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

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FINDING NEVERLAND

Of course it was Pan.

Emma let out a frustrated sigh. It felt a bit like she'd already been through this mess with the whole Hades/Underworld thing, though from what her illegitimate doppelgänger had meddled in, that was far more of a farce than this, more of the usual Storybrooke cliché running around and screaming as the town destroyed itself in some Greek God repo scam for the whole thing with Excalibur and Hook's "soul" or whatever amounted to one in a knockoff universe.

Or maybe everyone but her had a soul?

She still wasn't clear on that, not that it really mattered as she was now dead and solely a soul... with some sinful baggage weighing it down.

"Just tell me what vice you're supposed to be so we can get this over with," sighed Emma, refusing to be as creeped out by Pan's predatory grin as she'd been in life.

The faux youth stood from the lounge and told her while brushing off grains of Neverland sand, "Wrath of course. Who else would I be? Sure, I've got fair amounts of pride, greed, and sloth, but I've always been defined by my inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of hatred and anger toward my bloodline."

Frowning, Emma responded, "Yeah... that's kind of fucked up. I thought men of your... er... era were supposed to be obsessed with having heirs and all that. Also, fuck you for kidnapping my son and taking his heart and trapping him in a box and forcing us to run away to New York with fake memories which have really screwed me up emotionally - apparently. Also, the whole keeping Neal prisoner for centuries out of spite for his father... or to sire my son... or whatever. You're a psycho little shit."

"You sound just like mummy," Pan sniggered, then with a shrug continued, "It's certainly not the most beneficial of vices, I will admit. The self-destructiveness, violence, and hate... mostly it just feeds upon itself like an oroborous. But at least I wasn't a king in the Enchanted Forest using some immortality magic, feeding blood feuds and whatnot for centuries like some of those royal tossers."

"I'm guessing I don't want to know what was done to you as a kid that you turned out to hate children... while wanting to be a child forever," snorted Emma. "That's a worse complex than my inferiority complex about my superiority complex..." She frowned. "Or is it superiority complex about-"

"Boooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrring," Pan cut her and with a snap of his fingers they were standing in the middle of the jungle and Emma was dressed in her Neverland tanktop with Baelfire's sword against her back.

"And, no," said Pan, "I won't bore you with that story. I'm not like all the other villains in our sordid little anthology who need all their present sins washed away by placing blame for their debauchery on some past slight. Having bad parents doesn't make one a deranged murderer... though it certainly helps when recruiting. I'd say if your son hadn't been gifted with such a magically obstinate heart, he'd have been easily brainwashed like the rest of my Lost Boys."

"You're sick."

"And you're no better than all of those foster parents and social workers you see in your nightmares," retorted Pan while picking at a hangnail. "After a year being servants in Regina's castle, they were back on the streets of Storybrooke. Did you care? No. You were too busy chasing snow monsters and making out with Killy-Poo, your twu wuv - and showing your love and self-destructive, codependent abandonment issues by turning a man destined for death into the Dark One... an act even more buggered than Rumple merging with his son, who at least deserved life. Like those orphaned boys who ended up doing meth in Robin Hood's forest hobo camp. So kudos for saving them from the hellish prison of Neverland to shitting in the woods of Maine and rotting their teeth out in the hell-on-Earth of Stroybrooke you raised just so you could settle down in a drab house with a home wrecker."

"I'm sorry," Emma snapped, "if I was too busy trying to hunt down a murderous kidnapping witch who wanted to kill my unborn brother and rewrite history to have time for your kidnapped orphans. But everything after I fell down that time portal - that wasn't me."

"Part. Of. You," Pan stated bluntly. "How many of us have to bang your head against that tree, Emma? Nature, nurture, or magical inutero meddling, you turned out a bit messed up, a bit selfish, a bit... what did your uncle call it? Skanky."

Pan's lips twisted. "And wrathful of course."

"I am not wrathful!"

"Really? Did your anger toward Neal for leaving you not persist long after he was dead?"

Emma grimaced and crossed her arms. "I was angry that he died and left me again, not... not still about that."

