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Steerage,The SS Atlantic

Port of Boston, USA

Spring, 1903

She sits with her knees tucked into her chest, her arms around them, her eyes squeezed shut as she tries to calm her breathing.

I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe.

Her heart still pounds as fiercely as it had when she had first decided to do this. Running away to England with no money, no plans, no skills- well, no acceptable skills at any rate- wasn't the brightest idea but she had begun before she had had time to think it through.

Growing up in an orphanage had taught Emma three things. Never let them see you cry, never trust a gift that doesn't come with a price and a wealthy gentleman or lady is always in need of relieving a little weight from their wallets.

With nimble fingers and a steady hand, quiet footsteps and unremarkable clothes, she had become skilled in the art of picking pockets. Learning young, she had gone out with the other children to find a way to fill their bellies, their bodies too cold and small to be sated by what meagre fare they were given, forced to teach themselves to survive on their own.

It was a quick way to make a few dollars, enough to feed herself and put a roof over her head every night.

She still remembers vividly the first time she had clumsily knocked over a lady, her clothes rich and her hat an absurd thing, wide and tall enough that Emma's entire torso would fit in its frame. She remembers the overwhelming scent of jasmine as she had gone careening into her. She remembers the breathless running, her fingers clutched around the few coins she had picked up from the woman's dropped purse. She remembers the taste of the hot bread she had eaten that night, the sweetest she had ever tasted.

It had become instinct to her, a little bump into someone, a quick nod of apology and she'd be on her way, quiet as a mouse and they wouldn't even know until they tried to pay for something.

And so it had been, a man too unsteady on his feet, a wad of notes so thick it would scarcely fit in the wallet and a poster on a wall in the alley where she hid after, advertising the SS Atlantic travelling to London tomorrow.

She had begun walking to the ticket office, before she could second guess and talk herself out of it.

But even as she'd filled in her name in small block letters, her hand shaking ever so often, she'd been looking over her shoulder constantly. As if the man she had stolen from would follow her here. As if the man checking the tickets at the gate would catch her out, know that hers was paid for with pilfered money. As if one of the crew would barge in here before they could leave and have her arrested.

Even now, as she sits on her assigned bunk, her heart continues pounding its desperate rhythm as the ship finally weighs anchor. She feels the sudden jerk, her fellow passengers feel it too, more intense here in the steerage where they are closer to the bottom of the boat, shut into a large space with no walls between them, no windows around them.

The bunks around her are closely placed but not too close that it feels claustrophobic. The large compartment she is in houses the hundreds of unmarried women who have chosen to make this journey. Stacked on top of one another in their bunks, she is surrounded by women who are already in varying degrees of enthusiastic and irritated conversation with one another, companions and strangers alike.

Most of the beds in the their section of steerage are occupied but the bunk beside her is empty and she is grateful for it. She doesn't know if she can manage any more pleasant smiling and explanations of exhaustion to excuse herself from having to make conversation. So she sits hunkered down, her arms wrapped around her knees as she tries to become as small as she can.

No walls separate her from the others who accompany her on this journey, their excited chatter filtering into her ears, a raucous mix of languages and dialects, getting louder as they get further away from shore. But it is a tentative excitement, a layer of uncertainty undercutting it as they all embark on this adventure together. This group of people who had scraped together enough to leave this place for somewhere they thought was better even as people made the journey in the opposite direction everyday.

Her eyes still shut, breaths coming slower now she reaches for the small blanket at her side, pulling it over her knees, her fingers looking for and tracing the familiar stitching along its edge.

Emma.

Her name carefully knitted into the pattern of the baby blanket, the rich purple of it against soft white clear in her mind even as her eyes remain closed. She traces her name again and again, following the thick, looping letters as she has been doing for as long as she can remember while her other hand looks for the tag, a small piece of fabric with a different name embroidered onto it.

Her breath grows deeper and softer as her fingers follow her familiar path to calm. Her mind drifts along with the ship as it sways on the ebbs and flows of the waves beneath them until she is back there.

