Chapter Text
Emma tears Victor away from her as she stands before an angry mob and Emma holds her hand a little too long when she’s locked into a cell after. Emma runs across the room to help her up after the wraith attacks her and then Emma pushes her aside and falls into a portal to protect her.
Regina doesn’t remember her life before Emma, Emma, Emma, Emma who she loves and now the world knows, and David seems torn between cutting off her head or keeping her safe because of it. She reclaims her magic and attacks him when he storms into her house and he stares down at her in alarm.
She snaps threats at him and he snaps threats at her and it’s so useless because she has nothing to fight for anymore. She has her life and she has no family, no friends, no Emma or even Snow to fixate on and that’s…nothing.
David sees something in her face and his own softens a bit and Regina suddenly recognizes Emma in him, in his idiotic (idiotic, idiotic, lovable Emma) belligerence and his uncertain eyes, and she takes a step back as he speaks. “You love my daughter,” he says. “I want to bring her home. Does this really have to go like this?”
She thinks of emptiness, of hopeless endings and marks on her ankle that don’t matter anymore. She thinks of losing Henry to what must have been another portal and love that becomes loss and life without direction. She thinks of Emma’s smile, bright and promising, of Emma in a coat closet whispering, You choose what you want, and she chooses. “No,” she says.
They bring Emma home after some missteps- on Regina’s part, out of fear of her mother and Gold’s maneuvering- Snow with her, and there are awkward smiles and Emma keeping a distance with her eyes still soft on Regina. They kiss outside of Granny’s at the welcome back party and she feels whole and good and right like she hasn’t since she’d been a girl, and then Mother comes to town and it isn’t anymore.
She’s isolated and betrayed and Emma brands her a murderer and betrays her, she’s isolated and lashes out and Emma has left town. She makes mistakes, one after another after another, and the wholeness fades into new regrets, new loneliness, and Emma returned but distant again. She trusts Snow. Mother is dead.
Her earliest mistake in Storybrooke is in town, now Greg Mendell, and she’s strapped to a table and forced to endure a torture like she’s never felt before. Emma, she begs. Henry, she dreams. But in the end, she has only herself.
Until it isn’t just her. Until she hears a pained cry she recognizes as Snow’s (Snow? she wonders, and hates a little less) and David firing at Mendell and Emma’s voice over a radio. “Emma,” she croaks.
Snow presses a hand to her brow. “We’re getting you out of here,” she says, and the look in her eyes is haunted now like Regina’s never seen it before. She can’t imagine what would have brought Snow White to this, and she opens her mouth to ask.
And then there’s a shout from the radio, Emma speaking frantically, and Regina can barely make out the words. Tamara, she hears. A portal. Emma sounds afraid and then there’s silence and Regina is done with portals taking away the people she loves. She musters up the last bit of energy she has, closes her eyes and teleports to Emma.
Emma, who is falling into a portal already, sliding into it as Tamara flees. Her eyes light up when she sees Regina- as though she isn’t about to vanish, as though there’s nothing that matters more than Regina free, that idiot- and Regina pitches forward into the hole with her.
They land on grass and soft dirt, Regina’s arms limp around Emma.
She can barely move, her nerves feel like they’re on fire, and opening her eyes seems an impossible task. She’s going to die here in some other realm, Emma unconscious beside her, and she supposes that she deserves it. She’s spent far too much time doing unforgivable deeds, every step forward now accompanied by one back, to expect absolution now.
There’s a gentle hand on her face, rough and calloused but very small, and her eyes snap open. A boy is sitting over her, eyes curious as he touches the burns on her forehead. He looks about ten, just a bit younger than Henry would have been now, and she swallows painfully- everything is painful- and croaks, “What is this place?”
The boy doesn’t speak. Instead he scampers off and Regina’s resigned to lie in the silence until Emma shifts beside her. “You’re alive,” she says softly.
“For now,” Regina manages, her voice still hoarse and pained. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“Mary Margaret pushed for it as hard as I did,” Emma says, sitting up. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
Emma rolls her eyes, but she’s biting her lip, scanning Regina with growing concern. “I don’t know what I can do for you. Can you…will magic help?”
