Before Rumple could try and amend what he had said to Neal, the other man had given the smallest flick of his wrist - magic yanked Rumple to his knees, his mangled right leg grinding and crunching painfully as the long-suffering and locked joint was forced to bend. The older man couldn’t stop the yelp of agony that leapt from his chest and almost as soon as he was forced to his knees, he slipped to his side, clutching the quaking and agonized limb in a vain attempt to soothe it as tears of pain prickled his eyes.
He managed to scramble to a semi-comfortable position on the ground, the weight off his knee but unable to stand up for the moment, and looked up at Neal.
“P-Papa…how do I——?”
Oh, the pain in his heart at that simple implication of that stammering question went above and beyond any pain in his damnable leg—How do I control this darkness?—because the answer was just as simple…
You don’t.
You just try.
“…Bae…” Rumple fell back to the familiar name, forgetting his son’s preference for his new name, “…You need to calm down…magic runs on emotions, and the darkness of this curse only amplifies the negative emotions you have…it’s a vicious cycle…but you can keep it at bay…”
A brief flicker of light in an ocean of darkness. That was what drew Rumple back to brief moments of clarity and lucidity. What stopped him from his madness when his hate threatened to overtake him…
"…Y-You know how. When you were small…when you had nightmares and would wake up, frightened of the dark…remember how I’d get rid of it?” Rumple recounted the memory, hoping it would serve as a tether for Neal to focus on, “A candle. We’d light a candle and it’d keep the dark away…that’s what you need to do. You need to find your candle…a light and warmth in the dark…”
He prayed to whatever gods above that his words would serve their purpose, swallowing against the lump of fear that had formed in his throat - it was like creeping along a minefield, one wrong word would set off the over-fueled negative emotions the dark curse was feeding Neal and cost him dearly. Rumple’s heart sunk as he realised how it must have felt to speak to him in the Enchanted Forest - powerless, weak, terrified…he’d made others feel exactly how he’d felt before his curse gave him the power to stand up for himself and protect his family…the best intentions gone wrong…
He remembered, then—as soon as his father spoke of the darkness and his fear of it when he’d been a child, he remembered that situation and the remedy they had found against it. He hadn’t been afraid of darkness in such a long time—but this was an entirely different form of darkness. These shadows had not been created by the sheer absence of light and would no doubt be immensely difficult to drive away with a mere candle, but at least it was something to hold on to.
While his mind worked at full force to keep the darkness at bay as it crept up on him, he concluded that a different type of darkness required remedy with a different type of light. As opposed to the imaginative shadow-monsters that had lurked in his bedroom when he was a boy that were easily remedied with candlelight and a good sense of reality, these monsters were inside his mind. As was the light he was looking for.
Desperately searching his brain for anything at all to hold on to in the chaos of power that surged through him, Neal’s body trembled with effort—but at least he wasn’t harming anyone at this point. When eventually, he found a memory to latch on to, for the first time in a good long while, he looked at his father through a child’s eyes. Of course, he could have picked any random pleasant memory that involved Emma or Henry, but that would not make the strong emotions towards his father subside. What he needed was something positive to remember him by, to change his view on the man at least for the time being.
It was the simplest thing. One birthday spent together, just the two of them. Before the darkness had corrupted him, before disappointment had settled in. He now looked into eyes that were genuinely concerned for him, in stead of the black depths the power of the Dark One had replaced them with for so long. And for the first time since his childhood, he was reminded of the fact that his father did, indeed, have a soul, and a heart to boot. A heart that, despite all its wrongdoings, still loved him wholly. Yet with all those reminders, it was still incredibly difficult to keep control of his own mind, body and actions.
"Make it stop—please make it stop.”
