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It’s another world, and it had been her home for so many years that Robin is surprised at how familiar it feels as they bring the food truck to a halt on Main Street. She knows Storybrooke, has grown up here, has lived in this town for more years than she’d traveled world or realm. And nothing has changed, even if they’re back in time now. The same shops still stand on Main Street, Granny’s is still open and packed with the afternoon rush, and the clock tower still looms above the town.
“Odd energy to this place,” Alice says, frowning. “Feels wonky.” She’s staring up at the clock tower, fidgeting with the bracelet on her wrist.
“I ran away from home once when I was…probably four or five,” Robin remembers. “I hid in the clock tower. Mom was pissed.” There had been an anger between them for many years, borne of differences between them that had never been reconciled. Mom had been fragile for a long time, complicated in ways that Robin hadn’t grasped for a long time. There had been a lot of visits to Archie that had ended badly, a lot of instability, a lot of running off to Aunt Regina, then to Sheriff Swan when Aunt Regina had gone.
With time and age, she’d begun to grasp her mother, to learn her tics and understand what might set her off. Alice has some of the same tics, and Robin finds that she understands her instinctively because of it.
Just as she knows, right now, that Alice needs a hand in hers, anchoring her to this world where they don’t know what to expect. “Who found you?” Alice asks.
Robin struggles to remember. “An older girl,” she says. “I don’t remember who she was. Very pretty. I was a little bit in love for a while there.” Alice grins up at her, playful and mischievous, and Robin feels obligated to point out, “I was five.”
“I thought I was your first love,” Alice says teasingly, and Robin tilts her head and admires her for a moment, this precious girl who’d burst into her life and who has never given her peace since.
Their hands swing together as Robin leads her down the road, into Granny’s. Neither of them do very well without food, and Sheriff Swan might be in the diner, anyway. Which is perfectly reasonable, and this is definitely not Robin taking Alice for a tour of her hometown instead of finding help–
“My usual,” she says carelessly to Granny. “Do you…any chance you would make a marmalade sandwich–?” Granny is staring at her, eyes narrowed and no recognition on her face. “Oh,” Robin says, biting her lip. “A grilled cheese, please.”
Everyone in this diner is a stranger. Granny looks at her as though she’s never seen her before, and Red and Dorothy aren’t even here. There’s Archie, sitting at a table outside as he reads the paper, and he doesn’t look up when they walk past. There are kids underfoot, and–
“Neal?” she whispers, staring in horror at a child she’s only seen in pictures. He can’t be more than seven, seated at the bar with Granny and eating a giant milkshake, and Robin is openmouthed at him.
“This is Bizarro Storybrooke,” she mutters to Alice. “We have to find Emma and get out of here.” This place feels wrong, like skipping realms to one where everything is just slightly different, and it makes Robin itchy. The grilled cheese tastes different. The air feels different, somehow. Even the diner’s outdoor seating area feel like it’s just slightly off, and Robin shivers.
Alice leans her head against Robin’s shoulder for a moment. “This world has a stormy air to it,” she says consideringly. “A bit orange, perhaps. I don’t think a healthy realm should feel orange.” She frowns, disturbed by her observation, and then brightens. “At least we’ve still got marmalade.”
She takes a bite of her sandwich, her eyes flickering around the seating area and then settling on the building across the street. “Is that the sheriff’s station?”
“Yeah.” In another lifetime, one that hasn’t played out yet and may never again, Emma Swan had been a surrogate aunt to her, the two of them bonded by their connection to Aunt Regina. Emma had been sad and quiet more often than not, brusque to everyone in town and tormented by long-passed decisions. But she’d had a special fondness for Robin, and Robin had adored her.
But, like, in a subdued way. The other girls would never have seen her as a badass if she’d been friends with the sheriff, and Robin had been very focused on being a badass, with middling results.
All of that seems very silly now, after a realm hop and a curse and the fate of their families on the line. She squeezes Alice’s hand. “Let’s go get Emma,” she says.
They head across the street, unfamiliar faces looking curiously at them, and Robin pushes open the door to the station. “Emma?” she calls out, and a man stares back at her.
