Title: Just a Touch of Magic
Summary: After another squeeze of Emma's hand, Snow let go, patted her knee, and stood. "If anyone can figure out how to communicate across realms, it's you and Elsa."
Spoilers: Up through 4x11, "Heroes and Villains."
Rating/Warning: T, mostly for language and some (perhaps uncharacteristic for me) suggestiveness. Here be Charming Family, Captain Swan, and Frozen Swan goodness.
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I'm just trying to pass the time until hiatus is over.
Author's Note: I don't think it's a secret that I adored Frozen Swan. Like, we're talking grin-like-an-idiot, squeal-like-a-tween-at-a-Bieber-concert adored. Needless to say, I didn't want it to end, so in my own lovely little headcanon, it didn't! Not completely. And now I'm sharing that headcanon with y'all. ;) The title was snagged from a line in The Turtles' "You, Baby" (oldies strike again :)) and there's a little wink and nod below to "Dads and Daughters, Princesses and Kings," because the seeds of this were planted there. As always, though, knowledge of that story is not at all necessary to follow this one. Feedback would make my day! Enjoy. :)
"Are you sure you don't want to come, Emma?" Snow White asked as she hooked baby Neal's diaper bag over her shoulder.
Emma Swan sighed inwardly and tried her hardest not to roll her eyes. Between her mom and her dad, she'd been asked that very same question about a hundred times already. (Well, okay, they'd asked her three times but it might as well have been a hundred.) "I'm sure, Mom. Killian's coming over in a bit."
No one needed to know that she'd arranged for Killian to come over pretty much the exact second she'd overheard her parents discussing their plan to take Neal to the park for a picnic lunch. Henry was already at Regina's for the day so the two of them could work on their search the author of the storybook. With her parents taking the squirt out for a little while, Emma and Killian could take the rare opportunity to have the apartment all to themselves for the afternoon.
When she'd called Killian and explained as much to him, he'd been just as thrilled as she had. In fact, he'd said some things that ... well, thank God her father hadn't been able to hear him.
As it was, David's eyes had darkened a bit just now when she mentioned Killian's name. Clearly, Mr. Overprotective Dad had put two and two together enough to realize that his daughter planned to be alone with a (reforming) pirate.
"We're just going to be watching Netflix, Dad," Emma sighed, unable to control her eye-roll reflex this time. Seriously, she was almost thirty, for crying out loud. She had a kid of her own and everything! She was certainly allowed to spend an afternoon with her pirate if she so chose.
And if she and Killian just so happened to pay more attention to each other than to whatever was playing on Netflix, that was something else that no one needed to know.
To his credit, David did have the decency to shoot her a sheepish smile. "Of course you are," he said, thankfully easing up on the overprotective-dad attitude. He finished tucking the sandwiches in the small cooler he was packing for their picnic and then looked up at Snow, who'd gathered little Neal from the bassinet. "That's the last of it."
"All right, then, we're off," Snow said, smiling at her daughter. "As long as you're sure you don't want to come."
Emma wanted so very badly to go bang her head against the brick wall. "I'm sure. You guys should really get going if you want to get a good picnic spot."
David and Snow shared an amused glance. "Do my ears deceive me," David teased, a smirk tugging at his lips, "or is our daughter trying to kick us out of our own apartment?"
"Your ears do not deceive you," Snow replied with an identical smirk. "You'd think she's got a hot date or something."
Heat instantly rose in Emma's cheeks. Damn it, now she was blushing! "That's it!" she cried as she ushered her parents to the door, much to their amusement. "Out, the three of you!"
Laughingly, Snow and David exited the apartment with the promise of returning in a few hours. Emma closed the door behind them, sighing softly. Parents.
(Of course, despite the teasing and the embarrassment, her parents were absolutely wonderful. Hell, sometimes they were wonderful because of the teasing and the embarrassment. Yeah, feeling like a teenager sneaking around with her boyfriend at her age was kind of annoying but she had to admit that it was also kind of nice to be able to reclaim those little moments they'd missed. Better late than never and all that.)
A glance at her phone proved she had a good thirty or so minutes before Killian was set to arrive. Emma had banked on having a little more time to herself; getting her parents out the door with her baby brother but without her had been a bigger task than she'd anticipated. Still, she should have enough time to try something at least once before Killian came over and distracted her with other activities.
