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Chapter Text

They say that the castle deep in the forest outside Storybrooke is enchanted. They say that no one who enters it can leave. They say that an evil queen reigns over it, terrible and twisted and dark.

They say that she was cursed– by a fairy, by a witch, by another queen. Some whisper that the enchantress had been her own mother, a line of witches rotten to the core. They say that she is just as much a prisoner in her castle as anyone else, and only true love can set her free.

They say that she’s a beast, belladonna-beautiful on the outside and poison within. They say that she is terrible and evil and twisted within; and that certainly, she will never find that true love that would save her. She will rot in her castle until the last of the enchantment takes hold and then endure forever in despair. 

For who could ever love a beast?

There are few stories that begin with an ending, but our story today must, if it will ever begin. It begins with two endings at once, two hearts wildly beating and then silenced. It begins with a curse- with murder most foul- and it begins with a blessing that costs another her life.

And as a body falls to the floor to an agonized cry, across the woods, in a little village, there's a new cry, tinny and reedy and full of needs that can't be expressed. There's a low hush, child and a midwife gathering a bundle close to her as another gently closes a mother's eyes.

There is a beginning in these endings, after all, as a girl in a castle weeps into her hands and a much smaller girl surveys the world for the first time.

It's the younger girl's story we will hear today.

It's rather grim at first, of course; there's little hope for a child without a mother or father. The midwife keeps her until there's simply not enough food to go around, and then she's sent to a blacksmith without children until his wife is unexpectedly with child.

The little girl learns very young that family is as elusive as magic and can elicit hope and fear in equal measure. The little girl learns that the world is harsh and hard and she will have to be as hard as the world or she will break. The little girl has angry eyes, a kindly villager says, and she simply can't take in a difficult child right now.

The little girl with angry eyes grows up angrier, grows up harder. She scoffs at fairytales and true love and dreams late at night of them all the same. She loses two apprenticeships, learns the vocation of snatch-and-run instead, and finds herself locked in a lord's dungeons at seventeen.

And then something curious happens, the likes of which had never happened before and is in fact enough to make her hard eyes widen and falter.

The little girl is found by someone who wants her.

"What's your name?" the woman inquires, drawing her silk closer to her as she offers the girl a painted-lip smile. She has hard eyes, too, though it isn't anger that makes them hard.

“Emma," the girl says. The lord stands behind the woman, bored at the exchange. He calls her girl and street rat and has never once asked for the name etched on a blanket she'd left in the woods before she'd been caught. “Emma Swan."

"Emma," the woman repeats, and her eyes are cool as she turns away. Emma sags. But the woman says, "I will take her as a part of my price.”

"A part!" the lord echoes, and there is haggling and threats and a whisper of something that might be magic in the air. Emma stands white-knuckled and wipes her thoughts blank of emotion until she's stumbling beside the woman's rapid clip and the sun is beating down on her prison-pale skin.

"I don't know what you think I can do," she says quickly, determined not to hope when she knows where that always ends. "I never completed an apprenticeship. I don't have any money. I don't even have any clothing. My last mother said that I'm 'useless'. I don't know what you think I can do," she says again.

The woman turns to face her, her eyes glinting. "Can you steal for me, Emma Swan?”

"Oh." Emma watches her warily, expecting a trap. But there is only silence and expectation. "What do you want me to steal?”

"People," the woman says, and thus begins the chapter of the little girl with angry eyes and Lady Cora.

Now, while you and I might have seen this as the beginning of a fairytale, Emma Swan had had less grandiose expectations of a rags-to-riches story. Emma Swan had met few kind people in this world and even fewer who would spirit a girl like her from prison for noble purposes, and she had already begun to steel for the worst when she’d met Lady Cora.

She’d thought Lady Cora might traffic in people in the worst of ways, enslave young women or carry out kidnapping plots for the children of local lords. She’d been sure that she’d have to run or risk doing something unforgivable. Emma had never believed in fairytales, and she’d known better than to believe that one had stumbled across her now.

But Lady Cora, as it winds up, is as close to a queen as there could ever be in Storybrooke (excepting the queen that supposedly lives in the nearby woods). She governs her villages with an iron fist, and she has no tolerance for criminals or murderers in her midst. And all queens need thieves of their own, of course, because they can rarely be bothered to dirty their skirts with criminal chases.

This isn’t to say that Lady Cora is a noble or good queen, and Emma knows that from the start. She is cruel and harsh, a queen who rules by fear and shows only calculated kindness. But she’s earned Emma’s loyalty from the start, and Emma is wary but grateful regardless.

Eight years pass in this way, with very little to report to you, my dear reader, beyond the humdrum of everyday work. And Emma works quite a bit. Here are some things that Emma excels at: finding runners who violate Cora’s laws; seducing men and women into imprisonment; maneuvering around Cora at her most dangerous. 

Here are some things that Emma does not excel at: bringing in impoverished villagers who raise Cora’s ire when they can no longer pay taxes to her; controlling her temper when Cora finds fault with this; making friends.

“Someday, you’ll find your true love, too,” a woman had said to her desperately as Emma had dragged her into her carriage. “You’ll understand then.” 

“If you have to kill his wife for it, is it really true love?” Emma had slammed the door shut and locked it, scoffing to herself.

“That's the best kind of true love,” Cora’s deputy says, smirking at her. He’s a man who fancies himself a pirate, even though he’d nearly drowned the last time he’d proposed to her and she’d shoved him into the lake. Jones has it in his head that they’re going to wind up lovers or married, no matter how many times she’s had to inform him that they aren’t engaged.

“True love is a heaping pile of manure,” Emma says pleasantly, and when Jones slings his hooked hand around her shoulders, she leans back a step, twists her shoulders, and sends him tumbling into a stinking pile of said manure by the side of the road.

Emma, you see, has very little patience for affectations like true love. Love ends with rejection or despair or selfishness, she thinks, and none of that is true. Love is a useless delusion of attraction for which she has no patience. 

Does she know of the full story of the queen in the castle just yet? We can’t say for sure. Perhaps she’d overheard it from gossiping villagers, or from Lady Cora’s odd assistant, Doctor Gold. Knowing Emma as we do by now, I can’t imagine that she'd paid it any mind if she had heard it.

The one thing she certainly knows: Never set foot into the castle in the woods, or you will never escape it. 

Everyone knows that, though few have ever stumbled across the castle. There had been an old story of a man whose body had been found outside its gates just around when Emma had been plucked from prison, his body half-devoured by wolves. By the queen, some had whispered instead, eyes bright with fear and fascination. Emma had been too busy to listen to rumors back then.

You might think by now that Emma had been hardened even more by her day-to-day life, dealing with Lady Cora and with cruel, violent people. But somehow, she’d become a curiosity instead, a woman who works for Lady Cora for eight years and never picked up her cruelty. She would march through the village with a struggling prisoner in front of her and march right back through it to look after young Cinders-Ella with her new baby and hovel. She becomes a fierce protector of the needy, the helpless, the ones who Cora loathes most. She is kind, some of the villagers insist, and others laugh and laugh until tears stream from their faces at the thought of one of Cora’s entourage being kind. 

But Emma, too stubborn to believe in faith or love or dreams, is equally determined to make sure that others believe in all of it instead. It is impossible to resolve the woman who would kill for Cora with the woman who would hunt down Hansel and Gretel’s father to return him to them, and so few bother to try. 

Lady Cora is derisive but does not interfere. You see, Doctor Gold had foreseen, many years ago, that Emma Swan would be vital to Cora’s life or death someday, though he could not tell her for better or for worse. Lady Cora is careful to nurture Emma’s loyalty but never let her stray too far, lest she lose her tight control over the woman.

For her part, Emma is comfortable with her position and her life as it is. There is a creeping emptiness within her that she never quite resolves, a hole in her heart that had grown and grown since she’d been a child. She covers it up with layers and layers of shields, protects it from the world and from her own thoughts, and she keeps busy so she might never contemplate it.

And so our story takes us to Emma riding through the woods in the rain one evening, out on a manhunt that had taken longer than it should have and left her very irritated. She is irritated as a rule today, rather, though this new inconvenience hasn’t improved her mood. Twenty-eight years ago to this day, Emma had lost the only person before Cora who had wanted her, and each birthday is only a reminder of a woman she could never meet.

Her mark had run off before the rain had begun, fleeing to shelter and leaving Emma with gritted teeth and matted hair, urging her horse through paths in the woods that weren’t paths at all. Between the moonless night and the rain, it had taken Emma nearly an hour before she'd realized just how lost she is, and bites out a curse and rides on. 

She’d hoped she might stumble across something familiar, but the woods seem larger and more confusing than ever. There are wolves howling to the moon and sheets of rain beating down on her and she can't see much of anything but the trees directly in front of her.

It comes as a surprise when she looks up and sees, instead of trees, an enormous gate rising in front of her. She squints again, frowns at what can't possibly be real, but it remains ahead of her, partially open and with dim movements near the entrance.

Impossible. But then the rain slows for a moment and she sees what is beyond the gate: first, a castle, tall but concealed from the world by the hilly mountains around it. Second and more urgently, she is able to make out what the dim movements are.

Because, of course, it wouldn’t be that easy to walk inside a castle where no one can leave. White wolves move through the gates like ghosts in the dark, their low growls finally audible through the rain as they bear down on a figure hanging from the gate.

“Help!” It's the shout of a boy, a child, young and terrified, just within the gates of the castle. He hangs desperately from a pole of the gate while white wolves leap at him. They'd torn his shoes and clothes half off of him and he is bleeding profusely from a wound on his calf, and his hands are slipping against the rain-slicked metal of the gate. “Mama!” he screams. “Help! Mama!" But even Emma, just a few feet away, can hardly hear him. Wherever his mother is, she must have been impeded by the wolves.

And if you’ve been paying attention to our story by now, you know what Emma Swan’s response to a boy in danger would be. It should be no surprise to you that the warnings to never enter the castle barely fly through her mind before she’s riding forward, urging her horse into the the pack of wolves and calling out to the boy. “Kid!” she shouts, and the boy nearly slips from his position in astonishment. “Hold on!” 

“Who are you?” he demands, and Emma ignores him as her horse rears up in protest. A castle that no one can leave once entered. The boy’s hand slips and he slides down the gate, screaming again as he scrabbles desperately for purchase, and Emma urges her horse on with a slap to his flank and hurtles toward the boy just as he finally falls.

She seizes him by his ripped tunic and yanks him to her, settling him on the horse as she ducks her head. “Get ready,” she instructs the boy, and he huddles back against her as she yanks a knife from her boot and swings it at the closest wolf. 

It howls in agony, but it doesn't stop snapping at her until her horse makes a mad dash up the path, toward the castle entrance. And then, suddenly, the wolves stop completely. They fade into the dim light, the castle grounds clear and vacant, and not a wolf is in sight anymore. You see, these wolves are guardians, brought in by the curse to keep people in, not out. And Emma and the boy are now firmly inside the castle walls, whether they like it or not. 

Emma, you may recall, has had some experience with prisons, though a dungeon under a lord’s home is no comparison to this magnificent castle. Still, she stares at the open gate with a sinking feeling and feels a wave of claustrophobia at the threat of a new imprisonment. But then the boy moans and Emma remembers the bite in his leg. “Let’s dress that wound,” she says gently, shivering in the rain. She eases him off the horse once they make it to the doors of the castle, hoists him into her arms and stumbles indoors.

He buries his face in her shoulder, a moan of pain slipping from his throat, and Emma feels a twinge of something in her heart that she keeps shielded and refuses to dwell on. “You’re going to be okay,” she promises the boy. “Whoever lives in this castle must have something to bandage you up with.”

She looks around for the first time and immediately regrets that confident assertion. She hadn’t considered much about the castle interior before she’d entered it, only that a castle this magnificent without any signs of decay must have been occupied. But instead, they’ve entered into an opulent grand hall that looks utterly abandoned. 

There are cobwebs hanging from the walls, covering the chandelier at the center of the room. Dust mutes the colors of the walls, obscures the image of a woman in a painted glass window above them, is only lightly disturbed on the floor at one end of the staircases that wind around the far side of the hall. There are mirrored suits of armor on the opposite side of the room as the staircase, and even through the dust that coats them, Emma sees a telltale orange flicker. A fire. There is someone there, after all, and there is warmth and a fireplace reflected against that coat of armor. 

She's still dizzy from her madcap ride through the woods and the rain and the wolves, and maybe that’s why she begins to hear what sounds like a low hum of conversation. Whispers. They are coming from around her, from places there are no people at all, and the boy hasn’t reacted to any of it. She must have been imagining things, hearing voices, and she sighs at herself and takes another step forward–

It’s at this moment that I must introduce you and Emma both to a certain two objects bobbing around nervously on the floor. Several minutes before, they hadn’t been on the floor at all. They’d been standing on a bookcase in the room where Emma was heading before I pulled you away, whispering furiously to each other. 

“A girl!” the first had said, her eyes shining with glee. Most of her shines, as she is a small candelabra as well as being a rather impossible woman by the name of Zelena. “A woman! Here?” 

“The queen won’t take kindly to her,” the other says warningly. She is called Mulan, and had settled into her position as enchanted clock and Zelena’s compatriot with glum resignation. “She shouldn’t be here. We'll have to hide her.” 

“Hide her?” Zelena scoffs. “Hide a woman when we’re this close to being–“ 

“We both know that that’s as unlikely as–“ 

“You getting that stick out of your ass?” the candelabra grumbles.

Mulan sighs. “You know Regina. This isn’t going to end the way you want it to.” 

“I can handle Regina,” Zelena says boldly. “We’ll show our guest to the sitting room and the rest will work itself out.” She sighs, smug again. “Snow, you keep an eye on the little one,” she orders a teapot who’d been watching Emma and the boy progress down the hall. “I’ll take care of our guest.” She hops off the shelf with some difficulty as Mulan slides into place beside her on the floor. 

And that brings us back to the moment when Emma first meets them both. She stares. They stare back. “What the hell?” she demands, gaping at them and nearly dropping the boy. Emma knows of magic, of course, but very little of it had ever touched her. She’s never known enough about it to do more than stay away from a mark with a wand or ask no questions about Cora's sources or avoid the castle in the woods at all costs, for all the good that had done her. But those…enchanted objects…

Her mouth is still hanging slightly open, and the candelabra tilts its candle downward, extending its– hands. Those are hands– in a sweeping bow. And then it speaks, in an unmistakably feminine voice. “I am Zelena, at your service. This is Mulan,” she says, waving to her carelessly. Mulan tilts the top of her clock face, eyes wary on Emma. “What can we do for you tonight? You look like a drowned rat. It’s very homely. We’ll have to fix that,” Zelena says briskly, and Emma’s mouth hangs open a little more. 

“Did you just…call me ugly? You’re a lamp.” 

“I’m a candelabra! How dare you,” Zelena sniffs. “And silver doesn’t stay this clear unless there’s a genetic predisposition for clear skin, I’ll have you know. If you were–“ 

“Ignore her,” Mulan says hastily, cutting off the candelabra mid-sentence. Emma squints at her, thoroughly bewildered by them both. “I usually do, and I’m better off for it. That bite looks awful,” she says reprovingly, turning to the boy. “What did you do to it?” 

He looks sullen in response, burying his face in Emma’s shoulder again. Emma swallows her bewilderment and says, “Look, um…Lady Clock. I really need something to bandage it up before any dirt gets into the wound.” 

“She seems kind.” The third voice is a woman as well, a bit less strident than the candelabra’s and a bit less dour than the clock’s. There is a teapot at the end of the hall, in the cozy little room with the fireplace, and as Emma watches, it pours two teacups and sits back expectantly. “Why don’t you have a seat?” she offers.

And so Emma sets the boy down in a large, high-backed chair facing the fire as Mulan and Zelena vanish again in search of bandages for her. The boy hasn’t said a word since his screams of Mama! in the rain, and Emma keeps up a steady stream of chatter instead to distract him from the pain. She tells him about her mark, a man who’d been stealing goats from one of the outer edges of Storybrooke, and she tells him about a girl named Grace just his age who has a mad father and likes to travel with Emma to the market. The boy listens in silence until Emma runs out of words and the bite is properly cleaned and closed, and Emma sits on the floor beside the fireplace, wrapped in a blanket that Mulan had found her, and sips at the tea in defeated silence. 

This isn’t so bad, she decides. Trapped in a castle with a bevy of enchanted objects at her beck and call isn’t the worst way to be trapped at all. At least she won’t be alone again, and she’ll have to find a way to reunite the boy with his mother–

There is a thunderous slam behind her and she jumps, spilling tea all over her bedraggled clothing as she twists around.

Storming into the room, eyes dark and in a gown as magnificent as the castle around them, is the most beautiful woman that Emma has ever seen. Her skin is darker than Emma’s, her cheekbones high and sharp, her eyes a fierce brown and her hair piled above her head like the sort of regal women that poets write epics about. Emma gapes at her, momentarily stunned to stillness, and the woman hurls her across the room with nothing more than a twitch of her fingers.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the woman demands. 

“Snow invited her in here,” Zelena says quickly, pointing at the teapot with one lit candle. “Mulan and I had nothing to do with it.” 

“In my castle?” the woman roars, ignoring the candelabra. “In my chair! You dare to invade my home for…what, a sighting of the beast? Do you know what I do to people like you?” 

