A/N: Welcome, welcome my darling readers! Here it is at long last, the beginning chapter to my new AU fic, the theme of which was chosen by you: Emma and Regina as school teachers. It's more exciting than it sounds and I am a teacher so I know what I'm talking about when it comes to working in schools. I already have a pretty good idea of where the storyline is going so yay! I'm estimating the length to be similar to Behind Bars and Dangerous Desires and yes, the alliterative titles continue because I love them! Please let me know your thoughts on how it begins.

Also, just to say, this is going to be set in Britain for two reasons: one, I'm British and therefore understand the school system there better than the American one (there will be more info at the bottom of this chapter for those who need it). Two, I got a really bitchy review on Dangerous Desires complaining about the occasional use of English words in my story. So just for you, dear reviewer, sneakers are now trainers, couches are now sofas, sidewalks are now pavements, moms are now mums, and cell phones are now mobile phones. Enjoy!

Running his hand through his hair one final time, the boy scowled at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Leaning forwards, he bared his teeth, checking none of the remnants of his cereal had avoided the rigorous brushing he had just finished. They hadn't. His hands returned to his hair, trying to push his floppy fringe to the side but it kept falling back into place, covering his eyes so he looked like a Justin Bieber wannabe from 2009. Wetting his fingers under the tap, he tried again. The hair hovered momentarily, teasingly, and then fell back once more.

"Henry! Hurry up! We're gonna be late!"

"Coming!" Henry yelled back, giving himself one final glance in the mirror before turning off the light and slumping from the bathroom. He scooped up his new schoolbag in the hallway, swung it onto his shoulder, and made his way heavily down the narrow staircase.

"Do you have to stomp?" his mother asked him as the gangly fourteen year old appeared by the front door seconds later.

"I want a hair cut. And I wasn't stomping," Henry argued.

"But I like your hair long. And you were," Emma said, reaching towards him and tightening his school tie.

"Get off," Henry complained, backing away from his mother and loosening the knot again.

Emma sighed. "Henry, I know this is hard for you. I know a lot has changed but -,"

"We're gonna be late," Henry said, pushing his way past his mother and opening the front door.

Both Swans blinked in the bright September sunlight. As their eyes adjusted, they stepped out of the house and into the small front garden. Henry hovered by the gates as his mother locked the canary yellow door.

"We need to paint that," Henry commented, nodding towards the door before following his mother to their car.

"Why?" Emma asked.

Henry raised an eyebrow and pointed to the yellow Volkswagen Beetle they now stood beside. "Because I don't want my new friends to think we've matched our car and our house door. I mean, how lame is that?"

Emma just chuckled and climbed into the car. Henry got into the passenger seat and slammed his door, scowling again.

"And just to start the year on a jolly note, we are due an Ofsted inspection in the summer term." Everyone in the staffroom groaned. "Now I know school inspections are the bane of our lives," the school's headteacher Mr Gold continued, "but at least we know it's coming. We have a lot of time to get ready and I am expecting yet another outstanding report. We have a great school here and our students, despite some of their backgrounds, are fantastic. And that's down to you guys. As teachers, we are the front line for these kids and parents have entrusted their education to you. And I'm sure you won't let them down. So on that note, I'll let you get to it. I hope you all enjoy your first day back."

Chatter broke out in the staffroom at once; some teachers already moving towards the door with others heading to get more coffee or glancing over lesson plans.

"Oh one more thing," Gold said, raising his hand to indicate he wanted everyone's attention again. Headteachers, even out of the classroom, never forgot the tricks of the trade. "We have a new teacher joining Storybrooke Secondary School this year. Emma Swan," he waved his arm towards the blonde woman who was sat near the back, alone, "is our replacement geography teacher. She has just moved down to the area from … where did you say you were from?"

"Northumberland," Emma supplied.

"Right," Gold nodded. "So I trust you will all make her feel welcome and give her any help she may require. Welcome to Plymouth, Mrs Swan."

Emma walked into her new classroom and looked around. She had been in the previous week to decorate her room and now every available inch was covered in maps, diagrams, and beautiful landscape photographs. Hanging her red leather jacket on the peg inside her cupboard, she opened up her laptop and glanced once more over the list of students who would be in her tutor group for the year. She had always enjoyed being a tutor and liked the relationships she built between the children she spent time with every morning and afternoon. She had never tutored Year 11 before however and was curious to see how the eldest year group at the school would differ from her previous Year 8 class.

A commotion outside the door broke her reverie and before she could stand up, two tall boys bundled their way into the room, laughing and joking as they headed towards the desks at the back, shoving each other playfully.

