Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The small man stood on the porch of the Victorian house watching gray clouds crowd out the last patch of dirty blue in the sky. He leaned on the railing, lifting his right foot off the ground to ease the ache in his ankle. It never lied. Soon it would rain.

Thunder and lightning flared in the distance, the electricity in the air making the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

No, not just electricity he amended. Magic. Dark magic.

Even though he no longer possessed it, he could still sense it. It called to him like a lost lover, always just out of reach.

He heard the creak of the wood on the porch behind him. Someone stepping lightly on the squeaky board by the door.

Not someone. Her.

It was a relief in a way. He was tired of waiting.

“You can come out dearie,” he said in a sing-song voice. “Let’s have a look.”

He wondered what the curse would look like on her. You could manipulate it, once you learned how to create the front that you thought best suited to your needs. There had been dark ones terrifying, intimidating, disgusting, seductive, even childlike in appearance. Gradually, you could learn not to look human at all, to help distance yourself, keep them away, yourself apart.

Emma stepped from the shadows.   He was relieved to see she still looked human, though clothed entirely in black. No lizard scales for her.

“I should kill you, Gold,” she hissed as she strode purposefully across his porch.

“By all means make yourself at home,” he replied with a wry twist of the mouth, waving to his garden furniture with one of his old affected gestures, however much his heart quaked within him and he longed to flee and hide. He couldn’t forget how bereft of power he was now, how vulnerable to everything and everyone.

“All this, it’s all because of you.”

“You have my sympathies,” he said, though he doubted she’d believe his sincerity. “It’s not an easy path, the one you’ve chosen.”

“Did I ever really have a choice?” Her voice oozed bitterness.

“You always have a choice,” he said, echoing the words of Zoso, the man who’d passed the curse to him so long ago in a deal he didn’t understand, beginning a long-lived fascination for him with contracts and the fine print of human existence.

“Perhaps I could interest you in a deal Miss Swan…”

“Screw you and your sketchy deals,” she snapped. Her body swirled into a cloud of roiling purple-black smoke, reappearing now in front of him, startling him into letting go of the railing. “I make the deals now.”

He stumbled backward at her menacing approach, barely managing to grab the back of a deck chair for support.  

A cruel smile curled at her lips to see him so discomfited.

And yet a moment before, he couldn’t help but notice the look in her eyes right when she appeared in front of him out of the cloud of smoke, frightened, confused as if for a split second she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d got there. Her teleport had not been planned, it had just happened. Though she’d quickly covered it up as if she meant to do it all along, but he could see how her new powers and their unpredictable nature frightened her. He could use that, if only she gave him enough time.

“You tell me how the Dark One curse works and how to get rid of it.”

He shook his head sadly. “It doesn’t work that way. Once you take it on you’re stuck with it. The curse was bound to me for over three hundred years. Don’t you think I would’ve got shot of it if I could?”

“No, you were too afraid to let it go, of being defenseless without magic.”

“Was I now?” he taunted her. “Think back. I came to this world without magic to find my son. I subsisted like this, as you see me now for 28 years by my own choosing.”

“But no one knew who you were then. You had no real enemies. You didn’t know you’d ever had magic yourself, so how could you miss it?”

He had missed it though, during those 28 years. He’d been aware of feeling so hollow, so wrong for some reason, he just wouldn’t have been able to tell you why.

“At least let me tell you my offer,” he said mildly. “If you wish to eschew it, than by all means do, it’s not like I can collect on any favour you owe me these days.”

“Fine!” she said and evaporated in smoke again, to appear sitting in the chair across from him, arms folded across her chest pouting like a child.

“I can’t teach you to be rid of the curse, but I can instruct you in how to contain the darkness, how to remain yourself for as long as possible, long enough perhaps for someone to find a more permenant solution.”

She looked up. “And in exchange what do you want from me?”

“Protection,” his voice quavered slightly, he was not looking forward to begging, but if he had to…

“I’ve made many enemies over the years. Once they find out how…”

“Pitiful you’ve become?”

“I’d prefer indisposed…” he snapped, before remembering she could crush him with a thought. He smoothed out his tie and attempted to speak more softly. “Well, perhaps they may seek vengeance.”  