She recognizes him at once. Her hand is in a vise grip, Alice holding onto it so tightly that Robin thinks her bones might crack under the pressure, and she takes a breath and exhales, “Alice–“
She’d forgotten that, once upon a time, Emma had been married to a Hook. That relationship had been over when Robin had still been a kid, and it’s jarring to see this other Hook now, his brow furrowing as Robin’s warning comes too late and Alice is hurtling to him, pressing a hand to his heart in immediate wonder and not being thrown back by a curse.
No, instead she’s thrown back by an angry man, thrust against a wall with a hook at Alice’s neck. Alice whimpers, wide-eyed and heartbroken, and Hook snarls, “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Hey!” Robin snaps, and she’s drawing her bow at once, nocking the arrow and pointing it threateningly at Hook’s face. She doesn’t trust this Hook. Emma hadn’t trusted him, Mom hadn’t liked him, and Aunt Regina had loathed him. This isn’t Alice’s gentle father. “Let her go. You wanna see what this can do at close range?” she says darkly, and Hook releases Alice.
Alice stares at him as though she’s seen a ghost, and he snarls, “Get out of here.” He seems in a foul mood, and Robin doesn’t drop her bow.
“Where is Sheriff Swan?” she demands, keeping an eye on Alice. Alice is moving unsteadily back to her, her eyes still glued to Hook with rising despair. “Where can I find her?”
Hook sneers at her. “Not in town,” he bites out. “And she’ll make quick work of you, archer. I wouldn’t seek her out again.”
“Away,” Alice says suddenly, tilting her head. “Away with her family? That’s why you’re so…” She considers him. “Mm, teetering on a precipice.” She looks somber now, hurt, and Robin is protective at once.
“I’m her family,” Hook growls, and Alice tilts her head again and shivers. Robin seizes her, pulls her back before she can start up with this man who isn’t her father, and they make a beeline back for the food truck.
Alice is still trembling when they get there, clutching her temples and rocking back and forth, and Robin puts her hands gently on Alice’s face, holds her steady and waits. Mom had had fits like these when she’d been young, and she still remembers her chubby little hands on Mom’s face, so small that they hadn’t quite covered her whole cheeks, and Mom’s eyes focused on Robin’s until they’d cleared.
Alice’s eyes focus much faster, and she looks pained and guilty. “I’m sorry, Robin,” she says weakly. “I didn’t– he wasn’t mine, was he?”
Robin pulls her close, kisses Alice’s temple and shuts her eyes for a moment. “No,” she whispers. “But we’re going to find yours, Tower Girl. I promise.”
It takes a quick cruise past Emma’s house, then her parents’ apartment, before Robin finally decides they’ll have to try Aunt Regina’s house. “Someone’s there,” she says, squinting up at the light in the guest room. “Maybe they can tell you where Emma is.”
She begins to relax as they park and make their way down the path to the front door. This is home, as much as Mom’s farmhouse out on the edge of town was. Mom and Robin had moved in for good once Aunt Regina had left town, and she knows every inch of this house, every creaky step and crack in the wall. She might be a child out of time, but she knows this town, knows her place in it with such certainty that she can’t imagine whoever is behind that door won’t recognize it.
She raps on the door, and Alice smiles up at her. “You’re happy here,” she observes.
“Yeah. This was a good place,” Robin admits. Mom had been better more here than she’d been out in the farmhouse, less prone to fits or sudden fury that only Robin could abate. Robin had thrived in this environment, too, until tensions between them had gotten to be too much.
They’re finally past that, had healed twice over, and Robin can look at this house and think of family, not the tension of old. This is a place where she belongs—
The door is yanked open, and Mom stands behind it, clearly agitated. “I don’t have time for nonsense,” she barks out, and she looks at them with no recognition. “Who are you? Did you take her? Did you?”
Robin reels, very suddenly. Granny looking past her as though she doesn’t exist…Hook being here and hurting Alice instead of loving her…all of it had felt a little wrong, a little off. It hasn’t felt like she doesn’t belong, not until now, with her mother standing on the other side of the door frame and looking at her as though she’s a stranger.
She doesn’t have a place here. She doesn’t have a place at all, because her timeline has ceased to exist. Hyperion Heights has all but caught up with the moment that Henry and Aunt Regina had left Storybrooke, and now they’re going to bring Emma into the fray. No one is going to spend eleven years waiting for Robin to grow up before returning to Storybrooke again. No one is going to wait for the timeline to catch up with her.
