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━━━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━━━
KAELYN REMEMBERED when the Diner had been a source of comfort for a girl named Katelyn. There wasn't much of a difference between them when it came down to it. They looked the same, talked the same, thought the same, and their names were the same down to a 't'. But, in the end, the two girls could not have been more different. Katelyn did not leave people in fear, she was kind and compassionate, people often said her heart was "too big" for her body. Katelyn wasn't feared or hated, not like Kaelyn was.
She should've been thankful, yes. The queen's Curse had been broken after almost three decades. She was no longer living the eternal lie of an eighteen-year-old country girl who had been in her final year of high school for twenty-eight years straight without an inkling of time passing. But Kaelyn had liked the idea of it, the idea that there was an alternate universe where she was just an ordinary girl with an equal amount of friends and enemies. It had felt normal.
She thought of that often; someone's heart being too big for their body. What would that person think of her now? Would Katelyn – who she considered a separate person altogether – look at her in disgust the way everyone else did? Of course she would have. Katelyn had been a local babysitter, an ordinary teenage girl who tripped over her own feet and whose biggest problem was the homework she had left till the last minute. She had been well-liked, and people treated her like a child who didn't know better.
But now? Kaelyn was back, reclaiming all her memories and what made her different from the girl with a T, discarding the last twenty-eight years as a mere fantasy to the very back of her mind. And she wasn't the only one. Everyone else from their fairytale land had regained their old selves and how they were placed in a different world, all thanks to the 'Saviour.' And with the Curse broken, came back every memory Kaelyn had gathered over her annoyingly long lifespan, as well as the reputation she had earned back in the day.
It had been a fantasy. No longer was she loved and treated like a child, but scorned, shot wary looks, held at an arm's length. She wore the face of a teenager, of someone innocent and harmless, but the truth was very different to that. She couldn't blame them, her reputation had never been unintentional back in the Forest.
Some still liked to pretend their life was normal. Like they could all be friends and coexist in places like the library – a place Kaelyn would never verbally admit how much she loved – or Granny's Diner, where Kaelyn was currently sitting at a booth on her own. They acted as if they could live peacefully forever in a land without magic, tucked away behind the town line in a small pocket of fairytales and magic.
It was hardly smooth-sailing, with the amount of people who'd continually tried to screw up their lives. Kaelyn mostly stayed out of it, unless it involved Storybrooke as a whole or threatened Henry, Neal or especially herself, she wasn't interested. She kept up, though, she heard all the whisperings and the news from around town. She was good at getting people to tell her what she wanted.
