Disney's Tinker Bell in Storybrooke
A Disney Fairies / Once Upon A Time Crossover
Season 1, Episode 8

STORYBROOKE, MAINE

Claire and Vidia drove home smelling of paint, lacquer and solvent. Each just wanted to shed their clothes and take a long, hot shower. They had dropped off Paul and Ben on their way back to the house. Vidia tried to engage Claire in conversation during the drive, but the older woman wasn't very talkative.

Dr. Hopper had wanted to continue weekly sessions with Vidia to help her transition into this new world and help with any relationship issues. That first session was difficult for Vidia. She wasn't used to talking about her inner feelings to someone she just barely knew. Archie did learn that Vidia sensed that Claire was pulling away from her. Perhaps unable to accept Vidia as a replacement for her Valerie. He advised the young woman to give Claire time to come around and accept her.

This emotional distance as he put it was a dramatic change from the Claire who, just a few days earlier, had pleaded openly with Vidia for her little girl's return and then wept uncontrollably. Vidia, however, decided to follow Dr. Hopper's advice and soldier on through it.

On the positive side Vidia was quite heartened to see that Tina and Penny were getting along so famously. As they should. Tinker Bell and Periwinkle were sisters, real sisters. Whatever magic may be holding back their memories, their sisterly bond could not be repressed. Vidia had missed that interaction between them since awakening in Storybrooke. They were fortunate to have found each other again.

When Claire opened the front door to the house she and Vidia found Penny tutoring Tina in Geometry. The two young girls were sitting at the dining room table giggling and having a good time. Maybe too good.

"Are you two studying?" Claire asked suspiciously.

"Yes," they both replied together. "Jinx!" they then squealed at each other.

Penny said it half a beat before Tina. "You owe me a soda."

"Is that all you drink, Penny?" Claire asked her. "Soda?"

"Yes, ma'am. It keeps me awake and helps me function."

"Water can help with that, too, you know."

"Water has no taste," Tina said.

Penny agreed. "Yeah, it's just so…"

"…bland," Tina finished. "It's flavorless…"

"…colorless…"

"…no sugar…"

"…and no fizz…"

"…to tickle your nose."

"It's just terrible," they both said together. "Jinx! Jinx again!"

To Claire, listening to the girls finishing each other's sentences was like watching a tennis match. Her head kept bobbing back and forth in rapid fire trying to keep up.

Vidia, on the other hand, rolled her eyes and turned to go upstairs. "Now there is something I don't miss," she grumbled on her way to a hot shower.

After all the hard work she had put in today, Vidia wished for a relaxing bath like in Pixie Hollow where other fairies were tasked with cleaning her wings. It was one of the few things she enjoyed when she had lived a life of self-imposed isolation.

After her less than relaxing shower Vidia sat in her room dressed in a robe and fresh clothes. The young brunette rubbed the pain from her feet as she stared longingly out her window. She missed being able to soar through the skies. Flying was at the center of her life. It was her life.

She was a fast flying fairy, after all. Speed, freedom, flying these were all part of their culture. More so than for any other talent guild in the Hollow. She was grounded and it made her feel sick to her stomach to know it couldn't be changed.

"Huh? What's that?" she muttered. Vidia had spotted a strange sight in the sky. It was long, white, rail thin and crawled slowly from east to west. "What a strange looking cloud. If it is a cloud."

~O~

The hot water rained down on her cream colored skin. Claire switched from spray to pulse. The beating of the water felt wonderful as it massaged her aching muscles. Slowly Claire washed away all of her sweat, aches and worries. All but one. How to accept Vidia into her heart and treat her as her little girl once again. It seemed that there were no easy answers.

Afterwards, Claire sat at the edge of her bed clean as a whistle. The hot shower felt so good and she smelled so clean and fresh. Her work clothes were another matter. They still carried the stench of paint, lacquer and the solvent that were used to remove both from the walls and trim of the Town Hall.

She was about to ask Penny if she wanted to stay for dinner again when Claire noticed the flashing message light on her cell phone. Two people had called. One wanted his leaves raked while the other needed branches trimmed and readied for the annual brush pickup.

