Chapter Text
...
I couldn't utter my love when it counted
Ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now
And I couldn't whisper when you needed it shouted
Ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now
…
…
When Regina first comes to the land without magic, she reads many of their stories. The fairytales, of course, enrage her. They’re nothing more than glimpses of her own life, her own lands, twisted and reformed and put into palatable little tales that get most things wrong—her own most of all. But there are others that she enjoys. Science fiction stories end up being the ones that she is drawn to the most. Magic, but not. Not really.
And yet full of possibilities.
She comes back to the stories about parallel universes the most often. Infinite worlds simply existing out there together, pressed up against one another where everything is possible. The slightest shift, a different choice made, and a new world begins from that point on. Everything happens, somewhere.
(In the dead of night, when the insomnia hits her the hardest, when the loneliness becomes stifling, threatens to choke her, that’s when she is weak enough to allow herself a moment to imagine it. There is a world out there where Daniel is alive. One where they escaped together and Mother never found them. Snow never betrayed her. There is even a world where she never has Mother as Mother at all, where her life is full of love and kindness and there is no need for magic to save her. It all exists out there, somewhere.
Not here, though).
Here, she spends eighteen years alone realizing that her ‘happy ending’ isn’t a happy one at all, and it isn’t even an end. Here, she spends ten years scrambling to try and teach herself to love a little boy. Here, Emma Swan waltzes in and ruins her life, breaks her painstakingly crafted world wide open and leaves her to pick up the pieces. Here… her life becomes entangled with Emma’s, with the insufferable Charmings, with trying to be better, for Henry, always for Henry. Here… curses and other worlds come and go by the dozen and in all of them—in every single one—Emma Swan matters to her.
Somewhere, Emma Swan comes to Storybrooke dragging Henry back home in a beat up yellow bug, falling apart; she is all full of sharp edges, and wary, and angry. Somewhere, Regina fights with her tooth and nail, trying desperately to cling to a curse that (frankly) she doesn’t even particularly want, anymore.
It’s not here, though.
And, it is.
Sort of.
…
…
Regina wakes up in her own bed, head pounding. She doesn’t remember… there is something vital that’s clawing around at the base of her skull, but she cannot reach it, not all the way. Instead she gets up, throws on a robe and walks downstairs, going through the motions of making a pot of coffee.
She’s on her second cup by the time that Henry walks into the kitchen and Regina nearly drops her mug at the sight of him.
He’s ten.
That feeling at the base of her skull intensifies and then suddenly it all comes back to her at once, harder and faster and more painful than she could have ever imagined, and then, then she does drop the mug.
“Mom?” Henry asks, worried, but still looking at her a bit warily, as he so often did back then.
(Back then?)
“I’m fine, dear,” she says quickly, bending down to mop up the coffee. “Stay back. You’ll cut yourself.” He compiles, but moves around the mess to get cereal from the pantry, shooting distrustful glances back at her all the while. When she’s finished cleaning up, she can see that he’s got his old book laid out flat on the counter, reading it defiantly in between bites. Regina pours herself a third cup of coffee with shaky hands, swallows, and pulls herself together. She has to play along until she understands what is going on. When she turns back around to look at him, it’s like a punch to the gut all over again. He’s so little. “Do you have everything ready for school, corazón?”
He looks up at her, a mixture of anger and affection warring together on his face as it so often was back then. (Is, now). “Yeah,” is all he answers finally, stilted.
She dresses, takes him to school, and walks to the office all in a daze. Her head is swirling with thoughts of the color yellow. Yellow curls brushing against her shoulder, a yellow car encasing her, for once, making her feel safe, flashing back and forth in her mind and all she can feel is want. Sheer longing that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. She doesn’t know who the curls belong to, but she thinks in a panic that she should. That she did know, only moments ago in the kitchen, but it all slipped away from her as soon as she spilled her coffee.
She tries to grasp for it; for the surety that she had felt less than an hour ago and comes up with nothing. Regina grabs a small notebook that she leaves on her desk for jotting down quick reminders and writes it down, in case more of it slips away.
Yellow curls. Hair like a pale afternoon sun.
A decrepit yellow car. There’s a fondness as she writes that, an emotion that doesn’t make sense with her knowledge, her surety that this car is a death trap. Utterly ridiculous. And yet—
And yet— seems to be the theme of her morning.
