Her dealings with Hook—'relationship' sounded like something you had with people who didn't say 'matey' or make tired innuendoes about where to stick a sword—had never suggested that the guy was sentimental.
The picture, therefore, felt to her displaced—the only personal object in the Captain's stylish but utilitarian quarters. Wrinkled, faded, frayed around the edges-preserved under glass, quite lovingly, and unmistakably of a woman. She felt herself drawn to it, and wandered closer, before remembering with a jolt his tattoo.
Milah.
The sound of the name in her head burned her, made Emma physically step back. She hated it when people pried into her past, so she'd kept the questions to a minimum when dealing with him. It was easier that way. The drawing was enshrined in a velvet casing; it reminded her of the pictures of saints they put in churches, a tribute to times when people at least pretended to believe in something. Curiosity overtook her scruples, and she leaned in closer again.
"An excellent likeness."
Though she was expecting him, Gold's voice made Emma jump. It baffled her that a middle-aged guy with a cane could sneak around on a wooden ship.
They hadn't talked much since getting on.
She heard the steps of a man whose gait—normally so direct, a rhythmic tapping like the ticking of a clock—seemed shiftless and were slower. They had lost their purpose. He sounded older walking across the floorboards of Hook's master bedroom; Emma thought of looking in his eyes to see it. That's where age always started to show first.
He stopped somewhere behind her, close, because she could hear steady breathing. There was nothing else for them to look at but the tattered portrait, a museum of one piece.
"It's beautiful."
"And accurate. It's a self-portrait. The artist was unschooled, but had a natural talent for seeing things for…what they truly were."
"That's Milah, right?"
"Oh, yes," he leaned forward to examine more closely, appreciative of the artistry. "She's of particular interest to you."
"How so?"
"That's Henry's grandmother."
At that moment she knew what a 'pang in the heart' felt like.
"…Neal's mom?"
He nodded. She realized he hadn't taken his eyes off it since he walked in the room. Emma joined in him in his scrutiny, drinking in the face with .
"People often said Bae took after her." She traced eyebrows, a mass of tangled dark hair, that expression that seemed to be looking beyond her and Gold and this unnaturally small room.
Neal had always dreamed of enclosed spaces and warm food. Modest, domestic dreams.
"I think he looked more like you," She replied, finally.
Looked. Past tense. She hasn't talked to Gold about Neal. She doesn't want to.
He sighed.
"More's the pity."
Her eyes flicked away from the picture to him to ask a question she doesn't need to ask.
"Did you really kill her?"
"Yes."
She should be horrified by the admission that he'd murdered the mother of his child, but his bald honesty strikes her harder.
"You didn't ask to speak to me about my late wife, surely."
"Uh, no…I didn't. It's something else." She puts it out of her head—she's got to focus, which is what she's good at anyway. Focus is what pulls in bounties, a narrow vision, and Henry is the biggest bounty of her life. "About…magic."
"What about it?" She was channeling her father in that moment, all raw determination and guts. He knew what she wanted, had probably known for days, and was apparently prepared to let her work for it.
"If we're going to…Neverland—I need to be prepared. And I'm not. I know that now." She could feel the butt of her revolver through the coat—a comfort and reminder.
"From your time in the Enchanted Forest?"
"I tried to shoot an ogre," Emma said, flatly. "With a gun."
"I see." Immediately she was playing hardball with a guy who hadn't come the worse out of a deal in two hundred years. "Well, Ms. Swan, I must confess, I'm surprised you didn't ask Regina. Mothers united in the pursuit of their common son—"
"I did. She told me to go to you." Her next words produced a thin smile from him. "She told me you wouldn't have anything better to do."
"Classic. Did the queen warn you of my tendency towards veiled motives?"
"She did. But Regina doesn't know why you're on this boat, Gold. I do."
He met her eyes then, stared, searchingly—puzzling things out, because from what she could tell, that was how he operated. Wait and see, convince other people to do the heavy lifting, that was Gold's way. She didn't think she'd have to argue with him over this, it was something a year ago he would have persuaded Emma into wanting.
