"I'm the savior, right?"

Being a kid again was in many ways like having a kid: it was a near daily exercise in 'I've actually always wanted to do this, and now I have an excuse to'. Unfortunately there were a few very obvious trade-offs in the 'being a kid again' situation. Loss of fine motor skills. And muscle tone. And patience (which, admittedly, Emma Swan had not possessed in spades even as an adult with more impulse control and a more even temper). And it turned out that building an impressive castle out of sand was a lot harder in practice than it actually sounded. The sand couldn't be too wet, or too dry, the buckets were useless, and Emma had collapsed the same tower at least twice by knocking into it with her elbow or her knee, because she was a clumsy preschooler and they kept getting in her way. Her first attempt the day before had pretty much ended with her scowling at a shapeless pile of wet sand.

She had a plan, though.

She was enlisting the pirate's help.

All right, sure, she had no idea if Hook knew anything about sand castles, but he was a pirate and therefore had spent a lot more time on beaches than Emma had, so it seemed perfectly logical to her. She spent the walk to the shoreline giving him the highlights of her very strange week. "It hasn't been all bad," she admitted, swinging her buckets and kicking at sand with her tiny feet. "When you're short and cute people practically throw ice cream and candy at you. I'm the right size for the swing sets and the slide at the park. But it's really weird to look at Roland at eye-level. And Regina smiling at me, all warm and maternal and sweet? That goes beyond weird. That's scary."