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-FIVE

PUPPY LOVE

Emma had hoped to talk to Neal after Robin's wake, but he he'd cut out before the end. Granny's was the most likely place to find him, but he wasn't in his usual booth drinking coffee.

"Breaking and entering, darling?"

Cruella was standing in the hall when Emma looked up from her lock pick set outside Room 8.

"I... um..."

"I saw your baby daddy heading toward the pawnshop with the Bookworm while I was throwing moth balls down on passing pedestrians. Probably going to give Rumple a sponge bath or something. He must have worked up quite an order by now, going on... what is it... five... six weeks?"

"Why would you throw... never mind," sighed Emma. "Thanks."

"Just returning the favor I owed before heading on my way, darling," the odd former flapper replied while pulling a large suitcase into the hall from Room 9.

"You're leaving?"

"No reason to stay here. Certainly not some archer's funeral," Cruella replied. "Ursula has gone back to her world, Maleficent has her daughter to train. And the majority of the residents here are not from my world while the only thing that could rewrite my story has been destroyed."

"We could find a way to bring it bring back. We did in that other timeline. And I thought you needed Gold's help with fake IDs?"

"It turns out his wife is quite competent in personalizing his supply of fraudulent paperwork," Cruella answered with a shrug. "And truth be told, I am what I am. Badly written, but alive," she joked and dragged her suitcase with a grunt.

Emma poofed them to the parkinglot where Cruella's car was waiting and the fur-festooned woman smiled, "Well, at least someone here has hospitality. You'll probably pay for that, though, and I'm not sure your car can take any more interest."

"Yeah... it's gonna be in the shop for awhile," sighed Emma, putting the suitcase in the trunk and trying to ignore the uncomfortably appraising, rather Hook-like, look the other woman was giving her. "Apparently you can't magic away dragon fire damage. I'm not really sure what I'll do if it can't be salvaged. It's funny, all the times I told myself I was going to sell it or just send it into a lake, but I never did, and now..."

"You're awfully attached to that yellow monstrosity, darling."

Shrugging, Emma admitted, "It's where I met Neal. It's maybe where our kid was conceived. And it was like my surrogate kid for the eleven years after giving Henry up. I moved so much that the Bug became my home. And then in that other life I just... gave it up, left in this world with everything from my life that came before finding out who I was. I would dream about finding it in the forest and getting in and it would take me back to this world and I'd just drive down the road with the windows open without a destination, like after I got out of prison, and I'd feel free... and I'd then wake up in a castle, in a marriage, with a family that felt like it belonged to someone else."

"The worst prisons, darling, are the ones we place ourselves in," Cruella mused, closing the trunk. "Thank you for the help."

As Cruella was about to get in the driver's side, Emma called out, "I killed you."

Turning, the fur-festooned woman inquired, "Pardon?"

"In another timeline," Emma explained, "I killed you. I thought you were going to kill my son, so I used magic to throw you off a cliff to your death. I didn't know that you'd been cursed."

"Yes, well, it sounds like we were all rather different in that reality, darling," Cruella reminded. "I understand that Isaac wrote me to fit my name rather than my mother being evil."

"But you were still written that way," Emma said. "So I did murder you, the good woman trapped by all of that... magical insanity."

"Who's to say there was anything left alive beneath that insanity?" Cruella countered. "I can't claim to have held it together well here."

"Why did you do it?" asked Emma. "Ask a stranger for magical powers? When I found out I had magic, it's the last thing I wanted-"

"And it has only brought you suffering," Cruella deduced. "I was a fool. I thought Isaac would give me justice with magic, but instead I killed my mother and there was no way to prove that it was self defense, and all the evidence said I'd killed her past lovers and my father rather than her having done them in. And all because I refused Isaac's marriage proposal."

"He made you need to kill and then made you unable to kill when you found a way to survive with Maleficent's help," Emma recalled. "That's horrible. I remember how it was when I was the Dark One in that other life, and even after I wasn't anymore... the dagger still called to me." And yet she'd blamed Gold so entirely for becoming the Dark One again, after he'd been bound to it for 300 years, as if she could have resisted under the same circumstances...

"Darkness, however it's put into you, is hard to tame and harder yet to purge entirely," sighed Cruella. "Maleficent gave me an outlet for it that did not quite so destroy my sanity. I suppose a part of me hoped the other end of that portal would be death, just to escape the agony. It certainly wasn't genuine affection for the child. I was no longer capable of that. And in that I discovered there is something worse than the pain of lost love or blind rage of revenge: apathy for one you once loved... or hated. That is what Isaac gave me. I loved my father. I hated my mother for taking him from me. But in making me an animal, I did not kill out of love or hate. It was just... in my nature, a primal drive without emotion."

"Well, that's definitely not how it is being the Dark One. Everything is about emotion and twisting love into hate and when it was over I wanted to feel nothing," sighed Emma. "That's worse than not feeling anything. Feeling everything and wanting to escape it. Knowing you hurt the people you love because all of the little things that bugged you, that you resented, became more powerful than even true love and yet at the time, you actually believed hurting them was helping them, that the Darkness was the Light."