“I’m not sure anything will help now,” Regina whispers.
Emma leans down as though to kiss her, but instead she touches Regina’s lips, traces the burns like the boy had, and shakes her head. “I’m going to save you.” She closes her eyes and focuses, face screwing up and something like a wisp of breath tugging at Regina’s skin. Emma’s magic, untrained and so very mild, but still enough to reach her.
“Emma,” she says, jerking her hand up just enough to touch the other woman. “There’s nothing you can do. Please, just…” If she’s going to die like this, fade away in a mysterious realm where no one will know she’s gone, she wants it to be with Emma here, their resentments put aside for the final breaths of the Evil Queen.
“Wait,” Emma says, spinning around. “Someone’s here.” She raises her gun, spinning around toward the woods, and then lowers it.
It’s the boy again, a coconut shell in his hands and his eyes determined even when he sees the weapon aimed at him. He points to Regina and then to the coconut shell, and Regina asks, “Will that help?”
He bobs his head up and down and Emma lowers her gun but doesn’t put it away, watching the boy with distrust and some of the same curiosity that he seems to have toward both of them. Their eyes meet, both of them challenging, both of them uncertain, and Emma abruptly turns and drops next to Regina again.
The boy comes over, and Regina sees that his coconut is holding water. “Thank you,” she murmurs. Emma helps prop her up and the boy tilts the coconut shell into her mouth, cool water sliding down her throat.
She swallows again and blinks, feeling the pain begin to fade and her muscles begin to cool. Healing water. The boy grins at her knowingly and she sits up, touching smooth temples and clenching her fist with no interference.
“Thank you,” she says again, and he bobs his head and scampers back.
She looks at him properly for the first time, caught up in his expression as he watches her. He still hasn’t spoken, but she sees the tilt of a victorious smirk on his face at how he’d managed to save her. It’s pride, shared between them already, and he chews on his lip as his eyes glow at her. He might be light-skinned if not for how dirty his face is, what might have once been jeans and a t-shirt are now ripped and ragged, and his feet are bare, but there’s something that looks like red ooze from his left one. “Come here,” she says.
“Regina,” Emma mutters. “We don’t even know where we are. He could be some kind of…evil wizard.”
“He’s a boy,” Regina says (yearning. always yearning), and Emma’s jaw tightens as she looks at him. She must see what Regina sees- a boy who could have been Henry, who’s lost and doesn’t speak but seeks to help them anyway- but Emma rejects it, takes a step back and looks stubbornly annoyed about the whole matter.
The boy stares at both of them, hesitant again, and then takes a step forward at Emma’s curt nod. “I’m Regina,” Regina says. “This is Emma.”
He smiles and nods.
“Can you speak at all?”
He shrugs and looks down in sullen embarrassment, a fragile child out in the woods, and Emma is the one to speak. Emma, who resents him already, but can never pass up a chance to help someone vulnerable. “Come on,” she says with confidence that is absolutely fabricated. “We’ll get you out of here.”
They have him take them to a stream and strip down to his underwear and Regina helps him scrub off his body while Emma tries glumly to clean the clothes. “I only started using different settings for darks and light this year,” she complains. “Why did I get laundry duty?”
Regina ignores her and focuses on rubbing the boy’s skin until it’s pink and new, gingerly avoiding the redness on his left leg. “Have you ever had anyone…do you have a mother?” she asks finally.
He shakes his head, eyes fixed on her hand. “A father?” He shrugs at that like he doesn’t know what the answer is.
Emma takes over, old training kicking in. “Have you been in these woods for a long time?” He shakes his head uncertainly. “And before that. Did you have people looking after you?” The same look as the one when Regina had asked about his father. Emma’s eyes narrow, seeing something new in his shifty eyes, an emotion that Regina recognizes at once. Of course. No one knows more about children fearing the people who love you than Regina and Emma. “Do you want to go back to them?” He shakes his head vigorously and her hands tighten on his clothing, squeezing until there’s dirt and soap and water running over her fingers.
They leave him alone for a moment to work on his private areas, Regina sitting on a fallen branch while Emma leans against the rock next to her. There’s tension between them again, returned with the boy’s absence, and Emma ventures finally, “What are we doing with this kid?”
