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“Emma look––it worked, Regina and the Evil Queen are––“
“They’re––Shit, Regina? Regina! No, no no––Snow, get help, get help, get––“
“Emma––“
“Regina. Wake up.”
“She’s not––“
“The potion wasn’t supposed to do this––“
“Shhh, shh––give her time, give––“
It’s like being pushed into the ocean with chains on her feet.
At first, there’s nothing. There’s just a darkness and the vague sensations of falling, everything muffled. Regina tries to open her eyes but there are no eyes to open, and she all at once feels expansive and limited; she can’t place where she begins or where she ends.
What did you do , she hears. What did you do what did you what did––
She begins to feel a heaviness, overwhelming and material. Regina feels herself stitching into one existence but she doesn’t want it. No, I don’t want you back.
Then why––then why––
Regina finds where she begins and pulls away.
*
Before she can register where she is, she sees the Queen making a lunge at her with clawed hands. Regina braces herself, gasps and waves her arms in an attempt to materialize away, but an absence of smoke and an angry double behind her later, she realizes neither of their attempts had worked.
“What is this?” Regina asks, wide eyed and staring at the grass beneath her feet. The individual blades sway in light wind but she feels nothing on her skin, just a vague iciness despite the cloudless day. “Where are we?”
“Your foolish reunification potion,” the Queen spits, rising from her knees and shaking handfuls of her skirts, “didn’t exactly work.”
Stalks of grass remains unbent as Regina walks around, taking in the familiar meadows. “We’re in a memory.”
“Yes,” the Queen says with gritted teeth, trying once more to shove at Regina but only getting an incorporeal arm through her torso. “We’re stuck here in your mind because you––couldn’t––”
Regina turns around and stares with hard eyes. “Because I couldn’t what? Because I still don’t want anything to do with you? Even though I took the damn potion anyway because you just wouldn’t stop terrorizing my friends and family and die?”
The words leave Regina’s mouth and leave coldness in their wake, and it’s so easy here, where the thoughts don’t go through something before they’re said. The Queen’s lips catch on her teeth in an angry snarl before she tries to lunge at her, falling over once more.
“Those dresses weren’t necessarily made for brawling.”
“You’re despicable to me,” the Queen says.
“Likewise,” Regina says, and walks.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Away from you.”
She paces forward and is unsettled by even the absence of her shadow, looks up to focus on something else. As soon as she does, she spots a hill that makes her feel like floating away. She sees the familiar profile with the shade of brown hair she always loved that Henry had. She runs.
“What do you think you’re doing––“ the Queen says after her, pacing faster when she is ignored.
“Daniel,” Regina cries, “Daniel!”
He doesn’t turn toward her calls and when she reaches out her hand for him, she feels nothing. It goes through him like she had just touched a cloud.
“Daniel, it’s me, I’m here,” she says, longing for his line of sight to catch her standing right in front of him, for him to look down and give her that crooked smile.
“You idiot,” the Queen says, walking up behind Regina. “He can’t see you. We’re not really here.”
Regina’s eyes glaze and her lungs feel heavy. “Then what’s the point?”
“Daniel,” she hears a voice, light and sweet that she hasn’t heard in a long time.
Regina steps back as she watches herself run up to Daniel, red cheeked and in her light cyan riding coat. He gives her that precious smile as he takes her into his arms and kisses her.
She feels the tingle of her lips, and aches. She aches for being this youthful and innocent and in love. She aches because splitting herself in two was the closest she had ever gotten to being this again, and it still wasn’t enough.
When she can’t take seeing it anymore, Regina turns back to walk away, and is startled to see the Queen still standing there but not paying attention to her at all. She stares and stares at the young Regina and still alive Daniel and touches her fingertips to her painted lips.
*
The scenery changes. She’s tried over and over again to make it spin according to her will but as ever, as through her life, she doesn’t get to choose.
Instead, Regina stands stiffly as she watches her mother’s attendants pick at her white dress adorned with jewels, a sea of sparkles juxtaposed against the dullness of her eyes. The Queen leans back on a chair with crossed legs, indifferent, detached, the moment of vulnerability from watching herself with Daniel long gone. Regina feels her presence rumble when the young Snow, smiling and bubbly, enthuses endlessly at the young Regina.