…
…
It takes her until dinnertime to realize that something is wrong. She comes home from work at five o’clock every evening, no exceptions—unless there is a genuine crisis. (There is never a genuine crisis; she crafted this town herself from the ground up). Spending time regularly eating meals together had been stressed as one of the best ways to bond with a child, in all the books on adoptive parents that she read in those early years.
Henry always has an after-school activity. Soccer, three times a week. Art on Tuesdays. Piano on Thursdays. The days that he comes to meet her at her office for therapy are the only days that really deviate from their usual routine, and that has become a part of it at this point, as well. Five o’clock comes and goes with no sign of Henry. He is as punctual as she is, so, Regina grabs her purse and walks to the school only to find out that he never showed up to soccer practice. No one has even seen him since this morning. Ms. Blanchard thought that he was out sick today and never bothered to call and follow up.
Regina nearly claws her face off.
…
…
He comes home late. Far past his bedtime. Regina has worked herself up into a genuine panic—with Graham, useless as always—but she controls it, keeps it tucked inside of her where it can’t get out. It won’t help anything; her emotions never do. Not even her anger, not usually. However, the moment that her eyes find Henry again, the panic that has been slowing building all afternoon crashes into her harder than she could ever imagine, and she runs blindly, embracing him.
“I found my real mom,” he says, shrugging her off and running into the house. Regina looks up at the woman, hurt and shock stinging in her bones.
“You’re Henry’s birth mother?” she asks, too shocked for the accusation that she wants to fling at the woman to come out. She just sounds raw, like she’s hanging on by a thread.
(She is).
“Hi,” the woman says, sheepish and warm. Purposefully non-threatening.
(But everything is a threat).
Regina finally looks at her. She is slightly taller than Regina, with a lean, athletic body that’s crammed into a pair of atrociously tight jeans and a red leather jacket. Blonde curls cascade down her shoulders. Yellow curls. Hair like a pale afternoon sun. Regina looks behind her and sees the vehicle that she brought Regina’s son home in. A decrepit yellow car. Something alights inside Regina’s chest, and she can’t breathe through it, for a moment. She pulls herself together before the worry can fully crease between the woman’s eyebrows. “How would you like a glass of the best apple cider you’ve ever had?” she asks, quickly shifting into playing hostess. Her mother trained her well, after all.
“Got anything stronger?” the woman jokes.
We’ve done this dance before. The thought slips its way into her skull, unbidden.
“I do,” is all that Regina can say in response.
“Great,” the woman laughs. “Let me just…” she gestures back towards that awful yellow car. “She’s asleep, but I don’t want to leave her in there.” Regina has no idea what that means but she forces herself to stand still as the woman turns around and walks back towards the car. Regina’s eyes drop down to her ass almost of their own accord and something truly primal and hungry rears itself inside of her—it’s familiar and horrible and Regina quickly snaps her eyes back up to see just what the hell this woman is doing.
She lifts a sleeping blonde little bundle out of a car seat and shifts the child into her arms. Regina does not move. The woman walks back towards her with a little girl with matching blonde curls in her arms and gives Regina another sheepish, awkward smile. “She won’t wake up,” she says, almost like an apology and promise in one. “She’s a heavy sleeper.” It’s meant to be a reassurance. Regina simply turns around and walks inside, holding the door open in invitation.
It takes her a moment longer than it should to fully register: this isn’t just déjà vu. Regina walks on shaky legs into her downstairs office and pours them both straight shots of whiskey. Didn’t do that last time, she thinks. I gave her the cider.
Emma takes the glass from her with a grateful little laugh after settling the girl down onto the couch beside her. She takes a hefty swig of the whiskey and Regina has to gather up every bit of energy that she has left to keep herself standing. Because… this isn’t déjà vu. Because, this is Emma. Emma, who has not yet introduced herself and so how in the hell could Regina even know her name? Emma, who Regina already knows. Emma, who Regina lov—
She swallows the whiskey in one terrible go.
Her mind whirls, thinking of all the possible curses and spells that could account for something like this, and where she had been last that was not her bedroom this morning with a sullen ten-year-old Henry. She can’t remember. She can’t remember anything. The only thing that she is sure of, down to the marrow of her bones, is that Henry had been older before this morning. Taller than her by inches and inches. And this little girl… Regina has never seen her before. But Emma, Emma had been—
“I’m Regina,” she says, feeling insane.
