"What's going on?" David asks Emma, but she shakes her head and looks away from the bed, biting her lips, and David knows her well enough by now to know not to push.
His phone call to his wife took him away for less than five minutes, and while he knows, firsthand, that five minutes were more than enough for the Evil Queen of his land to create havoc in their lives, one look at his daughter's eyes lets him know that's not the case this time. This time the problem is not Regina, not in her typical Regina way, and not something that can be solved with a spell or a sword or even an unexpected alliance, and he feels lost.
Once again his daughter needs him and he can't help her.
And, like before, this is all Regina's fault, only it isn't.
"She had a seizure," Emma whispers, and he looks to the other side of the room where a nurse and a doctor are checking files and machines. "I mean, I think she had a seizure. I don't know. She was just…she was staring at me, but not really seeing me, you know? So I called for a doctor and he's been with her for a few minutes."
"It is…" he stops. He was a farmer and then a Prince in a land so different than this one. He doesn't know much about brain injury, but he knows that people that suffered from one in his land were mocked by the kids and considered a burden to their families. He licks his lips; how many had he mocked as a child? Children are cruel and he wasn't much different. "It is serious? What did the doctor say?"
"Not much, but the nurse said it's nothing to worry about."
"And that's not good why?" He asks seeing the worry in Emma's eyes.
"Because it means she's been having them quite some time now."
David says nothing. Emma is clearly upset and all he can do is put a hand around her shoulders, keeping her close to him. "Let's get a cup of coffee, okay?"
Worrying about his daughter, he's good at. Worrying for both his daughter and Regina, he's not so good at. Regina, in a way, is larger than life and he never had to worry about her life before. Her plans and evil ways, yes, but worrying about her well-being is more Snow's thing. He's a simple man and all he wants is to see his wife and daughter happy, and if Regina makes Emma happy he doesn't have to like it to accept it.
Emma doesn't move though and David can only guess what's going on inside her head. He knows she feels guilty about Regina's disappearing and, unfortunately, Henry has a lot to do with this. Emma, well, she's not much of a talker when she doesn't want to talk, but the last year was hard on her.
This time it wasn't a curse that took his mother away, and Henry is lashing out at everyone, but especially at Emma. No longer hiding behind lies, Regina and Henry had formed a very strong bond before the… "accident," and Emma's failure to find the former Queen took a toll on their relationship.
Sometimes David wonders if some of Henry's attitude comes from when Emma wanted to take him away without telling him or Regina first.
"Come on," he says again, gently squeezing Emma's shoulder. "Let them do their job."
Three Months Later
Henry wakes with enough time to spare until he has to get up. He turns off his alarm, rubs the sleep from his eyes, and turns on his side so he's facing away from the door in case Emma comes to wake him up.
Not that she comes, not anymore.
Emma is busy with breakfast and keeping on schedule, and while she's doing her best, they all know that that was his mom's territory. Schedules and meetings and his dentist appointment, and now that they are running to keep up, only now they understand the kind of hard, but silent, work, Regina did.
He wonders if she'll ever be like before.
He sighs and closes his eyes. Soon he's back to the hospital room, months after she was "lost," days after he was told she was alive, hours in which his hands were shaking with excitement and guilt. More excitement than guilt. More guilt than excitement. He even dyed his hair to his natural color- or at least he tried.
Grams was kind with him in a way Emma hadn't been in a very long time, helping him pick the right color and dying his hair in their living room, while David and Emma were off to bring his mom back home -only they didn't. And while he's the first to admit that he deserved it, he can't help but feel as if Emma let him down. But if he really wants to be honest with himself, the real reason for feeling that is because he feels like he has let down his mom, Regina, many times in the past.
Now he knows that his mom had an accident. Emma didn't tell him any details except that his mom was hurt, but a small part of him (okay, a big part of him) feels that his mother had had enough of him. Emma was right; she can take his teasing, but Regina did too many wrongs in her life to be able to tell the difference between teasing and accusing.
Not when it comes to him.
Because she thinks she hurt him in the same way her mother hurt her.
Only she didn't.
And he can't tell her because he's back at the hospital, with Emma and Grams by his side, and he's smiling, big and bright and so full of love, and he waits for his mom to open her eyes and see him and smile the smile she only has for him, and then she opens her eyes and he stops breathing for a few moments.
One brown, one black and weird looking. Not like his mother's eyes before Emma broke the curse and changed his world for the first time. Not like his mother's eyes when she was ready to die to make sure he could live. And definitely not like her eyes, dark and full of tears, when she was saying goodbye to him.
Her eyes weren't cold or dark with motive, but Henry felt cold water run down his spine. He looks at Emma, needing an explanation, needing this whole thing to be as simple as True Love's Kiss, but Emma doesn't look at him. She's biting her lip and can't, won't, look at him, and Henry knows. He knows that whatever he wanted to tell to his mom, it will have to wait.
Maybe forever.
