CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: FAIRY TALE CHARACTERS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE

(In which the characters nosh on diner food that isn't Granny's!)

The motel turned out to be a dive adjacent to a truck stop and a greasy spoon 24 hour diner. Food was the first order of business, all of them with growling stomachs by the time Neal pulled into the lot, under the glowing neon sign that had probably been erected in the 1960s and never painted since, accept by the pigeons that had left droppings at the top.

"Slug bug!" Emma suddenly exclaimed, socking Henry in the arm, and then threw open the door and squeezed out, clip-clopping her way in galoshes to the diner's front door.

"I'm covered in bruises!" Henry complained. "Please don't make me share a room with her!"

"I can't share a room with her!" Neal shot back as they got out. "And we can't let her have her own room. She might run off. Or, you know, have some other magical side-effect. Or just a regular concussion side-effect."

Henry groaned. "I can't decide if she's annoying, infuriating, or kind of adorable. It's like I suddenly gained a sister and I am totally reevaluating ever wishing I had one growing up!"

Neal laughed. It was kind of true, and this was a very different Emma than the one he'd met when she wasn't that much older. Living on the streets made you grow up fast. Just six months on the streets and in the workhouses of London had made him very different at fifteen from fourteen. Emma hadn't yet completed that transformation. She was just at the beginning of it, really. There were moments when Emma exuded the jaded maturity he remembered of her at seventeen, but then she would revert to more girlish (though not girlie) behavior and it was refreshing to know that once upon a time Emma still had some childish innocence and enthusiasm. She'd still had some when they met, though not this much.

This was an Emma who'd had only a brief taste of being on the streets, a bus ride and then a few weeks squatting in a lake house with Lily, the thrill of independence... followed by three betrayals, the loss of a friend, loss of a foster mother, and losing a second family because of the girl she'd trusted. It wasn't thrilling independence, that feeling he remembered when he arrived in London, but coming here to this world and being resigned to the notion that attempts to have a family would never work out. There was some relief in knowing you had no one to disappoint or be disappointed by, but there was also the gnawing sensation from the start that being alone however much it served as amour was the opposite of what you wanted - and so when someone extended a helping hand, you couldn't help but take it and try to enjoy it while it lasted, knowing it wouldn't, because life just wasn't that fair.

Emma had said something of that effect to him, Neal remembered now, and he'd promised they wouldn't let each other down. That if the world wouldn't help either of them, they'd help each other. He would forever kick himself for that, like so many things regarding her. Sometimes it did feel like they were cursed, like the universe didn't want them to be together. Between evil fiancees, Wicked Witches, and Snow Queens... who could say how much Emma's missing memories had altered how she recalled their time together had changed how she'd viewed him and them in Manhattan? She'd admitted over ice cream on one of their lunch dates that her perceptions had been somewhat altered when she regained her memories, but it was too late for it to make a difference, to know if she'd have had coffee with him that day if she remembered the crazy magic foster mom, remembering telling him about Ingrid and how that would have obviously influenced him not telling her the truth about himself. But they'd never know now.

Just like he'd never know if they'd have still become lovers if he'd known she was seventeen... and knew Oregon state laws. It was August who informed him, when he said Emma would most-likely be charged as a minor if she was convinced at all. That had been an unsettling shock, that he'd believed her as much as she'd believed him, though his lie was by far the worse one. Thinking about it now... he'd been young and far too naive for his age, but he should have been careful, should have thought about the consequences for both of them when they were a couple of orphans living out of a car.

Love could be blinding.

But love had also given them Henry, so he couldn't regret it, and he didn't think Emma did either, not that part anyway.

And maybe, just maybe, Emma's real grown-up self was still under the surface, because she'd left her blanket and cigar box of trinkets in the car. Whether that meant this ingénue thief version of Emma trusted them not to run off or it was some subconscious bit of her adult self seeping through... it made Neal smile as he followed Henry inside.

At least there was something to smile about.

Unlike Granny's the place was on the greasy side, grunginess evident in the corners where the floor buffer couldn't quite reach and there was probably twenty years worth of gum under the tables. It was packed with truckers even at this late (early?) hour and an assortment of other nightshift people and travelers looking for cheap, fairly reliable meals in proximity to wherever they were going to or coming from. It was the sort of place with which Neal had become familiar since arriving in this world, and even in the grubbier one there was always a sort of feeling of being included even a stranger, given the transient nature of many of even the regulars.

