. You were just so engrossed in what you were doing, you might have chosen not to hear me.” She looked around at the work he’d lost and sighed. “How much will you need to do over?”

“Not much,” he told her.  “I have plenty of the base. All I have to do is get some more and let this steep. Though it won’t be ready to give her today.”

A knock at the door made them both look up. “And here she is with Gideon,” Belle told him, handing the now damp apron over.  She took a few steps toward the sitting room, then turned back to look at Rumple. “Should I still invite her for lunch or have I scared you into making too much of a mess of things?”

Rumple flapped a hand at the table and made a face at Belle, hoping to ward off her tease. “We can eat outside. This is as good a place to stop for now as any. I will finish cleaning up, blow out the candles, and join you. We will just have to tell her that her grandfather’s treatments aren’t quite ready.”

—————

When Belle opened the door Gideon was happily hopping from one foot to the other, jabbering on about the many activities he had done on their neighbor’s farm.

“I milked the cows. And there were sheep! We didn’t cut the wool though. I wanted to, because papa used to, didn’t he?”

“A long time ago, I think,” Belle told him, placing a hand on his shoulder. It was their shared silent communication, her way of telling him she wanted to talk to other adults now.

“Hi.” Aldith grinned politely, but the quirk to her lips made Belle worry.

“Gideon, why don’t you go inside for a bit?” The boy obediently nodded and ducked under her arm for the door. “But stay out of the kitchen, your father’s had a little trouble in there.”

Her son looked worried. “Should I move the garden chairs for lunch instead?” He looked at Aldith with sad eyes. “You are staying, aren’t you? Papa made pea soup and he always makes the best pea soup.” He moved closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s very particular about ingredients.”

“I would love to stay,” Aldith told him, then waited for him to dash away before turning to Belle again. “I must say, the hands on our farm were a little dismayed at some of the things your Gideon was telling them.”

Belle’s heart sank. Never before had her son given away their family secrets, but as he was growing he had become so trusting of strangers. Would they be kicked out of the community before their work could even begin? Her expression must have changed drastically, because Aldith raised her hands as if fending off some horrible beast.

“Now, I’m not one to push myself nose-first into someone’s business, of course, but I can’t guarantee what anyone else might think. Those folks from town aren’t as understanding as we are out here. We have to get done what we have to get done, after all. Still, some of them work for us and I’d hate to have rumors spread because of ignorance.”

“What is he telling them?” Belle’s throat felt dry and the words hardly came out.

Aldith glanced around, then leaned closer. “That you and his father have already betrothed him to some older gentleman back in the town you came from.”

Relief flooded Belle, nearly tipping her over. She reached for the door’s frame and gripped it tightly to release the tension she’d been holding in. “Oh, that’s quite a misunderstanding on his part,” she said. “You see his father and I were talking last night and-”

“Well, I’ve cleaned up the worst of it.” Rumple’s voice cut in and Belle turned to face him. Her husband stood in the threshold of the kitchen, holding Belle’s yellow-stained apron in one hand and what was presumably a glass of the sample tea in the other. Only half of the container was filled with the golden tinted fluid, but he swished the liquid proudly, letting it swirl up the sides of the container.

Belle could hear Aldith swallow her words and watched the woman’s eyes wander before she tried to speak again. “That’s lovely,” their guest eventually beamed, exaggerating her words slightly.

Rumple nodded. “Gideon came through. He’s busily at work arranging a garden picnic. I’ll just set this aside and help him. You are joining us for lunch?”

“Yes. Wouldn’t miss it.” Aldith, still showing all her teeth with her grin, bent down to Belle and whispered. “Don’t worry. I understand now.”

Belle blinked at her. “Understand?”

The other woman waited for Rumple to disappear before adding, “Why yes, being married to a man with this age and these difficulties?  I completely understand why you offered to help with my grandfather’s bedpan predicaments. It is all such hard work with my grandfather. I can’t imagine managing a child along with your husband’s situation, whatever the circumstances of your arrangement might be.” She gave Belle’s arm a gentle squeeze, then followed the others through the house, asking if she could help arrange things in the garden in any way.

Belle stared at the woman’s back, trying to stammer out that this too was a misunderstanding, but she couldn’t work out where to begin. Instead she found herself closing the front door and hurrying after their lunch guest, hoping to correct everything once they were sitting with their food.

—————

“We truly are grateful that you were able to take Gideon for a while,” Rumple told Aldith as he walked her to the kitchen. “Mishaps while I am working can so easily happen, as I’m sure my wife spoke to you about.”

“Oh, yes. I completely understand,” she insisted tenderly.

Rumple moved through the room, set down the sample of tea he intended for the women to try, and pulled some bowls out of the hutch. “I’m afraid we have a rather simple meal today, if you don’t mind.” He paused to gesture at the work he’d been doing. “As you can see, I let things get a little out of hand and completely lost track of time.”

