Warnings: Mention of (canon) suicide attempt, references to past torture.
A/n: Beta read by the amazing killingkueen (killerkueen on Ao3). None of this would exist without her.
"To keep a man like the Dark One as a slave?" his target gasped.
Zozo stopped breathing.
He could kill this man right here, right now.
Rumplestiltskin shifted in discomfort. "I'd be terrified."
Zozo breathed again.
'Terrified' wasn't the correct word. This man understood the foolishness inherent in the idea. 'Horrified' might be more appropriate.
Zozo's estimation of him kicked up a notch. He'd chosen well. If he did not succeed in provoking him - for he thought Rumplestiltskin would need to be pushed into murder - he must be able to live with his choice.
Although… anyone would be better than the duke. Anyone at all.
"Then perhaps," he suggested, as though the idea were only just occurring to him, "instead of controlling the power, you need to take it."
There was nothing this man would not do for his son. Zozo told him how.
He'd planted the seed, now he needed to let it grow. Meanwhile….
It had been a long time since anyone had approached Zozo with anything but control, pain and degradation in mind. He wanted to feel alive, just once, before dying.
He set his bowl aside and reached out, slowly - Rumplestiltskin would startle like a squirrel. He touched his chin.
Brown eyes widened.
If what he'd learned about the man was true, Rumplestiltskin hadn't had another's welcome hand on him in almost as long as Zozo himself.
He tilted his head in question. "I would not want to impose upon my host."
Rumplestiltskin drew away, aghast. "You needn't. You helped me."
Zozo let his hand fall. Rumplestiltskin thought he felt himself obligated? The town coward was far too decent for this world. Zozo almost regretted what he planned to do to him in passing on the curse.
Almost. Maybe Rumplestiltskin wouldn't cause as much damage as Zozo had.
The man's pride had been wounded tonight. Let him have a taste of power; Zozo could play the part. It was far from the first time he'd found himself on his knees. But lowering himself down, he thought that it was the first time he'd found anyone worthy of it.
Zozo mused, with dark humor, that he'd better succeed in provoking him. Rumplestiltskin had no idea who he was; here, he was just a beggar.
The least of men, Zozo kissed him, gently.
His target was practically virginal. He jumped and shied and froze.
Zozo had been wrong; Rumplestiltskin wasn't a squirrel - he was a colt, gangly and skittish, the whites of his eyes bright and wary in the candlelight.
He needed to be coaxed.
Thin trousers covered Rumplestiltskin's thighs; the inner muscles of them shivered.
He laid his hand there, and waited.
The brown was really quite striking.
Rumplestiltskin huffed, and the whites surrounding his irises receded. "Me?" he asked, skeptically.
He thought so little of himself that a beggar would not wish to touch him?
The easy reasons wouldn't do.
"I've never seen anyone go as far as you did for your son," Zozo told him honestly.
Rumplestiltskin's whole body stiffened, and he looked away. "You want me because you saw me - like that?"
Some men were aroused by the humiliation of others. Some, such as the duke, were unable to achieve an erection without that stimulus.
Zozo had become less responsive with each passing year. Conversely, the duke had gotten more creative.
He sighed. "Because I saw you like that. I wished I'd had a father who loved me, that much."
Some men clung so tightly to their pride. He'd lost his years ago.
Rumplestiltskin looked back at him, slowly.
"Not that I would want that to happen," he amended, "but maybe I would have turned out differently."
This time when he kissed him, Rumplestiltskin didn't pull away, but kissed back, hesitantly.
Zozo pressed forward, wedged his hips into his. He was taller than Rumplestiltskin, standing; on his knees he could kiss him without strain.
"You've had something taken from you," he said, when they stopped to breathe.
Those brown eyes were guarded.
"Take it back from me."
They flew wide. "What?"
He laughed, and tried to conceal the harsh edge. "I'll live." Whether he wanted to or not. "Let me do this."
With Rumplestiltskin so close, Zozo could feel him hardening. He liked this idea, whatever he might say.
However, power over the willing was far different than power over the unwilling. Zozo knew this better than most.
