22Once Upon a Time... still isn't mine. Rats.
So I'm going to be blatantly screwing with our perception of canon here. Keep in mind, however, that it's our perception that's getting screwed with; I think you're going to like it. Poor Gold, all his lovely plans turned on their heads... Yeah, remember in chapter 4 where I said Gold ran off with what was meant to be one chapter and turned it into two...? He did it again and turned it into three. Ah well, such fun.
Thanks to my chapter three and four reviewers: Emoen, Irisrose37, EditorIncredulous, natural-blue-26, becca, and Fancy-Pants Lockhart. And Editor? You're right, the Gingerbread Man dashed through my head and demanded a cameo. What else could I do but comply? Read, enjoy, review!
What in the world...?
Gingerly, Mr. Gold reached into the hollow in his headboard. The temperature in the bedroom seemed to suddenly drop several degrees as he read the title on the cover of the small book he pulled out.
I Am Rumpelstiltskin.
He ran his hands across the book, assuring himself that it was real. It was there. And it had his name on it.
Of course it does. Who else but me would hide a book in my room, right where I sleep?
But that would mean... His blood ran cold. That would mean that this isn't the first time I've remembered my name.
With great trepidation, Gold folded back the cover on the journal. He had replaced the lid to the hidden hollow and retreated to his den, a place of bookshelves and plush leather chairs, with good lighting and nary a mirror in sight.
Now he stared at the words on the page. More specifically, at the date.
Ten years ago.
What happened ten years ago?
The journal had to have the answers. Gold read on.
Dreams. Dreams haunt my nights. I am not who I think I am. I am going mad. Am I going mad? Things are stirring, stirring, stirring in the dark and I can't stop them. Images, images, familiar yet false, twisted but true, over and over and over in my brain in my head and on and on and on... What is causing this? What is happening? I am not crazy! I am not! I am not I am not Iamnot!
But the crazy man insists he is sane. Insists that others are wrong and he is not. But if I am sane and insist I am sane... does that make me crazy? I awaken with the sense that the world is awry. That the things I do I have done before, over and over again. As in a dream. As under a curse. A curse... A curse, I remember a curse. Reality itself was destroyed. But not. I am here. I am real. Am I?
The book meandered along these lines for pages, interspersed with drawings and sketches, memories. Gold was shaken; many of them were in his journal - his new journal. Drawn anew. These were not the meanderings of a sane man. No sane man would think these things. A curse? Another life? That dreams were somehow real?
He stared at the book in his hand. It couldn't be him. Couldn't be. It was his handwriting, his turns of phrase, but there was no possible way he'd ever become unhinged enough to write the things he read here, in this frantic, frenetic script. He wasn't crazy. He was just a fairy tale character...trapped by a curse...in a land not his own...
Gold closed his eyes. I am not crazy. I can't prove it, but I am not.
He considered putting the journal away. He considered burning it. He was afraid of what he would find. His mind had snapped. It had to have. Was he having a relapse? Another bout of madness? Why, then, could he not remember it? If he had gone crazy before, surely there would be evidence, people would have mentioned it.
Wouldn't they?
But... if it was true... (and he wasn't sure which reality he meant by 'true')... he had to know. Had to.
He took a deep breath, and turned the page.
The handwriting here was more careful, deliberate, none of the frenzied scrawlings of earlier entries. A decision had been made. Or a revelation.
These. Are. Memories.
Regina has just confirmed it, though she doesn't know that she has.
She has asked me to procure a child for her. She is unable to conceive on her own and wishes to adopt. I told her that I would look around town for a likely candidate, but she told me no, none of the children here would do. She wanted a baby who could grow up, she said, who could be happy. I don't think she realized how much she was saying. To a mind under the curse, not much, I suppose. I told her that I would look outside the town. I would find her the perfect child to adopt. I would get her a baby.
