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

PART II

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE BORDER ANTI EMIGRATION ICE WALL

When the power went out without any warning, Emma found herself with a delayed case of deja vu as she stood in front of an ice wall with a bleary-eyed Neal who'd woken her from a sound sleep to inform her that A) the power was out and B) her cell phone had obviously ceased charging and the battery was dead because the power was out.

"What did you do?" Emma accused.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Neal huffed.

"Obviously, you tipped her off somehow!"

Neal rubbed the back of his neck, "Well... I might have taken some of her creepy momentos from her ice cream truck."

"Neal!"

"What!? How am I supposed to know that crazy woman would go to her broke-down rented warehouse space where she keeps the truck in the winter and go through her Emmabelia."

"Emmabelia?"

"Emma and memorabilia-"

"I get it. It's just lame, Neal."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry if I'm less witty than usual at three in the-"

The bushes rustled, Emma drew her gun - and, of course, Hook emerged.

"Where the hell did you come from?" Neal exclaimed.

"Granny's."

"That's five miles away!"

"Maybe I like to take long contemplative walks in the woods, mate."

"Or maybe you were drunk and you got lost."

"Yes, well, regardless," said Hook, "I noticed the power grid was down. Haven't found the line this thing cut, though."

Crossing her arms, Emma inquired, "How do you even know how a power grid works? It took Henry two weeks just to teach you how to answer a cell phone without hanging it up."

"He probably asked Belle," Neal considered. "Most of the clever things he says are things Belle told him. That's why he wants to hang around her, to mine her cleverness."

"I am plenty clever on my own!"

"You were trapped in Neverland and worked for a sixteen year old boy for three hundred years. You repeatedly failed to kill my father. Every evil plot you've been involved in is just attaching your revenge obsession onto the clever plot of some other villain."

"Why waste time and energy coming up with plots when you can just join one already in progress?" Hook argued.

"You mean why waste the time you can spend drinking and shagging unconscious women?"

"Not completely unconscious. Where's the fun in that?"

"You're disgusting."

"And you're ugly. Far too homely for Emma now that she's blossomed into a beautiful swan," replied Hook while wagging a brow at Emma.

"Yeah, well, at least I'm not going ba-"

"LOOK A CLUE!" Hook shouted while glaring at Neal.

The pirate had very obviously dropped out of his pocket a little pink plastic sample spoon.

"You had that on you the whole time," Neal stated.

"No, just since I found it over there," he pointed into the woods.

"Then why not show us earlier?" groaned Emma.

"He obviously wanted to find it while you were here, so he could look more heroic, and also so that maybe you'd be the one to bend over and pick it up so he could ogle your butt," Neal answered.

Hook just glared at him.

Emma rolled her eyes. "I don't need to pick it up, though I suppose I could fine Hook for littering."

"Oh, come on! I'm trying to help!"

"And ogle my butt!"

"It's not my fault you have a very nice-" He caught himself as Neal, standing behind Emma started pulling at his hair and smirking, "...er... investigative skills."

Emma blinked at the nonsensical statement. "Okaaaaay. I need to notify the power company. And my mother. See if they can't isolate the affected line and reroute the power. Then we're going for ice cream."

"Shotgun!" Hook exclaimed and hurried into the repaired Bug.

"Hell no! You are not riding in the Bug again!" Neal shouted, but Hook had already gotten into the passenger seat. He gave Emma a woeful look.

"You can't make me ride with him in the Bug. Make him get out!"

"Neal..."

"I's bad enough you road from New York here with him in it and you defiled it in that other timeline!"

"We never had sex in it!"

"No, you just made out like horny teenagers. You know, like we used to be," he complained.

"Oh my God, Neal, you are not going to guilt-trip me at three in the fucking morning for something I did in another lifetime without my soul. You think I like remembering any of what I did with him? I want to take a shower from the inside out. But I can't."

"But-"

"Just kick the back of his seat or something!"

"Or you could ride in the back."

"I'm the Sheriff."

"It's not the patrol car."

"I'm still the Sheriff."

