Chapter Text
To love, to love, and to truly been loved.
And to maybe, once more, have love again.
He reflected and wondered as emerald eyes stared up at him, glowing with a messy array of gold framing their tainted brilliance.
It was a frightening prospect, and a dangerous possibility; if one understood the context of it. The overuse and recurrence of that single concept, of that one little word, and of his bitter and long history with it.
"Love is supposed to be the simple part," Emma told him absently, her tone distant but light. Gold grinned humorlessly and toyed with a ringlet of her hair.
No, he'd wanted to say, love was an addiction, endless relapses and repetition.
Maybe to warn her from it or from him—likely both—but underneath his cold and calculating veneer lays that lowly coward still; impassioned, and pitiful in his silly desires. So instead he uttered her name and kissed her sweet, docile lips.
Poetically tragic is what it really was, a true and venomous form of literary madness at its heart.
His damnable and villainous heart.
For love—his love—was a vile poison. A sordid affliction for all those it happened to befall. It had and always would be.
He can't let Emma have it.
But, for the time being, he'll selfishly take hers.
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There's an art to it.
How Gold does that; kisses her in deep and colourful ways.
Emma doesn't understand the perspective of it, or him, or any of this for that matter.
It's difficult to grasp. Her mind kept swirling. He does that to her.
They were blending together swiftly and much too starkly. As if compelled solely by his will and fine talents; a startling stimulus that had rendered her defenseless to its decadent influences.
Her breathe hitched, her body quivering nimbly. Dark eyes are deviously shadowed as they look upon her, his touch a contrast and playfully teasing.
There's an eccentric quality to him that she had not expected, a baleful flair that was suited and entwined with an inherent darkness that brushed and lulled her in the most peculiar ways.
Like she was being spun round and round and round. Become disjointed, and not quite herself anymore. If she was she'd perhaps feel more concerned about this effect, this power, he held so easily over her, and of his unrelenting and persistent use of it.
It was making her abstract.
But he distracted her easily and often, spoke her name softly, and swayed her mind from such needless thoughts. Emma blinked, and blinked again; her mind becoming a canvas before him.
It fascinated and disturbed her and sometimes she hated the way Gold did that: said her name—Emma, sweet Emma, darling Emma—used it like it was precious and remarkable, and only his to have.
But she doesn't want it to belong to anyone. Not again, not anymore.
Yet, this was different; feels different. It's disconcerting and draining to be so fervently pursued and adored. A curious thing it was, to feel this ambitiously wanted, and by Gold of all people in this strange little town.
She's never felt this type of passion before, not like this, like it was somehow and always meant to be.
Destined is the wrong word for it, she wanted to believe that, but his sultry and excited breathe outlined her name, once more, along her blank skin with curing and precise strokes and suddenly it's the only one that seemed to fit the motif between them.
Insistently, he drew at her heart.
Fated, manipulated—it'll all look the same in the end.
Emma closed her eyes.
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A fool for love.
He's always been one.
That was very much Gold's problem and his most apparent weakness. It made him vulnerable and rash, encouraging him to become susceptible to his own distorted and twisted fallacies.
It should, and needed to stop.
Because he could love Emma, has nearly come to love her, in a way, in a terrible and haunting sort of way.
It may be for the best that he consider letting her go and be rid of her in this manner. For he was predisposed not to suffer heartbreak lightly; murder, betrayal, and violently destructive tantrums were his common outlets to its infliction. And she doesn't know that. She'd only had a glimpse. But he did, he knew all too much.
Like how he knew, with a harsh and defined certainty, that if they continued on any further she'll inadvertently break his heart. His thrice cracked and irreversibly flawed heart. And when she does commit to shattering what's left of it he can't be sure how he'll retaliate or the extent of the thoughtless cruelties he'll rain down upon her for doing so.
And he'll go too far if hurt again, regardless of circumstances. Rejection has always brought out the worst and most vindictive shades of his character. He can't allow that to happen. Not again, not this time. He's done enough to her already.
It took effort, and a degree of willpower he sorely lacked, but he rarely used her name anymore. And when he did there was no directed force or timbre behind it. It was honest now, said simply for the sake of saying it. Enjoying its sound and wanting to savor the feel of it before it faded from him.
Without its power he suspected that she'd be gone soon enough.
But then time passed and, quite astonishingly, Emma continued to come.
Gold cannot fathom why she would but it stirred something inside of him. And so he found that he was unable to push her away, to completely deny himself of her. Obviously, he's lonelier and more careless than he had once thought.
So he rationalized it, told himself that she came to him willingly out of her own tangible desires and because he is that fundamentally selfish, and just as desperate, and so can easily make himself believe it.
He wanted to keep her, just for a little while longer. But he'd need to tread lightly, and cautiously, or all would be broken to pieces.
This little dalliance could be nothing more than an illusion. A fictitiously weaved romance that would carry on so long as it remained anything but true.
For him, it was just a gratifying and self-indulgent lie. So he slipped his fingers behind Emma's neck and urged her close.
And he was so very good at lying to himself.
Gluttonously, Gold coddled and reveled in her as zealously as a man who has spent too much of his life without goodness or faith in its prolonged existence.
"Don't let me…" he whispered, pleaded, into her hair, against her flesh, over and over, as his hands devotedly worshipped the curvatures of her raw and supple body surrounding him.
It's a hopeless prayer. "Don't let me love you."