A cold night in a lonely room when she is seven, her blanket clutched to her chest even as a boy from her orphanage tries to pull it away from her, the corner of it stretching as she backs away, pulling it out of his grip.

"Come on Emma! Give it to me! It's not fair you get two blankets while the rest of us have to make do."

He pulls harder. His taller frame and stronger body almost taking it away but she is overcome by a fierce possessiveness for the only thing she had left from her parents and she fights him. She fights him for even though she had already begun to feel a hopelessness, a bitterness for them for leaving her, she could not bear to part with it.

"No! It's mine!"

She bites him and scratches at him wildly, her mouth pulled into a feral snarl, her voice hiding a tremulous warning under shrill shrieks until he gives up and goes away.

She had hidden in the pantry that night, afraid to face the other children, the chill creeping up into her bones, her little fingers trembling as she struggled to stretch the tiny blanket to cover her cold feet and colder hands.

That is when it had scraped her, the sharp corner of the little piece of fabric sewn onto the edge of the blanket. She had pulled it out and stared at it, her fingers tracing the letters even as she had been unable to read them in the darkness.

Nolan, England.

And just like that, she had known where she was from, begun to dream of being rescued from the cold and the hunger and taken away to England, of meeting her parents. She had begun to call herself Emma Nolan instead of the name they had given her- Swan. It had gone on until slowly, as the years went by, her dreams of rescue faded and then disappeared entirely, replaced instead by the walls that protect her heart now.

But even so, a part of her had never given up, her blanket and its promise of a home still giving her comfort.

Today, as she runs her fingers over these familiar marks upon the only constant in her life, for the first time, instead of comfort, she feels a restless anticipation. Her earlier panic sinking into it easily. Her belly twists with it, her heart not knowing where she was going to arrive, if she would ever find these Nolans, if she was one of them, if they would even know her, accept her-

The sound of a baby's shrill cry interrupts her thoughts, her eyes opening suddenly to find the source of the sound. She finds the young woman, not much older than herself she imagines, holding a young babe to her chest in the bunk opposite and a tier above her own. The woman rocks the baby slowly back and forth, her voice a soft whisper on the waves of sound from the other occupants of the boat, from the ship itself, creaking and shifting as it moves, quieter now but still ever present. She watches at the mother shushes her baby, her voice inaudible as she talks to it, as the child slowly calms down enough that Emma can no longer hear its cries.

And then, the woman begins to sing. It is a lullaby but it is not English, German perhaps but Emma cannot be sure. Her voice floats over to Emma's bunk and she can just make out the melody, a soft thing that almost matches the rhythm of the ship rocking gently on the waves.

She finds that her fingers have clutched at her blanket so hard that her finger has fallen through a loop in the knitting. She loosens her grip but thoughts of her own baby, her own son who she'd given away not two months ago refuse to leave her.

She hadn't even seen him. His mop of dark hair peeking out from the crook of the nurse's elbow as she had turned away becoming the only image of him she knows. That and the paralysing ache in her heart that she feels today as acutely as she had done that day, as though someone has physically ripped away a part of her.

Her heart starts pounding anew, her eyes squeezing shut again, her tears dripping softly on to the blanket as her hands twist it between her fingers. Her heart needing the comfort of it even as it chides her.

She hadn't even given him this. A token, a sign, something to tell him that she had loved him. Something to keep him warm when he was al-

No, he wouldn't be alone.

He'd have her.

"Mrs Nolan, wake up!"

Lady Regina Mills, the woman whose family owned the hospital where Emma had gone with all the money she had, a false name and promises of an imaginary husband, to have her baby.

Lady Mills had come to Emma in the dead of night, her voice like a whip cracking in the silence of Emma's room, her face lit by a dim candle. She had looked like a statue, marble skin, dark hair and darker eyes. Emma remembers her voice still, it's steady cadence ringing in her ears, overpowering the young mother's soft lullaby.

