Disclaimer: This is a non profit work of fiction and I do not claim ownership of the characters or settings used.
Notes: Based on a prompt from the ouatkinkmeme on livejournal, which suggested that Baelfire was Jack the Ripper.
In his more pensive moments he wonders whether there isn't some sort of genetic predisposition, if perhaps the phrenologists have it right and there's something about his head that explains it all. Something that explains why he is the way he is. A pale reflection of a man who doesn't even exist in this world. His father, if the Dark One had been armed only with a knife and not with magic. He sits at the window of his cramped London flat and stews in anger as he wonders if curses even exist in this world. If they do, then surely he is one.
If Baelfire is a curse then the only cure for these spells of his is true love.
He laughs aloud at the thought that anyone could love him now.
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He came through the portal in the middle of the night, tumbling through into one of London's back alleys penniless and alone. A strange boy in strange clothes in an uncaring city. Urchin, they called him. Orphan. Thief. He'd survived on the streets for almost a full year before they caught him, and then it was prison, and when he was booted out onto the streets again six months later that was when the curse had begun to take root. Or maybe it had been with him before then. Maybe it had come through the portal with him, born in the middle of a dark, dity alleyway on a cold London night.
Whatever the cause, back then he had thought he could control it, that it would never dominate him the way it had his father. He thought that he was stronger than that, that anger was an emotion he could easily overcome. He was wrong.
.
.
He kills for the first time in an alleyway, cold and dark and dirty just like the first one he'd ever seen in this town. There's no blood the first time. He does it all with his hands, wrapping her scarf tighter and tighter around her neck, pulling hard until it cuts off her air and her face starts to turn purple in the gloom.
He had paid her almost a pound to get her to come with him into this alley. His first time with a prostitute and he had come untouched as he watched the light disappear from her eyes. He had stolen his money back before he left her there, dumped in a corner like trash, skirts muddy and a ring of black bruising around her throat.
In retrospect he doesn't even know how it happened, what exactly she said or did that set him off. He doesn't know why he grabbed the ends of her scarf instead of her skirt, can't see the steps in his head between the girl's coy smile and her glassy-eyed corpse.
Baelfire runs the shabby green cloth through his fingers and thinks it must be some sort of curse. Sane men didn't do the things that he does.
.
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He found work in a butcher's shop soon after his release from the county jail. He lied about his name, called himself Neal Cooper because Neal was the hero of one of his favourite childhood stories and Cooper was his mother's maiden name. He lied about his past, said he had just moved from the country. And he got work as an apprentice, learning a trade that had nothing to do with magic or thread or the dreams of a naieve young boy who didn't know anything about how the world worked.
.
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Neal Cooper is a respectable man. He is one of two butchers in a shop that caters to people of the middle class, a shop that is better than most but not quite in the right part of town to be at all affluent. He is paid a decent wage and always has meat on the table. And while he can only afford a small flat in a barely respectable part of town he is neither poor nor poorly presented.
People know him. At the local pub, at the market, they stop to talk to him. He's a good man, that Neal Cooper, they say. A good, sensible man. The kind you can rely on.
Baelfire is not a good man.
.
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Men are different from women.
With women it comes on suddenly. One moment he'll be strolling along, calm and in control, and the next he'll see a flash of dark curling hair, or hazel eyes, or the right sort of smile, and the curse will be upon him. Like a flash he'll be after them, a charming smile on his face while his hand reaches into his coat to touch the knife he can't seem to stop carrying on his person. He lures them away with charm, or with money, or with a lie about how he knows their brother or their father. By the time they realise what they're dealing with it's too late. He has them silenced - a rag or a handkerchief stuffed into their mouth, or his hand clamped down over their mouth and nose to muffle the screams - and stuck on the end of his blade before there's a chance to run. It's violent and bloody, and sometimes when he snaps out of it, when he's Neal again, it's with blood up his arms to his elbows and some bit of flesh held in his hand.
With women, the curse gives him no room for argument. The rage is sudden and swift and unforgiving. A punnishment. Retribution for the mother who abandonned him, for the fairy who showed him the path to this world without care for the consequences.
Men are different.
