A/N: OMG! I am having so much fun writing this; I hope you are enjoying reading it as much as I enjoy writing!

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.

Emma drew in a deep breath, taking in the warm, smooth scent of her hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon, the one constant in her life of change.

"So, we broke the curse?" asked Henry next to her, slurping down the last of his own hot chocolate. "How'd we do it? What'd Mom do about it?"

Emma nodded, still finding it hard to believe that her fifteen-year-old son had reverted back into a ten-year-old, practically in front of her eyes. "Yeah. I, um." Emma paused, glancing down at the familiar countertops of Granny's diner. She was glad Regina had allowed them to walk here so she could talk to Henry completely alone. Even though she knew him, now that she had been cast back to whatever the hell this, this everything, was, he didn't know her. She felt awkward saying what she was about to say next.

"I kissed your forehead. You were in the hospital, and there was this big whoosh, and then-"

She paused. Henry was looking at her from his green eyes, colored like hers but shaped like Neal's, with an admiring expression. His eyes crinkled into a smile.

"What?" she said defensively.

Henry smiled at her. "You love me," he teased. "Or, loved, I guess. In the future. You would love me, you will love me…"

"Kid, I…" But, before she could finish, Henry had wrapped his arms around her, and, taking in the deep, woodsy scent of his shampoo, she couldn't say she hadn't needed that. He pulled back after a moment, though, his childlike (or childish, rather) curiosity quickly moving his mind to another subject.

"What did my mom do when we broke the curse?"

"Well," Emma replied, shaking her head, "I wasn't her favorite, for a while. But she changed. For you, Kid."

Emma felt the sudden urge to reach over and stroke Henry's hair back from his face, to tuck him under one arm and place another kiss on his forehead, much like the one she had given him in the hospital. But she couldn't. She knew him, but, again, he barely knew her.

It was just so difficult.

"So, you just need to kiss me again. Right?" Henry said hopefully. "Then the curse will be broken."

Before Emma could answer, the bell on the door chimed, announcing a visitor. Emma turned in her seat to look just as Mary Margaret stepped in.

As her eyes swept the diner, Mary Margaret's eyes met Emma's. Emma quickly averted her gaze, but Mary Margaret kept hers fixed on Emma and made a determined beeline for the counter. She placed herself in the seat next to Emma and stuck out a hand.

"Mary Margaret," she said. "I think we got off on the wrong foot yesterday, and I'd like to start over."

Emma accepted the proffered hand and shook lightly. "Emma Swan," she said simply. She was already on thin ice with her "mother"; she didn't want the whole town thinking she was crazy.

Emma saw the way Mary Margaret tilted her head vaguely to the left at the mention of her name, her mouth opening into a slightly-curved smile, probably thinking, "I've been holding onto that name for a baby girl. What a coincidence."

And Emma felt suddenly alienated from herself as she realized she had no viable evidence to prove that she was that daughter. That the name had been used already. By her.

Henry, not possessing Emma's superpower for determining if someone was lying or not, was nonetheless still incredibly observant and picked up on this subtle thought of Mary Margaret's.

"Emma," he whispered, tugging on the sleeve of her red leather jacket. "Do you still have the book?"

"Only thing I could get from the towing company," Emma said truthfully, and reached into her messenger bag, full of three possessions she considered to be the most important: her white baby blanket, the key to her room at Granny's , and Henry's book. Only one of them actually belonged to her.

Emma lifted the leather-bound book from her bag and handed it to Henry, wondering if this time, the book would be even less convincing to her. Right at the moment, she was fairly sure that this was all there was; there was no unbroken curse that made reality seem any less painful.

But, then again, she'd seen or possibly done all that she had. She'd broken the curse, traveled to Neverland and the Enchanted Forest, and turned herself into the Dark One. All that she'd learned around the people of the town, there was no way none of that was real.

Something fluttered to the floor as Henry accepted the book, a loose page from the story, and Emma scooped it up and placed it inside the front cover without once thinking that it might be important to her current situation.

Henry flipped through pages and landed on one that only had Snow White on it, pictured head-on, staring out through the book as if she were longing to be in Emma's world.

