CHAPTER SIXTEEN: HOP ON POP
(In which Baelfire contemplates Storybrooke's Library: AKA where books and knowledge go to die because fairy tale characters don't need books that aren't enchanted by sketchy scribes - and Henry emotes.)
A light rain had started to fall when Baelfire entered the library with a satchel slung over his arm. Part of getting acclimated to this world was learning its history, societal norms, and technology, and his papa had sent him shortly after his arrival to the Storybrooke Library to do so. In the weeks since, his papa's wife and the Librarian Belle had been testing his aptitude in various subjects, teaching him lesson material, and showing him how to use the machine called a computer for writing his assignments, doing research, and learning about this Land Without Magic-
A land that was over a century more advanced than the one he'd spent six months in. And that apparently wasn't this world at all but a timeless world of stories, and his papa seemed certain that the Blue Fairy had played the crooked cross on them. Ordinarily, he wouldn't trust his papa on such things, but now that his papa was no longer the Dark One and Belle had told him some rather shady things about Reul Ghorm - like how she had exiled a fairy to Neverland for trying to help a woman that she needed to turn evil so that his papa could use her to cast the "Dark Curse" that brought everyone here and tore apart a family so that a baby would be sent here to break it not with her parents but with a puppet she made that would abandon her so she grew up alone, embittered, and unattached to this world - well, Baelfire had to agree it sounded like she was a sketchy fairy in cahoots with that Sorcerer's Apprentice who'd had a mysterious beef with the Dark Ones that wasn't so mysterious anymore as he apparently had worked as a Buttoner for Merlin who'd created that beast!
There wasn't much to read about that business in here, though, at least not in the publicly accessible books that were about the Land Without Magic. Which was fine Bae as he'd had his fill of magic!
As usual, the library was deserted and even the lights in the computer lab were shut off. Belle had been excited about having transformed it recently from a storeroom into a room with the newest computers and high speed Internet access that wasn't, apparently, common in the rest of the town, but her excitement had ebbed in the weeks since as it had become clear that no amount of her putting up fliers around town was drawing a crowd... or a single person, really. His papa said that most people here didn't want to acclimate to the Land Without Magic, had hopes that in spite of his insistence that what remanded of the Dark Curse's self-contained energy was not enough to replicate a "reverse Curse" a second time, they could still find a way. It seemed there was also a growing anti-technology/Land Without Magic customs movement spurred on by a group who came with the "Second Curse" (though it was technically the third casting) and without false identities/memories of this world and headed by some disenchanted royals who'd been shafted of power in Storybrooke, and they didn't like their kids reading about anything but their own world, which was their own written versions of what had happened, and highly inaccurate, no doubt, since only the manipulative, power-hungry royals and their advisors were literate.
The rest of the people who accepted running water and medication for a raging epidemic just didn't see the use in knowing about countries, cultures, and governments outside of a town they couldn't leave without some magic scroll containing a bullshit prophesy written by The Apprentice to manipulate a would-be-queen who was imprisoned and turned evil because she tried to save her sister from being raped... which made about as much sense as the Enchanted Forest's social system back in Bae's time, three centuries earlier. It was both a relief and a frustration that little had changed, though Bae was leaning more toward the latter the more he learned about the progressive state of this world and listened to Belle's lamentations about her limited opportunities leading to working for his father being the lesser of two evils. In some ways, it actually sounded as if things had gotten worse, since even lesser nobles in his time had status, and women served in combat... though, on the other hand, he doubted the later really counted when the purpose behind the egalitarian army and repeated lowering of the draft age was the genocide of the immigrant population of The Frontlands who'd settled there after fleeing Dumarlone during The Great Dragon War. It was no wonder his papa hadn't wanted him to fight, though Bae hadn't learned the truth until after the war had ended and the children came home, talking of the horrible blood magic and the rumors that it was being used to create a great and terrible weapon.
Which turned out to be the Dark Curse, centuries later repurposed by Bae's papa to transmute matter instead of destroying it like the magical version of this world's nuclear weapons.
