Chapter Text
The car is parked outside your motel room at seven in the morning and you roll out of bed and tug on Emma’s jeans when you answer the door for the clerk. Emma is still curled up against the warm space you’d left behind and the second bed is still neatly made and it’s the same clerk from the night before smirking at you. You growl a curse at him and shove some money into his hand and slam the door again.
You open it once you’re sure he’s gone and retrieve Belle’s heart from the box sitting on the dashboard, breathing a sigh of relief as you slip both into your purse, and you head back inside to rouse Emma.
She’s already sitting up, rubbing her eyes and blinking at you, and you hold up your bags. “The bug is back.”
“You’re wearing my clothes.” You flush and don’t know how to meet her eyes for a moment. A smirk tugs at her lips and her gaze is hungry and she says, “Coffee?”
“There’s a shop down the road.” You’d borrowed Emma’s phone to find it, and you toss it to her now. “How did you sleep?” you venture. You don’t know if you’re acknowledging last night or pretending, or whatever unspoken code is in place for situations like I spent the night in bed with my son’s other mother on an ill-advised road trip.
Emma swallows and tightens her hands on her blanket. “Could be worse. I’ve done minimum security prison, remember? I’ve slept in my car dozens of times. I once spent a night in Texas in a room of taxidermied squirrels. Could have been worse.” The smirk is gone but there’s a glint in her eye that’s warm and uncertain and she coughs. “So, time to go find Robin, huh?”
Robin. Right. You fish through your bag and pretend not to notice Emma’s eyes fixed on your ass as you bend over in these jeans. These are hers, after all. You know.
Emma says again as she emerges from the bathroom later, fully dressed and still sleepy-eyed, though the redness from around them has faded a bit with the good night’s sleep, “Coffee. Then Robin.” There’s a glow about her, too, maybe from sleep and maybe from the events of last night that you’re not talking about, but there’s more life in her cheeks than there’s been in days.
She keeps mentioning Robin, bringing him up as a reminder that you think is just for her, and you don’t say what you’re really thinking, which is, Why?
Why, because you’re positive now that Emma is in love with you and you’d never seen the signs. Why, why now, when it would have been perfect before today, when it had been the two of you for two months with no distractions. Why, because it would have been the easiest thing in the universe to have loved her back.
At the coffee shop, a white woman with a vague resemblance to Maleficent and a star-shaped birthmark on her wrist serves you coffee. Emma blinks at her face and her wrist and then blinks at you and you say, “Run along, dear,” to the newest imposter with a smile like murder on your face.
She runs along.
Emma slumps. “We’ll do the Lily part of this trip on our way back, okay? Once we can call Gold and tell him to fuck off already because we have Zelena and Robin and no one’s hurting Belle.”
You’re inclined to agree. “If all else fails, we can get in touch with Mal and have her take care of Gold. He tends to underestimate what the women he manipulates are capable of.”
“He got my measure just fine,” Emma mutters, staring into her coffee.
“He thinks he’s launched you onto some dark quest. Emma, you killed someone whose happy ending was to be able to murder people.” You lean forward, reaching for her hands, and hold them together against the table. “You aren’t any less because of it.”
Emma looks tired again, the glow from last night finally faded. “I don’t know who I am.”
“You’re an idiot,” you grumble, and Emma shines for a moment- finally, something we can agree on- and rolls her eyes. “You’re exactly who you’ve always been. Don’t tell me your parents somehow magically made you perfect because that was clearly a dud.” You soften your tone, worried you might have been too harsh, but Emma just looks wanly amused. “No one makes you who you are. Not Rumple, not your parents, no one but you.”
“You make your own destiny.” Emma echoes your words from when you’d fought Zelena, triumphant hero for a day before it had all fallen apart. Destiny had given you a soulmate and then snatched him away two days later, and now you know that Zelena’s learned to make her own destiny as well. “Lily didn’t make hers. And everything I’ve done since then…every good thing I’ve managed…it was all her price to pay. How the hell am I supposed to be a good person with that on me?”
“Do you believe you’re going to become evil because of one angry kill?” You’re drinking tea, not coffee, and it’s tasting more bitter by the moment. “That kind of darkness isn’t something that comes to you because you had a bad day.”
“A bad day,” Emma echoes dubiously.
You ignore her. “You have to be steeped in it.” You raise your tea bag, touching it so your fingers are stained. “You have to spend every day angry and ready to hurt people, because you never know when your chance is going to come. Are you angry?”
