A/N: Hello again, everyone! Two chapters in one day? You see right! I just got the last few chapters back, so the whole story is ready. Why wait, right? :)

Thanks as always for your wonderful reviews! They made my day to read.

My awesome beta emlovesyouu is entirely responsible for this chapter being what it is. I don't own the show - if I did I wouldn't be writing fanfiction! Same goes for the lyrics. Any resemblance to any real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

Enjoy!

Chapter 7

And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows

28 October 2014

The long trudge back to town after defeating Ingrid's freaky black ice snow monster would have given Emma a lot of time to think if Elsa had remained quiet and left her to her thoughts. Every time the silence grew too awkward, the Arendellean queen attempted to draw her into conversation. Her most recent effort was unfortunate, to say the least.

"So, that was something back there, wasn't it?" Elsa picked her way over a fallen tree as she tentatively asked her question.

"What was?" Emma asked in return.

Elsa looked at her with a curious expression, concerned at her deflection. "Mayor Mills seemed colder than the ice bridge."

Miss Swan, one thing's abundantly clear: you've never had my back, and you never will. "Yeah, well, the attempt to fix things with Regina didn't exactly go as well as I hoped it would," Emma gave a dry laugh as she found the beginnings of the path that led back to Storybrooke's outskirts. "She still hates me, and that's not going to change. We teamed up to beat Ingrid's freaky ice demon, but that's all it really is now."

"Will you keep trying?"

"To work with her? I don't really have a choice. There aren't too many magic-users here, but I get the feeling that she'd rather work with Gold than me," Emma explained as they picked up their pace on the cleared pathway.

Elsa pursed her lips. "Will you keep trying to repair your friendship with her?"

With a sarcastic bark of laughter, Emma shook her head, moving quicker as she saw her car parked to the side of the road. "I think if I keep pushing her, she'll probably fireball my ass into next week." You ruined my life. And there is no coming back from that.

"I'm sorry I took off," Elsa apologized once they were in the car. "The snow queen tricked me. She made it seem like Anna was here. I thought I was chasing her."

Emma gave her a wan smile. "I get it. I'd do the same thing."

"So why did you let Regina just walk away?" Elsa persisted in her query, seemingly determined not to allow Emma time to mentally run from the confrontation. She stared out the window at the passing trees, but her question was no less pointed.

Emma grunted, keeping her eyes on the road; the only exception an occasional sidelong glance at her passenger. "You heard her. She wants nothing to do with me."

Elsa shifted her attention to Emma's profile. "Maybe you shouldn't give up on her so soon," she prodded, her voice quiet and calm in the near-silence of Emma's car.

With a shake of her head, Emma dispelled the notion of keeping after Regina to force a reconciliation. "It's like I said, once you screw someone over, there's no going back," she answered, hating the defeat she could hear in her own voice. You got your hopes up again, Swan, and look where it got you. She left, just like everyone always has.

"I don't believe that. If there's one thing my sister taught me, you don't give up on people. If someone's important to you, don't give up on them. Even if they say hurtful things or send a giant snow monster to chase you away," the Arendellean insisted. As she went on, her tone grew stronger and more forceful, even as she tried to lighten the atmosphere with her closing joke.

"And if there's one thing that my life has taught me, it's that eventually, people will leave. For one reason or another, I will always end up alone," responded Emma, despondence written across her entire being in that moment. It hurt to think of Regina in the same grouping as the dozens of foster parents and false friends she'd lost over the years, but that was the way things seemed to be heading.

Silence reigned in the car after that. Trees eventually gave way to clearings, which led to dirt roads, paved roads, and finally the streets of Storybrooke. Emma spared a thought for how intricate Regina's plans were to account for everything a small rural town would have.

She consciously took a route detouring around Mifflin Street before ending up in front of the loft. If Elsa noted the evasion, she kept her thoughts to herself. When Emma parked, Elsa unbuckled her seat belt with the usual extra attention she paid to modern devices. "Aren't you coming inside?"

Emma looked down at her own seat belt before answering. "Nah, I don't think I can handle the Charmings tonight, especially the kiddo. I'm going to drive somewhere to find some space and time to think."

