Chapter Text
((-Fairytale Land-))
As much as Amy and Rory were determined to find the TARDIS before Cora, Mulan and Mary Margaret insisted that they needed to head back to the ‘safe haven’ camp to not only check up on the refugees but also to resupply on food and weapons before heading out again. They also knew it would be an even longer journey to get to Rumplestiltskin’s old estate than it took to get to Snow’s castle.
“I don't know if I can do this,” Aurora was saying as she thought about the speech that she felt obligated to make to the refugees about the real Lancelot’s fate and how they were all deceived by a psychotic sorceress for who-knows-how-long. “I'm not a very good liar.”
“Well, it's not really a lie, Aurora,” Snow spoke up. “Lancelot did die an honorable death and Cora did escape. All true. Just... leave the particulars to us.”
“Yeah,” Rory said. “There's no reason to cause unnecessary panic amongst your people.” He remembered having to bring word to camp about all the Roman soldiers who fell in the various battles he fought each time they returned to camp to prepare for the next one and knew how difficult it was to share that news.
“I'm not so sure it's unnecessary—”
“Wait!” Mulan interrupted Aurora as she stopped abruptly in her tracks; the others immediately followed suit. “The tower. We always have sentries guarding the entrance.” She drew her sword, sensing something was very wrong, especially with how dead-quiet the camp was.
“What’s wrong?” Amy asked with concern, one hand hovering over her own sword at her hip and her other hand reaching for Rory’s arm. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know but stay close,” Mulan ordered as she led them through the gates of the camp.
The group were shocked at what they found. When they entered the camp, they were greeted with over a dozen corpses littering the place, all with bloody chests.
“Oh my god,” Emma gasped.
Amy covered her mouth in total shock, and everyone else just stared in horror.
Mulan spoke up first after a minute. “This can't be. Our land, we were protected here. Hidden. How did the ogres find us?”
“Ogres didn't do this,” Snow realized.
“What?”
“What happened to them?” Amy asked, struggling to control her twisting stomach.
“It was Cora, wasn’t it?” Rory theorized. “She did this?” Probably after we left the ‘safe haven’ to search for the wardrobe, he wondered.
“Their hearts…” Snow nodded, “they were ripped out. This was her magic... twisted and evil. We have to stop her.”
“Too late,” Mulan growled. “She killed them. She killed them all.”
“We have to stop her before she hurts anyone else,” Rory agreed with Mary Margaret.
“And before she reaches the TAR—”
“Hey!” Emma interrupted Amy, speaking up over everyone. “Guys, look!” She pointed to where she saw movement from one of the bodies.
“There's someone under there,” Aurora gasped as the group pulled the body off the man hiding underneath. “He's alive.”
“Please!” the thirty-something-year-old man begged, worried they’d rip his heart out like Cora did to everyone else.
“It's okay,” Amy said, putting her hands up to show she wasn’t going to harm him. Everyone else—except for Emma who just stared at him—did the same.
“Please help me!”
“It's okay,” Rory repeated as he knelt down in preparation to check the man for injuries. “You're safe now. We won't hurt you.”
The man sighed yet still shook with intense fear. “Thank you. Thank you…”
***
“You’ve seen him before?” Emma asked Mulan as they, Amy and Rory gathered in a small group a short distance from the survivor who sat shaking like a leaf at the table where they had Stuffed Griffin and Chimera the day before.
“Yes, I've seen him around,” Mulan confirmed. “He's a blacksmith. Came to our camp a couple of months ago. Said he lost his hand in an ogre attack.”
“Why would Cora leave a survivor?” Emma frowned at the man with suspicion. “It's messy. It doesn't make sense.”
“It might make sense if they’re working together,” Amy pointed out, and Rory nodded with her.
“What?”
“You think they are?” Mulan frowned at the redhead. “You think he’s lying?”
“Might be,” Rory shrugged. “I mean, Cora’s tricked us before.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised if she tries doing it again,” Amy muttered, “this time with help.”
The women and Rory all glanced over at the man, whom they caught staring at them from the table as if he heard their accusation, which may not have been a true accusation if it was true that he and Cora were indeed working together.
“Plus, we’ve dealt with people like that,” Rory explained. “People whom we thought we could trust suddenly turned against us because they turned out to be secretly working with the enemy…”
“Or are the enemy,” Amy added.
“Right. Or humans suddenly turn out to be aliens. That sort of thing.”
“You two sound like you deal with deception all the time in your land,” Mulan suspected.
“We do,” Amy admitted. “We pretty much live in it now.” She then lowered her voice as she turned away from the survivor. “Our son-in-law looks human but he’s actually an alien. A good one though.”
“And the TARDIS looks like a blue police box but it’s actually a bigger-on-the-inside time machine,” Rory added.
“I got it,” Mulan nodded before sighing and glancing back at the shaking man. “Well, if he might truly be working with Cora, we need to keep at least four eyes on him at all times. Just to be sure.”
“Right,” the blonde agreed, her voice deepening to a growl. “I don’t plan on being deceived again. If he does, I’ll put a bullet in his skull.”
