Chapter 8: A Kiss


For a long time, Bae cannot speak. He lands, heavily, on top of Jefferson, who groans and shoves him away. Bae only curls up in a ball on whatever floor they've landed in, in whatever world, and tries to hold himself together.

You can survive, he tries to tell himself. You've survived everything else. This is just one more thing.

But he can't. He can't make himself move. There are people all around him, voices presumably speaking some language he understands, but none of it penetrates past the fog that wraps around him.

Papa let him go. No. He pushed him away.

He doesn't want to be saved.

He never wanted to be saved.

He doesn't trust Bae to save him rather than destroy him.

If there are hands on him, if he is moved, Bae doesn't know it. He is trapped in a single moment of time. His hands are stained with blood, and Papa doesn't want him.


After a while, he slowly becomes aware that he's lying on a bed. It's not even a thin or uncomfortable bed. In fact, it's probably the most comfortable thing he's ever laid on in his life, plush and thick. Bae lets himself sink down into it and hopes the blankets suffocate him.

He waits for the Shadows to come. But they don't. He's alone. Completely and totally alone.

Everything he did, everyone he got killed, and for what?

Papa is still in Neverland. And Bae is a murderer.


Sometimes, they feed him. Bae wishes they wouldn't. Jones will never eat again. And Papa…well, he may never eat again either. The Dark One doesn't need to eat.

The Dark One.

That's right. He doesn't have a papa. Not really. Not anymore. He took his papa to a world without magic and let him waste away to nothing. He left his papa behind in a nightmare and let Pan erase everything but the Dark One.

Once, as an innocent boy, the night before his fourteenth birthday, Bae laid in bed pretending to sleep and heard Papa tell a beggar that if he lost his son, he would become dust.

What is he now?

Suddenly, Bae rolls out of the bed, crashes into something else, staggers out a door that isn't locked, wanders and wanders until he finds a fountain spitting water. There, he falls to his knees and plunges his hands into the warm water. But as hard as he scrubs, as wildly as he claws at his own skin, he cannot get the feel of his mother's lover's blood and his father's ashes to go away.

He's sobbing, screaming, begging, but there's just more blood, his hands skinned raw, his heart darkened, and Papa's still gone.

Something touches his shoulder. A soft touch.

"Hey," a woman says. "Easy there. What are you trying to do, poison the fish?"

Bae falls still. They're the first words he's understood. The tone is brusque, almost dry, but her hands are kind as she pulls him up and turns him back the way he came.

"Let's get you back to bed, okay? I'll call a healer to bandage your hands."

"Why?" he asks tonelessly.

She's silent a moment. Or maybe he just doesn't hear whatever she says. But then, as he recognizes the bed she pushes him down into, she says, "Because I don't want you to die."

Bae lets her put a towel under his hands, fluff the pillows up behind his back, and then leave the room. He still doesn't know what she looks like, can't look up from the bloody mess he's made of his hands, but her words echo and resound inside him.

Someone cares if he lives or dies.

I don't want you to die.

So he won't.


Now that he's semi-aware again, people come in and out—or perhaps they were always coming and he's only just now noticing them. He thinks Tink comes, applying some kind of poultice to his hands so that they heal in only a few days. Wendy and her brothers come, but he wishes they wouldn't. Wendy cries over him. He think she should be crying instead about the fact that their parents are long dead and she and her brothers will never be able to go back to the world they're from.

A woman he doesn't recognize comes and sits for a long time without speaking. "I'm Grace," she finally says after she's stared at him so long he forgot she was even there. "I had to see you. I had to… You took him away from me. But then…then you brought him back to me. So…thank you?"

When Jefferson comes, he's not so sanguine about the lost time, nor so on the fence about what he feels about it. He rages and rants, madness like a haze that follows in his wake, a dark shadow, and Bae rouses for this meeting, lets the Hatter hit him and then flee the room as if he can't bear to look at him anymore. Because this, he knows, is what he deserves. He ruined Jefferson's life, Grace's life, those soldiers who died…Papa.

Milah doesn't come. "She's in prison," a woman informs him. Not the woman who helped him before, just a woman with a flowery tiara in her ebony hair, her eyes just beginning to wrinkle with age. "She tried to kill you, when you fell into this world. Mulan and Shang were there immediately, but… You didn't see her?"

Bae turns his face into the blankets and doesn't answer.

He wonders which is worse: a mother who wants to kill him, or a father who doesn't want him at all.


"I'm Snow White," the ebony-haired woman says. "This is my husband, David. Do you remember us?"

Dim memories swirl through his mind of a time long gone. Belle spoke with the rulers who offered their aid more than he did, but Bae met them at a couple dinners. But…weren't they young?

Wasn't Grace just a little girl?

"How…how long?" he asks. His voice is little more than a croak, but it makes Snow White smile.

"You left twenty-one years ago. Bae, where is Belle?"

Belle.

She should be here by now. He gave her the pixie dust. Didn't he? He's sure he remembers…

But maybe he didn't. Maybe it fell. Maybe there was never anything in that pouch but the dust he turned his papa into.

Maybe he consigned Belle to the same nightmare to which he condemned Papa.

