A/N: Another OUaT story? Yes, I apparently like writing for defunct fandoms, so here we are. This one has been in the planning for years and years but only been in the writing for a month or two so hopefully that doesn't show too much.

Also, as a personal disclaimer that applies to every OUaT story I have ever and will ever write: I choose to ignore the fact that this show went on for however many seasons it did and willfully reject anything as canon after 3x11, so nothing here will be canon-compliant for anything after that. I'm sorry if that bothers you, but I choose to enjoy what parts of the show I love and not complicate my life (or my blood pressure) by trying to figure out what happened after I stopped watching. Thanks for understanding and I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: Most Rumplestiltskin parts from the show are here in some form or another, and some dialogue is taken directly from episodes that were written by others. No copyright infringement is intended, just admiration and enjoyment.

Chapter 1: The Deal-Maker

It all started when he took the gift of foresight from the lying seer. Or that's what he tells himself anyway (he has grown quite adept at lying to himself; just another habit picked up from the Dark One). It's only after he clasps those hands, feels the far-seeing eyes squirming against his palms, is overwhelmed by a thousand, thousand possibilities opening up before him, that Rumplestiltskin begins to see him.

Baelfire. Bae. His beautiful, brave, bold boy, out there somewhere all alone, a world removed from his father (so familiar, this tale, that it brings bile to his throat), waiting for Rumplestiltskin to find him.

And he will. Of course he will. He is immortal now, all of time mere threads to spin beneath his hands, all of magic his to claim and employ and wield. He has the inadvertent promise of the Blue Fairy and now the gift of prophecy to assure him that somewhere, somewhen, his Bae will be returned to the circle of Rumplestiltskin's once-feeble, now-powerful arms.

He will see his boy again, and until that day comes, he can be patient. He can subsist on memories (well-loved, well-worn, but still so much more vibrant than his lonely present), can bide his time and imagine the lives around him as strings to be plucked and played and propelled in certain directions.

And once he leaves the seer's body cooling on the forest floor (too little, too merciful a punishment for the one who brought down every bad thing in Bae's life, but such is life: the wicked thrive and the innocent suffer), he sees in his own mind that moment she promised him. One day, in another world, centuries from now, there will be a reunion.

It's just a glimpse, but it's enough.

Enough to comfort him. Enough to lull him. Enough to drive him mad.

Because that's when it begins. The visions that aren't visions. The sight that isn't Sight. The glimpses that lie and mislead and deceive—but oh, what beautiful, enchanting deceptions.

The first time he sees it (him), Bae's running ahead down the path as he kicks his ball (the one Rumplestiltskin handmade for the youngster and has carefully preserved along with all the rest of Baelfire's belongings, magic once more saving Bae for him) with agile feet and a child's energy. At first, Rumplestiltskin thinks he must have imagined the similarities, seeing the familiar in the stranger. But no, he knows that silhouette, the fall of hair over that brow, the shape of his form and the lines of his profile.

Perhaps, then, he is dreaming. Sleep is elusive in this new form of his and ever more so since that green cyclone (yet again) devoured the person he loves most in all the realms (and that, that, he wishes Bae could have understood, is the true curse). So perhaps he's simply nodded off, slipped into sleep without noticing and now dreams of days when the world was his, all wrapped up in dark hair and trusting eyes and a solid form that offered him unwavering support.

But magic curls, panting and eager, around his wrists, ready to be unleashed. And there are others around him, watching him, staring at the Dark One in their presence, keeping their distance while they watch (and wish, he knows, wish that his power was theirs to do with as they will). So he's awake. Awake, and yet that is his boy laughing as the ball nearly gets away from him.

It must, then, he thinks with dawning hope, be his foresight. A gift of the future delivered to him so unexpectedly. So graciously.

Rumplestiltskin takes his first full breath in months at the thought that this moment (this Bae of easy laughter and nimble feet) will be his again.

(There is a reason he has learned how to lie in the recesses of his mind, in the hollows of his echoing heart: it gives him reason to keep breathing when nothing else does.)

Breathing deeply, he (almost) doesn't mind when the vision of Bae disappears behind the clatter of an approaching wagon. It's a near thing, but he manages not to vaporize the wagon and donkey and driver altogether in retaliation. He thinks Bae would have been proud of that restraint (and he will be, one day in another world, when Rumplestiltskin has collected enough power to protect them but is separated from the curse his beautiful boy couldn't see past).

It's a reward, this brief sight (and if it seems strange, well, that is only because he is not used to receiving anything but pain and loss), a reminder to stay the course, to ignore the pain of magic's price and the loneliness of his cursed life. A gift beyond measure, and like the greedy beggar (the penniless coward) he is, he clutches it close and hoards it for the long years ahead.

It is not the last time he catches sight of his boy, and Rumplestiltskin begins to live for those brief glimpses. For the flicker of Bae's dark hair flopping just at the edges of his vision, the distant sound of his voice (Papa! in a childish squeal; Papa! with that sound of accusation that everyone else had already long since learned to throw his way, and oh, words and names and nuances matter more than he could have possibly comprehended before power and pain).

Some days, he sees Bae following in his wake, quiet but present. Other days, he chatters long words of gibberish like he did as a toddler, always so willing to cling close to Rumplestiltskin, never far from his side. Most often, he is removed from Rumplestiltskin by a distance he can't quite bring himself to broach—but sometimes, oh, sometimes he is so near that Rumplestiltskin could reach out and touch him (if he were only brave enough). And one day, one day he is brave (or just desperate, because that's what he is, his faults branded into a dagger and marked over all his flesh, his desperate soul cloaking him from the outside in). One day, Bae reaches out for Rumplestiltskin's hand, the way he once did so openly, so trustingly—and yearningly, foolishly (desperately), Rumplestiltskin lets him.

Bae vanishes.

There one instant, gone the next. Ripped from him again. A transition so abrupt, so damning, that Rumplestiltskin goes mad.

His son! His beautiful boy who would rest his heavy head against Rumplestiltskin's shoulder. The hand that used to slide so easily into his, then learned to curl around his papa's elbow to help him stand upright (wrong, so wrong, for his perfect son to have to support him, but Rumplestiltskin longs for it anyway because he is weak and selfish and not nearly as patient as he tries to pretend). All of it gone once more, leaving him alone and abandoned and solitary, not a papa, not a spinner, nothing but a monster.

When the smoke clears (when his sanity is yanked back into place through sheer force of will and Bae's name scrawled like fire through his veins), Rumplestiltskin finds himself standing in a crater a thousand feet wide. Mountains surround him where once there were flatlands, land crumpled upward and straining for escape from the magic still seething inside him.

Devastation on every side.

