I.
Boston is not the best place to be living out of a car in winter. It's an even worse place to be living out of a car in winter with a six-month-old baby, as there's nowhere to stash Henry's Goodwill car seat but the front, while Emma and Killian curl up together in the back, cramped and restless, woken to tend to him or by the hum of passing traffic, or to ensure the windshield hasn't iced up, because while they've managed to avoid one of those infamous blizzards that shuts down the entire Northeast for a week, the temperature has rarely struggled above freezing since November. They don't like to drive around much because they don't have gas money, and that, combined with the legendary difficulty of finding a parking spot, means they mostly stay put. But they can't remain in one place as obvious vagrants forever, even in the seedier sections of the city, and with both of them used to a life on the move, this feels different. Stranger. Oppressive. As much as they want a home, they don't want it like this.
Still, it could be worse. At least they're here. At least they're together. Killian is out pounding the pavement all day looking for work, and after Emma suggested that he cut his shaggy hippie ponytail and fringe – or rather she cut it, chopping methodically away with a pair of blunt scissors while he was as uptight as a princess about the whole thing – he's managed to keep them in enough money to feed Henry, if not always themselves, and book into a hotel room if the cold ever gets really bad. She loves those nights, those sweet rare nights where they're warm and comfortable, can take a hot shower and stretch out in a real bed rather than the tiny, cement-hard black leather boot of the Bug, where she knows they can sleep without the fear of an officer knocking on the window, or Henry abruptly turning into an infant icicle, or any of those. She's tried to persuade Killian that they should do this more often, they should sneak in between housekeepings or break into a low-rent motel where they'd probably just be glad there was anyone staying there at all, but he remains stubborn. He doesn't want to steal things. He wants to do this the right way. And he doesn't want to take any risks of what happened in Portland happening again.
Emma supposes grudgingly that he has a point. Even clear across the country, she'd be foolish to think they had an entirely fresh start. Of the two of them, Killian is the cautious, traditional, straight-laced one, the one who vociferously objected when she wanted to just steal food when they were hungry, who fretted that she was running too many risks by keeping the Bug, who still has this confounded old-fashioned belief that the world is a just and upright place filled with essentially good people that they should be loathe to take advantage of – much as she loves him, Emma doesn't understand half of how he thinks sometimes. But if it's ever a question of applying the five-finger discount or making her go hungry, Killian always chooses the former. Even insists that he do the stealing so she won't get caught, which they furtherly disagree about; of the two of them, Emma is the one who knows how to do this. Killian is as conspicuous as a four-piece mariachi band when he's trying to shoplift, sweating and nervous and stammering and loitering casually by the shelf with the food he definitely, no sir, is not going to try to stuff under his jacket the instant the bored cashier turns their back or goes for a smoke break. Nope. Nothing to see here, everyone. Move along.
Emma has just turned eighteen. Killian is perhaps a year and a half older, but neither of them are sure. He's never known his birthday, remembers nothing about his childhood, and isn't sure how he even ended up in the States in the first place; he has a still-noticeable English accent that he has learned to use to his advantage when faced with the inexplicable American weakness for it. Emma suspects repressed memories, an upbringing even more traumatic than hers, maybe a head injury at some point. It's part of what binds them together so deeply, this lost boy and lost girl. There is nothing in the world more precious to them than each other. They know what they've found, young and stupid and scared as they might be, and they have to hold on.
A mysterious man on a motorbike turned up one night and told Killian that Emma had a destiny, that he had to leave her for her own good, that the fate of everyone she loved rested on it. Killian told him to take a bloody hike.
As he related the story to Emma later, snuggled up under a blanket and watching the stars, listening to the distant booming horns of freighters on the Willamette, she'd thought he was pulling her leg. Why would anyone think she was important, why would anyone try to get Killian to abandon her when it was clearly the last thing he would ever do, and why would anyone ride up out of the blue and act as if they knew her and this nonexistent family? But Killian wasn't the type to joke about something like that, and looking at his face, Emma realized he was serious. It unsettled her, and she nestled closer. "Anyway," she had said. "Let's forget about him. He doesn't matter."