“Wait,” Rory spoke up, raising a hand. “We shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions. We don’t know for sure that he’s actually working with Cora. We need to approach this slowly. Calmly.” Of course, that’s what the Doctor would do, he thought to himself.
“Right,” Amy agreed with her husband, also thinking of the Doctor, despite her suspicions toward the newcomer. “We should talk to him first. Find out more about who he is, at least. Maybe it’ll give us a clue.”
“If by ‘talk’ you mean ‘interrogate’, I’m all for it,” Emma huffed. “Let me do the ‘talking’. I’m still the sheriff, even if we’re in the wrong universe.”
The group went off to fetch the survivor a cup of water.
“Here you go,” Emma said as she slid the cup toward the man and sat directly across from him, making the setting look almost exactly like an interrogation setting, except they were doing it at the scene of the crime rather than a proper police station; of course, they didn’t have any other choice. The rest of the group approached him but kept their distance so they could still hear the ‘interrogation’.
“I can't thank you enough for your kindness,” the man muttered as he took the cup but avoided direct eye contact. “Fortune, it seems, has seen fit to show me favor.” Rory noted that the man’s accent sounded almost identical to his and the Doctor’s.
“An island full of corpses...” Emma said, going back into full ‘sheriff’ mode, “and you're the only one to escape. How exactly did that happen?”
“She attacked at night...” the man said, his voice shaky with fear, “slaughtered everyone in one fell swoop. When she started ripping out peoples' hearts, I hid under the bodies of those who had already been killed. Pretended to be dead myself. Must be the ruse worked.” He glanced at all the bodies around them as if imagining himself as one of them, had he not made that decision to save his own life.
“So much for fortune favoring the brave,” Emma muttered. She said it as if she thought it was cowardly of the man to hide from Cora rather than stop her from slaughtering everyone else. The Ponds shared a look with each other as if they agreed.
“It was all I could do to survive,” the man confessed.
Of course, Emma seemed to think otherwise. She leaned forward on her elbows and crossed her arms across the table. “I'm gonna let you in on a little secret,” she said, deepening her voice. “I am pretty good at knowing when someone is lying to me.” She glared at the man as though seeing the physical lie right through him.
The man glanced around at everyone, particularly the Ponds who stared at him as if they, too, could see right through his deception (Cora did warn him about how clever they were). “I am telling you the truth,” he told them.
Emma was just about to argue when Mulan spoke up.
“We should leave here,” she suggested, “in case Cora decides to come back.”
“We should start searching for your TARDIS,” Mary Margaret told the Ponds, “so we can get back to Storybrooke. I only got about five minutes with my husband, not to mention my grandson.”
“You have a grandson?” the man said, shocked. To him, Mary Margaret seemed too young to already have a grandson.
“Long story,” she shrugged.
Of course, the man didn’t know about the age-lock on all the fairytale characters during the curse, which was why she looked twenty-eight years younger than she should be, the Ponds thought.
“And your ‘TARDIS’…” the man asked, turning to the Ponds, now sounding less fearful than he sounded before, which upped the Ponds’ suspicions immediately, “what is that?”
“Nothing,” Rory said pointedly. “Just something that might help us get home.”
“And besides,” Amy scoffed, “even if we told you—not that we would—you wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
“Try me,” the man shrugged. “I know this land well. If I knew what it was and where it was last seen, I can guide you—”
He immediately stopped talking when he felt a sharp knife pressing to his throat.
“You're not gonna guide us anywhere until you tell us who you really are,” Emma growled before nodding to a nearby tree. “Tie him to that tree over there,” she ordered.
“Emma—” Rory tried to protest, but Emma was having none of it.
“Do it! Now!”
Feeling like they had no other choice, the group did what the sheriff said. Mulan found a long rope off another body and tied it around the man and the tree while Emma and Mary Margaret held him in place. Meanwhile, the Ponds stood off to the side, uncertain what to do to ease the situation themselves and wishing the Doctor was there to deescalate the situation. The man continued protesting, but no one listened to him.
“I already told you,” he was saying. “I'm just a blacksmith.”
“Sure you are,” Emma snorted before she whistled loudly, ringing the dinner bell once again, this time for their captive. “You don't want to talk to us? Maybe you'll talk to the ogres while they rip you limb from limb.” She then turned to the rest of the group and told them to, “Come on,” as she began walking away.
Of course, the man didn’t like this decision. “What? You... you can't just leave me here like this!”
“What if he's telling the truth?” Aurora wondered.
“He's not,” Emma insisted.
At last, the man dropped his façade. “Good for you!” he congratulated them, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You bested me. I can count the amount of people who've done that on one hand.”
“That supposed to be funny? Who are you?”
“Killian Jones,” the man introduced himself. “But most people have taken to call me by my more colorful moniker...”
He glanced directly at the Ponds before revealing his true identity, as if he knew they would recognize it from their world.
“Hook.”
As he suspected, the Ponds were indeed shocked. Of course! Amy thought to herself. The guy was missing his right hand and dressed like a pirate. There was literally no other fairytale character that fitted those descriptions.
