Jake burst into his half-finished home between moonrise and daylight with a mouth full of gemstones and a corpse slung across his back, and Charming's first assumption was that he would be forced into hosting a manic fugitive for the remainder of his life. Because clearly his life was doomed to be cut short now that he was an accessory to this violent crime; clearly Jake would think nothing of holding a wand to his head and making him pay for years of ill intent, with the fire in his eyes and the deaths of too many loved ones hanging over his head. This was the end. This was how it went down, his final days at the hands of a Grimm, because it couldn't have been at the hands of anyone else.

Then Jake said, "This isn't what it looks like," and Charming, his voice coarse from sleep, said "What?" because what he had heard was something more like rubies and diamonds falling to the floor.

Jake spit out the rest of the jewels into his hand, keeping the cadaver supported with the other, and said, "This isn't what it looks like."

Charming wanted to ask, "So why are you running?" but what came out was "Did that hurt?"

Jake looked down at his hand and then mournfully at his current outfit, which consisted, as Charming was just now noticing, of a dusty robe, equally dirtied pants, and one shoe. "No," he said. "But they would have been easier to carry with pockets." A pause, then he looked up, wary. "I didn't kill anyone."

"Are you sure?" said Charming, motioning weakly to the corpse. The newly installed kitchen lights, which Jake must have flicked on when he broke in, were giving him a headache.

"This guy's been dead for weeks. I've got an alibi. For the murder, I mean, not the theft."

"Theft?"

"Yeah, of the body."

"You stole a body." It was three in the morning and simultaneously too late and too early to be dealing with this.

"Yes, but I shouldn't have told you that," said Jake brightly. "Please don't tell anyone else. Can I leave this here?"

Charming ran a hand over his face. "Why don't you go to your lunatic nieces for help?"

"They'll sense all the magic at the house," Jake explained, leaving the they in his sentence conspicuously vague. "You haven't set up any hexes here yet, have you?"

"Just the old one on the Porsche," Charming mumbled into his palms.

"Oh," said Jake, blinking. "So that's why the Hand never laid a—well, you know. A hand. On your car. You get it. Well then, I guess I'm just going to..." Charming peeked between his fingers and saw Jake gently lowering the dead body onto his kitchen floor.

"Please," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. All he wanted was to go back to bed and wake up from this nightmare. "No."

"Don't worry," said Jake, as he straightened and poked the corpse with the tip of his shoed foot as if to confirm its deadness. "It's cursed."

Charming's laugh then was abruptly loud, harsh to match the lighting. "Oh, well, that changes everything!"

"I mean I would think so, right? Now it won't rot and stink up the place. Tell you what, I'll even give you security." Jake leaned forward and pressed the smooth, icy gemstones into Charming's hand, catching his gaze as he did so and casting his bluest, most pleading puppy dog eyes. They were very pitiful puppy dog eyes, but Charming had been married to three princesses, and the effect was minimal. "I'll be coming back for these. And that," he added, his gaze darting to the floor.

Charming made one last tired effort. "And if I decide to call the police?"

Jake smiled sympathetically and patted him on the shoulder. "We both know that won't be of any help."

"Right, then," said Charming. Exhaustion was fast overcoming him: spending a whole day painting guest rooms nobody would ever use would do that to a man. "Okay. Sure."

"Really? Wow. That was easier than I expected. You know I thought you'd have to come out of this screaming—"

"Just go," said Charming, pointing none too subtly at the back door.

"Okay, I'm going," said Jake, but as his hand found the doorknob he turned around. "Oh, one more thing. I need your car."

Charming took a deep breath. He counted to five, because he was too tired to count to ten. And then he walked over to a drawer to exchange the gemstones for his keys. "Don't come back without her," he warned, tossing them across the room.

Jake caught them in one hand and stepped out with what sounded like, "No promises."

The door slammed shut behind him, and Charming stared briefly at the fresh corpse on the floor. No, not fresh. The Grimm said it had been dead for weeks. Okay. This was fine. Everything was fine. He'd seen dead bodies before, soldiers strewn across medieval battlefields. Men peppered with his army's arrows. His best knights in the crimson grass. And God knew how many murders had occurred on in this town—how many on both sides they had lost in the fight against the Hand—at least it was nobody he had killed. At least it was nobody he knew. At least it looked clean.

