fic: let it cost what it will (once upon a time)
regina/emma, pg-13, ~3550
companion to again, the fall
Three moments before and three moments after the curse is broken.
"... Rapunzel is lost to thee; thou wilt never see her more."
And the king's son was beside himself, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower... Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife.
There is a moment, one that happens before she realizes it is happening and which passes so smoothly that she does not think about it until she is almost asleep an hour later in her own bed.
Emma’s dressing, undershirt half over her head and fighting to be quiet, and hears nothing from the bed.
But Regina sleeps noiselessly anyway, silently rolling away from Emma as she drifts off and pulling her covers high up to her neck as she does, and it had stung until Emma had begun to understand that it was as much an unconscious instinct as breathing was to everyone else.
The sharp words and the hard glances come constantly even now, and Emma has grown completely immune to them, and as much as Mary Margeret is still confused by the whole thing she’s nonetheless kept her complete feelings for the subject carefully to herself.
And it’s disconcerting to now be able to tell what is a trained response and what seems to have been learned before Emma had ever come to Storybrooke, before Regina had adopted Henry.
And so she jolts, almost faceplanting right onto Regina’s super-expensive rug when the voice murmurs from the bed, sharply aware but suspiciously muted: “Would you find me?”
Her own voice comes as a croak, high-pitched and a little confused, “What?”
“Would you find me,” Regina repeats quietly, and tension settles in Emma’s shoulders, spreads down her back as she gazes at the bed in the dark, “if I was lost, would you find me?”
She says a little nervously, feeling extremely uncomfortable, “I don’t… know what you mean.”
And there is silence from the bed, and something in Emma’s gut tightens, and she shifts.
Because now she can hear the change in the Mayor’s breathing, has taken two steps forward without meaning to and she can’t see anything but it doesn’t matter, she can feel her.
“Regina?”
A short breath, and when Emma moves forward to drop onto the bed, reaching automatically to press a palm against Regina’s cheek in the dark, her fingers touch wetness.
“Would you still look for me?”
It’s a bizarre question, just the latest oddity in the things that Regina’s done in the last weeks, and yet Emma hesitates, right hand still against the other woman’s face as Regina waits.
The room is quiet except for Regina’s oddly tight breathing, and when Emma’s left hand lifts from the sheets (already smoothed out over her legs as if Regina can leave nothing uncontrolled and no, no, she can't) to settle with a possessiveness she never lets herself process over Regina’s chest, she feels Regina’s shift awkwardly, nervously- but stay still.
Regina’s heart is pounding a little too fast and Emma’s thumb slides, once, across the damp skin beneath one eye, and the words are a little difficult to get out, they feel so heavy.
Yet she manages.
“I’ll find you.”
Henry has no problem sleeping here.
But Emma tosses and turns miserably during the night, catching sleep rarely in fragments only to spend the rest of the night sitting hunched under a blanket gazing at all she has left of Regina in this or any other world.
It’s almost as bad as during the day, when she’s bored out of her mind once she can get the hell away from the crowds of celebrating people that continually circle her as if they’re always two seconds away from carrying her around on their shoulder like the star quarterback even though all she’d done was convince someone else to break her own damn curse and she hadn't convinced her, nothing could convince Regina to do anything.
But Henry’s taken to it like a royal duck to water, and she’s half-sure the royalty genes must have skipped her, and she spends time with him but nothing's changed: she's still got only little interest in doing the hands-on thing constantly, and thankfully Snow has a much better ability to care for him in that deeper way.
And her mother seems smart enough to back off enough to let Emma try to adjust but her father?
Emma’s lost count in the last couple of months how many times he’s tried to take her out to explore the kingdom or show her what they have at the markets or parade her around like thousands of people don’t know who she is.
“You will be happy here,” he says randomly while awkwardly pulling her into a hug she can’t make herself fit into easily even on her best day, and if there’s something desperate and afraid in his eyes, Emma can’t really process that much right now, can’t really deal with much more than the sharp sting of loss and the wrongness of this long-lost but totally new-fangled life.
Can’t deal with much beside the little metal object tucked beneath her pillow in this palace that’s her new home.
That day, Emma wakes up to silence, an odd tension in the air.
Her cell phone is dead when she tries to check it, and the air is hot and cold and still as she moves through it.
