Note: Warning to Hook fans. Hook in this story has a lot of dark deeds and failures in his past. Thought you might want to know.
And I own nothing in Once Upon a Time.
X
Emma had been expecting Hook to wander around the vault and poking his nose where it shouldn't go, like a three year old let loose in a room full of power saws. Instead, after a moment's dizziness and a couple of staggering steps to regain his equilibrium, he turned to her and said, "Swan, Rumplestiltskin came back from the dead. If he did it, someone else could. Promise me, if you ever see Zelena again—I don't care what time or what place—if you ever see her again, you'll rip that emerald right off her throat."
"Did you hit your head on the way in here? Where's that question coming from?"
"Just promise me, Swan—No, don't just promise it. Imagine it. See it in your mind. If you see Zelena, you won't waste time wondering what's going on. You won't try to figure out how this could be happening or if this creates some kind of paradox. You'll go for her throat and take care of it."
"Hook—"
"Promise me."
So, she was locked up in the Dark One's toxic waste dump with a crazy pirate. So, what else was new?
"All right, I promise."
He nodded gravely. "Good." Hook looked around. "See anything to write with? In case we die here, I want to leave a last message for posterity."
"What?'
"Nothing fancy. Burial plans, last will and testament, a few words of sympathy for the poor world that will have to try and soldier on bereft of everything that is Hook. I pity them, Swan, I pity them. Now, about the ways you could kill Zelena. . . ."
X
The Crocodile had been snide. Of course he had. He knew Hook. Or he knew who he was three hundred years ago. Truth be told, he knew who he was barely a year ago. The man who'd shot the little librarian in the back was no different than the pirate who'd sold a fourteen year old boy to a demon to protect himself and his men.
When his brother died, when they'd failed in their mission, he'd convinced his men the king was the one at fault, that he'd sent them on a base mission, doing a craven's work—fetching poison to murder men.
Then, the Ogres had attacked.
"Tsk, tsk. How unfortunate, dearie," the monster said as his wheel spun.
Ogres weren't men. They didn't think like men, they didn't communicate like men. They were, so tales said, superstitious. They had fled from the feeble tricks of a half-mad witch after fighting off (and devouring) armies. There was even a children's tale. Long, long ago, an army of Ogres was coming to attack a village. Nothing could stop them until the young hero of the tale fetches magic herbs from the end of the world. The Ogres, who could sniff out any poison mortals could make, did not recognize the smell of the herb. As the poison killed them, they were convinced the village was a magic place that had cursed them and fled.
The story made it far simpler and easier than Hook suspected it really was (that made the Crocodile erupt in giggles. "Oh, lots of things are simple, dearie. Life, death, treason, murder. They just aren't easy"). But, he recognized the tale when the stories of Ogres massing to move on the Frontlands first reached him. He recognized it again in the desperate letter that had finally reached him from the king, promising riches and pardon if Hook would just return the magic sail or, failing that, if he would only bring the king some of the herb he had first sent him for.
Hook, angry for his brother's death and blaming the mission the king had sent them on, had burned the sail. He'd told his men it was for a good and noble cause. Two had challenged him to duels after they learned their families had died in Ogre attacks. Hook killed them before they drew and threw their bodies overboard. Others had run away after that. The men Hook found to replace them were cutthroats and drunkards, the kind of men who didn't trouble their captain with moral dilemmas.
His ship had carried some of the refugees to safety—when they could pay. He didn't bother if they couldn't. And, if they were deserters or parents trying to save their children from fighting on the front lines, well, there were bounties to be collected and any fools who spoke too freely about what they were running from had to expect trouble to find them. It wasn't as if he was really doing anything wrong. If it wasn't Hook, someone else would have claimed the money on them.
"I'm surprised Milah put up with you," the Crocodile commented. "She never had much patience with cowards."
"She liked to mock you," Hook said. "We both did. From the day I met her and she told me about the weak fool she'd married."
"Oh, I see. You thought you'd finally found someone worse than you. I'd always wondered what you saw in each other. And when you told her the truth about the weak fool she'd run off with? What happened then."
But, he hadn't told Milah that. Or she hadn't heard it. She raved about his bravery, defying a king. Her eyes glowed as she spoke about his honor. She'd laughed when someone suggested he might owe something to the men and women fleeing before the Ogres, trying to save their children from battle. "Life is for the strong," Milah said. "People who won't—or can't—fight for what they want don't deserve to have it. Including their lives."
