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

CHAPTER TEN

THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR'S SEX VACATION

Emma nearly fell off the bed as she whipped her head around to find August W. Booth lounging on a bay window seat.

He raised a brow and quipped, "You've certainly matured since I gave you a bath as a baby."

Cheeks turning pink, Emma quickly gathered a sheet around her and glared. She'd always suspected August was a pervert who wanted in her pants, but apparently she'd dubbed his re-adult-ized self her BFF in theory to mollify Hook's jealousy so he would stop monopolizing her time with his faux insecurity over every man she so much as smiled at.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Getting a free ride to a tropical island filled with nubile prostitutes, cheap alcohol, and a wide variety of gambling opportunities," replied August, gesturing to the window.

Outside was a white sand beach with palm trees.

Emma glowered. "Phuket. You used my money to finance a tropical sex vacation for ten years!"

"Twelve, technically," August corrected, standing up. "Now, do you want to lounge around in this rum-soaked rape den or enjoy the sun and surf of one of the most popular sex vacation resorts in the Land Without Magic?"

"Is there a third option?"

"Nope!"

August grabbed her stained sheet, spinning her, and when Emma came to a dizzy stop, she was at a beach resort bar and dressed in a skimpy red bikini.

"Two Hangovertinis," August told the bar tender.

"I'm giving up drinking," Emma protested.

"That doesn't sound like you."

"Turns out my paternal grandfather was a raging alcoholic. And my... ah..."

"STD-riddled great grandfather was slightly more functional in his alcoholism?"

"You're one to talk about STDs. You spent a decade banging prostitutes."

"Yeah, but I'm not a real boy," August retorted. "My wood's immune to human infections. On the downside, I'm sterile."

"That's a downside?"

"Well, if you'd gotten your tubes tied, we wouldn't be here now, would we?"

"Shuddup, Puppet," Emma hissed.

August smirked at her and told the bar tender, "She'll have an Exile."

His smirk deepened at Emma's unamused look and he shrugged, "What? You are. Heard your soul was locked up here in Purgatory for awhile. That really sucks."

Emma harrumphed and crossed her arms before retorting, "What do you care, anyway? You never cared about me and I only pretended to care about you to appease my jealous asshole boyfriend since I knew you'd just disappear again for months or years, oh best friend mine."

"Now that's a cheap shot," huffed August. "I tried to help you. I came back."

"You died before you could provide any useful information, so Neal got shot which lead to a chain of events that resulted in his death while you got turned back into an adult-sized manwhore to continue your sick fetish lifestyle and writing shitty mystery novels. And you never paid me back that twenty grand, you cheapskate!"

"I didn't see the point," argued August after taking a sip of his drink. "Your parents are monarchs. You married a pirate with a ship full of gold doubloons..."

"It's the fucking principle, you asshat!"

"Yes, well, see, I was made without those," sighed August as though speaking to a small child. "Puppet remember? You can't hold me to the same standards as, you know, real people." He made air quotes. "Or even quasi-real people from our world. That was Neal's mistake. If you humans of fairy tale persuasion are stuck in a story you can't get out of, I'm stuck on a single page. I can't emotionally mature or learn from my mistakes. All I can do is get colored contacts and dye my hair since the ladies aren't really into gingers."

"Gaaaaaaaaaa, is every man in my life a misogynist douchebag?"

"Pretty much, though most of them have souls to get damned for it and lack of hereditary predisposition to psychopathy that's a sort of exemption from going straight to Hell," said August. "We seem to suffer from a literary predisposition to chauvinism, if we're being honest here."

"You honest?"

"It happens sometimes if I'm drunk enough," he confirmed with a grimace as though it was very distasteful to consider such a weakness. "Anyway, I'd say our world is made up of chauvinists like your father, Philip, Thomas, etc. - the princely sorts. And misogynists like... well... most everyone else with a Y chromosome. The women, they're either bad feminists or crazies... hence the lack of female empowerment that doesn't involve vaginal tyranny and mass genocide... which really just reinforces the cultural belief that powerful women are crazy evil bitches, so they should be oppressed in corsets and preoccupied popping out babies until they tragically perish and can be replaced with an evil stepmother."

"Sounds about right," sighed Emma.

"And what did you do about it?" challenged August. "Jack shit is what. You were too busy messing with magical bullshit and villains of the week to look at the bigger picture, the real evil that had infiltrated our world. It wasn't the Dark One, it was the very premise upon which the thing was written."

"Hey, Henry was the Author," Emma reminded. "What was I supposed to do?"

"Perhaps actually parent the kid?" August accused. "But you were too busy in your Lady Gaga Halloween costume crushing hearts to bother. Your fuckboy took a more invested interest in Henry's love life... although that's probably because of his sexual deviancy. But were you around to notice that he kept making inappropriate comments in the manner of encouraging your twelve year old son to have sex with a twelve year old girl he just met? No, again, too busy playing crush the coronary artery. And do I need to bring up what you did to cast that Dark Curse in the first place? That was such fucked up shit right there, and trying to out-wit the price by taking a page from your parents' heart-splitting book - like that never had any horrible consequences!"

