Archive of Our Own

There’s a strange sort of settling in that happens when Regina returns to Storybrooke. Nothing changes in Emma’s everyday life, not exactly. Emma is still raising a baby and a teenaged boy alone, is still sheriff, and while the outer fairytale worlds have been stitched into this Frankenstein (and yeah, he’s there, too) of a new world, Storybrooke remains itself. Strange monsters stumbling in, strange ex-husbands stumbling out, Emma with the sense that there’s something lacking in her life, something she’s still missing. (Love, Mary Margaret says as though it’s obvious, but Emma is very truly done with love.)

And yet.

And yet, there is a shift that comes to Storybrooke with Regina’s return. Emma wonders sometimes if it had been the same for Regina, back when the first curse had been intact. If the world had drifted into bland, still dullness, so subtle that she hadn’t noticed it until color had burst back into her life.

Emma is roused in the morning by the cries of an infant and thinks Regina is at Town Hall right now and it all feels brighter, happier, as though she can feel the warmth from here. Emma walks into the station, spots a takeaway bag from Granny’s that Regina had left on the desk on her way in, and she smiles like an idiot for the rest of the day. After work, Emma takes Hope and nudges Ry into traipsing out to Mifflin Street, where they can linger at Regina’s for the rest of the evening.

Ry has taken an interest in cooking, so he makes dinner while Emma sits against the couch in the sitting room, watching Hope tackle tummy time. A myriad of baby-related items have made their way into Regina’s living room over the past few weeks—a brand-new swing, a play mat, a solid wood changing table from Henry’s babyhood. Plastic rings and stuffed bears and formula in the fridge.

Emma doesn’t comment on it, and Regina doesn’t explain it. It’s just what they do, raising children together, as natural to them as breathing.

Regina leans against the back of the couch and observes, “Her cheeks are a little flushed.”

“I think I didn’t pat her face dry enough before we went out in the cold yesterday. It’s just a rash.” Absently, Emma pulls one of Regina’s feet over to her, massaging it with steady strokes. Regina’s eyes drift closed, and she lets out a sigh that leaves warmth flooding through Emma. “Long day?”

“Always. Still trying to get the Mage Coalition to open their doors to our united land. I’m beginning to think that this Good Queen position is just an excuse to trap me into unpaid labor.” Regina stretches her leg, the muscles within it shifting with the movement. Emma swallows, dismissing the natural bolt of attraction. That’s just…existing around Regina. Nothing new. “You know, at least the Evil Queen got a castle out of the gig. Got servants and guards and opportunity to terrorize the locals. Now, I just get a mayoral salary that I negotiated via curse decades ago and the sheriff to massage my feet.”

“If you feel like terrorizing the locals, warn me beforehand. I want to take videos for Henry.” Emma digs her thumbs into Regina’s calf and is rewarded with a breathy almost-moan.

Regina slides down to the ground so she’s leaning against the side of the couch and lays both legs onto Emma’s lap. “Honestly, the sheriff is getting it all out of my system. Sorry to disappoint.” Her eyes are mischievous but no less demanding than her tone.

Emma slides her hands up Regina’s legs to peel off the thigh-high stockings that she’d been wearing. “Mm. Imagine what you’d do if she wasn’t here to get out all that tension.” Regina lets out a noise of contentment.

This is new, a shift in their dynamic that had come with Regina’s coronation. Emma had only seen her in tiny flashes before then—Regina had been traveling between worlds, had stopped by for quick visits that had ended almost as quickly as they had begun. But the coronation had been an extended outing with Regina for the first time in months. (Had other people been there? Honestly, Emma barely remembers.)

And they had danced. God, how they’d danced. Emma has always been careful about touching Regina too much, about too many hugs and sitting too close. It’s awkward enough to be quietly attracted to your son’s other mother; it’s another thing entirely to take advantage of your proximity to get in stray touches. But Regina had danced with everyone at the coronation—Mary Margaret, David, Henry and Ry, Zelena, a thousand different dignitaries. So when she’d turned to Emma, eyes bright with exhilaration, and said, you owe me a dance, Emma had taken her into her arms.

Had held her close, had felt Regina’s ragged breath against her lips, had cradled the small of her back like a precious thing. They had danced for much longer than necessary, maybe longer than proper, Emma a little bit drunk on Regina’s touch. She’d been starving for so long on tiny glimpses, and she’d finally had her, her wicked humor and gentle eyes and the soft curves of her body, and never wanted to let go.

When the crowds had begun to dissipate, the night coming to an end, Emma had found herself lingering with Regina in a side room. Regina had kissed her cheek and said, nothing has been the same without you and Emma had stared at her, voiceless, and then reached out to tuck a loose curl behind Regina’s ear.

She doesn’t know what she might’ve done if Regina had leaned in just a bit closer, had given just a tiny cue. Killed her relationship with Regina, probably. She definitely wouldn’t be sitting here, massaging Regina’s legs while Regina winds a finger through her hair, twisting it absently.

(I don’t need love, Emma had said to Mary Margaret, rolling her eyes. I have the kids and Regina.

Mary Margaret had pressed her lips together and said nothing.)

Regina’s favorite thing to do, Emma suspects, is to watch Hope while she’s at work. Technically, Hope goes to the daycare on the ground floor of the new-and-improved Town Hall. But more often than not, Regina plucks her from the daycare and whisks her off upstairs, where she plants Hope on her lap during meetings as some kind of strange, maternal power play.

No one at these meetings seems to know how to react to a monarch with a cooing baby in her arms, which Emma secretly finds endlessly amusing. Aloud, she makes pointed comments about Regina’s work-life balance and asks if she used to do this with Henry, too. (Yes, of course, babies thrive when you include them in your everyday life.)

Today, Regina is taking a meeting from her throne room, Hope gnawing at a teething ring and gurgling commentary to Regina’s jawline. Emma can relate. Regina’s jawline is a magnificent thing.

Emma is technically the sheriff of Storybrooke, not Regina’s bodyguard, but she makes a point of attending every meeting with the Mage Coalition, who rule over a wide-ranging spread of kingdoms that have resisted unity. Every mage is a powerful magic user, and while Emma has absolute faith in Regina’s abilities in magic, she has some mild concerns when it comes to Regina’s skill in diplomacy. If something erupts at a Mage Coalition meeting, Emma is ready to step in.

With her renowned skill at diplomacy, of course.

She lounges against the side of the throne, a hand casually resting on the gun on her belt. The actual guards are in traditional garb, the swords and uniforms that make visitors feel at home, but Emma likes her jacket and her gun, the reminder to the Mage Coalition that Storybrooke is something grounded and real.

“Storybrooke is too grounded in something alien to us,” the Speaker Mage announces. He has no name. The mages surrender their names when they become part of the Coalition, a bunch of old men with pinched noses and no sense of humor. “I simply don’t see where our common ground is.”

“Our common ground is in our magic,” Regina retorts, leaning forward on her throne. “And right now, the stitching at the barrier between our worlds—the one that you and your mages erected—is an unnecessary power drain. In time, the magic that flows within each of our worlds will leak out of that rift. We will all suffer for it. We might lose the reserves of power that we have.”

“The Mage Coalition has far more stored magic than your land. We can endure despite our losses. Can you?” The Speaker Mage says it scornfully, and Emma takes a step forward, her eyes flashing.

Regina rests a hand on her shoulder in warning. Emma bristles but keeps her mouth shut. “You overestimate your abilities,” Regina says, her voice even. “And you underestimate ours. I fear that, with two such powerful worlds side-by-side, leaking magic into the abyss, we will fall to antagonism that will destroy both.”

The Speaker Mage smiles thinly. “I hardly think that the Mage Coalition is at risk. But I will bring your proposition to the council.”

He’s so irritating. Emma can feel herself grinding her teeth, annoyed at his smug confidence. She can sense Regina’s frustration in how her hand tightens, in the way that she speaks. “You will find that we are stronger and have more stability when we are together,” she says coolly. “Perhaps some of your mages would prefer to visit our lands and see what we’ve created as a unified world. You might be surprised.”

“I very much doubt it.” The Speaker Mage’s eyes flicker to Hope, and he says, abruptly, “Is that your child?”

“I—” Regina’s hands encircle Hope, protective, and Emma feels her magic flare to life at the attention suddenly on her daughter. “No,” Regina says, her hands settling down again. “She is—”

She hesitates, as though she doesn’t know what to say. Emma wants to speak up, but she’s stymied at the question, and at any explanation of who Hope is to Regina. My sons’ other mother’s daughter. My sheriff’s daughter whom I’ve kind of adopted because I love babies and babies love me. My—

“She’s the daughter of a friend,” Regina says at last, and it feels so oddly distant, so wrong, that it sits sour on Emma’s tongue.

But the Speaker Mage seems satisfied with her answer. “I will consult with the council,” he says. “Perhaps we can reach an accord that will allow you a position within our world.”

The throne room empties. Regina hisses between her teeth. “Within our world. As though we’d be privileged to be a part of their little clutch of ethnocentrist kingdoms—we’re triple the size—”

Emma climbs up onto the throne, perching on its arm and brushing a finger against Hope’s cheek. “Want me to shoot the fucker next time he comes? Just a little? He might just stop talking about his superior magic when there’s a bullet through his—”

Regina lays a hand on Emma’s thigh. “I would be flattered if I didn’t know that you’d shoot pretty much any of the dignitaries who walk into this throne room, whether or not they’re singing my praises.”

Emma laces her hand through Regina’s, fingers intertwining over the denim of her jeans. “What can I say? I’m a woman of action.”

“My favorite.” Regina leans against Emma’s side, just for a second. She steals these little moments now, Emma has noticed, tiny moments when she allows herself to share her burden with Emma. Never anything immense, anything so dramatic that it’ll belie her exhaustion. It’s just resting her head against Emma’s shoulder when Emma hugs her, a single instant when she doesn’t have to stand tall. Falling asleep on the couch in her office with her head in Emma’s lap. Their hands twining and untwining as they walk together, as natural as taking each step in perfect sync.

Regina is tired. And Emma wants to suggest that they head out right now—that she gets a well-deserved break after another Mage Coalition encounter—but then her secretary pokes her head into the throne room, offers a grin at Emma, and says to Regina, “Your 1:30 is set up in your office.”

“Fantastic.” Regina sits up. Passes Hope to Emma and steps out of her throne. The silky, elaborately stitched gown that she’d been wearing seems to melt away as she stands, fading into a practical pantsuit. Her hair, piled high in a regal bun, drops to loose, perfectly-coiffed waves that settle just below her shoulders. She transforms from queen to mayor in a mist of magic, striding from the room, and Emma thinks that the Speaker Mage would be speechless if he saw how fluid the change was.

Still, Emma can see the tiny hints of strain. The drop of Regina’s shoulders, subtle but there for people who spend enough of their time watching Regina. The slight drag to her steps. The way her hands swing, just a little, which Regina never does purposely.

“Wait,” Emma calls, and Regina pauses, turning, her eyes shifting from dull to bright as she catches Emma’s gaze. “Don’t let Ry come over to make dinner tonight,” she says on impulse. “I’m going to put him on babysitting duty at my place.”

“Oh? Where are you going?” Regina looks perturbed at the idea that Emma might be out, that there is any tiny iota of Emma’s life that she doesn’t share. (Henry calls them my codependent moms when he’s talking about them now. Emma just rolls her eyes at it, unbothered. She’d endured six endless months without Regina. Regina had managed over a decade without Emma. They’re making up for lost time now, and if they’re codependent for spending their evenings together, so be it.)

But it really is absurd for Regina to suspect that Emma might be spending a single evening without her. “I’m taking you out,” she informs Regina. “We are having a nice, quiet, relaxing dinner together at that fancy new restaurant in my parents’ kingdom. The one that Mary Margaret can’t stop talking about.”

“Well,” Regina says, and she shoots Emma a smile that flips Emma’s stomach, the kind of smile that Emma really needs to develop an immunity to. It was easier to resist when she was married and the guilt kind of tempered the inappropriate attraction. It’s harder now. “If you insist.”

The restaurant is a bust. It’s kingdom-style, which means that everything on the menu is sourced straight from Mary Margaret’s kingdom. “Authentic,” Emma says, biting into the worst chicken she’s ever eaten in her life. “How was this spiced, with salt and pepper?”

Mostly pepper, she’d bet.

Regina’s lip curls. “We had a much wider variety of flavors imported when I was the despot here. I expect that this suits your mother’s palate.”

“I have no idea why they ever deposed you.” Emma tries using some of the sauce on her plate to drown out the taste of the chicken, but it isn’t much better. Maybe Mulan’s kingdom has a better authentic restaurant they can visit. Or Aladdin’s.

Regina spears a stewed carrot with distaste. “Probably the mass murder of all dissidents.”

“They’re such buzzkills. Everyone wants democracy these days.” Emma shakes her head, mock-regretful. “No one wants to enjoy decent food.” She pushes the chicken to the edge of her plate. “I’m sorry. I thought you could use a break, but this is really just—”

Regina stands abruptly. “We’ll get it,” she proclaims in a regal voice that sends a little thrill through Emma. “Let’s go.”

They pay in coins—the standardized money system is another headache to enact—and Regina takes Emma’s hands and teleports her out in a gleaming purple rush of magic. When the magic clears, they’re standing in Storybrooke again, right outside the Thai takeout place on Main Street.

Regina rubs Emma’s hands a few times with her own as though they might generate enough heat to handle the biting cold, and then she releases them. “Come on. We’ll get something good. And we’re going to eat it in the nicest place in town.”

By which, Emma discovers, she means her house. Regina plates their food like a pro and brings it out with some wine, and they eat at the small table in the kitchen that rarely gets used. Regina dims the lights with a wave of her hand, lights some candles, and it’s the best dining experience Emma’s had in possibly her entire life.

It is not romantic because Emma is trying very hard to be normal about their closeness lately and she is fully aware that Regina just…operates like this. Regina probably eats like this when she’s alone, too. You can take the queen out of the Enchanted Forest but you can’t…yadda yadda yadda.

“You could have had a second career as a maitre d’,” Emma pronounces as they finish dinner, a vital reminder to herself that this is all this is..

Regina’s eyes flicker, but she laughs. “I’ll consider it. Maybe I can do both simultaneously, sort of how you’re pulling double duty as sheriff and personal bodyguard.”

“Your guards are useless.” Emma wrinkles her nose. There is a certain distaste that she feels for them, a resentment she can’t exactly pin down. “You did just fine for eight years in magical Storybrooke without them.”

“I did just fine because I had you.” Regina rolls her eyes with fondness, and unwarranted warmth sings through Emma’s body. “Who needs a personal bodyguard when you’re right there, putting yourself between me and angry mobs or unhinged villains or your own family?” She sets her hand down on the table, the tips of her fingers brushing against Emma’s. “The kids are the best thing that ever happened to me, of course. But I wouldn’t be here—not physically, not emotionally, not mentally—without you.”

The kitchen feels too bright, suddenly, as though Emma is sitting there exposed to the world. “It was a group effort,” Emma protests. “My parents—Henry—”

“You, Emma. It’s always you.” Regina stands, reaching out to take the plates, and Emma springs to her feet to cut her off. Regina is not serving and clearing the meal, not when Emma was supposed to—

Regina’s arms move forward as Emma shoots up, and abruptly, they are pressed against each other, Regina’s arms on either side of Emma’s. Regina freezes, same as Emma, their faces so close that Emma can feel Regina’s warm breath against her lips, that she can see Regina’s wide, brown eyes, that she can almost sense the warmth radiating off of her body.

