THE PLAZA HOTEL — SUITE 412 — 6:52 AM
Harry Potter wakes before the city does.
This is not unusual. He has woken before things for fifty years — before the silence settled, before the dust settled, before the particular quality of a dead world's mornings became ordinary. His body never quite unlearned the habit of vigilance. Darkness, then light, then: assess. Account for. Proceed.
He assesses.
The room is vast and golden and aggressively expensive in the way that only genuinely old money can produce — The Plaza's particular brand of excess, marble and gilt and curtains that cost more than Emma's car, which Regina had selected with the efficiency of someone who has never once settled for less than the best room available and sees no reason to start now. Floor-to-ceiling windows show Central Park going pale gray in the pre-dawn, the trees just shapes, the paths empty.
He accounts.
Regina is asleep against his shoulder.
This is — he takes a moment with this, the way he takes moments with most things that are real and good and likely to evaporate if he stops paying attention. She sleeps with the profound commitment of someone who rarely allows herself to. Her hair is loose against the pillow. The careful architecture of her face has gone unguarded, the control that she wears through waking hours resting somewhere off her, and what's underneath is — he finds he doesn't have the word for it. Younger is wrong. Softer is wrong. Just — her. Without the performance.
Last night had been —
He lets the thought breathe for a moment without finishing it.
Last night had been the first time in fifty years he'd been close to someone. Not proximity. Close. The kind that requires trust and is, therefore, the most dangerous thing a person with something to lose can do.
He apparently has things to lose again.
That's terrifying.
It's also, he thinks — watching the city go gray to gold through floor-to-ceiling glass — the best he's felt in half a century.
Regina stirs. The shift is small, the particular micro-adjustment of someone crossing from deep sleep to the shallower waters. He goes very still. She makes a sound that isn't quite a word, shifts again, and then opens her eyes with the abrupt alertness of someone who has spent decades not allowing herself the luxury of a slow wake.
She looks at him.
He looks at her.
A beat.
"Morning," Harry says.
Regina closes her eyes again. "It isn't morning until I've had coffee."
"Philosophically sound."
"It's not philosophy. It's policy." She doesn't move from his shoulder. "What time is it?"
"Nearly seven."
"Gold will be awake," she says. "He's aggressively punctual. It's one of his more irritating qualities."
"I'll add it to the list."
"It's a long list." Regina is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that has texture — something in it turning over. "Are you all right?"
The question surprises him. Not because it's wrong, but because she's asking it of him when he'd expected, this morning, that the careful accounting would run the other direction.
"Yes," he says. "Very."
"Not performing?"
"No."
She opens her eyes again. Studies him with the particular intensity of a woman who has learned to read people the hard way — by trusting the wrong ones, repeatedly, until the skill became survival. Whatever she finds in his face appears to satisfy her, because something in her own relaxes, fractionally.
"Good," she says. Then, because she is Regina Mills: "You should know I am not a person who is easy to be with in the mornings. I require coffee, silence, and at minimum twenty minutes before I'm expected to be functional."
"Noted."
"I'm also —" she stops. Recalibrates. "I don't typically allow people to see me like this. Without the —" she gestures at herself, the hair, the absence of the usual armor. "I'm telling you in advance so you understand why I may be unreasonably irritable if you comment on it."
"I won't comment on it."
"I know you won't." Another pause. "That's actually why I'm telling you."
Harry turns this over. She's warning him against a behavior he's already not going to engage in, which means she's not warning him. She's telling him something about the shape of what this morning requires. She's asking him, in the precise way of someone who does not ask, to be careful with her.
"I've got you," he says. Simply. Not making it larger than it needs to be.
Regina is quiet for a moment.
"Don't make that sound easy," she says, but the edge is soft.
"It is easy."
"For you. It's not easy for most people."
"Then most people," Harry says, "have been the wrong ones."
She doesn't say anything to that. But she also doesn't move away.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. Then again. Then a third time in rapid succession, which is the pattern of someone who has something urgent and has decided the direct approach is more efficient than tact.
He reaches for it.
Three texts from Emma Swan:
You two up yet?
I need to talk. All of us.
