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Henry was not born in Storybrooke, Maine. He was born in a prison in Tallahassee. His mom held him for a few minutes, tears in her eyes, before she steeled herself and handed him off.
“Are you sure?” The social worker asked.
For a moment, the blonde woman hesitated, but she looked at him and her resolve gleamed in her eyes. “I’m sure.” She replied. “I want him to have his best chance, and, if that’s having no contact with a deadbeat mom who can’t settle in one place, then who am I to keep him from a family that will offer stability and love?”
~~~
No one was quite sure how, but somehow a three week old boy born in Tallahassee, Florida had been adopted by and moved in with the mayor, who nobody had thought even wanted a child, of a tiny town in Maine called Storybrooke. It was small, cute, and hidden. Nobody from outside came in and nobody from inside left.
Outsiders were gently nudged away by the latent magic, a quiet whisper saying “No, not this way. Why not go here instead? There’s nothing for you.” There were no accidental entries by lost people, no tourism, no visiting family, no exploring. It was like a bubble.
On the inside, it was a bit different. If people wanted to leave, well, they could try. They’d crash into signs, have sudden emergencies, something.
If nobody could leave Storybrooke and nobody could enter, how did a three week old child arrive?
And another noteworthy thing. Nobody aged. Nothing changed. Ever. Regina Mills had been Storybrooke’s mayor for as long as anyone could remember, Ashley Boyd had stayed nineteen and pregnant, Ava and Nicholas Zimmer were eleven and in fifth grade.
Ask anyone about the past year, they could tell you. Ask an adult about their childhood or a seven-year-old about their fifth birthday, they’d look at you like you were speaking in tongues.
It was almost like they were cursed, but that was crazy, right? After all, Henry was aging normally!
But if you tried talking to one of them about this, they’d look at you like you were crazy and either laugh, get worried, or get annoyed.
~~~
Henry first noticed something was wrong when he was six. He had gone to preschool the year he turned five, and he’d started kindergarten this year. He hadn’t noticed at first, but none of the kids in his class were in his preschool group; he didn’t even recognize any of them from the playground.
Henry shrugged it off. He probably just hadn’t paid much attention. Or he’d been grouped with the younger kids.
After all, what other explanation was there?
It’s not like they were cursed.
~~~
He noticed again in first grade. He moved up, the others didn’t. “Maybe,” he reasoned to himself, “I’m just advanced and skipped a grade.” (But Ara was smarter, she got the best scores in his class, and she was still in the same kindergarten class as last year. Mya had known the alphabet two years ago, but she was still in preschool. Alec always got C’s, yet he was in second grade.)
And… wasn’t Ashley Boyd pregnant last year? “Maybe human pregnancies are just really long?” (Except his teacher said, when asked, pregnancies were nine months and she was nine months pregnant. But that was a month ago? Right?)
He shook it off. If his mom didn’t notice anything weird, there probably wasn’t anything weird. Curses weren’t real, magic wasn’t real. Everyone knew that the only real magic was holiday magic, like Santa and leprechauns.
~~~
By second grade he was suspicious and worried because now he was in Alec’s class, and, while he didn’t know exactly what grades he’d gotten last year, he got a single B, just like last year, and on the same assignment. (Alec was so proud, grinning like he’d won the lottery and showing everyone) Plus, he was the only one who’d changed grades, and nobody noticed that it was weird! And he was growing, he was getting taller and older and stronger, but nobody else was.
The babies were still babies, Ashley was still pregnant, Mya was still in preschool, his mom was still mayor, and Mary Margaret was still single(which wasn’t as strange, but she was so nice! Why wouldn’t somebody like her?
It was so much harder to brush it off this year, harder to keep telling himself that magic wasn’t real, harder to pretend everything was fine.
~~~
Third grade, he thought he might be going crazy, because the alternative was that everyone else was crazy or magic was real. He’d tried bringing up the aging thing with his teachers, but they all laughed him off. “What are you talking about, Henry? Alec was in first grade last year, he’s a year younger than you!” “Don’t you remember going to Kiara’s birthday party last year? She turned eight over the summer and her whole class was invited!” “What do you mean she turns eight every summer? Is this a game? Okay, I’ll play along.”
Nobody noticed. Their brains remembered things, but they rewrote the memories to include or exclude him. Nobody remembered what happened two years ago, or three, or four. When he asked Ruby’s grandma for stories about her childhood, she stared at him blankly for a few seconds then asked what they were talking about. They could tell him facts about their past(Regina had cared for her apple tree since she was a child, Mary Margaret had always loved reading and wanted love, Mr. Gold always knew where he got most of his things), but not emotions, not stories. (Not one story about how they met their boyfriend or spouse, not one concrete story he could hold on to. Regina couldn’t tell him when or how she got the apple tree she loved so much, only that she raised it. Mary Margaret couldn’t tell him her favorite book when she was a kid, only her current favorite. Mr. Gold was… nebulous. He seemed to know everything, yet nothing.)
