Title: This Side of Paradise

Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon A Time. If I did, Adam & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway.

Summary: A curse is broken and the aftermath is far from a happy ending. (mentions of Swanfire) (rated M for language))

Genre: Angst/Family, Hurt/Comfort

Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

CHAPTER ONE

THE BLIGHT

Something was wrong with Emma. David noticed it at the hospital, the tension in her shoulders, how quickly she handed the baby off to be passed around and shuffled her way to the bathroom to shower and change.

While Snow initially insisted that Emma was just tired from the labor and being bombarded by family and extended honorary family, as the hour approached for the new prince's coronation at Granny's and Emma hadn't yet shown or even picked up her phone while Hook was already toasting with his "mates" and insisting his wife just wanted herself and their son to look their best, she had to concede to her husband that it wasn't like their daughter to ignore them for the past two days. Or, perhaps, more accurately, it was like their daughter used to be but hadn't been since the whole Dark One mess when she'd retreated from everyone.

After ensuring that Neal was being watched and entertained by the gathering crowd and away from any sharp objects the toddler might find interest in, Snow and Charming jumped into their pickup and headed to the gray Victorian a block down from Miflin Street out front of which was parked a familiar yellow Volkswagen Bug but no sign of Emma fastening in her younger son to head to Granny's. It was still full of the fast-food wrappers and unfinished paperwork that David had noted when last parked at the Sheriff's Station, before Emma went into labor and he drove her to the hospital because of, well... Zelena.

"The least Killian could have done is cleaned out her car for her," sighed Snow, not particularly feeling the love for her son-in-law of late. He seemed to have done nothing but party me-harty over having a son since holding the baby. She was starting to sympathize a little with Gold who'd remained in the hallway glaring at the gathering, not remotely happy that Emma had talked him into giving the pirate back his hand permanently so he could hold his infant son properly.

"He has two hands now. He should be using them both to help Emma!" she huffed. "Why couldn't she have fallen for someone more like you?"

"Because she fell for someone who was more like her, I suppose, and by that it seems more like my brother than me," shrugged David with a slight wince, a fact he'd had to come to grips with over the years as he saw less and less of himself and more and more of the man he met in The Underworld in his daughter.

Emma had eventually revealed that she wasn't quite the long-standing hero and advocate for justice that she'd led Henry and all of them to believe when she came to Storybrooke. She was actually a criminal up until only a year before and only gave that up out of an opportunity to work of a probation violation as a bountyhunter for the company of a woman who died trying to apprehend her.

It was a shocking and disappointing revelation, to be honest, though no more David imagined than Emma finding out about the spell they had cast on her before her birth, a spell that for all they knew, was directly or somewhat responsible for the self-centered tendencies she'd stopped fighting against since becoming involved with Killian Jones.

But Hook made her happy and that's what mattered. That's what they had to tell themselves, anyway.

It was increasingly hard, though, of late to keep repeating that mantra.

After all, sometimes encouraging someone to do what seemed to make them happy, what seemed to be the way by which they accepted and were accepted into a new kind of life, backfired quite badly.

Case-in-point, the front garden, withered even though it was well into spring, just like most of the other gardens in town. The latest Storybrooke magical crisis that struck about a month ago was more of an eye-soar than anything life-threatening, though there was some initial panic concerning food shortages.

They were still waiting for Moe's shop to reopen, and the grocery store produce section was a bit barren while The Dwarfs took over Anton's farm to sprout and tend new flowers and crops, but it was certainly not the worst calamity to ever strike town... just a rather tragic one as they'd considered Anton, if not a friend, a close acquaintance who'd seemed to be a good person at heart.

"You think you know someone," sighed David as the brittle remains of a rose bush snapped with opening the gate. "I really thought he was part of this community, that he considered humans his friends."

"We should get the Dwarfs over here to replant," Snow decided, not wanting to dwell on Anton's apparent breakdown and attempt to unleash a famine on Storybrooke. "It's less noticeable how depressing this place looks when there's a full garden in bloom. And maybe we can finally convince Emma to paint it. I don't see why she has to keep it gray. It just seems like an additional reminder of the circumstances under which she bought - or stole - the place as the Dark One. I'm still surprised Henry helped pick it out. It really doesn't seem to fit either of them. Picket fences? I don't even like them. And it must have some awful memories for Emma. I just don't understand it..."

Shrugging, David considered, "Maybe she and Hook turned the basement cave into some kind of disgusting Dark One role-play sex dungeon..."

"What's wrong with you? I don't want to imagine that!" Snow huffed.

"Hey, you're the one who convinced me to accept their relationship," David shot back, "with all of its clearly problematic sexual issues because Hook made her happy."

"You said he grew on you."

"Like toenail fungus. I only let him tag along because he's always willing to jump into the fray just to look macho in front of Emma. And if he dies in the process again... well... she's already worked out how to go about mourning him and we've still got the gravestone and coffin, and if we're lucky, Zeus will be taking the day off and Hera will smite him to wherever douchebags go after The Underworld."