Her version of Mom is content in California, and Robin is on her own, standing in the middle of a world that doesn’t know her. She can’t come back here. There’s another Robin here, bright-eyed and chubby-cheeked and a child who knows nothing of other realms and evil witches and Hyperion Heights. This isn’t home anymore, just cruel imitation, and she wavers in place with her heart aching as she stares at her mother beseechingly.
Alice steps forward, a light hand on Robin’s arm, and she says brightly, “We’re looking for Emma Swan. Can you send us her way?”
Mom stares at her, then Robin, then turns away and slams the door on them. “No time!” she shouts from behind the door.
“You have eleven more years!” Alice calls back, but she turns away, her fingers running over the bands on Robin’s wrist. “It’s all right,” she says, then considers. “Well, it’s hardly all right, and it’s about to get worse, but…” Her fingers dance over Robin’s skin, light and gentle, and then she touches Robin’s lips and pauses. The kiss is over her fingers, their lips barely brushing, but it’s enough to make Robin’s heart stop thrumming quite so hard with the certainty of failure.
She isn’t supposed to fail. She isn’t even sure she’s supposed to be much of a hero. Sometimes she thinks about leaping into a portal and finding a new land where she can be the kind of archer that every Robin Hood in the realms is supposed to be, about becoming someone worthy of the legends. Sometimes she wonders if she’s ever going to be any kind of hero at all when the dust settles, or if this is just her trying, yet again, to be someone worth noticing.
But all the heroes are away, and some dumb kid with a bow is their only hope now. Some dumb kid with a bow and Alice, who seems to have lost her magic but is still the most incredible person that Robin’s ever known, and so Robin starts up the food truck and lets Alice direct them.
“That way,” Alice says, frowning. “I think. I dreamed of this. Left left right. Right left right?” She leans back against her seat with a sigh of dismay. “I don’t know.”
“You’re right,” Robin says suddenly, catching the scrape of tire tracks just off the side of the road. “There. The last people to leave Storybrooke turned left here.”
The next turn is just as quiet, untouched by anyone but Storybrooke denizens, and it matches Alice’s directions, too. By the third turn, Robin is confident enough that she turns right immediately.
At the last of the turns, there’s a gas station, and Alice says, “Look! We did it!” She’s beaming out at the space beside one of the pumps, delighted, and yes, there’s a yellow Volkswagon Beetle right there.
And as they watch, Aunt Regina emerges from one side of the car, a much younger Henry opening the back door, and they head into the gas station market as Emma pops out of the driver’s door to pump gas.
It isn’t the archer or the witch in her that tells Robin what to do in that instant. It’s the girl she’d been, angry and hardened and desperate to gain any kind of attention from someone who might understand her. She’d done it once, and she does it again. “Alice, go!” she orders, and Alice runs fleet-footed to the car, yanking open the door to the passenger seat and sliding inside.
“Hey!” Emma barks out, and Robin plows into her, slides into the front seat while Emma’s regaining her balance and starts the car. The fuel tank is still covered, Emma whirling around in outrage, and she takes off after them as they pull away, Alice laughing and Robin grinning fiercely.
There’s something about pissing off Emma that’s always been kind of satisfying. It’s that Mills blood, Emma had told her once, sounding wistful about it. Emma knows that better than anyone.
Robin drives slowly, careful to keep Emma close by, and once they’re out of the gas station and out of sight of Aunt Regina and Henry, she cruises to a stop and cranks down the window. “Get in,” she orders, drawing her bow threateningly, and Emma stares at her for a long, uncomprehending moment. “Get in,” she repeats, and she knows the magic words that always work. “Henry and Regina are in danger.”
“We’re from the future,” Alice says helpfully. “You should listen to her. I do…” She considers. “At least half the time.”
Emma stares at them for a long moment, breathless and outraged, and then something clears up in her eyes. “Robin?” she guesses tentatively, and Robin wants to cry with relief.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it’s me.” She digs into Alice’s backpack, finds the bag from Granny’s and proffers it. “Grilled cheese?”
Emma is still staring at them, shaking her head at everything that Robin is saying. “No,” she says finally, her brow furrowed. “No, that’s impossible. I would never…” Her voice trails off. “You’re saying that in a few months, I’m going to abandon Henry and Regina?”
