A/N: Another chapter, coz its ready and you guys deserve it.

Chapter 4

Henry burst from Mr. Gold's shop with angry steps and controlled breaths. He wanted to run and get away from Emma and David who pretended to care that his mother could be in danger or gravely injured or worse! But Mr. Gold had been serious when he had asked Henry to promise to not use the potion without Emma there and he wouldn't have said that if it wasn't important.

So, for his mom, he searched for patience and breathed in deeply, before letting the air loose in a long sigh.

"Henry!" Emma caught up to him and pulled his shoulder, making him turn to face her.

"My mom needs me and we can't wait." He tried using his mom's most authoritative voice and he was sure he failed, but Emma could see how very not kidding he was.

"We have to think things through, Henry. We won't help Regina if we get hurt or taken, too."

Henry couldn't control his anger anymore. "You don't care! She's just the Evil Queen to you!"

"That's not true, Henry…" David appeared behind Emma.

"Yes, it is. You don't care. Your life would be easier if she just dissapeared and never came back. But she is my MOM and I care. And I didn't even tell her!" He stomped his feet on the ground and then silently berated himself for such a childish action. "So, I'm going to find her and if you care about me, you'll come too".

"Okay, kiddo. But no running off into the unknown without being careful first. Regina wouldn't want you hurt." Henry offered a small nod in acknowledgement to Emma's very true statement. His mom would probably yell at Charming and Snow and Emma for letting him go to Rumpelstiltskin. He would be happy to hear her do that, though, if only he got her back.

Allowing himself another deep breath, Henry thought of his mother and his desperate yearning to find her. The vial flew out of his hand and crashed to the asphalt in front of him. The glass broke and in its place, smoke arose, deep purple and thick as winter fog.

Three sets of lungs held in their air, as three pairs of eyes watched the colored smoke rise up, expanding further. It swirled like a mountain and danced as if talking to the wind, before it started to fade, growing thin and more transparent. Henry only had but a moment to fear the potion hadn't worked, for behind the smoke, he started to see a shape. A very familiar shape dressed in a long, unfamiliar dress.

She had her back to them, hair long and loose trailing down to her waist. Her dress was pale and sparkled, its long train reaching well into the ground. It was her, though, Henry was sure.

"Regina…", he whispered, having to force himself not to call her mom. Mr. Gold had told him to say her name.

The figure, immobile and almost like a dream from his fairytale book, didn't respond to his call. Not even her hair moved with the wind around them. He saw Emma reach forward to touch his mom - probably growing impatient -, but Henry pulled her back, knowing somehow that they had to wait. Magic was about emotion and about patience. Mom had taught him that.

The silence stretched for a long time, or so it seemed to the young boy, and yet he remained steady, eyes never leaving the woman in the dress before him. He concentrated on his wish, his yearning to find his mother on the forefront of him mind. Vaguely, he registred that Ruby had joined their silent group. A hand to his shoulder let him know his grandma had also appeared. He ignored it all.

Mom, where are you?

Henry couldn't know exactly what changed. Something had changed, though. He could feel it in the air. And then the woman in the dress moved. Her hair blew with the wind, dancing sideways as she turned her head to glance over her shoulder. Her eyes were big and sad and Henry wanted to cry. She looked only at him, as if no one else was around them, and turned fully to face him. There were no words spoken; Henry wasn't sure she could speak, this apparition. But when she reached forward and caressed his cheek, Henry knew she was as solid as a real person and he couldn't help himself. His arms flew at her and in an instant, he was hugging her waist and hiding his face in her neck.

She even smelled like his mom.

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Emma couldn't quite process what she was seeing.

Actually, this whole situation was beyond her understanding. Since the fairytales had become real and the curse had been broken and Mary Margaret had followed her down the damn rabbit hole into another freaking world!, Emma couldn't quite seem to catch up. Would there never be a time that they could just live, without strange and dangerous things happening, she wondered. And then she snorted in her own head.

