Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Emma’s hallucinating.

She has to be. There’s no way she has a top-hatted, grinning madman lounging on her couch. She’s been up for thirty-six hours straight, time spent drugged and unconscious notwithstanding, and her mind is playing tricks on her.

This time yesterday, she was chasing off into the woods after a fugitive in a salmon-pink cardigan.

“Well,” Jefferson says, “I was wondering who lived here.”

And Emma Swan never screams. She reasons, she looks for an escape route, she attacks head-on if needs be. But she never screams. In her experience, screaming doesn’t usually call in the cavalry, no matter how much one wished it might.

So she just leans against the wall, and closes her eyes, and hopes he’ll be gone when she opens them “I live here. Please leave.”

“Gladly.” He stands, and heads for the door, and she doesn’t open her eyes when she feels him pass.

Then he pauses; she can feel his eyes on her, and she deigns to look at him.

The bastard still exists. She knows she’s lucky that she’s so tired: any other time, she’d be freaking out, and pulling her gun right about now. Something’s thrown a heavy blanket over all emotion, any fight-or-flight response, and she’s left with the simple urge to remove the crazy person from her house and go to bed.

She just glares at him, and with a little smile, he leaves.

—-

He should be home right now.

But he’s wandering in the Storybrooke forest, with no idea where or who he is, and this is not home. Hatter screams; Jefferson crumbles and falls around him.

He finds himself outside Grace’s house. He’s looking through the window from afar, watches her new father – his usurper, his unknowing adversary – kiss his little girl goodnight and tuck her into bed.

He’s done this a thousand times before; it’s like a fistful of thorns driven through his heart.

He howls in the woods, the cry torn from his throat like an animal in pain. The hat didn’t work; the hat is a lie, a velvet-covered hallucination. So he keeps walking, branches tearing at his shirt, hopelessness turning his skin cold and numb.

He feels the dream dying. His last hope, the one bright and magic spark in the whole town was a failure.

Hatter is let loose, more and more the farther he gets from the town. Here, there is no need for Jefferson’s reasoning, Jefferson’s restraint. Hatter can see everything he wants in the world, everything he’s been reaching for, through a pane of glass.

Glass is diamond: unbroken, perfect and shining, while his promise lies in jagged shards at his feet.

The Jabberwockies have won, and now they feed on the carcasses that riddle the battlefield. Hatter can’t feel the cold, or the thousands of tiny cuts riddling his skin from the branches and thorns. His skin is numb, insulated against all sensation. He curls up under a tree, and stares at the clouded sky. This is where he belongs: far from the world.

Then the universe tears. It rips neatly down the middle, and swallows him whole.

And he’s stood in Emma’s apartment once again, just like before. Just like the first moment after Snow White kicked him out of his own window, and he was falling, and he could taste the smoke and woodland of home on his tongue.

This place is dark, warm, and he can hear Emma’s snoring from across the room.

And he’s so tired. The last thirty years are a wasted, used-up nightmare, wrapped in purple velvet and silken ribbon.

So he walks, almost comatose, to the other bedroom, and finds a dark spot in the corner, by the wardrobe, where there are some old beanbags shoved in with the boxes. Here, at least, he is safe. Here the greatest danger is a woman he knows – he just knows – believes him somewhere under everything else.

And even if she doesn’t, she’s still the hero. Hatter knows enough about good and evil to know them when they stare him in the face, and play their cards.

—-

When Emma wakes up in the morning, she counts it as the waking dream of someone on the urge of collapse, or a symptom of shock, at worst a sign of very mild PTSD.

So she goes to work, and takes breakfast to her best friend in her cell, and neither of them comments on the night before.

The arraignment has come and past, and Regina had smirked the last time Emma saw her, and Mr Gold is acting even more shifty and suspicious than usual. And there’s Mary Margaret, an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the worst possible time, languishing behind bars.

Emma kind of hates Storybrooke. But the time to leave was seven months ago, and there’s nothing she can do about it now.

That evening, she arrives home, and she pulls out her gun as she crosses the threshold. Because, for now, she lives alone, and so there’s no reason at all why she should be able to hear someone cooking, and smell frying onions.

Jefferson looks up as she enters, and gives her a grin that’s just a little too bright, “I made pasta!”

She carries her gun everywhere, and right now its trained on his chest. It’s good to be on this side of the barrel, to know that he’s at her mercy for once, “What the fuck are you doing here?” she demands.

“I’m cooking dinner.”

“In my apartment. Like I’ll trust anything you cook.” She doesn’t know why that’s the important statement here, but there it is. She comes up behind him, grabs his wrists as hard as she can, and he doesn’t try to pull away when she cuffs him, and drags him by his wrists to the sofa.

He just gives her a look, like she’s annoying the crap out of him. The world is a messed-up place right now.

“Why are you here?” she’s not even trying to hide the anger and fear in her voice. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

“I don’t know.” He sighs, looks of to the side, irritated beyond belief, “I left, went for a walk, figured I’d just die in a ditch or something, then the clock struck midnight and here I was.”

“Would you cut it with the fairy tale crap?” she’s had it, she’s done. If one more person tells her that Snow White is her mom and that they do believe in fairies, she’s going to cut someone.

“Fine. I left, then it was midnight, then I was back here. So I slept in Snow White’s room, and-”

“Mary Margaret. My roommate’s name is Mary Margaret.”

“Whatever.”

“This is breaking and entering. If it wouldn’t upset Mary Margaret so much, I’d throw you in prison, but I’d rather you just vanished forever.” She takes the safety off her gun, warningly, although she’s not up for killing anyone tonight.

“I don’t think I can, much as I’d like to.”

“Try.”

“Fine.” He stands, and she pulls him out of the building and throws him onto the street. There’s no one around, thank God, and she releases his hands and pushes him onto the road.

She slams the front door, locks every window, bins everything he cooked and disinfects the entire kitchen.

That night, she stays up late, rereading details of Kathryn Nolan’s disappearance and murder over and over again. There’s something she’s missing, something obvious staring her in the face. And it’s not in the ‘Once Upon A Time’ book sat on the coffee table, however much Henry would protest otherwise.

In the distance, she can hear the town clock tolling midnight.

And then there’s a slightly rumpled and very pissed-off looking Jefferson stood in front of her.

“How the fuck did you get in here?” This time, she does scream. Just a little. Later, she’ll justify it as a cry of surprise.

“Magic.”

Her door is locked; the windows are locked. He just strolled out of her bathroom. She gets up, checks the bathroom window: it’s still locked, in tact, and the key is in her back pocket.

She returns to the main room and stares at him, more than a little bit disturbed, “No. There’s another reason for this. I just… don’t know what it is, yet.”

“But you see what I meant?” he says, “I came back at midnight. Like last night. And trust me, this isn’t where I’d choose to be either.” He sighs, “Can I just sleep, now?”

—-

All he wanted was to go home.

Not to Wonderland. Wonderland isn’t home, Wonderland is a nightmare wrapped in cotton candy. He sees the Queen of Hearts behind his eyes when he sleeps, and he has done for the last twenty-eight years.

That night, he crashes in Snow White’s bed: it’s the first night in decades where he has slept dreamlessly, and awoken feeling human.

It’s a mirage. He knows that. It’s a false reflection in the looking glass, which shows him as flesh and bone, a man with a heart and a soul, with a mind under his control. He hasn’t been that in years. He wakes up, and sees Jefferson’s face in the mirror, and no matter how closely he looks into his own eyes, he cannot see Hatter gleaming anywhere in the darkness.

He grabbed the hat as he fell, threw himself into it.

He doesn’t know what happened in the day between being drop-kicked out of a window – and wow, did Snow White pack a kick when she felt like it – and seeing Emma’s exhausted face.

But he left, and the magic brought him back.

Jefferson hates magic. He’d prefer if he never felt the goddamn stuff ever again. But it’s a necessary evil.

He’s not a sane man. He’s spent too long wide awake, staring out of windows into other people’s lives, sewing a million useless portals to nowhere and always drawing a blank. The world is a mess, this one and all the others, an insane chaos of blood and magic, of reason and flying, screaming colour. And he can see it all, inside his head.

