Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.

Review Error note: Since last chapter, guest reviews are going straight to being posted without ever showing up in "moderate reviews". WTF is going on with this website? First they're vanishing for days and now they're just showing up unannounced? Get your shit together, ffnet!

Note to Mir: I am not a fan of Brittany Spears either. I had never heard "Toxic" until it came on the radio driving home last week. As for Emma, she feels burdened by her secret and disconnected from Neal. As he pointed out, she has a weird and unhealthy fixation on trying to be friends with Regina - which clearly, ad hoc by the writing on the show, is because Regina is her Lily proxy and a way to make up for not trusting her and then discovering that her destiny is the reason Lily's life was ruined. I think Emma has been using Regina in Lily's place, thus trying to find a happy ending for her (as though she was Lily) when Regina herself was never her friend nor does she deserve a happy ending. But since Lily has been colder to her than Regina... long theory short, Emma has issues. But I don't think it's "cruel" to anyone but herself that Emma told Regina the truth. She's in a self-loathing place and felt guilty about all the accusations she threw around, knowing she did horribly selfish and dark things. If anything, it resets the Emma/Regina dynamic to the more authentic place it was before Neverland, just with self-loathing and paranoia on both parts, which does facilitate fixing "present problems and behaviors". As for Emma "blaming her behavior on an alternative timeline," yes, she is doing that a lot in the way Regina kept blaming her behavior on The Author. In a way, Emma is going through the Five Stages of Grief and Loss (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance), but pin-balling between all of them depending who she is interacting with and the circumstances. Denial and Anger seem to dominate her interactions with Regina and her parents while she's full-on bargaining and depressed with Neal. And every now and then there's a moment of acceptance and full responsibility for what she's done. Eventually, Emma will settle on acceptance, but it will be a long road.

PART II

CHAPTER TWELVE

BADASS OR BAD MOMS?

The smell in the Sheriff's Station caused Regina to recoil and swallow back the reflexive urge to vomit. Obviously, Gold had cast some sort of magical Febreeze after dispatching Zelena - a spell which had worn off since the discovery of her mysterious absence.

Regina was no fool. After Hook bitched like a little girl about Gold falsifying video evidence to frame him in a murder he actually was complicit in - but he didn't see it that way since he wasn't the one planning it and had nothing to gain - and knowing Gold would not be satisfying with leaving his tormentor and son's murderer in a cushy jail cell to have her fate determined by bleeding heart liberal pussy cats, there was a ninety percent chance that her former instructor had offed Zelena.

For which Regina would send him a fruit basket after his honeymoon, and he would know that she knew without either of them actually saying it, and that would be that.

"Mom!" Henry called out, scrambling off of his cot. "Can I go home?"

"Just because Emma had no right to criticize my parenting," Regina told him stiffly, "does not mean you get off without punishment, Henry. You are becoming increasingly and worryingly rebellious. You are still a child and you cannot go joyriding in stolen cars - or cars of any kind - or skulking around town at all hours, not when this is no longer a peaceful town where nothing dangerous ever happens. This is not the Storybrooke you grew up in. It's full of dangerous people."

"What am I supposed to do?" Henry complained. "I don't have any friends, in large part because of you and how Storybrooke was, me growing up while no one else did. I mean, did it never occur to you how lonely I would be? How selfish and unfair that was? I was a freak that no one paid attention to, because the Curse made them, and then I was the son of the Evil Queen who terrified everyone. I barely got to be the son of the Savior before that got shot to Hell, and now everyone hates me because I got to live in the real world while they were shitting in the woods."

"I hardly think a castle is 'shitting in the woods'-"

"Lad has a point," interjected Hook. "I saw your castle."

"Keep your mouth shut, Guyliner," Regina snarled, "or I'll find the keys to that cell and shove them up your-"

"Oye, enough threatening my arse!" the pirate grunted. "And having been neglected and abandoned with my only friend being my lovable bully of an older brother, I can understand the lad's grievances."

"Piss off, Hook!" Henry snapped. "I don't want your sympathy!"