After a moment's hesitation, Emma stepped in front of the full-length mirror in her parents' room. Her dad had actually given her this idea the other night, in between making her a turkey sandwich and getting her to release some pent-up emotion. Before she got her hopes up, though, she wanted to make sure it was even a little bit feasible.
Now, what had Regina told her to do when she was trying to use mirror magic to peek in on Ariel and Eric?
She needed to focus inward, to call to her magic and make it do what she wanted it to do. After taking a deep breath and setting her shoulders, Emma closed her eyes and focused.
The feeling of little butterflies flitting in her stomach whenever she called up her magic was becoming familiar. As they always did, the butterflies generated a warmth that began in her stomach and spread throughout her entire body. The warmth relaxed her, centered her. Within seconds, she felt her head dropping forward and her muscles relaxing.
Her magic coursed through her veins, each heartbeat radiating warmth outward. When the heat was at just the right temperature, Emma opened her eyes.
Ripples like the concentric rings that flowed outward when a rock was tossed into a calm pond appeared in the glass of the mirror. A wave of white light followed the ripples across the glass, swallowing Emma's reflection and that of the room behind her.
A breath caught in Emma's throat. She'd never watched the mirror magic take hold before. It was … kind of badass, if she did say so herself.
When the light cleared, she found herself staring at what looked like a bedchamber in some kind of castle. What in the fresh hell is this? Emma thought, blinking in surprise.
The bed was one of those big four-poster suckers, covered in thick, luxurious linens. The rest of the furniture in the room was deep mahogany with shiny brass hardware and cushions of tufted velvet. The walls were covered with tapestries, for crying out loud. "Holy shit," Emma murmured.
This was not how it had worked before. She'd seen Ariel and Eric on an island; she hadn't seen an empty room. Had she done it wrong?
Emma's increasingly split focus caused the image of the room to flicker. No, no, she didn't want to lose this. She didn't understand it at all but she definitely did not want to lose it. She took a breath and shored up her concentration to hold it in place.
Once the image regained its stability, Emma allowed herself to examine it further. Now that she thought about it, it seemed as though she were looking at the room from the inside, like from the point of view of a piece of furniture. From the angle and position of her view of the bed, maybe from a vanity.
Oh, whoa, wait a second. Was she actually looking through a mirror in the bedchamber itself?
"Wow," a soft voice breathed from behind her.
Even that quiet a sound shattered Emma's concentration. She gasped, startled, and the bedchamber vanished. It was replaced with the proper reflection of her parents' room, her, and her sheepish mother standing behind her.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," Snow said, wincing. "We got down to the truck and I realized I'd forgotten your brother's pacifier. When I came in here to get one, I saw you and the mirror and well ..." She waved her hand, indicating that Emma knew the rest of the story.
"It's okay," Emma assured her as she tiredly flopped down on the edge of her parents' bed. Whatever the hell she'd just done had taken a lot out of her. "I don't think what I was trying to do was working anyway."
Snow grabbed the pacifier from her nightstand and sat down next to her daughter. "What were you trying to do?"
Emma fidgeted a little uncomfortably under her mother's loving gaze. It was still so foreign, so new, to have someone look at her like that. "Aren't Dad and Neal waiting downstairs?"
"They can wait a few minutes."
She fidgeted again, not entirely sure why she was so hesitant to tell her mom what she'd wanted to do. Here was her mom, and she wanted nothing more than to know her child, to know what her child had wanted. Here was her mom, taking an interest in her. It was everything Emma had ever wanted, and yet, she hesitated.
What was that saying about old habits and dying hard?
After a beat, Emma sighed and briefly met Snow's eyes. Now or never, Emma, she thought. "I was trying to see if I could see Elsa."
Snow seemed surprised at first but then sudden understanding flooded her features. She smiled kindly at her daughter, unable to resist the urge to grasp Emma's hand. Emma let her take it and, to the surprise of both of them, even squeezed a little herself.
"It's only natural that you miss her, Emma," Snow said gently. "The two of you were practically inseparable when she was here."
They had been inseparable, hadn't they? Part of their closeness had sprung from necessity. Ingrid had been gunning for them both and neither of them had any memory of their pasts with her. It had just made sense for them to figure out the hows and whys together.
