Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jefferson/Emma, Jefferson/Alice, Jefferson/telescope. I'm not kidding.
Genre: romance/angst/fantasy/shipping
Summary: Why is he being defensive? Why is he angry with her? The answer's pretty obvious. He only has to think about it for a second. Because she never speaks to him, and then she goes and kisses someone else, that's why. (pre-Hat Trick)
A/N: AND I MUST SHIP!
The Tarantist
Jefferson dreams every once in a while, and maybe they don't make any sense, but that's really the beauty of them: the stark raving mad beauty, red on white. He appreciates the lines of it, though they change every time he looks away, every time he opens his eyes, there's something different waiting for him.
Unlike this house. This house crouches in on him, mocking him and itself by turning space onto itself, rippling like a curtain till he's living in a fold that takes up far more area than it should. The only thing that retains its shape is the telescope, poised at the window in his work room, delicate and strong.
The telescope is the constant, and it shows him what he needs to know. When his fingers are sore and beginning to bleed, he abandons the workbench with hats half-finished and comes to the window. The telescope awaits him obligingly, and he wraps both hands around it and leans like a lover.
The telescope shows him the Sheriff, when she first arrives and before she takes office, when she was nothing more than a stranger with the Mayor's son in her little yellow Bug— cute and retro, he thinks serenely, almost disgustingly so— and before the clock started to tick again. (He can see the clock, too, and the telescope calls him over to watch at the exact moment that it springs into action, the hands shift; Jefferson, eyes covered, grins ecstatically and would dance, dance to break the spell, dance to burst the bubble, but the telescope holds him and makes him watch.) He watches the Sheriff for days on end, leaving only to bruise his fingers against cloth and felt and scissors and stab himself with needles from distraction. There's something about her, the telescope says. Pay attention, Jefferson, there's something here you need to know.
It's not surprising when the Sheriff starts pursuing him into his dreams, after that. In the darkness of his mind she glows with an almost unholy light. She is pure and untouchable, and she looks at him so coolly, as though he means nothing. He's on his knees almost at once.
"Who are you?" he asks her, because this is the Question to end all Questions, really. He's been asked it himself, once or twice.
The Sheriff shakes her head, frowning gently. "Weren't you crazy, or something?"
Well, it's true, he was crazy. He can't deny it. Wonderland did things to a man. He swallows hard past the lump in his throat.
"Emotional distress," he says. Is he defending himself or offering a solution? He doesn't even know.
"Huh," says the Sheriff, flatly. "I've had that. Didn't make me crazy."
"Severe emotional distress," Jefferson amends, and she shakes her head again. Dips her chin and fixes him with dark eyes.
"Let's have the truth, now," she says, but she doesn't stick around long enough to hear whatever it was he was going to say.
Dark eyes under bright hair— the name is on his tongue twenty-four hours a day, after that, and he sits at his work bench and stares at the telescope accusingly.
"Well, I miss her, don't I?" he defends himself, after a very long time. The telescope just waits, does nothing, and after a moment he pushes himself to his feet and comes to it. Slides his fingers along it, pets it, in an apologizing way. He isn't angry, he couldn't be angry; the telescope is his only friend, really.
It's punishment and retribution, then, that it makes him watch the girl again. Grace. The girl that never gets older, that goes about her life at just under ten years old, blithely unaware that her world is at a standstill. He could cry for the things she doesn't know, and he does. He cries into the lens until his vision is blurred and hazy, but still the telescope holds him, holds him still, makes him watch. It is impassive, and does not care about his tears.
Some days pass, and the Sheriff that is still not yet the Sheriff but only the Deputy— there's a song there, he thinks, and takes himself unawares with the knowledge of this world that isn't his own— is moving ever steadily forward towards being what she's meant to be. The telescope shows him, and though it's silent, he knows it's watching him watch her. It hears his heart speed, it hears his thick swallow, it hears his memories echo and churn. It's the hair, probably, sure, but it's the air of magic too. The woman who doesn't belong, and thinks she does. She follows him into his dreams on a regular basis, now, but she stays silent, she merely glows from the shadows with an accusatory stare.
