A/N: The Dark One reaches a point of desperation as everyone deals with the fallout of the events in New York.

(Edited and updated as of 11/16/2015)

A Gambit in Trust

Rumplestiltskin II

Rumplestiltskin stood holding the curtain aside, a grim frown in place as he watched the person laying on the hospital bed unconscious. The world around him moved at a glacial pace while his mind fired on all cylinders, trying to come to terms with how quickly his reality had shifted. Just two days ago he had all the hope in the world that he could mend his family and finally claim his happiness.

That dream now lay shattered at his feet, and Rumple could not begin to fathom what was next. Every plan, decision, scheme, and effort he had laid out over decades upon centuries had reached their penultimate climax the day before, and left him with no other course to follow in the wake of their completion.

But one.

He moved the side of the bed, the curtain wall drifting closed behind him, and held up his cane in twirling fingers. In Storybrooke he did not need its aid in walking, but it still served a purpose. He brought the heavy, brass end down on the resting man hard, right on top of one of the thick bandages on the man's right shoulder that Rumple knew dressed a bullet wound.

The pirate woke, screaming at the top of his lungs and curling up against the pain. The Dark One took pleasure in the man's agony as his scream died down to grunting breaths. It took thirty seconds for Hook to gather his wits enough to move, and his eyes widened in terrified recognition at the sight of who stood above him. Rumple smirked, savoring the image.

Hook took a wild swing with his good arm, but Rumple chuckled as he caught the limb's stump mid-blow. The pirate's eyes shone with confusion as he regarded the bare end to his arm, and Rumple had the passing curiosity when the man had last seen it without his hook.

Rumple shrugged, uncaring, and squeezed the dense flesh, urging long inactive nerves to fire with new pain. The pirate grit his teeth against it, but Rumple called heat into his palm, building it to a point just shy of ignition until the pirate could no longer bite back another pained outcry.

He bared his teeth. "I wanted to be sure, dearie, that you understand the situation." He released Hook, leaving angry red and black skin behind. "There is no one here to help you," he said. "You are completely at my mercy." A silencing spell on the curtains and a sleeping charm on the bespectacled dwarf on guard had seen to that.

"Then just kill me and be done with it, Crocodile." Hook's voice came out scratchy and resigned. He tried to push himself into an upright position, but cringed to a stop the moment his right side moved. "Nothing's bloody stopping you now." The man fell back against his pillows, eyes drifting closed.

Rumple jutted the pommel of his cane under the man's chin, forcing his teeth to snap together in a shuddering click. "Nothing has ever been stopping me, save your complete irrelevance." He slid the pommel down until it hovered against Hook's windpipe. "But now my son is dying." He leaned pressure onto the cane until it cut off Hook's air. The man tried to meet the prospect of suffocation with a brave face, but soon succumbed to natural fear as he spluttered and fruitlessly tried to bat at the cane with his handless arm, unable to even twitch the other. Tears pooled in Hook's eyes as his skin darkened to grey, then to blue, and edged toward purple.

Only when the man's arm flopped onto the bed, its energy spent, did Rumple let up.

Hook drank in the air with coughing, desperate gasps that edged with grunted pain as he jarred his injured side.

Rumple should have felt a rush of adrenaline at holding such power over another life. It was an experience as familiar to him as breathing, but now there was nothing but contempt. "And the only thing keeping you from suffering tortures beyond even your devilish imagination," he said, tucking the pommel at the crook of Hook's neck and chin once more. "Is the remote possibility that you are wise enough to provide me with the antidote."

The pirate's hacking coughs subsided, morphing into raspy laughter. "There is no cure, Dark One." He struggled the words out and met Rumple's eyes with the righteous fury the pirate always managed to conjure. "It was made for you, Crocodile. I couldn't risk a cure existing."

"No…" With dawning horror, Rumple recognized no deception from the man as the pirate muttered under his breath. The cane slipped from his fingers and Rumple staggered back, mind whirling to find a solution. There had to be one. "You're wrong."

