OUaT fic: The Need (2/3)
Title: The Need (2/3)
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Characters: Emma Swan/Regina Mills, Henry Mills, Ruby Lucas, Archie Hopper.
Word Count: 3.822
Rating: M
Summary: Regina asks and Emma's life turns upside down.
Author's Notes: A big thanks to Dark's Queen for her beta help.
Part Two
Regina is reading a book.
Regina is reading a book and Emma watches, unable to do anything because Henry is sitting next to his mom, playing a game on his PSP. From time to time, he says something to her. Regina turns her head and looks at the screen, smiling softly before her attention is back to her book.
The fact that she’s reading a book with the title Snow White Must Die is not lost on Emma, but if she’s to start a fight with Regina, it won’t be because of some stupid book title. Instead, it would be because the brunette refuses to talk to Emma about what happened three nights ago.
Emma sighs. In the end, she couldn’t do it and now she’s not sure where they stand. She wants to talk to Regina, but doesn’t at the same time. The fact that the other woman is acting as if nothing happened between them is driving Emma crazy.
So, she does the only thing she can. “I’m going out.”
Henry murmurs something, never lifting his head from the video game and Regina looks at her for exactly three seconds, long enough to determine that Emma’s behavior is nothing to worry about, before replying with a, “Take the garbage out and don’t be late.”
I’m not twelve, Emma wants to scream, but goes to the kitchen and takes the garbage out anyway.
Ruby is one of the few people in town that was willing to give Regina a try and the only person that knows what Emma went through until the Queen decided that she had enough and let Emma inside her heart.
“You need to talk to her.” Ruby takes a swig from her beer and points to Emma’s empty one.
Emma shakes her head. Three is her lucky number. Besides, Regina will rip her a new one if she goes home drunk, the little hypocrite.
“Have you at least tried to talk to her?” Ruby insists, making Emma think of all the times she wished she had a best friend or a family, and now she has both.
“And say what? Sorry I freaked out on you; I’ll do better next time? I…I can’t, Ruby. I can’t. I tried once and I’m not sure I want to try a second time.”
Ruby gets up then and goes back to take another beer from the fridge, leaving Emma alone with her thoughts. She had tried and she wanted to do that for her girlfriend, as messed up as it was, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of person and seeing Regina in obvious pain was something she didn’t want to see again.
Of course, seeing the regret and humiliation in Regina’s eyes afterwards was another thing she didn’t want to see again. The image was burned forever in her memory.
“How did she take it?” she hears from behind her, and seconds later, an ice cold bottle appears in her vision. “When you left her? You’re still here and we’re not cursed, so maybe it’s not that bad?”
Emma takes the bottle from Ruby and downs half of it. “I found her smoking the other night.”
Ruby shrugs. “Yeah, so?”
“Have you met Regina?”
“She used to smoke before. Before Henry, I mean. I think she stopped because of him, actually,” Ruby says pealing the label from her beer bottle.
“Great.” Emma drains the rest of her beer. “Not only did I leave her when she needed me the most, but now she’s going to get cancer because of me.”
In self-loathing, she lets her head hit the table.
“Maybe that last beer wasn’t such a great idea,” she hears Ruby say.
“You think?”
It’s a little after midnight when she walks home.
The mansion is dark, but warm when she steps inside; the weather took a turn for the worse a few hours ago. Emma can’t help but think of all those times she had to go to bed with layers of blankets because the family she was staying with at the time didn’t have money to pay to keep the heat up for more than a couple of hours each day.
She’s glad that Henry never had to deal with things like going to bed starving or wearing clothes a size too small or two sizes too big. Evil Queen or not, Regina was a much better mother than a lot of her foster ones, and the kid is finally starting to realize that. He’s older now and is starting to see the world with the eyes of an adult and not with the black and white eyes of a child.
She takes her boots off and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water before heading upstairs, making sure not to wake Henry, and surprised to see that Regina is already asleep. The woman is always the last to bed and the first to wake. Emma tilts her head to the right, watching the Queen’s sleeping form from the door.
Like a lot of Regina’s quirks, not feeling the need to sleep also has to do with magic. Emma feels it too, she felt it the day she went to New York with Gold, but couldn’t really explain how it was possible to be up for almost two days straight and not feel tired. At the time, she didn’t know and didn’t care to ask; she just wanted to find Gold’s son and go back to her life.
A life that it wasn’t old enough for her to miss, but she did anyway.