He opens his eyes; the memory of his first visit to the hospital leaves him aching for something he can't have. Instead he stares at the wall of his new bedroom as if it holds the solution to his problems, and then he's out of his bed, hair fuzzy from sleep, but feeling tired already. In one week he's going to start school in Portland and this time he doesn't have the benefit of forgetting.
The floor is cold under his feet, but the room is warm. Emma is doing her best to balance rent, his new school and his mom's hospital bills, and sometimes she thinks that if she waits until the last possible minute to turn on the heat it will save them a few dollars. She used to do the same when they were living in New York when they obviously didn't have to, but old habits die hard.
Emma had told him once he didn't know how bad things could be in foster care, but he was too young to pay attention to someone else's pain. His mother was the Evil Queen of the fairytales and no one had it worse than him. Henry searches for a photograph of them, maybe when he was seven or eight, happy and knowing nothing about his adoption, safe in his mom's hug, and smiles when he sees it.
Most of his things are back at home waiting for him. His clothes are still in the boxes Emma brought for him. Every day Emma tells him to put his clothes in the closet and every day he picks what he needs from one box and uses a chair for a closet. His laptop and a dozen books he can't live without are the only items of his stuff piled next to his bed.
He knows they are going to stay in Portland for a while, but he can't bring himself to empty the boxes. If he does it, then it means that this is real and he likes to pretend that it's a nightmare he's going to wake up from any minute now for as long as he can.
Because this? This is entirely his fault.
There's a knock at his door and then a soft, "Henry?"
"I'm awake," he says, but doesn't move.
He looks around the empty walls. At least they are a nice light shade of blue. It wasn't supposed to be his room. His mom's nurses told them that the color blue has a calming effect on Regina so Emma had David paint this room a light blue for her. Not one of them thought much of the two steps you have to climb to get into the room.
Who pays attention to two steps, right? Only they should have because his mom's motor skills are the ones of a toddler, if said toddler was also drunk. No one had thought of that, not him, not Emma, not grandpa, until they drove his mom home from the hospital. And what a ride that was.
So Henry is sleeping in the master bedroom, which looks really big and empty with his single bed and workspace. He can fit all his stuff into the closet and still have room for him and both of his moms to step inside, sit and have a cup of coffee.
He misses his room. His old room, not the one in New York. Although, sometimes he misses his life back in New York. It's the anonymity he misses the most. At Storybrooke everyone knows his name, but in New York he was just another kid. He misses that. Not always, but there are nights when he's watching a movie or a TV show, sees a familiar building or street and smiles with nostalgia.
"Can I come in?" Emma asks behind the door.
He's alone in the room, but he nods anyway. "Yeah, come in. I'm decent."
He's wearing boxers and a tee and Emma needs to stop playing with the heater; it's not as if mom's gift didn't leave them with money. But he suspects that playing with money is Emma's way of not thinking about stuff. He does the same, tries not to think about his mom's condition, but he has a different way of avoiding it than Emma.
"Are you warm enough?" It's the first thing Emma asks when she steps into the room, and he raises an eyebrow because she's wearing a hoodie. "She likes the cold, you know?"
Yeah, he knows. His mom always liked Maine's cold weather and even used to let a crack of her bedroom window open to get fresh air. When he was small, about five or six, and there was a storm outside, she would pick him up from his bed (he wasn't afraid of the storms) and once in her bedroom, she would put him under the covers and tell him that he was in a shelter now, just the two of them, warm and safe from the world.
He smiles at the memory. "She likes to feel the weight of the blankets. She used to make a shelter for us to hide inside."
"I remember it too," Emma says after a few moments, and it's so weird because his first memory is of his mom, but now that Emma said she remembers, he also remembers Emma doing the same.
"Weird," he admits, and Emma is Emma; she makes a grimace and dismisses the whole thing.
"Breakfast is almost ready. You go wake Regina and I'll finish in the kitchen, okay?"
She doesn't wait for an answer; she almost runs out of his room and not for the first time Henry realizes that this is as hard for Emma as it is for him.
While his room is big and empty, his mom's room is small and the queen-size bed takes most of the space. There is enough space for a small nightstand and that's it. Emma doesn't have a lot of clothes, and mom's clothes are still in the closet and drawers exactly as she left them back at home before her disappearance. Neither Emma nor he had had the guts to pack her things away.
"Mom?" He calls from the door and when she doesn't make a sound or move, he walks inside. Waking her up in the morning is his least favorite thing to do. She always looks tired, as if she hasn't slept all night, and he always feels sorry for waking her up. The more she sleeps, the better the chance for her brain to heal, and if she didn't have pool today they would let her enjoy her sleep.
But they have to follow her schedule at all costs if they want her to make a full recovery. Henry of course knows that his mom will never be the same as before. He looked online for her condition and even became a member at a forum with people with traumatic brain injury like his mom. It will be a miracle if she comes back to 80% and even then her injury will last for life.
"Mom? Time to wake up."