He followed the Seer. Though he quietly trailed behind her, his head was a cacophony of noises as the voices in his head warred with him. The curiosity within him, his love for his family, and probably some of the dumber Dark One voices, were what kept his feet moving. She'd promised him answers, and he currently felt like answers were what he needed. Bae and Belle being in the castle gave him hope that something could be done, but it was likely a limited window. He'd been watching them. They didn't carry enough food with them to stay up there for a long time. They had no supplies really other than themselves. If they moved on before he could figure something out, it might not be his last chance, but it would certainly be his last for a while. But he was at a roadblock, if he didn't figure out something soon, his opportunity might be missed. He had to follow the Seer and get his answers!

However, his skepticism, his pride, and certainly Nimue were among those that wanted him to turn around. The Seer may have promised him answers, but all magic came at a cost, and if he was reading into the prize she'd given him correctly, then it might be too high a cost. His foresight was a blessing. It was one of the best deals he'd ever made. He'd love to say that the success that he'd garnered for himself over the years was all his own doing, but he knew that he'd only gotten as far as he had because of the hints that the Seer's gift had blessed him with. He was dying for answers, but to no longer have the ability to look into the future, to catch the brief glimpses that he'd gotten, to prepare and plan and act…it was almost unthinkable.

The future for a future…what kind of a maddening deal was that?

The war in his mind continued as he silently stalked after the Seer until it was easily the longest period of time he'd ever spent in her presence, and he wondered just how much those eyes of hers could see. She certainly wandered around this world as though she had sight, she knew where she was going without needing a lead or reaching out to touch anything as a reference point. She turned corners, crossed roads, and then finally took a step onto a path that made him doubt she knew what she was doing.

The terrain around them had changed. It faded from houses and sidewalks to a dirt path, trees, forest, and then…all at once the world faded, as if by magic, into something desolate and barren. The trees looked dead. The cave up ahead had a glow coming out of it that made him nervous. There was no war in his head when he looked at that cave. He didn't want to go inside.

But, naturally, that was where the Seer began to steer them.

"Where are we?" he inquired as they climbed the rocks, and his heart began to hammer.

"At an end and a beginning."

Of course, they were. How foolish of him to think that he might get a straight and clear answer.

Every fiber of his being rebelled when she slipped into that cave. Nimue was screaming at him, telling him to give in to the coward within and run away. The gift of the future was never a gift of the Dark One. It was too much a prize to give up over a wife and son. The only trouble was that the cowardly side of him was still being pulled in by curiosity. And the reminder of his wife and son only pushed him further into that cave after her.

The world outside of the cave could be considered chilly by Storybrooke standards, but the second he crept through the mouth of the opening, he was hit by a rush of heat to the face. A low rumble filled his ears, and he put his hand up to shield his eyes from an unexpected flare of light. Not light. Fire.

The cave the Seer brought him into opened up into a room. A small walkway of three to five feet rimmed the area, but at its center was a pit. The closer he got to it, the more he noticed that he could see no end to it. And yet, from that pit, fire licked at the sides of its prison, dancing before them. Before him.

Oh, fuck...his father had said something about a fiery pit, about not wanting to come here. What had he said?!

As he struggled to remember, he glanced back up to look at the Seer again, only to find that she'd already moved on. Now she was circling the rim of the cavern until she arrived at something he hadn't noticed before. It wasn't a pit of fire, it was a swimming pool. And there, suspended out over the side of it, was a rock feature that resembled a diving board, an invitation to walk out onto it and…

Had his father mentioned something about jumping in? Falling in?

"What are we doing here? What is this place?" he demanded as the Seer stepped up to the cusp of that diving board and finally stopped.

"This is where every chapter in this land comes to an end but where yours shall begin."

"No more riddles," he growled, suddenly feeling a wave of compassion for Belle, who hated when he spoke in them. "What are we doing here?"

"Making our exchanges. This is where the fire of hell meets the light of heaven. Once a soul has finished its unfinished business, this is the place to be judged and move on."

"The fire of hell meets the light of heaven," this was the train station Milah had spoken of? The connection point to either Mount Olympus or...

Another flair drew his attention to the bottomless pit. A path that looked quite literally as though it went straight to hell.

"This is a place of death."

"It is a place of rest," the Seer corrected.

He looked around the walls, around the caverns, and fire the bleak dive into the abyss…

This was hell.

But in front of him, the Seer suddenly turned back to him. Her stitched face made his skin crawl as he felt like she was looking right at him. Her unseeing gaze was already too much to bare when she did the unthinkable and held out her hands for him. She held her hands out in the same manner that she'd held them out when he'd once taken her gift. He took a step back.

