Yay people like me! Cheers! I have nothing else to say.

~88888~

It was a strange paradox. Snow White had learnt to get her sleep whenever and wherever possible during her years in exile. Wherever she could find a place where she was hidden, warm and dry she would do her best to get as many hours of sleep as she could before the sun would rise and she had to move on; it didn't matter if it was snowing, pouring with rain, or the middle of summer. Mary Margaret on the other hand, had no comprehension of what it meant to be sleep deprived. She had always had a roof over her head, always got eight hours, always. She didn't know what it meant to need her sleep, didn't know what it meant to sleep whenever she could. Two people, two completely different, unique, and yet startlingly similar individuals inhabited the one body. They didn't fight, didn't bicker, didn't claim superiority over the other, they were equal. And yet the apartment's thermostat was clearly tearing them apart over one issue, sleep. The ridiculousness of it was enough to bug Mary Margaret throughout the night, and yet it wasn't enough to keep Snow White away from her slumbering peace. The result was she would continually be waking intermittently throughout the night. David on the other hand seemed incapable of allowing anything to distract him from sleep. Clearly both David Nolan and her Prince Charming enjoyed resembling logs whilst their eyes were closed. It made Mary Margaret insanely (and ridiculously) jealous.

She and her husband had left Emma early in the night; they had 'things' they needed to do. They needed to 'discuss' their future, 'remind' themselves of the plan they had had in the Enchanted Forrest. After they had finished having a pleasurable and immensely satisfying 'conversation' they had fallen asleep, but Mary Margaret had woken not long after, unable to bear the combination of the heat in the apartment and the proximity to her husband. She sat up in the bed, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She looked over her shoulder to her husband, who was lying spread-eagled on the bed, the sheet covering one leg and his hips. She found it somewhat disappointing that he was covered; she couldn't silently bask in his glory. Then she realized that if she was able to see all of him, she would likely do something to wake him up, and right now, the idea of human contact was unbearable. She exhaled, looking away. Her skin was sticky and clammy; she thought a shower might be a good idea; might also cool her down so she could get back to sleep.

Silently she shrunk into her thinnest bathrobe and crept out of the bedroom. She hoped Emma had managed to get to sleep, and the last thing she wanted to do was wake her up. She tiptoed over the floorboards, careful to avoid the one that creaked loudly. Once inside the bathroom she was met with a blast of cold air; somebody had left the window wide open. A light dusting of snow flakes was fluttering onto the window sill and the tiles beneath. She rushed to the window and pulled it shut. It was still cold, but with the warmth of the rest of the apartment invading the room through the walls it was bearable. She dropped the lid of the toilet and sat down, stretching her legs out onto the bathtub. The ceramic penetrated her skin through her robe causing her to shiver slightly. She rolled her head back, enjoying the coldness, maybe she wasn't going to need a shower to get to sleep. Still, in her pose she found her mind wandering.

Her mind didn't really wander that far these days, there was really only one topic she thought about: Emma. It was rather she would think about different aspects of Emma's life, find different questions that she thought needed to be asked (and yet a part of her knew she probably never would). She would think about Emma's past; before she knew about Neal she would think about and try to answer the question of Henry's paternity, try and work out what type of man it was that Emma had fallen in love with. The first time she had thought about it, she had started crying as she thought about her daughter finding out she was pregnant whilst nursing a broken heart. She had wanted to kill the man who had made the image of her daughter cry. But then she had met Neal, learnt the story of what really happened all those years ago. She hadn't forgiven him for abandoning her daughter, but she had realized that there was still a lot of love between them, and she believed that maybe, just maybe, Emma could find her happy ending with him.

In this moment however, she thought about what had happened between her daughter and the father of her grandchild, and the sadness that seemed to follow them. She had watched silently as Emma and Neal had gone on a date at Granny's and had sat for a large portion of the night not talking. And the few times they had, they had been awkward exchanges about Henry, what he was doing at school, how he was getting better at sword-fighting, etcetera.

"Give them time, they'll figure it out." David had said to her after she had told him about it. "Oh and you do know what Emma will say if she finds out you've been spying on her dates." He had added.

"I have not been spying on her dates!" She had angrily responded. "I was just walking past Granny's and saw them in the window."

"Yes, and then you went inside, sat in a booth near them and hid behind a menu." He had looked down his nose at her.

Mary Margaret had huffed; David had chuckled, pulling her into a hug. They both wanted her to be happy, that was undeniable. And they would have dearly loved Emma to find her happiness with Neal rather than the seeming other option who had made himself scarce since they had all returned from Neverland.

It was at this point in Mary Margaret's thoughts that a noise jolted her back to reality. It was a door closing, followed by footsteps on the floorboards. Mary Margaret doubted it was her husband and wondered what Emma was doing; she had a thought that her daughter was coming to the bathroom, but then she frowned in confusion when she heard the apartment front door open then close. Throwing on a pair of David's jeans and a t-shirt that were lying in the hamper, she left the bathroom, grabbed her coat and scarf at the door and followed her daughter.

