Written for the nealfirexchange for lostboybae/nevernevergirl who asked for: AU where Emma and Neal meet earlier– maybe in foster care, maybe incorporating Lily and/or August. I couldn't quite get August's voice, so I didn't put him in, and I never watched far enough to meet Lily, but yay for foster care AUs?

Temporary Home
One-Shot

When the police found him, he hadn't given them a name. He couldn't. He'd still been dazed, lost in a fog as his mind tried to grasp the fact that he'd escaped. Somehow, he'd escaped Neverland. He was free. No more Lost Boys. No more Pan.

Mournfully, he realized that he'd left Tink behind. He hadn't meant to. He'd wanted to bring her with him.

"He said he doesn't have a name."

"Every kid has a name, Joe," the man's partner scoffed. "He's probably a runaway."

He was, he supposed. He'd run away just as much as he'd been abandoned. He didn't think there was a true term for that, not in his world or in this one. He kept his mouth shut, arms wrapped tight around himself as he sat in a building. The strange lights burned his eyes and the chaos around him made his head ache. He didn't like it, didn't like this place one bit.

Joe knelt down next to him, warm eyes meeting his, and he wondered if the older man was a father. He looked like one. "Hey," he said, "can you give me a name? I need to know what to call you."

He could have said Baelfire. He could have said Bae. He didn't. Something in him knew his name wasn't normal here, that they'd find it strange and not believe him. The truth would sound like a lie, but a lie would sound like the truth. The idea didn't sit well in his stomach, but as he chewed at his bottom lip, he wondered if it would be better. A new name. A new life. He'd spent so long being one person and watched as that life broke. The only good memories attached to Baelfire were ones of a father that didn't exist anymore and of Tink and Wendy.

He glanced to the side, thinking, and his eyes caught sight of a box high up on the wall, pictures moving across the front. He didn't know what it was, but the few lessons his papa had given him meant he could read most of the words that seemed to scroll across the bottom. "Neal," he read and said it like an answer.

"Neal? Your name is Neal?"

The name felt strange in relation to him, unfamiliar and wrong, but he nodded anyway and the man left him alone. Neal. He could be a Neal, right? He'd survived centuries in Neverland. He could adjust to a name.

Adjusting to a name, apparently, meant adjusting to two. They placed him in something they called a group home but that had the air of an orphanage. The woman leading it—Tessa, he remembered—looked at him with warm eyes, the way he'd expect a grandmother to look at him if he'd ever had one. "You don't have a last name, dear?"

He shook his head slowly. "No, ma'am."

She touched his cheek, her hand warm against his skin, and smiled. "You can use mine," she told him. "Everyone needs a last name."

He didn't stay with her long, but Neal Cassidy stuck.

He learned about the world he was in slowly. The technology confused him and the cars scared him, but he learned the rhythm of the streets and the paths. He buried himself in library books, hiding away in dark corners and on comfy chairs until the woman at the front desk told him they were closing.

She always asked if he wanted to get a library card.

He never did. He never got to stay in one place long enough.

They bounced him around, moving him between foster homes that never actually felt like home. They were stopping points, leaving him waiting there until he was shuffled off to the next one. Most didn't know what to do with him, the quiet teen that didn't seem to know much, but who read books like they were the air he needed to breathe. They never knew what to do about his nightmares, haunting memories of his papa letting go and of Pan coming after him. He woke up screaming most nights, shaking so hard that he thought he'd come right out of his skin. On the worst nights, he made himself sick, throwing up into the toilet or onto the floor if he couldn't move fast enough.

"The boy needs therapy. Something's clearly wrong."

"I'm not paying for it. Let the state handle it."

No one ever did. He simply moved on to the next house and to the next set of temporary parents. Another place. Another family name written down on the inside of his notebook.

Peterson. Chang. Jett. Granger. Ashland. Keller. Landon.

He was sent to the Huberts when he was sixteen. They fought daily, screaming at each other so loud that the walls shook. He covered his head with his pillow and tried to pretend that it didn't bring up memories of the way his mother used to yell at his papa before she vanished from his life.

For as much as they fought, toxic and angry and bordering violent, they kept him. They didn't send him away when his screams woke them in the middle of the night, but they didn't bother to comfort him either. They kept him and the cluster of foster children that came in after he did, not out of love, he knew, but because of the money they were given for it. Emma was the last one to be added to the house, just as skittish and jumpy as the rest of them, but he stepped up as the one-man welcome wagon he'd become.

He smiled at her softly, his hair hanging in his eyes as he held his hand out. "I'm Neal."

"Emma," she said stiffly. "They do that a lot?"