“Perhaps?” she snorted. “Everyone in this town wants a piece of you and I don’t see why I shouldn’t help them to it.”

“Remember, you need me,” he growled.

“Not all of you…” she answered and clenched her fist.

“I could probably make you tell me, you know.” He could sense the darkness in her now, tangling its cruel threads further and further into the weave of her soul. As her fist clenched tighter and tighter an invisible force pinched his injured leg, squeezing it in its most broken places, tighter and tighter… “How would you like to spend the rest of your days as a puppet on my shelf? No? How about inside a mirror? Trapped in Pandora’s box? Tell you what, I’ll let you choose!”

“Emma stop!” he gasped as white spots danced in front of his eyes. All the schemes and tricks he’d run through his mind, all his many ways to verbally manipulate her to his desired position evaporated under the onslaught of pain and fear. “This isn’t you!”

“Isn’t it though? How dare you ask me for my protection! You deserve to suffer for what you did to my family!”

My family. His eyes watered, but his breathing evened out as he remembered he still had one more card to play. “Maybe I deserve to suffer, but my child doesn’t! Please, don’t let him grow up without a father.”

“What is this?” she laughed bitterly. “Neal is dead.”

“Not Neal.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You and Belle are…?”

“Yes,” he nodded and couldn’t help, but let a small smile shine through. “Please, we want to give him his best chance.”

“His best chance?”

The light seemed to return to Emma’s eyes for a moment and her expression softened as her fist unclenched, releasing him.

“All right, Gold. Teach me.”

Chapter Text

Emma hovered high above Storybrooke. Being the new Dark One had major drawbacks, but she had to admit there were certain perks.

Looking down at the lawn of the mayor’s mansion, with its apple tree like a little green ball from her new vantage point she remembered that even smug old Regina had never managed to fly before, even back in the Enchanted Forest in her full Evil Queen glory.

A seagull soared by, making Emma remember, with a twinge, a day at the beach with Neal, how they stole one her French fries when she wasn’t looking, how Neal used to call them “shit-hawks.” And suddenly she was falling terrified. She tried to remember in her panic just how she flew— Think happy thoughts? Pixie dust? Wings? Jump up and forget to land? Alter the gravitational quotient of the Earth’s magnetic pole in the immediate vicinity around her body? She tried them all and still she was falling. She screamed for help, but she was above the forest, so high up no one could hear her.

Her last thought was of Henry as she hit the ground, arms outstretched to break her fall.

Only it wasn’t her last thought.

She should’ve been dead, and yet she opened her eyes and blinked, uncurled her body and stood up. Her clothes were pulverized, but somehow she was completely unharmed. She took a step, then another. She felt fine. She looked at the palms of her hands. Not even a bruise or a scratch.   And yet the forest floor was covered in pine needles, shaken from the trees by her impact and yet she hadn’t shed a drop of blood.

It was odd and disconcerting. A fall like that would have killed an ordinary person, savior of Storybrooke or not. To not even have a bruise— Unbidden memories of Graham came back to her, telling her how he just wanted to feel. To feel something, anything, joy, love, even pain. Was this how it felt to be without a heart? Or maybe this was what it was like when one’s heart was turning to that black shriveled thing Gold’s had been when they had taken the dark curse from him. Did he feel like this all those years? So cold inside?

So old?

But she wasn’t old. Gold was over 300, but she was young, not even thirty, and yet she was so tired, exhausted from all the horrible things she’d seen. Not just seen but perpetrated… slugs crushed under her own peculiar looking boots, screaming in tiny human voices only she could hear with her preternaturally acute hearing. No wait, that wasn’t her! It couldn’t be! Then why did…

Other memories came unbidden, different times, different places, different clothes, different faces… Hosts. That’s what it was. She was remembering different hosts. That’s all she was now. A host. Just another vessel to hold this thing she was now inexcoribly bound to like all the rest. She plucked at the shreds of her black shirt as if plucking alone could physically remove the taint, contain it, but the memories spilled over, drowning her. She was just one, and they, the collection of other hosts were so many, she could feel herself dissolving in their many memories like a tissue in water. She had to stop it. For Henry’s sake if not her own.

