Found My Home
Summary: People will tell you that a home is a place: with doors, walls, windows, beds, and three meals served on a dinning room table, whether by your mother or a retinue, where normal things like laundry and scraped knees and book reading happens.
Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Recipient: Ceitfianna
Summary: Snow or MM; found my home
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time belongs to ABC Diseny.
.
.
.
People will tell you that a home is a place: with doors, walls, windows, beds, and three meals served on a dinning room table, whether by your mother or a retinue, where normal things like laundry and scraped knees and book reading happens.
But Snow has known since she was was small as a cricket this isn't true, she's always found her home in other places than floors and foundations and roofs.
She found it in the way her mother would pull her into their bed, stroke her cheek, and then down the length of a curl, murmuring for her to sleep. She found it in the way her Father promised she would never be alone, never be unloved, even in his deepest grief.
She found it in her radiant awe of Regina's beauty and strength and candor. She found it in the first time Red said "Mary" and smiled, soft so as not to startle her, even knowing it was an outright lie, and then dragged her into her house, her bedroom, and her forever.
She found it the first time James picked her up and twirled her around in his bedroom, crushing her to his chest in the cage of his arms as though even this close she might turn into smoke and vanish, making his love for her more than words on the parchment in her pocket or lies his father had said must end.
She found it when Grumpy slipped his hand into hers, without trying to dry her tears, and said, for this night, she wasn't alone. She found it, even in grief, in the first glimpse of her daughters hazel eyes, when she knew she'd give up her entire world, her entire right to her own life, James, Red, the whole world, to save this one.
She found it when she handed Henry a book of fairy tales, wishes him hope and dreams to fill the silence that filled the bubble all around him.
She found it the moment her mouth touched David's, when every single thing that should have been wrong, obliterated an entire life with the only moment that had ever been right.
She found it, not when Emma knocked on her door, but when her hand clutched Emma's after her speech about having to choose to stay, having to have faith, about being family.
She found it, inside her chest, in the hollow cavern that ached longer than she knew how to recognize it, every time she learned to say I forgive you, and I love you, but I won't stand for this, to Regina, to David, to Emma.