Most mornings, Jefferson wakes up with a jolt. His eyes fly open and more often than not, his mouth is stretched wide open in a silent scream. Or so he hopes.
He has a good life now. He knows this. His beloved Grace is back. Emma Swan, savior of Storybrooke, has not only forgiven him for all that he did to her and her family, but has gone far beyond his wildest dreams and fallen in love with him, and he with her. Last, but not least, he actually has friends-people on whom he can depend, and who can depend on him. Or so he hopes.
Family, love, friends. He is not alone anymore. He is not trapped anymore. And still the nightmares continue.
Sometimes it's enough to run through this small, but growing, list of blessings. His eyes fly open, fists clenching the sheets twisted around his sweaty body, and he will chant to himself. Family. Love. Friends. Other times, rolling over in bed and gathering Emma in his arms is what calms him. Jefferson is fairly certain that one touch of that petal soft skin and all that is wrong in the world would be healed.
And then there are the mornings when nothing works, save one thing. These are the mornings he quietly leaves their bed, their house, and walks as deep as he can into the surrounding woods. These are the mornings he wakes up with the words "get it to work" echoing in his mind- when he looks at his new life, his new reality, and feels it to be far more foreign, far more surreal, than the distant past. These are the mornings he forgets that he isn't in Wonderland anymore. When he's more Hatter than Jefferson.
He walks, then runs, as far and as fast as he can, until whatever is building inside him spills over. When this happens, he comes to a halt as he's overcome. Then he screams, over and over, until his throat feels so raw he is certain it's bleeding. Afterwards, he grits his teeth and pounds his fist against anything and everything he comes across: trees, rocks, dirt, himself.
It happens more often than he cares to admit. If he's totally honest, there have been times it feels like it's a habit, a way to start the day.
He does this, he goes through it on his own, before they wake. He doesn't want to lose control like this in front of Grace and Henry. Somehow, he knows that he could stand it if he did lose it in front of Emma-probably because he already has. It's hard to make a worse first impression than the one he made with her. Jefferson joked about this once, in the self-conscious, stuttering sort of way that made it perfectly clear he wasn't really joking, and was surprised at Emma's response. How she pointed out that her first impression, technically, was of a handsome, charming man.
On these mornings, when he's exhausted this destructive energy, and has slumped to the ground, sweat and tears running down his face, he fights against the voice that tells him she's wrong, and that he knows better. But if Jefferson is certain of one thing, other than the magic of Emma's touch, it's that he's getting better at not listening to the Hatter. Slowly-very slowly, sometimes much too slowly-but surely.
The fact that Emma lets him slip away in the mornings, without so much a word, and then welcomes him back, without question, makes him love her all the more. There's an intrinsic understanding between them. He knows she's awake when he leaves the house. He's never had to explain to her what it's like, why he needs to run off and let the Hatter out, because she already knows. She's already seen him, after all.
He wasn't exaggerating when he said having two lives inside his mind was enough to drive a man mad. But now it's a different battle he's fighting. It's not Jefferson, Portal Jumper Extraordinaire vs. the Mad Hatter. It's not Enchanted Forest. vs. Storybrooke. It's madness against happiness and he'll be damned if he lets the madness emerge victorious. And if it takes him screaming his guts out every other morning to make him feel like he's physically expelling this lunacy, then so be it. He'll do whatever it takes to feel happy, to feel safe at home with his family.
Most mornings, Emma wakes up with a familiar sinking feeling in her stomach. Nearly thirty years of being alone, and a part of her still wonders if she will always wait for the other shoe to drop.
She's made a life in Storybrooke, complete with a responsible job, friends, and a family-her actual family, as well as the one she's built for herself. No longer is Emma Swan the girl who was abandoned and who, in turn, abandons others. She is done running. She tells herself this every single time she feels the urge to pick up and leave.
It's been ingrained in her for far too long, this fight or flight feeling, this overwhelming desire to cut and run before someone does the same to her, to suddenly go away. Nowadays, when Jefferson rolls over in the morning and holds her in his arms, she melts into his embrace and drifts back to sleep. In the beginning, her eyes would fly open and she would stiffen, feeling constrained more than anything else.
There are mornings he quietly leaves the house and wanders blindly into the forest, going as far as his sanity will take him before he snaps. She pretends to be asleep and he pretends to believe her. One time, and one time only, she followed him out the door. Emma felt certain she knew what he was doing, but she wanted to see it. She wanted to see the Mad Hatter again.
In a sense, seeing Jefferson come undone made her love him even more. It made her see how beautiful broken things can be. As Emma watched him scream and cry and rage, she wasn't afraid, or disgusted-she was overcome with how much she loved him. And in that moment, she also understood that happy endings are not neat, tidy sentences that have definitive resolutions. Happy endings are messy. For those who are broken, even just a little, happy endings are ongoing battles that are fought over and over, that have to be won repeatedly. Sometimes every morning. For people like the two of them, and possibly just in general, happiness isn't something that is freely handed out. Happiness is a choice.
So Jefferson fights his battles with his memories, with his past self, and Emma does the same. She fights the feeling that this is all too good to be true, that this life is a lie. She grits her teeth when the lost girl inside her says that her family will leave her, again, and her love will leave her, again, and continues on with her day. Some days, the fight is easily won, and others, it's all she can do to not take off with Henry. But she knows both she and Jefferson fight for the same reason: so they can feel happy to be safe at home, with each other.