"Henry," murmured Gold. He cast his thoughts backwards. He could remember being asked to find the child, of course. Could remember the conversation with Regina, vividly. Could remember carrying the baby from his car to the mayor's house, placing the infant in Regina's arms, seeing the smile of triumph and hope on Regina's face as she looked down on her new son.
What he couldn't remember was how he had come to choose that particular boy. It had been luck of the draw, a series of phone calls and negotiations that had narrowed the field from thousands to one. Or so he'd thought...
There is something different about the world, he'd written. There is no way a curse that has held sway for eighteen years suddenly begins to fail for no reason at all.
My memories come back to me, in the night, in my dreams. I knew about the curse before it was enacted. The queen came to me in my cell, told me what she intended. The fool actually believed me when I told her she had to kill the thing she loved most. A human heart - any human heart, so long as it was harvested by the curse-caster - would have done as well. How I laughed when she left! Tricked! Forced to kill with her own hands the one person she loved above all others. Revenge is as sweet in recollection as it is in person.
And that is not the only memory. Snow White and her prince came to me as well. They didn't know it, but it was I who had crafted the curse that threatened them; them and their whole world. Snow. Beautiful Snow. She who always came through on a bargain, little though she liked it. A woman of her word. Precious few in the world have her honor. I'd have liked her, in another life, I think. But Mary Margaret is so dull without her wits about her. This curse is a damned lobotomy on all the most interesting people.
So. Snow was pregnant with a girl-child. Would have given birth just before the curse took effect, judging from Mary Margaret's distinct lack of children in this life. Emma, her name was to be. Special girl. Big destiny. Break the curse. Roll back the Darkness. Thwart the evil queen and all her nasty little minions.
Lot of pressure to put on a kid who's not even a week old yet.
Or wasn't, anyway. Not so sure about the passage of time in my memories. Cave, you know. No sun. I'm almost positive the dwarves liked to mess with my head and play around with my sense of time - meal times at odd intervals, varying lengths of time for the guard rotation, that sort of thing. That reminds me, while I'm taking my revenge, I need to pay special attention to Leroy and his ilk. Stupid little men...
So why now? Why would the curse begin to fail now, of all times? Little Emma can't be twenty-eight yet; curse time is disorienting, but three decades haven't passed, surely. Besides, there's been no one new in town since... well, ever.
But why Regina's sudden interest in children? Tantalizing thought, that, she'd never expressed interest before. Not that I remember, anyway, things are all too bloody fuzzy. Well. If her interest in things outside the town is what has allowed me to start remembering, then hip-hip-hooray and may she always be so focused elsewhere. I hate living life in a cage, especially a mental one. Almost be worth it to bring little Princess Emma here just to keep my memories flowing. If only one could find her...
Gold's eyes paused, rereading the last section. He could almost - almost - remember penning it. Sitting at his desk, staring at the ink on the page as the wheels spun in his head, faster and faster. Find Emma, yes, and bring her back to Storybrooke. Keep her around until it was time for her to break the curse and in the meantime, gain back his mind and his powers. And do it all...
...under the queen's nose. I can mask my inquiries about her inside the inquiries into a child for the mayor to adopt. Who knows? I may find her yet.
The next several pages detailed the search and subsequent failure. Two weeks worth of nothing.
And then, pay dirt.
There had been a young woman who had given birth inside a Phoenix prison cell, two weeks earlier. The boy was up for adoption, but that wasn't the interesting part.
The interesting part was the mother's name. Emma. And her history: Found abandoned on the side of the road as an infant, only a few hours old, wrapped in a blanket white as snow, eighteen years previous. Exactly the day that the curse had taken effect.
Gold had gone to Phoenix himself, the only time a member of the town had ever been allowed to leave. He was eager to meet this Emma Swan, to see if she was, indeed, the lost princess. But she had been released from prison by then and even his silver tongue could not winkle out her whereabouts. So he turned to her son, instead.
In the few, brief weeks that he had had his mind and memories back, he had learned to recognize those like himself: those who didn't belong here, whose world was somewhere else. The infant practically glowed with nascent magic; magic thwarted, magic that should have been there but wasn't, magic that was by all accounts his birthright.
