He followed Regina out the door and down the sidewalk until they were beyond the fence of the diner. But once they were out of range for people with craning necks inside to see what they were doing, the following abruptly ceased. He reached out and grabbed for her elbow. She turned and yanked it away from him.
"You had better start talking," he growled. "I need to know exactly what kind of a situation we have with Cora, exactly what is going on, and how you know she's coming to this land."
"We don't have time for-"
"Oh no," he chuckled. "For this, we have time. Because those are questions that I can't do my work without. Tell me what you know."
Regina sighed unhappily. She looked up and down the street before crossing her arms over her chest and taking a step closer to him. "Henry made contact with someone in the Red Room, a Princess from our land…still in our land."
And that was the first suspicious thing about her story. "That's not possible," he explained, shaking his head. "Everyone in that land was supposed to be brought over by the Curse."
"Obviously, I missed a few."
"Not possible."
"Do you doubt me, or do you doubt Henry because he's the one telling the story."
That gave him pause. Her, he wouldn't believe for a second. He'd think that she'd gone soft or was too caught up in the warning about her mother to consider where the information was coming from and that it could be a trick orchestrated by Cora herself. But Henry…there was still a chance it was a trick. Of course, there was one way that they would know for sure it was a trick, and that was if Cora was, in fact, dead, as Regina had claimed all those years ago.
"You said she was dead. This wouldn't be a problem if you hadn't lied."
"I didn't lie!" she spat out.
"Of course, I shouldn't be surprised, you lied about Belle too, apparently lying about dead people is what you do best."
"I didn't lie about my mother!" she shouted. "I just…made a premature declaration. I had a plan for her; I just didn't have the motivation to go through with it when I told you, later I did. And I thought that plan had worked, saw the body and everything, just like I told you."
"Yeah… 'prematurely'".
"Heat of the moment," she dismissed with a growl as she crossed her arm. "Everyone makes mistakes."
"Well, apparently, you made two. The first was your premature declaration, and the second, you weren't thorough enough in your slaughter."
"When you want someone dead, better to do it yourself, lesson learned."
"Yeah, or call me."
"You weren't really in a situation once the time came if I recall."
He fought back a laugh. So, she'd done this once he was locked away. She'd told him that she'd had her killed before she'd ever cast the Curse…that was a year, maybe more before that. She'd lied for a year. He should have checked out her story a little bit more thoroughly than he had, confirmed what he'd suspected was a lie even then. Maybe now they wouldn't be in this situation!
"And besides, the way she tells her tale of the pair of you, I hardly had confidence that sending you would get the job done."
Wonderful…obviously Cora was lying about who had really won the upper hand when they'd fought back, but what disturbed him most of all was that Regina knew the tale. When he'd first met her, she'd never heard his name, her father was too petrified to speak it, and the servants knew better lest her blood protection was broken. And yet, here she was, spouting information about the past like she was some sort of expert. Though her father had let on toward the end that he knew more than he pretended to, he still doubted that he'd been the one to tell her. Which left Cora…they'd had more of a relationship after she'd gone than he thought. That was an oversight, an understandable one as he couldn't watch her twenty-four hours a day, but still an oversight, nonetheless. And now he was left wondering not only when Cora had the time to pass this information, this false narrative, onto her daughter…but where.
"And how, exactly did your mother get to our realm. She was safely locked away from both of us in Wonderland. People from lands other than our own could only be brought over here if you wanted them to be, not go to other realms. How did she go from Wonderland to the Enchanted Forest?"
"Well, I assure you, I didn't want her 'brought over,'" Regina growled herself. "That's why I had her killed."
"You went to Wonderland to do this."
Regina huffed so that he knew the answer before she even had to give it. "I sent an assassin to do the job and return with her body so I could bury her."
Foolish girl.
"So the last place you saw her was our land. So when you say 'she's with them,' meaning Mary Margaret and Emma Swan, in our world, it's all too easy for you to believe because-"
"Because the last place I saw her was the Enchanted Forest. I buried her in the family crypt. I thought she was there until now."
"You never thought to check."
"How often do you check on the bodies of your loved ones?"
"More often than you think," he lied. If he did that, then the fiasco with Belle would never have happened, but he was too angry to consider that at the moment. "And I most certainly would have checked if that 'dead loved one' was Cora."
"Can we focus on the real problem here?" she finally begged with a break in her voice. Stress. And panic. She was not in a happy place at the moment. "My mother is in our realm with Emma and Mary Margaret, and she's planning on coming here."