Claire wanted to get started as soon as possible. The contract with the city was paying nicely, but she was still in debt and had to come up with extra money to meet both her debts and the monthly bills. Mr. Gold may have helped Valerie stay out of jail, but he would still throw them all out onto the street if she couldn't make her payment on time.

Remembering that Paul and Ben were always looking for more work she gave them a call and arranged to pick them up. Claire dressed quickly and hurried out of the house leaving young Tina in charge of the house. "Don't do anything until I get back. And wash our work clothes."

The door hadn't been closed for five seconds when Tina started grousing, "Aw, man. We we're having so much fun."

PIXIE HOLLOW, NEVER LAND (The Early Edwardian Period)

Tink felt satisfied that her new inventions were speeding up the work for so many talents in Pixie Hollow. Many of the guild overseers were quite welcoming of her ideas and implemented them once they proved to be effective and safe which they always were.

Tinker Bell had learned long ago to implement a lengthy "testing phase" to ensure anything coming out of her workshop was safe, easy to use and always in perfect working order. It gave her a good feeling to know she was improving both her home and the lives of those who lived here.

Soon, though, things changed. All of her advancements left Tinker Bell in an unusual bind. There was very little for her to invent. It turned out that she had done such a great job of tinkering her new inventions that they needed no improvement. Tinker Bell tried to fill her free time by spending it with Terence, but he was quite busy. His promotion to Assistant Overseer meant he woke up extra early and spent most of his time studying and practicing well into the night.

On the rare occasions that Tink and Terence could spend some time together he usually greeted her with an exasperated, "How does Fairy Gary do this every day?"

This left her feeling alone for the first time since she and Terence started dating. Tink tried to reconnect with her friends and her sister, all of whom got pushed aside by her relationship. However, her thoughts always turned back to two things: first that she really missed Terence and second she was beginning to feel useless as a tinker.

THE ENCHANTED FOREST

Rumpelstiltskin and his son quietly approached the Duke's castle late in the evening. The sun had gone down and most of the people inside were preparing for bed. Father and son were busily laying hay at the base of the castle walls so they could set the castle ablaze.

The night Hordor humiliated Rumpel in the forest, the old beggar who came to his aid revealed a grand tale. Why would a creature as powerful as The Dark One work for a fool like the Duke? He had been enthralled. The Dark One had a dagger upon which his real name was etched. Whosoever possessed this dagger controlled The Dark One, and the Duke had taken ownership of this magical talisman.

"If you were to take the dagger," the beggar told Rumpelstiltskin that night, "then you would control The Dark One. If you kill The Dark One with that dagger you will make his powers your own."

Those words were all that Rumpel needed to save his son from the battlefield. He and Bealfire spent the entire day soaking wool in melted sheep's fat to make them as flammable as possible. But Bealfire, who now understood that his father was indeed a coward, wanted to go to the frontlines and fight.

The father realized that his son was romanticizing war. Bae must have thought if he could join the conflict and slay the beasts he would come home a hero, washing away forever the stigma of his father's cowardice.

"The Duke doesn't want you to fight," Rumpel explained to him, "he wants you to die." To prove his point, Rumpelstiltskin pointed to the red sky in the distance, which was now closer than it was yesterday. "That's not the fires of the front line, my boy, that's the blood of children."

Rumpel believed that by taking custody of the dagger he could use these powers to end the fighting and save Baelfire's life, along with the lives of countless others. That the Duke had never done this only proved his pettiness and stupidity. He would rather turn the powers of the most powerful wizard in the land against his own people than use it to save them.

That was why they were here this night. To set fire to the castle and during the commotion steal the dagger. The walls of the castle were stone as Baelfire pointed out, but the floors, rafters and verandas were made of wood and they would burn. When the hay was set ablaze the flames licked up high on the wall, catching the veranda and canopy on fire. Soon other objects within the castle caught fire, as well.

Just as he planned it, the fire swept through the interiors burning anything that was combustible: drapes, carpets, tapestries, furniture. It all went up. Taking advantage of the confusion, Rumpel snuck inside and searched the castle grounds. Eventually he found what he was looking for. Hidden behind a burning tapestry was a Kris type dagger, known by its wavy blade, and the name Zoso etched upon it.

Now he was the master of this powerful mage and Rumpel had what needed to erase his past, save his son's future and end the war in one fell swoop.

