A/N: My first long OUaT fic after Once Upon Another Time. I thought I'd need time to recover, but this idea hit (Rumplestiltskin's scenes in 2x13 'Tiny' are some of my all-time favorites) and wouldn't leave me alone, and I couldn't find another story where this idea was tackled. I'm thinking there will be seven chapters in total, and I'll post them probably about once a week or so. Hope someone besides me is still enjoying stories for this old show - and please feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you love Rumplestiltskin and all his relationship dynamics as much as I do!
Disclaimer: Some quotes are taken straight from various episodes of the show and don't belong to me. I didn't come up with these characters - I just love them more than they do! :) No copyright infringement is intended.
"Please," Belle says, one hand outstretched toward him, the other clutching Bae's shawl. "Please show me I'm not wrong."
He's not the man she thinks. Rumplestiltskin looks into Belle's eyes, her pleading, trusting eyes, and he wants to be that man. For her sake. He isn't, but maybe he can try. Maybe she can make him into the hero she deserves.
Or, more likely, he simply knows that this might be his last chance. After everything she's learned about him today, from the mouths of his enemy rather than him, Rumplestiltskin isn't sure that denying her in this moment is something they can ever come back from.
It's an ultimatum she gives him, really—the most loving, the most trusting, the most undeserved he's ever received, but an ultimatum nonetheless.
Let the pirate live…or lose Belle forever.
His fury crests, peaks, washes anew into another wave as he tears his eyes from Belle to look down at the pirate. Hook, a man whose life has now twice been spared thanks to the women Rumplestiltskin's loved—one foolishly, the other presumptuously.
There is nothing of regret or repentance in Hook's eyes. Only cold, implacable hate.
He will keep coming after Rumplestiltskin, time without end, surviving whatever is thrown at him, never forgiving or setting into the past. Like the other denizens of Neverland, he is frozen in stasis, caught in a single moment of time.
And Belle is so very, very vulnerable.
Magic works differently here in Storybrooke than in their world, but it is Rumplestiltskin who brought it here, and he has been practicing and learning it all over again for months now. It curls around his wrists, laps at his fingertips, spills out from his mouth with a spell he's cast only once before—for the Charming prince and his young wife, when the Evil Queen needed a last push to use his curse.
"This ship is your prison," he intones, magic crackling through him. "The moment you take one step off of it, you shall be cursed to never again raise a hand against me or my loved ones. Any harm you try to inflict on me or mine will come to nothing, and the more you try to break this curse, the stronger it shall control you, until the hurt you plot for me or mine will turn on your own self."
The curse snaps into reality, suddenly existing, demanding a price. Rumplestiltskin pays it with the protections currently kept over his shop, his home, himself, his little pockets of hidey-holes throughout the town. He keeps intact only the protection he spelled over Belle as soon as he set foot aboard the Jolly Roger. That, as well as the sacrifice he makes in pain with this enforced mercy, is all the price the magic demands.
"You take your little ship and you sail until you fall off the edge of the world." Rumplestiltskin slaps the pirate's cheek, refocusing his attention, sealing the curse. "I never want to see you again."
In the wake of this curse, he's weak, and it takes everything he has to carefully lever himself to his feet. As soon as he's balanced, he reaches for Belle.
She's there, instantly. Not once, even after he warned her of his violence, did she look away or turn her face, and she doesn't hesitate now to grab his hand and lead him from the ship. Even knowing what he's done, who he's killed, the violence that crackles within him—she still chooses him.
Rumplestiltskin doesn't look back.
"That favor you owe me," he calls to the Savior, "this is it. I can't run. Get him to talk to me."
A moment of indecision. The snap of a judgment call. "Watch Henry," she bargains, and he agrees with an impatient nod.
She takes off running, red scarf flying in her wake. In seconds, both she and the grown man who is, who must be, his son are gone, vanished around sharp corners.
A grown man. Not the boy he's spent so long imagining, yearning for, picturing in his mind, memories so well-used that they are worn through like tattered photographs. No. An adult. A man Rumplestiltskin can, he already knows, be proud of.
Adrenaline beats through Rumplestiltskin's bloodstream, washing away the exhaustion this day has brought. Passing the town line, navigating this strange world's customs without magic or engrained fear to help him, his own meager reflection taunting him in a mirror, a contraption that flies through the air and threatened to kill him before he could end his quest, and now this…delay.
This reminder that his son doesn't want to see him. That he runs rather than faces.
That Rumplestiltskin, through virtue of his own failures, has turned his son into himself.
