A/N: Wow! I never expected this story to have so much success; you guys are all AMAZING (but you didn't need me to tell you that…)!

Mary Margaret cocked her head to the side, surprised at the question. "Henry Mills? He's my student."

Emma dropped her head into her hands, seeing she had a much larger problem to deal with now than John Doe.

Storybrooke Maine.

Storyfreakingbrooke Maine. There was always something with this town, wasn't there? There was always some new problem arising before the previous one was resolved, one that Emma would inevitably have to deal with, whether she liked it or not.

Realizing she no longer had Mary Margaret's permission to reside in her roomy loft - being that Mary Margaret had not the slightest inkling of who Emma was – Emma had checked herself into a cramped room at Granny's Bed and Breakfast. Granny, as per usual, had been overly hospitable to Emma, had not refused her a room because of her Regina-caused "jail record," but had also shown no signs of recognition toward Emma. She had called Emma the unfamiliar title of "Miss," and then "Miss Swan" when she had finally looked down at the logbook and seen Emma's name scrawled on the yellowing paper.

Emma now stood in front of the sink in the communal bathroom. Two people. Two people she had known for over four years didn't recognize her! What the hell was happening? She felt like she had made a wish to be invisible, except being invisible would be better because than this she would, at the very least, have a weak explanation for why she felt so unknown, anonymous, unfamiliar.

Emma could feel her confidence crumbling like an abandoned sandcastle, left to dry out in the sun. God, was she really Emma Swan? She still had her curly blonde hair, her strong, powerful arms, and her foreboding expression, but none of that actually made her her. Wasn't your identity rooted in others to some extent, after all? Even if you were a loner, the fact was, that just meant that people didn't know you existed. Being a loner still required people: people not knowing you. So, if your identity suddenly changed, if people started or stopped knowing you, who were you, truly?

Emma sat down on the edge of the claw-footed tub and dragged a shaky hand through her tangled hair. She ran through the events of the past couple days in her mind: first, she'd woken up from a car crash. She'd dragged her beaten body to the hospital. She'd been treated, held for a couple of days for examinations, then released with a mild concussionand warnings to be careful.

Immediately after her release, she'd sought out Mary Margaret, who'd rejected her as a familiar face.

After that, Emma had walked to Granny's Bed and Breakfast, rented a room with what she had remaining in her pocket, and that brought her to the present moment.

Emma sighed. Nothing that had happened to her in the past few days hinted even in the slightest at what was going on. Mary Margaret didn't know who David was, either. Shouldn't that mean something? No matter how hard she tried, Emma couldn't seem to make the puzzle pieces fit together.

Abandoning her attempts to understand her situation for the night, Emma turned on the faucet and splashed cold water in her face. She regretted it, though, because the shock of the icy liquid against her skin only reminded her that this all was real; this all was happening. Her own mother did not remember her. She dried her face with a threadbare towel Granny had loaned her and headed off to bed, sighing all the way down the hall.

Emma yawned, sloshing the coffee around in her half-full cup as she walked to Regina's. Her car had been towed after the accident, and she hadn't managed to salvage the money to free it from the towing company yet, so her current mode of transportation was by foot.

Surely, if no one else knew who Emma was, Henry would. Henry had brought her to this town in the first place; there could be no Princess Emma Swan-Blanchard-Nolan-Charming without him. That was why she was headed toward the Mills' sprawling mansion.

Surely enough, Emma was right: Henry still knew her.

So did Regina. Kinda.

Regina answered the door after Emma had allowed herself a few hesitant knocks.

"Miss Swan," Regina acknowledged. Her greeting was courtly and polite but held none of the friendly tone that Emma had taken four years to get out of her.

"Hi," Emma responded more than a little uncomfortably, digging her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She glanced up at the brunette, then, noticing her shorter hair, awkwardly added, "You got a haircut. Looks nice."

Regina's hand instantly flew up to touch her hair, her stern expression unchanging. "Yes, I did get a haircut, but you've already seen it, Miss Swan."

"Guess I wasn't paying attention," Emma said to the ground. "Is Henry-"

Before she could finish her sentence, a figure came bounding past Regina and launched itself into Emma. Two arms squeezed Emma's waist so tightly that she suddenly found herself lacking oxygen.

Emma removed the arms from around her waist, and the figure immediately started babbling as soon as she got a chance to look into his face.

"I knew you'd stay; I knew it!" it said. "Mom sent you home, but I knew you wouldn't give up on me!"

Emma blinked twice. She rubbed her eyes. She blinked again. None of her methods altered what she was seeing standing directly in front of her. She held up a hand for the figure to stop talking, and it complied. She needed time to process this.

"Kid, you look so… young," Emma finally managed after a full minute had passed, tripping slightly over her words in her amazement.

Henry shrugged at this. "I'm ten. I always look young."

"Hold on," Emma said, shocked, almost before Henry had finished his statement. "Hold on," she repeated numbly. "Say that again, please?"

Henry frowned at her, furrowing his brows and dipping his head just like Emma did whenever she was confused. "Umm… I'm ten? And I'm young and cute?"

"What year is it?" Emma asked slowly, a sudden realization creeping over her.

"Umm, two-thousand and eleven?" Henry bounced impatiently on the balls of his feet. "Why?"

Emma, her mouth slightly agape, glanced at Regina. "Can I have a moment alone with Henry?" she asked.

"Sure, why not. Maybe it'll get you out of his system." Regina turned and slammed the door behind her, clearly upset that Emma was back.

Emma breathed a sigh that was simultaneously a sigh of relief and of worry. On the bright side, she had managed to find two people who were aware of her identity, though not the full extent of it. Considering the way things were going for her so far, though, two people seemed to be a fairly decent number, definitely nothing to sneeze at. However, on the very, very dark side, Emma was pretty sure she had been sent back to the beginning somehow, to when she had first arrived in Storybrooke, the idea of which would be a massive problem in and of itself.

What made her problem grow exponentially larger, though, was that Emma wasn't sure there would be a curse that she could just break this time. There seemed to be nothing that instantaneous to remedy her situation, to make everything better again at the snap of the fingers (or at the kiss of a forehead). Emma was almost entirely confident that what she was living in was a cold, hard, magicless…

…reality.