At first Aldith’s interest in Rumple’s work seemed casual, but after a moment he could see her nose curl up as she sniffed heartily at the air. “I’m sure it will be delightful,” she told him, though she did not sound as if she believed the words.  

“Well, we must have you over for a proper meal next time,” Belle insisted as she joined them all. She gathered the tea set, then studied the glass Rumple had carried in. “Is this part of the sample?”

“What’s left,” he told her. As he carefully served the soup into bowls, he said to Aldith,“I hope you don’t mind being a tester for this experiment. I thought since you knew your grandfather’s tastes-”

As they spoke, Aldith was studying everything and now bent down to examine the jars marked dandelion and juniper. Her gaze traveled to the remaining yellow teas and dropped to the bucket on the floor. Suddenly her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Do you know… I just remembered I had some neighbors coming to repair a hole in the sheep pen this afternoon. It will be an absolute disaster if I’m not there to show them what needs to be done. I’m so very sorry to bow out. Perhaps another time?”

Rumple opened his mouth to speak, but Aldith was already moving away.

“Lovely to see you all. You have… such gleaming windows,” she called out and bolted out their front door.

“The sheep pen?” Rumple blinked at the space his neighbor had vacated. “How is that complicated to repair?”

“It’s not the pen,” Belle told him, letting her body drop into one of the kitchen chairs. “Gideon told her we were having soup.”

Rumple looked at the bowls. “We are.”

“Pea soup,” Belle told him, emphasizing the first word while holding up the glass of very yellow tea.

Rumple dropped the ladle and looked around. “I see. Well, it certainly isn’t the worst rumor we’ve faced.” He sighed and went back to serving with a shrug, leaving the extra bowl empty. “Easily explainable.”

Winter storms in Avonlea had been louder: The sea breaking against the cliffs, the wind rattling the towers and lashing the rain until the line between where the sea ended and the tempest began ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Winters in the mountains were quiet in comparison. They were quieter still, when she was alone in the castle.

Rumplestiltskin had left early that morning, grumbling about oncoming weather and insolent nobles. He had not come back yet. Belle had not, previously, realised how much difference two people made to one, when it came to how quiet halls could be. 

Before her, the window was close enough that the cold pressed against her cheek. Behind her, the solar was almost stiflingly warm. The fire in the grate was burning at all hours this time of the year and the tapestries on the walls trapped the heat against the stone in the small room. The great hall had in contrast been barely bearable for weeks, vast and stone-cold even with the fires lit.

Her arm had gone slightly numb, pressed awkwardly against the stone of the embrasure. Belle had not noticed how long she must have been sitting there, staring outside. She noticed it now, because there were footsteps in the corridor outside, light and quick, and needles shot up her arm as she turned towards the door without quite deciding to. 

Rumplestiltskin came into the solar with snow still melting on him: In his hair, on his shoulders, beading and running on his skin in ways water did not quite move on human skin, catching the light oddly over the fine scales of his cheekbone. His aggrieved expression declared rather than suggested that the snow, the wet and the necessity of having to leave anywhere at all were each a personal affront.  

Belle watched him shake the snow out of his hair and mutter something uncomplimentary about the season – the small theatrical adjustments he made, when he was more annoyed than truly put out – and felt something warm move across her face.

“There is,” he began, one clawed finger raised, “a sort of stupidity, dearie, that comes packaged with hereditary title – present company excepted, naturally.” A belabored sigh. “I have spent my entire day staring at it across a table.” His voice came in the precise key it took when he had been suffering fools all day and now sought appropriate commiseration for this endured grievance.

“How gracious of you. You’re dripping on the carpet.”

“And you are insolent as always, dearie.” 

Despite his lamentation a wry smile had crept into the corner of his mouth. A flick of his wrist and the snow on his coat vanished, leaving the wool darker for the wet. A single drop he had missed slipped from his hair and ran a slow line down the curve of his temple, his cheek, vanishing in the collar of his cloak. A moment drawn taut, then she blinked. She carefully did not observe what she had caught herself at. She did not look away, either.

Rumplestiltskin crossed the room with the small impatient steps of someone who had not yet decided to be glad of arriving, and dropped into his usual chair, a high-backed thing of dark oak, the one nearest both the fire and her window seat. Turned away from the window, her knees almost brushed his armrest. The end of her shawl, slipped from her shoulder some time ago and now hanging from the alcove’s edge, did. Neither of them adjusted it.

For a moment, looking at the shawl, his face went still; a version of him she had only ever glimpsed sideways, when he forgot to perform his moods at all. Then the moment passed and he was back to himself, theatrical and put-upon and exactly the version of him she had been waiting for during the long quiet hours of her evening. The change left behind a small ache.

He shrugged off his still-damp cloak and let it land unceremoniously in a heap on the floor. A bottle appeared on the small table between them, two cups beside it.

