Title: "Empire State" (Spoilers for "Manhattan" and "The Queen is Dead")
Fandom: Once Upon a Time
Characters: August W Booth, Neal Cassidy, Emma Swan
Rating: T (some bad language)
Spoilers: general series spoilers up through 2x15 "The Queen is Dead"
Setting: Takes place post 2x09 "Queen of Hearts", before 2x10 "The Cricket Game"
Summary: August makes good on a promise.
August was surprised to find he had not moved on from the small apartment in New York City. When there was a significant change in a certain blonde's life, August sought out Neal - in part to make sure the man would keep up his end of the deal, in part to assuage his own guilt. And each time, it had been increasingly difficult to find the one-time thief. Staying in New York did not follow Neal's modusoperandi in their decade-long interactions concerning Emma. August would find him, they would chat - or not - for a time, and Neal would move to another place.
When August had found him a month or so after Emma was released from minimum security, Neal was in Bangor, Maine, flowing with the tide of misplaced travellers after the events of September 11. Emma was in Tallahassee; Neal had closed his eyes and dropped his head on his folded arms.
Two years later, Neal was in Boston when Emma had made her way up to Chicago to work, off the books, for a private investigator. Over beers in some slop of a bar with Dropkick Murphys blaring over the speakers, Neal had said Emma always had a penchant for finding things - or people - when she set her mind to it.
In 2005, it was a public market outside of Pittsburg to say he'd found Emma working as a bail bondsman in Philadelphia. From the expression on his face, August wondered how clean Neal's record had been at the time.
The most animated - and agitated - he had ever seen the man had been in Atlanta, when Neal learned Emma had a brief hospital stay after a run in - literally - with a car while chasing down one jumper in Denver. August absently rubbed his jaw, fingers ghosting over the invisible mend in the bone.
"You were supposed to watch out for her! This is better?! What the hell happened?!"
Within 2 weeks of waking to indescribable pain in his lower extremities, he had found Neal in this very bar, nursing a beer and aimlessly staring at a soccer game on the television.
"It's started," he had told Neal.
Neal had nodded, finished off his beer in a single go, paid his miniscule tab and left.
The next night followed in much the same manner, and the one after that, and the one after that.
On the fifth night, they had talked past closing about curses, daggers, monsters and fathers, orphans and broken dreams, finishing a bottle of 60-year-old MacCoutcheon whiskey.
Something must have changed to keep Neal in one place.
His phone danced on the bar counter, jumping against the sweating tumbler of club soda and lime juice. August checked the wall clock, Neal would not show for another 15 minutes. His fingers toyed with the phone, twirling it righty-tighty, then left-loosey as he contemplated flipping it over to read the latest missive from the very pissed off Sheriff of Storybrooke.
Tapping the back of the phone, once, twice, he made his decision and flipped it over to scroll through the myriad of messages she had sent him. Seventy-eight hours, eleven minutes ago, Emma and Mary Margaret had returned from the Enchanted Forest. He had stayed long enough to convince himself she was alright, that she was fine. The first text had come five hours later, while he was on the I-95 riding south.
It had been late in the evening, he could buy some time ignoring his phone. The real flurry of messages came the following morning, each next text more testy than the one before.
Where are you?
Seriously... are you in town?
Ruby & Marco say you haven't been around for weeks. Where the hell are you?
Granny's holding your typewriter hostage until you pay your bill
Where are you hiding? Henry wants to know
At least tell me if you're a real boy again
That last one sounded better in my head
Seriously, where are you?
Pick up your damn phone!
Pick up pick up pick up
Answer the phone, dammit!
She had called once more, but the phone had been silent since. The texts had stopped for a time, too, but it seemed she was back at it now. Emma was the only one with this number. While far from a luddite, August never felt the need to constantly keep tabs with people via telephone, text messages or email. He had bought burn phones for emergencies as he rarely settled in one place long enough to establish permanent residence.
He'd held on to this phone, though...
