Title: Navigation
Summary: Emma would have totally sucked as an old-time navigator. All the more reason she was grateful for GPS. ... Too bad there were no GPS systems for post-curse familial relationships.
Spoilers: Set after 1x22, "A Land Without Magic
Characters: Emma, Henry, Snow, and James.
Rating/Warning: K+, mostly for language.
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. They left the character vault open during hiatus; I'm just taking advantage of it.
Author's Note: So, I'm beginning to think that Vertical Horizon's Burning the Days album is some kind of precognitive soundtrack for this show. (Or, y'know, I could just be overly obsessed, but seriously, go give "Welcome to the Bottom" a listen and tell me it doesn't give you images of a pre-Emma Storybrooke.) The inspiration for this story and the lyrics used to head it came from a VH song entitled "I Believe in You" (see what I mean?). I've set this a few days after the events of "Can You Help Me," but you don't have to have read that one to understand this one. As always, I live for feedback, so lay it on me! Hope you like!

It's always hardest when you doubt it,
It's out of sight. It hides from your voice.
But you could never live without it,
It's your birthright, this beautiful noise.

Whenever Emma Swan needed to escape for a little while, she looked for someplace high. It was a habit that started when she was about Henry's age. The house she was staying in at the time – the second one that year – was an 1880s farmhouse. A previous set of owners had added an enclosed porch onto the back of the original structure and as a result, the upstairs bathroom window opened up onto the roof of the porch.

Whenever it became too loud in the house for her, whether from the other children being rambunctious or the adults – she refused to call them her parents, foster or otherwise – yelling at each other or the kids, she would climb out the window and sit on the roof. Sometimes she brought a book with her, sometimes she brought a deck of cards, and sometimes she just propped her back against the house and watched the birds build nests or the squirrels run from tree to tree.

Once after she'd had a nightmare, she slipped out of bed, pushed up the screen in the bathroom window, and crawled out onto the roof. With no moon, the stars were exceptionally bright. A shooting star darted across the sky and Emma found herself wishing on it. Wishing that someone would come and take her away from this hellhole.

She should have been careful what she wished for. The night she climbed down from the roof onto the railing of the deck below and headed off to an illegal campfire at a state park with some teenagers was the last night she spent at that house.

The night had been fun, no doubt about that. The thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds had been amused rather than annoyed by the rough-and-tumble eleven-year-old who'd crashed their party and had even let her start the fire. The only problem was that none of them knew a thing about controlling a campfire. Soon it captured the attention of the park rangers, who in turn called the police.

The cops had rounded up all the kids and called their parents to come get them at the police station. The next day, the adults were on the phone to Emma's social worker. Sneaking out and getting in trouble with the police … she was a bad influence, they'd said. Emma had tried to tell them that it was one of the older kids in the house who had told her about the campfire in the first place but no one paid any attention to her.

Every place she was sent to after that – and there were plenty – she always looked for somewhere she could go to escape. Somewhere she could let the wind blow through her hair or stare up at the stars.

Most places, it was the roof of the building but sometimes she had to improvise. In Storybrooke, it was Mary Margaret's – er, Snow White's, and sweet Jesus, how weird was that? – fire escape.

That apartment was in no way big enough for four people. A childhood spent crammed into tiny little spaces with a bunch of other kids had left Emma with a keen appreciation for privacy. She had just started to get used to sharing living space again with one other person and now she had to share it with three: her son and two people she'd thought of as friends – or in David Nolan's case, a guy she might have been friends with if he hadn't broken her best friend's heart – but were in reality her parents. And fairy tale characters but in all honesty, the parent thing was tripping her up far more than the fairy tale thing at the moment.

For her own sanity, having someplace to escape was a freaking necessity.

Emma didn't know how long she'd been out on the fire escape tonight. Long enough for the nighttime chill to set in. She had started to shiver, which to someone less stubborn would have been an indication to get back inside.

She was so lost in thought that she didn't know anyone had climbed out onto the fire escape with her. Something draped around her shoulders from behind. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her baby blanket covering her and groaned inwardly. Expecting Snow or maybe David, she turned around almost hesitantly and found, to her surprise, her son giving her a smile. "You looked cold."

"Thanks." She met his smile with a small one of her own. "I was getting cold." Getting? she asked herself. Try already there. Like, a half an hour ago.

Even though she hadn't extended the invitation, Henry sat down next to her and followed her gaze to the stars. "You know much about them?" he asked after a long beat of silence. "The stars, I mean."