The memory of Liam's voice, the looks of disappointment Hook could imagine him giving, went away when Milah was with him.
He thought he'd felt both looking over his shoulder when he'd found Baelfire. It hadn't stopped him from lying to the boy.
What he told about his father wasn't completely untrue, not completely. There'd been debts—if there hadn't, his father would have bought Liam a commission instead of sending him to sea—but Killian, the second born, was always destined for the navy. He'd been young, of course. It wasn't the tale of abandonment he'd tried to make it out to be. Boys as young as eleven were sent to sea, and Killian was thirteen when he was apprenticed to a naval ship. He was made a lieutenant at twenty-one. During all that time, he had regular letters from home and embarrassingly knitted gifts from his old nursemaid, Nana. He was expected to deal with the difficulties of life on his own but, the few times he'd gotten himself into trouble he couldn't talk his way out of, his father and brother were there for him.
His father had laughed at his escapades. "Youthful spirits," he'd called it. "Better a boy with a bit of fire in his belly than some cowardly milksop." He sent away some of the more persistent problems who managed to track Killian down to his home and demand recompense. One of them, the father of a girl he claimed Killian had gotten in trouble, Killian's father had had beaten for his impertinence.
Liam, though, had taken Killian to task. He'd also sent money to the girl regularly after that.
She'd lived in one of the villages along the coast, Killian thought, a little place whose name he couldn't remember. His ship had stopped there to make repairs and he'd been bored. He didn't know how she got by after Liam died. But, it didn't really matter. Two years after dreamshade killed his brother, the Ogres razed everything in that part of the kingdom.
He'd never told Milah about that, not really. He'd told her there had been people he knew who lived there.
Milah had been sympathetic. She'd also told him it wasn't his fault. "If fate meant for them to get out, there'd have been a way," she said.
"Maybe there was," he said. He was looking at a pile of gold coins, bounties on the latest batch of deserters he'd sold back to the army. That, along with the money the deserters had given him in the first place, made a tidy sum, especially since he didn't have to spend money getting them to where they were going.
Milah laughed. "If fate sends you a way out and you don't take it, that's your own fault. Look at me. When fate sent you to me, did I hesitate? And if I had and I'd lost you forever, whose fault would that be?"
Milah never asked about her son. She never tried to get word of him. Hook thought she'd looked relieved when they heard the Ogres had finally been driven back, but that was all. When he asked her about going back, she shook her head resolutely and said she hoped someday he'd be old enough to understand.
"She'd practiced that look," the Crocodile said. "Falling down drunk, she could still hold her head at that perfect, martyred angle. I don't think a day went by she didn't work on it."
Years later, seeing all the anger in her son's face as Hook tried to make him understand, he'd wondered if that day, when the boy was old enough to understand, would ever come.
He could have told Baelfire his father was looking for him, that he was hunting desperately through their world for the means to reunite with him. He could have told Baelfire his father wasn't lying when he said Milah was dead. He'd been saying exactly what Hook had expected him to believe.
The boy had hated him, and Hook had resented him for it. After everything he'd done for him, after he'd risked his life and crew to keep the brat safe.
After he'd tricked him into telling him exactly how to kill his father. . . .
And, now, Bae was dead.
Except he wasn't. Not for over thirty years. The little librarian was still the serving maid in the Dark One's castle. Emma's parents hadn't done more than touch hands (and attack each other with nets and large rocks. He could see where the savior got it).
The spinner sat in front of him, laughing and chatting, enumerating the many things Hook had done and failed to do.
For the first time, he looked around him.
"Where are we?" he said. "This isn't the Dark Castle."
"Isn't it, dearie?"
"And how did we get here? The last thing I remember, I was with Emma. In Storybrooke. I told her everything, how I got to her world to find her, how I gave up my ship to reach her in time. . . ."
"Oh, were you in time, dearie?"
"We saved Neal."
"That's not what I heard."
"I mean her brother."
"Huzzah for you."
"We stopped Zelena."
"No, I stopped Zelena. You did every idiotic thing you could think of to help her. You knew you could destroy Emma's magic, but you were the one who went with her to face the witch? How did you think that was going to end?"
"We got the dagger away from her!"
