A huge thanks to everyone who gave constructive criticism. I've tried to take it all into consideration but if there's any lingering concerns feel free to continue to share them. Please do, actually. I promise you won't hurt my feelings. The comments I've had so far have been hugely helpful.

Emma groaned in utter frustration as she picked up her ringing phone. She wasn't sure what she had just been dreaming about, but it seemed very important for some reason. "Who is this? Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Miss Swan, thank goodness you picked up." Emma sat up and rubbed at her eyes. She couldn't quite place the voice yet, but it seemed very familiar. "I don't know if 'one phone call' covers a redial."

"Wha… is this Regina? How do you have my number?" Emma pulled her phone away from her ear to stare at it as if it would give her the answers she sought.

"How did I have your address? I have my ways." Emma squinted at the phone with suspicion. Her instincts told her to be wary of the woman who'd shown up at her apartment earlier knowing too much about her, but she was also intensely curious.

It took a moment for her groggy mind to remember that she should probably respond. "What do you want at… one-fifteen AM?"

"I'm, uh, in a bit of trouble. Though they said no charges would be filed as long as someone picked me up and gave their word that I'd, you know, not just go right back to where I was." Emma wasn't sure how, but she knew this stammering manner of speaking wasn't characteristic for Regina. It worried her, despite her misgivings.

"And where was that?" Emma frowned as she walked into the living room with shoes in hand to find Henry still playing video games even though he promised he'd go to bed by eleven. She gave him a reprimanding look and he slowly set the controller down with a grin that said that he knew exactly what he did wrong.

"I, well… the building across from your apartment," The voice on the other end of the line sounded abashed. "The fire escape, specifically."

The niggling feeling in Emma that Regina was pretty creepy grew a little. "And what were you arrested for?" Emma watched Henry's sheepish look turn into one of intense interest.

"Trespassing, vagrancy, loitering, something like that," replied Regina dismissively. "They haven't given me a straight answer." Emma could hear Regina's voice growing more serious, imploring. "Miss Swan, the officer is motioning for me to wrap it up. Are you going to help me or not?"

Emma's wariness battled her curiosity for a long moment before she released a long sigh.

"Fine, if only to get some answers." Emma held the phone between her shoulder and ear as she put her jeans back on over her pajama pants. "Hey kid, up for a late-night field trip?"

Regina sighed out of both relief and annoyance as Emma unlocked the bug. "You would be one to insist on driving your deteriorating crime spree souvenir in a city with such adequate public transport."

Emma paused to glare at Regina. "You wanna walk?"

Henry's eyes grew wide as he climbed into the car. "Mom, is the car stolen?"

Emma's cheeks grew pink and she avoided meeting Henry's inquisitive gaze in the rearview mirror. "That's irrelevant. And that was over a decade ago." Emma turned an accusatory glance towards the woman buckling into the passenger seat. "And how did you know about that?"

"You stole this car a decade ago?" Henry mused "I was born a decade plus two years ago... Was I made during a crime spree?"

Emma groaned. "Tell me we are not having this conversation right now, at two o'clock in the morning."

Regina relished her son's proximity and brilliant inquisitiveness as he eagerly leaned forward to stick his head in the front seat and pester Emma. "Were you on the crime spree with my dad? Ooh, what if you stole the bug with Regina and you two made me together and you just don't recognize her because she's transitioned since then and that's how she's my mom and knows so much about us?"

"Henry, I'm not biologically your mother." Regina couldn't help but smile. Her boy was just as imaginative as ever, but this time he wasn't actually right.

"Besides, I would recognize your dad. Even in a skirt." Emma couldn't help but smile a little despite her best efforts. Still, she had to resist the urge to study the face of the woman next to her, considering she should probably be watching the road. She knew Regina wasn't Neal despite Henry's crackpot theories, but that did little to quell that tinge of familiarity Regina carried.

"You sure? Mr. Williams showed us a picture of himself when he was our age and had, you know, girl clothes and a ponytail and stuff. We could hardly tell it was him."

