The view through a crystal ball was nothing like being on the scene, but it was the best Belle was going to get. Rumple had swept them out of the White Kingdom scant moments after Maleficent had vanished. At Belle's protests, he had uncovered his crystal ball and summoned up this remote vision.

"There! Nothing but tedious little details — hardly worth the bother," he snapped, but she could see he was unsettled, so she bit back her annoyance.

Watching from the privacy (safety) of his tower work room seemed to calm his nerves, so Belle humored him and stood next to him to see how events played out.

Snow White and her husband were naturally too desperate to recover their child to worry about anything else, even the throne of the former White Kingdom.

"It proves my point," George was quick to announce. "You are too weak to make the hard sacrifices for the kingdom that are required of a ruler. Stay or go, but know that if you leave now to chase the sorceress, you forfeit any right to wear the crown."

It wasn't much of a choice, given their natures. Midas affirmed George's decree, but he softened the deal with an offer of assistance.

Once Snow (and a company of Yrkandan soldiers) had left the castle, the focus shifted back to Regina. The former Evil Queen seemed torn between anger that her stepdaughter had stolen her thunder and glee at her suffering, but as her sentence was pronounced, shifted into grim resignation. She was to be exiled to a tiny island off the Yrkandan coast, the magic-blocking cuff locked to her wrist for the rest of her life.

Rumple sighed, waving a hand at the crystal ball. The images faded away.

They were left with themselves and the aftershock of Maleficent's revelation. It still seemed unreal to Belle, and in the back of her mind came the caution passed down through generations of women — something about not counting chickens before they were hatched, and how fragile a new life could be, how often it ended in an early miscarriage.

Belle touched his arm. "Rumple..."

He whirled on her, his eyes wild. "Why? Why would Maleficent... in front of everyone? Was it a threat? A warning?"

Belle bit her lip. "Is that why you took us back here?" Then she shook her head. "But why would it be a threat? Aren't you happy...?"

"My happiness isn't the issue! Did you see the crowd?" Rumple twirled a hand savagely. "They were hardly rushing to congratulate us on our good fortune!"

Belle lowered her eyes, remembering the fearful, wary looks from the spectators after Maleficent had announced Belle's pregnancy. She whispered, "A reminder of where we stand?" Then she shook her head. "But she kidnapped a baby!"

"Turnabout is fair play." Rumple pulled away from Belle and paced back and forth across the limits of the tower room. "She did say the Charming couple had kidnapped hers. Perhaps that was her baby that she took!"

Belle sat on a table, frowning. "Why would they take her baby?"

"Some suitably heroic reason, no doubt."

Belle remembered the looks on Snow White and her husband's face. No, that had to have been their own child. If Maleficent was after revenge... "What if Maleficent—"

"Mal isn't the sort to harm children." Rumple stopped pacing to reassure her. "Well. A sleeping curse here or there, but compared to my parents or Regina, Mal is a veritable well of kindness."

"But she turned Prince Phillip into a yaoguai!"

Rumple shrugged. "Mal always did have a penchant for spectacle. I would have turned him into something smaller and more... crushable."

"Not. Helping." Belle looked down at herself, rubbing a hand over her belly. Not that she felt any different. Of course it was too early, she told herself. But now that everyone knew... her blood ran suddenly cold. Marceline. The gods had sent a Fury to kill her — or the child she carried. "Rumple. What Maleficent said. Do you think it's anything to do with the prophecy? What my cousin told us?"

Rumple stared into the distance.

"...Rumple?"

Then he shook himself all over. He said tightly, "I can't... I can't see."

Belle hopped off the table, seized by sudden urgency. "Lumiere. The Timers. Maybe the Queen of the Wood..." She half-ran towards the stairs. "Come on!"

But Lumiere was not in the Dark Castle, nor was Cogsworth. The griffons intercepted Belle's frantic search.

They left, Otulissa informed them.

Suddenly, said Eskereye. Called back to the Wood Beyond.