“‘Hook’?” Mary Margaret frowned at the nickname like it was the most ridiculous name she’d ever heard.
“Check my satchel,” the man insisted, and she began sifting through the bag in search for a literal hook.
Of course, Emma, Rory and Amy respectively were all still completely dumbfounded.
“As in ‘Captain Hook’?”
“Of the Jolly Rodger?”
“From Peter Pan?”
He smirked. “Ah, so you've heard of me. Although, I do wish you wouldn’t bring up that wretched name.” He frowned at how Amy said Peter Pan’s name, like it was the title of a book where she came from.
Of course, Amy herself frowned at why Hook called Peter Pan ‘wretched’, like he was the true villain of the story, which, she supposed, was true in Hook’s eyes. In the original story, Peter was the one who fed the captain pirate’s hand to the crocodile (of course, as a joke in Peter’s case, but it was more than a child’s joke to Hook) and tormented him whenever he got the chance by calling him ‘Codfish’ and other silly names. Of course, in this universe, the story of Peter Pan could’ve been much different.
Eventually, Mary Margaret found Hook’s actual hook, and everyone gasped.
Of course, the shock was short-lived, as everyone heard loud roaring in the distance.
“You better hurry up,” Emma told Hook. “They're getting closer. So, unless you wanna be dinner, you better start talking.”
At this point, Hook knew he had only two options: stay quiet and be eaten by bloodthirsty ogres or tell them everything about Cora’s plan.
“Cora wanted me to gain your trust,” he sighed, “so I could learn everything there is to know about your ‘Storybrooke’ and your world. She didn't want any surprises when she finally got over there.”
“She can't get there,” Mary Margaret shook her head. “We destroyed the wardrobe.”
He smirked. “Ah, but the enchantment remains. Cora gathered the ashes. She's gonna use them to open up a portal.” He then said, glancing toward the Ponds, “Of course, you lot may have another way back. This ‘TARDIS’ you mentioned, which sounds like a better option.”
Amy scoffed at this. “As if we’d ever let you near the TARDIS. Like we told Cora, the only way you’d get access to it is over our dead bodies. Good luck trying that while the ogres pulverize you into mashed potatoes.”
As if on cue, the ogre sounds got louder.
“No! Please!” Hook begged. “I can help you get it before Cora does!”
“No!” Mulan spoke up. “We should leave him here to die to pay for all the lives that he took!”
“That was Cora, not me!”
“And yet you did nothing to save anyone or fight back! Instead, you chose to hide like a coward!”
“Let's go,” Emma told the group as they began to leave.
Of course, Hook continued pleading for his life. “Wait! Wait! You need me alive!”
“Why?” the Centurion asked, wondering why on Earth—or the Enchanted Forest in this case—they would ever trust a villain, especially since they’ve been deceived by multiple villains on multiple—if not all—adventures with the Doctor.
“Because we both want the same thing: to get back to your land.”
“You would say anything to save yourself,” Emma said exactly what Amy thought in her own head. “Why are we supposed to believe you now?”
“I arranged for transport with Cora,” Hook admitted, “but, seeing how resourceful you are—as is this ‘TARDIS’ you keep mentioning—I'll offer you the same deal. I'll help you if you promise to take me along.”
“How are you going to help us get home?” Mary Margaret said, doubting his words, as did everyone else.
“You… know where the TARDIS is?” Amy asked a little nervously. From the way the pirate was talking about the TARDIS, he sounded like he already knew things (or at least some things) about it, which was further proof that he was indeed working with Cora, as she was the only one who would’ve told him about it.
Hook frowned. “I don’t know what this ‘TARDIS’ is you seek, but perhaps I have seen it. What does it resemble?”
Amy and Rory paused and looked at each other uncertainly.
“Please!” Hook insisted. “I’m the only one who might know where it is.”
For all they knew, perhaps the pirate captain was indeed telling the truth, at least about where the TARDIS was. Rory looked at Amy who shook her head, but Rory felt he didn’t have any other choice, seeing as the TARDIS may be their only option back to their universe now.
He sighed. “It… It’s a large blue box that says ‘Police Public Call Box’ across the top.”
“Rory,” his wife protested, but he ignored her.
“And where is its last known location?” Hook asked.
“Rory, don’t.”
“We think it might still be at Rumplestiltskin’s estate,” Rory admitted. “He stole it from the Doc—uh, our friend when they met. But it might not have been transported to Storybrooke when the Curse was cast; it may have been left behind.”
“Rumplestiltskin’s estate,” Hook nodded. “I was just there, about a fortnight ago. Sorry to say I didn’t find any ‘blue boxes’ there. Even if there was one, someone else must’ve gotten to it and taken it before me.”
While on his war path after the imp himself, Hook remembered journeying to his mansion and, like a typical pirate thug, pillaging everything he could get his hands on. He scoured all over the estate and pilfered anything and everything worth of value, but there was nothing that resembled what the Ponds described, or anything blue for that matter. The only thing blue he could find was a strange cube-shaped item with circular symbols painted on each face, like an alien puzzle box (which he still had yet to figure out how to open), but that was it.
