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Grace asks him, one night - (they have an arrangement, he and her Storybrooke parents, and some nights she stays with him, and they re-kindle all the years) - she asks him, Papa (she calls him Papa, she doesn't call the man who has cared for her all this out of time Papa) -
"Why don't you sing anymore?"
Jefferson doesn't have an answer for this.
"Even after mama died, you sang."
"It's been a long time, Grace," he says to her, sitting on the edge of her bed - that little-girl's bed, white framed and pastel-quilted, which she is too-quickly outgrowing. "It's just been a long time."
His love for her is undying. His presence in this life, this world, feels uneven. He loves her, but it's like a wild horse that he can't reign in, something bolting. What does he do now? He feels a stranger to her. Out of time and out of place. He loves her. He is Papa.
Even when his wife was lost, even then, at night when she whimpered in her cradle, he would lift her against his chest and sing to her in the dimming lamplight. He would do anything for her, give anything.
Jefferson wants to sing for her, to hold her, to teach her the fiddle, the piano, all the things he couldn't do in the enchanted forest, all the things he had so much time to ponder and now, so little time to share.
Grace kisses his cheek and her hair is soft. She takes his answer deep in those luminous eyes, a soft frown not unlike her mother's, a lifetime ago.
"Goodnight, my Grace."
----
Victor visits him regularly, but not on the same days as Grace.
It is not because he's afraid. Of course not.
Victor's hands - the steady, deft hands of a surgeon - arc over the piano keys. Hands that have tended the dead. Hands that have touched him, stroked him, aroused him. Stayed him when his mind slipped its bonds and fled him.
He hesitates. He waits.
Jefferson is not afraid, emphatically not.
Victor will shrug and scatter a tune to the silence, where it will shine like the sun on water, or the instruments of surgery in the hospital glare.
The notes will draw Jefferson to his side at the piano, where they might share a song. Victor sings shyly - steady, but soft, and a little higher than Jefferson would've expected. He closes his eyes and the sound, smooth to his ears and his soul like red tea with cream and honey, spreads warmth into the cold and dull-eyed corners of his self. Victor insists, plinking out a little tune, that Gerhardt - the brother, the younger, taller, darker, so-much-loved and so-now-dead brother - was the better voice.
Gerhardt played with little swords, and Victor took in the little birds with broken wings, the ones his brother brought him from the dust where the older boys had flung stones into the flock.
Jefferson remembers Gerhardt, and could imagine him as a child, his small, sturdy hands bearing out a small, fragile songbird.
What cruelty a broken bird was; desperate for the sky.
Victor plays. Jefferson has not sung for anyone. Not in a long, long time.
Sometime after the breaking of the curse, and the reunion of their bodies, Victor comes to him haggard and rumpled, with a violin case in his hands like an offering.
"I saw the books..." Victor nods toward the living room.
"Papa?"
Jefferson snaps around to her, his Grace, padding in from the kitchen with a glass of chocolate milk that has left a wet mustache dusking her lip.
"Excuse me," she says, as polite as she can be, at ten years, a poor hand at hiding her excitement, "Doctor Whale, is that a fiddle?"
His Grace was always perceptive. Clever as her Papa, and wise as her mother. He thinks she knows much more about him, and Victor, than he's thought she does.
Victor stands just outside the door with the violin in its case, and Grace waits expectantly with her chocolate milk, and the piano is much too silent.
And Jefferson, for the first time in a very long time, doesn't feel so afraid.
----
Storybrooke will be destroyed.
The roads are cracking; the trees thrusting back through pavement, the forest re-asserting itself. Leaves and vines are already encroaching on his house and Grace is crying, hiding under his bed, her hair wild and her eyes wet and glossy and red-rimmed.
She clutches her little stuffed rabbit and he remembers suddenly, dizzyingly, the day he had to tell her that mama was gone, mama was never coming back.
The town will be swallowed into the earth, as if it never was.
Everyone in it will die.
