#fun fact i drew like a hundred different fandoms for this prompt | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smartgirlsaremean · 6 years

Text

Stiltskin Family Bonding - Chapter 12

Fandom: OUAT

Relationship: Papafire (this chapter, at least)

Rating: N/R

Summary: The Stiltskin boys bond in a variety of ways. Sometimes it goes well, other times...not so much.

AO3

Chapter 12: No Rush

A Tumblr anon prompted: When he looks after the pawnshop alone, Neal has to deal with the customer who keeps saying bad things about Rumplestiltskin.

Neal hated it when his father left the shop on rent day. For one thing, working in the shop wasn’t exactly his dream job, but until someone else in town decided it was safe to hire the son of the Dark One he was stuck there, earning a completely unreasonable wage considering that he mostly polished things and updated record books. The only reason it didn’t totally suck was that he spent most of the time talking to Rumplestiltskin. They had nearly three hundred years to catch up on, and Neal had realized that he couldn’t expect to understand or forgive his father without talking to him.

The best part of the day, of course, was in the late afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Henry would come in to sweep and dust. It was good in a weird kind of way, hanging out in dim, dusty shop with his family as if they were just regular guys running a family business. Sometimes he wished that were true - that they were plain old Mr. Gold, Neal, and Henry - and eventually Gid. Gold and Sons, Pawnbrokers. Or maybe they could rename the shop entirely in case the new baby was a girl.

Spinning Wheel Antiques, maybe. Or just Gold Antiques.

Anyway, it was rent day and Neal thought it was kind of hilarious that his father still took Dove and made the rounds, as if direct deposit wasn’t a thing. Rumplestiltskin could grumble about late payments and people trying to take advantage, but Neal knew there was a part of him - and not even a very small part - that loved the drama, the theatrics of rent day. The grim, shady landlord showing up and demanding wads of cash and threatening to toss delinquents out into the street. His dealmaking days were more or less at an end, but Rumplestiltskin was a showman, and he’d always had a dark, sinister sense of humor.

The bell on the front door jingled, and Neal groaned. Few people came in the shop anymore, and Neal didn’t like dealing with those who did. He didn’t have his father’s shrewd business sense or Henry’s guile, and he really didn’t like the idea of making people pay for things that were technically theirs to begin with. He walked out from behind the curtain and saw a man he didn’t know bent over and peering through one of the glass cases.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

The man straightened, a mulish look on his face. “Yes. I’ve come for my sword.”

“Uh.” Neal glanced at an umbrella stand that was full of swords. “Could you be a little more specific?”

“That one.” The man pointed at a sword with a gold hilt, studded with rubies and emeralds. Neal pulled it out of the stand and held it up, and the man drew a deep breath. “That’s it,” he said. “I thought it was lost forever.” He reached for the sword, but Neal drew back, raising his eyebrows.

“That’ll be fifteen hundred,” he said, his grip tightening slightly when the man’s eyes flashed.

“Fifteen hundred! For my own sword!” the man exclaimed.

“For one thing, I don’t know for sure that it’s yours,” Neal said.

“You doubt my word?” the man said, drawing himself up to his full height.

“Well...yeah. I kind of have to. I mean it’s not like there are serial numbers on these things, and I doubt you have any proof of ownership.”

“A man of honor would not require any of those things.”

Ah. A prince, or a nobleman at least. Neal thought he’d noticed a certain...prickishness about the guy. “Well, what can I say? I’m just a lowly peasant. Honor was never really in my budget.” He shifted his grip on the sword, holding it not quite at en garde, and studied it carefully. “This is a pretty expensive sword to just...give up. What’d you get in exchange?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, it didn’t just show up on its own. You had to have made a deal with it. So what’d you get? Power? Riches?” He looked the other man up and down and smirked. “Good looks?”

The prince/nobleman/jerk turned red. “That is none of your business.”

“Okay, no problem. Doesn’t matter anyway, the price is the same. Fifteen hundred.”

“You’re just like your father, aren’t you?” the man sneered. “I should have known not to expect any better.”

“Any better than...what?”