Until the night he sleeps in Snow White’s bed, and it’s like biting that apple, like being drugged with something far stronger than a simple pill. He sleeps without seeing Grace’s smile, hearing his own words, warped and twisted down the years, promising to return. He sleeps without dreaming the night he tried to escape Wonderland, and saw the Queen of Hearts’ true face.

He sleeps without remembering a goddamn thing, and wakes up human.

Chapter Text

She lets him stay.

It was his smile that did it, when she said he could stay the night so long as he let her handcuff him to Mary Margaret’s bed, so he couldn’t get up and kill her in the middle of the night.

It’s the most stupid, dangerous, pointless thing she’s ever done, but she does it anyway.

She adds this to the list of reasons why she’s been spending too much time with Mary Margaret: she’s started collecting strays. Mary Margaret took her in, and then Ruby, and while Jefferson is indeed a potential psychopath who kidnapped them both and is convinced he’s the Mad Hatter, he’s also stuck in her apartment.

He leaves, and then he’s back at midnight, like clockwork.

They test it the second night: she drives him deep into the woods in her bug, and arrives back at 12:05. And there he is, stood in the living room, waiting for her.

Impossible. But empirically proven, and Emma trusts her own eyes if nothing else.

It makes sense for him to just stay there.

He seems calmer, at least, than he was when he kidnapped her. She keeps her eyes on him at all times when they’re at home, and her gun is always on her person. But his face seems lighter, less drawn and severe, and his smiles are a little less manic.

It is awkward, though, sitting and eating Chinese takeout with the man who drugged her and held a gun to her head. At least, when she goes to the door to collect the food, she knows that her carton is separate from his. He doesn’t touch a morsel that passes her lips: this is the rule.

“Why do you keep coming back?” she asks, on their second night in her home, swallowing a mouthful of kung-pao chicken.

“I don’t. I’m pulled back.” He eyes her for a moment, then sighs, as if he’s made a decision, “It’s magic, whether you like it or not.”

“No, you’re blacking out, or sleepwalking, or… I don’t know, being chloroformed and dragged back here every night without your knowledge.”

“And after all that, magic is the craziest option.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t mention Henry; she doesn’t talk about Paige. This is another rule.

—-

He has to come with her to work.

Mary Margaret flinches, and hides at the back of her cell when he comes inside, “Hey, princess, how’s it hanging?”

“Emma…” she whimpers, looking at her friend with wide, panic-stricken eyes.

“Yeah, I know, he’s with me.” Emma breezes in, throws her jacket over the coat hanger and frowns at Jefferson.

He’s settled himself on the couch under the window, and propped his feet on the end, ankles crossed. He’s smiling, and it’s less manic than before, but it’s still almost a smirk and it’s still infuriating.

“I have work to do, and I don’t trust him at home.”

“One day, you’ll believe me when I say that I’m not going to drug you.”

“One day, I’ll spend twenty-four hours without your stupid face, but today is not that day.” She counters, and he just smiles at the ceiling.

“You’d miss me.”

“Like I’d miss a brain tumour.” She shoots back. Mary Margaret watches with fearful eyes and a pounding heart.

“Why is he here?”

“Princess, if I knew, I’d tell you. But I don’t.” he looks at her, meets her eyes, and the smile on his face is almost sane, almost normal. Emma’s a little bit impressed. “If it would help, I can apologise.” He jumps to his feet, and gives a low bow, “I am deeply sorry, Miss Blanchard, for any and all suffering caused.”

“You’re completely deranged.”

“For apologising to a distressed young woman? Chivalry was obviously murdered in its sleep.”

“For kidnapping two people and raving about magic and Wonderland!” Mary Margaret almost shouts back, “Stay the hell away from me!”

“Fine,” Jefferson raises his hands in surrender, “But you might want these.” He reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out a small photo frame with two pictures inside.

He stretches his hand through the bars; Emma watches as Mary Margaret grabs the pictures with vicious speed and throws herself to the back of her cell. “Where did you get these?”

“Emma is letting me sleep in your room. I thought you’d want them.”

“Emma?” she sounds so betrayed that Emma wants to kill herself.

“I’ll give you two a minute.” Jefferson smiles, and Emma wants to smack him as he walks off to the side, to browse around her office and steal one of her doughnuts.

When they’re alone, Emma approaches the bars, eyes wet and pleading, “He keeps arriving back at the apartment… and I believe that he doesn’t know why.”

“You believe him?” Mary Margaret gasps, incredulously, and she looks like she’s about to cry. Emma wants to destroy anyone who gives her friend that look, like she’s just watched a puppy get murdered; it’s the worst thing in the world to know that she’s the cause.

“The doors were locked, and then he was inside. I don’t know what happened, but I…” she took a deep, shuddering breath, “I think he’s innocent here.”

“He tried to kill us.”

“He’s alone, and he’s not well. He needs help, and if it’s not me, it’s going to be Regina, and is there anyone on Earth who you would wish that on?”

Mary Margaret’s looking at her like she’s crazy, but Emma knows her well, by now. There’s a little spark in her eyes, and it looks a little bit like pride.

—-

He doesn’t miss home.

He can see it, from Emma’s office, while she tries to square her association with him with her knowledge of what he’s capable of. He watches her as she tries to convince Snow White to give the Mad Hatter a chance.

His house looms on the horizon, a dark, nightmarish chaos of dark stone atop the hill. If someone stood in his gallery, and looked through his telescope, they’d see his face, held in a mockery of curiosity and calm, staring right back at them.

It’s nice to be back in the world.

Everyone knows him in town, because Regina has done quite a number on this town’s collective memory. They think he’s an eccentric billionaire. They know nothing more, but their wild speculation is enough to answer most of their questions.

He can feel the curse tugging on the corners of his fractured mind.

It wants him to give in: to forget. His house had protected him from this, but out here, in this world of vicious, mocking half-truths and twisted lies, the urge to be Jeffery Capper is almost unbearable.

But Jeffery Capper is a bachelor; Jefferson is a widower.

Jeffery Capper is childless; Jefferson’s daughter’s face is forever burned and scarred into every facet of his mind.

He watches the women cry together, and sees the resemblance. Of course they’re mother and daughter. Of course they’re family. They’ve found each other, and yet neither one of them can even say the words.

And he hates them for it: at least they have the chance.

—-

She calls the hospital.

Four days in, when it’s clear that Jefferson isn’t going anywhere and that something is seriously wrong, she calls the hospital.

She speaks for a while with Dr Whale, and describes the blackouts, the psychotic episodes, and the delusions. She needs her life back, needs some reassurance that she can trust the food in her fridge and go to work without hauling a madman with her.

She wants to help him.

Because he’s alone, and no one else is willing to step in. Because this town turns the weak and the desperate into pariahs, it judges on sight and lives in suspicion and fear. Emma receives every 911 call, every domestic disturbance report; she knows this town’s soul better than most who were born here.

And it’s rotten. There’s something poisonous, something wretched and ill festering at the heart of Storybrooke.

Dr Whale wants to lock Jefferson up for observation, put him in an asylum. He wants to transfer authority for his case to the mayor and have him sectioned.

But luckily, Emma gives no names, and couldn’t provide records for her charge anyway. She hangs up, a little disgusted, and is surprised at herself. Because Jefferson needs help, and she’s in no place to provide it: how can she think herself better qualified than a medical professional.

The answer is simple: Dr Whale is in Regina’s pocket. And while she doesn’t believe in Curses or Evil Queens, Emma’s been here long enough now to know that the Mayor brings suffering and trouble in her wake.

So she calls Dr Hopper, and asks him to make a housecall. He agrees to come over in five days, on his day off. The man is a saint.

—-

She falls asleep on the sofa. Not in front of him, of course not: he’s been trapped in her home for a week now but she has no trust for him, not at all. She thinks he’s safely ensconced in Snow White’s room, fast asleep, dead to this world and all the screaming others.

She doesn’t know that he can get the handcuffs on and off easily enough: he was an escape artist in a past life. He comes to get a glass of water, and sees her sleeping. There’s an old movie playing on the television, an empty takeout container open on the coffee table, a cold cup of drinking chocolate abandoned on the floor.

She looks so different when she’s unconscious.