If I cannot have the mother, I will have the son, he had written. With the boy in town, perhaps the curse will continue to weaken through the blood ties. Blood magic is the strongest magic of all, save Love itself. And the love of a mother for her child is the strongest of all, a doubled bond of power.
The process of adoption had gone swiftly. A negotiation here, a deal there, a Deal under the table... and Gold found himself presenting the mayor with her brand new baby boy by the time he was three weeks old.
"Henry," Regina had said, looking at him for the first time as he nestled down in her arms. She touched his little baby palm with the tip of her pinkie finger and his little fingers had curled around hers, yawning and blinking sleepily, staring up at the new stranger holding him.
His eyes regarded her with that wisdom common only to infants, and they stared at each other, the baby and the queen, for probably thirty seconds or more. And then he began to cry; that wail that only a truly upset babe can make. He was still howling as I drove off. I wish the queen much luck in her new role as mother. Because sure as heck she's gonna need it.
And on a positive note, she now owes me a big, big favor. What am I going to do with it, I wonder? The possibilities are endless.
The journal continued, detailing memories and dreams for several days more, but the entries became shorter, more scattered, less linear.
I am forgetting, began the last entry. Whatever I was hoping for by bringing the grandson of Snow White here, it hasn't happened. Whatever it was that allowed that lapse in the curse to happen - whether it was Henry's birth or Regina's focus on getting a baby (and was that random or specific? Because it's too much of a coincidence to me, her wanting a child at the very time that Emma was giving birth) - that hole is starting to close. I reread my diary and it sounds like a madman, like a story. I know the memories are mine, but I cannot own them, they don't belong to me.
So I must wait, with the rest of Storybrooke, until Emma arrives. Because she will come. In ten years' time, she will come, and my memories will come back to me, and time will start again. I feel I have just enough time left to me to make preparations.
First, I will hide this journal. When I start to come to myself again, I am sure to find it. I know how I think, it shouldn't be hard to find someplace hidden from Regina which I will nevertheless find easily.
And secondly, I will give Emma the chance she needs to start fighting the curse. Ye gods, if I'd known how badly it would affect me, I'd never have crafted the daft thing. I hate cages, especially cages of my own making. But, well, I'm a craftsman. Of wood, of wool, of magic... The challenge to create the curse to end all curses was too tempting to pass up. Stupid of me, really, but there's hindsight for you. Actually, in retrospect, I'm not entirely sure I do want the curse lifted. It's quite comfortable here. But my mind will never be my own so long as Regina's spell is in place and uncontested. Therefore, a contest must be arranged, one which will last a long, long time, giving me the best of both worlds - my mind and my shape and the freedom of both.
So to give the lost princess her fighting chance: I have a book, a collection of fairy tales - the history of our world. I have imbued it with all the magic I have left to me - a mere spark, but that should be enough. I hope. - and given it to Mary Margaret, the schoolteacher, for safekeeping. Mothers and children, after all; when Emma arrives in town, the bond of blood and magic will draw them together. And when Emma reads the book, that spark will be released. It is a spell to open the mind to magic, to see the truth behind the lies. She will see the curse for what it is. Too simple, I fear, and yet I cannot make a bolder move; there is not enough magic left in me, for one thing; and for another, I don't want to chance Regina finding it, which she surely will with any stronger spell.
And now to dreams alone I relinquish myself, to hibernate until the curse begins to crack once again. May it be a long and glorious struggle, and may the victors always be those who know how to stay on top.
~ Rumpelstiltskin, a.k.a. Gold
PS: To my older self. For heaven's sake, find some way to remember things that doesn't involve a journal. The close shaves Regina gave me with this thing have started to turn our hair grey. Or would, if time passed here. Small mercies, eh? I don't believe we shall ever be grey or bald so long as the curse is in effect. Nor free, so pick your poison apple: no hair or no mind to go under it?