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 All Readers: So, I now have 2 votes for a Neal/Regina relation and 1 vote against. Everyone, please vote in your reviews!

Note to Mir: I'm not sure 'brilliant' will be the final conses. I hadn't even thought about Happy's pick-axe name having changed, but you're right, it should have! Maybe it would be 'Mopey'? He's been hiding his depression from everyone but the other Dwarfs, though. Well, the Junior Mint had no effect in the Seinfeld episode in the end. It may or may not have some ill-effect here. As to Regina's paternity, Lana is Hispanic, so some magic done by Cora would have to explain why she isn't white as rice. Of course, I already did that with Lily, so it's possible! I understand what you're saying about Henry Sr., but just because that would make his life even more tragic is no reason not to do it, and who's to say he wouldn't have known and still raised Regina anyway in the hopes that he could break her free of Cora... not that he ended up trying very hard! Honestly, Henry Sr. was a very spineless character from the start who ended up essentially an emotionally and psychologically battered spouse who was so traumatized by Cora that he ended up Regina's valet and assassin. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for Prince Henry.

PART II

CHAPTER FORTY

SCARECROW AND MR. KING

David sat impatiently waiting for his beloved to wake. No True Love's Kiss was going to revive her this time. In fact, it seemed that the many instances requiring said magical remedy had led them to this point, Snow's brain so damaged that it was beyond repair.

So had been his heart.

Should he feel different? He wasn't sure. When he'd appeared in this world (again) with his shockingly pregnant wife, he hadn't any memories of what had happened and no idea that his heart had been crushed and replaced with half of Snow's.

Which, really, when you thought about it, was as ludicrous a thing to not know as being heartless or the Dark One. Not that he would ever want to admit being as clueless about something as Hook. Frankly, that Dark One thing still baffled him, and it made him ill to think that Emma had been married to that creep without even factoring in the incest.

He had suffered from nightmares, though, which he now knew were of the afterlife... or rather being ripped out of the peacefulness of the afterlife. While David understood his wife's motivations and that they were tied to her illness, it was still something he was going to have to stop ignoring and deal with: the whole having been dead and ripped out of Heaven thing... or being on his way to Heaven, technically, but it was still more chill than this miserable plain of existence.

Probably, he should talk to Emma and/or Neal about that, even if he disliked admitting weakness to his daughter and just disliked Neal on principal.

"We need to do a better job with our second-born," David spoke rather grimly to his wife. "I know we screwed Emma up by not being there for her and making choices that led to us not being there for her and her path being even harder because of magic... but we haven't exactly started out with the best track-record the second time. I mean, our son might well have lost his magic to Zelena's spell and nearly lost his life. We didn't even name him properly - twice. I don't know... do you think maybe we're just not cut out to have kids?"

"That's entirely possible," said Archie as he finished setting a flower arrangement on the dresser. "But I only came here to access Snow's psychological state. If you want an actual session, I have an opening on Thursday at two. Also, AA meetings are on Fridays at seven. I would highly recommend joining sooner rather than later. We have more alcoholics than sponsors and Leroy is always on the verge of falling off the wagon and cashing in his chips."

"I'm not an alcoholic," David argued. "I just drink to alleviate the agony of being forced back into a mortal existence."

"Your liver function test would disagree with you. Emma is going to be there. Possibly Hook, though it might just be to try and pick up an emotionally vulnerable woman for sex. I'm still working on convincing Regina that her three glasses of wine a night is not normal antisocial drinking."

"Yeah, but if it keeps her from killing everyone..."

Snow groaned then, putting an end to the conversation.

While Dr. Hopper paged Dr. Whale, David squeezed his wife's hand. "Snow? Snow, it's me, wake up, sweetheart."

Her eyelids fluttered and it took a moment for her to focus, but Snow then peered at him, groggy and a bit confused. "David, what... happened?"

"You had something of an... accident," Archie interjected. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Um... Emma brought back some friends of David's to the Loft... I think... we left our son with them?" She frowned, trying hard to remember. "Did we... have a fight?"

