You Found Me

5. Our Last Hope

NEW YORK CITY, 2022.

An insistent, irritating iPhone alarm rings softly through the air, bringing Emma out of a fitful sleep. She reaches towards her nightstand blindly, knocking a bottle of pills and one of her earplugs to the floor before her groping hand makes contact with her phone and switches off the alarm. Her eyes open slowly, her mind a blank, bleary slate as she waits for it to catch up with the rest of her body.

Instinctively, she looks to her right, but the other side of the bed is messy and empty. She hadn't really been expecting him to be there. Lately, he's been leaving for work earlier than usual, and it's been months since he's woken her up to say goodbye before he leaves. And even though it sounds terrible and she's ashamed to think it at all, she can't say that she misses those moments when she woke up with scratchy lips pressed against her own and a gruff, even obligatory "goodbye, love," before he escaped the apartment. These days, she finds herself employing a daydream that she lives alone in this apartment, working for her own rent and with the freedom to leave whenever she pleases. Sometimes, in that daydream, she finds herself packing her bags and leaving the city--for good--before she even gets dressed for the day. Alone, without needing permission from a single soul.

Well, not exactly alone. A small smile curls the ends of her lips and her cold feet make contact with the carpet. She crosses the room to her crib, and lifts the child from her blankets and toys. "Good morning, Hope," she greets her daughter, her voice dry and scratchy from sleep. Hope reaches up and takes fistfuls of Emma's hair, babbling her own version of good morning, and Emma thinks she heard a few mama's thrown in there too. She lifts her onto her hip, smoothing down the cowlicks in her hair that formed during her sleep.

"This is a miracle baby, Emma," her doctor tells her again. Emma barely registers his voice in her head, her entire body fighting to stay awake and not to shut down from the heavy mixture of drugs, exhaustion, and the aftermath of excruciating pain. "Your body really didn't want this baby, but that little girl persevered."

Fresh tears trail down her cheeks now, a sob escaping her lips as she thinks of countless trips to the hospital, close calls, and the multiple times Emma had completely convinced herself that she'd lost the baby. "She's a miracle," she echoes, her voice so broken and hoarse that her words are nearly inaudible.

"What's her name?"

Emma opens her mouth. Only one name surfaces in her mind, and she wants to--wishes she could--blame it on the drugs. For months now, it's the only name she can give the invisible little fighter inside of her, and she almost says it. She opens her mouth. Regina.

But then Killian's swooping in and taking the screaming infant from the doctor's arms and grinning at Emma. "Hope. Because this little one was our last hope, right, Swan?"

Her throat closes, and she doesn't--I don't--but she's already drifting away before the girl is even in her arms. "Hope," she whispers to test the unfamiliar syllables on her heavy lips, but then she's gone.

-

Emma wipes a lopsided circle with her towel onto the fogged-up mirror and allows herself to study her reflection. Her wet, showered hair hangs in waves around her face and falls down her shoulders and back, darker than usual from the water trapped in the strands. Over time, her hair had grown longer than she'd ever kept it, and though her time in the sun is rather limited, it had become insistently paler and the warm golden hue that used to brighten up her face seemed lost and forgotten. In a moment of self-indulgence, she tries a few different smiles to her own reflection in a sudden attempt to soften the harsh and thin angles of her face. Though she'd only had the baby nearly a year ago, she'd lost the weight much quicker than she'd expected or even meant to; the extra skin at her navel sometimes seems to her the only proof that she'd really given birth.