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Chapter Text

friday.

It’s the first time Regina's walked out of her house in days. She’s been using her magic to transport herself back and forth from the vault to the mansion, wary of being seen. She doesn’t want pitying stares or low whispers of she deserves it, not when she’s half inclined to set them on fire for it. She doesn’t want to see Snow or her damned little brood on the street, struggling to make nice with her.

And yet, she’s left her house after dark in a quiet, empty town, and she still has the misfortune of spotting a familiar car parked right down the road.

So Emma is stalking her again. Emma’s been driving past her house far more often than any patrol would demand, attempting to steamroll her way back into the house and Regina’s life with that damned hangdog expression on her face. As though there’s anything worth saving with them.

Regina’s hand tightens around the card in her hand and she almost considers turning back right there. But no, she’s made her decision and she’s going to stick with it, no matter how formidable the yellow Bug at the corner might seem right now.

She walks quickly, as close as she can to the bushes at the side of the corner house, hoping to blend in. She doesn’t want to answer any questions Emma might have– Emma of the pleading glances and the tentative prodding, over and over again, as though Regina is going to cave to her persistence. She doesn’t need any more overtures that have her stomach curling into itself, knotting up with frustration as potent as any heartbreak.

She wants away from Emma Swan, who’d maybe been someone she’d trusted until a week ago.

The windows of the car are open, and Regina can see through them the way Emma turns, searching for the figure she must have seen. She stands very still at her spot by the bush across the street, waiting, and Emma lets out a loud sigh in the still night and reaches for her phone.

A moment later, Regina’s pocket starts buzzing, and she hits the ignore button without even confirming the caller. She watches nearly breathlessly as Emma heaves another sigh and waits.

And…she’s leaving a message, her voice artificially bright. “Hey, Regina. I know you don’t want to talk to me– I got that after that last…incident.” Regina’s jaw works under her skin. Emma goes on. “And by the way, that sweater wasn’t even mine. Mary Margaret says you owe her a Nordstrom gift card.” She laughs, halfhearted and wistful, and Regina’s stomach clenches more violently.

“I just…I know you’re hurting. And I know that you don’t want to see me. But I want to help you.” Emma’s voice catches. “I tried…I really tried fixing that sweater, you know? But I’m kind of useless at magic without you around.” She falls silent, staring out of her windshield in morose contemplation, and it’s the perfect time for Regina to slip past her car.

Instead, she’s rooted to the spot, incapable of moving on. Emma murmurs, “I think it’s admirable that you’ve been…that you haven’t been lashing out at anyone else. But I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life hiding because I–“ She tears the phone from her ear and frustratedly jabs at a button.

"Your message has been erased,” the phone says in a tinny voice, ringing out in the silence of the street. Regina straightens again, newly infuriated without even parsing what it is that’s irritating her so much.

Emma slams her fists against the steering wheel and then starts her car, swerving around the corner and never spotting Regina watching her.

Regina grits her teeth and stalks on, determined now more than ever to follow the message scrawled on the back of the card. (She knows the handwriting but can’t place it, but somehow she doesn’t give a damn about her own safety anymore.) She isn’t interested in Emma Swan’s sad little messages that she’s too much of a coward to send. Or…anything to do with Emma Swan, she decides with grim focus.

She rounds the corner and walks towards a path into the woods, following the trail with less and less confidence as she goes. The forest is gloomy and heavy with fog tonight, a dreamy quality to it all. She kicks aside a tree root and the point of her heel sticks to it, and with a grumble, she bends down to free it–

In the distance, there’s a chilling scream.

For a moment she thinks she’s imagining it, hearing something more in the wind than there is. She rises slowly, magic hovering just beneath the skin of her palm, and she’s clearing her throat when something careens into her. “Watch it!” she snaps, weaving in place.

For a moment she thinks she sees dead eyes, hollow and frightened as they glow in the fog. And then she blinks again and they’re gone, whoever had been the bearer of them gone.

Regina squints after them for a moment, set on reproving them again, but there’s no sign of the figure anymore. Had she imagined the whole thing? She takes in a breath and kicks her heel free, setting out again toward the destination on the card.

She enters the indicated booth and retrieves the card, fiddling with it as she takes in her surroundings. The room is empty and when she tries walking through the door at the opposite end of it, something magical pulls at her and keeps her in place. “Hello?” she demands, her voice low and hoarse in the tiny room.

There’s no response, but she can hear movements just outside the door, sharp and irritated. “I want him out there all night,” a man’s voice snaps. “I won’t have my m–“ He shoves the door open and falls silent as he comes face-to-face with Regina.

The short little man behind him scurries off, and this man’s face splits into a smile. “Ah,” he says.

“Who the hell are you?” Regina demands. She doesn’t recognize him. He must be from the second curse, but he’s still unfamiliar enough that he can’t have crossed over from their castle.

“I’ve been so hoping you’d come.” The smile is still too wide, and Regina twitches, uncomfortable and annoyed about it. “Let me tell you about the process here.”

He launches into an explanation, heedless of her scowl, and Regina closes her eyes for a moment and thinks about…others. Other hopes, other futures. But none of it matters anymore, does it?

And for a moment she shoves aside thoughts of destiny and soulmates and instead sees Emma Swan in her mind’s eye, wrapped in a sweater that isn’t hers and with her fingers drumming a beat against each other as she tries to speak again.

None of it matters, she thinks again, and follows the man’s instructions with renewed fire.

When he’s done with her, that damnable smile is still on his face and she has another face entirely. “Welcome to Double Blind, Artemis,” he says smoothly. “I think you’ll find that it’s a perfect fit.”

Chapter Text

DOUBLE BLIND, reads the card. TRUE LOVE IS OUR BUSINESS.

There’s no address or clarification, just a phone number in tiny letters below the logo and a nauseatingly cutesy heart with an arrow through it in place of the O in the title. Emma sets the jacket back down where she’d found it and tucks the card into her pocket.

“She wasn’t happy before,” Michael Tillman says, leaning back against the dresser. He’s been twitchy since he’d called Emma over, moving from structure to structure in the house as he shows Emma his wife’s closet. “She’d left me in the Enchanted Forest years before, and the curse…paired us back together. I don’t think she was thrilled when my kids came home, and she was even less thrilled when the curse broke and we remembered the rest. We tried to make it work, but she’s been distant for a long time. And then…”

He straightens, his face drooping some more. “Something changed. She was happier for a while there, like all that energy from before was back. She still wasn’t happy, but she smiled more. And then she went out one night and never came home. I waited days before I called you. I didn’t want to believe.”

“And you’re sure she didn’t…” Emma pauses, choosing her words carefully. “Find somewhere else to go again?”

“Where?” Michael spreads his hands helplessly. “It’s not like we could jump the town line and run. And she wasn’t the type to…we talked, since the curse. We tried to be on the same wavelength. She would have told me.” He leans forward, his eyes intent on her. “I know she isn’t the only one to disappear.”

“That’s classified.”

“I know.” Everyone had known when Lottie La Bouff’s newest boyfriend had vanished. She’d put up signs and gone shouting through Granny’s before she’d ever come to Emma, and the rumors had begun spreading immediately.

Michael’s wife marks the third disappearance from Storybrooke over the past three weeks since Zelena’s last stand, and the first who’d left behind any clue of where she’d gone. Emma plays with the card in her pocket. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have any leads,” she promises. Three murders means a serial killer, means magic numbers, means a whole lot of other things she’d really like to talk to Regina about.

Her phone rings as she leaves the Tillmans’ house, and for a moment she nearly believes that it might be Regina. But no, Regina had been lurking in shadows for the first two weeks after Zelena, locked away in her house most of the time. She’s been hostile and standoffish when Emma had come by to visit, and more recently she’s emerged even more hostile. You bring one soulmate’s wife back from the dead, and suddenly you’re blacklisted from the very small list of Friends Of Regina Mills.

Emma scowls at herself, frustrated at her internal whining, and scowls harder when she sees who’s calling. Hook. The night after her time traveling adventure had been one of epic fuck-ups, and Hook has probably been the worst of them. At least she knows that saving Marian had been the right thing to do. Kissing Hook had been…ill-advised.

She’d been grateful and overwhelmed, made vulnerable by her experience and taken aback by Hook’s admission about his ship. And so she’d said thank you in the only way he’d ever asked her to before; and now he’s refusing to accept her firm dismissals. “You’re in love with me,” he says when she picks up the phone. “And I know you’re afraid, but–“

She grits her teeth. “Did you speak to Lottie again?”

“Is that all I am?” Hook sneers into the phone. “Your errand boy?” Their friendship had gone from bad to worse since that night, and every conversation with him now is like pulling teeth. She never should have kissed him, and it’s pretty much just the guilt from that that’s why she still bothers answering his calls.

“Look, are you helping with this investigation or not?” she demands irritably. She hears a click and the phone goes silent.          

She tugs out the business card again, wondering if Hook might be willing to go find some true love and get out of her hair with this dating service. Or whatever it is.

“It’s a club,” Ruby says, sliding Emma's cocoa over the counter. “Down by the water. I think it came over with the second curse. Granny goes there sometimes.”

Emma leans forward in an attempt not to laugh. “Granny.” Granny is currently leaning against the counter, making small talk to Marco as he takes his coffee from her. He’s smiling at her, his eyes crinkling, and Granny looks chuffed at the attention.

Ruby shrugs, making a face. “Don’t ask me about my grandmother’s sex life. She says that ‘It makes her feel young again’ or something like that, and I stay very, very far away from it. I think there’s some kind of masquerade ball theme? I bet she’s hitting on all the hot dudes in town. Speaking of hot ladies–“

“We weren’t,” Emma interjects, glaring into her cocoa.

Ruby rolls her eyes. “Come on, Emma. We both know you didn’t come to the diner to ask me about that card.” She produces a plate of pancakes from what seems to be out of nowhere, and Emma eyes them suspiciously. “Go ahead, deliver them to her table.”

Emma takes a moment to choose between ‘hanging onto her pride’ and ‘hanging onto the pancakes.’ It isn’t very difficult.

She turns, her eyes settling on the far booth to the right. Regina is staring down at a newspaper with sightless eyes, boring holes into the center of the page as she sips at her coffee. She’s dressed in a grey pantsuit that hangs listlessly and drab on her, and Emma lingers at the hollowness around her eyes.

She slides the plate of pancakes onto the table and gets an absentminded, “Thank you, Ruby,” in response before her server registers with Regina.

A glare is turned full-force at her, and it’s amazing how relieved she can be at pure irritation on Regina’s face. It’s as though she’s sprung to life with Emma’s presence, even with sheer detestation, the listlessness melting away into irritation. “If this is another attempt to–”

And with perfect timing, the door to Granny’s swings open and Roland tears into the diner with Marian trailing behind him. Emma sits and Regina doesn’t object, her eyes flickering to the two arrivals and then back to Emma. Emma smiles, wide and false. “I’m just…going to sit and rest here for a minute, okay? Long walk from the counter to here.”

Regina glowers at her. “I don’t need you to coddle me, Swan. I don’t need you at all.”

And somehow it still stings. “You’ve mentioned.” Emma swallows twice and then tries again. “I know you’re going to hate me for a while and I get it. I’m the only one you can hate in all this.”

Regina’s lip curls. “Don’t turn this into some psychoanalyzing bullshit about displaced anger to make yourself feel better. I don’t hate you,” she says, and Emma bites back her initial proposal to Regina, which had been a let’s both hate Hook instead! It had seemed like a good idea when she’d come up with it in the shower last night, anyway. (She spends way too much time in the shower lately thinking about Regina, but she’s careful not to say things like that in front of Mary Margaret, who’s been looking at her oddly when she does.)

At last, progress, and Emma’s heart flutters a tiny bit at the promise of something more. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says, offering her best self-deprecating grin.

Regina continues as though she hadn’t spoken. “I simply don’t care at all.” Emma’s stomach drops again. “And if nothing else, this whole…” Regina waves vaguely in Marian’s direction. “Situation has reminded me of that fact. In everything non-Henry-related in my life, I want you far away from me. I don’t even want you around Henry, to be honest, but I recognize that I have no control over that,” she says darkly, and Emma thinks that Regina might not have overlooked that whole New York thing like everyone else had, shit.

“Regina–“

“I’m no longer the mayor of this town,” Regina points out, her jaw working under her skin. “There’s no reason for you to approach me with your problems. There’s no reason for you to follow me into public establishments, either,” she adds sharply, and Emma flops guiltily back in her seat. So Regina had seen her walk into Granny’s right after her.

“Wait,” she says, an idea occurring to her. Regina’s eyebrow arches. “There's…one last thing. You were mayor when this club–“

“Send it through official channels, Miss Swan,” Regina says, and she sounds very tired, as though Emma had revived her and then drained her with only one exchange. “Please, just…leave me alone.”

Emma slumps, glancing at Regina through her eyelashes and wavering at the finality in her gaze. Somehow, this is all worse than anger. Anger means they don’t function well anymore. Anger catches hold of them and has to be rejected for everyone’s sake. Indifference, distance…those are things that Regina can live with for the rest of her life. Emma can’t wait out indifference.

She says, “I’m not done,” watching Regina’s face as an instant of pained acknowledgement tightens her forehead, and then she trudges out of Granny’s just behind Marian.

She glances back once and sees Regina’s eyes on her, bare before she can conceal them again, and there’s quiet agony in them, longing and resentment and something more that Emma can’t place. Her throat closes up and she turns around again, words she won’t put a name to on the tip of her tongue, unspoken.

Double Blind is a nondescript booth at the border of a fenced-off stretch of forest near where Emma jogs sometimes. It’s so easy to overlook that she does twice before she spots the sign and a flat-looking building visible inside the slats of the fence.

She smoothes out her dress and tangles her fingers through her curls as she steps into the booth. It’s larger than she’d expected on the inside, double the size of one of the station cells with a desk stretching across one side of the room and a mirrored wall on the other.

A little man is twirling a wand from his seat at the desk. “Hello, little lady,” he drawls out, and Emma instantly dislikes him. “And who will you be tonight?”

An unrolled scroll appears in Emma’s hand, and she jerks and reaches for her badge instead. “I’m here on police business,” she says, unamused. “I have some questions about your establishment.”

“Far be it from me to keep you from investigations,” the man says, his eyes dancing. “Please, go inside. You may find what everyone seeks within.”

“True love?” Emma says, glancing down at the logo emblazoned across the desk, matching the one on the card. “No thanks. I’ve already got that.” She has Henry, and romance isn’t a thing for her, no matter how many times Hook pushes her. “I’ll just…” She takes a step toward the door into the compound.

The man says, “Ah-ah-ah,” and wags a finger at her. “No one enters Double Blind without being someone else.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She’d expected masks, maybe, or some other prop, but the man is waving his wand at her. Wide-eyed, she swings around, moving to escape his wand, but a glittery mist settles over her and she feels…different.

She peers at the mirror and jumps at her reflection. It’s a stranger, still blonde but with unrecognizable features, and when she speaks, it comes out a little too high and breathy to sound anything like her. “What the hell did you do to me?”

“A simple glamour,” the man assures her. “It will disappear the moment you step out of Double Blind. Our goal here is to allow kindred souls to fall in the truest, most intimate love with nothing in their way. No petty focus on looks or their positions within Storybrooke beyond this booth. Here, you can be anyone and fall for anyone.” He smiles, secretive, as though he’s already uncovered the secrets of the universe and is inviting her to join him. “Beautiful, beautiful souls,” he says, and points to the scroll. “Choose your name.”

“I don’t need–“

The humor fades from his face. “You will not march into this sanctum and tear my guests from their fantasy. We are a legitimate business and you have no warrant, do you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Choose a name.”

She stabs her finger at the scroll and chooses a name at random. “Eris,” she offers.

“Appropriate,” the man sniffs. “Go on. If you cause any disturbances, I will have you removed from the premises.” He waves his wand again as she rolls her eyes and the inner door of the booth swings open.

Up close, the plain-looking building is more elaborately decorated, subtle trimmings along the top and bottom and columns almost Grecian in design. Ostensibly, they have a theme going. The forest has been cleared down here to make way for gardens, each one small and secluded and leading to the next. If there’s a serial killer sneaking around in here, there are a dozen easy places for him to commit murder.

She holds off on exploring the gardens any further and enters the building instead. There’s light music playing and a few more cheerful little men weaving through the dance floor and tables, taking orders from the people arrayed within. These men are short, and though the glamour is concealing their true faces, they're unmistakably dwarves. Huh.

There are a good forty or fifty people in the large room, some paired off and some dancing and more lingering at the edges of the room, casting about for a partner. The room itself is elegant and understated, dimly lit and tastefully arranged, and Emma moves through it with a determined eye for detail. She spots dark corners intentionally left just so for some vigorous…acquaintancing (and in one of them, a stately brunette who looks just well-aged enough to potentially be Granny, locked in a passionate embrace with an older man) and doors to coatrooms and even a few rooms off the kitchen with deep couches and locks on the doors.

A mood has been established for Double Blind, and it’s especially conducive to murder.

Inside, it’s all heavy pheromones and a nearly palpable air of desperation. For love, for lust, for some kind of connection…She doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but she can feel it all. These are lovers caught in empty, meaningless relationships. These are lonely men and women who’ve never even tasted love. In a world made of fairytales, these are the people who’ve lived their entire lives with the knowledge of something as magical as true love and have never been able to touch it.

And here they are, in a room that promises them all they’ve ever craved, and Emma senses it like an infection, spreading their longings and dreams throughout Double Blind.

She buys a drink and sugary little pastry and heads out for the garden, eager to escape the building. It’s not that she’s averse to love. She loves her family and her friends as much as anyone can. Henry means…everything, and she’s fully opened up her heart to him.

But romance isn’t something she’s planning on seeking out ever again. There are only so many flying monkeys and needy pirates and dying men she can tangle herself with before she begins to distance herself from love. If she stumbles into it, fine, but right now, she has only one agenda, and that’s finding a serial killer in a sea of costumes.

Well, that and breaking back into Regina’s good graces, but that’s another story.

She ducks past the first few gardens until she’s deep in the fourth from the entrance, a single path shaped like a figure eight winding through the greenery. At the center, there’s a reflecting pool and a white marble bench, and she’s sitting down just as she notices that she isn’t alone.

The other woman is striking- though that isn’t her true face, Emma reminds herself- in the way she holds herself and in dark, lonely eyes, and she’s picking a bright purple flower from a bush to the right of the pool. Emma clears her throat and the woman jumps.

“Sorry,” Emma mumbles. “I was just…looking for a quiet place to eat.” The woman keeps staring at her and Emma shrugs helplessly and holds out her plate. “Pastry?”

The woman keeps watching her, the loneliness intensifying in her gaze, and Emma struggles to meet her eyes and smile impersonally. The stiff smile softens an instant later, her whole face gentling in the face of this woman’s unspoken distress, and the woman takes a step forward, holding out her hand. “My name here is Artemis, I guess.”

She sounds disgruntled about the secret name bit, but she doesn’t offer anything better, so Emma says, “Eris,” and takes her hand. “You really can have some of the cake.”

