A/N: I'm guessing at the time of year. We know that Kathryn disappears around Miners Day, which isn't very long after Valentine's Day. And although that plot takes up the better part of 1B, I don't think more than a week or two go by in SB. The curse breaks almost immediately after Kathryn's reappearance. Everyone is still wearing jackets and coats, so it's probably not late spring-early summer. I'm going with mid-March.

Chapter Three

Even though he knew it was futile, Rumple flung himself at the ground where the vortex had spun scant seconds earlier. His fingertips slid over vinyl flooring. "No," he whispered. "No, no, no, no no."

"Hey." Emma was beside him. "Hey, there's got to be some way to reverse the spell, right?"

Rumple turned his face toward her at that and Emma's breath caught at the anguish in his eyes. "Come on," she said shakily. "The hat couldn't have been the only way to get a portal open."

"A bean," Rumple whispered.

"Bean…?" Emma repeated, but Rumple kept talking over her.

"An enchanted mirror. A mermaid. Magical slippers. The wand of Merlin's Apprentice. Oh, Savior," he continued bitterly, "there are many ways to travel between realms, and none of them are open to us here!" He shook his head. "I spent three hundred years looking for a way to come here. Looking for my son. And now…" He exhaled heavily. "They are beyond our reach."

"No," Emma said. "No, I don't believe that. There's got to be something. We can't just… give up."

Gold's eyes flashed at that. "We have no choice!" he snapped. "With a realm full of magic at my disposal, it took me three centuries to find a way to get here. How long do you think it will take from this land? Four centuries? Five? The meanest room in my dark castle had more magic than this town does now. And," his voice took on a mocking singsong, "all the hopes and dreams and wishes in the world won't help us now." He fixed her with a cold stare, as he braced one hand on his cane and pulled himself up with some effort. "So," he said bitterly, once he was standing again, "since I'm of no use to anyone here, I'll be on my way."

"Gold," Emma said. "Wai—"

But Rumpelstiltskin had already vanished in a puff of black smoke.

It felt like Henry had been falling forever. He thought he was screaming—his throat felt raw enough, even if he couldn't hear himself over the howling winds. He knew that his mother—scratch that: the Evil Queen was holding him tightly and he struggled blindly to get away. Finally, the vortex seemed to open again and spit them unceremoniously onto firm ground.

The first thing Henry noticed was that his father was beside him, breathing hard, one hand gripping the sleeve of Henry's navy overcoat. The other was that his mo—the Evil Qu—maybe he could just think of her as Regina for now—was sprawled next to him on the ground, looking more undignified than he'd ever seen her in his life. He scrambled to his feet and, as she reached out for him, scuttled back. "Keep away from me!" he snapped.

"Henry…"

"No! It was supposed to be goodbye! I wasn't supposed to come with you!" He looked around now, realizing for the first time that they seemed to have landed in a forest clearing. It was silent, eerily so, the sun seemed to hang overhead a lot warmer and brighter than it should have been on a typical mid-March day in Maine. There was a strange fragrance to the air and none of the salt tang of the ocean that he was so used to he barely noticed unless he was at the beach.

"What is this place?" he asked, his anger replaced by uneasiness.

His father provided the one-word answer. "Home."

Mary Margaret took in the expressions on the faces of her husband and daughter at a glance. She scraped back her chair from the table as she got up nervously. "What is it?" she asked. "What's happened?" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "D-did Regina get her magic back?"

Emma shook her head. "No," she said raggedly. "But she got Henry. And Neal."

When her mother enveloped her in a fierce hug, Emma stiffened at first. Then, her shoulders slumped, and she put her head on Mary Margaret's shoulder and sobbed.

Mary Margaret hugged harder, while David patted her back.

Belle smelled the smoke before she saw it. Immediately, she flung down the book she'd been reading and sprang up to fetch water to douse the flames—

Then she realized that there were no flames, and that the smoke was dissipating rapidly. And Rumple was standing before her, his eyes brimming with tears, his shoulders slumped, and his face looking several years older than it had that morning. "Rumple?" she whispered, reaching out for him.

He didn't move into her embrace, but neither did he shrug off the hand she rested on his forearm. And when she pulled him closer, he offered no resistance.

"What… what's happened?" she asked, not sure why she was still whispering.

Rumple shook his head. "Bae," he said, whispering as well. And for several long moments, he said nothing more. Then slowly, haltingly, doing his utmost to keep from utterly breaking down, he told her what had happened as she hugged him harder.

He actually thought he had himself back under control when he finally slid out of her embrace and let her guide him to the sofa. But when she sat down beside him and wrapped an arm around him again, his face crumpled.

