Headlights lit the damp roadway on either side of what could have been just a heap of clothes ...or the body of a man. A truck horn blared, brakes squealed. The lights converged, touched, then veered wildly. The shape recoiled and pulled in on itself as if accepting the inevitable fate that, at last, finally, had come.
The brakes held. The truck stopped. But the driver, peering over the steamy snout of her engine, could see nothing. "I hit him! OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD... I..." The fur-hooded driver slithered down from her cab and ran forward. "Hey! Hey! Are you..." The driver paused at what she saw, "...alright?" Rumplestiltskin shakily tried to sit upright, engulfed and blinded by the giant headlights barely a few feet away.
"What are you -how'd you get out here, middle of nothin'?" The driver looked up and down the road. "Did you have, where's your car? Did ya get rolled? Was it, was it onea those car-jack in' things!?" Rumple finally took notice of the barrage of questions and tried to wave the nuisances away, losing his balance. The driver caught his outstretched arm, kneeling down, not knowing quite where to grab. "Are ya hurt?" They stood up uncertainly together. "That leg looks bad. Maybe ya shouldn't try to walk?" But Rumple lurched sideways and they staggered drunkenly together over to a fallen log where both landed ungracefully side by side. If looks could kill, the well-meaning truck driver would have already been deceased. "I've stepped on better men than you." Rumple groaned.
"The name's Amelia." He glanced over at her. "Yeah, great handle, huh? Did you get hit in the head? Was it a car-Jackin'? Was ya robbed?" It was the first thing she had said that made any sense. "Robbed... Yes, I was robbed. She... They... TOOK everything, I've lost every... "
"Least we got 911 out here now."'The driver wrenched a phone out of her parka, but Rumple pushed it aside before she could make the call.
"Okay, okay, okay, no, no police. I understand," the driver reassured, not that she really did understand, "Ahhhhh, Where's home, I, I can drop you off?"
"Home! What hovel, can I now call home? It's gone... All gone." The driver awkwardly tried to comfort the stranger who shrugged it away with open contempt. "You don't know. Maybe I don't deserve a home, a wife, eh? Did you ever think about that! I'm a VILLAIN. I've killed people. Do you know that? But I fought for 'em, those, those heroes. I DIED for 'em. So, so did my son! I did all I could but he died anyway. That was my price... I'd have died all over again for him, for HER. They made me stronger. Better. Did you know they could do that? But she, she..."
"God man, I'm sorry. You're a vet ain't ya. Killing people -you been in the war? ...Rollin' a vet, leavin' him out here, that's the worst. Look, I've gotta finish my run down to Bangor, but there's a guy I know in Crowsbutt helps people, doesn't matter what trouble you're in, he can help ya. Get ya what you need."
"War? yes, I... Where? ...no! I don't need any... No one... can... help me!" Words failed as Rumple tried in vain to resist as the driver easily gathered him up. He managed one last "No!" then utterly spent, could only grab at the driver's parka and hang on. Before they'd made it halfway to the cab of the truck, the night seemed to swallow him whole.
—
The smell of bacon, over-toasted bread and extra strong coffee. ...So familiar... He opened an eye. The room was a blur, a white void, too bright. "Good morning, son. Feeling better?" For a moment the man that approached his cot, mug in hand, looked just like his father bringing him breakfast as he did when Rumple was a child. The thought startled him bolt upright.
"Careful there, Careful, you've been out for an entire day."
"What? What do you mean? Who are you? How did I get..."
"Not to worry, not to worry. I'm sorry, Mr. Gold. I'm Father Cailean, you are in my church in, ah, in a place you've probably never heard of, Crowsbutt, Crowsbutt, Maine?"
He handed Rumple the mug, who took it in both hands and only answered him with a wary shake of the head.
"Thought not, just one of those hidden places time forgot."
Rumple winced at the description, resting his head back against the wall along side his cot, clutching the warmth of the mug to his chest.
"Millie got you to an ER in Bangor before bringing you here."
"Millie?"
"You don't remember? Millie, the truck driver who found you?"
"Oh... yes." Rumple opened his eyes again to try and take in the man before him a little more clearly. He did resemble his own father, not that anyone would have mistaken HIM for a priest. Father Cailean looked older, wiser, and obviously more sympathetic, as would befit a man of the cloth. Which, Rumple noticed, hung overly large, thread-bare and moth-eaten from the square of his shoulders. Shoddy workmanship, he thought to himself.
"I'm afraid the police couldn't find your car or a phone. You didn't have very much identification, but there was still quite a bit of cash in your wallet."
"My wallet!?" Rumple quickly felt about the bedding looking for it.
"Not to worry, here it is." The priest took it from an inner pocket of his cassock and handed it over.
"I'll worry if I want to."
"Your choice."