She’d been avoiding Gold, postponing the lessons for too long. She dusted off her pants and peered into the forest. Now where was he? And was it too late for her now to learn?

XX 30 Minutes Later XX

Maybe not for her, but…She stared down miserably at the broken cane and unevenly worn Italian leather shoes sticking out from beneath Storybrooke’s one and only Cadillac. It couldn’t be anyone else. She was reminded absurdly of Dorothy’s house falling on the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. Only now she knew it wasn’t like that, the real Oz.

“Feck!” swore a Scottish accented voice and something rattled from underneath the Cadillac and the shoes twitched in front of her.

Emma jumped back as a stream of curse words in a multitude of languages from a multitude of worlds came from under the car’s chasse. She didn’t know whether to laugh or sob with relief as a dirt and oil besmirched Gold wriggled out from under the car, still lying on the ground, smearing his greasy hands on his ruined suit as he went.

“Gah!” he jerked up in surprise at the sight of Emma standing there staring down at him unexpectedly, and bonked his head on the open car door.

Emma favoured him with a twist of a smile and a nod, “Gold.”

He sat up, gingerly rubbing the newly acquired bump on his head with a grimace. “Miss Swan.”

“I thought you’d been run over!”

“With my own Cadillac? Nothing so obvious, though I daresay the irony would be much appreciated by the more astute of the townsfolk,” he said baring his teeth. He flipped open a burgundy handkerchief from his suit pocket and briskly rubbed at the oil and grit on his hands. “But they couldn’t run me over outright. Our charming prince and sheriff wouldn’t stand for it. Amnesty agreement for reformed monsters and all that. Any would-be avengers would be punished. ”

“Of course.”

“Now a little untraceable sabotage, now that is a little more doable.”

“Sabotage? What did they do?”

“My best guess? Bored a hole in the fuel tank.”

“Ah.”

He shrugged.

“Can’t say I’m surprised. Last week it was slashing my tires while I was in the shop. Week before it was rigging my coffee maker to catch fire upon first use.”

“But you don’t drink coffee.”

“I didn’t say it was a particularly clever bit of sabotage.”

“You report it?”

“What’s the point? They’d never find out who did it. Who in town doesn’t have a grudge to settle with me?”

“You’ve really screwed over every single person in Storybrooke?”

“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing.”

He frowned down at his hands, which looked no cleaner than when he began and now his favourite pocket square was ruined into the bargain. It was the simple shortcuts for all these little irritations in life that made him really miss the magic he once possessed.

“Gold, have you ever fixed a car before?” she asked.

“Can’t say I have.”

“So you just thought you’d go at it with your bare hands and an instruction book?”

He shrugged eloquently.

“How long have you been out here?” Emma asked.

“Three, maybe four hours,” he said quietly.

“You could’ve walked back in that time.”

“You could’ve,” he said bitterly, eyes lingering on the broken cane, lying by the front left wheel.   She noticed now that there was a dent on the hood of the car shaped like the cane’s handle.

“They do that too?”

“Ah,” he gave a weak smile. “A bit of self-sabotage, that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You broke your own cane trying to beat up your car because you were frustrated it ran out of fuel?”  

He favoured her with a small smile. “Sometimes I have a wee bit of a temper.”

“Ya don’t say?”

He shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter, I’ll port us back to your house and then we can start lessons again.”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“We can’t just leave this all here and go back to town!”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m just going to have to come back for it all as soon as I get to Storybrooke. It’s stupid.”

“You have the money, hire a taxi. Not my problem,” she said and began to move her hand to teleport them.

“No.”

“No what?”

“We don’t need to go back to town for you to get a lesson.”

“But your spell books and all the rest of it—“

“Psssh!” he snorted. “You think I had spell books to crib from when I became the Dark One.”

“I thought—“

“Please, I was a spinner and sheep farmer, I couldn’t even read.”

“So how—?”

“I learned that magic feeds off two things: Imagination and emotion. That’s all you really need to know. The rest—it’s all just details.”

“So this lesson—what’re we going to do?”

“Repairs.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re going to fix the cane and the car using nothing but magic.”

“Uh, okay, so which do I do first?”