She still refers to them as a unit, and Regina breathes out her resentment and says instead, “He’s running away from someone. We keep him safe.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know.” She’s already making plans she can’t, thinking about taking him back to their realm once they find a way home. She has a guest room beside the nursery. She could…
She would’ve thought she’d thrown the habit of impromptu adoption attempts after Owen, she thinks wryly. But this boy has already wormed his way into her heart, in his shining eyes and tentative movements and the way he’d held her hand as they’d gone down to the stream. She can’t.
She might. “What would make him lose his voice like this?” she wonders.
Emma taps her fingers against the rock, keeping them carefully behind her. “Trauma, maybe. Especially if it’s been long term. He might speak again in time- if he ever did- or with the right trigger. But Regina, we can’t…” She stops. The boy stares up at her from where he’s climbing over the rock to them, and Emma backs away as Regina helps him down.
Only his ankle is left now. Regina washes the area around it gently, frowning at the cut on it. It isn’t infected (She’d read every book about first aid in the Storybrooke bookstore when she’d first planned to adopt, and she’s an expert even now) but it’s well on its way, and they tear off a piece of Emma’s shirt to wrap around it. Emma is hovering again, keeping her distance but her eyes still on the boy, and he shuts his eyes tight and tucks his face into Regina’s shoulder as she dabs at the cut.
“Hey,” Emma says softly, suddenly. “Left ankle.”
Regina pauses, looks at the gash that slashes across where his soulmate’s name would be. “Oh.”
The boy frowns at them, confused as though he’d never even known the significance of the left ankle, and Emma kneels down in front of them, meeting his eyes for the first time since he’d come to them in the woods. “You’re better off that way,” she says, and there’s a hint of a smile on her face for the first time since they'd gotten here. It’s still there when she looks at Regina, and Regina wonders if maybe some- not all, she doesn’t hope for all- has been forgiven.
They stare at each other and Emma says, “You know, if you hadn’t fireballed all those beans, we’d have a rescue party by now.”
So they’re doing this instead. “You know, if your mother hadn’t been planning to lock me up for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have fireballed those beans,” Regina responds evenly. “And if you hadn’t accused me of murder, I might’ve been on your side all along.”
“Funny. I thought you were already a murderer,” Emma retorts, and there’s the tense dislike at last. Regina hadn’t missed it but it swells within her now, makes her want to–
The boy pulls away from her, so fearful that her heart wrenches at the look on his face, and he vanishes into the woods before they can give chase.
Regina doesn’t talk to Emma for a long time as they walk in the direction the boy had gone. Emma is stubbornly silent as well, the two of them stewing in decades of baggage that they’ve been avoiding since the curse had broken. Murderer, Emma thinks of her. Regina grits her teeth. A little boy had run from her today because Emma had called her a murderer and maybe it’s true, but it isn’t who she is anymore.
Unless you count the mother whom she’d killed because Snow White had woven pretty words around the murder, and she’s sure that Emma doesn’t.
But she’s been trying. She’s gone astray but she’s been on her best behavior even when she’s been punished for it, and it stings that Emma would dismiss it so easily, use it against her when there’s a child in her arms.
Emma doesn’t say that she’s sorry, but she does say, “You should sleep. You’ve been through a lot that healing water can’t fix, Regina,” and it’s kind of like an apology. So Regina sleeps.
And when she wakes up, Emma is sitting at a campfire with the boy, speaking in a low voice. “So she cast this curse,” she’s saying, and Regina realizes that she’s talking about her. “Mary Margaret says it’s because she had nothing else. I think…Regina just wanted to be happy.”
The boy is listening, still a safe distance from Emma, and his eyes flicker to Regina. She says, “I can speak for myself,” but it’s grudgingly accepting. Emma has brought him back to them and he’s back to eyeing her with curiosity.
Emma says, “Kid? Do you have any reason to believe that Regina would hurt you?” Regina aches. He shakes his head vigorously, peeking over at her again. She breathes.
“Emma shouldn’t have said that,” Regina says.
