Bluebirds twittered joyously in a halo above Emma's head. She sat on a bed made with a vibrant purple comforter in a tiny room which had two large holes cut out for windows—one facing north, the other south—but no panes. The natural air sifted through, past the thin, pale pink curtain on the south side and lack of curtain on the north. The floor was made of dirt and had several leaves lying around. If Emma hadn't raked a couple of days ago, there'd still be a fine pile of leaves to wade through to get anywhere in the room.
Atop Emma's head sat a tiara construed of yellow gold. They'd found the tiara while hunting in a junkyard—or, as Neal liked to call them, a treasure chest. Emma's hair was loose below it, but bright yellow flowers infiltrated her hair. Her cheeks were rosy, and she wore a figure-hugging long-sleeved pale pink gown with yellow gold embroidery. On her feet were crimson glass slippers.
She was gazing lovingly into Neal Cassidy's eyes. He smiled down at her, but his eyes were stressed, and his smile wasn't as brilliant as usual. Fear stabbed her chest in a dagger.
"You do love me, don't you?"
Sighing, moving his neck to the side then downward, Neal dropped down to the bed, took Emma's hands in his. He was clad in a suit and tie but looked weird and out of place in it. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course I love you. There was this…" He moved his hand in a claw shape over his head then dropped it awkwardly on his knee. "Connection between us from the first minute. Electricity…look, I didn't fall in love with you at first sight, but I am not the type to hit on women because they're…women. I hit on you because I liked you. Because of the connection. And I fell in love with you…fast and easy. Because of the chemistry between us.
"But," he cautioned, "sometimes…sometimes things aren't supposed to work out. I want to be with you…very much. But the world is against us being together."
"Two common thieves," she started to argue. "That's crazy!"
"No…listen, Emma. A bird named Pinocchio came…" Neal rubbed the back of his head and stretched his lips out with disgust. Like "how can I have made such a stupid error"? "And he told me…you're the lost princess. The one that was kidnapped from Charming and Snow years ago."
"Oh, that's nonsense," sniped Emma. "Pinocchio? What, is he a woodcutter's son?"
"Toymaker."
"Same difference!" Emma got a bow and arrow and scared the bluebirds away from her. Although she normally welcomed the twitters, in this moment, she did not want them around. They made the horrible thing Neal was telling her seem truer. "He must've read that fictional novel, Anastasia, and actually…got his head full of fluffy fantasies. But what Pinocchio thinks is not true. I am not her daughter. I'm an orphan; I grew up an orphan." Seeing the look on his face, the way he turned to hide it and slide his hand down his mouth, gripping his chin in his fist, made her grab him from behind and try to reason with him.
"Look, if I was…kidnapped…" the word made her feel immensely conceited, so she crossed her eyes when saying it, "instead of abandoned or left alone to two dead parents, where the hell was my kidnapper? I mean, I know someone watched me until I became a toddler. An orphanage lady. And I sassed her when I was two, so she hit me in the mouth, and I scratched her in the eye then took off running and never returned. She wasn't my mama, nor did she kidnap me. She told me…now, bear in mind, I was young so I'm not sure I remember right…but I remember her saying someone left me on the doorstep of the orphanage. Could've been my grandma or a neighbor, for all I know. So my parents might have died first. But I'd bet anything my mother abandoned me.
"And if someone had kidnapped me, why didn't she hold me for ransom?"
Neal couldn't answer her hard question, so he merely toyed with proof of what his gut told him. "Those bluebirds like you. And they love Queen Snow. What do you think?"
"You are not listening to me! I am not her daughter!" Emma fumed. A purple storm cloud appeared and hovered above her head. She shooed it out the square cutout that didn't have a curtain right as it began raining in the room. Droplets of rain splattered on its way out, and bolts of lightning hit her dresser and struck the square cutout cracked down to the dirt floor.
"See? Only bad people have magic." Reaching for Neal's hand pleadingly, she pressed it against her chin. "You and I? We're villains. The desperate souls. The bandits who rob people—partly to survive, partly for fun. I'm not a princess; I'm a witch. Don't get me confused."
Running his hand through her hair, he pressed his nose against hers. Though his eyes glowed with love, his lack of a mischievous grin was disconcerting. Emma swallowed hard.