“Outside this…illusion…I do have a figure to maintain,” Artemis says, shaking her head. “I can’t spend all my time eating Granny-style pure sugar.”

“Oh, thank god,” Emma says without thinking.

Artemis arches an eyebrow. “What?”

She laughs. “You’re not Granny.” She doesn’t know why she’s so relieved at that revelation if not because she’s drawn to Artemis already, fascinated at the idea of a connection between them at once. She has no idea who Artemis could be on the outside, but seeing as the few people she knows who might qualify for that kind of bond would never set foot into this establishment, it means that she’s someone Emma has never looked at twice. Which is, Emma grudgingly admits, the whole point of Double Blind to begin with.

Artemis barks out a surprised laugh, her eyes sparkling with amusement. Emma is temporarily struck dumb. “Was that a risk?”

“Uh. I…” She winces at herself. She’s supposed to be on an investigation, not being blindsided by a stranger in the gardens. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy,” she allows, which is as much of an admission as the smirk creeping onto her face.

Artemis shakes her head. “Well, good for Granny, huh? I do think that we’re generally made to look our age, though,” she assures Emma. “Well, unless you’re under eighteen.”

“Yeah?”

Artemis leans forward conspiratorially, and Emma swallows hard at her proximity. “I’ve heard tell of a fifteen-year-old with a fake ID who tried to get past the man in the booth.”

“What happened?”

“He was glamoured into a toddler,” Artemis says, sounding very smug about it. “Serves him right.”

Emma snickers, thinking about Henry in a club like this one and very glad that precautions are in place. “Oh, my god. Good.”

“Mm.” The other woman finally joins her on the bench, swiping a delicate finger at the iced top of the pastry to taste it.

Emma’s eyes are glued to the movement of her tongue as it glides around her finger. Snap out of it. She shakes her head vigorously and earns a curious smile for it. “Fly in my ear,” she offers. Artemis nods. “So…uh…what brings you to Double Blind? You don’t seem like…well…”

“Desperate?” Artemis finishes.

Emma licks her lips uncomfortably. She hadn’t planned to phrase it quite like that, but there’s a palpable difference between the prospective lovers that she’d seen in the building and this woman. “Caught up in the fairytale,” she amends, thinking back to the hungry faces of the wallflowers inside. The gardens are empty because they’re too secluded, too difficult to meet people within them, and everyone here is plainly here to find or be found.

“I had my fairytale,” Artemis admits. “It didn’t work out.”

“Most of them don’t.” Which is maybe too grim for Storybrooke, but she’s pleased to discover from the eyeroll of solidarity that Artemis offers her that she isn’t alone in her grimness. “What happened?”

Artemis shakes her head. “I lost…more than just a true love along the way. Maybe I’d never had the true love I was meant for at all.” She leans back against a tree trunk that rises behind the bench, pensive eyes on the moon above them. “I found a business card slipped under my door one evening and I came here to investigate. I have little interest in loving again.”

“I’m sorry.” Emma almost reaches for the other woman’s hand. “I’ve been there too.”

The woman stares at her for a moment, disbelieving, as though she can’t possibly believe that anyone could share her pain. Emma shrugs and doesn’t clarify. My fiancé wound up being a flying monkey and my first love was trapped in his father’s body until he died might give away a bit more of her identity than she’s ready to right now.

“I’m not here for true love,” Artemis says at last. “I think…I just wanted to escape my life for a little while.”

Chapter Text

Why are you here? she’d asked Emma after that, and Emma had dodged the question with awkward muttering about the pastries. Which had been pretty decent, actually, and she’d gone back for more for both of them and returned to an empty garden.

In the light of day, Double Blind is a rickety sign on what looks like a lemonade stand, the flat building is a broken-down shed, and the garden where she’d met the woman who had called herself Artemis is a fallen tree trunk and a little indentation in the ground that could have been a puddle. Emma sits down on the tree trunk, struggling to focus her magic and find the residual magical energy that had brought the club to life, but that kind of examination would take someone far more familiar with magic.

The only someone she knows who might be able to help her without a price is also the one least likely to assist her right now, and she sighs, forehead in her hands, and tries not to think about Regina. She’s due to pick up Henry for his weekend with her, and that means a tense conversation at Regina’s door at the very best. She isn’t looking forward to yet another rejection.

Instead, she thinks back to the woman she’d met the night before, mysterious and lonely and engaging. She’d scoffed at the idea of a visceral connection when she’d entered the club, but she can’t deny that there had been something there. Something like My name's Henry. I’m your son. Like Mary Margaret ducking in to stare into the Bug window on her third night in town. Like…fuck, like drinks with Regina on that first night when she’d thought for a little while that they’d become fast friends.

Emma wants to see her again. Emma doesn’t know if she’ll be there the next time Emma comes by investigating, and she berates herself at her disappointment at the realization. Artemis hadn’t even said goodbye– she’d vanished like someone who’d been relieved to finally be rid of Emma, and there’s no reason to think that she’d been quite as fascinated with Emma as Emma had been with her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d misread a situation and wound up with…Regina.

She raises her face to the sky in frustration and a fat raindrop falls squarely between her eyes. And then another hits her face, and another, and she rises and heads for the exit.

She’s running late to Regina’s and she doesn’t have time to dry off and pick up the car without earning a slew of snide comments, so she makes a mad dash across the woods and down the road toward Mifflin Street, stabbing Regina’s doorbell before she remembers how to breathe again.

And that’s how Regina finds her when she opens the door- panting, hands against her knees, and soaking wet. She looks startled and then disapproving, and Emma winces. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I was in the woods and the rainstorm hit,” Emma pants out. “I’m here…I said I’d be here at noon for Henry. So I’m here.”

Regina sighs, long-suffering, and says coolly, “And how do you plan on getting him to your apartment?”

Oh. Shit. “Well, originally I thought I’d walk. I didn’t want to be late!” she adds defensively.

Regina stares at her. “You could have called.”

“I guess I could have,” she concedes, her head drooping. She’d been so distracted by Double Blind and Artemis and not pissing Regina off that she’d given little thought to silly little things like common sense.

Regina shuts the door. Emma leans her forehead against it, frustrated. Regina yanks it open again and Emma nearly falls into the house.

“Take off your boots,” she orders, and Emma blinks in surprise. Regina sighs again at Emma’s bewilderment. “I’m not sending you back into that. You’re supposed to be taking care of my son for the next few days and I won’t have you incapacitated because of your stupidity. Now take off your boots and come inside.”

She’s already shivering when Regina herds her into a bathroom with a change of clothes, and Regina casts a critical eye on her. “You are not dying in my house. I’ve had enough of cleaning up your messes,” she says, and shoves a blanket into Emma’s arms and then shoves Emma toward the couch. “Sit down. I’ll give Henry a ride back to your apartment once he’s all packed up,” she says brusquely.

Emma’s kind of bemused by the whole thing. “Thanks,” she says meekly as Regina flicks a finger toward the fireplace to light it.

Regina hesitates, her back to Emma, and she says, “Don’t think this is something more than it is. I meant what I said yesterday.”

“So did I,” Emma returns gently, and she knows that it’s her parting words that Regina is thinking of now, I’m not done her fiercest denial of Regina’s assertion. “Look, I know that you…lost your fairytale,” she says, remembering her words to Artemis last night. Regina stands rigidly in place. “I know it’s my fault. But I don’t want to lose what…what we had, either, okay?”

Regina laughs, low and scornful. “What we had? You barging into my life and taking my son from me? Me casting a curse that took twenty-eight years from you?” She turns around, and her expression is still bitter, still tired. “I think, Miss Swan, if you’d care to actually consider what it is we’ve gone through, you’d find that we’re both better off staying far away from each other.”

“You’re wrong,” Emma says boldly, because she is. Because they’ve been fighting tooth and claw for this…thing that had been between them ever since the moment Henry had bitten into that apple. They’ve understood each other– every nuance and cadence and piece of them that still remains raw– and it’s why they’d hated each other and why they hadn’t, either. Regina had been a friend, no matter how much she might deny it now.

Regina had been so much more than just a simple friend, Emma thinks, her heart in her throat. And she knows it, she must even now, and it’s why Emma can’t let go of this. “I’m supposed to bring back the happy endings, right? That’s why Henry brought me to Storybrooke in the first place. I want to…I want to bring back your happiness, too.” Regina turns, her lips parted, and Emma says quickly, “If you’ll let me. Even if it just means…tonight with a tub of ice cream and the last three episodes of Dancing With The Stars.”

“I have better things to do with my nights,” Regina says dryly, but she’s standing a little less stiffly, her eyes a little less angry. “Why are you so determined to win me over? Why does any of this matter to you?”

And Emma doesn’t know why, exactly. It’s all visceral, all unexplainable, and she can talk about a decade of happy memories or all the times Regina’s tried but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s something beyond words. “It just…does,” Emma murmurs, and Regina gazes at her for a long time before Henry bounds into the room with his knapsack on his back, both of them with cheeks tinted pink as they turn to greet him.

Henry is eating his ice cream at the counter with Granny and Emma guides Lottie to the back of the diner, wary of the outburst that’ll come when she asks–

“No, he wasn’t cheating on me!” Lottie wails, and it feels half overblown, half very real. “We were in love! Why would he need to find true love at some skanky bar?”

“I don’t know,” Emma says, reaching out to squeeze Lottie’s arm, and Lottie crumples in her arms, hugging her tight enough to strangle. “Sometimes these things just…happen. People drift apart.”

“He was gone every single night.” Lottie admits in a muffled voice against Emma’s shirt. (Okay, yes, it’s Regina’s shirt, which Emma had washed last night and then put right back on for reasons that she doesn’t want to think about.) “He’d leave at sunset and he wouldn’t come back until sunrise. I thought he had a secret job and he was saving up money for my birthday…he wasn’t a prince, but we made do! He took care of me.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emma says gently, patting her back. Lottie is her only chance for a tip about what had happened to the missing people, but she seems as clueless as Michael had been. There’s something about their conversation that twinges at her lie detector, but she concludes quickly that she’s just grasping at straws.

The third victim had been exactly the kind that Emma would have expected from Double Blind– a loner, a cannery worker who’d only been reporting missing by a work friend after a three-day absence. For all Emma knows, there had been other losses, missing people who’d never been noticed by anyone.

The perfect victims, cast aside and forgotten.

“There were roses,” Lottie says suddenly.

“Roses?”

“In the back of his car.” She sniffles into Regina’s shirt and Emma winces. “I thought he’d gotten them for me. I thought the love letters were for me, too.” She takes in a shuddering breath. “But now…I don’t know.” She scrabbles through her pocket and produces a worn card from Game of Thorns. “This was with the roses.”

Counting the minutes until I can look upon your face, it reads, and Emma says, “I’m going to need to keep this.”

Lottie bobs her head. “You can keep it all. I don’t want it anymore.” She looks dejected as she drifts down the hall, the outrage faded into defeat. Emma feels a rush of compassion for her, watching her go, and she stares down at the card again.

Until I can look upon your face is just specific and coincidental enough to be direct allusion to Double Blind. Lottie’s boyfriend had gone to the club to find true love and he’d gotten it, met someone he’d fallen for and been ready to meet her outside of the club.

And then he’d disappeared.

Never underestimate a lover scorned, she thinks idly, scrolling through her missed calls and deleting Hook’s name thrice in red. She’s going to have to go back to Double Blind tonight and see what she can find.

A bubble of anticipation rises in her stomach at the thought of it, and of the garden with a reflecting pool and a woman who may yet be there again.

She gets her warrant for information, but the man at the desk is unhelpful. “We don’t keep records of who chooses which identity,” he says, smirking at her and waggling his eyebrows. “Your privacy is our primary concern.”

“You’re going to have a new primary concern if rumors start spreading that this establishment is a hunting ground for serial killers,” Emma says sweetly. “Now, how about you dig deep into your memory and try to remember who these three went as when they were hanging around here.” She slides her pictures onto the desk. “I’ll need your contact information outside of the club, too.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the little man says. “I’m a fixture of Double Blind. I don’t exist outside of it.”

“Of course.” Her head hurts. She doesn’t know where she and Regina had left things after the rainstorm, but god, she really misses her now in the midst of all this magical crap. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Typhon,” the man says, pushing forward the photo of Lottie’s boyfriend. “Pan. And Erebos.” He waves his wand and transforms her. “Your discretion is advised, Eris.”

She tosses him a dark glare and heads back inside.

She has to make a conscious effort to avoid the garden this time, her first priority the victims, and she ducks into the building and casts her eye about for the older woman she’d seen last time.

She catches her at one of the booths, entertaining a crowd of much younger men, and she snatches up two drinks and joins them. “I need to talk to you.”

The woman eyes her up and down, lifting her lip in an unimpressed grimace. “You’re not my type.”

Emma rolls her eyes and sets down the drinks, glaring at the men around them until they scatter. “Granny, is that you?”

The woman’s face whitens considerably. “Ruby?” she hisses.

“Emma!” Emma hisses back. “I’m looking into some murders that may have taken place here. I need you to tell me what you know about the victims.” She recites the names and Granny frowns, downing her drink and glancing around the crowd.

“Yeah, I know the names. Typhon was one of mine for a while when this place opened up.” She says it casually, waving toward the gaggle of men still lurking a few yards away. “Then he found a woman…Thetis, maybe? And they were inseparable. I haven’t seen her around since he…well, died, I guess. She was an enthusiastic one.”

“Did these three have anything to do with each other? Or with Thetis?”

Granny shrugs. “No idea. I’ve been busy.” She crooks a finger at the gaggle of men and they return obediently, Granny leaning back to look them over. The grey-haired man from the night before rolls his eyes and follows them in, taking his seat beside Granny. “Don’t you dare shut this place down,” she says, and gives Emma a shove back into the crowd.

Emma watches her, bemused, and returns to the bar to scope out the people there. No one knows of Thetis, though several remember her and Typhon, and she presses more and more until she begins to get cagey responses, people eyeing her suspiciously.

“Fancy a dance, love?” says a voice from beside her, and Emma recognizes the cadence of the voice and the smirk on his handsome face, even past the glamour. Hook.

“Pass,” she says dryly, and his eyes narrow at her as she walks away.

She isn’t going to find answers here. This place is too dependent on anonymity, and everyone here is protective over theirs. She interrogates the man at the desk again, looking for more information on Thetis, but he refuses this time. “We have a dozen Thetises, and they all begin to run together in my mind after a while,” he says, and for once, he sounds apologetic. “If she stopped coming, there’s no record of her here at all.”

“You’re going to start keeping records,” Emma orders him. “If you want this place to stay open, I want names and details of every single person who enters this club.”

“That’s not policy–“

“You’ll make it policy.” Emma leans over the desk, her hands splayed out and her face as menacing as she can manage. “Murder is serious business, Mister…”

“Oh, I don’t have a name,” he says quickly. “Not one that matters here.” She gives him a dangerous look and he says, a sulky look on his face, “I’ll see what I can do about the records.”

“Good.” She heads for the door.

“That’s the entrance, Sheriff,” he calls out, and she ignores him and stalks back into Double Blind, this time heading into the garden.

She’s just looking around, she tells herself. She never had made it through all the gardens last time, and if she’s…hunting for dead bodies or whatever it is that might be there, she’d better do her homework first.

Still, though, she can’t contain the sigh of dismay when she steps into the fourth garden and finds it empty. She’d missed her chance, then. Whatever that chance had been.

She walks on into the next garden, wild with color and with a stone outline of a heart at its center, and Artemis starts, her eyes flickering with light when she sees Emma. “Eris,” she says. Her voice is guarded but her eyes glint with energy, and she rises from the heart-seat and smiles thinly. “I hadn’t expected you back.”

“I couldn’t get away last night,” Emma says apologetically. She’d stayed up late playing video games with Henry and determinedly not thinking about a woman she barely knows. “I didn’t even know if you’d be here.”

Artemis relaxes visibly. “I’m sorry I left so abruptly the other night. I saw the time and realized that I had to…I have a family,” she explains, and Emma's stomach drops.

“You’re married?”

“God, no.” Artemis shakes her head vigorously. “I…was, but that was long before the curse. I have other family.” She smiles for a moment, soft and loving, and Emma’s heart thumps rapidly in exactly the same way that it does when Regina hugs Henry like he’s the world.

“A son?” she says in sudden suspicion– No, it can’t be. But if it is–

Artemis must catch the way her voice hitches because she’s suspicious suddenly, eyes narrowing with protectiveness. “A…daughter,” she says slowly, and Emma’s heart quiets again. “You never did tell me why you’re really here,” Artemis says, changing the subject with finality.

“Oh. I…” She considers the woman opposite her and decides she’d make a helpful ally. “I’m looking for some people actually. You don’t know a woman who went by Thetis, do you?”

Artemis frowns. “Blonde?” she says, her brow furrowing. “Likes dancing?” She shrugs. “I didn’t spend much time in the main building. I’m not one for crowds.”

“What’s the point of being someone else if no one’s here to see it?” Emma asks curiously, and thinks she might’ve overstepped when Artemis tenses. These glamours leave her more reckless, quicker to say what she thinks.

And anonymity wins out with Artemis, too, because she shrugs simply and says, “It’s…complicated. I don’t particularly want to be around myself these days, either.” She ducks her head to sniff a lily from the group of them in front of her, avoiding Emma’s eyes, and when she looks up, it’s inquisitive. “Why are you searching for people here?”

“They’ve been going missing these past few weeks,” Emma admits. “And this club is the only clue I have.”

Artemis watches her with suddenly sharp eyes. “You’re with the sheriff’s office.”

“No!” Emma says quickly. “Not at all. I’m a private investigator.” Anonymity is a heady gift, an opening to being someone else, and she relishes both the opportunity to work undercover again and the freedom of avoiding the savior burden again for just a little while. “I’m working for the partner of one of the missing people.”

“Ah.” Artemis pauses. “You should coordinate with the sheriff and consolidate your leads.” She sounds decisive about it, enough that Emma wonders if she’s involved in detective work herself.

Emma shrugs. “Not a fan of the sheriff’s work,” she says noncommittally.

Artemis frowns at her, looking put out. On Emma’s behalf. Emma is simultaneously touched and confused. “Sheriff Swan is perfectly capable and very dedicated to her job. I’m sure she’d be helpful if you spoke to her.”

"What, did she save your cat from a tree once?" Emma says, faux-casual and wary of giving herself away.

Artemis takes a moment before she says, a little less friendly than before, “Of course, none of this explains why I saw you leaving the club and then you came right back in to the gardens.”

Emma flushes and Artemis smirks playfully, the mood restored. “Oh. That.”

“Don’t tell me you suddenly found Thetis in the shrubbery.” Artemis leans back against the side of the stone heart, framed into a half of it. Emma’s eyes linger on the way her dress slides up against her thigh, and when she looks up, it’s to Artemis’s amused eyes. “Or did you find something else?”

Emma sinks down to the ground opposite her, leaning against a thin tree. “I don’t know,” she admits truthfully. “I just…I see what it is about this place.”

“Hiding?”

