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He’s twenty-one. He’s twenty-one and he’s home from college for Spring Break even though his girlfriend, Maria (because he has a proper girlfriend now and it’s fantastic and she’s fantastic and he can’t stop talking about her), wanted to go to Florida. “We’ll be ironic about it,” she’d said. “It’ll be like that episode of ‘Gilmore Girls’ where Rory and Paris go on Spring Break and watch ‘The Power of Myth.”
But soon he will have graduated and he’ll have a real job in the real world and it won’t be in Storybrooke because it’s not exactly a place with a real growth market for professional careers in biotechnology and he doesn’t know when he’ll get to go home and properly see his mom and his Emma and so he turns down her offer. She’s understanding. He called her three times on the drive here.
So he’s at home and Mom’s happy, smiling her crinkly-eyed smile and fussing over the state of his hair. “It’s too long,” she says. “Just get a trim, please.” But she runs her hand through his hair when they’re sitting together on the couch anyway and he’s struck by how she doesn’t hesitate now, doesn’t worry or freeze thinking that he might recoil from her.
“My hair’s fine, Mom,” Henry says.
“You look like an idiot,” Emma says from the doorway to the living room, dressed in leggings and a loose tee-shirt and dripping with sweat. She’s pulling off her sneakers, throwing them over in the general direction of the door before slumping over to straighten them up when Mom glares.
“My girlfriend, Maria, likes my hair,” Henry informs her.
Emma falls onto the couch, head ending up on Mom’s knee, and whole torso draped across Henry. She’s wearing socks with little sparrows on them and she wriggles her toes. “Kid, we know. You have a girlfriend. You can probably just say ‘Maria’ now and we’ll figure out the rest.” Mom’s hand automatically goes to Emma’s hair and he wonders how many nights there have been, the two of them sitting/lying like this because there’s this undeniable comfort to the whole interaction.
(“We hang out,” Emma had told him, when he’d called her in tears during his sophomore year because Mom was all alone and he’d abandoned her and he was a terrible son (and, fine, there might have been pot involved but Emma never, ever needs to know that. Ever). “She’s fine, kid. Really proud of you.”)
He feels his eyes well with tears and so he knees Emma in the back. She falls off the couch and drags Mom with her and for a moment Mom’s in Emma’s arms and her cheeks are pink and he shirt is hiked, showing a sliver of her back and Emma’s smile is so broad her face might split in two. “This is war, Swan,” Mom says and she glares, though Henry’s unconvinced that she actually looks menacing. “You are disgustingly sweaty.”
Emma grins and waggles her eyebrows. “Dirty.” She holds a hand out to Henry. “Help me up, kid.”
He clasps her hand, hauling her up from the floor, and Mom rolls her eyes at the pair of them. “First, dinner.”
So they eat together and Mom has made lasagne, ostensibly because it’s Henry’s favourite, though judging by the way Emma’s eyes light up when she sees it and the way she’s onto seconds before Henry’s finished his first piece it might be Emma's favourite really. He notes that the lasagne is milder than usual and wonders whether this is Emma’s influence because Emma can’t cope with hot food – though she eats it anyway and gets hiccups and whines like a puppy wanting to be taken for a walk for hours afterwards – and Mom’s always teased her about it.
And when Mom starts to clear the table, Emma places a hand on her arm. “My turn,” she says and he wonders how they’ve both reached a stage where they take it in turns to clean up and how they still don’t realise that they’re probably married on some level.
Mom reaches across and takes his hand as Emma noisily stacks the dishwasher. “How’s your final project?” she asks, rubbing her thumb across his knuckles.
“Good,” he says. “I’ll have to do a bit of work on the write-up over this break.”
“Emma has the night shift,” Mom says, glancing at the door to the kitchen. “What would you like to do on your first night back?”
“You know her schedule?” Henry asks before he can stop himself. Mom silences him with a look. It’s the look he used to get when he got caught sneaking an extra cookie or when he threw a tantrum at the grocery store because she wouldn’t buy him something he wanted. Stern and loving and so, so very guilt-inducing that Henry almost apologises on instinct. “I wouldn’t mind a drink,” he says instead and Mom starts like she’s never contemplated the idea that Henry might like something alcoholic.
“Beer or wine?” she asks.
“Scotch?” he asks, flashing her his best puppy dog eyes (he learned from the master but they’re much more effective for him than Emma, or at least they have been in the past), and Mom smiles.
“When did you get so old?” she asks, though she grabs the bottle she keeps high on the shelf in the dining room, away from prying fingers, even if he can now reach it easily while Mom has to stand on tiptoes – and even then she struggles, using a finger to bat the bottle to the edge of the cabinet.
He laughs at her question but there’s something sad in Mom’s eyes.
She’s not sad after a glass of Scotch. She and Henry sits on the couch of the living room, Mom’s hand idly twisting the television remote as though contemplating switching it on, the bottle in front of them, and Emma enters. She’s showered, hair in a wet ponytail, and Henry hasn’t missed the fact that she didn’t need to ask about taking a shower – or the fact that she apparently keeps a change of clothes at Mifflin Street. “Oh man,” she says, lips falling into a frown. “I don’t want to go to work.”
