Emma had learned the hard way how to be patient. It had been one of her most valuable tools as a bounty hunter. She could wait, longer than most, better than most, biding her time and collecting intel or just waiting out a perp where her more impulsive colleagues rushed in, sometimes with disastrous results. She'd seen the the price of making mistakes and learned very quickly the value of patience. People who were desperate, who'd thought they'd won, they made mistakes, and she caught them. Fuck being virtuous, patience kept you alive. It kept her eating and paying rent. It wasn't her nature, but she'd learned.

She was having a very hard time remembering those lessons now. Because now, she and the people she cared about were the ones who were desperate. They were the ones who stood everything to lose if they made a mistake. But the longer they searched, the harder it was becoming.

It was the sheer scope of their search that was wearing on all of them. Most states didn't keep consistent records on abandoned babies and there was no national database for abandoned infants. Information about the foster care system was almost exclusively collected at the state level and many states hadn't bothered digitising older records of children who even if they had been in foster care, would have aged out of the system by the time digital became the norm.

During the time frame where Regina and Maleficent's baby might have come through the portal from the other realm there could very well have been thousands of abandoned infants across the country. Emma had been digging through old newspaper archives, county and state records but she'd also reached out to her network of contacts from her bail bondsperson days, asking them to help with (what she told them, and it was mostly true) a decades old cold case of a stolen child. All that took time. Time Emma knew Regina and Mal thought they didn't have. Even though rationally, she knew that there was no indication Mal and Regina's daughter was in danger anywhere, the tantalising prospect of finding her, the hope that shone in front of them was as effective a goad as fear. But none of that could make any part of the process go faster and it was several weeks before they'd amassed a fairly complete list of every newborn unclaimed in North America in the year leading up to Emma's own discovery in the woods.

It wouldn't be easy. However she'd travelled, their baby was in another place, not Maine (Emma had been able to sort the list of potential babies down until she was certain they could cross that state off the list.) Which left forty-nine other states, and the provinces of Canada, and they were only assuming that she had landed in North America because Emma had, and because to contemplate anything else was to admit that it would potentially take decades to search for her. Still, Emma knew if they couldn't find her there, they would broaden their search even further, to Mexico, central America, wherever they had to. Pouring over the records from Maine alone had taken Emma a full week of long days, incomplete records and lying to exhausted, overwhelmed file clerks and former social workers on the phone. The only unclaimed newborn in Maine who'd matched what they were looking for, was Emma.

That had been a bad day, staring down at the piece of paper and realising that she had been just another statistic.

She'd come back to the house early after that, unable to keep searching even though a small sliver of guilt twisted in her stomach.

But she'd walked into the mansion to find Henry playing video games in the living room, Maleficent stretched out on the couch making snarky commentary (which Henry seemed to be enjoying) and Regina in the kitchen, stirring something that smelled delicious on the stove. There was one half-finished glass of red wine on the counter and a bottle of beer next to it, still cold enough the glass hadn't started to sweat yet. It was so simple, so incredibly domestic, and yet this is what Emma had always dreamt about in the heavy dark hours on either side of 3am when she couldn't sleep between jobs, when she'd had too much to drink to control her thoughts but not enough to be happy, she'd dreamed this. Well, not Regina, not a character from the stories she'd read as a child, she hadn't imagined the dragon in cotton pyjamas and fuzzy socks on the couch either, sassing back and forth with her son - the little boy she'd given away now so grown up and brave - but home, family, warmth, safety...this was her dream.

This was better than her dream.

Swallowing past a suddenly tight throat Emma had stepped into the kitchen and Regina's waiting arms. "How?" she'd managed to ask as slender arms wrapped around her.

"I could feel you," Regina said softly, and the gentle flare of her magic against Emma's heart underscored her words.

Small black lines and clinical words were forgotten as Emma buried her face against Regina's shoulder and let herself come home.

