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

Note to Miss in Minn: Thanks for the head's up on "Attack of the TV Sets" ( s/11712192/1/Attack-of-the-TV-Sets) by Kelanie729. It's great! I recommend it to everyone (and really hope there's a sequel).

PART II

CHAPTER FOUR

ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

Emma hadn't set foot in Neal's room since the day before his funeral when she'd had to sort through his suitcase, looking for a suit to bury him in. That was the only time she'd let herself break down, allowed herself, Savior that she was supposed to be, the privilege and weakness.

Picking the lock was easy.

Nothing had changed, not that she'd expected it since Gold had only been freed of Zelena's thrall hours ago. That other her hadn't bothered to check back in, assumed that Gold had cleared it out before he was cast out of town, or had paid Granny to do it since he'd apparently shied away from anything that represented his adult son as much as she had. She was happily preoccupied swooning over Hook, revealing in her soulless lusting and half-assed, delusional plan to ensure she was never alone again.

Emma's soul now felt bruised and battered, worse off than the trouncing her body had taken. Fighting a complete breakdown, Emma snatched up Neal's purple scarf from the open suitcase and sunk onto the bed, hugging it to her chest the way she used to clutch her baby blanket when she was a small child cast off to yet another home.

"I don't know how to do this without you, Neal," Emma wept. "I don't want to be a fairy tale princess or anyone's savior. I just want you here. Why can't we have just gone back to Portland and done things differently? It's not fair! You deserved a happy life more than anyone here!"

"You can't always get what you want."

The drawling voice of Metatron made Emma jump and nearly roll off the bed as she turned. "What the - what are you doing here!?"

"Well, I'm not congratulating you on an impending virgin birth..."

"If you're here to make fun of my misery, you can go back to Heaven," Emma grouched. "I closed the time portal. Nothing got changed. Universe saved. And I'm not going to off myself to get out of my duty to fix things, so you don't have to worry, if that's why you're here. Happy?"

"It's not in my nature to be 'happy'. I am... satisfied," Metatron answered, taking a seat in a chair by the window. "But as I was saying, you can't always get what you want -"

"But sometimes you get what you need?" Emma muttered.

"Now you're just taking all the fun out of it!" the Angel complained.

"I fail to see what's 'fun' in any of this," argued Emma. "All we ever got was 'almost home' and we didn't get to raise our son and I crapped all over Neal's sacrifice and turned my promise into an incestuous farce that was going to end existence-"

"To be fair, not the entirely of existence, just a fraudulently spawned corner of it," Metatron clarified.

"And I didn't even get to apologize to him for it," she continued, "to tell him that I loved him and I'm sorry that I was too scared and angry and confused to save him, so I kept saving all the wrong people for the rest of my life to make up for it, which doesn't even make sense and just ended up being an insult to him, to the promise I made. I let his father become even more evil and I became evil and fell in love with another evil man who'd hurt him, and how I can I possibly make up for any of that if he's still dead? How can I possibly keep my promise when I know now there's no Tallahassee without him?"

Emma's shoulders slumped in defeat. "I thought I could do this, I really did, but I don't want this responsibility," she sniffed. "I never did. I don't want to be anyone's savior or a princess in some magical mess of a world. I don't know how. I don't know why I thought I could do this!"

The Angel sighed before advising, "You just be yourself. You be who you always were, before you came to this town, and from time to time, you be these people's savior also. It'll be easier with your soul in residence instead of locked away in Purgatory. It'll be easier as your real self rather than that homunculus with your memories masquerading as Emma Swan without morals and driven by an insatiable need for a soul - even one belonging to a dirty pirate."

"I still can't believe I, she, whatever did that," Emma groaned, face in her hands. "I don't know how to get beyond that, to stop seeing all of that toxic abusive mess, seeing how it destroyed my connections to every one of my family members and I didn't care. And now I've gone and ruined what little progress I'd made with my parents over my brother's name, and yeah, they deserved it, but-"

"It was rather spiteful and petty to humiliate them in front of their friends and subjects," Metatron offered, "not to mention your son."

"I don't know how to talk to him either," Emma admitted, "not... not after what happened, the things he said that were true about Regina's memories, the parenting memories of a sociopath who can't love anyone more than herself, that messed me up even more. They're still there, like they're caught in a war with my real memories, and I know they're not real, that those weren't my feelings because those things never happened, but those feelings and memories defined the kind of mother I was to Henry for that year, a pretty shitty one, so now all I have to go on are not being a mother, having been a bad mother in a fake life, and having been a worse mother in a real future."

"I could take those memories away," the Angel stated, "but you've learned from them. I know it hurts, Emma, that you have memories of raising your son, the choice you should have made, and that the memories are all wrong just makes it even more painful. You just have to let go of those false conceptions and the pain, you have to focus on the memories that came before, on what motivated you then, the kind of mother you wanted to be and why."

"One who still lied to her son about his father," Emma sighed.

"I'll never really be complete without him, you know?" she muttered. "I'll never be as good of a person as I could have been with Neal. Never as good of a mother or daughter or friend... or lover," she frowned, "not that I'm in the market for one. Every other guy I've chosen has turned out to be an asshole... and maybe that was the point. Either way, I'm done dating fairy tale characters, so you don't have to worry about that."

"Well, I'm not here to get into your sexually-expressed self-esteem issues," stated Metatron. "Though I was popping in to say I forgot to mention that you're STD free."

Emma sniffed. She'd actually forgotten all about that in the mess of everything else. Hook, Walsh, and by proxy Cora had turned her into a public service announcement for safe sex.

"I am?"

