my gift to you

misscanteloupe:

So I had a few death by feels moments while editing this. Enjoy?

*****

There’s one time, after the curse has broken but before Snow and Emma have made it back from the Enchanted Forest, while Henry is living with David and trying not to think about the house he grew up in, when Henry goes back home. Just once, just briefly.

He needs more clothes (and he really really needs more underwear) and David offered to take him shopping but Henry hates shopping and anyways, he points out, nothing’s really open right now. David also offers to go to Henry’s house for him, but Henry says no to that too. He wants to pick his own clothes, wants to get the ones that are worn in just right and don’t have itchy tags. Maybe wants to get some of his comics, too, and he doesn’t know if David would be able to find them all.

(He wants to see his mom.)

It’s two in the afternoon on a Thursday and he should be in school and his mom should be at work, but right now there is no school while families fit back together and teachers figure out if they still want to be teachers, and his mom isn’t mayor anymore because the town asked her not to be. (He remembers her telling him that when he—when he—that time he called.)

He lets himself in with the key he still has clipped to the inner pocket of his backpack; the sound of the front door closing behind him echoes in the entryway, and he tries to remember if it always did that.

He was going to go straight upstairs and start filling his backpack, but he thinks he hears voices coming from the living room, and he doesn’t know who would be here, other than his mom, so he should probably investigate because—because.  

“Mom?” he asks from the doorway, but she doesn’t answer. He comes in further and sees her asleep on the couch, hair falling over her face and his old stuffed hippo Babar tucked under her chin. Her laptop is open on the coffee table in front of her—that’s where the sound is coming from—and when he cranes his neck he can see himself, grinning straight at the camera.

“My turn my turn!” he’s saying, and his mom passes him her phone. His hold is unsteady, video jiggly and wobbly and he clearly isn’t very successful at pointing it right. But there’s this one flash of his mom’s face, smiling and laughing and happy, so happy.

(He hasn’t seen his mom happy like that in—in a really long time.)

“I love you mommy,” he says, and her face is only half in the frame but even so Henry can see the way she beams.

“I love you too, my little prince,” she says back.

His mom shifts in her sleep on the couch in front of him, murmuring something under her breath, and Henry backs quickly out of the room, hurrying out of the house and running all the way back to the loft. It’s only when he’s locked himself in, eyes stinging and heart hammering in his throat, that he realizes he didn’t get any of what he’d gone there for.

Henry curls up on Emma’s bed and closes his eyes, and his mind is a jumble of I love you my little prince and she doesn’t love me she just pretends to and his mom, all alone in their big house and that video wasn’t pretend and the way she looked so sad sleeping on the couch wasn’t pretend because she didn’t even know he was coming, who would she be pretending to?

Later, Regina wanted a child.

Regina got a child because of Emma.

Emma literally gave Regina the one thing she ultimately wanted and couldn’t have.