“Not abandon,” Robin says quickly, though she knows that Emma– the Emma she’d known, years in the future– had felt otherwise. “Henry leaves on his own. You know he’s going.” Emma still watches her, eyes narrowed and angry. “And Aunt Regina goes to help him.”
“But I don’t,” Emma repeats disbelievingly. “Like hell I wouldn’t go with her.”
“There were other factors,” Robin says, again. “Can we please just go save them?”
Emma bobs her head. She’s different like this. She’s always seemed so old to Robin, aged by the years of quiet in Storybrooke that had been lonely and dim. Here, she’s still young and vital, brighter than she’d been in Robin’s time and flushed with indignation at the idea that she could ever leave Henry and Aunt Regina.
Time heals most wounds, but those have never gotten less raw for Emma. Robin doesn’t know if her time will still exist by the end of this journey, after the curse had flung them back in time, but she knows that the Emma she’d known isn’t the one that this Emma would want to become. “Do you have any magic beans?” she asks. “We’re kind of stuck if you don’t, so–“
“I can get us one,” Emma decides, and then jerks around to crane her neck at the route back to the gas station. “Regina and Henry–“
“We left the keys in the food truck,” Alice says helpfully. She sticks out a hand. “I’m Alice, by the way. Alice Jones. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Alice…” Emma looks suddenly faint. “You’re not…you’re not my daughter, are you?”
“No!” Robin says hastily. “God, no. Different Hook. Very different Hook. No daughters with Hook, don’t worry.”
Emma blinks at her, and Robin flushes and slouches in front of the wheel. “I wouldn’t leave them,” Emma mutters again. “I don’t understand.”
“You will,” Robin murmurs, because there are reasons that had made sense at the time, reasons that Emma has regretted every day since. She still remembers the day she’d hot-wired the Bug and driven off with it, only for Emma to come after her. Emma had seemed inaccessible until then, as distant with Robin as she’d been everyone else in town outside her family, but then she’d taken Robin to a diner out of town and talked to her. Really talked, like Robin had been someone who might understand her, and Robin had confessed back secrets and insecurities that she’d never breathed a word of before.
After that, they’d been…friends, kind of. Emma had softened around her and Robin had run to her when Mom had gotten to be too much, when they’d fought too hard and Robin had felt as though she’d been alone in the world. Emma had given of herself as much as Robin had given to her, and there had been a bond between them.
This Emma doesn’t know her, but Robin understands her nonetheless, and she watches her for the telltale set of her jaw as she returns from the pawn shop with a bean in hand. Emma is angry, and Robin knows that it must be at herself. “Let’s go,” she says curtly, and she hurls the bean at the ground.
They emerge in a dungeon. Robin thinks. It’s dim in here, nearly impossible to see, but she can make out dank walls and the bars in front of them that lock them in. Instinctively, she twists around, searching for Alice. “Alice? Alice, I’m here.” Alice doesn’t respond.
Emma says, “Alice?” She’s just behind Robin, her steps cautious as her hand falls on Robin’s shoulder, and she says, “Were we separated?”
“No.” Robin clenches her fists, taking a breath. “She’s here. She doesn’t like to be locked up.” She gentles her voice, making it as soothing as she can manage. “Alice,” she murmurs. “I’m here. We’re going to get out of here. Emma has magic, remember? You might still have some, too. Where are you?”
She hears short breaths, ragged and harsh, and she follows them toward the back of the dungeons.
“Alice?” She turns a corner and finds a dimly lit passageway, light filtering in through a crack in the rock. Alice isn’t there.
But when she turns, she can see a bit more. Alice is backed up against the cell bars, huddled on the ground, and Emma has found her. She touches her tentatively, crouches opposite her and takes her hand as Robin watches them. “I don’t like being locked up, either,” Emma murmurs, and her voice is so gentle that Robin’s heart thumps in response. “Will you come with me? I think I can find us a way out of here.”
Alice’s hand is limp, and she moves it uncertainly, slips it into Emma’s until Emma can help her stand. Emma’s arm is protective around Alice, and Robin looks at her and thinks hero and aches to be the same for Alice. “It looks like there’s some light around the corner,” Emma says, her eyes falling to the spot where Robin waits for them. “Let’s see where we are.”