Maybe his list of crimes is too long to comprehend.

"She's not here?" he asks, and curls up into a ball and wills the world gone.


"What happened? What happened to you? What happened in Neverland? What happened? What happened?"

They all ask it, everyone who comes and sees him. Bae wants to tell them. He does. He tries. But every time he opens his mouth, words desert him.

Papa doesn't trust me to save him.

Papa doesn't want me.

I'm a murderer.

Papa's gone.

One night, he's aware that someone comes into the room and sits on the edge of his bed. There's a fire in the hearth, burning in golds and scarlets that drive back the darkness of the nights Bae hates. He tenses, afraid of more questioning, more hounding, more failure.

But the person only sits there. And then, eventually, lifts his hand—not bandaged anymore, covered in pink new skin that still feels stained and dirty to him—and puts a cup in it.

"Got it?" a voice asks.

He nearly drops the cup because he remembers this voice. He recognizes it. It's the woman who found him by the fountain and told him she doesn't want him to die.

Has she already changed her mind?

Bae tightens his grip over the cup, feels how hot it is, and looks up to put a face to that voice.

It's a girl. She doesn't look more than eighteen or nineteen, golden hair spilling down her back like a spill of starfire, her green eyes sparking with reflected flames. She's wearing a rich red tunic that nearly distracts from the fact she's wearing trousers. Like Belle did, when she followed him so trustingly to Neverland.

"Who are you?" he asks curiously.

"My name's Emma," she says. "What about you?"

Blinking, he tries to figure out where the flame's illumination ends and the gold of her hair begins. "They…didn't tell you?"

"I'm…away a lot." Her lips curl up in some private smile. "Come on, what is it? Don't tell me I have to come up with one for you."

His name is there, on the tip of his tongue: Baelfire. But he doesn't want to be Baelfire anymore. Baelfire is a murderer. Baelfire is someone not worth either of his parents' love. Baelfire is the person who left his dearest friend behind in hell and sentenced a whole bunch of people to a life outside of time. The Darlings will never see their parents again, Jefferson missed two decades with his daughter, those warriors might have lost some of their families—and all because of Baelfire.

"What name would you choose?" he hears himself ask. He's sinking back into the bed, already exhausted, ready to let everything go dim again, but the cup in his hand nearly spills and he's forced to sit up straight, startled fully awake, to keep it steady.

"Hmm." Emma tilts her head. "All I know about you is that you went on some grand journey to save a bunch of kidnapped children."

Bae frowns. "What?"

"That's what they're saying anyway." She shrugs and points at the cup. "You going to drink that? It's not as good cold."

"Aren't you going to ask me what really happened?" Bae looks away, bitter and angry for no reason that Emma deserves. "That's what they all ask."

"Seriously," Emma says. "That's my favorite drink. I want to know what you think."

I don't want you to die.

I want to know what you think.

Someone cares. It's not much—what is a drink compared to the lives he's ruined?—but it's enough.

Bae lifts the cup and carefully sips, afraid of whatever this concoction might turn out to be. At first, he only tastes chocolate, a rich delicacy Belle shared with him in an inn, splurging on what she claimed was her birthday but what he suspected was just a reason to cheer him up after he'd woken up four or five days in a row from nightmares even worse than his usual. Before he can choke on the memory—on where Belle is, because of him—another flavor intrudes.

"Cinnamon," he says, and is rewarded by Emma's eyes widening.

"Yes! Most people don't notice it right away."

"It's the best part," Bae says quietly. And it is, because now, he will remember this night, this fireside, this girl with her bright hair and her piercing eyes and her kindness, rather than Belle and how badly he failed her.

"So why don't you want me to ask what happened?" Emma says as Bae takes another slow sip of the hot chocolate.

His throat is so tight that he has to take another drink before he can force any words out. "I can't… I wish I could tell you, but I just…"

"Hey, I get it," she says. "Who wants to dredge out all their bad memories for everyone, huh?"

"No, it's not that. I just…" Bae runs a hand over his mouth, feels stubble that might actually count as a beard, and wonders just how old he is now. "It's hard to know how to…"

"Hey." Emma hooks her knee up on the bed so she's facing him. When her hand falls onto his arm, Bae freezes, afraid to move in case she decides to stop touching him. "Here's the thing…sometimes it's easier to talk about stuff if we pretend it's a story."

"A story." Bae closes his eyes over the memory of all the stories Belle used to tell him in the dark, when he couldn't sleep, when they were both so tired that her voice slurred. He thinks of the stories his papa used to tell him to hide how scared he was.

"So, if you want," Emma says, "you could tell me a story. And then I'll pick a name for you. It'll be a really good one, I promise."

I don't want you to die.

"Okay," Bae hears himself say. He tightens his hands over the cup with the last swallow of hot chocolate—thinks of a teacup he chipped and another story he told another kind woman. "Okay. A story."


Once upon a time, he says in a shaky voice, there was a boy who wanted to save his papa and be a hero.