Emma had returned from the bathroom and joined Henry in a booth under an old star shaped clock and a waitress schlepped over to take their orders just as Neal slid in opposite the two teens. Emma ordered a grilled cheese with onion rings and a rootbeer float, Henry got a BLT with no mayo and fries, and Neal got a burger; and though coffee or a coke sounded ideal, he decided to forgo caffeine for a cup of decaff, which got him called "old" by Emma.

"You're awfully critical for a hobo," Neal teased.

"I'm not a hobo!"

"Nothing wrong with being a hobo. Kerouac loved hobos. It was a badge of honor back in the day," Neal argued.

"I have no idea who that is," Emma declared with a shrug while shoving sugar packets and napkins into her pockets like a squirrel preparing for winter.

"He was a poet," said Neal, trying not to smile, because Emma had been clueless before and he could anticipate her response.

"Poetry sucks," she told him. "Only one I've read is Thoreau, and only because he's the poet laureate of Massachusetts, so it was mandatory to read his book about that pond. Pretty sure I can say for certain now that ponds suck. I don't know why anyone would want to live alone in the woods in the middle of nowhere and write poetry," she concluded, wrinkling her nose at the thought.

"I like to write," Henry defended, though he added, "not poetry."

"Well, you're not a total dork then, I guess," said Emma.

"Gee, thanks."

The waitress returned with their drinks then and their meals shortly thereafter. Ravenous as they all were and some truckers playing loud country music on the juke box, there wasn't much conversation. Neal tried not to laugh at the little 'mmmm' noises Emma made when she nibbled at the gooey globs of cheese that oozed from the sides of her sandwich; she'd done that when he knew her back in Portland, but seemed to have stopped the childish habit by the time she got to Storybrooke, which had saddened him a little. He did, to some surprise and silent delight, notice similarities between her and Henry that weren't so obvious in the older, more refined Emma Swan, that he wouldn't have really considered from their shared past without seeing the two side-by-side leaning their elbows in the same way or squinting at the menu.

Henry, for all of his insisting otherwise, was definitely going to need glasses, Neal realized, something which Emma had admitted to avoiding for years - people were less likely to adopt kids with glasses and teenagers just got picked on. She'd gotten LASIK surgery, she'd said, with one of her bounty-related paychecks early on, since chasing down bail jumpers wearing glasses or prescription contacts when the men had a penchant for throwing beverages in her face, had proved problematic. Neal kind of missed them, though, that Clark Kent phase; Superman was the savior with amazing powers, but he was also aloof in his Fortress of Solitude while Clark was the guy with the family, the connection to the people who helped him toward that destiny.

He didn't envy Emma, the burden that had been placed on her because of a choice her parents made without understanding the consequences for her... and without a loving adoptive family to start her out right.

"Gotta take a leak," Henry declared while they awaited the check and Neal rolled his eyes.

Henry had been such a polite kid when he met him, but puberty and a hanging out with Hook and August had given him a crass-streak, it seemed. It didn't really seem to fit his son, and Neal wondered if Henry was trying to be badder-ass than he was, because it seemed that both girls and boys liked bad boys. He'd been a bad boy by Emma's teenage standards when they met, but by the time they reunited, she'd graduated from car thieves to pirates, a fact that still stung no matter how hard he tried to get past it.

"So..." Emma broke the silence, "is 'Ohana' Henry's mom?"

Neal pulled his gaze from the dark parking lot uttering, "Huh?" as he was a bit late on the uptake with her question. "Oh, no. It's Hawaiian. Mean's 'family'."

"You're Hawaiian?"

He shook his head. "Naw. I knew a Polynesian kid when I was younger. Thought we were friends. Turned out he was just playing me, though."

Frowning, Emma uttered, "I know how that goes. I had a friend... she got me thrown back in the System... then showed up wanted for accessory to armed robbery with her boyfriend, so I had to leave my last home. Well, I didn't really have to, but... the way they looked at me, like I'd never be one of them, like they were afraid my past would endanger them, I had to leave. Maybe it would have? My foster mom before that was a real psycho. I figured after Lily screwed up my last chance it was best to get out of Minnesota anyway. It's not like crazy people care about restraining orders or like DCFS enforces them."