She’s in her car and driving to Regina’s a few minutes after she stumbles out of bed, jacket forgotten and bare feet crammed clumsily into her sneakers, and Henry is rushing at her before the car has rolled to a stop, face lit from within as he throws himself at her, rambling words she can only barely follow as she searches for a flash of dark hair.
“Where’s your mom?” she demands, and her voice rises in pitch when he ignores the question completely.
“Emma-”
“Where’s your mom- Henry, where’s your mom, where’s Regina-?”
“Mom, wait!” she hears and then she’s through the front door, freezing instinctively at the chaos inside, Regina’s always perfectly controlled inner sanctum completely wrecked. Items tossed away or smashed completely apart, drapes shredded and strewn about the floor, the mirror in the living room shattered, its frame an empty socket staring at her.
Footsteps behind her, small and rushed, desperate, but she is already bounding up the stairs to find even worse there.
And every mirror she passes is shattered, all of Regina’s clothes ripped from the closet and the drawers, torn apart.
The bed is the only haven in the chaos and Emma freezes two steps into the room, recognizes the sheets.
Dark brown and cream, the ones she’d left Regina wrapped in the first time they’d attacked one another, pulled each open to decorate one another with fingers and teeth, and Regina had spoken that too-physical and borderline brutal language with frightening clarity.
Three rushing steps and she’s reached the bed; another and she’s lunged across it to grab the little object off the dark brown pillow that Regina always uses for her own (she cannot even change the way she sleeps, is too damaged and too desperately paranoid to adjust even that inconsequential habit because what craves most is stability).
Emma gazes down at the object for a moment, baffled until she begins to understand what it is-
Someone half-laughs her name, frantic and exhilarated, and she jerks, spins, tension coiling inside her.
Glass crunches under her feet, and Mary Margaret is leaning against the doorframe like an exhausted horse, eyes wide and expression open, and the blonde has an odd sudden certainty that the woman had actually run to the damn house from wherever she’d been, and it’s the most ridiculous thing ever because there’s too much feeling in the other woman’s eyes, too much pain and too much relief- and Emma can vaguely make out Henry clinging to one of Mary Margaret’s hands and staring at her with something like confusion, like suspicion, and Regina is gone.
“Emma,” she hears, and Regina is gone, she feels it.
“Where is she?”
A sob is the only response she receives for a moment, Mary Margaret reaching for her, fingers outstretched. “She told me, Emma, she told me, I found you-”
And then it ends.
The aged compact looks like something out of an antique road show.
Crafted into a circular shape, opening with an annoying difficulty only when her thumbnail catches on the exact edge of the front latch, the mirror inside is more beautiful than useful, and Regina had clearly treasured it for years. Under her fingers she can feel faint outlines in the lid, can just barely trace words that she tries and fails to decipher.
When she finally manages to clean the mirror itself as well as she can, her own reflection stares roughly back at her.
Blonde hair hanging straggled around her face, heavy smudges of dark color beneath her eyes, cheeks beginning to sink slightly into her skull because she doesn’t have any interest in eating these days-
Emma sleeps with it under her palm when she’s actually able to sleep, and while she tries to leave it in the room, paranoid and afraid of something happening to it, she often wanders the back halls of the palace with it tucked into her bra (which she refuses to give up because, no, those band things are not good enough). She opens and stares into it for long minutes at a time, closes it and then takes it back out again, searching for a reflection not her own.
But this night it’s nearly four months into being here, and she’s half-asleep, and though her eyelids are heavy, she is still staring down at the open mirror cradled in her palms, the weight of a ring she no longer has sharp and painful-
Motion, blurry and quickly fading, and then it’s only her reflection again beneath the dirt.
Emma blinks, frowning, squinting down at it suspiciously.
There’s no candlelight beside her, only the moonlight from the open balcony doors as she clings to the object Regina left for her, and she sits up and turns the mirror this way and that, glaring at it when there continues to be nothing.
“Come on,” she bites out past a burning in her throat and an ache in her chest and for a moment, her own reflection clears enough for her to see the shadow behind it, and it fades immediately but this time she can see it more clearly.
Dark hair, a strong face- and it’s all she sees but it’s enough that she’s half out of bed already, rushing into the light.
Emma half-croaks, voice damp and suddenly excited, “please” and there is Regina, and she fights tears to keep her vision clear, to etch the image into her mind as completely as she possibly can, clings to it viciously.
