When Mary Margaret came around the hospital with a stack of used paperbacks to hand out to the patients, Moe French decided to just grab one to get rid of her as quickly as possible before she asked any questions or managed more than a few polite words of sympathy.
But, the first book was a romance novel with a lurid cover. He looked at the one under it, which was just as bad. He sorted through the pile quickly while Mary Margaret said something about "donations." He passed by Crime and Punishment and The Count of Monte Cristo – too thick and too old to be worth reading – and finally grabbed a collection of short stories with a rocket ship on the cover.
Then, he shoved it aside and forgot about it.
Or he meant to forget about it.
But, he needed a distraction. His mind kept going over what had happened.
Everyone in Storybrooke was scared of Mr. Gold, and with good reason. He owned just about everything in town and could be ruthless in exacting payment. If you owed him money, like Moe French, ruthless wasn't the half of it.
But Moe was a big man and, despite getting up there in years, more of muscle than flab. Gold, on the other hand, was built like a handful of twigs only held together by designer suits. He couldn't even walk without a cane. When he decided to repossess Moe's truck, he brought hired muscle to take care of it for him, just walking away while Moe lost the argument to Gold's thug.
Moe had run into the mayor after that. He'd been upset – he remembered that – and she'd invited him over to discuss his problems, offering him some of her apple brandy.
He was pretty sure he'd had too much of it. The rest of the conversation was a blur. Only, he remembered the mayor's sympathetic voice, pointing out how Gold would never have won a fair fight. No, he had to hide behind legal tricks and make others do the fighting for him. If a strong man would just stand up to him, Gold would crumble like the weak twig he was . . . .
And there'd been something else, something Moe had brought Regina to show her he'd really done it . . . .
Or maybe that was just the liquor talking. Moe had thought it was the next day.
Till Gold hunted him down and tried to beat the answers out of him.
Moe remembered talking to Gold, trying to reason with him.
And the feeling that he wasn't talking to Gold at all. Or that the Gold he and everyone else in the town thought they knew had never existed at all. It was a mask he wore, and this creature – a creature who could casually grab a man twice his weight off the street and truss him up as easily as if Moe had been a two year old child (more easily, Moe thought, since the two year old would have yelled and screamed and bitten instead of being struck dumb with surprise) and beat him half to death with that look of inhuman madness in his eyes.
Inhuman.
They aren't men.
The words echoed oddly in the back of Moe's mind.
He's a beast.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. Being beaten to a pulp did things to his brain. The pain medication they'd given him wasn't helping, either.
He'd given something to Regina. Or he thought he had.
And Gold had been ready to kill him to get it back.
Or that's what Gold had said when he'd shoved his cane into Moe's throat, choking him. He'd wanted to know two things: who told Moe to take it and where was it?
But that hadn't been what he'd said when the mad rage lit into his eyes, when he'd begun pounding Moe with his cane.
A small, thin, lame man beating another with his walking stick. Moe remembered some TV show where an enraged, little old lady began beating one of the characters with her cane. He remembered laughing at it. He would have laughed – well, he might have, people always thought twice about laughing at Gold – at the idea of Gold trying to beat someone with that thing before it actually happened.
She's gone. She's gone forever.
You are her father.
Or that's what he thought he remembered Gold saying.
You are her father.
He didn't have a daughter. He and his wife had wanted children, but it had never happened.
She's gone. She's gone forever.
Maybe Gold was insane.
Or maybe Moe was. Maybe everything he thought Gold had said was just a bizarre nightmare.
Drugs, he thought. Drugs and brandy and being hit over the head one time too many.
In the end, he picked up the book, trying to distract himself from his own, confused thoughts.
He skimmed through one or two stories, not paying much attention to the plot. Men and cats fought dragons in space (or something like that) in one of them. In another, nursery rhymes and someone who might have been the Pied Piper were the only clues for children trying to escape a dying, domed city.
Nursery rhymes.
Fairy tales.
He had that strange feeling again, of something he'd forgotten, something he needed to remember . . . .
No. If it had to do with Gold or Mayor Mills, the less he knew the better. Getting between those two was like volunteering to be the first grain of wheat to jump between the millstones . . . .
An image surfaced in his mind, cold and clear, of watching grain being ground between two, great stone wheels, hearing the sound of the water from outside he knew was turning them.
"If Avonlea falls, we'll be cut off. How much grain will we have ready if it comes to a siege?"
A voice, his yet not his. The accent slightly different, the words clipped and authorative.
Dreams, he thought.
He flipped pages, a title caught his eye, A Dream of Armageddon by H. G. Wells. Dream. Well, why not? He tried to read it.
It was, he thought, a stupid story. Two men meet on a train. One is reading a book about dreams. The other sees it and begins to tell him about his own dreams, nightmares about a future world you were obviously supposed to believe was real, or would be real someday.
But Moe found himself becoming more and more irritated at the man's story. He dreamed he was some future politician, a member of parliament, it sounded like, who threw it all away for some beautiful girl. All right, she sounded like a girl worth throwing a lot away for, beautiful, intelligent , and all the rest of it. But, the man knew the situation back home was getting worse. People came to him and begged him to return. He knew there'd be war, he knew millions would die –
And he knew he'd have to walk away from the woman he loved if he was to do anything about it.