“This is my realm,” Alice whispers. “There is where Papa is from. A wish, and it came to being.”
Emma stares at her, the color draining out of her face. “The wish realm,” she murmurs. “This is…I…”
“Yes,” Alice says, and she smiles tremulously up at Emma. “You’re much shorter than I thought you would be,” she says suddenly, and Emma laughs.
She slides an easy arm around Robin when they get to the corner, the two of them in the savior’s protective care, and this Emma is still more carefree, less burdened. There isn’t a single timeline where Robin can imagine that Emma wouldn’t be kind, but this Emma still grants her kindness freely, offers it to strangers and doesn’t retreat when it’s no longer needed.
“This way,” Alice says suddenly, a hand pressing to her heart. “This way, Papa is–“
She takes off, racing into the left passageway in front of them, and Robin and Emma take off after her. Alice is running in front of them, her backpack bumping against her with every movement forward, and she hurtles forward and then comes to an abrupt stop. “Oh,” she says suddenly, and she turns to face someone in the chamber where she stands.
Robin jogs toward her, Emma behind her, and she keeps going until she’s in the chamber and sees who’s locked up there. “Aunt Regina!” she says in relief, dropping to the floor to hug her. Aunt Regina’s wrists are chained, and she’s sitting against a wall, and she’d looked all but hopeless until they’d come in.
“Robin,” she says hoarsely. “You shouldn’t have come here. We’re all in grave danger. This Rumple is–“ She stops abruptly, her eyes settling on something behind Robin.
No. Someone. Emma is standing beside Alice, her eyes wide as she takes in Aunt Regina. “Hi,” she says tentatively, and she moves forward, removes something from her pocket and crouches in front of Aunt Regina to pick the lock of the cuffs. Aunt Regina stares at her as though she’s starving and Emma is a five-course meal. Robin stumbles aside, back to Alice to give them space, and Emma says, “You don’t happen to remember driving home in a food truck once, do you?” She looks sheepish. “I just want to be sure that you got home okay when the timeline shenanigans started. I’m from…do you remember where we were? When we were?”
Aunt Regina is still staring at her, eyes raking over her hungrily, and Emma falls silent, smiles uncertainly. “Eleven years ago,” Aunt Regina rasps out, and Emma looks stricken. “Eleven years since…”
She lurches forward, and Emma catches her, embraces her so tightly that they both fall to the hard ground again, leaning against the wall. Aunt Regina is clinging to Emma, tears spilling down her cheeks, and Emma holds her tightly, pressing her forehead to Aunt Regina’s hair.
Robin slips her hand into Alice’s. Something about the two of them together feels…transcendent, powerful beyond words, like something to strive toward after decades with Alice. Alice is beaming beside her, and something in Robin’s heart feels as light as it had been when her memories had first returned.
“Eleven years,” Emma says hopelessly, and then she’s brushing Aunt Regina’s hair aside, pressing a hand to her jaw and staring at her in pained denial. “I can’t believe– I never would have–“ She shakes her head rapidly, and then she swoops forward and presses her lips to Aunt Regina’s.
Robin’s mouth falls open in wonder, Alice bobbing with delight beside her. Aunt Regina kisses Emma back at once, hands running through her hair, eyes warm and so full of the sort of love that she usually reserves only for Henry. Aunt Regina has never been happy like this, has never smiled with nothing muting it, and Robin had never realized that until she’d seen this unvarnished smile that there’d been something missing within her.
“Emma,” Aunt Regina breathes, and she kisses her again, this time soft and chaste. Emma grins wetly, fiercely at her, dots kisses to her eyelids and to the tip of her nose. “We aren’t supposed to do this.”
“I’m not supposed to lose you for eleven years, either,” Emma retorts, and Aunt Regina watches her with eyes shining and longing. “So I hear we have to save the day together, huh?”
And they do, of course. Robin knows from the stories that Emma and Aunt Regina are unstoppable together, but she’s never grasped it until it’s them reaching out to this realm’s Henry, until they’re all reuniting and making plans together in the castle’s war room to fight against this realm’s Rumplestiltskin.
There’s a team effort and there are victories and there are losses, and some things change irrevocably. Hook’s heart is healed, two Rumplestiltskins are gone, and Mom arrives to help save the day, too. It’s a rush, and when it’s done, Alice is holding desperately onto her father as Aunt Regina and Emma had earlier, and Robin notices for the first time that they’ve slipped away from the group.