“Yeah. I’m angry.”
“Do you want to hurt people?”
“Sometimes.” Of course Emma sometimes wants to hurt people. She wouldn’t be Emma Swan if she weren’t dreaming about punching someone in the face.
Still, though, there’s something almost shifty in the way she answers you, and her eyes are fixed on you like she’s terrified of what you’ll ask next. And you think about a queen with no kingdom, alone in a castle with the people she hates, and you watch her carefully as you ask, “Do you want to hurt yourself?”
Emma’s eyes harden and she’s…betrayed, somehow, as though you’ve finally found words intrusive enough, and you’re terrified. “Emma.”
She slides her hands out from under yours and says, “We can’t waste time over coffee. Zelena has Robin, remember?” and she stalks out to the car with her head held high and her back so stiff that she’s a full inch taller.
Emma drives today. “I saw you without your makeup on,” she says reproachfully when you join her, her face wiped clean of hollowness. “Did you get any sleep last night?”
“Not really,” you admit, and she turns to stare at you with eyes caught in wondering pain. Her lips part and then close, and you don’t say I was holding you but it hangs in the air regardless.
Emma drives too fast and mutters curses under her breath and you say, "See, that's the difference between heroes and villains."
"What?" She jerks the wheel to the side and you thump over some long-gone roadkill.
“Villains prioritize self-preservation."
She refuses to take the bait. "Yeah? That why you keep throwing yourself into deadly situations for fun? I didn’t think you’d survive going undercover.”
You scoff. “There was plenty of self-preservation there. I wasn’t going to let them destroy the other mother of my child.” You’d failed at that, though, been too protective and blown your own cover.
Emma is frowning at you when you look up. “What does that even mean? You didn’t know I was their target. I thought my mother-“
“Your mother told me her secret. She was worried that if you ever found out, you’d be…well.” You wave vaguely at her. “She was right. I was supposed to stop them before it came to that.”
Emma jerks the car to the side of the highway at an emergency stop, nearly sending you flying into the windshield. “You teamed up with a bunch of homicidal ladies to protect my feelings?”
Yes. Yes, you had. You’d do it again if you had to, do anything to keep her from sinking into this devastation. “Well, you are Henry’s mother,” you say weakly. “I had to-“
Emma puts up a hand and you stop. “You really shouldn’t tell me these things.” There are shadows under her eyes and longing you can’t deny within them, and you ask her a thousands questions in one word.
“When?”
She shakes her head. “You don’t want to know.”
Oh, but you do. You can feel the same terror thrumming through you as you had on the train tracks a week ago, adrenaline mixing with dread as you can feel yourself about to be thrown. “When?” you repeat.
Emma stares ahead at the windshield and then back at you, a tiny smile on her face like her very first Hi and the sensation of the world changing beneath you. “That first night when we met, I thought…I don’t know. I thought maybe there was something there. Then you wound up being a raging bitch and I thought that thing was loathing.”
You can’t bite down the smile and the little huff of amusement. “Well, you’re not wrong.”
Emma shrugs. “I guess I always just…figured we’d keep it up like we did. Work out the co-mom thing and live our happy single lives together and maybe…who knows, right? And then you met your soulmate and nothing went the way I thought it would.”
“Emma.”
“He’s your soulmate.” She glares out the window, away from you. “And you love him. You’ve had this whole star-crossed separation thing going and you have some built-in magical connection and I wasn’t supposed to tell you about any of this.”
Her knuckles are turning white around the steering wheel and she accelerates, heading back to the road. You whisper, the weight of it too much to keep to yourself, “You weren’t wrong about there being something there, either.”
Emma laughs shortly. “You picked the worst fucking time to let me know that.”
“You were with Hook when I was with Robin,” you accuse. “Don’t act as though you sat around waiting for us to…”
“I wasn’t with Hook. Hook wasn’t anything to me then but a friend.”
“A friend who was in love with you!” Your voice is too high and accusing and you bite it back. It doesn’t matter now. Your time has passed and whatever might have been then…it doesn’t matter now. Now is a whole new range of complicated. “We shouldn’t talk about this,” you say hastily.
“Yeah.” Emma’s jaw is moving under her skin and you know, you’re both frustrated and lost now, and you stare at the road in silence for miles and miles and miles until halting, safe conversation begins again.
