CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: THE LEGEND OF CEBE TATE

(In which a plot device from several chapters ago is recycled without even pretending it's not lazy writing.)

Legend had it, Tate's Hell Swamp got its name from Cebe Tate, a local farmer who ventured into the swamp with his shotgun and his hunting dogs to track a panther that was killing his livestock. During his quest, Tate was lost in the swamp for seven days and nights, bitten by a snake, and after drinking from the murky waters to curb his thirst, came to a clearing near Carrabelle, living only long enough to murmur the words, "My name is Cebe Tate, and I just came from Hell!" before keeling over then and there.

Whether the story was true or not, Tate's Hell State Forest was certainly not the sort of place anyone would want to venture at night. While the 200 thousand plus acres stretching between Tallahassee and the Gulf Coast had been planted with trees for logging in the 1950s, since the 1970s the state had been buying back and restoring the land to its original swampy-ness. Or, at least, that's what Henry had read online before they'd left the hospital, and from what he could see in the glow of the headlights, the forest service had done a pretty good job of that.

They were driving on one of the old logging roads and trying not to accidentally swerve into what were probably once drainage ditches but now expanded into boggy ponds overgrown with bay trees that scratched against the sides of the car as they bounced along on the bumpy and muddy road - none of which seemed to bother a still-unconscious Emma, while Henry was sure he had acquired a number of lumps on his head from whacking it against the roof.

Belle had cautioned they couldn't put Emma's heart back in until they were in Storybrooke, but they could hopefully give her an artificial magical heart bypass jump start - or something, Henry wasn't clear on all of the big magical words Belle had used - assuming they found what they were out here looking for. Either way, it was supposed to keep his mom from suffering any further massive coronaries for the next couple of days, enough time to get back to Storybrooke where they could pop her heart back in after getting a magical diagnosis for the apparent "defect" that it sounded like, from what his dad had said, his mom knew about before they left Storybrooke, so it wasn't a result of her heart being outside of her body in a magic-less environment. Between getting stoned on his scattered pixie dust, getting infected with syphilis and monkey herpes, the whole 'removed dark potential' and Dark One thing, and an assortment of subsequent magical and physical ailments, should it really be a surprise that something was amiss with Emma Swan's heart?

Henry just hoped that Belle was right - and that they didn't drive into a pond they couldn't get out of. It would be pretty hard to explain to a park ranger why they were driving around after hours without a permit with an unconscious woman who had to be, by now, reported missing from the hospital, what with an ambulance that was supposed to show up to transfer his mom from the rural hospital in Apalachacola to Tallahassee about an hour ago. Of course, they could get eaten by gators, panthers, bears, snapping turtles, bitten by poisonous snakes, or just mauled by crazed wild turkeys before help arrived.

"I think we're almost there," Henry relayed while squinting at the GPS that kept losing the satellite. They'd passed Graham Creek awhile back and a turnoff that was supposed to lead to one of the "primitive campsites" that, maybe, they would have all tried out for a overnight if they hadn't been at each other's throats and totally had their fill of creepy night jungle camping in Neverland.

A few minutes later, the GPS announced a chipper, "You have arrived at your destination!" and Neal stopped the car, pulling the parking brake.

Their destination was a wet flatwood area, drier than what they'd driven through and overgrown with cypress.

It took a few minutes to get Emma out, find a working flashlight in the trunk, and then head out toward the actual destination in the approximate area that Belle had given them. With Neal carrying Emma and Henry carrying her increasingly monochrome and translucent heart as a sort of magical diving rod - which was super creepy - they set off into the woods.

"I still don't get why Mom would take her heart out," Henry sighed as they walked. "I mean, that seems kinda drastic and, you know, not well thought out a thousand miles from Storybrooke."

"I don't think Emma was really thinking it all through. We were arguing," Neal grimaced.

"Figures."

"Hey!" Neal shot back. "You're the one who brought up He Who Must Not Be Named at the beginning of a two day, two thousand mile car trip, after your mother failed her driving test."

"I didn't mean to," Henry defended. "And we wouldn't have had to take a two day, two thousand mile car trip if you'd stopped being so weird about He Who Must Not Be Named and just had sex already! And, don't make me state again that I want you and Mom to have sex, because as your offspring that evolutionarily disgusts me, but it's like my thing to make sure everyone gets their happy ending, and you two are not going to be happy until you have a taco party."