"I believe that we should be frank with one another. I know you don't have a husband coming soon to see you. I know you don't have the means or the potential to raise a child. So, I have an offer to make."

Her words had stung despite the hints of truth that Emma saw in them. She had been ready to refuse, afraid of the steel in her gaze and the unbending curve of her mouth. But as she spoke of her baby, Lady Mills' voice had softened and curved, her face breaking into a soft smile.

"He will know of no mother but me. But I can promise that he will be well taken care of. Loved and wanted and given everything he can imagine."

And she had felt herself softening too. Lady Mills had been everything Emma had wished she herself could be for her baby, much more suited to raise a child, with her home and her money. More than sufficient compensation for Lady Mills' own lack of husband.

"I will tell them you ran away, afraid of the responsibility or something similar."

So she had agreed. Sneaked out of the hospital in the dead of night and allowed Lady Mills to tell the story of a scared young girl who abandoned a sweet baby in a big city, allowed herself to become a shadow on the wind, a woman with no name to the son she had never known.

She hadn't given him anything. Except perhaps a chance at a better life.

She has never been one for prayer, but she thinks of him then, the little mop of black hair and the soft hiccupping cries as the woman continues to sing and she hopes that someone is singing him to sleep tonight too.

"Hey sister, are you okay?"

A gruff voice pulls her from her thoughts and she looks up to find a man looking at her. He is older, flecks of grey visible in his hair, carrying a small valise and settling into the bunk beside her. Perhaps there had been some confusion, they don't usually have men and women in the same-

"They ran out of space and this was the only bunk they had left," he says answering the questioning look on her face. He sits, his feet dangling off the edge as he faces her, a scowl on his face but strange concern in his eyes all the same.

She doesn't answer, only quickly swipes at her cheeks and sits straighter, her blanket falling to a soft pile at her feet as her knees rise higher.

"First time out?"

She nods her head, her hackles rising in defence as the strange man continues to talk to her. The steerage was such that it was inevitable having to interact with fellow passengers, their beds all stuffed together in the space but Emma has found it a good practice to distrust people until proven otherwise. The man seems to catch on to her apprehension, his hands going up in a motion of surrender.

"Hey, easy. You just look a little green is all. This place can be difficult for a first timer. We're really close to the bottom of the boat so every time this thing moves, we're going to feel it," his eyes leave her to scan the rest of the large space, beams and pillars the only thing separating one group of beds from another "and when there's bad weather, we're stuck down here for days, no fresh air, no one but each other for company and the smell-"

"That's supposed to help me feel better?"

She's saying the words before she can finish thinking them, her voice coming out stronger than her heart feels. But the man doesn't take offence, only chuckling softly in response.

"Not really. But it's worth it isn't it? Where you're going, it's gotta be worth it to travel there like this."

His eyes find her again and despite herself, she sees kindness there and she wants to trust it.

"I hope so."

He smiles then and the sour look on his face suddenly softens into something much younger.

"I'm Leroy."

"Emma Swan."

London, England

Winter, 1915

The walk to the house seems longer than usual.

Perhaps it's not the walk.

But the ache in her back from standing all night, the ache in her head from her brief but heated interaction with the chill wind of London in winter, the ache in her heart from the sadness in Philip's smile, from the pain hidden carefully in Captain Jones' smooth voice.

The ache in her very bones from the fact that her twelve year old boy had tried to join them.

She walks slower even as her heart pounds faster. A twinge of guilt niggling at the back of her mind even as her heart fills with dread for what awaits her when she gets home.

There is a bridge that she crosses on the walk from the station to her home. It is a sturdy thing, brick and mortar and curved gently over the part of the Thames that flows through here. She has always loved this bridge. In her first uncertain days in this home, this had been her place to stand and look out at the water, at the almost endlessness of the river as it flowed away into nothing, to calm her soul, to ease her often troubled mind.

But today as she walks along it, the cold breeze from the river stabs through her skin like needles, her every step becoming heavy until she walks leaning against the deep red painted railing of the bridge.

