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kelyon · 1 year ago

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Nephila 6: Abandoned

This is the fic where Rumpelstiltskin is a giant talking spider. And so is Neal.

In this chapter, Emma and Neal get to know each other.

Read on AO3

“Tell me again why you think I’m crazy,” Emma Swan said to Hat Man. “I want you to hear the words coming out of your mouth.”

Hat Man just chuckled and leaned back into his lawn chair. He took a swig of beer and smiled down at the fire pit in front of them. It was dark now, and getting cold--maybe into the sixties. The group had a campfire most nights, there was always something around to burn.

“I will tell you, Miss Em-maculate.” Hat Man’s lips smacked as he talked. “Firstly, I cast no aspersions on your sanity. As far as I’m concerned, you are among the soundest of all the members of our little troupe.”

Emma looked around at the motley crew of half-dressed druggies and wannabe hippies that made up her closest friends. The boys were divided between the knife nerds and the pyros, who were passing the time by finding things to throw into the fire pit and high-fiving each other when something exploded. Most of the girls were either smoking grass or braiding weeds into their hair. In a dark spot away from the fire, Killian and half a dozen other people--boys and girls together--were all making out with each other and rolling around in the dirt.

Yeah, Emma probably was the sanest person here.

Hat Man went on. “I am merely dubious as to the veracity of your allegations! How could it possibly be that a creature of heretofore alien genus and perhaps entirely undiscovered phylum be found here in our fair Sunshine State, when the only other known sighting was in that vast southern terra nullius?”

Emma ground her teeth. The trouble with Hat Man was figuring out whether he was too smart or too stupid.

“You said you saw a thing like what I saw when you were in Australia.” She lowered her voice. “You know, a spider-thing.”

Hat Man laughed so loud that everybody looked up from what they were doing--though Killian didn’t bother to take his hand out from under Penny’s bikini top.

“I saw all of my spider’s things.” He tried to elbow Emma in the ribs, but their chairs were too far apart. So instead he tilted his head back far enough for his top hat to fall on the ground. “He was wonderful!”

God, she did not want to think about what he meant by that.

“So you think the only reason I didn’t see a spider… man-thing here in Florida is because you saw one in Australia?”

“Naturally!”

“You don’t think there could be more than one of them? Or that the one you saw could have moved?”

“What? Rented a U-Haul?”

“No!” This was so stupid! “I mean like, he migrated or something.”

A drunken voice floated over the yard: “Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?”

Emma ignored the question. It was a line from some movie she had never seen but everybody always talked about.

Hat Man had finally noticed that his hat had fallen off. He leaned his chair backward to grab it off the ground. He dusted off the sand and set it on his head.

“The individual I met couldn’t be tempted to venture out into the sunlight, let alone traverse the globe! Besides, do you think he could fly?”

“He is a giant talking spider!” Emma hissed. “He could do anything! I know for a fact Neal can swim.”

Hat Man did shrug at that, and nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps it could be,” he admitted. “As a wise woman once said, there’s plenty goes on that we don’t know about.”

“Would it help if you saw him for yourself?” she tried. “Would you believe me then?”

“My darlingest mademoiselle, what does it matter whether or not I believe you?”

“Well…” Emma huffed. Why did it matter so much? Hat Man was just as crazy as everyone else around here. Killian had already seen the spider-thing. No one else in the group cared. She didn’t have to prove herself to anyone.

Anyone except herself.

“Well.” She faked as much confidence as she could. “This dumb monster made me lose your fancy camera. Maybe if you came to see him, Neal would, I dunno, give you something for it.”

Hat Man scratched his chin. “The individual I met down under had quite a penchant for compensatory negotiations…” A wide grin spread over his face and he bounced up from the chair. “By Jove, I’ll do it, Emmalinda! First thing tomorrow morning, we shall set out into the wild river of grass and find your cryptozoological marvel!”

“Um, okay,” Emma said, once she figured out what Hat Man was saying. “It shouldn’t be too hard to lift Penny’s motor again. From the looks of things, she’ll be spending the night at Killian’s.”

