He fixed the cuff on his shirt while he walked down the stairs, following the sound of clinking metal and scraping wood. He stopped when his foot hit the lower landing in the dining room.

Jade tossed a look back over her shoulder at him and grinned. She had a handful of weapons in her one hand and a whetstone in the other, a dirty rag draped over her shoulder. Her eyes glinted at him in the late afternoon sunlight pouring into the dining room from the open windows.

"Sorry about the mess," she said. She nodded to the dining room around her. "We kind of tore your house apart while you were gone, but we'll fix it," Jade said. She gave him a smile that was more of a challenge for him to defy her on that point.

He just shrugged and crossed the floor from the stairway, casting his eyes from right to left at the veritable arsenal that had been set up in the dining room.

A few strands of hair drifted from Jade's messy French braid into her eyes and she tossed it back. Holding her head high and her shoulders rolled back, she crossed the dining room in even strides, heading down the hallway and toward the north tower.

He circled the dining room slowly, his hand coming to rest on the handles of the weapons still on the dining room table. They looked different than when he had last seen them, and he could see Jade had taken his advice and gotten them dirty after all. A light smile licked at his lips as he ran the tips of his fingers over the flecks of dirt that worked their way into the ropes encircling the handles. She had been training with these – that much was obvious – but what he wondered was if she had taught Belle how to use them too. He cocked his head, resting his hand on the surface of the table at his side. Then he turned and walked toward the kitchen to make some tea.

She hadn't been kidding when she had said they'd trashed the house. The kitchen looked like the mess tents on some of the front lines he had seen. Dishes were piled in the sink until they nearly reached the base of the windowpane, and the cabinets were nearly empty – making him wonder whether they had been eating at all in the days before they had left to go get him.

His hands worked idly, while his mind spun, filling up the kettle with water and putting it on to boil. He turned and leaned his back against the marble countertop, his hands resting on the counter's edge. When the water was ready, he had to search for a clean teapot and settled on one he seldom used on the top shelf of one of the cabinets – the only one that had been spared – perhaps because it was too high for them to reach it. He pressed his lips together into a thin smile, and filled the little pot until it was brimming with hot liquid. He watched the steam move across the surface of the liquid, like a film barely parting under his breath. He filled his cup in the kitchen, rather than exposing the pot to the destruction of the dining room. He carried the cup out with him, blowing on the surface of the tea.

The dining room was still empty when he entered it, but he could tell by the number of weapons on the table that Jade had come down while he'd been in the kitchen and had gathered up another armful to carry back to the north tower. He sat down in his chair, resting the ball of his foot on the table leg beneath him and leaning back. It was perfectly silent in the dining room now, and the only movement came from the slightest of breezes coming in through a window Jade must have opened.

His gaze came to rest on the surface of his spinning wheel. He stood up and crossed the room to it slowly. The polished wood of the wheel gleamed in the light of the sun. He touched it. Everything in the house bore a light layer of dust or even dirt from use, except for this. Someone had cleaned it for him recently – someone had kept it clean while he was gone.

They came down the stairs at the same time – Jade from the north tower and Belle from the south. They crossed paths, hardly slowing down to toss each other smiles over their shoulders. Jade passed them and walked into the kitchen. Belle lingered at a spot just behind his right shoulder. She looked up at him – her clear blue eyes sparking in the light. He smiled at her, feeling his body turn – almost involuntarily – so that he was facing her.

She was wearing a pale yellow sundress, the top of it leaving her creamy shoulders exposed. She fairly glowed in the light.

The soft yellow cut sharply to inky black as Jade appeared just behind Belle, holding a heavy mug in her hand. Her hair was also pulled back, showing the long expanse of almond colored skin – her shoulders, back and long arm equally showing from the edges of her tank top.

Belle turned and took a peek into Jade's cup as Jade took a sip.

"Tea?" Belle asked.

"Coffee," Jade said. She held the cup out to Belle.

Belle took it and laid her lips lightly against the rim of the cup, taking a tiny sip. She wrinkled her nose and made an awful face, fairly shoving the mug back into Jade's hands.

Jade shrugged.

"Told you," she said. She grinned and turned back toward the dining room table.

Belle looked back up at him and gave a small smirk, the dimples appearing deep in the sides of the cotton candy cheeks.

Jade laid one hand on the table behind her and pulled herself up onto the surface of the table. She crossed her legs at the ankle and let them swing back and forth in front of her idly. Then she cocked her head, the cup raised nearly to her mouth again, and squinted her eyes a bit in the light coming from the window. She laid her cup down and slid off the table, crossing the room back to where she'd been standing a moment before.