“I’m not–“ Emma struggles against the magic holding her in place. “I’m not here to look at anything!” The woman’s face darkens even more, and Emma swallows. “I don’t want to be here at all, so if you could call off your wolves, I’ll be on my way!” she grinds out, terrified and angry. 

The woman looks unconvinced, eyes flashing. “Liar. Why else would you be here?” she snaps. “Don’t you know that no one who enters this castle can leave?” 

Emma hesitates, worried about what this terrifying, furious woman might do to the boy still hidden behind the couch. But then, a voice, worn after an injury and a night of terror. “She saved my life, Mama,” the boy says, and the woman releases Emma in an instant and flies across the room to the boy.

“Henry!” she gasps, and Emma sinks to the ground and stares as the woman drops to her knees to cup the boy’s face. 

Let’s rewind, shall we?

We can peer into the everyday lives of Henry and his mother, locked in a castle prison for the duration of Henry’s young life. We can see his wistfulness and his mother’s sorrow at what he’s been denied, we can see his face screw up with determination after being told again that he can never even try to leave, we can see him slip out of bed while his mother watches the rain in silence and slide down the banister, tiptoeing past an arguing clock and candelabra to make a break for the gate.

We can try to understand how a woman of such power and rage can be turned to doting mother for a small boy, or we can return to Emma and her flabbergasted bewilderment and learn from the image that she is seeing instead.

The woman strokes Henry’s face with heartbroken, fraught touches, her eyes welling up with tears as she stares at the cuts on his arms and his bandaged legs. She runs her hand over his leg, a shimmer of magic at the tips of her fingers, but nothing happens to the cuts or bite. “Sweetheart, why?” she asks him, and he sobs in response, sliding his arms around the woman’s neck as though the whole ordeal is only now finally over.

“I just wanted to try, Mama,” he whimpers. “I wanted to see if we could be free. If we could– if there could be some way to escape the curse.” 

“Oh, my darling boy,” the woman murmurs, holding him tight. Emma shivers. The empty spot in her heart stings, as it has the tendency to do whenever she sees mothers with their children. 

She takes a step back, unwilling to watch any of it, and the woman turns, suddenly reminded of her existence. “You,” she snarls, and if Emma had thought that Henry might have softened her reaction to an intruder, she is very clearly wrong. “I suppose you’ll want something for your troubles. Gold? Jewels?”

“I’d really just like to…go,” Emma says, pulling herself to a stand and running a nervous hand through her hair. The candelabra had called her homely, for fuck’s sake. Was she homely? She’d always thought she was decent-looking, at least.

The woman isn’t focused on her appearance, though. Instead, new rage simmers in her eyes as she snarls out, “Well, that’s too bad. Haven’t you been paying attention? No one leaves this castle. Not without being torn to pieces by wolves.”

“So I’m your prisoner.” Emma peers at her with trepidation, unsure as to whether or not this is bad news or…worse news.

The woman’s lip curls. “We’re both prisoners here,” she grits out. “Throw yourself to the wolves, I don’t care. Just stay away from me and mine.”

"Like I have a choice!" Emma says, outraged. "Listen, if I'm going to be trapped here with you, I'm not going to...lock myself in a room and hide out of your way!" She's had enough nightmares of grubby cells and tight spaces to last her an eternity, and she isn't about to let a nasty queen with some severe anger management issues force her into another one. 

"Oh, I beg to differ," the woman snarls. "You'll find it in your best interests not to aggravate me." She lifts an anxious-looking Henry up with a shimmer of magic that actually works and stalks past Emma to the door. “And stay out of the west wing of my castle!” she barks over her shoulder, storming from the room in another burst of energy and slammed-open doors.

The teapot says serenely, “Well, you can’t win them all. Tea, anyone?” 

Chapter Text

In another part of the castle, Henry is telling his mother everything about the stranger who had saved him from the wolves. “She came out of nowhere!” he says, eyes bright like they haven’t been in a long time. “Just fought through the wolves and brought me home!” 

His mother smiles indulgently, masking her trepidation and letting him go on and on about a woman she’d rather not see ever again. A woman in her castle, who won’t be able to leave. She swallows back her nausea and remains silent. 

Henry’s mother is named Regina, though no one has called her that to her face in many years. Once, almost twenty-eight years ago to this very date, this castle had been a little hut in the woods and she had thought she might spend her life in it with joyful optimism. Now, she is queen of a castle that hasn’t aged a day since and she wants nothing more than to escape it all with her son. 

But there is no escape. And this stranger in her castle bodes only new disruptions that will never end well. When Henry had finally returned to bed with a new bandage and another useless attempt to heal him– those wolves are resistant to magic, they wouldn’t serve any purpose if they weren’t– she steps out of their quarters and into the west wing of the castle. 

She had been there earlier that night, stepped through the ravaged rooms and the torn paintings and made her way to the highest room of the tower. There is a rose floating in a bell jar on the table, all but a few petals on the table below it. Regina stares at them in quiet despair and closes her eyes, drifting off to sleep in the hard chair beside them.

Meanwhile, Emma Swan is urged to a room by Mulan and Zelena. “It’s best that you stay out of her way,” Mulan says apologetically. “She’s not great at visitors. Or people in general.” 

“How dare you,” Zelena says, turning to glare at the clock. “She’s wonderful with the little tyke. She’s just been waiting for the right person to come along.” She offers a winning smile to Emma. Emma looks back at her, nonplussed. “Why don’t you select something lovely to wear for breakfast tomorrow morning?” 

The wardrobe, who goes by Aurora and has a friendly spinning wheel nearby, is quick to help her; and a dazed Emma is dressed and re-dressed several times before she pushes them all away. “Enough!” she says, a bit crossly. “I’m not going to breakfast. I’m not going anywhere near that woman again. You heard her. She doesn’t want me around and I’m fine with that.” 

Zelena and Aurora exchange a look. “Well, that won’t do,” Aurora says decisively, and brings out a sheer dress that begins somewhere halfway down Emma’s chest.

As you might imagine, Emma doesn't sleep well that night, even in the luxury of the castle. She tosses and turns and thinks too often of a beautiful, terrifying woman she hardly knows with flashing eyes that soften around her son.

Across the castle, the same woman lies flat in bed, wide awake, her thoughts troubled with the memory of a woman who’d looked like a drowned rat as Regina had born down on her, but with eyes that had flashed with defiance through the fear. That defiance sticks in her heart and stays, like a pesky itch she can't reach, and she sighs to herself and thinks instead of the rose in the west wing of the castle.

In the morning, Regina has found no more contentment than in the night before. “No,” she says immediately when Zelena finds her. “Absolutely not.” 

“Don’t you think you deserve better than this?” Zelena wheedles. “Doesn’t Henry? The rose is almost bare and this woman appears in our midst and you can’t tell me that she isn’t a part of this. She could be the one.” 

“The one,” Regina repeats dubiously. “That…that girl would be my true love? I’ve known her for half a day and I already hate her. She’s obnoxious. Irritating.” 

“So are you!” Zelena throws up her hands. A candle flies from her hands toward the bed, setting Regina’s pillow on fire. “It’s a perfect match!” 

“Zelena…”

Zelena hops down to face Regina, her eyes beseeching. “At least give her a chance. Invite her down for breakfast. Maybe she’ll surprise you.” 

Regina heaves a sigh. “Fine. But that’s all. No schemes, no games. I’ll order her to breakfast and then I’m done.” 

“Deal!” Zelena agrees, waving her candle-less arm in the air as Regina heads for the door. “Wait, did you say order?” 

But Regina is already out of the room, Zelena shouting after her, “Be nice!” to no avail.

She knows where the woman would be staying, knows which room is the only one in the castle where anyone had ever stayed before. She raps on the door once and barks out, “You will join me for breakfast!” 

The response is succinct and as obnoxious as expected. “Go to hell!”

“Say please,” Mulan hisses. Regina has no idea where she’d come from. A private meeting on how best to torment Regina, most likely, Zelena presiding. “At least make an attempt to woo her.” 

“Fine,” Regina says through gritted teeth, reminding herself that this woman had saved Henry and she owes her some tiny debt. “You will join me for breakfast…please.”

The woman yanks open the door, and Regina nearly gapes. Sometime over the course of the night, she’d dried herself off and been put into one of Aurora’s gowns, and Regina blinks, startled at the change in appearance. Those fiery eyes are now accompanied by pale skin and long hair that falls past her shoulders in waves, settling on a dress that hugs her body well enough that Regina can’t tear her eyes away. 

“Go fuck yourself…please,” she says sweetly, and Regina is still so transfixed by the dress that she doesn’t think to respond until the door is slamming shut again.

She jerks back and snarls back, infuriated, “Fine! But don’t expect to eat at all, then!” and storms for the dining hall. 

Inside the room, Emma plops back onto her bed, blowing a lock of hair out of her face and sighing at the ceiling in defeat. It’s been twelve hours in this castle and she’s already alienated its queen. “She isn’t the one holding you prisoner,” her wardrobe says reprovingly. 

“She might as well be.” She doesn’t deal well with being ordered around, especially not by a woman who’d threatened her life the night before. If she’s going to be trapped in this castle for the rest of her life, she isn’t going to do it while catering to the queen’s every whim. 

And so the day had continued as a hostile standoff, testing the stubbornness of these two women who we’ve seen possess inexhaustible amounts of stubbornness. By the end of the day, the inexhaustible were two, and the exhausted were…well, everyone else, not least of all you, my dear reader, and me.

But while we shake our heads from afar and clocks and teapots sigh from the mantle, one boy decides to take action instead. Regina has raised him with a good heart, you see, regardless of what kind of snit she might be in right now, and Henry is determined to ensure his savior’s happiness in his castle.

He pokes his head into Emma’s room just after sunset, when he knows his mother will be in the west wing alone. “I’m pretty sure this was the one thing your mother was really, really clear on,” Emma says dryly when she sees him. “You’re not supposed to be around me.” 

“I’m bored!” Henry protests, sitting down beside her on her bed. “You don’t want me to run away again, do you?” 

Emma raises her eyes at him. He pouts at her. “I just thought you might be hungry. Mama isn’t around right now. You can sneak down to the kitchens with me.” Her stomach growls. He beams, the same smugness that Emma had recognized in his mother’s voice. “So that’s a yes?” 

And that’s how Emma’s stomach betrays her to a boy who won’t take no for an answer. He talks tonight as she had the night before, keeping up a steady stream of chatter when he’d been silent until now. “Mama saved me before I was born,” he says, poking out a finger to wipe dust off a railing. “My birth parents were looking for shelter and they found the wolves instead. I think my father was carried away. My mother stayed in your room but she was really sick when I was born.” He continues on, unaware of the thunderstruck look on Emma’s face. “Mama promised her then that I’d never be alone.” 

“Oh,” Emma manages. She can’t remember her own birth, of course. She doesn’t know what had been said to the midwife or what her mother’s final words had been, but she knows that this boy, locked in a castle with a mother who looks at him with the same eyes that the queen had the night before, is infinitely fortunate for it. 

Her steps are a bit slower now, but Henry doesn’t seem to notice, and they’re soon welcomed into the kitchen by an overeager set of dishes and glasses. Emma settles down, positively famished, and stares in wonder at the table as it fills itself up.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s being watched. 

High in the west wing of the castle, Regina is sitting in solitude with the dying rose. There’s a mirror hanging from the wall, one of the few items in the wing that haven’t been wrecked or covered in dust. And in the mirror, Regina can see her kitchens with perfect clarity: her son, seated at the table as the dishes perform a little dance for their new guest; Zelena, lighting the table and being carried from dish to dish as though she’s the star of the show as Mulan hops away, alarmed; and the woman named Emma Swan, laughing helplessly at the entire scene before her.

Her eyes are bright and she looks younger, somehow, more alive. Regina is spellbound by her smile, caught in her glittering eyes and the way she exchanges a grin with Henry before she turns back to the table. Like this, she seems less a bullish stranger, come to invade Regina’s peace of mind, and more…whatever it is that Zelena and Mulan see in her. 

But Regina, queen of a cursed castle, hasn’t endured while frozen in time for twenty-eight years by chasing dreams of broken curses. No, Regina knows well enough that the rose and its promise had only been a cruel joke by the enchantress who had cursed her. 

True love and a broken curse are as impossible an ending for her as they’ve been since the night her fiancé’s heart had been pulled from his body, even more so now. The only true love she can ever have again is Henry’s, and she is better for it.

No woman will change that, not now or forever. Not even one who can stop Regina’s breath with only a smile.

You would think, in a castle the size of our heroines’ residence, it would be easy enough for them to avoid each other. At least one of them has spent a good portion of her life in Lady Cora’s sprawling complex and managed days, even weeks, of not seeing the mistress of the house, and that had been only an estate. This is a castle, and Regina and Emma are unpleasantly surprised at how often they seem to wind up in each other’s midst.

First, there’s an incident in the dining room that ends with Regina stalking from the room in a huff and a number of forks sighing reprovingly. “I didn’t mean it like that!” Emma had protested, and Zelena had offered her a withering look that had been less than encouraging. And yes, Emma had meant it like that, and Regina had been justified in storming off that time.

I won’t bore you with the details of the various incidents. Too many are snide remarks taken too harshly, Regina quick to anger and Emma quick to provoke. Too many are Emma-who-runs suddenly trapped and lashing out at the only person who seems to fight back. Too many are Regina with a dying rose on her mind and her heart clogged with fear and fury at her fate.

Emma walks past the west wing of the castle more than she absolutely has to, peering in surreptitiously and seeing nothing but closed doors. Emma is also rather atrocious at avoiding Regina in the first place, on par with only Regina herself. Zelena scoffs at both of them. Mulan is quietly wistful. Snow is certain already.

Henry’s thoughts on the matter are his own, and I won’t disclose them to you just yet. I can only tell you that he makes no particular effort to keep the women apart, but he winds up leaving just as frustrated as they are, more often than not.

One day late in the first week, Emma bursts into a sitting room and demands, “What the hell?” 

“What now?” Regina says tiredly, shutting her book with a sigh. “Come to critique my staff? My housekeeping? My face?” 

“Don’t be stupid, you’re beautiful,” Emma says irritably. Most everything about Regina irritates her, particularly the way her lips part for a moment like she’s actually surprised by the comment and then set in a grim line. “What did you do to my coat?” 

The coat she refers to in this case isn’t an ordinary one, carelessly borrowed from Aurora’s closet. No, this is the one Emma Swan had first purchased after she’d caught her first mark, a singular reward from Lady Cora that had meant, to Emma, freedom and the promise of a future. She’d ridden through a pack of wolves with a rain-soaked red riding coat and saved a boy, and now the only thing she still owns is missing from her room.

“Ah, that.” Regina busies herself with her book, revealing nothing– least of all, that she’d seen it in there while surreptitiously glancing into Emma’s quarters. It had been filthy and worn but folded with care, set in a place of pride on her nightstand. Regina had felt an uncomfortable twinge in her heart and had sent the coat downstairs for cleaning. “I burned it.” 

“You–“ Emma sucks in a breath. “You–“ She breathes fast, her fists clenched, her eyes dark and furious. Regina, despite herself, has discovered a certain kind of glee that rushes through her veins when Emma’s face screws up like this. She bites her lip to contain her smirk.

“It was unseemly,” Regina says calmly. “I won’t have peasantry in my home.” 

“It was the only thing I had from outside,” Emma says in a low tone, and Regina’s stomach twists at the emptiness in her voice. She nearly opens her mouth to admit the truth, but Emma’s already on the warpath. “You took my freedom. You took my privacy. You treat me like I’m the enemy here instead of a victim of whatever curse you brought upon yourself, and you had to take my coat, too?” 

Regina stops listening somewhere around whatever curse you brought upon yourself, the glee in her veins turning ice-cold to fury. “Do you think I want you here?” she spits out. “Do you think I asked for some girl to invade my castle and make yourself at home in this prison?” 

“So sorry I saved your son’s life!” Emma snaps, throwing up her hands. 

Regina grinds her teeth together, fingers digging into the cover of her book. “And you’re going to claim that was altruism?” She doesn’t pause to contemplate that idea, not when the retorts are flying fast and Emma’s eyes are nearly emerald green in intensity right now. “I know what you were after. I know why a street rat–“ And Emma flinches, but Regina doesn’t notice. “–would save a boy who lived in a castle that looks like this. You got what you deserved,” she bites out. “I have no pity to spare for you!”

“You think I did it for a reward?” Emma says disbelievingly. “Do you think the whole world is as cold as you?” Regina’s glower is on at full blast. “I didn’t save him for any of that! I saved him because he was in trouble and I cared! Not everyone is as horrible as you are!”

Regina scoffs. There is a tiny voice in her head, one that whispers warnings about a wilting rose and this woman who does seem to care quite a bit, but she pushes it aside. “You’re lying,” she says stubbornly. 

“You’re unbelievable.” Emma whirls around, stalks for the door, and then whirls back. “And you know what? Next time, instead of blaming me for saving Henry, why don’t you take a good, hard look at yourself and think about why it is that Henry was so desperate to run away from you.” 

“Leave him out of this!” Regina snarls, rising to her feet. She takes four steps across the room, standing toe-to-toe with Emma in utter fury. “You keep Henry away from your foul ideas of…” She’s shaking, the tiny voice quieted and a thousand new fears and helpless doubts running through her head. In another story, with women far less stubborn, she might have wept right then.