"You can be both. Anyway, look, when I was a teen, I met this sweet girl named Wendy…she took me in. In turn, I saved her brothers from being seized by Peter Pan. I lived there for a couple hundred years then escaped. Met you when I was eighteen in body and you were seventeen…well…" Neal rubbed the side of his face, "One of her offspring is the right age for me. Pinocchio introduced me to her, and she reminds me so much of Wendy. I love you, Emma, I do, but I think it's best for both of us if I marry her and let you go. She's a fugitive. That's more the kind of girl I can deal with than a…" He shook his head bewilderedly. "How did I fall in love with a princess?"
"I am not a princess! And what is wrong with you, Neal? Marrying a woman when you love another? Is that fair to her?"
Neal withdrew. Standing off the bed, he leaned up against the wall, a rangy cat looking down at a rascal of a kitten who would've gotten torn up by a Doberman if not for him. Then clearly had no idea how lucky it was to be alive. "Emma, marrying for love is a poor person's fantasy. You're rich, you'll have different motives for marrying.
"And I…I do want to marry you, Emma." He sounded very sad. "More than anything. But Pinocchio…" Neal squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his voice ever-so-slightly, "he talked some sense into me. I kept trying to argue with him, but he said…oh, honey. Look, Wendy's whatever-she-is is thirty-five and never had kids. She's not in love with me but likes me enough. We talked. She would like to have a husband partner to go on rebel adventures together with. That's me, Emma." He clasped his hand over his chest. "That's the kind of man I am…I'll never be a prince."
Emma couldn't answer him. Her throat felt very tight. Seconds later, she felt tears dribbling down her cheeks. She hastened to turn away. Not wanting him to see her reaction to his very real decision.
Emma was sinking in a pit of despair. The one person who made her feel she belonged in the world…like she no longer had to fend for herself…the person who felt more like family than anyone else had…was going to abandon her because of a man who'd been turned human from a puppet and never even experienced infancy.
The Blue Fairy was going to get an angry letter. A boxed ear. A package carried by bluebirds with horse dung in it.
Then she said cold words she knew she could never take back.
With her back to Neal Cassidy, she lied, "I don't love you. I don't care about you at all. I've been pretending all this time."
"Emma…I know you're hurting…but the way your eyes always sparkled at the sight of me—"
"Fake!" she spat bitterly. She took a deep breath through her nostrils, forcing herself to sound monotonous. "Actually, I've been in love with Pinocchio all along."
"You can't possibly mean what you're saying."
Strongly, she made herself turn to face Neal. Her face held firm. "Oh, but I do. I knew he'd never love me or treat me right, so I've been pretending I love you. And I found out yesterday I'm pregnant. The baby is his."
Neal tried not to let his face show emotion, but the way he smashed his head back into the wall, eyes squeezed shut with horror, and lips formed a grotesque angle, Emma knew she'd hit him where it hurt.
She felt no satisfaction for hurting him. Only cold, clammy misery. But her pride could not handle Neal Cassidy leaving her while knowing she cared so deeply for him.
Cheerfully, while pretending tomorrow would be the day she married Neal, Emma marveled, "Now go find your future wife and marry her. Love her and forget all about me. I don't love you, so thinking on me fondly would be a sheer waste of your time."
"Are you really pregnant? Is it Pinocchio's?"
"It's true," she said, answering only the first question so he would not hear the tinge of a lie. "It's all true."
His shoulders were shaking when he started to slump out of the room.
"It's why he wants me to believe I'm the princess. He wants to use me. He'll never love me, so don't you dare tell him I'm having his baby. You know he'll only lie to it until his nose falls off because it got so long it rubbed against a chainsaw."
Shaking his head and muttering angrily to himself, Neal left the home where she and he had hunkered down in when they found it abandoned.
When Emma was sure he was good and gone, she burst into loud, heartbroken sobs.
As her tears bubbled out of her, she slumped her knees off the bed and onto the floor. A leaf was under her shin. She rested her head on the purple comforter and cried past when her head throbbed and begged for mercy.
She only stopped when one of the tears touched the dirt floor then blossomed into a bubble with a tiny figure inside. As the bubble flew upward, both bubble and figure grew larger and larger.
