Chapter One—"Going Home"
"I'm still not sure this is a good idea," David pointed out, looking dubiously at Robin, who stood next to Regina with his arms crossed stubbornly.
"Look, Your Highness"—the honorific sounded a tad sarcastic coming from the outlaw who was busy romancing the Evil Queen who might or might not be considered "Prince" Charming's stepmother-in-law. Robin never called the Prince (who was technically a King) that unless he was trying to wheedle something out of him, either—"Regina is right. If there is someone else behind the Wicked Witch, we need to know it. Trust me. I've been dealing with the Witch while you lot were off playing house in Storybrooke, and she's bad enough by herself. If she's getting her marching orders from someone else, we need to know who it is."
"I'm not disagreeing with you," David replied, heaving a sigh. "It's just that this plan of yours is risky, and we can't afford to lose any more people. We've finally managed to meet the Witch's forces head on, and we can't afford to divert our resources from that course. Even now, Mulan's army is starting to regain territory in the south, and one more push might just free our first kingdom from the Witch's grasp."
"So push her. I'm proposing a small force going in to take just one town away from these people. So what if they have magical beasts guarding the place? Regina can deal with them. I won't even take Baelfire this time. You can have him."
"Gee, thanks, Robin." From Belle's left, Baelfire shot his friend a dirty look. Despite the odd manner of their meeting, Rumplestiltskin's son really had it off with the man his father had once started flaying alive, and they made an almost unstoppable team. "Glad to know you're so generous."
But Baelfire had also turned into one of their best generals, a point even the royals acknowledged after Baelfire had pulled Prince Thomas' forces out of trouble one too many times. Masterful strategy was apparently something that ran in the family, although everyone was careful not to comment upon such things in Belle's hearing. They all thought she was still fragile and heartbroken, even if a year had passed. She still thought they were crazy.
"I'll go in Bae's place," Belle volunteered, shooting her almost-stepson a shut-up look when he started to object. "Robin'll need another sword, and the castle's as secure as it's going to get. You don't need me here for that. Snow can handle things without me."
"Someone still has to go fetch Miss Swan," Hook spoke up before Charming could argue or Robin could agree. "Now that the Blue Fairy has managed to create a pathway we can use to travel tothe Land Without Magic and back, she belongs here. With her family."
No one bothered to pretend that Baelfire—still Neal, Belle supposed, where Emma was concerned—didn't throw Hook a furious look for that remark. A year hadn't cooled either of their feelings concerning the Charmings' daughter, and everyone knew Hook was burning to be the one that was sent after Emma and Henry. He'd only been arguing the point for months.
There were times Belle felt like volunteering for that job just to keep both of the foolish men in check, but there was no way anyone would agree to that idea. Now, however, Bae surprised her by grinning.
"I guess you get the job," he said to Hook with a painfully familiar smirk, then turned to David. "Since you need me to lead armies, and Hook sucks at strategy, he's nominated." He looked back at the pirate. "Just don't screw it up. Bring Emma and my kid back safely."
Hook, to his credit, only bristled a little. "I will do my best."
"That's all anyone can ask," Snow interjected, heavily pregnant and looking tired. Usually, she was the peacemaker in these rabid war councils, but lately Belle had found herself filling that role more and more. The pregnancy really was eating away at the usually fiery princess (queen?), and Belle felt terrible for focusing on the negative aspects instead of her own envy.
Back in Storybrooke, Snow had implied to Emma that going back without her and Henry wouldn't be a happy ending for her parents, but even with the war on, they seemed blissful enough. Belle didn't begrudge anyone their happiness, of course, but sometimes it burned to be shut up in a castle with so many True Love couples. Between Snow and Charming, Grumpy and Astrid, Thomas and Ella, Philip and Aurora, and even Abagail and Fredrick before the pair had set off with Midas to raise a third army, she found herself dwelling on her own loses far too often. It wasn't healthy, and going with Robin on this raid was just what she needed.
