Swanfire darlings, this is for you! Please review, everyone! Please, please, please!

"Oh, my God, this is the best chair ever," Emma said, closing her eyes as she sank into Rumple's armchair.

"Yep," Neal agreed absently as he skimmed through a menu, phone in hand. "Okay, what toppings do you want?"

"Sausage, peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni, shrimp, and onions," she said decisively. "Ooh, and pineapple."

Neal stared at her. "That is disgusting."

"We'll only put in my half," she shrugged.

"You're damn right, we'll only put it on your half." Neal put the phone to his ear, scoffing. "Weirdo."

Emma rolled her eyes, sighing dramatically. "Don't try to tame my spirit, Neal."

They were taking advantage of Neal's house-sitting gig to enjoy the comforts of Rumple and Belle's mansion: naturally, pizza and a rented movie were required, because how could one properly enjoy a mansion without pizza and a movie? For Christ's sake.

Emma hummed something under her breath while Neal ordered the pizza, looking around the room interestedly.

"And that was…" There was a riffling sound as the kid flipped through his notes. "Sausage, peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni, shrimp, and onions?"

"And pineapple," Neal said, grimacing.

There was a pause. "Dude, your girlfriend's weird."

Neal rubbed his eyes, and sighed. "Yeah, I know."

He hung up, tossing his phone on the table and leaning back in his seat. Emma turned her head toward him, smiling appreciatively.

"This is a nice place your dad has here," she said, gesturing with one hand. "I mean, nice nice."

Neal raised his eyebrows, nodding. "Yeah, it's pretty cool," he said, looking around. "A bit much, in my opinion, but yeah, it's nice." He tapped his fingers against the armrest, a little hesitant of his next words. "Actually, I was kind of thinking about finding my own place."

Emma's eyebrows shot up. "You were?"

"Yeah, why not?" he shrugged. "I mean, I can't live at Granny's for the rest of my life."

Emma nodded slowly, carefully keeping her voice neutral. "Where are you going to look?"

"Well—" Neal scratched the back of his head. "You know, my dad's the landlord of that apartment complex. Figured he could give me a discount, which I could use since 'junior deputy' doesn't pay that great."

"That apartment complex…" Emma said, not looking at him as she traced her finger along the armrest. "Where I live."

Neal raised an eyebrow, not entirely sure what she was getting at. "Ye-e-e-eah….?"

She opened her mouth answer, then apparently thought better of it. "Never mind."

"Okay…" he said slowly, giving her a quizzical look. Emma kept her eyes down, tapping out a rhythm he didn't recognize.

After another few minutes, he couldn't take the silence anymore. "I'm going to set the movie up," he said, getting up from his seat and reaching for the DVD case. Emma glanced up as he popped the cover open, pulling out the disc.

"So, what did we get for tonight?" she asked, rising in her seat to look at the cover. She wrinkled her nose. "Eww, Moulin Rouge? What the hell, Neal?"

"You always talk during movies," he explained with a shrug. "So instead of getting a movie we'd want to see, and missing every word of it, I found a movie we wouldn't want to see, so it wouldn't suck when we realized we had no idea what happened."

"Oh," Emma said, raising her eyebrows and nodding. "Good thought."

Neal made a noise of agreement, bending over the DVDV machine..As he was wrestling with wires and cables, the doorbell rang. "That'll be the pizza," he said over his shoulder. "You want to grab that?"

"No," she droned, getting up all the same. Neal untangled the red wire from the yellow, and plugged them into their proper outlets while Emma dealt with the pizza kid.

"Okay," Neal said finally, resting his hands on his knees. "It's all set. All we need is to press 'play' when we're ready."

"Still can't believe you got Moulin Rouge," Emma said, bringing the pizza over. "Of all the movies I'd've seen you picking up…"

"Would you have preferred a Rachel McAdams movie?" he grinned, sitting across from her as she opened up the box. "The Vow? The Notebook? The Time-Traveler's Wife?"

"I'm sensing some Rachel-McAdams-hate," she remarked, picking up a slice from her ridiculously over-topped pizza.

"Rachel-McAdams-movie-hate," Neal corrected. "Rachel hasn't done anything to me."

He lifted his slice to his mouth, and stopped halfway, staring at Emma: she was busy picking off all the toppings, setting them off in little piles along the edge of her plate. She looked up, and frowned at him, pulling her pizza to her protectively.

"What?"

"What are you doing?" he asked. "You make me order all these ridiculous toppings, just so you can pick them all off?"

"Well, I wanted the essence of them, you know?" she said earnestly. "Like, I wanted the flavor, but I didn't want the actual toppings."

Neal raised his eyes to the ceiling. "You are so weird."

"Yeah, I am," she agreed cheerfully.

"What am I supposed to do with all those toppings now?" he said, gesturing at them. "Make a casserole?"