However, a large part of their closeness had come from the deep bond formed in that ice cave. The two of them understood each other in ways that very few people ever could. From their upbringings – so similar, Emma with caretakers who never really saw her and Elsa with parents who isolated her – to their powers – gifts that had seemed more like curses – to the heavy responsibility foisted on each of them. It had been such a relief to be able to talk about all of it as if it were normal. They'd each helped the other to feel a little less alone, a little less lonely. They'd helped each other find their centers. They'd each been the other's calm during the storm.
And now … now Elsa was just gone.
"I feel like a little kid whose best friend moved away," Emma softly admitted.
It had been a full week since Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff had stepped through the magical door back to Arendelle. A whole seven days. Though Elsa had only been in her life a short time, Emma had grown accustomed to having someone to chat with after turning out the light or before getting up for the day. (Which had earned them their fair share of indulgent shushes from the bedroom below, by the way. And just like teenagers at a sleepover, the shushes hadn't made much of a difference aside from getting them to let out sheepish chuckles before lowering their voices.) She'd grown accustomed to having someone to practice magic with, someone who understood. And Emma hadn't seen that someone in a whole freakin' week, and it was basically torture.
"I'm sure you do, sweetheart. That's natural, too." Snow tightened her hand around Emma's. When Emma looked up at her, she saw comfort and wisdom in her mother's eyes. "You didn't want to just see her, though, did you? On some level, you wanted to talk to her, too."
Oh, God, how Emma wished she could talk to her. "I don't even know if they made it home okay," she shrugged. "We just sent them through a door and that was it."
Whoa, wait a second. This sadness, this emptiness, this agony of not knowing… this probably wasn't even a fraction of how her parents had felt when they put her in the wardrobe. After all, they'd had to send their brand-new baby through a portal with nothing but a blanket and hope to protect her. Or hell, even sending her off with Henry while the reversal of Pan's Curse whisked everyone back to the Enchanted Forest!
Holy shit.
She looked up at her mother, blinking against sudden tears. Snow must have been able to follow her train of thought just from her statement and the expression on her face because she smiled gently and said, "It's not easy sending someone you love into another world, is it?"
No. No, it certainly wasn't.
Thankfully, Snow didn't dwell on the emotion. "I'm sure they're all right," she continued, choosing instead to try to calm her daughter's raw nerves. "Even if they encountered some difficulty on the journey back, Elsa's powerful enough that she'd be able to handle it. Keep practicing, and I'm sure you'll get the chance to ask her yourself."
"Yeah but it didn't work," Emma said, her shoulders slumping in defeat. "When I did this before with Regina, I saw who I wanted to see. I didn't see a random empty room."
Snow hesitated before replying, as if trying to choose her words carefully. "No, but your intent was a little different this time, even if it was subconsciously. You didn't just want to see Elsa; you wanted to talk to her, too. Maybe you would have been able to talk to her if she'd been in the room."
That was something Emma hadn't considered. "You think that was Elsa's room?"
Snow smiled comfortingly. "If your thoughts were focused on her, it makes more sense that you saw into her bedchamber than it does that you saw into some random bedchamber in a random castle. Maybe you've figured out a way for you two to talk through the mirror."
Like an actual magical Skype? The little girl within Emma was positively giddy at the notion but the cynical adult within her didn't dare get her hopes up too high. "Yeah, maybe," she said softly.
After another squeeze of her hand, Snow let go, patted her knee, and stood. "If anyone can figure out how to communicate across realms, it's you two. Now, you're sure you don't want to come on the picnic?"
That now made the like, hundred and second time Emma had been asked. This time, though, she smiled. "I'm sure. Killian, remember?"
Snow's teasing smile indicated that she'd remembered just fine. "Just thought I'd extend the invitation again. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
And then she was out of the room, leaving a stunned Emma behind her, her cheeks burning. God, parents were so embarrassing!
As the embarrassment faded, though, Emma realized that two could play that game. Mary Margaret Blanchard may have been a top-button kind of girl but as Emma had so horrifyingly discovered, Snow White was not opposed to a little, er, afternoon delight. (There was not enough brain bleach in the world for walking in on one's parents, by the way.)
Oh, yes. Emma decided right then and there that she was well within her rights to abide by the Snow White definition of "anything I wouldn't do."