When Regina imagined an island, she always pictured something small, those little masses out in the middle of nowhere with a single palm tree, where the comic strips always had a bearded somebody using coconuts for everything. A few islands in Neverland fit that description, but Neverland Proper dwarfed every last one of them. Countless hills and lagoons awaited them. The flatter areas bulged with forest. A peak behind the hills looked snow-capped. It could take weeks, and that was being optimistic, she thought.
Her hands on the rail with a knotted brow, she saw Emma mirrored her.
"Step back, ladies, lest you enjoy a good splash," Hook warned from the helm. The Jolly Roger creaked, a wave splashing onto the deck.
"So," Charming said to him. "This island has all the same surprises as the other ones did?"
"More or less, leaning towards more. Come nightfall, you'll hear the Lost Boys crying."
"The Lost Boys? I thought they were the ones who were serving Peter Pan?" Snow asked.
"Not one and the same, m'lady," Hook said, taking a sharp turn towards a lagoon. "The Lost Ones serve Peter. The Lost Boys are the ones brought to him." A look of fear, no, she knew what fear looked like, this was regret and a twinge of guilt, coming over his face. No stranger to regret herself, she hugged herself and listened further. "No parents, so no one to comfort them at night when they have time to think, time to have nightmares. Most pitiful souls you'd ever lay eyes on."
"Orphans," Emma murmured. "Do they know the island well?"
"Inside and out. Wait." Stopping the wheel, he leaned down towards them. "Rescuing one boy is hard enough, Swan. Let's not complicate matters further."
"If they know the island, they can help us," Emma argued. "Can they defend themselves?"
"I honestly wouldn't know."
"Emma, you're not talking about arming children to fight, are you?" Snow asked. Regina glanced over at Rumpelstiltskin, all too quiet now.
"Of course not. But they can do other things and free us to fight. How many more pairs of eyes is that?"
"A lot," Hook said.
Something stirred in Regina, something warm and clenching spreading from her heart to the ends of her body, something she hadn't felt since she'd first announced she wanted...
"Let me go to them," she said.
"What?" Charming gawked at her.
"They need someone to take care of them. I earn their trust and then they'll want to help."
"It should be me," Emma said, shaking her head. "No offense, Regina, but I've seen your idea of good parenting firsthand."
"And what would you know about parenting?" she snapped. "Or you? Or you? It's a sad day when the only people around who have experience with small children are your Evil Queen and the Dark One."
"You're talking about using children, both of you are!" Charming shouted.
"We won't use them. We'll rescue them." Emma put her hand on his arm. "They'll come back to Storybrooke with us."
"Excuse me?" Hook bounded down the steps, the ship docked. "This is a confined space, remember."
"We can't leave them here. If they really wanted Henry all along then they won't need them anymore and they'll kill him. They can mind the ship, they can be a crew, they can be a diversion. We can get this entire place to finally wake up and stop this craziness," she said. That noble streak, Regina noted.
"I'll let them find me," she announced, starting for the gangplank. "You can come find me and bring me provisions at night." A tug on her sleeve stopped her, albeit a gentle one, from Emma. "I know how to deal with tantrums. I know how to fix a scraped knee here and there. I can even change a diaper. You let me be Regina back in the mines. Let me be Regina now."
Emma ended her shift at the helm, handing it over to her mother. Between the ship's creaks, she looked out at the island and tried to pinpoint where the Lost Boys and Regina would meet. If the story about a clasp of cow hide restraining magic was true, she should spend the next inter-world trip finding whoever made them and getting a decade's supply for Storybrooke. In moments more full of denial than others, she pictured a Storybrooke with Regina and, yes, Rumpelstiltskin behind bars as a safer, more ideal place to live.
Where had Gold sneaked off to, anyway? Hook too, for that matter? Team Bad Guy left to their own devices sent a knot into her stomach. Rolling her eyes, she descended into the bowels of the ship to search.
Sad day when only Regina and Gold had experience around kids? Emma huffed to herself. Sad day when she needed to actually give a rat's ass about them. She'd fantasized about a Storybrooke devoid of Regina pretty much since Day One and yet none of those little thought bubbles included some Lord of the Flies society clubbing her to death. Rumpelstiltskin, well, at least he owned up to all his faults, she thought, a quick sweep of the cabins revealing nothing. And he helped her more than he didn't and, she hated to restate, he was Henry's grandfather, which made them family. He did seem to care for him, volunteering to come at all. She couldn't say she looked forward to seeing more of what someone called the Dark One could churn out, but at least it would be on her side, whatever it was.