He thinks he should care whether there were towns, villages, people nearby, but he doesn't. He can't. None of them were Bae, and none of them would help him reunite with his son and he will outlive them all anyway, still hurting and waiting and manipulating long after they are all dust, so why bother himself with details (those tiny, oh-so-important details, the strands of lives that spool out possible futures, so many of them burnt to nothing now).

It's the crater that bothers him. A hole engulfing him. Locking him out. Reminding him that he is all alone, the only creature left with heart still beating to live out his worst nightmare. A pale mimicry of that smaller crater that stood as his son's…no! Not a grave, never a grave, just the mark of Rumplestiltskin's greatest mistake.

In a brilliant flash (not green, though, any color but green; gold and blue and scarlet, amber and carnelian and obsidian, but never again that cyclonic emerald), he fills the crater in, transforms it into a foundation (the same way two craters before have become the foundation of who he is) and then covers it with stone and brick, with doors and gates (not too many of those) and windows (all covered to mask his shame) and heavy ramparts.

A castle for the Dark One. Suitable and fitting. Long overdue, he tells himself, since he's long outgrown the little cottage where Bae was born (it hurts too much to visit it now anyway). He needs a place where desperate souls can come find him, far away from a spinner's humble hut and the lore of a magical dagger.

Rumplestiltskin tells himself he has many reasons for this new fortress, but really, the madness is too close and he needs a safe backdrop. A place where he will not go mad again should the visions of Bae return to him.

They do return. Bae plays in the great hall while Rumplestiltskin spins. He hums that off-tune melody while Rumplestiltskin accumulates and reads book after book after book (and who would have known that the greatest skill the spinner could own was not that of thread and wool and weft, but that of literacy?). He leans his head against Rumplestiltskin's shoulder, a ghostly weight, while Rumplestiltskin finds exhaustion pulling him down into sleep.

One day, he thinks, this will be his again. He has the Sight to prove it: a single glimpse of another world with his boy in it.

A promise gifted him by the dying seer and a curse confirmed by an angry fairy. So little, really, to plan his next few centuries around, but the visions of Bae remind him that everything, anything, is worth his precious boy.

So he learns. He has a castle now, and a reputation, and sheer power, but now he needs cunning and craftiness, a name that will spread and do half his work for him, lore that will armor him in confidence, masks that will fit every occasion, potions to ease the burden of magic's price, talismans and artifacts and magical antiques to fit any and every occasion (every obstacle) that might arise between him and his boy.

Rumplestiltskin was a name bestowed on him as a curse, and now he makes it one. No need the legends and whispers of a coward who took a magical blade for his son; now he needs a new legend. Dark whispers to match the Dark One's prestige. Thread by thread, piece by piece, life by life, Rumplestiltskin crafts a new story.

The Dark One who constantly makes deals. The Dark One who never lies but always wins. The Dark One who has no weaknesses save his penchant for crafting deals for desperate souls, who knows everything (or at least knows how to appear as though he does), who cares for nothing and no one (and so cannot be controlled or made to bow and kiss any more boots). For bullies, he remembers the whine of the spinner and the snicker of the men who ambushed him on his way home from the market in Longborne, the taunts of Hordor and the unconcern of all passersby. For the cautious, he channels the scorn of Milah and the ease of Jones. For the unknowing, the unwarned, he becomes the confidante, the learned scholar seeking to educate and refine.

There is a mask for every occasion, a spell for every desire, a solution for every problem—for a price, naturally.

(He paid the ultimate price for his wish to be granted, so why should they be any different?)

Deception is in his blood, after all. He can still remember Malcolm conning and conniving, manipulating and dreaming, shifting personalities as easily as he eventually shifted forms. He should have known he would end up here, in the end (a coward like his father, a failure like his rootless mother), playing parts and lying by omission, by appearance, by accent and choice of word.

Rumplestiltskin never thought of himself as smart, so the Dark One becomes the most cunning of individuals with a magical library that rivals any ever before compiled. Rumplestiltskin was weak, so the Dark One is strong, so strong that it is nothing to him, his power almost of no consequence. Rumplestiltskin was poor, penniless, helpless and frightened, so the Dark One is powerful and wealthy and influential and so infamous that even the whisper of his name is enough to raze towns to the ground and spill blood like rain and set even stone to flame.

Rumplestiltskin broke the only deal that ever mattered, so the Dark One never, never breaks deals (and no one breaks deals with him because, one day, they will all lead him like steppingstones to that moment where Bae is within arm's reach).

And still, none of it matters.

Still, when he returns to the Dark Castle, he is alone. The place echoes. It is haunted by the ghost of what has never been and what won't be for long centuries more.

Still, the only comfort, the only consolation, Rumplestiltskin receives are the glimpses of his boy, a phantom just at the corners of his vision.

For now, it's enough (so long as he never, never reaches out to touch).

It's been decades since he last heard any whispers about a magical knife, and decades longer since anyone has known to speak of a spinner or a son or a quest. For all intents and purposes, Rumplestiltskin has become nothing more than a myth to add to their world's lore.

Perfect, he thinks. It means that those who call him offer deals with no thought to what he might want from whatever it is he asks of them. It means that there's no one (aside from the meddling fairy, who's gone peculiarly quiet) to start a list of his deals and his prices, his moves and his interests, to try to puzzle them out.

He makes deals because it is simply what he does. He requires things of them because he is evil and twisted and wishes only to cause chaos and confusion and harm.

It's exactly what he wanted, and when he's alone, he capers to the knowledge that his plan is succeeding so wonderfully (it's strange to find success when for his whole life, failure has dogged his every step).

So why is he bothered, when he walks into a town, and sees all the children swept away? Why does it matter that he never sees anyone younger than two or three decades? What matter that they shelter their children from the man who led a thousand children home from a battlefield they never should have seen in the first place?

It doesn't. Of course it doesn't. None of those children are Bae anyway, so why should he care about them?

(He failed his own child, his flesh and blood, his everything, so why risk touching any other child's life?)

Just once, though, he longs to reach out and clasp a child's shoulder. Just to remember what it feels like. To test that he has not forgotten the feel of Bae's shoulder under his hand, warm and steady and fragile and trusting. Just once. One moment of touch, one instant to remember what it is to be loved unconditionally (except there was a condition, wasn't there, a caveat he failed when he let go of a hand that only tightened).

No matter.

Whatever child he touched, whatever shoulder he clasped…it wouldn't be Bae's. It'd be a fake, a lie, a betrayal.

Better to remain alone. Better to sneer at the children before they're snatched away and to smirk at the parents to remind them he allows the pretense that they could save their children (parents never save their children, he knows, not really; they only try and fail).