Just tell me you are alive.
Teeth worrying the thick stubble of hair under his lower lip, he tapped the message with his index finger to reply. It had been a long time since he'd foregone leather gloves when out in public.
Alive. Out of town.
It didn't take long for a reply to come.
Thank god. Where are you?
In for a penny, in for a pound. He wondered how much he should tell her. The last time they had shared space was just before the wraith arrived. The curse had been broken, but the look of disappointment on her freshly showered face still haunted him.
It had taken weeks for flesh to replace wood.
Waiting on someone.
Are you okay?
Fine.
Everyone's looking for you
August very much doubted that. He'd left a note for his father, tucked away in the hat he had carried with him like a talisman for nearly 30 years.
I'm glad you're back safe. Just in time for winter. Get a real coat this year.
Where are you now?
He had to smile at her persistence. But he also had a lifetime of experience at getting lost, feeling lost. He imagined she did, too.
I'll stop by soon.
That's not an answer
I will play the 'don't abandon me again' card. Where the hell are you?
I have somethings to take care of.
You just don't want to face MM's wrath. David told her about the wardrobe
August?
Come on, don't leave me here by myself
And don't feed me some crap about them being my parents and I'm not alone
Wincing, August flipped the phone over. He had ears in Storybrooke, knew of the fallout when James... David had found out that Pinocchio had taken the second spot in the wardrobe. The former prince was understandably pissed. August had never felt so proud of his father for standing up to the prince, and so much a coward for not doing it himself. For not living up to his father's expectations.
BZZZZZZ
How long had he let her stew, awaiting an answer? He flipped the phone over.
August?
I'll stop by soon.
Coward
She didn't know the half of it. He needed to get out of this conversation. It would be so easy to simply turn off the phone, ignore her like had so many times before. His thumbs traced over the small qwerty keys, thousands of words in his mind but none some to be adequate for what really needed to be said.
She didn't know that he was the reason Neal left in the first place, and he didn't know if he would have done anything different had he known she was pregnant at the time of her arrest. He couldn't go back in time, he couldn't change the past.
I'm sorry. I'll talk to you soon. I promise.
You'd better not be lying. I'm onto you, Pinocchio
The brass bell above the door rang. August pocketed his phone.
Neal had ordered a beer and a shot of Jack; downed the shot and half the beer before stepping away from the bar, traversing the obstacle course of empty tables to hit the men's room. August made sure there was 2 fingers of MacCoutcheon waiting for him when he returned.
The tie was stuffed in the breast pocket of his jacket; the buttons on the vest undone. He hadn't bothered with a stop off at home to change. August hadn't seen it before, but there was no denying it now that Neal was Henry's father. It was in the way he walked, the slouch to the shoulder, the half smile as he read something on his phone.
August was fairly sure Emma never told him about Henry; the kid - any kid - never came up in conversation before. It wouldn't be his place to say anything now. He'd already betrayed Emma enough.
Neal slowed as he noticed the fresh glass next to his beer, eyes scanning for the bartender, and stopped -
August tipped his own glass in Neal's direction, waited for the body language that would give him any answer.
Neal's expression was stoney, a slight flare of the nostrils, a solid swallow. No clenched jaw, no whitened knuckles. Not even eyes closed in resignation. More expressions he shared with Henry. He sat on his stool, dropped his phone on the countertop. Picked up his pint of beer and finished it with a few quick swallows.
"I assume you got my postcard?" August started.
"Yep," escaped around an attempt to prevent a belch.
August took that as a cue to move from his corner. He straddled the stool next to Neal, his forearms resting on the mahogany. Neal shook his empty pint glass at the bartender, asking for another. He noted the non-drink in the protective circle of August's hands with a nod of his head.
"Teetotaling it these days? Gonna make me drink alone?"
"I'm trying to be good." It sounded more real than selfless, brave and true.
The second pint went just as fast as the first. "Being good is overrated."