“You can’t hide from yourself. Not really.” Emma twists a blade of grass around her fingers, feeling Artemis’s eyes on her. “I guess…I’ve spent so much of my life running away from people. Or pushing them away. And it was good for me then. It was what I needed. But I’m finally at a place where I’ve been trying to change that.”

She thinks of Regina, eyes stormy and unsure, and of Why does any of this matter to you? “I’m tired of running,” she admits, and she doesn’t know what she’s confessing or to whom, if this mysterious woman feels the same connection or even wants her around, but she’s ready to try, at least.

“I was like you,” Artemis says, gazing down at her with unreadable eyes. “I decided it was time to…open my heart to love.” She laughs, low and mocking, and Emma shifts uneasily. “The highs are never worth the agony that follows.”

And she’s thinking of Regina again for some inexplicable reason, of group hugs with Henry and stakeouts together and talking over coffee after a magic lesson. There had been a lightness to her interactions with Regina since Neverland, an ease that had been like breathing during a time when everything else around her had made it so hard, and she treasures that feeling and can’t imagine giving it up.

She’s spent so much of her time being pursued- by Hook, but also by Mary Margaret and even Henry, each one determined to break through to her and be loved. And the latter two had more than succeeded, but she’s never been in a situation before where she’s the one taking action, chasing someone who’s unequivocally worth it, and she doesn’t regret it for a minute. “Maybe you never found the right highs,” she murmurs, and wraps the grass around her finger, tighter and tighter until it splits in two.

Chapter Text

Henry is off to the bus stop the next morning and he’ll be back at Regina’s when he comes home tonight, and she settles down at her desk at the station, feeling oddly lonely. David is out today, managing some noise complaints, and even Leroy’s been staying out of trouble lately. The station is quiet and Emma has no leads to pour over today.

Silence leads to thoughts of Artemis, hard and soft at once and still captivating. Emma likes to think of herself as down-to-earth and jaded, not someone who believes in magical connections that aren’t earned with hard work, and yet…and yet.

She doesn’t know Artemis’s identity. Frankly, she doesn’t know many women in Storybrooke with a proclivity toward other women, and she’s pretty sure that Artemis is at least a little interested in her, if the way her eyes sweep over Emma’s body is indication. (Then again, she can think of at least one other woman who looks her up and down the same way, and if she’s anything but straight, Emma’s positive she’d know that by now.)

The whole idea of the club is overly romantic and maybe she’s just…getting swept up in it, too. Emma doesn’t believe in love at first sight– for her parents, maybe, but not for her. That kind of attraction doesn’t come with a first meeting. If it really is their first meeting.

She stares down at the report she’s supposed to be filling out and sees lilies doodled all along the edges. Sighing, she crumples up the paper and tosses it into the garbage.

“Good shot,” Hook says, sauntering into the room.

Emma tenses and forces a thin smile. “Hook. Any news?”

“Yes, actually,” he says smugly, coming around the desk to sit on it beside her. She shifts back in her chair, eyebrows raised, and he leans forward closer to her. “All three victims were regulars at Double Blind. The club down by the water?”

“Yeah, I know,” she says, deflating. “You were there last night. You hit on me.”

Hook blinks as though he’s surprised, though it’s all a little too calculated, all a little too artificial. “I did?”

She plays along. “You asked me to dance. We did not dance.”

“In any costume and we still know each other, Swan.” Hook stands abruptly and stalks across the room, his fist clenched.

She sighs. This again. “What now?”

“What now? What now?” he echoes, wheeling around, and she can see sheer frustration on his face. “What now is what I’ve been asking for weeks. I’m in love with you!”

“Hook–“

“I’ve been nothing but supportive. I’ve given up everything for you, Swan, because you’re worth every bloody piece of me.” That damn ship, his life and his home, and he’d traded it away for her. She twitches guiltily in her seat and stops herself a moment later. “And I’ve been patient,” he says, stalking to the dartboard and yanking out a dart. He throws it with savage glee, impaling it into the corner of the bull’s-eye. “I waited and waited for you and then you kiss me–“

“I was grateful!” she interjects, equally frustrated. “I’m still grateful! You’ve been a good friend.”

“A good friend you kissed! You could have just said thank you if you hadn’t felt as I did!”

“Look, Killian…” she starts, and his eyes narrow like he’s going to pounce on that, too. “Hook. The last time I tried saying thank you, you fucking patted your lips until I did something about that, remember? It was what you wanted! But you’re right. I was wrong to kiss you. Is that what you want me to say?”

“No!” he nearly snarls, and she stands up, her face tight with warning. “No,” he repeats. “What I want is for you to admit what we have between us. I want you to stop hiding and at least try me instead of pushing me away! I want you to give me a chance, for your sake! You deserve someone who loves you like I do.”

She’s tough. She’s always been tough, always been impenetrable, and she’s spent a good portion of her life assuring girls and women that they don’t owe men shit for being decent to them. She’d been in that state, too, once, desperate and grateful after prison to anyone who’d give her a chance, and she hadn’t planned to ever return to that state of mind.

But Hook is her friend, someone who’s done more for her recently than anyone else (except Regina, who’d taken her hand and promised her a lifetime of good memories), and she can’t be the one to break his heart, can she? “That’s not fair,” she says softly. “Your feelings aren’t my responsibility.” His face darkens and her last defense fades with overwhelming guilt, an attempt to smooth things over. “I guess maybe we could–“

“Maybe you can save the lovers’ tiff for after work hours,” Regina says from the doorway, and they both start. Hook’s expression grows thunderous and Regina looks bored. “Run along, pirate,” she orders in a voice that allows for no argument, and he lets out a furious huff and storms out the door.

Emma blinks at Regina. Regina rolls her eyes. “I could hear him from outside. I thought I’d return the favor from Friday.” Right. With Marian.

“Thanks,” she says. She struggles to find something more to say and comes up blank.

Regina says, “You’re better than this,” and Emma’s eyes shoot up to meet hers.

“What?”

Regina clears her throat, changing the subject with abruptness. Her arms are folded against her stomach, her discomfort apparent. “I came here to find out if you’ve been looking into those disappearances.” She shifts on her heels, angling backward, and stares somewhere around Emma’s chin with tumultuous eyes. “I may not be the mayor anymore, but I won’t have anyone pinpointing the beginnings of this as an error in my leadership.”

“Yeah, I got it under control,” Emma assures her, dipping her chin so she can catch Regina’s gaze instead. “No dark marks on your mayorhood aside from the whole ‘cursed the whole kingdom into another realm and became their absolute dictator for twenty-eight years,’” she says, trying for a grin. Regina scowls and Emma’s grin widens. “Oh, yeah, and that time you spray-painted TRAMP on Mary Margaret’s car.”

“How did you know about that?” Regina demands, affronted.

“You left the spray paint can in your desk until my mom took over for you.” Mary Margaret had mentioned it over dinner the night before with a fond sort of wistfulness, and then they’d all reminisced about Regina’s reign of terror for long enough that Henry had started looking at them like they’d lost their minds.

Ah, nostalgia.

Regina purses her lips. She must have meant for it to be a sign of displeasure, but it emerges as a pout. “She had it coming.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Emma still hasn’t managed to wipe the grin off her face yet.

“Anyway.” Regina turns smartly. “I’m done here. I just wanted to make sure you and your buffoon of a father weren’t making laughingstocks of me in town. Have a good evening.” She stalks out the door and Emma leans back, watching her go and feeling brighter than she has in days.

She almost goes after Regina to ask her for help but hesitates, unsure of where they stand and reluctant to shatter whatever goodwill she’d inadvertently earned. She’ll take care of this on her own and work on Regina on her own time, she decides, and heads for the pawn shop instead.

She could call David, but she doesn’t want to get him involved in this when he’s so busy with the new baby. Every day he comes in with another awestruck revelation about him, and Emma smiles and is quietly very glad that she’s moved out of the loft. She loves them all, but she isn’t quite ready for the heartbreak of watching what she’d never really had with Henry and never had at all with her parents.

And then there’s Hook, who catches up to her the minute she walks out of the station. “We were in the middle of something,” he says stubbornly. He scratches the back of his neck, determined and unassuming at once. “We can discuss it…somewhere where we won’t be interrupted. I’d say let’s do dinner on my boat, but ah–“ He shrugs, his puppy-eye-level notching up to…eight, at least.

She sighs, remembering Regina’s disapproval and the you’re better than this that had seemed more like it had slipped out of her mouth than been intentional. “I think we finished up, actually,” she says evenly, steering them toward the pawn shop entrance. “Unless you want to talk about this murder case some more.”

Hook scoffs and follows her into the shop. “You’re at no state to worry about that, Swan,” he says, and she turns sharply to stare curiously at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Hook mutters, and sidles out of the shop as quickly as he’d followed her in.

She watches him leave, puzzled, and then turns to the counter.

…Which is, today, covered by dozens of books, all stacked up at varying heights. There’s someone moving behind them, so Emma says, “Hello?” and a stack of books falls down and reveals Belle.

“Oh!” she says, chagrined, and Emma moves to pick them up. “No, don’t touch those, don’t–“ She scurries around the counter and nearly shoves Emma aside, snatching up the books and pushing them back onto the counter.

Her eyes are wild and her movements are jerky, and Emma ventures, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Belle says quickly, reaching for her pen and snatching up…what looks like the Dark One’s dagger…instead. She waves it vaguely in Emma’s direction and Emma takes a step back. Belle glances at it. “Oh,” she says, tilting her head. “This is Rumple’s dagger. He gave it to me because he trusts me. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I…guess?” Emma says, puzzled at her jumpiness.

Belle stares at her again. “Yes, it is.” She beams, wide and uncertain. “Isn’t it? Oh…Emma. Sheriff Swan,” she says firmly. “What can I do for you?”

“I was looking for Gold for some magical help, but you seem…busy,” Emma says, backing away.

“No!” Belle holds up a hand. “No, I’m here to help.” She smiles again, a little more pained. “I can pass on the message if I don’t know.”

“Right.” Emma’s brow furrows. Belle is on edge, afraid of…someone? She glances at the dagger and decides it isn’t her business right now, no matter how much her instincts scream to protect Belle. “So…have you ever heard of Double Blind?”

“No?” Belle says, her voice rising. She’s lying, Emma knows instantly. “No,” she repeats more calmly, setting down the dagger. “Is it a restaurant?”

“It’s…a club,” Emma says, eyes narrowed. “Hide your identity, go find true love? I’ve been searching for someone who used to go there, but all I know is her fake identity.”

Belle shrugs, staring down at her books, and when she looks up, the wildness in her eyes is gone. “I can give you a spell to enchant a mirror to see through a glamour, but I can’t do that retroactively.” She’s businesslike again, her fingers moving tap-tap-tap against the counter but her eyes are fixed on the book. “Maybe a dreamcatcher like the one you used with Pongo that one time? I’ll talk to Rumple,” she promises, her eyes flitting to the dagger again. “Have you asked Regina for help?”

“Regina is…busy.” Emma chews on her lip and notices herself brooding again with a scowl.

Belle grins weakly. “Still annoyed at you, huh?” She softens, her fingers tracing the letters etched onto the dagger. “She won’t hold a grudge forever.”

“I’m sorry, have you met Regina?” Emma says disbelievingly. “The whole cast-a-curse-because-of-a-ten-year-old thing ring a bell?”

Belle laughs, gentle and melodious, and shakes her head. “I’ve met Regina around you. And I know you won’t give up on the ones you love. This will pass.”

Emma thanks her, even as something Belle had said niggles at the back of her mind. The ones you love. It’s…of course she likes Regina. They’re friends and they’re family and Emma cares about her more than she does most people. Love is something more intense, more than one-sided attraction or magic that grows stronger whenever they’re together. Love is being so absurdly invested in another person that she’s all she can think about half the time and–

She coughs and cuts off that line of thought. She won’t be giving up on her anytime soon, either way.

And maybe it’s that line of thinking that has her trudging up the walk to Regina’s house later that day with only vague plans about what she’s going to ask her. Something about the case, maybe. Or those soccer tryouts that Henry’s been talking about. Maybe they could talk about Snow's myriad deficiencies as mayor, since even Snow seems to think she’s incapable and has been begging Regina to return.

She’s halfway down the walk when she sees that the door is already open, haphazard as Regina never has been before. She fishes for her gun, heart in her throat, when she reaches the porch and sees Robin Hood in the foyer.

Regina is standing with her back flat against the wall like a cornered cat and her eyes are wide and vulnerable, defenseless in a way that Emma’s never seen her before– and at the same time she looks utterly, unequivocally humiliated by whatever Robin Hood is suggesting.

“…If you’ve been avoiding her because of my choice,” he’s saying. “But it’d be good for her to get to know you as more than…well, the woman who tormented her.”

It’s enough for Regina to usually rear up, fireball in hand, and bite out some threatening sarcasm to keep her dignity intact. But instead she nods tersely and says, “I’ll think about it,” and she still doesn’t meet his eyes.

Her gaze shifts away from him and meets Emma’s, and her lip curls. Emma stands in silence on the porch, at a loss as to what she’s supposed to do now, and Regina’s face stiffens until there’s nothing but venom in her eyes. “I have a visitor,” she says, her voice cold.

“Sheriff,” Robin greets her pleasantly, and turns back to Regina for one last, “Please, Regina, just think about it.”

“She’ll think about it,” Emma says in a guarded tone, and Robin smiles briefly at her and slips past her out the door.

Regina says, contained fury and hatred, “I told you to stay away.”

“I thought we could–“

“What?” Regina presses forward, and Emma knows, knows that this is Regina lashing out at her after she’d been utterly exposed in front of her so-called soulmate, and somehow it still burns. “What did you think we could do? Did you think we’d be buddies now? Did you think you could spend yet some more time stomping all over every singlerequest I make of you not to meddle?”

“Regina–“

“You’re worse than your mother!” Regina snarls. “You’ve done nothing but destroy my life, piece by piece, for the past three years, and now…what?” She spreads her hands, laughing humorlessly. “Did you bring some popcorn? Sit down, enjoy the show!” She grits her teeth. Emma is frozen in place. “I can’t kill you like I’d like to because the only person in this universe who matters to me…” She hisses out a furious noise.

There had been a time when Emma would give back as good as she gets. She’s never hesitated to before. But instead her stomach is contracting like she’s in pain and she swallows scathing retorts and her eyes sting, sting, sting like they’re being burned by the sun. “I want to make things better,” she says, her voice shaky.

And Regina looks at her with loathing like Emma’s never seen before, the uncertainty of their earlier conversation forgotten with her helplessness in front of Robin Hood, and Emma shrinks back, feeling very small and meaningless. “Get the hell out of my life,” Regina orders, and slams her front door.

She wanders around her apartment, kicking stray items and stomping around in a mood until she puts a fist through the wall and decides to get herself under control before she destroys anything else. She slumps on the couch and stares at the blank TV screen and drives every thought of Regina Mills from her mind.

When the sun sets, she almost doesn’t go to Double Blind, but suddenly all she can think about is Artemis, soothing and comforting with just her presence. She doesn’t want to be alone, not with her parents off with a new baby and her son with a woman who hates her, and she ignores the man at the desk’s knowing smirk when she doesn’t interrogate him tonight and heads straight for the garden.

The first is empty. The second is empty. Emma makes it all the way until the sixth garden before she slumps to the ground, surrounded by brightly colored flowers; and leans back against the chaise longue behind her, shutting her eyes.

She’s endured a whole lot worse than this from Regina in the past, hasn’t she? But she’s always given as good as she’s gotten, sending every insult volleying back at Regina until they’re both exhilarated and furious and very much on equal footing. But she’s tired. She’s tired of these battles being the only way they communicate. She’d thought they’d been close to…something, something nearly good, and now they’re nowhere at all.

She’s tired of trying, too, and she finally surrenders to that defeat, her heart quieting for a moment as she stares up at the sky and waits for Artemis.

Artemis never comes.

Another disappointment in a long, stressful day of disappointments, and Emma reacts in the best way she knows of– she marches out to the booth and snarls at the man behind the desk, “I want every single name you’ve recorded today. Every visitor.”

Her personal life might be in shambles, but she has a case to solve.

“Did you ever speak to him?” Emma asks patiently, and Ashley shakes her head.

“Never. I wasn’t going there to cheat on my husband!” she says for the third time since she’d been called in for questioning. She glances toward where David is in the next room with a shamefaced couple who’d both been on the list, one after the other. “I just wanted to get out and try something new! You have no idea how endless it can be, alone in the house with Alex–“

“I believe you,” Emma says, putting a hand on Ashley’s. “I just need to know about Pan.”

“Oh. Right. I didn’t do anything with him! We just danced a little bit. He was kind of detached, I don’t know. I never got the impression that he was all that interested in me.” Ashley looks miffed at the idea of it. “He was just a little rude, I guess.”

“And did he dance with Thetis?”

“Maybe? I’m not sure.” Ashley shrugs. “I don’t get to go that often. I only made it last night because of a last-minute sitter.” She slouches in her chair, looking glum. “I can’t believe Michael’s hardass wife used to come to the club.”

Emma lets her go and calls in Tom Clark, who’s on the defensive from the moment he sneezes his way into the room. No, the dwarves don’t work there. We’re just as entitled as any human to find love in this land. The Double Blind guests range from defensive to tearful, most of them embarrassed about it and most of them with something to hide. Questioning them is like pulling teeth, and Emma has a migraine by the end of it.

David invites her back to the loft for dinner but she shakes her head. “I just…need to decompress,” she says apologetically. “Thanks for today. You go back to Mom.”

She goes to Granny’s instead, laying out her notes in front of her. The club’s list is real names only, and she’d snapped at the man behind the desk about it when she’d seen what he’d neglected to mention. Still, though, she’s gotten plenty of information. Everyone seems to know Thetis, but no one has any idea where she’s gone. There had been a few mentions of a man around Pan, but nothing at all on Erebos.

“Who’s Hermes?” Henry asks, and she jolts, blinking up at him in surprise. He’d dropped by the station earlier but she’d barely spoken to him, the day too busy for distractions. He frowns at her. “Mom’s been in a foul mood for the past day. What did you do?”

“What did I–“ She glares up and catches sight of Regina across the room, staring daggers at the two of them. Henry sighs heavily.

“She’s going through some really bad stuff, Mom. I know she’s been…” He makes a face. “Tough to you, but we’re her family, right? We stick by her.”

Yeah. That’s what Emma’s been trying to do. She bites back the urge to blame Regina for this one, not when Regina and Henry are so perpetually fragile, and stands instead. “You’re right,” she says. Henry looks alarmed.

She makes her way to Regina’s table, sliding into the seat opposite her. Regina stares at her. “Thanks for inviting me to dinner, Henry,” she says, darting a challenging look at Regina. Henry sits, satisfied.

And Emma doesn’t know what she’d expected except that neither of them would rope Henry into this. Awkward chatting, maybe. A silent apology in the way Regina nods at her or talks to her.

But she refuses to start them off this time and instead it’s all terse silence, heavy on the table. Henry talks and talks and Regina gives him wide smiles that have Emma aching and Emma manages nods and muttered responses and Regina doesn’t look at her once.