When the bubbled popped, it was as large as one of her forefingers was long. It popped parallel to her eye and revealed a fairy inside. The fairy became Emma's size, if not slightly taller. Dressed in black with horns and a mint green complexion. Fire-red lips.
At her side appeared a translucent unicorn with a pastel yellow mane and tail and pastel blue hooves. The unicorn nickered and rose on its hind legs, doing a fancy arch with its front legs before returning them to the ground.
"Princess in distress, check. What do you need, kid?"
"I'm not a princess."
Maleficent winked mischievously. "Right. Well, doll, I'm only here on community service. My ride said if I don't patch things up for a devastated princess, I'm going to the gallows. And unfortunately, she means business. I'll tell you, I've had some rather unladylike ideas on how to deal with her, but you know, they'll only land me in hotter water once I'm caught, so duty calls." Rubbing her mint-green hands together, she inquired, "What's your dream, dearie? What will turn that frown upside-down and vanquish your tears?"
Emma's pride was still stabbing her, so she said what she desired most at the moment. "I wish Baelfire, son of Rumplestiltskin and Milah, never existed."
"Alright. One soul-destroying wish coming true!" Maleficent touched her unicorn's horn then waved her fairy wand. Bright, pale colors of light arches flowed in half circles from the ground nearly to the roof of the room before bursting apart in the center.
After the light arches stopped stemming from the floor, Maleficent uttered cheerfully, "Alright, Baelfire no longer exists, which means Rumplestiltskin died in the Ogre Wars because he went to the battle at the front. He didn't maim himself to get out of it because he wasn't desperate to come home and 'keep his son from being fatherless'. Milah got the letter he died in war. She was happy to hear that since she's kinda a bitch—you never met her, you wouldn't know, but boy was she a nasty thing—and she went off to be a pirate queen and never had kids because she didn't want them.
"Which is all fine and dandy, but don't marry a man who thinks you love him, sheesh! Anyway, so Rumple didn't die a coward. And, well…Zoso had to con some other poor sap into stabbing him to death. I mean, he really didn't want to live, poor guy. So we have a new Dark One."
"Who?"
Maleficent grew still, testing the new history leaking into her brain. Then she went, "That's funny…no, that can't possibly…" she dropped her wand, her eyes widening. "No, wait! This is impossible!"
"What?" Emma was on the verge of becoming grouchy with the fear pressing against her chest. Maleficent was scaring her, and her lack of ripping the Band-Aid off was making Emma feel very much in the dark searching for an outhouse on property that had poisonous snakes she could step on with bare feet at any minute. "Tell me, burn you!"
Maleficent stretched out her lips in disgust, folding her arms over her chest. "Two Dark Ones after Zoso, and now we have…Blue."
Emma sank to the floor. "Oh no. All this because I didn't want Baelfire to hurt my heart anymore?"
"Um…you probably should've vanquished Pinocchio instead." Maleficent splayed her hands. "But what do I know? I wonder," she chewed her bottom lip, "if it might be possible Blue knew I was going to…"
"Hmm?"
"She said some…very cryptic things a few days ago. About a new, better future." Maleficent shivered. "But for some reason…I'm more scared of her being attached to the dagger than that Rumple fellow. Maybe because she pretends she's such a saint who never lies, yet I've caught her lying…I mean, if you used your superpower on her nonstop, you'd see it too. But she's like the fabled Aes Sedai of the Black Ajah, in which she has to pretend she is bound to the no-lying oath on the Rod, so usually the truth she speaks isn't the truth you think it is but it's still true if you get under the riddles…but she has flat-out lied in front of me. Even though she claims she never lies."
Emma couldn't follow the ramblings, so all she said was, "Okay." Wracking her brain, she asked, "Can I fix this? By wishing Pinocchio out of existence?"
Clucking her tongue sorrowfully, Maleficent asserted, "No, because you can't mean it with all your heart. You aren't as upset over what Pinocchio did as you are over what Baelfire did. Because at the end of the day, Baelfire did what he thought was right, and you're in love with him, not Pinocchio.
"Besides that," she continued, turning away and pacing around her unicorn, "Wishing him out of existence won't solve anything because it can't bring Baelfire back. He's gone. Forever. No wish can change that."
