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Somewhere along the way, it all came a little bit easier. Everyone was still mad at everyone else, and yes, Regina had been right about the terribly strained Thanksgiving dinners once a year. Snow and David have a second child, and then a third in short succession and Emma rather falls by the wayside.
She’s okay with it though. She knew it was going to happen. They’re two people who are technically younger than her in this year. She can’t be their daughter, no matter how much the people in town desperately want it to be true. So she becomes sort of an aunt, sort of something else entirely.
And she moves in with Regina.
It started as an innocent enough reason really, Henry was growing up quickly and the idea of having divorced moms who were not lesbians and certainly did not like each other was gettin’ him hella down. Naturally he asked why Emma couldn’t live in the spare bedroom; and Regina, well, Regina hadn’t had a good reason why not.
So Emma moves into the spare bedroom and Regina asks her to help with laundry and the dishes. Emma mows the lawn in the summer of her own accord and Regina will sit in an Adirondack chair and watch her do it. She doesn’t call out corrections when Emma misses a spot, but Emma does make a point of going as slow as possible to make sure that she’s doing a good job.
It is an uneasy peace, really.
Or rather, it is a peace that is punctuated with moments of extreme tension. Emma thinks that Henry should be able to go to New York twice a year for a long weekend to see his father; Regina wants nothing to do with the man who had sprung from the loins of a woman fool enough to lay with Rumpelstiltskin. Emma doesn’t fold socks, Regina does. Emma doesn’t like apples very much at all, but Regina’s tree produces so many of the suckers that she’s eating all the damn time anyway and sometimes she catches Regina smirking as she slices up apples into oatmeal or for a crisp.
One day, Emma finds a crumpled sock caked with something none-too familiar in Henry’s hamper and she sighs. Their little boy is growing up. She has to tell Regina.
They sit him down and hand him a box of tissues and tell him to leave his poor socks alone in the future. Henry is bright red for about three days after that and Regina makes a point of teasing him gently about it. Emma just wants it all to go away because how the hell can Henry be nearly a real teenager? He’s almost thirteen.
She’s getting old.
“Your son is developing early, according to the books,” Regina comments later as they sit in her study and pointedly don’t talk to each other. Emma’s making a point to put her beer on a coaster as she reviews expense reports and makes sure that she’s coming in under budget.
Emma snorts, unladylike and certainly full of indignation. “Right, so he’s my son when he’s jacking off into his socks?”
Regina wrinkles her nose and flips a paper over to read its back side. She glances over the top of her glasses that Emma never knew she had and adds, “I assume you do something similar into your socks, Ms. Swan.”
Emma rolls her eyes and says nothing more. She can take a dig at her very excellent masculinity like the best of them, thank you very much.
In the weeks that follow, it becomes apparent that Emma is Snow’s go-to babysitter after Ruby fucked off to wherever on the back of that Harley. Emma doesn’t like that she’s somehow stuck filling Ruby’s role in Snow’s life (in more ways than one, she’s somehow on the hook to provide oodles of moral and bestie support that no mother should ever share with her daughter) but she rolls with it. She’s got a kid brother and sister now that drool and cry and poop in diapers a lot.
At least Regina’s somewhat competent with the diaper thing. She talks Emma through it on the phone as Henry looks on with a horrified expression on his face. Emma takes this opportunity to explain to him that condoms are amazing things that prevent things like his infant uncle from ruining his life.
Henry tells Emma she’s gross and sulks in his room for a few hours while Emma plays with the little ones. He comes down when she offers him Treasure Planet and mac and cheese that Regina made earlier. Apparently the kind from a box is inferior and the world ought to know that Emma cannot cook at all.
Somewhere along the way, they became a family.
There are still these incredibly, excruciatingly painful moments where Regina and Snow are about the kill each other and Emma and David have to pull them apart at family dinners. There are moments when David forgets that Emma isn’t a child and chastises her for staying out too late with Kathryn or Neal if he’s in town. There are moments when Regina lashes out with good reason at anyone who’s breathing the same air as her.
And there are moments when they’re both so jealous of the other spending any time with anyone but themselves that it’s becoming a problem.
Henry is fifteen now, and this arrangement is well on its way to something far more. He’s about to start high school - about to start driving. Emma’s going to give him the bug so he can learn how to drive stick and get a real car. Emma’s going to teach him to drive and they’re not going to tell Regina about his lessons until after each one is complete. She’d rather not know, she’s said many times, and Emma can respect that.
He’s a good driver. Too speed happy, but Emma’s grateful for his caution as the drive along the Maine coast. They get as far south as Boothbay one time, before they turn back, and Emma’s fucking proud as hell of her son.
“He didn’t speed once,” she says as they breeze in with three lobsters from the harbor market in Boothbay. “And I picked these up from an old lady on the side of the road on the way back,” she adds, depositing a carton of fresh, tiny, wild blueberries into Regina’s hands. “Now, we gotta race these suckers.”
That weekend, Regina makes blueberry currant jam and Emma might confess that she wants to marry Regina… and her jam.