A week later, the Timers still hadn't returned. Rumple's own attempt to reach Nevethe had failed. He had gone so far as to hire the portal jumper, the Mad Hatter (Jefferson to his friends), to investigate. Now they were holding a meeting in the great hall of the Dark Castle to discuss their findings. Included in the meeting were various interested parties, all the way up to the High Archon of Schlaraffenland. Though she reflected the mood of a populace more concerned with the shifting power balance with the dissolution of the White Kingdom, the High Archon still knew that turmoil in the Wood Beyond could potentially spill into this realm.

"It's as if it never existed," Jefferson told them. "There's no door at all."

"No one knows anything," was Lizzy's report, speaking for the Beggar Clan. "All the Timers are gone."

"They could have left a note," grumbled Rumplestiltskin, but Belle could see his paranoia and fear underneath the irritation.

The griffons have withdrawn as well, said Eskereye. Not that they talk to us much, but someone did tell us to stay out of it.

Belle translated for the griffon, then frowned. "'It'? What 'it'?"

"'It'! The one that concerns 'them' and even worse, 'things'!" Jefferson scoffed, letting his hat roll along his arms. "I can smell the sticky fingers of fate all over this."

Baelfire, who had been listening and saying little up to this point, straightened from the wall where he had been leaning, his brow furrowed and his eyes a little frightened. "Fate? Papa, all these things happening... you used to say there are no coincidences."

Rumple scowled. "Indeed not." He looked at Jefferson. "Any word from your... old relations?"

"Distant relations, you mean. No, no one's breathed a word to me, but it sounds like his omnipotence, lord of the thunderbolt and imperial migraine of the heavens, has succumbed to the family malady..." Jefferson shrugged. Looking at the half-mad hatter, Belle found it difficult to imagine him as he must have been once, standing among the Olympian gods. "There's a lot of that going around, considering what you said about your mother."

"She never tried to kill me," Rumple said darkly. "And neither have I tried to kill her."

"Give it time," Jefferson said with a cheerful wink. He flipped his hat onto his head. "But right now, it looks like you have visitors." He nodded to the doors as if he could see through them (and for all Belle knew, he could).

"Hmph." Rumple edged in front of Belle, as if to shield her from whoever it was, then waved a hand. She felt the magic throwing the doors open.

Snow White and James stumbled inside, apparently caught off guard by the suddenly opening doors. Both of them looked exhausted, the strain obvious in their faces and less-than-pristine clothes.

Belle stiffened at the sight, not liking the way their eyes found her behind the Dark One.

"Well, if it isn't Snow White and her charming husband," announced Rumple, a dark edge underlying the impish tone. "Fancy seeing you here!"

The two visitors shuffled forward a few uneasy steps, weighed down perhaps by the suddenly hostile atmosphere in the room. Lizzy looked especially disgusted, which made Belle smile a little. Her friend had blamed herself for not being quicker to notice Belle's kidnapping, and afterwards had organized the Beggar Clan's part in tracking the abductors. The affair had left her with a grudge against the outlaw queen but no opportunity to express it.

"Dark One, Lady Belle." Snow White looked at them almost defiantly. "We've come to offer our sincere apologies..."

"Oh, really?" mocked Rumple.

Belle held her tongue, but had her own doubts about the 'sincere' part. She thought it more likely that they wanted magical assistance. They didn't have the joyful look of parents miraculously reunited with their child. Understanding their desperation, Belle didn't have the heart to call them out on their obvious ulterior motives.

Snow White nodded. She swallowed visibly, almost looking contrite. "We were wrong about Gaston. We should have listened."

Rumple snorted. Pigheaded fools, he didn't say, but Belle could tell he was thinking it. "And what changed your minds, may I ask?"

"Other information came to light," said Snow.

James added, "Princess Marceline explained things to us."

"She gave us an earful." Snow White chuckled nervously.

