It was Henry's birthday, and he'd wanted to get out of Storybrooke for the weekend, so here he was with his two mothers, wandering through a community fair in Boston that they'd come across on the way back from the museum. His moms were mostly on good terms at the moment, so it hadn't taken too much cajoling to persuade them that he wanted to spend a weekend away with both of them. Right now, they were bickering about how much fairy floss Emma was allowed to buy for him (for herself, really – Henry didn't actually like fairy floss) and he rolled his eyes and tried to tune them out.
He was distracted by a larger-than-life-size cardboard cut-out of the cast of the Avengers, and wandered over to the booth to investigate. A bored-looking guy greeted him without much enthusiasm as Henry looked around, before turning his attention back to the comic book he was reading.
Henry's eyes lit up as he read the sign next to the cut-out. "Excuse me. How do you enter the competition?"
Bored Guy looked up at him again. "It's only for couples. You got a girlfriend, kid?"
Henry's face fell. "No." He had absolutely no game, and he didn't like his chances of discovering a hidden talent for attracting girls in the next week. But that prize… he wanted it more than words could express. He'd almost be willing to sell his grandmother to win it, particularly since she'd started knitting him ugly sweaters that matched the ones she made for herself, David and Emma. He revised his assessment; he was definitely willing to sell Grandma – those ugly bird-patterned sweaters were almost certainly the reason he had no luck with girls.
"Too bad." Something in Henry's expression must have roused what little sympathy Bored Guy possessed, because he put his comic book down. "Listen, kid. Those two over there, are they your parents?"
Henry nodded.
"They look like a pretty cute couple, very attractive, sure to be a hit with the audience. Maybe they'd like to enter."
"They're not…" Henry stopped himself. Eyes on the prize, Henry. "What do they have to do?"
"Here." He handed Henry an information sheet. "They need to fill out the online entry form, submit a couple of headshots, and they each need to complete the compatibility test. The shortlist gets chosen from that."
Henry walked back over to where his mothers had finally settled on one stick of fairy floss. If he pulled this off, he was going to be grounded until he was eighteen, but it would so be worth it.
When they got back to the hotel later that night, he pulled out his laptop and filled out the entry form. The compatibility test was going to be harder, but eventually he hit on the idea of passing it off as a class project on personality similarities and differences within families. Genius. He worked through the tests separately with both his Moms, with neither of them questioning his hastily manufactured reason. Operation Black Widow was a go.
Emma was standing in Regina's kitchen, waiting for Henry and Regina to finish getting ready to go out to dinner, when she received the phone call. She answered the call and frowned at the barrage of enthusiastic shouting that greeted her from the other end of the line.
"This is Sammy and Seamus from 4SQW, Boston's favourite radio station. Emma Swan, you and your lovely girlfriend Regina Mills have just made the finals of our Couples Challenge. How do you feel?"
"Umm." Emma was confused. She replayed the last few moments in her head and realised that she had heard exactly what she thought she had. "Surprised." That wasn't even a lie.
"Really? Well you shouldn't be!" Sammy and Seamus continued shouting in the annoying fashion of radio station announcers and Emma winced. "You and your girlfriend were judged 95 percent compatible by our expert team of relationship psychologists. INCREDIBLE!"
Emma held the phone away from her ear for a moment, trying to stop the ringing sensation in her ears. When she was certain they'd stopped shouting, she finally replied. "Wow. That really is incredible. Can I meet this team of experts?"
There was a booming laugh from the other end of the phone. "Unfortunately our interns… our relationship experts are too busy working on the challenges. But we're all looking forward to seeing how you and the other three couples do in the challenges next week."
When Emma finally got rid of Sammy and Seamus, she went through the very short list of people who might have been responsible for this bizarre prank. There was absolutely no way that Regina would have signed them up for this – too much potential for public embarrassment. Ruby kept teasing her about her supposed crush on Regina, but this wasn't really her style. Too elaborate. Killian had sulked when she turned down his third unsolicited marriage proposal in a week and yelled at her that maybe she should just marry Regina instead. But she hadn't heard from him in months, and, she wasn't sure he could actually read and write well enough to pull something like this off.
She noticed a flash of movement beside the kitchen doorway. "Henry. Get your butt in here right now."
He leaned against the doorframe, apparently trying to play it cool. "What's up, Mom?"
She crossed her arms and pinned him with her best I-can-be-a-disciplinarian-too look. It wasn't quite up to Regina's lofty standards, but Emma was trying to make sure that she wasn't just the fun-Mom all the time. "Kid, do you happen to know anything about a radio station competition that Regina and I have somehow been entered in? A competition for couples?"