There were other bad days, though. Regina was trying so hard to be optimistic, to smile when Maleficent needed her too, and she buried most of her grief and worry until she was alone with Emma. Those were the nights it was Emma's turn to open her arms and hold Regina close, silently stroking sable hair or running her fingers up and down Regina's back as she listened to the smaller woman's ragged breathing. Regina didn't cry, and she never said anything, but Emma knew. She had been through the system and while she would never compare her experience to Regina's, she was a mother. It was all too easy to guess what was running through Regina's mind as she shuddered her emotion out against Emma's skin; that the search was futile, their baby had died, long ago, that she'd suffered through the system, that she'd been adopted by a family that didn't love her.

Only once did Regina voice some of the fears that haunted her.

It had been late enough that Emma was drifting in that dark fog between sleep and awareness when Regina's voice, soft and so hesitant, pulled her back.

"What if she has a good life?"

To anyone else that might have seemed a strange question, but Emma could feel the tension of the slender body against hers and she knew Regina. She understood. There was always that chance - slim and fragile but there - that her little girl's story was a happy one, that she'd found a family who loved her, grown up safe and healthy. She'd be smart of course, with Regina and Mal as parents? There was no way she wasn't. What if she had a good life, a spouse and family, even children of her own and she was happy, never knowing that her birth parents loved her still, that they were out there looking for her because she didn't need them.

What if Mal and Regina finding her would only bring confusion and pain?

For a long time Emma had been silent, unsure how to put into words that she knew that wasn't true.

Adoption rates were fairly high and many adoptive families were loving, good people who might not have been perfect but tried. Emma's case was unusual. Cynically she knew that white children, especially little blonde girls, had a higher chance of being adopted and there were nights when Emma wondered if magic or Fate had somehow played a part in her growing up the way she had, if even outside of Storybrooke some larger force had ensured she would be sufficiently broken, sufficiently desperate to be good to fulfil her role as Saviour...

She tried very hard not to think about that, instead pulling Regina closer and concentrating on the feeling of soft warm skin against her own, on the way their bodies fit together and the way Regina's breasts pressed against hers as she breathed, soft and steady.

In the end Emma couldn't answer Regina's question. The certainty she felt, that Regina's daughter - wherever she was - had suffered as she had, had been alone like Emma, pieces of herself missing in a way that would never make sense, Emma couldn't tell Regina that. Couldn't bring herself to say out loud what they both knew on some level, as if speaking the words would give them the power of truth.

They had to find her, because if they didn't, Emma couldn't finish the thought. Somewhere out there was a lost little girl who had already been alone years longer than Emma, and she deserved to meet her mothers and know how much they loved her. She deserved magic, because she was Maleficent and Regina's daughter and it was part of her, in her heart and her blood. She was part dragon, trapped in a land where half of her couldn't survive and Emma could only imagine the ache, the unnamed longing that must have pulled at her her entire life. That was the night Emma realised she needed to find Regina's daughter not just for the woman in her arms, but for herself. She needed to know it was possible, that whatever she was - this title, this role - wasn't meaningless.

In some strange way she felt she owed it to this girl - woman - she'd never met. Where Emma had found her magic and her family and a home, had come to accept and even embrace the power swirling in her blood and the soft lips pressing against her own, another little girl still lived out in the cold, alone and missing a part of herself. What the hell good was being 'the Savior' if Emma couldn't save the person who'd been condemned by her own parents.

Regina's home office became their research room, one table covered with all the papers Emma collected and Regina's desk equally crowded with magical supplies until it looked like something out of the Harry Potter movies, something Henry quietly delighted in, even if he was mindful of the reason.

While Maleficent was still too weak to be up and walking around for too long, Henry had a perfectly good set of legs and he became the designated go-fer, constantly back and forth between the mansion and library, and sometimes Regina's crypt, getting books for Maleficent to look over and returning the ones she discarded.

More than once Emma walked into the living room to see Henry and Maleficent side by side on the couch, leaning over an ancient, moldy tome. Maleficent was shockingly patient with Henry, answering his questions about magic and history and pointing out passages in the book. In return he seemed to know instinctively when to be quiet and let her read or to get another book.

Somehow, Emma had no doubt there was an Operation name in the works.

