we'll go back to being just stories again

Hi, I'm CG. I like character development and tildes and ladies who care about other ladies. cis, she/her/hers one time over ten years ago Emma and Regina smiled at each other and I haven't been able to think about anything else since (save me) (jk i don't want to be saved) MARKLESS (Levine Querido) will be out Summer 2024!! DOWNLOADABLE FIC LIST

[coalitiongirl]

just an update! i am now un-suspended. i went through all my emails and found every single markless mention in comments and deleted them all, so hopefully that's enough to satisfy ao3! the email says the work will be un-hidden after seven days if everything they didn't like is deleted, so i think it'll be back up soon?? until then, if you are truly desperate to read it, i just pasted the whole thing under this cut.

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

My dear reader, it’s going to be rough.

Picture, if you will, Regina Mills, fresh from the new trauma of losing her son and burying her mother. She teeters, unstable, on the verge of doing something rash, something unforgivable.

Enter, stage right, Emma Swan, who is mostly just trying to do her best. There is no father of her son who appears, no strangers with plots to torture an evil queen, no added complications beyond a grieving woman who shares her son. Beyond her son, who is learning to be good and caring again, and who misses the mother who had raised him more than he’d admitted until now.

And Henry’s needs, she knows, will always come first– as distasteful as they might be.

The flowers, dear reader, will bloom when they come. First: I only ask for patience.

It is Regina who will begin this story.

She doesn’t expect anything, and isn’t that just a fucking joke? Twenty-eight years of dominance, of power and control, and now she expects nothing. She lives in her large house, as quiet as a tomb, and she goes to work as the mayor because no one has bothered to re-fire her, and she expects nothing else.

She has no real power here, nothing but the trappings of leadership without benefit, and yet, it feels much like it had when she’d reigned over a kingdom. Then, too, she’d had almost nothing to live for (except revenge, whispers a voice in her mind that will never fully quiet), and she had subsisted purely out of spite.

Now, she will do the same.

It would be so neat for her to roll over and die now, to go out in a blaze of glory or flee this damned prison of a town. It would be so easy for her enemies, who watch her with wary, pitying eyes now. Henry could be raised with only vague memories of a mother who had loved him first and most, with rose-colored glasses that recognize how hard she’d been trying before she tragically left his life. Like an old Disney movie, the villainess toppling off a cliff so no one has to kill her– how distasteful– or see her face every day.

Regina will not disappear of her own free will, no matter how dizzy or weak she feels these days. She strides into Granny’s every weekday morning, nods coolly to her before she sits, and she drinks her coffee and waits. Ten minutes later, Henry scrambles into the diner, lighting up when he spots her and turning to whisper to That Woman.

That Woman always hesitates, and she gets that strained, vaguely constipated look on her face. Then comes the smile, like stretching a rubber band that might snap back at any time, and the slow walk to her table. “Hey,” That Woman says, uncertain and wary.

Once, That Woman had been Emma, and they had been bound together by Henry, by a curse, by loathing so strong that it had brought them alive. Once, Emma had been thrown into another world to protect Regina, had emerged from that world and smiled at her like the sun, had knocked on Regina’s door and stumbled over her words as she’d invited her to a party at this very diner.

Once, Emma had immediately assumed the worst of Regina, had accused her of murdering the only person in this town who’d listened to Regina, had left her to her mother’s manipulations and then faced her as an enemy. Once, when Henry had been so overwhelmed after Mother’s death that he’d tried to wipe out all magic, Emma had said, magic isn’t the problem, kid. It’s her.

Emma is not Regina’s friend. Emma will never be Regina’s friend. She is only That Woman, who doles out Regina’s access to Henry as though she carries Regina’s entire heart in a careless dangle of her fingers.

And Regina has no choice but to say tightly, “Good morning.”

Emma twists to Henry. “Kid, want to order us some cocoa and muffins? Blueberry,” she adds quickly, as though Regina might be appeased by that. “And a banana for each of us.”

Regina and Henry arch their brows in unison, twin sets of dubious expressions that see right through Emma, but Henry scrambles off and Emma remains. “Uh,” she says, wetting her lips with a familiar, nervous tic. “Henry misses you.”

“I haven’t moved.” Regina taps her fingers against the table. “He knows where to find me.”