“The good wine,” she observed.

“I have, on this very particular evening, earned the good wine.”

“Shall I pour, then?”

“If you were so gracious. That sort of thing is after all what I keep you around for,” he added with a deliberate drawl.

Belle looked pointedly from him to the second cup, back to him. Paused long enough to let the implication linger and only then put her book aside and picked up the bottle. She poured. The dark of the wine moved into one cup and then the other, the small routine of many evenings’ habit. Her hand was steady. She had not been entirely sure it would be. She handed him his cup, and he took it from her with the particular non-touch she had been quietly cataloguing for weeks now: The specific distance of his fingers from hers, the careful arc of his clawed hand around the skin he had never once touched.

She took one sip, then another. The wine moved warm down her throat and warm into her chest, and warm, after a moment, into her face. She set the cup down on the table.

The fire shifted in the grate. Outside the leaded glass the storm went on burying the world. Inside, in the small heated heart of the otherwise empty wing of an otherwise empty castle, Belle sat with the man whose castle it was and watched him drink the wine she had poured him. The room was very warm. It had been very warm the whole evening, but not quite like this – warmth spreading from her chest outwards, independent of the hearth. Not kindled by the wine but fueled by it. Her shoulder was warm against the cushion. Her face was warm. The palms of her hands prickled in a way that was specifically neither the fire nor the wine.

In the firelight, relaxed by the wine and hair still damp, he looked nearly the way an ordinary man might have looked, settled into his own chair at the end of a long day. She did not know what to do with this observation. She had it anyway.

“You were reading the histories,” he finally said. He was not quite looking at her. His gaze was fixed with ostensible carelessness on the fire. “I noticed.”

“I am still reading them.”

“Hm.” He gestured. A small leather-bound volume appeared on the table beside the wine, unmarked except for the gilt of the title on the spine. “Then you may find that of use.”

She looked at it, from the fine binding to the embossed letters. “Where did you get this?”

“It was on the noble’s shelf.”

“You took it for me.”

“I did not –” He stopped. Rumplestiltskin had a particular expression for being caught at things he had not meant to be caught at. He was making it now, half-turned away. “It seemed to me the sort of thing you might find of interest. It is not a gift, dearie. It is debris.”

“Debris.”

“It would have moulded otherwise. The noble will not be reading it for some time.”

“For some time.”

A small pause. Then he smiled with the small theatrical pleasure that meant she had asked the right question for the wrong reason and inclined his head. Something tightened in her stomach.

“Someone thought he was cleverer than me, dearie.” His hand lifted in an expansive flourish to illustrate the words, his sleeve moving in the firelight. “He will not have the chance to repeat the mistake – I have ensured the matter.” His grin sharpened on the last syllable.

Her heart was beating faster than the wine could account for.

Beyond the leaded glass, the snow was rising further on the panes. The fire moved in the grate. A dark patch sat at his cuff. She had been seeing it all evening, taking it for the wet. The rest of the sleeve had dried. This had not. 

The dark stain was blood. 

The images broke uninvited through the warmth: Rumplestiltskin in the dungeon some months ago, with the thief – the bloody apron and the knife and the patient way his face had been arranged. And the image after, the one she had spent half a year not asking him about: The bow, the arrow, the deliberate miss he had never admitted to despite her not believing him.

There was blood on his sleeve tonight.

Her hand was very still in her lap. Her thumb was pressed hard against her palm. Her palms prickled. What her hand wanted was not to draw back – it was never to draw back, not with him, not for months now. What her hand wanted was to reach forward – to put her thumb on the wool where the blood was. The wool would still be cool from the snow. The blood would not yet have set. Belle wanted to reach out and not let go and hear him explain. 

She could ask. Rumplestiltskin did not lash out without reason. He would give her one. 

It would be looking for excuses. 

Her gaze moved from the bloodied sleeve to his hand, finely boned and clawed and clearly not human, lying relaxed on the table. There was good in him: There was the book. There was the bedroom door he had never knocked on. There was the arrow he had let miss. 

None of it made the blood on his sleeve vanish, or the contented grin he had been wearing at the thought of what had caused it. He did not regret it and the noble had suffered, whatever he had done.

Rumplestiltskin sighed contentedly, settled in his chair by the hearth, and lifted the wine bottle in the silent offer she had seen him make a hundred times before. The solar was still very warm. She was still too aware of his knee only an inch away from her skirt.

She had all the proof. She could not see Rumplestiltskin as a monster. Not yet.

Not when her heart still stuttered when he looked at her. Not when her first thought at the sight of the blood had been that he must have had a reason. Not when her hands still ached with the need to find out what his skin would feel like against hers.

She did not let herself think about what that said about her. She did not want to think about what it would take to change it.  

Belle held out her glass. Her fingers were too tight on the stem. They did not tremble.

Rumplestiltskin poured.