Oh, well, of course they would believe proper princess Marceline, was Belle's first resentful thought, but on second thought, she was touched by her cousin's defense of her (and Rumple). It seemed Marceline really did want their good will. Maybe they could even be friends.

Rumple looked unimpressed. "A pity you couldn't have done your research before abducting my wife."

"We're sorry. We acted too hastily." Apologies delivered, it didn't take long after that for the pair to ask what they were really there for: as Belle expected, they wanted the Dark One to help them find their missing child. Snow White even went so far as to turn to Belle, "As one mother to another, please, won't you help us?"

"As one mother to another, how could you do that to Maleficent?" retorted Belle. "Or are you saying there's no truth to what she said?"

"It wasn't like that..." Snow said. "Not exactly."

"Do enlighten us, then," said Rumple. He moved forward, circling around Snow and James, exuding menace with every turn. "Tell us exactly what happened. What you did. And then we can discuss help and how much it will cost you."

The details, as Rumple dragged them out of the pair, were appalling.

"You condemned an innocent baby to a life of darkness?" Belle was amazed these two had ever been hailed as 'heroes', but then she remembered Regina's trial. Everything was relative, and resistance to evil sometimes meant getting your hands dirty. But this went beyond resisting evil! "You people all think Rumple is some kind of demon, but he would never do something so despicable."

Snow White flinched guiltily. "We just wanted the best for our child."

James lowered his eyes. "But we made a mistake."

"And you think we can fix it for you?" Belle sighed. Desperate parents, she reminded herself. If it were her child, she would beg shamelessly if it came to that. "You know all magic comes with a price."

"We'll pay anything," James said rashly.

"What you did to an innocent baby will not come cheap," warned Rumple softly, his eyes going distant for a moment. Belle wondered if he had seen something.

Then Baelfire spoke up. "Innocent baby. Both of them. It's not her fault what her parents did. We have to help her... she doesn't deserve to grow up without her family."

Belle saw Rumple soften at his son's reminder. Baelfire knew that pain all too well, and so did Rumplestiltskin. Neither of them were the kind of person to wish that on anyone else's child.

There was no other decision they could make. Rumplestiltskin nodded to Baelfire, then fixed his gaze on Snow White. "Your baby. Give me her name."

James began to protest, but Snow White kept her eyes on the Dark One and answered, "Emma. Her name is Emma."

"Last I heard, the Apprentice lived in a cottage in the Infinite Forest," Rumplestiltskin told Belle. He had hoped she would stay in the relative safety of the Dark Castle, but she had refused, arguing that she was only a few weeks pregnant at most, not sick. He wasn't so sure about that, seeing how drained she seemed even at this stage of her pregnancy, her own magic weakened to protect the baby. "He must have been the mysterious old man the Charming couple stumbled upon so conveniently."

"The Apprentice, that's Merlin's Apprentice?" Then Belle told him about a book she had read in the Great Library of Yrkthera a few years ago. "Merlin and Nimue, Sorcerer and Dark One. According to Lumiere, our predecessors in a way."

"Hmph." Rumplestiltskin had never met the famous Sorcerer except through faint memories inherited from the first Dark One, but he had tried (as was the tradition for Dark Ones) to steal his magical hat from his apprentice.

"The book mentioned something about a magical pen that the Apprentice couldn't use himself, so he had to find someone else to write the story for him. That must be this Isaac Heller that Snow White met." A pensive look fell over her face, and then Belle said, "The pen was a gift from the gods, to write the story they wanted. More subtle than sending a Fury after Maleficent, I suppose."

Rumplestiltskin nodded. Something niggled at the back of his mind, a memory just out of reach, but he decided it wasn't important right now. "If I recall correctly, the Apprentice's cottage should be along this way..."

Or what was left of it.

They emerged into the clearing to find a heap of blasted stone walls, blackened timbers, charcoal, ash, and soot-covered foundations.

"Oh, dear." Belle stared at the ruins. "Do you think she killed him?"