Diamonds and rubies still glittered beside its head, as if to make up for the blank eyes.

Charming walked to the light switch, giving the body a wide berth, and turned off the lights. Then he went back to bed, with only one bruise on his side from running into the table.

He woke up late the next morning. The freshly painted upstairs rooms, including his bedroom, were still drying, so he had been sleeping on the first floor guest room on a futon that he supposed was comfortable enough. But now his side hurt, and he groaned as he stood up: either he was somehow getting old or he would have to start putting in beds today.

Then he walked into the kitchen to make coffee and promptly tripped over the corpse on the floor, and remembered that the reason his side hurt was not that he had been sleeping so close to the floor, but that he had bumped into a table in the dark after Jacob Grimm had left a dead body in his kitchen in the middle of the night. And Charming counted to five for the second time that day.

This was fine. He would just get dressed and drive into town and buy his coffee there. Snow had authorised a new coffee shop since the Sacred Grounds closed—no one could compete with Briar, but she was dead, and this was fine.

He stepped outside twenty minutes later, the October wind tugging in vain at his scarf, only to find the curb absent of his Porsche. And then he remembered that Jake had taken it along with his dignity.

This was fine.

He walked through the muddy fields and bleak, dry trees, up to Main Street, where the as of yet unnamed coffee shop occupied the old Sacred Grounds building. This was to his benefit, the Sacred Grounds being closer to his new house than it had ever been to the mansion—not that he'd needed to ever go himself, having Seven.

He was dead now too, and that was fine.

Charming's breath fogged in the cold, leaving a ghost on the glass door that faded before it had finished closing. The bored teenager at the counter stood up straighter, and he found the irritated expression she wore acutely familiar.

"Sabrina?"

"Charming," said the blonde. "Nice of you to finally drop by."

"What are you—"

"It's been three months," she said coldly.

He frowned.

"You didn't even show up to my birthday party." As if she'd wanted him there. "Daphne's starting to think you hate her."

With a scowl and both hands stuffed in deep coat pockets, Charming strode to the counter, ignoring the furtive glances he received from the shop's few other patrons. "I've been busy," he hissed quietly.

"Too busy to say hi to some of the only people who liked you before we won the war?" Sabrina fired back. She had lowered the volume of her voice to match his, but there was no dampening of the heat behind her words. "I don't think so, Billy."

"Too busy for anyone," he said darkly. "Listen, Grimm, I'm tired, I'm hungry, I don't even want to get started on what a night I had—please, just get me some coffee."

Sabrina shot him a scathing glare before she pulled away from the counter. Her voice dripped with a poison more suited to spinning wheels. "Just so you know, I'm only doing this because I'm getting paid."

"Triple ristretto, for here," Charming said. "Just so you know, I'm only here because your uncle decided to break into my house."

The girl whipped back around, stricken. She looked wrong in a uniform, thought Charming. With the apron and all. "Jake's back?"

Perhaps it was the uniform, or the look on her face, or the fact that he was so, so tired, but Charming's anger began to dissipate and the guilt set in swiftly. "What, you thought—you didn't know?"

For all her usual apathy, Sabrina's blue eyes burned. "Was Puck with him?"

"Maybe. I don't think so," Charming admitted. "He took my car."

"And you let him?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of," Sabrina repeated. She had turned to the coffee maker once more, but he could see the tension knotting in her shoulders as she worked. "You know, Billy, I used to think you were a smart guy."

Charming raised an eyebrow in spite of himself. "Did you really?"

Coffee trickled slowly into the tiny porcelain cup. It stung that she kept her back to him, arms crossed tightly against her stomach. "Yes. But then you had to go AWOL and make Daphne all miserable and not stop Jake from doing something stupid. Why doesn't anyone ever stop Jake from doing something stupid?"

The image of Basil Grimm's bloody, beaten corpse staggered into Charming's mind, unbidden. This was of a set of memories Relda had forced him to forget: weathered flesh mangled by Jabberwocky teeth, dark stains blooming from the old man's chest, the sound of Henry's scream as he rushed forward to tear his brother apart. But like all the memories he had lost—the many, many memories he had lost—they were slowly coming back to him, in dreams and bits and pieces.

