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Belle’s heart begins to shatter as she watches Jack walk away from her as they both exit their parts of the divided confessional. His nonchalance has her pulse quickening, blood rushing to her cheeks and temples, emotions fiery with anger.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” she chastises.
He hardly looks over his shoulder at her, a scoff on his breath. “Giving orders, Milady?”
“When you need them, yes!” She cries.
This time he does swing back, making her startle in her pursuit as he steps forward, hand raised as he points his finger towards her while speaking. “What I needed, Belle, was you to be there for me. Six months. Six months I sat in that prison and you didn’t do a thing about it!”
“I did everything!” She denies. She steps closer, face sincere and heart breaking. “I did everything.”
Jack is still, but his eyes are flit from every feature on her delicate face. She can see his breath pick up, emotion fighting to be released behind teary eyes. He shakes his head, appearing to refuse her statements.
“All you had to do was wait,” she insists. “I wrote to you, I told you I was seeking a pardon and you threw it away.”
Her sentence is released and she herself has to turn away, hand coming to her mouth to stifle her breath and tears. She did everything she could think of. Begged her parents for pardon, traced her own leads to who really killed Gaines, even attempted to break into the prison herself just to check on him. How could he stand there and say she did nothing? She told him all about it in her writings.
She shakes her head before turning back to him. Defeated, worried, strained and taxed with emotional exhaustion.
“Why didn’t you trust me?”
Jack blinks, as if the thought was both ludicrous and certain. Trust her? He trusted her with his life. He never believed that she gave up on him. Not until he escaped and his first question to Fagin was about her. Did she contact him, did she write, did she try to visit? Did she care at all?
The answer he was given was no.
“What letters, Belle?” He questions, face turning incredulous as his previous perspective is being legitimately challenged, because yes, he does trust her. Of course he does. And if she is saying that she was trying to free him, he has to believe her.
“What do you mean? The letters I gave Hetty to give to Fagin to give to you,” she explains. His breath starts to calm, as she begins to recognize the same thing Jack was. “Did you not receive my letters?” She asks, though it is more rhetorical than serious at this point.
He shakes his head.
“I wrote to you, everyday,” she whispers. “Every single day.”
“Fagin didn’t give me any letters,” he admits.
Belle’s face crumbles, squinting so that her tears are not free flowing the way they want. She sniffles, trying to pull herself together.
She can see that Jack is having difficulty with the realization that Fagin could be so cruel. That he would deliberately withhold their correspondence. But she knows differently. She didn’t have the type of blindness to him the way Jack did. She heard about how he abandoned him in prison when he was a boy and all she felt was rage, while Jack’s child side only felt the need to be loved by the person that partially raised him.
“I would never give up on you like that,” she says, defiance cutting through Jack’s internal struggle. Solidifying her resolve on the matter. “But you left me.”
Jack’s eyes turn upward, freeing him from his fixation on the floor while he tries to put together a part of this story that doesn’t end with Fagin betraying him more severely than he ever has.
“You doubted me so much, that you let me think that you were dead,” she continues.
Jack denies it, shaking his head as he approaches her, taking hold of her arms when she closes her eyes in anguish, needing her to believe him. “I would never. I could never, Belle,” he implores. “I was never going to leave you. I don’t think I can.”
It is the truth. He ran because he was being chased. Had he made it to the docks and aboard a ship it would have only been to jump right off and make his way back to Port Victory. There was no world in which he could simply leave her behind. No world where he would let himself be without her. He’d so rather die.
“Belle, I can’t live without you,” he declares. “I won’t.”
Belle’s eyes flutter and stray tears spill over as she let’s him over take her mouth with his own. Their lips speaking for them amidst the dim candle light of the church. Words unspoken for so long, now speak with the language of physical affection.
She moves with him, letting herself be consumed by his touch. A touch she’s wanted for so long her bones themselves were aching without it.
Sweet relief floods her. Overtaking her mind, her hands wondering to his neck and intertwining with his hair. She can feel him pull her closer, his hand on her hip, steadying her balance.
Jack fights the need to pinch himself to check if this is real. For so long he has dreamed of their reunion. Every day, it was all he thought about. Holding her in the hands that last held her heart, is overwhelming. His own tears soon relent and fall.
“I love you, Belle,” he whispers as they part, foreheads leaning against each other.