“And what makes you think you’d be welcome?” Mom asks, though she purses her lips into a smile and looks down at the drink in her hand in a way that tells Henry she’s just a little bit proud of herself for that comment.
“I’m always welcome for scotch,” Emma says. “Duty calls though. Don’t get too drunk.” She wraps an arm around Henry’s neck, nuzzling his hair. “Glad you’re home.” Emma doesn’t do ‘I love you’, not really, and even her ‘glad you’re home’ is missing a first person pronoun needed to make it totally affectionate, but she shows it in the gestures. There’s the dorky hair nuzzle, the fact that whenever he’s here she’ll take his car for servicing and she’ll buy him lunch at Granny’s and not steal a single fry from his plate even as she looks at them like she might die if she doesn’t eat one, and at least one night she’ll drag him and Mom out to hike through the forest and have a picnic or look at the stars or just lie on a blanket and talk.
Mom clasps her arm before she can move away. “Be safe,” she says and twists around, kissing Emma’s cheek. It’s so domestic and Emma doesn’t even blink and, oh my God, this must happen all the time.
They are so fucking married.
Henry pours himself another scotch and drinks, perhaps too quickly because the amber liquid burns more than he anticipates. Mom laughs when he splutters. “Perhaps we should have started with something smoother?”
“This is good,” he says and he means it. Everything’s good, but particularly the scotch. “Are you? Good, I mean?”
Mom finishes her second drink. “Yes,” she says, placing the glass on a coaster. “I am very content with my life. And I’m happy that you’re home.”
Henry knows that content is not the same as happy, but perhaps for Mom – so many years spent in rage and revenge and guilt and sorrow – content is good. Content is where she wants to be. “I’m glad,” he says.
“Now,” Mom asks. “Have you thought any more about your job hunt?”
He laughs. “Can we not have one night where I don’t have to talk about the future?”
“Fine,” she says. “I’m proud of you though. My son, the biotechnology graduate.”
“Almost,” he reminds her because there’s his senior project to complete yet and sometimes when he thinks too hard about it his stomach knots with anxiety. “I’ll probably have to do a PhD to really go anywhere,” he adds. “But I need a break.”
Mom smiles and pours herself another scotch. And after three more generous glasses, Henry’s telling Mom the story of him and Maria going to the Hispanic Society Ball and Maria drinking too much Sangria and dragging Henry up on stage to do a rendition of ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ at two in the morning at the after party in a karaoke bar and throwing up into the microphone just as Henry starts singing. And Mom is laughing, head thrown back and eyes crinkling at the corners and hair puffing out at her hairline where she’s run her fingers through it so many times. He thinks he might spot a streak of grey in her hair, just a couple of hairs.
“Emma dragged me to karaoke at the Rabbit Hole once last year,” she says when she’s able to speak without giggling. “She made me sing that old Taylor Swift song. Getting the Girl?”
“How You Get the Girl,” Henry says because it’s the song of his junior dances and his first crush on Paige and scribbled pages in notebooks when he had ambitions of writing.
“That’s it,” Mom says, gesturing so animatedly that she almost jabs Henry in the face. “That’s how it works, that’s how you get the girl, girl.”
“What’d Emma sing?”
“’Livin’ La Vida Loca’,” Mom says, scrunching her nose. “She has a lovely voice actually.” She sighs, leaning her head back against the couch and closing her eyes for a moment, just a moment, eyelashes long and dark against her skin.
Again, he contemplates saying something. Instead, he searches around for something to cheer Mom up. “Remember when I was, like, three?” he asks. “And you’d put on music and we’d dance.” His earliest clear memory is dancing to ‘Waterloo’, Mom picking him up and spinning around the room with him. She’d sing along to whatever it was they were dancing to, her lips tickling his ear, and when he squirmed away, she’d put him down and they’d dance together, sometimes Mom holding his hands as they boogied, sometimes Henry leaping around the room while Mom swayed and strutted.
She grins and gets up from the couch. Her gait is unsteady and she walks into the armchair on her first attempt to reach the CD player. “I still have that awful CD,” she says, holding up a lurid rainbow covered CD with ‘80s Party Hits’ emblazoned across it.
The music starts and Mom beckons for him. “You see a faded sign on the side of the road…” He eases himself off the couch and dances over to her. He’s a terrible dancer – Maria despairs of him – but it’s Mom and she doesn’t care and now he’s big enough that he can pick her up and spin her around until she says, “I’ll be sick if you keep this up, darling,” and though she laughs, he’s pretty sure she’s telling the truth so he puts her down and they try to out-perform each other with terrible dance moves.
He actually has a stitch in his side when they collapse back on the couch and there’s sweat sticking his hair to his forehead and maybe Mom has a point about his hair being too long. “Hey,” he says, throwing back another scotch. “What’s up with you and Emma?” He can hear the exhausted slur in his words and ordinarily he’d be embarrassed or worried Mom would hear, but she’s as far gone as he is.