Neal snorted, downed the whiskey with a hiss. "Why are you here, man? To tell me Emma's found her happily ever after?"
Neal's phone lit up from its place on the bar; a pretty woman with a gorgeous smile. August didn't catch her name; Neal had pocketed the phone.
"Have you found yours?"
"No!" There was a hard jab of fingers to August's chest, a slight shove after that. "No. We are not talking about her. You're not ruining a good thing for me. Not again."
August put his hands up in surrender. "Sorry." A pause. "I'm... glad. You should be happy."
"I am."
"Good."
Neal cleared his throat, waved down the bartender again. "Can I get the Man U. replay on? And another Yuengling, please."
August watched the game a few minutes. Closed captioning ran across the bottom of the screen, covering some of the action on the screen. "Still following soccer, I see."
"Yea, when I can," he replied, his hand stuffed in his pocket, fiddling with his phone.
"Do you still play?"
Brow furrowed, Neal gave him the stink eye. "How did you-"
"Wendy told me."
Neal laughed, tapped the bar counter with the fingers of his right hand to an unknown beat in his head. A self-depricating sigh later: "I always wondered how you knew my name."
"I was invested in finding all possible portals between our worlds. Find anyone else that might have come here." That might be able to help me, he added in his head.
There was a time when August had noble ambitions. Barely into his second semester of college, he'd suffered severe migraines for weeks. On the coat-tail of those headaches came a flood of images and stories, all from the Enchanted Forest. All more vivid than any memory he had had in his sparse years of existence there. And with that the mountain of guilt for not living up to The Blue Fairy's expectations.
He spent the better part of 3 years putting all of those tales together in an anthology. Emma was still in the system; he thought he'd have time.
August had always assumed The Blue Fairy had enchanted him to remember the stories from their land, to make sure someone knew the origin - the price - of the curse that would doom them to a land without magic. But he knew that those stories were woefully incomplete; the bias of those that remember- and live - to tell the tales.
Rumplestiltskin may have created the curse, but Blue left out a few of the details in the memories she'd embedded in his head. A long conversation over tea and biscuits with a lovely old woman with memories to last several lives, on the eve of her 105th birthday, told another side of that story-
- of a young man who wanted to save his father from dark magic; a young man who had found his way to Neverland through another enchanted portal, similar to the one a young Alice Liddell had tumbled through; a young man who had searched for a mother that had abandoned him when he could not find a way back to his father; when his father did not try to follow him.
And he wanted to write down all of the stories. He thought he had had time.
Only Emma had left the foster system as early as it was feasible, and his time had run out. He'd written the book with her in mind, to help her believe in her destiny.
"Nonna- Wendy- would have loved Emma," Neal waxed poetic. There was a misty look in his eye. Another time, another place. "Wendy was ballsy when she was a kid; took no sass from anyone."
"I definitely got that impression," August fed, hoping to gain a little more insight on the charge he had … misplaced... for so many years. He was, by nature, a listener; a dreamer. He wasn't so great being the do-er.
"Emma always had this way with gadgets: electronic key locks, cell phones, ATM machines, you name it, she could hack it."
August unconsciously pat the pocket with his own cell phone in it, remembering a time when Emma had confiscated it because he'd been missing her calls and text messages, reminding him that 'cheap-ass phones have cheap-ass reception'.
"I don't think I've ever seen someone boost a car that quickly. And it was never for the money, or even the thrill of it. Just to prove that she could do it. Drive the car around the corner and leave it; maybe take some pocket change out of the console."
"Sounds like she would have made a good Lost Boy." August suggested.
A genuine laugh erupted, deep and throaty and Neal was lost in his own memories for a time.
They both would have been better off in Neverland. Maybe. He still would have been left with the care of an infant, and eternally at that. He hated to admit it, but he likely would have left her if they'd been in Neverland too.
Temptation was not just a vice.
