#and he knew she wouldn’t publicize the source once she understood the gravity of the situation

[krohft]

It’s the way Jacob could have prevented hundreds of deaths if he’d just told Lara where the source was for me

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One:  Magical Loopholes

Chapter 65:  The Safest Place

In anticipation of their evening together and her "open door" invitation, he returned to the library the next morning with a couple of suits in hand. She seemed just as pleased as he was when he put his things in her closet. Small as it was, it still felt like an overwhelming achievement. They spent most of that day apart. He disliked it, but he was glad that she'd given him the time to prepare and grow confident that she would be safe as he carried out this plan. Belle was brave, but she was also smart enough to understand that bravery didn't mean going and looking for trouble. Terrified as she was of the Evil Queen, he knew that she wouldn't purposefully put herself in a situation that might endanger her. She'd stick to public places or the library. And if Regina did choose to hunt her down in that place, his spells meant that he'd be the first to know about it.

The day gave him time to make his final preparations, not only for the dagger but for her as well, for all the ways that he was about to let her into his world. The night before, he'd made another breakthrough, figuring out a combination that he believed would work best to get the magic he'd crafted well-hidden and over the town line. He'd gone with the weak magic theory, finding it to be the one that held up the best against his samples from the town line. All he really had left to do was test it, and he was free. He could be on his way to finding Baelfire as soon as he and Belle completed this task.

She arrived right on time, at the exact hour they'd agreed upon once the sun went down. It pleased him that she ignored the "closed" sign on the door and breezed right in without knocking, but it thrilled him when he heard her lock the door and pull the shades in the front as well before venturing into the back to find him. She acted as if this place were hers as well as his own. For all he was about to reveal, it may as well have been hers too.

"Thank you for coming," he whispered after he'd kissed her.

"Of course," she muttered before looking down at the objects he had out on the table in front of him, all ready and prepared for her. He hadn't seen the point in trying to hide them from her. "What, uh…what are we doing?"

He smiled at her curiosity and met it with his own genuine excitement. "Belle…I'm getting closer every day to my Baelfire. It could be any day now, and things in town being what they are at the moment, there is something that I must do before I go." With a hard, nervous swallow, he reached out to grab the hand she had resting on her hip. This was hard even at the same time it wasn't. But he knew enough to know that touching her would help.

"You already know, but I didn't want it to be a secret from you. I wanted you to know…everything."

She smiled as she tightened her grip on his hand and brought it to her mouth. She kissed his knuckles like she was the hero in some romance novel instead of the damsel…he liked that.

"You can tell me anything. Everything. Your secrets are safe with me."

"I know that," he smiled, holding in tears as he stroked her cheek. It was because he knew that they'd arrived here, in this place, together for this purpose. It was time. "Come with me."

He took her hand and led her into the main room. He heard her drift off to the other side of the counter as he went to the painting that hid his safe and swung it forward to reveal it to her.

"What is that?" she asked, sounding surprised. He tried not to hide his joy that there were still new things he could show her in this new world, new experiences they could have together just as they had at the house. It was the right question for her to ask.

"This is my safe," he muttered, palming the extra key he'd found just for this moment alone. "It's made of strong steel, and it is impenetrable. Unless…you have a key."

With that, he reached across the divide for her hand. Confused, she gave it to him, not to hold as he suspected she thought he wanted, but to slip the tiny piece of metal into her fingers. She jumped when she realized what he'd done and pulled her hand away to look at what he'd given her.

"You have the only copy," he confirmed before she could say anything. "Keep it safe, Belle. Can you do that?"

She looked at him, not with love or joy or even the look of someone who was impressed. Instead, she gazed back at him with utter seriousness in her eyes. It was a look that said she understood the gravity of their task even if she didn't yet know what it was.

"Y-yes," she stuttered out finally. "Yes, but…but why-"

He held up a hand to silence her. She need not ask the question. He knew the time had finally come. And he was so excited and nervous he was almost certain he was going to vomit because of it.

He turned back to the safe and angled his body so that he was certain she could watch him as he inserted his key in the lock, turned it, then pulled the handle and opened the door. He had several objects in here at the moment. Small vials of the potion he'd been perfecting, Bae's shawl, a few stacks of money, but most important of all…the dagger.