“I wish you would have waited,” she stubbornly replies. Even if it’s really Fagin’s doing, she still wants him to be more. Just like in that first carriage ride where she challenged him to grown a spine and use the ether to perform a surgery, and he was telling her to play God is foolish. She didn’t care about his ethics or morality. She demanded him be that and more. Expected it. Didn’t blight at it at all. She always treated like he could be more. Like he was more.
“I know, I know,” he softly accepts, his handles still holding her face. “I’m sorry. I apologize, Milady, you are right.”
She opens her eyes, locking them with his. The fire and anger that drove her to the church to speak with him fades, and she is only left with forgiveness. “Damn you.”
Slowly their hands drop from one another, each looking around, ensuring that the once empty church in fact remained so as they engaged in the passion lead embrace that diverted their attention from the priority of concealment.
It is just them, still. Time had slowed for them and they were not discovered. Yet.
And that yet is all consuming in Belle’s mind.
Belle runs her hands down the front of her skirt, a nervous habit and way of being able to collect herself. She blinks whatever remaining tears that pollute her eyes, and in the same turn Jack swipes at his own, turning around to do so, reserving a private moment to gather himself as well.
She clears her throat. “It’s only two years,” she addresses, seeming to pick up from where they left off before they exited the confessional. His stinging rebuke that she wanted nothing to do with him for that length of time was both untrue and inevitable at the same time, and as much as she wanted to fight him on the former, she couldn’t let that be a distraction. They have little time and whatever they have already used was to be reckless.
Jack’s eye becomes critical, a disagreeing brow being lifted as she continues.
“We can do two years,” she insists, taking his hands in hers, begging him to see it her way. “We can.”
Jack lifts her hands to his chest, holding them as he earnestly tells her, “I can’t Belle. I can’t fathom a second without you in it.”
It’s a complete impossibility. How could she possibly ask him such a thing? How could she expect him to survive without her. He’d sooner go longer without breath than him without her. His desire for her is more than a want, it is an inextinguishable need. A fire he cannot put out. A yearning he’s fueled into a reason for staying alive in prison these past six months. Having her back now and then withdrawing would be torment.
“I dodge death every day of my life, Belle. I don’t have two years, I have now, and I love you now.”
Her heart dips, because she feels the same. “Jack, I wouldn’t be alive without you. But I’ve felt how it feels to think you’re dead. You thought I left you in the dark, but I was in the dark. When I saw that man take your place in the hanging. I thought you were dead. I thought I had lost you forever. I cannot do it again. I love you too much.”
The mere seconds that she thought he had left this world and her to face it alone, without him, were the most excruciating moments of her life. More than the pain of her aortic aneurysm or her mother refusing to believe she was dying. More than the dozens of doctors telling her that her symptoms were in her head and condemning her to death. More than having to prepare herself for that reality. She would rather face it all again and that be that than ever face not having the man she loves in front of her.
So, yes, perhaps two years is a long while for Jack, but not to her. “Two years is nothing, because I have faced seconds without you.”
As she speaks, Jack holds her gaze, nodding as she begins to hyperventilate, pulling her closer to him.
“I do know what that feels like Belle,” he quietly argues. “I thought I lost you as well.”
When he was dragged out of the operating theatre by Gaines. When he begged Hetty to tell him if Belle was breathing and got no response. While he was marched through the streets, pleading with his captor to allow him to see if she lives. All he needed in what he believed was to be the short rest of his life, was to know if she would be meeting him on the other side, and if he were the one to have sent her ahead of him to wait. All that time he thought he had killed her by trying to save her life.
Belle puts her hand to his cheek. “You will never.”
“Let us be together,” he pleads, resting his head against hers. He feels her shake her head against his forehead. “In secret.” Belle opens her eyes, look intense, and he knows he has her open ear. “I cannot—I will not be apart from you.”
Belle frowns. “I won’t be your mistress.”
He almost laughs. Of all the preposterous assumptions. “Of course not,” he assures.
Her frown deepens, unsure of what he means then. “Then what would you call me?”
The answer is simple. Obvious to him. His reply comes as if anything else would be ridiculous. There is only one thing that she could ever be, has ever been. Closer to his heart than any other. His pair in devotion, love, and connection. A promise, a calling, an oath to his unrequited commitment to her and only her.
“My beloved.”