Chapter Text
Neal hadn’t seen weather like this in over a decade, as he pulled into his father’s driveway, turning the key in his girlfriend’s car and listening to the soft hum of snow accumulating outside the windows. He knew as soon as he opened those doors, as soon as the cold air rushed in to bite him, he’d feel differently, but right now he was just overcome with the overwhelming peace and stillness that always seemed to surround life in Storybrooke.
Neal had always hated peace and stillness. Or at least he had since he was seventeen and moved away to the big city.
And sure, they got snow like this in the city, but it wasn’t the same - it always melted quickly into a wet slush that seeped into your socks and turned an awful grey color within minutes of touching the ground. Nothing in the city ever stayed as pristine and perfect as it did in Storybrooke.
There was a loud slapping sound as something hit the car’s glass window and Neal turned to see his little brother, face pressed against the glass as his breath left an uneven circle of fog on the window, cheeks squished outward, hands framing either side of his lean face, eagerness written across the few features Neal could see that weren’t covered in a hat and scarf.
He laughed, “Okay, Gids, back up so I can open the door.”
Quickly, Gideon stumbled backward, leaving bootprints in the snow - soon to be covered by the increasing precipitation - already throwing questions at Neal as he opened the door, dragging his messenger bag out of the passenger seat next to him and following the eager preteen back to the house.
“I’m almost taller than you now!” Gideon exclaims as they burst into the entryway of his father’s house - the one Neal grew up in, lost his mother in, ran away from, hasn’t been back to in ten years - “Can you believe it? Mama says I’m going to be taller than papa in no time!”
Neal nods, trying to look interested as he takes in the front hall, the smell of his father’s tea collection and a warm fire bringing him back a decade or so, as his stepmom comes out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron before pulling him into a warm embrace and standing on her toes to plant a soft kiss on his cheek.
“We’re so glad you could make it back for Christmas this year,” she says as she pulls away. She reaches up a hand to flatten one of his many cowlicks, but stops herself - feeling the distance between the boy who left her and the man that stands in the doorway now. Neal kinda wishes she hadn’t stopped herself, but he isn’t about to tell her that.
“Papa says we can decorate gingerbread houses and make cookies for Santa and even go sledding if you want!” Gideon exclaims and Neal can hear the dry voice in which his father had probably said all those things. His dad hadn’t been thrilled when Neal had said he was coming home - the two of them had barely spoken since their last big fight the night he moved out - and so Rumple Gold was probably all too thrilled to heap commitments and chores upon his son. But that was okay, what his father saw as punishment was a joy to Neal. He had missed out on most of Gideon’s childhood and so a few precious bonding memories while he was home this week couldn’t hurt.
“Of course we can!” he tells his brother before bringing his eyes back up to Belle. “Where is pops, by the way?”
She sighs, as if this is an argument they’ve already had. Because he knows this is an argument they’ve already had.
“He’s in his study. He says that if you’re finally ready to visit you can take the extra ten steps down the hall to see him.”
Of course. Because Rumple Gold was petty and stubborn on a good day.
But the joke was on him.
His son was even more so.
Neal shrugs, shouldering his bag again as he makes his way up the stairs to the guest bedroom, feeling all the more confident in his decision to move to New York and stay there. He’d made a promise to an old friend, eleven years ago, that he wouldn’t come back to this town, and it was a promise he had always planned to keep. But he needed something from his old room, and Christmas had seemed like a nice excuse to get it. Besides, the statute of limitations on that promise was five years, and so Neal had more than paid back his debt.
“Neal, honey, don’t you want dinner? It’s a long drive, you must be starving?”
“Thank you, Belle, I’ll be down in a bit. I just want to set my stuff down and maybe take a shower.”
And tear his room apart. Because he wanted to find it, that thing he’d come for, tuck it away in his bag as early as possible - that way if he and his father got into it again he could always leave before Christmas and head back home to the little fake tree in his apartment and another year of watching black and white movies while blitzed out of his mind on eggnog. Alone.
But when he got to his room, the bag in his hand fell to the floor with an angry thud, Neal having to make a conscious effort not to grind his jaw so hard it popped.
Because Neal might have been more stubborn than his father, but Rumple was smarter.
*
“All right, where’s all my stuff?” he asked, storming into his dad’s study, furious at the effort that must have gone into this sort of well-timed revenge. It was exactly the kind of stunt Neal would have pulled, and that’s what made him so angry.
“What stuff?” his father asks, innocently enough, lowering his paper and picking up his glass of scotch to take a slow, satisfied sip.
“You’ve turned my room into some sort of… girly… it’s not… where’s...?”
“Yes, when we figured you weren’t coming back, we made your room into Belle’s craft room. There’s still a guest bed in there for you, won’t that be enough?”
“Very funny,” Neal says humorlessly as he approaches his father’s desk, hands gripping the edge of the polished mahogany as he leans forward to tower over his unbothered father. “Where are my things?”
“Oh, you mean the things I tried to call you about? The things I left a message about? The things that you never got back to me about?”
“Yes,” Neal mumbles, feeling heat rise in his cheeks, from embarrassment or anger he wasn’t sure. “Those things.”