The planes of her face are softer, the lines less harsh. She looks more her age, more like a carefree young woman and less like a battle-scarred, war-torn old soldier. But she doesn’t look happy. Even in sleep, Emma Swan is sad, and lost, and alone.

She is Alice from their darkest moments. When she had no plan, and they had no hope, and the Knave of Hearts was played high on the table. When he’d turn to her in the hedge maze, and for just a moment he’d know that her straight face was just a pretence, and that her hot blood masked cold terror. When he was vanishing through that goddamn looking glass and she was watching him go, waving her family goodbye.

He figures Emma knows a little bit about that.

So he pulls the patchwork blanket over her sleeping form, and turns off the TV. He brushes her hair from her eyes, presses a kiss to her forehead as if she’s Grace, as if she’s his own flesh and blood.

Then he gets his glass of water, and tiptoes back to bed.

Chapter Text

She has to go and pick up Henry.

Regina calls her – that’s the weirdest thing all on its own – and says that Henry’s sick and she can’t collect him, and while it’s killing her to ask this, she needs her help.

As Sheriff, she occasionally has to ferry sick kids home from school: it’s never been her own kid before. The idea of picking him up from school, of having some actual time with him without Regina’s watchful, judgmental eyes, brings a new brightness to her smile, a spring to her step.

But there’s one massive, psychotic, top-hatted problem with this. Paige is in Henry’s class, and Emma refuses to bring Jefferson into contact with the innocent child he believes to be his daughter.

So she gets off the phone, and looks to Jefferson where he’s lying in his customary position on the couch. He’s reading, distracted: he’s shown a liking for historical books, non-fiction, nothing with any reference to magic. She doesn’t question it. “Hey, Jefferson, could you throw me my handcuffs?”

He looks at her, grins, and she smiles back.

She likes his smile when he’s like this: when he’s relaxed, and not insane. His crazy comes in fits and starts, and when he’s almost normal, almost stable, he’s hard not to like.

When he’s not waking in the night and smashing mirrors, or running through town randomly trampling on roses, or staring, blindly, at a familiar little girl crossing the road. When he’s Jefferson, a man with dark eyes and a massive smile, and not the Mad Hatter, who desperately needs help.

He jumps to his feet and grabs her cuffs from the desk, throwing them to her.

Then she has his face pressed into the sofa, and his hands cuffed behind his back, and she’s throwing his ass into the cell next to Mary Margaret’s.

They’ve known each other two weeks now, and the court case is being postponed and postponed, and while Emma doesn’t want to leave Mary Margaret locked up next to a man she fears, it’s better than exposing an innocent and unknowing child to a man who obsesses over her.

She can’t take him to the school. That just has Bad Idea written all over it.

So she leaves him in the cell, and takes the key with her, and padlocks it just to be safe. He watches her with that calm, dead-eyed blankness she’s come to dread, that look that means someone has just lived up to his worst expectations.

“I’m sorry,” she says, although they both know he deserves far worse, “I’ll be back in an hour and a half, tops. But you can’t come with me.”

“And you don’t trust me not to break into the castle and shatter the crockery.” He hisses back, and in a blink of an eye he’s not Jefferson anymore. Emma is staring into the manic-eyed stare of the Hatter, and she’s glad he’s behind bars.

“I’ll keep an eye on them, if you wish, Sheriff.” A voice, cool and calm and solicitous comes from behind her, and she turns to see Mr Gold smiling at her.

Of all the people in the room, the two she trusts the most are the ones behind bars. She’d let Mary Margaret keep an eye on Hatter and Gold for hours, knows she’d do her duty and barely even blink.

But Mary Margaret’s asleep – she’s exhausted, battered and bruised, and Emma can’t blame her for taking this time in judicial limbo to shut down. If the woman wants to sleep in the middle of the day, curled into a tiny foetal position under the blanket, then Emma won’t deny her that comfort.

She’s not sure that Regina’s not keeping them all waiting forever on purpose. The suspense has given new lines to Mary Margaret’s face, new shadows formed under her eyes.

She won’t wake her, and so she leaves her possibly homicidal madman in the care of the most morally ambiguous, ominous, creepy loan shark she’s ever met.

She’s certain that, after allowing Jefferson to stay with her, this is the worst mistake she’s ever made.

But Henry needs her, and this is the best solution she has.

“I have this room memorised. If anything has changed between now and when I get back, I’m holding you both responsible.”

Hatter is eyeing Gold warily, sizing him up. Gold, for his part, just nods to Emma, ignoring the prisoners altogether, “Of course, dear. There’s some paperwork that needs doing, anyway, so I shan’t be a bother.”

“Hm.” Emma leaves, the knot in her stomach tight and fierce and painful, but there’s no more she can do.

—-

Jefferson feels the madness recede slowly, feels the Curse re-exert itself. He’s started to appreciate the pull it has on his mind, the way it drags him into something resembling stability. This Curse will not abide instabilities; will not cope well with disruptions in the order of things.

A madman, running around Regina’s pretty little town raving about magic hats and lost children would certainly cause some issues there. The Curse’s solution is simply to correct the problem: to make him not mad.

It’s only Wonderland, its tendrils wrapped like vines around his mind, thorns digging into sensitive spots, that keeps his memory intact.

But he’s Jefferson again, and Hatter – the madman he despises, the creature born of desperation, the monster who allowed his family to be torn from him, one by one – crawls back to the dark corners of his mind.

That doesn’t stop the fact that he’s trapped in an iron cage, locked and bolted by his one potential ally in this whole town, with Rumplestiltskin grinning at him from the other side.

“Well, this is unexpected.” Rumplestiltskin leans on his cane, his face too human, too normal, voice measured and sane.

“You think?”

“I take it, then, that the hat was a failure.”

“I’m still here, so, yeah, I’d say so.” Jefferson hates this man: this man who causes needless suffering for his own gain, who tears apart families and rends children from their parents.

Mr Gold may be the shell he wears, but Jefferson is still Hatter enough to know a fairy tale villain when he sees one.

“A pity.”

“You told me she had magic.”

“And she does, more than she knows. Perhaps it’s just not the right kind.”

“That’s bullshit!” he’s railing against the bars of his cage, screaming in Rumplestiltskin’s impassive, genial face.

“Calm yourself, dearie.” A little of his old self, a remnant of the past, creeps into the man’s voice. This small act of recognition calms Jefferson, puts Hatter back into his cage.

They’d only met once, in the other world. It was Rumplestiltskin who have Jefferson his first hat.

“We had a deal, I was supposed to be home by now!”

“I believe you misinterpreted our agreement,” Rumplestiltskin leans on his cane, smiling as if they’re taking afternoon tea in the Queen of Hearts’ garden, “All I did was send you Emma. If you couldn’t get what you wanted from there on, then that’s not my problem.”

“I kidnapped Snow White for you,” Jefferson’s voice is flat, as he tries to keep from shaking, “And I’m still stuck here!”

In the cell next to his, Snow stirs. Mary Margaret is shifting, and for a moment it seems to all like she will wake up, like she’s heard every word. But then she settles back down, curls further in on herself, and stills.

Jefferson breathes a sigh of relief; he likes these women, in his own way, Snow White and her daughter, and he doesn’t want them to have any more cause to hate him. Still he keeps his voice low as he says, “She escaped, anyway. They both did. And now I’m called back to their home night after night, and Grace is still-” he cuts himself off; he’s said too much.

Dragons hear everything, and they store your secrets on their tongues.

Rumplestiltskin’s expression hadn’t changed, but Jefferson was still compelled to curl in the corner of his cell, like Mary Margaret, and hide from his eyes.

He’d just traded away his daughter’s name, and gained nothing in return.

Rumplestiltskin approaches the cell, leans in close, lowers his voice to barely above a whisper, and says, “The world we left behind is empty and quiet. Everyone and everything is here.” he leans back, “There’s more here than meets the eye: stick around for a little while.”

He smiles at his own joke, and Jefferson grimaces.

—-

Emma buys him ice cream on the way home, as an apology.

It’s weird, buying the forgiveness of a man who held her at gunpoint, who forced her to bind and gag her best friend and sew together a purple top hat. But he’s a friend, of sorts, and she just locked him in a room with Mr Gold.

She’d by Regina ice cream as an apology for that.