"That would be the dagger you left lying on the ground while Regina picked it up for her new chew toy? Exactly what part of 'got it away from her' did that cover?"
"We—" He stopped, looking around again. There was nothing here, nothing but darkness, the spinner concentrating on his wheel, and Hook.
"This isn't real."
"About time you noticed, dearie." The wheel turned, spinning out thread.
Thread.
Not gold.
"And you—you're not Rumplestiltskin."
The spinner didn't even look up from his work. "Oh? And who do you think I am?"
"I don't know. But, you're not him."
The spinner gave him a sly, sideways look. "But, who do you think I am?"
Hook looked around at the vague, unreal surroundings. "Am I dreaming?"
"Depends what you mean by 'dreaming.' Let's agree you're not awake."
"I—I remember. We set time right. And Rumplestiltskin locked us up, the bastard."
The spinner laughed. It wasn't the way Rumplestiltskin laughed, high and inhuman. It wasn't the way Gold laughed, either. The pawnbroker, when he laughed at all, let the sound out as if it were a small party of soldiers suddenly emerging from an impenetrable castle, ready to wreak havoc and vanish back before you could retaliate—before you were sure they'd ever been there.
This sound was light and airy as bells.
"Rumplestiltskin is and has been and will be many things. But not that. Believe me. I should know."
"Who are you?" Hook asked.
"Do you believe in fate?" the spinner asked.
"You mean, if I mess up, it's because fate meant it to happen? Sure, why not?"
"No, no, fate simply means you were meant to have the chance to mess up. Many things are meant to happen. How you deal with them is up to you."
"Great. Since fate never bothers to tell me when that's happening, you'll excuse me if I don't take the blame."
The spinner gave him that sly, sideways look again. "Well, then, what if I told you?"
"What?"
"What if I told you the moment was coming? One of the moments when you may either rise or fall. What then?"
"Great. And what moment would that be?"
"You know it. You've dreamt it already. You told me. Don't say you've forgotten so soon."
"What, you mean dreaming that Emma gets us home? And snogs me senseless? Yay, fate. I'm looking forward to it."
"Oh? Are you?"
"Why shouldn't I be?"
"Yes, why shouldn't you be?"
Hook thought of Bae, not even dead a month.
"I can't bring back the dead."
"Who's dead, dearie? What's there to bring back?"
"Even if he isn't dead now, we know what happens when we try to change things. If I try to change this, I could keep Emma from ever being born. Bae could be trapped in Neverland forever. There's nothing I can do!"
"Oh? It sounds like there's a great deal you could do. You could keep Emma from being born. You could trap Bae in Neverland forever. How do you think you could do that if you can't do anything? And, if you can do something wrong, why are you certain you can't do something right? What are you afraid of?"
"Of trying to do things right and doing everything thing wrong! Of messing up the entire universe! What did you think?"
"My, my, sounds like someone has experience messing up the entire universe."
It was facetious, a quickly turned phrase. The words shouldn't have cut at all. But, they did.
Liam, Hook thought. His brother had tried to prove he was doing the right thing and died for it. Killian burned the Pegasus sail and turned pirate because, if he didn't, if he went back and asked the king why he had them do this—
—It was possible the king would have an answer. It was possible Liam had been right.
And, if that was true, his brother died for nothing.
No, he died trying to prove the truth to his brother. And Hook had betrayed him and their people and everyone the Ogres killed for nothing. Because it was easier than swallowing his pride and risking finding out he was to blame.
Or, was it Pan's fault? He'd been the great manipulator. Had he seen what would happen when he mocked the brothers and their loyalty to the king?
"Not quite," the spinner said. "Pan wasn't a seer. But, he caught glimpses of the future. Through Shadows. He also made futures from things at hand. Which you were? Did he see the havoc you would cause in his son's life? And in his son's son? Or did he just cut you loose and let you go? Or was it all a bad jest, and Pan was as surprised as anyone at how useful you turned out? Was all of this the workings of . . . fate? Is that a question you'd like answered?"
"Who are you?"
"Tell me, would you change the future? If you could do it without changing the things you want unchanged, would you do it?"
Dead is dead. And he'd seen what came of changing the past. He shouldn't—he shouldn't—
"How? How could I do it?"