If only that had been the case.
Emma named the baby Henry for the simple reason that Henry seemed like the kind of thing successful people named their children. Something in that vein, something nice and traditional: Henry, William, John, James, Michael. She hadn't been able to give it much more thought than that. Most of the time leading up to his arrival was a blur. After they had been pulled over for what they thought was a routine traffic stop, always a dicey proposition when you were driving a stolen car and had no insurance or in Killian's case, any actual government-issued ID, the troopers told them that they had been informed that this car, Oregon registration E83-KAE (Killian and Emma, Emma told him flirtatiously, it was a sign) was connected to the theft of twenty thousand dollars in watches from a high-end jewelry store. It didn't take long for the police to run the specs and come to the logical conclusion that these pair of teenage joyriders were responsible. Killian and Emma were both arrested, sent to the county jail while the authorities dug into her past as a troubled foster kid, and still failed to come up with anything on Killian. Both of them protested innocence in the matter of the watches, until the watches turned up hidden in the trunk. They didn't know what had happened, who had framed them or why, and considering they were already guilty of the Bug, there wasn't much chance of getting off. In the end, Killian had realized they were getting stuck with the blame one way or the other and insisted they punish him for it. Whether it was the English accent or the puppy-dog eyes or the fact that a local court reporter began writing sympathetic pieces detailing the plight of these two disadvantaged kids being given the bureaucratic runaround for a crime it wasn't obvious they had committed, it worked. Killian got a year in regular prison. Emma got six months in juvenile.
They had sworn they'd get through this, as they'd been sent to neighboring facilities in Phoenix, but that was reckoning without the wild card. By the time her release date rolled around, Emma was just over seven months pregnant and had nowhere to go, nobody she knew in Arizona, and still six months before Killian, who was trying to get time off for good behavior, was scheduled to be freed. It was the middle of summer, over a hundred degrees daily, and she was terrified of being on the streets alone, in such an obviously vulnerable condition. Maybe there were other options – mother and child halfway houses, rescue missions, Christian ministry centers – but Emma wasn't thinking clearly, and she was desperate. All she could come up with was to commit a few more petty thefts, get herself caught, and sent back to jail. That way she could be assured of a bed every night, meals, and a place to give birth that wasn't out back behind a dumpster. It was in the jail infirmary, in shackles. She didn't know why anyone thought it was necessary to shackle a woman in labor. She blacked most of it out.
She didn't think she should keep the baby. Killian didn't even know about it. She hadn't told him, had feared that if he heard, he would cut ties there and then, not be able to introduce such a complication into their already precariously unstable existence. Indeed, she'd signed most of the papers for adoption, but at the last moment she changed her mind. Asked to hold him, and the moment she looked into his face, ugly and squinched and red as it was, known she couldn't give him away.
She served out the rest of her second sentence, was released about the same time as Killian, and had been dreading the reunion. But he had been staggered, horrified and heartbroken and furious with himself and the world for letting her go through that alone, and insisted that he would spend the rest of his life making it up to her, to them. Packed up their few belongings in the Bug, which had been returned to them after failing to find any other owner of record for it, and drove them as far away from there as he could. Never once looked back.
Now they're here, in Boston.
Now, Emma supposes, ever after begins.
She'd say happy, but she doesn't know.
Killian finally finds somewhat-steady work in one of the souvenir shops that borders Navy Yard, selling nautical knickknacks to tourists and their whining kids, hands sticky with cotton candy as their parents try to drag them on the USS Constitution and increase their appreciation for American history. It pays like shit, but it's enough for them to rent a grubby one-bedroom in South Boston, as long as they don't expect to have money for anything else. Emma has tried breastfeeding Henry to save on formula, but it's not really working out for either of them, leaving him screaming and hungry and her sodden and sore and angry. She loves him dearly, but she resents him as well, keeping her stuck in their apartment instead of out finding a job too. Maybe with two incomes they could get a boost, they wouldn't have to go to bed most nights with nothing in the fridge but a carton of three-day-old Chinese takeout and half a jug of orange juice. She is always, constantly hungry, gnawing in the back of her head and twisting in her stomach. No wonder she can't feed Henry, why he'd basically starve to death from her and why they have to scrape to buy him formula, if she can't even feed herself.