The man who runs.
Rumplestiltskin blinks and becomes aware that young Henry is staring up at him. Curious. Impertinent. No longer afraid. He's not sure when the boy's fear of him, so healthy while they were yet cursed, dried up and evaporated. Perhaps when he spun him a tale to help him sleep and promised him safety in the netherworld. More likely, simply through familiarity, which does nothing, as Rumplestiltskin well knows, but breed contempt.
"Are you hungry?" he asks. It's a long shot since, as far as his distracted mind has noted, Henry has done nothing but eat since embarking on this trip, but then, he remembers how much food Bae could put away during his growth spurts. It had taken most of Rumplestiltskin's sleeping hours to spin the wool necessary to pay for food enough to keep his son from starving.
"I'd love to try a hot dog!" Henry says excitedly. He points toward a food cart half a street down from the building where his son lives. "Did you have any food like it in the other world? You know, our world?"
"Food is a universal constant," he says, and nudges the boy with his cane to get him moving. It's a torment, taking even a single step away from this building where his son has made a home, but he keeps it in sight, out of the corner of his eye, and hopes Henry will be easily distracted. No reason for even a child to be able to see his growing terror.
If Sheriff Swan returns—no, when she returns with his boy—will Rumplestiltskin recognize him right away? Will he see him, and instantly know, with a father's intuition, that this is his boy? Or will it be like the puppet all over again? No instant recognition, nothing but a stranger he paints loved features onto?
Henry is babbling away about something, and he turns, walking backwards to stare up into Rumplestiltskin's face as he asks some inane question. Rumplestiltskin rolls his eyes and readies a cutting remark about his resemblance to Charming suddenly being quite clear, when the boy stumbles.
No, he's shoved aside.
Rumplestiltskin lifts a hand—to steady him? To cast magic that's impossible here?—but the figure who knocked Henry aside rams into him full-force. His cane is ripped from his hand. Even before rage can be birthed, a shock of pain flares high in Rumplestiltskin's chest, just below his right shoulder. A line of fire that is familiar—sends him back to the deck of that cursed ship, a hook hanging from his chest; to the Dark Castle, Belle rushing toward him, as he yanked an arrow from his chest.
The figure, wearing a heavy coat and a hood with a scarf wrapped all the way around, yanks him back into an alleyway. The passersby outside fall away, distance yawning between him and any help.
Rumplestiltskin can't see Henry. Is he okay? Did he get back up? He promised the Savior—he promised Prince Charming—that he would protect him.
But then, he can't even protect himself. Not here. Not in this world, relegated once more to be nothing but a crippled coward, a beggar doomed to die on the streets.
"The Home Office sends its regards," a woman's voice hisses into his ear as she digs a hand into the wound in his chest and drives him to his back on the dirty road. There is something in her hand, something that crackles with blue lightning.
"Hey!" someone shouts. It's a young voice. A familiar voice.
Henry. He's okay.
The woman curses, then pulls hard at him—Rumplestiltskin feels her gloved hands at his neck and he shudders, a full-body ripple of revulsion. Then she's gone, her footsteps fading into the distance.
With her, she takes Bae's shawl.
The world goes fuzzy. Dull. Sounds are muted. His neck is bare.
Rumplestiltskin lays dying in the dirt, a helpless cripple, a coward with no power and no one to save him. And still no son.
Raising a blood-stained hand to his cold neck, the Dark One disappears into fading memory.
"Mr. Gold!" Henry feels sharp stones jar his knees as he stumbles to kneel at the side of a man he'd have sworn couldn't even be hurt. He thought it would be Gold who couldn't handle the world without magic, but maybe it's him because he can hardly breathe. His chest heaves beneath his coat.
But not as badly as Mr. Gold's.
"Mr. Gold! Are you okay?"
It's the blood on Gold's hand that he sees first. Only then, after he's stared at the coppery liquid turning that big ring the deal-maker always wears rust-red, does he realize that there's blood on Mr. Gold's chest, too. Blood seeping out, unhampered by the missing shawl that is all that kept Mr. Gold from losing his memories.
"Okay, okay," he says to himself. "This is bad. This is really, really bad."
Mr. Gold's eyes flicker, the pupils unusually large as he latches onto the sight of Henry.
"Boy," he gasps out. "Where's my boy?"
"Mom went after him," Henry says, trying to sound reassuring. "It's okay. She'll find him."
"My boy. Did they take my boy?"
"Nobody took him. Mom's a hero, remember? She'll find him. That's what my family does, right? We find people."