Better to return to his solitary castle and sit at his spinning wheel and wait (breathlessly, hopelessly) for the image of Bae to appear there.

To make him strong and real and patient once again.

(And always, always, always, just out of reach.)

Exhaustion is his constant companion, as close as the memory of Bae. It follows in his wake waiting to devour him. Rumplestiltskin gives in only occasionally and usually resentfully. It will be centuries more before he is reunited with his son, but still he feels as if there's not enough time for him to accomplish everything he needs to.

Curses are still beyond him—casting them is simple, but creating them is another thing entirely. He's only memorized potions thus far and is still learning how to mix his own recipes. There is still magic beyond him and magic-users who might challenge him. There are other ways to get to other worlds, and he's so far managed to run down only a few of them (all of them useless to make it to a world lacking magic; if ever he could blame his boy for anything, it would be to ask why he chose the hardest world of all to flee to); there are more out there to discover (the future can be interpreted in many ways, he knows that better than anyone, and who is to say that image he has of a reunion is not just another reunion, a homecoming, a visit after they've been together for decades thanks to something besides a world-destroying curse?). All avenues must be explored, everything learned, every book read, every magic-user questioned or defeated or controlled or discarded.

Besides…it is when he is most exhausted, when he's used so much magic, expended so much focus, when sleep has been weeks in the coming…that's when he sees Bae most clearly.

His boy, so beautiful, so young, kneeling beside his table filled with simmering potions and smoking ingredients and worn books. Looking up with eyes that shine with inner light, a hand hovering a hair's breadth over Rumplestiltskin's shoulder. So close. So clear. So forgiving.

Weariness makes the room spin and ingredients roll away from his hands, but Bae is there, every detail refreshed in his mind, every memory brought back to the forefront.

His boy.

Not a delusion. No, never that.

"Don't forget who you are, Papa," Bae pleads with him.

"I'll never forget you, son," he promises. His hands burn with wanting to touch, but slow as he is, he's learned this lesson. "Everything I do is for you."

"I know." Bae's head tilts, leans, and Rumplestiltskin is breathless with hope that he will lean against his knee, that he will feel warmth and a beating heart and frail shoulders capable of bearing such burdens (a crippled father, a terrible mother, a reputation he never deserved but was born into; a monster who thought he could protect him and instead broke every promise he made to his son). "I know you, Papa."

"Bae…" Rumplestiltskin's lungs turn inside out as he bites back words (arguments; truth, because Bae never knew him, not really, not the coward and the cripple, not until they hung over a place of nightmares and Rumplestiltskin made, as he always does, the wrong choice).

"I knew it was you the first time you came out of the woods with the dagger, do you remember, Papa?"

"I remember."

"You scared me."

"I didn't mean to. I just…I couldn't lose you."

"You loved the power."

Rumplestiltskin flinches away. "It was the first time I could protect you."

"And you did," Bae says, so gentle, so soft, his mouth curving into his crooked smile. Rumplestiltskin has to use magic to immobilize his hands so he doesn't reach out to touch that smile, to pull his boy close and embrace him so tightly that smile is branded into his skin. "You did protect me. And then you let me go."

There are no words. No argument. No defense. He did. He did let go. The moment it mattered most, the instant he could have redeemed every mistake, every failure, instead he compounded them all from failings into a crime so big it will take the sacrifice of a world to atone for it.

"Papa," Bae whispers, and Rumplestiltskin wants to weep (his tears are fire in his blood, coals in his stomach, lightning in his fingertips, a storm building and building and building but never unleashed, not yet, not yet, patience, patience, wait, wait). "I just want my father back. That's all I ever wanted: my father. Can't you understand that?"

"I'm coming, Bae," Rumplestiltskin says (ignores the question because Baelfire doesn't need to know what worse legacy he has in his family's past). "I'll find you, I promise."

And Bae nods. Believing. Patient. Wary but still giving him the benefit of the doubt, and Rumplestiltskin turns from ideas of bed to mix up yet more potions, read more books, hunt down more magic-users to question.

These glimpses are a reward. For his focus, for his patience, for his dedication. These glimpses are the tokens reminding him that he is on the right path, he's doing the right thing (he will never be like his own father, forgetting the son he abandoned).

These glimpses are what he lives for.

What use sleep when the alternative is Baelfire?

(What use living now when he lives, instead, for the future?)

Cora changes everything. His Sight has shown her to him for hundreds of years. He's lost count of how many times he's raged and slipped into madness waiting for this one auburn-haired beauty to be born, and then how slowly the decades dragged until this moment: her locked in a tower with a pile of straw and a spinning wheel.

"Who are you?" he asks, because for all that he has seen her (haughty and proud and unbowed; humiliated and shamed and undaunted; in his arms and under him and over him and all around him, a vision he has doubted and scorned and longed for in equal measure), he's never heard her name.

"Cora," she says, and he's not sure why it disappoints him, but it does.

(Maybe it's because Bae shakes his head and disappears from the tower.)

"Sounds like something breaking," he decides, and wonders if it's his patience. His long, long years of waiting and learning and playing parts.

Cora is just another pawn. Or so he tells himself. But she asked him Who are you?

Who. Who, when for so long everyone has asked what. When he draws near, she doesn't flinch. When he calls up magic, she draws nearer. When he bends his head so close to soft, clean skin, she melts back against him.

This is dangerous. Oh, so dangerous. He's Seen them together, but how well he knows that the future can change, and more importantly than the glimpses of pleasure, he's Seen this woman's child.

A girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a heart that can be made dark enough to cast a Dark Curse.

He can't mess that up. He can't risk Bae.

So he pushes. Runs his dry lips over her throat, wraps his clawed hands around her ribcage, and unleashes the Dark One.

"Magic is about emotion," he lectures (he's been taught by so many magic-users, and taught so many in his turn that the cloak of educator slips on warm and familiar and easy). "Summon up that moment that made you so angry, you would have killed if you could."

"What's your moment?" she asks.

It's been so long since anyone has asked about him. How long? Maybe his entire life. Maybe this is the very first time anyone besides his boy has ever cared about him. (But he's not that spinner, that lame husband, that invisible coward anymore; now he's twisted and broken and flawed and everything this young girl would never want.)

"Once," he whispers (to Cora, to her unborn, unconceived daughter, to the image of Bae flickering just behind him), "a man made me kiss his boots in front of my son. Now, in my mind, I go back and I rip out his throat, and I crunch his veins with my teeth. And that, dearie, is how magic is made."

