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“You might not remember us, but I remember you,” Lucy informs her dad. He’s still staring at her with a vaguely amused look on his face, and he blinks around the bar owlishly, as though he’s never seen anything quite like it before. Which is so impossible, because Daddy’s seen everything . Daddy was born in a world without magic, just like this one, and there’s no way–
“Should you really be in a bar?” he asks finally. “Aren’t you, like, seven, kid?”
She rolls her eyes at him. “I’m ten . Do I look seven to you?”
He almost quirks a grin. “I really don’t hang out with many people under twenty.”
“Do you hang out with anyone?” she says, a little snobby but a little interested, too. Daddy’s is really into missions and meeting new people and having adventures, but he’s not really into having friends . His friends are all Mama’s friends, and he likes to slip away when Mama starts chatting with them, crooking a finger so Lucy will join him.
Liked . Daddy doesn’t remember any of that anymore. “Not really,” he says, his eyes flickering to the bar. “Hey. Is that who we’re looking for?”
Lucy follows his gaze, but no , it isn’t Mama at all. It’s a woman she knows only vaguely at the bar, someone from this land who Mama has fake memories of being friends with. “That’s Roni. She’s not one of us.”
“One of us,” Daddy echoes, and he’s still staring at her fixedly, his brow furrowed as though to call forth a memory. She pinches his arm where she knows Daddy is super ticklish and he jumps. “Hey!”
“Pay attention,” Lucy orders him, scanning the bar. “We gotta find–” Oh, crap . Mama has already found them. She’s hurrying across the room, weaving through tables, and she shoves Daddy back with fiery eyes.
“What do you think you’re doing with my daughter?” she demands. “Lucy, you’re supposed to be upstairs in bed . What are you–” She looks wildly from Lucy to Daddy. “How did you– did you run away?” she says, and her eyes are wide. “Who is this?”
“I’m sorry,” Daddy says, and he smiles tentatively at Mama, his brow furrowing again as though he really does know that Mama is important. “She just…showed up at my doorstep and insisted she was my daughter. I tried to bring her back as quickly as I could. I’m Henry Mills.” He sticks out an awkward hand.
Mama doesn’t take his hand. “Lucy, you’re coming straight upstairs,” she orders. “What were you thinking ?” She glances back at Daddy, then back to Lucy again. “The upstairs isn’t a bar,” she explains quickly. “The owner rents an apartment to us. It’s perfectly stable.” She sounds defensive, and Lucy wants to scream. Not this single mother thing again. The moment she’d jumped through the portal last month, she’d been added into the story of this fake place and had become part of Mama’s family.
And if she ever wants to break the curse that had suffused this place, Mama and Daddy are going to have to remember that they’re true loves and that this is what happens.
Mama hurries to the bar, Daddy still trailing after them like a lost puppy, and she says, “I’m heading upstairs. Let me know if you need a hand,” to Roni. Mama helps out sometimes because Roni gives her the apartment upstairs for really cheap. Lucy likes Roni. Roni is funny and nice in a really sharp kind of way, and she’ll probably have plenty to say about Lucy running away in the middle of the night.
But she’s engrossed in conversation with a blonde woman who barely glances their way, and she nods in acknowledgment to Mama and then returns to the woman. The woman stares at them for a moment, eyes flickering to Daddy still standing behind them with his hands in his pockets, and she chews on her lower lip and then shrugs, returning to Roni.
Mama talks pleadingly with Lucy, lectures her in that way where she feels really bad until she remembers that none of this is real. She’s Mama’s only hope , and Daddy’s going to leave if she doesn’t act quickly. She brushes her teeth and gets back into pajamas and closes her door, and she parks herself at the window to see if he’s going to leave.
It takes twenty minutes after she’s in bed before he goes, trudging out the door of the bar and glancing back over his shoulder as though he isn’t entirely sure why he’s going. Lucy pushes the window open and calls out in the loudest whisper she can manage, “ Daddy! ”
He blinks, looking up at her. She shakes her head frantically, mouthing please don’t go , and he sighs and shoves his hands into his pocket again, looking very undecided. “Please,” she says again, and he sighs again and goes back into the bar.
Lucy steals out of her room. Mama is asleep on the couch, worn out from a long day, and Lucy pulls out a blanket and lays it over her. She kisses Mama’s cheek and opens the door carefully, sliding back out and toward the stairs.
Daddy is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re going to get me arrested,” he warns her.
She grins. “Maybe. Mama’s a detective.”
“Jesus.” Daddy pinches the bridge of his nose. “What’s your deal, kid?”
“I just want to talk.” And for you to fall desperately in love with Mama again , she adds silently. She knows that this is how curses break, has heard about the legendary Storybrooke and Gramma and Grandma and all their adventures. Daddy has a book just for them, and he always says that he isn’t going to finish the book until their love story is complete.
That’s what true loves do. They break curses . “You don’t remember, but you were once the Author,” she tells Daddy. “You wrote about lots of different stories in lots of different realms, and then you met Mama and you wanted to be in the story again. So you stayed. And then one day you and Mama disappeared and you were in trouble and I…” She gestures at the bar. “I came here. To find you. You’ve got to write us out of this curse. You’ve got to.”
