Homecoming

"And the waves crashing around me, the sand slips out to the sea.
And the winds that blow remind me, of what has been,

and what can never be."

It was taking him apart. His joints could no longer hold, his mind could not much longer stand the swirl of terror in the electric tempest of green.

There was a wind, but yet, not. His mind was swamped with fear, with terror. And the nightmare came back to him as his eyes, quite open, had let go of her hand. Abandonment: the greatest, unfaceable fear. Enacted upon him, and enacted by him.

'All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.'

If the portal were a spinning wheel he wished it could offer him a sleeping curse, a respite. Only his flailing hands could not locate its spindle.

His mind recalled his first realm leap, showed him the damp night in that forest, reminded him of slick palms, grabbing for his poppa and finding only loose soil and no footholds. Sinking, slipping, away. Away. Away.

Alone.

As his senses sharpened and the portal withdrew, perception returned to him. He could taste brine, and grit with it. His face, through no design of his own, was in sand, he foggily realized, his body coming to rest as though in the act of kissing the ground.

He could not have said how he knew, what about the air, the humidity that was so singular, the breeze along this seashore, but deep within something told him where he was—where he had been magicked to—despite it being the last place on Earth—Ha, his mind scoffed: Earth—that he would wish to come.

The Enchanted Forest.

Home.

He would not open his eyes. He would refuse. He would not accept this as his destination. He would let the pain throbbing in his right side grow, until it removed him from consciousness again. Until, perhaps, it removed him forever.

He did not think he could move.

He longed to hear a taxi drive by, a cabbie's rude shout, noisy exhaust and sounds echoing off buildings with more stories than he could squint to count. The smells of food and garbage, gasoline and asphalt in the heat. The press of people so numerous a single man who did not belong there was faceless, uninteresting. A true nobody.

Instead: water lapping not too far from his heels. Gulls calling to one another. Wind in tall evergreens. And then, as he faded in and out, feet upon wet sand. Approaching.

A man's voice.

Long hair.

"Poppa?" he asked, his mind muddled, his voice cracking so that he could hardly be understood.

He waited to hear his father say his name. To tell him who he was. If he was, again, Rumplestiltskin, the Dark One's, son.

Or still (warts and all) the man of his own making.

No. Not Poppa.

"Emma? Emma?" he asked on, begged, confused, lost to time and place. "Em, that you?"

"What's that?" the man's voice asked. "Emma? He's calling for someone," concern audible. "For 'Emma'."

"Emma?" a woman answered, her voice like the chirp of a bird, saying the name familiarly.

"No," her voice tried to assure him, tried to explain. "Emma's not here anymore. She's gone home." A pause, and then, "Home to Henry."

And there it was, like a magic word to unlock a grimoire spell. In its wake he could hold himself together no longer. With great effort and much physical pain he rolled away from where these voices were trying to rescue him. Away from help and succor, out of their grasp. He rolled back into the clammy sand of the beach where he had washed ashore and let himself shed the tears of a lost boy named Baelfire. For Emma, for Henry.

For Neal.