Hook...she wished she didn't give a rat's ass about him, either. Cunning, persistent, resourceful—pretty damn off-putting that the positive traits didn't need much tweaking to be negative ones. Far be it from her to judge someone else for hanging on to what maybe should have been let go, but in spite of herself, she wanted to know what Milah had been like, to piece together a, a crime scene, if nothing else, to see what happened. She could have thrown him away, been satisfied with using him as a resource for finding her son except for two things, one of which, bizarrely, was not that he had chosen to come back and do what was right. That hadn't necessarily been expected, but it hadn't been unexpected either. No, the first was that he was telling the truth at the top of the beanstalk. That didn't mean he wouldn't have screwed them all over had a better offer come along, but his loyalty in exchange for a "ride" to her world was the truth. The next was that, for all his fatalistic talk concerning his obsession, he wanted to live. Maybe after he stabbed Rumpelstiltskin...because being tied up in a room would have to give you plenty of time to reflect...he'd realized he had nothing to live for. Three hundred some years of having nothing to live for invoked more sympathy out of her than resentment.
"Yeah, I spit on you. That's for punching me in the face at the cannery!" she heard Greg spout in a wet voice, like he had a mouthful of blood, or spit, from the sounds of it. Stopping right before the steps descended into the hull where he sat as their prisoner, she waited.
"And now I'm the one emptying your piss." She heard Hook's voice. "Seems I was already paying for punching you."
Considering Greg's recent actions, she would have paid to see him punched.
"Don't humor him." Rumpelstiltskin sounded farther back. "There's not much he can do from where he is."
"Just spit in people's faces, that's all." Such bite in their voices, she thought, trying to imagine harboring three hundred years' worth of hate. Maybe calling it cabin fever was an understatement.
"I wouldn't be so out of sorts, Captain. Couldn't be the worst thing to happen to you."
There was a pause and Emma could sense Hook turning.
"You'd be right about that," he said through his teeth. "Far from the worst. Isn't there somewhere else you can slither off to to busy yourself?"
A laugh of an exhale chilled Emma's blood.
"A crocodile reference! How clever of you," he scoffed. "I suppose then you think the worst isn't finding out after seven long years that your wife wasn't broken by pirates but just wanted a change of scenery. I hope you don't think you stole her from me. You see she was so capricious, so hollow a woman that anyone, anyone at all, could have had her. You were just the first one with a mattress."
"I think that says more about you than it does me," Hook said at the same time Emma realized she needed to fight back a gasp. Wife? Oh dear god, that meant...so many things... "I suppose I did your Belle a favor."
"When you shot her?" Voices rising. Must intervene soon. She clenched her fists.
"If Milah hadn't left you you might have just gotten to live your ordinary little lives, no power, no magic, no missing child seething with betrayal and disappointment. You would have died plain and unnoticed centuries before that deluded girl was ever even thought of."
There was no sound, no zap or pow or anything that would have been comfortable on an old superhero show, but Emma ran in anyway, catching Greg's smug "they can't even get along amongst themselves" face. She shouted a single "Hey!" before making it in between them. A white flash erupted from her body, sending everyone reeling backward. Including herself. She fell back into the bulkhead, a hot searing pain registering in her shoulder seconds later. Gasping as if she'd run a marathon, she stretched the collar of her shirt until a nasty dark cut met her eyes. She must have bumped right into a nail.
Rumpelstiltskin gave her an astonished look, a brief wave of concern and shame over his face after that. Unsure whether to look her in the eye or keep his distance, he merely held his hand out in her direction as he hobbled up the stairs, like he had hit her himself and had gone into shock.
"When you all kill each other, be sure to let me watch," Greg said.
"Shut up," Emma ordered, her hand on her shoulder.
"You're bleeding," Hook said, back on his feet.
"Yep. Bye."
"Swan...Emma, it needs stitches."
"I'll deal, thanks."