Later, he will think back on this moment and wonder what magic compelled him to spill his secrets and his vulnerabilities and his past at her feet like rusty offerings. Later, he will shiver to know that he spoke aloud of his son to someone else, that he tried to conjure up another, closer, more solid vision of Bae with this flesh and blood woman at his side.

Later. At the moment, all he thinks of is how close he is to a world without magic. How warm Cora is and how rather than drawing from him in fear or disgust, she melts deeper into him as they speak of bloodlust and darkness (everything Bae would have frowned upon and ran away from). At the moment, he is enspelled by possibilities. By Sight come true (and if this one, as unbelievable and unlikely as it always seemed, can be true, then so can that other vision: that one singular vision promising him a reunion with his son). By warmth and round curves and softness that doesn't gasp in horror or scream in fright.

She read his contract, she speaks of vengeance and power and ruthlessness, and in her is everything he's ever seen in himself: trod underfoot of the unworthy, the powerful, but willing to stand and overturn and conquer. Not for a child, no, she signed the contract, after all; but for herself, and maybe he should sneer at that, but instead he admires her. Respects her for knowing what she deserves and for not accepting any less (it's a lesson he would have done well to learn well before a beggar whispered desperate tales into his ear).

Entire bloodlines have been erased, others created, to ensure that Xavier and Eva and Henry and especially Cora are all here to play their parts. Seeing it play out before him sends a thrill through Rumplestiltskin's soul. For seemingly an eternity, he has been operating on mere hope (on sheer desperation), on blind faith (on unrelenting insanity). Now, finally, it's all here. All happening around him, and he is mere decades away from his son.

Bae. His boy.

It's the day before Cora's wedding (a mere two years before his caster's birth) that it really hits him.

He's going to see Bae again.

Bae will see him again.

He knows there's no magic in this other world (of course he knows, it's what's caused every obstacle since the Blue Fairy stuck her insect wings where they didn't belong), but now he actually thinks on that.

No magic. No power. No influence. No reputation or name to inspire fear.

Nothing but the lame coward. The spinner who starved. The soldier who ran. The father who let go.

Bae will see him. His boy's brilliant eyes will look at him, free of scales or magic, and he will see…

What?

(What. Of course. What, not who.)

He'll see a man alone. A man with blood on his hands thickened over centuries and a heart blackened by every path he's gone down in an effort to get what he wants. Bae will see everything he ran from and everything he wanted to change and everything he couldn't love.

(He'll look at Rumplestiltskin and see Malcolm.)

Cora stands before a mirror dressed all in white. Beautiful. Brilliant. Pure in a way he never will be (but dark, too, dark enough to look at him and…and…care for him).

"I thought I wanted this," she says, and the Sight of a caster for his curse wavers and grows dim. "White and bright, all the admiration. But then I look at it. Fifth in line to be Queen. That won't happen without an awful lot of bloodshed. And what you give me…"

All the training he's given her, the bloodlust they've sought together, the ways he's become everything he ever despised for her (cheater and cuckold, pirate), but still she looks at him with wide, dark eyes and takes his hands without hesitating.

But.

(Baelfire.)

"I can give you nothing but darkness and isolation," he says.

Is that all he can give his boy too? Will that be all that's left of Bae's papa by the time he makes it through realms and curses and sacrifices?

(Will Bae even love him anymore?)

"And love," Cora says.

Sight falls away.

She's so close. So near. So warm. So brilliant and ruthless and bright and dark and everything he's never had before (everything a spinner never would have even been able to look at).

(But he's not that spinner anymore.)

"Yeah," he breathes. "And love."

Her breath is hot against his cheek. Her eyes are big and deep enough to fall into.

"I want that," she says. Forthright and honest and blunt and willing to fight for what she wants.

And this, this is more than he deserves. More than he's ever thought could be his.

There are, he thinks, many types of insanity, and he's grown so used to fighting off the effects of his darkness that he forgot the more common types of madness (he's forgotten just how easily it is to delude the desperate; how simple it is to promise everything to someone who knows better but who wants it too badly to care).

So he does what he's never done before: he alters their deal.

Their child.

His child.

A dark-haired, dark-eyed child still in the future, and he'll love her. He'll love her and protect her from the harshness of the world no matter what it takes. He'll raise her on stories of her brother, trapped in a world, waiting for rescue. He'll tell her she's their savior, that she must one day cast a curse to take them to the one place their family can be complete. She will grow up a hero (how could she not, with Cora's strength and Bae's bravery?) and she will cast his Curse—he'll rewrite it, he'll spend every waking moment, every night he could be sleeping, revising it and changing that final ingredient.

(The deal-maker, he's called, who never lies, who crafts every word so carefully, who chooses each sentence for a purpose.

Lies. All of it lies.)

"And that is why I love you," he says. It's a relief to finally give into this hope. To stop hiding what he wants. To let himself reach out for this future he never thought could be his.

Cora. Dark enough to tear out hearts, bright enough to expand his world—and another child. A girl. A daughter to hold and cherish and teach (a child who will not flinch from his darkness but understand his reasons for it).

(And if he reunites with Bae with a family at his side, won't his boy know, then, how much he's changed? How much Rumplestiltskin loves? How hard he's worked to try to fix that one, irredeemable mistake?)

It's the work of moments to teach her how to rip out a heart (she already knew how, didn't she?) and the work of hours to wait for her with visions and imaginings of a new, less lonely future in store for them, and the work of years to try to heal from what she did to him with so few words.

"Any baby I have…it won't be yours."

(Not him, not Rumplestiltskin, not the man who was never meant to be a father, the man whose only worthy gift to his child would have been to die before ever even laying eyes on him.)

Only later (who knows how much later? the passage of time hardly matters at all to an immortal) does he realize that the last time he caught a glimpse of Bae, it was just before he kissed Cora's shoulder.

(He bowed the neck. He bent his knee. He kissed her foot. He became the spinner again, and like a failure, he cannot hurt her, cannot raise a hand or power against this woman who willingly touched him; like a coward, he waits until someone else can send Cora to her rightful punishment: her daughter, the child she would have traded away.

She turned him into what he used to be, what he never wants to be again, and for that, he will never forgive her.

For that, he will never forgive himself.)

Bae's gone, obliterated by Cora's presence (she broke him, and in doing so, broke the only hope he had left).

Rumplestiltskin stays up for months at a time, demolishes his entire bedroom, tears apart half the Dark Castle brick by brick with his bare hands before rebuilding it with a wave of magic, but it's useless.

He swore to love nothing else, but once again, he broke a promise, and once again, it was a promise he made to his son. It's only fitting, then, that he is punished for this transgression not only by Cora's betrayal (by her empty chest and her blank eyes where once there was passion and intelligence and hope), but by the image of his son abandoning him.

