Chapter Text
Lying together in the park on Seventh,
our backs smoosh grass and I say
I will love you till I become a child again,
when feeding me and bathing me is no longer romantic,
but rather necessary.
I will love you till there is no till.
Till I die.
And when that electroencephalogram shuts down, baby
that’s when the real lovin’ kicks in.
the planets will bow.
On a cold, wintry night, Regina Mills meets a Time Lady.
She isn't expecting to, of course, and nor does she have any idea what a Time Lady is at the time. No, she's too busy reading through reports and writing emails, filling the evening with the useful, mindless busywork of Mayoral duty as the sky darkens and the thin patter of rain on the window behind her desk threatens to harden into snow. It's mind-numbing work that she could easily hand off to a secretary or some other underling, but she actually enjoys it in a strange sort of way—savours it even, for the alternative is hours and hours of loitering in her son's room, attending to his every need, trying not to react when he inevitably brushes her off with a muttered you aren't my real mom—
But anyway.
She's just settling in for a few hours of work before bed when the room lights up a brilliant orange and she jerks in her chair with a gasp as an almighty explosion sends shudders through her seat.
Startled, alarmed, she rushes over to the window where that near blinding-light had been most intense. There's a cloud of black smoke rising from the middle of her backyard where once there was her apple tree—her apple tree!
If some hooligan or anarchist had pulled some stunt—one of her political rivals, maybe, or a distraught relative of one of the people who’d gone missing of late—there will be hell to pay. A part of her, a measured, rational and long-suffering part of her, cautions that it's probably wildly unsafe to be outside when there's been an explosion in her own backyard—but as usual, she ignores it, and doesn't even break stride as she grabs a coat and marches downstairs.
She soon reaches the back door, and opens it to her backyard—but almost closes it again immediately, taken aback by the intensity of the heat mere yards away, completely banishing the usual winter chill. There's another loud bang, albeit smaller than the first, and another gout of flame rises from what was once her beloved honeycrisp tree, planted with fruit from her childhood farm. She really should just go back inside, away from the flames and call the police, the FBI and probably the Governor too—
But she doesn't, because the flames clear and she spots a flash of red. Not the blazing incandescent golden-red of the flames, but darker, almost maroon… leather?
Is that—?
Gingerly, she steps forward, towards the heat. As she gets closer, the billowing pitch-black smoke begins to dissipate, clearing the scene a little. She doesn't get too close, though, because the flames aren't dying down, and if anything they're getting even fiercer, threatening to consume everything in what she can now see is a small crater surrounded by burning branches and charred, pulverised pieces of apple, within which she can see pieces of metal and an—arm, clad in red leather, hanging limply over the crater's lip.
It's stupid. It's extremely unwise, dangerous in the extreme, particularly when whatever calamity—a bomb? a crash?—had befallen that sorry individual, and she can already hear her mother's voice in her mind, berating her for her foolishness, telling her that your destiny is to rule the entire universe, not to worry herself about the fate of one insipid fool—
She grits her teeth, puts her head down, and heads towards the fire.
She almost regrets it immediately, as there's a small explosion, a spitting gout of flame from the burning pile of what looks like metal at the heart of the crater. The heat is intense, and she's starting to sweat even in the sub-thirty temperatures, and she's wondering whether this is at all wise or even worthwhile—
But then she hears a groan and a cry from the crater, and she runs forward again without thinking.
There's a shift in the wind, blowing smoke away from Regina as she reaches the lip of the crater, and by crouching and covering her head she manages to reach the woman, whom she sees is trapped under a very heavy-looking chunk of metal. She has curly blonde hair, which is currently messy but Regina suspects would be quite striking in the daylight. She's conscious and trying to tug herself out, but she seems exhausted and dazed, half-overcome by smoke inhalation, unable to focus on anything and with skin covered in soot, a look only partially offset by the strange gold-yellow glow surrounding her—
Regina blinks. It's a trick of the light, probably—and she has other things to worry about right now.
"Can you hear me?" she yells, then coughs—thirty seconds, that's as long as she'll give this, or she'll probably burn alive in here.
The woman blinks at Regina, looking confused. "What... who are..."
"Can you hear me?"
"I—yes." The woman nods, slowly. "Yeah."
Regina takes this as enough, and turns to the metal piece currently trapping the woman's leg. It's a painted yellow panel of some kind, and it's been wedged deep into the earth as if pushed down with great force—or dropped from a great height. She grabs it—and almost releases it immediately, because it is hot—and pulls, but it doesn't come fully loose straight away.
Damn it. "Can you help me with this?" she yells. The flames are dying down, she notices, which is probably the only reason they both haven't been burned alive, but her head is feeling light and she really, really needs to get out of here.