His papa had also speculated that The Duke (or The King he served) got Zoso to create the disease that had turned people there crazy, though maybe it didn't progress as quickly as it should have without the twenty-eight year delay, since the first case, apparently, Bae's mother, who didn't really die, but run away with her lover, whom she infected, because she had slept with a lot of soldiers, pirates, and traveling salesman - just like Bae had heard from other people in town but hadn't wanted to believe until living on the streets of London chipped away at his innocence enough that hearing the truth, while disappointing, was not really a great surprise. And though it was something of a blow to be the son of the town coward and the town whore who'd spread her disease down through the generations as the worst family legacy ever, Bae supposed that, at least, by being born before his mother became a lose woman (and before The King expanded his biological weapons quest beyond poisons) and falling through that portal a virgin, he'd escaped acquiring it.
Thankfully, Bae had also never done anything with the Dollymops in London, not enough to get even the regular sort of glim. And Mr. and Mrs. Darling would have tanned his hide if he'd tried "putting Nebuchadnezzar out to grass" with Wendy as the chaps said, though Bae didn't think of her like that. He might have had a bit of a crush on Morraine, but she'd apparently married and had kids and died three centuries ago, so if he wanted to find love and start a family, it would be in this world... or whatever muddled version of his home world and The Land Without Magic that Storybrooke housed, unless they could find a way to return, but that was unlikely, depleted as the Dark Curse was, thanks to Peter Pan... who apparently was Bae's evil grandfather and thankfully not among those who'd returned from the dead, perhaps because he'd been artificially outwitting his time to kick it for centuries. That his own grandfather had him kidnapped to screw with his papa, his papa also said was likely some dealing of The Blue Fairy's, since she'd used another boy being kidnapped to Neverland as a means to destroy Pan's Shadow. Shadey, indeed!
It was probably a good thing then that the fairies had limited power here. One thing that had changed in three centuries was Reul Ghorm amassing an army of lesser fairies who sold magic wishes as a commodity, which Belle equated with drug cartels, as poor and pedigreed alike became reliant upon fairy godmothers (or the Dark One) to achieve their goals rather than hard work and/or collaboration. The lack of any industrial or sociopolitical revolutions, she believed, was due to dependence upon magic, and the fairies specifically, who also used Dwarfs and slave labor and spread the rumor that giants were blood-thirty beasts the fairies defeated to save humans who owed them a great debt of gratitude, when it was really that the giants were peace-loving vegetarians who disagreed with the fairies wanting to give humans magic and occluded themselves after stealing the original Dwarf Gold that the Ogres pillaged from their smaller brothers' mines during the Great Dragon War so that humans couldn't drain the magic from it for evil purposes. In response, the fairies stole a bunch of magic beans from the Giants as a "fuck you" before the Giants put up better anti-fairy magic security on their beanstalks... which by modern times had been reduced to just one, what with humans looking for ways to bypass the security to steal the gold and magic beans and murdering the giants, and the fairies continuing to say how great it was that the threat had been eliminated! Tinkerbell, the exiled fairy, was apparently one of only a few who'd defied the Blue Fairy and during her time in Neverland found out that the most expensive commodity of "pixie dust" that was used to "find true love" was actually a highly addictive narcotic and hallucinogen... which Bae's papa suspected was the reason this Regina Mills and her husband Robin Hood fell ridiculously in love after knowing each other for a day... and was possibly part of why her former nemesis and step-granddaughter fell for a pirate, then got syphilis from him - it would be just like Pan, he'd said, to dose everyone with pixie dust while they slept, for while it made children fly, it made adults "horny as fuck".
Belle had socked his papa in the arm for swearing in front of him! It was rather funny!