But not this one, where these two have only ever learned how to fight. “And I knew!” Emma says fiercely. “I knew what would happen if I crossed into the castle. I’ve heard the stories.” Regina stills, her heart pounding with new fear now. But Emma doesn’t notice. “When I met you, I thought they were wrong about what lived in this castle. But I was an idiot.” Her breaths escape in quick puffs, her chest heaving with fury, and Regina can feel the heat coming off her in waves. “They were right all along. You really are a beast.” 

Regina slaps her, catches her nail on Emma’s lip and draws blood. Emma laughs, hard and wild, as Regina flees from the room, still trembling with suppressed fury and sorrow. 

And Emma laughs and bleeds and heads upstairs just in time to see Mulan struggling to set down a pile of freshly laundered clothes in front of Aurora. The red coat is folded on top of it, gleaming like it hasn’t since Emma had first purchased it, and Emma curls up on her bed with it still in her arms as the laughter turns to frustrated tears.

And as Emma is regretting her outburst and wondering why the hell Regina has to make everything so hard– as Mulan climbs onto the bed and pats her shoulder with one awkward non-hand– Regina is already back in the west wing, her hand resting on the bell jar and her eyes fixed on the image of Emma in her mirror. She isn’t weeping. She sits rigid, in absolute silence, and then she tears the bell jar from the rose it protects and hurls it at the mirror.

It bounces off, doesn’t even crack the mirror, and when it falls to the ground, it shatters. Regina doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, and a new bell jar appears over the rose before she turns back.

In summary, our early episodes are…less than ideal. I’ve seen my share of fairytales in the past, and none have been quite as fraught as this. It’s a miracle that they made it past the first week of coexistence, let alone…

Oh dear, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s return to Emma instead, yes? 

Emma is still learning more and more about the castle. Henry shows her secret passageways and high towers in the north wing, and Emma asks probing inquiries about the west wing that have him shrugging. “I don’t know. Mama doesn’t like me going there, either.”

Emma learns quickly to avoid the front gardens of the castle, where she’d first come in. It only takes several steps toward the gate before the growling begins, and she’d dared once to keep walking and had nearly lost a hand to a wolf’s snapping jaw. She’d avoided going outdoors since, anywhere but the balconies and porches within the castle, and so she’s startled one morning to look down from a balcony and find a neatly tended apple orchard behind the castle.

It’s still within the gate, at the base of the small hills that hide the castle, and so she pokes around until she finds a door behind the kitchen that leads to the outdoors. And it is an apple orchard, the trees lush and green and the apples that grow from them a healthy shade of red. 

Emma wanders around, half expecting to find a walking and talking garden hoe, but instead, she nearly trips over a woman, bent over the roots of an apple tree. She yelps out a curse, flailing and catching herself on the tree trunk, and Regina says dryly, “Incompetent as always. What was that, attempted murder?” 

“You!” Emma straightens, her lips pressing together. She’s been doing her best to avoid the queen since their last argument, building up their next encounter in her mind so much that it comes as a surprise to see Regina is only a woman, dressed in casual clothes with dirt on her knees. “What are you doing out here?” She begins accusingly and then falters, taken off guard. 

Regina blinks at her, amused. “This is my orchard. I tend the trees.” She stands up, wiping off her knees with a swift movement, and then plucks an apple from the lowest branches of the tree. “I’m rather good at it,” she says, tossing the apple to Emma.

Emma takes a bite, bemused. It is rather good. “Why apples?” she asks, licking juice off her lips. 

When Regina doesn’t answer, Emma looks up and sees Regina’s lips parted, her eyes glazed where they’re directed at Emma’s tongue. She flushes and takes another bite as Regina’s face finally jerks up guiltily. “I…” Regina takes a breath and then begins again. “Henry’s birth parents had been thieves of some sort. When the wolves went after his birth father, he left behind a sack full of apples.” Her eyes are distant now, soft as they never have been before. “I had some books about gardening in the library. I planted as many as I could. I thought…everything in this castle is made of magic, and I wanted Henry to have something real.” 

“Oh,” Emma says, nearly voiceless at Regina’s wistful eyes. “You…” 

It’s as though Regina is transformed in an instant, her face suddenly wary and dangerous. “What?” she barks out, defensive again.

Emma’s eyebrows shoot up and she makes an effort not to snap back. “I was just going to say that you’re a really good mother,” she mutters. Regina’s eyes round and she looks unguarded again for a moment. It galvanizes Emma. “It’s your only redeeming quality, actually,” she offers, less rancor in her voice than there could have been. 

Regina stares at her for a moment, her lips pursed together. “Is that supposed to be an apology?”

It absolutely is, though Emma isn’t prepared to admit it under Regina’s judging eyes. “No!” she says, scowling. “I’m not going to apologize for you calling me…”

My apologies for interrupting the tale here, but I think it may be instructive to look back again to the grubby-faced girl locked in a prison for a moment, to her huddled in a corner as her captor walks in. He kicks over a loaf of bread with a snide your meal, street rat, and she scrabbles at hard bread with her teeth, fading back into the shadows of her cell.

I can tell you that in the two years that Emma Swan spent in a jail cell, she’d almost forgotten her own name. Sometimes she’d forget that she’d been a person at all, someone beyond a shadow creature alone in a cage. Street rat had become a new identity, of sorts, and even in the days when she is hardest, it still probes deep.

She doesn’t tell any of this to Regina, of course. Not now. Maybe someday.

Instead, there’s a tense silence and then Regina speaks again. “It isn’t quite as unseemly now that it’s clean,” she says, reaching out to tug at Emma's coat. It’s an apology of sorts as well, and Emma’s cheeks heat up accordingly. 

Emma shrugs, feeling helpless and uncertain in their exchange. “It’s just a coat. I just…it was the first thing I ever really had, you know?” Regina doesn’t respond, only waits, and Emma ventures on. “I find people who don’t want to be found.” 

“I’ve noticed,” Regina says dryly.

Emma scowls at her. “No, it’s my job. I spent a few years locked up when I was pretty young. I was freed by a Lady who thought I had some talent, and this was…” She bites her lip. “She paid me handsomely after the first time I brought in a criminal. She said it was an investment in me. No one had ever invested in me before. So I purchased the coat and I…” She shrugs. Regina’s eyes are unreadable. “It’s important to me.” 

“I see,” Regina murmurs. And there’s a moment here in our tale– not a turning point, though that will come soon– but a moment of clarity, in which two women can stand opposite each other and dare to bend, unexpectedly. And Regina, a distant queen who quails at the thought of opening up to a crass stranger, suddenly wants to know more– everything– about the woman fiddling with her coat opposite her. “Do you think your employer is searching for you now?” 

Emma shakes her head. “I go on a lot of long trips to track my marks. I don’t come back until I win.” She grins for a moment, fierce and proud, and Regina can’t tear her eyes from Emma’s face. “And I always win.” 

A shadow crosses her face. “Though…this time, I suppose not,” she says, raising her eyes to gaze at the mountains that rise above them. “Maybe in time, she’ll realize I’m gone and replace me. She’ll think I ran off.” She sounds disturbed at the idea. “I never wanted…”

“Is there anyone else who’d be looking for you?” Regina asks, curious. Emma looks at her askance. “I worry about my privacy,” Regina says swiftly.

“Of course you do,” Emma says, and there’s a note of disdain in her voice that has Regina deflating, suddenly reminded that her change of heart doesn’t mean that Emma’s had one of her own. 

Alas, she has no way of knowing that Emma is just as deflated, brought from a moment where they’d seemed to almost have something back to a stark reminder that Regina is only inquiring for her own sake. “Don’t worry,” Emma says flatly, “I don’t have anyone who would care about me. No family at all.” The words shouldn’t hurt quite this much after all these years, but somehow they still do.

Regina’s lips curl into a smile, unbidden, and Emma gapes at her callousness. She’d known Regina could be angry, of course, and self-centered as hell, but she’d never truly thought her capable of such cruelty. But then Regina says wryly, “My mother was the one who put me in this castle. I can’t help but envy you a bit,” and Emma doesn’t know how to respond to that at all.

She fiddles at her coat again, rubs her thumbs against the newly soft-again fabric and endures Regina’s gaze on her in silence until she can’t restrain herself anymore. “Why did you tell me that you burned it?” she asks tentatively, because Regina is baffling and Emma never knows what to expect from her.

“Ah.” Regina quirks a smile, and a new tiny voice within her that sounds alarmingly like Zelena says tell her the truth. See what happens. She doesn’t need to be urged. There’s something about Emma Swan that draws out her truest self, each and every time, for better or for worse. “I suppose…I enjoyed seeing you riled up over it.” 

That had certainly not been the answer Emma had been expecting. Emma drops her hand, her eyes wide, and she gapes at a still-smiling Regina. “What?” Regina is still smirking, insufferable, as though she thinks that she’s won this round. Emma blinks rapidly, infuriated and…much too flustered. “You…you’re a piece of work.”

“Thank you,” Regina says serenely. 

Emma glares hard at her and then stops abruptly, frustrated. “I can’t even get angry now, can I? Because apparently you think it’s– you think it’s–“ She flails, at a loss for words.

Regina, however, seems to still have at least one. “Cute?” she suggests, and the stiffness and hostility fade from her face for one unguarded moment.

“Cute?” Emma stammers, horrified.

Regina’s eyes only glint in amused response, and Emma’s ire rises again and stutters to a halt behind her flabbergasted frustration. “You’re full of it,” she snaps, gritting her teeth and so off-balance that she can hardly focus at all. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing with me, but if you think you can manipulate me into…” She notices what can’t possibly be fondness on Regina’s face, an eyebrow arched and her lips twitching and her eyes very warm. “Into…” Emma’s cheeks are heated, her heart beating a hair too wildly and her fists burrowed in her coat. “That’s it!” she bursts out, overwhelmed. “I’m done!” 

She storms from the orchards, back into the shelter of the castle where she can lean against a counter in the kitchens, breathing hard as though she’d just fought a battle.

Back in the orchards, Regina leans against a tree, her own heart pounding with the same wildness that Emma’s had been. And Emma doesn’t know it, but Regina is just as helpless, as out of her depth and control as she had on the day she’d been entombed in this castle, and she can’t– She won’t– 

She thinks of the rose, wilting away in a room high above her, and she sucks in a shaky breath before her lips settle into a grim line. To hell with the rose. To hell with bending and exposing every vulnerability to a woman she can hardly be around without fighting. To hell with the way her heart flutters with renewed hope each time Emma had been taken off guard in front of her.

There are no happy endings. There is no hope. And she has to stay the hell away from Emma Swan if she ever wants to acknowledge that. 

There comes a time in any story when our heroes are in limbo; when any action requires making overtures they’re not ready for or capable of. There’s the nagging suspicion that something is going to have to change, that it’s only a matter of time before everything they know is turned upside down, and there’s a rush and a fear and finally, a movement forward.

Regina, however, is in no state to make a movement forward. Regina keeps to herself again, watches from the balcony of the west wing as Emma paces in circles around the orchard. Regina has quiet meals with Henry that Emma is still too stubborn to attend, and Regina avoids Emma wherever she can.

“Is she really that bad?” Henry asks one evening. They’re in a quiet sitting room far across the castle from Emma’s usual pacing grounds, Regina flipping through a book and Henry with his head on her shoulder as he watches the pages turn with sleepy eyes. “Emma, I mean. I like her a lot. I don’t know why you two hate each other so much.” 

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, my little prince,” Regina murmurs, absentminded fingers stroking his arm. “Or maybe it isn’t. Sometimes…there are just some people who can’t get along.” 

“But what about the curse?” Henry’s eyes are open and guileless, just a child who sees things too clearly. Regina thinks for a moment about I was just going to say that you’re a really good mother and she feels sick for a moment, nauseous at the thought of a rose and a lie that even Henry believes. “If she’s the one…” 

“Henry,” Regina says pleadingly. It’s been nearly ten years of this, the two of them together in a castle prison, and she can already see how a first glimpse of sunlight is making Henry dream. “There is no one. My mother didn’t put me in here to find happiness. If nothing else, Emma Swan is here to prolong my agony.” A shoulder turns stiff and bony against her arm, and she winces, close to tears. “I’m sorry. I wish there were a way–“ She sucks in a breath.

There’s a secret between mother and son, one nearly tangible in their quietest interactions: a night, three years earlier, with a boy who’d wept and screamed and shouted you’re not my mother, you did this to us, I want to be free as the weight of years of captivity had finally pulled him underwater. A night, three years earlier, when his mother had tucked him into bed anyway, kissed his cheek with an I love you, and gone upstairs and thrown herself off the balcony.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that Regina had wanted to die that evening, to try the one thing left to break the curse that had hurt her son so. Instead, she’d landed on the ground with her body bent impossibly, but her heart still beating. The rose had bloomed ever brighter when Mulan had found her, gleaming mockingly from the window.

It had taken months before the bones had knitted back together around her cursed, immortal body, a pale-faced Henry curled around her each night. “Too precocious for his own good,” Regina had said dismally, because he’d understood even with the falsehoods she’d offered him. 

And now, with Henry’s charge into the wolves and this new hope surrounding Emma, Regina fears and Henry’s shoulder slumps again. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, she doesn’t have to…” His voice cracks. Regina kisses his forehead, and if there were a curse that could be broken here, it would shatter with that touch alone. “I just want us to be happy.” 

Regina has no answer for that.

Across the castle, Emma Swan is crouched in front of a tree, glaring at the stars twinkling down at her as she searches for uncooperative answers as well. A teapot is perched beside her, in careful silence as though she suspects she might get a fistful of frustration if she says the wrong thing. “I just…the nerve!” Emma says furiously. “We finally get along for a couple of seconds and now she’s blatantly avoiding me? What the hell?” 

She’s been lurking, waiting for some kind of…follow-up, maybe, some explanation or something that would clear up whatever had gone on between them. Instead, it’s almost as though Regina is deliberately changing her schedule, going out of her way to avoid Emma. And actually succeeding, for a change.

Regina might be comfortable being in limbo, but Emma is certainly not, buzzing with impatience and a need to move before she loses her mind. “She’s a coward,” Emma fumes, twisting around to glare up at the balcony where she knows the west wing is. “I can’t believe I actually…I thought that we could…” She lets out an unintelligible grunt of frustration. “How the hell do you put up with her?” 

Snow shrugs, the ceramic bumping upward where her shoulders should be. “It’s…complicated,” she says, and she sounds almost guilty. Emma peers at her, suddenly confused, and Snow smiles sadly and says nothing more.

A scene, if you will: a familiar one, a girl kneeling on the ground with a boy in her arms. A curse cast in cold fury. And just outside the scene, a second girl watches in horror, her father’s best soldier standing beside her with her sword drawn. 

Aging has always defied reason in the castle. Snow knows sometimes that she is older now– that she must be, as the weeping girl had grown into an angry woman into a wistful mother– but she’s never seen herself in the mirror, not since she’d been barely an adolescent who’d nearly started a war. 

But she is older now, perhaps the same age as the woman kneeling beside her with fire in her eyes and something lost and uncertain in her voice, and Snow sees her and thinks of a girl who’d grown into a woman who still won’t speak to Snow. And that creeping hope that had so suffused Henry for a moment rises in her as well.

Emma, of course, shares none of their optimism, and Snow’s silence on the matter is enough to work herself back into a fury. She’s guided by distaste– everyone is so tolerant, dammit, as though Regina is only misunderstood. People aren’t misunderstood. People are assholes, and good people make excuses for them. 

And as the evening passes– as Henry returns to his room and Regina retires to the west wing, as Zelena provokes Mulan until the bulk of the castle staff is distracted by the squabble, as Snow watches Emma stalk away with thoughtful eyes– Emma is furious enough to consider pushing past breaking point, finally giving way and yanking them out of limbo.

When she makes it past the staff and upstairs, no one looks at her twice, not even when she makes a sharp turn away from her bedroom and toward the west wing.

And abruptly, she’s in forbidden territory, fists clenched and raring for a fight. She pushes open a door and stalks in, ready to explode at Regina, and pauses momentarily in bewilderment.

The castle is opulent, a sort of grandeur to it that hearkens back to the days of true power and wealth. The west wing, however…

It looks almost like Emma’s cottage, at first glance. The ceiling is lower, the paneling dark wood without any marble or gold. There’s a cozy-looking couch on one side of the room, a cold stove on the other, and it’s as though another building entirely had been transplanted into the castle. 

There’s a door at the back of the room, and Emma opens it and finds a bedroom, then another. The cottage is small but warm, homey in a way that the castle never quite masters, and Emma is startled when she opens a final door and finds the stone staircase of the castle tower instead of more of the cottage.

As she climbs up the spiral staircase, confusion fades back to ire. There are torn tapestries up here, a young girl posing with a man and a woman whose face has been burned beyond recognition. In another painting, it’s the girl herself who has been burned out of it, the tattered tapestry hanging half off the walk. Emma’s feet crunch on broken glass and she sets her jaw, preparing to confront Regina at last in a place where she can’t run.

Regina is at the top of the stairs.

She’s sitting in front of a table with a bell jar atop it, a rose glowing as it floats within the jar. As Emma stares, a petal falls from the rose and Regina lets out a strangled noise and turns away from it–

–Right toward Emma. Emma freezes, a deer caught by a torch, and Regina says slowly, “What…the hell…are you doing here?” Her eyes are blazing, her hands quivering as she stands, and she seems like an alien person, like the woman who had found Emma in her castle on that first night. 

