Author's Note: Here, have some Charming Family angst & hurt/comfort, because the feels hit me hard. (Honestly, I have no idea where this came from other than a random feels attack.) This was supposed to be a oneshot but as I wrote, it became too big to be a oneshot so it's now a two-shot. ;) Killian and Henry both make appearances in the second part. Title taken from Daughtry's "Life After You." Feedback makes my little day! Enjoy. :)

It had already been one of those days.

Emma Swan's morning had started with her awakening less than five minutes before she was supposed to be at the station. She'd called her dad to let him know that she was running late and, for reasons unclear to Emma, he must have called Snow, who in turn called her ten minutes after she plopped down at her desk to give her quite the teasing. (Which was funny, don't get her wrong, but there were only so many times she could listen to her mom joke about certain late-night activities with a certain pirate before her cheeks turned bright red.) An hour after that, she'd knocked over her cocoa, spilling it all over the paperwork she'd been filling out.

When she'd had to clear a jam in the printer three separate times, David had finally taken pity on her and offered to buy her lunch. Since she'd needed a break, Emma offered to go to Granny's to pick it up. In keeping with the spirit of the day, however, there was a line literally out the door when Emma arrived. In what ended up being the first thing to go right all day, she called the takeout order in while she was in line and was able to pick it up when she got inside.

Now she was standing in front of the door of the station, still vaguely annoyed and somewhat perplexed. A tray of drinks occupied one hand and the bags of food were in the other. If only she had a third hand so she could actually open the damn door.

Heaving a sigh, she shifted the bags to the crook of the arm holding the drink tray and said a silent prayer that she wouldn't drop anything. In the miracle of the ages, she managed to get into the building without spilling a single thing but man oh man did Storybrooke have a cranky sheriff on its hands.

She was so annoyed that she didn't even register the fact that her mom's station wagon was parked in one of the visitors' spots. It was a surprise to her, then, when just as she was about to round the corner into the bullpen, she heard her mom say, "Didn't they come out great?"

Despite the rumbling in Emma's stomach telling her to eat that delicious-smelling food in her hands now, please and thank you, she halted in her tracks. Didn't what come out great?

Oh. Oh shit. Now she remembered exactly what her mom was talking about.

A couple days ago, David had arranged to come into work late because he and Snow had made an appointment to get professional pictures of Neal done now that he was six months old. Snow must have picked the prints up this morning.

A sudden pang of sadness in Emma's chest made her breath catch in her throat.

She didn't begrudge her parents any of this time or any of these baby activities with Neal. She honestly didn't. Of course they should have the opportunity to do all the little parental things with their baby and of course Neal should get to do all the little baby things with his parents. But sometimes it royally sucked watching her baby brother get all the family opportunities she never did.

The opportunities that were stolen from her.

She didn't feel jealous, exactly. More like wistful. All those little things parents did with their children, all those little bonding activities … those chapters were over for her. Those chapters were over for her parents with her. So yeah, it was hard sometimes to watch Neal get the chance to do all the things she never would. It was hard to watch her parents reveling in the chance to get to do all the things with Neal that they didn't get to do with her.

And now here she was, standing stock-still in the corridor of the station, not meaning to eavesdrop on her parents' conversation but doing so anyway. "They came out wonderful," David agreed, his tone tender. Despite the pain Emma was feeling at the entire situation, she smiled at the pure love in her father's voice. He was such a good dad. "I think this is the one we should hang on the wall."

"I think so, too." Her mom let out a soft sigh. "I just wish we had pictures like this of Emma. We have two babies, Charming. It's not fair that we can only put up baby pictures of one of them. We … we don't even know what she looked like at this age."

Emma felt tears pricking the backs of her eyes. It wasn't fair, was it? It wasn't fair at all.

"I wish we had pictures of her, too," David said softly. "She's our baby, too, Snow. We should have known her."

They should have. They should have known her and she should have known them. She should have grown up with them, with her loving parents who wanted nothing more than to take care of her and love her and make sure she grew up happy and healthy. They should have gotten to raise their little girl. They should have had each other but they didn't.

They didn't. And it sucked.

The tears in her eyes were on the verge of escaping. Emma took a deep breath and blinked them back before they could fall. Then she retreated a few steps and made more noise than necessary in the hallway to warn her unsuspecting parents that she was coming.

By the time she rounded the corner, both Snow and David had managed to swallow their outward emotion, too. They smiled warmly at her in greeting, which she returned. Little Neal was nestled in the stroller beside Snow, indulging in an early afternoon nap.

Emma tried to keep the emotion out of her voice as she plunked the food and drinks down on her father's desk right on top of the paperwork he'd abandoned when Snow arrived. "Granny's was a zoo. Next time, I call Not It on getting the food."

Both of her parents chuckled, which was her intention. Still, their previous conversation weighed heavily in the air because the smile David gave her lacked the usual teasing sparkle. Instead, it was tinted with a little bit of pensive sadness. "Of course, darling daughter."

"And hello to you, too, Emma," Snow laughed. Even her teasing lilt was tinged with just a hint of sadness, though Emma probably wouldn't have picked up on it if she hadn't been eavesdropping.

"Hi, Mom." She nodded toward the photos in Snow's hand. "I take it the squirt's pictures came in?"

Snow smiled as she handed them over to her daughter. "They did indeed."

