ataraxionlogs | open-ish | i'm just trying to find my way to you

One year ago, I didn’t even believe in magic.

[ Sometimes, she’s still not sure she does. ]

You’ve got a long definition of ‘new.’ How the hell does a fairy stop believing in themselves?

[ Tink comes to mind, of course, but not believing IN herself is different than thinking her own species didn't exist. ]

Like I said - my father was adopted out of the family. We're descended from Mr Haughty, there, but through a relationship he had with a human woman. I didn't have to 'stop' believing in something I never knew. Given I only found out because the world became one great slow-moving clusterfuck--

( a grimace. )

It's easy to still be new to something when you've got fuck all to go on besides whatever you can figure out for yourself without drawing attention, that's all.

[ She opens her mouth like she’s ready to be shocked that no one told her or raised her like a fucking fairy, except—

A relationship he had with a human woman. Emma’s eyes shut and she borderline grimaces. Neal had managed to go eleven years without meeting Henry: if Emma had her way, he’d have gone even longer. It’s pretty easy for men to just bail out or never know about something like that. ]

Sorry to hear it.

( ilde's great-grandparents had priorities, and their priorities were more about maintaining the respectable position of their family and less about someone telling the inconvenient baby they had to get rid of about his heritage. unfortunately, all of the people involved in that are now dead and gone and there's no satisfaction to be had in picking it apart - ilde tries to be grateful for the fact she ever got to know her father's biological family even a little, for knowing that aelfraed would have been with them if he could have been and that he might still live, might be somewhere she could find him.

in isolation in the south of france, that's a little difficult. still, she does try. )

She was married, ( with a shrug. ) It wasn't difficult for her to keep her, um, indiscretion apart from where she wanted her family to be. But my grandmother and my uncle-- they had contact with him, and that's where I eventually got the details from, from them.

It is what it is, you know? You make the best of things.

At least you had a family line to trace back.

[ The minute it comes out of her mouth, Emma feels a little guilty for it. That’s the old Emma. The rough around the edges, adversity olympics Emma. She doesn’t want to do that anymore. Her life sucked. Big surprise. She’s trying to move past it, but the active effort isn’t always enough.

Still. She feels the need to explain. ]

My … family wasn’t really accessible. I got pushed around foster care. Didn’t manage to find my real parents until last year.

I'm sorry, ( genuinely, and with no offense taken at the initial bite - like, fair enough. for as much bullshit as there's been in ilde's life, she's not ignorant of how many safety nets she's had, over the years. her father's money, her husband's willingness to cover for her, the fact that she had living relations to contact, even if they didn't tell her the truth until it was almost too late.

she's lucky, in a lot of ways. it's just the ugliest parts of herself come from illness and not hardship. makes life interesting, when there's more hardship to go around. )

My father got lucky-- when he was taken away from his parents, he was given to a couple who couldn't conceive that their parents knew. He was always such a princess about them trying to contact him, though-- so many people who'd kill to know where they came from, he didn't want a bar of it.

When the place you come from is that unbelievable, I’m not sure I can blame him.

[ It’s certainly crossed her mind to turn and run. In so many ways, she feels like she doesn’t belong amongst them. While they have their fairytale history and their magic, Emma doesn’t engage it. She grew up in the real world where none of it was possible, where there were no happy endings. Letting go of that isn’t as easy as breaking some curse.

What's more, that real world doesn't look so bad by comparison. What good is a happy ending if it gets taken away at every turn? She found her parents, then got swept away to another world. They got back, and Cora tried to destroy them. Her mother's grief had almost crushed her, and then Regina and Gregmara tried to destroy the town. Since that, there had been Pan, and—And it's too much, sometimes. ]

For him it was just- loyalty to his mother. I got that, I tried to respect it for a long time, but-- you know, he can't make the decision for everybody.

( emery'd been happy with his adoptive family; he'd been the miracle child, the son they'd always thought they'd never have. his parents - particularly his mother - had doted on him and he'd felt, and made clear that he felt, it'd be disloyal to go looking for anything else. he'd turned his back on the idea of ever being anything but their son long before fairies got involved in the mix.

blandly wry, a moment later-- )

Then he accidentally enchanted a ballroom full of people and said 'oh, fuck' into a microphone and had to leave Italy or be burned as a witch, I guess we don't always get to choose for ourselves, either.

( it's pretty horrible (because she's not kidding, he might not have lived through that), but be honest: that's also kind of funny. )

Edited (every??? emery your name is dumb it makes me typos) 2014-09-21 05:09 (UTC)

[ Oh. Good.