“I know you and Daniel will be so happy together… ”
Regina turns away, unable to look at the transformation.
“Ah,” the Queen coos, leans forward, knuckles resting under her chin. “Here it is. The genesis. And there––“ young Regina turns to face Snow after a moment of lurching, a smile plastered on so horribly that Snow was a fool to believe it––“There I am.”
“We didn’t have to lie,” Regina’s voice shakes, still turned away. “We didn’t have to tell her that we were going to be––“
“What other way,” The Queen says in a low, grating voice. “What would’ve happened if we had shattered her then. If we had yelled. What would’ve happened if we made the poor princess cry.”
Regina clutches her chest, feels the darkness and anger bloom there. “Damnit,” she hisses. “Damnit .”
“As Mother had said.” The Queen follows Cora’s mouth, says it in tandem. “You’re learning. ”
*
“Is Mom going to be okay?”
“I don’t know, kid.”
“My true love’s kiss didn’t work.”
“Henry, Henry––it’s not your fault. We’ll find a way. We always do.”
*
She sees herself as the young Queen marching through the woods in a black leather dress. The darkness is new here, she can tell from the quietness of her fury. Regina wants to follow her, to tell her no, don’t do what you’re about to do.
But she watches her rip out that woman’s heart, remembers how it felt to be hardened by hopes raised only to be destroyed. Mourns the way the lines on her face put on exactly what Rumpelstiltskin had been looking for.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” the Queen comments, back straight and admiring what she sees. “To finally… shut away all those feelings that made you weak, that kept you from doing what you needed to do.”
“We didn’t even know her,” Regina cries. “We just killed her. She didn’t do anything to us.” She shakes her head, holds it as it pounds. “Why are we here? Why do I have to see this?”
The Queen looks at her over her shoulder, a corner of her lip tugged upward in disdain. “Because you forgot,” she says, slow and crisp and practiced, turning her body and walking forward in predatory steps. “You forgot why you needed me.”
She flings her hands up and the space dims, whirls, until the forest beneath their feet are hard cold floors, day fluxing into night. Until the lines on younger Regina’s face twist into something else as she sits at her vanity, wiping the powder from her face so hard the cloth chafes on her skin.
“Stop,” Regina whispers.
“Look at you,” The Queen says, bending down and serving the memory up with her hand as Regina falls on her knees, cradling her stomach.
It’s the night after the wedding. The late hours after, when Regina had left the King’s chambers when he was asleep and wiped every single part of herself down, weeping.
“It felt good, didn’t it? When he was finally dead?” The Queen places her own hand above her stomach, clutching the material there. “When this finally stopped?”
The heaviness blooming between her lungs feels more like rotting and Regina hates it, she hates it. “Yes,” she says bitterly, “It did.” She looks up and gives the most burning look she can muster. “But you couldn’t stop at that, couldn’t you? That’s why I will never forgive you, because you couldn’t stop, and I had to live with it!”
“I am you!” The Queen shouts, shaking her clenched hand towards her chest. “You became this!” Regina screams as the younger queen begins to cry louder, wishing and wishing to drown it all out. “You became the Evil Queen. You cut yourself in two but that does not mean that this was never you!––“
“I know that,” Regina yells into the ground. “I know! ”
She cries and cries. The Queen breathes heavily, standing straight up again, watching Regina as she curls in on herself under the weight of it all.
*
“Regina... Please hear me. Please wake up. We need you.”
Wet droplets fall onto a still cheek.
“I need...”
*
The memories pass like a horrible dream. Innocents she killed. Hearts she tore out, kept or crushed or eventually both. Mothers she took away from children, children she took away from fathers. Hansel and Gretel. Paige. Maid Marian. Emma. Owen. Breaking family after family, not caring whether they had anything to do with Regina or not.
“This hurts,” Regina says, tired, weary. Standing there like a passive and powerless observer as Regina of years and years ago reaches her hand out to the town barrier. Owen cries for his father, holds up his lanyard and makes a promise.
