The purple thunder cloud that crashed fiercely through the town dissipated. Regina could feel magic buzzing around her. It was a familiar feeling, one that she missed having for twenty-eight long years. She can now use this magic to claim Henry for herself and make her pesky blonde problem go away.

Just as soon as that thought crossed her mind, she saw a car that had just past not too long ago, started moving backwards.

That is odd. Regina thought to herself. She noticed the car picking up pace and continued moving backwards until it was out of sight. Another car appeared to be moving backwards too! A few people on the sidewalk joined in the phenomenon along with a bird! The sun that had risen a couple of hours ago began to set in the east!

The brunette stood slacked jawed. She had a bad feeling about this. Time was moving back and it was picking up speed. Just as quickly as it started, it suddenly stopped. Regina turned to check the time on Henry’s Transformers alarm clock on his nightstand. 8:15pm it read.

Whoever it was that brought magic back to Storybrooke had got to be the one to cast this new spell to turn back time. The mayor had a confident inkling as to who had cast such a curse.

Regina felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. Being mayor of Storybrooke, she the habit of keeping her phone on vibrate in case she was in the middle of her many meetings. Even though the town was created from a curse, Regina took her mayoral role very seriously.

She fished out the phone from her pant pocket. She normally had her phone with her in her handbag but whenever she wore slacks that had pockets, she would take full advantage of its convenience.

The screen flashed brightly with the number to the local hospital shown clearly in the display. The brunette slid the call button to the right of the touch screen.

“Hello?” Regina answered.

“Regina! It’s Whale.”

“What is it, Doctor Whale?” concern evident in her voice.

“It’s Henry. He… he is being brought in.” the doctor tried to explain as calmly as he could. “I think you need to come to the hospital right away. He’ll be here any minute.”

Regina blinked a couple of times. This was the exact same phone call she had received the night before. The mayor quickly linked what she witnessed outside her house not a moment ago to the phone call. Time had rewound to the exact moment Henry had slipped into a coma from eating the poisoned apple turnover she had made specifically for Emma Swan.

She had no idea what Rumplestiltskin had planned or why he chose to rewind time to this exact moment, but she didn’t have time to think about this as she had to attend to her son.

                                                                *****

Where was it?! Emma dashed to the other side of the room with Henry’s bag. She emptied the backpack onto a hospital bed. She needed confirmation. Her son had taken a bite of the apple turnover Regina had given her earlier as a parting gift to enjoy on her trip back to Boston. Henry wanted to prove a point that his adoptive mother wanted to poison his birth mother.

The blonde should have believed him. The contents of the bag littered the bedsheet. It became apparent that the storybook her son carried around with him religiously was missing.

Even though Doctor Whale insisted that Henry was not showing any symptoms of being poisoned, the blonde knew who was to blame for her son’s condition.

The door to the trauma room burst open.

“Where is my son?” Regina inquired frantically.

Despite having gone through this before, Regina wasn’t sure if this was the same emergency or a new one. Before she could reach Henry’s bedside to talk to the medical personnel treating her son, she felt a tug on her elbow and shoulder. She spun around to find herself in the storage room. She braced herself as she was unable to stop herself from crashing into the storage racks.

“You did this!” Emma’s eyes burned with anger.

“Emma?!” Regina gasped. This was the same night! The brunette could finally confirm it.

Having gone through this moment before, the mayor was sure she did not want to go through the physical manhandling of the sheriff.

“WAIT!” the brunette called out before Emma could grab her and pin her to the wall like she did before.

“You did it didn’t you?! You poisoned the pastry!” Emma screamed the accusation in Regina’s face.

“I know this looks bad…”

Wrong answer Regina! The brunette knew she was done for the second she uttered those words. Emma pulled Regina by the shoulders and swung her to the metal cupboards, pinning her body against the furniture, the blonde’s full body weight pressed into her.

“Emma, I need you to calm down. I’ll explain everything.” Regina said slowly with slight fear in her voice.

The sheriff was expecting a fight. She was taken aback by the mayor’s calm despite her son’s life slowly slipping away in the next room. However, Emma was not ready to release the grip on the brunette.