“Regina?” she whispers and doesn’t wait long for an answer.
“Have fun with Miss Lucas?”
Emma smiles in the darkness of the room. “How you know I was with Ruby? I coulda been at my mom’s.”
“I can smell the cheap beer and desperation from here,” Regina answers. Emma gets out of her jeans and tank top, throwing them down, knowing full well that it will earn her a five minute lecture in the morning.
“Hey now, Ruby’s not that bad.”
“I was speaking about you, dear.”
“Uh huh.” Emma doesn’t take the bait and instead goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth, noticing the yellow bottle in the sink. “Another migraine?”
“Mild one,” Regina says from the bedroom, and from the way she hasn’t moved or tried to start a fight for the late hour, Emma knows she’s lying.
“Want me to bring you some ice?” she asks, brushing her teeth. When she gets no answer, she cleans her mouth with some water, spits it, and goes back to the bed. “Regina?”
“I’m not mad at you.”
Emma sits carefully beside Regina, making sure that her weight will not cause discomfort to the other woman. Her hand searches to find Regina’s body, and once she does, she slips inside the covers, her body as far away from the brunette’s as she can manage. Emma suffers from migraines too. After all, magic comes with a price and having magic in this world, using it or not, is taking a toll on their bodies.
“You want me to sleep to the other room?” Emma asks and from the way Regina sighs she can tell that in her attempt to be a caring and loving girlfriend, she pissed off the Queen.
“I’m not mad at you,” Regina says again, and that’s the second lie for the night because Emma can actually hear the lie behind the words.
“I think you are,” she starts to say when the other woman interrupts her.
“I’m mad at myself.”
And Emma stops because lies, she can handle lies, but the truth? She’s not Henry. The truth is something she doesn’t know how to handle, and right now, she doesn’t know how to handle the woman laying next to her either. It strikes her as weird since she spent the last three years of her life handling her.
She flicks the light on, instantly regretting it when she hears the groan of pain from Regina. But she needs to do something with her hands because she’s not ready to talk about that night. She thought she was, she was even mad with Regina for not sitting down to have the much needed talk, but now she understands that Regina was holding back for her.
And she’s still not damn ready.
“I’ll bring you some ice.”
When she wakes up the next morning, Regina is gone. Not only from their bed, but from the house as well and Henry is giving her the silent treatment.
“Okay, I messed up, sue me,” she says to him between bites of Cheerios she doesn’t particularly like, but Regina only made pancakes for Henry, so in a way, she’s given her the silent treatment as well, she’s just not present. But the message is loud and clear. “Do you know where your mother went?”
She had already made a list with the places Regina wouldn’t go: at Granny’s since her parents are probably there for breakfast, and after a migraine, Regina’s tolerance to Snow is low, so Granny’s out and so is her office. It’s far too early for her appointment with Archie, but Emma will not cross that from her list just yet.
“Her crypt?” she asks with hope, and when Henry doesn’t even shrug his shoulders to help her, she yells at him. “Henry please!”
He looks at her for a moment with eyes that burn, so much like his mother, before his face softens and he’s more her son again and less Regina’s.
“She went to the stables, mom,” and he gives her an apologetic smile because they both know that as much as Regina loves riding, the stables is where she lost Daniel both times and nothing good ever happens after a visit there.
She pushes her bowl away, still hungry but it seems like the right thing to do in front of him. Show him that she’s upset. She’ll eat something on her way to the stables.
“What did you do?” Henry asks her with the kind of tone he uses only with Regina, not so much these days though. Emma discovers that she doesn’t like it when he’s all nosy and judgmental. She wonders how Regina stands it and makes a note to talk to him about it later.
Right now, she has to find Regina so she murmurs a, “It’s what I didn’t do,” not expecting Henry to understand before telling him to get ready because she’s going to drop him to her parents. A decision he doesn’t like much.
“What’s the point of having all of my things here when I spend most of my days there, anyway?”
But he’s ready in minutes and actually has to wait for her to put her clothes and boots on.
“Regina is a complicated woman.”
Archie states the obvious, looking at her with concern. Emma opens her mouth to say that Regina would never do something to hurt her, not now, when she realizes that Archie’s concern is about Regina, not her.
“She told you,” she says, feeling stupid the very next second, because of course Regina told him; he’s the person she talks to about everything every day.
“She might have mentioned it.”