Rumple snapped a glance at him while riffling through the bulging billfold, noting the hint of wit from this new benefactor, or was he a captor? Folding it again he reached to put it into a coat pocket only to find that he was not wearing his own clothes, just impossibly baggy, faded pajamas. "WHERE are my clothes!"
"A bit the worse for wear I'm afraid, but I've done my best," he replied, motioning to them draped over a chair by the far wall.
"I have to get out of here."
"Is there someone you need to notify?"
"Someone… no, no, not anymore."
"I'll have to arrange for transportation. It may take a while."
"I can pay."
"It's not that. The phone is out again. It often is. In the meantime you should rest." The padre rested a heavy hand on his shoulder and Rumple realized it took little effort to keep him from rising. "Not to... ahem. Don't worry. I'll bring the rest of your breakfast now; hope the toast hasn't burnt!"
—
A fork fell from sleeping fingers into the empty dish in Rumple's lap, ringing it like a bell. He startled awake, but this time fortified, clear-eyed, and, strangely, without the debilitating fear that had struck him down like an illness. The afternoon sun poured shadowless warmth into the simple white-washed rooms of the Father's apartment, but he was nowhere to be seen. Rumple took the opportunity of this solitude to test his footing and was pleasantly surprised to find his game leg expertly bound and supported. He could almost stand unaided, but was glad to find a sturdy cane of blonde wood thoughtfully hooked over the far end of his cot. With its support he crossed the room and changed into his own clothes.
—
"Thought I'd find you up here," called the Father from below. "Getting a breath of air? This must have been hard on your leg," he observed, as he himself trudged with difficulty up the steep stairs to join him in the bell tower.
"I like to know where I am." Rumple replied flatly. "Where's the town?"
"You're looking at it, or all that's left of it. Most everyone's left and the forest has reclaimed its own."
The padre inhaled the view with relish, "Makes you feel like you could fly, doesn't it?"
"There's just a lot of trees." Rumple observed even more flatly.
"Crowsbutt's never had a view of the sea, nor of the mountains, just a Little Main Street with a church and a LOT of trees. It was never much of anywhere or anything -unless you had the imagination to see it." At that, a flock of crows noisily left their hiding place along the rafters above them; escaping in a cacophony of loud complaints, flapping wings and vanishing tail feathers. Both men flinched and ducked out of the way.
"Well they didn't call it Crows' Butt for nothing." Father Cailean quipped over the din.
Even Rumple could not suppress a grudging chuckle. The Father good-naturedly pointed an accusing finger in his face, "There. There. See that? You've still got some smile in you." There was something all too familiar about his manner. Somehow the memory was more troubling than it should have been.
"Come on, let's get us down from here. I don't suppose you can fly?" cajoled Cailean. Back on terra firma he added, "Feel free to look around once you've rested, but like I say, there's very little outside to find." He motioned Rumple to sit in a pew. "I've got some nice bass in the freezer I've been saving. I'm going to go putter in the kitchen for dinner."
The little church was white-washed and rough hewn just like the father's apartment. Plain but festive with bright angular swatches of red and green cast by squares of colored glass in its windows . Rumple was puzzled to find no symbol there of any religion in particular. On the altar only a large book lay closed on an ornate stand. The stand itself belied the austerity of its surroundings. Gold, jewels, glinted in the light that sputtered from stout, thick candles on either side. Rumple certainly knew real gold when he saw it. It called to him, drew him. If the stand wasn't fascinating enough, the book upon it was even more so. It appeared to be a Christian bible, but it was like none he'd ever seen before. Bound in finest embossed leather, trimmed with every conceivable ornament, its pages illuminated in gold, hand-written in Latin, yet illustrated in the style of many lands from many time periods. Beautiful, but perplexing.
—
Having broke bread, Rumple now broke the comfortable silence that had been a welcome sauce to an otherwise plain but satisfying meal. "Your bible."
"Yes"
"I have some experience with antiquities."
"I noticed that on your card."
"I've never seen anything like it."
"I'm sure you haven't."
"What can you tell me about it?"
"Well, it's been here since the church's founding, that I know."
"It is very rare."
"Very valuable you mean? Not half as valuable as what's inside it, I can assure you."
"For true believers, perhaps."
"Perhaps, but I come from an ecumenical order in service to all. Our bible contains the teachings, the stories, of many faiths, some with quite different beliefs from one another."
"I know someone who believes that fate has an author. She believes that if you can find out who that author is, you can make him re-write your story and change your destiny."
"That would be one way to insure the proverbial 'happy ending'? Wouldn't it?"
"Yes. It would."
"Too bad getting what you want isn't always having what you need."
"What?"
"If life were a book, with fixed page numbers, chapters. If it always had exact beginnings and definite ends- that might be a wise quest. But life is always in motion, indefinite by nature, the most you can ever achieve in one place, at one time, in one moment, is balance."
