OUaT fic: Joshua Tree (2/?)
Title: Joshua Tree (2/?)
Rating: M
Characters/Pairings: Swan Queen
Word Count: 2.541
Summary: There is no such thing as a magic cock. Regina knows that too well.
A/N: A big thank you to my betas. You know who you are.
You would have been enough.
But she isn’t, is she?
Regina, on her back, a hand behind her head as if the world hadn’t crushed around her, stares at the ceiling and while Emma, exhausted from the day’s events, is sleeping somewhat peaceful next to her, she’s watching the seconds turn into minutes and then into hours, but every time she tries to close her eyes her mother’s words come back to haunt her, keeping her from finding the solitude to sleep.
Emma turns on her side and a heavy breath escapes her lips. Regina looks at her, waiting for a sign that the blonde is waking, but after a few moments her breathing goes back to normal and Regina is left to stare at the ceiling once again. She’s not a fool to think that Emma’s dreams are pleasant, but she’s the one awake and irritated and she would feel a lot better if the blonde was awake with her.
She, too, turns on her side and instead of the ceiling; she stares outside the window at the black winter sky. They’ve had a heavy winter so far, days and days of rain and snow. She shivers at the thought of the last snowfall and despite herself she moves closer to Emma. It seems that Emma is almost always cold and Regina, despite what she shows to the world, likes to cuddle.
But cuddling tonight means she has forgiven Emma and she hasn’t. She’s not sure she will. Never is a very long time, she finally starts to realize that, but she’s not going to forgive the blonde anytime soon; that much she knows. Part of her even hates Emma for making her feel like she’s eighteen again with a mother that didn’t love her, a father that never protected her and a husband she didn’t want.
It always comes back to that.
Her mother, her mistakes, the way she can’t let go of things like normal people can. People accuse her of not feeling a thing when the reality is that she’s feeling too much. “People love in different ways,” Archie told her one morning when she was upset about something Henry did. “You feel too deep. It is part of why you can’t let go. Everything you feel, you feel it too much.”
She’s surprised that the bug doesn’t need therapy after their sessions together. They had a rough start, with him betraying her trust and her mother using him to achieve her plans, but now they have a nice doctor-patient relationship going. Sometimes she even thinks of him as a friend. Therefore she won’t tell him about Emma’s situation until she’s sure what they are going to do.
Lying to Henry is one thing, lying to the whole town might take more time and effort.
Her eyes search for the clock again and when she sees the time she lets out a sigh; she’s not going to get any sleep tonight and since David will come at six to take Henry on the fishing trip, she doesn’t see why not get up now and fix a nice breakfast for her son. And maybe a snack for the road.
Like she does every time she gets out of the bed, she makes sure not to shift her weight much and wake the blonde. She realizes what she’s doing a minute too late and spends the next few minutes staring at the sleeping form with dark eyes. Then her gaze falls to Emma’s belly and she feels the walls closing in.
She needs to do something.
Cooking is a lot like making magic.
Curses and spells, and magic filters that can make someone grow hair or fall in love with their worst enemy. Wearing a hideous lime green t-shirt (sometimes Henry forgets that she doesn’t share his taste in comic books) and black sweatpants that she borrowed from Emma’s wardrobe, Regina finds her way to the kitchen.
Closing the door behind her she opens the light and goes straight to the fridge, but not without noticing the empty dish in the sink. Henry, probably, had a snack before bed and like most boys his age found it easier to simple leave the plate there until tomorrow than wash it out.
Just like his other mom.
But unlike with his other mom, Regina can’t seem to get mad at him. Her little boy is a little man now, with all the bad and good puberty brings. His voice still cracks sometimes and she pretends that she doesn’t see the redness of his cheeks or the way his showers get longer and longer. Soon he’ll start to shave and sneak girlfriends into his room.
(She’s not ready to be replaced again.)
Fridges, she long discovered, hold secret powers of hypnotism. Small and old or big and brand new, people open the door and step into another world, one that takes them away from their problems, there is no other explanation for the amount of time people spend looking inside a fridge. She’s not different either despite being, literally, from another world.
When Henry was a toddler and she was reading The Chronicles of Narnia at him, to make him stop opening the fridge and leaving the door open when something else caught his attention, she had convinced him that their fridge was a pass way to another land. It didn’t stop him from leaving the fridge open and didn’t stop him from dreaming of other worlds when he found out that sometimes a fridge is just a fridge.
And now that he knows the truth about other worlds and mythical creatures, now he prefers to go to baseball games, watch too many zombie movies for him to be able to sleep peaceful at night, and hides when he sees the girl he likes. The son of the Evil Queen and the Savior grew up to be an all American boy.
