A/N: So the doc manager doesn't like strikeouts and I've had to drop back and punt with what I had written, but I've done the best I can. Standard disclaimer: don't own, just a fan work, etc. Depending on reception and my mood and schedule this may be more than a one-shot and cover multiple characters whose background would have taken them outside of Storybrooke-Dr. Hopper and Graham, for example-but for now we're just gonna focus on Mr. Gold. I'm a review whore so please drop a line if you're so moved.

Everyone has a story.

Ryland Gold's was a mystery story, to him at least. The mystery was how he'd ended up in the ass-end of Maine.

"How can I help you?" He pulled on a tight smile which made it clear that the intruder on his solitude was unwelcome. That was another mystery: why he had opened a shop when he hated people so, so very much. Then again, customer service had always been his business, in a roundabout way, so perhaps that wasn't such a mystery.

"Oh I'm just looking for a gift for a friend." A stout little woman-Johanna he thought her name was-shuffled around the center display, looking at items on either side of the tiny, dim shop. "Just browsing for now."

"Suit yourself," he replied with a shrug, bending back to his ledger and his thoughts.

It could have been better than this, really. He had been king of the streets back in Glasgow, controlling twelve blocks with unquestioned authority. And now? Now he had a thousand and a half square feet on Main Street in Storybrooke, Maine population: thirty thousand. How in the hell did that sort of thing happen?

To be fair at least, he was still a fair way from where he had been. Ryland could still smell the moldy carpet and constant meals of cabbage soup; the stink of addicts killing themselves, rotting from the inside out; sex and sweat and the peculiar acrid, unhygienic smell which always seemed to follow the abjectly impoverished; the damp brick and the old wood being slowly but surely hollowed out by termites in the old mill building which should have been condemned years ago. Instead it had been turned into trendy apartments thirty years before he had been born, and by the time his turn had come it was nothing but run-down slum with a whorehouse on the top floor, a drug den on the bottom, and two floors of tenements sandwiched in between. He was ten when his father got sent to Germany NO Maylaya NO Korea NO Oman NO Ireland "to fight the good fight" as he'd put it, and never come back, but it wasn't like that was what had landed them there. He'd been born in that building and surely would have died in that building had it not been for his mother.

"Power comes with a price, Ry," she used to say as she pocketed a wad of cash, "and there will always be someone willing to pay that price."

He used to wonder whether that meant that whoever they were giving the cash to was the one with the real power...but then even that power came with its price. Jail time, for instance. She had gotten two years for operating an illegal brothel and another two for bribing police officials shortly after his father had left for the war, forcing him to move in downstairs with the elderly Miss Weavers, a pair of unmarried spinster sisters of no relation but who had always felt bad for the poor little upstairs neighbor boy. By the time she returned the sisters had both died and he'd been out on his own and doing just fine without anybody, thank you very much.

Fiona Gold-a name she almost certainly had chosen for herself, but the surname had been on his birth certificate either way-had still been beautiful the last time he'd seen her nearly thirty years ago. Surely she still was, if she were alive. She had always defied expectations, and the stereotype of the sad, tired old whore ridden hard and put away wet was lost on her. She had still been just as glamorous as ever and the word "courtesan" still applied much more than whore ever had. That was what she had called herself: a courtesan. Names had power in them, she had taught him, and it mattered what one called oneself.

She had been a courtesan, not a whore; and by the time he was seventeen he had been a street entrepreneur and not the common thug the cops had insisted he was. He had started off small, certainly-deliveries, small-time sales, that sort of thing-but through shrewd business practices and manipulation Ryland had a piece of most of the illegal activity in his part of town. Gambling, drugs, street prostitution (he had learned from Fiona's mistake of keeping them all in one easily raidable place), guns...if he wasn't involved directly then he at least had his fingers in the supply line. By twenty he had learned to specialize a little more and held control of six blocks in either direction of that broken down old tenement he had escaped. Still he couldn't help but make a few deals on the side; he couldn't let good business sense get in the way of his knack for acquiring hard-to-find things. He had found all sorts of nasty weapons and objects for his acquaintances, the fates of which he neither knew nor cared so long as it stayed out of his neighborhood. He had also found Milah.