No…he didn't like this one bit.

Leave! Nimue hissed in his ear. But the coward in him was too prominent. He couldn't get his feet to move. And he hadn't gotten his answers! he needed his answers! Surely there had to be a way around this, a way to get her to tell him what she knew without giving her the power. She was right at the edge of the fire, if he could get her to tell him what he needed to know then a firm blast of magic would send her toppling over it and he could escape with his information and his gift intact.

But doing something like that, in a place like this, had him suddenly feeling uncharacteristically conscious of his life's decisions.

"I must have what is mine to cross," the Seer pushed.

"Cross?" he huffed, glancing back at the diving board she stood upon. Maybe she didn't see. "Cross into where? It's a straight drop below!"

"It is more than meets the eye."

"And you'd know all about more than meets the eye…" he muttered, glancing down at the lidded slits on her hands.

"This is as it should be. You will return what I gave to you so that I may end my time in this world. And in return, I'll grant you your answers so that you can finish your business in this world and your time."

Riddles, just because he spoke in them too didn't mean he couldn't decipher them. There was a lot of wiggle room in that promise that she'd just made, but unfortunately, there seemed to be none to her deal. She was careful, handling him one trickster to another, demanding her prize before she gave payment, refusing to let him take advantage of the situation. But now that he was here, and he saw this place...he wasn't about to give up his foresight without knowing that his "time" wasn't going to end in this chamber.

"This unfinished business will get me back to my family," he clarified. "To Belle and Bae, to Henry."

"All will be as it should," she repeated in a voice so eerily calm it made him nervous.

Fucking Seer…

"And how should it be?!" he screamed, as fear began to break his brittle sense of composure.

"Look inside, Rumpelstiltskin…you are still the one in possession of the future."

He swallowed hard. That was true. He'd followed after her, curious, but without thinking that he could still look into the future and see it. Probably because it felt like ages since he'd had a vision. Here it had felt impossible, and as his father pointed out, he couldn't get visions in Neverland. It had been a long time since he'd had a true vision, and yet…they were there, pieces of visions that he'd had over the years that were not yet settled, visions he'd often wondered and feared were fantasies conjured by his own desperate mind. But as he closed his eyes now, he could still see them.

An image of Henry with a pen in his hand.

A little girl he didn't recognize.

A man in a black robe he'd never met.

There was Regina with Robin Hood.

The Charmings with a baby.

He saw the face of his son laid out on the ground, staring up at him.

He saw Belle with a child in her arms.

"Not fantasy, Rumpelstiltskin. Merely a life not yet lived. A life that will be filled with moments of joy and devastation, with happiness and sorrow, with trials and tribulations that will make the victories that much sweeter and give the defeats greater meaning."

"So why should I give up my foresight now? How am I to live without it? How am I to navigate those trials and tribulations into victory without answers?"

"You will learn as you did once before," she answered calmly. "The answers are in your future, but you cannot go there from here. You can only get them by leaving here and living. The fates have spoken. There is but one way."

Her hands had never ceased stretching out to him in their conversation, but now her fingers strained for him, as if she could not take another step but wanted to reach him all the same. Her voice sounded calm, but the small shake in her muscles revealed her desperation, and something inside of him gave a small wrench.

It was an odd sensation, a lurch not in his belly but in his head, as though something did want to jump from him and into her arms.

His gift…it was never his. It had always belonged to her. But to give it back…

He looked around the room before him, at the platform and the fire below. Oh, he didn't want this to be his fate. He never wanted to come back to this place again. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see what Henry would do with that pen. He wanted to know who the girl and the man were. He wanted to see Regina with the smile on her face she bore when she was with Robin Hood. He wanted to see Belle in the rocking chair with a baby in her arms.

The Seer was never wrong. And the cost for all of that…it was like comparing the power of the dagger to slipping through a portal with his son. He'd made that mistake once, terrifying as this was, he wouldn't be making it again.

"What will happen to you?" he asked, peeling himself away from the wall and one step closer to her. The living thing that was squirming in his head grew excited.

"My fate has already been decided. Now I learn the decision."

"And you'll accept it?" he questioned. "You'll jump into the fire if that's the decision."

"Please, Rumpelstiltskin…" her hands stretched out again, her fingers reaching. "I am ready to be at rest."

Her gift gave another lunge in her direction, one so powerful that it forced him to close the distance between them.

The Seer was always right…

And with that, he slammed his palms down upon her own and felt their fingers curl around each other as they had once before.