Also I found things. Bad things. But also useful bad things. Coffee first. Neal's place. 9:30.
Harry shows the screen to Regina.
She reads it twice, and he can see the shift happening — the queen assembling herself behind her eyes, the softness of the morning pulling back like a tide. It's not performance. It's armor, and it's real, and it serves her. He simply makes note of having seen what's underneath it.
"She's been at Neal's since yesterday afternoon," Regina says.
"She was thorough."
"She's always thorough when she's scared," Regina says. "It's how she copes. She turns fear into work."
Harry types back: We're up. Coffee in the suite first. What did you find?
Emma: Enough to ruin everyone's morning. See you in an hour.
Regina, reading over his shoulder: "Cheerful."
"She's efficient."
"She's Emma." Regina sits up, and the movement is the closing of a chapter — this morning, which was warm and quiet and briefly not about anything terrible, formally ending. "Wake Gold. I'll order coffee. Real coffee, not whatever the Americans have decided qualifies."
"The Americans have an extensive coffee culture, actually."
"They have enthusiasm," Regina says, standing and reaching for the silk robe folded precisely over the chair because of course she'd thought to fold it the night before. "Enthusiasm is not expertise."
Harry watches her cross the room with the unselfconscious authority of a woman who has always known exactly how much space she's entitled to occupy.
"You're staring again," she says, without turning around.
"I'm observing."
"We've had this conversation."
"And I stand by my position."
She turns at the doorway to the sitting room and gives him the look — the one that is approximately forty percent withering and sixty percent something else she hasn't named yet. "Wake Gold," she says. "Before he starts making plans without us."
Harry gets up.
— — —
PLAZA HOTEL SUITE — SITTING ROOM — 7:45 AM
Gold is already awake, which is not a surprise. What is a surprise is that he's sitting at the suite's writing desk with the posture of a man holding something fragile, turning a folded piece of paper over and over in his hands.
Harry stops in the doorway.
Gold doesn't look up. "Close the door."
Harry closes it. Crosses the room. Sits.
"Belle?" he asks.
"Baelfire." Gold sets the paper on the desk with careful hands. "He called last night. After — after the hotel. He found something in Tamara's things. He wouldn't tell me what, over the phone." Gold's jaw works. "He called me, Potter. Not Emma. Not the police. Me."
Harry understands what Gold is not saying. "He trusts you."
"He called me," Gold corrects, because he is a precise man and precision is how he manages hope. "That's not the same thing. But it's —" He stops. Picks up his coffee with hands that are not entirely steady. "It's something."
"It's something," Harry agrees.
"I've spent three hundred years searching for him," Gold says. "I'd imagined the reunion approximately ten thousand ways. None of them involved me sitting in a hotel suite in New York feeling —" He glances at Harry with something that might, on a different man, be vulnerability. "Frightened."
"Being found by someone you love is the most frightening thing there is," Harry says. "Because it means they can leave again."
Gold stares at him.
"Fifty years alone," Harry says, by way of explanation. "I've had time to work through the mechanics."
"That's either very wise or very grim."
"Both," Harry says. "Usually both."
The sitting room door opens. Regina enters in full morning armor — blouse immaculate, hair pinned, face composed — carrying three cups of coffee from room service with the efficiency of a woman who ordered before she got dressed because priorities are priorities. She sets one in front of Gold, one in front of Harry, keeps the third.
Gold looks at his cup, then at her. "You ordered for me."
"I ordered for the room," Regina says, sitting. "Don't assign significance."
"I've been trying not to do that my entire life," Gold says, with something that might be humor if you were generous. "It hasn't worked."
"Then today," Regina says, "try harder."
She wraps both hands around her cup. Harry wraps both hands around his. Gold sits with the posture of a man attending a meeting he's not certain he's qualified to be at.
Outside the windows, Central Park is doing what Central Park does — being enormous and green and full of people going about small ordinary lives with the specific New York energy of urgency about nothing in particular.
Harry watches it.
He could watch it for a very long time.
His phone buzzes: Emma, twenty minutes out.