"I wouldn't know how to begin," Rumplestiltskin confessed.
That made sense. Cruelty was learned. Ah well. Other things were simple. He glanced across the room to where the man's son slept soundly.
It was too cold outside to go elsewhere for privacy. There was another bed made up in the opposite corner, a curtain separating it from the small living space. Rumplestiltskin led him there.
"We must not wake my son," he warned Zozo.
Zozo kissed him. He would have liked to hear him, but this would do. This would do nicely.
He made sure they did not wake the boy, though Rumplestiltskin could not know that he'd muffled the sound of their activities.
Neither could he know that the man who lowered himself to his knees at his hearth, and then onto his cock in his bed, was the most powerful sorcerer in the nine realms, were he free to do as he wished.
Soon, it would not matter.
He slipped away before dawn. To his surprise, he regretted that their association must end.
Every Dark One has two sets of memories like this, mirrors of the same event. The other inherited memories are more distant to each individual. These stand out.
He was close; he could feel it. He only had to find the right key. He'd tried several, but this one….
He sneered. "What a poor bargain that would be, to lay down your soul to save your bastard son."
Rumplestiltskin went still.
The wide hood hiding most of his cursed appearance, and anything Rumplestiltskin might recognize, Zozo's mouth stretched into the rictus of a cadaver's smile. "So I ask you, what would you have me… do?"
He held his breath, hoping.
Rumplestiltskin wavered. An eternity passed, then, "Die," he rasped, swinging the dagger, all of his unbalanced weight behind it.
There was a wet, grating clank of metal scraping past bone. Zozo had never expected to feel such satisfaction at being stabbed, right before the pain seared through him.
They tumbled to the ground, Rumplestiltskin driving the dagger further. Now there was anger - protective rage. He'd touched a nerve, there. He'd known it would.
He'd have to remember that for… there would be no 'later.' He'd done it.
He felt the magic shift sideways, his cursed face slip away, and coughed, blood tickling his lungs. He laughed, a high wheezing sound he hadn't made in years, Rumplestiltskin's warm weight on top of him.
There was nothing so intimate as killing another person. Or being killed, as he now learned.
Puzzled confusion filled the other man's face, followed by betrayal. "It's you," he whispered, pushing himself up. "You're the beggar."
Zozo smirked. He'd won. "Looks like you made a deal you didn't understand." He wheezed with laughter. "I don't think you're gonna do that again."
Rumplestiltskin shook his head. "You told me to kill you." Was it a question?
"My life was such a burden," he spat.
Skeptical disbelief quirked the other man's brow.
"You'll see," Zozo responded with grim certainty, even as his own blood threatened to choke him. "Magic always comes with a price. Now it's yours to pay."
The air he breathed was becoming scarce. It wasn't the first time he'd felt that burn.
It was the first time he'd been allowed to die.
He coughed.
"Why me?" Rumplestiltskin demanded.
Zozo grinned, not a bit sorry. "I know how to recognise a desperate soul." He'd heard the phrase somewhere.
Why wasn't he dying? He should be dead by now.
He looked down, and knew. The dagger was in the wrong place; it pierced his lung, but not his heart.
"You fool!" he wheezed.
Rumplestiltskin stared at him, bewildered and perhaps questioning the same; Zozo should be dead.
Mad laughter hurt, and his life wasn't fading away. His magic would have healed around a normal knife, but not this one, not the dagger that bound his soul.
"Get it out!" He wouldn't beg; it was disgust.
He could no more touch the dagger buried in his chest than he could command his own will.
Rumplestiltskin clung to both, his desperate possession forbidding him, freezing his limbs in place. Every breath pained him, cut the wound open further, but he wasn't dying. The little cripple couldn't even kill him properly.
He was well and truly trapped now.
Rumplestiltskin followed his gaze to the cursed blade and reddened.
Zozo's flesh made a wet sucking sound as the blade withdrew, but he didn't heal. Not from his own dagger, not while it was wielded by another. More blood flooded into the gaps left, and he choked.
He wasn't allowed to die.