"Nope." Which was kind of sad, considering all the time she had spent looking at them. She could pick out of the most basic of constellations: one of the Dippers – she didn't know which was which – and Orion. Sometimes she thought she could see Cassiopeia but she was never quite sure.

Not that any of that had mattered to her. The night sky calmed her in a way that very few things could. Looking up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe made her problems seem so … insignificant. "I like the view here, though. I can see more stars here than I could in Boston."

"When I was little, she bought me this thing," Henry spoke up quietly. "When you turned it on in a dark room, it projected the night sky on the ceiling. Kind of like a little planetarium, I guess. After she tucked me in, sometimes we'd try to find constellations together."

Emma raised her eyebrows in surprise. This was the first time Henry had shared something nice that Regina had done for him. She remained quiet, willing him to continue the story, but he didn't. Instead, he pointed up at the sky. "There's the Big Dipper." He moved his hand slightly. "And there's Polaris, the North Star."

Emma leaned over, followed his finger, and squinted. She saw the Dipper, all right, but she couldn't find the North Star. She would have totally sucked as an old-time navigator. All the more reason she was grateful for GPS. "Where? And how do you know which Dipper is which?"

"The Big Dipper is bigger, obviously, but it's also brighter," he said, answering her second question first. "That's usually the one you see if you only see one of them. As for Polaris, see the two stars that make up the outer edge of the bowl of the Dipper there? They point right to the North Star."

She followed the line he'd indicated and grinned when she finally found the North Star, a bright point twinkling high up in the sky.

"You see it now."

It wasn't a question. When Emma turned her head to meet Henry's gaze, she saw that he was smiling, too. "Thanks for the astronomy lesson, kid."

"Don't mention it."

A comfortable silence fell between them as they both returned their attention to the sky. After a few minutes, Henry's teeth began to chatter. "You should get back inside," Emma told him.

"So should you," he shrugged.

"Inside is a little cramped for me right now." Which was a really polite way of saying that inside was goddamned claustrophobic.

"They just want to get to know you, Emma."

Emma shut her eyes for a brief moment. She most certainly did not want to have this conversation with her ten-year-old. Henry wouldn't understand; that kid was far braver on the personal relationship front than she could ever hope to be.

However, from the expectant look on her son's face, Emma knew she had to tell him something or he wouldn't let it go. "I know they want to get to know me, Henry, but you guys have to understand that I spent my whole life thinking they threw me away. The fact that I now know they didn't doesn't just erase all that."

"But this is what you wanted," he insisted. "You have parents who love you. They only gave you up to protect you–"

"They didn't do it for me."

When her son's eyes widened, Emma realized she'd spoken out loud. Damn it, damn it, damn it! "What do you mean?" Henry asked her, an inscrutable expression on his face.

"Forget it, kid."

"No."

She didn't say a word. Maybe if she refused to talk, he'd just let the conversation drop and they could go back to safe topics like the stars.

He grasped her hand and looked slightly hurt when she shook it out of his grip. "Emma, what do you mean?" he asked insistently.

Of course, he'd inherited her stubbornness. Of all the things he could have inherited from her …

She sighed, partly in exasperation but mostly in defeat. "They didn't put me in that wardrobe to save me. They put me in that wardrobe to save them. They didn't care what happened to me."

"Is that what you really think, Emma?" a hurt voice asked from behind her.

Emma whirled around to see Snow standing at the window. Another silent string of curse words ran through Emma's head. This seemed to be the night for inserting her foot firmly into her mouth. Why had the universe forsaken her to the point that a girl couldn't sit out on the fire escape in peace anymore? "M-maybe," she answered in a meager attempt to spare Snow's feelings. She shrugged and blurted out a lame, "I don't know."

"Come on inside, then," Snow said in a tone that indicated it was not a request. "We clearly have a lot to discuss."

All three adults told Henry to go upstairs while they talked but he refused to leave Emma's side. The four of them settled at the kitchen table, Henry and Emma across from Snow and David. When Emma drew in a shaky breath, Henry reached below the table, took her hand, and squeezed. To her immense surprise, Emma found herself squeezing back.

Snow and David exchanged a glance. David nodded at her, telling her to take first go. Snow returned his nod, took a deep breath, and turned to face her daughter. "Let us have it."

Emma blinked hard. "Wh-what?"

"You obviously have some things you need to say," Snow clarified, her voice some kind of miraculous combination of tenderness and strength. "So say them. Let's get everything out in the open."

This was not at all how Emma had expected this conversation to go. She'd expected to sit there while they serenaded her with a chorus of "we love you" and "of course we did it to save you" and "you're our baby girl." Never in her wildest dreams had she expected carte blanche to speak her mind.