"David, that's awful!" Snow hissed, though she bit back a slight smile, because Hook, while easy on the eyes, really was a pain in the ass most of the time. She wanted Emma to be happy, really she did, but that didn't mean she wanted her glued to Hook like a barnacle, turning every family gathering into a public make-out session. There was really no way anyone could still be that into a person after this long, which just made it seem like some kind of 'we are better/hotter than you' contest that was frankly becoming insulting.

"What's awful is Emma answering the phone 'Ahoy' and calling him 'The Captain'," David grumbled. "I have no idea how I went so long without that annoying the crap out of me! It's just weird."

"Well, I call you 'Charming'. I suppose she wanted a nickname for Killian," Snow shrugged. "She seems big on emulating our story."

"Right, and there's nothing unhealthy about that," he sighed at which Snow grimaced in agreement.

Frankly, it didn't seem like the couple had a very healthy basis for a relationship, how they met notwithstanding, something Snow had been pondering since having to watch them make-out like horny teenagers for the 10,000th time at Granny's.

In retrospect, since Snow had trusted a complete stranger with no knowledge of modern medical science and a big-ass weird emerald necklace to be her midwife, she had to blame "baby brain" also for setting her previous reservations about Hook aside to encourage Emma's reticent and seemingly pure-sex-distraction-form-everything-else-in-her-life-based interest in the pirate instead of squashing it and getting her to deal with all of the revelations she'd gone through in just a few short months before jumping into a relationship with a man who'd recently tired to kill them all more than once, never mind who was also Henry's step grandfather.

And who had such awful taste!

"That's so tacky," Snow complained of the empty rum bottles lined up front porch railing.

"Worse than the miniature Jolly Roger mailbox?"

Before Snow could answer, they both heard the muffled cries of a newborn, and when knocking and ringing the doorbell failed to herald the sound of footsteps, David used their key.

The living room and kitchen were a mess, reminding of Emma's "house" in The Underworld, strewn haphazardly with the baby items and toys that they and others had dropped off prior to the coronation/belated baby shower scheduled for today. Under the layer of toys, Snow lamented, was more nautical themed crap. While she had been no fan of Emma's "Dark Swan" interior decorating, she'd rather take a bland Ikea catalogue interior over this 18th century English naval museum theme that had been expanding outward over the years from Hook's man-cave room where he kept his selection of expensive rums and presumably his porn stash.

Even the rather narcissistic blown-up framed drawing of the pair at the ball in the Once Upon a Time book above the mantle and their wedding photo with Emma in Snow's gown and flowers in her hair were now mostly obscured by crap like ship-shaped salt shakers and a tie rack that had rope tied in nautical knots hanging from it like little nooses.

It was no wonder Henry spent most of his time at Regina's. This place looked nothing at all like the apartment he and Emma had decorated in Manhattan. Snow wasn't sure exactly when Emma had turned Hook's sea-fairing predisposition into an OCD hoarding of all things naval and pirate-related, but seeing it combined with the mess of baby toys somehow made it seem far more disturbing than in the past when she'd shrugged it off as a tacky but harmless hobby.

"I don't think this is Hook's," David pointed out a nearly empty bottle of McClutcheon's Whiskey amongst the open boxes on the coffee table and exchanged an even more worried glance with his wife.

While Emma had a tendency to drink when she was in emotional turmoil - to try to numb and not deal with the emotions - and her continued day-drinking as some sort of flirtation with Hook was something that had never sat well with either of her parents, particularly David whose father was an alcoholic, neither of them would have expected her to get drunk two days after giving birth... even considering the onion-ring-accelerated pregnancy was sure to have thrown her off her game a bit.

"Emma?" Snow called out, but the only answer was their grandson's crying.

Upstairs, the master bedroom was empty and so was Henry's little used room, outdated with a young teenager's posters and other items that that no longer interested the boy who'd just gotten his driver's permit.

While David braved going down into the basement, Snow found the newborn in his crib, red-faced over a soiled diaper and smacking his small lips with hunger.

"Shhhh, it's okay," Snow tried to comfort the infant, but it clearly wasn't. Very clearly wasn't.

The wall paper that she and David had hastily put up while Emma was still recovering in the hospital was scorched all around the rocking chair in the corner. And she found her daughter's ring in the diaper pail.

"No sign of her anywhere," David reported, looking rather pale when they regrouped back in the kitchen.

"Are you okay?" Snow asked, concerned, and he shuddered.

"No. I think I'm going to need therapy. It really is a sex dungeon. There's whips and shackles, bra-less corsets, and buttless leather chaps. And trunks of things no father should ever know his daughter uses!"

Before Snow could comment on that horror, David's phone buzzed with a voicemail from the 911 system.

He read the transcript with a mix of dread and releif. "There are 'magical anomalies' reported at the edge of the forest near Old Yale Road."

"Emma..."

AN: If I mispelled Regina's street or the booze, sorry. I was too lazy to Google them.

Next up: The Playground.