CHAPTER THREE
THE BIRTH
Her daughter is born in the very same bed that saw her brought into the world. Emma screams and curses and demands to the answer of no one why she has to be stuck in this medieval nightmare world instead of the home she desperately misses but can never bring herself to tell her parents.
She knows Dr. Whale feels the same, trapped in yet another world not his own, but more backwards than even the one he was born into. He is her coconspirator in this and the need of some medical supplies to an Ogre-caused refugee camp several kingdoms away sent Killian aboard the Jolly Roger, and though the ship is fast, it's not fast enough to make it in time when she made magically sure her mother's letter was delayed, the dove traveling far off course with an enchantment until the child was already arrived and held in her arms.
Swaddled in that big purple scarf of Neal's that with a bit of magic still smells like him, Emma has a few precious moments with his child. She couldn't bring a lot not made in this world when they "moved", but a variety of spells were used to allow Henry to come with them, and she'd tucked it and a few other things, like the dreamcatcher, into his bag. She has his cape too, from this world, that was left behind when he was "absorbed" by Rumplestiltskin - something she tries not think about - and given as a gift by Belle, the only one she thinks suspects the truth; the brainy brunet has never asked or given any indication of passing judgment.
Emma knows that the rest of her family would, and so this short time is all she will have with her daughter as she truly is - with her father's big brown eyes and a mop of unruly brown tufts. Her eyes will become blue like the sky, her hair like golden straw, her skintone a shade lighter as well - some sort of obscure magic that Lily was given by The Apprentice to alter her in such a way that she was able to stalk Emma for ten years without being recognized. And so Emma takes this time to memorize Charley's features while telling her all about the father who would have loved her so much and given her all of the encouragement and opportunities that seem to be so severely lacking in the men of this world.
Charley won't get them from Killian, that much she knows. He wants a boy, a male heir to usurp Henry's place, a legitimate son, and her tweaking the magic in her grandmother's pendant assured an inaccurate prediction. Any further attempts at a son will be thwarted by the infertility potion taken from Cora's spellbook until enough time has passed that her family gives up on the idea of her joining the herd of princess brood mares.
Zelena may have been bat-shit crazy from the womb, but she was completely right when she claimed the lot of them are delusional fake feminists buying into the patriarchal model of a woman's happiness being defined by a man and children. The sad truth of it is, that in their desperation to pretend that the Stepford Wife model is somehow healthy, they end up binding themselves to selfish losers through children they raise through a messed up combination of impossible expectations and emotional neglect that she can already see impacting upon her brother and his age-mates with personality traits that will result in yet another generation of selfish royals who think happiness magically trickles down to the peasants from their own like fairy dust... instead of championing any kind of social or economic reforms and activism.
She doesn't understand how her parents, a former shepherd and ex-bandit, can sit in their dining hall every night feasting on the finest food this land has to offer, waited on by servants hand and foot, and never seem to consider that the excess is taking away from those they once lived amongst as commoners. Killian certainly doesn't care, and for all of his outcry against an authoritarian monarch three centuries ago, he gloats over his life in the lap of luxury like a preening peacock, happy to have gotten himself a princess, and who cares about the rest when life is a competition and if you're given a bad hand to live in a mud hut, well that's just fate.
Emma really hates fate.
She hates that everything good or bad is so easily justified as fate rather than free will.
She hates the possibility of its existence even more, of being stuck in some wheel of destiny, heading toward a certain end no matter how much you fight against it.
Her little princess, her 'fuck you' to fate, cries and fusses, little hands kneading her makeshift blanket like a kitten and Emma swallows back tears at what could have been. What should have been. This child should have been conceived in a celebrated love, instead of a secret and posthumous one involving a cold hospital room and a man who is literally the originator of the term "mad scientist". Charley should have been held in her father's arms instead of a scratchy old scarf that will go back in the bottom of a box of momentos. She should grow up loved and appreciated irregardless of sex, instead of growing up to find herself wanting in the eyes of the man duped into thinking he sired a daughter he wasn't expecting.
She will be named not for a song that defined a summer of love and dreams of home, but for an alias and a fraudulent trip to a ball that destroyed an entire universe and created this version of home in which so very much has gone wrong.
It isn't fair to either of them what she's done. Neither is it fair to Henry, who'll never know that he has a full sibling; in spite of his claims otherwise, she knows her son will feel slighted on his father's behalf that she's sharing with his stepfather what he never got with either of his birth parents. Perhaps most of all, it's unfair to Neal, to whom she made a promise she has been unable to keep.
But how can there be Tallahassee without him?
AN: I have a suspicion the show will conclude with everyone back in Fairy Tale Land. Unfortunately. That place is a fucking mess with terribly backward concepts of justice and love that should be burned to the ground.