She could almost see the series of thoughts chasing each other through his brain as he calculated just how much trouble he was likely to be in, and how best to squirm his way out of it. He looked at her with his best puppy dog eyes, the very look that she herself had rehearsed in front of the mirror over and over again until it was perfect. It had worked better for him when he was ten, but even as an overgrown fifteen-year-old with messy hair, a deepening voice, and three inches of height on her, it was still surprisingly effective.
"I just thought it would be a nice way to feel a bit more like a family."
She sighed. "Kid, we're a family, but not quite like that. You know I care deeply for your mother, but we're just friends."
His expression turned hangdog, and Emma felt a twinge of guilt, until she noticed the way that he was carefully watching her. "Okay kid, I call bullshit. What's your angle here?"
Regina chose that exact moment to walk in and she glared at Emma. "Language."
Emma rolled her eyes. "It's nothing he hasn't heard before. Besides, do you realise what our shit of a son has done?" She didn't wait for Regina to respond. "He's entered us into a radio station competition for couples."
Emma watched enviously as Regina effortlessly summoned a perfect disapproving-Mom-face. "Is this true, Henry?"
He looked down at his feet, hunching his shoulders to make himself look smaller and softly replied, "Yes, Mom."
"You understand that that was incredibly inappropriate, don't you?"
Regina's Mom-voice even made Emma feel ashamed and repentant for crimes that she hadn't even committed, and Henry continued to look at the floor, scuffing his shoes against the tiles, as he responded. "I know, Mom. I'm sorry." He looked up, and Emma clocked the exact moment he switched on his puppy dog eyes, and Regina softened in response. "It's just that the prize was so awesome; I knew it was something we'd all enjoy."
"What's the prize, kid?" Emma was actually curious now, and she cursed the combination of her genetics and Regina's brilliance that made Henry such a force to be reckoned with.
"A cameo in the next Avengers movie, and a meet and greet with the cast." He looked back and forth between them both with pleading eyes. "Please, Moms. The competition really isn't that big a deal, and I really want to meet Scarlett Johansson."
"Really? That's a seriously weird prize for something like this." Emma glanced over at Regina and realised that Henry's ridiculous little scheme was on the verge of success. When it came to Henry, she was an absolute sucker. And, she was totally a closet comic book nerd as Emma had discovered.
"Emma and I will look at what's involved and we'll think about it, dear."
And yep, there it was. Regina, the former Evil Queen, feared across the lands, had folded in the face of a pair of big sad eyes, and Emma was going to have to play along with this idiotic scheme. There was no way this was going to be awkward. Nope. No way at all.
As they were leaving for dinner, Emma pulled Henry aside for a moment. "So what'd you call this little scheme? Come on, I know you'll have a name for it."
He winked at her. "Operation Black Widow."
That'd be right. Emma wondered if she was going to wind up being the main course.
As it turned out, there were a series of challenges as part of the competition that 4SQW were filming for their website and social media. Emma had half-expected to Regina baulk at that, but apparently her love for her son, the Avengers, or both, was strong enough to overcome her usual distaste at the possibility of public humiliation. Emma hated to admit it, but she was actually kind of having fun, enjoying the opportunity to spend time with Regina in a way that was relaxed and not the usual mess of mortal peril and world-ending drama that they were normally facing. Yes, she was definitely enjoying it, but seeing Regina like this really wasn't doing anything to help with the annoyingly persistent crush she'd been harbouring for years.
So far, the challenges had been relatively innocuous. A quiz about their partner, a locked room challenge, a three-legged race. They were actually doing surprising well, and were tied for first place on points at the moment. They would have been outright first, but Regina had stubbornly insisted on wearing heels for the three-legged race, and they'd tripped, falling in a ridiculous tangle of arms and legs. Emma had lain on top of her laughing, completely forgetting where they were, while Regina rolled her eyes, grumbling, without actually making a move to push her off.
Ruby had been all over that footage and waved it under Emma's nose the next day when she was getting breakfast in the diner. "I knew I wasn't imagining it. You and Regina totally have a thing."
Emma swallowed her mouthful of pancakes before responding. "I already explained to you that this whole thing is fake."
"Nuh uh. No way I'm buying that line. You can't fake chemistry like this. Look." She replayed the footage, pausing at a particular scene.
"What am I supposed to be seeing?"
"This." Ruby gestured emphatically at the small phone screen. "You don't look at someone like that unless you seriously want to jump their bones."
"We've already discussed your theories about my feelings, and I didn't deny them then." She'd only admitted to the crush after Ruby had plied her with enough tequila to kill a moose.