When he realized there was no way to get them to realize, no way to fix it, no way to unfreeze time and give them back their memories, no way to get his mom to realize that she was frozen in time while he was growing up, that one day he’d be older than the woman who raised him, that he would never truly have a friend or lover or spouse, he curled up in his room and sobbed.
He’d never graduate with the rest of his class and go away to college, trying to keep in touch with friends, because they wouldn’t remember graduating, would just go through senior year again. He’d never have a true love because they would be frozen in time, forever fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and he’d keep aging, getting older and remembering how he’d cared for them while they remembered nothing at all.
He wouldn’t have to watch his mom grow old and die, but his mom would have to watch as her son grew older than her while she stayed the same, and she’d know he was her son but she wouldn’t understand because she was still 38 while he was old enough to be her brother, then her father, then her grandfather, then he’d be gone.
By now, he knew it was a curse. The question was, was it Storybrooke that was cursed or him? If he left, would the world around him freeze while Storybrooke unfroze and he kept aging, or would Storybrooke stay the same, frozen forever in time, while he was among people who aged? Would they realize he had left? If he returned one day, would they know who he was or keep looking for him as he had been, a child or a teen, eight or eleven or sixteen?
He didn’t know.
And that terrified him.
~~~
In fourth, Mary Margaret, or Ms. Blanchard, gave him a book of fairy tales. It was beautifully bound, a big book where all the stories happened in the same universe. There were beautiful illustrations, and illuminated letters at the beginning of chapters, and the words started out in large-ish text, about the size you read in third or fourth grade, but slowly got smaller and more complicated the further he read. He loved the book.
The weirdest thing was that the people in the illustrations looked like simplified versions of people in his town; Mary Margaret was Emma, Sheriff Graham was the Huntsman, his therapist wasn’t a cricket but he sure acted like Jiminy Cricket, but the most obvious yet worst one was his mom. His mom, the mayor of Storybrooke, the one who had chosen him, who had loved him and raised him, was the Evil Queen.
And he reached the end of the book and he realized it was true. It had to be. The Evil Queen had used a curse and sent them here, trapped in time, no memories of their past, no realization that this wasn’t who they were or where they were supposed to be, only missing a child. A baby girl, the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, the only one who could break the spell according to Rumplestiltskin.
Henry didn’t know what to do. Could he find her? How old was she? Would she be willing to help, willing to hear him out?
And his mom… His mom was the Evil Queen. Was his mom exempt from the memory loss? Was his mom… evil?
~~~
On his tenth birthday, he decided he was going to do something about it. He had eventually realized that nobody could enter and nobody could leave, so how did he get here? Was it something to do with the baby savior, the nebulous Emma?
Could… Could she be his mom? That would mean he had her blood in his veins, and that could be why he could enter, why he could leave(nobody else could even get past the sign, but he could. What did that mean?)
He knew it was wrong, but he stole Mary Margaret’s credit card. He’d only had the book since the end of last school year, and he was putting a lot of faith in it, but this year he actually had Mary Margaret as his teacher, and it was the only thing that made sense. Ashley had been pregnant since at least first grade, Mya was still in preschool six years later, his mom was still mayor, nobody was aging, and they looked like the people in his book of fairytales. He needed to find Emma, and the only way for him to be here that made sense was Emma being his mom, so he needed to find his mom.
So yeah, he stole Mary Margaret’s credit card and used it to pay for a website that would tell him who his mom was, then he walked down the road until he reached a town. He checked the address he’d written down, found the bus station, and asked if they had any buses to Boston.
“Sweetie, you look a little young to be traveling all the way to Boston. Are you sure?” The woman asked, her wrinkled face scrunching up in concern.
He sighed, trying to sound annoyed, and lied, “I’m older than I look, I’m thirteen. I’m just really short and the baby fat refuses to go away.” He closed his eyes, took a breath, and smiled at her. “Sorry for snapping, it’s just frustrating that I look so young. Anyways, my parents are divorced and my mom lives in Boston, but they’re both really busy, so dad told me to just ride the bus to Boston.”
“Oh, it’s okay sweetie. You’re so polite! Anyways, there is a bus that goes to Boston, but the drive is around four hours and it’s about $20. You’ll have to talk to the person at the desk to buy the tickets and to learn which bus to take, though.”
“Thank you, ma’am!”
He had to have a similar conversation with the man at the desk, but he eventually got the tickets and got on the correct bus.
Hopefully, Emma Swan could help.
Hopefully, she’d believe him.