And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill's side. — La Belle Dame sans Merci, John Keats
Cast ashore with the bitter taste of the Styx staining his tongue, the man awakens in a different place, in a different year. She who once held his heart so warmly has turned cold. Memory is no comfort for what was never there.
Still, he has never been one to palely loiter, alone or not. Someone needs him. That much he knows. Everything else he can find out along the way.
In Vienna, Mr. Gold was exploring the old city on foot with his wife and son when the Dark Curse ripped through him. His thoughts scattered into the void, the world vanishing around him.
Then he opened his eyes, disoriented to find himself lying on his back. He jerked upright even as Belle caught him and tried to ease him back down.
"You fainted." Worried blue eyes gazed down at him.
"I'm all right," he insisted. He sat up again, more slowly, looking around. They were in the lobby of a hotel, and someone had moved him to a couch. Gideon was still in his stroller next to Belle. "I'm fine. Maybe the heat..."
It had been a hot summer, and dressed as he was in his usual three piece suit, blaming his collapse on the heat was plausible enough. A bottle of water and a string of promises to be more careful later, he convinced Belle that they could continue the rest of the day as planned. She knew better than to believe him, but let it go — for now. After dinner, back in the privacy of their own hotel room, she demanded the truth.
"It was the Dark Curse," he admitted. "It's been cast."
"You could feel it? Even from here?"
He made a face. "Even from here." He touched his chest. "All the power dragged out of me to tear open a slice of reality." Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the dagger. It shivered under his touch, growing less substantial by the second. Then it was gone.
Belle gasped.
"There's only one real dagger," he explained in a low voice, not meeting her eyes. "And he has it."
"You gave it to him," Belle whispered. "I remember..."
"It was almost two years ago."
"You thought he wouldn't cast it?"
He shrugged. "A calculated risk. I thought we'd be safe enough to do a bit of traveling."
"Do you think Storybrooke's in danger?"
"They have our phone numbers if it comes to that." Then he sighed. "But if it's magical help they want, well, I won't be any use to them."
"What do you mean? You're the..." Belle stopped suddenly. "Oh. Oh, I see."
He nodded. He closed his eyes, not sure how he felt. A burden that had defined him for so long was finally gone, this time forever. He had avoided thinking about it all day, but now that Belle knew, that made it real.
"You're not the Dark One anymore."
The balance of the worlds shifted. Souls poured from one reality into another, dragged into existence by dark magic. The curse roused the Blue Fairy from her torpor — enough to recognize her predicament, but not enough to escape it. She fled into her own thoughts, where she met herself with dismay.
"You should not be here." Steely eyes met hers, demanded submission.
"You must help me," she begged herself. "The Dark One... Rumplestiltskin..."
"What has he done?" The part of her that had been real confronted that which had been false.
"The Dark Curse," she told herself. "He has twisted it... twisted us. Made a wish into reality."
"This is a corruption of fate." The Blue Fairy absorbed the knowledge from her counterpart, then grimaced in distaste. "Such things were never destined to be."
"He has never been one to obey destiny, from the first," said the Blue Fairy born from a wish. She knew she was a corruption of fate. She felt the darkness binding her to existence when she should have been no more than a discarded possibility. She knew. But she existed, and it horrified her. And clung to it with every fiber of her being. Was this what it had been like for Rumplestiltskin, once he was no longer a Savior? Once he had taken on the cursed darkness? "Ever since his mother cut his fate, he has become the opposite of what he should have been, turning darkness on those loved."
"Saving those who should never have been saved." The first — the true — Blue Fairy was pale, a tremor of fear underlying her words to herself. Then she recovered her aplomb. What must be would be. "You must go back. See that these dark reflections are sent back behind the mirror. They have no place in the realms of the living."
"I can't. I don't have that power." And such was the extent of her corruption that even if she had the power, she wouldn't. That knowledge, she kept unvoiced.
"He does. The Dark One." The Blue Fairy regarded herself sternly. "You know what must be done."
"He doesn't have that power, either. Not anymore." She had felt the power it had taken for the curse to weave so many new souls into the web of fate. He had drained all her magic, and all of his own in both wish and reality.
"Don't be deceived," said the other. "If he has none, he seeks it out. He was powerless before he became the Dark One. He was powerless again after he was no longer the Dark One... until he stole the power of all the Dark Ones. Power enough to kill the the Black Fairy when she brought all the realms to the verge of destruction, power enough to break her curse."
"He did what? But his fate was cut." She knew he had once been destined to die in battle, taking down a great evil — his own mother. Knowing the prophecy, the Black Fairy had used the shears of destiny to prevent that doom. Yet it had still come to pass? Even without a Savior's gift of light magic?
