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Like. Maybe it’s ridiculous to feel awful about reuniting a woman with her husband just because the woman who was going to execute her was dating him. And maybe it’s weird that whenever she sees the woman who’d essentially ruined her life looking so sad, she just wants to make her smile again. They have a complicated history. If she digs deep enough, she can probably figure out how this is all really about Henry’s happiness instead of Regina’s.
But whatever the reason, Emma’s positive that she’s going to have to find Regina some new happiness. Because Regina’s worked this hard for long enough, trying to find it, and it just seems pretty crappy of Emma to take it away from her now. And dangerous. Probably dangerous.
So she shows up at Regina’s door at eight o’clock on a Friday and bounces anxiously on the heels of her feet as she knocks. She’s not good at the whole…girly thing, drinking too much tequila and stumbling over each other’s feet, giggling at whoever they’re flirting with. She suspects that years of casting terror into the hearts of the Enchanted Forest townspeople hasn’t made for many girls’ nights out for Regina, either, and it’ll probably be a wonder if they make it past nine.
Regina opens the door. Regina glowers at her. Regina closes the door.
Anticipating a slam, Emma sticks her foot in the doorway. “Wait!”
“And why exactly should I wait, Miss Swan?” Regina’s voice is frosty, and her hand is glowing orange like there might be a well-directed fireball in her future. “Have you found a new mother for Henry now, too?” She smiles, thin-lipped and unfriendly. “Or…no, that was last year.”
“I’m going to be your wingwoman!” she blurts out, and no, that was not how she’d planned this. The tequila was supposed to come before the declarations about finding new love. (She doesn’t know much about that, since the last guy she’d kissed had nearly cried when she’d suggested a friends-with-benefits thing instead of dating. Overly emotional guys, sheesh. She’d had Mary Margaret dictate the right stuff to her and slipped it into a post-it note in her pocket.)
And from the sour look on Regina’s face, the tequila would have been a much, much better idea. “You’re what?”
“Wingwoman! Find you new love?” she tries. Regina’s expression doesn’t change. “Mary Margaret says that you didn’t really like this guy all that much when you were all living together.”
Oh, no. She hasn’t seen this face since she took a chainsaw to Regina’s tree. “He was my true love,” Regina enunciates, tapping the underside of her wrist like it’s supposed to be significant.
Emma frowns. “Really? Didn’t you know him for, like, a week?” Regina’s face turns thunderous. “How do you know that, anyway? Is there some kind of creepy Enchanted Forest ritual? Is blood involved?”
“Get out of my house, Miss Swan,” Regina growls.
“Come on,” she wheedles. “Fine, I’m not gonna find you true love tonight. But the best thing to do after something like this happens is to find as many distractions as you can, right?”
Regina shrugs. “When I lost my last chance at love, I turned to dark magic and murder. I found it to be quite distracting.” Her face is studiously devoid of any expression, and Emma squints at her, unable to figure out if she’s trying to be funny or not. “Would you be my…wingwoman…for that instead?”
“Mayhem. Murder.” She bobs her head up and down. “Sure. Maybe without the murder part, okay?”
“We’ll see.”
Regina’s eyes are glinting like she might have found her first target, and Emma smiles brightly and says, “Well, normally I think we’d start by TPing his house. But he just lives in the woods, right?”
“Yes. We should TP the woods,” Regina says, very seriously, and Emma laughs until she remembers that Regina has unimaginable power and isn't super on the whole moral and practical qualms of any situation.
But Emma has worn her favorite leather dress for the occasion and if there's no tequila in the cards, maybe it wouldn't be terrible to watch the (formerly) evil queen decorate the woods like it's Halloween in winter. "Sure. Which part of it?"
They appear and reappear in front of the town line, and Emma wobbles on her feet as Regina stretches out her hands at the land in front of them. “All of it,” she says grandly, and toilet paper falls from the sky to settle atop the branches around them. She waves her hands and it spins in circles, winding around tree trunks and along branches until everything ahead of them is dotted with white.
And really, she bets Regina’s house is that one that no one dares go near on Halloween. What a waste. “Very nice. What do you want to do now?”
“I want to…” Regina furrows her brow thoughtfully. “I think I should call him.”
“Whoa! No. Don’t do that.” She snatches Regina’s phone before she gets to it and makes a mistake that’ll have her humiliated and out for everyone’s blood, probably. Regina’s reformed, but she’s no saint, and Emma likes her just fine that way.
Not that she likes Regina, of course. Nope. Regina would never allow it. “What if we stole that ugly green scarf thing he always wears? It’s a little bit of mayhem and it’s a public service, if you ask me.”
Regina’s lip quivers. “I liked his scarf.”
“Wait, is that why you wore that terrible fuzzy blue thing to Neal’s funeral?” Emma blinks. “Am I the one with good taste now?”
“You wore a shirt with frills to my seance! My mother had to wait until you left to come out of hiding!” There’s something weird about Regina today, more off than usual, and Emma squints at her glassy eyes and tries to figure it out while Regina steps back and announces, “I think I’ll kill Marian. She shouldn’t be alive, anyway, so that doesn’t count.”
“I think it does!” She thinks about invoking Henry, but she should probably save that for when Regina’s at her limit. Mention the magic son’s name too often, and you lose its potency bit by bit. And that had been the story of their last town meeting.
“Roland likes me better,” Regina sniffs. “And Robin keeps trying to chase me down to talk to me.” She brightens. “Maybe I’ll take out his tongue!”