There is something hot and wanting between them, and Emma’s mind goes blissfully blank. There are no sensible warnings ricocheting through her mind, no reminders of what she might ruin. There are only Regina’s lips, dangerously close, and Emma needs—she needs—

She lurches forward, her hands moving up to bury themselves in Regina’s hair, her lips colliding with Regina’s. Regina shudders against her, presses herself even closer, her body gyrating against Emma’s, and Emma lets out a sound almost like a sob against her mouth. “Regina—” She struggles with herself, her fingers loosening from where they’re tangled in Regina’s hair, a moment of hesitation. Of sense, threatening to crash down upon her.

“Do not stop,” Regina orders, her hands clamping onto Emma’s hips with an iron grip, and she moves again, rolls her body against Emma’s in invitation. Emma forgets her protests, drops her hands, and lifts Regina up onto the table, clumsily sweeping the plates to the side. One of them crashes to the floor and Regina hisses, pulling back for an instant so Emma can see eyes blown wide with desire, wild and wanting.

Emma pushes Regina back, presses her against the window beside the table and shoves up the slinky Enchanted Forest dress that Regina had worn for the restaurant. She has wanted this for…for how long? Years. Since she’d first met her, and Regina had just been an attractive stranger. Since the first time Regina had picked a fight with her, since the first time Regina had been honest with her, since the first time Regina had stood too close and Emma had forgotten her own name.

She has dreamed of these thighs, has dreamed of peeling off stockings and watched Regina’s knees rise unconsciously. She’s dreamed of pulling her forward, of laving Regina with her tongue, to watch Regina’s hips jerk as she cries out Emma’s name. She has dreamed of all of this, of Regina’s taste on her tongue, and she is drunk on the reality of it. On Regina’s scent, her taste, her thighs tightening around Emma’s head. On the hands clenched in her hair as Regina lets out mewls, hisses, a thousand animalistic noises of pleasure until she’s crying out, rolling her body against Emma’s mouth, and Emma almost comes herself from the sheer ecstasy of this moment.

It feels like an instant later when Regina yanks her forward by the hair, her eyes wild and purple mist rising around them. Abruptly, they are in Regina’s bedroom, and Emma is thrown backward in one motion onto Regina’s bed. “I’m going to make you scream,” Regina promises, and she pounces, tearing at Emma’s clothes, her teeth at Emma’s skin. Emma writhes against her, peels off her clothing, too, and she is screaming soon, crests over fall after fall, Regina’s fingers moving within her with expert skill and her mouth swallowing up Emma’s cries.

And then again, their bodies sweat-slicked and warm despite the cool air filtering into the room. And again and again, Regina between her knees, Emma’s breasts pressed into her back, Regina’s hands everywhere and a spark of something that must be magic plucking at Emma’s most sensitive spots, leaving her overstimulated and desperate and in a state of such arousal that she can’t speak.

When she finally collapses on the bed, spent, Regina tugs the comforter out from under Emma and wraps it around them both, and slow horror begins to wash over Emma.

After years of repressing feelings and doing her best to ignore her attraction, she had just shown her hand. Embarrassingly so. She had gone down on Regina on her kitchen table. She just killed one of the most important relationships of her life for an hour or two of ecstasy.

No. No. She needs to fix this before Regina says a word, before Regina starts asking questions that Emma can only lie in response to. Before they’re trapped in a cycle of awkward avoidance. Regina doesn’t have feelings for Emma. Emma knows how Regina gets when she has feelings, the gentle girlishness and the way that she idealizes the other person, the way that she seeks every reason to touch them as though to reassure herself that they’re still there.

Emma might have feelings, which is very inconvenient and totally unnecessary, and she blurts out, “So, are you feeling relaxed now?”

Regina is silent for a moment. Emma can’t see her face, can only feel her arms around Emma’s waist and her chin on Emma’s shoulder, and for a moment, Emma is terrified that Regina isn’t going to answer at all.

Then she says carefully, “Is that what this was about? Giving me a relaxing evening?” It’s a little teasing by the time Regina’s done, more casual, and Emma lets out a little breath of relief.

“I think it’s my duty, as your personal bodyguard,” she shoots back, and Regina laughs, a purring sound that vibrates against Emma’s back.

“You’re doing an excellent job. I should give you a promotion.” She runs a lazy hand over Emma’s stomach, and even after an evening should have exhausted Emma’s libido already, Emma feels a little spark of desire. “I never thought you’d be quite that good at this, honestly.”

“Excuse me?” Emma catches her hand and pinches it in reproof.

“Well, I saw who you were satisfied with for years,” Regina retorts, her hand snaking down to toy with loose curls. Emma’s breath hitches, and Regina rubs her thumb in gentle circles, drawing out Emma’s need like a slow burn.

“Not often…satisfied…” Emma gasps out, more like a choking, strangled noise than a real response. Regina has an instinct for Emma’s body, as fluid and insightful as her grasp of all the rest of Emma, and she moves just so, her words like a velvet touch against Emma’s ear.

“It’s not like we didn’t all know that you settled,” she murmurs. “That you thought that he would give you something that you’d always wanted. Who would have imagined that this was what you really craved?” Her murmur has fallen to a purr, teasing Regina transformed to a seductress, and Emma writhes against her steady stroking. “That you just needed a gentle touch, the right hands on your body—” She presses hard with the heel of her hand and Emma jolts, her body seizing up, the pleasure coursing through her like a tsunami. Regina holds her in place, unrelenting, and Emma shakes in her arms, rides out the entire wave with Regina murmuring filthy comments in her ear through it.

And when she finally stops trembling, she’s left with a helpless sense of devastation, of getting everything she’s ever wanted except all wrong, and she suddenly, desperately needs out.

She is gripped by the urge to twist around and catch Regina’s lips again, to say everything that she’s kept bottled up for years, and she fights it like she’s never fought before. She slips out of Regina’s grasp instead and pulls herself from the bed. “I’ve gotta grab a shower and get back before Ry starts asking questions,” she says. “But that was—” Her throat stops up, rebels against what she wants to say.

She motors through. “That was fun.”

Regina stares at her for a moment, her face unreadable, and Emma is terrified like she’s never been before. Then Regina flashes her a wicked smile. “It was. We should do it again sometime. It’s…I’ve missed having companionship.” She pronounces it rife with innuendo, and Emma laughs and ducks into her bathroom.

Then she sobs in the shower, because nothing has been ruined.

It’s not that Emma meant for any of this to happen. She’s always been attracted to Regina, sure. She’s also always been attracted to Ruby and Mulan and even Zelena, just a little. She just…knows a lot of attractive people. It’s not like those had consumed her.

She had felt a strange empathy for Regina even when they’d been mortal enemies, had always wanted to understand her, to get through to her somehow. For Henry, but also…something that had transcended Henry, that had become something so essential to her existence that she had felt irrationally lost and abandoned when Regina had left town.

Emma hadn’t consciously developed feelings for Regina. Hadn’t walked into the mayoral office one day and thought, oh, I love you. There hadn’t been a great moment of realization that had staggered her. There is only the ever-present awareness of what Regina means to her, and when Emma thinks back through the years, she can’t recall a time when she didn’t feel this way about Regina.

And now, she has new memories that won’t leave her, her skin molded to Regina’s so securely that it’s learned her touch, that it won’t forget it. Now, she knows what Regina tastes like, had managed it without killing their friendship, and it should be better, should feel good, except for the strange, emotional way that she wants to fall apart whenever she thinks about Regina laughing, you’re doing an excellent job, we should do it again, I’ve missed having companionship. Like this is casual. Like this is two friends, scratching an itch together.

It’s the most she’ll ever get of Regina. It’s more than she’d ever imagined was available to her. And it makes her want to catapult herself off the top of Town Hall and embrace oblivion.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, she tells herself the next time. Because there is a next time, because now that they’ve done it once, they can’t seem to keep their hands off of each other. Regina walks them back to Emma’s place one evening and then teleports right onto Emma’s bed, legs crossed and smirk expectant when Emma walks into her bedroom. Emma visits Regina’s office at lunch one day and finds herself on Regina’s lap a few minutes later, the door locked as Regina brings her to the edge.

“We’re just too good at this not to keep it up,” Emma says after another bout in Regina’s living room.

“That’s the spirit,” Regina says agreeably. She’s always agreeable when they’re done, slack against Emma like she’s another pillow. “We’re just two consenting adults having a nice time together. Sometimes, that means wine or a movie. Other times—” And she snakes a hand onto Emma and makes her whine, just a little.

It’s casual. It’s ecstasy. It’s a new kind of heaven and hell all mixed into one cocktail that’s going to kill Emma one day, if the Mage Coalition doesn’t get her first.

The latter is a real risk at their negotiations sometimes.

It’s been nearly three weeks since the first time that Emma and Regina had crossed the line, and Emma is on self-imposed bodyguard duty. She is standing too straight today, on high alert, and even the tips of Regina’s fingers on her shoulder doesn’t relax her today. Regina, at least, will probably ascribe it to tension about the Mage Coalition, who have sent several dignitaries today to talk in circles around them. As usual.

The Speaker Mage is in the back this time, his sharp, pinched nose scrunched like he isn’t happy about it. In front are two mages whom Emma doesn’t recognize, all as ancient as the Speaker Mage. One introduces himself as the Diplomat Mage, which begs the question of what they’ve been doing until now if not diplomacy. The other is called the Secondary Mage, though he seems to be the highest-ranking mage present.

“We have conferred with our council and inspected the rift you’ve been concerned about,” the Secondary Mage announces. “The Head Mage believes that you are correct. The rift is taking more magic than we anticipated.”

Regina doesn’t move from her throne, doesn’t budge at all, and the only sign of her anxiety are her shifting fingers, dipping down from the side of her throne to dance against Emma’s shoulder. She waits in silence.

“He would like to take action to protect our people.”

He. Completely inappropriately, Emma blurts out, “Are there any woman mages in your lands?”

The Secondary Mage looks puzzled. “How would they keep their magic after birthing a son?”

The Diplomat Mage clarifies. “Some women are born with an echo of magic, certainly. But it transfers in the womb to her first son. Rarely are there women who avoid that fate. Some leave our lands entirely. But none has ever risen to the position of mage.”

“I’d leave, too,” Emma mutters, and Regina’s fingernails dig warningly into her jacket. That awakens all kinds of memories that Emma can’t think of right now, and she falls back into silence.

The Secondary Mage looks offended, but he clears his throat. “We are reluctant to cede any power to your organization. The Mage Coalition has been independent for over eight centuries, and we do not wish to be absorbed into a patchwork of weaker kingdoms.”

“However,” the Diplomat Mage chimes in, “We recognize that this is an urgent time. Perhaps we can allow for an alliance. A merging of our empires, if you will. One that will allow for us to keep our independence.”

Regina’s face is carefully blank. “What do you have in mind?”

The Diplomat Mage smiles. “The Speaker Mage tells us that you are unattached,” he says, and Emma’s blood runs cold. “Our Head Mage is, as well. If you wish us to join you, you must wed him. It will be a marriage of power and dominance, joining your worlds to ours in the process. It is the only option. The only way to keep our worlds intact.”

Bile rises in Emma’s throat as the words register, growing in heinousness with every passing moment. She jerks around to watch Regina.

Regina is frozen in place, her eyes wide, something very young and afraid within them, and Emma can’t even think of herself, of how it might feel to watch Regina married. Emma can’t think of anything except the desolation lurking beneath Regina’s eyes, the trauma that would come from another unwilling marriage, another wedding with no way out.

“Absolutely not,” she hisses, and the Secondary Mage looks affronted again.

“Your guard is very forward,” he says. “I wonder if you might consider guards that are more equipped for the difficulties of the throne room. The Head Mage will expect some respect.”

“Regina isn’t getting forced into another marriage,” Emma snarls, taking a step forward. “You can find some other way to save face, but we won’t allow you to—”

Regina’s voice rings out from behind Emma, stopping her in her tracks. “I would like to meet him before I make a decision,” she says. And then, with a certainty that she can’t possibly feel, “I must do what I can to protect our worlds.”

Emma’s entire body feels as though it’s vibrating, as though friction has turned into coursing heat and fury. The Secondary Mage nods, his lips pursing together. “He will arrive tomorrow to court you.”

Tomorrow. The mages might have talked around their fears, but they aren’t wasting any time. They’re nervous about the rift, are speeding this along, and they’re determined to marry Regina to their Head Mage. Emma is nauseous.

The meeting ends, and Regina rises, inclining her head toward her actual guards. “I will retire to my office,” she says, and she walks out of the throne room, Emma hot on her heels.

Regina sits on the couch in her office, her hands twisting together, and Emma locks the door and sits down next to her, pulling Regina’s hand into hers. “You don’t have to do it,” she says immediately. “They’re desperate. I saw it. They’ll cave even if you refuse to marry their guy. No one would ever force you to—”

Regina kisses her, hard and fast, and Emma kisses her back. She pours helplessness and rage and strength into it, her yearning set aside and replaced with something protective and defiant. She tilts Regina down onto her back, licks a trail up her neck, cups her breasts over her royal dress and kisses her way down Regina’s cleavage. Regina shakes beneath her, doesn’t take much maneuvering to come, and Emma tries to catch her gaze once the glassiness fades from them.

“You don’t have to do it,” she says again.

“I know.” Regina reaches up, tucks Emma’s hair behind her ear. “I know that.”

“They’re a nightmare. What the fuck is that whole thing about the mages? The babies leech away women’s magic? I’ve given birth to a son in the Land Without Magic and kept mine just fine. They must have set up their world that way to subjugate the women. And they think they can ever subjugate you? They haven’t done any research, obviously.” Emma can feel her chest heaving, her words coming too quickly. She needs to punch something. That Secondary Mage’s face would be perfect.

Regina slides out from under her, her hand still on Emma’s cheek, her finger winding around Emma’s hair. “It might be prudent.” She offers no explanation, no justification, no reason why she would just surrender herself to a fate that has given her nothing but trauma before.

“It would kill you,” Emma says, and she tries to find that young, frightened girl in Regina’s eyes again. But she is gone. Regina is opaque, as unreadable as she is after their trysts. “The people chose you to be queen. That doesn’t mean that you need to…to do these things to protect them. You deserve freedom. You deserve…”

A finger is against Emma’s lips, gentle but unrelenting. “Let me meet him,” Regina says. “Let me see.”

“Fine.” Emma stands up, frustrated at infuriating women who won’t help themselves. “I’m calling Henry.”

Henry is as horrified as she is, which is validating but also makes her even more anxious about it. “And…do we know anything about him? Mom seems fine with it?” He’d jumped into a portal the next morning to get here faster, and he walks with Emma to Town Hall and the castle adjoined to it.

“She isn’t fine. She says she’s fine, but you know how she gets when she doesn’t want to listen to anyone else.” Regina had refused to talk about it at dinner last night altogether, had ignored Emma whenever she’d tried to bring it up. Ry had been puzzled about the whole thing. He’s still a little too new to this world to grasp Emma’s aversion to political marriages, and ones for Regina in particular.

Henry gets it. “They can’t force it, though. That’s the point of putting Mom in charge of the entire world. We’re supposed to be free to make our own decisions. To overthrow all the monarchies and—well, you know. Mom does not have to marry some old guy. Not ever again.” He shoots her a sidelong glance. “How are you handling this?”

“Handling what? Regina not marrying some stuffy old mage? I don’t think there’s much to handle there. Why would I be handling anything?” She’s talking too much. “How’s Lucy’s new school?”

Henry lights up, distracted, and begins a recounting of Lucy’s adjustment to her new classes.

