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Henry’s already dropping his backpack on the dining room table and pulling out the camera Mom had gotten for him for his birthday when he realizes that the door hasn’t closed yet. Of course. Mom is leaning against the doorpost and Ma is shuffling her feet and they’re both staring at each other like they aren’t sure how to look away, and Henry rolls his eyes and reaches for an apple from the bowl while he watches them. Mom says carefully, “You don’t have to go. I...appreciate you walking Henry home from school, but you know you’re welcome to stay here after. If you want.”
“I do want!” Ma says quickly, and then bites her lip, sighing. “I have to get back. Hook is being…he’s trying really hard. He wants to do some kind of outing today after work.”
“Lovely.” Mom turns around, the conversation done the moment that Ma had mentioned Hook, and Henry frowns at her pursed lips. Ma frowns, too, her eyes looking a little wild for a moment.
“I asked him to move in with me,” she blurts out. She sounds helpless for a moment, her hands out of her pockets and raised for a moment before she stares at them as though she doesn’t know what to do with them. She puts them back in her pocket.
Mom is standing very still, her lips open in a perfect oh and her eyes staring blankly in Henry’s direction. He watches them both, waiting, and Mom says, “Congratulations,” in the same voice that she had once responded to Henry telling her about Ma’s engagement to Walsh.
“No, it’s…” Ma shuffles again. “He’s been watching a lot of TV since I moved into my new apartment, and he got hooked on The View.” Henry snickers. Mom doesn’t seem to hear either of them. “It’s been hell. He gave me a DivaCup for my birthday and told me it’d change my life. And then yesterday he sat me down to define our relationship.” She makes air quotes and Mom finally turns back to her. “He said he needed to know if I was just ‘using him for his body.’”
Mom’s pursing her lips again, and this time she looks like she’s trying to hold back a laugh. “And are you?”
“We haven’t even slept together!” Ma protests. Henry winces. Mom casts a glance back at him and he busies himself with his apple. “So I panicked and I told him I wanted him to move in with me. And now he wants to celebrate it with…” Ma glances at Henry, too, and says, “Alcohol,” instead of what she’d wanted to.
She covers her face with her hands and Mom takes a few steps back. “Regina,” Ma murmurs, reaching for her. “Wait.” Henry snaps a picture of them, Ma holding out a hand and Mom trembling, and they both jump.
Mom backs up even more, away from Ma, and Ma bites her lip and says, “I’ll call him.”
Ma stays for dinner and then plays video games with him after, until way later than she usually stays, and Mom sits beside Ma on the couch with a book and criticizes her aim instead of reading until she drifts off to sleep early, her head dropping onto Ma’s shoulder.
Ma curls the hand she’d been using for the controller around Mom’s neck to rest on her shoulder, declaring them done for the evening, and Henry rolls his eyes and goes upstairs to bed.
They don’t move in together after all, he finds out a few days later.
“I know you have pull with the Storybrooke Theater,” Ma is saying when Henry emerges from the bathroom at Granny’s. Mom is still in their booth, her back ramrod-straight and her fingers pressed white against the table. Ma is in his seat, Hook hovering behind her. “You’ve had Peter Pan as the only movie they’re showing since I started dating Hook.”
Mom refuses to give an inch. “It was for the homesick Lost Boys.”
“You only let them advertise the cartoon Captain Hook.”
“Who is nowhere near as dashingly handsome as I am,” Hook puts in, and Mom gives him a look so quelling that he falls silent again.
“Anyway,” Ma says, looking annoyed about this whole conversation. She always looks annoyed when she’s around Hook and Mom at the same time, like she doesn’t know who to be. When it’s just Ma and Hook, she’s all smiles and flirty looks that make Henry a little sick. But Mom makes her agitated and uncomfortable and…weird, and if Henry doesn’t see the wide-eyed awe that she has sometimes, he might even believe that she doesn’t like Mom nearly as much as she does. “Do you think you’d be able to allow the theater bring in anything more recent? And more…adult?”
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” Hook puts in quickly. Mom and Ma both stare at him in unison. “What? If we’re trapped in this land, I might as well learn its entertainment,” he says in explanation. “I go on Reddit all the time now.”
Ma looks alarmed at the prospect. “Is that why you called me a feminist killjoy yesterday?”
“I didn’t think I would, but I’ve quite been enjoying My Little Pony,” Hook muses. Henry slides in next to Mom, giving up on reclaiming his seat. Ma is slouched over in it and looks as though she doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
There’s nothing like Ma with her head on the table, absolutely defeated, to cheer Mom up, and she smiles at Hook with the fakest smile Henry has ever seen on her face. “I’ll do my best,” she promises, and Ma glances up, her eyes brightening as Mom’s smile turns genuine.