— — —
PLAZA HOTEL SUITE — 8:15 AM
Emma Swan arrives the way Emma Swan does most things: efficiently, leather jacket on, hair still slightly damp, with the focused energy of someone who has been awake since four and has made the most of it.
She stops in the doorway of the suite and takes in the sitting room — Gold at the writing desk, Harry in the armchair, Regina on the sofa with her coffee and the particular posture that means she's been awake long enough to be back in control.
She takes in Harry and Regina specifically.
Says nothing.
Files it.
"Nice room," she says instead. "Very — gilded."
"Sit down," Regina says. "There's coffee."
"I've had coffee."
"More coffee."
Emma sits. Takes the coffee. Drinks it and does not comment on the fact that it's better than anything she's made in fifteen years.
"Neal called you," she says to Gold.
Gold's chin lifts fractionally. "He did."
"He called me too. Separately." Emma sets the cup down. "He found something in Tamara's things. He sent me photographs." She pulls out her phone, arrays them on the coffee table — long-lens surveillance photos, clearly printed from a cloud backup. Tamara in a parking structure. Two men, one with his back to the camera, one in partial profile. "She had these hidden in her desk. I went through her apartment yesterday afternoon, before Neal found them in the cloud backup. Same images."
Gold reaches for the photographs. Picks them up. His expression does not change. His hand does.
"Gold," Harry says quietly.
"Marcus Killian," Gold says. The name comes out flat, contained, the voice of a man locking a door from the inside. "I believed him dead."
"He's not," Emma says. "Tell us who he is. Everything. Not the edited version."
Gold sets the photograph down. Looks at it for a moment, then looks away — the gesture of someone choosing not to flinch. "He was born in 1887. Hunter, in the old sense. Not of animals. He identified, tracked, and dealt with those possessing magical ability, on behalf of those who wished to eliminate such things from the world." A pause. "I hired him. Approximately ninety years ago, to handle a problem I am not proud of. We parted on terms that became — acrimonious. I believed the matter resolved."
"He resolved it differently," Emma says.
"Apparently."
"He's running something called the Home Office," Emma says. "Anti-magic organization. Long established, well-funded. They know about the Enchanted Forest. They know about Storybrooke." She picks up the photograph. "And they've had Tamara positioned next to Neal for at least eight months."
The room goes still.
Regina speaks first. "Positioned."
"She's not in love with him," Emma says. She says it with the flat precision of someone who has made peace with the fact that they feel something about this and is choosing not to perform it. "Neal was access. He's Gold's son, which connects him to the Enchanted Forest, to magic, to Storybrooke. She got close to him to get close to all of that."
Gold's jaw tightens.
"He knows," Emma says. "Neal. He ran her last night on his own. He's — he's not oblivious. He's been uncomfortable for a while and didn't trust himself." She looks at Gold. "He called you because he wanted you to know before anyone else did."
Something crosses Gold's face that Harry has no name for, and then it's gone.
"What's the target?" Harry asks. He's been quiet — letting Emma run this, because it's hers to run, because she's earned the chair at the head of this table. But the tactical picture is becoming clear and he wants it confirmed.
Emma turns to him. "Phase one: eliminate the most significant magical asset in accessible range. That's Gold." She meets Gold's eyes briefly. "Phase two: Storybrooke. Full elimination of all remaining magic." A beat. "They already have someone inside. Moved there after the curse broke. Presenting as local."
"The town line is open now," Regina says, quiet and sharp. "Anyone can cross. Anyone has crossed."
"Yes," Emma says.
Regina looks at Harry.
He looks at her.
"Henry," she says. Not asking. Naming it.
"Is with Snow White and Prince Charming," Harry says. "Both of whom survived a war, a dark curse, and Rumplestiltskin as a neighbor. He is not unprotected."
"He's ten."
"He's extraordinary." Harry's voice is level. "And right now, he's safe. We're going to keep him that way by staying focused and not panicking."
The look Regina gives him is the most unguarded thing she's shown since the suite this morning. It lasts one and a half seconds.
"I'm not panicking," she says.
"I know."
"I'm strategizing."
"I know that too."
Emma, watching this exchange with the expression of someone filing things she'll process later: "Emma calling my father now." She's already dialing.
