Ricochet (Once Upon a Time; Regina/Emma)
TITLE: Ricochet
CHAPTER 2: Incongruity
FANDOM: Once Upon a Time
PAIRING: Swan Queen (Regina/Emma)
SPOILERS: "The Cricket Game" (2x10) AU
RATING: PG
SUMMARY: For a made-up, curse-borne town, there was no shortage of paperwork -- paperwork she had inevitably fallen behind on after falling, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. And if she was going to deal with staring at an empty cell for eight hours, cursing Regina the entire time, then hell - she deserved a second muffin.
*****
When Emma awoke, it was with a tumble of dread in her gut and half-open eyes. A mere three hours had passed since she'd left Regina at the sheriff's station and she knew she would return to find an empty cell. That in and of itself was enough to incite dour spirits, and the three hours of sleep was doing nothing to help. Worse than that, the middle-of-the-night disturbance didn't seem to affect anyone else in the house, if the happy chatter was any indication.
She oozed out of bed and kept her eyes half-closed, as if that would allow her to get any more rest, while she haphazardly threw on jeans and a sweater. Then she stumbled toward the source of the happy chatter and plunked herself unceremoniously on the bar stool beside her son.
"Morning!" he chirped.
"Yeah, morning," she groaned, sweeping her hands through tangles of blonde.
"Some coffee?" Mary Margaret offered with a raised brow.
"Yes," she sighed, and the desperation within the single syllable caused that brow to go even higher.
Henry just sat at the counter, feet kicking under him while he stirred his cereal. Emma watched the motion, faster and faster until she was looking at a whirlpool of milk and corn flakes.
Her mother's voice drew her attention. "How did everything go?"
Emma grunted tiredly, reaching for the mug Mary Margaret slid toward her. "Good as can be expected, I guess."
"Did she escape?" Henry wanted to know.
Emma shook her head, slowly. "Nope. She let me lock her up."
"Well that hardly means she'll still be there," David reasoned as he strolled into the room, heading for the front door and opening it to grab the paper.
"Yeah, I know. I know what to expect." She yawned down into her mug.
"Do you need me there this morning?"
Emma took a long sip of her coffee, ignoring the brief scalding her tongue suffered as she swallowed and shook her head. "Nah, I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? You didn't get much sleep."
Again, Emma waved him off. "I can just stock up on coffee at Granny's. I'll be fine." She finished the rest of her coffee in a gulp, hoping it wouldn't result in third-degree burns, before she clapped her son on the back and said, "C'mon kid, I'll walk you out. Bus'll be here soon."
**
After seeing Henry off, she stopped at Granny's to pick up two large lattes and, for good measure, two apple crisp muffins. For a made-up, curse-borne town, there was no shortage of paperwork -- paperwork she had inevitably fallen behind on after falling, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. And if she was going to deal with staring at an empty cell for eight hours, cursing Regina the entire time, then hell - she deserved a second muffin.
By the time she had reached the station it was just barely nine. She fumbled for her keys, the bag of muffins dangling from her teeth. A balancing act kept the two to-go tumblers of coffee upright as she slid the key in the lock and strolled into the station.
And when she rounded the corner, she very nearly lost her grip on everything. The bag dropped from her open mouth and for a second she just stared.
There sat Regina on the cot in her cell, leaning against the wall with a thin blanket draped around her elegantly as if it were a silk wrap. With a flick of her deep brown locks, she looked up and they met eyes. Her tone was even... professional, if a little superior... as she greeted her, "Good morning."
Dumbfounded, Emma closed her mouth and managed to stammer out, "Uh, hey," before setting the coffee on the filing cabinet. Her eyes remained cemented to Regina as she bent down to scoop up her breakfast.
Before she could stop a dumb question from emerging, she asked, "What are you still doing here?"
Regina tilted her head and quirked a brow, an almost patronizing curiosity in her voice as she asked, "Where else would I be, exactly?" and held up her still-bound wrists.
Emma's mouth opened and closed on unformed sentences and thoughts. If possible, she was even more confused by this incongruity than by last night's. Regina turning herself in? Highly unexpected. Then actually staying in jail? Even moreso.
"Sorry, I just..." She gestured to her. "I-I wasn't expecting..." After a moment in which she continued to struggle throwing a sentence together and in which Regina stared expectantly, she just huffed and gave up. "Are you hungry?"
Both brows lifted in response, and Regina appeared taken aback for a moment. Within a blink, she had composed herself and replied coolly, "I suppose."
Emma made her way to the cell with the bag, holding it up. "I, uh... I got some muffins."