“Emma Swan.” She smiles again, somehow managing to be both open and wary at the same time and it’s so familiar that it feels like Regina has been punched in the gut. “And this is Hope,” she says, motioning to the little girl.
“Your daughter,” Regina says, a statement that makes… no sense.
“Yep,” Emma says, popping the ‘p’ and looking… almost ashamed. No, not ashamed: guilty. “I…” she swallows thickly and downs the rest of her whiskey, scooting forward on the couch and pressing her palms into her knees. “I had Henry when I was really young,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to — well,” she laughs, a sharp painful rasp like it’s being torn out of her and then she looks back down at Hope. “I don’t know if I was really ready this time either, honestly, but—” she shrugs, trailing off and unsure—or unwilling—to explain herself further to a stranger.
(Regina is a stranger to her. But—)
“Should I be worried about a father coming along and making some sort of demand for custody?” Regina asks, even though she knows the answer. Did know the answer. The Neal Cassidy that Regina knows is long dead, Emma’s little brother now bears the shackles of his name. Idiot Snow strikes again, Regina thinks, more out of habit than anything else.
“No,” Emma says, gruffly. “He doesn’t know.”
Regina doesn’t comment on the inaccuracy of her answer. She wants to ask about Hope, wants to ask about her father, suddenly remembers Hook and feels bile rise up at the back of her throat, and quickly moves to pour herself a glass of cider.
Her mind passes through curses and spells and dismisses them all. Nothing could quite account for this that she knows of offhand. Time travel. Parallel universes. The stuff of this universe’s science fiction tales. She almost scoffs at herself for the thought. Regina thinks of stories and scientific articles that speak of chaotic inflation, of the breakdown of singularity, of the theories that say ‘yes, this might be possible’. Science was never quite her passion, but it was adjacent to many of the things that were. Magic, cooking—both close enough for her to have some overlap in interest. Enough that she knows some of the actual terms that went a bit beyond her fiction. Regina looks over at Emma Swan, the woman that she raised Henry with, in another life. The woman that she loved, but never had. She closes her eyes and breathes hard, in and out through her nose. She remembers the first time that she ever picked up H. G. Wells or Diana Wynne Jones novels, the online collegiate course that she took in the early 2000s that introduced her to the relativity equation. Her professor had said that it contained the infinite.
The closest thing we’ll have to magic, he’d said with a laugh. Other than perhaps, love. Regina had scoffed at his words, at the sheer idiocy of them. She was here in this land because of actual magic, and love had never given her anything other than pain.
Now, her mental calculations of spells are drawing up short; she’s desperate to go scour through her books, but there aren’t any in this house right now. If this world is the way that she thinks it is, then everything is locked up tight inside her vault.
“I’d better get back on the road,” Emma says, breaking the quiet. “Hope wakes up pretty early and in the whole…” She makes some kind of motion with her hand. “I was flustered and I forgot to fill up her diaper bag,” she admits.
“I have diapers,” Regina says.
Emma’s eyes widen and she looks up at Regina, confused. Join the fucking club, Regina thinks. “I… I have some left,” she adds, by way of explanation. “I always bought too many and I just… never donated all of them.” Just in case, she’d thought.
“Oh… well, um—”
“It’s late, Miss Swan,” Regina says, the familiar name making her tongue feel like cotton. “I… have a guest room.”
“Oh!” Emma looks utterly shocked by the offer, but Regina can also see relief in there. She is trying to hide it, but Regina knows how to read her. Did know, once. Emma looks at her like she’s trying to figure Regina out, like she doesn’t already know how to read Regina better than almost anyone, like she has no idea who Regina is, other than the woman who has had her son for the last ten years. “Um, you don’t have to,” she finally says, but Regina can hear how exhausted she is, can see it in the set of Emma’s shoulders and the raspy quality to her voice.
The rasp that once filled Regina’s ear as Emma’s fingers filled—
“It’s no trouble,” she manages to say with a clear voice. “The room is already set. I still have a crib, if you need.”
“Oh,” Emma looks sheepish now, utterly familiar; it’s the look that she always gets whenever she is unsure of her maternal instincts, of how others will think they hold up against their own ideas. “She actually just sleeps with me, so. Um, thanks.”
