It took a few minutes for Emma to realize how hungry she was. Maybe she would have to another doughnut on top of her bear claw because damn, she was so hungry her stomach hurt. Which didn't make any kind of sense to her because she'd eaten a lot more at dinner than normal and she'd had s'mores and marshmallows for dessert. Eh, whatever. All the more reason to chow down on pastries when her father returned.
Speaking of, where the hell was her father? How long did it take to pick up a dozen doughnuts? She'd already asked Henry twice what time it was, once when she first woke up and then again when she realized she was hungry. She'd started to ask a third time, which made Snow teasingly interrupt her with, "Three minutes after the last time you asked."
Then, after making sure neither her grandson nor her daughter would mind, Snow had headed upstairs to retrieve something from the apartment. Now Emma and Henry sat alone in the tent, waiting for both Snow White and Prince Charming to return.
Just as Emma was about to only half-jokingly suggest sending out a search party for her wayward father, David ducked back into the tent with a box of pastries in hand. When he spotted two sets of eyes lighting up at his arrival, he cracked up laughing. "If I'd known this was all it would take to excite you two, I would have bought doughnuts days ago."
Emma ducked her head sheepishly. The fact that her reaction to doughnuts for breakfast was the same as her eleven-year-old son's was a little embarrassing but damn it, she was flippin' starving. Besides, bear claws were delicious. Forgive her for being a little excited.
Henry, it appeared, had no shame. With a wide grin, he tore into the box, snagging his cinnamon doughnut along with a chocolate frosted. He glanced at Emma out of the corner of his eye and started to reach for her bear claw.
"Back off the bear claw if you want to keep your fingers, kid," Emma warned.
David snickered, both at Henry's little joke and Emma's reaction to it. His grin growing wider, Henry withdrew his hand from the box and raised it in surrender. "I wasn't really going to take it. I just wanted to see what you'd do," he said, settling back down on his sleeping bag to eat.
Snow returned a moment later, slipping back into the tent with a bag filled with paper plates and plastic cups in one hand and the almost full gallon of milk that had previously resided in their refrigerator in the other. Emma hid a smile. Since her family wasn't having the healthiest food for breakfast, Snow was apparently trying to force some healthy drink into them. She handed the first plate to Henry, a few seconds too late to keep him from trailing cinnamon-laced powdered sugar across the tent.
When Snow handed Emma a plate, she took it and dove into the box for her bear claw, lest someone else try to take it from her. Snow raised her eyebrows at her daughter but David gave her an amused shake of his head, silently telling her not to worry about it. As soon as Emma had moved away from the box, he reached in for a Boston cream, Snow chose a glazed, and soon, everyone was sitting quietly, enjoying their breakfast.
"What are we going to do after we eat?" Henry asked after he'd swallowed his last mouthful of chocolate frosted doughnut. Emma noted with amusement that he had saved the cinnamon one for last.
"We still have to clean up in here and take the tent down," Emma reminded him. "Not to mention get all the camping stuff put away." She and Snow hadn't done a careful job putting things away the previous night. They'd emptied out the cooler, but they'd left everything else piled up in the living area.
Henry wrinkled his nose, clearly displeased with the notion of more work. "I meant fun stuff. What fun things are we going to do?"
"There is work to be done before fun can be had, my boy," David spoke up, pitching his voice like a burly lumberjack.
Emma and Snow shared an indulgent roll of their eyes at David's teasing tone of voice while Henry pouted. "I don't want to pack up. That means back yard camping is really over."
And there it was, that disappointment in her son's voice that tore into Emma's heart every time she heard it. Sometimes she believed that if she'd had the means to raise Henry from birth, she probably would have ended up spoiling him rotten.
Then something else came to her, something she and one of the little boys in one of her group homes used to do. "We do need to get the tent off the grounds because it's not really our yard," she reminded him. "So how about after we take down the tent and put the rest of the gear away, we unroll our sleeping bags on the floor in the living room? That way we can still pretend we're camping but we won't be in anyone else's way."
The wide smile on Henry's face provided all the confirmation she needed: the kid loved the idea. A glance over at her parents told her that her plan was perfectly fine with them as well.
Pretending to camp out by sleeping on the floor was something she'd loved when she was little. She and … crap, she couldn't even remember his name. All she knew was that she was five and he was four and they used to pull their bedspreads off theirs beds and curl up on the floor next to each other to pretend they were camping. It drove the director of the group home crazy, if only because he didn't understand why they would choose to sleep on the floor when they had perfectly good beds to sleep in, and they were too little to properly explain to him that it was just a game.