“Archie,” Emma tries to keep her voice calm and smiles softly when she does. “What else has she told you?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“We’re talking about Regina, Archie.” She gets up from the couch, Pongo doesn’t move from his spot and it drives her crazy because the stupid dog can’t keep his paws away from Regina. But her? He lets her pat him a few times on the head before going back to chewing a plastic bone. “She’s not exactly an open book.”
“And that’s exactly why I can’t help you, Emma.” He gives her an apologetic smile, the second in under an hour and the day is still young.
“No, it’s okay. I understand, there’s nothing you can do, it’s the law.”
He nods and stares at her in an almost comical way, and if she didn’t want to go find Regina and fix things between them, she would even find it cute.
“What?”
“Well,” he grins and it’s such a un-Archie thing to do that Emma is not so sure if she wants him to finish his sentence. “I can’t talk about what Regina told me, but you can--“
She waves and shakes her head, her whole body in motion, and she’s pretty sure that she looks like a character of those anime shows Henry likes to watch with her. “Absolutely not!”
“It will help you,” Archie tries again.
No, she’s not one for sessions that leaves you exhausted and barely able to function; she has seen what those sessions do to Regina, and truly? She’s not strong enough to face her demons yet and she has a lot of them. Maybe her wounds don’t go as deep as the Queen’s, or maybe they go deeper. Guess she’ll never know.
“I’m sorry, Archie. I can’t.”
He smiles again with the same reassuring smile. Emma understands why people here listen to him, ginger hair and all. “If you ever want to talk, my office is always open for you.”
“Can I…” She looks down, not sure how to say the next words, but she needs to know. “Is it normal? What she…what Regina wants. I need to know that. I-I need to know at least that.” And she laughs not because she feels happy, far from it, but because it’s finally out of her chest.
Archie points at the couch and she’s sitting again, running a hand through her hair; she’s already exhausted and she has done nothing at all.
“I try not to see things as normal or not. After all, I was a cricket and that was normal for me, but not for you.”
Emma can’t help but smile because Archie does have a point.
“There are common behaviors and not so common ones,” he continues. “It would be wrong to label Regina’s…need as not normal just because it’s not something I come across a lot or because I don’t understand it.”
“It’s not that I don’t understand her. Trust me, I understand just fine. Not that I want to, no,” Emma makes a grimace. “I just thought that with me it would be different, you know?”
“Are you afraid that, somehow, you are not enough?”
“Yes! I mean, no. What I mean,” she sighs and looks at Pongo happily chewing his toy bone, suddenly wishing to be a dog, chewing toys all day, having bad breath, and not a single care in the world. “Shouldn’t I be enough?”
“Emma, I assure you, that’s not the problem, you are not the problem.”
“I’m not?” she asks, her voice small, not feeling so secure.
“Regina has been in some situations in her life she couldn’t cope with.” Archie stops and Emma waits for him to continue, feeling like she’s sixteen again and in the principal’s office. He looks skeptical and Emma can practically see the battle inside his head, the need to protect his patient and the need to help his friend. Finally he says, “This is her way of coping and has nothing to do with you.”
Emma leaves his office with more questions than answers.
By the time she arrives at the stables, the sky is a dark color and she can see the first drops of rain in the windshield of her car. She parks the car as close to the gates as she can and runs inside, heading straight to where she knows Regina will be with a heavy heart; she’s not ready to have this conversation, but it’s too late to back out now.
Regina is grooming her horse, and even though Emma doesn’t make a sound approaching the other woman, she sees her tense, causing her horse to neigh nervously. Once the original shock is over, Regina continues combing the mane of the horse, ignoring Emma completely. Emma feels slightly out of place as she rarely goes to the stables. She’s a city child, after all.
“I’m sorry,” Emma says because sometimes sorry is not the hardest word, but the most earnest. She waits. And waits. And she’s not exactly sure how, but it seems that even the horse is ignoring her. “Regina, I’m sorry.”
“I heard you the first time just fine, dear.”
Emma bites her lip and says nothing for a while. “You’re not being fair.” Which, of course, is not the right thing to say to the brunette.
“I’m not fair?” Regina stops and for a moment Emma thinks that she will throw the brush at her. “Life is not fair, Emma. If it were fair, I wouldn’t be here.”
The with you it’s implied, not that Emma has a problem reading behind the lines, but she also knows that Regina’s words aim to hurt. “If that were true, you wouldn’t have Henry.” She calls out the other woman’s bullshit and is happy to see that her words hurt as well.
