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one.
It's quiet for once.
Not in a physical sense, of course. The town is always quiet in that sense, has been for three decades—but that had mostly been less quiet and more silence, a smothering blanket over any noise or cry that could break the imposed, relentless monotony of Regina's curse. And besides which, it's a little coastal hideaway on the coast of Maine—not exactly anyone's idea of hustle and bustle.
But appearances, as everyone knows, can be deceiving, and in truth now is the first period of genuine peace, welcome peace, not choked by fear or enforced by magical dictat that there's been in years almost beyond memory, and now the town is quiet. Truly, genuinely quiet.
It isn't something that the townspeople devote too much time to wondering about, of course. That's the point of the quiet, the purpose of peace: to be ignored, to be taken for granted. But if one looks closely, studies the little details from far enough away, looks out over the town lights from the silent perch at the top of a cliff, overlooking the rows of houses and shops, the well-kept gardens and the distant hum of low-level traffic, one can sense it
Maybe that's why Regina comes to this spot. For the quiet. For the peace. For the calm that she'd fought against for so many years, then fought for, strove for, sacrificed for—
Well. What's past is past now, and she—she's grateful for this, at least. She isn't so stupid as to call this a reward, a victory, or anything else so ephemeral as that. She doesn't deserve such things, she doesn't deserve this peace, but her family—
Her family—
She sighs, and sits down on a fallen tree, looking over the blinking array of lights below. Maybe this is her place now, to sit and watch and watch and—
"Hey! Who's there?"
She spins around, startled at the voice, sees a beam of light making its way through the trees towards her, almost dazzling against the near-total darkness. What—? "Emma?"
"The woods are closed, you can't—Regina?"
Emma emerges from the treeline, blinking wide, surprised eyes as she shines the flashlight at Regina's face—then her legs, when Regina flinches away.
"Oh, sorry, I—what are you doing here?"
Regina blinks stars from her eyes, tries to focus her vision. "Taking a late-night stroll during the woods. What are you doing here?"
"I'm on late-shift. Mrs Merrett called about hearing someone sneaking around the forest." Emma hesitates, then moves up besides her, switching off the flashlight. "You know the woods aren't safe at night, yeah? Whatever Hyde has planned, and if your magic still isn't working properly..."
"I can handle myself, Emma."
"I know, I just—" Emma rests a hand on Regina's forearm, looks down at it. Even in the moonlight, with vision that hasn't fully readjusted to the darkness, Emma's blonde hair seems to shine as it shields her face. "I get worried, you know?"
Regina knows. Of course she knows, between the gentleness of Emma's fingers brushing over her thick, pitch-black overcoat and the earnestness of her voice and her words—
—but she doesn't understand it.
She turns away from Emma, and resumes her silent watch over the quiet of the town.
"Good night, Emma."
* * *
Officially, of course, Hyde is why she goes there. He hadn't exactly sounded like a grateful new resident upon his arrival in Storybrooke, after all, and his move to the woods had given everyone all kinds of bad vibes. The strange thing, though, is that even two weeks later, he still hadn't actually done anything, and nor had anyone found any trace or sign that anything is imminent.
Still, someone needs to be on guard, or so she tells Henry the next morning over breakfast.
"But—but why?" he asks out of thinly-veiled frustration. "Why does it have to be you?"
Not so long ago, she'd have panicked at his hesitancy, his lack of trust—but then she remembers I don't know what I would do if magic took away one of you.
"It isn't just me, sweetheart. Everyone is trying to find Hyde and uncover whatever he has planned—"
"Everyone is trying to find Hyde during the day. You know that he said that whatever's coming will come at night."
"And so someone has to keep watch, and look for any clues that might only be there at night."
"But your magic—"
"Henry," she says a little firmer, a little sharper, but softens again when he closes his mouth. He's taller than her, stronger by far—but right now, his bright, curious eyes are those of any other scared thirteen-year-old boy. "Don't you worry about me. I'll be fine."
He bites his lip, worry-lines pulling at the edges of his mouth—before sliding across, and sinking into her embrace.
two.
She returns to the hill a few nights later, two hours after putting a still-visibly-concerned Henry to bed and an hour after making sure that, yes, he actually had gone to sleep. As usual, there's no sign of Hyde when she gets there, or dark magic, or dark anything except the completely natural kind, the kind broken by the glow of the moon above and the twinkling of street lamps below.
She's about to resume her usual vigil on the log at the top of the cliff when there's a sharp crackling noise behind her.
Footsteps.
She's on her feet immediately, drawing out a handgun and aiming at the source of the noise—noises now, plural, as the crackling of leaves underfoot is only getting louder and closer.
"Who's there?" she calls out, flicking the safety off the gun. "Show yourself!"
A pause, a second's silence, and Regina's finger starts drifting towards the trigger—
"Regina, it's me."
She breathes, exhales the sudden tension out of her body. "Emma. I thought you were some creation of Hyde's."
"And so you were just gonna shoot me?" Emma says, emerging from the treeline, her eyes glinting in the moonlight. "Christ, Regina. What are you doing?”
