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

Chapter 43 Answer: The X-Files "Home"

Note to Mir: Remember, not everyone's story/life is the same in this universe, because Emma never changed time, thus no Buttery Effect. Isaac did indeed meddle with Cruella's story/life, but the circumstances are different. (I was annoyed with Cruella being a straight up psychopath created just so Emma could kill her in self-defense and everyone on the show call it "murder" for some reason. Plus, the stink breath power was STUPID.) I imagine an election in Storybrooke WOULD get messy, a sort of current American presidential politics in microcosm. I imagine King George/Albert Spencer would be the Donald Trump candidate. Glad you're interested in the murder mystery involving Zelena's farm and these mysterious factions of Second Curse people, as well as Ursula's story... which will also answer a question from several reviews.

PART II

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

ROADTRIPPING

The final two hours to Manhattan were excruciatingly unpleasant. After Only You came on the radio, Emma couldn't switch it off fast enough to prevent the mood of 'I Spy' being soured... not that it had been easy to play 'I Spy' on a dark freeway.

Rather than stay at Neal's place for the night - it was vacant - or attempt staying at Emma's place - she had sublet it to another bountyhunter - they headed for Ursula's place.

The former mer-princess was a night janitor and would be coming home from the pet shop where she cleaned up bird seed, puppy poop, and scummy fish tanks.

Emma kept lookout while Neal picked the lock... or tried to before realizing it was broken and the door opened by just jiggling the knob and shoving the door in.

There wasn't exactly anything worth stealing in the place, to be honest.

"And I thought you had nothing going on," muttered Emma.

"Yeah, that doesn't not still hurt," Neal retorted.

"It was a bad humor defense mechanism! You do that all-"

The sound of footsteps in the hall silenced them just before the door jiggled and opened. Ursula, looking exhausted and smelling strongly of pet store stink didn't even bat an eye at the two strangers in her apartment.

"Go ahead, take the fish food, what do I care?" she announced. "If you're looking for something worth pawning to steal, try the Super, the jackass who hasn't fixed the communal bathroom in a month so I have to walk across the street to the Seven-Eleven every time I have to take a shit."

"We're not thieves," said Emma.

"Well, we were once," amended Neal. "But we're here to help you get your voice back."

"My voice isn't lost, honey, and I can scream pretty loud if you try anything," Ursula warned.

"He means your magical singing voice. Hook is in this world and he's willing to part with it."

That gave Ursula pause. "Rumplestiltskin cast the Dark Curse, didn't he? When I heard reports about a strange weather phenomena in coastal Maine a few months after arriving in this world and a child who insisted his father had been killed by an evil witch in a town that no one could find... Cruella and I tired to find it, but we never could."

"The Curse was broken a little over a year ago, but Storybrooke is cloaked thanks to, for better or worse, Rumplestiltskin bringing back from the Enchanted Forest... and then, actually, several recastings of the Curse by various villains, one of which resulted in the town vanishing off the face of this earth for about a year, which is what took us so long to find you. Long story short, you can only find Storybrooke if you're invited in, so we had to fetch you instead of just giving you a call," Emma explained.

"And you're going to invite me? A villain?" asked Ursula.

"We know you were screwed over by Hook and your old man," Neal answered. "And that you were just trying to protect Maleficent's daughter. Emma's parents were in the wrong that night-"

"And I've paid for their selfishness my entire life," Emma amended. "They ripped out a part of me and it made me fall in with the wrong crowd, trust the wrong people, hurt my family with selfish actions again and again to try and fill the void they created in my magic. I had my potential for darkness stripped away, so instead of being good I just latched onto bad people who dragged me down with them."

Emma shook her head and sighed. "I ended up as bad off as Lily who didn't have the hope in her heart to try to be good, I was just an asshole by proxy. Which is why we have to find her. We have to fix what my parents screwed up and reunite Maleficent with her daughter."

"And you don't think she'll burn your town to the ground?"

Shrugging, Emma answered, "You could say I have something like foresight - and your friend might actually be the most well-adjusted parent and forgiving person in Storybrooke... which might not be saying a lot considering pretty much every parent is a jerk and we just got past a curse that made everyone vent their grudges through trying to murder one another... but it's a start."

"So, what's your deal?" asked Ursula, sitting at the bar with Neal as they waited for Emma.

It was early afternoon. Neal had loaded up the furniture he wanted to keep and was taking a break from the boxes while Emma took the trailer to her place where movers were supposed to be helping out, because she'd thought of that while he'd just assumed she would be helping him pack - which was dumb, because being together in his apartment was a bad idea - so it had been just him and the fish princess.

