Chapter Text
It was a perfectly ordinary Thursday morning, and Emma Swan was walking down Main Street with a bear claw in hand. Distracted by her delicious snack, she did not notice the stranger with the even stranger gun in her hand until it was too late.
In her defense, the dude did not look dangerous. In fact, he just looked like your normal average dorky suburban dad, complete with the glasses. That probably should’ve been her first clue.
When was normal ever a part of Storybrooke?
In the end, there was exactly a second for her to realize something was wrong, as a bright flash of light enveloped her, and then, well…
An instant later, Emma became an ant-sized version of herself, as the gun turned out to be a shrink ray, of all things.
Emma was rather dumbfounded by this development understandably, though probably not anywhere near as much as she would’ve before she’d come to Storybrooke and realized fairy tales were real and she was technically sort of one of them.
At this point, Emma was just sort of pissed she didn’t get to enjoy her bearclaw before shit went down as usual. She spared a forlorn glance at the suddenly gigantic bear claw that had dropped to the dirty ground next to her.
Hmm… wait. Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all? Just as she was contemplating jumping right into the bear claw and eating it top to down—she could just stop a little before she hit the dirty ground and it would be fine, probably—the stranger who had cursed her to this fate spoke up.
Oh, right. It was time for the villainous monologue.
With a long-suffering sigh that had become common to her ever since she found out her mother was Snow White, Emma looked up at the gigantic man, who had bent down a bit to better deliver his no doubt well-practiced revenge speech. That was thoughtful of them, at least.
Actually, up close, he looked kind of familiar, which made sense. No doubt this was some character from yet another Disney movie, whose story was yet again, not faithfully adapted at all, and they’d get the full backstory at some point.
Emma refocused her attention just in time for the somehow familiar stranger giving her the usual cliche villain smile, as he made the usual villainous speech, which was all rather ineffective considering his dorky appearance, “Tell the Evil Queen that she’s next, Sheriff . If you manage to get that far, that is.”
Of course it was yet another villain with some kind of personal connection to them. Great , Emma thought sarcastically. At this point, she was honestly unsurprised by the development. One of these days, she should probably sit the whole tangled family tree of theirs down and have them write out a list of people they’d possibly wronged over the years. It would save them a lot of time and effort.
Before Emma could even open her mouth to reply to this latest villain—with what was going to be a truly devastatingly snarky remark—the man turned on her heel and walked away. Well, that was just rude , Emma thought indignantly, before shaking her head.
-
Just another day in Storybrooke, honestly.
-
Going from a perfectly respectable 5’5” (it was taller than Regina, after all, which was very important when kissing), to about an inch tall was not a pleasant experience. Was this karma for all the height-based insults Emma may or may not have slung about in the past? Because even so, it was just messed up . Karma totally owed her one for this.
Needless to say, possible food related opportunities aside, Emma’s new size presented more cons than pros, as she quickly discovered. See, the thing about delicious bear claws out in the open ground?
Emma was not the only one who wanted a bite out of that buttery goodness. So, it did not take long for her to start screaming in panic as she found herself suddenly tiny and in danger from the insect population of Storybrooke.
In what seemed like moments, she was surrounded by a growing line of rather scary looking ants, who were getting closer to the pastry, and thus, to her . Why did this have to happen outside? Why were these villainous revenge plots always so inconvenient?
Emma only had a spare moment to complain about her lot in life, unfortunately, because the ants were very shockingly fast. One moment, they were locked in a staring contest that was seriously creeping her out because insect eyes were not meant to be seen by human ones up close like this—and in the next, they were moving .
Oh, shit. Emma quickly backed away, wondering if it would be smarter to turn around and start running. But you weren’t supposed to show them your back, right? Then again, that was bears or something, not ants . What exactly was the protocol for handling hostile ants? Was this them displaying their dominance or something?
In this moment, Emma deeply regretted not watching more of the boring nature shows Henry somehow enjoyed (she blamed Regina—truly, he made an excellent case for nurture versus nature). Maybe if she had, she’d have more of an idea what to do now that she was somehow part of it.
Well, it wasn’t like she needed any details to understand the gist of it.
Namely, that she was seriously fucked.
-
Fuckfuckfuck.
The all too loud sound of insect wings beating was almost enough to drown out the litany of curses running through her head, while her body was running even faster.
At some point during her inner monologue, Emma’s baser instincts had kicked into gear, and feeling like a cavewoman faced with a woolly mammoth, she’d stopped thinking so much about nature shows and just started running for her life.
Unfortunately, this was not going so well. Because, it turned out her flight instincts were nothing compared to the crazy beast chasing her.
Flying ants were apparently a thing that existed, and they were fucking scary .
Why did Emma have to discover this horrible fact when she was an inch tall and not her usual 5’6”, when she was perfectly capable of handling the little monsters? Oh, yeah, because Fate hated her.