"You already know why I'm here. Why the hell are you here?”
Emma shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep, decided to check out the forest and see if I could find anything. So far, I’ve only come across you and your gun pointed at my face.”
“Yes, well, forgive me for taking precautions."
"I know, but—is this what you meant the other night when you said you could take care of yourself? Do you even know how to use a gun? I bet you don't."
Regina stares, affronted. "Of course I do! You gave me this gun in the first place, and in case you've forgotten, I spent twenty-eight years without magic. I wasn't about to be so stupid as to rely entirely on the curse to protect myself and—and you're joking, aren't you," she realises, having caught a glance of Emma biting her lip, trying to suppress a laugh. She huffs and turns away. "Idiot."
"Yeah, yeah." Emma brushes past her and plops herself down without preamble on the log, motioning for Regina to do the same. "Still, I'm kinda surprised. Guns aren't really your style, usually."
"Yes, well, we all have sacrifices to make," Regina says evenly, resuming her seat next to Emma. "Especially without magic."
"Have you worked out what's wrong with it yet?"
Regina bites her lip. She shouldn't lie. She can't lie, not when it's Emma next to her. Not when Emma knows her better, more intuitively, than almost anyone ever has, not when Emma always knows when she's lying—
"No," she says quietly. "I haven't."
A pause, a silence, as Regina's words hang in the air between them, inviting Emma to reach out and say bullshit, I know you do—
"Oh. Okay." Emma looks down, starts playing with her fingers. "You know, it's funny that we're talking about magic. Here."
Regina blinks. "What do you mean?"
"The last time I was here, I'd—" Emma swallows visibly, the words catching in her throat, and Regina is suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to reach over and touch. "I'd hurt Henry, and I was about to go and try to—"
"—give up your magic. I remember," Regina completes.
"I remember being scared. Terrified, actually. Of what would happen if I gave up magic. Of myself—mostly of myself, and what I'd become," Emma says, bowing her head, her face shielded from Regina by waves of hair and her posture drawn inwards. "Little did I know what was to come, I guess."
And Regina has no response to that, can't have a response to that, because that's the one thing that they still haven't discussed, even now—
"Was that what it was like for you?" Emma asks, as if knowing somehow that Regina wasn't going to continue that line of conversation without being told.
Regina runs her lips over the back of her front teeth, considers for a moment. "A little. You had more to lose than I did."
Emma pauses, absorbs, then—"Yeah, I guess so. Mom said that you convinced her to try and stop me," Emma says, suddenly looking up again, straight at Regina with bright, bright eyes, so like her son's. "You told them I couldn't give up what was special about me."
Emma's gaze is too intense, too laden with emotions Regina can't even begin, won't even dare to put a name to, and she looks away. "I did."
"I don't think I ever thanked you for that."
Regina shakes her head, continues to look out over the town. "There's no need. It's not like you ended up needing our help anyway."
"Oh come on—"
"Please, Emma. I need to do a hell of a lot more than state the obvious before I deserve any plaudits from you or the rest of your family."
"Our family," Emma corrects, her voice still achingly soft, her fingers reaching across and sliding over Regina's closed, gloved hand. On instinct, without any conscious thought at all, Regina turns the hand over, opening it up so Emma's fingers can thread through hers, palm to palm.
"My mistake."
three.
It becomes a routine of theirs.
Regina, each night, will put help Zelena put the baby to bed, ensure the same with her own son—assuming he’s staying with her that night, of course—then head off to that little spot beneath the stars, overlooking the twinkling town-lights.
And each night, she’ll hear the distant sounds of tyres on dirt and gravel, a car door opening and closing, and smile gently to herself as the sound of leaves crunching underfoot—almost deafening in the quiet—approaches her.
“Emma.”
“Hi,” Emma says gently, taking her usual place next to Regina. “See anything?”
“Nothing. Whatever Hyde’s planning, he’s hiding it well.”
“Maybe he isn’t planning anything,” Emma suggests, a little too brightly for the time of night. “Maybe he wandered over the town line and couldn’t come back. Maybe he fell into the ravine. Maybe he decided to become a cave hermit for the rest of his life.”
Regina snorts. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
“Right? Why can’t the bad guys all just become hermits? Live out in the middle of nowhere, plot evilly to themselves and leave everyone else alone?”
Regina’s smile dims a little. “I don’t think leaving me to my own devices would have protected anyone, Miss Swan.”
A sharp intake of breath, a wince visible out of the corner of Regina’s eye—“No. Me neither.”
It’s one of the only times Emma’s even so much as referenced her time immersed in the darkness, the consequences of the sacrifice she’d made for Regina’s happiness—and it relaxes Regina a little, lets her breathe a little freer.
Maybe—just maybe, possibly, this is the time. Maybe they can actually talk about this.
“Can I ask you something, Emma?”
“Sure.”
“How did you fight the darkness?”
There’s a long silence, fraught with memories and anguish and guilt—
“Badly.”
