-Flashback-
Rumplestiltskin hated Neverland. It was close and dark, suffocating and claustrophobic, frustrating and empty. Too empty. Too dark. Too lonely. Too frustratingly absent of what he needed.
Or perhaps it was too full. Filled with shadows that watched and pointed and laughed and disappeared whenever he looked for them (and reappeared when his nightmares lingered into his waking hours). Filled with lost boys stolen from homes and families and worlds (boys better than a little son who loved and believed and would have given up anything for his papa; little boys Malcolm chose rather than the boy he abandoned). Filled with everything but what he sought so desperately.
Peter Pan's emissary had welcomed Rumplestiltskin as soon as he arrived (as if he were a prodigal son returned, but that wasn't how this story went), and some stubborn part of Rumplestiltskin had hoped, impossibly, that maybe his search would be quick and easy, that the bits of Peter Pan that still remembered a young boy would help him find his own young boy.
He should have known better. (He had known better, but he'd hoped anyway, still repeating all his past mistakes. He never learned, did he?)
"Why would I have your son?" the eternally immortal boy had asked when Rumplestiltskin finally forced a confrontation. "I do collect Lost Boys, it's true, but only those who feel abandoned. Lost. Betrayed. Are you…" That look of innocence, crafted over card games and piles of winnings, to combat little boys with hungry stomachs and big eyes and too much faith in a father who never deserved it. "Are you saying you lost your son? Oh, that's rich. No way to take the high road anymore, ay, laddie?"
And instead of helping, instead of trying to make up for what he'd done, Peter Pan (not a straw doll, but a figure crafted of something just as flimsy, of pride and selfishness and unbridled ambition) had only presented obstacles—dolls that chased him and drove him to his knees, forests that went in circles, shadows that were never there when he looked but always just over his shoulder, taunts about sons following in their fathers' footsteps and Dark Ones on leashes not being worth the price of turning into the same man he could never forgive. It was enough to torment and destroy Rumplestiltskin, enough to send him on a rampage, to demand Zoso tear the place apart island by tree by hollow.
Except.
Except Bae was here (should be here) and Hook was here, and all that waited for him back in the Enchanted Forest (a place he couldn't reach anyway, not on his own, and he hated himself for looking for an exit already, but the habit of survival was far too engrained and he was far too used to living without his son) was Cora and centuries of patience and decades more of hands-on work setting his pieces into play.
So Rumpelstiltskin stayed. He kept going, kept trying, kept looking, kept walking, kept questioning Lost Boys and searing away the reflection of Bae in their eyes.
Kept pretending that he could still see Bae in his visions of the future, clouded and hazed to the point of invisibility under Neverland's concealing night.
(As if the future wasn't whatever Peter Pan wished it to be, here, where his thoughts were reality and his every whim law.)
Zoso hated the place, too, hated being here, hated how it crowded his magic, hated being on the run, hated Peter Pan (hated even more than the demon could see him so clearly, within his flesh-and-blood shelter, and that Rumplestiltskin had never told him the history between him and the malevolent child). Above all, he hated that Rumplestiltskin could no longer see a clear path for them. (It wasn't his quest, this search for a stolen son, but it had been their common goal for so long that maybe it was professional pride that wouldn't allow him to fail.)
So it was Zoso, in the end, who set a tracking spell and led them to a too-familiar ship called, ironically enough, the Jolly Roger, hidden behind an island in the shape of a skull.
And now Rumplestiltskin (trapped and hopeless but still clinging to determination anyway because he had nothing else to cling to) stared down at Killian Jones, bound by magic on his knees in the firelit clearing, and wondered why and how he'd ever thought coming to Neverland was a good idea (wondered why he'd thought he was strong or brave enough to face the monster that had taken his father and the pirate who'd taken his son).
His one act of bravery and it was all for nothing.
"Why are you even pretending? You're cold as a crocodile and just as slimy!" Hook snarled at him, ferocity and defiance blazing from every inch of his black-garbed form as if he faced a villain. He acted as if he were the one who'd been wronged, who'd had a wife stolen and a son kidnapped and a life destroyed. He acted as if he were the hero of this story, and Rumplestiltskin hated that anyone looking at them, at the scene they made, would probably think the same.
But it didn't matter, not really. Rumplestiltskin had a son (Baelfire, Bae, the name spelled out in liquid blood with every thrumming beat of his heart), and he would save him (in this world or another, in any world), and maybe he wasn't a hero for the masses (brave or strong or good), but he'd be a hero for Bae, and Bae was all that mattered. So Rumplestiltskin gave a tight, narrow smile as he leaned on his staff and fingered the ends of his ragged, precious shawl.
"Pretend?" he murmured silkily. "Who's pretending?"
Hook's eyes narrowed. "You think tales of you and your doings haven't spread to this land? You think Bae didn't know what you'd become, what kind of evil soul his father possessed? You think he didn't cry himself to sleep at night knowing his father had power and didn't come after him?"
There was a tight humming burning through Rumplestiltskin's skin, a resonating chord that thrived just beneath the surface, as if he were filled with lightning crackling beneath his fingertips. Zoso, from his place within, murmured something, but the words were drowned out by the sheer emotion flurrying through Rumplestiltskin like the weather Neverland never had, like storms and ice and snow.
A twisted smirk strangled Hook's lips as he stared up at Rumplestiltskin and saw the effect of his words, written there in flesh and bone. "He heard you come, Dark One," he said, softly, cruelly. "He heard, and he was afraid. His own father—and he was terrified of you! Why do you think he ran? Why do you think he's not here anymore? It's because of you! Because he couldn't bear to be found by the monster his father had become!"
Rumplestiltskin nodded, tight and constrained, held back by Zoso's rigid hold that slipped just a bit as he made a face and struck a pose and pretended to be thinking this through (though what was there to think through about these words that could only be lies and were probably truth?). "So you're saying that you don't have him anymore? You held onto him for centuries, but now, at the drop of a hat, you…just let him go?"