"What do you mean 'what's my deal'?"

"You and Princess Self-Loathing. You were a thing, huh? More than just stealing."

Neal grimaced. "We were... partners in crime and lovers when we were kids. Then Emma got arrested because of this puppet guy from our world who'd escaped the Curse and got conned by Peter Pan's minions into thinking we had to be broken up for our own good, but it was only because Pan knew Emma was pregnant and he wanted our son's heart to become an immortal demigod."

"Yeah, I heard about Pan having some crazy-ass prophesy to do that," Ursula nodded. "So... did that happen?"

"Temporarily. My father killed him in a murder suicide, but it was after Henry gave Pan his heart for awhile and Pan had recast the Dark Curse, so everything got messed up. And then I made the mistake of trying to resurrect my father on the advice of a candle stick and ended up merged with my father until Emma's mother cast the curse again and in this world we couldn't stay that way, so one of us had to die. I made the choice, because my father knew how to stop another villain who was trying to rewrite history and wipe Emma and her family, including my son, from existence."

"But you're here now."

"Unexpected divine intervention. Technically, Emma died too, but since she's the Savior she got a reset button to fix everything that went wrong when Zelena did cast the time travel spell and rewrote history... or rather Emma accidentally rewrote how her parents met which caused a cascade failure of altered events that caused the universe to implode."

"Hate it when that happens," joked Ursula. "So... all of this happened already, I just don't remember it?"

"Well, it wasn't Emma and I who came to find you, but yeah."

"And I got my voice back?"

"You did."

Ursula took a swing of her beer, then prompted, "So, again you and Emma, what's the deal? You got a second or third chance here it seems, but you're giving her the cold emotional shoulder and she looks guilty as sin."

"In that other timeline she mourned me for like five minutes and then went to Hell to resurrect Hook and married him."

"That'd do it," Ursula choked on her beer. "Jeez, how are you not strangling that bitch? Do you want me to strangle her? Like as soon as we get to town and I've got my tentacles back, I can do you a solid and strangle the life out of that pirate-whoring princess."

"Tempting as that is to the dark spot in my heart," said Neal, "I love her too much to want her dead."

"Or not enough," Ursula countered. "It's usually not enough. If you loved her full-stop then you'd hate her just as much. Believe me, I've met enough villains to know how it works."

Neal picked at the label on the empty bottle by his glass. "Yeah, okay, maybe. Thing is? I'm afraid to really love Emma, to be that vulnerable again, not just because I don't feel like I can really trust her not to hurt me, but because I'm pretty sure my sidekick role in her story will end when she succeeds in fixing all the magical damage to the people of Storybrooke that's keeping them from breaking free of their stories."

"You think the Grim Reaper will come calling again?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I've never gotten a happy ending, never gotten the girl or the family or even the good job and nice apartment," Neal explained.

"I hear you," nodded Ursula.

"My story wasn't written to be a happy one, and I died before things were reset, so my being here is an anomaly, a paradox, just like I've always sort of been," Neal continued. "So, I've got no reason to expect I could have even a piece of that happy ending, you know?"

He sighed and shrugged, not sure what else to say. What could he say? That he was actually okay with that? That he'd put in enough time in Purgatory that he'd probably have a spot reserved in Heaven if he didn't screw things up too badly - but it still hurt that he'd probably never get the chance to be a real hero, to be someone that his son was proud of and wanted to know instead of just an ex-deadbeat thief bum in thrift store clothes who's only honest job was sketching tourists in Central Park.

"I guess I'm just a loser," Neal sighed again.

"So, your kid has a loser and a failure for parents," snorted Ursula. "Who doesn't?"

"Some people I would imagine."

"Yeah, well, not where we come from. Everyone thinks my father is this great and terrible but great king. He's a hack who gets all his powers from my namesake, which is why he named me after that crazy sea goddess bitch in the first place. And my mother? She never should have married that jerk. She was young and foolish and he was a handsome prince. She thought they would do great things together, reclaim our people's power over the sea from man through diplomacy, and instead she got harpooned by a pirate, and I got stuck being raised by a tyrant who exiled me to living amongst humans."

"Because you had your singing voice taken."

Ursula snorted. "Is that his story? No surprise there. It was just his excuse. I'm like seventy percent sure he set the whole thing up to get rid of me. My father didn't like me interacting with humans to entertain them rather than luring them to their deaths. Plus, he found out I had the hots for Ariel and even being a little bit bi is a crime punishable with exile in Atlantis. I mean, that was never going to happen. She was straighter than an arrow and yeah, she was hot, but she was dumber than a bag of barnacles with a serious kleptomania problem. But all you have to do is look at the wrong eye candy too long and if you can't be rehabilitated by drowning pirates, it's off to dry land for you!"

