Chapter 55

As a wedding gift, Gold had taken Bae aside and offered to pay for the honeymoon, but Bae had surprised him. "Thanks, Pop, that's a fantastic gift, but, the thing is, I want to do it myself, as my gift to Emma. See, when we were together the first time, we used to daydream about places we'd like to go. We'd go into public libraries and flip through the travel books, and we found this one with color photos of Barbados. Emma was knocked out by it. I promised her someday I'd take her there, and now I am. I've been saving up; ever since I moved to Storybrooke, I started saving, because I knew I'd marry her someday. So thanks, but no; I hope you're cool with that."

"I get it, son. Nothing made me happier than to be able to make Belle's daydream happen. What would you like as a wedding gift from us?"

Bae had grinned. "Thanks for asking, Pop. What we really need is a place for Henry to stay while we're gone. David and Snow would do it, but then we'd have to take Henry out of school for those two weeks."

And that's how it happened that Belle and Gold got a taste of parenting a teenager.

First there's the sheer mass of stuff that comes along with a boy moving in for two weeks–and that's even with having ready access to his own house, just two miles away. The clothes alone take an entire trunk: since he's in sports, Henry needs three changes of clothes a day: his classroom clothes, his baseball uniform and his pajamas.

The first time she washes Henry's clothes, Belle finds something in his hamper that's completely foreign to her, a stretchy contraption with a Fruit of the Loom label. She brings it to Gold: "What is this? Should I put it in the washer?"

"Beats me. We didn't have such things in my day." He holds it up for examination, turning it around and around until. . . "I think it's a codpiece." When she looks more confused, he clarifies, "Underwear."

Belle looks doubtful. "It doesn't offer much coverage, does it?"

"Maybe it's the male version of a thong." Gold shudders, imagining wearing such a contraption himself.

Belle has her bedroom smile on; she's imaging the same thing. "No, Belle, don't ask: I'm sticking with boxers."

She looks disappointed. "Well, what's that pocket in the front for?"

With as straight a face as he can muster, Gold suggests, "Car keys?"

She punches his shoulder. "You're not helping. What should I do with it?"

"Well. . . I'll just go ask Henry. Man to man." He squares his shoulders and with a kiss as his token, proceeds like a knight into battle.

He's back in five minutes, red-faced; he drops the contraption into the laundry basket.

"Did you find out what it is?" Belle asks. He just nods. "What's it for?"

"Just wash it with the whites."

"At least tell me what it's called. Rumple! If we're going to be parents, I need to know these things."

"We'll just make sure our son joins the chess club. Just remembered: gotta water the garden." Gold rushes off.

Then there's the case full of toiletries: smelly ointments, messy creams for zits; antiperspirant, aftershave (Henry doesn't have a whisker; he just wants girls to think he does). Everything but toothpaste: he forgot to pack that, so Henry takes Gold's. He squeezes it from the middle and leaves the cap off. Naturally.

Then there's the electronics. Henry comes complete with enough gadgets to start his own mad-scientist lab. Gold helps him carry it all in, but when they have all that equipment spread out on the bedroom floor, it's like a snake pit of wires. "Help me hook it up, Grandpa?"

"Sure." Gold picks up something that has a hole in it and starts trying out various wires, looking for a piece that will fit the hole.

"No, that goes with the X-Box."

"Oh. Of course." Gold picks up something that looks like a wing and searches for a hole to plug a wire into.

"No, that goes with the Wii."

Gold sets the wing aside. Now here's something he understands: a guitar. Except apparently Henry got mad at it one day and tore off the strings (so the lad's inherited the Stilitskin temper, eh?). Gold tries, to no avail, to plug the guitar into something, anything. Before Henry can tell him he's wrong again and the guitar goes with the ScrewYou, Gold clambers to his feet. "Just remembered, gotta water the garden," he mumbles.

And then there's the phone, Henry has only one, but he has a different ring tone for each friend, and he has a lot of friends. Worse, the ring tones don't ring, like a sensible phone does: they whistle or sing or chirp like electronic birds or crack like baseball bats hitting a homer. Gold's house fills with sounds that make him feel like he's fallen through a portal to Wonderland. The ring tones fill his dreams with creepy noises. Gold walks around his house like a soldier walking through a landmine field, until at last he limits Henry's phone usage to two hours a day.

