Disclaimer: Alas, I own none of these characters, and no profit is being made.

Spoilers for everything through 3x13, "Witch Hunt"

Watching the Wheel

"I like to watch the wheel. Helps me forget."

"You could spin for kings and queens one day," the spinsters tell him again, as if that will help mollify the fact that his father has left him. But little Rumple has nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, so he spins the wheel and hopes it will help him forget. Soon enough, the motions become automatic. His hands drift over the wheel easily as days fly by, creating finer and finer thread and pleasing the two women who have given him a home. But he thinks of his father often, thinks of a shadow dragging him away from the only family he's ever had, and tears cloud his vision as he watches the wheel.

Years pass, and he spins. There's nothing else for him in the world, until the spinsters arrange a marriage between Rumple and the youngest daughter of a merchant who has five others. Milah has few skills to speak of, so he tries to teach her to spin, tries to share some of that peace he finds sitting at the wheel. But Milah is clumsy and isn't patient enough for spinning, so Rumple teaches her a bit of weaving instead. He'd picked up spinning so fast that Hanka, the elder of the two spinsters, apprenticed Rumple to her cousin for a season, and that cousin had taught him to weave. Most spinners were not so skilled, and Rumplestiltskin's talents were in high demand. They made a good living, which meant Milah's meager abilities were not required to make ends meet. Still, she enjoyed weaving in the beginning, and Rumple watched the wheel less and less, instead choosing to sit with his wife by the fire and talk of the future.

He thinks his spinning days are over when he is called to war, and dreams of an even better life when he returns. Instead, he is branded a coward after shattering his own ankle, after doing everything he can to make sure that his son does not grow up as he did. Years of watching the wheel has not made him forget how his own father abandoned him, has not made him stop having nightmares of Neverland and of a shadow demon pulling him away, screaming, from the boy who his father has become. "A child cannot have a child." He will never forget those words, because they translate into I don't want you, anymore, and he will never recover from that heartbreak.

They claim to be merciful when they do not kill him after he proves himself to be a coward just like his father. Instead, he's flogged to provide an example for the new recruits arriving, to prove to them that the Duke's justice is tempered by mercy, and even cowards can be spared to serve a larger purpose. One of the medics takes pity on him treats his wounds, but the same man has been forbidden to set his ankle. It will be a reminder, the general says, to everyone who sees him. As if Rumple will forget; scars crisscross his back from the whippings, and his nightmares now change. When he finally returns home, seven months after he left, four months after the battle he'd staggered away from, and ten floggings later, the news has traveled faster than Rumple can limp. Milah calls him a coward, but she holds a beautiful baby boy named Baelfire in her arms while she does so.

Rumple learns to operate the wheel with his left foot, but spinning has lost its joy. Now he spins to forget, spins to make the image of ten weekly floggings—each done as a new company of recruits arrives—blur into exhaustion, so that he might actually sleep. He spins to forget how Hordor eggs angry townspeople into beating him senseless, to block out the memory of Milah's disgust that first night. Now he spins because she doesn't want him in her bed, and he watches the wheel when she doesn't come home at night, trying not to think about where she's gone or who she's with.

Still, he never expects her to actually leave, not when he never complains and only asks her to stay for Baelfire's sake. Their boy is better than either one of them, bright and precocious, and Rumple spins and spins in hopes of proving his son with a better future. But his cloth and thread never sell for what they are worth; he is the town coward and has to take what the villagers will give him. Most tell him to consider himself lucky that they pay him at all, and although Rumple knows he is skilled enough to demand four or five times the pittance they throw at his feet, what can he do? Even Milah calls him a coward, even she tells him that he's gotten what he deserves.

"Why couldn't you have fought, Rumple?" Milah demands frequently. "You're worthless now. A cripple and a coward. What kind of example is that for our son?"

She wishes he'd died. Milah doesn't say that right away, but after a year of living as the town coward's wife, she demands to know why he won't do the honorable thing and commit suicide. "There's only one way you can make this right," she tells him, not understanding why Rumple can never leave his son without a father. He loves Bae with all of his broken heart, pours his soul into the little boy, and feels that he is at least a good father if he is good for nothing else. Milah never understands.