While Bae had never considered having a stepmother, he liked Belle. She had to be a bit dim or desperate in matters of romance to have put up with his papa as the Dark One for so long, and maybe had suffered that Stockholm Syndrome he'd read about from her captivity in the Dark Castle, but she was kind and his papa seemed to at least be trying to curb his desire for power, and they were both helping him to adjust to this world, so Bae was happy for them both and hoped they succeeded in having a child, as he'd love a little brother or sister... just as long as the kid wasn't as insufferable as the little brats that belonged to the group of giggly women who loitered under the library's large overhang with their prams, sipping giant cups of coffee and talking about The Real Housewives, while their children screamed like banshee and spit up on clothes that looked more expensive than anything Bae had ever owned and entirely unrealistic for babies to wear, like they were little girls' dolls or something instead of live humans. These people were crazy!
0And, at least, here in the library, Bae was safe from them, even if it was getting a bit lonely now that he figured he could carry on a conversation without looking foolish. He just had to pass the last of Belle's grade level placement exams - since the school didn't have one and she felt was academically "run like an under-funded public school in the hood" but that didn't mean Bae was going to "coast by on the bureaucratic apathy of his teachers and administrators" if she had anything to say about it. Belle was definitely 'mom' material, and it was nice to have a mother who actually gave a crap about his well-being. Besides, he liked books and learning, even if he wasn't the introverted type like her to be perfectly find burying himself in the stacks all day without human contact.
Soon, Bae thought with purpose as he let himself into the library's small break room to put the sack lunch that Belle had made him in the refrigerator.
I am going to live in the present, embrace this new life, and make the most of it, he repeated his new motto with conviction.
As he headed back toward the table where he'd left his bag, Bae paused upon spying another backpack on a table along with a winter coat and a scarf he recognized from the school uniform.
He felt both excited and nervous. Other than talking briefly with Mr. Tillman's kids last week - Gretel was grounded for having done something bad and Hansel had some sort of music lesson - Bae hadn't interacted with anyone his age. Other than his papa and Belle, he hadn't really interacted with adults either. He wasn't really sure the carpenter Marco and his grown son August who came over to the house to fix something, the younger man spending most of the time asking Baelfire weird questions and being shot warning looks from his papa counted; his papa later warned him that August was the puppet from the story he told and a liar and a pervert and a thief who had way more venereal diseases than just the magical ones plaguing the town and not trust him.
Curious, Bae walked into the stacks toward what sounded suspiciously like a sniffle and rounded a bookshelf to find a boy about his age, perhaps a bit older, sitting on the floor by a stack of unshelved books that Belle had brought back from the Mommy & Me class at Granny's. The boy, who turned out to be both lanky and tall, sprung up from his spot, grasping a book.
"Are you okay?" Bae asked.
"I'm fine," the boy responded a bit snappishly - and nasally. "I was just looking for something for a book report. I found it."
Bae's brows lifted. "You're writing a book report on The Compiled Works of Dr. Seuss?" he asked, bemused, drawing a startled and sheepish look from the other boy.
"Um... it's for my uncle..."
"Your uncle?" Bae asked, confused.
"He's twelve years younger than me. You know. Little Prince Neal? And, yeah, I know it's weird, but this whole town is weird. And why do you care, anyway?"
It took a moment to work past the boy's hostility to his actual words and then Bae put the pieces together from what he'd been told, mostly by Belle, of the town's leadership structure. "Oh, you're Henry Mills, the son of the Sheriff and the Mayor. That must be odd, having two mothers."
Henry snorted. "Yeah, well, it's not like that, though they'd probably have been better matched than with the assholes they ended up marrying. The only really good guy in my family was my dad, and he left, and it's my fault," he admitted miserably. "He was gone for so long, and it wasn't his fault, and no body even looked for him, we just assumed he was dead, and then I was a total jerk, but it's not because I was mad at him, not really. Well... maybe at first, but mostly it was because my step-dad was just a gloating prick who kept rubbing it his face that he got my mom while my dad was away and my mom, she acted just like him, and they were just so awful that I thought if I was too, they'd have to see what selfish creeps they were being! But they didn't. So, my parents had a big fight and my dad left. Turns out they both had frigg'n syphilis AND herpes that made my mom a horny idiot! But once you leave Storybrooke, you can't get back, not without this stupid scroll, and he's really good at disappearing. My mom's really good at finding people, but I don't think she even really cares and even if she did, he said he was gonna use magic to forget all about us and everything. I should have told him that I didn't mean it then, but I was sure my mom would snap out of it. And now he's gone and she just sits in her office throwing pencils at the ceiling or at home drinking, and don't even get me started on my other mom and her creep husband that I thought was my childhood hero from the stories I read in this world before he turned out to be a massive loser who's screwing over his first wife that my killed before my aunt went back in time and killed her instead, and now they're both alive again and I have had enough of my family's fucking drama!"