"I don't know," he said.

The cup clattered as she set it on its plate. She pushed it towards him without meeting his gaze. "Will that be all?"

Her voice was toneless, monotone. He wished he could blame the sudden greyness of her eyes on the weather.

"I'll have a scone. Please."

He got his scone and paid for it and ate by the window. Sabrina didn't say anything more until he was on his way out, when she called after him with some forgiveness, "Good luck with your self-pity project."

"Thanks," he replied.

"Yeah, you'll need it."

Sabrina was right. The house was a self-pity project. There were plenty of homes in Ferryport Landing for sale, emptied out by the Hand's tyranny or abandoned after the curse was lifted, and he had no right to go building another one.

But something had happened to him that day he lost the election; something had—snapped, like a bow strung too taut. He was no position to fix himself now. Fixing his house was the next best thing.

He was still very much broken.

Of course he had expected Snow to win. He had gone into the election preparing a concession. Hours after her name was announced, at the last ever party he was to throw at the mansion, he was more than fine. He toasted to the new mayor at dinner. He made it through a questionably sourced appetizer of banana blossom soup, courtesy of Relda. He wasn't quite hungry enough to finish off his pasta, which was just fine, since Elvis was in attendance and happy to do it for him, and he excused himself just before dessert to get Snow's present.

"Hurry back, dear," Snow had said, just loud enough for him to hear. Her smile was warm from too much wine. But they had just won a war, and she had just won the mayorship, and they were all friends here; there was nobody in the world at that moment who would hold it against her for pouring herself another glass.

He didn't know if it was her glass or somebody else's that shattered while he was up there in his room. But he knew it was wine that had been spilled because Goldi had cried in distress that it would stain, and he remembered that the acoustics of the mansion made the sound deafening, and it was difficult to forget what it felt like to have a heart attack.

At least he thought it was a heart attack. At first it was just a pulse that got louder in his ears, a sudden, heated sense of dread, a fear of both something that had happened and something yet to come. Perhaps it should have chilled him to the bone. But instead the fear seared through his skin, and the blackness behind his eyelids began to burn; he knew it wasn't normal for his heart to beating this fast or his chest to hurt or his lungs to squeeze the air out of his body and the oxygen out of his blood. He was dizzy and strangled and on fire, and could not remember what it felt like to breathe; his body had betrayed him as his history had, and he was terrified, and devastated.

He remembered, briefly, faintly, from his childhood, a young boy who would take a bite of his food before he did to make sure it wasn't poisoned. It had been a mistake not acquiring another such servant, he thought, at the same time he thought of how despicable it was that he would rather another person be killed in his place. He began to see spots and then unconsciousness found him, just before consciousness wrested him dutifully away from the darkness, and then he was breathing in huge, gasping lungfuls of air like a drowning man and weeping. Tears rolled down his face and onto his tie and onto the floor, and they wouldn't stop though he tried to keep them in, and he could not stop gasping even when he had enough air to think straight.

He stayed there on his knees for a long time. Snow's present—a tiny graphite pencil encased in rough ebony—had morphed into a fighting staff when it fell from its hand, and bruised his knees, but the pain was a dull ache; everything was a dull ache, a throbbing thing he pushed down like he pushed down all memory of his rewritten pain.

Tears spilled until they couldn't anymore. He stopped feeling them long before they stopped hitting the carpet. Numbness overtook him as dawn overtakes the dusk, and he stood up, and picked up the staff and twisted it back into its less threatening form as a writing utensil, then he rejoined his guests and gave Snow her gift to receive a hug in return. And he talked. And he laughed. And he drank. And when the moon reached its peak and friends began filing out he bid his most boisterous farewells, and said sweeter goodbyes to those who didn't quite want to leave. Those who were almost too drunk to stand up he admonished fondly before sending them home with Henry in the battered limo.

At the end of the night, when the sky was beginning to lighten and Snow had at last kissed him good night, one very tall, very beautiful woman remained at the door. She had her arms crossed over her tight black dress, her dark lips turned ever so slightly downward.

"Bunny," he said. He was on the stairs, a fresh hand towel slung across his arm to replace the dirtied one in the first floor bathroom.