What he gains in release from the ring tones, he loses to knocking. Girls start showing up at his door, asking for Henry: some at least pretend to have homework with them, but a few have come to very boldly ask Henry out. There's a coffee shop the teens in town have confiscated as their own, even those who, like Henry, are too young to drink coffee: the ambiance–amateur guitarists playing Pete Seeger songs, coffee aromas, murals of South American bean fields–is attraction enough. Parents permit their kids to spend evenings here: the owner discreetly reports to parents any major infractions.

As Gold discovers, the night he's called about Henry. "Uhm, Mr. Gold, do you know where your car is?"

Gold's mouth goes dry as he walks out onto his porch. "Cy, what are you in your not so subtle way referring to?" He looks toward the garage: the door is open.

"I take it you don't know then: the Caddy is here." The Caddy: it's the only one in town. Henry's vanity's overwhelmed his intelligence: if he'd taken Belle's nondescript Honda, he might have gotten away with it.

"Thanks, Cy." Gold pokes his head back into the house. "Going for a walk, Belle."

"Okay, honey."

He could borrow the Honda, but walking to the coffee shop gives Gold time to reason with himself. He reflects on all the ways Bae screwed up as a kid: well, they were too poor for Bae to do anything this big. He reflects on the war stories he's heard from other parents. He makes a mental list of all the things teens get into: drugs, drinking, breaking and entering. This is small potatoes by comparison; still, it's borderline larceny. "Ah, Henry, you're on my watch. Why couldn't it have been Playboys under your mattress?"

By the time he gets to the coffee shop, he's calm. He has a plan. He knows a reasonable punishment to impose. He will walk in, taking on his old Dark One face to scare the kids, but he'll speak slowly, coolly, not embarrass Henry, just remove him from the scene before imposing punishment.

He throws the coffee shop door open. "HENRY MILLS SWAN GOLD! Get you ass out here now! You're in Big Trouble, young man!"

Gold's second mistake: he doesn't give Henry a chance to obey (or recover his poise after being yelled at in front of friends). Gold storms over to the couch where Henry is sitting with two girls and another boy; he yanks Henry up by the arm and hauls him toward the exit as the girls giggle and the boy speculates that "it must be time for Widdle Henwy's diaper change."

Gold realizes then he's screwed up, but he's too angry to apologize just yet and Henry's too angery to listen to an apology. So they stomp back home, and Henry runs into his bedroom and slams the door, and Gold hovers outside, shifting from foot to foot as he alternately decides to barge in and yell some more—or apologize; he's not sure which would be effective—or walk off until they've both calmed down. When Belle, puzzled, approaches, Gold growls, "Gotta water the garden" and bangs out the kitchen door.

Henry doesn't speak to him for a week. He obediently accepts his punishments of cleaning and repainting the garage (the garage is only a couple of years old and doesn't need painting, but that fact serves to remind Henry this chore is a punishment), but he glares when Gold tries to start a conversation. Gold goes out to tend the garden so he won't yell at Henry, and so Henry won't see he's hurt.

Belle has a heart-to-heart with each of "her boys," separately, and they mumble apologies, and Gold says, "Yankees game on tonight," and Henry says, "Can we order pizza," and when Emma Skypes in later that night, Henry reports he's having a great time and Gold reports Henry's been doing his homework and helping around the house.

When Bae and Emma, sunburnt and tired, come for Henry and his clothes and computers and pimple cream, Gold grabs the boy for a hug, and Henry hugs him back. "Thanks, Belle. Thanks, Grandpa. You guys are the coolest." Gold knows Henry means it, and he means it when he answers, "Come back anytime."

"I know we made some mistakes with him," Belle reflects as they wave goodbye.

"Thanks for the 'we,'" Gold says. "But the mistakes were all mine."

"Don't be hard on yourself. I think you did very well. It must be so much harder to raise a teenager now than when you raised Bae; the technologies provide too many ways for kids to get into trouble."

"Got that right. If Bae had wanted to go joy riding, he would have had to steal a sheep. Our village was so poor no one owned a horse."

"All in all, I think we did okay, and we'll do better when it's our own child. Rumple. . . I still want a baby," Belle proclaims.

"Me too. Just not a teenage one," Gold says.

Gold's garden has gotten a lot of water in those two weeks.