Regina is fast to recover. “If that were true, I would have Daniel and Henry, and maybe a little Elizabeth for Henry to play with.”
Emma frowns. “Elizabeth?”
“Daniel’s mother.”
Okay, that hurts. Not the fact that Regina is still in love with her dead fiancé, because as Emma knows, you can’t really forget your first love. And as Emma also knows, Regina never had the chance to see her first love lose some of its appeal like hers with Neal did. Sometimes, when Emma watches Neal with Henry, she thinks of all the crazy things they did when they were together with a smile, and even if her mind wonders what if, her heart doesn’t skip a beat anymore.
Not the way her heart does when Regina is talking about the kids that she might had with a man that’s been dead for almost four decades now. No, her heart doesn’t just skip a beat, it stops beating for a few moments and when it finally starts again, Emma is sure that it will pop out of her chest.
“I can’t compete with that,” she shakes her head, trying very hard not to run back to her car and out of Regina’s life. “I can’t, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Can’t compete with what, Emma?” Regina’s voice is barely a whisper, as if she doesn’t understand and probably she doesn’t.
“I can’t compete with a dead fiancé and perfect kids with perfect names and smiles that exist in your mind. I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is that why you told me?” Emma’s eyes widening in horror. “I…is it? D-did, what, I don’t fit in your perfect little family anymore and you want me out?”
The horse moves nervously in the small space. For a moment Emma is afraid that it will hurt Regina, but the other woman is standing next to it, looking more confused than ever before.
“You have Henry back, you run this town again, not official but no one is stupid enough to believe that Doc is making the calls, people don’t want to kill you anymore, your life is back to normal, and I’m the odd-ouch!”
The brush hits her in the face, but Emma doesn’t have time to recover from the hit; she feels the wind change, she’s getting better at tracing the magic in the air, but the next second she’s flying up in the air and into the booth behind her and she can’t move no matter how hard she tries; product of True Love she might be, but her magic is still young and weak.
“You don’t have a single cell of Snow in your body, do you?” Regina walks predatory towards her, eyes dark, voice dangerous low and Emma is more angry than scared. “Do you honesty think, Miss Swan, that I would go in all that trouble just to throw you out of my bed? That I would lay awake next to you while you were snoring and drooling in my ear for weeks waiting for you to say something because I’m tired of you? Do you really think that I would wake every day for the last month, hoping that this would be the day you’ll finally come and talk to me instead of your mother or Ruby or everyone else on this town, but me, because I’m afraid to break up with you? Do you?”
Regina is inches away from her, somehow feeling much taller to Emma than she really is, horse forgotten, her promise to Henry also forgotten and Emma can’t help but think that Regina does have a point.
“No,” she swallows hard and then with more force, “no.”
She doesn’t let her free just yet. She tilts her head to the right, staring at Emma with brown eyes that are almost black with a-million-and-then-some emotions before fingers stroke down her sore cheek, a bruise already forming. She’ll have to put some ice on it if she doesn’t want people to think that she had a round with Tyson, when a soft sob escapes Regina’s lips.
“I always hurt the people I love.”
And, Jesus, Emma thought she had issues, but Regina has the trade paperback, deluxe edition.
Wait, what?
“What?” she asks because she’s not sure, but did Regina just tell her that she loves her?
The brunette just nods, and if Emma can’t move it’s not because Regina is holding her with magic anymore, but because she’s too thunderstruck to move. “Do you mean it? Regina. Do you mean it?”
“They are right you know,” Regina says, eyes glossy with tears; sometimes it scares Emma how fast the Queen goes from one emotion to another, as if she has no filter at all, and perhaps she doesn’t. “Your parents, the town. I’m not good for you. I’m the Evil Queen-“
“Was.” Emma corrects.
“I’m the woman that cursed a kingdom, tried to kill you a few times, almost killed Henry.” Her voice faints with that. Emma stays rooted in her spot, not willing to move as she wants to know where this confession is going. “But I’m also Henry’s mom and your lover, and I’m tired, Emma. I’m tired of everyone seeing only parts of me; I’m tired of waiting for someone to see me, the whole me, Regina, not just the Evil Queen or just your lover, but me, and I thought that if I told you my deepest secret you would, and maybe, you wouldn’t run.”
It’s the most anti-climatic confession Emma ever witnessed; there is no final battle, no one is admitting feelings while dying, yet each word feels as if it’s the last one.
