Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon A Time; that universe belongs to Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. Nor do I own This American Life, the radio series from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International, and hosted by Ira Glass.

Author's Note: This story was inspired by the TAL episode 486: "Valentine's Day 2013", specifically Act 2: "21 Chump Street" and a little of Act Four: "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend", which belongs to Comedian Mike Birbiglia. If you don't know about This American Life, check out podcasts at the show's official website or check your local NPR station's site for broadcast times. I rated this story T for a few bad words and acknowledging the existence of sex between adults. Nothing explicit. Anyway...

Summary: Oh my God, I wrote a story! Gasp! It's been AGES! This is a one-shot drabble about love, lies, and regrets. I hope you all enjoy!

—Tallahassee, baby—

They were two kids living on the streets, stealing to survive. Now, maybe it is hard to imagine a love story coming out of this situation, but one did. A love story where somebody went out of his way and took action at a key moment for love. But it didn't seem that way then. Not to her. And as the years had passed, he began to doubt.

He could hardly believe his luck when a very pretty girl broke into the yellow Volkswagen Bug he'd stolen just a few days before.

She sat in the driver's seat in front of him, and after he'd scared her half to death, he started talking to her. Oh, hey, my name is Neal. What's yours? She was Emma Swan. A good name. The name that he used was Neal Cassidy. Some might say it was a lie, but in his mind and legally on the paperwork filed by Social Services in the state of New Jersey, he had truly become Neal. The name he was given at birth, Baelfire, no longer held meaning for him, accept to remind of the deep pain of abandonment that he'd spent his life since the age of 14 trying to escape.

After he got them out of a traffic ticket, he sat next to her and they went for a drink. She said she was from Boston, though she'd perhaps been born in Maine where she was found as a baby. She was an orphin who'd grown up in the foster system, who'd gotten arrested and was bugging out on her probation in Massachusetts and that's what caught him even more.

Neal told her about group homes, and juvenile detention, about always feeling weird and alone, and she could relate to that. She just got really close to him. She got attached real quick. She was like, wow. Look at this.

In the beginning she would have to wake him up all the time where he passed out in the back of the Bug, be like, hey, Neal, wake up. She did wake him up. Emma woke him up, made him a better person. Before her, he would spend his days sleeping in cars or on the street, because he didn't sleep well at night. Because he was hiding from the past and unable to imagine a future that held any meaning. Then Emma walked into that alley and into his heart and with at his side he felt like he could actually be somebody and do something with his life. He could be happy.

He'd never wanted to take life seriously. What was the point when serious was fraught with disappointments? When all he'd ever gotten out of love was a bunch of crap? But with her, it was different. With her his life wasn't crap, even if the situation was, and he started to believe that maybe letting himself love could be okay. It could be good, actually. At first he was just like, oh, man. Wow. She's cute and smart and fun. But it became more than that. Best of all, he could talk to her. He'd never had anyone to talk to, and even if he couldn't tell her the whole truth, he could tell her enough. And she knew better when not ask too. When the nightmare came and he woke up screaming, calling for a father that was never going to come—not a night goes by that he doesn't see his papa releasing his grip, letting him fall through the portal alone—she was there. And unlike the social workers and other kids who'd made his life so miserable, Emma never judged, because she had the biggest heart. And because she had her own night terrors, ghosts of her past in the system that still haunted her some nights when Neal would find her holding her old blanket, that'd she'd admitted once she got teased for carrying around as a little kid, like that Peanuts character Linus. It was all she had of her parents, which was more than he had, and he envied her that token and that she could still have any kind of optimism after being abandoned like that. Maybe Emma wasn't a hopeful person, but she still walked on her toes, still believed like could get better, and it made him want to be good. To be better.

To Emma, Neal was a good-looking guy, funny and smart. The kind of guy that would be popular and well-liked, if he'd been the social type instead of being a wallflower like her. Broken inside like her.

She'd had boyfriends before, but nothing that lasted, nothing that seemed worth holding on to. But Neal seemed different. He was a good listener. He didn't play games.

She seemed very adult for 17. He had know she was young, but he hadn't known their relationship was illegal, technically, in Oregon. Even after his years in a world without magic, he'd been ignorant of a lot of things.

Emma told him a lot of her feelings. She told him how she felt for him. She was not the type of person to open up unless she had a really good relationship with that person. Back then, she'd never actually had that and it was so nice. She could open up so much. She told Neal about everything, her whole life story, about her parents who abandoned her. She told him the problems she'd had in the foster system, stuff she'd never told anyone about. The abuse. And the loneliness.

What was it about Neal that made her trust him? That made her feel like she could open up to him? That she could settle down with him forever? Maybe it was that he told her about the problems between his parents, how his mother blamed his father for their poverty until the day she died and that his dad had take "desperate measures" to make a better life for them, only the plan went all wrong, and now Neal was alone. He'd been through the system only to end up back on the streets in a life of crime that he'd never wanted, but it was all he had, because no one had given him a chance. And here he was stuck, because he felt like he didn't know how to live in this world, to be a real functioning person. Just like her. It was little stuff like that, just telling about the painful past, even if he never talked in any great details, that she believed and thought, oh, wow, okay, since you're telling me stuff like this, I can tell you about my life.