“Yeah. I just…I don’t know how comfortable I am with him hanging out with you unsupervised when things are so…unstable.” Emma shifts from foot to foot, the words a little sheepish. Ha-ha, I’m so awkward, don’t mind my words when they’re sharp as needles digging into your skin–

“Unstable?” Regina echoes acidly. Typical. Regina can come in every morning at the exact same time for weeks, on her way to a thankless job where she keeps this entire town running, and Emma has the temerity to call her unstable. “Strong words for the woman who cuts and runs whenever she’s uncomfortable.”

Emma’s face hardens, the uncertainty replaced with hostility. “If I didn’t leave when you tried to run me out of town, I’m not going anywhere again. I’m Henry’s mother.” Regina’s hand tightens on her coffee, fault lines spidering across the mug. “And you’re…you are, too,” Emma adds swiftly, her eyes flickering down to the mug. “But you’re not always good for him. I thought you knew that. David said–”

Oh, Regina is not going to allow That Woman to use her admissions to Henry against her. “I’m better for him than you’d ever be,” she spits out. “I’m his mother. Everything he is now is because of me.” In spite of you, says a dark voice at the back of her mind, but she refuses to share that with Emma. It sounds very much like her mother, like Rumple. “What have you done for him? Encouraged him to skip school? To disobey me? To run off and throw himself in danger?”

“You made him believe that he’d lost his mind,” Emma says, eyes narrowed. “That everything he believed was a lie.”

“And you thought it was a lie and still let him believe it so you could get close to him,” Regina shoots back. Her head aches, and she sees spots when she stares at Emma for too long. “So which of us is worse?”

It is so much easier to stay calm when it’s someone else, when she can make slick comments and laugh at their helpless, flapping fury. It’s far more difficult with Emma, who always manages to grate at every nerve that Regina has, hitting vulnerabilities and pushing, always pushing–

“Stop it,” cuts in another voice, and it sounds frightened enough that it jerks Regina from her rage. “Stop it, both of you!” Henry has made his order and returned to them, looking between them with wide, unhappy eyes. “Mom,” he says.

“Yes?” they both say, and Regina thrums with fury again for an instant before she averts her eyes, staring down at her mug.

“Mom,” Henry repeats, looking up at Emma. Regina’s mug is leaking watery brown coffee. “You said you were going to try.” He sounds disappointed, and Emma hangs her head, sheepish and declawed again.

“Sorry, kid. I was trying.” Regina snorts. Henry’s disappointed face turns to her, and she hastily arranges her face into an expression of regret. Emma says, terse, “Do you want to have Henry and me over tomorrow night or not?”

Maybe she had imagined a pleasant conversation which would have ended in an invitation. Maybe this is exactly how Emma had wanted this to go. Gone are the sweet, tentative eyes, the stuttered Archie made a cake– from the days before Mother had come when the impossible had been so tangible.

God, Regina had felt it like a clenching in her chest when Emma had smiled at her that night. Like the first evening when she’d met Emma, like that moment at the mines when she’d first trusted her with Henry, like Emma carrying her from a burning building all aflame with righteous stubbornness.

She has never been able to fully excise the idealist from under her skin. Emma Swan might do it for her. “Henry, I would love to have you over for dinner tomorrow,” she says, and it takes no effort at all for her eyes to find warmth and her smile to go soft. Henry beams at her like a spark of light in the darkness.

She raises her face to the stony expression of That Woman, and she says, her voice like steel, “And I suppose your chaperone can attend, too.”

Emma stares at her from the far end of the table. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t offer to serve the food or help set the table. She just watches Regina with Henry, her face unreadable, passing judgment upon every word that slips from Regina’s mouth.

It stings, thinking about when Emma hadn’t hated her. Not because it had been like a waterfall, a rush, something that Regina could drink in forever as it had brought her back to life– never that– but because Regina hadn’t done anything to earn it this time. Because Regina had been desperately trying to prove herself, and Emma had been so encouraging until it had all shattered. The unfairness of it all eats away at her, makes her resent the woman watching her even more.

She doesn’t show it to Henry, who is eager and happy to be at home. “I know where the spoons are!” he throws over his shoulder when she suggests that he gets them. He bounces into the kitchen, opens extra drawers once the spoons are in hand as though reassuring himself that everything is as it should be. After that, he peers into the fridge, finds an orange, and eats it as though this is just an ordinary afternoon instead of a day that will keep Regina going for another month.

She wants to sob. She laughs lightly and says, “Henry, I’m about to serve dinner.”

“This is my appetizer,” Henry says, and there is a note to his voice, a test that isn’t exactly hostile as much as it is curious. What will you do, Mom? Are you still afraid of my unhappiness?