Mom gets a movie called Gone Girl instead, and Henry goes in to sit through Peter Pan for the hundredth time while she sees it, ever-so-coincidentally at the same time as Hook and Ma do. He hangs around in the theater, munching on popcorn and people-watching with Grace, snapping photos with his camera.
He takes a photo when they all come out together, and Henry’s delighted to see that Hook looks shell-shocked, pale and shaken, and Ma is standing close enough to Mom for their fingers to slide between each other’s as they shuffle along. “I think it’s a fairly accurate story,” Mom is saying matter-of-factly when they reach Henry. “Not every woman is Amy Dunne, but plenty of us have someone like her lurking beneath the surface.”
“Is that so?” Hook sounds faint.
Mom nods authoritatively. Ma is grinning, watching Mom's face with the same kind of unreserved affection she usually reserves for pastries. “Oh, yes. Take Emma, for example. There’s a lot of darkness in women scorned, and Emma’s just the type to Gone Girl herself.”
Hook blinks at Ma. Ma tilts her head in absentminded acquiescence, eyes still on Mom. Hook says, “I’ve decided to identify as a meninist.”
He mutters something about checking on the sea- he does that a lot, sits out on the pier and watches the ocean mournfully- and hurries off, and Ma finally jolts out of her reverie. “You really shouldn’t screw with him like that,” she says reprovingly.
Mom huffs, still unapologetically smug. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with it.”
“I was distracted! You have…” Now Mom and Henry both are looking at her curiously, and Ma flushes. “You do this smirky thing when you’re screwing with Hook. It’s very proto-Evil Queen.” Mom looks oddly gratified at this explanation, and Ma rushes onward. “It’s cute.”
“Cute?” Mom is outraged. Ma presses her lips over her teeth and bites on them, eyes bright again. “I would have killed you once for calling me cute.”
“So that’s why you used to, like, do that whole murderous villain thing?” Ma dodges Mom’s sharp elbow and grabs a handful of Henry’s popcorn instead, fleeing safely to the other side of the room. “Granny’s on me?” she calls out, holding up a hand in unspoken apology.
“Granny’s is the least you could do,” Mom mutters, but she’s rolling her eyes and doing her best to pretend that her smile is a grimace. Henry takes another picture, very carefully.
The teacher he’d had for his brief, non-avian-based education in New York, had liked to say that a story is made of a middle. The beginning we know, the end is inevitable, but it’s all made into a story by the middle.
Henry knows the beginning of their story, saviors and curses and queens. It’s the middle that stymies him. The middle is Mom being sick three times a week after grilled cheese lunches that Ma brings her sometimes. The middle is after the barrier is taken down and they go back to New York to pack up, and Ma spends over an hour trying to pick out a souvenir for Mom. The middle is Operation Mongoose shifting from them searching for the author to excuses for Ma to be over all the time, to dinner dates he’s invited to only to spend the entire time watching Mom and Ma steal glances at each other.
The middle is pretty darn frustrating, he decides, glancing out the window and spotting- surprise!- Ma strolling up the walk to the house, twirling her keys around her finger. The doorbell rings moments later and Mom perks up. “Go get the door for your mother,” she says, putting down her papers.
“How’d you know it was Ma?” Maybe they have secret magical sensors for each other that let them know that the other one is around. Maybe it’s just pheromones or something.
“It’s always Ma,” Mom says, rolling her eyes and standing.
She’s eyeing herself in the mirror when Henry opens the door, smoothing her hair back, and Ma says, “It’s just me, you don’t need to make yourself all…” She twists her hands and says, “Anyway, I was thinking.”
And Mom knows what she’s thinking, apparently. “We are not practicing choreographing our magic, Emma. I have some dignity, even if you’ve lost yours long ago.”
“You want to hear about dignity? Remember that ogre running loose last week?” Ma says. “He laughed at me when I used magic on him. Laughed! As though my concentration face was funnier than the fact that he was dying.”
“It does kind of look like you’re constipated sometimes,” Henry offers helpfully.
Ma gives him a dirty look. “Shut up, kid.” She turns back to Mom. “Come on, we can work on timing too! Do that fireball magic thing we did in the woods with that snow monster and do it better. I need you.” She says the last bit so simply that Henry almost thinks he’s imagining things, but then Mom shakes her head and sighs deeply and leads Ma out to the backyard.
Ma is stiff and unsteady, falling into her old crouch as she squeezes her eyes shut and pushes outward, and Mom moves to guide her, stands just behind her pressed against her back and holds her hands. Ma’s forehead unfurrows and her hands move with Mom’s, stretching out more easily. “Angle your body to the side,” Mom murmurs into Ma’s ear. “Hold your hands, pull back, gather your magic…”
Ma pulls back too hard and Mom gets elbowed in the gut for it. She chokes and slips back and Ma is whirling around an instant later, catching her in her arms before she can fall any further.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, and Mom reaches up to touch Ma’s cheek, the two of them standing much too close and showing no will to move.