“Emma—”
“Come on, Regina,” Emma interjects harshly, staring with fierce determination at her own two feet, her hands balled up tightly in her lap. “You saw what I did. I ripped out hearts. I got people killed. God, I almost got you killed. What I became—”
“What you became is nothing compared to—”
“What you were? Yeah, forgive me if I don’t think clearing that bar is cause for a party,” Emma cuts across fiercely, eyes blazing. Regina recoils immediately, which Emma must see because her eyes widen, the fire vanishes, and she immediately shuffles across. “Shit—Regina, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s—it’s fine,” Regina says, as evenly as she can manage. “You aren’t wrong after all.”
“No, I—I’m an idiot, I know that you aren't—I’m sorry, Regina,” Emma manages in a rush, panic visible on her face as if she’d gotten it into her head that Regina is on the verge of just getting up and leaving her alone and in the dark. “I just—I hate talking about it, you know?”
Regina knows, Regina understands, possibly more than any person alive—but Emma is here, talking now, so Regina remains silent.
“Kil—Hook won’t talk to me about it,” Emma says, amending herself when she notices Regina’s expression start to twist involuntarily, “My parents pretend it never happened. So does Henry. And I get it, I get why they don’t want to think about me like that—”
“Emma—”
“But it still happened, I know it, they know it, and I just know that at some point they’re gonna just look at me and see her and—”
“Emma.” Regina shifts across, takes Regina’s trembling hands in her own, tries her best to still them by drawing soothing, random patterns on the backs. “Do you really believe that?”
Emma looks up, looks Regina in the eyes at last, wide and glazed with unshed tears, almost glass-like in the moonlight, yet coloured by years upon years of closed doors and turned backs and cold shoulders—
Regina flinches. “Well. They’re fools.”
“Are they? I mean, I’m supposed to be their Saviour. Their perfect little ray of sunshine. They even made another kid’s life hell to make sure of it. But then—”
“Then you made your own choice. Because you’re human, Emma. Not some fairytale plaything of your parents’, and they can go to hell if they ever think otherwise,” Regina intones, low and firm and almost imploring, willing Emma to understand, hands still firmly clasped within Regina’s and eyes locked. “Literally, as it turns out.”
Emma lets out a thin, weak laugh. “I—you’re right. I know. I just—I wish I had fought a little harder. And listened to you a bit more when you kept nagging me about how terrible dark magic was."
“Well, yes,” Regina agrees, never missing an opportunity to remind Emma that yes, she really should listen to Regina more often and not be such a stubborn—“But you fought far harder than I ever did.”
Emma looks Regina in the eyes, darting between them as if searching, probing for any hint of insincerity—before shaking her head almost imperceptibly, looking down at their joined hands.
“I still see them, you know?” she says, almost a whisper, as small as Regina has ever heard her voice.
“See whom?” Regina asks, but rising trepidation tells her that she already knows—
“The faces. Of all the people whose—whose hearts I ripped out. And I know it wasn’t that many,” she adds, just as Regina is about to open her mouth, “But I still see them. Every night. It’s why I can’t sleep."
She’s crying now, silent tears trickling their way down pale, moonlit cheeks, but Regina remains quiet.
“It’s always the same face too, the same expression, right at the moment where they realise what—what I’m about to do. With my hands. These hands. Do you—do you know what I mean?”
Regina never takes her eyes off Emma’s, never breaks gaze, but she lifts up one of Emma’s hands, feels them shaking, so tense like they’re made of over-taut steel cable on the verge of snapping, and presses her lips to the knuckles.
“Yes,” she murmurs, “I do. Of course I do.”
four.
Their nighttime meet-ups aren’t completely about just small talk, of course. They do have a job to do, and a threat to the town to explore—but what exactly that threat entails, no one knows, and even after a full week their stakeouts haven’t yet turned up anything of use
“It has to be a spell of some kind. That’s all it can be,” Regina declares one morning, at the town council meeting—or, more accurately, breakfast with the Charmings. “A very complicated, subtle spell, or I would already have found traces of it in the woods.”
“I thought your magic wasn’t working still?” Snow asks, an eyebrow raised.
Regina swallows, stiffens a little, tries not to react too visibly—“I don’t need magic of my own to recognise when it’s there,” she says as firmly as she can, her chin raised haughtily. Across from her, Zelena raises an eyebrow, but otherwise doesn’t say anything, and no one else seems to pick up on it.
Including Emma. Who must, by now, know that she’s lying about her magic. She must.
Regardless, the piece of information, whilst not exactly a surprise, lets them focus their search more on magical threats. They spend one afternoon, then the next, and the next researching summoning spells, portals, various curses—
“Nothing,” Emma declares eventually, near sunset a few days later when it’s just the two of them, slamming a heavy leather tome shut and startling Regina with the noise.
“Patient as ever,” Regina quips dryly once she recovers, not taking her eyes of sheets and sheets of freshly translated runes.
“Sorry, I just—I’m really bored of this. It’s been days and we’ve found nothing, and I just want to get out and do something.”
That’s obvious enough to Regina as she glances over, watching Emma fidget in her seat like an over-agitated teenager, full of nervous energy. She reaches over, massages her forearm—they seem to do that a lot now, that whole touching thing.