“I’m tired of being parts, Emma. I want to be whole again.”
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Characters: Emma Swan/Regina Mills, Henry Mills, Ruby Lucas, Archie Hopper.
Word Count: 3.822
Rating: M
Summary: Regina asks and Emma's life turns upside down.
Author's Notes: A big thanks to Dark's Queen for her beta help.
Part Two
Regina is reading a book.
Regina is reading a book and Emma watches, unable to do anything because Henry is sitting next to his mom, playing a game on his PSP. From time to time, he says something to her. Regina turns her head and looks at the screen, smiling softly before her attention is back to her book.
The fact that she’s reading a book with the title Snow White Must Die is not lost on Emma, but if she’s to start a fight with Regina, it won’t be because of some stupid book title. Instead, it would be because the brunette refuses to talk to Emma about what happened three nights ago.
Emma sighs. In the end, she couldn’t do it and now she’s not sure where they stand. She wants to talk to Regina, but doesn’t at the same time. The fact that the other woman is acting as if nothing happened between them is driving Emma crazy.
So, she does the only thing she can. “I’m going out.”
Henry murmurs something, never lifting his head from the video game and Regina looks at her for exactly three seconds, long enough to determine that Emma’s behavior is nothing to worry about, before replying with a, “Take the garbage out and don’t be late.”
I’m not twelve, Emma wants to scream, but goes to the kitchen and takes the garbage out anyway.
Ruby is one of the few people in town that was willing to give Regina a try and the only person that knows what Emma went through until the Queen decided that she had enough and let Emma inside her heart.
“You need to talk to her.” Ruby takes a swig from her beer and points to Emma’s empty one.
Emma shakes her head. Three is her lucky number. Besides, Regina will rip her a new one if she goes home drunk, the little hypocrite.
“Have you at least tried to talk to her?” Ruby insists, making Emma think of all the times she wished she had a best friend or a family, and now she has both.
“And say what? Sorry I freaked out on you; I’ll do better next time? I…I can’t, Ruby. I can’t. I tried once and I’m not sure I want to try a second time.”
Ruby gets up then and goes back to take another beer from the fridge, leaving Emma alone with her thoughts. She had tried and she wanted to do that for her girlfriend, as messed up as it was, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of person and seeing Regina in obvious pain was something she didn’t want to see again.
Of course, seeing the regret and humiliation in Regina’s eyes afterwards was another thing she didn’t want to see again. The image was burned forever in her memory.
“How did she take it?” she hears from behind her, and seconds later, an ice cold bottle appears in her vision. “When you left her? You’re still here and we’re not cursed, so maybe it’s not that bad?”
Emma takes the bottle from Ruby and downs half of it. “I found her smoking the other night.”
Ruby shrugs. “Yeah, so?”
“Have you met Regina?”
“She used to smoke before. Before Henry, I mean. I think she stopped because of him, actually,” Ruby says pealing the label from her beer bottle.
“Great.” Emma drains the rest of her beer. “Not only did I leave her when she needed me the most, but now she’s going to get cancer because of me.”
In self-loathing, she lets her head hit the table.
“Maybe that last beer wasn’t such a great idea,” she hears Ruby say.
“You think?”
It’s a little after midnight when she walks home.
The mansion is dark, but warm when she steps inside; the weather took a turn for the worse a few hours ago. Emma can’t help but think of all those times she had to go to bed with layers of blankets because the family she was staying with at the time didn’t have money to pay to keep the heat up for more than a couple of hours each day.
She’s glad that Henry never had to deal with things like going to bed starving or wearing clothes a size too small or two sizes too big. Evil Queen or not, Regina was a much better mother than a lot of her foster ones, and the kid is finally starting to realize that. He’s older now and is starting to see the world with the eyes of an adult and not with the black and white eyes of a child.
She takes her boots off and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water before heading upstairs, making sure not to wake Henry, and surprised to see that Regina is already asleep. The woman is always the last to bed and the first to wake. Emma tilts her head to the right, watching the Queen’s sleeping form from the door.
Like a lot of Regina’s quirks, not feeling the need to sleep also has to do with magic. Emma feels it too, she felt it the day she went to New York with Gold, but couldn’t really explain how it was possible to be up for almost two days straight and not feel tired. At the time, she didn’t know and didn’t care to ask; she just wanted to find Gold’s son and go back to her life.
A life that it wasn’t old enough for her to miss, but she did anyway.
“Regina?” she whispers and doesn’t wait long for an answer.
