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Emma doesn’t want to go to Regina, exactly. Well, she doesn’t plan to, anyway. She’d kind of figured that Regina would trail after them to the diner, incapable of leaving Emma alone for a moment of victory, because that’s always been Regina until now: obnoxious and in her face with that smug look on her perfectly sculpted face–
Anyway. She’d assumed that Regina would be there for dinner, and she’d been a little surprised that she hadn’t. Maybe even, in some weird way, disappointed. She’s kind of missed the verbal sparring that has plagued her for her months in Storybrooke, and she feels like she understands Regina a little better, now that she’s met Regina’s mother. Cora is a piece of work , and Regina is afraid enough of her that she’d put a death curse into the portal.
“She absorbed the whole thing,” Ruby explains to them at the diner. “We had no idea who was going to come out of that well, but Henry begged her, and, well…” She spreads her hands and shrugs, what are you gonna do? , and returns to the topic of the ogres in the Enchanted Forest.
Emma breathes and feels as though she doesn’t understand Regina anymore at all. There had been a time when she’d believed that Regina hadn’t really loved Henry, that she’d seen him as a possession to use and abuse as needed. Maybe she’d only told herself that, an excuse to run off with Henry and think it justified instead of horrific. Maybe she’d just been so angry with Regina, who had put into motion the curse that had given Emma a miserable twenty-eight years.
It is harder to be angry now, with Regina’s wide-eyed, tortured gaze from earlier still engraved in her mind. She’d managed to smile, but she’d been leaning against that tree like it had been the only thing holding her up, and she’d stood in the pawn shop as though it had been a struggle to move. Maybe she’d meant to come with them and just hadn’t been able to.
“Maybe she’s just beginning to accept that this isn’t her town anymore,” Mary Margaret suggests. “She can’t just show up where she’s uninvited and universally reviled. It’s amazing that she made it through the past few weeks without us protecting her.”
“It’s been harrowing,” David acknowledges. “But she really does care about Henry. I think he’s the only one keeping her in line.” He smiles, almost affectionate. “Honestly, she was growing on me for a while there. I don’t know what had gotten into me.”
Something about the way that he says it prickles at Emma, makes her tetchy. “She isn’t repulsive ,” she says. “I mean, she’s kind of a bitch, but she was also a pretty good mayor, from what I saw. Beyond…all the cursing of the townspeople, I guess.” She can’t exactly ignore that, but it’s done , isn’t it? Regina lost. What point is there in rubbing it in her face now?
Mary Margaret and David exchange a look, one that Emma has only experienced rare times in the past few weeks, that she expects most teenagers with parents experience daily, and that has only come up when Emma brings up Regina. “Emma,” Mary Margaret says delicately. “I think that you look at Regina from a very different perspective than the people who knew her as the Evil Queen.”
“It’s not that you aren’t a good judge of character,” David says. “I mean, you didn’t like cursed me very much, and I think you were on the money on that.” He grins, extremely over it, and Emma blinks at him and does see a startling family resemblance between them.
“It’s just that…you and Regina are always going to have a very different relationship than everyone else in the town does with her,” Mary Margaret says. “And it’s understandable.”
Not this again . “Mary Margaret, I’ve told you, being a lesbian doesn’t mean I’m automatically going to be attracted to every hot professional woman I see in my everyday life,” Emma says tiredly.
David blinks at her. Ruby snorts. Mary Margaret says, a touch of amusement in her voice, “I meant because of Henry,” she says. “Not because you’re gay.”
Oh. Why are her cheeks so hot? Emma swallows, finds Henry across the room where he’s happily eating Granny’s apple cobbler like apples hadn’t nearly killed him last time around, and she says, “You know, I think I’ll head out. Back home, I guess. I miss sleeping on a bed.”
“Henry’s been in yours,” David offers. “But we have a trundle that could fit up in the loft, too. I’ll set it up later. Been napping on the job instead of preparing for your homecoming.” He grins at his own humor, and Emma decides that she does, in fact, like the new-and-improved uncursed David much more than she had liked his cursed self.
She tugs Henry away from the counter, stealing a bite of his cobbler before he sets it down. He glowers at her. “If you hadn’t just disappeared for two weeks, I’d make you pay for that,” he says, the glare turning to a grin, and she wants desperately to hug him again, hold him tightly and remind herself that Henry is back with her again, that this precious boy is hers now.
Hers, and someone else’s. “Hey, do you think we should check in on your mom before we head back?” she says abruptly. “Maybe invite her to that welcome back party that Ruby was talking about throwing tomorrow?”