"I let him go once," he said brokenly. "I-I regretted it the instant I lost him, but he couldn't have known that. For more than two hundred years, he thought I threw him away for power and immortality and just when I got him back again…" A wrenching sob escaped him as Belle gently stroked his hair with her free hand. He turned anguished eyes on hers.

"Does he know?" he demanded, squeezing his eyes shut too late to stop the flood of hot tears. "Does he know I held on this time? That I tried to pull him back, but I was too weak, too useless, too…?"

Belle blinked back tears of her own, as she whispered comfortingly, "I'm sure he knows you tried, Rumple. I'm sure he knows."

"It would be helpful to know the land in which we've arrived," Regina muttered, looking about as though she expected to see a 'Welcome to So-and-So's Kingdom' sign through the trees. "One forest looks just like another."

Neal nodded. "I can't answer that either," he admitted, and the queen's lips curled scornfully.

"Well, you're pretty useless, aren't you?" she snorted. "Come along, Henry." She gripped her son's wrist tightly and started making her way through the trees. Neal followed. After they'd gone several steps, she turned to face him.

"I hope you don't think you're coming with us," she snapped.

"Henry's my son, too," Neal reminded her, his tone affable, but his gaze level.

"It wasn't my intention to bring you with us," Regina said. "You may have hitched a ride, but this is as far as you go."

"Dad!" Henry exclaimed, struggling to break free, but Regina's grip was like iron.

Neal stayed calm. "Can you hunt?" he asked.

"What?"

"Or fish?" Neal persisted. "Do you know which plants are safe to eat? Do you know how to build a lean-to shelter or a fire that won't set these woods ablaze? I may not know where we are, but I've spent a couple of centuries in another realm that was frozen in time and I spent a good portion of my stay there honing my survival skills. Unless you had the opportunity to learn any of that in your castle, with your servants at your beck and call, and your magic to make things easier—" He stopped, eyes widening, as Regina reared back, her hand upraised, as though she was preparing to throw something.

And then, he realized that nothing was happening and, after a moment, she exhaled noisily and lowered her arm. "Fine," she snapped. "As long as you're useful, you can stay. But as soon as we reach my castle, you're gone."

Neal raised an eyebrow. "Guess we can talk about that when the time comes," he said. Regina opened her mouth to protest, but Neal kept talking. "Or I can strike out on my own like you were telling me to a minute ago."

That last part was almost a pure bluff. Neal had no intention of leaving Henry behind in the care of someone who had as good as admitted to lacking even the most basic knowledge of bushcraft. If Regina called him on it, he would follow at a distance, relying on his tracking skills to keep her from realizing, but if danger were to strike, he knew that he might be too far off to get there in time. He watched her, a half-smile on his face as she considered his words. It didn't take her long.

"Fine," she snapped again. "Now figure out a way to get out of this wood."

The Mother Superior—Emma found herself flinching every time that Mary Margaret addressed her as 'Blue'—regarded them sympathetically as they poured out their tale, but at the last, she shook her head. "I am sorry," she said, "but bringing us all out of our land required the Darkest of curses. Although the Dark One has brought magic into Storybrooke, he has brought only its raw potential. Until and unless we can discover fairy dust here, our own Light magic is quite limited. And even once we have the dust, without the proper components, we wouldn't be able to begin to fashion the proper workings. And if we knew the correct spells, but they required ingredients not native to this realm…"

Mary Margaret's gaze faltered. "Couldn't there be a substitute?" she asked.

Blue smiled sadly. "An apple cake recipe can be modified somewhat. You might substitute pears and, while you wouldn't have an apple cake, you would have something approximate. Ginger can stand in for cinnamon, or perhaps almond flavoring for vanilla. It might not be quite what you had in mind, but it might still suit. But how if you are missing flour or sugar?"

"There are gluten-free recipes," Emma ventured.

Blue nodded. "And those might have a solution to the absence of wheat flour, though even for those, you might need to alter its ratio to that of the other components, add stabilizers and so on. But suppose that you had no flour available at all? Or perhaps the flour that you had would lend a bitter taste to the batter, requiring additional sweetener? That might overtax your leavening agent or under-tax it. The baking time would likely be thrown off. And at the end of it all, you might well end up with a cake that was burned on the outside and raw in the middle."

"Can't you try?" David asked.

"We can," Blue acknowledged. "If we are able acquire a store of fairy dust. Until we do, I'm afraid that this entire discussion is academic. But if we should acquire it, we will do our best to create such a passage. I ask only that you realize that our best might be far from good enough."

Three pairs of shoulders slumped. "Thanks," David murmured, dejected.