Another tilt of the head and Regina asked, "Is this your usual treatment of prisoners, Sheriff Swan? Because if so, I may just have to re-examine your budget."
Emma rolled her eyes, though she couldn't help the smirk. "Do you want something to eat, or not?"
That seemed to temporarily lower the walls the 'Evil Queen' had built so high. All traces of sarcasm left her voice and she said, "Yes please."
"Here." Reaching into the bag, Emma pulled out one of the muffins and held it out, then stopped. "Oh. Right." The cuffs.
And then she was struck with an inner conundrum. Was that why Regina hadn't escaped last night? She was in handcuffs? But that didn't make sense; she could've easily made them disappear, or... turned them into diamond tennis bracelets or something.
As if able to pick up on her thoughts, Regina rolled her eyes and sighed, "For god sakes. I'm still here. I'm not going to use magic, and I'm not going to try to escape." She lifted her bound wrists. "Now will you please uncuff me?"
"Sure." The response was knee-jerk though doubt still reigned. She recalled Regina's words from several hours ago.
"You believed me earlier. In there. Please believe me now. I didn't do this."
If she was lying, this seemed like an extreme measure to go to - even for her. And Emma still couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss. She knew Regina's moods and looks. And with her polygraphic superpower, she knew that eyes didn't lie -- least of all Regina's. If anything, Regina's eyes were the most honest part of her. So she watched those eyes again... searched them. And she pulled out her keys.
"C'mere," she said softly.
A mixed bag of emotions passed across Regina's features in response: surprise, confusion, gratitude and some faint sadness. She approached the bars and held up her wrists, passing them through for her to reach.
Emma flicked her gaze up to Regina's, watching her watch her wrists, as she gently took one in her hand. She felt a brief surge, and a shudder through her bones. Like touching the prong of a cord as it's pulled from an outlet. Her skin hummed where it connected with Regina and she recognized the feeling -- magic. Similar to when they opened the portal together, but somehow stronger now.
Regina vibrated with magic so intensely that Emma nearly dropped her hand. But instead she held tight, fascinated by the sensation as she slipped the handcuff key into the lock, waiting for the click. Her thumb slid to Regina's pulse as the cuff swung open, and she thought she could hear the blood rushing through her veins -- thought she could hear Regina's heartbeat thumping through her head. The second cuff fell away.
Regina sighed with relief and massaged one of her wrists, glancing at Emma surreptitiously. Did she feel that weird electric pulse too?
"Thank you," she murmured.
Emma just nodded, too thunderstruck by whatever the hell just happened to give any sort of verbal response. Instead, she stowed the handcuffs in her back pocket and grabbed one of the muffins off the desk. "Uh, here ya go. It's apple crisp." Off Regina's almost-smirk, she replied, "Non-poisonous."
A full smirk came through at that, and Regina examined the muffin as if it were a piece of artwork. "Pity," she quipped. "I could use a good sleeping curse right about now."
"What, for me?" Emma chuckled, glancing up with her hands on her hips. "I'm not gonna fall for it this time."
"No," Regina's reply was soft and her smile was slightly sad. "For me."
She was slightly thrown off by that comment, uncertain how to respond. Apparently the comment was rhetorical; Regina carried on without her.
"I have tried.... so hard. So hard to be a good person. To do right by my son." She tossed the muffin onto her cot and shook her head, staring at the floor as she started to pace. "I have all this-this..." She lifted her hands, palm-up, fingers flexed as she practically shook and finished, "magic... within me. But he begged me not to use it. And I've tried not to."
Emma wasn't entirely sure where this was headed, but chose to take the placating route for now. "It's hard," she sighed, hoping it came across as empathy.
That earned her a sharp glare. She should have known empathy wouldn't work on Regina. "And suddenly you know the trials of attempting to do right by your child? You wanted nothing to do with him for the first ten years of his life!"
"I am not talking about parenthood, Regina, I'm talking about trying to change! To be a better person! It's hard. And sometimes it sucks."
"What does it matter, anyway?" Regina huffed, fists planted on her hips as she began to pace in the opposite direction, along the length of the cot. She threw a hand up in a quick gesture toward Emma. "You said it yourself. I am who I am and I'll always be that way. What's the point in even trying?"
Emma sighed heavily through her nose, closing her eyes. She knew, when she had spewed all that vitriol, that it would come at a price. She hadn't meant it... or at least, she didn't think that she did. She had been scared -- alarmed at what she'd seen Regina do in that dream catcher. She'd been trying to get her out in the open. She'd been trying to bait her. And she knew, as soon as the words left her mouth, that she'd taken it way too far.
