A/N: Microfic. Got this idea after watching the deleted "Jell-O" scene. Enjoy!
'Your father', she'd said. For just a moment Emma really hadn't known who she was even talking about. 'My father', she now repeated in her head again and again and again. Sometimes she just looked at the man – David, Prince Charming, her father – as if seeing him made it more real. Or more true. On so many levels Emma understood the simple fact that he was her father and Mary Margaret her mother. There was just this gigantic 'but' that followed her around. Her family (that word gave her some well needed distance) was so comfortable with all of this. They embraced having found their daughter and their grandson. It was just Emma who couldn't deal with all of it; this wasn't some game, not some fairytale. This was her life. When Henry found her in Boston, he had immediately accepted her as part of his family. He had accepted her as his mother. Emma had tried to push him away gently (and sometimes not so gently). Immediately she had seen herself and Neal in this strange boy, but that didn't make him his mother. Did it? In the beginning she hadn't thought of him as her son. She did now. Her parents had been just like Henry; just as needy, just as accepting. To them it didn't seem to make a difference that they all hardly knew each other. Shared DNA didn't make a family. Admittedly, Emma had no idea what did make a family.
Having gotten to know Mary Margaret as a friend and not her mother, Emma could almost understand the way the woman was acting now. Like a mother. David, however, was a whole different matter. In some way she had figured he would be just as uncomfortable as she was. But even he was dealing with this better than she was. Whenever she looked at him, she saw pieces of herself in him. All her life she had looked for these people. Mom and dad. She had waited so long to say these words and mean them. Now here they were and the words didn't seem to fit. Naturally, Emma had expected to find a couple older than herself. People who did not come from a fairytale land. She had come to accept the strangeness of that at least. 'Her father', it rang through her mind and made it impossible to concentrate on anything else. Emma had never liked definitions, because for her they had never worked. She'd never really had a father, a mother or a family. These words held different meaning for her. So Emma didn't like definitions, she preferred following her instincts. These people were her family. Her mother and her father. She couldn't give them these definitions. Yet. Her parents. They were her parents. The word scared her as well, but not as much. It had a nice ring to it, she thought. Emma had seen the wish in both their eyes. All they wanted was for her to acknowledge who they were. She couldn't give them the words they probably wanted to hear; there was time for that later. But she could think of them as her parents. She could give them that much.
END
