He had the bean.
Milah was dead.
The pirate was bleeding.
And he had the bean! He had the truth and closure he hadn't had in a far more satisfying way than he'd ever imagined, and now he had a way back to Baelfire as well. In the end, he was almost happy Milah hadn't died as he thought she had; without this incident, he might never have found himself so rich with knowledge or in possession of the greatest of prizes.
When he arrived hundreds of miles away, back in his aunts' home, his mind raced, making lists of what he had to do so that he could take that bean and depart for the world Baelfire was in. First thing first, his wound needed tending. He didn't feel pain anymore, not when he applied his magic to places he might feel pain, but he could feel his chest bleeding beneath the vest he wore. A deep breath, a greater concentration of magic, and his free hand over the hole in his heart, he felt the wound the pirate had left him with close over and seal shut as the blood evaporated as if it had never been there. When he pulled his hand away, there wasn't even a hole left in his clothes. He smiled as he pulled the magic away and felt no trace of the pain that had once been there. But as he looked down at the hand still in his clutches, he felt certain that was not the case with Jones. It had been a clean cut, but the ship's surgeon would still need to patch him up again. His pain was only just beginning. Meanwhile, all the pain he felt, the pain that Milah had caused him-it was about to vanish altogether.
Chest healed, he knew that if he was to join Baelfire there were other plans that needed to be made, a spell of some kind that might work in a Land Without Magic to lead him to his son would be important. Proper protection of the dagger still needed to be enacted. He would also need to fetch a cane, of course, if not finally heal his leg the way he should have when he first acquired the curse. And money. He would need to take gold coins with him, maybe even a few precious gems, anything he could carry! Maybe this way when he arrived and found Bae they wouldn't have to live in poverty. There were many things to do, and he knew he should set to work, but…
He wanted to see it again! Locked as the bean was in Jones's fist, he knew it was safe there but he wanted to see his prize, to feel it in is own hand, to know this was all about to draw to a close.
He set the severed hand upon the work desk before him. His eyes automatically found the picture of his son that he kept there. He'd drawn it not long ago on a cold night when he'd waited for a potion to brew in the fear that one day Bae's face might become as foggy and hazy as his aunts' faces had become. He didn't want to forget. And from that moment he'd let it that picture inspire him and goad him on. Now the moment had finally arrived to move on. To meet his son in this Land Without Magic. It was going to be terrifying and confusing, it was going to require bravery and every inch of the thick skin he'd required since he'd become the Dark One to deal with the pain Bae would no doubt feel from his first betrayal, but it was going to be worth it. He'd get what he needed together and when night fell he'd go to the same place that Bae had gone through a year ago, and he'd make the jump. He'd find his son if it was the last thing he did.
With a sigh and a smirk, he reached for the hand and began to peel the stiffened, cracking joints of the fingers back one by one by one to reveal-
He froze as the last one came up. His breath held in his chest as he beheld a sight that wasn't right. His brain took a second to process what exactly was wrong.
No!
Desperate, he reached down and smoothed the hand out feeling for something he couldn't see, praying and thinking and hoping and-
His eyes didn't deceive him. There was nothing there. The hand was empty. Quickly his thoughts played out in his mind reliving the incident perfectly and then seeing something he hadn't before…the number of times Jones had turned his back to him before he'd cut his hand off, the number of times he'd been focused on Milah, the number of times he hadn't kept his eyes on the bean…
"Watch the lady!" his father used to chant. He'd taken his eyes off that bean for one instant, and Jones…
"No…he tricked me!" he roared, reaching out and pushing the table over in a loud crash as his chest heave. He let the useless limb fall from its place and shatter with the rest of the items he had, including that picture. Gone. Frustrated he ran his fingers through his hair and sat down as angry tears gathered in his eyes. The bean wasn't there! He'd switched hands or put it in a pocket or…
What was he doing? Moping? Mourning?! Feeling pathetic and sorry for himself?! He was the Dark One! A lie meant nothing to him. The bean existed, he'd seen it! And if it wasn't here, then he knew exactly where it was!
He closed his eyes, summoned his magic…and nothing happened. He'd meant to go back to the ship, for the magic to take him right to what was owed to him, but he was still there, in his aunts' house. Why…
He knew why...