“Did you and Gold have fun?” she asks, as they sit in the ice cream parlour. They face each other over the table, and it’s almost easy, almost fun.

“Oh yes, the man’s just a barrel of laughs.” He frowns into his raspberry ripple; “We’re going out for pizza and beer this weekend. I think it’s getting serious.”

She can’t help it, she laughs. He watches her for a moment, like he’s never heard laughter before, his face creased in puzzlement. Then it clears, and he’s laughing too, and he looks like a completely different person.

For some reason, she finds herself more comfortable around Jefferson than she does around August. Even though August is a nice guy, who takes her out for drinks and doesn’t point guns at her head, and Jefferson is psychotic and convinced he’s the Mad Hatter.

But Jefferson, at least, is honest. Not since the moment she came home and found him on her sofa, confused as hell and trying not to show it, has he said one word to her that wasn’t the absolute truth.

And that counts for a lot in Emma’s world.  

—-

“That wasn’t nice of you, you know. Locking me up like that.” He tries not to accuse, as they walk home, but the words are burning on his tongue and much as he’d like to accept her tacit apology, he can’t help it.

“I couldn’t take you to school with me. I’m not setting the best example here as it is, Henry doesn’t need encouragement.”

“And you don’t trust me around children.”

She stops, insulted by the annoyance, the exasperation in his voice, “You watched a ten year-old girl through a telescope, convinced she was your daughter, for God knows how long. She’s in Henry’s class.”

Jefferson swallows, and nods. He understands the urge to protect a child; he even admires her for doing what he couldn’t, for looking out for Grace’s best interests as well as her own child’s, as much as her own child’s. She’s looking up at him, and the anger is gone from her face, but she’s still so sad, so much older than she should be.

For just a moment, he sees Alice.

But his wife is long gone, long lost and dead. He buried her himself, saved her bones from the Queen’s treasure chest, buried them beneath the white roses at the bottom of their garden.

Emma is breathing, flesh and blood. And she isn’t Alice: she’s so much harder, scarred by experience, baptised in the centre of a volcano. Emma’s softness, her curiosity and innocence, is locked away far beneath everything else. She’s no ghost of the past, no frail and faded shadow of a love from long ago.

She’s more like a phoenix: a scorched and burning hero born from Alice’s ashes. They are spiritual twins.

“Thank you.”

He reaches out his arms, and wraps them around her, so lightly that he knows she could break away without even trying. He’s barely touching her, and she’s shaking, but she doesn’t pull away.

Slowly, she brings her arms up and hugs him back. It’s a brief thing, a small comfort, but she smells like cinnamon and vanilla, and she’s so warm, so alive, and it’s been thirty years since he’s embraced another living soul. He wonders how long it’s been for her.

They cling to each other like children, for just a moment. Then they pull apart, and she searches his face for just a moment before her hard, warrior’s mask slides back into place. And they keep walking, like nothing ever happened.

Except that her hand is clasped around his, cold and thin, and it feels like she’ll never let go.

Chapter Text

Emma walks Jefferson to his first meeting with Dr Hopper, and even offers to wait outside.

She hopes he won’t do something drastic in the time between her leaving him and them meeting up again. She’s actually reached a point where doesn’t think that he’ll drug her again – but she still doesn’t eat anything she didn’t buy and prepare herself – or that he’s going to break any laws or stab her in the back.

They got through a whole movie together the night before. They even laughed at the same jokes.

So she’s okay leaving him with Dr Hopper, and going to see to Miss Ginger’s missing garden gnome. She walks along the street, for once without her human shadow, and she’s genuinely smiling.

Until she almost runs right into Regina: that knocks the smile right off her face.

“Sheriff Swan, I was hoping to bump into you soon.”

“What’s the problem, Madame Mayor?” the less time Emma has to spend with Regina, the better it was for everyone.

“My problem is that you’re harbouring a dangerous lunatic.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Jeffery Capper. He’s been seen creeping through town, peering in windows, running through the woods in the dead of night. He’s sick, Sheriff Swan, he needs help.”

“He’s with Dr Hopper right now.”

“I think we both know that that won’t be enough. He’s a danger to himself and others.”

Emma watched her for a moment, eyes narrowed, “He’s getting better.”

“And you’re a qualified psychiatric professional.”

“Obviously not… I don’t think that locking the guy up is the best solution.”

“For whom, Sheriff Swan? For him or for the town?”

—-

Jefferson watches Dr Hopper, as Dr Hopper watches him.

He’s giving something away. He can feel it, there’s a nervous twitch in his right index figure, or a manic tilt to his smile. Jefferson lived an entire life trying to not be seen; Hatter was watched every hour of every day, a shiny, crazy bird in a shining cage.

But Hatter isn’t here, the Curse has seen to that, and Jefferson almost misses him. Being Hatter makes things easier, the pain can balance out anything the world throws at him. Hatter can scream and howl at the moon, and holds nothing inside. Hatter would give Archie what he’s looking for and then some.

But Hatter isn’t here.

“How are you feeling today, Jeffery?”

“My name is Jefferson.” He stresses his name, sounds it out, rolls it around until it becomes an internal war cry. He’ll behave like a rational, sane human being, like he belongs in this slate-grey mindfuck of a town, but he won’t wear Regina’s lie around his neck.

“Shall we settle on Jeff?” Archie’s smiling, trying to set him at ease, and he stretches his lips into a smile.

Jeff will work for now.

“Alright.”

“So how do you feel, today?”

“Today I feel…” he considers, looks to the side, tries to find the emotion he knows is in there somewhere, “Bored.”

Archie nods, “Do you often feel bored?”

“I can’t leave town, and there isn’t exactly a bowling alley and a multiplex around the corner.”

“And do you feel trapped here, in Storybrooke?”

“Everyone’s trapped here.”

“You’re not alone in feeling that.” Archie’s voice is measured, soothing, and Jefferson hears none of the sharpness that lies create. This man believes what he’s saying. “But it’s not a pleasant feeling, is it?”

“It’s like… being trapped inside a box at the centre of a hedge maze.”

They continue in this fashion for an hour, and Jefferson becomes more adept at masking the truth. This man cannot see Hatter, should not see Hatter. Hatter would be locked away, sectioned, labelled a lunatic and shut away, far from the world.

Jefferson is enjoying his freedom. Emma is helping to bring him into the world.

And then, five minutes before their time is up, Archie strikes a massive, throbbing nerve, “What about family?”

“What about family?” Jefferson stills, his muscles tense. He can’t do this, not now, not yet.

“Well, you haven’t mentioned anyone to me except for Sheriff Swan, no parents or siblings. I was wondering if there was anything you wanted to discuss?”

“I’m an only child, and my parents passed away years ago.” He pauses, and tries to swallow down the words, summoning the Curse from the corners of his mind to smother Hatter’s voice, screaming Grace’s name in the blackness.

But he can do this; he can keep his mouth clamped shut.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Were you ever married?”

And Jefferson’s shaking, all over, his heart racing faster than the day he slipped through the Queen of Heart’s tearoom, running for the Hall of Mirrors. Hatter smiles. His silver dagger teeth gleam in the darkness of Jefferson’s mind. And he whispers, softly, Alice.

“Jeff?” Archie prompts, concerned by his silence.

Archie is an insect in a little tuxedo, holding an umbrella over his tiny green head. And oh, Grace would have loved that: she would have carried him in her palms, cupping her hands to shield him from the wind.

Hatter’s smile reaches Jefferson’s lips, wide and manic, and Archie frowns, “Are you feeling alright?”

“Splendid.” Hatter replies, and then he’s across the room, his hand around Archie’s throat, “Stop your questions, cricket, you don’t need the answers.”

He expects Hopper to fight back, to throw him off or to struggle. But he doesn’t. He relaxes back in his chair, Hatter’s hand around his throat, and just looks up at him “I can help, Jeff,” he chokes out, “You just need to let me.”

Hatter can’t see what he’s trying to pull. He can’t hear the jagged lies; taste the bitter, sour tang of deceit or self-interest.

Jefferson regains his eyes, and stares in horror at his hand around Archie’s throat, “I… I apologise…” he stands up straight, lowers his trembling fingers to his side.