Probably not.

So, she was obeying her son's command not to do anything as they just stared at a long haired woman in a dress that seemed to be Regina, but from this angle, who could be sure? She wasn't moving, wasn't saying anything and could very well be a damn statue, for all she knew.

Henry proved to be correct, though, because the woman finally turned towards them and well… it really was Regina. And she was breathtaking. She didn't look like the Evil Queen they all claimed her to be, but she looked like a queen, elegant and regal and incredibly real. When she touched Henry and the boy threw himself at her, Emma had to admit that the woman was solid enough to be real.

Not real, though.

Regina pulled back from her son and stepped back, her hand in Henry's. She started pulling him away from them, never glancing at the other four people surrounding them. Emma didn't hesitate to follow them, suspicion making her eyes narrow. A quick glance around proved it wasn't just her who didn't trust this situation.

The woman who was Regina, but not the real Regina - and that was rather easy to remember because this woman was soft and caring and so out of this world, she almost didn't look like Regina -, lead them into the woods, always walking backwards and looking solely at Henry. She didn't trip on the long train of her dress or the roots of the trees around them or even collided with a trunk standing in the way. She never looked over her shoulder, either. She just walked and pulled Henry with her.

Their progress was slow and steady. They walked for over an hour, Emma calculated, before a house appeared behind the queen in the sparkling dress. Jefferson's house. The hairs at the back of her neck rose to attention and Emma felt a shudder rise up her spine. For the first time, she felt that the danger to Regina was real and possible and, God… damn inevitable.

Regina didn't glance at the house, nor did she make any move to enter it. She just stood there and looked at Henry with love in her eyes. Her son, for his part, was not about to ignore exactly what he had wanted to know and let go of his mother's hand. Emma had but a second to get her legs moving and Henry was already running at full speed towards the house.

"Henry…", the queen spoke, her voice soft and ethereal, genty echoing in the brise.

The boy stopped his progress towards the house - and really, Emma thought, two more steps and he would have been there already -, and turned to face the woman he had conjured into existence. She was slowly shaking her head from side to side and beckoning him to come back. Henry did obey, reluctantly, and Emma sighed in relief.

"Emma?"

The determined son with sure strides was gone and in his place there remained but a little boy, who was scared and alone and needed her to protect him. So Emma did what she was sure Regina would have done. She pulled her gun from its holster and watched as her mother pulled an arrow from her quiver and her father gripped his sword more firmly. Ruby nodded, placing herself nearer to Henry and the woman that was Regina.

No matter what, Regina was family now and family was everything.

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The arrow was poised and the bow was up and she moved with a silent gait born out of necessity into the house that was Jefferson's home. Snow could still remember the night Emma and her had spent with these walls and it made her want to shiver and bolt. How could it be that so much had happened since then and the place still made her scared?

The three spanned out and steadily searched the first floor of the house. They saw hats and fine china and felt a sense of abandonment to the place that could only be described as creepy. No sign of Jefferson and no sign of Regina anywhere. The second floor came next.

That was another story completely.

First thing Snow saw as she reached the second landing was a bloody hand print on the blue wallpaper. It was dried and brownish and probably old. She gulped. How could they have not realized Regina had been missing for so long? They stepped carefully around the remnants of a broken chair and saw that more than one painting stood crooked along the walls. One room, a little girl's room with pink wallpaper and toys everywhere, was empty and undisturbed. The next room was mostly bare, with only a grand piano and a long chaise. No signs of the struggle the hallway bore witness to there either.

It was only when they followed the path of destruction all the way to the end of the hall and pushed the half opened door to the last room open, that the members of the search party paused, horrified. Snow felt her husband gasp right behind her and watched as her daughter's wide eyes searched the place from top to bottom. And she… well, she struggled with the deep ache in her chest, the shaking hand which still held the arrow and bow and the need to return to the world that which she had eaten that day.

