STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2012.

Green smoke in the shape of terrible, dark storm clouds pour continuously from a well deep in the forest, spreading out to loom in on every corner of the quaint town in Maine, signaling the newly deceased Peter Pan's curse taking action. In the middle of the road on Main Street, a small cluster of people stand together, including a little boy, his two mothers, his grandparents, and his birth father.

The booming voice of a certain dwarf is heard above the sounds of crashing thunder, becoming louder and louder as he runs towards them. "It's here! It's here! The curse--it's here!" Leroy shouts, nearly stumbling over himself in his plight. "It coming," he pants, a horrible look of sadness and resignation settling into the lines of his face. "From all sides. There's no escape."

"It's not too late; we can still stop it, right?" David asks, placing a hand on the dwarfs back trying in vain to calm him. Though he wishes to offer some scrap of hope to everyone, the former prince's normally optimistic, heroic voice wavers as he looks towards the woman who is their only chance. She's been quiet for too long, and the knot of fear in his gut tightens. "Regina?" He prompts.

As if shaken from a trance, she lifts her head and aims her breathy, forced answer towards him. "Yes....yes."

The blonde behind her steps forward, the wind blowing her long strands into her concerned face. "Wh-what's the price?" Emma stammers, "Gold said there was a price. What's our price?" She nearly demands, repeating the word as if hoping it would convey some new meaning to her.

There's a pause; then Regina turns to face her with what she hopes is a brave face. "It's not 'our price'...it's mine."

"What are you talking about?" Emma asks in a tone hardly heard from her--she sounds frightened, almost terrified of the answer.

"It's what I felt when I....first held it." Regina clarifies, gesturing to the scroll of the curse she still held tightly in her hand. She takes a deep breath, then continues. "I have to say goodbye to the thing I love most." And just like that, Regina feels a part of her heart entirely break away. Saying the words out loud made them real--a sickening real that is taunting her.

Emma's jaw unhinges, as realization slowly pours over her features. She spins behind her, grabbing their son across the shoulders as he walks nearer to his two mothers. "Henry?" She asks her, but she already knows the truth.

"I can never see him again." Regina takes a deeper breath. "I have no choice. I have to undo what I started."

"The curse that brought us to Storybrooke," Mary Margaret tacks on, her voice lifting at the end of her sentence as it usually does when the pieces are forming together in her mind.

"That created Storybrooke." Regina corrects, and continues with a humorless chuckle decorating her words. "It doesn't belong here--! And neither do any of us."

"Breaking the curse destroys the town." David finishes for her, his deep, rumbling voice confirming what everyone was thinking.

"It will wink out of existence as though it were never here." Regina explains, slowly giving them all the details to this terrible truth staring them in the face. "And everyone will go back to where they're from, prevented from ever returning." She hangs her head after revealing the last part, to prevent herself from seeing everyone's reactions.

"You'll go back to the Enchanted Forest." Emma says, frowning as she struggles to grasp the concepts coming her way.

"All of us..." Regina tells her, then pauses. "Except Henry." She raises her eyes to see Emma and her parents' shocked expressions, but can't bring herself to look at Henry. "He will stay here because he was born here."

"Alone?!" Emma asks, panicked; her voice breaking at the mere thought of it.

"No." Regina comforts, and wills herself the strength to continue to say what she needs to. "You will take him, because--you're the savior." She breaks off to laugh the slightest bit, if only to hide the emotion weighing down her voice. "You were created to break the curse...and once again, you can escape it."

Emma recoils, looking horrified as she shakes her head. "I-I don't want to--we'll both go back, with everyone-!" She punctuates her words with clutching her son's shoulders tighter and brings him closer to her chest.

"That's not an option." Regina closes her eyes and repeats the very worst part about all of this. "I can't be with him. If I don't pay the price, none of this will work."

An echoing, louder thunderclap supplies an unfriendly warning as to how much time they really have before the curse hits.

Mary Margaret gasps in a sharp intake of air, then turns to face her daughter. "Emma, you have to go," she pleads with her, though it breaks her own heart and a wall of fresh emotions is clouding her vision.

"I just found you," Emma objects in such a broken way that everyone can see the little orphan girl still inside of her.

"And now it's time for you to leave us again." Mary Margaret says with a bitter chuckle escaping her at their luck. Of course this would happen as soon as she finally, finally has her daughter back. "For your best chance--for his."

