Chapter 28

The ancient fairy sends a testing tendril of magic to wrap around his open hand and worm its way into his heart. His magic senses the intrusion and would fight it off, but he forces a stillness over his body. As her magic retreats, he tells her what she's just learned: "No glamour here, Blue. This," he turns the heart about to inspect it, "is the real deal, unadulterated."

"A recent development, I'm sure." She pulls a mouth.

"Ah. In the lifetime of one such as us, yes. A slow process that began with regret and, I hope, will end with enlightenment. This happened not because of me," he nods at the heart; "I fought like hell to stay dark. But little by little, they've worn me down: Baelfire, then Belle, Josiah, Adelena–and these days, Emma and Henry have been getting to me too."

"There's still a great deal of blackness at the center; it will never go away," Blue challenges him.

He's tempted to throw the challenge back at her by inviting her to present her own heart for inspection: he suspects they'd find a spot or two on it. But he's here to make peace, and he won't see Bae again unless he does. He takes his heart back into his body. The tremendous magical energy expended in removing one's own heart, one of the most complex and risky of all stunts, leaves him drained and vulnerable. She knows that, though it's a stunt she's never attempted: she's never been one for rolling the dice with her magic. His face is ashen as he agrees with her. "Of course. The damage I've done, and how I've felt–or haven't felt–about the misery I caused will never disappear from the world. But I loved and was loved in spite of myself."

"You don't deserve that." She gestures to his chest.

"No, you're right; I don't. But I've started to see that I need it." Although she still hasn't offered him a seat, he takes one before his knees buckle. He rests his forehead against his palm. "Will you give me and Belle access to your library?"

The fairy returns to her chair. She is weighing her options: she believes him but doesn't trust him, and she doesn't try to hide her doubt.

"As long as the curse remains, no one can leave Storybrooke," he reminds her. "Blue, there are more than three hundred children in this town."

He needn't connect he dots for her: she draws in a deep breath. "Yes, I see. It's not 'if,' but 'when.' When some foolish or unsuspecting child crosses the town line. . . .To forget their lives here, the people they've lived with for thirty years–"

"The people who still love them, even though, in the Enchanted Forest, they didn't belong together." He allows her to hear how tired he is. "I can tell you from direct observation, the bonds within the false families that the Storybrooke curse forced together are just as strong as the biological ties. The Storybrooke curse did a tremendous amount of damage, ripping families apart, but the boundary curse would do the same, in reverse."

"I've heard about the legal work you've been doing," she says. "I've seen some of the results. I realize it must have required a great deal of negotiation and finesse to keep families intact."

"It's in your hands, whether this second curse is broken."

"There are no guarantees. Surely you realize that; a curse that's never existed before, in a land that's new to magic–it'll be guesswork at best."

"Educated guesswork," he corrects. "Between us, we must have, what? Eight hundred years of experience?"

"Didn't your mother teach you, Rumplestiltskin, it's rude to ask a lady's age?"

"No mother, and my father wasn't too concerned with etiquette. But I shall try to behave less crudely while we work together." A question is implied in his statement.

She makes a quick decision. "I'll put two of the sisters to work on the research."

"And Belle and me?"

"You will have access to the library. There is a small supply of fairy diamonds, deep in the abandoned mine. We will use them, if additional power is called for."

"How soon can we start?"

"After lunch. You and Belle are invited to dine with us. It's Spaghetti Day."

He can see how heavily this cooperation taxes her. To ally herself with the Dark One goes against everything she's taught or been taught. "Thank you, Reul Ghorm." He reaches for his phone. "I'll call Belle."


Throughout the meal, the nuns silently and openly suspiciously stare at their guests. As Gold passes a platter of garlic bread to her, Belle whispers, "Would it be rude to talk? Do they have a noontime vow of silence or something?"

"I'm entirely the wrong one to ask about that," he whispers back. "But the looks on their faces suggest anger, not meditation."

"Okay," she passes the platter on to the nun seated at her left. "So, Sister Bernadette, how large is your library? And is it arranged by Dewey or LC?"

"They're arranged by me. There is no Sister Dewey or Sister Elsie here. Our convent library is approximately two thousand volumes," the nun answers. "I'm not familiar with the magic library."

"Reverend Mother?" Belle's voice is so sweet and her manner so polite, Gold doesn't see how the nuns could possibly continue to distrust her, but their stares show they do. She will wear them down, he's confident–just as she did the Dark One.