Emma felt stirrings of grief. She hadn't honestly considered there wouldn't be a loophole waiting to undo her erasure of Neal Cassidy when she was healed enough to bring him back to life.
Tossing her hair back, Emma wondered with a trembling bottom lip, "There's nothing I can do?"
Maleficent hedged then made her unicorn poise his horn at the wall facing west. When she stroked him behind his left ear, his right ear began to twitch, and a bright blue cone of magic burst from his horn until a dark red spinning wheel stood against the wall, making the small room feel smaller.
Emma stepped out of one of her crimson glass slippers to get a closer look at the massive wheel. She began to stroke it but kept her finger away from the pointy end.
Shifting from one foot to the other, Maleficent murmured, "If you get Pinocchio to prick his finger on that—preferably with a lie that will tempt him—he will die. Slowly. There will be a small hole in his wood. It will rust through when it rains. He will get smaller and smaller until—poof!—he's gone. It's not bringing Baelfire back, nah, but it's all I've got."
This idea made complete sense to Emma. She decided to go for it.
"Thank you."
"My pleasure. Now, I must go handle my daughter." Maleficent changed into a dragon then soared out the window with her unicorn galloping under her belly.
It almost amazed Emma that Maleficent had been able to go out the window in her dragon form, but she had more pressing matters weighing on her mind.
Mainly, she had to find Pinocchio and convince him to rust himself.
Reaching under the bed she'd shared with Neal, she pulled out a sorcerer's purple hat. They'd dug it up in the backyard of this place, so it still had some dirt on it.
To herself, she wondered if Neal was truly gone, why did she feel the baby in her belly? It was still there. She gnawed her bottom lip, hoping against hope the rewritten version of things hadn't changed the father. Because that thought unsettled her to her core.
Wringing out her hands, she blew some dirt off the sorcerer's hat then placed it on her head, concealing the yellow gold tiara beneath it.
The sorcerer's hat began to glow with her magic. She closed her eyes and willed Pinocchio in front of her.
When she opened her eyes, someone was staring at her. His face half an inch from hers. She whipped her head backward and barely stopped herself from smacking him in the nose.
"Pinocchio!" she gasped, leaping on the bed and crossing her legs in front of her. He glanced at her feet, one bare and the other with a crimson glass high heel, but did not comment. "I have a job for you."
"You're wearing the sorcerer's hat," he mused, cupping his chin in his hand and stroking it. Then he enlightened, "Whatever your request, please don't make me face the Dragon again. I couldn't bear it. Our last encounter…did not go the way I'd planned. A part of me died that day."
"Oh? Is he the one who fixed your nose?"
His eyes narrowed then he closed one eye before switching which one was closed and which was open. Then he sucked his bottom lip between his teeth and admitted while giving her full and unwavering eye contact, "Unfortunately, that was me. I fell from a tree onto a chainsaw. It didn't even hurt, which was…almost embarrassing. My dad made twenty toys from that long slab of wood…"
"I take it the Dragon isn't your best friend?"
Pinocchio glanced over her shoulder. "Well, yeah, I guess you could say that. He knew I didn't have ten thousand dollars—American or Hong Kong. So what did he expect? Me to steal it or cut my leg off and turn it into money, you know? When I told him I was going to return Tamara's money to her, he turned into an actual dragon and tried to burn me. He was right though. I'd spent a lifetime running, so I was made to run away from him. In fact, I nearly had it carved on my inner wrist. Made to Run. But I didn't think anyone but I would find it funny, so I decided not to go to the tattoo artist. Anyway, I think the artist would've found how the needle was working to be…completely unrealistic."
Frowning, Emma wondered, "Why didn't you do it yourself? With a carving knife?"
"Because I wanted it on the arm I use to carve," he explained with restrained patience. Trying his best not to say "duh".
Emma hoped she had him good and distracted. "Well, this isn't quite as exciting as running from a dragon, but I need you to do something a little like a tattoo…"
Scrutinizing Emma speculatively as a bluebird perched delicately on her outstretched finger, Pinocchio suggested, "You want me to get a tiger tattoo on the left side of my chest?"
"Huh? Um, no." Emma was trying to figure out how to convince him to do what she wanted. Therefore, she was slightly distracted. "I, um, had a needle I needed to use to fix a wooden shoe, but I love the shoe. So I wondered if you'd do me a favor and see if you can prick your finger…to make sure it works on wood."
