His plan was falling perfectly into place. Regina - or The Evil Queen, as the people so fittingly had dubbed her - would soon cast his spell. Even though he was destined to spend the last days of preparing in a cell (which one, he was not sure, but there was most definitely one in his future), Rumplestiltskin was ready to do a dance of victory.

Instead of doing so, however, he calmly sat down by his spinning wheel, and started spinning, as he had neglected to do for a while. Once, he had told his servant that he spun to forget. It had been a lie. For, sitting there at the spinning wheel, his mind opened up to old memories - and new ones from a distant future. He remembered the face of his beautiful boy the first time they met, and he remembered the last time they parted. From the first I will never abandon you to the last I'm sorry, he remembered it all. And he remembered the look in his wife's eyes when he joyously announced that he was going to war to prove his worth, and he remembered the turn of her lips when she yelled at being exactly like his father. And then memories of said man, blurry because of old age, danced through his mind, teasing and mocking him, showing him their similarities again and again. I'm nothing like my father. And then his servant, for she was so much more than that, joined the mocking choir. Her face pale, her lips blue and blood running from her head and scrapes on her arms. Dead, because of him.

These were all horrible pictures, yet his face was carefully blank. Rumplestiltskin had mastered the act of pretending - pretending that he was without weaknesses; pretending that he was content with whom he had become, when he was secretly disgusted with himself.

The creak of the door was a welcome sound, as were the footsteps that followed. They pulled him away from his thoughts and embraced him like a concerned mother. They kept him safe - they kept him sane.

short story: it is very satisfying to cause problems then shout at your house manager about the problems + other problems that other people caused

long story: we are finally holding a house meeting tomorrow (this is legitimately the second one for the semester, the first one was in JANUARY and the house manager was LEGITIMATELY HONESTLY SURPRISED THAT I WANTED A HOUSE MEETING DUDE HAVE YOU EVEN FUCKING TRIED TO THINK AT ALL THIS SEMESTER) to address the Many Many Mysterious Problems that have either magically cropped up over the past week and to fix the existing problems