He only had a small memory of the spinsters promising him that he would always have a home with them after his father left. But from that day on, he had many memories of the ways they'd made good on that promise.

He remembered the soldiers coming by to look for him, to take him in payment for what they hadn't received. And he remembered the way that Mabel and Elizabeth had both told him to hide inside when they did. They lifted a secret stone in the floor that revealed a place just big enough for him to hide in, then he'd listened as they informed the soldiers that they could search the house, but the boy wasn't there.

"Knowing that family Malcolm probably took the boy and ran off into the woods with him."

"You could spend your time looking-"

"But we all know that property will more than pay for the debt that man collected."

"He's gone."

"Why not just let him be gone?"

He'd never seen the soldiers again. But things soon started to change for him, his life got better, in a way that made him almost glad that his father had left him.

"His mistake."

"Didn't know what he had!" the spinners insisted on the rare times he brought it up.

In the years that followed, he began to grow fond of his new guardians, and he began to see what it felt like to have someone be fond of him as well. They soon began to call themselves his aunts when people asked how they came to have him. He too began to call them his Aunts, even going so far as to name them Aunt Mabel and Aunt Lizzy. They cared for him. For the first time in his life, he began to attend school. He didn't know as much as the other boys his age, on his very first day he'd spelled his own name wrong, "Rumpelstiltskin" instead of "Rumplestiltskin". His face had reddened as the children laughed at him and he insisted that he'd spelled it correctly and it was the teacher who was wrong. Eventually, his teacher believed him, but now his name was stuck that way, Rumpelstiltskin. His aunts insisted it wasn't because he was stupid, he just didn't know any better. They called him clever for giving himself a new name, for marking this new chapter in his life with a new identity of his own making. He liked that, he liked the way they saw the world and the way they could fix things for him and make him smile even on the worst days. And so he adopted his new name proudly and soon enough he began to catch up to the other students with his aunts' help. He learned how to read and write and even do math, first on paper and then in his head. They spun together every day after he returned from school and when he had a bad day, they made his favorite, meat pie, for dinner, which they ate together. Their home was smaller than the house he'd once shared with his father, the house that was now nothing but dust and land for potato crops, but he was happier there than he'd ever been. His Aunts were attentive to him, waking him with shrieks once in the middle of the night when one of them thought they'd spied a Shadow hovering over his bed. They'd been trying to protect him...no one had ever tried to protect him before.

"It was probably nothing, Rumple," Mabel assured him as she tucked him back into bed.

"A dream," Lizzy added.

"An owl in the moonlight. Whatever it was, I'm sure it won't be back."

"It". They tried to reassure him "it" wasn't the Shadow from Neverland, but he had his doubts. Aunt Mabel had described exactly the very thing that took him from that place, and he watched from outside as the woman slowly walked around the yard, sprinkling something they called "a protection spell" around the house. "Just in case." If they really thought it was nothing then they wouldn't have done that.

Still, it didn't escape their notice when strange goings on began to affect not just him, but the entire town. Boys had suddenly begun to have strange dreams, all the same. They dreamt they went to an island, one where they could do anything they imagined; dance all night around a bonfire to music, eat anything they dreamed up, even fly. One parent reported seeing a Shadow that resembled the one Aunt Mabel had seen, the one he swore brought him back from Neverland. There was even a rumor, one night when that parent turned up dead, that it was the shadow, who had ripped his own away, instantly killing him. His Aunts denied it. But how many shadow-men with glowing white eyes could there be in the world? They could deny it all they wanted, but he knew the truth. Even if he didn't want to speak the words aloud, he knew.

Even more so, his fears seemed to be confirmed one day when he'd gone into town with his aunts, to take their spun wool to the weaver. They'd traded what was in their baskets for coins and a brand new pair of clothes for him to wear to school on cool mornings and he was admiring them with Aunt Mabel over his shoulder when he saw a crowd and heard a familiar whisper from the depths of it.

Peter Pan.

"What was that you said?" he asked pulling away from his Aunts and pushing to the front of a crowd. There was a woman there, sitting on a bench with her head in her hand crying while another woman comforted her. Someone in the back of the crowd grabbed the threesome and began to steer them away from the scene.

"It's the most terrifying thing," she whispered. "Her boy ran off into the woods and hasn't come back."

"Was it the wolves?"

"Or trolls?"

"Not the ogres again surely!" his Aunts questioned. "Perhaps he's just been lost."

"Felix has been lost for a while now," the woman whispered with tears in her eyes. "He's been so lost to that dream of his he's run off to find that island!"

"They've been hearing him talking to someone late at night for a while," another woman in the crowd whispered to them. "But when they looked they saw nothing. Now he's left only a note that he'd gone off to join Peter Pan. If you're smart you'll stay away from boys like that Rumpelstiltskin," she insisted suddenly looking down at him. "Especially those named Peter Pan."