“The cane will be easier. Now imagine the two parts back together again, forming one solid narrow cylinder of continuous wood. Should do the trick.”

Emme imagined as hard as she could, letting a picture form of Gold’s cane as it looked when it was whole foremost in her mind.

“Good. Now comes the tricky part. To repair, fix or heal something is a positive thing. It requires different emotions, than say turning straw into gold for example.

Now as you picture the walking stick whole again think of a positive emotion one you associate with the object in question if possible, a warm recollection or something happy to make the repairing energy flow.”

“A positive emotion associated…with your walking stick?”

“Look, I didn’t say it’d be easy. Just try.”

Emma wracked her brains for some sort of positive memory involving Gold’s walking stick but all that came to mind was walking in on him beating Moe French with it. As the memory bloomed in her mind and all the negative emotion that came with it, the wood of the cane trembled on the ground next to Gold.

“Look! It’s working!” she exclaimed, but he didn’t look suitably impressed. The two halves shivered. There was a crack and both pieces split straight down the middle. The purple haze of magic faded and they were left with the stick in four pieces now instead of two.

“So I guess that’s not much of an improvement.”

He gingerly fingered one jagged splintered piece of wood that resembled something you might stake a vampire with. “What memory did you use?”

“You and Moe French.”

“Ah, touché.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Help you up?”

He took her proffered assistance with a look of distaste despite the fact that he was the one whose hands were still filthy. He hated having to rely on anybody’s help. On his feet again he leaned against the hood of the car, keeping most of his weight off his right leg. Who knows, maybe if this went right and she learned the proper repair spells it would no longer be a problem. This thought cheered him as he went on explaining to her how he proposed they fix the car by magic.

“Now just imagine the car—picture how it would look like when fixed and fully functioning, how it would drive—“

Emma tried hard to picture it, biting her lip to focus on the car image in her mind.

“Conjure up a feeling. Doesn’t have to be attached to this car. Some positive feeling or memory involving automobiles would help though.

Unbidden she recalled her little yellow bug—the first time she met Neal, frightening her as he rose from the back seat as she tried to steal the very car he was sleeping in. Buying herself her first box of tools under Neal’s direction so she could make repairs on the car without relying on a garage. Then on her own, for the first time after getting out of jail, her little yellow bug her only friend in the whole wide world, bittersweet to see the little red tool box with her name on it sitting just where she’d left under the passenger side seat.

She opened her eyes. Someone was clapping.

“Well done,” said Gold warmly. She looked around at the Cadillac. There was still the big puddle of leaked fluid around it and the dent on the hood. It didn’t look any different.  

“I don’t understand.”

Gold looked down and she followed his gaze to see her old red tool box nestled between his feet on the ground.

“Is it real?”

He nudged the box towards her with the toe of his shoe. “See for yourself.”

She bent down to pick it up. It was certainly heavy and seemed solid enough.

“Not quite what I was expecting Miss Swan,” said Gold with a Cheshire cat’s grin, “but it’s a start.”

Emma popped the top of the box to find all her old tools inside. “You assume I know how to use these,” she said to him.

“Of course,” he replied.

“You have a lot of faith in me,” she said as she popped the hood of the car to get a better look at the fuel intake system.

“I always have,” he said as he watched approvingly over her shoulder. “Always.”

Chapter Text

Emma sat in the passenger seat as Gold drove watching the speedometer zoom well past the speed limit for their particular stretch of road.

Gold’s favourite suit was covered in car grease and his cane lay in four pieces in the trunk, but at least she’d fixed the car.

“You’re going pretty fast,” said Emma suspiciously. “What’s the rush?”

“If you must know,” he said through gritted teeth as he gave the Cadillac more gas, “I have an appointment to make.”

“Important deal going down?”

“Doctor’s appointment.”

“Heart trouble again?”

“It’s not for me.”

“For—“

“Belle. Ultrasound.”

“Ah,” said Emma. “She must not be far a long. She isn’t showing.”

“Two months,” said Gold, eyes focused intensely on the road, as if he could eat up the miles through staring alone.