“No. I shouldn’t have.” Emma watches the boy instead of Regina, and he nods slowly and clambers back over to Regina, showing her where their makeshift bandage is already torn. She sighs at him and sits up, and he grins, sheepish and not quite as apologetic as he should be. But his hand is already resting on her arm, unafraid, and she finds she doesn’t mind the inconvenience.
Emma tears off another strip of fabric, still avoiding Regina’s eyes. Regina takes it from her, the two of them as silent as the boy, and they seal up the campsite and keep moving.
They stop when the boy begins to stumble, his injury and exhaustion slowing him down, and when they sit down, he lays his head against her shoulder and closes his eyes. Emma slips her coat off and drapes it over them both. “I’m going to go look for some food,” she murmurs.
“I won’t stop you.” Maybe there’s still some aggression in her voice, unrestrained even by the boy in her arms. Emma winces.
She takes a step forward, palms out. “Regina…what am I supposed to think? I love you. There’s a whole town of people who can testify to that. And you also spent decades trying to hurt my mother and separated me from her–“
“I didn’t do that,” Regina feels obligated to point out. “I never meant to harm you…well, maybe once Rumple told me that you were the savior. But you were already gone.” She thinks she might’ve seen the baby then and kept her instead, and that raises all kind of worrying questions about their relationship now that she refuses to think about.
“Okay.” Emma presses her lips together and then releases them tiredly. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to…I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about all of this. I don’t think I should get over it but…” She turns away. “What does it make me if I just don’t want to care?”
“You don’t have to bear your parents’ burden for them, Emma,” Regina says gently, and the simmering part of her that still hates clashes with the part of her that had seen Snow’s face when she’d awakened from torture and stays stuck to it, like magnets with opposing polarities drawing strength from each other at the same time.
“Don’t I?” Emma demands. “I have to–“ She stops at the sound of a low chuckle, twisting and reaching for her gun.
“Well, well.” A teenage boy walks into the clearing, an unpleasant smile on his face. Regina clenches the fist of her free arm and then releases it with a ball of flames in the center. “Mothers in Neverland.”
“Neverland?” Emma repeats, spinning around to face the teen. Their boy starts in his sleep, his eyes shooting open as he looks around wildly. He sees the other boy and rises, fists up at him. “What’s next, Peter…” Her voice trails off. The older boy looks very amused. “Fuck.” She slumps against a tree and down to the ground.
Their boy runs at- Peter Pan, Regina supposes- with his fists still raised and Pan laughs. “Come now, boy, you don’t really think you can fight me? Isn’t that why you ran?” He vanishes and reappears behind the boy, yanking him to him by the scruff of his neck. “Are you expecting these two mothers to help you?” His eyes regard them with sneering knowledge, and he scoffs. “‘Mother’ may be a bit much. These two have never been mothers.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Regina says, eyes on the boy. He meets her gaze desperately, begging for her aid, and she stands, fireball still in hand.
Pan laughs again. “I know who you are. Both of you. You abandoned your son.” He turns from her to Emma, who stares up at him with deadly eyes. “You didn’t want him for your own selfish reasons. You know nothing about being mothers but silly little dreams that never made it to reality.” He drags the boy a little closer. “They aren’t going to save you, boy.”
“Really.” Regina draws her hand back, but she wavers, uncertain that she can get to Pan without hurting the boy. He shakes his head wildly, defiant to the end as he urges her on, but still she hesitates.
The bullet blows through Pan’s other side and he releases the boy just as Regina slams a fireball into him. He jolts back, mouth gaping open, and vanishes again.
The boy is shaking, fists still clenched and eyes terrified, and Regina takes a slow step toward him. Then another. Then another. He crumples into her arms, holds onto her and cries into her chest, and Emma puts her gun away and kneels beside them.
“You’ve been running from Pan.” The boy nods. “What does he want from you?” The boy presses a hand to his heart and Regina’s own heart sinks.
It’s a certain kind of twisted joke. She’s spent her life taking hearts and now she’s protecting a boy from losing his own heart. But he doesn’t deserve it. He’s only a child, she thinks, watching as he tries and fails to catch berries in his mouth. Emma is succeeding only half the time, and the boy laughs silently when one hits her in the eye.