With men, the anger is a slow burn. An accent, a phrase, some small greivance that he can never put a name to. Perhaps Baelfire just doesn't like his face. Whatever the cause of the anger, it comes on slow. Slow enough that he can plan. Which is good, because men are not so easily subdued as women. He can watch, and wait until they are alone and vulnerable. And then, when the timing is right and he has them just where he wants them he will appear from the shadows to grab them from behind. One arm around their throat to silence them, the other stabbing quick and brutal with his knife. He steals their valuables to make it look like just another robbery and melts into the night, gone until the next time the curse flares to life.
.
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Neal sees the headline from across the street, glancing across at the paper-boy on his way home from the shop. He crosses the street and gives the boy a coin, then stands there reading the article in the dim light from the street lamp nearby. It's one of his. He recognises it all. The alley, the blood, the colour of her hair. She died so prettily.
He cuts the article out of the paper and carefully presses it between the pages of a book.
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The next morning it's all anyone can talk about. He makes the normal replies, remarks on the tragedy and the travesty, certain to agree that at least it wasn't a nice, respectable girl. They can all rest easy knowing that it wasn't anyone who mattered. Baelfire wants to laugh at them, but Neal keeps his mouth pressed firmly into a line of grim silence and nods at the comments. He thinks of mute servant girls stabbed to death just for hearing things they shouldn't and the anger burns low in the pit of his stomach. He doubts they would care very much even if it had been a proper, respectable woman.
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The water in his wash basin is pink, the cloth in his hand turning the same as he scrubs blood from his hands and wrists. There's old blood under his nails - normal for a butcher - and new blood caked on over the top. Neal washes his hands methodically and stares at the pink water in the basin. He is the son of a whore and a murderer. And now he murders whores and men who remind him of his father. Whores and cowards.
They have a name for him in the papers, a name that makes him think that maybe he should stop. The name is getting publicity, people are taking notice. Sooner or later they'll catch him, and talk of curses wouldn't save him from execution.
'But are you cursed?' Baelfire whispers in his ear, masking the hair at the back of his neck prickle. 'Am I a curse? Are you as weak as our father?'
Neal dumps out the washbasin with more force than necessary, splashing pink water out into the gutter.
.
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There are more articles cut out from the papers, each one neatly folded and pressed between the pages of the large, heavy book on the bottom most shelf of his bookcase. They're calling him the Ripper.
He wonders what his father would think of that.
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It's a saturday morning when Neal's boss introduces him to his niece. A pretty young girl, blonde, blue eyed and shy. She can barely look up from the shop floor, and says her good mornings to his shoes. She's dressed in pink and looks almost exactly like a doll. Neal looks at her and smiles, and for once the charm is only meant to make her smile and not to lure her away.
"Emma," he repeats the name aloud, his voice pleasant and full of good nature, "that's a pretty name."
She dares a glance up at him, blue eyes pretty and innocent, and she looks nothing like Milah - nothing like the drunken whore who had left him as a child. He'll never know the irony in her name.
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The body falls into the river with a splash, the sound muted by the heavy fog that blankets the city in shades of white and grey. It muffles everything, sounds and feelings alike. Baelfire briskly brushes off his hands against the legs of his trousers, and when he straightens he's Neal again. He checks the time on his pocket watch, he still has an hour before he needs to meet Emma and her chaperone for dinner, and strides away into the fog.
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Fourteen years old and an urchin, Baelfire sat huddled on the doorstep of a shop that was closed for the night in the sparse shelter provided by its archway. Rain poured down from overhead, droplets splattering against the pavement and spitting back to hit his feet and shins. A world without magic, the blue fairy had promised. She had given him a world without pity, a world with no mercy.
Hungry and cold, rain soaking through to his bones, Baelfire swiped hot tears from his face and told himself he wasn't crying.
.
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Neal Cooper's boss has promised him the shop when he marries Emma. He was old, he said, it was time to retire. He didn't want to just sell the shop, he wanted it to go to someone he knew had a good head on his shoulders; Someone reliable, someone deserving. Neal signed the papers and bought a ring the very same day.
Baelfire laughed and laughed and laughed until his landlady came downstairs to bang on the door and ask what the matter was. Hours later, with his landlady's blood on his hands and staining his best dress shirt, Baelfire laughed some more as he chopped her up and stuffed her down the sewer grates. 'Deserving,' he chuckled darkly, kicking the old lady's left foot down the storm drain. 'You're deserving, Neal. You deserve it all. You deserve everything you get.'