New York comes too soon and not nearly soon enough. You're driving around in what feels like circles and Emma’s tapping her hands against the steering wheel at the midday traffic. “I think I took the car out of the garage twice in the year we were here. We might as well…” She glances outside and then, abruptly, turns a corner and drives down a small street. “We’re not far.”
You nod, a little dazed at the traffic and noise and smells surrounding you, and you follow her from the car when she pulls in beside a garage and starts negotiating payment. New York is dizzyingly high above you, like you’re surrounded by castles that cage you in, and you stumble backward as a group of people shove past you and nearly knock you over. “Hey!” Your hands are out and magic isn’t springing to them, and Emma catches you before you fall over, her grasp firm on your upper arms.
“You’ve never been to the city before.”
“I’ve been to Boston,” you protest. Boston had been smaller, more…refined, almost, without the rush and the overwhelming sensation of how tiny you are, helpless and without magic and so easily trampled. Boston had been calmer, but you can handle this. You gather all your queenly poise and start forward through the rabble.
“No, hey, this way.” Emma tugs on your arm, her face lit up as though she’s about to take you somewhere important, and when she points upward, you begin to understand. “I’m sure it’s rented out now, but the third window from the left? That was our kitchen.” You walk toward the corner together, her hand sliding down to your wrist as you stare up at that little square of glass window that had been Henry’s life for a year without you. “Henry used to walk this way to school. I’d go with him and then to work.”
She points up ahead to yet another skyscraper. “The agency I worked for.” She turns. “And Neal’s apartment was two blocks down. I’m surprised we never ran into…” She shakes her head, as though ridding it from years of false memories, and you see a glimpse of longing on her face. You can’t quite separate it from the way she’s been looking at you.
You walk slower now, closer to the apartment, and a woman jogs up to you, eyes widening in mock surprise, and says, “Emma?” For a split second you’re worrying about soccer moms and Henry’s group of friends in New York and then you see the star birthmark against pale skin and Emma’s confusion and you sigh heavily.
“Emma, take out your gun.”
“I can’t just shoot anyone who annoys y– oh.” She spots the fake scar and the woman’s belligerence fades as Emma reaches for her gun. She makes a quick retreat.
You’re standing outside the apartment now, and Emma is still holding onto your wrist as she tugs you to the side of it. “You go up the fire escape and try to catch Robin’s eye. Get him to distract Zelena and you take Roland out while I burst in.” You nod and she drops your hand and you seize it again, not ready for what’s inside that building.
Your hands join and then her hand lands around your waist and you’re kissing one last time, Emma against the wall and you leaning in closer and closer until you’re pressed against her and you can’t breathe until you’re inhaling while she’s exhaling and then- the other way back. You taste her lips and her cheeks and her hair and you press your forehead against hers as she breathes hard, eyes shut tight.
You can’t close your eyes. You want to memorize every last centimeter of her skin and her face when she’s like this, breathing into you, loving you, and you struggle to remember how it had been with Robin, if it had felt quite as consuming as this, but all you can think of is Emma.
And then there he is after months away and you’re peering in through an open window, crouched down in a dress and heels and a ridiculous sight for anyone in the street who might look up, and Robin is sitting on a couch with Roland on his lap and a woman who isn’t Marian clearing plates at a kitchen table. You’re relieved to see him, alive and well, and all the other feelings that well up are for another time.
He glances toward the window and his eyes widen when he catches your gaze. Regina? he mouths disbelievingly, blinking again as though he’s certain you’re just a mirage. You hold up a hand to your lips, gesturing to Zelena, and then shake your head.
He stands up, and you can hear him through the window, commenting, “I think there must be a draft,” as he walks over to you.
He opens the window and you breathe, “Bring Roland here.” And he nods, trusting you implicitly, but there’s none of the neediness and struggle that there is when Emma trusts you. It’s different. You and Emma have battled to get to this place, have earned every moment of it, and…and you shouldn’t be comparing them when there’s Zelena to fight.
Robin says, “Actually, it’s rather nice out tonight. Mind if I open the window?”
“Go ahead,” Zelena says absently. You see the phone on the counter, the one her eyes flicker to, and you gesture hurriedly for Roland.
He’s passed to you in silence and you set him down and whisper, “Stay here. No matter what happens next, do you understand? We’re going to come to get-“
There’s a knock at the door and Zelena says, “Someone’s here?” with suspicion. She whirls around instead of answering it, catches sight of you, and her eyes narrow. “Regina,” she hisses, and you pitch forward into the apartment and land in a crouch just as Robin races past you to yank the door open.
