Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
RIP Alan Rickman. May he get wings and plenty of tequila in Heaven!
PART II
CHAPTER SEVEN
JELL-O IS FOR PERVERTS
"Everything checks out," Dr. Whale declared, letting Neal up from the bed he'd occupied a few short weeks ago. "Of course, the last time I said that, you dropped dead in the forest a couple of hours later, so... have I mentioned lately how much I hate magic?"
"A couple of days ago after Zelena tried to murder you with magic," said Emma.
"Right. And a couple of days before that when a forest hobo turned into a Flying Monkey and ransacked this very ER... which I had only just repaired before that redheaded psycho witch ransacked this very ER... and in neither case was I am reimbursed for the damages or emotional distress. I am hereby filing a lawsuit against your family and City Hall for this flagrant disregard for public health, safety, the cost of expensive medical equipment destroyed by you magical freaks, and my hair turning prematurely white!"
Emma rolled her eyes as her phone chimed with the Imperial March from Star Wars. "Fine, whatever. I have to take this."
She stepped away, grimacing as she did so, leaving the three men and a teenage boy to continue to behave like children.
"I take offense to being called a freak!" Hook complained from the adjacent bed where he was bleeding through a wad of gauze. "And why does Neal get a full bloody physical while I'm bleeding all over my only set of clothes?"
"I knew it!" Henry crowed. "I knew you only had one!"
"Because I had to trade my ship to a madman to get here to save you and your mum. Which you never thanked me for, I might add."
"Why would I thank my pervert deadbeat step grandfather who wants to shag my mom?"
"Because I reunited you with your family, which is more than Baelfire here did!"
"Hey, I got you the potion and you wouldn't have even known to trade your damn ship and look for Emma if it wasn't for me,!" Neal returned.
"Oh... that was you... I figured it was Emma's parents," Hook played dumb.
"Dude." sighed Henry, "you were there when they said it wasn't them and we all figured out it was my dad. Or were you too busy checking out my mom's butt to pay attention?"
"Well, you can't fault me for that. Swan has some fine tail feathers," he turned to flash a grin at Neal, "am I right, mate?"
"I'm not your 'mate', Hook," Neal stated coolly while pulling on a medical scrubs top. "I may have decided to forgive you for being a douchebag of a step father after you helped rescue Henry and got Emma to Storybrooke with her memories, but I didn't know at the time you sexually assaulted her and then spent the next week pestering her to go out with you like a creepy teenage boy or that you'd stalk her all around town and decide to interpret my forgiveness as a blessing to try and sleep with my kid's mother and turn Henry into your replacement me to work out your weird guilt complex! All of that negates my forgiveness! I thought maybe you'd changed, but you're still a creepy pervert!"
"I am not creepy," Hook muttered, offended and poked at his blue Jell-O.
"Yes you are," Whale interjected, "and having slept with Mary Margaret and then dumped her and then convinced her that because the cursed gynecologist was actually a fishmonger in real life I should deliver her child, thus allowing me to get all up in her vagina with her husband standing right there, I know a creep when I see one."
"Dude," Neal uttered, "what is wrong with you?"
"I brought my brother back from the dead and he murdered my father," said Whale, "and then your father entrapped me in a scheme to fake a botched resurrection of his former lover's daughter's fiancé so she would fall to the Dark Side in despair, after which, years later, when she realized that I'd played her, she ripped me out of my comfy isolated alpine estate where I kept my brother locked up so he wouldn't murder the villagers, and transplanted me into this cursed hell of a town, and then when Pan recast the Curse and she altered it for Henry here, she didn't bother to send me back to my world, so I had to hang out with a bunch of filthy feudal freaks with no indoor plumbing and rancid food for a year - before being brought back to this shithole town just as I was finally on the verge of finding a way home. So now I am stuck here, kissing all your magical booboos while my brother either starved to death long ago or broke out and feasted on all of Switzerland.