Leaving the two muttering quietly at each other one afternoon she'd found Regina in the kitchen. She was still in her slacks and blouse but her feet were covered by fuzzy socks and her glasses were perched atop her head and Emma got that melty, wobbly feeling in her stomach that happened every time Regina looked relaxed. It only got worse when she wrapped her arms around the smaller woman, resting her chin on Regina's shoulder and feeling the way she relaxed into Emma's arms.

Emma kissed the corner of her jaw and grinned when Regina shivered.

"Is it just me, or do we have a pet dragon?" She murmured, kisses down Regina's throat.

Regina's hands came to rest over Emma's and she made a soft sound of amusement. "Henry does seem enamoured with her."

"Hmm," Emma agreed, lips against Regina's shoulder. She was fast losing any desire to talk about Maleficent."

"At least she mostly walks herself."

Emma couldn't help it, she snorted, squeezing Regina gently in retaliation and straightening. "She's good with him."

In her arms, Regina stilled and Emma held her tighter.

"She was always good with children."

Surprisingly, the time Maleficent and Henry spent together paid off. They discovered an ancient spell of finding for "loved ones lost." It was old magic, crude and fueled by blood and potentially dangerous, but not - both Regina and Mal determined after poring over the text multiple times - dark. The blood had to be given willingly-

"Ew, there's a difference?" Emma asked. The look Mal and Regina shared had her holding up her hands. "No, never mind, I don't want to know."

And the searchers had to have a connection to the one lost. Parents, children, siblings, spouses

"Wait, why spouses, I thought this was about blood?" Emma wondered, looking down at the ancient pages.

Regina looked away, shadows in her eyes and it was Mal who answered, her voice unusually soft. "In the time this spell was written, many marriage rites included a binding of blood or magic or both. Even standing before an herb witch and being handfasted was enough to forge the connection. Magic in our land was different, it was...more."

It was also, unfortunately, tied to the moon and was only workable from sunset to sunrise during the new moon. Lunar magic often needed sacrifice; the old magics always did, and this spell took blood of those who loved the one who was missing. Regina and Maleficent desperately needed something to believe in, and someone to promise them that it would all be all right in the end, so Emma kept hoping, kept looking, and always said it was going to be all right.

Emma thought the stretch of waiting for the dark moon was the longest three weeks she'd ever sat through. Their resident dragon improved daily, which only made her more impatient. Regina tried to bury her own concerns deep, but she was more impatient than Maleficent and Emma used everything she had to try and make it easier. She moved in, officially, taking all of her stuff out of her parents' loft. She'd needed Regina as back up when she'd spoken to them, and talking to each other on the street was painful, yet Emma wasn't ready to heal that wound. She didn't know what she'd say, how much she'd want to gut her parents emotionally, and if she trusted herself not to break down completely. When Regina was with her, she could be civil, but anything more than that hurt too much.

Time passing slid them slowly into muddy, pale green, oddly scented, spring. Henry's classes moved into the fourth quarter of the year, and his grades were excellent, just as they'd expected. Emma had half-hoped he'd get a C or two, just to have something to work on, but his lowest were two Bs. Pretty damn good, she thought, and Regina was equally pleased. Parent-teacher conferences with the former Evil Queen had to be awkward for a school full of teachers who'd once lived in fear of her, but they'd fairly well with Emma in tow. Only their discussion with Snow had been acutely uncomfortable. Emma still hadn't found a way to bridge the gulf between them. Her parents had hurt an innocent for her, damned that baby and her mothers to a life of pain without each other, and Emma wasn't ready to forgive.

The strange consequence of strained relations with her parents was that they spent much more time socially with the "villains" than the "heroes." Dinner with Cruella, Ursula and Maleficent happened at least twice a week, and even after Maleficent was well enough to return home, she was a frequent guest in Regina's- their- home. Emma knew what it was to be lonely, and, strangely enough, she was used to the dragon lady now. She was overdramatic, sarcastic, and self-involved, but funny, and happy to join in their movie marathons and bingewatching of cultural treasures (like the X-Files) that Regina hadn't experienced. Even though she never admitted it, Maleficent seemed to enjoy their company, and she even sought them out, which Emma found touching.