It's nice to be off the streets, though. Emma can't deny that. Job opportunities for a couple of broke teenage felons without a completed high school education are thin on the ground as it is, and she lives in fear that Killian's boss is going to decide that it's time to stop extending whatever charity he offered in the first place. No wonder Killian is a model employee, volunteering for all the extra shifts and walking to work if the T isn't running, rain and snow and sleet and everything else. The end result is that she barely ever sees him, except when he slides into their double bed late at night and she wakes up long enough to beg for a kiss. He gives her that, but he's usually too tired for anything else, and considering they also can't afford birth control beyond a handful of free condoms from the clinic, maybe that's not so bad. They can barely support Henry. They definitely can't handle a second unplanned pregnancy.
Emma has lived her life alone. She knows what it feels like.
She has rarely felt so alone as she does now.
Spring comes, somehow. The snow starts to melt and there's a hint of greenness and warmth in the air, and she finds a used stroller at the thrift store for $10 and sacrifices dinner that night to buy it. It turns out to be a good decision. She feels less trapped when she can get out in the fresh air with Henry, and they can also walk downtown and visit Killian at work. The sight of the sea calms her, salt breezes and seagulls wheeling overhead, and there's a secondhand bookstore nearby where she can sit for hours as long as she buys a coffee and browses. She pulls the GED prep books down and pages through them, straining her rusty brain for ninth-grade algebra (she never took ninth-grade algebra, at least never in one place or in any sort of coherent fashion) and identifying parts of speech in boring paragraphs with gender-neutral names. She joggles the stroller whenever Henry whimpers, takes ruthless advantage of the fifty-cent refills. It's fairly obvious she's there because she doesn't have anywhere else to go, but the bookstore owners turn out to be fairly accommodating about it. Eventually they come up and ask if she would like to help out in the cafe part-time at nine dollars an hour, and she jumps on it.
With this extra money, she and Killian can actually eat on a consistent basis, which does wonders for both their mood and their health. He can cut back on some of the overtime, so they can walk home together at night after work, enjoying the bustling city scene and pretending they're part of it. One night along the Charles River path, he asks her if they should get married.
Emma's startled. The thought hasn't really crossed her mind. They do have a child, they're living together in a more or less respectable fashion, and she knows that Killian is inclined to be of the opinion that this means they should be joined in matrimony. Again; old-fashioned like that. Not that she objects, per se. She just… doesn't know. It seems dangerous. She loves Killian more than her own life, and knows he feels likewise for her; among all this hardship and struggle, he is the one thing she has never doubted, and for a girl so used to everyone leaving her, Killian's constant, unqualified, rock-steady reliable love is still a gift it feels as if she can't clutch too closely, a beautiful treasure that will by its very nature be taken away. Other people get that. Not her. She doesn't trust it. Not Killian; she trusts him implicitly. She doesn't trust the world. They've started to build something here, despite everything. No use drawing attention for a thunderbolt from the heavens.
She tells Killian she needs to think about it.
Emma crams in studying for the GED between everything else on her plate, mainly through sheer stubbornness, and takes it that winter. It isn't until past the new year when she finally gets the email telling her that she passed, and she sets her sights on some online college classes. She should study something prosaic and practical, like business or finance, and she dutifully does so, no matter the fact that it bores her rigid. Henry is a year old now and she needs to think about his future. But finding time isn't easy when she has to chase after an energetic toddler and realize that she won't be able to bring him to work much longer. It wasn't a problem when he mostly stayed asleep in his stroller, but no matter how understanding her bosses are, they don't want him crashing around the shop all day.