“We can all see through him now,” the man said, leaning over the glass case. “Back in our world he dressed himself up in fine silks and leathers and flourished his magic and made us all fear him, but we all know who he is: a peasant, with no more claims to greatness than a common beggar. A coward who hides behind his stolen magic and his powerful friends.”

Neal clenched his jaw, willing himself to stay calm. There were an awful lot of expensive things in here, and it wouldn’t do to break them.

“He’d better pray his magic never forsakes him,” the man continued. “I’d like nothing better than to cut him back down to size.”

Of course, Rumplestiltskin could always magically repair whatever ended up broken.

“Did you seriously threaten the Dark One in front of his son?” Neal asked. “While I’m holding a sword?”

“As if you would know what to do with a fine weapon like that,” the man scoffed. “Gutter rats like you barely know which end of the sword is which.”

“I know a few things,” Neal said. He grasped the hilt of the sword and reached out, carefully placing the tip on the man’s chest, over his heart. “The pointy end goes in the other guy, right?”

The man’s eyes widened. “Are you threatening me?”

“No,” Neal said. “I’m challenging you.”

“How dare you…”

“Me?” Neal scoffed. “You’re in my father’s shop, insulting both of us, demanding something for free. And I’m the jerk in this situation?”

The man opened his mouth to reply, but froze, his eyes widening in something like terror. Neal didn’t have to look back to know that his father must have returned.

“Well, well, what have we here?” Rumplestiltskin’s voice was quiet and calm, but Neal felt goosebumps crawl over his skin. “A dissatisfied customer?”

“I - I only want what is mine,” the man said.

“That’s all anyone ever wants,” Rumplestiltskin said, approaching the counter. “Unfortunately, our definitions of what is yours appear to differ.” He placed his hand on Neal’s arm and pressed gently, and Neal let the sword fall to his side. “This sword, for example. You sold it to me, and it is therefore mine. The fact that you regret that does not negate the transaction.” Rumplestiltskin clasped his hands before him and raised one eyebrow, smirking. “Unless you have two thousand dollars to hand, I’m afraid your sword will remain in my possession.”

“He said fifteen hundred!”

“I tend to charge more when death threats are involved.”

The man wilted a bit. “I can - return tomorrow. With the money.”

“We look forward to it.” Rumplestiltskin grinned. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

The man huffed and walked away, slamming the door as he went. Neal took a deep breath and replaced the sword in the umbrella stand.

“Well, that was fun. I almost expected him to slither out of here.”

Rumplestiltskin shrugged. “There was no reason to dirty my floors.”

“You didn’t always need a reason.” Neal studied his father. “You really do...have things under control, don’t you? The curse, I mean. You’re more...you than you used to be.”

“I’ve lived with this curse for three hundred years, son,” Rumplestiltskin said wearily as he pulled out a thick ledger.

“Yeah.” Neal fidgeted with a pen. “If you could get rid of it, though...would you?”

Rumplestiltskin was quiet for a few minutes, and Neal thought he’d gone too far, but then the sorcerer sighed and shook his head. “Once upon a time I’d have said no. I’m not a brave man, and the thought of facing this world without magic frightens me, but…” He looked up at Neal, his eyes wide and glistening. “But I see the beginnings of gray in your hair. Henry and Gideon grow more each day, and Belle’s getting laugh lines around her mouth. And I…” he waved a hand up and down his own body. “I stay the same.” Rumplestiltskin leaned against the glass case and stared at the ledger without appearing to see it. “Every day I grow closer to losing all of you and...and that’s more terrifying than anything I can imagine. To be truly alone, to lose all that I hold dear. I don’t want that.”

“Well, there’s got to be some way, Papa,” Neal said. “What about True Love’s Kiss?”

“We’ve tried,” Rumplestiltskin sighed. “Over and over, we’ve tried. But the Curse - it’s grown stronger, more resilient. It weakens a little, and then it’s back, as strong as ever. Belle is at her wits’ end.”

Neal thought of the fairies, but dismissed that idea immediately. The last time he’d gone to the fairies for help, it hadn’t gone so well.

“We’ll think of something,” Neal said. “We have time, after all. There’s no rush.”

Rumplestiltskin smiled slightly and then looked away, his eyes dark and sad. “Aye. No rush.”