Rather than one of the many, many addicts and whores he dealt with day in and day out Milah had actually been fairly normal. Ryland had, admittedly, a bit of a sweet tooth and she had worked in the bakery on the street he controlled. Eventually he didn't even have to ask for the turnover; she immediately chose what she deemed the best one and began warming it up for him. "It's Turnover Tuesday," she had declared cheerfully the first time Ryland had asked how she knew. One Tuesday he had invited her to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him and the rest, as they say, was history. Well, it was history until she kept pushing him to find some sort of legitimate business to get into. The bitch just couldn't be happy with what they had; she always had to have more. It wasn't as though she had been doing anything to help, and the more he gave the more she took, until one day...she just took off. He'd found a letter from the doctor in the trash, congratulations on a positive pregnancy test; he could only suppose it wasn't his. By that point, good riddance if he was entirely honest.

"Will this be all for you?" Ryland jerked out of his reverie, realizing that he'd been staring at the page of the ledger for the better part of twenty minutes while Johanna browsed. She had come to the counter with some old tiara. Who gave someone a tiara as a gift?

"Yes I think that about does it," Johanna replied cheerfully. "Do you eh...do you do gift wrapping, Mr. Gold?"

Gold bristled. "Madam," he said, a certain strain in his voice indicating barely-restrained contempt and rage, "this is a pawn shop, not a department store."

Everyone has a story.

Ryland Gold's story was written on his face, if anyone cared to look. Nobody here seemed to care to look.

"How can I help you?" Smiling was difficult today. It was difficult on the days that he felt the sameness, when reality felt thinner, like if he poked too hard at it it would break.

It seemed in this town as though nearly the same thing always happened: he always walked to Granny's for lunch, he always saw Mary Margaret Blanchard running into Mayor Mills, he always saw Marco-what was his last name?-fixing his sign, he always came back to the shop, and he always asked how he could help the people who walked into his shop. Sometimes, when Ryland had gotten too deep into the old MacCutcheon, he thought maybe they were all stuck in a time loop like in that movie Repeat Performance NO Mirror for a Hero NO Groundhog Day. No one here seemed to age, after all, and they seemed to do the exact same thing every day. It wasn't all that crazy when you thought about it, considering some people genuinely thought we were living in an alien zoo NO simulation like the Matrix. But then he reminded himself that people were predictable and generally kept to routine, that Mayor Mills had a few more lines around her lips and eyes than she used to, and that he could remember everyone who had come into his shop and what each one had bought. Sometimes it seemed like too many people had come in for the amount of time that had passed since he had come here, but so went the passing of time and ravages of age.

He could also remember Main Street decorated for the harvest festivals, the spring flings, the solstice celebrations; he remembered Girl Scout Cookie seasons (the actual most wonderful time of the year, in his opinion); he remembered signs for graduations he didn't care about at the tiny little building which passed for a High School even though in reality the town was so small that it was just a K-12 building. When the scotch got to his brain he would recite the trite little solstice celebration themes and count the graduation years and never question why he only considered the last few years. Frosty the Snowman...Yuletide...Narnia...Winter Wonderland. Last cookie season he had bought Thin Mints and Tagalongs NO Thin Mints and Do-Si-Dos NO Thin Mints and Samoas NOsix boxes of Thin Mints from the only Girl Scout brave enough to try and sell to him-Paige-who had aged like a normal child. Congratulations, graduating class of 83, 84, 85, 86 NO...89, 90, 91, 92 NO...96, NO 97, 98, 2000, 2001…

"Oh we're just browsing." The customers were a couple he recognized but didn't know the names of. They clung tightly to one another, grinning ear-to-ear and holding hands as they looked at the jewelry in their various displays. Clearly looking for an engagement ring, Ryland decided. After Milah he had been determined not to feel like that for anyone ever again, but despite himself there had been one other that he had looked at the way these two looked at each other.

