Title: Joshua Tree (3/?)
Rating: M
Characters/Pairings: Swan Queen
Word Count: 2.329
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 guys rock!
A thunderstorm makes avoiding Emma an easy job for Regina.
There is a warning about a thunderstorm that no one in Northern Maine gives much attention; Maine gets twenty or less thunderstorms per year and their primal fear is keeping the roads clean from the snow, not taking cover when it starts to rain. But, as Regina finds out, sometimes Mother Nature has plans of her own.
The storm hits the northern parts of the state with force, making people search for shelter and causing enough damage to have the mayors of ten cities on the phone for weeks. Storybrooke’s marine pays the price and part of the roof of the sardine factory is found some hundred feet away. The shops near the marine are the ones with the most damage and even Granny has to clean her diner from the waters.
Regina’s days mixes with her nights and for ten days straight she practically sleeps with her phone in her hand and doesn’t come home until both Henry and Emma are fast asleep. She takes quick showers that do little to take the edge from her shoulders and she’s asleep before her head hits the pillow.
The phone wakes her before dawn and she feels every second of her years.
Apparently Henry has taken nothing from his grandmother because he keeps his mouth shut and shrugs his shoulders when his grandparents ask him why Emma is feeling tired all the time.
“I’m not home much,” Regina says and Henry gives her a sly little grin behind his grandparents back.
“Being a single parent is not an easy job. Perhaps, if David doesn’t mind, she could take the week off?” She offers with a smile (and when in hell did she reach the point where she doesn’t have to fake it?) before a look at her watch has her running back to her office for another long afternoon.
What with avoiding Emma and trying to find a way to balance the budget without asking for additional financial help, it means that she has little time to think about the baby so it comes as a surprise when getting out of the shower one day, she sees Emma looking at herself at the mirror. She’s on her side, covering her breasts with her arm, hair down, a mess of blonde curls and she carries a small smile that with the only light in the room coming from the window, makes her look almost like an early Botticelli painting.
It would be more than enough to make her drop her towel that holds around her down, take Emma to the bed and make love to her until the sun is well up at the sky.
The small baby bump stops her from doing so and she just stands on the bathroom’s door staring at the other woman.
“I’m showing,” Emma says searching for Regina’s eyes.
“Have you seen a doctor?” Regina asks casually, as if she’s not been doing everything possible to be out of Emma’s way for the last couple weeks. She’s not giving Emma the silent treatment per se, but they are not exactly talking. Not about the things they needed to talk about. They do small talk about Henry or what food Regina should cook - if she leaves her office on time.
Emma nods. “Yeah, to Ellsworth, last week. I didn’t want to see someone here,” she bites her lip. “I mean, not until I’m- we, are ready.”
It’s Regina’s turn to nod. Of course Emma would want time to tell her mother and father that she’s with child especially since she’s dating the Evil Queen. Regina looks at her, then at the baby bump and she feels like she’s frozen in time; she needs to get dressed and go to the grocery store.
Instead, she finds herself admitting things to Emma that she never wanted to admit. “I wanted a big family.”
Emma finds her eyes from the mirror and waits for her to continue. They have done that enough the last weeks to know when to keep her mouth shut and when to talk. Regina is grateful for that.
“I was an only child and, as you can imagine, my family didn’t get along with other people,” she gives Emma a small, sad smile, thinking how different her life would have been if her mother wasn’t so obsessed with power. “I didn’t have many friends growing up and I always thought that when I had a family of my own I would have lots of kids so they would always have someone to play with.”
“Did he-” There is emotion in Emma’s words and it surprises her how Emma can feel so much about someone that she never met. “Did he want a big family?”
Regina laughs- not from her heart; short lived, and her laugh has sadness in it, the same sadness that her eyes have when she’s talking about him. “He wanted my kids.” Something chokes her and swallows hard, the motion hurting her throat more. “Daniel had lost a brother and a sister to winter and the flu. His family was poor and they barely made even. Working for us was the best thing that could happen to them. They offered us their services and my family offered them a roof over their heads and a warm plate of food.”
She doesn’t need to continue, they both know what happened to Daniel. Emma doesn’t know that when Daniel died and she was forced to marry the King, she took his family with her to the palace. Every day until the day both his parents died she had to watch them mourn for a boy they didn’t know had died. She had told him the same story as she had told Snow; that Daniel run away, leaving her and his family behind and she had to watch them every day as the lines got deeper around their eyes.
They had already lost two children, so she let them believe that their son was happy somewhere else, or so she thought. Having Henry in her life showed her how wrong her thinking was. If something happened to him she would want to know. She would want to make whoever was responsible pay.
“Regina?” She snaps from her daydreaming when she feels Emma’s hands on her shoulder. She’s dressed now, Emma, with a shirt that barely covers her belly and they really need to go shopping because this is really happening. “Did you hear a single word I said?”
“I was thinking of something,” she justifies herself.
“Do you really have to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Do you really have to make me feel like crap, Regina?” Emma is not angry, but not calm either; the calm before the storm. “’Cause you can stop, okay? I feel like shit without you and your stories. I screwed up, okay? I screwed up!”
