Chapter 10

Storybrooke 2:29 pm

There is still a way she can salvage this, Regina thinks. There has to be: she's worked so hard, come too far to fail, especially to a simple lapse in judgment. That's always been her downfall: the hope that pushed her into trusting people. Believing Cora when she said, "Who am I to stop you?" Believing Jefferson when he said, "I know the man who can do what you want—bring back the dead." Believing Snow when she promised to keep the secret. Believing Rumple when, after she'd asked if studying magic would cause her to become evil like Cora, he said, "That, dearie, is entirely up to you."

Because it really wasn't. She'd come to understand that, after arriving in this world. Her feet had been set upon this course even before she was born.

But she has a choice now. Regina raises her chin. Her eyes are wide open and no one's ever going to cheat her again. She's powerful, she's smart, and she will salvage this. She will win Henry back.

"Look, darling." Cora shows her the dagger. The "e" has vanished.

Highway 2:29 pm

"Hey." Emma nudges Neal. "You said something about going somewhere that slowed your aging down? And I heard one of your buddies call you Petey. Is that as in Peter Pan?"

Neal shrugs. "At one time."

Emma settles back against the seat, even though it means she squeezes him out. After what he did to her, the least he can do is give her some room. She's never been a believer in that men-are-from-Mars crap, but there is one relationship theory that's beginning to make sense now: the one they call "the Peter Pan Syndrome." She sniffs. "That explains a lot."

But he's wrapped up in other thoughts and won't bite at the bait she's dangled. "I'm a Peter Pan. One of many."

"You're kidding." Now she's a believer. Hell, she's ready to start the club: Women Who Love Peter Pan Types. They'll all change their names to Wendy.

"Every generation has its own Lost Boys. And every Peter eventually grows up." Before she can ask him if he's got to adulthood yet, his phone rings and he snaps it open. "Yeah?" He listens a minute, then curses, then says, "Yeah. Let me know if you find him. . . . Yeah, I know you will. Hey, how's"—Emma listens to him stumble on the words—"my father?. . . Yeah. Let me know. . . Thanks." He closes the phone and slips it back into his hoodie. He casts a guilty glance at Emma, though none of this is his fault. Is it? But he knows her; she'll need to vent, and he's the closest target. Beating around the bush will just make things worse, though, so he plunges in. "Henry's missing. Slightly's searching for him, but he thinks he may be running back to Storybrooke. Would he do that?"

Beneath his question is a sad admission that he knows nothing about his own son. It's true: he doesn't even know Henry's birthday or his middle name, let alone anything about his character. She'd feel sorry for Neal, if not for the jail thing. And then she thinks about the question and realizes she doesn't know the answer. Maybe she doesn't know Henry as well as she needs to, either.

Jolly Roger 2:33 pm

This room does not beckon like the others: it insists. He's thrust from behind and yanked from the front so there's no way to resist; he falls forward onto the rocky ground. When he rises, his ankle no longer aches, but he can't see. He stretches out his hands, making his way by touch. His fingers tell him that three of the walls are made of a hard stone, while the fourth is made of wooden bars, spiked at the ends. The bars reach from ceiling to floor. He sniffs: the air is moist and smells of sulfur. He finds a dry spot and lowers himself to the ground to wait—for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, for someone to speak to him, for anything to happen.

He drifts in and out of sleep. There's nothing else to do. When he awakens, he can't estimate the time: he remembers it was somewhat after 9 pm when the clever princes captured him with a fake contract.

His eyes finally adjust to the dim light of torches, his nose learns to ignore the stench, but his stomach never learns to tolerate the cold, greasy pottage the guards try to get him to eat twice a day—especially when he finds maggots among the lentils.