“Augh! I’m blind!” She slaps a hand to her eye and pretends to stagger around the campfire, nearly crashing into it before Regina yanks her back down. The boy laughs again, eyes bright, and Emma leans into Regina’s arm. “I see nothing funny about any of that,” she says primly, and he throws another berry at her. She catches it in her mouth and smirks expectantly at Regina.
Regina rolls her eyes at both of them and the boy comes over shyly, lifts her hand in his and puts a berry in it. She glares at both of them but they’re watching her with matching grins and she’s helpless against both. At least it’s a distraction from Pan.
She tosses the berry in the air and coaxes it toward her mouth with magic, letting it arc high in the air and land on her tongue. The boy looks impressed. Emma looks suspicious. “Nice throw,” she says in a tone that indicates that she doesn’t think it was nice at all.
The boy reaches past Emma to grab more berries and she flinches away from his touch.
It’s barely noticeable, like a brief twitch and nothing more unless you’re watching for it, but Regina sees it and the boy sees it and the smile Emma had put on his face fades. He takes the berries and scrambles back to Regina, shoving them into his mouth and refusing to meet Emma’s gaze.
Emma stares into the fire for a moment and then bolts from their clearing, muttering some halfhearted excuse under her breath. The boy looks to Regina, helpless and distraught, and she strokes his arm soothingly. “It isn’t…I think Emma’s a bit afraid of you.”
He points at himself in confusion, Me? Then a questioning look, a finger pointed at her. What about you?
She smiles at him, a catch in her voice when she says, “I think you’re terrifying.” She leans over to kiss his forehead in reassurance, and he reaches out and grasps her hands in his. There’s a message here, a permanence already, and Regina can’t find the words to explain to him how he’s already broken them both. She can’t explain Henry and she can’t explain how she already loves this fierce little boy with frightening depth and need, holds onto his little hands and feels like she’s drowning.
He sleeps on the ground beside her, one hand still in hers, and she wonders for a moment what had happened in his childhood to make him as desperate to hold onto someone as she and Emma have been. He’d been fearful of Pan, been vehement about his desire to run from him, and had been unsure about his family. She can write that tragedy in an instant, piece together who she’d been and who Emma had been and take the parts of each that had mattered too much.
She responds to loveless years by seeking out love. Emma responds by fleeing blindly from it, searching out the most painful ways to avoid it. And this boy reacts as she does and Emma runs from them both.
Still, it doesn’t take long for Emma to resurface. Regina expects her to be shamefaced and avoidant, regretting hurting the boy and running off, but instead her eyes are dark and angry and defiant as she sits back down at the fire, orange flames dancing in her eyes. “What the hell are we doing with him, Regina?” she demands without preamble. “We can’t just pick up a boy in the woods and…what? Bring him home? We don’t even know how to get home. We don’t know if he’ll ever talk. What kind of fucked up parents would we be for him?”
She doesn’t even think to exclude herself from the mix, we and parents and Emma in crisis. “Pan was right. We’re not mothers. We’ve never been mothers.” She laughs bitterly and Regina strokes the boy’s hand with her thumb, refusing to let Emma provoke her. “I lived through the foster system and I still- I wanted to believe that he’d be better off without me. And instead he lived…what? A week? before vanishing forever.”
“You didn’t know that,” Regina murmurs. She lifts her free hand, about to reach for Emma, and then thinks better of it. “You were a teenager with no options and you gave your baby to someone who’d want him. To me. Do you have any idea what he meant to me?”
Emma laughs, her voice wet. “I’ve been in the nursery. I’ve got an idea.” She comes without beckoning, sinks down beside Regina and wraps her arms around her knees. “I would have wanted you to be his mom, you know that, right? I know you were…some kind of sadistic queen, I don’t know. My parents have been telling me stories since we broke the curse.” She looks uncertain again, what does it make me if I just don’t want to care? and then defiance settles in. “You would have been a great mom anyway. You would have been perfect.”