He felt fear creep into his body and twist his stomach up into knots. Aunt Mabel kept a hand on his shoulder and led him away back to the house without another word until they got home. He expected they'd want to talk about it when they got home, but he didn't expect them to so blatantly dismiss it as they did.

"I wouldn't worry about it Rumple," Aunt Mabel stated. "There's no proof it's your father."

"Coincidence!"

"And even if it were you've nothing to worry about here," she told him leaning down and taking his face between her palms. "You are safe here from shadows that come to the windows at night. Come, let's spin a bit before dinner, hm?"

Spinning was their answer to everything as the years went past. Bad day at school? Spin. Learned something new in Math? Spin. Bored? Spin. Tired? Spin. Early? Spin. Nervous? Spin.

He loved his Aunts, and after a while, he knew they loved him. They were good providers, kind, gentle, caring…they were everything his father never could be. But as much as he loved spinning with them at his wheel he longed for something more. Friends. He thought as a child, he'd wanted nothing more than he wanted a home, but he was convinced that he wanted friends more than he ever wanted that now. His Aunts had told him the night before he started school that he was bound to make many friends there, and yet, no matter how hard he tried over the years, he couldn't.

His father was gone, but their prediction that he would never outlive his name seemed to have come true. Children of parents who had been cheated by his father were told to avoid him, not to trust Malcolm's boy. Others were put off by his spinning. Living alone with his two aunts and being poorly at reading gave them an excuse to mock and tease him. He was proud of his aunts, adored them in ways that his classmates couldn't understand, and that was always why Mabel told him that they did it. What happened to him was something they couldn't understand.

"And people are always afraid of what they don't understand," Aunt Lizzy told him.

"Exactly. They try and turn it into something funny so they don't have to be afraid of it anymore. But they'll see Rumple, they'll get to know you as we do and soon treat you just like everyone else."

He waited for that day to come, longed for it just as he had longed and waited for everything else in his life. But one winter, years after his father had left, he saw the boys playing by a frozen lake. He watched as they teased and taunted each other, walking out farther and farther onto the ice, daring one another to go farther and farther. Something came over him at that moment, and he determined that if they weren't going to treat them the way he wanted them to on their own, he'd make them.

"I can go all the way to the center," he claimed walking over to them. The boys all stared back at him, as though they hadn't even been aware he was nearby.

"You?" one of the boys, Rolf was his name, questioned. "You can't walk out to the center. You'll fall in and die, be trapped under the ice forever!"

The other boys were smiling, lips poised to laugh when he walked away. He wasn't going to give them the opportunity to laugh. He set his bag down right there on the shores of the lake, hoping the leather would keep the papers inside from growing wet and trying to pretend he didn't care so they wouldn't think he did. His heart was racing even before he took that first step, the warning Rolf had issued him dire in his head. But he did what his aunts always told him to do with unpleasant words and thoughts. He tucked it away deep in his mind, then locked it away.

Off he raced, not just walking, but running. Rolf shouted his name and made a grab to catch him, but he was smaller and easily darted away. He'd always thought ice was slippery, but the snow upon it provided just enough traction for his light feet. He heard the breath, felt the cold searing it in his with every inhale. He'd never run like this in his life, but it felt good. He felt free. Until he came to the center of that lake. Feeling the slick ice beneath his feet he planted them and let himself slide a little before coming to a stop and looking back at the boys. They were staring at him now with open mouths and wide eyes. The way they were looking at him now was different the looks they'd given him before.

And he liked it.

True story, there has always been a problem coming in this fiction that, in fairness, I created for myself. When I first started writing Moments many years ago, I decided that I wanted to pay homage of sorts to my grandparents and my German heritage. I have always used the traditional "el" German spelling of Rumpelstiltskin. The problem with that lies in the fictions to come when the dagger writes his true name as "Rumplestiltskin"; "le". So, basically, I had two options, go back through all of Moments and change every last "el" back to "le", or come up with a way to explain the difference. Considering it would take me months to go change all of that in Moments, I've obviously opted for Option Two. If you hate it, I'm sorry, truly for changing this one little thing, but I also beg that you'll let it rest as this issue will come up again in the next fiction and Rumple is going to be able to use it for good in the future. My apologies.

Thank you, Jennifer Baratta, Grace5231973, and Enomisje, for your reviews on the last chapter. I'm happy that even if I didn't like the 3x08 chapters, you did like them as well as how they were written. I'm excited to hear what you'll think of the next chapter. The subject is one that I've been waiting to share with you for well over a year. It was briefly mentioned in a Moments chapter, but there is so much more to it than it seemed in that one chapter. We'll get the answer to a couple of very important questions in the next chapter and I can't wait to hear what you think! Peace and Happy Reading!