These villains were rowdy, sardonic, eccentric companions, and yes, Ursula, Cruella and Mal could drink their way through most of Regina's good wine in a night. (Regina limited such occasions to weekend nights, but after she'd spent two Saturday mornings miserably hungover, she left them to it and stuck to one or two glasses). Emma rarely drank enough to be tipsy, because they still hadn't eradicated the devouring beetles. The weather was still too cool for so many insects, and even a late snow hadn't deterred them, or diminished their numbers. They had no reason to be in Storybrooke, or to be so hungry, and as much as it pulled her in two directions, she had to keep the town safe.

With the attacks growing in frequency, they lost the time to for hunt their nests. Emma and the rest of her sheriff's department carried flamethrowers in their patrol cars, and responded when the hungry creatures amassed in a large enough swarms to be worrying. The scent of scorched wings and shells hung in the air most evenings, strange and heavy with sulfur. The moths too were cursed creatures, something that had been summoned into being by some dark magic that they had yet to find any trace of. Cruella could enchant even the smallest ants to help them trace their summoner, but those trails all ended. It was as if the beetles had simply popped into being, ready to devour everything they could find. Even with their search consuming so much of their time, Emma couldn't help being a little grateful for their bug hunts, because they kept Regina busy, gave Emma something to do, and eventually, when Mal had recovered enough, they distracted her too.

The hanging moon above them functioned as their countdown. Emma had often thought the moon was pretty, and romantic in the movies, and it was nice when it was bright enough to see by, other than that, she hadn't paid much attention to it in her life. Now it was what they all lived by, watching it wax and wane, moving them steadily closer to the right time to cast the spell. All of them, including Henry, stared up into the sky once the sun set, daring the moon to disappear faster. Watching didn't make it easier, but none of them could help it.

When the moon had finally faded to a tiny sliver in the night sky, Henry sat with Regina in the hospital as they drew as much of her blood as they dared to use for the spell. Emma took the turn with Maleficent because she couldn't be trusted to remain polite with the nurses who (for sound medical reasons) were not happy with the idea of drawing her blood when her vital signs already registered so strangely. She insisted (of course) that it was because modern medical technology hadn't been designed for one of her species, but there was no way to argue against how pale she'd become as the little blood bag filled or how it had been a good half an hour before her dizziness faded and she could sit up. Maybe it would have been better if Regina was the one who walked her out to the car with an arm firmly around her back, or had to sit with her in the living room and convince her to drink juice and eat sugary junk food (though Emma was more of an expert on the latter), but Maleficent stopped arguing when Emma insisted that this was the right way to do it, because daggers and bowls would have wasted precious blood and meant it would be easier for both of their bodies to heal.

They did end up keeping two neatly labelled packs of blood in the refrigerator for three days leading up to the new moon. When the night finally arrived, though Henry had school the next day, they let him help because they needed his optimism. The spell required little more than the mixed blood of those who loved her, their clasped hands, the non-light of the new moon and Emma's endless pages of names, dates and sites of abandonment.

As they began, Regina and Maleficent's mingled blood rose in a thin stream from the measuring cup Emma had grabbed from the kitchen. It wasn't a classy goblet, but Regina said it didn't matter, and the sturdy glass was dishwasher safe.

While fire magic, dragon's magic, made Emma's head spin and her heart pound, this spell altered the world in a different way. It made the air heavier; tasted metallic when she breathed and whatever magic this used pulsed through her, as if it fed on her blood as well. The line of enchanted blood moved across the pages as if being drawn from a pen, staying bright red even in the air. It touched each name, as if tasting it on the page, and discarded them, moving on to try the next. Emma had tried to organise the print outs in steadily increasing circles outward, and as they watched it, she kept track on a map, marking cities that they could ignore in their search. Her heart thudded in her ears, as if she'd been running, and when she looked at Henry on the sofa, he felt it too.