The pirate laughed a melancholy sound, his voice cracking. "You've killed your son, Rumplestiltskin. Just as surely as you murdered Milah."

Rage filled him. A seething white hot river of wrath ran through his being. Conscious thought left him as Rumplestiltskin forwent his cane and opted to wrap his bare hands around the bruised flesh of Hook's neck and clenched with all the might he could bring to bear. Hook did not fight the attack, his eyes closed and tears streaming down his cheeks as his complexion raced through a myriad of darkening blues and purples once more.

The concept of his son outliving his murderer brought Rumple little satisfaction, but still he pressed on.

"Rumple!" The shocked shout tore through his haze of fury as well as a finely sharpened blade as delicate, familiar arms wrapped around his shoulders and yanked. She did not possess the strength to do more than throw him off balance, but Rumplestiltskin let Belle pull him away. Hook took a tiny breath, but remained unconscious.

The adrenaline of the moment bled away in the seconds that followed. Frustration, shame, anger, guilt, grief, and desperate terror filled him in its wake and Rumple fell to his knees, head bowed and chest heaving.

With a start, he realized he was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks in rapid rivulets.

Gentle fingers touched beneath his chin, drawing his gaze upward until he found fright and sadness reflected in Belle's expression that matched his own. "He's my son, Belle. My Baelfire," he said through his sobs. He felt lost. Adrift without a solution.

She caressed his cheek with a sympathetic quirk to her lips and drew him to his feet.

"I know," she said, quiet and without judgement. "Which is why you should be by his side." She reached beyond him to draw open the curtain wall. "And not here." He nodded as he tried to rein in his emotions, pressing his face to the crook of his elbow to dry his eyes.

"I don't know if I can do this, Belle," he said in a whisper as she nudged him out of Hook's enclosed space.

"You won't have to do it alone," she said, squeezing his arm. "Let me make sure that bastard is still breathing, and we'll go together. Alright?" He nodded again, ignoring the fresh wave of shame as Belle slipped back behind the privacy screen.

On the floor nearby, the dwarf he had charmed blinked in confusion as he woke, eyes searching around him in bleary disorientation. The idle realization struck Rumple that he'd lost focus on his spellwork.

A rare thing indeed.

A chuckle bubbled up his throat, threatening to become another wave of sobbing grief. Rumple began to wonder if this was how he would lose his sanity.

Belle saved him from internal contemplation, emerging from Hook's sectioned off room while rifling through her purse.

"He's alive," she reported, pulling a pair of silvery blue flowers from the bag, their stems wrapped in moistened paper towels. "No harm done," she rested a warm hand on his chest and offered an attempt at reassuring smile. "Come on."

She took his arm and Rumple let her lead him away from the man whose fault everything was. They remained quiet as they climbed the floors toward Storybrooke Memorial's ICU. How every nurse, patient, doctor, and guest avoided his attention along the way would have amused the Dark One once upon a time, but in the wake of feeling too much, he had opted to force himself to feel nothing.

It seemed to be working for the moment.

"Just one second," Belle stopped short outside a private room and slipped inside. She spent all of thirty seconds before emerging – sans flowers – and they continued on.

"And how is Miss Lucas doing?" Rumple asked, tone flat. Rumple knew he owed the women a debt for sacrificing herself to give Belle a chance at escape, but he could not drum up the emotion to care about her wellbeing. Not today.

"Not well," Belle said, eyes on their feet. "She's getting worse every day. Whale can't figure it out." Rumple offered no words of comfort, having none to give, and pulled Belle closer against him as they walked.

The Intensive Care Unit in Storybrooke's only hospital was a small thing, and rarely used. The last occupant, Rumple believed, had been David Nolan during his longtime coma. The wing was all but abandoned save a bored looking woman in scrubs manning the nurse's station on her own. Her eyes flicked up to them in disinterest as they passed, and she lifted a finger in a halfhearted point toward Bae's room.