They make their way down Main Street as he talks. It’s shifted in recent months, has become prime real estate now that Storybrooke is at the center of a massive group of unified worlds. Granny is expanding, and formerly abandoned storefronts are big and booming. If there’s an occasional monster attack, it doesn’t seem to dissuade anyone from shopping there.

Emma takes pity on a good-looking man in a jacket and jeans who’s wandering around, staring at Ye Olde Magicke Shop with a look of bewilderment on his face. “You aren’t going to get anything too exciting there. A couple of minor spells, some tonics to keep you healthy,” she offers. Every now and then, they’ll get visitors from one of the less fairytale-style lands, still wrapping their heads around the idea of magic. “But the back room still has all the stuff that used to be in the pawn shop, and some of that might be cursed. Could be fun for a game night.”

“Right. Is that real magic in there?” The man shakes his head like he’s dislodging himself from a bad dream. “It doesn’t look like magic.”

“You’d be surprised. Where are you from?”

Before the man can answer, a fiery beast emerges from the woods near Main Street, trailing flames behind it and roaring at the top of its lungs. Emma sighs. “That’s magic.” It only happens a few times a week, and it would happen today, when Regina is already dealing with enough.

Well, this is why Emma is still the sheriff. She reaches out with her magic, feels the pipes rushing with water beneath the concrete ground, tracks them to the hydrants that dot Main Street and let them erupt at the fire beast. Its flames are put out in an instant, and it is abruptly less intimidating—only an enormous, vicious demon with slavering teeth and wild eyes.

So still pretty dangerous.

Emma sighs, situating herself between Henry and the beast, and raises her hands. She sees Regina striding down the street from a distance, ready to chip in if they need it, and she shakes her head. This one is fine. She’s got it under control.

And then the lost-looking man who had been standing next to her throws what looks like a punch in midair, and a stream of magic emerges from his fist, so immense that the monster bursts into a million tiny pieces and then blows away in the wind.

Emma’s head pounds as she makes a terrible realization. Henry exclaims, “Wait, I know you! You once knocked out a herd of ogres who attacked our forest!” Regina arrives, her fingers on Henry’s cheeks, her eyes examining Henry for any damage before she turns, satisfied, and does the same to Emma.

“Were you hurt? I saw there was fire. What did you do to the demon?” She brushes her fingers along Emma’s jawline, her dark eyes questing. “Is that a bruise? I’ll kill it.”

“Mom. You’re being embarrassing,” Henry says, sounding fond instead of embarrassed. “You can’t kill it. He already did.”

“He? Who?” Regina twists around, and studies the man as though she’s only just noticed that he exists. Emma studies him, too, with narrowed eyes and absolute disdain. He’s not that good-looking, she decides. He just has decently proportional features, and a neat little black beard over light brown skin. He’s just…a lot younger than she’d expected. Younger than Emma, even, with a casual feel to him that Emma didn’t think was possible for any of them.

He turns, sees Regina, and seems to light up. Emma knows why, of course. If she’d been promised to some strange woman by a bunch of old men and realized that she looked like that, she’d probably have the same look on her face. But it still grates at her. “Him,” she says dully. “The Head Mage.”

“That’s…” Regina cocks her head, her gaze turning contemplative. “You don’t look very much like the rest of them.”

“You mean I’m not a stodgy old man?” The Head Mage laughs. Emma glares at him. Henry chews on his lip. Regina’s eyes don’t leave him. “Unfortunately for the Secondary Mage, the Head Mage is chosen based on who possesses the strongest power, even if he’s a brash fifteen-year-old. It’s been a decade and a half now. They’re used to me. I think they like the idea of seeing me married, though. Settling me down a little, and with such a striking, powerful woman.” He steps forward, drops to one knee, and takes Regina’s hand in his. He raises the back of it to his lips.

Regina gazes at him. Emma is seized with the childish desire to stomp on the ground until Regina pays attention to her again. She quashes it, but Regina’s eyes still flicker to her as the Head Mage kisses her hand. “Thank you,” she says. “For stepping in to save my son and my…my Emma.”

“One might even say that it was a little convenient, yeah?” Emma puts in. “Nothing wins Regina over like protecting her family.” Henry elbows her. “What? Weren’t we all thinking it?”

“Emma,” Regina says, shooting her a quelling look. “Stop.”

“No, that’s fair,” the Head Mage says, grinning boyishly at Emma like they’re friends. They are not friends. Emma wishes she’d thrown him to the fire beast. “Does it help if I tell you that I had other plans to win your queen over? I dressed in the cultural garb of this place—” He gestures at his clothes.

“Regina would never be caught dead in the vicinity of anyone in a jacket like that,” Emma says. The Head Mage blinks at her, and Emma is abruptly left with the unfortunate knowledge that they’re wearing the same jacket.

“And I didn’t come empty-handed.” The Head Mage holds out his free hand, and a gorgeous golden bracelet forms around Regina’s wrist above where he holds her hand, rubies sparkling from within it.

Regina smiles. “You’ve done your research,” she says, lifting his hand, and the Head Mage rises with it, standing opposite her. Their hands are still clasped, and the Head Mage murmurs something to Regina that has her smiling, her eyes guarded but not unhappy.

Emma’s eyes are fixed on the bracelet, on those clasped hands, on the rubies that gleam against the gold. And maybe it’s just her, but that bracelet is looking remarkably like a handcuff.

Henry stays all afternoon, hovering close to Regina like a bodyguard. Emma, hereby replaced for the day, is forced to linger in the sheriff’s station. The fire beast had been only the first of an onslaught, so Emma spends the bulk of the day getting burned and soaked, alternatively. She hates to think of what she must look right now like next to the Head Mage, with his perfectly selected clothing and well-groomed face.

Not that any of that is relevant. Emma is not going to be jealous of the Head Mage, whose potential relationship with Regina is even less solid than Emma’s. For all Regina’s willingness to martyr herself for the good of her people, Emma isn’t going to allow it to come to that. Regina isn’t going into another arranged marriage. This is diplomacy, too, forging bonds with a powerful leader so they might reach an accord. If nothing else, the Head Mage seems moderately more reasonable than the Speaker Mage.

That’s all this is going to amount to.

Still, something sharp stabs its way through Emma when she sees Regina emerge from Town Hall, pushing Hope in her stroller, Henry on one side and the Head Mage on the other. It looks so dangerously domestic that she freezes midway through an attack on the final fire beast, her throat closing up.

Do it right now or he will, she reminds herself sharply, and she unleashes a surge of magic so blinding that the street seems to light up with a second sun upon it. The beast crumbles into ash, and Emma turns, eyeballing the mage.

Beat that.

But instead, she’s treated to the sight of Regina racing down the sidewalk to her, her eyes narrowed in concern. “What the hell are you doing?” Regina demands.

“Oh, no, did I embarrass you in front of your fiancé?” Emma might sound a little splenetic. “Storybrooke is looking a little less than perfect today?”

“What?” Regina looks baffled at the hostility, then shakes it off, glowering at her. “If you’re going to deal with demon attacks all day, you get me. We’ve talked about this. Look at you. You’re all—” She waves a hand at Emma, her thumb catching a bit of ash and swiping it from Emma’s face. “And I know you’ve got bruises under your jacket. And you’re drenched—”

Emma shrugs off her jacket to check. Underneath it, she only has a soaking wet, thin white tank top, clinging to her body and nearly translucent. She looks down at it and grimaces.

When she looks up, Regina is still staring at her tank top, her eyes dark and just a tiny bit dilated. “Bruises,” she says, as though it has taken extra effort for her to talk.

“I just have one,” Emma says, patting the side of her abdomen. “I think. That’s the only part where it’s sore. I got thrown into a hydrant. Kind of my fault. I didn’t—” She stops short as Regina, right in the middle of Main Street, seizes her tank top and rolls it up over the bruise.

Emma glances down the street, her breath hitching as Regina’s fingers touch a tender spot. Henry and the Head Mage are lost in conversation, Henry gesturing to Geppetto’s carpentry shop with enthusiasm as he rocks Hope’s stroller. Granny is standing in her doorway, eyebrows raised as she takes them in. No one else seems to notice the Good Queen peeling up Emma’s tank top to inspect her bruise.

“This isn’t a bump, Emma,” Regina says, frowning. Whatever moment of attraction she might have felt at first is gone now, replaced with concern. “It wraps around your entire back. How does your spine feel? Let’s get you into the station.”

“I’m fine,” Emma protests. “Shouldn’t you be—aren’t you busy with your—”

“I can’t believe that you would think that any diplomatic visit would take precedence over you,” Regina says darkly, and she herds Emma into the station. Emma is briefly without words.

Once they’re inside, she runs her thumbs over Emma’s wet tank top, tracing the curves of her body for a gripped moment. Emma closes her eyes and inhales sharply. Being touched by Regina like this shouldn’t still feel like a novelty, like something impossible and precious each time, but she can feel herself come to life with wanting, with a warm flush of desire.

“Don’t get too excited,” Regina murmurs, shooting her a wry glance like she knows exactly what Emma’s thinking. “I’m here to treat you. The other way,” she clarifies, and dares to smirk for a split second. Emma loves her so much that she might choke.

She gives Emma a light shove into her chair, and Emma is briefly flooded by a wave of agony before healing, gentle hands are splayed across her bruised torso. Then she only feels peace, something bright and glowing in her chest, and she closes her eyes, overwhelmed by a sense of renewal.

Regina has gotten really, really good at healing since she’d stepped into that portal and left Emma behind. Emma nearly dozes off, feels a kiss to her hair and warm wind drying her clothes, and when she finally opens her eyes, a little sluggish and oddly refreshed, Regina is smiling down at her with those warm, unforgettable eyes. “All better?”

“Forget maitre d’,” Emma says sleepily. “You should run a spa.”

“I’m a woman of many talents.” Regina tangles her fingers into Emma’s hair for a moment, gentle and affectionate. “I wish you would have called me earlier.”

“You seemed busy with your…guest.” Emma slouches in her chair. “You like him?”

“He is likable,” Regina says. “He doesn’t want to jump into an arranged marriage. He wants us to get to know each other first. He wants to spend some time here. Meet my family, my friends.” She sits down on the desk, her face uncertain. “He isn’t what I thought he would be. I don’t know if it would be the same as it was with…with the king.”

“If you don’t want it, then it’s the same.” Emma reaches for Regina’s hands, holds them in hers, and Regina falls silent. “Look, tonight…why don’t we give Ry the night off and just order in at my place? We can have more time then, you can sleep over—in the guest room,” she adds, lest Regina think that this is anything but an attempt to talk things out. “Or wherever,” she finishes, because she’s only human. “But just…process a little.”

“You are so good to me,” Regina murmurs, and the warmth that floods Emma has nothing to do with magic. “But he…the Head Mage…he wanted to take me out for dinner. To spend time with each other in a less formal setting.”

“Oh.” Emma’s head hurts. The bruise on her torso, gone now, still seems to ache with invisible pain. “Don’t…uh, don’t take him to that new restaurant in the Enchanted Forest.”

“Emma.” Regina is watching her, and Emma feels it like a prickle across her body, making her itchy and uncertain. “Are you…are you all right with all this?”

“Obviously not,” Emma says immediately. “There is no reason for them to bully you into an arranged marriage when—”

“I didn’t ask if I was all right with all this,” Regina corrects her, which is stupid, because that’s the whole issue. But when Regina’s gaze is this steady, this compassionate, Emma can’t point that out. “I asked if you were. Because we…” She gestures, the motion loose between them. “If you aren’t…”

The idea of Regina’s compassion transforming to pity stops Emma in her tracks. Of Regina understanding what their…whatever they’ve been doing…of Regina grasping what it means to Emma. Of the rift growing between them, wider and wider, because Regina is so leery of hurting Emma that they drift apart. Of Regina seeing Emma as a sadsack friend who’s so obsessed with Regina that they can’t have a functional friendship, let alone—

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Emma gives Regina a little shove on her thigh. Friendly. Dismissive. She’s cool as a cucumber. “I thought we agreed that we were just having a good time. Enjoying some excellent sexual compatibility.” She waggles her eyebrows. “I hope this little date tonight isn’t going to get in the way of that.”

Regina turns away from her, and Emma can’t see her expression. For a moment, she’s petrified that she’s said the wrong thing, that she’s shown her hand. But when Regina turns back, it’s to press a kiss to Emma’s cheek and a squeeze to Emma’s thigh.

“I’ve got to go check on Henry and the Head Mage,” she says, her fingers drifting to Emma’s knee. “I don’t…I’ll try to drop by later, okay? After dinner.”

“Okay,” Emma says, and she longs to catch Regina’s wrist as she turns away, to say wait. To say that marriage would be poison for you. To say you’ve atoned enough and you deserve peace. To say I was lying when I said that this means nothing.

But she just watches her go and aches, aches, aches.

Regina returns from her outing with the Head Mage with a flush to her cheeks that Emma wants to ascribe to wine and not the fact that the Head Mage is very effusive, Regina allows, once they’re all curled up together in front of the TV. Ry is watching avidly, still caught up in the novelty of action hero films, and Regina has Hope on her lap, fast asleep. Emma sits stiffly, her hands on her lap because she doesn’t know what to do with them, and Regina shoots her worried glances until Emma sighs and wraps an arm around her shoulders. Regina snuggles in, pulls a blanket over the three of them, and she murmurs acid-sharp commentary on the movie into Emma’s ear until Ry kicks them both out.

“Effusive how?” Emma demands after Hope is in her crib and they’re hiding out from an irritated Ry in the kitchen. Regina digs through her cabinet for their favorite wine glasses and Emma leans against the wall, watching her steady movements. “Was he pushy?”

“Not at all. He only talked about…about what he’d heard of me in the past. Their time passes at a different rate than ours, and he was already Head Mage when I took over my kingdom. The other mages were scandalized at a witch ruling a kingdom.” Regina sets the glasses onto the counter. “He claims that he was intrigued.”

“Well, obviously,” Emma says, scowling at Regina’s back. “You were powerful and beautiful and just a tiny bit homicidal. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have been intrigued. When I was in the past—” She stops abruptly.

“Hm?”

It’s a sick kind of irony, how Regina feels so far away right now, but Emma can cave to her impulses in a way that she never has before. She slips up behind Regina, wrapping her arms around Regina’s waist and feeling the way that Regina exhales against her. “You were…really a sight to behold, you know? You forced me to kneel and I was pretty sure you were going to kill me but if you’d ordered me into your bedchambers right then—” Regina tilts her neck, and Emma lowers her lips to it, brushes kisses against warm skin and hears Regina’s sharp intake of breath. “I wouldn’t have hesitated for an instant.”

“God.” Regina shudders against her, and Emma lets one hand dip lower, splaying it over her center. “But you still…five minutes after you got back, you were with him.”

“You were attached. I didn’t know this was an option.” Emma sucks on Regina’s neck, laves the area with her tongue, feels Regina’s hitched breathing like a victory. “I wouldn’t have been opposed if you’d suggested…”

“Some stress release?” Regina laughs softly, and Emma thinks, this is enough. It has to be. “We’d have never gotten anything done. An enemy would have attacked, and I’d have been thinking about your—oh.” She lets out a little gasp as Emma presses against the right spot, the silky fabric of her dress hardly enough to muffle the feeling.

Emma licks her earlobe, lets her teeth close around it for an instant, and presses a knuckle against Regina’s clit, moving it in slow circles. “Oh,” Regina whispers, and her hands drop to the edge of the counter, digging into it.

There is a certain kind of power that comes with Regina unraveling beneath her touch, with seeing what she can do to the force of nature that is Regina Mills. Emma doesn’t pull her dress up, doesn’t attempt to slide her fingers inside, only strokes and presses, licks and sucks, tastes skin beneath her lips and feels tremors passing through the woman in her arms.