"You can sew?"
"Not like a miracle-worker, but never mind that. Can you help?"
"Certainly." Eyeing her with raw pity, he murmured, "I do feel bad that my actions led to the death of your lover. He was only trying to save me, but I put myself in danger in the first place…I'll never forget the look on your face…" he closed his eyes. Two tears trickled out of his right eye. "When I told you he was dead…I can't live with the guilt, but maybe…" Whipping his eyes open, he stared at her earnestly. "If I help you a little here and there, your life won't be terrible without him."
Emma didn't know what he was talking about at first but finally deduced it must have to do with the altered history. "Thanks." She patted his elbow. "I appreciate it."
She watched him lift his finger and prick it on the dark red spinning wheel's needle.
Then he skipped out of her stolen home, none the wiser on his future fate. Convinced he had selflessly helped her.
Emma was staring at the letter she'd received by bluebirds several seconds ago. Slumped on the floor of her stolen home, her legs beside her and skirt surrounding her.
"Hola! Pinocchio has rusted over! He's dead! Cheers! —Malef"
Emma shut her eyes and pressed her fingertips against the center of her brow. Wondering if the guilt would stop eating her alive.
Remorse flickered around her. Why had killing Pinocchio sounded like a grand idea when it had surfaced from Maleficent's lips? Emma didn't blame her, but she couldn't understand. It was clearly a stupid idea. Petty revenge.
If Emma shilled out money for her future child's wedding only for him or her to tell her they didn't want to marry their partner after all, would she get angry over the lost shillings? Raging and throwing things? Plotting her child's death? Putting money over the welfare of her child?
Wrenching her head up, she decided she had to give the baby up for adoption. No matter how hard she tried to make good choices, everything around her was always a mess. She couldn't be a mother under these circumstances.
It wasn't going to be easy to give this baby up, but it was the right thing.
She now knew it was indisputably still Neal's child. The fake new history had swept up to her slowly, and she knew the man Pinocchio had accidentally killed in this altered universe had died two years before. Neal Cassidy was still the man who'd won her heart, the love of her life, as evidenced by the fact she couldn't put a face to this fake history man. Therefore, when her false memories nudged her, she saw Neal's face. In this altered universe, she hadn't been intimate with any man since, so it was impossible for the child's birth father to be anyone but Neal.
She was going to give up her last link to him, but she would do it to give the baby a better chance than a life being her child.
Because there was nothing she had done in her life that she didn't regret—
"Oof!" Emma awoke out of the cursed sleep and into her prison in the castle on the island with Lily the Dragon as her guard by springing her limbs apart and smashing her wrist on the side of the well.
Shaking, she sat up. She felt like she was a horse with her nose buried up to her eyes in pond water.
That dream her own mother had cursed her into…was the absolute worst…possible thoughts that could be leaking through her mind this very moment.
The feel of knowing both Neal and Pinocchio—oops, August B. Wayne to her…or was it August Wayne Booth?
She gagged and tossed her head, telling herself aloud, "It wasn't real, calm down. Everything's going to be okay."
She heard Lily roar and saw flames burst in the sky. Shuddering, she whispered, "Unless Isaac decides to let Lily eat me, everything will be fine."
The Blue Fairy had replaced Rumplestiltskin…she was glad she hadn't met Mother Superior in her dream…and Maleficent had been her fairy godmother? On community service?
Boy did that Isaac have a whackjob of an imagination.
She swiped her fingers down from her closed left eye to her chin, breathing jaggedly. The stubborn feeling of telling Maleficent to erase Neal from history had felt so real. As had her proud move to inform Neal she'd never loved him.
She hoped she would not dream about any of this stuff when she fell into a real sleep. Because the thought of jumbling this new form of fiction with the novel she'd been wading in for a while was too much for her to handle.
She decided to attempt to use her mind powers to encourage dreams of Hook. Because right now, Hook was the light she felt vanquishing all the dark thoughts surrounding her. He was the slit of joy wading through the fortress of remorse tearing her mind apart.
"I love you," she whispered to the memory of Hook. "I hope to be reunited with you…sometime."