****

In Hat Man’s vocabulary, “first thing tomorrow morning” was roughly one PM. Emma knew that, and didn’t wander over to the trailer in front of the sinking mansion until 1:30. Then, what with one thing and another, it was well after three by the time they actually got Penny’s Evinrude engine onto Emma’s jon boat and set sail into the Everglades.

This time, she wore an old baseball cap with a visor, so she would be able to see around the gold glare that surrounded Neal’s little island. Hat Man daintily seated himself at the back of the boat and used a lace parasol to shield himself from the sun. The lace was yellow, but Emma guessed it had been white once. It must have belonged to Hat Man’s grandmother or great-grandmother.

Crazy to think that he knew who his ancestors were, and he still had all their stuff. None of the people who used to live in that big mansion were alive anymore, but they also kind of were alive in Hat Man. Did knowing where he came from help him know where he was supposed to belong?

Emma kept one hand on the tiller, but she couldn’t stop biting her nails. Australia. Of all the places in the world, why did the spider come here from Australia?

It was easier to find Neal’s island now that she knew where it was. As they motored up to it, Emma saw him in a tree. He was climbing around the branches, upside down on all his creepy legs. Everywhere he moved there was more of the gold string shit. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the whole place kinda looked like a weird Christmas ornament.

“Ahoy!” Hat Man called out. He started to stand up as soon as Emma slowed down the boat, but a long time before it was really stopped. When he saw Neal, he took off his hat and bowed like somebody in a movie. “Greetings and salutations, good sir!”

Neal’s head popped out of the tree. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, with his face all weird and spidery. All his big black eyes went round when he recognized her.

“Emma!” he shouted.

He climbed down from the tree and scuttled over to the edge of his island. He moved a little sideways, kind of like a crab. Were crabs and spiders related? What was this guy?

He had some of the gold string in his hands. It looked like he was about to throw it.

“Catch this! I’ll tie you off!”

“I got rope,” Emma said. But before anyone heard her, Hat Man was already wrapping the string around the cleat on the side of her boat. Neal wrapped the other end around one of his tree branches. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about the boat drifting off with the tide.

“A thousand gratitudes!” Hat Man said. He pranced off the edge of the jon boat with his arms spread wide and his parasol in one hand.

“Um, hello,” Neal said. Hat Man was staring at him, looking him up and down and all over. Neal backed away, but looked like he was trying to be polite about it.

Emma took a second to double-check Hat Man’s knots before she jumped out of the boat and onto the island.

“Hey,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind I’m back.”

“I don’t mind you at all,” Neal said. “See you didn’t bring the idiot with you this time.”

She shrugged. “Killian’s sleeping it off. I don’t think he liked you anyway. I mean--I think you scared him.”

“Oh, but how could anyone be afraid of this face?” Neal spread his hands out around his head and made a big smile. At least, his mouth went wide and his big fucking fangs raised up. Short brown hairs stood up all over his face. It kinda looked like stubble, but it really looked like a werewolf. Or a tarantula. That much made sense.

“Yeah,” Emma tried to smile. How many of his eyes was she supposed to look at when she talked to him? If she tried to look at all of them at once, she’d have to stand ten feet away.

Hat Man was still walking around Neal, shaking his head and muttering things like, “Astounding!” and “Phenomenal!”

“So who’s this guy?” Neal asked her.

“Oh!” Hat Man snapped to attention. He came around to Neal’s front and stuck out his hand. “Geoffrey Lutwigde Jefferson the Third, at your service!”

Neal’s hands and arms were the same size as Hat Man’s. He bent his spider-legs down to a crouch so the two of them were the same height when they shook hands.

“And I’m Neal,” he said. “You’re a friend of Emma’s?”

“I’m a friend to all God’s creatures. Emma and I are bosom companions!”

Neal gave her a look and she just shrugged.

“You remember that camera I lost yesterday? Hat Man’s the guy it belongs to.”

The upper ridge on Neal’s forehead wrinkled, just above his two biggest eyes. He held up a finger, then scuttled back across the sand and up into the gold-covered tree. After a minute, he was back.

“You mean this camera?” He held up the ziploc bag, still sealed, with the camera inside.

“Holy shit! Are you serious?” Emma shouted. “You found it? Seriously?”

“I seriously found it,” Neal said. He was smiling for real now. Emma could tell it was real.