"Sort of," said David. "The Snow Queen cast the Curse of Shattered Sight. It made us all pretty angry with one another. You hit your head during the... well... melee. Emma seemed to heal you with magic, but you complained of head pain and then collapsed later that night."

"It was an extremely severe concussion," interjected Dr. Whale, coming into the room with a chart. "I'll spare you the medical jargon for the time-being, but suffice it to say that thirty-odd years of repeated concussions and whatever additional trauma you might have suffered regularly during the years of Curse combined with what is most likely synaptic damage caused by repeated memory spells and their reversal, the most recent episode being that idiot book we got stuck in with completely different lives and personalities, plus heart removal in a world not particularly compatible with such magic and the physical damage caused by syphilis which you contracted from your mother during pregnancy and has gone through intermittent periods of infectiousness, destroying brain tissue, culminated in you falling into a coma and being on the verge of brain death. There was a small chance you would wake up, but with degenerative and irreversible brain damage, and so your husband made the decision to proceed with a brain transplant."

Snow stared at the doctor for close to a minute, then exclaimed, "YOUR REPLACED MY BRAIN!?"

"Honey, there really wasn't a choice," said David. "Emma saved all of your memories. And there's an added bonus. You have your whole heart back. Dr. Whale did a heart transplant for me, magic-intact and everything, so now we don't have to worry about orphaning our son if one of us is fatally wounded... not that we've been the best parents, granted, but now that you have a fully functional brain and we both have whole hearts, we should be better at this."

"YOU REPLACED MY BRAIN!?"

"Hmm, you're not stuck in a loop, are you?" asked Dr. Hopper.

Snow glared at him. "I'll stick something in your loop! You agreed to this!?"

"Well, I wasn't consulted to be quite frank, but it does seem the only option short of dangerous dark magic. And Dr. Whale does seem quite competent at preserving organ tissue while Tinkerbell used The Apprentice's super powerful and oddly phallic wand to ensure David's new heart is functional and that the memories Emma pulled into a dreamcatcher and backed up in Ingrid's memory stones just in case were properly implanted in your new brain. Really, it's a fascinating mix of medicine and magic!"

"Thank you, Dr. Hopper!" beamed Dr. Whale. "Now, I know this is shocking, but if you could answer some questions and proceed with a simple flashcard test to ensure everything is working as it should..."

The test took several hours, and Snow was exhausted. She honestly didn't know if she'd gotten all of the answers right, and David didn't seem certain on a number of things.

It was shocking, demoralizing, and unsettling to learn that, for years now, she had apparently been exhibiting delusional behavior, but David had at first ignored and tried to dismiss it, and then just quietly lived with her forgetting this, "making shit up that never happened", or really alarming stuff like thinking it was her middle-of-the-winter birthday in March; he'd even gotten Johanna to play along, which had backfired horribly because she'd messed things up with Cora.

How many people had been hurt, or worse died, because she was brain damaged?

And how many people were infected with syphilis because of her?

Snow felt so stupid for not even knowing she was sick with a pirate and prostitute disease!

She was just a kid when she got that weird soar on her 'private lady parts' and never told anyone. It healed up in a few weeks. She, of course, being eleven years old, never connected the full-body rash, lesions, and flu-like symptoms that followed a few months later: the castle's healer had diagnosed her with Dragon Pox! And, of course, her mother was dead by then, and Eva had probably never told anyone about her illness if she herself had ever even figured it out since it was also congenital.

And that stupid old book from the Library never covered pregnancy with syphilis either!

Maybe if she'd gone to Dr. Whale instead of Zelena for her prenatal care, she would have been diagnosed and she'd have gotten treatment for both herself and her unborn son. But, of course, she didn't know she had syphilis. So now her son could suffer multiple organ problems along with vision, hearing bone marrow, liver, skin, and heart. He already, apparently, had a heart murmur and though it wasn't severe and Dr. Whale didn't think it would be a problem, it was probably her fault!