“Alright,” Regina says instead of: that might make it hard to get her into her own bed when the time comes. All of the literature recommends sleeping separately. You could roll over in the middle of the night and crush her. “The guest room is this way,” she says, and gets her legs moving.
She lies down in her bed—too big for one person, she notes for the first time in… she has no idea how long—and stares up at the ceiling. Emma is sleeping downstairs in a tank top and her underwear; Regina knows this because she knows what Emma sleeps in, or she did. Hope. This is Hope. My daughter. Regina closes her eyes. Her brain assaults her with images of Emma; Emma’s hair; Emma’s eyes; Emma’s ass; Emma’s mouth; Emma’s hands. Her eyes fling open and she thinks: I don’t remember the flavor of her chapstick.
The reality of her situation grows until it is too big for Regina to hold inside of her body, and she thinks that she might throw up from it. It’s an accident, but her tongue runs itself over her bottom lip, and the only thoughts she has left are the desperate need to remember Emma’s chapstick. To taste it on her own lips again.
Fuck.
…
…
It starts like this: they’re fighting.
That’s pretty much a given, considering it’s them, but this is old and new all at once and Regina doesn’t know how to navigate her way through it. One minute, she is snapping at Emma about custody of Henry like she did the first time around, and the next thing that she knows, Emma’s hands are in her hair and her lips are crushing against Regina’s own.
Papaya. Her chapstick has a hint of papaya. Regina remembers the exact red tube of it now that Emma has crushed their lips together. She can picture it resting on the dresser. Snippets of things keep coming back to her like this, unbidden, though refusing to come to her whenever she actually tries to grab for them with any sort of purpose.
“I’m not here to take him from you,” Emma snaps again, later. Her eyes are skittish, they never rest in one place for too long, darting back and forth between Hope playing on the floor in front of them and the walls of Regina’s house. Emma doesn’t look at her at all.
“So you say,” Regina says, agreeably, flipping over to sprawl her limbs out on the couch in a way that she knows show off her legs.
Bingo, she thinks as Emma’s eyes land there and then quickly dart away.
She’s scoured her books three times over and come up with only a few options that might fit her predicament. Gold has been no help whatsoever; all of her cryptic attempts to get information out of him simply resulted in him mocking her, delighted at her distress. She needs more information.
Snow had been as useless as ever. Charming is still in a coma. Belle hidden away in the hospital, Sidney fawning over her, Ruby and Granny bickering in the diner, it’s like the world shifted and sent her back in time, except—
Except that Regina runs into Mulan and Aurora at the grocery store. The two of them laughing and holding hands and glancing right past her like this is a perfectly normal and regular occurrence. Mulan actually waves when she catches Regina’s eye.
Except that Kathryn is Regina’s friend. Properly, already. She knows exactly where Charming is, knows that Regina ‘found him’ and she’s… happy? Content? She visits him once a month nowadays and she is his emergency contact and Regina is not.
Except that Marian, Robin, and Roland are here. All alive, all happy. Roland looks to be about seven years old and Regina doesn’t know what to do with any of that information. Doesn’t know how to match it up, but she doesn’t know how to match any of this up, so it hardly matters. Marian is—apparently—Regina’s oldest friend. She is the one who introduced Regina to Robin, and Robin is… a soulmate of a different sense. The kind that he might have been, if she’d had the time to actually settle into it without misinterpretations of Fate and curses getting in their way. Here, he is her friend who knows exactly when she needs to have company who will not bother her, but who will just be with her, nonetheless. In this life, all of them come over once a week for dinner, usually on Saturday nights. It’s the happiest that she ever sees Henry, their house full of people who apparently love them both.
Except that Hope Swan exists. Emma has a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter who has Henry’s little smile, and big bright blue eyes, and the sweetest personality that Regina has ever seen. And Regina’s feelings about this little girl’s mere existence are… so complicated and varied that she doesn’t know how to parse her way through them. All that she knows for sure is that when Emma is in a hurry that second morning, frazzled, as Hope screams unhappily about an emotion that she can’t quite explain by herself yet, and Regina just reaches over and picks her up on instinct and starts chatting with her quietly, softly, rocking back and forth with a little bounce until Hope looks her right in the eye and starts to calm down—Regina’s heart melts. It cracks wide open as this little wobbly smile worms its way inside of her and holds on tight.
