The stars keep their silent council above his sleeping town, exhaling stale midnight, the breath of ten thousand frozen days. Ten thousand, two hundred and fifty-one, to be exact, and Gold is nothing if not an exacting man. He has no magic here, but moonlight holds power and pain holds more; the veil lifts, bares the truth he has betrayed. A river runs beneath Main Street, muddy gray and lifeless, though in the days since the savior's arrival its current quickens with each passing day. Haunts and echoes, dust and shards...The ancient bones of the world lie shattered beneath Storybrooke's bland façade, turrets and peasant hovels, castle keep and miller's wheel.

He makes his way home from a dungeon masquerading as a jail cell, a beast masquerading as a man, Moe French's blood still dark on his hands.

The price of guilt - his own? Her father's?

Yesterday, the question didn't matter. Yesterday, he knew she was gone.

Those stars, they've begun to move again, and their dance heralds the battle he's waited so long to command. Leaning against the café's low railing, he lifts his eyes to their waltz, marks the constellations, so commonplace, so foreign: the Serpent, the Wolf, the Hunter, the vain Queen on her throne. The cup lies cradled close to his chest, fragile as an infant's skull; its retrieval had cost him dear. Regina has revealed her endgame, and that has cost him more. As she'd surrendered his prize through the sheriff's steel bars, there'd been no mistaking the snake-tongued flicker in the depths of those dark eyes. Triumph, blazing too bright to mark so small a victory. In her eagerness to swallow his pride, she had surrendered knowledge far more precious.

We shall see...

Belle lived.

Belle, the only weapon in this world or the last that could make the witch so certain she could bring him to his knees. He knew now, beyond skin, beyond bone...the Queen had lied, all those years ago, had taken the woman he'd mourned so long as a pawn to draw his rage. Rage that sang now in his veins, rage he could ill afford on the brink of this world's unraveling. The Dark One bares its fangs, howls its hunger, capers wild on the edge of his soul. He'd fed it sparingly over the years, bits of necessary cruelty, the leavings of his carefully wrought curse. Enough to keep its ghost alive, enough to keep it ready. Ashley's fear of losing the baby he'd never intended to take, Emma's grief in losing Henry, the dread of anyone desperate enough to dance with a tailored devil. All carefully forged maneuvers designed to cut his dark spells' knots. He'd been so careful, until yesterday, when the Black Queen placed Moe French in his path.

Love is the most powerful magic... Hate runs a very close second.

He passes the schoolyard, pavement shimmering above fields of wheat ripe with a distant sun - he can almost feel its warmth, feel hers. Stars swirl, darkness surges, and the cane flashes once, twice, three times against his ravaged thigh; the pain is exquisite, a living, snarling thing chained by blood to serve his purpose. An image of Regina torn and butchered slowly fades into the shadows, and he gathers control, limps on.

A rush of black wings and harsh cries announce his arrival...a kindness of ravens, a murder of crows...bound in service as portents, even in this world, of the transformation to come. Home, his Dark Castle folded and crushed into brooding gothic frippery. He makes a halting ascent to his second floor bedroom, and strips off his armor of fine-spun wool, slips naked between silk sheets.

Comfort, he'd asked the Queen for comfort, knowing full well he'd spend twenty-eight years walking on broken glass.

Gathering his cunning's threads like a cloak, he wraps himself in what passes as magic in this dreary dying town. Belle lives, and he has nothing left to lose to power, to deal-making, to the Queen and all her wrath. Tomorrow, he will call in favors, take back what is his. Sleep does not come, but for the first time in decades Belle does, and he allows it. Soft hair, yielding flesh, the heat of her, like molten gold. A woman spun of joy and fire, transforming all she touched with a tender wild-rose alchemy...and he had scorned her price.

Storybrooke transmutes the essence of all those who dwell within its walls; what has she lost to his sorcery, to him?

Love has killed more than any disease... He knows Belle would abhor it, but he will kill for her.

xxxxxx

She dreams. These concrete walls mask mildewed stone, and the sunlight threading through her window's mesh is the wrong uneasy color. Outside the door lies a hospital corridor, white tile and sickly green walls, a vague memory from days ago...weeks? Months? She dreams of rusty bars and a demon guard, loyal to a heartless Queen - of a spinner's wheel keening golden dirges, her promise of forever to a lonely mage with serpent's eyes.

There'd been whispers, even when she was a child, that her feet never quite touched the ground. Maybe that is why she's here, maybe the lies the queen tells are true. She doesn't believe that in the dark, where the mist always clears. Her dreams sing, and every word is sharp and bright.

She remembers learning to drive Gavin Thorn's red Mustang (and a first time in its cramped backseat), her high school graduation, her job at the library, and the day that she tried to leave town. No one, ever, leaves this town; she knows this now as surely as she knows her own name, Gabrielle Suzanne French...Belle, daughter of Sir Maurice de Beaumont, Baron of the burning Frontlands. She remembers her father, a mediocre florist and hopeless businessman, standing mute beneath Regina's basilisk gaze as she claimed his moonstruck daughter.

She dreams of her brave choice, clutching a whipcord arm clad in dragonskin, deciding her own fate.

She remembers, knows, that she belongs to Storybrooke, but she dreams of a land where magic breathes, where she has left her heart.

xxxxxx

Twenty-seven favors called to an accounting, thirteen palms crossed with silver, one dead nurse - the glint of the gun in her hand, his knife caressing her throat like a lover - and he stands at the door of Belle's prison. Emma presses behind him, muttering something about multiple felonies and wiping blood spray from her cheek; he waves her back with a sweep of his hand, and just this once she obeys.

"Who could be worth all this, to you? Who's in there, Gold?"