The other blonde gave her a knowing smile. "I understand. I'll – what is it you call it? – run interference with your parents for you?"

"Thanks, Elsa," Emma replied, smiling her gratitude at the kindness. She backed out of the parking spot after Elsa went inside before driving to the one place she felt certain Regina would be at that particular moment.

Approaching the mausoleum above Regina's magic-storehouse, Emma noted the closed door and tested her still-unreliable magic. Reaching out with her emotions, she felt an incredibly strong protection spell cast over the small building. Picking up a nearby rock, she carefully hefted it to gauge its weight. With a grunt, she tossed it at the building, only to see a purple shimmer in the air as the spell did its job, flinging the stone off in a random direction.

Crap. She REALLY doesn't want to talk to me.

After staring at the mausoleum for a few moments, Emma turned and walked back to her Bug, shoulders slumped in defeat.

2 November 2014

Fourteen years removed from foster care and nothing had changed, Emma snorted to herself as she trudged through Storybrooke's northern woods. Changing group homes as often as she changed her socks, she'd gotten used to keeping things to herself. It made it both easier for her to avoid the heartbreak of leaving friends and gave less to older kids looking to be bullies.

Finding family and friends had started to change that, but there she was, stepping around fallen trees and looking for a random ice cream truck, alone in a crowd. The only difference between twelve-year old Emma and thirty-year old Emma was that her current isolation was not her choice.

Regina was continuing her policy of completely ignoring her. When Emma tried to force eye contact for some sort of human recognition, the brunette went so far as to duck behind a tree, shouting at Robin to get the lead out.

Hook had apparently completely moved on from her, spending the entire trek on his phone with Tinker Bell. At least the fairy had taught him how to use his phone, Emma chuckled to herself. Her mirth turned sour when Hook began spouting things like 'me fair fairy' and launching into some more risqué remarks about his plans for that evening.

She dropped back to spend some more time around her parents before the group split up to cover more ground, but that wasn't any better. Mary Margaret and David, not seeing her slowing down to walk with them, were in full discussion on childcare options with their combined work schedules during Maine's colder months. With the coming school year and David taking on extra time at the station while Emma searched for the Snow Queen, they were apparently in need of alternate arrangements. When they started talking about how to improve Storybrooke's preschools for Neal and the other children his age, Emma felt a growing ball of nausea settle deep in her stomach. Hearing her parents talking about how to give her baby brother every advantage she'd never had as a kid was a new kind of torture.

Emma had rarely been as relieved as she was when the search party broke up to search different sectors of the forest. Her nerves, already frazzled from the past few weeks, were wearing as thin as they had ever been after the morning of being ignored by those she still considered her nearest and dearest. The rapid transition from feeling like she was a treasured part of a community to a virtual outsider left her disoriented and unsettled as she picked her way toward another potential fight.

The silence echoed in her ears as they stumbled upon the ice cream truck. Emma had to blink a few times to be sure she wasn't seeing things. A real, honest-to-God ice cream truck in the middle of the Maine woods. She unclipped her radio, clearing her throat. "David, call off the search party. We found the truck near the Merry Men's camp."

She looked at Robin, standing guard and looking slightly ridiculous as he stood guard with a 21st century crossbow. "Thanks for keeping an eye out," she said, proud of herself for only including a tiny bit of sarcasm.

"Gladly. You're the first sheriff I don't mind assisting," came his reply.

At least someone was talking to her.

But just as quickly he turned from her to speak with the Mayor. "Uh, Regina, I was hoping we could talk."

Regina rolled her eyes, but kept her focus on the truck, pushing forward to the back door. "Um, in case you haven't noticed, I'm about to storm an evil ice-cream truck," she snarked, pushing past him.

"You could have just said, 'Maybe later'," Emma chided, hoping the barb would at least draw a reaction.

"I know you're trying to make everything better, but staying out of it is your best bet. It's bad enough I'm stuck with you on this search. Once we take out Frosty the Snow Bitch, I can finally get a moment's peace and quiet," Regina shot back.

Emma blinked her eyes at the explicit rejection in the rebuke. She hadn't expected anything less, but the sting was still sharp. "Sorry," she muttered, unsure of what else to say.

Regina snorted. "Of course you are. Just do what you always do and follow my lead."