But then she's suddenly gone, leaving a crippled coward with their precious boy, and after he leaves the laughing pirate behind, he tells Baelfire that his mother is dead. The words stick in his throat, because Rumple is pretty sure that they're a lie but won't be for long. He loved her, and although a corner of Rumple's mind will always wonder if she'd gone to the pirate of her own volition, Milah deserved better than to die that way. So he spins that night, trying to forget the sound of her voice or the way she said his name before she stopped loving him. He spins to forget about pirates and their cruel laughter, to cancel out the images of what must have happened to Milah after he left. Baelfire asks him why he's crying, and Rumple tells him that his mother was a brave woman.

Years more pass, and the ogre wars begin again. His nightmares return, and Rumplestiltskin stares at the wheel in the wee hours of the morning, spinning and spinning, trying not to think of the lash coming down on his back while his broken ankle rolls under his body, unable to support him as he slumps against the whipping post. Some of those watching were once his friends, but they'll never look at him the same way again, and most deny ever having known him once he becomes the town coward. Their blows hurt most of all. Spinning helps block out the pain, and the way the wheel slides smoothly beneath his hands reminds him that he is good for at least this one thing. He'll never spin for kings and queens, never make more than this scratched-together living he provides for his boy, but something deep within the broken spinner remembers that he could once have been something.

He accepts the townspeople's beatings as always he accepted Milah's verbal abuse, figuring that he deserves their hatred. After all, he lived while so many others died, and he knows it was worth it every time he looks at his boy. But Baelfire is growing so much, now, and he is the center of his father's world. Bae is all that matters, so when the beggar offers him a way out of the horrible fate his son is sure to suffer, Rumplestiltskin gathers courage he did not know he had.

Then the dagger is in his hand, and moments later he is the Dark One. Strength fills his body, fears vanish beneath the sudden knowledge than he can do anything. He can feel his face changing and his mind filling with rage, but Rumplestiltskin can make his boy safe for the first time in Baelfire's entire life, and that is worth any sacrifice, worth even the way he feels his soul slipping through his fingers. And he can have revenge on all those who wronged him.

He loses track of how many he kills in those first few days. Power is exhilarating, engrossing, extraordinary. Suddenly, he can give Bae everything he always wanted to give him: comfort, wealth, safety, and love. Rumplestiltskin stops spinning, stops trying to forget, and lives in the moment. They have a better home, now, though they're still in the same village, and Rumplestiltskin tells himself that he doesn't have to be evil. He ends the war, brings Bae's friends home, and brokers a peace that will last a hundred years. Now people look at him in fear and with a little awe, and it is so much better than what they had. Except Bae is not happy.

The wheel sits in the corner as his son grows more miserable. He thinks he should get rid of it, but the monster inside him hasn't completely overcome his ability to feel. He remembers Hanka and the other spinsters fondly, and the wheel was a gift from them. It's older than he is, lovingly kept in good repair despite hard use. He should dispose of that last reminder of his old life now that he is something new, but Baelfire asks him not to.

Then he loses his son, and then loses himself, and suddenly the wheel is all he has to turn to for comfort. So now he spins to remember the sound of his boy's voice, spins to forget his own last act of cowardice, spins to forget that he let his precious boy go. Listening to the creak of the wheel is the only thing that can soothe his murderously heartbroken rage, and Rumplestiltskin clings to the knowledge that Bae loved his father the spinner, even as he struggles to forget that Bae hated the Dark One.

"Don't you miss how it was?" Baelfire had asked him so many times. He'd say yes now if it brought his son back, he's willing to go back to that terrified spinner if it could only be with his Bae. So he spins to forget how it was, to forget that he was ever anything besides a monster, because he's lost his son and there's no reason to be better.

He acquires a grander spinning wheel, and a castle in which to display it. Yet he keeps the old one, keeps it in the tower he makes home more than the splendid bedchamber filled with luxuries he scarcely notices. Rumplestiltskin—never Rumple, not now, for that would be a hint of humanity he no longer possesses—spins at the great wheel when he wants to impress visitors or impress himself, but he spins with the old wheel sometimes. When he's not burying himself in work, in the magic he laboriously teaches himself. He tries to think of spells as he spins, tries to use the time wisely. It never works. Instead, he always finds himself coming back to the wheel to forget, or to remember. Eventually, he accepts that about himself, accepts that the only semblance of peace he will ever find is behind a spinning wheel.

