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“So, you’re the little broodmare?”
They have delivered her in the unmanned carriage he had left behind, as per his instructions, and Rumplestiltskin is glad this girl isn’t a weeping thing, his boots and silk shirt untarnished by the mess and salt of tears.
She’s young, exceptionally so compared to his lifetimes, but she doesn’t wither before him, her back remaining straight, though her eyes can’t quite meet his.
She must be the pick of the lot, washed and dried and dressed in the finest threads her village can afford - made up as a little parcel in which to sate his lusts - especially in such times, but it isn’t her paltry wardrobe that offers this girl beauty. No, she is quite pretty, with her dark russet curls and pink mouth, the hint of a fair bosom and the finest skin one might hope to find in a sea-town.
She has cried, however, he can see. Little and not enough, but she does not break now. She stands strong.
“Your elders were very adamant in making the choice, weren’t they?” Rumplestiltskin announces, keeping her upon the doorstep, away from the warmth of his lit halls another moment. “What if I had wanted to select my stock?”
He means to drag something out of her. He does so love it when the truth shows itself, when defences break, when they realise just how ugly he is.
She looks up, this lady of nothing, and Rumplestiltskin sees that she has the most incredible pale blue eyes, a gift, no doubt, from the glittering sea that washes upon the rocks of her home town.
He is, all at once, terribly quiet, and it seems as though his silence gives her courage to speak, rather than more reason to cower.
"I am here…” She stops only to continue, too brave for her own good. “…at your pleasure, Dark One. I have been told what is expected of me and I have been…prepared. My name is-”
“I don’t want to know your name,” Rumplestiltskin tells her shortly, gruff-voiced, brandishing a black claw and a finger. “You’ve been prepared, have you - for my bed? That is, should I deign to have you there and not among cold stone and straw.”
The night’s chill, he can see, is taking its toll upon her skin. The girl has no shawl or cloak. She has been sent to him as pretty as a proffered rose, ready to be ravished, simply meat to a beast.
She looks at him warily, even shaken as she is by her shivers.
"Tell me,” he demands. “You’re a maiden, or else they wouldn’t have sent you. Do you know what a man does between a woman’s legs?”
At last, the glow of a blush, as vibrant as any red petal.
“I have some idea,” she answers him quietly, and he knows that the village hadn’t saw fit to tell her of her fate, of what making a babe truly entails.
She watches him step aside, giving her leave to enter, and she takes a hesitant step.
“And that’s all it will be to you, dear - an idea. Forever.” He wonders if she understands now that he had never intended on touching her or using an inch of her, let alone making her a reluctant mother. “Never real.”
Rumplestiltskin turns, banishing his pity for the young woman treated as a child, and walks from this business to the next.
"Find yourself a room and keep it,” he tells her, already fading into smoke, one foot in another land less complicated than this. “You won’t be leaving these walls again.”