CHAPTER TEN
THE STAR CAVE
Wayland is not what Emma expects, though she's not entirely certain what she had been expecting. It's a jungle much like Neverland - or perhaps a mental construction of the island as the further she walks, the more familiar it seems.
It takes a bit to get her barrings, and then she heads for the cave... which appears as she remembers it, which she increasingly suspects is quite literal here.
The door moves aside with the same scraping sound and everything within sits just where she recalls it when she stepped inside for the first time - including the coconut that Regina had joked was a colander. She has a flint and uses it to light the candle, filling the cave with simulated starlight.
"That's mine," a voice tersely objects.
Emma almost drops the coconut star map as she drops her gaze to the teenage boy who's seemingly appeared out of thin air brandishing a memorable cutlass that Charley found in her wardrobe once, hoping to learn to use to impress her "father" but ended up cutting herself instead.
"Give it back," teenage Baelfire demands.
Emma does so, carefully, as the boy continues to view her with suspicion.
This is not what she had been expecting. But then, the Cora that Regina had summoned turned out to be the young woman from years before her birth and there's apparently speculation that Wayland is somehow connected to .séance It's some sort of waystation where the dead, or some fragment of them, are pulled by the living. It's taking that fragment and pulling the rest along and back to the land of the living that's the hard, perhaps impossible, part.
"Are you with the pirates?" Baelfire asks. "Or did Pan bring you here for one of his twisted games? Did he tell you that I'm some dangerous traitor that has to be brought in?"
"No. I'm here to help you get home," Emma replies, but that doesn't strike the cord she hopes.
Baelfire moves the sword to her throat, his eyes pain-filled and terrified, like a cornered animal, even though she's the one with her back to the wall.
"I won't fall for such tricks again. He sent Rufio to pretend to be my friend. I may have wanted a friend, but I certainly don't want a mother after the heartless pirate's whore mine turned out to be."
The statement is as absurd as it is jarring, and it reveals so much about Neal. It makes Emma's heart ache for Baelfire and burn with guilt for essentially becoming the same pirate's whore - and that Neal had to watch as he lost her to a man whose selfish action trapped him in this place for centuries... She is a horrible person, Emma knows this, but she isn't doing this for herself. She's doing it for Charley, for Henry, for Neal... for Baelfire who'd looked up at these stars every night dreaming of a family and home.
"I'm not working for Pan," Emma insists. "I came here for my daughter. My friend is getting her to our ship. She'd heard about you, that you were held prisoner here."
It's a half truth, and she thinks that he reads the partial lie, but he lowers his sword a bit and tells her, "You've got two minutes."
AN: Yeah, Emma, you'd better feel sorry, you pirate whore!