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nostradamus0 · 1 year

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your voice is the splinter inside me

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Nothing about Storybrooke, Maine makes sense, and no one seems to notice. It doesn’t take long for Henry to come to this conclusion, and it doesn’t take much longer for him to realize that everyone he meets is lying to him.

Not maliciously, he thinks, but lying all the same. He feels like the only person left out of something important, and it’s an ugly feeling that makes him want to run back to New York, where his ma wasn’t hiding anything and nobody looked at him like they were afraid of saying something they weren’t supposed to.

Sure, New York was loud and lonely and life there felt like a picture torn in half, but it had been better than staying in Maine. And now they’re back in Maine and everywhere he goes he wants to leave. Every corner he turns, it’s like he’s expecting she’ll be there.

Which is stupid, because they lived in Portland, not Storybrooke, but maybe the entire state is just haunted. Or maybe he’s just going insane, because he can barely remember her but it’s like the moment they drove into town, he could see a flicker of her in the passenger seat of the bug she hated so much. A glimpse of a smile so clear and warm it was like she was there with them in the car. And now he thinks he’s been waiting like it’s possible he’ll hear her voice call him down for dinner or feel her kiss on his forehead in the dark after turning off the bedside lamp and whispering:

Goodnight, my little prince.

He sits on a lumpy couch in the cramped, low-ceilinged apartment of his ma’s ‘old friends,’ and he turns when someone drops down beside him like he’s expecting to see her there, book in hand and reading glasses slipping down her nose, but it’s just Ma, and she’s alone.

She’s not leaning over the back of the couch to nudge Mom’s glasses back into place, or grin when Mom swats her hand away. She just sighs, and they’re alone.

(And in the memory, his mom has no face. His therapist says this is normal. Trauma affects the memory in complex ways, Henry.

Whatever.

What kind of person forgets what their mom looked like?)

“I thought you were done taking cases.”

“This is different,” Ma says, looking at him through the corner of her eye as she scrunches a t-shirt into a ball and shoves it in her suitcase. He’s cross-legged at the edge of her bed, his own suitcase empty on the floor of his room. If he refuses to pack, maybe she won’t make him go. He doesn’t want to meet her old friends. It’s bad enough that there’s one perched on the couch in the living room like he has a right to be in their apartment, dripping from his flask onto the cushions and calling Henry a ‘lad.’

“Doesn’t sound different,” he mutters. Louder, he adds: “I don’t want to go to Maine—I don’t like Maine. I don’t like your friends, either.”

“You don’t have to like it, but you’re still going. They need my help, and you’ve never even met them—you might like them.”

Henry tips backward until he hits the mattress, sinking into the memory foam that always hurts his spine if he lies on it too long. He stares at the cracks in the white paint on the ceiling and furrows his brow, tapping his fingers like a heartbeat on his stomach.

“They abandoned you. I won’t like them.”

Ma stops tossing things into the suitcase and sighs. For a long moment she just looks at him, head tilted and eyes conflicted. He tries to read her, but her expression that’s usually an open book to him is closed and buried in the back of the shelf. She reaches out and runs the tips of her fingers through his bangs.

“You need a haircut,” she says, her voice quiet and hollow; she’s miles away. She brushes his dark hair away from his eyes, lets it part down the middle and flop off to the sides, then turns away, her shoulders rising and falling like she’s taking a deep, shaky breath.

The air changes and she resumes packing. The conversation ends, and he trudges to his room to fill his suitcase. In protest, he packs almost nothing but comics and his favorite notebook and an extra memory card for his camera.

Anyway, something is not right about Storybrooke, and everyone there is lying to him. Especially Ma. He’s not sure she’s told him the truth about anything since they left New York. In fact, he thinks the only person who might not be lying to him is the mayor. Regina Mills.

Regina Mills, who’s connected to Ma in a way she won’t explain, but that Henry can nearly see when he catches her staring. It almost reminds him of how she looked at Mom, and he doesn’t know how to feel about that. He would be . . . okay, if she wanted to fall in love again, but three days ago they were trudging through monotony in New York, still soaked in grief.

Then they drove through the overhanging trees, over the town line into Storybrooke and she pulled off the road, and he watched her twist off her ring from the backseat, where he was pretending to still be asleep. She held it in the hollow of her palm, staring at it like she was losing something. The pirate man—and Henry’s fine with people expressing themselves how they wish, but the hook, he thought, was taking it a little far—had looked at her like he understood that kind of grief, and said, his voice low: “You could leave it on. I reckon she’d be alright with it.”

Mom scoffed almost inaudibly, and he continued: “She gave you that life, Swan.”

“She meant to give me happiness. Not memories of a life with her.”

“Maybe that’s the same thing.”

They were quiet for a long time. Then, Ma seemed to snap herself out of a trance and pushed the ring into her pocket. (He assumes it’s still there, because he hasn’t seen her wear it since.)

She took the car out of park and pulled back onto the road, and as the first buildings of town faded into view, Killian said, in a voice that sounded unnaturally kind, “If you don’t go after your happiness, Emma, you will never get it.”

Ma introduces him to Regina Mills when they’ve already been in Storybrooke for two days. It’s the end of a drizzling, misty morning, and she’s cautious and careful about it like it’s very important that the two of them get along.

He gives her an awkward wave as he says hi, standing in his socks in David and Mary Margaret’s living room, and she waves back, but it’s weak.

“Hello, Henry,” she says, and her voice is faint. She stares at him and he stares back, and her hands shake, white-knuckled and clasped over her stomach. (He hears the echo of shattering ceramic on the diner floor and eyes too haunted for looking at a stranger.

He remembers the way Ma had jumped up and dragged her out the back door into the hall, and how she’d returned a few minutes later, alone.)

“So,” he starts, offering her a smile. Henry’s not sure why she’s so nervous, because something—perhaps everything—about her suggests that she could take the world apart and put it back together in an afternoon. “You’re the mayor—that’s pretty cool.”

Her shoulders relax somewhat, and an inexplicable jolt of pride shoots through his chest at her small smile. “It’s quite a lot of paperwork, honestly.”

Ma seems offended at this, turning sharply to stare, incredulous, at the mayor—

(“Mayor Mills,” he tries to address her later that afternoon, but the words struggle on the way out like muscle memory wants to call her something else, but he can’t imagine what.

“You can call me Regina, Henry,” she tells him, but that feels wrong, too.)

—who purses her lips as though she’s trying not to find Ma’s extreme reaction amusing. Ma turns to him, eyes indignant and determined, and says, matter-of-fact: “Don’t listen to that, Henry. She’s practically the Queen of Storybrooke, but with democracy.”

The corners of Regina’s mouth twitch and she stabs her elbow into Mom’s ribs. The result is a loud, undignified squeak from Ma and a distinct feeling within Henry that he’s missed something important.