He develops a cough. The muscles in his legs weaken and cramp from lack of exercise and nutrition. He allows the guards to witness his decline: they will report back to Prince David. And yet, he is exactly where he wants to be: caged and stripped of his magic, seemingly forever. It's one of his cleverest tricks, for who would suspect that the Dark One actually sought out such a state? But here, reduced to this shivering, starving, unwashed almost-human, he's a far cry from the Feared One, and so when Snow implores her husband to allow her to consult Rumplestiltskin, Charming relents, and an exchange of information wins the imp the last piece of the puzzle: the Savior's name. As the White Queen, her arm wrapped protectively around her belly, and her consort, his arm wrapped protectively around her, hurry from the damp cavern, the correctness of Rumple's choice is confirmed for him: if he hadn't allowed them to cage him, Charming never would have allowed Snow to come to him, and he never would have learned the precious name. In his new life, Rumple promises himself, he will never lower himself like this again.

Sometimes as the guards stare at him, he rocks back and forth, giggling. Sometimes he literally climbs the walls and hangs from the ceiling. They stand farther back on the days he performs this mock circus for them. They know he's growing crazier, but what they're not sure of, even after weeks of his imprisonment, is whether he has any magic left. The fairies promised their dust would weaken him and leave him powerless, but then, no one has ever imprisoned a Dark One before, so who can say for sure?

When he's lost so much weight that his leathers hang loose from his body, he asks for paper, ink and a quill. He wishes to unburden his soul, he says; he wants to write his confession, in hopes that the prince will permit it to be taken to a priest. Not even Charming can refuse that request. The materials are brought, and additional torches are lit so that he can see what he's writing. He labors on his confession for days, but when the guards come for it, saying that the itinerant priest has arrived and wishes to read it, he giggles and claims he got hungry and ate it. Then he hangs upside down from the ceiling, and the guards back away.

What they don't know is that the scroll has been rolled up and hidden behind loose rocks. What they don't know is that on the night he was captured, he carried a small bottle of ink in his boot— ink he had personally extracted from the largest squids in the Southern Seas. This is the ink he used to write his confession—ink with magic properties resistant to the dampening effect of fairy dust. What they don't know is that his "confession" is a single word, written elegantly, exactly one hundred times: Emma Emma Emma Emma.

And what they don't know is that when he finished his confession—maybe it is a confession, for Emma is the savior, and for there to be a savior, there must have been a sin committed, yes?—when he finished his confession, he pressed the scroll against his nose and breathed in deeply, over and over, taking into his lungs, his blood, his cells the magic of the ink, casting a spell upon himself for which the name Emma would be the trigger.

And what they don't know and never will learn is that when the trigger activates the spell, no matter what the Final Curse has done to him, no matter how intricate and detailed the fake life that Regina has created for him, Rumplestiltskin will rise again.

Rumplestiltskin the immortal.

"His footprints ended where the SUV was parked."

Gold pries his eyes open. "He couldn't have gotten into the vehicle; there's nowhere he could've hidden in it. He must have brushed out his tracks. Kid's seen too many TV westerns."

Slightly kneels. He wants so badly not to let Petey down; he wants to do something useful, however small, so he withdraws Gold's Armani handkerchief from his Armani jacket and dabs at the blood seeping from the wound. "You want some water?"

Gold shakes his head.

"I might be able to find some booze."

Gold tries to smile to reassure his caretaker. "The only thing worse than a poisoned imp is a drunk poisoned imp." The poison in him is urging his body to shut down: he fights back, ordering his lungs to take in air, his heart to keep beating, his brain to keep thinking. "Mr. Slightly, will you run down to the captain's quarters. On the desk you'll find paper, ink and a quill. Please bring them."

"Yes, sir." The lad clatters off.

"Good lad," Gold mutters. He wonders if this Lost Boy has a father somewhere.

It's time, Gold realizes, to consider death.

This is a most remarkable thing for him. From all appearances, he is a slight, middle-aged man, and one would assume that death is a subject he has considered before; statistically, he is probably less than twenty-five years from it. But whatever shell his spirit has been poured into by the Final Curse, he's still Rumplestiltskin, just in a more mundane package, and the thought of death has not occurred to him at all in the past two centuries.