Ruby grinned. "Yeah, that's not news. But you're both looking at each other the same way in this shot."
"You really need to get a hobby that doesn't involve dissecting my imaginary love life in slow motion," Emma grumbled, as she finished her pancakes.
"But this is the most interesting thing that's happened in months." Ruby looked at her phone again and laughed. "I'm totally going to gif that bit where you grab Regina's boob."
"Just remember that I'm the Sheriff. I could make you disappear, and I'd be the one in charge of the investigation." Emma lowered her voice and whispered, "They'd never find you."
Ruby thought for a moment, before she eyed Emma cheekily. "You know, you and Regina are totally doing that couples thing where you get more and more like each other. That was vintage Regina."
"I'm sure I could find a silver bullet or some holy water at Gold's shop, if you keep this up." Emma adopted her most menacing tone, which really wasn't particularly menacing really, no matter how many times she practised it. She'd actually asked Regina for tips once, but she'd just rolled her eyes and told Emma to stick to her knitting.
"Alright, alright. So, what's the last challenge?"
"Don't know. They kept this one a secret."
The secret was revealed later that day, and Emma paled as she heard it announced. It was a kissing contest, with the best kiss as voted by the public taking full points.
"Oh no. I think I'm going to be sick," she whispered, as she heard the details of the challenge. She hadn't realised she'd said it aloud until she saw the brief flash of something that could have been hurt on Regina's face.
"I know we haven't always seen eye-to-eye, Emma, but I didn't realise that you found me that repulsive."
Emma found herself completely at a loss for words. She tried to think of an appropriate response, but she only managed to choke out a mess of half-sentences. "No, Regina. No that's not… Damn it."
"Well, you're just going to have to get over yourself, because we're not letting Henry down. And, I refuse to lose to that boring accountant and his irritating fake-tanned wife."
When they were called onto the stage, Henry gave them both a thumbs up. Making out with your son's other mother in front of him, and thousands of strangers on the Internet; Emma tried and failed to think of a more excruciatingly embarrassing moment.
The kiss was awkward at first, and she was dimly aware of the running commentary in the background being provided by Sammy and Seamus. Emma wasn't quite sure where to put her hands, and she was taken by surprise at the enthusiasm with which Regina threw herself into the kiss. After an initial clash of teeth, they found a rhythm, and Emma became more and more lost in the sensation of Regina's lips moving against her own, tuning out the world around them. She'd never actually dared to dream that this could happen, but now that it was, she decided that she was damned well going to enjoy it, no matter how ridiculous the pretext. She tangled a hand in Regina's hair, her other hand skimming the soft skin of her hip, just below the hem of her shirt. Regina responded by pulling Emma more firmly against her, their bodies melding together at a thousand points.
Gradually, they came back to themselves, remembering where they were. Emma couldn't help the smile that spread across her face as they separated. She gazed at Regina, who was wearing a slightly dazed expression that she suspected was the mirror image of her own.
"Well…" Regina whispered, slightly breathless.
Emma only realised that their hands were clasped together when they returned to their seats to listen to the rest of the live broadcast and Henry held up his hands to high-five them both. "That was awesome, Moms. I mean, totally gross, but awesome."
"Gross, huh? That's your own fault, kid." Emma shot Henry a look. "I seem to remember that this was 100 percent your idea." She grinned deviously. "You know, your Mom is a pretty great kisser." She laughed evilly as Henry screwed up his face, before she choked a little, the unfamiliar sensation irritating her throat.
Regina rubbed Emma's back soothingly and whispered, "Careful, dear. It takes years of voice training to laugh like that." Regina waved a hand in a vague sweeping gesture that seemed to range from her diaphragm to her mouth. "This certainly didn't all happen overnight."
As the show came to an end, the winners were announced. Somehow, Regina's hand had made its way into her own again as they waited for the results, and Emma found that she was rather pleased at this turn of events.
"Well, the results are in. And it seems that it's Emma and Regina by a landslide. I know I would have voted for them, Seamus."
"So would I, Sammy. So, this means that Emma and Regina will be the lucky couple kissing in a scene in the next Avengers film."
Emma and Regina looked at each other in shock. Emma was the first to speak. "That's the prize? I thought we'd just be standing around in the background, maybe getting shot or something."
Regina quirked an eyebrow. "Well, I suppose we'll have to practise some more to make sure we don't embarrass ourselves. Will that be a problem for you?"
Emma's smiled as she held Regina's gaze. Regina had an incredible poker face, but Emma could see the hint of a smile that she was fighting to suppress. "No. Definitely not." Her smile widened. "Should we start practising right now?"