CHAPTER SIX

THE WARRIOR

It's been a week and Charley remains in a comatose state.

Emma has barely spoken to her parents, not since they demanded the story of her "affair" and seem to have found the lack of an actual sexual liaison even more disquieting. Straying during some moment of strife, of tension in her marriage, that was more excusable than being unable to let go of grief, of a lost love - even though her mother had split her own heart to avoid such a fate.

But she's used to their hypocrisy by now.

Henry won't talk to her at all. They sit with Charley in shifts, and he has so far said nothing each time he arrives to relieve her, though at least the angry glares from the first week have subsided into something between ambivalence and apathy of her presence. She understands that she robbed him of something, a deeper connection to his sister that he deserved, and that there is nothing she can say to make it right.

Regina, at least, brings her food - food that she rarely touches - while making a snarky comment. It's her way of trying to show sympathy, Emma understands, because she otherwise doesn't really know how given the parents she had. Emma doesn't have the strength to point out Regina's hypocrisy regarding romance and how her marriage is at least as big of a shallow sham as her own was.

Killian is gone.

When she'd returned to their bedroom, many hours after Charley's surgery, she'd found all of his possessions gone and a sheet of parchment stamped by some arch bishop that declared their marriage annulled. There was no official legal divorce in this world, not according to laws that were never altered to reflect life in Storybrooke, but annulments were allowed in cases of fraud.

Somehow the man who'd left her and her mother in a dungeon to starve to death had, legally speaking, become the victim of their tragic love story.

But the innocent child who looked as though she was under the spell of a sleeping curse was the real victim.

At the creaking of the door, Emma turns expecting to find Henry, but instead it's someone she has not seen in a very long time.

"I heard about your daughter's accident," Mulan speaks, her posture as rigid and proper as always even as she strides into the room.

"Then you've probably also heard about the rather abrupt end of my marriage," replies Emma with a sigh, amending, "You met Neal...?" She thinks that he had mentioned it, briefly, in Neverland, though she isn't certain.

"I did. We only knew one another for a few days, but it was clear that he loved you and your son deeply, that he wanted more than anything to find you and tell you much you meant to him. That was his biggest regret after leaving you," she recalls, "that he hid his true feelings for you until it was too late. He wanted very much to earn your forgiveness for his mistakes.

"I heard from Belle what happened upon their return here," she amends, "and I regret that I had left Robin's Merry Men to return to Shangri-La, or perhaps things would have been different."

"Aurora mentioned that you'd gone with Robin and his men," Emma tells her, eager to get off the topic of Neal, even though she was the one to ask. It pains her to hear from yet someone else how much he wanted to be a family and make up for leaving her. "I was surprised to hear that no one knew where you'd gone, so soon after you joined them."

Mulan grimaces slightly, a hand on the hilt of her sword as she speaks, "Robin Hood was not the honorable man he presented himself as when we met. While I hesitate to speak poorly of those within your family, I do not think he has a true understanding of 'honor'. It is just a word he and his men throw around that signifies nothing, and in a land that I have observed has so very little honor to go around, he has easily deceived those he claims to help - and himself. And in doing so assured that a woman who has killed many with impunity will never be held accountable. That is not honor. That is just another man, like so many men who call themselves great warriors, being lead around by the sword between his legs... or in his case, I suppose, arrow."

"So, what you're saying," Emma quips, too weary to put much sarcasm in it, "is that you don't care for Robin."

"As an acquaintance, I do not," says Mulan, "but as the 'soulmate' for a mass murderer, I cannot say that I have much objection. Any man willing to look past the murder of his wife to lay with her killer twice over deserves whatever misfortune he gets. I only feel sorry for the child produced by that incestuous threesome."

The next generation's probable rampaging magical lunatic, Emma thinks silently, as all evidence points to Zelena's child inheriting the same brand of certifiably crazy magic that was just slightly less insane in her mother and sister. It won't surprise Emma if, in ten to twenty years, the creepy little redheaded Children of the Corn reject and her birth mother plot to murder her father and adoptive mother/aunt... or perhaps just recast Zelena's time spell the next time some true love baby is born.

"I didn't just come here to offer my sympathizes," Mulan imparts and Emma raises a brow.

"I'm surprised you came even for that. If you think Robin is such a terrible person... I married a man complicit in the murder of hundreds of people who took Aurora's heart and left us for dead."

"We cannot help those we love," the warrior replies with guarded look, sadness in her eyes. "I too once loved someone who had not changed as I wanted to believe. And trusted another as a comrade-in-arms who did not fight for the equality I foolishly hoped would come of our friendship."

Emma doesn't have to ask of whom Mulan speaks. Though she had never known Philip until Storybrooke, the Aurora she came to know and respect has been nowhere to be found, it would seem, since she was reunited with her "true love". It had been easier to dismiss Killian having taken and used Sleeping Beauty's heart when she arrived in Storybrooke ten times as spoiled, cynical, and intolerant as she had been when they'd met. Philip had been no different, and learning that the pair had lied through their teeth to everyone about Zelena to save their own asses had forever tainted any respect Emma might have had for them. The couple seemed only to bring out each other's worse qualities, yet another example of true love being based on belief rather than actually exemplifying particular qualities and virtues.

This world, Emma thinks with a weary sigh, is such a goddamned mess.

"There's a lot I believed about my family - or wanted to believe - that's resulted in disappointment," admits Emma. "But I've disappointed them in turn. I rejected true love and deluded myself into thinking I could replace it with someone I chose simply because he would never see the damaged, imperfect failure that I am and leave. Which, of course, he did. And now I have parents who are disgusted by me, a son who can't even look at me, and a daughter who's dying, who'll meet her father in whatever comes after this life instead of in this one."

Mulan looks at Charley, regarding her for a long moment before proposing, "Perhaps there is a way to have both."

Emma's head snaps up. "What do you mean?"

"You know Aurora and I retrieved Philip's soul. There are different levels to the netherworld," she explains, "and though the living cannot pass into the true after life, there are legends of those who have been to a place called Wayland..."

AN: It was never explained why Mulan left the Merry Men in what amounts to about a week between her arriving at their camp and Robin and Company bumping into Regina and her dumbshit "wingman" stepdaughter. I can only imagine that Mulan soon learned Robin was about as honorable as Hook and heartbroken and dismayed returned to "Magical China" which is a nonsensical name for a place, so I went with Shangri-La.