“Or perhaps it did get sent to Storybrooke like everyone else,” Amy said. “Perhaps it’s been there the whole time, and we weren’t looking in the right places.” Assuming this was indeed true, she felt a bit relieved that Cora wouldn’t be able to get her hands on the time machine unless she succeeded in getting to Storybrooke. However, it concerned her that they were still stranded in the Enchanted Forest unless they found another way back to Storybrooke.
“If the TARDIS is in Storybrooke, hopefully the Doctor finds it,” Rory said, his legitimate hope rising.
“And when he does, he’ll be able to come here and find us and bring us back home.” Amy deliberately chose to use the word ‘when’ instead of ‘if’, feeling confident that their son-in-law would come back for them, even if they had to wait another fourteen or even two thousand years.
“We must find another portal,” Mary Margaret said, her anxiety to return to her husband and grandson rising. “It might be our only way back now.”
“But how?” Rory wondered aloud.
“The ashes from your wardrobe will open a portal,” Hook explained, “but to find your land, Cora needs more. There's an enchanted compass. Cora seeks it. I'll help you obtain it before she does.”
“So Cora won't make it to Storybrooke,” Emma realized, “and we'll be one step closer to getting home.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” Mary Margaret admitted with a shrug.
Or a death sentence, Amy thought to herself.
“There's only one way to find out,” Hook shrugged at all of them.
“You tell me one thing,” Emma said as the ogres sounded much closer, just outside the camp, “and whatever you say I better believe it. Why does ‘Captain Hook’ want to go to Storybrooke?” Everyone else stepped closer, eager to know the same thing.
Of course, Amy and Rory already knew the answer, having read Henry’s book; of course, they were surprised that it was not the mischievous redheaded teenager in green who could fly using pixy dust instead of a jetpack.
“To exact revenge on the man who took my hand…” Hook said, glaring at all of them but mostly at Emma and the Ponds.
“Rumplestiltskin.”
***
((-Storybrooke-))
“Thank you very much for caring,” David Nolan said as he shook the hand of another resident who had tried giving him and the Doctor hope that they will find their families and return to their land. “See you.”
Meanwhile, the Doctor leaned over the patio railing of Granny’s Diner as he thought about Amy and Rory and his anxiousness to get back out in the universe, knowing he’d been grounded far too long; it had been almost a week since he lost them to the portal, and even longer since he lost his beloved TARDIS. He also worried about the missing piece of his biology that was stolen from Regina’s vault and worried where it was and what was being done with it. For some odd reason, he had the disturbing feeling that something bad was going to happen (of course, he always had that feeling since he expected bad things to happen 24/7 and was always expected to fix them), but he didn’t know what, but he feared it had something to do with his missing piece.
“You alright there, Doc?” David playfully nudged him, sensing the Time Lord’s nervousness and anxiousness and felt the need to cheer him up.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor replied with a smile that poorly masked his fear.
“You’re doing it again,” the prince lowered his voice.
“Doing what?”
“You know what. We talked about this. Many times.” Of course, he was referring to the Doctor’s lying and evasiveness.
The Doctor sighed, reluctantly accepting the fact that he can no longer hide from David. “I know,” he said, but that was all he chose to say in the moment.
“I know she meant a lot to you,” David spoke up gently, thinking of the Time Lord’s previous relationship with his former cellmate—and the fact that he had to turn her away in order to respect the so-called ‘timeline’ as well as his own marriage to his wife despite his romantic feelings for his cellmate—and thought that was what was bothering him. “Belle.”
Of course, that wasn’t what was really bothering the Time Lord—at least, not as much as his worries for his In-Laws and his stolen properties—but he chose to go along with it anyway. “She did,” he admitted. A large part of him still admittedly loved Belle, but he knew their love would never have worked out even if he wasn’t already married in his own universe; frankly, his life (or the life that he had left, at least, since he was on his last) was just too dangerous. “But she’s with her ‘Beast’ now—her true ‘Beast’. The timeline is fixed—or starting to. That’s what matters.” He then shook his head and straightened up, indicating that he was done talking about Belle and wanted to forget her now (or at least try to, as impossible as that was going to be). “Now, I can focus on the Ponds and not have to worry about getting murdered for the umpteenth time by my assassin-wife.”
David had to fight back a snort about the Doctor’s ‘assassin-wife’, remembering when the Doctor told him about River Song and her complicated history with The Silence. David decided to focus on the Doctor’s companions instead to prevent his head from melting from trying to understand the complicated chronology of the Doctor’s relationships with his companions. “Speaking of ‘the Ponds’, I’m sure they’re fine.”
“Oh, I know they are. They can hold their own, wherever they are, as long as they have each other. They’re strong and clever. They can survive anything… as do your wife and daughter, I’m sure.”
“Yeah. They’re the strongest people I know. So, what about your ship? Have you… found any leads on that?”
“No,” the Doctor groaned. “But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve been grounded far too long. That’s the worst possible punishment for a Time Lord.”
“Yeah, you mentioned you were grounded for over a decade once.”