Little stuff like that makes people bond together.

In the beginning they were just hanging out. She was playing kind of hard to get. What's the next step, he'd ask himself? He honestly didn't care about sex or anything. He just wanted to know if she was going to be his. And when they got to that motel room, saw that family he'd realized how much he wanted that. That simple dream he'd never thought he could have, because the family he'd come from was such a mess.

And he like, oh, man. Okay, so I'm asking Emma to settle down with me.

She really liked this boy. Emma felt like all the signs were good that night at the train station, because she never got a dis, a non-sign. She was taking a risk on Neal Cassidy. On love. And hope. It was a crazy plan, but she couldn't help it, because she liked the boy.

Neal couldn't believe she'd agree to help him like that. That a life with him meant that much.

She was walking into that train station thinking, what the heck am I doing? She had never done this before, so she was really scared and skeptical about it too at the same point. She was, in fact, petrified. She was like, oh my god. I'm actually going to do this. And then she was back in the car and she sat next to him and gave him the watches and said maybe the stupidest thing she ever had after "I love you". She'd said "I guess we're keeping this one."

Man, it tore him apart when he learned the truth about Emma. He was like, Oh my god, why does the universe hate me? Why can't I just be happy? If he'd known who she was, he'd have steered clear, and he knew he had to do that now, only it felt like ripping out his own heart. Magic, it seemed, had made him irony's bitch. Because it always had a price, that's what his papa would say after he became that thing. And somehow he had to pay up for his father's magic. Again.

In hindsight, Emma decided that he'd taken her under his wing for a different reason than the love she'd been drawn in by. All of it built up, inevitably, to his having her steal for him. And leaving her to take the fall while he skipped town. He used reverse psychology and messed with her, said he didn't want to risk it and had to leave her and the money behind. And she bought it. She'd given him her heart and her virginity. And when the cop showed up and told her that Neal had set her up, she was just—she was shocked.

Her emotions were running wild and all she could think was, This is so mean. This is so messed up. How can he do this to me? And in that moment it dawned on her that Neal was never her boyfriend. And now he was done with her. The thing is, you're not going to turn down the person that you want to be with, even when you have to do something crazy to have the chance to be with them. And because of that, she found out the hard way that when you fall in love, you tend to overlook certain red flags. One of them was that Neal was a liar.

Emma would later find out that stealing that amount of jewelry was a felony in Phoenix punishable by seven years in state prison. Since she wasn't yet 18, she took a plea deal —11 months in minimum security in exchange for pleading guilty to the felony charge of possession of stolen property. Her lawyer told her that if she went to trial, she might get a hard-line judge, looking to make an example and try her as an adult, because of her probation violation in Massachusetts. But before the deal came through, she spent more than a week in county jail in Phoenix, going over and over in her mind what had happened, and still thinking, in spite of herself, about Neal.

She would have a good time when she was with him. She would be with him all the time. And that's why, when all this collapsed and caved in, she felt so, like—it just hurt.

She remembered people coming up to her, and she couldn't even hear them. She couldn't even tell them what had happened, because even though she was being dropped, the relationship itself was based on a lie.

In other words, she had made an irreversibly bad decision, the worst decision of her life. Not because she went to jail, but because it was love that got her there, the one thing she'd never had and always wanted. Oh, and he'd given her a baby, just to rub it in. Because she couldn't keep her son, the one good thing she'd done in her messed up life. She didn't know how to be a mother and how was she going to raise a baby in a broke-ass car anyway?

He just wanted to know that she would be okay; that someday the insanity would end and she would be free. Because he didn't think he ever would. Neal kept telling himself that he'd done the right thing. But a nagging little voice that he tried to ignore, that sounded a lot like hers, told him that he was no better than his papa. Most days he could ignore it. The nights were a different story; in a world without magic, dreamcatchers apparently didn't work for shit.

Looking back, the whole situation seemed kind of unbelievable to Neal. He knew it had to be magic, because there were no coincidences for people like them, but still... Of all the alleys, in all the towns, in all the worlds, she had walked into his. He wanted to believe that something good came of it, but all he felt was the emptiness of Emma Swan's absence.

When she got out of jail, Emma still went to Tallahassee. And it was this horrible, lonely feeling where you're walking around someplace, and there are people all around, and there's only one person you want to be with, no matter how much they've hurt you—no matter how much you hate them for hurting you. She just wanted to hear that: "Tallahassee, baby. We're almost home."

— fin—

This story is distributed by with love for Once Upon a Time and This American Life with management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who when asked where he'd like to take the radio broadcast on the road, replied, "Tallahassee, baby!" (In joke for all you TAL listeners!)