Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

one.

He's had these dreams for several years now, but this is the first time there's someone else here with him.

“Hello?” He tries to move forward to the newcomer lying on the floor in front of him—a woman, he sees, an adult in an expansive purple dress—but is rebuffed by a warning gout of flame. “Who are you?”

His voice seems to rouse the woman, who shakes her head and picks herself off the ground. She's halfway to standing when she spots him—and immediately, her face face fills with light.

“Henry,” she murmurs over a sigh, her voice low and warm, warm—

He frowns.

“How do you know my name?” he asks, and wakes up.

* * *

The next time Henry dreams of the room on fire, she's there, standing tall—though not that tall—and waiting for him.

“Who are you?”

She smiles again, and once again there's that warmth—he's surrounded by flames, but only his mom has ever made him feel like this.

“I'm a friend,” she says instantly, the words rolling off her tongue like they've been prepared long in advance. “But you can call me Regina.”

“So how do you know who I am?”

She laughs, low and harmonious. “Oh, Henry. This is your dream; of course I know who you are.”

“Oh.” Duh. That should have been obvious. “So why are you here?”

“Because of the same reason you're here, I suspect.”

And that isn't really helpful in the slightest, because—“This is a dream. I don't know why I'm here.” He tries a different tack. “I've been dreaming of this room for ages. How come you're here now?”

She smiles again, but not like before; this feels distant and—and sad, somehow. “I suppose I needed a friend, like you.”

Which sort of makes sense, except for one thing. “You're just in my dream. Do dream people need friends?”

“Henry,” she reproves, but gently, so gently. “Everyone needs friends.”

“Oh.” It still doesn't make total sense, but he accepts it. For some reason, there's something about this woman that he simply trusts. “I'm glad you're here. It got lonely in here.”

She's definitely sad this time, there's no mistaking it, and he's briefly tempted to go hug her—and as if responding to the mere idea of it, flame rushes between them, warning him away. But Regina, she just stands there, still and poised and smiling that sad smile of hers.

“I promise you, Henry, you won't be alone again.”

He blinks, taken aback by the openness of the promise. “Thank—thank you,” he stammers, unsure how to reply, but it seems to be all she needs because there's that warmth again.

“So why don't you tell me how you've been doing?” she says, in a voice too composed to be entirely natural—she's definitely been rehearsing this. As much as dream people can rehearse anything.

“But shouldn't you already know?”

“I don't know everything, Henry. Besides, we have a lot of time before you wake up.”

“But what about—”

“I'm a dream person,” she says, soft and comforting. “I'll be here for as long as you're here. I promised, remember?”

“Okay.” He sits on the floor, crosses his legs, and tells his new friend about his day.

two.

They talk for hours, spending the rest of the night in the same position, seated opposite other on the floor.

Or, rather, Henry talks. Regina mostly listens, only occasionally interjecting to ask him a question which invariably eggs him on, teases out some part of his story that he hadn't thought to vocalise. And it's nice, it's great to have someone who just listens like this, but—

“What about you? Don't you have any stories?”

“I'm a dream person, Henry. You haven't forgotten, have you?” Regina reminds him, and he wonders whether dream people are meant to be snarky. He likes it, though.

* * *

He's in the middle of telling her about his friends at school when she holds up a hand to pause him mid-sentence.

“Henry, wait.”

He frowns. “Is there something wrong?”

“Look down.” He does, and his hands are strangely transparent. As is the rest of his body.

He realises what it means at once. “I'm waking up.”

She nods, and for a brief moment her face cracks and—oh, Henry just wants to run across and hold her.

“I'll be back,” he promises instead, and it works, it works.

“And I'll be here.”

He wakes up drenched in warmth and a smile on his face.

* * *

He tells his mom at breakfast, but it doesn't go quite to plan.

“I made a friend,” he declares over waffles. “Last night.”

Her postures hardens, her green eyes wide and round. “What do you—”

He rolls his eyes, because whilst Emma is a great mom, relaxed and cool, she gets way, way too protective of him sometimes. He's thirteen, not six. “Not like that. I mean in my dream.”

Her shoulders loosen, and she lets out a snort. “Right, okay.”

“We talked for ages,” he begins, his voice trembling with excitement, “Her name is Regina and she's really nice, she just sits there and listens to me—”

“Kid, you do know it was just a dream, right?”

“Oh—yeah.” He looks down at his waffles, which have already begun to go cold.

three.

He next dreams of the fire room a few weeks later, and he's met at once by that warm, warm smile of hers.

“My mom doesn't believe you're real,” he says glumly, without preamble—but to his surprise, he gets a scoff and a roll of the eyes in reply.

“Of course she doesn't. I am just someone who appears in your dreams, after all.”

And he knows, but—“Just because you're just in my dreams doesn't make you less real.”

Not for the first time, he wonders how anyone can smile like that, how someone can look so happy yet so heartbroken at the same time. “No, it doesn't. But Miss Swan has always been quite the cynic and—”

“Wait. You know my mom?” he asks, surprised—and she freezes, her face two shades paler than before, as if she'd just given away a closely-guarded secret, but he soon remembers himself. “Right, hang on. In my dreams.”

She constructs a composed smile. “Of course. So, how have you been, Henry?”

He sits down in his spot and talks of school, New York, and a man named Walsh.

“This Walsh,” Regina drawls slowly, not quite making eye contact with him, “what do you think about him?”

He shrugs, well aware of his mom's checkered history with boyfriends. “He's nice, I guess. Mom just started going out with him.”

“Hmm.”

He has no idea how a dream person can make that sound that disdainful.

* * *

“I found an apple tree in Central Park.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “Oh? What type?”

“Honey crisp.”

A smile. “My favourite.”

He wonders at that—after all, do dream people like apples? But he doesn't question it.

“I might have stolen some,” he admits, trying to look bashful and failing miserably.

She snorts. “You truly are your mother's child.”

* * *

“You know, for someone who's only in my dreams, you have a lot of opinions.”

She frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You don't like soft drinks,” he says, interpreting the roll of the eyes he'd just seen seconds before. “I love soft drinks.”

“Just because I'm a dream person doesn't mean I have to approve of all your tastes. Merely most of them,” she declares, her voice strangely firm. “And besides which, I don't hate them. I merely think they're very unhealthy, and you would do well to cut them down.” She sounds oddly tired as she finishes, as if she's said this many, many times before.

“You're not my mother,” he grumbles, and something happens to her face, something he doesn't recognise at all.

“Regina? What's—”

“Nothing. It's fine.” And just like that, she's composed and dignified again. “So: the museum.”

He nods, accepting, and continues his story.

four.

Six months in, his mom falls ill.

“—And she's always sleeping and has a fever and coughing and I don't know what to do,” he gushes, several days' worth of mounting anxiety spilling out in a rush.

“Your mother is an exceptionally strong woman. I'm sure she'll pull through this just fine,” Regina reassures him. It sounds exactly like the platitudes he's been hearing all week, but from Regina it feels… real, somehow.

“What can I do?”

“Make sure she sleeps and drinks plenty of water. Some honey and lemon tea may help with the sore throat, if she has that.”

He nods, but—“I'm only thirteen, I don't know how to take care of her like that—”

“Henry. I know you'll take care of her. You always have.”

He doesn't ask how she knows, because he sure as hell doesn't.

* * *

“Kid, this is amazing,” Emma rasps, her voice sounding marginally less like her throat had been dragged over a cheese grater now that she's drunk the honey and lemon tea. “Where'd you learn this?”

He swallows, unsure how to reply. “A friend taught me.”

“Well, tell them I said thanks a million.”

That night he does, and Regina laughs.

* * *

Despite his best efforts, Emma's condition does not improve over the next few days. In fact, the precise opposite happens.

“She has pneumonia,” Henry tells Regina glumly. “She got admitted to hospital this afternoon.”

“Oh, Henry.” Regina sighs, and her face is suddenly pale and drawn, which—which is good. He doesn't need reassurances and kind platitudes right now, he has plenty of those. He needs someone who understands.

“I'm scared,” he says miserably, wrapping his arms protectively around himself.

“I know, sweetheart. I know.” And her face is open and kind and no one, not even his mom—who has always displayed her love in other ways, though equally meaningful ones—has ever looked at him like that.

“What should I do?”

“Be there for her. That's all we can ever do.”

He nods, but he still mumbles, “I wish you were there for her.”

“So do I.”

* * *

A week which feels like a thousand years later, Emma, together with Henry, as he had spent most of his waking hours by her side, is discharged from the hospital. Henry clings to her on the ride home like she'll float off into the sky if he doesn't.

When he dreams of the room that evening, he tells her immediately.

“Thank you,” he says, more than a touch bashful but nonetheless determined to give his friend her due for the last week. He desperately, desperately wants to give her a hug, but the room—as ever—has other ideas.

In any case, the brilliant, star-bright smile he receives is all the reply he needs. He sits in his usual place, and starts telling her about how much he hates hospital food.

five.

Eight months, and for the first time he doesn't sit straight down when he dreams of the fire room.

“Henry, what's wrong?”

He turns away, not wanting her to get a full look on his face. Regina isn't his mother, she's just a friend, a dream person—but regardless, something tells him that she won't react well to the unsightly dark purple patch surrounding his left eye.

“Henry.”

His eyes fixed to the obsidian-black floor, he shuffles ever so slowly back so he's facing Regina. Sort of. Just enough so he can claim that he isn't hiding anything from her, whilst still hoping that she can't see—

“Is that a—”

He flinches. Damn.

“It's not a big deal,” he claims, trying to sound convincing and evidently failing, because Regina's lips thin and her eyes are glinting in a way which doesn't seem entirely natural.

“What happened, Henry? Was it those… those children?” She's talking about that clique of wannabe-footballers at school, he knows. He's ranted about them often enough in the past.

“Nothing, I just—”

“What happened?” Her voice hasn't raised in volume, but there's something about that tone which makes every hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

He swallows, a tightness in his stomach that he hasn't felt in this place before. “It's seriously nothing. “We were just playing hockey at school, and—and these guys came over and started arguing with us, and I—I got—Regina, are you okay?”

Regina's face had been gradually twisting into something genuinely terrifying, her jaw has locked in a way which must be painful and her eyes are burning with fires far less controlled than the ones separating them. Frankly, she looks murderous.

“You—you're scaring me a bit here,” he says, taking refuge in colossal understatement. Even his mom, who is easily the most intimidating person he knows when she wants to be, has never looked quite like this.

Mercifully, the words seem to pierce whatever hellish bubble Regina has sunk into, and her expression drops—too far, in fact, because it quickly descends into blatant horror. It's better than what came before, but not much.

“Henry, I—I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you—”

“It's fine,” Henry reassures, maybe a shade too quickly. “It's really nothing. I got distracted and the puck hit me in the face when I wasn't looking.”

She relaxes, just enough so his own anxiety melts away. “And you're sure it was an accident?”

“I'm sure.” He rolls his eyes. “You're almost as bad as mom was.”

“Oh, I can be much, much worse.”

six.

The second time he doesn't sit down immediately is close to a year after moving to New York, almost to the day.

“Henry, is there something wrong—”

“It's not me,” he says quickly. He sighs, and sits down. “Walsh proposed to mom.”

Regina's face twitches, then becomes expertly neutral. “I see.”

“You don't have to pretend,” Henry says, smirking a little at her reaction. “I know you don't like him. And I don't know if mom is going to say yes.”

Regina looks pleased—suspiciously so—but her voice is carefully calibrated to betray no emotion when she says, “What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “She's been super weird ever since.” Once again, safety in understatement—he hasn't been able to get a handle on his mother all week, since coming home from the dinner with Walsh and telling Henry that he'd proposed to her. Ever since that day, she's been erratic and distracted and so not like his mom at all.

He guesses this is what adults around him call commitment issues. It's a good thing that he's already aware of his mom's awful track record with men (since his dad, anyway), or he'd be worried about her.

“And what do you think, Henry?”

“I just want her to be happy.” It's a non-answer, but an honest one. Walsh is the first boyfriend of Emma's that Henry's even met, and even though he's iffy about the man—Regina's work, mostly—Walsh seems to make her happy, which is the important thing.

He scratches the back of his head. “I dunno. I mean, I like him, and he was around a lot and visited us in the hospital when mom was sick but he didn't really take care of her.” Not like we did, he doesn't add. “I mean, he's nice, but shouldn't that be his job?”

“I suppose it should, but Emma had you. That's more than enough.”

“More you than me. I didn't have any idea what to do.” He pauses. “You know, for a dream person, you really care about my mom.”

“I don't know about that,” she says cautiously.

“You do. You keep asking about Walsh and about her work and you were really worried about her when she was sick.”

“Only to ensure she's taking good care of you, Henry. You are all I care about here.”

He doesn't buy it, but he doesn't push the subject either.

* * *

If anything, Emma gets worse. Much worse, given that they abruptly up and leave New York a few days later to go to Maine of all places. To make things even stranger, they go with a dark-haired man that Henry had never met before—a client, apparently, though the way he looks at her gives Henry other suspicions.

But Emma barely takes any notice; she's sombre and elsewhere even as she's driving, unresponsive to conversation and gazing pensively into the distance. Their new companion—Killian—is friendly enough, but even he is weirdly evasive when he asks about this supposed case that Emma just took, and he's soon bored out of his mind.

So bored, in fact, that he doesn't even notice he's drifted off until he feels cool, polished stone under his cheek and the insistent heat of nearby flames on his back.

“Henry!” Regina calls out as Henry hauls himself to a sitting position. “I didn't expect to see you here.” As ever, she looks delighted to see him.

“Hi.” He stretches out his limb—he may be dreaming, but the floor is still uncomfortable. “I—uh, I guess I nodded off.”

“In the middle of school?” Regina narrows her eyes in a manner that looks so mothering it's almost funny. “Henry, you know you shouldn't—”

“No, um—mom took a case. In Maine. We're driving there now and I guess I fell asleep.”

“In Maine?” She frowns. “But you said that she wasn't taking any cases outside of New York.”

“Yeah.” He purses his lips. “I think it's about Walsh.”

A second's pause, and another. “Ah. She said no.”

“Yeah. She's being really weird about it too. She says she's fine with it, but then the next day she packs our bags and takes us on a road trip with some random guy with one hand who we've never met—”

“Henry, wait.” Regina's voice is suddenly sharp and her eyes wide. “Are you—can you say that again? A man with one hand?”

“Yeah. Weird, huh?” He looks at Regina, noticing for the first time the unguarded shock written all over her face. “Is—is there something wrong? Should I worry about this guy?”

The look of total surprise hangs for a moment, but then collapses into a neutral and very-obviously-fake smile. “It's nothing. I'm merely as surprised as you were to hear about his… handlessness. I'm sure Emma knows what she's doing,” she adds with more conviction.

An idea strikes Henry and he opens his mouth—before hesitating. It's a stupid idea, one he knows is ridiculous and he's probably going to get mocked for it.

But still...

“If—if I find out anything about this case, could you help me out with it?” He already feels ridiculous, because Regina is a literal construct of his imagination—yet even so, he's never been quite able to shake this feeling that she's something more, so he continues, “I think mom could use a hand with this.”

As he had suspected she would, Regina laughs—but kind and warm, without a trace of mocking to be found. “Henry. Even if I could help, I don't think there's anything I could provide Emma Swan that she would actually need.”

It's honestly as good an answer as he could have expected. “Okay, I just—sometimes even mom needs some help.” And you could give it, he doesn't say.

“Oh, she'll have it. I'm absolutely certain of that.”