"Go ahead," Hook dared him. The silver hook where his hand had once been glinted with reflected flames. The temptation to melt the silver down into nothing was so strong Rumplestiltskin had to look away before the magic (magic even he knew by now) could spring forth and make his imaginings real. Peter Pan would only laugh if he used the powers he'd been afraid of as a child. "Kill me—we all know you're going to do it eventually. I don't have your son, and even if I knew where he went, I'd never tell you."
"So you said." Rumplestiltskin giggled, then, as if this were a joke, a façade that didn't matter. But in this moment, with Jones's words still ringing in his ears, he felt that the façade of Dark One, of monster clinging to sanity by the gnarled edges of his fingertips, was more real than it had ever been before.
Why listen to this tale and worry? Why sag to the ground and curl up around his shattered heart and weep? So Bae was missing—he'd been missing for hundreds of years. Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. He had only to stick to his original plan, had only to discipline himself to patience once more.
"Well, you don't seem to be listening," Hook drawled, and Rumplestiltskin hated him for being able to laugh in the face of danger.
"Oh, I am," he said, drawing so close to the pirate that Jones had to recoil, wrinkling his nose at the smell of Rumplestiltskin's breath against his cheek. "I heard you this time, and the last time, and the other four times you told me. Methinks the pirate doth protest too much!"
"And what do you want to find him for anyway?" Hook asked, abruptly calm (and his new name was far too appropriate, wasn't it, his words threaded through with bait and oh so dangerous, his entire person all sharp points and serrated edges). "You're not the influential spinner he left, not the father you were all that time ago. What does a monster need with a boy, huh?" Hook strained against his invisible restraints, lunging forward, his teeth bared. "What does the Dark One's master possibly need with a boy he can't protect?"
Only Zoso turning his bones to immovable steel from within kept Rumplestiltskin from leaping on the pirate, from lifting his staff and beating that smug smile until it was only spatters of blood and splinters of bone, until he erased the words and the accusations and the image of Bae recoiling from him in fear and disgust.
"Punish him," Zoso advised in the silence of an indrawn breath, gnashing words covered up by the rush of air through lungs. "Don't just hurt him, Rumplestiltskin—punish him."
Yes. Of course. Hook deserved it, after taking Bae's mother, Bae's freedom, Bae's future, Bae's father. After the lives he'd ruined and the wives he'd treated like things he could steal and the hearts he'd stopped and the countless years he shouldn't have lived. Hook deserved to hurt, to feel proper anguish, to die.
And there was only one person Rumplestiltskin knew who could inflict hurt more deeply and more cruelly than any other.
So he smiled, and he let out a tittering giggle, dancing even nearer to Hook. "That's for me to know and you to rage against," he answered in a singsong voice. "But the thing I don't have a use for…is you. If you don't have Bae, there's no more reason to keep you alive." He paused, let Hook's smugness waver for an instant before firming up, a mask to cover real fear. "I'd do it myself, but I don't have the time to waste. Fortunately, there's someone here who's found you as much of a bother as I have!"
And he laughed outright to see the pirate's brave mask flicker and fall away, his features blanched in a rictus of terror. Within him, Zoso relaxed a bit, preening at their success.
"Neverland has its own rules," Rumplestiltskin said, and this was the perfect time to gloat, but he hadn't actually gotten anything he wanted and the whole scene seemed suddenly too long and drawn out. He wanted only to be done and gone, on his way (before Peter Pan could inflict another in a long line of bloodless wounds draining him dry), so some of his weariness leaked into his voice.
He had thought (hoped, really) that there'd be a noticeable sense of accomplishment or finality or satisfaction—something—to mark the moment when he was finally able to face, defeat, and leave behind Captain Killian Jones. But there wasn't. He felt…numb. Old. Used up. Every bit as much a failure now as wanted the pirate to suffer, wanted him to feel pain equal to what he'd inflicted on Rumplestiltskin and Bae, and he would (oh, but Peter Pan was more adept at being a monster than even Hook himself), but once again, he wouldn't be the one doing it. Again, always, he'd leave the work to others, to the spinners who'd raised him, the soldiers on the front lines of that first Ogre's War, Zoso, and now Peter Pan himself (and if Bae was no longer here, no longer prevalent and safe in his mixed-up foresight, then he was once again back to needing someone else to cast the curse for him).
Another failure, but Rumplestiltskin almost didn't care.
Because Bae was gone. He'd been gone for centuries, of course, but Rumplestiltskin had thought he was so close. So very close to holding him in his arms and reassuring him that he'd come as soon as he could, that he'd tried every avenue and path that could lead him to worlds his foresight revealed to him. He'd been able, this seemingly near his goal, to close his eyes and remember. He'd been able to look to the future and see an adult man with a little boy's familiar eyes.
But now Neverland swallowed up every memory, devoured them and spit them back up as nightmares. And the future was empty and confusing. And he once more needed whole decades of waiting before he could even contemplate holding his boy in his arms. Bae was gone (but he was still alive because Rumplestiltskin's heart still beat and his lungs still filled with air, so there had to be hope, had to be a son alive somewhere even if he did hate his papa), and this whole trip was for nothing, months wasted when he could have been furthering his plans in the Enchanted Forest.
"I knew you'd come around to my way of thinking."
Rumplestiltskin tensed as Peter Pan appeared, leaning cockily against a tree. In his hands, he held a set of shepherd's pipes. The sight of them speared anguish through Rumplestiltskin's heart. He'd headed off the Piper from stealing Bae away, all those years ago, but who knew? Maybe if Baelfire had chosen to go with Pan then, Rumplestiltskin would even now be hugging him tight against his heart.
"This is simply a trade," Rumplestiltskin said. "The pirate for an uncontested exit."
"As if I've ever tried to stop you from leaving here," Pan said. The grin on his lips, so familiar a con, was even worse than the pipes. "Boys," Pan called with a nod to Hook. Rumplestiltskin barely resisted spitting on the pirate as the Lost Boys carted him away.