The Dark One hates that about himself, hates the way that harkens back to the broken spinner he was before killing Zoso. But he never can bring himself to be rid of that old wheel, even though he doesn't care about the gold he's discovered he can spin. Rumplestiltskin taught Bae to spin sitting on his lap, and sometimes when he spins the Dark One imagines he can feel the tiny weight on his leg. If he closes his eyes—and he has to, on the tears—he can remember Baelfire, just seven years old, his hands light on the wheel and watching his father with wonder.

"How does it work, Papa?" Bae once asked, just as he'd asked the spinsters. He couldn't afford a child-sized wheel, so he'd helped his boy learn on the one he'd inherited. If Hanka had lived long enough, Rumplestiltskin sometimes thinks that he would have asked her for the one he'd once learned on. But she and the others died before he turned himself into a coward, a small blessing for which he is always grateful. There have been so few of those in his long, lonely, life. The best of those was the boy who he remembers, forgets, yearns for. The regret that he cannot shake.

Years pass, and still he spins. He spins to remember Baelfire's face, spins to forget his heartrending regret. Neither works, and he slowly forgets his boy's features as he sits at that wheel, not watching the gold pile into a basket. It doesn't matter. So little does. He rarely cries—he won't let himself any longer. Monsters who lose their children do not deserve such release. His grief bottles up inside him and waits to explode.

A century goes by, and he wishes he could stop. Yet spinning is the only comfort Rumplestiltskin allows himself, and he cannot bear to be rid of either wheel. He learns more magic, and it fills his life. He becomes an academic, gathers a library on every topic the world can imagine, and reads everything he owns. But magic is always what he comes back to, because it is the only thing that can bring him back to his beloved boy. And in Bae's absence, when he's not spinning to forget he pain, he comes to love magic. It cannot love him back, but it makes Rumplestiltskin worth something, and soon the world is turning to him to do the impossible.

Anything is possible, if you are willing to pay the price. He is the master of miracles, and knowledge tries to fill the gap left by the son he lost. There is a hole in his heart that will never be filled, but his mind races with knowledge every day, until he is so tired that he must stop. Then he sits at the wheel and spins, thinking of Baelfire and even Milah, dreaming of being normal and having had a family once. The monster inside him rails and says that he is a fool for missing such things; the dark voice of his curse tells him that he is better now, better like this. So, he spins to forget being human. To forget being anything but the Dark One. To forget love.

He thinks he's succeeded until he meets a miller's daughter, and in the midst of teaching her to spin gold, he falls in love with her. Rumplestiltskin tries to fully emerge from beneath the Dark One for the first time in centuries. If she had not broken his heart, perhaps the man his boy had loved might have come out of hiding within the depths of his battered soul, but break him Cora does. Now he spins to forget her, too, rage making his fingers harsh on the wheel, his motions choppy and the soothing rhythm gone. A long while passes before he can calm himself, before he can move past the betrayal of how she threw him aside for an empty-headed prince. Love is weakness, Cora had said. Sometimes he wants to believe she is right.

He plans his revenge from behind the wheel in those first months, now calmly letting the wood slide beneath his fingers and knowing he will teach her daughter, the one that should have been his. He fools Regina from beside that wheel, using the Hatter as his pawn and growing his own monster. He needs her to find her son, but the spinner within him rears his cowardly head, reminding the demon that there is a conscience buried within the darkness. So, he spins to forget that this girl should have been his, spins to bury his regrets. He spins to forget everything.

"I want true happiness," she tells him, and he scoffs at her because he's spun his way into forgetting what that is. But something in his withered black heart bleeds for this starry-eyed girl. He spins to remember her, later, because he thinks that's his penance.