“You definitely screwed someon-”
Emma’s palm is heavy on her cheek and the shock is so great that she drops the towel and stands to stare at Emma, cheek burning from the slap, naked as the day she was born. Then something snaps inside of her and it must be showing in her eyes because Emma holds both her hands up and takes a step back.
“I shouldn’t have done that, I’m sorry.”
Her lip’s barely moving and she’s not blinking when she says, “You are going to be.”
Emma stares at her with wide eyes and Regina flexes her fingers because if they are going to do that she’s not going to hold back not even for Henry when a sob escapes Emma. The blonde starts to cry, turns her back on Regina and sits down on the bed, almost missing it, and Regina is so confused she doesn’t know what to do; comfort Emma or get dressed and get the hell out of there.
“Emma?”
“Shut up. Shut up! Shut up!” Emma slides from the bed to floor; her body shaking with sobs and Regina goes from pissed off and ready to throw a fireball to worry in record time. “Just shut up.”
Regina licks her lips, trying to figure out what to do when she realizes that she’s still naked. Without talking, she gets new clothes, bra, panties, black skinny jeans and her favorite shirt, black of course, a gift from Henry. Emma is still on the floor by the time she’s dressed, but her sobs have calmed and Regina kneels next to her.
“Are you okay?”
“No.” She sniffs and leaves something like a laugh. “No, I am not okay. I’m definitely not okay.”
Regina nods and with a wave of her hand a glass full with cold water appears next to Emma. The blonde takes it with a small smile and drinks it heartily.
“Are you feeling better?”
Emma shakes her head and offers a confusing, “Not really. A little. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Regina sits down opposite to her. “Do you want me to call someone?”
Emma laughs again, the same bitter sound, and looks at her with puffy red eyes. “I thought you were my someone.”
She doesn’t want to upset the blonde more, but she doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut either.
“The evidences say otherwise.”
Clearly the wrong thing to say because when Emma looks at her, her green eyes are filled with tears.
“I fucked up. I know, okay? I know. I made a mistake. If someone should understand me it should be you.”
“Because I’m the Evil Queen and I always will be?” She’s not using Emma’s exact words, but she remembers too well those words, at her front yard years ago, like it was yesterday. Emma was right that morning; people will always remember the things they did, good, bad, they are stuck in their memories forever and they don’t have the benefit of a curse this time.
“Yes.” A heartbeat later, “No.”
“Yes or no, dear? Make up your mind.” She moves closer, her anger gone.
“No.”
Well, small victory.
“Would you have told me? If you weren’t pregnant, would you have told me?”
Emma shakes her head. “He was no one. Just a guy at the bar. Passing through.”
If she says that to make her feel better then Emma doesn’t really know her at all.
“I need to go to the grocery shop.”
She ends up at the playground, the one that Henry never liked and rarely came to play. Now the place is full with kids that are running around, chasing each other and driving their parents crazy with their cheers. She has to wait to find a bench to sit and then she has to wait until the last kid is gone to open the grocery bag she’s holding.
Wine, blue cheese, fresh baked bread and a bag of walnuts; a pity party for one but at least she’s doing it with class. Well, with the exception of one plastic cup for the wine.
The sky is dark blue and it smells like rain although the broadcast last night said nothing about rain. Living in Maine for so long had taught her a couple things about the weather and she looks at the ocean for any sight of a storm. The waters are still calm, but have a dark silver look and she has a few hours before it starts to rain.
She’s in the middle of a perfect bite (bread, cheese and a walnut on top) and has done some damage to the wine, when she spots Henry riding his bicycle. He asked for a dirt bike and while Neal said yes, both Emma and she had voted against it. He was mad at them for a few weeks, even went as far as to stay at Neal’s and they had to sit him down and explain to him their reasons for not buying him one.
He’s at that age that girls and cars have most of his attention and he thinks that riding around with his bike makes him look cool.
“Hey mom,” he greets her and lets the bike fall on the ground before taking a seat so close to her their legs touch. “You went to the store?”
“I did,” she nods.
“Wine, bread and cheese. Wow, I’m so glad that I had a burger at Granny’s.” He attacks her bag of walnuts, throwing three of them in his mouth. “Emma said you two had a fight.” And then, before she has time to answer or he to swallow, “Why we never came to this playground? The view is awesome from here.”
“Who told you we didn’t?”
“We did?” Another handful or walnuts, a little bit of cheese and he’s eyeing the bread on her lap.
“Here,” she breaks the bread giving him the largest of the pieces. “I used to bring you here all the time when you were little.”
“Yeah? I don’t remember the place.”
“When you were six you decided that you liked the castle better,” she takes a sip from her wine. “We never came here again.”
They watch the sea for a while; her drinking her wine, him chewing loudly before he has enough.
“Were you fighting about the baby?”
“Henry-“
“Why were you fighting about the baby? Emma was crying and you were nowhere to be found, and…I don’t like it when you fight. Emma’s burying herself in work and you brood for days.”
“I don’t brood.” He raises and eyebrow. “I don’t brood.”
“You do, mom, and it used to scare me.”
If Henry had slapped her, she wouldn’t be so surprised. “It did?”
“Well, yeah,” he looks at her as if he doesn’t understand how she doesn’t know that. “I used to think you were plotting something.” Then it hits him. “Mom? The reason you and Emma are fighting, it doesn’t have to do with you, you know, being the Evil Queen, does it?”