Chapter Text
The portal didn't feel like falling so much as being unmade.
Emma had a half-second to register Hook's hand closing around her wrist, his face white and furious behind her, and then the green light swallowed everything — the cliffside, the witch's scream of triumph, the entire shape of the life she'd built in thirty-some years — and there was nothing but pressure and cold and the sense that her body had been turned inside out and put back wrong.
Then grass. Real, solid, unglamorous grass, and the smell of pine sap, and the impact of the ground knocking the air clean out of her lungs.
She lay there a second, blinking up at a canopy of trees that did not belong to Storybrooke, and thought, with the strange clarity that came from shock: Henry.
"Swan." Hook's voice, rough, close. A hand at her shoulder. "Swan, look at me."
She rolled onto her side and looked at him instead of answering, because answering required her throat to work and her throat was doing something complicated. He had a cut above his eyebrow, sluggishly bleeding, and pine needles in his hair, and behind him the sky was the wrong color — not Maine sky, not October sky. Too blue. Too bright.
"I'm fine," she managed. "Are you—"
"Vertical and breathing. Which, given the circumstances, I'll take as a win." He got an arm under her and hauled her up with more care than the gruffness suggested, and they stood together in a clearing that smelled like nothing she'd smelled since she was a kid — woodsmoke and wet earth and something underneath it, something old.
"Where are we." It wasn't really a question. She already knew, in the pit of her stomach, what the green light and the violent yank and the utter absence of asphalt anywhere in sight added up to.
Hook turned in a slow circle, taking in the trees, the angle of the light, the total silence except for birdsong. "If I had to wager," he said, "I'd say home. Mine, anyway. Question is which version of it."
"What do you mean which version."
"I mean, love, this forest hasn't seen a road built through it in centuries." He crouched, picked up a fistful of dirt, let it run through his fingers like that would tell him something useful. "And there's no curse smoke on that horizon. No castle lit up like Christmas with modern wiring it shouldn't have. This is the genuine article. Untouched."
Emma's stomach dropped the rest of the way. "Untouched as in—"
"As in we're not just in the Enchanted Forest, Swan. We've gone back."
She had exactly one thought, fast and ugly and entirely unhelpful: I have a kid waiting for me at home and I just got thrown into a fairy tale before he existed.
She didn't say that. She said, "Okay," in the voice she used on bail jumpers who'd just realized the exits were covered, and started walking toward the tree line, because standing still and panicking had never once solved a problem in her life and she wasn't going to start now.
They didn't get far before they heard the horses.
It wasn't subtle — hoofbeats drumming hard against packed earth, the particular crash of a body moving through underbrush at a dead sprint, and under it, a girl's ragged breathing close enough that Emma's hand went to her hip out of pure reflex before she remembered she didn't have her gun. She had a belt knife Hook had pressed into her hand at some point during the fall, and that was it.
"Down," Hook hissed, and they dropped behind a fallen log just as a figure burst through the brush ten feet away — a young woman, dark hair coming loose from a braid, wearing what looked like stolen men's clothes, moving like she'd been running for a long time and had a long way left to go.
Behind her: three riders in black and silver livery, and the unmistakable bright flash of a crossbow being raised.
Emma didn't decide to move. Her body just did it — up over the log, knife in hand, putting herself between the girl and the riders before the part of her brain responsible for strategy had finished loading.
"Hey!" she shouted, which was not a plan, but it worked, in that all three riders reined up hard, startled by a second target appearing out of nowhere.
"Stand down," the lead rider said, voice flat with the particular boredom of someone who did this often enough that it no longer bothered him. "This doesn't concern you."
"It does now." Emma kept her knife low and her stance loose, the way she'd learned a hundred years and one lifetime from now, breaking up bar fights for a fee. "She's not worth whatever you're getting paid."
"She's worth a great deal to the Queen." The rider's eyes flicked over Emma — the leather jacket, utterly wrong for this place, the knife held like she knew how to use it. Something in his expression shifted from bored to wary. "Who in the seven hells are you supposed to be?"
Behind her, the girl had gone very still, breathing hard, watching Emma with the kind of desperate, assessing hope of someone deciding in real time whether a stranger was about to save her life or get her killed faster.
Emma's mouth opened before her brain caught up, the way it always did under pressure, and what came out was the first thing that surfaced — an old joke, a stupid joke, something Henry had made her watch eleven times one rainy weekend, his favorite line from his favorite movie, and it was out of her mouth before she could stop it.
"Princess Leia," she said. "And I'd really suggest you turn that horse around."
It bought exactly enough confusion. The rider's eyes narrowed — Princess of where, exactly, that he hadn't heard of — and in the half-second of his hesitation, Hook came up out of the brush at an angle they weren't expecting, sword drawn, and the calculation on the lead rider's face visibly changed from one armed stranger to not worth it.
"This isn't over," he said, which was the kind of thing people said when it was, in fact, over, and then all three of them wheeled and rode hard back the way they'd come.
Emma let out a breath and turned around. The girl was staring at her.