“That boy grew up to be a monster,” the Queen mutters.
“We made him a monster,” Regina fires back, eyes teary. “We caused all this unnecessary hurt and didn’t even regret it. So much collateral damage in our endeavors for revenge.”
The Queen scowls. “Don’t you understand. We have always been the damage, collateral and otherwise. The point is to show everyone else how it feels. That’s how we stop it from hurting.”
“No.” Regina turns to her in the middle of the road, hands shaking in frustration and the heaviness in her chest returning. “I stopped it from hurting when I ripped you out. For once, I felt unchained from this horrible past, I felt free, I felt good. I could finally forgive myself for everything I had done––“
“That’s your idea of forgiving yourself?” The Queen asks, posture vigilant now and the way her brow quirks up and her mouth turns upward makes Regina want to shout. “Ejecting all of your evil, darkness, and guilt into one separate being, blaming her, hating her, and getting rid of her––that’s what forgiveness looks like to you?”
“It’s the only forgiveness I deserve,” Regina says, the words coming out like a shaken soda bottle twisting open. Her nails dig into her palms, fists tight.
The Queen steps closer to her, meeting her eyes. Her jaws harden. “Well that’s the problem with you, isn’t it?”
Regina tightens her mouth and walks forward right through the queen, and doesn’t look back at her. She can still hear Owen crying, even when the memory has passed altogether. As the space in her mind blackens again, his sobbing bleeds into the sound of everyone else’s, and then the sound of hers.
*
Regina and the Queen watch as people walk down the streets of Storybrooke. They’re morose under the eyes and in the spine; Regina can’t bear to look at how familiar this emptiness is, and the Queen can’t keep from smiling.
“See, this is how it should’ve been,” The Queen sighs, arms crossed and shoulders shrugging in glee. “All those miserable years in the castle, now they get to have a taste. Except here they’re also powerless, and no one is going to help them.”
“Emma is,” Regina says, not looking at her, hiding her face in the upturned collars of her coat. “Soon enough.”
The Queen inspects her with a harsh eye. “It’s like you wanted this curse to break.”
“What I want is for you to stop––“
She’s rendered silent by a figure in the distance, turning towards Granny’s diner: a tan peacoat, a diaper bag, a stroller. The Queen knits her brow at her and turns to look behind her, a disdainful word caught in her throat and dying there. Eyes flash to each other and back at the diner, and wordlessly, they follow.
It’s Regina who runs. She longs and aches and even just for the memory of her baby boy. She walks through the diner walls and sees him fidgeting and giggling in the high chair, grabbing for Regina’s fingers. She glances at the menu with a smile that has nothing to do with the menu.
“He’s one and a half here,” the Queen says behind Regina.
“I know,” she replies, irritation drowned in what blossoms in her chest, the warmth in her stomach. When Henry laughs at Regina and calls her mama, all three of them––Regina now, Regina then, and the Queen––all hold their breath.
*
“I shouldn’t have lied to him,” Regina says, watching herself follow around a four year old Henry as he climbs up and down the wooden castle. “I should’ve always put him first, and not the curse.”
“No, we shouldn’t have,” The Queen agrees, and Regina quickly turns her head to look at her. “He should’ve known from the start. We should’ve been honest about our darkness.” Regina’s brow creases, beginning to shake her head. “We should have made it so that Henry would love us and our darkness, too.”
“No,” Regina says.
The Queen looks at her and narrows her eyes. “You spoiled him. You raised him to be soft, with no help of that Emma Swan.”
“I owe Emma my life for Henry,” Regina counters. “And we raised him to be good.”
“And fragile. And easy to hurt.”
A flash of tree branches stringed into vines around Henry’s wrists and ankles comes into Regina’s eyes and settles there in a glossy sheen of tears. “You would know, wouldn’t you?”
“I love my son,” The Queen counters, “I would do anything so that he wouldn’t be hurt like us. If he doesn’t learn how to fight the world the world will only come after him.”