"Don't let them take my son!" Mr. Gold heaves up, his hands latched around Henry's coat, pulling his scarf so tight it digs into his throat. "He's too young! He's not fourteen yet. They can't take him, please, he's all I have."
"It's okay," Henry says. There's a leaden pit of fear anchoring the pit of his stomach. He doesn't think this is Mr. Gold talking to him. Not even a little bit of Mr. Gold.
This is pure Rumplestiltskin.
Maybe even Rumplestiltskin before the Dark One.
Henry pries Mr. Gold's hands off his coat and then starts patting down the man's pockets in a frantic attempt to find his phone. Batting away Mr. Gold's warding hands, Henry finds the phone and pulls it free.
"Please," Mr. Gold says. His voice is high and stuttery in a way Henry's never heard it before. He doesn't think he likes it. It sounds scared. It sounds…like a little boy. Like someone who should have been protected by the heroes rather than like a villain who was locked up in a dungeon so dank Henry's storybook showed it only as shadows. "You can take whatever you want from me, but please, just tell them that he's too young. Bae can't be a soldier."
"I'm not stealing from you," Henry says, stung despite himself. "I'm just going to get help, okay?"
Whether Mr. Gold believes him or simply runs out of strength, Henry isn't sure. Regardless, he curls in on himself and shakes in a way that makes Henry's own hands tremble on the phone.
Henry dials Emma's number—the one he memorized a long time ago, when he still had to sneak time with her and call her up often just to make sure she hadn't left town and the kid she'd already given up once before—and waits for her to answer.
He has no idea how she's going to fix this, but he knows she will. Of course she will.
She's the Savior.
"You left me and let me go to prison because Pinocchio told you to!?" Emma nearly shrieks.
This is her life. This is what it's all come down to. Standing in a bar, staring at the man who broke her heart, talking about Pinocchio's culpability in her fate, and all at Rumplestiltskin's behest. More than she ever knew, even, it is all Gold's fault.
Neal is a liar. He's a lying liar who lies and she can't believe a word he says.
But he was afraid. Back there, in the street, staring at her with a happy smile she can't acknowledge even now, and then, when she said Gold's real name…that was real terror.
He's a liar, but he's a liar who's afraid of something, and Emma tucks that knowledge away for a rainy day. Or five minutes from now. Whichever, she's not picky.
"Emma…" Neal can't meet her eyes. Of course he can't. A little piece of her heart tries to say that this means he does have a conscience, but the rest of her ignores it. He used her. He abandoned her. He left her alone to give up her son and there's no coming back from that. He can look as much like a hurt puppy as he wants; her heart is steel.
"I loved you!" she grits, and the words land like the blow she meant them to.
Neal fiddles with something on the bar, his fingers as restless as they ever were, and when he speaks, his voice is a mere shadow of the villain she's built up in her head over the past decade. "I-I was, um…I was…I was trying to help you."
She nearly hits him. "By letting me go to jail?"
"By getting you home," he says so earnestly that Emma, for the first time in years, remembers a kiss, and the feel of his arms wrapping so tentatively around her, and the look on his face when she first told him she loved him—like it was something he'd never imagined he'd ever get to hear. Like it was the best moment of his life.
Home. It was all they ever wanted. All they ever talked about, thought about, dreamed about. But he didn't love her. He couldn't, not if he thought she could find love without him. If he could do it, if he could let her go and move on, then…then whatever he'd felt for her, it was nothing compared to what she felt for him.
Slowly, forcing her limbs to the same steel that her heart has become, Emma sits and sets her phone aside, not wanting any distractions. He denied it out in the street, but she was thrown off then, reeling and nearly out of her mind with astonishment—with love exploding out of the box she'd locked it away in the moment she opened a package containing a set of keys. Now, she's calm—well, calmer. She can look at him, stare him down, and tell if he's lying.
Because of course he is. There is no way that Rumplestiltskin didn't engineer all of this. Not him, not the man who manipulated her election to sheriff, every move planned out weeks in advance, every word so carefully chosen. The man who let himself be locked up for who knows how long with her name his only companion, writing it over and over again like a psychopath, all so she could be the Savior and he could play her life here as well as he played her parents' in the other world.
"Are you telling me," she says as calmly as she's able, "that us meeting was a coincidence? Because how the—"
Her phone rings. Once, again, again, again. She and Neal stare at each other, neither of them so much as blinking. If he won't look away, neither will she.
The phone finally goes silent.