In the first fifty years of the Dark Curse, when he had considered his immortality, he'd run the gamut of emotions. Initially, he'd felt sheer delight, for now no bully—not ogre nor knight nor soldier nor king nor sorcerer—could touch him. But as the humans around him grew and aged and died, he began to feel burdened by his unique gift, for he could do none of those things, and when Belle entered his life and for a short time created in him fanciful dreams of a lasting relationship, he came to understand how completely separate he was. Had he remained with her—Gods, if only he had!—he would have had to employ magic to give the illusion that he was aging along with her, and when Regina informed him Belle's time on earth had passed, he grieved not only for her, that she'd suffered at her own father's hands, but he also grieved for himself, for he had no hope of ever joining her in the afterlife. It was then he fell into periods of heavy depression, becoming drunk on grief when he discovered he couldn't become drunk on alcohol.

But the Final Curse was his blessing. Once he'd discovered how to bottle True Love—the curse's antidote—he then threw himself into his work, for now, perversely, he had hope once again.

And now the Fates are screwing him over once more. Three centuries of work and waiting have come to fruition, he's been rewarded with the return of Bae to his life and rewarded a second time, unexpectedly, with a grandchild—and no sooner has that come to pass than, in the two days he's spent beyond the reach of his magic—two days without the protection of immortality—Hook has found him.

He fingers the gaping wound in his chest, weeping blood and poison. Hook has found him and killed him.

Storybrooke 2:35 pm

Dove is speeding as he whips the Yukon off the highway and onto the access road; he slows only slightly as he turns onto Bleaker Street. With no traffic to impede him and the town's only officer of the law in his backseat, he's apparently not too concerned with legalities today. At the intersection with Main Street the stop light's red. Emma leans forward and pokes his shoulder. "Run it!"

He does. He makes a left at the library onto Lachlan Avenue—and then he slows down because he has no choice: the street is filled with people. He slams the brake on and his passengers pile out before he's shifted into park. Emma runs ahead, seeking her parents in the center of the crowd, with Dove hot on her heels, and the Lost Boys whoop as they fall in with the disorganized army.

Dove finds Snow before Emma does; by the time Emma arrives, the vial has already changed hands. "Good luck, Ms. Swan," Dove offers before he runs back to the Yukon.

"Don't stop for any red lights," Emma advises, watching him go: for such a big man, he moves awfully fast. In the few minutes they've been together, he's earned Emma's respect, and by extension, her estimation of his employer has inched up as well.

Dove pauses in his run just long enough to squeeze Bae's shoulder. "Good luck, Master Baelfire."

"Careful with that antidote," Bae says, but he realizes his words are needless: Dove will guard that vial with his life. "You comin' back after you deliver it to the doctor?"

Dove shakes his head. "I'm going back to Mr. Gold. He told me to stay with you, but—first time I ever disobeyed him." Dove shrugs with a lame smile. "He can give me hell for it later."

A muscle in Bae's cheek twitches. "Tell him, if you get back in time. . . tell him I kicked ass in his name."

Dove now grins fully as he resumes his run to the car. "He'll like that. Tear 'em a new one, Master Baelfire."

Jolly Roger 2:37 pm

"Mr. Slightly."

"Yes, sir?"

"I may not have a choice in the manner of my death, but I will have a choice in its location. Please remove me from this damned ship."

The young man tucks Gold's cane under one arm and slides the other around Gold's back. He takes most of the pawnbroker's weight onto himself as he walks him down the dock. As soon as Gold's Ferragamos hit the beach, he drops to the sand, exhausted. "One moment, please."

Gold raises his right hand and yanks off the ring that he's worn every day of his life in this world. When Regina had designed Mr. Gold—the shaggy hair, the tailored suits, the tailored speech and the Scottish accent, and absence of a christian name—she'd thrown in the bum ankle and the ring too, without knowing why. Just a whim, she'd assumed; but in reality, Rumplestiltskin had planted those notions into her head.