"Then let me do it by way of an apology," he said, his eyes not leaving the dark spot on her shirt. "I've needle and thread up in the cabin, along with some rum." He waggled his eyebrows at her with a grin. "Dulls pain in a rather pleasing manner. Come now, you know you'll be the one meeting Regina tonight. You want to be at your best? I doubt Red Bull can take care of that."
"Red Bull? What the hell are you talking about?" She was already following him up to the cabin, waving her good arm at her father to not be worried. Just a scratch. Only a flesh wound. You should have seen the other guy.
"Your mum's Red Bull. She offered it to me earlier, an elixir of sorts, I gathered." He opened his cabin door and gestured for her to take a seat near the desk while he fetched the sewing kit.
"Spacious," she breathed, cocking her head at the books. Three full shelves, not one of them familiar, but, judging from the titles, most of them involved time traveling, inhabited stars and planets...guess every world has its version of science fiction, she thought. She rolled up her sleeve, each roll tighter and tighter until she wondered if she would cut off her circulation. Finally, she exposed her shoulder. Hook pulled a chair next to her and threaded the needle, the point of his hook not much help.
"Sure you don't want a little bit of rum?" he asked.
"Just do it."
It was a fiercer pinch than Emma had expected. She tucked her lips into her mouth and gummed them. Tears prickled her eyes.
"You could provide a distraction, you know," she winced.
"The door still being open puts a limit on my distractions."
Oh, the Innuendo Show again. Just what anger, physical exertion, and injury had been missing.
"Tell me a story then." It worked on little kids, older ones, sometimes. No reason it wouldn't work for her. She could visualize better than most people assumed. She'd seen the world she'd thought Henry created so vividly when he spoke of it, even before she took a good look at the book's illustrations.
"You tell me one. Make your mind work on something else."
"Or you could humor the injured woman since it was partly your fault in the first place."
With a smile, a hesitant, fine-I'll-stoop-to-your-level smile, he looked away from her back at his work.
"Well, once upon a time." His mouth twisted a certain way. "There was a young boy who lived with his mother on the outskirts of a port town. His father was a merchant sailor, which meant he didn't see him often, but that didn't stop him from wanting to be just like him, like most sons." The words ran together, without much inflection, but they held her attention. "Life went smoothly until he was four when his mother died and his father was now charged with full-time parenting. He knew nothing but sailing, so he decided that was the place for the boy, and brought him along.
"The boy took to the sea. He loved sitting and drawing the silhouettes of the islands, he loved taking hold of the wheel, and he especially loved climbing the rigging into the crow's nest. He loved anything he could climb. Rigging, the rocky coasts when the ship would make stops."
Beanstalks, she thought.
"It took a while, but he eventually caught on that the things he and the men around him were doing weren't what the other merchant sailors were doing. Somewhere in the middle of robbing a passing ship, the thought must have hit him. He also realized his father, while an enthusiastic pirate, was not exactly a smart one, and it was only a matter of time before they'd all be caught.
"He made a good case for retiring, as good as a ten-year-old can, and his father agreed that they would abandon the captain and the crew and stowaway on an outbound ship. It didn't matter where it was going. They had enough loot to start a new life anywhere, perhaps even be actual merchant sailors. The next morning, the captain shook the boy awake, but he didn't have him arrested. He sat down next to him and showed him parchment with his father's face on it. It gave a description and mentioned the fact he traveled with a small boy. He'd left him, abandoned him to strangers and the sea to save his own skin. The captain pitied the boy and made him a cabin boy. He brought him up to speed on all the fundamentals he'd missed when he was learning how to sail and pillage, how to read, how to figure. The boy's father was caught and hanged a few weeks later, but it was then the boy decided that the best life that could be allotted to him depended upon him becoming the captain of his own ship." He swallowed, looking at her out of the corner of his eye and continued his work. With one last pinch, she watched him gather the thread. "That's it."
She flexed her shoulder, rotating it a few times, the red thread a beacon against her pale skin.
"That was the only color." He made a dismissive gesture at it, reading her like an open book once again.
"Thanks." She watched him pull the chair back and ease into it, preparing for conversation, or at least company. "So, what have you got planned when we get back?"
"Swan, I sit here and hope for some casual, albeit it stimulating, conversation and come up empty-handed. A shame, you being interesting and all."
