Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SORROW FOR ANOTHER'S GOOD
Emma landed face down. Considering how hard the ground felt, it should have hurt - it should have killed her - but since she was dead, apparently she was now the metaphysical equivalent of Wile E. Coyote and got up without injury, brushing bits of dirt and grass from her Neverland clothes.
Surveying her surroundings, Emma appeared to be in a forest hollow, though the sort with broad-leafed, color changing trees rather than the pines of the Enchanted Forest - or Storybrooke for that matter. Reds, golds, yellows, and oranges fluttered in a crisp autumn breeze, here and there a leaf drifting down to the colorful carpet that seemed at odds with the unseasonably vibrant green grass.
The sound of crunching leaves immediately drew Emma's attention and she her cutlass as she spun, expecting Zelena, but instead it was a child with strangely colored orange skin and green-streaked blonde hair tied into puffy pigtails. Wide-eyed and clutching a flute, the child let out a startled "Eeeep!"
"It's okay!" Emma quickly assured while lowering her weapon. "See? We're cool. I'm just lost, Kid. Can you tell me where I am? And if you saw a green lady with red hair and questionable fashion sense?"
The child tipped her head and then crooked her finger, beckoning Emma closer as if to tell a secret. As she bent down, the kid suddenly raised the flute and blew-
At the sharp stinging pain in her neck, Emma realized the object the child had been clutching was not a flute at all, nor was the child a child... and apparently not female either given what looked like a creepily impressive erection tenting the crotch of the little creep's white overalls.
Head starting to swim, Emma pulled out a feathered dart and muttered, "Awe shi-" before the world cut to black...
Only to return with a pounding heartache and... humming?
Brows furrowing, Emma opened heavily-lidded eyes while realizing that her wrists and ankles were bound with... red vine licorice?
Also, she was naked.
And covered in what smelled like mole sauce, the chocolate goo smeared liberally on her skin.
Plus, there was an apple shoved into her mouth.
Needless to say, this was quite distressing, and made all the worse by the discovery that she was surrounded by a large group of small 'people' with orange skin and green-streaked hair tied into bizarre, almost cartoon styles from cinnamon-bun-like mohawks to bug antenna spikes. They all wore plaid shirts with either white overalls or jumpers (the women presumably even though there was no discernible anatomical difference) and were carrying a variety of cooking supplies while humming in unison.
One of the women approached her with a large bottle and doused her face in... cayenne pepper!
Emma let out loud sneeze - which really hurt with her mouth full of an apple- and her captors stopped humming... and then chittered excitedly while her eyes burned horribly.
As Emma tried to struggle free of the ridiculous candy ropes, a group of stocky orange pigmies appeared carrying a very large two-ended lollipop and began singing uproariously.
"We represent the Lollipop Guild,
The Lollipop Guild,
The Lollipop Guild
And in the name of the Lolly pop Guild,
We welcome you to dinner in Mucha Loompa land.
We welcome you to dinner in Muncha Loompa land, Tra la la la la la la"
It was pretty clear that this was a Twilight Zone episode kind of culinary welcome as Emma found herself hoisted up like a pig on a spit. And her hosts continued singing as they carried her toward a currently unlit fire pit!
"Munchy crunchy bloody and goo
You'll make a yummy supper or two!
Munchy crunchy bloody and bone
We'll roast you on a pit of fire and brimstone
Munchy crunchy bloody and yum
We'll take your fingers and soak them in rum
And put a swizzle stick up you bu-"
In a poof of green smoke just as the 'kid' was about to light the fire, Zelena appeared and the little people skittered back and hissed like a group of angry opossums.
"Oh, piss off you tetchy little freaks!"
They yelped and backed away fearfully, save one who tried to throw a bucket full of water. All it did was stain the hem of Zelena's black dress, drawing an eye-roll.
"I said piss off before I turn you all into chalupas and feed you to the street Chihuahuas of El Dorado."
They hissed again, but scattered back into the undergrowth.