As they turned to go, Emma muttered under her breath, "…for nothing."

From the way that Blue stiffened, Mary Margaret knew that she'd heard her.

Neal kept watching the skies as they made their way through the wood. He was glad to see vegetation he recognized. During the Ogre War, the duke's army had laid claim to the lion's share of the district's harvest and, like most of his fellow peasants, Neal had become an expert forager. During their trek, he'd managed to fill Henry's backpack with a goodly amount of mushrooms—he took only the ones he was positive were safe to eat—lady's mantle, spicknell, wild strawberries, and bedstraw.

"Is that what we're sleeping on?" Henry asked when he heard the name of the last, only half-joking.

"No, but if they'd started flowering, they might have been something to wake us up," Neal replied with a grin. "The burrs make a pretty good coffee substitute, not that I knew what coffee was when I was a kid. Since we're going to eat them, though, it's better that we've found it now," he went on. "The young shoots taste a bit like peas, especially when they're cooked. By the time the plant's old enough to flower, it can get pretty bitter."

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Regina was feigning disinterest, even as she listened intently to what he was saying.

"So," Henry said, changing the subject, "how long do you think it'll take before they figure out how to bring us back?"

"They won't," Regina said bluntly, giving up the pretense of not eavesdropping. "While that portal might have only been meant for me, the only person with a chance of opening another one isn't going to do it unless it's in his best interests. You two are just as stuck here as I am."

Neal regarded her for a moment. Then he smiled at his son. "It could take a while," he admitted, "but they'll find a way. Meanwhile, it'll be dark in an hour or so. We'd better figure out where to camp."

"I'll thank you not to go filling his head with false hope!" Regina snapped. "The sooner he faces reality, the better!"

"I agree," Neal said mildly. "And the reality is that he and I will be getting home. Probably sooner, rather than later."

"And what makes you so certain?" Regina demanded. "There's one person in Storybrooke who might be able to get you back and considering that he's also the one who sent us here, he's hardly about to."

"Oh, I think you're wrong about that," Neal said, his smile back again and growing wider.

"Why? Because you think he's made your fiancée his protégée and he'll do it as a favor to her? Sorry to disillusion you, but I think I've known Gold a bit longer than you have."

"Possible," Neal allowed, "but I knew him first. He's my father. And after I came through a portal to a land without magic, he spent more than two hundred years crafting a Dark Curse that would let him follow me. If he didn't give up after two centuries, he's not going to give up now. Bonus? That makes Henry his grandson. That gives him even more of an incentive. And now that Storybrooke has magic, I doubt it'll take him another three hundred years to find a solution. What do you think?"

Regina's eyes widened. "No," she said, her voice a horrified whisper. "He made that Curse for me! He did it so I could finally get my vengeance on Snow White after—" She stopped. "After he cast a spell that ensured that I couldn't harm her or her prince in our land," she said in a completely different tone.

He'd taught her spell after spell, each one Darker than the last, let her believe that her happy ending was in her grasp… and then, he'd given Snow White that protection and snatched that victory from her very fingers. Was there more? Had Rumple been aiding and abetting Snow White from the start? Certainly that charming prince of hers had kept popping up at the most inopportune times, almost as though he was being pointed in certain direc—

"He did this to me," she said, her eyes flashing dangerously.

Neal gave her a slight nod. Then he shrugged. "Looks like Henry's found a good spot to bed down. Help me gather some wood and we can get a fire going before it gets too cold." He turned away, stooped down, and started picking up thin branches from the forest floor, moving in Henry's direction.

Regina watched him for another moment, feeling her heart sink down to her stomach. "He did this to me…"

Late that night, Regina listened to the sound of Neal's snores and Henry's regular breathing as she watched the campfire with a bleak expression. The Dark Curse had never been for her. Rumple had tricked her into casting it for him. All magic came with a price. Rumple had been content to let her pay it. Perhaps, he couldn't have paid it himself, even had he been so inclined; if the price of the curse was the thing you loved most, and he needed the curse to take him to the thing he loved most…

A chilling thought struck her. She'd murdered her own father to cast the Dark Curse. She'd thought it a hard price to pay, but a brutally fair one. But had that been all? A curse that could transport all the inhabitants of one realm to another, create a living space for them, wipe their memories, allow the caster to include specific outcomes for specific individuals… She'd never considered the kind of power such a curse would entail; she tended to focus on results rather than processes. But was it possible that casting the Dark Curse had cost her, not only her father's life, but her own magic, as well?

If that were indeed the case, then it would explain why neither Rumple's purple smoke nor her return to the Enchanted Forest had restored her power. If that were the case, then her magic was well and truly gone.