She doesn’t realize she’s crying until a tear streaks down her face and Emma is brushing it away, is pressing a chaste kiss to the corner of her mouth and whispering I love you into her cheek. “I love you,” she breathes. “I haven’t said that to anyone in so long and I’ve said it to you three times already.”
“I love you.” Regina kisses her, then shifts away to regard her. “And…a seventeen-year-old girl in prison is not the same as fully capable woman. You’re not the same person you were ten years ago, and if we did find a way to bring him with us–“
But Emma is already shaking her head. “Regina, you don’t understand what I…you named him Henry,” she says, and now she’s crying, too, head bent and fingers clutching at the edge of her boot. “I spent my whole life waiting for my fucking soulmate to cross my path so I could have a family and I gave him away before he even had a name,” she chokes out, and slides her left foot over her leg and yanks off the boot.
Regina has to crane her neck to see what she knows suddenly will be there, the name HENRY in tiny block letters. “No,” she whispers, and it’s all clear, it all makes sense at once, years of craving all the wrong people and blaming an act of rebellion for Henry’s loss. Not rebellion.
They say that your soulmate can be someone unexpected, that you can share your soulmate with another, that it doesn’t always spell out romance. They say so many things that Regina had stopped listening to them decades ago, but as she slides off her shoe and bares her own ankle, shows Emma the HENRY etched into her own ankle, she remembers them all in a rush of final understanding.
Emma stares at it, her finger brushing against the letters as the tears dry up. “What does it mean?”
It had been rebellion, maybe, a battle against destiny they’d waged victorious, made of choices and defiance. Emma’s, to send him to her. Hers, to name her own soulmate. “I don’t know. Maybe we were always meant to be a family. Maybe we made it for ourselves.”
Emma whispers, “But he’s gone now.”
An unexpected wind sweeps in through the humidity, and Regina shivers and swallows a dry sob before it can erupt again. It’s a nightmare, it's unfair, but she’s long ago learned that fairness is a luxury and can’t be found or sought after. And there’s a new little boy now to whom fairness is just as alien an experience, a new little boy to look after and care for here. “He’s gone now,” she agrees somberly, and grasps Emma’s hand.
Regina falls asleep with both her hands locked into someone else’s and Emma’s other hand wavering near the boy’s mussed-up hair (she never touches it though, just watches him and hurts), but by morning Emma’s let go and is curled against her stomach and the boy is…
Gone. Regina sits bolt upright. “Emma. Emma, wake up.”
“What’s going– the kid. Where’d the kid go?” Emma is stumbling to her feet, casting about wildly for a sign of him, and Regina freezes. She’s babbling aloud, she realizes a moment too soon, talking about Pan and Neverland and Henry all in one breath, and she doesn’t even notice that she’s called the boy Henry until Emma is seizing her by the arm, yanking her up- We have to go, he went this way, Regina, get a grip!- and they’re following broken branches to a stream, the boy’s coconut shell lying on the banks of it.
“He went to get water and Pan took him,” Emma announces unnecessarily. “We have to find Pan.”
Regina is still shaking, her mind like quicksand and images still flying through her head, and Emma fills up the coconut and splashes it into her face. Regina jumps, but her mind clears. “We follow the river,” she says. “Pan’s compound will be near water.”
They’re both stumbling too much, exhaustion and panic slowing them down, and they don’t talk. They don’t look at each other but their hands are joined tightly, Regina’s right in Emma’s left, and Regina finds strength in that.
It isn’t much. It isn’t enough to survive losing another almost-son (She’d once so desperately wanted a child that she’d tried to kidnap one herself, and he’d grown up to hate her. Hasn’t she suffered enough for it?), but it’s keeping her anchored to the ground, keeping her moving so she won’t float away into new emptiness. “If he’s gone–“ she starts.
“He’s not gone.” Emma does better in crises once they start moving, once she’s given a goal and can move toward it. Regina does better with a target to destroy. “Pan needs his heart. And you yank them out of people’s bodies, right?”
Her eyes narrow. “Oh, yes.” She settles into what Emma had given her, a lifeline. A glimmer of the murderous intent that had kept her going for so long. And Emma casts her a sidelong glance that indicates that, yes, she’d done it on purpose.
