Disclaimer: ABC owns Once Upon a Time. I don't. It's that simple.
"No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true." -Oscar Wilde
One advantage of being the Dark One was that dreams rarely came to haunt him. His sleep was rarely disturbed by fleeting fancies and subconscious wishes.
Then Regina visited, bringing with her news that she took a perverse amount of joy in telling.
That night, as he collapsed into his four-poster bed, he expected dreams of Belle to haunt him. They would be dreams of Belle hurt, of clerics and whips, of her jumping from the tower.
When he finally succumbed to slumber, however, it wasn't her that haunted his sleep. It was an old dream – a nightmare, a memory – one from long, long ago. Before darkness and gold and chipped cups.
The armor weighs heavily on him, too large and bulky for his slight frame. Everywhere around him, there is blood and destruction and death. Ogres are everywhere, killing soldiers and causing absolute chaos.
He grasps his sword, feeling like a child playing at war. The sword is too heavy, and he doesn't know how to use it properly. He is untrained for war, and shouldn't even be here.
How could they win? Who stood a chance against the ogres, an enemy even the legendary Dark One couldn't beat. All these men around him knew it was hopeless; that they were fighting for a cause they couldn't win. Yet they kept hacking away with their swords, thinking that they could change their fate.
He wasn't strong or brave like them though. He wasn't a soldier, destined for the glory of the battlefield. He was a man who spun thread for a living, a man with a wife and a child on the way.
A child…his own son or daughter who would love him unconditionally. If he died on this bloody battlefield, he would never get to see his own child.
In the end, that was the reason. That was why he turned away from all the fighting and the death and the fire and ran. It was all because he wanted to be there when his child opened their eyes.
He nearly made it all the way back to his village. In fact, when Hordor and his fellow knights found him, he could see the roof of his house in the distance.
"Look what we've found here!" Hordor exclaimed. "A little mouse, scurrying away, while other men lay down their lives."
They had punished him for his cowardice. Hordor had ignored his desperate pleading and cries, and slammed the heavy hilt of his sword in Rumplestiltskin's knee, shattering the bones beyond repair.
Then they had laughed at him as he agonizingly crawled away. And as he lived his life by darting from shadow to shadow like the coward he was, their laughter mocked him still.
Rumplestiltskin jolted himself awake, drenched in sweat and shaking. He ran his hands over his face, trying to wipe away the guilt he felt at remembering how much of a coward he was.
Oh, he liked to pretend he was something of a hero. A hero who came waltzing in and helped make your problems disappear – for a price of course.
Yet for all his powers, deep down inside, he was nothing more than the coward that he had always been. A coward who ran from war, a coward who let his son fall, a coward who didn't believe in love, even when it backed him into the spinning wheel.
Once, if he had this dream, Baelfire would have awoken him, dark eyes worried as he shook his father. Once, Belle would have wondered what was wrong as she laid her cool hands on his brow.
But he was a beast and a coward. And beasts and cowards had one thing in common: they were meant to live their lives alone.
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