Emma’s knuckles are white against her knees when Henry leaves the table to greet a friend at the door. Regina bites viciously into her salmon and Emma’s legs shake with restrained energy. This whole not talking thing is virtually impossible, but Regina is better at it than she is.

Finally, she slams her hands on the table, her headache worse than before. “I’m leaving.”

“I’m bereft, really,” Regina says nastily. “Go give someone else a headache.”

Which is rich of her, considering how Emma’s been nursing this migraine since yesterday afternoon. “You know what?” she demands, leaning forward. Regina looks at her with blank distaste, Madam Mayor returned in full. “What you’ve been doing–“

“What I’ve been doing?” Regina repeats, eyes narrowing. “Living my life? Devoting every waking moment to the Charming squad’s every whim? Saving the day when you failed to go off and make out with your boyfriend?”

“I– what?” Emma sputters, taken aback by the shift in tack. “That isn’t what happened! He isn’t my–“

“I don’t give a damn,” Regina hisses. “I am sick and tired of being a casualty of your mishaps. You’ve been nothing but useless since the moment you came back to town.”

And that stings more than it should, because Emma can point fingers and talk about whose sister it was who had started all of this to begin with, but Regina isn’t wrong. She’s been basically ineffectual since the moment this had all begun, led in circles and tossed aside and foiled and screwing up, and now there are three people dead under her watch and she has no idea how to stop it.

She curls her fingers into her palms and shuts her eyes, reminding herself again that she’s done fighting back. “I…I thought we were a team.”

Regina scoffs. “Despite what you wish, we’re not partners. You’re nothing but a nuisance I’ve been saddled with, and I want you gone.”

“You’re in luck, then,” Emma says wearily, glancing outside and seeing the sun beginning to set. “I’m out of here.”

Fighting back is easy and invigorating and will do absolutely nothing but make the situation worse. She knows this. She knows Regina. And she knows that Regina’s craving destruction right now and it’s up to Emma to put an end to this. It all hurts, so much more pain than Emma had ever thought Regina Mills could inflict on her. And Emma’s beginning to think it was a mistake to start up with her this time at all.

She’s done. She has to be done trying, because all she does when she pushes Regina is get caught in the recoil.

She bolts for the door, patting Henry on the back and ducking out of the diner, Regina scowling after her.

Artemis isn’t there again when she makes it to the gardens and she refuses to care, about Artemis’s absence and Regina’s continued rebuffs and the poisonous way that Regina’s words sink into her skin and leave her helpless and angry and desperately longing for better times.

She hears low curses and foliage being brushed aside as someone stalks toward her, and she’s whirling around with her hands out to strike when Artemis shoves aside a tree branch and catches sight of her. Her eyes widen. “Eris,” she says, softening.

Emma waves weakly. “Hi.”

A scrutinizing gaze at Emma’s glamoured face. “You look terrible.”

“Thanks ever so.” Emma stares at Artemis. Her own face is worn too, a scowl curling the corners of her lips down and her eyes dark and guarded. “You don’t look so hot yourself.”

Artemis rolls her eyes, sitting down on the bench in front of the water. “It’s been a day.” She’s grim-faced and a little standoffish and what is it about people lately that has Emma shifting forward, desperate to break through to them?

“Tell me about it,” she offers, joining her on the bench. “I’m kind of the queen of sucky days.”

“I’m not the queen of anything,” Artemis mutters, her eyes tracing swirls into the water.

“You can be the peasant of sucky days,” Emma says, and Artemis’s eyes crinkle up for a moment into a laugh.

“I would never be a peasant,” she scoffs, imperiousness on par with Regina. “I was born into royalty.”

“A princess!”

“A lady,” Artemis corrects her, chin outthrust and eyes dancing. Not quite on Regina’s level, then. As if Regina would ever deign to be teased like this. “I…I was only ever a lady. My family was disgraced.”

Emma leans back. “I once sneaked into a royal ball,” she says truthfully. “That’s…most of my experience with royalty before Storybrooke.”

“It was all very dull,” Artemis murmurs. “Balls and teatime and curtsying just so–“

“Show me.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I’ve had a really shitty day,” Emma coaxes her, and Artemis rises and does a perfect, split-second curtsy before she drops back to the bench. “That was beautiful.”

Artemis rolls her eyes. “Shut up.”

“Inspirational, really. I bet you’ll bag a prince someday.” Emma bounces in her seat, her gloominess forgotten. “Maybe even a princess, if you’re lucky.”

“Maybe a king,” Artemis says, and her eyes flicker closed for a moment. She looks troubled again, distant and lost, and Emma bites her lip and takes Artemis's hand.

She keeps her voice even, alarmed at the hitch in it when she says, “And in Storybrooke? Who are you here?”

Artemis shakes her head. “We’re not doing that. I won’t…I can’t do that. And you wouldn’t want to know.”

“Try me.” Emma watches her, the fine line of her jaw as it clenches shut and the eyes that seem the only familiar part of her, beyond the glamour. She’s been running with the Evil Queen and Captain Hook. She can handle whoever Artemis really is. “I’ll show you if you show me.” It emerges suggestive enough that they both suck in a breath, Artemis’s hand tightening in Emma’s.

“I can’t,” Artemis says finally, and she lets Emma go and stands. “Thank you for tonight. I really should be going.”

“Hey, no. Wait.” Emma grabs her wrist. Artemis twists in place, gazing down at her. “It’s fine. It’s…I’d rather not be myself, either,” she admits with a sigh.

“Tell me something about you.” Artemis is still standing, her arm crossing the gap between them, and her face is wary.

“I don’t trust easily.” It’s an apology and an explanation at once. “I don’t like the unknown. But I…I don’t know, I’m trying to change that, right?”

“You’re tired of running,” Artemis echoes from two nights previous. “I’m tired of trying. We make for quite a pair.” She laughs, wry and sad, and circles the water to pluck a flower from a bush opposite them. “I feel so trapped in this town,” she confesses suddenly. “The curse is broken but it still never changes, does it? People don’t change.”

“Yeah.” Emma stares at her back and thinks about New York with Henry, happy and peaceful with a decade of memories gifted to them by Regina. Regina. “No. Some people change.”

Artemis’s spine stiffens. “No one allows change in Storybrooke.”

“Well, it’s not really up to anyone else, is it?” Emma points out. “In the end, it’s all on you.” She thinks back to a terrified eighteen-year-old without a home or a child or a future and she shivers. “I have had…so many people telling me who I am, who I’ll be, who I never could be. And eventually I learned.” Artemis has turned, her eyes intent on Emma, and Emma remembers Ashley in the laundry room during the curse and You gotta punch back and say this is who I am. “You don’t let them matter to you. You make your own destiny.”

Artemis startles violently and Emma furrows her brow, curious at her reaction. “You really believe that? That you make your own destiny?”

“I used to. Now I don’t know. Destiny kind of screwed me over,” she admits. “But I know people who’ve…who don’t let that stop them.” Regina, Regina. Regina who’d railed against her destiny and found goodness and light magic and Emma shines when she thinks of her. No one understands what it’s like to be rejected and misunderstood, not like she does, not like Regina does. No one understands how much it’s taken out of them to fight back anyway. “We have that power to resist it.”

“And then destiny slaps us right back down into our place.” Artemis must be speaking of her own fairytale, the true love she’d lost, but Emma finds something else in her words, Regina’s certainty that she and Emma have only ever been destructive for each other. That’s who they are, isn’t it? The savior and the evil queen? And destiny does its part to ensure that it continues as such.

“I’ve never been good at staying in my place,” Emma murmurs, and Artemis finally sits down again, their fingers entwining as she searches Emma’s face.

She must have found what she’d been looking for, because she closes her eyes and smiles.

Chapter Text

“It’s called a Revealer. In English, anyway. It operates on the same kind of principle as that magic-canceling cuff, but it emanates instead of containing?” Belle’s face twitches into a frown. “It’s complicated. I don’t know how I’d explain it to you. Anyway, you unwrap and point the cone-shaped part at anyone in the club and it’ll remove their glamour.” She glances around the diner anxiously, her eyes falling on Regina’s and then spiraling away from her at once. Emma doesn’t bother catching Regina’s glare.

Instead, she eyes the tiny silver contraption warily. “Gold put this together?”

Belle bobs her head, up-down-up-down-up-down too many times. “Of course he did. I asked him to, so he did. He loves me.” Her eyes are vacant and she stands too quickly, banging her knees against the table as she does. She doesn’t pause, just winces and runs for the door, and Emma watches her with bemusement.

She has to get back to her interrogations, and she rises to make a quick stop at the counter to pick up her coffee. Walking to the counter means walking past Regina’s table, and she hesitates for a moment beside it.

Regina looks up at her, her eyes glinting with ready challenge, and Emma walks on quickly, leaving a miffed Regina behind.

The day is drab and empty and the answers she receives from the day’s witnesses are equally so. A few recall Pan, none recall Erebos, and everyone knows Thetis.

The last name on her list today has her groaning and peering into David’s room, hoping desperately that he’s done with his witnesses, but he's lost in conversation with one of the old regulars from the Rabbit Hole. With a long-suffering sigh, she shoves the door open to the office. “Come on in, Hook.”

He swaggers in, sliding into the chair with his knees so far apart that they nearly touch the table legs. “Hello, love.”

“Mr. Jones,” she says formally, ignoring the way his hands slide down to frame his crotch.

He scowls for an instant before it fades into a mock-stern frown. “Still a captain, even without a ship,” he informs her, and the worst part is that she can see the loss in his eyes, genuine without agenda. Emma knows what it’s like to keep things close, the home that doesn’t mean other people to let you down, and she’s sympathetic in spite of her frustration.

“Listen,” she starts, her voice unsteady. Hook smirks. She clears her throat and reminds herself how irritating he is. “I have some questions about Double Blind. You visit there often?”

He leers at her. “Often enough.”

She flips through her notes, her voice and demeanor all business. Hook doesn’t seem to notice. “Have you ever spoken with a woman who went as Thetis? Blonde, wore a lot of big dresses, very loud?”

She looks up a moment too late. When she does, something has shifted in Hook’s eyes, dark and ugly and mean, and then she blinks and he’s smiling suggestively at her again. She doesn’t know if she’d imagined any of it. “I’m…familiar with her, yes.” He packs a truckload of meaning into that yes. “Not quite as striking as you, but an evocative dancer.”

Emma watches him. “Have you seen her at all since the first murder?” He shakes his head and she thinks he’s telling the truth. “Okay, how about a woman named Erebos?” A flash of confusion.

And then Hook leans forward, his eyes dancing with smug confidence instead. “Swan, are you jealous?”

“I am working a case,” she says through gritted teeth.

“You seem quite interested in the women I chat with at the club.” His eyebrows arch up and he leans forward at last, arms down on the table so his hands are reaching for hers.

She snatches them away. “That isn’t what this is about, Hook.”

“Except it is a bit, isn’t it.” It isn’t a question. Hook looks at her with soulful eyes, inviting and still infuriatingly attractive, and he’s so goddamned sure of himself that it has her hackles rising.

“No!”

“You know I’m still here, Swan.” He gestures at himself, a twist of the wrist that has her staring determinedly back at her notes. “Devilishly handsome. Waiting. My love has spanned centuries in the past–”

Her head drops, thunking against the table. “Hook, can you please just answer the question?” she demands, exhausted.

He stands, smirking like he’s won this one. “I’ll save you a dance,” he says as he saunters out.

She slams her folder shut and takes off after him, catching up to him just outside the station. His hooked arm is hanging down, and she seizes it roughly and jerks him around. “This is bigger than your bullshit–“

He slams hard into someone else, and Emma sees a blur of black leather and purple dress as they both go down, Regina with a strangled noise of outrage. Emma watches her with concern, but she seems unmarred by the encounter and Hook helps her up with a drawled apology. “Don’t touch me!” Regina snarls at him, her eyes flickering to Emma.

It takes everything Emma has to hook her thumbs into her jeans and find a wall to gaze at with rapt attention instead of checking on Regina again.

Regina’s eyes bore into her, setting her skin aflame. Emma doesn’t move. Regina turns on her heel and stalks away from the station toward her car, parked at the curb behind the Bug. She drives away too quickly, running a stop sign in the process.

Hook laughs unpleasantly. “Lovely to see you, Swan,” he says, and he departs with the same saunter he’d entered the room with.

“What are your regrets?” Artemis asks suddenly. They’re in the first garden, which is set up with what’s really just one elongated fancy beach chair; and they’re lying side-by-side on it, both of them staring up at the night sky framed between cherry blossoms.

Emma props herself up on her elbow to look at her. Artemis has been morose today, somewhere on the line between irritable and distressed, but she still smiles at Emma and Emma’s heart glows in response, warm like she’s coming home. “Regrets?” she repeats.

“What would you change about your life? Isn’t there something you…?” Artemis’s voice trails off, her eyes still on the sky.

“I don’t know.” Emma wants to say yes, wants to regret so much. She does regret so much. But she can’t regret being put in the wardrobe. Princess Emma, spoiled daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, is an alien being to her, someone she doesn’t even know if she’d like very much. She holds years of adversity close to her heart, defines herself by what she’s overcome, and she is what she’s endured.

She can’t regret giving up Henry anymore, not really– not when Henry as he is is smart and kind and giving, not when he believes in heroes and villains all the same and he is who he is– Regina is who she is– because of the mother he’d had. Regretting Henry’s adoption is far too close to regretting the boy she knows, and she thinks she finally understands Regina’s proclamation at the tree in Neverland.

They can’t allow themselves to be bogged down by regrets, reaching up and suffocating them until they're consumed by the past. Emma loves the people around her too much to mold them into something more convenient, to take away all they’ve been through for her sake. Emma might even love herself enough to keep herself unchanged. She sucks in a ragged breath, Artemis’s fingers against her arm, and admits, “I don’t think I can have regrets.”

“Another charmed life,” Artemis mutters, looking displeased with this revelation. “Typical.”

Emma stares at her for a minute. “No, it wasn’t,” she says, taken aback. “What crawled up your ass and died?”

“Enchanting.” But Artemis heaves a sigh and says, “I’m sorry. Another bad day.” She looks lost as she says it, lonely and uncertain, and Emma softens enough to let her speak. “No, I didn’t,” she says suddenly. “I had a great day. I finished some work at home and I spent quality time with my– with my daughter and everything went exactly as I wanted it to.”

But she sounds bereft, and she whispers, “Then why the hell do I feel so…dammit!” she snarls, standing up, and she paces in a straight line as Emma watches, her brow furrowing.

“What do you regret?” she asks, sitting up to meet her gaze.

Artemis turns to stare at her, her eyes empty. “Meeting my true love.” She blurts it out like a curse and her hand flies to her mouth a moment later, her face stricken.

Emma forgets that she’s annoyed at her, drawn to her vulnerability with an urgent need to comfort. “It’s okay.”

“It isn’t. It’s…” Artemis presses her hands to her face, embarrassed and guilty at the admission. “I do regret it,” she says fiercely. Tears are sliding from her eyes and Emma crosses the garden in quick steps and stops in front of Artemis. “I wish I’d never thought it was something I was worthy of. I should know better than to hope–“ She leans forward, into Emma’s arms, and Emma holds her tightly.

She’s been here, seventeen and in prison and hating desperately that she’d ever fallen in love. She’s been here four weeks ago, Regina standing opposite her with defeat in her posture and frustration in her voice. “I know how vile these stories end, my punishment complete. I wish I’d never had a chance to believe otherwise,” Artemis says, her voice rough, and Emma can feel tears damp on her shoulder as she holds onto the other woman.

“Your story isn’t over,” Emma murmurs at last, stroking Artemis’s dark hair. Like this, in the dimly lit garden with her in her arms, it’s a sensation both familiar and unfamiliar. Regina is just this size, though they’ve never even hugged and Emma can’t imagine Regina ever being this open to anyone. Still, though, she can close her eyes and pretend– and hate herself just a little bit for wanting to.

Regina isn’t made for heart-to-hearts and girl talk and secret dates in gardens. Regina is snide on her best days around Emma, and Regina would never give Emma any of what Artemis has already. Artemis is perfect for Emma, and Emma can think only of someone who loathes her instead of enjoying Artemis’s company.

She feels even worse when Artemis takes a half-step back, her eyes shiny and wet and her fingers trailing up to Emma’s cheekbones, tracing them as she gazes at Emma. “You’re beautiful.”

Emma ducks her head, embarrassed at the glow in Artemis’s eyes. “This isn’t how I look.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Artemis’s eyes don’t leave her, and Emma flushes and waits until Artemis says, “Thank you for listening.”

There’s a charge between them, electric and dangerous, and Artemis is close enough that Emma can feel Artemis's breath on her lips when she talks. And for a moment, Emma thinks about Belle’s Revealer in her pocket. Point it at anyone in the club and it’ll remove their glamour.

Whatever is happening between her and Artemis, it’s leading in one direction. Artemis can loathe true love and reject it entirely, but she’s obviously attracted to Emma and Emma can barely breathe when she’s this close and…and if she crosses this line…

She has to know, know who she’s so drawn to, be careful like she hasn’t been before. She can’t make the same mistakes again. Artemis can’t be a mistake.

Her fingers close around the Revealer and Artemis’s fingers are gentle on her cheek and she drops the Revealer back into her pocket and drops her forehead to Artemis’s shoulder. No. If this is about trust, it can’t just be about hers. Artemis wouldn’t forgive her for breaking her glamour, and she’d be right not to. She’d shatter Artemis's faith in her– Artemis, who tells her secrets and opens herself up as much as Emma has– and Emma desperately doesn’t want to do that.

Artemis is too important to lose.

Whoever she is.

She does her final interviews and lets a relieved David get back home to baby duty, laying out everything he has and she has and consolidating all of it into three files. She’s action girl, not paperwork girl, but years as a bail bondsperson has at least trained her how to analyze data.

Typhon. Lottie’s boyfriend. Apparently deeply involved with Thetis, who everyone knows and no one has seen since. Typhon has a type, she decides, picking through the descriptions of Thetis. Blonde and loud and showy. She still has a gut feeling that Thetis is the key to all of this, even if there’s nothing to associate her with any of the other victims.

Erebos. Michael’s wife. And she might as well have been an enigma from the start, a mystery to everyone else in the club. Maybe she’d haunted the gardens as Artemis does, silent and alone and free of a husband she hadn’t loved. Artemis hadn’t known the name, but maybe she’d known her face. (She wonders jealously for a moment about Artemis’s true love before she nips that in the bud. There’s no reason to– Not that any of this matters just yet anyway.)

Pan. Accompanied occasionally by a man who’d been as curt as he’d been, and the two of them had endured in happy standoffishness. No one knows the man’s name– Ashley had been able to give Emma Pan’s description, and Emma suspects that most of her witnesses wouldn’t have been able to identify him from just his name.

Three murders, three people with absolutely nothing tying them together. They’re of varying ages, ethnicities, and even fairytale kingdoms (She’s proud she’d even thought of asking that one). Serial killers have patterns. They don’t lurk outside clubs killing whoever’s handy. Even vampires on TV always target the most attractive people on hand.