Emma wanted to ask Regina what was happening, but her attention was consumed by casting. She and Maleficent sat next to each other, their hands wound together, and their eyes locked on the invisible guide that drew their blood across the pages. Each page that the spell finished with was rejected, turning brown like a dead leaf and falling to the floor. The papers rustled, Henry touched Emma's arm and they stared together as the women they cared about sank deeper into some kind of trance. Sweat broke out on Regina's forehead first, covering her skin with a faint sheen just after midnight. Maleficent's own soon followed, and by the darkest hours before dawn, both of them were drenched in perspiration, as if they'd been running, or trapped in a hot room. Their spell continued, racing through the pages as the rejected names turned to dust on the floor. Henry stayed up with Emma, holding her arm just as tightly as Maleficent held Regina's, and they watched, drinking caffeinated, sugary nonsense and eating junk, because that kept them both awake.

The darkness grew weaker as dawn neared, Maleficent's and Regina's breathing had synced into an echoey panting that cut at Emma's heart. They were probably not supposed to focus for so long and who knew what it was doing to them. Sweat pooled on the table around their hands and their clothing clung to both of them as if they'd been dipped into the sea.

"Are they okay?" Henry asked, resting his head against Emma's shoulder.

"I don't know," she admitted. "They're both pretty tough."

"Mom hasn't looked that bad since you saved her from Greg Mendel," Henry said, his face grave. "And they're going to do this next month?"

Emma glanced at the softening grey sky. "They still might find something tonight," she said, hoping, and he nodded grimly. She left him to watch them and grabbed towels, blankets, sports drinks and more chocolate before she returned. She didn't know what the protocol was for recovering from all nighters in spell-induced trances, but she knew basic first aid. She'd seen people look better after running marathons.

As the sun finally rose, Mal and Regina came back to themselves, starting to breathe independently, blinking, and weakly moving sore shoulders. Emma almost expected some kind of snap as the spell ended, but it simply faded away, taking all the rejected pages and dust from the floor with it, as if it had been burned away by the sun. Maleficent shoved off of the table and cursed (at least, that's what Emma thought the words were, she'd never heard anything like them). Regina wavered in her chair and Henry caught her, holding her shoulders with a towel.

Emma followed Maleficent as she paced, learning heavily on the wall. "You can try again," Emma reminded her. "You're through almost half."

"Almost half?" Maleficent repeated, her voice hoarse and desperate. "And we can try again in a month." She slammed her fist against the wall. "Fuck."

Surprised by the very normal reaction to being really pissed off, Emma almost smiled. Punching a wall and swearing was exactly what she'd want to do. "It'll work next month. You two have time to rest up, I'll try and see if I can shorten the list-"

"I'm all right, Henry," Regina insisted, but she shivered in her chair and Emma wanted to run to her, but she wasn't sure she could trust Maleficent not to crumple against the wall, so she stood beside her, letting Henry hold his mother.

Maleficent dropped her hand heavily to Emma's shoulder and nodded, trying to appreciate Emma's optimism. "You tried."

"We'll try again, and you'll find her," Henry insisted, his arm wrapped protectively around Regina in a way that stung Emma's heart. He'd grown up so much.

"Mal-" Regina urged, her voice weak and small, and that weariness reached even Maleficent, who sighed and let Emma escort her back. "We'll find her."

Surrendering to hope, just for the moment, Maleficent nodded and bent down to kiss Regina's damp hair. "You get her to bed," she insisted, retreating to the sofa where Emma and Henry had spent most of the night.

Emma set two bottles of bright blue sports drink (Henry's favourite for after track practice) on the table in front of her, and a chocolate bar. "Drink these, eat this, the guest room's all set up or you."

Her blue eyes were too bright with tears when she met Emma's gaze, but Maleficent didn't argue. "Look after Regina, she'll push herself too hard."

Regina rolled her eyes and bit something back that Emma probably would have said in her position. Emma and Henry shifted around, so Emma could help her to her feet and on her way up the stairs. Henry brought a blanket to Maleficent on the sofa while Emma tried to make sure Regina's feet were where they were supposed to be.

"I know," Emma teased as they headed for the stairs. "You two are a great example of the pot calling the kettle black. Luckily, Henry and I have the day off and we know this incredible recipe for apple pancakes."

Regina hugged her closer, nuzzling Emma's neck. "Thank you."

"We got this," Emma promised. "You, me, Henry- and the surprisingly helpful villains club."