Anyway, she figured that Henry was probably going to try to worm another night out of camping; she might as well set the stage for compromise now. She'd slept outside one night for him already, and that had been plenty.
"Okay, now that that's settled," Henry said, once again commanding everyone's attention, "what are we going to do after we take down the tent and get everything upstairs? We still have all day to do fun camping things."
"We could go on another hike," Snow offered.
Emma winced. Another hike? She liked hikes and everything but second hikes on the same camping trip hadn't exactly ended well for her in the past.
Not that she really thought history was going to repeat itself. Clearly, no one in the tent had any intention of leaving her behind. Plus, she was older now, much more equipped to take care of herself. Even if something happened to separate her from her family, she could certainly find her way back to civilization a lot easier now than when she was seven. However, as Emma was discovering, reason and emotion were two separate things. She had to bite her tongue to keep from adamantly refusing the second hike.
"We could make up a scavenger hunt list or something before we go and play against each other as we follow the trail," Snow continued, focusing on Emma to carefully gauge her reaction. She must have seen the panic in Emma's eyes because she took her daughter's hand in her own, as if to tell her that she was there and had no intention of going anywhere.
"What, like identifying six different kinds of birds following us around?" David teasingly asked his wife while giving Emma's knee a gentle pat.
"Something like that, yes," Snow replied, shooting her husband an amused look.
She let go of Emma's hand and bit into her doughnut as if she hadn't just done something so … motherly. A large part of Emma was embarrassed by her apparent need for physical comfort from both her parents – and a little weirded out by it, to be completely honest. All those years of learning to fend for herself were being completely undone by her own, long-suppressed insecurities.
She didn't think she liked this development. At all.
Still, there was a little girl buried somewhere deep inside her, a little girl who longed to latch onto her mother's hand and squeeze tight. A little girl who wanted desperately to let her father wrap her in a big bear hug. A little girl who knew all too well how it felt to be completely alone in the world and was thrilled that she didn't have to be alone anymore.
This dichotomy, this war within her between the self-sufficient adult who didn't need anybody and the little girl who just wanted her parents to make everything better … it was enough to make her head swim.
Seemingly oblivious to his mother's mental wanderings – which Emma took as a good sign, since it meant she hadn't completely lost her careful control – Henry exclaimed, "We can follow the brook this time! Remember, Mom? You said we could follow the brook."
When Emma hesitated, Henry almost immediately gave her the Stage One Puppy Dog Eyes. Seriously, Emma thought, those things should be illegal. One of these days, she needed to learn how to build up an immunity to puppy dog eyes.
One of these days was apparently not today, though, because she sighed and found herself saying. "Okay, I guess we can follow the brook to see where it leads. After we take the tent down and get everything put away."
"Yes! Thank you!" He happily went back to his remaining few bites of cinnamon doughnut.
Snow caught Emma's eye and gave her a reassuring smile. No words passed between them but words weren't needed. The love and comfort in Snow's eyes had said everything: I'm here for you and I'm not going anywhere. You don't have to worry.
Emma averted her gaze, focusing on her breakfast while trying to calm her nerves. Seriously, the amount of worrying she was doing over this was ridiculous. No one was going to leave her. No one was going to get lost. All they were going to do was follow a brook to see where it ended while maybe playing some kind of silly scavenger hunt game. Last night's activities had turned out just fine, and so would this.
Henry set his plate down and swallowed the rest of his milk in one big gulp. "I should bring a change of socks this time," he said, mostly to fill the silence as his mother and his grandparents finished their meals. "That way I can wade in the brook as we follow it."
"Why are you so interested in finding out where the water goes?" Emma asked, not unkindly. She just curious as to why the kid had such a fascination with a random stream in the middle of the Storybrooke woods.
He thought about it for a moment before shrugging. "I don't know, really. I guess I just like solving mysteries."
Everyone smiled at him, all thinking the same thing: if he hadn't liked solving mysteries, perhaps none of them would even be having this conversation. Without Henry bringing Emma to Storybrooke, the curse would still be active and they'd all still be separated from each other.
Thankfully, before anyone could get too bogged down in emotion, David asked, "Are we giving this an operation name?"
Once again, Henry frowned in thought. "I'll have to get back to you on that," he said after a long beat. "I want to make it something good."
Emma smiled. "Like Operation … Water Works?"
Henry wrinkled his nose and shook his head at her. A moment later, his entire face lit up. "Operation Sidewinder!"
"Sidewinders live in the desert, though, not water."
"Maybe, but the brook winds through the woods, so it sort of works."
Emma glanced up at her parents, who looked thoroughly amused. Neither one of them seemed to want to argue the point, so she simply shrugged at her son. "All right, then. Operation Sidewinder it is."