Thetis has to be at the center of this. But Thetis isn’t visiting the club anymore. The man at the desk insists that she hasn’t been there since the day Typhon had vanished, and the other club-goers have corroborated that.

What had the club been in the Enchanted Forest? Pixie dust dating app, she thinks spitefully, wrinkling her nose at the thought of Tinkerbell’s insistences of soulmates. Whatever it is, she feels some days as though it has everyone in town keeping secrets, hiding deceits and betrayals from Emma and hindering her investigation at every turn. Hook is up to something. Even Belle is up to something.

And she’s alone in all this. David does what he can, but he’s busy with the baby now that Snow has been strong-armed into mayoral duties. Hook is…no longer helpful. And the one person she’s come to rely on most, the one who always seems to have everything working smoothly in the end…

…Is walking through the door to the station, her heels tapping an angry beat through the room. It takes Emma back to Mayor Mills and Deputy Swan, to confrontations and recriminations and marked hostility that she’s come to remember fondly. At least then they’d had fun hating each other.

Today, Regina doesn’t look ready for fun, and Emma stands unsteadily. “Can I help you?” Distance is key. Distance is what she’s been trying at, giving Regina the space she’d demanded so forcefully from the start.

“You,” Regina spits out, moving closer. Emma flinches and Regina pokes a finger at her, undeterred. “You are utterly useless.”

Is she…drunk? She must be tipsy at least, her words dragging into each other, and Emma says tersely, “It’s barely seven and you have our son tonight.”

Regina waves a careless hand. “I’m not drunk,” she snaps. Emma cocks a disbelieving eyebrow. “I’m…thinking. About how inefficient you are. How little drive you have to get anything done.”

“If this is about the case, I swear I'm–“

Regina throws her hands up. “Oh, please, no more promises.” She twists back to Emma and takes a step forward, effectively trapping Emma against the wall behind the desk. “How long will it take for you to give up on this one? When the murderer gets a little nasty?” She laughs, caustically mocking, and Emma can only stare back in bewilderment. “When the going gets tough, Swan gets going.”

“What the fuck are you on right now?” Emma demands, struggling to parse her words. And then, with dawning comprehension, “Is this about…this is because I promised you I wasn’t giving up on you?” It’s absurd. Regina doesn’t want that from her, and she’s been an uninvited pest since the day she’d brought Marian back. She’s looking for signals where none exist.

But Regina says, “You promised!” with all the fury and desperation of someone in pain, someone who’d wanted something entirely different. It’s almost childish, like stomping feet and helpless decisions, but there’s something else glowing in Regina’s eyes.

No. Maybe Emma’s imagining it, but Regina almost looks…hurt by Emma’s surrender. “I was giving you space,” she whispers, and Regina leans in to hear her, as close as Artemis had been the night before. “I was trying to…respect your wishes.”

“You’re so incompetent,” Regina snarls. Her hand is suddenly spread across Emma’s neck, burning into her skin, and she looks as though she very well might strangle Emma on the spot.

They’re both panting hard, their bodies in sync and millimeters from each other, and Regina’s eyes are dilated with…whatever’s going through her head right now. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I despise you,” Regina says, breathlessly indignant.

Emma leans back against the wall and Regina’s face moves even closer, drawn to her as though she’d pulled it. Regina's thumb is at Emma’s throat, moving as she swallows and asks, “Do you want me to keep trying?”

Regina jerks back from her. “No!” she growls. She’s like a cat today, prowling and sudden strikes and then prowling again, making the station her own without any effort at all. Emma can’t take her eyes off her and wants to hide from her at the same time.

Emma says, shaken and confused and desperately missing Regina more than she’d ever thought possible, “Then why are you here?”

Regina’s response is somewhere between a snarl and a scream, an incomprehensible noise of disgust, and she flees the station without a lick of propriety.

Emma slides down to the ground, her body aching as though she’s lost yet another battle, and she doesn’t move again until the sun has set and Double Blind is open for the night.

Artemis is stalking back and forth in one of the deepest gardens, the one featuring a chaise longue surrounded by bursts of color, and there’s nothing calming about her today when Emma finds her. She looks nearly as agitated as Emma, but when she turns and sees Emma watching, her eyes quiet. “Eris.”

“Hi.” She waves weakly, and they both smile at each other with relief. Is this what it means to have a soulmate? To be so in tune with someone else’s emotions that finally seeing each other is like coming home? She isn’t really into the whole…all-or-nothing true love crap of the Enchanted Forest, but there’s something about Artemis that has her wondering far too much.

“Talk to me,” Artemis says, sliding down onto the chaise with regal grace. “I don’t think I can handle another minute alone today.”

Her voice is imperious, even if it’s too low and throaty to be Regina-caliber imperious, and Emma hears desperation beneath it. She sits down in front of the chaise, her face raised to the flowers around them. “I don’t know. Tell me about your family.”

“I loathe my family,” Artemis grumbles. “Not everyone,” she adds hastily, and Emma remembers her smile from the night before. “Just…most of them, really. Self-righteous, overbearing…” Emma can feel the frustration coming off her in waves and she curls her hand into Artemis’s. “I’m better off without them.”

“But you love them.” She loves her daughter, that much Emma’s sure of.

Artemis hesitates. “I do not.”

“You’re lying,” Emma says, sure about that. “Come on, they’re your family.” She can’t help but love every piece of the family she’s found, can’t hold onto resentment for too long when they’re all she’s ever dreamed of. Maybe she’d have managed if, like, Snow had been Cora instead.

She isn’t supposed to think about Regina, but her breath hitches and she’s lost again. Artemis’s hand tightens against hers, an unwitting anchor. “Under duress,” she concedes, “I might be willing to express some tiny bit of love for some of them.”

Emma grins. It's weak but it’s there. “You’re really not a people person, are you?”

“A week lurking in the garden and you’re just figuring that out?” Artemis says dryly. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same if you weren’t investigating someone.”

“I’m much smarter about avoiding people,” Emma informs her. “You bring one friend and ignore everyone around you until you find someone else worth talking to.” Ruby would usually be up for it, at least. Hook…might’ve, before that kiss.

Artemis says, “That requires having friends. I don’t.”

Emma twists her head to squint up at her. “Seriously? You must have someone.”

“I had a friend before the curse.” Artemis looks up, pensive. “It ended rather badly. And since…I’m actually very off-putting, once you get to know me.” She sounds angry about it, frustrated again, and Emma hurries to distract her.

“I’m a ‘grumpster,’” Emma hooks her fingers into quotes. Ruby says it fondly, at least. “I’ve still managed to have…” Her voice trails off and she thinks of them, Hook who wants her to be in love with him, Ruby who’s closer to her mother than to her, Mary Margaret who is her mother, and Regina who…

Regina who…

The first dry sob comes out like a hacking noise and Emma crumples, her spine bending in and her knees drawing up and she’s not this girl, she doesn’t care when people shove her out of their lives because she’s the one to get up and leave first. She doesn’t open herself up to pain.

Except this one time when she’s been trying, and she’d trusted the wrong person. She should have known that she’d been trusting the wrong person but she hadn’t cared because Regina had been worth it, hadn’t she?

And now she’s in this garden that feels more like a haven and Artemis is sliding down to sit beside her, fingers stroking her back in a motherly gesture and her hand back in Emma’s, tight and soothing, and Emma leans into her and blinks furiously at the tears stinging her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she says again. “I had a really, really shitty day.”

“You don’t need to apologize for that.” Everything is reminding Emma of Regina tonight, even Artemis’s hand clasped in hers and the gentleness of her voice. She’s been living life in this impossible filter of Regina, Regina, where every step is a memory and everyone around Emma is a reason to think of her again.

“I had a friend,” Emma whispers. “And I fucked it up and I think I lost her and I don’t know…I wasn’t going to walk away anymore, right? I shouldn’t feel this sick about losing a friend,” She laughs, watery and lost, and Artemis strokes her back again. “We were so much better together, and now we’re never going to have that again.”

“Never say never,” Artemis murmurs, and she presses a soft kiss to Emma’s cheek, her lips lingering against Emma's skin. It twinges at something deep within Emma, warmth blossoming from her stomach, and Emma closes her eyes and leans against her.

“You don’t know her. It’s over.” Even Artemis and their easy bond can’t get rid of the pit in Emma’s stomach that Regina had planted, and she aches and warms and aches some more. “She isn’t exactly the forgiving type.”

“That makes two of us,” Artemis says wryly. “I told you I was off-putting.”

“I don’t see it.” Emma leans in closer, ducking her head down to rest on the other woman’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you don’t have any friends.”

Artemis is quiet for long enough that Emma pops her head up again to glance curiously at her. “What is it?”

“I…might have had another friend,” she says, looking stricken. “I never thought… No.” She shakes her head, her hand clenching so tightly around Emma’s hand that Emma can feel nails biting into her skin. “No, I didn’t. I couldn’t have.”

She stiffens and then sags, her grip on Emma loosening, and Emma closes her eyes again and listens to their disjointed breathing in the quiet of the garden.

Chapter Text

She mopes around in the station in the morning, still gloomy but better at containing it. But David must have sensed it anyway and called in the cavalry, because Henry arrives after school and lingers until she sends him home, unprepared for another confrontation with Regina.

She calls Gold this time and gets a nervous Belle again. “He said he’d look into it for a price,” she says apologetically. “He…he hasn’t been around much, sorry.”

Short of putting up signs and interrogating the whole town, she doesn’t have any leads on this murder investigation, and she makes a note to call in the cannery worker’s colleagues for another run of interviews.

That done, it’s a tired, lonely day, and she drives back to her apartment and decides not to go to Double Blind tonight. She doesn’t have the energy to be around people, not with this storm cloud that’s settled over her since yesterday afternoon.

She scrubs off her makeup and pulls on her rattiest, most comfortable pajamas when someone raps at her door.

“Now?” she groans, slumping back into the couch. There’s a second, less confident knock, and she sighs and yanks open the door.

Regina is framed in her doorway, her arms full of… Is that a tub of Rocky Road? And…

“The show isn’t available at our local video store,” Regina says, tugging at Dancing With The Stars: Dance Off The Pounds with confidence. “I didn’t think this was what you wanted, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

Emma takes a step back and Regina walks past her into the apartment, peering around until she finds the kitchen and locates a pair of spoons and bowls. “Henry’s with your parents,” she calls from the other room. “I’m holding that handheld time waster you got for him in New York hostage tonight to make sure he actually makes some headway on his book report. He’ll– what?” she says, looking surprised.

Emma is standing right behind her, too close and too taken aback to realize that fact until Regina is turning and her hand is splayed across Emma’s stomach to steady herself. “What are you doing?” she says, at a loss.

Regina purses her lips and turns back to the ice cream, her palm against the thin material of Emma’s shirt just long enough for Emma to feel the heat of it. “I thought that was obvious. I’m apologizing. Where’s your ice cream scoop?” She opens another drawer and wrinkles her nose at its offerings, fishing out a large spoon instead.

No. Regina, apologizing to her? Impossible. “What?”

“I shouldn’t have to,” she says, a note of resentment returning to her voice. “You were like a dog with a bone.” Emma grits her teeth, hopeless again. Regina mutters, "But…I was overly harsh, I guess.”

“You are apologizing,” Emma says in astonishment, and only about half of it is feigned. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

Regina quirks an eyebrow. “Give it up, Swan.” She gives her a shove toward the couch and picks up her bowls of ice cream, settling down against the arm of the couch before Emma can take that seat.

“We don’t eat outside of the kitchen in my home,” Emma says primly, if only to get that eyebrow to rise again.

Regina doesn’t disappoint. “There’s an open sleeve of cookies under this cushion. I think I’m sitting on a soda can.” She digs it out of the cushion and tosses it at Emma. “Tell me you’ve been recycling.”

“You’re not the mayor anymore. You can’t fine me,” Emma informs her, plopping down beside her. Regina rolls her eyes. Emma switches on the TV. “Unless you want to ‘dance off the pounds’ instead?”

“Maybe after the ice cream.” Regina licks her spoon, her tongue flitting out as she lets out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan. Emma’s eyes are glued to Regina's tongue before she remembers herself and course-corrects. “I really am sorry,” Regina says, catching Emma’s gaze.

“You were right,” Emma admits. “You did ask me to stay away from you and I shouldn’t have seen any of that. I just…I thought we had something worth saving.”

Regina’s face does that funny soft thing that she usually only reserves for Henry, and Emma’s heart does that other funny soft thing that she hasn’t reserved for anyone in a long, long time. “Maybe we do,” Regina says, and she reaches out like she’s going to take Emma’s hand, fingers curling around it into her palm. Emma stares down at it. Regina retracts her hand, awkwardly patting Emma’s knee instead.

They steal glances at each other and watch TV and eat ice cream, and Emma has no idea what’s going on here– if this is Regina’s way of ending the whole conflict or if they’ll be back to hating each other tomorrow. And then Regina sighs loudly, dropping her spoon into her bowl, and says, “Robin wants me to take her around town so she’ll stop thinking I’m going to kill her in her sleep,” and Emma barks out a startled laugh. Regina puts a hand over her eyes. “And I’m actually considering it.”

“Marian is really nice.”

“You may have noticed this one, but I don’t do nice.”

“You brought me ice cream,” Emma retorts, grinning stupidly. This feels good, secure and hopeful in a way that she hasn’t felt since New York, and she dares to believe that it might last this time. “And you went hunting for Dancing With The Stars for me.”

“Yes, well, you get extra whiny when you’re moping. Henry was ten minutes late for dinner, don’t think I didn’t notice,” Regina huffs.

“I missed you, too,” Emma ventures, her eyes dancing, and Regina shakes her head and turns back to the TV without confirmation or protest.

She awakens in the morning with a crick in her neck and something heavy holding her down, and she realizes that she’s still on the couch. She picks up her head. Regina is lying on her side, her head resting against Emma’s abdomen and an arm flung over Emma's thighs. She looks peaceful, unworried, as distant from the Evil Queen in sleep as she’s ever been, and Emma reaches out to brush Regina's hair out of her face without a second thought.

It’s almost as though she's been given something precious with just Regina’s trust, something to treasure no matter what comes next; and Emma is content to watch her, Regina’s breath soft against her stomach and her body shifting against Emma in her sleep. This is good. This is…better than good, and she doesn’t know what could have brought Regina to this point– to what looks a hell of a lot like forgiveness– but she’s glad.

Her musings are interrupted by a banging at the door and Regina wakes with a gasp, looking around wildly for a moment before she catches sight of Emma. Surprise flits across her face, then the old guarded fear, and Emma watches her with warm eyes that dissipate the panic on Regina’s face into a smile. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Regina says groggily, and she still sounds…not quite comfortable, but not angry, either. “I fell asleep on your couch.”

“It was a late night.” They’d talked and then You’ve Got Mail had been on so they’d watched that, and then they’d exhausted Emma’s meager wine supply and…had they planned a campaign to win back Regina’s mayoral seat? She squints at the floor and sees a paper reading ALL OF YOUR CURSE ARE BELONG TO US. Oh. Yeah, they had. With wine.

“There’s someone at your door,” Regina notes. The knocking is getting louder, more urgent, and someone– Granny? Emma thinks, with a sudden surge of dread– is shouting her name.

No, no, no. Something’s wrong and she hadn’t been at the club last night, had missed– Artemis, Emma realizes in terror. Artemis had been there.

She pulls her still-asleep legs out from under Regina, who picks up her body and then drops again onto to the couch, her eyes drifting closed. “Wake me up when there’s coffee.” Regina in the morning is nothing like Emma would have expected– eggs and toast already on the table, she’d imagined, and Regina strutting around in a pantsuit like she’s been up for hours– and Emma has to swallow the fondness that mingles with terror as she pulls the door open.

“Where the hell have you been?” Granny demands. “I’ve been calling all–“ She cuts herself off, eyes zeroing in on Regina asleep on the couch. “Well,” she says, loading her words with equal parts distaste and suggestion.

Emma ignores that. “What’s going on, Granny?” Her phone is dead somewhere in the bedroom she’d never made it to last night, and she bites her lip guiltily. She’d taken a night to herself and now…

“Hephaestus disappeared from the club last night,” Granny says, and Emma can see the fear on her face. “He went to get us drinks and never came back. I tried tracking him and someone…I think I was knocked unconscious. And I woke up at sunrise.”

“Hephaest–“ Emma remembers the older man who’d been with Granny even while she’d entertained. “You’re sure he didn’t just get tired and leave? It’s not like you can get in touch outside the club, right?”

Granny shakes her head, her eyes pained and furious. “I thought so. And then Pinocchio came wandering into the diner this morning, crying for his father. No one’s seen Geppetto anywhere.”

“Marco,” Emma breathes. “You and Marco? You knew who he was?”

Granny scowls at her. “Of course I did. The glamour changed his face and voice, not his scent.”

It’s kind of cute, in a gross kind of way. Snap out of it, she warns herself, and shakes off the last of her sleepiness and Regina high. “Have you checked his house?”

“The Blue Fairy says that he isn’t on this plane of existence anymore. Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.” Granny heaves her crossbow. “And when I followed his scent into the woods, it just stopped where…” She waves her hands vaguely. “Somewhere in the gardens.”

“The gardens,” Emma repeats, her heart thudding with hope. A lead. A real lead. She focuses on that instead of the guilt and dismay that threaten to overwhelm her instead, the awareness that she could have been there to see it all.

Artemis must have been there. Artemis must have seen something.

And Emma had decided to wallow in her misery instead of joining Artemis, and then she’d had Regina receptive and she’d just…pushed aside the case for a night. Just one night, and someone had died. Someone she knows, someone she’d liked…

“Does Archie know?” she asks, her fingers digging into her sides.

Archie finds out. Marco is beloved enough that everyone’s heard by the time Emma reaches Granny’s in the morning, and she’s inundated with demands as she walks inside.

“Does Storybrooke have a serial killer on their hands?” Sidney demands. “What is the sheriff’s office doing about this?”

“The Evil Queen did it!” comes the predictable shout.

“Is he dead or just gone?” someone else wants to know. “Because if he’s dead, then I’m not paying him for that sign repair he did last month. It was a shoddy job, anyway.”

“Is it true he was eaten by werewolves?” one of the dwarves asks, and Ruby gives him a dirty look from where she’s sitting with a pale Belle.

“We’re all going to die!” Lottie wails, and Emma sticks two fingers in her mouth and blows out a piercing whistle.

“Enough!” she shouts. “I am investigating these disappearances!” They fall silent, watching her attentively. “Everything is under control.” She says it with enough firmness that they listen, just like that, comfortable to leave this in her hands when she sounds so confident. “I don’t recommend that you go out at night. If you do, bring a buddy. That’s all I can share at this time.”

She marches to the counter and makes her order.

She doesn’t get to stay at the apartment after she rouses Regina again, ticking off the details of what had happened, but she leaves behind Granny’s pancakes and a coffee and then heads down to Double Blind with Ruby. “This is a club?” Ruby says dubiously.