She is terrified, even more so because of the woman sitting silently at the table, taking stock of all the ways that Regina is a failure to her son. She clears her throat. Finds a compromise. “Save it for dessert,” she says at last. She hasn’t baked him anything for dessert. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever bake him a dessert again.

Henry pouts, then shrugs it off with a grin, pulling out a dessert plate and setting his orange down on it on the counter. He peers at the pot on the stove, then twists around to run to Emma. “Mom made chili gnocchi!” he pronounces as though she knows that it’s his favorite. “Usually, I only get that for my birthday.” His face falls, the veneer of cheerfulness faltering. “I guess we missed my birthday this year.”

Emma looks away. It’s just an instant of guilt, but Regina sees it, and it sends a juddering vibration through her chest. She glances around, finds the closest tissue box, just in case. When Emma looks back, Regina keeps her eyes fixed on her, and Emma takes a breath and says, “Hey, there’s no law against celebrating your birthday a month late.”

“Certainly not,” Regina says, and she’s talking to Henry, not Emma, except for the way that she can’t quite tear her eyes from her. There is a battle being fought in their stares, and Regina remembers now how good it had felt last year, when Emma had waged war against her. How vibrant she’d felt, how her skin buzzes with it now.

She takes a step back. Emma still watches her. Another step, until she is finally safe in the kitchen, torn from Emma’s gaze. She spoons out the chili into three bowls and brings them to the table. Henry takes his, bright-eyed and eager. “It might be a little too hot for you,” he tells Emma. “Grandma’s food is a little…well, you know, it tastes really good!” he says hastily, glancing over at Regina. “It just doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor.”

“I remember,” Regina says dryly. One of her first actions as emancipated queen was to replace the cook with one from her father’s native land. The heat of the food had tasted like freedom even when Snow White had still been at large.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Emma says to Henry, her eyes locked on Regina again. “I’ve eaten plenty of Mexican takeout over the years, and that’s pretty intense.” But she doesn’t eat, not yet, and Regina sighs.

She moves around the table, her spoon in hand, and she digs into Emma’s bowl and takes a spoonful of her chili, licking off the spoon in front of her guest. Emma gapes at her, her pupils large and her lips parted in shock, and Regina says, “See? I haven’t poisoned it.”

Emma’s eyes dart to Henry, who is ignoring them both in favor of his food. “I didn’t think–”

“Didn’t you?” Regina breathes, and Emma swallows hard and jabs her spoon into her bowl, her eyes narrowing. She emerges with a large heap of chili, and she shovels the entire thing into her mouth.

A moment later, she’s gasping for breath, her face flushed and her eyes bulging. And Regina had, perhaps, meant for this to happen, had cooked this for Henry’s birthday and out of sheer spite for his hanger-on. It takes all she can manage not to smirk, to keep her face wiped clean as Emma gasps, “Water! Please!”

Henry passes the pitcher of water to her, his face screwed up with concern. “I don’t think water really helps,” he says as Emma downs a glass. “It usually just kind of spreads the heat around.”

“There’s some rice on the stove,” Regina says helpfully. “I was giving it a few more minutes to sit before I served it.” She takes her time in the kitchen, humming to herself as she fluffs the rice and brings it out. By the time she returns, Emma is sitting stiff in her chair, eating more of the chili as though it is an enemy she has to vanquish.

It’s painfully endearing. No, she tells herself, something rising in her throat. No.

Henry is grinning, and Regina can’t help the smile that crosses her face at his joy, the lightness when she says, “If the chili is too much for you, I won’t be offended if you skip it.”

Emma glowers at her. She might be on to Regina. “It’s delicious,” she grinds out, and she eats the rice between bites, but she does finish all of her chili and says yes to seconds. By the end of the meal, Regina isn’t entirely sure who’s won this round.

After dinner, Emma lays a possessive hand on Henry’s shoulder and says, “We should really head home soon. Tomorrow is a school day and you have homework.”

Henry hesitates, and that is enough to make Regina’s heart sing. “You can do your homework here, if you prefer,” she says.

Henry looks at Emma. Regina can’t see his expression, can’t tell if it’s pity or guilt or real desire, but it has Emma wavering. “I guess you could,” she says at last. “Is your backpack in the car?”

Henry slumps with disappointment. “No, it’s back at the loft.” Regina’s heart thuds, and she is an open book, can feel the plaintive despondency that will come with Henry leaving.