Now that she had free reign to let loose, however, she found she couldn't. She wanted to holler, wanted to yell and cry and scream, but nothing came.

After a few moments of silence, David said, "Don't worry about hurting us, Emma. Just let it out."

It wasn't until he said it that she realized she had been afraid of hurting them. Just a few days ago, she and Snow had made a decision to start off as friends. If this friendship was anything like others she'd had, it wouldn't survive once she told her what was really going through her mind.

Henry's hand tightened around hers. When she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, he nodded at her, a silent gesture telling her to go ahead. Once again, she squeezed his hand back and took a deep breath to shore up her courage. "I was told I was found along the side of the road. You know what else is found along the side of the road? Litter. Trash. Things people don't want but can't be bothered to get rid of properly. I spent my whole life thinking that there was something inherently … unlovable about me because the two people who were supposed to love me more than anything else in the world didn't."

Anger stirred somewhere deep inside her, an anger that, for some sick reason, she liked. Snow knew about the hardships of Emma's childhood because she'd let bits of information slip to Mary Margaret. David probably knew, too, if only secondhand through Snow. They were aware what their decision had cost her, but she had never actually told them how she felt.

And she needed to. Desperately. "And then I find out that my parents didn't just throw me away. No, what they did was worse." She looked directly at them, watching the pain register on their faces with a perverse sense of pleasure. "They sent me off to some unknown place with nothing but a blanket to protect me in the hope that I would somehow figure out a way to save them. It was never about protecting me from the curse to save me. It was about protecting me from the curse so that someday I could save you. If you cared what happened to me, one of you would have come with me."

"Don't you think that was the plan?" Snow interrupted, tears welling in her eyes. "I was supposed to go with you but you came early. The curse was coming. Sending you off in that wardrobe by yourself was the hardest decision we've ever made but we did do it to protect you. It was the only way for you to escape the curse, for you to have a shot at a real life."

"What the hell kind of real life did you expect me to have?" Emma cried, her anger growing. "I was minutes old and you sent me off with a little boy instead of a parent!"

David and Snow looked at each other with identical bewildered expressions. David recovered his voice first. "Emma, what on earth are you talking about?"

Seriously, he was asking her this? Didn't they know? "August was … is? Ugh, whatever. August is Pinocchio. He was sent through a little bit before me."

"H-how is that possible?" Snow murmured to David, the tears in her eyes spilling over. "The wardrobe only took one. That's what they said!"

The utter fury clouding David' eyes caused Emma to wince. "I have no idea," he said through gritted teeth, "but believe me, when we're done here, I'm rounding up Geppetto and the Blue Fairy and demanding some answers."

"Emma, we promise we didn't know," Snow said in a rush, her eyes frantic. "We were told the wardrobe could only protect one. The original plan was for me to go through and raise you in the new world. But then you were born early and … you have to believe us, Emma, we never planned on sending you through alone. We thought it was our only option."

From Snow's panic and David' seething rage, Emma could tell they were telling her the truth. She felt the fight leaving her, the anger subsiding, the pleasure at their pain vanishing. But they had only addressed one part of her complaint. Her voice notably softer, she said, "But it was still about saving me so that I could save everyone."

"You're right, Emma, on a practical level, it was," David said. "But on a personal level, I was devastated at the thought of my beautiful little girl never getting to experience happiness and love and joy."

"It was both," Snow agreed. "We saved you because you're the savior but also because you deserved better than the life you would have had if you stayed. Because we're your parents and we love you and we wanted you to have a life not clouded by the curse. I'm truly sorry things didn't work out the way we would have wanted for you but you have to believe me when I say that we did want to protect you."

Emma remained silent, letting their words settle. David mistook her silence for hesitance. "I know we've given you no reason to trust us." She flinched at his words because she did trust them. At least a little bit, enough that she hadn't taken Henry and moved out of the apartment with him. "Trust is something you don't give freely. We're going to have to work for it, and that's fine, because we want to."

He paused, and Snow grasped his hand, encouraging him to continue. "But we can't know we're not working hard enough unless you tell us, Emma. If you have questions, ask. If you want to yell at us, then yell. If you want or need to talk, let us know. We're trying to follow your lead but you have to give us some kind of direction in order for us to do so."

All of a sudden, she felt exactly as she had when Henry had to teach her how to find the North Star. She was the one navigating her family's reconnection? Too bad there were no GPS systems for post-curse familial relationships. "It's just that … well … it's …" She sighed in exasperation at being unable to find the correct words.