He was not his son's first visitor of the day.

Emma Swan and Regina stood on either side of Baelfire's door, a pair of bedraggled and weary sentinels. They bickered at each other as he and Belle approached, oblivious to their presence.

"-told Henry he was dead," Regina said, arms crossing. "He has a right to be angry."

"I didn't exactly expect to ever see him again, let alone have him know that I had a kid," Swan replied, holding her hands out wide in front of her. "After what he did, I didn't want him anywhere near Henry."

"I don't disagree." Regina crossed her arms and glanced into the room. "That he's Rumplestiltskin's son, on top of it?" She shook her head. "I don't like this."

"Despite your best efforts, Dearie," Rumple said with a hard look to his former apprentice. Both women started at his appearance, but he could not muster the energy for proper anger. "The fates do not weave their tapestry according to your will."

"Gold, we—" Rumple ignored the blonde, not caring what she had to say, and pushed between the two and into his son's room. He heard the three women follow behind him, but he could not tear his eyes away from his son lying on what was becoming more and more likely to be his deathbed.

"Bae…" He moved to the bedside, hesitant to reach out and touch his boy. Baelfire's skin held a pallid color, doused in sweat. The steady, quick beep of the heart monitor assured him his son still fought. A stark contrast to the shallow, hardly noticeable rise and fall of his chest.

"Gold," Emma Swan spoke again, but Rumple paid her no heed, reaching a hand over Baelfire's chest. The mortal doctors had to have missed something, the though occurred to him, and Hook may yet have been lying. He closed his eyes and focused, the dark energy his powers granted him came to his call without hesitation and reached out toward his son.

The technique could not offer him a diagnosis. Magic was never so straightforward, even for the Dark One. Instead, his spell would grant him an impression; a distinct feeling of his son's state of being.

Rumple wished with all his might that he had not done so a moment later. An immediate perception of pure wrongness invaded his senses. He shuddered, bile at the back of his throat as he pulled his metaphysical sense away. To his horror, the sensation followed his magic as he tried to end the spell, surging in strength. Baelfire's heartbeat skyrocketed and Rumple threw caution to the wind and yanked the magic away from his son.

Baelfire's chest heaved up off the bed, his breath hitching into desperate gasps. Rumple staggered backward, and only Belle's hands kept him from collapsing. Sound reached his ears that he did not comprehend as Emma Swan moved to hold his son still as Bae started to convulse.

The poison fed off magic, Rumple realized.

That devious bastard.

It would have spelled certain death to the Dark One had Hook been successful, and, Rumple suspected, the poison would have torn through him at a much more rapid pace.

He watched, forcing himself to remain impassive, as his son's seizure slowed to a stop and his heartrate evened out. Only then did the on call nurse wander in, eyes wide and panicked.

"What happened? He was stable!" She rushed to Baelfire's side and began taking his vitals, shouldering Swan out of the way. Her posture relaxed with every test, to the point where she looked bored once again when she pronounced him "As well as he was before."

"What'd you do to him?" Swan asked the moment the nurse left the room, always the picture of tact.

"I did what these professionals could not," he said, stepping back up to Baelfire's bed and laying a hand on his chest to feel his breathing. The rise and fall soothed his ragged emotions. "The poison seeks out magic. Uses it to make itself stronger."

"Oh, that's brilliant." His former student was the first one to put it together, the light of realization sparking in her eyes in the way that sparked an ironic pride from Rumple decades before. "You wouldn't have had a chance." She concluded.

"No," he said, trailing the word out as a quiet whisper.

"But Neal doesn't have magic," Emma said, brows furrowed. "Shouldn't that mean he can beat this?" She looked to Regina in askance, Rumple noted in wry amusement.

"All life is magic…" Belle spoke from behind him. All three turned to look at her in curious surprise. She flinched for a moment before shrugged, saying, "I read about it."

"What does it mean?"