"You play one prank on a stupid bint from Kansas and suddenly everyone thinks you're allergic to water," sighed the Wicked Witch who with a snap of her fingers freed and cleaned Emma - and had her standing dressed, of course, like teenage Dorothy, complete with pigtails and ruby slippers. She couldn't have even gone with adult, demon-hunter Dorothy... though, to be honest, that revelation was pretty much the nail in the coffin of Emma's like for The Wizard of Oz.
"Really!?" she huffed.
"It takes me back."
"To what? Did the Munchkins try to eat Dorothy too?"
"Of course not," Zelena retorted. "Munchkins were peaceful little vegan nutters. Those were Muncha Loompas."
"Muncha Loompas?"
"Were you not paying attention to their song?"
"I was kind of busy trying to escape being roasted alive!" Emma snapped.
"Yes, well, when you went back in time and stepped on a Monarch colony worth of butterflies, in the three years between your parents rewritten meet cute and your conception, that bloody psycho Author took a number of different paths than he would have otherwise, one of which was deciding to use his magic quill to morph Munchkins and Oompa Loompas into a single species... which resulted in psychotic cannibal pygmies who eat people while singing about turning them into dessert foods."
"That's... horrible."
"Yes, so one more of the many horrible things you are responsible for. The worst, of course, being A Galaxy Far Far Away."
"The... what?"
"That hack scribe destroyed the timeline of 'A Galaxy Far Far Away'. Instead of that big-eared creature being a masterful villain orchestrating the universe's most impressive deception, Scribey McShitstain, who couldn't write true love of it rammed its way up his small intestine like an angry gerbil, wrote away his powers and focused on turning the most reviled villain in all the universes into a whiny manchild obsessed with a spineless fool who compromised her career and integrity to bend to the whims of a stalker."
Crossing her arms, Emma scoffed, "You're just fucking with me to make some shitty parallel."
"I would never do that," Zelena scoffed, "but it is quite a coincidence how that applies, don't you think? But you're certainly no Princess Leia. Sure, she kissed her brother, but you fucked your own great grandfather repeatedly for years and liked it. Also, you know, the whole thing where your sense of justice and morality is completely self-serving - just like your parents."
Emma glared.
"I get it," she growled unhappily. "Falling for Hook was dumb. I neglected my kid and destroyed a universe - and apparently a lot of timeless literary worlds - for a fake romance based on lots of messed up emotions and fear of dealing with actual emotions and death and an inability to give a fuck about actual emotions and death because I got my soul stuck in purgatory thanks to your spell."
"My spell that was only cast because your mother is an idiot," Zelena retorted and mimicked Snow White, "Oh, look at me, so perfect and pure that I don't need to pay a price when I cast the Dark Curse to ensure my widdle Emma that I decided to replace with a new baby after telling her baby daddy to fuck off and not try to get back to her world would defeat the Wicked Witch and save my unborn replacement baby so all of that selfishness wouldn't be in vain - just like the last time around with the whole inutero 'make a perfect baby spell I'm sure there will be no consequences' thing."
Zelena snorted and began walking away from the fire pit. "Your dipshite mummy ripped out her heart because she couldn't live without her prince even though she was pregnant and had no idea if splitting her heart would resurrect or kill her and her baby - and she had the nerve to criticize you for wanting to kill me and ensuring my child wasn't collateral damage?
"Of course," Zelena continued while Emma trailed a few steps behind in her uncomfortable shoes that should really have been silver instead of red, not that it mattered, "since she succeeded, the price was not paid. So you lost your magic, your brother was almost murdered, and a universe undone to turn your parents' meet cute into a shitey setup for your romance with the man who repeatedly tried to kill your family - and I lived to kill Marian and trick Robin into knocking me up.
"And still your mother trusted me, even after the trying-to-kill-her-baby-and-rewrite-history-without-her-in-it and murdering your baby daddy thing - though she obviously hated Neal since she reserved lending the 'I will always find you' family motto to situations involving alcoholic rapists.
"Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, long story short, I kidnapped you all and got Hook mortally wounded and you resurrected him so he could try to kill your entire family. Such fluffy full circle family feels!"
"Not really," sighed Emma.
Zelena rolled her eyes.
