I don't own Once Upon at Time.
Note: The main character in this, Alix, is from some stories I started writing as a kid and has never been published anywhere (although she gets some passing mentions in my story, Ill Met by Moonlight).
I was upset at recent events in the show, so I decided to send her over to fix them.
X
The irony is that, if the woman known as Emma Swan had seen the ethereal creature walking the edges of the Enchanted Forest, unlike the people who had grown up in that world, she would have found the words at once to describe her: something from a fairy tale.
The people of that world wouldn't have thought it. Magic might be real in their world, but it was as solid and unsurprising as the dirt beneath their feet or a cold rain in autumn. Fairies, sirens, they were warm creatures of flesh and blood you could touch with your two hands (whether or not you'd be wise to do so).
For Emma alone, the world fairy tale could still mean something too fragile and pretty to be real. This being—very like a woman but far too lovely to be one—was an illusion, like a confection spun of glass and light. She had all the beauty of a soap bubble waiting to vanish at a touch or breath of frost on a window about to be dismissed by a flame.
Her braided hair was sunlight yellow. Her skin was the color of snow at sunrise when the morning light may touch it with just a hint of pink rose. Only her eyes seemed real. Their burning, blue light was too intense to be anything else. She wore pale, faded lavender and ghostly shades of white.
Alix set up her nets.
Different nets, as any fisherman could tell you, for different fish. Different weights to hold the nets to different depths to catch the fish that swam there. The rules applied to her as well.
Most of her webs, spun delicately as lace, were all silver and starlight, innocent strands for an innocent soul or the echoes of one. She had to be grateful for the forces that had (once again) shattered this realm. Like getting the yolk of an egg, some things were so much easier once the shell was cracked.
It was the other land that was troubling her.
Still, she set her lace nets to catch her prey where it ran low to the ground through woods and fields. She set them, pretty as snowflakes, high above to catch dreams that had traveled among the stars (and through the stars, and through the darkness to the shadows that lay beyond). In a ruined castle and along deserted roads, she hunted. She made other webs, spinning threads the dark colors of grief and others the unchangeable hues of courage. She found fear and anger, pain, betrayal, love, and a thousand other echoes.
Last of all, she placed her web around the white ice that hid the darkness, a place that could never be found by light of day, only by night.
A tricky web, she thought. So easy to gather what she did not want. No pretty lace here, no hint of anything that did not speak of purpose; nothing that, in its very lines and form, did not speak of guarded readiness (so obvious, Alix knew, but the darkness she walked around was subtle and ever shifting, so her webs stood strong and honest). She placed the nets with utmost care and walked around them, waiting and listening as the winds began to blow.
The webs caught them, as they always did. The winds, touching those threads, took visible form, ghosts and memories that struggled against the threads that bound them. She watched as they twisted and writhed, seeking escape. Then, they burst free, leaving the tattered bits that clung to her webs behind them.
Alix began to circle round, gathering them up. She held each piece up to the moonlight, examining, listening to each voice, running them through her hands as ardently as a blind woman feeling secrets, looking for the taints that might so easily poison it and destroy all her work.
Then, she put each piece carefully away.
There was another world she needed to search.
The many souls of the cities she searched were like sounds drowning out the music she needed to hear. Still, Alix set up nets. She called winds, she searched for bits and pieces in the places where her instincts said she might find them.
In New York, she found a small apartment where he had lived. She sat crosslegged on the floor of his room as the sound came down from the old record player on the shelf above. She closed her eyes, head tilted back and mouth slightly open, as if the sound were rain she could catch on her tongue.
Last of all, she stood in the tangled forests of Neverland. Here, she made nets of green threads that grew leaves and thorns. She spun shadows, and the starlight that graced her threads was cold, an alien watcher instead of the promise of wonder.
The harvest in the world without magic had been thin. In Neverland, where time was meaningless and echoes of the past blended into each new day, she found many scraps of memory, each blending into the other threads.
Alix looked them over. It was enough, she thought. Not all that the one who summoned her had hoped for, but as much as she had hoped for and a little bit more.
When all the pieces were gathered, she set up her loom and began to weave.
Spinner, weaver, there were threads of fate tying to two together. It bound her to this work.
The warp was made of golden thread, spun fine as gossamer. This spinning was none of her handiwork
Again and again, each piece was examined. Now, she did not look just for taints, she looked for the length of each piece, for its strength and weakness, for how it fit—or didn't—against all the others, joining fragments as carefully as if she were piecing together broken glass, jagged glass edged with poison to destroy everything with one careless nick.
Now and then, there was not enough. Pieces ran short or didn't fit—or were gone entirely, leaving nothing but gaps. When that happened, she picked up more of the golden thread and worked it in to cover the gaps.
Till, at last, her weaving was done.
Alix gathered it up, examining it closely. Not perfect, she thought. So much less than he'd hoped for but still more than she'd expected. The work was flawed, as would be its making.
But, it was enough.
Or so she hoped.
The time was drawing near. She didn't see futures, but centuries of work had left her sensitive to the stirrings of fate around her. The time was soon.
She found her way again to the shattered realm, the Enchanted Forest that was, and found the ragged threads that still bound it to the small world that had been born out of it. She followed the path to Storybrooke.
She had arrived in time. The woman they called the Savior, their fair swan, held the hands of a man she had loved (Alix, with an eye for weaving, saw all the threads that had woven those two lives together, satisfied she had got it right).
She held out the cloth she had woven to the winds as they gathered. She saw the spinner bow over his dying son and watched as the man's soul broke free of his flesh.
Here, she thought. Come here. See what I have made you?
The soul trembled, uncertain.
Here. It is not your time. The dead do not call you. Not yet. Come here.
The soul drifted towards her. It sensed what she held, moving towards it.
Alix held her breath (not that she needed to breathe, but the habit was strong in her and she had a predator's need to taste the air for danger and prey). The soul drifted closer. It seemed to look at what she held. She felt curiosity more than recognition. It seemed to look at what she held, with a sense that it should know what it was.
Tentatively, it reached out—and was sucked into the weaving Alix had made for it.
Hastily, Alix put it down. She had two last treasures, a drop of blood and a single hair, precious because they were the only ones she had. Without them, what she was doing would fail. Even with them, it might fail.
She placed the hair over the place where the heart would be and let the blood drop fall over it. The garnet drop slid itself over the hair, like a larger snake devouring a smaller one. Then, both were sucked inside her weaving. Alix watched as her handiwork began to shift and change, becoming solid, colors blossoming across it as it took form.
A young boy, perhaps fifteen years old, lay on the ground in front of her. He seemed to be asleep. His face twisted in a nightmare and he woke, gasping for breath.
"Papa, no! Papa!" he yelled. He looked around. Alix was quite sure he didn't notice her. All he saw—or didn't see—was the one person he was looking for. "Papa?" he said. "Papa, where are you?"
Alix cleared her throat. "Baelfire?" she asked.
The boy looked at her, confused. "Who are you? Where's my father? Did he—" the boy's face crumpled. "Did he leave me?"
"Oh, let's not go down that road again," Alix said. "Hello, Baelfire, I'm Alecto, but you can call me Alix. I'm a friend of your father's. He asked me to help you.
"This is rather a long story, but I put together as much of your past as I could. I'm afraid I missed a lot in two worlds where you've lived, although I did save some things. For example, I'm betting your dying for a pizza about now. . . ."