"I'll get you for this, Crocodile!" Hook shouted. His yells faded with distance; Rumplestiltskin wondered how long his defiance would last when pitted against Pan's cruelty. If he were a betting man, he'd have wagered not long at all.
Pan pushed off the tree. "Here, laddie—a parting gift."
Zoso moved Rumplestiltskin's arms in time to catch the pipes as they sailed through the air. Rumplestiltskin stared down at them for a long moment before he forced himself to sneer.
"I don't need to replace my son with a tribe of riffraff mesmerized into fawning over me," he said. He wished it felt satisfying to drop the supposed 'gift' to the ground, but the sight of it falling atop yet another of those infernal straw dolls drained him of any victory.
"Don't be petty," Pan said. "No one likes a sore loser, after all. You played the game, you lost—there will always be other games."
"Not for me," Rumplestiltskin snarled. "This is it, Papa."
"Oh, I know." Pan sank to sit cross-legged on the ground. There was something else in his hands, now, though the shadows congregated around it so Rumplestiltskin couldn't quite make out what it was. "You always have such good intentions, don't you? How have those worked out for you, by the way?"
At Rumplestiltskin's silence (the lump in his throat muting him more effectively than a gag), Pan laughed.
"You're a villain now, my boy. And villains don't get happy endings."
"How does that feel for you?"
"Oh, I'm not a villain." Pan laughed again, happy and free and unburdened. "I, my boy, am a winner. Neverland is my home. The Lost Boys are my family. And all eternity is mine."
"Then enjoy your pirate." Rumplestiltskin turned to go (everything in him screamed at exposing his back to this demon—as if Pan had ever waited for Rumplestiltskin to look away before stabbing him through the heart).
"Here, boy."
Rumplestiltskin couldn't hide at how he flinched away from Pan's nearness. The boy smiled at him and took hold of his hand long enough to place a box in it. A red jewel winked up at him.
Zoso shrieked silently, a maelstrom of terror.
"Pandora's Box!" Rumplestiltskin hissed as he threw the box as far away from him as possible. "You said you'd let me leave in exchange for the pirate."
"And like I said, I'll never stop you from leaving here. You don't really belong anymore, do you? How old are you now? A couple hundred years old? Two? Three? Will I never be free of you?"
"We're done here." Rumplestiltskin took one breath, another, another, while inside him, Zoso burned with fear so cold it lined Rumplestiltskin's bones with ice.
"So be it. Just remember," Pan called after him, "I tried to give you a gift. It's your own fault you didn't take it!"
Rumplestiltskin walked away. And kept walking. Walking, walking, walking, mind carefully blank. He walked until he came to a cliff-edge, and even then, it was only Zoso who stopped him before he stepped right over into the foaming sea.
"No need to add injury to insult," Zoso said testily. "Pan could have had us trapped inside that box in a second if he wanted to. Do you know what it's like inside that box? Nothing but an eternity of your worst fears and regrets with no escape in sight."
"And that's different from reality now…how?" Rumplestiltskin snapped.
"You know what? You're right?" Anger glittered unveiled in Zoso's eyes as he sneered at Rumplestiltskin. "Always being controlled by a coward who chose the stupidest option of Neverland instead of waiting a few more measly decades for everything he wants does sound like an eternal nightmare!"
"Enough." Rumplestiltskin finally uncurled his fingers from their white-knuckled grip around the hilt of the dagger. He hadn't stopped holding onto it since he'd dropped Pandora's Box (even the thought of a Pan in control of a Dark One was enough to set the entire world trembling). "We have someone to meet."
"About time you remembered."
Rumplestiltskin left the cliff-edge and the straw dolls multiplying behind him without a second look. He had someone else waiting for him (someone much more useful than Hook, unconnected to Pan, and so much less important than Bae), hopefully already at the cove.
And he was, mad as ever but dependable (if not entirely trustworthy).
"Aha! There you are, you imp!" Jefferson jumped to his feet and fastidiously brushed off the seat of his trousers. "I was beginning to think you'd been caught up in…things…and weren't coming."
Rumplestiltskin rolled his eyes. "I see you got my message."
"But of course!" Jefferson doffed his special hat and gave a bow with as many flourishes as he had idiosyncrasies. "A mermaid is a bit hard to miss, especially showing up in a lake in the middle of a forest. I thought about ignoring her, but you've always paid well and been true to your word, so…here I am!"
Zoso growled impatiently, but Rumplestiltskin hushed him absently. "And did you bring a second to remain here?"
Jefferson arched a brow, half-offended and half-questioning, which actually made Rumplestiltskin smile (and smiles were rarer than wealth or power—though not as rare as sons—and one of the reasons Rumplestiltskin continued to work with Jefferson despite his frequent bouts of insanity).
"Right." Rumplestiltskin shifted his stance to remind them both of his gnarled and notched staff, proof and reminder of who he was and what power he held—what power Zoso held, but Rumplestiltskin held the dagger so it amounted to the same thing). "Don't worry, I'll be sure to make it worth your while."
"Well, then of course I brought a second." He tilted his head and indicated the beach to the right. When Rumplestiltskin followed the gesture, he saw a trail of destruction heading deeper into the jungle, uprooted trees and crushed foliage sign that something big—and angry—had passed by not too long before.
"An Ogre?" Rumplestiltskin smiled again (a betrayal of Bae, but he was getting used to the twinges of guilt). "Excellent."
His father, Rumplestiltskin thought, would probably not appreciate that beast being let loose in his domain. A pity he wouldn't be around to enjoy the show (though he didn't regret it nearly enough to spend even a second longer in Neverland).
"Shall we go?" Jefferson asked.
Taking a deep breath, Rumplestiltskin nodded. "Yes," he said. "There's nothing here for me anymore."
Compulsively, he checked that the dagger was tucked into his belt and the shawl was around his neck (checked that the straw doll from his childhood wasn't hidden in his pockets). He sucked Zoso in tighter, compressed the Dark One into something pure magic and darkness and insubstantial weight that floated inside him. An invisible passenger stowing away in the marrow of his bones and the core of his soul.
