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 FORTY-FIVE

BACK AT THE RANCH... ER... FARM

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... er... farm, an investigation was underway. Which, of course, didn't mean much in Storybrooke as a couple of flying monkeys could have probably carried out a police investigation as competently as the self-appointed and completely unqualified and untrained Sheriff's Department employees could.

"Well, at least Cruella isn't as psychotic as Emma originally said she would be," Snow considered as she loitered around Zelena's old barn with David and Ruby, who was an acting deputy until Emma returned... which was definitely awkward because even though Snow had an excuse now for her bad behavior, their friendship was pretty shaky.

"But she'll still want to resurrect Maleficent," sighed David, looking for clues.

It did appear that the farm had been recently occupied by the compound people, though also recently abandoned. Other evidence suggested the killers had used the farm to scope out the adjacent compound. The hay loft had been disturbed, scuff marks and shoe prints that suggested someone had been up their with binoculars - or a spyglass.

Dr. Whale had informed them that Hook's spyglass had been taken from his box of personal effects at the hospital.

But there were no video cameras in the psych ward and Regina had intentionally placed the one on the main floor pointing away from the once secret entrance, so either it was an employee or someone had swiped a key-card, and the hospital was pretty lax with those.

That the killers wouldn't just buy some binoculars did suggest the culprits were broke forest people who didn't know how paper money or credit cards worked let alone have any.

Plus, there was an empty one of those off-brand Cheetos bags, the kind he got free sometimes from the Dark Star because Sneezy/Mr. Clark gave them away when they were past the expiration date... or at least he used to before he donated old food to the 'food bank' that was just a food donation service for the Second Curse Crowd.

Which was kind of annoying. David had really liked getting those free fake Cheetos on his night patrols. Not that he was begrudging the forest people, because it wasn't their fault they got swept up in Snow's curse and needed charity to survive in a world very different from the one they knew how to make a living in.

It was just annoying that he'd gotten his job back and was now out of free fake Cheetos!

"Looks like they were into more than just free fake Cheetos," David noted, plucking a blunt from the floor. "I'll have to chat with Anton and Happy later."

"Just don't shut Anton down," Ruby interjected. "He provides a valuable medical service. Like my waitressing-related chronic lower back pain."

"I don't care about the forest people getting high," sighed David, "I care about them getting high and murdering people... and eating my fake Cheetos. I thought stoners only ate Funyuns?"

"Sneezy doesn't give away Funyuns. The stoners buy them all out before the expiration date. This town has a lot of stoners," said Ruby. "I mean, with all of the incest related trauma and relations, you'd have to either get drunk or high to not kill yourself, right?"

"You make our world sound like an amoral cesspool, Ruby," Snow groaned.

"It is an amoral cesspool. Probably because fairy tales are supposed to teach the people of this world how to live by not emulating us. You ever think about that? I mean, Isaac was a shitty scribe, but whoever wrote us down to begin with was a real asshole," she declared.

"It's too early in the day to have a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence," David complained. "Why don't you go get some more evidence bags?"

"Sure thing, Sheriff," Ruby snorted with a mock salute before heading down the stairs.

"Why did Emma appoint her deputy?" groaned David.

"Because she knows Ruby hates us, so she'll be objective on the job instead of being your thug to beat up random people," Snow stated bluntly.

"I don't beat up random people!" David exclaimed.

"Okay, maybe not random, but you punched Bo Peep in the face to try and get her crook to tell if Emma was still alive in the Enchanted Forest," Snow pointed out, "and now we can't get any meat, David!"

"Yes, well, you got us banned from the dry clearer and the manicurist!"

"That bothers you? Were you planning to take Hook out for a manny-peddy and brow-wax when he gets out of the psych ward?"

"I meant that I have to put up with you leaving nail clippings all over the bathroom floor," David shot back, and Snow paused in her nail-filing.

"Maybe if you put the seat down I would put my clippings in the trash."

"So you're retaliating against my poor toilet etiquette with poor foot hygiene?"