The middle, the middle, Henry thinks, and goes upstairs to get his camera. It’s a nice day. Everything is about it is nice.
Mom is kind of stalled on Operation Mongoose and everyone’s out of ideas, but Ma still shamelessly comes over almost every night to “work on it.” Which mostly means eating two platefuls of dinner and then stretching out on the living room floor complaining of a stomachache. Mom kicks her a lot. She also takes off her shoes and brushes her toes along whatever part of Ma is lying in front of her until Ma is grinning to herself and Mom is staring determinedly at the TV.
He guesses it’s complicated and still hasn’t figured out how to broach the subject. Then he drops by the station after school one day and sees them together, Mom sitting on the desk with her hands against Ma’s cheeks and their lips unmistakably locked. Ma is shaking a little and Mom murmurs something against her lips, kissing her again, and neither of them notice Henry staring.
He digs into his bag and snaps a photo but the flash goes off, making Mom jump. She sees him and flushes dark orange, mumbling something and fleeing past him out of the room, and when he turns to go after her, Ma says, “Wait, Henry.”
“I knew you two were in love,” he says, a whiny note entering his tone. “I thought you didn’t know it.” He’s been waiting and waiting, thinking about how he can explain it to them, and they’ve been like this all this time. He can’t help but feel betrayed. “And you’re dating Hook!”
“Your mom insists on it,” Ma says, and he stares at her in wild disbelief.
“She hates Hook! And she loves you!” He knows Mom in love, even if he’d never really seen much of it. He knows that she’s different around Ma than she is anyone else, that she cycles between hurt and affection so effortlessly when Ma brings it all out in her, that her emotions are always close to the surface and it’s always so easy for her to forgive with Ma.
Ma licks her lips and sits down on the desk where Mom had been. “She doesn’t believe that…whatever we are…she doesn’t believe that she can have a happy ending. It’s very complicated. It’s always been complicated,” she says, shadows on her face like this has been going on for more than just a few months.
“That’s stupid,” he says.
“I know that and you know that. But she doesn’t. She’s been through some tough stuff, Henry.” Ma’s eyes gleam with earnestness. He drags his feet as he finds a chair, sitting down and ready to go. “And I don’t think she has much more hope to spare.”
“So what do we do?” He’s already thinking up new operations, new ways to force Mom’s hand. Really, if he could convince her to give up on the dark side and all that, dating someone she already treats like her wife shouldn’t be that hard, right?
“Operation Mongoose,” Ma says, and it isn’t a new operation they need at all. And maybe Ma isn’t just coming over claiming that she’s working on it to get free dinner. Her face is determined now, her fists clenched around the edge of her desk, and she says, “We find the fucking author. That’s what we do. And then Regina can figure out what she wants.”
Mom doesn’t talk to him about what he’d witnessed, just kisses his forehead when he gets home and refuses to meet his eyes. It’s okay. He has other plans.
He slings his camera over his shoulder and heads out to the author’s mansion down by the water. He takes a book and leans against the back of one of the chairs, crouching down behind it so he’s out of view as he opens the book.
The blank pages are less mocking today, somehow, now that he has his own ideas about what he’s going to do, and he pulls out a pen from his backpack and begins to write careful words into the book. They look false and childish in comparison with the real book, but he keeps going anyway, fills two whole pages before he hears the click of the secret door.
He grabs his camera, twisting around to snap a silent picture just as the footsteps stop, but all he captures is Mom, walking into the room with a pensive look on her face. She walks past the bookcase, her fingers trailing across the rows and rows of blank books, and then she pauses at the gap he’d left and says, “Henry.”
He pops up, unapologetic. “Hi, Mom.”
She smiles at him like it’s a struggle, like there’s so much she wants to say to him and doesn’t, and he bites back what he wants to respond, too. Instead, he stands up and tucks the book back into place on the shelf.
“What were you doing with that?” she asks.
“Writing.” He refuses to expand on that, and she wraps an arm around him and kisses the top of his head.
“I don’t want you to…you’re better than this, Henry. There are pieces of your story that have already been written, but your future is still wide open.” They stand together, staring at the bookcase, and Mom says, “The storybook is the past.”
“But you think it’s the future, too. You think it’s why you can’t be happy.”
“Maybe there are many books,” Mom says. She exits the room while he’s still staring at the shelf, concentrating on what she means, and when he goes home she’s locked up in her study.
Hook is hanging out in the station the next afternoon when Mom and Henry stop by after school. “Regina! Kid. Hey.” Ma brightens and Mom tears her glare away from Hook for just long enough to soften at Ma’s eyes. “Save me from this guy, please.” But her tone is light and Hook laughs as though she’s joking and Henry doesn’t take it as an actual plea.