Door still open, she frowns. Her son is finally happy and telling him the truth about the baby will only set him back. Perhaps even hate both of them for lying to him again. And as much as she wants to wake him up and tell him the truth, that yes, Emma cheated on her; she knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of his anger and doesn’t wish it to anyone.
Especially Emma.
The blonde just recently found her footsteps as a parent, finally figuring out that a parent is not someone that lets their teen son skip school to play swords with his grandpa or allow him to eat burgers and fries for breakfast. Sometimes a mother needs to be mean, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love her child. Once Emma realized that, she started to say ‘no’ more often to Henry’s demands allowing Regina to take a breath.
She closes the door with a thump and opens it right away; she still needs to figure out what to cook and what ingredients she will need. After another few minutes of staring, she decides to make chicken enchiladas; easy to make, Henry loves them and he can eat them on the road.
She looks at the time, too late to be up and too early to start cooking and when a yawn escapes her lips, she’s already putting water in the coffee machine. The smell of coffee will probably wake Emma, the only thing in the world that can, and she’s surprised when she’s sitting at the kitchen table, tomatoes, coriander leaves, yellow and serrano chili spread in front of her on the table, drinking her second cup and Emma is nowhere in sight.
Oh right. The baby.
If she could pretend with Emma the same way she did with Snow, but she can’t. Emma didn’t tell her how far along she is, but sooner or later she’ll start to show and even Regina can’t pretend that Emma is not with child. And if she could, she’s not sure if Henry can keep this a secret for long.
And they are back to lying.
Emma to her, Regina to Henry and Henry to the whole town.
She takes another sip of her coffee, enjoying the bittersweet taste of the beverage. Thank the gods that blessed her with an extraordinary good memory because in the next days she’s going to need it. She drains her coffee, gets up and stretches her back and neck, satisfied when she hears a ‘crack’, and leaves her cup in the sink; no reason to wash it now after all.
Time to cook.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Emma’s voice surprises her, causing her to jump and hit the top of her head on the open kitchen cabinet. For a minute her vision blurs from the pain and she curses under her breath, hands caressing the sore spot; she doesn’t feel anything warm so she’s not bleeding.
“Shit,” she hears Emma move next to her rather than see her. “Let me just…”
Emma is standing too close to her, so close that when Regina opens her eyes she looks right into Emma’s cleavage and despite herself she tries to figure out if her boobs are bigger. It is too early, she knows that, and Emma didn’t seem to be more sensitive to the touch when they had sex four nights ago. But one part of her still believes that this is going to turn out to be one big prank.
That perhaps Emma is wrong.
“Here,” Emma turns off the tap, Regina didn’t hear water running but she must have turned it on because she feels something wet and cold on the top of her head, a cloth or a towel, and the pain is still there, but bearable. “You’re not bleeding, are you?”
She shakes her head causing the black spots to blur her vision again and Emma must have seen her dazed look because she’s helping her sit in a chair before moving a second chair next to hers.
“You want me to call Whale?”
Regina almost smiles. She has a hard time imaging Dr. Frankenstein running to her house in the middle of the night to treat something that is as life threatening as a paper cut.
“I’ll live.” She says dryly.
Emma doesn’t say anything. She pushes her chair behind; Regina is happy to notice that she didn’t scratch the floor, and watch as Emma opens the cabinet, takes one clean glass and fills it with water from the tap. Regina is refusing to pay and will not pay money for something that she can have for free. It’s not as if they had bottled water back at the Enchanted Forest.
The best they had was watery wine and lukewarm beer. People like to complain about the curse, but Regina still remembers the stink of the town around the palace. More people died from diseases than from her hand. It doesn’t justify her actions, but sometimes she wishes people could remember the truth about their land and not pretend that everyday life there was out of the books.
Emma offers the glass to her with a, “You’re making Enchiladas? Jesus, Regina, its four in the morning!”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“And making Enchiladas in the middle of the night is going to help you sleep?”
“No.” She answers firmly, holding the glass. “I decided to cook because I’m angry at you.”
Again Emma says nothing. But unlike two nights before, she doesn’t turn her gaze away. She looks at her as if she’s waiting on an explanation and Regina is so tired of explaining everything to everyone that she feels her anger rise so fast and so sudden inside of her that she feels like she’ll drown if she doesn’t do something.
“Don’t do that,” Emma says and reaches for her hand, and Regina knows exactly what Emma is asking her not to do and hates her a little more because Emma is right; nothing good ever happened when she let her anger and desperation take the best of her.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” She stands up, throwing the wet towel into the sink, missing her cup by an inch or two. “Don’t tell me what to do.” She repeats again, with less malice to her voice than before, but the need to do something is stronger than ever.