David thought it was a bit absurd for the Doctor to complain about being grounded for a few days, but then he thought about the Doctor’s time in captivity in both the psychiatric ward and in Regina’s dungeon and realized that the Doctor had been grounded for well over a decade—close to thirty years or maybe more, whether he was consciously aware while in his cursed state or not. The second he realized this, David finally understood the Time Lord’s anxiousness to leave.
“Yeah. My people, they… Well, let’s just say there were many choices I made that they didn’t always agree with, so they punished me for it. Not that that ever fully stopped me.”
“But now that they’re gone, they can’t punish you anymore, right?”
“Right.”
“But you still miss them,” David stated, sensing the Time Lord’s sadness.
The Doctor nodded. “A part of me does.”
David thought back to everything he learned about his new roommate from the day he and Henry took him in after the ‘portal’ incident. He remembered learning about the Doctor’s role in the Time War but not much about his history before that. From the bits and pieces the Doctor shared about his past, David was under the impression that the Doctor hated his life on Gallifrey. The Doctor may have liked the beautiful landscapes—David remembered the Doctor mentioning that there were forests of silver trees—but he hated the politics, hence why he stole a Type 40 TARDIS and ran away, yet the Time Lords still managed to find him and bring him back to Gallifrey during times of need (especially in the Time War) even when the Doctor had no interest in returning. From the way the Doctor talked about his people, he seemed grateful to have left and felt better off without them, yet he mourned their destruction all the same.
“I’m sure it’s still out there,” David spoke up gently, referring to the TARDIS.
“I know she is,” the Doctor said immediately. “I can still sense her… but the connection gets weaker and weaker every day. It’s almost like she’s—” He stopped that thought and shook his head. “No. No, she’s not. She is still out there, and she will come back, as will the Ponds and your wife and daughter.”
“What about that thing of yours that was stolen from the vault? Have you found anything yet?” Ever since their trip to Regina’s secret vault, David had seen the Doctor sneaking out of the apartment in the middle of the night, presumably to hunt for whatever this thing was, but he always came back the next morning empty-handed, and the Doctor seemed to grow more and more anxious every time he would.
The anxiety clearly showed in his voice. “I have not, and it’s starting to worry me. I mentioned that anything Time Lord in the wrong hands can be catastrophic. That’s why I must find it, and soon.”
“I wish there was something I could do to help.”
“I know, but like I said, it’s best if I handle it alone. I’ve seen what Time Lord power can do on a human. Trust me, it’s not pretty.” He remembered Rose and Donna and how Time Lord power, specifically from the Time Vortex, nearly burnt out their minds. He couldn’t imagine the same thing—or worse, a piece of his own biology—happening to David or any other fairytale character.
David shrugged. “Well, if you’re planning to go out hunting again tonight, I wouldn’t think about it. We’re supposed to have a bad thunderstorm roll in around 9pm; it’s supposed to last through the entire night.”
“How bad?”
“Power outages. Maybe some wind and hail damage. No tornadoes though, which is good.”
“Right. Suppose I’ll have to wait ‘til morning, then.”
“It’s supposed to be nicer tomorrow. I’m planning to take Henry down to the stables to teach him how to take care of and ride a horse.”
“That sounds brilliant,” the Doctor genuinely smiled this time, remembering how enthusiastic Henry was about riding a horse and becoming a true knight. “I’m sure he’d appreciate that.”
“He will. You’re welcome to join us, if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by.”
In that moment, they were interrupted by the arrival of the ‘other doctor’, as the Doctor started calling him since their faceoff in front of the mob at Regina’s mansion.
“You!” He approached David, ignoring the Time Lord entirely (which the Time Lord himself didn’t mind one bit). “We need to talk.”
“Sure. But first…” David reluctantly turned to him before immediately punching him hard in the face.
“David!” the Time Lord gasped automatically, despite himself.
“Ow!” the other doctor exclaimed, rubbing his nose. “What the hell was that for?”
“Sleeping with my wife,” David confirmed in a ‘you know exactly ‘what the hell’ that was for’ manner.
“Kathryn?”
“Snow.”
“Look, I didn't know, alright? I was cursed.”
“Yeah, I got it,” David huffed. “What do you want, Whale?”
“So, is it true?” the other doctor asked. “People are saying that you're trying to find a way to build a portal back to your land because that's where you think Emma and Mary Margaret are, that they're alive.”
“Well, the whispers can stop. We have no secrets from this town. That's exactly what we’re doing.”
“But the land... it's... it's gone, destroyed by the curse.”
“Apparently not,” the Doctor piped up.
Whale glanced for half a nanosecond at him before turning back to David. “Well, you having any luck?”
“Not yet,” the man who Whale once claimed to not be his prince said. “We're working on it.”
“Does that mean that all the lands still exist?”
“Right,” the Doctor spoke up again, remembering reading about Whale’s true origins and identity in Henry’s book, “because you come from ‘The Land Without Color’, don’t you?”
This made Whale—Frankenstein—pause. “How… how do you know about that?” he asked, finally turning fully to the Doctor and glaring at him. “What do you know about me?”