She knew about it, he knew that much, but in all her time at the castle, she'd never seen it, and he'd never been the one to tell her about it. That boy she'd brought to help, Samuel, he had come searching for her, he'd always assumed that he'd been the one to inform her of its existence, but when he'd spoken to him later, he'd been baffled as to how she knew about it. Where the information she carried came from was a mystery. How much of it she knew was questionable, but after tonight none of it would matter. After tonight she'd know it all straight from the greatest source there was…The Dark One.

"The Dark One's Dagger," he pronounced as he laid it gently upon the black scarf on the table between them. She was quiet, her mouth open just a bit as she stared down at it with the proper amount of respect and awe an object of power like this deserved. The voices in his head screamed at him. Nimue was calling him every name in the book, ordering him not to turn it over to her, not to let her touch it, to slay her and keep his secret hidden. One look into her eyes silenced their voices.

"This is the dagger that gave me my power," he began. "This is the only way the Dark One can be killed, the only way to acquire the powers."

"Is there any way to reverse it?" she questioned desperately, finally peeling her eyes off of it and looking at him. "The powers, I mean. Is there any way to reverse them or give them back or-"

"Not one that doesn't end in death," he finished for her. "Although we've seen True Love's Kiss is effective, but apparently not in this realm…"

A lie. Sometimes it astounded him how easily and quickly they could come out when he wasn't watching. This realm had nothing to do with why her kisses didn't work here. He'd bound the power to himself back in their own realm after she'd kissed him, and he'd realized that her very touch had healing abilities. He'd have to tell her that. He should probably admit that shortcoming.

"Why are you telling me all this?" she questioned suspiciously as if she could sense there was more behind this than him just wanting to be truthful with her. "Why now?"

"There are very few people who know about this dagger, and what they know is mostly myth and legend, but with the threat of Cora, I began to worry that it might not be safe and after what Regina did to Archie…" he explained, giving her a shorter answer for the sake of time alone. He was eager to do this, to get it out of the way. The rest could wait until after they were done.

"It needs a new hiding place. Somewhere no one can find it, where no one can use it against me."

"Use it against you? You mean use it to kill you."

"Yes and no," he sighed, tamping down the nervous buzz of the Dark Ones in his head. "The Dark One can be killed with the dagger, but whoever holds the dagger has power over the Dark One. Anyone who holds it could order me to do anything, and I'd have to do it whether I wanted to or not. I could kill you without a moment of hesitation if it was commanded of me, Belle, and I won't let that happen. It needs to be safe as much for your sake as it is mine."

"You could never hurt me," she insisted, shaking her head in a way that saddened him because he could tell that she believed that, and if she did, it was a problem. He didn't want to break such a beautiful spirit any more than he wanted to break her, but she needed to understand how serious this was, the gravity of it.

"I could, Belle. This dagger in the hands of the wrong person, and I assure you I could. I can't let that happen. I won't let that happen. It needs to be hidden away, protected."

"So why not the safe?"

"It's too obvious, too much of a target," he explained.

"So…where are you going to hide it?"

"Oh, not just me!" he teased, getting to the best part of this. "We. We are going to hide it."

Together. Because if she didn't know, then she would never be safe.

And with that, he wrapped the dagger carefully in the scarf it had been resting on and then slid it into his jacket. He checked the store, turned off the lights, made sure the doors were locked for the night, making it appear that the only thing special about this night was that he'd be spending it with Belle. When he finished closing up the shop, she looped her arm through his, and the pair of them crossed the street…carefully. He made sure to scan ahead of them, to be on the lookout for anyone that might spot them, for Regina, or for anyone who might want to make themselves a threat. But they encountered no one for the brief twenty seconds it took to cross the street. Once there, he took out the key that he kept to the library and unlocked it himself,

"Here?!" she hissed when he finally closed the door.

"Yes and no," he answered, ignoring the shocked expression on her face as she realized it was going here. He waited for her to object, waited for her to deny him access, to tell him to find another place, but she didn't. Surprised as she was, she allowed him into the library and followed after him as he walked back through the shelves. He didn't bother with lights; those might only assist anyone watching outside in tracking their movements through the library. In the dark, for all a villain knew, they'd run up to her apartment and fallen into bed, or hell, they were having a nighttime rendezvous on the library desk. Let them think anything other than be suspicious about the dagger.