Hat Man raised one fist in the air. “Sublime!”

Emma took the bag from Neal and got the camera out. Did it still work? Had the bag held up and kept the water out? She fiddled with the buttons to check. When the screen came on, she laughed out loud.

“Smile, guys!” She snapped a few pictures while Hat Man posed like a model and Neal looked confused.

When she was done, she brought the camera over and showed them the results. Hat Man took a quick glance and then wandered off to see the rest of the island. She gave the camera to Neal and showed him how to scroll back and forth. He frowned when he looked at the pictures.

“Don’t like ‘em?” Emma asked. “I can take more.”

Neal shrugged and waved her off. “Nah, I--I’m not gonna like any pictures of me. Part of the territory of being a freak of nature.”

Emma swallowed. In all the excitement of getting the camera back, she’d forgotten the reason she’d borrowed it from Hat Man to begin with. There were rumors about a monster in this part of the glades, something undiscovered by science. Emma had gone out here to find proof. She was gonna post the pictures on the internet and get famous and rich.

Now that she knew the monster was Neal, telling the whole world about him didn’t seem important anymore.

She took the camera back from Neal and deleted all the pictures she’d just taken. “They’re gone now. You don’t have to look at them, and no one else is ever gonna find out about you. Not from me, anyway.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to.”

They didn’t say anything for a bit, just stood there on the sand. Then Neal asked, “Could I… take a picture of you?”

Emma made a surprised noise. “Uh, sure, I guess.” She showed him the buttons on the camera. “You just see what you wanna take a picture of on the screen, and when it looks right, you press that big circle button.”

“Like this?” He took the camera and held it up. His hands brushed over hers during the transfer. They were as brown as the rest of him, but didn’t have the spiky hairs. His hands were actually really soft, and warm.

She cleared her throat, paid attention to him aiming the camera at his gold-covered tree. “Yeah, that looks great. Then just press the button.”

There was a click noise, and the picture was on the screen. Neal looked really proud of himself for figuring it out.

“Okay, now I’m gonna take some of you. Go stand out closer to the water, I bet that’ll look great.”

Emma tried to relax, but it was hard to know how to stand or what to do with her arms. Should she smile? There was nothing worse than a fake smile, but she didn’t want to not smile either.

Getting her picture taken was the worst. It always reminded her of when she was a little kid and her foster parents would drag her to some Sears studio for court-mandated photographs every year. They always forced her to smile, no matter how much the too-small frilly dresses they put her in itched. Her birth parents wanted to know she was happy so she had to look happy no matter how much she wanted to scream and cry.

“Hey!” Neal’s voice broke through her thoughts. “You okay over there?”

Crossing her arms over her chest, Emma stomped back over to him. “I’m fine,” she said. “I guess I don’t like pictures either.”

“I can get rid of these like you got rid of mine,” he offered.

“Nah, it’ll be fine. Can I see ‘em?”

She was small, in the pictures Neal took of her. Like he had been trying to take a picture of just the glades and she had wandered in from the side. The whole horizon was flat, water and sawgrass stretching out to the end of the world. She was the tallest thing in these pictures, so she stuck out. She was looking out at the water, head turned away from the camera.

She looked lost.

“Dang.” Emma passed the camera back to him and sat down on the sand. “That’s good. You could be an artist.”

“You’re being nice.”

She shook her head. “I’m not nice, ask anybody.”

“I don’t know anybody. I just know you’re nice to me.”

“Nah.” She picked up a stick and started poking it in the sand, just for something to do.

“Emma, you’re talking to me,” he said. “I-I know what I am. Every human I’ve ever met has been terrified of me, even my own--doesn’t matter. Point is, you really are nice.”

She shrugged. It was hard to look at him, and not just because of the spider thing.

“Everybody deserves a chance,” she muttered. “No matter what they look like or where they come from or--or what fucked-up things happened to them.”

Emma Swan didn’t believe in much, but she did believe that. She had to, or else she’d never be able to believe in herself.

Neal was sitting next to her. His weird spider-legs were tucked in under his body. It looked like the way cats will sit on their legs and look like a loaf of bread. He was fiddling with the camera, but it seemed like the same thing she was doing with her stick in the sand, just something to do.