Chapter Text

seven.

“Henry. Hey. Time to wake up.”

He groans, opening his eyes and rolling away slightly from the firm hands shaking his shoulders. He'd been in the middle of talking to Regina about the Yankees and his new-found fascination with astronomy, a long-winded result of the fact that he was, at long last, actually good at math.

“Don't wanna get up.” He curls up further, digging towards the car door. Emma chuckles.

“Come on, kid. We're at the place, you can sleep more once you get inside.”

He grumbles, but picks himself up and out of the car.

“Where are we?” he asks, as he stumbles towards a three-storey house. His heart sinks; he thought that at least they'd be staying in a hotel.

“Storybrooke, Maine,” Emma says softly. “I used to live here; we're staying with some old friends.”

“Oh.” Old friends? He's never heard of this place before, and he certainly hasn't heard of any old friends in Maine.

“Can you wait here for a sec?” Emma asks at the base of a set of wooden stairs. “They don't know we're coming, I need to talk to them first.”

“Will they be okay with us?”

A hesitation, so small that Henry almost misses it. “Sure, they'll be fine. Wait here, yeah?”

He knows he isn't getting anything else out of her—not today, at any rate—so he does as he's told. His vague fears prove unfounded, as the man who opens the door to Emma greets her with a hug like he's welcoming home a long-lost relative. A brief, low and strangely serious-looking conversation later, Henry follows Emma up to a homely-looking loft occupied by a David and a heavily pregnant Mary Margaret. And they're pretty cool, honestly; Henry can see why they'd be old friends of Emma's (but then why hasn't she ever mentioned them?). They even offer him to make him cocoa with cinnamon—

“Actually, Henry's pretty tired,” Emma interjects, laying an arm across his back. “The upstairs is still free, right?”

“Of course,” Mary Margaret says with an oddly knowing smile.

* * *

Free turns out to mean completely prepared as if Mary Margaret and David have been expecting him the whole time, which is weird. Like this whole trip has been weird. Like this whole week has been weird.

He's still sleepy, but this whole day has just been sostrange that when he hears a conversation going on downstairs, his curiosity overpowers his exhaustion. He creeps over to the top of the staircase and listens in.

“...don't even know if we left Storybrooke,” the husband—David—is saying, sounding decidedly exasperated.

“Aye, you did. I was with you,” Killian says.

“In the Enchanted Forest?” Mary Margaret asks. Henry frowns. The enchanted what?

“Regina's spell brought us back,” Killian continues. Henry's eyes widen immediately at the name—is that—“We spent a brief time with a princess named Phillip and Aurora. But I wasn't feeling the community spirit, so I ventured off on my own. The last I saw of you lot, you were making your way to Regina's castle.”

Henry blinks rapidly, his head a throbbing, spinning mess. Spells? Princes and princesses? Castles? What the hell is this place?

“And now you're cursed. Why doesn't that surprise me?” Emma asks rhetorically, and that confuses Henry more than anything, because how is his mom, his cynical, worldly mom, unsurprised by this?

“Regina wasn't involved in this,” Mary Margaret says, with some conviction.

“So she says—”

“We're sure.”

“How?”

A long, long pause, to the point where Henry starts to wonder if they've stopped talking or he's about to be busted—

“You'll see tomorrow at the hospital,” Mary Margaret says cryptically, which is just infuriating, to be completely honest. He wants more—he needsmore—but the voices drift away after that. The conversation, as best he can tell, is steered quickly into more understandable territory—missing people, apparently, which at least explains why his mom is here—and he doesn't hear anything else that's interesting.

He sighs, and goes to the surprisingly soft and comfortable bed, curiously similar to his one back home, and falls asleep with a hundred unanswered questions still swimming in his mind. He means to tell Regina all about his discoveries, but annoyingly his dreams are mundane, ordinary ones about flying with Peter Pan.

eight.

“So who are we visiting? Another old friend?”

He knows that they're off to the hospital. Even if mom hadn't told him as much, he still would've worked it out given what he'd overheard. But Mary Margaret and David Nolan are in the car as well, so he keeps quiet about that.

He wants to talk to Regina about that stuff first.

“Something like that,” Emma murmurs, in a way that indicates something more.

And there clearly must be something more, because at the hospital they see a doctor who tells them that the person they're visiting is in a coma, and his mom just stops.

“Mom.” He pulls gently on her sleeve, but Emma just stands there as if frozen in time, her face devoid of all colour. “Mom.”

His voice finally breaks through her shell. Her face crumples and she pulls him in, holding him tight, tight, whispering apologies he doesn't understand at all.

There must be something more.

* * *

Storybrooke Hospital is more or less like every other hospital he's ever visited, all off-white fluorescent lights and polished floors smelling of antiseptic. He's not really a fan, particularly after spending way too much time in one back when Emma had pneumonia; so when Mary Margaret suggests gently that he waits outside the hospital while they go see their old friend, part of him—a small part, true, but a part regardless—wants to say yes.

But mom gives Mary Margaret a look, and he's soon following Emma up to the third floor, through a pair of heavy wooden doors to a private ward—

He freezes.

The dark hair is shorter, lying back straight on the pillow rather than impressively tied up as he's used to, and the olive complexion has been replaced by a sickly paleness filling the gaunt hollows of her cheeks, but it makes no difference.

It's her, and the nametag on her wrist confirms: Regina Mills.

Mills.

Her last name. His secret friend, his dream person, has a last name.

“Henry?” It's Mary Margaret, watching him with curious, cautious eyes. “Is something wrong? Do you—”

Instinct yells at him to spill his year-old secret, but he remembers: cold waffles. This is between him and Regina. He shakes his head.

“How did my mom know her?”

A sigh. “They were… not friends, honestly, but allies. They helped each other, and she did something very special for your mom once.”

“What happened to her?”

“We're not sure. David and I just found her like this in her home.” A pause, a purse of the lips. “Unfortunately, we weren't very surprised.”

“I don't understand.”

Mary Margaret hesitates, as if she's unsure whether to continue—but she does. “She lost someone very important to her, and I—I thinkshe felt that life wasn't really worth living after that.”

His eyes widen in stark horror. “She did this to herself?”

And Mary Margaret, with her pixie cut and doe-eyes, already looks seriously guilty at having spilled so much, so she immediately changes the subject with a don't-worry-about-it and an obviously constructed smile—but too late, too late, too late.

* * *

He dreams of the fire room the moment his head hits the pillow that evening.

“You lied to me.”

Regina blinks, obviously baffled at Henry's immediate outburst. “Henry—”

“You lied to me! You said you weren't real!”

“I'm not sure what you're—”

“I saw you today. At the hospital. The real you.”

At once, comprehension dawns on Regina's face—and it hurts. Oh, it hurts.

But not as much as it hurts to be lied to.

“You were in a coma. Mary Margaret Blanchard said you put yourself in a coma.” He blinks away furious tears. “Why?”

She's crying, and her face, the face he's literally been dreaming of for the last year, has shattered into such open despair that he knows he's crying too, and her voice is cracked and raw when she pleads, “Henry, please, I—let me explain—”

But he can't; he's angry beyond words, bouncing endlessly between why didn't you tell me you were real and why are you in a coma and he just can't.

He lies down on the hard stone floor, curls away from her and listens all night to the sounds of uncontrolled sobbing behind him.

nine.

Unsurprisingly, he wakes up the next morning feeling like a bus has run over the top of him. He'd slept unbroken all night, but sleep and rest are not quite the same thing. Emma is similarly exhausted—apparently she'd been up most of the night working on the case—and the two of them eat breakfast together without conversation. The TV is turned on and the presenters are babbling on about god knows what and it almostfeels normal.

Thoroughly normal, apart from the fact that they're three hundred miles from home in a house belonging to people he'd never met until two days ago.

“I gotta go out for the day, work on stuff for the case,” Emma declares once she's done, sounding roughly as enthusiastic as the last time she'd had a dental appointment. “You and Mary Margaret'll be alright for the day, yeah?”

He nods. He's not going to give his mom an inkling about what he'd found out yesterday. For one thing, he's now aware of just how little he knows about the dream woman he's called a friend—his best friend—for a year now. “Are you going to check up on Re—on that woman in the hospital?”

Emma's shoulders droop and she suddenly looks tired. And a little bit lost. “I—I don't know. The doctors said she isn't going to wake up any time soon, if at all.”

He eyes her carefully, recalling not friends but allies. “Were you… were you guys friends?”

She snorts. “You've been talking to Mary Margaret, huh?”

That draws a glare from him because yes, he has, but he would have asked the same question anyway purely based on how she'd reacted at the hospital. He'd seen her talking to Regina—talking to a coma patient! He hadn't heard what she'd said, but he knows from the movies that that means something.

But Emma's face softens into something distant, pensive—mourning? It's not an expression he's used to seeing on his mother, and he can't quite place it. “We weren't friends, not really. Regina and I barely got along at all. But she...” Emma pauses, bites her lower lip. “She was important, and we—we were family. Sort of. She made me happy.”

It still doesn't quite all add up, weren't friends and barely got along warring with memories of what he'd seen yesterday, but she made me happy? That, at least, makes sense.

It feels true, and right now that's enough for him.

* * *

It takes a few days and constant needling of Mary Margaret—who seems to have appointed herself his minder when mom isn't around—but he finally, finally manages to wheedle out some details about the case.

Not much, of course, but better than nothing. In fact, it's much, much better than nothing because he manages to find out exactly who Emma's mysterious client is: no one.

This isn't a job at all, because Emma isn't looking for some random person. She's looking for his dad.

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said—”

But Henry smiles at Mary Margaret, cutting off her guilty looks and babbled apologies. “It's cool. It explains a lot.”

And it does explain an awful lot: why mom seems to know so many people here yet had never mentioned the place; why she'd seemed so conflicted in coming here yet had come anyway; why she'd brought him along as well when they'd barely set foot outside of Manhattan for the last year; and why she's so determined to see this through.

He's actually pretty excited, to be honest. His dad may have done a pretty awful thing, leaving Emma like he had and completely ruining her love life for, like, a decade, but he's still his dad. Whatever he'd done, he's pretty sure it could all be solved with at least twelve boxes of ice-cream. Or maybe fourteen.

The buzzing anticipation makes him infinitely more enthusiastic about every activity David and Mary Margaret have planned for him. He briefly forgets about his lack of fire room dreams, and for a while he even stops thinking about Regina and the way he'd blanked her. By the time he's back from a fishing trip he'd enjoyed way more than expected, he's positively bouncing.

Then he sees his mom sitting on a park bench, waiting for him.

It only takes one look at her face, and somehow, he knows what's happened.

* * *

Apart from the endless beeping of the heart monitor beside him, he honestly can't tell if Regina is alive or not. But she is, just, and he can't help but stare at her as he walks up to her bedside.

“Hi,” he begins, but doesn't continue immediately. What do you say to someone who you've been baring your soul to for the last year, thinking they aren't real? “I—uh, Mary Margaret thought I should come here. And I wanted to talk to you.” The real you.

He swallows.

“And I know you can't hear me but—my dad's gone. I didn't even know him, but he's gone and I—” His breath hitches, his eyes watering. “I—I think my mom needs you. Mom doesn't usually need anyone, but I think she needs you, and I don't—I don't know what happened between you guys, but mom says you were important to her and I believe her.”

The tears are flowing freely, and his voice has broken into a hundred jagged pieces as he seizes her pale, limp hand and it's so very, very cold. “So—so please wake up. Please. For mom. And I—I'm still really mad at you,” he adds, because he is, “but I promise I'll forgive you if you wake up. So please wake up.”

The heart machine beeps on, and on, and on.

ten.

Zelena.

That's the name of the woman who had killed his dad. That's the woman who his mom is hunting down. He's heard of the four on the case—Emma, Mary Margaret, David and Killian—calling her a witch before, which confuses the hell out of him because the last time he had (accidentally!) called someone that, mom had punched him in the arm.

Of course, that's far from the only thing that's different about his mom right now.

He honestly hasn't seen his mom like this before; even on her most difficult, frustrating cases she's usually a firebrand, full of ceaseless energy and more prone to frustration than actual anger. She's so innately warm that she sometimes burns too hot to be touched, and he can't remember her ever being cold before.

But apparently a personal vendetta will do that to someone.

“Mom,” he whispers when Emma comes back once again too late, too drawn, too reluctant to make eye contact. “Mom, are you okay?”

She smiles and gives him a hug. “Yeah. Fine. Just really busy.”

She hugs him a little tighter than normal these days, and it's pretty much the only reason he isn't flat-out unnerved by her behaviour.

Apparently, though, others are.

“Emma,” Mary Margaret hisses in a low, fierce voice one evening. Henry leans over in his chair as surreptitiously as he can without giving away the fact that he's listening in, not daring to take his eyes off his Vita. “You have to slow down. You can't keep hunting Zelena like this.”

Emma's expression ignites instantly. “Slow down? She killed Neal. She wants to destroy—”

“Emma, I know. I know. But going after her like this isn't the answer.”

“Do you have a better idea? Because—”

“Vengeance is never the answer,” Mary Margaret says, firm in her unwavering confidence. “You know it isn't.”

“What I know is that the person most in danger here can't even protect herself, because she's in a coma!” Emma half-shouts, half-snarls, and Henry wonders just how much the last week or two has gotten to Emma. Mary Margaret looks mortified, and Emma seems to notice because her voice has lowered when she says, “Sorry, I just—I really wish she were here.”

Mary Margaret bows her head. “I never thought I'd say it, but so do I.”

And this, this is something Henry can understand.

* * *

The next time Henry goes to the hospital, Mary Margaret accompanies him. He wonders why, because this isn't the first time that the woman has seemed unusually curious about his interest in Regina. She asks leading questions and looks at him with unreadable eyes every time he mentions her—which isn't often, honestly.

There's something more to this.

But she just laughs and rubs his shoulders and says that she was going to visit anyway. Which is maybe true, maybe not, but he honestly doesn't mind.

The weird thing is, though, neither Mary Margaret nor anyone else seems willing to talk about Regina. About who she is, about how they really know her and about her as a person. They're all perfectly willing to admit that they care about her, and they need to protect her from Zelena—who apparently has a mega-grudge, and is one of the reasons why they're at Regina's bedside, watching over her—but every time Henry asks about their obviously shared past, the subject is instantly changed.

And it's really, really annoying.

“I just want to know!” he eventually huffs out of sheer frustration. “You guys keep promising me that you care about her and mom gets really mopey every time I bring her up, but you won't even tell me anything about her.”

“It's not important,” Mary Margaret intones in that unreasonably reasonable voice of hers. “And besides, why are you so curious about her? You said you'd never met her before you came to Storybrooke.”

He drops his head, playing with his fingers.

“Henry? Is something wrong?”

He sighs. Fine. “I'll—I want to tell you something, but you have to promise me that you won't laugh.”

“Of course.”

“Okay. I—I don't know her, but I have these dreams,” he says, and already he knows that this is sounding silly, “Where she'll be there, and I sit down and we—we talk,” he finishes lamely.

Mary Margaret goes very, very still.

“And… how long have you been having these dreams?”

He blinks. This is not the reaction he'd been expecting. “Ages.”

“With Regina there?”

“Oh. No, she only showed up… uh, a year ago, I guess.”

“And in these dreams, the two of you just… talk?”

“Yeah.” Emboldened by Mary Margaret's apparent acceptance, he adds, “She's really nice as well, she listens all the time and gives me really good advice and helps me take care of mom—”

“Henry,” she interrupts, “These dreams, do they take place in a dark room? With lots of fire?”