“Emma. Relax.”
And Emma does, smiling a little, eyes glinting and cheeks flushed a little pink and—Regina looks away, at somewhere near her shoulder, so as to get rid of the sudden flutters in her chest. “Right. Sorry. Back to this, then.”
Regina gives her arm one last squeeze and a smile of her own, before returning to the runes. Only forty-seven pages to go.
* * *
Alas, the runes turn up nothing useful. Nor does anything else they try, and Zelena for one is starting to vocally call the whole threat overblown. Regina is tempted to agree, but she’s long since learned that even innocuous-sounding, boiler-plate snippets of information like being of the night can take on all sorts of unexpected and twisted meanings when attached to magic.
And anyway, it’s not like they lack for actual threats to the town. Hyde might have become all but invisible, but his 'friends' definitely aren’t. Most of them are no more than not-quite-ordinary people looking for an ordinary life, just like the rest of the town, and Regina’s had plenty to do getting them integrated into Storybrooke life in her capacity as Mayor.
It’s a good thing that most of them are like that, too, because there are some who are less... eager to adjust, and need more encouragement. Flame demons, for instance.
In theory, they’re simple enough to defeat, and ordinarily Emma’s magic alone would at least pacify it. But in theory can only go so far, and as townspeople run down Main Street screaming their heads off as the demon marches in its ungainly way towards Granny’s, setting trees and hedges on fire as it goes, Emma's magic doesn't quite seem to be doing the job.
Regina stands in the middle of the road a few feet behind Emma as she tries in vain to keep the demon away, caught between competing instincts as Snow yells, “Regina! If you could give us a hand here—”
She could, of course. Emma’s magic alone might not be enough, but both of theirs combined—
She strides up to Emma, barely acknowledging the way Emma’s eyes brighten when she spots Regina next to her. All she has to do now is reach out, draw up those vast, intoxicating reserves of power within her and just let them flow—
She swallows, and instead grabs hold of Emma’s arm. The beam of light pouring forth from Emma’s hands immediately doubles in intensity, and the demon disintegrates into a cloud of black-red mist.
* * *
Incidents like that are few and far between, though, and none of them seem to have any direct connection to Hyde. Nonetheless, there’s a known threat to the town, and they have to remain vigilant.
And anyway, if she’s being honest, that’s not the whole reason why she continues her nightly starlit stakeouts—no, there’s something much more beneath this. Something deeper, something darker that she isn’t yet ready to name. Something that draws her and Emma to the woods in words and quiet touches.
The upshot is that she continues to go out to that little spot each night, every night, and gaze out over the town she’d built. Emma usually shows up a bit later, leather jacket and wry smile and all, and they’ll search the woods looking for any sign of magic or malevolence, voices carrying clearly between the trees; or they’ll stand on the cliff-face and talk in soft, gentle voices about Henry and his plans for high school, about babies and raising them as a parent when you know you aren’t, about darkness and pain and guilt so powerful it’s suffocating; or they’ll just sit and rest, and watch over the quiet in silence, shoulders bumping together and cheeks tickled by hair.
Whatever they do, they have a pattern: Regina shows up around midnight, and Emma turns up about an hour later—except for one night, when she’s already there.
That in itself is the first sign to Regina that something is quite wrong—and the second comes almost immediately afterwards, when she sees that Emma is shaking slightly, head bowed, and her arms are drawn tightly—protectively—across her chest. She looks small, young, and Regina’s heart twists at the sight.
“Emma?”
Emma turns around, gives a thin, fragile smile which doesn’t reach her eyes—god, her eyes. Regina can’t tell how long she’s been crying, but it’s clearly been quite a while.
“Hi.” Even on that single word, Emma’s voice almost cracks.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Emma.”
“I’m serious, it’s nothing,” Emma repeats, more vehemently this time, quickly wiping her cheeks and sniffling, trying to compose herself.
“It doesn’t look like nothing. Emma, you know that—” Regina hesitates, licks her lips, before, “—you can tell me anything, right?”
Emma turns away, looks out over the cliff. “Thanks, Regina.”
Regina stands behind Emma, watching her, the crouch of her shoulders, the still-present shaking in her arms, the stiffness of her back—
“Okay,” Emma says after a few seconds, “We had a fight.”
And it’s exactly what Regina had feared, and it’s everything Regina had feared. “You and Hook.”
“Yeah.”
“Is this the first time?”
“Ye—no,” Emma adjusts, correcting herself mid-word. “We had a few when I was the Dark One.”
“Him shouting abuse at you while you stand there and take it doesn’t count as a fight, Emma,” Regina says, trying not to make her voice sound too sharp. Emma doesn’t need that right now.
Emma spins around, her eyes flashing. “He didn’t—you can’t—”
“I can and will,” Regina replies, stepping closer to Emma. “You know I don’t like him.”
Emma breathes out, the fight draining out of her as she remembers herself. “Yeah. Henry does, though.”
“Henry likes everyone.” Which is something Regina treasures and adores in him and doesn’t understand at all. “Including that awful Violet girl.”
Emma laughs between her sniffles. “Don’t say that in front of him. He really does like her.”