“You really can’t see it, can you?” Regina shakes her head, looks on at the wooden castle. This is when Regina was too slow and Henry hit his little head on a stair step and wailed. Regina had cried too and kissed the tender spot until Henry told her she could stop. “The point is that Henry is nothing like us. Should never be like us.”
Soon Henry isn’t crying anymore. He laughs as Regina blows air onto his belly. “That tickles! ” he squeals, and Regina wants nothing more than to hear him laugh like that again and again.
“I have to get back to him,” Regina says. “I can’t stay here forever.”
The Queen and Regina look at each other, looking and looking, quiet in the understanding that waking up whole isn’t going to be the compromise.
*
“Regina.”
A minute stretches endlessly. Lips touch the knuckles of a limp hand.
“What I’m about to do... you would do the same for me. So hang on for me, okay? Hang on...”
*
“Oh look,” The Queen says wryly, standing with Regina behind a hedge on the mansion’s lawn. “Your favorite person is here.”
“Emma,” Regina breathes, not quite hearing herself and not quite seeing how the Queen narrows her eyes at her. “She looks so young.”
It’s hard to watch, almost to see them like this when now it’s so different. When the pushing and pulling became standing together on the same side. She watches the Regina in the gray suit and hard expression and can feel how much she wanted to hurt Emma then, and it pains her.
“Being a savior does take a toll.” The queen lets her tongue roll off her teeth with exaggeration. “You should’ve tried harder to get rid of her.”
“Stop. She was right to stay.”
“Do you love him ?” Emma asks. It pulls Regina the way Emma had always pulled her.
“Excuse me? ”
“The gall of that woman,” The Queen says.
“Shh,” Regina says.
“Henry. Do you love him? ”
The Queen says it along with her: “Of course I love him.”
The door shuts. The queen darts her eyes at Regina’s glassy expression and scowls, anger bubbling up inside of her in betrayal.
“You’re in love with the Savior.” It’s said with a dose of amusement but Regina can feel the undercurrent of rage. “The only reason why you haven’t given up here is because she keeps calling to you.”
Regina’s face drops as she looks at the Queen, words caught in her throat.
“I can’t believe you. She was literally born to destroy me.”
“Well maybe it’s not always about you,” Emma shouts from the walkway.
Regina and the Queen snap their gazes to Emma. They recognize the way her eyes shine, just a little duller these days, and the weight of her voice.
The Queen is the first to act. She walks forward but the leaves of the hedge brush against her dress and––
She smirks.
“The rules have changed, it seems,” she says, collecting a flame in her palm.
“Emma!” Regina snuffs it out of the Queen’s hands, which earns her a sharp look and a shove against a tree.
The Queen materializes behind Emma and swipes at her, and Emma ducks, snapping out of the way with her own magic and appearing next to Regina on the ground.
“What are you doing ? How are you here?” Regina asks as Emma touches her shoulders, her hands warm.
“The potion has a side effect,” Emma rushes, bringing them down closer to the floor as the Queen flings another fireball.
“So I gathered ––“
In a puff of smoke and one sweep of a motion the Queen has Emma pinned to the tree by the neck.
“Oh would you listen for one moment!” Emma shouts, and perhaps it impresses the Queen because she loosens her grip but still holds her against the trunk.
“Spit it out, Savior.”
“Your body is in a coma,” Emma rasps, the lines on her brow wavering from softening and then going hard again. She’s trying, but Emma pushes back when pushed. “And if you don’t finish what the potion was meant to do, you’ll die.“
Regina feels herself go numb, ears ringing. The Queen narrows her eyes at Emma, presses her palm against her neck. “So then what?”
“There’s not enough power to split you two again.” Emma breathes in painfully. “There’s just one body now. So one mind needs to wake up.”
The scenery goes gray, Regina hears her heart pounding inside and her ribs ache. One. One. One. She remembers how it felt to be immaterial and stitched back together with the Queen and it sears. Emma says something more but it wobbles out, muffled, drowned out by thoughts that swim around in Regina’s mind until she makes the decision, then and there. She raises her arm and push es.
A sick sound of flesh later, Regina has her hand inside the Queen’s chest.