With his head hung low, chin just resting on his sternum, Neal got his church-giggle-trip down memory lane under control. "She told me once that one of her guidance counselors gave her the idea to leave school early, to get her GED and just move on as quickly as possible."
And that was when Emma had slipped from August's radar.
"Wendy would have told her the same thing; to follow her own path... maybe not to go boost cars, but..."
August had missed her by 14 months. Nearly sixty one weeks. Four hundred and twenty-three days between the time he had left on his jaunt to research possible portals and when she had dropped out of school. If he had stayed in the United States, if he had done things differently, if he had watched over her as he had promised his father with a more active role and not the tattling guardian angel that slipped in and out of her life without her even knowing it-
But then Emma may not have met Neal, she wouldn't have Henry, she wouldn't be... Emma.
"Emma's safe, right?" Neal asked with trepidation.
"Yeah."
And she was. For now. Maybe more so because he wasn't there to screw up her life like a bad penny. Five bad pennies. A wooden nickel.
She might be mad at him now for his most recent disappearing act, but she'd be pissed when she discovered all of the ways he had screwed her over in the past 28 years.
Neal seemed to deflate with the statement that Emma was safe, a slight settling of his shoulders.
"She's happy?"
August didn't honestly know. She'd found her parents, or her parents had found her. While he was still lying insensate at Granny's Bed and Breakfast, her voice had taken on that high, anxious pitch when she was out of her element. He'd maybe understood 2 words in five, she was speaking so fast. And he couldn't do anything but listen.
Maybe she had settled down some since that long, lost afternoon.
"She's ... Emma."
Neal apparently took that in a good way, the soft upturn of the corner of his mouth giving away his internalizations. August knew with that sort of smile that Neal still loved her.
"You believe in fate?" Neal asked, twirling the empty tumbler on its edge as if the last drops of whiskey could provide a tea-leaf fortune. "That all this.. crap... that happens to us, happens for a reason?"
August mulled over his answer, pulling and pushing so much on his lower lip that it looked like someone had punched him in the mouth. "I like to think that we have some choice."
He'd certainly made a bunch of bad decisions, but wouldn't it be nice to have a net to fall back on - it was fate. To let destiny take the blame for all his foibles.
"My father used to say there are no coincidences," Neal revealed, slowly running his index finger along the rim of the glass. "Everything happens for a reason. I don't want to think that meeting Emma was fate. That it was part of some grand plan. Emma shouldn't be someone's pawn."
Emma.
"Would it have really been that bad if the curse never broke?" Neal asked, anger seasoning his tone. "I mean, you haven't gone back! Wasn't that part of the deal?"
August has wondered the same thing himself. Was the curse truly a curse for everyone? Did everyone really lose their happy ending, a happy ending?
Emma didn't want to believe. Emma didn't believe until circumstances forced the situation.
"Seriously, did we really make it better? Emma went to jail! That is such crap! That's not a scene from a fairy tale, that's a bad dream!"
Emma didn't have to stay in Storybrooke. She'd stayed, for Henry. You didn't stay for her. Ever.
"We could have had a life together!"
Neal left because you convinced him it was the right thing to do. That Emma had a destiny to fulfill.
"But magic always comes with a price."
Neal did everything for Emma; everything you did, you did for yourself.
"I left my home to get away from magic, yet I'm still paying for it. How is that fair?"
Emma made a wish on her birthday; Henry brought her to Storybrooke. You wrote a book... that she didn't believe.
"If my father is responsible for that curse, you can bet this is not the end of it."
Emma... saved... you. Emma made a wish, and you turned back into a realboy.
August's chin met his chest, fingers steepled and thumbs along the bridge of his nose. His elbows locked him in place. Magic was back in Storybrooke. His promise to the Blue Fairy so long ago came back to haunt him.
"Selfless, brave and true."
But it didn't describe him or his actions.
Neal's posture mirrored his own. "What?"
"Just a promise I made. A long time ago." August straightened, threw $30 on the counter to cover his and Neal's tab. "About time I made good on it."
END