STORYBROOKE, MAINE

"Hey, why not have Valerie wash the clothes?" Penny suggested to Tina.

"Mom told me to do it," the slender blonde answered. "She'll go nuts if I pawn it off on Val."

"She needs to learn, doesn't she?" Penny replied.

Tina thought this over. "Yes. Yes she does. And I can just tell mom I was helping her adjust to life in the twenty-first century."

~O~

"You want me to what?" Vidia asked with a confused, but suspicious tone.

"Mom wants the work clothes the two of you wore today washed," Tina replied. She was standing in the doorway of Valerie's bedroom. She kept feeling a bit awkward. Ever since their father died Valerie had become more and more detached and irrational, turning into a Goth in the process. She had changed the décor of the room to reflect her new found nihilism.

Now all of that was gone as Vidia had insisted on removing every bit of that "dark and gloomy" stuff. It was like looking into a stranger's room.

"Tinker Bell! I am a fa-."

"Fast flying fairy. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well today, you're a clothes washing fairy."

"And where am I going to wash these clothes?" Vidia asked petulantly. "The shore? A stream? Should I beat them against a rock?"

"No. Just use the machine. Geez."

"Machine?"

In the middle of the upstairs hallway was a set of double doors. Behind them, Tina revealed, was a pair of devices called a washer and a dryer. Tina rather casually ran through the dials and settings for both as Vidia tried to understand things like "wash and wear" and "fluff."

"You put the detergent from this red bottle in first," Tina said demonstrating how to measure using the cap. "Then you add some fabric softener from the blue bottle into this tray on the side. Now, since you've got some really ugly stains and, ugh, horrible smells you should probably run the normal cycle twice just to be sure."

"How do I do that?"

"Uh, just repeat the steps, of course," Tina grumbled. "Then when you're done, stick them into the dryer and let them tumble dry on low heat for about an hour."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

Vidia just stared at the two white colored machines. "This is going to be so much easier than I thought."

"Yeah, just remember to take the clothes out of the dryer and hang them up before they wrinkle."

"Gotcha." Vidia hesitated for a moment. "Which one does the washing again?"

~O~

With less than an hour of useable light remaining, Claire dropped off Ben and Paul so they could rake and bag leaves. She went to the other house to trim branches. When she arrived Claire waited for the owner of the house to answer the doorbell. She had contacted him earlier to let him know she would be coming today to start work.

"Where is he?" Claire rang the doorbell a second time.

Splak!

"What was that?"

Splak! …Splak! Splak! Splak! …Splak!

Claire wheeled around to find three kids throwing eggs at her truck. "Hey! Stop that!" she yelled, chasing after them. The kids ran, laughing hatefully as they did. Claire then saw that they written "Bitch!" in the dust that covered her vehicle.

She groaned, complaining she would have to wash her vehicle to remove both the eggs and the epithet. "I hope the car wash is still open."

"Here, let me help." A freezing cold spray of water hit her with a shock from behind. The cold autumn weather made it feel even worse. "We read the papers. This is what you get for what you did to your daughter," a man yelled at her. "You call yourself a mother? I'd deck you if you weren't a woman."

"Stop it!" Claire yelled. "Stop it! I'll catch cold."

"You'll get no sympathy from us," a female voice said. A stern looking woman stood nearby, a cruel smile curling her lips. "Spray her some more," she goaded.

Another vehicle drove up, screeching to a halt. Claire could not tell who it was, she was too busy trying to deflect the sharp spray of water. She did, however, recognize the voice.

"ENOUGH!" It was the throaty timber of Hartley Winter. "Stop this instant."

"Make me, you stupid limey," the man coarsely challenged.

Two seconds later Claire heard the very distinct sound of Hartley's fist decking the man in the jaw. In the next instant the cold water stopped hitting her. Then she heard the screams from the man and woman who had been assailing her. When she looked up, Hartley was dousing them both with the same garden hose they had been using against her.

He tossed the garden hose to the ground, locking the jet sprayer so it would flow and run up the couple's water bill.

Then he put his coat around Claire's shoulders. "Come with me before you get sick."

I hope everyone is continuing to enjoy this story. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, thank you.