"Also, I think I might be gay and the gynecology thing was just a desperate attempt to prove that I was a hot-blooded misogynist like every other man in this town... well... save Jefferson. He's pretty queer, but also bipolar and schizophrenic, and the last time I delivered his meds, he drugged me and quite possibly molested me, because I'm positive my shirt was tucked in when I went into his house.
"Is that explanation enough!?" Whale finished, red-faced, which clashed with his white hair.
"Um... er... that's rough, mate," squeaked Hook, having no real experience with the whole 'gay' thing, other than the time he walked in on two of his crew in the galley, after which he made them walk the plank, because that's just how things were done in his day - but he did feel a bit bad about it, since the ship was far less clean and the food far less edible afterward.
"Anyway," the pirate changed the subject, "are you going to fix me or what?"
Whale sighed and answered, "Let me just get the suture kit."
"Brilliant!"
"Brilliant!" Neal mimicked his accent and threw Liam's handkerchief at the pirate, hitting him in the face.
"Gaaaaaaa! That touched your arse!"
"Yeah, and I wiped my balls with it too," smirked Neal. "Also, I might have blown out a couple of wet farts in your coat."
Henry laughed while Hook glowered at the both of them. "No wonder the Crocodile can't shake his villainy. It must be heredit-OUCH!" he howled as Whale jabbed him in the forehead with a needle of anesthetic.
"Stop squirming!" Whale growled. "How can a murderous pirate be such a damn baby about medical procedures!?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe because I come from a time when these fancy machines did not exist and people relied on magical potions to heal their injuries, not bloody needles and getting cut open like fish by what I understand from Tinkerbell is commonly referred as a butt pira-"
Suddenly Hook slumped off unconscious and Whale feigned surprise, "Oh... ooops, I grabbed a surgical sedative by mistake!"
Emma returned to find Hook drooling on his pillow while Whale stitched his forehead and complimented, "You got him to shut up. I didn't think that was possible without a sleeping curse."
"Science has its uses," boasted Whale. "He'll be out for a few hours. I'll call when you can come and collect him."
"Fine," nodded Emma, then she amended, "on second thought, can you just lock him down in the Asylum for a day or two?"
"Oh, sure, just foist him off on Dr. Whale to take care of!"
"Hey, don't blame me!" Emma shot back. "My father's been suspended and I still need to clean the Zelena stank out of the station. I don't know the magical particulars of transforming one's self from a shattered piece of crockery to an incorporeal entity, but it smells like a stink bomb went off in there, and fun as it would be to make Hook inhale that funk, he'd probably end up smelling like it, and he already uses that noxious cologne and uses all of the hot water at the Inn, so he'll make everyone in town sick from his stench while trying to dry hump them. Really, I'm doing you a favor."
"Fine," sighed Whale. "Nurse Ratched would probably enjoy giving him an enema, anyway. Now that woman has anal issues."
As they left Whale to his suturing, Henry mused, "Hey, won't Granny have to evict Hook now that he's been arrested? Grand theft auto is a felony."
"Good point. You can spend the night in the station, Kid."
"What!? You can't do that, Mom!"
"Yes, I can, and I will, and then when Regina makes threats about getting to see you, I'll send you over to stink up her mansion," Emma cheerfully declared, ruffling his hair.
"Doesn't Dad get a say in my punishment?" the boy meekly protested.
"Dad was still dead when you committed the crime. And Dad no longer owns the stolen title to the Bug, I do. Also, I seem to remember Neal being quite fond of the Dutch oven treatment, anyway," said Emma with a raise brow at Neal who rolled his eyes.
"Hey, you kept buying those giant three bean burritos."
"Because we kept getting coupon flyers on the windshield," Emma shot back.
"Speaking of food," Henry interrupted. "Can we at least get lunch first? I've never eaten with both of you guys, before, and the walking and eating pizza with you and Grandpa Gold moping behind us doesn't count."