“I’m glad you came back,” he said after a while. “I didn’t think I was gonna find another person who wasn’t afraid of me.”

“Hat Man’s not afraid of you.”

“Yeah, what’s the story with that guy?”

“He’s crazy. He says he’s seen you before, or seen something like you.” Emma shrugged and held up her hands so Neal would know she was just repeating Hat Man’s story and didn’t know if it was real or not.

Weirdly, Neal just nodded. “There are other things like me,” he said. “At least one. I feel like there should be others, but I don’t know. That’s… kind of why I left home. I wanted to find out.”

He talked about leaving home like he was going off to college. Emma never could imagine doing that. If you had a home where you were welcome and wanted, why would you ever leave it?

“Where’s home?”

“When I lived there, all I knew was that it was a cave underground in a desert. Once I left, I did some research and found out I had been living in Queensland, Australia.”

Emma let her stick fall from her hands.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

She stood up, brushed the sand off her jeans, and put her hands around her mouth.

“Hey, Hat Man!” she shouted towards Neal’s tree. “Hat Man, come over here! You might not be a nutjob after all.”

****

“So the creature you met,” Neal said after they had found Hat Man and brought each other up to speed, “it didn’t speak English very well, did it?”

“Hardly as loquacious as a native interlocutor, though he did have a preternatural knack for making his preferences known.”

It took Emma a minute to put all that together. “He didn’t talk much, but he let you know what he wanted?”

“Explicitly!” Hat Man’s eyes lit up like fireworks. “The end result was one of, if not the, most exhilarating erotic encounters of my youth!”

Neal made a face. Then he seemed to decide he didn’t want to think about exactly what Hat Man had done when he was younger.

“What did your creature look like? Like what colors or markings or… I don’t know what humans would notice about us. Anything?”

“He did resemble you quite a bit, my lad. Though larger, and somewhat more… cuspidated, let us say. ‘Pointy’ for lack of a better word. You’re rather stubby of limb in comparison. Without meaning any offense, of course.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Neal said thoughtfully.

“It does?” Emma said. “Really? Any of this makes sense to you?”

“It does, yeah.” Neal nodded to himself. “I know I look different from… from my father.”

“Ah-ha!” Hat Man laughed. “Your progenitor, how marvelous! Was that the fellow I met in my travels, in your estimation?”

“I don’t know.” Neal ran his fingers through--was it his hair? It was on his head, so Emma had to call it hair. “My thought is that either you met my father or some other member of my kind. Something less diluted than I am.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “What does water have to do with anything?”

“No, it’s…” He gave her a soft smile, like he knew full well how crazy every part of this seemed to her. “Like I said, I know I’m different from my father. I’m--well, I don’t know how much human my father has in his DNA, but I know I’ve got more.”

Hat Man pulled his cell phone out of the band of his hat. He looked thoughtful. “Who else accompanied me on that expedition?”

He was mostly talking to himself, so Emma ignored him. She kept talking to Neal. “Are you saying you’re part human?”

“I am, yes. I don’t remember a lot about my mother, but she definitely only had two legs.”

“Might I request the return of my photographic device?”

Neal passed the camera back to Hat Man, who started flipping back through old pictures. Emma was still having trouble believing what she was hearing. She moved away from Hat Man and stood a little closer to Neal.

“So you’re half-part human and half-part… another spider-man-thing?”

He sighed, and looked down at his hands. “You know, sometimes I wish science would discover me, just so I could have a name for what I am. For now I guess ‘spider-man-thing’ is as good as it’s gonna get.”

Emma’s face was hot and she wasn’t sure why. This whole thing was so fucked-up and weird. How did a girl get together with a spider-thing and make something that would grow up to be Neal? How do you screw a thing like him? Even if you wanted to, how would it work?

“I bet your parents, like, really loved each other.”

They’d have to.

Neal shook his head. “Nah, there was no love lost between them. My mother especially, she was just a normal person. She didn’t wanna get caught up in some weirdass family web.”

He said that last word like he hated it. Like he hated everything about himself and what he was. Emma bit her nails. She wanted to say something, but what could she say? He wouldn’t believe her if she said something nice, even if it was true.

“She left,” he said after a minute. “When I was little. She walked out of the cave and I never saw her again.”