She can just barely see stones somewhere behind Regina, shadows everywhere around the woman, and there is something sunken and starved in her expression, a heaviness in the way her hair is pulled to one side and draped over a shoulder, and it is the sharpest contrast to every image she has worked so hard to present to every world she has inhabited, to every illustration Emma has found of her and every memory that she has of her.
This time when Regina is gone, the mirror feels odd and heavy in her hands, the glass seeming as solid as a wall.
Regina is gone.
And it is all Emma needs.
“What is this?”
The question is delivered with startling viciousness, and Regina’s eyes are lit from within with suspicion, anger.
Even for the constant mood swings Regina’s had for the last couple of months both behind closed doors and in the middle of the town, the reaction is a frightening extreme- and a year before even Emma would have faltered in the face of the violence darkening the other woman’s face, fallen back a step in alarm.
But that had been before.
“It’s clearly a ring,” Emma informs her, and doesn’t bother to hide the sarcasm. “See, and that’s the part that goes on your finger,” she adds, letting it swing between her fingertips as she holds it closer to Regina’s face.
Regina is still just staring at the ring like she’s about to try to strangle it to a non-existent death.
“I don’t even know what stone it is-” she starts to admit after a careful moment, and Regina’s left shoulder twitches.
“Garnet,” the other woman bites out, and then says nothing else, expression sick and afraid and furious.
She flinches oddly when Emma takes a careful step forward, and her face turns, shoulders hunching as she ducks her face behind perfectly trimmed dark hair, shifts awkwardly on her feet but doesn’t quite run for it.
“I just thought it fit you,” Emma explains softly, and Regina’s glance is furious, afraid. “I saw it and-”
“Why are you doing this?”
There’s an edge of desperation in the question made even more obvious by the failed attempt to hide it away, and she looks so absolutely destroyed by Emma’s little surprise gift that Emma almost wants to take it all back.
Almost.
“I want you to have it,” she says quietly, and Regina is still just staring down at it with suspicion and fear but she hasn’t grabbed it out of her hand to throw it at her face (which Emma was expecting to happen by now). “And you’re still a real bitch most of the time, and you just keep getting nastier the happier I seem to make you-”
A noise that slips from Regina’s throat then, so quiet that she knows instinctively to give it no attention.
But it’s small and thin and curiously desperate, plaintive in its need.
And so Emma reaches out and draws Regina’s hand up, draws open the tight fist and sets the ring into her palm.
It sits there, and Regina’s expression is still sick and afraid, and for a moment Emma is lost, balanced on the edge.
Until she says, finally, “I’d find you” and cannot think of anything else to say.
Nothing else… really seems to want to be said.
Regina’s mouth opens, closes, and then her fingers curl around the ring, her hand lowering.
Something glints in the back of her eyes, long-brutalized hope so splintered apart that what’s left has only done more permanent damage, and Emma starts to reach out, hesitates but then doesn’t touch, an instinct warning her not to.
But she says, “Regina” and the other woman’s back straightens and she is as regal as a queen, gaze watchful.
“I can’t do this right now,” she admits slowly, and is still holding the ring, dark eyes shuttered as she watches Emma’s face, searches for something that she can’t seem to accept she’s already found. “I have an appointment I must get to, and I have to pick Henry up from school and then I have a meeting to handle tonight,” and the ring is still cradled in one hand, and Emma is carefully quiet and somehow more patient than she has ever been, “-you’ll have to find me later.”
There’s something odd about the tone in the last words, something hesitant and unsure and bitterly hopeful as Regina stares at her, eyes murky and mouth tight with emotion, and Emma can’t seem to move.
“I’ll come by the house tomorrow.”
Regina only says, “That’s really up to you” and there is a strange hesitation at the end, words held back.
This so stated, Regina turns and is already heading for the door of her office, leaving Emma behind.
But the ring is still tucked into her fingers and Emma is already clearing her schedule.
Her mother ambushes her just a few minutes before she’s managed to sneak out of the stables with the most impressive-looking (and least terrifying-looking) horse she can find that doesn’t seem to want to crush her to death.
Emma is less than surprised, honestly.
“I haven’t told your father,” Snow states quietly, and Emma kind of wants to tell the young woman who had given birth to her that, oh hey, sometimes she’s just as annoying and melodramatic as Regina is.