The Queen eyes widen, caught off guard, stuck in the moment. She lets go of Emma, who coughs and lands on her side.
“So I have to kill her here,” Regina says. “Right here. And then I can go back home.”
“Regina, wait,” Emma says cautiously, rising slowly from the ground.
“No,” The Queen says, deep and pained, and in a sharp movement reaches her hand into Regina’s chest. Regina reels in pain, hears Emma gasp. “If I go, so do you.”
“Then so be it––”
“Regina,” Emma implores, settling her hands on Regina’s elbow. “You don’t have to kill her. You can take her back.”
“No. Emma, don’t you get it? I can never…”
“Never what?” The Queen pushes, eyes wet and burning. “Be forgiven?”
The fingers around her heart twitch and Regina aches and hurts, from all the memories relived, witnessing her sins over and over, from this brush with death.
“Yes.”
Emma looks at her and Regina can’t bring herself to look back. She feels Emma’s hand firm around her forearm.
“You can be whole and forgiven, Regina,” she says softly, desperately. “You deserve that. You really do.”
The words sting, and Regina can’t take it in. She shakes her head.
“She won’t let me,” Regina cries. “Look at her. She wants me dead, too.”
“You fool,” the Queen spits, her voice coming out watery.
Emma looks at the Queen now, eyes sad and afraid and everything the Queen hates about the people this Regina loves. “That’s not it, is it?” Her voice is clear, low. “You want to be whole. You want her to take you back.”
“Oh, now the Evil Queen gets mercy from the Savior.” The Queen clenches her teeth, her arm shaking. “What happened to swinging that enchanted sword at my face, Swan?”
Ignoring her, Emma turns her head back to Regina. “Listen. You don’t have to do any of this to be good. It’s okay to bring her back to you.”
“It’s not.”
“Like I said the first time,” The Queen says, voice gravelly, chin jutting out towards Regina. “You don’t have what it takes.”
Regina tries to recreate the feeling of being without the Evil Queen and can’t, and it hurts. “Yes. I do.”
“Regina! ”
She screams in anguish and the Queen shouts as they both pull.
*
There’s nothing again. Darkness and sightless running, the world turning and shaking. Tumbling. Sensation. Burning. Not knowing where they begin or where they end.
(Voices. Memories. Echoes and booming all at once.)
(It hurts.)
Do you remember what we told the fairy? (A small cold hand over a pulsing heart, a back without wings) What would you be without your anger?
(The door that was opened and shut. The green light that was never followed. Years and years and years of pulling out hearts and pain and suffering. Years and years of gray skies. Monotony. Emptiness at every turn. Nothing. I’m feeling … nothing. Then a small baby boy and the smell of his sticky little fingers, always reaching for something, and warmth, warmth, warmth)
Happy. I would be happy.
NO.
(Burning cheeks scrubbed until they were red, covered in white powder––glaring eyes attached to pale faces behind fans––the expectant glint in the King’s eye––the devotion to him and his smiling daughter––cold and then burning then nothing––shaking the railing like the cage it was and falling––)
Weak! Our anger was our only proof that we had been wronged! (Pages and pages and pages of the book, and no trace of the one story that started it all) It remains the only proof!
(But then a pair of shining eyes and a lopsided smile. They don’t know what it’s like to be rejected or misunderstood, not the way I do, not the way you do.) It’s not––
Weak and willing to bend–– (The elegant braids on Snow’s head. The pony bowing, just like everyone else. Let’s get rid of her. Let’s be the family we were always meant to be) ––no matter how much that meant you would break!
Stop it–– (I am so happy that you ripped her out and threw her away) ––Stop!
Why are you so weak? (Love is weakness, Regina––) Why do you fight me when everything I did was for you? (You always have to do what’s best––)
I just want to be good!
It echoes. (Feet above the ground. Begging.) Silence.
I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be––
*
For a moment it’s just the sound of Regina’s breathing, heavy and shaken and the tension tangible in her shoulders and behind temples. When the silence becomes longer than a moment, she finds that she can open her eyes.