“At night it is. I don’t ask questions about this town anymore. Can you…” She nods at the grass in front of them. “Sniff him out?”

“He went this way,” Ruby points toward the shed that is the main building at night and then steps around it. “And then…” She cocks her head like she’s picked up a new scent and grins wildly. “Emma, you didn’t tell me you were–“

She flushes. “Shut up, Ruby.”

“Not a word.” Ruby holds up her hand. “Explains the two coffees, though.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do here.” Ruby touches a bush near where the chaise longue had been. “Here. He vanished here. It smells…kind of like the cannery, actually. Fishy. Think this is where the other ones went, too?”

Emma closes her eyes and concentrates, focusing on any residue of magic she can sense in the area. There’s something, a potential like a geyser about to erupt from the ground, and she backs up just in time, shoving Ruby back as there’s a burst of light around them, dark and angry and with enough force that they both go flying.

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know.” She can still feel the magic around them, acrid against her tongue and enough to make her shiver with revulsion. It feels…wrong, untenable, like oil against water, and she dials Regina’s number with shaky hands.

She clicks away from the screen a moment later, sending a text instead because she’s a coward and has no idea where they stand when Regina’s actually awake– if she's going to shrug off last night as an error in judgment and go back to giving her the cold shoulder. Magical explosion down by the water where Marco disappeared?

I’ll take a look, comes the immediate response, and Emma stares at the text for a hair longer than necessary. Ruby snickers. “Shut up, Ruby,” Emma says again.

Ruby heads out while Emma awaits Regina. “Granny could use some support right now,” she says apologetically. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

She needs a scalding hot shower now to scrape the darkness off her skin, and she sits down where she’d sat on the day that Artemis had comforted her and tries to remember the touch of Artemis’s hand against her back as she longs for Regina.

“Emma.” She’d drifted off and now she awakens to Regina crossing the clearing to her, her fingers touching Emma’s face. “This whole place stinks of dark magic. What did you do?”

“It’s in the ground,” Emma manages, focusing on Regina’s touch to clean away the ugliness of the magic.

Regina pulls away from her and stands, Emma staggering to her feet to follow her. They close their eyes, turning to sense out the magic from the ground again. It explodes with the same force, and Emma’s hands windmill in place for a moment before she tumbles to the ground onto Regina. Regina’s hands are pressed against her chest and Emma’s are flat against the ground, and both of them look like they’ve lost a battle with a tornado.

Regina stares up at her, wide-eyed and sick, and Emma tucks a loose strand of hair behind Regina’s ear before she registers their position and that Regina’s hands are still braced against her chest. “Sorry about that,” she says, and Regina’s eyes flicker to her hands for a moment. “Normally I’d take you out to dinner first,” she jokes wanly, and Regina shoves her away in surprise.

She recovers a moment later, rolling her eyes. “Miss Swan, I’d expect a lot more than that before we got anywhere near that.”

Emma gapes at her, open-mouthed, and Regina shifts back to businesslike before Emma can retort. “That was…almost familiar. Tastes like Gold,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “This is his handiwork.”

She stalks back out through the gate without a glance back, and Emma trails after her obediently. “Does magic really work like that? Like, you can sense someone else’s magic fingerprint on everything they do?”

“Depends on how familiar the other person’s magic is.” Regina tosses a brief glance at her. “I’ve had a handle on yours since you jumpstarted my magic with Jefferson’s hat.”

“Got it.” She feels warm at that revelation and shakes it off as overly sentimental. “Uh. About last night.”

“It was a mistake,” Regina says immediately, and Emma's stomach drops. Regina ignores her squeak of frustrated denial. “I don’t need to run for run for mayor when Snow keeps begging me to retake the office. We wasted all that wine on nothing.”

“Regina.” But when she catches up to her, she sees the hint of sly amusement in her eyes at screwing with Emma so thoroughly. Emma narrows her eyes at her. “You’re an asshole.”

Regina quirks a smile. “That I am, dear.”

Regina’s car is parked at the edge of the woods and they drive it to the pawn shop in comfortable silence. Emma’s surprised when Regina’s the one to break it as they pull in in front of the shop. “About Marian.”

“Yeah?”

“If I did…” She drums her fingers against the steering wheel. “If I did show Marian around Storybrooke, would you come with me? Make sure neither of us kill each other in the process?” She sounds like she’s joking until her voice rises too quickly at the end of the question, and Emma looks at her and understands that it’s a very real fear.

She grins, ducking out of the passenger seat and pulling Regina’s door open for her. “I’ll make sure that if you’re plotting to kill anyone on that outing, it’ll be me,” she promises, and Regina elbows her hard as they walk into the shop. “Hey, is it okay if Henry stays with you this weekend? I don’t want him to be in the middle of…” Her voice trails off.

Belle’s stacks of books have gotten even higher in the past couple of days, and Emma’s eyebrows rise. “Belle?”

“Emma!” A stack of books is pushed aside and Belle pokes her head out from between them. “Regina.” Belle sounds alarmed at the idea of both of them in the room. “Is something wrong?”

Emma hooks her thumbs into her pants, leaning back against the wall as disarmingly as she can. Regina glowers in place and says, “Where’s Gold?”

“He ran out for a little while,” Belle says, waving vaguely toward the door, and Emma’s lie detector pings. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” she says, and Emma’s lie detector pings louder.

Regina takes a menacing step forward and Emma seizes her by the arm before she can terrorize their newest lead. “Stop that,” she hisses, stepping in front of her. Regina sulks. Emma takes Belle’s hand before she can retract it. “Belle, when’s the last time you saw him?”

Belle’s hand trembles in hers. “I…I don’t understand what you mean.” She looks terrified, just as much as she had the other day. “He’s here. He just…ran out for a little while.”

Emma smiles as gently as she can manage. “Let me know when he comes in, okay? I promise that no one’s in trouble. We just have some questions for him.” And then he’ll be in trouble, probably, but she doesn’t mention that to the woman covering for him. She has no idea what Gold could be after with the club or why he might be taking human sacrifices, but she isn’t going to bring that up to his girlfriend just yet. They’ll find him on their own.

Belle bobs her head and watches them as they leave, looking very, very anxious.

She’s already at the club when the sun begins to set and a sparkling pink fairy dust seems to rise from the ground, constructing Double Blind in a matter of minutes. There are already a few visitors lurking in the area, glancing around at each other and then looking away, and Emma waits in the shadows until they’ve all filed inside.

“Another disappearance,” she says to the man behind the desk.

He inclines his head, looking unsurprised. It’s a struggle to keep from punching him on the spot. “I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“I’m going to need those records you’re keeping again. Last night’s?” she demands, holding out her hand.

He produces two scrolls from out of nowhere, and she scans them, frowning. “You didn’t match up the names.” The first list reads like a visit to Olympus and the second is Storybrooke citizens, but there’s no indication that one matches the other, unless Granny really has been going as Zeus.

“Anonymity, Sheriff, anonymity!” He looks delighted at her irritation and she scowls and flips through the pages again, scanning the names on the list.

“I’m keeping these,” she announces, bolting for the door to the outside, and she settles down in her car, parked where Regina’s had been earlier that day, and goes through the lists.

There are no new names on the Storybrooke list that she’s had to look out for before. Quite a few Lost Boys. An elementary school teacher who’s famously uptight, even according to Snow. Leroy is on the list, as is that fairy Astrid he’d been so besotted with. Mulan is the final name on the page, and Emma sighs and ticks off all the people she’d call in for questioning.

She doesn’t see a Thetis on the alias page, although there are three other Erises, and–

She blinks at the page, trailing her finger down the names a second time. No Artemis. The odds of Artemis not being there– conveniently on a night when Emma hadn’t been present– are next to none. Artemis is always there. Artemis herself had admitted to it.

And yet she isn’t on the list, not as a visitor who’d passed in through the booth. Suspicion flares and takes hold of Emma, and she’s back out of her car a moment later, leaving the lists behind and racing back down to Double Blind.

Artemis is in the garden where they’d met this time, and she looks up at Emma with bright eyes. “Eris!”

Emma grabs her, twists her around and slams her down onto the bench, drawing her gun with one smooth move. Artemis’s eyes flicker to it and hold. “Eris,” she says, her voice darkening. “You’re the murderer.”

“What? No, I’m not the murderer!” Emma sputters. “You’re the murderer!” She keeps her gun pointed at Artemis, her hands shaking. “Where were you last night? How did you get in without using the booth? Are you a witch? Some kind of spirit? Do you even exist outside of this club? Was this all some twisted…some twisted…” Had she been taken in by another con, just weeks after Walsh? She is sick and tired of her romantic life being manipulations and–

“What the hell?” Artemis demands, and she’s twisting in place and moving so quickly that Emma isn’t sure if she’s seeing things or it had been magic at work. But suddenly Artemis is behind her, one hand wrapped around Emma’s outstretched hand and the other around Emma’s waist, and Emma freezes. “Eris, what are you talking about?”

“I saw…you weren’t on the visitor list…” She’s suddenly a lot less confident. She can also feel Artemis breathing against her, warm breath tickling at her ear in very un-spirit-like ways. “Last night…Marco…”

“I didn’t come here last night,” Artemis says slowly. “You had me…thinking about some things and I was working through them. I wasn’t here when Marco went missing.”

“That’s convenient.”

“It’s the truth.” Artemis takes a step back, tugging her around and sliding the gun out of Emma’s hand. She sets it down on the bench. “Eris, I’ve never hurt anyone in here.”

Emma sags, sensing nothing but honesty in Artemis’s words. “Then who did?” she whispers. “I should have been here. I should have seen–“

“This isn’t your responsibility,” Artemis says swiftly. “You’re allowed to take a night off.”

“No,” Emma says glumly. “It’s the sheriff’s responsibility.” She can feel the weight of it finally sinking in, the day of action cut short and the guilt of the morning returning. “The sheriff should have been here at all times if she’d known that people were going missing. She can’t take a night off.”

“Of course she can.” Artemis sounds miffed by the accusation and Emma wonders for a moment if they really do know each other on the outside. “What, is she supposed to devote every waking moment to investigating? So we can have a stressed, exhausted sheriff making judgment calls?”

“Better than no one making them,” Emma mutters.

Artemis narrows her eyes at her. “I understand that you’re feeling helpless about this happening, but the sheriff has been working hard to find the culprit and I’m sure she has some leads. Which you’d know if you coordinated with her.”

She still sounds defensive and irritated with Emma for suggesting otherwise, and Emma grumbles, “What do you care?”

“I care about this town running smoothly,” Artemis retorts, and then she sucks in a breath and says, “It’s good for business.”

“You’re a businesswoman?” Emma had thought for a minute that she might be Mulan under that glamour, which had been…not the worst thing in the world, maybe– except that she doesn’t think the glamour changes ethnicities and Artemis seems vaguely not-white to her eyes, but definitely not Chinese. “Who are you on the outside?” It slips out of her mouth, not her first violation of unspoken protocol.

“You don’t need to know that,” Artemis murmurs, sitting down on the bench at last. She pats it, still looking unhappy with Emma, and Emma joins her uncertainly. “The only person at fault with all of this is whoever is snatching away people in the night.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” She must sound unconvinced, miserable and guilty as she is, and when Artemis touches her back, she leans against her and closes her eyes.

For a moment, she remembers sleeping with Regina in her arms and wishes again that instead of Artemis…No. Regina wouldn’t do any of this, anyway. And she has all kinds of complicated but intense feelings for Artemis. She’s happy here with her.

Still, though, she thinks of Regina and smiles.

Chapter Text

Granny peers through the names on the list and shakes her head again. “I have no idea. I know that…” She stabs three names. “They were all nearby when Geppetto went to get us drinks. I can’t recognize everyone’s scent, though. Not in a crowded room.” She clenches her fists on the table. “We knew who we were from the start– well, I did. He caught on later.” She smiles, hard and angry. “And we kept going back because I was having fun.”

“You’re allowed to have fun,” Emma says gently. “You couldn’t have known. You didn’t make Marco disappear.”

Granny gives her a long, tired look. “I’ll go get your grilled cheese,” she says, and stands up abruptly.

Henry takes her seat a few minutes later. “Mom is on her way,” he says, sliding Emma’s cocoa down the table to him. “You guys are friends now, huh?”

“Sorta. I guess so.” She bites into her grilled cheese. “For now.”

He rolls his eyes. “That’s reassuring.”

“Shut your mouth, kid,” she says pleasantly, and then sees Regina standing over them and adds hastily, “While you’re drinking. My cocoa. Hey!” She snatches it back from him and he slides further into the booth to let Regina sit.

“Was Granny able to help you?”

“Not much. But I crossed a few names off my list.” She passes it to Regina, who peruses the names on it.

“Mulan,” she says thoughtfully.

Emma shakes her head. “Not a murderer, come on. Have you ever met her?”

Regina shrugs. “That wasn’t what I meant. I was just…” She frowns. “Never mind. When is Marian due to arrive?”

“Right now,” Emma says, glancing up at the door. The woman she’d saved from the past is looking around warily, and she meets Emma’s eyes with gratitude and hurries over to her. “Hey, Marian. This is becoming a family outing, I guess?”

“You guess wrong,” Regina says dryly. “Henry is on his way to the bus stop.”

“There was a murder yesterday!” Henry protests. “And there’s this annoying quiz first period that I didn’t–“ Regina turns steely eyes on him. “I’ll go,” he mutters, taking one last sip of Emma’s cocoa.

Emma gives him a one-armed hug before he goes and Regina heads out to walk him to the bus stop, Henry dragging his feet all the way. When they’re gone, Marian sits next to her, leans in, and says, “This is a bad idea.”

“No,” Emma says halfheartedly.

“Robin was so insistent. She hates me. She nearly killed me the night after I came here.”

Emma hadn’t heard this. “What?”

“I mean, she saved my life.” Marian twists her hair between her fingers. “I got lost in these woods and I was tracking my way back home and she was just…suddenly there right in front of me. I thought she was going to kill me. She looked like she was going to kill me. And then she tossed aside a werewolf who’d been creeping up on me, welcomed me to Storybrooke, and walked me back.”

“Oh.” That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as Emma had thought it might, but she remembers Regina’s fear, Make sure neither of us kill each other, and wonders. “Are you sure she wasn’t just–“

“I live in the woods, Emma. I know when I’m being hunted.”

“And Regina is very good at being creepy,” Emma concedes. “She had Sidney following me around town when I first got here, snapping photos of me and reporting back to her.” She remembers it a little wistfully, the good old days when they’d hated each other. Now is better, but that had been fun, she thinks, recalling a chainsaw at the apple tree and that really nice dress that Regina’s eyes had popped in as she’d shouted at Emma.

Marian is watching her silent reminiscence, bemused. “I thought you were with the pirate.”

“I’m not. What does that have to do with Regina?” Emma says, defensive, and Marian shrugs hastily and watches as Regina enters the shop again. She looks thoughtful now, a little less afraid, and it seems to relax Regina, too.

They head out after some brief small talk and Regina begins pointing out different shops and locations. Emma, true to her word, pipes in with comments that have Regina glowering at her.

“That’s the town library–“

“Underneath it is a giant cavern where Regina turns her friends into dragons and locks them up for 28 years,” Emma adds. “It’s roomy.”

Marian stares at both of them like she isn’t sure what to make of this, and Regina says tightly, “Yes, this is a fate that could befall any of my friends, really,” with a pointed smile at Emma.

Emma says, her body warm with any of my friends, “And hey, there’s the clock tower!”

“Oh?” Marian asks, sounding relieved.

“One time Regina’s psycho sister came to town and threw her into it.” She frowns, remembering it. “How in the world did you survive that?”

“Magic.” Regina rubs her side as though she’s aching all over again.

Marian says, “Sounds like there’s never a quiet moment here.”

“Not often. But we manage to get them in.” Regina’s voice lilts, ever-so-inconspicuously, in Emma’s direction, and there’s a little bit of tinted pink at her cheeks when Emma looks at her. Emma bites her lips together to keep from grinning. “The park is down this block. I’m sure you’ve been there before.”

“Of course.”

“But see that building over there?” Regina gestures across the street to a storefront that Emma’s never noticed. “Henry used to go there all the time when he was younger. It’s an indoor playground, complete with a sandbox and a few inflatables. Perfect for a rainy day.”

“I’ve never heard of it.” Marian drifts down the block, Regina attentive at her side, and Emma trails behind them, watching their body language for a trace of unease from either. This isn’t something she can participate in. She hasn’t…raised a kid in Storybrooke or played that whole soccer mom thing out with Henry. She hasn’t actually raised Henry, no matter what memories Regina has given her. This is good for Marian and Regina, though, and she’s glad that they’re getting along.

Then she moves a little closer to them and realizes that they’re talking about Robin Hood.

Regina’s hands are clasping and unclasping, her only sign of discomfort, and Emma hangs back and watches them like a hawk. “I just…I know people drift apart sometimes,” Marian is saying slowly. “And you have this whole soulmate thing between you–“

Regina holds up a hand. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, people drift apart– not usually because their soulmate had executed their wife in another timeline, but this is Storybrooke,” she says wryly. “But what matters is the decisions we made after. The whole idea of a soulmate…it only matters if we decide it matters, right? And it doesn’t.” She says it with confidence and a little piece of Emma’s heart glows with pride for her.

Marian looks relieved and guilty. “I just…I’m sorry. I’m not sorry,” she amends just as quickly. “You killed me. But you’re different now. And you were happy.”

“I’m happy now,” Regina murmurs. “I have…something now. It’s very new.” The glow in Emma’s heart is blotted out. She’s lying. She’s making up stories to keep Marian and Robin Hood at a distance. There’s no way Regina has moved on to a new man that quickly.

But she sounds earnest and Emma can detect no trace of a lie in her voice. Regina means it, or she’s gotten very good at pretending. “How about we show Marian the school?” she says, a little too loudly, and Regina’s brow furrows. “Is Roland enrolled yet?”

Marian leaps onto the proffered topic and Regina eyes Emma with concern, Emma refusing to look back at her or think about why it is that she can’t breathe right now.

They make it down to the pier with Marian and Regina still chatting and Emma silent and moody, kicking at pebbles and mustering up smiles whenever one or the other of the women looks back at her in concern. “Did you ever hear from Gold?” Regina asks her as they turn toward the woods. Double Blind is down the path below that snakes out from the beach into the woods, not more than a five-minute walk away.

Emma shakes her head. “Belle is still insisting that he’ll be back soon. She seems kind of addled by the whole thing. I don’t know what he did to her, but whatever she’s covering up for him, it’s something shitty.”

“You should bring her into the station for questioning.”

“I did.” Belle had shaken through the whole thing and given Emma nothing concrete, just begged her again and again to be let back to her books. Emma had told her she needed to find Thetis and she’ll let her off the hook if she can help. “You really think that Gold is behind this? It doesn’t sound like his M.O.”

“I have no idea. It’s possible that it’s just…general dark magic and I was wrong about his signature on it.” But Regina sounds dubious. “Gold is a collector, but it’s usually of items, not people. Something of significance, maybe a necklace or a hair, but not anyone who’d give him trouble.”