“Obviously,” Emma retorts without much care, and there’s silence as mother gazes at daughter, as daughter tries to figure out the mechanics of how to combine saddle with horse.
Her mother, sounding amused a moment later: “Can you even ride a horse, Emma?”
“I figure it’s gotta be in the genetics, right?”
No one can ever accuse her of being a coward.
Emma leads the horse carefully out of the stall once she manages to figure out how to get the saddle on, and then remembers that she needs to secure the pack before she gets on. She does it as well as she can and is so focused on her task that she forgets, completely, about her freakishly young mother.
She’s trying to get up onto the horse, for the first time nervous about how it might go, when her mother says quietly, voice thin and heavy, “She told me. Before we… left that place, it’s the last thing I remember before I found you, she… she found me and she told me…”
And Emma freezes almost comically, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
“I didn’t know,” the woman known as Snow White says softly, “I didn’t know. If I had-”
When Emma turns, wary and a little defensive, her mother is staring at her with eyes that have gone damp, expression some mix of frustration and some terrible grief. “I visited her every day after everything and I didn’t know, Emma, she didn’t tell me, I thought…”
“She wouldn’t have known how to explain it to you anyway.” Her voice sounds ragged even to her ears, the sharp pain that isn’t even hers to feel now carried in her heart as well. “You would have been too young.” Too young to possibly understand, and Emma had spent the last four months putting the timeline together, had begun to grasp the full weight of it all.
Snow comes forward, and Emma is already shifting on her feet, ready to bolt if there’s an attempt to stop her even after all the touchy-feeliness of the last few minutes.
“I want you to be safe.” Her mother’s voice is thick, and she’s gone from teary-eyed heroine to openly crying, and something in Emma almost comes completely undone. “Your father will come for you, he’ll try to stop you, but…”
“He won’t be able to stop me.”
She’ll be fatherless before she’ll run again, before she’ll return without Regina.
“I know.”
Her mother will not stop her.
There’s a heaviness in her throat, and her eyes are burning, and so Emma turns away and goes back to fiddling with the pack like she still needs to fiddle with it, wanting to leave but suddenly too emotional for a moment-
“Did you know that I bought her that mirror you keep trying to hide from me?” Snow asks her quietly, and there is something startlingly determined in her voice. “When she cared for me, before everything happened, before my father took her as a wife, I thought she was just the most amazing woman I had ever known, I imagined… I imagined that we would become as close as sisters, that… that we would go on grand adventures and travel the world.” Footsteps behind her and then Emma sees her mother reach past her to do something with the saddle, feels her move around beside her before stilling again. “I had never had a friend that… treated me the way she did, not like the king’s daughter but… just like any other child. I wanted to grow up to be her, Emma, she was-”
Snow’s voice stops abruptly, and the words are unsaid, do not even need to be spoken.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Emma feels the need to say, as if her mother doesn’t already know it.
Silence.
Then: “You’re going to find her.”
“One way or another,” Emma agrees, and feels her mother’s nod, the simple acceptance of it all.
When she starts trying to pull herself up into the saddle, she slides right back down and tries again with a growl of quiet frustration, pausing to narrow her eyes when she notices Snow’s laced hands just beside her. “I can-”
Another moment of silence before she mutters, “Fine” and obeys the silent order, hauls herself up that way.
It’s easier, she has to admit, and it’s immediately weird, it is, but something inside her settles as if just the last few minutes have brought her closer to Regina.
“I don’t even know where I’m going,” she admits, and her mother shrugs as if that isn’t a problem at all.
“You don’t need to,” she assures Emma with a smile that’s a little sad and a little amused, and if there’s a weary glint of some old grief shining for a moment behind her eyes, she hides it as well as she can. “Just keep going and you’ll find your way, Emma, I promise.”
Still: “Which way do you think I should go?”
“You already know she likes the cold,” Snow advises, and of course, why else would her ideal world be freaking Maine, and Emma nods as she bounces a little in the saddle, swallows nervousness when the horse starts forward into the courtyard that’s so freakishly quiet, and she’s not going to think about what all of this might cost her mother.
“North here is still north, right?”
“Yes, Emma.”
Would you still look for me?
Her mother is watching her, smile sad but hopeful, and Emma manages a shrug before she gets a better grip on the reins, decides that she’s going to have to get a lot better at this but not really caring all that much because it is this simple, because she had made her choice long before anyone had ever asked her to, and because-
I’ll find you.
companion to again, the fall
Three moments before and three moments after the curse is broken.