"How was this possibly not part of a plan?" she asks as if there was no interruption. "Yours or your father's?"
Neal flinches. Again at the mention of his father.
Emma doesn't often feel bad for Mr. Gold, but she almost did on the plane several hours earlier, staring down at his bleeding hand and the poorly concealed panic in his eyes. She'd even found herself hoping for the best for the guy.
But now, knowing that Neal is his son… Well, she doesn't think Mr. Gold is going to be anything but disappointed.
If she even tells him. She doesn't have to. She could let all of this disappear.
Neal says something about Gold wanting her to break the curse, that her and Neal meeting—falling in love, she knows he means, the liar—could have distracted her.
Does that mean that since he let her go, Neal wanted the curse broken too? Why? Just so she could have her parents? She doesn't believe that. Neal is a thief and a conman, a liar, and he doesn't do anything unless there's something in it for him.
But he's terrified of his father. Why would he have wanted the curse broken? Why would he want Rumplestiltskin unleashed on him?
"Maybe it was fate," Neal says.
Emma stares. Okay, she was already staring. Now she gapes. "You believe in that?" she asks.
The Neal she knew didn't. He was all about forging their own path, finding their own way, ignoring the lines to color outside of them in whatever direction they fancied. He wouldn't let anything hold him back…not even her.
Before he can answer, her phone rings again. And keeps ringing.
Neal's eyes bore into her, and Emma doesn't care anymore about winning whatever this strange standoff is. She grabs for the phone and answers it before she can register Mr. Gold's name on the caller ID.
"What?" she snaps.
"Mom!" Henry cries, and the panic in his voice instantly ignites her own. "You have to come back, Mr. Gold is hurt and maybe he's dying and they took his scarf! He doesn't remember being Mr. Gold! He thinks his son's only thirteen!"
"He is!" Mr. Gold's voice says in the background. It's desperate in a way she's never heard from him. Broken. "He's too young! Don't take him away!"
"Please, Mom," Henry keens into the phone. "You have to come help me. There's…there's a lot of blood."
"I'm coming, Henry," she says. "Don't move, okay? I'm coming to find you."
"We're in the alley right by Gold's son's building," Henry says. "Hurry."
The dial tone startles her into shutting off her phone. When she turns, numbly, in a daze, she finds Neal staring at her.
"Something wrong?" he asks, and for all the world, he looks as if he's concerned. Worried. As if he cares about her.
He'll come with her. Sure, he flinched and there was sheer terror on his face out in the street, but Neal won't stand by if he knows he has a son. He'll…he'll follow her. He'll want to know Henry. He'll take him away from her.
Simply by existing, he'll show Henry that Emma's nothing more than a liar and a coward.
"I have to go," she says. "Your dad wants to see me."
Yep. There it is, that terror, an unfamiliar expression on features she is realizing she's never forgotten. If he comes back…if he's involved in any way in her life…she'll forget the years she was alone. She'll remember all the reasons Tallahassee was her dream, and all the ways that Tallahassee was a person rather than the city she tried out for herself before giving up on the idea of family and home.
"Tell you what," she says, "I'll make you a deal."
She has a feeling Mary Margaret wouldn't approve. Too bad there's no time to call her.
Neal's eyes narrow. That dimple in his left cheek flashes as he grimaces. But he listens.
"If I agree to tell your father that you got away, that you left town, that I didn't find you…you agree to stay out of my life forever."
"Emma…"
"Deal?" she asks over whatever he has to say, and holds her breath as she awaits his answer.
This is a terrible idea. Neal knows that. He should be getting as far away from this side of town as possible. Maybe Tamara's. Yes, that's the perfect place. He should turn around right now and head for Tamara's. She'll smile to see him and talk about the news, or some new food place she wants to try, or that marathon she has coming up. Real things. Solid, nonmagical, ordinary things that have no basis in any other world. And he'll anchor himself to that the way he always does. He'll hold onto the ordinary things and pretend that this is where he belongs—it must be, because it's the place where a woman loves him and he hasn't let her down and he hasn't been abandoned or betrayed. He hasn't abandoned or betrayed the people who love him.
But for some reason, no matter how much he tries to talk himself out of it, Neal keeps putting one foot in front of the other, his eyes locked on that beacon of red and gold ahead of him.
Emma.
He's been missing her for so long—since the moment he left her, pacing and chewing his fingernails and trying not to obsess over what she must think of him. August hadn't told him about the police until later, so that night, all Neal had thought about was how she must be assuming he'd abandoned her. Just turned around and walked away as if he could ever do that to her.
