Disclaimer: I do not own Once Upon A Time or any of its characters. I make absolutely no money from this. All I receive is the satisfaction of knowing that people enjoy my fic.

.-.-.-.

Emma hisses through her teeth and drops the dreamcatcher as if it's burned her. She blinks several times before looking back to the storybook on her table. Of course Regina would use a transferring spell to hide her dreamcatcher in plain sight. It's not like Henry or her parents would have figured it out. The feeling of power Excalibur graced her with tipped her off to something being out of the ordinary.

"Very clever, Regina," Emma mumbles to herself, raising a perfectly sculpted brow at the book. "But not clever enough."

She flips through a few pages, scanning their contents intently. Finally, she spots it.

Excalibur.

It is resting in a barrel of shiny steel swords in the illustration of the armory that she was foolish enough to skip past earlier. Although Emma has to give Regina credit for using such a complex spell to hide it in a place as simple as a book, the queen was stupid to put Excalibur and Emma's memories together. After all, the storybook could have very easily fallen into the wrong hands.

Emma's eyes widen, and she looks up at the clock. It is 4:13 in the afternoon, and Killian usually stops by her house to spend time with her at 4:30. She doesn't have much time to get rid of the book, and if she leaves the house, someone unwanted is sure to find her within a matter of minutes.

Killian still wants to destroy the Light. He pretends to have given up on that plan, but he has only been sidetracked by this latest little debacle involving Emma's memories. If she in any way lets it slip that her memories are back, he will go right back to his previous plan and bring back all of the Dark Ones to destroy Storybrooke. There's no telling who he will kill to get his way.

Emma inhales and exhales deeply, forcing the tension to escape her mind. She will simply have to keep up the ruse of a clueless woman who "lost" her memories. While Killian and her family are fooled, maybe she can seek Regina's help.

She did make that promise back in Camelot, after all.

As for the book, and Excalibur…

Emma swiftly shuts Henry's storybook and tucks it under her shoulder. She heads up the staircase and into her bedroom, flipping up the light switch so she doesn't walk around in the darkness. Before Killian stole her memories, she had hollowed out a floorboard in the back of her closet and stashed some sentimental keepsakes from her childhood. The space below the floorboard is the perfect size to store the storybook. She lifts the wood and slides Henry's book into the cubby, securing the plank back into place when she feels confident it is safe.

As she kneels against the wall, the Dark One considers calling Regina and letting her know the most recent development, but she decides against it. Partly because it would be best to wait for the right moment, and also because she's pretty sure one of her parents swiped her cellphone the last time they were here.

Emma looks down at her clothes and frowns.

Although her Dark One attire was, well, a bit scary, it just felt right to wear it. She knows it was something a villain would wear, and that was part of the façade she put up. But it was very fitting and comfortable when she wore black leather all over. And now that she's wearing light jeans and one of many frilly shirts that her mother stocked her closet with, she feels out of place.

The Darkness in her also despises the bright, floral curtains that Snow hung up in every room of her house to replace the plain grey shades she chose prior to losing her memories.

In fact, it seems as though Snow changed everything that she didn't think matched her own damn aesthetic.

Emma stands and enters the master bathroom, frowning at the light blue towels hanging beside the shower, which now sports a wavy curtain with colorful bird designs all over it. The Dark One huffs as she walks out into the hallway and spots a fluffy yellow rug at the top of the staircase.

The downstairs is even worse. It seems Snow also decided to place a plastic fern next to the door to the basement. The dining room table has a flowery tablecloth that leaves a rotten taste in Emma's mouth. Beside the front door are a white shoe rack and a coat stand that has a wooden bird glued to the top. The couch is now home to more than five embroidered throw pillows that rest against the cushions, the coffee table has a stack of coasters with "inspirational" quotes on them, and all of the paintings on the walls have been replaced with family photos.

Emma wonders how she could have possibly allowed it to get this awful, until she reminds herself that without her memories, she would have no way of knowing that her mother was changing everything in a way she would not appreciate. And now she's going to have to start righting all the wrongs and find the old decorations her mother replaced with all of this colorful crap.

A knock on the door startles Emma briefly. She looks around the house to make sure she isn't forgetting anything important before letting Killian in. On the dining room table, she sees her dreamcatcher and nearly slaps herself on the forehead for leaving it out where literally anybody could see it.

She picks up the dreamcatcher and looks around the space for a good place to hide it. After a few moments, she gives up on finding an inconspicuous place and tosses it into the knife drawer in the kitchen. Nobody ever roots around in the kitchen, especially since she doesn't need to eat and her parents are most certainly never going to cook here again.