“Yeah.” He frowns, suddenly noticing something off amidst his delight at being believed. “How do you know about that? Do you have these dreams too?”

“Sometimes.” And then, just like that, a smile. “But I'm sure they're just dreams.”

Henry honestly has no idea what to think.

* * *

After that, pretty much the last thing he expects is for mom to be at home when he and Mary Margaret—who had been strangely upbeat ever since a suspicious-looking phone call—return from the hospital.

“Hey, kid,” Emma says, and she smiles at him. It's a warm, bright smile, much more like what he's used to—but there's something else there too, he just doesn't know what. Perhaps it's the way the smile hasn't quite reached Emma's eyes, which are still riven with sadness. “You went to the hospital?”

“Yeah.” He bites his lip as he plops down on the sofa next to her, wondering if he should tell his mom—

“Mary Margaret told me about the dreams. You've been seeing Regina in them?”

His eyes snap to hers, stunned. Uh oh—but her face is open, so open, and he wonders.

“Yeah,” he says, a little hesitant. Where is this going?

“Can you pass on a message to her for me?”

eleven.

For the first time in two weeks, he dreams of the room, and Regina—

Regina looks awful, dishevelled and sprawled out across the floor.

He'd wondered for a while whether the startling coincidences were merely that, and maybe Regina-the-dream-person is just a creation of his own imagination, an echo of some long-forgotten memory from when Emma and the real Regina had known each other back in his distant childhood. But the more he'd thought about it, the more unlikely it had seemed, because the truth is that even when confined to his dreams, Regina is as real and vital as anyone he had ever met whilst awake.

And now, seeing her untied, unkempt hair, the heavy bags around her red-rimmed eyes and the hollowness of the cheeks, he knows that his Regina and the Regina lying dead to the world in a hospital are one and the same. Emma had already told him as much, of course, confirming that his dreams were no mere dreams, but seeing for himself is another matter.

Regina looks up upon hearing him, and face lights up as it always does, but there's a wildness there, an uncontrolled desperation which makes him flinch. “Henry—Henry, I'm so sorry—”

“My mom wants to tell you something,” he says brusquely. He can't hear her apologise—not yet. “But first I want to ask you some questions.”

“I—of course.” She picks herself off the ground, and looks marginally more composed. “Anything.”

“And you won't lie again?”

“No. Never. No more lies, Henry.” Her eyes are pleading, and he wants to believe her. Oh, how he wants to—

“So why did you lie before?”

“Because I—” She cuts herself off, licking her lips apprehensively. “Because I was scared, I suppose.”

“Of me?”

“Yes.”

He frowns. It doesn't make sense, but something tells him that Regina isn't lying. Another time—he has more important questions to ask. Vaguely, he's aware of how absurd this is; he's more or less playing twenty questions with a woman who's supposed to be in a coma.

Which brings him immediately to his next question.

“Why are you in a coma?”

A lifeless, joyless smile. “That's a very long and complicated story, Henry.”

“Can I have the short version?”

“There isn't one.”

He pinches his nose. Fine. More specific, then.

“Did you put yourself in a coma?”

Her face twitches. “Yes.”

“How?”

“That, Henry, is the very long and complicated story.”

Right. He should have guessed as much. “Mary Margaret said you lost someone important to you.”

A flash of genuine anger. “Mary Margaret—”

“Did you?”

She quells herself, shaking visibly. “Yes. Someone very important.”

Someone I loved, Henry hears.

“A friend?”

“Family.” It's said without hesitation, without qualification—without sort of.

Is it—? But no. If he asks that directly, Regina will just deflect. He tries another avenue. “Did you know my mom?”

She gives him a look of… disappointment? “Henry,” she reproves, and Henry is on the verge of offence because is she chastising him? “Clearly I did.”

At that, he remembers hot lemon and ginger tea—and okay, he probably deserved that. “Right,” he mumbles, a tad embarrassed. “But like, did you know her really well?”

A sigh. “More than either of us would have preferred, I suspect.”

“She said you were important to her.”

Regina is totally silent at that, and Henry briefly wonders why—before realising he hadn't actually asked a question.

“Did you make her happy?”

A long, long pause.

“Yes.”

And it clicks, it all clicks, and he suddenly realises that Emma's message is far, far more important than he'd first bargained for. A good thing too, because he notices that his hands are starting to fade. At once, a hint of the desperation from before creeps back into Regina's eyes.

“Henry—”

“She needs you,” he blurts out, suddenly regretting on wasting so much time with his own selfish needs when there had been someone else whose needs are so, so much more. “My mom needs you.” Still.

Regina frowns. “Your mother has never—”

“She does. She told me so,” he calls out, just as Regina disappears along with the rest of the room.

He needs her too, of course, but that no longer seems important here.

Chapter Text

eleven.

He wakes up to dazzling sunlight through the open window, blinding him and leaving him about ten degrees too hot under the blanket, with his mom perched on the edge of his bed.

She smiles at him, but with a cautiousness to it that gives him pause. “Morning, Henry.”

He knows what she's doing here, of course—he'd have to have been completely stupid not to know. But he thought he'd at least have to wait until breakfast before talking to her about it, and her eagerness—need?—to get news, to find out if Henry really had delivered her message is yet another scrap, another tidbit to go in the slowly-growing mental scrapbook he's compiling.

Who was Regina to you?

* * *

That afternoon, Emma accompanies him on to the hospital. It’s one of the few times he’s gotten to spend any decent time with mom since arriving in this town, and he’s not about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. Even so, curiosity is a difficult beast to tame, and he can’t help himself asking a few questions.

And honestly, he feels he's showing the height of self-control by limiting the number to merely a few.

For one thing, the doctors seem convinced that there's no chance that Regina wake up on her own—and suspiciously, no one seems to disagree at all. Mom and Mary Margaret seem the closest things to loved ones that Regina has here; doesn't that mean they're obliged to never give up on her? Isn't that how the story goes?

Emma places an arm across his back, squeezing his shoulder. “This ain't a movie, kid.”

He furrows his brow slightly; okay, this is real life, not a movie, but he's in a small town with people who apparently all knew him before he'd even arrived, chasing after a witch with a weird name, and passing on messages to a comatose dream person. Oh, and he suspects that his mom had—has?—feelings for said comatose dream person once.

If this isn't the plot of a movie, then it probably should be.

“But if you care about her—”

“We're not giving up on her, Henry,” she says emphatically, smoothing lines on his jacket. “It's just... complicated, okay? She needs more than what the doctors can give her.”

Which makes roughly zero sense at all, because what kind of doctors are they, then? But it at least explains why they're so keen on having him around.

“Having the presence of loved ones around may, er, trigger a sudden recovery,” a doctor named Whale says cryptically.

“But I'm just a friend,” he points out, thoroughly baffled. If it was Emma that was being constantly encouraged to visit then he could understand, but as far as he knows this is just the second time his mom has even come. “How am I meant to help?”

“You're the only one in contact with her,” Whale says—and for the love of all that is holy, why is no one surprised by that?

He'd hoped that getting a few answers to his initial questions would help calm his mind and sate his curiosity for a while, but no—like that many-headed Greek monster he'd learned about in school, answering one question just seems to bring on a deluge more, each more vexing than the last.

So.

He has questions, and he's going to damn well ask them whether his mom likes it or not.

Emma just sighs, long and exhausted, slumping back in her chair—he feels more than a twinge of concern, because the only time he can remember his mom looking this tired in the last year was when she had pneumonia, but he banks it for the time being.

“Look, I—I wish I could tell you more. But this is really messed up, okay? I'm not going to be able to answer all your questions.”

Which is not good enough, to be honest, but he knows it's also as good as he'll get. “Okay.” Number one. “Do you know how she put herself in a coma?”

There's a long, long pause, punctuated by the constant, ceaseless beeping of the heart monitor—“No.”

He thins his lips, a little spurt of anger flaring inside him; he doesn't need his mom's famous superpower to spot that particular lie, but he knows he won't get any more, and what is not actually the most important phrasing of that particular question.

“Do you know why she put herself in a coma?”

“No,” Emma says immediately, and this time, he doesn't detect anything but the truth—“Did she talk to you about it at all?”

“She said it was because she lost someone she loved.” Which is technically an inference, but it's one he's certain is correct.

Emma simply remains silent, and the heart machine beeps on.

* * *

He continues to ask questions throughout the afternoon, and Emma continues to not answer them. He finds out a little: for instance, he learns that Zelena is actually Regina's half-sister and he finds out that Regina and Mary Margaret are family somehow, though he suspects that neither of them are thrilled about it.

He's in the middle of asking yet more questions on the way back home from a snack at Granny's diner when Emma abruptly freezes, her hand squeezing so tight on his shoulder that it actually starts to hurt. He glares at her in outrage, but she isn't paying attention to him. Instead, she's looking at a ginger-haired woman that he recognises as Mary Margaret's midwife, dressed in an elegant black coat and strolling haughtily down the footpath towards them.

“Afternoon, pretties,” she drawls, smiling in a way that makes Henry's skin crawl just a little. “Lovely day, isn't it?”

“You,” Emma spits out, still gripping vice-like onto Henry's shoulder. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Language around children, dear,” the woman reproves, but Emma doesn't seem to care—and Henry realises. This is Zelena.

This is the woman who'd killed his father—the woman who wants to destroy his friend.

“And Henry,” Zelena says, her coruscating, almost manic eyes alighting onto him. “I wonder, just how much do you miss your mother?”

He draws into Emma a little tighter, but—“My mom is right here,” he shoots back, defiant. “And she'll beat you.”

Zelena lifts her head up and laughs, unrestrained and more than a little bit chilling. “Oh, Emma. He really has no idea, does he? My sister would be disgusted to know what you're keeping from him—if she were awake, of course.” She smacks her lips, fakes a thoughtful expression. “But perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised—after all, I hear you have a tendency to run away and hide.”

Emma is grinding her teeth so hard that Henry can hear it, and shoulders are going to be sore for days at this rate. “Zelena, I swear to god—”

“Oh, don't worry. I'm not here to hurt your precious boy. I can see that isn't possible. Not yet, anyway,” Zelena adds, her gaze flicking contemptuously down at him. “On the contrary, I'm here to make an offer.”

Emma draws him in tighter, tighter, but says, “I'm listening.”

“Very good. Quite simple: stay out of my way. Do that, and I promise that no harm will come to the boy. You can all go back to your happy little lives out there in this silly world of yours, and me? I'll take what is mine.” She gives one final smirk, then turns on her heel and walks away.

Emma is still stiff, hard and frozen like she's been encased in ice. He wriggles out of her grasp a little, tugs on her elbow. “Mom. You're not going to, right? We're going to help Regina, right?”

It breaks through, and she draws him in close, close. “Yeah, kid. We are.”

twelve.

“Were you and my mom, like, together once?”

A short, sharp laugh, surprised and flirting dangerously close to derisive and—oh, that stings. “Oh, Henry. Absolutely not.”

“But—”

“Surely your mother has told you enough about our past by now?” Regina asks, still with traces of disbelief in place, as if the very idea of it is absurd. And he remembers that, but doesn't that happen between lovers after they break up? “We despised each other. We were enemies most of the time.”

“But—”

“Henry, please.”

He sighs and drops it, but only for the time being. He can buy the idea that they weren't exactly close in the past, at least—not least because pretty much everyone he's met in this damn town seems decidedly hostile to Regina, and appallingly unconcerned about her being in a coma, like she deserves it. The only exceptions seem to be Mary Margaret and David, and even they seem a little muted in their worry, particularly David.

Yeah, he can accept that possibility in the past, but now? Well, that's a different story.

After all, Emma is the only person—the only person—he knows who is unreservedly concerned about Regina. Emma is the only person who hurts when she sees Regina in this state. Emma is the only person who talks to Regina despite knowing she won't be heard; the only person who hugs him and whispers me too, kid when he says how much he wishes Regina were awake; the only person who seems to understand just how important Regina is.

“Henry?” Regina's eyes are wide and her pace pale—he's been silent for too long, he realises. She's been like this all night, on tenterhooks and patently terrified of offending him again. It makes him feel kind of awful, but the stronger, more stubborn part of him remembers that she had lied to him for a year. “Henry, I'm sorry if I—”

“It's fine,” he reassures him quickly, because he might be mad but he can also tell that she's sorry. That's enough for now. “I, um, was just thinking.”

A sigh. “Henry, I really don't know what else I can say—”

“I know, I know. You guys hated each other, I get it,” he groans, before ducking his head, fiddling with his fingers. “I just—” Think that she might be in love with you, he doesn't say. “I just wish you were awake. You could help her.”

A spasm passes through Regina's face, pained and uncontrolled. “Henry, I can't—”

“But she needs you,” he says, repeating the message from just a few nights ago—then, suddenly, all his worries, his scarcely held concerns and fears that he has no idea how to deal with come pouring out in a flood.

“And she's always really upset every time I bring you up and she's always exhausted and no one else seems to be helping her enough and she's so busy trying to help Mary Margaret and everyone else that she doesn't have any time for me or herself or—or anyone, and I'm really, really worried.”

He wraps his arms around himself, his eyes downcast, shivering slightly despite the ever-present flames.

“I—I think she needs help. Can you help her?” he asks, his voice quavering. “Please?”

Regina's eyes are glazed with unshed tears and she's stiff, like she's physically stopping herself from rushing across the fiery threshold to enclose him within her arms—but is because she can't bear to see him upset, or because she can't bear the reality of why he's upset?

She wets her lips, flexes her jaw. “Alright. I'll try.”

His gaze flicks upwards, his face brightening. “You will?”

“I'll do my best.” Her chest rises visibly, falls again. “What does she need from me?”

“I'll ask her.”

* * *

When he does, Emma doesn't understand for a moment.

“Kid, thanks for the offer, but I really don't want you involved in this—”

“Not me. Regina.”

Emma opens her mouth. Frowns. Stares for a moment.

“She—she said that? She's offering?”

He nods, swallows a little. “I told her you needed her help.”

A second's pause, another—then there, slowly, the first signs of a hopeful smile.

thirteen.

Over the next fortnight, Emma continues to use him as a conduit to pass on messages to Regina, and Regina begins to pass messages back. He conveys them eagerly, not least because it seems to be the only thing keeping his mom in one piece right now.

“Henry, I'm okay,” she tells him when he starts worrying aloud, with a smile which doesn't even hint at reaching her eyes. He accepts the hug, but doesn't accept the answer.

“Is it Zelena?” It is, of course, but asking might be the only way he gets anything out of her. She sighs, bowing her head a little, her shoulders tensed inwards and down. “Did she do something?”

“Yeah. But I've got it under control,” she says firmly—too firmly, like he's not the one she's actually trying to convince. “Now that I've got Regina's help, I'll deal with her, and then we can go home. You miss home, right?”

And yes, of course he does, he misses his home and his Playstation and his friends and the pizza parlour three blocks down the street and even his school, but—

“What about Regina? Are we just going to leave her here?”

The fragile, summery demeanour she's giving him falters, and she looks away from him, holding him tight.

* * *

As a general rule, the messages are cryptic and couched in hidden meaning, a weird cross between motivational pep talks and unintelligible jargon, often containing a reference to some arcane book that isn't even in the library.

For instance, when Emma asks him to ask Regina how she can protect Mary Margaret—which he'd initially interpreted as straightforward venting of frustration—he gets a thoughtful purse of the lips in reply, then—

“Tell her to look at page forty-two of the Apocrypha. Ask Belle for the translation. It should be well within her capabilities—assuming she can focus for once in her life,” Regina adds dryly, her face lined with obvious scepticism.