Emma bowls him over to storm in and there’s a flash of green- magic, Zelena still has her magic, you hadn’t realized she’d have anything more than what had been needed for the transformation- and Emma’s flying across the room and her pistol is flying into Zelena’s hands.
“Well. That was easy,” she drawls, looking over the three of you.
Robin is gaping at her and you can’t feel a rush of compassion for him as he stutters out, “Wh-who…Marian…?”
“Afraid not, love.” She touches her necklace and transforms in an instant, Marian’s eyes glittering with the familiar manic glow until it’s Zelena standing in front of you, smug and despicable. You shake with rage. Robin is still staring at her in agonized disbelief.
Emma says, “Yeah, we’re all very impressed. I have no idea how you managed to pretend to be a decent human being for this long.” You can see her stance shifting while she talks and you recognize it as the one she’s been using to call forth her magic. But magic won’t work out of Storybrooke, not without some kind of artifact like Zelena’s necklace.
Zelena snarls out a response and you remember Emma recalling lost memories to you, sparks that had flown when she’d concentrated enough and…no. When you reach into yourself, all you can feel is emptiness.
“Okay. You have me,” you say, pulling Zelena’s gaze from Emma with as even a voice as you can manage. “What do you want to do to me? Kill me? Go ahead.” You spread your arms wide and Emma shakes her head at you and focuses harder. You remember to look at Robin when he groans out a No, don’t, and then you look away, determined. “Try.”
“Kill you?” Zelena sniffs. “What’s the fun in that?” The last time you’d seen her, she’d been sullen and muted, but the wild energy has returned to her in the meantime, and now she’s uncontrolled again, flirting on the edge of desperation and madness. When she smiles, you’re almost afraid before you’re angry again. “Killing you is too easy. I want to make you hurt.”
And Emma, who’s afraid and angry at once, grits out, “Zelena, wait. Think about what–“
“No more talking.” Zelena’s arms swing around to point the gun at Robin, and she’s pulling the trigger with practiced skill and you hear screaming because Emma’s running, Emma’s shoving Robin out of the way like the fucking idiot that she is, and then there’s a thump and someone’s still screaming and you realize later that it’s you.
You're hurling yourself at Zelena a moment later and there’s a crack in the emptiness of the place where your magic lies and all the lights in the room explode at once. Zelena jumps, taken by surprise. You tear the pendant from her neck and smash a fist into her face and you're still shouting when Robin yanks the gun from Zelena’s hand and pulls you away from your sister.
“Emma,” he manages, and it’s enough to have you twisting around and sliding to the ground beside Emma. There’s blood…everywhere, it’s too much, so much blood…
Emma’s eyes are shut and her side is soaked in red and her breaths are few and far between but they’re still coming, and you shove aside images of Daniel in your arms and Henry in a hospital bed. You can’t let this… There’s no one who can help. Nothing except…
You raise the pendant in your hand, staring at it, and Zelena says, “It won’t work for you. It’s my magic.” She sounds disdainful and terrified at once, and you turn with furious eyes and see that Robin has the gun pointed at her on the floor.
“Congratulations,” you say dully. “You’ve earned yourself a few more hours before I kill you.”
You hold onto the pendant even when it’s around her neck, your fingers tangled in the chain so any sudden movement will detach it. Roland’s been brought inside and instructed to stay in the bedroom with the door locked, and Robin still has the gun pointed at Zelena. Zelena doesn’t speak to either of you. And Emma is still lying on the ground and hot, useless tears are spilling into your eyes so all you see is blurred red and glowing green. You keep your free hand on Emma’s stomach, unwilling to let her go even now.
“What did you do to Marian?” Robin demands. He still looks shaken, violated in the worst of ways, and you shudder.
Zelena sighs irritably. “I killed her. Don’t look so outraged about it; you didn’t bat an eyelash when it was your precious Regina who’d done it.” Robin’s eyes blaze and you tense, fingers stiffening against her neck with grief and fury with everyone in the room. “Precious Regina, so concerned about Marian's safety.” You can hear the sneer in her voice. “So good. You’re pathetic.”
“Not pathetic enough to spend three months of my life pretending to be someone else to irritate my little sister,” you sneer right back. “Tell me something. Was it worth it? For this one moment where you failed again? Is all of this worth rejecting the second chance I offered you?” The vulnerability slips through in a tremor in your voice and you shut it down at once. You’ve been dwelling on this for far too long, Zelena’s apparent suicide rather than to consider being…family. You don’t care anymore, not after what she’s done to Robin and now Emma. You don’t.