It’s Emma who says, “Well, I bet Regina can just snap her fingers and bring it here, right?” She glances up at Regina, casual and questioning, and Regina stares at her, her face darkening.

Is this a trap? She has avoided magic all evening, has been careful not to mention it at all, and here is Emma, inviting her to use it. Henry looks just as perplexed, but Emma shrugs. “It’s fine, isn’t it?”

It hasn’t been fine in months, since they had first decided that Regina has a magic problem, that this is the root of all ills in Storybrooke. Regina has been letting her magic atrophy since Mother’s death, has been trying desperately to be worthy of Henry again, to prove that she can go without it. It’s fine, isn’t it?

Maybe it is better to keep her interactions with Henry to a minimum, to avoid moments like these. To step back, if only to give herself space from Emma Swan, who can say a few words and reduce Regina to a frenzy of fear and despair. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she says, her words wet and afraid, and Henry chews on his lip and says that he’d rather just go back to the loft, after all.

He hugs her before he departs, affection freely offered that she holds onto tightly, and then they are gone and Regina sinks to the floor and chokes sobs into her knees.

There is no delayed reaction from Emma, no recognition of that strange, tense night when Regina next sees her with Henry in the morning. Emma nods to her, a single acknowledgement that effort is being made, and Henry is the one who runs to her, who tells her about a mishap with his laundry (“Everything is pink, Mom, it’s a nightmare!”) and then bounds off to get his breakfast from Granny.

Regina’s chest is tight, and she swallows hard and nods back to Emma when they leave the diner together, her son and his chosen mother. She coughs into a napkin once they’re gone and drinks some coffee to soothe her throat, and then she sits back and contemplates going to work while she’s an emotional wreck.

It wouldn’t be anything new.

The next day, Emma nods again, and Regina nods back this time. The day after, Emma doesn’t notice her at all, engrossed in conversation with Ruby, and the day after that, they’re running late and even Henry doesn’t greet Regina. Regina still arrives each morning because what else can she do but steal glimpses of her son, isolated moments that will keep her enduring for just a little longer? Who is she anymore if she doesn’t have Henry?

She is certain that she’s failed some test. That Emma had brought Henry to her that one time with some arbitrary criteria for Regina to fill, and no one had told her what it was. But she’d done something wrong, because there had been no more dinners, no more invitations, no more admissions that Henry misses you.

She loathes the power that Emma Swan holds over her. She loathes Emma Swan. But still, she runs through that night over and over again, struggles to understand how she’d failed to measure up. Had she been too hostile toward Emma? Had she not been effusive enough with Henry?

Had she reacted wrong to Emma’s invitation for her to do magic? Maybe she should have recoiled, immediately refused. Maybe her confusion had been taken as guilt. Maybe…

Maybe Emma is just drunk on power, savoring her control over Regina’s happiness, and making her suffer out of some sadistic desire to punish Regina.

It never feels more like that when, on one Sunday morning, there’s a knock at Regina’s door and Emma and Henry are standing behind it. “Hey,” Emma says, offering her a nod. It’s the first nod in days, not that Regina is counting. “Uh.”

Regina is wearing a long dress, floral and casual, because she hasn’t had the energy to do the laundry in weeks and she hadn’t planned to leave the house today. Emma glances at it– at her, her gaze as startled as Regina feels– and Regina’s throat closes up. With humiliation, maybe. Shame. Stupid. She hadn’t expected visitors.

“We were going to the park,” Henry adds, and his smile is genuine, makes Regina’s breath come more easily. “Do you want to come?”

There is no answer but one. Regina doesn’t think to change her shoes, to put on something more severe that will exude mayoral poise. She doesn’t dare to do anything more than nod, of course, lest Henry and Emma leave without her.

She tugs at her dress as Henry chatters alongside her, suddenly self-conscious at how simple it is. How the long skirt of it softens her edges, makes her seem approachable. Weak. She can’t afford to be weak. She should have been wearing heels. It’s a beautiful day, and there will be so many people around.

Emma trails behind them, and Regina can feel her stare on her, always hot and challenging. When they near the park playground and Henry races ahead, to grab a swing before another kid can, Emma murmurs, so close to her ear that Regina startles, “If you’d wanted to change, we could have waited for you.”

Regina scoffs, unwilling to give Emma more of herself. “This is fine. It’s just…a little casual, I think, for a public servant to be seen this way.” She makes it pointed, turning to rake her eyes over Emma’s thin tee, the tight jeans molded to her skin.