Henry looks at her with sudden concern. “What if people don’t want her there?” he asks. “I don’t want her getting hurt– or hurting anyone,” he adds quickly, as though she’s going to judge him for caring about his mom.
“I’ll protect her,” Emma promises him. “I’m pretty tough.”
Henry beams at her. “You slayed a dragon ,” he says, holding her hand tightly.
At some point, the crises are going to stop and Emma is going to be exposed as unremarkably normal, an ordinary person unlike the superhero whom Henry has built up in his mind. At some point, Henry is going to stop being awed by her, and Emma is going to become mundane, and she has no idea if she’ll measure up to Henry’s image of her.
Not yet. For now, she’s going to savor his attention. “Hey, kid, did I tell you who that dragon was? Crazy,” she says, leading him down the street toward his house. “So apparently, your mom was buddies with Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. I guess the friendship ended badly. Unless Maleficent was kind of into being a dragon living under a library, which is possible, I guess. It was pretty roomy down there.”
Henry asks her questions about the Enchanted Forest, and Emma does her best to answer them, drinking in the sound of his voice and the feeling of his little hand in hers. This is what Regina has had for ten years– has had until Henry was gone , off in a world where Regina had been the villain. Emma resents her, yeah, but she can’t help but feel some sympathy. She’d probably become an unbearable monster if Henry was taken from her, too.
“Hey,” she says suddenly, cutting off her own description of an ogre. They’re right in front of Regina’s house, and something is amiss. “Does your mom usually leave the door open like that?” It’s ajar, mostly closed but not quite, like someone had forgotten to shut it.
“Never. I used to sometimes and she’d lecture me about strangers,” Henry says, his brow furrowing. “Especially not since the curse broke. People keep throwing rocks at the windows and spray painting the walls.”
Emma takes a breath. Regina hadn’t looked great at the pawn shop. If someone had followed her home…had overpowered her in the state she’d been in… “Stay right here,” she says, jabbing a finger at the walk in front of the house. “Anything happens, you run back to the diner. Got it?”
Henry nods, suddenly somber, and Emma takes quick steps down the walk. If someone has gone after Regina– has hurt her in any way, while they were all chatting and celebrating at Granny’s–
She pushes the door open a little more before she hits resistance, something stopping the door. Carefully, she pokes her head around it and her heart seizes up.
Regina is crumpled on the floor of her foyer, her eyes squeezed shut and her face wet with sweat and tears. “Oh, god ,” Emma says aloud, her throat closing up. “Regina? Regina!”
“What’s wrong with her?” Henry had predictably disobeyed her order and stands behind her, pale and worried. “What happened to my mom?” he demands, his voice rising. “Mom! Mom! ”
Regina’s eyes open at Henry’s voice, bloodshot eyes nearly red as she catches sight of them. “I’m…fine,” she manages, and then she lets out a choking noise, convulsing against the floor. “Just…curse.”
“The death curse,” Henry says, his voice still too high and panicked. “I told her to and it… What’s it going to do to her?”
Emma remembers Ruby explaining it, Regina convulsing at the well as she’d absorbed a powerful, deadly curse that she’d meant to use for Cora. Clearly, something like that can’t just be absorbed without consequences. “I don’t know, kid,” Emma says, and she bends down to check Regina’s pulse. Regina squeezes her eyes shut again, but she lets out a little moan at Emma’s cool touch, the first sign of some kind of relief.
“Does this help?” Emma says, and then thinks better of it. “Don’t talk. It’s fine. We’ll figure this out.” She’s beginning to wonder, with frightening clarity, if absorbing a death curse might end with the obvious conclusion. No . This is not happening. Regina is not dying .
“I think it’s overheating her body,” she says, and she turns and looks at Henry, who shouldn’t be seeing his mother this way. “Listen, why don’t you go hunt through your freezer for anything cold? Ice packs, veggies, whatever you think might last. And then get some dish towels wet and stick them in the freezer, too. That’s probably our best bet.” Henry nods and runs to the kitchen. She doesn’t think that they’ll be much help, but it’ll get Henry away from Regina in this state. He doesn’t need the nightmares.
Regina thrashes around again, reaching for Emma’s hand, and Emma presses it to her forehead. “I’m going to take you upstairs, okay?” she says. Her voice is gentle, gentler than she’d thought would ever be possible when talking to Regina, and Regina opens one eye to give her a tormented glare. “A cool bath might help.”
“Nothing…helps,” Regina gasps out. “Death…curse.”
