Chapter One: Regina

"Mom? Who's Regina? Is it bad?" Emma blinked and frowned, as if she'd been somewhere else and couldn't remember where that had been.

"Regina? I don't know, Henry, why don't you…get ready for school or something."

"It's Sunday."

"Oh, right, yeah…" She grabbed a seat and sat down unsteadily. A fog still clouded her mind and trying to hold on to threads of reality felt like grabbing at smoke: elusive and not-quite tangible. She traced along solid lines of memory until she reached a point where things started getting confusing: images of a woman with dark hair and anguished eyes, purple and green light, apologies and promises of a happy ending…

"Mom, snap out of it!" Henry's voice got through to her, finally. She pushed aside all thoughts of the strange woman in her dreams and focused on him. He had his hands on both of her cheeks, grounding her to reality. It was Sunday and he had soccer practice, so she'd have to drop him off on the way to work. Sunday shifts were a drag, but she'd lost the bet this week and had to do it. She really ought to know better than to compete against Kate in archery – her strengths lay in shooting and, for some reason, fencing, and she couldn't shoot an arrow to save her life. She shook her head once more to make sure the weirdness had passed, before getting up and going back into her bedroom to get dressed.

"Okay, kid. Ten minutes and then we'll hit the road."

The day started off pretty normally: she got Henry to his practice at 9:00 and then dragged herself reluctantly into work for 9:30. It was going to be a long, slow day of shooting hoops at the office and filing paperwork against various child support-dodging douchebags and people who insist on parking their cars in a goddamn no-parking zone. At least on weekdays she was guaranteed company to gripe at, but only one deputy was needed in the office on weekends so she was left to stew in her own irritation for eight hours. If she was lucky, she'd be called out on a car chase or she'd get to sprint after some muggers and stretch out her legs. Emma was pretty sure that it wasn't very morally acceptable to wish that a serious crime would happen just so she could go outside.

It was baseball season, however, and the Yankees were playing the Sox so she had high hopes for some good bar fights. She was just considering whether it was worth going out on patrol when the phone rang.

"New York City Sheriff's office, Swan speaking." Emma could hear a strange scratching noise on the line, but couldn't make out any words until –

"Emma?" The line went dead and she had to sit for a second to process the freaky crap that had just gone down for the second time that day. Seriously, was she finally losing it? She'd seen a few kids go a bit crazy in some of her foster homes, not that she blamed them, they'd been through a lot – they all had. There was a reason why she'd gotten out of the system as soon as she could, even if it wasn't exactly legal. Perhaps those ghosts had finally come back to play games with her mind and now she was hallucinating. Yeah, that sounded more plausible than anything else she could come up with.

She just couldn't shake that voice: she could've sworn it was the same one she heard in her dreams and it had sounded so strange, like it was being transmitted through water or something was interfering with the signal…she shook herself off. Definitely time to go on patrol. She picked up her badge and gun from her desk and locked the office on the way out, trying to block all thoughts that weren't directly related to her job. She recited arrest procedures and warrant protocols in her mind just to distract herself, and soon found herself walking along Queens Boulevard towards the East River. She sometimes missed being a beat cop in Boston – being on the streets and fighting crime on the frontline was more her style, but working in the sheriff's office was more challenging in some ways, since she had a broader variety of work and she got to use her brain a bit more. It was also a lot safer, which was a comfort to her since she was raising her son alone. Paperwork still sucked though.

As usual, she had written about ten parking tickets before she even reached the river. People were idiots and she could've sworn she'd seen that Mercedes somewhere before. Maybe she'd had to tow it last time? Just as she was about to write up her eleventh parking infraction of the day, she felt a weird tug on her insides and found herself drawn to a shop just down the alley to her left. As she followed the call, she found herself captivated by a dream catcher hanging in the window of what she now saw was an odd occult shop. The hair on the back of her neck rose and she got that odd feeling someone was watching her, but saw nobody when she looked around. She stared at the dream catcher again and could have sworn she saw a flash of gold before she blinked and it disappeared. The whole thing felt really familiar, and she was honestly getting sick of that feeling.

That's when her cell phone rang.

"Mom? I just got home and there's a guy here. He says he's my dad." Her insides froze. It couldn't be…how did he even find them out here? Then again, she supposed the downside to working for the public was that she could probably be found on any half-decent search engine, but her address shouldn't be there. How in hell had Neal found them?

She raced home, slamming the door open upon her arrival and searching frantically for her son. He wasn't supposed to come home alone – she'd made arrangements with one of the other parents from the soccer team to drop him off after practice. Henry had a tendency to wander off, though, so she wasn't entirely surprised and this wasn't the first time it had happened. It was just the first time it had gone wrong.

Henry looked up from the couch and waved. And opposite him was…yep, that was Neal: all of 5"9 and useless, dumping her ass without a word of explanation and leaving her to get arrested for his crime. Needless to say, she wasn't pleased to see him.

"Emma, you need to come with me. Your family's in danger." She simply raised an eyebrow at that, since Neal knew perfectly well that the only family she had was sitting right across from him. And how had he known that Henry was his son, anyway? Not that it mattered, since he'd been involved in absolutely no part of Henry's life since birth and in her book that meant he wasn't really the kid's father. She quickly moved to stand in front of Henry and glared down at the intruder in her house. Neal simply sighed. "Okay, so you really don't remember anything. I was so hoping Regina was mistaken there." Emma froze once more, her mind once more assaulted with images at the mention of that name. Neal was looking away and scowling, so he didn't catch her shocked expression.

"Regina? Who's Regina?" Emma was proud of the fact that her voice was almost steady. Neal turned back to look at her and seemed mildly confused as to why she was more disturbed at the mention of the other woman's name than she was at his sudden appearance in her life.

"She's…look, it's a long story. Can we talk about this in the car?" His voice took on that plaintive tone that she hated so much and she simply glared back.

"You're going to have to give me more than that if you want me to go anywhere with you. I'd be taking Henry as well and I don't trust you right now, certainly not with him." For some odd reason, her ex smiled at that.

"At least that hasn't changed. Okay, Emma, I need you to think hard and ask yourself some questions that I bet you've been avoiding. First off: why did you name our son Henry?" The blonde woman bristled at the use of the word 'our', since the guy had literally turned up five minutes ago and therefore had no claim whatsoever over her son. She put that aside for now though, and focused on the question.

"He's named after…" There was a blank. There was a blank in her brain and she had no idea what was supposed to be there. Her face screwed up in frustration. "He's named after…I-I don't remember." And there was that dull, sickening feeling that something was wrong. Something was missing and she could not remember what it was.

"Alright, how about this apartment? How much are you paying in rent?"

No answer.

"How much are you paid a year for your job?"

Nothing. She couldn't think. It didn't make sense.

"Emma, you know this world. Do you think your average deputy sheriff could afford a place like this? Could afford to send Henry to that nice private school and take him to games every season? You weren't supposed to question it, she made it that way. She just wanted you and Henry to have your happy ending."