Another knock sounds from the front door.

"Just a second, Killian!" Emma calls out, putting a magical barrier on the knife drawer.

"Emma?!" Snow's voice startles the Dark One, and her balance falters for a moment. She shuts her eyes and puts her hands to her temples.

"Crap," Emma mutters under her breath. She breathes out a frustrated sigh.

For the last several days, she has been hiding from her parents in her house. So careful has she been to watch for them coming near. She made sure to close the curtains, walk silently through the house, and keep the lights off. Emma nearly slaps herself on the forehead when she realizes that she unconsciously turned on the light in her bedroom a few minutes ago. But there's no way her mother could have been able to know that unless she was watching outside, just waiting for it to happen.

Emma wouldn't put it past her.

"Emma, sweetie," Snow speaks through the door. "Please let me in, I just want to talk."

The Dark One circles the entryway. Her mother can't get into the house on her own, but now that her cover has been blown, she'll have to do something. If she still didn't have her memories, would she let her mother into the house? Or would she hide away in the basement again? Or maybe she would speak to her through the door?

She huffs in frustration, not knowing how to handle the situation while still making everyone believe she doesn't have her memories back.

In the end, she decides to lift the sealing spell from the house and open the door to her mother. In an instant, she is wrapped up in a firm hug as the door shuts loudly. She pats her mother on the back and gives her a weak smile.

"Emma, why have you been avoiding us? We've been looking for you everywhere!"

"I…" she trails off, her eyes darting around the room to look at everything but her mother. She doesn't want to tip her off to something out of the ordinary. "I am sorry."

The hug tightens as Snow squishes Emma's upper arms to her sides.

"I'm just glad you're finally speaking to me again," her voice breaks. "Your father is so worried about you. We've all been going insane thinking about what you've been doing."

Emma glances toward the kitchen instinctively. She bites her bottom lip and pulls her head away from her mother's, allowing her to continue holding her in a vice grip.

"Thank you for—"

The front door swings open and Killian walks in.

"Sorry I'm late, love. I was just…" The pirate's words fade into silence as he spots a teary-eyed Snow clinging to her daughter.

Emma's eyes widen at the sight of her boyfriend standing before her with no idea of what she's been up to in the last hour. She takes a step back, breaking the motherly embrace, and keeps her gaze locked on the other Dark One.

"Killian," she whispers. A second later, she realizes her mistake and masks her discontent with joy at seeing the man she loves.

Snow looks between her daughter and the pirate, a frown appearing on her face.

"Hook, you said you didn't know where Emma was," she announces loudly. "You've been visiting her this entire time?"

The man rubs the back of his neck with his hand and looks to Emma for help, but she looks to be organizing her own thoughts. After a moment, she grabs onto his arm and pulls him closer to her. She gives her mother a smile too forced to be believable.

"I asked him to cover for me," she explains, hoping to avoid any and all problems before they start so she can escape sooner and get in contact with Regina.

"Aye," Killian agrees, catching on to Emma's white lie. "And a gentleman never refuses a lady's requests. Although I would be amiss if I didn't apologize for having lied to you."

Snow's eyes soften, though her frown remains. She takes a deep breath and turns back toward Emma.

"Sweetie, I respect your wishes to be alone, but your father and I have been really scared for the past week." She steps forward and reaches her hand out to brush a lock of her daughter's hair over her shoulder.

Emma resists the urge to recoil from the touch.

"I just wish you had told us, your parents, where you were. We would have understood. We would have helped."

It takes all of the Dark One's willpower to not snap her mother's wrist at those words.

"I appreciate that," she plasters a nervous smile on her face and gently moves Snow's hand off of her shoulder. "I've just been so scared."

Killian's warm hand wraps around Emma's, and she startles at the contact. Her eyes dart down to their intertwined fingers. Despite her irritation at the current situation, her heart melts ever so slightly. For the briefest moment, she can almost believe that he still loves her, that he's not just blinded by his own screw-ups to continue with his own twisted plan with Excalibur.

That is, until she looks back up into his eyes.

Behind the clear love and devotion, the Darkness still has a firm grip on him.

He's fooled them all.

At this point, it's damn near impossible for Emma to distinguish between the voices of past Dark Ones and her own. Though at this point, she can't quite bring herself to care.

She pulls her hand away from his and rests it against her chest, hoping to mimic a pose she'd been displaying an awful lot lately.