Emma is looking at her, still on her seat, but Regina knows her too well by now, knows how her body feels next to hers, when she’s tense and ready for a fight or relaxed and ready for a good time and Emma? If Henry wasn’t sleeping in his room, it would be a fight bards would make songs about.
“You think I wanted this?” She asks, her body shaking with nerves or anger, Regina doesn’t know and doesn’t care, trying to keep her voice from waking Henry.
“You think I did?”
It unnerves Emma, how weak her voice sounds and she drops her head between her hands with an even weaker, “No.”
And Regina, because she can’t hurt or throw Emma without losing Henry, she sits again, feeling as defeated as the woman next to her, and as desperate as the woman she once was, takes a knife from the table and starts to chop onion she won’t use in the food, but as an excuse for her tears.
One onion.
Two onions.
Three.
“What are you doing?” Emma sniffs besides her.
“I’m angry at you.” She replies. “When I’m angry I cook. Instead of doing magic.”
“Does it help?”
Regina stops what’s she doing and laughs, and when she sobers she finds Emma’s eyes. “We went to see The Avengers with Henry. Despite everything, he was still a child that wanted to see his favorite superhero so we went to see The Avengers.”
“O-Okay.”
“Near the end of the movie, there was a scene with the Avengers sans Iron Man, and Dr. Banner where he tells them his secret. Leaving the cinema Henry asked me how could someone always be angry and I looked at him because how could someone not be?”
She watches as Emma closes her eyes and licks her lips, realization hitting her. “Regina, I…”
“I wasn’t.” Regina continues not giving her a chance to talk. “With you. I wasn’t. And for a moment I let myself believe that maybe this is it, my happy ending. Or this world’s version of it. A world where I wake up in the morning and wasn’t feeling angry and it was such a relief. And then…you’re with a baby and how could I even think of having a happy ending?”
There are tears in Emma’s eyes and Regina knows this time it’s not because of the onions.
“I still want a family. I want Henry and, for some reason, I still want you.” She shakes her head and looks outside the window; the sky is pitch black and there’s not a ray of light in the horizon. “But I can’t stand you right now.”
She wipes her cheeks with the back of her palm, stands up and lays a kiss on the top of Emma’s head.
“Turn the stove off in five minutes.”
Rating: M
Characters/Pairings: Swan Queen
Word Count: 2.541
Summary: There is no such thing as a magic cock. Regina knows that too well.
A/N: A big thank you to my betas. You know who you are.
You would have been enough.
But she isn’t, is she?
Regina, on her back, a hand behind her head as if the world hadn’t crushed around her, stares at the ceiling and while Emma, exhausted from the day’s events, is sleeping somewhat peaceful next to her, she’s watching the seconds turn into minutes and then into hours, but every time she tries to close her eyes her mother’s words come back to haunt her, keeping her from finding the solitude to sleep.
Emma turns on her side and a heavy breath escapes her lips. Regina looks at her, waiting for a sign that the blonde is waking, but after a few moments her breathing goes back to normal and Regina is left to stare at the ceiling once again. She’s not a fool to think that Emma’s dreams are pleasant, but she’s the one awake and irritated and she would feel a lot better if the blonde was awake with her.
She, too, turns on her side and instead of the ceiling; she stares outside the window at the black winter sky. They’ve had a heavy winter so far, days and days of rain and snow. She shivers at the thought of the last snowfall and despite herself she moves closer to Emma. It seems that Emma is almost always cold and Regina, despite what she shows to the world, likes to cuddle.
But cuddling tonight means she has forgiven Emma and she hasn’t. She’s not sure she will. Never is a very long time, she finally starts to realize that, but she’s not going to forgive the blonde anytime soon; that much she knows. Part of her even hates Emma for making her feel like she’s eighteen again with a mother that didn’t love her, a father that never protected her and a husband she didn’t want.
It always comes back to that.
Her mother, her mistakes, the way she can’t let go of things like normal people can. People accuse her of not feeling a thing when the reality is that she’s feeling too much. “People love in different ways,” Archie told her one morning when she was upset about something Henry did. “You feel too deep. It is part of why you can’t let go. Everything you feel, you feel it too much.”
She’s surprised that the bug doesn’t need therapy after their sessions together. They had a rough start, with him betraying her trust and her mother using him to achieve her plans, but now they have a nice doctor-patient relationship going. Sometimes she even thinks of him as a friend. Therefore she won’t tell him about Emma’s situation until she’s sure what they are going to do.
Lying to Henry is one thing, lying to the whole town might take more time and effort.