"I've seen prophecies, ah, fulfilled."
"Self-fulfilled you mean. Prophecies never quite turn out as expected though do they?"
"Are you saying you believe fate is a delusion?"
"No, no more than I believe that all of history is a fiction."
"It's hopeless then, a tightrope walk forever ...until you fall."
"If that is your story, than aren't you, yourself its author?"
"You make it sound as if there is a choice in the matter, what if your story was forced upon you, made for you without, without, caring what would happen, what it would make of you?"
"That would make life itself a fiction don't ya think. You and I are not metaphors poured from some writer's pen. Stories need not necessarily be real to tell the truth. But life, no matter how you live it, is all that is truly real."
"That's an odd thing for a true believer to say."
"It depends on what you think truth is. Or should I say faith."
"Well, then who wrote your book?"
"Do you want me to say that God whispered his secrets into just a few Saints' willing ears? I'm not sure how accurately some of them may have taken the dictation. There's more to it than that. But I don't think of balance the way you do."
Father grabbed up the salt and pepper shakers and started prying off their lids.
"What are you doing?"
He made two equal piles on the clean but yellowed table cloth, one of salt, the other pepper.
"There. Call this space a moment of opportunity. It's all a great game. In it, good and evil, heroes and villains, if you like, are waiting to take an advantage. Here, they are equal adversaries at a stalemate, so no one wins. Even if one side were to completely overwhelm the other, there would still be nothing happening, no progress. Time would not move. ...But add motion..."
Half rising, he sculpted indentations into each pile, then with one sweeping gesture flowed them both equally into one another.
"...Now each side stays what they are, but are also a part of each other. The balance is maintained without having to stand still. Progress can happen. You see?"
"No. Not really."
The Father frowned down on his creation. "I'm forgetting something. Oh, yes! Into the heart of each is placed some of the other." So saying, he placed a pinch of salt in the pepper and then a spot of pepper upon the salt. "See now? No heart is pure. And in every situation you face there will be seeds planted that will cause change to come and keep the wheel of life forever turning in balance."
"I don't like it."
"Well, at least it allows for free will. It's better than waiting around for someone else to write down what you're going to say next!"
The two men sat in silence frowning at each other across the table for many moments ...as if waiting for a deus machina with a giant pen to descend upon them from above and write their next words for them. The image must have occurred to them both, for they threw down their napkins in mock dudgeon and laughed together at the nonsense.
—
Rumple found his host after dinner nodded off on a park bench in the little church's courtyard. He studied the man. Even asleep he was still smiling. How could he be so careless? So trusting. So confident that fate would be kind? There were no locks on his doors. No gate on this garden. He sheltered strangers under his roof, who could be anyone, who might do anything. A deep longing stirred in him for the trust he himself had first known but had been stolen from him as a child. He longed for the trusting embrace of his own child that he, himself, had betrayed. Longed for the trust he had felt again with Belle before she had been proven just as vulnerable and dangerous as everyone else. And he was right, she had become the most dangerous of all.
"I must be dreaming." Father Cailean yawned and stretched, "is this the same fellow Millie dragged in night before last?"
"In the flesh."
"I apologize for needing to catch up on my rest."
"Quite alright."
"You talk pretty loudly in your sleep you know."
"What!?" A threat. A definite threat. What did this man now know of him that even he himself did not know? He tensed and readied himself for defensive action. In a moment, the cane could become a weapon, the gateless entrance to the courtyard, an escape.
The Father saw the change in his guest's demeanor, "Sit with me," he said simply, "I didn't mean to eavesdrop. Consider anything said here as privileged as a confessional. It will go no further"
"What did I, what do you think you heard?"
"Delirium mostly. But I could make sense of some of it. Your wife, Belle? She threw you out of the house? Am I right?"
"I was about to do away with an old enemy, a man who had tried to do the same to me and would again." Rumple had tried to make it sound like a joke, but what had he just admitted to, and so easily!? He gripped the neck of the cane even tighter and tried not to look for a reaction.
"He stole your first wife." Rumple whirled around to stare into the priest's face at menacingly close range, looking for a reaction to what he was about to add in all seriousness: "I thought he had killed her, but I wound up doing it myself."
The priest merely raised an eyebrow, though the smile had gone, "I've heard worse done under the influence."
Perplexed at his inability to shock, Rumple rocked back, "Influence? What do you mean, influence?"
"I don't know what it was, you kept calling it power, or was it darkness? No, no, magic. That's it. Doesn't matter what it's called, addictions are all the same. They make you feel empowered, like you can do anything; but in the end all you are is its slave."