"Obviously. It's buggered up. And while I appreciated not having to endure nine months of pregnancy, I don't appreciate you siding with my selfish, hypocritical bitch of a sister," Zelena snarled, "who fraudulently took your baby after destroying your family forced you into a situation to have to give it up, who poisoned your kid, who told you she would do it all over again to get her widdle baby moral compass. You sacrificed your soul for that drama queen attention whore who never did anything selfless in her entire life and was no more fit to raise anyone's child than your brainless parents or you - because she deserved a happy ending?"
Hands on her hips, Zelena turned toward Emma and relayed furiously, "Between Regina and Captain Grandpa, exactly how bad does someone have to be for you to not lay down your life for their unrepentant souls? Do you have a body count total? Killed no more than a thousand. Raped no more than fifty individuals or one individual for no more than fifty years? Do you actually have some kind of messiah complex where you think your martyrdom will somehow save their souls? Because that's rubbish. And egotistical. And I know narcissism."
"I don't have a 'messiah complex'," Emma huffed.
"Well, you've got some kind of complex. Maybe a double standard one? Because somehow sending me off to Oz so Gigi could steal a third child, fourth if you count Roland considering she murdered Marian first-not that her troglodyte true love ever cared about that-was the absolute right thing to do."
"She went to the Underworld with me," sighed Emma. "I couldn't exactly judge her decisions."
Zelena snorted. "Oh, that's right, you have a Little Orphan Emma Complex. You can't possibly question the motivations or morality of anyone who expresses even the most vague smidgen of compassion toward you or they'll leave you alone forever. Bullshite affection based on codependent selfish desires and false overtures of gratitude to mask insecurity and self-loathing are the kind of love that every child and woman-child with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old slut deserves."
"I was not a slut at thirteen!"
"So you were a slut at some point, you admit it," smirked Zelena. "And that's not what Lily told me."
Glaring, Emma grated, "Yes, well, Lily was a magically deviant little shit who took advantage of me."
"Ooooooo, in a kinky way? Did she pop your lesbian cherry?"
"No!"
"Hmm, pity, her mother scissored Gigi good before Isaac found out, and being massively homophobic unwrote their bisexuality and inserted some weird dragon bestiality bullshite that the Apprentice told everyone was Merlin transforming into a dragon, because... you know... that's even worse than fucking a flying monkey."
"Shut up! I didn't know he was a flying monkey! And he wasn't when were... you know..."
"Were playing Hide the Banana? Funny, how in your world you learn about safe sex by rolling those rubbers on bananas, and you had unprotected sex with a banana enthusiastic. Plus, you know, the whole getting pregnant and abandoned by your boyfriend after unprotected sex thing. And you still had your conscience and presumably self-worth at the time. What's your excuse? And don't say 'because nobody wuved me and I grew up on the mean stweets of Portwand.'"
"Okay, seriously, stop with the baby talk," Emma snapped, "or I will cut you. And I do have an excuse. Your sister's fucked up fake memories that inserted her complete lack of emotional connection to anyone under the age of thirty and reduced my relationship with my son to playing video games, talking about my boyfriend, and making scrambled eggs in four inch stripper heals!"
"Okay, you get a pass on that one," Zelena conceded, walking again. "But once you got your wits back, you were still extremely witless. Sometimes I think your entire family shares a single brain cell that you borrowed from Dopey the Dwarf. Between your mother's pathological pep-talks in support of unhealthy romance stemming from her bloodline of plundering rapist supporters and your father's only qualities: dragon slaying and bro-ing around with villains, it's no wonder you're such a disappointment. The gene pool you popped out of is rather toxic."
"Like you and yours, you mean?"
"Oh, snap."
