Author's note: This story is placed just after everyone comes back from the Underworld. I'm hoping that I'm able to finish this before season 5b starts up. The challenge is on.


These are the things that they don't tell you about True Love's Kiss.

1. Sometimes, it's inconvenient. Like, really inconvenient.

Emma Swan should have known that this was how the situation was going to end. Well, not end per say because that would infer a denouement to the shit show that is her life.

No, the end meaning an end to the darkness that she had consumed so long ago for the new situation.

Right now, there are five things that Emma Swan knows

One: She's lying on the ground and, if she's not mistaken there's a wet patch where her shoulder blades meet.

Two: Everyone sans Hook, who decided to stay dead in the Underworld, is back in Storybrooke.

Three: She doesn't hear foreign Dark One voices anymore. Which yay, because she hated hearing about Chimera cravings.

Four: There's a tingle on her lips and the taste of light magic on her tongue.

And Five: Regina's really, really close to her face. Like, so close that Emma can see what she had affectionately labelled the scar of seduction eons ago and, stains of tears streaking down her face.

Emma tries to get up, fails and then groans.

"Regina? What the hell happened?" she asks groggily, trying to cover her failure.

She blinks heavily and takes another look at the woman, who, at the moment is looking both horrified and scared, looking as rough as Emma internally feels. She looks up the woman she addressed and receives silence, which is a little weird because the other woman is notorious for her quick wit and succinct explanations.

Her parents, Henry and Robin are all there, standing around them a little awkwardly. She blinks again and starts to feel the dredges of consciousness loose her.

And no one is still saying anything.

"We need to get you to the hospital," David says this gently, trying to lead when no one else is.

She grimaces, "No, no hospitals, I just need to lie down, like, I am now. I'm good here, just put traffic cones around me." She hates hospitals.

She feels a gentle hold on her arm and, in the next moment, she's hears a whoosh and feels as light as a feather.

The disinfectant filters through her nostrils making them twitch and, she instantly knows that Regina has transported everyone to the hospital. It figures that the Mayor would never have listened to her.

The hold on her arm loosens and is replaced by the abrasiveness of her mothers.

"Are you ok? Where else are you hurt? You're bleeding," Mary Margaret asks in a flurry. The maternal gesture makes Emma want to whine like a child about being tough and strong but, she doesn't.

"Oh come on, it's just a little flesh wound," Emma replies.

She knows that she's on a hospital bed, she can feel the frenzy going around her, the tension in the room, the beeping of monitors and calls for doctors.

What she wouldn't give for just a little bit of morphine or a shot of Jack right now.

But, in all the disarray she hears one awed statement.

"Mom saved you," she hears her son's voice causing her to look at him.

"Henry." She says this reverently, as if it were the first time she learned his name or, the last time that she will ever say it.

Life and death situations have a strange way of bringing out emotions like that and, she hates that she has become more than acquaintances with it in the past few years.

"Mom saved you, Emma," he says more firmly taking a slight step towards her. She notices the slight undercurrent of desperation in his tone as if her were trying to convey something important.

She blinks heavily.

She remembers getting separated from everyone with Regina, running away from Cerberus into Hades lair, remembers being stabbed by Hades (Thanks asshole), remembers being infected by a curse that had been killing her slowly from the inside because of Asshole's stab.

She remembers leaving Hook in the Underworld because he had met with his lost love. She remembers a hurt not one forged from the heart but, through knowing the abandonment of someone dear to her once again.

She remembers getting back to Storybrooke and collapsing onto Regina.

She remembers seeing black.

She doesn't remember how she woke but she knows that the curse had been broken with a True Loves Kiss.

"Regina?"

The woman in question caught like a deer in headlights desperately looks from Robin to her to Henry to her again and before anyone can say anything else, she leaves in a puff of purple smoke.

It smells like cinnamon and feels like a lonely sort of safety.

Before any more comments can be a made, a nurse walks in, "Ah, the Charmings again, I do hope that you've remembered to bring your medical insurance information this time."

And dammit, Emma just had to forget to lodge the premium papers for hospital insurance last month.

Saving everyone is damn inconvenient sometimes.


Thank you for reading.