“Unless he’d loaned out a spell or some magic to someone else. He’s done that for you, hasn’t he?”

Regina scowls. “I will not have another sorcerer causing trouble in this town. We have enough–“ She stops, frowning at the rickety sign reading Double Blind with extra venom.

“What is this place?” Marian asks.

Regina shrugs quickly. “No idea.”

“It’s a club, I guess,” Emma says, affecting an air of cluelessness. Regina eyes her suspiciously and Emma eyes her back with equal suspicion. They both look away a moment later.

Marian says, “Oh, yes. This is where those murders are happening.”

“Right.” Emma freezes. “Wait. How did you know that they were happening here?”

“We lost a Merry Man here.” Marian looks troubled. “Well. I think we lost him a long time before today.”

“Wait.” There hadn’t been any reports of a missing Merry Man, not unless Typhon had had a second job. “Lottie La Bouff’s boyfriend?”

Marian shakes her head. “Much the Miller’s Son. At least, that’s what we knew him as. Here he was…” She bites her lip. “I’m not meant to speak of it.”

Regina says gently, “Marian, we need to know. If there’s some little detail that can help Emma with her investigation– you can save lives with that information.”

Marian still looks reluctant. “It’s complicated. The Enchanted Forest has never been hospitable to those who don’t fit all the proper molds.”

“What, like it’s racist?” Regina and Marian both give her long looks. Emma winces. “Right. Got it. So what’s the deal with Much?”

“Much fled his life when he began to come to terms with who he truly was,” Marian murmurs. “Left his husband and faced a lot of hostility until he joined us. Eventually, I think it must have gotten to be too much and he stopped presenting as a man for his own safety.”

Emma puts the pieces together, goes through her brief list of victims as comprehension settles in. Michael Tillman had said that his wife had been unhappily paired back with him because of the curse, that she’d been– “Presenting as a– Erebos is trans?” she says, remembering the mysterious man who’d accompanied Pan, and there’s the missing piece at last.

She enters the station and sinks down heavily in her seat as David looks up from interview reports. “What is it?”

“They were all in love,” she says. “Granny and Marco. Lottie’s boyfriend and Thetis. Much and Pan. That’s what the missing piece was. That’s what all these people had in common. They were the ones who’d found true love at Double Blind. And they were murdered for it.”

She leaves Michael a message and heads out to the club again, her fists clenched and suspicion rising. She doesn’t give a damn about this being Storybrooke and improbable structures rising from the ground whenever they please. There’s something sinister about this one, about the club and the man behind the desk, and she’s determined to get to the bottom of it at last with good, old-fashioned police work.

“Swan.” It’s been days since she’s seen Hook, and she does a double-take when he pops out of the woods. He ducks his head, grinning at her. “Back to fall madly in love with me, aye?” But it’s weaker than it’s been before, as though he’s finally beginning to accept that she has other priorities, and she manages a smile.

“Be glad that I didn’t fall in love with you or we’d both be dead,” she offers, running through everything she knows now. She can feel his eyes on her as she speaks, but she’s still uncomfortable enough around him that she watches the entrance to the club instead.

“You’ve been busy,” he comments when she finishes. There’s an unspoken without me and she shrugs and glares at him reproachfully. “Swan–”

She cuts him off before they fall into the same conversation again. “I’m hoping we can still be friends.” She says it with firmness, more confident than she’s been in a long time. She has Regina back and there’s Artemis in the club and maybe, just maybe, she’s back in control of her life again and not nearly as vulnerable as she’d been since that terrible mistake of a kiss. “I need you to understand that nothing is going to happen between us. And if you really do have all these feelings for me, I’d hope that you’d respect that.”

Hook nods, his eyes unreadable. “I will take what I can get,” he says, and the second half of that, what I can get, rings a little too ominous to Emma’s ears. Maybe she’s just hearing things, stretched to her limits and distrustful of Hook to begin with, but she still hangs back until he disappears into the club.

She’s about to march in after him when she sees movement out of the corner of her eye– two hooded figures slipping along the side of the fence toward the right. She shines her flashlight at them and they scatter, one running at the beach with a flash of yellow hair and the other hurtling deeper into the woods. Emma takes off after the latter, winding through trees and tripping through the underbrush.

She isn’t fast in the woods but she’s faster than the other hooded figure, and she stretches out her hands as they run and sends a wave of magic at the runner. The figure goes flying through the air and lands on the ground with a thump, and Emma races to them and tears the hood off.

“Belle?” The other woman blinks up at her owlishly, and then begins to sob. Emma gapes, another piece slotting into place. “Belle, was that Thetis?” Belle bobs her head up and down. “Tell me,” Emma commands.

“I didn’t…he was just…Rumple lied to me,” Belle manages, the tears still spilling down her cheeks. “I thought he loved me! And he’s been…I didn’t know what to do.” She’s gasping out fragmented sentences, each one more incomprehensible than the last, and Emma tugs her back to her feet and puts an awkward hand on her shoulder.

“I’m going to take you to the station, okay? I need…the whole story. And Thetis.”

She makes a quick stop at the booth to pick up the evening’s lists from the man in the booth, watching him warily as he summons them into her hand. She doesn’t say anything yet, careful about spooking him when she’s this close, and she tucks the scrolls into her pocket and heads back out with Belle.

Belle is still shaking and babbling and she keeps begging Emma for my books, please, my books can make it better and Emma sits her down and sends David out to get her something to eat. “Tell me where Gold is,” she says.

Belle looks up, her mouth stained red with the cherry pie that Mary Margaret had delivered with David. “He’s here. He’s all over, can’t you feel him? Where’s my dagger? It’s a lie,” she says in a rapid stream of half-explanations that make no sense.

She falls asleep sometime around sunrise, her words more and more cryptic as the night goes on, and Emma curls up in her chair and pulls out the list she’d been given. David is long gone and Emma is on her own, her finger trailing down the page to compare it with the visitors from the night Marco had vanished, and she surrenders to slumber at last somewhere around the H’s. 

Chapter Text

When she wakes up at noon, Belle is tossing and turning in the cell and there’s a fresh cup of coffee on her desk from David. She takes a long sip and stares down at the lists again–

–nearly spits out her coffee–

–gapes at them again.

Clearly written just a few names down from where she’d been, is La Bouff, Charlotte. “Lottie,” she says aloud, the pieces coming together; and then, just below it, Mills, Regina.

Her heart sinks and she jumps up, banging her knees on her desk, and stumbles out the door.

Lottie is at Game of Thorns when Emma comes in. She watches her flit from flower to flower, plucking out a few to make a bouquet, and her face is as gloomy and distressed as it’s been since the day her boyfriend had gone missing. “Thetis?” Emma ventures, and Lottie turns slowly.

“You don’t understand,” she says.

“I think I do.” Emma leans back against the wall, ticking points off on her fingers. “You figured out that your boyfriend was cheating on you, so you followed him out to Double Blind to have your revenge.”

“Yes, but–“

“You made him fall in love with you there.”

“It wasn’t–“

“And then you killed him.”

“No!” Lottie shakes her head vigorously. “No, of course not! I didn’t even know who he was when we’d fallen in love! Not until…”

She sits down on a stool, burying her face in the flowers. “I knew I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d seen. They said I’d be killed if I–“ She gulps in a breath. “I think I was drugged, but it didn’t knock me out. I have a good tolerance for…all of that.” She looks around nervously. “We shouldn’t be in here.”

“Okay.” Emma holds onto her wrist with a firm grip as they go outside, dragging her along to the park. “Tell me everything.”

Lottie is oddly subdued for a change, glum and nervous and still, and she sits down on a bench with hands folded primly on her lap and stares down at them. “I went after Ral when I figured out what he’d been doing. And I didn’t…know with the glamour and all that, but I decided that if he could find someone new, so could I.” She sobs out a laugh. “And Typhon was everything I’d wanted from him before Double Blind.”

“So you fell in love.”

“We fell in love.” Lottie winds her hands around the stem of the flower she’d taken with her. “And then one day this…handsome man with the loveliest accent and a charming smile offered me a drink when Typhon was out, and I said sure, because why not? We went out to the gardens and…”

She clasps her hands together over her heart. “The man from the desk was there, too. They said…they spoke some incantation and I could feel my heart…exploding, I don’t know. It felt like the life was being sucked out of my body.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Lottie wipes away a tear. “I couldn’t do anything to stop them. But Typhon…he followed me out and he jumped on them, trying to keep them from hurting me…I couldn’t move, but I saw them take him. And then he just…crumbled to dust.” She’s crying now, loud sobs that are drawing attention from the passersby, and Emma rubs her shoulder soothingly. “I knew they’d kill me if I told anyone about him, but I thought…I just needed you to know about it. I knew you could stop them.” She turns pleading eyes to Emma. “Can’t you?”

“Yeah,” Emma promises. “I’m going to stop them. You need to tell me everything else you know.”

“I know what they want,” Lottie whispers. “I know that...they kept talking about me like I was a placeholder. And they kept talking about magic.”

“Like how they were taking you?”

She shakes her head. “Like how it was what they wanted. True love and magic. Magical true love, maybe.”

Emma glances behind them, at the town hall building poking out above the houses around the park, and she bites her lip so hard that it bleeds. “I need to…I have some things to take care of before tonight.”

She runs until she’s breathless and her heart is pounding and all she can think of is Mills, Regina written on that list and Regina murmuring about someone new. And she’s frustrated and she’s terrified and she doesn’t know how she’s going to stop Double Blind, but all she can think about is protect Regina. Save Regina.

“Emma!” Regina looks up at her with welcoming eyes and confusion, and Emma comes to a halt at her desk, hands slamming down onto it as she does. “Emma, what’s wrong?”

“Tell me you haven’t fallen in love,” Emma gasps out.

“What–“

“At Double Blind. I know you’ve been going there. Tell me you aren’t in love!” She aches at the thought of it, longs for it to be a pithy lie and nothing so earth-shattering, and she doesn’t know if she needs it not to be real for Regina’s sake or her own. She isn’t supposed to think about that.

But Regina’s eyes shutter closed and she says cautiously, “That isn’t your business.”

“You can’t go back there.” Emma knows she isn’t explaining herself properly and she doesn’t care, she’s a mess of urgency and terror and then he just…crumbled to dust and she can’t watch that happen to Regina. She can’t–

“Of course I can. What is this, are you trying to sabotage my love life again?” Regina’s voice is decidedly hostile.

Love life.

Emma crumbles, her body going limp until only her hands are holding her up, and she’s miserable and heartbroken and she can’t be, she has…She just wants to protect Regina. That’s why she wants to shatter onto the floor with renewed devastation. “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t–“ she’s chanting, and she thinks there are tears sliding down her cheeks and she doesn’t know why.

Regina circles the desk to steady her, to wrap gentle arms around her, and Emma’s head drops to her shoulder and she quakes in Regina’s embrace and cries wet tears down her dress. “Emma,” Regina is whispering. “Emma, please. Tell me what’s going on.”

Emma slides down to the ground and Regina sits heavily on one of the chairs in front of her, and Emma keeps her arms tight around Regina’s legs and her head on her lap. Stupid, stupid, stupid. When you knew– and you never thought– stupid, stupid Emma Swan who never expected to be it but hurts anyway.

“Don’t go back to Double Blind,” she chokes out, and she wrenches herself away from Regina’s hands, smoothing down her hair, and flees the room.

By nightfall, she’s embarrassed at her breakdown and vulnerable enough that she doesn’t call Regina to explain herself. She’ll have to see her tomorrow to pick up Henry, but maybe by then she’ll have some answers for her, too.

She doesn’t confront the man in the booth yet. First, she has to clear out everyone inside the club. No more casualties. And she has at least one ally here. “Hook,” she mutters, sidling up behind him at the bar.

He frowns at her. “Swan.”

“Listen, something’s going down tonight. I need you to clear out the room, okay? Get everyone out of the club fast and quietly. I’ve found the murderer.” He gives her a curt nod and moves to the closest couple, speaking in low tones to them.

She heads out to the gardens, stepping through each one with no sign of who she’s looking for throughout most of them. She’s never been in the seventh before, and it’s the most elaborate one of all– hanging plants and long paths and a fountain at the center made to look like a waterfall. Artemis is tracing her hand along it, watching with troubled gaze as the water bubbles over her skin.

“Hi,” Emma says.

Artemis turns, her eyes lighting up. “Eris.” She’s bolder than usual, reaching for Emma’s hands and taking them, and Emma feels warm and wishes that this were enough. “You look awful.”

“True love,” Emma murmurs. “That's what the murderer is after.”

“Love,” Artemis repeats, stroking her thumb against Emma’s hand. “How did you find that out?” She tilts her head, frowning at Emma as though she’s beginning to make sense of something.

Emma shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. But I have to stop him. People I…people are in danger.”

“Eris,” Artemis whispers, reaching up to cup her cheek. “You...”

Emma shivers into her touch, closing her eyes and unsure of what they’re talking about. She isn’t in danger. She knows that now. "You need to leave."

"I'm not going anywhere," Artemis retorts. "You need me. You can't do this alone."

And she's so close and that connection is still there, that ease and that magnetic bond that they have, and Emma closes her eyes and wonders if it's really this easy. If she could push aside this useless longing and take what Artemis is offering. "Okay," she breathes, and Artemis leans closer, her lips brushing against Emma's—

Emma drops her hand and flinches back an instant later, her head sagging in defeat. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm...oh god, I'm in love with a straight girl."

Artemis takes a step back. "I see," she says numbly, and she looks like Emma feels, small and hurt and angry.

"No, it's..." She rolls her eyes upward in a silent plea to the universe to make this all work. "It's so fucked up. I brought her soulmate's wife back from the dead and she hated me and now she doesn't and I can't pretend that she doesn't matter. I don't know how to stop feeling—" She covers her face as Artemis's lips part with dawning (fond?) comprehension, as though she's about to laugh. Emma can't— "I should go."

She bolts for the end of the garden and Artemis shouts after her, "Emma, wait! Emma!"

She charges past the gardens and into the building. She's determined to— she doesn't know. End this. Live without the embarrassment of this place and whatever she'd just destroyed with Artemis, whatever she's lost with Regina with her own admission. There's no coming back from any of this, not until Double Blind is gone and this whole period of time is just a series of bad memories.

She pushes open the door and stops running at last, her eyes taking in the room with just enough surprise that it wipes the despair from her mind.

The room is empty, clear as though it hadn't been completely full minutes before, and only the little men who work here are still underfoot, silent as they watch her. Emma twists around, searching the shadows for the one person she’d thought would still be around. She clears her throat. “Hook?"

"Time's up, Swan," Hook says, his voice devoid of glamour, and his arms wrap around her, tight and constricting. She feels a pinprick against her neck where it meets her shoulder as she kicks outward– slow, too slow– and the world blurs before her.

Artemis, she thinks. Artemis is still in the garden. But she’d fled Artemis, had rejected her and run, and Artemis might have given up on her already. Artemis had called after her…Emma, wait.

Emma?

She’s dazed and distracted and everything is kind of hazy as she’s guided to the ground in Hook’s grasp and then let go. “You gave me your word,” he says from a distance. Betrayal moves through her veins, hot and sluggish. “You said if I brought her to you, you’d open her heart to true love.”

“Ah, but I did, didn’t I?” She isn’t surprised to hear the man from the desk responding. “You weren’t the only one with interest in her heart. And she is undoubtedly in love.”

“Not with me!” Hook barks out. “I worked with you, brought you all those people, and you lied to me!”

“Love lies,” the man says smugly. “Three hundred years and you’ve never learned that?”

When Emma focuses, she can see the fury fading from Hook’s face, to be replaced with dawning horror. “You’re going to take her, too, aren’t you?”

“A heart of true love, in true love, to cap off my collection? Of course. My master has very specific needs.” The man gives Hook a mocking bow.

Hook shakes his head. “I won’t let you. You can’t–“ He turns, seizing Emma by her limp arms and pulling her to him. She thinks…she’s angry, she can feel that, and she can feel her own terror like a tangible thing somewhere nearby. “Swan,” he promises, turning them away. “I’m going to save you.” 

Emma feels it before she sees it, an eruption of dark magic like the one that had thrown her into Regina the other day. Only this isn’t a blast, isn’t a blow that sends them flying. It’s like a cavern opening around them with the force of a black hole, pulling with unstoppable force at Emma’s insides.

Hook stumbles, dropping her again, and this time she falls at a position to see what’s going on in front of them. The man’s mouth is expanding, larger and larger still to devour them, and inside of it there is only blackness. Hook shouts a threat and there’s a sensation of silent laughter, the floor vibrating below Emma as Hook draws a sword and points it at the growing cavern of the man’s mouth. “Rot in hell, beast!”

The sword flies from his hand into the mouth, dissolving into spots of silver against the blackness, and then Hook is jerked forward by the chin. Emma’s mouth falls open in horror, whatever sedative she’d been given already beginning to wear off (not enough, she thinks. She still can’t feel her legs).

Hook’s skin comes off as though it’s being suctioned off of him, sliding from his body with a sickening squelching noise as his muscles and organs and bones follow, flattened by the sheer massiveness of the dark magic hole of a mouth, a scream echoing through the room for seconds after he’d already disappeared. Emma scrabbles weakly at the floor with uncooperative hands, struggling to retreat from the beast.

“True love must be reciprocated.” The words echo through her and she isn’t entirely sure that she’s actually heard them as much as felt them. “I had no use for him. You, however…”

There’s a sound like an engine starting, loud and irritating and long, and she realizes a moment too late that it’s an inhalation. The man is breathing in, and her heart jumps in her throat.

No, her heart is actually, physically jumping. She can feel something being sucked out of her, bit by tiny bit, and when she squints in front of her she can see it emerging as multicolored bits of light, drawn slowly toward the man’s still-devouring mouth. “Please,” she chokes out, in agony.

“Please,” echoes a voice behind her, but it’s scornful and unimpressed. “You think you can come terrorize my town? This isn’t the Enchanted Forest. Did you fill out a permit before eating the villagers? Have you even read the town charter?”

Artemis, bold and unafraid, stepping in front of Emma and abruptly cutting off the demon mouth’s hold on her. The flecks of light spring back into Emma, letting her breathe again, and she gapes at what’s unmistakably…it can’t be.

She reaches with useless hands for the Revealer that Belle had given her, finally pointing it at the woman in front of her. “Regina,” she croaks.

And Artemis shrugs off the glamour like it had never been there, revealing the woman beneath it. Regina Mills draws herself up to her most intimidating and glares at the monster in front of them. “What are you trying to accomplish here? Murdering my sheriff with the power of your bad breath?”

The man makes the same wheezing-engine sound again and Emma snatches Regina by the legs, pulling her back before she can be swallowed instead. Regina slips back onto the floor, glowering at her. “You have the worst gaydar in the universe.”

“How long have you known?” Emma demands, remembering the realization dawning on Artemis’s face after they'd kissed. “Ten minutes?”

“Longer than you,” Regina huffs. “Can we focus instead on the thing trying to eat us?”

