Once Upon a Time in Wonderland Call Me Your Son

_**Author's Note: Been wanting to write this for a while. Jafar was, in my opinion, the most threatening, most competent, and certainly the coldest villain in the OUATverse. And yet, true to form, we were shown a glimpse of his horrible past and what shaped him for the future. As with so many other villains, it doesn't excuse what he's done. It merely shows how he is who he is. And frankly, I hate the Sultan with a passion. Yet I'm also able to see the humanity in him. So this little piece was born. I haven't written anything in quite a while, so bear with me! Please enjoy and no, you are not prohibited from feeding the writers with reviews and peanuts. :) I don't mind at aaaaaaalll. :D**_

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**Call Me Your Son**

There are days when Jafar is successful. Everything he attempts goes well, from the first ritual in the morning to the last written scroll that night. Days when he moves along the prison parapet like a desert breeze, elegant and lively and swift, burning hot with power and potential. His black robes billowing behind him with golden embroidery shimmering like sunlit sand. His snake staff tapping the ground as if beating out the rhythm of that vainly happy song his heart is singing. A devilish smile, a hint of mischief pulling at his mouth and a glow in his eyes as he laughs at the world and especially at the old man he walks towards.

And then there are days when he's failed. Long weeks of research are wasted, carefully plotted forays into ancient ruins lead to nothing but dead ends and echoing loneliness. His head aches from long hours of working himself into a frenzy, his brown eyes are tired and heavy and strained from pouring relentlessly over a wealth of magical tomes, searching for more pieces of the great puzzle that consumes his entire life. His robes sway, stiff and heavy, over the flagstones. His staff seems slower as he follows the same path to the edge of the pit. In an effort to conceal his exhaustion, his _failure_, he pours emotion into his walk. Emotion…like rage. As the cages loom closer he grows quicker, until his black mane bounces on his shoulders and the guards back away like rodents he might step on.

But it doesn't matter what kind of day he's having…his welcome is always the same. "What do you want, Jafar?"

He slams his staff into the little worn spot between the stones. The hard gold end bites into the rock as it always has before. Jafar's brow darkens and his eyes storm, vulnerable with the hatred of being vulnerable. He runs his fingers impatiently up and down the grooves of his snake-rod. "You know."

"I will never give it to you. Ever." Suspended over a gaping chasm and bathed in rusty torchlight, the old man is barely more than dust and rags now. Dust and rags and a face that burns like a thousand suns, branded into Jafar's most beautiful, impossible dreams and his most terrible, tangible nightmares. Everything he wants and everything he hates, somehow blending into one expression. Jafar doesn't know how or why…he prefers to leave those questions alone. He prefers to speak, and watch, and hurt, and hope, torturously molding his future, fighting to cram it into the exact shape he desperately desires.

"No? Not even an apology?" His cultured voice is light and airy. An innocent, whimsical tone that has lured many secrets out of unwilling hearts, secrets that are sometimes fatal. Fatal, sudden, and certain…like the venomous punctures of a snake bite.

The old man shakes his head scornfully, his wrinkled, kindly face screwing itself up into something horrible to look at. The malice is wrong. It doesn't belong in the eyes of a wizened old grandfather-figure. "For what? For drowning you instead of having my guards take your head off of those shoulders for stealing? Beheading might have worked, yes, I made a tactical error there." He smiles, actually _smiles_, the rusty sunlight reflecting in his normally peaceful eyes like a red-gold glow. He gazes at the sorcerer hungrily, almost as if he can actually see the inner torment that storms beneath Jafar's skin. An intrinsic pain that snaps and burns from Jafar's heart to his bones and begs to leap from his fingers and reduce that cruel face to ashes. "You have my apologies, Jafar."

"_Apologies, father."_

Jafar knows this game. He's played it for years now. He always has the last word, and he always walks away feeling like he's been defeated, like he's lost. Lost what? Only something he's never had. He smiles, his eyes wide and frozen with hurt and helpless, seething anger. "No apology needed, _father_."

"_No apologies needed, son."_

The old man's face falls ever so slightly, the way it always does when Jafar calls him by that name. It's the one word Jafar can throw at the Sultan that will get a reaction out of him, and it's the one greeting the Sultan will never return, no matter how much Jafar burns for it. "You're not my son, Jafar!" the old man whispers harshly, standing up a little straighter. "You are your mother's bastard, not mine! Allah created mankind out of clay and water, but you…you are dead, empty sand. You burst from your mother's womb and you dried her up, killed her. You have no true home, no other purpose than to blow forever across the world, causing misery and famine wherever you go."

"_Give him another one." _

Jafar blinks. His breath catches and his entire body moves back ever so slightly, as if pushed by the dying breaths of that wandering, famine-laden storm the Sultan speaks of. Its hot, burning desolation saps the strength from his throat and he swallows. He's hurt by those words, by the ridiculous accusation that he killed his…mother. He should have gotten over it by now. He should be stronger. He should just give up on the demon he calls father and end him permanently, save himself the embarrassment of looking any weaker. But he doesn't.