It’s like she’s gone back in time, except that it’s not like that at all.
Zelena is here. And she knows. Regina goes to the farmhouse on a whim, a week after Emma shows up and she’s gone over her books too many times, exhausted herself with Gold, and feeling just a little desperate. There is a light on in the kitchen window and Regina holds her breath. When she knocks and Robyn answers the door, looking like the perfect picture of the girl that she knew, and clearly in her late teens, Regina nearly starts to cry.
“Mom,” Robyn calls, turning around behind her. “Aunt Regina is being weird. I have to go meet up with Alice, I’m late!” She gives Regina a one-armed hug on her way out the door. “Bye, love you, see you later!” she says—clearly to them both—and then she’s off. Regina watches her walk down the street, already ducking her head into her phone and laughing as Regina tries to keep on breathing.
“Oh, so you know now,” Zelena says, far too calmly as she comes up to take her daughter’s place.
Regina whips her head around. “What?”
Zelena’s lips quirk up at the corners. “So, it’s weird to you too that Henry is ten and Emma’s not following you around like a puppy in love, huh?” she taunts, familiar and aggravating and Regina throws herself into her sister’s arms like a child and bursts into tears.
Zelena allows it. The two of them stand in the doorway of Zelena’s—stolen, at least in the memories that are currently coming back to Regina—house and Zelena holds her tight and doesn’t grumble and Regina lets out every emotion that’s been building inside of her for days, now.
Five minutes later, and they’ve composed themselves and both are pretending that the moment never happened at all. Regina knows that Zelena is going to whip it out and lord it over her at some opportune moment later on, but that can’t really be helped, anymore.
“What is happening?” Regina asks.
Zelena—infuriatingly—simply shrugs. “New curse, obviously.”
“But I don’t… nothing makes sense with that. I’ve looked through everything that—”
“Do you want some tea?” Zelena asks, rising and going to put the kettle on like they aren’t the only two sane people in the middle of a crisis. “I have that herbal mint thing that you like—”
“Zelena,” Regina snaps. “Henry is ten.”
“Yes,” Zelena says with a shrug.
“How old is Robyn?”
“Seventeen.”
“Who is her father?”
“Robin, obviously.”
“How old is Roland?”
“Hum? Oh, I don’t keep track of that, darling. Five, maybe?”
“Seven. He is seven.”
“Sure, sure,” Zelena waves her hand and moves to get them some mugs.
“How exactly is that possible, then? None of the curses that I know can just—”
“Details, details, who cares?” Zelena shrugs. “Frankly, this is one of our better setups. I’m not over-bothered by it.”
“Emma doesn’t know me,” Regina bites.
“That is a bit of a pickle for you, isn’t it?” Zelena says, a feral, impish smirk rising to her mouth. “Though, granted, the two of you have never managed to actually get your shit together and talk about your feelings without that insipid pirate coming in and—”
“Is he here?” Regina asks, cutting her off. She’s been looking—despite actively trying not to—and she hasn’t found a single trace of him.
Zelena gives her a long, knowing look and draws it out before she finally answers. “No. Not that I’ve seen.”
And that sort of, is that.
(For a while, at least).
…
…
It starts like this: they’re fighting.
Regina is trying to navigate her way through a confusing combination of old and new memories all at once without letting it slip that she knows Emma. Gods, she used to be good at this, but this new version of Emma throws her so off kilter that she feels like a teenager all over again. One minute, she is snapping at Emma about custody of Henry like they did the first time around, and then, the next thing that she knows, Emma is underneath her on the couch. Regina’s hands are making slow caresses up and down Emma’s—very toned—abs. Regina’s hips are grinding down against Emma’s own desperate motions, and her lips are assaulting Regina’s neck in the single greatest way imaginable.
It starts like that, but it doesn’t end like it.
…
…
The thing is, you inevitably learn a lot about someone while raising a child together and occasionally sharing a living space—even if a solid half of that time is spent trying to kill or get rid of the other.
