Title: Wildings
Disclaimer: I do not own Once Upon a Time or its characters.
Rating: T, for sexual suggestiveness and mentioned violence
Summary: Sequel to (I Carry it in My Heart). Multiple POV.
Author's Note: Spoilers for Season 2, with a little bit of timeline disturbance. Basically, you know how twisted that damn Charming tree is? I'm screwing with the alluded timeline in order to make it worse.
I wasn't going to make a sequel, since the stream-of-consciousness writing lent itself so well to an open-ended ending. Even as I finished it, I knew that if I was the one reading it I'd be clamoring for it not to end there. Only fair to have it continue. However, this will be more of a traditional style; we're not in Emma's head anymore (for the most part).
You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.
Come with me, then,
And we'll leave it far and far away —
(Only you and I, understand!)
- E.E. Cummings
It's often quiet at night.
So quiet that she can hear the water lap against the prow of the ship, the creaking of the wood, the flap of the sails, and the soft breathing from the crew. She can distinguish each sound from one another, hear the nuances and fluctuations. She has learned that the slightest change in wind can signal a coming storm, that the sound of a bird cawing in the distance meant land was near, and that hard snoring meant a sick assembly in the morning.
She has learned much from him.
He watches her as she sleeps, she knows. She can feel his eyes on her at night, sometimes stretching for hours before they close in exhaustion. She never tells him that she knows that he does this; it might make him stop. She also doesn't tell him that she'll open her own eyes and stare at him often enough as well, though she suspects he knows just as surely as she does. He is like an illusion, a fantasy, at night especially. He made all her dreams come true, as saccharine as the notion sounds. Sometimes, it seems too much, that her heart will swell with love and happiness and explode within her chest. Other times, her more pessimistic times, she'll think that it will only be a dream and she will wake in the hovel with her crippled husband sleeping beside her, stuck in the same village she had been born in with no hope of a life beyond.
Not that her life is a fairy tale, not in the slightest. She and her beau fight just as passionately as they make love. They scream each other hoarse and then bite and claw their way through couplings. Some of the crew watch her with derision and barely hidden contempt to see her command the helm, a right given only to her by their captain. Sure, some follow her orders readily and offer her respect. But a couple of them have tried to attack her with various weapons, from dagger to gun to fists, to change their own position in the crew. She has killed men to get what she wants, wielding a sword as easily as she once wielded a needle. They are not always guilty. She bears the scars of these encounters as proudly as the one she has from bringing her son into the world. Prouder, even.
She adjusts her back against the mattress. Her bed is warm, faintly musty, and lumpy against her back. It is perfect. She looks glossily around her shared quarters, noting each trinket that had come to mean so much to her peppered around the tiny cabin. The thick cracked rum bottle she had used against the first of the men when he got too aggressive, the break spider-webbing from the base to form a pattern she had memorized long ago. Dried blood looped languidly around it: her first kill. The jeweled handle of a dagger that she'd pilfered off a rival, the brilliant sapphire and ruby flickering at her with each dip of the ship in the moonlight. She could picture how it felt in her hand, the weight and coolness of the metal and sharpness of the stones against her palm and the wet sound it made when she'd tugged it loose from the body. The onyx stone, highly polished, that she had found amongst the debris of her very first raid. She remembered the feeling of the last piece of her innocence dying in the ashes of that village, just as her foot caught against the smooth, mesmerizing piece of rock. It held energy inside it; to cup it in her hands was to warm her from the inside out, as if it retained the fire that birthed it.
Finally her gaze settled on the golden chain with its hammered metallic sparrow. It was his first gift to her, just before he said the first words of love. She had laughed in his face outright when he said it and he had held her wrists until they bruised and made furious love to her until she sobbed out her own devotion to him in climax that night.
That night ….
The baubles were all placed prominently around the room and all had the attachment of feelings of one thing: adventure. Adventure has always been in her blood, calling her to it. It was as sure as the salty tinge to the air, the rocking of the ship against the storm, the pounding of her heart. She had ignored it for the longest time; the impulse had been crushed down by formalities and duty and propriety. She had married the first man that gave her a second look, gotten pregnant as quickly as possible, and fallen into a routine as dry as sand. She had finally seen her misery for what it was, though it had taken her much too long. Seeing the dirty, cocky man swaggering down the path, making his way to the village tavern changed everything. She shed all of her old self and all attached to it behind to answer that call and is now living life to its fullest.
Did she have regrets?
Only a few, she supposes, as she brushes a hand through her lover's dark tresses. He stirs but doesn't wake, using gentle fingers, nails embedded with dirt and deeply sun-tanned, to brush against hers. She exhales slowly, feeling a much-forgotten pain resurrect deep in her chest. Despite everything, she had loved her son. She had to truly harden her heart to leave him behind. She can't think of him too often or her resolve would lessen. Maybe someday she will be able to see him again, to have him join her on the quest. For maybe he had inherited this pure desire for freedom and would need the salt and air and sea just like she did. But then again, maybe her cowardly husband's spinelessness did win him over in the end and he will be content to live and die in that same village with the same people in the same routine, day in and day out.
Her lips curl into a sneer. Wouldn't that be a cruel twist of fate?
She turns to her side and her lover grumbles out something in sleep in protest of her movement. She strikes the pillow with a firm hand and fights back an angry, frustrated scream of protest against that possibility. Her son had been somewhere between his mother and father and had always teetered to one side or the other depending on the situation. But above all, her son always wanted his father proud of him and that alone might cement his fate. In his eyes, she is dead and that stupid imbecile is all he has left.
She knows that she never wishes to have more children.
Her son was a light in the life of misery she had with her husband, a deep pulsating ray that kept her heart grounded for a short time. However, he wasn't and couldn't be enough. He would have never have been enough to keep her heart from turning black as the onyx stone. She would have come to hate him, just as she did his father. It's better this way. She left him behind for this life and because of it they will both have a chance for happiness.
Sometimes, when the nights are blackest and her heart aches for change, she pictures what a child with her lover's features would be like. She could see that black hair, wilder with her genes, blue ocean eyes, angular face, his father's accent. He would grow strong under the work of the ship and have a kind of swift intelligence unknown to the people on land. His heart would remain compassionate and strong, even if his actions said otherwise. He would have a dashing smile and be able to charm any woman he wished, but he would only wish for one. He would have love, that child, and it wouldn't be easy. But it also wouldn't stop him.
However, as much as she enjoyed the vision, she couldn't fathom having a child aboard such a ship. The crew was far too unaccommodating, the sea too dangerous, their enemies too numerous. Having a child on her breast would only make her a target and have the others view her as weak. Maybe they would even leave her on a port one day and set their rudders to her body and take away that adventure and excitement and freedom forever. He might stand up for her; that was true. But for how long? Or else the crew may turn on him as well, leaving all three on some godforsaken spit of land in the middle of some blasted kingdom. Then she'd be stuck, again, in a miserable existence and come to hate the child and the lover as they would remind her of what she almost had and failed to hold on to.
How could she fathom having a child when she considers all this?
No, she could not keep this child. It would have to go.
TBC