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Emma somehow time travels. She doesn’t mean to, but these things just have a way of happening to her. It’s unbelievable, really.
So, yes, Emma travels back in time and meets Regina.
Only this Regina feels broken and is seemingly fighting to convince herself to take another breath under the ever growing weight of her perceived failure; Rumple has granted Snow protection from her and she doesn't see how she'll ever be able to gain the upper hand, to use that hand to squeeze the life out of Snow, because she's untouchable in this world and maybe Regina should just leave this one behind then?
Maybe she should drink that liquid in her glass that smells oddly sweet (because of course death would) and throw herself off her balcony and then eventually, after the animals were done and their stomachs filled, the peasants would see the broken bones through the remains of broken skin and realize that underneath it all, she too was a person built out of things that could break.
And then Emma is somehow there and she's you can't because there will be someone. A son. Someone who will see the broken but eventually understand and even before then he will begin to heal and Regina is furious at this deceit and these lies that claw at her, scratching in an attempt to break through. So she sends Emma away but at night, at night she dreams of him, and he's faceless, an entity, a feeling that fills her and makes her feel strangely at home in her own body, within herself.
And when she wakes she misses him and it's the absolute worst kind of longing because it has been brought forth by the most awful thing there is in her world; hope. So she seeks Emma out and slowly they bond over the strangest things, like how Emma talks about Regina's future like somehow she knows and somehow everything is better and less alone in a sea of people and why does it feel oddly like home? Like belonging?
And then Regina falls in love with this feeling and with this person that is a stranger but not and this means everything will change, because Henry. Henry that exists, but not right now, not yet.
So now she must cast a curse not to end Snow's existence but to save her own, and she's in the grand hall when he shows up; his smile so wide that if you reached out and touched his scaly green forehead it would surely topple over and fall on the floor. And he's mocking her because she is furious, furious, because it didn't work. It didn't work and now she's killed her father and what kind of person kills their own father?
Someone who has no other choice, someone who deserves a chance at something else, she thinks. Something that isn't black; isn't defined by the absence of.
And he's just grinning now, grinning, because he knows. Of course he does and she doesn't understand it all yet because how could she possibly? How could the Queen know that the person whose heart she crushed is, was, no longer the person she loves the most but that the space in her own heart has been given to a stranger? To belonging? To home?
And when he explains it all, like he's telling a goddamn joke, she finds she can no longer keep standing and as he disappears her knees hit the cold marble floor and her despair fills the room like water flooding and she finds she can't breathe, she cannot cannot cannot. The scream she lets out reverberates off the walls of the empty hall and if someone had heard they never would've believed it had come from her. In fact, painted by her grief, it doesn't even sound human at all.
And Emma, sweet sweet idiot Emma, listens and she understands. She accepts because Henry. Because Regina and Henry. Together. And something like someone who used to be a stranger and belonging and home and as Regina is fighting it with everything she has Emma says that she must. For Henry.
And then I'm sorry Regina. And why are you sorry? Surely that's absurd. Because this will be so much harder on you. And it's things like this that make Regina think idiot but also I understand now. (Belonging. Home.)
So she watches Emma's face as her hand plunges into her chest to grab a heart that's given freely and Emma's mouth falls open on a gasp; she looks like she's in pain, but not like she is scared, and this makes no sense to Regina.
But while Emma has learned a few things about the concepts of reality and realms and time, she still believes dead is dead and she's more worried about Regina who will find herself with one foot in the grave for another 28 years, and is that not the true curse of someone still breathing?
Then there's I love you and I'm sorry and a squeeze and nothing. No longer Emma. Nothing.
28 years later there's Henry returning and Regina has to look again and again through tears because it can't be. Dead is dead. And why didn't she ever say? And you're his birth mother? she asks though she understands this Emma won't comprehend the magnitude of that question. Won't understand belonging and home and a stranger who is not one. She won't understand. Yet.
"Hi."