It only took twenty minutes for the sun to sink below the horizon. Ten minutes after that, it was so dark that seated on the sofa, Emma couldn't see the bed on the other side of the shack. The only light in the room came from the dancing flames in the fireplace, flickering orange light that didn't quite have the power to chase away all the shadows.
"Wow," she muttered after her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. "I never realized how much I took electricity for granted."
Electric light and electric heat. She shuddered despite the warmth from the fire and the blanket covering her legs. She'd spent plenty of nights without electricity in recent weeks, but the urgency of her times in the Enchanted Forest and Neverland had kept her from truly noticing the lack of modern conveniences. Now, though, an entire dark and cold night stretched out ahead of her and there was nothing she could do but wait it out.
Emma hated waiting things out.
Snow smiled as she eased down on the sofa with her daughter. Her smiled widened when Emma held up the blanket so her mother could cover her legs as well. "Not having electricity isn't a big deal," she said, her voice soft. Neal, cradled in her arms, was fighting sleep and she dared not disturb him lest they all have a screaming baby on their hands.
"Yeah, for you," Emma easily returned. "You're all used to this."
"I'm not!" Henry spoke up from his spot front of the fire with Killian and David.
"I didn't mean you, kid. I meant everyone else. What the hell did you three do at night with no lights or TV or radio or anything?"
"There are sources of light other than light bulbs, you know," Snow replied with mock offense at Emma's implication that a world without electricity was primitive. "Light is light whether it comes from a table lamp, a lantern, or a candelabra. As for the rest of it, we found ways to occupy ourselves. Telling stories, playing games, or even just reading by lantern light. It was never boring."
Maybe, but they hadn't known any different.
"I used to study the stars at night," Killian spoke up. He'd finally warmed up enough to turn his back to the fire, facing Emma and Snow on the couch. He let the blanket drop from around his shoulders and smiled when Henry grabbed a corner of it to drape over his own legs.
"Well, yeah," Emma said, rolling her eyes, "but you kind of had to, didn't you? You were the navigator."
"Aye, and I learned how to navigate by them, but that's not what I meant. I would watch them. Nights when the seas were calm, I'd go out on deck and do nothing but watch the stars for hours. I found it relaxing."
She arched an eyebrow at him. Sitting on a boat deck and staring up into the sky was relaxing? She'd be bored within ten minutes. "Seriously?"
"Aye. The night sky has the power to soothe unlike any other sight I've seen. The stars dance, they wink and blink, they flicker, and they shoot across the sky. They put on a show, one that's never the same and yet never changes. Night in and night out, the stars appear, no matter what is happening down here. There's a comforting steadfastness to it all."
A gentle smile curled on Emma's lips. Come to think of it, the notion that the stars were always there despite whatever was going on in one's own personal world was comforting. It was a constant, and if there was one thing both she and Killian had had very little of in their lives, it was constants.
He returned the smile.
"What about you, Gramps?" Henry asked. "What did you do in the evenings on the farm?"
"Our evenings were actually quite short because we got up so early in the mornings," David explained.
"At the ass-crack of dawn," Emma teased. Snow winced at her language.
"Hey, now, don't knock sunrise," David teased right back. "Watching the darkness turn to gray light and then to the warm brightness of the early morning was my night sky."
Emma playfully wrinkled her nose. "I much prefer my mornings to start after it's been light for a couple of hours."
"Believe me, we all know," Snow teased.
Everyone snickered while Emma pursed her lips. "Anyway," David said after the snickering died down, returning to Henry's original question, "we didn't have long evenings but my parents still made sure there was time for stories or activities before I went to sleep."
Emma smiled even as the back of her throat began to constrict with emotion. Her parents' evenings had been filled with togetherness despite the lack of modern conveniences. Her evenings, while filled with modern conveniences, had lacked the togetherness. They'd consisted of homework and finding ways to occupy herself until lights out.
In response to her daughter's rising emotion, Snow shifted closer to her, snuggling up as much as she dared. And in what was yet another example of the lost little girl forcing her way to the surface, Emma closed the gap, nestling into her mother's side just as she'd done earlier. She felt more than heard Snow gasp, and before she had the chance to shift away, Snow once again wrapped an arm around her daughter's shoulders while cradling her son in the other.
