He had to fix this. And he knew how.

Snow and David awake ahead of schedule, wanting to go out and find their daughter…this wasn't how it was supposed to be. The Seer said that Emma would return on her twenty-eighth birthday. He hadn't a clue how that was going to play out, but he had a terrible feeling that if her parents found her, then they would steer her clear of this place for all her life. He hadn't gone through all of this just to lose his son in the last steps! He had to stop David and Snow from leaving to find their daughter, or else everything might be off track forever. That was how he fixed things.

But the Seer was silent. His head was quiet. No magic. If they were back home, then he could solve all of this with a wave of his hand by simply locking the pair away somewhere. But he didn't have magic. Not here, not now. In order to get magic, he needed Emma to slay Maleficent and retrieve his egg with the potion in it! Or…

His eyes roamed over the back of his shop and stopped at the black bag haphazardly shoved into the corner. He needed magic…and he had it. He wasn't magical now, and he couldn't do big magic because of the Curse, but maybe this didn't need big magic. He pushed himself up off the cot and grabbed the bag. A doctor's bag, Gold told him. The pawnshop owner always believed it was filled with old fashioned "potions" to cure ancient ailments. But now that he had his memories, he knew what it was. It was the bag he'd packed before he'd been imprisoned in the Enchanted Forest. The potions weren't "witchcraft," as this world might call them. They were genuine magic. He'd always had a deep desire to craft them before he'd arrived…was it the Seer's doing? Had she known this day would come?

Of course, she had. She knew everything that would happen. There was an answer here somewhere. It was just a matter of coming up with the right potion to fix it. There wasn't magic in this realm, but he could feel it in this town; it was what was holding the Curse together. A big potion or spell or even curse and the Dark Curse might grab a hold of the massive amount of magic and use it to fuel itself. With small magic, it might be ignored completely, too small for the Curse to detect or not worth the magic it would take for the Curse to harvest and use it.

There.

His fingers roamed over the tiny bottles before him. With each one, he remembered what he'd created, what lay within the bottles. He found one in particular that made his heart jump.

Memory Potion.

Before that potion, he hadn't had a single thought about how he was going to fix all this, but now…now he did. Snow and David were awake eighteen years too early. There were still eighteen years until Emma arrived. They were ready to go now. He couldn't think of any decisive way to keep them from going and to keep them off of Regina's radar for eighteen years…unless he reversed this. They were awake…so he'd put them back under. All of them, himself included. That would eliminate their memories of the last few hours, since they'd woken up. Without their memories of who they were, without memories of flowers or Emma's name, they'd all be back in their cursed states. It was perfect! It was genius! It was…

Fuck.

It wouldn't work. The memory potion might work for himself and Mary Margaret, but there was a significant problem with it when it came to David. He hadn't been living a life here, he'd been in a coma. He'd been strapped to a bed with wires and tubes sticking out of him. He could strip his memories, but he wasn't sure David even had memories to begin with. If the flower had simply wakened him, he would have been in the hospital right now telling them to call his wife Kathryn…or at least he supposed. He couldn't be sure. And that was enough to force him to place the memory potion back into his bag. "Supposed" and "Couldn't be sure" were not acceptable when it came to finding Baelfire. He had to have something that he knew would work. And even if the memory potion did manage to erase this morning from everyone's minds, he knew it wouldn't put David back into his coma. And having David and Mary Margaret out and walking around among each other for the next two decades wasn't an option. It was too risky that they might find each other, and something like this might happen again.

But now that he was thinking it through and looking through his stores, he did have another idea. It wasn't a single potion but two—a very simple Magic Cleansing Potion and a powerful Light Magic Suppressant. The former was worth nothing next to the latter, neither in value or ability. But the Light Magic Suppressant was a different tale. He'd invested a lot of time and magic into that potion. Once upon a time, he'd had plans to use it on the Blue Fairy. Because of her magic, that witch would be exceptionally difficult to kill or even wound unless he suppressed her magic. In the back of his mind he'd always figured he'd do it after he got Baelfire back. He'd let her be around just long enough to see him succeed and then kill her after they had magic, of course. There were special tools that could do the job but he'd never come across any, so he'd made the potion. It wasn't easy to make, a once in a lifetime kind of potion, even for the Dark One. It would take decades to brew it again. But for Bae…he'd use the potion.

The Blue Fairy was a thorn in his side, but after the Curse was broken, when it was meant to be broken, it wasn't as if he was planning on staying. Where he and Bae would go…

That was a question for a later time. Gingerly he retrieved the two potions and mixed them into a single container. He was about to move onto his next question when he pulled out a second empty vial and poured some of the potion into it. Not one for each. One for them. One for himself. The potion would be weaker here than it was there, but combined with the cleansing potion it would be enough to rid the couple of any remaining fairy dust, then suppress any Light Magic working within them for long enough that the Dark Curse around them would overcome them. David would go back to his previous state, Mary Margaret would forget, and he…

Later.