"Do it!" he snarled, hoping Rumplestiltskin would finish the job.
"You tricked me," he accused instead, rising to kneel over him, the dagger red with Zozo's blood.
His name still written there mocked him.
"'S what you wanted, wasn't it?"
Rumplestiltskin shook his head. "All I wanted was my son's safety."
"All I wanted was to die," Zozo countered resentfully. "The Dark Ones have a long and glorious tradition of suicide."
"And you'd have passed that to me?" Rumplestiltskin asked indignantly.
"I'd have escaped," he muttered, coughing.
Rumplestiltskin pushed aside his torn robe, examining the wound. "Do you normally heal?" he asked curiously.
Zozo growled. "Can't."
The burn was filling his pierced lung, drowning him.
Brown eyes questioned him, puzzled. "Why?"
A direct query. "You made it. I can't." He struggled for breath.
"What if I told you to?"
"Why would you do that?" Half of it came out in a gurgle.
Rumplestiltskin blinked, understanding him anyway. "Because I'm not a monster?"
Zozo laughed, and choked. "I am."
His hand tightening on the blade which lay naked upon his thigh, Rumplestiltskin said, "Zozo, heal yourself." There was something exasperated in the words.
The wounds closed, his cursed face slipping back over his skin, and Rumplestiltskin climbed off to let him roll over, coughing blood onto the ground.
His hand rested on his shoulder. Zozo was surprised to find it comforting.
When there was no more blood, Rumplestiltskin sighed, pulling out a stained cloth and cleaning the blade. Zozo watched him from where he lay, his belly knotting.
"What do I do now?" his master wondered.
Zozo snorted. "Anything you want."
Rumplestiltskin looked up. "Can you stop the ogres, bring my son safely to me?"
It wasn't an order, but he owed this man. Deals and violence and betrayal, those were the currency the Dark Ones operated in.
He flicked his hand. Magic rushed out. He let the hand fall to the ground.
"They're gone?" Rumplestiltskin asked.
There was the snap of a twig, and the man's son stumbled into the clearing, his wrists bound with tight straps of leather.
Rumplestiltskin rushed to him, heedless of his gimpy leg. "Bae!" he cried. He wrapped the boy in his embrace, tears streaming down his cheeks.
A twitch of Zozo's fingers, and the straps dissolved from the boy, who yelped as circulation returned. They would have damaged him had they been there much longer. Zozo's hatred for the duke's men was rooted in years of similar incidents, both casual and deliberate cruelty.
Baelfire's eye was blackened and beginning to swell. Rumplestiltskin drew back and touched it, making his son flinch.
"Papa?"
"Yes!" The man wept unashamedly. He cupped his face, drinking him in and ghosting shaking fingers around the edges of the bruise.
Whatever his neighbors said about this man, there was no denying that he loved his son.
Rumplestiltskin kissed Baelfire's brow and turned in Zozo's direction. "Come, you need to meet someone."
Baelfire wrapped an arm around his father's waist and followed, looking on in surprise. He helped Rumplestiltskin to the ground, sitting close beside him. "You're the Dark One?" the boy asked.
Zozo sat up, watching them cautiously. He nodded.
"We met you on the road, didn't we?"
"Your father would be the new Dark One right now if he hadn't had such sorry aim."
Baelfire's eyes widened. Then he winced, the bruised eye fluttering in pain. "Papa?"
Rumplestiltskin huffed. "I lost me mind. He said you weren't worth…." He trailed off, hugged his son to his side, glaring at Zozo.
"It almost worked, too," Zozo grumbled. He reached over, magic curling about his fingers, and made the bruise go away.
Baelfire blinked, his eye refocusing. He smiled at him, a tiny thing.
Something long dead inside Zozo warmed. He touched the boy's wrists. These were small magics to him.
"Are the ogres gone?" the boy asked, flexing his hands in relief.
Zozo laughed. The sound startled him. "They're gone."
Baelfire shook his head, his dark curls shifting. "Just like that." He sounded bemused.