He runs, as fast as his legs can carry him, out of the office and into the waiting room. He collides with Emma at the front door, and he knows he looks a mess. His eyes are still wide as dinner plates, his nemesis lurks in the back of his mind, and the terror raises the hairs on the back of his neck, around his scar.

Emma looks at him with more fear than he’s seen on her face since the night he pointed a gun at her head.

He knows her distress mimics his own.

—-

She comes out of her room on Saturday morning, and it’s her day off. She’s still in pyjamas, assumes Jefferson will still be asleep. The man sleeps like the dead.

They haven’t spoken about the incident with Dr Hopper. She’s afraid to ask, and she knows he doesn’t want to explain.

Dr Hopper keeps calling; it seems rude to answer, to deny Jefferson the chance to tell her the truth on his own. She’ll go see Archie herself on Monday, if Jefferson hasn’t opened up by then.

But she’s learnt from her relationship with Henry that, with therapy, it’s better to allow the patient to help himself.

He’s sat on her sofa, watching cartoons. The title card comes on while she watches from her bedroom door, something about a Robot Unicorn Attack. “That seems highly developed and mature.” She mutters.

He turns around, and today is one of his good days because he’s smiling like a child with a new puppy, “It’s amazing!”

Despite herself, she’s intrigued. Because he’s so endearing when he’s like this, when he’s happy and innocent and just… sweet. Like the best friend she never had. So she comes around to sit next to him, and they curl up under Mary Margaret’s hand-stitched crazy quilt on the sofa.

“That’s Silverwing,” he points, seriously, to a rather evil looking unicorn that’s just come on the screen, “He’s the bad guy, but he secretly has a heart of gold. He lost his true love, you see, and it’s made him bitter and twisted.”

“Cartoons are complex these days,” she says, “In my day it was just a cat chasing a mouse.”

“I might have elaborated a little. Evil isn’t born, it’s made.” He frowns, “I hope they realise that before Harmony and Sunflower throw him into a giant ceiling fan.”

She laughs, and he’s laughing too, and the sunlight streams in from the windows.

“How can you even watch this?” she asks, after a minute, “Won’t it set off an episode or something?”

“I can handle things like this,” he answers, eyes on the screen, “It’s not as randomly weird as Wonderland, and it’s not as cruel or fierce. Everything is what it seems, and the evil is trapped behind the screen.”

And she understands. How can she not, when she reminds herself everyday that Henry’s Evil Queen is trapped inside a book, and that she doesn’t really run the town? A belief in fiction can be a powerful reassurance, especially in this world where magic seems so close and so menacing.

So they watch the cartoons all morning, reruns of Fairly Odd Parents, of Spongebob Squarepants, and even a few Loony Toons that Emma remembers from her childhood. And all the jokes are funnier, and weirder, and more surprising when viewed through adult eyes. She wonders if maybe he’s driving her insane, wonders if ever she would have done this in the days before their strange little friendship. Perhaps a little madness isn’t always a bad thing.

Their feet are pressed together under the quilt, the only skin-to-skin contact they’ve ever had. Emma finds no fear in their proximity, despite their history.

Because he can’t hurt her, not now: not now that they’ve sat together in the sunshine, and trapped all the monsters in ink and pencil lead, behind a television screen.

—-

He sees Grace in the street, just once, and then it’s all the time. She’s everywhere: in the comic book store with Henry Mills, in the 7-11 with her new mother, around corners and reflected in shop windows. And he never says a word to her, never approaches her.

He’s her father, and he wants her to be happy. And here she is, smiling with her friends, chatting with shopkeepers, playing hide-and-seek in the park. What father couldn’t delight in seeing his child so safe and so at peace?

He wants her to smile at him, so he smiles at her.

And she always smiles back, his Grace: she is a girl born of sunlight, her mother’s daughter through and through. Alice always had a smile for every creature she met. Alice never judged at first sight, and Grace inherited that trait. She smiles like there’s nothing wrong with the world, and for those moments wishing makes it so.

Emma doesn’t notice the smiling, but she sees Grace. Even though she calls her Paige, even though she steers Jefferson away the second she catches sight of her.

And he’s glad for her presence, for her warm and stable hand on his forearm, her fingers weaving between his, guiding him away from the pain of Grace’s blue eyes and beaming grin. Emma is a mother herself, and she understands how it is to have to avoid your own child.

So she’s there to stop him from doing something stupid. She’s there to keep Hatter in his cage, to keep him from snatching his daughter into his arms and running far and fast.

She keeps him sane, better than any Curse.

And then she takes him for ice cream, and they smile across the table, and a little more of the sadness in her eyes falls away every time. He’s bringing the Alice out in her, the brightness and curiosity, the innocence.

They smile together like children, like conspirators, like the only sane people in a world of lunatics.

Chapter Text

Regina comes in the middle of the day, when she knows Emma will be at work.

Jefferson is trusted to stay in Granny’s, where Ruby can keep an eye on him. If he leaves, Granny calls the Sheriff and she’s there in a heartbeat.

When the phone rings, and Emma picks it up, she expects to hear that he’s gone outside and disappeared, or that he’s harassed a customer. He gives people the creeps, she knows that, but people have come to accept that he’s her responsibility and that she’ll deal with it.

She’s his only friend, like it or not, and that’s just the way it is.

No one ever said that life was fair.

But it’s Ruby, telling her that Regina came with Dr Whale, and they took Jefferson in Dr Whale’s car. Granny said not to worry about it – no one could believe that the Mayor and the Sheriff would disagree over this – but Ruby insisted.

And Emma wants to go to the hospital right that second. She wants to bust Jefferson out of there, prove he’s safe in her home.

She likes having him with her. She’ll miss him when he’s gone.

And these are truths that her empty heart knows, even when her mind is screaming and waving its arms in protest.

But she can’t. Because she’s not a medical professional, and she’s broken no laws, and Archie told her what happened during their session: Jefferson lost his mind and attacked him.

The Mayor has broken no laws.

So Emma goes home to an empty apartment, and doesn’t worry about eating right from the fridge, and turns on her stereo to escape the silence. Jefferson is always talking, whether he’s giggling like a child or brooding in deep and dangerous anger. He’s always talking, and the silence is heavy.

But she carries it, like she carries everything else, and she has no high hopes when the doorbell rings.

It’s Henry, and he’s got a friend with him. Paige smiles, shyly, as Henry pushes inside. “Ah, hi.”

He has his determined-face on. Emma groans, “What’s up, Henry?”

“You have to go save the Hatter!”

“Henry,” she sighs, and sees Paige fidgeting out of the corner of her eye. She kneels down, so she’s face-to-face with her son, and looks him in the eye, “Jefferson is a very sick man, and he needs help.” She sighs, and she knows Henry can see the pain on her face, “And he can get that in the hospital.”

“But my mom looked so happy when she came home tonight, like she’s winning.”

“How do you even know about him?” she frowns, and Paige coughs.

“He always says smiles at me, in the street.” She says, and her voice is quiet, “And now, he’s always with you.”

And maybe Jefferson is this girl’s father, because her sad, sweet smile is a carbon copy of his.

Henry takes over, “He needs you, Emma. He needs you to help him break the Curse. And you can’t do that if he’s locked up.”

“Henry, I can’t go busting people out of insane asylums, I just can’t. They’re going to make him better again, and then they’ll let him go.”

Letting him go seems like the order of the day.

“My mom doesn’t let people go,” Henry looks at her like she’s incredibly dense, “He’ll disappear into the hospital and never come out.”

She doesn’t want to think that. But she can’t help it: a part of her, irrational and stupid as it is, still blames Regina for Graham’s death: because until she got angry, Graham was alive.

And until she got involved, Mary Margaret was fine.

Regina has a talent for taking away the people that Emma cares about.

“How about I go visit him tomorrow, huh?” she compromises, “You can come, too, and-” she breaks off, remembers a crucial detail, “He’ll be back by midnight.”

And Regina would think she’d stolen him away. And then she’ll be fired for sure, and Mary Margaret will be truly screwed.

“What?” Henry’s confused, frowning, and Paige is watching the pair of them. She looks so awkward, like they’ve both lost their minds.

“I don’t know why, but Jefferson is always back here at midnight.” She stands, and grabs her jacket from the chair, “Let’s go.”