Whenever Emma was in a car with Gold, and there had only been one time really where she’d spent an extended period being driven by him in the Cadillac, that time when they’d gone to Boston with Henry to find Baelfire, she couldn’t help but notice he had the most peculiar driving style of anyone she’d ever met. He drove with his left foot, which wasn’t odd in itself, seeing as how his right ankle didn’t seem to bend properly, but instead of stepping on the pedal and applying pressure to increase the speed, he moved it up and and down and up and down to his own peculiar rhythm, almost like someone working a treadle on a sewing machine instead of a car. It took her an entire trip to Boston to figure out why it looked so familiar, and then she remembered the pictures from Henry’s book, Rumplestilskin at the spinning, foot on the treadle.
Not a sewing machine then, she corrected herself, a spinning wheel. It was odd to think of Gold driving a Cadillac this way for 28 years under the curse.

She didn’t need him to turn to her in all his sparkle skinned rotten teethed dark one glory to creep her out, this little bit of fairy tale land, still clinging to him as he went around completely oblivious to it, even in this most banal of surroundings, was even creepier, somehow.

He became aware of her staring. “What?” he snarled as he turned to her.

“Sorry, you’re just making me carsick.”

He snorted. “The Dark One does not get carsick. Trust me, I would know. I drove with Cruella DeVille after all. Now what are you really thinking?”

“I never got an early ultrasound,” said Emma, shocked to find herself telling him that. She clamped her hands over her mouth, but even as the Dark One she didn’t know how to unsay what she had said.

“Ah,” said Gold.

The truth was, she wanted him to know. She wanted him to feel guilty. All that she had suffered, her childhood deprivation and loneliness and despair in jail—if he hadn’t set the curse in motion, she would’ve never been separated from her parents as an infant. What kind of person could she have been if she’d grown up the way she was supposed to?

“I suppose you hate me,” said Gold softly.

“I suppose I do.” But hate wasn’t really what she felt. What she felt was tired, tired and drained and old and she wasn’t sure if it was her or the cursed spirit that resided in her, exhausted from wandering the earth for so long without rest.

“But you still helped me.”

“We had a deal.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Why? Why deals?”

“Why do you think? What does the Darkness need?”

“The Darkness—it needs—it’s chaos, an imp and playful in its own way—it needs—it needs—“ she paused for a moment and looked inside herself and questioned the spirit, politely, calmly, and it answered, strangely in kind. “It needs a space to play. You cannot frustrate it completely, or it will burst through, destroy you in its anger and frustration at being so stifled.”

A smile bloomed on Gold’s weathered face and he sighed, fully understood by another person for the first time in 300 years.

“You must give part of yourself to it,” continued Emma, “allow it out to play, otherwise, it will revolt and destroy you… You must live in balance. And the way to prevent the Darkness from taking over, is to give it parameters, a structure, a field in which to sow chaos to its delight but with a fence around it. For if you allow it to range, unrestricted it will drag you along with it and you’ll lose yourself. But in the fine point of the deal you can tell the darkness only this much and no more. This is how you managed to live with it for all those years and never completely lose yourself to it, until the very end. You kept it fed with mischief, to prevent a greater chaos.”

“There will always be shadows and evil in this world. It is necessary, the yin with the yang, the bitter with the sweet. The key is to maintain a balance, the narrow bridge between the two. I took on the curse to save my son, to keep Baelfire from having to go to the front like I did. You took the curse to save Regina. You have the other hosts inside you. Why did they take on the curse? Very few to help someone else. We are unusual, have something in common that way. ”

“I don’t have anything in common with you Gold, or your ways of doing things.”

“You didn’t know me in the beginning. Maybe I started out more like you than you’re comfortable admitting.”

“And maybe not.”

The first buildings of the town were coming into view now.

“I gotta go,” murmured Emma and to Gold’s ears she sounded like a scared heartbroken little girl. “I can’t have them see me like this.”

“Wait!” he cried and reached out to her on the passenger side, as purple fog swirled around her.

He drifted into the right lane as soon as his eyes were off the road as someone honked.

“Watch where you’re going asshole!” cried an irate man through an open car window. Mentally Gold tried to use his magic to grab his tongue, and shut him up, but of course nothing happened.

When Gold turned away from the distraction to the passenger seat, Emma Swan was gone of course, a few sparkly scales on the seat the only thing to show she’d ever been there.