“Well, you never did call me back about that. I offered to box them up so you could come get them. But when even Belle couldn’t reach you, we figured they must not be important to you. So we sold them.”
Neal feels his headache growing, only in Storybrooke for an hour and already he can tell it’s going to be a doozy, his fingers flexing as he tried his best to think of something. Because if his dad had sold it…
“Of course… some of the more valuable things might still be in my shop,” Rumple offers with a glint in his eye, and suddenly Neal realizes that his dad knows exactly why he’s here. And, judging by the roadblocks he has already put in Neal’s way, he doesn’t approve. Fine. Neal’s never needed his approval. But he does need that one stupid thing.
“Can I have your keys?”
“Lend my shop keys to someone with a criminal record? You must be insane, son. What kind of business man would I be if I did that?”
“I don’t know about business man, but you’d be a half decent dad.”
His father made a small tsking noise as he stood from his chair, placing a hand on Neal’s shoulder as he led him over toward the study door.
“It’s a good thing we already decided that I’m not, years ago, then. No, stay. Make yourself at home. Have dinner with me and Belle and your brother. I’ll take you into the shop with me tomorrow and we’ll see if you can’t find what you’re looking for.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Son, I’ve never been more serious.”
*
Neal had never been very patient. He’d always been a tad impulsive, and single-minded, and sticky-fingered. It got him in his fair share of trouble as a kid. And a teenager. And an adult too, if he was being honest. Good thing he always had never had the capacity for learning from his mistakes, too.
At least not in Storybrooke. He was trying something new in New York. Building a life there that he could be proud of, even if his dad wasn’t. Even if Belle changed the subject whenever he brought it up at dinner and Gideon looked down at his plate like he had listened to the Golds argue about Neal’s choices before. But Neal liked his choices, and he liked his life, and he just needed one more thing to make it perfect.
So, after everyone had gone to bed, he crept down the stairs to his dad’s study, picked the lock on the top drawer of his desk, and extracted the shop keys with as little fanfare as possible. He’d even remembered that the floorboards in the front entryway squeaked, and so instead he took the back door, creeping around the edge of the house - the snow still thankfully falling to cover his footprints - and started his girlfriend’s car with the headlights still off, waiting until he was far away from the driveway and onto the main road before turning them back on again as he drove back to Main Street. It had been a decade, but Neal remembered the way to his father’s shop so well that he probably could have driven there blindfolded.
Because there had been a time when he and his dad had gotten along. When he’d worked after school and summers in that shop, when he’d taken his high school sweetheart to get ice cream at the store next door, when he and his best friend growing up had split meals at Granny’s to ogle at Ruby and avoid having to pay more than their meager allowances could afford.
All those thoughts hurt now. The sweetheart, probably grown and someone else’s love these days. The best friend - no longer even an acquaintance, Neal hadn’t bothered to call and let him know he was coming into town. Even Ruby was grown, and Granny was too old to run the cafe by herself, and he and his father hadn’t been cordial since the arrest his senior year of high school.
He pulls up to the shop, heading around to the back door so that any late-night stragglers on Main Street wouldn’t notice, and slides the key in the lock.
Had he been a smarter man, he might have thought this was all just a tad too easy.
Unfortunately for Neal, that thought didn’t kick in until he had the back door open and the alarm system inside was blaring loudly at him that it needed a password.
It needed a password in sixty seconds or it would alert the police.
Neal tried his birthday first, that had always been his dad’s first choice growing up. 0323. No good.
He tried Gideon’s next, thankful that he remembered it. He always tried to send a gift and a hand-drawn card. Even if sometimes he was a little early… or late. But either he hadn’t remembered it correctly, or that was no good either.
The little box blinked at him, warning he had one more try.
It was a shame, because he could see the glass cabinet his father kept all the jewelry in from here. Wondered if it might just be faster to run over, smash the glass, pocket all the rings, and run back to his car. It wasn’t robbery if your dad took it from you first, right?
“Put your hands up where I can see them!”
“Shit,” he swore under his breath before turning around with his hands raised, and whining, “I hadn’t even set off the alarms yet.”
“Alarms?” the cop asks, stepping forward with a frown that creases her forehead. “No, we got a phone call from the shop owner. Said someone was breaking in - Neal Gold, is that you?”
“Emma Nolan?” Neal asks, his eyes wide as she steps into the streetlight, her entire frame seeming to light up - no, to glow - as she lowers her gun, putting it back in the holster. But while his face floods with relief, and a little bit of longing for what they used to have, hers darkens incredibly. She seems much less excited to see him. And, all right, he can’t blame her.
"Well, this takes me back," he chuckles, hoping to disarm her suspicions with a smile, just like he always had in the past.
But she wasn't falling for it this time.
“Okay,” she sighs, “Hands behind your back, Neal. I’m taking you in.”
“But Emma!” he protests, “It’s me! This is my dad’s shop! You know me!”
“I know,” she insists through gritted teeth. “That’s why I’m arresting you, Gold. You’ve a right to remain silent, though we both know you probably won’t use it…”