It takes him all night. He knows he rambles. He forgets things and goes back to fill them in, sometimes he loses the thread of what he was talking about, and a few times, he just can't talk at all because he doesn't want to cry anymore, and certainly not in front of this pretty girl. But eventually, when his throat is raw and the bed is full of all his sloppy confessions, he can't find anything else to tell.

He just wanted to save Papa. And Papa just wanted to save him. And Belle just wanted to save everyone. It's not fair that none of them get a happy ending.

"Not a very good story, huh?" he asks with the weakest excuse for a laugh ever made.

Emma's long since twisted to sit side by side with him, her back leaning against the headboard, her legs stretched out right next to his.

"Do you think," she says very slowly, "that maybe Pan really does have your dad's dagger?"

There's a sharp, tight burst of something in the center of Bae's chest. Maybe something cracking inside him. Maybe just his heart unlocking in answer to this girl's matter-of-fact, logical approach to trying to make him feel better.

"I think," he says, "that I would be a horrible, awful person to wish that Papa's being controlled by a monster."

"Really? Because I think that'd make you a normal human."

He barks out a laugh. "Normal, ha! How many years has it been since the First Ogre War, Emma?"

"I don't know." She shifts uncomfortably, her eyes darting as if she thinks this is some kind of test. "Like…three-hundred?"

Despite his shock at just how high that number is, Bae smirks at her. "Then that's how old I am. And yet I think this is the first beard I've ever grown."

"It's a look," Emma says, dubiously. "You might want to revisit it when you're up to looking in mirrors again."

"How old are you?" Bae asks, for no particular reason except that he's suddenly realized, now that she's studying him so closely, that he might not want her to think him odd. Or old. Or horrible.

"Twenty," she answers without missing a beat. "I think you're twenty-three."

"What?"

"I just decided. You look about that, and I mean, you said time doesn't pass in Neverland so none of that counts, so…twenty-three. It's a good age. It's got a three in it as kind of a nod to your three-hundred years. I like it."

For the first time, Bae thinks maybe Emma's a little strange.

Nervously, he runs his hand over his mouth again. He wonders if she'll bring him more hot chocolate on another night. He wonders if she notices that dawn is creeping in through the window.

He wonders if she remembers that she said she'd give him a new name.

"Hey." Emma takes his hand, then seems to immediately second-guess herself, looking so self-conscious Bae can't help but squeeze her hand in reassurance. She smiles up at him before turning serious once more. "It's not a happy story, right? But most stories aren't happy for the people in them. And I think you're forgetting something."

"What?" he breathes, caught by the color of her eyes in the brightening sunrise.

"You did save Michael from Pan's clutches. And you saved all three of the Darlings from that horrible place. And your dad knows, now, that you didn't break your promise. He knows you came back for him. And you found a way for almost everyone you were responsible for to get out of Neverland—that place you said no one else ever escaped from. That's a lot of heroic stuff, so…you know, maybe you shouldn't get greedy about hogging all the story-worthy feats."

"But Belle—and Papa—"

"She might still come through. You gave her the pixie dust. From the way Mom and Dad talk—I mean…" Emma tugs her hand free of his and pushes her hair back behind her hair while she tries to extricate herself from the bed. "I just meant…the way people talk about her, in general, she seems pretty smart. She probably has a plan, and you don't know what that is, but you probably shouldn't count her out. Okay? That's all I'm saying."

"Okay."

He wants to believe her. He longs to believe her. But Neverland has preyed on his beliefs for too long, and Bae doesn't think he can risk losing anymore.

"Where are you going?" he blurts when she grabs hold of the door handle without a single word of goodbye.

She doesn't turn around, but she does look at him over her shoulder. "I have to go. I'm not supposed to—" She twists her lips. "Look, I'll come back, okay? I'll bring you some more hot chocolate."

"Oh. Okay. Thanks for…you know. Everything."

"Yeah."

Bae watches her pull the door open. It feels like the ending of something—something ephemeral and precious—like he'll never get another night like this. Never see her again, or if he does see her, she'll be different, he'll be different, they'll be different with each other.

But Emma pauses and throws him a quick, warm smile. "Neal," she says. "That's the name I'm giving you. It means champion."

And she's gone, disappearing like a bolt of light. But Bae's smile lingers for hours afterward.


"Have you ever heard of the giants?"

It's been three days since that cup of hot chocolate, but Emma bursts into the room as if he hasn't been wondering if he'd ever see her again.

"Hello to you too," he says wryly. Every morning, he's made sure to get up and get dressed. He's taken to walking through the palace corridors, always with an escort Snow White insists is for his benefit, trying to build back up his stamina. Tonight, though he didn't know he'd have visitors, he's sitting in a chair near the fireplace, doodling on a paper David gave him when he screwed up the courage to ask for it. If Emma asks, he's not waiting for her, but he's certainly not upset to see her either.

"Hello," Emma says. "Have you heard of the giants?"

"Don't they eat people in pies or something?"

Emma rolls her eyes and throws herself into the other chair. Bae suddenly wishes he were in the bed still so she could sit directly beside him. "That's just a myth."

"And the giants aren't?"

"No, I was asking the Bl—" She almost chokes, then says, "I was asking the…the book-keeper…about ways to get to other worlds, and she said that Dad—David's father has records talking about when his son led some charge up to the land of giants."