And Emma. She didn't have the disease now, but she also said she had had it and been treated in New York. She'd thought afterward she got it from Hook, until now. And her brain scan did show some damage in the pleasure center of her brain, so it could be why she was kind of a sexual deviant; her brain was just messed up as a kid and didn't develop right!

Well, and the pixie dust. At least having a new brain now she didn't have to worry about that, Snow supposed.

And Henry, at least, had been spared. The disease was, thankfully, either dormant in Emma when she was pregnant with him or the prison doctors just dosed all the pregnant inmates with penicillin.

David had contracted it, though. It seemed that being in a coma kept it dormant, but it had left him with some minor impairment and was potentially the cause of his rage incidents since the Curse broke... unless he was just in denial about shit he shared with his brother... although, all things considered, James probably got syphilis from his slutty mistress!

Snow wanted to cry.

But the fancy neck-brace that was screwed into her head made it hard to reach over for the box of Kleenex, so instead she focused on her anger.

She just wanted to rip out someone's heart and crush it!

Which was completely illogical and she never got that angry, but suddenly she knew what all of the villains felt like when they insisted that their lives were messed up and they'd hurt people because their parents or ancestors screwed them over unfairly.

She could probably find some magical means to rip out Hook's heart, but much as she loathed him, she didn't want to follow in his or Regina's kin-killing footsteps. Sure, she'd killed Cora, but they weren't blood related...

There was a knock on the door and Emma entered, walking a bit stiff and carrying some cups from Granny's.

"Hot chocolate with cinnamon," she said. "I thought it might help."

Snow smiled and took a cup. "We haven't shared hot chocolate in ages."

"I know," Emma sighed. "To be honest, we completely stopped in that other timeline. I was into Irished-up coffee and you... I don't really know. We stopped hanging out."

"Can I ask why?"

Emma shrugged. "You had a baby. I had... a pirate. I bought my own house. Had my own family. Henry outgrew hot chocolate and moved on to coffee and Red Bull. And I just don't think I ever really thought about it much. Maybe it was a soul thing. Maybe it just hurt too much, like I stopped doing and talking about stuff I used to love that reminded me of Neal..."

"Because you didn't feel like we were friends anymore," Snow said, suddenly remembering a flash of their fight in the Sheriff's Station. "Emma..."

"We're not, though, that's the thing," Emma sighed, frustrated. "We were never friends, not really. I was friends with an impostor, who's not really you, and then you just went full mom-zilla on me, and when that backfired with you pretty much choosing to abandon me in Neverland with that speech about what a disappointment I was and wanting a new baby and then you showing up nine months pregnant less than a year later and the revelation about that spell... I still loved you guys, or I wanted to, but it was more 'I'm obligated to because they're my parents' than any real connection."

While Snow looked sad to hear this, Emma shrugged and amended, "I don't resent that you have another child, not really. I'm happy for you, that you get to have those experiences we didn't get to have. But it does hurt that we didn't have them. Like it hurts Regina had them with Henry and I never can have that, not even with fake memories, which actually make it more painful, because I know they're fake and Regina-ish and when I think about it, in that other timeline, I kind of became Regina-ish in how I parented Henry and the..." she winced, "child I had with Hook. I did that even though in this one I hated how Regina parented him. I used him and neglected him... and I raised a child to become a monster because of more selfish choices.

"And... sometimes, to be honest," Emma admitted, "it feels like you and Dad did that to me."

"Emma..." Snow uttered, dismayed.

"I'm not trying to hurt you," she assured, "but it feels like you had this one moment, when you jumped through that hat after me when you really wanted to try being my mother, but then after a month together, you realized that you didn't really like me that much, and then what you said in the Echo Caves and then finding out you tried to make me a perfect daughter because you couldn't stand the thought of me making any bad choices on my own... and knowing how that completely backfired and I grew up to be a horrible person who became the Dark One..."