Zelena rolled her eyes and picked up the pace as she conveyed, "It was almost tempting to stay in Oz just to not have to deal with the stupidity, you know. Thank the gods that I was immune to flying monkey herpes! Though I suspect it was more the syphilis being spread by your pirate slut for three centuries on his supply runs that really made everyone such idiots! Good riddance to the original universe, really, it was an STD brain-fucked mess with a side of inbreeding and magical insanity. Getting rid of its bad fanfiction reboot is just cleaning up the lose ends."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. Why should I care how you feel? I'm a psychopath. By definition, I'm incapable. And since we're both dead, I have no ulterior motive for which to pretend that I want you to feel better. I'm simply stating the facts as they stand. The original timeline was a bad movie. You fell down a time portal and created an even worse remake of that bad movie. I'm sure God is relieved to have that adolescent deity fanfiction wiped off the cosmic harddrive."
Emma let out a sigh, having no strength to argue further on the point. Plus, they'd reached what she assumed was the Yellow Brick Road... or the metaphysical purgatorial equivalent.
"Why are we in Oz... or fake Oz anyway?" Emma demanded. "I get Neverland. I was actually there and dealt with emotional shite, but Oz? Did you just drag me here to get basted by Muncha Loompas?"
"Of course not. That was just a bonus," retorted the witch. "But it also served a point. The unholy quill splicing messed up their souls... such as literary character souls are, anyway. As you've probably been informed, you're the only one with the potential to be real and bring about the transformation of the souls of all of our kind to exist with all the same benefits as the people who raised you and threw you in prison. Seems only fair. But, of course, God can't do things the easy way, She has to pick some savior to get it done."
After a pause, Zelena uttered, "Oh, wait, I do have a selfish ulterior motive to care. Because right now we're all stuck. And we can't play in Hades because it no longer exists. We no longer have our literary equivalent of purgatory because you destroyed existence. We don't have our version of Heaven or Hell either. We're just drifting in the ether unless some angel plucks us out to have a chat with you, the prideful little bitch who was supposed to give us all a chance to break out of our trope and redeem ourselves - or damn ourselves - of our own full free will, but instead reduced to having even less than the pathetic substandard existence we had written for us. So, yes, I care. In the words of your former sweetie pie, I feel hate for you. I want you to suffer."
"I'm sorry," Emma croaked out. "I didn't know so much depended on me. I-"
"Was selfish and stupid and slutty," Zelena cut her off. "The way I see it, God must have wanted us gone and you were just the perfect pawn to get it done. Because otherwise what's the point of an omniscient being who created all of existence if she won't just snap her fingers and fix her mistakes born of centuries of neglect and the meddling of her underlings and exiled demons when they snowball out of control thousands of years later?"
"Um... humility?"
"Manipulation. We're all pawns. We've had our free will shackled from the beginning of our time by literary tropes inspired by the Muses and yet it's up to us to free ourselves? Well, up to you. But when you had so many factors working against you - there's no way God didn't know about all of it. You were set up to fail by all of the limited free will - free will limited by the Almighty Author - being used to its utmost bullshite levels to shape your path one way or the other until it was just one big clusterfuck of mixed agendas and careless stupidity that culminated inevitably in the end of existence and our fate hinging on...
"God only knows."
Zelena waved her hands around. "Maybe we'll all be reduced to this Five People You Meet in Heaven rubbish, the Walmart Greeters of Purgatory, because it's not like our souls were made with the most expensive materials. We're the broken-down Volkswagen Beetles to the Ferraris of the real world and now we're in the compactor and no one gives a shite."
"You're saying I shouldn't feel guilty, because all of this was meant to happen?"
"Oh, you should feel guilty. If not for what happened, then for your complacency. I mean, you were a corrupt Sheriff, an ungrateful daughter, a shitey mother, and a giant skank who decided you was all heroic and went with it like one big slutty hypocrite who couldn't feel complete as a woman without a cock buried between her thighs.
"You reminded me of my sister, actually. Endless speeches about being a strong woman and a good mother punctuated by dry-humping her doofus lover in public. And, you know, getting everyone with a sense of honor to donate several days of their lives to save his sorry ass because everything was about her man. Her entire existence came down to being defined by a man. That was her character arc. And it was yours, of course, since that Fury was actually there for your fuckboy toy.
"But kudos to having the lady balls to let my sister offer herself up to death in his place. Real sporting of you! Of course, anything that benefited your plot to save Captain Chlamydia. Considering you screwed over your own kid and then dragged him and your parents to the Underworld for that abusive arsehole, I can't really give you points for letting my sister be an unwitting sacrifice."
