A/N: As I said about the original Father-Daughter Dance, the fact that Charming and Emma can't be given an opportunity to have an interpersonal conversation or screen time together is poppycock of the highest balderdash variety. And I refuse to let it continue.

The Father-Daughter Dance II: Put Your Head on My Shoulder

Just prior to, and including, the staircase scene in "…And Straight On 'Til Morning", when Regina has not yet woken up to reveal that she no longer has possession of the Trigger, and that Storybrooke will shortly be obliterated.

Neal has fallen through a bean portal and is presumed dead or in the process of imminently dying from the duplicitous Tamara's gunshot wound.

It is up to Emma to share this news with her mother and father.

Mostly, it turns out, with her father.

Snow White's Storybrooke Loft – Emma Swan could not have easily said how she felt. So much emotional turmoil had overcome her in the last half-hour, and somehow she now found herself face-to-face in this moment of mind- and heart-splitting grief opposite David Nolan, the man who was her father.

The Original Prince Charming.

Who wouldn't want such a person at their side in any time of crisis? She had only recently witnessed the tender way in which he attempted to guide Mary-Margaret through the wake of Cora's death. And, she had actually spoken out against it. Coddling was for sissies, right?

As for Emma, she knew little enough of any line between comfort and coddling. And in most all situations a life of hard knocks had left her suspicious of both.

Prince Charming, indeed.

His daughter would be the first to admit that more than a little of her perception of him-not as David Nolan, but as Prince James-had been formed from reading Henry's book; tales, possibly exaggerated, of her father's courage and bravery in the Enchanted Forest. Usually she deliberately chose not to think too deeply about a connection with that heroic character and the man standing before her.

Today, her emotions and senses on a total overload, she found no room to even attempt to reconcile his two selves, much less to hold up the walls (he would say battlements, probably) that were meant to protect what there might yet be of soft underbelly, of bruised heart, that she had left.

'Ten feet tall, and bulletproof, right?' Neal used to crack wise to her when he had felt her defenses were growing a bit too thick for her own good.

She looked around, not really seeing anything, until her eyes came to rest upon David's.

"I told him that I loved him," she blurted out, in the wake of that memory of Neal.

"What?!" Charming spluttered, unable to hold his knee-jerk response in. "I mean, Snow—" he caught Emma's slowed, but still incredulous reaction to his self-editing. "Yes," he confessed. "Your mother and I speak about you." He paused, wondering if a shrug were the right gesture to couple with what he was saying. "Snow always thought…" he shook his head back and forth. "But you know her, she's never been able to truly accept the way romance and sex work in this world." He ventured a small, crooked half-smile. "Of course she would think: Neal is Henry's father. She would never want to accept that Henry was conceived by anything other than the truest of loves. So naturally it was her sincerest hope that…" He let his voice trail off, realizing he had taken them off on an entirely, for-the-moment, inappropriate tangent. The moment was about Emma, about Neal's entire lack of any future, with either his child's mother, or his son.

Not about Snow's secret (and not-so-secret) hopes for her daughter's happiness.

He was not sure what to do next. He wanted to get Emma a glass of water. Actually, he knew it was far from fatherly, but he wanted to be able to hand her something far stronger, to take the edge off the present moment, and the ones to come: something bracing.

But it did not seem right to step away from her, even for her own sake. She looked as though she might at any moment lose the legs out from under her.

Without realizing how he had done it, he managed to get her to sit on the winding metal stair, and found himself next to her.

"What am I gonna do?" she asked the air as much as him. (It was possible, he thought, that she had entirely forgotten he was there) "It's not like we can bury him, David," she mourned, using his name. So she did register his presence.

"It's not even like he's dead yet," she went on, her mind now rushing ahead in a flood of logic and practicality. "He might not be," she hit on the idea, like a light going on in a dark room. "Maybe if I could find him in time…" She looked from side to side. "Jefferson. I need to find Jefferson. Maybe he can read the closed portal from the bean, tell me how many possible places a bean can take someone. Something," she all but stamped her feet, now turning toward him, searching his face to see if the idea were as harebrained as she feared it might be. "Something." Here her voiced half-croaked, half-disappeared into a high octave usually unreachable by nature.

For a man well-known to always be able to find his wife, he ached at giving his daughter the truth of her present situation; that what she was looking for they would be unlikely to locate anytime soon.

His face fell as he spoke, knowing he was crushing the last drops of hope she had managed to gather in the wake of the day's dark events. "The last time I looked for Jefferson, Emma, he was awfully difficult to find. And now that we hear he has his daughter back—he might have gone well and truly underground."

He wondered, if he attempted it—would his embrace reach around the outsized hurt she had experienced only an hour ago? Could his arms encompass the lost years and the many hurts received then? Or was such an act beyond his ability?

"But you don't understand," she told him, not knowing his thoughts. "You weren't there. You didn't see him—the look in his eyes as he dropped." For a moment it became more as though she were speaking only to herself. "I mean, he's Baelfire, right? How could he stand going through a portal again? Alone? Into—into—I mean," and then her gaze was up, onto his, and she was back with him. "He used to have night terrors, okay? When we were together. He would cry out, go into sweats." She shook her head. "But he would never tell me what they were about, Never. Only that like me he had been abandoned."