"Interesting," she repeated. She bit the inside of her cheeks, not wanting to laugh at him after all she'd just listened to, but jeez, when he wasn't dripping in double entendre, he wasn't that formidable a flirt. All right, she'd bite. "How?"
"Well, having Rumpelstiltskin as a member of your family among other reasons," he said. "Just what is that even like?"
"It's..." Good lord, she hadn't even had time to think about it hard, not since she'd found out. "It's Maury-worthy, I'll say that." That would fly right over his head. "It's terrifying and it's a little hopeful. Don't. Don't. I don't want to argue about it. I had asked you what you had planned once we get back."
The white in his knuckles faded after she changed the subject.
"I ask because, because I want to help you." She leaned forward and risked looking into those mesmerizing forget-me-not blue eyes she'd made the mistake of looking into a few times in the Enchanted Forest. "I'm going to owe you ev—so much," she said. "If there's something you'll want to do in Storybrooke, I'll be the sheriff again, well, maybe..." Brushing off the train of thought that was who would be doing that job right now, she shook her head and looked back at him, seeing an unreadable expression she wasn't sure she liked. "But I might have some pull and you would have a second chance to live your life. Really live." A flash of blue dragged her eyes to the door where she saw her father pass by not even trying to look inconspicuous. Standing up, she rotated her shoulder one more time. She heard a tiny clunk before she had even straightened her back. Panning the floor, she picked up a gray metallic thimble that must have fallen out of the sewing kit.
"Sorry about that. Here," she said, dropping it into his hand.
"Thank you," he said, so hushed.
They wore animal skins. They smelled. Even just watching them weave through the trees, hiding from her but wanting to be seen, she could smell the pungent mix of oil and body odor boys never seemed to rid themselves of until they were men, and not even then sometimes. She ignored them and trekked farther, hoping that would prompt one of them to pop out and introduce themselves. It wasn't like the Lost Boys in the stage show she'd seen on TV once or twice. Those Lost Boys had seemed to swarm to new people like bugs toward a zapper. Ha, foolish comparisons of real life to fiction—so this is how Emma must feel all the time.
"Halt!" Three feet in front of her, a blonde, wavy-haired boy of about twelve, with eyes the same shade as a bowl of melted chocolate, stood with his feet shoulder-length apart and his hands on his hips. On either side, boys, twelve altogether, she counted, blocked her path, none older than Henry, two or three of them only about eight or nine. "Who are you?"
"I'm here to find someone," she said. Years with Henry taught her not to bend down with kids this age, nor to adjust tone of voice. They needed to be talked to like adults. "I'm his mother."
"Are you my mother?" one of the smaller boys asked, his mop of red curls and enormous black-licorice eyes drying her lips.
"Grown-ups don't belong on our part of the island," the blonde boy said again. "She's a Lost One."
"No, no, I'm not. The Lost Ones took my son," she said, reviewing in her mind what magic she'd used since she had arrived. She couldn't let children overpower her, not when they were this close to Henry. "And I have a feeling they took all of you."
"The Shadow took me," one of them said.
"Me too."
"They send the Shadow to other worlds. It always comes back with a kid."
"Then I don't like this Shadow any more than you do," she said. The horror of imagining a shadowy, translucent magical thing flying off with Henry made her almost grateful that two mortal humans had done it instead. Almost. "If you tell me everything you know, about them, about this place, you can come back with me. We'll give all of you mothers." And for the first time since Emma had suggested it, Regina wanted them to come back with them, wanted it bad enough to drag each one of them by the hair onto the ship itself. Before, it had been the idea of being around young children again, to maybe relive the days before Henry discovered things in Storybrooke weren't normal. These boys were older than she'd assumed, but they needed someone.
They huddled, whispers and grunts all she could make out.
"So you've come to be our mother," the blonde boy spoke again with the confidence and presence of a forty-year-old.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Miles."
"Miles, I'm here to help you. I want my son, but I want to help all of you." Most of them were tanned, the little redheaded boy the freckled exception, and all of them looked able to lift more and run faster than any child she'd seen before.
"Like the Wendy lady!" a long-haired, gaunt boy cried.
"Quiet, Aaron!" Miles hissed. "We have to be careful this time. You remember what happened to the Wendy lady."
Every last one of their eyes went downcast, obviously pained but stoic, the way solemn grown men might stand at a funeral. Regina shuddered.