"Yeah, orphans aren't high on the priority list," Neal agreed, then amended, "but living on the streets is no picnic either, Emma. Getting food out of dumpsters, shoplifting, avoiding muggers and perverts. It's no fairy tale."

"Yeah, well, there's no fairy godmother's in this world," said Emma with a shrug. "If you want something, you just gotta take it. So I'm taking my life away from that crapfest and doing what I want."

Smiling ruefully, a bit wistfully, Neal told her, "Now you sound like Henry's mom."

Emma's brows lifted at that. "Yeah? He said you're kinda exes but you're trying to work it out."

Neal shook his head and replied, "It's complicated. We love each other, but there's a lot of hurt on both sides that's not easy to get passed."

"Henry said you accidentally got her sent to jail and she accidentally married your step-dad."

Neal snorted. "Not sure 'accidentally' exactly applies in either case, but close enough, I guess. I was pretty much alone until I met her. She was another orphan kid living on the streets. We were gonna settle down, get our happy ending, but a guy who'd known her parents promised he'd help her out, called the cops, got her arrested, took all our money. I never did figure out if he was just a gambling sex addict who really wanted what was best for her and sent her to jail so we wouldn't be able to contract each other and planned to help her out after her release but relapsed and then felt too guilty to try and get back in touch with either of us... or if it was always just that he knew I had twenty grand stashed away and just played us both."

"Sounds like a real jerk either way!" declared Emma.

Smiling a little at that, Neal continued, "Anyway, I didn't know she was pregnant. I didn't know he'd bail and her life would suck. But I did know she wouldn't forgive me. So, when our family shit collided, when Henry tracked her down and helped her find her birth parents and my dad ended up in the mess and tracked me down and that's how she figured out my dad was involved in why her parents had to abandon her as a baby... well... she was angry and confused and upset... and I was engaged..."

"To the woman who shot you?"

"Yeah. After that mess, I tried to be patient, step back, give her space, hope that we could talk things out. But more shit got in the way. And then I was gone, because I did something stupid to get my father out of prison, and everyone thought I was dead..."

"And she married your step-dad."

"Yeah. When I finally escaped, made it back, everyone had just moved on," Neal grimaced. "Everyone thought he was a great guy, reformed from his lapse into criminality as though my father had him do it all, restored to the great Navy man he was." He rolled his eyes. "They were married, and she said she didn't know he was my stepfather, and maybe she didn't, but even if he'd threatened everyone else, including my father and his wife, not to tell her, it wouldn't exactly have been hard for her to find out, when doing background checks and finding people was her claim to fame. It boils down to her just not caring to know," he sighed. "Or it felt like that, anyway. And I held it against her."

Neal sat back a little before admitting, "But... it's not all that different than my not looking for her, not checking to make sure August was keeping his word, not going to find her when I knew she'd been reunited with her parents. 'Course, knowing something doesn't make it hurt less, make it easier to forgive and forget, not when you've gone through life being tossed aside like you're no more important than the junk people leave by the curb. It's kinda hard to believe you're worth the trouble. And it turns out she's from a really affluent family and I'm... well.. not remotely, not where our families are from. And I know her parents aren't fond of me, never wanted me part of their family. They think she could do a lot better than me."

"Why? Because you're an accountant from Jersey or some... third world slum?" Emma countered. "Who cares what people do or where they're from or who their parents are? I've lived in foster homes with really poor people using food stamps who have to save money just to shop at the Salvation Army who are a lot nicer and more honest than rich people in big houses with designer clothes who say they're doing something charitable to help the poor, but really they're just trying to look good for their rotary club or Church and get a tax write-off. You coulda handed me over to the authorities, but instead you're helping me out, even if you could get in trouble. That sounds a lot better than those parents of hers who happily let her marry some murderous douche just because he wore a uniform."

"They're not bad people," Neal countered. "They just want what's best for. I did too. I thought that was leaving back then, but I was wrong. If I could go back and make a different I choice, I would..."