"You just don't want me to ever drive the Bug again."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!"

Emma handed Neal the keys and stomped to the Bug, flipping the driver's seat forward to get into the back.

"Why are you riding back there, Swan?" Hook asked.

Getting into the driver's seat, Neal answered, "I told her she could get a good look at your ba-"

"What are you waiting for, mate!?" Hook cut him off. "There's some evil ice maker on the lose!"

Neal groaned and turned the car back toward Storybrooke.

Thankfully, it was a short drive and Neal pulled up outside Any Given Sundae just as The Charmings were emerging from the Loft across the street.

As Emma went to talk to them, Neal observed, "Hey, what happened to your coat?"

"I sent it out to get defunkified, what do you think?"

"My father?"

"No, of course not! I'm not that stupid," Hook huffed, his tone and posture making it obvious he was that stupid.

"What did he make you do in exchange?"

"Nothing. I told you, I didn't go to the Crocodile. Stop pestering me about my bloody coat! And stop making jokes about my affliction! You promised!"

"Fine. I'll stop joking about your 'affliction'. You could just shave your head, you know, instead of taking some experimental medication that could turn you into a werewolf. I gotta say, you're chest is looking a bit furrier than usual. It's almost the full moon..."

"Shut up! There's nothing overly furry about my chest hair!" Hook pouted while covering his exposed chest with his hand.

"Do I even want to know?" sighed Emma as she returned with David and Snow following.

"No," both men answered.

"Good."

Emma turned to Neal, "Please tell me Ingrid didn't find the GPS you put on her truck?"

"Still there," he replied, holding up his cell phone. "She's in the woods near Pop's cabin."

"Wonderful. Another trip to the woods," sighed Emma. "We might as well make sure she hasn't left anything in the shop, though I don't think she has any more memory stones..."

"Memory stones?" asked David.

"From Arendelle where your friends that you shouldn't have are from, because it makes no logical sense for a shepherd to be friends with an ice merchant from across an ocean, so I know you two were up to something illegal," Emma told her father and eyed him suspiciously. "Did you try to kill Bo Peep?"

David blinked. "Who told you that? Of course not! Yes, she was a shady tax collector who demanded extra payment for keeping George from turning our town into a resort spa... but better having a farm and a home than being indentured into hitting nobleman with seawe-"

There was a loud clank as Hook knocked off the doorknob with his hook.

"What the hell, man!?" Neal exclaimed.

"What? You're concerned about protecting the property of a woman who might want to freeze us all to death?"

"You don't have to just bash everything! Some things call for finesse, something you wouldn't know."

"I have finessed many a woman!"

"Getting an unhappy housewife drunk and giving her syphilis is not 'finesse'!"

"Well, at least I didn't give any of them more children like their useless troll husbands who demanded they pop out as many little brats as possible!"

"Because you shagged them in the ass!"

Snow made a horrified face and David grimaced, "That's just wrong, Hook."

"They liked it! Why won't anyone believe me that they liked it!?"

"Because no woman likes anal, Hook," Emma told him. "Oh, sure, they'll say they're willing to try it if a guy is hot enough and they're desperate enough to keep him from straying to the next woman who'll say she's willing to try it... and so on and so forth. But none of us like it."

"It's true, we don't," conceded Snow and she gave David a look. "Also, we never buy the 'I slipped' excuse."

"Oh, come on!"

"Okay, I think I need to join Henry in therapy," groaned Emma.

"Hey," Neal piped up as they all entered the shop, "I may not have the prettiest face, but I never slipped."

"I never slipped either!" Hook defended.

"That's actually not helping you look better," David told him.

"Damn it. I hate this family!" the pirate howled.

Emma and Neal both snorted at that, which drew a suspicious look from Hook.

"What? What was that?" Hook demanded and when they said nothing, he glared at Neal. "You did tell her, didn't you!? I thought we had a Bro Code thing! How could you!"

"Bro Code?"

"Yes, 'Bro Code'. Smee said it's a real thing, as in 'bros before hoes'."

