Chapter 21
They haven't buried a child, really. They've buried their own innocence.
Even Gold, who has committed many a crime in Storybrooke, had possessed innocence of a sort as long as he lived under the ignorance of the curse. After his awakening nearly a year ago, he'd kept himself so busy executing his plans–and so emotionally distracted with Belinda/Belle and the hope of bringing Adelena and Bae into his life–that he had managed to avoid confronting his past. But as he sprinkles a handful of soil onto the casket, it all comes crashing down on him. What a selfish, single-minded, bloody-minded ass he's been.
He climbs into the backseat of the Cadillac behind Belle. Later. He'll deal with his stupidity, his cruelty, his selfishness later. After he's won Bae back. He's come too far, he's too close now to risk getting sidetracked by remorse. Later, he'll let the softer feelings in.
"Thank you," Belle says, resting her head on his shoulder. Her gratitude makes him feel like a total bastard.
Each night at dinner Belle fills him in on the progress in the search for Baelfire: few significant leads from law enforcement; lots of leads, but all false, from social media. Belle's energy and enthusiasm increase with each day, however; she's busier than she's ever been, between assisting with Gold's legal research and hunting for Bae, but the activity seems to be good for her.
Not so much so for Gold as he runs back and forth between his office and the courthouse, and as he crosses another day off the kitchen calendar each night.
He has the word of a Seer that he will be reunited with Bae, but he's learned the hard way not to take information gained through Second Sight at face value. And then there's that pesky codicil the red-headed Seer put on her vision: "the boy will be your undoing." Still, he grits his teeth and soldiers on: he'll take the reunion at any price.
As soon as he's shown the last client of the day to the door, he crosses off another block on the calendar: Day Twenty-One.
He trudges into the kitchen to start supper. In the center of the table is a white box that FedEx delivered today. He raises a suspicious eyebrow at it, then turns his back on it as he pre-heats the oven. Opening the refrigerator, he throws a quick glance over his shoulder toward the box, as though expecting it to have moved. He lays out four tilapia fillets on a baking tray, seasons them, and as he slides the tray into the oven he scowls at the box. He keeps shooting eye daggers at it as he tosses a salad and heats up some dinner rolls. At last, with the meal cooking on its own, he has no more excuses; he tears the lid off the white box.
It looks kind of like a flat Etch-a-Sketch.
He picks the thing up and runs his fingers around its sides and back. He can't find the control knobs. There's a slit in one end but no on/off button. He growls; the store has sent him a defective device, obviously. He turns the box upside down and shakes it in search of the instruction manual: again, clearly, he's been cheated. He shakes the device but nothing happens. He grabs one end of the device and is about to fling it into the trash can when it clicks and its face lights up into quite a lovely, spacey picture of clouds and stars. The device shows him the date and time. Nice, now he's getting somewhere. He sits down at the table, holding the device delicately with both hands, careful not to smudge it. He stares at its face, waiting for something to happen. The clock changes but nothing else does.
He waits and the clock rolls over and over: five minutes, ten. The screen goes dead, but he's got this under control: there's a little black slider that he's figured out is the on/off switch. He slides it and sure enough, the screen lights up again.
He takes the rolls out of the oven and sits back down with the device, holding it like the Crown Jewels. The clock rolls over and over and the screen keeps dying, requiring repeated restarts. Fifteen minutes, twenty. The cosmic clouds are pretty enough but gods are they boring after twenty-five minutes. He growls at the infernal contraption as he takes the tilapia out of the oven.
"Rumple, I'm home!"
He jumps out of his seat. He hadn't even heard the front door open. He shoves the damn machine into the box and covers it with a dishcloth. As she strolls into the kitchen, he's setting the table, his features smooth as if he hasn't a care in the world. . . as if he hasn't just wasted four hundred dollars and twenty-five minutes on a piece of junk.
Belle kisses his cheek and brings a pair of tumblers down from the cupboard and fills them with iced tea–more ice than tea, but he doesn't mind: she has a thing for ice. As she sets the tumblers on the table, she notices the misplaced dishtowel and snatches it up to toss it into the sink. And then she sees the white box. "For me?" She's so delighted he can't bring himself to tell her the truth.
"I didn't get time to wrap it," he mumbles.
"An iPad!" She thanks him with a hug that's worth four hundred dollars and, forgetting all about supper, she sits down to play with the damn thing, her fingers skimming the surface of the device and making colors burst into life. "Thank you, darling! This is so much easier than my laptop. I promise to put it to good use. Let me just update my Facebook page. . . ." And in a few slashes of her finger across the screen, she's totally absorbed in a world as confusing and nonsensical as Wonderland.
He realizes he's made a mistake when he learns she can eat with one hand while operating the iPad with the other. He realizes he's made a colossal mistake when she takes the damn thing to bed with them.
"Where did all these kids come from?" Gold mutters as he and Belle slide into a booth farthest from the entrance. They're celebrating–when Belle asked the reason, Gold winked at her: "Because we can" (but really, because it's Day Twenty-Nine and in two days he can unleash magic in this world). He's treating her to dinner at Granny's and a movie, but it seems that everywhere they go, there are parents and children.
Intellectually, of course he knows there are a lot of children in Storybrooke: on his desk at home, he's got a stack of file folders a mile high and each one contains the story of a child. But it's been the parents he's been dealing with, only the parents: he seldom sees the children except briefly in the courtroom or in the wallet photos some of the parents thrust under his nose, in the desperate hope that if he can only see how special their children are, he'll want to help them. . . as if he can just wave a magic gavel and poof, all the custody disputes will disappear.