They'd made a deal. The bean for their lives. He'd taken Milah's. He'd broken the deal. The magic didn't recognize that the bean belonged to him and so it wouldn't take him to it.
He grit his teeth together and sneered. He'd be damned if that was going to let it stop him! People broke deals with him all the time and never batted an eye until he killed them for it. The magic certainly didn't bind them the way it did him, and there were loopholes to everything! In this case, he knew exactly how to get around her death. He grabbed the hand and set his magic not on the bean but on the blood within that hand and the ship he'd been to, and the next moment when he turned around he found himself face to face with the docks only…
The ship was gone. Impossible.
Impossible!
He looked wildly around in the place that Milah had just brought him to, next to the ships that he remembered from only moments ago, but their place was empty! How could it be? How could they set sail so quickly?! Their Captain had been missing a hand! Surely they wouldn't have just left if he'd been injured, and even if they had, they couldn't have gotten very far.
There.
As he turned to search the harbor for their ship, he sensed it. In the air, when he paused to take a breath, he could smell it, he could taste it.
Magic.
They'd used magic somehow, to shield or hide themselves or…
With another breath, he didn't have to wonder anymore. There was something familiar about the trace of magic that had been left behind. It was a much more powerful scent than he'd originally encountered, like the difference between smelling a pinch of cinnamon and a tablespoon, but he remembered the source and identified it. And for this he didn't need a loophole.
Once more he let the magic overtake him. He held the pirate's hand in his own fist, so tight and shaking with rage, he knew from the moment that he appeared back at the old woman's tent that she'd give him what he needed as well as meet her death.
Yes.
This was it.
The old woman who had set up the meeting for him with Smee, it had the same smell that the docks had only…only different. It had been muted before, heavily repressed. Now it wasn't. That familiar magic poured off of her home and into the grounds around it nearly overwhelming him. A simple witch, he'd thought. A woman of no significance…what he sensed now suggested otherwise. She'd been hiding her power from him.
"Well, well, well…someone has been a very naughty-"
He stopped as he entered the house and took in the scene around him. The woman was there, but she was on the floor.
She was still.
Jones's hand still clutched in his own; his stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch as he leaned down to examine her carefully. She wasn't breathing, her heart wasn't beating, her skin was cool to the touch, and there was a pool of blood on the floor that was still dripping from her mouth. She was dead. And one smell of that blood told him everything he needed to know, everything that she'd been shielding from him the day before. Disease. She'd been dying for a long time if the smell of the polluted blood was any indication. She was gone. And he sneered as he stood up and looked down at her.
"Well, lucky you…"
So she wouldn't meet her fate, not at his hands at least, but he was one of the greatest wizards in the realm, and certainly the greatest that wasn't also trapped inside of a tree! He didn't need this nobody to break her charms! Something! Most weakened when the creator died anyway! It should be easy! There had to be something around here that would do it!
He looked around and found that her home was a much different place than it had been when he'd first stepped inside. Books, baubles, amulets, trinkets, bottles and potions litter every surface. So she wasn't just a powerful witch, she'd been a clever one as well, not only in muting her powers from him but in hiding it so well it had only appeared again in death! He nearly jumped at the sight of a snake floating in a jar of preservatives. Atlantean Rat Snake, the same kind that had bitten Bae so long ago…she had one?
It didn't matter! Though the knowledge in his head whispered about how effective and important it might be to hold onto it, he quickly removed the lid, reached inside, and cast the thing into the fire! It wouldn't help him find the pirate or get back to Baelfire! The pirate's hand, flesh and blood and bone, however, just might. And with that thought, he thrust it down inside the preserves and returned the lid before moving on to check the books around him.
No, they were useless. Books he'd seen before, books his aunts had, books in the castle…one by one he tossed them into the fire. There was nothing inside of them that indicated where the ship had gone or what she'd given the pirate to hide so well except…
The book on the pedestal. He'd nearly forgotten that the night she'd summoned him there had been a book on the pedestal that she'd been reading from the one that he'd burned, perhaps that one…
"No!" he growled as he inspected it. The book was open, unharmed by the fire he'd started. It was open to a spell to hide family. Blood magic. Magic that would hold even in death. "No!" he roared again kicking the pedestal over so that it tilted into the fire. He only just managed to grab the book off of it before the pedestal caught and began to burn. The spellbook was a powerful one, one he hadn't seen before, and if there was ever any hope of breaking the spell that she'd placed on the family member then he needed it. But who…
Flipping through the book, hoping to find some kind of family tree, he only found one name written into the side of a page. "Morgana." The Sorceress.