"Taco party?" Neal repeated, brows furrowed. "Isn't that 'the talk' for lesbians?"

Henry gave him an annoyed look, though he had to concede the point with a snort. "Me and Mom walked in on Gran and Gramps. I was eleven. We were making tacos for a party at Granny's. I didn't know what they were doing. It's kind of an in-joke."

"Ah. I've heard about those. In-jokes," Neal quipped, then grimaced a little. "Me and Emma used to have those. Feels like forever ago, though. And now, instead of being funny, it's like time transformed them into insults," he sighed, then shook his head. "Sorry. I know you really wanted this trip to go well, buddy. For us to work things out. Maybe we'd have managed if, you know, if your mom hadn't ripped her heart out to prove her point..."

Letting out a sigh of his own, Henry grouched, "Why can't we have one actual family anything that doesn't turn into a magical fuck-a-palooza?"

"Probably because our family is a fuck-a-palooza," said Neal. "Until we work out all our crap, we're just taking it with us."

"Yeah, I guess," sighed Henry. "I just wanted one time for things to work out, for us to... I dunno... feel like a real family instead of people who got stuck together because of some crazy circumstances. I know you and Mom both want that. I know if the stuff hadn't happened with the Vault, Mom would have realized that you guys were supposed to be together. I wish you would just... cut her some slack, Dad. I know she messed up, but you messed up too, and she wouldn't have agreed to this trip if she wasn't desperate to prove that even though she messed up in the past, she's fighting for you now. So why can't you guys just stop going in circles about not trusting in each other when you needed to then and have faith in each other now?"

"I think it's more complicated than that, buddy," Neal sighed.

"Yeah, I know it's complicated. Mom's got a ton of other family issues, between sharing me with Regina and sharing her perfectionist parents with a brother and sister that she says she's cool with, but I know she really isn't, and that's given her all kinds of additional trust and insecurity issues she doesn't know how to deal with, so she pretty much just doesn't," said Henry. "I know what it's like to want to find your parents and have all these ideas of what they'll be like, but for mom... they're legit famous fairy tale characters that gave her this initial impression that she had all these huge expectations to live up to that probably informed a lot of the choice she made, that maybe she wouldn't have if she'd known that pretty much the entire premise of their being super virtuous heroes was based on a lie they perpetrated that kind of resulted in her ending up an orphan. And Archie said, he thinks, people who grow up orphans stay children their whole lives, at least in some ways, with like... decision making and stuff, so you can't really expect Emma to know to make the right choices when she didn't have anyone to teach her the difference," he reasoned. "I mean, I guess I learned by doing the opposite of my mom's bad examples, but only because she cared enough - about me or herself, I dunno exactly," he admitted with a shrug, "to try and grill certain lessons into my head that I realized were pretty messed up. It's like Belle says, the worst thing in the world isn't hate, it's apathy, and that's what Emma grew up with. And every time she thought some loved her, it turned out they were just using her. Or that's what she thought, anyway. That's gotta mess a person up, right?"

Neal frowned at Henry's rather astute pop psychology while adjusting his hold on Emma, who seemed so big and strong most of the time with her in-your-face attitude but was really just a slip of a thing barely over five feet tall - though she was probably in better physical shape than he was, having his pizza-and-bagels-subsisting body restored to its lapsed six month gym membership physique after death; with the temporary turn back into a kid, he'd not had nearly enough time training with Mulan to entirely work off the take-out food gut that he'd been trying rid himself of with walks through Central Park home before this whole insanity began. Maybe it was stupid to feel embarrassed that Emma was in better shape than he was, to worry about what was such a trivial sort of disappointment in the grand scheme of things.