"Your science teacher, with the bowties and the Victorian-ish waxed moustache?" Emma was mildly surprised; she knew Henry's education in today's New York would be different from her own in 90s Maine but hadn't realised quite how progressive it would be. She too a moment to be glad that she's made the decision to put Henry in his more interesting public school instead of the prissy private school they'd considered. For some reason Henry had an irrational dislike for the navy blue sweater vests anyway.

"Yup." Henry started to say something else but was interrupted by a yawn.

Emma glanced away from the road to eye Regina. "You haven't explained why you were arrested for trying to climb the building across the street."

"I wasn't trying to climb it, I was climbing it. I only fell because the officer surprised me." Regina felt her anger welling again like it had when she had been surprised by the flashing lights. She had really wished she could've conjured a cloaking spell to escape, or at least a mattress to cushion her unceremonious fall. "Hijo de la puta," she mumbled heatedly "Si yo tenía mi poder, él sintiría mi fuego en su…"

"Hey, careful! I don't know what you're saying, but Henry's been taking Spanish so he might. Watch your language." In truth, she couldn't quite remember how Henry knew his rudimentary Spanish. His academic record hadn't shown any previous classes, but the placement test at his new school put him in Spanish 3. It seemed as if she might have memories of calling him "mijo," "Enrique," and "mi principito," but that didn't make sense given that she knew little Spanish beyond the profanities that some bail skippers shouted at her. It was just another of the fallacies that she'd noticed in the last year or so and tried not to think about.

"All I caught was something about a son of something." Henry piped up sleepily. "And something about fire."

Regina found small pleasure in the fact that even if her son didn't remember who she was he did remember that little piece of her that was the language she shared with her father. Emma's hard glance brought her back to her explanation. "Anyway, it took significant convincing before the police believed I wasn't trying to rob the place."

"So what were you doing on the fire escape?"

"Waiting," Regina replied crypticly.

"Waiting? Come on, if you want to crash on our couch you're going to need to give a better explanation than that." Regina was sure that if Emma wasn't driving her hands would've been on her hips, he tone reminiscent of their first few weeks of butting heads in Storybrooke. She was amused to note that Emma too hadn't changed.

"I'll admit that I hadn't planned as well as I should've," Regina was quieter now, both out of a degree of shame and because Herny had fallen asleep in the back. "I was so focused on getting here that I didn't really think about what I would do once I found you. I wasn't so delusional to think that you'd believe me instantly, but I failed to anticipate food, housing, et cetera."

Emma parked the car but didn't get out immediately, instead turning to gaze at Regina intensely with a curious expression Regina couldn't quite read. "Were you going to sleep out there? In this city?"

Regina didn't meet Emma's gaze. "Well, yes. But I've grown re-accustomed to inclement sleeping conditions, so it wasn't…"

"What were you thinking?" Regina's instinct upon noting the harshness in Emma's voice was to go on the defensive, but she didn't fail to notice the degree of concern Emma exhibited. "It's dropping below freezing tonight, if you hadn't been arrested you might've ended up with frostbite, or hypothermia."

"Well what option did I have?" Regina crossed her arms and noticed with distaste that the elbows of her blazer were wearing thin. "Knock on your door and say 'Sorry for barging in earlier but can I sleep here, as I'm temporarily homeless?'"

"That's better than falling off a five-story building or freezing to death or…" Emma took a deep, calming breath. "Let's just take sleepyhead back there inside and then we can discuss… all this."

Regina turned around in her seat to smile at the young man dozing in the backseat.

Inside the apartment Henry stood with squared shoulders and crossed arms at the threshold of his room. "No I'm fine, I'm awake."

Emma ruffled Henry's hair with a smile. "You fell asleep in the car, and it's well past your bedtime anyway. Off to bed."

"I had a quick nap and now I'm fine. I wanna stay up and figure out what's going on, with you two!" Henry yawned widely, betraying his previous statement. "Really I'm fine," he covered. "I'll make us all some coffee."

Emma intercepted him as he stepped towards the kitchen. "No. Bed. Now. We'll catch you up in the morning."