A flush warms Emma’s cheeks, and her eyes drift across Regina’s frame. “It’s nice,” she says. “You look nice in it. Which I guess is why you hate it.” Regina inclines her head in acquiescence, and Emma rolls her eyes at her. “Look, you can’t always be the big bad scary evil queen. I thought you wanted to move on from that. Henry says–”

Regina cuts her off, her stomach roiling. “You talk about me with Henry?”

Emma shrugs. “You come up sometimes. He really does care about you. And I think you care about him.”

“You think?” Regina demands, and her fists tighten. “You think?”

Emma turns away from her, focuses on Henry on his swing. Regina follows suit, letting the sight of him calm her. He’s going higher and higher, and he kicks off his shoes when he’s at the top of the swing, sending them flying across the playground. It’s so normal, so much like a scene from a year ago, before everything had fallen apart. “I wasn’t sure,” she says. “I didn’t know if you…if you saw him as something to have. Or if you really loved him.”

Regina seethes. Something in her chest withers and dies. She’s furious. She isn’t hurt, because she will never give Emma Swan the power to hurt her again. “This town still stands only because Henry is inside of it. And you think that I don’t love him?”

Emma doesn’t respond to the threat, which had been stupid and will set Regina’s time with Henry back again, she’s sure. “You didn’t kiss him. When he was…after he ate that turnover. You didn’t even try to kiss him awake.”

Regina had sat in the hospital room and wept, had felt the world falling apart around her, and no, she had not kissed Henry as Emma had. How arrogant it is, to believe that a kiss can work magic. How privileged it is for the laws of the world to break only for you. “I am no Charming,” she spits. “I don’t get beautiful fairytales, and I don’t expect them. Forgive me for being a realist.”

Emma is silent. When Regina turns, Emma is watching her again, and there is a lingering something in her eyes. Not quite pity, not quite sorrow. But understanding, and Regina hates seeing it more than anything else. Hates the way that her heart leaps, and the next few breaths hitch and don’t emerge right.

Finally, Emma says, “David told me about…about that guy. The one Whale brought back to life.”

Screaming panic turns Regina’s vision red. “Please stop talking.”

“He’s the one your mom–”

“Please stop.” She can’t speak about this. Not with Emma. Maybe not with anyone anymore. She had tried to speak to Archie about it, but that had been a terrible mistake. She has locked away that horror, those terrible memories, and Emma prods at them, pushes unrelentingly, and Regina can’t–

She is interrupted by a shriek, and then a scream. She knows that scream. Her head whips around, and she catches sight of Henry, crumpled on the ground.

She runs, heedless of any of the irritations of before, and drops down beside him. He moans, and she reaches for him, holds him to her chest in an instinctive move. “What happened?” she says breathlessly, arms wrapped around him.

He is eleven now, and he squirms free, too big to be seen in his mother’s arms. “It’s fine,” he says, but he’s breathing hard, clenching his jaw to stop tears from blooming at the edges of his eyes. “I just…slipped off the swing. Banged my knee a little.”

“Can you move your leg?” Emma is in front of them, on the ground, too, her eyes wide and concerned for Henry. Henry moves it obligingly, and Regina nearly breathes a sigh of relief before she spots the other side of his leg.

There’s a long gash across it, oozing viscous blood, and Regina sucks in a sharp breath. “Henry,” she says hopelessly, and he leans back for just a moment, resting his head against her shoulder. She raises her face, looks at Emma. “He’s going to need stitches. Call for an ambulance.”

Emma looks pale. “That’s a lot of stitches.” The cut is long and nasty, his knee torn open and his calf streaked with blood. She catches Regina’s gaze, her own pleading. “You can heal it, can’t you?”

Again, Regina is stunned, bewildered. Furious. Emma is testing her now? Emma is pushing her to her limits while Henry is bleeding out on the ground?

“Regina, please. It’s fine.” Emma’s voice is low, her hand on Henry’s leg, her face limned with fear. “Please, hurry.”

Henry’s breathing is quickening, and there is no choice, not really, when it comes to Henry suffering or not. Regina lays a hand on Henry’s knee, just below Emma’s hand, and she closes her eyes and calls her magic to her.

It floods her, washing through her like the first drink on a hot day. Her head feels clear, her heart feels light, and an eternity of agony and loss are washed away in an instant, made so much less with the warmth of the magic moving through her. For the first time in weeks, Regina feels alive, strong, present. She lets her magic run over Henry’s cut, cleaning it and then healing it. And then she is overloaded, overwhelmed, and it feels so good, so bright, as though it is as necessary as the blood rushing through her veins.