"Basically, yes," Snow responded. "If I'd had my full wits about me, perhaps I would have devised something more direct like putting saran wrap over the bowl at night so you peed all over your feet."

"Ha ha."

David put another fiber in a bag and then asked, "Do you think Ruby's right? That... we're badly written? I mean, Neal keeps making jokes to that effect. Does he know something more than this whole crack universe Emma apparently accidentally created that she had to unmake? Does Emma know something? Are we really nothing more than bad morality tales brought to life by some deity with a sick sense of humor?"

"I don't know. It's very existentialist. And I'm too sleep deprived to ponder it, David," Snow answered while returning to her fingernails.

The damn things had grown like weeds with her pregnancy hormones, and she didn't have servants here to take care of her manny-peddy needs, which was annoying since, as David had said, she was banned from the manicure shop - by the cousin of the Shangri-la-ineseian who ran the dry cleaner. He had previously banned her during the "Town Tramp" incident and she'd just maybe insulted his mother when she couldn't get her favorite cashmere sweater cleaned, and then the Curse broke, and how was she to know then that Regina killed his father for having provided imported silks for Snow's sixteenth birthday ball and not making the Queen's dress more glamorous than her stepdaughter's after which his mother committed suicide and the kids all had to join the army back in Magical China instead of emigrating to the Enchanted Forest, but then "Mr. Kim" and his cousin went AWOL only to end up caught in Regina's curse, that she only cast to get revenge on Snow White...

So, yeah, pretty much Mulan was the only Asian person in the Enchanted Forest who didn't hate her, but she was still in the Enchanted Forest... or Enchanted Forest adjacent since she parted ways with Robin and his Merry (but incompetent and chauvinistic) Men prior to the whole crushing David's heart to cast the Dark Curse again thing.

That was a shame, Snow mused. She missed Mulan. The woman had actual authentic bona fide honor, which was pretty much bullshit and lies in the Enchanted Forest. So, okay, back then Snow had hated Mulan and had been more than willing to murder her both to get home and to not be reminded that she wasn't as honorable as she made everyone think she was. But twenty-twenty hindsight made her appreciate the warrioress more, and Snow was pretty sure Mulan would have kicked all of these forest squatters' butts over their stupid turf war so she could get back to making bird houses... or whatever it was she did now.

Snow sat down on a bail of hay and sulked as she watched Charming doing his fake sherriffing, like he actually knew what the hell he was doing considering she was the better tracker between them and all he did was raise sheep and then get beaten up by a girl with braids and then impersonate a prince badly until she came into his life. Well, he did kill that dragon by pure dumb luck.

And he was cute and not bad in bed, and Snow did respect that he was generally more honorable than she was, less inclined to act selfishly, unless he was doing it to save her, because true love clearly blinded people and made them act like idiots until they ended up cursed in a town they couldn't seem to escape and the same miserable jobs as everyone else in the outside world.

Maybe Ruby's theory had some merit!

Ugh, Snow groaned, but her life sucked in Storybrooke. At least David had a fun job he wasn't qualified for. She taught little kids and if she wasn't Snow White she'd still be teaching fourth graders instead of being able to convince the principal to let her teach sixth graders; honestly, she was not remotely qualified to teach anything but fourth grade, so it was no wonder Henry was skipping class all the time, but she'd chosen not to notice that she was dumbing down her own grandson and forcing him to go to Belle for academic material, not to mention the Internet where she wouldn't be shocked if he was dipping his pixie dust boosted puberty toes into porn, because she already knew that Hook had gotten someone to show him how to use the Sheriff's Department computer to look at porn... searching for pictures of skanks that resembled Emma!

Apparently, that fetish had been going on since they all returned to this world, which explained why Hook had hung out at the station even when Emma wasn't there. It was creepy, and maybe if David and Emma had spent more time at the Station in general instead of whatever gallivanting about they did pretending to police the town, they'd have found Hook out instead of it coming down to the IT guy fixing the computers they destroyed in their battle royale!