"That particular collection consists of probably a thousand volumes, many of them handwritten and difficult to read; many of them in languages no longer spoken." The fairy sips her ice water. "No longer spoken in the old world, I mean; never spoken here. The books and tablets and scrolls are organized by a system I designed myself. I do have a handwritten index."

"That will help tremendously," Belle compliments her. "If you like, I can create a simple database for that index, so it can be searched by relative terms. And as for the languages, I used to have a reading knowledge of three ancient languages. I'm rusty, but. . . ."

"And then there's always Google Translate," Gold pipes up, earning glares. "Ahem. Actually, I can help there. I've had a great many years to accumulate languages."

Blue offers this tidbit: "I have four tablets that were written by Dusta."

His fork freezes on its journey to his mouth, but his tone remains level. "How did you come by those?" A "dearie" hangs invisible on the end of the question. A chill has fallen over the room.

"Acquired in battle." Blue holds back a smirk. "I won."

"I see. Will you permit me to read them?"

"They contain nothing relevant to our purpose," Blue says, but as his face darkens, she surprises him. "But yes, you may borrow them to read at your leisure."

"Who's Dusta?" Belle asks.

"The first Dark One." Gold preoccupies himself with his spaghetti.

"Oh. . . ."

"The tablets may interest you for another reason, Belle," Blue suggests. "They are among the oldest written documents in existence and the first written record of magic, written, it's believed, a few years before Dusta died."

"How did he die? Wasn't he immortal?"

"The way all Dark Ones do," Gold says.

"Not quite. At least, not according to our legends," Bernadette explains. "He was slain by a fairy."

Gold's and Belle's heads snap up. "But if you kill a Dark One, you become the Dark One," Belle says slowly.

"As we found out the hard way. To this day, we consider the second Dark One both an enemy and a martyr. When the dark powers came upon her, nothing was left of the Black Fairy. She became as evil as Dusta."

"Not entirely true. Something of her fairy heart remained," Blue argues. "She fought against the darkness and it drove her mad. She found a mercenary and gave him the dagger so he could kill her."

"Vyapari. The first of the dealmakers," Gold mutters. "Contrary to popular belief, I was not the first to sell acts of magic. Though Vyapari did it for amusement. He was also the first to be enslaved."

"And so it was with every Dark One until the present one," Blue reports. "Enslaved to a human for all or most of their days."

"Always a less clever, less imaginative human," Gold speculates. "I've often wondered about that. How did ignoramuses like the Duke of the Frontlands manage to gain control of the likes of Zoso?"

"Fortunately for the world, the Dark masters were fixated on acquiring wealth, land, titles. As you say, none of them seemed to have the imagination to seek world domination," Blue muses.

Awareness fills Gold's eyes. "You."

"Actually, my predecessor, twice removed."

Belle cocks her head. "Sorry, I'm lost here. What about Blue's predecessor?"

"The Reul Ghorms figured out that a Dark One enslaved to a dimwit would do less damage than one unchained." Gold tightens his grip on his fork and the magic in his fingers flares. He forces himself to bear in mind that this is all history now. They are not in the Forest and his dagger is safe in his own possession, as it always has been. His magic recedes.

"It worked well for centuries, until Zoso in his impatience chose you instead of the one we intended."

Gold slowly raises his eyes to Blue. "Zoso cooperated with you?"

"Well, he didn't know he was; none of the Dark Ones were aware of our behind-the-scenes efforts. You weren't the only mage with. . .social engineering skills. The Reul Ghorms had that skill too. But Zoso was borderline insane, and so he grabbed the easiest desperate soul at hand, instead of Hordor, as we had intended."

"Hordor?! Hordor was to have been the next Dark One?"

"Even as a human, Hordor needed someone to control him. We would have done the Flatlands a favor to remove him from a position of some power and place him entirely under another's control. We had planned for Reginald the Gambler and his descendants to fill that role."

Belle gasps. "My father is the great-grandson of Duke Reginald."

Blue smiles kindly. "Sir Maurice would have been the least greedy of all Dark masters, we felt. He would have accepted the dagger from his father only when he saw no other way to end the Second Ogres War. But Zoso was too impatient to wait for Hordor to work up the nerve to steal the dagger."

Gold chuckles in surprise. "So I became the Dark One because I was bolder than Hordor?"

