Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ORIGINAL RAPE APOLOGIST

Emma had been covered in a variety of weird substances, but marshmallow was a new one. She would definitely never eat a s'more again, she decided as she tried to pull globs of the stuff out of her 'straight dishwater blonde' hair while navigating the destroyed section of the carnival in the still dark of night.

This place was like fucking Neverland with its never-ending night.

So focused was she on pulling a wad of puffed sugar out of her hair - and so stuck were her fingers to her hair - that Emma failed to notice an impediment in her path as well as to catch herself as the impact to her shins sent her pitching face first into an overstuffed trash can.

Tumbling over the bin, Emma landed in a smelly pile of garbage that had been the disgusting fried food repository for the day's probably nonexistent carnival-goers. Thanks to the marshmallow, a wide variety of the disgusting half-eaten "treats" stuck to her.

And the unforeseen impediment let out a laugh that if not so girlie would have reminded Emma very much of that bully kid Nelson on The Simpsons. But instead of a boy in ratty jean-shorts her bully was a young and prissy looking woman in a fancy white ballgown, tiara, and elbow-length gloves.

Emma glared at a strange young woman. "What the fuck, lady? Did you just trip me?"

"You're guttersnipe trash. I thought you'd be missing your home and wanted to help you get back," snidely replied the young woman.

"Seriously?" Emma spat, flicking off garbage from her person as she got up.

She'd dealt with this sort of adolescent bullshit in elementary school, but this bougee little snot was calling her trash? Okay, so Regina had pretty much called her that early on in their... whatever you wanted to call their "relationship", but strangers in fancy clothes didn't usually come up to her and insult her.

"Who do you think you are?" Emma demanded, "you uppity bitch."

The young woman turned her nose up and declared, "I am Princess Eva of the Enchanted Forest, second cousin to Prince Leopold, soon to be King Leopold after his brother's impeding abdication. And you are trespassing!"

"Trespa-"

Emma stopped herself as she realized the surroundings had entirely changed. They weren't in the food area anymore, but rather a garden. It was sort of a cheap beer garden with a fake-ass gazebo that made Granny's Camelot mash-up look professionally done. There was a mural of a castle on a wall that Emma supposed was meant to be like a movie set backdrop - at least to her grandmother's delusional thinking.

"You know what? Fine," Emma told the crazy lady who was, apparently, rape-spawned by Killian Jones, "I'll just be on my wa-"

"Let you go? Trespassing is a punishable offense, peasant!"

A vulpine grin crossed Eva's face and she seemed to pounce, startling Emma up against the side of the gazebo.

"No, I shall summon the guards and you will rot in the dungeon!"

There was a chain on the wall of the gazebo which the snotty princess pulled, causing a bell to chime and she looked smugly at Emma, still covered in trash.

"This will soon all be mine, you know," she boasted. "And I schemed masterfully to get it. Of course, my husband is a complete dolt and not especially attractive besides who fell in love with a miller's daughter, a peasant just like you. The things one must do to secure hereditary security for their descendants!"

"Yeah, well, you know what?" Emma retorted, "I'm one of them! I'm your frigg'n granddaughter whose life got ruined because you fixated on ruining that woman's life! And you got poisoned to death and your 'dolt husband' was murdered by Cora's daughter who cast a spell that destroyed the life of your daughter and me and turned your ill-gained kingdom into an uninhabitable wasteland, you greedy bitch!"

"Quite," said a similar but more mature voice from behind.

Emma spun and an older, dressed in red velvet Queen Eva was seated on a padded bench twirling a pink tea rose between her fingers.

"Wait," Emma deduced, "you're Greed? Here I was expecting... I dunno... King Arthur."

"Oh, he is quite greedy," conceded Eva, "but also was certifiably insane with his megalomania when he set about all of his horrible misdeeds. Also, you were soulless and your corporeal form possessed by a demonic force when you met him. Greed and pride feeding off of each other and strengthening your mutually psychotic ambitions and lustful manipulations. A shame what happened to Guinevere, though she was a bit of a self-centered hoe from the start..."

Frowning, Emma inquired, "You're saying that just because she got with some other guy when her husband was ignoring her she deserved to be mind-wiped and basically raped by her husband for five years? What the hell is wrong with you? I thought you matured and got a clue when you had my mom?"