She knows what Emma looks like in the morning, in her tank top and shorts, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, her curls deflated and sticking out at odd angles. She knows the kind of coffee that Emma likes first thing in the morning (black, sugarless, unexpectedly enough), her favorite cereal (Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch — ridiculous), the music that she dances to while cooking in the kitchen (“Take on Me” by ABBA — even more ridiculous, especially with the added dance moves), and that sound she makes at the back of her throat when she comes. (Alright, perhaps the last one is not something that one would inevitably learn from constantly trying to kill each other, occasionally successful co-parenting, or finally managing to work together to stop countless evil curses from invading their lives, but she knows it anyway).
She knows quite a few things about Emma Swan. And she knows that part of her martyr ‘I am the Savior’ act is overcompensation. Not all of it, because Emma actually does just… care about other people that much—but some of it. It has almost grown into an apology of sorts to the universe, or something along those lines. Sorry, I’m angry at the parents that I longed for my entire life; sorry, I gave up my son because I didn’t trust myself; sorry, I’m in love with the woman who ruined my family’s life; sorry, I continue to let a terrible man love me because it feels like the kind of love that I deserve. Sorry; sorry; sorry, I’ll kill myself to save you all.
And Regina is decidedly not.
She is not sorry, not anymore. She wasn’t at all, for a long time, and then she was, because of Henry—because of Emma, a little—but she’s worked herself back around to a healthier version of no longer being sorry simply for existing. For her desires. For this hunger that curdles inside of her that holds onto people just a little bit too tightly.
Hook could make her feel sorry, sometimes—a skill that he truly perfected with Emma that occasionally worked on her, too. Directed in a specific way, Snow could make her feel sorry, but neither of them are around in any capacity that matters right now, and so Regina is not sorry at all.
And she had come, she knows that, now, and it’s not something that she can just forget. She remembers the feeling. Regina came with Emma’s name on her lips and she can remember it now in full vivid color and so Regina is not sorry and she is never going to be again. She’s not sorry because she is in love with Emma and she has spent so long trying not to be. She can’t do it anymore, she won’t.
She had hated Emma the first time that they met; hated her in a visceral way that had caused her to want to press Emma down and fuck her in order to expel that hatred—but hatred had still been the dominant emotion. She can’t even pinpoint when it shifted into love, not really, and gods, she’s tried. There were a hundred moments that brought lust up further than hate, that shifted the hate into something like acceptance, that eventually shifted and dulled into something close to affection, but love? She has no idea. Regina doesn’t know if she doesn’t know because she doesn’t have all of her memories anymore, or if she never knew the answer to begin with, but either way, it doesn’t matter now. She watched Emma with Graham, with Neal, with Elsa, with Lily, with Hook, and seethed a little bit more each time, confused and resentful until she had wanted to crawl out of her skin; and she had always known that Emma was at least little bit in love with her, too, but in that moment, she could actually feel it, and that was a whole different thing entirely.
The memory comes back to Regina unbidden as Emma passes by her in the hallway, her bare thigh brushing against Regina’s hip. Emma’s mouth between her legs and that single-minded determination that she’d always hated otherwise. Her eyes locked with Regina’s until her back arched and she just—
She’s not apologizing for that and she is going to find a way for this version of Emma not to feel like she has to, either. Because Regina knows things about Emma Swan that this Emma does not know about her in return—or, simply doesn’t remember, right now. Regina knows Emma, and Regina loves Emma, and Regina is good at seduction, when she wants to be.
Emma is about to be fucked. Hopefully in more ways than one.
…
…
Henry is—in a word—furious.
Emma is not his reluctant ally in breaking a curse this time around. Instead, Emma is an ally to Regina. Regina has been nothing but pleasant and cordial, and she is slowly working her way up to befriending and seducing Emma to—so far—great success. She’s treating it like a game. Regina has learned something resembling patience over the years, and patience with a delightful reward is well worth the wait.
She offers the guest room that first night, too shocked and confused to do anything else.
The morning after is abruptly strange. Emma comes into the kitchen carrying Hope on her hip and Henry goes still in his seat. Wary. He thinks that Regina is an evil queen in hiding and that Emma is supposed to be his savior and the breaker of curses and not the mother to some other child. She is not supposed to be happy to sit down and have coffee with his mother and chat, while Hope echoes every single word that they say as she gobbles up the fruit and oatmeal Regina gives her with vigor. Regina tries to subtly parse whether or not memories are coming back to Emma, too—and comes up short. There is one moment where she thinks, oh, oh there she is, as Emma looks up from her coffee and gives Regina a grin that feels so familiar, it nearly knocks her over. But it disappears right afterwards, and Regina can’t be sure that she didn’t just imagine the familiarity there because she wants it to be.