Bae sits upright. "Wait. Is King David's father King George?"

"Yeah, kind of, why?"

"Because when I was trying to get people to help me save Papa, George was going to send men, but then his son James died leading a charge against…" His eyes widen. "Against giants."

"Yeah, the…book-keeper—"

"Aren't they called librarians? Did they change their name in the last twenty years?"

He wouldn't swear to it, but Bae's pretty sure Emma sticks her tongue out at him. "Anyway, she says that giants used to grow beanstalks."

It's instinctual, by this point, the way his entire body tenses at any reference to beans.

"Beanstalks," he repeats. "Like—"

"Like magic beans!" Emma says, her smile wide enough to light the whole room.

Filled with nervous energy he doesn't want to name terror, Bae leaps from his chair. "Why would you…why would you want to know about ways to get to other worlds? Why are you asking about this? What do you need a bean for? They're a trick, Emma. They never lead to anything good. All they do is—"

"It's for you."

Bae stares at her. "What? I don't…"

"To go back to Neverland," she says. "To save your dad and Belle."

He can't breathe. He can't breathe. Bae lifts his hand, covering his mouth so he won't be sick. He feels the bit of beard, reminder that time moves here, he's safe, he's really here.

"Neal? I thought you'd want to go back."

Back. Back to Neverland. Back to the dark. Back to Pan.

Is everyone expecting him to go back?

Bae runs.


She finds him by the fountain again. It's a new moon, thankfully. Bae's not sure he could have endured the wide-eyed stare of another moon in yet another nighttime vista. He trails his fingers through the water, casting ripples over the sleeping fish, and doesn't startle when Emma's hand appears to drift parallel to his.

"I'm sorry," she offers.

"You shouldn't be," he says. "You're brave. That's not something to be sorry about."

"It's easy to be brave when you haven't ever faced anything terribly bad."

"I thought I was brave," he confesses. "But I'm not."

"Neal…"

"I think you picked the wrong name. I can't be anyone's champion, Emma. I can barely get out of bed most days. How am I supposed to go fight some giants for a magic bean to take me back to the last place in the universe I want to go?"

"You don't have to go now," she says. "Just…when you're ready, if you wanted, you'd have a way. And there's only one giant left."

"How do you know that?"

"Da—uh, King David talked to George. He says James killed all the giants, but the Bl—the book-keeper says that there's one left."

Bae half-chuckles. "What do you think a giant wants in exchange for a couple beans?"

"I don't know. But I can find out for you."

As his hand falls still in the water, Bae looks up at her. She's just as pretty out here in the dark as she is by firelight or by sunrise.

"Why are you helping me?" he asks. "Why do you care if I live or die?"

It's a risk, asking this so bluntly. If she tells him she doesn't, if she topples the fragile foundation he's building on the fact that one person still left in this world cares about him…he's not sure he'll be able to claw his way back to life again.

"Because," she says. Her hand drifts through the water to bump against his, knuckles against knuckles, a tap that seems almost intimate. Almost precious. "I…kind of like you, Neal. I wouldn't mind if you stuck around for a while."

"You don't even know me."

She shrugs. "No one really knows anyone until they try. Until they spend time together. We could do that. Couldn't we?"

"Yeah." Bae sighs and lets his shoulder lean, ever so softly, against hers. "Yeah, I'd like that."

And when they've been quiet together for a while more, he scrapes up the courage to say, "And when I'm ready? You'll help me make a trade with the giant?"

"I promise."


It takes him a long time to be ready. He wasn't lying when he told Emma that he could barely get out of bed most days. Sometimes, it doesn't seem worth it—he doesn't seem worth it. But Queen Snow visits to tell him how Wendy and her brothers are settling into the palace, learning new things, exploring this new world. Tink comes occasionally to remind him that it's his fault she's here so if the Blue Fairy ever deigns to acknowledge her, she's counting on him to get between them. Bae bites his tongue so he doesn't tell her that she should have better taste in choosing her heroes. Jefferson and Grace are long gone, slipped away without a word to anyone, though Jefferson left behind the charred remnants of his hat in its case.

King David finally comes to see him, and Bae's glad he made it up and ready and even took a long walk that day.

"Your Majesty," he says with a clumsy attempt at a bow. It's been a long time since all those audiences he had begging for help. Besides, this is the only King that really helped him, and Bae's aware he didn't bring anything of value back with him.

"Please don't bow," the King says. "Snow says she's finally cured you of doing it with her."

"That's because she usually comes when I'm already sitting," he says wryly. "Easier not to get up and make a fool of myself."

David laughs. "I understand, trust me. I wasn't always a royal, you know."

"No?" Bae's never understood the full story behind why the guy used to be called James when he was a prince—the same name as the guy who died facing down the giants—only to become David when he was married and crowned.

"Turns out being royalty doesn't help any when your wife can't have kids. And it also turns out that when you're a terrible person who's used to getting whatever you want and isn't afraid to use brute force and intimidation, it's easy to go out and steal a child. And then a replacement son when the first twin ends up dead in battle."

