Ficlet: Faith and Fantasy (1/1)

Another response to a Facebook prompt: "Once Upon a Time - Indescribable." I'm not publishing it as an exercise because this is actually the second version of the piece and as such, I've done a more intense editing than I usually do for the exercises. That said, it's a little less polished than normal for me, but I kind of liked the rough way it was reading.

Title: Faith and Fantasy
Summary: That was when her streak of taking things in stride for the sake of the mission had come to a crashing halt.
Word Count: 1011, so sayeth Works.
Spoilers: The following takes place during 1x22, "A Land Without Magic."
Characters: Emma Swan, with mentions of Regina, Mr. Gold, Henry, and August.
Rating/Warning: PG for brief language.
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I borrowed the characters for a bit but I'll return them when I'm done!

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Emma Swan could handle Regina Mills being the Evil Queen. In point of fact, she had been thinking of the illustrious Mayor Mills as an evil witch for a good long time now. Emma had bestowed the title on her metaphorically, of course, but still.

Mr. Gold being Rumpelstiltskin … well, that was more than a little unexpected. However, after a moment of silent boggling and a you’re-kidding-me-with-this-shit look at Regina only to find Regina most emphatically not kidding her with this shit, Emma had handled that new truth pretty well, too. Gold, she’d thought when her tumbling mind finally made the connection between the man’s false name and his real one. Rumpelstiltskin’s name was Gold. Clever.

And then came kicking in August Booth’s door at the bed and breakfast and seeing him lying on the bed with a man’s head and wooden arms. That was when her streak of taking things in stride for the sake of the mission had come to a crashing halt.

Emma had stood stock-still, her thoughts zooming in and out and over and under. What in the hell was happening? He’d had hands – real hands – before. Hadn’t he? Of course he had. So, what, he was … turning to wood? Why? Then their previous conversation had tickled the back of her mind.

“You’re asking me to believe that you are a fairy tale character?”

“Pinocchio.”

“Right, of course, Pinocchio. Explains all the lying.”

Clearly, he hadn’t lied to her, not about this. For whatever reason, a grown-up Pinocchio was turning back into a wooden puppet. The proof was right in front of her, staring her in the face. It always had been; she’d just been too stubborn to see it. She had frantically searched her memory banks for what Pinocchio was supposed to do in order to remain a real boy but had come up empty.

So Emma had asked him what she had to do in order to stop it, and he’d told her to break the curse. Which was just great. If she knew how to do that, maybe they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

She had sat with him, willing him to hang on, begging him to tell her what to do, while the wood claimed his neck and face. When the light went out in his eyes, she had gripped his hand, a hand once flesh and blood and warm and now wooden and rough and cold, dropped her head, and let the tears come. She had failed him. He’d had nothing but faith in her, and she had let him down.

If only she had believed sooner. If only she had listened to him. To Jefferson. To Henry.

Oh God, Henry. That kid was lying in a hospital bed and hooked up to machine upon machine all because he ate a poisoned apple on purpose to save her. To prove to her that the curse was real, that magic was real. When he woke up, she was going to have some choice words for him for that little stunt. After she wrapped him in the tightest hug imaginable, that is.

But none of that could happen unless he woke up. “You can save Henry,” August had told her with his last breath. He had believed in her right until the very end. Come to think of it, right before he ate the turnover, Henry had said he believed in her, too.

August and Henry, Henry and August. Both of them believing in her for reasons completely unknown to her. How in the hell was she supposed to do this? Any of it?

Then the pieces shifted and light dawned. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what to do. Faith wasn’t about knowing. The point of faith was to believe.

Henry had faith in her, and she couldn’t fail him the way she’d failed August. That badass little kid had put his life in her hands, damn it, and she was going to save him.

Emma had swallowed the rest of her tears, taken a deep breath, and lifted her head with renewed determination. She owed it to Henry. She owed it to August. Once the dust settled, she would make it up to August somehow. She would find some way to make it right. It was too late to do anything for him right now, but it wasn’t too late for Henry. And it wasn’t too late for Storybrooke.

So now here she was, standing in front of the boarded-up library in the center of town with Prince Charming’s sword – her father’s sword, Gold, er, Rumpelstiltskin had said – in her hand, waiting for the Evil Queen to tell her what she had to do in order to find magic.

She couldn’t make this stuff up if she tried.

Wait a second. If her father was Prince Charming, that made her a princess.

Hadn’t every little girl once hoped that she was secretly a princess? Emma remembered wishing it herself, back when her first foster family returned her to the system. She remembered clutching her blanket to her chest and wishing as hard as she could that her parents would come for her. That her real parents were a king and queen from a faraway land and that they would reclaim their little princess and take her back to a palace full of riches and a stable full of ponies.

It hadn’t taken her very long to give up that fantasy. But now, minus the palace and stable, that little-girl fantasy from twenty-five years ago was her reality.

She shook her head. It was all so ridiculous, so off-the-charts insane that it had actually circled around to making some semblance of sense. Kind of like how if you kept a piece of clothing long enough it was called either retro or vintage and became trendy again.

After all, this was just another fairy tale, right? A modern-day fairy tale. And it was time to take her place as a modern-day fairy-tale heroine.