"It would be a very tiny casserole," Emma shrugged, dusting pepperoni crumbs off her pizza. "But yes. That would be adorable."

"What's adorable about a casserole?"

"It's not the casserole, it's the fact that it's tiny."

"Tininess has no merits of cuteness."

"Oh, my God, Neal. Yes, it does."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it actually does."

The debate lasted through the rest of the pizza, ending when they both agreed that tininess was a factor in cuteness, but not the deciding one. On that relevant note, they agreed it was movie-time.

"Okay, you ready to be mock the shit out of Ewan McGregor?" Neal said, bending down for the remote.

"Mmm-hmm," she said, getting up from her chair to toss her napkin in the box. "Come on, let's sit on the couch."

"Couch is good," Neal agreed, settling on the couch beside her as the trailers started up. Emma brought her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them as she leaned into him. Neal twitched a smile, bringing his arm around her shoulders. It was a nice, comfortable feeling, sitting with her like that.

They managed to get through three minutes of the movie before Emma started her commentary.

"Oh, my God, I hate him," she groaned as Ewan McGregor's character sobbed over his typewriter. "Do you think he dies in this movie?"

"One can only hope," Neal said, frowning.

"Where are they supposed to be, even? I can't tell."

"At the Moulin Rouge, he just said it."

"Yeah, but where is the Moulin Rouge? I'm feeling France, is it France?"

"I don't know."

They lapsed into silence. After a few disorienting loud, flamboyant numbers, the dull plot began to rear its ugly head. They suffered through half an hour of the director's attempts to be edgy and creative and poignant and tragic, even though it really only managed pointless. After a while, Neal felt his eyes flickering open and closed. He was starting to drift off to sleep, when Emma's voice woke up.

"Can I ask you something?"

Neal blinked rapidly, forcing himself to wake up. "Yeah, sure," he said, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "Go for it."

Emma twirled her necklace around her finger. "You ever think about what would have happened if…you know, if you hadn't listened to August?" she asked. Neal inhaled slowly, lowering his hand as he considered.

"Well," he said after a minute. "I s'pose we'd've headed for Canada, like we talked about…found what jobs we could…probably not very good ones, but whatever."

"Then we'd have gone after some crappy apartment that we could barely afford," Emma said, joining in. "With roaches."

"With roaches," Neal agreed.

"Maybe a bitchy landlady."

"Nuh-uh," he objected. "Canadians are nice."

Emma snorted. "That's a stereotype."

"Maybe," he shrugged. "One of the more pleasant stereotypes to get branded with, though, you have to admit."

"I admit," she smiled. "Okay, so what would have happened after our Canadian landlady?"

"Let's see…" Neal dropped his head back against the couch, looking up at the ceiling. "Henry would have come along at some point. That could have gone one of two ways: one being we keep him, and the other…we don't."

Emma was silent for a moment. "Do you think we would have kept him?" she asked softly.

Neal turned his head against the couch to look at her. "I like to think we would have," he said. "But if I'm being realistic…?"

"We wouldn't have been able to afford it." There was an edge to her voice: an edge laden with guilt and sadness. She stared at the screen dully, barely seeing it.

"Hey, come on, Em." Neal nudged her, making her look up. "Don't do that to yourself. Best chance, remember?"

"Yeah, I know," she sighed. "I just can't help but think that no matter what, in every parallel universe, I end up giving him away, and I just—"

"Feel guilty about it, but Emma, it was an impossible situation. In any universe." He took her hand, squeezing it for comfort. "Giving him up was the better choice. You wouldn't have been able to take care of him on your own, we wouldn't have been able to together… It was the right thing to do, and I'm just glad you had the strength to do it."

"But then he would have had to grow up in Canada alone," Emma mused, looking up at him. "And he would have had a Canadian accent. And eaten maple syrup with the other Canadian-accented children. And hunted mooses."

Neal frowned slightly. "It's not mooses. It's just moose."

"No," Emma said, raising her eyebrows. "You can look at a moose, and you can look at moose…Hey, you know what, you're right," she frowned. "Mooses doesn't sound right."

"And I don't think you're allowed to hunt moose, either," Neal said. "Leave the moose alone. That's just good, general life advice."

"That's true."

They turned back to the screen, watching Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman overact and sing their hearts out in yet another outlandishly over-the-top number.

"You know," Emma said thoughtfully. "I don't like how everything happened…but I like how it turned out."

Neal looked at her in surprise. "Yeah?"

She shrugged, looking up at him. "Yeah. I mean…we got a good thing going here in this little town, you know? I've got my parents, you've got your dad and Regina now, Henry's got an entire kingdom looking after him…it's nice."

"Nicer than living in a car and breaking into motels, anyways."

"Well, that had its moments, too," she said with a smile.