The shadows, dark and heavy and desperate, began to whisper in his head, reaching out with formless arms, with deadly intent, grasping and tugging and pulling until Rumplestiltskin felt as if he were a boy again, holding onto the only thing that mattered, screaming and terrified and crying. And ignored.
But he wasn't powerless anymore, and as Jefferson whirled his hat into a portal, Rumplestiltskin let out a surge of magic that beat the shadows back, silenced their screams, darkened their glowing eyes. Then he grasped Jefferson's sleeve and leaped into the whirling vortex beneath him.
For the second time (for the last time), Rumplestiltskin left Neverland behind.
-Storybrooke-
They call him mad and think him poor, and in both beliefs they are wrong, these gossiping townspeople with their fake memories and false emotions and flawed personalities. Or at least, he thinks they're wrong. He's almost sure, almost certain that he is the one who is sane, who sees the truth of things when he looks through the tiny, magnified window to this world and sees a prince doing paperwork, a mouse fixing a car, a wolf serving tables, a sorcerer selling chinaware (a savior changing all of reality with a flick of her hand while she turns from a little boy in fear).
He is sane, and even if he is not, he is certainly not poor. He can't be, not when it is only his money and his mansion that keep his case from being irrevocably closed.
"I'm sorry, Jefferson," Flayme tells him, and even with the bitter shells encasing everyone in their forced disguises, there is sincerity bleeding from him along cracked and fraying edges. A District Attorney who is a prince looking for a love and a kiss, he's the only one willing to help Jefferson find his own little butterfly kiss (and he cannot decide if this is part of the curse or some tiny little drip-drip-drip of hope seeping through even the most well-built curse).
"I'm sorry," Flayme says again, and Jefferson has to look away because there are literal flames burning in the man's eyes, hot and cloying and wasting away, shaped in the echo of the fading form of another cursed state, more beast than man. "Without certified proof that you're stable, there's no way I can guarantee you even partial custody of Paige."
"Paige, Paige, Paige," Jefferson repeats (fixing the name in his mind, a flutter of white and the smell of tea overlaid atop the flash of a brow and the elegant turn of her wrist and the flick of her ankles as she dances, laughing, with him and her stuffed rabbit).
Flayme's smile is slight and sad, ready to be blown away by the powerful blast of breath from the Wicked Mayor. "Paige," he confirms softly, like the echo of a reminder of a dream Jefferson can never quite catch hold of. "Your daughter."
"Yes, that's right!" Jefferson knocks aside his teacup and comes to his feet. "My daughter, she's mine, she's for me—she loves me—and I need her."
"Okay." Flayme takes a deep breath in, out, in again to release words that would mean nothing at all if Jefferson really is sane and none of this is real. "I know you love her, but you have to be careful. No more talk of needing her or owning her, all right? You have to think about what she needs. What's best for her."
And Jefferson cannot speak at all, his words marching up his throat and then tripping over a stumbling-block, falling one by one like dominos, toppling back down his throat and landing in the pit of his stomach with the clatter of breaking bones and crushed hearts and smashed hope.
What's best (what's right; what's sane) seems perpetually outside of reach, just at the corner of his vision, fluttering away and laughing shrilly at his clumsy efforts to turn after it. He remembers a girl in a hut, graceful hands examining mushrooms for flaws. He remembers laughter and games and an "I love you, Papa."
But he also remembers a tiny girl running through echoing rooms of marble and ebony, laughing until his monsters rise up, and then she's not laughing as she flees, running, scared and crying and calling, "Please, Daddy, it's me—please!"
What's best for her—he doesn't know because as much as he remembers, he can't quite tell which of those memories is truth and which is delusion.
"Jefferson." Flayme's quiet voice calls him (the name that's his no matter the world) back to the present, immediate, imperative, and so substantial that it sits on his throat like a heavy weight. Flayme's clouded eyes gaze at Jefferson, not looking away, not backing down (a knight with a quest he can't complete; a prince without a kingdom; a man cursed to be continuously ineffectual). "I believe in you, Jefferson. I believe you can get Paige back. You can be the father she needs as well as the one she wants. You just have to be patient. Let's do this right so no one can take her away ever again, okay?"
"Right," Jefferson says, because what else can he say? Grace—no, Paige—is everything that makes this town worthwhile, if he can only get her back. But he has had patience, has been waiting and waiting and waiting and trying and trying and trying for decades—how much patience is a father supposed to have? How can they expect him to keep waiting when it has done him no good and Paige—no, Grace—has only grown further away?
Flayme grimaces and looks away. "I know it's been too long already," he admits, and Jefferson gives him a sharp look, searching for a glimmer of knowledge, a flash of realization in those faith-filled eyes (he sees only blank ignorance, compounded by compassion and memories of a mere nine months of hearings and appeals and interviews). "But we're getting closer. At least you get to see Paige once a week now, yes?"
Jefferson nods slowly, following the cues laid out for him in expression and posture. "Yes," he says. "Just enough to remind me how much I don't want to let her go."
Flayme flinches, his neck drawn down into his collar (as if the King of Hearts is coming for his head). "I'm sorry," he says (a good man coming up against failure and not knowing what to do but to apologize for it).
It comes easily, the façade of a throwaway smile and a disposable shrug and a careless flip of his hand. "Don't apologize," Jefferson says breezily. "As you said, progress. Nowhere to go but up."
Nowhere to go at all, trapped here forever, the clocks stilled, the two pasts meshed together in his head so he never knows which way is up and which is down (just as helpless and imprisoned here as in Wonderland). But Robert Flayme's the only one even trying, the only one who believes he's not completely mad (and he's very, very wrong, but Jefferson appreciates the sentiment), and the rest of the town has all but forgotten him outside their gossipy circles, so no point (even in this pointless existence) to antagonize the one man on his side.
"Right." The District Attorney doesn't look fully convinced (as unsure as Jefferson is about what happened to lose him his graceful Paige), but he nods anyway, going through the motions. "So…see you next week? I'll have the court date by then."