"Regina... I'm--"
"Oh just save it," she snipped.
"No." She took a confident step toward the cell. "I defended you to my parents. They wanted you locked up from the get-go and I got them to back off."
Regina glanced up at her, halting her pacing. "You did?"
She nodded. "I told them that I knew you weren't lying. I told them I know your expressions - that I know how to read them. I know you."
Emma watched as the last vestiges of anger and confrontation seemed to leak from Regina like air from a balloon. Her shoulders relaxed and her eyes softened. The taut, angry line of her mouth slipped into a frown of solemnity. Her hands slid slowly away from her hips, hanging limply at her sides. Her approach toward the bars was slow, but not her usual saunter.
This wasn't the catlike Regina, toying with her prey. This was the vacant, nearly-lifeless walk of a defeated, fallen queen. "You do know me..." she murmured, every word gliding slowly off her tongue, a dim realization in her tone.
Emma nodded, then amended with a shrug. "At least, I thought I did. But, after seeing you..." She averted her gaze, shaking her head back and forth, still unable to bring herself to say the words 'kill Archie'. "After seeing you do that, I don't know what to believe."
"But it wasn't me!" Regina gripped the bars on her cell, a desperate glint in her eyes.
"Even though I saw you do it, it wasn't you."
"No. It wasn't."
Emma tilted her head skeptically and smirked, folding her arms. "Right. Well if it wasn't you, then it was someone doing a pretty good impersonation of--"
She stopped, and the pit of her stomach dropped past her feet. Her smirk faded, arms unfolded and her stance became unsteady, eyes widening as she straightened her neck and finished on a breath, "...you."
She looked up at Regina with wide eyes, watching as Regina's eyes searched her.
"What?"
It was ridiculous... and yet it made perfect sense. "That's it. That's gotta be it."
Regina shook her head, confusion wrinkling the skin between her eyebrows. "What is?"
Emma flicked her gaze up to Regina's one more time, hands planted on her hips, before she turned on her heel and strode quickly out of the sheriff's office, grabbing one of the tumblers of coffee on her way out.
"Emma!" Regina called after her, trying to get her to stop. "What is it?"
As Emma strode out, on a mission, she cocked her head slightly and dropped the bomb:
"Your mother's in Storybrooke."
TBC
{x-posted to regina_emma and onceupon_fanfic}
CHAPTER 2: Incongruity
FANDOM: Once Upon a Time
PAIRING: Swan Queen (Regina/Emma)
SPOILERS: "The Cricket Game" (2x10) AU
RATING: PG
SUMMARY: For a made-up, curse-borne town, there was no shortage of paperwork -- paperwork she had inevitably fallen behind on after falling, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. And if she was going to deal with staring at an empty cell for eight hours, cursing Regina the entire time, then hell - she deserved a second muffin.
*****
When Emma awoke, it was with a tumble of dread in her gut and half-open eyes. A mere three hours had passed since she'd left Regina at the sheriff's station and she knew she would return to find an empty cell. That in and of itself was enough to incite dour spirits, and the three hours of sleep was doing nothing to help. Worse than that, the middle-of-the-night disturbance didn't seem to affect anyone else in the house, if the happy chatter was any indication.
She oozed out of bed and kept her eyes half-closed, as if that would allow her to get any more rest, while she haphazardly threw on jeans and a sweater. Then she stumbled toward the source of the happy chatter and plunked herself unceremoniously on the bar stool beside her son.
"Morning!" he chirped.
"Yeah, morning," she groaned, sweeping her hands through tangles of blonde.
"Some coffee?" Mary Margaret offered with a raised brow.
"Yes," she sighed, and the desperation within the single syllable caused that brow to go even higher.
Henry just sat at the counter, feet kicking under him while he stirred his cereal. Emma watched the motion, faster and faster until she was looking at a whirlpool of milk and corn flakes.
Her mother's voice drew her attention. "How did everything go?"
Emma grunted tiredly, reaching for the mug Mary Margaret slid toward her. "Good as can be expected, I guess."
"Did she escape?" Henry wanted to know.
Emma shook her head, slowly. "Nope. She let me lock her up."
"Well that hardly means she'll still be there," David reasoned as he strolled into the room, heading for the front door and opening it to grab the paper.
"Yeah, I know. I know what to expect." She yawned down into her mug.
"Do you need me there this morning?"
Emma took a long sip of her coffee, ignoring the brief scalding her tongue suffered as she swallowed and shook her head. "Nah, I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? You didn't get much sleep."
