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 FIFTY-FOUR

THE UNCHOSEN ONE

"Why are you pissed at me?" Emma snapped after growing tired of Neal giving her the cold shoulder or stink eye or whatever seemed to suit his sour mood at any given moment since they're return from New York two days ago.

"I'm not pissed at you," Neal said without looking at her as he swept into a dustpan more of what used to be the Sheriff's Department.

Technically, there were other people that could clean up the burnt out husk of a building, but salvaging boxes stuffed with the half-charred remains of files for cursed people that were all bullshit was preferable to planning Robin Hood's funeral, something they'd left to Regina, Little John, and the creepy funeral director who may or may not have been a vampire from Dr. Whale's not-quite-as-magical world.

"Yes, you are!" huffed Emma while sweeping up a cloud of ash that made them both cough.

"All right, fine," Neal responded after he'd stopped wheezing. "You're not wearing the keychain."

Emma sputtered, having not expected that. "I... what?"

"The keychain. Did you even look for it? You said you lost it here during the fight with Regina."

Emma frowned at him. "When would I have had time, Neal? In case you haven't noticed, the place was burned to the ground by dragon fire shortly after we arrived!"

"Which wouldn't have destroyed something enchanted by true love. If you really wanted to find it, you could get some 'find it' potion shit from the pawn shop," Neal pointed out. "But maybe you're just waiting for me to kick it again so you can replace it with Hook's brother's creepy cock ring and go back to your bullshit plagiarism of your parents' epic romance."

"Are you serious!?" Emma squawked. "Why the hell would I want to relive that incestuous mess? I thought we were done with this!"

"Yeah, well, I guess we're not," Neal countered with a sigh, setting his broom down. "Look, here's the thing. You say that, but you've said a lot of bullshit over the years, Emma. You think other people who've been accused of banging their blood relatives don't say it's nasty while not giving a damn that they're related? And it's not just that. I mean, hell, even that crazy bitch on Game of Thrones genuinely cared about her kids over banging her brother, even if she went about protecting them in a shitty way. You couldn't even do that for Henry."

Emma smacked him on impulse.

Neal gave her a bemused look. "Funny how whenever Hook called you names you stuck your tongue down his throat. Me? I always get the bitch slap and 'I wish you were dead' treatment."

"That's not fair!" Emma snapped, hurt by the accusation, "I know I was a hypocrite, okay? But you say you want me to get back to my true self. Well, that woman bitch slaps guys who insult her. You can't have it both ways when you want me to change, Neal."

"But have you?" Neal countered. "You keep saying you want a second chance for us, but your actions don't add up."

"Well, I'm sorry that I'm not living up to your expectations!"

The crunching of glass under boots alerted them to the arrival of Snow and Charming who looked uncomfortably between them as Snow announced, "We just wanted to stop in and see if there was anything we could help with before the wake."

"Not really," said Emma stiffley.

Neal responded sourly, "Looking for another excuse to not spend time with your kid, huh?"

"Excuse me?" sputtered Charming.

"Ignore him. He's pissy for some reason," huffed Emma.

"Some reason? I got a lot of reasons to be more than pissy," Neal corrected and frowned at her parents. "Like you two with the whole mass murdering that no one'll ever know about cause your shit don't stink."

"It's better for everyone-" Snow began.

"It's better for you," Neal cut her off. "All you ever do is try to save face for your selfish mistakes that hurt people. Yet you're supposed to be these great heroes and examples of moral fortitude.. You're not. You suck as leaders. And you suck as parents. You say you want to be better people, better parents, but that's what you said after tossing Maleficent's kid down a portal, right? And not so much with the character growth," Neal accused. "It's just a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit with you two, even more selfish and shitty than all the times Belle has made absurd double standards for my father."

"Neal..." Emma cautioned, trying to lay a hand on his arm to stop him from infuriating her parents more, but he pulled away and kept ranting.

"Naw, it has to be said," he stated. "I sacrificed our happiness a decade ago," he turned back to her parents, "so Emma could find you guys, but what have you really done as parents to make that worth it? Tell Emma she wasn't good enough and replace her with another kid as soon you could, then inform her that, hey, you're the reason her life sucked in the first place because you couldn't stand the thought of her making bad choices and how that would reflect on you?