“I’m broadening my horizons for you, Swan,” he offers. “Far be it from me to live in this world and never learn its culture.”
“I don’t think The Brady Bunch is really our culture anymore,” Ma says, rubbing the sides of her forehead. Mom takes a few steps forward and rounds the desk, her fingers pushing Ma’s aside as she massages her temples.
“Better?”
“Always.” Ma’s head lolls back to rest against Mom and Henry glances at Hook. Hook seems unbothered by the contact. “Hook thinks I’m the team Marcia.”
“That’s absurd.” Mom rubs in long strokes and Ma is making borderline embarrassing sounds about it. Henry retreats to one of the beds in the cells and flicks through his camera’s archive instead of watching them as Mom keeps speaking. “You're clearly the Jan. I’m Marcia.”
Ma lets out a delighted laugh. “Rude!” Henry looks up. Hook is smirking as though he thinks he’s about to watch Mom chastised when Ma admits, “Nah, you’re right. I am the Jan. How the fu– how do you even know about the Brady Bunch? Aren’t you supposed to be a fairytale character? They’re not real, too, are they?” She sounds genuinely panicked for a moment there and Henry snickers.
“Emma, I’ve spent just as long here as you have,” Mom reminds her. “I was captivated by the TV for years during the monotony of…before Henry.” She flashes him a quick smile, eyes alive and loving, and Ma echoes it a moment later. Henry snaps the photo before they can protest. “It took years before I cultivated a more high-brow appreciation for quality programs.”
“Is that your way of denying that you watched all the SVU episodes without Olivia?” Ma leans back enough to eyeball Mom. “Because I know, Regina. I have spies everywhere.”
Henry whistles innocently. Mom gives him a dirty look, quickly turned on Ma. “You’re one to talk. Someone’s been leaving season DVDs of The L Word by the TV and I can’t imagine it’s Henry.”
“You own season DVDs of The L Word!” Ma points out, equally accusing and grinning straight through it.
“Love?” Hook says, and Ma nearly jumps. As if she’d forgotten he was there. He smiles genially at them. “Is love the ‘l word' you speak of?”
Mom and Ma stare at him, Mom’s hands still massaging the sides of Ma's head and Ma leaning back into her. “Yeah,” Ma says. “Love.”
Mom presses hard enough against Ma’s temples that Ma yelps.
Mom isn’t there the next time Henry goes to the mansion, this time with a stop at the pharmacy first to print out some things. He writes as much as he can again and tapes in some other stuff and he’s feeling like real progress is being made when he heads home.
Mom isn’t in her study or upstairs, and he’s about to call her when he glances out the window and sees her outside instead, sitting on their old wicker swing with Ma beside her. They aren’t kissing this time but Mom has her head on Ma’s shoulder and Ma has an arm wrapped around her and a blanket shielding them both from the cold.
Henry opens his window and listens to the voices drifting up from the yard. “…On a secret mission,” Ma is saying. “You know how he is.”
“Mm.” Mom curls up closer to her and Ma kisses her forehead. “Don’t do that,” Mom says, with absolutely no fire behind it.
“Ever?”
“Emma…” Mom sighs like heartbreak and Henry frowns fiercely. “This isn’t…we aren’t mortal enemies anymore...hating each other in all the ways we used to…hate each other.”
“Multiple times,” Ma offers helpfully. “With much hating. The best hate I’ve ever had.” Henry doesn’t think he wants to interpret this bit. Ma grows serious. “But you’re right. This is different.”
“This is dangerous,” Mom murmurs, and the wind swallows it up before her sigh does. “ However it ends… You don’t want to be here.”
“You know that isn’t true.” Now Ma sounds just as tired, the amusement gone and replaced with momentary defeat. “We’re just sitting here, Regina. Being good friends. I don’t want you to feel as though you have to just…give me what I want–“
Mom lifts her head from Ma’s shoulder and kisses her, shrinks into Ma’s arms and the blanket and clasps onto her face and shakes and Henry doesn’t understand why it always has to be so hard. Not when they’re like this, holding on like they’re never going to let go and wrapped together with a blanket around them and this is how the story goes, isn’t it? This is the elusive middle, no great climax and no dramatic demons to fight. Why can’t they just…
“Not what you want. Not just what you want,” Mom murmurs against Ma’s lips, and she shivers again and again until her eyes are shiny in the light of the yard but no tears are escaping down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Emma, I really am. I wish–“
Henry takes a picture, waits until the yard shines bright with the flash and ducks out of view, leaving them alone again.
Mom is there again the next time he arrives at the author’s mansion, his book closed beside her at the desk.
“You read it!” he accuses her.