Emma gathers her courage. “I want to talk to you.” 

“I told you the west wing was off-limits,” Regina snarls, her voice carrying down the staircase, rich and dark and deadly. “Get out.” 

You may recall that Emma has the unfortunate habit of pushing back when shoved. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me–“

She’s abruptly stopped by a fire. No, a ball of fire, flaming as it hurtles past her and the heat emanating from it lightly singes some hair. “Get out!” Regina roars, drawing another from her hands and hurling it at Emma. “Get out of my home, get out of my castle, get out!”

There’s a violet energy sparking behind her, a halo of fire and magic like none Emma’s ever seen as new fireballs hit the walls on either side of her. Emma’s never experienced magic like this– never suspected it could be real, never suspected it of the woman she hardly knows who rules this castle– and she’s terrified, heart-pounding, knee-wobbling, shaking with terror. Regina looks just as terrified beneath the fury as she continues to throw fireballs that never hit Emma, as though Regina is chasing her away with faux aggression. “Get out!” Regina howls, and Emma finally runs, eyes stinging with abject fear. 

She doesn’t run to her room. She doesn’t even run to Snow, or to anyone else in this twisted, magic-ridden castle. She can only hurtle down out of the west wing, into the abandoned front hall, and stagger out the door without a second look back.

There are some things that our minds can’t conceive of even once we’re faced with them, and Emma’s line in the sand is a tower on fire, a woman with murder in her eyes, and the kind of fear that could bring her to her knees. She isn’t thinking when she climbs onto her horse and rides forward toward the gate in a panic; but if she had remembered the wolves, it’s likely that they wouldn’t have stopped her.

Not until she’s already halfway toward the gate and they’ve materialized around her, and at that point she doesn’t give a damn. “I got past you to get in,” she grits out, kicking away a wolf. “You don’t think I can’t to get out?” The wolf’s teeth sink into her heel instead, and she’s thrown off balance and yanked from her horse instead. “Damn it!” she cries out, her eyes still stinging but now with frustrated tears.

The wolves are everywhere, pressing down on her so she can’t stand or run, and the gate is nowhere near her. She punches one in the neck, kicks another, desperately tries to push them away and fails. Her head falls back against hard stone, her neck exposed, and she hears a growl and closes her eyes, tears trickling from them as she waits for them to finish her off. 

Instead, there’s a bright light and a weight is suddenly thrown from her. She cracks open an eye, disbelieving and astonished, and sees a woman standing over her. 

Regina is still glowing with that violet light, and maybe that’s why her blows are hitting the wolves; they fall back and charge again and again and again, clawing at her as she claws at them and tearing into her. Emma struggles to sit up and is dizzy, her head pounding and her body not moving properly, and all she sees is Regina like a beacon of light in front of her, keeping the wolves from Emma with desperate, faltering blows.

She hurls fire at the wolves with a final surge of strength and they retreat at last, vanishing from their place at the gate, and Regina turns and blinks at the empty path with bleary eyes before she drops unceremoniously to the ground.

Emma catches her before she hits the stone path, cradling her in her arms as she scuttles away from the wolves. She musters up enough energy to climb back onto her horse, Regina wrapped in her embrace as Emma's head droops, and she rides him back into the front hall and tumbles down to the fireplace, her face still wet and her heart thudding against her ribs.

She doesn’t think to fear the woman in her arms again. 

Chapter Text

A curious thing happens that night in the castle, after Henry is in bed and the staff is quiet in their places, watchful.

It begins with Regina’s eyes flickering open with a groan as Emma presses a cloth soaked with boiling water to it. “Ungh,” she says, and then “Ow!” a yelp so high that Emma nearly jumps. 

“Hold still,” she orders her, and Regina makes another surprised sound, less pained.

“Emma,” she says, her face tight. “I thought you’d have run.”

Emma presses the cloth to the wound again and Regina hisses, yanking her arm away. “You stayed to kill me!” she accuses her, and nearly drops her hand into the boiling water. 

Emma slaps it away before Regina accrues even more injuries. “I wasn’t the one throwing fireballs!”

“You shouldn’t have gone into the west wing!” Regina says furiously. 

“I wouldn’t have if you’d just talked to me!” Emma says, equally angry, and Regina’s gaze falls to her lap, almost…

…penitent? Her fingers twist together and she doesn’t move when Emma pours a bit more water from Snow’s teapot and puts a compress on another scratch. She clenches her jaw and endures it in silence, back straight and eyes downcast, and Emma says quietly, “Thank you.” Regina looks up again, startled. “For saving my life.” 

Brown eyes with immeasurable depth hold hers, gleaming in disbelief, and Emma bites her lip and focuses on wrapping the wounds instead. There’s something bubbling in her chest that she can’t name, threatening to overwhelm her, and each time she looks up and catches Regina’s gaze, it grows and grows within her. “I don’t see why you can't just magic away your injuries,” she says unsteadily.

Regina’s lips quirk wryly. “The wolves wouldn’t be very good guards for me if magic worked on them, would they?” She leans back against the chair, her arm still extended to Emma. “There are herbal remedies that might help. Henry’s wound was gone in days.” She sucks in a breath. “I panicked,” she murmurs. “When I saw you in the tower. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, just to make you leave.” 

“Yeah, well, I didn’t expect you to have all that magic, Your Majesty,” Emma shoots back, but she can breathe now, more relaxed around Regina now than she’d ever been before. Regina is leaning back against the chair, the smile still dancing at her lips as Emma’s fingers graze over unblemished skin. Emma shivers despite herself.

“Not Your Majesty,” Regina says, her eyes falling shut. “I was never a queen, despite Mother’s best efforts.” 

“Never? But…” Emma gestures at the castle around them, perplexed.

Regina tilts her head back, the smile fading from her face. “When I was eighteen years old, I saved a princess on a runaway horse. In return, her father graced me with a ring and an offer to be her mother.” 

The teapot on the table splashes, boiling water nearly landing on Emma’s leg. “Sorry,” Snow says hastily. Regina doesn’t look at her.

“My mother accepted it for me. I was in love with our stable boy and still young enough to believe that love conquered all.” The words tumble from her lips with quiet resignation, admissions that can end only in tragedy. “We ran away, and only that little princess knew that I’d gone.” 

“You ran here,” Emma says, as the horrifying reality of the story begins to come together. The old stories about the castle had been with the certainty that the queen had deserved her prison sentence, that it had been some karmic punishment for her own actions. But this… 

“I was a foolish girl,” Regina agrees grimly. “I thought I could hide from my mother.” She sucks in a breath and winces in pain. “No one hides from my mother.” 

Emma watches her in silence, crouching down to find the source of the pain. Her fingers skitter along Regina’s side until Regina groans and jerks away, and Emma says, “If you want me to help you with that…” 

Regina struggles when she stands, gasping out in pain again and falling back against Emma. But she slides out of her dress with ease, letting it drop to the ground and reveal smooth skin in the expanse beneath the corset, so soft that Emma inhales sharply when she touches the bruise marring it. “What happened next?” Emma asks, determined not to show her…not quite discomfort…to Regina. 

Regina braces herself against the side of her chair, her knees wobbling as Emma presses the cooled cloth against the bruise. “The king was furious. Embarrassed. Mother was humiliated, and she spread a new story instead– that I had been deceived and kidnapped by the stable boy, and all she wanted was my safe return. And then the princess told her and her father everything she knew.” 

“The king blamed Mother and…” Regina glances at the teapot for a moment. Snow stares back in silence. “I don’t know what came next. He must have tried to imprison Mother. She killed him and went to find me.” 

Emma’s fingers are unsteady around Regina, and she’s doing her best not to stare. She watches her face instead, the firm jawline and soft chin and the way her jaw is stiff and clenched as Emma ventures, “The cottage in the west wing.” 

“That was all there was here before Mother found me. She ripped out the heart of my…” Regina trembles, the dispassionate voice wavering. “She cursed me into a castle to live the rest of my days. I can’t die here. I can’t live, either. I’m doomed.” 

“Tell her about the rose,” Snow says from the table, and Regina jerks and glares at her with betrayed fury. Snow says evenly, “Tell her.” 

“You don’t have to tell me anything.” Emma is now determinedly looking away as Regina bends down to slide back into her dress. She glances back for a second– enough to see how well the corset displays Regina’s already impressive assets– and her mouth goes dry and she forgets what she’d meant to say.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Regina says dully. “The rose is what my mother excels at most– offering hope only to snatch it away again. When the last petal falls, I’m trapped here forever.” 

“Aren’t you already…” Emma gestures at the room around them. “What possible escape route could you have?” 

“True love,” Snow says, and Regina sinks back into the chair with a sigh. “True love is the most powerful magic of all.”

I’m going to let you in a little secret, one Regina keeps closely guarded even from herself. It’s a dream that haunts her, a maybe she fights against as fiercely as she’s ever fought her mother.

But Regina’s mother had known as well as I do what Regina’s secret vulnerability is, and she’d used it with terrifying precision.

Here is Regina’s most secret vulnerability: deep down, she still believes just as much in true love as she had when she’d been a young girl in a cottage with a stable boy.

“True love,” Emma repeats, and she laughs without humor. Regina watches her, her heart thrumming and her side hot with a bruise she’d gotten for standing in front of Emma. “That’s cruel,” Emma pronounces, and something within Regina withers and dies. “To have you chasing dreams and lies for your freedom.” 

Regina smiles grimly, her heart held firmly in check. “Indeed,” she says, and she looks away as Emma sneaks a final glance at her.

Here is Emma’s most secret vulnerability: deep down, she wishes dearly that she could believe. 

Events unfold in a drastically different manner from then on, as Regina and Emma settle into a different sort of routine than sniping and avoiding.

Emma begins it, perhaps, the morning after that harrowing night when she peers through Aurora’s wardrobe for far longer than she ever has and dresses for a formal breakfast. She lingers at the bottom of the grand staircase, paces in front of the door to the dining room as casually as she can.

Zelena hisses, “Stop being an ass and go inside,” and Mulan lets out a long-suffering sigh that’s probably directed toward Zelena, but Emma doesn’t enter until Regina descends the staircase as well and starts, her eyes widening for a moment until she settles into something imperious instead. 

“Miss Swan,” she says formally. “I thought you’d sleep in today. You had quite the night.”

Wary eyes follow Emma’s movements as she knots her fingers together, stumbles over breaths of half-begun sentences and struggles to keep it casual. “I was just…wondering if that breakfast invite still stood?” 

“I believe that was an order, actually,” Regina says primly, and she moves past Emma into the dining room, her warm hand brushing against Emma’s side. Emma’s skin tingles as she gapes after Regina. 

Regina turns. “Are you coming or not?” she demands, and Emma hurries after her.

Somehow, everything is a bit less claustrophobic when they don’t despise each other. The castle is brighter and the larger rooms less oppressive, while the smaller rooms are downright cozy. Emma finds herself drifting more and more often to wherever Regina is at the time, her nerves calmed by that rich voice and her heart warmer and warmer with each tentative glance her way.

And Regina finds herself drifting more and more often to wherever Emma is at the time, taking solace in her company as she does Henry’s. There are small moments– impossible moments– where Emma’s heart-stopping smile is directed toward Regina, and Regina is left breathless in an undertow of exhilaration every time. 

After one such time, Regina forgets to look unmoved, and she’s forgotten entirely that she’d been in the middle of reading a book with Henry when he says, “Mama, the page?” and looks at her quizzically.

Flushing, Regina pulls away from Emma’s warm gaze and returns to the book. “Yes,” she says, flustered. “The page.” 

It’s yet another fairytale, and they’re fortunate that the library has enough books to feed Henry’s newest obsession. She refuses to read into his choice for tonight, an old storybook with the silhouette of two women stenciled onto the cover.

“Johari was terribly frightened,” she reads, all too aware of Emma’s eyes on them as she reads. “She was all alone in the woods, and there was still a vicious demon on the loose. Her escape from the palace now seemed silly. Perhaps the queen she was meant to marry wouldn’t be so bad, after all.” Her throat feels raw, too raw to deal with this story, and her hands are limp on the book.

Henry, whom she’d assiduously shielded from the more unsavory bits of her past, says, “Mama?” with a furrowed brow. 

And then there’s a set of hands over hers on the book, their fingers just barely touching. “Hey, why don’t I give your mother a break?” Emma says, tugging the book from her limp fingers. 

Regina seizes it back, horrified at her own weakness. “That’s quite all right, Miss Swan,” she says stiffly, returning to the proper page. Emma stays where she is, crouched in front of Regina with the tips of her fingers resting on the book as Regina reads on.

The princess finds a stranger in the woods, a young huntress she’s fascinated by at once, and Regina’s voice stops wobbling. She reads through the book, though Henry’s already guessed the ending, and Emma’s leaning against the side of the couch as the huntress is revealed to be the young queen who’d been engaged to the princess in the first place. 

Regina shuts the book with a definitive “The end,” and then it’s time to guide Henry to his bedroom before he falls asleep on the couch. She returns to the library after and is surprised to see Emma still sitting against the side of the couch, fast asleep.

“Emma,” she whispers, putting an awkward hand on her shoulder. 

Emma blinks up at her and asks drowsily, “Was Althea Johari's queen?” 

“Indeed she was,” Regina confirms, biting back a too-fond smile. 

“Oh. Good.” Emma’s head lolls back again and her eyes drift shut as she curls against the side of the couch. “Night, Regina.” 

Regina. A long time ago, I told you that no one had used that name in years. Regina is accustomed to being the queen or Your Majesty or Mama, and she’s been comfortable with the distance the former two imply. It’s an alien thing for her, to be called so casually by her name, and Regina jerks away from her in surprise and then something more.

Impulsively, a silly, daring– Regina leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to Emma’s cheek. Emma mumbles in her sleep approvingly, curling up tighter with a smile light on her face, and Regina’s cheeks heat up as she backs out of the room.

What had she expected? A broken curse? Emma to awaken and kiss her back? They’ve barely just learned to tolerate each other, and Regina is angry again– this time at herself, for giving form to foolish dreams for even a moment. 

She storms back to the west wing to brood in silence.

“I’ve been thinking about what I want for my birthday,” Henry announces. He’s perched between two branches of an apple tree, tossing apples down for them to put in Regina’s basket. 

Regina says, “Careful–“ and recovers just as quickly, arching an eyebrow. There’s a long history of this between them, Regina fretting and Henry fearless as he scales the highest trees in the orchard. Emma doesn’t know this, but she’s already managed to memorize the way that Henry’s lips twist into a smirk identical to Regina’s and the way that Regina’s hand almost rises to her heart each time Henry jumps to another branch. “Your birthday?” she says, lowering her hand with perfect composure. If Emma hadn’t known to look, she might not have even noticed it.

Henry, of course, knows how to look as well, and Regina is treated to a look of withering scorn. “I’m not going to fall, Mama,” he informs her, swinging over to a branch directly above them. “I’ve never fallen.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Regina says grimly.

Emma interjects, eager to cut off the bickering before Henry starts throwing apples. “So what do you want for your birthday, kid? How do we buy you presents if we can’t leave the castle?” 

“Easy.” Henry shakes a branch, dislodging a number of apples. “You throw me a ball.” 

“A ball?” Regina repeats, her brow creasing in disbelief.

“Yeah, a ball!” Henry tosses an apple into the basket with expert precision. “We have someone new in the castle, finally, and I’ve never had a proper royal experience. I want to have a party like a real prince!” He says it matter-of-factly, as though it’s patently obvious.

Regina says, eyes narrowing, “Did Zelena put you up to this?” 

“No!” Henry insists. Conniving as he can be for a ten-year-old, he’s telling the truth today. In fact, it hadn’t been Zelena who’d suggested it.

It had been Snow. “It’s the only thing I want for my birthday,” Henry says, pouting as he shakes another branch.

Apples rain down on their heads and Emma ducks, batting them away before they can hit her. One glances off Regina’s side instead, hitting the spot where she’d been bruised after the wolves, and Regina lets out a cry of pain and loses her balance.

Emma moves instinctively, catching Regina around the waist as she falls backward, and at once, there’s a woman pressed to her. Regina is still wobbling from the blow, her hands reaching to grasp Emma’s wrists for balance. Her head lolls back, resting against Emma’s shoulder for a long moment, and Emma’s breath catches in her throat.

Regina’s hands are warm on her wrists and her body is warmer, her breathing soft as it tickles Emma’s neck. Emma is warm, too, and there’s an impossible gap between them, suddenly, an unspeakable but desperate need that crosses over both of them at once. They’re both acutely aware of the closeness of their bodies, of the distance from Regina’s lips to Emma’s neck, of how easy it would be for either of them to shift and suddenly they’d be–

Emma swallows, overcome with a buzzing sort of anticipation, and she shivers and raises her chin, just slightly, her mind blissfully empty of everything but need. Regina lets out a throaty hum that vibrates against Emma’s shoulder, and she–

There’s an “Oops!” from above and a final apple drops onto Emma and bounces to the ground. Regina startles in place, pulling out of Emma’s arms as neatly as she’d fallen into them, and she scolds Henry, “You’re going to give one of us a concussion at this rate.” 

“Sorry!” But Henry’s eyeing them curiously, his lower lip caught in his teeth as he studies them, and he says, “So, the ball?” 

