Disclaimer: I don't own Once, or any characters therein. However, I am taking one of them out for a spin around the block. I promise to return him in relatively the same shape I found him. Maybe.
First off, this is the first story I'm posting here. Second, it's not a nice story. It is dark and twisted and angsty and sprung pretty much full blown from my mind this morning (what does that say about me?). The imagery may be disturbing to some. That said, if you want to proceed, please do so at your own risk.
Summary: What do you do when there's nothing you can do? A captive thinks on his past and his future.
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Darkness Abides
He was in a cave. He knew that much. The cold dampness seeped into his bones; the stygian darkness preventing him from seeing anything of his surroundings. He was naked. His arms and legs bound tightly to the sides of a stone altar. Unable to move, he awaited his next torment. He knew it would come. It always did.
He did not know how long he had been a prisoner in the darkness. Was it only a matter of days? Weeks? Months? Or had it been years? He had no way of knowing, but he surmised that it had been a considerable time. Either months or, more likely, years. He didn't know how many times he had died on the altar, nor how many times he had died by other means. But die he did.
Always to be resurrected for the next torment.
At times like these, his mind began to wander as he waited. To wonder. Was the cave really as dark as he thought? Or did he simply no longer have any eyes with which to see? He expected that he did have eyes for he recalled having them burned from his skull by hot pokers, but he also recalled his eyes being quite literally popped by knotted ropes that were tied over them before being tightened.
He recalled his fingernails being torn from his body, yet he could feel them scraping over the rough-hewn stone.
Every part of him, then, was restored for the next round.
He was never able to recall how he wound up in the positions he found himself upon awakening. He suspected that a decision regarding how he was to die next was made following each death that he experienced, and his body, or what was left of it, was then placed appropriately to await his resurrection.
Who made those decisions and why burned through his thoughts and, if he was honest with himself, he supposed that he deserved his fate. He hadn't lived the most honorable life. He could not recall the number of people he had hurt and killed while he was alive - some for the most trivial of reasons.
But, really, he wondered, couldn't he have had at least a modicum of happiness before suffering this never ending fate? Would that have been too much?
He thought back over the various means by which he had died. Each of them made as painful as they possibly could be. Being blinded and burned. Boiled alive. Whipped until his flesh hung from his body in bloody ribbons. And others he would really rather not dwell on. So many methods of torment, yet he found the altar to be one of the worst.
As he anticipated what was to come, his thoughts began to break apart; to tatter and shred.
Was this, then, what was wanted? Would his torment end when his mind was fully lost to never ending pain? Or would his thoughts always heal with the rest of his body to begin anew? Would he spend eternity dying and being reborn? Would he spend eternity knowing he would continually die and be reborn?
His thoughts spiraled away from him again when he heard a soft scrape that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. His body shuddered as he began to anticipate the first cut of many. Each cut that would remove a tiny portion of his flesh until there was none left. He knew - recalled - that the pain would be excruciating. His nerve endings raw and exposed. That the pain would go on for what would be hours. Or was it days? Whichever, he knew his mind would have unraveled before the bloody mess that was his still breathing body was given over to the ravening hounds? that waited to fed on what was left of him.
This was always one of the hardest deaths to return from. He knew it in his very bones.
He had created a curse that destroyed a world in order that he could be reunited with his son. A curse that tore other families apart to restore his own.
The curse had been broken as planned, but for the first time he could recall, he had made a serious misstep that resulted in something he had never anticipated. Something that had never occurred to him. He supposed that it should have, though, given what Rheul Gorm had said to him after he lost his precious boy: That the power of the Dark One did not belong in their world.
He had never thought to question the source of the power. Or why it was controlled by a cursed dagger. Or how the dagger had come to be cursed. The power just was.
He knew now. Oh, how he knew.
It had come from this realm. A realm of darkness and demons. Of pain and suffering.
It was a being from this realm, and it was furious. Furious at having been forced from its own realm. Furious at being bound to and controlled by something as insignificant as a dagger. Furious at being trapped within the body of a coward. Furious at being forced into a realm of light and goodness. A place anathema to it. Inimical.
And it was taking its revenge on him for the centuries - Millennia? - of its own torment. He was paying the price for having had the power of the Dark One. For all of the Dark Ones before him. But most especially for whoever or whatever had first drawn the being from its own realm into his and made it a slave.
When he had brought magic to Storybrooke, he had not anticipated that the Dark One had been separated from him by the curse. That after so many centuries, his body had adapted itself to use magic, and, although he had retained the ability to use magic, he was no longer the Dark One. That he was free of the curse. But his ability to use magic was still bound to the dagger, allowing him to be controlled by it as always.
He had opened a portal to what remained of the Enchanted Forest to bring magic to a world that had none. Unbeknownst to him at the time, though, the being had also come through. An inky blackness that crept from the well under cover of night and had kept hidden in the darkest corners. Had traveled through the darkness until it found its former host. Then it had torn him from his new realm, his new life, and taken him to its own. He knew this in the deepest recesses of his mind. How he knew, he was unsure. But he did know. Perhaps he had become attuned to the being over the centuries and that was how he knew.
He wasn't quite sure how it was possible for the being to bring him here. He thought that, perhaps, the portal he had opened somehow linked to other realms through various small interstices and that the being had discovered that it could return home during its passage through the portal. But not before retrieving its prey. Its soon to be victim.
A small susurrus of sound caught his attention an instant before he felt the first cut. His blood welling up to the surface of his flesh provided a brief flash of warmth before the flaying truly began and the pain flooded his body and scattered his thoughts.
For a brief moment, before the coherency of his thoughts fully left him, he had to admit to himself that, for torture, the methods used were quite inventive.
Then he began to scream.