No One Called Family, My Ties Are Severed Clean
Title: No One Called Family, My Ties Are Severed Clean
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Characters: Greg, Tamara, Regina, Henry.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Only spoilers through S2
Pairing: Greg/Tamara
Notes: For florencia7 for convincing me to finish this fic rather than let it get eaten by my temperamental laptop. Also for being one of the two people who convinced me not to quit writing. (By the way, this isn't the sucky 2013 draft!)
Summary: What happened to Owen Flynn after Welcome To Storybrooke and how he met Tamara.
They always said that when changing your name, you should stick with what you knew. Well, that was easy for him. Mendell was the name that he’d adopted when he’d moved in with his uncle and aunt. He hadn’t wanted to change his name at first, had wanted to stay a Flynn to keep that last link with his father alive. But later, he’d come to see the advantages of changing his name. The people of Storybrooke, if he ever made it back there, might have recognised the name Flynn but Mendell would mean nothing to them. As for Greg, well, Gregory was his middle name. It was simple. If anyone ever tried to run a background check on him, they’d come up goose egg.
Madam Mayor, he had thought as he got into his car, I’m going to find out what really happened to my father. And if I can bring you down, then so much the better.
1983:
Since his uncle and aunt had been away and couldn’t get there straight away, Owen had been placed temporarily in a children’s home while he waited. He didn’t remember much about it, other than that it had been pretty chaotic - apparently the day before he arrived a bunch of kids had stolen some money and taken off. After a few hours of hearing the abandoned baby girl crying, he understood why they’d done it. He never heard the outcome of that, since it wasn’t long before his uncle and aunt came and collected him anyway.
He’d kept badgering his uncle and aunt to drive out to where he’d been camping with his father, trying every road they could find, knowing all the while that each of them wasn’t the one he remembered seeing, but determined to prove that Storybrooke wasn’t a figment of his imagination. At night, he’d crept downstairs sometimes and heard his uncle and aunt arguing about it.
How many more times do we have to go down this goddamn road? There’s no Storybrooke there.
But it just isn’t like Kurt to just disappear. He wouldn’t leave Owen like that. Something must have happened to him.
I wouldn’t have seen him abandoning Owen either. The kid was all he had after Diana died. But you can’t try and tell me he’s in a town that’s disappeared into thin frigging air. He said there’d been a storm. Maybe something happened out there. Maybe Owen got hit on the head or something.
But there was no sign of an injury when we picked him up.
Well, I don’t know what the hell happened out there. But we keep driving to Maine looking for a town we both know doesn’t exist, we’re not helping him. Kid’s crazy as a coot, he needs to let this go.
After a while, Owen had just stopped mentioning it. Although they never said anything either, he could tell that his aunt and uncle were relieved. Eventually, he could look at them and not see that inevitable something behind their eyes, the hidden belief that Owen was crazy. They moved away in the end, to a town that was too far to travel to Maine so frequently. Officially, this was because his uncle had been transferred. Unofficially, it was to get Owen out of the area. His aunt and uncle told people in the town they eventually moved to that both of Owen’s parents were dead. People didn’t usually question any further, but if they did the usual response was that Owen’s father had died in a car accident. Pathetic attempt at what they thought was a half-truth, Owen thought. Yes, it was true that if they hadn’t had the car crash in that forest, his father wouldn’t have disappeared. But to come up with that stupid story - it pissed him off. They’d given up on trying to find out what had happened to Kurt.
“But I never will,” Owen whispered. “I’ll find you, Dad.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected to find years later when he’d left home, moved back up north and made that journey to Maine again. But the one thing he hadn’t expected was the one thing he should have; the same old road all over again, with no sign of the town called Storybrooke exactly where it should have been. And yet he still continued going back every so often in the hope that he would find something that would lead him to his father.
One day, on one of his trips, he was flagged down by a woman. “You look like you’re looking for something,” she said, “just like I am.”
