Chapter Text
To say that Henry wasn’t doing well was an understatement.
Mary Margaret
Snow
Her mother was filled with optimism and ‘It’s for the best.’
David
James?
Charming
Her father walked around the town chest puffed out, hand on the hilt of his sword—when did he get a sword?—issuing orders to all these people that Emma had grown to know yet were somehow completely different. Different names, different mannerisms, different clothes even in some cases. All of them bowing to his every command and rushing around the tiny Maine town with a sense of urgency and purpose that had clearly been brewing inside of them all these years.
Regina was blissfully unaware of it all. Her body motionless, unresponsive, yet strapped down nonetheless to the hospital bed that held her. Henry’s hand usually found intertwined with hers, as he read to her accompanied by the rhythmic beating of her heart monitor.
Henry’s routine was simple; he would wake in the morning and shower before breakfast. At least he was eating now. He would then wait for Emma in the car, usually honking the horn impatiently as he demanded she speed up in the morning. She would then drive him to the hospital where he would sit with his mother for as long as Emma would allow before he was dragged to school. The most Henry had ever been granted was around ninety minutes, but that was only because he had woken Emma up before her alarm and presented her with a travel mug of coffee, a granola bar, and insisted she get up then and there.
Emma had got the majority of his before school visits down to about twenty minutes since then.
After school was another battle altogether.
On the days Henry had homework he would use Regina’s bedside table to work from, speaking aloud as he completed each task as if expecting that if he made a mistake so heinous in his algebra Regina might wake up, snatch away his pencil, and complete the problem for him.
When Henry didn’t have homework, he simply narrated the video game he was playing to her—I’ve just got to defeat the boss this and Just one more gym badge to go that—or read to her from his comics or whatever book he’d borrowed from the school library.
There he would stay until thirty minutes before his bedtime, when he would kiss his mother on the forehead and finally allow Emma to drive him back to the mansion; where he’d change into his pyjamas so he could go to sleep and do it all again the next day.
Emma hated being in the mansion. She hated the spare room. She hated how good the shower was and that not only was the water pressure as next to perfect as it could be, but the temperature was also always quick and easy to fix to her liking. She hated the the weight of the utensils Regina had and the sound they made against the china. She hated the fact that she now knew which steps creaked, and the fact she knew not to have the washer running at the same time as the drier as the vibrations of the two machines reverberated from the garage and around house. Emma hated the fact that she knew that Regina had a secret cupboard of sugary cereals for Henry to have at the weekend, and the cupboard under the stairs contained old VHS tapes from his childhood.
Most of all she hated that Henry insisted that the house be kept methodically, regimentally, clean, and so Emma now had a near intimate knowledge of Regina’s bedroom so there wasn’t a scrap of dust anywhere, so it’ll be ready for when she wakes up, for when she comes home.
To say that Henry wasn’t doing well was an understatement.
He was getting paler by the day, all his free time spent beside his mother—his real mother—waiting for her to wake up. He was getting thinner by the day as most of his meals were nothing more than hospital food.
And of course, she was right there by his side as she watched her son mourn for his mother that wasn’t dead, simply trapped in an eternal cursed sleep; a fitting punishment, Emma’s own mother and father had decided, for the woman that had cursed a realm to sleepwalk away 28 years of their lives in a small town in Maine.
That’s how it would have, no doubt, continued had Henry not sneezed.