After the family finished a calm and comfortable dinner, Snow sent Henry and Emma to stoke the dying fire while she and David cleaned up the grill and put away the uneaten food. "Are you ready to admit that you might have packed too much for us to eat?" Emma teased, giving her mother a grin as David folded the top of the bag of chips over itself.
Snow glanced from the uncooked hot dogs to the few helpings of macaroni salad and cucumber salad that remained in the plastic bowls. "Perhaps," she allowed. "Although, we did make quite the dent in what we brought. There aren't any burgers left."
"There are some pickles left," David laughed, holding up the almost-empty jar. "Want to finish them off, Emma?"
"No, thank you," Emma groaned. She was far too full to even think about eating anything else at the moment.
Everyone chuckled, which made Emma smile to herself. "Come on, kid," she said, leading her son over to the waning fire.
She may have had issues starting a fire, but stoking one was something she knew she could handle. She showed Henry how to carefully feed kindling into the fire to keep it burning steadily. "Lessons from the Enchanted Forest," she said softly when she caught him looking at her in barely concealed awe.
This had to be the kid's first campfire. Or perhaps his first fire, period. She tried to recall if she'd seen a fireplace at Regina's house but came up empty.
Her attention shifted back to the present when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Henry reaching for more kindling. She eyed him carefully and was pleased to see that he was taking the proper care as well. "Oh, I forgot to ask you," she said after he'd drawn his hand back from the ring of flames. "How did you like mustard on your bacon?"
Henry narrowed his eyes in thought briefly before saying, "It was different."
David's chuckle drifted to them from the cooler. "A glowing review from Henry Mills," he said, closing the lid. All the food was finally put away.
"It wasn't a bad different," he insisted with a little shrug. "It was just different."
"Well, I like it," Emma sniffed.
She met Henry's amused eyes briefly before facing the fire and watching the flames dance in the dying daylight. Her father and Henry had built a nice fire, she realized as the wood crackled and popped.
The sound reminded her of other campfires. The fun one with the Brownes, Mr. Browne strumming on a guitar and, much to Mrs. Browne's amusement, attempting to teach five children under the age of eleven all the words to "Piano Man." The fires in the Enchanted Forest, built not for togetherness but out of necessity. Built for light and warmth and cooking what little they could find to eat.
She felt her mother's hand slide onto her shoulder as she and David joined her and Henry at the fire. From the look in Snow's eye, she knew exactly where Emma's mind had gone,
and from the comforting smile she gave her, it was clear she wished she could make it better. Emma smiled back and tried to force the memories back where they belonged.
"So," Henry said almost hesitantly after everyone was comfortably settled around the fire, "campfire songs?"
Emma groaned inwardly. She thought they might be able to have a little bit of time to sit before jumping into the campfire activities. Still, she'd told her family they could all sing around the campfire if they so chose, and apparently they were choosing. "Nothing too cheesy, all right, kid?"
"So, no 'Kumbaya?'" Henry asked, swallowing a mischievous giggle.
"Exactly."
"We could start with 'Clementine,' maybe?"
"Actually, you know what?" Emma asked, a tiny smirk on her lips. "Have you ever noticed that a bunch of these supposedly children's songs are not at all appropriate for kids?"
Her parents exchanged an amused glance while raising their eyebrows at each other. Emma grinned to herself, already planning to ramp this joke up to be the rant to end all rants. "All right," Snow sighed. "I'll bite. What do you mean that the songs are not appropriate for kids?"
"Well, Clementine dies, for one thing," Emma said, ticking the point off on her finger.
David bit his lip to keep from laughing out loud. "It's a parody, Emma. She falls into the drink, yes, but she falls into the drink because she gets a splinter. How on earth a splinter knocks her into the river is beyond me, but the absurdity is part of the joke."
"Plus, the singer forgets all about his darlin' Clementine in the last verse after he kisses her sister," Snow pointed out.
"That depends on the version you hear," Emma reminded her. "Sometimes the last verse includes Clementine's old miner father dying of a broken heart to be with her. None of it is appropriate for kids, though, because yes, let's make death funny."
Her parents were trying not to laugh while Henry was grinning like the little kid that he was. Since her rant was being well-received, she continued. "And that's not the only one. The clock stops when the grandfather dies. You eat a rotten peanut and die. You swallow the littlest worm in your soda straw even though he begs you not to. Which, by the way, means you've committed premeditated worm murder after your victim has begged for its life. That's just cold."
"And you're a baby bumblebee murderer!" Henry added.
Emma ticked Henry's point off on her finger in addition to her own. "And a baby bumblebee murderer. The old lady who swallows the fly dies. And then there are all those people who try to kill that cat."
"But the cat comes back," Snow pointed out.
"The very next day!" David added with a laugh.
"Yeah, and at the end of some versions of that song? The entire world is blown up by nuclear bombs … all except for the cat. It's morbid!"