"Court date," Jefferson repeats, a puppet to fit in with all the other puppets here. He locks his eyes on all the decorative objects around him, perpendicular edges against circles and rings encompassing squares, shapes and colors all clashing together and reminding him he is not in Wonderland (not surrounded by landscapes so bright they hurt his eyes, courts set in front of hanging islands, judges who were also jury and executioner and king and victim all at once).
Worlds flash and revert and appear and vanish before his eyes as he escorts Flayme to the door. He moves by habit (engrained over twenty-eight years), by memory (flawed and broken, a patchwork quilt of portals and hats and mansions and software and a daughter he fails in both), by pure rote (because there's nothing else in this storybook made real). Flayme passes on details as wispy and insubstantial as Grace, gives farewells as easily as Paige always does before skipping back to her foster parents, the remnants of the tight, little hug she gives him once a week all he gets to keep of her.
"Paige," he says when the door closes behind Flayme, leaving Jefferson alone again. "Paige. Grace. Paige. Grace." He chants the names, over and over, an incantation, a spell, a litany to keep him company as he wanders empty hallways, echoing rooms, cold grounds. Names have power. The Spinner had told him so, dealing out antiques and casting magic. Names have power, and Jefferson thinks that if only he knew which of these chanted names were real (Grace or Paige, elegance or books, tea parties or bicycle rides), then he could chant that one, real name enough to make her truly materialize at his side, quiet smile on her lips as she tells him she loves him, Papa, won't he play hide-and-seek with her—and all the fear (the disappointment, the uncertainty) would be gone from her eyes.
Jefferson squeezes his own eyes shut and remembers (tries to remember, to pluck one singular memory from the deluge overwhelming him), thinks as hard as he can. "What did I name her?" he mutters. Holding an infant in his arms, covered in blood, crying, so small, so dependent on him. He'd looked and been speechless in awe. He'd felt tears on his cheeks. He'd let her squeeze his finger in her tiny fist as she quieted and looked up at him with milky eyes. He'd opened his mouth (could feel the lump in his throat making it hard to get any words out), and he'd said...
He'd said…
What? What? What did he say? What what what what what?
"Think, think, think!" he mutters. He presses his fists to his forehead. The memory is there, blurred between a hospital room and a hovel but there, and it's only one word (the most important word of all); all he has to do is grab hold of it. It should be simple—this shouldn't be so hard! How can he be a father if he can't remember the name he spoke over the little infant he'd held so preciously? It can't be hard!
But it is. He can't remember (so many memories, too many memories, and for all that, he can't remember enough).
He lets out a scream, a shout, a roar of rage (all of these things because if he can't be the same, if the world can't be the same, if his daughter can't be the same, then why should a sound get to be simple?) and lashes out. His arm hits a vase, a cup, a figurine he doesn't even remember owning. They crash to the floor with a loud explosion of sound, like tiny sparks of noise that leap outward to land on Jefferson and coat him with scarce bits of calmness.
There's blood on his hands. There's a mess on the floor. There are bruises on his temples, and this is all wrong. He's afraid and he's panicking and he doesn't know what he's doing, and those are all Bad Things.
They'll take her away if he's irrational. She won't get to see him at all if he can't control himself (because he didn't know what he was doing before and when he woke up, she was scared of him, she was crying, and they took her away). She won't love him, won't be safe and happy if he doesn't stay sane. Stay in the now, in the here.
"Calm," he says, because if it's a word he can say, then surely it must a state he can attain. "Calm. Stay calm. Don't panic. Be the father she needs, not the man you think you are."
There's only one thing that calms him (besides his Grace, his Paige, either one, both of them), and that's his spyhole into the world. His telescope for ferreting out the secrets of this hidden town, for looking for people and cataloguing everything he remembers of them, Storybrooke and Enchanted Forest (as if giving them names and titles and correlations can make his hallucinations any more real).
The metal is cold and silky smooth when he runs his hands down it, the wood fine and free of splinters. For a moment, he can only touch it, fondle it, reassure himself that he is rich and living in a mansion, that he creates software for a living and lives alone, that he is a father doing everything he can to get a judge to see him as a fit parent (that the real world is one where magic cannot grant him wishes and fairies cannot bring him his daughter and the Dark One cannot give him gold in return for traveling to faraway realms).
Finally, when his hands no longer shake and his breath stops coming in fits and starts, he looks through the telescope, past trees and beaches, to the small town where Grace now lives. It's late now, almost dark, the twilight when day and night blur together, so she isn't out where he can see her. He looks at the house where she lives for a moment, hoping that she is safe, is happy, is getting ready for bed and (dare he hope it?) dreaming of Friday when she'll get to visit him for one beautiful hour.
But it's not good to spy (he's been told), so he moves on, lets the telescope wander from place to place to place, the felon wandering the streets and fingering some cash he shouldn't have. The waitress walking down an avenue, all curled in on herself until the mechanic comes out of the shop and meets her and she is all smiles and he is shy and they walk on together. The sheriff's car still parked at the station (it almost never goes to the apartments anymore, only moves between police station and Pet Shelter). The newcomer (the savior, all gold and red, a champion's colors) stepping outside Granny's and looking up at the stars for a few moments before heading around to the bed and breakfast where her friend is waiting for her.
And the mayor. She's almost never alone, the Heartless Queen, almost always surrounded by lackeys and minions, by victims and prisoners, and if they are all gone, obeying her commands, then her daughter is usually with her, an ever-present shadow tugging half-heartedly against the leash at her throat and baring her teeth only when her son is threatened.
But now the Queen is alone. Heading purposely toward the hospital where…ah, not alone any longer. A man in black, with a stuffed glove for a hand, with emptiness for eyes, with hatred for meat. The new stranger, the one who watches the Spinner with suspicion and waits, disappointed, for something that never seems to appear.
Jefferson watches (a puppet, a prisoner, but one with eyes of his own and a tiny window to the outside world) from afar. Watches as the Queen and the stranger confer for a few moments, their heads close together, their bodies angled away, as if they would rather be with anyone other than their current companion (as if they realize how not-real all this seems). And then they head into the hospital. Jefferson's about to look away, to find something else to watch while they linger behind closed doors and blocked windows, but…but they are not long.