Regina looks at Emma, her cheeks a warm tone of red-brown. Emma says, “It sounds like fun?” a bit uncertainly. She’d never been to a ball before, not without a mark in her sights and a dress that could be easily swapped for subtler clothes. But her heart is beating unsteadily in her chest and she doesn’t dare put a label on it, other than a certainty that it’s about this ball.

“A ball it is,” Regina decides, her eyes flickering to Emma as Henry whoops and nearly falls out of the tree. “Henry!” 

Emma’s enthusiasm waxes and wanes throughout the day, and she’s restless as Regina and Henry sort through the apples, making plans about what they’re going to do with them next. There’s an emptiness at the pit of her stomach that isn’t filled with an apple. Some might say it’s about the future looming before her, the domesticity of the day she’d spent with mother and son and how it makes life in the castle seem so very livable. 

Others– those who know Emma Swan best, perhaps– might see instead her past and future spread before her and remember how much she loathes being caged. And each future that stretches ahead of her is within a cage, suddenly eminently possible and eminently stifling.

Emma walks through the dusty front hall instead, sneaking glances out the doors to where the gates lie wide open, taunting her. She hesitates when she’s directly in front of them, claustrophobic in this massive empty hall of a castle, and she clasps her hands together to filter out some of the nervous energy that wiggles through her. 

A hand lands on her arm, gentle and a bit cautious, and Emma turns guiltily. Regina withdraws her hand, apologetic, and Emma is even guiltier at the idea that she’d hurt Regina’s feelings. She seizes her hand instead, their hands dangling between them as Regina clears her throat. “I have something I’d like to show you,” she says, shifting from foot to foot.

She leads Emma up a rear staircase, past whispering dishes and a corner where Mulan and Zelena are huddled together, watching their ascent. Their hands are still together, keeping Emma centered as she blinks in the darkness of a winding staircase that goes higher and higher still. 

“We’re not…going to a dungeon or something, are we?” Emma says, laughing nervously.

She can almost hear Regina roll her eyes. “No, Emma.” She’s come to love the way Regina’s voice curls around the syllables of her name, the crack of hesitation in the Em before the ma, the way it makes warmth bloom in Emma’s chest like the first rays of sun after a thunderstorm. “I’m not taking you to my dungeon.” There’s a note of seductive danger in her voice, making it clear that Regina does in fact have a dungeon to lock Emma in. Emma gulps.

Regina laughs. “We’re almost there,” she promises, tugging at Emma’s hand, and they round another circle and are abruptly on a dark landing. Regina says, “Close your eyes,” and Emma obliges, stumbling after her with eyes shut.

A cool breeze whispers against her face and she breathes in, feeling nothing but the outside air and the electric touch of Regina’s thumb grazing her wrist as she guides her forward. Emma wonders for a moment where they are, somewhere high and outdoors, and if Regina might just…push her out of a tower…but she silences the voice in her head quickly. No, Regina isn’t going to hurt her. She…she trusts her. 

She breathes in calming night air at that revelation and Regina says, “You can open your eyes now.” 

Emma opens her eyes and gasps. They’re on one of the rear turrets of the castle, a higher one that sits above the orchard. It’s just high enough and positioned just between the two hills that rise behind the castle, and Emma can see directly from the turret to Storybrooke, sprawling out over the opposite side of the hills. The night sky is dark and vibrant black-blue over it, the stars gleaming brighter than any she’d ever seen before. It’s a stunning, impressive view that, for a moment, makes Emma forget that she’s a prisoner here.

“I go here sometimes when I want to…” Regina huffs out a little laugh. “Pretend, for a little while.”

“It’s beautiful,” Emma murmurs, watching a tiny horse and carriage, small enough from this distance to be a toy, cross a bridge she’s ridden across hundreds of times in the past. 

“I know you don’t want to be here,” Regina says, her fingers light against Emma’s palm. “And I can’t do anything about that, but…I thought this could be a private place for you when you need to feel free.” She exhales, long like a whisper, and says, “This is my gift to you.” 

“A gift–“ Emma tears herself away from the view to stare at Regina, eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “This is your place.” 

“It’s yours now.” Regina is lit up by the stars, her skin gleaming with an almost otherworldly glow; and when she smiles, it’s breathtaking. Emma stares at her, wordless, a lump in her throat. “I never did say thank you for saving Henry’s life.”

“You don’t have to thank me for that.” Emma leans in closer, drawn in toward Regina’s gaze like a moth to a flame. For all the beauty of the view beside her, she finds that she’s far more awestruck at the smile that sits so easily on Regina’s face, as though it truly belongs. “You saved my life, too.” 

“I know this is…” Regina gestures around them, back to the castle. “I know that this is the last place you want to be.” She’s still smiling, though it’s tinged with regret. “But I can’t say that I’m sorry that you came here.” 

“Because of Henry,” Emma whispers, her eyes seeking the world in Regina’s face and finding something they can’t comprehend instead. 

“Henry,” Regina echoes, and Emma wants to reach for her and is afraid of what might happen if she does. “Of course, Henry,” Regina repeats. “And…” Her voice trails off.

Emma shakes her head, her fingers sliding between Regina’s. “This isn’t the last place I want to be,” she admits, in this empty castle that’s become a home warmer than any she’d ever lived in before. “It’s…if I weren’t locked in, I think I’d… Because of Henry. And…” 

“And,” Regina says softly. Emma’s lips curl upward, though her eyes are still lost in another emotion altogether.

“Stay with me,” she requests in a murmur, and Regina’s eyes grow impossibly brighter. They turn together to watch the river flow through the hills in silence, Emma’s finger crooked around Regina's. 

Chapter Text

Aurora is delighted to have something new to design for her. “I was never allowed to spin, back when I was human. There was a curse I…never managed to set off,” she says, laughing that full-bodied laugh of a wardrobe. “I was trapped in this one instead.” 

“Everyone’s got a curse these days,” Emma says half-jokingly. “How did you get here?” 

Aurora sighs, even as the wardrobe hums busily with magic. “I was very young. Very besotted with Mulan. I used to follow her and Snow everywhere, and I had no idea what I was in for when Snow took off in a rush to a strange cottage in the woods. We were caught in the curse and I was suddenly…” The face of the wardrobe contorts into a grimace. “My father must have been ready to start a war, but the queen’s mother left no evidence behind. I have no idea what became of my kingdom.” 

“You’re a princess,” Emma understands, startled. “But not the princess who– Snow.” Aurora bobs her head. “Snow was the princess who told the secret?” It all makes a bit more sense with that context, and she’s still mulling it over when the wardrobe pops open and there’s a new dress hanging within it.

It’s a deep red, a larger skirt than she’s accustomed to and a bodice that dips lower than anything Aurora’s made for her thus far. She touches expensive satin almost reverently, somehow moved by this dress made just for her, just for the following night. “Henry’s going to be so excited,” she says, for lack of a better explanation of the anticipation that shivers through her.

Aurora snorts. “Sure, this dress is for Henry.” She slams the doors of her wardrobe closed when Emma steps back to stare at her. “No more touching. I don’t want you getting it dirty before tomorrow night.” 

There’s a level of excitement that permeates the whole castle before the coming ball, excitement that manages to infect even Emma and Regina, who have fewer designs on the night than anyone else. There’s something shifting between them, subtle but not unwelcome; it means secret smiles to each other and themselves, means hands brushing in the hallway and little electric jolts with the contact, means eyes that search and find something in the other. 

It’s…something, something Emma won’t name because she’s never had anything quite like it. It makes her warm, makes her breathe, makes every visit to the turret a reminder that has her heart glowing in her chest.

It’s something Regina won’t name because it hurts, because every moment of warmth is a reminder of something she isn’t destined to have. Every glance and smile and Emma’s skin against hers is a quiet knife digging into her skin, and she willingly pulls it in deeper if it means just a few more moments of seeing Emma’s face so bright.

She magics up a dress for the ball that has Zelena cock a waxy eyebrow and say, “I do like the slit, but if you’re going to seduce the girl, consider a bit less of a collar.” 

“I’m not trying to seduce her,” Regina says wearily. “I don’t want her to…I’m not roping her into this twisted situation.” 

“Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it?” Zelena shoots back. “She’s trapped here until the day she dies. The least you can do is try to have her break the curse.” 

“She can’t,” Regina says, bone-tired of dreams that never come to fruition. “You know Mother as well as anyone. She doesn’t dole out escape routes. And Emma deserves more than this castle or…”

Her voice trails off, and it’s Mulan who says, “You?” They both stare at her. She gives a helpless little hop in place, leaning back against Regina’s closed door, and shakes her head. “You hardly have control over that.” 

“I don’t have control over anything,” Regina retorts, sharp enough that Zelena attempts to step between them and Mulan rolls her eyes, unimpressed. “This least of all. Emma making the best of a bad situation doesn’t mean that you two get to turn this into some sort of fairytale.” 

“We–“

“And don’t you dare talk to her about this,” Regina snaps, frustrated with them both. Zelena glares back at her. “Don’t you dare make her uncomfortable or put her in a position where she feels like she has to… To…”

She can’t even say love me, and Mulan gives her a grave look before she departs, Zelena stomping behind her. Regina kneads her temples and remembers wistfully when she’d been intimidating enough that only Henry would dare speak his mind around her. 

What has Emma Swan done to her?

And, my dear readers, though I’m sure you’re already several steps ahead of Regina, you’ll want to watch her here, as the next day passes in a whirlwind of birthday preparation and Henry’s ball begins at last. Sit back, take a breath, and imagine the wonder when they first appear at the top of the staircase to the ballroom.

Emma is the first to enter the ballroom, and she does so with awe. The dusty entrance hall has been scrubbed clean, the floors shiny and new and the massive chandelier cleared of spiderwebs. There’s a birthday cake at a place of honor on a back table, surrounded by finery and more food than the three of them could eat in a year. She’d be horrified at the waste if it she hadn’t known it was magic; instead, it all intimidates her, more opulent than any event she’s ever attended. 

“You’ve outdone yourself,” she says to Mulan and Zelena, who’ve offered themselves up as centerpieces near the spreads and are very obviously watching with the same anticipation. “Henry’s going to love–“

The orchestra strikes a beat, a music stand waving its hands as the music rises, and Emma twists around to watch the star of the show descending the staircase, his mother’s hand wrapped around his. He’s wearing a smart little suit and beaming down at her, and she grins right back at him and cranes her neck to get a better view of Regina.

Regina is in black, her dress flowing behind her and slit half up one thigh. The rest of the dress is almost conservative, sheer black fabric spanning the expanse between Regina’s neck and her cleavage and stretching along her arms, but it manages to display Regina with regal poise like the queen she’d never truly been. Emma’s mouth is very dry as she watches as Regina steps down a stair and a long leg dips into sight and then out again.

Regina looks around at the tables first; almost smiles at the chandelier, and only then sees Emma at the bottom of the stairs. “Emma,” she breathes, her eyes sliding down Emma’s dress with heated interest. 

“Happy birthday, Henry,” Emma says in response, and Henry looks between them with acute suspicion before Regina takes his hand and tugs him into a dance. 

Mother and son do some artful dancing, both apparently well-versed in it, and Emma lifts an eyebrow, impressed. She has no way of knowing, of course, not about a tiny baby gurgling in Regina’s arms as Regina had practiced, for the first time in decades, the dances that her mother had taught her. My little prince and movements that make tiny Henry giggle or sleep, my little prince and Henry is almost five but still loves dancing with his mother. They dance less as the years go on, but the moves still come naturally to them both.

They come less naturally to Emma, who stumbles onto Henry’s toes a dozen times before he gives her a dirty look and shows her how to lead. She’s a quick study, and they’re spinning around the room soon enough, Regina leaning against the table beside Zelena and watching them with bemusement. 

Zelena lets out a little huff of frustration and hops onto the next table, extending a gallant hand to Mulan. Mulan eyes her suspiciously but takes her hand, and Regina laughs aloud as she watches them twirl across the ballroom floor. I can tell you that all the pressure and anxiety that had suffused the night had slipped away from her as she’d watched her son dance with their guest, and she’s beginning to feel light and unbothered in a way that has so rarely touched her before.

Henry goes in for another dance with his mother, tugging Emma with him, and they dance together for a few bumpy minutes of whirling laughter before Henry announces, “I’m going to get some cake,” and leaves them standing opposite each other on the dance floor.

Emma licks dry lips and extends a hand. If, perhaps, Regina has been calmed by the night and the dancing, Emma remains tense and waiting for something she can’t name. And they both know it’s here now. “May I… May I have this dance?” Zelena hurls a candle that whizzes over and nearly hits the conductor stand across the hall. The orchestra tempo immediately slows, the music drifting through the hall so gentle that it’s nearly melancholy. Regina takes Emma's hand and spins from her, then returns, landing in her arms with dark, dark eyes.

Emma gapes, struck by them. “Hi,” she whispers, smilingly awkwardly, and Regina’s lips curve into a much more graceful smile. She doesn’t answer her, just takes her other hand and leads Emma in a smooth dance that Emma somehow manages to follow. 

They’re apart again in a moment, Emma’s hand high as Regina spins beneath it, and then she’s back in Emma’s arms and doesn’t move from them again. They’re swaying together, the steps of the dance becoming routine enough that Emma can forget them and focus on Regina instead.

They’re barely inches apart, cool breath close enough to feel and gazes locked as they sway, and Regina, at that moment, cares little about curses or roses or her friends’ urges and only about the figure opposite her, radiant in red, and how the smile has fallen from her face to be replaced with something almost fearful. Emma, at that moment, cares little about anything else in the world aside from Regina’s hands on her back and shoulder, her eyes betraying a deep tension that has Emma leaning in, craving to know more.

Snow is humming something from her spot near Henry. Henry is watching Emma and Regina in silence, his eyes bright. Emma and Regina notice none of it, not when Zelena dims the lights in the room or all of them fade back against the walls. There’s a single moment near the door when Emma whispers something in Regina’s ear and Regina turns to find Henry, but Henry waves them on swiftly and returns to a serious conversation with the orchestra. 

Regina, mollified at Henry’s approval, tucks her head against Emma’s as Emma steers them out an inner door and around a corner, stepping out onto a balcony that overlooks the orchard. One arm is still wrapped around Regina’s shoulders, Regina comfortable resting against Emma, and Emma strokes the silk of her dress from her shoulder to her waist.

Regina shudders against her and Emma slides her fingers just a bit lower, over her hip to where the material of the dress splits and opens, and Regina shifts in place so she’s standing opposite Emma again, her forehead pressed to Emma’s neck as Emma’s fingers twitch against the barest hint of skin.

“I had a really good time tonight,” Emma murmurs into Regina's hair. “Your castle knows how to throw a ball.” 

“A ball for three.” Regina snickers against Emma’s neck, raising her face at last to meet Emma’s gaze. “They’re glad to do it. Especially for you and Henry.” 

Emma scoffs, dropping her hand and letting it settle again on Regina’s waist. “I’ve met them. I know how much they adore you.” Regina quirks an eyebrow in polite disbelief and Emma says, “No, really. I’m…” She winces, embarrassed. “I’m glad you have that kind of support, you know? I’ve never really had anyone, aside from…”

A shadow falls over her at once, a guilt she’s been shrugging off for weeks now that has never been as much as she must think it should be. Because Emma Swan who’s never been good but always been true has vanished without a trace mid-mission, and probably lost Cora’s faith forever. And to her always-charitable thoughts, Cora had been the only one who’d ever had faith in her–

–Ever, except maybe the family she’s found here. Emma stares at Regina, helplessly caught in her worried gaze, and Regina says, “Your employer,” with so much understanding in her voice that Emma doesn’t know how she’d ever hated her. Maybe she hadn’t, after all. She can’t imagine how she could possibly hate someone with Regina’s eyes.

“You’ve been so kind,” Emma whispers. “I’ve really been…I’m happy with you. Please don’t think I’m unhappy.”

And there’s a shift in the atmosphere of the room, a new degree of intensity where it seems at last that these two orbiting hearts might finally collide. Their eyes are dark and lidded, both of them tilting toward each other, and Emma licks her lips and looks down at Regina’s with breathless hunger. Regina puts a hand on Emma’s cheek, thumb moving along her jawbone, and Emma’s heart flies wildly against her ribs.

Regina ruins the moment, to our despair. Regina thinks first only of Emma and second only of what she needs from her, and Regina whispers, her breath tickling the moisture on Emma’s lips, “I can show her to you, if that’s what you need.” 

“What?” Emma blinks up at Regina, their prior conversation promptly forgotten with Regina so close. 

Regina winces, her fingers falling from Emma’s skin. “I have a…I suppose it’s a magic mirror, banal as that sounds. It can show you anything you want to see. If you’d like to see how your employer is now…if it’ll give you some peace of mind…” Her smile is tentative, and something warm and unnamed swells in Emma’s chest. “I can help you.” 

And it’s all about to go to hell, of course, though I’m sure you’ve already guessed that. So let’s take a moment to enjoy what we can– Emma’s hand, tucked into Regina’s elbow as they leave the porch. Emma’s head is ducked down and Regina is smiling at her with bright eyes, and both of them have little smiles on their faces. Enjoy the breathless anticipation of two women who know where this is going to end– where tonight is going to lead them, and how happy they both are about it.