"I'm tired," she announces quietly, trying to look and sound drained. "I think I'll lie down for a little bit."

Snow seems caught off guard at the change of topic, and presumably, end of the conversation.

"Oh, um," she begins, pausing for a moment. "I can head home then. I'll let David know you're okay." She gives her daughter another suffocating hug with an accompanying kiss on the forehead before leaving the house.

Emma looks up at Killian with as innocent a look as she can muster.

"Join me?" she asks, praying to God that he refuses and decides to leave. But if she's going to keep up this ruse, she needs to act like she did when she didn't have her memories. And that Emma couldn't keep her hands off Killian, in the least sexual way possible.

Killian visibly debates his answer for a moment.

"As much as I'd love to, I really should get back to the library." He looks deeply into her eyes, his own hesitantly cautious. "Will you be all right alone?"

Emma feigns disappointment but nods her head anyway.

"I'll be fine."

Her assurance soothes the pirate, and he gives her one final hug before departing from the home that was meant to be theirs.

The moment the door shuts, Emma's face darkens. She enters the kitchen and pulls her dreamcatcher out of the knife drawer, clutching it tightly with her cold fingers. With a wave of her hand, Henry's storybook appears in her other hand. Emma looks down at the two objects, a cold smile settling on her face.

"Congratulations, Regina," she whispers. "You've just earned a visit from the Dark One."

.-.-.-.

Killian turns onto Main Street, feeling raindrops on his head and stones in his stomach. The moment he walked into Emma's house, he could tell something was wrong. The way she spoke, her smile never meeting her eyes, the distrust on her face when she looked at him. Even her magical energy felt off. Something has changed between yesterday and today. And whatever it is, it clearly isn't good.

At first, he'd thought that perhaps she was acting differently because her mother found her and gently confronted her about hiding, but that idea was dashed away as soon as Snow left the house. Emma's strange behavior remained.

The tone she spoke with reminded him all too well of when she recreated their first date on his ship a few weeks ago. Though her voice was purely innocent, malice burned in her eyes.

Killian looks both ways before crossing the street to the library, his hand leafing through his damp hair for a moment when he steps onto the wet sidewalk.

He doesn't understand why Emma suddenly appears to be a different person entirely, but he does know that she's putting up a façade that she clearly thought would fool him.

Now if only he could figure out why she changed overnight.

.-.-.-.

The driver's side door of a black car shuts brusquely, the owner hoping to keep the rain from entering her car in the short time it takes to grab her purse and get out. She pulls a deep purple umbrella from her handbag and opens it up over her head to maintain her hair's professional style. After spending an unreasonably long hour earlier this morning making sure it looked perfect, it would be a travesty to ruin it now.

This damned storm has been going on nonstop for a week now, ever since Emma lost control of her emotions, and magic. There is no way it's natural anymore, it has to be Emma's magic going haywire without her knowing about it. Thankfully, Storybrooke's storm drains are deep and lead right out into the ocean, and the town rests just high enough above sea level for that to not be an issue.

As the mayor and former queen makes her way to the mausoleum that doubles as her magical vault, she feels a cold chill shoot down her spine. Lightning strikes uncomfortably close to her, making an impact with a small pool of week-old mud to her right. The loud boom could be enough to deafen a crowd of people, but Regina merely grimaces and finishes her all-too-long trek to the vault.

Once inside, she shuts the heavy doors with a thud and sets her umbrella down in the corner before proceeding down the cement staircase in the center of the small building.

As she turns the left corner to the main room that contains potions and ingredients, her heart stops.

Right there, in the center of the room, is Emma Swan.

More specifically, it's the Emma Swan everyone thought was gone.

Her snow-white hair is once again wrapped up in a tight bun made up of braids and twists, pulling harshly on her scalp, though she doesn't seem to mind. Bright red lipstick is painted on her downturned lips, the only pop of color to be seen on the woman. The black leather jacket that Snow considered tossing out now hugs her body, its squeaking audible any time she moves her upper half. To complete the ensemble, her black leggings disappear under a tall pair of boots that match her jacket in color and material.

And in her hands rests the one thing she could ever need to take over the world and snuff out the Light forever.

Excalibur.

"I was wondering when you'd show up," Emma says flatly. She lifts her hand, and Regina hears the horrid screech of stone against stone above her.

She quickly backtracks toward the staircase just in time to see her father's coffin closing the rest of the way over the exit. Black magic particles flutter over the underside of the coffin, letting Regina know that she is truly trapped now.

"Just a precaution," the Dark One explains. "I can't have you running off and telling everyone I'm here."