“We all have to make sacrifices from time to time,” Regina mock-grumbles, before becoming more sombre again. “Tell me what happened tonight.”
“I don’t know.”
“Emma.”
“I’m serious. I don’t even remember how it started, it was something really stupid and small and—and then suddenly one thing became another thing and we were yelling at each other, and he was saying—he was saying—”
Regina steps forward again, lets her fall into her arms, and waits for her. Waits for her, as blonde hair nestles in the crook of her neck, and short, breathy exhales brush over her shoulder.
“He said—he said all the stuff he’d said about me as the Dark One again,” Emma whispers. “Except now he’s not, and I’m not, but he still—”
“Darkness isn’t something that just controls you, Emma,” Regina whispers, closing her eyes and rocking gently from side to side as if instead of Emma, it’s their son that they both share, that they both love— “It doesn’t take away your choices or your responsibility.”
“I know, I—” Emma starts, extricating herself from Regina’s embrace and wiping her eyes again. “I just had hoped that was what had made him say that, you know? That’s why I didn’t say anything back. But then tonight—”
“You fought back,” Regina says softly, a hand reaching up without thought to tuck stray, messy blonde hair behind one ear.
“Yeah. And he—he got—”
“Angry?”
“No. I thought he would, but instead he just—went quiet, and said he was surprised. It’s like he was—”
“Disappointed,” Regina completes. “And that’s when you ran.”
Emma nods.
A year ago—a month ago, even—Regina would have ignited, blazed off into the night, burned down everyone and everything in sight until she’d found Hook and made him beg forgiveness but—not now. Not anymore. That part of her is—must be—gone now.
Instead, she accepts Emma into her arms again and holds on, and on, and on.
five.
That night is the last time she sees Emma for quite a while.
She still goes out to the spot—their spot—each night, but for the next week, Emma doesn’t join her. Which is fine, absolutely fine, as she tells herself even as he stomach drops and a sigh escapes her lips as the stars drift overhead and she remains alone. She knows that, like for herself, this increasingly pointless-seeming stakeout doubles as a useful alternative to sleep for Emma, and she won’t begrudge her if she’s solving that issue. She won’t.
If Emma’s managed to make peace with the darkness in her memories—well, she deserves no less. If Emma is happy even with Hook, then that’s good, that’s wonderful.
Isn’t it?
“I dunno,” Henry replies with a shrug when she asks—obliquely, of course. “I haven’t really talked to her a lot in the last few days.”
“Even you were over there at her house?” she asks over her shoulder, keeping her back turned and her voice carefully casual.
“Yeah. She seemed tired a lot. I don’t think she’s sleeping well.” At this, Regina does turn around, and she sees that Henry’s brow is deeply furrowed, and his fingers are playing nervously with the handle of his mug. “She says she’s okay, though.”
Regina forces down a sigh, tries her best to ignore the nasty sinking feeling in her belly. “I’m sure she is.”
* * *
A few days later and she’s basically accepted that Emma won’t be coming out to their spot. She’s even questioning the wisdom of going out to their spot in the first place, since it’s now coming close to a month since Hyde had made his appearance—a month of fragmented sleep, unanswered questions, a permanent feeling of being off-balance—and still, nothing has happened.
Eventually she decides that she can skip one night, and try to get a full, unbroken night’s sleep. That alone is enough reason for Henry to perk up in scarcely hidden delight, as he’s been increasingly worrying aloud about the bags under her eyes, the way her hair seems increasingly messy, the patchy complexion of her skin, the aftermath of weeks of truncated sleep.
She just ruffles his hair and smiles. “Don’t worry about me,” she says gently. She means it too—he shouldn’t worry about her, because what she’s going through isn’t anything new, anything surprising, anything undeserved. Her actions, her past is what’s bringing on these constant dreams of frightened eyes, shocked faces, and malicious, cruel laughter even as the bodies crumple before her—
She wakes with a start, forehead covered in sweat.
There’s a shrill, high-pitched beeping sound echoing through the room—the phone, she realises, after a few too many seconds’ thought. Groggily, with half-asleep limbs, she reaches over and takes the call.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” a voice demands—Emma’s voice.
She blinks, looks at the time. Three-thirty. Fuck. “I’m at home, I was sleeping—where the hell are you?”
“In the woods.” Emma sighs, and Regina can hear her relax through the sound. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“It’s fine,” she replies, though her voice remains sharply clipped and openly irritated, if drowsy. She’s awake now, anyway, and she sits up straighter in bed. “Is there a problem, Miss Swan?”
“No problem, I was—I came out here and couldn’t find you, and thought...”
Regina leans forward a little in her bed as Emma’s words trail off into nothing. “Thought?”
“It’s nothing. I was just worried, that’s all.”
Worried? Emma knows that Regina can protect herself, she’d said so personally—“No, that’s not it. What are you doing out there, Emma?”
No response.
“Emma...”
“It’s nothing,” Emma repeats. “I just—stuff happened, I was hoping to talk to you, I couldn’t find you. That’s all. I had a bad night.”