Emma winced at that. "Oh, fine, emotionally blackmail me, Kid."
"I call shotgun! And I get to use the siren!" Henry proclaimed before jogging toward the exit.
Whale interjected, "Want me to prescribe some Ridlin for that one?"
"Not yet," sighed Emma, "but I'll take the offer under advisement."
She glanced down at Neal's paper surgical slippers as they left the doctor to his suturing and after a moment of thought, set her mind to an image and waved her hand. In a puff of magical smoke, the booties were replaced with the scuffed black shoes from his room.
"You used to have better taste in footwear. And clothes," she stated. "Belle had to take something from your father's closet for your funeral or you'd have been dressed like a hobo."
"I used to steal my clothes," Neal reminded sourly. "Acquiring a wardrobe legitimately on a shitty salary means whatever the thrift store has in my size. I spent eight years taking off the books sketchy jobs while waiting for a statute of limitations for a felony to run out. And being thirty with a junior high education and zero references doesn't exactly inspire management level. Or did you not see my apartment and observe it meant I didn't have a lot going on?"
Before Emma could comment, Neal amended, "Apparently, the lack there of meant you didn't even bother to go box up my stuff, but you gave my keys to Regina to let her lover and his fake wife who was my murderer shack up there free of charge and fuck in my bed. So, thanks for that."
Emma winced, then stopped and realized in dismay, "You know about the other timeline."
"Yeah," Neal nodded, "I know about the other timeline. And I know you lost your soul and I know that you was a warped version of you like everyone's cursed selves here, but that was still them and that was still you."
He shook his head. "I know you wished me here, and I'm grateful that, Emma, that you wanted me to have a second chance. And I do love you, I know I always will, but... given everything that's happened, the person you became and what that says about who you were already becoming before we met again in New York..."
"You don't want a second chance at us," Emma concluded, her throat closing up. "I thought... I thought maybe God had answered my... wish and we could... could finally get that coffee and..."
"Hey," Neal sighed, laying a hand on her arm. "I wasn't expecting I'd get a second chance like this, and in a perfect world, if we could have started over from the beginning, that's all I'd have wanted, to never have left you, to raise our son together, to face all of this as the team we used to be, Bonnie and Clyde, but... that's not how this works, and with all of the crap that happened in that other timeline, it's just..."
"Too painful," she finished again and laughed morosely. "Never thought what I said in Neverland would come back around and bite me in the ass."
Frowning, Emma amended, "I am sorry for saying that I wished you were dead. I didn't mean it literally. I just... it was easier not to deal with that hope and having it crushed again after those months in prison, hoping there had been a mistake and you'd be waiting for me only for those keys to show up from Thailand and realize you'd spent the money on a sex vacation."
"Yeah, kinda wish I'd gotten the opportunity to punch August for that. And kinda upset you declared him your best friend since Lily, like I was chopped liver," Neal reminded.
"Because you were more than just a friend. And I was just trying to keep Hook from being a jealous prick and making everything about him again," Emma tried to explain, then winced, "which doesn't really help my case, does it?
"I know that I hurt you with my choices, Neal," she sighed. "And I know I don't have the excuse that I thought it was what you wanted or needed. I hurt Henry. I used and then ignored and then conspired with your father to do something awful that involved lying to Belle again. I tainted the momentos of our past together to try and destroy that dream that could never happen, to make it easier to move on with the future I was clinging to so desperately in some twisted, screwed up attempt to keep my promise to you - and in doing so I turned the things I could have shared with Henry to feel like he knew you into nightmare reminders of how I used him, how I became just as bad as the woman he found me to save him from.
"I should have been strong enough to save you," she sniffled. "I should have done something to change things when I went back in time, or when I went to the Underworld. I told myself that it would be wrong to take away you're dying a hero... and then I went after Hook. I don't expect you to forgive my hypocrisy. I didn't think I could forgive you for leaving, saying it was the best thing, and I know it was a lot of that... anger that made me not choose you, which I'm not trying to say is your fault, because it's not."