—-

Jefferson sits in his chair, and has a million little lights shone in his eyes.

The doctor is trying to find Hatter, hidden behind Jefferson’s blank eyes. He’s probing, looking for signs of the madman within, for a reason to lock him up and throw away the key.

Regina watches from the side, and he wants to leap from the chair and off with her head!

She has a Jabberwocky’s smile, with diamond-dagger teeth and blood red lips bared in a snarl. And he hates her, more than anything in the world, more than he hates magic, more than he hates the family that stole his daughter.

He could rip her to pieces with his bare hands.

It’s her fault that he’s insane. It’s her fault that Grace doesn’t know his name.

And that thought brings the smile to his lips, brings Hatter to his eyes. He tries to move, he’s growling, screaming, and he’s tied down but he could break free. He needs to feel her throat, soft and malleable, beneath his fingertips. He needs to hear her bones crack; watch her blood flow like wine.

He hates her more than he hates the Queen of Hearts.

Hatter is drugged, and carried under the Earth. He can sense the worms in the soil beyond the walls; feel the weight of the building crushing them as he’s locked in the basement.

He’s alone down here. And it’s cold and dark, and almost peaceful, almost liveable.

It’s not home. His home is a whitewashed wooden house, with a patchwork quilt and the Curse-Breaker in the next room.

He’ll be home by midnight.

He expects to feel the way he did in Wonderland. He wants Hatter to remain in control, to scream like the crazy man he is and tear at the walls, to make his fingernails bleed with the need to get back into the world, the world that has his Grace in it.

But Hatter withdraws, and it’s Emma who he holds in his mind. He has learnt to live a life without his daughter by his side, and while he would give anything to have her back, here and now she’s not what he needs. He needs his sanity, his hope: his best friend. He needs Emma to hold his hand and bring back the light.

He’s there for minutes or hours, he can’t tell. He stays by the window, watches the sun arc across the sky,

Then there’s a small voice, tired and croaky, through the stone walls. “Hello?”

“Who is that?” he asks, wondering if his insanity has re-emerged, wondering if he’s hearing voices now. But this isn’t one of Alice’s lullabies, crooning through his memories, nor Grace’s delighted giggle. This is accented and new, someone he hasn’t met.

“I’m one cell over, I think.”

“Oh.”

“Did they hurt you?” that she’s so concerned for him, when she sounds so sad herself, makes him want to weep. He might have been insane, but at least he was free.

“No. Not really. No more than usual.”

“Who-” she stops, and he can almost feel her thinking, “Who are they?”

“A Queen and her apothecary.” He says, and then sighs. Hatter isn’t here, and Jefferson suffers for his mistakes, and speaking in riddles won’t bring him back, “The Mayor, Regina, and Dr Whale.”

“Oh.” Then her voice takes on a different tone, “The Queen? Your friend, the Queen?” she sounds like she’s reciting something from a television show, high and mocking, truly insane, and bitter.

“No. Not a friend.” Not anymore. They had been, once upon a time, when he was a magician’s apprentice and she a lady in love with a stable boy. But the girl he knew all that time ago is long gone and dead, replaced by the woman who sent a whole world careening into Hell, and abandoned him in Wonderland.

“Do you… remember?” she whispers it, as if it’s a sin.

“Remember what?”

“White knights and princesses. Magic.” The last is said so quietly he barely hears it, but there it is.

“Yes. I remember the Evil Queen’s curse.”

And she laughs, and she’s not insane, and he’s laughing too. “I’ll be home by midnight,” he says, after a moment, “I’m Jefferson.”

“My name is Belle.” She says, after a very long pause, “But you won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Why not?”

“Names are a powerful magic. Someone once told me that.”

“Only Rumplestiltskin ever used names in magic.” He says, without thinking at all, because here is someone who understands, here is someone who remembers.

But she’s crying. He can hear her, sobbing through the walls, and he knows it was his fault.

And he doesn’t know what to say.

So after a minute of listening to her weeping, to a girl he’s never seen crying her heart out in a dark, cold, cell, he just asks, “What happened?”

“Names have power. And that one’s the worst.”

Chapter Text

Emma drops Paige back at home. She hopes that, one day, she can allow Jefferson to be in the same room with the girl without having to keep them apart. A part of her is starting to think there really is more to this than meets the eye, more strangeness on this Earth than she’d allowed herself to dream.

Henry’s delighted, of course.

But even if Paige is Jefferson’s daughter from a fairy tale realm – and Lord, how truly insane does she sound right now – she’s still not taking a child she just met to an asylum. She’s nervous enough with Henry here.

She can’t just bust in there. She needs some legal pretence, some way of claiming jurisdiction. She has to bring him out, has to have them home before midnight. Otherwise everything goes to Hell, and she won’t be able to haul it back.

So she goes to the one man in the whole town who knows the law better than Regina. The one person who could bullshit her out of this, if needs be.

She stops outside Mr Gold’s house, and Henry turns to her in utter dismay, “Emma, no. He’s worse than my mom, he’ll doom us to failure.”

“No, Henry, he’s helping Mary Margaret,” she sighs: she really hates having to shine reality into his magical little world, but this is important, “There are no heroes, and no villains. People change sides. Today Mr Gold is going to be on ours.”

“Okay…” she can see him trying to fit that into his personal view of the world, then looks up at her, more unsure than she’s ever seen him, “But we’re always the good guys, right?”

And because she can’t imagine this amazing, intelligent, innocent boy as anything less than pure sunshine, she smiles, and nods, and says “Of course. We’re the good guys.”

His smile is beatific, and infectious. But her grin falls from her face when she knocks on the door of the scariest man in town, with the sun setting behind her, and this is suddenly the worst idea she’s had in her life.

After allowing a lunatic to sleep in her best friend’s bed, and then locking him in a cell under the watch of someone she didn’t trust as far as she could throw, and listening to his mad little stories, and allowing a belief in magic to creep inside her safe, warm home.

Okay, this is maybe the sixth worst plan she’s ever had.

Her stupid ideas are piling up, but they seem to be working out thus far. Maybe magic does exist: it seems the only explanation for her current luck.

“Sheriff Swan,” he greets her, smile wide and courteous. The way snakes smile before they poison their victims, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She glances back at Henry in the car, at his pinched and worried face, and says, “I need help. I need to break a man out of the hospital, and I need to do it tonight.”

And he smiles that smile, that dragon smile, that makes her want to call the whole thing off, and go and hide under a blanket with every modern convenience she has to convince herself that such things can’t exist.

But scepticism has no place here. Not now, when every choice she makes feels like casting a spell.

Maybe if she wants to get Jefferson back, if she wants to save Mary Margaret, if she wants her family around her and her heart to be full, she has to start believing.

“Come inside, then. I have just the thing.”

—-

Jefferson listens to Belle from the other side of the wall, and for the first time in thirty years, he feels sane. In this place, this sanatorium meant for those consumed by darkness, by insanity, he has gained back his mind. The irony is almost comforting: he knows where he stands, with painful and twisted truth.

Hatter is still there, but his cage is iron and steel, and he is bound and gagged. Jefferson seals him away, and knows that they’ll never meet again.

Belle’s not crazy: he knows crazy, and while she’s broken, and unstable, and in desperate need of a soft bed and a warm smile, she has no Hatter in her.

She’s lost the only thing in the world that was important to her. And she’s stronger than he ever was: she never left until she was told to. She never promised to come home, and yet she did so anyway.

Her story falls from her like a waterfall, and he sees the pain pooling around his feet, seeping through the walls.

He wonders if it’s the first chance she ever had to tell it.

When she says his name, the name of her lost love, the name of the man who sent her careening toward this dark and empty place, she chokes it out like a curse and a prayer.

Like he used to talk about Alice, once upon a time.

Like he knows he’d think about Emma, if he ever lost her, too.

But he’ll be home by midnight, and that thought keeps his mind awake and his emotions in check. He wishes he could take Belle with him.

“I’ve met him,” he says, when she’s finished, when he’s placed his hand on the wall, in the only gesture of solidarity he can muster.

“Who?”

“Your monster. He made a deal with me, and it landed me in jail.”

And this girl, this strong and shattered princess, laughs through her tears, “That sounds about right.”