Hook. Regina’s definitely awake now. “What did he do this time?”
“What? He didn’t—” Emma begins, her voice rising, before cutting herself off abruptly, as if her conscious brain has caught up with the words falling out of her mouth. “I mean. We... we had another argument.”
“If he said those things about you again—”
“He didn’t! He just—” And again, Emma immediately cuts herself off. There’s a deep, exhausted-sounding sigh. “Can we talk about something else?”
Regina would love to, of course, would love to talk about anything other than Hook, but there are more important things at stake here than what Regina wants. “Emma.”
“Look. We just... we...” Emma trails off again, and Regina waits for her. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” Anything.
“Say you come back from the dark. Like—like we did. But then you don’t change. You don’t really do anything differently. You just... keep on behaving the same as you did when you had that darkness in you. Could you become dark again, just like that?”
“Evil isn’t born, Emma, it’s made. You know that.”
“Yeah, but—even if you don’t do anything bad. Or evil. But you just behave the same way as when you had that darkness, and sort of just... assume that not being dark makes everything okay.” Emma pauses on the line, takes one, two short breaths. “Does it?”
Regina opens her mouth to answer—but doesn’t, because she doesn’t know. Because answering would mean she can explain why she has to fight to look townspeople in the eye sometimes; why she wonders if Robin, if Daniel was karma, her just deserts; why she still can’t admit to Emma, to her best friend what she clearly knows about Regina’s magic.
So she remains silent, and doesn’t answer.
six.
To be clear, though, she has no real interest in Emma and Hook’s relationship beyond Emma herself. None whatsoever. It’s not something that concerns her, it’s not something she wants to think about, and so long as Emma is satisfied with it—well, Regina will bear that for as long as she needs to.
It’s a total surprise, then, when the doors to her office fly open, the wood splintering around the locks, and a red-face and wild-eyed Hook charges in.
“Regina,” he snarls, striding up to her desk. Regina doesn’t look up.
“Hook.”
“I know what you’ve been doing with Emma.”
Regina blinks. Doing with...? “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she replies evenly, still intent on studying the latest residential plans for the newest arrivals from the Land of Untold Stories.
“Don’t you dare lie to me, Your Majesty. You’ve been seeing her every night, hasn’t she? That’s why she keeps saying she can’t sleep, eh? So you can steal her away from me.”
Her fingers tighten around the edge of the paper and her lips thin, but she doesn’t rise to the bait, doesn’t give herself over to that rush of anger, like she once would have.
“Your faith in your supposed true love is inspiring,” she notes, as cuttingly as she can.
“You aren’t denying it.”
“There’s nothing to deny. If you’re too inadequate to give Emma what she needs—”
The metal hook slams down on the table.
“Don’t bait me, your majesty,” he hisses through unsteady, heavy breaths, “don’t even dare—”
“Dare what? Pick up on what you’ve been too stupid and self-congratulatory to notice?”
He’s leaning forwards now, and she can feel the heat of his breath on her forehead, hot and pungent, like it was when he strapped her to a table and left her to die—
Or when she tried to talk him down from killing her family and responded with the brutal, terrifying vice-grip of magic around her throat—
There’s a buzzing underneath her fingers, familiar and just there to be called upon, but she ignores it, and she still doesn’t look up to meet him in the eyes. She won’t give him that dignity. “If you—if Emma—”
“Once again, your faith in her is noted,” Regina says sarcastically. “No, we haven’t slept together, or kissed, or done anything beyond what friends do. Because that’s what we are, and what Emma needs right now.”
He snorts mirthlessly, a despaired sound, a desperate sound, and Regina almost—almost—feels sorry for him. “What the bloody hell could Emma need from you? I died and came back, I gave up my feud with the Crocodile, I was the Dark One, I fought the darkness like she did—”
Finally, finally Regina’s eyes snap up to his, and her lip curls, and she stands. She’s shorter than him, but he falls silent at once regardless. Once, not even that long ago, she’d have fought and fought to stop herself from just reaching forward into his chest and taking—
But not now. Not any more.
“You know nothing about fighting the darkness,” she says, low and fierce and fuelled by righteous contempt for the incomprehension in front of her. “Now get the hell out of my office.”
He turns on his heel and flees.
seven.
That night, she goes back out to that spot between the town, the woods, and the stars.
She wonders if Emma will come to night. She hasn't seen her since she'd first found out about her relationship problems—an understatement if there ever was one—and she wonders if she's made a misjudgement. If she really is doing as Hook insinuated, and intruding into places that are not hers to see—
But no. Emma Swan's happiness will always be her business, so-called 'true love' or not. It's not like she puts that much stock in the concept these days, given how true love has gone for her family of late. No, she couldn't care less about those things in the face of Emma needing her help, Emma hurting—
She can't know either way, though, until Emma shows up.
Hours pass.
She spends them mostly in the clearing overlooking the cliff, either pacing impatiently to and fro or seated on the log, looking over the town as usual and trying to savour the peace of it, centre herself and ignore the insistent drumbeat in her mind of Emma not being here. At roughly two o'clock, she even decides to make a short trek in the woods, to see if there's any sign of Hyde or magical threats or—much more fancifully—of Emma herself.