Enjoy them stumbling up staircases because they won’t let go of each other and Regina’s arm dropping so she can seize Emma’s hand as they enter the west wing. Enjoy the fierce little flicker of hope that alights on Emma’s heart and then Regina’s, as she climbs the staircase and sees a withering rose in her bell jar.

You can, if you dare, even enjoy Regina’s gentle touch on Emma’s elbow as she says, “Mirror!” and a face appears in her mirror on the wall.

“Your Majesty,” the face says, and waits.

Regina looks at Emma. Emma steps forward, eager at last to see this single taste of home, and says, “Please…show me Lady Cora, the Queen of Hearts.” 

She sees only the mirror, the raised eyebrow and then the flickering picture that begins to form. She doesn’t see Regina’s face stiffen like a waxen figure, immobile and with only her eyes expressing any sort of horror. She doesn’t see the way everything stops for Regina and the medley of emotions that cross over her face– suspicion, horror, fear, grief, all at once. 

And then she sees Cora, coughing up blood as Doctor Gold examines her. “No,” Emma whispers, horrified. Cora is lying in a bed, her steely face pale and weak with sickness, and Emma doesn’t hear the strangled noise from behind her. 

And then Cora croaks out, “Emma Swan,” as though she knows that Emma’s watching. Regina’s lips are pressed into a thin line. Emma watches, eyes wide and heart heavy with guilt. “You told me once…” Cora coughs again, nearly chokes. “Emma Swan is the only one who can save me.” 

Doctor Gold is a witch doctor of sorts, stranger and more disconcerting than any man Emma’s ever met. Now, he nods. “I still see Miss Swan in your future, though I can’t say how.” Emma’s brow furrows. “Perhaps she will be the one to save you, if she ever returns.” 

Cora says, “And if she–“ and the mirror glows blank, returning to its reflective surface. And behind her reflection, Emma can see Regina’s hand extended at the mirror, her eyes thunderous. 

“Regina, what–?” Emma starts, but Regina is suddenly laughing, loud and desperate and her eyes watery with tears. 

“Of course,” she says tilting her head back and laughing even harder. “Of course she’s your employer. The world has only ever been so cruel to me.”

Emma stares at her, nonplussed. Regina snarls out, “Damn it!” and hurls a bolt of lightning at the mirror, smashing it into shards. 

Emma jumps back, spinning around to grab Regina’s arm. “Regina! What the hell?” 

“Your employer–“ Regina hurls another surge of magic, her teeth grinding together. “That woman you owe your freedom to–“ She’s shaking, her face twisted into something Emma’s never seen on her before and dislikes at once. “She’s the woman who cursed me. She’s my mother.” 

“What? No, that’s impossible.” But Regina isn’t joking. Regina is furious, her arm still trembling in Emma’s grip, and Emma is frozen with indecision. “Cora’s kind of a tough cookie, but she wouldn’t have cursed you. There must be some…some…” 

“Don’t be an idiot, Emma,” Regina says coolly, and Emma’s head jerks up in outrage but she only sees weary regret on Regina’s face. “I know my mother better than you ever will. She’s never done a single thing that wasn’t self-serving.” 

“She saved me!”

“She needed you. She needs you right now, don’t you understand?” Regina’s arm quivers uncontrollably, her eyes wet and vulnerable. “She’s dangerous and she will do anything she can to destroy everything I–“ She shuts her eyes, tears still leaking through them.

Emma says, “She’s dying. I can’t just– She’s dying and she thinks I’ve abandoned her.” Her heart is thumping in her ears and her head is hot, aching, and she can’t quite process that the villain of Regina’s story could be the hero of hers.

And these are two very stubborn women, women burdened with desire to do the right thing that becomes ever more potent when they can’t agree on what that thing is. Regina, violated at this connection and horrified for Emma and for what Cora might do next, knowing her mother with the intimacy of a victim. Emma, made obstinate with the debt she owes to Cora and sick at the thought of abandoning someone in need.

So they fight, as they do. Emma is helplessly determined. “I can’t leave her alone. I can’t– she’s changed, Regina, and if I can talk to her–“ The thought comes like a breath of air after drowning, fresh and right. “If I talk to her somehow– she can lift the curse! We can leave here, be free and–“

And something curious happens within Regina, queen of a castle prison she’ll never leave. The rose on the table drops another petal– second-to-last, but it seems redder somehow– but this curious thing isn’t about the rose on the table, nor is it something that Regina cares to define. It’s a sort of surrender that is both joyous and defeated, that is the very hardest and very simplest thing she’s ever done in her life. It’s a moment of pure clarity that tears through her like a knife and rends her into two halves before she carefully sews them together again.

She clears her throat and her eyes are still wet when she smiles, cutting Emma off before she can make promises she won’t keep. Emma is noble words and so focused, always, on what others need. Emma is…Emma is someone she was never going to be able to keep, and she should have known better than to think otherwise. “You can do better than that,” she says, her breathing unsteady. “I think I might have figured out a way to you out of here.” 

“You–“ The betrayal that Regina’s expecting never crosses Emma’s face. Instead, there’s wonder and concern. “You’d do that?” And Emma sounds vulnerable– as though she’s shocked less at Regina helping her get to Cora than she is at Regina helping her, at anyone helping her– and Regina knows that there’s never been a choice at all.

“Of course,” she says, but when Emma reaches for her hand again to hold it, she twists away before Emma can touch her. 

Emma is going home at last, somehow– Regina’s better than anyone at making the impossible seem effortless, and Emma doesn’t ask questions but she believes her implicitly– and instead of joy, she can feel a dozen different concerns thrumming through her at once. Cora. The wolves. Regina and Henry. 

Regina and Henry.

Regina leads her down the stairs again, back through the cottage-that-was, and there’s a new distance between them that makes Emma want to sob instead of exulting. Fuck. Cora is Regina’s mother. Cora is Regina’s mother and Regina is going to send Emma back to her regardless. She can’t blame Regina for this new stiffness in her posture– leading instead of walking side-by-side, Regina’s shoulders high and her eyes fixed ahead of them as Emma pads behind her. 

She’s going to fix this, though Regina won’t understand yet. She’s going to go to Cora and figure out whatever it is that she’s supposed to do to save her, and then she’s going to bargain for Regina’s freedom. “I’m coming back,” she says aloud, her every syllable marked with determination. “Please believe that.” 

“Don’t,” Regina says, and Emma is silent again. “You…” She gestures toward Emma’s room, near the end of the next hall. “You should go change into the clothes you came in. I don’t know how well the magic will last outside of this castle.” 

Emma tries again, tumbling in the undertow of Regina’s coolness. “Regina…”

Regina turns, finally, her shoulders dropping and her eyes still unreadable. “Emma,” she says, and there’s finally, finally a wealth of emotion in her gaze with that single word. “I want you to be happy.”

Emma watches her, aching with all her heart. A window shutters again over Regina’s face, the inhuman stiffness that sits so wrongly on Regina, who feels so much, returned. “Thank you,” Emma whispers.

“Please be careful with my mother,” Regina says, a note of pleading leaking through in her voice, and then she’s turning on her heel and retreating to her quarters.

Emma swallows and watches her go as she pushes her own door open, which is why she’s so distracted that she doesn’t notice Henry on her bed until she’s kicking off her shoes. “Henry,” she says, alarmed. “I was about to change–” 

“You’re leaving?” he demands, his little face colorless and his eyes blazing.

Emma sags at his disappointment. “Just for a little while. I promise, I’m coming back.”

“Not good enough!” Henry snaps, his hands clenched into fists. “The last petal is about to fall. If you leave now, we’ll never be able to break the curse!”

“Break the curse– Henry, what do you mean?” She can feel blood rushing to her head, can feel herself on the verge of exhausted tears from what this evening had been. Has it only been an hour since she was dancing with Regina and Henry?

Henry is still dapper in his suit, his eyes red-rimmed beneath their fury, and he bursts out, “You were supposed to fall in love!” Emma stares at him in consternation. The room around them feels thick, suddenly, like straining through an overpowering heaviness just to remain standing. “You were going to have true love’s kiss and break the curse!” 

“Henry.” She keeps saying his name, desperate for the grounding it lends her. “Your mother is right about that. The curse is rigged. There’s no such thing as true love.” 

“There is!” he says stubbornly, blinking away tears. “There is, and I saw it. I know you’re in love. You have to be.” There’s a traitorous blur of wetness in Emma’s eyes, and she remembers suddenly what it had been like when her heart had been a heavy stone within her ribs, reminding her that she is no one at all. It’s been so long that she’d hardly thought of it at all. “I’ve seen you together. You have to be–“

“I’m sorry,” Emma says tearfully, and Henry is still talking urgently, still dredging up every catalogued exchange and touch and gaze as though he might be able to persuade her, and she can’t bear to listen to any of it. She can’t think about what Regina means to her because– because–

She falls to her knees in front of the bed, pulls Henry into her embrace and lets his angry sobs fall against her skin, lets him cry furiously as she blinks away her own tears and kisses the top of his head, over and over again.

When she shifts at last, it’s from a strained voice in the doorway. “Henry, why don’t you let Miss Swan get changed.” Regina is dressed simply now, wearing the sort of clothes she reserves for tending the orchard, but her hair is still piled atop her head. Emma’s eyes stray to her neck and she wants, so desperately–

No. Not anymore. Maybe when she returns.

And when you have freedom, when you can run anywhere you want, why would you ever run back here? It’s a stray thought but it isn’t her own. It bubbles up in a distinctively Regina voice, caustic but resigned, and Emma bites her lip so hard it bleeds. 

She changes slowly, reluctant under Aurora’s somber gaze, and she joins Regina at the door to the castle. Henry is on a chair in the ballroom, glaring at her with betrayal. She can’t bear to watch. “What are you going to do?” she asks, turning to Regina. “How are you going to stop the wolves?”

“I won’t,” Regina says grimly, and she charges forward, straight to the gate.

The wolves come. The wolves tear into Regina before she’s halfway there, and Emma cries out in horror and bolts after her, climbing onto her horse and kicking wolves aside. “Regina!” 

“Emma, go!” Regina snarls as she throws a wolf back with magic that sputters and dies. “I can’t hold them off forever!” 

“I’m not leaving you to get mauled!” 

“Go!” Regina shouts again. “They want me, not you. It’s the only way they’ll let you–“ She’s cut off as a wolf leaps onto her, its fangs snapping at her neck, and Emma screams. 

There’s a flash– no, fire. The wolf is suddenly aflame, Zelena holding her candelabra-hands high in victory as she defends Regina. Mulan is behind her, waving around a sword three times her size and fending off wolves. They don’t move from their spot, gathered around Regina, and Zelena catches Emma’s gaze and snaps, “Get out of here before she has to endure any more of this.” 

Emma rides through the gates and stays there, just beyond them, watching until Regina can stagger away toward the castle again and the wolves vanish. She turns back only once, touching a hand to a scratch across her upper lip, and Emma sucks in a deep breath and waits.

She doesn’t ride away until Regina is inside; but she doesn’t see when Regina emerges again, in a raised balcony, watching her retreat until she’s long, long gone.

Chapter Text

Our stories diverge in this most unfortunate of times, Emma riding back to Storybrooke and Regina sequestered in the west wing again. I could bore you with details of Emma’s overnight journey back to Storybrooke, how she’s surprised to see how many people greet her, how she’s surprised at how trapped she still feels. I could bore you with hours spent watching a rose lose its color and Regina refusing to speak to anyone who knocks at her door.

Instead, I’ll take you to Cora’s sharp-eyed smile, even in illness, when Emma arrives at her quarters. “I’m sorry I was away for so long,” Emma says, blinking at Cora with marked horror. She looks worse now than she had in the mirror, her skin sallow and loose and her body shivering uncontrollably. “What…happened?” 

Cora gives her a tight smile. “A bit of old magic, taking its toll. I will die soon, I’m afraid. I’m glad you’re here.” She doesn’t ask where Emma had been, and Emma doesn’t offer any answers. She kneels beside Cora instead and presses compresses to her forehead, helps her sit and eat and quietly suppresses dozens of questions of her own. 

Cora doesn’t explain to her why she’d needed her; but after hours of uncertainty, Emma’s beginning to think that she doesn’t know, either. She looks at Emma expectantly, as though there are answers within her she can’t find, and Emma finally blurts out, late in the afternoon, “Do you have any family?” 

Cora stares at her, her lips pursed. Emma stumbles over her words. “I mean, because if you do, they should be here if you– right?” 

“No,” Cora says flatly. “I no longer have family.” She rests a hand on Emma’s, but her smile doesn’t meet her eyes. “You’re the closest thing to a daughter that I have.” Emma swallows. When Cora changes the subject, she gladly accepts the reprieve. 

Across the village, through the forest and up past a tall gate guarded by wolves, Regina is brooding in silence, a hand splayed over the bell jar as she stares at Emma and Cora behind the spiderweb patterns of her now-shattered mirror. 

“You’re not going to find any answers by staring at them,” says a gentle voice from the door.

Regina’s voice is rough. “I said I wasn’t to be disturbed. What the hell are you doing here?” 

It isn’t Zelena or Mulan. It’s someone she hasn’t spoken to in decades, a teacup hopping behind her. “Bringing you tea,” Snow says. “Come on, up this way,” she coaxes the teacup, and they bump around the room until Snow is sitting on the table beside the bell jar.

Regina stares blankly at her. Snow murmurs, “I was very young when we were first cursed. I was…so hurt, at first, when you wouldn’t even acknowledge me. But in time, I understood.” She laughs quietly. “I was so spoiled. I was more concerned about not getting my way with you than I was…being a teapot.” 

Regina sneers down at her. “Is this supposed to make me fond of you?” She regresses around Snow, can feel the anger that had accompanied her when she’d been just a heartbroken girl in a prison built by Snow White’s negligence. “Do you think I want to hear this right now, after I’ve…I’ve…” She sucks in a long, shuddering breath. “Why are you here, Snow?” 

There’s still something of that innocent-eyed girl in Snow White, even now. “I’m here to tell you that it’s okay. That we understand why you let her go.” 

“You understand nothing.” Regina flings the words at her in fury, her breath shallow and broken. “You think you have some great insight into me because you know my story? Because you saw– you saw me with– Em-ma–” The name escapes her lips like a groan of defeat, like a sob that lodges in her throat and stays there, and Regina presses three fingers to a spot just above her eye in an attempt to keep her balanced. “She was our only chance at a savior. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know that I sealed all of our fates by sending her away?” 

“I think you underestimate how much we value what you value. And none of us can be angry that you sent her away.” 

“Why? Why aren’t you furious? Why did Zelena and Mulan help me?” Regina demands, her voice quivering more and more. She feels again like a girl sobbing on the ground of a castle, alone and bewildered and lost.

“Because we love you. And you love her,” Snow says gently, and Regina cries in loud, heaving bursts, sliding from her chair to sit on the ground so she can curl her body up against her knees and cry without the wolves’ attacks hurting even more. Snow moves beside her, crooning soft words that Regina doesn’t hear, and Regina weeps into her knees for Emma Swan, gone forever.

“There’s something else,” Snow says after a minute, her eyes downcast as though awaiting Regina’s fury.

Regina shakes her head, hopeless and still wiping at tears. “How can there be anything else?” 

Snow takes a deep breath. “It’s about Henry,” she says, and Regina’s eyes grow dimmer still.

Meanwhile, in Storybrooke, evening is beginning to fall on the peaceful village and Emma Swan is standing on a bridge that she’d once seen from a castle turret. If she squints, she can see something gleaming between the hills that might be a castle. She can’t say for sure, nor can she imagine that a woman or a boy standing at that turret might know that she’s standing there.

The thought of it makes her unconscionably lonely, even in this village full of people who know her name. Tears prick at her eyes and she blinks them back before they can emerge.

Home isn’t what she remembers it being. Home now feels more like apple-picking in an orchard with a little boy and his mother; like bedtime reading in the library and dark eyes that gleam with promise. Home is the thumping of her heart when Regina smiles or Henry grabs her hand.

She’s never felt the lure of freedom like this before, where freedom might mean a castle guarded by wolves where she doesn’t want to run at all. She’s never ached for anything this badly– like a physical need, desperate hunger for her family, the only she’s ever had. How long had she been in the castle? Two months? Maybe three? And yet, it’s enough to have transformed her existence into blinding color, into a world where she has a place in her heart for hope and…

And…

She squeezes her eyes shut; imagines, for a moment, that she’s standing in the ballroom as Henry dances with Regina; imagines, for a moment, fighting with Regina with biting comments and flashing eyes and feeling so alive; imagines, for a moment, a world that had stopped turning when they’d all danced together.

She knows, incontrovertibly, that she will return to them. She’d thought– maybe, it had all just been a reaction to being trapped in close quarters. Maybe she’s fallen so deep because Regina is everything and how could she not be consumed by everything when it’s so near? But she’s been away for a day now and she can’t breathe, overwhelmed with grief and loss as though she’d been dealt the worst blow in a life in which she’d only known loss. 

“Swan!” The voice is unpleasantly familiar, dragging her from a castle hours away to the present. She’d nearly forgotten Jones entirely during her time away from Storybrooke, and she’d been happier for it. He catches her elbow with his hook. “My fiancée, back with me again.” 

He moves in as though he might kiss her cheek and she wrenches her arm free of his hook, elbowing him in the gut in the process. “Same old Swan,” he gasps out, grimacing.