"Billy."

He was smiling, warmly, flushed and tipsy on good wine, but the coldness of her voice startled him almost sober. He drew his face into something more appropriately solemn. "I'm guessing you're not here to help me clean up."

"I'm afraid," she said shortly, "that you may be experiencing some side effects of the rewrite."

He tried for a grin but it felt like more of a sneer. "I think I'm the same as I always was. But don't take my word for it. You're the one who created me. You know better."

Bunny's eyes were a cold, steel grey, and unflinching. "Unless you were having panic attacks before the war ended," she said, "I doubt you're the same. And I didn't create you."

"You stole me," he said.

She watched him, her gaze steady. Calculating. She said she wasn't, but she was a little evil. Evil, he thought, and stunning.

"You stole my life from me," he said, his smile crooked, mutilated. It was a smile anyone else would have stepped back from. "You stole lives from me."

The Wicked Queen stood her ground. Her eyes were dark but they smoldered. "To give life to my daughter."

Hysteria was a slow-acting poison, but it had been two hundred years, and his blood was boiling. "At my expense? At the expense of fate?"

"There's no such thing as fate."

"Of course there's such a thing as Fate," he said, the words cracking as anger flared bright and fearful in his chest. "You just overthrew her. Stole her throne from under her and now you sit on it pretending—"

"You're drunk."

"I'm dying."

"Try hard enough and you'll live forever."

"I can't live like this."

They stared at each other and his throat tightened.

"How?" he said finally, faintly. "How am I supposed to live with this? Knowing I let her die a hundred times? Knowing I shouldn't even be part of her story?"

"I can make you forget," she told him.

"I'm tired," he said, "of forgetting."

"Then I won't be of any use to you." There was edge to her voice that he couldn't place. "You suffer from an affliction that magic can't touch."

Of course I do, he wanted to say. Since when has my life been easy?

He took a page from Sabrina's book instead and muttered, "Whatever."

"I would never undo what I have done," she said.

He looked away.

She pressed on. "I would never have stopped writing until she lived to see another day."

"I know," he said. And he did.

"I would do it again."

"I know."

"I'm not sorry."

He met her eyes for a final time. "At least you can say that and not wonder if someone else put those words in your mouth."

Bunny left without even laying a hand on the door, and that was when Charming decided to build a new house. As far as he knew, he had never done anything on his own. Every action he had taken before waking a girl in a glass coffin in the woods had been determined by a witch, a wand, a word. Even now he was unsure as to the status of his own autonomy, but he would not let himself think the worst: he would roll up his sleeves and get to work and find sanctuary in a place that had not come premade.

He had spent ten or so minutes proudly surveying his newly purchased land before he realised he had no experience in the area of home construction. He finagled his way through Ferryport Landing's regenerating bureaucracy for the permits, enlisted the help of Boarman and Swineheart, and now resided in an almost completely empty two-story Georgian that was too big for any one person to live in alone.

It was, however, just big enough to distract a war casualty through the winter.

That day, Charming avoided the kitchen entirely, opting instead to drag the boxes of bed parts all the way from the garage to the front door. It meant that he had to circle the entire house, but he believed, rightly, that he wouldn't be able to handle any corpses until at least noon.

The work was time-consuming and pointless, but then, that was the point. It was a relief not to have to think about anything but hammering in the next nail. The sound of the drill drowned out Charming's unsettled thoughts, and splinters were welcome diversions from the pain that scarred his mind in lattices. All in all, the prince felt his best when at his busiest, which in hindsight was perhaps why he had been so invested in his office as mayor in the first place—along with the power and money to which he was accustomed, though the earnings he gained from the position were admittedly minimal. He was rich more through careful saving and investment of his acquisitions from the Old World than anything else.

With the autumn chill safely resigned to the outside of the house and the sun unabashedly pouring in through the windows, Charming was pleasantly warm as he worked, and his thoughts pleasantly numb. He considered going outside to sketch later. He used to like sketching, as a boy; the portraits he sat so still for always impressed him, but he had abandoned his artistic aspirations when it became clear he could put politics to better use than a paintbrush, and the inclination had only recently returned. He thought he'd try his hands at birds this afternoon: sparrows and warblers darted by the dozen about town, amidst the leaves, as much a part of the seasonal whirlwind as the dying trees. But lunch would have to come first. Butternut squash soup, he was thinking, with fresh bread, although he would have to go back downtown for the bread; he hadn't left any dough to rise—

"Not a scratch," came a voice from the doorway, and Charming turned around just in time to catch his keys.