“Have fun with Miss Lucas?”
Emma smiles in the darkness of the room. “How you know I was with Ruby? I coulda been at my mom’s.”
“I can smell the cheap beer and desperation from here,” Regina answers. Emma gets out of her jeans and tank top, throwing them down, knowing full well that it will earn her a five minute lecture in the morning.
“Hey now, Ruby’s not that bad.”
“I was speaking about you, dear.”
“Uh huh.” Emma doesn’t take the bait and instead goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth, noticing the yellow bottle in the sink. “Another migraine?”
“Mild one,” Regina says from the bedroom, and from the way she hasn’t moved or tried to start a fight for the late hour, Emma knows she’s lying.
“Want me to bring you some ice?” she asks, brushing her teeth. When she gets no answer, she cleans her mouth with some water, spits it, and goes back to the bed. “Regina?”
“I’m not mad at you.”
Emma sits carefully beside Regina, making sure that her weight will not cause discomfort to the other woman. Her hand searches to find Regina’s body, and once she does, she slips inside the covers, her body as far away from the brunette’s as she can manage. Emma suffers from migraines too. After all, magic comes with a price and having magic in this world, using it or not, is taking a toll on their bodies.
“You want me to sleep to the other room?” Emma asks and from the way Regina sighs she can tell that in her attempt to be a caring and loving girlfriend, she pissed off the Queen.
“I’m not mad at you,” Regina says again, and that’s the second lie for the night because Emma can actually hear the lie behind the words.
“I think you are,” she starts to say when the other woman interrupts her.
“I’m mad at myself.”
And Emma stops because lies, she can handle lies, but the truth? She’s not Henry. The truth is something she doesn’t know how to handle, and right now, she doesn’t know how to handle the woman laying next to her either. It strikes her as weird since she spent the last three years of her life handling her.
She flicks the light on, instantly regretting it when she hears the groan of pain from Regina. But she needs to do something with her hands because she’s not ready to talk about that night. She thought she was, she was even mad with Regina for not sitting down to have the much needed talk, but now she understands that Regina was holding back for her.
And she’s still not damn ready.
“I’ll bring you some ice.”
When she wakes up the next morning, Regina is gone. Not only from their bed, but from the house as well and Henry is giving her the silent treatment.
“Okay, I messed up, sue me,” she says to him between bites of Cheerios she doesn’t particularly like, but Regina only made pancakes for Henry, so in a way, she’s given her the silent treatment as well, she’s just not present. But the message is loud and clear. “Do you know where your mother went?”
She had already made a list with the places Regina wouldn’t go: at Granny’s since her parents are probably there for breakfast, and after a migraine, Regina’s tolerance to Snow is low, so Granny’s out and so is her office. It’s far too early for her appointment with Archie, but Emma will not cross that from her list just yet.
“Her crypt?” she asks with hope, and when Henry doesn’t even shrug his shoulders to help her, she yells at him. “Henry please!”
He looks at her for a moment with eyes that burn, so much like his mother, before his face softens and he’s more her son again and less Regina’s.
“She went to the stables, mom,” and he gives her an apologetic smile because they both know that as much as Regina loves riding, the stables is where she lost Daniel both times and nothing good ever happens after a visit there.
She pushes her bowl away, still hungry but it seems like the right thing to do in front of him. Show him that she’s upset. She’ll eat something on her way to the stables.
“What did you do?” Henry asks her with the kind of tone he uses only with Regina, not so much these days though. Emma discovers that she doesn’t like it when he’s all nosy and judgmental. She wonders how Regina stands it and makes a note to talk to him about it later.
Right now, she has to find Regina so she murmurs a, “It’s what I didn’t do,” not expecting Henry to understand before telling him to get ready because she’s going to drop him to her parents. A decision he doesn’t like much.
“What’s the point of having all of my things here when I spend most of my days there, anyway?”
But he’s ready in minutes and actually has to wait for her to put her clothes and boots on.
“Regina is a complicated woman.”
Archie states the obvious, looking at her with concern. Emma opens her mouth to say that Regina would never do something to hurt her, not now, when she realizes that Archie’s concern is about Regina, not her.
“She told you,” she says, feeling stupid the very next second, because of course Regina told him; he’s the person she talks to about everything every day.
“She might have mentioned it.”