He blinks in confusion, but agrees to pass it on anyway.

* * *

When he does, Emma glares at him with a pout, as if he's the one insulting her.

“Tell Regina that I can focus just fine, thanks,and that she's an ass.”

But apparently the advice must make sense, because when he returns from his daily hospital visit, Emma is flushed and exhausted but obviously thrilled, as if she's just run and won a half-marathon.

“Did you manage to do it?” Mary Margaret asks, her eyes suddenly lighting up with excitement. He's very, very tempted to ask exactly what it is, but restrains himself. Just. “The, uh, new security system?”

Emma smiles a tired yet patently satisfied smile. “All done.”

He frowns a little, because he hadn't heard anything about a new security system this morning. On the other hand, he knows a little about speaking in riddles and code. “Is this what Regina was helping you with in her message?” he asks.

Emma's eyes widen, and her lips part slightly in surprise—but the smile remains, as does that increasingly-rare warmth in her eyes. “Yeah. Thank her for me, will you?”

And he will, absolutely he will, just—“Should I still tell her that she's an ass? Or should I save that?”

A snort. “Are you kidding me? Of course you should tell her.”

* * *

As such, when he next dreams of the fire room two evenings later, he starts with, “Mom has two messages for you.”

Regina raises an eyebrow—this is the first time Emma's passed on more than the single message at once. In truth, he could just deliver it all in one go, but he figures it's funnier this way.

“Go on.”

“Okay. First, she managed to do—do whatever it is you helped her with,” he manages, because he's convinced that whatever Regina had helped her with, it hadn't been a few cameras and an alarm. For one thing, if he were going to install a home security system one day, he would not ask a dream person for advice. “And she wanted to thank you for it.”

Regina's eyebrows lift in surprise and the first makings of a smile play on her lips, like she hadn't been expecting the thanks; but there's something more in her eyes, something that looks almost like—like pride?

“She was the one who did it, not me. What about her second message?”

He pauses for a second, fights to keep his face neutral, because it wouldn't do to give away the gag early.

“She also says that she can 'focus just fine, thanks',” he says, holding up two fingers and wiggling them as mock-quotes, “and that you're an ass.”

Regina bursts into laughter, rich and melodic, and he can't help but laugh with her.

fourteen.

The back-and-forth over the next week gets no more clear, but he figures out that Emma seems to be working on some sort of task or problem, something that Regina knows how to solve. He has no idea what it is, and for some reason they're both particularly keen on keeping any details from him despite the fact that he's the one passing on the messages for them.

But the growing shadows beneath his mother's eyes hold back his ever-growing frustrations for the time being. He doesn't ask Regina either; he feels it isn't fair to try and wring any information out of her when she's just advising, and doesn't exactly have any control over this situation either. She's just trying to help, like his mom had asked—and given how increasingly dependent Emma seems to be on said help, he's not going to do anything to jeopardise it.

He's still more than slightly convinced that they're secretly in love, after all.

Anyway. Whatever it is, they seem to sort it out, and he's all but pushed the exchanges out of his mind when Emma comes up to him with a decidedly weird request.

“Henry, can you wear this for me?”

He looks up from his schoolwork, the back end of a pen still jammed against the corner of his mouth. “Wear what?” Then he notices what she's holding. “Mom.”

“Come on, kid, it's cool,” Emma intones in that falsely cheery voice, like the last time she'd tried to bribe him—more than a little hypocritically—into eating extra vegetables. “It'll look great on you.”

He wrinkles his nose—the necklace is golden and heavy-looking, with a stupidly large seven pointed midnight-blue star as the pendant, decorated with ornate, sparkling silvers. It's probably the dumbest thing Emma has ever asked him to try on, and that's saying something because Emma has zero fashion sense at all when it comes to young boys. She's cool and all, but bright green is most certainly not.

Emma's shoulders fall and her lips thin, sensing his reluctance. “Can you just wear it, Henry? For me?”

He rolls his eyes, but his mom seems genuinely serious about this, so he accepts the necklace without further complaint. Well, without much further complaint, anyway.

He's the one who has to wear the damn thing, after all.

* * *

He actually comes to hate it even more than he'd initially feared he would—the gold chain is a burdensome, oppressive weight on his neck; the metal is rough, chafing his skin constantly; and the star pendant is so embarrassing that he actually resorts to wearing a scarf just so he can hide it.

“Mom,” he groans one afternoon, after he'd spotted Leroy and Ruby stifling laughs in Granny's diner. “Can I please take it off?”

“No, kid,” she says, her voice laced with exasperation. “I know that you don't like it it, but it's important that you keep it on, alright?”

“But why—”

“Henry, drop it,” she cuts across suddenly, brooking no argument. “Just wear it, okay? Please? Regina would want you to as well.”

He acquiesces at the name-drop, but sullenly; this is just yet another thing his mother is keeping from him, is lying to him about, and he hates it. Ever since they've arrived in this town, it's as if Emma has turned into a completely different person, cold and secretive and harsh and god, he just wants his mom back.

He comforts himself with the fact that he at least has Regina, as he takes a morose stroll down the street to clear his head of the resentment that has been building for the last few weeks. At least he has a friend who he thinks he can trust, who is at least open and honest enough with him to admit when she's lying, who at least listens to him when he talks and doesn't treat him like an idiot—

“Oh, you foolish, foolish boy,” a gleeful voice suddenly emerges right behind him. He whips around, to see Zelena suddenly standing right behind him.

“Where did—how—” he splutters, utterly at a loss to explain how she had snuck up on him without him even noticing. Had he been really that caught up in himself that he hadn't even noticed his father's murderer approaching?

“You really should have listened to your mother,” Zelena says, in a way that—to his horror—reminds him slightly of Regina—“And she should have listened to me.”

He tries to run, but he's cornered and his legs seemed to have turned to jelly, and Zelena is already so close, reaching out to take him—

—before jerking backwards, letting out a piercing yelp as if electrocuted.

“Oh, clever. Very, very clever,” Zelena snarls as her eyes alight onto his star pendant, sounding so vicious that his legs seem to revive of their own accord and he stumbles backwards. “Well. Tell Regina that she may have won this battle, but I'll win the war.”

She spins on her heel and stalks away, rounding the corner, and for some truly daft reason, he decides to follow—but she's already vanished from sight.

He turns around once, twice, making sure there's no trace of her—then looks down at the necklace that he so despises.

Maybe there's more to it than he thought.

* * *

He still hates the stupid thing, though.

Indeed, the necklace gets so irritating that he doesn't even wait to sit down before beginning his rant to Regina a few nights later.

“—And it's so dumb, it looks awful and I saw Ruby and Leroy laughing at it in the diner—”

“Henry—”

“—I don't even know why she's making me wear it, all my friends back home would laugh at me too if they saw it—”

“Henry,” Regina says again, with such strength that he falls silent immediately. “Did you take it off at all?”

He sighs, kicks out an invisible rock on the floor. “No. She won't let me.”

“Good. Do not take that necklace off, do you understand? Under no circumstances should that star be away from your body.”

He blinks.

“But—”

“Do you understand?” And her eyes are ablaze, her mouth is pressed into a single line and it's as fierce, as uncompromising as he's ever seen her. “Henry—”

“I—okay. I get it,” he stammers out, completely unnerved by just how important this seems to her. It works, because she deflates, and some of that scorching heat leaves her expression. He exhales some of his worry—sometimes he has to remind herself that she doesn't actually know this woman that well, and based on the rare glimpses he's seen and the whispers he's heard around the town, there's a side to his friend which is darker, harder, monolithic in its magnitude.

“Good. I—I know this is all very confusing,” Regina says, softer, sounding far more like herself again. “But please listen to your mother on this. She only wants what's best for you.”

“But why?” Why does this matter so much to them—both of them? What so special about this necklace that they're treating it almost like a shield, as if it's—

As if it's...

He tilts his head a little to the side, furrows his brow, remembering witches and security systems and a town he'd never heard of who treat Emma and Henry like a returned prodigal, like he really ought to know them like they seem to know him.

Above all, he remembers the encounter with Zelena, he remembers the way she'd stared at it like she'd wanted to pulverise it in her bare hands, but had instead turned to flee.

“It's magic, isn't it? The necklace. It—it protects me?” Oh, it suddenly makes sense, and he's suddenly filled with a deep, glowing warmth at—at Regina. Regina. This is what she and Emma had spent those days working on.

She's comatose, confined to dreams and passing on weird messages to Emma, and she still somehow managed to protect him. Plus there's another thing, related to those weird messages. “And that stuff you've been helping my mom with, that's magic too?”

Regina's face blanches and opens with shock—and, that's it, that's it. That's what this is all about. That's what Emma has been hiding from him this whole time. And once the surprise passes, the colour returns to her cheeks, her lips curl ever-so-gently and her chest swells, like—

Like she's proud of him. Not mad. Not upset. Proud.

“Is—is it really magic? It's real?”

“My clever little prince,” she murmurs, almost to herself, the reflected flames dancing joyously around her irises. “Of course it's real.”

Chapter Text

fifteen.

He must be learning a modicum of self-control, because he actually manages to wait until breakfast before spilling the beans. It's mostly because David and Mary Margaret have left the house for an early-morning appointment at the hospital—he wants this to be his and his mom, one-on-one.

“I know about magic,” he declares, laying his spoon down in his milk-covered cornflakes.

Emma stills, slowly sets down the milk, straightens her back ever-so-subtly on the stool opposite him.

“What?”

“I know about magic,” he repeats in case Emma hadn't heard him, though she clearly had. “I found out about it last night and I know why you gave me this necklace and—”

“Did Regina tell you?” Emma interrupts sharply, her shoulders drawn upwards and inwards and her knuckles white as she clenches her fists on the edge of the table.

He blinks. “No. I figured it out by myself.”

“Oh,” Emma says, looking tense and stiff and, well, not pleased. Not in the slightest. “You weren't supposed to know that.”

“Why? It's magic!” Surely that must be a good thing? Surely it has to be, it must be; it's endless possibility and dreams and fairytales beyond measure. “What's so bad about magic?”

Emma locks her jaw, stress-lines appearing around her eyes. “It's a long story, kid.”

Something stirs within him at the words—Regina had said that to him after a lie too. “But—”

“No, Henry. I know this seems all really exciting for you, but this isn't something I want you involved with—”

And weeks upon weeks of pent-up frustration are rapidly burning, boiling, scalding, threatening to spill over the top. “But why? I already know about Zelena and magic. And I know that Regina and Mary Margaret and David weren't just friends to you.” And he thinks back to a dozen different interactions around the town, to Ruby seemingly knowing he prefers cinnamon in his cocoa before he'd even said anything; to a bespectacled man waving hello as he walked his dog; to a multitude of occasions where his first meeting with someone had been too stiff and forced to be a genuine first meeting.

“And I know that there's stuff here that I'm meant to know and that I don't remember but you keep hiding stuff and lying—”

“Henry, enough!”

He falls silent at once, and stares at her.

His mom doesn't yell at him. His mom never yells at him. Emma will be sharp and direct and firm but she's always kind, always warm and she does not yell.

He stares, and stares, and stares.

A horrible, frozen second passes, and another, and another, the air thick with awkwardness and contaminated with a thousand questions that he never would have dreamed of before like what happened to you and where did my mom go—

Her shoulders drop, her face pales.

“Henry,” she says once, her voice trembling as much as her hands. “Kid, I'm sorry—”

He pushes off the stool, abandons his cornflakes, and heads for the staircase. Before heading up, he turns, gives Emma one last glance. She hasn't moved, hasn't shifted, hasn't done anything to follow up the meaningless apology with the truth—

“I wish Regina was my mom instead of you,” he says softly, quietly, with the precise and unflinching violence of a knife to the heart.

Part of him regrets saying it immediately, but only part—the rest of him, white-hot and fuelled by a toxic mixture of despair and betrayal, doesn't regret it at all.

That woman isn't his mother, after all. Not at the moment.

* * *

He has nothing to do once he gets to his room, of course, but he's drained and exhausted in ways that can't be put down to mere sleeping patterns, so he curls up into his bed, screws his eyes shut and wishes.

He wishes—he wishes for everything. He wants his mom, his real mom, back. He wants his best friend to wake up. He wants to get Regina and Emma and take them all back home to New York and away from Zelena and this town he's come to despise so deeply for everything it's doing to the most important person in his life—

“Henry? What are you doing here?”

He opens his eyes again.

Oh.

“Hi,” he mumbles, pushing himself up to a half-sitting position. “I, uh, decided to take a nap.”

Regina looks completely nonplussed over her instinctive delight at seeing him over the barrier of flame. “In the middle of the day?” Then she looks closer, sees him properly for the first time. “Henry, what's wrong?”

He looks down, remains silent.

“Henry, please. You can tell me anything.”

He takes one short breath, fiddles with his hands. “I—I said something to mom.”

“Said what, exactly?”

“I said—” He stops, breath catching in his throat. “I said that I wish you were my mom instead of her.”

Regina goes very, very still, and doesn't speak for a moment.

“Regina?” he asks quietly, nervously, glances upwards at her as the enormity of what he'd just said begins to dawn on him. “Regina, are you—please don't be mad at me—”

“I'm—I'm not mad. I promise,” she says quickly, freely, with such sincerity his heart feels like it's about to burst and god, right now he does wish Regina were his mother. Maybe not instead of Emma, but a mother nonetheless. “But that—that was a very hurtful thing you said, Henry. Did you apologise?”

He turns away. “No.”

“Henry. Why not?”

And she's shaking so visibly she looks like she could crack open, like saying that hurts, like somehow she's talking from first-hand experience, and his shame briefly gets the better of him for a moment. “I—I will,” he says meekly at first, and then—“But she keeps lying and then I told her about magic and she got all angry and she yelled at me and she never yells at me—”

“Your mother is under a lot of stress right now,” Regina says softly, but with enough firmness that he falls silent and halts his heated rush of words for a moment. “People are expecting a lot of her and she's struggling to cope.”

“But she has magic. She should be able to do anything.” That's what magic means, right?

But Regina's face opens into a small smile, and it's so warm, so empathetic, so loving that he struggles to think for a moment. “Oh, Henry. Magic doesn't mean you can do anything. Magic can hurt as much as it heals.”

“Did you have magic? When you were awake?” He shouldn't ask this question, he knows, it's unimportant here—but curiosity dies a hard death.

“I did. And I—I used it in bad ways. I hurt a lot of people with it.”

“Oh.” And then he remembers something else, remembers whispered rumours and suspicious glares—“Is that why everyone hates you except Emma?”

Regina swallows visibly, knots her fingers together. “It is.”

And if he looks, really looks, beyond the kindness and the empathy and the love, he can see glimpses of it, of fury and darkness and a force so menacing, so overwhelming it could well blot out the sun—but that isn't really her. That isn't his Regina.

“Well, they're wrong,” he declares. “I'm gonna show that they're all wrong.”

Regina just smiles down at him, eyes glistening with unshed tears, as she calls out his name over and over—

sixteen.

—and over.

He opens his eyes, but almost closes them again due to the brightness of the sunlight surrounding him.

“There you are,” Emma says, sitting on the edge of his bed, her lips curling upwards but her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks streaked with still-wet tear-streaks. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He looks down, away—anywhere but her, anywhere but where he can still see just how much she's hurting. He decides to dive into the safety of irrelevance. “I—how long was I asleep?”