She sees the Queen, still and glowing. They stand face to face in the darkness, both of their right hands holding onto the hearts they had torn out from each other, beating slowly in their palms. They’re ghostlike and suspended in the void, the echoes no longer reverberating through chaotic chambers, and there’s a light caught in the Queen’s eye, caught in a devastating epiphany. For the second time since the memories of Henry, she is quiet. The silence makes Regina feel like she is underwater.
“I learned who to be just so I could breathe,” the Queen says, clear and crisp and not like she is beneath the sea. “At some point it stopped being an act but a language I couldn’t unlearn. I did what I was taught. As Mother had said,” she repeats from the beginning, “ I was learning.”
The rotting that Regina had felt in her chest changes into something even heavier, something sadder.
“Evil isn’t born,” Regina says, like a far wind had brought the words to her.
“It’s made,” the Queen shakes out. She brings the heart closer to her chest, fingers shaking in temptation to clench, lip quivering. In her eyes the anger still burns even as tears threaten to spill. “And I can’t… unmake this. You can’t unmake me.”
“No,” Regina breathes, a bitter concession, aching and aching, staring down at the red heart with the blackening clouds at the center. “No, and I’ve been trying, so much, to pay penance for it. But it just follows me everywhere.”
“I made us powerful,” the Queen rasps. “I made us able. I survived because I fought for us. We have Henry because I fought.”
Regina feels tears gather in her eyes for every second she stares at the dark heart, her shoulders sagging. “It felt good to fight. It felt good to do something, and then it became so easy to slip back, to take things into my own hands when I wanted to.”
“Because where would we be if we hadn’t?”
“Gone. Lost.”
“We needed to have that control.”
“We needed something. But what we had wasn’t really control. Mother made sure of that. So did Rumple. I never wanted that power. I just wanted to be free.”
The Queen looks and looks and looks, still not letting herself crumble, like at any moment she’ll have to cover it up again. “I know,” she whispers. “I remember.”
Regina tries to summon a feeling of shame and hatred but suddenly she can’t. She remembers the way the Queen’s brow had knit, the way she looked down as she crumbled away. How she had held this heart, just like this, before crushing it.
“I don’t know what to do,” Regina says in defeat. She looks at the Queen then, and finally, finally––spots a tiny droplet run down her face.
“Take me back,” the Queen cries. One by one the jewels on her dress disappear like stars going out in the night sky. Her hair, pinned up in those intricate buns, falls loosely away like the rest of her mask. With her other hand she wipes away the powder, just like she had done on the night of the wedding.
“But I can’t.”
“But you did this to me. You didn’t want all this pain and anger and now I have it. I have nothing else.” Her fingers tremble around Regina’s heart. “And you––you have all this love in your heart. Holding it I can feel it, and yet you…you––”
“How could I?” Regina says, letting her own tears fall. “How can I love you? After all we did? After all that you make me feel?”
“Because I did it out of love for you . Who you used to be before Daniel died went with him and I ––”
Regina shakes her head, feels the wet roll down her cheeks until they sting at her chin. Feels the loneliness inside the dark heart and it’s hers, it’s always been hers. “You loved and fought for me when no one else would. Yes,” she says. “But I can’t allow you to have what you want. I can’t let you consume me again.”
“Then don’t,” the Queen says firmly. “Just let me be whole again.”
She watches her weep, shaking in desperation and she remembers looking into the mirror and seeing this, and then as time went by seeing it less. Everywhere hurts as Regina lifts her free hand, and it takes so much just to let it land softly on the Queen’s face. It’s her own face. Her own eyes, her own longing.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
She takes the Queen’s shuddering hand, holds the hearts close together until slowly, slowly––
The dark becomes bright, slowly, and then quickly. She rises back to consciousness like swimming to the top of the ocean, and breathes .
“Mom!” Henry cries with a wet face as he hugs her, cradling her head without even making sure if he was talking to Regina or––
“Henry.” Her lips shake as she takes everything in––the feel of his short hair on her cheek, the smell of his jacket mixed with the always too floral air of Snow White’s flat. How having him in her arms again feels real and not like a hazy painful memory.