But she finds nothing, and sees nothing, and Emma doesn't come.
It's only at four in the morning, when the first streaks of daylight are starting to make their way above the horizon, working their way into the starlit night sky still dominant above, that she finally succumbs to both exhaustion and reality, and drives home.
The last desperate possibility she holds onto is that she might have dropped by to see Henry; that certainly would have made sense, given the day Emma must have had with Hook in this sort of mood—but no. When she opens the door, he's still sound asleep and alone.
She sighs, kisses his temple, and leaves the room to go to bed.
* * *
She asks Snow about it the next day. Apparently no one has seen Emma, not for several days.
“And that doesn't… worry you? At all?”
“Of course it does. But you know Emma, she can take care of herself.”
Which is true, and correct, and logical, but does nothing to quell Regina's steadily rising anxiety or deflect Regina's temptation to hit Snow for her pigheadedness. Or at least say something very sharp to her. She refrains from both, though, and returns to work.
That night, she goes to the spot, and Emma doesn't come.
* * *
The night after, she spends hours anxiously pacing around the clearing at the edge of the woods. She even gets her phone out and turns it over in her hand again and again and again, waiting for a call she knows won’t come and considering making one of her own.
She agonises it for so long that the phone seems to magically grow in weight over that time until it feels like a red-hot brick in her hand, searing invisible burns into her skin as she fights temptation and near-crippling worry—
Damn it.
She unlocks the phone, and quickly scrolls through to call Emma. It rings once, twice, three times—then abruptly stops, ending in a dead tone.
She blinks, looks at her phone in disbelief—that surely couldn't be right—and tries again.
This time, she only gets to two rings before the call terminates.
Fuck. Someone's hanging up on her—but is it Emma herself? Does Hook have her phone or—or perhaps Regina had finally overstepped the mark, and breached something that was sacrosanct, endangered Emma's happiness.
She grimaces, screwing up her eyes in desperation—no. Emma wouldn't do that to her. She wouldn't just cut Regina off like that.
Wouldn't she?
Either way she doesn't find out, and Emma doesn’t come.
* * *
The fifth night, and Regina’s even asked Henry during the day if he knows anything about Emma, about what she’s been up to the last few days.
“No. She texted me not to come over to her place tonight,” he tells Regina, brow creased and lips thinned with worry. “I'm getting kind of worried, to be honest. She’s okay, right?”
Regina hadn’t known how to answer that, mostly because it’s not her question to answer. There’s only one person who can do that, while Regina sits on the log and looks over the cliff-face, hoping and hoping and hoping—
“Hi.”
Regina smiles, and breathes. Emma sits next to her, their shoulders brushing, and she waits, savouring the quiet. She waits for a second, then two, then three, but Emma doesn't say anything, doesn't move or make any sign that she's about to do anything special or out of the ordinary or anything at all but sit and watch over the town—
“I broke up with Hook,” Emma says softly, almost inaudibly, and Regina turns to face her. There are tear-tracks on Emma’s face, but she’s smiling, her eyes clear.
Oh.
“Really?” Regina barely even recognises her own voice, it's so quiet and cracked.
The smile grows, the eyes brighten. “Yeah.”
“So the last few days...”
“Aren't important now,” she whispers, her hand coming up to rest over Regina's, while she smiles and smiles, sad and melancholic and hurt yet hopeful, beautiful—
Oh.
Regina turns slowly so their bodies are facing, extricating her arm. Emma's eyes briefly widen in surprise and concern—but it vanishes when Regina reaches around to wrap an arm around Emma’s shoulders and pulls her in, brushing her lips gently across Emma’s forehead, on the tip of her nose, and—after pausing briefly to look at Emma one more time—on her lips gently, so gently, before letting her settle her head in the crook of Regina’s neck.
They don’t speak for the rest of the night.
eight.
Two weeks later, the town is still quiet.
Everyone has all but accepted that Hyde won’t be making any moves any time soon—assuming he’s still around, of course—and so most of the gossip around the town has been about Emma and Hook, and their suspiciously well-publicised break-up.
There are more than a few grumblings going around about the whole affair, particularly once it’s revealed that Emma has moved out of her house she’d made as the Dark One. Regina has her own suspicions as to where the rumours come from.
Like she gives a damn about those, though.
There's a few more arguments to be had about where Emma will live. Snow and David hint in none-too-subtle terms that Emma could move back with them, which at first is what happens. Regina finds the arrangement frankly gallingly unacceptable, given that they already have a baby they need raising in their increasingly cramped loft—Regina had not intended to give Mary Margaret accommodation suitable for a family with the first curse—but she remains silent and impassive when the matter comes up over a family dinner. Regina's not in the business of making choices for Emma, and if she wants to spend more time with her parents then—
“Actually, I—I think want to spend more time with Henry now. Is that okay?” she'd asked over dinner one night, eyes darting between her parents and her posture drawn inwards, like she genuinely isn't sure if it is—but Snow had just smiled, and squeezes her daughter's hand in understanding.