It has been but a year since she has learned her son's name, since she has begun to learn how to be a mother. Her own mother, though ripped away from her child for eighteen long years, has the tender heart, the soft voice that a child needs, that a mother is supposed to have.

But, Emma. Emma with a heart too broken, its edges too jagged, she worries that she will only hurt her son in place of comforting him.

So, as she often does, she tries to remember what her mother had done for her, the first time she had stepped into this house with her head bowed, her hands rough, her heart a tender, skittish thing. She remembers the kindness, the joy, the love her parents had given her when they had realised that she was the daughter they had left behind when they thought that they had nothing. That she was the little bundle they had handed over to a person they thought they could trust so that she may have a life better than they could give her.

The dream of blonde hair and sparkling laughter they had been chasing ever since.

She remembers the apologies.

They hadn't known, they said. Emma had been and has been the love of their lives but they had had nothing. No money, no prospects, no future. When she came into their life, they hadn't known.

They hadn't known that David would inherit an estate, a title from a brother and a father who had disowned him for daring to love a woman they deemed unworthy. They hadn't known that not a year after they had come home to England, not a year after a failed attempt to make a life in the country where dreams came true, theirs would.

They finally had enough to support themselves and so many more.

But they no longer had her.

Until that night, eighteen years later when Emma Swan stepped into the Nolan Orphanage looking for the woman who ran it, looking for the woman who shared her name.

(Later, between tears and hugs, she had realised that she shared her eyes too. A little bit of her chin.)

But, families have a way of repeating history, she thinks, her steps slowing further as she traces the initials H.S that have been carved into the stone at the end of the bridge by a young hand and shaky fingers.

And so it had gone with them. Henry arriving at the same doorstep eleven years after she had given him away to the hope of a better life. His fingers wrapped around an old hospital form that read Emma Nolan- a sentimental slip on her part when she had been admitted, a desperate, yearning effort to not be alone- his face dirty with soot, his eyes bright and curious, hopeful somehow, even as the rest of the world had begun to have a war. Even as he himself had lost a mother recently and travelled across oceans in search of another.

He had told Mary Margaret his story. He had told her that his own mother, the only one he had ever known, had succumbed to influenza and as she lay dying she had told him that he had other family.

And that as soon as he had found out, he had run away from his now empty home and begun his quest. Her mother had brought him home and accepted him with not a question asked, not a disapproving look, not a disappointed stare.

Emma had not been at home at the time, having volunteered to join the VADs a few months before. With her steady hand and deft fingers, she had learned quickly and been sent to the front to fight the war to keep their men alive.

Mary Margaret had written to her immediately, calling for her to come meet her son.

After the initial shock, a letter slipping from loosened fingers, a name resting foreign on her tongue- a name finally to put to the image of dark hair in a nurse's arms-Emma had requested reassignment at once and come home.

Her house comes into view and it looks just as impressive as it had fourteen years ago. All big gates and beautiful gardens, the small estate still looks like a castle to her. She wonders how it had looked to Henry when he had come home. Had he too stared in awe at the beauty of the roses that lined the outside of the house, perfectly trimmed and blooming in a multitude of colours. Had he too seen David with his big hat and his beautiful clothes, the lord of the house, crouching in the dirt tending to the plants and felt a gentle warmth settle in his heart. Had he too wondered if Mary Margaret's smile was magic, her hands soft and sure as she held his.

Had he felt that overwhelming amalgam of fear and anticipation and joy as she had.

For the day that he had stepped into the their lives, from the moment her mother had brought him home, he had become theirs. The guest room upstairs immediately refurbished to be his, her father making jokes about how runaways ran in the family, her mother feeding him until his cheeks grew round and his body grew healthy.

But for Emma it had been harder. Though she had immediately asked to be stationed closer to home, though Henry had hugged her about her waist as soon as he'd seen her, though they had concocted a story to explain Henry's sudden appearance and her noticeable lack of a husband-

(Something about a shipwreck and lost families finding one another. Most people had just looked at her with misty eyes and accepted the story with no questions asked.)