She’s quick to shake her head. “I would never read it without your permission. I just…had it ready for you.”
He snatches it from the table and she stands, still apologetic. “There isn’t much to do here.” She sits in one of the leather chairs across the room, folding and unfolding her hands. “Nothing but write, I guess.”
“I like writing.” Henry jots down the next sentence, brow furrowing as he contemplates what to add next. “And I’m not going to write books that hurt you, Mom.”
“I never thought you would,” Mom says softly. “I think…there are books that just tell truths, even if they’re not the easiest truths. And I know that the truth is paramount to you.”
He flushes, glad that she knows now. It’s taken them years to reach this place, but it’s good. It’s really good. “You’re afraid of the truth,” he guesses.
“Always,” Mom agrees. “The truth is…the truth doesn’t care about motivations or excuses or cause and effect, Henry. The truth has no agenda, but it has no compassion, either.”
“Stories have compassion.” He doesn’t quite know what they’re talking about, doesn’t see how it connects back to the ever-present issue of Mom and Ma, but this he knows. “Stories need truth, but not just truth, right? I used to think that the truth was most important, you’re right. But the storybook was just truth. It wasn’t the story.”
Mom leans forward, coaxing him on. “And what you’re writing now?”
“It’s a story. It’s a better story than the storybook,” he says determinedly. “This is how we all get our happy endings.”
“I thought that was Emma’s job.”
“Ma doesn’t write stories.” Henry finishes a page and flips to the next, beginning to scrawl across it in long, dark strokes. “Ma is a part of them, too. I’m the only one in this town who isn’t a story.”
“You’re the only story, sweetheart,” Mom says, smiling at him, and she flips through blank pages for a long time while he sits there writing.
It’s Ma who's walking through the hall to the secret room this time he’s in there, and Henry perks up and listens to her exasperated voice as she speaks too loudly on the phone. “Yes, I know, Killian, but I can’t tell you that.” A pause, then even more forcefully, “I don’t give a fuck what Dr. Phil says!”
Henry shoves his book back into place on the shelf before she can enter the room, listening to the sound of the secret doorknob being pulled and the door creaking. “Yes, I know. I know you…and I know you want me to…but I can’t give you that. I’ve been trying to tell you that for months now. I can’t.”
She stops in the hallway, sounding very annoyed. “Yes, there’s a deeper reason. How do you not know that by now? How are you missing any of this? I’ve never even tried hiding–“ She emerges, sees Henry, and says hurriedly, “I have to go.”
She’s pacing and Henry only gets a sharp nod from her, irritated and uncomfortable and not directed at him. “Sorry, kid. It’s just…Hook. You know. The boyfriend no one will let me give up.”
“You’re angry at Mom,” Henry guesses. Hook never earns Ma’s frustration like Mom does. She usually winds up rolling her eyes and ignoring whatever offense he’s offered, but Mom makes her grumpy for days, spinning rapidly between outrage and resentment and misery all at once. Ma has the same effect on Mom, though Mom tends to shut down completely when Ma is the one to hurt her, turning on a cool mask to the world and refusing to acknowledge that she’s hurt until she forgives.
Ma grimaces. “I’m not angry at her. She hasn’t…she’s been very clear with me. And I understand why she’s so afraid, especially after what happened with Robin. I’m just…frustrated.”
Henry waits and Ma paces more, dragging her feet and squeezing her phone like she thinks she might pop it into pieces. “I know your mom is fearless sometimes. And I guess I wish…it’d be nice if she could have been less afraid for us. Like she is for you.” She smiles and Henry can see the way it quavers, Ma trying to be strong and wavering.
He shakes his head. And then rolls his eyes for good measure. “Mom was so afraid of losing me that she lied to me my whole life. She let me think I was crazy. Don't you know how long it took her to be brave?” Ma stops pacing, her back to him, but he knows she’s listening. “Mom’s only fearless when she thinks there’s nothing else to lose.”
“What else is there to lose now?” Ma whispers, turning abruptly. Her hand is white because she’s squeezing the phone so tightly and her eyes are pleading, begging for understanding from him.
And now he’s a writer, even if he isn’t the writer. This story is writing itself and Henry feels as though he can be outside, can understand some of the things that just the truth won’t suffice for. “You,” he says simply, and Ma is shaking her head already. “Me.”
“Regina doesn’t believe she makes her own destiny anymore.” The anger is all but gone, replaced with glumness instead. “And we don’t know who does, then.”
“Not yet,” Henry says, and Ma sits down beside him and looks through the photos on his camera, her eyes yearning more and more with each picture scrolled past.