"... Rapunzel is lost to thee; thou wilt never see her more."
And the king's son was beside himself, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower... Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife.
There is a moment, one that happens before she realizes it is happening and which passes so smoothly that she does not think about it until she is almost asleep an hour later in her own bed.
Emma’s dressing, undershirt half over her head and fighting to be quiet, and hears nothing from the bed.
But Regina sleeps noiselessly anyway, silently rolling away from Emma as she drifts off and pulling her covers high up to her neck as she does, and it had stung until Emma had begun to understand that it was as much an unconscious instinct as breathing was to everyone else.
The sharp words and the hard glances come constantly even now, and Emma has grown completely immune to them, and as much as Mary Margeret is still confused by the whole thing she’s nonetheless kept her complete feelings for the subject carefully to herself.
And it’s disconcerting to now be able to tell what is a trained response and what seems to have been learned before Emma had ever come to Storybrooke, before Regina had adopted Henry.
And so she jolts, almost faceplanting right onto Regina’s super-expensive rug when the voice murmurs from the bed, sharply aware but suspiciously muted: “Would you find me?”
Her own voice comes as a croak, high-pitched and a little confused, “What?”
“Would you find me,” Regina repeats quietly, and tension settles in Emma’s shoulders, spreads down her back as she gazes at the bed in the dark, “if I was lost, would you find me?”
She says a little nervously, feeling extremely uncomfortable, “I don’t… know what you mean.”
And there is silence from the bed, and something in Emma’s gut tightens, and she shifts.
Because now she can hear the change in the Mayor’s breathing, has taken two steps forward without meaning to and she can’t see anything but it doesn’t matter, she can feel her.
“Regina?”
A short breath, and when Emma moves forward to drop onto the bed, reaching automatically to press a palm against Regina’s cheek in the dark, her fingers touch wetness.
“Would you still look for me?”
It’s a bizarre question, just the latest oddity in the things that Regina’s done in the last weeks, and yet Emma hesitates, right hand still against the other woman’s face as Regina waits.
The room is quiet except for Regina’s oddly tight breathing, and when Emma’s left hand lifts from the sheets (already smoothed out over her legs as if Regina can leave nothing uncontrolled and no, no, she can't) to settle with a possessiveness she never lets herself process over Regina’s chest, she feels Regina’s shift awkwardly, nervously- but stay still.
Regina’s heart is pounding a little too fast and Emma’s thumb slides, once, across the damp skin beneath one eye, and the words are a little difficult to get out, they feel so heavy.
Yet she manages.
“I’ll find you.”
Henry has no problem sleeping here.
But Emma tosses and turns miserably during the night, catching sleep rarely in fragments only to spend the rest of the night sitting hunched under a blanket gazing at all she has left of Regina in this or any other world.
It’s almost as bad as during the day, when she’s bored out of her mind once she can get the hell away from the crowds of celebrating people that continually circle her as if they’re always two seconds away from carrying her around on their shoulder like the star quarterback even though all she’d done was convince someone else to break her own damn curse and she hadn't convinced her, nothing could convince Regina to do anything.
But Henry’s taken to it like a royal duck to water, and she’s half-sure the royalty genes must have skipped her, and she spends time with him but nothing's changed: she's still got only little interest in doing the hands-on thing constantly, and thankfully Snow has a much better ability to care for him in that deeper way.
And her mother seems smart enough to back off enough to let Emma try to adjust but her father?
Emma’s lost count in the last couple of months how many times he’s tried to take her out to explore the kingdom or show her what they have at the markets or parade her around like thousands of people don’t know who she is.
“You will be happy here,” he says randomly while awkwardly pulling her into a hug she can’t make herself fit into easily even on her best day, and if there’s something desperate and afraid in his eyes, Emma can’t really process that much right now, can’t really deal with much more than the sharp sting of loss and the wrongness of this long-lost but totally new-fangled life.
Can’t deal with much beside the little metal object tucked beneath her pillow in this palace that’s her new home.
That day, Emma wakes up to silence, an odd tension in the air.
Her cell phone is dead when she tries to check it, and the air is hot and cold and still as she moves through it.