She was young — younger than Emma had expected, sixteen or seventeen, with dark hair and a scraped jaw and eyes that were doing the same rapid assessment Emma's had been doing thirty seconds ago. There was something in the shape of her face that snagged at Emma's chest, something painfully, achingly familiar, and it took her a full two seconds to place it because the context was so wrong.
Mom.
Not Mary Margaret. Not the woman who drank cocoa with cinnamon and ran a classroom and had aged thirty years the hard way. This was Snow White as a teenager, hunted and filthy and entirely unaware that the stranger who'd just saved her life was her own daughter, not yet born, calling herself after a space princess from a movie that wouldn't exist for several hundred years.
"Thank you," the girl said, a little breathless, straightening with the kind of dignity that suggested she was used to being underestimated and resented every second of it. "Princess Leia. I haven't — I don't know that kingdom."
"It's far," Emma said, which had the benefit of being true. "Very far."
Her name, it turned out, was exactly what Emma already knew it would be, and hearing it out loud — Snow, just Snow, please — did something strange and vertiginous to the back of Emma's skull, like standing at the edge of a drop she hadn't expected.
They walked together for a while, because Snow insisted, because apparently saving someone's life in this world bought you an escort whether you wanted one or not. She talked fast and a little too brightly, the talk of someone working hard to seem fine, and somewhere in the middle of an explanation about huntsmen and bounties and the Queen, you must have heard of the Queen, everyone has, Emma caught Hook's eye over the girl's head and saw her own realization mirrored there.
"You know who that is," he said quietly, once Snow had darted ahead to check the path. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah."
"And you intend to do what, exactly, with that knowledge?"
Emma thought about Henry. Thought about the version of this story she already knew — the wedding, the curse, the year of her life spent thinking she didn't have a family until she found out she had two — and the thought arrived with total, unsettling clarity: none of that happens if I let her die in a forest because I was busy feeling weird about it.
"Keep her alive," Emma said. "Same as I'd do for anyone."
"She's not anyone, love."
"No. She's the reason I exist." Emma kept her eyes on the girl's retreating back. "Which means I don't get to mess this up."
They parted ways with Snow at the edge of a ravine, after Snow had pressed bread and a waterskin into Emma's hands with the fierce, slightly embarrassed generosity of someone who had very little and gave it anyway, and after she'd extracted a promise — you'll come to the camp, won't you, if you need anything, James will want to thank you too — that Emma made with no real intention of keeping yet, not until she understood the shape of the board she was playing on.
"James," Hook repeated once Snow was out of earshot, eyebrow raised. "That'll be the shepherd prince, then. Before he remembers his own name."
"Before a lot of things." Emma watched the trees where Snow had vanished, already turning over a dozen logistics in her head — Snow trusted her now, a little, and trust was currency, and currency was the only thing standing between her and getting home to her son. "We need a plan, Killian. A real one. Not just 'don't die.'"
"I'm listening."
"You stay close to them. Snow, Charming, whatever name he's going by. Keep them alive, keep the timeline on its rails — don't let anything happen to either of them that isn't supposed to happen." She turned to face him fully. "You're better at the long game than I am. You've survived centuries doing exactly that."
"And you?"
This was the part she hadn't fully admitted to herself yet, not in words, but it arrived now with the same flat certainty as everything else that morning. Magic powerful enough to send two people six months — or six years, she didn't even know yet — into the past didn't come from nowhere. It came from somewhere with resources. With power. And in this entire realm, at this particular moment in its history, there was exactly one place that kind of power lived.
"I'm going to find a way home," Emma said. "And the fastest road to anything magical in this kingdom runs through the only person in it who actually has any."
Hook's expression went carefully neutral in the way it only did when he already knew exactly what she meant and didn't love it. "The Queen."
"The Queen."
"Swan." He said her name like a warning. "You understand what she is. What she's done. What she's going to do, before this is finished."
"I understand she's the only person in this entire kingdom with the kind of magic that could possibly get us back." Emma shouldered the small pack Snow had given her, already turning toward the smoke rising in the far distance — a castle, dark against the bright sky, the seat of all the stories Henry used to make her read out loud. "I'm not going to provoke her. I'm not going to fight her. I'm going to figure out what she wants, and I'm going to become something she can't afford to get rid of."
"And if what she wants isn't something you're willing to give her?"
Emma didn't have an answer for that yet. She didn't know, standing at the edge of that forest with bread in her pocket and her son six months and one impossible distance away, that she was about to find out exactly how much she was willing to give.
"I'll figure it out," she said instead, which was true in the way most of her life had been true — one foot in front of the other, plan as you go, survive first and sort out the rest later.
Hook studied her for a long moment, the wind moving through the trees between them, and whatever he saw on her face made something in his own expression settle into resignation rather than argument.
"Be careful, Emma." It was rare enough that he used her actual name that it landed harder than the warning itself. "Whatever else she is — whatever she becomes — she is not a woman who forgives being used."
"I'm not going to use her."
"No," he said, and there was something almost sad in it, like he could already see further down this road than she could. "I don't imagine you will."
He turned and went one way, toward the camp where two children who would someday be her parents were learning how to survive a kingdom that wanted them dead.
Emma turned the other way, toward the smoke and the dark towers rising against the sky, and started walking toward the Evil Queen.