Henry wakes up late one night after Mom had gone out for drinks with Ma to the sounds of chatter downstairs. Ruby, with Aurora and Mulan and Belle behind her, from the sound of it, and Ma bringing up the rear with Mom and- of course- Hook. “Mulan’s going to have to drop us all off,” Aurora is saying, giggling through her hiccups. “She holds her liquor the best.”
“Please stop kissing me,” Mulan says, sounding exhausted. “Belle, you too.”
“It’s okay! I’m not even married anymore. Not really.” Belle sounds just as tipsy as Aurora, and Henry rolls out of bed to shut the door before he hears anything even more disturbing about his (maybe?) grandmother.
“Philip likes you, too,” Aurora says, and Henry hears Mom snort. He peeks down the stairs, curious, and sees that she’s standing taller, steadier than the rest of them, and Ma is draped all over her while Hook traipses in behind them, looking very amused and unsteady on his feet.
“I hold my liquor considerably better than all of you,” he objects, but his voice is slurring and Mom wrinkles her nose at his breath. Ma buries her face in Mom's shoulder. “Except perhaps Her Majesty.”
“Can you drive a car?” Ruby asks dubiously, swaying a bit.
“I watch high-speed car chases on TV all the time. I know how to drive.” Hook sounds offended when Ruby laughs, clapping him on the shoulder.
She puts a loose arm around him and Belle makes a face and moves from Mulan to Ruby, standing closer to her than she is to Hook. “What are you doing here, anyway? It’s ladies night. No boys allowed. Shoo.” Belle swats at him and hits him squarely in the face, looking very pleased with herself. “You fucker.”
“Belle!” Ruby sounds delighted. Henry watches with interest.
Hook blinks at her, raising his hook. Ruby’s eyes glint yellow and Mulan is drawing her sword before he can strike Belle back. Mom looks very pleased at all of this. Hook retreats, blinking blearily at them all. “I am very, very drunk,” he says in apology. Then, “I don’t leave Emma alone.”
“We’ve noticed,” Mom says dryly. Ma sighs and flops over her again, long-limbed and boneless.
Ruby scowls at Hook. “You know, when Regina and Emma were banging all over every surface in Storybrooke way back when, they still didn’t follow each other around like this. It’s so…” She yawns and drops her arm, frowning at Hook. Hook is gaping at her. “Was I not supposed to say that?”
Hook looks at them again, Ma all over Mom in all the usual ways, but this time he doesn’t look amused or confused but wholly unsettled, grasping what he hadn’t before at last. He turns and storms out the door, slipping halfway across the porch steps, and Ma makes a vague kind of effort to follow him before she slumps against Mom instead.
Henry hurries back to his room and opens the window, watching Mom guide Ma out the door. “Get up,” she orders Hook. “I won’t have you vomiting all over my porch.”
And it’s the weirdest thing, actually, because Henry knows that Mom hates Hook, that they have a lot of history that Mom refuses to talk to him about but it all seems to lead to more and more loathing. But Mom yanks Hook up and settles Ma down on the stairs and says almost gently, “I’ll drive you back to Granny’s.”
“Swan,” he mumbles, but Ma is rubbing her head and avoiding his eyes, and she’s the one to throw up on the stairs a moment later.
Henry waits by the window until Mom returns a good five minutes later, waving her hand so the vomit disappears. “Did you break up with him for me?” Ma asks, gazing up at her hopefully.
“I don’t think he wants to end things with you, Emma.” Mom runs her fingers through Ma’s hair, pulling it back and tying it into a ponytail. “It takes more than competition for your heart to bring him down- or so he told me, anyway.”
Ma tries to stand and stumbles, and Mom catches her, keeps her steady, and Ma’s arms snake around her and hold her tightly. “Don’t want competition. Just want you.”
Mom’s hands are at Ma’s waist and Ma’s arms are flung around her and she laughs a shuddering laugh and says, “Isn’t this about the time that we usually get caught on camera by Henry?”
They both look up, just in his line of sight, and he waves at them silently from the window. Ma moves to stand behind Mom and tuck her head over her shoulder and Mom stands, eyes closed, and they both wait for the photo.
Ma breaks up with Hook officially, Henry guesses, because he’s been skulking around Granny’s lately flirting with everyone who looks at him for days now. Mom and Ma don’t do anything; except that since that night, Mom is avoiding Ma more than she ever has before.
Ma grumps around and snaps at Grandma and Gramps and Henry and then apologizes minutes later. “I’m just on edge, I guess,” she says, and she storms off to the author’s mansion most days. Henry comes with her and she never asks him about the book he’s writing in, never seems to notice, and she searches for clues and finds nothing and winds up doing push-ups one-handed on the floor to take the edge off.
Mom is silent and distant and refuses to tell Henry anything but it’s complicated, and she looks devastated every time Ma stalks to their front door and rings and rings and rings. Henry, you get that, and she vanishes with a puff of smoke to anywhere but near Ma, and Ma enters with a perpetual storm cloud around her. “She left?”