No.

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It's funny how your survival instincts can kick in even when you have already given up.

Regina had no intentions of fighting off her attacker or of prolonging her own demise. The soft bed underneath her, the hand on her thigh, the rough pulling of her shirt, the heavy breathing on her neck… She was up and swinging before she could consciously take notice of her own actions.

But he was so strong and she felt so weak.

Her legs wouldn't cooperate and yet she managed to rise to her feet. Her arms hurt and stung and yet she clawed her nails on the man's face. A wall rushed up to meet her and her head bounced off it so quickly, it almost felt like rubber. Except it hurt. A lot.

She kept going… out the room, past the hallway, almost to the stars. It was disheartening to feel like freedom was so close and then feel the heavy body of evil tackling you to the floor, taking that freedom away. She should have known, though. It was always the same.

Her magic had been robbed or had abandoned her voluntarily, she was not quite sure and since getting it to work seemed futile, she dispensed her thoughts and energy into fighting back, instead of wondering exactly why she had been left so bereft.

There was not a single moment she failed to fight, even when tears started to fall freely down her cheeks. In the end, all her struggled were for nothing. It didn't prevent the pain, the humiliation. The utter powerlessness of the violation of one's self.

She had once said that Jefferson hadn't in him to kill her. Seemed she had been right.

And oh so wrong.

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Regina wouldn't want Henry to know.

That is all Emma could think about. No mother would wish their children to see that room. No mother would want their children to know that monsters were real and among them. Not even a woman commonly known as the Evil Queen. Not even to a boy who knew more about evil then he should at his age.

Regina wouldn't want Henry to know.

But Emma had to say something. Henry was outside and he was waiting. He was the one who had brought them there and had it not been for the ghost of the woman they were searching for, he would have been the first one through that door. Not even an apparition of Regina wanted her son to see the insides of that house. She had led them there, though, and that had to mean something.

With a long sigh and a weight on her chest, Emma exited the house, closely followed by Snow White and Prince Charming.

"Emma? So? Is my mom there?" Henry seemed excited and worried and almost desperate all at once and she could understand his anxiety.

"No, kid. She's not there. We think she was there at some point, but she's not there anymore." The truth then, a very downplayed version of it, but the truth nonetheless.

Henry wasn't stupid, of course. All he had to do was really look at his birth mother and his grandparents and he would know something horrible was inside that house. And that is exactly what he did. Pale and breathing hard, he turned and hugged the woman in the dress once more, tears falling from his eyes.

Regina hugged him back and kissed his brow.

"Mom?" Emma watched him glance up, arms still around the woman. "Are you… dead?" His voice was small and almost broken and Emma felt like crying.

The woman had love in her eyes and she seemed to interact with Henry. Something about her continued serene expression, though, and the way she seemed unaffected by the boy's tears reminded Emma that she was not, in fact, Regina. She was nothing but some form of spell made out of glass and blood and hair and heaven knows what else.

"Are you?" Henry pleaded.

Long dark hair shook from side to side as Regina finally answered the boy in the negative. No, she was not dead. The woman volunteered no words to go along with that answer. Maybe, Emma caught herself wondering, maybe she was like that book from Harry Potter… A memory, an imprint. She had no thoughts of her own, no emotions. She was only a vestige of Regina, with but a few bits of her knowledge.

She couldn't volunteer information. She wasn't made for that.

"Regina… Do you know where you are?" Emma tried tentatively, stepping towards the woman and her son. "You were here and then where?"

There were no signs that Regina had heard or acknowledged Emma and her words. The woman only continued staring at Henry and stroking his hair.

"Henry… Hey, kid!" Emma waved her hand and finally caught the attention of her son. "She doesn't look at us or respond to us in any way. You were the one to cast the spell…"

"I'm the only one she sees", Henry finished the thought.

Determination was back to his face and a part of Emma felt relieved.