Zelena doesn’t quite sneer this time, her eyes intent on Emma’s side as she pulls the bullet from where it had been lodged in. “I didn’t reject it,” she mutters. “You- for all your vaunted goodness- you couldn’t protect me from Rumple.” You jolt, suspicions you’d since pushed aside returning. “I never want to be as weak and helpless as you.”
She says it with venom and the part of you that understands her too well knows, remembers that anger was all I had. What would I be without it? and you determinedly ignore the emotions welling up within you. You stare instead at Emma, stroking the skin of her belly as you speak. “There are no more second chances for you.”
“Good.” Zelena’s voice is hollow and she’s glaring down at the floor, her magic healing as her eyes scorch.
You can sense, rather than see, the moment she finds her malice in place of defiance. “It seems as though I did shoot the right person, after all.”
Your fist clenches around the necklace. “Are you trying to provoke me into killing you before you can heal Emma?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Robin demands.
“Oh.” Zelena turns to smile at him, smug and knowing. “You know, just sister things.”
You don’t deign that with a response, just crouch in silence with one hand holding Zelena and the other one pressed against Emma, eyes welling up but no tears falling. Emma. Emma, Emma, who wouldn’t admit to wanting to hurt herself and whose eyes shine when she speaks to you. Emma who never hesitates to do the right thing and thinks first of innocents and then of herself. Emma who’d thrown herself in front of a man she’d been convinced would be your happy ending.
You choke back a sob and the tears splash down onto Emma’s side, landing in Zelena’s magic and making it grow dark with more power. Zelena catches your eye for a moment, resentment gleaming in both of your gazes, but it’s soon replaced with uncertainty and defeat and she says nothing to make this even worse.
You drive back to Storybrooke in silence. Zelena is tied up in the back seat, Robin between her and Roland, and Emma is buckled into the passenger seat beside you and wrapped in all the pillows and blankets from the apartment. She still hasn’t awakened and she isn’t fully healed, but you trust your own magic considerably more than you do Zelena’s now that Emma can be transported.
Zelena is either asleep or pretending to be, and you see Robin staring at her in the rearview mirror before he says, “Regina, I’m so–“
“You have nothing to apologize for,” you tell him swiftly. “You didn’t know. No one knew. And you…you and your family suffered the most because of her.” Roland sits somberly in the backseat, huddled under his father’s arm, and you stare out onto the highway with a heart tight with regrets. “If anyone should apologize, it’s me. This happened because of me. Because my sister saw you as a tool to hurt me.”
“That isn’t your fault.” His voice is affectionate, and you think that if you were looking for it, you’d see love in the reflection of his gaze. You stare out the windshield instead. “I never imagined we’d see each other again,” he murmurs. “I thought you were out of my life forever.”
There’s a bump on the road as you steer around to a rest stop and you check on Emma instinctively. “So did I,” you allow.
“And what now?” He asks as though he knows the answer and your face freezes in a false smile and you know what comes next, twisting around and kissing him and all is well, everything is as it should be.
Instead, you let out a strangled little laugh and say, “Now, you take Roland to the restrooms.”
He smiles genially and moves, and you glance back at Zelena again. Zelena, who’s done the unforgivable, and you don’t know what to do with her now. You’ve believed other villains who’d insisted they’d changed and Zelena hasn’t even gotten that far. But you’re sick to death of destruction and everything you touch falling apart and you wonder silently even though it makes your stomach churn.
You turn back to Emma and your stomach quiets. She’s still unconscious, curled up against a pillow- you’d arranged her in the way that she’d slept on the way to New York, up against the window with her legs folded under her- and her forehead wrinkles in a grimace. You reach out to stroke it, smoothing out the lines on her face, and you peel her tank top up to graze pink skin where she’d been hurt, watching as she grimaces again from your touch.
You remember curling up beside her the night before and losing yourself in the scent of motel shampoo and the sensation of a hand wrapped into your hair. You remember backing up against the apartment wall and you remember touching Emma’s shoulder after the Chernabog and you remember Emma wandering up and down Main Street while hunting for the perfect lunch for you.
