A/N: Again, thank you for reading, reviewing and following; and unfortunately, I still don't own Once Upon a Time.
-Chapter Two-
Two Months Later
A shiver ran through Neal's bones, chilling him to the core despite the old, brown jacket that hung on his shoulders, as a particularly strong draft blew through the car. He wanted to cross his arms to capture any remaining warmth, but he couldn't. He was driving, after all, and he reminded himself that it was much colder and windier outside than it was inside the tiny car.
He took a hand off the steering wheel to adjust one of the knobs next to him, in an attempt to turn on the heating system. It was a futile effort, and he knew it, absolutely nothing changed. It was still freezing.
He didn't know why he had bothered to try in the first place. That heater had been acting up for weeks, blowing out cold air where warm air should have came. He had got to get that fixed soon...winter was coming, and it would be even colder where they were going. He guessed had come to take the heating and air conditioning technology in this world for granted over the years.
He bet it wasn't this cold in Florida right now. Heck, it was never cold in Florida, right? Wasn't it supposed to be sunny and eighty degrees all year round or something? (Or at least, that's how travel-agency commercials on television seemed to portray it. ) Probably not, but still...
He wished he was there right now, on a beach somewhere instead of driving down some road in the middle of the night in...well, he wasn't sure of his exact location. All he knew was that he'd crossed the Maine state border a few hours ago.
Turning off the faulty car heater, he slumped back in his seat and returned his focus to the seemingly endless highway ahead of him. His eyelids were heavy and drooping, and he knew he was going to have to stop somewhere soon for the night.
Only...there was one problem. There was nowhere to stop. No towns in sight, no inn, nowhere. There weren't even any cars in sight, no matter how far ahead or behind he looked. That came off as a bit strange to him.
There were no signs of civilization anywhere at all, it was practically a ghost town. In fact, the whole atmosphere felt like something out of a cheesy Halloween movie. The fog that obscured his vision of the upcoming roadway, the sounds of the wind rustling through the trees, the lack of any light source, everything. It creeped him out a bit, to be honest.
He was alone, except for Emma of course, but even she was fast asleep, sprawled out across the backseat behind him. Neal could see her blonde curls spread across the seat as she breathed softly. The birthday girl herself-she was officially eighteen years old as of today-was oblivious to the world around her.
He resigned to the fact that they might be sleeping in the car tonight if he couldn't find somewhere to stay soon. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. Ever since the watch incident, they had been trying to make it across the United States border in the shortest possible amount of time, which meant there wasn't always time to search for a motel. Besides, the funds were becoming dangerously low at a dangerously rapid pace.
Their only source of cash flow was the money from the stolen watches kept hidden in an envelope in the trunk of the car, right underneath the cardboard box containing Emma's baby blanket and a few other items. Or what was left of it, rather. The majority of the twenty thousand dollars had been quickly blown over the last two months on things like food and the cost of getting a clean VIN number on the car and changing their identities-Neal and Emma Sheppard were their official names now, despite the fact that they weren't technically married. Their original last names were most likely still on a wanted poster somewhere, and it was too dangerous to keep them.
Tallahassee was also too dangerous to stay in, and Emma's disappointment, it became out of the question before they even made it there. And to think, they had been so close to a chance at a happy ending before having to run yet again.
Neal was tired of running.
But their chosen destination was a large city, and the cops would find them for sure if they stayed, leading to them being put behind bars. And he wasn't about to let Emma go to jail for a crime he committed, and Emma sure didn't want to go there either. He'd messed up her life enough as it was.
Things had gone downhill shortly before their supposed arrival to their new home, towards the very end of the long drive from Portland, one they had taken in the exact same car in which they first met (it was only fitting, after all).
He had gone into a grocery store to pick up food, when he saw a wanted poster tacked to a bulletin board, amongst several others.
It had his name on it. Hers, too. How they had figured out about her involvement in the crime, he had no idea. His best guess was that somebody had tipped off the cops and told them to look at the footage from security cameras taken at the train station where she had retrieved the watches from the locker. Who that person was or how they knew so much, he again had no idea. He really shouldn't have ignored the whole "being chased down an alley by some guy" thing as much as he did. But he and Emma were set on going to Tallahassee, and he had tried desperately to do so despite the red flags popping up in every direction.
No matter how much he racked his brains, his mind always came up blank. With them always moving from place to place, he hadn't had the time to make any friends-or enemies, for that matter. Nobody should have known about their supposedly foolproof plan. It made no sense whatsoever.
They had quickly formed a last-minute backup plan, however. Neal was going to go ahead with his earlier plan to escape to Canada, only this time Emma was going with him. Maybe there they could finally settle down. It wouldn't be near a beach, but it would be home.
That was provided they could make it out of the country without being caught, however, which was not an easy thing to do. So the last two months had been spent fleeing the police, making their way up the East Coast, living out of the car once more and flinching whenever a siren was so much as heard in the distance.
The sleeping in the car or in a different inn every night , the occasional fight between them, their stealing bits of food from stores to save money well after they had decided they didn't want to steal anymore, those were all his fault. All because he had robbed a jewelry store in Phoenix, well before he had even met Emma.