The woman still looks totally disoriented, barely aware of her surroundings. "I... I don't know. Where am I? Who are you?"
For the love of—"I'm Regina Mills, Mayor of Storybrooke," she grits out, tries yanking on the metal once again. It comes slightly loose—which is good, because much more of this and her skin will start to blister. "And you blew up my apple tree."
Finally, finally, the woman's attention sharpens a little and she starts tugging on the metal panel too, finally, starting to shift meaningfully. "Storybrooke—America? Earth?"
For a second, Regina wonders if this woman is having a lend of her—but surely not in this situation, now. "Yes, Earth. And you'll enjoy your time in an Earth jail if you don't help me—pull!"
At this, the woman focuses at last, putting her full weight into moving the metal panel, and with a last, almighty heave, it comes loose, freeing her trapped leg. Regina quickly slides an arm under the woman's shoulders and scrambles her away from the burning crater, only to be thanked by a high-pitched yelp.
"Ow—ow! My ankle!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, next time I won't save your life," Regina snaps, but she slowly lowers the woman down to the ground. From here, in the cool of night, she can see that her eyes either hadn't been playing tricks on her before, or they're playing a much more elaborate trick on her now, as the woman seems surrounded by an aura of golden-yellow light, a thin glowing mist rising from her body. Just like Father had before he died—
She blinks, and the glow is gone, taking the stray thought with it.
"Who are you?" she asks, crouching down to be at the woman's eye level.
The woman's mouth rapidly opens, then closes, then opens again, as if she's unsure of how to even answer the question. "Em..." she begins slowly, like she's enunciating the word for the first time and hasn't quite gotten her tongue around it yet. "Em—ma."
"Emma?" Regina repeats cautiously. It isn't a difficult name, why had this woman had such difficulty with it? Maybe she's just insane—which would at least go some way to explaining why she'd destroyed Regina's apple tree.
"Emma Swan," she says then, more confidently. "Sorry. New body, new mouth. Time Lady problems, you know?"
Which makes precisely zero sense to Regina, but she isn't concerned by the ramblings of a madwoman right now. "You destroyed my apple tree."
Emma Swan frowns. "I... destroyed your apple tree?"
Regina glares. "Yes. And since it was my favourite, planted with fruit from my father's farm, you'd better explain what exactly happened here and why, or you'll find yourself spending the rest of the night as the guest of the police department."
Emma's eyes widen and go round, bright and... a little scared, Regina thinks. She opens her mouth, and Regina thinks she's about to get some madcap explanation which makes no sense whatsoever, but instead a small cough comes out.
And a little wisp of golden-yellow dust.
They both stare at it with slack-jawed shock as it rises into the dark of light, dancing upwards against the falling flakes of snow, before dissipating.
"Oh," Emma lets out, then faints.
After checking that, yes, Emma is just unconscious and hadn't keeled over and died on the spot, Regina decides to lay the unconscious stranger down on the sitting room couch—though with hesitation, as she's coated in a thin, patchy layer of soot. Now that she can get a better look at her with indoor lighting, Regina can see that Emma looks young, younger than her, and healthy-looking—strangely so given her recent ordeal, with nothing but cuts and rips to her clothes to show for her troubles. She's taking only small breaths and she's pale, though, that strange golden-yellow glow having long departed—if it had even been there in the first place as opposed to some weird trick of the flaming light, which is very possible.
Regina purses her lips. She should probably go to the police—she really should go to the police, given that this Emma was clearly doing something untoward in her backyard, but she doesn't. She doesn't know exactly why, but she doesn't—as if there's a little voice in her head silently cajoling her to stay with this mysterious blonde arsonist, an impulse, a curiosity she can't quite explain as she studies the unconscious Emma—
She's abruptly taken out of her thoughts, though, by the voice of her son, Henry.
"What's going on?" he asks, and Regina does a brief double take. "Is everything OK?"
She turns to face him. He's at the top of the stairs, already in his sleeping clothes, leaning over the railing with apprehension on his face, his dark brown hair falling across his face somewhat. She's tried to get him to get him to cut it, but to little avail.
She gives him a smile that isn't returned. "Fine, sweetheart. Nothing to worry about."
A year ago, he would have believed her, turned and gone back to bed—but not now. Not now. "I thought I heard something really big, like a crash," he says instead, "I think we should call the cops—"
"No police."
Regina turns back.
"That's what you were talking about outside, right?" Emma says from the couch, eyes wide open as she pushes herself up to a sitting position and turns to face the two of them. "You were gonna call the police. The cops."
Regina folds her arms across her chest, takes one, two steps across the stone floor, Henry skipping down the steps behind to join her.
