Chapter Text
Emma Swan runs her fingers through her hair and pushes her glasses further onto the bridge of her nose while she peruses her cue cards. Her eyes scan the keywords written there in her messy scrawl, settles briefly on a dried coffee stain, before landing on the small, neatly cursive written love you followed by a heart at the bottom.
She throws her cue cards onto the table in front of her and closes her eyes. Breathes in. This is the last show. The last time she will ever deliver these exact jokes and tell these exact stories. The butterflies flutter in her stomach, and she knows she should probably be more melancholic about it, but she can’t help but look forward to whatever happens next. Not travelling around for a while, settling down, doing some writing and making podcasts.
She feels blessed. This show has been a bigger success than any of her previous ones, and it’s most likely do to with the fact that people can totally relate to everything she says. Her previous shows have been known to be more niche, even though her jokes have always made people laugh their asses off. This show is so popular that she had to make extra shows in most of the bigger cities on her tour, and it’s great to be wanted, to feel like people really want to see her shows.
She’s no longer just the self-deprecating orphan, lesbian comedian, but she’s Emma Swan – and people fucking know her name. What a feat that is for someone like her.
There’s still roughly twenty minutes until she has to psyche herself up, get her adrenaline flowing, and Emma rolls over on the couch and stretches her legs. She can hear Killian ordering someone around on stage, no doubt having troubles with the tech, and she thinks she hears Tilly singing loudly at the top of her lungs. There is a knock on the door, and Emma lifts her head from the plush couch to find her girlfriend’s sister’s child poking their head through the door.
Robin has embraced their dorkier side lately, and they wear their glasses with pride these days. “You about ready, Em?”
Emma nods and pulls herself up.”Yeah, I just – I’m taking a moment to remember where I was a year ago.”
“So much can happen in a year, huh,” Robin replies and slips inside, closing the door behind them with a soft click. “My mom says you better deliver by the way, now that she has decided to spend money on listening to your horrible jokes that she gets for free on Sunday dinners.”
Emma makes a face. Zelena and her funny, funny jokes. One would think that she was the stand-up comedian. “Is everybody out there?”
Robin hands Emma a bottle of water and says, “Yes. Aunt Regina is very excited. Tilly and I leave with the kids in a moment. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Kiss Henry and Lucy from me,” Emma whispers and takes a long gulp of the bottled water. Her throat is drier than usual today. Nerves.
With a smile, Robin backs towards the door. “Good luck, Emma. I can’t wait to hear all about it!” they eagerly say, before they slip outside again and the door closes, leaving Emma to her own thoughts.
She reaches for her phone and sees a text from Regina. We can’t wait! it says, accompanied by a selfie of her, Zelena, Sabine and Jacinda. Emma chuckles to herself and shoots back a thumbs-up, knowing that her girlfriend and her friends are seated at the best seats in the house, probably already a little drunk on wine from their dinner.
Emma goes over her additional ending in her head once more, visioning the keywords in her mind and rehearsing the delivery. It should come almost natural to her once she is out there, it usually does, but this is one thing she cannot mess up. She finally pulls herself off the couch when her agent August pops his head into the room, motioning for her to get her ass in gear. She gives herself a once over in the mirror, quickly deciding that her jeans, her tank and her red leather jacket are all on point, and she runs her hands over her pockets to make sure that they are securely zipped.
“Ready?” August asks as she steps outside, and they huddle together in their three-way circle; her, August and Killian, her brothers from the system, the two first people she ever got to call ‘family’. Now they have expanded their family; Killian has his daughter who is basically Emma’s niece, and August found his real father three years ago, who never even knew that he existed. And Emma? Emma got fostered by Mary Margaret and David when she was sixteen, and she still considers them the closest things to parents she’s ever going to get.
“Yeah, I uh, I’m ready,” Emma whispers and clutches them closer.
Killian nudges her in the side. “You got this, Swan.”
The nerves tingle in her belly, and her warm-up comes off stage with a roar of applause, and Emma gives her a high-five. Ruby Lucas is a few years younger than Emma, but she’s funny, and exactly what Emma’s audience wants: Beautiful and gay. “They’re all warm for you, boss,” she laughs and unscrews the lid on her water.
Emma jumps up and down a few times before she runs onto the stage. The cheer from the audience excites her, gets her blood pumping, and she basks for a second in their enthusiasm as her eyes get used to the light focused on only her. Their faces are a blur – grey blobs in the darkness of the room, hundreds of eyes looking up at her, and she relishes it; the last of this feeling for a while.
She places her water on the small table in front of her and squints. “Hi,” she greets, and there are scattered chuckles in the room. “So how about Ruby Lucas, huh? Isn’t she great?”
A loud whoop can be heard in the back of the room.
“Enthusiasm! I love it!” Emma laughs, pushing her glasses to the back of her nose and shuffling on her feet. “So welcome to the last show on this tour. I’ve been, you know, I’ve been around the country for a while with this show, and it’s been really great so far, and I have to say,” she pauses, perusing the audience slightly, before continuing, “it’s also kind of hard to be travelling like this while also looking for true love, you know?”
She motions towards the screen to her left where the title of her show – HAPPILY EVER AFTER – emerges.
“Yes. This is a show about finding love, because I know you all know this,” she licks her lips and stuffs a hand into her back pocket, “But it can be kind of hard to find a girlfriend. Especially when you’re a lesbian, I mean, there’s just not as many options, you know? And as someone who grew up reading fairytales and dreaming of true love and the whole shebang, it’s kind of hard to accept the fact that you might not get it.” She laughs to herself, shaking her head, “So this show kinda came to be after I got dumped on my ass by my ex-girlfriend-”
A group in the audience starts heckling loudly, clearly making their opinion on Emma’s ex-girlfriend known, and Emma laughs and does a funny bow in their direction.
She continues, “Thanks, thanks, she’s, she’s OK, I guess, kind of a hard-ass, but OK, and yeah, she dumped me good and hard, and I was starting to believe that maybe I just didn’t deserve love, you know? That maybe someone as fucked up as me just didn’t deserve it, but my friend Killian told me that that’s bogus and thus my hunt for True Love – the Disney kind of True Love, with magic and dwarves and the whole thing – begun. This show is a testament to that.”
Emma takes a gulp of water.
“So uh, yeah. I didn’t really think that it could happen to me, you know? But while on the quest for this love that everyone was always talking about, while I’ve been touring with this show, I kinda…” She shuffles on her feet and she can feel the goofiest smile come onto her face, “I kinda actually got a girlfriend.”
The audience aws, and Emma grins.
She places the bottle back down on the table. “So while this is most definitely my show that you’ve all been dying to see-” she pauses and lets them all agree loudly, “-this is actually also the story of how I actually found my happily ever after. The story of me meeting Regina.” She licks her lips, takes a dramatic pause and turns slightly, “…and this is how it happened.”