"You okay?" Baelfire asked as the others filed out, and Belle tore her eyes away from where Charming laid a protective hand on Snow's stomach.
"Of course," she took a deep breath. "Some days are just better than others. That's all." Belle forced herself to shrug. "Are you sure you're all right with Hook going for Emma?"
He scowled. "No. But Hook'll bring both of them back safely, and if I'm lucky, he'll make an ass out of himself and piss her off. And I really am needed here. Hook couldn't lead an army if one threw itself at him."
"At least he's good in a scrap?"
"Robin is good in a scrap," Baelfire corrected her. "You watch yourself out there, okay? I think Dad would probably resurrect himself and kill me if I let anything happen to you."
Belle smiled wistfully, but she didn't tear up. Some days were worse than others, but she wasn't some weepy little princess. She poked Baelfire in the chest instead and gave him an exasperated look. "No, if he were here, he'd tell you that no one decides my fate but me. I'm not going to hide, Bae. This is my world, too, and I'm going to fight for it."
She would rework the curse. Fragile, human, and without magic, the process should have been simple, though a part of him knew that more time had passed than ought to have passed.
Fire roared through the left side of his chest, and he screamed weakly in pain. He convulsed, but the chains holding him were too tight, and his body barely moved. Everything burned, and then darkness tore into him, racing through every muscle and every bone, tearing, ripping, slashing into his soul. He screamed again, helplessly shaking against the onslaught he could not fight.
Sometime after the darkness finally withdrew, he heard her snarl: "I will have no Merlins here."
Hook set out to find Emma and Henry the same day that Robin's merry brand of marauders left the castle. Belle supposed that the small group really couldn't call itself Robin's merry men any longer; even though Mulan had left to command an army, Regina had more or less taken her place, and now Belle was along for the ride, also. Not that they were actually riding. There weren't enough horses to provide both the army and their raiders with mounts, so they set out on foot.
"There's something we forgot to mention back at the castle," Robin said when they stopped for the first night, exchanging a look with Regina that spelled trouble.
"Oh, this should be fantastic," Alan-a-Dale snorted from where he leaned against a tree, his ankles crossed casually.
Robin, of course, looked her way. "Lady Belle, do you want to explain?"
"You're going to have to stop calling me that one of these days," she pointed out sourly but fondly.
"Not with your father stomping around the castle, my Lady," was the grinning response, although they both knew that wasn't the reason. Sir Maurice—thankfully off with Charming's army—threw noble suitors and knights at Belle on almost a daily basis, hoping one of them might catch her fancy. He'd found her and Robin talking quietly one day, and had tried to run the outlaw off, shouting that Robin wasn't worthy of his daughter. Belle had tried to explain that she and Robin had met years ago and they were just catching up, but even Robin's explanation of how she had saved his life didn't mollify Sir Maurice.
"Oh, because a man who could shoot a half dozen arrows into my father before he could draw his sword is so terrified of him," Belle shot back.
"My Lady!" Robin gasped, looking offended. "How could you say such a thing? It would be at least a dozen."
Their small raiding force laughed, and Belle was glad that her joking with Robin could help break the tension a little bit. These were Robin's men, and though they were used to Regina and they all knew Belle, none of them were used to having her along, particularly not without Baelfire to ease things along. She was the lady of the castle they lived in, more or less, and most of them had started out as peasants of one sort or another.
She imagined that Regina had experienced even more problems fitting in with them at the start, but at least she was a powerful sorceress, with magic that could make an argument for itself. None of Robin's men were fools, and only a fool could discount how useful it was to have someone like Regina along, particularly given the nature of this war and just how many magical enemies Regina had slain since their return from Storybrooke.
"Well, I suppose I will explain, so long as you promise that you didn't pepper my father with arrows before we left," she said when the laughter died down.
"Cross my heart," Robin replied jauntily.
Belle took a deep breath, and then turned to the others. "It actually started with the message you all intercepted last month," she started. "I was able to decode it a few days ago, and it concerns the town we are heading towards."