“Not long. Your cornflakes went soggy, though.” She squeezes his arm, sniffles audibly—and it's too much. Too much.

“Mom—mom, I'm sorry, I—I shouldn't have—”

“Henry,” she sighs, low and deep and reminding him so very much of Regina. Fresh tears leak from her eyes and he hates it, he hates everything that his town has done to her—“You don't have to apologise to me. You haven't—I've been terrible to you, I know.”

He wraps his arms around his own body, cloaking himself in weeks upon weeks of misery. “I just wish you wouldn't lie to me all the time.” He looks up at her—reluctantly, because he can barely stand to see her like this. “Is it because you were afraid I wouldn't want to go back home if I knew about magic?”

And Emma's lip quivers and oh, that's what it is, that's what all of this is, because this—this is his Emma, through and through. This is the woman who can barely get through three dates without fleeing; the one who had spent his early years bouncing from place to place to place before finally settling down in a little loft in Lower Manhattan; this is his mother.

He'd been so busy hating this town and the isolation it had brought, he'd forgotten to notice the one person who hated it even more.

“Oh, kid,” she whispers, and pulls him in. He buries himself within her arms, lets her rock him gently from side to side as she'd once done every night when he was still a child, feels a kiss being pressed to the top of his head. “No more lies, okay? I promise.”

“Okay.” He looks up and while the tears are still there, the smile is back, bright and fragile and she's utterly, totally his mom again. “Can I ask a question?”

“Just one?”

“For now.” He breathes in, readies himself, calls to mind the only question he has which really, truly matters. “Why is Regina in a coma?”

She strokes lines through his hair, the smile rapidly fading into a sombre frown. “You already know. She lost someone.”

“Who?”

She swallows visibly, holds him a little tighter, looks like she's about to break for a moment—

“Us. She lost us.”

* * *

That afternoon, Emma accompanies him to the hospital for only the second time—and this time, he's under no illusions as to why she's there.

“She was such an asshole,” Emma says, but there's a shadow of a smile on her lips as she cradles one of Regina's limp, cold hands in her own. “She tried to threaten me with a basket of apples the day after I first met her.”

“What kind of apples?”

“Honey crisp, I think.”

So Regina had been telling the truth about those being her favourites—no surprise, of course, but at the time he'd thought she was just humouring him. Then again, he hadn't known she was actually real back then. “Really?”

“Yeah. Then she had me arrested. I took a chainsaw to her tree in retaliation.” Emma's smile grows. “Later on she made me so mad that I punched her in the face.”

“So you actually hated each other?” He'd figured that that had been a useful lie too, but apparently not.

“Oh, yeah. We almost killed each other more than once.” But there's a fondness to it, a distant amusement like near-murder was little more than a mildly interesting diversion for them. “Her more than me. She liked her schemes.”

“But she's good, right?” Yes, he knows—and Regina has admitted as much—that Regina has a less than pleasant and flattering past, but that's the past. The Regina of the now, the dream person, the coma patient, is a good person—she has to be. Good people don't help him take care of his mom like she did; good people don't fall in love like she so clearly has. “She's a good person?”

A pause, a second's contemplation which goes on a bit too long—“Yeah. She's a good person.”

They both fall silent, watching the rhythmic, almost imperceptible rise and fall of Regina's chest.

seventeen.

Emma walks with him on the way home; apparently, Zelena is actually after Mary Margaret's unborn child which, okay, is a little too horrifying even for him, so for once he isn't bothered when Emma stands over him like his own personal bodyguard. He doesn't even know what Zelena is intending to do with said baby, but for once this is a piece of the truth he's perfectly happy to remain hidden from him—he's starting to see what Regina meant when she said that magic could hurt as much as heal.

In any case, the combination of Emma and his necklace—which, now that he knows its true purpose, isn't nearly so burdensome—ensures that they remain unmolested and unmet by any deranged witches on a power trip.

And it's nice, to be honest, being able to stroll with Emma down the street like this. She even buys an ice-cream for him—only after continuing an age-old argument over whether mint chocolate-chip is better than cookies and cream, which come on, it so clearly is—and for a moment they're back in New York, legs swinging out over the balcony (or a retaining wall, as the case may be) as they gossip and tease and laugh, until a phone call interrupts them.

“Hang on,” Emma says, taking the call. “Hey, what's—really? Okay. We'll be home in five.”

The call ends, just like that. Emma sighs, running a hand through her hair, tousling it—he notices it's gotten a little frayed at the ends, presumably a product of stress meaning she can't devote as much attention to it as usual. “That was David. Apparently Mary Margaret is throwing up again.”

He scrunches up his nose—he's seen Mary Margaret suddenly feel sick completely out nowhere a few times now, and it's decidedly not pleasant. “Do we really have to go back? It's super gross when she's sick.”

Emma snorts. “You're such a wuss. Besides, don't you have homework to do?”

He stares at his feet, kicks away a rock whose mere presence had suddenly offended him. “It's not urgent.”

“Uh-huh. Come on, kid. Walk.”

* * *

When they get home, he discovers to his distaste that it's even worse than usual—multiple buckets have been deployed, there's a constant low moaning coming from Mary Margaret's bed and it smells something nasty.

“Is this really what it's like to be pregnant?”

“Yeah. Never try it yourself,” Emma tells him with such seriousness it must be faked, and he rolls his eyes because god, Emma's jokes are so lame. “Go upstairs 'til I call you, okay? This might take a few hours.”

He nods and makes to leave, but hesitates before ascending. “She isn't actually having the baby today, is she?” He doesn't know much about pregnancy—by choice as much as anything else—but he's picked up enough to know that it can't be long before the baby is due.

Emma's lips thin and her expression hardens, and the stress of the last few weeks rushes back just like that. “She might. We won't know for a while, so just keep upstairs, okay?”

He can see more there—something beyond mere worry about the imminent arrival of a not-just-friend's baby whose life is already in danger—but today has been way too much for both of them already, so he doesn't push it. “Okay.”

* * *

He soon finishes his homework—a really dull, repetitive algebra exercise—but he doesn't go downstairs save for one brief visit to get a glass of water, with the emphasis on brief. Given that Mary Margaret still seems to be in all seven levels of Pregnancy Hell at once, it wouldn't do to be down for longer.

He heads back upstairs, and starts reaching under his bed for his Vita when his hand instead bounces off something large and heavy.

Frowning, he bends down lower to peer properly underneath the bed, and soon spots it: a very thick, decidedly old-fashioned looking leather-bound book that he's absolutely certain was not there the last time he'd checked. His eyebrows now pressed as close together as they'll go, he extracts the book from its hiding place, dusting it off as he lifts it onto the bed.

Once Upon A Time, the title reads, in ornate, heavily embellished capital letters. Weird. Had Emma placed it there last night while he'd been sleeping? He liked fairytales, of course; he was one of the few people his age who still did and he'd been teased about it more than once, so he supposes it isn't completely impossible, if a little strange. Perhaps this book had actually belonged to Emma once, back in that shared past with Regina he's only just beginning to understand, and she's just passing it on.

Quickly deciding that he has nothing better to do, he opens the front cover—and immediately gasps.

Property of Henry Mills.

Oh, this book isn't Emma's at all—it's Regina's. Or rather, it belongs to Regina's son, who happens to...

Who happens to...

Now profoundly suspicious again, and wondering exactly just what complications and secrets are being held from him, he opens the book to a random page—

“What?” It comes out as a low breathless whisper, but it could just as well have been a shout—the person depicted in the full-colour illustration lying before him is unquestionably Regina. And not the Regina lying dead to the world in a hospital either, but his Regina—the same sharp and glittering purple-black dress, the same thick eye-liner beneath curled lashes, the same hairstyle. It can't possibly be anyone else—but it can't possibly be Regina as well, because Regina—

The Evil Queen threatens Snow White, the caption reads, and it's definitely an accurate depiction of the scene pictured, but—

But—

Eyes now widened to their maximum extent, he flicks through hurriedly to another illustration, this one of Regina laughing maniacally—an expression he can't even imagine on his Regina—as houses burn in the background. The Evil Queen punishes an innocent village for hiding Snow White—

“No,” he whispers, his fingers trembling as he grips the book. “No, it isn't true. It can't be true.”

He flicks through again, hurriedly, heart racing and thundering in his temples as panic fills him—it's not true, it can't be true—

But on page after page after page, the same thing: The Evil Queen executes the prisoners; The Evil Queen steals Ariel's voice; The Evil Queen takes the Huntsman's heart; The Evil Queen—

“It's not true,” he murmurs to himself, over and over like a mantra, like repeating the words enough will erase the treasonous ones in front of him. “It's not true, it's not true, it's not true.”

But he isn't sure he believes them.

eighteen.

It takes him two hours, but he ends up reading through every word, all the while telling himself that it isn't true, none of it is true—except it has to be.

Why else would Mary Margaret—Snow White—and Regina hate each other like so? Why would the town be so suspicious of Regina? Why else would everyone be so reticent about telling him who Regina actually is?

He staggers downstairs in a daze, overwhelmed, stunned and incapable of clear thought—all he can see are those words, those words condemning Regina, detailing her every crime and her every act of evil—

“Henry? Kid, what's wrong?”

He blinks, and for a moment sees Regina snarling at him, conjuring a fireball and preparing to throw—but then he blinks again, and the vision settles into a very real and very confused-looking Emma.

“I'm fine,” he says, trying to sound as chirpy as possible; he'll tell his mom about this soon, he just—just needs some time to process. “Just need something to eat.”

“Uh, okay. Help yourself.” She eyes him more carefully. “You sure you're alright? You look you've seen a ghost.”

He supposes he has. Lots of them.

“I'm okay. Actually, um, can I take a shower? Is it free?”

Emma still looks decidedly unconvinced, but then Mary Margaret calls out her name from within. “For now,” she sighs, and heads off.

* * *

The shower doesn't help.

He thought it would be a nice distraction, that hot water and steam and shampoo would be a good way to clear his head—but apparently standing completely alone in a largely featureless glass stall for is a recipe for staying locked in your own mind, and he berates himself for ever thinking otherwise.

He supposes he should have known. Of course he should have known—the reaction from the townspeople, the suspicion from the doctors at the hospital, even Regina herself had hinted at it. But he'd been stupid, and selfish, and too delighted to have her as friend to ever bother finding out anything about her, the person, the Evil Queen.

He doesn't need to know why Regina had lied to him about this, of course, it's already plainly obvious. Instead, he wants to know—

Well.

He isn't actually sure. What made you like this? Are you still like this? How can I trust you when you're so—

He squeezes his eyes shut, trying not to let that word bounce endlessly around his head, breaking and corrupting every image and every memory of the dream person he'd held so dear for so long, but fails. It's incontrovertible, after all: Regina is evil, evil, evil—

A knocking sound, quick and hard, echoes through the room.

“Who is it?”

“It's me,” Emma calls out, and her voice is already high-pitched and frantic when she continues with, “Are you done yet?”

“No!” He's only been in the shower for five minutes, for goodness sake—Emma usually takes fifteen minimum.

“Well, you are now. Get some clothes on and meet me in the living room in five minutes.”

“But—”

“Five minutes, Henry!” she shouts, using that tone of voice for the second time in the day—and suddenly, Henry knows what it is.

“It is the baby? Is it coming?” he asks as he shuts off the water, but Emma has already gone.

* * *

Emma drives in a wild panic, running red lights and barely missing oncoming traffic as she tries to reassure the screeching woman in the back seat.

“Faster, Emma, if we don't get to the hospital before Zelena realises then—oh god, it hurts—”

Emma glances at Mary Margaret—who has doubled over in pain, or at least doing her best to given her posture—in the rear-view mirror before wrenching her eyes away, taking a deep, shuddering breath and flooring the accelerator once more.

“We'll get there, mom,” she says, her voice shaking with scarcely concealed fear. “We'll get there.”

It doesn't even strike Henry until much, much later exactly what she'd said.

nineteen.

In the end, Emma's utterly lunatic brand of driving ensures that they make it to the hospital within ten minutes and, more importantly, without encountering Zelena on the way. Mary Margaret is immediately whisked to the delivery ward, and Emma starts working on—well, something.

“What are you doing?” he asks as Emma holds her hands up against the door, concentrating so hard he's actually worried she might pop a blood vessel.

“Protection spell,” she says breathlessly, taking deep pants as she finishes her task. “This'll keep any dark magic out.”

“You mean Zelena?”

“Yeah.”

Spell done, she takes a seat next to him and joins him in waiting.

* * *

They wait for hours outside the ward, the only break in the tension the brief moments when a doctor comes out to divulge some information to Emma which isn't passed on (“Childbirth details, kid—seriously, you don't want to know—”) and when Emma decides to wind her arm around his shoulders and pull him in, which he knows means she's worried.

Which is fair, of course. Zelena is still out there, and Emma doesn't seem to have that much faith in her magic—but there's something else there too, something about this baby which is far more significant to Emma than merely being the child of her friend Snow White—

Oh, about that.

“I found a book in my room this afternoon,” he says at about six, after two solid hours have passed.

“Yeah? DC or Marvel?”

He suppresses the urge to snark at her, because of course she would tease him at a time like this. “A really big old storybook called Once Upon A Time.”

Emma stiffens immediately, and he's sure he felt her swear under her breath.

“I wasn't supposed to find it,” he surmises, a little more sharply than he'd intended.

“No. I'm guessing you already read it?”

“Yeah.”

Emma sighs. “So you know, then. You can't blame me for not wanting you to find it.”

And he honestly can't, but still—“Is it true? The stuff in the book?”

She pulls him in, rests her cheek on his head. “Yeah. It's all true—I mean, I think so, anyway. I wasn't actually there for most of it.”

“But—but I can ask Mary Margaret, right? Because—”

“She's Snow White? Yeah. And David is Prince Charming.”

“And—And Regina,” he begins, then stops, because he so does not want this question to be answered—but he has to know. He has to know. “She's the Evil Queen?”

Emma just holds him tighter and doesn't speak, which is all the answer that he needs.

* * *

“Do you want to see her? Her ward is just around the corner.”

He thinks about it for a moment. He wants to, he needs to—

“Not yet.”

* * *

Hours more pass, one after the other after the other, and still no news.

“This is normal, kid,” Emma tells him, but the brittleness of her voice makes him rather doubt that, “It's gonna be a little bit longer, that's all.”

But six becomes eight becomes ten, and he's getting more than a little bored, quite tired and very, very hungry. In the end his whining becomes so incessant that Emma huffs and pushes him to his feet.

“There's a vending machine just around the corner,” she says curtly, jamming a few dollars into his hand. “Go. I'll check on Mary Margaret, and you better be here by the time I get back.”

He does so without dragging his feet too much, but he scowls when he sees that the vending machine has nothing but chips and chocolate bars—not that he minds them, of course, far from it; he's just looking for something more filling right now. Nonetheless, he picks out a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips and bends down to collect—

—and stays down, because something hits him in the chest, something enormous and brutal and constricting it so tight that it feels like his heart is about to implode and be crushed within him.

“Mom,” he hisses—hisses, because he can barely breathe—“Mom, help me—”

“Oh, she can't help you,” a silky-smooth voice suddenly says above him. “Not with her magic, anyway.”

He looks up to see Zelena, dressed entirely in black, smirking down at him. He instinctively reaches for his protective necklace—but it isn't there. Instead, it's in Zelena's hand, as she holds it up to his eye-line.