“We were about to get lunch at Granny’s,” he blurts out, lying. Ma squints her eyes at him and he silently begs her not to blow his cover.

Of course, she blows his cover. “We were? I don’t remember—”

“You should join us.”

“—Oh, right, of course we were,” she says, scoffing as she attempts to backtrack. Smooth, Ma, he thinks, and it’s clear by the way Regina looks between them, her eyebrows raised and her eyes sparkling with amusement, that she knows they’re lying. He wonders if she’ll call them on it, but she doesn’t.

“I’d love to.”

It doesn’t take long for Henry to realize that Regina is someone who must have been very close with his ma, when she lived here. About five minutes, actually. He observes them on the walk to Granny’s.

They interact like half the things they’re saying are unsaid. They bicker and tease and toss words between them but it’s like things are missing and it doesn’t make sense, like he’s only hearing half a conversation. Like the other half is silent, taking place in the looks they share, which vary from amusement to mock annoyance to something he can’t pinpoint, almost akin to affection. If he didn’t know better, he’d suggest telepathy.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say they don’t seem like people who haven’t seen each other in years. He’d say it hasn’t been long at all.

Except it has, because Ma’s barely left his side since they moved to New York, and before New York there was Portland, which Ma never strayed far from without him and Mom. And no matter how familiar Regina may seem, Henry is sure they’ve never met and he’s sure he’s never been to Storybrooke before. ( . . . Except when Ma is rambling about nothing and Regina turns her head to meet his eyes, sparkling and fond and there’s a look in them that he recognizes, and for a minute, he’s completely certain that he’s known her for a long, long time.

Of course, that’s impossible.)

The bell over the door rings in his ears; Ma is holding the door open for Regina, and he darts through after her before it swings shut. He tries to ignore how everyone looks over at them, but the nagging feeling of being watched never quite fades, even after they turn back to their meals.

“You two grab a table—I’ll order,” Ma says, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the counter, where the waitress is leaning against it with a notepad already in hand.

“Hey, guys!” She says, grinning. “What can I getcha?”

“Hey, Ruby. We’ll get two grilled cheeses and—” Ma pauses, glancing back at Regina. “You want your usual?”

Your usual.

“Yes, thank you,” Regina says, and Henry absently trails after her as she starts toward a booth by the window. Behind him, he hears Ma say: “And a kale salad, please.”

Your usual.

If it’s been years, Henry thinks, his heart a little too fast, why would Ma assume her usual order at one specific diner would be the same?

He sinks into the booth, sliding over to the window, and watches Regina sit down across from him. For a moment, there is silence contained within their table. Around them, everyone is talking and eating, clinking silverware against plates and cups against tabletops. Regina just looks at him. His ma is still at the counter. (How long does it take to order lunch?)

“So, Henry,” Regina starts, clearing her throat almost like she’s nervous. “New York. What’s it like there?”

Sad, he could say. New York is sad and loud and lonely, and we’re only there because we’re running away. Instead, he pulls a napkin out of the dispenser and starts to pick it apart, tearing pieces off the corner into a pile like paper snow on the tabletop. “It’s alright, I guess.”

She nods, shifting in her seat and tapping her fingers silently against the table, one at a time from pinkie to thumb, and back again. He watches the movement, steady and rhythmic, until he feels words building in the back of his mouth, stringing together and growing until there’s no room left to hold them in: “Kind of lonely. It feels fake, sometimes. Like something isn’t right. My therapist says that’s normal, though.”

The napkin is gone—nothing left but a fragile pile of shreds. If he even exhaled too close, it would blow apart. When he looks up, Regina’s hands have stopped moving and she’s looking at him like there’s something inside her that’s haunting her, but he doesn’t know what it could be. He almost asks if she’s alright, but a glass of water hits the table in front of him, unsettling his napkin pile. The water sloshes around the edge of the cup but doesn’t spill, and two more glasses are set down before Ma drops into the booth across from him, next to Regina.

“Lunch is on the way,” she says, smiling at him like everything is normal. If she’s noticed that something in the air turned pale, ghostly, while she was gone, then she doesn’t say. She just mentions the picture he took last month that’s on the cover of his school’s newspaper, and the mood lifts. Regina straightens in her seat, congratulates him, and pride unfurls in his chest.

For a moment, everything feels almost normal.

They’ve been in Storybrooke almost a week and he’s starting to regret packing so little out of spite: he’s done laundry twice already. He thinks they’re here because one of his ma’s old friends is in trouble. Or sick. Maybe. It’s unclear, and no matter who he asks or how he asks them, no one will give him a straight answer. Ma mentioned something about a doctor’s appointment, but she’d avoided looking him in the eye so she was probably making it up.

On day six she asks him to spend the afternoon with David and Mary Margaret and he says no. They had seemed alright when he met them on day two, but he can’t forget how they abandoned her. She went to prison and they weren’t there. She got out, but she was afraid and penniless and they weren’t there. Mom died, and they weren’t there. She suffered, and they left her in it, alone.

She stares at him across the diner table, tapping her fingers against her glass as he drags the pad of his thumb across the streaks of dry cleaning spray on the tabletop. They don’t even smudge, and she just sighs.

“I want you to get to know them, Henry,” she says. “They want to get to know you.”

“They could’ve twelve years ago.”

Ma runs a hand across her face, over her eyes, like she’s trying to wipe something away but there’s nothing there. “Please, Henry.”

Anger builds like a heavy stone in his chest. Ribs tight and hands pulsing like he wants to curl them into fists, Henry gathers his colored pencils from where they were scattered on the table and closes his notebook. He stands on shaky legs and says, voice quiet and hard:

“I said no.”

“Where are you going?”

Ma stops. For a moment she stands completely still, one arm in a jacket sleeve and the other out, frozen in the doorway. Henry knows that face—she’s trying to figure out what to say that will appease him without saying much of anything at all. He hates that face.

“I’m taking Mary Margaret to an appointment,” she says, but she’s lying. She slips her other arm into her jacket and grabs her keys off the table by the door. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“I’m going to the park; I wanna show Regina some of my pictures.” He holds up his camera by the strap, which was sitting next to him on the bed with a large, drugstore photo envelope with a tear at the bottom corner, held shut with masking tape.

Ma blinks. There’s a beat where he wonders if she’s going to tell him not to, but instead she just smiles—close-lipped but not unhappy. (She seems to like it when he spends time with Regina. That means something, he’s sure, but he doesn’t know what.)

“Great idea,” she says, and just looks at him, her hand curled around the doorframe and her head tilted, eyes more honest than her words have been since they got here. In a jolting movement, she pats the doorframe and straightens up: “Okay, I’ve gotta go. Wouldn’t want to make Mary Margaret late.”