Not wanting to miss out on a family cuddle, David pushed himself up from the floor and plopped down on Emma's other side. Thankfully, no one called any attention to the fact that her parents were now flanking her. After a moment of silence, Snow began to hum softly, her way of giving the little squirt the final push he needed to sleep.
Snow's humming seemed to fill Emma's ear. It was a lullaby of some sort; she could tell that much. The tune was unfamiliar to her, though. Unfamiliar or not, it was soothing and it, combined with the warmth of her parents surrounding her and the exhaustion still weighing down on her from her magic use, was making her drowsy.
The sounds in the shack combined to form their own lullaby. Snow's quiet humming, the crackling of the fire, the wind whistling outside, the soft conversation that had sprung up around her. It was only when a deep shiver ran down her spine that Emma was startled back to attentiveness. It was getting cold, despite the fire and despite the efforts to stay close to share body heat.
David rested a gentle hand on his daughter's shoulder before standing up to feed a couple of logs into the fire. "We need those colored logs Doc Brown had in the third Back to the Future movie," she mumbled.
Henry snickered, partly in amusement but mostly because he was the only one in the shack who'd gotten the joke. Killian frowned at her. "What is this Back to the Future thing you keep talking about, Swan?"
"It's a movie about a kid who has to get back to the future," Henry explained oh so helpfully.
Snow, David, and Emma swallowed snickers while Killian heaved a sigh. He arched a questioning eyebrow at Emma, silently begging her to translate. "Basically, what the kid said," she smiled, too tired to fully explain both what a movie was and the storyline of a 1980s movie trilogy. "I'll show you someday. I think you'll get a kick out of it." Mostly because she and Killian had pretty much just lived the plot of the first one.
David sat back down then, squeezing in closer to his daughter than before. Emma rolled her eyes but she didn't have the heart to tell him to scoot over. He wanted to be close with her, and the lost little girl inside her was once again leaping for joy.
Truthfully, the lost little girl inside her wanted her dad to be close to her just as much as her dad did. And the lost little girl wanted her mom close, too. The fact that between the two of them, her parents were staving off the cold for her was an added bonus.
Emma was drawn from her reverie when Snow stopped humming. She glanced to the side and sure enough, the little squirt was finally sound asleep. Judging by the time, he'd get a good few hours in before he started to fuss. Snow didn't get up to settle him in the car seat, though. Emma suspected she was trying to keep him warm with her body heat as well.
For a few moments, everyone sat in silence. Then Henry spoke up, mostly because the warmth of the fire at his back was beginning to make him drowsy, too. "You know what we should do?"
"What's that?" Snow asked.
"Tell ghost stories."
Emma groaned. "We're not telling ghost stories."
"Aw, come on, Mom! It's a perfect night for one!"
The kid had a point. The wind whistling outside rattled the window panes, and wooden shack creaked and groaned with the force of it. It was indeed a perfect atmosphere for ghost stories, which was the exact reason they weren't going to tell them. "No."
"Please? You tell the best ghost stories. Please?" He drew the word out that time, sticking out his lower lip in a slight pout.
She had every intention of resisting her kid's Puppy Dog Eyes this time but then her pirate had to go and pull the same damn stunt! "Aye, love," he spoke up, coming thisclose to batting his lashes at her. "I would like to hear a ghost story as well."
Emma swallowed a groan and glanced at her parents for backup. Unfortunately for her, they both looked just as intrigued at the prospect of a ghost story as the kid and the pirate. Damn it, she did not have the energy for this tonight.
Just as she was about to tell them all as much, Killian copied Henry, pouting at her with a pleading expression on his face. "I told you stories, Swan," he reminded her.
"You told me stories so I could make sure you weren't freezing to death in the tundra."
"Turnabout is still fair play, lass. You owe me at least one story."
"Ugh, fine!" she cried. Henry and Killian shared a grin. "I'll tell you guys a ghost story. One story, though, and that's it. Got it?" She stared pointedly at her kid for that one.
"Got it," Henry grinned.
Her family and Killian arranged themselves comfortably while waiting for her to begin. Since she lacked the energy to make up a story, she decided to tell an old standby. None of them would know the difference. She waited until everyone stopped fidgeting and then a beat longer to build the anticipation. "Once upon a time, a family named the Freelings–"
"An original story, Mom," Henry interrupted.