He knows this. In his bones. Like a ship that is sinking, like the traveler lost in the mountains, there is only the hours before the inevitable. There is only the time for the believers to pray, for the sane to weep, for the mad to stare fate in the face and think goddamn you, I will be with my daughter.
"Papa, Papa, what's going on?!"
She cries to him, and he squeezes beneath the bed with her and he holds her and he should be saying my Grace, my darling Gracie, we'll be alright, it's only a storm, we'll be just fine.
But the ivy is already straining at the windows, and Jefferson can smell earth deep in his sinuses, the loamy, sweet, choking scent of decay and new life, decay and new life.
"Papa," she cries to him.
He holds her.
"My Grace, my Grace, oh, Grace, I love you, Papa loves you."
Together, beneath the grand bed, huddled in the lush carpet, they wait for whatever is inevitable, as the town around them thrashes in the jaws of the world that surrounds it.
"Papa."
And after a long, long time, it just.
Stops.
----
When night falls Victor comes to the house without a violin, only himself, ordinary, without tie or crisply ironed trousers or long white coat. Only himself, his ordinary, outsider self.
Grace clings to his side, which is just fine, because he's never letting her go again.
Victor at the door. Victor looking dazed.
He would've had no one, Jefferson thinks. Brother and father and mother dead, his world lost to him. Where was he, when the town began to crack? Was he in his basement office in the hospital, the door locked twice, his pager perhaps dashed to pieces against the cement wall?
Was he alone, then?
A long time ago - a lifetime, and another world removed - Jefferson made a clumsy, stupid mistake, and left a beautiful woman (who loved him - who loved her daughter) too long among the wild things, and she died alone. Her skin was cool as moonlight when he came back to her, panting, hands shaking and sweating around the medicine that would've saved her.
Victor stays him when his mind deserts him; and when he wishes he could leave this and all the worlds behind, reminds him of Grace.
And it's Grace who reaches out first.
"Doctor Whale?"
"Yes, my dear?"
She holds her bunny - her Thomas - out, its ear lopsided and ripped half-off in the chaos. "Thomas hurt his ear, Doctor Whale."
Victor's face draws down, deep, but he crouches, and he takes Thomas in his gentle hands. "Oh," he says, his brows lifting, expression brightening, "He's a tough little fellow isn't he? Get him fixed up in no time."
Grace almost smiles. Jefferson feels like his heart can finally beat again.
In the living room, Victor takes needle and thread and, with extraordinary care, returns Thomas the Rabbit's ear to its former prominent glory. He places a small bandaid on the 'wound' and gives Grace a quick run-down of proper aftercare, mostly involving extra hugs and carrots. Victor's eyes are tired and sunk deep, but he smiles at her, and he smiles at Jefferson.
Grace hugs her bunny, and Jefferson takes the violin, the gift from Victor, and begins to play Gerhardt's song, which Grace has never heard before. Slow, cautious notes.
"Do you know this one?" Victor asks. "My mother, she taught it to me and my brother, and it was his favorite."
"You taught Papa?" She asks, muffled in the bunny's curly fur.
"I taught your papa, too."
"Doctor Whale," Grace says, very serious, her expression much too old for her age, "Papa doesn't sing anymore."
Victor looks up, and smiles at him, and Jefferson plays from the start, and Victor begins to sing it - it's a sweet song, a hymn of some kind, in the language of Victor's land. Victor has never told him what the words themselves mean but it doesn't matter. Victor shifts to the piano - and Grace slips over to put one arm around Jefferson.
Victor sings, and then begins to play, and as the notes of the violin fade into the notes of the piano, Victor's voice falls away and leaves Jefferson's, deeper, a little more raw in its way, like the forest, like the deep earth beneath the roots. Dark and full of life.
The night's come down and the lights burn soft. Jefferson sings, bolstered by Victor's encouragement, and Grace, as the last notes fall into the silence, crosses the carpet, and puts her arms around Victor's shoulders.
"Can you teach me, too?"