Emma shook her head with regret. "I have no one but myself to blame for my bullshit justifications when I knew that being a father would obviously have been what you wanted more than some stupid 'heroic death' that hardly even counted as that when we all let Zelena live and ignored your father's back-slide into darkness. You died for nothing and I wouldn't give you a second chance for all kinds of stupid reasons that I regret. We were supposed to be together, you were supposed to have my back and keep me from getting... brainwashed by all of this fairy tale stuff, but maybe I wanted to be, because it was easier than reality, than life with rules and consequences and accountability.
"So... I'm sorry," Emma repeated. "I'm sorry that I was a coward, and I'm sorry for how you suffered because of my fear and selfishness. And I'm sorry... I'm sorry that I've fucked up Tallahassee for both of us."
Neal let out a sigh and told her, "Look, Emma, that stuff hurt, I won't deny that, but I know I hurt you too. And I was a coward for leaving you and for using dark magic to try to get back to you. You're right that my death wasn't heroic, but not just some ad hoc sense. It just wasn't heroic. I was already dead the moment I turned that key."
"But I could have saved you," she cried.
"But we both knew you couldn't have," he shook his head. "That wall around your heart... it wasn't gonna let me in, not even then. You just said that. And I knew it. I knew I was a complication you weren't ready to face, so we weren't gonna get that chance, I wasn't gonna get the time to be patient, to hope that you'd heal from all of that accumulated crap and get that coffee. You weren't ready and I ran out of time."
"I'm ready now. And we're both here..."
"Are you really?" Neal countered, "cause deciding you want to be with someone after being guilt tripped and tortured by assholes doesn't exactly count as therapy, Emma. Near as I can tell, that's how you've done things your whole life. Someone treats you like shit and you decide that makes them worth your while. Maybe you got messed up as a little kid, that the only attention you got was shitty, so something got wired wrong in how you look at love. Maybe people who treat you right scare you 'cause you think they'll dump your ass like the Swans. But people who use you and abuse you and make you feel like shit and responsible for them treating you like shit, there's something safe and familiar in that fucked up situation, cause they need you, whether it's that Ingrid wackjob needing you to replace her sister or Hook needing you to replace my mom."
Emma swallowed thickly and averted her eyes at Neal's pop psychology assessment. He ran a hand through his hair and amended, "You are still that orphan, Emma. I don't mean it in a bad way, just... it's who you are and you never dealt with that. You're like all of Pan's Lost Boys that he picked from abusive families, who were desperate to be needed and useful to someone, even if that someone treated them even worse than their parents and only needed them to stroke his ego and take the blame for his failures, and just be an outlet for his rage, a punching bag that would take it and apologize for bleeding on his shoes.
"You giving half your heart to Hook wasn't all that different from Felix giving his heart to Pan," Neal surmised with a grimace. "Both were based on something that wasn't real love, that was just being the victim of a narcissistic psychopath who was able to twist the increasingly broken laws of magic to bend to their self-love. You weren't being loyal or saving anyone and like mine, your sacrifice wasn't heroic and didn't amount to anything."
"So... you're saying we're both pathetic idiots with parental issues?" Emma laughed despondently.
"Something like that," Neal told her with a shrug. "I wouldn't have left you in Portland - or proposed to a woman I barely knew to pretend I was moving on and happy and had no regrets for leaving you if my childhood hadn't messed me up. My last memory of my mother was seeing her make-out with the man who ultimately sold me out to a child abuser. My last memory of my father at that point was him choosing power over me.
"I never exactly had the best self esteem, and falling in love with some savior princess? Believing I could be that lucky... I chose to believe all the worst parts of that: being reunited with my father going horribly wrong, you finding out the truth and telling me to fuck off, because I was the catalyst for your life being destroyed, because I lied to you for months, because you had an amazing destiny and royalty in your future while I was a peasant relic from the past who was meant to die in a war centuries ago."