There’s no appointment. He’s sure there isn’t. She keeps lying; this entire town is lying to him. Except Regina, he thinks. Regina isn’t lying.

Regina doesn’t lie to him, but sometimes it’s like she’s trying to evade having to. He’ll ask her something and she won’t answer or she’ll change the subject, sudden and abrupt and a bit like there’s a rock lodged in her throat.

They’re sitting on a bench in the park and she’s flipping through his pictures, holding them delicately by the edges and listening carefully to everything he tells her about them, and he thinks about how it’s been an hour and his ma probably isn’t back at the hotel room yet. She’s probably still out somewhere that isn’t the doctor’s office, doing something she doesn’t want him to know about.

He’s got no idea where she is, but Regina is right here with him in the park, looking at him like she’s proud of him for every picture he shows her, and he doesn’t really know why, but he blurts out: “Everyone keeps lying to me, like they all know something I don’t, and I don’t get why. Especially Ma.”

“I will not lie to you, Henry,” she says, her voice careful and quiet, almost shaking, and she’s looking at him so seriously that he wonders if there’s something about that statement that runs deeper for her. “I can’t always promise you the truth—not all secrets are mine to tell, but I will never lie to you.”

And he thinks she meant it, because he likes to think he’s inherited at least a bit of Ma’s superpower, and not once has he felt like Regina is lying to him. He taps his fingers on his thigh and bites at the inside of his cheek.

“Did you know my mom?” He asks. Briefly, the thought flickers through his mind that he doesn’t know what answer he’s hoping to hear. She turns away from him to look forward, out at the small pond by the edge of the park, the outer curve of which follows the treeline of the woods that climbs up into the mountains. A shaky hand rises to tuck a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear, the shine of her deep blue nail polish catching the light, and he’s launched headfirst into a memory—

He’s five years old, knees folded under him on the couch, bare-chested, fluffy pajama pants, hair damp from the bath and sticking out in every direction, dripping down the back of his neck. Mom’s hand is soft like flower petals as she holds his, her thumb rubbing circles on his palm as she paints his nails a sparkling shade of violet. The beads of her bracelet spin easily under his fingertips as he plays with it, watching her work. Her own nails are the same purple—already dry.

Morning sun glowing through the window, Phil Collins on the radio; it’s that song from Tarzan and she’s humming along, he’s rocking his head back and forth to the beat—he could recite that movie line by line in his sleep. Ma’s singing off-key from the kitchen and he can smell pancakes and bacon, and he looks up at Mom and her eyes are bright and warm warm warm, and she almost looks like—

Regina clears her throat, and he’s jolted back to the park bench in Storybrooke, early March and soft grass from a recent, cold rain. He’s not five years old, his nails are clear, his mom is dead.

“It’s been some time since I’ve seen her, but yes, we did know each other. It’s been . . . nice, catching up.”

“No,” he shakes his head, “not Ma.” He pauses to pick at a hangnail. “People here act like they know me, so we must’ve visited when I was really young because I don’t remember it. But we wouldn’t have come without Mom. I get why no one’s talking about her—nobody likes talking about dead people, it’s just. . . . Did you know her?”

There’s only silence. The biting breeze tears through his windbreaker and rustles the trees. A bird at the edge of the woods takes off from the grass with a loud flutter of its wings and the water is rippling, lapping against the muddy bank. Regina says nothing.

Henry turns to look at her and she’s frozen still, her hands clasped in her lap and her shoulders rigid, facing forward. She always looks at him when he’s talking, listening so attentively that he can’t help but feel incredibly valued. Now, she’s only staring out at the pond, her body so still it’s like she’s stopped breathing, stuck in a single frame of time like one of his photographs.

“Regina?” He says, hesitant, heart tightening in his chest, and she exhales heavily, her breath shuddering.

“That depends on your definition of knowing someone, I suppose,” she says, each word slow and careful, and the conversation ends there because she jolts into motion, standing suddenly and waving with a shaky hand, and he looks over to see Ma jogging toward them. She looks far too tired to have been taking Mary Margaret to a doctor’s appointment, but he just smiles a tight smile and asks how it went.

“Not bad,” she shrugs.

“Everything’s okay?” Regina asks. Ma nods, but her body is tense and Henry can tell she’s lying because of him. When he starts to gather up his pictures, she glances over at him, but quickly averts her eyes.

“Yeah, she’s fine. Nothing to worry about,” Ma says, and there she goes, lying again.

“We’re going to Regina’s house for dinner.”

Henry looks up from his notebook, the next panel of his comic half-drawn, and Ma is standing in the doorway, staring at him with something that’s almost anxiety in her eyes. He tries to keep his voice light to counter it as he says: “Okay. When’re we leaving?”

She makes a face. “Um. Now?”

He feels his neutral expression twitch, thrown off by her last-minute planning. But she’s worked that way forever and he should be more used to it than he is. Mom always planned things at least a few days in advance, and while sometimes it went overkill, he liked her way of planning. Their minds ticked with the same gears. You’re just like your mom, Henry, Ma used to say.

But he just nods and closes his book, and feels more nervous than he can fathom why at the prospect of going to Regina’s house.

He’s dizzy the moment he steps through the door.

Ma’s still far behind, getting out of the car, as he braces himself against the banister at the bottom of the stairs, eyes unfocusing and focusing again. He doesn’t mean to, but his gaze narrows in on the empty nails sticking out of the walls in a row down the hall, dark against the white paint, and he almost reaches out to touch them. But Regina starts talking, like she knew what he was wondering, and all his hands do is twitch at his sides.

“I have a son,” she says, and his heart climbs into his mouth, “but he is lost to me. Sometimes I have to take the pictures down.”

“Where is he?” Henry asks, but he’s not sure he really wants to know. Outside, the car door slams. Regina’s silent for so long that he doesn’t think she’s going to tell him, but then, as she reaches out to trace a circle on the wall around one of the nails with the tip of a finger, she says: “Far enough that I can’t be with him, but close enough that I can’t reconcile why.”

It’s not a real answer, but he can tell she’s not lying.

Her hand falls away, and she moves toward the still-open front door to greet Ma, whose footsteps are heavy on the porch, having answered his unasked question with nothing that actually answered anything. But even still: she’s the only person in Storybrooke who isn’t lying to him. (And she smoothes down the fabric of her slacks before she steps into the doorway like she’s nervous and getting rid of the nonexistent wrinkles in her clothes will make it better.)

“Hey, Regina,” Ma says, breathy like she’d jogged up to the house from the car, parked at the side of the road.

“Good afternoon,” Regina smiles, but she still looks anxious, and Ma shifts on her feet, bouncing on her toes awkwardly like she’s giving herself an internal pep talk. Then, she shrugs off her jacket and—uncharacteristically—hangs it on the coat rack. (At home, she’d just toss it over the back of the nearest chair. It drives Henry crazy. It drove Mom crazy, too.)