"Yes, well, this 'hoe' is the mother of my child and you're trying to sleep with her! Pretty sure you killed any 'bro code' we might have reestablished if you'd apologized for handing me over to Pan, but you didn't. You babbled some bullshit about not letting a woman come between us, like it was my fault, hugged me, and then walked out after joking that I was a villain and then tried to sleep with Emma."

"Well, I'm sorry! She's just really really hot! You obviously understand that since you got her pregnant! And there's just some secrets told in confidence that you don't reveal, Neal! And the most sacred one is to do with a mate's follicular difficulties! Do you have any idea how hard this is for me? I have gone three hundred years with a lush head of hair that has enticed many a woman to partake of my rum-"

"Ewe," muttered Emma, Snow, and David.

"And now I am trapped in a strange world that I barely understand, without my ship, a ship I sacrificed to get to Emma so she could regain her memories and save her family, and replay my heroic sacrifice with sexual favors, but now any chance I might have had to continue my gallant pursuit of her has now been derailed! Every time she looks at me, she will see me looking like Leroy. Leroy. That's even worse than looking like you! You've ruined my dream!"

Emma rolled her eyes. "Over dramatic much? Neal didn't tell me you were going bald."

"Wait... you... you tricked me!?" he accused Neal.

"Well, kinda, yeah," he snorted.

"I already knew," she sighed. "Don't blame him for being an ass."

Hook looked momentarily hopeful. "So... all this time...?"

"No, only since right before the barn thing."

His expression fell. "When you started saying you want nothing to do with me! You were just trying to put me down gently without revealing that you knew my horrible secret. That's very sporting of you, Swan."

David cleared his throat. "Not to interrupt, but can we perhaps stop pandering to Hook's insecurity over losing his looks and get back to the memory stones?"

"Right," Emma agreed, while Hook went to get a gallon of rum raisin ice cream. "They're stones from Arendelle that can take and store memories, but can also restore memories lost due to head trauma or other magical intervention. So, if you accidentally set your dreamcatcher on fire after putting your memories in it, a memory stone is your best bet to get them back.

"Anyway, Sarah Fisher, who is really Ingrid, dethroned Queen of Arendelle, came through the magic wardrobe that the Apprentice has in his house, which at the time was in the Enchanted Forest, so she ended up in New York City for some reason. He told her there was a prophesy that I would get to this world in a couple of years and when I grew up I could help her get her sisters back and return her home to rule Arendelle with them."

"Get them back from where?" asked Snow.

"Death. They were both dead. Her interpretation of the prophesy, which is really just bullshit the guy made up in part of his twisted anarchy plot, I guess after generations of having to clean up Merlin's Dark One mess without him, is that her niece Elsa and I will be hosts for their souls, which she can somehow summon by using magical yellow ribbons they all had as children that Rumplestiltskin took as payment for a means to control Ingrid's ice powers... with which he threw in a 'last resort' in the form of a magical urn."

"Iss an't end gwell," said Hook through a mouthful of ice cream.

"It doesn't," sighed Emma. "Ingrid's youngest sister was dating a duke who just wanted to get control of the throne. When Ingrid found out his true motives, she tried to use her ice powers to stop him. He tried to rape her. Then he tried to rape her sister. She tried to ice him to save her sister, but the bastard threw her in front of the spell and she shattered. After he ran off, her other sister showed up and instead of giving Ingrid a chance to explain, decided her powers had just gone crazy and the only solution was to put her in the urn because she was an uncontrollable danger to everyone.

"As such, Ingrid spent something like thirty years trapped inside that urn, and when the Duke and his younger minion who was dating her niece Anna - slightly less douchy since he wasn't into raping his marks - let her out to try, once again, to take over Arendelle by making everyone think her other niece Elsa was just as crazy and dangerous, Ingrid was now actually crazy and dangerous.

"It's pretty tragic, actually," Emma grimaced. "She was a kindhearted young woman who was trying to use her powers to protect her family and ended up turned into a homicidal lunatic by her family's misguided attempt to protect everyone form her. Her remaining sister actually went so far as to use the stones to make everyone, including their parents, forget that Ingrid had ever existed... which had to be the final insult when she finally got free."