"I made a lot of bad decisions..." sighed Emma.
"Just keep repeating it, and maybe that'll be enough. But I doubt it. Penance doesn't work like that. You don't get to say a bunch of prayers or mea culpas and be absolved," Zelena told her. "Believe me, you have to walk through Hell to get purified, and I don't mean the watered down anti-amusement park of Hades with joyrides in Cruella's hotrod and a glorified carnival barker and magical goblet collecting hobbyist running the DMV. Real Hell makes the actual DMV seem like Heaven full of puppies and kittens and baby unicorn rainbow farts. Fake dying through magical bullshite is all fun and games compared to actual dying, and that half-arsed death became a real farce after your rewrote the universe, so own up to your selfish decisions, both with and without the better angel of your nature to keep all that nastiness inside you in check.
"That nastiness was always there," Zelena continued. "But letting it out ruined you. It made you a pathetic disgrace to feminism, something I care deeply about, even as a psycho, murderer, and rapist written to have the emotional maturity level of a small child. As a character, you made yourself desperate, irresponsible, unsympathetic, and entirely unlikable, which I doubt is what God was actually going for even in a self-sabotage 451 our little storybook. That is what you did with your free will. You disgust me even more than I disgust myself, and I am quite unlikable."
"That's... self-reflective and insulting at the same time," snorted Emma as she almost tripped over a rock that turned out to be an angry hedgehog.
"Baby steps, my therapist says," Zelena replied, ignoring Emma's attempt to kick away the ankle-attacking critter. "If only Freud was still allowed to proscribe cocaine. But anyway, as I was saying, all of your insecurities and confidence boiled down to that dick you were sucking like it was permanently shoved down your throat, in your cunt, and up your arse twenty-four seven. Even I had more integrity as a living, breathing woman with a soul that had half the free-"
Zelena finally glanced over her shoulder and with a flicker of her hand the spiney mammal was turned to stone.
Her ankle socks shredded and cuts all over her calves, Emma glared at the Wicked Witch.
"Oh, don't give me that look. I'm not responsible for the psychotic wildelife around here... other than the flying monkeys. I'm the one who has every right to be digusted with you. Which I have been, ever since you came to see me in my cell. And that is why I wouldn't take your deal. It had nothing to do with your family or mine. I simply had zero respect for you as a woman and a person, never mind a Dark One, when you had the potential for the greatest dark power at your disposal and squandered every part of it for a complete loser who was just manipulating you to get into your crocodile skin pants.
"I mean, really," Zelena scoffed. "You couldn't fight it because your biggest fear was moving in with that douchebag. You didn't fight it - to save that douchebag. And you used that power to give it to that doucbebag and cover up that you did. You gave not only your heart but your character arc, the most important part of a story, what in essence amounts to a soul in our existence - not that you actually had one, but still - to a man wholly undeserving of it. Soul or no soul, that's just pathetic, Emma. As pathetic as making out with the creep who admitted to your father that he only saved the man to get into your pants.
"Obviously, you have serious self-esteem issues and an even more warped conception of love than I do, and I'm a bona fide psychopath raised by an alcoholic prick who regularly called me a freak of nature that should have been left to die by the side of this Yellow Brick Road."
As Zelena finished, they had turned a corner and the Emerald City appeared in the distance. Or the burning ruins of it, anyway.
Maybe real Purgatory was a lot like Hades. Or Hades was just a cheap knockoff the real deal, Emma supposed was the more apt description.
"I feel for you, I do," said Zelena with false sympathy in her voice, "in as much as a psychopath who lacks the capacity for empathy can. I have no conscience, but without your soul, you were much the same, driven by desires, instincts, incapable of truly understanding the feelings of others, through you learned tricks, even fooled yourself into thinking you could feel something genuine for another human being that isn't selfish. And now... now you have your empathy back, that part of you that was shackled in torment in the dark void, but the rest of you went for so long without it that now you've got yourself an internal struggle between self-loathing and denial. Fun times."