“Speak!” the sheriff demanded.

“Everything Henry told you is true.”

Emma was definitely not expecting to hear those words coming out of Regina’s mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“The curse, the fairytale characters… me being the Evil Queen…”

“What?!” Emma’s green eyes grew wide. She released the brunette from her grip.

“You poisoned the turnover didn’t you?”

The mayor nodded yes.

“I placed a sleeping curse on it. I used the same poison apple your mother, Snow White took a bite out of.” Regina could not help but clench her teeth when mentioning the name of her arch nemesis.

My mother is Snow White? Mary Margaret?! Emma couldn’t believe her ears but looking at the caramel eyes before her, she knew Regina was telling the truth.

“How are you so calm? Don’t you care that Henry is dying?!”

“Because… this has already happened once before.”

“What do you mean?” the sheriff asked incredulously.

“You broke the curse! You brought Henry back to life!” the brunette’s voice was laden with hope.

“How?! When?”

“This morning… well this morning for me but tomorrow for you.”

“You are not making any sense!”

“You broke the curse I cast to bring everybody to this town from the Enchanted Forest. Everybody woke up and remembered who they were. I went back to Henry’s room because I was sure that I would never get to see him again. I had to hide from the townspeople who wouldn’t be too pleased to see me.” Regina paused to see if the blonde was buying her explanation.

Emma’s silence indicated that she wanted to hear more so the mayor continued. “I saw the day moving back to this night… to this very moment.”

“That’s impossible.” Emma whispered.

“Believe me, dear, all of this is very much real.”

“What do we do? How do I break the spell?”

“Well, the last time you broke the curse by kissing Henry.”

“That’s it? Like Sleeping Beauty?”

Regina was slightly annoyed by Emma’s reference to people who are very much real in her world like they are mere stories.

“True love’s kiss is the most powerful magic of all.”

“Okay,” the sheriff look deep into the mayor’s eyes “let’s do this.”

Regina’s breath hitched in her throat. She shook herself out of it as the blonde start to exit the storage room The mayor pulls Emma back in.

“Not now!” the brunette rolled her eyes.

“Our son is dying!” the sheriff pointed out.

“He won’t die until tomorrow morning. We have plenty of time.”

“Are you kidding me?!” the idea of her son dying alone was reason enough to make haste but Emma trust the mayor. Despite their differences she knows deep down that Regina loved her son unconditionally.

“If you go now, they won’t let you near Henry. They need work on stabilizing him.” the mayor pointed out.

Emma calmed down as she considered the point.

“As soon as they cleared the way, we can go save him.” Regina reassured the younger woman.

The blonde nod in agreement. The two women exit the storage room and watch as the medical team worked frantically on stabilizing Henry, who had already been intubated and hooked onto machines that measured his vitals.

It only took a few minutes before the medical personnel cleared out of the room. Satisfied with the readings on the monitors saved for Doctor Whale who was recording the treatment rendered onto Henry’s chart. During the women’s absence, they had also collected a sample of the patient’s blood to run tests as the diagnosis have yet to be determined.

After placing the clipboard back in its place at the foot of Henry’s bed, the blonde doctor walked over to where the two mothers were waiting. In order to avoid being caught between the two adversaries, Doctor Whale figured it was best to talk to both ladies at the same time.

“Henry’s vitals are stable now. We will continue to monitor him. We have also taken a sample of his blood to run some tests so that we know what we are dealing with.”

Doctor Whale looked at both women expecting the typical reactions one would expect to see from mothers of a patient who was in a coma, but the two women who were known enemies to each other were calm. No questions. No tears. In fact they acted like they couldn’t wait for the doctor to leave. Which was exactly what was happening.

After lingering a minute too long at what was close to becoming a staring competition, the blonde doctor left the mothers to be alone with their unconscious son.

Emma lets out a breath.

“You’re sure this will work?” the blonde asked Regina after Doctor Whale had closed the door behind him.

“It should work. It has to.” that last part was more of a reassurance for herself.

The two of them rushed to the side of Henry’s hospital bed, careful to touch any of the many tubes and wires that was hooked onto him.