“Sorry.”
They all attend a family dinner together at Granny's and Henry takes the spot at the head of the table with the same swiftness as Grandma claims the spot on Gramps’s other side, and Henry thinks he might have an ally there. Mom sits beside Ma in the booth and refuses to look at her for a full hour, and Ma finally mutters something and storms off toward the back of the diner.
“Go,” Grandma says, voice like steel. “Make it better.” Mom blinks at her and heads off without another word, and when Henry follows them a few minutes later, he isn’t surprised to see Ma leaning back against the wall of the hallway, Mom peppering her face with soft, gentle kisses. Ma’s eyes are closed and her teeth are clenched and she’s crying silently, and Mom whispers apologies into her ears.
I want to protect you, Mom says. Like you’ve protected me.
“You want to protect yourself,” Ma grits out, and Mom retreats at last, walking down the hall with her face very stiff.
Henry snaps one picture before Mom grinds out, “Not now, Henry,” and makes her hasty way out of the diner.
The only time he sees her relaxed anymore is when they’re in the author’s library alone together, Mom turning pages of blank books as though she can see stories within them and Henry writing furiously. He’s nearly at the end now, taping in pictures where they belong and leaving the final page blank. The end is supposed to write itself, but the middle still isn’t over, still moves forward at an agonizing pace.
“You’re having trouble,” Mom notes.
“I know what’s supposed to happen,” he says. They don’t talk about what exactly he’s writing but he knows she must know, must understand every time she poses for a picture for him. “But I can’t write it until it does. And it won’t until…I’m just the writer. I don’t get to force people to make the right decisions.”
Mom is staring at him expectantly and he frowns, understanding. “But what does that mean about the author? Is he really writing a story for you or is he just writing your story?”
“Why do we write stories, Henry?” Mom has a book open in her lap, her eyes tracking the page even though there’s nothing on it. “Why did the author write the storybook?”
“To make me understand,” Henry guesses. “To show me the truth. A truth,” he corrects himself, because the truth without compassion is no story.
Mom leans forward. “When I read the book, all I see is the evil I’ve done with no rationalization. It painted a harsh picture but I needed one to understand what I’d become.”
“What gives the author the right to decide what you needed, though?” Henry objects, making a face.
“No one,” Mom agrees. “No one has that right but me.” Her eyes glint like she isn’t sharing a private amusement, and she hurries on. “But when I look at myself now in the mirror, I see good. I see what I can be, not what I was. And I know that your book will tell me…a better story.”
“Are you sure about that?” He glances down at the last photo, Mom stalking off while Ma looks stricken in the background.
Mom stands up. She walks to him, pressing a kiss to his forehead that lasts so long that he looks at her worriedly. She smiles, her eyes soft. “Tell us both when you’re finished, all right?”
After she leaves, Henry writes and writes until he’s all caught up, until there’s nothing left to say anymore. The middle is all done, the ending is nowhere in sight, but there’s only one page left to the book and he doesn’t know what comes next.
He tucks the book back into place on the shelf and walks home.
Mom and Ma are still stiff around each other, still angry, all sharply aborted touches and quickly averted gazes. But he’s summoned them both to the house and he stands over them, arms crossed, and says, “I finished the book. Well, there’s no ending, but I finished what I could.”
“Book?” they say together, and then wince together at that.
Mom says, “Have you been writing something?”
He blinks at her, confused at her motive in pretending. She eyes him curiously. He says, “The book? The one I’ve been writing in the author’s mansion?”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Ma asks. “You’re holed up there all the time.”
Mom still looks perplexed. “You were writing a book?”
And she doesn’t know, he realizes in a flash. She has no idea what he’s talking about, as though the weeks he’s been writing with her had never happened. As though–
“I know who the author is,” he says wonderingly, and turns and runs from the house.
Mom and Ma trail after him, follow him to the mansion and into the private room. It’s empty. Henry doesn’t know if anyone will ever return there again. But he seizes his book and flips it open, Mom craning her neck to see the page. The text has become elaborate script and the photos pasted in are now a part of the paper as though they’d been printed into it, the sharp details of a photo gone and replaced with art. “It’s true,” he breathes. “It’s a Book now.”
And there's the photo of Mom that he’d snapped in the mansion when he’d been staking out the author. She looks different now than she had in the original photo- older, a bit, with greying hair and wrinkles at the corners of her mouth- but still Mom. A different Mom.
He turns with shaky hands to the very last page, and there’s Mom’s careful scrawl across the page. “You always made your own destiny,” Mom reads aloud. “With love, RM.” She shakes her head and Ma presses closer, a hand on Mom’s back. “What does it mean?”
Henry tells them.