#stiltskin family bonding #ouat fic

17 notes · View notes

amtushinfosolutionspage · 6 years

Text

Arsene Wenger Was Too Beautiful to Last

I did not come by my crippling addiction to Arsenal honestly.

I’ve written about it before, but I only watch soccer at all because of a video game. Soccer was weird and effete when I was a kid, the domain of preppies and future Rotary Club boosters. It was a rich kid’s sport in a poor kid’s town and I had no time for it, right up until the moment I did. Well after it was feasible to establish any nascent sense of soccer aesthetics in me, I fell for the game, hard, after the 2010 World Cup.

You have to follow a team, but if you’re stuck in the soccer hinterlands of the United States and you’re starved for the sport, you have to pick one. And, no disrespect to my local minor league team, Europe was where the best was played.

The English Premier League was there and available, so I scoured the teams, looking for some club which had the obscure criteria I wanted. Didn’t want to be a frontrunner, because I’d grown up with fans who moved from the Cowboys to the Patriots with an ease which made me feel queasy. No weird money doping. Attacking, beautiful football (“beautiful soccer” doesn’t have the same ring, so I say neither out loud, for fear of sounding too affected).

Arsenal would fit the bill, but what really drew me in, what made me the drooling addict I am today with hundreds of dollars of shirts and an impulsive trip to New York to see them play live, was Arsene Wenger.

One of the first things which struck me when I was casting about for a team was just how repulsive the average football manager was. The EPL managerial fraternity was a sea of oafs, men like Sam Allardyce and ‘Arry Redknapp. Worse were men like Jose Mourinho (who wasn’t at Chelsea when I arrived, but who I quickly became familiar with), genuine sociopaths who were inexplicably egged on by an English press which dwelled on “mindgames,” as if this handful of awful coaches were actually just putting people on and not deeply fucked up.

But the Arsenal manager, now, he was different. Even his physical presence was markedly different from his peers. He seemed impossibly tall and thin, his limbs coming to sharp angles like a screwed up trapezoid made human. His French accent was gravelly and phlegmy, and he would pause before he spoke, making a famous “Look, uhhhhhhhhh” when he was searching for a word which would draw out forever in a sort of hypnotizing chant. Arsene Wenger seemed like some sort of delicate alien sent to Earth to teach people the delights of what soccer could be, a Martian philosopher-king in a puffy coat who could figure out how to turn Thierry Henry into a striker but who was flummoxed by the concept of the zipper.

I never got the Invincibles, the Double, or 1989. I claimed them later, well after I’d already done my duty as a plastic fan and picked my team. What I got, what my Arsenal was and is, was scraping for fourth on the last day of the season with a bunch of kids. It was the 8-2 and coming back with Per Mertesacker and Mikel Arteta, middling names who righted the ship when everyone said that they—we—sucked. It was laughing at Tottenham when St. Totteringham’s Day was still a thing, because it was actually way more fun when Arsenal sort of sucked, too, so the last day of the season meant huge stakes in that tradition. It was never getting into the round of 16 in the Champion’s League but always getting out of the group stage, a sort of warped callback to my childhood UNC basketball fandom, where we didn’t win a ton of titles but we by God always got to the Sweet 16.

This was Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal. Don’t spend too much, work on the philosophy of the game, and let these young men express themselves. That was the thing: we know he’s not a Pep Guardiola tactics obsessive, so the fact that these guys actually did sort it out for themselves on the pitch was and is amazing. It’s not the Invincibles, but in retrospect, those times the world sneered at the “fourth place is like a trophy” sound bites and the teams which prompted them are some of the most memorable of his tenure. Wenger’s way was the right way. It felt right in a soccer world even a relative naif like me could see had gone completely off the rails with money and graft.

Expectations changed the second Mesut Ozil, one of my favorite players, arrived. The FA Cups came, too, but everything else seemed to stand still. What had been overachieving became, objectively, underachieving once the oft-cited financial shackles were off. Because a team with players like Ozil, Alexis Sanchez, Aaron Ramsey, Laurent Koscielny, and all the rest (yes, even Olivier Giroud) should be challenging for the title. Really challenging, not creeping up to second and then collapsing in a heap when the weather is slightly too cold or the fixtures slightly too close together.