"Liar!" snapped the not-boy. "You don't wish a man dead if you don't have wrath in your heart. You don't 'grieve' his passing by giving your heart to his enemy, to the man who destroyed his family and imprisoned him in a hell you saw for yourself, unless there is pure unadulterated hate in your heart."

Pan concluded by waving a hand and parting the undergrowth to reveal Baelfire's cave and Emma swallowed thickly.

"You saw his prison cell, the one he occupied as a child for centuries," Pan accused, "and yet you could not forgive him for the eleven months you spent in jail."

Eyes flashing, Emma retorted, "Because he knew what it was like and it meant I had to give up our child."

"Yet that was all your puppet friend, wasn't it? Baelfire didn't know he would call the cops on you. He didn't know you were pregnant. He didn't know Dildoccio would take that money. You knew all of that, and yet you called him your dear friend while dishonoring your former lover who was as much a victim of his lies and circumstances as you were. You crushed all of your love for Neal while throwing yourself into self-destructive behavior, from magical abuse to suicidal acts of so-called heroism. And did not try to save him. You did not have the pure love in your heart to save him - while you used darkness to save others. That is wrath, girl.

"Your actions may not always have been associated with selfishness or self-interest, but they were no less wrathful," Pan told her. "You let that love become hate. You let it fuel you in defense of your other loved ones. You let it blind you to those who truly loved you, made you obsess over the one who deserved your affection the least to the point that you endangered your family, your child that you promised Neal you would protect, ensure he did not grow up as he did - child of the Dark One with no parents. Sure, your boy technically had parents, but were you ever there? You were too busy making every waking moment about your fuck buddy, which is even more than your parents' sick codependent obsession with each other that kept endangering you and your brother.

"You were once an honorable person, Emma," said Pan, "but your love of justice was perverted by revenge and spite and lust just as theirs was by arrogance and perfection and a delusion that kindness trickles down to the peasant masses and serves as armor against the enemies who would slaughter them in their beds."

Brow quirked, Pan queried, "How many died because of your selfish, foolish actions? From that moment in the barn and everything the apathetic freak you spawned from your broken soul did for her own desires? How many corpses did you put in the ground before it all came undone and you have the fate of an entire universe, innocents damned, to shackle your soul to this place - or some place worse?"

Shaking his head, the demon 'child' amended, "If you think some Greek interpretation of Hell manifested in the mortal world is any comparison to real Hell, to the place God created for smiting actual sinners rather than entertaining people in togas into a gradual progression toward monotheism through allegorical tales juxtaposing Good and Evil, then you're one dumb twat. And sure as shite no Penelope. Not that your kid was much of a Telemachus, what with helping your creepy new beau buy you a shagpad instead of defending his father's honor and having faith that he would return. But then, why would he have faith when you had no time to even tell him about his father and acted like poor Baelfire was just a sperm donor?

"Well, that and it seems the laddy got a double dose of the arsehole gene. Pity that didn't kick in until after I was dead."

"My son isn't an asshole!" Emma snapped. "He's the best part of me, the only good thing-"

"It doesn't take much to be the best part of a amoral whore, girl," Pan interrupted, getting uncomfortably close. "That's what you are. It's what you've always been. You can't take the potential for darkness out of someone and not have them turn out wrong. You were born wrong, Emma. That's why only perverts and murderers love you. That's why Neal left you. And why you can't see him. He doesn't want to see you, the heartless, soul-sucking bitch who let him die, who left him to rot because she couldn't find love enough in her heart for one good man, the father of her child, before proceeding to shower love and fuck flower petals on every deviant she met like a hippy guru. And you know what they are? Frauds. Frauds who delude themselves into thinking lying and manipulating others is saving their souls and setting them on the path to a happy ending when it's really all about getting what they want, making them feel powerful as benevolent dictators and turning innocent and gullible fools into brainwashed prisoners."

He grinned. "You're just like me."

"I'm nothing like you!" Emma shouted.

"Yes you are," laughed Pan. "All of that anger you built up as a child, you never let that go. You just re-channeled it into an internal hatred, a self-loathing that you couldn't face. It made you strong. But it made you a stone-cold bitch that only an asshole could love. You rejected a second chance at true happiness, let it perish in a most tragic way out of fear and hatred, and so you primed your heart to be a vessel of darkness and your body to become a soulless creature that used love as an excuse to help a psychopath who wore the trophies of his victims cheat death again.