Belle clasps her hand to her mouth. "My gods. If you hadn't become the Dark One, my father would have been a Dark master. Rumple, you saved my father twice."

"No, my love, don't redefine my act of cowardice as something noble. I stole the dagger out of fear; I killed Zoso out of anger. But that's history; the present time presents us with enough of a problem."

Blue takes the hint and rises from her seat; her sisters follow suit and begin to clear the table. "Sister Bernadette, Sister Cecilia, please come with us. Rumplestiltskin, Lady Belle, this way please."

Gold ponders as the nuns lead him down a long corridor: if, when he wrote the lease, he'd realized just how big this building was, he would have charged more rent.

Belle too is pondering. "It must have been lonely," she whispers to him. "The fairies had each other, but you were the only Dark One. All the others like you were dead."

He squeezes her hand. "You were right, all those years ago: it wasn't a caretaker I needed; it was a friend. Only you could befriend the Dark One."

When they arrive at a small, locked room filled ceiling-to-floor with books, Belle rushes in, chattering with Bernadette about classification systems and archival finding aids. Gold summons Belle's laptop from home and the nuns shudder at the release of dark magic in their home. Blue counters it with a wave of her wand that causes the uppermost books to fly down to the carpet for easy access.

As Bernadette, Cecelia and Belle dig in, Blue offers an olive branch to Gold. "We–I–came to realize you were right about one thing: we shouldn't have given away our magic so freely. Now it's almost gone."

"You needn't limit yourselves to fairy dust. There are many other sources of power."

"Fairy dust is more than our tradition; it's our identity."

"One can change one's identity without losing the true sense of self, just as you became a nun and I, a pawnbroker."

"I suppose we have no choice but to learn spells and potions." She seems saddened. "We must prepare in case Regina comes back and taps into the magic here."

"Direct combat may not be the most effective way to stop Regina. If she comes back, it'll be for something she cares about more than magic." Now it's Gold's turn to seem saddened, for he's always had a fondness for Henry, and now that he knows the boy's bloodline, it's even more difficult to place him at risk. "There is only one sure defense against Regina."

"Surely not even you would sacrifice Henry!"

"No, Reul Ghorm, but I would strengthen him so that he can stop her."

"You're going to teach him magic."

"No. I'm going to teach Emma magic, if she'll accept it. I'm going to teach Henry his lineage." Gold sighs. "Just as soon as we break this boundary curse, I'm going to restore his father to him. As soon as I can figure out how to do it without breaking my promise to Emma."


Belle gives him a funny look as he climbs into bed.

"What?" He runs a hand through his hair. "Do I have a cowlick?"

She shakes her head. "You were singing in the shower."

"Was it that bad?" But he knows she's not laughing at him.

"It's the first time I've ever heard you sing."

He slides under the sheets and clutches her waist. "I respect music too much to desecrate it like that. But today I couldn't resist. It was a good day." He lays his damp head in her lap. "The fairies are cooperating with us, Emma's working for us, and I've spoken to my son, even if he didn't know it was his father calling. I know he's alive and I know where he resides."

She smooths his hair. "It won't be much longer now."

He lifts his head. "Hey, I just remembered: you were singing too, on the way home from the convent. Something on the radio–one of this world's many songs about a subject they know nothing about."

She grins at him mischieviously. "Yes, but I can carry a tune without using a bucket."

"Well, I could make some modifications: how would you like to be serenaded by Curuso? Pavarotti? Bing Crosby? Freddy Mercury?"

"No thanks. I'll take your voice, flat as it may be, because it's yours." She stretches her legs and sighs in satisfaction. "It was a good day. I enjoyed working in Blue's library. I enjoy having a role in this world that challenges me intellectually, makes me feel like I'm making things better."

"You may not have realized it, but when you were my housekeeper, you made me better."

"I did, and I was so glad you chose me for the job–both times." She urges him up for a kiss. "Then and now, you've given me a life of adventure and a chance to make a difference in the world."

"Is that why you put up with me?" he teases.

"That, and you look sexy as all get-out in those leather pants."

He whispers in her ear, just before his teeth snatch the lobe, "And you look sexy as all get-out in the altogether." He yanks the sheets away.


A/N. I'm imagining Belle singing Katy Perry's "Dark Horse"–so deliciously Rumbellic. Coming up: an opportunity for revenge pops up when Regina returns; our researchers learn the price of breaking the new curse and it's higher than Gold is willing to pay.