He never before noticed just how many kids there are in Storybrooke. It makes him nervous. Worse, when some of the adults insist upon bringing their tots up to Gold's table for introductions, it reminds him he must share the blame for the mess these families are in. Only four people in the world know this, and the one most likely to try to use his guilt against him has vanished from Storybrooke, but he squirms anyway when face to face with the innocent victims of his and Regina's curse.
Belle understands. She works her own sweet magic on these families, ushering them along without offending them. Still, it's only in the darkness of the movie theater that he relaxes.
The women beat him to the punch. On Day Thirty-One, they ambush him in his own kitchen as he groggily seeks out the coffee pot.
"We're close, I can feel it in my bones," Emma says, pouring him a cup of coffee. "And believe you me, after ten years of tracking down bail jumpers, my bones know what they're talking about."
"I have five thousand followers on my Twitter page," Belle says as she presents him with an omelet. "All over the world, parents of missing children are spreading the word for us. Someone out there will come forward any day now. A neighbor, a co-worker, a teacher, a doctor–someone out there knows Bae. It's just a matter of putting two and two together." She sits down at his right and Emma seats herself at his left.
"No," he growls. "No extensions. It's been a month. We do it my way now."
"I haven't even got the age progessions yet," Emma interjects. "Look, Gold, you've got to allow that time. Since we have no idea how old Bae is, I had to ask the artist to do progressions for every three years from age fourteen to age forty-two. Come on now, that's nine pictures. It's gonna take time. You know how hard it is when all you've got to go on is a three-hundred-year-old charcoal sketch drawn by an amateur?"
"And you've said yourself, you have no idea how magic will interact with the natural elements of this world," Belle says.
"And what if Regina show up?" Emma adds.
He pauses in mid-bite.
Emma presses her case. "You know she won't stay gone long. Not as long as Henry's here. Considering how much damage she did here without her powers, what do you suppose she'd do if she was fully charged again?"
"I can handle her," Gold argues.
"What if she comes after me again?" Belle lets the chilly question hang in mid-air.
Gold opens, closes, re-opens his mouth. "I'll protect you, Belle. I swear I will."
"I know you want to," she says fondly. "I know you'll try, but you can't be with me 24/7."
"She's not the only one you need to worry about, Gold," Emma reminds him. "There are other magicians here, right? What chance do the normal people have against them?"
Belle picks up the thread. "What would happen to Ruby if magic came here? What might the fairies do with their powers restored? With you being distracted with searching for Bae, Blue might take that as an opportunity to wage war on everyone she considers evil."
"She can have the town and welcome. Magic will show me where Bae is, and then you and I are out of here. We're not coming back."
"You thought like that before, but not any more," Belle insists. "You've changed, Rumple. You care what happens to the people here. In the past month, I've watched you change as you've helped these families reunite. You can't abandon them. You have too good a heart to do that."
"One more month, Gold. Just thirty more days," Emma bargains. "We'll find your boy. Have a little faith in your girl and me. Give us one more month and I'll owe you whatever favor you want. You say I'm 'the savior'—well, a favor from me's got to be worth something, right? One more month is all. Thirty days to do this the right way, so no one will get hurt."
"So you can tell Bae when you see him that you really have left magic behind for good," Belle finishes.
"Besides, you've still got eleven cases on the docket. You're not going to dump those kids, are you?" Emma pushes. "There's the Sellers triplets, the Hymel kids, Kyle and Keri Klemperer, Grace Hatter–who else, Belle?"
"Micky Nesmith, Peter and Adrienne Wilcott, the Bakers' two-year-old–"
"Stop!" Gold pushes away from the table so fast his chair topples. He doesn't pick it up. "All right, one more month, but that's all. I want your word, both of you, that if you haven't found Bae by the first of next month, you'll get out of my way. Let Red and Blue and Purple Polka Dot be damned. If you can't find Bae in thirty days, magic will. I'm going to work." He storms from the pink house.
Belle knows better than to remind him his work is now in his study. She cancels his morning appointments, and when she goes looking for him to bring him lunch, she finds him in the back of the shop with Jo, tinkering with a 1909 Kinetoscope. They're deep in a debate about two people Belle's never heard of: she's not sure if they're politicians or generals or what, but Gold is adamantly in favor of Casillas and Dove is just as vociferous about Buffon. She sets her picnic basket on the counter and tiptoes out, leaving them to their debate: she's already scored her victory for the day.
Day Forty.
He's been shut up in his study all morning, writing and rewriting the custody agreement he'll present to the Wilcotts and their rivals the Isleys tomorrow. It's complicated by the fact that in the Enchanted Forest, the Wilcotts were serfs and the Isleys, their masters, and those bitter feelings have carried over, although in Storybrooke the families are both solidly middle class.
Belle has been at the sheriff's office all day, working alongside Emma in the search for Bae. As a thank-you, at lunchtime Gold calls Granny's and asks Ruby to deliver them lunch. Throughout the day, he keeps his phone in his pocket, hoping it will ring with good news, the reward for the women's efforts.
At one p.m. it finally rings. The caller wants to know if he's satisfied with his phone service provider. He chucks his cell phone into the trash can.
He spends the rest of his day in meetings. He wonders how the women are doing. He wonders how the shop is doing. He wonders if France's win in the World Cup was just a fluke.
He wonders which city he'd be in right now, if he hadn't let the women talk him into one more month, and more importantly, whether Bae is looking for him too.
After the last client leaves, he opens the safe, then opens the ornamental egg just to make sure the vial is still there, still safe. It is. He sets it on his desk and watches a beam of sunlight light the potion from behind, so that it glows.
Through the open window he hears her car pull into the drive. Hastily he replaces his treasure in the safe.