Rumplestiltskin shrugged. "I doubt it. He would have been expecting an attack." He moved forward, scrambling through the rubble and clearing the space to reveal a trapdoor. Underneath it, a stone staircase led down into the cellar. The vault hidden underneath the cottage was still whole, though the magical wards protecting it had fallen. More tellingly, the shelves were stripped of anything of value, and the hat box that had once taken pride of place in the center of the vault was gone. "One of them must have taken it."

"Taken what?" Belle followed him down the stairs and whistled softly. "That's pretty ostentatious for a cottage in the woods."

"That's the Apprentice for you," said Rumplestiltskin sourly. "Fancy hat, fancy hatbox, fancy vault. All that humble pretense is only that."

Belle laughed. "You're one to speak. Have you even looked at the Dark Castle?"

Rumplestiltskin rolled his eyes. He waved a hand and concentrated. "No scent of death. I think he got away. The question is, what did Mal get out of him first?"

"You mean the 'fancy hat'? Is it magical?" Belle continued her exploration of the vault. Belle being Belle, she found a book abandoned on a shelf and leafed through it. At his questioning look, she showed him the blank pages.

Sensing no magic in it, his thoughts went back to the hat. "It was crafted long ago by Merlin. It steals magical power, stripping it away or even trapping magical creatures inside."

"What? Why would he create such a thing?" Belle put the empty book back and crouched down to peer into a box of what seemed to a pile of dirty dish rags.

"I'm not sure. His apprentice stole it from him before he could use it." Rumplestiltskin frowned, drawing on the memories of the Dark Ones before him. "Once stolen, the power isn't accessible to be wielded, and it feeds into the magic of the hat itself. Nimue wanted to use it to gather enough power to untether herself from the Dark One dagger, by feeding that binding into the hat. As did each of us who followed, but all met with failure."

"Bindings," mused Belle. Then her expression changed. "Rumple... in the book I read, it said Merlin was trying to free Prometheus. I think he made the hat to break his chains, only Merlin was betrayed first."

"A useless theft on the Apprentice's part. He himself wasn't powerful enough to control the hat." Rumplestiltskin looked at Belle, amazed anew that she had somehow managed the feat before she had any magic of her own. He considered the strength of the chains binding the Titan, then mentally weighed it against the power of the Dark One dagger. "Perhaps your theory does hold water. But whatever its original purpose, its power remains. It's possible Maleficent may be able to wield it."

Belle nodded. "Is there a way to tell who has it?"

"Not directly, but we can try to reconstruct what happened here." With the two of them working together, one focused on detecting traces of light magic, the other dark, Rumplestiltskin could force his seer's sight to yield up a few impressions.

"She pinned him down and squeezed a few answers out of him," he concluded after mulling over the images. "But not much beyond what we already know. The Apprentice cast a baby into a wild portal to an unknown realm. He was acting under orders from higher powers, as we surmised."

"And then the Apprentice escaped?" guessed Belle.

"Slippery old fish, that one. Not only did he escape, he had the forethought to send his luggage ahead of him before Mal ever darkened his doorstep."

"And then she burned down his house." Belle's lips twitched in guilty amusement. "And then she went to steal Snow White's baby."

"It wasn't only for revenge," Rumplestiltskin noted. "The two babies are linked — a piece of Emma's soul resides in Maleficent's baby, meaning they'll be drawn to each other. Mal can use that link to find her child."

"Do you think she'll bring them back once she's found them?" Belle asked hopefully.

Rumplestiltskin snorted. "That, I doubt. I didn't say revenge wasn't part of it!"

"That leaves us back where we started," complained Belle. "They've gone to another realm, but we don't know which one."

"No, but we have Snow White, so we can use her blood to key a portal to take us to her daughter." Rumplestiltskin looked around at the rubble one last time. "Nothing more to see here. Let's go."