A voice says, “Thank you.” It is Emma, and her soft words send ice dripping through Regina’s warmth, remind her that she is being tested, that she has failed. Henry is safe, is healthy, and Regina tingles with magic, with color that she has been struggling to dull for weeks.

She’s supposed to show Henry that she can be good. That she can stay away from magic. And one fall– one coaxing from That Woman– and she has lost him again.

Ah, my dear reader. There you are again. And what, you might be wondering, is going through Emma Swan’s mind as she navigates this strange new relationship with her son’s mother?

I can tell you only what I know, which might be just a bit more than she allows herself to know. I can tell you that whenever Emma sees Regina, she is stricken by the reminder that she had offered Regina a chance, that she had reached out and made overtures and then crushed them all to dust on the testimony of a Dalmatian. I can tell you that Emma is desperate to find some evidence that she had been right all along, that she hadn’t been the one to shatter Regina Mills, that Regina had been sour from the start.

(I can tell you that Regina’s smile haunts her sometimes, that tentative hope in her eyes when Emma had made her promises on the day that the curse had broken. That Emma makes a point of walking into Granny’s every weekday morning because Regina looks a little worse each day– more wan, waxy-skinned and slow-moving– and no one else seems to notice.

Sometimes Emma wonders if she’s going to be the one to race to Regina’s house when the other woman isn’t at Granny’s one morning to find her collapsed on the floor, sapped of all energy for good.)

I can tell you that when Henry had said Mom loves the park with that wistful tone that makes Emma gratefulresentful, then what if we invited her along?, Emma hadn’t known what to say.

You don’t have to invite her along because you feel guilty, she had assured Henry, only for Henry to stare at her in bewilderment.

Mary Margaret had said, serenely flipping through a book, I don’t think he’s the one who feels guilty, and Emma had mashed her fist into the counter and ignored her for the rest of the morning.

Regina wants to tear things apart. She wants to set things on fire, to tackle the things that she can’t understand and rip them to shreds. She wants to scream, to let out her fury and frustration, to let streams of purple smoke flood her house until it’s all she has in her lungs.

Instead, she cleans. She scrubs the walls and the counters and the table, the acrid smell of ammonia like a poison she wants to savor, and she’s on her knees on the floor, scraping at a black rose petal stuck to the floor as though it is a usurper to her throne, when there is a knock at the door.

It has been hours since the park, and she knows that there’s only one person who it can be. She doesn’t want to answer it. She has no choice but to answer it if she wants to see Henry again.

She throws out her hand, defiant, because Emma says it’s fine and so she should have no problem with the front door unlocking itself and sliding open. Then she returns to the floor, glaring at white tile until Emma says, “I should have talked to you about this.”

Regina scrubs more. Emma says, “We just…we haven’t been great at talking. I guess I thought it would end badly. Ruin the park. I don’t know.” She crouches down in front of Regina, and Regina looks up just enough to see a bottle of wine in Emma’s hand. A peace offering. “Can we talk now?”

Regina has learned her lesson. She changes from her cleaning clothes first. She looks at the last few clean mayoral pantsuits, sharp and intimidating, but it is so late at night and she has no energy left to be powerful right now. Instead, she pulls on a cardigan and a pair of leggings, and Emma looks startled when she sees her. “You look good,” she blurts out. “I mean. I’ve never really seen you in…” Regina meets her gaze evenly. Emma swallows. “Can we talk?” she says again.

Regina pours the wine. Emma sits on the couch of her study, as uncomfortable in her own skin as she’d been on the night when they’d met. “I’ve just…I’ve been thinking about this whole magic addiction thing, and it’s kind of stupid, isn’t it? Like a really hackneyed way to explain why you went off the deep end. You were kind of off the deep end when there was no magic in Storybrooke in the first place.”

“And you thought this conversation would end badly,” Regina says dryly. But it’s easier to be calm now, to raise her eyebrows without spinning into a bitter spiral. Without Henry here, floating between them like a sword at Regina’s neck, she finds that she can allow for some awkwardness from Emma.

Emma chews on her lip. “I mean it, though. It’s not magic. And I met your mom, and she’s…well, you know.”

Your mom…she’s a piece of work, you know? Emma, wide-eyed and windswept, staring at Regina as though she can’t believe that she’s there. Regina forcefully quashes the choking cough that rises. “She was gone long before I became the Evil Queen,” she reminds Emma.