"As you said, he was never one to obey destiny." The Blue Fairy who was real looked at the Blue Fairy who was not. "But this duty falls on you. It was your failure which permitted this perversion of reality. You must see that it is undone..."
"How?"
"Find a way. Gain the Dark One's compliance. Whatever it takes."
She recoiled at the phrase, the same she had heard from countless villains before. "'Whatever it takes'?"
"In the service of fate," said the other.
"Ah." More corruption, more darkness, even if the other justified it as necessity. She should have seen that coming, considering— She diverted the thought before it betrayed her. "I can't. He trapped me. Stripped me of magic and stopped my heart. There's nothing I can do — that's why I came to you."
"Came to me? But it is not my place to meddle in your twisted reality."
"Then the Dark One remains unchecked. And he is not alone."
"What do you mean?"
"There is Gothel."
"Gothel is bound in Merlin's stone tower!" The Blue Fairy clung to her knowledge of reality as it should have been.
"No longer." The wood nymph's power was ancient. Stronger than anything the fairies could muster. "The havoc she could wreak on this realm..."
"...doesn't bear thinking of." The first Blue Fairy shuddered. "You must stop her. Listen. I also was stripped of power, my heart stopped, but in the end, the Dark One revived me. Perhaps yours..."
"No." The other Blue Fairy smiled tightly. "You are on better terms with your version than I am with mine. Even if he wanted to wake me, he is cursed and without his memories now."
"There must be some way..." started the first Blue Fairy.
"Oh, there is." And her tone must have betrayed her, because the first Blue Fairy's eyes widened and she raised her wand in shock...
It wasn't there.
The other Blue Fairy had the wand. All the time she had kept the first Blue Fairy talking, she had silently, invisibly cast a binding spell around her counterpart, taking advantage of their link to siphon away the magic she needed.
It's the curse. It's corrupted me. Or had she always had this streak of selfish self-preservation underneath all the pious words? She had known as well as she knew herself that the first Blue Fairy wouldn't willingly help her tainted reflection.
"You can't do this," said the first Blue Fairy. "This is wrong. You know that!"
"I know," agreed the other. "I also know that your time is done. Didn't you admit that the Dark One saved you? That the Dark One defeated his mother? I doubt he had any help from you."
The first Blue Fairy was silent.
"Well?"
"No," she said at last. "He faced her alone."
"Then it's clear. You aren't needed anymore." The other Blue Fairy granted her counterpart what mercy she could as she took her life and reduced her to mere memory. Infused with new strength, she could rise from the glass coffin, fully restored. She suppressed her guilty conscience. Fate had changed. She served what was, not what "should have been", and who was to say this was worse?
We are the same person. It's not murder to choose one possibility over another.
It was murder, and she knew it. But she also knew that if she laid the blame for the shifting of fate at Rumplestiltskin's feet, she was responsible for putting him there. After all these centuries, the two years spent in enforced stasis had given her the space to gain perspective on her past.
She had meddled in fate, pride blinding her to the effects of ill-spoken prophecy. Did destiny need a herald? True destiny could be left to take its natural course. An innocent child had paid the price of her loose tongue, losing both mother and father. And years later, she had separated him from his own son.
It had been Rumplestiltskin's weakness to choose power over his son. But was he right that she shared the blame for that loss? And later for Baelfire's death? At the time, she had accepted it as fate. Princess Emma had not, even to the point of begging the Dark One for help — so Blue had eased her pain with a memory potion. But some memories could not be so easily excised; the potion had damaged Emma's psyche, leaving her unable to save her parents from the Evil Queen. Blue had blamed Rumplestiltskin for creating the Evil Queen, but Blue, in trying to remove the Savior from the Dark One's sphere, had crippled her ability to resist evil. No wonder the real Emma had been so vehement in denying and repressing her other self.
Perhaps she had made mistakes, Blue finally admitted to herself. She had failed the infant Rumplestiltskin, and resented him for her failure ever since. Were they both monsters, when all was said and done?
She had acted in the service of Good. Why did that no longer seem enough justification for her own choices? Her duty was to protect the realms from Evil. But was what she had told her other self just as true for her? Was the time of the Blue Fairy over? She could push up, through the curse and into the Land Without Magic, there to oppose the Dark One or Gothel or whatever other foe presented itself.
Or she could choose another way.
That's the darkness speaking.
Or was it enlightenment? If she was honest with herself, she knew she didn't have the power to defeat Gothel. Or the Dark One, if he managed to regain his magic. His mother had been the Black Fairy — who knew what powers lurked in her bloodline?