"Er, boys!" Emma called out, getting to her feet. "This is a classroom, not a playground. If you're going to insist on behaving like monkeys, kindly do so outside."

The two boys sobered at once, unsure quite what to make of this new, young, beautiful, and yet authoritative teacher. The brunette boy's eyes fixated on Emma's breasts as his taller friend spoke.

"Sorry Miss -,"

"Swan," Emma supplied. "And you are?"

"Felix," the blonde haired boy answered. "And that's Peter."

"Well, Felix and Peter, it's lovely to meet you but I'd appreciate it if you did not use your new tutor room as a rough house. Unless you want to receive a month long ban from entering here during lunch times on the first day of term?"

Both boys shook their heads.

"Great," Emma said, smiling widely. "Then I suggest you go outside and wait until the bell rings, at which time you shall enter this room in a respectful and quiet manner."

The boys nodded mutely and left the room.

Emma smiled to herself. That couldn't have gone much better. It seemed the same discipline tactics and attitude she had used with her younger students in the north of England would be just fine on the Year 11s in the south too.

There were many things Emma worried about when starting a new school but her teaching ability was not one of them. She had graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Masters in geography and then gone on to study for her teaching certificate. From the age of 25 she had been in front of a class, inspiring young minds and nurturing passions for volcanos, river formations, tectonic movement, and population studies. So that day, seven years later, it was no surprise to Emma that her morning went as smoothly as it ever had in Northumberland.

She walked to the school canteen alone, head and shoulders above most of the pupils she passed and soon found her way into the lunch hall, despite only receiving a short tour from Mr Gold the week before. The room was loud, excited chatter and children's laughter bouncing off the tiled floor and concrete walls, a long queue snaking along one side leading to the food counter. Emma walked straight past the line and up to the serving area, politely excusing herself and squeezing in front of two Year 10 girls.

"Hi," she said, smiling broadly at a dinner lady with grey hair. "I'm Emma Swan, the new geography teacher." She ignored the giggles from the girls as they heard her first name. What was it about students that made them believe their teachers' Christian names were Mr or Mrs?

"Welcome," the woman said, returning Emma's smile. "I'm Eugenia Lucas, head dinner lady here. What can I get for you?"

Emma glanced up the row of silver trays, each filled with questionable looking cooked food. "I'll take the bangers and mash, peas and gravy too, please."

Eugenia nodded and moved to expertly pincer two pale sausages onto a clean plate, followed by a yellow blob of mashed potato, a scoop of dark green peas, and a ladle of lumpy gravy.

"Enjoy," Eugenia said, without a hint of irony, as she handed over the meal and turned to the Year 10 girls, interrupting their conversation about the football team tryouts they wanted to attend, if only for the opportunity to stare at the boys playing.

Emma thanked the older woman and turned to survey the canteen once more. There were lines of long tables and benches running parallel to each other throughout the room. Most were filled with students, talking and eating, but against the far wall were two tables occupied by her own kind: teachers. Emma weaved her way through the room until she reached the other adults. She hovered for a moment, unsure quite where to sit. There were only two free chairs, one at the end beside an older man and one between two female teachers.

"Come and join us," one of the women said, waving Emma over with a smile.

Emma grinned back and placed her tray down before sliding into the plastic chair.

"Emma Swan, right?" the fellow blonde said.

"Right," Emma nodded.

"I'm Rose Bell, drama," the woman said, holding out her hand for Emma to shake. "And this is Ruby Lucas, P.E."

"Lucas?" Emma asked, as she began to cut up a sausage. "You won't happen to be any relation to the woman who served me this meal would you?"

"She's my grandmother," Ruby nodded. "Please don't judge me for some of the tripe she serves up."

Emma chuckled. "Well, no school has a reputation for good meals. I'm sure it's can't be worse than I'm used to."

"You said earlier you were from Northumberland?" Rose asked.

"Right," Emma nodded.

"Quite a way from Plymouth," Ruby remarked. "I mean, you couldn't have moved much further and stayed in England."

"We needed a new start," Emma shrugged.

"We?" Ruby said.

"My son, Henry," Emma informed. "He's just started in Year 10 here. Although he's not taking drama for his GCSEs I'm afraid," she added with an apologetic look at Rose.

"Henry Swan is your kid?" Ruby asked, surprised. The new teacher looked far too young to have a fourteen year old son.

"You've met him already?" Emma said, a sinking feeling in her gut that the teacher already knew her son's name.

"He had P.E. with me this morning. Although of course we didn't do anything, what with it being the first day back and all. I just went over a bit of basic human biology with them. He was good. Named the tibia and the ulna if I remember correctly."