"Look at you," she murmured. She tilted her head, and her voice was so soft it sounded as if she were merely talking to herself. She brushed the hair from Belle's back over one of Belle's shoulders and turned her, so that Belle's back was bathed in the light from the sun. Jade ran her fingers lightly over the smooth, creamy expanse of Belle's skin – over her back, her shoulders and then her arms – where not even the barest hint of a scar remained to tell a story that Belle had wanted so badly to erase. She turned Belle back to face her and touched the bottom of Belle's chin lightly with her curled finger. "You're radiant," she said.

Belle pressed her lips together tightly, and her eyes brimmed with heavy tears.

"That day that you look into the mirror," Jade said. She smiled – that extremely old and sad smile. "That day is today," she whispered.

Belle closed her eyes briefly, the tears breaking away and slipping down her cheeks very fast. She leaned forward and clutched onto Jade tightly.

Jade closed her eyes too, her chin resting on the surface of Belle's creamy shoulder, and he was surprised when he saw that she had tears in her eyes too.

He crested the top of the stairs slowly, glancing back over his shoulder. Their laughter drifted up the stairway to him, and he smiled. He walked in through the open doorway into the library – which looked even worse than the kitchen and the dining room had been. He hesitated on the landing, before starting a slow and methodical circuit of the room. The books were still out, but most of them were closed and stacked up in high piles on his alchemy bench. Each stack was labeled with a single word – prisons or power or talismans or weapons.

Drawings covered every inch of the wall between the windows – large, poster-size schematics of the tunnels below Snow's house, with every point of weakness marked with a green x and a single red x denoting his position inside the cell. There were hand-drawn maps of the countryside along the way, with more x's showing places they could stop if they needed to, with the largest x placed on the rock quarry where they had regrouped after the fight. There were several drawings of places he'd never seen before, with labels like architect and builder and informant. And there were a number of scenarios drawn over more copies of the outline of the tunnels, marked with x's and o's, showing which positions to fall back to and which places they had to take along their way. He ran his fingers over the surface of the barely curled pages, each drawn with such careful attention and detail. It was a battle plan, here on these walls. This was where they had planned the details of their war.

He dropped a step back and turned toward the stacks of paper, lying in little piles on the floor. Each stack was secured with a little rock from the outside or a trinket from inside the library. He bent and picked one of the stacks up, flipping through it slowly between his hands. The stack was labeled "power", and the pages were filled with spells copied out of the books about how to strengthen someone's magic. There were pages and pages of notes, asking questions and posing theories. One of the pages contained a single sentence, "the things that he made will make him stronger – the thread?"

He replaced the stack on the floor and stepped around it to another one. This stack was labeled "talismans", and the top sheet contained a detailed listing of the weapons in the arsenal in order of descending power. The bottom of the page referenced a book in the talisman section on the bench – it was one of the ones he thought may have been written by Zoso. The top item listed was the dagger of the Dark One – the one that now bore his name. Second on the list was the dagger that Jade had brought to him.

He flipped the page and found a series of hand-written notes about the dagger of the Dark One – conflicting accounts about how it was to be used and the limits of its power. The last page contained a spell that had been copied out of one of the books – this was a spell that he had never seen. It was called "the blood of the ones who love you". The spell said that to take an object – but especially one that held its own source of power within it – and to cover it with the blood of those who love you the most, was to enhance the object's power by some untold amount. He lowered the sheet slowly in front of him.

He held the sheet gingerly between his fingers and carried it back down the stairs with him. He wanted to show it to Belle – to see where she had found it – to see how she had figured all of this out. He found her sitting on the floor in front of the glass cabinet, the lower drawers pulled out. She was replacing a number of the unused spools of gold thread into the drawer, lining them up close together so that they would all fit.

"My dear," he said. He came up behind her and dropped to a crouch at her side. He held the paper in his hand, his arm resting on the top of his bent knee.

"Hm?" Belle said. She looked up at him over her shoulder and tilted her head.

"Where did you find this?" he asked. His gaze washed over her, a look of wonder crossing his face.

"What is it?" Belle asked.

She slipped the sheet from his hand, her bright eyes scanning the surface of the page.

"Oh," Belle said. "I don't know where she found this one," Belle said. She shook her head and handed the page back over to him. "It didn't come from one of your books in the library. I think it came from one of the new books that she brought back when we were trying to expand our research," Belle said. She licked her lips and looked up at him.

His eyes came to rest on the page in front of him, and he stilled. The blood of the ones who love you. The blood of the ones who love you. He read the title of the page over and over again, without really reading it at all.