David had been gone from his shop for a long time. The couple was determined to get together and leave; he had to find them before he lost them and convince them to put themselves under again. The real question now that he knew how to do it was where to find them and how to get them to take it willingly. David had taken off without a word, he didn't know where to. But he had a potion for that, one that was weak enough to avoid the Dark Curse's detection and strong enough to find them.

A Locator Potion. A very potent one indeed, which was necessary for using it during the Curse. And as for what to use it on…he had everything he needed right here. He gathered his cane in his hand and quickly went out into the main room, the room that he knew a very precious object was waiting for him in one of his glass cases. The former Queen's necklace…and he meant that in more ways than one. He'd taken this necklace off of Snow White back in the Enchanted Forest, a payment for "wasting his time". She'd fought him on it, saying it used to belong to her mother, but he'd taken it anyway. And a good thing too. It was about to come in handy.

He plucked it out of its case and tore the tag that read "$500" off of it as he hobbled into the back. He laid it out on the table and then retrieved his Locator Potion. He uncorked it and just before he poured it over the necklace he thought twice about that choice and instead retrieved an eyedropper. Better safe than sorry. One drop, two drops, three drops, then four…after a bit of hesitation he added a fifth just in case. He held his breath as he watched it. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the table.

"Come on…" he hissed.

Locator Potions always took a while to work, the magic had to identify the owner of the object, find them in the great wide world, and only then would they rise into the air and work. They took a while to work…but it shouldn't have taken this long.

"Damn it!" he growled. It wasn't enough. The Locator Potion didn't have enough magic to activate, or if it had, the Curse had drained its magic long ago. He had to think. He had to focus! He couldn't just give up now and hope for the best he had to go out there and find them but he couldn't spend his time in the car crisscrossing Storybrooke hoping to find the pair. The town was larger than it seemed. There could be any number of places the royal couple was hiding. He couldn't send his flunkies out after them. He would need a picture of David that he didn't possess or need them to know Mary Margaret well enough to track her down. Dove was good, but he wasn't that good. He needed something more! He needed…

More magic.

When he shifted his weight, something winked at him from inside his black bag—two spools of golden thread. Mr. Gold thought they were just part of the ancient medical kit, gold wiring to suture incisions or cuts. He'd had no idea that this gold thread was actually spun from wool and wasn't wiring, but pure magic.

It was worth a shot.

Without hesitation, he pulled the spool free and cut several long strands off, enough to stick into the jar of Locator potion. He retrieved aqua regis, a special mix of acids from across the room. Rumpelstiltskin never knew what to do with it, but he did. He carefully placed a few drops of the acid at the top of the golden threads with another eyedropper. They sizzled and smoked as they traveled down their perspective strands, destroying the gold and, he hoped, releasing the magic into the bottom of the container. The threads shriveled and blackened under the acid and once more he watched it carefully, waiting and watching for something, anything to show him-

Something like that!

It was small, but the liquid at the bottom of the tiny vial flashed green. That was a magical reaction, not a chemical one. Stopper in place, he shook the potion vigorously for ten seconds, aware as he did of the small flashes of green light. Then they tried again.

One drop, two drops, three drops, then four drops, and a fifth just to be on the safe side. He corked the potion, placed it back in its bag, and watched the necklace with bated breath, unsure what he could do if it failed this time around.

He was just about to give up on it when the necklace rose up off the table.

This is something that I added into the 6x17 chapters as a necessity because otherwise, there were a lot of things that just didn't make sense here. For starters, I wanted to show Rumple using magic during the time of the Curse. I did this mostly because I wanted to establish how Regina does it while the Curse is still in operation. I wanted it to be clear that there is magic in this town, all around them, the entire thing is made of magic, but it's so busy holding the Curse together that it doesn't really have the capacity to work in any other way unless it's something big, which will be made weaker as the Curse leeches off it's magic (think Jefferson's hat), or something small, which the Curse will either not recognize or register as something that would take too much power to leech and therefore isn't worth it (think the locator spell). It's sketchy, but A&E didn't give you an explanation, so this is my theory. Second, A&E also didn't give you an explanation for how Rumple knew to find Snow and David out in, what was at this time, a random rundown farmhouse, on the outskirts of town. They also didn't explain how Rumple had a potion to put them under "just right" so that Snow and David would remember these events later but essentially lose their memory in this moment. It couldn't be something that was prepared ahead of time because otherwise when David stumbles in Rumple could have just said "oh, so this is that time that I prepared for, hey David, come take a drink of this." This chapter had to answer all those questions. It might be more of a reflective chapter, something reminiscent of Research!Belle (though I guess we could start using Research!Rumple at this point), but it works. It serves its purpose. What do you think?

Thank you, Alarda, Jennifer Baratta, and Fox24, for your beautiful reviews! I'm so glad that you are enjoying this fiction so far! I'm happy that you are content with what I've worked up for this time that we really don't know too much about, and I hope that as we move forward, you'll continue to find it acceptable. Peace and Happy Reading!