“That sucks,” Emma whispered. She held her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry. Good parents don’t leave.”

He looked at her. “That sounds like the voice of experience.”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe I’m wrong. There are plenty of parents who hurt their kids by not leaving.”

“Not yours, though?” Neal asked. “Your parents left?”

How did he know? Did being a spider make him psychic? Or was she just worse at hiding things than she thought? If it was anyone else, she woulda lied or dodged the question or punched him in the face. But it was Neal. For some reason, Neal was different. Emma pressed her lips together and took a deep breath through her nose.

“I’m adopted.”

There were people she’d known for years who didn’t know that about her. Her friends didn’t ask about things like your parents or your history or your future. All anyone had the brainpower to think about was what was going on right in front of them. How to get what you needed to keep you going for another day, how to ditch the cops or stay out of trouble with the really tough guys, how to have a good time because life was dangerous and short. No one had time for mushy shit.

“My parents left me because keeping me would have dragged them down. They were poor when they had me, but they’re rich now. They’ve got this bigass sheep farm in--you’re not gonna believe this--Australia.”

Neal snorted. “The place where I lived in Australia had sheep. When my father couldn’t find anything else to hunt, we would eat them.”

Emma made a face. It was nice of Neal not to freak out about her parents. It was nice to not think about her problems for a minute. “You eat ‘em raw?”

“Like animals,” he nodded. “Like we were animals, I mean.”

“What do you do now?” She couldn’t imagine Neal spider-crawling his way into a McDonald’s.

“The same thing, but now I try to cook my food when I can.” He shrugged. “Actually, I make an effort to hunt the big snakes that live out here. They’re an invasive species, so I think of it as community service. Something good for the native wildlife.”

Her lips twitched into a smile. “Well, aren’t you a nice guy?”

“As nice as you?”

She shook her head. “You’re a lot nicer than me, Neal. Your mom shouldn’t have left you.”

He leaned closer to her. “Your parents shouldn’t have left you. And for the record, I don’t think you would have dragged them down. I bet they’d like you.”

Emma looked up at him. Maybe it was because the sun was going down, but all his big black eyes didn’t seem scary now. They seemed warm and soft. He still had fangs, but all she could see was his smile. His mouth was so wide and so weird. If someone was gonna kiss a thing like him, how would they start? She leaned toward him. She’d have to figure it out, and soon. Their faces were about to touch. They were about to--

“Eureka!”

Hat Man shouted so loud the whole goddamn Everglades must have heard it. Emma winced at the noise. Her and Neal broke apart at the same time. Next thing she knew, Neal was on the other side of Hat Man, looking at the glowing camera screen.

“Look at this photograph! A memento of my expedition!”

Emma blew air up out of her mouth and went over to look at the camera. She was mad, and she didn’t want to think about why she was mad. She would have to think about whatever BS Hat Man was talking about now.

The picture was a group of kids her age, standing somewhere sunny and dry. They all looked… Well, weird was the only way to put it. It was the same sort of outcasts she hung out with now. Hat Man blended right in with his top hat and long coat like a magician. The boys wore leather and crazy colors, and the girls’ clothes were all different types of flowy--shawls and skirts and scarves in their hair. The kinds of outfits you could wear while you were getting high,and looking at fabric in the wind could keep you busy for hours. There was also a lot of skin on display, from the boys and the girls.

“So this is you when you went to Australia? Did these people come with you?”

“Oh, they came!” Hat Man laughed. “With me, with each other, with all of nature and the oneness of the universe.” He sighed and smiled at the memories. Then he seemed to snap back to whatever his version of reality was. “And she,” he zoomed in the tiny image to focus on one of the girls, “came with me to the spider’s den.”

“What?” Neal said. He took the camera and squinted at the screen.

“You didn’t say anyone else was there!”

“No one asked,” Hat Man shrugged.

She was gonna choke him. “Who else went with you to Australia and saw the giant spider that might be Neal’s dad?”

“Those were all my companions on our journey of transcendental orgiastic discovery,” he said. “Only brave Milah heard my tale of arachnid ecstasy and chose to venture out with me the next time I went.”

“So you did meet my father.” Neal sounded really serious. “And you know who my mother is.”