Henry concluded this with a world-weary groan as he shoved his Dr. Seuss book back onto the shelf.
"I'm sorry, " said Bae. "My mother wasn't great either. All I remember about her is that she yelled and drank a lot and was pretty horrible to my papa. She was always threatening to leave him for someone stronger and braver and better looking until she finally did, though I think she had a very skewed definition of 'bravery'." He shrugged. "Belle says she was probably just a really shallow and selfish person who felt trapped by society's treatment of women as chattel forced into arranged marriages to have babies and took it out on my papa and me instead of trying to change things, which doesn't make it right that she left me to rot in a war-torn wasteland. Some people just shouldn't be parents."
Frowning, Henry responded, "Yeah, like all of the parents in my family! They all suck at it! Though my birth mom wasn't always like that. Between magical crap and getting monkey herpes from her boyfriend and then neurosyphilis from my dad's step-dad, and possibly being high on pixie dust, which might actually be my fault for sprinkling the stuff around to fly, though to be fair, Pan manipulated me into it and I had no idea how long the stuff stays potent or that it makes grown-ups horny as fuck..."
Bae nodded at that, remarking, "I suppose I should be glad, in a way, that I drown in the Never Sea before meeting Pan."
That gave Henry a start. "You... wait... are you one of the...?"
"Recently undead," Bae confirmed, "but not in the zombie apocalypse kind of way. I have been brushing up on my Land Without Magic pop culture with Belle's help."
Henry's brows furrowed. "I didn't know any kids had come back... though Hook had seemed worried that Rufio that might pop up and poke dreamshake holes in his bullshit story that he killed the kid to save my dad. Well, and his first wife. I'd wished she came back, just to clue my mom in on what a lying creep he was, but she'd have probably made my family's life miserable, anyway and tried to poison my mom with dreamshade to get my step-dad back or something. Apparently, she convinced my stepdad to go back to Neverland to get the stuff that killed his brother to use to kill their enemies. She was like a real stone-cold bitch. They were totally made for each other. Then ever since we went to Neverland, he started trying to transform my mom into her personality double, like he was picking up where he left off when his evil first love died or something. So, you know, my family is fucked up"
"Ah." Bae nodded. "I heard something about your family all going to Neverland, because you were kidnapped. I'm really sorry about that. It sounds like it's a truly horrible place. And... um... that your family has had issues ever since your return."
"Yeah, it was and they do. Worse family vacation in the history of family vacations."
The sound of stilettos and a call of, "Baelfire, are you here?" interrupted them. Ordinarily, you weren't supposed to shout in libraries, but since no one ever came in, Belle was pretty lax with that rule.
Bae turned toward his stepmother, calling out, "I'm in the stacks. I'm just talking with-" He turned back, but the boy was gone. Hurrying out from the stacks, he saw the edge of the taller boy's scarf billowing on the way out the door.
Belle, emerged from the elevator with a stack of books from the second floor storage, looking toward the closing door in confusion. "Oh, no, did I miss someone?"
"It was Henry Mills," Bae answered, "though I don't think he was here for books."
Sighing, Belle uttered, "Oh no. I'll have to call Emma... and Regina."
"Why?" Bae asked, confused. "I know Papa doesn't seem to like either of Henry's mothers, and he said the boy was a bad influence, but he seemed quite nice. I don't think he meant to be so awful as Papa said. He seems quite broken up about it, actually..."