Again, Emma waved him off. "I can just stock up on coffee at Granny's. I'll be fine." She finished the rest of her coffee in a gulp, hoping it wouldn't result in third-degree burns, before she clapped her son on the back and said, "C'mon kid, I'll walk you out. Bus'll be here soon."
**
After seeing Henry off, she stopped at Granny's to pick up two large lattes and, for good measure, two apple crisp muffins. For a made-up, curse-borne town, there was no shortage of paperwork -- paperwork she had inevitably fallen behind on after falling, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. And if she was going to deal with staring at an empty cell for eight hours, cursing Regina the entire time, then hell - she deserved a second muffin.
By the time she had reached the station it was just barely nine. She fumbled for her keys, the bag of muffins dangling from her teeth. A balancing act kept the two to-go tumblers of coffee upright as she slid the key in the lock and strolled into the station.
And when she rounded the corner, she very nearly lost her grip on everything. The bag dropped from her open mouth and for a second she just stared.
There sat Regina on the cot in her cell, leaning against the wall with a thin blanket draped around her elegantly as if it were a silk wrap. With a flick of her deep brown locks, she looked up and they met eyes. Her tone was even... professional, if a little superior... as she greeted her, "Good morning."
Dumbfounded, Emma closed her mouth and managed to stammer out, "Uh, hey," before setting the coffee on the filing cabinet. Her eyes remained cemented to Regina as she bent down to scoop up her breakfast.
Before she could stop a dumb question from emerging, she asked, "What are you still doing here?"
Regina tilted her head and quirked a brow, an almost patronizing curiosity in her voice as she asked, "Where else would I be, exactly?" and held up her still-bound wrists.
Emma's mouth opened and closed on unformed sentences and thoughts. If possible, she was even more confused by this incongruity than by last night's. Regina turning herself in? Highly unexpected. Then actually staying in jail? Even moreso.
"Sorry, I just..." She gestured to her. "I-I wasn't expecting..." After a moment in which she continued to struggle throwing a sentence together and in which Regina stared expectantly, she just huffed and gave up. "Are you hungry?"
Both brows lifted in response, and Regina appeared taken aback for a moment. Within a blink, she had composed herself and replied coolly, "I suppose."
Emma made her way to the cell with the bag, holding it up. "I, uh... I got some muffins."
Another tilt of the head and Regina asked, "Is this your usual treatment of prisoners, Sheriff Swan? Because if so, I may just have to re-examine your budget."
Emma rolled her eyes, though she couldn't help the smirk. "Do you want something to eat, or not?"
That seemed to temporarily lower the walls the 'Evil Queen' had built so high. All traces of sarcasm left her voice and she said, "Yes please."
"Here." Reaching into the bag, Emma pulled out one of the muffins and held it out, then stopped. "Oh. Right." The cuffs.
And then she was struck with an inner conundrum. Was that why Regina hadn't escaped last night? She was in handcuffs? But that didn't make sense; she could've easily made them disappear, or... turned them into diamond tennis bracelets or something.
As if able to pick up on her thoughts, Regina rolled her eyes and sighed, "For god sakes. I'm still here. I'm not going to use magic, and I'm not going to try to escape." She lifted her bound wrists. "Now will you please uncuff me?"
"Sure." The response was knee-jerk though doubt still reigned. She recalled Regina's words from several hours ago.
"You believed me earlier. In there. Please believe me now. I didn't do this."
If she was lying, this seemed like an extreme measure to go to - even for her. And Emma still couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss. She knew Regina's moods and looks. And with her polygraphic superpower, she knew that eyes didn't lie -- least of all Regina's. If anything, Regina's eyes were the most honest part of her. So she watched those eyes again... searched them. And she pulled out her keys.
"C'mere," she said softly.
A mixed bag of emotions passed across Regina's features in response: surprise, confusion, gratitude and some faint sadness. She approached the bars and held up her wrists, passing them through for her to reach.
Emma flicked her gaze up to Regina's, watching her watch her wrists, as she gently took one in her hand. She felt a brief surge, and a shudder through her bones. Like touching the prong of a cord as it's pulled from an outlet. Her skin hummed where it connected with Regina and she recognized the feeling -- magic. Similar to when they opened the portal together, but somehow stronger now.
Regina vibrated with magic so intensely that Emma nearly dropped her hand. But instead she held tight, fascinated by the sensation as she slipped the handcuff key into the lock, waiting for the click. Her thumb slid to Regina's pulse as the cuff swung open, and she thought she could hear the blood rushing through her veins -- thought she could hear Regina's heartbeat thumping through her head. The second cuff fell away.