Shrugging, Emma continued, "Anyway, she froze Arendelle over and traded something Anna stole from Rumplestiltskin that she'd recovered from Belle... assuming that all actually happened that way... maybe it didn't."

She glanced at Hook who was yet unaware of the alternate timeline and amended, "What with the whole memory stones thing. Either way, he gave her that bullshit prophesy that Neal found in her truck along with stuff."

"Your stuff?" repeated Snow.

"She was my foster mother for about a year, back in Minnesota," said Emma to her gobsmacked parents. "And don't ask me how I got from Boston to a shitty little town in Minnesota. Point is, she seemed really nice until she pushed me in front of a speeding car to try and trigger my magic. It didn't. I ran away. Then I got to Storybrooke and when I found her here she used a stone to take my memory. She did the same before that with Regina so she'd think she was just another Enchanted Forest dweller who'd always been here."

"All right, I think I get it, weird as that all is," said Hook, and narrowed his eyes, "but if her nieces are frozen in Arendelle, how is she going to summon her dead sisters' spirits into their bodies if we're all here? How does an ice wall help her? Is she just angry that Swan here didn't go with all of us to the Enchanted Forest so she could do it then and has just lost her marbles completely?"

"I'm not really sure," admitted Emma. "From what I understand, Ingrid trapped Elsa in the urn which Rumplestiltskin locked up in a vault of things that didn't come to this world. She's beyond Ingrid's reach. But...," she recalled, "he does have a necklace that belonged to Anna that can work as a one-way portal to bring its owner here. Maybe she thinks she can use it to bring both sisters, then just off Anna."

"I'd better talk to my father," said Neal. "Make sure she can't-"

Of course, right then, the ground shook and there was a loud smashing sound.

"Damn it!" Emma growled, "not the stupid snow gollum!"

"Snow what?" said David.

He didn't need anyone to answer, though, as something big and very cold blocked out the moonlight from the windows in front of the shop and the blue glow of the back-up generator illuminated the bloodthirsty gaze of an abominable snowman.

The snow gollum bellowed, shattering the windows and reached in, sweeping its giant hands.

"Nooooooo! My iced rum!" cried Hook.

"Run!" cried Snow, just before she was knocked unconscious for the 1,485th time.

Neal grabbed her while Emma threw David her gun, which he fired at the monster while Emma tried to conjure a barrier spell that finally gave them a head start running after Hook out the back.

"You run pretty fast for a guy who was just complaining yesterday about being ass-raped!" Neal shouted.

"I'd rather have a soar bum than be squashed by a snow monster, mate!"

"I am not your mate!"

They ran into the street, nearly getting run down by Regina's Mercedes. The former Mayor got out, scowling at them. "Why did no one inform me that there was a power outage due to an ice wall around-"

"ROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

Regina sighed. "Which one of you is responsible for the town destroying monstrosity this time!?"

Everyone pointed at Neal.

"Oh, come on! I was just following Emma's orders!"

"Which you screwed up!"

"Then you should have broken into that truck yourself!"

"ROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

The snow gollum lumbered around the corner. Regina glared at it and conjured a massive fireball.

"ROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

It began to melt, not completely, but enough that it was disoriented and Regina could throw more fireballs at it.

Emma added in her own magic and the creature melted down to rather cute little snowman with a carrot nose.

"Oh, thank you! You saved m-"

"KILL IT KILL IT!" Hook shouted and smashed the small snowman creature with a trash can.

"What the hell, man!?" Neal exclaimed.

"Talking snowmen are unnatural!"

"For once I agree with Guyliner," said Regina, her tone belying disgust at ever doing so. "So, what is this all about?"

AN: Neal and Hook turn into such babies around each other, don't they? Hook is jealous even though Emma has made it clear she hates his guts. Neal is jealous even though he's made it clear he wants nowhere near Emma's pants. Men are such idiots, am I right? Yeah, I killed Olaf, that creepy little freak of nature!

Next up: Wardrobe trip!