When he'd first come through, out into a world of noise, bright neon and carriages without horses he'd been understandably scared.
Had screamed and clawed at anyone who'd tried to get him a 'nice clean set of clothes' even after everything had stopped smelling like papa…like home.
Eventually they'd sedated him, stripped him of everything but the scarf and, once the nightmares had set in, he'd been glad of the fact. Indeed he'd gone to give them the scarf so many times, to request the one last scrap of his boyhood be burned away with everything else and yet the words had never quite formed.
So he'd put the scarf in a box, locked it away with the fear and broken shards of who he'd been before the portal and started again.
Once or twice after Emma, beautiful, almost impossible, Emma had stumbled into his life he'd been tempted to show her the scarf, to give her all that he was in wish that she'd give just enough to agree to walk life with him always. There was just so much tied to it though, a poison he knew he'd likely truly never be able to leach without telling her EVERYTHING and sounding like mad man.
Then.
Then August had happened and he'd absorbed himself into his 'other' life, had locked the scarf into the safe of a low rent apartment and all but forgotten that it existed until his father had broken his way on in.
That he had, indeed, seemed so very much papa rather than dark one, that Emma had been there in his shadow, hands looped tight into the smaller hands of the son he'd never known existed, had prompted him to agree to follow in his wake.
To attempt to be again Baelfire after so long being anything but.
In the threshold of the fragment remains of the door, balanced between one 'world' and the next he'd been struck a strange little compulsion.
Had worked his way back through the reams of empty trinkets, pulled the scarf from the safe and, once more, settled its soft material against his neck.