Chapter Text
Henry dealt with his false memories easily. Television shows with muppets taught him to read and count. His mom couldn’t afford primary school or day care, and he suspected that she stole cable from the neighbours, but the TV shows gave him everything he needed to prove that he was smart. He started school early—he was maybe almost five years old—and it had been a private school, in the city, and on scholarship because a child psychologist made him do some tests and decided that he was gifted. His mom had to go look for a job that day. He hadn’t wanted to be any trouble, but he cried when she left because he hadn’t ever been left alone with so many strangers before. She should have waited two more years to save up for the cost of even getting him into a public school, and when he thought about it there was no call to go about giving scholarships to grade schoolers even if a kid could read whole sentences silently at age almost-five, but then again…
…this never happened.
On his first day of school, a little after he had turned six years old, his mother drove him to the schoolhouse and walked him to the classroom. The teacher and his classmates had already been at their desks, but nobody scolded him for coming late. Instead, they all sat in silence, staring straight ahead of wherever they would be looking, until his mother began to speak. After that, there had been lessons in counting and the alphabet. He learned to dance the hokey-pokey for physical education hour. His mother still sat in the corner and watched. Henry wondered if she was trying not to laugh at him whenever he got a step wrong, and then he wished that she would laugh at him. Anything but that coldly cautious silence.
At noon, his classmates took their lunch boxes to their table and ate there, but his mother took him downstairs to the cafeteria. This was so that they could have a proper lunch with plates and cutlery. When his mother decided that wasn’t proper enough, she drove them to a restaurant. He had wished that she'd let him stay and eat in the classroom, where all the chairs were just his size, but then again, she let Henry choose the restaurant.
He went back to class late, and his mother didn’t think it was fair that he should miss out on art hour because of that, so the whole class had art hour all over again. Henry was relieved. This, at least, was something that he knew how to do. He had modeling clay to play with back at home. They used a different brand at school, though—one that didn’t taste as good and, as it turned out, was not non-toxic.
His new classmate Eustace made a snake out of clay, or maybe Eustace just liked to roll clumps of clay into logs. Another classmate named Jill made pancakes out of clay, or maybe Jill just liked to slam her hand against the table over and over until she hurt herself and started crying.
Henry made Regina worried sick. He tried to argue that he was making an apple pie out of clay that was meant to be eaten, and of course he knew that it wasn’t a real pie, but it might have been his argument that not non-toxic didn’t automatically mean poisonous that saved his education.
Regina allowed him to attend the next day of school—counting, the alphabet, the hokey-pokey that he finally knew all the steps of and called his mother to join in but she wouldn’t, they had lunch out, and art hour again. Eustace made snakes. Jill made pancakes. Henry ignored the clay and went for the building blocks.
“But that’s not art,” Regina told him.
“Is too,” Henry argued. “It’s artsy-hit-texture.” He remembered the alphabet lessons, and put his knowledge to use when he read the spines of the books on Regina’s shelf. One had been a book about architecture, which he didn’t know how to pronounce. “If you don’t let me play blocks, I’ll eat something I shouldn’t instead.”
Regina let him play blocks.
Several days later, Regina made him a packed lunch and stopped sitting in for his classes. Henry didn’t blame her for not showing up, but he did complain to her when she drove up to take him home at the end of the day. He could recite the alphabet backwards, not because anybody had taught him to but because he was so bored with what they were teaching him. He had applied his knowledge of numbers to the passage of time, to the o’clock of the day and its pieces of minutes, to the passage of years that made a person how old they were…and nobody cared, or maybe nobody understood. Didn’t it make sense? Didn’t it matter? Wasn’t it awesome? No. Henry had stuck in and out and shaken about his extremities, and turned himself around, enough times to question the final declaration of, “That’s what it’s all about!” That’s what the entire educational system wanted him to think, drilled into his head every single day, but every fiber in his being rebelled. There had to be more than doing the hokey-pokey in this world. There just had to be.
Art hour had been modeling clay, again. Eustace had made snakes. Jill had made pancakes. Henry had refused to make friends.
“I’ll have you promoted to the second grade,” Regina said, firmly, when his rant had ended.
It hadn’t helped.
Henry preferred those memories, though. It was frustrating, but it was real. His memories before moving to New York City, the ones that had nothing to do with Storybrooke, were like trying to remember a dream if the dream lasted for a decade. He thought it was because the present moment is always more real, but the moment he and his mom drove over the town line kept memories more trustworthy than memories. The Storybrooke memories felt like that, too.
