III. Emma

He had been having strange dreams. Perhaps it was the fairy's foot that brought it on. Another use for it, he recalled (perhaps too late), was the drinking of a tea made from it in order to help locate something once lost. Nothing too important, mind you. A misplaced key, a few silvers hidden from an over-thirsty husband and then forgotten. Small things, needing small magic to find them. It took no great wizard to make such a tea. Any wife in the village could brew such a thing.

Though he was only using the Enchanted Forest plant in a poultice on his side, it must be seeping into him, through his skin, working at recalling lost things, forgotten memories, to his sleeping mind. Awakening something in his blood, something of the past.

Such dreams and his unfiltered speech during them worried Aurora, who herself slept little enough of a night. He hated to cause her concern, to dim her cheerfulness in any way, but he feared stopping the poultice too early, especially since the bullet still rested within him, and had not yet worked its way out.

So he continued using the poultice, tried to bite his tongue of a morning when Aurora questioned him about things she may have overheard the night before. Tried to smile more to offset his tumultuous nights in her mind.

"You cried out last night," she told him one morning, her concern visible. "Were you in great pain?" she asked, ever sympathetic.

"You could say that," he quipped in understatement, though his pain had not been a physical one, and let it lay.

It had been a dream vision of some eleven years gone, during his time in the World Without Magic. He and Emma had thrown their lot in, briefly, with a traveling carnival, moving about the American Southwest. A month and a half in, and they'd even scored their own mini-trailer to park among the other carnies'.

He worked with Emma along the midway, where she ran several games and he was the crowd plant helping her sucker in the marks, getting them to throw a ball or toss a ring, and believe—because he had won—that the games weren't fixed.

They were pretty good at it, and while it was unusual for either of them to work for a larger group, they were, despite this, settling in. Things were becoming familiar, relaxed.

But he never went near either the freak tent or the fortune teller. Even such humbug magic left him cold and uneasy. He'd have nothing to do with it.

"I'm gonna need a better ID," Emma had confessed to him when first they signed on with this crew. Her eyebrow cocked in that fetching way it had when she was coming clean about something. That fetching way in which he really had to work to be cross with her over whatever she had been keeping from him.

"How come?" he had asked, knowing no one here was looking too closely at anyone's papers.

"Because I'm still a minor," she explained, speaking on perhaps a bit too speedily, "and my forgeries aren't really good enough."

"A minor?" he had asked, marveling, his mind officially blown. His eyes blinked in rapid succession, he shook his head back and forth. "What?"

"You're one to judge," she sniped back at him, not enjoying his reaction. "I don't even know your real name."

He shot her a look.

"Don't give me that," she busted his balls. "I may not have finished high school, but Neal Cassady? It's the name of some Jack Kerouac Beat or whatever. Not your real last name."

"That what you think?" he asked, working to keep defensiveness out of his voice, but testing her resolve in pursuing the matter. Emma Swan, after all, was hardly the greatest alias he'd ever heard of.

"How old do you think I am?" she asked quizzically, letting the question of his true identity drop.

"I don't know?" he replied, his confusion genuine. "Twenty? Twenty-one? You look twenty-one. At least." He paused. "You act forty."

He did not miss the spike of outrage in her expression. He lifted his eyebrows toward her. "You are definitely jaded enough for forty."

"Seventeen," she answered with finality, emphasizing the 'teen', proving again that there was still a level of withholding between them, no matter how close they had become. A closet yet full of secrets and unshared past.

Quick as he could, he had gotten her better fakes.

"C'mon," she had begged him, pulling at his arm in a girlish, clingy way Emma never employed. She was determined to visit the carnival's resident medium, who had promised her a free reading in exchange for some favor Emma had done her.

"Nah," he had tried to shrug it off, get her to let go of him. "You go." But she proved so set on it he finally allowed himself to be pulled along, albeit reluctantly.