"No. N-no, I-I...I'm not..done! I'm the savior right? I'm supposed to bring back all the happy endings, right?--that's what Henry always said," Emma stammers, fighting back what she feels is the start of a panic attack.

Her mother shakes her head and puts on a very poor attempt at a smile. "Happy endings aren't always what we think they will be. Look around you--you've touched the lives of everyone here."

"But we're a family." Emma reminds her in disbelief. She doesn't know much about families--having spent almost the entirety of her life an orphan--but this doesn't sound like her mother at all.

"And we always will be," Mary Margaret tells her, trying in vain to continue her sad excuse for a hope speech for an entirely unhopeful situation. "You gave us that." She's extremely grateful when her husband picks up for her from behind where she stands, his arm tucked protectively around her.

"You and Henry can be a family and you can get your wish--you can be like everyone else, you can be happy." David supplies, followed closely by his wife.

"It's time for you to believe in yourself Emma; it's time for you to find hope."

Emma cringes at that cheesy line, but can't find it anywhere inside of her to be annoyed at that--not in this situation. But then, Regina's speaking again.

"I've known you for some time, and all I've wanted is for you to get the hell out of my life so I can be with my son," she softens her words with a smile as she looks down at her little boy. "But really--" her voice is breaking now and she does nothing to try to hide it, "--what I want..is for Henry to be happy." She lowers her gloved hand and cups his perfect chin in it, savoring her every last moment with him. "We have no choice. You have to go." This last part is said in almost a pleading sort of way--a mother-to-mother sort of moment where she's imploring her to do what's right for their son.

Another rumble of thunder is heard as Emma's eyebrows knit together, fighting back tears as she makes possibly the hardest decision of her life. Finally a whisper floats from her parted, chapped lips. "Okay."

-

Now at the town line, the small congregation consisting of Regina, Emma, Henry, the Charmings, Neal, Captain Hook, the seven dwarves, and a few scattered others crowd in front of Emma's yellow bug parked just a few feet away from the painted yellow of the town line. The very first thing Emma does is walk straight to her parents, going limp in their arms as she drinks in every scent and feel of what it is to have parents--ones that are being mercilessly ripped from her far too soon. Henry soon follows after her, and the four of them hug, squeezing each other with emotions hardly expressed.

Henry pulls away first, moving over to the woman that raised him beautifully for the first ten years of his twelve-year-old life. He stares up at her, memorizing her features before saying the only thing he can think of. "This isn't fair," he hears his still high-pitched voice confine to her. What else does one say to their mother as they're parting, never to see one another again? But then he's continuing, needing to get what he's feeling off of his chest before it's too late. "This is all my fault."

Regina looks at him, face contouring into confusion and almost pity. "What do you mean?" She asks in such a soft voice, he hardly recognizes it as his mother's.

"If I had never gone to get Emma," he explains, "if I had just lived under the curse with you..none of this would've ever happened." He pauses, trying to collect himself for a moment before continuing, but fails. "I thought I was alone..I thought you didn't..love me." He blinks up at the sky, refusing to let tears fall, not letting anything mar his last images of his mother. "But I was wrong."

Regina bends down in front of him so their eyes meet at the same level, though, she notes with a pang, she has to crouch significantly less for their eyes to be level. "Henry," she begins as a whisper, her very voice caressing the precious name. "I was wrong, too. It wasn't your fault--it's mine. I cast a curse out of vengeance, and I'm..." She pauses for the slightest of moments, not quite wanting to address herself this way in front of him. "I'm a villain. You heard Mr. Gold: 'villains don't get happy endings.'"

Henry, without hesitation, stops her from continuing. "You're not a villain," he tells her, voice openly breaking with emotion as he grasps her shoulder in his hand. "You're my mom." He then shoves himself into her chest, memorizing that flowery, unexplainable smell that follows his mom wherever she goes--the scent that only described itself as home to him--and the feel of her arms surrounding him in such a way that he feels entirely safe, out of harm's way. He'd always felt as though nothing could touch him while in his mother's arms, and his throat blocks with the sudden thought that he will never feel this sense of security again. He never wants to let go.

But he finally does, just in time to see her tear-stained, touched expression and his other mother saying goodbye to Neal, his birth father that he'd really only just met. With trouble, he forces himself away from Regina and steps over to him. Neal throws his arm onto Henry's shoulder roughly, seemingly unable to show any more affection in the moment. Henry understands the feeling--having never had a dad before--but right then, he would have allowed one last hug. Emma steps forward and Neal collects her into his arms.