Emma gets a room at the bed and breakfast, but this time, it’s because Regina suggests it. (She nearly offers her the guest room indefinitely, but knows that Emma will not accept, that it will make her wary and put her on defense, instead of charmed). Emma has enough of Hope’s things in her car, and—despite the two-year-old—she seems to travel as light as ever, so it’s nothing to make a phone call to her old boss and say that she’ll be out of Boston for a while. Regina knows that the issue of money will come up soon. Emma can’t pay for a room forever and Regina is going to have to plan this out right, slowly edge Emma towards the idea of her guest room being a better—and rent free—fit before Snow comes sniffing around or Henry gets any big ideas.
The minute after Emma leaves that morning with Hope on her hip, and a tentative grin on her face, and promises to be back for dinner later that evening, Henry rounds on Regina.
“What did you do to her!?” he accuses. “Did you cast a spell on her?”
“No,” Regina says, forcing herself to be calm. It’s hard to see him look at her like this again. To have anger and distrust hovering in the corners of his beautiful little face, to know that every time she reaches for him, he’ll pull away from her touch, instead of leaning into it. It’s been… years since he has looked at her with anything other than brilliant shining love and faith in her goodness.
And frankly, it hurts.
She doesn’t want to lie to him, this time. It’s one of her biggest regrets. Regina knows how to love, now, she’s not grasping at straws, and holding on too tightly, and scrambling to keep control in the way that she was all those years ago.
But she is just as lost, just… in a very different way.
“I wouldn’t cast a spell on Emma unless it was some sort of last resort to save her life,” Regina says and Henry’s mouth clacks shut so fast she winces at the sound.
“What?”
“Corazón, what do you remember?”
“What do you mean?” he asks, still wary but far too interested in whatever is going on. He’s walking closer towards her, listening intently.
“About me, about our lives… about magic.”
His eyes widen and he looks up at her, like he is afraid that this will be a trick but he wants it to be true, all the same. “I—”
“That insipid book only tells part of the story,” Regina says. “Quite a bit of it isn’t true at all and even more is omitted, but… the core of it is true,” she says, careful.
“Magic is real?” he asks and the wonder in his face is familiar and terrifying all at once. “Wait… so, you are The Evil Queen?”
Regina closes her eyes for a brief moment. “People have called me that, yes.”
When she opens her eyes, and looks directly at Henry, his whole body is taut with tension. Regina crouches down to his level, literally on her knees for the first time in… she has no idea how long, and Henry is looking at her like… like she is a whole new person, and he has no idea what he wants to say to her. “You’re a bad guy?” he asks, barely a whisper.
“Well, first of all, I’m a woman,” Regina jokes, trying to release some of the tension in the room. Miraculously, it works. Henry gives her a sheepish smile before going serious again. “I… have done a lot of things that I’m not proud of,” she says. “I had reasons that… well, the world that I come from has… some archaic laws and traditions that don’t allow for much gray area. This world certainly isn’t perfect, but overall, it’s better about things like consent and mental health and bodily agency than mine ever was.”
Henry may currently be in the body of a ten-year-old, but Regina doesn’t know if this actually is ten-year-old Henry, or if this is part of this new curse. New world. Whatever the fuck is happening here. Regardless, her son is smart, and though Regina wasn’t a perfect mother in his first ten years, and though there were a lot of things that she would love to go back and do differently, she did make a few things adamantly clear from the get-go. Henry has known about consent since he was a toddler, and he knew to ask if people wanted hugs or to have some space instead. Regina taught him that his body was his and his alone.
Mental health… well, she didn’t have that one quite figured out herself yet, back then, so that lesson hadn’t made it through at that point in his life. At least, not in her old life. Universe, whatever.
“I didn’t have the words to name it, and even if I did, I don’t think there would have been anyone to really help me through it, but I…” she isn’t going to explain her parents’ abuse, or a forced marriage and the toll that could take on a young woman to a ten-year-old in any detail. But, she can try to find the words to make him understand some of it. “I had a mother who… was more focused on her ambitions than on my feelings and needs,” Regina says. Henry is listening intently and Regina notes that he’s already shuffled closer towards her. In some ways, she has already shifted back into his mother, rather than an enemy. “One of her ambitions was to be royalty. To marry a king. She almost did, in her youth, but circumstances prevented it and so she decided that I would. Whether I wanted to or not.”