It rings once. David picks up, which means he was also awake early, which means he's been waiting.
"Hey," he says, and the warmth of it — uncomplicated, immediate — still does something odd to Emma's chest that she is also filing for later processing.
"Dad." One word, and she hears him shift. "Put on the sheriff hat."
She lays it out: Killian, the Home Office, the sleeper in Storybrooke. David listens without interrupting, which is, she is learning, one of his better qualities. When she finishes, he says:
"How do you want to handle it?"
Not I'll handle it. Not leave it to me. How do you want to handle it, which means he knows she's the one running this and he's offering himself as backup, which is —
She thinks about it later.
"Quiet containment," she says. "Find whoever moved there in the last two months that no one actually knows well. Sit on them — don't spook them. I want to know how much they've already sent back."
"Leroy is —"
"Do not let Leroy near this."
"He's already started a neighborhood watch."
"Then tell him it's called the sheriff's volunteer auxiliary, he reports to you, and if he makes one unilateral decision I'm personally revoking his axe privileges."
A pause. "Does he have axe privileges?"
"He seems to think he does."
"Fair enough." She can hear him smiling. "Henry's asking questions."
"Tell him everyone's fine. Tell him I'll call tonight."
"He'll want to know when you're coming home."
Emma looks at the room — at Gold holding a photograph with steady hands and too-careful eyes, at Harry watching her with the quietly attentive expression she's starting to recognize as his version of I'm here, take what you need, at Regina who is sitting very straight and not looking at Emma directly but is absolutely tracking every word.
"Tell him soon," she says. "Tell him we're all coming home."
She hangs up.
"So," Emma says. "We go to Neal. We get everything he found. And then we go back to Storybrooke and we deal with this properly, on home ground, with everyone we've got."
"Today," Harry says.
"Today."
Gold stands. The movement is measured, deliberate, the posture of a man who has decided something. "I should like five minutes," he says, "before we go. To speak with my son alone. If that's acceptable."
Emma looks at him for a moment. Then: "You get three minutes. And Gold?"
He pauses.
"Don't make deals. Don't offer anything. Just talk to him."
Gold considers this with the expression of a man being asked to put down a weapon he's carried so long he's forgotten it's in his hand. "That is," he says, "genuinely difficult for me."
"I know," Emma says. "Do it anyway."
— — —
NEAL'S APARTMENT — 9:40 AM
He opens the door before they knock.
He's been awake all night. Harry clocks this the way he clocks most things: without announcing it, without making it an event. The dark geometry under Neal's eyes, the coffee cup carried like a prop rather than a beverage, the kitchen table visible behind him covered in the organized debris of someone who turned fear into research at approximately midnight and didn't stop until dawn.
Neal looks at Emma first. He'll always look at Emma first. Old gravity. Old guilt.
Then Harry, with the specific assessment of a man recalibrating someone he doesn't have a category for yet.
Then Regina, who he clearly finds alarming in the particular way of people who've never stood in the same room as absolute authority before and are realizing they've been living at reduced volume.
Then Gold.
With Gold, Neal's face does something that takes a long time to produce — the layered expression of someone who has rehearsed anger and found it cohabiting, uneasily, with something else.
"Come in," Neal says.
The apartment is the same IKEA furniture and exposed brick as yesterday, but the table has become a situation room: three coffee cups, a laptop open to a background check service, a legal pad dense with notes that get smaller and more urgent toward the bottom of each page.
Harry moves to the table first.
"You ran her."
"Yeah." Neal sets his coffee down. "I've been uncomfortable for a while. I kept telling myself I was paranoid." He looks at Emma. "After yesterday I stopped telling myself that."
Emma pulls out her phone. Lays the photographs on the table — Tamara in the parking structure. Killian's profile. "Tell me if you recognize the man on the right."
Neal looks at them. The recognition is immediate and he sits with it for a moment before naming it. "Marcus. He's — he's high up in the organization. The one Tamara works for."
"The Home Office," Emma says.
Neal looks at her sharply. "You already knew."
"I found the same images in her desk yesterday. Different copy." Emma's voice is even. "Tell me everything you found."
