Author's Note: Not dead yet, and I have somehow found a way to continue this. Unbeta'ed. Characters belong to others who should just let Swan Queen happen already. Read, review, rant. :)

Dark and light magic continued to battle within and without the sleeping couple. The mist around them were dancing purple and gold, but soon enough a blinding white light started to emerge from them both.

"Is that supposed to happen? That doesn't look like a curse acting to destroy Regina." Snow White growled towards the Blue Fairy, who, at the moment, is looking turning white with alarm.

"No, Your Highness...I think we've come across something unanticipated."

As the light continues to grow, enveloping and protecting both women, a force emerges from it, sweeping across everything in its path.

Snow White gasped as she recognized that sudden rush she has felt twice before in her life: once when she was woken from a curse, and again when her grandson was saved by her daughter.

"This can't be..."

"It is. You more than I know that one cannot defeat -"

"True love."

A vortex began to form around Emma and Regina and as it begins to consume everything, Snow White's last thought was a prayer to whatever deity could be listening, to whatever force that could help her now, that true love be enough to save Emma, to give her happiness somehow, even if it was with Regina.

Emma Swan opened her eyes, having blown out the candle on her self-bought cupcake. A knock interrupted her trek towards a six-pack in her fridge. She was sure it was no one from work, and absolutely not one of the string of occasional fuck buddies she kept on file. Her birthdate was one of the rare things she truly knew about her origins, and she made sure to keep it sacred. She opened the door to find a small face hidden under a mop of hair.

"Are you Emma Swan?"

"Maybe. Shouldn't you be home somewhere, Kid?"

"I am. I'm your son, Henry. Henry Blanchard."

Shortly after feeding the boy and trying to navigate between getting him to stop talking about some childish curse and getting him to start talking about directions to his real home, the rest of her birthday was spent driving to Storybrooke, Maine. As her beloved and battered car passed beyond the quaint welcome sign, Emma felt that her life is about extremely complicated.

Across town, the hand of the clock tower started to move. Regina Mills felt an odd sensation pass through her, but she dismissed it as coming from fatigue. When Daniel died, she threw herself into making Mills Bakery a successful business. Her mother never approved of him nor of her plan to earn her own money. Her father had, over the years, given up any semblance of being an individual, and resigned himself to being controlled by his wife. She had pinned her hopes of making a happy life with Daniel, and his death shortly after their engagement nearly broke her. Paradoxically, it was the tyranny of her mother that made her push on. She was no weakling, and she won't make herself vulnerable again. She gave up the fairy tale of a happy ever after with anyone. She had dalliances, of course, with Ruby being the most memorable, and also the most fleeting. Graham was the most recent, and he was starting to get demanding, which signalled to Regina that it was getting near the time to end their fling. To be a successful, independent, smart, and desirable woman, she supposed, was as happy an ending as she could get. As she walked to her Mercedes Benz, she watched in bemusement as a lemon of a car throttled by and broke the silence she was enjoying. She expected that like most unfamiliar cars, it would pass through their fiefdom and be gone by the morning.