Disclaimer: It's the show's world. I just play in it (with my own toys).

13

Notebooks of every kind spilled out of the suitcase. Some were leather-bound, some spiral-bound, some nothing more than a collection of scrap paper tied with every manner of string. Some were older than others, many of them in excellent condition, while several others were yellowing and falling apart.

Gold reached for one of the leather journals and opened it. In delicate script, the inside cover read "Journal #33 - Wonderland, Part II." Setting it aside, he chose another and read the inside cover. "Journal #57 - Narnia, Part I."

"Magic always comes with a price," Finn said. "The price for using fire portals is that you give up all memory of who you were after the first time you stepped through the first one. Fire burns. It destroys and cleanses and renews. It strips away everything you are. Every time I step through a portal, I'm fourteen again. I began keeping journals to remind myself of who I've been and what I've done."

"How did you discover you could conjure these portals?"

Finn reached for the glass on the table, rose, and refilled her drink. She downed the second glass with purpose and poured another.

"My father was some kind of aristocrat when he was younger. He was clever and jovial, never had a bad word to say about anyone. At least, that's what others have told me. By the time I met him, he had lost his title and wealth, his sight, and the love of his life." She sipped her brandy slowly and closed her eyes. "I shouldn't have stayed. But I had nowhere else to go."

"Your grandmother?" Gold prompted. "Surely she would have welcomed you back."

"Almost certainly," Finn answered. "But I couldn't have asked that of her. There was something... dark... inside me after what happened with that mirror. Whatever it was, it was growing. The fairy tale in this world says that Gerda's love melted the shard. The reality wasn't so simple."

"It never is," Gold muttered, thinking of Belle.

Finn softly murmured in agreement. "I couldn't ask her to forgive me when I already knew what I was going to become."

"Which was?"

"Every bit as cold as my mother."

Gold had to admire her selfless foresight. He had known, at least intellectually, what being the Dark One would mean. He had understood that it would be difficult for Bae, that his son would pay a price for his own deeds. He considered sometimes how much easier Bae's life might have been if he had left him in the care of some neighbor in the village, keeping watch from a distance and stepping in only when necessary. But he couldn't. He was selfish and cowardly, and he did not have the strength to let go, and it had doomed them both.

Finn's fingers ghosted across the back of his hand, and he pulled away abruptly. His memories of Baelfire were his and his alone. She could not have them.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Rumplestiltskin," she said quietly. "We're in the same boat, you and I."

"You were telling me about your father," he said sharply.

She sighed, letting his curtness go. "He never wanted me. He wanted my sister. His sweet, beautiful, youngest daughter. Not me." She scoffed sadly. "Never me."

"You said your sister was older."

"I'm technically twenty-seven, remember?" she replied, raising an eyebrow.

Gold nodded, understanding. "Life with him was difficult."

Finn stared at the liquid in her glass. "I was selling matchsticks the night before the New Year festival. It was freezing, but I couldn't go home. I had only sold half of them, and I would have been punished." She put the glass to her lips and swallowed hard. "He may have been blind, but he was a crack shot with a fire iron."

"He beat you." It wasn't a question.

"Badly," she answered softly, nodding. "Sometimes. It never made any sense to me. I don't know what he expected would happen. His wife would still be dead. His daughter would still be lost. We only had each other, and he did everything to drive me away. But I couldn't leave. Until that night."

She took Gold's silence as a sign that she should continue.

"Instead of going home, I huddled in a doorway that would keep me out of the snow. I'd already learned that I could see the past in fire, and I missed my grandmother. The smell of her, the sound of her voice. Everything. So I lit the matches to remember. And every time one fizzled out, I lit another and another and I wanted so badly to run away, to just be gone, and I poured all of that desire into that last match, and the fire grew in my hands until it swallowed me. And when I looked up, I was in a new world."

"Which world?" Gold asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know. I still don't know how many portals I jumped through before I learned what happens."

"How did you find out if you don't remember anything?"

She smiled slightly. "Did you always know you were Rumplestiltskin after the curse was cast?"

Gold frowned. "Not until Emma returned," he admitted. "When time began moving forward again, then I knew."

"And before, when you believed you were just Mr. Gold, friendly neighborhood loan shark, didn't you feel like there was something missing?"

Always, he wanted to say, but he couldn't bring himself to speak the word. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Nightmares?" she asked. "Déjà vu? A flash here and there like you're remembering something that couldn't possibly have happened? So you shrug it off as if you were daydreaming, but that feeling won't go away."

A shiver ran across his shoulders. He didn't like the way she could read him, especially the parts of him she had no right to know.

Belle had seen the man she wanted him to be, the man she'd made him wish he could be, a wish he had long since stopped believe was possible. But Finn saw who he was. There was no anger in her eyes. She didn't want to change him. She didn't judge him. She didn't run. She didn't even flinch.

"You were saying?" he said smoothly, hoping to steer their conversation away from himself.

She eyed him reproachfully but apparently thought better of voicing what she had originally intended.

"When I realized that I had memories of another life and no idea where they came from, I looked to the fire. It's hard to read your past in the flames if you don't know what you're looking for. Everything is cloudy and disjointed, but I learned enough to figure out what was happening to me." She nodded at the suitcase. "That's when I started keeping the journals. I was in..." - she paused to search for the memory - "Camelot at the time."

She rifled through the collection of journals until she found what she was looking for. She pulled out a compilation of parchment leaves, the exposed threads along its spine brown and frayed.

"This," she said solemnly as she handed it to him, "is the beginning."