"And what about me?" Neal continued. "I made that sacrifice, and what did I get? Told to fuck off when I asked for you help to be reunited with Emma and my son while you bent over ass backwards to kiss the pointy boots of the guy who banging Henry's grandmother and made getting into Emma's pants his number one priority the moment I was presumed dead using alcohol, emotional blackmail, and stalking until some magical book bullshit made it all sound like an epic romance parallel of your own revamped story, so she gave in? What kind of heroes do that?

"What kind of 'good parents' applaud their daughter becoming an emotionally abused doormat so their grandson's sleep written fairy tale history book can recount their true love in pretty pictures and poetic lies? I mean, Christ, when Emma dragged you to Hell in that other timeline, you didn't give a shit for days that you abandoned your son and when you finally thought about him for a second, your solution was to fucking haunt him in his sleep through a phone booth, which is creepy as shit, but you all agreed it was some beautiful expression of perfect parenting because a creepy ass quill recounted it with the same poetic bullshit lines Hook uses to revisionist history his date raping into dashing conquests of seduction. You abandoned your kid. He's a rapist. You're both assholes. But that's what being a fairy tale hero is, right? Dumb fucks who rely on 'good intentions' rather than 'common sense'."

David looked ready to punch him, but Snow held him back as Charming seethed, "You have no right to judge us, Baelfire. You sent our daughter to prison. Pregnant."

Neal rolled his eyes. "No, August sent her to prison. And he stole all the money Emma could have used to raise Henry, but conveniently, no one ever seems to remember that. I guess because you just want another reason to hate me, another reason beyond the son-of-the-Dark-One thing to have grounds to push me out of this family so you can pair your daughter up with some fairy tale legend, whether that's a chauvinist cardboard prince or a slutty misogynist pirate, because anyone with literary pedigree is a better choice for her soulmate than some peasant nobody who didn't even get his own chapter in that book and doesn't have some epic magical love story, just stolen convenience store hot-dogs and dirty motel rooms, right?"

The Charmings had no immediate response to that, so Neal raged on, "Well, you know what? You can stop the worrying and sabotaging, cause there's a better chance of me resurrecting the Dark One again," Neal concluded with a cool look at Emma, "than giving my heart and soul to someone who clearly never appreciated either."

Emma gasped and sputtered, "This is all because of a keychain?"

"No, it's all because you never chose me, Emma," he answered, anger fizzling out to resigned disappointment.

"That's not-"

"Magic brought us together," Neal cut her off. "And it pulled us apart. You made the choices that sounded good, that you thought would make you happy or at least your life easier: working together instead of going it alone on the streets, getting out of that life we were living when the opportunity presented. Always what was easiest. But you never chose me. If you'd chosen me we would have just gone to Canada instead of getting the watches. If you'd chosen me you'd have tried to save me so I could see my son grow up, even if you didn't want anything to do with me again. If you had - I could have forgiven you for sleeping with Hook after knowing he was my deadbeat stepfather, even marrying him and having his kid, as disgusting as that is. You didn't though. You didn't choose me. So, I can't choose you, Emma, no matter how much I do love you. I'm sorry and it's not my intention to your hurt, but self-respect is pretty much the only thing I have, and considering that's a rare commodity in this town... between us and me, I gotta choose me. Because I'm the only one who ever does."

He turned then and strode out into the street, unnecessarily opening and slamming the melted front door that shattered. The flash of sunlight against the dreary, charred surroundings reminded Emma of her 'vision' on the way to The Underworld that wasn't even really Neal, just a trick.

She wished that she'd wake up and find it was all dream. But she didn't, and when she got to the sidewalk he was driving off in the Chevel.

"Emma..." Snow began, laying a hand on her shoulder.

Emma shrugged her off as Neal had done and sniffed back tears. "Don't."

"He had no right to say those things," David argued.

"He had every right," Emma countered, "and you know it - at least the part you were involved in. You did treat him like trailer trash after Pan's Curse. It was selfish and horrible of you not to help him find Henry. Naming my brother after him was so many kinds of wrong that not only hurt him, but hurt me and Henry, a constant reminder of how we both failed that was made even worse, because you were bad parents who neglected him so badly if this was the real world Social Services would have taken him away. And, yeah, I was just as bad, but that doesn't make what you did okay. And half the reason I turned out so fucking messed up is you abandoning me and then barging back into my life with your bipolar parenting!