Finally, he arrived at a bookshelf he deemed appropriate and hid a small piece of paper with a map on it, "X" marking the spot, behind the books. Then he looked at the call numbers on the spine. From his pocket, he took a pen and a piece of paper. This was the only thing he hadn't prepared for ahead of time, but it was her escape route, one of them at least. One of the best parts about hiding it in plain sight was that if someone captured her to take the dagger, then here she'd be surrounded by people, people who could see her, people who could hear her scream, people she could run to for help. And if she didn't attract attention on the way in, then he was giving her a second chance at doing it on the way out, though he would much prefer that she just turn over the breadcrumb for a false trail and not get into trouble, to begin with.

"Keep this with you at all times!" he ordered, handing her the paper. When she reached out to take it, he touched her shoulder and squeezed hard, hoping the pressure would impress upon her the importance of what she had to do next. In her desperation to be heroic, it was the one part of this he suspected she'd struggle with the most. "If anyone should come to you, if anyone demands the location of the dagger, give them that paper and tell them that is all you know about it."

She nodded, letting him know she understood.

"It'll lead them here, which will lead them into the forest. Runaway as fast as you can. You come to me. If I'm not here, then as soon as they're gone, get the dagger and go somewhere safe: Ruby, Mary Margaret, anywhere that you can be hidden and protected. Do you understand? Do you-"

"Yes! Yes, Rumpelstiltskin, I understand," she insisted, the use of his full name indicating that even if she hadn't before, she was beginning to understand the seriousness of all this. Good. Because there was one last thing.

"Belle…if it's not safe…if it is a choice between you and the dagger, promise me-"

"I won't promise what you're going to ask me to!" she stated before he could finish. "And we'll only waste time arguing."

He let out a heavy sigh. That, right there, that statement and determination was the one thing in all of this that scared the shit right out of him. The idea that if it wasn't safe, she would die defending that dagger for him or maybe even worse. It was the only part of this whole thing that made him want to rethink this, to hide the dagger from her for her own good. But she was right in more ways than she knew. They could argue about it and waste their time, but time was something he had so little of before he left. He didn't have a backup plan for the dagger if she insisted on something like that. So perhaps, for now, the safest course of action was to allow her to think that, take the bet that while he was away the dagger would be safe with her, and then once he returned take it back and think of a better plan; a safer plan for her. But for now, he had no choice but to go through with this.

He nodded with a dissatisfied sigh, then reached for her hand and led her back out of the main library and into the lobby. He moved quickly to the elevator doors he'd checked on yesterday, summoned the rattling cage, and let the doors open.

"This is an elevator," he explained before launching into an explanation on what they were in this world and how to summon it to her. "Never use it to go down, Belle. Always up. Why is unrelated and a story for another time, but please, never use it to go down."

Maleficent may be gone, but that didn't mean he wanted her down in those tunnels to discover what else was lurking there.

She nodded her understanding, and when he walked into it, she followed. It scared her. He couldn't blame her, not with the way it creaked and groaned and swayed with their weight, but his brave Belle followed him anyway, ignoring the hitch she had to feel in her own chest, and wrapping her arms around his own again. He explained the controls, explained how to close the doors and how to go up and down before telling her again not to go down. And then they moved upward. Her grip on his arm tightened as they moved slowly upward to his dagger's new home.

When they finally stopped at the clocktower, he let the darkness hide him and let his eyesight guide him. He pulled her forward with him to the clock face and removed one of the glass panels protecting the inner hands of the clock, then he took the dagger out of his jacket pocket, magnetized it magically, and cast a spell to make it weightless so that the hand wouldn't be slowed down by the extra weight and force someone up here to fix it. Then he set it to stick on the back of the minute hand, replaced the glass, and smiled at how perfectly concealed it was.

It was easy. Almost too easy. The fact that it was right in front of everyone and yet out of sight made him want to laugh hysterically at the same time he cried.

"Are you sure it'll be safe here?" Belle asked at his side.

"With you?" he asked. She hadn't figured out yet that she was his secret weapon, the Dagger's guardian, the one part of the puzzle that he hoped anyone who came for it would fail to take into consideration. If she wasn't here, he would never have done something as bold as this. With her here, knowing it was here…

"It's in the safest place in the world."