Housekeeping
Since moving into the house with the white picket fence, Henry honestly cannot say there are many ways in which his life has changed. For the most part, things are the same. He still lives with his mom. He still sees his family – his other mom, his grandparents, his uncle – every day. The town is small and his family is close by and close-knit, and there is always someone to walk him to the bus stop in the morning or meet him there in the afternoon when school gets out. There are fencing lessons and riding lessons and archery lessons and sailing lessons and meals at Granny's.
Henry loves the things that have stayed the same. But he also loves the new things, the changes which – though small in number – have come to mean so much. He loves that, finally, at age 14, he has the home he's always wanted. It is a dream that is at once wondrous and utterly mundane, unglamorous in its ordinariness, but it is precisely this normalcy that makes it magical. Sometimes just the sheer improbability of it is enough to make him stop and pinch himself, just to be sure that he doesn't wake up to find it all fading away.
Mornings – especially weekend mornings – are his favorite. When they can, they all sleep in. Whoever wakes up first gets to choose the music, and as luck would have it it's usually him. He puts on whatever album happens to be his latest favorite, opens the curtains, collects the paper from the front step. When his parents come down – groggy, tousled, but cheerful – his mom makes pancakes and scrambled eggs, his stepdad makes coffee and Henry makes cocoa and waters the plants. They sit down together at the dining table in their pjs and clink their mugs in a toast before tucking in. It's a ritual.
There are other rituals, other routines, other symbols of normalcy. On the weekends his stepdad mows the lawn – a chore he picked up quickly and at which he is surprisingly proficient – and if she's not working, his mom sweeps the front walk and weeds the flower border by the fence. When the paint starts peeling, Henry puts on an old raincoat and covers the fence with whitewash so that it's like new again. It is vital that these things be maintained, not just for appearances' sake, but because investing in this house and the fence especially is a way of expressing gratitude for the second chance – the future – it represents. It is also a way of thumbing their noses at the Fates that have put them all through the wringer again and again, of saying, this is permanent, this can't be snatched away. This family is staying. All of these efforts do not go unnoticed by the neighbors, and Henry has heard more than a few townspeople muttering about keeping up with the Joneses, to which he always wants to reply "Don't you mean the Swan-Joneses?" but he bites his tongue in time. Because he doesn't need to argue, doesn't need to defend them. It's enough that he's just proud of them, his mom and Killian, proud that they can inspire envy, that they have come far enough to be a subject of harmless town gossip.
There was a time when he feared they wouldn't get here, when he needed all the help he could get to hold onto hope. Henry does his best not to dwell on that time – they all do. There have been many dark times over the years but that was the darkest, so they all bury it deep, and instead the living room and hallways and bedrooms are decorated with better memories – a barrage of photographs that act like a barricade against the darkness. There are still a few relics that remain, though, from that other time. The dreamcatcher Henry found at the bottom of his stepdad's sea chest, in the corner of the shed. The dried rose his mom keeps in a box in her sock drawer which she thinks no one knows about. And Henry has a relic of his own: a song on an old iPod that he can't bring himself to listen to anymore, even when it means skipping over it on a playlist. He tried to listen to it shortly after moving into the new house, tried to just hold on to what was good from the memories it provoked, but everything was tainted through and through and he turned off the music with a shiver and an aching heart. Some wounds heal too slowly.
When it rains or snows or it's too cold or hot, they clean inside the house, vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, tidying. As a teenager Henry is given a little leeway, but he's still expected to pitch in and at the very least to keep his room reasonably neat because, as laid back and permissive as he is in some areas, when it comes to his living quarters Killian wants everything shipshape, and that applies to the whole house. Henry grumbles about it, but in truth he doesn't really mind. Rules mean stability, which is something all of them want and need, he no less than his parents, and he reminds himself that like the fence, the tidy house is a promise. A promise to themselves that this home is their present and their future, and that by keeping it, looking after it, they are looking after each other. And so they keep it clean, fill it with people, host brunches and dinners and birthdays and game nights. And when they have been away and return home, the house welcomes them with its familiar smells and its growing collection of happy memories: of Killian carrying Emma over the threshold, of Henry sliding down the long bannisters, of scavenger hunts and hide and seek and endless games of Monopoly, of Sunday crosswords and impromptu dance parties, evening Netflix marathons and stargazing through the telescope.
Henry has a bedtime, and some nights he sticks to it, switching off the light and knowing, under the warmth of his covers, in the quiet of his room under the eaves, that he can sleep soundly, without fear or uncertainty about where he belongs. But on other nights he switches off his bedroom light and creeps on tiptoe down the hall, down the stairs, where he sits at the base of the staircase and listens to the murmur of his parents' conversation at the end of a long day. They cannot see or hear him from the living room couch, and he cannot see them, but he finds comfort in the sounds of their voices, in his mom's light laughter, his stepdad's low chuckle. The rise and fall, the cadences tell him without words that all is well, that they are safe. There will be more crises – this is Storybrooke, after all – and he knows there will be more obstacles, more sorrows to overcome, but for now they are all safe and that is happiness enough.
Many of their words do not carry, swallowed up by the carpets and furniture and never making their way to Henry's ears, but there are a few that do, three in particular, which he hears uttered night after night. Over drinks on the couch, or in the hallway before bed, or whispered behind his parents' bedroom door. He hears them in the daytime too, coming downstairs in the morning or over the breakfast table, words which are repeated in phone calls, written in little notes that find their way to the dining table or stuck to the fridge or to the dashboard of Emma's car. Those words – that phrase – is everywhere now, part of the house itself and inescapable, permanent, as fixed as the constellations he spies through Killian's telescope.
Because once they were afraid to say it, afraid what it would mean, afraid that, by speaking the words, they would have so much more to lose. But they're not afraid anymore because they have already lost everything, lost it again and again, until loss on top of loss was too much, until a life emptied out, hollowed like a shell, a life of mere survival, was not enough. And so they fought for the right to speak those words without fear, fought for their happiness, their future, and they clawed their way forward out of the dark, flying in the face of Fate and Death and Memory and Time, until those monoliths yielded and at last they fell into each others arms, finding each other again. It is a story for the ages, an Epic worthy of the greatest heroes, and one day Henry will write it all down, taking care to omit no detail, gloss over no ugliness or hardship, rendering faithfully all that occurred, the bad and the good. When that day comes, his blank book and his pen will be ready, laid out on his desk in the room under the eaves, but for now he has taken a break from writing. He has a life that needs living and a family that needs loving and a house that needs keeping: a fence to whitewash and rooms to clean and promises to keep.