"Your father asked me to." His gaze drifted to the man, clinging to his son before him. He wondered when he would be ordered to fix the man's leg. The demands never stopped, the larger magics taking their toll on him. All magic came with a price indeed. When someone else commanded his magic, it was he who paid the price they owed, later.
Death; killing was easy. Life; the process of living - now that was difficult. It went against everything the dark magic wanted, and the price was always steeper for it.
Rumplestiltskin considered him thoughtfully. His eyes were still rimmed in red, his cheeks damp. Then he adjusted his grip on the dagger. Zozo flinched despite himself, the briars wrapping tighter 'round his soul.
Rumplestiltskin reversed the blade, and offered it back to him.
Zozo stared.
"Why?" he asked. This didn't happen. This never happened, had never happened, not in all of his inherited memories.
Rumplestiltskin tilted his head. "I know better than to keep a man like the Dark One as a slave. It would be… unwise."
Zozo took the dagger with a trembling hand. It had been years since he'd held it, foolish cad that he'd been.
He'd hoped to have opportunity to later provoke the man, but now knew he would not have been able to, not after that first time.
He'd given Rumplestiltskin what he wanted. There was nothing now.
He banished the thing to the bottom of the ocean, deep under rock.
"You don't need it to use your magic?" Baelfire asked.
"That's how I lost possession of it." Zozo stood, summoned the staff to his hand, and pulled Rumplestiltskin easily to his feet.
At the edge of the forest, a woman's joyful shout mingled with a girl's higher pitch.
"Morraine," Baelfire whispered, his head turning.
Zozo detained him. "Don't tell them how," he cautioned. "It could be dangerous for you both."
Baelfire nodded. Already primed to bolt, he looked to his father.
"I'm fine, son," the man assured Baelfire, a quirk of his lips. It was an echo of eons ago.
So affectionate, these two. A wistful ache clawed at Zozo's blackened heart.
Baelfire hugged his father, pride shining from him, and dashed off. Closer to the village, they heard him calling to a neighbor.
Rumplestiltskin turned to him. "Was it an act?"
"Some of it." The obvious parts.
"Not all?"
Mutely, Zozo shook his head.
Rumplestiltskin studied him for a long moment, then laid his palm on his cheek and kissed him.
"Why?" Zozo asked. This wasn't how the world worked; good men like Rumplestiltskin did not kiss monsters like Zozo.
"You gave my son back to me."
"I tried to give you my curse."
"You left, and then you tried to trick me into killing you."
"Lousy job you did of it."
Rumplestiltskin turned to leave.
"Wait."
He planted his staff in the dirt, peered at him over his shoulder.
Sometimes the price of magic was negligible, when he had the choice to bend it. It was always greater than it seemed. However….
His eyes flicked down, at the man's ruined leg, back up to brown. "For a warm hearth and a meal, when a beggar asks."
Puzzlement gave way to hope. The Dark Ones had always been known to make deals with the desperate, though never for so uneven a trade. This was not how the world worked.
"You would?" the cripple asked.
Hadn't he said? Zozo waited.
Rumplestiltskin's reply was a kiss, setting them both off balance.
Zozo bore him to the ground, still stained with his blood, and pulled his head down for more. He wanted.
He felt alive.
Rumplestiltskin began to crawl up his body, his slighter weight warm in the morning chill. He winced when his foot encountered a stone, and Zozo wrapped his fist in his tunic.
"No more," he said, and pushed the magic outward.
Rumplestiltskin slumped into his chest, breathing harshly. His leg twitched, experimentally.
Stunned brown eyes looked up at Zozo. Rumplestiltskin pulled the leg under him, put his weight upon it.
Zozo grinned. "Going to run off on me?" he asked.
"Bastard." Rumplestiltskin rolled, took Zozo with him, set his feet upon the ground and arched up into him. He was hard.
"I've every intention of following through." Zozo's hips rocked, ground into him.
"You left me," Rumplestiltskin accused him again, thrusting.
"That was the plan," Zozo said. He pressed down into him, pinned him in the dirt and rustling leaves. The man was made up of angles and edges.