So. That had been that.
The upshot of it all is that Emma is here on Regina's doorstep now, with two suitcases full of clothes—but not heavy suitcases, Regina realises with a nasty pang, even after all this time in this town—and fidgeting nervously. Seeing Emma here, in this house, Regina wonders if she had just played her cards differently all those years back when they'd first met, if she'd made different choices—but that's in the past now, and she won't second-guess the present by living back there any more.
“You'll be taking the second guest room,” Regina says, as she takes one of the suitcases up the stairs. “It'll be opposite Zelena's, so you might be woken up by the baby—you know which one, right?”
Emma nods, but she still looks anxious as she enters the room. Regina hesitates before following in.
“Emma, if there's anything—”
“No, no, it's really nice, actually. Thanks.”
“It's my pleasure,” Regina says, but Emma still isn't facing her, and there's a slight tremble to her body that has Regina on edge. She still isn't quite sure where they are now with their ever-evolving relationship, and if Emma realises what she's doing—“But if you don't think living under the same roof as me is a good idea, then maybe you could—”
She never gets round to explaining exactly what, though, because Emma turns around and kisses her full on the lips, hard, passionate and open-mouthed until Regina is seeing fireworks under her eyelids and her hands are tracing their way unconsciously up Emma's shirt.
“Okay,” she says, slightly breathless, when Emma finally separates with a nastily devilish smirk but with gratitude written all over her face. “Okay.”
* * *
They still go to their spot at night, even after Emma has moved in.
No one thinks it's necessary any more, but it’s still official Storybrooke policy that the woods are too dangerous to be approached at this time, and it's their job—their duty—to protect the town from threats, however vague they may be. So Regina continues her night-time stakeouts, most nights that she doesn't fall asleep within an hour.
Less now, though. She doesn't need to leave home to talk to Emma any more, of course, and sometimes she's too preoccupied with other nightly activities—though it's a challenge to keep them discreet—to have the energy to drive or teleport out to the woods.
Sometimes, though, she just likes the quiet.
Emma doesn’t always join her. She'd been completely honest when she said she hasn’t spent a great deal of time with Henry in the last few months, and Regina knows that whatever she herself may offer, Henry will always be the first and foremost thing that draws Emma to her house—their house, their home. Even when she does, though, there's less and less talking to be done. Regina supposes that they simply have less to talk about now, in the quiet honesty of the dark.
Alternatively, it could be because they spend more and more of their time kissing instead—but that’s between the two of them, and not really a point of discussion, thank you very much, and besides, it really does get difficult to take a moment for themselves with so many people in the house.
There is one thing they do need to talk about, though. One last confession for Regina to make.
“What do you mean?” Emma asks, breaking off from Regina with flushed cheeks and swollen lips and a half-unbuttoned shirt and—god. Regina looks away—has to, or she’ll never get this done.
“It’s—about my magic,” she says haltingly, putting some space between her and Emma. If she’s wrong—if Emma doesn’t actually know—
“Oh. Yeah. I know you still have it,” Emma says casually, lips whispering across her neckline in an infuriatingly distracting way, as if Emma wants to get back to other, more pleasurable activities—
Regina exhales, bites down on the smile threatening to break down all over her face. “No, I mean—Emma, stop that, this is serious. I haven’t told you why I’ve been hiding it.”
At this, Emma stills, sits back. “You mean why you’ve been lying about it.”
Regina closes her eyes. “Yes. And it’s—I can explain it, but—”
“Hey.” Emma reaches forward, takes Regina’s hands in exactly the same way that Regina had done in the weeks before in this exact spot. “I know.”
“But—”
“I fought the darkness too, remember? I worry about it coming back too, but magic doesn't make you dark.”
Regina keeps her eyes closed, can’t bear to look at Emma when she’s like this, when she doesn’t understand—“Not like me. Nothing like me. Emma—the things I did—the things I see—if I fall back into old habits, if I let the darkness back in—”
“I know. I know. I don't—I don't see what you see, but I've got my own demons, and I’m still here. You're still here, and you—you're good. You're Regina.”
“But—”
“Regina, please.”
She opens her eyes.
There’s a glowing halo of light surrounding Emma’s hands, dancing, brilliant, captivating—but incomplete, imperfect, blocked by the pitch-black of Regina’s gloves. Regina looks up, sees Emma waiting, ready.
“We're still here,” Emma says, one more time.
Regina breathes out, and pure white light blazes forth from their joined hands in the night.
* * *
Two days later, Henry asks her a question. Emma is on the opposite couch playing with her phone, Zelena and the baby are upstairs sleeping, and Henry is flicking through his book while she sits next to him, half-reading and half-studying the growing pimples on his face with a frown.
“Mom, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, dear.”
“What is darkness? Like, actually, what is it? None of the books really say.”
He looks up at her, her beautiful darling boy, her and Emma’s, and sees that where once there was betrayal and fear, there’s now curiosity, love, hope.
“Something we can overcome,” she says, smoothing hair down behind his ear, and looks past him to Emma. “If we fight.”
Emma meets her eye, and smiles.