His eyes drifted open, still bleary from sleep. He remembered crawling into bed late last night, paperwork overwhelming him until he barely made it up the stairs from his study to his bedroom. He had stripped down and gotten into bed without even bothering to brush his teeth or put on pajamas. He had really been that exhausted.
For a moment he lay there, eyes trained on the ceiling of his bedroom, just barely able to make out the swirled texture of the paint as he slowly came to full consciousness.
Everything flooded him a moment later, memories of two worlds clashing inside his mind, headache starting just behind his eyes. He was in Storybrooke. Here his name was Mr. Gold. He searched his memories for his first name and found none. He was simply Mr. Gold, first name unknown. Leave it to Regina to leave the man who considered names important without one. He supposed he should be thankful. "Rumplestiltskin" was quite a mouthful, a name even Regina had stumbled over the first time she had called him to her and one that had gotten laughter in his life before he became the Dark One. He couldn't imagine what unpronounceable thing she would have come up with had she thought about it.
So Mr. Gold he was. He sat up in the bed, held his hands out in front of himself, flexing the fingers. Human…he was human again. He hadn't looked fully human for as long as he could remember, the curse changing so much about his appearance when he first took it on that he had spent hours that first week staring into the mirror, a sneer across his otherworldly features. Here he had no magic and so no curse to corrupt his body.
He couldn't even remember what he had looked like before the curse took effect.
Twisting on the bed, he let his bare feet hit the cold floor and attempted to stand. Pain shot through his right leg, causing him to gasp and fall back just to get it to stop. It was something he hadn't felt in years, something he had nearly forgotten about, the first thing his curse had taken care of. But here, in this magicless world, the old self-inflicted injury was back. It was, ultimately, what had started the chain of events that lead to the here and now. After injuring himself to escape the war and return to his newborn son, he had been branded a coward, ridiculed, reviled, brought to his knees in shame time and time again, until he had taken on the curse of the Dark One. He had reveled in that curse in the beginning and ultimately that drove his son away from him.
Now here he was again, a crippled old man, the magic he had come to rely on gone. He could feel it, somewhere brimming beneath the surface. But here he couldn't access it. Here it dissipated as soon as he tried. It was a strange feeling, like one addicted to a drug he could smell, but could not inhale, could not get that high off of it that he so desperately needed.
He shook his head slightly, allowing his mind to sift quickly through the implanted Mr. Gold memories. He saw the cane leaning against his bed, an elegant substitute for the notched walking stick he had once used. It would lend him a certain amount of dignity here in this world, marking him as a distinguished older gentleman instead of the town coward.
As he stood, walking slowly with the use of the cane, rebalancing himself to the feel of his twisted ankle, he realized the extent of his influence in this little town, this Storybrooke, that his apprentice had created. It seemed that while she was mayor of their rather ridiculously named town, he was the most feared. He owned most of it, spending his days collecting rent and overseeing his pawn shop. The shop contained items once important to most of the town and so people tended to wander in and never quite find what it was they were looking for.
It was a strange life he led in a strange town. But it seemed Regina had kept her promise. He was comfortable. He was rich. He knew who he was. He had no reason to believe he couldn't leave the town. Others would not be able to. The curse would find some way to keep them within the borders. But he had been granted the ability to drive out of town without looking back.
Once he knew where Belle was, he would do so. And once he knew where she was, once he had her back with him, they would set off in search of his son. He had to still believe she would lead him to his boy, even in this strange new world.
He had spent some time that morning staring at his face in the mirror. Without thinking, he had walked into the bathroom to begin his morning ablutions, and found he could not look away. It had been so long since he had seen his own reflection and even longer since he had seen himself looking like this. He had forgotten the deep worry lines between his brows, the lines about his mouth, his tired human eyes. He looked gaunt here, a little pale, dark circles beneath his eyes. Regina had given him the comfort and riches he so sought, but had not given him a happy life. Mr. Gold's memories were difficult to sort through, a jumbled mess of anxiety and depression treatments, a son who had died in a car accident, an ex-wife who hated him. He was not a happy man here in this cursed world and that deep unhappiness was reflected on his face.
The world would not see it, not this world at least. He would go out with teeth bared and eyes narrowed as he always did, but those hid a deep-seated loneliness that only Belle and his son could remedy.
He never realized quite how lonely he was until she had touched his life and then disappeared from it. His driving force had been his son and so he had never bothered to take the time to examine his current life. All that mattered was getting to his boy.