She’s in her car and driving to Regina’s a few minutes after she stumbles out of bed, jacket forgotten and bare feet crammed clumsily into her sneakers, and Henry is rushing at her before the car has rolled to a stop, face lit from within as he throws himself at her, rambling words she can only barely follow as she searches for a flash of dark hair.
“Where’s your mom?” she demands, and her voice rises in pitch when he ignores the question completely.
“Emma-”
“Where’s your mom- Henry, where’s your mom, where’s Regina-?”
“Mom, wait!” she hears and then she’s through the front door, freezing instinctively at the chaos inside, Regina’s always perfectly controlled inner sanctum completely wrecked. Items tossed away or smashed completely apart, drapes shredded and strewn about the floor, the mirror in the living room shattered, its frame an empty socket staring at her.
Footsteps behind her, small and rushed, desperate, but she is already bounding up the stairs to find even worse there.
And every mirror she passes is shattered, all of Regina’s clothes ripped from the closet and the drawers, torn apart.
The bed is the only haven in the chaos and Emma freezes two steps into the room, recognizes the sheets.
Dark brown and cream, the ones she’d left Regina wrapped in the first time they’d attacked one another, pulled each open to decorate one another with fingers and teeth, and Regina had spoken that too-physical and borderline brutal language with frightening clarity.
Three rushing steps and she’s reached the bed; another and she’s lunged across it to grab the little object off the dark brown pillow that Regina always uses for her own (she cannot even change the way she sleeps, is too damaged and too desperately paranoid to adjust even that inconsequential habit because what craves most is stability).
Emma gazes down at the object for a moment, baffled until she begins to understand what it is-
Someone half-laughs her name, frantic and exhilarated, and she jerks, spins, tension coiling inside her.
Glass crunches under her feet, and Mary Margaret is leaning against the doorframe like an exhausted horse, eyes wide and expression open, and the blonde has an odd sudden certainty that the woman had actually run to the damn house from wherever she’d been, and it’s the most ridiculous thing ever because there’s too much feeling in the other woman’s eyes, too much pain and too much relief- and Emma can vaguely make out Henry clinging to one of Mary Margaret’s hands and staring at her with something like confusion, like suspicion, and Regina is gone.
“Emma,” she hears, and Regina is gone, she feels it.
“Where is she?”
A sob is the only response she receives for a moment, Mary Margaret reaching for her, fingers outstretched. “She told me, Emma, she told me, I found you-”
And then it ends.
The aged compact looks like something out of an antique road show.
Crafted into a circular shape, opening with an annoying difficulty only when her thumbnail catches on the exact edge of the front latch, the mirror inside is more beautiful than useful, and Regina had clearly treasured it for years. Under her fingers she can feel faint outlines in the lid, can just barely trace words that she tries and fails to decipher.
When she finally manages to clean the mirror itself as well as she can, her own reflection stares roughly back at her.
Blonde hair hanging straggled around her face, heavy smudges of dark color beneath her eyes, cheeks beginning to sink slightly into her skull because she doesn’t have any interest in eating these days-
Emma sleeps with it under her palm when she’s actually able to sleep, and while she tries to leave it in the room, paranoid and afraid of something happening to it, she often wanders the back halls of the palace with it tucked into her bra (which she refuses to give up because, no, those band things are not good enough). She opens and stares into it for long minutes at a time, closes it and then takes it back out again, searching for a reflection not her own.
But this night it’s nearly four months into being here, and she’s half-asleep, and though her eyelids are heavy, she is still staring down at the open mirror cradled in her palms, the weight of a ring she no longer has sharp and painful-
Motion, blurry and quickly fading, and then it’s only her reflection again beneath the dirt.
Emma blinks, frowning, squinting down at it suspiciously.
There’s no candlelight beside her, only the moonlight from the open balcony doors as she clings to the object Regina left for her, and she sits up and turns the mirror this way and that, glaring at it when there continues to be nothing.
“Come on,” she bites out past a burning in her throat and an ache in her chest and for a moment, her own reflection clears enough for her to see the shadow behind it, and it fades immediately but this time she can see it more clearly.
Dark hair, a strong face- and it’s all she sees but it’s enough that she’s half out of bed already, rushing into the light.
Emma half-croaks, voice damp and suddenly excited, “please” and there is Regina, and she fights tears to keep her vision clear, to etch the image into her mind as completely as she possibly can, clings to it viciously.