"It means," Rumple answered the savior. "That everything alive or that has ever been alive has magic in some form." He studied his son's pale face. "It will still kill him."

"But slowly," Regina said.

"So we have time." Emma concluded, a hesitant smile on her lips. Regina looked to her with a frown. "We can figure out how to cure this thing."

Rumple marveled at the, frankly, dumb positivity, but it sparked stray thought. "Where's Henry?" Three sets of eyes blinked at him. "Surely he wanted to spend time with his father while he still could?"

Emma glanced toward Regina before looking down, sheepish. His old apprentice's tightened jaw could have cracked rocks, he suspected.

"He already had to watch this happen," she said, waving a hand over his son. "The last thing he needs is to watch a stranger die an ugly death, too."

"Regina," Emma scolded as the queen's words grated against Rumple's fraying calm. He fought to keep his fragile composure, afraid any magic released might set off the poison in his son's veins.

"Go," he demanded, raising himself to his full height.

"Gold, we need-" Swan said, but he held up a hand, cutting off her words.

"No. Pay your respects, and leave."

"Oh, for… We need your dagger, Rumple." Regina's blunt, annoyed delivery left Rumple offguard..

"What!?" Belle expressed his incredulity for him.

"Tell me," he said, sarcasm dripping from his words. "How do you picture this conversation turning out?"

"With you seeing reason," Regina said without hesitation. "You know whose fault all of this is." She stared him in the eye, unflinching. "She won't ever reveal herself when she doesn't have the advantage."

"So we need to give her one." Emma picked up the thread. "Get her out in the open and take her down."

"A trap," Belle said, stepping forward with a scowl. "Last time you tried to trap her you failed, Regina. Then she came after me. Forgive me if I'm not confident in your abilities." Regina drew herself up, a look of contempt crossing her features.

"Things didn't go according to plan," Emma said. She placed a hand on the mayor's arm to keep the woman from lashing out. "And it still almost worked."

Belle made to retort, but Rumple shut the conversation down, his patience gone. "And you expect me to entrust my life," he paused, cocking his head and pushing as much disbelief voice as he was able. "To you." He caught the wince before Regina hid it behind a mask of calm. "In a desperate ploy to trap your mother." He shook his head, dropping his tone several octaves. "Which does nothing to help my son."

"We could still-"

"Enough." Rumple felt the tenseness in his shoulders as he approached the bring. "Go." An annoyed tick played at Swan's eye, but Regina urged the blonde forward before she could make the fatal mistake of speaking. He did not watch them as they went, his eyes on his son. Only when Belle's hand found its way to the space between his shoulder blades, rubbing gentle circles, did Rumple allow his nerves to relax.

He bowed his head, putting his thoughts to work trying to focus on moving forward. "Sorry, Belle." He whispered. She tapped her fingers against his back to acknowledge him. He hated when she saw the monster beneath the man, but there seemed little he could do to keep it under control this day.

"I hate to suggest it…" Belle spoke up minutes later, hesitant.

"You agree with them?" He did not bother to hide his surprise.

"No," she said immediately. "But they did remind me of another option." Her voice trembled as if terrified. Frowning, Rumple turned away from Belle's gentle ministrations so he could study her. Frightened sadness was written plain her face. "With the dagger…"

Rumple made the connection and his instinct urged at him to rage against such a suggestion, to protect himself at the cost of all else. He turned away from Belle once more, afraid he could not control the emotion, but the sight of Baelfire worsened the storm of his thoughts and his breath quickened, the needs of the Dark One warring against the wants of a father.

He pictured the scenario. Wrapping Baelfire's unknowing fingers around the dagger's hilt. Forcing his son to stab the blade into Rumple's blackened heart. The black tendrils of magic surging from Rumple's dying body and into Baelfire's, breathing new life into the man.

Would it work without his intent? Would the magic purge the poison from Bae's blood as surely as it had healed Rumple's crippled leg? Or would the devilish concoction only feed on the fresh energy and doom them both? Would the power pass onto Hook?