“Looking for this?” she asks, her voice sickly-sweet. “I found it in your bedroom after you had left. You must have been in an awful hurry.” She laughs, a sound that would raise the hairs on the neck if he didn't feel like his all ribs were about to snap in half—oh god—“You people didn't seriously think I was going to attack you in the car, did you? I need Snow's child alive, which requires it to be born first.”

His eyes are watering, but he still manages to force out, “My mom—my mom has magic. My mom can stop you.” He snaps his gaze to the intersection of the two corridors, fully expecting to see Emma bounding around the corner, some form of magic in hand—

“Oh, she isn't coming. She isn't the only one who knows how to place protective wards,” Zelena says with a mock-sigh. “Pity, really. I thought it would be harder than this.”

“Why—why are you doing this? Why—why me?” he gasps, leaning against the vending machine as he takes great, heaving breaths.

Zelena just laughs. “You? Oh, I don't care about you. What I do care about is Emma no longer having her magic.” She places a hand on his shoulder, a gesture that would be companionable had she not been in the process of killing him. “You have four minutes—three now, actually. She already knows the spell that she needs to perform. If Emma's magic isn't trapped in this necklace by then, then I'm afraid this unpleasant little curse of mine will be running to its conclusion.”

He stares at her, eyes wide with shock—no. No, Emma can't give up her magic. Not for him—not for anyone—

She smiles, placing the necklace in his trembling hand. “Three minutes, Henry. It's your mother's choice: your life or her magic. Be a good boy and make sure she makes the right choice.”

She vanishes in a cloud of green smoke.

twenty.

He stumbles from side to side, his vision blurred and his chest screaming every step of the way. He makes such a commotion, knocking over chairs and trolleys and water-coolers that Emma opens the door before he even gets there.

“Henry, what's—Henry!” She rushes through the door—or doesn't, because an invisible force hurls her back in the room the moment she steps across the threshold.

He keeps staggering towards her, ignoring her panicked yells and cries—if he can just get through the door, if he can just reach his mom and her magic—but he can't. He tries, but his feet seem stuck in treacle and he barely has the energy to step, and some sort of invisible barrier is blocking his way, like—

Oh.

Emma's barriers were designed to keep out dark magic. Including, apparently, anyone carrying dark magic, such as a curse.

“Mom,” he whispers, collapsing to his hands and knees. “Mom, please, it hurts—”

“I'm trying, Henry,” she says through the rapid onset of tears, and as she does so she tries again—but is rebounded backwards once more. “Please—what happened?”

“Zelena. Zelena wants—ow—she wants you to give up your magic.” He dangles the necklace, and her eyes widen immediately as they alight on it, as if she suddenly realises—no. “No—you can't—”

“I will if I have to.” She reaches out a trembling hand, invites him to throw it through. “Henry—please—”

He drops the necklace, and Emma screams.

“Henry!”

“Find another way,” he gasps. “There has—has to be—another way—”

“There isn't.” She's still reaching out, inviting, pleading—but he can't. He can't be selfish like that. “Kid, my magic could help you but I can't even get through these wards—”

His eyes flick upwards, despite the fact they're almost beyond sight, ignited by sudden hope. “But—but magic could?”

“Yes, but I'm the only one with magic here and I'm stuck in this room so please—”

“No,” he murmurs, forcing himself to his feet. “No, you aren't.”

* * *

It takes him twenty precious seconds to find Regina's room.

He all but falls through the door and can barely make out more than vague shapes and smears of colour, but knows he's found the right room when he hears the endless beep of the heart monitor by Regina's bedside.

He falls to his knees by her bedside, reaches up to grab one of her hands, anchoring himself in reality for just a few more seconds—

“Hey,” he says, his voice shattered by breathlessness and pain. “I—I know who you really are,” he says, before swallowing a yell as a spasm wracks his chest again. Not long left now. “But now I need you—ah—to do some—something good because you—you have magic, right? And you might have—have hurt people,” he murmurs, his strength starting to fade at last.

“But you could—could save me. And I—I know you—you would—if you would—would wake up. Be—because you love me,” he squeezes out, the scorching flames at the centre of his body spreading outwards, consuming him at last—and he knows, he knows.

He knows what he needs to say now, because it's his last chance.

“And I—I don't care about—about any of that,” he says, closing her eyes for what surely will be the last time, pressing her hand towards his lips. “Be—because I love—”

The woman who was my friend for the last year—

And told me her favourite apples when I found a tree in Central Park—

Who watched me and my mom as we drove away from Storybrooke—

The day after placing a spell on my heart to stop it being taken—

Who almost sacrificed her life to a self-destruct so I wouldn't have to be alone—

Even though she was the Evil Queen, who tearfully said she loved me after I woke up from her sleeping curse—

Even after I told her I'd found my real mom and ran past her—

A few months after she asked what was wrong, why I wasn't talking to her—

Which was two years after I had the flu, and she stayed home for two weeks and got the flu herself taking care of me—

Four years after holding my hand all the way to my first day of school, I love—

“—you, mom.”

He opens his eyes again, feels the magic washing over him, a feather-light breath of wind and memory and family and true love.

“Mom?”

Regina blinks her eyes open for the first time in a year, raises her head.

“Henry?” She looks at him—and oh, how could he have ever thought he could do without this, without her? But instead of just looking, she sits up immediately. “Henry, what's wrong?”

He opens his mouth—but no words come out, a choking noise making its way out instead, and he doubles over as one final, great paroxysm hits him at once, and Regina, his mother, dissolves into a swirl of rapidly fading colour—

“Mom,” he whimpers, one last time. “Mommy, it hurts.”

His hand slips from hers, and he falls into darkness and flame at last.

Chapter Text

twenty one.

The fire rages hot, hotter than it had even been in the days and weeks after the curse—the first curse—had broken, and he burns.

He cries out for help, but it isn't forthcoming; he's alone, of course, accompanied only by the immense and utterly featureless walls which seem to bend over him as they rise, making him feel so very, very small. He stumbles this way and that, seeking a way out of the searing flames licking at his torso, but he can't—they chase and follow him everywhere he turns, a crackling laughter surrounding him as he burns and burns and burns.

“Mom,” he cries out, cowering—but she isn't here, is she?

Regina isn't here. He'd seen to that with that final desperate act of his waking self, waking her, remembering her, and now his reward is to be stuck down here again in this treasured refuge now turned into his own personal hell, alone and trapped and burning and—

He just wants his mother again.

He curls himself up on the floor, shielding his face from the scorching heat, but to no avail. “Mom,” he says again, this time to himself.

If he closes his eyes and ignores—with serious effort—the heat and the pain, he can imagine her standing in that regal dress of hers just a few metres away, smiling down at him. Henry, she'd whisper, in a voice still infused with all of that love for him even if it had hidden all of the reasons for that love.

Oh, how he's missed her. The real her.

“Mom, help me,” he whispers, because if he really imagines... and what, if anything, is he better at than imagination?

Henry, she whispers again. He can hear her, he swears, through that part of her buried within him that could never be dislodged, even through his rage at her for the lies, even for the righteous disgust at her true nature and her character, even through a total excision of his memories of her.

“Please help me.”

Henry.

“It hurts—please—”

Henry, wake up.

He stills.

“Mom?”

Henry, come back—

He uncurls a little, ignores the flames. “Mom, I'm here.”

Please don't leave me, honey, wake up—

“I'm trying—”

“Henry—”

“Mom!”

The word falls out of his mouth in a breathless gasp and his eyes fly open as his body surges forwards, upwards into a waiting embrace. His chest—which he instantly realises is bare—heaves, and he struggles to blink through the watery haze that seems to have fallen over his eyes as the arms holding him rock him back and forth, strong, trembling, familiar—

His vision clears at last, and he spots dark hair out of the corner of his eye. “Mommy?”

The hold loosens slightly, but only so Regina can lead her forehead against temple. “Oh, Henry.”

“Wh—what happened?” His teeth are chattering slightly, and there's still the last vestiges of that awful tightness deep within his chest. He looks around, noticing a pair of discarded shock paddles which had been roughly thrown away. Oh. So that's how he had woken up.

“You had a spell on your heart,” Regina says shakily, brushing his hair away from his face in that way he now so remembers—“It was broken by the time I woke, but apparently not quickly enough.”

“Oh.” He looks away—if he hadn't been so stupid, if he hadn't been so angry at her for so long for so many irrelevant reasons and instead done what he'd had the opportunity to do right from that first morning—

“Henry, no.” She places a hand under his chin, forces his eyes back to hers, deep brown and open and warm—“You shouldn't be sorry. You woke me up.”

You loved me, she doesn't say, but it's written into every line of her face, wondered and blissful and loving and—how had he doubted this? How had he ever doubted this?

“But I—I broke the spell, right? With the kiss?” He must have, surely? That could be the only reason that the spell hadn't done anything more than given him a heart attack.

Regina's smile falters, and every muscle in his body tenses, because the alternative—

The alternative is bursting through that door at that moment, breathless and wild-eyed and tear-streaked.

“Henry—Regina—” Emma chokes out, before wrapping them both—both—in a hug so tight that he feels that his ribs are about to crack once more (though this time in an infinitely more pleasant way).

And here, now for a moment, ensconced deeply between his two mothers, he doesn't care about alternatives and lies and unanswered questions and memories-just-returned, because he has his family back again, all of it, and he—

“Well, isn't this sweet.”

He detaches himself from his mothers, sliding behind them as Regina steps protectively between him and her sister—her sister, his mom has a sister—and shields him with her body.

“Hello, sis.” Zelena is smiling like she always is, slanted and with that wildness in her eyes which always makes her look slightly manic, cradling a bundle of blankets in her arms containing a—

No. Oh no, no, no. He shoots a glance at Emma, who seems to have turned to stone, fixed immobile to the spot.

Mom, what did you do?

twenty two.

The baby is squalling, tiny, high-pitched cries piercing through the frigid silence that's descended over the room. Zelena shushes it, cooing gently as she does.

“Hush now, little one. You have a big day ahead of you.”

Emma grinds her teeth, clenches her fists. “Zelena, I swear to god, I'll—”

But Henry never finds out what Emma plans to do, because she makes a pained gulping noise mid-sentence before falling completely silent, clutching at her throat as the spell takes effect.

“Mom? Mom, what's—”

“Oh, don't worry, she isn't hurt. Merely mute. Pity, really—if she'd just waited a few seconds longer, then...” Zelena throws him a glance that he can't quite read, the usual disdain intermixed with something that looks almost like—like she's impressed? “But then I wouldn't have had a chance to meet this little one, would I?”

“Zelena, put that baby down,” Regina says, low and fierce, stepping forward so there's merely a few feet separating the two of them. “Even mother wasn't twisted enough to use children for her spells.”

Zelena's face twitches, the haughty, arrogant mask slipping for a moment into something borderline deranged. “Even mother—”

“Oh yes,” Regina interrupts, her lips curling upwards disdainfully which makes Henry's blood curdle. Or would, if he were on the other end. “Of course, you would know this if she hadn't abandoned you.”

And that makes Henry's chest swell with pride, because that's his mom, his snarky, fearless mother who doesn't take a backwards step against the bad guys and beats them even while she antagonises them—

—Which maybe wasn't so wise, because Zelena flicks a wrist at Regina and Henry topples over, knocked backwards by his suddenly airborne mother as she crashes into the now-silent heart monitor and crumples to the floor.

“Mom!”

He rushes over along with Emma, who had been watching the whole exchange seemingly paralysed. Emma rolls her over onto her back, and her eyes lose a little of their desperate quality when Regina lets out a thin but audible groan.

“I could kill you, you know,” Zelena says, trying to sound silky but her words contorted by still-burning rage. “I could have killed you months ago.”

“Then why didn't you?” Regina growls between gritted teeth, pulling herself to unsteady feet using the bed frame, despite both Emma trying to insistently keep her on the floor, still so protective despite not having a voice.

“What would be the point? You aren't a threat; your magic is useless against me. I don't want you dead, Regina,” Zelena says, smiling wickedly as she does so. “I want the life that mother gave you, the life that you wasted. I want you to have never been born.”

Regina snorts. “And how exactly do you plan on that? Fairy dust induced hallucinations? An invisibility spell? Time travel?”

But Zelena's smile only broadens, which can only mean—oh. Oh. Regina must realise too, because he feels her arm stiffen against her body.

“Well,” Regina says softly, though he can hear the barest quiver in her voice. “I suppose we don't have anything to worry about, then.”

“Such over-confidence.”

“It's never been done.”

“It's never been done by others,” Zelena corrects harshly. “The ones who tried before didn't have my power—they were weak. Like you.”

Regina snarls, steps forward again. “Call me weak again. I dare you.”

Zelena laughs, giggles almost. “Isn't that the truth? Look at you, once a Queen, reduced to moping after your lost son so much that you were too busy sleeping to even protect him from a simple curse—”

Regina snaps—no, Emma snaps, rushing straight towards Zelena and the baby—

But Zelena just laughs and flicks a spell at Emma, sending her sailing through the air just like Regina had and slamming into the hard concrete wall with a sickening crunch.

“Emma!”

Regina is crouching before her in an instant, cradling her cheeks and peering with distressed eyes into rapidly clouding green—

All the while, Zelena continues to laugh.

“Foolish girl. Haven't you worked out yet that only light magic can hurt me? And you gave yours up.” She draws herself back in, gives one last smirk. “Enjoy these moments, all of you. They'll be your last.”

Green smoke billows around Zelena, and both she and the baby are gone.

twenty three.

The room is silent for a moment.

“Emma,” Regina says eventually, fast and frightened, like she only ever does for him. “Are you alright?”

Emma glares at her.

“Oh yes. Your voice.”

An effortless wave of her hand, a strange whooshing sound—

“Regina,” Emma blurts out in a sudden yet slightly slurred gasp as speech returns, “Regina, I'm sorry, I—I had no choice, I didn't—”

“Emma.”

“—I didn't know what she—I had to save Henry, I couldn't—”

“Emma. It's fine, it's—it's not your fault.” Regina pauses, inspects a purpling bruise rapidly growing high on Emma's cheek, traces her fingers over it slowly, slowly. Emma inhales sharply, closes her eyes. “If you'd waited, you—I might not have been able to bring Henry back.”

And Henry watches, understands, believes. Believes in his mothers, because once again they'd saved him—both of them.

“But I—was Zelena lying? Only light magic can beat her?”

Regina sighs, bowing her head slightly. “Yes. It's why your parents cast the curse.”

Emma starts. “My parents—?” But the question dies in her throat, like the mere thought of Henry's grandparents had led her to somewhere she couldn't even contemplate. “They tried to find me?”

“They did. Your light magic was her only weakness.” Regina's shoulders slump, and she looks lost, resigned in a way that's totally unfamiliar to Henry. “I'm sorry. If I'd remembered, I would have warned you.”

“There has to be another way,” Emma says, just like he had mere minutes ago, before he'd staggered into the room of the mother he hadn't remembered and woken up with true love's kiss—

“There is,” he says suddenly, his mouth moving before his brain has even caught up with itself. Both Regina and Emma turn to look at him, inquisitive but plainly cautious—or, in Regina's case, openly sceptical. He goes on anyway. “It doesn't have to be Emma. You could do it.”

Regina starts to laugh, but catches herself just in time. “Sweetheart, you saw what she just did to me. My magic can't hurt her.”

He looks at Emma beseechingly, hoping for support. She frowns at him, her brow creased as she tries to work out what his plan really is—then it hits her, and her eyes light up like they haven't done in weeks.