"Ungrateful little-"

"KEYS!" Regina growled and Hook retreated back into the shadows of his cell, flopping back onto hit cot, grumbling about 'women on the bloody rag'.

"Look, Henry," she said, moving to stand in front of his cell, "I know I made a lot of mistakes in raising you, and yes, I may have been selfish at times, but consider that the alternative would have been being 'adopted' by Peter Pan's agents and growing up with 'friends' like Felix, I hardly think you can consider your upbringing a hardship."

Henry rolled his eyes and argued, "Being the lesser of two evils doesn't make you a 'good', Mom. I may see you as my mom and not a villain, because I'm your son, but that doesn't make you not a villain to the rest of the world. Maybe I should've clarified that.

"And maybe," he amended, "you should think if it's really your best chance to be with a guy who says nothing bad you did matters anymore and none of that it is who you, like the Evil Queen phase of your life just suddenly disappeared because he loves you. Which is stupid. That's part of who you are. And I thought you were working on that with Archie before your mom came along, and now you're back to self-pity and blaming everyone and saying you deserve a happy ending without any work to earn it just because you met some guy a delinquent fairy said is your soulmate.

"Nothing against Tinkerbell, but she sounds kinda like she was snorting pixie dust instead of just tossing it around to play matchmaker."

"Lad makes another point," Hook interjected again. "Bloody fairy was probably higher than a beanstalk when you met her. She's half the reason Neverland's pixie dust supply was depleted. Never trust a junkie for dating advice."

Regina scoffed, "Says the serial day-drinking pirate who's currently stoned."

"ON PAIN KILLERS FOR MY VIOLATED BUM!"

"And I'm sure thousands of bar maids you gave every STD under the sun are high-fiving each other in the Afterlife," said Regina.

"I was sparing them the indignity of bastard children!"

"You were getting them drunk and date raping them in the ass, you loathsome cretin," Regina snapped. "You're no better than the bastard who raped my mother, who no doubt contributed his psychotic gene pool toward the creation of my late psychopathic sister."

"Please, your mother was just as much of a psychopath, luv," Hook argued from his cot. "One would have to be to murder their daughter's love, a good man, and force her into a loveless marriage with a creepy old king to groom her into becoming a second generation murderer to carry out revenge upon a family that wronged her as a young lass by taking over instruction under her tutor who would require her to murder her own father and all with the ultimate goal of becoming a heartless Dark One."

"Yes, you'd know all about hearts and Dark Ones," Regina mumbled.

"And I have abandoned my quest of revenge in the interest of perusing a good woman who sees the good in me!" Hook boasted.

Regina rolled her eyes. "I think those sedatives and pain killers caused memory loss, Hook, because Emma is neither a good woman nor does she have any interest in you pursuing her."

"She's just playing hard to get. It's her thing. She's hot one day, frigid the next, but I'll met that icy wall around her heart with my persistent charms," Hook argued. "I made a vow. And I told Neal that I was in it for the long haul, so he'd best get his silly attempts to rekindle that short-lived childish crush out of the way, so a real man can show Emma how to love."

"And people accuse me of being a delusional narcissist," groaned Regina.

"Can you just kill him?" sighed Henry. "We can say Zelena must have left some residual dark suicide magic in that cell..."

"Tempting, but that would violate my attempts to be a better person," said Regina with a grimace, "and make you an accomplice to murder. I don't want you adopting my morals, Henry. Doing a bad thing for good reasons is still a bad thing. It still darkens your heart. And your heart must be protected most of all."

"Oh, spare me!" whined Hook.

"I may not kill you, but I my gray morals still allow sodomizing you with rusty jail cell keys, pirate!"

"Bitch!"

"Manwhore!"

"Can I at least have my blanket?" sighed Henry.

AN: So, Henry has a bit more sense than his AU self, though Regina seems stuck in the land of I-Don't-Recall No Accountability. Hook actually made some good points, but he's still loathsome.

Next up: Emma has an actual legit more than thirty second conversation with her father about family stuff and not some magical fiasco interrupted by a screaming Dwarf.