The girl kept crying till she ran out of tears and just sobbed dryly. She curled herself up in a ball on the thin straw mattress, pulling a dirty rag full of holes over her to preserve some warmth. Her weeping turned into quiet breathing as she inevitably succumbed to sleep. Rumpelstiltskin sat in his cell, watching her. He didn't need to sleep and that was how he spend most of his nights - or what he guessed to be nights according to his inner clock - staring at something absent-mindedly or thinking. Well, that was a half-truth. He would have to catch some sleep eventually, but he hated it.
As soon as he would close his eyes and let his mind slip into half-consciences, he would be haunted by terrible visions. Most of them were random - usually Rumpelstiltskin watched himself murder for the first time, stabbing the men who wronged him repeatedly until hot thick blood covered his fingers and left a metal ting in his mouth; or he was forced to look at his rage-contorted face as his fingers crushed his wife's heart, the expression changing to cruel glee as the wind carried away the dust that was the remains of her life. There were many more - his dark experiments with human flesh; ripping nails off the hand of a man who tried to steal from him and torturing people whose faces he couldn't quite recall. There was no lack of disturbing images which would whirl in his mind and make his sleep restless. He's done his share of evil and he would sometimes dream of the terrible things those who were the Dark One before him did. If he cared to dig deep enough in his memory, he could recall the tiniest details of their lives, but he never cared for it.
Those images (Rumpelstiltskin refused to call them nightmares, they were simply memories of real-life horror) were hard to wake up from. They were like a sticky web that clung to his mind, not allowing him to break free easily and turning his mood foul for days.
The girl's dreams weren't peaceful either, she thrashed around and whimpered. Rumpelstiltskin wondered what could trouble her at such a young age. She looked to be in her early twenties, maybe a little older.
She woke up at the sound of a food tray being shoved in her direction. She jerked upward instantly, looking around wildly. Rumpelstiltskin picked up his bowl of porridge and scowled at its greyish contents. He was mildly hungrybut he didn't want to even think of putting that concoction in his mouth. Rumpelstiltskin actually was amazed by the meal. It must have taken an enormous lack of any cooking skills to prepare that. Did Charming and Snow White hire someone to spoil all his meals? Few of his worst potions could look as bad as this porridge. He could transfigure the food of course, there were spells for it. But it would just be a temporary solution and he dreaded the feeling of the meal changing back to its form inside his stomach as it would probably cause some serious damage. Magic was dangerous to play around with, even though he mastered it, it tended to turn out unexpectedly once in a while.
He entertained the idea of throwing the spoon at the food-boy but decided not to. After all, he didn't want the lad to start spitting into his porridge. Instead he winked at the boy and watched his terrified face with satisfaction.
Rumpelstiltskin noticed that all the girl got was water. She pressed the cup to her lips clumsily and drank the contents down hastily, a few drops escaping her mouth and trickling down her neck. She put the empty cup down and, avoiding staring in his direction (not that she would actually see him in the dark), wrapped herself back up into the blanket and lay down to face the wall. She began crying again, quietly at first but gradually louder as she shivered with cold.
Rumpelstiltskin didn't feel cold nor was he sensitive to heat. His body could adjust to any temperature and he was immune to illnesses, but humans were different. Maybe the girl would catch a cold and die, he speculated, that would be mercy for her.
Her wailing was getting on his nerves though. He hoped she would cry herself back to sleep but after several hours of sobbing he realized that wasn't going to happen.
"Stop it!" He snapped. "You're giving me a headache."
The girl tensed up and stopped crying indeed, but she also muttered something incomprehensible under her breath.
"What was that, dearie?" He enquired sweetly.
Rumpelstiltskin expected the girl to grow quiet but instead she surprised him by repeating her words clearly.
"I said", she began, her voice husky from sleep and all the crying, "that you definitely know how to comfort a person."
The Dark One just blinked at that statement. Did she just give him sass? She certainly did not sound afraid, unlike most people who dared to talk to him. Perhaps she was too dehydrated from all of the crying or did the muddy water made her tipsy? While Rumpelstiltskin was thinking over his reply, the girl sighed and turned to her other side. She pressed her palms together and lifted them to her mouth, breathing on them in attempt to warm up her fingers. She jerked and sat up when she felt something warm and fuzzy brush against her face.
"What was that?"
"Oh, it's just a rat, dearie. It probably came out to gnaw on your fingers when you sleep", Rumpelstiltskin said matter-of-factly.
He expected the girl to shriek or swoon (she was a lady after all) but she merely frowned at his words. Neither of them spoke again that night, the silence of the dungeon broken only by their soft breathing. The girl kept sitting up as though it could protect her fingers from the rats and drifted away to sleep in that position, not waking up even for the evening meal.