Chapter Twenty-Two: Henry's Grace

(Author's Note: Please ignore age inaccuracies. Per my fanfic, these are Henry, Grace, and Roland's ages)

Henry was sitting near the creek with his legs splayed out, knees at his shoulder level and width as he moved his hands and produced purple light. His stomach clenched with guilt, and shame moistened his upper lip.

Over his shoulder, a Friesian gelding stood, muzzle close to the top of Henry's head. Inspecting Henry's work.

"Merlin, this is…" Henry's voice trailed off as he tried to squeeze the droplets of magic back inside of himself.

"Are you doing magic?" a girl's silvery voice inquired, making Henry jump a mile.

His first thought was Hermione from the Harry Potter film. Had he conjured her? But when he flung his head around, he saw Grace. The Mad Hatter's daughter.

Bile rose in Henry's throat. He didn't want anyone to know. No. This was utterly shameful.

"Not me," he said, his pulse thudding in his throat as he patted the Friesian's chest. "Merlin here did it. He's a special horse."

Grace laughed. "Come off it, Henry! You're Rumple's grandson. The Savior's son. Probably a product of True Love. Of course you can do magic."

"But I judge people who do magic," Henry grumbled.

"Yes you do," Grace said bluntly, without beating it around the bush. Henry winced at her bold honesty. Grace had turned fifteen recently, and privately Henry found her much more beautiful now but extremely bold and not sweet anymore like she used to be. She didn't sugarcoat anything anymore, and while she was becoming a bit weird and rough around the edges like her father—nowhere near holding someone at gunpoint, however—she was becoming uninterested in spending time with Jefferson. Her growing feet were anxious to take the whole world in her hands and steer with an unforeseen force.

Henry didn't like that. He liked peace and perfection and the ease and simplicity of good guys versus bad guys.

Grace was good sometimes—very good. But others, she was bad—very, very bad. She'd been caught drinking beer with a twenty-one-year-old guy in an alley—one of the loneliest young men in Storybrooke—just two days ago. Henry judged the hell out of that.

He knew Roland had found it funny. But Roland was young and dumb. Only eight. Henry felt ancient at fourteen next to him.

When Henry had been eight, he hadn't known Emma. He'd just been a loner in school. Grace had always said hi to him, from the very beginning. Because she had always been sweet, even under her Paige alias. However, they had never been friends.

He gazed at the purple smoke now vibrating between his fingers. "I don't want to use magic."

Grace collapsed next to him and put her arm around him. "That's like saying you don't want to have brown eyes. It's in your blood. As I am."

With slitted eyes, Henry muttered, "You stole that line from a movie, didn't you?"

Dropping her arm to the grass and running her palm through it (newly cut, thanks to a magical gardener), Grace murmured, "Maybe. Lion King II. But what I say still stands."

She gave him an incredibly cute glance. Henry was not amused. He smashed the purple smoke into the ground by thrusting his palms at it, not even touching it, and it broke the earth for a mile, pulling both of them down a rabbit hole.

"Holy crap," Henry murmured, eyes at their widest. "We're in Wonderland."

Grace laughed cheerily. "Think about that! All that time when you and your grandpa searched hopefully for a portal to get your mom and grandma back to Storybrooke…and you have the power to make portals with your own hands!"

Henry shook his head in disbelief. "Grace, don't make this worse." He glanced around, thinking with a frown. "Cora is dead…so perhaps…there is no queen?"

An arrow flew past Henry's ear, squelching it with blood. "Wrong!" came a loud voice as Henry dropped his head between his legs and swiped his ear. "Never say there is no queen in Wonderland!" a card man snapped, yanking Henry up to his feet. The card man had a cigar between his teeth. A bow at his hip and arrows slung over his paper-thin back. As he released Henry, he removed the cigar from his lips and blew smoke into the air. "That's treason!"

Henry had, for a fleeting moment, hoped for anarchy. He decided to do the most powerful thing in regards to fairytales.

Folding his arms over his chest, he stomped his foot and stared icily at the card man. "I don't believe in you," he insisted firmly.