Snow let out a breath. "Emma, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you're not the daughter I envisioned, but I'm more sorry that I've been unable to accept you and love you for who you are... or try to help you be a better person instead of just... going along with what makes you happy in the hopes that being supportive is the kind of parenting you need if you don't want advice. I was more concerned with how motherhood would affect me, reflect on me, than what was best for you, letting you make your own mistakes as I did.

"I promise, no more advice."

"It's not that I don't want advice, I just don't want hypocritical bullshit," Emma told her with a shake of her head. "And I really don't want you guys going along with me doing stupid stuff. It's hard to respect you guys when you only have two settings: Condescending Advice and Enabling Dumb Choices. You guys just... ream into me when that's the last thing I need and then pat me on the head and tell me what a good job I'm doing when I'm fucking up my life. I want parents who accept that I'm a grown woman who's had experiences as powerful as theirs - but who also get that I got screwed up as a kid and sometimes that means I don't learn the right lessons from those experiences."

Frowning, Snow said, "And that's why we drifted apart. Because I failed at both of those."

"Well... kind of, yeah," sighed Emma. "Between your crappy excuses for that spell and squeeing over my dressing up like a character in Grease for a creepy date with Hook, I couldn't exactly bond with you about anything anymore. I mean, you failed at being my mom before I was even born - and I get that I did that with Henry - but it hurts. And Hook basically stalked and harassed me into a relationship and then used me, lied to me, and insulted me, and tried to kill us all, but you were just 'if he makes you happy then it must be true love'.

"But it wasn't! I was so afraid of losing his undivided attention that I risked everything and ruined relationships with my family for him because I had more faith that he'd never leave me or be disappointed in me enough to not want me, even if it was a shallow and obsessive wanting me, than I did you guys or Henry. I never had to be a hero or The Savior for him, just... a pretty pirate wench replacement that he use to feel good about himself. I had to be so much... better for you guys. I had to be perfect even when you weren't..."

"Emma, you don't have to be perfect!" Snow told her sadly.

"I do. For everyone," sighed Emma just as there was another knock on the door and David came in.

Emma gave him a tight smile before saying she had to get back to the station.

After she'd gone, Snow sniffed and wiped at her eyes.

"Snow?"

"I've been such a bad mother, David," she exhaled. "Just having Emma should have been enough. This is all my fault."

Sitting at her beside, David squeezed her hand. "There's still time to fix things, Snow. It's never too late."

"I hope you're right."

AN: If you're wondering about the chapter title, Scarecrow and was a television show in the 1980's; I thought it would be punny, since Snow White lost her brain and heart-snatched David is a quasi-king. Snow not liking Emma... I can't really see how Snow would like her, to be honest, considering she disapproved of so much about Emma from Day One and her only attempts at parenting were condescending advice delivered like a sanctimonious harpy until she completely gave up trying to point out Emma's flaws and heal her damaged emotional state, and just went along with Emma's latest teenage crush after the time travel fuckery and decided to re-envision Emma like the teenager her behavior emulated and make fake "mother/daughter first boyfriend/date" memories because if Zelena's spell resulted in combining their love stories, then why not just go along with Emma loving the pervert who threatened to rape her after leaving her for dead? Maybe they had a connection under the Curse and could have ended up friends if that had gone on longer, Emma healing more, Mary Margaret earning her trust and learning what screwed up childhood shit really made Emma like that. But they didn't get that chance. I see Snow's declaration about unhappy motherhood and that she doesn't like Emma akin to Alicia on The Good Wife lamenting, was her life just supposed to be bringing up two kids that she isn't sure she even likes anymore? The way Snow is with parenting, it's like she so desperately wanted to be a mother because she didn't have one, but then she realized she didn't like her adult daughter, so she thought trying again from scratch would work, but it turned out that whatever void she thought a baby would fill didn't, because she can't bring back her mother or replicate that bond from the child's side through the experiences of a mother. She's failed to form a mother/child bond with both of her children because she wants to be the child in the relationship... which further explains her spoiled brat approach to "parenting".

Next up: Emma's not handling things so well.