"That wasn't me!" Emma growled. "And even that was mostly the fault of my family that forced my hand to taking extreme action and even that asshole part of me possessed by immortal evil felt shitty about it, okay!?"

"Yeah, but still..."

"Don't you get judgey on me, Pinocchio! None of that would have happened if you hadn't harassed me into freaking the fuck out and kidnapping Henry which put me in a position that just lead to endless fucking fiascoes, all because you were afraid of turning back into fire wood. Maybe the world wouldn't have ended like it did - or at all - if you hadn't been a selfish prick who pretended to befriend my son and acted like you wanted to bang me-"

"I did want to bang you-"

"Until," Emma glared, "you ran out of time on that long con and just freaked me the fuck out. If you were remotely heroic, Pinocchio, you'd have let yourself turn to wood, I wouldn't have freaked out and kidnapped Henry, Regina wouldn't have tried to poison me and put Henry in that coma, I wouldn't have gotten sucked into that portal, and yadda yadda yadda, I wouldn't have lost my soul in a time travel shitstorm!"

"Again, puppet," sighed August, taking a drink.

"And why the hell," Emma continued, "did you even decide to look for me after I ran away from Ingrid's place if it was just to screw me over? How did you even find me?"

"Yeeeeeeaaaaah," winced August, "about that. I wasn't actually going to look for you, but I owed some people some money and one thing led to another... and I'm pretty sure they were working for Pan and wanted to steal your unborn baby, but then Regina got him first. Oops?"

"You knew I was pregnant?" Emma seethed.

"A fortune teller might have mentioned it."

"Who, Madam Mim?"

"Maybe?"

Emma threw her drink in his face.

"Hey! What the hell?"

"You knew I was pregnant and you still made Neal leave me so I'd give up my baby that, what, would just end up wherever and I'd never see again when I was reunited with my parents because kids born in the real world didn't matter to your asshole plan?"

"The Blue Fairy's asshole plan, you mean," corrected August as he strolled from the tiki style bar to a row of chaise lounges along the shore where he used a convenient beach towel to dry his face. "She's the one who could have placed Geppetto with a new family but instead had him raised by a cricket man with the worst role models for parenting since Pan whose parents had, in point of fact, killed Geppetto's parents while Jiminy was trying to kill them instead - which he never did tell Geppetto. Man that won't go over well in the afterlife, let me tell you!"

August flopped onto a chair and shook his head. "Anyway, come on, Emma, you can't put it all on me. Geppetto grew up to be a werido incapable of forming human relationships or getting an erection so he cut down an extremely endangered magical tree that later could have been used to save your whole family and instead made me, and the Blue Fairy was shady cool with that and went behind your 'rents back when my pop blackmailed her, but I'm pretty sure she A) knew you'd be born early, B) knew your parents were too dumb to consider you'd die if you went through the wardrobe alone, and C) wanted you alive but abandoned and miserable so you'd be impressionable to however she and possibly that douche Merlin saw fit to mold you into a 'savior', whether that was fighting for justice in a weird small town in Maine or not giving a fuck about justice in a magical small town in Maine and other parts magical - because, you know, the literally layout of the tragic hero's journey is our Bible."

"So I should be praying to Joseph Campbell then?" snorted Emma, taking a reluctant seat on the adjacent lounge.

"No, but you could probably get his autograph if you end up in the same place."

"And which place is that?"

"You're the type of girl who flips to the last page of a book, aren't you?" August quipped. "Look, don't take this as fact, but if you ask me, the Blue Fairy is just as evil as the Dark One in her own way and this end of existence thing is all part of some plot of hers. She might be an agent of the Underworld."

"What, she works for Hades?" Emma asked, brows furrowed and August rolled his unnaturally blue eyes.

"No, you dummy, not the mythological dude who teabagged your great grand sugar daddy. Lucifer, Former Angel of Death, Prince of Eternal Darkness who made up the River Styx in Serendipitiy's Heavenly Fanfiction Contest of... I dunno... ten thousand years ago, let's say. He was quite the aspiring author and got pissed off that only God could create things, you see..."

"You're saying Lucifer went to war with God over copyright laws?" snorted Emma. "Okay, now I know you are bullshitting me, August. Frankly, I think between seventy and a hundred percent of what comes of your mouth is pure bullshit. And even if there was some truth in that, I don't want any more useless exposition on magical history. I got enough of that shit in actual life so death should at least be a blissful escape from that."

"Literary characters do tend to be overly expository," agreed August.

"Some more than others," she grumbled.

"I head that."

"You were supposed to."

August gave her a sour look. "Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning."

"I was raped, you jackass!" she seethed and he shrugged.

"No, technically he's your husband even if he's also your kin and in our world marital raping goes on all the time. I mean, if Leopold didn't have erectile dysfunction, he'd have been all over his hot little second wife before she learned magic enough to make that performance issue permanent. And did anyone care that Arthur's use of emotionally manipulative magic on his wife resulted in her being raped for five years because she obviously was not into him and wanted to be boinking Lancelot, which was the whole reason he ruffeed her? Nope. Our people got weirdly obsessed with the whole memory loss thing but never dug into the deeper consequences of loss of free will that comes from the manipulation or erasure of thoughts and feelings. I mean, look what your parents did to you before you were even born? We're shallow and lazy and douchey like that."