"Really, Emma, which one was the real psychopath? The one looking for some snatch who admitted he'd been a vile human being or the one trying to fill an empty void by latching onto the damaged soul of a pervert and deluding herself that playing God for a murderer out of love absolved her of her own evil incarnation?"

"I didn't make those choices," Emma tried to argue.

"You need to own your pride, Emma. You let it run unchecked," Pan reminded and shook his head. "I truly hate all of you, but I must Regina credit for admitting that she would murder, rape, and destroy all over again to fraudulently get your child... that soon after more-or-less went from overly disciplining to habitually neglecting almost as much as you, what with her lover's rape baby to raise. And people say I'm the worst parent our world ever produced? No. I owned my wrath. You shared your parents' delusion that you were actually doing right by your boy when you weren't breaking his heart and gaslighting him into forgiving you out of the same soul-crushing fear of abandonment and loneliness that you once understood, before it became your motivation for whoring and necromancy. Pride comes before the fall, Emma. And you've not fallen nearly far enough."

Before Emma could respond, Pan simply vanished, leaving her alone outside Baelfire's cave.

Emma looked at the cave door again, then back to where Pan was no longer standing. It was obvious she had to go inside, much as she did not want to. This place, this jungle, brought back too many uncomfortable memories, from her breakdown over realizing she still loved Neal to her rejecting his wide-eyed hope to try again - something she'd continued to do in Storybrooke, even though it was so very unfair and he'd tried so hard to fight for her.

She'd never fought for him, not even to preserve his memory. She could shout to the starry void that she didn't have time, that without a soul how was the part of her that lived on supposed to? But she knew deep down that was part of her, a twisted and incomplete part of her, but one that didn't so badly represent the person she'd been for a long time with her emotions repressed and distracted by cheap thrills. Like a person without a heart, it seemed a person without a soul still thought and felt when not being controlled... they just didn't feel the right things for the right reasons or in the right ways.

Maybe she was hear to figure out what 'right' was, because she'd forgotten or never really knew. Never understood why anyone would go all in when the price, the pain, could be so very high. It had taken darkness to make her overcome that fear, but she'd faced it in the same fucked up way as Rumplestitlskin that wasn't overcoming it all, because Merlin, douchebag as he turned out to be, was right that darkness couldn't be used for good. And no being was meant to contain the extremes of both darkness and light - or even just light, soul or not, pure or not.

And her soul, like her heart, was certainly far from pure. She'd fallen far from the moment by Lake Nostos when Cora couldn't pull out her heart. She'd become someone entirely unlike the person she'd wanted to be for Henry even before she destroyed it all and reshaped it into a world where nothing made sense and all of her selfishness was shaped into a completely fucked up Emma Swan while all the rest of her could do was cry in the darkness at the horrible scars that thing's actionsleft upon her soul.

Now that thing was a part of her again, somewhat tamed but stronger for having been freed of conscience. It was like being host to the Dark One all over again, but it wasn't some foreign evil, it was a deviant side of her own making. A side that, maybe, if it hadn't been stripped away by her parents and then slapped back into place like a cheap ass bandaide wouldn't feel like a malignant growth.

With a grimace, Emma at last unsheathed Baelfire's cutlass and entered, expecting some dark and horrible test...

But instead it was just the cave, lit with the old coconut luminary that had gotten thrown in the fire back in Storybrooke. The stars danced about the walls which were covered in drawings, a talent Emma remembered Hook attributing to Neal's mother long before she made the connection that his mother was Milah - and by then she was in too deep, too much in what she thought was love... if a soulless being could love.

That wasn't her.

And it was her.

And either way it didn't mean she hadn't betrayed him.

"I'm sorry," she spoke to the flickering light. "I'm sorry I was a terrible friend. I'm sorry I didn't help you find your home, Baelfire."

Emma should have known better than to pick up the coconut.