“Right. I know. But I don’t think your issue is magic,” she adds hastily. “I think it’s control. You probably didn’t have a lot of power around her, growing up. I mean, she did everything she could to keep control over you when she was here. With Archie and…” Emma twists her fingers, looks down, the lightest of flushes high on her cheeks. “It really did look like you,” she says quickly, defensively. “I had no way of knowing that she wasn’t the one who–”

Regina trembles. “Leave,” she says. She can’t bear to listen to Emma justify it, to shrug off her betrayal as though it was no betrayal at all. As though it hadn’t shattered Regina and left her in pieces for Mother to mend. “Get out.”

Emma winces. “Mary Margaret said that I should have just come over and apologized.” She sits back on the couch, and Regina wants her to go, to leave Regina to this strange limbo again where the one thing that makes her feel all right is evil and untouchable. Emma says, it’s kind of stupid, isn’t it? and Regina wants nothing more than to believe her.

She can’t allow herself the vulnerability to admit it. Instead, she says coldly, “When your mother came here to apologize, I tore out her heart and showed it to her.”

“Yeah. She mentioned that, too.” Emma offers her a wry smile. “I think it kind of made her feel better, honestly. I didn’t really feel like I got to feel better.”

It’s so earnest that Regina feels a self-destructive urge to deny Emma’s shame. “Don’t tell me you’ve had a sudden guilty conscience. I might not have killed Archie, but I’ve killed plenty of others. You know what I am.”

“I know who you are,” Emma echoes. She stares at her feet. “I wanted to go to you. When we found Archie. And then there was some complication– Gold’s girlfriend pushed him over the town line, you know that, and we had to get him set up in the ward because he couldn’t remember a thing…and then, by the time I went to find you, you’d chosen your mother.”

“Chosen,” Regina echoes bitterly. As though she’d had a choice.

Emma chews her lip. “I thought you were like me. When…when someone lets me down, I’m done, you know? It doesn’t matter if they apologize. I’m never going to trust them again. I’m never going to forgive them. I didn’t think there was anything to salvage.” She looks up again, imploring, and Regina’s breath catches in her throat.

Her words emerge hoarse, wet. “No. I’m not like you.” Regina will forgive, again and again, when it’s the right person. When it is someone who holds her heart in the palm of their hand, someone who has wormed their way in despite being enraging, irritating, confounding–

“Okay,” Emma says quietly, and she squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them again, they are glimmering with determination. Regina half-expects an apology, as late and useless as it might feel, but Emma surprises her. Emma always surprises her. “I don’t think you should keep yourself from magic,” she says, tentative. “You looked…I didn’t even realize how sick you’ve been until I saw you doing magic again.”

I haven’t been sick, Regina wants to say, except that she has, sick of mind and spirit and heart and lung, and the magic thrumming in her veins had given her a tiny reprieve. “And how do you know that I won’t use it in all the ways that you’re afraid of? For control,” because that’s what Emma claims is her problem, the thing that has made her evil. The thing that had devastated an entire realm and left her the queen of nothing, because she’d only wanted control.

Emma might grasp her a little too well.

“I don’t,” Emma admits. “But it’s not like I’ve been…I haven’t been checking up on you until now. And you haven’t tried anything, right? No dastardly plans or secret plots to take over Storybrooke?” She peers at Regina, a little dubious, as though she isn’t positive that the answer to that is no. Regina shouldn’t find it as endearing as she does.

She clears her throat. “Only the one where I reinstated myself as mayor. And most of Town Hall seemed fairly relieved about that, so I don’t think it was sufficiently evil to set off the savior.”

Emma laughs. “Oh, I’ve heard. The station got so many calls on your first day back. The queen is about to stage a hostile takeover. The queen gave me a stack of files that seem suspicious. The queen ate a chicken salad for lunch. I told them that it was only going to get worse. If they weren’t careful, you’d give them paperwork.”

Regina wants to laugh, to make a snide comment, to do anything other than stare at Emma, who keeps redefining all the ways that Regina understands her. Emma stops laughing, shifts in her seat, suddenly uncertain. “Anyway,” she says quickly, standing up. “I just came it to say that it’s okay, isn’t it? If you use magic.”

“Magic isn’t the problem,” Regina echoes, because Emma’s outburst still stings. “It’s me.”

Emma hesitates. Regina wants…an apology, an acknowledgement, something to cling to instead of those callous, cruel words. Instead, she gets Emma, frozen in place, her arms stiff at her sides.

