Where I Belong
A/N: The inspiration to this story came after I read "Captains Of The Sands" (Capitães da Areia, in Portuguese) by Jorge Amado. If you ever have the chance I highly recommend reading it. The fanfic is very loosely based on the plot of the book and it focuses mostly on the relationship between Emma and Mary Margaret/Snow. Hope you like it.
Disclaimer: I don't own neither the characters, the show nor the book.
Emma was running out of options. Finding a place to spend the night in an unknown city was turning out to be a lot harder than she'd previously predicted, mostly because she couldn't risk being found by any local authority social workers.
The main reason why she decided to leave Boston was the chance of getting as far away as she could from the last places she lived in. Far from the system that treated her so poorly, from the so called 'parents' that only bothered to pretend to care about her when they were receiving a paycheck, from the orphanage, from the memories of Richie.
No, she definitely couldn't be taken back to the place she escaped from. Considering there was no way she could afford a night in a hotel Emma resorted to looking for shelter in the least personable motels and Bed and Breakfasts she could find, in the hopes that people wouldn't be bothered to ask why a 13 year-old was wandering alone.
Throughout all of the afternoon Emma went to seven different places, offering doing some of the house work in exchange for shelter for the night. Laundry, cleaning, washing the dishes, anything. To no luck.
If only she had considered the need to grab enough money to survive all alone in the world…If only the moment she had had the chance of running away hadn't been surrounded by so much adrenaline and desperation. Maybe by now she would've found somewhere to stay. But all she had in her pockets had been spent on the bus trip.
Emma had no place to go, absolutely nowhere. Not in Boston and not in here, this unfamiliar place. So she resorted to walking. For hours, until her legs were shaking and her head felt light with hunger. Until her body couldn't take it anymore.
Walking slowly, as the streets got more and more desert, she saw a bridge in a dark alley and by that point it seemed the best – or yet the only – option Emma had. How did this happen? When she left the orphanage she was trying to get away from all the degrading situations she'd ever been put through. Spending any amount of time under a filthy bridge on a city where she knew absolutely no one was as far as it gets from what she wanted.
Yet, all Emma could do was drag her old backpack towards there, just to relax her tired limbs for a while. She decided to start looking for the proper shelter again when she felt a little rested.
Against her wishes, thought, Emma started to doze off, only to be startled by a voice close by.
"Hey!" She saw a boy coming in her direction. He was black and tall, probably a few years older than her, and like Emma carried a bag with him. "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be in here".
"I…" fear clouded her mind, she didn't know what to say. He was right, Emma wasn't supposed to be there.
Emma tried to say something, anything. That she didn't mean to. She didn't know. But no sound came out of her mouth.
"You don't know Sebastian, do you? He'll beat you up if he finds you in here. He's delirious, thinks he owns the place. Come on". He gestured for her to follow him.
The boy saw when she hesitated.
"Come on", he repeated, a nice tone to his voice. "My name's Luke by the way".
"Emma", she simply said. Collecting her bag Emma started to follow him. Carefully, not too closely.
"You should go back to your home, Emma, it's getting late and your parents must be worried".
"I don't have a home", she snapped, letting show in her tone all the bitterness resulting of the day she was having, "nor parents".
Luke turned to fully look at her and shrugged. "Neither do I" he said matter-of-factly. "So…where do you live? I know it's not under that bridge".
"Just got away from an orphanage in Boston. The Ruggeri's".
"No way! Isn't Ruggeri's the one where the director is a drunk who makes the kids do all of the housework, and starve them if he thinks the job isn't done properly?
"Yeah", Emma started, surprised "How do you…"
"My friend Brick used to live in there years ago. Man, he says the place sucks – Wait. So you don't have nowhere to go?"
"No".
Suddenly Luke stopped by a bench and sat down, opening his bag and gesturing Emma to sit down as well. He retrieved a sandwich. Emma's stomach churned.
"I stole it in the morning. Was planning to eat it tomorrow". He held it to Emma's direction. "Here, take it".
She was too hungry to refuse it and wasted no time in removing the wrapping, giving the sandwich a bite. The last time she had eaten anything was the evening before.
"Thank you".
He only smiled in response.
"Since it's late and you have no place to go I think it would be best for you to spend the night in our house, what do you think?"
Emma had no idea who 'our' referred to, or why this stranger was being so nice to her, but her only other option was sleeping in this very bench.
"I…" Luke was right again. She didn't have any other choice. "Yeah. Thanks".
It turned out that Luke lived in a big abandoned house in the outskirts of town. The house looked very old, the windows were broken and the painting on the walls was worn. The path to the door was overgrown with bushes and brambles. It was easy to understand why no one had interest in purchasing it.