Emma slowly examined the portraits. One of the poses was the requisite baby propped up on a white-fluffy-covered baby seat picture. In the second, the squirt was looking up at the camera while doing tummy time on what looked like a picnic blanket. But Emma's favorite was the third shot, in which little Neal was sitting up, happily hugging a teddy bear, and giving the photographer a wide, gummy smile.

That had to be the one David had said they should hang on the wall.

"They're adorable," she said softly.

She meant it. They were adorable. Her baby brother was the cutest baby brother in all the realms. But there was still that pang of sadness and injustice underneath it all.

Emma handed the pictures back to her mother. Snow returned her baby girl's smile, tucked the pictures back in their protective envelope, and stole a peek at her napping baby boy. "All right," she said through a quiet sigh, "I have to get this little guy home. We'll let you two get to your lunch."

David and Emma bid them goodbye with hugs (for Snow) and gentle forehead kisses (for Neal). Proving the accuracy of his nickname, David then offered to walk Snow and little Neal to the door.

Warring emotions filled Emma as she watched them go. She was happy that her family was happy. She was happy that she had a family at all. But all the things that she'd missed, all the moments and milestones she could never reclaim filled her heart with a heavy, almost physical ache.

Learning that her parents were taking Neal for a special little portrait session had been hard enough. It was another thing entirely to actually see the fruits of that session.

Emma heaved a sigh as she grabbed her food and drink and took them to her office. She'd just opened the Styrofoam takeout box to reveal her grilled cheese sandwich and onion rings when David rapped his knuckles on the doorjamb. "Are you all right?" he asked when she looked up.

"Yeah." She shrugged. "Why wouldn't I be?"

They both knew why she wouldn't be but thankfully David didn't press her on it. He simply gave her a nod and returned to his desk.

The minutes ticked by. Emma picked at her food as her brain made its way down the mental rabbit hole she'd been hoping to avoid.

The only pictures she had of herself as a baby were the grainy photos printed in the newspaper articles about her first few weeks of life. Once she was remanded to the foster system, she was no longer a news story and so the articles stopped. She was pretty sure the Swans had taken pictures of her during her baby- and toddlerhood. A sneaked peek at her file when she was about eight had revealed a few of pictures of a smiling baby, including one of her face covered in tomato sauce from the first time she'd tried to feed herself spaghetti. None of those pictures had ever made their way to her, though. They were probably languishing somewhere in some state's child services file archive.

The earliest picture she had on actual photographic paper was a candid of her little six-year-old self with an eight-year-old boy named Matthew. They'd posed with their arms around each other's shoulders and they were grinning at the camera. She remembered being happy in that foster home, mostly due to Matthew. The director of the group home was nice, too, but Matthew had made that place special. The two-year gap in their ages hadn't mattered to him at all and they'd quickly become best friends.

Then Matthew had gotten placed and everything had fallen apart.

The next picture in Emma's collection was taken two or three foster homes later, and the instability, along with the loss of Matthew, had already started taking their toll. There was no grinning smile in this one, just a little girl with sadness in her eyes. A little girl who'd already begun to lose hope. She kept that one in the file she'd made of her research into her own history.

A few of her school pictures had managed to make their way to her. They were taken every year, of course, but not every foster family had purchased the packages.

Her favorites were the the few candids she'd managed to save, though. Sometimes the kids were given a couple of rolls of film to waste or disposable cameras to play with so they all took nonsense pictures of each other. One of her favorites was of her at nine years old, sitting backwards at an indoor picnic table next to a twelve-year-old named Christine. They were smiling at the camera and, unbeknownst to each other at the time, giving each other bunny ears.

So she did have some pictures of her early years but barely enough for a cheap drugstore photo album. Not a lot to show for the twenty-eight years prior to her arrival in Storybrooke. The way she moved around growing up and living on the streets as a teenager, though, she was lucky she was able to save what little she did.

Emma had traveled so far down her little rabbit hole that she didn't notice David had once again stepped up to her office door. His clearing of his throat startled her back to the present. She jumped and blinked up at him. "Sorry, were you calling me?"

He smiled gently at her. "I just wanted to remind you that it's perfectly all right if you're not all right. Things like getting Neal's pictures done are hard for us because it makes us more keenly aware of what we missed with you. I can only imagine how hard those things must be for you."

The telltale tickle in the back of Emma's throat told her that, if left unchecked, tears were imminent. "I'm fine," she insisted, even though it was plain as day that she wasn't.

Again, he didn't argue with her. He simply nodded with another smile, leaving the proverbial door open for conversation should she change her mind, and retreated to his desk in the bullpen.

A heavy sigh escaped Emma's lips. Stewing over everything hadn't helped in the slightest. Now she was upset and to top it all off, her onion rings had gone cold.

She could fix the onion rings, at least. With a wave of her hand, she reheated the food with her magic.

Unfortunately, the pain and hurt in her family wouldn't be so easy to fix. A glance out the office door at her dad proved that he was indeed upset. He was starting despondently down at his own food and his mind appeared to be miles elsewhere.

Emma's heart clenched yet again. God, this was so damn unfair. She should have had loving, caring parents and her loving, caring parents should have known their little girl.

Her eyes traveled to the locked cabinet where she kept her bankers box. Where she kept her childhood.

Maybe … maybe it was time to let her parents in. Maybe it was time to let them see what little of her childhood she'd managed to save.

Maybe it was time to let them know the little girl they so desperately wanted to know. Because maybe the little girl wanted them to know her, too.