Neal pulls the laptop around. "Anti-magic organization. Old. Well-funded. They've been documenting the Enchanted Forest for longer than I knew it existed, which —" he stops. "Which means they have sources I haven't found yet." He looks at Gold. "They know about you. Specifically. You're listed as primary target."
Gold says nothing. His expression is the face a man makes when he's confirming something he already suspected and is choosing not to let it show.
"There's a secondary target," Neal says. "Storybrooke. Full elimination of magical presence." He turns the laptop. "They already have someone inside. I found encrypted communications — I'm not a tech guy but I found someone who is, last night, online. They've been operational in the town for at least six weeks."
"Contained as of this morning," Emma says. "My father's team."
Neal stares at her. "You have a team."
"I have a father who happens to be a prince and a town full of fairy tale characters, so yeah," Emma says. "I have a team." She pulls out the chair across from him and sits. "Neal. What do you want to do?"
"What do you mean?"
"You could walk away from this," Emma says. "You're technically a civilian. You've got nothing to do with Storybrooke except that your father lives there and your son — " she holds his gaze, "your son lives there. You could walk away and let us handle it."
Neal looks at her. Looks at Gold. Looks at Harry, who is standing slightly apart from the group, watching with the quiet attention of someone who has decided something and is waiting to see if the room catches up.
"Henry lives there," Neal says.
"Yes."
"Then I'm not walking away."
Emma holds his gaze for a moment. Then she nods, once, and the decision is made.
"Good," she says. "Then we go back together. All of us. Today."
She stands. Gold is still at the edge of the room, and Neal is still at the table, and the centuries between them are visible in the apartment the way weather is visible — you can't touch it but you can't move through a room without noticing it.
"I'll get the cars," Emma says to Harry and Regina. She says it with the precision of someone who is giving a father and son ninety seconds and calling it logistics.
She and Harry move toward the door. Regina follows.
In the hallway, Emma exhales once. Sharp. Controlled.
"You okay?" Harry asks.
"I'm great," she says. "I'm thriving. I love bringing my ex-boyfriend to the town where my son lives right before a magical organization tries to destroy everything."
"It's a lot," Harry agrees.
"It's so much."
"Swan." He waits until she looks at him. The green of his eyes is even and certain and entirely focused on her. "You've got it."
Emma looks at him. Then at Regina, who has her arms folded and her chin tilted at exactly the angle that means yes, what he said, obviously.
"This is very annoying," Emma says, "that you're both right."
"We're generally right," Regina says. "You'll adjust."
"God help me."
"Also us," Harry says. "God help all of us. We're going to need it."
Emma almost laughs. Doesn't. But almost.
"Car," she says. "Now."
— — —
CAR — MANHATTAN TO JFK — 10:15 AM
Emma drives.
This is Emma's stated preference and also, Harry suspects, a control mechanism, which is fine. He would also prefer the person with the most operational tension to be the one with both hands on the wheel rather than sitting in the back running catastrophic scenarios.
He takes the passenger seat. Regina and Neal are in the back. Gold is in the car behind them — separate vehicle, Neal's arrangement, his instinct for keeping a manageable distance that Harry thinks probably has decades of complicated history behind it.
New York moves around them. The Lincoln Tunnel approach. The particular organized chaos of people who drive like they've calculated that aggression is statistically the most efficient approach to urban traffic.
Harry watches the city with the attention he gives most things — like he's afraid it'll stop being real if he looks away.
"You're doing the thing," Emma says.
"What thing?"
"Where you look at everything like it might disappear."
"Old habit."
"Fifty years alone habit."
"Yes."
Emma changes lanes with the casual authority of someone who learned to drive in situations less forgiving than this. "It won't disappear."
"You can't know that."
"No," Emma says. "But I'm telling you anyway." She glances at him briefly. "For what it's worth."
"It's worth something," Harry says.
In the back, Regina is looking out the window with the focused expression of someone thinking through multiple scenarios simultaneously. Neal is sitting with his hands on his knees and the posture of a man who has spent his whole life waiting to land somewhere and isn't sure this is it.
"Question," Neal says.
Everyone in the car waits.
