A/N: Alright, I'm gonna try something a little different here. This will be a pretty slow burn fic with lots o' Swan Queen and a lovely narration by Henry Mills. Just to set you guys up, this is an AU, no curse obviously, no magic, taking the characters and deviating them from the show a decent amount.

The story begins with Henry at age 23 and will work as a series of flashbacks. Hope you enjoy!

**For those who have already read this...yes! this has been posted before. Eventually, it disappeared off fan fiction and my computer after a misfortunate and freak computer crash from a bug/virus thing. ANYWAY. Thanks to some Swen they supplied me with a copy that they had saved so here it is! :)***

We should just outlaw folding chairs. Let's just make them completely illegal. I filtered through my knowledge from an American Politics course I took a couple years ago. I mean, how hard could it be?

They were uncomfortable in every way. They hurt your butt. They hurt your back. I'm pretty sure they were hurting my self-confidence too, because it was pathetic how exhausted I was from sitting up this straight.

When I found myself going through the process for my new folding chair bill to become a law, I forced my brain to stop its mindless whirling. This is what happened when I got nervous. I ended up coming up with all these plans to change the world, and almost always in completely irrelevant way.

Whenever I'd share my dumb nerve induced ideas in the past, Emma would just say, 'ambition is ambition' with her trademark shrug.

Emma. Stupid Emma. Can't a guy just go through his life without having inspirational quotes sprung upon him at every given moment? My Mom only encouraged her too.

If they were to walk up onto this stage with me right now, I'm pretty sure my Mom would say, "eighty percent of success is showing up", and then Emma would say something like "every strike brings you closer to a home run" which would be not at all encouraging, and basically have nothing to do with the situation.

When I'd call her out on it, she'd smile knowingly, like she did it on purpose, and tell me to 'break a leg, literally.' I'd probably punch her in the arm or something and she'd pretend it hurt even though my arms have the circumference of a small twig and my punch probably felt like a cotton ball had been thrown at her.

I twisted my hands around the paper that they held until it was rolled up like a log. I looked around the crowded auditorium, tightening the paper until the log transformed into a tiny stick. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty accurate with the arm circumference because when I held the paper up to my arm it looked pretty simi-

"…Henry Mills." My head shot up. That was my name. The man on the stage was calling my name.

For days, I had been waiting nervously for this moment. I had dressed in my most uncomfortable, yet dapper suit for this moment. I had sweated almost completely through my most uncomfortable, yet dapper suit for this moment. And here I was, completely blowing it, as I stared up at the man who looked down at me expectantly.

He nodded once, an encouragement to get up. I stared at him with wide eyes. He nodded again, now begging me to get my ass up. Before he got to the third nod, which was bound to up the anty with a threatening hand wave of some sort, I pushed up onto my shaky legs.

Did I mention my legs were also had the circumference of sticks? It was practically dangerous for me to even exist.

The third nod came along with the hand wave I had predicted. I forced my legs to move and sort of skip-jogged to the stage. I couldn't be sure from the man's uncomfortable face if he now regretted pulling out the third nod to get me to come up, or was just relieved his part was done as he shuffled across the wooden floor.

I made my way to the speaker stand and stood stiffly behind it. If I wasn't already sweating enough before, lights from all across the stage shone on me, seemingly trying to boil me alive. I knew enough about the state I was currently in to clear my throat before I started talking. I leaned my face so that my mouth hovered over the flexible speaker.

"Hello." My voice echoed throughout the huge room and I looked out to the crowd. They all looked like a bunch of dark blobs. I guess that lights were good for one thing. I didn't know if I would have been able to keep going if I could see the individual faces of the people staring at me. I leaned back into the microphone, my hand still clutching the rolled up paper at my side.

"When I was younger, my Mom used to say eighty percent of success is showing up." I backed up a little more, perfecting the distance I would have to be in order to prevent breaking the eardrum of some poor, unsuspecting crowd member.

None of the black blobs seemed to respond, they just coughed, and sneezed and shuffled around like black blobs do. My heart sunk at the thought that I was going to have to do this alone, that it was completely up to me and only me to pull this off.

I flattened out the paper that had been previously in my hand, slightly amused through the stress at how the paper refused to lay flat and instead just kept rolling up on the sides and rocking back and forth. Shaking me head slightly, I started again.

"When they asked me if I would speak up here in front of all of you, I was pretty shocked." I wrapped my hands around the edged of the stand, hoping that maybe if I held on tight enough I'd be able to stop myself if my legs started running by themselves to escape.