Henry says that they’re gross and rolls his eyes at them. He’s spread out his algebra homework on the table and Emma remembers that she never actually, you know, went to class in high school. Thanks Snow and David, for trusting goddamn August with childrearing. She has no idea how to even do the math he’s working on and to her credit, Regina is faking it like a boss. Emma’s seen the algebra books she’s got hidden under her bed.
“You’re a good mom,” Emma says to Regina as she watches Emma do the dishes later that evening. Henry’s upstairs on the phone with some girl and they’re really very pointedly not talking about that particular problem right now. They both want him to be their little boy for at least a few more days or weeks or months.
Regina sets her wine glass down into the sink, and presses her fingers into Emma’s shoulder encouragingly. “You too,” she says quietly. And her lips graze Emma’s cheek briefly before Regina’s gone and Emma’s completely flabbergasted up to her elbows in soapy water.
She kisses Regina properly under the mistletoe at Christmas a few weeks later and they have a shit ton of sex. Henry says that they’re totally gross and goes to spend a few days at his dad’s for New Year’s.
They’re growing up together.
Over the next summer, all Henry does is eat and sleep. He grows four inches and he hurts constantly. Emma gets August to take him out in a sailboat so that he can trail at least his legs in the water to stay cool. The water in Maine hardly ever gets above sixty degrees.
Henry loves it and takes up rowing, which starts to get him attention from the local prep schools who are always looking to recruit.
They keep him in Storybrooke, however. He’s happier here. There are people he likes, and people he doesn’t have to hide things from here. Everyone knows who his parents are.
Plus there’s Grace.
And Henry’s hopeless with girls.
He takes her to prom and he’s all knees and elbows and she’s maturing into a beautiful woman who looks suspiciously like Cora in certain lights. Emma’s got all sorts of ideas about that, but Regina’s sworn up and down that she never had anything more than a dalliance with Jefferson, and she certainly never had his love child. Emma still likes to joke about it, and Regina threatens to murder Emma and really, it’s just business as usual.
They have Grace for dinner one night and Regina makes lasagna, only to discover that Henry neglected to mention a severe milk allergy on Grace’s part. Emma saves the day with hot dogs and burgers on the grill, but jesus, Henry’s so bad with girls.
“Why doesn’t she like me?” Henry wines at Emma later after he’s driven Grace home.
Emma rolls her eyes and glances at Regina who’s hiding a smile behind her hand. “I think you’d be surprised, kid.”
Henry takes the SAT the next summer and blows them all away with how badly he does. Dot tests are apparently not his forte. Regina insists on hiring him a tutor to teach him how to take the test and Emma talks to Neal about contributing to Henry’s college. Neal is all for it, and the three of them look at their finances and realize that Henry could go anywhere in the country, provided he gets his scores up.
He ends up with a pretty average score, but it’s enough to get him looks from Bates and a year deferment offer from Colby. He gets into USM and UM – but decides on UNH because it’s still by the ocean. He’s grown up around it, he explains to Emma as they load up the rented mini-van that they’ve got to take all of his stuff down to move him in for freshman year. He can’t leave it behind.
Regina is beside herself the whole way down. Henry’s eighteen now. He’s a magical boy who’s grown into a young man who could use light magic if he so chose. He’s not going to, though, no matter how much Gold wants him to learn. She’s sobbing into Emma’s shoulder in the back seat as Henry drives, and it’s all that Emma can do to hold herself together. This is her son, and he’s eighteen years old and going to fucking college.
Fuck she’s old.
UNH is beautiful, but the town is gross and a total dump. Emma wishes he’d gone to UMass or Vermont, both of those schools were gorgeous and the towns they were in were wonderful as well. But this is where Henry felt the most at home and they can’t blame him.
He majors in English and minors in binge drinking and smoking pot. He tells Emma about it, but never Regina. She tells him that he should go to class and save it for the weekends. Henry doesn’t really listen to her and ends up on academic probation after his freshman year.
Neal threatens to withdraw his financial help if Henry doesn’t shape the fuck up. Emma doesn’t say anything, because it’s the first time that Henry’s ever fucked up anything in his life. Regina just asks him if it was worth it.
His sophomore year, he joins the staff of the school paper and begins writing for real. His teachers sing is creativity and his writing prowess. They say his style is unique, that he’s like a modern bard in their midst. At Regina’s encouragement, Henry gets published in the school paper and he mails home the clippings. He’s writing fairytales in a modern setting. They’re gorgeous and the whole town soon knows of their favorite son and his writing prowess.
His senior year he gets approached by a publisher and Regina calls him her bard. He’s going to tell their story now, and it’s fucking beautiful. Emma kisses Regina over the copy of Henry’s book that he’s mailed them and they stay that way for a long time, holding the book between them.
It is Emma who opens it at first, and reads the first line.
“When I was ten, my fourth grade teacher bought a book from an evil imp who wanted to break a curse…”
“Gold’s gunna be pissed,” Emma mutters and Regina just laughs. That night, Emma reads the first chapter to her brother and sister, who are now nine and ten, they stare up at her as she paints Henry’s words into a picture.
“Will you tell more!” They ask him later, and Henry just rubs his three-day-old beard over Skype and shrugs.
“Tell me your story,” he replies. “And I’ll spin it into gold.”