"How do you know that's her plan?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"And now that I have the other important details, I'm ready to listen."
She glared at him in a frustrated way that made him want to smile. Good, maybe now she knew how difficult it was to deal with her all those years.
"Henry, the Red Room he goes to with your necklace…the Princess is in there. Aurora, you remember her, I'm sure."
He nodded. "Daughter of Briar Rose and King Stefan, Maleficent put her under the Sleeping Curse…"
"Well, she's awake and going to the room. Somehow, she was left behind in our world, and she's met up with none other than Emma and Mary Margaret. They're working on getting back here, but unfortunately, so is Cora."
"And how exactly are they planning on doing this? Returning to our land?"
"Henry didn't know, or if he did, he didn't say. He just said they had a way back, but Cora was standing in their way, and only you knew how to defeat her."
He let out a sigh and tapped his cane against the ground as he thought. It was a disturbing tale she painted, very disturbing indeed. Because he couldn't disprove anything. Flaws and doubt, coincidence and suspicion, he had no problem finding those. But he had no ability to disprove any of it with certainty.
Regina's story confirmed that Cora had been brought from Wonderland to the Enchanted Forest.
He'd never seen Aurora here in Storybrooke. Of course, other than putting her name down on a list of unknowns when he'd woken up, he'd never really thought about it or her. Why would he? He had no quarrel with the girl. But the last he'd seen of the girl, she'd been in a Sleeping Curse. He would have expected a girl in a coma to be the talk of the town, just like David had been at one point in his false memories. And he certainly would have heard rumors of a deadly beast in the woods as her prince had been last he'd heard. But there were no hints that either she or her Prince were in this place. That wasn't definitive proof they were there. It just meant he didn't have anything to contradict Regina or prove that Cora might have been impersonating the girl.
And as far as making their way back here, if it were as easy as Emma and Mary Margaret were making it sound, then he would have done it himself centuries ago. Although, if there was anyone he'd put money on to somehow make it work, it would be a Savior. And now that magic was here in Storybrooke…
"We need more information," he concluded quietly to himself. He wasn't ready to jump right in and believe this was exactly what Regina said it was, but he wasn't stupid enough to ignore the potential risks either. They needed to know more.
"Why do I have the feeling that means sending my son back to a burning inferno?!"
"Because it does. All magic comes at a price. This is it. If we want to keep Cora out of Storybrooke, away from Henry, away from Belle, then we're going to need more information. Where is the boy now?"
"David's with him."
"Have him brought to my shop for another little nap."
"They're already there…" she turned and pointed down the street. Sure enough, Henry and David were idling outside of his shop, waiting for them.
"Good." He nodded, satisfied that she'd known to work that far ahead at least. "The boy and I need to have a discussion."
"Then have it," Regina sighed. "I've already heard all I need to. And if you are sending my son back into that room, there's something I need to do for him."
Regina moved around him without further explanation and back to a car he hadn't noticed was parked on the street. He wasn't sure about where she was going or what she was doing, but he didn't particularly care. He didn't need Regina to talk with Henry. He just needed the boy.
Filler chapter? I'm genuinely asking because, at the end of the day, I have no idea what this chapter is if I'm entirely honest. I know that in my original outlining, it wasn't supposed to be here. This chapter was originally a little note for the top of the next chapter that just said, "Regina fills him in outside of Granny's before leaving to fetch Henry's blanket." The problem is...Rumple. As I wrote this chapter, he sort of came more to life and took a lot more of an active role than I'd intended. First, he's not one to sit on the sidelines and just let things slide, so when Regina tells him it's Cora, he fights back. He takes out his anger on Regina, naturally, but also in a way on the story. I think if this had been any other villain coming into the picture, Rumple would have been like, "fine, this is annoying, but let's go stop this." But because it's Cora, because he has experience with her and knows how deadly she is, I think there is a part of him that doesn't want to believe it, that is trying to find the flaw in the story, the part that doesn't fit with the hope that it's not Cora. And with that...well, this chapter was born.
Thank you, Grace5231973, for your review of the last chapter. Hard to believe we're in this section already. I hope that you'll find the characters actually "in character" in this scene. I find that when they add things to the chapter like what happened here, they usually are. Still, my fingers are crossed that you'll agree. It all works out in the end, I guess. Rumple gets the info he needs, and Regina is dismissed to get the blanket all before the next scene. I hope you don't mind. Peace and Happy Reading!