That hairbrush is stuck in his mind. Well, who wouldn't be obsessed with the possibility of acquiring (in his case, reacquiring) power surpassing that of any mortal man? It doesn't matter how many times he reminds himself he can't have both his family and his power, or how often he measures his current happiness against that of any other time in his life. He stands his memory of his wedding to Belle against the day he led the children of his village home from war. Choose, he demands of himself. The wedding march or the homeward march? He stands his memory of sitting in Yankee Stadium with Henry, Bae and Dove against the day his enchantment of Ruth's ring led Charming to Snow White. Which would he keep?

He knows where happiness lies, and yet his body craves, yearns for, was born for magic.

He tells Archie about the hairbrush.

"Wow," Archie exclaims. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The same ingredients that made magic in the first place still exist in this world."

"Yeah."

"I guess the first question should be 'Why?' What do you need that only magic can do for you?"

"It's my destiny. Just as you were born to counsel people and Charming was born to rescue them, I was born to make magic. "

"Why?"

"Excuse me?"

"The world needs rescuers and counselors. Why do we need sorcerers?"

"For the same reason we need music and art and literature. To inspire, to feed the imagination, to inform and nourish the soul."

"Not to give one man the power to turn people into quaking globs of jelly. Or to enable one woman to make an entire town drop to its knees."

"That's what magic does to some of us. Not all."

"Perhaps. But I recall that for the so-called 'good' users, magic made them judgmental, unforgiving–and those qualities make a person unloving."

"You think I made the right decision then about the brush."

"It doesn't matter what I think. What do you think? And how do you feel?"

"Confused. It used to seem so simple. I wanted protection from bullies, I wanted to provide for my family, I wanted my son back. Answer: magic."

"You have healthier ways to accomplish those goals. Maybe you've outgrown magic."

"I like that thought. It puts me, not magic, in the driver's seat."

"Which brings us back to your question: can magic take a back seat in your life? It's already a crowded car you're driving: family, friends, a town. Who would you kick out of the car to make room for magic?"

"No one."

"There you go."

"But with magic I could conjure a bigger car."

"Rumple. . . ." Archie sighs. "Yeah, but are you strong enough to wrest the wheel away? Because you know the Dark One will seize it from you."

"That's what I'm asking. But what I hear you telling me is, if the answer was yes, I wouldn't be asking the question."

"So what do you think about the choice you made?"

"I think I did the smart thing. Not the fun thing, but the smart thing."

"Well, look at it this way: you can now get on with the business of living, and that's a nice business to be in."

In her old flannel shirt and frayed jeans, with a bucket full of rags in one hand, her keys in the other and a broom under her arm, she looks just as she did in the old days, when she was Belinda Dove, come to clean Mean Mr. Gold's pink house on the hill. Except, he reminds himself, that's his ring on her finger, that's his kiss that's swollen her lips, that's his chest she's admiring. She drops the bucket. "One more try before I go?" Her free hand slides under his shirt.

"I think I can–" But the kitchen door bangs open. "Belle, you ready? Let's hit the road."

Belle picks up her bucket. "All right. We'll probably get back around six."

"I'll have dinner waiting."

He sends her off with a last kiss. While she, the Doves and the Swan-Golds assist the nuns in converting the pawn shop into a clothes giveaway station, he will spend the day serving antiquers. At noon he'll stroll over to Persie's, where Persimmon Plockton will have the daily special and this week's issue of the BC Chimes ready for him. He'll keep busy enough.

Still, he's grumpy. It's not his bad ankle that's preventing him from working alongside the family: it's his bad behavior from long ago, for which he'll be answering all the rest of his life. But he has to admit, he has nothing to complain about. He's only forbidden from one town; he was left the rest of the world to play in, and he has. So he slips a copy of Fodor's Disneyland with Kids (because although he's not Rumplestiltskin any longer, he's still a long-range planner) into his pocket, picks up his cane and walks to work.

"No, ma'am, that's not a popcorn popper; it's a bed warmer. It belonged to an apothecary in Rochester. I haven't been able to verify its origins, but from the emblem on the back, I think it was manufactured–"

His cell phone begins to ring with Belle's ring tone. She hadn't planned to call. Nervous, he excuses himself from the customers; a moment later, he's back with them, excusing himself again. "Folks, I'm going to have to close now. Family emergency."

The customers accept the explanation and wish him well. He follows them out, then flags down Sheriff Wolf. "Can you take me to my house so I can pick up my car?" At Wolf's nod, he jumps into the passenger seat. "There's been an accident. It's Emma."