When he pulls away she blinks, adjusting to the light and seeing David at her side.
“Where’s Emma?” she asks. David points with his eyes to stairway, where Emma descends holding her head.
“That stuff feels like a goddamn hangover,” she grumbles. David and Henry laugh. Regina smiles.
Emma asks Henry and David to get them water, as if it required two people, and sits at the edge of Regina’s bed. Regina lifts her torso up, leans her back against upright pillows, her movements stiff and unfamiliar.
She searches Regina’s eyes. “Did... did you...?”
Regina sighs. “No. She’s... she’s me again.”
Emma makes a small nod, and hugs her. Doesn’t mind when Regina gets tears all over her shoulder.
*
Later at night, when Henry’s been long asleep, Emma finds her in her backyard patio, curled into the outdoor nest chair with a fleece blanket over her body. Regina feels heavy and exhausted and her mind hasn’t been quiet since coming out of the coma.
Emma brings up a chair next to her, Regina wincing as it slides noisily against the wood. She leans her elbows on her knees, hands folded together. “You’re not usually one to stargaze.”
Regina sighs. “I needed some air.”
“I imagine.”
“So,” Regina begins, staring at the sky. “How did you manage…”
“I had some help. From your sister, mostly. When she stopped crying.”
“Huh,” Regina laughs.
“Listen, Regina,” Emma shifts uncomfortably. Regina turns her head to look at her, illuminated under the patio light, shadows around the valleys of her face. “You need to know.”
There’s a sadness underneath Emma’s eyes, and Regina stares at it. “Need to know what?” she pushes, softly.
“I had to do some jumping around in there to finally find you. And I saw…”
It feels heavy in her chest again. “Ah.”
She expects Emma to get up and leave her, because who could stay after witnessing all she had done?
But it’s Emma. Emma has run all her life but she stays in that chair. “You never told me. Everything that happened to you.”
Something stills in Regina’s stomach, almost a laugh, almost a cry. “That’s not often what people focus on.” Regina rolls her head away, covering herself with the blanket up to her chin. She feels words bubble up inside of her but now there’s something that filters them. Whatever she had meant to say comes out as, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Emma says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
She lets them settle in the silence. Regina closes her eyes, tired.
“How are you feeling?” Emma asks.
“Well,” Regina breathes. “Being one again is… it’s… It feels like square one.”
Emma’s eyes soften at her. “You know it’s not.” Emma raises her hand to settle it on the edge of the nest chair. Regina slides her own from out under the blanket to meet it.
“I know it’s not.”
“I think,” Emma pauses. “I think I’ll talk to Snow. If you’ll let me.”
Regina opens her eyes, looks into Emma’s. She feels something blooming. Gratitude. Fear. Uncertainty. Love. “Thank you, Emma.”
“Of course.” Emma laces their fingers together. “Go to bed. You’ll catch a cold if you fall asleep out here.”
“Fine.”
Regina folds the blanket and in her arms and goes inside with Emma. At the stairs, she turns back to her.
“What you said earlier. About being whole and forgiven.”
Emma’s eyes shine, those soft, soft eyes. “Yes?”
Regina swallows. “I don’t know if I can believe that yet.”
“I know,” Emma whispers. “Will you try?”
“I can try.” Regina tentatively brings up a hand, can’t decide whether to land the pads of her fingers on Emma’s jaw or not, but Emma takes hold of it and kisses it.
“I want you to be happy,” Emma says. “I want to fight for you.”
“No,” Regina says gently, a sunken memory of I fought for us at the back of her mind. “I don’t want you to do that.”
“Then I’ll be with you. At every step.”
Regina kisses her then. Soft light touches of her lips with her fingertips brushing the bottom of Emma’s chin. She feels a sting in her eyes, guilt and sorrow coming in a melancholy wave that needs to be tempered.
Regina trembles. “I don’t think I can be alone tonight.”
“Okay,” Emma says.
They walk up to her bedroom in silence. Emma leaves her jacket on the chair, slides in where Regina has given her a space. They fall asleep with their foreheads together, hands loosely tangled, and in her dreams, the Queen walks around with her but says nothing.