Emma couldn't understand why, though. She'd rather be in the book, where everyone knew who they were at every moment; no guesswork.

"That's you, Ms. Blanchard," Henry said, placing his index finger on the shiny book page.

Mary Margaret laughed shyly. "That's not me, Henry. I'm not special enough to be in any book. Besides, her hair is long, and mine is short, see?"

"I bet," Henry began, flipping pages once more, "I bet that you would name your daughter Emma if you had one, right?" Mary Margaret's mouth gaped slightly, but Henry plowed on before she could get a word in. "Well, look." Henry stopped at the page with baby Emma on it, wrapped securely in her white knit blanket. He grazed his thumb over Emma's name, embroidered into the edge of the blanket, indicating that Mary Margaret should pay attention. "That's Snow White's – your – daughter, named Emma."

"That doesn't mean anything," Mary Margaret said, almost obstinately, and Emma could see why Mary Margaret wasn't buying it, why even she herself was having trouble convincing herself the fairytales were real, even through she had lived partially through it. After all, how could anything as crazily wonderful as the perfect life depicted in fairytales possibly hold true for someone living in reality? Reality was rude. Reality was harsh. Reality was real. Even when Emma thought she had her life secured into a place she was happy with, fate had torn that away from her and was now tempting her to find out why, how. It was forcing her to hold four years of her life up to the light and examine in objectively, to say, 'That's not real. Good things don't happen to people like me.'

"There are a lot of coincidences in life, we shouldn't get excited over all of them," Mary Margaret said.

"How about this?" Henry asked, sounding like the little detective he was. He tugged Emma's tattered baby blanket out of her relatively empty bag and handed it to his teacher.

Mary Margaret ran her fingers over the soft thread, feeling the fraying yarn tickle her fingers. It felt strangely familiar and strangely not. She glanced up at Emma, a surprised look on her face.

"I like hot chocolate with cinnamon," Emma offered weakly, a vague smile on her face.

"You could've just made this… knitted it and roughed it up a little…" she said, still rubbing the fabric between her hands.

"We didn't," Emma said quickly, rushing her words out. "Do I look like someone who knows how to knit?"

"No, but-" She cut off her sentence abruptly.

"I need to think about this," she said.

Suddenly, Emma had a thought. A thought that would allow both her and Mary Margaret to find out what kind of a reality they were actually living in. "The John Doe at the hospital?" Emma began. "You read to him, right?"

Mary Margaret looked at her then, frowning. "Yeah, why?"

"Is he blond, muscular?"

"Yes…"

"Strong nose and perfectly sculpted lips?"

"Why?"

Emma could tell she was making Mary Margaret nervous again, and she knew she had to hurry it up.

Emma sighed and slid the book over to her. "This is all going to sound crazy, but I may have been through this all before. I don't know. I don't know what to believe anymore." Emma pushed the hair back from her face. "I feel like I don't know who I am anymore." She blew out a puff of air and let a long pause go by before she spoke again.. "I need you to do something for me. If it works, I'll tell you more. But" –she pressed a hand flat on the book and leaned in closer to Mary Margaret, so close that Mary Margaret could smell the cinnamon on Emma's breath – "first, I need you to read this to John Doe. Supposedly, you're Snow White, and he's Prince Charming. If that's true, he's going to grab your hand while you're reading, but he'll be completely motionless when you try and tell the doctors." Emma paused to lick her lips. "He's going to wake up and wander off eventually, to the toll bridge. He's looking for you, because, according to the book," she tapped the hard cover, "the troll bridge is where your story really begins. You need to be there before he is, or we're going to have serious problems."

Emma drew in a deep breath. Never in her life had she said so many words all at once, and she was worried what Mary Margaret would say. Even if Mary Margaret wasn't her mother (this whole situation was making her less and less sure of herself), she was the closest thing Emma had to a mother figure in her life, and she didn't want to lose her.

Mary Margaret looked skeptical but compliant. "I'll do it," she said.

Emma bit her lip and nervously curled and uncurled her fingers, hoping her plan would work. It was all she had.

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