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They are back in Storybrooke after a year in the Enchanted Forest, and they know who they are, though sometimes Regina wishes they didn’t. How much easier would it be to just forget? Of everyone, she’s never had the luxury of forgetting, and god, she wants to sometimes.
Being back should be nice (even if Regina feels a bit like a yo-yo, and oh how sick she is of curses and realm jumping and all of it) because Storybrooke is more of a home to her than the Enchanted Forest ever was. So she should be relieved.
Should be.
But what kind of home can it be now, without her son? When she can see him in milkshakes at Granny’s, in the empty space where his castle used to be, in the comics that are somehow in his room in this new Storybrooke. (And is it cruel or is it kind that his new-old room still smells like him, even though he has never actually been in it?)
Being in another world from Henry was hell, but being back in the same world and knowing she no longer exists for her son is hell too, and Regina goes back and forth every day as to which hell was worse.
(It’s okay, though, honest, it is, because he’s happy. He’s happy he’s happy he’s happy and usually this is enough to get Regina out of bed in the mornings, but some days—his birthday oh god his birthday—it’s just not.)
*
Regina is in the kitchen making tea when the doorbell rings, and she frowns as she looks up. Archie comes by with Pongo on Tuesday afternoons, and Kathryn with dinner on Sundays, but today is Friday, midmorning, and nobody comes then.
She contemplates not answering, but whoever is at the front door is insistent, bell ringing again and again and again, until she finally puts down her tea with a sigh and goes to answer it. (And maybe, she thinks, just maybe whatever this crisis is—because surely this must be some kind of crisis—will finally be enough to finish her off.)
She straightens her shoulders, and opens the door.
“Mom!” Henry barrels into Regina, almost knocking her over (it doesn’t take much these days, to knock her over), and throws his arms around her waist while she sinks to the floor. Emma stands behind him in the doorway, traces of tears in her eyes and a slight smile on her face.
“We remembered,” she says simply, and Regina just stares at her while pulling Henry close.
“I missed you.” Regina can feel Henry's tears trailing down her collarbone as he cries into her shoulder. “Even—even when I didn’t know you. I missed you.” Regina closes her eyes, tries to remember how to breathe while holding Henry tighttighttight.
“You might be depriving our kid of oxygen, there,” Emma jokes, though Henry is hugging Regina back just as hard.
Regina trembles. “I can’t let go,” she says, and she’s not sure if she’s talking to Emma, or Henry, or herself. “Every time I let go I wake up.” Her voice cracks, and she wonders if, when she does wake up, she will find tear tracks on her cheeks like she has on so many mornings.
Henry holds on tighter, and Emma’s hand is gentle on her shoulder and voice soft as she says “You’re not dreaming, Regina.”
Regina just nods. “I am,” she says. “I always am.” She buries her nose in Henry’s hair and breathes in deeply, because she will wake up, she will, but until she does she has this.
Henry pinches her arm, sharply, and Regina rears back in surprise while Emma lets out an aghast “Henry!”
“You’re not dreaming,” he says firmly. In his determined eyes, she can see the three-year-old who wanted to go down the big-kid slide by himself, the five-year-old who demanded she take his training wheels off, the eight-year-old who sat her down and told her that he was now old enough to go to work with her instead of going to school.
“There might have been nicer ways to convince her of that, kid,” Emma tells him, and for the first time in what feels like forever, Regina laughs, and if there is a slightly hysterical tinge to it, at least both Emma and Henry are kind enough not to comment.
*
“We came as soon as we knew,” Emma says, while Regina leads them into the living room because she thinks sitting down might need to happen soon. “Henry wanted to come here first. So did I, really. But we should go see my parents soon, too.”
Regina knows she should agree, but she’s not sure she can handle watching Henry walk out that door. Henry, though, shakes his head.
“No,” he says, and he hasn’t let go of Regina’s hand since they got up from the hug. “I don’t want to leave. Can’t they—can’t they just come here?” He looks up at Regina. “Can they, Mom?”
Mom mom she is mom again, and Regina can’t talk, can’t, so she just nods.
Emma reaches into her back pocket for her cell phone, and she is starting to pull up her contacts when she looks up in consternation. “I don’t have their number anymore,” she says, and Regina can read the dismay and hurt written all over Emma’s face at the reminder of what this past year has been. She knows too well the devastation that can come from something as little as losing a phone number.
Regina clears her throat three times before she can make any sound come out, and her voice still sounds hoarse as she tells Emma, “I do.”
In the end Regina is the one to call, because after a year, Emma doesn’t want the first time she talks to her parents to be over the phone. Regina doesn’t even try to explain the situation, simply tells Snow there is something they need to discuss, and asks her and David to come over as soon as they can.
She hangs up the phone, and they wait. Regina’s arms find their way around Henry again, encircling his shoulders while he leans back into her. She rests her chin on his head (and now she has to tilt her chin up slightly to do this, because a year it’s been a year), needing the physical reminder that he is here, and real, and not just some ghostly apparition of her son come to haunt her house.
When the doorbell finally rings, both Regina and Emma freeze. When it rings again and still neither woman moves, Henry gives Regina’s hand a squeeze and says “I’ll get it,” leaving Emma and Regina alone in the living room. Emma is the first one to step forward, but then Regina does too, until they have their foreheads pressed together.
“You’re real,” Regina whispers. “You’re real.”