It surprised her when the man looked back at the drawing as though he had not heard her.
"Before she left with Hook, it never would have occurred to me to raise a hand to my wife." Emma could no longer hear him breathing—something about him felt less human. "It wasn't my way. I couldn't bring myself to fight for her, either. But when I saw Milah again—this was after I became the Dark One, after I lost Baelfire—I had magic. I had power, for the first time in my life I felt as though nothing could hurt me—and if it did, I could hurt it back tenfold. So when she told me she never loved me, it was so easy to rip out her heart and crush it into dust."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"You have to understand." He crossed to Hook's desk and the impressive high-backed chair. The visual was as startling as his confession. "You must understand the magnitude of what you're undertaking."
When she didn't immediately reply, he considered her, thoughtful, putting on the hat of the concerned high school guidance counselor.
"Have you discussed this with your parents?"
"I don't need their permission."
"I'll take that as a 'no.'"
She picked up the only portable object in the room, a cast-iron paperweight, wondering what he'd do to her if she threw it at the back of his head.
"Why does that matter?"
"Your mother and father don't mind traversing Neverland without the aid of magic." He was so mild, so reasonable, a familiar urge to deck him boiled beneath Emma's surface. She sure as hell didn't need life lessons from him. "Why do you?"
"I've seen Mary Margaret shoot an arrow through an ogre's eye, and from what I understand, David's alright with a sword."
"A gift he's passed onto you—and one that you could hone as easily."
She got in his face, matching steely look with impassive brown eyes.
"Look. I'm going to be a lot more useful if I've got an ace-in-the-hole. Like magic. So either you agree to teach me, or we stay in this room until you do."
For about a half second she thought she might've actually scared him. In reality, his stare back lay somewhere on the scale between amused and endeared.
"I can see you're determined." The words rolled off his tongue as does that which tastes familiar . Gently he got out of his chair and pushed past her; he paced up and down the narrow oak slates of the room. He was either thinking or giving her time to think. "There's a question I ask every person I teach—or rather, a question I ask that they ask themselves. How you answer will determine whether I take you on as a pupil or not."
"What do you want to know?"
Rumplestiltskin stopped his forced march; a sudden jerking motion, the breaking of a car. He's stopped in front of his dead wife's picture.
"Why do you want this?"
"I need to save my son."
A choked laugh, racked with irony, bounces off the walls and echoes a thousand times in a second.
"You think magic can save him?"
He is raw pain wrapped in vicious urbanity in that moment, and it makes her want to shake him, shake whatever's haunting him out of him (and out of her.)
"If you didn't think so, why the hell are you on this boat?"
He blinked and didn't reply—she knew she'd reasoned him into a corner, and it was satisfying in a totally different way than punching Regina or body-slamming Tamara was. If she beat him, she could get something out of it that was worth a hell of lot more than brief satisfaction. His respect paid dividends.
"There's something else I want to know." He concedes her point, informally. "How did it make you feel?"
"How did—"
"Casting the protection spell, assisting Regina," He waved his hand. "Magic. Tell me, honestly."
She didn't hesitate.
"Pretty damn good."
The resignation in his eyes told her that she'd won the battle.
"That's always how it starts."
It was a hollow win at best.
The Savior didn't know what she'd said to change his mind, only that she had. He told her it's because he has too much respect for the art of sorcery to watch Regina butcher teaching it. Emma could see that's a lie right off, or at least a half-truth. He doesn't tend to outright lie, only when she asked him, offhandedly, how he's doing does she see what she calls the honest liar. He doesn't even try to pretend that he's okay.
He's right that her parents aren't happy with the arrangement—it makes sense, he knows them better than she does, in a way. David sees her as his little princess. That frustrates her because of how badly she wants it deep down; it's difficult to fight an impulse she's repressed for almost thirty years when the question has its answer. Mary Margaret sees herself in Emma, fears that Emma might walk her path. During her "classes" all they can see is the Dark One, and it scares Snow and Charming to see him transfer anything of himself to their daughter.
