Not All Stories,
Written by WickedSong.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything used here. This is a small drabble, based on a caption I wrote for a gifset I made on tumblr. I just took the quote and I ran with it, so this is basically a train of thought kind of piece. Hope you enjoy!
Not all stories end 'happily ever after'. Some just end. As if they weren't even important enough to begin with. But they were. And they are. They are the ones that are remembered – as unjust, unfair, tragic.
Not all stories end with Prince Charming waking Snow White up with a kiss of pure, true love. Some just end with The Lost Princess, the unknowing Saviour, cradling The Heartless Huntsman's limp form in her arms. Where Prince Charming tells Snow White that he will always find her, his long lost daughter simply begs for the sheriff to wake up.
And when the spell is broken and their eyes opened, it is much too late. Charming and Snow find one another one more time. And they find their daughter too. But their daughter finds that declarations of missing hearts and Evil Queens she had long ago put to the recesses of her mind are true. Her guilt cannot be assuaged. Even if she is sure he smiles down on her with pride, instead of turning away in hate.
Her son begins his stories, 'once upon a time' and it's another world. Because in that world didn't good always beat evil? Didn't patience and purity win out? Weren't they the rules of whatever world she had been born in? Her mother tells her a story of her own that she believes will make her daughter see the similarities all too clearly. That she had once found herself cradling her Charming as he bled in her arms; gone, deaths icy grip taking hold of him and refusing to let go.
But that is a story that ends happily, or at least as happily as she can see for now. And therein lies the difference.
So the Saviour, the Princess, she's not bogged down in titles, decides to keep him around in the small ways. A doughnut she doesn't eat here and there because perhaps it would've been his (some clichés are true), his jacket hanging close by (I thought that you might want it after all) and a badge she swears to do only good by because dammit it, that's what he would've wanted (if you really want to be a part of this community then we have to make it official)
It is, to her surprise, her father who makes her see what it really is, in the end. She's at the grave, she comes here once in a while, just to say hello and have a quiet place to think. He had found her special place and knelt beside her. He understood and was quiet. The final battle for good against evil has been won, and in the face of the casualties, they have been worn out by it all. But she still has to thank him, because he was the first to fall, and she hadn't even realised.
And again, she's crying, and her father holds her and tells her it will all be okay. He claims he's not a good father because he missed twenty-eight years but she is sure it is his next words that make him the greatest.
He may have never got to have a 'happily ever after' but you gave him something much greater, Emma, you gave him a happy ending.
While she still thinks it was a horrible ending, she remembers the night vividly and that tells her all she needs to know. If he could've he would've stayed. He would've been the exception, the important one. And it is still as unjust, unfair and tragic as it was that night – and it always will be. But she has heard stories now. And she knows he was free. She freed him.
And that is all she needs to know and to remember for it all to be okay.