The uncertainty of such a path relieved Rumple as it gave him a reason not to ponder the true question.

Could he make up for his greatest mistake? Give up not only his power, but his life to save his son?

The Dark One shoved his inability to answer to the back of his mind, joining the looming specter of shame at the edge of his peripheral perception. Always there, never truly acknowledged.

Rumple explained his reasoning to Belle, her countenance turning crestfallen. "It's not simply a life for life trade." His words sparked an echo of memory almost forgotten. He recalled an artifact absconded from Regina's late husband's castle long before, just after the woman had agreed to an apprenticeship.

The fool Leopold had kept the double-ended candle on display, having no idea what power it had truly possessed and thinking its only value lay in its beauty.

"Rumple?" Belle asked, worried. Rumple realized he held a grin from ear to ear and laughed as the plan came together. He embraced Belle and kissed her with all the pent up pressure and frustration bleeding out in the passion of the simple act. When he broke away, Belle stood dazed, blinking owlishly.

"There's an enchanted candle." He started to explain, hurrying from the room, his lover on his heels. "An ancient thing, but powerful."

Emma Swan and Regina remained by the nurse's station, but their attention remained captured by a pile of his son's personal effects spread out in a clumsy disarray. Both women studied the screen of a smartphone, Regina hovering close over Swan's shoulder.

"—viously important to him. She called over two dozen—" Rumple blazed past them, shelving irritation for the breach of his son's privacy for a later time. Belle peppered him with questions as he strode through the hospital and then the streets of Storybrooke at a pace just shy of a run.

"You know all magic comes with a price," he said as the turned the corner to his shop. "Most times, the cost is subtle and hard to predict. This artifact is rare in its simplicity. It does what it says…" He trailed off, stopping as his instincts threw up a warning a dozen paces from his shop's entrance. It took him a moment to realize it was the complete lack of energy in the air that had stilled him.

Someone had taken down his defenses.

"Stay back," he told Belle as he stepped forward, metaphysical senses reaching out in a way the mundane simply could not. Where once stood a dome of potent magical defenses was only the empty , still air. With cautious steps, he approached the store's entrance, noting the ghost of a scar floating in the air where the center of his wards had once stood. The echo of power glowed in the dim light, a contrast to the dark wood of the shop's entrance.

It was tinged pink. Not Cora, he concluded and stepped through it into chaos.

None could argue that on a normal day, Rumplestiltskin's pawn shop was anything less than cluttered. A crowded display of the staggering numbers of artifacts he had collected both mundane and magical, priceless and worthless, always lined the walls from floor to ceiling and took up much of the floor space as well.

For his cursed persona, it had been a strategic design allowing him to study his customers from the moment they entered. To see where their eyes drifted and their interests piqued. An advantage to securing a profitable sale.

It had all been torn asunder, and Rumple had no doubt as to the culprit.

He could not begin to categorize the damage as he simply did not know where to start. Not a single thing remained where it should have save for the ancient register dutifully sitting on unbroken glass of the display counter ,and the items held within the deceptively sturdy display.

He allowed himself a moment of relief, shelving his anger once again. On the bottom shelf, next to his newly acquired globe (the crimson dot now shining here in Storybrooke, Rumple noted in passing), sat the enchanted candle. Rumple thanked the stars that it was a pretty enough thing to earn a prime place of presentation.

As long as his forearm, one half the purest white and the other the deepest black. The two colors met in the center of the candle, bleeding into each other in a filigree design representing the opposite and intertwined nature of life and death in an elegant, if simple way.

He unlocked the cabinet and pulled the candle free. It weighed heavy in his hands even as his chest lightened with hope. He was never gladder to have had a spell fail, for if Belle had not stopped him, Rumple would not have been able to find the opportunity to turn Killian Jones' death into anything more than a hollow act of vengeance.