And maybe if Henry's mothers cared a bit more about his well-being, Snow mused, it wouldn't have taken her own grandson telling her she could shove a birdhouse up her ass... and, yes, she'd spanked him for it... and then Regina had punched her in the face and Emma had gone into a rather frightening fit over it that now made Snow suspect her daughter had been physically abused as a child...

So... she had the bad mother thing going for her too, which meant it was basically at least a third generation thing with this family, and that was rather disturbing.

Snow had only wanted the best chance for her daughter, but she had made all the wrong decisions to make that happen, resulting in the exact opposite. And now Emma had lived some horrible life that sounded just as bad as being cursed for twenty-eight years, married to her own great grandfather (Snow was still trying process that connection to herself) and basically reduced to a soulless jerk who did a complete reversal of personality and ethics that had made her The Savior and resulted in the end of the world, because her parents were too guilty over their fuck-up and concerned with her still loving them to tell her that she was being a stupid and desperate skank with the emotional IQ of a teenage slut for replacing her integrity with a lady boner for a rapist fanboy who'd banged her own son's grandmother!

"Did you hear me?"

Snow blinked and turned toward her husband who'd moved to a different corner of the loft. "Hmm?"

"I asked if you'd gotten a text back from Regina yet."

"No, not yet," Snow answered, not thrilled with having to let Regina run this show.

Everything of late called into question her own trying to be BFFs with Regina after all the things that woman did to her and David like trying to murder Emma as a baby. If Emma was going to rethink her own childhood-regret-related transference onto Regina that had "inspired" an attempt to befriend Regina in and after Neverland, even with the fake memories Snow's stepmother had given Emma and Henry to escape Pan, then she was also going to rethink that relationship. After all, things had gotten quite nasty under Ingrid's spell, and it was clear that reformed or not, forgiveness or not, they were both still not remotely over how each had hurt the other.

And Snow was almost certain now that Regina had orchestrated the whole thing with Roland submitting that stupid name so she could get the position of Mayor back!

Well, the joke was on her. Someone had given Belle the idea to run for Mayor and sent around a petition to call for a special election that was picking up steam, and there was no way the (former) Evil Queen would beat that bookworm who actually cared about other people outside of this family.

David gave her a concerned look. "Are you all right, hon? You look distracted?" He was actually thinking slightly devious and maybe Snow was going to prank Ruby for bitching at them all morning, but he didn't want to get into another argument and he was all about plausible deniability if that was the case and they ended up with a very angry werewolf.

"I'm just really really really tired," answered Snow.

At another sigh from his wife, David resisted rolling his eyes and asked, "Okay, what?"

Snow grimaced before admitting, "It's just that waking up from my surgery... it feels like coming out of a fog. I didn't even know my judgment was clouded, but now I know what's really important about being a mother, and I know it wasn't my fault that I was sick, so the things that did that hurt people aren't entirely my fault, but I still feel guilty and I don't know how to make it better with Emma. She was still so... angry when we last talked, I could tell, upset that we weren't even friends anymore, that I'd pushed her away by trying to badly parent her. I know now that being a mother isn't about me, how that makes me feel or others look at me, it's about sharing that bond with my children, loving them unconditionally no matter how they turn out, allowing them to fail, but guiding them to make the right choices... even if I stumble along the way and go about it in occasionally deceitful ways that sounded good at the time."

"If that bond is so important," interjected Ruby, coming up the ladder, "why are you here instead of breast feeding your kid?"

"Because," Snow huffed, "Regina and Robin and bringing delegates from the different factions here to try and figure out what happened and I am-"

"Snow White, diplomat extraordinare," snorted Ruby. "At least to the people who haven't lived here long enough to know otherwise."

"Yes, thank you for that, Red."

"No problem, Mary Margaret."

Stepping into the barn, Regina called up, "Well, this sounds promising. Everyone's at the house. Shall we?"

'Everyone' was a wide assortment of people, including an exhausted Robin Hood and disgruntled looking Prince Philip and Princess Aurora who'd tried their hand at town living before trading some of Aurora's jewelry to Mr. Gold for Jefferson's manor after that crazy tenant moved closer to town so he could see his daughter on weekends with court supervision after he ran off with Grace during Pan's Curse and she was kidnapped by trolls... or something.