Her eyes search for the clock again and when she sees the time she lets out a sigh; she’s not going to get any sleep tonight and since David will come at six to take Henry on the fishing trip, she doesn’t see why not get up now and fix a nice breakfast for her son. And maybe a snack for the road.
Like she does every time she gets out of the bed, she makes sure not to shift her weight much and wake the blonde. She realizes what she’s doing a minute too late and spends the next few minutes staring at the sleeping form with dark eyes. Then her gaze falls to Emma’s belly and she feels the walls closing in.
She needs to do something.
Cooking is a lot like making magic.
Curses and spells, and magic filters that can make someone grow hair or fall in love with their worst enemy. Wearing a hideous lime green t-shirt (sometimes Henry forgets that she doesn’t share his taste in comic books) and black sweatpants that she borrowed from Emma’s wardrobe, Regina finds her way to the kitchen.
Closing the door behind her she opens the light and goes straight to the fridge, but not without noticing the empty dish in the sink. Henry, probably, had a snack before bed and like most boys his age found it easier to simple leave the plate there until tomorrow than wash it out.
Just like his other mom.
But unlike with his other mom, Regina can’t seem to get mad at him. Her little boy is a little man now, with all the bad and good puberty brings. His voice still cracks sometimes and she pretends that she doesn’t see the redness of his cheeks or the way his showers get longer and longer. Soon he’ll start to shave and sneak girlfriends into his room.
(She’s not ready to be replaced again.)
Fridges, she long discovered, hold secret powers of hypnotism. Small and old or big and brand new, people open the door and step into another world, one that takes them away from their problems, there is no other explanation for the amount of time people spend looking inside a fridge. She’s not different either despite being, literally, from another world.
When Henry was a toddler and she was reading The Chronicles of Narnia at him, to make him stop opening the fridge and leaving the door open when something else caught his attention, she had convinced him that their fridge was a pass way to another land. It didn’t stop him from leaving the fridge open and didn’t stop him from dreaming of other worlds when he found out that sometimes a fridge is just a fridge.
And now that he knows the truth about other worlds and mythical creatures, now he prefers to go to baseball games, watch too many zombie movies for him to be able to sleep peaceful at night, and hides when he sees the girl he likes. The son of the Evil Queen and the Savior grew up to be an all American boy.
Door still open, she frowns. Her son is finally happy and telling him the truth about the baby will only set him back. Perhaps even hate both of them for lying to him again. And as much as she wants to wake him up and tell him the truth, that yes, Emma cheated on her; she knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of his anger and doesn’t wish it to anyone.
Especially Emma.
The blonde just recently found her footsteps as a parent, finally figuring out that a parent is not someone that lets their teen son skip school to play swords with his grandpa or allow him to eat burgers and fries for breakfast. Sometimes a mother needs to be mean, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love her child. Once Emma realized that, she started to say ‘no’ more often to Henry’s demands allowing Regina to take a breath.
She closes the door with a thump and opens it right away; she still needs to figure out what to cook and what ingredients she will need. After another few minutes of staring, she decides to make chicken enchiladas; easy to make, Henry loves them and he can eat them on the road.
She looks at the time, too late to be up and too early to start cooking and when a yawn escapes her lips, she’s already putting water in the coffee machine. The smell of coffee will probably wake Emma, the only thing in the world that can, and she’s surprised when she’s sitting at the kitchen table, tomatoes, coriander leaves, yellow and serrano chili spread in front of her on the table, drinking her second cup and Emma is nowhere in sight.
Oh right. The baby.
If she could pretend with Emma the same way she did with Snow, but she can’t. Emma didn’t tell her how far along she is, but sooner or later she’ll start to show and even Regina can’t pretend that Emma is not with child. And if she could, she’s not sure if Henry can keep this a secret for long.
And they are back to lying.
Emma to her, Regina to Henry and Henry to the whole town.
She takes another sip of her coffee, enjoying the bittersweet taste of the beverage. Thank the gods that blessed her with an extraordinary good memory because in the next days she’s going to need it. She drains her coffee, gets up and stretches her back and neck, satisfied when she hears a ‘crack’, and leaves her cup in the sink; no reason to wash it now after all.
Time to cook.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Emma’s voice surprises her, causing her to jump and hit the top of her head on the open kitchen cabinet. For a minute her vision blurs from the pain and she curses under her breath, hands caressing the sore spot; she doesn’t feel anything warm so she’s not bleeding.