"They are hiding something there, aren't they?" Alan asked.
"According to the message, there's an object of great magical power there," Belle replied. "Something that the Witch has been told to send her fiercest creatures to guard."
Much the Miller's Son dropped his head into his hands morosely. "Flying monkeys again. Great."
"Flying monkeys and more," Regina interjected, but she was smiling. "It sounds like the Witch has also acquired a dragon."
"A what?" several voices demanded at once, but Robin shrugged.
"You hold it still, I'll kill it," he said to Regina with a cheeky smile. "I've always wanted to be a dragonslayer."
Regina's laugh always made her look years younger. "I was hoping you'd say that."
"Is that why you raided my squid ink supplies?" Belle had to interject, not sure when they'd become hers, but still wanting to know the answer.
"I didn't think you'd notice," Regina replied, abashed.
"You could just ask next time," Belle pointed out.
"My apologies."
Taking a deep breath, Belle nodded. Regina's words were a bit stiff, but the remorse was genuine; although the pair would probably never like one another, they'd formed an odd type of understanding over the last year. Aside from Belle and Baelfire, Regina had known Rumplestiltskin better than anyone, and she mourned him, too. Belle wasn't quite able to forgive Regina for tricking her and then locking her up, but she could move past that. Regina was their best hope for defeating the Witch, after all. They needed her.
Particularly because the fairies weren't being very helpful, unless you counted Tinkerbelle, who spent more time at the Dark Castle than she did wherever the rest of the fairies called home. Astrid was off with Grumpy and the army, of course, but she seemed to have given up on being a fairy, period. Tinkerbelle had offered to teach her—over the Blue Fairy's objections, of course—but Astrid (who no longer went by Nova at all) had refused. And the other fairies had followed Blue off to whatever stronghold they had, there to do, well…something. Belle wasn't sure what, and it was irritating that the fairies no longer felt they had a stake in the war just because they had somewhere safe to go.
"So," Belle continued brightly. "Whatever this object is, we need to acquire it or destroy it. From what the message said, it might even be one of the Secondary Powers, and that means that it could be used to kill the Witch. Maybe it could even work against whatever or whoever it is who is backing her."
"So, what you're saying is that killing the flying monkeys and a bloody dragon could possibly win us this war," Little John said after everyone gave her words a moment to sink in. "Assuming we can fetch whatever you want us to fetch."
"Pretty much."
"But we have no idea what this object is," Tuck pointed out. "Do we?"
Belle smiled crookedly. "Not a clue. I mean, I know what some of the Secondary Powers are—I found a book on them—but I won't know until we're there. I did bring the book."
"I can help," Regina volunteered unexpectedly. "If there is an object of such power being hidden in Bremen, I can find it. After we're done with the dragon, of course."
The smile she gave Robin was radiant, and Belle wondered if Regina knew enough about magic to combine her hair with the outlaw's and find out if there was yet another True Love pair in the castle. The way Tinkerbelle watched them and the way the Blue Fairy frowned indicated that this might actually be True Love, despite the fact that the Blue Fairy seemed determined to argue that no redemption was possible once darkness started to consume a person. Belle, however, knew differently, and Regina deserved happiness. She had waited long enough, and sacrificed enough.
Somehow, she thought even Rumplestiltskin would be happy for his old student.
He thought he was in a cellar. The wall they chained him to was cold and damp, and the persistently murky smell screamed 'underground' like nothing else did. Blindfolded more often than not, he had no concept of time. The last he had seen of daylight was before they threw him into the darkness. The only light he saw now came when torches strayed too close to his face; they burned the blindfold off once while he screamed in pain. Someone had healed him after that, but the magic had an odd flavor to it, one he could not recognize. Someone else muttered that the wounds should have killed him had he been human, but no one noticed the muffled sound of mixed amusement and befuddlement he made from behind the gag.
From the first, they'd asked for nothing and brought only pain. Only she—the woman whose face was a blur in his memory from the pain—actually spoke to him, and what she wanted made no sense. There was something about a curse and the scar on his chest, and both references made him want to laugh and tell the torturers how stupid they were.