He was stronger than he looked. He bucked up into him. "Don't."
Rumplestiltskin would make demands of him? He reached down, fisted his cock through his thin trousers, watched him gasp and writhe.
"Don't what?" he asked, when he'd made him come.
He wasn't immune to retribution. Perhaps living would not be so terrible.
They could do without the mess. These were small magics.
Rumplestiltskin watched him, sated. "Did you mean it?" he tried, cautiously. "A warm hearth and a meal?"
"When a beggar asks," Zozo replied, levelly.
"Then I expect you to ask. Often."
"I would not ask, if I were not welcome."
"You're off your head."
Zozo had a duke to kill, next.
He would kill the duke's men as well, if only because no one must conclude that the spinner who was no longer lame had consorted with the Dark One these nights past.
Dark Ones did not love. This was not how the world worked.
One day, months later, he kissed Rumplestiltskin, and felt strange.
He scrunched his nose. "What's happening?"
"Your face was changing."
"Changing how?"
"It looked human again, Zozo."
"Like your curse was going away?" Baelfire asked, coming over to see.
Zozo stopped breathing. Dark Ones did not love.
This was not how the world worked.
True love was silly, a child's tale, a myth.
True love had broken at least two curses that he knew of, more if he delved back into inherited memory.
"True love can break any curse," he told them.
There was a whoop, and Rumplestiltskin was kissing him. The curse unravelled from Zozo's soul, long-entrenched briars ripping loose, tearing from him.
Zozo was human again.
The curse was not dissipating.
It was not gone.
It rose into the air above them in a sibilant fwipping of flung ropes, malevolent tendrils which sought a host to devour.
The curse was not destroyed, only dislodged, and it set its sights on Rumplestiltskin's son.
Then Zozo knew no more.
Baelfire was there when he woke. The boy's expression was worried. The boy was human.
"Papa went out," he told Zozo.
No.
A human heart broke so much easier than his had been able to in many years.
He sat up.
"Rumplestiltskin," he whispered, a lump in his throat.
There was no sound, only the Dark One, shadowed at his side.
Zozo flung himself into his arms without hesitation. He wept, a babbled string of apologies spilling into the chasm between them.
Rumplestiltskin shook his head. "You didn't know." He kissed Zozo's cheek, a gesture that Zozo would never be able to return.
He'd made the error of loving too much, and it was Rumplestiltskin who paid the price of magic.
Once, Zozo would have done anything to be rid of his curse. Now, he would take it back again in an instant if it meant that Rumplestiltskin did not have to bear it.
Resigned, he tried, "You won't give it back?"
"It's too dangerous," Rumplestiltskin said, suddenly wary.
Zozo sighed, and held him tightly. The power had been intoxicating, in the beginning. "Tell me that you hid the dagger."
Rumplestiltskin laughed, the stiff set to his muscles relaxing. Laughed? "I had a good teacher."
Zozo drew back, examined him. He was right in his suspicions.
"The curse does not lay as heavily upon you?" he dared to ask.
Rumplestiltskin tilted his head. "I feel better when I am near you or Bae."
"Like you can think more clearly?" He'd thought he'd been mistaken, the times he'd got an inkling of something similar.
Rumplestiltskin had not one, but two people who loved him. Zozo knew beyond doubt that Rumplestiltskin loved Baelfire.
"How near?" Zozo asked. He held out his hand to the boy, who had hung back.
Baelfire stepped forward, and Rumplestiltskin breathed in sharply.
"There," he said.
Touching distance, then. Rumplestiltskin appeared a little more human, as if two were better than one.
He squeezed Baelfire's hand. They would use this discovery, he decided.
Many years and several lifetimes later, the ogres returned.
Rumplestiltskin traded for a girl. His successor must not be someone likely to wreak havoc as some of the Dark Ones had done. He would choose carefully, and then, because Zozo had asked it of him, he would offer her the choice.
He was ready, he thought.
But she was a tiny thing, and lovely. She tore down his crumbling walls and fit herself into his solitary life as if she had always been there.
… and then one day she kissed him.