When they break apart, Neal reminds them in that roughly soothing voice, "Hey. This isn't over. I'll see both of you again."

Emma, never one for goodbyes, just smiles and starts walking to her car, but is stopped by Hook. She allows his one last romantic comment before making her way closer to her bug, but then Regina's behind her.

"Emma--there's something else I haven't told you."

The blonde can only give out a sigh--she believes she can't possibly take any more bad news. "What now?"

"When the curse washes over us, it will send us all back. Nothing will be left behind...including your memories. It's just what the curse does." She tries and fails not to notice Emma's blotchy face and tightening lips as she soaks in the new information. But, she continues. "Storybrooke will no longer exist. It won't..ever have existed. So these last years..will be gone from both of your memories, and we will go back to just being stories again."

"What will happen to us?"

"I don't know." Regina admits.

"That doesn't sound much like a happy ending," Emma says in slight disbelief, eyes darting around at her family, trying to imagine not ever knowing them.

Regina lets out a humorless chuckle. "It's not." She pauses. "But I can give you one."

At this, Emma brightens the tiniest bit. "You can preserve our memories?"

Regina shakes her head sadly. "No. I can..do what I did to everyone else in this town, and give you new ones."

The ray of hope extinguishes from Emma's face. "You cursed them, and they were miserable." She says in a tone close to accusatory, but the pain etched onto her face makes it impossible for Regina to become defensive. Instead, she smiles a little and shakes her head again.

"They didn't have to be." She pauses once more, then does the very thing she never thought she would. She reaches down, and grabs Emma's hand tightly in both of her own as she says in a voice entirely honest and softly as though she means every word: "My gift to you...is good memories. A good life for you.." She's interrupted by a loud thunderclap as she reaches behind her to grab one of Henry's perfect hands. "...and Henry. You'll have never given him up." A smile decorates her words, and Emma actually gasps in appreciation and awe of the woman in front of her. "You'll have always been together," Regina continues in a broken voice with a stretched, closed-mouthed smile that doesn't match her teary eyes.

"You would do that?" Emma whispers, not believing her ears. She'd never known someone could be this selfless, and her chest racks with a sob that's fighting to get out.

Regina fixes her with a pointed stare and says in a very determined tone, "When I stop Pan's curse, and you cross that town line, you will have the life you've always wanted."

"But it won't be real."

"Well..your past won't, but your future will." She lets that sink in for a moment, before inhaling sharply. "Now, go." She squeezes Henry's shoulder repeatedly, wanting to touch him as much as she can to remind herself that he's still here and he's not gone yet. "There isn't much time left, and the curse will be here any minute." As soon as she finishes speaking and she lifts her hand off of Henry, he tucks himself into her one last time. She closes her arms around that little body that had changed her life in a million different ways for the better, the son who had been the only one to see the woman behind the monster everyone feared. She presses her nose into his hair, smelling his boyish, unique scent for the last time. She gives him one more squeeze, one more kiss on his forehead, and then she has to release him.

Mary Margaret gives Emma a lingering kiss on her forehead as the blonde finally lets the sob out, then Regina's watching as he and Emma walk to their opposite positions in the car, and open the doors, memorizing his every last move.

Numbly, she unravels the small scroll in her hands and tears it in two, purple magic leaking from it and reverberating into her veins. She crumples up the parchment, turns slowly around, charges up both hands and sends two strong, purple blasts into the green stormy fog quickly surrounding them. With all of her strength and with every last ounce of love for Henry in her being, she fights the curse and turns the storm clouds to a deep purple.

Emma starts the engine, and drives the bug over the town line just before the purple mist reaches the car. The magic stops right up against the town line, encasing the entire town and its residents as it prepares to send everyone back to where they belong.

In the yellow bug, a blissfully ignorant mother and son pair smile at each other as they start down the road.

AN: The dialogue was taken straight from 3x11, Going Home. This was meant to pave the way for this story, and maybe give a little refresher of what happened. I of course incorporated what I imagined their feelings would be into this, but I take no credit for the dialogue.

I hope you all enjoy this story, as I am extremely excited about where I plan to take this! Please, vote or comment your thoughts. :)