Her name was Tamara, she told him, and she was working for an organisation whose aims were in sympathy with her, and she believed his, own. The organisation was called The Home Office, and she was working with them to bring down magic. They’d sent her here to find a town named Storybrooke. “It’s the only explanation for how the town could be hidden from you that way,” Tamara had explained. “You must have been camping within its boundary walls to see it initially, but once you’d left, you couldn’t get back.” Much as Greg hated to admit it, there was a part of what she said that sounded crazy, and yet in another way it made so much sense. Finally, he’d met someone who believed him, and was going to help him get the answers he needed.
Like him, Tamara had kept close to the truth in creating her new identity. She’d stuck close to the original story when she followed various leads to people who could supposedly cure all ills, as she told them that it was she who was suffering from a form of cancer that traditional medicine was unable to cure. In fact, it had been her mother whose life had been on the line, who the family had been so desperate to save that they had turned to magic, only to realise too late the cost that came with that when the potion had saved Tamara’s mother’s life only for her grandmother’s to be taken instead. Tamara had carried around her grandmother’s picture ever since, to remind herself exactly why magic had to be destroyed.
Most of the leads she had followed had just led to a bunch of frauds. But just as Greg was determined never to give up on finding out what had happened to his father, Tamara was equally determined that one day she would find someone who was really offering magic to people, and she would do what she had to do to make sure no one lost their family members as she had.
They started working together. Tamara would run her con by claiming to be incurable, then she would pass whatever crap the quacks gave her to Greg to analyse, to see whether there was any kind of ingredient that wasn’t from this world. Usually, he found that the so-called medicines contained ingredients that, while they wouldn’t have cured anything at all, were certainly everyday items from the world around them. But Tamara refused to give up, insisting that one day, she would find something that would prove magic’s existence in their world. And once they had the ingredients, maybe Greg would be able to find some means of destroying it.
When they did eventually find magic, in Hong Kong when Tamara had been pointed in the direction of a man who called himself The Dragon, they found someone else as well.
“I’ve got it, Greg,” Tamara had whispered when he had called her while she was in the office. “Even if I haven’t got the cure yet, this is the one. There’s a guy in the waiting room, and I know who he is. He’s that kid who just appeared around the time Storybrooke did. August W. Booth. And if he’s here, then we’re on the right track. I’ve found magic, Greg. And soon, we’re going to find Storybrooke and your father.”
The next time Greg drove back through Maine, a part of him expected that this would be the time when the “Welcome to Storybrooke” sign would finally appear. The disappointment he felt when all he saw was the same old rocks again was worse than it had ever been before, because he knew that he was so much closer now than he had ever been. But he knew he would never give up. Now he knew that the answers were within his grasp, and it wouldn’t be long before he knew what had really happened to his father.
“It’s happened,” Tamara called him late one night to tell him. “I just found it in the trash. Cassidy had a postcard in the mail, and it’s got Broken on it.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Greg yawned.
“It’s postmarked Storybrooke, Maine. Sounds like the spell that was hiding Storybrooke from the world is what’s broken. You can go there, Greg. You can finally find out what happened to your father.”
That’s not the same sheriff I saw before, Greg thought as Emma Swan walked into his hospital room. For a moment he wondered what had happened to Graham, the man who’d been sheriff in 1983. If he stuck around long enough, maybe he’d even find out. But that wasn’t what was important now. Even then he had understood that Sheriff Graham was nothing more than Regina Mills’s puppet, so it wouldn’t have made a difference if he were still here or not.
He had to go through the motions, to act like he actually gave a rat’s ass about the guy he’d hit. (Who he didn’t recognise, so he had to admit that that guy may have had no involvement in what happened to his father, but he still didn’t care anyway). And it was easy enough to convince Sheriff Swan that he hadn’t seen anything odd. There were stories in the news all the time about people who’d been texting and not concentrating on the road and had ended up causing accidents, so the chances were that she wouldn’t question it. Greg did notice that she looked relieved when he gave her that story. So she’s in on it too, he thought, the conspiracy around magic in this town. He didn’t know why he was surprised.
But that didn’t matter. He’d made it. He was in Storybrooke, the town where his father was last seen, and he was finally going to find out what had happened to him. And after having seen Gold use magic at the site of the accident, he had more evidence for the Home Office. Soon, magic would be destroyed, and he and Tamara would have played a leading role in that.