But then, he had.
He had walked away, and then run, and he'd kept running. Even after that bird dropped a postcard, August's strange way of fulfilling his promise, he hadn't stopped running. Oh, he has a lot of excuses. Tamara, and the betrayal Emma thought he made, and the fact that she must hate him, and…and his papa.
Always, always, his papa.
Because if his world was here, if magic was here, then so was Rumplestiltskin.
The Dark One.
Neal shudders and quickens his step. There's something nibbling along the edges of his gut, something making it hard to catch a solid breath, something that makes him shove his hands in his pockets to hide their trembling.
He hasn't seen his father since that portal snapped closed so long ago, trapping them both in separate worlds, but he's heard of him. How could he not? In Neverland, Pan used the Dark One as a taunt, as a goad, as a secret that could only maim. In this world, after age and time saved Neal from the threat of Neverland, August came with news of Rumplestiltskin, questions about the dagger, stories about some storybook with tales of his papa. Rumplestiltskin the Deal-Maker. The Spinner. The Dark One. The monster.
And why had Neal let it disappoint him? He's not sure. His papa was a monster well before Neal ever wished on any star, and if even his own son hadn't been able to conquer the darkness, then without his son, how much worse would the Dark One have grown?
"Turn around," he mutters to himself.
But he doesn't listen. He never listens.
Neal follows Emma past his building—his brows furrow in confusion—and then he comes to a standstill as she disappears at a run into the back-alley.
It's a trap. It has to be. The Lost Boys set these up all the time. A trick, some bait, and then an ambush and pain. Waking up from their snares in Dark Hollow, or worse, trapped in Echo Cave.
Flooded with adrenaline, Neal looks all around. There's nothing out of place. No sign of anyone watching him in turn.
Slowly, carefully, he crosses the street, edges to the corner, peers around into the alley.
What he sees floors him.
It's Emma and a boy, both kneeling over a body on the ground. Emma's hands, when she raises them from the body, are stained red. The boy is nearly crying, his composure hanging by a thread. The body…it moves. He moves, with a groan that Neal, for all his running, for all the years between, recognizes instantly.
It's his papa. Not the monster, the Dark One, the figure in his nightmares. His papa.
His papa on the ground, bleeding, battered, helpless. Just like…like he used to be, in dim memories Neal had nearly succeeded—he thought—in erasing. His papa, the way he used to be, before the darkness stole him away.
"Papa!" he shouts, and that's the end of his secrecy.
Emma stares at him, horror scrawled across every line of her being, but that doesn't stop Neal from running forward, skidding to a halt, reaching down toward the man he's spent lifetimes avoiding.
Rumplestiltskin stares up at him. There's nothing of recognition in his eyes. Instead, there is only cruelty. Disdain.
"Get your hands off of me!" he snarls. Even wincing in pain, he still manages to half-stand before setting weight on his bad leg—when did Papa hurt his leg again? How? What could possibly hurt him?—and crumpling back to the ground.
"How did you get inside my castle?" he snaps. "What have you done to me? You think a little wound will stop the Dark One?"
"Mr. Gold," the boy tries to say, but Rumplestiltskin shoves him aside. Neal catches the boy in his arms and steadies him, his eyes locked on his papa.
"Papa," he says. The second time he's said it after he'd sworn never to let that word pass his lips again. "It's me."
"Get back!" Rumplestiltskin roars. And he is the Dark One, all fury and malice. But there's something else there too, so evident in this face that Neal nearly forgot, the one he'd longed for after it had been subsumed beneath scales and rotted teeth. Something like fear. Like vulnerability. "Don't touch me, any of you! Where's—"
Though he bites off whatever the next word is, he still sways, his arms held up like a shield between them. Neal is caught between wanting to reach for him, this man who once soothed his nightmares and lit a candle on his birthdays and laughed for him even when he was hurting, and the urge to run far, far away from the cursed creature staring out of his papa's hurting eyes.
"Let me help you," Neal says.
He's thought a lot about what he'd say to his father if he ever saw him again—too much, really—but in a life unnaturally long, he never once imagined these words.
"No. No, where's—" Rumplestiltskin groans and curls up, one hand rising to press against the right side of his chest. "Belle," he breathes out, and collapses.
Neal just barely catches him before he hits the ground. Looking up from his father's bleeding form, Neal stares at Emma.
"What," he asks, "is going on here?"
And who, he wants to add, is Belle?
He hopes to God it isn't what it sounds like. There are only so many fairytales he can take at a time.