Elated, he turns back to Regina. “That's because she thinks you only have dark magic.”

“But that's—that's all I have.”

“No,” Emma says, breathless, as the magnitude of her realisation overtakes her. “No, she isn't. When Henry woke you up with true love's kiss, that's light magic.”

Regina's eyes dart between the two of them, wide like the possibility is dawning on her too. “But—”

“You were a villain once,” he says imploringly. “But you've changed. You're good now.”

And her gaze is warm, so warm, so loving—“I—I don't know if I can, Henry, not on my own.”

He takes her hand. “Then we can do it together.”

Regina holds his gaze for a moment, then another, searching and studying and trying to find that hope that he so desperately wants to give her—then she looks away, turns to Emma.

“Do you know where she'll be?”

A quick, sharp nod, fuelled by newfound energy. “She's set up in a farm, just north of the town.”

“Very well.” Regina closes her eyes as Emma takes her other hand, and Henry sees—feels—her grip tighten on them both as purple smoke surrounds all three of them.

* * *

They reappear underneath a star-filled night sky, with nothing but a pale half-moon to illuminate their surroundings. Henry's eyes are still used to the off-white fluorescent lighting of the hospital, so it takes him more than a moment to get his bearings, and he clings on firmly to Regina as he does.

“You're sure this is the place?” she asks.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” Emma says, though she too looks like she's struggling to orient herself in the near-total darkness, spinning this way and that, before pausing and pointing at what looks like a barn. “Look. Is that it?”

He can barely make it out, but if he squints he can see the outlines of the closed barn door not far away, illuminated from within by some sort of yellow-green light.

Regina takes a breath, tenses her shoulders in preparation. “Yes. The spell's already begun.” She looks for a moment that she's going to stride in and burst the doors open, regal and magnificent—but instead she hesitates, turning around. “Henry—”

“I'll go and hide, mom, don't worry,” he says, reassuring her with a gentle tug of her sleeve—when was the last time he'd done that, really done that, before today? He can't remember. “I just wanna see you win.”

She simply looks at him for a moment, irises glinting in the reflected moonlight, soft and coloured by a hundred intertwined emotions—then she turns to Emma.

“Let's go.”

twenty four.

Just as he'd imagined, Regina does indeed raise her hands and use her magic to burst the doors open with a resounding bang, and it is—for the moment—glorious.

“Get the baby,” she says to Emma, barely loud enough for him to hear from his hiding place about thirty feet away. “Zelena, stop. We won't let you get away with this.”

“Regina.” Zelena looks surprised as she turns on the spot, staring wide-eyed at her sister with the spiralling greens and yellows of what could only be a portal behind her. “Come for another beating, sis?”

“Actually, I came for some jewellery,” Regina drawls, effortless in her projected confidence. She reaches for Zelena's green pendant—

And lets out a choked gasp as Zelena magically hoists her into the air, her fingers curling viciously as the spell clamps around Regina's throat.

No—

“Regina!” Emma cries out, distracted from her quiet sneaking by the sound of Regina gasping for breath, but she's hurled away, thumping into the side of the barn and falling motionless to the ground, blonde hair spilling over her face. Zelena smiles, and raises Regina even higher into the air, dangling from an invisible rope, that horrible choking noise fills his ears, and it's too much, he can't watch this, he can't just stand by—

“You fool,” Zelena snarls at them. “What did you hope to achieve? Only light magic can harm me, and you're as dark as they come, sis.”

“You're wrong,” he says, before realising where exactly he'd said it from.

Zelena freezes.

He freezes. When had he gotten so close? How had his legs carried him out of his hiding place? What on earth had he been thinking—had he been thinking? At all?

Or had he just seen his moms in danger, and been unable to merely watch?

Regina looks down at him from her airborne position with suddenly terrified eyes, as if Zelena's chokehold is nothing—nothing—compared to him possibly being in danger. But there's something else there too, something like longing, something trying to find and hold and never let go even as her eyes glaze over and her movements begin to still.

“Look at them, Henry,” Zelena hisses, low and vicious and—and imploring? “Both of them, so pathetic and weak. All that power, and neither of them could protect your grandparents, or even you. I'd have made a far better mother to you than the Evil Queen.”

But Henry doesn't care any more, he doesn't care about any of that, because Regina is on the edge, gasping and struggling for the last whispers of consciousness, and even now she can't look away from him with those endlessly, infinitely warm eyes of hers, exactly like she had when he'd visited that fire room one evening and New York and found a dream person for a friend.

“She isn't the Evil Queen,” he says simply, never breaking his gaze, never leaving her. “She's my mom.” He reaches up to her once last time, her trembling hand stretching down towards him as their fingers brush—

Light blooms out from the point of contact as something rushes through him, a force, an energy beyond all description spreading outwards, like a million curses being broken a million times over and over again all in a single moment, electrifying, dazzling—

Zelena topples backwards from the force of the magical explosion, and Regina falls to the ground, immediately crumpling to her hands and knees as she takes great, heaving gulps of desperately-needed oxygen.

Mom—but he can't. Not yet. Not until he's finished the job.

He steps cautiously over to Zelena, a significant portion of him still unable to quite believe that he's actually doing this; but Zelena doesn't protest or fight back or do anything but stare up at him with unveiled disbelief, so when he pulls off her pendant in a flurry of wispy green, he simply exhales a sigh of relief, the fear and worry sliding out of his shoulders as the portal dissipates into nothingness.

“How?” Zelena asks, and it isn't a question he can answer because he doesn't know himself, so he simply turns away from her and strides—runs, really—over to Regina as quickly as possible.

“Mom,” he says quickly, worriedly, shaking her shoulders because she's still mostly sprawled on the ground, small and fragile—but she's breathing, at least she's breathing—“Mom.”

“Henry.” She looks up at her, smiles—and for a moment, the pitch-black darkness which had reclaimed the night once the portal had closed lifts again. “You did it.”

“We did it,” he corrects, because whatever that explosion had been, it had definitely been light magic, and only one person here has light magic. For now, anyway.

And speaking of which...

“Did you see that?” he says, a grin working his way onto his face because, yeah, they'd beaten the villain of the story again, all of them, including Emma. “That was cool, wasn't it?”

But there's no response.

“Emma?” Regina has recovered enough by now to sit up, craning her head to look around the barn. But neither of them can spot her in the darkness, and the only other sound being made is the quiet cries of the baby for its mother. “Miss Swan, this isn't really the time—”

Regina words cut off with a gasp, because as she'd spoken she'd lit the entire building using some sort of spell, and found that—

Well, found nothing. No trace of Emma, anyway.

Regina stands and rounds immediately on Zelena, who crawls away a little on her back, visibly afraid now that her power is gone.

“What did you do?” Regina snarls.

“Me? You think I did anything?” A laugh, light and quick and searching for that old arrogance, but it's several tones too high, quavering too much, and Henry realises that though that however much Zelena loves spinning little tricks on them, this won't be one of them. “She ran once Henry took my magic. I guess she felt the saviour wasn't needed here any more,” she spits out, cutting in its impotent bitterness.

And Henry knows, instantly, that she's telling the truth.

twenty five.

They run into Mary Margaret and David—into his grandparents—just a few hundred metres from the barn, laden with enough weaponry to equip a small army. A very small, mixed-era army. Henry and Regina aren't immediately recognised, and they're momentarily rooted to the spot as both sword and gun are pointed at Regina's face.

“It's us,” Regina says, much too calmly given the events of the day—then Henry remembers that this is just sort of what happens in this town. His home. “We have the baby.”

There's a strange gasp, as Mary Margaret emits some sort of squeezed-out squeaking noise, and then the baby is back safely in its—his, actually—mother's arms. David, meanwhile, envelops Regina in an all-encompassing hug and Henry's honestly never seen her look so obviously uncomfortable. He even has to fight down a laugh as she pats him awkwardly on the back, completely at a loss to do anything else.

“And Zelena?” David asks, ever the warrior.

“Powerless. And immobilised for the time-being, until we work out what to do with her.”

“Thank you,” Mary Margaret says breathlessly, eyes still only for her second child. “Thank you for everything.”

And he frowns for a second at the phrasing, because everything seems a little too broad for this one thing, and hadn't Regina just woken up? What else could Mary Margaret be thanking Regina for unless they'd talked in that year they could now remember—then it dawns on him. Right.

“Yes, well,” Regina says, clearing her throat bashfully, pulling Henry into her side. He happily burrows in. “I had help.”

“What do you—oh. He remembers,” Mary Margaret realises, finally looking at him, truly looking at him, for the first time in over a year.

“Hi, grams.”

“Henry. I'm sorry we had to keep so much from you, but Emma and I both agreed—where is Emma, actually?” she asks, that star-bright smile slipping into something more sombre.

Regina frowns. “You didn't run into her on the way? We thought she went to find you.”

“We assumed she was with you two,” David explains. “Where do you—”

But Henry never hears the rest of the question, a ringing static in his ears, because he knows where Emma's going. And from the way Regina's arm tenses around his shoulders, she knows too.

* * *

They go back to the apartment first. Henry already suspects that Emma won't be there, and he's pretty sure that Regina thinks the same thing, but they have to check.

The apartment is a mess—the door has been blown clean off his hinges, which he assumes was the byproduct of Zelena's break-in earlier on when she'd stolen the necklace, but there's also clothes strewn everywhere, most of it Emma's, red leather jackets and tank tops and jeans left on the couch, stairs, and floor. He immediately dashes to her bedroom, and finds that all of her things are—

“Gone,” Regina breathes out, following after him. “Henry, she's gone.”

“We have to go after her, mom,” he says, spinning around and tugging pleadingly on her coat. “Please.”

She swallows, the lines of her jaw working as her inner conflicts briefly show on her face, and for a stomach-clenching second he thinks she's going to say no, thinks she's just going to let Emma disappear so she can have him all to herself again.

But instead she gives him a pained smile and a nod, and closes her eyes as the purple smoke whisks them away to the town line.

twenty six.

Emma is already there.

And by the looks of things, she's been there for some time, having driven right up to the edge and then gotten out to stare distantly into the wider world beckoning to her from beyond.

They reappear about twenty yards behind her, and Henry immediately runs forward to try and pull her back. “Mom,” he cries out, and Emma turns around at his voice—but he stops again, so quickly he almost falls over, when she starts to back away from him, takes another step towards that line.

“Henry—Henry, please,” she whispers, utterly broken and with her arms wrapped around herself, like the tremors wracking her body might shatter her to pieces if she doesn't. There are tears still wet on her face, glistening in the moonlight, and it takes all his self-control to not run across the and hug her, bring her back—but he can't. He can't.

There are no flames, but once again he's being separated from his mother by a line he can't cross—because this time, if he does, that invisible threshold between them might become permanent.

“I—please go,” she says between hitching sobs, despaired and frightened and overcome at last by weeks—years, maybe—of stress. “You—I have to go.”

“Miss Swan,” Regina says slowly, carefully, inching forwards with an arm outstretched like she's approaching a cornered animal, like Emma will bolt if she makes any sudden moves. “This is a bad idea. A terrible idea.”

“Is it?”

“You don't know what will happen.”

“Zelena's magic is gone, right? So I—I'll be fine if I cross.”

“That isn't the point.”

“I—it doesn't matter. I can't be here, Regina.”

“And so you're just going to run, knowing you might never be able to return?”

“That's what you wanted, right?” A laugh, watery and shaken to pieces. “I—all I have to do is go and I can go back to my normal life, just like—like you always wanted me to. And you and Henry can be together.”

And Regina doesn't have any immediate counter to that, so Henry takes over. “Mom. Emma, please don't do this. Don't go.”

He hasn't used Emma's real name by her real name since—god, in years, and it immediately provokes fresh tears from his mother, his mother. “Henry, I—I have to, I can't—”

“I thought you loved me,” he whispers, and now he's starting to cry too, because why—why would Emma leave like this? Why would Emma leave just as they've won, just as he's gotten all of his family, gotten everything—gotten his mother back? “What did I do wrong?”

I wish Regina was my mom instead of you...

He chokes back a sob. “Mom—mom, I'm sorry, please don't be angry at me, please don't be mad—”

Emma lets out a strangled cry, and immediately staggers forward despite herself, pulling him into her arms. “I'm not mad, Henry, I promise, I could never be angry at you—”

And she's still crying, and he's still crying, but she's here, she's still here, and Regina is here, and they're all a family again as Emma rocks him slowly back and forth, sobbing quietly into the top of his head and promising that she loves him and she never meant to make him upset and she wishes they could just leave this town they both hate, all three of them—

“What?” He breaks away from her, stares at her in disbelief. “You—you still want to go?”

She nods, untamed, uncontrolled hope breaking through her still-sharp despair. “Back to New York, where we can be a family and we don't have to worry about magic and—and we can go ice-skating and shopping and—and have pizza nights every weekend. How—how's that sound, kid?”

And it's tempting, it's so tempting, but—“What about Re—what about mom?” he asks.

“She comes with us,” Emma says, her eyes darting up to the woman who'd been watching them both from a small but still-significant distance, a pained expression on her face like she's stopping herself from intruding. “I said all three of us, right?”

Regina's eyes widen and her mouth opens a little, like she hadn't even considered the possibility. “Emma, this is our home.”

“Not if you don't want it to be. Regina, this town—these people have been terrible to you. I hate it here. Henry hates it here.”

“Henry hates that we lied to him,” Regina corrects, and Henry notes with a nasty pang the use of we. “This is his home.”

“It doesn't have to be. Regina, I—New York was perfect. Life was simple and happy and we could all have that again if we just go,” Emma implores, even going so far as to seize Regina's clenched hands and tug her closer, so there's almost no space separating the three of them at all. “We could build a family there.”

“And the family we already have? What about your parents, Emma? You have a baby brother now as well.”

For a second, a horrifying second, Henry thinks it's the wrong thing to say, because fresh tears leak out of Emma's eyes and the despair comes back—but Regina holds tight, tight, and doesn't let her go. “I can't—they—”

“They're upset over what you did,” Regina says, low and cautious, but still laced with that same care she only ever reserves for those most precious to her, for him. “And they may remain so for long time, but they would be fools beyond understanding if they rejected you over this.”

“You did what you had to do, mom,” Henry adds, squeezing her still-trembling hand for added effect. “You saved me.”

And there—there's the first signs of a smile, but still fragile, still nothing more than a broken shadow. “But—Regina, they trusted me to protect their baby and I—I couldn't, and then at the barn—”

“They love you,” Regina interrupts softly, gently, reaching up and cupping one of Emma's cheeks, rubs circles there, smiles a little when Emma can't help but lean into the touch. Distantly, Henry remembers an old theory that he'd been so convinced on—a theory he'd decided was off-base once he'd learned what Regina had truly lost a year ago, but now he's wondering again. “For all their faults—and they are innumerable—they do truly love you. And so do we.”

Emma's eyes jerk upwards immediately, wide and alight, filled with the same boundless wonder they'd held a year ago, in this very spot, with just the three crying and treasuring that precious moment of family as Pan's curse descended—

"We? You—you mean—"

But Regina, like she had on that day, simply smiles. Warm. Loving.

“We.” She leans forward, closes the gap between the three of them, brushes her lips across Emma's forehead still bowed with awe. “Come home, darling. Come home.”

And Emma accepts at last, allows herself to fall and be caught, sinking into the hold of mother and son as their little reunited family embraces under the silent gaze of the twinkling, star-filled sky.

Chapter Text

epilogue.

aleph-nought.

