Title: Hope in All its Forms
Rating: K+
Summary: In the Underworld, Emma searches the headstones.
Note: Snowbellwells prompted: "I really wanted Emma to look for Graham's headstone in the Underworld, wanted her trying to make sure that he had gone on to eternal peace and wasn't still suffering. That could have been a lovely moment and they missed out on putting in." There will be at least one follow up to it.
She tells herself that she doesn't know what she's looking for.
The cemetery in the Underworld is vast, full of headstones both solidly intact and cracked along their foundations. She's seen Neal's and Johanna's and even Walsh's. But as her fingertips trail along the hard, uneven stone of someone called Kurt, her heart aches as she realizes exactly whose stone she wants to find.
She's not sure if she hopes to see it cracked or, selfishly, if she wants to see it tall and proud. She wants to see him, to touch his face and those wild curls like she never got the chance to before he was gone. She wants to ask who he was back then, to hear how his time was spent, to demand answers to why he left.
She doesn't want him to be suffering, though, could never wish for that. After a long moment her throat closes up and she hopes he has moved on.
Her wrist feels glaringly bare, a smooth line of white where the bracelet had graced for more than a year after his death. As she moves, the chain of her necklace rolls across her clavicle, and her breath catches in her chest. She shouldn't be feeling like this when there is another that has managed to brush past all the walls surrounding her heart, but another part of her insists that she must feel it, just the same.
She swallows thickly. The mist is rising over the field, thick and foreboding in the crimson glow. She lets out a low breath and closes her eyes. Instinct flickers inside her, and she turns sharply as her eyes snap open.
It is there, as if it has been waiting for her the entire time. Thick block lettering scrolls out his name, solid and cementing. Graham Humbert, it reads, and just below, The Huntsman. And it is sturdily upright.
She stares at it until her eyes turn scratchy, itchy in dryness, as her throat collapses into itself, as her heart jackhammers against her ribcage.
It feels like it did that day, the day he collapsed in her arms.
The wind finally sucks into her lungs, hard and painful, and her knees slam on the ground as she loses her equilibrium. The tears fall down her face, and she's not even sure if she can pinpoint why. It is sharply familiar, the feeling of loss that resounds inside her.
She realizes that some terrible part of her wanted to believe that the headstone wasn't there, because (just like Archie, just like Neal the first time, just like Blue, and August) he wasn't really dead, not actually. It had been too sudden, and during the curse, so maybe he was just waiting in some fifth world for her to find him once more.
The part of her that had that beautiful, treacherous hope cracks and falters under the pressure of the reality.
Her nails bite into her palms, and she takes the second to calm her hiccupping breaths. This isn't the world she wanted to find him in. Not when she can't bring him home.
She squints at the headstone, not able to look directly at it. It hurts, even just the small glance. With a shiver, she brushes her hands down her arms and considers it a long, uneasy moment. Finally, she bites down hard on her lip and reaches forward, the rough stone scrapping against the pads of her fingers as she traces the engraving.
She's barely said his name since he left, barely managed. To see it now reminds her of why that is. Her nerves feel raw and frayed, a livewire waiting to be ignited with the barest tinder.
She's not sure how long she drowns in her grief, how long she lets herself be consumed by it. The light never changes down here, and she can't clock the hours or minutes she stays locked in the emotion.
She doesn't feel better after it is expelled. She just feels resigned.
She sniffs and brushes her palms along her knees. Carefully, she pushes everything under pragmatism. She stands on shaky legs, and instead tries to consider the one new piece of information: The Huntsman.
She hadn't exactly read the book forwards and back, but she thinks she knows who the Huntsman is … was. She remembers part of her mother's story, a man with a wolf and a sacrifice. Somehow, the realization makes his death all the more senseless.
A part of her wants to ask Henry, to see if he knows. He is the expert on his book, has practically memorized the entire thing. But another part of her is scared to hear it; she already knows what kind of person Graham had been, and to hear explicitly how his happy ending never came would be all the more heart-wrenching.
(the look in his eyes as he cupped her face flashes behind the lids of her eyes and she blinks it away before it can settle)
Either way, it doesn't stop the resounding feel of failure that echoes in her soul.
And the new, dreaded hope that she may still see him again.