From an outside view it was impossible to know that in there lived group ten young boys. The youngest one, Evan, was only eight years old and the oldest, Ian, was seventeen. Each one of them had their own story, their own reason to why ending up there. What they had in common, though, was the fact that they all had run away. From their abusive foster parents, from the foster care system as a whole, even from their own families. Now all they had left was each other and this old and rusty house. With time they became a tight group, loyal to one another, surviving anyway they could.
"We call ourselves the Hidden Boys", Luke explained, "because we hide from the society, the system. We don't belong. We only belong here".
Although some of the boys, Ian particularly, were less than thrilled with having a new addition to the group, let alone a girl, Emma ended up staying there longer than one night. On the first morning after she met them, Emma helped Brick and a skinny boy named Nate rob a convenience store by distracting the cashier, telling him she was lost – from a young age she had developed, out of necessity, a good ability to lie.
Later that night Luke taught her how to pick pockets in a crowded avenue. The boys allowed her to remain living there for the time being, because sometimes such an innocent-looking girl could be very useful. And Emma did everything she could to become a part of the group. It was a new and strange experience, belonging somewhere.
The younger boys liked having her around. Every night she would read them a story from a book Nate had stolen "from a snobby kid" and every time one of them got hurt she would treat their injuries.
"You're like a mother", little Evan told her one night after she finished the bedtime story. Emma smiled enthusiastically at him, but inside she didn't feel like that at all. Mother. She couldn't be like a mother, she'd never even had a real one.
Out of everyone, though, it was Luke whom she got the closest to. He told her how he ended up living with the Hidden Boys five years ago, because after his mother died and his father started drinking he was sent to live with a rich foster family who used the fact they had adopted kids as a way of showing off to the society, but in reality completely ignored the kids' needs. Luke used to say that no one cared about kids like him, like them, so they had to take care of each other. It was a problem of the society, he said. They could be great people if they were given the chance, but no one was willing to help them.
Emma thought he was absolutely right.
She also liked the fact that he'd always share his food with the younger kids when they hadn't managed to find it anywhere else. Luke reminded her of Richie but the memory was too painful. She never mentioned him to anyone.
After residing in the house for over a month, getting by through stealing whatever she needed – most times to eat, but she did stole a jacket and a pair of shoes from a shop once – and relishing the joy of being away from the injustices of the system that abused her throughout all of her live, Emma started to feel like one of the boys.
Not that livingin there was ideal. No, it was far from perfect, far from the dream life she envisioned when she was a little girl. With a family that loved her. She wasn't sure if she wanted to keep stealing, though they would all starve if they didn't, and knowing that while she lived in there she probably wouldn't go back to school was a bit disturbing – Emma had always been a good student.
But that house was the only place where everyone understood her, felt like she felt. So that one night, when Ian gathered everyone to discuss a very important job he had for Emma, she realized it was her chance to prove to everyone and to herself that she was a real part of the Hidden Boys. It was the final test.
At that exact moment, not too far away, Mary Margaret got back to her apartment from the hospital. It had been quite a tiring day, helping with the preparations for the Miner's Day.
Like she frequently did, Mary Margaret instinctively glanced at the closed door of the room in the second floor, but diverted her eyes quickly. Not a day ever went by without her thinking about her daughter. About what she could have done to avoid what happened. What she should've done.
Like every day, though, there was nothing to be done. So Mary Margaret sighted and headed to the kitchen to prepare dinner for herself.
"So do you understand?" Ian asked.
"Yeah".
"Then don't mess it up, or you can get us all in trouble". He voice was menacing. "And if you don't make it right don't even bother coming back".
"I won't mess it up", Emma said with more conviction than she actually had.
Storybrooke. What kind of name was that? A strange little town that wasn't that far away, but a place where any of them had ever been to.
Emma would be lying if she said the plan was going to be easy to execute. Getting acquainted with someone, making them trust her, telling a fake life story. Yes, she could do that. She was a good liar. But the next part? She had to learn the habits of the richest citizens and the places that held the most valuable objects, then find a way for the Hidden Boys to rob a significant amount of money and give them the coordinates for the so called 'biggest theft of the history of the group'. She wasn't so sure she could do that.
That night went by restlessly. Even though they were in the middle of July it was strangely cold, and the wind made the wooden windows creak, thought that wasn't what kept her awake. If she failed she couldn't come back. She had nowhere to go.
Emma glared at the moonlight through the hole on the ceiling as she tightened the grip on her baby blanket, the one she had since she was born, the only connection she had with her real parents. Wondering how on earth she was going to do what they wanted her to do.