Killian, meanwhile, is increasingly preoccupied with contacting the British Embassy in New York, trying to see if they can track down any record of his family, if one of the million Joneses applied for a visa or a residency permit and made any mention of a son named Killian. Nobody has, and this pursuit makes Emma nervous. Killian has obtained a few requisite documents showing that he exists and has a driver's license and a job and a family, but even though he's lived here as long as he can remember, he's still essentially an illegal immigrant, and Emma worries every day that the U.S. government will solve the vexing question of his origins by deporting him back to the UK and telling him to figure it out there. Especially with a felony conviction on his record, and not much of anything else. They're lucky to live in Massachusetts, with its relatively lenient laws on ex-cons, but still even here, not many employers are going to bother to look into the facts of the case, see that they were essentially unfairly framed, and got railroaded into a plea deal. They all say they're innocent, anyway. They all say it wasn't their fault.
Emma gets a job off Craigslist that lets her work from home. It's probably not the most up-and-up thing in the world, so she doesn't ask questions. It does make money, though, and for the first time in their lives, they're not existing entirely hand-to-mouth. She's barely twenty, but she feels decades older. Killian has a haggardness to him that feels like the weight of centuries. He's sick of his job, sick of hawking overpriced commemorative memorabilia, sick of being paid peanuts, sick of feeling like he can't take care of her and Henry. He does his best to be cheerful, always supporting and loving and kind, but his temper is fragile, his eyes shadowed. He's slipping away, somewhere she can't follow. He kicks around the idea that he should join the Navy, but he's not a U.S. citizen, so he can't. Who knows if he's even a British citizen. He is, in the eyes of the world, nothing at all.
It's that fall, in this tenuous environment, that Emma discovers to her shock and disquiet that she's pregnant again. Despite their precautions, she and Killian are not a couple that can live celibate forever, or even for long. They have to touch each other, have to be with each other, and trying not to has had a considerable negative effect on their mental health. Money at least will be less of an issue this time, but nothing else seems like the optimum circumstances for another baby.
Emma considers not going through with it. She considers having it and giving this one up for adoption instead. She runs through all the choices. All the things it would probably be best to do. But she so very much does not want to give this one up, leaving another child in the world without their family, and much as Henry can get on her nerves, as is the case with any parent of an almost-two-year-old, she loves him so fiercely that it frightens her. Loving something that much, like this, and giving it away… no. And no matter how much of a crap job she thinks she's often doing, Henry hasn't been irreparably screwed up yet. Maybe she can be a mother. Maybe.
She tells Killian that night. They cry together.
"I'm sorry, love," he says, as she slumps with her head on his shoulder, as they listen to the clock tick, to time speed onward. "I'm sorry."
He doesn't say for what, but it frightens her.
It turns out to be more than that. It turns out it's not just one, but two: twins. Both of them think the ultrasound technician is pulling a bad prank when she tells them, and the next week is spent in panic. Either they have to keep them both or give them both away; raising one but not the other is too unfair for either of them to contemplate. They can't make a decision now, and so they simply don't. They are both in full agreement that they want them, they want their children, they want their family whole more than anything, but they just don't know if the world is going to agree.
They are harrowed, exhausted, barely able to sleep, lying in their bed staring at the ceiling as Killian absently strokes her hair, as they deal with a grief that feels so leaden in their bones that they can't move. Emma quickly swells up to what feels like the size of a house, has cramps and cravings and bad sickness that lasts not just all morning but all day, and one or another of the kids is always kicking. She doesn't know if love is strong enough to get them through this. She's not sure about much of anything anymore.
She's eight months along – and due pretty much any day, multiples tending to come early – when the truly unthinkable happens. Killian is hit by a car leaving work late, and although he survives, he's badly injured – so badly, in fact, that they can't save the lower half of his left arm. At this, the realization is starkly, terribly plain. It was already uncertain enough if they were going to be able to deal with the twins in their current situation, and if Killian is crippled and one-handed, there's no way they possibly can. They have to give them up for adoption. They have to give them their best chance.
Emma goes into labor a few days later, and they wheel Killian in on his hospital bed so he can be with her this time. Because it's two, they're delivered by C-section, and as she's still groggy from the anesthetic, she tells them to tie her tubes. She isn't doing this ever again. She can't stand it.