“Don’t touch me,” she says stiffly, turning away. The sun is gone by now, the gleam that could have been the castle indistinguishable from the mountains, and she feels nothing but grief for what she’s left behind. 

Jones scowls at her. “Cora requests your presence in her quarters,” he says, his voice no longer genial or playful. “I would refrain from making her wait.” 

Emma almost says something rude, but contains herself. She climbs into Jones’s carriage without a word, staring out at the town around her and wondering what acerbic comments Regina might have had for Jones.

Thoughts of Regina weigh down her heart and dampen her eyes, and she swallows and lets herself dream, just a bit, of what freedom might look like for them. 

Soon. Soon, she’s going to find a way to save Regina. She just has to find out what it is that she can do for Cora. She exits the carriage and climbs up the staircase, past a distracted guard and into Cora’s quarters when she hears Doctor Gold’s voice and hesitates outside the bedroom. “I’m only giving you the facts,” Gold says patiently.

“The facts are absurd. You’re insisting that my life-force is being drained by one tiny curse, cast decades ago?” Cora says disbelievingly. 

“One tiny curse,” Gold repeats, and lets out a wild cackle. “Twenty-eight years of sustained power! I warned you when you began that it would have consequences. No magic as great as that you cast around Regina wouldn’t.” 

Emma freezes, flattening herself against the wall as her stomach drops. Cora is speaking again, her voice strident. “I won’t break that curse. Better I die than Regina is freed after her insolence.” She sounds firm, still coldly furious with her daughter, and Emma’s bright hope begins to dim.

“You can’t break the curse,” Gold corrects her. “Not anymore. But there is another way,” he says sleekly. 

“I’m listening.” 

Gold clears his throat, his voice lowering to nearly a whisper. Emma leans in, holding her breath. “Pluck the rose that centers the curse,” he says. “Pluck it and it will kill your daughter and you will live forever in her place.” 

“No,” Emma says, horrified, and it’s only when the room falls silent that she realizes she’s moved forward instinctively, into the doorway with her fists clenched. Neither Cora nor Gold looks surprised. “You wouldn’t.”

“Your loyalty is to me, not Regina,” Cora says coolly. She’s drawn herself up in a way that counteracts the frailty of illness, that gives her an imperious stance that demands obedience. “Don’t tell me that barely a couple of months have changed that.” 

“You imprisoned Regina,” Emma says, all guilt and anger and fear.

“I freed you,” Cora counters. “Would you forget that over a family spat you have no business interfering in?” 

They’ve moved quickly from You’re the closest thing to a daughter I have, haven’t they? And Emma feels the rejection and stands tall, all but swept away if not for her determination to protect Regina. She says, “I can’t let you hurt Regina," and turns, ready to flee back to the castle, when she comes face-to-face with another man waiting patiently behind her.

“I was so hoping you wouldn't say that,” Cora says grimly, and Jones slams his hook against Emma’s skull.

As Emma is dragged beneath Cora’s estate, into dungeons as grubby and unpleasant as the ones she’d spent years in as a teenager, Regina remains in her tower. She watches Henry in her mirror instead of Emma and with rising concern, until she can’t see even him without bitter despair overtaking her.

Mulan is the only one who’s been allowed into the west wing since Snow had left. “Zelena wanted to come,” she murmurs when she brings up Regina’s dinner. “She’s worried about you.” 

“She’s angry at me,” Regina deduces, and Mulan winces.

“No. She…doesn’t understand, I think. You know she has a complex relationship with Cora. She can’t quite grasp why you would let Emma go to her.” 

Regina sits forward in her chair, stabbing dully at her lettuce with a fork. “I couldn't force or manipulate Emma into staying where she isn’t free. I won’t have her resent me or– or hate me…” She stares at the dusty wall opposite her. “This is what she wanted. Our curse isn’t her burden to bear.”

“It shouldn’t be yours, either,” Mulan says gently.

“But it is.”

“It is.” Mulan takes her tray and leaves the room reluctantly, glancing back at Regina as though she might say something more. But she doesn’t. Mulan is wiser than any of the others ever could be. 

Regina doesn’t light a lamp when the dark comes. Once, she’d kept the west wing as a sanctuary to mourn her stable boy; but as the years have passed, her pain has been less about that loss and more about the loss of freedom– for herself and for her son and for the other people here she cares most about.

And then Emma had stepped into the room with her, their hands locked, and Regina had been almost breathless at the promise of a future, of someone she’d have happily spent the rest of eternity beside. And somehow her brief visit has suffused the walls and air and light in the west wing, brought it to life for the first time in twenty-eight years, and Regina can’t escape from any of it anymore.

Emma is light, and without her, Regina sits in darkness.

It’s late, her eyes nearly drifting closed as she sees a glint of light flickering up from the stairs. No one would dare come up here now, not without her express permission. Even Snow knows better now. Unless… 

Her heart leaps with sudden hope and she can feel every heartbeat in time with the creaking on the stairs. Thud. Creak. Thud. Creak. It can’t be…

She’d promised she’d be back but Regina hadn’t dared believe…

Regina rises, gripped with sudden hope, and she nearly runs to the stairs, to see who could be approaching. It’s been two days and she’s already bereft, already helpless with need and grief. She’d never imagined that anyone who’d left the castle would return. 

Thud. Creak. Thud. Creak. Thud. Creak. “Emma?” she breathes, and the lantern-bearer turns the final round of steps at last. 

Regina can see her face flickering in the orange light, eyes somber and her gait weak and unsteady. “Hello, darling,” Cora says, her pursed smile barely visible in the light of her lantern.

Thud.

“Let me out of here!” Emma shouts. “Let me out!” No one responds, if anyone can hear her at all. She sinks to the ground, her fists clenched and her heart racing.

She’s alone in Cora’s dungeons, without even a guard to bribe or a fellow prisoner for company. If she’d thought the castle had been a prison, it’s nothing in comparison with this place in the dank blackness of a place forgotten by time. “Hey!” she shouts again, and her voice is as swallowed by the dark as everything else around her.

She leans back against the wall, feeling the desperation threaten to overwhelm her. Regina’s in danger, and Emma's locked up hours away. Cora’s going to kill Regina. She falls forward again, scrabbling at the bars of her cell and the walls and hacking helplessly at packed dirt with a sliver of stone.

Regina can’t die. She can’t. Emma refuses to live in a world without Regina ever again. “Augh!” she shouts again, louder and furious. “Cora! Gold! Jones! Let me out!” 

“Ah, she summons her hero at last,” comes the oily voice from the darkness, and Jones saunters into view. 

Emma nearly cries with relief. “Jones. Dammit, I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see you before.” He grins down at her, and she takes in a breath, feeling hope rise in her stomach. “Just let me out of here. I swear, I’ll never come back and Cora will never know it’s you–“ 

“And what can you give me in return?” Jones says, his eyes lecherous as always. “I think I have everything I want right here.” He takes a step forward, fumbling for the keys to the dungeon, and Emma thinks that there may yet be something worse than being alone.

She reaches for her sharp stone, tucks it between her fingers as she crouches in wait, and Jones says softly, “All that time running from me and rejecting me, and for what? This prison for the rest of your life? A disgraced bitch of a queen?” 

“She's not the one who has to lock up a woman to get her to talk to him,” Emma shoots back, wary but unafraid. “You’re pathetic, Jones.” 

He reacts in a flash, slides his hook into the cell to slam it against her cheek, and Emma tastes blood and spits it at his feet. “I’ll kill you,” he snarls out. “I’ll kill you and–“

There’s a sound like a thump, something hard against something soft, and Jones slumps to the floor without another word. A smaller figure behind him says, still staring down a Jones as though he can’t believe that he’d felled him, “Don’t talk about my mother like that.” 

“Henry!” Emma does cry now, tears of relief cascading down her cheeks as the tension of the past few minutes is gone, just like that. “Henry, how are you here?” 

Jones is still stirring, not quite out cold, and Henry says, “There’s no time. Let’s get out of here.” He produces the keys and unlocks the door swiftly, and Emma takes his hand and follows him from the cell. She treads on Jones’s good hand with savage satisfaction as they flee the hallway.

“Tell me,” Emma demands as Henry leads her back the way they’d come. “Where’s your mother?”

“Home.” Henry’s face falls. “I just…I wanted to make sure you’d come back, okay? So I followed you out of the castle and then it took me a whole day to make it through the woods! I didn’t have a horse!” He’s breathless as Emma takes the lead on more familiar ground, slipping through Cora’s estate and past guards to the stables. “And I found my way here just in time to see them dragging you into the dungeons. Is my grandma going to hurt my mom?” He turns to Emma, his eyes fierce and afraid.

“Not if we can help it,” Emma assures Henry, and she can already feel her confidence returning.

Hang in there, Regina, we’re coming for you.

There’s an old, formal seat built into the wall below the tower window, cobwebbed and dusty from years of neglect. Regina perches at the end of it, her back straight and the bell jar with the rose on her lap as Cora examines the room. “You’ve broken my gift to you,” she says, disapproving as she slides her fingers across the remaining shards of the mirror.

“Gift,” Regina repeats evenly.

“Of course.” 

“You wanted me to see what I could never have again.” Freedom, and Cora has always been so effective at manipulating that pain to a peak.

Cora spares her a thin-lipped smile. “I wanted you to have power,” she corrects her. She’s sliced open one finger on the shattered glass, and it bleeds and crusts over without the tiny bit of magic that Cora would normally use to heal it. Regina stares at it with blank eyes.

Cora says, “I suppose you must have guessed why I’m here.” 

“Emma sent you.” It comes out too hopeful, too uncertain, and Regina knows it’s weakness even before Cora’s eyes glimmer with danger. 

“Emma,” she repeats. “My deputy, Emma Swan?” She laughs, light and unbothered, and Regina is afraid. “Oh dear, no. I would imagine she’d be the last one to have encouraged me to come here.” She tilts her head, a proprietary hand squeezing Regina’s shoulder. 

“What…” Mother manipulates. Mother will lie to you. “What do you mean?” she asks anyway.

“I came because I’m dying, Regina,” Cora says, sitting down beside Regina with frail hands folded on her lap. “Until now, Emma Swan would have received quite a bit of my holdings and my little kingdom. Yet…You are my daughter,” she says, and reaches out to squeeze Regina’s knee. “I want nothing more than to make amends.” 

Regina still sits stiffly, her mind racing. Cora must be lying about Emma. There’s no way that Emma had– Cora had given Emma a motive almost carelessly, a reason for Regina to distrust her. Cora doesn’t want to make amends. “Then set me free,” Regina challenges, her voice already hoarse and wavering. “If you want to make amends, let me leave this castle.” 

“I’ve come here to do exactly that,” Cora says serenely. She lays her hand over the bell jar. Regina jerks it away from her touch, her heart cold and brittle and ready to crack like the mirror on the wall. “My dear Regina,” Cora says, and after twenty-eight years, the disapproval in her voice is still enough to make Regina quail. “I’m only trying to help.” 

“Where is Emma?” Regina demands, fingers pressed against the glass of the bell jar as though to find an anchor in it. Her fingers slide instead, smudging smooth glass as Cora looks on.

“Emma?” Cora smiles, tight and sharp. “Last I saw her, she was reuniting with her beloved fiancé.” 

The ice of her heart shatters in a bang hard enough to have her chest reeling as though it’s been struck. She can feel slivers digging through her skin, puncturing her heart and lungs and stomach, and in helpless defense, her skin hardens and hardens until she feels nothing at all. “Of course,” she says, and her hands slip from the bell jar in defeat.

Cora catches it before it can fall.

It’s said that the world can change in a split second, to which I say that the world changes every second, and each incremental alteration redefines it as we know of it. But for an individual, perhaps, change can come with only a few moments such as this one:

In the dungeons, Jones picks himself up and runs to the stairs, bellowing shouts to rally the army of guards that Cora pays handsomely for their support. “We must do everything in our power to stop Swan!” he shouts, his purpling face a testament, most of all, to the impressive ability of Cora’s army to maintain a straight face. 

In the woods, Henry is perched on a horse with Emma behind him, urging their mount forward into the dark. There’s a roar of an army just beginning to form behind them, and their horse bolts as Emma struggles to keep it moving forward but Jones’s men take the lead.

And in the highest tower of the west wing of Regina’s castle, Cora says gently, “I never should have cast the curse.” 

Regina’s mind is still working at a frenetic pace, running through a dozen instances when Emma could have revealed– a fiancé? and there’d been fingers brushing against the skin of her thigh and hands on her under the apple trees and stay with me, how could Emma have been in love with a man she’d never spoken of, hadn’t Emma said she’d had no one at all– and she can feel every last bit of her so thoroughly worn through until she’s nothing at all. And then Cora speaks and Regina has no defenses at all.

“But you did,” Regina says, her voice dull. “It doesn’t suit you to feign regret now to assuage your conscience.” 

“No,” Cora agrees. “I prefer action.” Her eyes are on the rose in the bell jar, and Regina feels an unease at that that she can’t name. “And it’s time I told you the one true way to break the curse.”

I’ll give you a moment to gasp in dawning horror as we swing back to Emma, who’s being outridden by Jones’s army and spitting curses at them that have Henry say, admonishing, “Emma.” 

“Cover your ears. Don’t tell your mom about this.” Emma hunches down, tugging at her reins, and reconsiders. “You know what? Tell her. I’d rather have her kick my ass than…” She can’t finish her sentence. 

Henry bobs his head, shivering just a bit in the cold. Emma rides forward, exhaling when she finally reaches the castle. The white wolves lie on the ground before them, bleeding from protruding arrows and sword wounds, and Henry gapes as three men at the front of the castle ride toward them.

Emma shoves him. “Go! Run to the orchard and hide! I’ll take care of this!” 

And Henry obeys, for once in his life.

Inside, Jones has been stymied by a clock wielding a sword around as though she’s one of the best fighters in the world. Above her on the stairs, a candelabra hurls vicious green fireballs at their attackers, and a teapot calls forth the other objects decorating the room to resist the invasion.

Emma hurtles into the castle and nearly gets nicked by a fireball. “Emma?” Zelena says disbelievingly. “You’re back?” 

“Where is she? Where’s Regina?” Emma asks frantically.

“She hasn’t left the west wing in days,” Snow calls out, and every other defender of the castle stares at her in horror at the revelation in front of their invading forces.

Jones wrenches himself from his battle with Mulan and makes a mad dash for the western stairs, and Emma follows, Mulan at her heels. “Regina will set him on fire,” she assures Emma, though she sounds uncertain about it. “I don’t know where this army came from, but–“ 

“Cora,” Emma says grimly, racing down the hall after Jones. “Cora’s already here.” 

I hope you’ve finished your gasp of dawning horror, because it’s time to discover that, yes, Cora’s scheme is exactly as atrocious as it had seemed. We return to a very dubious Regina. “After all this time…you’re telling me that just plucking the final petal from the rose would have broken the curse?” 

Cora inclines her head. “I only wish I’d told you when we had more time together.” She slides a hand through Regina’s hair, the affection stilted but just enough that it has a Regina who’s lost everything– her son, free from her castle at last; twenty-eight years, all but gone; a woman she loves who will never return to her– lean into the embrace. 

Below them, there are sounds of battle and shouts of dismay, but Regina hears none of it. 

Emma catches up to Jones at last, wielding her sword with grace as he laughs and deflects every blow. “Did you think it would be that easy?” he mocks, parrying and driving her back toward the entrance to the west wing. The room that had once been Regina’s cottage with her stable boy is in shambles; each carefully preserved bit of the past turned to broken clay and battered furniture with every moment the fight continues. “Did you think you could reach your queen in some daring rescue when I’m still here?” 

“You were taken down by a ten-year-old,” Emma scoffs, bobbing on the couch cushions and slamming her sword down on him from above. 

As Cora murmurs promises to her daughter– each of them a half-truth, because those are so much more effective than mere lies– and Regina takes them in in silence, starved for human connection as she’s been for days, Emma dodges Jones’s flurry of attacks and holds steady as he bears down, closer and closer until their faces are just inches away, behind their crossed swords. “I’ll kill you,” Jones snarls, and his hook flashes out with renewed speed–

A sword pierces him from behind, tilting upward as though its bearer is particularly small. “A dishonorable death,” Mulan says, wrinkling her nose and wiggling her sword free as Jones chokes and flies toward a window, crashing through it and over the edge of the castle wall. “But he didn’t seem to have much honor to begin with.” Emma gapes, a bit disappointed at not getting to inflict the final blow, and Mulan pokes her with one of her clock hands. “Go. Help Regina. I’ll hold the line.” 

Regina has the rose in her hand, the stem between two fingers as she stares at the half-detached petal that remains. Cora beams at her. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long,” she murmurs. 

“The curse broken?” 

“Forgiveness,” Cora corrects her, and something in Regina’s shattered heart still yearns for the warmth that that word promises. “I never wanted our last time together to be marred by the bitterness of the past.” 

“Our last time together,” Regina repeats, frowning at the rose. “Then you think…” She looks up, tense again and afraid of even more loss. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promises. “I’ll stay by your side for as long as this sickness lasts.” 

“You’re too good to me, darling,” Cora murmurs, pressing a kiss to Regina’s cheek. “Now, the petal. We have no time to lose.” 