She pulls her boots off and lines them up on the mat as neatly as she can like she’s trying to make a good impression, which strikes Henry as being very weird. But he follows suit, setting his sneakers next to a pair of winter boots that look like they belong to a child, just slightly smaller than his own. (His hands shake as he stands sharply and turns away.)

Regina closes the door with a soft click. Then, she starts down the hall and he follows after her, counting the empty nails on the wall. One, two, three, four . . . eight, nine, ten . . .

The hall opens into a large dining room—a table that could seat a whole family, large windows facing the yard, an intricate china cabinet and a large entrance-way into a kitchen with an island counter and a ticking oven timer. Warm, natural light through the windows and a fridge with magnets that are spaced out like they held things that have since been taken down, just like the frames on the walls. The air is warm like she’s been cooking, and he can smell—

“Did you make lasagne?” Ma asks, unable to hide the excitement in her voice.

“I did,” Regina says, her smile warm as she moves across the kitchen, her movements smooth and graceful almost like she’s floating.

“Red pepper flakes?”

“Red pepper flakes,” she confirms with a soft laugh, eyes bright.

“You’re perfect,” Mom grins, and a memory strikes Henry like lightning, so clear in his mind that he feels like he’s there again, in their living room in Portland that he usually can’t quite remember, and it’s Friday Movie Night—

He’s on the carpet in front of the couch that Ma’s draped across, her head on the armrest, all their DVDs spread out on the coffee table and he’s rifling through them. She’s been vetoing most of his picks. In the kitchen, the popcorn maker is screeching and he can hear the hum of the microwave melting butter. The noise stops as Ma shoots down another movie.

“Nothing animated,” she tells him, which knocks about a third of their movies out of consideration. He’s pushing them off to the side as Mom returns, three bowls balanced in her two arms. Ma sits up straight, says: “Ooh, popcorn. You’re perfect; will you marry me?” and Mom just laughs, the lamp-light glinting off her wedding ring and everything is warm and she’s laughing, bright and happy and alive—

A pan clangs against the stove and the memory is gone. Henry is back in Regina’s kitchen. He looks at his ma, leaning with her elbows on the counter, and thinks about how she took her ring off when they got here, and hasn’t worn it since. Before Storybrooke, he never saw her without it.

The more time Henry spends with Regina, the more he remembers his mom.

It doesn’t make sense, but sometimes she’ll say something or look at him in a way that feels so familiar, and a memory will come to him as though it’s being yanked out of the furthest corner of his mind, almost violent as it tears him backwards in time. Some of the memories feel more real than others. They contradict each other. She wrings her hands when she’s nervous just like he does.

Regina asks him about his school in the city and jokes how different it must be from the small-town schools that are all she knows, and suddenly he’s five years old with a brand-new backpack and a Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, and Mom’s waving goodbye from the doorway of his kindergarten classroom, except Mom looks like Regina and his school in Portland didn’t look like that. (What did his school in Portland look like?

He can’t remember.)

It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense.

Henry wakes in the middle of the night, shaking in the aftermath of a dream so vivid it must have been real, but he was standing in the street and there was a suitcase in the backseat of Ma’s car and he was crying; Ma was crying and Mom was trying not to but her chin shook and the wind swept her hair across her cheeks and they were damp. Her hands shook and she said goodbye, said I love you—I love you I love you I love you, my little prince—over and over and over and then she was gone. He watched her disappear in the rearview mirror and she was alive. There was no fire and no funeral and she was not dead.

He wakes up crying. He stumbles down the stairs, out into the dark, and for a moment he swears he sees Ma standing on the sidewalk just outside the front door of Granny’s, a few years younger in a sweater he’s ever seen, his own face peering through the window as she calls after a woman walking away toward the street—Mom—but that doesn’t make sense.

No, it’s not Mom. It’s Regina. It’s Regina in the street like the ghost of a memory he doesn’t remember living. He blinks and she disappears. The pavement is lit by pinpricks of stars and one flickering street lamp, and there is no moon. He’s alone, wondering why a flash of a moment that never happened feels more real than years that did.

He borrows someone’s bike, left in the rack outside the hotel without a lock. The front wheel is low on air so the ride is slow and wobbly, and he dismounts to push it down the sidewalk until it runs out and he’s left walking in the street. The morning is frigid and his breath looks like smoke when it hits the air. It flurried in the night and his sneakers become snow-soaked and rock salt wedges between the tracks in the soles. His bare fingers are stiff from the cold and the tips of his ears sting in the quiet wind.

The yellow town line where the outskirts of Storybrooke meets the outside world is shrouded by curved, overhanging trees on each side of the road, colliding in the center like a tunnel of branches and leaves. It almost doesn’t look real. The morning is still navy-gray—tinged red at the edges—and he stands there, motionless, until he feels the echo of a kiss on his forehead, and the fog low in the hills looks almost purple.

He tries to remember the fire and all he sees is his mom, swallowed by smoke, shrinking in the rearview window ‘til she’s gone and he wonders, not for the first time, how they ever could’ve left her grave hundreds of miles away. He wonders, not for the first time, if he’d even find it if he went to Portland and looked. (He wonders why, in these glimpses of memory, she looks so much like Regina.)

“Have we been here before?” He asks Ma, later that day. They’re sitting in the corner booth at Granny’s, and he’s been picking at his lunch as she swallows hers whole.

“Granny’s?” She deflects. “We’ve been staying here a week, kid. You feeling alright?”

Henry flattens his straw wrapper and starts folding it like an accordion. Ma sighs.

“Yeah, we have. It was a long time ago, though. You wouldn’t remember.”

Truth. Lie. Truth. He wonders what she’s hiding that’s so terrible that he can’t know.

“Portland’s only 58 miles from here,” Henry says. He’s flat on his stomach on the lumpy hotel bed, flipping through the pictures on his camera. Ma’s leaned back against the headboard of hers, nose in the beginning of a book from the library on Main Street. It’s been at least fifteen minutes since she’s turned the page, but now, after a moment of ignoring him, he hears the rustle of paper and the flip of a page.

“Is it?” She asks, feigning disinterest. Henry puts his camera down and pulls himself up, turning to face her.

“I want to visit Mom’s grave. Bring flowers or something.”

She doesn’t say anything for the longest time, but he keeps staring and staring until finally, she sighs. “Why?”

Do I need a reason? he thinks, and almost says so. Easier to swallow back is the admission that: the harder I try to remember her funeral, the less sure I am that we had one. When I try to remember how we lost her, the smoke is a purple fog and there’s no fire. But he just shrugs and she flips another page, so soon after the last one that he can tell she’s only pretending to have read it.

