"You ready?"
"No, but go ahead".
Emma grits her teeth and Neal switches on the tattoo gun. It doesn't hurt nearly as bad as the needle version, but she'd been pretty drunk them too. Neal had flat out refused to let her drink to prepare for this one, as he put it "Drunk people won't stop moving and bleed way more".
So she grins and bears it. But as the lines emerge, the little flower becoming just one in a field on a forest floor that comes to life on her arm, it starts to feel worth it.
One of the benefits to being on campus all the time is that there's always someone willing to babysit for cheap. Worries about both of them going to school at night while working melt away when Emma meets her classmates and realizes how desperate a pre-pre law student who's class load is too high to work is for a few extra dollars.
Neal takes well to watercolors and oils. He obviously can't go for anything degree-seeking, but he insists that his skill is improving, and the stuff he does and hangs around the apartment become almost professional looking.
Emma was never made to be a student, but she pushes her way through the criminal law and justice systems classes required. After she calls Susan to ask her for her contact name, and with luck and persistence, manages to clinch a short internship that the law dictates.
She mails in the application for her private investigator's license the day Henry starts kindergarten. When it comes in the mail, the card reads Emma Cassidy.
Henry, it turns out, loves school. He comes home each day with new stories. His teacher compliments him on his enthusiasm and friendliness. At the end of the first week, he comes home with an armload of library books and an insistence that he already found a best friend and can he please go over to her house next week?
Her name is Tiana, and she lives with her mother in the apartment above her mother's tailor shop. Her family is from New Orleans, and her father is away in the military. The shop is only a few blocks from the apartment that they rent now that they can afford something with two actual bedrooms.
Emma watches them play a little bit jealously. Tiana's a smart and brave little girl. They're both fond of make believe and adventure stories. Emma had never, really, had a best friend. And the old fairy tales had never been any kind of comfort to her.
Neal loves watching them, because he insists that its amazing that kids play pretty much exactly the way the ones he knew when he was a child did.
"The stories have changed, and they have more toys, but we always pretended we were great people who saw amazing lands and magic. The only difference was we knew it had some amount of reality for us, even if we might never get to live it".
More importantly, it means Henry has a place to go when Neal's at work and Emma has to leave the city.
Emma bullies her way into becoming a partner of established Tallahassee PI Victoria Peretsky. There would be no way for her to afford her own office space as a newbie, and she has no desire to work for a large corporate firm.
Emma does her research. Peretsky is a borderline middle-aged ex-cop who still wears shoulder pads and chain smokes. She specializes in philandering spouses and has a reputation as a bit of a misanthrope. And also one for a long waiting time.
So one day, Emma dresses in her business best (covering her, now two complete half-sleeve tattoos), and delivers this proposition;
"Give me your runaways, give me missing adults. We'll split bail jumpers- they're easy money. I'll lighten your case load and won't undercut what you're known for".
And as much as Peretsky is known for "catching that cheating bastard", Emma becomes known for "finding your drugged out sister who ran away".
It breaks her heart sometimes. Pretty much everyone of the young women she finds feel like dark mirrors of what she could have turned out like. Many refuse to return, some from shame, or guilt, others stubbornness. The kids are worse. She takes more than a few photographs for battered fourteen year olds and gives them instruction on how to approach the police before leaving them back home. Sometimes she wonders if anyone would have ever cared enough to get someone to find her when she was that age, but when she sees some of the kids, she guesses that that might not be a good judge of love.
But she's good at it, it turns out. She has extremely good intuition, and is good enough at telling when people are lying that Henry insists that it must be a super power.
Even when they're doing fairly well, some habits never change.
After a field trip at the end of second grade to see a play, Henry insists that he wants to be an actor.
A few weeks later, Neal tells her at home that he let Henry sign up for the local children's theater's camp that summer. Emma almost cries when she sees the price.
"Emma, it's fine. The rent's paid, the utilities are paid. We have groceries. Nothing is broken, or about to break, we even have some savings. Henry deserves to get to do the same things other kids do".
Emma wipes her face and admits "I guess it's kind of hard to stop thinking like that when you've never had money before".
"Why do you think I still buy cereal in giant plastic bags with cartoon penguins on it?"
But Henry loves it, and they promise to come at the end of the summer for the show the camp is putting on. It's Peter Pan that year, which makes Neal unexpectedly grouchy.
"Please don't try to convince me Peter Pan is real".
"He is. Total asshole".
So Emma just rolls her eyes and goes back to helping Henry find his prop sword.
A few things happen in the last year and a half before they end up leaving Tallahassee.
First off, Neal is approached by a former customer named Mark Rutherford. Turns out he's an author, who is seeking an illustrator for a series of books he was working on and had been impressed with the work Neal had hanging in the shop.
"Do I even want to know what you did on him?"
"Pretty sure it was his girlfriend's name"
"Is it still there?"
"He had someone else fill in the heart".
"Sounds like a real forward thinker".
But Mark insists that he'll split the royalties with him, and keep his name off the books.
"Are you going to do it?"
"Are you kidding? This is pretty much all I've ever wanted to do, and if it means that tattooing gang symbols on skinheads can become a side gig than all the better".
The first book in the series is a retelling of the Little Mermaid set in the Caribbean. They end up taking a lot more day trips to the beach for "inspiration".
"Not going to claim you already know how everything should look cause you've been there?"
"Nah, our village was close to a trade harbor, but it was rocky, no real beach, and no sea creatures that I knew of".
After Emma's twenty-fifth birthday the mysterious letters start coming again.
Instead of postcards, this time they're photographs.
A clock tower, a line of houses, shops on a street.
And one of a sign, reading "Storybrooke Maine".
Emma rubs her eyes in frustration. "What are we going to do?"
"I guess if we want them to stop, next year, we go".
"Neal, that's crazy. The only evidence we have of this so called "curse" is the rambling of some guy neither of us know, and some things you remember from growing up! Even if you're right, and magic is real, how does this August guy know about it? How does he know anything about us?"
"What does it matter Emma? What harm could finding out do? Even if August is crazy, we still get a vacation in a little town in Maine. And if we don't we'll always wonder what could have happened".
Asshole's got her with that one. Emma does hate dangling threads.
"Besides, we've got a whole year to think about it."
The last thing that happens is unbeknownst to both Neal and Emma.
One Saturday in October, when Neal is off running some errand, and Emma is cleaning their closets out, she asks Henry to run down to the mailboxes to see if they got anything that day.
Henry bounces down the stairs. His birthday was on Tuesday, and he was wondering if he could convince his mom to let him have his party arcade after school like a classmate had had earlier that year.
This was what he was thinking of when he opened their mailbox and found a large package.
A large package addressed to HIM.
He looked at the address again. There it was, "Henry Cassidy-Swan, apt 5c". The name was a tip off- all his school forms read that, even though Emma had just been using Cassidy for a few years. Maybe it was from some relative he had never heard of? Other kids at school got presents in the mail from aunts and uncles and other people they never saw. Just because his parents didn't mention them, they had to have them too right?
He walked back up to the apartment, leaving the other pieces of mail on the kitchen counter.
He went in his room and shut the door before tearing off the paper.
It's a book, a large, leather bound book, unlike any he'd ever seen before.
At that moment, Emma knocks on his door, "Henry? What are you doing?"
"Playing Mom! Mail's on the counter!"
"Remember, you have to clean under your bed today, or you don't get your allowance this week!"
"I remember, I'll do later, I promise".
When she leaves, Henry runs his fingers over the gold embossed cover, that reads "Once Upon a Time".
"Cool" he muses, flipping it open to start reading.