(Or is it he who abandoned Bae?)

Only a handful of years left in this world, but they are far, far too many.

Rumplestiltskin retreats to his tower, to the curse he's written and rewritten, and he revises it once again. Now, when he looks ahead to the caster of his curse (not his daughter, just a girl, some girl who craves vengeance rather than family, a Queen but not a Savior), he ensures that with their banishment to another land, they will no longer remember who they once were.

(He will no longer remember everything he hates inside himself. For a few brief years, he will know peace.)

There are still avenues he hasn't tried yet. Opportunities he hasn't fully plumbed. Possibilities he's ignored in favor of other, more likely ones. After Cora (after hope he didn't deserve and a future that will never be his), Rumplestiltskin redoubles his efforts. He employs anyone he can find—portal-jumpers and realm-skippers, witches and sages and even a few scientists from a dreary world of no color. He tracks down any and every magical artifact ever whispered about, seeks them all, buys most of them, steals the rest. He becomes absolutely ruthless in his dealings, pulling no punches, granting no favors.

Baelfire is all that matters. What matter that Cora's daughter is growing up the child of another man? What business of his is it that she is abused and mistreated by the woman who should know better than anyone how foolish it is to try to dominate anyone? (Why should it bother him that the man chosen to be her father, unwarned by any seers, untouched by any fairy's meddling, is useless to protect his little girl?)

Nothing. He doesn't care. In fact, if any of these other leads pay off, he may never have to come face to face with Cora's daughter, after all.

(Once a coward, always a coward.)

Still, though, Bae doesn't appear to him. No rewards for the man who came so close to losing everything.

(Impossible, he remembers now that it's too late, to rewrite this curse for anything less drastic than the heart of the thing you love most. Magic has a price, and even if he's the one who pays it constantly, others too must bear some of that cost.)

No longer content to leave the work to others, Rumplestiltskin travels to other worlds himself, delving deep into his Sight and manipulating until he owns the people who get him to those worlds (he'll never trust goodwill again; never believe that anyone could ever care for him enough not to betray him). He hates it, traveling away from home. Away from the world where he's known and feared and has to do little more than snicker in a high pitch to get what he wants. He's never been a man well-suited to risking life and limb (and magic) in long shots and far travels.

But for Bae, it'll all be worth it.

(To prove to what little he has left of Bae that he's not giving up, he'll do anything.)

Wonderland. A world without color. Oz. Olympus. More and more until they blur all together in his mind. None of them stand out. None of them matter. (Bae is in none of them.) Neverland is the only place he avoids. He tells himself it's because there's nothing of use to him there (but he knows better, doesn't he?).

(Some fathers don't even admit to mistakes that must be remedied. Some sons are better off without.)

And still, the only time Rumplestiltskin sees his son is when he can fight sleep no longer. Passed out over his potions, slumped on the floor of his tower, he always sees Bae then. Nightmares, mostly, of a hand opening and another, smaller hand slipping away. Of a final screamed denunciation and that horrible, awful condemnation in eyes that had always, always before loved him.

But occasionally (enough that he keeps letting sleep conquer him every couple months), he dreams of that one Sight he clings to: a black road. A red scarf. Blond curls.

And Bae.

Obscured from sight by the only points of color in the scene, maybe, but Rumplestiltskin knows: it's Baelfire. His Baelfire.

He dreams, in his reluctant sleep, of a boy, wary and unsure, who steps closer, listens, looks at his father and sees his papa. He dreams of a hug, of a boy in his arms, his warmth and his weight and his trust and his forgiveness.

Rumplestiltskin hates that dream (no matter that he longs for it). Hates it and avoids it (courts it). Loathes it (yearns for it). Because it's not true. It's not Sight, just foolishness.

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers over yet another candle lit for his boy's birthday (the commemoration of a day Rumplestiltskin didn't even get to see, to share, too busy dragging himself down a cold road as his ankle screamed and his body ached from a beating, mind filled with thoughts of a son he hadn't yet seen).

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers another year (Cora's daughter has started riding horses, playing with the stable boy in green fields; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers another year (Regina spent this day weeping in her useless father's arms, bruises inflicted by magic all covered up by pastels and tears; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers the next year (Regina kissed the stable boy, and smiled wider than she ever has before; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers the next year (Regina held the stable boy's body in her arms and tried True Love's Kiss once, again, again, again, while Cora stood pitilessly over her; not that Rumplestiltskin cares).

"I'm coming, Bae," he whispers not quite a year later, and readies himself to go to Regina's first call.

Just before the smoke envelops him, he sees his boy, come back to him, standing over the cold candle, his bright eyes wishing him well (forgiving him for his newest betrayal).

"Bae," he whispers, and it's enough to hide the sting when the girl (who could have been his) asks him what he is (not her father, but Baelfire's and that's all he needs; that's all he cares about).

Around Regina, the future coalesces like a tornado, and standing in the eye of it, she is transformed—from pastel innocence (hidden bruises and seeping fractures) to dark elegance (blackening heart and growing void) to Evil Queen (desolate rubble to mark where once there was a pure soul). It's not easy, trying to parse out the useful from the superfluous in the maelstrom of futures swirling around this troubled girl, but he has loads of practice and little else to do until she's completely ready.

Besides, Bae's always there now. A baby in the basket of straw at his feet, deep breaths reassuring Rumplestiltskin's paternal heart. A toddler gamboling through Regina's austere rooms, laughing and chortling as Rumplestiltskin prepares his final plays. A youngster so curious and earnest and loyal, standing at Rumplestiltskin's elbow to watch the empty, waiting vials be filled with tangible emotions one by one 'til there is only the last left clear and void. A boy just as he was the last time Rumplestiltskin saw him, tall and handsome, bold and brave, standing across the great hall and watching Rumplestiltskin from a distance as he deals and barters and manipulates this Queen who could have been his sister.

Snow White grows in beauty and stubbornness, a charming prince receives his grooming on a sheep farm (better training Rumplestiltskin could not have devised himself), a girl's father dies leaving her to become a cinder maid, Jefferson loses a wife and gains a daughter, Midas makes a deal he didn't understand, and the Blue Fairy bides her time as always, grooming her own carpenter and conscience and cowed puppet, setting her own pieces in play (too late, too late; she had all the time in the world to plan, but none of the stomach necessary to set up any lasting obstacles).

And still Baelfire stands before him and watches. Waiting. Withholding judgment until he can tell just how devoted Rumplestiltskin will prove to be.

"I'm coming, Bae," he says, but Bae doesn't seem to hear him. Can't hear him because Rumplestiltskin talks only to himself.