Bae shrugs uncomfortably. "Huh," is all he can think to say. It does explain the name thing, at least.

David smiles at him. "I used to be a shepherd."

"Me too," Bae says, but then immediately wishes he hadn't. It brings to mind too many memories he can't think about if he wants to remain on his feet. "It was a long time ago."

"For me too." David sits and gestures Bae to the opposite chair. "But sometimes it still seems more real than all this." He gestures around himself, to the palace, his leather finery, the servants outside Bae's room.

Bae wishes he could say the same. Unfortunately, when he wakes from nightmares—or just forgets himself in the dark—it's not his shepherding days that have him clinging to anything solid here. It's Neverland.

"Baelfire, I'm afraid I've come with what may be bad news."

A knot clenches in the pit of his stomach. They're kicking him out. They want him gone. Jefferson has returned and is demanding he be punished for all the years he stole from his daughter. Mulan and Shang want recompence for the lives of their fallen soldiers. Belle's father is here and he's demanding to know what Bae did to Belle.

"It's your mother."

Bae blinks. "What?"

"We've held her for the maximum amount we can on assault charges, but I'm afraid if we don't have any other crimes to charge her with, we'll have to let her go."

"Other crimes."

"Like piracy, for instance." And David's eyes, still just as friendly as before, are now sharper, more intent on him. "Of course, without a witness to those crimes, we don't have any way of proving her guilty. So she'd walk free."

"But with a witness…"

"We'd keep her in prison."

Bae's tongue feels like a heavy cork of wood in his mouth. He can't move it to form words at all.

"I thought…maybe you'd have something you wanted to say on the subject." At Bae's continued silence, David nods. "It's up to you, Baelfire. I have three days before I have to make a decision one way or the other."

It hurts to bend his neck, but he nods anyway.

"I know this is a difficult decision," David tells him, a rare note of gravity beneath his usual good humor. "Trust me, one of the first things I faced as King was the trial of my wife's stepmother. Snow couldn't bear to see her killed, and I…I searched out a hundred different ways of trying to banish her, exile her, imprison her. That's how I met Jefferson, actually." He takes a deep breath and looks away. "In the end, hearing all the alternatives, we chose the most merciful option we could find. But mercy doesn't always pay off. And sometimes second chances are actually hundredth chances, and a hundred and one is too many."

"If it's that difficult, why are you leaving it up to me?" Bae asks, though it comes out hoarse and almost vicious.

"Because," David says calmly, "only you know how much she hurt you. And how dangerous any forgiveness you might offer might end up being."

Silence is the only answer Bae can conjure up for a long time. Eventually, David rises.

"Uh, King David? Your Majesty?" he calls just before the older man can reach the door.

David looks back at him, patient and waiting.

"Can…Can I see her? Can I talk to her? Before I tell you anything."

"Yes," David says. "Of course you can."


In the end, Bae only asks Milah one question. He waits until she's done railing at him for Killian's death, for her accommodations here, for forgetting her and leaving her to rot, and then he says five words.

"Would you do it again?"

"What?" she spits. "Leave the place that was suffocating me, draining the life out of me, pulling away at all that I am? Go off and see the world and fall in love and have adventures and be someone? I would do everything the same—except you, Bae. I'd take you with me." He doesn't have time to find some kind of solace in that before she adds, "Because if you'd been raised with Killian as your father, you'd never have turned into the kind of coward that uses poison to kill. He'd still be alive. I wouldn't be all alone. We could be a family together. I should never have left you with that coward."

Bae turns around and walks away. He leaves her to her cell with the bed covered in blankets and a pillow, the courtyard where she takes monitored walks, the walls she covers with her drawings of far-off places—all of it looks like a paradise compared to Neverland.

He leaves her and he never looks back.


"Well?" David asks him.

"She's a pirate," Bae says. "I've personally seen her hurt four Lost Boys and kill one. She sold me into what amounts to slavery with Pan. And in the Frontlands, before she left, her and Captain Jones menaced the entire coastline. Is that enough for you?"

"It's enough." David hesitates, then steps closer. Slowly, so slowly Bae can see it coming, he clasps his hand over Bae's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Baelfire."

"Hey, do you think…" Bae takes a deep breath. He wonders if he should be crying. If his mother deserves for her son to shed tears over her or if it's his cold anger that's justified instead. "Do you think you could call me Neal?"

David smiles, some kind of private joke in his eyes—though not that private, really, considering Bae's heard some people still refer to him as James and his wife regularly calls him Charming. "Sure thing, Neal."

It feels new. It feels different.

It feels real.


"Do you think I was wrong?" he asks Emma the next time she comes to see him. He hasn't figured out what she does in the palace, or if she lives here or somewhere else, but he does know that every night he watches the door hoping she'll slip through, and the nights that she does are the best nights—not just since he got back, but maybe in his entire life.

"I think your mom hurt you a lot and has never once apologized," Emma says in her characteristic blunt way. "And you didn't lie. She really is a criminal, so she really does deserve to be in prison."

"But I only trapped her there because I'm mad at her."