A couple of years ago, on an episode of the Arsecast, the Irish Times’ Ken Early said (paraphrasing) that sensation isn’t a feeling, but a change in feeling, that you can only feel anything in relation to some other, different one. That Arsenal fans suffer from a lack of sensation because nothing really changes. Every season seems the same as the last, even with the Cup wins.

He was right. For every good thing the post-Ozil, supposedly financially-free Wenger accomplished, there was some opposite event neutralizing the good feeling from it. We won the FA Cup; we kept losing in the Round of 32 in the Champion’s League. We got some good wins; we kept losing to the rest of the top six.

Fans of smaller clubs, mired in midtable or worse, get annoyed by what they see as Arsenal fans’ sense of entitlement. It’s not really that. It’s this endless grey Limbo of sameness, where even the third FA Cup win, over hated Chelsea, felt rote. It was, again paraphrasing Early, like placing a finger on the same spot of skin and just leaving it there. We felt nothing.

Arsene began to sound tired. What had been wit with an elfin smile started to feel like entitlement, the interviews of a man who, on some level, knew he could crack wise or really say whatever he wanted because he was never, ever leaving. He started to look hapless on the pitch, a man devoid of ideas when his greatest notions were hidden behind locker room doors and training pitch codes. The optimist’s view was that tactics had evolved but he hadn’t; the pessimist’s was that you couldn’t send players out to sort it out in real time because they were too stupid, too drilled, and too pampered to handle it.

Regardless, he was a man out of time. Most people knew that it was time to slowly close the door on the funny, smart, strange Arsene Wenger, but each person had an individual moment where there was no coming back. For me, it was at Old Trafford the season Leicester City won the title. Louis Van Gaal sent out a bunch of kids and retreads and Manchester United proceeded to kick Arsenal’s ass. I remember Alexis Sanchez’s face as he shrugged his shoulders in disbelief, the title gone in a season where everyone else in the traditional top tier of English soccer sucked. It was time.

It’s hurt to watch Wenger cut an increasingly harried figure, not least because I’ve resented how it’s caused me to question so much of what I love about him. I even came to dislike him a little, which I hated so much there were days I had to get my mind off of it after a game.

Laurent Koscielny is a perfect microcosm of Wenger’s late career. He was plucked from relative obscurity on the cheap, which is a cool example of Wenger’s ability to grab young, usually French talent. He wasn’t great to start with, but he grew to become a really, really good defender. Wenger trusted him, year after year, and he formed a tragically underrated partnership with Mertesacker in those FA Cup winning seasons.

But what would’ve happened if Wenger had gone after the finished product, instead of Koscielny? Would it have been 3rd instead of 4th? Does the League Cup loss to Birmingham happen? What if he’d been less stubborn about buying a defensive midfielder? Is Koscielny better regarded if he doesn’t spend a career in an isolated defense?

The sight of Koscielny on the ground in the Europa League semi-final, screaming for help as he clutched a ruptured Achilles tendon, brought me to tears. Not just because I was watching a man’s career end, but because it was so easily avoided. He’d been in pain for a couple of years now and he should’ve been a backup. Instead, Wenger refused to buy another starting centerback, driven by some combination of faith, stubbornness, cheapness, and infatuation.

All of it rankled, in the end. It rankled for Koscielny, for Wenger, for me. It was time. But when Wenger finally accepted it was time, somewhere around his lap of appreciation after his final home game as Arsenal manager, it felt good. It went away. The fans chanted his name and he said, simply, that he would miss us. It was the first time it truly felt like he’d let go of all of this, and that we could, too.

I’m going to miss him so desperately, more than any other sports figure in my life. More than Dean Smith, even, and oh you have no idea what a big deal that is. This funny, odd man who told people to eat their vegetables and, above all else, to be beautiful. The game has changed. Maybe it’s not for the better that that simple foundation for everything else isn’t enough anymore, but that changes nothing. Arsenal will continue, and Wenger will, too, somewhere else. But part of him will always be with the club and with me, until I give up on this maddening, thrilling, beautiful sport. Merci, Arsene, nous t’aimons.

Arsene Wenger Was Too Beautiful to Last syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com

0 notes