She is at her most wretched, of that he is certain. Why else would she feel the compulsion to summon him as she has now?
The room Rumplestiltskin finds her in is mostly darkened as he finally appears to her, the dim flicker of a single candle it's only source of light. The sound of Emma's breathing is shallow but controlled. A struggle though, clearly, as he notes her skin has paled quite significantly and that the candlelight glistens against its obvious dampness. He wonders if she even has any strength left to speak.
The first words spoken between them are his then, "the pirate?"
It excites him to see the instant clench of her fist, the thin blanket crushed in her hands. All that was missing was a heart between them. Her weakness and strength on full display for him to both loathe and admire in equal measures. But she loses the battle for the will to look him in the eye as she nods her head in defeated affirmation.
"It seems his need to exact some form of revenge against me has outweighed any sort of…"he pauses then to find the right word, for affect and for flair and because it was cruel, "…fondness he may have carried for you."
"You knew it would," Emma accuses, he words stressed but enduring
"I suspected," he corrected, "two hundred years is a long time to hold a grudge."
"It's why you came after us—after me—the way you did that day after staying away for so long." Emma concluded with a resigned shake of her head. "You knew that if Hook saw that you cared about me that he would try to find a way to leverage it against you. And so he has, at my expense."
Rumplestiltskin approaches her carefully, lays a cool palm against her forehead, and studies the deterioration already caused by the poison. Emma leans weakly into the touch, to what little relief it offers her heated flesh.
He allows his hand to linger as he tells her proudly, "He's dead now."
She stiffens but says nothing. He reads her silence for what it is, "but you knew that I would kill him, didn't you?"
"I suspected." And wasn't Emma just full of wonderfully dark surprises, his darling Princess and forgotten Savior, so like her parents and yet nothing like them at all. A testament to the subtle influence he's had on her in all these years together. Rumplestiltskin hummed and mused aloud, "Does it please you? Knowing that I would hurt anyone for daring to hurt you?"
Emma leans back to look up at him with a stare both jaded and cutting, "you who have hurt me most of all?"
His hand lurches, shifts from its place on her forehead to the back of her skull, fingers lacing through hair but not painfully so. Not yet. "The Queen wants you desperately. And I find myself growing more and more inclined to hand you over to her."
She is unfazed, like ice, asking him briskly, "Am I to beg for my life now? Bargain its value and worth to you?"
"What do you think has kept you alive and safe from Regina all this time?" he seethed in return, his anger sparked to life and threatening. "Why summon me at all, knowing the creature that I am and have always been towards you? What's there to gain for me by coming here to save you?"
Her eyes melt for the briefest of moments against his own, the poison seeping through and taking its toll, "I don't want to die. Surely you don't want me to die ether. Cure me or don't cure me. But understand that there's no deal here to be struck. This time I won't give you what you want so easily, or so foolishly."
Rumplestiltskin lets her go, lets Emma crumbles down into the bed. Her remaining strength diminished completely at this point. She stares up at him openly and strangely as he considers her in return.
"Maybe I don't want you anymore. Not like that at least," he decided then and there, because he won't let her win like this. "Not when I can have instead something I thought I lost a long time ago."
Emma looks at him curiously, "what?"
"True Love, dearie"
Author's Notes:
Short but an update no less. This snippet being longer than the ones in previous chapters is what made me decide to post it as its own entity and chapter.