“Shit,” she hears Emma move next to her rather than see her. “Let me just…”
Emma is standing too close to her, so close that when Regina opens her eyes she looks right into Emma’s cleavage and despite herself she tries to figure out if her boobs are bigger. It is too early, she knows that, and Emma didn’t seem to be more sensitive to the touch when they had sex four nights ago. But one part of her still believes that this is going to turn out to be one big prank.
That perhaps Emma is wrong.
“Here,” Emma turns off the tap, Regina didn’t hear water running but she must have turned it on because she feels something wet and cold on the top of her head, a cloth or a towel, and the pain is still there, but bearable. “You’re not bleeding, are you?”
She shakes her head causing the black spots to blur her vision again and Emma must have seen her dazed look because she’s helping her sit in a chair before moving a second chair next to hers.
“You want me to call Whale?”
Regina almost smiles. She has a hard time imaging Dr. Frankenstein running to her house in the middle of the night to treat something that is as life threatening as a paper cut.
“I’ll live.” She says dryly.
Emma doesn’t say anything. She pushes her chair behind; Regina is happy to notice that she didn’t scratch the floor, and watch as Emma opens the cabinet, takes one clean glass and fills it with water from the tap. Regina is refusing to pay and will not pay money for something that she can have for free. It’s not as if they had bottled water back at the Enchanted Forest.
The best they had was watery wine and lukewarm beer. People like to complain about the curse, but Regina still remembers the stink of the town around the palace. More people died from diseases than from her hand. It doesn’t justify her actions, but sometimes she wishes people could remember the truth about their land and not pretend that everyday life there was out of the books.
Emma offers the glass to her with a, “You’re making Enchiladas? Jesus, Regina, its four in the morning!”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“And making Enchiladas in the middle of the night is going to help you sleep?”
“No.” She answers firmly, holding the glass. “I decided to cook because I’m angry at you.”
Again Emma says nothing. But unlike two nights before, she doesn’t turn her gaze away. She looks at her as if she’s waiting on an explanation and Regina is so tired of explaining everything to everyone that she feels her anger rise so fast and so sudden inside of her that she feels like she’ll drown if she doesn’t do something.
“Don’t do that,” Emma says and reaches for her hand, and Regina knows exactly what Emma is asking her not to do and hates her a little more because Emma is right; nothing good ever happened when she let her anger and desperation take the best of her.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” She stands up, throwing the wet towel into the sink, missing her cup by an inch or two. “Don’t tell me what to do.” She repeats again, with less malice to her voice than before, but the need to do something is stronger than ever.
Emma is looking at her, still on her seat, but Regina knows her too well by now, knows how her body feels next to hers, when she’s tense and ready for a fight or relaxed and ready for a good time and Emma? If Henry wasn’t sleeping in his room, it would be a fight bards would make songs about.
“You think I wanted this?” She asks, her body shaking with nerves or anger, Regina doesn’t know and doesn’t care, trying to keep her voice from waking Henry.
“You think I did?”
It unnerves Emma, how weak her voice sounds and she drops her head between her hands with an even weaker, “No.”
And Regina, because she can’t hurt or throw Emma without losing Henry, she sits again, feeling as defeated as the woman next to her, and as desperate as the woman she once was, takes a knife from the table and starts to chop onion she won’t use in the food, but as an excuse for her tears.
One onion.
Two onions.
Three.
“What are you doing?” Emma sniffs besides her.
“I’m angry at you.” She replies. “When I’m angry I cook. Instead of doing magic.”
“Does it help?”
Regina stops what’s she doing and laughs, and when she sobers she finds Emma’s eyes. “We went to see The Avengers with Henry. Despite everything, he was still a child that wanted to see his favorite superhero so we went to see The Avengers.”
“O-Okay.”
“Near the end of the movie, there was a scene with the Avengers sans Iron Man, and Dr. Banner where he tells them his secret. Leaving the cinema Henry asked me how could someone always be angry and I looked at him because how could someone not be?”
She watches as Emma closes her eyes and licks her lips, realization hitting her. “Regina, I…”
“I wasn’t.” Regina continues not giving her a chance to talk. “With you. I wasn’t. And for a moment I let myself believe that maybe this is it, my happy ending. Or this world’s version of it. A world where I wake up in the morning and wasn’t feeling angry and it was such a relief. And then…you’re with a baby and how could I even think of having a happy ending?”
There are tears in Emma’s eyes and Regina knows this time it’s not because of the onions.
“I still want a family. I want Henry and, for some reason, I still want you.” She shakes her head and looks outside the window; the sky is pitch black and there’s not a ray of light in the horizon. “But I can’t stand you right now.”
She wipes her cheeks with the back of her palm, stands up and lays a kiss on the top of Emma’s head.
“Turn the stove off in five minutes.”