“Archie,” Emma tries to keep her voice calm and smiles softly when she does. “What else has she told you?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“We’re talking about Regina, Archie.” She gets up from the couch, Pongo doesn’t move from his spot and it drives her crazy because the stupid dog can’t keep his paws away from Regina. But her? He lets her pat him a few times on the head before going back to chewing a plastic bone. “She’s not exactly an open book.”
“And that’s exactly why I can’t help you, Emma.” He gives her an apologetic smile, the second in under an hour and the day is still young.
“No, it’s okay. I understand, there’s nothing you can do, it’s the law.”
He nods and stares at her in an almost comical way, and if she didn’t want to go find Regina and fix things between them, she would even find it cute.
“What?”
“Well,” he grins and it’s such a un-Archie thing to do that Emma is not so sure if she wants him to finish his sentence. “I can’t talk about what Regina told me, but you can--“
She waves and shakes her head, her whole body in motion, and she’s pretty sure that she looks like a character of those anime shows Henry likes to watch with her. “Absolutely not!”
“It will help you,” Archie tries again.
No, she’s not one for sessions that leaves you exhausted and barely able to function; she has seen what those sessions do to Regina, and truly? She’s not strong enough to face her demons yet and she has a lot of them. Maybe her wounds don’t go as deep as the Queen’s, or maybe they go deeper. Guess she’ll never know.
“I’m sorry, Archie. I can’t.”
He smiles again with the same reassuring smile. Emma understands why people here listen to him, ginger hair and all. “If you ever want to talk, my office is always open for you.”
“Can I…” She looks down, not sure how to say the next words, but she needs to know. “Is it normal? What she…what Regina wants. I need to know that. I-I need to know at least that.” And she laughs not because she feels happy, far from it, but because it’s finally out of her chest.
Archie points at the couch and she’s sitting again, running a hand through her hair; she’s already exhausted and she has done nothing at all.
“I try not to see things as normal or not. After all, I was a cricket and that was normal for me, but not for you.”
Emma can’t help but smile because Archie does have a point.
“There are common behaviors and not so common ones,” he continues. “It would be wrong to label Regina’s…need as not normal just because it’s not something I come across a lot or because I don’t understand it.”
“It’s not that I don’t understand her. Trust me, I understand just fine. Not that I want to, no,” Emma makes a grimace. “I just thought that with me it would be different, you know?”
“Are you afraid that, somehow, you are not enough?”
“Yes! I mean, no. What I mean,” she sighs and looks at Pongo happily chewing his toy bone, suddenly wishing to be a dog, chewing toys all day, having bad breath, and not a single care in the world. “Shouldn’t I be enough?”
“Emma, I assure you, that’s not the problem, you are not the problem.”
“I’m not?” she asks, her voice small, not feeling so secure.
“Regina has been in some situations in her life she couldn’t cope with.” Archie stops and Emma waits for him to continue, feeling like she’s sixteen again and in the principal’s office. He looks skeptical and Emma can practically see the battle inside his head, the need to protect his patient and the need to help his friend. Finally he says, “This is her way of coping and has nothing to do with you.”
Emma leaves his office with more questions than answers.
By the time she arrives at the stables, the sky is a dark color and she can see the first drops of rain in the windshield of her car. She parks the car as close to the gates as she can and runs inside, heading straight to where she knows Regina will be with a heavy heart; she’s not ready to have this conversation, but it’s too late to back out now.
Regina is grooming her horse, and even though Emma doesn’t make a sound approaching the other woman, she sees her tense, causing her horse to neigh nervously. Once the original shock is over, Regina continues combing the mane of the horse, ignoring Emma completely. Emma feels slightly out of place as she rarely goes to the stables. She’s a city child, after all.
“I’m sorry,” Emma says because sometimes sorry is not the hardest word, but the most earnest. She waits. And waits. And she’s not exactly sure how, but it seems that even the horse is ignoring her. “Regina, I’m sorry.”
“I heard you the first time just fine, dear.”
Emma bites her lip and says nothing for a while. “You’re not being fair.” Which, of course, is not the right thing to say to the brunette.
“I’m not fair?” Regina stops and for a moment Emma thinks that she will throw the brush at her. “Life is not fair, Emma. If it were fair, I wouldn’t be here.”
The with you it’s implied, not that Emma has a problem reading behind the lines, but she also knows that Regina’s words aim to hurt. “If that were true, you wouldn’t have Henry.” She calls out the other woman’s bullshit and is happy to see that her words hurt as well.