Her voice is rising, and Roni is suddenly beside her, crouching in front of her. “Lucy, what are you doing out of bed again? Where’s your mother?”
“This is my father ,” Lucy says, and maybe Roni will understand. Maybe Roni can help her.
Daddy’s already shaking his head, but he and Roni are looking at each other curiously. “I do know you, don’t I?” Roni says slowly. “I remember…” She shakes her curly hair, shrugging airily. “You must have been here before.”
“I don’t think so.” Daddy laughs uncomfortably. “Though according to this little girl, there’s a whole lifetime of memories with her that I’ve forgotten.”
“The oldest pickup line in the book,” Roni says dryly, gesturing to the blonde woman who’s followed her over to them. “She keeps saying the same thing. Lucy, don’t you think you’re a little young for this guy?”
“He’s my dad ,” Lucy says, and she wants to stamp her foot like a kid before the rest of Roni’s words sink in. “Wait. She keeps saying…” She turns to stare at the blonde woman, for the first time really taking her in. She looks like a regular person from this world, red jacket and jeans and a gun at her hip, but there’s something else in the way that she’s staring at Lucy with the same narrowed eyes.
“Don’t let him leave,” she tells Roni, and she grabs the woman’s hand and pulls her to the quiet staircase to upstairs. “You. Who are you?” she demands. “What do you remember?”
“Listen, kid, I don’t have time for games.” The woman glances back at Roni, and Lucy sees yearning in her eyes. “I have to–” She takes in a deep breath. “What do you remember?”
“The Enchanted Forest,” Lucy says immediately. The woman swings around, her eyes sharp and haunted. “That’s where I come from. My Mama, she’s upstairs– her name is Cinderella. But she doesn’t remember.”
“Your Mama is…” The woman’s voice trails off. “Alexandra?” she says, staring at Lucy. The name is wrong, but the familiarity in the woman’s voice can’t be disguised. This woman knows about Cinderella, about the Enchanted Forest– This woman could help her. “No. There’s no way you’re–” She clenches her fists. “I have to go back out there. I don’t have time for this.” She climbs back down the steps, back toward the crowded bar.
“My dad is Henry Mills,” Lucy calls after her. It’s a dumb idea, to tell people Daddy’s name when he’s so powerful and has so many people after him. But he’s also made a lot of powerful friends along the way, and this woman…there’s something about her that just seems good . Right , in a way that Lucy can’t explain, like sitting on the bar before it opens and watching Roni mix a fruity drink for her.
And the woman freezes, just like that , Daddy’s name enough that she stops moving instantly. “Henry Mills,” she repeats hoarsely. “That’s…Henry Mills?”
Maybe it was a mistake to mention him. Lucy can see hunger in the blonde woman’s eyes. Lucy knows desperate souls, the kind who’d stop at nothing to use the author’s pen. This is that kind of desperation.
Daddy doesn’t see it. He’s talking to Roni, who has a hand on his shoulder and is smiling at him with the same smile that she usually reserves for Lucy. “Yeah,” Lucy admits, rising to clamber after the woman. “He’s Henry Mills. But he doesn’t remember , so he isn’t going to write you anything –”
She stops when she catches up to the woman and sees the tears and awe glimmering in her eyes. “Henry,” the woman breathes, and she doesn’t say it like people do when they say the Author . She says it in a choked voice that’s thick with hope, and Lucy wonders if she has found an ally, after all.
She asks what she should have asked first. Every name has a story, Daddy’s told her a thousand times. And every story is worth knowing . “What’s your name?” she says, staring up at the woman, glancing back to the stairs, staring across the tiny yet endless gap between them and Roni and Daddy.
“Emma,” the woman says, and it’s Lucy’s turn to gape up at her with eyes glimmering with awe. “My name is Emma Swan.”
Gramma. Gramma Emma, a woman she knows more about than anyone else in the world– except for maybe Grandma Regina. She’s been raised on bedtime stories about Daddy’s moms, about curses and Storybrooke and Neverland and Camelot– and she’d always believed that she’d meet them someday. They might be in some distant realm, but Daddy has always been certain that he’d meet them again someday.
Lucy bets that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Roni– Grandma Regina – is kicking out the last stragglers at the bar now, and Daddy is eyeing the door like he isn’t quite sure if he should go or not. “You’re staying, kid,” Gramma Emma says, putting a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Did you just call me kid ?” Daddy says dubiously. “How old are you ?”
“Never ask a lady her age,” Grandma Regina says archly, flicking his head with the back of her knuckles. Gramma Emma grins up at her, and there’s so much adoration in her eyes that Lucy understands why Daddy had been so stubbornly sure that they’d fall in love someday.
(“You don’t see it when you’re younger, you know?” he’d said thoughtfully. “You think of having two moms who love each other as perfectly natural, but you don’t think about them falling in love.” His eyes had gleamed, and he’d looked wistful for a moment. “Then you start writing stories, and you don’t know how you ever missed it.”)