“But… you can’t make someone get married?” Henry asks.
“You can,” Regina says. “In my realm especially, arranged marriages were very common. Even more so than they are here.”
“But—” Henry begins to protest.
Regina holds a hand up, gently cutting him off. “The point is, I was put into a situation that I didn’t want—forced into it, really—and I was grieving the man that I did love, and angry at the people responsible for both of those situations, and I… allowed my anger and resentment to fester and build, instead of trying to deal with it in a healthier way. I had a lot of good reasons to do the things that I did, but doing them was still wrong. It’s a lot more complicated than your book says, but I still did many things that I regret.”
“So, you were a bad guy—woman—but… you’re not anymore?”
“I… suppose that’s not an inaccurate way to describe it.”
“But, Emma’s supposed to be the Savior. She’s supposed to break the curse.”
“She already did, corazón.”
That snaps Henry into attention. “What?”
“I… don’t know what is happening here,” she admits. “But I have memories of a life where all of this has already happened. I remember you as a young man,” she says with a fond smile. Henry’s eyes blow wide. Regina hadn’t intended to tell him this, but now that she’s done it she can’t really go back. She also knows that this isn’t his burden to bear, and she’s not going to give him anything more to worry about if she can help it. “I don’t want you to worry, corazón, I’ve done this many times before and I’ll figure out anything that needs figuring out. I just… didn’t want to lie to you.”
“So… Emma is The Savior, and you are The Evil Queen?”
“We have both embodied those titles before, yes.”
“And you know Emma? You’re friends?”
“I — yes,” Regina says. “I care about Emma very much,” she admits softly. She doesn’t want to lie about this, either. Not anymore.
Henry studies her carefully and Regina lets him. She keeps herself very still and allows the inspection, though it makes her want to squirm. There is still wariness in his face, and honestly, she’s glad. If this version of Henry blindly accepted what she told him, he would be far too gullible, she wants him to make his own decisions about the world. “Okay,” he finally says. “But if you’re evil again…” he squares his shoulders. “Then I’m going to stop you.”
Regina smiles. “Good. I’ll hold you to that.”
His eyes widen. “You want me to?”
“Yes, I trust you.”
Henry looks astonished. “Okay,” he holds out his hand for her to shake. “Deal.”
Regina takes his hand in hers and holds it reverently before shaking once. “Deal.”
“What are we gonna do to get everyone’s memories back?” he asks. “We should come up with a plan. Operation… Elephant.”
Regina rises, her knees protesting the assault of the hardwood floor. She had been calling it Operation Seduction in her head, though she absolutely cannot say that to her son. “Why elephant?” she asks, making her way into the kitchen to get started on dinner. Henry trails after her, suddenly bursting with excitement.
“Because elephants have really long memories! And they think about things a lot like people do, like with family and mourning them and stuff. And they’re a matriarchal society,” his face shifts. “That’s not part of the operation, really. I guess, it’s just cool and I thought you’d like it.”
Regina beams down at him. “I do. However—”
Henry groans loudly. “You have to let me help!” he protests, cutting her off and knowing exactly where she is going with this. “You can’t just tell me that magic is real, and my book is real—mostly—and that you have magic and that you know Emma and that we’re all a family but we lost our memories! Or, got sucked back in time? Whatever! I can help!”
Regina looks down at him and sighs. She doesn’t really want him involved in this, she doesn’t want him to have the burden of worrying about his memory, or saving the town, or any of it. However, she knows her son. And she knows that he will try to do this regardless, whether he has her permission or not, and… he could make an utter mess of things accidentally on his own. If she gives him a few small tasks that make him think that he is helping… well, it might even actually help, and it will make him feel useful. Like they’re a team.
(Selfishly, she wants to do some of this with him).
“Alright, Operation Elephant can be a go, if you agree to some ground rules that are non-negotiable.”
“I promise!” he swears, jumping up and down with excitement. “I promise!”
“First rule is to help me make dinner while we go over the rules,” she says, and grins as Henry runs over and grabs his old stool and sets himself up beside her at the counter.
“Ready,” he announces, beaming.