He grimaced. "Most days. You learn to tune it out." The screaming in the other room went up a few notches and he grabbed his jacket off the hook. "They'll go for a while. I'm going to the library if you want to come?"

"I thought you said you tune it out?"

"I can," he said. "Real quiet is better."

She watched him, considering. "I don't know you. You could be a crazy person."

"Maybe, but I'm saner than them."

"That doesn't sound comforting."

He shrugged.

His escape became their escape. Emma never read, her nose wrinkling at the idea of cracking open the dusty classics he always gravitated towards, but she brought the iPod he was pretty sure she'd stolen and listened to that while he read. She listened to music until she fell asleep and turned him into a pillow, her arm wrapped around his like she was ordering him to stay still. It became a habit that was strangely comforting.

"What happened to your parents?" Emma asked one day as rain splashed against the window.

"My mom died. My dad…" He bit his lip, eyes turned down towards the closed copy of Tom Sawyer in his lap. "Things went bad and I left."

"He doesn't know you're in foster care?"

He shook his head, but he didn't elaborate and she didn't ask him to. Even if she had, he didn't know what he could say without inviting questions about fake names and where he'd really come from. "What about yours?"

The curious look in her eyes flickered and disappeared. "I got abandoned on the side of a highway."

"I'm sorry."

She nodded and he let the subject drop. They had their pasts, harsh and scarring, and he understood that as much as she did. He wondered sometimes if that was why he connected with her more than to the other kids in the house. The rest of them, they'd had hard lives, but something in Emma clicked with him the same way he seemed to click with her. They understood each other on a basic level he couldn't define. Two pieces of the same puzzle.

She rested her head on his shoulder, fingers skimming over the raised lettering on the book in his lap. "I don't know how you can get through that crap. It's ancient."

His lips quirked up. "Call me old fashioned."

Emma never asked about his nightmares. He woke up with her beside him some nights, her hand clasped in his and so much understanding on her face that it broke his heart a little. She didn't know what he'd seen or what he'd lived through—lived for too long, really—but she understood the pain and the demons lurking in his head.

"It's alright," she told him, her voice at a whisper. She squeezed his hand, tight, and shifted with him when he pulled at her arm. The Huberts would be mad if they caught her in there, but as she lay down beside him, he decided he didn't care. Let them be angry. Let them jump to whatever conclusions they wanted. Emma's presence next to him calmed his heart and the hand on his chest slowed his breathing. "It's alright."

He turned towards her, his face pressed into her shoulder. "Thanks…"

"Stop thanking me," she murmured fondly. "It's annoying."

"You're annoying," he muttered back.

"Shut up and go to sleep."

The first time she kissed him, it was with her lips pressed to his forehead as he drifted off again, despite the storm crashing outside. Lightning flashed, illuminating his small bedroom and in the light, she saw the furrowed brows, like whatever had scared him awake was still too clear in his mind. Childish notions told her the kiss would ward them away, but life told her they wouldn't. The nightmares would still come the way they did every night. The Huberts slept through it like they didn't care and the other kids learned to sleep with their heads under their pillows.

She was the only one that ever went to him, the only one that ever held his hand and rubbed his back on the nights that he got sick. He didn't have anyone but her.

She wondered what haunted him, what horrors he must have seen to scar him like that. He was only a year older than her, but something in his eyes made him look like he was decades ahead of her. Eons. She smoothed his hair back with a sigh and wondered how he could be so tortured at night and still manage to joke with her and give his easy smiles when the sun was up.

She was messed up, distrusting and skittish around people because she'd been hurt so many times, but Neal didn't make sense to her. He was light and tortured dark rolled into one. A contradiction, she thought, but also a balance. He confused her as much as he intrigued her.

He shifted in his sleep, his arm coming around her waist, and she touched his cheek. He made her want to let him in and she had, little by little. She thought he knew—hoped he knew—as much as she hoped he didn't. The rules said nothing could happen between foster siblings. If something started between them and they got caught, they'd get split up.

Somehow, the idea of not seeing him when she woke up in the mornings broke her heart.

She bought him a dreamcatcher when he turned seventeen. "Something to keep the nightmares away," she told him. He kissed her head like he knew feathers and woven string wouldn't ward off what kept him up at night, but he still hung it over his bed.

He read to her sometimes, unbidden and unexpected, but there was a light in his eyes when he did it. She wondered if he used to read to someone else or if someone used to read to him. She never asked, but she listened until she fell asleep with her head in his lap.