Whatever that story actually was, the Prince and Princess occupied the last of the nonagricultural zoned residential properties outside of the town proper and also being on a hill that looked down on both the coastal community and the outlying farms in the other direction, that meant they might have seen something.

"We didn't see anything," said Philip.

"We try not to intrude on peasant matters," amended Aurora while fawning over Philip Junior.

"Naturally," grumbled Snow while thinking if more people met Aurora they'd change their minds about Snow as a leader and how she "mistreated" peasants. Oh, Aurora had seemed to transform into a wonderful and brave person after Philip lost his soul and she came out of her stuck up bitch shell, but she was right back in it after saving his boring backside and getting knocked up. And if that wasn't bad enough, being a flying monkey had kept the snotty little cunt from putting on a single ounce of pregnancy weight!

"What's that supposed to mean?" Aurora exclaimed.

"It means, you're a spoiled brat!"

"Snow!" David croaked.

"Oh come on, David. I know you agree with me! She's a spoiled brat and he's a spineless pretty boy, and together they betrayed us and everyone we care about to save their own useless asses! If they had just told us upfront about Zelena, Neal wouldn't have died, I wouldn't have had to cast the Curse by crushing your heart, and we could potentially all be living happily ever after!"

"Spare me!" Aurora scoffed. "Everyone knows you cursed your unborn baby so you wouldn't have to be an actual parent."

"I had an illness," Snow growled, "that affected my judgment. What's your excuse? Monkey herpes?"

"You take that back!" Aurora demanded, pulling a dagger and advancing.

David intervened, his own sword going quickly to the auburn-haired princess' throat. He preferred diplomacy, but truthfully, Snow was entirely right about how he viewed these two and every time he encountered them he felt less and less sympathy for Gold's wraith taking Philip's soul and Hook pulling out Aurora's heart. The only good thing to come of it was Mulan being free of the both of them!

"Threaten my wife again," David warned, "and you'll be moving out of that mansion into a jail cell, Princess."

"Perhaps," Philip stepped in, "you should keep a muzzle on your wife."

"Perhaps," Snow shot back, "you should wear a sign that says 'Misogynist Asshole'. The only good thing your 'true love's kiss' ever did for your wife is wake her from that sleeping curse and give her a month of freedom to realize that women actually have brains and can fight as good as any man - before she made the mistake of retrieving your soul. Your soul-sucking soul that regressed her back into a spoiled little dimwit who thinks her purpose in life is fawning over you with carefully quaffed 'I just got fucked good' hair.

"You want to know why your so-called friend Mulan left you both?" Snow continued nastily, "It's because she was disgusted to see what your love did to each other and know that she enabled this codependent bullshit romance. Honestly why are you even 'true love'?" she scoffed. "Charming and I had to fight to be together. We fought battles together and had many harrowing adventures. All you did was get contractually obligated to marry by some fairies that raised Aurora and didn't even meet until her father was killed by Maleficent and you were supposed to get married, but you both got cursed on Aurora's sixteenth birthday."

Snow crossed her arms and glowered at Aurora, "And don't even try to pretend that ten years under a sleeping curse makes you legal. You're still a stupid girl with a cradle-robbing husband who thinks a woman's place is producing heirs. Thank the gods Mulan realized what a hot mess you both were and left before she got stuck with your spoiled little Lolita ass!

"You should both be grateful that the age of consent in Maine is sixteen," she directed at Philip, "or you'd be Prince Statutory Rapist."

"Shut up!" Aurora hissed. "You don't get to judge either of us! I wouldn't be stuck in this horrible world if it wasn't for your selfishness! You could have taken care of Zelena in some other way! But you just had to protect your stupid replacement child at all costs!"

Things looked ready to come to blows again and this time Regna conjured a fireball and shouted, "ENOUGH! Look, none of us want to be here. Do you think I enjoyed being dragged back to this prison where the majority of the residents want me burned at the stake? But arguing over who is most to blame for that is not relevant to why we are gathered here today. A large group of people were murdered in a grizzly fashion less than a mile from here, and while none of us liked them, and while we're all aware of the accusations of child-bride kidnapping and worse than the usual levels of incest around here, the culprits have to be identified and brought to justice."