"I thought about everything I could say, everything I needed to say. And I just-" I stopped, releasing air I'd been holding in my chest. The whole room was so freaking stagnant I felt like I was struggling to breathe.

This is not at all how I wanted this to go. I released the wooden stand, half expecting there to be indents on the sides from my iron grip. But who was I kidding, arms like sticks, remember?

"Just uh, one minute." I craned by neck to speak properly into the microphone while I shrugged off my suit jacket and began to roll up the sleeves on my white button down shirt. I'd made sure the damn thing had been so perfectly ironed too. Well now that was out the window, along with my practiced speech.

I glanced around for something to throw my suit jacket onto, but the only thing near me was the stand. I folded in haphazardly and tossed it on the ground beside me. Clearing my throat once more I leaned my elbows on wooden surface.

"So, this didn't exactly go as I planned. I decided I'm going to say something a little different if that's okay with you guys."

My nerves began to settle as I denied this moment for what it actually was and pretended it was for something else. Story time. Yes, at twenty-three years old I was now going to tell a story to hundreds of currently humorless and stone faced patrons.

And I was going to do it while about ten highly watted, glaring stage lights threatened to sweat me out until I collapsed to the floor in dehydration. In other news, the tag on my shirt was a little itchy, but that was least of my worries.

"I'm not sure how much you really know about me. I know some of you out there, but most of you I've never met. Uh, I'm currently going to grad school for English. Writing specifically." I paused, sort of wishing that I could at least see the faces of the black blobs. At least then I could judge if they were even listening or not.

"And there was this one class where our professor would just walk up every day and write a prompt on the board. Then, we had twenty or so minutes to answer it. You know just to write as much as you could. Kids would like bring four pencils and switch them out as the one they were writing with got dull. They claimed a sharp pointed tip increased their writing speed or something.

Anyway, the point was these kids would go crazy because they never felt like they had enough time. They were writers, they had too much to say for only twenty minutes. After class they'd argue with the professor, but he'd just say 'twenty minutes is more than enough to get the job done'.

I, on the other hand, would just sit there looking at my blank paper with the stupid prompt and the stupid professor wondering why I wanted to be a stupid writer when I had nothing to say."

The black blobs shuffled slightly when I looked out all the way to the back and even though I couldn't see them, somehow, I knew they were following along to what I was saying. I mean, they had no choice right?

"One day he went up the board and wrote his prompt as usual. Kids around me nervously tapped their pencils, waiting for their twenty minutes to begin. I just sat slouched down in my seat, knowing I'd yet again have nothing to write,"

I bent my spine and hunched over to show them just how unprofessional I could look if I wanted to, not like the first ten seconds of my speech hadn't already shown them that. My slouch impersonation must have really done the trick I think cause I heard some child in the front row laugh at me before their parents shushed them. I thanked that kid in my head.

"After he told us to begin I pulled my head up reluctantly, and read the prompt. For there was nothing more that would wake me up in the morning than some good old, freshly brewed failure. But this time, after my eyes finished scanning the board, my hand did something…weird." I scrunched my nose dramatically, feeling grateful for my extensive acting experience as Tree #2 in our high school's rendition of Peter Pan.

"The weird thing that my hand did was - oh god you sickos nothing like that!" My face transformed into one of exaggerated disgust as I pointed in joking accusation to a black blob that I could now decently make out in the front row.

He laughed, and I had to refrain myself from running off the stage and kissing him on his extremely bald head. I vowed right away that Mr. Blob in the front row, with the head as smooth as a baby's butt, was my new hero.

"So back to my hand. The weird thing it did while I sat in that classroom, was pick up the pencil," I paused for dramatic effect, who knew I was such an actor?

"I wrote two pages in that twenty minutes. Pathetic compared to some people whipping out six, but it was an all time record for me. Those two pages have guided me in every single writing assignment since, including the story I'm going to tell you today."

I took a deep breath, 'eighty percent of success is just showing up' I repeated in my head.

"Now I'm sure you're wondering what this wonderfully inspirational prompt was," I peered around into the blackness, before realizing that this was not a pop concert. The crowd was not going to scream 'WHAT' in unison, begging me to continue.

"On that board, the professor had written: Explain what defines something as being extraordinary." I stopped again, I guess my acting skills needed a little brushing up on cause apparently all I had were dramatic pauses.

"So I sat there for a little. You know half-heartedly thinking about it. I began listing all the things that I found extraordinary in my life so that maybe I'd find something they all had in common. And I realized hallway through the list that most of them, if not all of them included both my Mom, and Emma. And I thought to myself...no, that couldn't be, they were just so, ordinary.