"And you a military man. Can't you see what's obvious? All right, I'll ask a question. If there is one man, standing in a crowd of hundreds, and you need to kill him—kill him and none of the others—how do you do it? Do you fire cannons into the crowd and hope you hit him and no one else? Or do you do something different?"
"Get up to him," Hook said. "Get close. Strike."
"Well, then, if you wished to strike a specific moment without bleeding through to all the others, how would you do it?"
Hook stared at him, not answering.
"Come, come, what would you do?"
"The same."
"And is there such a moment? Can you see it?"
"I. . . ." The moment. He couldn't save the people from his own past. It was too long ago. Too many things would change after. Emma. Bae. The world.
He could change a moment. A single moment. A single outcome.
"It pays to consider the options," the spinner went on. "Who will be present, what will be happening, what will be happening even if you succeed. The devil's in the details, you know."
"Is that who you are? The devil?"
The laugh, this time, was like Rumplestiltskin's. "Me, dearie? Oh, no. I am simply . . . bringing you to a moment. And giving you a chance to act. Or fail to act. As the case may be."
"Who—"
"Oh, really!" the spinner stopped the wheel in exasperation. "Did Milah, in all her years of mocking the man she chose to marry, never once speak of his past? Surely there are some things that haven't escaped your recollection?"
"She spoke about his father and called him a coward." Hook felt a chill down his spine. Pan was vengeful with a twisted sense of humor. Had he ever heard any of the thing his daughter-in-law said of him? For the first time, he wondered about Milah showing up in exactly the right spot to stop Rumplestiltskin from killing him that night. All his men had sworn they'd kept it secret. He'd just assumed they were lying. He remembered the trouble that had kept them in port long enough for him to meet Milah and decide he wanted more than just a few days pleasure on land. The steersman had said he'd seen strange shadows that night and thought he heard the sound of pipes. . . .
"Think further back," the spinner said. "Think, dearie." His hand ran over the wheel. "It's not a secret. I've all but told you."
"Rumplestiltskin. Raised by spinsters."
"Oh, very good. And, what is a spinster?"
"What. . . ? A—a woman. Who earns her living by spinning. Or a woman who's never married, because spinning is her means to live."
"Well, then."
"Spinsters," he said. "Spinners." Fate.
Ridiculous.
"Rumplestiltskin," the spinner said. "was born to one of three sisters. Or three kinswoman. Three women, if we may call them such, of one blood. Or one woman of three. It hardly matters. Two—we will call them aunts—raised him. The third. . . . Dead is dead. Born is born. We spin the thread. We measure the thread. We cut the thread. When the spinning's done, the thread must be given to other hands."
"I don't understand."
He had to be dreaming. The figure sitting at the wheel hadn't changed. He was sure of it. Yet, why had he ever thought this was Rumplestiltskin? A woman sat at the wheel, she looked at him with warmth and amusement. Yet, he was sure he could drop dead right now in front of her, and she wouldn't do more than sigh and go back to her spinning."
"You don't need to understand. You know the moment. You know how the time spell works. It takes you to the moment you are thinking of. That doorway is about to open in front of you. And that is all I mean to say."
"Why?" he asked. "If you're—if you're—why help me? Why help anyone?" Her hair was the same color as Rumplestiltskin's. It fell down her shoulders in soft, brown waves.
"Helping you? I'm not helping you. It's not my business to help you." She looked up at him. The warmth he thought he'd seen before was gone. Her eyes were a merciless, icy blue. "My only duty is to see you arrive at the proper moment. The rest is up to you. If I might . . . prefer a certain resolution above another, that doesn't change things."
"Your son," Hook said, not believing what he was saying. "Your grandson. You want them to live."
"Is that what this is?" the woman asked. "I'm not used to wanting. Things are as they are. It's enough. Or should be." She turned her cold eyes on him again. "You're used to wanting, aren't you? It's what your kind do. Is this what you want? To pay back the debts you owe? To Milah, to Bae, to king you once served, to the people he ruled who looked to you to save them, to the crew you led to destruction, to the Lost Boys you killed trying to save them, and all the rest."
He thought of a girl in a seaside village and a child that might have been his. He didn't even know if it was a boy or girl. "I'll change my own past. What about me in that time? What happens to him?"
"You have only one life. When it's paid out, it's paid. For you then as well as now."
"Poor sot," Hook said. "He'll never know what hit him."