There’s too much going on right now. There’s Rumple at home and there’s Mal’s agenda and there’s Lily- the real Lily- still waiting to be found. There’s a man on this trip with you who pixie dust designated as your soulmate and there’s a sister you can’t soften around and the world is spinning and expanding but Emma has a way of shrinking it down when you’re around her, making it stretch only as far as you and her and Henry.
You run your fingers across her forehead again, along her cheeks and to her shoulder and arm and hand, and your fingers are still wrapped around her fingers when the back door opens and Robin ducks in.
You’re finally home. Magic returns to you in a rush of energy when you cross the town line and you drive slowly the rest of the way, one hand on Emma’s bullet wound as you keep healing it. It’s layers and layers of tissue and muscle and you park outside your house and wave your hand to transport her inside, forgetting about your other passengers until there’s a knock at the front door and Robin is waiting patiently on the other side. “Oh! I’m sorry.” You fish for your phone. “Roland, come on inside. Robin, you call David and have him bring Zelena to the station.”
You’re focused solely on Emma for the minutes that follow. After some time, you can sense him hovering behind you but you don’t turn around. You finish healing her and then you focus on returning some vitality to her, to getting her magic flowing through her to reenergize her. You doubt she’s ready for her parents again just yet.
Oh, right, and Hook. You’d forgotten about Hook. You roll your eyes privately and instruct Robin, “Don’t let anyone but Henry inside. She needs rest and quiet.”
“Of course.” He shifts uncomfortably behind you, and you don’t turn until he says, with an air of resignation, “We missed our chance, didn’t we?”
You fold a blanket over Emma before you turn, your hands lingering against cloth heated by her skin, and you try voicelessly, “Robin…” He waits, begging you with only his eyes not to confirm his statement. “It isn’t that we missed our chance. I still…we’re soulmates, Robin. I was devastated when you left.”
“But you moved on,” he says, defeated. “You found something new.”
“I love you,” you try, and you don’t know if it’s true, what that love means anymore or what it had ever meant- if you’d created an image in your mind and fell in love even before you’d gotten to know the man behind it. If years of doubts about a night you’d run had made you bold and reckless when you’d seen a lion tattoo again. You like him, that much you know, and you love so fiercely that sometimes it all gets tangled up.
Robin is silent. You say, “It's just that…once this door was opened, once I knew how Emma felt… I don’t think I could ever move on from that. It wouldn’t have made a difference where you were or who we were at the time.” You’re not great at reassurances, but this- this part of the whirlwind of emotion that this road trip has been- this isn’t Zelena’s doing or because he’d left. “I don’t want you to have regrets when it comes to me. You did the right thing.”
“I left town because a monster manipulated us both.” A monster. You made me a monster. You couldn’t protect me from Rumple. You bite down hard on the inside of your cheek. You’re not making excuses for Zelena, not now. Maybe not ever.
“You did the right thing,” you repeat firmly. “I didn’t say that she did.”
“And it wouldn’t have changed anything if I hadn’t.”
“No,” you say honestly. “And it wouldn’t be fair to you to believe otherwise. It was always going to be Emma.”
Emma stirs on the bed as though summoned by her name, and Robin takes a step back, a touch too reluctant to be a graceful departure. “I’ll leave you two alone,” he says, his voice emerging rough and uneven. “David mentioned a debriefing at the station.” He raises his voice. “Roland! Time to go find our Merry Men!” and he’s hurrying out as Emma’s eyes flutter open.
“Oh,” she says, blinking around at the couch and the ceiling and settling on your face. “I guess I survived.”
“You idiot.” You nearly spit it out. She looks vaguely alarmed, as though she isn’t quite sure that you won’t set her on fire. Good. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Saving…your happy ending?” She hoists herself up and you don’t move to help her, just fold your arms and glare down at her. “I made you a promise, remember?”
One arm escapes your hold and you grab her by the collar, shoving her back from you. “You don’t get to decide that for me! You don’t get to throw yourself into some pea-brained, self-destructive, suicidal- half-baked noble- stupid- selfish!-“ You’re sputtering out words and Emma’s expression is shifting from bemused to outraged to bemused again, and you plow onward. “You don’t get to throw yourself into the line of fire just because of a guilty…”
She stands and takes a step forward, deep in your personal space, and you clasp your hands against her cheeks and kiss her, long and chaste until it’s a little less than chaste and Emma guides you down onto the couch with her.
There’s something different about her now, and you finally place it. The red circles and the pallor are gone and the energy around her has changed, shifted back to the charisma that had drawn you to her even when you’d been trying to hate her instead. Whatever healing you’d tried to do with her body had made it to her heart, and she carries herself differently now.