No. Only one thing had ever stopped Rumplestiltskin. The same thing that had pushed a fateless, powerless spinner into achieving the impossible...
The Blue Fairy made her choice. She descended to the underworld. She found the soul she sought and weighed his heart against her pleas on the balance of fate. The exchange accepted, the soul was permitted to ride the silent ferry down the river of souls into the light.
Granted life. Memory. All the accoutrements of the embodied.
She left him to find his own way, while her own path finally took her beyond the confines of her story.
Victoria Belfrey, owner of Belfrey Towers and most of the surrounding neighborhood, stood at the window of her penthouse office and tested the name aloud. "Victoria Belfrey... Ms. Belfrey..."
It would do. She had her kingdom at last, whether her subjects were aware of it or not. Only one thorn remained in her side — one last invasive weed in her garden. But it was easily taken care of.
Belfrey smiled to herself as she turned away from the window. Away from the light. This weed was contained for now: caged in metal, in the dark, and away from earth and water. Her thumbprint granted her access to the service elevator and the upper maintenance level. There, under the unnatural flicker of fluorescent lights, lurked her nemesis.
The witch. She had another name under the curse, but they both knew the names that mattered.
"Come out into the light," ordered Belfrey. When the witch didn't respond, Belfrey picked up the chain. She forced the issue, pleased at the heavy rattle of the chain as the witch was dragged out from whatever crevice she had found shelter in. "I want to see you."
The witch glared up at her. "You think you've won?"
"I know I've won." Belfrey hadn't been able to do anything to Gothel in their home realm, but this was a land without magic, and Gothel was as vulnerable as any mortal bound in chains. Belfrey pondered suitable methods of execution. A knife across the throat would be quick, but messy. Dehydration was terribly inhumane, and she had no need of cruelty. Poison, perhaps...
"You think you can kill me?" It didn't take magic to guess that much.
Belfrey scoffed. "You think you can stop me?"
"Perhaps not," allowed the witch. "But I am the last. Think carefully..."
"You think words will stay my hand?"
"That depends. Are you like the rest of your kind — a ravening brute without the foresight to protect your own interests?"
Belfrey frowned. "My own interests would be served best by your absence."
The witch lifted her arms, letting the chains rattle. "You think you don't need me? Fool. It is they who don't need you."
"'They'? What are you babbling about?"
"The future belongs to the machines." The witch bared her teeth. "In your false memories, have you not seen them? The masses paint their nightmares for all to see, too blind to realize how short a time before that apocalypse will fall upon them..."
Belfrey eyed the witch suspiciously. Drawing upon her curse-given past, she vaguely remembered movies, but they were— "Fiction. Fantasy."
The witch laughed darkly. "Kill me and find out. I am the last bastion of natural life in this realm. Your mechanical creations will devour your kind as your kind has devoured mine. Without me, you have no shelter against the coming storm."
The witch was lying, thought Belfrey. Lies were the only weapons left for a helpless prisoner. That meant she posed no threat, and could safely be kept a little longer — and if Belfrey harbored a modicum of doubt about the truth of the witch's words, it wasn't worth mentioning.
"Shelter? It is I who shelter you this time around." Belfrey dropped the chains. "Crawl back to your dark corner and dream all you like about your 'storm' — that's all it will ever be."
She strode away, confident in the power of the Dark Curse to hold even time on a leash. No matter how many threats the witch planted, none of them would ever bear fruit. Belfrey smiled to herself. She had her kingdom. The daughter Marcus had betrayed was alive once more. All was as it should be.
Time seeps in through the cracks. Stray moments pool in the footsteps of a stranger.
Not every tower in the city is as well-guarded as Belfrey's glorious edifice. The stranger watches, waits, then slips inside on an old and faded lobby on the heels of an oblivious resident. He avoids the lift and climbs up a musty stairwell, checking the floor against the address scrawled on the underside of his forearm. Once he arrives at his destination, he stares for an eternity before rapping sharply on the door.
It cracks open. A wary face peers out at him — youthful, on the brink of adulthood.
"Hello," says the stranger. "Are you Henry Reyes?"
"Yeah," answers the boy. "Who are you?"
"I'm Neal Cassidy. I'm your father."
Author's notes: Since I'm taking s6 as canon (mostly), that means canon!Emma, with all the damage to her character that entails. For wish!Baelfire, the woman he loved never existed. She's just a phantom, perhaps the least real person in the wish realm.
Ok, I am now caught up with my posting/writing (as in, I've hardly written at all this month), so this chapter marks the last of my regularly scheduled updates. *kicks self to get writing...any second now...honestly...*