"After how I grew up, everything we shared," Emma countered, "you really believed I'd think I was better than you and everything was your fault? That I would leave you?"
"It's kinda the story of my life," Neal pointed out. "And you kind of did."
"That's not fair. Just because I reacted one way a decade later doesn't mean I would have back then, Neal," Emma argued. "I loved you. I would have done anything to be with you. Stealing those watches should have proven that. You think I really believed your name was 'Neal Cassidy' and you were really from New Jersey? But I didn't care, because you were my best friend, you were home, and I thought you felt the same about me, that you didn't care if I was a delinquent nobody high school dropout whose parents left for dead by the side of the road and was only ever wanted by a lunatic who believed in magic."
"Who made me all the more less likely to tell you the truth."
Emma's shoulders slumped. "I didn't remember that, though. Ingrid took my memories. Maybe... maybe that's why I could never figure out how to talk to you. Those memories... they were tied to so much of who we were together, and without them..."
Neal sighed. "Yeah maybe."
After a pause, he smiled sadly. "I did love you, Emma. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and until finding out I had a son, you were my happy memory. Thinking about you, about what we shared, and hoping you'd find your family and your happy ending... that made those old nightmares of my father and Neverland bearable. Memories of you, my hope for you, that was my real dreamcatcher."
"And I screwed that up," Emma sniffled. "I didn't find happiness, I made my family worse, and I ruined those memories for us - for Henry."
"You weren't the only one responsible for that," Neal insisted. "And you were in a shitty situation, cut up into pieces of you from your parents spell to your soul and your heart. You kept giving away pieces of yourself to try and do the right thing. And, yeah, most of the time it wasn't, and some of that is on you. But you paid your dues for that, Emma, you passed those trials and you're here. Whole. Maybe don't be so quick to try giving up what you just got back? You got your heart, your soul, and your dark potential which you've got in pretty good check from what I can tell. That's something to be proud of. And it's a good place to start working on healing from all that crap, that baggage you've been carrying around your whole life.
"I know I've got a lot to sort through myself," he said and offered with a smile, "And I wouldn't be here if I didn't still mean what I said in Neverland: that I'll always fight for you. I've got your back here, Em. No matter what."
It was impulsive, and she didn't know if he'd reciprocate or not, or be offended, but Emma took a quick step forward and wrapped arms around Neal's waist, hugging him tightly and uttering, "Don't leave me again."
Neal was still for a moment before returning her embrace, burying his nose in her hair. "I never left you, Em. I was always there. You just... didn't want to believe."
Emma hiccuped at that and sniffled again before pulling away and wiping at her eyes. "I was never great at my family's optimism. Sorry about that."
"S'okay, I knew you'd let me go," Neal told her with a tight smile. "I knew you wouldn't want to hold onto that pain."
"Because pain is love and I'm afraid of love," sighed Emma, "because I never really had it without being afraid that it wouldn't last. You're right. My childhood fucked me up big time."
"Well lucky for you," Neal chuckled, his smile turning wry, "so did pretty much everyone's in this whole damn town, which is why they are all a bunch of assholes-"
"That I'm supposed to save," Emma harumphed.
The loud scream of a police siren suddenly cut through the ER and Emma pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed, "While somehow keeping Henry from turning into one."
AN: Poor Whale! (His sexuality and Jefferson's was inspired by another story, It's Always Sunny In Storybrooke.) Did you catch the Seinfeld reference, anyone? On the Emma/Neal front, sorry to those who were hoping for some slow motion jogging on a beach and passionate reunion kiss. It was just too cliché, and Emma and Neal are the only not cliché couple on the show. They both hurt each other badly, and that's not something that even dying can erase. If there's hope fore Swanfire here, it's not going to be instant or easy, but they will be allies in the cause.
Next up: Onion rings.