By time ticked by, and everything hurt. The constant onslaught of darkness and pain robbed him of most of his coherent memories; images drifted by sometimes, not all of which made sense. The flashes of memory were disjointed, disconnected. He remembered darkness, death, fury and lashing out until the entire world burned with his pain. He remembered tricks and traps and trying so very hard to do better, failing all the while. He remembered a battle, a great War in which the nature of magic itself changed, remembered betrayal and pain and sacrifice—
And love. He remembered love, too.
Buried beneath centuries of rage, power, and pain, there was love. Flickering against the darkness, there remained a small light. He could hardly recall feeling it, but it was there, somewhere, just on the edge of his consciousness. And when the pain grew too great he clung to it, holding tightly to that feeling while he screamed and sobbed, all the while unable to remember why.
"Y'know, I'm starting to think that this bunch of ogres is nothing more than a distraction," Baelfire said to David, keeping his tone conversational. The last thing their threadbare army needed was for their leaders to start sounding panicked; if there was anything Bae had learned from painful experience, it was if the leadership started to be afraid, the army would quickly turn from brave to terrified, and there was almost no coming back from that.
There were many reasons Prince Thomas had been relegated to commanding the reserves, and his inability to keep his own fears under control were certainly high on the list. Oh, he cut a pretty figure in armor and his daddy the king was undoubtedly proud, but the boy was something of a nervous ninny. If there was anything Bae hated more than playing the Enchanted Forest status game, it was doing it with someone who couldn't man up enough to take care of his own responsibilities. Granted, Prince Thomas admittedly still held a grudge over the minor inconvenience of Bae's father having demanded his and Ella's firstborn, but that really wasn't a convincing reason for Thomas to have been quite so overbearing.
Maybe Belle was right. Maybe I could have been more diplomatic, but the boy's an idiot, and he got dozens killed by his little freakout. Being royalty doesn't absolve him for his mistakes, and so what if I knocked him unconscious and took command? It was almost a year ago, and it's not like I left him to rot on the battlefield.
"They seem pretty convincing to me," David remarked, sitting relaxed on his own horse as they surveyed the battlefield. Sometimes thinking of the fact that this man was Emma's father was absolutely surreal, but Baelfire liked David. He respected him enormously, too, which was why he went to great pains not to respond to this prince like he would have if Thomas had said something so inane.
"Well, they wouldn't be a very good distraction if they didn't," he replied with a twisted smile. David snorted, and Bae waved a hand at the archers who were attempting to take out the dozens of ogres. "But look at them. They're…kind of staying in one spot. Like they have something to hide."
David nodded immediately. "Or like they're trying to buy time. While our entire army sits here and waits for the archers to clear the ogres out of the way."
"Exactly." This was why he liked David. The man had a first-rate brain, particularly when it came to battles. Bae wasn't sure when or how he'd grown quite so comfortable with armies and warfare, but it all made sense to him, and he made an even better team with David than he did with Robin. David handled the tactical end while Baelfire looked at the big picture, and together they generally managed to win battles instead of losing, even when they were at the wrong end of three-to-one odds like they usually were.
"What are you thinking?"
He scratched his goatee absentmindedly. "Honestly, I was just thinking about how much I want to know what's on the other side of that ridge."
Emma's father snorted again. "The one right behind the ogres. Naturally."
"Well, it wouldn't be much fun otherwise, would it?" Bae shot back, making David roll his eyes. But the prince did start passing orders to his senior officers, and before long, the army started making its way around the ogres and into the valley beyond them.
Three hours later, they finished off the real battle, having interrupted the Witch's forces whilst they were in the midst of setting up the second best trap Bae had ever seen, complete with flying monkeys and what would have been a well-positioned ambushing force if Bae hadn't brought the cavalry around into their flank before the Witch's archers could finish digging in. Not long after that, the false retreat he led suckered the Witch's griffins—her main attacking force, one they'd been trying to destroy for months—straight into the best trap Baelfire had ever created (or seen), and burned the lot up with some well-placed fire arrows. The oil they'd soaked the ground in the night before ignited immediately, filling the valley with flames and death.