Regina sighed with relief and massaged one of her wrists, glancing at Emma surreptitiously. Did she feel that weird electric pulse too?
"Thank you," she murmured.
Emma just nodded, too thunderstruck by whatever the hell just happened to give any sort of verbal response. Instead, she stowed the handcuffs in her back pocket and grabbed one of the muffins off the desk. "Uh, here ya go. It's apple crisp." Off Regina's almost-smirk, she replied, "Non-poisonous."
A full smirk came through at that, and Regina examined the muffin as if it were a piece of artwork. "Pity," she quipped. "I could use a good sleeping curse right about now."
"What, for me?" Emma chuckled, glancing up with her hands on her hips. "I'm not gonna fall for it this time."
"No," Regina's reply was soft and her smile was slightly sad. "For me."
She was slightly thrown off by that comment, uncertain how to respond. Apparently the comment was rhetorical; Regina carried on without her.
"I have tried.... so hard. So hard to be a good person. To do right by my son." She tossed the muffin onto her cot and shook her head, staring at the floor as she started to pace. "I have all this-this..." She lifted her hands, palm-up, fingers flexed as she practically shook and finished, "magic... within me. But he begged me not to use it. And I've tried not to."
Emma wasn't entirely sure where this was headed, but chose to take the placating route for now. "It's hard," she sighed, hoping it came across as empathy.
That earned her a sharp glare. She should have known empathy wouldn't work on Regina. "And suddenly you know the trials of attempting to do right by your child? You wanted nothing to do with him for the first ten years of his life!"
"I am not talking about parenthood, Regina, I'm talking about trying to change! To be a better person! It's hard. And sometimes it sucks."
"What does it matter, anyway?" Regina huffed, fists planted on her hips as she began to pace in the opposite direction, along the length of the cot. She threw a hand up in a quick gesture toward Emma. "You said it yourself. I am who I am and I'll always be that way. What's the point in even trying?"
Emma sighed heavily through her nose, closing her eyes. She knew, when she had spewed all that vitriol, that it would come at a price. She hadn't meant it... or at least, she didn't think that she did. She had been scared -- alarmed at what she'd seen Regina do in that dream catcher. She'd been trying to get her out in the open. She'd been trying to bait her. And she knew, as soon as the words left her mouth, that she'd taken it way too far.
"Regina... I'm--"
"Oh just save it," she snipped.
"No." She took a confident step toward the cell. "I defended you to my parents. They wanted you locked up from the get-go and I got them to back off."
Regina glanced up at her, halting her pacing. "You did?"
She nodded. "I told them that I knew you weren't lying. I told them I know your expressions - that I know how to read them. I know you."
Emma watched as the last vestiges of anger and confrontation seemed to leak from Regina like air from a balloon. Her shoulders relaxed and her eyes softened. The taut, angry line of her mouth slipped into a frown of solemnity. Her hands slid slowly away from her hips, hanging limply at her sides. Her approach toward the bars was slow, but not her usual saunter.
This wasn't the catlike Regina, toying with her prey. This was the vacant, nearly-lifeless walk of a defeated, fallen queen. "You do know me..." she murmured, every word gliding slowly off her tongue, a dim realization in her tone.
Emma nodded, then amended with a shrug. "At least, I thought I did. But, after seeing you..." She averted her gaze, shaking her head back and forth, still unable to bring herself to say the words 'kill Archie'. "After seeing you do that, I don't know what to believe."
"But it wasn't me!" Regina gripped the bars on her cell, a desperate glint in her eyes.
"Even though I saw you do it, it wasn't you."
"No. It wasn't."
Emma tilted her head skeptically and smirked, folding her arms. "Right. Well if it wasn't you, then it was someone doing a pretty good impersonation of--"
She stopped, and the pit of her stomach dropped past her feet. Her smirk faded, arms unfolded and her stance became unsteady, eyes widening as she straightened her neck and finished on a breath, "...you."
She looked up at Regina with wide eyes, watching as Regina's eyes searched her.
"What?"
It was ridiculous... and yet it made perfect sense. "That's it. That's gotta be it."
Regina shook her head, confusion wrinkling the skin between her eyebrows. "What is?"
Emma flicked her gaze up to Regina's one more time, hands planted on her hips, before she turned on her heel and strode quickly out of the sheriff's office, grabbing one of the tumblers of coffee on her way out.
"Emma!" Regina called after her, trying to get her to stop. "What is it?"
As Emma strode out, on a mission, she cocked her head slightly and dropped the bomb:
"Your mother's in Storybrooke."
TBC
{x-posted to regina_emma and onceupon_fanfic}