Then the Huntsman dies— although the Sheriff doesn't know he's the Huntsman, she thinks he's just the man she kissed— and Jefferson's watching. Jefferson's watching because the telescope insists, though he doesn't like death and he doesn't understand what the telescope wants him to see. At first it's just the two bodies close, mouths and mouths, and he makes a small sound at the back of his throat to see the blonde hair and the dark, because it's like a mirror to a past life: in another world, this is Jefferson and Alice, close together and getting closer. Here, though, the only end is tragedy. Jefferson watches silently for a while, till the telescope lets him go and he steps back, looks down, lets the sedate pattern of the floor be a welcome blankness to his sight.
It's that night that she moves again, steps forward out of the shadows. He's given up on speaking to her, knowing that she never replies— and the arched eyebrow that she gives him at some of his dreams is commentary enough, probably— but this time it's the Sheriff that speaks first.
"Do you know who I am?"
Jefferson's dreaming about making a hat that insists on being a ridiculous beret. It's frustrating, to say the least, and he throws the felting needles down to turn to her.
"I did ask you," he says. Why is he being defensive? Why is he angry with her? The answer's pretty obvious. He only has to think about it for a second. Because she never speaks to him, and then she goes and kisses someone else, that's why.
The Sheriff shakes her head— she's always shaking her head— but this time she's smiling, just a bit.
"I thought maybe you'd figured it out by now."
"I've got more important things to think about," he tells the stupid, ridiculous, recalcitrant beret.
"Uh-huh," says the Sheriff, who clearly doesn't believe him. She moves toward him as he sits at the work bench, his back half to her, and takes the partial hat from him to hold in both hands. The felt in her fingers makes him anxious, and he shifts his weight on the bench, fidgets.
"It doesn't matter," he says.
"Oh, it so does," she tells him, with the beginning of a laugh. "You just keep telling yourself that, though. Whatever makes you happy, Jefferson."
He looks up at her, squinting into the light. She's glowing even brighter, this dream around. "Why do you know my name? I don't know yours."
"Emma," she says. "Sheriff Swan."
He scoffs, just a little. "Emma Swan. What are you, then?"
"Jefferson," she says, leaning into him. "I'm magic."
He can't believe this, because though she's undoubtedly special— the telescope told him as much— magic seems so distant now as to be a product of his own madness. He's not as mad here as he has been in the past, but nearly thirty years of trying to make one functional hat is enough to tamper with anyone's mental functions. Her mouth is tampering a little, too, though, and when he feels her fingers at his neck, he shivers. Just a little closer. She must hear him, somehow— well, this is a dream, after all— because her mouth meets his, angled slightly, lower lip first, and her thumb skims upwards on his neck to tuck the pad of it under his jaw.
He draws back almost immediately, though just a little, and she has enough space to say, "Oh, now you're a skeptic." Laughing at him, sure.
"I'm a realist," he says. It's more or less true.
"This is real," says the Sheriff, a sweet sort of lie, and he thinks of the dark with the light, two heads pressed close together, the past and the future, and it shoots a jolt right through him so he covers her laugh with his mouth. His hands are at her waist and she sinks down over him on the chair, fingers running the line of his scar. He wishes she hadn't told him her name, so he could carry on the lie of light and dark.
"Jefferson," she says, "look."
Open your eyes. Isn't it about time?
He turns his head and sees the hat beside him on the work bench, peaceful and complacent, waiting.
"Take me there," she whispers in his ear. "With you."
Jefferson wakes without breath, struggling in his lonely bed, covers jettisoned over the side and the sheet twisted intimately around his legs. He sits upright, covers his face with his hands, and concentrates on breathing till the world starts spinning again, time starts ticking once more.
The telescope calls him in the morning, and he sits at it without looking through the lens, to please both of them.
The day he realizes the curse is breaking— like clouds breaking, sun beginning to glint through, a lightness on the horizon— he stands by the door with hopelessness weighing down each arm. The telescope is in another room, it's saying nothing. He's alone for the first time in a long time.
It's a struggle, but he manages to lift a hand to the door, and turn the handle. The door opens without a sound, and the house unfolds itself behind him to its true size and shape. It's a beautiful house, he realizes, not bad at all. He loathes it anyway.
It doesn't matter now, though. Before him is the sunshine, the gravel drive, and a long arched path leading into the woods. He can run as long as he wants, provided he returns. The telescope will be waiting for him, when he comes back.
He hovers, indecisively, on the threshold before he closes the door carefully.
He wonders if the Sheriff would like to come for a cup of tea.