Emma Swan and the (Rather) Abrupt Realization That There is Truth in All Stories

Wishes, Emma muses as she surveys the scene before her, are utter bullshit.

It would be really cool if Henry would just - for once - listen to her, Regina, Snow, David or anyone else that doesn't suffer from the incurable disease of being a ten-year-old-idiot.

But no, Henry had to watch that movie and get a bug up his butt about asking everyone in town if they'd ever heard of the Goblin King.  He'd dragged Emma from displaced townsperson to townsperson, demanding to know if there was any validity in the idea of David Bowie in tight pants.

Well, he hadn't phrased it quite like that, but Emma really wasn't above looking.  She’d been a teenager once, after all.  And David Bowie was fine as all get out.  Even though he’s old as fuck these days.

The problem is that everyone seems scared to death of the man, everyone save his mom, naturally. 

Regina had raised an eyebrow and sat back on her heels, regarding Emma with something akin to confusion.  She was out in her back garden, a wheelbarrow full of bulbs beside her and a trowel in her hand.  "He is real," she says, and won't say anything more, no matter how much Henry pesters her.  It's really quite annoying how tight-lipped Regina is about most things in that world, but when she pulls Emma aside later and hisses that Henry is never to summon that creature under her watch, Emma thinks that maybe, just maybe, Regina is afraid of the Goblin King.

So the only question, then, is why.

And Henry, who obviously gets his colossal idiot genes from his father (not that Emma is thinking kindly about that asshole ever again, mind), just has to go and say the magic words before Emma, Snow or David can lunge forward and clamp a hand over his mouth.

It's sort of hilarious, in retrospect, that he demanded that the goblins come and take Emma away, rather than his mom, Rumpelstiltskin, Cora, Hook, that weird yuppie flatlander who'd nearly killed Belle or some other bad guy they weren’t aware of yet.  No, Henry wants the goblins to take Emma away.  Right now. To prove a point.

For a minute after he makes his wish nothing happens, and Emma feels herself let out a shaky sigh of relief.  Maybe it was just a movie after all, Regina's certainly not above fucking with Emma for a laugh.  She's got half a mind to call the once-Evil Queen and demand an explanation, when the wind seems to pick up outside and Emma's staring, slack-jawed into the night.  The windows are rattling on their hinges now, and the one over Snow's bed flies open without its usual shoulder-breaking hesitation.

Emma doesn't care that Regina's evil, that her mom's in town and probably corrupting her, that this whole thing is really her fault.  She types out a message on her phone with shaking fingers as Henry pulls out of the worried hand that Snow has on his shoulder.

The man that appears in the window is not, regrettably, David Bowie.  Emma scowls and David's already lunged across the room to pull Henry back and behind him, his sword held in front of him in defiance.

"Come now, James, that's no way to greet a king," Comes a deep, clipped voice of a shadowy figure that's blown in with the wind and the rain, all over Snow's nice white bed sheets.  Emma takes a step forward, but Snow's got her arm around her wrist, holding her back with a frightened look on her face.  "Even if I'm not here for you."

The man turns then, his cloak's hood falling down to rest upon his broad shoulders.  Emma is at once struck by how beautiful he is, and how inhuman that beauty is.  His eyebrows grow in high arches and are so white they seem almost silver, and his face is far more youthful than it was in the movie.  His hair is yellow, blue and silver all at once, and it hurts Emma's eyes to look at him for too long.  She wonders if this is because he isn’t human at all.  She’s read stories of the fair folk, but he doesn’t look at all like the Blue Fairy, so she’s a little confused.