Looking down the stairwell she caught a glance of Emma's head descending the final few steps. At a distance Mary Margaret followed her daughter, curious as to where she could be going. Despite the distance, Emma was not moving at a great pace which suggested to Mary Margaret that she was just attempting to escape the stifling heat of the apartment for a brief moment. Mary Margaret had to speed up as she saw Emma turn a corner. She slowed down at the corner, peeking around cautiously; the last thing she wanted Emma to think, no know, was that she was following her – which she was but that was an irrelevant fact in this moment. Not that far ahead of her was Emma; she had reached the docks and was staring towards the Jolly Roger. Mary Margaret had had a hunch this was Emma's destination but it was difficult to judge when the person you are tracking is not exactly displaying any trait that they know where the hell they're going (and Snow White had some experience tracking people). Mary Margaret watched as Emma considered the ship before her. She saw her turn, like she was going to head home and that induced a moment of panic when she realized that both women's tracks were still clear in the snow. She breathed a sigh of relief when she watched Emma turn back to the ship and move toward it.

She ensured she was hidden in darkness as she watched the silhouette of Emma follow Hook's around the deck, talking, and then they weren't talking. She felt decidedly awkward as she saw her daughter's silhouette climb the silhouette of the pirate. Then they disappeared below decks. Mary Margaret knew she was deeply disturbed to be curiously moving closer to the ship.

She crept aboard; she had barely travelled two steps when she heard a series of loud noises from below decks. It seemed that they were the snap her brain needed. She turned away, hearing the noises that carried in the silence and thankfully (she hoped) covered her footsteps as she departed the deck, and made an immediate decision: Emma was a grown woman who was definitely not a virgin, and she was also very capable of making her own decisions. Mary Margaret may not have approved of her daughter's current path, but she was not going to judge. Hook, for all of his faults had demonstrated a far greater sense of decency than Whale ever had, and Emma had never judged Mary Margaret for that decision, before or after the curse breaking.

Mary Margaret practically ran back to the apartment and found it still stifling hot. She immediately extricated herself of the unnecessary layers of clothes and made her way back to the bathroom; she definitely needed that shower now. Stripping, she stepped under the highly pressurized flow of water, rinsing the moment from her body. After a few moments, she stepped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around her and left the bathroom. She made her way into the kitchen, hopping onto one of the stools. She needed to form some semblance of a plan for the morning – that is if Emma wasn't back yet – as David would definitely notice her absence.

The easiest option was to suggest she was at the Sherriff's office 'she probably went in to escape this heat' she could already hear herself saying. Yes that was easy. But if David wasn't convinced, and wanted to go looking for her, she had to ensure that he was nowhere near the Jolly Roger. Who knows what he might find – or worse see – whilst he was there. In that case, the best option was to send him off to find Neal, or Regina, or Gold or someone else, or have him look somewhere logical – Granny's, she could be meeting Henry for breakfast there – or have him check out a couple of the haunts she and Henry used to meet at before the curse broke. What was deeply fundamental was for her to get to the Jolly Roger first.

With her plan formulated she slunk into the bedroom. David was still spread-eagled on the bed snoring softly; evidently he had not noticed her absence. She sighed, momentarily thinking about crawling into the bed beside him. It seemed the thermostat had decided to issue a wave of heat in that moment, and feeling it against her skin said to her that she couldn't experience human contact again tonight. Instead she changed her mind and decided to sleep in Henry's room. It was at least more logical that he would notice her missing before he noticed the absence of his daughter. And sleeping in Emma's bed would be a dead giveaway that she knew her daughter was gone, and maybe even knew where she was. Henry wasn't in the apartment – he had made it known quite clearly that the heat in the apartment was not for him, his bed was being unused, and if David found her asleep in Henry's bed, the reason for it was far easier to explain. She grabbed one of David's softest t-shirts and moved to the smallest room in the apartment. She crawled onto the bed, went over her plan again, and then flitted off into an unsettled sleep.

She eventually woke hours later, the apartment still unbelievably furnace like. She made her way out of Henry's room and very quickly realized that she had slept a lot longer than she had hoped she would; the one part of the plan she couldn't control (and hadn't thought to) was the time. She hadn't taken into consideration what might happen if her husband awoke before her. She moved into the kitchen and sitting at the counter she saw her husband. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.

For all her planning, she couldn't do anything to stop him. "David, are you alright?" She asked, noting his white face and rock hard stance. "David, what's wrong?"

But there was something about his look that made her worried; she doubted that this was the reaction he would have if he had found his daughter in a compromising position with a man whom he hated. No something else had happened in town, something very bad.

He didn't respond, didn't say anything. She moved to be in his eye line, so she could see his eyes.

"David? You're starting to scare me." She whispered, touching his face.

His head moved a fraction, his jaw clenched for an instant as he swallowed, hard.

~88888~

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