Who: Emma Swan and Neal Cassidy When: Thursday Evening (Well after the 4th celebration!) Where: 2 Lacemine Street, Emma's home. What:Can we just call it a clusterfuck of everything? Things. Lots of things. Rating: PG-13? R? TBD? Status: Completed
This couldn't be happening. Emma wanted to desperately believe that. She should have never crawled out of the overly comfortable bed in the strange bedroom. Going back to sleep would have brought her back to the drafty pirate ship she had been on just moments before this. Now here she was once more having lost Henry and her parents, and track of three of the most questionable individuals she had ever met.
Her sudden movement out of the bed hadn't been the most graceful and had rewarded her with a neatly-forming bruise to the left knee. The house was unfamiliar and when she had stepped outside, the neighborhood was just as strange. It was all too perfect and lacked the familiar aged look of Storybrooke. Either something had gone horribly wrong with the portal or Regina, Gold, or Hook had tricked them all. The motive was unclear, though. None of them had anything to gain by separating them. There were the few loose string theories that Emma could easily follow, but things weren't adding up. Perhaps if she had landed in a strange land filled with two and three-head mythical creatures, her suspicions would have been raised. This was not like that, though. To the plain eye, it looked completely normal.
It was just before she had stumbled upon a message from Neal that she had done a quick sweep of the house. Tucking the credit card into the pocket of her jeans, she had been thumbing through the paperwork when the exchange started.
Emma had watched Neal disappear forever. He had let go and she knew she would never forgive herself for it. She should have held on and she didn't. He was here, though, and quite alive. Was this some form of punishment? Purgatory? Had she actually died attempting to use a portal again? Had everything been some crazy dream that she was finally waking up from? If only it could have been the latter.
Five minutes. Five minutes. That was no problem. Should she set out some lemonade? Did she even have any lemonade? It seemed like she should, but what did one offer the man you still loved who you assumed had died being sucked into a magical portal just moments ago?
Pausing in mid-step as she left the bedroom, Emma placed a hand against her forehead. "I swear if this stuff wasn't true, I'd consider committing myself right now."