"Of course there isn't a scratch," he said testily. "It's hexed."

Jake shrugged. He was clean now and wearing a blue sweater that looked a size too big—Henry's size, thought Charming—and dark wash jeans that were a mite skinnier than those he had sported in the nineties. Puck's, possibly. He was hefting his greatcoat in one arm. "Well, I brought it back, anyway. You need any help?"

Charming flinched. He didn't need help. He was fine. He was absolutely one hundred percent okay on his own.

He's talking about the bed, William.

"No," Charming answered, pulling away from the incomplete bed frame and rising to his feet. "Have you gotten that cadaver out of my kitchen?"

"Yeah," said Jake, "Puck's taking him back to Cairo. Thanks for letting me leave him here."

"You make it sound like I had a choice in the matter," Charming huffed, as he made his way past Jake and out the door. The Grimm tagged along at his heels, following him downstairs.

"All right, so I didn't leave you a lot of options," he conceded, "but still, you're a lifesaver, you know?"

"I don't want to know," said Charming ruefully.

"Mm. It's for the best," he said, and then they were in the kitchen, staring at the spot where the body used to be. "The more you know," he said ominously, leaning in close, "the more reason they have to kill you."

Charming clocked him in the shoulder and Jake laughed as he stumbled away. "So," he said brightly. "Lunch?"

Charming stared at him. Jake reciprocated the gaze hopefully.

"Grimms," is all Charming could say, with distaste, and an hour later he found himself knocking shoulders with Jake at the kitchen counter, watching steam rise from his bowl of squash soup.

Entirely blasé about risking a burnt tongue, Jake downed his food with relish. "Man, can you cook. If I'd had any idea, I would have broken into your house sooner."

Charming tried not to be flattered. He hadn't prepared a meal for anyone besides himself in years, and the compliment felt new and nice, but he wasn't about to forgive Jake that easily. Even if he was decent company, for a Grimm. Even if he'd gone out to buy the bread. "Maybe just ask, next time?" he suggested, and immediately regretted it, because Jake started grinning.

"Is that an invitation?"

"No," said Charming fervently. "I just meant, if you're going to drop by again, might as well do it legally—"

"I'm going to take that as an invitation," said Jake. He finished off his soup with a flourish. "And I accept."

"I never did anything to deserve this."

"You're right," said Jake, nodding seriously. "Very few people are deserving of my friendship. But you saved my ass last night, so I think you earned it."

The prince wanted to laugh at that, rudely, but he was caught off guard by light eyes and a crooked smile that promised comfort beyond the distraction of cooking, of cleaning, of furniture assembly, and he swallowed down the offenses that were stuck in his throat. "One condition."

"Shoot."

"You need to stop leaving dead bodies in my kitchen."

Out of bread, Jake leaned over to tear a chunk from Charming's portion, and he chewed thoughtfully and thoroughly before declaring, "No promises."

"Okay," said Charming.

"That's it?" said Jake. "You're not going into this screaming? We're friends now?"

"You make it sound like I have a choice in the matter."

"Aw, pretty boy, you've always got a choice."

"Then I choose you," said Charming, and Jake looked at him and it was the first time in a long time the prince felt seen. "Don't make me regret it."

A sweet kind of silence was suddenly caught between them, suspended by some quiet understanding, and Charming had seen centuries of strange things but decided then that this was the strangest. They were opposites in too many regards. There was rightly no connection between them besides that between every Grimm and Everafter, between soldiers who had fought on the same side and had lost the same friends. This thing that was happening—this empathy that embraced them, entwined them—it was a fluke. It had to be.

But Jake's expression was gentle and his words were soft when he said "I won't," and Charming felt his pulse hasten. Just a bit.

Before he could find the words to respond, Jake straightened and was his brashest, boldest self again. "Now, are you going to finish that soup?"

a/n: there is much more i wanted to do with this, but it will have to be done later.