Ursula threw back a shot. "My father is such an asshole."

Neal nodded. "Yeah, I hear you. Mine promised to make the most of the second chance at happiness with his true love that I gave him by sacrificing my life. I wasn't even cold in my grave before he started lying to his wife and scheming to get even more dark power. He even let this idiot squatting in my apartment throw out all my stuff because the man I grew into after I landed in another world meant nothing to him. He didn't want to know that guy. Me. All he cared about was preserving his memories of me as a kid before I grew up to remind him of how he failed and I screwed up and wasn't everything he hoped I'd be."

"Exactly," nodded Ursula. "Father's are the worst. Why should I even go back?"

"Well, you are living in a shittier apartment than mine and I know from experience how crappy the janitorial services are," Neal told her. "He did seem genuinely happy at the idea of a reunion."

"Only when that dirty pirate brought up his shell. Did he ever go looking for it while I was destitute in the Enchanted Forest and had to make a living having tentacle sex with creepy men? Or rotting here in a world I knew nothing about, had no identity papers, no way to make a real life for myself?"

"Yeah, fair point. Father's are the worst."

Grimacing, Neal amended, "And I suck as one too, so... yeah."

"You can't say that. It sounds like you barely got the chance to know your kid thanks to that evil puppet man and fate being hell-bent on killing you. Then you lose a year, he's now a bratty teenager. I remember being a bratty teenager. I didn't want jackshit to do with my father - and not just because he was an asshole. I mean, he was a king who gave me anything I wanted, but the way I saw it, he was a hack who never had to work at anything, who just postured around using his tentacles so scare people into getting what he wanted, not by being a real ruler who worked hard for our people's best interests. If he'd even tried talking to human leaders, maybe my mother wouldn't have gone out that day and gotten killed. But he'd never admit it was his fault or change his ways. That is a father who sucks.

"You sound like you really want to try to be a good guy and make up to your kid all the stuff you couldn't help that happened," Ursula concluded.

"I wish Henry saw it that way," sighed Neal. "He just hates me and Emma. To be honest, the real reason we wouldn't let him come along is that being stuck in a car for eight hours together was less awkward than being stuck with him too after all of the things he said under the Shattered Sight spell."

"That bad, huh?"

"It was really bad. I loved my father. I thought he was a good man and I was proud of him even when everyone else thought he was the town coward for leaving the battlefront of a war that was using our people as sacrifices. I was proud because I knew him, I remembered how he cared for me, how he was always there even my mother was off drinking and skanking it up. But I was never there for Henry, so he has no reason to love me or be proud of me," lamented Neal, "and that hurts the most, you know? All I ever wanted was to not be my father, but now what I wouldn't give to have my son look at me the way I did my papa. But it's too late for that now. I missed my chance. Maybe I had it when we met here over a year ago, when he was still a boy, but between the pixie dust puberty onset and him not even remembering me when I died... I'm more a sperm donor to him than anything."

"I always thought I wanted kids," Ursula mused, "until Cruella and I were stuck here with Lily and had no way to care for her. Cruella was cool with marrying old geezers to get their money, but I wanted to make an honest living. I'd try to look in on Lily until I just lost track of her. They said she ran away from her home in Boston and I didn't have the means to pack up and look for her and Cruella didn't want to bother. What kind of parents would we have been anyway?"

"Well, she is a patricidal serial killer," said Neal.

"That's not her fault, though," Ursula sighed. "We ran into that Author once, in the Enchanted Forest. He exiled her there. When they met in her world, she refused his advances even after he wrote her magical powers to protect herself from her abusive mother. So he wrote her multiple personality disorder. Like a Dr. Jeklye and Mr. Hyde situation. And it was the Mr. Hyde who murdered her mother. With the police after her, she begged Isaac to fix her, and he agreed if she'd marry him. But she tried to escape and he sent her here where magic made it harder to fight her dark personality.

"Maleficent found her," explained Ursula, "and recruited her to kill bad people, so she could satisfy her urge without hurting innocent people. But then we ran into Isaac and he when he learned about the loophole, he changed her story again, made her homicidally impotent but no less cured of the intense desire to kill. It was torture for her. She didn't want to kill, but she felt like she had to kill, but she couldn't kill, not even bad people who deserved it in self defense. She couldn't protect herself even with her magic. She couldn't stop Snow White and Prince Charming from taking Lily. It really took a toll on her, especially when we got her and she had to start over again in a strange new world. She ended up with some old geezer Big Pharm CFO and got antipsychotics and antidepressants for free. So, I can't really blame her. She'd have been locked up by the State of New York and forgotten otherwise."