“Shut up,” Emma says, shooting a look at the kitchen. Hopefully, Henry hadn’t heard. “You’re not going down like this . Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of grand fairytale villain? It’s off a cliff screaming or nothing.”
Regina’s body vibrates again, and Emma is pleased to discover that it’s a laugh, even through the pain. “There you go. Alive enough to find me funny. Glad to see that the curse has improved your sense of humor.”
Regina closes her eye again, and Emma lifts her up. She’s light, surprisingly so. All those power suits have managed to conceal a concerning boniness to Regina, and Emma files it away as something to discuss with her once she isn’t dying anymore. She doesn’t know when, exactly, Regina had become her responsibility, but she is absolutely sure that Regina is.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get you upstairs.” She stumbles a little, leaning against the banister as she makes her way up, and she finds her way into Regina’s room and sets her down on her bed. “Uh. You can’t get undressed by yourself, can you?”
Regina’s body vibrates with a laugh again, and then she lets out a groan of pain and curls back into herself. Emma starts a lukewarm bath, and she swallows before she emerges again. “You know, I did wonder if our issues might be best resolved by undressing you, but I didn’t think it’d be like this,” she says. It’s a bold, stupid comment, but she does it to see Regina’s body vibrate again, to be sure that she’s still capable of hearing and understanding Emma again. This time, Regina doesn’t laugh, and Emma bites her lip and wonders if she’s overstepped.
She eases Regina’s slacks off, then pulls off her jacket. Her shirt is a bright blue, darker than the one that Emma had borrowed from her that one time, and Emma unbuttons it slowly. Regina grits out, “Keep…fingers…there,” and she breathes out, arching up to Emma’s touch.
Emma has never been so relieved to have cold hands. “Henry’s getting some ice together for you,” she promises. “And I’m going to run cool water into the bathtub once you’re in. We just gotta get you in.” She does her best to avert her eyes from Regina’s body, wrapping a towel around her and forcing down the inappropriate thoughts that spring, unbidden, to mind as she lifts Regina again. “Hold on,” she murmurs, and Regina clings to her with trembling fingers, her body shaking as Emma lowers her into the tub.
Regina lets out a breath and something green and poisonous-looking comes with it. It hovers in the air, a threat that sits in front of them, and Emma reaches out to touch it.
Her fingertip turns black and decayed, and Regina musters up the strength to slap it away from from the poison magic. “You…kill yourself,” she says. “Don’t…touch.”
“I thought you wanted me dead,” Emma says, offering it in a light tone of voice, and Regina lets out a ragged noise and emits another puff of the magic. Emma watches it with rising concern. “That’s what’s inside you?” Regina had done a good job of hiding the depths of the curse she’d absorbed when they’d been in the pawn shop, and it’s only now dawning on Emma exactly what they’re up against. A real, fucking death curse . Something meant to kill the person who touches it.
And Regina had ingested the whole thing.
Regina just looks at her, her eyes open and tired, and Emma flips her finger over to stare at her blackened fingertip. To her surprise, it’s whole and clean, the magic gone as though it had never touched her. “Hey,” she says. “I guess it isn’t as deadly as we thought.”
Regina barks out a choked laugh. “Speak…for yourself,” she says, and she coughs, a wracking, painful noise that comes with another wave of poison and blood.
“Shit,” Emma says, staring at her. “Shit, shit, shit .” She reaches through the smoky poison, heedless of the way that it burns, and she props Regina up, kneeling on the floor in front of the bathtub to try to straighten her out.
Regina shakes her head, groans, “No. Going to…hurt yourself…” But Regina slumps against Emma’s shoulder, unable to stop Emma, and Emma feels the magic around her stop burning, watches it slowly dissipate around her. She’s doing that, somehow, stopping the poison with nothing but her touch.
She remembers the cryptic conversation with Gold in the pawn shop, the implication that she somehow possesses magic, the white light that had blown from her chest into Cora when Cora had tried to take her heart. She has magic. It explains a lot of strange happenings in her childhood, lights blinking out when she’d been angry and occasional implausibilities, and it might explain what’s happening to the poison now.