All she can see is Neal's dad.
Neal is the constant, unbroken and unspoken thread that binds them together. She has her mother and father and Regina to remind her of why they got on the Jolly Roger in the first place—but Neal she guards jealously, a secret, sacred tomb deep in the pit of her heart. Only Gold can intrude on her grief, because he's the only one who knows what's been lost. Hook mourns for the mother, her parents for her sake.
Only she and Gold loved him. Just him.
He's not touchy-feely. She likes that, neither is she. It's a welcome change from Mary Margaret and David, who are well meaning but relentless in their pushing. They think talking about it will help, but Emma knows that saying the words out loud will only cement the helplessness she feels. Magic is something physical, like weightlifting with the power of your raw rage; she prefers to move books across Hook's bolted table with her mind than dwell on what she can't change.
Gold changes. He speaks less, but with more purpose. In their lessons, he makes her repeat what he calls "essential magical truths" so often she wishes for a tape recorder.
"Alright—" she snapped, after the one hundredth recitation. 'Rain in Spain fell mainly on the plain' her ass. "I'll remember the limits of splitting magic—cool your jets, Obi-Wan."
Gold frowned, confused. Confusion was too pedestrian a state for him. He had grown so comfortable in extraordinariness that it made everyone else nervous when he wasn't.
"What did you call me?"
Not much makes her laugh these days, but his cluelessness nearly got her to that place.
"What, you never seen Star Wars, Gold?" Neal hadn't liked Star Wars. He hadn't liked anything not grounded in "what was solidly real", but she'd made him sneak into a divey movie theater in Toledo to watch it anyway. For weeks afterwards Emma gave him crap about being scared, because he'd nearly squeezed her hand numb during the "intense" moments.
"I guess it hit too close to home, Em." He's joking, laughing it off, not meeting her eyes.
"Oh, come on, Neal. I had some crappy foster homes, but no way was your dad on the same level as Darth Vader."
"I can't say that I have."
The curse hadn't seen fit to give a Scottish pawnbroker false memories of basic pop culture, apparently. It was Gold's curse, maybe it wanted to cut him slack, in a weird way. It felt like they were all living in a fantasy movie half the time, who needed the Hollywood stuff?
When they were home again, she wanted to take Henry fishing.
"It's a movie. Obi-Wan's a character. He teaches the main guy about the Force. It's basically magic," she hastily adds, noticing how disconcerted he is. "In their world."
"And I…bear some resemblance to this man?"
"Not that much. He was a good guy."
His mouth turned upward, the facsimile of a smile.
"I can see where the comparison would deteriorate."
"I just feel like I'm the last of the Jedi over here, or something." Again, he looked blank. "Like I'm the last person you're ever going to tell about this."
"Maybe you are."
She stretched her arms, not wanting to waste this break, and leaned on the railing. To the untrained observer he might've been her yoga instructor.
"I thought there were only three certainties in life," She yawned, trying to touch her toes. The boat was too damn small, what she needed more than a shower was a sprint. "Death, taxes, and you outliving everyone."
"There are three certainties: the past, the future, and our inability to change either."
His bleakness left her numb, made her drop her foot. Clunk.
"You really believe that, don't you?"
"I know it." He breathed deeply of the salt air on the deck and gestured with a finger that they would begin again soon and to not get comfortable. "What happened to this…Obi-Wan, after he taught his hero?"
She abandoned the railing and took her place on his right. Every second is one closer to Henry, and she's not about to waste time.
"He dies. He sacrifices himself so the heroes can get away."
"Doesn't sound much like me."
She knows him. Not like her parents, or Regina—but she knows that expression. Emma saw more of Neal in Gold than she could ever say, because words and names and deals were his bag, not hers. But she recognized that resigned hardening in his eyes like she did her own face.
It was the last thing she saw before he let go.
"No. Not at all."