Her Name Shall be Belle (on hold)

Chapter 13: Seeing Inside

Day after day, it was the same. Belle would come up and clean and Rumple would just sit at his spinning wheel, watching her clean. Belle pretended to not see his intense stares. She knew that everyone misjudged him. He wasn't a monster. He was a man, who had been turned into something that wasn't him. Belle walked over to the cabinet that held treasures from all over the world.
"Wow, where did you get all of these?" One by one, she took the treasures out and dusted them.
"I picked them up here and there." He actually smiled, seeing how mesmerized she was by his insignificant trinkets.
"Belle?" She turned her head to him, liking how he spoke her name instead of calling her maid.
"Yes?" She put all of the trinkets back and walked over to the dining table that she had cleaned so many times. Rumple walked over and sat up on it.
"I've been trying to figure you out. I just can't. Why would you leave your whole life to come clean for me? All you knew about me was terrible things. I'm the Dark One. I terrorize everybody." He looked puzzled, and Belle was glad to see that she could puzzle the most powerful person in all of the lands.
"I love reading. I knew about the heroes in my books, and I wanted to be one. If I could sacrifice myself for all of my people to live, I would gladly do it again. Sometimes I am sad. All I wanted was to travel the world and be a hero fighting in combat. I got to be a hero, in a different way though. I disagree. I don't think you are terrible. Maybe that's your name, but a name has no meaning. You haven't terrorized me. It isn't my first choice of a life path, but it definitely isn't my last choice either." By then, she was sitting next to Rumple on the table. The gap between them was only a few inches.
"I don't understand sacrifice. Only the heroes do." He wasn't looking at Belle. He was practically looking everywhere but at Belle.
"I'm not a hero either." That made him look at her.
"Yes you are. You saved everyone in your kingdom. If I hadn't put up the protection spell, none of them would've survived. You're one of the greatest heroes ever." His eyes were interesting. Belle was looking into them. They had flecks of many different colors.
"So you like books?" Belle inhaled.
"I LOVE books. I had the greatest library at my castle. I had one favorite book. It was a guide for when I was going to travel the world. I would just sit in my corner and read books all day. I stopped going into the library when," she stopped talking.
"Yes?" Rumple was urging her to continue.
"That's where my mom was killed by ogres. I stopped going in the library after she died. The memories were too harsh. I felt as if I had killled her." Rumple looked saddened to hear this.
"I'm sure you didn't have anything to with it." They sat there for a moment in silence, pondering whatever thoughts that they had. Then Rumple snapped out of his phase.
"This castle isn't going to clean itself dearie!" Then he left Belle in a cloud of purple smoke. She sighed and continued to clean. She wasn't fond of when he just left. Even though he mostly never talked, she felt lonely when he left.
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One day, Belle was tired of the gloomy darkness. She walked over to the drapes and climbed the ladder that was close to them.
"What are you doing?" She heard Rumple's voice.
"It is too dark in here." She was trying to pull down the curtains, to no avail.
"Did you nail these up?" She asked sarcastically, but Rumple replied yes and she laughed even more. She had one foot leaning on the ladder and her other was too far away from the ladder. She yanked for the last time and the curtains fell down, bringing her with them. Rumple quickly teleported and caught her. She sat in his arms for a minute before he realized what was going on and dropped her. She started smiling.
"You saved me. Thank you." She smiled at him to see what he would say.
"No matter. I can't have my maid die on me. They're not easily replaceable." He walked over to his spinning wheel, but this time, he wasn't looking at Belle. She had unleashed something in him, she just didn't know what. If he could, she thought he would blush. His skin wasn't scaly as it appeared, but soft and smooth. This time, she was staring at him. He looked up and caught her.
"Do you need something?" He stopped spinning momentarily.
"Oh. I just... don't know what else to clean." It was true, she had cleaned everything in the dining room. It looked so much better than when she first came.
"Come on, I'll show you something that you can clean." He snapped his fingers and both Belle and him were enveloped in a cloud of smoke.
"Don't you ever think about walking?"