“I’m going to punch him in the face,” he promises, “Next time I see him. I’ll sock the bastard in the jaw for you, Belle.”

“That sounds good.” She sighs, “Don’t tell him about me.”

“Why not?”

“He wouldn’t care.” She starts to cry again, and bites it back, “I’d rather believe he doesn’t come because he doesn’t know, than know he’s not here because he doesn’t care at all.”

“Then I’ll get Emma, and she’ll bust you out of here herself. That woman is a human battering ram: she can knock down steel doors. She can blow the walls off of brick buildings. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

“You sound like me,” she almost sings it, in Rumplestiltskin’s mocking tones, “Lost in love.”

“It’s better than just being lost, isn’t it?”

She hums, and he takes it as agreement. “I said something like that, once. Before the Queen found me. Before I was insane.”

“You’re not insane. I officially declare you one hundred per cent healthy, in fact, by decree of the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, you are the sanest person I’ve ever met.”

She giggles, and he can understand why Rumplestiltskin must have loved this girl. Her laughter is music, is sunlight.

He is a prince of broken promises, and here he vows to break one more. Rumplestiltskin will know of Belle’s presence. He’ll drag the man down here, drug and carry him if needs be. He will be forced to see what he’s done to this amazing woman, to understand the weight of his mistakes.

Jefferson’s lived twenty-eight years of that, and he never did anything awful enough to be worthy of the Dark One. Belle deserves to be free. She deserves to see her monster supplicated at her feet, to see her Jabberwocky tamed.

—-

Henry rings the doorbell, and Emma is horrified to see him standing there. He brought the fairy tale book, of course he did, but she told him to stay in the car.

Mr Gold terrifies him, and he’s shaking just standing there, but he’s so determined. His little face is cast in stone, his mouth a firm line. She knows that expression: she wore it herself for eighteen years of foster care.

So she ushers him in, and takes his tiny hand in hers, and keeps him close in Gold’s home.

It’s too cosy for a man like him. He needs a castle of dark stone and storm clouds. He needs a house like Jefferson’s, and Jefferson would suit this one, all stained-glass windows and warm, dark wood. Mr Gold is a dark, bitter aberration in this homey little world.

“Hello, Henry.” He smiles down at him, and Henry doesn’t flinch. He’s a brave boy, and Emma feels a little thrill of pride, “Are you helping us, too?”

“Yes.” He looks up, and asks the question that Emma knew was coming, but dreaded, “Why are you helping us?”

“Your mother asked very nicely.”

“Oh,” he doesn’t believe it: he’s also a damn sight smarter than she is. “Not because of the Curse, then?”

“That too.” He casts the answer off so negligently, so carelessly, that Emma can’t believe her ears. Henry’s face lights up for a moment, then creases into a confused frown. It matches Emma’s perfectly.

“Um, Gold? Can I just see you a moment?” she lets go of Henry, regretfully, and leads Gold off to one side. The man is smiling like he’s done nothing at all, and she finds it worrying that he’s so good at it, when he’s always up to something. “Why are you encouraging him? He doesn’t need anyone else telling him that fairy tales are real!”

“Sheriff Swan, for an intelligent woman you’re incredibly stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re asking me to help you break a lunatic – who kidnapped you and your roommate and threatened your life – out of the asylum so he can stay with you, correct? If there’s no magic involved in this equation, dear, then I can’t see you explaining that.” She stares, dumbfounded, as he pauses for a moment and licks his lips, thoughtfully, “And he keeps appearing back in your home, without any explanation. Tell me you’re not trying to rationalise that.”

She had been, ever since the first night, but she wasn’t for admitting it.

“Magic isn’t real.”

“Your boy believes it is.”

“He’s a sad little kid who needs an escape.”

“You sewed a magic hat and tried to send Jefferson home. But when you thought ‘home’, you couldn’t keep his home in your head, so you thought of yours.”

It’s the most insane explanation possible. The hat is stored in the evidence locker of the precinct, and she didn’t do anything more than sew some fabric and ribbons together at gunpoint.

And yet it feels true, and she can sense a liar. Gold isn’t delusional: he’s right.

When that falls into place, she feels everything else slot together as well. And with this comes the truth of the matter, the reality of the situation. She just allowed the Evil Queen to steal Jefferson – her comfort, her companion – away without a fight.

And the pang of missing him grows into a roaring fire, and feels that she might collapse, her knees weak, bones brittle and trembling. She wants to sob like she hasn’t since Graham died in her arms.

Because he’s under her skin, caught up in the brambles inside her heart, and she needs him there as much as she needs to breathe. And now, Regina has ripped him away from her, too.

Gold sees all of this play out on her face, and watches with a smile, “Now, let’s go save your Mad Hatter.” He sets off toward Henry, who’s staring at him with something akin to admiration, but closer to astonishment.

“I’ll owe you another favour.” She doesn’t know why she says it, why she names his price for him. Perhaps because it’s finally time to lay every card on the table, and see what they spell.

“And it’ll piss off Regina something rotten,” he turns to her, his smile wide and gleaming, and she’s glad that he’s on her side: it’s an evil, vicious grin he has. “Today is shaping up rather nicely.”

—-

“Belle?” Jefferson calls her name in the dark, and hopes she’s still awake.

She takes a moment to respond, “Yes?”

“Do you hear that?”

The dead silent asylum is creaking, shaking, and for the first time in hours there are voices that belong to neither of them.

“There’s never anything to hear.” Her tone is numb, small and thin.

“I think there is, now.” He’s desperate to hear her agreement, hear some hope in her quiet, desolate voice, “The cavalry comes to save the day.”

“No it doesn’t. All that comes is the Queen, to smile and smile.”

“Hope is the thing with feathers, Belle,” he whispers, his hand pressed against the wall, his smile wide and eyes bright. He can hear his saviour in the hallway, would know her voice anywhere and everywhere, “Watch her fly.”

And there’s the nurse, her words clipped and tight, as Emma spouts nonsense words like ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘due process’ and ‘medical evidence’.

These words mean nothing in the castle of a witch, of an Evil Queen. What use are laws when the powerful can seize their helpless enemies and trap them deep underground? But Emma won’t cast spells, or slay dragons, or capture firebirds and harness weave their feathers into burning armour.

So she throws her meaningless complexities to Regina’s servant’s feet, and Jefferson, listening as hard as he can to the battle in the hallway, hears every other word.

And the tap of a cane on the stone floor.

He wishes Rumplestiltskin weren’t here. Belle has been through hell and back, following his coattails, and she deserves a freedom without his poisonous influence.

—-

Emma forcibly pushes the nurse aside to get to the door, and pulls the shutter across, to look inside.

Jefferson’s eyes – calm, entirely sane – look back at her. He looks furious, and she accepts that he has good reason to be. Even if a little part of her can’t help but see it as karmic retribution for kidnapping her in the first place.

She’s just relieved to have found him. She’d left Henry in the car with his book: she didn’t need him there for yet another face-off between his mothers. Regina, in fact, hadn’t been there at all, which saved one problem for Emma to cope with later. But it still took over an hour of searching the hospital, bullying Dr Whale, and finally employing Mr Gold’s fearsome reputation to find the locked ‘exit’ door to the basement.

She’s just watching her debt to him wracking up, but she’ll worry about that later. The bigger question is: what the hell is wrong with a town where the insane asylum is a closely guarded secret?

She can see Jefferson on the other side, glaring at her impatiently, and considers kicking the door down. But it’s made of reinforced steel, so she has the nurse – who she’s never seen before, but has ‘creepy’ written all over her – open it for her.

Jefferson, for his part, seems fairly composed considering. Then again, ‘trapped’ takes on whole new meanings when you know exactly where you’ll be on the stroke of midnight, each and every night of your life. Stone walls are nothing when compared to magic top hats.

That’s the maddest thing she’s ever thought without provocation.

She smiles, she can’t stop, as they cross the cell and he has his arms wrapped around her, hard enough that she can barely breathe, and everything is warmth and strength, and his scent of old cloth and Mary Margaret’s lavender fabric softener.

“I missed you,” it’s an unimpressive statement, but sometimes the simplest things have the deepest meanings.

“You weren’t in the cell,” he murmurs against her hair, and she huffs out a laugh, “I was going mad in here.”