Greg had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to Ms. Regina Mills, and it looked like that opportunity was about to present itself when he saw the kid, Henry, running through the woods towards him. Is there anyone in this town who doesn’t lie? he wondered as Henry told his tale about trying to earn his Scouting badge. Still, Greg knew by now that Henry was Regina’s adopted son, so he either learned it all from her, or he lied TO her just to escape her sometimes. Greg found himself hoping it was the latter. He wondered briefly how this child, just the same age as he had been when he was here before, had fallen into Regina’s clutches. He had picked up by that time that Henry wasn’t living with her, but with his birth mother now, and there had to be some story behind that.
Despite knowing that Emma was Henry’s real emergency contact, it was Regina Greg called. He had to reach out, make some kind of contact, just to see what she would do. Would she brazen it out, pretend not to know anything? Would she break down in tears and confess all? Unlikely, Greg knew. But what he wasn’t expecting was her appearing not to know who he was. That clearly wasn’t true. It had been the case then and it still was now, no outsiders came to Storybrooke and therefore anyone who did was guaranteed to stand out like a sore thumb.
It had been just the same when they eventually met face to face in Granny’s Diner. Regina looked through him as though he were invisible, seeming not to recognise in Greg Mendell the child who had once been Owen Flynn.
You took my father, my world from me, you had the world thinking I was crazy, you even had me doubting myself at one point, all so I could live here with you, and now you look at me as though I’m nothing? Greg thought. I was so important to you back then, and now you don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Well, I know who you are, Madam Mayor. I know you haven’t aged since I first met you in 1983. And even when she did eventually say that she thought he looked familiar, she didn’t take a lot of convincing that they’d never met before. In a way, he wished she had recognised him. He imagined her tearfully confessing to her crimes, saw her begging for her life, but only for a brief moment before he understood what she would really do, which was what she did do once she had figured it out.
And in that moment as she stood before him making her threats, Greg knew what he had to do. Yes, there were ways to make people disappear permanently. So that was what he was going to do with Henry. It was too bad about the kid, who was the only innocent party in the whole goddamn town. But it was what he had to do. Regina had taken Kurt from Owen, so Greg now had to take Henry from Regina, as well as her magic, to leave her with nothing in the way she had left him.
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Characters: Greg, Tamara, Regina, Henry.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Only spoilers through S2
Pairing: Greg/Tamara
Notes: For florencia7 for convincing me to finish this fic rather than let it get eaten by my temperamental laptop. Also for being one of the two people who convinced me not to quit writing. (By the way, this isn't the sucky 2013 draft!)
Summary: What happened to Owen Flynn after Welcome To Storybrooke and how he met Tamara.
They always said that when changing your name, you should stick with what you knew. Well, that was easy for him. Mendell was the name that he’d adopted when he’d moved in with his uncle and aunt. He hadn’t wanted to change his name at first, had wanted to stay a Flynn to keep that last link with his father alive. But later, he’d come to see the advantages of changing his name. The people of Storybrooke, if he ever made it back there, might have recognised the name Flynn but Mendell would mean nothing to them. As for Greg, well, Gregory was his middle name. It was simple. If anyone ever tried to run a background check on him, they’d come up goose egg.
Madam Mayor, he had thought as he got into his car, I’m going to find out what really happened to my father. And if I can bring you down, then so much the better.
1983:
Since his uncle and aunt had been away and couldn’t get there straight away, Owen had been placed temporarily in a children’s home while he waited. He didn’t remember much about it, other than that it had been pretty chaotic - apparently the day before he arrived a bunch of kids had stolen some money and taken off. After a few hours of hearing the abandoned baby girl crying, he understood why they’d done it. He never heard the outcome of that, since it wasn’t long before his uncle and aunt came and collected him anyway.
He’d kept badgering his uncle and aunt to drive out to where he’d been camping with his father, trying every road they could find, knowing all the while that each of them wasn’t the one he remembered seeing, but determined to prove that Storybrooke wasn’t a figment of his imagination. At night, he’d crept downstairs sometimes and heard his uncle and aunt arguing about it.
How many more times do we have to go down this goddamn road? There’s no Storybrooke there.
But it just isn’t like Kurt to just disappear. He wouldn’t leave Owen like that. Something must have happened to him.