It was in her handwriting. He didn't know how he had missed that. The same lyrical scrawl she had left her notes on the table for him in – the loops and swirls on the labels in her sketchbook. It was Jade's handwriting. Jade had written this. Jade had written down the spell that had told them to write their love in blood across his name. He lowered the page, and his eyes found Belle's soft blue ones.

"I love you," he said. He leaned in close to her, so that she could see his eyes when he said it, so that there could be no mistaking his meaning.

The smile dropped from Belle's face into a look of surprise and then of wonder and then of awe. "I," she said. She stared up at him – her blue eyes huge and round like the moon reflected in water. She laid her hand over his, where it held the paper. "I love you too," she said. She smiled and then laughed a little, shaking her head.

"I know," he said. He said it quietly, and the paper moved in his hand when he said it. He leaned in close to her and kissed her on the forehead. "My darling girl."

Belle looked up at him and smiled, closing her eyes and pressing her cheek into the palm of his hand, the way she had done so very long ago when she had been sitting at the spinning table and wearing chains.

He kissed her one more time on the forehead, letting his lips linger there a long time before standing slowly, smiling down at her and turning to cross the dining room toward the stairs.

He walked across the landing and stepped down onto the cold marble floor at the base of the north tower. The air was cooler there where the rooms were bathed in shadows, pale blue tapestries – as cold and clear as Zoso's eyes had been – draped in folds over the walls. The heavy, dark oak dining table was covered with more of Jade's things – making the tower feel familiar to him for the first time. He pushed aside the ink black curtain separating the great room from the base of the spiral staircase and started up it. He paused at the middle landing, where a few of the bedrooms were located. Zoso's bedroom door stood open, and his things had been disturbed – as if Jade had searched through it looking for answers.

A second bedroom door stood open, the closet doors ajar, and he realized that some of the clothes he had seen Jade wearing since his return had come from this room. The pale blue blankets on the bed had been pulled back, as if Jade had laid down there to rest for a while before she had gotten up to keep working. He stepped out and back into the hallway, feeling sorry now that he had suggested Jade take a room in the north tower when she had first come to live with him. It was cold and sterile and hollow in the north tower, and although Jade's clothes and her weapons seemed to fit in there – she did not. It almost made his heart ache to think of her laying down up there, sleeping anywhere that wasn't the warm, dark green room with the golden trim.

He turned and walked away from the landing quickly, pushing aside a second black curtain and climbing the upper staircase. He entered the weapons room quietly and rested his shoulder against the doorframe, looking in but not crossing the threshold. Three of the four walls were empty – their wooden racks standing barren against the stone wall behind them. Some of the weapons that had just been removed from his dining room table were now piled up on the thick black Oriental rug waiting to be cleaned. The gabbro stone anvil stood just beyond the edge of the rug, the base of it littered with small rags covered in grease and oils.

Jade glanced back over her shoulder at him, both arms reaching high over her head to slide a polearm back into its spot on the rack.

"Hey," she said. She turned and stood on tiptoe, pushing up higher, and sliding the weapon into place. It gleamed from a recent shine.

He cast a glance around the room again but kept his eyes mainly on the Oriental rug on the floor. This room had always felt angry and cold to him, like Zoso's energy surrounding him and mocking him. That's why he had shut the north tower up tight and never gone in there again. But the room – it was now filled with the scent of Jade's tea tree oil, and he could feel himself start to relax within it. It reminded him of the nights they would sit up late in the dining room, him working at his wheel and her polishing her sai at the dining room table.

Jade turned and walked over to the center of the oriental rug, pulling a rag down from where it had been draped over her shoulder. She sat down, cross-legged on the plush carpet, and picked up a long, slightly curved sword. She rested it on her lap and began running the cloth back and forth over its surface, keeping a steady, measured pressure between the cloth and the steel. After several passes, she held the sword up and looked at her own reflection in its surface. Then she laid the sword back down onto her lap and continued shining it.

She didn't look up at him, and other than that one word of greeting, she didn't acknowledge his presence. She was waiting – he realized – for him to be ready, for him to enter the room on his own terms and in his own time.

He leaned the side of his head against the doorframe and watched her.

Did she know that this room made him uncomfortable? How did she know his secrets – his sore spots – so well?

The cloth moved and up down the surface of the sword, glinting as it reflected the light. Finally, she stopped polishing it and looked back up at him. She tilted her head, her gaze watchful and steady, calming.

He took a small breath and pushed himself off the doorframe, crossing the room to where she sat waiting for him. He sat down on the Oriental rug beside her, and although he had always assumed it to be hard and steely like everything else in this tower, it was soft – plush even. His eyes lingered on the page he had carried with him.