“I think I’m immune,” she reassures Regina, who still shakes against her shoulder. “Not really sure why, but…”
Regina coughs again, and this time, Emma can feel the hot blood against her neck. She squeezes her eyes shut, imagining Henry downstairs. He must be taking apart the freezer, doing everything he can to make Regina comfortable, and Regina is dying. Regina is dying because she’d saved Emma , saved Mary Margaret, done something heroic after years of fuckery, and now…
“You’re not dying,” Emma says grimly, and she runs a hand through Regina’s hair, feels the strange tenderness that follows. Regina had been a pill last year, a sociopath bent on Emma’s destruction, but there had been moments of humanity scattered in there, all of them around Henry. Emma had watched her from the start, had longed for a connection with her birth son’s mother, and there had been times when she’d wondered if they might still have a chance. To be friends, to be allies, to like each other, because Emma has always had a soft spot for hard-hearted women scorched by life. Regina had pissed her off, but she’d also brought Emma to life, and Emma refuses to let Regina go like this.
Another puff of poison emerges from Regina, this one landing at the base of Emma’s neck, and Emma feels the pain less and less. When she touches the spot where it had hit, the skin feels smooth and solid beneath it, and her fingers graze Regina’s lips accidentally. “Oh,” she says, hardly a breath, and Regina shivers against her.
And Emma has an idea. “Hang on,” she says, and she eases Regina back against the bathtub wall, propping her up as Regina sinks down into the water again. She kicks off her jacket and her jeans, because those are never going to recover if she brings them with her, and she says, “Don’t laugh at me, okay? I want to try something.”
She steps into the bathtub. It’s hot where it had been lukewarm before, and she lowers herself down onto her knees in the water, the bottom of it sinking into her thin tank top and dragging it down. Regina squints at her, too weak to look bemused at this turn of events, and Emma plants her knees firmly on either side of Regina.
She tamps down forcefully the traitorous desires that bubble up within her, inappropriate when Regina is so sick and vulnerable, and Regina surprises her by saying in a ragged voice, “Think…I’ve dreamed…this.”
It stops Emma in her tracks. It’s a joke, obviously , but she hadn’t thought that Regina would…that Regina had…
She swallows again, and she says, “Oh, we are definitely pretending that you didn’t say that when this is over. In fact, we should probably pretend that none of this ever happened.” Regina tilts her head, watching Emma with hazy eyes, and Emma regrets the last two sentences with sudden fervor. She keeps her eyes trained on Regina’s, terrified of being stupid about this, and she sidles forward, her legs settled comfortably on either side of Regina, and puts her mouth to Regina’s.
It’s not quite CPR, but it works. The poison seems to spring out, hungry for another host, and it sinks into Emma’s throat with such force that she gags on it. Regina lets out a worried noise, and Emma puts her hands on Regina’s cheeks in reassurance, keeping their lips locked together. Their mouths are open, magic passing between them, and Emma can feel something white-hot churning through her, catching the poison and decimating it as it comes. Regina’s lips are warm and full, are like a fantasy of an impossible future, and Emma gasps against them, wants everything at once: to save her, to hold her, to feel her lips on Emma’s again without the poison flowing between them.
Beneath her, she can feel Regina moving, her hands coming up to tangle into Emma’s hair with renewed vigor, her body trembling less with the death curse and moving against Emma’s with a different kind of movement. Emma doesn’t feel any more poison in her throat anymore. She lets out a noise that shouldn’t be a groan, that should be about the curse , but Regina makes an identical noise and pulls her tighter, yanking at Emma’s hair–
“Oh, wow,” says Henry, and Emma pulls back from Regina. The sallowness is gone from Regina’s face, her eyes wide open and her lips kiss-bruised instead of greenish. She slides down in the bathtub, letting only her shoulders be seen from the doorway, and Emma slides a little with her, accidentally grinding against Regina. Henry looks very alarmed under his pile of ice packs and frozen spinach. “Uh, I’ll just…put these down over here,” he says at last, backing out of the room.
“Henry, wait!” Regina says, her voice strong again. She pushes Emma back, climbing out of the bathtub and wrapping a robe around her, and Emma allows herself to, after a quick decision that it’s ethical this time, admire the brief flash of Regina’s naked curves that she gets as Regina escapes. “Henry, that wasn’t–”
Emma leans back in the bathtub. She is feeling a little weak, but nowhere near what Regina had been going through, and that hot magic that courses through her is oddly energizing. She pulls herself to her feet slowly, and Regina reappears at the door to the bathroom, her robe tightly closed around her and a glare of concern on her face. “Emma, you did not just absorb that whole curse from me, did you?”
“I think I made it disappear,” Emma says, a little giddy. “That’s okay, right?”
“Ugh,” Regina says sourly. “Another way to play the hero in front of our son.” Our son , offered so freely that Emma can’t take Regina’s attitude to heart. “Typical.” She walks to the tub, yanks Emma out, and looks critically at her soaking clothes. “You’d better change before the townspeople start asking questions,” she says coolly, and she marches Emma to her closet and throws a shirt at her face. “Get dressed.”