Wolf barks an expletive. "Forget your car. I'll take you. Where we going?"

"Storybrooke General Hospital."

Wolf glances at him, then guns the squad car engine.

"Just drop me off at home. You could lose your job if you take me into Storybrooke."

"I don't think so. That's my deputy in trouble. What happened?"

Considering the risk Wolf is taking, Gold can't lie to him, but the sheriff is a down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth man: this truth won't fly with him. "She got exposed to some hazardous chemicals. She's unconscious."

"F–."

As they pass the Gold house, Gold makes a snap decision. "Stop! Wait. I have something that could help her." He leaps out of the car, leaving the door open; in a minute he's back, slamming the door. "Let's go."

Wolf wheels onto the highway. "What is that?" He glances at Gold's lap. "Is that a hairbrush?"

"I'll explain later." Gold hesitates for just a moment, then, to Wolf's amazement, he begins to brush his hair.

The gray-brown strands are glowing and dancing around the auburn ones by the time Wolf parks the squad car in the visitors' lot at Storybrooke General. Wolf glances at the brush, but he doesn't really notice what's happening; his mind now is focused on the hospital staff. "Emma Gold! Which room?"

An orderly begins to stop him, but Wolf flashes his badge. "Yes, sir. Room 314A. I'll take you."

Other hospital staff take note of Wolf's companion, and phones are picked up, security guards are summoned. In 314A, civilians stand off to the side of the room as medics work over the unconscious patient. The nuns are praying with Bae, Charming and Snow.

A man Gold doesn't recognize is offering comfort to the queen and her consort; the man wears a crisp uniform with the sheriff's badge pinned to the pocket. This new sheriff leaves the queen to investigate the newcomers. Wolf nudges his way past the dwarfs and offers a handshake to the Storybrooke sheriff. "Sheriff Ian Wolf, Scotsman County. She's my deputy."

That's all he needs to say. The local sheriff accepts the handshake. "Richard Grayson. Deputy Swan is a hero here; we're doing all we can for her. She was in the deserted pawnshop on Gold Way when she collapsed, fell into unconsciousness. That was an hour ago. They haven't been able to revive her."

Charming spies Gold standing behind Wolf. "What are you doing here? Sheriff, this man–"

Snow interrupts. "This man is family. He can stay." She glares at her husband, who is about to protest, then grabs Gold's sleeve. "Help her."

Gold's mouth opens and closes uselessly.

Whale, a silver box in his hand, breaks away from the other medics and comes to Snow's side. He shows Gold the silver box. "Emma was holding this snuff box when the ambulance arrived."

"It came from a locked drawer in my workroom." Gold can't face Snow. "I thought I'd disposed of it. I took it from a pirate I defeated in a swordfight."

"What's this black, oily stuff inside? We found a smudge of it on Emma's fingertip."

Gold's mouth twitches. "Dreamshade."

"Never heard of it."

"Exclusive to Neverland."

"Toxic?"

Gold nods.

"Antidote?"

"I have a spell that I think will work. Not sure; I didn't get to the testing stage."

"Oh please. . . ." Snow begs.

Now he looks her in the eye. "It requires magic."

"Then we're lost." Snow falls into David's arms.

A powerful memory stirs in Gold's imagination as he hears a child's voice from the past: "Papa, help her. Use your magic!" In his mind's eye he sees the fourteen-year-old Bae kneeling at the bedside of his friend Morraine. All it takes is the slow movement of the Dark One's hand across the girl's body: the ogre bite wounds on her legs vanish, the claw marks on her chest disappear. "There, there, sweet girl, get some sleep now, eh?"

That boy's voice comes back to him now as a man's. "Pop, can't you do something?"

A hand squeezes his wrist and a voice whispers into his ear, "Do it." Belle walks around from behind him, draws his head toward hers and whispers, "You brought my new brush."

"I intended to–I'm not sure–"

"It's working." She lifts his hand and they admire the colors sparkling around the bristles. "There's no choice."

"Francoise! Go back to the shop. Behind the Sherwood Forest landscape–"

"I know the one." Fran is already in the hallway.

"Combination is left 42, right 39, left 12. Get the Golden Fleece, bring it back here."

"You got it, Rumple!"

"Josiah," Gold calls out. "I need a ride. Blue, will you come?"

As Gold, Dove, Blue and Belle start for the elevator, Bae calls after them. "Pop! Whatever you're doing, good luck, huh? And hurry."