Next, he teaches a green-skinned girl, and spins to forget that such spells as she dares could never do such damage to him. He isn't human, and spins to remember that. She is Cora's daughter, too, but not the monster he is looking for. He has visions of her, though, visions that indicate she'll cross his path once more, but he pushes those aside when they accost him at the wheel one night. His visions are of a man who looks like he once did, weak and lonely, so they are clearly unimportant. There is no man left inside the monster. The only thing that remains of him is the father who will rip worlds apart for the chance to apologize to his beloved son. He has himself convinced of this by the time he trades for a knight's daughter, knowing she'll be important but never knowing why.

"Why do you spin?" she asks him, and she is the first to do so since Baelfire. And then she laughs at his joke when he tells her that he's already forgotten. She is a flicker of light in an ocean of darkness, a moment of love in a life full of pain. He should know that it will never last, and yet he fools himself for a few precious months, growing to love her more and more. Belle. Her name becomes his prayer, and he lets her go because he loves her.

She comes back. Belle comes back, and hope sings within him. She kisses him, and for a moment he melts—until he feels the curse unraveling within him, and he is so afraid that he will lose his one chance of finding his son. "I don't want you anymore, dearie," he tells her, as Malcolm said to him so many years earlier. His heart breaks as he says it, not meaning a word, and yet knowing that there is no other way. Rumplestiltskin is meant to be alone, and he spins to forget her smile, her hands, and the soft feel of her lips on his own. But those feelings are burned into his mind, burned into his soul, and all the spinning in the world will not help him forget.

He's spinning when Regina arrives to break his heart. "She died," his Evil Queen tells him. Clerics and scourges and purifying. His Belle. The only person to touch his soul since Baelfire, the one person he has truly loved. Rumplestiltskin, the man inside the monster, doesn't believe Regina, but even his magic cannot find her. So he spins to remember her face, spins while tears roll down his face.

He'd spin to forget her, but the heartbreak is just too strong.

"You just don't think I can love you," her voice echoes in his ears, and now he spins to forget his two great acts of cowardice, clinging to a chipped cup and a tattered shawl. This is who he is. He loses those he loves. He drives them away.

He can't spin enough to forget that.

So Rumplestiltskin buries himself in readying for the curse, in making sure that when Regina rips their world to pieces, he'll be able to put things together on the other end. Every deal he makes brings him one step closer to Baelfire, one step closer to creating the Savior they will all need. Every day that dawns is one less he will live without his son, and he spins to remember Baelfire's face, clinging to the few memories he still has. Pain wells up in Rumplestiltskin as he remembers, though, knowing that no matter how hard he fights, Belle will not be with him. Not ever again.

There's no wheel in the rotten cell Cinderella and Charming lock him in. There's no way to spin to forget, so he is locked in with the memories. His curse means he does not need to sleep often, but when he does, he calls her name, whimpers it out with apologies that belong to the man buried under the monster, the man both Belle and Baelfire had loved. For the first time, he starts to feel regrets, starts to wonder if this curse will make his son hate him. But it is too late now. He has done his work too well, and the curse is coming. He only has to live through four months of solitary confinement, through four months of regret and pain. Four months of memories he cannot banish without a wheel to watch.

Then there are twenty-eight years of silence, twenty-eight years when he only dreams of Baelfire and Belle in bits and pieces that his cursed self does not understand. He cannot remember anything under the curse, until a simple name brings Rumplestiltskin crashing into Mr. Gold.

"Swan. Emma Swan," the savior says.

He needs to spin. The curse put the large, showy wheel in the shop, but the old one he inherited from the spinsters landed in the basement of his house, and Rumplestiltskin stumbles down the stairs to find the only refuge he has found during the last three hundred years.

No, that's a lie. Belle was a refuge who he lost too fast. "All you'll have is an empty heart…and a chipped cup," she'd told him. So he finds the chipped cup; the Dark Curse brought that, too. And he clings to it as he cries, clings to it and promises that he'll find Baelfire and that he won't forget her. He stops spinning almost as soon as he starts. His penance is to face the pain until he can take it no more.

Mr. Gold dusts off the wheel in the back room of his shop, repairs it slowly, by hand, as he has always done. By the time he is done he has paid some of the price he knows he must pay, and he is desperate for some sort of solace. So, he spins to ease the pain, spins until the tears he wants to cry are bottled up inside. He cannot afford weaknesses, cannot afford to let the broken spinner out once again. He has a curse to break and a son to find, and maybe Rumplestiltskin might just find a small measure of redemption. He has waited over two centuries to say he is sorry. Even if his boy rejects him, he can do that much.