Before Emma knew what to say, they were combing through the remnants of her childhood in an empty ice cream truck in the middle of the woods.

9 November 2014

The search for the Dairy Queen's hideout was fast going nowhere, leaving Emma with that rarest of boons in her new life: a day off. When the search of the woods turning up the ice cream truck-turned surveillance van but no Snow Queen, they'd called off the hunt temporarily. David – who had fallen into the role of group leader by default with Regina only interested focusing on something that wasn't Robin's wife and Emma getting more and more stuck inside her own head – left them all with the phrase 'regroup and reassess'.

She'd added next to nothing on the search, depending on Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who she still expected to be a fox and a bear, to find the truck and Hook to break into the freezer. Any of them could have looked through the folder of her past and known what it had meant. She had been almost entirely extraneous on that search, so with David calling for a break, her day off couldn't have come at a better time.

It also helped that it lined up with her promise to give her parents a night off of their own. She grimaced as she walked from the station to Granny's, where Cinderella – Ashley, Emma reminded herself with a snort – was holding her Mommy and Me class. It was somehow ironic that Cinderella, a former maid, was teaching new mothers how to take care of children.

Emma held back a huff as her boots echoed on the concrete sidewalk. Time to go be a good daughter. Maybe they'll decide that's enough for them.

There was no part of Emma that had been prepared to babysit her infant brother at the age of 30. She'd never even babysat her foster siblings. Repeat runaway episodes had left her with the 'unreliable' reputation that no parents wanted in charge of the younger kids.

Feeling her spirits wane, Emma remembered Elsa's encouragement in the station and tried to force the negative whispers from her mind. She could do this. She could keep an eye on N – her brother.

She still couldn't say his name. It wasn't even his fault, but she still had a twinge of pain whenever she heard her brother's name. Her parents meant well, she knew that, but privately she thought it was still an uncaring move on their part to name their son what they did. If she had been asked she would have suggested something, almost anything else. Not that she'd expected them to consult her at all; what her parents named their children was their business, but when they'd decided to call him after her son's dead father, a simple heads' up would have made the moment easier on her, rather than hearing the name along with everyone else at Granny's.

When Emma tried to push the mounting irritation back to the corners of her mind, she became conscious of some streetlights flickering in the broad daylight as her magic started to go haywire. Calmness was key with magic and babies. The kid would probably sleep a while when she had him. She could probably play with him for a bit, then he'd conk out and she'd have something that was increasingly rare around Storybrooke: downtime. It had been so long since she'd been able to play Angry Birds that she almost expected a notification to appear on her phone one day asking if she was still alive.

Looking up at the front sign for Granny's, Emma took a deep breath and walked through to the bed and breakfast portion of the business.

Her timing was almost perfect. Almost.

Emma got to the class just as they were singing a song that consisted entirely of saying goodbye to all the babies by name. It was cute, but seeing the faces of every woman in the room smiling as broadly as they could down at their babies pulled uncomfortably on strings in her mind. She had far too many memories of watching younger foster kids leave the group homes with parents who smiled that way at them, always wondering why she was never chosen. Why she wasn't good enough to be loved that way. Why she never saw loving smiles, only guarded grimaces.

Seeing Mary Margaret looking at Neal that way hurt, as if a physical crack etched its way across her heart. All she had ever wanted was for a mother to look at her that way, and now her own mother was looking at her replacement with more love than Emma had ever seen in her life.

Still, she made a promise, and it wasn't the baby's fault. Emma took another deep breath, pushing aside the irrelevant thought that if she had to keep breathing this deeply she'd eventually hyperventilate, and then another that Snow could have been a bit more tactful when she laughed at Aurora's question about CDs. Any other day it would have been impossible to stifle a chuckle of her own at the reaction of someone from the Enchanted Forest to a piece of 21st century technology from her world, but with the stress of the day, the disconnect barely registered.

"Emma! You missed The Goodbye Song!" Mary Margaret chirped, not missing a beat.

With a shrug, Emma gave in to the situation and offered a tight smile. "I got the gist of it from the title. Is baby bro ready?"

"Yes. Oh, just a few things. Uh, diaper bag, stroller, milk," Mary Margaret pointed to each in turn.