By now, the whole family was laughing. "You've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this," David said around a chuckle.
"You don't even want to get me started on 'I've Been Working on the Railroad.'"
Snow's brow wrinkled in confusion. "What's wrong with 'I've Been Working on the Railroad?' From what I remember, no one dies in it."
"No, no one dies in it," Emma admitted, "but there is something funny going on in that kitchen, if you know what I mean. Why else would the singer care if anyone's in the kitchen with Dinah?"
She could tell from the amused but bewildered look on Henry's face that he didn't have any idea what she was hinting at, but her parents certainly understood. "No one's doing anything untoward, Emma," David laughed. "They're playing music! Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, strummin' on the old banjo."
Emma snorted. "Yeah, like that's not a euphemism."
"What's a euphemism?" Henry asked with a little frown.
"Nothing," Emma replied quickly, because she was not about to explain it to him. That was a parent-child discussion for which she was not at all prepared. "My point is, Dinah and this unnamed someone are having 'fun' while Dinah's husband is working on the railroad all the live-long day."
Although Henry clearly didn't have the faintest clue what Emma was talking about, he was laughing just as hard as his grandparents. "A lot of kids' songs are weird," he said after he caught his breath. "I mean, think about it. How does the baby get in the treetops, and why does no one care when the bough breaks?"
"And how did the monkey get drunk at the animal fair?" David asked.
"Why does the itsy-bitsy spider insist on crawling up the water spout if it's just going to keep getting washed out again?" Snow added.
"Now you're all getting it," Emma laughed.
After the family's laughter had a chance to die down, Henry asked, "Mom? Did you have a favorite song when you were little?"
"What, kids' song?"
"Any song."
She thought for a moment. Aside from the Brownes and her fifth-grade music teacher, no one had really tried to cultivate musical interest in Emma. She liked music, of course, but she didn't exactly have a childhood filled with music and the arts.
"Surprisingly enough,"she eventually admitted, "I was always kind of partial to 'Let's Go Fly a Kite' from Mary Poppins." She paused as a vaguely horrifying thought hit her. "Wait. Mary Poppins isn't real, is she? Like, she's not running the Storybrooke Day Care Center or anything, right?"
Again, everyone laughed. "You never know," Henry told her with a cryptic smile.
Emma didn't even want to think about what his little smile could possibly mean. So she put it right out of her head, along with the notion of accidentally bumping into Mary Poppins on the way into Granny's or something.
Then again, after finding out that fairy tales were real and hanging out with Mulan and Aurora and finding out that she was a fairy tale princess herself? The Mary Poppins thing didn't seem all that weird. Certainly no weirder than Snow White being her mother.
"We could sing 'Let's Go Fly a Kite," Henry offered, smiling hopefully across the flames at her.
Emma narrowed her eyes at her son, knowing in an instant what was trying to do. Well, he could keep dreaming because singing – around a campfire, no less – had barely been fun when she was a kid. "You guys can sing whatever you want."
"As long as it's not cheesy or morbid," David said to his grandson while winking at his daughter.
"Exactly."
When Henry's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, Emma could tell he was trying to think of another tactic, another way to get her to sing. She smiled to herself; the kid was stubborn, she'd give him that. She was coming to discover that innate stubbornness ran through her family's genes.
She sat and listened as her family launched into "Let's Go Fly a Kite." It took Henry a moment to properly harmonize but after a false start, he managed to blend his young voice quite well with his grandmother's soft lilt. What surprised Emma the most was that her father had a surprisingly decent voice as well.
Things were going quite well until they reached Bert's verse. Henry stumbled over the words, causing Snow and David to stutter to a confused stop. Seriously? Emma thought. It wasn't like the song was all that hard.
She heaved a sigh, rolled her eyes, and opened her mouth to correct her son's mistaken lyrics. "You can dance on the breeze over houses and trees with your fist holding tight to the string of your kite."
It wasn't until her parents both stared at her in shock and a smug grin pulled at Henry's mouth that she realized she had sung the line. When she brought her hands up to cover her face, embarrassed, she heard the entire family giggling.
"It's okay, Emma," Snow said, her amused tone soft as she gave her daughter's knee a gentle pat.
When Emma brought her hands down and looked back up at Henry, she noticed that the smug expression was still on his face. And that was when she realized that he had screwed up on purpose, knowing she would correct him. "Ugh," she groaned. "I walked into that, didn't I?"
"Yep," Henry chuckled. "Smack into it."
Over the amused snickers of her parents, Emma said with a sigh, "Well, there you go, kid. You got me to sing. You happy now?"
His grin grew wider. "Yep."
Author's Note: To give credit where credit is due, the entire "I've Been Working On the Railroad" discussion was actually dinnertime conversation within my family one night. It's my brother's theory, but I thought it was funny, so I hope he doesn't mind me co-opting it. :)