Moe, felt his blood pressure rising, as if it were really happening.
The idiot wouldn't do it. Wells apparently agreed with him. Love was supposed to be worth it.
Of course, the obvious happened. The war spilled over to the lovers' island sanctuary. They became refugees. The woman was killed in the fighting and the man died not long after.
But even that didn't seem to let the dreamer off the hook. His last, horrified line suggested he still dreamed about this future world, dreaming about the carrion birds feeding on what was left of him.
Good, Moe thought.
The viciousness, the anger he felt surprised him.
But he could imagine it too easily. A lord of some sort sitting behind barred doors in a fortress, his guards around him, desperately trying to find some way to save his people from the inhuman enemy bent on destroying them.
That man would trade his crown, his throne, his last drop of blood to save them.
But that hadn't been what the enemy wanted, had it?
The story seemed to open up in his mind, almost as if it he'd been there himself.
A beautiful woman. Yes, there was one. But not some lover or mistress. Moe could see her, a princess, a king's daughter.
Her father would die sooner than sell her to the enemy.
Except when that was the price demanded to save his people.
Even then, he couldn't have done it. To sell his only child – and sell her to that – impossible.
But, she was made of stronger stuff.
He could hear her accepting the terms, hear her demanding her own conditions.
"My family, my friends, they will all live?"
"You have my word."
"Then you have mine."
H. G. Wells' girl didn't have a fraction of that strength. When war began to become real, her eyes grew big and frightened. Then, she let her lover convince her it wouldn't happen, that it didn't matter, that it would never reach them.
Belle, even when he begged her, would never be as stupid as that –
Belle.
Memories whirled around him. He was like the madman in the story, his dream life more real than everything around him –
No, it was the drugs, it was his injuries, it was the memory of Gold's inhuman face and the insane accusations pouring out of his mouth.
"You are her father."
"You had her love and you shut her out."
Belle.
Belle.
"It's your fault. Not mine. Your fault."
Gold's face.
He knew Gold's face.
The inhuman face that had looked down at him, beating him, wanting to kill him –
Belle's deal, her friends, her family, they would all live.
And Gold . . . or the man – the thing – Gold really was always kept his deals.
Regina Mills. The mayor.
Only she was much more than the mayor, wasn't she?
She had sent him to Gold to get her . . . something. Something small. Something harmless. Only it wasn't small and harmless, was it? Not if it was Gold's.
In the story of Aladdin, the evil wizard sends Aladdin into the cave and tells him he may take whatever jewels he wants – but not the lamp, the small, dirty, battered lamp that the evil wizard knows is the most valuable treasure of all.
Regina knew. When she sent Moe in there, she knew what Gold was, knew she was setting Moe up.
Knew, for whatever reason, Gold wanted to kill him.
Dead.
That's what Gold had said. "She's gone. She's gone forever. She's never coming back."
Belle was dead.
And Gold –
No, not Gold. Never Gold.
Rumpelstiltskin blamed Moe French.
Because, when word came that Belle had somehow escaped Rumpelstiltskin's castle, Moe – Maurice – had listened to Queen Regina, just as he'd listened to her when she came too late with help for his people against the ogres, when she'd learned the dreadful bargain Belle had made to save them, and she'd whispered all the terrible hints about what Rumpelstiltskin would do to a young maiden in his power (Gaston had listened to the rumors, too, and run off to fight him. No one knew what had happened. Gaston was seen going up to the Dark One's castle and was never seen again coming out).
When word came that, somehow, Belle had freed herself, Maurice had followed Regina's advice, spreading rumors that she had returned to her own country, half mad with the tortures she'd survived. Maurice let it be known that he had summoned the greatest healers and clerics of the land to try and help his tormented child but, in an unguarded moment, driven mad by what the imp had done to her, she had thrown herself from the castle tower.
It would, the queen said, give her people time to find Belle, to keep her safe where Rumpelstiltskin would never find her, not that he would look, not when he thought she was dead already.
Maurice cursed himself, with how he'd been used.
The fury in Rumpelstiltskin's eyes as he spoke about a dead woman, a fury that made no sense in a man who had tortured a girl and driven her to madness.
But a fury that made complete sense in a man who had done none of those things, who had let the girl go –
Only to hear tales Maurice himself had helped make up about how she had died in the care of her family.
No, this was insane.
Even if what he was thinking is real (it can't be. But it is. He knows it is), then Gold is a monster, a greater monster than anyone in Storybrooke has ever imagined.
(Unless they remember, too).
But, he remembers Gold's mad fury and . . . something more than fury.
Moe French looked over at the phone beside his bed.
A part of him is dimly looking on, still sure this is all imagination, sure that, once the drugs and pain are in the past, he will know this is nothing more than a bizarre delusion, a drugged up dream.
But, right now, he believes it.
Right now, he knows.
He reaches out for the phone.
Awkwardly, he hits the numbers.
It rings.
"Gold, here," a calm, cold voice answers.
"This is Moe French," Moe licks his dry lips. "Gold – you have to tell me – what happened to my little girl?"