It turns out that Henry Mills is not very good at packing. It's a surprise, given that he only has one bag he needs to pack for a few days and he's been given a few hours to do it, but apparently it's a lot harder than it looks.

“Kid, you done yet?” Emma calls from the downstairs foyer, her voice laced with obvious frustration.

“Yep!” he lies. “Be down in a second!”

“Funny, could've sworn you said that ten minutes ago.” There's an exaggerated stomping noise on the stairs, which he knows immediately is Emma's way of signalling to him that you better be done or I swear to god—

He sighs to himself—why is she in such a rush, anyway?—before shoving his Vita and his scarf between a jumper and his storybook and hurriedly zipping up the bag. Just in time too, because Emma appears in the doorway just as he hauls it over his back, leaning against the doorway with her hands folded across her chest. It's a posture designed to tell him just how badly he's covered up the fact that he'd been dawdling for twenty minutes.

But her eyes are glinting and there's the first inklings of a smile on her face anyway, and his heart is light as he skips down the stairs to where Regina is waiting, taking them two at a time.

* * *

The trip is honestly fairly uncomfortable; for whatever reason, they'd managed to talk Regina into taking the Bug instead of the Mercedes. Emma hadn't even insisted on it; after raising the idea, she'd quickly backtracked in a hurried and wide-eyed rush, her voice raised half an octave and her eyes averted like she'd done so often in the last month since the curse had broken, since moving into the guest room with them—

But Regina, watching with unreadable eyes and a slightly creased brow, had immediately agreed.

Now, though, squashed between empty suitcases and boxes in the narrow backseat, it doesn't seem such a good idea. Emma—who had insisted on taking first drive—eyes him in the rearview mirror shuffling to try and get more comfortable, and frowns.

“Okay back there, kid?” He squirms a little more, but only succeeds in accidentally kicking one of the suitcases—the one that'll be for the books, if he recalls correctly—and yelping in pain. The frown on Emma's face deepens. “Regina, we could go back and get the other car.”

“That's not an option,” Regina says, a little tiredly. “I put it into service before we left.”

“I'm sorry. We should have—”

“Emma,” Regina says, softer and gentler, sliding a hand over to rest on Emma's leg just above the knee. “Relax.”

Henry's eyes dart between the two of them, from the rearview mirror's reflection of Emma's eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead and her posture still too tense, to Regina leaning forward as she continues to squeeze Emma's thigh. Emma's grip on the wheel tightens for a moment—before exhaling with a sigh, relaxing again.

“Okay. Next gas station you can take over and I'll swap with Henry.”

“Mom, it's fine,” he says, because the idea of Emma squashed into the backseat of her own car is just absurd. It would be funny, though. “But next time we take the other car.”

He only catches half a glimpse of Regina's expression in the rearview mirror, but god is it smug.

* * *

It's a microcosm of the last week, really, ever since Emma had mumbled below her breath that all their stuff was still back in New York. He hadn't even thought about that in the past month, assumed that now that Emma had effectively moved in with them that they'd left that part of their life in the past, but apparently not quite, not yet.

Henry had been worried that Emma going back to New York in the Bug, even with them in tow was a sign that Emma hadn't quite gotten over that day, that moment at the town line. So too had Emma, if the way she'd immediately flushed and looked away and started trying to reassure them that it was just an idea, she didn't actually have to go—

But Regina had pulled her in close—too close, given that he'd still been in the room and did they have to always be so touchy-feely in his presence?—and started brushing hair away from downcast eyes.

“Emma. Darling, corazón, it's okay. We trust you.”

Emma had softened, smiling and leaning into Regina's touch, while Regina had continued to stroke intricate lines down Emma's cheek, and his worries had simply melted away.

aleph-one.

They reach New York in the evening, and have dinner at Henry's favourite pizza parlour before heading to the apartment.

Regina is intensely sceptical, muttering the whole way through about excess salt and absurd prices and far too many people, but Henry orders her a Margherita—“Seriously, just try it,” Emma had urged to her raised eyebrows and pursed lips—and when her suspicious scowl dissolves into something which looks rather like bliss, he beams at her.

“See?” he says, as Emma surreptitiously gets out her phone. “Told you you'd like it.”

“You did,” she admits, though the grouchiness quickly returns when she realises that Emma is taking pictures. There's a brief tussle as Regina hisses at her to delete the incriminating photographs—“At once, Miss Swan, or I'll make you regret ever being born.”

But Emma gleefully refuses, even holding the phone teasingly above her head as Regina snatches at it, giggling as Regina snarls increasingly elaborate threats at her. The upshot of it all: Henryends up laughing harder than he has in a very, very long time.

* * *

They finally enter the apartment at about nine, far too late to start packing up this evening, which means they'll be here a bit longer than originally planned. The loft is that peculiar sort of cold unique to abandoned buildings, and already smells vaguely of layered dust when they enter. Henry shivers.

“I'll turn on the heaters,” Emma says, moving off around the loft with practiced ease to bring some light and warmth to the building. Meanwhile, Regina stands rooted to the spot in the doorway, stiff and drawn into herself, studying her surroundings with obvious apprehension, and—

“Mom.” He pulls one of her arms away from her body and closes it within one of his own, swinging it from side to side. “Don't worry. She'll come back with us.”

But Regina just smiles, easy and effortless and warm, and he wonders what exactly he'd been afraid of.

“Of course she will.” She uses her trapped arm to draw him in, hugs him quickly. “Now, why don't you show me around?”

* * *

They end up staying a few days in the city; there's a lot to pack up and none of them are particularly keen to spend all day surrounded by boxes of clothes and other belongings. Particularly when they could be having a holiday instead, out enjoying the bright, crisp sunshine and the city haze thickened by street food and traffic congestion. Henry loves it, just as he'd loved the last year, and it's even better now that he gets to show his mother around.

He and Emma decide to pull out all the stops for Regina: they visit the Statue of Liberty by morning, where he discovers that, without magic as a sort of backup, Regina is actually quite nervous around heights; they get completely lost on their way to Times Square which Emma insists is not her fault despite the fact that she's supposed to be leading the way; they all have ice cream—Regina included, to his surprise—outside Carnegie Hall.

It's fantastic and wonderful and feels more like a family than anything in the last year had been, and he can barely stop smiling the whole time, but Regina—

She isn't unhappy. She isn't, he's sure of that. And he knows well enough by now that his mother will never able to smile completely freely, will never be able to hide just how much blood, sweat and tears she's had to invest in order to have this—but when Emma asks her if she's okay whilst they're all taking a break in Central Park, he isn't surprised.

“Of course I'm fine.”

“Regina.”

Regina sighs. “I am, Emma. It's just odd being here. In a sense.”

She's sitting between them, and Henry leans into her the most reassuring way he knows as Emma rests her head on Regina's shoulder, trying to massage some of the coiled tension away in her arms.

“Yeah.”

“This was meant to be my gift for you. I never thought—”

“Hey.” Emma raises her head to look at Regina properly, and her eyes are shining bright, so bright. “What you gave us… that year was everything to me and Henry. You—you made us both so happy.”

Regina looks down and away, but there's a shadow of a smile dancing on her lips, and Henry feels her hand tightening ever so subtly on his forearm. “Oh, I know.”

* * *

By the fourth evening, they've packed everything they can into the car and given away the rest of what they could, and are ready to go. They'll leave tomorrow morning, partly because an eight hour drive in the middle of the night is, to quote Regina, the height of stupidity, but more because they're all exhausted.

Even so, Henry struggles to sleep for some reason. Maybe it's just the fact that this is the last time he'll ever sleep in this bed, the one that feels so much like the one he has at home because for so long this was his home, even if it isn't now—

He sighs, and sits up. If he keeps overthinking this he won't get any rest at all; he needs to clear his head before he tries to get back to sleep, preferably with a glass of water. He creeps out quietly into the living room, trying to get to the kitchen without making any noise, as he doesn't know if his parents are awake and he'd prefer not to be caught by them—

But they are. Because they're on the couch.

Kissing.

And not just kissing either, though that's the most obvious thing: their bodies are tangled up, Emma caught underneath Regina's body in a half-spitting position as her hands roam up and down Regina's shoulders, with one of the buttons on the latter's shirt already undone, and—nope. Nope. He does not need to see this, even if he'd sort of wished for it.

He scarpers immediately and curls back into bed, already aware that he has an entirely new reason to not get any sleep tonight.

aleph-two.

Their behaviour in the morning does not improve; Emma is all shy smiles and soft touches, and even Regina is positively glowing, her demeanour light like she's floating miles above the earth and basically joined to Emma's hip as they make scrambled eggs. They're cooking breakfast, damn it, do they have to be so gross?

He glares at them through bleary eyes when they sit down to eat. His hair is thoroughly mussed, the after-effects of having used a pillow to muffle his ears last night so as to block out any potential noises that he knew they were making—he's thirteen, not clueless—but Emma simply rolls her eyes at him and laughs, stage-whispering to Regina and—

Ugh. Gross, gross, gross.

* * *

Mercifully, they get back to normal on the drive home, bickering over directions and getting into a somewhat heated debate over the best Pixar movie and then the best adaptation of the Snow White tale, because of course they would. Sometimes he has to remind himself just how odd his life really is, despite the fact that he's taken it completely for granted for years now. It's all good-natured, mind, and he joins in after half an hour or so, even if he's a little worried by just how invested Regina is in the whole matter.

It falls away soon enough, and somewhere between Boston and the New Hampshire border he drifts off into a half-asleep doze, only vaguely aware of quiet conversations and endless rows of trees and buildings filtering on by as his head rests against the window. He briefly wakes up properly hours later, when it's basically sunset and they're at a rest stop just fifty miles from Storybrooke.

His parents are no longer in the car; the two of them are both sitting on the front bonnet, Regina's head resting in the crook of Emma's neck as Emma draws patterns on her arm. They're deep in conversation as they watch the sun descend between layers of cloud, illuminating the early evening sky into brilliant stripes of vivid reds and purples. After a few minutes Emma turns her head to press her lips to Regina's temple, and he can just about make out three little words on her lips.

He smiles, and closes his eyes again.

* * *

When they finally arrive at the mansion, Mary Margaret and David are already there—or, rather, they show up about two minutes afterwards. Henry barely has time to even get his shoes off and fall onto his bed—his bed, the one he'd grown up in—before Regina is calling him back down. Apparently they're having a family dinner at Granny's—again.

His grandparents have been very fond of these over the last two weeks, and he's fully aware that this is Mary Margaret's attempt to mend things with Emma. He likes them, though, not least because he gets to see his baby uncle. To his slight surprise, Regina likes them too, but that's probably for the same reason as she's very much become the family babysitter.

It's pragmatic, she explains: she's by far the best at keeping him quiet. Henry suspects it's more than that—for one thing, the times when they're over at the old loft are some of the only other times when Emma is in her parents' presence, and absolutely the only times when she's in her brother's presence. She's still too stiff and her smiles too forced around Neal, but she's getting better as the days go on. Slowly.

And to be fair, Regina does have a knack for quelling his cries.

“Were you always this good?” he asks as Regina rocks the baby in her arms, smiling lazily down at him. “Like, when I was a baby.”

“Not at first. Mary Margaret was much better in those first few days,” she says, nodding at the woman seated opposite them. For a brief moment, he looks between them with trepidation; he knows how far they've all come, especially given that Regina and Mary Margaret had communicated extensively in the fire room in the last year, but that's very much a recent thing compared to, well, before.

But Mary Margaret just smiles broadly, happily taking in the image of Regina making silly faces at her baby. “Oh, I remember that. I don't think I'd ever seen you look so stressed, which is saying a lot.”

“The things we do for our children,” Regina murmurs, before passing the baby back to his mother. “Now, can we please order already?”

* * *

By the time they get home at last, the day's travelling and his lack of sleep the previous evening has rendered him completely exhausted, and he almost forgets to brush his teeth and get changed before collapsing into bed.

Before he falls asleep, though, there's a soft knock on the door. “Henry?”

He rolls over, seeing Emma in the doorway in her sleeping clothes. “Mom? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing wrong. I just, um—do you mind if I stay here for a bit?”

“Uh, sure.” She'd done this in New York when he'd been upset or scared or thinking too hard something but hadn't wanted to worry her unnecessarily. She'd always known, mind. Always.

Sometimes, though, it hadn't been about him at all; if she'd had a tough case, or a dodgy date, or just had a bad day which had reminded her of a childhood spent alone and lost and unwanted, she'd quietly slip into his room and watch him fall asleep—except she hadn't, had she?

None of that had ever happened. All those memories were constructed, fabricated, fake, and they'd been too happy in New York for that to ever have happened like that.

“Mom, is everything okay?”

She perches herself on the edge of the bed, eyes glimmering in the moonlight filtering through the window. “It's fine.” She looks down, fiddles with his blanket. “New York was fun.”

“Yeah.” He pauses, bites his lip a little—a habit he's inherited from his other mother. “It was weird, though.”

“Really?”

He shrugs. “It felt strange, you know? Like, it was our home. But that apartment, it just felt—”

“Wrong. Yeah.” She closes her eyes, flares her nostrils as her breathing gets heavier, more unsteady. “But it was good, right? That—that year.”

He reaches out, holds her hand. “The best, mom.”

“I just—I can't help but think about Regina, back on that day. She gave us all that, made us so happy, but then she—you know.”

He swallows, feels his eyes watering, recalls to mind that one question that had been haunting him for over two months now. The most important question that had come to him one morning in a hospital, the one question that Regina had refused to answer ever since.

“She didn't have to do that. I didn't want—did it really hurt that much?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

And he does, he does, but—“It doesn't mean she had to do that. Why did she do it?”

Emma shuffles up, gives him a soft, fragile smile. “It's obvious, isn't it? She wanted to see you.”

Oh.

It doesn't make it any less painful, it doesn't make it any nicer to think about, but—but it makes it easier. Through realms and curses and magical barriers and apparently eternal separation, she'd still found a way, even if at a terrible price, and it makes it easier.

Emma leans down, presses a soft kiss to his forehead.

“We both love you, kid, more than you can imagine. Now get some sleep.”

He settles back down into the bed, and slips out of consciousness at last.

* * *

He's had these dreams for several years now, but this is the first time his mother has been here with him.

Well, maybe that's not strictly true. Because even if he hadn't known—and if he stops and thinks and digs down deeper into himself than boys his age ever really should, he probably had, or at least suspected—she had certainly known. She'd simply hidden it, burying that bottomless wellspring of love under tales of apple trees and honey and lemon tea, beneath layers of dignified friendliness and useful advice and quiet nods and the facade of a dream person.

But not now. Not now.

To be honest, his initial reaction to being here again is surprise; after that last dream, immediately after the curse had broken, he'd had nothing for weeks and weeks, and he'd assumed that the dreams had faded away permanently. His mom still has them occasionally, albeit with reducing frequency—though not that she ever says as much, of course. But sometimes her hair is a little more unkempt in the morning, there's ghosts in her eyes and she hugs him even tighter than she normally does, and he knows.

Now, though, he hears the gentle crackling of the fires around him, and he knows immediately that he's back in this room again. He opens his eyes as he stands, feeling the familiar distant tickle of the flames surrounding him—but they're docile, calm, warming rather than burning, illuminating rather than scorching as they had on that night.

He looks across the threshold of dancing fire at a dark-haired woman, finally out of her regal costume and into a cream silk blouse and dark pants instead. It makes her more relaxed, happier, like his mother.

“Hi mom.”

Across the flames, Regina smiles.