Regina presses herself against Emma, arms shaking and body quaking, and Emma gradually brings her to the edge, every breathless whimper sending a bolt through Emma. Emma is drunk on Regina, desperate for more of this, and she moves steadily, slowly.

Let the Head Mage talk big. Emma has this, and she isn’t letting go.

“Do you think he could do what I do?” she breathes. “That he could take you apart this easily?”

Regina chokes out something inaudible, pushing herself against Emma’s hand. Emma digs her finger against Regina’s clothed center and Regina lets out a low whining noise. “Easy,” she whispers again, kissing Regina’s neck.

“Like…like you were…made for me,” Regina gasps out, and Emma is so startled that she presses too hard, too quickly, and Regina comes undone under her touch, shaking and shaking until Emma has to wrap her arms around her to keep her upright, holding her tightly against her.

When Regina finally stops tremoring, she clutches Emma’s arms, swaying in place for a moment. They don’t move, and Emma is silent, Regina’s last words ricocheting through her mind. She knows better than to read too much into what a woman says as she’s about to come, even when it’s something she’s craved for years.

Then Regina twists in her arms and leans against her shoulder, arms coming up to tighten around Emma as though it is too much effort to stay upright. “Like you said,” she murmurs, “excellent sexual compatibility.”

Like you were made for me.

Emma opens her mouth to say something—anything—and then, a sharp cry sounds from the baby monitor in the hallway. Regina kisses her collarbone. “Go to Hope,” she says, her hands dropping from Emma’s sides. “I’ve got to head out, anyway. It’s late.” She takes a step back, her cheeks flushed and her eyes averted from Emma. “I’ll owe you one.”

“Next time,” Emma says, putting in effort to keep her voice lightly teasing. She opts to look on the bright side when Regina steps out with just a quick goodbye to Ry.

However much the Head Mage is trying to woo Regina, Regina is still thinking about a next time with Emma. Regina isn’t committed yet.

Not that the Head Mage has conceded. He appears at Regina’s office the next morning with flowers and her breakfast order from Granny’s, which a traitorous waitress had helped him to arrange. He goes to visit Henry and his family, who are reluctantly impressed with him.

“I don’t like this arranged marriage element,” Henry admits on a call, frowning. “But if it had to be anyone…he really is a decent guy. You remember the last one was…a little on the boring side? Not really a conversationalist, either? But the Head Mage sat down with Lucy and talked to her about math for a half hour. How it works in Hyperion Heights, how they do math in his world…”

“So you’re saying he’s even more boring than the last one,” Emma says.

“Be nice.” Henry wrinkles his nose in the phone screen. “Mom likes him, I think. She’s a little cagey about the whole thing. But she was really glad that he came to spend time with us. It’s…I worry about this, of course, but he’s making a real effort with us.”

He even makes an effort with Emma, utterly oblivious to the disdain that she feels for him. “I know that you’re Regina’s closest friend,” he says, catching up with her as she dispatches a group of wild pteranodons who’ve been preying on the clocktower recently. “I thought we could get to know each other. See what we have in common aside for a proclivity for target practice.” He blasts one of the pteranodons out of the sky just as Emma gets the one beside it. “You’re quite strong.”

“Right. No one stole my powers out of me when I had my kids,” Emma says tightly.

The Head Mage winces. “I wish the Speaker Mage wouldn’t have mentioned that. It’s not…it isn’t something we chose.” He brightens. “Perhaps Regina will have the power to investigate and change that. We’re long overdue for some new perspectives.”

“Regina isn’t going to marry into a misogynistic society. You know what happened the last time she was forced into an arranged marriage?” Emma asks, keeping her voice pleasant.

To her displeasure, the Head Mage laughs. “Of course. I will endeavor to never deserve the queen’s vexation.” He squints up at the sky. “Is Storybrooke always under attack like this?”

“Yep. Part of the package.” Emma gets two pteranodons this time before the Head Mage can blast one.

Instead of looking chastened, he looks admiring. “You are very impressive. I wonder if this is what we’re losing when we lose the female mages,” he muses. “Between you and Regina, Storybrooke has more power than most of our mages combined.”

“That’s not how your Speaker Mage tells it.”

“Yes, well. He’s a bit of what you would call…what does Regina say? A dick.” He pronounces it proudly.

“She call you that a lot?”

“Never. Only the other mages. I tend to agree.” The Head Mage winks at Emma.

And Emma decides, with an uneasy feeling, that she can’t just brush him off forever. If Regina really…if Regina is serious about letting him court her, then Emma needs to know everything about him. Every flaw, every personality tic, every reason why he might pose a danger to Regina, physically and emotionally.

“Look,” she says. “You want to get lunch?”

She takes him to Granny’s, where she orders him a grilled cheese sandwich that he pronounces the best thing that he’s tasted in this land thus far. Emma watches him eat it with marked suspicion. “So you’re just…cool with getting hitched to someone you don’t know. This whole arranged marriage thing. Were you even single?”

“Single?” The terminology seems to escape him.

“Unattached. Like, you didn’t have a girlfriend back home?” The Head Mage shakes his head. “Boyfriend?” Another shake. “Why not? Most powerful guy in your land, and you aren’t…” Emma waves her hand vaguely at him. “You aren’t completely hideous.”

“You flatter me.” The Head Mage takes another bite of grilled cheese, eyes closing in brief ecstasy. “I have had dalliances in the past, but no one who really struck me. None who compared to Regina.”

“Convenient.” Emma narrows her eyes at him. “And with those high standards, you were totally willing to marry a stranger.”

“Not a stranger.” The Head Mage turns his attention to the fries that Emma had gotten on the side. “I had heard of her, many years ago, when they still called her evil. I have been following her career since. That curse was phenomenal magic. And the news my mages have carried to me! She once moved the moon, you must know that.”

“We did it together, actually,” Emma feels obligated to point out. The Head Mage should be very aware that Emma is capable and dangerous and will murder anyone who hurts Regina.

“Of course, of course. The two strongest women in your world, unstoppable together. It’s why I think that we must be friends,” the Head Mage says, leaning forward. “We will be spending much time together if Regina does accept my offer of marriage. And I know that your approval is paramount to her acceptance.”

“You think she won’t marry you if I don’t like you?” Emma says skeptically.

The Head Mage looks sincere. “Certainly. A close friend is something more beloved than a husband or wife. If Regina concedes to visit my land, I will introduce her to my own dearest friend, the Weather Mage. We were raised by neighboring mages, and I am never at peace unless he is nearby. He is my starlight, my heart, my other half.”

That feels…a little on the nose. “Mm-hm. Are you sleeping with him?”

The Head Mage’s brow wrinkles. “Why would I sleep with him? He is like a brother to me, as Regina is like a sister to you.”

“Right. Yeah, that’s what I meant to ask.” It had been a shot in the dark, really, though it leaves Emma a little glum. It also explains why the Head Mage is so pleasant to her, because she’d half thought that he was onto her by now. But if he has platonic relationships that he describes as my starlight, my heart, my other half, then he must think that Emma is just…a really good friend.

Which is what she is, and she grudgingly has to admit to Regina later that day that she hasn’t found any fatal flaws in the Head Mage. “Maybe he’s homophobic,” she says, sounding a little too hopeful to be impartial. “He told me he’s never even had a boyfriend.”

“I think they just call that straight, Ma,” Ry says, rolling his eyes at her from the other side of the table. “He’s been dropping by in the afternoons to spar with us, and he didn’t blink twice when Alice and Robin started kissing in the middle of the piste.”

“Well, he might’ve been objectifying them. Besides, he told me that he likes grilled cheese most of everything here. You have a delicate stomach,” Emma says, twisting back to Regina. “What are you going to do if he wants to soak everything in cheese all the time?”

Regina looks pointedly at Emma’s plate, which is covered with a cheese sauce that Regina has used only sparingly. “Somehow, I’ll manage.”

“And you’re…” Emma glances at Ry, who is busy coating his broccoli with the same layer of cheese. “You’re really ready to jump into marriage with someone you barely know?”

Regina shrugs, her shoulders delicate and small. Emma wants to run her hands over them right now, wants to gently slide Regina’s cardigan from her shoulders and down her arms, to kiss her and never let go. Instead, she presses a little harder. “Would you even consider dating him if not for the rift between worlds? If not for the mages’ ultimatum?”

“It’s not really relevant, is it? This is where we stand, and we don’t have another option. I’m…I’m fortunate that the man they’ve put forward is…is a good match.” Regina takes a breath, her eyes pleading as she looks at Emma. “For once in my life, the right thing to do isn’t the difficult thing. Can’t we agree on that?”

Great. That’s great. Emma feels like a child, sulky and confused and resentful, determined to hate everything about this situation. She refuses to answer, stabs at her food in the awkward silence that follows and doesn’t speak again until Regina deems the meal finished and starts clearing the table in a subdued, irritable motion. Emma follows suit, her jaw tight, as Ry goes to get Hope out of the pack and play and transfer her to her stroller.

He gives her a wary look as she bundles Hope up. “I’m going to take her home,” he says. “You can catch up. Say goodbye to Mom.” It’s an odd thing, having a second Henry grow up with them, one who’s never experienced them at odds. Henry would have accepted a spat, would have trusted it to end soon. Ry looks stressed, uncertain, as though one of the pillars of his world are in danger of cracking.

So Emma lingers by the door, waits until Regina emerges from the kitchen with her lips thin and her eyes unreadable. And maybe Emma’s supposed to apologize for being so unsupportive about something that she will never support—

But when she opens her mouth, it’s only to blurt out, “I don’t like him.”

Regina’s lips press together so tightly that they’re nearly white. “You’ve made that clear.” She stands opposite Emma, almost in the doorway, her body very stiff. “This is what has to be done to save our lands. And he is…he’s a pleasant conversationalist. He’s interested in me and in my family. He knows my past and accepts it. He has magic to match mine, and he wants to marry me, so what reason is there not to marry him?”

There’s only one answer that Emma can give, so clear to her that it emerges in a rush. “You didn’t choose it. You didn’t choose him.”

Regina stares at her, something softening in her gaze, and Emma feels it deep within her, moves her hands to catch Regina as the other woman moves in. The kiss is gentle at first, almost tender, and then Regina presses harder, mouth moving with desperation, and if they weren’t in an open doorway, Emma might have pushed her against the wall and had her way with Regina right then.

But before Emma can subtly kick the door closed, Regina pulls away. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have done that. We shouldn’t be…”

Emma has the very acute sensation of a rug being pulled out from under her and revealing a black pit beneath the ground, sucking her in. She struggles to keep her voice light, but it wobbles, giving her away. “Since when?”

Regina takes a step back. “We can’t do this anymore,” she says, and she seems to search Emma’s face, hunting for something that Emma refuses to give her. “You and I…”

Starlight, Emma thinks stupidly in the pause that follows. My heart. My other half.

“We were just having fun together,” Regina says finally. “With him…with him, I think it might be real.”

Emma staggers back onto the porch, stunned into silence. Into disbelief, betrayal, hopelessness, and none of it makes sense. It’s idiotic, because she’d known that this was coming. She’d known that this wouldn’t last forever, and somehow…somehow, she hadn’t let herself prepare for this moment at all. Somehow, it still hits like a fist to her face, and she can taste acrid air and despair at once.

“I’m sorry,” Regina whispers. And she closes the door, leaving Emma shattered to pieces on its other side.

And it’s fine. It’s fine, because Emma doesn’t really have a choice in the matter but to be fine.

When Regina had left town, Emma remembers the devastation. Walking toward Town Hall instinctively, then remembering, and being slammed with so much grief that she’d sat down on a bench, on more than one occasion, and cried. She’d ascribed the pain to being pregnant and hormonal, but it hadn’t felt like that when Henry had left. She had missed him desperately, had wondered about him and thought of him all the time, but it hadn’t felt like a loss. It had felt natural, in that strange way that watching a child grow up and find his own life is.

But Regina’s absence had been glaring, had felt like she had lost something so immense that she might never recover. Emma had struggled to eat, to smile, had gone through the motions and wound up at Archie’s twice a week, desperate to talk to someone about it. How could one person leaving her make her feel as though she was drowning?

Her marriage had dissolved rapidly. She had been too lost to be the perfect wife, to be tolerant and fun and funny, and her ex-husband had made his excuses and disappeared. When he was gone, the misery hadn’t compounded. She had only felt relief, and grief that Regina hadn’t been there with her to watch him leave.

She is so, so far gone.

It shouldn’t feel like that again today, when Regina is fully in Storybrooke. When Emma still arrives at the station the next morning to a takeaway bag from Granny’s, as though nothing has changed. When Regina drops in while Emma is fighting an eight-headed serpent and slices off three heads at once and then grins at her with that fierce enjoyment that violence always puts on her face.

But it does, because Emma doesn’t drop into the castle at Town Hall for meetings. Because Emma makes excuses to avoid their dinners together, and she stays home with Hope while Ry shoots her looks and goes to Regina’s alone. Because there is a gap between them, widening by the day, and it’s as deadly and all-consuming as the rift that had started this whole issue in the first place.

She’d spent so long terrified of moving forward, of acting on this ache within her. She’d been sure that it would ruin her relationship with Regina. For a month of dusty arrogance, Emma had believed that she had beaten it, that she could have her Regina and eat it, too. But in the stark light of day, she grasps how foolish she’d been.

From time to time, she glimpses Regina out the window of the station, the Head Mage always walking beside her. He watches her like she’s a revelation, like he’s in awe of the fact that he’s being given the time of day. When she speaks, he hangs onto every word, and Emma should be gratified that Regina is finally seeing someone who grasps how important she is.

Instead, she despises him.

She is at one of the new shops on Main Street one afternoon, Hope in a sling against her as she browses through their offerings. Storybrooke is an amalgam of Enchanted Forest and Land Without Magic fashion lately, and the same stores now offer jeans and ballgowns a few aisles apart. They all seem to employ some kind of expansion magic, too, so small storefronts go on for hundreds of square feet.

Emma is there because Hope is rapidly outgrowing her 3-6 month clothes, and if she doesn’t take initiative, Mary Margaret is going to outfit Hope in the next size at her next visit. “No creampuff dresses for you,” Emma promises Hope, who gurgles happily in response. “We’re going to find the cutest little power dresses for you to wear to work with the Good Queen.” Sharing a baby with a woman she can’t talk to right now still feels concerningly natural to her.

She finds a blue dress that matches one of Regina’s perfectly, then cedes to the weather and pulls leggings off another shelf. Hope chews on a pacifier with remarkable intensity, which is probably a sign that she’s teething and that’s why Emma hasn’t been sleeping at night, rather than heartbreak. Fine. Great.

She’s picking out pajamas for Hope when Hope suddenly shifts, alert, and coos at her. Emma hears it a moment later, as attuned to Regina’s voice as Hope is, and she moves instinctively to hide herself behind a display as Regina glides past.

“I’m not sure about it,” she’s saying, and Emma watches her and feels a thudding in her chest, an ache that leaves her struggling to breathe. Regina is in a small, mayoral grey dress, but with a gentler cut, the kind of thing that Emma has only ever seen her wear before when she’s been in love with some man. The Head Mage is beside her, as always, his hand on the small of Regina’s back. “It’s a long time to be away.”

“You deserve a break,” the Head Mage says gently. “And I would very much like you to see my world. If ours are to be joined, then we should know each other.”

“Right. Of course. You’ve done the same for me. I just…” Regina’s uncertainty pricks at that part of Emma that wants to leap to her defense, to go in strong and protect Regina with all she is. She quells the desire, staring at a stretchie with laser focus and eavesdropping at the same time. “Maybe we can cut it down to five days?”

