A/N: I know I know it has literally been forever. In my defence I had two parents die and inherited two children and a mortgage and a mountain of anxiety and things are really only just starting to settle. Anywho I'm crazy rusty and I suspect this just might be awful. If anybody out there is still waiting for this, you are awesome and I love you and it's almost done I swear. Also it should be noted that I wrote this before the whole "Welcome to Storybrooke" debacle. Nothing after season one exists. We shan't speak of it.

"I must confess, Sheriff, once you realized your situation I had thought you would be much quicker at tracking down a solution. Enjoying ourselves a little too much, were we?"

There was absolutely no possible way he could know just the sort of fun Emma had been having but the suggestion made her skin burn with guilt and embarrassment just the same.

She couldn't quite bring herself to look him in the eye and took interest in a mobile hanging from the ceiling instead, tapping the little glass unicorn figurines with her fingers so they spun and caught the light filtering in through the shop's windows. Pretty. "I had… Other theories to work out."

"Oh I'm sure."

Smug bastard."It doesn't matter alright? What did you do? What is thing? What did you give her?"

Rumple gave a long suffering sigh. "It was a sort of, shall we say, trial run for the Dark Curse."

The Dark Curse. Henry's curse, Emma realized. Well, Regina's curse. The one she'd cast to trap Emma's parents. The one that had landed Emma herself on the side of highway in Main. One day soon she'd have to let her brain go there, she'd have to think about all of the that and what it meant, but not today. One curse at a time. Parents and Evil Queens… That could wait.

"One," Rumple continued, oblivious to his audience's inner turmoil or simply uncaring, "That I discarded for obvious reasons, I think. Imagine living the last few weeks as you have for twenty-eight years. In the end I went with a much more subtle approach. We were still frozen in time but with the opportunity for a little more...variety, shall we say. The illusion of time and free will. And of course the caster's memories needed to remain in tact. I spent the better part of a century perfecting the formula."

He was vibrating with barely contained energy, like a school kid showing off his A plus. Look what I did Ma'. I wrote the perfect curse, aren't you ever so proud?

She wasn't even going to ponder the fact that he was apparently more than a hundred years old. "That's fine and dandy but why the hell would she do that?" Emma swallowed, a sudden lump forming in her throat. "It just got her..." Not killed. Not dead. She stopped that. She would always stop that. "Hurt."

"She came to me, looking for a way to keep her curse from breaking that wouldn't harm you. For the lad's sake, I assume. If she happened to pick a day to repeat that ended rather unfortunately for herself, well, perhaps it's, what do they call it? Ah yes. Karma."

Emma's heart clinched. Maybe for Henry's sake. Maybe not. It probably wasn't wise to get warm fuzzies about a woman who had literally cursed the whole town not once but twice just because the woman had tacked on an addendum of not letting Emma actually get hurt by it, but there it was just the same.

"So why do I remember?" She asked. "Hell, why do you remember? Why are you even willing to tell me all of this?

"You're the savior. You remember because I made it so. Even in the beginning, I made plans for loopholes. All who call this town home were cursed, much as the people in the village that housed my original...trial. And you, Emma Swan the orphan, you do not call this town home. Not yet, at any rate."

Emma's ears burned. He was right, of course. She was a wanderer. A runner. She had always been a runner. Home was her bug. Home was the soles of her boots on pavement. Things that couldn't giver her away or hurt her. Maybe someday that could be Storybrooke. Maybe not. Maybe she'd fix this thing and hightail it back to Boston. If only there weren't so many people here she was starting to care for, each one a link in a chain that was slowly attaching itself to an anchor for her heart.

"As for me..." He shrugged. "My interest in this little farce waned shortly after my own agenda was accomplished. From this point on allowing you to end it is in my best interests. And I daresay you'll never get there on your own."

Emma puffed her cheeks out, insulted, but hell, who was she kidding? Left to her own devices this thing would probably continue indefinitely.

Well, while he was feeling generous. "And Sidney? Where you responsible for that too?"

"A tragedy to be sure. He was... waking up. Having memories of being trapped in a mirror... Trapped by love for a woman who will never return it... I imagine it's enough to drive anyone mad."

Trapped in a mirror. Emma tried to imagine the deranged reporter as the cartoon character she'd see as a child, telling Regina she was the fairest of them all. "Yeah. Okay. So what do I do? Can you fix it?"

"That's out of my hands now. There is a place in this town where that which is lost might be returned. I think you know what I'm talking about." He lifted a brow significantly.

It took her a minute to get there and when she did she supposed she shouldn't have been as flabbergasted as she felt,, considering. Still. The super corny touristy wishing well? Was that really a thing?

"When the one who cast the curse lets it go, it will be ended. Convince her she does want her curse broken." He smirked. "Or perhaps that she does want to do you harm. Depending on which notion she was most desperate to hold on to, either one might do. "

"Get Regina to drop the thing in the place. Okay. I got this." She didn't have this. She was going to try to break a curse. A fairy tale curse. No one in their right mind could have that.