No boy to chatter about his own day playing with friends and feeding the dogs and seeing to the sheep. No beautiful woman to speak to him of special vengeance and shared resentments. No small daughter to sweep into his arms and twirl on two good ankles and whisper to of a beautiful future.

Nothing that he so briefly let himself imagine.

Just him, alone in an echoing castle with his boy's eyes always following, forever out of reach. Forever forbidden for Rumplestiltskin to touch. Forever silent.

The spinning wheel creaks so loudly it deafens Rumplestiltskin. His heart pumps so swiftly he can hear nothing else. The silence grows so vast it swallows him whole.

(Madness creeps closer, stealthy and insidious, beaten back scarcely at all by the sips he steals from a flask.)

So when the ogres rise one last time, when a message arrives with a laughable offer of gold, Rumplestiltskin thinks of a battlefield free of children. He thinks of a field of blood cleared of young sacrifices. He thinks of Bae, smiling at him so proudly (the first real, uninhibited smile he's given him since Rumplestiltskin long ago told him his plan to steal a dagger from the Duke's castle).

He thinks of how shabby (how quiet) his halls have become, how dusty (how lonely) his trophies have grown, and he opens his mouth and names his price.

"My price," he says, "is her."

And then Belle. Belle who slips in so quickly, so unexpectedly, that he doesn't even realize what's happening until it's far, far too late. He picked her on a whim, he tells Bae, on the tug of magic toward her (surely a hint that she was the proper price to pay for defeating ogres, a child for peace; what other magic could be strong enough to reach him?), and his foresight shows him nothing at all concerning her (she's an oasis of silence, of peace, next to the constant chaos of Regina), and what danger at all could this magicless young girl pose him?

Nothing, of course. He's come too far to be distracted by eyes bluer than the sky or giggles that share joy with him rather than take it at his expense. She is here merely to dust the place, make it look nice once more (Dark it may be, but he still has his pride, doesn't he?), and maybe provide him a bit of conversation when the silence grows too overwhelming.

It takes him a while to notice that she's everywhere (this girl who was supposed to be relegated to a corner whenever he wasn't consciously thinking of her and needing idle amusement): in the mopped entry, the dusted trophies, the open curtains, the smell of roses, the chipped cup never far from reach. She fills the castle (his life) with light and hope and possibilities that should be impossible.

She is so unexpected, so different from anyone or anything he has never known before, that it doesn't occur to him (old fool that he is) what's happening until there's no escape.

"So," she says one day as she adds the perfect amount of sugar to his tea. "The library."

"Best dusted room in the whole castle, I imagine," he sneers even as he hovers, near but not too near, distant but not too distant (drawn like a moth to flame that will disintegrate it the moment it reaches to touch).

"It's funny." Her mouth is curved up in that smile she's begun giving him since that day in the forest, when magic failed him and an arrow missed its target and she saw in that moment some pretty picture of kindness. "When I first came here, I explored quite a bit of the castle. When I peeked into that tower where the library is now…it was just a dusty storeroom."

Her fingers brush his as she hands him the cup, chipped and warm and too small because her fingers always brush his during these handoffs. He wants (oh, how he wants) to believe it's purposeful, but it's a small cup and maybe he lingers near her more than he should. Just because she's different. Intriguing. Something not nearly as boring as the rest of his empty, echoing castle.

"You probably got lost," he says after a moment, when her hand has fallen away and he's tucked away the memory of her gentle touch somewhere deep inside his twisted heart. "Are you sure you're thinking of the same tower?"

"I'm actually not bad with directions," she says, and for all that she's pouring tea, he could swear there's a teasing note in her voice. For him. The beast who stole her away from her family.

"No doubt why you always end up in that library instead of in dusty hallways that need a maid's attention."

She raises her own cup to her lips (when did she start drinking tea with him, anyway?), still smiling, a curve of her lips that invites him to share in some secret with her (but what secret? Belle is one of the very few things in his life untouched by his path to the future). "Hmm," she says. No trace of fear to be caught out by the monster. No hint of trepidation to have the library he gifted her taken away. Nothing but gentleness and humor and…fondness? No, it must be a trick. A secret. A bit of misplaced confidence he'll surely disappoint out of her eventually.

"Well, anyway…" Belle sets her cup on the table, so near to where he's leaning that Rumplestiltskin feels his breath catch in his throat. She's closer than he realized, so near that his skin buzzes with something a lot like anticipation (but no touching, he reminds himself; maybe she's real and not a delusion, but still she is not his to touch). "I was just going to say thank you, again. It's the best thing anyone's ever given me."

With another smile (she gives them out as if there is a limitless supply of them, though Rumplestiltskin's experience tells him that any form of approval is finite), she brushes her hand over his and wanders from the room.

Rumplestiltskin stares down at his hand, at the place she touched (on purpose!), and wonders what magic this Belle is.

She smiles at him without expectation. She laughs with him without ulterior motive. She asks after him in ways no one (not even Cora; especially not Milah) has ever bothered to. She's scared when he's harmed and happy when he returns to her and delighted to talk with him or read to him. She's warm and slight and fragile in his arms (clumsy little maid, always falling and tripping and stumbling; foolish little girl, always hugging and clasping hands and brushing against his sleeves), and her eyes are wide and open and her breaths are short and staggered and she doesn't flinch away (doesn't bat her eyes and conjure up lust and rip out her own heart like Cora), and Rumplestiltskin is caught unawares.

He dares to draw nearer, to open up conversations, to gift her small tokens, to reveal (once more, but this time, he chooses to) the existence of his son, and all the time, he thinks it is curiosity. Intrigue. Academic interest. Research, even, into who this woman is, so curious and compassionate and brave and kind.

(He does not think of a spinner, long ago, drawn to the beauty of a dark-haired, light-eyed woman, edging closer, risking timid jokes to make her laugh, gifting small tokens of his affection, until he could finally propose to her, offer to share his humble livelihood with her. He does not let himself consider how the Dark One grows quiescent and tame beneath Belle's attention.

Above all, he does not think on how silent and dark his Sight is concerning her—and on how the only other thing his foresight hides from him is his boy. He cannot think on how his emotions cloud the clarity of the future. He cannot allow himself to realize just how much this clumsy, foolish, wonderful woman matters to him.)

And for a while, Rumplestiltskin lets himself…be happy. Or at least, content (he can't be happy, not really, not without Bae). Pleasantly fond of his life. Certainly not unhappy.

Deals seem less important. Regina's trials seem less pressing. Bae's growing absence seems less alarming (he's going to find him anyway, here soon, the real Bae, the one who might choose never to forgive him; and in the meantime, he grasps at what happiness he can).