As much as it amused Regina to watch this display of the stubbornness Henry has inherited from both mothers, she interrupted him as he groaned petulantly. "I could tuck you in, if you like?"

"He outgrew goodnight kisses when he was eleven. He's a manly man now," Emma teased.

"Actually, it would be cool if you'd read me a story from the book you brought me." Henry offered with a smile. He was sure he was much too old for a bedtime story, but he was down for any activity that would give him a chance to investigate both his interesting new book and the strange and strangely familiar woman who'd given it to him.

Regina's face lit up. "Yes!" She realized as soon as she said it that she should temper her enthusiasm. Emma and Henry still didn't remember who she was, after all. "I mean of course, which one?"

Emma was still a little wary of the stranger who seemed to know a little too much about them, but she figured Henry could handle a bedtime story. He had a can of mace in his nightstand, after all. "I'll start a pot of coffee."

"I've read all the stories, so you can pick which one you want to read me. They're all..." Henry yawned as he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his jeans to reveal that he had been wearing pajamas underneath. "...they're all pretty awesome."

Regina picked up the book from where it lay on his unkempt bed, open to the illustration of the Evil Queen storming Snow white and Prince Charming's wedding. Her eyes lingered on her own severe and unnaturally pale visage for a moment before she closed the book. She smiled shyly at Henry, clutching the book to her chest, as he climbed into bed. "How about a story that's not in the book?"

"Is it like the stories in the book or is it about you?" Henry studied the way Regina's fingers absently traced the gold leaf on the worn cover of the oversized book. He scooted over in the bed to make room for Regina to sit down next to him.

"Yes," Regina replied simply, not letting go of the book as she perched on the edge of the bed. "It's called 'The Little Prince'."

"I don't think that's a fairytale I've heard before," Henry remarked as he settled in, supressing a yawn.

"You have, a long time ago." Regina smiled sadly.

As Emma went to the cupboard and pulled out a dry filter and the tin of grounds she ruminated over why Regina seemed so familiar. It was unsettling, really. For the last year or so she had been noticing little inconsistencies in her memory for the last ten years. She distinctly remembered that Henry's first "solid" food had been homemade applesauce, but she couldn't remember how or why she would've made applesauce instead of simply buying it. She seemed to remember a career as a bailbondsperson that had kept her out late and sent her all over the country, but she couldn't reconcile that with simultaneous memories of long evenings spent reading with Henry or teaching him to ride a bike or his school records that showed that he had been in the same school since kindergarten before coming to New York, even though for some reason those records didn't say where he'd been attending.

Emma realized she'd been heaping way too much coffee grounds into the coffee maker and began scooping some of them back out. Her mind began to wander again. If Regina was strange, Emma's reaction to her had been stranger. If it had been some random man to show up at her doorstop spouting nonsense she would've closed the door in his face, yet Emma had welcomed this stranger in a threadbare powersuit into her home to read to her son. Emma almost wanted to change her mind, tell Regina she had to go, but her curiosity and empathy won out. Even if it made her uneasy to have a beautiful stranger staying in her apartment, Emma could use the chance to study the woman who apparently believed everything she'd said about... family. Plus, she wouldn't starve or freeze in the process. Emma sensed that Regina could use a break.

Emma grabbed two mugs out of the cupboard, then remembered to turn the coffee maker on.

As Regina finished her story Henry's eyes refused to open. He tried so hard to pry them open, but the soothing tone of her voice and the loving warmth that radiated from his hand that she held in hers had made them much too heavy. He smiled sleepily as she smoothed his hair, her hand lingering on his face that had grown so much since last she saw him. "Sleep," she whispered. "I'll still be here in the morning."

As he nestled down into his pillow and began to nod off, he suddenly looked just like he had when she first brought him back to Storybrooke.

"Goodnight, my little prince. I love you."

Regina almost missed it as she began to stand up, but her heart swelled as she heard Henry mumble "Love you too, Mom."

After a moment's hesitation Regina leaned over to press a quick kiss to Henry's forehead before leaving his room with a hopeful smile.