"Not really."
"The consequences of envy are never rainbows and unicorn queefs."
"Envy? You're saying I'm an envious person?"
"Of course. What you never had with your parents and they had with your brother, what my sister had but you never did with your son. If you couldn't have that for yourself, you wanted them to suffer, to be consumed by guilt - as well they should have, quite honestly.
"You envied their true love, but yours was dead, in part due to their selfish refusal to accept him as part of your family, and so you sought to undermine theirs, to prove it selfish and shallow with your own mockery of it.
"You envied my sister's bond with Henry, and you sought more than once to undermine it, to make yourself the favored parent - but all you did was weaken your own tenuous bond with the boy. If he wasn't so brainwashed as to think it normal that all of his relatives used him as a pawn for their own needs, he would have emancipated himself and run back to New York City as soon as he got his memories back."
Emma grimaced and the Wicked Witch continued, "Envy is a heavy weight. Like greed and lust, it's characterized by an insatiable desire. Some mistake it for jealousy as both feel discontent towards someone's traits, status, abilities, or rewards. But envy is so much more. It's the desire to covet things to deprive other people of theirs.
"Most poetically, envy is the sorrow for another's good," said Zelena. "We see others who are happy - or who seem happy in comparison - and we want that for ourselves, to take it from them and see them brought down to our level of misery, of wanting. Was that not what you felt when Neal revealed his fiancé? And did that not influence you to callously push him away every time he wanted to talk? Even influence you to spurn him for the pirate, to allow him to die in the forest day, punishment for his moving on without you, even if that moving on was a fraud. How tragic for you both.
"That's what comes from growing up without love, without material things, being told you are not good enough to have them, that you never will. But it also doesn't excuse it. I tried that card many times, and it's shite. You can't blame being an arsehole on others for everything. Eventually, an arsehole is just an arsehole."
Emma ducked her head and argued, "I didn't want people to be miserable. I didn't want Neal to die. I didn't."
"Oh, not everyone, and not the good part of you, but certainly some part deep in your heart," Zelena shot back, "and that was enough to keep true love magic from working and instead doom a man who had suffered for the better part of three hundred years as an unwanted child to never seeing his own child grow up, to being cast into the void when your soul was ripped away by your own doing and the fabric of our universe began to unravel with multiplying Dark Ones and nonsense magic-creating artifacts.
"Poor Baelfire couldn't even look down on you - though I'd say that was a blessing, not having to watch that soulless mannequin of yours spouting epic love speeches at the man who destroyed his life and conspiring with the father whose life he sacrificed his own for so the bastard could trade his redemption for deeper villainy in order to help you drag to the Underworld his son who had given up grieving him to instead help his quasi-step-father-slash-step-grandfather-slash-actual-great-great grandfather pick out the perfect pirate fuckpad to turn into Tallahassee."
Emma sunk to her knees in the weeds at the side of the Yellow Brick Road. "I didn't know," she choked out, eyes filling with tears. "He... he couldn't see me... because he hates me. That's it, isn't it? I destroyed Tallahassee and Neal hates me."
"Are you surprised? Even not knowing what you did to him, you knew how you betrayed him in every other way," sneered Zelena. "I may have taken his life, but you stabbed his soul repeatedly. You are pathetic."
The Wicked Witch snapped her fingers again and a broom appeared in her hand. As she mounted it, Emma croaked, "How do I get out of here? Back to... to... where I'm supposed to go?"
"Ask your former flea-bitten lover," Zelena replied and added with a smirk, "I'm sure it warmed the cockles of Walsh's huckster heart that you mourned his loss even after he conned and essentially raped you for eight months. Tootles."
Zelena lifted off and shot away in the opposite direction from the ruined Emerald City, leaving Emma alone, with no choice but to get back to her feet and slog onward toward the smouldering skyline that seemed appropriately symbolic of her life.
AN: Oz is a two-parter. It didn't start out that way, but I couldn't resist another interlude.
Next Up: Emma reaches the Emerald City. What will she find there? Not a warm welcome, most-likely. This isn't West Oz.