Unlike at Regina’s mansion in front of the mob and at Town Hall, the Doctor remained calm towards him, saying softly, “I know enough to know that extreme loss and power can end up consuming you if you cling too tightly and too long to them.”
This seemed to strike a nerve in the other doctor that the older Doctor didn’t initially intend to strike; or perhaps the older Doctor had intended to strike—or at least poke gently—that specific nerve all along. “You… you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered.
“No, I do,” the Doctor said, thinking back to the Bowie Base One incident on Mars in 2059 and how the aftermath consumed him, turning him into The Time Lord Victorious. “And I know you do too,” he said as he sensed that Whale was planning to go down a similar path in order to return to his land and brother, which almost happened with the mob at Regina’s mansion. “Trust me, I’ve been down that path before. You don’t want to do the same… Do you?” He said that last bit like he sensed Whale was about to do something reckless and was seemingly warning him against it.
Dr. Whale glared back at him, looking like he wanted to answer with violence, but David stopped him.
“Okay, Whale,” the prince said, stepping once again between the two ‘doctors’, mirroring the exact same action from the ‘mob’ incident at Regina’s mansion. “I think it’s time for you to go. Please.”
“Fine,” he spat at David as he reluctantly backed down. “I’ve got my answer anyway. So the Queen lied to us. Again. That’s just what I needed to know.” He smiled like he was satisfied with this answer (why he would be satisfied after he had almost choked the life out of the Queen for lying to them before, the two men didn’t know) before glaring back at the Doctor.
“I’m sure you may have heard,” he told the Time Lord with a smirk like he knew the most dangerous secret in the universe that was, perhaps, more dangerous than the Doctor’s own true name. “There’s a big storm coming. I hope you survive through the night.” He chuckled like he highly doubted that would happen before turning his back on the men and leaving.
“What the hell did he mean by that?” David frowned at the other doctor’s back. Knowing the older Doctor, he figured of all the horrors the Time Lord had faced—giant squids in battle tanks that could exterminate entire planets, statues that could move in the literal blink of an eye, cryptids that you would forget the exact moment you looked away—thunderstorms were the least scary threats for him.
“Beats me,” the Doctor shrugged despite his Time Lord ‘Spider Senses’ tingling.
“And what did you mean,” David asked, “when you told Whale that extreme loss and power could ‘consume’ him if he ‘clung too tightly and too long’ to them?”
The Doctor shrugged again. “Well, think about it. Too much power can do all sorts of crazy things to a person. Look at Regina and Rumplestiltskin.”
“Fair enough. But Whale doesn’t have any magic.”
“But he is a scientist. That’s the most powerful magic of all in my world… and his. Not that I would call it ‘magic’.”
“‘And his’? You said he came from ‘The Land Without Color’. So he’s not from the Enchanted Forest, then.”
“No. He’s from an entirely different universe… like me.” The Doctor shuddered at that last phrase.
“So… he’s from a similar universe as yours, but a colorless version?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps he’s from an entirely different time period… and was apparently color-blind, at least before he was cursed and his cursed self was given the ability to see color.”
“Who the hell is he?”
The Doctor snorted, “Again, if you’d read Henry’s book, you’d know,” before muttering, “And perhaps rereading Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein wouldn’t hurt either.”
“Frankenstein?” David frowned. “What’s that book have to do with anything?”
The Doctor shrugged once again. “Trust me, it may have to do with way more than you think.”
***
Of course, as the whole town suspected, late that evening, the storm came down on Storybrooke like a judgment delayed. Clouds rolled in low and black over the harbor, swallowing the moon whole. Rain lashed the streets in silver sheets, gutters overflowed, and every clap of thunder seemed to strike from directly above. The power wavered from block to block. Porch lights blinked. Hospital windows flashed white, then vanished again into darkness. It was the sort of storm that made ordinary people pull blankets tighter and lock their doors. In Storybrooke, on a night like that, it felt more like the world holding its breath.
In the psychiatric ward of Storybrooke Hospital, Victor Frankenstein worked beneath that breathless pressure as though the thunder was applause meant only for him. The room had been stripped of comfort and converted into purpose: steel instruments, wheeled trays, jars, cables, a bare bulb fighting the intermittent flicker overhead. On the table lay a broad human shape entirely hidden under a white sheet, a beloved failure awaiting correction.
Beside Victor, in its sealed jar, the stolen organ shone through cloudy green fluid with a rich, hungry gold that no earthly anatomy had any right to possess. It had not stopped doing that since he had taken it from Regina’s vault. Even now, as lightning cracked against the building, it pulsed with a strength that felt almost arrogant. Victor admired it the way lesser men admired relics. He admired it the way priests admired miracles they intended to misuse.
This time, he thought, there would be no weakness in the mechanism. No disappointment. No crude imitation of life. And no collapse…
Well, except for its original owner.
Ten miles away, in David Nolan’s apartment, the Doctor sat curled into the sofa as if he had forgotten how human furniture was meant to be used.