"Perhaps," Cruella conceded, "but the worst thing of all is just being alone. I spent thirty years conning old men... but alone."

"And you're going back to that?"

"I'm accepting my fate and what happiness I can find in the cards I was dealt, darling. It's better than being a pet store night janitor surviving on ramen."

"You never helped Ursula, not even when you were living the high life," Emma stated, having wondered about that oddity. "Why? Even if you were apathetic about everyone, didn't you have some... sense of decency, some feeling of obligation?"

"As I said, darling, loving someone and then growing to feel nothing for them is a terrible tragedy - and a burden for the one not afflicted by such magic. Staying was cruel. Leaving... I freed her from that burden."

Emma's brows shot up. "Wait... you and Ursula... really?"

Cruella smiled sadly. "We met long ago... or perhaps not that long ago? Time between our world and mine was so fluid. She's a mermaid so, of course, she could travel between worlds - or at least she could before the pirate took her voice. We were both quite young. But she went home - apparently to be badly scolded by her father. And I... well... my mother and stepfather were quick to beat any ideas out of me that I should entertain affection for a girl let alone a Negro."

Letting out a sigh, Cruella continued, "Isaac promise that he could take me with him to the Enchanted Forest. I had told him... I wanted to see an old friend, a mermaid I'd met as a child. Of course, I didn't tell him I was a bit more than a child and that we were more than friends, but perhaps he knew in his way and he just delighted in fooling me, in punishing me for the terrible crime of being pretty and making him interested in more than I had any intention to give.

"And he did punish me. I'm sure that he fully intended on your parents' paths and Maleficent's crossing, in Ursula and I falling through that portal. We were all a big joke to him, people who wronged him or even just people who didn't behave as he wanted and could amuse him if he changed their stories to emulate whatever pathetic state of being under appreciated that he felt he had escaped by being chosen for such great power."

Cruella shook her head and said, "And that is why I won't wait around for some magical loophole to resurrect the biggest loophole maker, darling. I wouldn't want your son burdened with that task. And I wouldn't want the fate of the world hung upon the moods of an angry teenage boy.

"That pen," she continued, "is clearly magic not meant for mortals that turns men into monsters... and with your boy's family history, both hereditary and thanks to Regina's parenting, well... he's already predisposed to the darkness, is he not? The light in your line couldn't push back your darkness... or his the last time around. The way I see it, binding himself to that quill, to that book, and it's fraudulent interpretation of reality, doomed that world as much as you did. It made you all think the terrible things you did were justified, even heroic, because the words were spawned from the unconscious of a psychologically abused and emotionally neglected child desperate to have a family at all costs, even if the cost was ignoring that they were all greedy frauds who were destroying the world. And that is a far worse mind than a run-of-the-mill narcissistic psychopath to have hold such power."

Emma grimaced at that.

"Some power we're not meant to have, darling," Cruella told her with a shrug. "And some love we're not meant to keep."

"Yeah," lamented Emma. "Me and Neal... now we're just... stuck... being these painful reminders to each other of what we could have had, but now we can't."

"Perhaps not," conceded Cruella. "But you still have family who love you... and you can always kill the psychopaths who lead you to your self-destruction and misery. You have that, at least."

"Revenge?" snorted Emma.

"Justice. Don't mistake charity for justice. Or giving up for failure."

Cruella de Vil then got in her roadster and backed out of the parking spot with tires squealing, nearly mowing down a group of Dwarves on the way down Main Street.

Letting out a sigh, Emma pulled her swan keychain from her pocket. It had survived, found in the smoldering remains of her office, but not for any magic she'd put into it. The cheap wax seal replica taunted her in the afternoon light. Swans represented all of that good shit in poetry and heraldry and they mated for life. And every time she looked at it in the mirror, even just feeling the warmed metal against her skin beneath the camouflage of a turtleneck she felt like such a fraud. She wasn't a savior or a hero or even a good person. She'd chosen another. She'd chosen wrong.

And the little metal fob that she'd worn as a reminder not to trust anyone, as a symbol of a promise Neal had broken, was now a symbol of a promise she had broken.

AN: So, if you're wondering, Tink returned the necklace to the Sheriff's Department while Emma was in NYC and no one will ever be the wiser, other than Whale, that she snagged it. I have a love-hate relationship with Cruella. Much like Zelena. On the show I hate her with her passion. Who writes a serial killer and a rapist into a family show for kids? I mean, Regina, okay, but she was the Evil Queen whose murder was canon. But why make a dog-napping fashionista a serial killer who stood there and laughed as dogs mauled her mother to death and then she killed the dogs and made a coat out of them so she could wear her murder weapons as a trophy? But in fanfiction these characters are blunt talk gold. Since Zelena died early on, I needed another mouthpiece, and that was Cruella. May she find something like happiness in her travels!

Next up: Another funeral and another talk.