Author's Note: Beta by jdmusiclover. However I was rebellious, so any mistakes left are my own.
The first time she remembers having one, she was six.
She doesn't remember what she saw; she only remembers waking up in the middle of the night, the other children sleeping peacefully in their bunks, the room illuminated only by a small nightlight. She wanted desperately to stand up and turn the lights on; she didn't care if it would wake up and anger the other children. She only wanted to stop shivering in her bed. But the leftover terror from the nightmare kept her frozen, unable to relax for hours that night.
They would return sometimes in the next years. She would wake up and, unlike the movies, she wouldn't jump in bed screaming. She would only open her eyes to see nothing but the soft light from the night lamps or the moon, hear nothing but the soft (or loud) snores from the older children and the foster parents.
Sometimes she would scream, or cry. She didn't want to, she guessed, but she couldn't control herself. When that happened, an adult would come and hold her hand, stroke her forehead and stay by her side until she fell asleep, or at least until she pretended to. She'd come to realize that some parents were so impatient to go back to bed that even her pretending would do for them.
But there were times when the adult would stay and mean what they did. When she was ten, for the first time someone sang her to sleep with a lullaby. A foster mother named Irma took her in her arms, gently rubbed her back and said it was just a dream. When Emma lied back in bed expecting her to leave, Irma stayed there caressing Emma's hair, singing a soft tune, the melody and words of which Emma cannot recall anymore.
When she saw that same mother console the other children the same way, she felt shameless envy. Irma would hold them the same way, comfort them with the same words and stay until they fell asleep too. She felt a strong urge to run those times.
As she got older, it got worse. She realized that foster parents would prefer to comfort the younger children. "You're a big girl now", they would say before going back to sleep, but for other children, or for their children, they wouldn't be so indifferent.
She remembers vividly the nightmare she had in the early hours of her fourteenth birthday. She was walking through a dark, barely lit corridor between dungeon cells, and she could barely breathe. It didn't feel as if there was enough air in that place, but that didn't really scare her. What scared her was a woman suddenly opening her cell door and shooting her in the chest. She woke up only after a few moments of seeing herself lying on the filthy corridor, blood spilling out from her imaginary wound, the woman above her laughing.
She ran off that day. She didn't care about the birthday card that awaited her on the kitchen table. She just flung open the first door she found and started running until she realized the siren from the familiar cruiser car was ringing for her. Nobody told her anything after she was driven back home. Not that she expected any kind of celebration, the foster parents barely even remembered her birthday anyway, but when she entered the house and saw the indifferent looks from both parents and the other foster kids, she just wished she could shrink back to her six-year-old self and receive any kind of comfort, as fake as it always seemed to be.
The night she spent in that house with Lily, she barely looked at the TV screen, listening to the other girl mumbling nonsense in her sleep across the couch. She found herself hoping to have someone sleeping beside her, hoping it was something she could have for good. She liked having someone and standing by them herself.
It didn't take long to have that hope crushed.
And then there was Ingrid. Emma felt that Ingrid gave her special treatment, always coming for her whenever Emma's nightmares grew too wild for her to stay asleep. She would swear the woman had a camera monitoring her the whole night through, but honestly, Emma craved the genuine care showing in the woman's eyes, the way her soft voice didn't deliver sweet lies, the way her hand would keep caressing or even playing with her hair until she dozed off back to sleep.
The way she would kiss her forehead goodnight during the few days Emma stayed there after learning she would be adopted.
After her, the streets weren't a great place to find someone to lean on after waking up in a cold sweat, breathing hard with a racing heart. She'd gotten used to the nightmares, she could usually fight them, but sometimes they were too many and too cruel for her to stand. Sometimes, when she would wake up on a cold and hard bench, her stomach growling, she would wish she could go back to any of the homes she was in. Even the fake care, being jealous of the children who were so lucky to get even that, was a comfort. Sometimes.
The first night she slept in the Bug, she practically didn't sleep at all. She was lying on the back seat while Neal was scrunched up in the driver's seat, trying to hug himself warm. Neal didn't mumble in his sleep, but he would shudder and sigh from time to time during the night. She cursed herself for feeling the need to wake him up and tell him it's okay. She wondered if he was dreaming about his father.
For the first time in her life she felt glad she had nobody like that to have nightmares about.
Emma felt her heart swell the first time she dragged Neal into the back seat with her. She wanted to treasure the moment, the first time someone hugged her to sleep in almost a decade, but she fell asleep immediately and didn't dream at all.
When he told her about the dreamcatcher, she'd laughed it off.
She thought she had it all. He would caress her when she was shivering, and she would do the same for him. And it felt complete. For the first time in her life, she felt certain. The old crushed hope was nothing compared to what she felt with Neal.
(And if they managed to get rid of the freezing cold in Oregon, she would never complain again.)
But even that certainty flew away through her prison bars. She heard it fade away with the cries of her baby as he was carried away to a better mother - one who was not plagued by nightmares with no one to comfort her. That was when she simply let the nightmares come. She didn't feel she had anything left at that point. Laying on her hard mattress, her body still hurting, still remembering the baby moving inside her, she would wish for the familiar nightmares and the familiar loneliness that followed their restless aftermath. There was obviously something wrong with her, something she had yet to discover. So if the universe thought this creeping loneliness was the punishment she deserved, she would welcome it and learn to live with it, carefully avoiding actually sleeping with anyone next to her.
It wasn't easy. Sometimes the urge to listen to the other guy asking her to just stay, it's late, I mean, you can sleep on the couch if you want was almost too strong to handle. But it was familiar. She knew how to mute it and ignore it, hard as it was. And it got easier as years went by, slowly finding herself wondering how she could ever sleep with someone lurking to hear her cry in her sleep, only to take that as an advantage against her.
So the first time Mary Margaret woke her up, Emma was so shocked she almost reached for her gun.
"Easy! It's just me," she said.
Emma shook her head and turned towards her. She looked worried, and Emma hated it. Mary Margaret had welcomed her into her home, cared for her and treated her as, God, family, and Emma was worrying her awake.
"It's nothing, it was just a bad dream."
"Yeah, I saw that. Are you okay?"
Emma looked at her as if she'd spoken in another language.
"Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be?"
"I… well, Emma, you were crying."
Her voice was so soft and her eyes so caring that Emma felt her heart clench.
"I was just worried, I mean, I didn't think you'd want to keep dreaming whatever you were dreaming."
"Yeah, well, I'm… okay now. Thank you."
"Do you want me to-"
"No, no, I'm okay. Go back to sleep."
Mary Margaret nodded hesitantly and rubbed Emma's forearm.
"Sweet dreams."
For a long time Mary Margaret didn't find out that her wish had come true that night.