Author's Note: This is NOT the sequel to "The Curse Breakers"...I'm sorry. I'm actually waiting for the summer to write that one. But this was an idea that olverabonk gave me and I thought I would run with it. Insert pithy disclaimer here...I own nothing nothing.

Dance of the Curse

Chapter One: The New Deal

Moe French has been staring at the same ceiling tile for the last forty-five minutes but the images behind his eyelids do not change. The words that are ringing in his ears drown out the various machines that are beeping and whirling by his bed. Most patients in this hospital were caught in that ethereal world between slumber and wakefulness while he hung in the twilight of two very different lives.

You shut her out...

His arms throbs with the memory of the beating, the "caning" as the nurses are calling it with subtle smiles. The irony is not lost on him and perhaps he will be able to smile in a year or two. However, his thoughts are focused on the words that were spit at him between the blows.

You had her love, and you shut her out.

He always had a feeling Gold's harshness towards him revolved around a woman, an assumption he held to until Gold's accusation of parenthood. And that was the trigger...It was about a woman, a very special one at that.

Belle.

Moe closed his eyes, tears slipping out and skidding down his face only to be absorbed by bandages. His throat constricted, sore from the cane being pressed into it and irritated by emotion. Memories of that other life, mixed and mingled with this one and he had to concentrate on separating them out and ordering them properly. The pain medicine was being both a help and a hinderance. It relaxed him enough to gain access but not enough to organize. So, he settled on the images that were granted to him after so many years.

He gets flashes of her as a child, climbing trees in satin dresses and her mother's pearls. A ten year old, yelling at the cold marble of her mother's headstone, demanding Hades to return what was hers and scolding him for theft. The time she tried to keep up with a fox hunt, fell off her horse and broke her arm. And the young soldier, Gaston, who brought her home, cushioned in his thick traveling cloak while he stood shivering on the palace steps waiting for the doctor's assurance she would heal.

But then the images start to change. Red fills the skies, and whispers of war coming to their sea-side land start to creep along the villages. Then the horrors begin and his girl grows quiet, angry and begins to wear her satin gowns like they were armor. The day comes when she saves them all by going off with the magic man from the Western Mountains. He was so afraid he would never see her again after that day and he didn't.

Not until the Queen of the Northern Forestlands arrived in his kingdom with a coffin. She had heard the story of the poor girl trapped with the monster. She went to see what she could do to bargain for the girl's freedom but she had arrived too late. That morning, the girl had thrown herself from the tower in a desperate attempt to free herself of the monster's clutches. Out of the kindness of her heart, she had brought the body home to rest since Rumplestiltskin wanted nothing more to do with it.

Moe opens his eyes and goes back to staring at the ceiling tiles. The Queen of the Northern Forestlands, her face was so clear and it was also that of the Mayor. Gold, Gold himself was Rumpelstiltskin and it was enough to put a fire in Moe's chest that he hadn't felt for a long time. He had been a Merchant King, not a conquering one, but he certainly felt bloodlust now towards the man who had driven his daughter off a tower. He would burn an entire range of mountains to avenge his daughter's death.

You were her father...This is your fault, not mine.

And he wonders why it's his fault that she's gone. Did Rumplestiltskin blame him for letting his daughter leave? Surely, after the first month did the monster not know that Belle had a mind of her own? How was it his fault? Moe pushed the button on the bed that raised him into more of a sitting position. His broken ribs protested but it allowed him to reach the phone by the bedside. He had Gold's number memorized, realized it was a stab in the dark but the satisfaction of waking the pawnbroker at 3 in the morning made the gamble worthwhile.

The dreams were back with a vengeance. Twenty-eight years and they had stopped for the most part but his run in with Moe French, the frantic search for that damned tea cup, had awakened those brilliant and lovely nightmares. Every time he closed his eyes now, he saw the brilliant blue of hers. Her smile raked deeper furrows into his heart and he would wake up in a quiet house, with an empty ribcage and burning eyes.

He was having one such dream, of Belle being her bright and beautiful self but just far enough away that she slips through his ever reaching fingers. Her laugh is ringing through his head when he realizes it's not her laugh but his phone. He looks at the clock, a garish red light to see it's barely past 3 in the morning. Fearing someone has finally gotten the nerve to burn his shop to the ground, he braces himself for Emma Swan's voice as he answers the call.

"What?" It's three am and manners are completely foregone.

There's silence on the other end with just a faint beeping in the background. "Gold?"

He scrubs a hand across his face. "Yes." There's more silence and just as he's ready to hang up, the words stop his world from spinning.

"What happened to her?" The voice warbles, accented and thick with emotion and painkillers. "What happened to my Belle?"

Too many thoughts vie for space in his sleep addled mind. Moe French remembers his life from the other world. He remembers his daughter, but he doesn't remember what happened to her. Soon he's gripping the phone so tightly he can start to hear the plastic give under the pressure. "What do you mean, 'what happened to her?'"

"She went away with you and she came home in a coffin." The beeping is getting louder in the background. "What did you do to her to drive her to her death?"

The odd thought that this is just a bad dream crosses his mind but if it's not, he has a chance to get answers. "The last time I saw her, she was walking out my front gates, sound and whole, released from her contract with me."

"That wasn't what I was told."

"And what, exactly, were you told?" Gold had a good idea what French was going to say but he needed to hear it himself.

"The Queen of the Northern Forestlands said that s-she threw her-herself off your tower."

"I see," Gold said tiredly. "Would you like to know what I was told by the same Queen? That you locked her up in a tower, sent in clerics to cleanse her soul and then she threw herself off your tower."

It doesn't take long for French to put the pieces together. "Does that mean...could she be..."

As if he needs another reason to hate the witch on the hill. "Yes, she very well could still be alive." And he curses himself for not thinking about it sooner. But this is the problem when emotions become involved in a situation, they blind and bind you. They warp and twist until you're convinced the sky is green and the grass is blue. Blue...the same sky color of her eyes.

"Let's make a new agreement, Mr. French."

And by the time dawn breaks over Storybrooke, Gold is dressed and ready for the first day of his second chance at life, sipping tea from a chipped cup.