He looked down at the body before him and eyed it wearily, then sighed in disappointment. Morgana was a powerful sorceress that Nimue had learned some of her magic from. He very much doubted that she was that Sorceress. For one she would have died hundreds of years ago and not just now, taken down by a disease! This witch had certainly been more powerful than she'd let on, but she wasn't Morgana. More likely the book had once belonged to Morgana, and somehow, this incompetent, foolish girl had gotten her hands on it. It would certainly explain why it had a spell for summoning a Dark One inside of it.
On a whim, he waved his hand over the name written along the side and watched as the letters reformed into his own true name. It was his now. And it, along with a severed pirate hand, were terrible things to acquire when he realized that he could have had that bean!
He picked up the nearest object to him and threw it, casting it against the wall so that it shattered. The destruction felt good. But not as good as having the bean. On and on he raged. He needed to feel it, to let the anger consume him so he could get back to work. He needed to topple her tables, destroy her furniture, shred the sheets of her bed, break her baubles, spill her potions, destroy everything in her life right down to…
Something peaked out at him from underneath the bed. Something that didn't quite belong in his hellhole of a place. It was a bag. A bag with something very distinct on top. Dyed red yarn, poor quality, and knitting needles. And at the bottom of the bag, a single dying, decaying leaf on which words were written in crude, childish handwriting. "To Nana Odie, love Billy."
Billy...William...
He looked down at the book still safe in his hand. "A spell to protect a family member..."
"From something Dark when you could no longer do it yourself…" he added, looking at the woman's lifeless body.
She wasn't related to the pirate. She'd been related to the trader, the one with the floppy red hat she had made for him. Smee.
What a clever little liar she'd been. What clever little liars they'd both been.
A simple transaction gone wrong, and now he stood with a hand and a spellbook and no bean.
He hoped the pirate killed him.
I hated this chapter! No, wait, that's a lie, I hated the end of this episode and writing it was a bitch. Not because of anything that happens in it, just because I felt like the writers did something so stupid I resented them for having to clean up their mess. Seriously, think about it. What do we see at the end of this episode? We see the scene with Rumple of course, he finds out he doesn't have the bean and he gets angry. Cut to Hook getting his hook as Milah's body is dumped overboard right before they accept Smee and move to Neverland. And the premise of that is just so...stupid! Really, think about it. Rumple had just cut hook's hand off then poofed himself back to his house...so when he found out he didn't have the bean why didn't he poof himself back to the Jolly Roger? He'd seen it, he must have known what happened, he knew where it was, why didn't he go get it? Well, Treatian, I think they left pretty quickly. I doubt it. Why? As mentioned before the next time we see Hook he has a metal covering on his wound that perfectly matches his hook and Milah's body is wrapped. I don't see Rumple leaving and Hook saying "right, now quickly as we can let's dispose of the body, someone bring that metal hook holder up from storage that we got for just such an occasion as this, and we'll be on to Neverland in two seconds flat before the Dark One comes back!" It's just not plausible to me, but then neither is the fact that Rumple wouldn't just say "let me poof back over there and get my bean". So this chapter had a lot of questions to answer. I had to come up with a reason for something logical not to take place and then figure out a way to protect them along the way and...well, this is what I came up with. I'm sorry it's scattered, but I promise I did the best I could with it.
Many thanks are going out to MerlockVonBaron, Grace5231973, Jennifer Baratta, and Fox24 for your reviews on the last chapter. Crazy and irritating as I found this chapter was I must admit that I enjoyed putting some easter eggs in it for you. Some of those treats are going to be really important for future chapters and episodes and others were really just fun to mention. Did you spot one? Two? Any theories? Let me know! The next chapter is another familiar one and it's one that I love because it's so crucial to the rest of the story! I hope you'll like it! Peace and Happy Reading!
