IC: CONTACT (EUDIO)

[royalpassport]

❝ I'm not here. Leave a message. ❞

[ And now, thanks to Emma: ]

❝ Send me a message, and I'll respond when I get around to it. ❞

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[royalpassport]

[ On some level, he knows Emma's likely right. At least when Snow told him about his future, it was some comfort. But he'd asked her for that update, and besides, who but Regina would assume bad intentions from Snow White?

It's the subsequent comments thrown his way that have been needling at him. The questions, the casual assumptions that he's already been reunited with her. As if he'd ever leave her again if he already got her back. Not only does it leave him feeling her absence all the more painfully, but it also makes him feel like a fool for coming here at all. Like he's keeping himself from a bright and happy future, prolonging his misery by being here.

So he has to scoff at her talk of their Storybrooke neighbors trying to offer him some assurance. And he's about to dismiss everything she says until the last words that Emma says. Preparing himself.

It strikes a nerve. He'd mentioned something to Harley the other day, during her house-call.

(Yeah, he has a madwoman for a therapist. Of course he would.)

Jefferson stops fiddling with the cup, dropping his hands flat on the table, and the dark expression softens, resentment giving way to something more vulnerable. ]

I worry sometimes. [ He doesn't know why he's confiding in Emma about this, considering their past. Maybe because even then, when he was ranting and waving a gun around, he was unloading his grief onto her. ] That when I see Grace again-- my Grace-- [ Not Paige. ] That I can't be any sort of father to her at all. That's the future I imagine sometimes.

[ That he can't take care of her, or he'll scare her. That she'll want to go back to the neighbors he'd left her with back when Regina wanted to go to Wonderland. They were, after all, her parents during the curse. Stable, kind, good people. Not like him. ]

[sheriffing]

I know.

[What Emma has faced with Henry isn't exactly the same. That transition to parent from something else - Jefferson is already her father, Grace knows him in that role, but he has to worry about some of the same things she does. Is she good enough to call herself a parent? Does she make him proud? Has she let him down? Henry deserves everything a person has to give, and she's already screwed it up by lying about Neal.

He'll forgive her, she knows he will, but it still feels like she's working from behind. She hasn't had a mother for long enough to know how to be one.]

But I've been on both sides of this.

[ She's been the parent who left her child for their own good, and the daughter abandoned to a similar situation. It sucks, there's no way around that. It's still easier to believe in the forgiveness of a child than it is to think about where she is thirty years later. And even now, it's working. She's learning how to be what Henry needs, her parents are doing the same for her. Jefferson may not be a prince riding in on a white horse, but he's a father. One who, twenty-eight years later, was still fighting to be with his child.]

If someone had told me when I was ten years old, that my parents never stopped fighting for me, that would have been worth everything.

[ That's a starting point, isn't it? It's a path that leads to stable, to good. He loves her, he won't fail her.]

I mean, I've had some choice names for you. [Kidnapping her and Mary Margaret will do that, alright?] But I've been through enough to know that we become someone else when we're desperate.

The future's not that far off, you don't have to fight as hard anymore. Just take some time, try to figure out who you are now that you know what you're going home to.

[ She has a feeling that if he does that, the transition will be smoother than he's expecting.]

[royalpassport]

[ Both sides. That's enough to have Jefferson looking at Emma with renewed focus. That's right, she's been reunited with her parents after being apart for the entirety of the curse. The circumstances of their respective separations may not have been identical-- Prince Charming and Snow White had far more noble reasons for abandoning their daughter, whereas Jefferson had simply been a fool-- but Emma, more than anyone, would know what it's like to be in both his shoes and Grace's.

The corner of his mouth twitches a little when she says she had some names for him, and it's hard to say if Jefferson's about to laugh or scowl, but he does, at least, appear somewhat grateful in the end. Now, at least, she understands; it's not like before, when he felt like he was going madder and madder trying to explain things to her that she wasn't ready to believe in.

His voice is soft, a little reluctant, but he manages to at least express some of the gratitude he's feeling once he absorbs everything Emma just said, particularly about how she would've felt, as a child, to know that her parents fought for her. ] Thank you.

[ But the perspective does bring him to another question, one that's been lingering at the edges of his mind, though he usually doesn't have it in him to really voice it to himself or others. ] Did you ever hate them? Your parents. Before you knew...

[ He doesn't know, exactly, how Grace might have come to regard him in the time between he left her and when Regina cast the curse. So much could have changed. ]