"Well, you thought wrong based on Snow's delusionally perfect view of me created by my dolt husband who worried that he had traumatized the girl by not attending my funeral out of spite after, some years earlier, discovering that I had contrived Cora's downfall to get the throne for myself. Why do you think we had only the one child? Well, that and Leopold's erectile dysfunction. Probably a result of his parents being cousins."

"Wait... and you're also cousins?"

"We're royalty. We're more inbreed than Golden Retrievers, Emma. I mean, honestly, if my mother hadn't been raped by that pirate... well... let's just say if my adoptive parents had actually produced a child who then married Leopold, my daughter probably would have been born without a chin."

"So now you're trying to put a positive spin on rape as a counter-balance to greed-based inbreeding?" scoffed Emma.

"Well, you put a positive spin on it by completely ignoring that my father did it to hundreds of women for centuries because you wanted him to put his sword in your scabbard. Anyone can set aside morality for their own personal gain," said Eva. "You dragged off perverts to jail for years, but when you were attracted to one of them, you ignored every terrible thing he ever did to get him into your bed."

"I didn't have a soul."

"You were quite ensouled in the beginning."

"I was emotionally compromised," Emma argued, "and then I didn't have a soul before I had time to reconcile any of it. You got your cushy position in line to the throne and still couldn't help yourself tripping Cora so she nearly got murdered by a tyrant and to escape had to learn dark magic from Rumplestitlskin which is what set her down the path to mess up her daughter who ruined my life!"

"Yes, yes," conceded Eva and the Queen shrugged, "but how much better would your life have been if none of that had happened? Your parents were written as soulmates so they would have met and married somehow. Your mother would have been born regardless of how my marriage to Leopold turned out. Your father still would have assumed James' identity. You just would have grown up in the Enchanted Forest and been married off to some vain prince with a bouffant... a marriage you probably would have fled to unknowingly get pregnant by the Dark One's son and then leave him for the slutty pirate you did not know was your kin. And Zelena is just a psychopath, so raised by a well-adjusted Cora or not, she would have still attempted her little temporal rewrite and you, being an air-headed little princess whose only knowledge of the world was a peasant boy from Neverland and pirate's cock between your legs would have still fucked it all up right and proper."

Eva clicked her tongue. "So don't go blaming your misfortune on me, missy. You saw how I turned out. With the same gene pool and royal upbringing you actually think you would have turned out better than you did as an impoverished orphan?"

Letting out a grunt, Emma allowed, "Okay, fine, maybe not. All you royals seem to be idiots and assholes."

"Yes, exactly. It's a trope."

"That I was supposed to break," sighed Emma, sinking onto the bench and picking up Eva's discarded tea rose. She began plucking the petals, recalling distastefully how she'd kept that fuck flower. Stupid soulless Emma. "Yeah, yeah I heard that already."

"But have you really listened?" Eva scolded. "Have you accepted all of your sins? Are you repentant? You judge me for my crimes that hurt my bloodline, but you place all the blame for your own faults upon this unintended creation - one spawned from your unclean soul."

Shaking her head, the Queen expounded, "I seem to recall you denigrating your first love in front of your child, did you not? You flirted with and extalled the virtues of my father in the very last moments you might have shared with your family. Such loyalty. And you blame that on too much happening too quickly? Hardly. Your uncle is right. You adored the attention, being seen as the princess you know you aren't really, even if you have the right by blood. I let a rapist go free, yes, and you took one into your bed and let him mind your son. You told him that all of his sins were forgiven, absoled by the wonder of his love for you."

"That wasn't me!"

"It was part of you," stated Eva harshly. "You have to accept the good with the bad, Emma. My daughter could never do that. She could never see me as anything but perfect. And could never stand to see herself as anything but perfect, going to great lengths to excuse away all of her atrocious behavior from the time she was a small child. I tried to impress upon her the virtues a princess should have, but she took everything to absurd extremes. I did love my little Snow, but God, she was bratty child. Mostly the fault of her father spoiling her, quite honestly, and he only worsened the treatment after my demise, playing right into her hereditary failings."

Eva shook her head as she pulled back. "Truly, I'd hoped Snow would use that candle. I was at least trying to right some of my wrongs, and there were numerous murderers and fools she could have traded my life for. She always did confuse being self-righteous with being righteous. And selfish.