It's a girl and a boy. They're perfect in every way. The idea of naming them what successful people name their children is almost an unbearable joke, but they do: Elizabeth and William. They get to hold them briefly, and manage to keep it together. They've been told that there is an adoptive mother arranged: a successful single woman, a mayor of some small town in Maine, who is willing to take both children. Very few other details are available, but Emma and Killian are allowed to learn that her name is Regina. The records will be sealed until the children are eighteen. Then, if they choose, they can decide to get into contact with their birth parents.
Emma breaks in half when they come to take the twins away. She cries, later, until she can't breathe. She can't see, speak, stand up, remember her own name. She lies flattened, as the world fades in and out around her. She feels numb, floating. Surreal.
She envies Killian then, desperately.
She would pay any price to forget.
One night after she's out of the hospital, Emma goes to sit by the Charles River and stare out at the horizon, thinking very seriously of throwing herself in and never coming up. She will be a mermaid, perhaps, or a water nymph. She wonders what it would be like to breathe without it hurting, what it would be like to sleep the night through without terrible dreams. Killian is home as well, but still bedridden, and she stays on the couch most nights anyway, to avoid disturbing him with her tossing and thrashing. Henry can tell something is wrong, in that unexpectedly perceptive way of young children, but both of his parents are such wrecks that they can barely drag themselves together to look after him. The neighbor has been drafted in most days. They beg her not to call Child Protective Services; the thought of having Henry taken away as well is something they can't stand.
Emma is still sitting there, staring bleakly at nothing, when she hears the crunch of gravel behind her, the roar of a motorbike. The engine cuts out, and footsteps come closer.
She tenses, ready to punch whoever's daring to disturb her. She might never stop. She is a coiled ball of rage and pain and grief, and she doesn't want to be touched. She doesn't want to hear anything, or deal with anyone. She starts to get up, to walk away. To shut the door, and let that be that.
An unfamiliar man's voice says, "Hello, Emma."
And despite everything, she freezes.
He says his name is August W. Booth.
He says he tried to track her down a while ago, in Portland.
He says he wasn't lying when he said she had a destiny, and all at once, wildly, she remembers that story Killian told her, about the man on the motorbike who wanted him to leave her, and the strange way they ended up framed after that, convicted for a crime that wasn't theirs, something that might well have torn them apart if they weren't so hell-bound and determined to stay together. A horrible suspicion begins to form in her head, something that she can't articulate and is terrified to. Something about him, and what he might have been doing to her all along.
She tells him to blow it out his ass, and that she never wants to see or hear from him again.
As she's jogging away, head down, tears burning in her eyes, he shouts after her desperately. "When you're twenty-eight, Emma! When you're twenty-eight, damn it! They're waiting for you, they need you! All of them! Don't you know who she is? Who Regina is?"
The word strikes Emma in the back of the head like a bullet. Hating herself, she swivels around. She can barely pry her lips apart to speak, but she does. "What," she spits, low and level and lethal. "What did you just say?"
"Her name is Regina," August W. Booth repeats, unflinching. "The name of the town is Storybrooke. It's not a coincidence, Emma. Ignore me if you want, but you know I'm right."
Emma doesn't answer. Her tongue is made of wool, her limbs of iron, and she still can't breathe or focus or believe in what he's throwing at her, this ridiculous fantasy. Even if the names have already caught in her heart like a claw, twisted in, until she can't pull it loose. At last, she manages, "Get lost."
"Don't you want to know?" he bellows after her. "Don't you want to know who you are? Who he is? Killian? He's looking in all the wrong places! He's never going to find anything at the embassy! Emma! Emma, damn it, wait!"
She doesn't.
She runs.