Regina is fast to recover. “If that were true, I would have Daniel and Henry, and maybe a little Elizabeth for Henry to play with.”
Emma frowns. “Elizabeth?”
“Daniel’s mother.”
Okay, that hurts. Not the fact that Regina is still in love with her dead fiancé, because as Emma knows, you can’t really forget your first love. And as Emma also knows, Regina never had the chance to see her first love lose some of its appeal like hers with Neal did. Sometimes, when Emma watches Neal with Henry, she thinks of all the crazy things they did when they were together with a smile, and even if her mind wonders what if, her heart doesn’t skip a beat anymore.
Not the way her heart does when Regina is talking about the kids that she might had with a man that’s been dead for almost four decades now. No, her heart doesn’t just skip a beat, it stops beating for a few moments and when it finally starts again, Emma is sure that it will pop out of her chest.
“I can’t compete with that,” she shakes her head, trying very hard not to run back to her car and out of Regina’s life. “I can’t, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Can’t compete with what, Emma?” Regina’s voice is barely a whisper, as if she doesn’t understand and probably she doesn’t.
“I can’t compete with a dead fiancé and perfect kids with perfect names and smiles that exist in your mind. I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is that why you told me?” Emma’s eyes widening in horror. “I…is it? D-did, what, I don’t fit in your perfect little family anymore and you want me out?”
The horse moves nervously in the small space. For a moment Emma is afraid that it will hurt Regina, but the other woman is standing next to it, looking more confused than ever before.
“You have Henry back, you run this town again, not official but no one is stupid enough to believe that Doc is making the calls, people don’t want to kill you anymore, your life is back to normal, and I’m the odd-ouch!”
The brush hits her in the face, but Emma doesn’t have time to recover from the hit; she feels the wind change, she’s getting better at tracing the magic in the air, but the next second she’s flying up in the air and into the booth behind her and she can’t move no matter how hard she tries; product of True Love she might be, but her magic is still young and weak.
“You don’t have a single cell of Snow in your body, do you?” Regina walks predatory towards her, eyes dark, voice dangerous low and Emma is more angry than scared. “Do you honesty think, Miss Swan, that I would go in all that trouble just to throw you out of my bed? That I would lay awake next to you while you were snoring and drooling in my ear for weeks waiting for you to say something because I’m tired of you? Do you really think that I would wake every day for the last month, hoping that this would be the day you’ll finally come and talk to me instead of your mother or Ruby or everyone else on this town, but me, because I’m afraid to break up with you? Do you?”
Regina is inches away from her, somehow feeling much taller to Emma than she really is, horse forgotten, her promise to Henry also forgotten and Emma can’t help but think that Regina does have a point.
“No,” she swallows hard and then with more force, “no.”
She doesn’t let her free just yet. She tilts her head to the right, staring at Emma with brown eyes that are almost black with a-million-and-then-some emotions before fingers stroke down her sore cheek, a bruise already forming. She’ll have to put some ice on it if she doesn’t want people to think that she had a round with Tyson, when a soft sob escapes Regina’s lips.
“I always hurt the people I love.”
And, Jesus, Emma thought she had issues, but Regina has the trade paperback, deluxe edition.
Wait, what?
“What?” she asks because she’s not sure, but did Regina just tell her that she loves her?
The brunette just nods, and if Emma can’t move it’s not because Regina is holding her with magic anymore, but because she’s too thunderstruck to move. “Do you mean it? Regina. Do you mean it?”
“They are right you know,” Regina says, eyes glossy with tears; sometimes it scares Emma how fast the Queen goes from one emotion to another, as if she has no filter at all, and perhaps she doesn’t. “Your parents, the town. I’m not good for you. I’m the Evil Queen-“
“Was.” Emma corrects.
“I’m the woman that cursed a kingdom, tried to kill you a few times, almost killed Henry.” Her voice faints with that. Emma stays rooted in her spot, not willing to move as she wants to know where this confession is going. “But I’m also Henry’s mom and your lover, and I’m tired, Emma. I’m tired of everyone seeing only parts of me; I’m tired of waiting for someone to see me, the whole me, Regina, not just the Evil Queen or just your lover, but me, and I thought that if I told you my deepest secret you would, and maybe, you wouldn’t run.”
It’s the most anti-climatic confession Emma ever witnessed; there is no final battle, no one is admitting feelings while dying, yet each word feels as if it’s the last one.
“I’m tired of being parts, Emma. I want to be whole again.”