AN: Here is some more talking and some bonding. And the word 'wool' doesn't even look like a word anymore. Again, if this is boring, I'm sorry. There will be more action in the next chapter, I swear.
II: Tailspinning
Stifling a yawn, Emma rolled onto her side, reaching blindly for her cell phone on the bedside table. Her hand met empty air before dragging down heavily to bang against the ground. She opened her eyes, clutching the thin blanket to her with her other hand. The events of the day before came rushing back, and she looked around the small stone house, despairing to see that it was all still very real.
Sunlight streamed in through the wide window on the far wall, lighting the room across the structure, though the side with the beds remained mostly in shadow. The bed across from her was empty, the linens folded neatly. Sitting up, she saw she was alone in the cabin.
She turned her body to let her feet rest on the floor, studying the packed dirt as it gave slightly under her toes. She scrunched them, unable to make more than a faint dent in the soil. It was packed tightly, she realized, and she wondered how many generations had lived in this small space to make it so.
More light spilled into the space as the flap of skins was shoved aside. Emma's eyes constricted automatically against the glare, and when her vision steadied, she saw the man had returned. He carried a mass of straw threshed together by a rope, slung over one shoulder, and in his left hand, he balanced a bucket of water carefully. Stumping heavily against his staff, he made his way closer to the hearth where he dropped both burdens.
"You're awake, Miss Emma," He said conversationally, turning away almost immediately to his store of herbs at the fireside. She stood up and crossed the space, folding her arms to her chest against the early-morning chill. She felt curiously exposed all of the sudden, in the light of day, with no undergarments under the thin chemise.
As she came closer, she saw his face was bleeding, high up on his cheekbone, a sharp gash about an inch long. He wiped at it with his sleeve absently and she raised her hand to stop him. He froze when her hand closed around his wrist, turning to stare at her, eyes wide.
"You're bleeding," She said dumbly, her wit not equal to her present circumstances.
"It's just a small thing," He replied softly, still staring.
Feeling her face warm, she released his wrist, turning to the bucket of water. "You shouldn't use your sleeve like that. Have you got any clean rags?"
He shrugged, confused, and she sighed. Hiking up the chemise, she dipped some of the bunched material it in the water, wringing it out as best she could. With a hand on his shoulder, she guided him to sit on the stool and then leaned over to wipe at his face.
"Rough day at the well this morning?" She asked, trying to ignore the way he flinched under her hand. This man's timid posture did not match the face she knew and it unnerved her.
"...Something like that." He murmured, eyes sliding away.
"Did someone do this to you?" She asked softly as she lowered the stained bit of her garment.
He swallowed hard, deliberately turning to fiddle in the packets and jars on the shelf, pulling out some kind of white salve that smelled strongly of mint. She took it from him and rubbed a bit of it against his cheek. She wasn't sure if he jumped from simply being touched or if it stung.
"If someone hurt you, you should tell me," She said finally.
He shrugged, looking away, hands clenching and unclenching in his lap. "It was a boy... playing with a stone. An accident, I'm sure."
"I'm sure," She repeated, recalling the woman's words the night before – He's... not well-liked.
"Have you eaten?" He asked suddenly, eyebrows lifting in an almost hopeful expression.
Emma tilted her face to the side in a look, aware of how he was changing the subject, but she decided to let it go and replaced the lid on the salve. "No, not yet. What is there? I don't want to eat all your food."
"No, no, it's fine..." He insisted, rooting around the hearth for the pot from the night before. The fire burned low in the hearth, most of the embers gone grey, but he raked at them with the sharp stick before setting the pot inside again. "It'll be good for another few days, I think. I have salt this time to preserve it."
She bit her lip, not particularly thrilled with this news. Fairy tales never seemed to mention that people were really sort of dirty and ate questionable foods.
Emma turned her head as he got back to his feet, limping across the floor to the wheel in the bright corner of the room. He settled himself on the wide stool there, leaning his staff against the wall.
She watched him root around in the baskets around the wheel, pulling out a large pile of rough wool. It looked almost like yarn already, but he began pulling on the pieces, making them puff out into something resembling cotton stuffing.
A few minutes later, she could smell the food getting warm, so she carefully pulled the pot out by the handle, setting it on the hearth. The bowls from the night before were sitting nearby, so she helped herself to some of the stew. It tasted roughly the same as the day before, but she found she had less appetite for it.
As she ate, Emma turned to watch him working at the wheel. The spinner, the woman had called him. Intellectually, she knew what a spinning wheel was, having seen them in, well, fairy tales, but watching one at work was a new experience.
He tugged on a bit of string already in the shaft attached to the larger wheel. He began to turn the wheel, using a foot pedal, pumping lightly and rhythmically with his good leg. With both hands, he carefully fed the tufts of fluffy wool towards the guiding string, where the wheel's mechanism caught it, twirling it around and into a recognizable yarn. She wondered if it hurt him to do it - if his weight shifted to his wounded side as he worked the pedal.
Rumpelstiltskin bobbed his head slowly, in time with each revolution of the wheel. His lips moved soundlessly as though counting steadily to himself. Slowly, the shaft on the side of the wheel began to fill up with yarn, thick and coiled and white, like something someone would crochet with, she guessed. It was calming, almost soothing, watching him work. He seemed to have forgotten she was there.