He spins to push aside the fear that the Seer was wrong, that Bae is dead and long gone. Or that his son will hate him as he deserves to be hated. He spins to forget his fears, and sometimes he even manages. Rumplestiltskin has never been anything save a coward, and he will not lie to himself. Instead he will stop his spinning, help the savior, and break the curse. So he does.

Magic is all he has to live for, so he plays a few more tricks and steals his own potion away from Emma Swan. He needs magic to find his precious boy—and then it finds someone else for him, completely unexpectedly. Suddenly, Belle is real, she's alive, and everything Rumplestiltskin has ever wanted is within his grasp. Of course, within a few hours, he finds himself spinning to forget the pain of having pushed her away. But perhaps it is better like this. This is who he is. He loses those he loves.

He spins to forget the possibility that he might lose his son, too. Spins with the chipped cup sitting nearby, wanting to weep and yet knowing this time he does not deserve to do so. Rumplestiltskin finds himself remembering her face, spinning to remember, spinning to forget. Then she comes back, and in his joy, the wheel is forgotten for a while more. Until he loses her again due to his own foolishness, and thankfully the spinner inside him wins when he goes crawling back to her to apologize. He's all but spun Milah away by this point, but Belle is so unlike her that he begins to hope.

"You are nothing now," Milah told him so many times, often while patching up cuts and bruises left from someone beating the town coward. "I love you," Belle says instead, holding him tight and urging him to be the better man she somehow sees inside him. She says his heart is true. Milah used to tell him that he must be heartless, otherwise he would never have done this to her. He once spun to forget the cruel things Milah said. Now he sits with Belle the way he once sat with Milah, feeling ever closer to the beautiful woman who has given him her heart—until a pirate takes her away, too.

"I hurt his heart. Belle is just where he keeps it."

He cannot make her remember, so he spins to forget once more. He finds his son and nearly loses him, almost dying before they can speak a civil word. Then he spins to forget Cora, spins to forget the fact that he's made his son hate him, and he cannot be anything better than he is. Rumplestiltskin has a grandson, but that only makes him turn to the wheel because he cannot figure out what to do with this unexpected gift. The boy will be his undoing—but when he finds that his son is dead, nothing else matters. There's no time to spin after that, only time to cling to Belle and wish the world would end.

It does not, and then he's volunteering to go to Neverland, needing to do one good thing with the time left to him. He was a good man, once. He could never spin enough to forget that, to push aside the man he'd been before he became a coward. But he needs the monster now, needs the monster to find the grandson he could never properly love. He wants to love Henry, but is too twisted up inside to do so, and Rumplestiltskin understands that, now. He even understands why his son won't trust him, though it rips what little soul he has left to shreds. There's no wheel in Neverland, no way to mitigate the pain.

And perhaps he doesn't need one. For the first time in his long, twisted life, he forgets his cleverness and makes a fatal mistake, and Rumplestiltskin finds himself within Pandora's box. But it's his beloved boy who saves him, who pulls him out of the horrible place where there is no forgetting, only remembering. He pays the price there, inside that box, remembering all his mistakes, his cowardice, and his loves. Rumplestiltskin wants to go to pieces when he is pulled out, but suddenly there is forgiveness and love and it feels for a few days as if he can be more than the Dark One.

For the first time since he came back from the ogres war, Rumplestiltskin feels like he belongs. His beloved boy is now a man, but a good one, and they finally can look one another in the eye and try to overcome their differences. They sit next to the wheel one night and talk about old times, and Baelfire seems to believe that maybe his father is inside the monster somewhere. Until a greater monster arrives, and Rumplestiltskin puts his soul on the line.

Now he's in a cell again, though this one has a wheel. Sometimes he sings to himself, sanity cracking under the memories, and sometimes he spins. He spins to forget what she does, this green-faced former student of his. And he spins to remember those who he loves, to remember what he was and who he might be again. His life passes before his eyes as his fingers caress the wheel. Watching the wheel.