"The town. Storybrooke." He says it like he's feeling the shape of it. "What's it like?"
Emma's expression shifts — something she's working out in real time. "It's —" She stops. Starts again. "It's a small town in Maine that used to be under a twenty-eight-year curse, so the diner has been serving the same rotating three pies since the eighties, and everyone who lives there is technically a fairy tale character from another realm, and the mayor's office has a vault under it." She pauses. "Also there's a wolf."
Neal stares at the back of her head. "A wolf."
"Ruby. She's — she's great, actually. You'll like her."
"There's a wolf and I'll like her."
"The werewolf thing is incidental to her personality."
"That sentence has never been said before."
"Many sentences have been said for the first time in Storybrooke," Regina says, without turning from the window. "You adapt."
Neal looks at her. Something in his expression is tentative — the wariness of someone approaching a thing they don't entirely have a read on. "You're the one who cast the curse."
"Yes."
"And now you're — what. You're one of the good guys."
Regina turns from the window and gives him the look — the one that is approximately forty percent withering and sixty percent something else. "I'm one of the useful ones," she says. "Whether I qualify as good is a question I leave to philosophers and ten-year-olds."
Neal considers this. "Henry's the ten-year-old."
"He is," Regina says. "He'll have opinions. He always has opinions. I'd prepare yourself."
Something crosses Neal's face at the mention of Henry. Not grief exactly — something more forward-facing. The expression of a man trying to imagine something he doesn't have a frame for yet.
Harry watches him do this.
He thinks about what it means to be given back something you'd stopped believing was still there. He has some recent data on the subject.
"He knows about you," Emma says to Neal. Not looking away from the road. "Not — not the details. But he knows he has a father. He's always known."
"What does he know?"
Emma is quiet for a moment. "He knows you were young and scared and made a bad call. He knows I forgave it." A pause. "He knows I want him to have as many people in his corner as possible."
Neal looks at the back of her head for a long moment.
"Emma."
"Don't," she says. "Not in the car. Not today. There's enough happening today."
"Okay," Neal says. Quiet and meaning it.
The tunnel takes them. New York goes dark and then the car emerges into the gray New Jersey morning and Emma accelerates onto the turnpike with the purpose of someone who knows where they're going.
Harry looks at her profile — at the set of her jaw, the particular composure of Emma Swan managing a day that has more moving pieces than most people handle in a year. He thinks about what it takes to drive toward something this complicated and not flinch.
He thinks about the fact that she does it while also checking that everyone else in the car is okay.
He thinks about what a remarkable person she is, and that he is going to tell her so, and that she will tell him he's being weird, and that he intends to be undeterred.
His phone buzzes. He reads it.
David Nolan: Found the second one. It wasn't the librarian. The librarian was clean — false lead. It's the new pharmacist. Been sending GPS coordinates of the town's infrastructure. We have him.
Harry shows it to Emma.
She reads it at a stoplight. Her jaw tightens.
"Good," she says.
"Two in position that we've found," Harry says quietly. "There may be more."
"There are always more." Emma hands him back the phone. "That's why we go home and do this properly." She glances at him sideways. "You ready for Storybrooke?"
Harry considers the town — the aggressively quaint main street, Granny's Diner with its rotating pies, the particular energy of a place where everyone has a secret history and most of the secrets involve magical creatures. The place where he landed, through a tear in reality, into a room with a wraith and four people who didn't run from it.
"I was ready the moment I landed," he says. "I just didn't know it yet."
Emma looks at him for a half-second. Something in her expression does a thing he doesn't have the name for.
"Sap," she says.
"Completely," Harry agrees.
From the back: "Are you two always like this?" Neal asks.
"Yes," Regina says. "You'll adapt."
Neal looks at Regina. Regina looks out the window. Harry looks at Emma. Emma looks at the road.
Ahead of them, the turnpike stretches north.
Behind them, New York goes small in the mirror.
And somewhere above Maine, in the specific gray of a late-morning sky, Storybrooke is waiting — with its fairy tale citizens and its complicated histories and one ten-year-old boy who is absolutely, certainly, definitely going to know something is happening the moment he sees their faces.
Emma accelerates.
Going home.
---
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