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━━━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━━━
KAELYN FIRST MET Rumpelstiltskin when she was thirteen.
She had been living with Malcolm and the spinsters for around a year, the happiest and lightest she'd felt in years, even if it was spinning thread all day just to then flit around town in the setting sun with Malcolm, when they were joined by a smaller boy. His name was Rumpelstiltskin, a hideous name apparently given to him by his father out of spite, which fit the bill as the man in question abandoned his son with the spinsters on a random afternoon at their doorstep.
They were, of course, too nice to send him away and had taken him in as their third lost child to raise without a second thought, Kaelyn and Malcolm watching apprehensively through a window as the boy cried for his father who wasn't coming back while the spinsters had ushered him inside. Within days, the boy had joined them at the wheels, and turned out to have a natural gift for spinning. Kaelyn was a bit annoyed by the new talent, but was nowhere near as bitter as Malcolm, who had insisted on the pair excluding him out of pettiness.
Kaelyn felt a little bad, but wasn't about to fight Malcolm on it as she did love their one-on-one ventures into the town after a day of spinning. They had developed a bad habit of stealing, something it seemed neither could quite grow out of, but mainly because the spinsters didn't have as much as they probably needed to support three children. Thieving then reselling was a common tactic, but food was also common in desperate times. During her first winter with the spinsters, Kaelyn had eaten less than she had in her entire life, no matter how much better her life was with them.
In the same year, Kaelyn had never once slipped up and revealed her abilities to Malcolm, past experiences being too harsh for her to trust anyone else again with that information. She'd, luckily, come a long way since her time with the Carroways and getting sick over just holding her abilities back. They were far more refined from her time spent with Ajax and his group, however sick that made her feel. Both the memory of the man and what she'd ultimately done to him had haunted her for months afterwards, and she'd sometimes wake choking on imaginary blood or feeling his hands on her.
Either way, the thirteen-year-old brunette was far better off than she had been in years, and every time she looked at Malcolm, she was reminded of how lucky she was to have met him and how much she owed him. Even if he denied it and didn't think it was that deep, Kaelyn held him nearer and dearer to her heart than she probably cared to admit. After all, he was technically her first real friend.
Every time the pair left together after a day of work, Rumple would watch them with sad eyes, Kaelyn occasionally meeting them apologetically, before they were off.
"We need to take him with us," Kaelyn would often say, because she knew she was right.
"We don't need to," Malcolm would reply, indignantly, as always.