A back door opens, one he almost doesn't catch (wouldn't have except his attention is already wavering and he's searching for something else of interest), and the Queen and the stranger slip back into the night, cloaked under the cover of darkness, headed for the stranger's car.
And they are not alone (not like him).
Between them, they carry a body.
When the door to her prison opens, she's filled with wild, uncontrollable hope, like a blazing bonfire consuming everything and sucking up darkness (she doesn't recall even having a mental image of bonfires until the door was opened: to ideas, to concepts, to possibilities).
She comes to her feet, trembling, inwardly still, as if poised for flight (to the opposite corner of her cell, to nowhere, but she's strong now from endless pacing, ready to run in endless circles forever, bolstered by flaring urgency), and she has never felt closer to flying apart in a thousand pieces. She vibrates from the outside in, prompted by outside forces, and that's her first clue that this is not what she so desperately wants it to be.
Because if things are really changing, shouldn't she finally be moving, be changing, be acting on her own? At her own impetus?
But others controlling and keeping and watching her…that's just more of the same (that goes back as far as her memories, frayed and jagged where the missing parts were ripped away, a tapestry that's been mutilated).
She's frozen save for her trembling. She stands there, and she doesn't flee (even to a corner) when the woman with honey-dark eyes sends in white-clothed guards (with dead eyes that are as good as masked helmets). She doesn't use her newfound strength to fight when they take her arms and tug her forward like a doll, a life-sized figurine they position as they choose (she wonders if she ever had a doll, and if not, how she knows of them). She just lets it happen, because this is what life is and she can't quite recall why she ever thought it could (or had been) any different.
There's an odd sense of dislocation when she's pulled past the threshold of her cell (her cocoon, she thinks, and revels in all these new thoughts and facts filling her mind, sinking in to click into place in the empty parts of her head). It's so strange and different, and she has no frame of reference for it, for being outside her cell. It pauses her, leaves her upset and disturbed within herself.
Before she can spiral too far, though, she hears it—quiet and soft and beautiful but oh so strong (like steel, like iron, like magic).
Humming. Music created with hardly any effort, almost inaudible but perceptible in every bone of her body. Thrumming, vibrating, shaking her away from this hushed, habitual (cowed) silence.
The brave girl. The strong girl. They haven't opened her door, aren't taking her to what might or might not be freedom, and she has been better and endured so much more and even now she hums to give courage to her cellmate.
So finally she, the girl in the middle, finds a reason to fight. She knows even as she begins to thrash in the guards' grip, to pull and tug (against their tugging, their positioning, the honey-dark ruthlessness) that it's useless. She is strong for a tiny girl lost in gray walls, but she is altogether flimsy and frail, held together only by things she can't remember or quite comprehend. She's only one fragile collection of brittle bones and sluggish veins, humming heart and empty hands. She won't be able to break free or impose her own will on the world, but she can make them realize she's not complicit in this. She can make them know she might be small and lost and broken, but she is her and her is different from them.
She fights and struggles (and marks her victory in the bruises rising on her unblemished arms), and as they pass a section of dry, featureless hall she has never seen before, she looks past broad, white shoulders to the door she knows is there (has heard snick, over and over again just before hers).
She catches a fractured glimpse of her own cell, and it seems both bigger and smaller than she'd ever thought (she wonders if the same is true of herself). And then she sees a closed door (it seems so much more normal from this side). There's a tiny box (backward, inside out), but it's closed, and she can't hear the humming anymore.
Instead, she hears a thump-thump-thump. A repetitive sound, weak and slow and not very loud, diluted by walls and doors and locks, but her heartbeat adopts its rhythm and it turns her captors' hands into clutching claws. Best of all, it freezes the honey-bitter woman (affected, for once, by the ones she locked away rather than the other way around).
It's coming from the last cell, this thumping that winds through the girl in the middle until she is both strong and brave. The cell beyond even hers. The silent one. A thump-thump-thump like the beat of a heart coming alive and awake and fierce again. Thump-thump-thump, and she feels it like war-drums in her bloodstream, like fizzing, sparking energy in her head, like vast strength lent to her as surely as the strong girl's humming lends her bravery.
It doesn't last long, but it's enough. Enough to give an instant of pause to their warden. Enough to give the brave girl enough time to pry open that little rectangle (a snick that rings like a crack, broken and inverted), exposing wasted light within.
The honey-dark woman's irritated (afraid?) and she hurries her guards, and the walls are moving too fast, the flickering lights too bright, and her feet barely touch the floor to remind her it's her (the girl in between) who's moving—but she sees her. The humming girl. The girl with music and fire and hope.
Pale, pale skin (like white petals of delicate flowers clinging to life amid sharp stones), and blue, blue eyes, and mouth closed tight and small out of habit. It's like she's looking at a reflection of herself (she doesn't remember how she knows, but she's sure her own eyes are too blue for gray cells, and her thin, weak-strong arms are too pale for stark lighting, and her mouth is perpetually closed over things she doesn't know to say).
An instant's reflection (an instant's revelation), and then the humming girl is gone and the thump-thump-thump is silenced, and she-who-is-in-between fights because she has no noise of her own save the marred sounds of struggle.
More gray walls pass her by, more brilliant fluttering lights (like candles stirred by fingers of wind). There's the nurse who slides in tasteless food, but this time, instead of a platter of porridge, she holds a needle that glistens like diamonds, hard and sharp and heavy enough to bury her completely.
Her fighting takes on a whole new urgency, a violence she's never before realized she contains within her (birthed from that cocoon and the midwifing of the brave one and the strong one), but now it burns and writhes inside her, lashing out with ineffectual fists and tiny whimpers of denial that fall like heavy, wet snow at the honey-dark woman's feet.
But none of it matters (it never does), and the needle pierces her throat. She feels her blood being coated with slick, oily poison, racing through her whole body, from extremity to extremity, crisscrossing her flesh in a webbed pattern that pulses in time to her deafening heartbeat.