Emma smiled a little and deduced, "You really love Henry's mom, don't you?"

"Yeah." Neal didn't hesitate in his response. "I do. I knew from the first time I kissed her… She wasn't his mom then, obviously, she was just this girl in a car. But when we kissed, it was like… I gotta tell you, it was like I never kissed any other woman before. It was like the first kiss… the right kiss. And I knew one day I was gonna marry her. Only I let that dream slip away. And sometimes people change too much to get those innocent dreams back."

Sighing, Neal expounded, "Henry's adoptive mom and her husband... they had a chance when they were young, but she didn't take it, he got married, had a kid, and though they got back together... with all of the tragic bullshit that happened in between... I look at them, and they're a trainwreck with him fighting over his custody rights with his first wife for their son and her half sister who basically date raped the guy and got pregnant just throw a wrench in their plans. It's like a bad telenovela and cheap cable reality show collided and fused into a new romantic monstrosity, and I don't want us to end up like that."

He grimaced and shook his head.

"Being someone's soulmate...," Neal stated, "sometimes I think maybe it's a moment in time, that in that moment you're in tune, it's right and if you head down a path together then you grow closer, make each other better. But if you let that moment pass, then maybe you're not really soulmates anymore, not when you change so much on different paths. Converging those paths after so long and so much hurt... I don't think it's so easy and maybe not even possible, and you just end up with a forced mess trying to recreate what could have been, singing the same old lyrics but to a completely different tune that doesn't match up at all."

"But if you don't try, you'll never know, right?"

Neal didn't have a chance to answer, a scuffle over by the jukebox drawing their attention. One of the truckers gave Henry a shove, knocking him into those cheap plastic toy dispensers. But before Neal could reach them, the beefy fry cook let out a warning, "Hey, hands off the kid or I'll haul all your asses outta here!"

"Don't wanna eat your shitty food, anyway!" the guy declared, flipping the cook off as he and his buddies staggered out... one of them stopping to piss in the bushes out front.

"What a bunch of creeps!" Emma huffed.

"What was that about?" Neal asked Henry, who shrugged.

"Just being drunk assholes." He pulled one of those plastic eggs out of his pocket and handed it to Emma who's eyes lit in surprise.

"You got me something?"

"You don't have to keep it if it sucks," Henry returned.

Emma beamed and took the toy, popping open the egg which had a glittery pink plastic-rubber bangle bracelet in it. She tugged it onto her left wrist and then gave Henry a quick kiss on the cheek, declaring, "It's great!"

A bit flustered, Henry answered, "Erm... glad you like it... Emma."

Neal considered how fun it would be to tease Emma about that later, but seeing as the group of drunk rednecks had finally made it to the cluster of trucks at the other end of the parking lot, decided, "How about we get desert to go? I don't know about you guys, but I really need to wash the swamp off. Why don't you get your stuff outta the Bug while I check in?" he prompted, handing Henry the keys.

As the kids headed out and he took out his wallet to pay the bill, the waitress came over, looking bemused.

"Two fucking babies at the same time."

"Pardon?"

"Your kids," the woman specified, nodding toward the pair who had, for some reason, linked arms in a most uncomfortable looking way while taking exaggerated steps through the parking lot toward the Bug. "My sister had twins a couple of years ago. That's how she describes it: 'Two fucking babies at the same time.' People think it's just like having two kids, she says, but going through two of 'em in diapers and wailing at three A.M... that's a whole different kind of crazy."

Neal just laughed, having nothing he could say to that. For a fleeting moment, as he left the woman a generous tip, Neal wondered what it would have been like if he and Emma had raised Henry, if they'd been blessed with a daughter as well, a few years later, if the two would have grown up bickering but supporting each other in that way he supposed only siblings could understand - that he and Emma and Henry would never really know.

The 'could have beens' felt heavy as he stepped back out into the humid night.

AN: I just love Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. Neal's line about kisses is borrowed from another tragically killed-off ABC character. "Two fucking babies at the same time" is from a This American Life Father's Day episode. Emma is talking about Walden Pond; did you know one of the themes is that water is an axis mundi? Neal's tattoo is MRJ's, which means "family", which just makes his character's death and treatment thereafter all the more of a "fuck you".

Next up: Ice ice, baby.