I wouldn’t have seen him abandoning Owen either. The kid was all he had after Diana died. But you can’t try and tell me he’s in a town that’s disappeared into thin frigging air. He said there’d been a storm. Maybe something happened out there. Maybe Owen got hit on the head or something.
But there was no sign of an injury when we picked him up.
Well, I don’t know what the hell happened out there. But we keep driving to Maine looking for a town we both know doesn’t exist, we’re not helping him. Kid’s crazy as a coot, he needs to let this go.
After a while, Owen had just stopped mentioning it. Although they never said anything either, he could tell that his aunt and uncle were relieved. Eventually, he could look at them and not see that inevitable something behind their eyes, the hidden belief that Owen was crazy. They moved away in the end, to a town that was too far to travel to Maine so frequently. Officially, this was because his uncle had been transferred. Unofficially, it was to get Owen out of the area. His aunt and uncle told people in the town they eventually moved to that both of Owen’s parents were dead. People didn’t usually question any further, but if they did the usual response was that Owen’s father had died in a car accident. Pathetic attempt at what they thought was a half-truth, Owen thought. Yes, it was true that if they hadn’t had the car crash in that forest, his father wouldn’t have disappeared. But to come up with that stupid story - it pissed him off. They’d given up on trying to find out what had happened to Kurt.
“But I never will,” Owen whispered. “I’ll find you, Dad.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected to find years later when he’d left home, moved back up north and made that journey to Maine again. But the one thing he hadn’t expected was the one thing he should have; the same old road all over again, with no sign of the town called Storybrooke exactly where it should have been. And yet he still continued going back every so often in the hope that he would find something that would lead him to his father.
One day, on one of his trips, he was flagged down by a woman. “You look like you’re looking for something,” she said, “just like I am.”
Her name was Tamara, she told him, and she was working for an organisation whose aims were in sympathy with her, and she believed his, own. The organisation was called The Home Office, and she was working with them to bring down magic. They’d sent her here to find a town named Storybrooke. “It’s the only explanation for how the town could be hidden from you that way,” Tamara had explained. “You must have been camping within its boundary walls to see it initially, but once you’d left, you couldn’t get back.” Much as Greg hated to admit it, there was a part of what she said that sounded crazy, and yet in another way it made so much sense. Finally, he’d met someone who believed him, and was going to help him get the answers he needed.
Like him, Tamara had kept close to the truth in creating her new identity. She’d stuck close to the original story when she followed various leads to people who could supposedly cure all ills, as she told them that it was she who was suffering from a form of cancer that traditional medicine was unable to cure. In fact, it had been her mother whose life had been on the line, who the family had been so desperate to save that they had turned to magic, only to realise too late the cost that came with that when the potion had saved Tamara’s mother’s life only for her grandmother’s to be taken instead. Tamara had carried around her grandmother’s picture ever since, to remind herself exactly why magic had to be destroyed.
Most of the leads she had followed had just led to a bunch of frauds. But just as Greg was determined never to give up on finding out what had happened to his father, Tamara was equally determined that one day she would find someone who was really offering magic to people, and she would do what she had to do to make sure no one lost their family members as she had.
They started working together. Tamara would run her con by claiming to be incurable, then she would pass whatever crap the quacks gave her to Greg to analyse, to see whether there was any kind of ingredient that wasn’t from this world. Usually, he found that the so-called medicines contained ingredients that, while they wouldn’t have cured anything at all, were certainly everyday items from the world around them. But Tamara refused to give up, insisting that one day, she would find something that would prove magic’s existence in their world. And once they had the ingredients, maybe Greg would be able to find some means of destroying it.
When they did eventually find magic, in Hong Kong when Tamara had been pointed in the direction of a man who called himself The Dragon, they found someone else as well.
“I’ve got it, Greg,” Tamara had whispered when he had called her while she was in the office. “Even if I haven’t got the cure yet, this is the one. There’s a guy in the waiting room, and I know who he is. He’s that kid who just appeared around the time Storybrooke did. August W. Booth. And if he’s here, then we’re on the right track. I’ve found magic, Greg. And soon, we’re going to find Storybrooke and your father.”