She moves away to swat his arm, “Now that’s not even funny.”

“Yes it is.” He grins unrepentantly, and her relief fades into familiar annoyance.

“Will that be all, then, Sheriff?” Mr Gold asks from the doorway, light and casual and impatient, “It’s not quite pleasant down here.”

“No.” Jefferson is across the room in a moment, and Emma’s afraid he’s going to do something awful, something like what happened with Archie. Emma’s afraid he’s going to show his madness again, and that this will have been for nothing.

But he looks sane enough, for now, and he’s just looming over Gold, breathing hard, like he’s having to hold himself back from ripping his skin apart.

“You owe someone an apology.” He takes Gold’s arm, with a forceful grip, and marches him to the next cell over.

Emma breaks their contact as fast as she can, wrenches the pair of them apart, and is about to scold Jefferson before she sees the anger in his eyes. It’s different, this time, righteous and selfless. He’s angry for someone else. “What happened?”

“Open the door.” Emma still holds the nurse’s skeleton key, and she follows the command, clicks the lock and swings the door open.

The girl in the corner is pale, thin, barely human-looking. Jefferson is by her side in a moment, muttering something, soothing her as she starts to tremble. He takes her in his arms and starts to rock her like a child, but the girl’s eyes don’t close.

She’s locked on Mr Gold’s face, just as he’s locked on hers.

Then he turns, and walks away.

Chapter Text

Emma gets a 911 call as soon as she gets back to the station.

One of Mr Gold’s neighbours: another domestic disturbance. She’s wanted a word with him since the asylum, but that was hours ago and the man knows how to disappear.

She’s there within fifteen minutes, to find windows broken to smithereens, and whole cabinets of trinkets smashed to ruins.

And there’s Gold, leant in a doorway, breathing hard and clutching something in his hand. He looks like he’s fought an entire war single-handed, like he broke every cup and saucer in the whole town in one night.

He looks at her dazedly as she pulls her gun on him, like he’s just woken up from a bad dream, “Emma?”

“What happened here?” she asks, “Did Mr French come back?”

This doesn’t look like a robbery: this looks like a bombsite. Gold’s cane lies over by a glass cabinet, and she’s suddenly certain that he is the cause of this whole mess. He’s wrecked up his own home, and she’s wondering if maybe Jefferson and his friend from the asylum aren’t the only ones who’ll be in Archie’s office on Monday morning.

“No. I’m perfectly fine, Sheriff Swan. You may return to your duties.”

“Oh, no. I got a report of a domestic disturbance from the neighbours: I need to know what happened here.”

And for once, he seems at a loss for words. He stumbles, his feet slipping under him, and crumples to the floor, his bad leg stretching out in front of him.

And he was her ally, tonight. He told her truth and helped her rescue Jefferson from an Evil Queen. So she puts her gun in its holster, and goes across to him, and kneels so they’re face-to-face.

Everyone needs a friend. Even battered, morally-ambiguous, highly selfish pawnbrokers.

“Did… did you do this?” She asks.

He looks up at her, face ravaged and bitter and oh, so tired. There are legions of dead and wounded soldiers behind those dark eyes of his, and a guilt that believes he killed them all. She wants to hug him, in that moment, but he’s still Mr Gold, and tomorrow he might be beating florists half to death in cabins again.

“Is this about that girl? The one from the asylum?” The poor thing is currently curled on her sofa under Jefferson’s watchful eyes. Four hours in that place, and he looks at her as if she’s his little sister, and some asshole beat her up.

She has a feeling she knows exactly which asshole to blame.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emma almost wants to smile, because she can tell lies a mile off, and he reeks of self-deception almost as much as she does, “Jefferson looks ready to kill whoever put her there.”

“He can start with our exalted Mayor.”

This, at least, has a ring of truth in it. Emma adds the girl on her sofa to her already growing list of Regina’s victims.

“Why did you leave?”

“We were ready to go.”

Emma has a feeling, deep in her gut, that there’s something he won’t tell her. But she sees Gold as more of a friend than an enemy, despite everything, and so she lets him be. There will be time for interrogations and reunions and confessions tomorrow: now, all she wants to do is take a bath and go to bed.

She rolls herself so she’s sat beside him against the wall, and together they lie in dazed and broken in his smashed and ruined home.

—-

Jefferson has Hatter locked up inside, safe and sound, but watching Rumplestiltskin flee weakened the bars somewhat.

He wants to chase after him, tie him down and gag him, force him to hear Belle retell their whole story, exactly as she did in the asylum. He wants to watch the suffering play out across his face, reach into the monster’s dragon-scaled chest to tear his heart to shreds with his bare hands.

Belle is sleeping on Emma’s couch. The place is becoming an open house for insane runaways, but Jefferson isn’t letting the girl out of his sight.

Emma took him in – unwillingly – and he’s only able to look in the mirror and see no one but himself because of that. Because of her, because she kept an eye on him and forced him to be sane, because she’s still here, watching him with more warmth than he’s felt in decades.

Now, it’s his turn.

So he pulls the quilt over Belle’s thin, shaking form, and goes to join Emma at the table.

They sit opposite each other; her arm is stretched across the wood. He takes her hand wordlessly, and they smile like they share a secret.

“Thank you.” He says, after a few minutes of just watching her read her case files.

She looks up at him, “For what?”

“Not thinking I’m a danger to myself and others. If you don’t watch it, I’ll start to think that you trust me not to poison your food.”

“Don’t worry about it, I wasn’t going to abandon a friend to Regina’s ‘special care’.” She looks across at Belle, “Is she doing okay?”

“She’s sleeping,” he sighs, heavily, “But she doesn’t stop shaking. She’s chasing Jabberwockies in her mind, building dartboards for witches.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s… Rumplestiltskin’s lover.”

“Who?” she looks at him, blankly, and oh, this will be an uphill battle. But at least she’s asking the question.

“Mr Gold. Your pet dragon.”

“Gold is capable of love?” she stares for a moment, then something resembling comprehension, a new puzzle piece, flits across her face. Then it’s gone, and she laughs and shakes her head, “Today just keeps getting weirder.”

“A long time ago, maybe…. He didn’t even look at her.” His hand is shaking, and Emma squeezes it to calm him, “I could have torn the serpent’s head off, Emma. I could have fed his heart to him bit by bit.”

“Why? What did he do that was so horrible?”

He looks across at Belle, small and trembling under a borrowed blanket. “He was her family, and he abandoned her. He let the nightmares come and take her away, and now he doesn’t even have the courage to look her in the eye.”

He looks back at Emma, who’s staring at him like she never has before. With warmth, and respect, and something else, something he can’t put a name to.

Then, slowly and deliberately, she pushes her chair back from the table, and comes around to stand in front of him. She’s dressed as she was the night they met, in a tank top and jeans, her hair long and loose down her back. She looks softer, more vulnerable without her leather jacket armour.

She takes a deep breath, as if steeling herself, and he just watches her, not daring to move a muscle.

Then she leans down, and softly – so softly he might have imagined it – she presses her mouth to his.

It’s over as soon as it starts, and she’s pulling away, and staring at him with wide and astonished eyes. As if she doesn’t know at all why she did that. As if she didn’t just kiss him breathless with a simple touch of her lips.

He stands, and everything’s slow, everything’s quiet and soft and tentative, feeling their way around this new place, these new emotions.

They don’t know what they’re doing, but he slides a hand into her soft blonde hair, and kisses her as deeply as he can, tries to taste as much of her, feel as close to her as possible before the spell breaks, and they’re sent spinning away from each other again.

And she’s kissing him back, with just as much attention, just as much care. Theirs is a quiet desperation, a subtle urgency, without the frenzied passion or rapidity he might have expected, had he ever allowed himself to imagine this.

Because they’re both of them necromancers, and they’ve brought each other back from the dead, and living fast and hard is impossible in this languid, limbo world.

Instead, everything is measured, and gentle, and gradual: kissing and touching by degrees. She cups his face in her hands like she’s afraid he’ll disappear, with a soft, tentative sweetness. He threads his hands into her long, golden hair and adores how soft it is, how it slides between his fingers like water.

It’s not a happy ending, but it’s the most wonderful beginning he could have hoped for.