AN: Gosh darn it, I ship it. Not entirely sure what this was born out of, other than a desire to peek into Belle's head. A special shout out to my editor and wonderful friend, Perfume. Without her, ideas and discussions for many fandoms would stay locked up inside my head with no one to put them off onto.

The room is cold, like usual. The air has a familiar scent of mustiness and rust. With a heavy sigh, she cards fingers through her hair but gets caught up in tangles and knots so her hands fall listlessly. Her arms curl themselves across her knees, which she has pressed to her chest, all in familiar gestures. Everything she does, thinks, feels or sees is familiar or routine. The padded walls that surround her; the covered windows; the only other people she catches sight of. The spot she's folded herself into is also well-known to her. It's one of those days, then; reminiscence, facts, and theories are her companions. She can recall the smell of the forests that surrounded her home-a heady scent of pine and the occasional wisp of evergreen. She misses the long walks through the sprawling courtyard gardens. She misses being able to curl up with a treasured book and lose herself in it.

She appreciates what little sunlight she receives, although the warmth is practically non-existent. She remembers what it feels like, though...or at least she thinks she does. She remembers days filled with light and warmth-tilting her head back and feeling the kiss of that sunlight and the peace it brought.

She has a very distinct memory of it. He's spinning yet more gold and she is confident that he should have just a little more warmth around him. A joke and a heavy tug send her tumbling, and then the next thing she knows she's being rescued from a dangerous fall. She can recall the pounding of her heart at the feel of his hands wrapped around her-across her shoulders and under her knees. She can picture the light, too-reflecting and glinting off the silvery tone of his skin. She should have been more surprised, she thinks, but somehow she just remembers the expression on his face-one of slight confusion and just maybe a desire to stay there like they are.

She wanted to. To stay, that is. Locked up in that castle if it meant that she wouldn't have been parted from him. She still isn't sure if she pushed him too fast, or if she shouldn't have at all. She just wanted to love him. To perhaps show him that he was worth being cared for.

She frowns as her gaze turns to her grated slice of outside. It is essentially just a bit of sky and a portion of a few trees, but it helped her hold onto her own thoughts some of the time. She's only ever had one visitor in all the time she's been locked away in her padded cell. She knows it is the mayor of the town she exists in, Regina Mills. She also knows that the mayor has some kind of long-term plan for her, for Regina has said as much. Uselessly, every time that flap opens in the door she hopes for a different face-one with stubble gracing his chin and pained dark eyes that stared at her with an intensity she hadn't come across before.

She knows this Regina Mills, though. There is a very large part of her that wishes she had not been so eager to fall for the hopeful tale of true love's kiss that day in the forest. If she hadn't, she might have still been with him. She had been hopeful that she could break the curse on him-that the power he possessed was, in fact, unwanted.

She supposes that her sanity could be questioned by this point. She's been tucked away in the dark for so long with only her own mind for company that sometimes she answers back. Sometimes the words echo like she is living it in the present instead of a memory.

"It's quite simple, really. My power means more to me than you."

"You're a liar, Rumplestiltskin," she replies confidently. "I would have given you anything that was in my power to do so."

The words tumble through her head, sometimes in whispers and sometimes in shouts. She is not crazy, she swears it.

"No one-no one- could ever, ever love me!"

"Does that make me a no one?" she whispers back. She gives the words her breath and a voice. She is determined to make him believe, even though he is nowhere that she knows of. "I loved you. I still do."

Her kiss was never given in treachery or in trickery, but only ever in love and genuine devotion. She can recall his lips on hers-cool and surprisingly soft. She loved him for his kind moments, and maybe a part of her loved him in the absence of them. At one point during her stay, he gifted upon her an entire library. He claimed he had little use for it, choosing instead to spend his days at his spinning wheel in search of forgetfulness. Upon seeing her own joy at the extravagance of it, she could have sworn that his eyes softened just a little.

A familiar grief strikes at her heart. Even after their falling out, she would have willingly gone back to him. Anything was better than the alternative she had found herself faced with.