“Yes.” Regina examines the rose again, still with that uncertainty in her eyes. Now that freedom feels as though it’s in her grasp, she’s hesitating. It’s too good to be true, Cora reaching out and an end to this damnable curse and a future ahead of her, and she sucks in a deep breath and places her fingers on the petal–

“No!” comes the cry from the doorway, and Regina had been so absorbed in the rose that she hadn’t heard Emma Swan approaching until that moment. Emma is breathing hard, leaning against her sword, her free hand outstretched. “Regina,” Emma breathes, and days of tension and fear and loss all fade away when their eyes lock. 

“Emma,” Regina says shakily, and she can’t believe any of the poison that her mother had poured into her ears when Emma is standing before her with her eyes gleaming with relief and bare affection. 

“Do it,” Cora says forcefully. “Do it now, before she can–“ 

“She’s lying to you,” Emma grinds out, glaring at Cora. “Whatever she says is a lie. She’s trying to kill you!” she snaps, taking a step forward, and Regina’s fingers freeze on the petal of the rose. 

“Mother,” Regina says. “Is this true?” She doesn’t need to ask it but she still does, desperately dreaming for a moment– desperate to hold onto someone who has only caused her pain in the past, desperate to have not been so deceived so coldly. 

Cora says, eyes flickering toward Emma with her sword and Regina still bearing the rose, “Darling, everything I’ve done for you has been for our good. If you’d only understand that–” 

Regina stands, backs away from her in horror, and Cora sighs, “I truly didn’t want it to end like this,” and the rose disappears in a puff of pink energy and reappears in her hands. 

“No,” Emma says, eyes wide, and she races forward, across the small room–

–It’s too late. Cora plucks the final petal from the rose.

Regina trembles, seizes up, reaches out for Emma and then falls to the ground, still twitching, and Cora laughs as magic roars up around her and envelops her in its glowing light. It’s stronger than anything Emma’s ever seen, unstoppable and terrible and Emma can only gape at it for an instant before she’s dropping down to hold Regina in her arms. “Regina! Regina!” 

There’s no answer. Regina is still twitching and Cora is shouting something victorious and Emma crouches over Regina, tears falling freely from her face. “Oh, oh no– Regina. Regina, no, come back to me, please, Regina–“ The idea of a world without Regina is as foreign as a home is to Emma, as difficult to conceive of or accept at all. “Regina, wake up, oh, fuck–“ 

The cloud of magic is coalescing around Cora, and Emma can hear the threats now past the laughter, silky and directed at her. Emma can’t even see Cora through her blurred eyes, and she feels a hot blast of magic nearby–

And then Snow’s voice, and Zelena’s, and Mulan’s and Henry’s and Cora is distracted. Emma crouches over Regina, barely aware of anything else happening around her. “Regina, Regina, Regina,” she chants, over and over, as though she can somehow wake her with only her name. “Please, Regina– I can’t–“ She inhales a sobbing breath. “I just found you,” she chokes out. “I can’t lose you.”

But Regina’s skin has taken on an unnatural pallor, and even the twitching has ceased. She lies in stillness on the ground, looking for all the world like she’s only asleep, and Emma’s forehead drops to Regina’s, her tears wet and glistening against Regina’s skin. Henry is crying out something from the doorway, still blocked by Cora, and Emma can’t hear any of it– can’t hear anything but the deafening silence where Regina’s heartbeat should be. 

“I just found you,” she whispers again, into the silence. “Regina, please, don’t…” She’s never felt this sort of loss before, this absolute despair that comes with loving and losing– not when she’d never loved like this before. She can’t imagine leaving this spot, not until Cora blows her apart. She can’t imagine ever returning to a world in which Regina isn’t at its epicenter, and she refuses to…to…

She raises her head and falls forward again, unable to support her own weight when she feels this weak, and she presses her lips against Regina’s forehead instead. “I love you,” she murmurs against her skin. “I love you, Regina, you can’t–“ 

Something surges at the point where her lips touch Regina’s skin, something multicolored and powerful and…magical? Emma looks up, finally startled from her Regina-induced stupor by the magic coursing through her, and she sees Henry’s beaming face first. “You did it!” he says, and Cora screams again, loud and furious as the magic pours from her as quickly as it had come. 

“You really did it,” says the woman beside Henry in wonder, reaching up to touch her own face with the hand that isn’t on her sword. “We’re–“

The redhead beside her lets out a whoops of joy and kisses her square on the lips, and Mulan– it must be Mulan and Zelena, what is happening– looks startled and amused and doesn’t push her away. Henry is still grinning, grinning like a boy who hasn’t just lost his mother, and Emma can’t see whatever’s going on there when Regina is…

Regina is…

Regina is smiling, her eyes flickering open, and Emma gasps out a choked sob. “You broke the curse,” Regina murmurs, her voice hoarse and worn. “Emma, we’re…” 

And the most important thing about this moment is Regina, alive and well again, but somehow Emma can only manage a stupid, “You’re in love with me, too?” 

“Emma,” Regina sighs, her eyes shining, and she tugs Emma back down to her lips for a proper, real kiss that has Emma’s head spinning and her heart aflame with warmth and hope and wonder.

Chapter Text

You might not expect moments of tension after the great final kiss, the curtains ready to fall and our players ready to return to the ever-promised happily ever after. But today we have one; Emma sitting on the grand staircase, drumming her fingers against her knees, Henry curled up beside her. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he says with conviction. He smiles, but it’s uncertain. “What…what do you think comes next?” 

“You’re happy,” Emma promises. “You and your mother are happy.” She glances once toward the room off the side of the ballroom, where Regina, Zelena, and Mulan had vanished nearly an hour before with Cora. Emma has no way of knowing what their plans are– if Cora might still sabotage them or if she has kept her magic, after all. Emma and Henry have been kept in the dark, and Emma can only stare at the still-empty hallway in silence.

“Henry,” a gentle voice says from behind them. It’s Snow, her kind eyes still somehow the same eyes that had been on the teapot. Now, though, she crouches down and suggests, “Why don’t we go out to the orchards? There are still shooting stars out from the curse breaking.” Knowing eyes land on Emma’s. “And Emma, you’re welcome to join us. I suspect Regina will be in there for a while more.” 

Henry frowns at her, rising with reluctance. “Don’t you have a whole kingdom to get back to?” 

“Eventually,” Snow says, wincing. “I’ve been speaking to the soldiers who’ve remained in the castle grounds. A neighboring king took my kingdom after the power struggle and installed his son there. I’ve got my work cut out for me.” (There is a story there, a false prince stumbling through the politics of the kingdom, a lost princess returned to bedlam, an unexpected connection; but these are tales for another day.) 

She smiles again. “Come, Henry. Take a breather. You deserve it.” Henry looks to Emma for approval. Emma shrugs, biting her lip, and follows after them.

She hadn’t wanted to leave Regina alone with Cora at all, but Regina had insisted. There’s a furtive sort of fear when Emma is anywhere near Cora, and Emma remembers what had happened to the last one that Regina had loved when he’d been in Cora’s vicinity. For her part, Emma can only think of Cora tearing the petal from the rose; and she thinks that even without her magic, Cora is a formidable foe. 

Henry slides his hand into hers in quiet solidarity as they walk after Snow, and when he smiles at her, she relaxes a hair. “We’re free,” he says, blinking out at the orchards. Neither of them has stepped out of the castle again since the curse had broken, waiting for Regina and for everything to be settled, but the castle is emptying out, formerly cursed objects fleeing their prison with wonder. “Do you think we’ll still live here now?” 

We is fluid to him, easy acceptance of Emma as a part of his family, and she wraps an arm around his shoulders with indescribable fondness. “We’ll live wherever you and Regina decide to live.” 

Henry’s brow furrows. “What about you?” 

Emma shrugs. “I’ll just…” She doesn’t care where she is anymore, castle or town or a hut in the woods, not as long as she has this family with her. “I’ll be with you,” she says simply, and Henry’s head falls to her shoulder, his arm tight around her waist.

Across the castle, another woman longs to be with them both, but she stands strong and alone as she makes her final decisions. “Exile, Mother,” she says at last. “I don’t want to see you again.”

“If you ever come back into our lives…” Zelena’s hands light up with emerald fire. Cora sneers at her, at Regina, at Mulan safe behind them with her sword drawn. 

Perhaps she’d be better off dead and far from our heroes, but no one in that room is willing to deal the killing blow. Regina stands secure and tall, her allies around her, and Cora says, “You’re making a mistake,” with so much scorn that Regina nearly quails.

Mulan lays a calm hand on Regina’s shoulder and Regina remembers herself. “I don’t think so,” she says. “You’ve done your worst to me, Mother. I’m not afraid of you anymore.” 

A wistful part of her still dreams of reconciliation, someday, of the closure she’ll never truly have with her mother. Cora is old and trembling, no longer with the magic that would have protected her from aging any more. And Regina hesitates, that wistful voice still yearning for a woman who had caused her nothing but pain.

She reaches out and touches Cora’s cheek with the backs of her knuckles, watching her mother’s eyes flicker shut at the contact. “For what you’ve done for Emma,” she says finally, and Cora scoffs and glowers at her. “I’ll have a carriage drawn for you. You will live the remainder of your life in comfort,” she promises, and turns away from her to the door. “Goodbye, Mother.” 

Zelena says something in a low tone to Cora, still lounging in front of the door with Mulan. Regina exits the room and finds a soldier milling about in the courtyard. They’ve been made friendly with Cora’s defeat, and she gives him strict instructions about where to take Cora. 

And then, finally, finally, she can find her son and her…her true love, she thinks, and I swear to you that you’ve never seen Regina smile as brightly as she does in that moment, gazing out through iron gates and thinking of her family. No. No, a moment later, it’s even brighter, as Henry emerges from the side of the house and leaps into her arms. “Mama!” 

“Henry!” she exclaims, and they’re spinning in a circle, exhilarated and breathless and alive. The dimness that suffuses her time with Cora is swept aside by the moonlight, by her son’s eyes glowing as he looks up at her, and she inhales fresh, free air and runs a hand through his hair. 

She hasn’t stepped through the iron gates yet, and she considers it now but it doesn’t feel quite right just like this. “Where is Emma?” 

Henry shrugs. “She went upstairs a few minutes ago.” He looks perturbed. “She seemed distracted. Maybe in a good way? We were talking about what we’re going to do next and she just…said she had to go. I don’t know where she went.” 

“I do.” Regina squeezes his shoulder. “I’ll be right back, all right?” Henry bobs his head. He, too, lingers near the gate, not ready to leave.

It’s been years of these two in their tight little family, isolated from the world. The greatest fairytales begin with one: alone; and then end with two, three, four: a family. This tale had begun with two, Henry and Regina’s paths entwined in their castle, and now that it’s time to go, something holds them back.

Upstairs, Emma who had thought only of freedom is locked away again, back to the stone wall of her turret with her knees up and her eyes blank on the pages of the book open against her legs. And, my dear reader, I can’t describe to you what’s whirling through her head, because she couldn’t, either. Not at this pivotal moment, when a way out finally appears within all their grasps. Not when they’re finally ready for happily ever after.

She doesn’t move when there’s a light knocking at the door to the turret, and Regina steps into the room and slides down onto the floor beside her. A tentative arm slips around Emma’s waist, Regina laying her head against her shoulders. Emma’s lips curl upward, the turmoil within her mind quieting at last.. “Hi,” she murmurs, wrapping her own arm around Regina to tuck her into her embrace. “I was beginning to think you’d never leave that room.” 

Regina sighs, stretching out her legs on the floor and shifting to lean closer to Emma. “Mother has no more magic. I don’t think I want to hurt her, but I want her gone from my life.” She hesitates. “She hasn’t left yet. If you want to–“

“I don’t,” Emma says quickly. “I mean…” She laughs wryly. “I think my debt to Lady Cora was repaid a long time ago, but I would have stayed forever if she hadn’t tried to kill you and lock me up indefinitely. Let her go.” 

“Maybe someday…” Regina says uncertainly. Her admission is barely a whisper, a secret desire that she can’t tamp down even now when it shames her.

Perhaps there’s a sort of longing to it that can’t be described or understood by anyone but those who have spent their lives unloved. Even a girl who’d been so shattered by her mother– locked in cages long before a castle and always denied what she’d yearned for– even that girl who still dreams of fairytales hopes furtively for one where she might have a mother who loves her. 

And Emma Swan, child of no one but the wind that rushes unfettered through the world, squeezes the skin of her hip gently in understanding. “Maybe someday,” she murmurs, brushing her lips to Regina’s temple for a moment. 

Regina sighs happily and shifts closer still to Emma, peering down at the book on her lap. “Althea and Johari again?” 

Emma’s shoulders rise and fall. “I fell asleep when you were reading it to Henry, remember? I never got to read the end.” 

“It’s the same ending as always,” Regina says, turning the pages to show Emma the dramatic kiss on the final page. “And they lived happily ever after.” 

Emma is tentative, unsure, afraid. “What does that mean?” she wonders, her voice unsteady. “How is happily ever after just…a state of being? It doesn’t guarantee–“

“Emma,” Regina whispers, and in that moment she finally understands what it is that’s plaguing Emma so. “Do you want to know what my happily ever after looks like?” Emma bobs her head, still so tense that Regina has to uncurl Emma's fingers from her hip and lace them into her own. “I want to see the world with you and Henry,” she says, her eyes distant, and Emma’s fingers are less rigid at the you. “I want to travel and ride again and learn about the world without Mother’s hands holding me back by the wrists.”

She pulls away and stands, staring out from the turret to the river that flows to Storybrooke. Emma follows, tucking her book under her arm. “And when I’ve seen enough,” Regina says, her eyes distant, “I want to come back home to my castle with my family.” 

Emma starts, glancing over at Regina as her heart warms and warms. “You want to come back here?” Regina’s eyes are wistful instead of pained, and Emma doesn’t understand. “I thought this was your prison.” 

“It was.” The wind is light around them, these two women who have known too many years of isolation and finally found something real beyond it. When you look at them now, perhaps, you might see just a hint of the magic that whirls around them, no longer a curse or spell but the quiet freedom of hope. “It’s also the place where I…where I raised my son and found so many people I…and…” Regina’s voice is tender, her heart at peace. “It’s the place where I fell in love with you.” 

Emma’s breath catches in her throat and she manages, “Oh,” as Regina smiles dazzlingly at her. “Okay, then.” 

They stand in silence for a moment, Regina’s smile still bright and gleaming and Emma’s eyes wide with unspoken emotion. Neither of them can tear their gazes apart, and Regina finally asks carefully, “And you? What does your happily ever after look like?” 

Is there really an answer that isn’t clearly apparent in this tale, in Emma’s eyes, in every motion of fate and every battle against it? “You,” Emma says, helpless, and Regina moves forward, captures Emma's face in her hands, and kisses her fiercely.

There are hands on hips and backs and sliding through travel clothing worn out by wolves and prisons. There’s Emma gasping into Regina’s mouth as her hands trace the curves of Regina’s skin; as Regina digs her fingers into Emma’s sides and bites the slope of her jaw and Emma sucks hard at Regina’s pulse point until Regina gasps as well. There are fumbling hands that slide everywhere, that see clothes as nothing more than barriers, there are rolling hills within their breathless movements that rise and rise and rise until they fall, one then the other, damp foreheads dropping together and a fervent kiss placed to a bare shoulder as Regina strokes Emma one last time.

“We should, um…” Emma bites her lip, then Regina’s for good measure. “Get cleaned up.”

“Of course,” Regina says agreeably, and they slip from the turret together, too lost in each other to notice the absolutely filthy-smug expression on Zelena’s face as they stroll past her to the baths.

(Between you and me, she’s just collected quite the debt from Mulan over a certain wager.)

The obligatory denouement is upon us, just hours after the true love’s kiss that spells an ending in every fairytale. It’s sunrise, a new day after a never-ending night, and the world around the castle is orange with promise. Henry has fallen asleep in the grass where wolves once roamed and Zelena is gleeful on the other side of the gate, waving around a sword with the same wildness as she had her candlesticks, once upon a time. Mulan ducks and winces and spars with her, making a futile attempt to bring some dignity back to their sparring session. 

And then she pauses, distracted, and Zelena follows her gaze to the front doors. Her eyebrow quirks, and she might have said about time if we could hear her from our vantage point.

Regina has stepped out of the castle doors.

Henry stirs, rises, waiting for his mother. Emma trails behind her, eyes with the same wonder that there is in Regina’s (though hers are focused more on the woman in front of her than on the open gates beyond which Mulan and Zelena remain). 

Regina walks in front of them, brisk step after brisk step, and Henry and Emma both linger behind her when Regina’s businesslike stride falters at the gates.

And then she’s stepping through the gates, her eyes wide with wonder and a burst of laughter in her throat, and she walks a few more steps before she spins around and spreads her arms and beckons to her son and her true love.

Henry breaks into a run and Emma quickens her step, right behind him as he lands in his mother’s arms. She’s pulled into the embrace as well, the three of them laughing and crying, a tiny bit, as the sun climbs up from the horizon and dawn settles onto a new day.

And indeed: after travels and more laughter and tears; after castles and taverns and dragons and ogres; after kisses and hugs and whispered declarations of love that are easier and easier as time passes; after family, free to have all they’ve ever dreamed of–

–after and during each moment that follows our three heroes in each other’s arms, they have exactly what they’ve never dared imagine. My dear reader, I can only wish for you the sort of fairytale that Emma, Regina, and Henry had found together.

And they lived happily ever after.