“A week,” the Head Mage offers. “I think the other mages will see it as an offense if it’s any shorter. Oh, this is excellent.”

Emma peers past the pajamas. The Head Mage is holding something, though Emma can only see his back now. Regina stares at him, her eyes wide and unguarded for an instant, devastation leaking into her expression.

And then the Head Mage moves to try on what he’d selected, and Emma’s stomach roils. It’s another leather jacket—he’s become very fond of them, she’s noticed irritable—but this one is red, the exact shade and cut of Emma’s favorite one.

The last time Emma had worn hers, Regina had pulled her close by its edges, had kissed her on the windowsill of her study and then carefully tugged a glass of cider out of Emma’s hand and led her to the couch. Emma feels sick, thinking about it now, how the tenderness had twisted her up into knots and she would have been content just to hold Regina that night.

Regina looks as though she might be sick, too.

The Head Mage must notice her distress, because he asks, “Are you feeling all right, my queen?”

Regina takes a breath. Smiles, practiced and calm, as though her eyes aren’t still stricken and her hands aren’t trembling. “I don’t love the red on you,” she says, her voice unsteady. “Maybe something in black?”

They move on through the store, and Emma hurries to the counter to pay, desperate to get out as quickly as possible. But as she finally grabs her bag and heads to the door, she hears the “Oh! Emma,” and has no choice but to turn.

The Head Mage is eyeing some earrings with interest behind Regina, and Regina stands alone, watching Emma with such unmistakable fondness in her gaze that Emma can almost believe that nothing has changed. Almost, except for the way that Regina lifts her hands in a nervous gesture, the way that she holds her shoulders so tightly. “I haven’t seen you much lately,” she says carefully.

“I’ve been…busy,” Emma says, though it sounds pathetic even to her. “Uh…Hope might be teething.”

“I know.” Regina takes that as invitation to move forward with a determined sort of stride, as though she refuses to let Emma keep the distance between them. “Look at this.” She puts a finger into Hope’s mouth, and Hope clamps down, gnawing at it with renewed energy through a gummy smile.

Regina’s scent floods Emma’s nostrils, drowning her in yearning, and Emma struggles to keep her expression neutral as Regina brushes against her, hair falling forward as she coos at Hope. “You’ll get some of those teeth out soon and let your mama sleep, yes, darling? She gets grumpy when she doesn’t sleep enough,” she confides in Hope, who chews happily, her legs kicking in contentment in her sling.

“I wish you’d come for dinner,” she murmurs in a lower voice, and Emma would recoil if she weren’t wearing the sling, contact woven from Emma to Hope to Regina, locking them together. “I know you don’t agree with…with my decision about the Mage Coalition, and I’ll give you all the time you need to come to terms with it, but I’d like to still see you sometimes. You’re my best friend.”

Is that what Regina thinks this is? Emma disconnecting from her because she doesn’t want Regina trapped in another arranged marriage? It assumes a level of altruism from Emma that she doesn’t feel right now, and Emma swallows, her voice hoarse, and says, “I’ll…I’ll try. I’ve just been tired lately.”

“I’m sure.” Regina looks at her, eyes very sad, and Emma would weep if she were a weaker woman. As it is, she isn’t strong enough for this, and she escapes through the door, clutching her bag, and heads home to curl up on the couch with Hope.

When Ry comes in after school, Emma says dully, “I bumped into Regina today. She wants us all to come to dinner tonight.”

Ry drops his bag on the floor, right in the doorway, which is deeply uncharacteristic for a boy whom Emma remembers being fastidiously neat in the castle where he’d grown up. “All of us?”

“You, me, Hope. First time in a week or two, huh? Might be nice.” She forces a smile. Ry will probably be relieved. He’s been antsy about the whole not-conflict between Emma and Regina.

She doesn’t expect his face to go hard as steel. “Absolutely not. I’ll go on my own.” He picks his bag up again, hanging it neatly on a hook inside the closet, and stalks into the kitchen.

Emma sets Hope down on the floor and follows him. “Absolutely not? Is it—do you feel like dinner is kind of your special time with Regina, because I can totally—”

“I don’t feel like dinner is my…” Ry turns around, shutting the fridge door. “I feel like forcing you to do dinner with us right now is completely unfair to you and tremendously callous of Mom, considering.”

Emma freezes, alarmed. “Considering? Considering what?”

Ry shoots her another look, unamused. “You know what. I might be fairly new here, but I’m not blind.” He sets the juice down on the table with a thud. It’s a tropical mix, the kind that he’d never tasted in his old world. The first time he’d drunk it, he’d been sick. Now, it’s all drinks.

Ry is new here, Emma is reminded. And sometimes that means that he doesn’t quite understand all of their complex dynamics. It means that he’s still wrapping his head around Mary Margaret and Emma’s relationship, that he gets stressed when Regina and Emma fight, that he doesn’t know what it means for Regina to fall into an arranged marriage.

But it also means that what had always seemed so simple to Henry, who had watched it grow gradually over the years, is something else entirely to Ry. “I remember how you got your memories back in my world,” Ry says flatly, pouring his juice into a glass. “All it took was Mom in danger and you froze time and ran off forever. So don’t tell me that you’re fine with watching her marry someone else. With eating dinners with her and knowing that he’s going to be over after.”

“Does he…” Emma feels a little faint, zeroing in on the end of that. “Does he come over after dinner a lot?”

Ry shrugs. Stares at the juice on the table, the pink swirl of it, his jaw set. “It’s not right. I don’t know how Mom can just—”

“She doesn’t know,” Emma hurries to defend Regina, incapable of shrugging it off. Ry shoots her an incredulous look. “She doesn’t. It’s not…we’ve never been that simple. And I’ve never…” She can feel her throat getting scratchy, her head hurting. “You can’t tell her, Henry. You can’t put her in that position—it’ll kill us. I can…I can get over this eventually. I can be fine with it.” It doesn’t feel like she can ever be fine with it, but she can pretend, can put on a good show until it becomes habit. “But I can’t lose her.”

Ry scoffs. “You wouldn’t.” But he falls silent, his hands clenched into a fist.

When he finally speaks, it’s a concession. “I’ll tell her you fell asleep on the couch. Maybe you’ll come by another time.”

Thank you, Emma wants to say, but her throat is too tight, her eyes on the verge of surrender. She can only nod, hopeless, and sink onto the couch.

Ry kisses the top of her head before he leaves, so gallant and knightly that Emma is taken back to her false memories, to this boy who had grown up in a castle without Regina’s influence but had still somehow developed her protective instincts. “You really should sleep,” he murmurs. “I’ll bring back leftovers.”

He closes the door behind him, and Emma wraps herself in a blanket and stares blankly at the wall.

Regina doesn’t push her on dinner that night. The next morning, there is no takeaway bag on Emma’s desk, a hint of Regina’s frustration with her, and it lands like a blow. Emma stares at her desk, sits down, waits for a distraction—something attacking Storybrooke, some drama that will drag her out of her funk, even a cat out of a tree—but she is forced, instead, to reckon with her emotions.

She isn’t a child in a snit about some love triangle. At some point, she’s going to have to put on her big-girl pants and go out there and pretend that she’s perfectly fine with all of this to rescue her relationship with Regina. She is going to compartmentalize these raging feelings, like she had done so successfully until the moment she’d first kissed Regina, and be the friend that Regina deserves.

She just has to stop feeling, just a little, because every moment around Regina claws open something inside of her right now. She could fall into the arms of someone convenient, like she had the last time, and drown her emotions with a new relationship, but the idea is dull anathema to her right now. She can’t go through the motions of a subpar relationship when Regina’s touch is seared into her heart. She can’t move on. She might never move on.

She’ll just have to ache from afar, watching Regina throw herself into this marriage. Into a marriage that is wrong, that should be awakening all kinds of trauma for Regina, except Regina seems completely fine with it. Which, what the hell, by the way.

She stews in that for an unproductive moment before the station door opens and the woman consuming her thoughts pokes her head in. With grim satisfaction, she takes in Emma, a predator at an ambush. “You’re here.”

She’s holding Emma’s takeaway bag and two coffees, and Emma’s first reaction is relief instead of panic as she accepts hers. Regina hasn’t given up on her just yet.

“Thanks. Thanks for…for bringing this over every morning.” Emma’s heart thuds, awash with pained affection. “I bet you don’t even do it for all the other government employees.”

“Only the ones I like best.” Regina smirks at her, something determined in her eyes. “Anyway, I postponed all my meetings this morning. We’re going to the beach.”

“Regina.” Emma wonders, briefly, if this arranged marriage is doing something terrible to Regina’s mind. “It’s thirty degrees outside. Fahrenheit.”

“Emma.” Regina raises her eyebrows at her as though Emma is the one who’s very, very stupid. “We live in the United Realms.”

Oh.

No monster attacks. No meetings. Emma can’t think of a single excuse that makes sense, a way to avoid this time with Regina. Regina must see the thoughts running across Emma’s face, because her frown deepens. “I am not going to let you hide away from me forever. We’ve fought too hard for…for this—” she waves between them. “—to lose it over one argument. I am spending the morning with you.”

She wraps a hand around Emma’s wrist. Emma shudders at her touch, which is very embarrassing, but when she glances sidelong at Regina to see if Regina has noticed, Regina is staring straight ahead, breathing slowly. Focused, presumably, on whatever portal she’s about to pluck out of the air.

“Okay,” Emma murmurs, defeated, and Regina pulls her through a whirling portal into warmth.

When they emerge, they’re both in light beach dresses, Emma’s blue and long and whipping around her legs. Regina’s is purple, sheer from the waist down, and Emma stares at it for just a moment too long. The sun shines down on them, warm and comforting, and the sand sparkles white beneath Emma’s bare feet.

“I found this place while I was stitching together different worlds,” Regina says, gesturing at the sapphire-blue sea. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I keep meaning to come back.”

“You should schedule it in every day. Some quiet meditation here.” There are no signs of human life on this beach. It stretches back for a distance, only forest beyond it, and Emma falls into step beside Regina, their hands twining naturally.

There is something so peaceful about this place, the waves lapping at their feet and the thrumming of wind and ocean and nothing else. Emma could walk along it for hours alone, her mind blissfully blank and her arms swinging, and she would come out refreshed and renewed.

With Regina beside her, though, all she can think about is how easy it would be to pull Regina to her, to kiss her, to lay her down on the sand and worship her—

But Regina, she knows, would push her away. Would tell her that she’s found someone she might actually love, that there is no place for that between them. Would cut Emma off easily, because there are no threads there for her, tying the two of them together. Regina doesn’t ache with the same pain as Emma, which is her right, even if it kind of makes Emma want to die.

“I didn’t bring you here to talk about feelings,” Regina promises her, a lilt of amusement in her voice at that. “I just…I wanted to know how you’re doing. What’s going on with Hope? With Ry? Have you seen your mother lately?”

“Uh. No, not really.” A part of Emma is sure that her mother will take one look at Emma’s face and know about everything that she’s done with Regina. Mary Margaret isn’t an idiot, no matter how many times Regina calls her one. She’ll know exactly what heartbreak looks like on Emma’s face, and Emma can’t—can’t—talk about it. “I did get an ink demon a few days ago.”

“Is that why Main Street has that splotch in front of the magic shop? I thought we got some kind of oil spill that leaked through portals. You heard about the boat that got jammed in the middle of the throne room last week?” Regina launches into the story, a saga of a misdirected  illegal portal and a pirate ship, both of which seem to fill her with irrational rage. Emma has heard most of it from Ry already and had seen the incident report, but she enjoys hearing it from Regina, listening to the way her voice rises and falls with outrage and smugness, to the enthusiasm with which she describes how she’d threatened the pirate, to the pride she can’t quite keep tamped down at how the pirate had left, terrified.

“Sometimes, I get the sense that you’ve decided to extend a grudge against one pirate to all pirates out there.” She squeezes Regina’s hand, feels Regina squeeze back.

“I’ll have you know that I did meet one pirate that I found quite charming.”

The last thing Emma wants to hear about is a charming pirate. “Do tell,” she says anyway, because she’s a little addicted to Regina’s voice.

Regina’s lips tug into a smile. “She was in the wish world, actually. Very dangerous. Very powerful. I could never invite her back to Storybrooke without risking our equilibrium, but I was certainly intrigued.”

Through debilitating jealousy, Emma casts back through hazy wish memories, trying to recall a pirate queen. She stops short. “You mean, the pirate queen who fled my parents’ kingdom?”

“Mm-hm.”

“The one formerly known as the Evil Queen?”

“Got it in one.”

Emma licks her lips, her mood rising abruptly. “You should have brought her back. I’d kill to meet her.”

“Absolutely not.” Regina glares at her. “She tried to seduce me, and she was fully aware that I was her double. Can you imagine what she’d do to you?”

Emma can indeed imagine it quite well. She feels suddenly warm, too warm, the heat flooding through her. Regina’s eyes are suddenly narrowed, a scowl settling onto her face, and she says, “Absolutely not,” again, her fingers tightening around her coffee cup.

Is she…is she jealous? Or just protective, unwilling to see anyone get too close to Emma, even her doppelgänger? Emma swallows, her mouth suddenly dry, and Regina shifts, dropping Emma’s hand. Emma only has a second to feel the loss before Regina’s knuckles are brushing against the flush of Emma’s cheek, cool on heat.

“Regina…” Emma whispers, and Regina’s eyes flicker down to her lips. They’re standing very close now, and Emma can’t remember how they’d gotten there. Her heart judders against her ribs, her breath coming in short bursts, and she waits, afraid of what new way Regina might find to shatter her.

But Regina seems to conquer the urge, because she takes a step back and says abruptly, “There was something I wanted to ask you.”

Emma exhales, forcing the tension to leave her. “Ask away.”

Regina stares out into the ocean, eyes averted from Emma. “It’s…well, it won’t be a traditional wedding, not for my worlds or for his.” An unpleasant reminder of what’s coming, and it’s suddenly much easier to take a step away from Regina. “But we do both have this concept of…of someone there for the bride and groom. In an honored position.” She’s stumbling over the words, nervous, and Emma would be instantly sympathetic if not for what she’s pulling out of Regina’s stilted explanation.

“Are you…are you asking me to be your maid of honor?” she demands.

Regina shrugs helplessly.

“What the fuck,” Emma says. There isn’t really anything else to say. “What the fuck.” When Emma had gotten married, she had sidestepped the maid of honor thing altogether, mostly because she’d thought that she was going to die anyway and had left all wedding plans to Mary Margaret. And yes, Regina would have been the obvious choice, but Emma hadn’t been sleeping with her back then. “You want me to be your maid of honor? After what we were…”

She takes a breath. It doesn’t fill her lungs, just sits stale in her mouth. “Do you think your fiancé wants a maid of honor there who’s…who’s done to you what I have? Who—” And she can’t stop herself from reaching out, from trailing the tips of her fingers down Regina’s bare arm. Goosebumps follow her touch, and Regina inhales sharply, her eyes suddenly fixed on Emma. For an instant, Emma is drunk on the power of it, on the way that Regina shudders beneath her touch, on Regina so malleable to Emma’s wants.

If she kissed Regina now, Regina wouldn’t stop her. Emma knows it instinctively, just as she knows that it would destroy her. Destroy Regina, too, maybe. But she still runs her fingers along Regina’s arm, fascinated at the way that Regina shakes, so fine-tuned to Emma’s touch even now.

“I can’t…” Regina has to struggle to get the words out. Emma shifts her fingers to the fabric of her dress, to the gentle curve of her hips, letting them linger there. “I just can’t see it being anyone else,” she whispers. “At the wedding.”

