CHAPTER FIFTEEN: FATE IS THE HUNTER

(In which The Author retcons who maxed out Neal's credit cards... or Killian was lying. Both are equally likely and the truth will never come out, so just deal with it, okay? Jeez!)

Emma was fuming when Henry entered the apartment. After dealing with Walsh and the "Cannery Seven" late into the night without resolution, the last thing she wanted to wake up to was another argument with her son, but the universe had other ideas, and it looked like a civil breakfast before school was not to be. "Where were you? It's Saturday. I made pancakes."

Brows furrowing, Henry answered, "Mr. Tillman was giving me parallel parking lessons before opening the garage."

"Well, you can tell Mr. Tillman your lessons are on hold until further notice."

"But I have to pass driver's ed in school to get my licensee which requires ten hours of night driving, and no one else has the time to spare after work-"

"Yeah, well, I can't see you affording a car and insurance when you have thousands of dollars in credit card debt," Emma snapped, holding out a stack of papers.

"You read my mail!?"

"I opened it by mistake, and that's not the point. You've been using Neal's credit card since he died!"

"Well, he wasn't using it! And it's not like anyone filed a death certificate outside of Storybrooke!" Henry shot back.

"What happens when he tries to get a new one?" Emma snapped. "You've ruined his credit!"

"Well it's not like you'll have to worry about him coming back since he doesn't remember we exist!" Henry shouted. "And I was only using it to try and get his stuff back, because neither you or Grandpa Gold gave a fuck about it!"

Emma was struck speechless for a long moment, before she recovered. "You had your father back and you didn't act as though you appreciated him!"

"Because I thought if I acted like a total jerk you'd say something and you'd realize that you were being a total jerk to him!" Henry snapped. "And maybe you'd realize that you'd picked the wrong guy! But you didn't! You were too busying making eyes at my boozing step-grandfather to even care!"

"I was sick."

"Or maybe you were just too wasted on his shitty rum!" Henry shot back. "If you really cared, you'd have saved Dad in the first place!

"And this 'ratty hoodie' is my dad's!"

With that, Henry turned and left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

"Shit," Emma sighed.

After standing there a moment, her son's words and accusations sinking in, Emma made her way to the kitchen to the cupboard where she presumed she could find a bottle of McCutcheons, because even if her mother was almost like a Baptist in her dislike of hard liquor, her father still had a finger or two now and then after a hard shift. Unless, of course, her father took it with them, but to her relief it was there... minus her parents and siblings, of course. She could have tried to find another apartment, but tight as lodgings were with the whole Resurrection Crisis thing, it had just been easier. And, truth be told, Emma had hoped that the familiarity of the loft would help with the transition back to single life.

Right now, though, it was more disconcerting than comforting.

Like the couch she slumped onto with a glass of scotch, for instance. She remembered now sitting here giving her jealous then-boyfriend a pep-talk about August that was mostly bullshit, because really, she barely knew the guy and he'd never done anything remotely nice (short of dying prematurely before he could give her useful information because he spent most of his remaining life running away) to justify as grounds for friendship, because for some reason she'd been so desperate to reassure Hook of her feelings... maybe because she was trying to convince herself that she really did love him instead of just the idea of being loved so completely by someone.

There was also sitting here with Mary Margaret when they were just roommates, feeling for the first time in years like she had a friend and confidant, a relationship that had redefined her sense of purpose... only to be lost immediately upon her breaking of the Curse, replaced by a mother she grudgingly came to love for all she'd endured yet, as a person, found she did not actually like the woman very much; and so maybe she had returned here because this apartment was a reminder of the friend she lost for a mother who was so much less than she'd hoped.

But it was also where she had her only real non-argument (or mortal peril) conversation with Neal. It was where they tucked Henry in together, the one and only time. It was where Neal said he believed in her, where he understood her ambivalence about her parents trying to emotionally blackmail her into going with them to The Enchanted Forest without her even having to tell him the details or even having fully formed in her own mind what made her so uncomfortable. It had been a quiet, understated moment of shared... something, something that had still been there, even when she'd tried to deny it, some understanding or kindred... sameness that made them just get each other in a way that no one else had so easily read her... though she'd been far too emotionally a mess to really read through his defenses; or maybe she just hadn't wanted to, because it was easier to make him the villain of the story.

He wasn't though. Neal was the tragic hero, the tragedy in that his heroism always seemed to be for naught in the end... kind of like her own journey as a The Savior, really. It felt like she was forever a novitiate - tangled and stumbling in the robes of her order, a savior who had no guidebook and ended up hurting the people she was supposed to protect and save as much as they had, in turn, hurt her in some weird, twisted cycle that seemed to define both sides of Henry's family.

Emma looked with disgust at the glass in her hand as she recalled from somewhere that kids experienced grief in fits and starts, going through it with each stage in life, each monumental moment when they thought 'I wish _ was here'. She'd tried to put Neal behind her, and she'd thought that Henry had dealt with his grief, that he'd let go and moved on, but that had been selfish of her. Selfish because she wanted to forget. Selfish because she knew better having gone through that in her own way, never having a dad or mom there for her firsts. She'd grieved for what she'd never had in those moments that were supposed to be the happiest. Henry had grieved for what he'd had only for a few days in those same moments, and probably that made it even more painful, in the way she'd known if she'd looked at her son when he was born, the years after, every time she saw a child the age he would be, a family doing what she might have done, it would have hurt more.

Neal had been right that they were messed up, that they screwed up, but she hadn't kept her promise to not do to him what he did to her and his father did to him. She'd continued that cycle, and that was just the worst part of it all.

AN: Fate is the Hunter, chapter 2: "A Novitiate - Tangled and Stumbling in the Robes of His Order".

Next up: FINALLY we find out what Neal, or rather Baelfire, is up to.