He should have known that Bae's fading was a warning. He should have remembered Cora, should have armored himself against anything that could distract him. But he is weak, so he forgets. He is selfish, so he lets down his guard. He is afraid, so he allows himself to stall.

It's not until he's holding a rose that could have been instead a favor owed him from a powerful man, until he's smiling and bowing (bowing, when he swore never to bow again!), that he realizes what he has done. What he has allowed. (How far he has fallen.)

He loves her, this Belle of brightness and light and goodness and sweetness and everything he isn't (everything he can never have). He took something beautiful and he caged it, and then he let himself imagine that it could ever be his. That he could do anything other than darken it, sully it, destroy it.

She sits on the table before him, leans closer, closer, and how could he have thought she'd ever really care for him? She's compassionate and curious, and in those things, he has fooled himself into seeing something different.

And Bae is nowhere in Sight.

So he lets her go.

Cora was dark and vengeful and beautiful, yes, but a brittle, dangerous beauty—and even her, he had a hard time believing could be his.

But Belle…Belle is pure. She's a hero, and he's a monster, and the only hero that might ever be his is his precious boy.

It's better that he be alone. It's best that he focus everything he is, every moment left to him in this world, on crafting the perfect apology for his son.

What matter that he can't move from the window in his tower? He can do his best thinking, sometimes, when he is still and silent. So what if he cannot tear his eyes from the road where Belle disappeared from his life? It's not like she'll ever come back, and anyway, the road is as good a place to look as anywhere.

The sight of Belle walking up the road (toward the Dark Castle) is so enchanting that for a long moment Rumplestiltskin doesn't even register it. It's a delusion, he's sure, and spares a thought to wonder why his subconscious didn't place Bae at her side to really complete the picture.

But his wards twinge as she passes through them (and if he really was as sure as he thought, why didn't he lock her out?) and it's her. Belle. The impossible, incredible girl.

She's come back.

It's everything he's only just realized that he wants, and instead of being smart, he is a fool. Instead of being strong, he is weak. Instead of being noble and self-sacrificing, he is selfish and covetous and greedy.

(But how could he have known? How could he have ever guessed that she would kiss him? That she would want him? That she could care for him? It was so far outside the probable that even his Sight had no warning of it.)

She tames him with a touch, gentles him with a smile—and destroys him with a kiss.

A single kiss (one kiss when he and Cora exchanged hundreds without ever budging his curse!) and Bae is nearly ripped from his arms once again. A single kiss (that he leans into, that he wants with a familiar desperation, that he is left dazed and dull by) and all his sins, all his crimes, his murders and his machinations, are nearly for nothing. A single kiss (the perfect kiss, so sweet and chaste and overwhelming after centuries of dark isolation; the merest brush of grace and light and beauty almost unfathomable to him) and she comes closer to crushing him than anything since Pan showed up to steal his son away, since the Blue Fairy finished the job.

(And how can she possibly care for him? How can she find anything in his messy, raw brokenness worthy of her light and her touch and her joy? It's a trick, it's a ploy, it's an attack, it's anything but what it seems because slow as he is, even he has long learned his lesson, knows better than to expect anything good to happen to him—and Belle is the most, the best good he has ever encountered in his long, long life.)

He sends her away, but it's too late. This is one betrayal too many (the third time he's let go of his son's hand and watched him fall away), and Bae is gone. Gone forever until Rumplestiltskin can break magical laws and transcend realms to buy his single moment with Baelfire, to fall on his knees (kneel before the one person who deserves his fealty) and accept whatever judgement his boy sees fit to pronounce on him.

(And if he dreams of falling on his knees before Belle, if he dreams of sweeping her up in his arms and dropping kisses over her cheeks and brow and lips, if he dreams that she cared about him more than just as a lost soul needing salvation…well, they are only dreams, after all.

And if he wakes up weeping, wishing with all his might that his dreams were at all touched by foresight…well, he has always been a foolish man who hopes for far more than he's ever deserved.)

Bae doesn't watch him mix potions anymore, or sleep to the rhythm of the spinning wheel, or play happily as he makes deals. He's just gone, leaving the Castle emptier than ever, and echoing with not one, but two ghosts (or is that three? surely he himself is little more than a ghostly phantom now, withered away in all his long centuries of loneliness).

Now it is Belle he sees everywhere. A flick of blue skirts around the bend. The sound of her voice outside the door. A wisp of her perfume beside his wheel.

She could come back; she's stubborn enough even if she can't love him (anymore).

"I'm sorry," he whispers to the rattle of tea things behind him.

"I thought you would rip out my heart instead of your own," he tells her cup, tucked away so innocently behind a dozen other unimportant cups.

"No one's ever wanted good things for me," he tries to explain. "Only Bae, and I can't lose him again. I can't."

"All I could have given you," he weeps into his hands, jarred awake from a dream so beautiful it makes his chest ache until he can hardly breathe, "is darkness and isolation. And you deserve better, so much better than to be sullied by my love."

(But if she chooses him… If she comes back of her own accord… He has never been good at saying no to temptation.)

"Flimsy locks," Regina says as she strolls into his hall (as if he'd locked the doors at all, not when Belle could wander back in at any moment, so righteously angry and empathetically understanding).

For once, Rumplestiltskin doesn't see a girl who might have been (a girl he could have rescued, could have groomed, could have invited close even without any blood ties). For once, he sees the Evil Queen everyone else does.

"I'm not dealing today," he says.

"Is this about that girl I met on the road?" she asks, and Rumplestiltskin almost cannot move to hear Belle's existence confirmed by someone else (he'd begun to wonder if his madness had been sneakier than ever, if his cowardice had woven a beautiful mirage for him, if his inherent flaws had broken the delusion before it could completely play out).

Then she speaks of tragedy, and Rumplestiltskin is in the eye of the storm with Regina, surrounded by possibilities—he sees first a lonely and outcast Belle, one he can usher home and coddle and protect and start over with. He sees a beaten and bloody Belle, one he will rescue and avenge and heal and start over with. He sees a defiant and unbowed Belle, perched over a high drop and waiting for him to catch her up and save her and shelter her and start over with her.

And he sees a pale and blue Belle, unbreathing, unsmiling, unlaughing. Dead, dead, dead, and there is no starting over because he's already played out their last moments (filled them with lies and coldness and silence and hurt; he let her go just as surely as he did his son, and he thought it the one good thing he could do but it was just as much a crime as the first time).

The possibilities coalesce until there is only a single form before him. Tall and imperious, cloaked in black he painted over her, her bruises turned into stains turned into cruelty, and one day he will need her (but not love her), but not this day (one day he will be just as cruel and gleeful and condescending when it is her loved one to be turned into a corpse).