The heavily-scented tent was prerequisitely dark. He kept as near the flap exit as possible as the woman tried to impress Emma with her practiced tricks. As one would expect, she looked deep into Emma's eyes and spoke of a trip, of true love, of reunions.

Growing bored (as well as already being uncomfortable), he risked a step or two forward and set his hand upon Emma's where it lay upon the medium's table, to try and get her to cut this nonsense short and leave.

"Em," he said, but the fortune teller had his hand almost before he laid it across Emma's.

"What is this?" the medium asked, seeing the bandage wrap across his knuckles that hid the few stitches he had needed after a small accident raising one of the tents with the other men.

"I don't know," he snarked to her, unnecessarily harsh, "you tell me." He was still intent on getting Emma to leave with him.

Emma looked up, her curiosity more than sated, her own skepticism having taken any fun out of this outing shortly after they had arrived. "Yeah," she agreed, able to sense his discomfort, "let's go."

But the woman had her thumb on top his bandage, and suddenly she was holding back his hand far too tightly for him to smoothly pull away.

"You should not have left," she said without preamble, her voice now devoid of the gloss she had put on it when faking Emma's fortune.

He did not respond, but tried again to jerk his hand out of her grip. No luck.

"You were protected there," she declared. "Powerful magic. Enchantment. None could spill your blood there. A protection spell. You don't belong here."

"Yeah?" he asked, faking interest, trying to cover for the instant sweat that had broken out all over him upon seeing a violet mist begin to swirl deep within her eyes. "Don't worry. I'm going," he told her, referencing only his and Emma's exit from her tent.

He could not pass through that flap quickly enough.

Emma, unusually, had not asked about the woman's speech. In fact, it was as though she had not actually heard it.

He walked, probably too quickly, back to the mini-camper they had been given to sleep in. "We gotta go," he announced, surprising himself by not simply saying 'I gotta go.' Or, in fact, not voicing his intent to leave immediately at all.

"Now?" she asked, somewhat taken aback.

"I can't stay," he had told Emma, knowing she would merely think someone had put the cops onto him. "She knows who I am."

They had quick-packed the few things they considered necessary for their coming travel, and had been on the road in the Bug minutes later.

That night, at the Flying J they had parked at for a few hours' sleep, both of them trying to fit with front seats reclined into the back (it was no mini-camper), their limbs and bodies a tangle not uncomfortable in the Fall chill, Emma was nearly asleep when, as he watched her, felt her presence, he realized how badly he wanted to tell her of his past. Had to remind himself that neither she nor anyone else in this world would ever believe him. Not even that fortune teller, likely, once the violet mist had dissipated from her eyes. His was a story too impossible for belief.

Still, he had said "we gotta go". Still, his heart had produced that pronoun shift.

"My name is Baelfire," he had told Emma that night at the Flying J, into her ear where it lay so close to his mouth as she was nearly asleep.

He had done it, spoken that word for the first time in that World, that magic-less world. He had agreed to give her that power over him. The power of his name. To go along with the power he was beginning to understand that she had over his heart.

"Build a fire?" she had responded, drowsily. "Nah, I'm not cold." And she had snuggled in closer to him.

He had kissed her ear, the one into which he had confessed, wished a blessing on her, and slept himself.

When he awoke from the fairy's foot dream memory, he realized he had forgotten. That old charm of protection when he was within the Enchanted Forest. That no one could spill his blood. So it was Poppa, after all, who had saved him from Tamara's bullet—The Dark One's magic staunching the flow of blood upon his landing here. Why he hadn't bled out. Why he had instead been able to heal.

"It's time to get this thing out of me," he informed the three amigos later that morning. "But I'll have to be the one to guide your hand," he warned Mulan. "Mine on the blade first, yours over it."

"What," Mulan had asked, no humor about her, only wary confusion. "Don't you trust me?"

So much more complicated than that, he thought, knowing she would not believe the truth: that in doing so he was saving her life, and his own.

…TBConcluded in Part IV. "Mulan"…