Of course she didn't have any delusions about being in her right mind at this point. She was talking to Rumpelstiltskin about the Evil Queen from Snow White as casually as one might talk about the weather.

All well. When in Rome. Or Fairy Tale Land, apparently.

Emma tucked the necklace away in her pocket. Something so powerful but it held no actual weight, it felt like nothing at all.

She was almost out the door when she paused, one last curiosity gnawing at her gut with something that felt an awful lot like dread. Rumpelstiltskin gave nothing away for free. That was perhaps the most pervasive theme she'd found in Henry's story book. More than any morality or true love crap. The whole thing could easily read as a manual for what not to do where the man was concerned.

She turned back, tangled curls falling forward across her face. "What did she give you? For this?" She patted her pocket. "You must have asked for something pretty big."

"Nothing she'll miss."

Somehow Emma sincerely doubted that. "And...What do you want from me?"

"You're going to break the Dark Curse, whether you mean to or not. I could ask for nothing more."

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Emma thought that it should probably be weird that it wasn't weird that she had gotten the morning down to such a perfect routine but perhaps there was something to be said for muscle memory.

Actual shoes on feet. Check.

Crazy guy in lock up. Also check.

Henry safely to school. Probably? She could spend forever making her lack of attentiveness during this whole ordeal up to him but really, he wasn't going to remember anyway. She'd buy him ice cream later to assuage her own internal guilt and he'd be none the wiser.

Also if this was the day that stuck she should probably come up with some explanation as to why the sheriff was running around town in her pajamas like a maniac but eh. Maybe they shouldn't elect almost strangers if they didn't want to deal with the occasional weird.

And maybe they would all remember they were fairy tale characters at the end of the day so there was that.

When the door to the mayoral mansion swung open Emma allowed herself a moment to drink the woman in, to memorize the lines on her face and the scar on her lip and the exact brown of her eyes. She could write endless poems about those eyes, if she had a single creative bone in her body. Something corny. Probably involving a coffee metaphor or two.

In any case these were all essential things that she had to catalogue right now this minute because she had no idea how the day would end and it might be her very last opportunity to do so. She would probably never be allowed as close as she had been again and the memories that were just hers, the days that happened but didn't, those just didn't seem like enough.

"Miss Swan- Unless it's an emergency I really must insist you contain yourself until office hours. Kindly remove yourself from my porch."

"Can it, Regina. I know what you did."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"I know what you did and we seriously have to fix it like, yesterday because if today happens one more time I am going to lose my mind. See? I'm not even sure that made sense."

"Well you didn't have very far to go, did you dear?" Regina's lip curled upward in a sneer and she waved a hand dismissively. "I have to get to work. Kindly take your mental break down somewhere else."

"You're the Evil Queen. I'm the… I'm the Savior." It felt hard, getting that word out to describe herself. Like choking. Or drowning. "Only I don't think you're exactly evil anymore, I think Henry changed that. You cast a curse that trapped this town in time and then… Last night? I guess it would have been for you? You cast another one. Only now we're really stuck in time. Like I could literally choreograph your entire day stuck in time. And you have to fix it. You have to help me fix it Regina, this can't go on."

Regina's fingers flexed on her front door, and for a moment Emma feared it was about to be slammed in her face. "Assuming any of that nonsense it true… and I'm not saying it is… Why on earth would I want to help you fix anything?"

"Because you've changed enough that when you went looking for a solution you chose one specifically that wouldn't hurt me. I think you already knew it was basically over but you couldn't let go. I get it. I do. When you finally get something good you hold on so tight you break it. I do it too." Emma peered at the woman through lowered lashes, feeling an uncharacteristic shyness, a vulnerability to admitting the similarities between them she'd noticed almost from the start. The other woman's expression was unreadable, however, a mask Emma had come to know wasn't her true face. Not by a long shot. "And I also know that living in the past… er, present… It isn't living. It'll eat you alive, if you let it."

"You want to break my curse. You want me to voluntarily give up my happy ending."

Emma wanted to point out that this ending didn't seem particularly happy- least of all because Emma herself had to stop her from being murdered on a daily basis- but the admittance itself a victory and she didn't want to lose ground by being glib. "Not the big curse just the little one. I mean, I guess we'll have to deal with the big one eventually. I'm here. Things are happening, whatever that means. But I promise we'll deal with it. I won't let anyone hurt you. Or Henry."

Emma felt a scratchiness at the back of her throat that most assuredly wasn't tears. "But I can't keep doing this. I can't watch you die again, I can't."

Regina's brows knit together in confusion and Emma hoped desperately that she didn't ask her to elaborate because she was too raw and too tired to do it. When she finally did speak her voice was small, hesitant. "I don't even know what I did, let alone how to undo it."

Emma felt the flutterings of hope stir in her chest. "Well, what kind of Savior would I be if I didn't have a plan?"