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*[emma swan is loved; it is not enough]*
It’s because I love you.
She likes the way they make her feel; warm, precious, a thing to be kept. But she’s not. She’s not being kept. She’s being returned like an item broken, worth the currency of refund or exchange.
It’s because I love you.
And it’s not a lie. It’s not. Because he is sincere, all docile pastel and the freckles of a robin’s egg. It has never been a lie, these words on him. A truth taking her by the hand and leading her to the home of the unwanted.
It’s because I love you.
He loves her. He will not keep her. He will not keep her because his wife wanted something else; someone else. Younger or innocent or better. She wasn’t told and does not know. Razor cuttings to a quilt, the only impression of a woman who looked at her and saw something else.
It’s because I love you.
And she believes him, but she wants to take her cracked heart and mend it on her own merit. Not because she’s being forced by distance. By time. Why is it so very wrong to love him back?
*[she is young and in love with an idea]*
Do you love me?
A 50’s starlit is crooning to empty seats and they are two bodies dancing in headlights. It’s not just them, it’s a sky of stars and summer’s heat and limbs grasping for touch. It’s cicadas and the wind and something new.
Emma asked him once: do you love me?
And he had told her yes and had known it to be a lie.
She had told her mirror it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t love him, after all.
And the mirror had swirled to her these truths: it matters; she doesn’t love him; it matters that she doesn’t love him. But she found out other things as well: she doesn’t hate him or his touch.
This is why she will tell him yes; why she will let him drive her into summer’s night; why she will pull at his belt and at her own.
But the mirror had shown her something else besides: I love; I can love; I love myself; she was nothing but a youth drowning in lies.
*[that first night, emma asks a question]*
It was a stupid question, really. Subjective and imprecise. Do you love him? Emma needn’t have bothered waiting for the answer; of course it would ring with doubt, of course it would hold the tremble and taint of falsehood.
Love. A feeling, a notion, of holding one above-- Above what? In comparison to what? Love was a catchall phrase, implications infinite. Love is not an involuntary action, it is conscious decision and action in conviction. Something done again and again or something that is not done, but it is never something that is always done. She should not have asked a question of love; has never liked an answer yet.
Do you love him?
Him. Here too, implications infinite. The conversation had been about the boy (The Boy, not her son. He hadn’t been hers long enough for him to be anything near that), but there was no name to bind the notion and compel the thought. Keep the notion of love, change the notion of the ‘him.’ She has been lied to in such a way before, from one who could not stop seeing her as someone else.
Do you love him?
Do you. Immediate action, present tense; here-and-now. A verb to dictate character. Is it too singular, too absolute, when paired with everything else? Variables unaccounted for, variables denied; could one do a thing in singular? No, she knows this as improbable. Thought and mind and body hardly ever move as one, but such wording has room embedded into its sound and shape and this is not what trips her up.
Do you love him? She had asked, but the meaning has been molded anew. Discrepancy between what she means and how it is perceived has always been the tripping point.
Yes, Regina had said, of course I do.
And the words coat the mayor dark, cling to skin and bone and paint these words a lie. A truth. A lie.
Emma Swan should have asked a different question.
*[mary-margret does not love a married man]*
I’ve not fallen in love with David!
There is nothing to say; not on this or for this. There is no way to fix the tremble in her being as color swirls a halo. She doesn’t tell Mary-Margret yes, yes you have because it’s a lie preferable to the truth.
It doesn’t matter if you have Emma almost told her. She would have meant it. It hardly matters to her if Mary-Margret tumbled herself into Florence Nightingale. It’s not her love that would cause problems. Not when scandal and rumor are so quick to ruin in this town. The problem wouldn’t be love; it never has been. It has always been what one does with it.
Be smart, Emma tells her instead.