The apartment had gone quiet hours ago. The grandfather and grandson were asleep down the hall. The only light came from the lamp on the end table and the intermittent lightning at the windows, and even the lamp was unreliable now, flickering with every growl of thunder. The Doctor did not look up once. He had Henry’s storybook spread across his knees, one hand braced in the gutter of the pages, long fingers stained faintly by dust and old paper. He was deep inside the chapter about Frankenstein, moving through it with a scholar’s intensity and a child’s appetite, bow tie slightly crooked, hair in its usual storm-tossed disarray.
His old eyes skimmed the page that told of a queen in grief asking for the dead to be restored, of a doctor who mistook obsession for mastery, of a stable boy laid out too still beneath a sheet. The irony passed within arm’s reach of him and went unnoticed. He was reading the shape of a tragedy while the storm carried that same shape into being elsewhere.
Back in the ward, Victor slid instruments into place with the confidence of a man who had already rewritten the ending in his head. The power dipped. Machines clicked off, then back on. Rain hammered the high windows. None of it mattered.
What mattered was that the man in tweed had seen too much earlier that day.
Victor could still remember those absurdly old eyes fastening on him with infuriating softness, naming the Land Without Color as casually as if he had strolled through it on holiday. He remembered, with a fresh twist of disgust, how the man had seemed to know not only where Victor came from but exactly what he meant to do tonight, as if the operation had already occurred somewhere behind those alien pupils. There had been no accusation in it, which somehow made it worse. No righteous fury. Only that unbearable, pitying certainty—as if Victor were transparent glass and the Doctor could read the cracks before they formed. A man should not see through another man so easily. It was indecent. Unnatural. Useful, perhaps, in a creature one might kneel to—but obscene in someone who still bled.
It had made Victor want to split him open then and there.
And still, beneath the revulsion, there had been that other feeling he would rather have denied: awe. At Regina’s mansion, even in a hospital gown, the man had carried himself like a thing the world ought to orbit. At the town border, when the townspeople whispered about his titles, about worlds, about impossible machines and more than one life, Victor had felt the truth of it settle coldly into his spine. The man in tweed was not merely clever. He was the sort of being old men in older centuries would have mistaken for a god.
Victor had hated him for that almost as much as he had envied him.
As he reached for the heart, he thought about the townspeople and how they had all begun going to the new guy for answers, for hope, for help, as though Victor had not been the one in the white coat, the one with the practiced hands, the one who had spent a lifetime dragging miracles out of dead flesh. The man in tweed had stolen his thunder without even trying. Or perhaps, Victor thought bitterly, by trying exactly as hard as gods always did: effortlessly.
Not that any of that would matter for much longer, since the man would be gone soon.
In David’s apartment, the Doctor turned another page.
The lamp fluttered once, twice. The room dimmed to amber, recovered, dimmed again. He kept reading, tracing one of the lines with his thumb and then, all at once, paused.
A small pain had started in his chest.
It was not dramatic at first. Just a tightness. A wrongness. A brief pressure behind the sternum, sharp enough to register and then soften, like a warning knock from inside. He shifted on the sofa cushion and kept reading, frowning now, more irritated than afraid. His body had been through prisons, poison, memory loss, deprivation, magic, and Regina Mills; one odd pang did not automatically earn his attention.
The story reclaimed him for another minute.
In the ward, Victor held the glowing organ.
Even in gloved hands it seemed to carry its own weather. Gold shimmered faintly across its surface and slipped between his fingers in thread-thin veins of light. He opened the shrouded chest cavity with reverent efficiency, not looking at the face beneath the sheet, because he did not need to. He had built this moment in his mind too many times. He had built it over years, over worlds, over the first death and the second and the long humiliation of being forced to wait.
He thought of Regina’s vault.
He thought of theft as correction.
He thought of the Doctor as subtraction.
He remembered the little curl of satisfaction he had felt when he told the alien earlier that afternoon that he hoped he survived the night, and how even then the sentence had sounded less like a wish than a prognosis. The memory made him chuckle now, a dry, private sound swallowed by thunder. He would be right very soon. When this was finished, he would never have to deal with that prying Time Lord again. No more old eyes seeing through him. No more townspeople bypassing the proper doctor for the dazzling outsider. No more muttered reverence for the madman with the box (rather the lack of a box). With the rival removed from the equation, Storybrooke would remember necessity. They would come back to Whale. They always had during the curse—when medicine was ordinary and he had been enough.
He lowered the glowing heart into the waiting cavity and felt, through gloves and instruments and all his elaborate self-control, the wrongness of how quickly it seemed to belong there.
The lights flickered again.
So did something in the air.
Across town, the Doctor’s eyes snagged on an illustration of storm-lit machinery and a body prepared for return. His chest tightened again, harder this time. He inhaled sharply. The pain was no longer abstract. It had shape now, pressure now, something reaching inward from a distance as though fingers had found a hidden seam in him and were testing how far it could be pulled. He sat still, listening, but only thunder answered. David and Henry slept on, untouched behind their closed doors. The lamp fluttered. Rain rattled the windows. The Doctor bent over the book again, stubborn with the particular stubbornness that had carried him across centuries and battlefields and prisons alike. He would not let discomfort win. Not tonight. Not over a story.