Emma twists on the floor to face him more fully. They're lying on a blanket on the balcony to stare at the stars. Neal meant to show her the constellations he can still remember, but they're all new here. He doesn't even recognize any from his childhood, at least not in the same places he thinks they should be.

"I'm mad at her too," Emma says.

"You are? You don't even know her." His eyes narrow. "Do you?"

"No." She rolls her own eyes and props her head up on an elbow. "What I do know is that you've already given her a whole lot more thought that she ever gave you. Why let her have all this power over you? I say, let her go. And by that," she adds hurriedly, "I don't mean out of prison, I mean out of your head. Out of your heart."

Neal can't help but stare. There are torches lit on either side of the doors leading back to his room, but it's Emma's hair that shines the brightest in the night. He thinks that even in Neverland, she'd shine like a beacon. Like a way out. Like a star that leads him home.

Slowly, hoping his hand doesn't shake to betray the coward he's become, Neal reaches out to cup her cheek in his palm. He waits for her to swat his hand away, to duck away, to stand and leave and never come back.

She doesn't do any of those things. Instead, unless he's hallucinating, she slides a bit closer to him. Her hand comes up to lay over his, sandwiching his cold fingers between her cheek and her own palm.

"Emma," he says, mostly just because he wants to say her name. He smooths his thumb over her cheekbone, just below her eye. She doesn't even flinch. He thinks she might be breathing just as unsteadily as he is. But when he leans forward, she doesn't look scared.

Because she's not scared.

She's brave. And brilliant. And beautiful. And he's none of those things. Whoever Emma is—the cut of her fine clothes and her presence here in the palace and a hundred other hints point to her being super important in some way he should probably know—she's too good for him.

So Neal lets his hand fall away. Lets himself roll onto his back, his eyes staring at the stars but seeing only the bold afterimage of Emma's burning gaze.

She mirrors him. He hopes it's not an accident that her hand falls to lay between them, her knuckles bumping up against his.

"Have you thought of something the giant might want yet?" he asks. Mainly because it's the last thing in the world he wants to ask. It's just more proof of how cowardly he's become—and how brave Emma is.

"Yes!" she says excitedly, sitting up and crossing her legs so she can lean over him. "I was talking to Pinocchio and—"

Neal groans. She must bring up Pinocchio five or six times a night, and Neal's beginning to resent each one.

"Shut up," Emma says without much concern. "He actually had a good idea. He says that the giant must be lonely being the only one of his kind so if we could find a way to let him live with humans, he might give us the beans in trade."

"So what? We need a way to shrink him?" Neal's thoughts are more fixed on Emma and how close her lips had come to his than on what he's saying. "How small are we talking? Tall human size or dwarf size?"

Emma gasps. "That's it! Don't you remember? The stories from Wonderland say that the food there makes people grow or shrink."

"Wonderland?" Neal sits up to face Emma. "Now we're not just planning to get to Neverland, we have to go to Wonderland too?"

"No, of course not! You can buy bits of Wonderland mushrooms from any sorcerer in the realm."

Neal frowns. "I don't have any money."

"I do. I have lots. Seriously, don't worry about it, Neal."

"I can't let you do that." Nerves buzzing, Neal climbs to his feet and wraps his hands tightly around the railing of the balcony. His feet edge through the slats to hang over the drop. His eyes drink in the sight before him—no full moon, no jungle foliage, no boy-demon swooping down from the air to grind his soul to powder.

He's still free. He's still safe.

"Neal, I want to—"

"Emma, why are you doing this? I don't even know how you found out about me. Or why you care about me. Or why you're putting so much time and effort into this when I can't… I don't even know when I'll be ready."

"Neal." She steps up close. Closer. So close Neal wants to back up, but he can't. The railing is behind him. He's sandwiched between cold stone and Emma's soft warmth.

"Why are you here?" he whispers.

She lifts her hands and cradles his face between them. It surprises him to realize that she's going up on her tiptoes—that she has to go up on her tiptoes—and before he can second-guess himself, he puts his hands on her waist to steady her.

"Neal," she says again, in such a way that it occurs to him to wonder if she likes saying his name too. The name she gave him. "I want to help you."

"Why?" he says again.

Papa doesn't want him. Milah never wanted him. Belle will never want him again now that he's left her behind. Pan wants him only for the worst reasons. But Emma…she keeps coming to him of her own accord. Keeps spending hours with him before slipping away as dawn paints the sky blue and pink. Keeps helping him in ways he can't even quantify.

"Because," she says. She's so close that her words are breaths that mingle with his. "I want you to be happy."

"You make me happy," he admits all in a rush.

And she kisses him. Neal tightens his grip on her waist, pulls her closer, and hopes to every realm and every world that this is real.


In this in-between time—Belle refuses to think of it as anything else—after Bae's escape and before their own, Rumplestiltskin has two moods. He swings wildly and often unpredictably from one to the other, or so it seems to Belle, though she can't be sure what Pan says or does to him in the periods he commands Rumplestiltskin to follow him. When he returns, Rumplestiltskin never says a word about what he's made to do, and Belle's stopped asking since it only seems to hurt him. Or send him skittering wildly to one extreme or another.