He remembered in Neverland when Emma's mom had basically told her she was a disappointment and wanted a new baby to do mommy things with. It was pretty brutal and completely unexpected from what he'd just assumed Snow White would be like as a mother. And had made it hard to be mad at Emma over the whole 'I wished you were dead and I'm not giving you a second chance' thing. Neal had understood as the group was spilling their secrets that everyone means cruel things sometimes, when anger and bitterness and hurt just... festers. And when you're afraid of being in pain. So, those things, they can be true, but at the same time... you know that you don't want to mean them. And so he'd just assumed that mother and daughter (and her father besides) had worked that out, worked past it following the mess with Lily and the Dark One; but that obviously wasn't the case, and Emma still felt like a failure in all the ways in which Neal wanted to believe her mother hadn't actually meant, even if Emma had obviously interpreted it that way. Of course, given his own interactions with her parents, then and more recently, maybe he shouldn't have assumed; he'd taken it all personally, like they were just directing some kind of prejudice against him specifically, but maybe it was really just their general way of treating everyone, including Emma.

Maybe it was true that all parents messed up their kids... whether it was by abandoning them or raising them... or a combination of the two. It had to be some miracle that Henry was still pretty level headed, his rebellious behavior contained to one of his operations gone fubar rather than spiraling into some real self-destructive crap like cooking meth in August's old trailer in the woods. Especially considering this family just seemed to have a nasty habit of getting stuck in a loop, saying all of that hurtful crap, never getting far enough beyond it to put it permanently in the rear view.

Or they did, but it was always in the midst of some crazy magical shit, like finally hashing it out with his old man only for the celebration to end in a murder-suicide.

Neal knew Emma hadn't intended to keel over in a crummy beach house, though, she'd just been trying to make a point - with a visual aid that was glowing in Henry's hand... the glow having gotten significantly weaker since she first ripped it free.

Before Neal could say anything to Henry's point, his son exclaimed, "Oh, look here we are!"

Here was a swampy pond about the size of a kiddy pool with a rusted truck axle half submerged in the weeds and what looked suspiciously like leeches. It also did not smell great. But Belle had said to look for a tree ( an endangered Whitewood, specifically) that had a carving of a lion on the trunk, and there it was. Apparently, the publicly known "legend" of Cebe Tate failed to mention the magic-related part about that scummy water he drank (and misinterpreted the carving as his doodling of that panther in his snake-bite-delirium), but Belle was 95 percent sure that this pond was a bit like the healing waters in Neverland, and that Tate had probably drank it after the snake bite, which had allowed him to survive to make it out of the swamp, after which, he might have survived if he'd known it was temporary... and had lived in an era in which anti-venom existed. Of course, they didn't know exactly when during those seven days he got bit and drank the water, and Emma was incapable of drinking, which meant an alternative plan.

The things we do for love, Neal thought as he waded into the stinky, oily pond.

Once he was in the middle, the dark, smelly water at about mid-thigh height and wicking up his boxers through the drenched fabric of his jeans, Neal bent over and dunked Emma like one of those river baptism things.

"Hey, I think it's working!" Henry exclaimed as the heart in his hand grew more vibrantly red.

Just as he spoke, there was coughing, splashing, and struggling, forcing Neal to release Emma. He smiled, relieved - and then the shaft a rusted car axle collided with his junk, causing him to see stars as he fell face first into the pond, and the woman he'd just saved shrieked-

"Get away from me, you pervert!"

Correction: woman was not an accurate description, because standing drenched at the side of the pond and brandishing the rusted pipe was a fifteen year old Emma Swan.

"Awww crap," Henry groaned while Neal coughed and spit a leech out of his mouth.

AN: A shortie after two excruciatingly long chapters. I think that's the end of any excessive lengths and rantings. Henry's closing line "Oh, look, here we are!" is a shout-out to a now rather old fanfic series in the Harry Potter fandom in which it was a running joke used often by one character to prematurely end conversations. Any guesses? Obviously, the pond was the Fountain of Youth. Did you know that the poet Neal Cassady's middle name was Leon, which is the County in which Tallahassee is located, named for Ponce de Leon, of course. A lion standing on its hind legs is on the family crest of both the House of de Leon and the House of Trastámara, that of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Information on Tate's Hell, including the legend of its namesake, is taken from Divisions-Offices/Florida-Forest-Service/Our-Forests/State-Forests/Tate-s-Hell-State-Forest.

Next up: A de-aged Emma Swan finds herself on the road with two very unusual campers, and perilous situations featuring embarrassing misunderstandings occur.