“I’ve got too much going on right now, Henry. Maybe another time,” but her voice sounds pained and she’s lying.

(Later, he looks up Portland, Maine cemeteries and realizes there are twenty-three and he doesn’t know which one is hers. He clicks on Find A Grave and realizes he doesn’t know what to type in. He can’t remember her name.

His therapist’s voice echoes in his head: Trauma affects the memory in complex ways, Henry, and he wraps his pillow around his head and tries not to cry.)

“I’m running out of excuses, Regina.”

His ma’s voice stops Henry in his tracks where the banister meets the second floor. The bed and breakfast is a small building, with skinny halls and steep wooden stairs. The railing wobbles if you hold too tight. Peering around the corner, Henry sees his ma’s profile in the dim hall. She’s leaning against the closed door to their room, running a hand through her hair and refusing to look at Regina, who stands with her hands deep in her coat pockets. Henry presses his back flat against the wall, breathing as quietly as he can. He’s not sure why he’s hiding.

“And I’m running out of ideas to solve this whole mess,” Regina sighs. “I know this isn’t easy for you, but it’s not exactly easy for me, either.”

“I know. And we’ll figure it out. It’s just. . . . There’s only so many times I can claim a ‘doctor’s appointment’ before Henry stops pretending he believes me.”

Called it, Henry thinks, but the feeling of being right is bittersweet. It hurts far more than it feels like any shred of validation. Slowly, he slides down the wall, sinking until he hits the floor, knees pressed up against his chest.

“We could—”

“We can’t tell him. God, Regina, you know that. He’s already confused.” Ma’s voice is so frustrated, and as he hears the quiet creak of the old floorboards, he pictures her pacing the width of the hall, running a hand over her face. His heart pounds in his chest and he can feel the pressure against his sternum and in his throat. Anxiously, he twists his fingers together and squeezes his eyes shut.

“His memories are literally fighting each other, of course he’s confused. Telling him won’t erase that, but at least he’ll know what’s real.”

Ma says nothing in response, and for a moment, the hallway is silent. Outside the cracked windows, the wrens that don’t migrate for the winter are chittering among the branches of the young Ash trees behind the hotel. A breeze blows in through the windows and the curtains flutter. Then:

“Those memories,” Ma starts, her voice careful like she’s talking to an easily-spooked animal, “how were they . . . chosen?” (The way she says chosen makes him think she was looking for a better word, and couldn’t find one.)

There’s a pause, and he opens his eyes, dares to peer around the corner—Regina is looking at the floor, arms hugging her torso like she’s trying to hold herself together.

“I didn’t choose them, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says finally, and his ma averts her gaze as if she feels guilty. “Your subconscious wrote that life for you. It took the core of what we needed it to do and filled in the blanks with whatever would make you happiest. That way you’d be less likely to question the fact that sometimes, the memories didn’t feel real.”

“Oh.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

“Are you sure? Henry mentioned he had a m—”

“Seriously, Regina, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it,” Ma says, and Henry thinks she sounds tired. (Sometimes he thinks she’s always tired.)

“I’m sorry,” Regina says, her voice soft and clear, and something about her tone sounds like an echo. Like she’s apologized for this before.

“It’s not your fault. Just . . . just don’t tell him, okay?”

Tell me what? Henry thinks, frustration coiling in his chest. A door opens and closes down that hall and he pushes himself to his feet on shaky legs, starting down the stairs as silently as possible. What aren’t they telling me?

(He remembers sitting on a park bench with Regina in the aftermath of fighting with his ma, the air damp and cold like the dirt, and remembers her promise: “I will not lie to you, Henry. I can’t always promise you the truth—not all secrets are mine to tell, but I will never lie to you.”

He wonders if lying and keeping secrets are the same.)

Henry wakes early the next morning, shivering and drenched in sweat.

For a moment, he wonders where he is. But then he remembers Storybrooke with a jolt in his stomach and rolls over to stare—eyes empty—at the framed print of a painting of a sunrise, hung slightly crooked next to the window. Outside, the horizon is still dark and there is nothing but night sky. His dream is already slipping away, but he stumbles out of bed and into his shoes, clinging to the fading feeling of loss he’d been fighting in his sleep. He opens the door by twisting the handle first so it doesn’t make a sound.

It’s quiet in the hall. There’s a light downstairs, and he traces it to a small room near the restaurant’s kitchen, where Ruby is crouched by a door he knows leads to the alley, untying a pair of worn running sneakers. Her ponytail is loose and sinking down the back of her head, and her face is shiny with sweat.

“Morning, Henry,” she says without looking up, and he starts, jolting backward into the wall like he’s almost startled by his own physical presence in the room.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quick and sincere, but she waves him off.

“No need to be.” She stands and shoots him a half-smile. “You’re up early. Couldn’t sleep?”

(Something nags in the back of his head about how everyone in Storybrooke talks to him like they know him. Sometimes, he forgets that it should feel weird.)

“Sort of.”

She nods like she understands what he means even though he doesn’t, and slips past him toward the kitchen. “Hot chocolate?” She asks.

“If it’s no trouble.”

“None at all.” Ruby sets a kettle on the stove and turns the dial; the burner ticks, the gas hisses and ignites. “What’s keeping you up?” She asks, dragging a stool into the kitchen from outside behind the register. After dropping it in front of him, she opens a cupboard and starts rifling through the mess.

Henry considers how honest to be. (Ironic, he thinks, since he’s been so frustrated with everyone lying to him.) Neither, he decides, and changes course: “You knew my ma, right? Before she left?”

Ruby pauses. With a box of hot chocolate mix in hand, she falls back on her heels from where she’d been stretched up on her toes to reach the top shelf.

“Yes,” she says slowly, like she’s worried about saying something she shouldn’t. (Everyone’s that way with him, these days.) “I did. We were good friends. Well, friends.”

“So you guys knew each other when you were young?”

She laughs: “She’s quite a bit older than me, Henry.” She drops the box of teabags onto the counter in front of him. “Milk chocolate okay? We’re out of semi-sweet—sorry.”

“That’s fine,” he says, pulling a packet out of the box. Ruby pulls a handful of big marshmallows out of a bag from the cupboard and slices one in half. (Apologizing for not having my favorite hot chocolate, he thinks. Another thing to add to the ‘Why Does Everyone Know Stuff About Me’ list.)

“Did you know my mom?”

The knife slides hard through the marshmallow and hits the cutting board with a sharp thump. Ruby stands perfectly still for a moment before she jolts back into motion, and she seems unsettled by his question, but she doesn’t step around it as Regina had, and she doesn’t lie.

“Yes, I did.”

Henry sits up straight, his fist clenching around the hot chocolate packet. For reasons he doesn’t understand, nerves shoot up his spine.