Finally, all of the wool in his lap had vanished, spun tight into the mechanism. He paused, wiping his face with his hand wearily. He turned behind his stool and found what looked like a canteen, leaning down to oil the leather straps that controlled the shaft inside the mechanism.
Slowly, Emma came to stand next to him, dropping down to her knees and then to sit on the floor at an angle to him. "Can I help?" She asked.
He looked at her, mouth opening, seemingly startled before he recovered. "Do you know how to pick?" He asked finally.
She shook her head. "Not a clue. But I'm willing to learn..."
He snorted softly at that, leaning over to drag another bag of wool closer to her. He took out a fat wad of it, gathering it into the lap part of his tunic, motioning for her to do the same. Emma grabbed her own chunk of wool, nodding. He showed her how to separate the wool curls into the cottony puffs he had made earlier, spreading the fibers until they were thin and fine.
Once he was satisfied she had the general ideal, he began working with the portion in his lap, feeding into the orifice of the wheel, nodding to himself again.
"Have you been doing this a long time?" She asked, looking up. He broke his rhythm, turning to look at her sharply. "Oh, sorry, is that going to mess you up, if I talk to you?"
He considered a moment, probably parsing over her sentence structure, before shrugging. "I don't know. I've never tried it."
"Okay, so how about we talk and if it's bad, then we stop?" She suggested brightly.
He shrugged again; face quirking into a smile, as he went back to work.
"So you've been doing this a long time?" She repeated, returning her attention to the wool. It took her a lot longer to pick through it than he had spent on his pile, but she seemed to be getting similar results.
"All of my life," He answered, head still nodding. She watched his hands, combing back over the wool as it spun free of his fingers, a delicate, seemingly effortless dance of pulls and releases.
"Isn't this kind of...? Kind of like a woman's thing here?" She joked.
He shrugged again. "I'm the one that's left to do it. In this village, you do what your parents did, what their parents did. Once they were all gone, they had no choice but to take it from me. It's all I know how to do."
It seemed like the longest chain of comments she had heard him make thus far, so she mulled over the words carefully. His voice sounded so much like Mr. Gold's, but his accent was thicker, stranger, and he spoke without his counterpart's calm authority.
"What happened to your family?" She asked suddenly, remembering his mention of siblings, parents, the night before.
His foot came down hard on the pedal and the wheel stopped abruptly, yanking the thread from his hands. He looked down at his fingers where the wool had scratched across them, taking a deep breath before picking up another tuft of wool. "They died," He said shortly, resuming his spinning. "In the war."
Emma bit her lip, feeling guilty. Clearly this wound was still fresh for this man. She wondered how long it had been since he had lost them, but she knew better than to ask. "So there was a war here?" She said finally.
He laughed bitterly at that. "Always a war here. Always has been. Always will be."
"Why is that?" She glanced up at the window, at the sky, blue overhead from this angle, but the day before, the horizon on the opposite side had been a terrible, bloody red. "Is that what's happening over those hills?"
He nodded silently, staring at the wool in his lap until it was gone.
Finally, he turned to her, reaching for the pile she held. She gathered it up, passing it over to him. Their hands touched briefly, fumbling under the soft curls. His hands were warm, coarse, and weathered. Gold's hands were smoother, softer. This man worked hard, and clearly had all his life.
As he continued, she pulled out some more wool to work with. To her surprise, he began to speak, his voice rising and falling in time with the wheel, almost as though he were talking to nothing, as though she wasn't there. "Over the hill, there lives a race of creatures. Terrible creatures. They are not men. They may have been once, but they are not men anymore. We call them ogres.
"Every year, they come to hunt, to find food and captives to take back to their lands. They burn our villages; take our women, our men. Our children. What they can't carry, they destroy. We hold the line as best we can, but there's no hope in it. Generation after generation of our people fight, and bleed, and die, for a few inches of soil long since dead.
"Everyone must fight, once they come of age. When I was a boy, the age was twenty one. Now, it is sixteen. Children are sent over the hills, to be bodies on a wall, in a field. ...That's soon all they are."
"That's horrible," She whispered, mouth opening in surprise.
"Fairy tales," He replied obliquely.
Emma stared at her lap, feeling strangely ashamed, though she was unsure as to why. Finally, she said, "It's funny... Where I come from, I do work that's usually considered a man's job. And here, you do this. But it looks like you're good at it."
"What do you do, in your... Storybrooke?" He accented the name awkwardly, rolling his mouth over the syllables.
"I'm the sheriff there. I catch the criminals, keep the peace. I make sure the town is safe, and the people are safe."
He nodded. "I'm sure you're very good at your job."
She smiled wryly at the compliment, "What makes you say that?"
He jerked his head back down, a smile tugging at his lips. "Because you care about people when you look at them. That's easy enough to see."
"But how do you know that?" She protested, lifting her palms questioningly.
Rumpelstiltskin cocked his head to the side, smiling faintly, his hair hanging shaggily over his eyes, casting shadows on his lined face. "...Because you care about me."
AN: (Note: 'tailspinning' refers to the type of yarn Rumpelstiltskin is making in this chapter, as well as being a homophone for tale-spinning, which he is also doing, by telling her a story.)
And yes, gentle readers, in this story, there is no Baelfire as of yet. I can't imagine why that could be, can you? The next part will feature a bit more action, and Emma being a BAMF, as is her wont.