"You're used to taking care of yourself and it's hard to let anyone else in," Snow provided for her. When Emma gave her a relieved nod, Snow smiled gently at her. "I know that, Emma. And I know we've hurt you far more than we ever intended. It's okay if you're not ready to let us in completely. We haven't earned it yet but we want to earn it."

When Emma felt a familiar scratching in the back of her throat, she groaned inwardly. God-freaking-dammit, she was not going to start crying now. Henry squeezed her hand again, and the gesture helped her regain her control. She swallowed hard and looked up at her mother and father. "Thank you. I know I'm not making any of this easy and I'm sorry."

"There's no need to apologize, Emma," David assured her, his voice soft. "We're the ones who are sorry. For everything."

"There's no need for you to apologize, either." She glanced over at Henry, who gave her a proud smile. "It was an impossible situation and an impossible choice," she paused, giving a little nod in Henry's direction, "but it's one I think I would have made myself. I know what it's like to want your kid to have the life he or she deserves. And I know how it feels to find out that the kid didn't get it."

David and Snow gave their daughter a smile through glistening eyes. Oh, fantastic, she'd made her parents cry. While she may have had a few minutes of wanting to hurt them earlier in the night, that desire had long since passed. "All right, are we done with the mushy portion in the evening?" she asked through a self-deprecating chuckle. "Because I think I've reached my mushiness threshold."

The joke was met with a chorus of relieved snickers, which was what Emma had intended. "Yes, I think we're done with the mushiness," Snow smiled as she pushed herself up from the table.

The other three followed suit, standing up from their seats. After looking Emma over to make sure she was okay, David met Snow's gaze, the fury returning to his face. Snow gave him a nod to tell him she wanted to join him on his quest for answers before turning back to her daughter and grandson. "We're going out for a little while." She had addressed the statement to both of them but then she focused solely on her daughter. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm okay," Emma told her. "Tired now, but okay."

"All right," Snow replied. She ran her thumb down Emma's cheek, a gesture Emma ordinarily would have taken umbrage to but tonight found comforting. "We'll be back as soon as we can."

After Snow and David closed the door behind them, Emma let out a heavy breath, ran her fingers through her hair, and looked down at Henry. She hadn't been lying when she told Snow she was tired; she was freaking wiped. "I don't know about you, kid, but I'm beat. I think it's bedtime."

Henry wrinkled his nose but apparently didn't have the heart to argue with her. "Sounds good to me."

Emma raised her eyebrows at him and snickered. "No, it doesn't, but thanks for not putting up a fight."

She let Henry have the bathroom first while she went upstairs to change into her pajamas. When Henry emerged from the bathroom, Emma took it over. After she brushed her teeth and washed her face, she climbed the stairs to find Henry camped out on her bed. "So, downstairs with your parents," he said before she could even get one word out, "was that so hard?"

A sly sparkle brightened his eyes, a sparkle that she'd seen many times when they were discussing Operation Cobra. But why would he have that look in his eye now?

All of a sudden, it hit her. "Did you plan this?" she asked, her voice rising in indignation.

"I might have told Snow that you were sitting on the fire escape again and that I was going to go check on you, knowing she'd follow me," he replied with a nonchalant shrug.

"Henry! That is … that's not … you can't just do that!"

"You needed to talk but I knew you'd never go to them on your own and that they didn't want to upset you. You guys needed a little push."

"And you thought you were the one who should give us that push?"

"Well, yeah." It was clear he had absolutely no idea what the big deal was. "Who else was going to do it?"

Emma chewed on her lower lip, trying to decide whether she was annoyed or grateful. Eventually, gratitude won out. She heaved a sigh as she plopped down next to him on the bed. "You are aware that I'm supposed to be the adult in this relationship, right?"

"Yep," he grinned. "I just didn't care."

"Well, thank you, but if you ever do anything like that again, you'll be grounded until you're thirty."

He raised his hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay, I get it." A moment of silence passed between them and then Henry asked, "So, which was harder, that talk with your parents or fighting the dragon?"

Emma allowed a second of shock at her son's cheekiness before lightly thwapping him with a pillow. He cried out in surprise and, grinning widely, grabbed the other pillow and hit her back.

The fight escalated, and soon they were both using Emma's bed as cover, Henry on one side and Emma on the other, ducking behind the mattress and tossing the pillows at each other. They were laughing so hard that they never heard Snow – who had returned to the apartment because she'd forgotten her coat in her rush with David – climb the stairs, peek in on her daughter and grandson, and creep back down the stairs with a wide smile on her face.