Sometimes, he'll return or she'll wake up to find Rumplestiltskin soft and slow and quiet. If she looks at him only briefly or from afar, she might think he is calm, in these moments, even peaceful. But a second look, a closer study, reveals his thumb working almost obsessively against his finger. As if searching for something to hold onto—for someone who's been ripped away from him too many times. And his eyes… In these quiet moments, Belle nearly flinches away from the storm of grief and anguish that turn his eyes dark.

In the quiet moments, he exists as if living is painful. As if it is mere habit, and one he resents. Belle tries to persuade him to eat or drink, to talk, but words are hard for this lost Rumplestiltskin to grasp, each dragged out through a thorny maze of loss. He will move if it's to help her—to reinforce their green canopy or to hold back the dreamshade bushes so she can retrieve water from the small pond—but otherwise, he tends to sit as still as a statue and stare at the sky.

His other mood is rage personified. He paces and snarls and mutters to himself, every inch of his body crackling with energy and purpose that has nowhere to go—no permission to be let out. She often has to bandage his hands after he's attacked and laid waste to all the close, suffocating greenery. In these loud moments, Belle gives him space, lets him rant, then eventually sets a gentle hand on his back or his shoulder or his arm…and he falls still. Quiets. Sometimes descends all the way back to his quiet mood. Which is why she's never quick to touch him.

She can't tell, really, which emotion helps him endure the most. Which hurts him worse.

"Looks like another cold, wet night," she says as she follows his hurting gaze up to the sky where clouds blanket the horizons. Not even the full moon that never sleeps is enough to pierce through these heavy layers.

Ever since Baelfire's escaped, Pan's temper has been as unpredictable as Rumplestiltskin's, and Neverland reflects that in its weather.

"It will rain," Rumplestiltskin says. His voice is dull. In his quiet mood, he can only seem to get the most obvious of statements out past the cork that is his son's name. Sometimes, when he thinks she's sleeping, Belle watches him mouth Bae over and over again, a prayer or an incantation or a talisman, she's not sure. Maybe just a reminder to himself that he didn't magic his son up. That he is real and out there somewhere.

"Good thing you fixed the canopy for us, then," she says with the determined cheer that has become her default tone. Every day—well, every endless night—Belle's chest burns with the weight of that pixie dust hidden there.

They could leave. Right now. Right here. Just…toss the dust and wish and be free.

But Pan still has the dagger. And Rumplestiltskin will never be free without it. And Belle's wishes are useless to change that simple fact, so maybe they will be useless in opening a portal too.

"I never thought I'd miss the humidity," Belle chatters to herself. "But the chill from this constant rain is worse. Well, perhaps not. Maybe an even mix of the two?"

"Pan throws tantrums," Rumplestiltskin says. He frowns into the distance. "He always has."

And Belle suddenly can't think of anything but the memory of Pan referring to himself as Rumplestiltskin's parent.

They've never talked about it. Rumplestiltskin is still grieving his son, and Belle won't demand he expose his heart any more to the cruelties of this place just to satisfy her own curiosity.

A gust of wind makes Belle shiver and draw her cloak tighter around herself. Rumplestiltskin rouses himself and gestures her to their tiny shelter. It's not much, really, but it's theirs, and it's protection from the rain if not the cold. In fact, the cold just gives Belle an excuse to stay almost as close to Rumplestiltskin as she wants to.

As he always does, Rumplestiltskin lays his coat on the ground before letting her sit. And as she always does, Belle takes his hand and tugs him in after her.

"Do you want a story tonight?" she asks. She's wrapped her book and the chipped cup in her pack and several layers of leaves and buried it deep beneath the dirt under their canopy to protect them from the elements, but she's been getting better at making up tales just for Rumplestiltskin. He seems to like listening to her voice, and he always comes close of his own free will to listen to the stories she makes just for him.

Stories that prove monsters are redeemable, beasts are misunderstood, and villains sometimes find themselves the recipients of happy endings. He's always careful to sneer, to shake his head, to narrow his eyes, sometimes even to snap at her, but he comes just as close the next time, listens just as intently, drinks in every word she spills out for him, and shudders when she finds a hopeful place to leave the story.

"A story," Rumplestiltskin agrees.

Belle presses up against his side and drapes her cloak over his legs as much as she can. "I'll think of a good one," she promises.

"No." Rumplestiltskin's free hand rubs her cloak between his fingers. "Tell me a story about you."

"Me?" Belle blinks before feeling a soft smile curve her lips. "Okay."

How long have they been in Neverland? It feels like forever, but surely it's only been weeks, maybe months. A year at the very most. She can't have forgotten everything outside this awful place.

Closing her eyes, Belle thinks of her father, before her mother died, before she grew up, before Ogres encroached on their lands and politics encroached on their relationship.

"Once," she says, "my father took me a fair. I was only seven or eight, maybe nine, and so tiny that he was sure he would lose me. He could have brought guards or kept us both in a carriage, but I begged him to let us wander around on our own adventure. So Papa took my hand in his—he's so much bigger than me even now, you can imagine the difference when I was a small child!—and he bent down and said, 'Belle, my little rose, you need to hold on. If you let go of my hand, terrible things will happen.'"