"You trespassed onto my home," Regina starts slowly, low and hard. "Started a fire, or set off a bomb, or whatever the hell you did—you could easily gotten me or my son killed. You killed my apple tree."
Emma swallows visibly. "I know, I—I'm sorry, I'll fix it, I promise. Just—don't call the police, okay? Or the hospital."
Regina stares. "You almost literally burned to death in that fire, and I'm positive there's something not right with your heart." Regina had checked Emma's pulse—it had been bizarrely rapid and erratic, the beats coming in a strange rhythm she hadn't been able to work out.
"I'm fine now. See?" Emma holds up her hands, and Regina does indeed see that they're completely unblemished. "It's weird, I know, but I—I can explain, I promise."
"Alright. So explain."
Emma opens her mouth—then closes it again immediately, almost as if swallowing the words that had been on the verge of falling out of her mouth. "It's complicated."
"How convenient."
"It is! It's—fine." Emma sighs, runs her hands through her messy, ash-coated hair. "I'm not from this world. I mean, I grew up here but I'm not, like, from here technically."
Regina stares for a moment, frowning, and is about to ask what the hell that's supposed to mean when—
"You mean you're you're not from Earth?" Henry asks curiously.
She cringes, shoots her son a reproving glare—which, as normal these days, is summarily ignored as he steps in front of her. "Henry—"
"Like, you're an alien?"
"Henry—”
"A real alien?"
Emma bobs her head up and down. "Yeah."
Regina stops.
Emma is looking down at her palms, which at first glance seems a shy, nervous sort of gesture—but on closer inspection she's staring at them too intensely, too transfixed for it to be merely that.
"I mean, if you mean what you think I mean then yeah, I'm an alien."
"Oh," Henry says, as if taking the news in his stride—but Regina can already see the brightness in his eyes, his posture a little straighter than usual as he begins to bounce on the balls of his feet. "So, like, is that your spaceship outside—"
"Henry, that's enough," Regina cuts across him. She tries to bodily push him back behind her and out of Emma's sight, but he forces her arm off him.
"You don't get to tell me what to do. You aren't my real mom," he retorts angrily, giving her a furious glare, and it takes all her willpower not to physically recoil.
She breathes in, breathes out, steadies herself.
"Go back to bed, Henry," she says, looking him straight in the eye, refusing to break gaze, refusing to let even a hint of the weakness enter her voice. "We'll talk about this in the morning."
A second, two, where he doesn't move, doesn't do anything but obstinately just stand there and scowl at her—before giving one more angry shrug and brushing past her as he skips up the stairs two at the time to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose, listening to the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.
She isn't even angry about the insubordination any more—in front of a seemingly mad stranger who had destroyed her tree, no less—she's just tired. Two weeks of this, two weeks of cold shoulders and silent dinners and furious one-sided arguments and she's just... so tired.
“I’m sorry,” Emma says softly, and Regina opens her eyes again.
"Excuse me?"
“About that. Seeing that and—I’m sorry,” Emma says again, looking down at her hands. "He's lucky, you know. Your kid," Emma continues, the softness in her voice replicated in the gentleness of her expression—the longing? "He's adopted, isn't he?"
Regina gives her a narrow-eyed glare. "And how would you know that?"
A shrug. "I spent a lot of time in orphanages. Kids there were always so jealous of the kids who got adopted early."
"Yes, well, try explaining that to him."
"I will, if you want."
It takes Regina a moment to realise that Emma is being completely serious. "If this is some way to coax me into—"
"It isn't!" Emma interjects, her eyes briefly flashing. "It's—look, I do owe you for the whole tree thing. But he looks like a good kid and you obviously care about him. If I'd just had that..."
And yes, that is definitely longing that Regina sees now. She sighs.
"In return, I guess you still want me to not call the police, or the hospital, or the mental asylum."
“The—what?" Emma's eyebrows crease with confusion—then shoot upwards, as her eyes widen. "I'm not making it up!"
"Convincing."
"I'm not! The heart thing is just because I have two of them, and—" Emma begins, her voice rising in pitch before abruptly cutting off, like she'd remembered just in the nick of time not to divulge some closely-held secret. "Look. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can prove it to you in, like, five minutes."
Regina just stands there, arms folded across her chest again.
Emma sighs audibly. "Fine. One minute. And we'll just stay in your backyard. Promise."
It's insane. It's absolutely, certifiably insane, and if anything it's even more reason to take this woman straight to the police and get her away from her son permanently—but then.
But then she remembers that longing, that undisguised yearning on Emma's face when she'd looked at Henry—at Regina and Henry, as if even the crumbled pieces of their relationship is something to strive for. But then she sees that fidgeting eagerness now as Emma twists her fingers together, that shining sincerity that tells that maybe, just maybe...