Letting the fake memories focus in his mind felt like overhearing his moms fight about money—which had never happened, but he could imagine some hint of the depth and complications of adulthood, mysteries that even Henry the boy genius wasn’t ready for, and he felt it. Even a hint was uncomfortable.
Regina’s magic took Emma’s memories and blended them into Henry’s own mind, in Regina’s own style. Regina wished that she’d sent Henry to school sooner, even though she couldn’t ever have let him go or admit to herself that he was growing up at all, let alone growing up that fast. For Emma, school had been just another pretence of her foster so-called “families” that they ever really cared about her future. She was a frequent truant, needing to reveal the sham that each family was, even when nobody believed her and she only hurt herself.
The grade school scholarship wasn’t a memory so much as somebody else’s fantasy, somebody else’s regret, branded into some foggy corner of his brain.
Henry, now almost thirteen years old, paused on the suburban sidewalk of Storybrooke town and indulged in an apprehensive shudder. He could have been cursed. He could have lost his mind, he could have lost time, and danced the hokey-pokey every afternoon for twenty-eight years like Eustace and Jill. That hadn’t been what happened, but the false memories were the closest he’d ever gotten to being cursed.
Even the blessing of fiction was a curse against truth.
Things were better now, Henry reminded himself as he approached the campus. Everything was better now. Regina let him walk to school. Emma let him pick up stuff on the way back that she needed. Regina had made up with her stepdaughter, put her toxic half-sister behind bars, and started dating again.
Henry could make his own decisions, too. He was going back to school here in Storybrooke.
Archie and Belle had helped him with the enrollment, which was more complicated than when Emma did it for him under the cloud of a contagious memory spell. Without a transcript of records from his year in New York, the headmistress let him take the three requisite tests: the test of strength, the test of wits, and the test of heart.
The swordfighting practice Henry had with his dad and granddad helped a lot with the test of strength, which was basically whether he could hack a scarecrow into a pile of hay in under fifteen minutes. The test of wits was a regular pencil-and-paper entrance exam, which Henry thought was easy until he got to the Enchanted Forest History & Geography section. Fortunately, it was all multiple choice, and Henry was a good guesser. The test of heart was a stethoscope pressed to his back and chest, under his shirt, in the school clinic.
When Henry emerged from the final test, he caught the headmistress saying to Archie and Belle, “Of course we’re going to let him take the class! He’s the mayor’s son, and Mr. Gold’s grandson, and claim to the throne of at least three kingdoms. We’ve got to find something for him to do, though, or else he’ll start casting magic…” the headmistress trailed off when she saw Henry.
“I’m in, then? That’s great,” Henry said. The nurse had mentioned a theory of the headmistress that students who weren't challenged enough academically might develop uncontrollable telekinesis. “So, tell me about the clubs.”
Membership openings and meetings would be announced at homeroom, but Henry could look forward to the following: several kinds of scouts including “hamlet militia scouts”, ballroom dance, folk dance, contemporary dance, fatal dance survival, choir (celestial), racket (infernal), orchestra, drama club, mixed martial arts excluding weaponry and magic, mixed martial arts including improvised and skilled weaponry but excluding magic, Little League baseball, Major League Calvinball, archery, swimming, equestrians, dragonslayers, otherkin-human alliance, psionics, and the school newspaper which was for some reason planning to publish in Esperanto and Tengwar but not in English.
Henry thanked the headmistress and the three of them left. That had been yesterday.
Today, Henry decided, “Sea scouts.” The student council had been the first extracurricular on his mind, but even if he didn’t like that the school decided grade-schoolers would be too young for that, he didn’t want to start it from nothing. Maybe nobody in his grade or lower would be interested, anyway.
Or maybe…
He caught sight of some familiar faces: Ava, sitting on the swing like a grown-up instead of actually swinging, was slightly older than a sixth grader should be. Henry was happy to see her in school at all, instead of stealing from convenience stores so that she and her little brother didn’t starve. Her wild and bushy blonde hair had been plaited and tied in a bun. Seated beneath the shade of a tree was Cygnus, who Henry suspected was the son of Sir Percival of King Arthur’s Round Table but the other boy was too snobbish and shy for Henry to want to find out. Grace wore a chain of daisies in her hair and twirled around somewhere off in the corner. Meanwhile, bolting around the playground and shouting with excitement, went the Woolfe quadruplets. They looked nothing alike, but Henry hadn’t bothered to tell them apart because they shouted a lot and roughhoused everybody they ran into. He used to just stay away.
Henry vaulted the gate and landed in the playground, waving an arm in greeting. “Hey, everybody!” He shouted, happily. “I’m back! I’m home—”
The sentence broke because someone punched him in the stomach.