“Leave them,” Henry advises. “They have some…stuff to sort out.” He shrugs carelessly, grinning. “I can’t imagine that my other mom’s going back to her timeline now. What’s she missing out on, a kind of shitty version of Alice’s dad?”
Robin looks at him askance. But of course– he doesn’t know. Or he hasn’t thought about it, about what there is to lose if Emma doesn’t leave. “I’ve gotta go,” she says, and she takes off into the castle.
It takes some hunting, some careful tracking through the halls of the castle before she finds a door that’s latched. She stands back in the hall, readies an arrow and fires it directly into the lock, and the door slides open.
There they are, sprawled out on the bed and very naked. Aunt Regina is contentedly asleep, wrapped in a blanket, and Emma sits up and pulls the blanket to her, wide-eyed. “What the hell, Robin?” she hisses. “We’re in the middle of something here!”
“You have to go,” Robin hisses right back. “You can’t be here.”
Emma shakes her head vehemently. “I’m not going! I’m not leaving Regina again, are you kidding me?” Robin stands her ground, determined, and Emma says, “I’m not going to return to a timeline where I abandon Regina and Henry!”
“You have to,” Robin repeats, and she takes a breath and starts again. “I can’t– I can’t explain this to you while she’s around. Okay? She doesn’t know.”
“Know what?” Emma demands, and she slides out of the bed, angry now. Robin averts her eyes as Emma dresses, stalking out past her with her shirt still unbuttoned and her eyes narrowed. “What could possibly justify losing Regina again? Going back to– to making some fatal error that takes me away from my family! What could possibly–“
“You have a baby,” Robin whispers, and she closes the door as Emma stares at her in horror. “In a few months, Henry is going to send you a call for help, and you’re going to be pregnant. He’s going to tell you to stay home and Aunt Regina is going to go with him instead. You’re going to have a baby, and you’re going to get a divorce, and no one really understands why until Hope gets a little older and we all see that she has Regina’s face.” She’d been Hope’s babysitter when she’d been an adolescent and she remembers how unnerving it had been, the little girl who had been Aunt Regina’s carbon copy, who had used her magic with more enthusiasm than Robin ever had.
Emma is shaking her head, is still staring at her with lips parted and eyes disbelieving, and Robin says, “Mom used to complain all the time that Aunt Regina had never told her about you two. But that was because it didn’t happen, did it?” she presses. “You’ve never been with Aunt Regina in the past.” Emma’s hand is lingering on her abdomen, and she turns back to stare at the closed door behind her. “You have to go back,” Robin says desperately. “You have to– you have to let them leave you behind. The timelines are weird as fuck. Aunt Regina will be back sooner than you know.”
Emma is silent, torn and helpless, and she says, “Can I…can I write her a note?”
They find Alice wandering the halls of the castle, searching for them, and Emma writes hurried, cramped words on a sheet of paper from her notebook. I will always find you, it promises, and Robin raises an eyebrow.
“Sap,” she says.
Emma pokes her. “I’m a sap? You’re surgically attached to your girlfriend’s hand,” she accuses. Alice grins happily and Robin is too charmed to fight Emma on that. “I just…” Emma wrings her hands, staring out in the direction of where she’d left Regina. “She was all alone for so long. I can’t imagine going back to a world where I have to choose the wrong timeline.”
“I know,” Robin says, and she does. “There’s…there’s no future for me in Storybrooke, you know?” Alice watches her, brow furrowed, and Robin looks down. “The Robin who grows up there…she’s going to grow up into a different person entirely. I don’t even know if I’m going to exist, or if every little change is going to keep shifting me until I’m a new person, one who isn’t even–“ She stops short of what she wants to say, a niggling fear that’s only gotten worse.
One who isn’t even the girl Alice loves. So much of who she’s become is Alice, Alice, and her heart twists in her chest to imagine losing both herself and the girl she loves. She peeks over at Alice, sees her gazing at Robin with raw concern, and she inhales a shuddering breath.
“Robin,” Emma murmurs, and she’s turned away from the door at last, her eyes steely determined in a way that makes it so clear why Aunt Regina loves her so deeply. “I swear, that isn’t going to happen. From the moment you want it, there will always be a place in Storybrooke for you.”