Damn it.
Snow gaped at him. "How'd you know that wasn't original? She hadn't even finished the first sentence!"
"The Freelings are the family in Poltergeist," he shrugged.
Aw, crap, she'd forgotten she'd let him watch Poltergeist for the first time this past Halloween. "All right, all right, let me think for a second."
She really did not have the energy to think up a ghost story … and then it came to her. She didn't have to make one up at all! "Okay, you want a real ghost story?"
"A real one?" Henry asked, his eyes wide.
"A real one."
The kid nodded vigorously. Snow and Charming looked both confused and intrigued, and a dubious Killian almost imperceptibly raised his eyebrows.
Oh, yeah. This was totally the story she was telling.
"The house I was living in when I was nine was really old," she said, leaning back on the sofa to make herself comfortable for story time. "Really old, from the 1850s. It had been a farmhouse that was converted into a group home, and it was one of the nicer ones. We slept two to a room, all except the littlest boy, Jacob. He had a room of his own. Every morning, he would tell us about the woman in his room the night before. Every night, she stood at the window shade. He never could make out any features; she was just a shadow that never moved, a shadow standing at the window and watching him go to sleep. He was only four, so I never really believed him. I just figured there was something outside that was making a shadow on the shade and he just thought it looked like a woman."
"I would have, too," Snow softly interrupted.
Emma smiled at her. "I never really believed him … not until one day a few months later. This girl Alana and I were home sick from school with the flu, so we were alone in the house."
Snow and David exchanged a pained glance at the thought of their nine-year-old baby girl being left alone with only another sick child for caring and company. Wincing slightly, Emma charged on with the story. "I was napping but a voice woke me up. I couldn't make out what the voice was saying; it was almost like trying to listen to a conversation in another room. I thought it was Alana calling me so I got up and went to her room. It couldn't have been her, though, because when I got there, she was sound asleep."
"You could have been dreaming," Killian pointed out. She raised an eyebrow, and he smiled sheepishly when he realized his mistake. "Except you just said the voice had continued after you awoke."
"Yes," she replied dryly, swallowing a chuckle. "Anyway, I couldn't hear the voice anymore but I did hear the back door open and close. I didn't think anything of it, just figured someone had finally come home. I had just stepped back into the hallway to go back to my room when I heard the footsteps. Heavy footsteps going up the stairs … the stairs I was facing. No one was there."
Henry shuddered.
"The footsteps continued past me down the hallway and stopped in Jacob's room. I pretty much freaked out at that point and ran back to Alana's room, woke her up, and hid under the covers with her. When Jacob overheard me and Alana talking about it later, and he said, 'That was Florence.' He said she liked the back yard because that was where her garden used to be. Anyone want to take a guess which yard his room overlooked?"
"The back yard?" Killian asked.
"Yep."
The pirate's expression had shifted from dubious to intrigued while her parents were waiting with bated breath to find out what happened next. Henry was squirming on the floor, which made Emma feel both triumphant and somewhat guilty. "I ended up learning through a local history project for school that there really was a garden in the back yard at one point and that a woman died in the house in 1905. Her name? Was Florence Robinson."
Everyone gaped at her. "You're making that up," Henry said once he'd finally recovered his voice.
"I swear I'm not."
"I don't believe you," he insisted, but the tremor in his voice said otherwise. Emma hid a smirk.
Killian raised a questioning eyebrow at her, and she nodded to let him know that she was indeed telling the truth. If anyone had asked her a couple of years ago if she'd really thought it was a ghost or if the whole thing was just the result of some kids' active and fever-induced imaginations, she would have placed all her bets on imagination. With what she'd seen and done in recent weeks, though, an actual ghost was a more distinct possibility.
The very notion made a shudder run down her spine, a shudder not caused by the air temperature in the shack. At least she got a kickass story out of the deal, judging by the expressions on everyone's faces.
"Did you call Ghostbusters?" Henry asked cheekily after a moment of letting the story settle.
Everyone laughed, even though the Enchanted Forest denizens didn't quite understand the joke. Either way, it released the dramatic tension Emma had built with her story. "No, we didn't," she said, smirking, "and I'm kind of glad about that. The last thing I need is to find out they're real, too."