The old year ends and the new year starts and somehow things still seem to be going on. Killian is almost recovered from his wounds by now, but he's still not used to life as a one-handed man. The only prosthesis they can afford for him is a clumsy hook, which Henry thinks is amazing and which Killian tries to make the best of for his son's sake, but he's a proud man and constantly knocking things over and having to ask for help and getting stares and gawks when he goes outside is running him ragged. He won't touch Emma with it; they haven't been intimate once in the seven months since they gave the twins away, even if there's no risk of any further children. She has the distinct feeling he too might not mind jumping in the river and never coming out, and it scares her more than the impulse does in herself.
They don't talk about Elizabeth and William – or as Emma thinks of them in her head, Ellie and Liam. It's too painful. She doesn't tell Killian about the return of August Booth and the motorbike and that ridiculous, impossible story of his. Even if she doesn't forget, not for a day, the names chasing each other around and around her head. Regina. Storybrooke. It's not a coincidence, Emma.
No. There's no point to this. She has to try to move on, she has to try to heal, to do something other than think that it wouldn't be too bad to drown. When you're twenty-eight. She doesn't know what to do if there's something to August's insane ramblings, and even less if there isn't. No matter how hard she tries to shut it down and chase it off, some tiny, bruised, beaten part of her heart has latched onto his fables, the idea that there might be something greater out there. It's gotten to her. False hope is the worst thing you can give someone, and as hollow and haunted as her life is right now, she knows she's vulnerable to latching onto whatever snake oil he's trying to sell her. It's a scam, she knows it's a scam, but it's too exhausting to work out how. Even Killian is no longer the traditional, uptight, play-by-the-rules gentleman he used to be. He's turned tarnished, broken, moody and bitter and brooding, increasingly talking about revenge. On who or what, she doesn't know. Just that he, like her, can no longer tolerate the unfairness of the world. Can no longer open his eyes and breathe without it hurting.
They still love each other more than anything, but living together is turning too much for them, especially when both of them are in such dark nights of the soul. They're still not married, but they agree that a trial separation is in order. They've been together since they were teenagers, and the idea of striking out on their own is even worse, but they have to.
Killian says he's going to go to Britain to try and look for his family.
Emma takes Henry and moves to New York.
The next few years are, if not happy, at least tolerable. Emma enrolls Henry in school and takes a job as a bail bondsperson, which brings in enough money that they have a decent existence. He likes it here, he has friends, he's growing up stable and well-adjusted, and that's good enough for her right now. She has thought once or twice about starting a new relationship, but she can't, not in the state she's in. There's too much baggage for any prospective mate to be asked to take on, and she'd rather keep a halfway normal home for her son, not have a revolving door of strange men in and out. If she needs a one-night stand, she can find it, discreetly. Otherwise, she's better off this way. Stronger. It was always destined to end up like this. She was right. This kind of love was never for her.
It makes sense, this way.
It's only logical.
So she tells herself, at least, when she's lying awake in the wee hours, missing her other half too badly to sleep.
Henry is ten when Emma turns twenty-eight. He's a great kid, he's the light of her life, he's come to terms with the strange and fractured nature of their existence, and she's not sure he remembers he had a father at one point, let alone a brother and sister. As far as he knows, it's him and her, the two of them a team against the world, and he's said they'll have a celebration tonight. She's not really in the mood, but she humors him. He has a cupcake with a sparkler and he's made an attempt at cleaning up the house, which she appreciates the most. She kicks off her heels – just another mark down, just another night, what the hell do you know about family? before she slammed his head into the steering wheel – and smiles tiredly at her son. "Okay. Knock yourself out."
Henry sticks the star-shaped candle in the cupcake and reaches for the matches, but she takes them away from him and strikes a light. Pauses, then touches it to the candle.
"Make a wish," Henry urges her. "That's what you do, right, Mom?"
The only wish Emma has is an impossible one. She's not going to give the world the satisfaction of asking for it and then letting it be stamped out, but if this moment is anything else than a seductive lie, if August Booth was anything else than a crazy person and a liar, if all this time and all this heartbreak has been for anything in the least, she has to do it now.
She pauses, then closes her eyes tight. Wishes with everything she is, and blows the candle out.
Silence, still. Nothing. Naturally.
And then, a knock on the door.