"Really?" Emma said, eyebrows raised.

"You sound surprised," Rose pointed out.

"The move has been hard on him," Emma shrugged. "There's been a lot of changes in our lives recently. But I'm hoping Plymouth will be a good one. Fresh air, countryside, time by the ocean and all that."

"Well he seemed like a great kid to me. Tall too, does he play basketball?"

"We didn't have a team in our last school," Emma said. "But if you think he'd be good, I'm sure it would be great if he found something he was passionate about again." She thought briefly of all the dinosaur models, books, and paraphernalia her son had collected ever since he was two, still lying in a moving box somewhere at the foot of Henry's new bed.

"I'll let David know," Ruby smiled. "Have you met David Nolan yet? He's the other P.E. teacher and the basketball team coach."

"Was he wearing a tracksuit in the staff meeting?" Emma asked.

"Perk of our teaching position, and yes," Ruby nodded, gesturing to her own sweat pants. "He's just walked in actually," she said, pointing to a tall, blonde man who had entered the canteen beside a brunette woman with a pixie haircut. "That's his wife, Mary Margaret. She teaches English."

A few minutes later, as she was being introduced to the couple who had joined their table, Emma spotted Henry walking into the hall with a couple of other boys.

"Excuse me," she said. "I just need to check on my son."

She hurried across the room and tapped Henry on the shoulder.

"Hey kid."

"Seriously?" he scowled, turning to look at his mother with the increasingly familiar expression on his face. He waved a hand at the two boys, indicating he'd catch them up, and stepped away from the other students queuing for lunch.

"I just wanted to see how your first morning went," Emma said, smiling brightly.

"Fine, now leave me alone," Henry grumbled, turning back to his friends who had joined the queue and were watching curiously.

Although a little disgruntled at the abrupt dismissal, Emma returned to the staff table without arguing or scolding Henry for his attitude.

"Your son?" Mary Margaret asked as Emma approached.

"Yes," Emma nodded. "Seemingly it's not cool to be seen with your mother in the school canteen though."

A low chuckle from behind her made Emma look around.

"Sorry," the brunette said in a deep, rich voice. "But what did you expect? No teenage boy wants students at a new school to know his mum's their teacher."

"Fair point," Emma conceded, looking at the interrupter with interest. The woman was perhaps a few years older than Emma herself but still young. Her dark brown hair was cut into a no-nonsense bob and her eyes surrounded in smokey eye-liner. Her black pantsuit looked expensive and tailor-made to her slender figure. Emma thought she was probably a stickler for discipline and used to getting her own way.

"Not least a geography teacher," the brunette added, unnecessarily, pulling Emma from her appraisal of the beautiful woman.

"Hey!" Emma exclaimed. "What's wrong with geography?"

"What's right with geography?" the woman retaliated, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms, a challenging glint in her eye.

"Let me guess: history," Emma grinned.

"Regina Mills, head of aforementioned department, in fact," she smiled, showing off dazzling white teeth which wouldn't have been out of place in Hollywood. Emma smiled back but sensed that something was a little off, a little forced, with the way the other woman was positively beaming at her.

"So the age old rivalry continues down south I see," Emma chuckled. "Considering we're the two subjects always fighting for funding you'd have thought we'd have teamed up somewhere along the way."

"I guess your research proposal just wasn't as good as mine," Regina teased. "I certainly had no problem getting a fully funded PhD from Cambridge."

"OK, showoff, pipe down," Ruby called from the far end of the table where she and Rose had been listening to the exchange. "We know you're a doctor of all things old and dusty from the old and dusty university of old and dusty colleges."

Regina laughed again. "I'd hardly call the cultural revolution of the sixties old or dusty. Quite the opposite in fact seeing as I'm sure you and your friends are dancing to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimmy Hendrix in mini-skirts every weekend. Those fake breasts you're so fond of, also invented in the sixties. We landed on the moon in 1969. And you know that calculator you use to work out your students' grades? Came out in 1967."

"Yes but the true measure of whether a decade was a long time ago is: were any of us alive in the sixties?" Ruby countered.

"I was."

The teachers all laughed as they turned towards the older man sat at the end of the table, beside whom was the chair Emma had debated over.

"Archie, you were alive in the fifties," Regina joked.

"Indeed I was and as someone who has lived for so long I can tell you that the seventies were the best decade: giving us the internet, mobile phones, and roller blades," Archie said, his arms spread wide as if his point was proven.