Ma snatches the book first, stares at page after page of the pictures that Henry had taken, reads the text silently, and Mom crowds in to see it too. He has them at Granny’s, in the yard, in the station. He has them staring at each other with those looks on their faces and he has them close enough to kiss and he has all three of them together, laughing and mugging for the camera.
“I wanted to write your story,” he says. “The one that I saw. You- the other you- she said that the truth is only the truth. And stories are feelings. These are feelings, right?”
Mom looks at him, then Ma’s shiny eyes, then back at him again. “Oh, Henry,” she whispers, and then repeats again the words on the final page of the book. “'You always made your own destiny.’ Which of us was she talking to? You? Me?”
“All of us?” Ma murmurs, and Mom turns and they’re holding hands, tight and uncompromising, and Ma says, “Happy endings aren’t always what we think they’ll be. I’ve been trying to tell you–“
The door opens, cutting her off, and a boy runs in with a cry of “Regina!" and Henry’s heart sinks as Mom’s eyes widen. It’s Roland, Roland who shouldn’t be here in town, Roland whose father is…
And yep, there’s Robin Hood, walking into the room while Hook trails behind him. Mom gapes. Ma removes her hand from Mom’s very quickly. “Did I mention that I found your love on the Storybrooke Reddit subthread? He's a Fluttershy man, but we've made our peace with it,” Hook says pleasantly. “I thought I would do you a favor, Majesty. For helping me out that once. I let him know that we took the barrier down weeks ago.” He’s smiling and it’s impossible to say if he knows what he’s done or not.
Of course he does. His eyes are gleaming with malice, a man scorned and seeking vengeance, and Henry has the sudden desire to kick him in the shins. Ma squeezes Henry's shoulder and says a low, hurt, “Thank you,” and then takes a step, unsure, and flees past Hook out of the room just as Robin flies forward to wrap his arms around Mom.
Henry runs out, too, leaving the book behind.
They’re huddled together on Ma’s old bed in the loft, up against the headrest with a box of chocolates they’d snagged from Grandma, and Ma isn’t eating. She’s staring into space and she looks- not angry, not unhappy, just resigned. “Mom loves you,” Henry says. “I know that. I know how she looks when she loves someone.”
“I know she cares about me. But love is…” Ma’s eyes glaze over. “She’s in love with Robin Hood. Her true love. I guess I…” She laughs and it’s sharp and hoarse. “I kind of had it coming, right? When he ran to her, all I could think was, This is how Regina felt when Marian came back. It’s pretty fucked up, Henry.”
“You’re not supposed to use that word around me,” he informs her, but he leans against her shoulder and she tucks her chin in over his head. He can feel frustrated tears falling and tries to hide them from Ma. They’d been so close and it had felt right, everything about the three of them together had been right. Mom had smiled so much and hurt so hard and that’s it? It’s all going to be thrown away because of this?
This isn’t the ending. This can’t be the ending.
“You left your book behind,” comes a voice from the steps, and no, it isn’t the ending at all, he understands, new hope blooming in his stomach. Mom emerges, book in hand, and smiles at both of them. “I didn’t want you to lose it, Henry. Not after all the work you’ve put into it.”
Ma sits up straighter and curls her arms around herself protectively, and Henry says numbly, “Does any of it matter anymore?”
“Very much.” Mom is talking but her eyes are still glittering with something else, and her gaze finally shifts from him to settle on Ma, watching her with a face wiped clean of emotion. “Of course it matters. It’s…it’s ours, Henry. It’s our story. Even if you never did get to the ending.”
Ma still doesn’t talk, but Mom is patient today. “I told Robin to go,” she says, and Ma’s hand jerks up and then drops. “He was…very important to me. He taught me that I could love again, and now I do. I really, really do.”
Ma climbs off the bed and Mom is still gazing at her and Ma murmurs, “He was supposed to be your happy ending.”
“I choose my own happy ending,” Mom says fervently. “I love you, Emma. I don’t want to be afraid of that anymore. I’m sorry that I’ve been so–“
Ma surges forward and kisses Mom and Mom pulls her close, strokes the back of her neck as Ma cups Mom’s face in her hands and they kiss, and kiss, and smile and kiss some more, foreheads together and eyes so soft and this is the kind of fairytale love that his moms deserve, yeah?
Henry still makes a face and takes only the one obligatory photo before he scrambles down the stairs, book in hand, and opens it again to the last page. Now there’s a photo behind it that matches the one he’d just taken, Mom and Ma together.
Except that somehow- by magic or some other forces he doesn’t know- he’s in it too, a boy seated on the bed with a camera aimed at the two of them. And they lived happily ever after, he thinks, shutting the book. Until the next story.
He knows better than to believe that his moms are going to have an ending anytime soon, but that’s okay with him.