CHAPTER TWO
THE DOCTOR
Baby fever has hit Storybrooke. Emma is not entirely surprised given her mother is more obsessed with setting up couples and encouraging the overpopulation of Storybrooke than an old spinster matchmaker in the "Old World", which is actually how they refer to The Enchanted Forest while ostensibly trying to find some way back there that doesn't involve a calamity or leaving Henry behind.
Both her mother and Aurora are heavily pregnant again and with Belle expecting twins and Regina parading her ginger-haired niece-slash-daughter around in fancy-ass strollers, it's only a matter of time before everyone starts looking at Emma like something's wrong - and then asking her intrusively if something is wrong.
Children aren't something she and Killian ever discussed, and it's been fairly obvious from both his past in Neverland and how he acts around her brother and Henry that he both dislikes babies and young children and has no clue how to interact with older ones other than to taunt them or preen in front of them in what she suspects is some complex from having an absent father and a bully for an older brother. That, and the sociopathy thing. Emma supposes Regina got enough experience in raising Henry from birth to be able to fake that particular brand of selfless love with comic books and jointly run operations as part of her "redemption" arc. Henry's adoptive mother at least puts in the effort to pretend she's trying for the Kid's benefit rather than to impress, and so Emma supposes she ought to respect the woman a bit for putting the "functional" in her psychopath after decades of just being bat-shit-crazy-evil.
She supposes that she has to respect all of her family for either being heroes or recovering villains. At least, that seems to be her required role as Savior. She does love them to various degrees, not always for the healthiest of reasons, though. And respect and love doesn't means she wants to contribute to adding more serial-killer-type genes to the pool. Between an unapologetic date rapist baby daddy and having a grandmother who let a rapist run free to get her spoiled ass on a throne, there's probably a good genetic chance that their combined DNA pops out a more attractive and sexually deviant version of Zelena. The peer pressure is unrelenting, however.
Stuck between the rock of her 1950's values minded family and the hard place of being the odd one out as she has been most of her life, Emma caves under the pressure. Which doesn't mean that she falls in lockstep. Her potential for darkness, after all, is back in place, and that has brought with it an ease at deception that is at once disturbing and welcoming when surrounded by a family half populated by psychopaths.
Emma takes a page from their stories: lies and deceit, with a side of self-loathing.
It's a moonless night when she's supposed to be out on patrol that Emma ends up in the cemetery with none other than Doctor Frankestein for a bought of grave robbing. Or grave contents borrowing, rather. She tells herself that she isn't going to look, but she knows that's a lie even before the coffin is levitated out of the ground. Her heart aches and her stomach feels full of lead, because Neal looks like he's simply asleep, preserved by the spell Regina used on Daniel. She's seen dead bodies - saw his dead body - and the dead aren't meant to look simply slumbering. The dead should look altogether wrong, devoid of whatever it is that had made them a person instead of a corpse. Emma thinks that Neal would be disgusted to be preserved this way, that he would cite it as evidence for how unnatural magic is.
But she was weak then.
She still is.
Emma doesn't watch as Dr. Whale does his thing, after which the coffin is returned, the ground above it restored as though it was never touched; and then she returns home to spend the rest of the night throwing up... where Killian finds her and leaps to the conclusion that she's pregnant.
She doesn't deny the possibility.
A week later, Emma has a "prenatal" appointment and she stares up at the fiberboard ceiling, counting the holes, the final procedure almost complete, which she can almost convince herself is just a regular pelvic exam, accept for it ending rather beginning with her being forced to lay there for an hour, waiting... and the whole having a progesterone suppository shoved up her hoo-ha.
When Whale finally lets her up, it's with another set of needles and vials for self-injection and an appointment scheduled for two weeks to do a pregnancy test.
And so she goes home, lies to Killian that she's pregnant, and is relieved that the pelvic exam allows at least some truth in avoiding the activity that he considers, along with alcohol, the only real form of celebration.
That night, she refuses to feel guilty and holds her cheap convenience store keychain tight, praying despite a lack of real faith, that something good can come out of being with the man she chose instead of the one she was meant to be with.
AN: How the hell did Regina put that preservation spell on Daniel's body years before she met Jefferson and Frankenstein? In that flashback, she was utterly shocked when she was able to actually do magic, something she'd actively rejected up to that point. Is it a massive plothole or do you just pour a potion or pixie dust on a corpse to keep it minty fresh and resurrectable for decades?