And still she fights (because she's realized she can, she wants to, and she refuses to give that up).
The grip on her arms turns steadier, less restraining, but tightens in readiness of her slumping to the floor. The lights seem to go out for a second, and she wonders, in the blackness, if the honey-dark woman who stares at her so aloofly is revealing her true alliance. But it's not the lights—it's a tall man clothed all in black, and death is in his coldly glittering eyes.
Instantly, she goes completely and absolutely still.
But she isn't giving up.
She's still fighting.
This man is dangerous, and though he leans against a wall and fingers his lip as if he is harmless, she can smell danger rolling off him in waves. He's cold and he's harsh and he doesn't care about her at all, and she knows (without knowing how, because nothing in her four gray walls taught her this, or maybe it did: maybe it taught her that some victories come by pretending to defeat) that he likes to taste fear, that he wants it, craves it, and that if she gives it to him, he will control her.
So she slackens her stance (not hard to do with leaden paralysis coating her veins) and deadens her stare and loosens her hands from fists into empty palms. She feels his gaze rake over her, long and slow, from head to toe, and she wants to shudder, to recoil, to shrink away (to spit in his face), but she doesn't. Because things are changing but old lessons can still apply.
"This is her?" the man asks dismissively. Light glints off his ear and scatters, frightened away by the touch of him. "He went from Milah to…this?"
The honey-dark woman stands with her back to the light, yet still her tight smile is visible in chasms of shadows cutting across her face. "He takes what he can get," she says. Her voice is as honey-smooth as her eyes, sweetness to mask the bitter taste of poison.
"I suppose," the man says. Then he shrugs; as easily as that, he no longer notices her in the middle.
As if she has ceased to exist. She has ceased to be of consequence to him, and so maybe she has, in his eyes, disappeared.
But the humming of her companion still sings in her bloodstream beneath the diamond-tipped poison, and the thumping of her silent neighbor still beats in her heart beneath her cowed façade, and so she does matter even if these others can't see that.
The blood roars in her ears, drowning out the dangerous words wielded around her. When her knees buckle, she feels herself caught up, leather (smooth and sticky) beneath her shoulders and knees. Her head lolls against a muscular, bared chest. She smells leather and salt and spice and hatred. It stinks, and she rolls her head until she is looking away from the man who holds her in the jaws of a metal trap waiting to spring on her and crush her (or is she only the bait? does the trap wait for someone else?).
They're moving, jarring steps that cause her arms to hang uselessly in the air, her bare feet to swick-swick against the long edges of a black coat (and in this moment, she loves that her skin is pale enough to show stark and vibrant and different against the darkness, like the moon against black winter sky), and her eyes flash open and closed with each succession of light-dark-light-dark until it is only dark and there's only her and black hate and honey ambition. She looks up and up and up to a sky that isn't grated or glassed over or walled away, and she thinks she sees a faraway star winking at her like an eye that sees beyond the horizon.
But then the black man shifts her in his grip and she falls into a seething pit of salt and hatred.
Next to that, oblivion is a welcome relief.
The air is so cold it turns into ice crystals in his mouth, tasting of brittle frost. Gold swallows back the sharp ice and tightens his gloved hands over the head of his cane, determined not to shiver and give away just how very human (how very vulnerable) he is. It's late and he's tired. The back of his neck feels sore from all the tingling it does to warn him that he's being watched, he feels as if he's been playing his game so long he's reverted from master to pawn (even after he'd promised himself he'd never be a pawn again), and he probably shouldn't be conducting negotiations when he feels so half-hearted.
But.
But his target is already here, crackling through the underbrush in heavy boots, and he's already put it off two weeks too long. Besides, it's not as if he hasn't negotiated in worse situations. There's only so much he can do to avert Hook's suspicions before the pirate convinces himself that patience is overrated. There's only so much he can do to reassure himself Bae is safe and free of Hook (to convince himself Hook wasn't lying in Neverland and Bae really did run, after lifetimes spent convincing himself of the opposite) before he has to do something to quench the burning panic building to an inferno within him.
When the man stumbles into the clearing and comes to an abrupt stop, Mr. Gold summons a smile made colder by frigid moonlight. "Mr. Booth," he says calmly, and is gratified when the puppet shudders in response. "Imagine finding you here."
"I thought…" August trails off, then gives a shake of his head. He pretends to bravado fairly well, but he gives himself away by the hints of uncertainty bleeding through along the corners of his eyes, the lines around his mouth (a boy pretending to be a man and failing). "What is it you want?" he asks bluntly, and bravado or not, Gold allows himself to be slightly impressed that the puppet's voice doesn't shake. Of course, even cowards can find bits of bravery when everything they love is threatened (though it often comes far too late).
"Straight to the point," Gold says, as if it's an observation. "No beating around the bush anymore."
"I haven't been the one beating around the bush," August points out. He is brave, and he is bold, and he trembles from head to foot but still stands his ground, and Gold looks at him and wonders if Bae would look like this. If Bae would be brave after finding his father again. If Bae would fight to protect him and make deals for him.
(Or if Bae would turn aside and look another direction and walk away. Run away, as fast as he can, to worlds unknown, to lives unglimpsed, just so long as they are removed from the papa who failed him so badly.)
Gold gives the impression of a shrug with a mere flick of his eyes. "True enough. Shall we lay all our cards on the table, then? Our old deals are fulfilled, after all. All that's left to us is to make new ones."
"The Deal-Maker," August whispers.
From within the husk of Mr. Gold, Rumplestiltskin stirs. "Spinner, Dark One, destroyer of worlds, supplier of dreams, etcetera, etcetera," he says with a veneer of boredom. "After a few centuries, the titles grow tedious."
He doesn't miss the flinch to the puppet's body, nor the widening of his eyes.
Even here, fear of the Dark One precedes him. Good. That will save time.
"Then I guess the lying can stop," Booth says as boldly as his fear allows. "Rumplestiltskin."