"I don't know," he says, and draws the bolt, steps into the dark.

She's crouched in the far corner, just a shadow, thin and feral. He steps closer, as close as he dares, and hears the sharp intake of her breath.

"You're the man from my dreams."

Her voice is toneless, flat, not the music he remembers, but he asks the question anyway. He's already so far off his artful map that her answer cannot matter, but he must know, needs to know.

"What was my name, in your dream?"

She rises, stepping into a ribbon of weak filtered light, and the sight of her comes closer to killing him than anything has in five hundred years. Emma's fingers grip his shoulder, but she's uncharacteristically silent, a witness to their tableau. The girl - a woman now, she's somehow older, marked by his own cruel lash, his love - steps closer, her lips moving around a whisper. He hears the Dark One's mocking laughter, feels the world's cursed fabric rend and fray.

"Rumpelstiltskin. Your name was Rumpelstiltskin."

xxxxxx

"I can see him, beneath your skin, but he had a sense of humor, wicked, and I don't think you laugh. Did she steal that, too? Can you take it back?" Passing streetlights taunt him with glimpses of her face, full lips forming a line that isn't Belle's, blue eyes that hold no warmth, but her slender fingers have gripped his coat sleeve since he took her from that cell.

"Not my most useful attribute, but I will be taking it back." He knows there were drugs on Regina's orders, doesn't know what they mask and what is simply his own design, the work of his monstrous curse. The woman beside him isn't Belle, she's her jailer, and he has no magic to free her from that.

"You threw me out - will you be taking me back as well? Where are we going?"

She remembers, his name and his sin; perhaps she is not so far from his reach.

"I thought I was protecting you, I didn't know that she...I thought you were dead." She nods, blank and distant, so far away, but she slides across the vinyl seat until their bodies touch and hope plunges its knife in his heart.

"I know. She told me, so many things, because I couldn't fight back. I don't think she had anyone else, you see, and she needed to tell her secrets. Such terrible secrets. And then, I dreamed the truth - I have to sort it all out, the dreams from the other stories. Where are we going?"

Emma glances back from the front seat of her cruiser, and he knows there's only one answer, knows the sheriff will object.

"Home. I'm taking you home."

xxxxxx

Emma does object, strenuously, but Gold brushes aside her arguments with the ghost of his familiar sneer. He's different somehow, softer, and she's lost in his labyrinth of evasions and their rescued victim's resolute stare.

"I want to go with him. It's the only way I'll be safe from her."

Emma hits the brakes, pulls into the curb. "Who is 'her'?" Who put you in there?" Gold's arms slip around the woman beside him, pull her close to keep her from falling.

"Regina. The Black Queen."

She'd helped Gold bundle her into the squad car, leaving behind a barricade of flimsy yellow tape to protect the hospital's basement crime scene - a crime scene that no longer existed. When they'd finally emerged from that grim locked room, they had found no record of the woman currently cradled in Gold's arms, or how long she had been held there. No trace of the nurse's body, no blood, no knife, no gun.

Gold hadn't batted an eyelid.

She didn't know how he'd known the code to open the door marked "exit," didn't know how he'd discovered the woman imprisoned below, and hadn't a clue who she was. Emma Swan hated not knowing above all things - hunting down truth was her forte, and ever since she'd arrived in this godforsaken town truth had eluded her at every turn.

Maybe Henry was right. Maybe on some level she wanted him to be. Ashley was Cinderella, Mary Margaret was Snow White (and her mother), David was Prince Charming (her father - she's not so comfortable with that idea), the nuns were fairies, Leroy was a dwarf, Dr. Hopper was really a cricket and she was meant to save them all from Regina and an evil curse. At least tonight, she'd managed to save someone.

"Ooookay. One condition - you see Dr. Hopper in the morning. He's a good man, and you've obviously been through something traumatic. Are you sure you can trust him? I can keep you safe, find you somewhere else to stay."

"I'm sure."

There's something in the way Gold touches her, like she's made of porcelain and he can't trust his hands; something in the way she looks at him, steadfast and unafraid. This woman, whoever she is, does not seem so easily broken. Emma sighs, puts the car into gear, and heads for the pink Victorian that houses a man she can't pin down. Henry has begun to think Gold might be on their side, all evidence to the contrary.

Emma doesn't like contrary evidence, and she doesn't trust Mr. Gold, but she helps the woman up his steep front stairway - ("Belle. My name is Belle.") - and drives back to the hospital in a haze of pre-dawn gray. She's learned to trust her gut, in foster homes and alleyways and a dozen Bad Life Choices; somehow, in that mystic place beneath her eighth rib and the ninth, this feels right.

In the parking lot, she's halfway out of the car before she remembers the latest addition to Henry's book, a story she could swear hadn't been there before, and an illustration of a beautiful girl in a sky-blue flowing dress. Belle. Beauty and...the Beast. The picture only shows him in profile, a wild-haired creature dressed in tight spiked leather, gazing at Belle swept up in his arms as if she'd hung the moon. Emma had thought at the time that it looked like some mutant front-cover cross between a sci-fi novel and a lurid Harlequin romance.

Now, she thinks the love-struck Beast bears an alarming resemblance to Storybrooke's own dastardly Mr. Gold.

She slams the cruiser's door and by the time she hits the lobby she's engulfed by something like fury. The world is spiraling out of control, reality is shifting beneath her feet, and there's a smarmy doctor waiting who'll make a most convenient target.

Emma hates not knowing, and she's reached a point where answers have fangs, and the questions are all spelled backward.

"Lousy metaphor, and me without a broadsword. Or an eraser. Good morning, Dr. Whale."