Why he had stolen them in the first place, he didn't exactly know. Maybe it was because he was sick of his job, maybe because he had grown up poor and never even dreamed about having those kinds of expensive things, or maybe he just had awful impulse control. He remembered how he had been standing there in that store, fingers twitching, and thinking, Nobody will catch me, I can get away with this...
He had resisted stealing them twice already. The third time's the charm, he supposed, as he had caved in and stolen the watches after all. Not exactly one of his best decisions. He hadn't done anything like it before or since, having stolen only what he needed to survive. And also maybe a cheap trinket that struck his fancy every once in a while, but that was besides the point.
However, the watch money had been their only money source on their little road trip. It seemed ironic-that the money from the stolen watches was the only thing that could possibly help him get away with stealing the watches.
The sight of a town welcome sign on the side of the road, coming out of the swirling clouds of fog in front of him and becoming caught in the car's headlights brought Neal out of his memories and into the present time.
"Welcome to Storybrooke, Maine!" it read in an old-fashioned script.
Relief went through Neal. Maybe they wouldn't be spending Emma's birthday in the car tonight, he thought, as the sign whizzed out of his view and became instead visible only in the rearview window.
He turned around in the seat, reaching back and shaking Emma's shoulder to wake her up, slowing down the car, but not bothering to stop it.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty."
She sat up immediately, a light sleeper by any means, and Neal stifled a laugh at the sight of her long, messy hair streaming in every possible direction as he turned back around to face the road.
"It's really morning already?" she yawned, pushing said hair out of her face before noticing that it was still dark outside the window of the still-moving car.
"Nah, I was kidding. Actually, it's almost midnight," he said, glancing at the glowing red numbers staring back at him from the dashboard. "I found somewhere to stay for the night, by the way. Storybrooke, Maine, it's called."
"Storybrooke? Seriously?"
The hint of joking sarcasm in her voice was easily detected in her only reply.
"Seriously," he said back.
The woods soon gave way to the main part of town as he drove, the trees on either side of the road replaced by houses and buildings.
Neal wasn't sure what to think of the town at all. At first glance, it seemed like any other American small town, if a bit of a lost-in-time one, what with the vintage cars he saw lining the streets and the worn-down buildings passing him on either side. Actually, everything seemed old-looking, worn down, and dreary. But maybe that was only how it was at night, with street lamps casting eerie white spots of light against the dark. Maybe it was less creepy in the daytime.
But there was something else about it, something he didn't like. He couldn't put his finger on why, but something felt off. It was a gut feeling of nervousness that appeared very early on. He ignored it, however, and focused on trying to find a place to stay instead of worrying about some town he knew nothing about.
Pushing the nagging thoughts to the back of his mind, Neal soon found an inn after a surprisingly small amount of searching, having just entered the town a few minutes ago. It must be that small of a town, he thought. One where everything is within a few blocks of each other.
It wasn't something he was used to seeing in the big cities.
Stopping the car in front of the building and climbing out, he heard Emma climbing out, and they soon strode up the sidewalk leading to the inn. Granny's Bed and Breakfast, it was called, according to the large sign hanging over the door.
Dead, brown leaves on the steps of the building swirled around their feet in the crisp fall wind as their shoes pounded against them.
Opening the painted wooden door and entering the inn, they were immediately greeted by an older woman. She was standing behind a counter, looking strangely awake and alert for it being almost midnight, unlike Emma and Neal with their wrinkled clothes, messy hair, and tired eyes. The woman had a look of...surprise, maybe? Pleasure? Curiosity?
"You're new here, aren't you?"
Emma spoke first. "Yeah, we just got here. We'd like a room."
"Really? Of course. Would you like a forest view or square view? Normally there's an upgrade for the square, but I can waive it just this once. We hardly ever get visitors around here. "
"Square's fine."
"Now. What are your names?"
"Emma and Neal Sheppard."
The woman jotted something down in a dusty ledger book that looked as if it hadn't been used in ages. Without looking up, she continued to speak. "How long will you be staying with us?"
"Just for tonight. We're only passing through," said Neal, handing the woman a wad of money from his pocket in which he'd removed from the envelope in the trunk earlier that night.
"Great. I'm Granny, by the way. I run this place."
Granny handed Emma an elaborately-decorated room key depicting a swan. Fitting, since the girl had shared a surname with the bird for the majority of her life.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, Granny," said Neal, already beginning to turn around, toward the staircase leading up to the rooms.
The inn, like the town, had not made the best impression on him. It unsettled him, for no particular reason other than it "just did," and he was eager to leave.
No matter. They planned to do just that by morning, this town being just like all the other ones in which they'd stayed in for a night or two.
"Oh, and one more thing!" said Granny, causing him to turn around to face her again. "Welcome to Storybrooke."
...
The curse of this seemingly normal New England town was designed to be like a glass cage, trapping every single person inside it forever, unable to get in touch with the outside world or their true selves, unable to be free, unable to so much as notice that anything was wrong. The clocks always stayed frozen at 8:15, regardless of what time it was in the outside world or whether the sun was rising or setting.
On that night, on the twenty-third of October, that cage finally cracked.
In another part of town, the minute hand of the clock tower in Storybrooke's center inched forward for the very first time in eighteen years.