As soon as it was in her hands the cave shifted, the items vanishing and the walls pushing outward until she realized that she was now in the Echo Caves... and a cage sat on the isolated outcropping, a shadowed figure inside.

Her heart pounded. Was that Neal?

Emma hadn't thought about it at the time, but it was very Indiana Jones and the Search for the Holy Grail. Of course, Merlin had found the grail and turned it into Excalibur and Nimue turned the broken tip into the dagger of the Dark One...

She had to tell her deepest secrets if she wanted to reach the cage and who or what was inside.

It was time to stop lying. It was time to admit to all of the bullshit she'd been trying to cover up.

Emma took a breath and steadied herself before stating shakily, "Cora was right. I gave my son away to save myself from having to be a stronger, better person - from having to be reminded of... of love and betrayal and my failures every day."

The first segment of the bridge jutted out and it was both a relief and filled her with shame. Could he hear her?

"I use sex, magic, and alcohol as a distraction from dealing with my problems."

Another few feet emerged and Emma swallowed thickly.

"I like feeling... special and... wanted even if I know it's for all the wrong reasons by the wrong people," Emma spoke shakily. "I know it's some messed up childhood shit and it usually means making the wrong choices, but I just... I can't help feeling like without it I'll just be a number in a file again."

Again the bridge extended.

Almost there.

Emma took another breath before admitting, her voice raised, "I don't know how to love right and I'm afraid to try. I didn't love my son enough - or myself enough - to be a better person for him, to be his mother when he was born or the mother he deserved after he showed up on my doorstep. I didn't let myself love his father enough to save him even though I knew he deserved a happy ending more than I did, even though I was letting the darkness take him away from Henry, because it was easier to have a love that was new and uncomplicated and superficial - and I've regretted that every moment I've been stuck in this fucking purgatory, and I know the empties wasn't just the absence of potential for darkness, or the absence of a soul, it was the absence of him and the shame that I didn't save him and that everything awful that happened after that was because of that one moment when I didn't try, when I was the Savior and I had magic and I didn't use it for the one person who deserved it, who needed it the most."

The final segment of the bridge extended, and Emma gripped her sword as she strode forward, heart in her throat.

She expected some movement from within, hoped and feared that Neal would be there, that this time she could say all the right things.

The figure didn't move, however, curled up in a cape, back facing her.

Emma immediately knew the cape, though, remembered Belle gifting it to Henry, explaining that Neal had taken it off before making that fateful choice with the key to the vault; she'd returned to Regina's castle with it... after which it had vanished for a time, eventually ending up in the back of Gold's shop.

"Neal?" Emma inquired, and the figure tensed in a way that she knew he was awake, but yet did not turn to face her. Her throat closed up before she forced a breath.

"Neal, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't save you. I'm sorry that I said I wished you were dead, but that was only because I love you so much and I was afraid of the pain of dealing with everything - and then losing you again. I did. I lost you twice again. And I should have grieved for you. I should have honored your life and your death. But I was angry. I was angry that you fucked up again and left me. And I was angry that you made me promise to find Tallahassee without you, because Tallahassee was ours and how could you just give that away to find with someone who helped destroy your life?"

Again the figure stirred and a voice, muffled, but clearly not Neal's answered, "What a pretty little speech."

Red hair spilled from the cape as the figure uncoiled like the snake she was and Zelena smiled in her unnatural way as the bars vanished.

"But words are meaningless, little swan," she continued. "As are intentions. Actions make reality. Actions define our lives. And yours add up to a pathetic, needy, lying, disloyal pirate's whore. And you know what happens to pirate whores? They get thrown overboard."

Zelena grabbed Emma by the scabbard strap at her shoulder and in one swift move threw them both over the edge into the gaping abyss.

AN: I'm not thrilled Pan is coming back for the 100th. Robbie deserves better... and probably better than Heroes Retcon. I hate Zelena as you readers probably know and hope Emma kills her annoying and useless character even if it means Regina gets another free baby to fuck up into a gaslit little perv-loving creep (or slut in this case, I guess) - but she makes me smile in fanfiction where her truthiness can be portrayed as such instead of bullshit for the "heroes" to disprove through the scientific method of dry humping.

Next up: Emma gets schooled in envy.