Race Through Time:

A Shocking Vision

Usually, Fidget would have driven his car or maybe flown all the way back to his cottage, but with Midnight trying to hunt him down, he preferred to do the quickest and laziest way: magically teleporting himself from outside the sheriff's station to his kitchen.

The first thing he did was to make doubly sure that no psychotic alicorn was lurking in his small, yet comfortable kitchen. He briefly sniffed the air: all he could smell was the black painted wood of the cabinets, the vanilla-scented polisher he had previously used to clean his freezer and refrigerator, soap fragrance from recently cleaned dishes, and lilacs...

Fidget stopped at the scent of the lilacs. This was one fragrance that he didn't recall smelling before he left his cottage yesterday. He found the scent coming from the small table where he usually ate alone these days minus the Thursdays when Rosetta came for tea. Right on top of the lace tablecloth he had managed to recover from the ruins of Aldorada stood a small vase with a purple lilac in it, and right next to the vase was laid a small package with a paper note on the top.

Fidget took the paper. At first, he assumed it might be some sort of trick from Midnight, but after sniffing the paper and recognizing the handwriting, he let out a sigh of relief when he found out that it wasn't from the crazy alicorn.

'Dear Fitzgerald,

I came earlier today to check up on you to see how you've been doing since our first encounter, but you weren't home, so I chose to leave you this. You'd be surprised: I actually found this old thing inside the Storybrooke Library and seeing something inside of it reminded me of you.

I hope you are enjoying your day and that you occasionally think of dropping by at Dutchman's Teapot on Sundays.

Theresa'

Theresa Rogers, the charming, yet seemingly so familiar volunteer he had met when he had moved in. She had left this here. She had placed the lilac onto the vase. And once again, she was suggesting that they one day hang out as 'friends' at Dutchman's Teapot.

Curious, the Batrishan took the small package and used one of his claws to get rid of the carton paper that covered the package. While strands of carton fell onto the floor, a red book with the golden title The Poetic Wondering laid in his hands. Fidget's eyes nearly watered at the sight of the book and his memories went back to the days when his foster mother, Geneva Denada Cortés, still lived. Back when he was seven and living a happy life in Aldorada, his mother tried to get him into poetry when the two of them were stuck inside the family estate due to a horrible rainstorm. Her selection on that stormy day was The Poetic Wondering, a collection of classic tales. It was such a warm memory: the two of them sitting by the fireplace and taking turns reading poetic verses while their maid Carmen came in to serve hot tea.

Fidget noticed a bookmark within the book and was quite surprised to see when he opened it that it was placed right at the first page of the poem Pan's Pursuit For Syringa.

Two women were after Fidget. At least one of them wasn't crazy.

Later

Fidget unlocked the brown door once he got to the upper floor of his cottage. The door creaked itself open once he pulled out the key and pushed the door.

The storage room, where he kept all the magical items he had collected during his pursuit for revenge and anything he save from his ruined past. If anybody else had stepped inside and seen all those objects sorted out, cleaned, and dust-free, they would have mistaken it for a mini-version of Mr. Gold's pawnshop. Each step Fidget took caused the floor to creak. The wind blew a bit through the slightly open window, causing the white curtains to move silently and let out a little bit of sunlight.

Fidget closed the window, thus preventing the wind from coming in. With darkness now starting to fill the storage room, he grabbed an old Victorian lamp from the days he spent in Victorian England at the end of the 1890s and used magic to light it up. Purple light began to fill the room.

"OK," Fidget asked himself out loud. "Where the hell did I put that mirror?"

He scavenged through the items he kept until five minutes later, when he found a hand mirror hidden in a cabinet.

It was quite a fancy mirror, with hearts and vines carved into the silver metal that formed it. The glass was stainless and emitted quite some light when the lamp's purple light reflected on it.

Fidget remembered when Cora, his mentor and one of the five immortals he struck deals with, gave him the mirror. It went back to the days before the First Dark Curse and Cora ruled Wonderland as the dreaded Queen of Hearts; Regina must have still been a young queen and Snow White hardly in her pre-teens back in the Enchanted Forest. When he learned that Cora had the power to rip out hearts, Fidget had traveled to Wonderland and presented himself to the queen in the hopes that he could strike some deal with her and she'd teach him how to rip hearts (Fidget had hoped that he could rip and crush the codfish's heart out).

But Cora had seen more into him. She had seen the darkness in him that rejected love and craved for revenge more than a beggar could go mad for water and food. She had seen in front of her an eternally young teen Batrishan who had potential and was willing to use it for purposes that even her own daughter Regina couldn't pursue without pressure. So Cora had sweetened the deal: she'd teach him magic if he served her as her right-hand man until his apprenticeship was complete.

Such dark days were part of Fidget's villainous success, that was certain. He had learned much faster than any of Cora's other pupils in less than five years, which was a record. Even Cora had begun to see and treat him as if the Batrishan were her own son and she held no grudge when Fidget had declined her offer for him to become her heir once his apprenticeship was over, saying that his thirst to crush his incompetent rival mattered more to him right now. Cora definetly saw that she taught him well.

Back to the mirror. During his third year of apprenticeship, Cora had held a small birthday dinner as a token of her pride in his success. It was quite a moment for Fidget, since the last time he celebrated his birthday was decades, maybe a century, ago, when he turned seventeen back in Aldorada. As a birthday gift, Cora had given him the mirror, which had the power to show him whoever he wanted to find. The mirror turned out to have worked when Fidget tried it out and saw that the codfish was running errands for Peter Pan.

In the present day, Fidget glanced at his reflection in the mirror. If this mirror helped him track the codfish and find his final location to be Storybrooke, then it should help him find Rosetta no matter where she was.

"Show me the demigoddess that I seek," he spoke to the mirror. A silvery haze began to spin within the glass until it revealed something that appeared to be a river full of almond-brown water in the middle of a vast land of highlands. Right at the shores of the river stood a bunch of people disassembling carts in order to create some sort of boat. What really stood out to Fidget was how animalistic the people looked. In some ways, they almost reminded Fidget of himself.

The mirror then showed what he was looking for: Rosetta getting her bruised fingers wrapped with a cloth bandage by what appeared to be some sort of humanoid spider. The two of them were moving their lips as if they were having a conversation but no words came out. That was the problem with the mirror: it showed however you wanted to see, but you couldn't hear anything.

Another person came into the scene, as if to check up on Rosetta getting her medical help. Fidget felt himself trembling as he saw the new person on the mirror. It wasn't possible! How could this be? Bartok and everyone he knew had strictly told Fidget that he was the last of his kind.

So why on earth did he see a Batrishan other than himself on the glass?

His sight became hazy and he collapsed onto the floor, with the now blank mirror in his hands.