“Really?” He asks. It’s the first time he’s gotten a real, straight answer about his mom since they arrived in Storybrooke. “Did she live here?”

“Since forever, it seems.” Ruby sighs and turns around, leaning back against the counter and crossing her arms, looking at him like she’s trying to open up his brain and dig around, figure out what’s going on in his head. “What’s with the interrogation?”

Behind his sternum, Henry’s chest aches. He can barely breathe and his lungs burn. Ruby knew his mom. His mom lived here, in Storybrooke. (And Ma never said.)

“I miss her, that’s all,” he says. It’s his turn to lie, to evade a question with a half-truth. The words are bitter on his tongue, grating on his teeth like the gritty feeling of too much sour candy. He spits them out anyway. “I wanna learn more about her. It’s like I barely knew anything.”

The small smile Ruby offers him is sad. “I’m sorry.”

She turns back to her marshmallows, cutting the halves into quarters and pulling them apart before dropping them into a mug. The kettle whistles on the stove, and she fills two mugs, handing him one. The warmth seeps through the ceramic into his palm as he pours the powder inside. She shakes cinnamon into his mug and hands him a spoon to stir. (Cinnamon. Something else for the list.)

“Were you close? To my mom,” he asks. Ruby scratches the back of her neck and tightens her ponytail. She doesn’t speak until after she’s made her own drink: four marshmallow quarters (she pokes them under the surface with the tip of her spoon), hot chocolate powder, cinnamon, stir.

“Even in a town this small, you can’t be close with everyone.”

Sure, he thinks. That’s true—but completely useless.

“She was gone before I really got the chance to be, and that was a long time ago. She wouldn’t have been the same person you knew.”

And now, she’s lying.

“What kind of person was she, then?” He asks, desperation leaking into his tone. His cocoa is too hot to drink and the mug almost feels like it’s burning his hands, but he doesn’t set it down. Ruby blows over the top of hers, and takes a sip. “Anything you remember. Please.”

“She was complicated,” Ruby sighs. “Being a good mayor was so important to her. She knew this town and everything in it like the back of her hand, but no one really knew much about her. I don’t know why.”

Rubbing a hand over one eye and shaking her head, Ruby sighed. She took a long sip of her tea and Henry thought to himself that she suddenly looked incredibly tired.

“And then she was gone.” Lie.

It takes him a while to finish his hot chocolate. The sun is creeping up outside the windows as Ruby takes him back to his room, escorting him like she thinks he might wander off somewhere else if she doesn’t. When they reach his door, he stops and turns to face her, meeting her eyes. There’s one more question he needs to ask before the moment passes. “Why did she leave?”

She looks away, focusing her eyes on something distant out the window behind him. There’s probably nothing there.

“I don’t know, Henry,” she sighs, pushing her hands deep into her pockets. She shifts her weight, clearly uncomfortable with this question. “It was never my business, and Regina—”

“Regina?” A strange, unidentifiable emotion shoots up the center of his chest, stomach to spine and up into his throat. “She knew my mom back then?”

Scrunching her expression as though she’s said something she shouldn’t have, Ruby shakes her head. “No. Yes. I mean. . . . Your ma and Regina are a long and complicated story, Henry. Truth be told, I don’t know most of it.”

(Another terribly unhelpful answer, but it doesn’t sound like a lie.)

“Then how do you know it’s so long and complicated?”

She laughs—“You haven’t changed one bit.”

His heart seems to pause in his chest. “Changed?” He asks. Ruby’s jaw twitches. She shakes her head like she’s shaking something out of it, and purses her lips.

“I’ll see you later, Henry.”

Her footsteps echo down the hall as she leaves, and he’s left standing alone in the doorway of the hotel room, staring out the window at the red horizon, knowing less than he did before he asked. His real question, hidden behind all the wondering of what did Regina Mills mean to my ma? hangs heavy in the air around him like smoke from the fire he doesn’t remember.

And why do I feel like I know her?

He goes to Regina’s home by himself for the first time because his ma’s off doing something he’s not invited along for, and she’s decided he needs a babysitter. (It’s been ages since the last time she thought that. Even since they’ve been here, she’s left him alone.)

It’s different being at Regina’s without Ma; the house feels bigger. Emptier. She drops him off and doesn’t even come inside, instead speaking quickly with Regina in hushed voices on the porch before she leaves, driving like she’s in a hurry. He lines his sneakers on the mat and hangs his coat on the rack, and when he turns to look at Regina, standing in the entrance to the hall, her smile is nervous.

For an awkward moment, they just stare at each other. Then, she straightens her shoulders and asks, voice no less anxious than her eyes: “Do you like to play board games, Henry?”

He nods, cracking a smile. He loves board games. “Yeah.”

Regina has more board games than he’s ever seen in one place before. They’re carefully and alphabetically organized in a cabinet under a bookshelf in the living room, and he thinks without having opened any of them that the boxes alone look too worn to be owned by someone who lives alone. In various states of wear and tear, some are simply softened around the edges, the cardboard at the edges scuffed and the colored paper shell peeling off. Others are torn and bent with tape wrapped around the corners to hold them together. Scanning the titles, he finds every favorite game he’s ever had, plus a wide collection of ones he’s never even heard of. (His favorites seem to be the boxes that are worn the most. Coincidence, he’s sure.)

“Pick any one you like,” Regina says, but it’s almost impossible to choose. Finally, he reaches for a beat-up box of Yahtzee and she smiles, tells him: “Great choice.”

Dropping into an armchair next to the coffee table, Henry lifts the lid off the box and peers inside. The blue cup lies on its side, several of the dice still inside and the others spilled out onto the scoring sheets, which have three pens strewn across them. Tons of loose sheets are already filled out, several different handwritings scrawled across them in a handful of colors.

“I’m sure there’s an empty one in there somewhere,” Regina says, her voice quick and breathy as she leans over his shoulder to pull the entire stack from the box. Before she can pull away, he catches a glimpse of two players listed for every game and a few with three, the letters at the top of every column: R, H. Sometimes: R, H, E.

Suddenly, his chest aches and his lungs burn like he’s breathing smoke instead of the clean air of Regina’s living room and the warm, sweet smell of something baking in the kitchen. He can’t breathe. In front of him, the room shifts out of focus, and the empty score sheets and the dots on the dice turn blurry.

“Henry? Are you alright?” Her voice is soft. Her palm, warm through his shirt and a light, gentle touch, grazes his shoulder. Henry glances up and she’s looking down at him, dark eyes wide with concern. The room around her is blurry, but she’s crystal clear. He nods and abruptly stands; she blinks, startled.

“Can I use your bathroom?” He asks, a hoarse quality to his tone. She nods, but there’s hesitance in the motion and she’s wringing her hands in front of her stomach—she’s worried. (About him? he wonders.)

