On a Cold dark night, a crowd was gathered around a tiny bed where a woman had just recently passed away. A green skinned, curly haired man sighed. "You should have called for me sooner and I might have been able to save your queen! But you just had to wait until it was the last minute and it was too late for me to get to her in time, I can do many things but i can not raise the dead. But every thing comes with a price, including wasting my time!" he snapped at the king.
The king sighed and nods "what is your price?"
The man paused as if to think long and hard about what to ask for and then his eyes fell upon a gold necklace with a rose dangling from it. "how about that necklace that she is wearing, she's dead she don't need it anymore!" he said insincitively. Maurice didn't blink an eye, he quietly removed the jewlery from his wife's cold neck, and placed it into the hands of Rumplestiltskin, who turned on his heels and walked away from the room.
As he started to pass by a room that was not far from the room he had just left he heard a noise, a sound that tore through the hardest shell and deep into his heart, a sound that no father would ever forget. It was the sound of a child crying. Rumplestiltskin stopped and looked at the door, unable to move on, his heart was cracking, was breaking at the soft cries that came from that room. He thought of his own son Baelfire, who he had so foolishly allowed to disappear from his site, a boy he had lost so long ago, he had held Bae just like that so many years ago, but even if it had been a long time he hadn't forgotten his perternal instincts.
Unable to turn away, he reached out and slowly opened the mahagany brown door, and stepped in. Inside he found a light oak brown crib pushed up against the wall, and a tiny child of about maybe two standing up clutching the top of the crib with her hands tears pouring down her face, loud wails coming from her tiny mouth. Rumplestiltskin smiled at the tiny pig tailed child, and could tell that the loud wailing coming from the other room had woken and terrified the tiny child.
Paternal instinct took over and he approached the crib and took the little girl into his arms and held her against his chest, he sits down in a nearby rocking chair and slowly sets her in his lap still holding her to his chest, and rocks her gently, rubbing and patting her back comfortingly at the same time speaking in a low tone to her "shhh, it's okay, it's okay sweatheart, your going to be okay."
The child appeared to be very trusting, and did not seem to be at all afriad of Rumplestiltskin, a thing that surprised the old man very much, as normally anyone that saw him was always automatically afraid of him, but yet this tiny child was not, instead she was actually showing him a type of trust he hadn't seen since he had become the dark one to protect his own son, and consequently scared his boy and made him eventually fall into a hole and disappear into a world that Rumplestiltskin had no idea about.
He knew even as he held her that eventually this child would probably grow up to fear and hate him just like everyone else, but for the moment the perternal feelings inside him, the man that had loved his Baelfire just couldn't leave this tiny crying child without holding and comforting her first. He continued to whisper comforting words to her, "shhh, it's okay, it's okay Belle, i've got you now, your ok, I'll stay right here until you go to sleep!" he told her gently. He was now petting her hair as she curled up harder and closer into his chest.
At some point Rumple felt a familiar wetness on his shirt, and new without looking that the child was drooling on him, but the father in him just didn't care, this child for the moment had softened the monster within him revealing for the moment the man that had once been a father, all those years ago. But he soon felt her breathing change and knew that the child was asleep.
He stood and carefully, and gently carried the little girl back to her crib, covered her up gently and finally after kissing her cheek, step outside the door so as to make sure she didn't inhale anything and finally disappeared in a cloud of smoke