"Slave." If he understood nothing else, Rumple understood the living meaning of that word. It had a feel to it, the feeling of his son's dying breath upon his face, the feeling on his cheek of that hated dagger forcing him to look away. The same dagger Belle had just used to cut him out of her life, to abandon him. Everyone he had ever dared to love had, one way or another, abandoned him. Even his beautiful, beautiful Belle, no different from all those other beautiful things he had tried so hard to possess but could never, ever keep.
The priest seemed to sense an opportunity and tried to make it count, "No one gets it until they hit bottom and take a good look around. Then salvation becomes a matter of survival. And salvation? Salvation is all about forgiveness, forgiving others, forgiving even fate..." Now it was his turn to draw Rumple in close, "...forgiving yourself."
"NO! You don't know what you're talking about. What's been done to me. What I've done..." Rumple wrenched the priests hand away making him clutch at his shoulder in pain. "...The price I've paid."
"That's just it. You've paid it. The deal is done. You can go back. You can have all that you want. Just stop trying to force it to happen. "
"It can't be that simple."
"It's never that simple ...until it, until it just is."
They didn't notice the sun was setting, losing its way among the trees, getting lost behind countless hillsides, falling to sleep in every valley waiting for the next tomorrow to come. Light and dark forever turning the days round, just as Cailean had tried to describe. Both men again sat silently opposite each other, only this time it was not about some harmless existential argument. Rumple's anger seethed between them until he could stand it no longer: "Enough of this!"
"Where are you going?"
"It doesn't matter."
Rumpelstiltskin stormed back into the church, Cailean trailing behind him.
"I think you owe me something for wasting my time," Rumple snarled.
He marched up to the altar hooking his cane over his arm and roughly grabbed the book in one hand and the bejeweled stand in the other. He seemed to be about to weigh their worth against how hard one or the other would be to carry. But then he dropped the stand to the floor. "What is this? Where's the book that was here before? How did Henry's book get here?!" On closer inspection, he realized there was no title on its cover and when he opened it there were only blank pages. "This isn't Henry's. Where did you get this!? ...Are you the author?"
"No, no I am not."
"Then why are all these pages blank?"
"You have come to a new beginning, a new volume, you haven't written anything yet."
"This is all a lie, a trick!"
"No Rumple, it..."
The book landed with a thud back on the altar. "How do you know my name? How... do... you... know... MY... NAME!?" He had hold of Cailean's cassock and the fear he now saw in the man's eyes only kindled more suspicion.
"I heard it, in, in your sleep!"
"I ...don't ...believe ...you." He let go of him with a shove like he wasn't worth killing. "Oh you'll die here, Father Cailean or whoever you are. Alone, useless. This is what your truth gets you. That's what you have on offer. Empty pages? That's your great balancing act? Nothing in nowhere for nothing!"
"Son! son..." Cailean did not follow him as he left. In pain, he put his hand to his breast beneath the cassock and withdrew it covered in blood. "Die? Maybe. But you're only half right. ...Not alone."
At that a strange light filled the little church. The sound of wings and a voice that could be a fairy's spoke from all around him. "You've given him his best chance."
"Much too late." He observed in a voice that somehow no longer sounded like a man's. Indeed, where the man had stood was now the boy he had always wanted to remain. "But I've been, like a father to him?"
"Yes."
"Has the price been paid?" asked Peter Pan, now summoning up all his courage.
"Your shadow is waiting," the fairy voice replied.
Darkness encircled the defiant man/child now grown up in all but appearance. He bowed his head to the inevitable, but then suddenly looked back up again and challenged the dying light as fiercely as he could...
"Don't let it be too late!"
Rumple didn't hear him as he flung open the front doors of the church. The sounds of an oncoming semi were too loud. To his horror, its lights were heading straight for him as he stood in the doorway. All at once he found himself back again on the rainswept highway where Belle had left him, the oncoming truck almost upon him. Behind the wheel, laughing wickedly —and in full pirate garb— his first wife! He fell to his knees screaming, "Milah!" shooting out a hand between them. But the truck did not stop. It roared right through and past him like a breaking storm— or passing mirage —disintegrating around him as it went, then vanishing without trace.
Stunned, he knelt there trying to catch his breath, arm still out before him until he couldn't hold it up any longer. Its fall set him in motion and he scrambled to grassy safety at the side of the road as quickly as he could clamber. "It wasn't real, none of it. It, it, wasn't real!" He backed further away never taking his eyes from where the truck had been. Rumplestiltskin felt the bark of a fallen tree behind him and backed up and onto it. He kept repeating to himself, "It wasn't real. It wasn't real! It wasn't real! It was, it was just a dream. A dream!"
It was then while still trying to perch without falling, just as he had finally steadied his nerves by believing it all to have been a hallucination, that he felt something hard, smooth, and familiar behind him. He turned to look down at what it was and found a blonde wooden cane set against the log behind where he sat. ...Put there as if waiting for him.