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For a land of endless peril and wonder, the Enchanted Forest is surprisingly… two-dimensional. The early Disney animators were clearly onto something, allowing dynamic shapes to shift across vague, picturesque backgrounds without ever feeling a need to really flesh things out. Emma can remember thinking that Storybrooke—name, like everything else, as on the nose as the plot of Pinocchio—was a strangely literal town, even setting aside Henry’s grandiose interpretations. People lacked a sense of humor, for one thing, with the dubious exception of Mr. Gold. Minute dramas were larger than life; smoke and mirrors were painfully real. Emotions existed too plentifully, unchecked by the barriers of world-weariness and caution that Emma had learned to build so well.
Now, she knows that Storybrooke (pre-curse) was damn well subtle compared to all this sorcerous hogwash. Ogres, roaring and raving! Sworn fealty and magical wardrobes! A mother her own age who speaks almost exclusively in motivational quotes!
All things considered, it’s a wonder that her parents didn’t name her Hope. That would have been perfectly in line with their heroic delusions, and even more ill-fitting for their hand-me-down-clad foster-kid daughter than Emma, a name which, depending on etymological tracing, means universal or healer or whole.
Emma has spent her whole life shaping invisible armor around a hollow core. She’s anything but whole.
And she’s already laboring under a fresh layer of bad mood today, the day that they dig a lone survivor out of a heap of massacred corpses. Already regretting her most recent bonding moment with Mary M—Snow White, who squeezed her shoulder this morning in the chilly dawn and said, in a reverent whisper,
“Cora didn’t defeat us. It was a setback, but she just proved we’re stronger together.” Then, with a glint of the old Mary Margaret in her fairy-princess eyes, she added, “Girl Power!”
Was Emma’s fleeting wish for a little testosterone heard by some vengeful fairytale demigod, such that she’s now gazing down into a pair of lying blue eyes, feeling the heat of long-smoldering wrath rise in her gut?
It’s a bad day to be Emma Swan, sure.
But it’s also a bad day to be an overly self-assured, literally underhanded pirate.
“You know, there’s no real hurry to get where we’re going,” Hook points out maddeningly, never keeping his voice quite as low as co-conspirators trekking over unknown terrain might deem advisable. “At least, that’s the impression you ladies are giving me. Never been held to a forced march, eh, your highness?”
“We have to go slower,” Snow counters coldly. “To keep an eye on you.”
“Oh, I’m an eyeful and no doubt about it,” he purrs. He says more crap after that, too, but Emma tunes him out.
She wishes she wasn’t so… raw. She hadn’t thought the almost-28-year-old Emma Swan was to be envied, but now she’s questioning how accurately she gauged her own loneliness back then. Was it so bad, to be wandering the city in search of suitable marks, living off frozen dinners and relying on early morning workouts to give her a sense of structure?
Of course it was bad. You didn’t have Henry.
But she doesn’t have Henry now. The thought of him has a way of altering the lines of her frown, revealing things she doesn’t want to reveal. She can feel the change on her face. So she presses it all back into shadowy oblivion, conscious that she’s being watched by many eyes.
Everyone looks to her. As hope, as leader, as enemy.
She doesn’t feel like staring down her mother in a way that might seem aggressive—their bond is, in Snow’s eyes, growing stronger by the minute, and why burst that bubble before it's absolutely necessary?—so Emma satisfies herself by casting a stony glance at Hook.
He has fallen silent, by now, accepting that nobody cares to listen to him. When he looks back at her, for just a second, there’s a flash of something that isn’t a lie.
Answer me, that look demands, and the heat in her does: a flare of that former heat, only not as wrathful as it should be.
Emma chooses not to understand it. She needs to keep her options open, for now.
She presses on through the blank-walled forest, reaching for an ending.