The ankle had been a voluntary payment on the curse: Rumple had hoped if he made enough offerings, the magic would accept them as sufficient payment and extract no more from him. Who could blame him for trying to bargain with the Fates? He'd already paid heavily, with the surrender of Regina and Belle.

The ring, however, was an insurance policy. Regina thought she had seen it for the first time on the Genie's finger, just one of many trinkets he wore—but that was a false memory planted by one who had studied false memories for decades. The ring had actually come from the North Country, a gift from a young sorcerer who received some training from the Dark One, and it held special properties. In a land without magic, it appeared to be just a lovely opal, a bold choice for a man whose tastes in all other matters ran conservative.

Had there been a jeweler in Storybrooke, perhaps he or she could have revealed something of the myriad legends associated with opal that would have also revealed something about the ring's wearer, for in this world, the opal was indeed a stone of conflicting perceptions: thought by ancient Egyptians to possess powers of healing, by Romans as the token of hope, by medieval Europeans as granting the wearer the ability to turn invisible. Yet in later centuries, the opal devolved into a symbol of ill fortune—and some even believed it a cursed stone. The opal was not unlike Rumplestiltskin himself: a powerful being upon whom the desperate projected their hopes, their superstitions, their fears and their hatred.

It was the ancient Greeks who came closer to the mark, however; for in the lands with magic, opals were a sort of calling card, a stone to be worn only by those with the gift of prophecy. And on a practical level, the stone was known to change color in the presence of magic and to warn the wearer of the presence of poison.

Gold snorts at that last thought. Right now, his opal, normally a sky blue that reminds him of Belle's eyes, bears a red crescent. Too little information, too late. But the stone might still be of some use.

"Mr. Slightly."

"Yes, sir?"

Gold offers him the ring. "Put this ring on and take a hike."

"Excuse me?"

"Walk toward the road and watch the stone. When you see it become purple, note the landmarks before you and mark that spot." Gold struggles to catch his breath.

"What does the purple mean?"

"It means, Mr. Slightly, you've entered a land of magic. And it means I dare not pass that line."

This isn't a room. Not by the standards of the world he lives in now, and certainly not by the standards of the castle he inhabited in the old world. It's really just a loft, but it boasts a straw mattress covered in sheepskin, and a finely stitched fuzzy toy lamb holds pride of place in the center of the mattress. His ankle is throbbing by the time he reaches the top of the ladder; he drops onto the mattress and stretches his leg out to rest. He feels safe here, safer than he's felt in a lifetime. Rested, he picks up the lamb and holds it in his lap, remembering the hours he'd spent hunched over it, sewing in the dim light of the nighttime embers, pushing to finish it in time for Bae's name day. Only the children of nobles receive name day gifts, Milah scoffed; how will the neighbor children treat Bae if you spoil him like a princeling? But Rumple clung to his intentions, and on the fourth day of the first month after harvest, when Bae came down the ladder for breakfast, this lamb had been waiting beside his bowl.

Rumplestiltskin makes the lamb dance in his lap, as he did so many times for Bae. He starts to smile—and then a shout, and another, and another, coming from the walls, all four of them, startle him and he drops the lamb.

It's true you ran.

You told me she was dead.

I'm frightened.

I want my father.

You hurt people all the time.

She was mute!

Papa, please!

You coward!

Get out of my apartment.

You have no idea what I've lived with.

Time's up.

Time's up.

He shoves his hands against his ears. The wound in his chest rips apart, splitting his breastbone, and a foul fluid spurts from his heart. "Bae," he cries weakly. "Don't leave me, Bae."

Time's up.

Tick tock.

Storybrooke 2:38 pm

"Oh my," Cora says. "No more time to dilly-dally."

The first "s" on the dagger has vanished.