"I had wondered what happened to that," Belle said from just behind him.

He was halfway through turning toward her when the cloud of grey overtook him, its effect instantaneous as nearly every one of his voluntary motor functions seized up and Rumplestiltskin was only able to dart his eyes around, everything else frozen in place.

A thousand and more questions burned through his mind as panic settled in.

Belle stepped into his line of sight, an alien smirk tugging at her lips and a swaggering haughtiness to her visage that did not belong. "I warned you, Rumple," she said, smoothing a hand through his hair as a mother would a child's. "Love is weakness."

Cora. Confusion gave way to resumed rage as Rumple pushed every ounce of his will toward breaking the hold, but the fairy dust's work was absolute. He could not commune with his magic.

She stroked his cheek, a gesture both familiar and foreign at once, and pursed Belle's lips in a pout. Rumple could not help but recognize the skill in which Cora wielded heart control even as he felt violated on Belle's behalf. He could see the sorceress behind every twitch of Belle's expression and movements, now, and no trace of his Belle.

The level of control over the puppetry spoke volumes to how Cora had earned the title Queen of Hearts.

"You know, she's quite a willful one," Cora said with Belle's voice, tilting her head to the side. "She tried to kill me with what I've learned is called a shotgun. Very crude." She shook Belle's head, wavy auburn hair flowing with the motion. "But I could see that spark of defiance you love so well."

Cora slipped Belle's hand into his, prying the enchanted candle loose. She examined it with a small smile, confident in her prize.

"I had the long plan figured out," Cora mused, tracing a finger over the candle's filigree design. "But Captain Jones proved to be quite useful despite his rampant idiocy." She chuckled and Belle's laugh had never sounded worse. Her tone dropped to annoyance as she continued, "And my daughter seems to be growing bolder in the company of Swan." She bit out the name as a curse.

"I don't have the luxury of time any more." She dropped the candle into her purse and pulled out a slip of paper, prying open Rumple's jaw just enough to slip it between his teeth until it was held securely. Cora's smirk played upon Belle's lips once more at the sight of him. Rumple hoped his fury expressed its full might through his gaze alone. "You will have thirty minutes after the dust wears off to bring the dagger to that location." She flicked the paper. "And leave it there. Talk to no one, and know that I will know if you do.

"And I do not know what I'll be capable of should you betray my trust." She leaned in close until Rumple could feel Belle's breath on his neck, warm and inviting despite the situation. "Maybe I would show mercy and save poor Baelfire with this one's heart." She tapped above Belle's left breast. "Or I could reward Captain Jones for his unwitting service. Fitting, I think, to gift him your replacement for Milah to soothe his heartache."

Bile rose to the back of Rumple's throat, vile and burning as he wished to physically recoil from the thought. Core raised Belle's eyes to meet his with a wicked grin.

"Don't disappoint me Rumple." Belle's lips pressed against his in a way familiar and foreign and wrong. He recognized Cora's kiss through Belle's lips and his stomach twisted once more.

She pulled away and his lips felt burned as if touched by hot iron. She stroked his cheek with the pad of Belle's thumb, amusement glittering in the eyes he loved so. She stepped around him, each echo of Belle's heeled shoes against the hardwood compounded his anger and shame.

The bell above his door chimed and Rumple was left alone with his thoughts and the agonizing realization that, for the first time in centuries, he had no idea what to do.

Coward, the looming presence at the edge of his mind whispered, and Rumple could not find it in him to banish the word away.

He was terrified.

E/N: A shorter chapter, I know, but Cora trumping Rumple demanded to be the scene to end the chapter, and I was in no position to argue!

Things just keep on climbing toward the climax as Cora adapts to the advantages fate has given her, and everyone else scrambles to tread water. Will Rumple be able to keep his dagger or will he become another of Cora's pawns? What fate lies in store for Belle, whatever choice Rumple makes? How will our lead duo react to this new set of challenges?

Find out next time!

Until then, happy reading!