The first time they'd exchanged the gift, it was violent. His magic had clawed its way into her body and yanked her gift out of her by the root, tearing her apart and sending her to this world. She'd screamed. He'd screamed as he'd felt the invasion, the onslaught of pictures and a voice that was neither his own nor the Dark Ones. It was overwhelming and powerful, like a surge of electricity, and it had left him stunned and disabled for the longest time as he figured out how to control what he'd been given.

There was nothing unnatural or violent about the exchange this time. There was no screaming. There was no flare of power. There wasn't even a bit of his mind that felt empty by the departure. Instead, it felt like a shifting. There was more room for the voices in his head, more room for his own thoughts. The gift seeped out of him and into her, and she gasped and whimpered in what he suspected was euphoria. It was a reunion of mind and body; for both of them.

When it was over, there was no crash to the ground, there was no violent yank, no tearing away of the soul. He simply felt his fingers loosen over her arms, felt her grip fall away, and they took a step away from each other.

Her palms were wet. There was a small puddle of water in each of them that hadn't been there when he'd taken her hands. He hurriedly rubbed the tears away, or tried to, but couldn't help but notice that no matter how much he felt like he rubbed, they seemed to stain him. Blood on his hands he didn't blink an eye at, but tears had him feeling like Lady McBeth?! Then again, perhaps it wasn't just the tears. Perhaps it was emotion. He felt his own throat go thick and his eyes swell as he glanced over at her, shaking and staring down at her hands as if they were the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Too much. It was overwhelming. It was just...it was too much.

"My answers…" he choked out as she continued to stand there as if in shock. "We made a deal." But despite his promptings, she stood that way for a while, silent and overcome, looking down at her shaking hands…

Suddenly she sucked in a deep breath of air. The water that collected in her palms slid away as she opened her hands wide, flipped them over, and stretched them out in his direction once more. The blue eyes peered out at him from behind thick, eerie lids.

"There are two who are one in this world who seek your help!" she gasped out. "You will not provide the help, and yet you will succeed because of the help you give without giving. The consequences will be most unexpected, as unexpected as the presence of the living in the land of the dead. Father will be reunited with daughter, Muse will be reunited with muse, and the Dark One shall be reunited with his heart as the darkest curse of all finds its rest in a guardian without corruption!"

Suddenly the Seer let out a small squeak. Her hands closed, and her arms swung to her side. The Seer swayed; she swayed dangerously close to the cliff, but as he moved to collect her before she fell, a blinding light stopped him in his tracks. It wasn't a flare of flame. It wasn't red. It was white. It came from the other side of the room across the fiery pit. On the opposite side of the diving board, there was suddenly another reaching in their direction. A portal of gentle but brilliant white light shone forth where once nothing had been. He stared at it in wonder and amazement. The Dark Ones hissed in fear. And the Seer…

He somehow managed to tear his eyes away from it long enough to find her on the ground. She'd collapsed, but fallen safely onto the small space of land that extended out over the pit. She stared across the void as though she could see it herself, and then, like a moth to the flame, she picked herself up, and didn't even bother to shake the dust from her body as she began walking. Suddenly he realized, it wasn't a diving board into a pit of fire. It was a bridge, a lifeline to what awaited on the other side. As the Seer walked forward, the bridge grew with her, a path formed where it hadn't before, and the fire receded into the ground so that it didn't even come close to her heels.

Though a dozen questions came to his mind, he couldn't bear to voice any of them as the girl who had lived in his head for centuries crossed the bridge and went into the light.

When I say this fiction isn't a filler so much as a bridge, there is maybe no chapter in this fiction than this one that illustrates that point perfectly. When you read carefully enough, you should see a lot of little details that will be imperative to the future coming to light. We're not just talking about a reference to season 5; season 7 is accounted for here, Gideon, Regina, and so much more, are all referenced in this chapter. It felt like a good place to do it. If Rumple has to have a single point where he changes, whether or not you believe it's for better or worse, where better to have that change clearly take place than at the place where the soul comes to die? There is an end here for Rumple. But there's also a beginning. It likely will just take him longer to see it.

Thank you, Grace5231973, Rsbeall12, and Jennifer Baratta, for reviewing the previous chapter. I'm hoping that you will like this one. I'm hoping that if you haven't already, you can begin to see how this experience is going to really change Rumple going forward in future fictions. However, while you are busy searching for all those hints of future fictions, do not neglect the important hints in this chapter for this fiction. The Seer is the last "Blast from the Past" that we're going to see in this fiction. There is, however, one other blast that we're not going to see. This character is going to play a big part in the story going forward, even though we'll never see them. It's a point of redemption for Rumple, an opportunity to fix something he broke. This character is going to be revealed in the next chapter...any guesses? Peace and Happy Reading!