She didn't lean over to look at it – just sat quietly, waiting for him to show it to her.

Finally, he did. He turned the page over and held it out for her to see, and she took it gingerly from him with both her hands. She held the white cloth pinned against her palm with her last three fingers. She studied the page for a moment and then handed it back to him.

He looked at her – gold eyes brimming with the things he didn't say.

Her eyes drifted down to the page and then back up to his face, a gentle question – a soft nudge – the lightest prod to explain why he had shown it to her.

"I," he said. His voice sounded dry and a bit scaly to him. "I guess I didn't realize – didn't really think about it until now," he said.

He rubbed the margin of the page between his fingers and his thumb.

"Didn't realize what?" she asked.

Her dark eyes were quiet as she looked at him. She leaned back on her hands, tilting her head a bit and watching him.

He gave a sad smile and almost laughed, holding the paper up in one of his hands.

"The blood of the ones who love you," he said. He gave her a pained smile and lowered the page back onto his lap.

She tilted her head. She didn't say anything. She just waited for him to go on.

"You wrote it down on this page," he said. He moved his finger over the paper as if he were brushing a grain of sand across it. "And you wrote it again, on my dagger, using your blood."

He glanced down at the paper and then back up at her face. "I thought it was Belle who had written this," he said.

She tilted her head to the other side and waited.

"I thought it was Belle who had made this entire plan," he said. He gestured around the room to all of it – to the weapons – to the paper in his hand – to the thick stacks of notes that had been painstakingly written out by Jade's hand inside the library. "But it was you. You read the books. You tortured the people who had information about how to save me so you could put all of this together," he said.

She sat back – still – waiting for him to finish.

He looked down at the paper, held between his two hands. He shook his head, looking back up at her and searching her face for what he was trying to say.

"I didn't understand when you told me you didn't drink the potion. I didn't even understand it when Belle told me that you made her carry my dagger because you were ready to die for me, and you wouldn't get the chance to give it to me yourself," he said. He shook his head and stared at her. "I didn't understand until I read it – until I saw it written down on this piece of paper," he said. He lowered his other hand and held the page suspended in front of him. His voice dropped lower. "You've told me many times, haven't you, since you came to live with me here? And I never heard it," he said.

Jade tilted her head, her eyes narrow in concentration.

"You found Belle – you didn't drink it – you made this plan – for me," he said. He squinted his eyes and looked into her face. "You did it because you love me," he said. He finished his statement, even though he couldn't quite believe it through and through.

Jade gave her head a little shake, as if she were not quite following what he was saying. "Of course," she said. She shook her head again, a few strands of hair tumbling loose from her messy French braid. "I'm not sure I understand what you're asking me."

He laughed and closed his eyes, the tips of his fingers resting on the surface of his mouth. He felt a smile forming under his fingers. He opened his eyes after a moment and looked at her. "I'm not asking you anything, my dear," he said.

Jade smiled at him, a crinkle in the corners of her eyes and squeezed his hand where it held hers.

"I didn't know," he said. He enunciated each word, saying them out loud. "What you were trying to tell me," he said. "But I wanted to tell you now that I heard you."

Jade smiled, and then she almost laughed. "That's good to know," she said. She let out a small laugh and squeezed his hand again.

He pressed his teeth together lightly – it was almost a wince.

She fought the smile down from her eyes, and settled her gaze onto his.

"It's good," Jade said. She pressed her lips together. "To know."

She cocked her head, and he could see that she was taking some of this onto herself as well – that the knowing was hers as much as it was his.

Seeing them together like this – it was like catching your reflection in a mirror after you're used to having all of them covered up. They were so different from each other in every way. Where Belle was soft, with cotton candy cheeks and a laugh like water rippling over smooth rocks, Jade was loud and spirited and rash. Her beauty was dramatic and haunting and fierce where Belle's was languid and lovely and soft. And he knew them – he knew them each so well – and it was like a catching a reflection of yourself from two eras in your life when you were so different you could barely recognize yourself.

Belle stood, one arm tucked lightly behind her back, her head leaning against the edge of the window frame. Her cheeks were pink, and she was laughing and shaking her head, giving Jade the knowing smile that she always gave him when he was teasing her. Jade sat on the wide window ledge, one leg up on the seat it in front of her, heavy leather boots laced up to her knees. The black tank top hugged every curve of her body and left much of her upper chest and back exposed. Scars criss-crossed themselves across her skin, and she wore them almost proudly now like battle scars because that's what they were. They were beautiful – these two divergent women – who had been willing to give their lives for him and nearly had.

The End