She can just barely see stones somewhere behind Regina, shadows everywhere around the woman, and there is something sunken and starved in her expression, a heaviness in the way her hair is pulled to one side and draped over a shoulder, and it is the sharpest contrast to every image she has worked so hard to present to every world she has inhabited, to every illustration Emma has found of her and every memory that she has of her.
This time when Regina is gone, the mirror feels odd and heavy in her hands, the glass seeming as solid as a wall.
Regina is gone.
And it is all Emma needs.
“What is this?”
The question is delivered with startling viciousness, and Regina’s eyes are lit from within with suspicion, anger.
Even for the constant mood swings Regina’s had for the last couple of months both behind closed doors and in the middle of the town, the reaction is a frightening extreme- and a year before even Emma would have faltered in the face of the violence darkening the other woman’s face, fallen back a step in alarm.
But that had been before.
“It’s clearly a ring,” Emma informs her, and doesn’t bother to hide the sarcasm. “See, and that’s the part that goes on your finger,” she adds, letting it swing between her fingertips as she holds it closer to Regina’s face.
Regina is still just staring at the ring like she’s about to try to strangle it to a non-existent death.
“I don’t even know what stone it is-” she starts to admit after a careful moment, and Regina’s left shoulder twitches.
“Garnet,” the other woman bites out, and then says nothing else, expression sick and afraid and furious.
She flinches oddly when Emma takes a careful step forward, and her face turns, shoulders hunching as she ducks her face behind perfectly trimmed dark hair, shifts awkwardly on her feet but doesn’t quite run for it.
“I just thought it fit you,” Emma explains softly, and Regina’s glance is furious, afraid. “I saw it and-”
“Why are you doing this?”
There’s an edge of desperation in the question made even more obvious by the failed attempt to hide it away, and she looks so absolutely destroyed by Emma’s little surprise gift that Emma almost wants to take it all back.
Almost.
“I want you to have it,” she says quietly, and Regina is still just staring down at it with suspicion and fear but she hasn’t grabbed it out of her hand to throw it at her face (which Emma was expecting to happen by now). “And you’re still a real bitch most of the time, and you just keep getting nastier the happier I seem to make you-”
A noise that slips from Regina’s throat then, so quiet that she knows instinctively to give it no attention.
But it’s small and thin and curiously desperate, plaintive in its need.
And so Emma reaches out and draws Regina’s hand up, draws open the tight fist and sets the ring into her palm.
It sits there, and Regina’s expression is still sick and afraid, and for a moment Emma is lost, balanced on the edge.
Until she says, finally, “I’d find you” and cannot think of anything else to say.
Nothing else… really seems to want to be said.
Regina’s mouth opens, closes, and then her fingers curl around the ring, her hand lowering.
Something glints in the back of her eyes, long-brutalized hope so splintered apart that what’s left has only done more permanent damage, and Emma starts to reach out, hesitates but then doesn’t touch, an instinct warning her not to.
But she says, “Regina” and the other woman’s back straightens and she is as regal as a queen, gaze watchful.
“I can’t do this right now,” she admits slowly, and is still holding the ring, dark eyes shuttered as she watches Emma’s face, searches for something that she can’t seem to accept she’s already found. “I have an appointment I must get to, and I have to pick Henry up from school and then I have a meeting to handle tonight,” and the ring is still cradled in one hand, and Emma is carefully quiet and somehow more patient than she has ever been, “-you’ll have to find me later.”
There’s something odd about the tone in the last words, something hesitant and unsure and bitterly hopeful as Regina stares at her, eyes murky and mouth tight with emotion, and Emma can’t seem to move.
“I’ll come by the house tomorrow.”
Regina only says, “That’s really up to you” and there is a strange hesitation at the end, words held back.
This so stated, Regina turns and is already heading for the door of her office, leaving Emma behind.
But the ring is still tucked into her fingers and Emma is already clearing her schedule.
Her mother ambushes her just a few minutes before she’s managed to sneak out of the stables with the most impressive-looking (and least terrifying-looking) horse she can find that doesn’t seem to want to crush her to death.
Emma is less than surprised, honestly.
“I haven’t told your father,” Snow states quietly, and Emma kind of wants to tell the young woman who had given birth to her that, oh hey, sometimes she’s just as annoying and melodramatic as Regina is.
“Obviously,” Emma retorts without much care, and there’s silence as mother gazes at daughter, as daughter tries to figure out the mechanics of how to combine saddle with horse.