Despite it all, it had been difficult.

She had spent the first few months hiding from him, her hands reaching for him but pulling back at the last minute, her breath catching every time he called her mother. Her heart had been nurturing a storm of guilt and shame and anxiety until the day her father had talked to her.

(He wants you in his life, Emma. I know it's hard but I thank whoever is up there everyday that you wanted us in yours. Give yourself a chance.)

Her feet finally bring her to her doorstep and she stops a moment, her hand reaching for the keys in her coat pocket, hiding in the warmth for a second longer as she collects herself, as she tries to stop the pounding in her chest that makes her feel like she is drowning.

A deep breath.

One.

Two.

She opens the door.

"More tea, madam?"

"No, I'm alright. Thank you, Johanna."

Her mother's voice drifts through to her as she closes the door behind her quickly, trying to keep the warmth of the house contained even as a small gust of wind kisses her cheek as she shuts it. She begins to take off her coat and scarf but even as she takes the weight of the wool off her shoulders, they still feel strained under the weight of all that clouds her mind.

Her shoes click softly against the wood of the floor, the sound disappearing as she steps into their carpeted parlour where her mother sits. A fire burns behind her as she sways softly on a rocking chair, knitting lying forgotten in her hands, her eyes fixed somewhere far away outside the window that she faces. Her lips turned down, her brows furrowed in a gentle frown, her hair glinting silver in the sunlight, Emma is suddenly struck by how old her mother looks.

She feels just about as tired.

Mary Margaret's raises her head from her knitting to look up as Emma steps into the room, her glasses perched on her nose, her hands stilling as her frown of concentration melts into a soft smile.

Emma feels her shoulders lighten just a little.

"Oh! Emma, you're home. How was your day?" Mary Margaret says as she puts her knitting away, moving to stand.

"It was alright." Emma finds herself replying instinctively. Used to hiding her feelings, it is a habit she had developed early that hadn't left her despite the years she has spent with her parents. Her eyes drift towards the stairs that lead up to Henry's bedroom, her twinge of guilt sharpening into a prickling in her belly.

"Henry?"

Mary Margaret's smiles drops a little bit as her eyes follow Emma's to the stairs.

"He's alright. Your father is talking to him. We hoped that maybe he might-"

Her eyes are going up the stairs one at a time, counting them as she breathes, as she tries to calm the agitation that twists inside her.

The stairs with their green carpet spilling into the ground floor of their home bears the marks of Henry's life in this house. A year now he'd raced down these stairs every single day, his hand sliding down the banister, his happy voice ringing out into the halls. A year now he had shown her that it does not matter how long you have known someone to love them with all your heart. That it does not matter that she is still learning how to be a mother, still floundering in her quest to be someone she never had as a child. God, she loves him and she knows he loves her but-

"I worry about him," Her mother's voice is soft, her hand coming to rest on Emma's shoulder.

"So do I."

A/N: So sorry for the delay in this update! I've been travelling and it's been hard to stick to a writing schedule. But anyway, moving on to-

Notes, historical or otherwise:

In this chapter,

The Steerage was the lower deck of a ship which was often used by immigrants and people who could not afford the more expensive second class and first class cabins. Conditions in Steerage were pretty horrible with a large number of people stuffed into small spaces, no windows and limited time on deck. If there was a storm, they would be stuck down there for ages.

Early steerage was just one large room filled with as many people as they could fit, common bathrooms and bunks even in the common dining area. People were expected to wash their own dishes and the only privacy was the extent of their bunk. By Emma's time, they had begun to separate the steerage into three compartments, men, women and married people.

It cost about $25 to cross the Atlantic Ocean in steerage in 1903. The price went down to $10 in 1904 as more companies began offering the transatlantic trip.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Thank you so so much to everyone who has commented and followed and favourited. I really, really appreciate it more than you know.

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