She was too absorbed to notice the intake of sad breath her use of this word always inspired in her father.

"But abandoned at a time when he was old enough to remember it." Again she looked up, this time beseechingly, as though begging him to accept what she was saying. To understand.

"Tamara just sent him through his worst nightmare," she declared, her gaze for a moment steadying. "But maybe we can find him," she declared, always an eye toward action, toward movement. "Maybe I can find him." She clamped her mouth shut and her chin down at this. "I shouldn't have let him let go of my hand," she announced, as though a judge condemning herself. "I should have hung on."

This, he had to disagree with. As her father, as her son's grandfather. "No," he said, but gently, so as not to stir up defensiveness in her. "You were thinking of Henry, as you should have been." He nodded, agreeing with himself. "As Neal, rightly, was. Don't hurt yourself, Emma, and dishonor his act of refusing to let you go with him by second-guessing yourself." He paused. "But you need to tell Henry, to share this with him. You need someone to grieve with."

Her eyes shot up. "Not you?"

Those eyes. His daughter's eyes. Like a double arrow to his heart. Her voice asking why he thought he alone would not be enough in her time of crisis.

"C'mon, Emma," he said, brim with practicality, but speaking softly, reasonably. "What was Neal to me? A nice enough guy since he got here. Certainly, thankfully I never saw any shadow of his father in him, which was a relief." He sighed. It was maybe not the right moment to say it, but there it was. "But in the end, he's the man who made the choice to leave my daughter on a path to jail and single parenthood while she was still underage."

Her eyes searched his, wondering where he was going with this.

"Neal, as is, belongs to you and Henry," he shrugged. "Maybe one day he would have belonged to us as well, but—as it stands, I thank him for not letting you go with him and letting you become lost to us yet again. I call him brave. That he has lost his life in saving you from that portal, I am in his debt. That he thought first of his son-of Henry-I respect. That you tell me now that you love him…I'm, I'm so sorry, Emma."

He wanted to better see her face, but they were so close, her hair slipping in the way of his view.

"How am I supposed to tell Henry?" she asked.

He almost—nearly, somewhere contrary inside himself wanted to laugh. A semi-bitter sort of chuckle that would morph into holding back tears. How am I supposed to tell Henry? she asked. How do I tell my child something hard? How do I bring him through it? she asked him. Him, her father. Sitting beside her on the same level of stair. No lower, no higher, wondering just the same thing. Just as clueless. How am I supposed to tell Emma how to tell Henry? he asked himself. How?

He stole a look over toward where he had last seen Snow. He did not doubt she would know the right answer, the right words to couch it in, the right gesture of tenderness and compassion to rely on in such a moment. But she was not here, not on this stair. And the question had not been asked of her.

In an instant he thought of his mother. How every moment prior to a hard truth had been buffered by a kiss, her hand pulling back the hair she had always complained was in his eyes, her cool mother's lips finding his forehead.

He did not let himself think about a kiss, he simply did it.

He let a moment pass, and then he spoke in answer. "You tell him the truth," he said, his voice resolved. "That his father died thinking of him, loving him. That Neal sacrificed having you with him on his journey and in what was to come so that Henry might have you instead. You tell him that his father's death will be remembered as heroic, whatever other choices he may have made in his life… You tell him that, and you tell him that you told Neal that you loved him."

She sniffled, though it was far from dainty. More of a snuffle. "Why would I tell him that?" she asked, uncertain of his advice. "What good could that possibly do?"

Finally, in it all he had found a moment to smile. "Because children like to know their parents love each other, Emma," he told her. "And because if you said it, it must be true. And a hard truth, like Neal's death, will be softened for Henry somewhat by the truth that love still exists between the two of you."

"What?" she sniffed again, needing a tissue. "Spoonful of sugar?"

He raised his eyebrows in a 'you caught me'. "Tell him—because I imagine you haven't—some stories about when you and Neal were together. When you were happy. He needs to hear those as much as he needs to hear the bad."

"But those stories-" she objected. "So many of them are—not—"

"Suitable for children?" he asked, reminiscing. "As I recall, those were always the ones as children we wanted to hear most."

"Okay," she agreed momentarily, but only conditionally. "So tell me one."

"What, now?" he asked. "Ookay…" and he scrambled as fast as he could to pull out a story of his and Snow's that she could not possibly have known. He didn't try to find one that had any bearing on their present situation, not one that was sure to impart sage-like wisdom for dealing with crisis or death. Just, a story. And he spun the telling of it out as long as he could, adding description and detail he would not usually have fallen back on. Whatever it might take to keep her looking at him.

He was not so foolish as to think he could distract her from this present grief and uncertainty, only that she seemed to take some comfort in the sound of his voice as he told it, the proximity of him on that step as he spoke of her mother, of once upon a time.

And if this was the way in which he could be present for her, slaying neither dragons nor ogres—if this was the rescue she, in this moment needed—not from a high tower, not from a fell beast, he would do it.

David, no longer a prince, father to Emma, never a princess, parenting his child.

…The End…