Emma gets dressed. Henry is still sitting on his mother’s bed, a bag of spinach in his hands, and he says, squinting at her, “That wasn’t true love’s kiss, was it?”
“No,” Emma hurries to say. “It was…mouth-to-mouth, really. The spell doesn’t work on me.”
“You don’t know that,” Regina says darkly from the corner. “It might take you in the middle of the night. Or when you least expect it. What an idiot ,” she says, mostly to herself, because Henry is watching them both with dubious eyes. “Moronic savior complex–”
“Hey,” Emma feels obligated to say, and at Regina’s towering glare, she says meekly, “I really appreciate you, you know, saving my life.”
“It’s hardly saving you when I’m the one who put that death curse in the well in the first place,” Regina informs her grouchily. Somehow, Regina’s mood seems to drop with every moment that Emma looks at her with something other than hatred, which Emma finds very encouraging.
“Thanks for not killing me, then,” she offers. “I know that must have been very difficult for you.” She’s only half-joking, and it staggers her when something else crosses Regina’s face, something gentle and soft that Emma’s never seen before. It transforms Regina’s entire expression, makes her into someone who is no longer larger-than-life but who makes Emma’s heart thump furiously against her ribs.
Regina shakes her head, and the expression is gone. “Well, I think you’ve overstayed your welcome,” she says briskly, and she turns to Henry, still on the bed with the spinach in his lap. “Henry,” she says tentatively. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
They’re like strangers, dancing around each other without quite knowing what to say, and Emma breathes easier when Henry smiles at his mother and says, “Can I come back in the morning to make sure you’re all better?”
Regina looks as though she might cry with gratitude. Emma says quickly, before this becomes too much for a ten-year-old boy to handle, “We also wanted to invite you to the welcome home party tomorrow at Granny’s. Since you’re kind of the reason I’m home at all. You know, if you can make it,” she says, feeling suddenly self-conscious.
“I’ll clear my calendar,” Regina says dryly. She follows them downstairs, retrieving the spinach from Henry’s death grip on it, and she sets it down in the foyer and walks them out. Henry gives her a tight hug, staring up at her with the eyes of a child who doesn’t know what he wants to say, and Emma watches them and feels a painful stirring of yearning in her heart. “I love you,” Regina whispers, and she presses a kiss to the top of Henry’s head.
She turns too quickly away from him– or maybe Emma’s standing too close, for no reason that she can explain– and she looks at Emma, their faces just inches apart, their bodies close enough that Emma can nearly feel the way that Regina is breathing against her. “Regina,” Emma whispers, and she feels– on the precipice of something, something that can be good , if they manage to do it right. If she doesn’t push right now, if everything goes exactly the way that it should.
She can feel Regina’s words against her lips, the way that Regina’s eyes settle back into that gentle, pained face that she’d had before. “Thank you for saving my life,” Regina murmurs, and Emma’s legs feel wobbly, incapable of holding her up.
Emma manages to breathe out, “Ditto,” and stumbles back a step, overwhelmed at whatever it is that has passed between them.
Regina straightens, a queen again even in a bathrobe, and she says, “I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow, if an angry mob doesn’t get me first.”
“You know who to call for an angry mob,” Emma says, recovering enough to offer Regina an easy smile, and Regina smiles back, tentative and bright.
They walk away from the house, Henry’s hand in Emma’s again, and he says, “So, you kissed my mom.”
“I did CPR on your mom. Sucked out all the funky magic,” Emma reminds him. “Not a kiss .” Her lips still tingle when she thinks about it.
Henry shrugs. “Looked like a kiss to me,” he says, and then, just as abruptly, “It’d be cool, though. If that was your happy ending. It would kind of make sense, I guess.”
“Are you…are you giving me your blessing?” Emma asks skeptically, somewhere between amusement and panic. “Thanks. I will happily perform CPR on your mother whenever it’s necessary. Hopefully never again,” she adds, though her traitorous heart gives a little leap in response.
Henry sighs. “Emma, you’re so weird,” he says, long-suffering, and he holds her hand and walks happily back to the apartment, chattering about swordfights and magic all the way there.
And Emma thinks– maybe, maybe , if tomorrow’s party goes well, if Regina looks at her like that again, if this is the way that their lives will be from now on– maybe, there might be something to unearth with Regina Mills, evil queen and hardass boss and mother of her son and a mystery she’s eternally working to solve.