“I don’t know,” Robin says, and she can hear the wet way the words emerge, the lack of tears fooling no one. “I just want…I want the other Robin to be happy, you know? With her mother and with…with some other realm’s Alice to love and with whichever legacy she chooses for herself.” She can’t imagine it, a girl who grows up with Aunt Regina around to temper Mom’s fits. A girl who grows up grounded when Mom had guiltily spoiled her instead. She can’t imagine it, but she knows that it isn’t her, and she’s afraid.
“You both will,” Emma says firmly. “Okay? I’m going to make sure of it.”
“Okay,” Robin says, and she can’t believe Emma, but she wants to try.
Alice is insistent that she joins Robin on the way back to Storybrooke. “You shan’t be alone,” she says forcefully. “Papa has waited for me for years. He can wait a few more hours while we take Emma home.” She smiles at Robin, a little tremulous, a little vulnerable, and Robin’s heart skips. There is something about Alice that is fragile and strong at once, that makes her seem small and still larger than life. She remembers being an adolescent with an impossible crush on Emma, and she thinks she probably has a type.
Probably, which is why Alice is never finding out about that old crush, anyway.
They emerge from a portal just outside Mifflin Street, Emma tense and brooding beside them, and she exhales loudly when she catches sight of the food truck parked outside the house. “Regina made it home,” she says, breathing a sigh of relief, and she darts down the path ahead of them, rapping on the door.
Robin hangs back, pulling Alice with her just in time as another Aunt Regina opens the door. This one is younger, with less weight in her eyes, and she drops the phone she’d been holding and throws her arms around Emma.
Emma hugs her back, eyes squeezing shut and her lips curved into a smile, and Alice says under her breath, “Seems like she’s still quite wanted in her own timeline.” Robin blinks at her. There’s a secret little smile on Alice’s lips, content as she watches Emma and Aunt Regina embrace, and Robin shrugs helplessly.
Aunt Regina is inspecting Emma like she does Lucy sometimes, hands running over her face and shoulders as she searches for injuries, and she says, “We saw you abducted by those witches, too. How did you– did they do anything to you?” She waves a frustrated hand at the food truck. “That behemoth is so slow. We couldn’t keep up at all. Though the beignets in the back were the best I’ve ever tasted,” she admits, and Alice grins from beside Robin.
“There are beignets?” Emma says, betrayed, and Aunt Regina laughs so fondly that Emma’s eyes go soft and misty. Her fingers move to Aunt Regina’s chin, stroking her jawline, and Aunt Regina looks at her with a moment of gripped wanting.
“Swan! Emma!” shouts a voice from down the road, and Hook– not Alice’s Hook– jogs toward them. Emma’s hand falls from Aunt Regina’s cheek, and Aunt Regina exhales, taking a step back. “Finally,” Hook says, and he slips his hook around Emma’s wrist, tugging her closer.
“Killian,” Emma says, and her smile is uncertain, forced. She looks back at Aunt Regina, and their eyes meet, a glowing, intangible line between them that steals Robin’s breath away. Hook is slipping a proprietary arm around her, and Emma seems to lurch in it, magnetically drawn back to Aunt Regina before she catches Robin’s eye.
She nods almost imperceptibly, her smile sad, but hope gleaming in her eyes. Hook says, “This calls for a drink,” and Emma says, “I think I’ll pass on that, actually,” as her hand moves unconsciously to her stomach.
“We have no time for drinks!” Mom says from behind them, her voice shrill. “Those girls took my daughter!” She jabs a finger at them, and Aunt Regina’s eyes narrow, a fireball springing to life in her hand. Robin’s mouth falls open as she finally understands.
She’d been prone to running away as a child– well, as a teen, too– to turning all her hurt externally and lashing out by making Mom worry. And she’d picked the very worst day to have run off, with Suspicious Persons in town. Great job, past self.
“No,” Alice says suddenly. “But we can bring her home.” She turns on her heel and runs up the street, and Robin shrugs helplessly at them and takes off after her.
Following Alice is always an adventure. Alice runs down Mifflin, makes a right turn at Oak and then climbs up a dumpster onto the roofs of Main Street. She leaps from store to store, Robin panting after her, and then she tumbles down to the ground, landing on her feet in a crouch in front of the library.