That level of crazy, granted, sounds about on par with Greg and Tamara, and yet Emma finds herself wanting less and less to be connected to any of it. That’s the kind of danger that awaits her with these fairytales. Not just her, but more importantly Henry. And they’re all expecting her to fix it any time it happens. ]

How do you accidentally enchant anything?

One of the things we have in common with sirens is...you know, the music. Thing.

( ilde tries to avoid drawing attention to the fact she can mind-control people with her singing voice or other musical talents - she can do it without singing, too, but it's harder. this is not something that you generally want to discuss casually with people, who will, generally, look at you a bit differently.

but emma can probably take the thrust of what she's talking about, all the same. )

My father's a composer and musician who's spent most of his life performing for charity; he probably never had an inkling of why his causes always raised the precise goal figure, but there you go, that was...a really simple thing, you know. He cared about something passionately, so for a little while, people listening to him play cared about it, too, and gave accordingly.

He got a power boost, it got a little bit - weirder. I don't know the exact details.

( she makes a face. )

I can tell you from my extremely experienced position of six more years than you, none of that bullshit gets any less bizarre, by the way.

Yeah, no kidding. I just dropped into Neverland to team up with Tinkerbell to fight Peter Pan. I’m about full-up on ridiculous.

[ Still, she sighs, scrubbing a hand over her face. The music thing. That’s, at least, good to keep in mind for if it ever comes up here. The more she knows, the better equipped she’ll be to handle it when it happens. Maybe. That’s the theory, anyway. She still isn’t sure she wants to know half as much about any of this magic bullshit as she already does. ]

( philosophically: ) I always thought he was a little prick in that book.

Seriously?

[ Emma was a Peter Pan stan and her childhood has been ruined. It's an orphan thing. She used to call herself a Lost Girl in idealistic, hopeful solidarity when she was just a kid. Now, having heard Rumplestiltskin's father use it as a weapon, it makes her want to crawl out of her own skin. ]

Oh, come on! He was terrible. I mean, he was fantastic, but I always wondered how many lost boys he'd probably just sort of got into trouble and forgotten about because they weren't fun any more.

Wendy was wonderful.

( how quickly the mighty magic moms have fallen. what is this conversation. )

Wendy was a little traitor who was ready to sell us out. She was working for him!

[ Sorry to crush that dream. ]

Real life never lives up to storybooks.

( so unfair. )

That's why they call it real.

[ #cynic. ]

Not always worse, just, you know. God forbid anybody think they're prepared for anything.

( depending on the stories you're reading, after all, fairytales can be pretty fucking horrifying. or they were when people were reading them to her, as a child. she refused to wear red shoes under any circumstances until she was well into her adolescence.

just in case. )

I guess that's what happens when there's a billion of us writing the story instead of just one.

[ Except fairytales aren't just stories for her. They're her family history. The mental block between her and accepting that fact remains, however. ]

And there were already plenty of cooks in that kitchen. The sheer variety of versions must get a bit -

( little gesture. like emma's already said, peter pan and wendy: not exactly as advertised. proper fairytales-- she'd be hard pressed to think of one that has just one singular accepted text.

sifting through all that by necessity sounds a lot less fun. )

I found a reliable source.

[ Even if she still doesn't know who that source came from. The book is as much a mystery as anything else at this point. ]

( wryly: ) Just one?

( it's a knowing sort of wryness, not mocking; ilde's got her trustworthy source, too, but like a single book without an author, she has gervase's records but no gervase to clarify them for her. )

I'll let you know if it turns into a collectible set. But for now? Yeah. One.

Me, too.

( so it goes. )

I guess we just try to be reliable ourselves.

( it's a bit tentative, like she's not sure emma won't dismiss her presumption at grammatical inclusion, but well-meant; it's not often ilde encounters someone in an even slightly comparable position, back home, spending more of her time trying to obscure the fact that she's pretty much winging this shit. even the kind of fleeting sort of 'yeah, this shit' bonding of a glance that's never followed up would be sort of nice. )

[ She hesitates.

More specifically, she waffles, actually leaning away for a minute as the uncertainty buffets her expression. Emma struggles with trust, and even moreso she struggles to trust people from some fairytale world that she can only barely accept as real.

But she's trying. Ilde's similarities only make her fight harder—on the one hand, Emma knows all the terrible things that she's done herself, which makes her more inclined to believe that others like her are capable of something precisely that bad, but she also knows that she forgave herself for it. And so did Henry.

Finally, she drums up a smile. ]

I guess so.

[ Reluctantly, she steps forward, reaching out one hand. ]

I'm Emma.

open-ish | i'm just trying to find my way to you

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