Here in this world, even that was taken away from him, leaving him the lonely old town monster, a pariah people would sooner spit on than talk to if they weren't so scared of him. Mr. Gold liked it that way. Rumplestiltskin would play the part as best he could. He was a showman after all. And being the Dark One, he was used to their fear. Mr. Gold had had to create the sense of menace that came naturally to the Dark One, but it seemed his personality here was not much different, on a superficial level, from that of the Dark One.
After finally getting himself ready for the day, finding that he had swapped his wardrobe of leathers and brocade vests for finely tailored suits that were this world's idea of elegance, he headed out of the large Victorian mansion he had been granted in this new land.
For a moment he contemplated taking the car, the knowledge of how to drive it coming easily to his mind but instead he sneered. He would have to use it sometime, but he was not quite ready for that bit of the curse just yet. He had barely trusted horses and carriages in their old world, preferring first to walk and then later to use his magic to transport himself places. Trusting a piece of machinery, which Mr. Gold's memories told him could be unreliable at best and dangerous at worst, was not something he was prepared to do at this point.
The town they found themselves in was small, just a little New England coastal town. It was an easy walk, even with the constant irritation of his ankle and the need for a cane, to the center of town. He paused outside his shop, smiling at the view through the window. The objects there were easily recognizable, some that had graced his castle, others he was sure came from the residents of this new town.
He put his hand on the door knob to open it when he felt a hand come down on his forearm. Turning, he met the eyes of the Queen-turned-Mayor and his face split into a smile, a dark grin he couldn't stop from spreading out over his features. "So I see you won, Mayor."
"I have, Mr. Gold." Her own smile was edged in the same darkness that his was, tight-lipped, more a sneer than an expression of good will.
"A nice touch, that one," he commented, as if they were exchanging pleasantries about the weather, his voice carefully modulated to show no emotion.
"I thought so. I hardly recognized you. You look so…"
"Indeed." He refused to say more, to satisfy her curiosity. If she did not know his origins, the humble coward he had once been, he was not going to share such information with her. "Now if you excuse me, Madame Mayor, I find I have many things to do."
He set foot in the shop, breathed in a scent that was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and made his way to the back room. He kept his office there and he knew that sitting there, collecting dust in the corner, was one of his spinning wheels. It was the small one that he kept tucked away in the tower room. The larger one from his Great Room was hidden in the basement of his home, a place of refuge, a hobby that none really understood in the Enchanted Forest and would seem even odder here in this modern-day world.
It was still where he did his best thinking and so he pulled it out, dusted it off, and sat down. Here his spinning would require wool, not straw, and the result would be thread, not gold. But still, just the act of feeding the wool through the machine soothed him, allowed his mind to wander and sort out the best way in this world to go about finding his Belle.
The memories he had been given indicated there was a library in the town, kept by a doddering old fool of a man. It seemed to be the best place to begin and he headed there as early in the afternoon as possible.
As luck would have it, the elderly gentleman was out and the son, a man still older than Mr. Gold's physical years, was at the front desk when he walked in. The man stood quickly, smoothing down the front of the gaudy sweater he wore, and faced him. He could see the nervous sweat across his brow. "Mr. Gold." He stuttered over his name. "We paid the rent last week."
A tight-lipped smile crossed Rumplestiltskin's face. Ah yes, the rent, the one reason he had for going out into public in this little town. "I'm not here for the rent."
He could see the man breathe a sigh of relief before his gaze turned quizzical. "Then…"
"You keep the newspapers of this town?"
The man responded in the affirmative and Rumplestiltskin requested a table out of the way and the last three weeks worth of local papers. It had taken Regina nearly a month to decide to cast her curse, to sacrifice her father for her revenge.
He was sure that someone appearing in the woods, confused and talking of another world, would have attracted some sort of notice. At least a back page story would have been told, especially as she had no relatives in this world.
Or didn't, at the time she went through. Regina's curse would have brought her father with it. Her only family member would be here now, though there was no guarantee he was even aware he had a daughter. He knew his name was Moe French here in this new world. He knew he ran a flower shop that was falling on hard times. He knew that as Mr. Gold he had been close to foreclosing on the man. As Rumplestiltskin that bothered him only a little bit. Belle's father had not been a bad man, but he was far too easily swayed to do things that tore apart his daughter's life.
When the man dumped the papers on the desk and disappeared again, he sighed. They were obviously kept in complete disarray, probably shoved into some bins and left there to rot. There was no order, no rhyme or reason to the layout of them.
It took him some three hours to get through them all, carefully flipping pages, folding them back, reading every tiny bit of print for some small story about Belle's being found.
There was nothing.
With a snarl he swept the mess off the desk. Leaving it in an unorganized pile on the ground, he grabbed his cane and strode back to the front desk, calling for the librarian on the way.
