Dark One's Daughter *Book Three*

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After leaving with Emma, David and Mary Margaret soon came back, Emma not long after. Clearly she was still having trouble coping with Bae's death.

David relit the torch and our search continued. Everyone split off onto their own searches, trying to find anything that could help us figure out how Bae got out of here.

I tried to use the 'twin tactic'. I needed to think like him, and usually I could do that pretty well as we were twins and I knew how he used to think.

Concentrating on what Bae would have thought, I started to walk around the room, pausing when I reached a familiar jacket. It was the jacket that Bae had been wearing when he fell through the portal. It looked slightly different now, patches were covered in different fabrics and it looked like it had been restitched multiple times.

Hands shaking slightly, I picked up the jacket and smiled at it. But then I noticed something on the wall behind it. There seemed to be dozens upon dozens of lines, as though he had been counting his days here. It was the most reasonable explanation.

There was a blanket thrown across the large rock that was just below the tallies. I started to pull it off but it got caught on something.

"You need a hand, luv?" Jones offered, making me turn to look at him with a raised eyebrow.

"Is that supposed to be another one of your one-handed jokes?" I asked.

"Hmm. No, not this time. I'm being quite serious," Jones assured me, unhooking the blanket from where it had gotten caught.

I then pulled the blanket off so I could get a better look at all the tallies. There were so many of them that it made me feel so guilty that Bae had ended up here, losing hope every day.

"What is it?" David asked, clearly noticing that we'd found something.

"It appears Baelfire marked his days trapped on this island," Jones told him.

As Jones was speaking with the others, I noticed something strange.

"Hang on," I muttered, shifting around Jones to get closer to the tallies. "Look, here."

I pointed at the wall where, rather than having a set of four vertical lines with one horizontal line crossed along the middle, there was just two lines.

"What's wrong?" Mary Margaret asked, walking over to us.

"Bae stopped counting," I commented.

"Cause he got off the island," Mary Margaret smiled.

"No. He was here longer," I said, looking over to Jones for confirmation. Jones nodded to show me that what I had said was right.

"Then why would he..." David trailed off, gesturing to the unfinished tally.

"Because he lost hope," Emma finished off for me, as I hadn't been sure why.

"You got that from scribbles?" Regina asked.

"I got that because it's what I did every time I went to a new foster home. I counted days until counting seemed pointless," Emma answered.

"You think the same thing's happening to Henry," David realised.

"Pan said it would," Emma told him.

"Hey. We're gonna rescue him," David assured her.

"Yeah, I know that and you know that, but Henry doesn't know that," Emma countered. "Pan wants him to lose faith."

"So what, you wanna send him a message? Because I haven't seen a Neverland Post Office," Regina said sarcastically. "What are you suggesting?"

"We take a page from Pan and we start being clever. We need to send a simple sign, a sign that we're coming," Emma said.