Emma got close to Neal to look at the camera in his hands. The woman on the screen had black hair and blue eyes and a sort of ‘screw you’ look on her face. She didn’t seem anything like Neal.

“That’s your mom? You’re sure?”

He nodded. “I remember that much.”

“How fortuitous!” Hat Man beamed. He took off his hat and bowed to Neal. “Happy to be of service.”

“Maybe I can find her now,” Neal said softly. He looked at Hat Man. “You said her name was Milah.”

“Yes! Milah… something or other. I want to say it started with a J, but that might have been her middle name. Milah Jane, we would call her. Or Milah Jochebed. Milah Jezebel? It’ll come to me. Or!”

He pulled out his phone again and started scrolling through it.

The sun was almost all the way down by now. The brightest light was Hat Man a few feet away, looking at his screen. Emma stood by Neal and didn’t say anything. What are you supposed to say to someone you met yesterday and didn’t know anything important about until an hour ago? Are you supposed to tell them how much you want them to be okay? Are you supposed to tell them they mean something to you, even if you don’t know what that meaning is?

Emma couldn’t say any of that. So she found Neal’s hand in the darkness and held on.

He held on to her too.

“Ah-ha!” Hat Man broke the silence. “Vickie will help us, I know it!”

He pressed the button to make a call, while Emma and Neal stayed together.

“Vickie, darling! How are you? I haven’t heard your voice in ages!” There was a pause while the other person spoke. “Why it’s Geoff, of course! Geoff Jefferson? From college? You remember, I taught you the thing with--Yes! I knew you’d remember me!” Pause. “What do you mean, how did I get this number?”

Hat Man kept talking to whoever he thought would help them get more information about Neal’s mom. Emma and Neal just stood together, on a little island in the middle of the Everglades. They were two kids left behind, with nothing to hold onto but each other.

****

Three thousand miles north, in a cramped section of student housing for the University of Main’s Storybrooke campus, almost-MD Victor Whale tossed his phone into a pile of dirty laundry and flopped face-first onto the bed, groaning.

On the other side of the bed, almost-PhD Ruby Lucas looked up from her thesis research. Her and Victor’s new-semester tradition of ‘sex and study Saturdays’ had been going well so far. The weird phone call had only interrupted the ‘study’ portion.

“Who was that?”

Victor rubbed his face. “There should be a statute of limitations on friendships you make as an undergrad. After ten years or so, people should forget you ever existed.”

“Old buddy, huh? They hitting you up to join a pyramid scheme?”

“It’s actually weirder.” He pulled a textbook out from where he’d been lying on it and got more comfortable on the bed. “Did I ever tell you I got into a sex cult the summer after my freshman year?”

Ruby set her notecards on the nightstand and gave her boyfriend a look. “No, you never mentioned that. I guess that explains why you’re so enthusiastic about the tantric stuff.”

“Tantra is legit. This stuff was kooky. I mean, it was just drugs and sex and New Age nonsense. Opening your mind to the sensuality of the universe and banging your brains out against the doors of perception.”

“And this is why I make you wear condoms.”

“Yeah, and you’re not wrong. Anyway, all the love-in mumbo-jumbo culminated in a trip to Australia. It was basically Burning Man, but with ten people and no money. Miracle nobody died. When it was over, I sobered up and got ready for the fall semester. Seems like some people never left Wonderland.”

Ruby smirked. “So what did your friend want?”

“He wanted to know if I kept in touch with any of the others. I told him to check Facebook like a normal person. Of course, normal was never Geoff’s way of doing things.”

Nodding, Ruby rubbed her chin. “Why Australia?”

“Damned if I know. Either because the laws there were more lax or because an aura of dreamlight descended on Geoff in a vision and told him where he could find enlightenment.”

“I wonder if Belle is still in Australia,” Ruby said, half to herself. “I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks. Figured it was just the time difference. I should call her.”

“You said she was pregnant, right? How far along is she now?”

“I dunno, I guess four months?”

“I hope she finally found an OB.”

“I’m sure she did, Doctor Whale,” Ruby teased. “But I think I should call her. Just to make sure nothing as crazy this is happening in her life.”

#nephila #rumbelle #swanfire #once upon a time #spiders

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