When she turned sixteen, he snuck them both out of the house and broke into Oaks Park with the key he never gave back after he'd worked there the previous summer. They took a ride on the carousel and played a round of mini golf before they left, smiling and with Emma clutching the stuffed dog he'd 'won'.

She wondered if it was possible to fall in love with someone she'd never even kissed.

He kissed her in the kitchen, his hands buried in her hair and with such an intensity that her knees felt weak. He kissed her like she was air and he'd been drowning and she didn't know someone could kiss like that. It woke something up in her that she couldn't explain on a normal day and had no chance of explaining as her brain seemed to short-circuit.

He broke away, eyes wild and looking like he hadn't expected the kiss any more than she had, and walked out. Something in her said he was running from a rejection he was expecting and something louder told her to move. She followed to his room, her lips swollen and her heart pounding, and she should have said words, but she kissed him again instead.

He pushed her up against the door and they kissed there until they fell to the bed.

She asked him out on a date a month after things between them started. Curled up together in a bed that wasn't big enough for two people and her fingers tracing shapes on his bare chest, she looked up at him. "You wanna go on a date?"

Neal's eyebrows inched up, surprised at the question. "Isn't that supposed to be my line?"

"You didn't ask, so I did," she said, shrugging. "So do you?"

He smiled. "Yeah. I'm paying, though."

"Deal."

He took her out to a movie and for crappy Chinese, but it was the best first date Emma could have asked for. She'd never been one for five stars and frills, anyway.

He didn't kiss her at the front door, but he kissed her in his bed that night as their clothes hit the floor.

The Huberts started getting suspicious around New Years, but it was closer to Valentine's Day that social workers started poking around. Emma grabbed Neal when he was supposed to be in history and she was supposed to be in English, her breath panicked until he pulled her into a closet and held her against his chest.

"They know."

"I know," he sighed, lips pressed against her hair. "We'll figure it out."

"They're going to split us up."

"They won't."

"You can't promise that." She pulled back enough to stare at him and wondered how she'd fallen so hard for him. "What are we going to do? Run?" She meant it rhetorically, but something in the way his eyes widened told her he thought she was serious. "Neal…"

"How hard could it be?"

"Plenty. Trust me. I've run enough and they always catch me somewhere."

"What other option do we have?" he asked, truthful but not unkind. He had a point. If the social workers were getting off their asses enough to come poking around, they wouldn't have much time left. They'd kept things subtle since things between them started, but maybe it hadn't been enough. Something had caught someone's attention and it was too late to do anything about it. Stay and get split up. Run and stay together.

"You really want to do this?" Just to stay with her, she wanted to ask, but she couldn't make herself form the words for fear that he'd change his mind.

"I love you," he told her like it was an answer and maybe it was. It definitely was, she realized. The conviction. The way he looked at her…

"I love you, too," she whispered before she kissed him and hoped that was the only answer they needed.

They snuck away in the middle of the night, bags packed and moving silently as the kids slept and the Huberts drank. No one looked for them. If they did, they didn't find them.

They stole a raggedy old Volvo to get out of Portland and traded it out for a beat up yellow Bug they found in a WalMart parking lot when they made it to Nevada. It became their home, even if Neal snorted and called it a beacon and why couldn't we have stolen something that doesn't look like it belongs in a Beatles song, but Emma liked it and they drove on.

Neal turned eighteen in the back seat while Emma counted stars.

When Emma turned eighteen, they were parked over a lookout point in California and he asked her to marry him with a ring that was sterling silver and a stone that wasn't real. "I'll get you a better one," he promised as she kissed him chanting yes against his lips. "I didn't have the cash for anything better, but I didn't want to ask without it and-"

"Shut up."

He did and she became Emma Cassidy in a Vegas chapel a week later.

They lived in Tallahassee for a year before they got sick of it, but it was where their son was born, so they stayed and gave him the stability they never had.

They decided to move when Henry was ten and picked a spot on the map at random. Emma's finger landed in the Maine woods, but they drove that way anyway—just to see what they came across—and didn't stop until they pulled into Storybrooke.

Henry bounded out of the car first, anxious to move his legs and they followed, eyes glancing over the quaint buildings. "What do you think?" Neal asked as he walked up behind her, arms wrapped around her middle and his palms flat against the little swell of her belly.

"I like it," she answered after a moment. "Seems quiet."

It was the farthest thing from quiet, but she found her parents and Neal found a version of his father he could learn to forgive. She gave birth with more family than she knew what to do with waiting in the hallway and Neal's hand clutched in his, screaming through the pain until their baby girl was being laid on her chest.

"I think this is home," she whispered to him later as she watched their families mill around her hospital room.

He smiled and rested his cheek against her head. "Me too."

The End