“Go ahead.” Regina urged.

Emma leaned in to kiss her son on the forehead. Regina took a deep breath willing that the kiss would work.

The blonde took a step back to see if it worked.

Seconds went by. Nothing.

“That should have worked!” Regina began to panic.

“Why didn’t it?!” Emma asked.

“I don’t know… do it again.”

Emma took a deep breath and kissed Henry again on the forehead, a little longer this time.

Still, nothing happened.

“It’s not working!” Tears started streaming down the blonde’s eyes as she wondered if this was Regina’s idea of a cruel joke.

“Let me try.”

The brunette half pushed Emma out of the way as she took the blonde’s place. She leaned over and kissed Henry on the forehead.

The ten year old remained in his comatose state.

“No!” Regina began to sob. Her son’s imminent death starting to become apparent.

“I don’t know what you are playing at Regina, but you fix this!” the sheriff growled.

Just then, Regina remembered that magic was in Storybrooke before everything went back in time. She looked down at her son’s pale face and placed a hand over his heart as she willed magic to heal the unconscious boy. She steadied her breath and focused on only healing her son.

Nothing was happening. Not even a slight tingle of magic.

“What are you doing?!” Emma demanded.

“I’m trying to heal him” the older woman answered, her hand still hovering over Henry, not leaving her sight off the boy. “Magic has come to Storybrooke. I can feel it in the air. I saw it appear before time rewind itself!”

“What do you mean has come? Come from where?!”

Regina was losing focus and starting to get annoyed with the blonde’s questions. If she could use her magic at that moment she would have muted the sheriff before healing their son.

The mayor broke away from her concentration and turned to the other mother.

“Do you mind? I’m trying to concentrate.” she huffed before turning back and continued the healing process. She furrowed her brow in concentration.

Both mothers silently waited for something, anything to happen.

“Work, damn it!” Regina shook her hand trying to shake out some magic in a manner akin to shaking a Heinz ketchup bottle that was stuck.

Nothing. She let out a final guttural sound as she breathed out.

“Maybe you’re wrong about there being magic?” Emma pointed out.

“Oh there’s definitely magic. I can sense it in the air. It’s just that magic works differently here.”

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.” Regina looked dejected. She hated not knowing what was happening. She saw henry woke up from his coma before. She saw the curse broke from True Love’s Kiss! She was at wit’s end on how she was going to save her son.

Emma felt her anger starting up again. Just an hour ago, she was ready to leave her son behind in the care of his adoptive mother. She had given Regina her son but the woman had to go and create a stupid curse that could not be broken. She couldn’t care if what Regina said about time turning back was true. Henry was very much dying and she was not going to allow Regina to just do nothing about it.

“Everything you said about breaking the sleeping curse did not work.”

The brunette snapped out of her daze. Emma sounded furious.

“What?”

“You said that a kiss worked last time.”

“It did!”

“But it did not work this time. You did something.”

Regina was taken aback by the accusation.

“Why would I try to kill my own son?!”

“I don’t know. Maybe after Henry woke up, you realize that he did not want to be with you anymore. Maybe you think that if you couldn’t have him, nobody else can. Just like Graham!”

The mayor’s deep chocolate eyes grew wide. Regina was surprised that Emma even knew that she had killed the departed sheriff despite not being anywhere near him when she crushed his heart.

“How did you know I killed Graham?”

“So you admit it!”

“That was different,” Regina said dismissively, “I would never do anything to hurt my son. I love him!”

“And you didn’t love Graham?”

“What we had wasn’t love!”

“I want you to leave and don’t come back until you found a way to wake Henry up!”

The brunette wished that she could throw a fireball at Emma’s face, but lucky for her, Regina couldn’t even light a candle at the moment with the state of her magic.

There was a lot of tension in that room. The mayor heeded the sheriff’s request. It was useless to try to wake Henry up while the blonde was taking out her anger at her. She still had a few hours before her son’s condition takes a turn for the worst.

Regina straightened her hair and walked out of the room reluctantly. She vowed to not rest until Henry Mills woke up from the curse.