The door slams behind Regina's parting shot. Rumplestiltskin is alone. The chipped cup calls to him, suffocated and overwhelmed in the cabinet. He can't breathe, can't see, can't do anything but cradle the cup (so, so carefully, as carefully as he should have handled Belle herself) and set it out where he can be punished by sight of it every day (too little, too late).

The clink of the cup on the plinth and Belle comes out of hiding.

No longer in the corners of his eye, just out of sight, just within earshot, now she stands where once Bae did. She watches him cry, but when she reaches out (to hold him? to strike him?), he flinches away (he cannot watch her vanish as Bae did). She stands at his elbow as he commiserates with a heartbroken Snow in return for one of her hairs. She greets him when he returns home from casting a protection spell over the two future parents whose True Love glows from that last vial. She brings him tea while he writes the last finishing touches of his Dark Curse (and if it's more geared toward separating all True Love couples now, well, it is called the Dark Curse for a reason) and watches disapprovingly as he gives it to Regina.

"It's necessary," he murmurs, and Belle shakes her head. So disappointed in him. So sad for him. So willing to chivvy him out of his dark mood with a cup of tea—only he can't take it from her because that would mean watching her fizzle away into nothing (it would mean admitting she isn't real and never will be again).

Bae's birthday comes, and much as Rumplestiltskin wishes to glimpse another sight of his boy, it is only Belle there, bursting into the room and refusing to leave even when he tells her to go away (it's all he ever tells her, isn't it?) and snuffs the candle (he always had so little to give his boy, but that's the one thing he made sure to always do for him, even back before power: light him a candle and give him a wish).

"I'm so sorry," Belle says, and Rumplestiltskin feels his shoulders hunch in on himself (she so rarely talks to him). "It was a remembrance, wasn't it? How old would he be?"

She's touching Bae's shawl. Her hand only an inch or two from his claws, so close and yet so far. It's almost mesmerizing, to see another hand next to his (even if it is only a delusion).

"Well, he's not dead," he hears himself say. "He's just lost."

(He promised her this story, after all, a deal he…didn't break, but didn't have time to fulfill. Now, in some way, it's come due.)

"Lost?"

"Today is his birthday," Rumplestiltskin says, a near whisper he knows she will hear anyway (she always heard the things he couldn't say). "I should be with him…celebrating. We had a chance to be happy together, but I was afraid."

(Is he talking about Bae? Or Belle? Not that it really matters, he knows; he lost them both in the same way: because he is too afraid to hold on long enough for them to let him go like his father did.)

"Maybe it's not too late," this vision of Belle says, all hope and faith and goodness.

"I hope not," he says, but then has to move away from the desperation coating those words. (Hope has never done anything but set him up for pain.) "No," he realizes anew as he hears the deafening sound of his loneliness (unbroken by Belle's breathing or heartbeat or anything real), "my ending shall not be a happy one."

"Rumple," she murmurs, but he doesn't say anything more. He can't. What could he possibly say anyway?

He can't apologize because he hasn't changed his mind. She is better off without him. Even dead, the method of it should prove why any association with him is a bad idea.

He can't tell her he wishes he could have kissed her again because it would be a lie. Even if it weren't for Bae, for his promise (already broken twice-over), he'd be lying. He's come too far, made too many enemies, burned too many bridges, has too many pieces developed over centuries now finally in play for him to give up his power (to go back to being the crippled coward that even Belle could do no more than pity).

No. There's nothing to say because all his monstrous words are nothing; she deserves so much more, so much better.

(Better silence, he thinks, than lies.)

This world holds nothing for him any longer. His fascination with Regina has played itself out. The usefulness of the Charming couple is near its end. The cinder maid plays her part and Rumplestiltskin is almost happy to let the squid ink paralyze him. Finally, finally, his remaining time here is measured in months rather than in years.

The cell itches, the key shaped as ink in a bottle in a pocket burns against him, and he chafes to be free (to never again be weak, humiliated and ground into the dirt). But, ah, he's still in control here, and it's never bothered him to appear less than he is if he knows there will be a pay-off. Patience, he cautions himself, once, again, again, countless times as his patience evaporates, the well run dry just before the end.

And here, locked away with a key in hand, it becomes so much harder to ignore her.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, and she's there constantly. Always watching him with a chipped cup of tea at her elbow and a sweet smile on her face.

"Tell me about your son," she says, and he turns his face into a corner and shrieks into the night.

"And since then, you've loved no one, and no one has loved you," she says, and he throws himself against the bars until blood runs red and black and glistening in the dark.

"All you'll have—" she starts to say, and he turns on her.

"You think I don't know my heart's empty?" he snarls at her (she should have known, she always should have known better than to taunt the beast). "You think I need the reminder? I've had an empty heart far longer than you've been alive, dearie. That's what all of this is for, don't you see that? Everything I've done, you—"

No, no, no! Somehow he's slipped from snarling to begging. And much as the superstitious guards keep their distance, sound travels oddly down here among the fairy dust and dwarf blood. He hasn't come this far, kept his secret this long, just to falter here at the finish line.

So he turns to insanity. Madness has always been there, creeping in at the edges, overwhelming him for a moment here, a decade there, slinking back to the shadows only to dart out and strike in unguarded days. Now, with Emma's name written until his ink is gone (the Savior tied to that drop of True Love on that scroll Regina has just stolen back from Maleficent), with his foresight turned to maddeningly tantalizing glimpses of a world stranger than any other he's ever seen—with Belle there on one side of his cell and Bae sitting on the other side—Rumplestiltskin retreats into the safety of that madness. Hides in the corners of the cell where neither of his ghosts can reach him. Both of them watching, judging, understanding, pleading, all too much. It threatens to bring secrets spewing up out of his blackened mouth. Threatens to ruin everything, trip him up here at the end. Only, he's not lame anymore; smooth, prancing steps that glide seamlessly forward are the norm now.

The madness buys him Regina's complacence, earns him a last deal here where his magic is strongest, and then the centuries-become-decades-become-years-become-months-become-days now trickle down to a handful of hours.

"Bae," he croons. His guards are long gone. Panic sweeps the land. This curse, greater than any other ever written, sum of all his knowledge and deals and life's blood, boils up to seek out every corner of their world, touches and influences adjoining realms, and Rumplestiltskin takes in a deep breath of purple smoke and powerful magic that strums familiarly against his hollow heart.

On his left, Belle vanishes, subsumed in magic. Rumplestiltskin shuts his eyes before he can watch the same happen to Bae (Belle is gone, dead, beyond the reach of curses, but Bae is his future).

Rumplestiltskin disappears with Bae's name the very last word uttered in the Enchanted Forest.