Written for the Swan Queen Summer Big Bang: Banging All Summer. Massive thank yous to everyone who cheered me on this time around, it's helped more than you know. Also to the wonderful mods for once again giving me the motivation to get off my ass. You guys are the greatest.

Most importantly thank you to my fantastic beta ohthesefeelingz, who once again has put up with my nonsensical ramblings and appalling grasp of grammar. The woman is a star.

Shout out to the Cristina to my Cristina because she knows my soul, and she's always there come D-Day.

Finally thank you to the wonderful meqhanory for my beautiful mix, which may or may not have made it rain on my face a little bit. You can find it at her AO3. Please don't forget to give her love. (Cover image also made by her)

The town of Storybrooke, Maine, was much like any other small town. It had a little town hall, and a clock tower. It had a school, a main street with neat rows of different colored store fronts, and a fresh food market on Sundays. It was normal. An ordinary little town in an ordinary little corner of the state.

Only Storybrooke, unlike most other towns, was home to a family of witches.

The Swan family had been living in Storybrooke for hundreds of years, and as long as they'd lived there - they'd been shunned for their magical abilities. It hadn't always been awful. Once upon a time they had in fact been revered for their power. They had helped with the natural order of things, acted as healers and helpers to any and all who needed them.

But steadily, jealousy of their power turned to fear, and fear into hatred. The hatred grew so bitter that when one Swan woman - Maria - fell pregnant with the wrong man's child, she was cast out. Branded harlot and witch, Maria ended up exiled, waiting for her lover to come to her. When he never returned for her and his child, grief and heartbreak turned Maria's warm heart stone cold, and so she cast a curse to last all the generations of her family: that any man who loved a Swan woman would be doomed to die.

Over the years many a Swan woman fell in love, as people are inclined to do, but no matter what they did to try and save their loved ones from Maria's curse, eventually the death watch beetle would come, marking the doom that awaited them, and yet another Swan woman would end with her heart broken.

The situation it seemed, was hopeless. The curse was inevitable, and ever lasting. No man had ever escaped it and, it seemed, none ever would.

The prospects of her own love life aside, Emma Swan had suffered enough at the hands of the curse by the time she was only eight years old. Her father had been no exception to the death watch beetle's mark, and the grief of losing her husband had proved too much for Emma's mother, who'd died not long after. In her heart, Emma had never quite forgiven her for it.

Emma had gone, along with her adoptive sister Ruby, to live with her mother's crazy Aunts - Mal and Lena - in their strange old house on the edge of town. Things with the Aunts were different. Rules were shady, bedtimes were never observed, and by ten Emma was quite sure she never wanted to see another piece of chocolate cake again.

It wasn't a bad life. Odd, certainly. Difficult, often. School was never fun when children inherited their parents' prejudices - and having taunts chanted at you all day every day was hardly conducive to a nurturing working environment. They managed though. Emma and Ruby, Aunt Mal and Aunt Lena. They stayed in their little non-routines of non-enforced toothbrushing and brownies for breakfast. Of spells practice instead of homework and all sorts of magical traditions that made the townsfolk cower in their beds but the Aunts laugh for weeks at a time.

Emma had never been as interested in the magic as Ruby. The power came naturally to her, something she'd learnt early in life, but she didn't much like to use it. Ruby, on the other hand - who hadn't been born a witch - was fascinated. The little brunette would sit for hours watching the Aunts cook up potions and remedies. She'd sneak out at night to peer over the stair railings and watch, riveted, as townspeople came in secret to desperately beg for a magical solution to their problems.

She'd always been more adventurous, Ruby, so it was no surprise to Emma when, on the night after her eighteenth birthday, her adoptive sister packed her bags and left. Flying out of the door with whispered excitement about Tibet, and monkeys, and falling in love. There'd been blood pacts, and promises to be careful, to write at least once a week. Emma was scared for her, honestly, but there was a part of her that was jealous too. A part of her wanted nothing more than to get out of town - to leave Storybrooke and its witch-hating townsfolk behind and never look back - but she was a Swan, and Swan's didn't leave Storybrooke. Despite everything, it was their home, it wasn't in their DNA to want to leave.

So Emma stayed. She lived a quiet life, working in the garden, keeping an eye on the Aunts. Eventually she opened up a little shop on the main street, selling natural potions and balms. It wasn't the most riveting work, but it kept her occupied - and it was a simple life, uncomplicated. She kept her head down, didn't get in anyone's way - hardly spoke to anyone who wasn't family. The way she figured, the less people she interacted with, the less likely she was to ever fall in love. And falling in love was something she most assuredly did not want to do. Ever. Love had ruined her parents' lives, and countless of her ancestors'. Love was what killed her mother and left her an orphan, it was what drove the citizens of the town to come to the people they feared and despised for relief. It was what stole her beloved sister away to distant countries.

Love, Emma was sure, could only result in bad things - and she was adamantly against falling in it.

Which is why it was so strange when, one sunday afternoon, she suddenly found herself smitten. His name was Neal, and he worked in the market. She'd noticed him around town before, in a vague acknowledgment of attraction, but she'd never so much as talked to him otherwise. But one day he was standing in her shop, staring at a natural soap in his hand like he'd no idea how it got there, and suddenly she'd felt like her very world revolved around him and his strangely soppy expression.

After that, everything had happened fairly quickly. One day Neal was standing in her shop staring at a bar of soap, the next he was her husband, the father of their child - Henry, her little boy. The next she heard a beetle and everything fell apart.

Neal died on a Wednesday, hit by a truck that just didn't see him. He didn't even make it to the hospital. Henry was three and a half at the time, and he cried the entire way through the funeral. Ruby wrote a letter from Hong Kong, heartfelt and love filled and enough to have lifted anyone's spirit. But Emma wasn't anyone. She had tried so hard not to fall for it, love. To avoid the curse that had haunted her family for so long - but instead she had become a prime example. Worse, was that unlike most of her predecessors, Emma had had a male child - and what that meant no one knew, but there hadn't been one in generations. The few the Aunts knew of had all died, just the same as their fathers', and Emma could only hope, pray for the safety of her little boy that a beetle shaped omen of death would never come to claim him.

They'd moved back in with the Aunts, though Emma had vowed neither she nor Henry would have anything to do with their magical ways. It was just for convenience, and company. Not to mention Henry - who she was all too aware she wasn't in a state to parent at that moment. The Aunts were eccentric, and lax on discipline, but they were good and loving and kind and that was what Henry needed. Henry needed a little lightness in his life, Emma was too broken and bitter to be that for him, at least for a while. She needed to heal, to move on. She should have known this would happen, and the blonde wanted to kick herself for letting love and happiness blind her to the inevitability of pain and loss. She'd been naive, despite all her best efforts to the contrary. It had cost her her husband, and the fear of it costing her her son as well hardened her. Naivety and love had caused her all this grief, and consequently, neither was something she ever planned on falling victim to again. Ever.

Especially not love.