"Some shallower and lazier and doucheyer than others," scoffed Emma.

"I know, you're parents are pretty awful."

"I was talking about you, you tool!"

"And I was choosing to ignore that, because I was carved into a douche from a magical douche tree and they were only written to be marginally gullible and self-centered but ended up using their smidgen of free will to put themselves before their children and share a tainted heart which, as something mortals are not meant to ever do no matter how pure the thing is, turned them into egotistical dolts. So, continuing that train of thought..."

"That wasn't me."

"Yeah, yeah, you didn't do it. You were never responsible for anything. Now you sound like me. Welcome to the 'take no responsibility club for slackers'. Cheers!" He took another gulp of his drink.

Emma scoffed. "I get it, you're Sloth."

"Damn straight I am!" August proudly confirmed as he stretched out on his chair. "I never do anything unless it comes handed to me on a platter or is a literal life or my death situation, and even then... it's fifty-fifty."

"Ugh. You're awful!"

"Made that way. What can I say? It's ingrained in me to be physically and spiritually lazy as fuck... often by fucking whores when I should be tending to other pertinent obligations!"

August shrugged. "But, really, when you think about it, if the Blue Fairy is possibly evil, is rejecting her grace really a bad thing?"

"You didn't reject her grace, you totally accepted it and then stole Henry's lunch money!"

"Okay, but the second time, I literally manned up and stayed a man when she offered to give me another chance."

"Only because you wanted to have sex with Tinkerbell!"

"Okay, but the third time-"

"AUGUST!"

He rolled his eyes. "Chill, totally fake BFF. Look, I'm here to spout literally trope wisdom, and the definition of my character flaw is a failure to do things that one should do best described by Edmund Burke who said, 'Evil exists when good men fail to act. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.'"

After grabbing a Sex on the Beach off a passing tray, August expounded, "Vain-glory, that's your dark passenger. And I don't mean vanity. That's the repurposed modern bullshit definition. I mean pride. It got ego-stroked by the consequence of your sloth. Instead of associating with good men, you cavorted with villains, and now you're an unpitied sacrifice in the contemptible struggle that was the fight to un-fuck-up our destiny. So, good job, Emma."

"Fuck you, August," she retorted.

"Well, if you insist..."

Emma glared harder. "Stop channeling Hook."

"All right, but I was just going for what turns you on."

"I'm going to find a wood-chipper and throw you in it!"

"I'd like to see you try without magic. You're not even five foot five! How did you ever manage to even kiss that sea slut without carrying around an apple box to stand on every time you two got horny? I mean, Henry was taller than you when he was twelve."

"If I wanted to sit around being insulted by a douchebag, I'd go find my uncle again," Emma grated.

August smirked. "Fair enough. I'm getting off topic anyway. We should further address your slothfulness."

"Seriously? You really think I hung out with jerks because I was lazy? I worked my butt off my whole life, even when I was stealing to survive and I sure as shit did when I was the Savior!"

"Oh, sure, you worked your physical butt off, but your emotional butt? She's been on disability since two thousand and one."

Emma harumphed and August tutted.

"Hey, I said I was spiritually lazy? You're emotionally lazy, Emma. Your gift was your heart, your ability to love, with or without that shifty extra mojo your parents dumped on you without a warranty. But you kept it closed up for so long that when you tried letting it out, you didn't even know how to love right anymore and you were afraid of trying, afraid that it would be hard and messy. Which love is. It's Wuthering Heights and Anna Karenina hard, not that Twilight Fifty Shades bullshit."

"I know," Emma sighed. "I just..."

"Was afraid. And the consequence of the failure to utilize your gifts was an all-paid holiday in Purgatory. Did you know medieval monks thought the punishment for Sloth was running continuously at top speed? Rather ironic."

"Ironic?"

August nodded, "Dante described acedia as the failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul - as an absence or insufficiency of love. You didn't love enough, Emma. You didn't love yourself enough and you didn't let yourself love others - or let them love you enough. You contrived all sorts of facsimiles of love in your denial, and you used your physical constant running at top speed through every crazy fiasco in life as a justification for not dealing with your feelings."

August rattled his ice cubes, amending, "At least I own my slackerhood. You've been denying it for years. What your mother said in Neverland was right: you have to deal with the pain. Love is pain."

Suddenly, with those words the sun began to set with unnatural swiftness and a strange wind picked up the fine grains of sand and caused the bartender to close up his hut.

When Emma turned her attention back toward August's chair, he was no longer in it. Another had taken his place and gave her a feline grin.

"Emma, still trying to find yourself, I see?"

AN: August is a douche. I don't know why people like him. I don't know why Emma likes him when he ruined her life twice and never apologized. Stupid fucking senseless man-pain loving writers!

Next up: Save the Savior, save the world?