She’s overwhelmed with all of it, grief and rage and gratitude and love, and she presses onward anyway. I’m going to save you. I’m going to murder Pan and anyone working with him and I’m going to save you. We’re going to save you. She stalks forward, marches onward with Emma until they hear voices at last.
Pan’s compound is set up like someone who’s never had a true threat to his land. There are boys arrayed around the edges, but they’re distracted with swords and campfires and don’t look up when Emma loudly steps on a branch right behind them. There are no guards, no walls or protection, and there’s no sign of Pan or the boy.
Still, they get in close enough to hear one of the taller boys talking to the others, his eyes wary but missing them in the underbrush. “He’ll be back in no time,” he says. “He’s taken the spare to Skull Rock with Michael and John.”
Spare. Regina seethes in silence, Emma’s eyes narrowed dangerously beside her, and Regina finds her hand again. There’s an answering squeeze, and then another, more urgent one. Emma mouths, behind us. Regina turns.
There are three rowboats in a line at the curve of the stream where it empties into the ocean. And, not far away, an island with a prominent rock structure shaped exactly like a skull.
Bingo. They sit huddled together in one of the boats, each of them manning one side, and Regina takes comfort in Emma’s shoulder pressed against hers. “If it’s heart magic,” she says, the thought striking her. “It’ll have to be willing. An unwilling heart doesn’t…retain as well.” She feels sick thinking about this with the boy, remembering so many hearts, snatched from bodies out of impatience and never returned.
She’s spent the year in a crisis of faith, torn between goodness and the stark world she’d reveled in until then, but in the darkness of Neverland comes new understanding, new remorse. Faced with a new threat, all she can see is what she’d wrought when she’d been worse than Pan, and she puts it aside for the moment to vow with chilling determination, “We will destroy him.”
“We might not have to,” Emma says, glancing at Skull Rock. The light in the stone flickers then stabilizes, like a fluorescent light in a bad storm. “It looks like the power’s going out.” Emma echoes her thoughts and takes them a step further. “What do you think he needs to recharge it?”
“Our boy’s heart.” Regina rows faster and Emma matches her pace. “And without the magic of Neverland, Pan will no longer be forever young.”
They run through an outer corridor, move a wall aside and slip through the edge of a cavern when there they are, Pan and the boy standing together in front of an enormous hourglass resting atop a pile of skulls. The boy’s feet are secured with a chain to a nearby lamp, and Emma takes a step forward.
“Wait,” Regina whispers, eyes tracking Pan’s movements. “There are supposed to be two others, aren’t there?”
“Michael and John,” Emma repeats the names they’d overheard. “Let’s give it a minute.”
Pan is talking to the boy, who remains stubbornly still, eyes fixed on the ground. “Come on,” Pan cajoles. “You have a chance here to do something special. To save this whole world.”
The boy hesitates for a moment, then shakes his head as though rejecting Pan’s promise. Pan’s eyes darken. “What are you waiting for? Those two women? They aren’t going to help you. They’ll drag you back to their world and then send you off to someone else when you get to be too much work. It’s what they do.” Regina shakes with fury and barely notices to seize Emma before she charges forward.
The boy is listening now, his gaze fixed upon the same spot on the ground. Pan races onward. “Do something good today,” he coaxes the boy. “Change the world. You are worth so much more than a toy to be cast aside…or starve slowly in this room,” he says, the threat dressed up as an afterthought.
The boy hangs his head in final defeat and reaches into his chest. Regina cries out in a whimper, too low for him to hear her but loud enough that there’s a movement behind them and Emma is suddenly moving between her and two men she recognizes immediately.
She’s memorized all their features, watched grainy security footage of them thousands of times and stared at their faces for days, consumed with fury and despair. She knows them even ten years later as the two men who’d stolen Henry, and here they are now.
A father? The boy hadn’t known. The men who’d kept him alive over the years, priming him for sacrifice with Pan, they hadn’t been fathers. He has no mother. And he’s just old enough to have grown up in another world and then have stopped aging here for a few months. “Henry,” she says in dreamlike realization.