"Justice?" scoffed a Dwarf who wasn't one of the seven exiles. "When were you ever brought to justice for your mass murdering? Or cursing the first group of people?"

"YEAH!" was the collective shout.

"Maybe," David interjected, "we should table justice in favor of just the piece of mind that we know whomever did this, it was a one time operation in... defense of the greater community that went too far, perhaps due to the circulating rumors that there is a rampant pot addiction around here coupled with rumors that Anton is using a secret stash of pixie dust to fertilize his crop, and apparently that flower pollen, when not processed correctly in some special fairy lab and used in minimal doses, has a tendency to alter brain chemistry and enhance irrational and violent behavior."

"In short," said Regina, "whomever did this has a solid defense, other than the narcotics possession, and since Storybrooke doesn't technically have laws against pixie dust use, it's a formality. We just want to know who did it so we can move on and try to facilitate a better relationship between the towns people and the forest people so that disagreements don't have to be solved by mass murder and mutilation."

"I might have seen something," spoke up a man who was previously a troll and lived with his other troll-people in the junkyard. "I was working on the crane at the junk yard that night. I saw two people walking through the wildlife refuge gate toward that path that swings around behind Gold's cabin. It'd be the best way to surprise those child-stealing freaks, to come at them from the park."

"Who are you calling 'child-stealing freaks, troll?" accused the Dwarf.

"Trolls only kidnap children for ransom. We only kill adult humans. We are not sickos!"

"You eat kittens!" David reminded.

"But we don't steal them, we are supplied with kittens by unscrupulous humans," the former troll stated, giving David a knowing look.

"I did not steal and sell kittens!" David exclaimed, exasperated. "How many times do I have to say that it must have been my brother impersonating me-"

"And hanging out with Kristoff?" Snow inquired, arms inquired.

"Oh, come on, Kristoff is an idiot who probably spends most of his time sitting in a reindeer pen smoking pot. James probably met him on some 'diplomatic' trip for George and took advantage of him to try and steal gold from some trolls. Let it go, Snow!"

"Back to the two people," interjected Ruby. "Just two?"

"Well, there could have been more," said the former Troll. "I finished up and went to bed around one, maybe fifteen minutes after I saw them. Didn't think anything of it. Assumed it was just two teenagers going up to the lookout to makeout. Wouldn't have been the first time. Of course, Bill and I went up there in the morning to see if they'd slipped and fallen off the cliff as they occasionally do so we could pilfer their jewelry before calling the authorities, but sadly there were no bodies. Although, in retrospect, if they were involved in the murdering, less of a disappointment."

Snow looked on in disgust and exclaimed, "How many teenagers have fallen off that cliff?"

"Not counting since the Curse broke, a couple a year," he answered. "It'd be weird if no one in town ever died, of course, so between the cliff-slipping and car wrecks at the town line, I suppose it kept things seemingly normal, apart from the lack of births, of course."

"You think no one ever succumbs to fatalities around here?" sighed Regina. "People tried to leave town every now and then and were killed in car wrecks. As for the cliff thing, I have no idea why it kept demanding teenagers falling to their demise. Perhaps it satisfied the Dark Curse somehow since it was apparently involved in Zoso's contribution to The Frontlands' genocide by drawing on the life-forces of Ogre-murdered teenagers... or something. I was only half paying attention when Rumple explained that years ago.

"Anyway," she continued, "since the Curse broke it's been a hodgepodge of teenagers and people fleeing various catastrophes. A park ranger when Gold summoned that Wraith. That giant sent a car off the road and over the cliff. An entire family got knocked to their deaths by a tree during that Doomsday Crystal thing. Some nature enthusiast slipped on that snow chick's ice after she wandered out of this barn on her roundabout ten hour walk into town. Might have been a few suicides."

"How the hell do we not know about this!?" exclaimed David.