"Coming back at you with the sixties for petrol pumps, artificial hearts, ATMs, and valium," Regina said. The woman was intelligent, Emma could tell. But there was something about the way she postured herself that made Emma think the confidence and humour was a performance, almost as if she didn't want people to know the real Regina.

"Oh dear, this could go on all lunch time," Archie chortled. "I'm Archie Hopper by the way," he said turning his attention to Emma. "School psychiatrist."

"This school needs an onsite psychiatrist?" Emma asked, slightly alarmed. That had certainly not been a feature of her last school.

"Well, we have a number of children we believe benefit from regular contact with someone they know and trust," Archie explained. "And I'm here for the teachers too, should you ever need to talk."

"I'm good thanks," Emma said quickly. She had had enough of therapists over the past twelve months and was determined that her new life would not involve them. "So you went to Cambridge?" she asked turning back to Regina.

"I did," Regina nodded, pulling out the chair beside her and gesturing for Emma to sit down, a large diamond glinting on her left hand as she did so. Ruby slid her half finished dinner down the table and the blonde nodded her thanks. 'What about you?"

"Oxford," Emma said through a mouthful of mash.

"Really?" Regina asked, eyebrows raised as she watched the blonde wipe her mouth on the back of her hand.

"I was one of their 'let's improve our statistics by letting a poor kid in' students," Emma shrugged. "But I got the best teaching in the country so I'm not complaining."

"The second best," Regina countered.

"Seriously? We're going to become rivals in both our subjects and our universities?" Emma laughed.

"So it would seem, Mrs Swan," Regina replied.

"Ms," Emma corrected without thinking.

"I'm sorry," Regina said. "I just assumed because of your son -,"

"It's fine," Emma said quickly. "I've got to go though. Lots of lesson plans to do, you know. It was great to meet you, Doctor Mills. All of you, actually," she said to the table at large as she stood up and picked up her empty place. "See you later."

Emma leaned against her car, tapping away on her phone, and didn't even notice when Henry eventually walked over to her. It wasn't until she heard him rattle the locked car door that she looked up and smiled at her son.

"Hey kid, am I ok to talk to you now?" Emma joked. She had parked at the far end of the teachers' car park that morning at Henry's insistence and then he had loitered behind her for a minute or so before walking onto the campus.

"Open the door," Henry sighed. He looked as tired as he sounded.

Emma complied, opening her own door and climbing into her seat so she could lean across and unlock the passenger side. Perhaps one day she should upgrade to a car with central locking she mused as her son sat down heavily inside the bug.

"So how was your day?" she asked as she pulled away from the school, Henry's seatbelt clipped into place seconds after her own.

"Fine."

"What an expressive word," Emma said, her sigh mirroring Henry's from moments ago. "I hear you were good in P.E. this morning."

"I named a couple of bones, big deal," Henry grunted.

"Miss Lucas thinks you might be able to try out for their basketball team. I told you that growth spurt over the summer would be a good thing, even if we did have to replace your entire wardrobe."

"I hate basketball," Henry replied.

"You hate everything at the moment," Emma pointed out.

"Can you blame me?" Henry snapped. "My life has gone to shit. It was bad enough before but now? You had to move me so far away from my friends that I'm never going to see them again because I live in the arse end of nowhere so none of them are going to want to come and visit. And I'm in some shitty new school with stupid, rough, council estate kids. Plus everyone already knows the new, hot geography teacher is my mum. So why the hell would I want to join a basketball team? It's not going to bring Dad back is it?"

The car was silent. Emma didn't know what to say. She rarely knew what to say when her son mentioned his father. Her eyes swam with tears and she blinked them back, trying to concentrate on the road as they pulled into their street. As soon as she had parked, Henry jumped out of the car and ran up the path, opened the yellow front door and disappeared. Emma leaned her head on the steering wheel and let her tears fall. For five minutes she sat there, her grief and despair pouring out until, at last, she stopped. Wiping her eyes, Emma blew her nose on a tissue and got out of the car, following her son into their new home and started to cook dinner.

A/N: so a few background notes on the English school system in case any of you guys are unclear. Our secondary schools start in Year 7 (aged 11) and finish in Year 11 (aged 16). In Year 11 we take exams called GCSEs and with these we apply for two more years of schooling at a college or sixth form (Years 12 and 13) where we'll study three or four A level subjects. It's A level examination grades which we use to apply for university, which we can attend from the age of 18. Oxford and Cambridge and Britain's two oldest and most prestigious universities. Whilst I attended neither, I have visited both so I know a bit about them.

Any more queries, tweet me at SwanQueenUKFF or leave a review. I will try to answer all of them as promptly as I can.

Can't wait to hear what you think of how this fic has started.