Tearful and aware of being utterly alone, Belle had wandered the forest for what could have been hours or no time at all. She knows she should have been more careful, but the emotional pain she was feeling dulled her mind from whatever awareness she should have had. She can recall in hindsight that she could hear steady footsteps behind her and a soft creak of leather. In that moment when she began to turn, a sharp pain raced across her temple and it all went black. When she awoke, she was once again in a dungeon.

She was getting rather weary of facing nothing but stone and metal bars. Her head throbbed with every beat of her heart. She raised shaky hands to tenderly prod at her temple. Just beneath her dark hair lay an egg-sized lump. The hem of her skirt was stained with dirt and one of her sleeves was torn. There wasn't much to inform her of where she was, or with whom. Four simple walls of blocked stone and a door comprised of metal bars.

"H-Hello?" she stuttered, afraid and unsure of what mess she had landed herself in this time. With no other options left to her, she came to a quick decision of trying to discover who exactly had taken her prisoner.

A swish of elegant fabric across the uneven floor preceded the tall woman.

"Good evening, my dear. So glad you could finally join me," she said. Her ruby red lips slowly spread into a perfectly sinister grin. "I must admit, that would be the fault of my Huntsman. He is not the most delicate of beings and I was rather vague on how he got you here, so long as you were alive and whole. I would assume that he meant he could simply bestow a blow and be done with it."

"Why?" Belle questioned. She was quite certain she wanted to elaborate on that point, but she was having a slight amount of trouble putting the words together at the moment.

"Leverage, of course. I cannot bring myself to reveal everything I have in mind, but I will tell you this. For whatever strange reason, you mean something to that…thing you call Master. I find myself playing a very precarious game, you see, so I also find that having alternate means of being the victor in said game a necessity," she explained. The Queen moved a few steps closer to the door of Belle's prison and gripped the bars with a hard grip. "You, lovely girl, might prove to be useful against him." She grinned again and stepped back, the shadows quickly swallowing her up. An evil laugh fell from her lips, bouncing down the corridor along with fading clicks of her high heels and back to Belle, who was frozen a bit with shock.

"Please! Please, no!" She cried. "I'm not what you think I am." Her voice rose in panic. "I serve no purpose to you! Let me go…just let me go back to him, please…."

Overcome with sobs, Belle crawled to a far corner and curled into herself-knees to her chest and arms wrapped around.

She remembers dark days in that cell. She wanted nothing more than to be free of the stone walls that surrounded her. She would go home if she could, but first she would go back to him. It would be weak and not very like a heroine, but she would do it if she could. She would imagine, on occasion, just what she would say to him. Tell him she was sorry, maybe? That she regretted not being with him in whatever way she could-as a friend, as a servant if need be?

The last memory she has of that time is an opaque, inescapable smoke roiling over her. After that, she woke up here, in this cell. Surely if she was insane as they labeled her, she would remember something else, anything else, in between?

She was distracted by the creak of her cell door opening, which struck her as odd. She couldn't even recall the last time those hinges swung outward. She was about to turn her head when-

"You were right, dearie. An empty heart and a chipped cup were all I had, with a mountain of regrets," he said.

She gave an odd sort of gasp, an unexpected reaction due to her surprise and quickly turned to face him, pushing snarled hair out of her eyes as she did. Her mind raced with all the things she desired to say to him.

He leaned against the doorway, a cane in his left hand and carefully clasped in his right, a certain teacup with a chip along the rim. He glanced at it once and then his eyes met hers and he gave a melancholy smile to her. Just like everything else she knew, that was familiar to her, too and so was the smile she gave in return.

Please review!

I took some liberties with my theories here, which might be apparent by the end. Particularly with Belle ending up in the institution and her being kidnapped in the first place. It's a theory, like I said. I'm basing it, I suppose, on what I've seen so far. Prince Charming/James is injured and then in a coma in Storybrooke, Ashley/Cinderella=pregnant, etc. So I made it the same with Belle.