Power sparks. Flares. Lights up the night.
Rumplestiltskin drinks it in. If he were to sit at his spinning wheel and weave long into the night with his boy's name on his lips, he almost thinks it would be gold thread that would coil at his feet.
"Ah, but if memory serves me, honesty's never been your strong suit, has it?" He smiles his thin smile. "And I assume that's coming back to haunt you now."
August freezes before lunging forward. He doesn't quite touch Gold (even desperate courage has a limit), but with his arms stretched out, he demands, breathlessly, "Are you doing this to me?"
"Me?" Gold laughs. "Oh, no, dearie. This is all your own doing. What did that fairy condition your blessing with? Selfless, brave, and true? How many lies have you told since you arrived in this world, Pinocchio? They're catching up to you now that you've come home."
"But I…" The lost look on the puppet's face makes him look like a real boy. "I've been trying to do the right thing. I had to lie! No one here would believe me."
"I'm not the one who applied a bit of magic to your wooden body," Rumplestiltskin says. "Fairies never do quite remember to outline the price of their wish-granting, do they? Lies of omission. Quite useful."
"So I…" August takes a deep breath and tries to hide a wince as he straightens his wooden leg. "I'm just going to keep getting worse?"
"And not much chance of wood keeping any sentient life in it here," Gold observes neutrally. "No magic, remember?"
August lets out a breath and turns away, closing his eyes. "This isn't fair."
"Maybe, maybe not." Allowing a touch of sternness to bleed into his voice, Gold says, "You were supposed to prepare the Savior. Not train her in skepticism and stubbornness."
As baseless an accusation as the fairy's judgement on necessary falsehoods, Rumplestiltskin supposes, but then, it is only desperate souls who make deals with him. A few more nudges, perhaps a sturdy shove, and the puppet will be ready.
"They separated us," August says bitterly. "She was a baby and a family took her in right away. What use could I have served by staying with her? I kept in touch as best as I could, but… Everything was so different here. Way more different than they told me."
"It wasn't my idea to send you through," Gold reminds him. "I advised against it, but as usual, the heroes"—he sneers—"know best."
In fact, Rumplestiltskin hadn't contested the decision for long. Snow and her prince had believed the Spinner's warnings about an upcoming curse enough to go on the run, and the fairies had been manipulated (or had reasons of their own) into bringing out the tree they guarded with a plethora of dust, but in the end, it had been seeing Geppetto's desperate love for his boy that had convinced Rumplestiltskin he couldn't use the wardrobe himself.
Well, that and the visions he'd seen warning him that he'd never find his son that way (not without dying first).
Still, he'd told them it was foolish to place so much responsibility on a boy who, for all intents and purposes, had only been alive for a couple years.
"You said that I'd find the right place," the boy remembers. He's wide open, beseeching and despairing, as he turns to Rumplestiltskin. "You said that everything would work out in the end. So long as…so long as I…"
"Yes?"
"So long as I remembered who to turn to for help."
The woods are silent. Cold. Rumplestiltskin hides another shiver, spends a useless moment wishing for Zoso there to warm him from within (wastes another second scorning himself for that wish), and then, finally, the puppet breaks.
Wood always does, in the end.
"Please," he says, defeated and, ah, there it is. True desperation. "I just found my father again. Emma's happy here. I…I don't want to lose this. Please, Rumplestiltskin, help me."
"Gladly." Gold tilts his head with narrowed eyes. "First, stop going to the fairy. She's useless to you."
August frowns. "I thought she might remember."
"She might," Gold allows. "But regardless, she won't help you. Fairies don't believe in altering deals."
"Neither do you," he scoffs.
"Well then…" Gold turns as if to leave (all the old tricks come back so quickly, rustiness vanishing as if by magic; conman's blood, after all, runs through his veins), and August stumbles after him.
"I'm sorry," he grits out. "Really. Just…what can I do?"
"There's no way to help you now," Gold says. "Not until the curse breaks."
"Emma doesn't believe in fairytales," August half-laughs. "I tried, believe me, and there's this book…" He cuts a sharp glance to Gold. "You didn't make the book, did you?"
"Curses come with contingencies built in," Gold says carefully, as if it doesn't matter to him. "Especially ones as well written as this one."
"Yeah, well, even with the book, Emma's not biting. We might not make it until she finally comes around."
"Heroes are always cast in a certain mold, aren't they. Stubbornness is to be expected. No matter." Gold (or is he Rumplestiltskin now? the differences are fading, worn thin and rubbed nearly to nothing) resettles his balance against his cane, leaning into the pain growling along his ankle (familiar pain, both noble sacrifice and staggering betrayal). "It's the pirate I'm interested in."
"The pirate?" August's thoughts are clear to read on his face, as legible as ink across paper. "What does he have to do with Emma?"
"Nothing, of course." Gold shrugs. "And if you're lucky, it'll stay that way. He does, however, concern me. When I last saw him, he had someone with him. A boy. I want to know why that boy isn't here now. And where he is."
"How will this stop me from turning into wood?"
Rumplestiltskin blinks at him. "It won't."
"Then why—"
"Deal-Maker," Rumplestiltskin reminds him haughtily. "It means something needs to be in it for me before I offer my help. Now, when the curse breaks, I'll fix your…little problem. But in the meantime, I want you to learn everything you possibly can about Killian Jones."
August studies him for a long moment. Rumplestiltskin lets him. The cane is altered, the lack of Zoso gives him a different air, and their world is long gone. But for all that, he knows who the puppet boy sees looking back at him.
"Fine," he says, as Gold knew he would. Time is moving now (his boy is aging, growing, somewhere, somewhen), but still the parts they play are all the same. After centuries of practice, Rumplestiltskin's learned that the script never changes that much. "Deal."
"The deal is struck," Rumplestiltskin says, and this time, he doesn't hide his shiver as sparks runs up and down his flesh.
August shivers too, and finally, things are coming together.
(Finally, once again, Rumplestiltskin inspires fear rather than drowns in it. Finally, he is powerful again.)