“Right.” She’s giddy and she can’t tell if it’s from the loss of higher brain functions or the realization that Regina and Artemis are one and the same. She’d felt a connection because they are connected, they’ve been connected for much longer than a week at a club without their true names. Artemis is the parts of Regina that Regina has hidden away from her, and now…

And now. “I have half a mind to introduce some new ordinances about acceptable villainy in Storybrooke,” Regina mutters, watching as the man bears down on them.

“When you’re mayor again,” Emma says helpfully. “If we survive.”

“Two magical True Love hearts?” the man– demon– booms. “I will gladly take you both.”

Regina shifts, her eyes belying concern beneath the irritation as she brushes her hand against Emma’s forehead. “Can you move?”

“Ish.” She can wiggle her toes, which is a start. “Regina, I–“

“I know.” Regina leans in, pressing a swift kiss to Emma’s lips, and Emma closes her eyes and holds her there for an extra minute. “I’m going to buy us some extra time,” Regina promises in a whisper, staggering to her feet.

The demon inhales a third time, and Regina fires a blast of fire-red magic out at him. It hurtles into his mouth and disappears, same as Hook’s sword, but Regina keeps it going, keeps a steady stream firing at him with gritted teeth. Emma closes her eyes and forces her body to respond to her, draws up all the magic she can reach and feels it die halfway through her veins.

Regina flicks a finger and a chandelier drops from the ceiling as a flurry of chairs attack the creature on all sides, battering at him as he twists to catch them all. “Who the hell are you?” Regina demands, fierce in the face of something far beyond them. Emma concentrates and concentrates and struggles to find her strength. “What are you doing here?”

“I was summoned,” reverberates through the room. Emma falls backward again with the shaking of the ballroom floor. “And don’t you recognize me?” The whole building rocks with what must be…laughter? Emma doesn’t know. “My name is Eros.”

“No, her name is Eris!” Regina snaps back, hurling a fireball at the man’s stomach. He leans down, swallowing it into his maw. “I don’t think I’d get you two confused. Not unless she overdid it on my lasagna last night.”

“Really, Regina?” Emma whines, and Regina rolls her eyes at her with affection.

“Eros,” the man repeats. “You may know me as Cupid, purveyor of true love.”

“Oh, come on,” Emma groans. “Is this town trying to ruin everything?”

Regina laughs like a hiss and a grand piano flies through the air, crashing into the back of fucking Cupid's head. He stumbles forward, his mouth shrinking, and then he blows outward with a rush of wind strong enough to hurl Regina against a wall. She drops to the ground and the room shakes again with laughter, Emma scrambling to the side as Cupid bears down on Regina.

She can see it again, flecks of color escaping Regina’s body as her magic wavers, and she acts before her body can stop her, shakes off the last effects of the sedative, races across the room, and hurls every last bit of magic she can find at Cupid.

Her magic hits Regina’s and it glows with curse-breaking light, iridescent and multicolored and shining bright enough that Emma has to squint to see the man ahead of them. He’s laughing, the room still shaking with his glee, and he’s swallowing more and more of their combined power, growing in size as he takes it in.

Emma half-expects him to pop like a video-game final master but he doesn’t, and she’s getting tired and worn out as the monster feeds on their magic and sucks out pieces of them in the process. She can feel something leaving her, something good and warm and loved, and she reaches blindly for Regina. “I need–“

They’re both unsteady on their feet, wavering from side to side as they push their magic outward, but Regina’s been at it for longer than Emma and Emma feels the moment that she slips. “Regina!” She catches her instinctively, her hand still outstretched toward Cupid as she pulls Regina to her. A little bit of the emptiness that he’s making from them fades away with Regina’s touch. “Come on, come on,” she chants. “I can’t fight him without you. Where’s that most resilient heart?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Regina mumbles into her shoulder, but she manages to channel a little more magic outward. Emma staggers in place, her heart pounding and her head blissfully blank, and she catches sight at last of what their magic is illuminating below the beast.

A dark strain of magic, pouring up from underground to counter their attacks. “Regina!” she shouts on a hunch. “Aim at his feet!”

It’s no struggle at all to drop her hands, directing the magic at the demon’s feet instead, and Regina joins her a moment later. Their magic slices into the blackness seeping out of the ground, light hitting dark and exploding into a mass of color, and Regina hisses, “Pull it out,” which makes no sense at all until Emma can feel Regina using her as a conduit, yanking at their magic in the other direction.

“How do I–“ Emma furrows her brow and does her best to pull instead of push, seeking out the strength they’d emptied into Cupid and yanking at it. Cupid is helpless now, the dark magic feeding him now split from him, and he can only shrink and shrink before them as they pull.

And then, abruptly, Emma can feel her magic tugging at something alien, familiar but not quite theirs, and Regina gasps, “Together,” and they yank until there’s someone emerging, re-forming in front of them. And another. And another.

Marco, unconscious on the floor. The man who must be Pan. Erebos curled up beside him. And Typhon is last before Emma lets go with a gasp and Cupid’s shrinking even more, smaller than the man at the desk had ever been and…

Becoming a baby? Emma gapes. Cupid is, in fact, now a tiny cherub with wings and a business suit, eyeing them and looking for all the world like the cover of a Hallmark card. He dusts off his clothes, flutters into the air, and inclines his head at them as they sink to the floor, Emma halfway onto Regina’s lap. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he says, unflappable.

Emma stutters, trapped between outrage and amusement. Regina growls, “Get out of my town.”

“I thought you’d thank me.” Cupid tilts his little head. “Without me, you’d both be moping around town pining over each other. I’m just an honest businessman, looking to spread some love,” he assures them. “And I do believe that you’ve given me more than enough of that true love that I was summoned for. Really a lovely magic you two ladies have,” he says, puffing out his chest and beaming like a diaper model.

He winks. “I’ll even let the spares go as my little gift to you. Until next time!” His magic is blindingly bright now, whirling around them in a flash of color, and Emma ducks her head and feels Regina’s hands steady around her, blocking both of them from the energy ripping through the room.

And, abruptly, they’re seated on half-rotted wooden planks in the back of a run-down shed, Emma cradled in Regina’s arms. “You know, when they complain about Cupid and Valentine’s Day being commercialized, I don’t think they meant like this.” She closes her eyes. Regina’s arms are still protectively tight around her, and she’s afraid to move and dislodge them. “We didn’t stop him.”

“We sent him away for now. I don’t think you can kill a god. Even a ridiculous one who eats people.” Regina makes a face. “But we gave him what he wanted.”

True love, Emma doesn’t say, but Regina drops her hands and Emma shifts off of her and they stare awkwardly at each other. “You were Artemis all along.”

“You kept insulting the sheriff’s department!” Regina accuses. “Do you know how much it takes out of me to defend your incompetent– mmph!” Emma kisses her hard, slips her fingers into Regina’s hair and lets her thumb run across the shell of Regina’s ear. Regina bites Emma's lip and slides her tongue into Emma’s mouth.

“I can’t,” Regina says suddenly, pulling away from her. Her eyes are dancing and she’s smirking and Emma half expects the words when they come. “I’m in love with a straight girl.” She curls right up against Emma, catlike, and brushes kisses against Emma’s neck as Emma rolls her eyes. “It’s okay. We saved the day.”

“I didn’t save Hook,” she says, a little glumly. “Who…I think was behind the whole thing?” She blinks, trying to remember a time before she’d kissed Regina. My master has very specific needs. “No, he wasn’t,” she says slowly. “But someone in Storybrooke summoned him.”

“To what end?” Regina wonders, and her eyes fall onto the spot where Cupid had vanished. She moves quickly, faster than Emma can ask what she’s doing as she scrambles past the rescued men, and she stretches out both hands over the spot and jerks them upward. She pulls as though she’s yanking at marionette strings, and the ground moves beneath them, Emma standing back just as the rotting planks of the floor crash into pieces and a prone man shoots through them.

Regina drops her hands and he lies still on the ground beside Typhon, only his stomach’s gradual rise-and-fall any sign that he’s alive. “He’s in stasis,” she says grimly.

“He wouldn’t have summoned Cupid,” Emma says, frowning down at him. “I can’t imagine him ever conceding to be so helpless.” And that means there’s only one person who would have had the power to do all of this. “I know who the murderer is,” she says.

“Yes,” Regina agrees, stepping past Gold’s body, and they run from the shed together.

Emma doesn’t bother checking in at the station; instead, they radio in medical assistance for Gold and the others and then drive straight across the street to the pawnshop.

Emma’s out the door before Regina parks. “You can stop searching,” she says, pushing the door to the shop open, and Belle gapes up at her from around another stack of books. “Double Blind is closed for business.”

Belle reaches for the dagger and Emma swipes it aside, snatching it from her before she can use it. Not that it’ll do any good if she does. “It’s a fake, isn’t it? That’s what set you off. Gold gave you a fake dagger.”

“He said he trusted me. I thought there was good in him.” Belle’s eyes are hollow. “But there was nothing.”

“And true love is the only thing that can break the Dark One’s curse,” Regina says, her hand drifting to brush against Emma’s. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Freeing Rumple?”

“My love wasn’t enough,” Belle says, shaking her head wildly. “So I knew…if I could harness his powers to save him…I didn’t think anyone would die.” She laughs, too high and too unsteady, and Emma doesn't anticipate it when she shoves a pile of heavy books directly into the spot where she’d tricked Emma into moving. “Well, no, I did think that. I even saved Granny for Ruby. But it would be worth it, right? What’s a few sacrifices to free the world of the Dark One?”

Emma sees stars as the books rain down on her, Regina letting out a curse as they topple onto her, too, and Belle says from somewhere behind them, shoving more books down. “I knew you were the key, Emma! You and your heart of true love. So I left a card for Regina and I waited until people started dying because I knew it would bring you straight to the club.”

She’s laughing again and it doesn’t sound right, it sounds like someone who’s suffered too much and surrendered at last, broken down and shattered. “I would do anything for true love,” she says from the doorway. “I see the monster beneath the man! I love him! What does that make me?”

“Untenable,” Regina says regretfully, and Belle drops to the floor in a heap. Emma is crouching by her side a moment later, shaking off the headache from the pile of books, and when she cuffs her, it’s with gentleness. Regina watches with old, deep-seated guilt.

“This one isn’t on you,” Emma tells her as David arrives with the patrol car, lifting the woman and seating her in the backseat. “She made her own decisions and Gold drove her to them.”

“She’s been through enough in her life,” Regina says, a non-response. “Eventually it was going to take its toll.”

Emma squeezes her hand and Regina murmurs in quiet invitation, “It’s still early in the night. And I hear that there are bars in town where you don’t need to put on a mask to get in.”

And Emma– because she really is stupid and doesn’t know how to let it lie without attempting to be noble, says, “I think that you should go home. Go to sleep, take a breather.” Regina watches her, eyebrows raised, and she flushes. “Look, you haven’t had much time to…adjust to who I was. We got distracted by the cannibalistic god-monster…thing.”

“That we did.”

“And…I don’t know, Double Blind was kind of an easy way to not be ourselves, right?” She’d reveled in the anonymity, let herself be open in a way she’s never been before, and she knows that Regina within the club had been more vulnerable with her than she’d probably meant to be. “I just…you don’t need to be with me just because we were together there or because of anything I said. There’s a lot more baggage now, and you–”

Regina’s eyes are narrowing and Emma’s doing this all wrong, somehow. She can’t figure out how or why it is that Regina looks so irritated with her again, the fondness fading and her face closing off again. “I mean– I don’t want you to feel–“ She bites her lip. The lip that had been thoroughly sucked and bitten by Regina not very long ago. “I’m sorry,” she says helplessly.

“I’m sure you are,” Regina says, layers upon layers in her response. Emma opens her mouth again but Regina is turning sharply, no more lingering looks to spare. “Go take a nap, Miss Swan. I’ll send Henry over in the morning.” 

She saunters out of the shop, her hands twitching like she might strangle someone, and Emma is spellbound with longing as she watches her go.

Chapter Text

In absolutely terrible taste, Mary Margaret decides to celebrate their victory by throwing a masquerade party at Granny’s the next evening. “Everyone can be somebody else without all the murder!” she says brightly.

“I think Regina may be ready to reclaim the mayoral seat,” Emma offers diplomatically. 

Mary Margaret beams, unfazed. “One last hurrah, then.” 

Still, Emma is expected to go as both the hero of the story and as her mother’s daughter, and it’s easier to do that than to mope again. Regina hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, hasn’t done anything but drop Henry off outside the apartment building and flash an uncomfortable smile at her from the car, and she’s beginning to think…

She’d screwed it up, somehow, by offering Regina a way out. Regina had seized it and run, and Emma’s just going to have to live with the fact that Regina knows that she’s hopelessly in love with her. They can bounce back from this. Emma isn’t going to pull a Hook and start murdering people to win her back.

Probably.

Still, though, the things that stay with her: Regina kissing Emma back. Regina mocking her, I’m in love with a straight girl, brushing kisses along her neck. Regina inviting her out to a bar after they’d apprehended Belle. None of it makes sense and Emma struggles through it, through a lifetime of being unwanted to piece together what Regina had wanted. 

Maybe she’d just been giving Emma what she’d thought she hadn’t had a choice in. Emma is sick at the idea of it.

She’s still ill at ease when she arrives with Henry at Granny’s, taking the masks proffered at them by a very pleased-looking Mary Margaret and glancing around the room. “She isn’t here yet,” Henry says, biting into a brownie as he peers around the room. “She said she wasn’t going to come at all, but I told her that I was meeting my girlfriend here.” 

“Girlfriend?” Emma repeats, spinning around. “You have a… There’s a…” 

Henry finished the brownie, rolling his eyes at her through the mask. “I can find a girl to hang out with tonight if it means that you and Mom will work out your own weird girlfriend thing.”

Oh. Emma smacks him on the shoulder, scowling at him with a frown that never really reaches her eyes. “You are a devious child.” 

“Thank you,” Henry says happily, heading off to join some of his friends. Ava and Nick, Emma recognizes under the masks, and there’s a man sitting with them that she takes a moment to place. Erebos, under the mask, and Pan is leaning against the booth with a hand firm over his shoulder. Erebos is smiling tentatively, Ava just as tentative as she smiles back at him, and Henry slides into the scene like sunshine as he offers them brownies. 

He’s a good kid. He’s a really good kid, and he has a really great mother, and if she were around right now, Emma would apologize for whatever it is that she’d done and promise to never bring up anything from Double Blind again. She would–

The doors open and Regina strides in, as though summoned by Emma's thoughts. Emma hangs back, watching as Regina yanks on a mask and stalks to Henry’s table, giving Ava dark looks. Ava glares back at her just as darkly. Henry speaks hastily until Regina is flushing and scowling and stepping away from the table, and Emma sidles over with two bowls of ice cream and says, “Regina?” 

“Emma.” Regina stares at the bowls for a moment. “What…what is this?” She isn't angry anymore– which is an improvement– but she does look confused.

“I thought that was obvious,” Emma says, pressing her lips together to keep them from curling upward. “I’m apologizing.” 

“Ah.” There’s a shadow of a smile on Regina's face as she accepts the ice cream. “You have nothing to apologize for. I understand that I put you in an uncomfortable position, and you had every right to back out of this…” She waves vaguely. “Thing.” 

“What?” Regina had thought that Emma had been backing out? “I thought you were– I told you I was in love with you!” Emma says, befuddled.

“And then you ran.” Regina leans back against the counter, tweaking the feathers of her mask between her fingers. She seems nervous now, uncomfortable, and Emma is still gaping at her in disbelief. “I know it was an emotional time. I overstepped.” The words come out in spurts of wooden admission, apologetic and with anger pointed inward. “I wanted it to be you. I always wanted her to be you.” 

Emma freezes and then exhales. “Come with me,” she says, and starts forward before she looks back to make sure Regina is following.

They’re still wearing their masks as they slip out into Granny’s outdoor seating area, which has been cleared of tables so couples can sway together to the music. Granny herself is waltzing with Marco at the center of the dance floor, and she winks at Emma with approval as Emma hesitates in the doorway. “Give us a dance, ladies!” she calls, Marco laughing lightly. 

Regina’s hand slides into Emma’s. “You don’t have to,” Emma says, a bundle of nerves again. 

“We can’t disappoint our public, can we?” Regina retorts. “If I’m going to run for mayor again, I’ll have to show I’m in touch with the common people.” Still, she’s just as tense as she steps down the stairs and extends a hand to Emma. Emma takes it in hers, letting Regina twirl her around once before she lands safely in the other woman’s arms.

They hadn’t done this at Double Blind. They hadn’t shared anything of themselves in public, hadn’t dared anything more than private whispers in the garden, and Emma can see the flush on Regina’s face as Lottie and Granny hoot in unison. “We really don’t have to do this,” Emma offers again. Regina is warm in her arms, smelling indescribably good, and it all feels too perfect to last.

But Regina says haltingly, “Eris was just like you. You gave so little of yourself in the gardens but it still felt like you.”

They sway together, their foreheads tilting closer so the feathered mask on Regina’s face is tickling Emma’s skin. “You were so angry with me,” Emma says, uncomprehending.

“I didn’t want to be.” Regina’s fingers brush against the curve of Emma’s mask, pensive. “I meant it when I said I wished I’d never met…” Her voice trails off. “I just needed a place where I didn’t have to be angry. And there you were.”

Her eyes are shining now, as free as Artemis had ever been, and Emma says a little breathlessly, “And here I am.”

They’ve both been caught up in their minds for so long that it’s frightening and exhilarating to have the beginnings of something real between them, something mutual, and Emma’s still cautious about pushing too hard. “I never thought you’d go to a place like Double Blind,” she murmurs. “I didn’t know who Artemis was, but I didn’t think she could be you.” 

Regina curls her fingers into Emma’s hip. “I could have seen through you any time, did you know? It was all party tricks and glamours. Any decent witch could have undone them.” 

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted her to be you,” Regina says again. “I was terrified I would take off that glamour and she’d be someone else. I didn’t want to be in love with anyone but you.”

Emma stops dancing abruptly, her body seizing up in disbelief. Regina’s eyes gleam in the lights set up around them, warm and loving and open like they’re still in a garden in the woods with their faces concealed and their hearts exposed instead.

She puts two fingers on Emma’s cheek and kisses her, long and slow; and Emma can feel flames churn and calm at once with Regina’s touch, burning like a hearth on a winter’s night. “I love you,” she whispers against Regina’s lips. “I love Artemis. I love Regina.” She slips Regina’s mask up past her eyes and over her hair, gazing at her in earnest. “I love Regina,” she says again, awestruck at the way Regina glows as they’re caught in each other’s eyes.

Regina tucks her fingers under Emma’s mask and tugs it free, snapping the cheap string that had held it in place and tossing it aside. It lands on the arrow of the Cupid lawn ornament that someone– probably Mary Margaret, dammit– had inexplicably decided would make a good decoration tonight, and Regina grimaces.

Emma kisses it away: once, twice, thrice, and they’re locked together in the dim lights, drawing new endings into their beginning.