"Such an ugly name," he had sneered over the howling steel guitar in the dark, crowded London nightclub. "Sounds like something breaking, dunnit?"

"Well, it's the only name I've got," Cora had shrugged.

That night had been a blur of drugs and booze and sex, and he had honestly never expected to see her again. Get a call or a letter maybe, asking for an extension on the load he'd given her to pay off some pimp she'd stolen from then lipped off to, but he was genuinely surprised when he saw the too-pale pinched face and the too-red lipstick appear in the doorway of his office in the back room of a billiards hall back in Glasgow. Catching Ryland Gold off-guard was not an easy thing to do, and he'd admired her for it.

But that too had backfired. He had taught her everything he knew about dealing, about managing personnel, about supply lines and how to keep her hands clean to avoid jail time even if the cops did catch up with her. For two years they had done everything together, side-by-side. Ryland had even stayed (mostly) monogamous. And when he had found a ring in a pawn shop-much like this one-and gone down on one knee in front of the club where they had met she had even said yes. At least she had had the courtesy to leave the ring on the nightstand when she'd left in the middle of the night once they'd gotten back home, with a note pointing out that he had told her once never to let anyone control her. Of course he had meant her pimp, her boss, her father, and Cora knew that...but she had learned his lessons too well and applied it to Ryland as well. Last he'd heard she'd had a thriving brothel in Amsterdam known as Wonderland and was calling herself the Queen of Hearts. Bitch.

"Will you marry me?" The motions were familiar, cliche as the man went down on one knee. Obviously they had talked about this beforehand and had only come here for a ring on the cheap, but the woman still cried when he went down on one knee immediately after paying for it.

"Yes," she said from behind her hands, sniffling and wiping tears from her eyes. "I will."

"Congratulations to you both," Ryland said with a tight smile as he stood and they embraced. "Unfortunately, however, you've come in just a little bit before closing." It was a lie, he didn't close for another hour, but he had the strongest urge to throw them out physically. It worked much better if he threw them out politely.

"Right, of course. We were just going," the man said, barely paying attention and staring at the woman in his arms the way Mr. Gold remembered once staring at Cora. "Sorry to bother you."

Everyone has a story.

Ryland Gold's story could be seen in his teeth. He hated his teeth almost as much as he hated his story, but that was his own fault. Too much ecstasy and cocaine had rotted a few of them, necessitating root canals and caps, and he'd gotten his gold tooth from a mean left hook in a fight over who exactly had snitched about the drop. Once they'd met at the safehouse he had accused an enormous Swede called Little Sven-or just Littles most of the time-of being an informant. Little Sven hadn't taken too kindly to that, and certainly would have killed him if he'd known it had been Ryland himself.

"How can I help you?" He caught sight of his teeth in one of the mirrors and hid them quickly. "Madam Mayor?" he added.

"I need you to find something a little more...unusual for me." Regina leaned on the counter, folding her perfectly-manicured fingers. Sometimes she wore too-red lipstick in a way that reminded him of Cora, but today she opted for a much more flattering brownish-purplish-burgundy. "How connected are you to the adoption industry?"

Ryland allowed himself to show his teeth again. "What age are you looking for?"

He himself had never had children. But then again, men like him weren't meant to. After Fiona, his father, Milah, Cora, he was incapable of loving anyone other than himself because people seemed incapable of loving him. Hell, Milah had thought him so unfit to be a father that she had left once she found out she was pregnant. Whoever it was, after all, couldn't have loved her more than he had. That was nearly impossible. Still, children had across the years been one of his biggest sources of income. Nothing sketchy or morally objectionable, of course-he wasn't a complete monster, after all-but adoption through the proper channels was expensive and the religious ones could be judgemental on unwed mothers, even successful ones like Regina. Instead he had a network of connections in Portland, Manchester, and Boston, in the slums and the prisons where the desperate and incarcerated were more likely to make the right decision without much of a second thought until it was too late. Closed adoptions were closed for a reason.