She took it all in, swallowing hard on some of the meaner things she wanted to say. "He sure has a lot of stuff," she muttered, picking up the bottle.

"Well, I wanted to give him everything," her mother explained, oblivious to the effect her words had on her daughter.

Emma's eyebrows rose as the remark hit home. This could have been hers. She'd seen her nursery in the ruined palace when she and Snow went through the portal after the wraith. It was lavish, almost as nice in its devastion as some of her foster care rooms had been. Now, here Mary Margaret was doing this world's version of that, giving her baby everything she could. Everything Emma could have had. Everything she never did.

Thankfully, Ashley chose that moment to greet her, heading off Emma's wounded retort. "Oh, Ashley. Look at you! The Baby Whisperer," she answered, thanking every deity she could remember for the interruption.

"What can I say? I just took to it. Now, if you need help getting him to sleep, just tell him he's going to turn into a pumpkin by midnight," she grinned at her own joke.

"So this is what you do here, you give sleeping tips and sing songs, and…" she trailed off, not having observed any other things Ashley did for this Mommy and Me group to add to her list.

"Oh, it's more than just that; it's like having a support group. I mean being a first-time mother is not easy."

"First-time mother," Emma murmured out of the side of her mouth, wanting some kind of reassurance from Mary Margaret but feeling another unintentional shot hit home. Of course it was a support group for first-time mothers. Of course neither of her parents had ever called it that in her presence. Mary Margaret was not a first-time mother with Neal, but she was a first-time baby-raiser, having sent her own firstborn through a magical portal at all of five minutes old with only the word of a glittery moth that it would be safe.

"Emma! Of course I'm not a first time mother," Mary Margaret whispered, trying to head off an emotional scene.

It had the exact opposite effect. Emma felt the last shards of control she had over her magic shatter along with her emotional restraint. She could no more control her next words than she could have made the sun rise in the west. "Well, you kind of are. You've never raised a baby before," she gave a dry, humorless chuckle, "You just put one through a magical wardrobe."

"Emma," her mother said, trying to console her.

"It's okay," she insisted, trying to appear calm, "I get it. It's all new for you. This is exciting. 'Mommy and me' classes and first steps and all. It must be really…exciting," she finished.

Silence reigned. At first Emma thought it was her loss of verbal and emotional control, but as she looked around, Mary Margaret, Ashley, and Aurora were all staring down, brows furrowed in identical expressions of worry.

"W – what?" She asked, forcing a smile as she tried to appear like she wasn't as upset as she was.

"The bottle," Aurora explained, not looking away. Emma shifted her own gaze to the point they were watching, and saw her hand glowing as the milk in the bottle boiled. Her magic was out of control.

"Oh, um," she muttered, forcing her magic back down and cooling the milk. "It's just, you know, magic. I've been practicing to try to capture the Snow Queen and I guess I must just still be a little revved up," she finished, clearing her throat.

Mary Margaret kept her gaze fixed on the bottle as if she couldn't believe what she'd seen.

"Okay, phew!" Emma said, plastering a smile on her face and moving to take her brother. If she could get him into the stroller, she could get the hell away from the emotional scene and work on reestablishing her control while Junior slept.

Then it happened.

Something that hadn't happened since the Curse broke and she knew her parents for who they were: someone turned away from her in fear. Not uncommon when she was robbing stores and getting into trouble as a rebellious foster child, it was wholly unexpected when Mary Margaret turned away from her, shielding the baby from Emma with her own body.

Her own mother protected a baby from her.

My own mother thinks I'm such a danger she won't trust me with my own brother.

Another person came to her rescue when her phone rang. David, telling her that they'd tracked the Snow Queen to the clock tower.

"The Snow Queen is in the clock tower," she explained the call to the little group. "Guess I'll have to take a rain check on babysitting?" she asked her mother.

Emma tried not to show how much seeing Mary Margaret's relief hurt as she all but sprinted out of Granny's. Run away from the scene. Run away from the memories and whispers. At least she could put her magic to good use against the Snow Queen, instead of terrifying her own mother.

I'm a monster.

A/N: Things are kicking into high gear! We still have a bit more to go.

Thoughts?