"One minute."
It doesn't even take thirty seconds.
Regina had been questioning that it'd happen at at all, of course; but upon stepping outside, the sight of the previously-fierce flames having being replaced by a lightly smoking crater containing a whole car—a car of all things. A hideous little yellow VW Beetle that looks like it should have been melted down for scrap some time in the last four decades at least, but it's there. It at least explains what the enormous metal object was that made getting Emma out of the fire such a tightrope affair, and it gives her enough pause to go along.
Still...
"This better be good," she warns, clambering gingerly down the crater to where the car has been embedded in the soil, as if it had crashed down from the unseen heavens above.
Emma opens the door, her face now illuminated by a warm glow seemingly from within.
"It is."
Regina steps inside and—
Well, it hadn't even been thirty seconds. Not least because while it looks like a car on the outside, on the inside, it's—not.
The room—the room—is lit a gentle sort of orange, a comforting tone which matches the homely feel given by the various odds and ends—clothes, notebooks, boxes, other random items and contraptions that Regina doesn't recognise—strewn about everywhere. She almost could have believed that she'd walked into a teenager's bedroom, or Henry's when he's feeling mutinous, if it weren't for the enormous central column dead centre in the room, covered in steel mesh and flanked by two panels of knobs and levers that Regina just knows already that she shouldn't touch.
Whatever this thing is, it sure isn't a car.
"So this is my Bug," Emma says, motioning around the room with a broad sweep of her arms. There's an energy to Emma now, a bright eagerness about her as she skips up to the central console, flicking random switches along the way. "It's—um, not a car, as I guess you can tell."
"I can tell," Regina breathes out, eyes bulging a little as they absorb her surroundings, take in every last detail of this room—this room inside a car. "It's... it's..."
Emma takes half a step back towards Regina, bouncing on her heels. "Yeah?"
Regina opens her mouth, considers for a moment with the small part of her brain not yet paralysed with shock—"It's messy."
Emma's shoulders slump a little, the little up-curl of her lips fading. "Oh. Um—yeah, I should probably clean it up. But it's been kind of hectic around here lately, I haven't really had time with work and all."
"Work?" Fine, the sooty face and ragged, singed clothes may be skewing Regina's perception of Emma somewhat, but the woman does not strike her as having exactly a stable Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five working life, what with the alien spaceship and tree-killing and all. Still, she's aware that her perceptions aren't to be trusted tonight. "What kind of work?"
Emma's smile fades even further. "I find people, wherever they are. It's something I'm good at, I guess."
Regina reads between the lines of Emma's unsaid words and the sudden awkwardness of her posture, and her eyes narrow a little. "You're a bounty hunter."
"No! No, I—" Emma swallows, lowers her gaze. "I only work for people who are good. I mean, I think they're good. It's a really big universe out there, and sometimes people get lost in it."
"I see," Regina says, keeping her voice determinedly neutral as she runs her fingers through a set of arcane, intricate engravings running the length of one of the walls. God, if she could just spend an hour, a day in this thing, cavorting through the universe—but she can't. She has her life and her son, and she learned a long time ago what really matters.
"Well, you've made your point. Do try to avoid any apple trees next time you decide to crash-land in these parts," she advises, turning towards the door to leave.
"Wait—you're leaving?" Emma asks, her voice raising in pitch, caught somewhere between surprise and disappointment. "But I haven't even shown you the best bit yet!"
She stops with her hand on the door-handle (exactly like that of a car door, she notices off-hand). "What?"
"This thing—this thing isn't just a spaceship," Emma says, that breathless eagerness, that sincere plaintiveness returning to her voice again as she skips over to Regina, close enough to touch. "It's so much more than just a spaceship."
Regina breathes out, looks Emma straight in the eye. "I have a son to take care of and a life to live. I can't just run off and see the universe."
Something in Regina's words must have stung, because Emma recoils visibly—and to her own surprise, Regina feels a nasty drop in her stomach at the sight.
"I—I know, I'm not asking you to run away or anything. Just—" Emma pauses, waits, places an arm around Regina's wrist, tugging gently, imploringly. "Give me five more minutes. Please? Henry won’t even know we’re gone, so you can see that I'm—I'm not mad, and to thank you for not calling the cops, and for saving my life."
Regina stares at Emma's face, then down at the hand enclosing her arm, then back up at Emma's face again, eyes so clear Regina is momentarily fooled into thinking they're glass, giving her a view straight into the eagerness, the urge to show Regina something truly incredible.
"Five more minutes," Emma repeats softly.
Regina looks one more time—and nods.
Emma smiles.