Belle sighs softly as she curls up closer against Rumplestiltskin, while outside their flimsy shelter, rain begins to fall. "I stayed right next to him, but instead of seeing all the exciting sights around me, I could only think on his words. I couldn't help but wonder what terrible things would happen. I thought maybe I'd turn into a toad. Or perhaps I would be doomed to wander forever, lost and alone. Or—and this was the worst thing I could possibly imagine—maybe I'd lose the ability to read books."

"Books." Rumplestiltskin's chuckle is so soft, so unexpected, that Belle only registers it because it vibrates through his chest and into her cheek. "Even then?"

"My whole life," she says with mock affront. As if she's not controlling it at all, Belle watches her hand rise to hook through a fold between buttons in Rumplestiltskin's shirt. She can feel his heart rattling away behind his breastbone. "Eventually, after walking for what felt like miles, Papa asked if I wanted something to eat. We walked up to a stall where an old woman was selling the best smelling bread I've ever encountered. But when Papa tried to let go of my hand so he could retrieve some money, I was so terrified of what would happen if I let go that I held on to him with all my might."

"You held on," Rumplestiltskin murmurs.

"I did," Belle says, and she lets her laugh color her voice. "I held on so hard Papa lifted me straight off the ground and nearly used me to pay for a couple loaves of bread! Both he and the baker laughed and laughed, and I just kept hanging on, terrified I'd never be able to read another book again. After that, Papa started calling me his bit of gold, and unfortunately the joke got so bad that almost every formal dress he commissioned for me from then on was made in that color."

"Bit of gold," Rumplestiltskin repeats, his voice nearly sing-song. "I used to spin straw into gold. Just for a little while. It was…one of my favorite things."

"Why?"

"It helped remind me."

"Remind you of what?"

"That I wasn't poor or useless anymore. That I could feed my son. I could protect him."

She feels him spiraling away from her, and she doesn't want him to go. She doesn't want to be left alone here, hugging his body but far away from his heart. She wants the moment before back, when he actually laughed and she could feel his smile.

Without giving herself time to think better of it, Belle splays her hand over his chest and draws back to meet his eyes.

There's the grief. The anguish. The loss.

But there's something else too. Something startled, and mesmerized, and beautiful—and all hers.

"All that magic," she says, "and you used it to feed the one you love."

"We didn't have sweet-smelling bread," he says with an attempt at a sneer that fades immediately when her fingers drift across the hollow of his throat. Outside, the rain falls in earnest, but beneath her canopy, Rumplestiltskin has made of his slim body a shield between her and the elements. "But there was food. So much food we could save some of it for another meal."

"I wish I could have been there," she says softly. Her breath catches in her throat when Rumplestiltskin's hand lifts to cup her elbow, keeping her hand pressed against him. "I could have brought bread to share."

Rumplestiltskin's eyes fall away. "You wouldn't have wanted to see me then."

"A devoted father with his loving son?" Belle smiles at him and waits until his eyes are dragged, as if he cannot help himself—or, maybe, doesn't want to help himself—back to hers. "I would have loved nothing more. You and Baelfire…and me."

"You love him," he breathes, as if just remembering. As if, in his infinite grief, he forgot that he's not alone.

And for the first time in ages, he is seeing her. He looks at her, and he's half embracing her, and his breath is feathering over her nose, and he sees her.

"Belle," he says.

"I do love him," she whispers, her words dancing between the fall of pelting rain. "I didn't mean to. It just kind of happened. But I wouldn't change a thing."

"For Bae?"

Belle swallows and thinks of how often and how long and how fervently she has wished to be brave.

"For you," she says. He smells of rain, of the sticky sap that dreamshade exudes, of lightning and magic and leather.

Rumplestiltskin turns his face into her palm as she cups his cheek. "You shouldn't have come," he chokes out.

She tries not to let that hurt. "Why not?"

"Because," his hand rises, his fingers touch one of her curls, rubs it against his spinner's callous, "you'd be safe now."

At that, she can't help but smile. They're so close, she can't see anything but him. "Do you know," she says, "I used to want to be a hero. I wanted to do brave things and save people and show exactly how much I could be capable of if given the chance."

When Rumplestiltskin swallows, she feels it against her hand. "And now you know it's not worth it," he says.

"No." She lifts her hand a little higher and nearly gasps as she finally lets it play back through his hair. "Now I know that something else is worth so much more: being here. With you. It's more than I ever could have dreamed."

"Me?" he scoffs. "I'm a monster—"

"You're not. You're really, really not. And I can prove it to you." He's so hot, the only warm thing in the whole world, and Belle feels a fever in her bloodstream until, in her delirium, she finds herself tugging his neck—gently, so gently!—down toward her.

She's surprised when he bends easily toward her.

She's even more surprised when he kisses her back.

"Kiss me again," she all but begs.

But she'll never know if he would have.

Because the rain stops, the clouds clear, and Pan is standing outside their canopy, grinning his sneering smile, and try as she might to hold onto him, Rumplestiltskin is ripped away from her.