The older man rushed out, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. "Mr. Gold."
"There was nothing there." He leaned forward and grabbed the man by the front of his sweater.
"I…I'll just get some other newspapers then shall I?" After being released, the man tripped over himself to rush to the back and find more.
Rumplestiltskin returned to his now-clear desk and after rubbing the bridge of his nose, stretching a bit, delved back into his search.
The print was starting to get to him, the headache he started with spreading across the middle of his forehead. His forefinger and thumb were covered with black ink, his back ached, his ankle was throbbing. It seemed the good town of Storybrooke was about as dull as one could get. So far the biggest news he had come across was the mystery of whose dog impregnated Mrs. Patten's poodle.
Not much creativity there, Regina. He had expected little else out of his former apprentice. She could make their lives unhappy, but she would never be creative enough to make them truly miserable. Oh, she had so much she could have learned from him, had he bothered to teach her. Or had she bothered to ask. There was a time he was truly devoted to her education in the dark arts. Then there was Belle and he had all but abandoned Regina in the intervening time.
Finally, some five hours after he had begun searching he found a small article on page ten of the newspaper of a nearby town. Jane Doe found wandering forest. There was little in the article, not even a picture. It told of a couple who were hiking in the woods and rescued a woman dressed in a fancy gown who they found wandering the forest. The woman's name was not listed, nor was any further information.
It seemed a dead-end until he went through subsequent papers and found related small articles on the inner pages of the papers over the next week. It seemed that Belle had indeed given her name and so here in this world they were calling her Belle March. The reporter admitted no one knew if that was her real name. Her likeness did not match any missing person reports. Her name was not on any missing persons lists. The final article asked that anyone who had any information on her come forward.
It had a photo, grainy and cheap, but a photo nonetheless. It was most certainly Belle, though her normally neat hair was in disarray and her eyes looked wild.
"I'm sorry Belle," he whispered to the paper.
"D'you know her?" The librarian's voice intruded on his thoughts, loud and a bit brash. He flipped the paper over and turned to the man with a glare.
"No."
A moment later he was striding out of the library, the paper tucked up under his arm, a stolen relic from a library that didn't truly exist.
He had plans to make.
Belle, as it turned out, had been taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Warren. There was little information on what happened to her past being taken there, but he gathered she was being kept in the psychiatric ward for observation. The few articles he could find on her indicated they were concerned about her mental health, that she thought she was from another world. One mentioned her calling for fairy tale characters when she was found and he cringed.
He knew who she was calling for.
He found it strange that somehow he and the others had made it into this world's cultural history as myths, legends and stories. He wasn't sure if he should be thankful or not that this world seemed to have turned him into some three-foot-tall gnome with a penchant for stealing babies. Three feet tall. He had grumbled at that. I'm short, but not that short…
Settling at the desk in the back of his shop, he knew he had a bit of work ahead of him. None had, of course, come forward to claim Belle as a relative, a friend, as anything. She had been alone in the hospital since her discovery over three weeks ago, locked up in some ward where people no doubt poked and prodded her, tried to figure her out. He knew she'd be frightened, confused, perhaps even a little bit angry.
He couldn't blame her for the last one. He had told her to run. She had done as he asked and ended up here.
But he would come for her soon. And they could begin a new life here, in whatever world this was. If he delved far enough into his memories he could come up with names for the place he lived, things he knew about it. Belle would know none of it, of course. He had Regina's curse to thank for his knowledge of this world. Belle had been transported without such a safety net in place. There was much he had to teach her, much he would love to teach her, giving her the knowledge for real that he had learned from a curse.
It was an exciting prospect, one he didn't even know he was looking forward to until just that moment.
First, though, he had to arrange things. This had to go off without any sort of hitch. There was paperwork to create, hands to grease. He'd love nothing more than to storm the place, play Prince Charming to the damsel in distress, though with less obtuseness and more finesse than the prince in their land. But he also knew how that would go in this world where paperwork was important, proof was important, and where guns had replaced magic.
He settled into his seat, pulled out a notebook, and began to jot down all that he needed to take care of before he could even set foot in the hospital. The list was daunting, but eminently manageable for one of his reputation and wealth. Nothing he did would be legal, not exactly at least, but it would appear so to those in charge.
And if they were to ever discover the deception, he would have disappeared, no trace of him to be found in the world. Truly, Mr. Gold only existed in Storybrooke, a town that was not even on the map for the state of Maine and not one currently anyone could get to.
Soon he would rescue Belle from her hospital prison and together they could begin the search for his son.