Or maybe Fate just wanted her to get some exercise , she thought, a little hysterically. Emma hadn’t run this much or this hard in ages, and boy, was it showing. It was honestly a little pathetic how much she was straining right now. Shit, she was out of shape, wasn’t she?
The longer she ran, the more exhausted she got. It was a simple and obvious equation, one that meant, eventually, she was going to run out of energy to run and get caught.
This was how Emma Swan was going to die. Eaten by ants.
It made for a truly terrible epitaph. Emma was torn between the urge to scream, cry and laugh. Clearly driven insane by exhaustion, she actually halfway managed to make a sound that encompassed all three.
Needless to say, the result was horrifying to hear, so much so, the ants chasing her actually seemed to freeze at it. Emma would’ve been insulted if she wasn’t so relieved. Unfortunately, the relief was pretty short-lived.
Letting her guard down was a horrible mistake, as was looking behind her to check the suddenly frozen ants, because the moment she did, she tripped .
Landing face first into the cold hard ground, her entire being exploded in pain. A barely coherent series of curses ran through her mind, as she struggled to get up again. Yes, she had a pretty high pain threshold, but boy this did hurt like a bitch. Unfortunately, she did not have the time to be lying prone on the ground while she screamed in pain.
Emma managed to glance back and saw that her untimely accident had allowed the ants to catch up to her. Oh fuck , she thought despairingly. Was this really going to be the end, after all?
Her arms were raised defensively, a last ditch instinct as she closed her eyes. Just in time too. A rush of bright light escaped from her hands and hit the insect.
Magic .
Oh, right. That was also a thing that existed, and which she possessed. Emma was a fucking idiot , as Regina liked to say, minus the swearing bit. For once, Emma herself agreed with the sentiment.
Now that she remembered that she had magic, she used it to fight off the rest of the ant army, who were no match for her.
“Yeah, you run away!” Emma yelled victoriously.
Alone and relatively safe, she was able to think again. First, she mourned the loss of her poor bear claw. Maybe she could summon it to her? Though that might end with her getting squashed beneath it. That sounded about as pleasant as by ants.
Focus, she reminded herself. She had bigger issues right now. Like how to get bigger again. Wait. Couldn’t she just magic herself back to her regular size?
Picturing what she wanted to do as best as she could, Emma closed her eyes and summoned her magic. When she opened her eyes hopefully, however, she found that nothing had changed.
Yeah, she couldn’t just magic herself back to normal, it turned out.
Probably because Emma had no idea what spell that would even involve. None of her “visualization” was helping, nor was just forcing as much magic out as she could. Clearly, her usual method to magic was not going to work for this.
She needed Regina, who would no doubt know what to do, and hopefully offer some kisses to her poor girlfriend too.
Actually, remembering what the villain of the week said, she needed to get to Regina quick, both to find a solution to this predicament and to warn her about being the next target. Shit, what if she was too late and Regina got shrunk too? That was not good. Henry would be without both parents and the town would probably be fucked without any magical protectors aside from Gold .
Thank fuck, her magic still worked. Because with magic, Emma wouldn’t have to make the perilous trek through an endless sea of grass and asphalt.
All she had to do now was poof to the Mayor’s Office. She could do that.
-
Fuck, she couldn’t do it.
Instead of landing in the midst of Regina’s office. She found herself…. at Granny’s? Emma groaned. How the hell had she poofed to the diner instead? Well, okay, maybe she’d been thinking about her poor bear claw, when her stomach had reminded her that she hadn’t been able to take a single bite out of it. Still!
Ugh . Regina always made poofing look so damn easy. But it was not as easy as it seemed, okay? Especially when you were only one inch tall. Not for the first time, Emma cursed her bad luck.
Why did magic have to be so complicated? They always made it look so damn easy in the movies, she thought, grumbling to herself.
-
It took two more tries, but finally, finally , by some miracle, Emma managed to make it to the Mayor’s Office, appearing in a tired heap on the floor just in front of her desk.
By which point, the poor woman looked like she’d just been through a war. Her clothes were all torn and tattered. She was covered head to toe in dirt, rubble and all sorts of substances she tried very hard not to decipher. There were also plenty of scratches all over her body, and she was bleeding from several places.
Actually, she was making the marble floors of the office pretty dirty, which Regina was not going to be happy about. Though her tiny size meant that she was really only making a very tiny section of the floor dirty. That was one positive, she supposed.
Emma would just use magic to fix all these issues but poofing so many times in a row, for such long distances—because they were basically the equivalent of crossing an ocean now that she was this tiny—had taken a lot out of her.
Though she was dimly aware that she was working on a time limit, most of her was a bit too busy just trying to catch her breath while she flopped like a fish on the ground.
Just another day in Storybrooke, indeed.