"I wanted a friend, I thought I had one," Emma accused Snow, "but then you turned into a condescending bitch who put me down at every turn to lecture me with your 'wisdom' about how life works only to then support me in all kinds of self-destructive choices out of what I assume is guilt for that spell with a side of indoctrinating me into this fake feminist bullshit you all think is being a strong woman. But punching people in the face on a journey that's all about making babies with some hot stranger is just being an asshole and an idiot! So is it any wonder I ended up with Hook?

"I lost my friend and gained a bossy know-it-all snob for a mother on the same day," Emma continued. "I never got to know my father, because he went from some guy having an affair with my friend to some guy broing around with my lover, more concerned with looking cool in comparison and having a cohort to punch people he didn't like than protecting me and my son from utterly fucking up our lives. We could have been happy, there were moments when we could have made the choices that led to that, but you either weren't there or you worked against our happiness because it conflicted with yours. And now... now it's too late to fix. I'm still The Savior, but this time I don't get to save myself, I don't get to have a happy ending, because you both failed to fight for me... so I didn't fight for Neal."

Despondent, Emma walked away, and her parents didn't follow. Snow was fighting tears and David just looked devested.

"So," he said after a minute or so, "that was the long version of the talk you got in the hospital."

"And then some," sighed Snow and she shook her head. "We have to do something, David. We have to fix this."

"No, we don't."

"David-"

"The last time you said that, Snow, I tried to convince Emma to have coffee with Neal, and you know how that ended - with us telling him to 'fuck off'. The last thing either of them wants is us trying to fix our mistakes - and if Regina were here, she'd probably say the only thing worse than us coming up with a plan is us coming up with a plan to fix our plan that blew up in our faces. Face it, it'll just snowball into another magical catastrophe. We're complicit in our daughter losing her happily ever after in order to save our own, and there's nothing worse than parents putting their own safety and happiness before their kids. She's right, Snow. We broke the cardinal rule of parenting. We failed our daughter. And there's no coming back from that."

"Neal forgave his father," Snow pointed out, desperate.

"But he obviously doesn't trust him. He's addicted to power," Charming argued. "And we're... addicted to looking like heroes, even though it seems we're just as fucked up as the rest of them."

"We used to be heroes," sighed Snow. "We used to make the right choices. It all goes back to that spell, doesn't it? I ruined everything. If I'd never done that, Emma wouldn't be the Savior. Rumplestiltskin wouldn't have had his loophole to cast the Dark Curse-"

"And then Emma and Neal might never have met," David pointed out, sighing. "It's a paradox."

"Emma loves him so much. And he loves her too.. He would be so hurt if he didn't," Snow lamented. "We should have tried harder to get Emma to talk to him before all of this. Now they both think we're against them. I don't care who Emma's true love is, Charming, what his station or pedigree is. I just want her to be happy, and if that's with Neal-"

"But we don't know that it is. That's the mistake we made with Hook, isn't it? After Neal died, we agreed that if the flirting went somewhere, if that's what Emma wanted, but what she wanted wasn't what she needed."

"We are terrible judges of character," sighed Snow. "Regina was right about that. And we haven't been good parents either. How can we be so bad at this?" she lamented.

"Well, my father was an alcoholic and you're related to Hook..."

Snow grimaced. "I'm still not ready to deal with that."

"Yeah, me neither. All I can say is, with that haircut... it's a good thing you didn't get your mother's eyes or a leather fetish..."

That earned a glare and Snow picked up the dustpan Neal had left on a half-burnt desk and tossed the contents in her husband's face.

David sputtered and coughed and wined as he jogged after her into the street, "Oh, come on, Snow!"

"I do not have Hook's hair!"

"Look, there's no shame in that weave you wore back in the Ench-"

0"It was not a weave!" snapped Snow, taking the keys out of his jacket pocket. "Now get in the truck. We have to pick up a funnel cake to take to the wake of my step mother's lover whose wife she murdered for supporting me as the rightful ruler of a kingdom that is now a pile of ruins."

As Snow got into the driver's seat, David mused unhappily with a skyward glance, "Guess it hasn't been a great week for true love, has it?"

AN: Snowing really are dumb fucks. Props to NatalieTudorYork for the tweet "Just adding Belle to the list of dumb fucks that we call "heroes" on this show who rely on "good intentions" rather than common sense". That really is how heroism works on this show. *sigh*

Next up: Emma gets advice from someone other than Hook.