“You bring me out to this gorgeous beach. Ply me with coffee and donuts. All to…stand next to you and watch you marry some asshole.” Emma is furious. Is devastated. Is addicted to the way that Regina’s body moves beneath her fingers as Regina waits. Abruptly, she wants to sob.

“I’m sorry,” Regina murmurs, her face falling. “You’re right. It’s…it isn’t fair. Not to you, or to him.” She takes a step back, making space between them, and Emma is seized by sudden sympathy for her. She can’t help but feel for Regina, in every moment and at every time. Even when Regina had been trying to kill Emma and her family, Emma had still felt for her.

And right now, Regina is desperately trying to make amends, to protect the entire world by throwing herself into another marriage, and Emma is only making it more difficult for her.

“Well, none of this is fair to you,” she mutters. “So we might as well make it that way for all of us. I’ll do it.”

“Emma.” Regina says Emma’s name like that, with a little pause, as though she is careful to draw out both Ms. As though it’s something she savors, speaking Emma’s name, her heart fully engaged. “You’d really…?”

“Yeah. I probably don’t have any other plans that day, anyway.” Emma shrugs, nonchalant, and Regina steps forward and embraces her.

Their bodies mold together as though they’ve been created like that, arms wrapped tightly around each other. Emma can feel Regina’s curves against her, presses her face into wind-whipped hair salty from ocean air and tears. The warmth is unbearable, the closeness as necessary as breathing, the arms around her like a balm that soothes her raw, blistered heart. She never wants to let go, and Regina’s arms tighten around her like she feels the same.

Emma doesn’t know how long they stand there. Too long. There is no one around to stop them, no world rushing around them to spur them on. There is only Regina wrapped around her, the two of them pressed together, and no reason to let go.

Then, finally, Regina’s head falls to Emma’s shoulder, a shift in position that reminds Emma that they’re playing with fire. Emma tucks her chin over Regina’s head, tries to speak, to push her out of this terrible, hopeful mentality. “When…when is the wedding going to be?”

“I’m not sure yet. He wants me to visit his land first and meet his people. I’m supposed to go there at the end of the week.” Regina shivers against Emma.

Sometimes, Emma thinks that they’re mentally linked after so many years of fighting together, magic flowing from one to the other and carrying along some kind of emotional connection. It’s the only thing that really explains how she knows, with perfect certainty, that Regina is terrified. That the woman clinging to her right now isn’t nearly as calm about this marriage as she’d like to appear, that she’s petrified of going off to this other land, as she once had with another leader of his realm, and throwing herself to the lions there.

And because Emma is kind of hopeless—because Regina’s pain is more debilitating to her than her own—Emma promises, hands tight on Regina’s back, “I’ll come with you.”

Ry is disapproving. Henry is relieved. “I’m glad she’ll have you with her. She won’t say it, but she can’t really be totally okay, can she?” He looks to Emma as though he’s seeking an explanation, but Emma can only shrug.

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” is all she can offer.

“Take care of yourself, too,” Ry says, frowning.

“Ma will be fine. She might not be great at diplomacy, but she’s better with people than she thinks,” Henry reassures him. “She can handle a bunch of stuffy old men.”

Ry stares at him scornfully. “That’s not what I mean,” he says, and he grabs Henry’s arm and drags him to the next room so they can talk about Emma without Emma interrupting or—perish the thought—defending herself.

Not that she has much of a defense.

Emma keeps an eye on them as she packs Hope’s things. The Head Mage has been enthusiastic about her joining them, promising her that Hope will have a crib and other baby paraphernalia, but Emma isn’t too confident in a bunch of misogynistic men managing to successfully prepare for a baby’s arrival. She folds the stroller, using a magical tweak to shrink it to fit in the suitcase, and removes Hope from the sling to change her diaper.

In the next room, Henry is laughing at something that Ry says, shaking his head. Ry’s brow furrows and he gestures very obviously to Emma, then talks faster in a lower voice. Henry squints at him, then looks at Emma, too.

Emma rolls her eyes in denial. Henry says loudly, “Oh, my god. She is. But—”

Ry speaks again hurriedly, and Henry nods, the two of them with the same cadences and tics. Every now and then, they really do look just like brothers with a large age gap. When they turn to watch Emma together, it’s with the same sharp stare, the same discerning expression.

Emma grinds her teeth, just a little, and says, “What now?”

“Nothing,” Henry says hastily, his eyes gleaming with mingled hope and compassion. “Nothing. I hope it’s…I hope it’s a good trip.”

“It’s going to be agonizing. I hate the Mage Coalition,” Emma says, determined not to address whatever had just happened in the next room. “You’ll check in on Ry every day?”

“I was literally king of my realm before you all brought me back here and enrolled me in high school.”

Henry ignores Ry. “Every day,” he promises, laying a hand on Ry’s shoulder. “Ma…” And she is treated with a bear hug from Henry, reassuring and full of faith. “It’s going to be okay. I know it.”

Once Hope is no longer in danger of being smothered by a brother, Emma slides her back into the sling and drops her bag into the stroller, easing it down to the street. Regina is waiting at Town Hall, the Head Mage beaming beside her.

“I’m so glad you’re coming,” he says, which…okay. “It isn’t a simple thing, to go somewhere new without a friend. I miss the Weather Mage desperately every day I’m here.”

Emma opens her mouth again to ask about the Head Mage’s relationship with the Weather Mage, but Regina shoots her a warning look. Then takes her hand, which feels like a reassurance and an apology at once. “Thank you for being here,” she murmurs. “Of course, I’m looking forward to seeing the Mage Coalition,” she adds to the Head Mage, who doesn’t seem to catch the hitch in her voice.

Emma does, and she tightens her grip on Regina. “How are you guys going to work that when you’re…?” She can’t say the word married. A part of her is still in deep denial.

“I will travel back and forth each day,” the Head Mage offers. “Regina will stay here, of course. Her empire is much larger than mine.”

“And you’ll be able to get in time with the Weather Mage? I would hate for you to miss out on some time together. I’m sure it’s painful, being apart so often,” Emma says, the height of sensitivity. Regina’s nails dig into her palm warningly, but Emma can see the smile she’s biting back.

The Head Mage misses it all. “Oh, certainly. We’ve discussed him moving here to live near me.” He waves his hand to create a portal, shimmering in the middle of the sidewalk. “I know you’re going to adore him.”

He reaches out for Regina, takes her arm in his, and Regina lets go of Emma’s hand with visible reluctance, her fingers trailing across Emma’s skin for a moment before she steps forward. Emma follows behind, pushing the stroller through the portal.

They emerge outside a strange-looking castle, bearing none of the grandeur of the Town Hall-Enchanted Forest combo that Emma’s grown accustomed to in Storybrooke. It looks a bit like it had started as a hut, another hut built onto it, and a series of other dubious construction decisions had followed to create a ramshackle castle-shaped structure that the Head Mage gestures at. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Beautiful,” Regina says, but she twists to mutter to Emma, “It looks kind of forbidding, doesn’t it?”

Forbidding isn’t the word Emma would use. Pathetic, maybe. Laughable.

“Our castle is built on perception,” the Head Mage explains. “You see it as you expect it, deep in your heart. I’m glad you think it’s beautiful,” he says, smiling at Regina. “I hoped it would look like home to you.”

Regina smiles, a practiced political smile. Emma feels a surge of worry. “Of course.”

A group of men stand at the base of the castle, and the Head Mage separates from them to race toward one of the only young ones, to swing him around in an exuberant embrace and press their foreheads together. Emma mutters, “I hope you plan to greet me like that every time you go off to Mage-land for the weekend.”

“I’m counting on it,” Regina says, and she doesn’t sound like she’s joking. She wraps her arms around herself as she steps forward, and then, with effort, lets them drop to her side, striding forward like a queen unafraid of what is coming.

Emma spots the Speaker Mage up ahead and grimaces. She’d rather slow down than spend extended time with him. She twists around, taking in the land around her. Is it all guided by her perceptions? There’s a preponderance of small huts and quiet farms, which is definitely how she’d thought of the Mage Coalition, for all their posturing. And behind her—

Behind her is the rift, a raging, blackened storm of chaos. It’s not like the rift in the United Realms, where you can just barely feel it at the edge of one world, a wispy sense of loss that makes Emma sluggish and sad. Here, it’s actively roiling, like a hurricane that won’t wane, and Emma can see the magic flowing freely into it, unstopped.

“This is your minor rift?” she asks, disbelieving, jogging to the mages. “Have you seen it lately? You were just going to leave that like this?”

The Speaker Mage looks affronted. “Well, it’s certainly not ideal, but it’s only a slow debilitation. This marriage should repair it.”

That makes no sense. “Is this perception-based, too?”

The Head Mage frowns, disentangling from the Weather Mage to look at her. “Well, isn’t everything?” But he shakes his head, considering. “The legends do say that female mages see past the perceptions.” Emma thinks about pointing out that this might be why they keep trying to get rid of female mages, since they’re the only competent ones who see their world as it is. But this isn’t the time.

“It does confirm what we’ve believed to be true,” the Weather Mage says gravely. “The rift is too far gone to be stopped easily. We must begin at once.” He bows to Regina in a graceful motion. “The wedding must happen immediately.”

“Immediately?” Emma repeats, her heart rate quickening. Regina hadn’t mentioned a wedding here, on this visit. Emma had assumed months of preparation, a wedding fit for the queen of pretty much everything. Emma had assumed time.

But Regina looks just as stunned as Emma. She stands, rigid and frozen, unnaturally pallid—like the start of rigor mortis, like death itself.

Even the Head Mage seems to notice that something is wrong, because he twists to face the other mages, frowning. “We weren’t planning to wed just yet. Regina hasn’t even seen our land.”

“There’s no time for that,” the Secondary Mage says. “The wedding must happen at once. Today, if possible. Tomorrow, if we must. The day after tomorrow at the absolute latest. This is what needs to be done for our worlds.”

The Head Mage inclines his head in acquiescence. “Then it shall be done,” he pronounces.

Regina still hasn’t spoken. Emma says through gritted teeth, “Hey. Head Mage. A word?”

She passes Hope to Regina, an underhanded attempt to calm her. Regina takes the baby without a word, holds her tightly and turns to stare at the rift. She must be seeing what Emma does—the same wild, untamed energy, sucking the magic straight out of the Mage Coalition, because Regina gazes at it with hopeless horror.

Emma drags the Head Mage to the side, out of earshot of the mages, and says, very pleasantly, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“I didn’t mean for it to go like this,” the Head Mage says, sounding apologetic. “I thought that this was only a visit to my home. Regina deserves a larger celebration than a halfhearted union in the Mage Coalition.”

“Regina deserves a choice in the matter,” Emma hisses at him. She can feel her rage about to boil over, simmering dangerously through her. “Do you have any idea about—did she tell you about her last marriage? The way that she was—” Emma can’t say the words, can’t spell out what Regina has whispered to her on a late night in the past.

It had been ages ago, back when Emma had been married and her husband had gotten irritated and felt threatened by Emma spending too much time with Regina. But Henry had graduated from school, and Emma and Regina had promised him a trip together, just the three of them. They had flown out to the Grand Canyon as a family, had gaped at it in awe and explored wild, rocky lands unlike anything they’d seen in Maine, and then, at night, Regina and Emma had shared a room and a bottle of wine.

It had been quiet, contemplative, no magic or enemy attacks to distract them. Henry had been on the verge of leaving, riding off into a portal and leaving them mothers without a shared son. It had felt like the last time they might ever get to spend time together like this, without Emma being stifled and restricted by a man she liked less and less with every passing day, without the excuse of Henry to unite them. And so they had talked through the night, the two of them on opposite beds, a careful distance between them. Emma had spoken about her orphan childhood, about bad relationships in her twenties, about the bad relationship she’d been in at that moment. And Regina had spoken about a childhood with Cora, about punishment and abuse and fear, and then—

Then, she’d spoken about the king. It hadn’t been a time for varnishing over truths, for making them feel glossy and fairytale-ready. Regina had spoken plainly, had spelled out exactly what her marriage had been. Regina had wept, and Emma had been afraid to climb onto her bed back then, to offer an embrace. She had only slipped down to the floor between them, had laid a hand on Regina’s, had listened, feeling sick and furious.

“Do you know any of it?” she demands, because a man who has known Regina for a few weeks can’t possibly understand any of it.

The Head Mage looks regretful. “I wouldn’t choose this, either,” he says. “But can we do? This is what’s best for our people. Regina will understand that. She’s a leader, too. We can’t put our own petty human desires ahead of the whole.”

“It isn’t a petty human desire to have a choice. Look at her,” Emma bites out, gesturing in Regina’s direction. Regina is holding Hope against her, her face still pallid and her arms trembling. She has a smile on her face, stretched across it like a painful swipe of red, but there is something dead in her eyes.

The Head Mage says, sounding uncertain, “She’s smiling?”

“Fuck you,” Emma snaps. “I’m taking her home. This is—this is bullshit.”

“You take good care of her,” the Head Mage says, and he sounds soothing. Emma wants to punch him in the face. Instead, she stalks back to Regina, the Head Mage hurrying after her. “But I do think—”

“Tomorrow,” Regina says when Emma returns. She passes Hope to Emma, her eyes still blank. “I will marry you tomorrow.”

The Head Mage’s face blooms with relief, and he sweeps forward, cradling Regina’s face in his hands. She looks up at him, and Emma can’t believe that he can’t see how empty her gaze is, how lost. His thumbs run across her skin, gentle and affectionate, and the Head Mage lowers his lips to Regina’s.

Emma watches them, torments herself by memorizing every moment of it. The Head Mage kisses Regina carefully, as though she is a tender thing to be treasured. Regina kisses him back, her eyes still open, her hands moving to touch his sides lightly. She fits neatly in his arms without being swallowed up by them, and they make for a beautiful couple, the two of them, a picture-perfect moment. The mages are all beaming, looking grandfatherly in most cases. The Weather Mage looks bafflingly ecstatic about the whole thing.

Emma’s stomach churns, and Regina’s eyes—still open—find hers. A spark of life returns to them, a fleeting terror within them that makes Emma want to vomit right there, to fight the entire Mage Coalition, to throw herself into the rift so she never has to see any of this at all.

Regina is getting married tomorrow. Regina is marrying someone else tomorrow. Emma clings to Hope, wonders how anyone withstands the kind of pain that she feels in her chest right now. She had felt something similar when she’d married, too—the same panic, the same sense of loss, the same awareness that this was wrong and she might never escape it. But this is worse. This is agony.

Regina separates from the Head Mage, who offers to show them to their rooms. Emma keeps up the conversation, terse and without generosity. The Head Mage seems to let it wash over him, unworried by Emma’s hostility. Unworried by Regina’s silence.

“I expect that they’ll bring over some dresses this afternoon for your approval,” he says. “We can still have a second, formal ceremony once this is done. Something that befits you.” He kisses Regina again, another stomach-curdling gentle kiss, and then leaves them alone in Regina’s room, Emma’s adjoining.

Emma says, “You can’t do this. You can’t.”

Regina still doesn’t speak. It’s as though she’s shut down, has built a cage around herself and won’t allow her consciousness to emerge. She is strange and silent all day, responding only when necessary and making little eye contact.

A plethora of dresses are brought forward for Regina to choose, and Regina stares blankly, says nothing until the Wardrobe Mage (because sure, of course they have one of those) begins to sound impatient and Emma steps in. “I think that one works,” she says, picking a long, sleek number with a long train. It’s pretty, with a more modern kind of touch that Emma wouldn’t have expected here. Maybe that’s also perception magic. Maybe the Head Mage had given some recommendations based on fashions he’d seen in Storybrooke. Emma feels a slash of hatred for him, cutting through her, all her grudging tolerance for him gone forever.