"It turns out Monkey Herpes and that particular magical-world-acquired neurosyphilis are not easy to cure. Which is a pity for the numerous citizens of your hamlet that have one or the other - or both in the case of a few pirates - so you should probably have Dr. Whale start researching that and make sure Henry knows about safe sex."

"He's twelve!"

"Twelve going on sixteen the way all those portals and memory losses affect the onset of puberty. It's like dosing water with human growth hormones," said Metatron. "You're probably lucky you scared off his first girlfriend the last time around or he'd have gotten her pregnant in the back of your car and your family would officially become a bigger white trash cliché than an episode of Jerry Springer."

"Great," Emma sighed and wondered if she could get Whale to proscribe something to repress puberty... a bit longer... like forever... although even just the normal couple of years would do it to keep Henry from 'doing it'.

"Oh, come on," the Angel complained. "I came baring glad tidings. God doesn't just hand out divinely purified pap-smears every day."

"I am grateful," Emma stated. "But I've got a lot of other crap to not be grateful about right now, okay? My parents are lying hypocrites-"

"Says the mother who told her son his father was a dead firefighter as you just pointed out. All parents are liars and hypocrites, Emma. It's an unfortunate fact of them being mortal and fallible and in the case of your world, just about all of them had either no parental figure growing up or an evil parental figure."

"They blew off their credo because they didn't want to deal with Neal," huffed Emma, "the man they were just days before telling me I should try to get over my pain and talk to him even if it's hard, because life is made up of moments and that could be a good moment - but it apparently interfered with their good moment of baby making!"

"The prospect of sex can be blinding. You're far from immune. Lust, quick and easy, swayed your attention away from love with all of its painful complications. A new child was, in essence, their lust-"

"And I'm a painful complication," Emma grumbled.

"You u viewed your own son that way when you were pregnant - and when you first came to this town. You wanted to leave."

"But I didn't. Because I could tell he was unhappy. They didn't know if I was happy or not. They just chose to believe that I was so they could be okay with their decision!"

"As you chose to believe Henry was happy in with a new family-"

"OKAY I GET IT!" Emma growled and crossed her arms. "But I'm still angry with them."

"What happened with that Author, Emma, is far more convoluted than in the altered timeline where history was regressively revised and it required only the innate selfishness in all of its inhabitants to make that spell happen," Metatron reminded.

"But they still made the choice, didn't they?"

"Yes."

"They I'm still mad at them. Maybe they weren't jerks to the same extent, so then they were even more gullible. I'm tired of them trusting evil people for no reason! And don't tell me they were written that way! I was supposed to be changing things, but even when I was entirely soul-having they just kept trusting evil-er and evil-er people!"

"To be fair, the sheer amount of memory loss curses and concussions they've suffered have most likely resulted in traumatic brain injuries," said the Angel. "Again, you might want to have Dr. Whale look into that. Did your father have a full physical when he joined the Sheriff's Department?- Oh, wait, he's self-appointed and completely untrained, but for some reason you've been okay with that."

"We were barely in town at the same time," Emma pointed out and amended, "And it's not like it matters now. I highly doubt my father's going to want to play co-Sheriff after I basically called him a lying hack of a hero and father."

"Hm... true. Sounds like you're in for a fun few days."

"Yeah, I was kinda planning on spending them here. I'm sure there's enough Apollo Bars in Neal's suitcase to hold out through the weekend and everyone avoids this room like the Vault of the Dark One is going to open up and suck them in."

Emma sniffed again and grumbled, "All Neal ever did was try to help people, put them before his own happiness, you know? It's just not fair that I got a second chance after all of the dark shit I did, and he made one mistake he was conned into, and he's stuck and he can't even get into Heaven properly unless I don't fuck all of this up because we're all like... damned children's book characters or whatever until I fix things. Why can't he get a break? Why can't his soul be good or pure enough? It shouldn't have to rest on me, on my not screwing up this time, because I'm not that good or pure."

"You're not, that's true. And I know it's unfair," Metatron agreed. "It's not right for those who suffer repeated indignity while trying to do good meet a tragic death while those who do nothing but hurt innocents for their own gain, who have wronged them are rewarded with the chance to repent.

"But life isn't fair, Emma," the Angel continued. "It's no more fair to say to someone who grew up with nothing, who wanted nothing more than to have a home and a family and be ordinary that she's meant for a life of tragedies and to carry the burden of ensuring the happiness of those who sacrificed her happiness as an innocent baby for their selfish adult intentions. And to be separated from her true love, from the life she would have chosen if destiny hadn't reared it's ugly head.

"If I had the power, I would take that burden from you, Emma, as I would all those I've had to give tasks that no mortal should bare the weight. I would give all those who died cruelly another chance, have those who commit unspeakable evil take their place in death. But I'm not God. I'm merely a messenger. All I can do is remind you that you are stronger than you think you are and that love transcends all realms."

"You're never truly alone, no matter how much you feel otherwise," Metatron told her, reaching out to touch the swan keychain. "You just need to have faith."

The headlights of a car passing down Main Street flashed into the window and when the glare faded, the Voice of God was gone.

Emma let out a sigh of, "Stupid Angels." She almost expected a disembodied snarky reply, but when none came, Emma laid back down, tucking the scarf under her head and clutching the keychain.

She was supposed to be "The Hope" of this town, but she'd never had much hope in her life. She'd never had much faith in anything, perhaps least of all in love when it mattered most.

"You're my Tallahassee, Neal. I forgive you, for all of it. I hope you can forgive me. I hope you'll wait for me. I'll wait for you."

Fighting more tears, she pressed a kiss to the cheap trinket, then closed her eyes and let the sound of Granny and Ruby arguing lull her into an exhausted sleep.

AN: More emo Emma angst. Sorry about that.

Next up: A minor disaster.