The school house they led Rumple to was a simple wooden structure in the woods, with a crumbling stone staircase going up the hill it sat upon. The wood was rotting, he noticed, and the windows, if they weren't shattered, were awfully dirty. Inside, the floor and every standing piece of furniture was covered in dust. Vines from outside grew into the broken windows. There were a few desks, most of them toppled or with broken legs—one even appeared to have had the back of the seat ripped off and thrown across the room. Surrounding the desks and littering the floor, several quills and battered books lay uncared for. There were even spilled ink stains of various ages in a few places.
Sun spilled through the windows in a vain attempt to restore some of the buildings former beauty.
"Quaint little...place..." Rumple said quietly.
They opened closets, followed by an avalanche of more useless school supplies, and called through the window, but nothing happened. They went into the other room, which was quite small and in much the same state as the first, and found a larger desk, one meant for a teacher. It, too, was dust covered, and the color had faded from the middle, due to the window directly behind it constantly allowing sun to shine upon it. And little supplies remained on the desk, as most of it was, again, littering the floor.
"This Miss Kinley of yers- a teacher, was she?" Rumple asked.
"Yes, sir," the girl said.
"And wot does she teach?"
"Everything, sir,"
"My type of teacher. Is this where she gives her lessons?"
"Yes, mister,"
"Ah!" he exclaimed, reaching into the desk and finding an old quill pen. "Hers, I believe?"
"Yeah, mister!" The boy said happily. Rumple squeezed it in his hand until it glowed bright red, and then opened his hand.
"What're ya doing, Mr. Rumpelstiltskin?" the girl asked.
"A sort of trick, see- magick!" a sort of window opened above the quill pen. The children stared in amazement. "Look through it! Do you see her?"
"Well, the house," William said.
"Maybe she's there!" The girl said happily.
"Do you recognize that place?"
"Yeah!"
"Where is it?" asked Hook.
"It's in the middle of the woods," the girl shrugged. "Let's go," she grabbed Will's hand again. Rumple followed, putting the pen into his pocket. They ran off again, and eventually found the old, weathered house. The kids ran straight in and started calling for Ms. Kinley.
It was a two story house (already more than Rumple expected) and had at one point been white with a green shingled roof. But now the paint was peeling and moss grew over the concrete base and vines climbed up the red brick chimney. Several ravens flew over head or perched on the roof or swooped down around the house as if to frighten the new comers.
Rumple wandered the house, tracing a particularly long crack in the wall with one scaled finger. Suddenly, William cried out and fell through the ceiling from the second floor. He landed with a thud on the wooden floor and Rumple teleported over to his side. Will rose slowly, blood covering his knees and palms. Tears made streaks down his dirt covered face.
"Oh, Dearie..." pitied Rumple, "come into my arms, child."
William crawled over to him. Rumple held him tight and the wounds began to close. "W-what did you do?" The boy whimpered quietly, "Did you use magick again?"
"Yes, Dearie." He patted his head gently. "Better now?"
"Yeah, I like your magick Mr. Rumpelstiltskin," he giggled.
"So do I."
Will started to run backup stairs, but turned on the second step. "Could I do magick, Mr. Rumpelstiltskin?"
"Perhaps. You can certainly try, at the least. But be warned- all magick comes with a price," he chimed.
"How much?" Will asked innocently.
"Well, it's... It's not money, see, and it depends."
"On what?"
"On different things,"
"Well, like what?" he asked, "I just wanna heal things. And make people happy."
"Well, sometimes that has the steepest price. But..."
"But what?"
"If it's a price you are willing to pay, then it's a price that doesn't matter." He said simply.
"Oh, okay!" Will smiled.
"You could be a mighty and much-loved sorcerer!"
"Like you, Mr. Rumpelstiltskin?" William asked.
His face went suddenly to that of a man standing at an old grave. "Rather like that, I suppose."
"Yay!" William cheered, hugging Rumple around the legs.
"William!" The girl said from the backyard. "Ms. Kinley!" Rumple looked somewhere between a soldier victorious and a child readying to curl into a ball and weep as he led William towards the girl's voice. She was jumping up and down in the doorway and pointing outside.
There, just in front of the rusting metal fence, in the middle of a yard filled with dried yellow grass and random patches of dirt, lay a grave stone that had once been nicely polished with an angel that appeared as though she had fallen to her knees behind it and began weeping against her arms upon the grave. Her hair fell over the side, and in one hand she held a small bouquet of flowers.
Rumple hesitantly stepped forward to read the plague on the stone.
Lorelei Kinley, 1866-1896.
Killian, having left the others to do as they pleased, looked around upstairs and wandered back to the school house, leaving everyone else at the house. He looked around, in books and at toys. In the teacher's desk, he found several photographs of what he assumed were her old students. Each child was almost inhumanly pale, like William and the girl, and had the same dark eyes. The girl's wore white play dresses, and the boys wore nice black pants and white shirts.