“Of course, dear. It’s just upstairs—first door on the left.”

Nearly slamming his leg into the coffee table on his way out, Henry flees the room. He clings to the banister as he climbs, trips on the top step of the stairs as he reaches the second floor of Regina’s too-big house. All the doors along the hall are cracked open except one: the last door on the right, all the way at the end, shrouded in shadow. Dim, natural sunlight comes in through a window in the bathroom—first door on the left.

As he closes the door behind him, he leans a hand against the doorframe for support. There’s ink under his fingers, deep in the wood and not quite black anymore—fading into a dark gray like it’s been there for years.

I have a son, Regina had said, and a part of him had tried very hard to not believe her. (He’s been confused enough, lately.) But he drags a forefinger down the doorframe over the inked lines and numbers and he can’t ignore this. It’s a growth chart and he can almost picture it: a little boy, her little boy, year by year with his back pressed against the frame, stretching as tall as he can, chin up and shoulders back.

He sees himself standing there, a little boy with his mom marking how he’s grown, and he’s giggling and she’s smiling, writing his name and the date in flowing letters—except he doesn’t know what he looked like when he was young. The pictures all burned in the fire that he can’t remember, and he doesn't know if they had a doorframe like this in Portland. He doesn’t really remember Portland. (Trauma affects the memory in complex ways, Henry.

Bile rises in his throat and his eyes burn. He can’t remember if Mom ever marked his height on the wall. He can’t remember her death—the funeral or the fire she carried him out of before running back inside, choking on smoke. He’s been told the walls came down around her.)

His hand shakes as he drags the pad of a finger over the letters on the doorframe like he’s trying to see if they’ll smear under his touch, but they don’t. They just stare at him:

Henry Mills, age 3.

Henry Mills, age 4.

Henry Mills, age 5 6 7 8 9 10 11—

Her son was named Henry, too. Is named Henry. (“He is lost to me,” she’d said. Lost.)

Suddenly, he’s overwhelmed by the need to run away, to get to Portland, to search the graveyards until he finds his mom—to prove he’s not losing his mind. Instead, he washes the implications of the growth chart off his hands and heads back downstairs. He can still feel the letters—his name—under his fingertips, but checks his hands and they are not stained with ink.

Regina makes lunch and they play Yahtzee and Clue Jr. and he loses terribly at Scrabble until Ma finishes whatever it was she didn’t want him to know about, and Henry does not run away to Portland. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t think he would find her there, anyway.

Morning frost has frozen the damp earth by the pond. Sitting back on that bench at the edge of the park, staring out at the treeline and the mountains and the low-hanging fog, jacket zipped to his chin and scarf wrapped twice around his neck, Henry prods a clump of solid dirt and torn grass with the tip of his sneaker.

Ma left the hotel before the sun rose, claiming Mary Margaret had an appointment and telling him to go back to sleep. (Liar.) Instead, he got dressed and made the ten minute walk down Main Street to the park, where he sought out the bench he’d sat on with Regina that first week, when she promised to never lie to him. That feels like a lifetime ago; it hasn’t been more than a few weeks. Sometimes, he thinks about how time feels strange here, like it’s passing by so fast and yet not moving at all. There must be a stack of homework a mile high waiting for him at school. (He’s missed a math exam, but that’s probably for the best.)

He feels like a different person in Storybrooke. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell if his memories are real or if he’s made them up in his head. (Trauma affects the memory in complex ways, Henry. You’ve experienced something painful, and your mind is trying to protect you from that.)

“Henry?”

Regina is standing by his shoulder, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat. Her head is tilted to the side and down at him, her eyes questioning, but she’s got a warm smile on her face. It’s that same smile she always has for him: soft and familiar. It’s the smile from his memories of flipping through DVDs and her bright laughter, sparkling violet nail polish and breakfast on the stove—his mom holding his hands, skin like soft flowers, beaded bracelet spinning and spinning and spinning—

In his fleeting memories, Regina and his mom are the same.

“You remind me of her,” he says, because he cannot help it. She blinks, lowers herself onto the bench beside him, and folds her hands in her lap. She does not ask: who? like he expects her to. (Like anyone else would.) In fact, she says nothing at all, and he’s left with a tightness in his throat and the urge to reach up and pull his collar away from his neck. “I miss her.”

“I’m sorry.” There’s grief in her voice, and he wonders how much there is about her that he doesn’t know, about what his ma won’t let her say and what Ruby wouldn’t tell him. Her apology means something he cannot understand. He could ask about it, but it’s probably on the list of things she’s not allowed to tell him. So instead, he changes tracks completely, and asks:

“Do you love my ma?”

There’s a heartbeat of empty silence, then: “What?” Regina chokes out. She sounds like there’s a tightness in her throat, too, and maybe he shouldn’t have asked.

“My ma; do you love her?”

For a moment, Regina is silent, and all Henry can hear is his own heartbeat, pounding in his head, and the drill of a woodpecker somewhere beyond the treeline. (He wonders if she’ll tell him the truth. He wonders what he needs the truth to be, and thinks that maybe her silence is enough to know it.)

Briefly, her mouth opens, wavers, and closes. She purses her lips and he half expects she’s going to evade the question, give him some semantic answer like: that depends on what you mean by love, the way she did when he asked if she knew his mom. But she doesn’t. Instead, she sighs and her head shakes in such a small movement that he can barely see it. Finally, she says: “Please don’t ask me to answer that, Henry.”

The words are spoken before he knows he’s saying them—“Why not?”—and her jaw twitches. Her hands, still clenched in her lap, shift, and he glances at them to see her tracing a pattern at the base of her ring finger, a subtle side-to-side motion like she’s imagining twisting in circles something that isn’t there. (Ma does that sometimes. More and more now that she’s taken her ring off. He can still see faint lines from the time spent wearing it—little indents in the skin.)

“Because I promised to always be honest with you.”

They sit in the echo of that for a while. There’s a lone patch of snow under the bench that Henry kicks at during the silence; the water ripples on the pond, growing in size until it fades back into the glassy surface. For once, the air is motionless, and the water isn’t choppy in the wind. Regina shifts her weight and inhales deeply, and when she stands, she runs her palms down the front of her shirt and the top of her slacks even though there are no wrinkles in the fabric. He looks up at her, and she tries to smile.

“I haven’t had breakfast yet—are you hungry? I was thinking of making apple pancakes, but it seemed silly for just one person.”

The walk to Regina’s house is mostly silent. It’s the kind of silence one spends wanting to speak, but failing to find the right way to say anything. So they say nothing at all, and he thinks about how Mom always made apple pancakes on Sunday mornings. It’s been a year since he’s had them.