"How did you not know or care about anything who died during 'various catastrophes' before?" scoffed Regina. "At least I visited my father's grave often enough to take note of the marked rise in grave digging following the town nearly being destroyed."

"But... shouldn't the Sheriff's Department be notified of that sort of thing?"

Shrugging, Regina considered, "Oh, I'm sure the Department was called, but the switchboard doesn't consider curse-related-collateral damage an emergency worth forwarding to the Sheriff's cell and you and Miss Swan have a nasty habit of just deleting the office voicemail, assuming it's all about cats in trees and parking tickets."

"You really are a bad Sheriff," Robin spoke up. "I mean Nottingham was a corrupt Sheriff, but-"

"Oh, shut it!" David snapped at him. "You're a piss-poor thief and not remotely honorable banging the woman who murdered your wife! You have a serious problem and at least Regina had the sense to realize it before you let her ruin your son the way she ruined Henry."

"HEY!" Regina hissed. "I did not ruin him!"

"And that's based on what, not listening to everything he said last week under that spell?" Snow countered. "Please, you and Emma both did a piss-poor job of parenting that kid-"

"You let him drive down a crowded street!"

"I never said we did a good job of grandparenting him."

"Okay, can we get back to the meeting!" David exclaimed and looked around at everyone. "I'm sorry that I began this town's post-curse existence with a bullshit speech to get everyone to stay and haven't lived up to my responsibilities. But this is an opportunity for all of us to be a better community. Also, my wife had given me syphilis."

"Which I got from my mother when she was pregnant with me, not from sex with filthy bandits and pirates!" Snow interjected, which did not go over with the filthy bandits and pirates in attendance.

"Hey, I shower regularly!" Smee snapped, "and I still haven't gotten reimbursed for the damage to my lobster-slash-house boat where I would be living instead in this forest dump if I had gotten any insurance money for it!"

Regina retorted, "You can't collect insurance money for a policy purchased by a man my mother turned into a fish and you just stole his boat and started using it!"

"Why not? Finders keepers!"

"That's not a thing!" said David.

"Look, back to the possible murderous thugs advanced scouting team," Snow cut in. "You said you thought they were teenagers going to make out, so they were a man and a woman?"

"Because teenagers of the same sex can't go to Make-Out Point?" argued the troll-person. "That's very bigoted of you."

"I didn't mean-stop trying to put words in my mouth, Troll, or I'll turn you into a bug like I did your cousins!"

"With what? Your princess farts? The darkest fairy in town is Tinkerbell, and the only dust she distributes is the kind tainting the weed."

"Wait, Tinkerbell is running the illegal pixie dust weed fertilizer scam?" Ruby exclaimed, then scowled. "I knew she was acting shady!"

"Please, she's always shady," scoffed Regina. "But back to the not-explicitly-stated-gender-specific trespassers..."

"Fine, they were a man and a woman," the troll-person conceded. "If I was my real self, I'd have been able to catch their scents on the wind, but alas I am stuck in hideous human form in this world."

"Maybe I can still track their trail, though!" Ruby exclaimed.

And the game was afoot!

AN: So, I'm not the only one who thinks Philip turned Aurora into a bitchy little brat, right? Like she went from wonderful Xena/Gabby potential with Mulan to tossing her 'I just got fucked' hairdo around, squeeing over getting knocked up two minutes later, and then bitching about the world while fawning over her dumb monkey baby like she was back in the mindset good little princesses get married and pregnant and complain about how the nasty Land Without Magic world doesn't give them the ass-kissing they deserve. (Who thinks David really was involved in kitten poker smuggling, and who thinks it was James taking advantage of Kristoff mistaking him for David to pull one over on some trolls to get Arendellian gold for George which later led to David being mistaken for Fake David by trolls in the Enchanted Forest as someone who tried to swindle them in kitten-smuggling-related matters? And were they bridge trolls in the Enchanted Forest or are Rock Trolls much creepier than you thought? There has to be some connection between trolls that live under stone bridges and trolls made of stone, right?)

Next up: Lily gets Hooked.