The next time Greg drove back through Maine, a part of him expected that this would be the time when the “Welcome to Storybrooke” sign would finally appear. The disappointment he felt when all he saw was the same old rocks again was worse than it had ever been before, because he knew that he was so much closer now than he had ever been. But he knew he would never give up. Now he knew that the answers were within his grasp, and it wouldn’t be long before he knew what had really happened to his father.
“It’s happened,” Tamara called him late one night to tell him. “I just found it in the trash. Cassidy had a postcard in the mail, and it’s got Broken on it.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Greg yawned.
“It’s postmarked Storybrooke, Maine. Sounds like the spell that was hiding Storybrooke from the world is what’s broken. You can go there, Greg. You can finally find out what happened to your father.”
That’s not the same sheriff I saw before, Greg thought as Emma Swan walked into his hospital room. For a moment he wondered what had happened to Graham, the man who’d been sheriff in 1983. If he stuck around long enough, maybe he’d even find out. But that wasn’t what was important now. Even then he had understood that Sheriff Graham was nothing more than Regina Mills’s puppet, so it wouldn’t have made a difference if he were still here or not.
He had to go through the motions, to act like he actually gave a rat’s ass about the guy he’d hit. (Who he didn’t recognise, so he had to admit that that guy may have had no involvement in what happened to his father, but he still didn’t care anyway). And it was easy enough to convince Sheriff Swan that he hadn’t seen anything odd. There were stories in the news all the time about people who’d been texting and not concentrating on the road and had ended up causing accidents, so the chances were that she wouldn’t question it. Greg did notice that she looked relieved when he gave her that story. So she’s in on it too, he thought, the conspiracy around magic in this town. He didn’t know why he was surprised.
But that didn’t matter. He’d made it. He was in Storybrooke, the town where his father was last seen, and he was finally going to find out what had happened to him. And after having seen Gold use magic at the site of the accident, he had more evidence for the Home Office. Soon, magic would be destroyed, and he and Tamara would have played a leading role in that.
Greg had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to Ms. Regina Mills, and it looked like that opportunity was about to present itself when he saw the kid, Henry, running through the woods towards him. Is there anyone in this town who doesn’t lie? he wondered as Henry told his tale about trying to earn his Scouting badge. Still, Greg knew by now that Henry was Regina’s adopted son, so he either learned it all from her, or he lied TO her just to escape her sometimes. Greg found himself hoping it was the latter. He wondered briefly how this child, just the same age as he had been when he was here before, had fallen into Regina’s clutches. He had picked up by that time that Henry wasn’t living with her, but with his birth mother now, and there had to be some story behind that.
Despite knowing that Emma was Henry’s real emergency contact, it was Regina Greg called. He had to reach out, make some kind of contact, just to see what she would do. Would she brazen it out, pretend not to know anything? Would she break down in tears and confess all? Unlikely, Greg knew. But what he wasn’t expecting was her appearing not to know who he was. That clearly wasn’t true. It had been the case then and it still was now, no outsiders came to Storybrooke and therefore anyone who did was guaranteed to stand out like a sore thumb.
It had been just the same when they eventually met face to face in Granny’s Diner. Regina looked through him as though he were invisible, seeming not to recognise in Greg Mendell the child who had once been Owen Flynn.
You took my father, my world from me, you had the world thinking I was crazy, you even had me doubting myself at one point, all so I could live here with you, and now you look at me as though I’m nothing? Greg thought. I was so important to you back then, and now you don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Well, I know who you are, Madam Mayor. I know you haven’t aged since I first met you in 1983. And even when she did eventually say that she thought he looked familiar, she didn’t take a lot of convincing that they’d never met before. In a way, he wished she had recognised him. He imagined her tearfully confessing to her crimes, saw her begging for her life, but only for a brief moment before he understood what she would really do, which was what she did do once she had figured it out.
And in that moment as she stood before him making her threats, Greg knew what he had to do. Yes, there were ways to make people disappear permanently. So that was what he was going to do with Henry. It was too bad about the kid, who was the only innocent party in the whole goddamn town. But it was what he had to do. Regina had taken Kurt from Owen, so Greg now had to take Henry from Regina, as well as her magic, to leave her with nothing in the way she had left him.