“We’re friends,” Mom says. She’s swirling the glass of scotch in front of her and some of the liquid sloshes from the sides. It’s a tribute to how drunk she is that she just licks her hand to clear it up, like she’s one of Henry’s college friends.
“Seems like more to me,” he says. “You kissed her.”
“Friends kiss each other’s cheeks,” Mom says, defensive and just a little bit too loud.
“In Europe,” Henry says and Mom scowls at her drink before tipping the whole glass back. “How often does she stay over?”
“She stays in the guest room,” Mom says, though a red flush appears high on her cheeks. “Mostly.”
“You act like you’re, like, married.”
“I’m not… I mean, Emma, she’s not…” Regina says. “Neal and then there was Hook.”
“Hook was a douchebag,” Henry says. He felt bad for Emma when he died – not too long after the Queens of Darkness came to town – but he still feels like he might have felt worse for her than she did. And, like, Dad and Emma were never going to happen, and even if he might’ve wanted it when he was eleven, he knows enough now to know that Emma would never have gone there, would never have been able to trust him with her heart.
Not the way she seems to trust Mom.
“Language,” Mom says, though she can’t help the smile that blooms across her face. “He was, wasn’t he?” she confides in a loud whisper.
“Emma totally likes you too,” Henry says and watches as Mom bites her lip to try and stop the smile from spreading further. Fatigue is beginning to seep into his voice, his very pores reeking of it. He stands but only makes it to the second couch before giving up on the prospect of sleep in his own bed. Instead, he lies down and closes his eyes, pulling a cushion under his head. He hears Mom shuffling around, feels a blanket being thrown over him and a soft kiss pressed to his temple, and wonders if she’s going upstairs but when he opens his eyes a crack, he sees her outline in the dark, curled up on the couch, one arm stretched out above her head and knees bent. She breathes just loudly enough in her sleep for him to feel comforted. Safe.
He wakes again when Emma comes home. She makes a ridiculous amount of noise kicking off her boots and shutting the door and then seems to be making am equally ludicrous effort to try and be quiet as she sneaks into the living room. “Hey,” Mom whispers and he imagines her eyes barely open.
“You reek of booze,” Emma says and there’s a creak of leather as she sits and then, oh God, he hears what he can only describe as slurping and he’s pretty sure Mom’s kissing Emma.
“Uh, wow,” Emma whispers when he coughs loudly, making as much noise as possible because he feels like they might forget he’s there.
“Sorry,” Mom says and the frost is beginning to permeate her voice.
“No,” Emma says. “That was nice. Good. I liked it. Just maybe next time you’ll be sober and our grown up son won’t be asleep on the next couch.”
He hears Mom laugh, deep and raspy. “Next time,” she says. “Get some rest, Emma.”
He drifts off again and when he wakes it’s early and he’s got the worst hangover he’s ever had in his life (except for maybe the one after the brewery tour for one of his biotechnology papers where he drank his samples and the samples of his classmate who was allergic to alcohol) and he sees Emma being spooned by Mom on the couch, Mom’s arm wrapped protectively around her stomach. Mom’s face is hidden by Emma’s hair but there’s this shit-eating grin on Emma’s face, even in sleep, and, shit, she’s going to be unbearable. He groans and squeezes his eyes shut.
When he wakes again he’s alone and cold sunlight hits his face and he fumbles, bleary eyed, for the aspirin and glass of water that he knows instinctively will be there because it’s Mom. And as though summoned by his thoughts, she enters the living room and he wants to die all over again because she’s impeccably dressed and made-up and looks like she never spent the evening drinking like a college student. “Emma’s taking us out for brunch,” she says.
“How are you not incredibly hungover?” he asks.
Mom smirks. “Experience, darling.”
So he goes and showers and wonders if maybe Granny’s bacon and eggs will cure the pounding in his skull and when he returns to the hall – clean and dressed at least, if not quite at Mom’s level – he finds her and Emma wrapped in an embrace and Emma’s kissing Mom and he doesn’t want to think about where her left hand is and he clears his throat loudly.
Emma flushes scarlet but Mom just smiles. “Shall we?” she says and when they leave, Emma having attempted to apologise for ‘scarring him for life’ or something (which, really, that ship sailed when he was twelve and he walked in on her macking on Hook, who honestly seemed a lot more into it than she was), Mom’s sitting in the passenger seat of the bug.
“Why are we going in the bug?” Henry asks and Emma just laughs.
“Why not?” Mom asks.
“You hate the bug,” he says. “You always insist on driving.”
“I do not,” Mom says, affronted.
Emma nods. “Sorry, Regina, you do.”
It all becomes much more apparent when Emma has to stop the bug in the five minute drive to Granny’s because Mom has to open the door and puke violently in the gutter. “Experience, huh?” Henry asks.
“Shut up,” Mom mutters.
He doesn’t miss Mom’s hand over Emma’s on the gearstick, nor does he miss Emma stopping her before they enter Granny’s to tuck her hair behind her ears and kiss her cheek. “You’re lovely even when you puke,” she says.
In that moment, Mom’s smile could power the entire town and perhaps this is more than content. Perhaps this is happy.