“Very well.” The Wardrobe Mage waves a hand, and Regina is abruptly clothed in the dress Emma had picked. Regina gasps, hands moving to wrap around her body, and Emma wants to snap something about consent, except that she is briefly wordless, too.

Regina is a vision in white, is beautiful in an otherworldly way, gleaming like an angel in the dark. The fabric wraps around her perfectly, complementing her curves without being indecently tight, and when she steps forward toward Emma, she nearly seems to float.

Emma’s throat stops up, and she blinks, stupid, grief-stricken tears pooling at her eyes. Regina looks stunning. Perfect. Except for the dark look that swims in her gaze, she looks like a fantasy, like something Emma would never dare to dream of. Like something that was never meant for Emma at all.

“Yeah,” she says, her voice thick with tears. Regina averts her eyes, stares down in silence. “This is the one.”

At dinner, Regina has recovered enough to chat, her words dull and small. She smiles a lot, empty and unnerving, though none of the mages seem to notice that anything’s wrong. Emma sits beside her, Hope in a high chair that she’d had to modify with her magic, and keeps a hand on Regina’s thigh under the table.

This place is hell.

The Head Mage takes Regina for a walk in what he calls the gardens after the meal—though Emma just sees some overgrown weeds and wild trees—and Emma comes along because no one tells her not to. The Weather Mage comes, too, and no one seems to question either of them being there.

“Hey,” Emma says when Regina is ahead of them, the Head Mage gesturing around earnestly. The Weather Mage is quieter than his counterpart, content to lumber alongside Emma without conversation. “You’re not a little in love with that guy, are you?”

The Weather Mage blinks at her. “Of course I love him,” he says. “He’s my glowing sun, the light of my life, the blood coursing through my veins.”

“So…are you guys just like…super homophobic?” She knew it. Wait until she tells Ry.

The Weather Mage only looks puzzled. Emma sighs. “Never mind.”

It’s a relief when they’re finally left alone for the night. Emma slides into her room, gets Hope settled into a crib that seems like it might pass muster, and then pulls on a tank top and knocks on the adjoining door.

There’s no answer, and Emma sighs and pushes the door open anyway.

Regina is in bed, staring sightlessly at the door. Emma leans against it, watches her. You don’t have to get married tomorrow, she wants to say, but she knows that Regina will only send her back to her room, will push her away and refuse to discuss it.

Instead, she props the door open so she can hear Hope and sits on the edge of the bed. “I couldn’t sleep, the night before I got married,” she says. “I mean, there was something going on, I remember. Some…I don’t know, a musical attack. But I kept thinking of it like I was about to walk to my grave.”

Regina’s voice is raspy, hoarse from underuse. “You wanted to get married.”

“I wanted to be wanted. You know it was never really…he was there, and he was obsessed with me, and I figured that was as good as it got.” Emma still feels a flush when she thinks about it, how stupid it had been, just caving to his pressure. Years of trying to appease him when she’d only ever settled for him. “I kept wondering if…if I was giving up any last chance of happiness by marrying him. If there might be something more for me out there.” She had replayed the moment when Regina had seen her ring and embraced her over and over in her mind, wondering if it had been a little too tight, if Regina’s congratulations had sounded a little too false.

It had all been easily explained. Regina just hadn’t liked Emma’s husband, and Emma had pushed the doubts from her mind. “I’m just…I just don’t want you to do something that makes you feel like this,” Emma whispers. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

Regina shivers under her thick blanket, her eyes sparking to hopeless life for an instant. Emma would pick her up and carry her right out of this castle right now if she only believed that Regina would go.

But all Regina murmurs is, “Would you please hold me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” Emma slides under Regina’s blanket and holds out her arms. Regina slips into them, her head on Emma’s shoulder, her arms tight around Emma. She holds on like she might be able to burrow into Emma and never leave, her face molded against Emma’s neck, her lips on Emma’s skin, her legs tangled in Emma’s. Emma’s heart thuds against Regina’s side, so loud that it’s a wonder that Regina drifts off.

But drift off she does, and Emma follows quickly, dreaming of insubstantial enemies and kisses to her neck and a world where everything has fallen into place for them.

And when she awakens an hour later, Regina is gone.

Gone, disappeared into the night, and for a moment, Emma thinks hopefully that Regina might have run away. But Regina doesn’t run. Emma reaches out for her magic, feels it near the roiling eddy of the rift, and she panics, leaving Hope behind with an enchanted baby monitor in her pocket and throwing on a jacket and pants so she can follow Regina.

Regina is a fighter. Regina has always been a fighter, and maybe—for a wild moment, Emma thinks that Regina might be trying to close the rift on her own. That she’s trying to fix this singlehandedly, fight the forces of nature themselves, if only to save herself from this marriage.

Emma would have helped her. Nature has never stood a chance against the two of them.

But instead, when Emma reaches the rift, she only sees Regina standing at the edge of it, staring up as though she is contemplating throwing herself into it. Raw panic screams through Emma’s veins, and she’s running before she can think, smashing into Regina and throwing her to the ground before she can do something idiotic.

“Emma!” Regina glowers at her, pulling herself back to her feet. “What the hell?” But there’s a tremor to her voice that gives her away, her eyes averting.

And there’s no point to it anymore, dancing around the horror of this in order to still give Regina some autonomy. To say you don’t have to and you should have a choice when she really should have been saying one thing all along. “Don’t do it,” Emma shouts over the roaring of the rift. “Do not marry the Head Mage tomorrow. Get out of here and leave this place to its rift!” She gestures at the roiling darkness, at the way that she can feel it tugging at her own magic. “This is their shitstorm, not ours. It’s—”

Regina raises her voice. “It’s affecting people on our side, too. One day, it’ll grow to the same size there—”

“No, it won’t!” Emma throws up her hands. “Look at it! It’s going to swallow all the mages whole and leave their world destroyed. And for what? Because they want the upper hand in some negotiations?” It’s so absurd, now that she’s seen it, for the mages to posture and insist that they get equal billing in the United Realms when they’re so close to entropy. “They’re in no position to make demands of you. They’ll fold.”

“And if they don’t?” Regina demands. “You know that they only see what they perceive. They have no idea how bad it is.” She gestures up at it, and Emma can see lavender magic flowing in a straight line from her arm, swallowed up by the rift. “If they refuse—if they die, if our people die—”

“You can’t save everyone!” Emma’s hair is whipping around her face, and she swipes at it, suddenly furious at them all. At the Mage Coalition, at the United Realms, at Regina and her fucking desperation to martyr herself. “This isn’t penance!”

“It’s always penance!” Regina shoots back. She looks just as wild as Emma, as uncontrolled and desperate. “It’s always going to be penance, Emma. It’s not like there’s another option for me!”

“Bullshit.” Emma takes a step forward, grabs Regina’s hand and yanks it down. There’s a brief interruption in the magic that courses toward the rift, their connected hands glowing like a shield against the rift. “It’s all bullshit.”

Regina looks annoyed, almost as angry as Emma feels. “Don’t tell me what’s bullshit. You never—you didn’t see what I did. Who I was, when I was…”

She’s shaking with it, terror and anger and decades of guilt, and Emma is not going to let her do this. “You were a homicidal mass-murdering despot,” she snaps, and she sees how Regina flinches. “And you know what? There’s no penance that’s ever going to make up for it. Nothing is going to undo the lives you took. The lives you shattered.” Regina looks shattered right now, stumbling back from Emma, but Emma isn’t done. “So why the fuck do you think that forcing yourself into a marriage you don’t want is going to be enough? Why do you think that throwing yourself into a queenship that you never wanted is going to be enough? Why do you think that constantly tormenting yourself with pain and trauma is going to fix it?”

Regina’s hands are tight at her sides, her shoulders bent inward. She looks so small now, superimposed against the howling rift. She doesn’t look like a queen upon a throne, a mayor in her element, a witch who can hold off thousands of enemies at once. She only looks like a woman, bruised and tiny and vulnerable, and Emma can feel tears streaking against her face, can see the same on Regina’s cheeks.

“You can’t take back what you’ve done,” Emma says, and her voice is still too loud, too aggressive, too angry. “You can only do more good. And I get it. But when…when we—the people who—the people who care about you—when we have to watch you punish yourself, over and over again—” She blinks at the tears, too angry to talk through them. “How can you justify that? How can you say that this is goodness?”

She imagines Hope growing up with a Regina who is distant, who has caged herself again until she dissolves into nothingness. With a Regina who would stand by a rift and watch it consume herself because she’s lost the will to fight. She imagines losing Regina, bit by bit, to a life that Regina has never wanted, to a faded, dulled version of herself.

If she could, she would turn away now. Would refuse to watch it happen. But she still feels a helpless obligation to Regina, to be there for the gradual debilitation that will unfold. She’s trapped in Regina’s orbit for life, even if it’s painful to watch.

“And I’ll still be there,” Emma says, and she doesn’t know if her voice is swallowed up by the rift, if Regina can hear her at all. “If you get married tomorrow, I’ll still be there. If you spend years exhausted and stressed because of your job, I’ll still be there. If you choose suffering every single time, I’ll still be there.” She swipes at her face again, frustrated and embarrassed and feeling utterly exposed.

Regina’s eyes are red, her shoulders trembling, and she takes a step forward. Then another, until she is standing right in front of Emma, and Emma can feel her legs buckling. The rift is draining her energy, is leaving her exhausted magically and emotionally and physically, and she wants to weep, to fall to the ground, to stop fighting for someone who won’t fight for herself, after all. “I just…I think you should choose yourself sometimes,” she mutters.

Regina bows her head and their foreheads fall together, hair whipping around them and Emma’s eyes drifting shut. She feels the gentle lips against her own, the careful hand that cups her jaw, the warmth of Regina’s touch on her skin. She can feel the way that her magic bursts to life again, warding off the black hole of the rift, but she can’t open her eyes, can’t see the resignation of martyrdom in Regina’s gaze. Can’t bear to hear Regina dismiss everything that Emma has said out here, to see her throw herself back into this twisted, devastating wedding.

But Regina only whispers a single word against her lips, gentle as a sob. “Okay,” she says.

Regina carries herself differently in the morning. Her face is drawn, and Emma feels it, too—a medley of exhaustion from a sleepless night and the constant drain of magic. Even if the mages’ perceptions are off, they must be feeling their magic fading, must be anxious about it. The Head Mage had gotten more and more enthusiastic and energetic in Storybrooke, Emma remembers; it must have been the rush of his magic slowly replenishing.

But when Regina walks, it’s with her head high and her stride sure. She stands opposite the Head Mage and the Secondary Mage and lays the wedding dress down on the table in front of them. “I will not be marrying you,” she informs the Head Mage.

He looks just a little bit heartbroken, which Emma can feel sympathetic about now that Regina is stepping back. It can’t be easy to almost get to marry Regina Mills and then have it taken away from you. “May I ask why not?”

“I don’t want to.” Regina levels a hard stare at the mages. “I can see your rift clearly. It’s at breaking point. You don’t have much time before it swallows every last bit of magic that you have.”

“And you would risk our worlds because of some personal preference?” the Speaker Mage demands.

Regina scoffs. “I risk nothing. You risk your own world with your stubbornness. You need me more than I need you, and if you insist on political unions and equal power, then you will only cause your own downfall.” There is something severe about how she speaks, something authoritative and domineering. It sounds more like the Evil Queen than the Good Queen, Emma notes with satisfaction. It’s also very hot.

The Secondary Mage sputters. Regina smiles, cool and unmoved. “If you want to save yourselves, you’re going to need to set aside your pride and forge that alliance with us.” She puts a hand on Emma’s back, turning them both away from the men. “Or we will stitch the ruins of your world to ours once you’re all dead.”

She walks from the room, guiding Emma with her, and Emma adjusts Hope against her and mutters, “Ten bucks that they come running after you, groveling.”

“I do love a good grovel.” Regina’s eyes are warm, her hand gentle. “Thank you, Emma. You—”

Before she can finish, the Head Mage is running to stand in front of them, breathless. Emma smirks, just a little.

The Head Mage doesn’t notice it. “They are…well, you know them. They are old and stubborn,” he sighs. “And they are so certain of their superiority that it will take some time for them to concede. But they will concede. I will make sure of it.” He glances at the Weather Mage, who has joined him, looking just as breathless. “You are right. We have only ourselves to blame for this.”

Emma, feeling charitable, offers, “I mean, you guys seem all right.” If nothing else, the Head Mage has excellent fashion instincts. And he’s a good guy, overall, if you omit the part where he nearly married Regina. “And listen—just a thing I think you should do?”

The Head Mage nods, eyes wide. “I’ve learned to value her counsel,” he confides in the Weather Mage.

“It’s usually quite apt,” Regina agrees, her hand roving to squeeze Emma’s arm.

“Right. I’m brilliant.” Emma moves her other hand to rest on Regina’s, as though to reassure her that Regina is still with her. “Anyway, you two should try hooking up.” The Head Mage looks blank. “Uh…kissing each other. Give it a try. You’ll thank me later.”

Regina laughs quietly, just a breath, and Emma’s heart sings in response. The Head Mage blinks at her, then at the Weather Mage, and says, “Well, I suppose there’s no harm to it,” and leans in. The Weather Mage’s eyes shine.

They’re still kissing, desperately clutching at each other with unrestrained passion, as Emma and Regina join hands and step through a portal back to Storybrooke.

This one has been keyed to Regina’s house, and they emerge down the path to her front door. It’s snowing, a steady wave of it dropping down onto them. Hope coos, the first time she’s sounded this content since they’d left to the Mage Coalition, and Emma feels an unlikely warmth on her skin, the sense of magic revitalizing within her. Regina grabs the stroller, Emma grabs the bags, and they walk inside together.

They don’t talk much. It’s a lot, how drained Emma feels, how worn out by the past twenty-four hours. By the past three weeks, really. They just orbit each other, falling into simple, familiar roles. Regina goes upstairs to unpack. Emma finds a frozen lasagna and sticks it into the oven. Regina gives Hope a bottle, curling around her on the couch, and Emma leans against the doorway and watches them, something loosening in her chest.

The enemies who used to attack Storybrooke would come in waves—one would be defeated, and the next would begin to rise. But there had always been moments like this, brief snatches of peace, of relief, before a new crisis. Emma had coasted on them, had let them carry her through to the next moment of peace: the family eating dinner all together at Granny’s; walking with Henry and Regina through the park; movie night and charades and memorizing the way that Regina would tilt her head back when she laughed.

This is a moment to file away, to hold close forever. Regina cradling Hope, pressing a kiss to her brow, easing her into a swing and switching it on. The soft lullaby music, the light in Regina’s eyes again, the way their gazes lock. It’s an instant of stolen perfection, and Emma remembers, suddenly, Regina’s lips against hers last night, foreheads together, a hand under Emma’s jaw. Regina in her embrace, huddled against her, clinging to her like one might cling to a life preserver.

She would do anything to have Regina in her arms again, and she nearly holds out her arms, lost in some fantasy where she can only just hold her, swaying together to the canned music playing from the swing.

Instead, she ruins it all.

“You know,” she says, sauntering over to Regina, running a hand over her arm. “No one even knows we’re back yet. Other people are filling in for us at work.” She wiggles her eyebrows, playful. “We might even have the whole day to ourselves.”

Regina laughs. There’s something strained about it, guarded. “What were you thinking?”