Rumplestiltskin led their little expedition to the freestanding, empty gate structure that passed as a garden ornament most of the time, but with Jefferson's help, could be transformed into something more. "Well? What do you think?"

Jefferson, having finished painting a fresh set of sigils onto the wooden support posts with paint mixed with blood from Emma's parents, squinted up at the plaque mounted on the double upper beams. The carved glyphs glowed with golden light. "I can hold it open on this end, and I think we have enough to aim the beam, but you'll have to push it through and crack open the other side."

Rumplestiltskin nodded. He cast an eye over the group gathered to go through with an inward sigh. The Charming couple were needed for navigation in the void between the worlds. Then Belle and Bae had insisted on helping (and to be honest, the addition of Belle's magic would make this portal more stable), and then the griffons had added themselves to the party. Rumplestiltskin had allowed it, in return for a promise to keep an eye (preferably two or three) on Baelfire.

The air inside the gate turned dark, hissing out in an unseasonably cold wind.

"Come along, then." Rumplestiltskin steeled himself, then stepped into the void. He sensed the others following him, one by one. He reached for Snow White and David. "Concentrate. Think of your daughter."

Their faces were lost in the darkness of the void, but he could feel their wariness and hope.

"Concentrate!" He wrapped his own power around their wishes.

A thread of golden light floated ahead of him. Emma, it seemed to whisper.

They followed the thread as it grew thinner and thinner. The Apprentice had sent his victim a long way away. Not only far, but blocked from entry by a heavy barrier of isolation. Maleficent's baby must have been sent with considerable momentum to break through, thought Rumplestiltskin, or perhaps it was the sharp point of destiny. The initial break had sealed itself, then been broken again by Maleficent, and now was sealed once more.

Rumplestiltskin wedged the claws of his magic into the hairline cracks left behind and pried. "Belle?"

"I know," she replied in instant understanding. Her fingers shone with white light that flooded the barrier, picking apart the scar to open their way, while Rumplestiltskin kept them anchored and provided her with leverage. A pinhole opened, gradually widening.

Then he felt a familiar tug.

Rumplestiltskin.

No. He was being summoned. More than a name, more than desperation, this was compulsion. Impossible. His dagger was safely tucked away under his jacket, but to his horror, he felt it burning with power.

"Rumple!" Belle's hand closed on the back of his collar, tightened into a claw, holding him in place. For a moment, she matched the strength of the call.

Then it began pulling at her, through him. Belle refused to let go. Her other hand gripped the edge of the portal. The edge of the other realm.

It slipped.

Bae. His son was in the void, trusting him to find the way. If this summons took Rumplestiltskin, Bae could be lost forever. He poured everything he had into the spell, wrenching the edges of reality apart, then shoving his son through. "Bae, go!"

Everything was going dim as the compulsion tugged him away, but Rumplestiltskin saw to his relief his son falling through the portal, followed by the two griffons, then Snow White and her husband.

"Now you, Belle. Go!"

But instead of following the others into the realm on the other side of the gate, Belle clung even harder to Rumplestiltskin. "Rumple, here!"

And though she tried to drag him through the portal with her, the force of the summons yanked both of them into another reality altogether. They fell, hitting the ground at an angle, hard, rolling once, twice, before disentangling themselves. Belle was on her feet first. She gave him a hand up, and he staggered after her.

"Kneel."

The command struck him with such force that he went blind for a moment, even as he dropped gracelessly to the ground. Distantly, he heard Belle cry out in protest. Then her voice, naming his tormentor.

"Zelena!"

Author's note: The hat: well, the Apprentice did use it in canon, but note he failed to contain the darkness and ended up dead, hence my head-canon here. And canon does support the idea that you can use it to extract the magic without sucking in the whole person, since they did that with Rumple and his magic/darkness, and it's what he suggested as a possibility for Elsa's parents to use on Elsa. (It's just that Rumple was getting rid of inconvenient witnesses by hatting the Apprentice and the fairies, and threatened Ingrid with it!)