Henry. It’s really him, of course it’s him, she’s known him and loved him from the start. He’s theirs, uncontrovertibly so even now, too similar to them and so different and the last piece to make Regina and Emma both whole again.
She’d dreamed of a soulmate as a child but instead she has them, the boy with no soulmate and the woman who shares one with her, and she finally understands. She knows what it means to see someone and love them at once, what it is that has poets write epics and artists create masterpieces, what this love is that consumes all three of them.
After all these years, she’s found him. Her heart swells and her head hurts at this, this finally, this encompassing relief even at their mortal peril. Henry is here. Her Henry. Their Henry. And she loves him with all her heart.
Emma doesn’t hear her, distracted in a scuffle with one of the men, but someone else does. The boy jolts, hand dropping from his chest, and raises his face to stare at her. “How do you know my name?” he asks, and looks startled at the sound of his own voice.
Pan lunges at Regina in a rage and Regina spins, pops out of sight and back in behind him. She launches a fireball at him and he swats it aside, brandishing a knife and running at her.
He trips over a small leg, stumbles for a second and Henry- Henry!- raises his little fists and slams them against Pan’s back, punches his arm until he releases the knife, and Regina yanks Pan forward just as the hourglass drops its last grain of sand and the room’s lamps flicker again and go dark.
The light in Pan’s eyes fades and he begins to age rapidly, shifting from a boy to a man to an aged, wizened creature, faster and faster until he’s something like a living corpse, head thrown back weakly in Regina’s grasp. She drops him in disgust as the skin stretched across his body begins to peel back, and he withers away into dust right in front of them.
The island shakes and Emma takes advantage of it to gain the upper hand in her own battle, punching one of the men and kicking the other until they’re on the ground and she can run to Regina and Henry.
“Kid! Regina! Kid!” She’s rushing toward him and he staggers forward, bright-eyed even as the ground shakes beneath them and his leg is chained to a lamp. “Oh, god,” Emma says, fiddling at the restraint until it pops open. She presses her hands to his cheeks and Regina watches Emma fall, just like that, surrender to the love she’d resisted for days and wrap her arms around him at last. Her eyes are shut and she’s holding on with all her might and Henry laughs, “Emma! You’re going to suffocate me.”
Emma’s eyes pop open in surprise. “Kid,” she says, brow furrowing. “Did you notice that you’re talking?”
“Not kid,” he corrects her. “Henry.”
“Henry.” Emma looks over at Regina, her head moving from side to side in disbelief. Regina nods with shining eyes, stepping over Pan’s remains to fling her arms around Henry, too. Emma has silent tears glittering in her eyes as she frees one arm to wrap Regina in her embrace and announces, “Pan is a fucking liar, Henry. We’re…we’re not going anywhere.”
“Anywhere?” he repeats, but he’s grinning like he knows, he hasn’t doubted them at all. “Because I have this bean…” He fumbles in his pocket and extracts a clear magic bean. “One of the boys slipped it to me. They’ve been keeping them in secret in case this whole using-my-heart thing failed and we had to run.” He beams at them, looking very pleased with himself, and Regina takes a step back to gaze at him in wonderment.
“What is it?” he asks, and Emma lays a hand on his shoulder, can hardly keep herself from staring at him as Regina sways against her arm.
He’s Henry. He’s their soulmate, the boy Emma had given to her and she’d named herself. He’s an integral part of a family that hasn’t been until now, just two bruised and battered hearts within a world that has never been theirs. He’s the child she’s been mourning for a decade and he’s finally here and ready to come home.
She can scarcely believe it and she suspects Henry will have even more trouble believing any of this once they’re back in their realm. What could have been. What is. How we found each other. The life he could have had with her- and she craves to hear everything about how he’d suffered until now, how he’d been left voiceless in Neverland until he’d heard her call his name. She wants to know everything about him but she thinks she already understands who he is when she's seen defiance and resilience and love and all that makes up the soul of all three of them.
They have forever, all three of them, and Regina doesn’t plan to let it slip away ever again.
Henry tosses the bean. They hold hands, the boy who had had no name and the girl who had had no family and the girl who had believed in fairytales until life had intervened, and they leap together into their ride back home.