A/N: Friends, I don't even know what this is. Basically, I've been having a lot of connection with Emma's struggles with…everyone…in her life at the moment, and so I was inspired to write this. It feels good to me, but it might not even make sense, so—yeah. There's that. I hope, though, that you enjoy it—and review if you like it or if you don't!
Disclaimer: As usual, my feels and my love for my ships and my words belong to me. Everything else doesn't.
"Be careful with Hook and Neal. The fact that they both have feelings for you is dangerous too."
Emma knows. She knows because she's been in relationships before—with players and cheaters and general idiots of every shade imaginable. Granted, they didn't last long. But she thinks that her serial string of failures may, for all its lack of positive results, give her just a smidge more insight into the whole romance-screws-things-up phenomenon than a woman who, one night stand with a cursed Dr. Frankenstein notwithstanding, has had a blissful romance with her true love, who will always find her—who isn't a pirate, or a traitor, or a mystery.
Even…especially…if that woman is her mother.
She wants to scream it out, to tell her and everyone else in this stupid misfit-superhero-rescue-team to get the hell out of her way because she is done being placated and advised and she wishes to God that she'd stayed in Boston alone and friendless and loveless because at least that way she could pretend that she was finished with hurting.
Perhaps she's even about to say it, but then she lets the talk rattle on about things that are more important to everyone else (and perhaps even to her), because she realizes that that's not what she misses. She doesn't miss Boston. She doesn't miss an empty room and a lonely cupcake. She misses being Henry's hero and David Nolan's confidante and Neal's…nobody.
And she misses the time when Mary Margaret thought that she was strong, and wise, and looked up to her for advice…before she was daughter and Savior and Lost Girl, for whom knowing everything now means power over nothing.
Including herself.