“Alice?” Robin calls, and Alice looks up at her, then raises her face to the clock tower. And oh, Alice somehow knows her better than herself, has pieced together a story and a timeline and figured out exactly where it ends.
They climb up the clock tower together, and Robin hangs back as Alice surges forward. She doesn’t know what kind of paradox might arise from her seeing her past self, but she isn’t willing to find out, or change any of her own memories now. It’s Mom’s job to scar her for life, not her own.
“Hello, Tower Girl,” Alice murmurs, smiling down at the little girl crouched at the face of the clock. “Are you lost?”
“No,” the little girl says defiantly. “This is my home now. Go away.” Her magic sparks and dies in her hand, and she shivers, her arms pulling her knees up against her body. “Did my mommy send you to make me come home?” she demands, challenging.
“Oh, no,” Alice says smilingly. “Your mommy thinks I’m the one who hid you here. We’re both a bit mad, you see, and sometimes we make mistakes when we’re scared.” She touches her temple with one finger, and the little girl looks up at her, drawn despite herself. Alice lowers her voice. “Can I tell you a secret, Robin?” she says.
The little girl bobs her head up and down, eyes glued to Alice’s face. Alice says, “I used to live in a tower, myself. It wasn’t as nice as it sounds.” She smiles conspiratorially. “But sometimes, it was perfect.”
The little girl looks at her, tiny brow furrowed and lips pursed. “Why?” she wants to know.
Alice drops from a crouch to sit down on the ground beside the little girl, legs splayed out in front of her. “My papa came to visit,” she says. “You see, the tower wasn’t my home. Home was with my papa. Home is still with the people I love.” Her eyes are warm as she finds Robin on the stairs, and the little girl follows her gaze to eye Robin curiously.
Nothing happens. Robin doesn’t burst into flame, or suddenly become a new person. Robin remembers this conversation with the fuzzy, indistinct perceptions of a five-year-old. The little girl tilts her head, and she says, “Who are you?”
Robin hesitates, then jabs a finger at Alice. “I’m her…” She takes a breath. “I’m hers,” she says finally. Home is still with the people I love. “Can we take you home?” she says, and the girl looks back to Alice for guidance. Alice smiles, digs into her backpack and finds the last marmalade sandwich, and offers it to the girl.
The girl takes a bite and makes a face. “This is yucky,” she says. “Did Mommy make dinner yet?”
“I imagine not,” Alice says ruefully. “Maybe once she finds you.” She sticks out a hand and the little girl takes it, shakes it, and then reaches up with both arms until Alice lifts her into her own arms.
The little Robin is asleep against Alice by the time they make it down the clock tower, and Robin takes her the rest of the way, carrying her down Main Street and Oak until Mifflin. Mom is still outside, her voice shrill on the phone, and she takes off toward them when she sees them, lifting the little girl into her arms. “Thank you,” she says breathlessly. “You found her, you found her–“
“Of course they did,” Emma murmurs from the doorway, alone again. She smiles at them, her eyes still grieved and her smile weak, and Robin gives her a weak smile back. “I hope you’ll be back soon,” she says, and then lightly, as though there is no hidden burden that they share, “With beignets, even.”
Robin can’t make any promises, not when her mother is clutching onto a little girl who looks just like her and has a future of her own ahead. “Maybe you’ll visit us,” she shoots back instead, and she lifts a hand in farewell as they climb into the food truck.
She turns around with some effort, maneuvering on the empty street until they’re facing the opposite direction; and by the time they’re done, Mom has gone back inside. Emma is still standing outside, her eyes distant and her hand resting absently on her abdomen, and Aunt Regina emerges beside her, her lips brushing Emma’s cheek in a casual, affectionate gesture. Emma’s smile widens, bright enough to wash away the sadness for a moment, and Robin turns away from them and shifts into drive.
“Back to H-Town?” she says, turning to Alice, and Alice’s smile has none of the weight of Emma’s, the knowledge of any ordeal ahead of them.
It’s bright and unfettered, glowing with certainty, and Robin can feel it like a smooth confidence that she’s never known before. “Back home,” Alice corrects her, and her hand closes around Robin’s free hand, pressing it to her heart.