Her mother, sounding amused a moment later: “Can you even ride a horse, Emma?”
“I figure it’s gotta be in the genetics, right?”
No one can ever accuse her of being a coward.
Emma leads the horse carefully out of the stall once she manages to figure out how to get the saddle on, and then remembers that she needs to secure the pack before she gets on. She does it as well as she can and is so focused on her task that she forgets, completely, about her freakishly young mother.
She’s trying to get up onto the horse, for the first time nervous about how it might go, when her mother says quietly, voice thin and heavy, “She told me. Before we… left that place, it’s the last thing I remember before I found you, she… she found me and she told me…”
And Emma freezes almost comically, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
“I didn’t know,” the woman known as Snow White says softly, “I didn’t know. If I had-”
When Emma turns, wary and a little defensive, her mother is staring at her with eyes that have gone damp, expression some mix of frustration and some terrible grief. “I visited her every day after everything and I didn’t know, Emma, she didn’t tell me, I thought…”
“She wouldn’t have known how to explain it to you anyway.” Her voice sounds ragged even to her ears, the sharp pain that isn’t even hers to feel now carried in her heart as well. “You would have been too young.” Too young to possibly understand, and Emma had spent the last four months putting the timeline together, had begun to grasp the full weight of it all.
Snow comes forward, and Emma is already shifting on her feet, ready to bolt if there’s an attempt to stop her even after all the touchy-feeliness of the last few minutes.
“I want you to be safe.” Her mother’s voice is thick, and she’s gone from teary-eyed heroine to openly crying, and something in Emma almost comes completely undone. “Your father will come for you, he’ll try to stop you, but…”
“He won’t be able to stop me.”
She’ll be fatherless before she’ll run again, before she’ll return without Regina.
“I know.”
Her mother will not stop her.
There’s a heaviness in her throat, and her eyes are burning, and so Emma turns away and goes back to fiddling with the pack like she still needs to fiddle with it, wanting to leave but suddenly too emotional for a moment-
“Did you know that I bought her that mirror you keep trying to hide from me?” Snow asks her quietly, and there is something startlingly determined in her voice. “When she cared for me, before everything happened, before my father took her as a wife, I thought she was just the most amazing woman I had ever known, I imagined… I imagined that we would become as close as sisters, that… that we would go on grand adventures and travel the world.” Footsteps behind her and then Emma sees her mother reach past her to do something with the saddle, feels her move around beside her before stilling again. “I had never had a friend that… treated me the way she did, not like the king’s daughter but… just like any other child. I wanted to grow up to be her, Emma, she was-”
Snow’s voice stops abruptly, and the words are unsaid, do not even need to be spoken.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Emma feels the need to say, as if her mother doesn’t already know it.
Silence.
Then: “You’re going to find her.”
“One way or another,” Emma agrees, and feels her mother’s nod, the simple acceptance of it all.
When she starts trying to pull herself up into the saddle, she slides right back down and tries again with a growl of quiet frustration, pausing to narrow her eyes when she notices Snow’s laced hands just beside her. “I can-”
Another moment of silence before she mutters, “Fine” and obeys the silent order, hauls herself up that way.
It’s easier, she has to admit, and it’s immediately weird, it is, but something inside her settles as if just the last few minutes have brought her closer to Regina.
“I don’t even know where I’m going,” she admits, and her mother shrugs as if that isn’t a problem at all.
“You don’t need to,” she assures Emma with a smile that’s a little sad and a little amused, and if there’s a weary glint of some old grief shining for a moment behind her eyes, she hides it as well as she can. “Just keep going and you’ll find your way, Emma, I promise.”
Still: “Which way do you think I should go?”
“You already know she likes the cold,” Snow advises, and of course, why else would her ideal world be freaking Maine, and Emma nods as she bounces a little in the saddle, swallows nervousness when the horse starts forward into the courtyard that’s so freakishly quiet, and she’s not going to think about what all of this might cost her mother.
“North here is still north, right?”
“Yes, Emma.”
Would you still look for me?
Her mother is watching her, smile sad but hopeful, and Emma manages a shrug before she gets a better grip on the reins, decides that she’s going to have to get a lot better at this but not really caring all that much because it is this simple, because she had made her choice long before anyone had ever asked her to, and because-
I’ll find you.