Regina can't remember a time when she felt so powerless. With the exit sealed, and an unbreakable magical barrier surrounding the vault to keep her from teleporting away if things get ugly, she finds herself with no other choice than to confront the – immortal and immune to all magic – situation in front of her.

"How long?" the queen questions, trying to sound angry rather than afraid. "How did you even get your dreamcatcher back?"

To answer her question, Emma outstretches her hand and produces Henry's storybook in a plume of black smoke. Regina's heart stutters as the failure of what she thought was a fool-proof plan stares her directly in the eyes.

"Really, Regina." A stone-cold smirk creeps onto Emma's face. "Hiding my things in a book? I thought you were a little smarter than that."

Emma sets the storybook down on a shelf to her left before bringing her dreamcatcher into existence within the vault. She waves it around in the air nonchalantly.

"Wasn't too hard to figure it out with my memories gone. It only took an hour or so." She slowly stalks toward Regina and circles around her like a shark in the water. "But I couldn't have done it without Henry. He was kind enough to bring it to me. Practically handed my memories to me on a silver platter… unknowingly, of course."

Regina feels her stomach churn. She should have considered Henry would want to visit Emma. But she'd assumed Emma had run off and found a lodge to take up shelter in somewhere out in the forest. So Henry's plans weren't very high on her list of fears, not that she has a "list of fears."

"You won't get away with this," Regina says lowly.

"Oh, please," Emma scoffs. "You don't even know what 'this' is." She tosses her dreamcatcher on top of the storybook and lifts Excalibur, holding the tip of it right under Regina's chin.

The sharp blade forces the older woman to stretch her neck further so as to avoid a deep cut.

"Look, I'm s—"

"Save it," Emma growls. "I don't care about a pathetic apology from a disgraced queen."

The jab stings, but not nearly as much as the threat of being violently sliced open at a moment's notice by the most powerful artifact known to every realm.

"The only thing I care about…"

Emma presses the tip of the Kris sword into the hollow of Regina's throat. Her green eyes sparkle wickedly at the fear she's directly causing. Regina shuts her eyes and feels her body begin to shake in panic as her heart pounds against her ribcage. Sweat drips from her hairline down her face, disrupting her foundation. But she can't bring it in her to care about her makeup being ruined. The very real possibility of being murdered outweighs that right now. She feels the point of Excalibur dig against her skin even further. This is it. She's going to die, without ever getting to say goodbye to Henry or Robin. They're going to find her mangled corpse days from now, trapped underground and surrounded in blood and bodily paste.

"… Is destroying the Darkness."

Regina's eyes shoot open at the words and dart to look straight into Emma's.

Mirth now replaces the malice, and the Dark One bursts into laughter. She pulls the sword away and tilts it toward the tile beneath them.

The queen releases a breath she didn't know she was holding and nearly collapses onto the floor, just barely able to catch herself on the wall to support her weight. Her legs violently wobble, knees bonking against each other continuously. She reaches up to feel her throat, completely baffled that it hasn't been slit open. Her blood isn't staining the floor. A wave of nausea crashes over her, and she moves the hand not supporting her up to press against her temple.

Emma's laughter continues like a hollow echo taunting her from the edges of her sanity.

"Wh-what?" Regina sinks further against the wall, the sick feeling in her gut growing too rapidly for her liking.

The Dark One wipes a tear from her eye and slowly allows her amusement to die down. She holds a hand over her stomach and lets out a few softer laughs before shaking her head and leveling Regina with a more serious stare.

"Consider that your punishment for trying to keep my memories away from me," she explains. "As for the real reason I'm here…"

She lifts Excalibur to support it in both of her hands, holding it out toward Regina, who just stares at it with lidded eyes brimming with tears.

"I need your help."

And with those words, Regina feels her consciousness slip away as the world suddenly turns black.

.-.-.-.

A/N: I hit a dead end with this fic, but then I was suddenly hit with the inspiration stick and thought of a great way to end this in the next 3-5 chapters and move onto a sequel in the future. I played with that idea in the past when I had a completely different vision for this fic, but now that I've changed trajectory, it would make a lot more sense to write a sequel, or I'd be a huge jerk for ending this fic the way I'm going to. I can't say I'll be posting a lot more frequently, but I will definitely be writing more, seeing as some drama has exploded in my life and writing calms me down and lets me escape my problems for a while. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter! Please let me know what you think, I'd love to hear what you all thought of this chapter and how you think this fic will end!
~IvoryFaye