But I wrote about them anyway for the remaining twenty minutes. At the end of those twenty minutes I realized I had found my direction as a writer and I guess, as a person." I laughed slightly as I remembered exactly who was in the crowd, "actually that professor is probably here right now. Thanks Dr. Palmer for making me miserable for twelve out of the thirteen weeks I went to your class."

Dispersed laughs sounded from around the darkness and it was enough to force one side of my lips to curl up into a smile.

"So now I've got my direction. The idea being that the most ordinary, is extraordinary. It kind of of sounds like a snack commercial now when I say it out loud, but just hear me out. I start thinking about my life, about Emma, my Mom, how extraordinarily ordinary they are and I decide to just write it all down. Because that's where my inspiration was coming from. Them.

So I thought, if I write on paper, maybe I could sleep with that paper under my pillow, or rub it on my head or something and I would literally have physical inspiration rubbing off on me," I rubbed my own head with my curled up, now useless speech that sat on the stand in proof that I had thought this through.

More blobs laughed. I was beginning to love those blobs.

"So I wrote it all out, everything I remembered, along with a little help from something else I'll reveal later. And I actually just finished it, yesterday,"

I said slowly, finding it strange how something I'd been working on for so long was now finally done, "I figured I'd read it as a speech for some convention or awareness rally, or something like that. I never really figured I'd be revealing it here, but now that I think about it, there really is no other more perfect time."

I tapered off, nodding my head, convincing myself that it was the right time. It was the only time, I realized. I had inadvertently written my first completed piece for this day.

"Now, this story I'm about to tell you is about the single greatest love story you will ever hear. I don't care who you are, straight, gay, man, woman, single, in a relationship," My fingers rapidly shot up one by one as I counted off, getting to five before cycling back.

"I don't care if you're a realist, an optimist, perfectionist, brunette, blonde, even a scheming red head. Yes, I know you redheads are plotting to take over the world. I don't even care about the excuses you guys have. This is the," I slapped my hands on the wooden stand, "greatest," slap, "love story" slap," you've ever heard."

I waited for five seconds, gazing out before one more slap on the stand, "and it's available to you for six payments of 19.99."

The crowd bubbled fully with laughter now. Took them long enough. I thought the lights would have succeeded in melting me into a puddle before I'd get this crowd on my side.

"Alright, so I lied, it's free. But the rest is true. This really is the greatest love story you've ever heard. And of course, if you haven't figured out what I'm all about yet, the reason it's so great is because of how extraordinary it is. You're thinking, yes, yes, it's extraordinary because it's ordinary, we get it Henry."

I took a deep breath in and exhaled it, stretching my fingers wide as they rested on the stand.

"And going into it, yeah I totally thought that too. I mean they were my family. And look at me," I waved my hands up and down my body, "ordinary." The crowd chuckled as I nodded my head, completely agreeing with them.

"But…that wasn't it. As I worked my way through this story for the first time I realized that my professor's prompt was a little bit irrelevant. Because sometimes some things just are. There was no reason, no explanation, no pattern you could analyze. If there ever needed to be an ultimate example of why things just are. Emma and my Mom would be it. They just were," I waved my hand in free space in front of me, slightly tilting my head, "extraordinary."

I leaned in close to the microphone. "So without further ado, here we go. Dim the lights back there please."

I turned and began to walk off the stage before laughing at the confused looks and furrowed brows that stared back at me. I quickly pivoted back around and returned to the stand.

"Sorry, nope there's no movie for you. All you got is me." The blobs didn't seem to mind though since some unorganized clapping began from various parts of the crowd.

"I'm just going to pretend for a little that all of you have no idea who they or I am, this way you can get the story through my eyes. Okay."

I walked from behind the stand and stood straight in the middle of the stage, challenging those lights to glare as much as they wanted on me.

"Ever since, I don't know, I was sixteen, I began to refer to the past in two separate section: B.E and A.E. You know my own version of B.C and A.D. It was my way of keeping track of memories and timelines. B.E meant before Emma and obviously A.E being after Emma. I've organized this story the exact same way so we have a nice timeline were gonna travel down." I crossed my arm across my body in a straight line in the air, creating my own invisible timeline in the air.

"We'll go a little out of order and start right where all the action happens. You know? Why not just jump in? And when is that you ask? Well, that would, of course be Zero." I punctuated my hand on the middle of the invisible timeline. "Which is in fact, the very moment my Mom met Emma."

Please read and review and do all that wonderful stuff that makes me smile like an idiot :)