So it’s a quiet walk, filled only with the songs of the wrens, perched in the branches of every house’s front-yard trees. Little buds of green are sprouting leaves in many of them, pushing their way into a spring that hasn’t quite arrived. It hasn’t snowed in a few weeks, but the air is still chilly and brisk. In the early hours of each morning, the world is coated in frost that glitters under the rising sun. Compared to New York, this town looks like a fairytale.

The fairytale shatters when they arrive, and his ma is sitting on the porch steps, her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her. She does not look happy. Beside him, Regina sighs, heavy and slow like all of a sudden she’s incredibly tired. They stop several feet from the bottom of the stairs, and Ma looks at him, her expression blank and her eyes boring into him. She says nothing, and strangely enough, Henry wishes she’d just yell at him and get it over with instead of whatever this is.

His jaw tightens, and he speaks before he can stop himself: “Did you really take Mary Margaret to an appointment?”

Ma clenches her hands so hard they quiver. Her gaze breaks, settling somewhere behind his shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes.

“Of course,” she says, spitting the words out like they’re bitter in her mouth, like just saying them hurts. Good.

“You’re lying,” he says, stomach turning and voice on the verge of shaking, “I heard you tell Regina.”

She opens her mouth, but closes it without saying anything. She sighs briefly but heavily, as though the air is suddenly a hundred pounds and just breathing it in requires all her strength. Expression pinched, she finally speaks, and her tone is so, so tired: “I can’t do this right now, Henry. Not now.”

It happens fast—his frustration grows and grows and twists into something that wants to yell and scream and demand to know everything, and his chest burns and anger bubbles inside him like foaming poison—

“Why can’t you just tell me the truth!” He snaps, voice rising, cracking into a shout. She reaches out to touch his arm, but he jerks back, wrenching away from her. “I don’t understand why you keep lying to me!”

“Henry, please—” Her voice cuts off. Slightly wavering, her hands hover where they’d frozen after he pushed her away, hanging, uncertain, in the air.

“I don’t understand,” he breathes, the volume gone. Anger and grief harden and spin together inside him until they weigh heavy, choking him like a stone in his throat. He’s been beating a dead horse, pulling apart his own past like somewhere inside these mixed-up scraps of memories, he’ll find something that makes sense. His shoulders fall and his anger sinks from his mouth to his stomach, and down into the dirt below his feet. “We’re not here because your friend is sick, are we.”

The look on her face says no. Henry wonders if she’ll lie anyway. The rims of her eyes are damp; she looks so torn and pained that he almost feels bad.

“Why’d we come here?” His words beg her to tell him the truth. (And yet some small voice, deep inside, raises the question: are you ready to know?) “Why does everyone here seem like they know me? Why can’t I remember anything that makes sense? What about Mom?”

His face feels tight like he’s going to cry. Growing tears blur the bottom edge of his vision and his chest heaves, trying to catch enough air. Beside him, Regina stumbles back and when he looks at her, her eyes and expression break like he’s hit her in the face and he’s trapped in some sudden, suffocating urge to take it all back, but it’s too late. It’s too late, so he pushes and he keeps pushing.

“If you wanna move on, that’s okay, I promise,” he chokes, turning back to his ma, and she goes pale but he pushes. “But it’s like you knew you would because you took off your ring when we got here and every time I ask about Mom you run away. I wanted to visit her grave because I can’t remember the funeral or the fire or her name. Why can’t I remember her name?”

His last words fall out broken and quiet, not quite a whisper but hushed all the same like he isn’t even sure he wants her to hear them.

“It’s—it’s complicated, Henry . . .” she starts, trailing off helplessly, fixated on his wobbling chin and his arms wrapped tight around his torso. He hisses: “How is that complicated?”

“It just is.” She steps toward him, arms twitching up like she wants to hug him, but he flinches away again, tears slipping from the corners of his eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” he whispers, and the way she shrinks inward makes the anger in him simmer down, twisting into a terrible, sickening kind of remorse he can’t bring himself to voice. He won’t apologize, not like this, not when he doesn’t mean it and when she’s still not telling him anything—when nothing makes sense and he knows she could explain but she won’t.

“There are things I can't tell you yet, but I’m trying Henry, I just don’t know—” he wraps his arms around his head and pulls them tighter tighter tighter until he can see her mouth moving but he can’t hear her. Eventually, she stops. She presses her lips into a thin line and her shoulders slump. Slowly, he lets his arms fall until they’re looped around his neck, hands linked and palms pressed flat around the base of his skull, and he’s shaking. She doesn’t look away, but she doesn’t try to speak. Hesitant and careful, Henry turns his head to meet Regina’s eyes.

Her gaze is steady. Her body quivers like she might crumble any moment, like her body can barely keep her up, but her eyes are soft soft soft and he remembers the growth chart on the doorframe in her bathroom and her son who is lost but not dead, close but far away at the same time. He remembers the collection of games on the bookshelf in her living room with all of his favorites, all worn and loved, and he remembers empty nails where pictures came down, and beautiful, looping handwriting in black ink on white paint: Henry Mills Henry Mills Henry Mills—

Picture frames taken off the walls; his childhood photos burned in the fire he cannot remember. His mom has Regina’s face in the memories he clings to.

“You said you won’t lie to me,” he says. It’s not accusing, but desperate—a request for a truth no one else has been willing to give him.

“Yes,” she says. “I promise, I haven’t.”

“Everyone else is.”

She shakes her head, small and fast like she needs him to believe her. “I won’t.”

“If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”

“If it is mine to tell.”

Henry stops. This is where that little voice that says: Do you really want to know? gets louder, aggressive, pounds its fists in his head and demands he listen, but he doesn’t.

“My mom died in a fire.”

Regina’s knuckles are ashen. She’s clasped her hands together, pressing her palms against each other so hard they shake. There’s an ache behind his sternum that’s pressing on his ribs.

“That’s not a question,” she rasps.

“I was there, but I can’t remember. I barely remember her, and it was only last year.”

“Please, Henry.” The pain in her voice echoes inside him. She twists at her fingers, and her dark eyes are wide and glassy and something about the way they show emotion reminds him of himself. Head spinning, Henry studies the way she holds her body, the arch of her forehead and the curve of her jaw. His ma’s hair is pale, wheat field yellow. Unruly, a mess of curls she never even tries to wrangle. Regina’s is dark and brushed neat like his own, and he knows his mom wasn’t the one who gave birth to him but he always took after her more.

He glances down and she’s wringing her hands, held against her stomach, and he does that too, when he’s nervous. He looks up, meeting her eyes that glisten with tears that haven’t fallen, reflecting back at him his own heartbreak, and he knows the answer before he asks:

“Mom?”

#henry mills #regina mills #emma swan #regal believer #swanqueen #ouat #once upon a time #ouat fanfic #fanfiction

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