A few flying monkeys managed to escape the inferno, but most of the Witch's best army burned to a cinder, and if David looked a little nauseous after the battle, well, that was the breaks. Even if Emma chose Hook, Baelfire was damn well going to make sure that Henry had a safe world to come back to, and that meant killing the enemy before the enemy could kill them. He'd dedicate his life to that goal, if that was what it took, and have no regrets whatsoever. Oddly enough, Regina understood that better than anyone else. That was why she was off doing everything she could to defeat the Wicked Witch while Hook fetched Emma and Henry. They both wanted Henry to be safe, even if it was with someone else.
"Where did you learn this?" David asked him quietly as they watched the fires burn themselves out.
Baelfire shrugged. "It was either video games or figuring out how to outsmart Pan in Neverland. Pick one."
"I think being a tricky son of a gun must run in your family tree," the prince replied after a moment, smiling. "Henry certainly got that from you, anyway."
"Yeah." Thinking of family was still damn complicated, particularly while living in his father's castle with the woman who his father had loved, and with his son stuck in a world that Neal Cassidy had tried so hard to make his own. Not to mention the fact that I'm in love with a princess, who is the actual heir to not one but two kingdoms once we straighten this mess out.
It was probably a good thing that Emma hadn't been there during the last year. She would have punched out a half-dozen of the self-important lordlings and knights would have undoubtedly tried to charm their way into her heart, and then maybe shot them for good measure. But oh how he would have paid to see that. Bae missed her more than words could describe. Although Emma hadn't really been back in his life for very long, and he'd spent more time missing over the years than he had actually spent with her, thinking of her made his heart ache. Shaking himself free of those thoughts, Bae forced his attention back onto Emma's father.
"He's a good kid," Bae said hoarsely, hoping and praying that the Witch hadn't found a way through to endanger Emma and Henry. "A great kid. Even if he's got the craziest family tree ever."
David laughed. "Well, I'm actually a shepherd and not royalty at all, if it makes you feel any better."
"Really?" He hadn't heard that one before.
"Oh, yeah. Sheep and all."
"Well, maybe someday I'll show you the village I grew up in," Baelfire replied, his eyes on one of the dead ogres. "Assuming it's still there."
"Be careful what you promise," David warned him with a grin. "I might take you up on that. It might be nice to see somewhere normal."
"Funny. I'm not sure what normal is any more, to be honest."
Normal. Had he once had a normal life, the child of a crippled spinner and a woman who wanted out so badly that she ran away with a pirate? Baelfire barely remembered normal, despite the fact that his memories of Hamlin sometimes seemed so fresh that he might have left yesterday. More than two and a half centuries had passed since his real childhood. Who would have thought he'd wind up here, commanding armies and sharing jokes with a king? No matter what David wanted to call himself, the man clearly wasthe most powerful king in the entire Enchanted Forest; he and Snow White were the leaders everyone turned to, even the older monarchs.
Dirt poor thirteen year old Balefire would have never imagined himself in this position, not when he'd been certain that he'd die doing his duty in the Ogre Wars. He hadn't wanted to die then, but he'd wanted to fight, and a part of him had been irrationally angry at his father for years because he'd never gotten the chance. Well, I've seen plenty of battles and ogres now, he thought with a crooked smile. It's not nearly as glorious as I thought it would be, and now I'm doing it for entirely different reasons. These days Bae understood his father better than ever before; all he wanted was to make sure that Henry didn't have to fight these battles, and that his son would have a safe world to grow up in.
Sometimes, he supposed, fate really did have a rotten sense of humor.
A/N: So, here we go! Stay tuned for Chapter 2: "Ancient History," in which Belle, Regina, Robin and company find something no one expects in Bremen and Baelfire tries to save idiot royals from themselves.