"Well, I imagine it's not been easy for Henry," said Belle with a pinched look as she handed some of her books to Baelfire to shelve. "He's always been a loner, though I understand he did have a lot of friends when he lived in New York with Emma. But the other children tend to avoid him here, first because Regina was, well, the Evil Queen, then just as he was starting to make a few friends, Emma became the Dark One. It was really inevitable that he'd start acting out eventually, particularly as unstable as his mothers' marriages have been, between a murderous pirate and a lying thief. We wanted to take Henry with us on our travels, but everyone else was against it, so without Rumple... they'd gotten fairly close while Henry worked at the pawnshop and helping Rumple with his recovery while Rumple helped him cope with his mother becoming the Dark One. I sometimes worry that his family doesn't care as much about Henry as they care about how he can help them clean up their various messes.
"And, of course," she considered as she booted up the circulation desk's computer, "the other children can be quite mean, indoctrinated by their parents as they are into certain beliefs."
"Because of the Dark One and Evil Queen thing, you mean," said Bae.
"Well, yes, but it's a bit more complicated than that. You see, his parents never married, so by the Enchanted Forest standards, Henry is a bastard and unable to inherit his birthright, but his grandparents don't seem to see it that way, which rubs many people the wrong way, particularly the factions who want to transform Storybrooke into a replica of the Enchanted Forest - or find a way to return there. And though Snow and Charming apparently issued some decree of legitimacy, it's not as though that would change anyone's minds where such things as friendship or marriage are concerned. Which has made Henry something of a pariah, I think, not that any of them have noticed, loner that he always was - as if that was by choice rather than the other children not aging. As a result, he ended up with that other outcast Gretel, who's a rather homely girl by fairy tale princess standards, and a peasant besides, and I think the royal children have spread rumors that her parents were not married before her mother died in childbirth, and that's why they lived alone in the forest instead of the village. I don't know if it's true or not, but children can be horribly cruel."
"I know," Bae grimaced.
"Oh, of course," Belle said with a sympathetic look. "Anyway, I think Henry has often thought more about the happy endings of others, a lot like his father, and hoped that everything he saw as his own happiness would naturally fall into place. But that hasn't been the case. He championed to convince Emma to stay here more than once, for the good of his family, but they have not really treated him well in return, and he has not made the friends he thought he would, and the academic subjects he excels at like math and astronomy are considered near to useless by most Enchanted Forest people, other than for mariners, and it's not as though we can easily sail anywhere. Well, Rumple and I took that cruise, of course, and we offered to bring Henry along so he could see more of the world he was born in, but his mothers and Emma's parents refused, which I think he took quite hard besides. He'd really had his hopes up, even if he hadn't let on how much. Having an adventurous spirit myself, I understand what a crushing blow it can be to be essentially caged and only experience things through the recorded journeys of others. Henry might not have felt that at ten, when this mess began, but he's at that age... well... I'm sure you understand that as well. I know just being cooped up here is hard for you."
After a pause, Belle gave him a smile. "Rumple is just trying to keep you safe, Baelfire. But I know Henry could use a friend. Perhaps you can help each other."
AN: So, if you hadn't guessed already, Neal de-aged himself. Will Henry and Bae become pals? And what kind of crazy trouble could two teenage trouble-magnets get up to? Also, if you want to know what the heck Baelfire's Victorian slang means, check out . /Sophie/Castle/victorian_ .
RETCON ALERT: The pixie dust thing making adults horny, I came up with when editing this chapter yesterday and didn't go back to insert it in posted chapters, so Tinkerbell shared that theory with Emma while she was in the hospital, so it just hasn't been mentioned as of now, even though it happened, and even if it makes no fucking sense that it hasn't been mentioned, because it's kind of a big deal as a motivator for Emma's crazy behavior in Neverland. Deal with it, bitches!
Next up: The Princess Posse is on the prowl. And Emma is going to need therapy.