They won't even know she's missing until she doesn't come around to collect rent, and by then he's already moved into his new house with his young wife.
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She suspects something is wrong sometimes, and he knows it. Of course she does, when some evenings he doesn't answer to his own name and the darkness in his head is plain on his face. He hides it from her as well as he can, hides the evidence of his curse and the things it makes him do. She can still see it though, hiding there in the shadows and the long silences. He doesn't realise that he talks in his sleep sometimes until one day she asks him; "Who's Rumpelstiltskin?"
Neal hits her without meaning to, his hand lashing out to slap her across the mouth. "Never say that name," he growls in Baelfire's voice.
Emma stares at him a moment, pretty blue eyes wide, small, pale hand held to her trembling mouth. But she's a good girl, a good little wife, and says nothing more about it.
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This world is not without magic. It's a lie. A horrible lie made up to trick him into leaving the Enchanted Forest. A gamble played by fairies who didn't care about the consequences for one young, naive little boy. Baelfire discovers this by accident, the last thought he ever has before he dies. His arm is around the neck of a man in a tophat and tailcoat, squeezing tight, his knife blade sinking into the man's kidneys when suddenly something falls from the man's pocket. Baelfire sees it a split second before it hits the ground. A large, transparent crystal shaped like a bean glinting in the moonlight.
The blue fairy lied.
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.
The bodies fall from the sky in the middle of a busy road. Cars swerve and traffic screeches to a halt, but not quite quick enough to avoid running one of them over. Sirens wail and soon ambulances arrive. DOA and critical condition, only one of the two ambulances speeds away towards the hospital, the other one in no hurry. Its patient wasn't going anywhere.
There is one more article in the paper about Jack the Ripper, this one three weeks after Emma Cooper's husband disappears. Ripper disappears, it says. And she cries, and everybody worries and wonders why she doesn't want to have this baby.
Neal Cooper wakes up in a hospital bed, a feeding tube through his nose and an IV in his arm. He doesn't know where he is, doesn't know how he got there. He has several fractures, including a cracked skull, which the doctors say could easily account for his lost memories. He doesn't tell them that he remembers more than he lets on, that he knows where he was - just not how he'd managed to rocket forward about a hundred or so years between leaving work at the butcher's shop and waking up in hospital.
He skips out on the hospital bill, changes his last name again and tries to settle in to this new world. The culture shock is more than it had been last time, but he'd been fourteen then and teenagers were always more adaptive than adults. He still manages to figure it out and in the course of a year goes from clueless to competently able to get by. He's still just a petty theif and drifter, his old skills not exactly high in demand in this new world, but he'll figure it out sooner or later.
.
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He's sleeping in the back of a recently stolen yellow beetle when a sound wakes him up. Neal cracks open an eye in time to see a flash of blonde hair as someone ducks in through the open driver's side door. He watches the someone - a woman - shut the door and pull a screwdriver out of her purse. His eyebrow raises a little as she uses the screwdriver to start the car. He can't help but smile when she drives off without checking the back seat. He could've been anyone, he could've been someone dangerous (something twinges in the back of his mind there, but he can't identify why that thought unsettles him). Lucky for her, he's not that kind of man.
"Impressive," he says, sitting up properly and making her jump a little, "but really, you could've just asked me for the keys. Just drive," he adds, smiling at her, "it's fine."
"I just stole your car," the woman replies, and while her words are tough her expression betrays her, "your life could be in danger."
"Neal Cassidy," he introduces himself casually, as if this sort of thing happens every day. It doesn't. But then he's also dealt with enough crazy things in his life to not let this ruffle him.
"Yeah," she snorts, "I'm not telling you my name."
"No," he agrees with an easy smile, "I don t need it to have you arrested when the robbery s in progress."
She hesitates, glances back over her shoulder at him. "Emma," she says finally, "Swan."
Neal blinks. Something about the name strikes a chord, though he doesn't know why. One of those memories gone in the fall between Victorian London and modern day New York a couple of years ago. "Good name," he says, and means it.
He likes the name Emma. It's a pretty name for a girl.