The card man laughed with his bony red shoulders shaking. "Good god, man, I'm not Tinker Bell!" He bent over his thin red knees, laughing and swaggering his cigar. "Not believing in fairytales doesn't make me any less real unless you got a curse." Straightening, he duplicated Henry's posture exactly, right down to the crossed arms and stubborn jaw. "Try again, kid."

Henry thought for a minute, letting his arms drop to his sides. Stroking his chin thoughtfully, he glanced at Grace. "Since I have magic, ought I to challenge the queen?"

"No," Grace retorted swiftly, no hesitation or uncertainty.

"Why not?" he whined. "I'm half the Dark One, half the Savior. I'm sure my magic is unbeatably powerful."

She shook her head and gazed with restrained patience at the cotton candy-colored sky before asserting, "You are not half the Dark One, Henry. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Rumple and Emma didn't have a baby. Neal is hardly the Dark One. What I meant earlier was his blood is inside you, yeah. But don't go around getting too damn sure of yourself. Don't go challenging a queen you've never met."

The card man nodded heartily. "I like her way of thinking," he urged, patting Grace on the shoulder. "I'm not anxious to bring a man who challenges the queen to her."

"Did she take over right as soon as Snow killed Cora?" asked Henry.

The card man's red face brightened. "Do not speak of the broken glass or the perfect apple!" He spat. "Treason!" With wide, swirly eyes, he asked, "What hellish kind of world are you from that reasonable and obvious manners elude you, boy? Must be quite a wretched place if you think behaving in such an appalling and disgraceful way is charming and unworthy of prison. I'd watch that tongue of yours before I," he produced a full-sized ax out of a tiny card pocket. He took a swipe in the air with his ax. "Swipe it off."

Grace turned on her sugarcoating charm. "Please, sir, could you give us this book of manners so we don't make another blind mistake? Our world has different rules, different ways of showing respect. Different ideas on what is proper. And I don't know about him." She shot a glare at Henry to shut up any ideas in his head about talking again. "But I do not want you to cut off his tongue. He might need it for something one day, something besides insulting your queen."

As the card man evaporated, Henry whispered, "Thanks, Grace. I mean, I'm not happy I needed you to save me, but if I had talked again…"

"Yeah, yeah," she waved dismissively. "Don't you worry about this. I've had to talk my dad out of killing people a few times in my life. Can't tell ya how often I crawled out of bed to have a glass of water to find he was holding someone tied up at gunpoint and threatening to shoot them if they didn't help him." Fluttering her lashes in reverie, she whispered, "He always thought it was extremely important…"

"I should have challenged the queen."

"No. I have a feeling," Grace wrinkled her nose, "Cora dethroned the true Queen of Hearts and she took her throne back. And if you challenge her, she cheats and calls it fair."

"Oh. Right. I forgot." Henry had only read the Alice in Wonderland book once.

"It's okay. I used to spend a lot of time watching Disney movies. I know you weren't allowed until Emma came. But that was twenty-eight years of me being the same age…plenty of Disney…"

"But we need a plan…or I do."

"Why you?"

Henry paused, "Because I have magic?"

"But maybe if we milk both of our brains, we can come up with something truly brilliant?" suggested Grace.

"There's an idea," Henry said, "but I have been one for overusing my imagination."

Both of them sat and wracked their brains as a phoenix lit up the sky with a caw that made their insides vibrate. It exploded not ten inches from Henry's nose. All that was left was a flaming tail feather, which floated down. Before it could land on his nose, Henry reached up to grab it between his fingers.

Grace yelped, "Don't touch that, Henry! It will singe you!"

But not only did it not singe him (as the fire went out at the pinch of his thumb and forefinger). It also caused Henry to lapse into a trance in which he couldn't hear Grace. Nor was he aware of her as his thoughts filled his brain.

"Wait a minute…I've got it!" he yelled, perhaps an octave too loud, just as the card man returned.

The card man was caressing a playing card-sized book. He stared at Henry, unnerved by his exclamation.

Then he dropped the book in Grace's hand and left them, crying, "Danger, danger, danger," in a voice that sounded like a police's siren.