Ursula spun a coaster on the bartop and mused, "Sometimes I think we're just made to lose every time. That even when we cut a break, it's a shitty break, a last resort that kills a little bit more of our soul each time. Maybe we're cursed by fate. It's our destiny to be fucked over no matter how hard we try. That's how our stories ago, that's the role we're meant to play on the stage of life that is the farce of our magical existence."

"That mean you don't want to help us find Lily and go to Storybrooke and back to the Enchanted Forest?" asked Neal.

Ursula shrugged. "Oh, I do, if anything just to get my father to take human form so I can knee him in the balls as hard as I possibly can - and with any luck expose him for the fraud he is, break his cult-worship crap, stop humans from hunting mer-people on the false assumption that we are evil human-eaters. Though just hitting dear old dad in the nads would be enough if your ex fails again to give us all a shot at breaking free of this shitty typecasting."

"Emma has a taser you could use," suggested Neal. "Henry used it on Hook. He pissed himself. It was a wonderful moment. Also, you could tase Hook in the nuts again too... assuming he's recovered from his mental trauma of some charlatan shaman telling him that he had sex with his own prostitute mother."

"Oh, that totally happened."

Neal choked on his beer. "What... seriously?"

"Oh, yeah, it's another reason my father didn't want me hanging out at pirate pubs unless it was to kill sailors. He would tell me about how there was an infamous pirate whore who used our magic powers to cure her frequent cases of syphilis. She had been married to a cruel sailor who tortured and killed a mer-child caught in a net and abandoned her own children after which the only life she could make was as a whore. She had beautiful hair with magical powers and many a client who paid her a great deal... which she needed to pay for her syphilis medicine. One day her eldest son tricked her youngest son into sleeping with her. She didn't know, obviously, at the time he was her son, but later her eldest came and told her that was his revenge for her leaving them, after he'd learned she wasn't dead like their father had said, and because he had left them too and to be indentured into child slavery aboard merchant ships where he was molested by some troll kitten poker broker to protect his brother from the man's perverted ways, and so she drown herself after hearing the horrible tale of what was done to her son and those kittens. My second great grandfather turned her hair into a magical net with which to trap pirates."

"That's... both ironic and seriously creepy."

"What in our world isn't?" said Ursula as Emma entered, looking tense.

"What's wrong?" asked Neal, brows furrowing.

"What isn't?" retorted Emma.

"Well, Hook really did sleep with his mother, so turns out that shaman guy is legit. Also, his brother may have been kitten raped as a child... or something and his mother's scalp became a magical homicidal hairnet."

"Many a shaman tried to buy it," recalled Ursula. "They were only into killing white men, but it was some common ground between our people, particularly since like ninety-nine percent of our world's land-fairing population is whiter than rice."

"Riiiiiiiiight, okay," groaned Emma, "you can tell us more about the mer-folk-indiginous-human cracker-killing alliance on the way upstate, because Ruby called. Apparently there was a massacre at the compound."

"The incesty one?" Neal recalled.

"Yeah, that one. They think it was another Second Curse faction that objected to their objectionable beliefs in the weird feudal jockeying for land that none of them are legally entitled to squat on in the first place. Seems while we were in Camelot it's really turned into a mess of feuding encampments lead by low-level royals all trying to establish their own kingdoms free of modern interference."

"Sounds about right," scoffed Ursula. "Humans are always looking for reasons to hate, kill, and control each other. Y'all suck."

"Yeah, I know," sighed Emma, throwing some money on the bar. "No Coney Island or MOMA."

"It's not like you wanted to go to MOMA anyway," Neal pointed out.

"Yeah, but you did," Emma argued, "and I wanted to share in something you loved, even if I don't love it myself."

"That's sweet and nauseating," groaned Ursula. "Can we go?"

"Do you need to stop back at your place and pack?" asked Emma.

"What? Boxes of instant ramen and roach traps? As long as we can grab a Papaya on the way out of town, I'm good to go."

AN: Ursula and Neal both suffer from absentee (dead?) mothers and asshole fathers who sent them away and for all their posturing and blaming other were obviously and fault and clearly didn't look too hard. Also they were hurt by Hook. I could see them being friends. And, yes, Hook really did sleep with his mom. Did you have doubts?

Next up: Meanwhile, back at Zelena's ranch... I mean farm.