Emma recalibrates before it sounds like she’s asking too much. “Maybe some…stress relief?” she breathes, her fingers moving to brush against Regina’s chest. It’s been so long, and she’s missed Regina so much—she’ll take anything, even if it’s—

But there is a hand on her own chest, suddenly, pushing her back. Regina isn’t smiling anymore. “No,” she says, and Emma’s heart sinks. “It’s…it’s still a bad idea.”

A kaleidoscope of worst-case scenarios whirl through her head. Regina moving on. Regina finding someone new, someone she chooses and wants. Emma watching from afar, only her memories for company. Has she shown her hand? Has she been too obvious, too frighteningly invested? “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she says quickly. “It’s just—we’re just two friends blowing off some excess energy.”

Regina laughs again, but she sounds upset. She looks upset, and Emma shrinks back. “Emma,” she says, twisting her hands. “You know it meant something to me. It always has.”

Emma stares at her, frozen in bewilderment. “What?”

Regina’s eyes are tired, are sad, are just a little bit hurt. “It’s not like I’ve been subtle. You knew. Everyone knew. It’s been…it’s always been unfortunately public knowledge how deeply I love you.”

What? What?

What?

“And I thought that this was…that it could be casual, but you were right. I can’t just suffer pointlessly forever. And I can’t put myself through this again.” Regina steps forward, delicate but with gravity, and she presses her lips to Emma’s unmoving, gaping mouth. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”

And she shoots Emma one more pained smile and slips out of the house without a word, leaving Emma stunned into silence in her wake.

“I mean, yeah. Mom isn’t exactly subtle.” Henry pours her a cup of cocoa, sprinkles some cinnamon in it, then adds a splash of something spicy that burns going down Emma’s throat. “It’s been…what? Probably seven, eight years?”

“Seven or eight years of what? Since…you’re telling me that Regina’s been in love with me for seven or eight years?”

Henry shrugs. “I don’t know. Definitely when she sent us to New York after Pan’s curse. That’s when I realized it, anyway. Then I forgot it for a year,” he says, reflective. “But when I met her again, I thought she was your ex. She looked devastated when I told her about Walsh. Then she started dating someone else. Not that it really took.” He squints at her. “I couldn’t believe it when Ry told me that you didn’t know. If you didn’t know, why were you always so…you were always so, like, tender with Mom? So protective?”

Emma shrugs helplessly. “Because. It was Regina. That’s just how we…how I…”

“Right.” Henry pinches the bridge of his nose. “And how long have you been in love with Mom, exactly? Because I’ve been feeling really dumb about that one. I always figured that you were letting her down really, really gently. You got married.”

“I didn’t really think I had a chance with her,” Emma says gloomily. “No one bothered to tell me what was apparently common knowledge.”

“I mean, I knew,” Jacinda says, patting her back. “And that was before I ever met you. It was just the way that she talked about you.”

Emma is beginning to regret visiting Henry at all, wild-eyed and discombobulated after Regina’s pronouncements. She stays for dinner anyway, lets Lucy play with Hope for a little longer, and then she bundles the baby up and heads back to Storybrooke.

The snow has gotten heavier, which feels pointed somehow, too, and Emma has to park on the side of the road and trudge up to the house, where Ry has turned the heat alarmingly high and is unapologetic when she catches him. “What? It’s a literal blizzard out there.”

“You’re going to suffocate in this heat,” Emma tells him, snatching a Regina-purchased fuzzy hat off his head. “At least take off your coat. This can’t be so much colder than the Enchanted Forest. Did you know that Regina was in love with me? And no gloves!”

She slips it in like an afterthought, tugging at his scarf, but Ry catches it anyway. “Ma,” he says. “Everyone knows. Except you.” He looks hopeful. “She stopped by earlier and told me…she said she didn’t marry the Head Mage. That she wasn’t going to. Did you two work things out?”

“Not yet. I’m…I’m processing.” She needs to understand this, to put together this impossible new reveal. To figure out what it means, because it can’t be this simple. Not after this long. Not after this many years of wanting, of waiting, of silent yearning. They would not be permitted a happiness this easy.

Ry looks very disappointed in her. “You didn’t walk out on her, did you?”

“She walked out on me!”

“Because she seemed really down. Like she’d just been rejected.”

“I didn’t—I did the opposite of rejecting. She rejected.”

“I just think you’re not always…you have trouble coping with good news sometimes.”

Okay, that one’s fair. “I’m working on it. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I mean, I thought you were quietly together,” Ry says, frowning. “Like, from when she brought me here and on.” Emma remembers that, Regina with a tired-looking boy beside her, a younger Henry who had immediately struck a chord in her. He’s ours, too, Regina had murmured, and Emma had remembered him, her beautiful little knight, a child who had burst from a wish and refused to leave.

Ours, she remembers saying, still stunned to see Regina again, and she had watched Regina go once more with her heart aching and tears in her eyes.

“Maybe even before that, when you froze time and your memories returned just to save Mom,” Ry amends.” And then she was going to do that arranged marriage, and I was furious with her. I didn’t realize that you weren’t even really together.” He looks disgruntled at that.

Emma kicks at the carpet, scuffs her boots against it. “Well, we were. Kind of.”

“Kind of? How are you kind of—oh, gross, Mom, that had better not mean what I think it does—”

Emma puts the hat back on Ry’s head, pulling it down firmly to cover his face and pushing some of it into his mouth before he can say anything else. “Watch Hope,” she orders. “I’m going out.”

The portals to the Enchanted Forest are distorted by the snow, blinking in and out of focus and oddly blurry at the edges. Emma steps through one anyway, emerging in a sunny, warm spot near her parents’ castle. It explains Ry’s layers, at least.

She finds Mary Margaret in a clearing, bow in hand and a target in front of her. “I kind of figured that you spent most of your time here singing to birds,” Emma comments, watching her mother hit a target right at the center.

Mary Margaret sounds reproving. “Not in the afternoon. The songbirds are out in the morning.” She sets her bow down and wraps her arms around Emma, then takes a step back, frowning. “And where is my granddaughter?”

“I knew you only loved me for my adorable baby,” Emma says, mock-hurt.

Mary Margaret takes it with sincerity, as she always does. “I love you for every last part of you,” she says, pressing a kiss to Emma’s cheek, and Emma feels, in the way that she can’t quite stop, like she might break beneath her mother’s touch.

“Regina loves me,” Emma says, and she gulps in a sob that sounds stretched and odd and confused.

When she looks up, Mary Margaret is smiling warmly. “Well, yes.”

“Did everyone else know? Why would…why wouldn’t anyone mention it to me?” Emma feels on the verge of hysteria. “Was this just…a running joke between all of you? That Regina was right there and no one ever bothered to tell me—that you were all just laughing at Emma, the idiot, who didn’t know what was right in front of her?”

Mary Margaret sighs. “It’s not that we were laughing. We just…we kind of thought that you hadn’t gotten there yet. But you’ve been there for a while now, haven’t you?” She sits down on a mossy rock, a few birds fluttering down to peck at the ground around her, and Emma stares down at her in hopeless disbelief. “I thought you might be. You’ve been so withdrawn lately.”

“Regina never said—we were—” Emma rubs her temples, at a loss for what to say. “It doesn’t go like this for us. Every time we get close to something good, something terrible happens and ruins it.” There’s always a monster. A villain. A crisis. A man. There will be one this time, too, ready to threaten everything that Emma loves.

Maybe it isn’t only Regina who has embraced her own suffering. Maybe it’s Emma, too, who struggles to trust happiness when it comes, to believe that it could be real. “What if we try and it falls apart?” she asks, her voice small. “What if I tell her and it doesn’t work?”

What if you don’t? She can almost hear Mary Margaret saying it, romcom-esque, her eyes sparkling and that eternal faith etched upon her smile.

But Mary Margaret surprises her, as she still has the capacity to do. She has never been all that great at being a cartoon fairytale archetype. “Oh, grow a pair, Emma,” she says, plucking a bird from her knee and letting it flutter around her. “After fifteen years, you still think there’s anything that you and Regina can’t do?”

The snow has gotten worse since Emma had left. Or maybe it’s just a surprise, ducking through a portal and finding herself pelted by heavy snow that instantly coats her jacket and her hair. Emma fishes through her pockets and finds a pair of gloves that Regina had gotten her last month, slips them on with an overwhelming sense of affection.

Everything that she’s experienced is being reframed and reformed in her mind. Regina’s smile, a decade ago, when they’d saved Henry from Neverland, when they’d both embraced him and then split to stare at each other. Emma had felt a shuddering something in that moment, in the warmth of Regina’s gaze, a sense that she could have stayed there forever, holding Henry and staring at Regina.

Regina’s hands on hers at the town line when she’d promised Emma a good life with Henry. The way she’d cycle between sharp and sincere when Emma had returned to Storybrooke, like she’d never really known if she resented Emma or was happy she was back. Emma had treasured those moments of sincerity, had come out of them energized and oddly vulnerable.

The way that they’d fought when Emma had traveled to the past and brought Marian back, the way that Emma had felt as though she’d been enduring a strange, delicate heartbreak that might have shattered her to pieces. She remembers vulnerability on both their parts, remembers the way that her heart had been so full that it felt like it might explode when Regina had rolled her eyes and said, I don’t want to kill you.

And then—then, the transformation that had been friendship, that had been two women slowly forgetting how to exist without each other. Emma’s had friends before, rare as they’d been before Storybrooke, but never one who had felt as necessary to her as breathing. Had Regina really loved her then? Had Emma loved her back? Have they wasted so many years of lingering close, taking whatever they could and believing it was all they could get?

She shoves her hands into her pockets and trudges through the snow to Mifflin Street, to the large white house that feels like home, and knocks on the door.

Regina opens it after a long pause. She looks guarded, uncertain, and she says, “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Come on,” Emma says, nodding to the snow behind her. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“A walk. In this weather.” Regina arches her eyebrows, very skeptical, and Emma feels that heart-bursting affection again.

“It’s better than the rift,” she offers, and Regina smiles at her, a little sadly, and goes to the coat closet. She emerges with two scarves, one of which she wraps very carefully around Emma. She is cautious, Emma notices, uncertain about touching her too much, but she still wraps it. There is a caregiving part of Regina that Regina can’t switch off.

The snow seems lighter now, white fluff settling around them, and Emma takes Regina’s hand absently and holds it in her own. She feels Regina tense, then relax, and she says, “I’m glad you didn’t go back to work today.”

Regina takes a moment to think. “Well, I took a week off. I left a whole system in place for the United Realms to operate without me. I think…I think you might be right. That I might be punishing myself a bit with my work. I should be able to take a vacation sometimes.”

“Fuck yeah.” Emma squeezes her hand. “And while you’re at it, you should get some servants out of it, too. Some perks to the job.”

Regina laughs. “I don’t want any of that. I…” And now she sounds embarrassed. “I do like it. I don’t know if it’s…if I’ve just become so accustomed to running a kingdom, or if there’s this part of me that’s never going to shake this need for domination—”

“Regina.” Emma stops, snowflakes settling on their hands. “You chose to be mayor of Storybrooke. You liked the work. You’re a good leader. It’s not about domination—well, not completely,” she amends, because Regina definitely does like being in control. “You’re allowed to like your job. I am wrong sometimes.”

“You weren’t completely wrong. I do need to find that balance between doing the right thing and letting myself do what I want.” Regina sounds almost embarrassed, thoughtful, as though that admission is already too self-indulgent. Emma is overcome by a wave of pride in her, so overwhelming that she has to look away and keep walking.

And then she says carefully, “Were you punishing yourself by telling me how you felt?”

She walks on through the snow, refusing to allow Regina to hesitate. Regina laughs, a little hoarse. “I thought you knew,” she says. “That you’ve always known. It was a little bit of penance, every time, getting to touch you and then hearing you tell me that it didn’t mean anything. Like burning myself just to feel the pain.”

They turn toward Main Street, but Emma tugs Regina in the other direction, toward the frozen woods, where they won’t be surrounded by people. Regina follows, her face flushed with the cold, red-cheeked and dark-eyed and watching Emma with an expression that Emma has never once considered might be love.

“I said it because I was afraid that it would ruin our…our friendship,” Emma says finally. “If one of us had feelings and the other didn’t.” Regina lets her hand go, stands silently beside a tree, her face stricken.

Emma chokes on what she needs to say next, feels it bubbling up as her throat constricts, her heart tight and expanding all at once. “Regina,” she murmurs, and she takes a step forward, reaches up to warm Regina’s cheek with her gloved hand, feels the way that Regina is stiff and afraid beneath her touch.

And all she can ask is, helplessly, “But what was our friendship?”

“Emma, please,” Regina whispers, her voice shaky. “I can’t…”

“I mean. Henry calls us codependent. I feel codependent. I feel like if I don’t see you at all, my whole day is ruined.” It surges out of Emma, a litany of confessions that have always been too much. Emma has spent a lifetime terrified of being too much, of losing everything because she wants it all. “When you’re around, everything seems possible. When you aren’t, I still have this tiny Regina voice in the back of my head, this constant awareness of what would Regina say?”

A ghost of a smile. “Was she the one who told you to get rid of your husband?”

“We did that together.” Even with both of them all bundled up, Emma can feel a warmth emanating from Regina, imagined or magical or something else entirely. “Sometimes, you smile at me and I feel like I can move mountains. When you’re stressed or afraid, it’s the only thing I can think about. And yeah, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—ever been with, ever wanted—” She smiles helplessly. Regina’s eyes are narrowed, and Emma doesn’t know if Regina’s getting angry with her or seeing something, finally— “And I don’t know how I missed, since I’m clearly obsessed with you, that you loved me back—”

Regina pulls her in by the scarf and kisses her. It’s hard and warm all at once, Regina’s kisses different now, less restrained. Emma’s hands press snow into Regina’s hair, back her up against the tree, rove up and down her body with the devotion of someone who has only ever craved one thing. Regina gasps into her mouth, laughs out a sob, and Emma kisses her again, kisses her eyelids, kisses her cheeks and her forehead and every last bit of Regina that isn’t covered up at that moment.

It’s different. It isn’t cautious and uncertain, doesn’t have the same desperation as their prior trysts. It isn’t stolen moments and fear of giving away too much. It’s kissing like they have all the time in the world, like they can do this forever, like they really just might.

And when the air is too cold, when their faces are too wet from snow and tears, Regina slips an arm around Emma’s waist and murmurs, “It’s almost time for dinner.” They walk like that, as close as they can, and Emma sees eyes on them when they emerge—townspeople glancing over at their proximity, whispering to each other. Cars slowing as they pass.

Maybe they’re being obvious. Emma feels like she’s glowing so hard she might go supernova. She also doesn’t care. Let everyone stare. Let them know. Regina and Emma aren’t going anywhere.

When they finally reach the front door of Regina’s mansion—Hope gurgling on the play mat, Ry filling the kitchen with a heavenly aroma of garlic—Emma hesitates in the doorway, eyes flickering toward their children, inside. “Are you ready?”

It’s a question with a dozen questions bundled inside. Are you ready to tell our family? Are you ready to try this out? Are you ready for me to stay? Emma doesn’t know if they’ll ever move further than this, being in love and raising children together. She doesn’t know if Regina will ever want to marry again, if anything will change significantly from how it’s already been. She doesn’t know any of it, but the question still lingers between them, unspoken. Are you ready for forever?

Regina kisses her on the tip of her nose, gentle and teasing. “Are you?” And there is an uncertainty to it, too. A fear that this happiness isn’t something that they’ve ever been able to keep.

But Mary Margaret’s words are still strong in Emma’s mind, a steady reassurance.

“I was born ready,” she says, and she takes Regina’s hand and leads her inside.