Which, gross. This is escalating a little too quickly, and as Emma opens her mouth to respond, Regina starts eyeing her tongue. She shuts it again and pulls out her phone to google ways to get back at your boyfriend when his wife returns from the dead. There are no results for that, but google suggests simplifying that to ways to get back at your boyfriend when he cheats and she scans that instead.
“Ex-lax brownies?” she says aloud, and Regina is brightening like she’s got another poison apple hidden in her mausoleum. Emma skips to the next one. “Steal his pet. Little John isn’t a flying monkey anymore, is he?”
“Roland has a stuffed monkey,” Regina says sagely. “I made it for him. Now it’s a stuffed townsperson.”
“That’s horrible, thanks for sharing.” Emma studies the next few items on the list, and Regina stands right behind her to peer over her shoulder, apple-tinged breath heavy against her cheek. “Want to break stuff?”
Her phone rings once, and Regina grabs it before she can. “Speak,” she says haughtily, and nearly anyone Emma knows might have paused to make sure it’s actually Emma who’s answering the phone.
Anyone but Hook, who immediately breaks into a loud, “I’ve reconsidered your offer, love. If friends with benefits is all you can give me now, then I’d be happy to take it.”
Regina scowls at the phone. “That’s vile. And Emma is not getting any until I do,” she announces, and it takes the tiniest slurring of her voice for Emma to finally figure out what’s wrong with Regina.
“You’re drunk!” The exclamation is too loud for Regina, apparently, who drops her phone to the floor and covers her ears.
“That’s absurd.”
Emma shakes her head. “How much of your cider did you have?” She’s gotten a little woozy after one glass in the past, and judging from Regina over the past half hour in retrospect, Regina’s had a full flask of it.
Regina rolls her eyes to the sky, the picture of disdain. “I’m not drunk. I’m Emma. You’re drunk.” She manages to get it all out without any more slurring and with extra snippiness, and, actually, this is kind of familiar from Regina.
Oddly familiar. “Are you drunk whenever we have a meeting?” Emma demands. “Wait a minute, were you even sober when we beat Zelena?”
“I defeated Zelena. You stood around with your friend with benefits and looked worried that I couldn’t handle her.”
“I was being supportive!”
“You lost your powers!” Regina’s eyes go wide and she jabs a finger at Emma. “You kissed him!”
“It was CPR!”
“No!” Regina looks outraged. “You kissed that malodorous moon-eyed mongrel!”
Which kind of has a nice ring to it, actually. Maybe she’ll change his name in her phone, since apparently he’s off-limits anyway until Regina moves on. “Is that a nursery rhyme?”
Regina sighs heavily. “Did you say something about breaking things?”
So they break stuff. They throw around vases and vials in the mayoral office and set the beds in the cells at the station on fire and it’s a very good thing for both of them that she’s the only law enforcement in this town. Regina takes a golf club to David’s jeep and explodes an apple pie on the desk in Mary Margaret’s classroom and shows Emma how to superpower her hands so they can punch in the oven at the diner. It’s all very violent and destructive and kind of fun, and Emma doesn’t exactly have the same excuse as Regina but whatever. She’s saving her tongue, probably.
Oh, and then Regina sticks her tongue in Emma’s mouth. Or maybe Emma had stuck hers in Regina’s first. She isn’t exactly sure what happened when they threw that streetlamp into the window of Gold’s shop, but Regina had looked really, really hot right then and did that thing where her lip curls and Emma can't be responsible for her actions after that.
“You wanted the pirate when you could have a queen?” Regina scoffs, three fingers inside of her as she bends her over the counter in the pawn shop. “You don’t even deserve this, Miss Swan.” She says Miss Swan like she has a dungeon in her basement filled entirely with leather and Emma gulps and yanks her closer with her boots.
Gold comes in a little while later and looks irritated and suddenly they’re inside Regina’s house with a whoosh of magical energy, Emma on the counter in the kitchen. “This is unsanitary,” Regina snaps, but Emma surges forward and pins her against the sink and Regina stops arguing very abruptly and starts saying Good. Do that. Don’t stop, you idiot. Emma's never been lectured by someone mid-orgasm before, but honestly, the safe bet has always been on Regina for that.
They collapse onto Regina’s bed a few hours later and Regina is grinning at her, smirking like the cat that got the cream, and she says, “You’ll do,” as though she isn’t nuzzling Emma’s neck and pressing a hand to her heart and hadn’t declared her love (but I still hate you, she’d said primly a moment later, and Emma had agreed with both sentiments. Maybe the first a little more than the second. Hate is a strong word, and it's more...vague affection than hatred. Right.) half an hour ago on the staircase. And then twice more in the bathtub.
“Yeah, yeah,” Emma says, pressing her lips to the top of Regina’s head. “You’re okay too.”
“I’m magnificent,” Regina corrects her, her hand sliding over a scrap of paper that’s stuck in Emma’s hair. She flips it over and reads it aloud.
“True love isn’t easily replaceable, but Regina, I know that you can find another man. You’re very beautiful even if you’re highly unstable and spent years trying to separate me from my own true love, and I know that no man can resist your dangerous femininity and those nice dresses you wear. Have you met Happy the dwarf? He’s kind of charming in his own way, and I know that he’d be a calming influence in your life–“
Regina blinks. She stares at Emma.
Emma shrugs and mentally curses Mary Margaret. To a distant land. Preferably one without Midol. Regina is right, she deserves The Absolute Worst. “You made her this way.”