In the back corner of a drawer, he found what looked like a picture of Ms. Kinley herself. The boy was right- she was quite beautiful. The only thing that was not so attractive about her was her eyes, the same as the children's.
Then...he found a picture of her dead body.
Tears streaked her face, and blood was splattered on the ground beneath her head. She lay upon a wooden floor, with obvious pieces of broken wood surrounding her.
In panic, he tucked the pictures into his coat and ran as fast as he could back to the house. "Rumple!" He called urgently, "Snake skin! Rumple!" He skidded to a halt when he found Rumpelstiltskin and the children by the back door; looking at the gravestone with the "pale lady with pretty hair," Rumple staring open-mouthed at the realization. He stood silent before the tomb, glancing down at the children at his sides.
"They were looking for..." Hook mumbled.
"Yes, yes, I see that!" Rumple snapped.
"Oh, dear,"
"Erm, dearies…?" Rumple said slowly.
"Yes?" The girl asked, happy that they had found her. The boy, however, was visibly shocked and saddened by this.
"Dearies, Miss Kinley would appear to be...indisposed." Rumple said. The boy soon had tears down his face again. Rumple had no clue what to do.
"What?" The girl asked William, "Didn't ya know?" Killian pulled the pictures from his coat and nudged Rumple with them. He took a long look at them. She was certainly pretty. But the age of the photograph told all.
"What happened to my mummy?" The boy wept, tugging on Rumple's pant leg.
"Well, she... must've had an accident." He replied.
"Can you bring her back, Mr. Rumpelstiltskin?" He asked, a bit hopefully. "Can you heal her?"
"Dearie, that's... "
"Can you? Please, Mr. Rumple?" he pleaded.
How does one tell a child that their Mother is beyond rescue? That even magick cannot resurrect-
Wait.
He stood silent, gazing down at the boy.
"I'll pay something', I promise!" he cried.
"But is it a price you can pay? These things are no light matter."
"Yes, sir, anything!"
"He can make no promises," warned hook. "And if he could, I should be VERY wary." However, the boy paid no attention to him.
"I can certainly try, anyway." Rumple told him. "Captain Tight-Pants, hold them safe." Hook rolled his eyes and held them back. Rumple trudged over to the dirt of the grave and knelt. William watched intently. He put his hands at the foot of the headstone, with his palms flat on the dirt.
The weeping angel on the gravestone seemed to grow a bit hopeful and slow in her silent sobbing. The air came suddenly violent and turbulent, and each torrent of wind seemed almost like a gasp of breath as it came, rattling the trees, the ruptured earth, and all that wasn't anchored to the ground. That made both children cower behind Hook.
Rumpelstiltskin was muttering some strange incantation, inaudible among the noise as the earth beneath them began to shake. Hook knelt down and took the children in his arms. Suddenly, in a stupor, Rumple cried out and jerked backwards as the weeping angel began to quake. William broke from Killian's hold and ran towards Rumple, but Killian only yanked him back.
He panted and pulled himself up as the angel freed herself of the stone bonds and stood above them with her granite wings outstretched gallantly. The stone slowly faded from her skin, and it was returned to its normal color. Her hair turned to auburn once more, and the stone dress turned white. She smiled sweetly, kneeling down on the gravestone closer to rumple. The flowers in her hand had turned to carnations and she laid them upon the gravestone.
"He's over there, Dearie. Behind the pirate." Rumple told her.
She looked over and extended an arm towards them, gesturing for the children to come closer.
"Go see her, children. She's looking for ye." Hook said, letting go of them.
William ran towards the woman and the girl followed. He struggled to climb up upon the gravestone, and Rumple picked him up and put him beside her. She wrapped her arms around the two, smiling gently.
"Mummy!" The boy cheered. "Mummy, why are you an angel?" He asked. Rumple then remembered the hole in the second floor that William had fallen through earlier.
"Because bad things have happened," she said briefly.
"Will you stay this time?" William asked.
"Forever and ever," she swore.
"Yay!" The girl cheered. But the woman's hands started to phase through the children and the smile dropped from her and Rumple's faces. Rumple raised his hand forward and she stopped fading, for a minute at least. She talked joyfully with the children until her entire image began to fade.
Rumple raised his hand again, and more times after, but pain was clearly written in his features each time. She looked at him with concern. Her expression told him to stop. Blood began to stream from his nostril, but he refused to stop.
Rumpelstiltskin, stop, he heard someone tell him in his mind.
No- no, they need you... and you don't need to go... he thought in return.
They will be fine. William loves you. I just needed him to hear me say goodbye.
He'll be crushed if he loses you again!
Only for a short while. She assured. Please, stop.
I…I…
The woman's skin faded and William fell from the platform as her body went back to the weeping angel position and her skin was transformed into stone once more. "Mummy!" William cried tearfully, "Mummy come back! Mummy!"
"Hang... Hang on, William," said Rumple as he started to raise his arm again.
DON'T YOU DARE, RUMPLESTILTSKIN He heard in a motherly tone of voice that made him want to behave. He fell to his side, gasping.