"If Regina's curse was cast out of wrath, Snow White's was cast through greed. Perhaps not the pursuit of material possessions, but to outwit fate, to think herself somehow more deserving than others. Special. Theft and robbery, she might have been unable to avoid while wanted for treason, but that she repeately excused away her use of violence, trickery, and manipulation of authority on the grounds that being Snow White made her immune from darkness, is all inspired by Greed."

Eva sighed sadly, lamenting, "She was given the choice, the opportunity to live a simple life and put an end to a war. She could have used that to inspire the peasants to unite against Regina, to put away with the monarchy altogether. But deny it as she might, my daughter loved the attention, the authority, the paegentry. She loved being a princess and a queen and a simple life would never satisfy her. Hence her attraction to a peasant who dreamed of escaping and quickly forgot that life as though he'd been born with a silver spoon up his backside."

Looking at Emma sourly, her grandmother declared, "And you, Emma, are greedy. Greedy for material things. Greedy for attention. Greedy for anything that makes you feel special. I suppose because you know deep down you aren't deserving of being special. And in that, we are alike. And it is that which we must fight against to find the better angels of our nature, to make the world more and better than what we were born into. I failed at that."

"So did I," Emma croaked out, hating to admit it, but Eva was right.

"Yes, you did."

Eva let out a sigh, lamenting, "A rather tragic legacy I have left," as she picked up a carraff of wine from a small table - because royals always had wine within reach - and poured it into a pair of chalices.

"Plus, you made-out with my father. Souls-aside, you were physically intimate with him and birthed my great grandchild-slash-sister."

"You had to remind me," grimaced Emma. Just thinking about it... it felt like someone had stolen and defiled her body while she was temporarily misplaced outside of it.

"Hence the wine to dull the self-loathing," quipped the Queen. "And yes, I did. I chose the easiest lover to get what I wanted, as did you. It lead to my death, as it did with you. If love is easy, then it isn't love, it's lust - and greed, desire for everything but love that it provides. Rejecting that darkened your heart, made you susceptible to Zelena's tricks, allowed your pride to get in the way and end your life before you'd accomplished all that you were meant to.

"Again, we're not so different you and I, and for that I am sorry, Emma. I'm sorry that you carried the burden of my flaws and that my daughter had not the insight or empathy to help you fight them."

"You didn't have anyone either."

"True. A vicious cycle in this family on all sides of generations passing down their darkness and parents unable to help their children be free of it. A cycle you were meant to break."

"But I didn't."

"No, you didn't."

Emma took a swallow of her wine before inquiring with a mix of trepidation and resignation, "What happens now?"

"Nothing pleasant, I'm afraid," said Eva with an apologetic look -

Just as Emma realized everything was starting to get fuzzy. Her brows furrowed and she blinked owlishly at her grandmother.

"Dijoo... druhhh... meh?"

"What can I say," the blurry Queen responded with a smirking smile, "you were right. I am a bitch."

Reviewer Shout-out: Thank you to Mir for the kind review. I'm with you 100%. I can't stand it when "fans" confuse David with James and my particular pet-peeve is the lack of originality in naming Henry in AU stories. I only ever read ONE story that came up with a plausible reason for Emma to name her son Henry. It just detracts from otherwise good stories when writers don't give the audience credit enough to stick with their work/comprehend what's going on if they rename a character. I mean, sure, a great majority of the OUAT audience must have IQ's on par with Robin Hood, but they're not reading Swanfire!

AN: So... yay or nay on Queen Eva? I never liked her, tbh, even when she was portrayed as saintly in her death episode. I mean, come on, she waited until her daughter was, what, ten, to tell her not to belittled the help and then gave her a major inferiority/perfection complex with her dying words that lead to Snow letting a murderer run free and the ruination of her granddaughter's life by proxy. Between letting a serial rapist run free, the peasant tripping, and being a shitty mother, Queen Eva was one self-centered, amoral royal. Also, the bitch must have been pretty vain to lay ill on her death bed in a fancy red velvet corset dress. Besides, if Leopold wanted nothing to do with her when she was dying, she couldn't have reformed that much from her youthful scheming hoe ways.

Next up: Bad, graphic shit goes down that is neither brushed off as irrelevant nor portrayed as rakishly romantic and any CS trolls will surely be morally offended... not that they have morals.