Just like the boy being slapped like a dog before his brand new father so long ago, Jafar stares at the Sultan, hardly trusting his own face, expressive as it is, not to scream or cry with frustrated, endless pain. He can barely breathe past the sudden pounding in his head, a throbbing ache that has nothing to do with stinging cheeks or burning eyes. It thuds dully in his chest, heavy and saturated with a poisonous mixture of hatred and longing.

And just like so long ago, he struggles. He struggles to understand what is going on in that significant, important, familiar face, in those cold, dark eyes with their reddish sheen. He strives to understand and see what his father could possibly be trying to tell him.

But his father doesn't tell him. He never does. No word or action he commits brings Jafar any closer to understanding. _Why?_

"_If you are to be Sultan one day, the people must fear you. You are blood of my blood, and my __**only**__ heir, Mirza."_

Jafar's brown fingers shift and tighten on the snake-staff. His weak, fallen face suddenly brightens. One side of his mouth pulls up in a bright, beautiful smirk and a spark begins to return to his chocolate eyes. He's thought of the words…the last words he must always have.

"_True power comes from fear."_

The Sultan's face becomes wary, alert. As inhuman and monstrous as he acts, Jafar knows his father is a man like anyone else. His heart is soft. Sharp, cruel words can make it bleed. And Jafar wants to stab that heart, he wants to bruise it and grind it into dust and destroy it, until the ruined remains look anything like the shattered, broken heart of the boy who entered the palace to find his father and left a mere two days later as a wet, cold corpse wrapped in an old rug. Thrown into the rubbish. Garbage. _Bastard_.

"You know, I've just been thinking," he smiles, fist on his hip, casual and powerful like a coiled snake. "It wasn't really me that killed Mirza. You see, I may be full of hate, and I may be mad, but I'm not afraid. Not afraid of anything. And Mirza…he could have fought me for you, hand to hand, fist to fist…but he realized, realized the moment we met eyes that day, that I had no fear in me, which meant that he had no power, none at all. Because he knew that true power comes from fear." He pauses, watching for the subtle flair of guilty pain in the Sultan's eyes. To his delight, he sees it. He sees it in the slouch of the shoulders, the way the old man leans his forehead against the bars and closes his eyes as if he hasn't slept in a thousand years, as if he's begging the bars to dissolve and let him fall, let it all end.

"I wonder who taught him that." Far from being satisfied, Jafar's outraged soul roars with hunger. He presses his advantage mercilessly, insanely pleased with himself. "Had he been ignorant, he might have taken me on, might have had a chance…but alas, it was not to be." He takes a few steps back, standing smugly in the center of the parapet to deliver an afterthought, a postscript to his verbal blade thrust, "Ah, well, at least you still have one son. And I…I will remember your lesson, father. I will rule through fear!"

He comes forward one last time, sticking his face so daringly close, breathing in the same air as the man who taught him what it feels like to be unable to breathe for an eternity. He pauses, his soft black curls barely brushing over the thick, rusty bars of the cage. He stares into that wrinkled face with the eyes sealed shut with pain, and he smiles. "I will rule through fear…but unlike Mirza, I will always fight for you. Because I fear nothing, nothing _at all_."

For a moment, Jafar stands before his father as the victor. He is the superior, if unwanted, son. He is the ruler of any land he walks upon. Someday, he will be Lord of Life and Death and Time. Magic and the World will bend to his will. He will be all-powerful and he will turn to his father and say, "Call me your son."

And, whether his father wishes to or not, he will.

Nonchalantly, he turns and swaggers off down the parapet, his staff tapping energetically on the flagstones as he strides away. He feels reenergized, prepared to trample over the ruins of the world and satisfy his thirst from the spring of limitless power. He will be his father's son.

But no sooner has he finished speaking, but he sees it from the corner of his eye. A barely audible lament. A resigned sigh. An ageless, undefeated disgust that will never be overcome because it is as natural as the color of the sky, as natural as life…and death.

And once he turns around to leave the dungeon, once he turns his back on the prisoner, he feels it. A cage of flesh, fingers of warm stone sealing around his neck from behind, pushing at his shoulders with the weight of the entire world, a thousand times more powerful than all the pitiful magic and all the puny hatred Jafar can ever dream of. It pushes him, pushes him into cold, flooding airlessness, wet liquid that runs up his nose and down his throat and fills his lungs until there is no other sensation but the icy, terrified agony of suffocation and the burning touch of his father's hate as his father _kills_ him. **_Murders_** him.

And Jafar is afraid. Afraid of water, afraid of turning his back, afraid that, in the end, no matter what he does, he will never have his father's True Love, never turn that heart of stone into the warm, living one he's sought for all his life. Because his father cannot be defeated, not by words or torture or tears. Because his father is the one with all the control here.

Because Jafar is afraid of his father.

And fear, as he learned so long ago, is power.

FINIS


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Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Angst, Tragedy