Back in the ward, the covered body arched beneath the sheet before Victor had even begun the final sequence.
He froze.
Light leaked through the cloth—not the crude flare of electrodes or the stark blue-white of mortal electricity, but something richer and stranger, spilling out in molten ribbons of gold that breathed rather than flashed. It licked along the outline of the body, slipped through the folds of the sheet, lit the undersides of Victor’s hands. It was beautiful for one instant and monstrous the next. Not his science. Not his current. Not anything from his world.
In the apartment, the Doctor’s fingers suddenly dug into the edge of the storybook. The pain flared hot and wrong beneath his sternum. He rose halfway from the sofa and then sat back down hard, breathing through clenched teeth, trying to laugh it off and finding no laugh there. A memory hit him sideways—bars, Regina’s face beyond them, the awful intimacy of violation, the sickening pressure of a gloved hand closing around something that should never have been touched. His vision blurred. The room tilted. He clutched his chest with both hands now, as if he could keep himself together by force.
The lamp beside him flickered harder now, rhythmically, almost in time with the thunder.
At the hospital, Victor should have shut the process down. He knew that. Every useful instinct in him said he had crossed into phenomena he did not understand. But that same ignorance dazzled him. The gold poured brighter, forcing itself through the weave of the white sheet, limning the outline of ribs, throat, jaw. The body arched once again against the restraints, not in convulsion but in something far more purposeful, as if a vast sleeping engine had abruptly remembered its design.
Victor’s eyes widened with naked, greedy awe.
In the apartment, the Doctor doubled forward.
The storybook dropped to the floor with a heavy thump, pages fanning open to an illustration of lightning over a laboratory tower. He did not see it. The pain was everywhere now, behind the breastbone, under the ribs, radiating through both sides of his chest in impossible contradiction. He clutched at his shirtfront, knuckles whitening, and half-rose before the room lurched sickly sideways.
Thunder crashed directly overhead.
Back in the psych ward, the glowing reached its height and then seemed to pull inward, all that golden violence collapsing into the hidden body in a single blinding breath. The machines screamed. The restraints strained. The room smelled suddenly of ozone and rain and scorched linen.
Then stillness.
A beat.
Another.
And under the sheet, the body took its first breath.
At that exact instant, ten miles away, the Doctor screamed.
The sound tore out of him raw and helpless and was immediately swallowed by the storm. No one stirred down the hall. David slept on. Henry slept on. The thunder took the cry and broke it apart above the roof while the Doctor fell from the sofa to the apartment floor, one hand still clawed over his chest. The pain detonated once more, white-hot and blinding, and then the dark rushed up to meet him. He hit the carpet hard, booklight trembling over him, and blacked out exactly as Victor had imagined he would.
Victor barely had time to smile.
Success, hot and triumphant, surged through him. Another resurrection. Another impossible victory dragged from the teeth of death. He leaned in, eyes fever-bright, ready to witness the face beneath the sheet, ready to savor the first stunned look of borrowed life.
Instead, the arm shot upward.
Not weakly. Not confusedly. It moved with a violent, terrifying certainty, bursting from beneath the sheet and clamping around Victor’s throat before he could recoil. His breath cut off in a shocked rasp. The clipboard crashed to the floor. Gloved fingers clawed at the hand crushing his windpipe.
The golden afterglow still clung to that newly living skin, tracing every tendon in molten lines.
Victor’s triumph curdled instantly into horror.
Because whatever he had brought back had not opened its eyes like a patient.
It had awakened like a beast. A monster.
***
Rain battered Regina’s windshield so hard it turned Storybrooke into a smear of black pavement and fractured gold. Wipers snapped back and forth with useless determination. Thunder rolled above town like something old and angry refusing to die.
Hopper had made her talk about Daniel.
The thought alone tightened her grip on the wheel. Archie, with his soft voice and patient eyes, had kept pressing at grief as if it were a knot to be loosened instead of a blade best left buried. She had cut the session short before he could drag the rest from her—before she had to describe a stable boy’s frightened eyes, Cora’s hand, a heart crushed by a mother who called it love. Regina had walked out before she shattered in front of him. She would rather be hated than witnessed.
Ahead, a golden blur hovered in the intersection. Through the rain it looked like a traffic light gone strange, some watery halo caught in the downpour. She drove toward it—and nearly plowed into a passing car when the true red light bled into focus. Brakes screamed. Her pulse struck hard once, twice.
Then she saw him.
A man stood in the middle of the road, soaked motionless, staring toward her as if sleepwalking through the storm. Gold fire leaked from him in violent ribbons, from skin, from throat, spilling down his shirtfront exactly like the Time Lord regeneration accounts she had read in stolen notes and books about the Doctor and his impossible blue box.
He coughed light.
And the face inside it was Daniel’s.
His name escaped her before pride could stop it.
Regina squeezed her eyes shut. Dead men did not stand in intersections. Dead men stayed in mausoleums, in magical stasis, in memory.
When she looked again, the road was empty.
Only the storm remained—yet the image of Daniel, haloed in impossible Gallifreyan gold, stayed burned behind her eyes.