"How do you find these things, anyway?" Regina sounded curious as she read through the contract. Mr. Gold answered with merely an enigmatic smile.

"I have my ways."

The older he got the more he realized that Milah had had a way of being right about things. He hadn't been fit to be a father, and it had been better for him to strive for something more legitimate. More being the operative word. He never entirely gave up the guns, but once he'd hit his personal rock bottom and gotten clean the sight of the little plastic baggies and phials filled with mystery powders and liquids turned his stomach as much as it made his fingers itch for more. After getting burned on a few deals, he'd had enough. A few correspondent courses later and Ryland had entered the world of law. He wasn't technically a lawyer-he'd never passed or even taken a bar exam-but he knew enough now to make heads and tails of contracts both written and signed. Nobody had gotten away with wriggling out of a deal with him since, and after building a certain reputation nobody dared even try.

From there it was acquisitions beyond guns, real estate, high-level political and police bribery. Glasgow had gotten too small. London, Belfast, Cardiff, eventually he had created a web of black market goods and rare objects across the UK. Once he had even arranged for ancient artifacts to accidentally be looked over in customs in order to make it, eventually, to the British Museum. That had been enough to enable him to move his operation to New York. He still had business ties in the UK which he still tapped from time to time but for the most part if he needed something he had created supply lines throughout the Northeast extensive enough that he could almost always find what he needed without having to wait for his letter NO long-distance phone call NO email NO text to be returned and then the shipping. Also helpful in building these supply lines from his base of operations in New York was that he had withheld his real name and ensured that there was limited contact between suppliers. Nobody really knew who was pulling the strings, even now years later.

Was that why he'd come to Storybrooke? As a sort of quasi-retirement? He was still having trouble remembering...

"So I need to go to this address?" Regina held out a hand for the slip of paper. Mr. Gold started to hand it to her, then jerked it back.

"On one condition." He knew his smirk was infuriating and he got a certain sort of pleasure out of it. The two most powerful people in town, he enjoyed the back-and-forth between them despite how much he hated her. That muscle in her jaw was going, working furiously as she clenched and unclenched.

"What's that?" she asked through gritted teeth.

"What's his name?" Ryland nearly giggled, watching her. Not that he was the giggling type but the urge welled up in his throat almost before he could stop it. Almost.

"What's it to you?"

He shrugged. "Call me sentimental." There went that muscle again.

"Henry," she said at last. "After my father."

"Henry," he repeated, letting it roll off of his tongue before lowering the paper toward her hand. "Good, strong name." Regina snatched it before he could take it away again. "Can't wait to meet him."

Everyone has a story.

Ryland Gold's limp was a part of his story, though most people didn't think twice about it. He was old-well, older-so they probably thought that it was arthritis or something similar. As he walked down Main Street to Granny's for lunch he leaned a little more heavily on his cane than usual. There was a storm coming and although he didn't have arthritis the pain still flared whenever it threatened to rain.

"How can I help you?" The girl-he was pretty sure her name was Ruby, but he didn't particularly care-didn't look terribly happy to see him. Of course she wasn't; he was the landlord, just as he was for the vast majority of the town. Nobody likes the landlord, especially when they can't pay the rent when he comes calling. And her granny, it seemed, was always only just barely making rent. "The usual?"

"Of course." Ryland slid onto a stool to wait. "Extra ketchup and mayo this time, you forgot yesterday." If magic existed in this world, surely its conduit was through mayonnaise especially in the context of a juicy, medium-rare burger on a soft kaiser roll. Whatever else he thought about Granny's Diner, they sold an exceptional burger.

"Comin' right up." It was very clearly an extreme effort of will not to roll her eyes as she turned away to put the order in.