But she still looks at you as if you hold the world. “Robin…” she starts, licking her lips, and there are two questions in the single word.
“Safe and sound. He went with Roland to the sheriff’s station to fill your parents in on Zelena.” You kiss the corner of her lips, telling another story with the motion, and her eyes round with disbelief.
She winds her fingers through yours and holds your joined hands up together, staring at them with eyes that would have you scorched to the ground. Today they just make you warm. “This…” she murmurs, not quite a statement, not quite a question.
“Yes,” you whisper back. “Yes.”
She presses her lips to your entwined fingers, a tiny breath ghosting across your skin. You shiver and you’re warm and it’s as messy and simple as it was always going to be Emma. Always, always, and now she lifts her face to study yours. “Okay,” she says.
It’s a long time before you speak again. You’ve made it to the kitchen somehow and you’re heating up a soup while Emma sits at the little table and watches you with the level of intensity that she usually reserves for magic lessons. You ignore her until you can’t, you’re accidentally catching her eye and biting back smiles and oh, you can’t believe that you’re going to have this all the time.
You almost don’t say what you’ve been thinking, reluctant to interrupt this idyll, but there are still shadows behind Emma’s smile and you won’t let them grow where she can hide them. “You said this morning that you don't know who you are.”
Her smile wavers. “Regina, I don’t want to…”
“You’re the kind of idiot who jumps in front of bullets for people you don’t even want around,” you continue determinedly. “That’s what you do instinctively. Even if you also sometimes shove Henry’s kidnappers off cliffs.”
She barks out a laugh despite herself. “Sounds like you, actually.” Her eyes are bright again, sunshine chasing the shadows back to where they belong. “I can live with that.”
You flush and you remember I need to be around people I trust and Emma’s voice rising plaintively at the thought of you leaving town unprotected. Sounds like you.
“I just…” Emma shrugs helplessly. “If I’ve been turned into that person, if my parents picked and chose to make sure I’d be someone they wanted…” She bites her lip and you note that Snow still has a long way to go in reconciliation. “Do I even have free will?”
“I think the Cruella incident made it clear that people can’t be molded like that.”
“Right.” Emma licks her spoon and, completely inappropriately, you’re fascinated by the movement of her tongue. She gives you a knowing look and you manage to summon an eyeroll. “Fuck this whole heroes and villains bullshit that complicated all of this in the first place. No one gets to hide under a title and let it dictate their lives. People are more complicated than that. I’m more complicated than that.” And she sighs heavily. “And my parents are, too.”
You watch her silently, your knees bumping each other under the bend of the table. “I don’t think they want to acknowledge that.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t think I can…I won’t be able to get over this if they can’t do that. But I keep thinking about how they were just a couple of kids who got overwhelmed and did something unforgivable. They were arrogant and selfish and human and I never should have put them on a pedestal to begin with.”
You smirk. “I could help you with taking them off it.” Emma snorts. “But…I do think that I might have had something to do with their decision. With Snow being…so terrified of someone she loved growing up to be evil and full of hatred.” It’s a little more insight into Snow’s mind than you’ve ever wanted, and it makes you feel prickly and uncomfortable to admit it.
Emma shakes her head vigorously. “What they did isn’t your fault.”
“Nor yours,” you point out gently.
“Yeah,” she says, her face hardening into steely determination. “But I’m going to make it…not right, but better. I’m going to find Lily and bring her to her mother. Because you’re right. That’s what I do. Whoever I am.”
“You had a bullet tear into you ten hours ago,” you object.
Emma makes a face. “I feel fine. I feel…better than fine, actually. Magic therapy, huh?” Your lips quirk. “We can leave in the morning. It’s a weekend, maybe we’ll bring Henry with us and make a family road trip of it. Visit some landmarks, have some picnics, find a long-lost dragon baby.”
She says it so casually that it takes you a moment to register that, that you’re a family now, nothing standing between you anymore. It’s the easiest, simplest thing in the world, Regina and Emma and Henry, and you can have it all. Your happy ending.
“But tomorrow,” you say, a hair too late.
She smiles like she knows what you’re thinking anyway, is alive with wonder, and she leans over her bowl of soup and cups your face with one hand, her thumb tracing patterns into your chin and her eyes glowing like the moon illuminated by a hundred stars in the night sky. “Tomorrow,” she agrees.