With a stifled groan Ryland stretched out his bad leg and rested it on the foot rest of the neighboring stool. Sometimes it was his foot, sometimes his knee, but always a it was a dull throb when the pressure started dropping. Despite all of his precautions he had wound up doing a stint in prison-one of the valuable lessons he had learned in time to impart upon Cora-and however short it had been small men like him generally didn't do well in prison unless they showed the others just how little they should be fucked with. Unfortunately he had been naive and despite everyone's insistence that he assert himself on day one...well, he hadn't had the foresight to get the lay of the land first. He hadn't known to avoid picking a fight with Cormack, an enormous man who essentially ran the prison.

He had only broken Cormack's ribs, really. Well, and his face. Ryland was certain that that was a long and painful recovery, but he'd only broken two ribs and fractured a third with a support broken off from the underside of the top bunk in his cell. No lasting damage, in any case. But Cormack's thugs didn't take too kindly to that and had cornered him in the latrine once they knew their leader would be alright. One beatdown later he had a shattered ankle, a dislocated kneecap, and a punctured lung. It had been touch-and-go for a while, but he'd pulled through alright and spent much of his prison stay in the med ward, recovering. Warnings that his lung could collapse again hadn't compelled him to give up cigarettes and so far it hadn't happened, but his leg had never been the same. Once he'd gotten out he'd had to make up for it by being more dangerous, more lethal, less tolerant of jokes at his expense. You didn't see many twenty-somethings walking around with canes, after all; even fewer who were thugs NO successful street entrepreneurs. Sometimes he wondered whether his pain had led to his success over the years, how things would have been different without this limp he carried now.

He took the burger, as usual, back to his shop and bent his head over the ledger. Henry Mills, the boy he had acquired for Regina some time ago, had been in here earlier looking for something. Funny...Mr. Gold had been certain that the boy had never been in here before, and yet he also knew things about him that he shouldn't have known if he hadn't seen him before. He went out of his way to avoid most children, except for the one brave Girl Scout, Paige, who ever dared to try and sell to him. So why did he get the feeling that Henry had bought something here before…?

Eight o'clock came more quickly than it usually seemed to. Just to put his mind at rest about Henry, Mr. Gold had done a full inventory and lost track of time. Nothing out of the ordinary. He could have sworn he remembered selling an old, blunted practice sword to the boy but no, it was still there where it had always been. After supper he realized that rent was due today. No wonder the girl had been so wary of him. The new woman he had seen about town a few times earlier today was at Granny's-his usual second stop after the convent-and appeared to be checking in for the evening.

"What's the name?" the old woman asked, sending up a puff of dust as she opened her registry. Maybe if the old bat would clean once in a while she'd get more customers. Mr. Gold shuddered to think what the kitchen at her diner looked like.

"Swan. Emma Swan." She said it like James Bond, as though it were a revelation highly important to some unseen narrative.

Swan. Emma Swan. Emma Swan...Emma...Emma...Emma Emma EmmaEmmaEmmaEmmaEmmaEmmaEmma all those repetitions of a highly valuable name in highly valuable ink until it didn't even look like a word anymore an eternal prison in a land without magic and the Queen oh the foolish Queen who couldn't see past the end of her own nose when it came to her precious revenge oh why was he the only one who ever bothered actually getting clever about these sorts of things oh dearie how you'll pay for making me forget Rumplestiltskin NEVER forgets and-

Rumplestiltskin.

Rumple...stiltskin...

My name.

Rumplestiltskin was his name. And his son...oh Bae! She's here, she's broken the curse! I'm coming for you! At that moment he felt a rush of what could almost be described as gratitude, at least until he realized a split second later that she hadn't actually done anything, not of her own volition; nothing that he hadn't already ensured she would do. Even so, Emma Swan was at this moment in time a name he valued almost as dearly as his own

"Emma!" Ryland NO Rumplestiltskin YES! knew he had startled them. He also knew that she didn't fear him as Granny did. Well, she would learn in time. "What a lovely name."