Emma has already told her the truth. When someone lets me down, I’m never going to trust them again. I’m never going to forgive them.

But then, she steps closer to Regina, and she reaches out in a sudden movement and grasps Regina’s hands, one in each of hers. She holds them, her eyes unreadable, and Regina wonders if Emma can feel the pulse racing through her veins, can hear the energy of Regina’s magic thrumming through her chest, can smell the scent of camellias in each breath that escapes from Regina’s mouth.

Emma sets Regina’s hands down again, onto Regina’s knees, and she shakes her head as though she’s jerking herself from a dream and strides from the room. The front door opens and closes footsteps, a creak, a click, and Regina is alone again.

She takes a strained breath, and then she coughs. She is prepared for it– there’s a tissue box within a hand’s reach now, always– and she holds a tissue to her mouth as she coughs vigorously, hacks against it. Her lungs strain. Her windpipe burns as she coughs again, again, until, at last, something dislodges from her throat and emerges onto the tissue.

It is a single marigold petal, golden and tinged with a few spots of blood.

Chapter Management

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Chapter 2

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Oh, are you still here? I suppose you’re hungry for more. We left off at a fraught moment, after all, though you’ll be unsurprised to discover that Regina recovers quickly. The petal is tucked away into a desk drawer, a burst of orange in a bowl of colorful blossoms. She is accustomed to this by now, though the blood is a bit worse than before, and Regina eyes it with a weary gaze and refuses to think of it again.

Emma does not recover quickly.

She doesn’t know what had possessed her, at the end, to grab Regina’s hands and almost apologize…and then step back. Apologizing would have been the decent thing to do. Emma Swan prides herself in being decent, a self-proclaimed good person.

“You are a good person,” Mary Margaret says, passing her a plate of pancakes. Mary Margaret’s specialty is breakfast food, and so they often wind up eating it for multiple meals a day. David’s specialty is shepherd’s pie. Just shepherd’s pie, every single night for dinner if Emma doesn’t stage an intervention.

Emma’s specialty is mac and cheese. They’ve silently agreed that eggs and bacon will be just fine for dinner. “A better person would probably have groveled a little. Or at least acknowledged that I sabotaged Regina’s whole…redemption thing.” Somehow, it gets so much harder to say when it’s to Regina’s face, when it feels like they’re on the edge of a precipice and coming in too strong will end with both of them veering right off the edge. “David, did I really tell Henry that she was the problem, like, a day after my mom killed her mom?”

David says, “You’re the brawn, not the brains. You get that from me.” He offers Emma a wink, a little bit of father-daughter bonding over their shared idiocy.

Emma sits. Buries her face in her hands. Reminds herself that a few months ago, she pulled Regina out of a burning building. And jumped in front of a wraith trying to suck her into hell, or something. Reminds herself that Regina had cursed the entire town and would totally have murdered her as a baby if she’d had the chance. She’s entitled to be a little bit hostile, and she doesn’t have to apologize for it. Regina owes her.

Right.

So there’s no reason why, when Emma sees her next at Granny’s, she feels that irresistible compulsion to make her way over to Regina. Henry isn’t even there. He went to school early with Mary Margaret. It’s just that Regina sits there every day, alone– in defiance of the sidelong stares and hostile murmurs– probably just to see Henry, and Emma figures that she deserves at least one semi-friendly face.

“Henry had to bring in a volcano today. For school, I mean,” she says, stumbling over her words. “Mary Margaret gave him a ride. I don’t think that thing would have survived the bus.” And then, because she knows that Regina is just waiting for a reason to deem Emma an unworthy parent, she adds, “I offered to take him, but Mary Margaret was going anyway, and she was insistent that it would be a waste of time. Anyway.”

She says it all in one breath as she slides into the side opposite Regina. “Hi,” she says.

Regina stares at her. Blinks. Says, “It’s the morning rush. They aren’t going to come here to take your order.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Emma says breezily. What is it about Regina that has her pretending that she has everything under control? “Ruby knows my usual. She’ll bring it over.” A breath. “Have you thought about what I said the other night? About magic?”

The color still suffuses Regina’s face, the aftereffects of the magic that she’d used on Henry, but it’s duller now, slowly leeching out again. “I thought about it,” Regina says, wrapping her hands around her mug. “Maybe I do feel a little less…energetic when I’m not using magic. But Henry doesn’t want me to use it.”

“Henry’s pretty smart for eleven, but he’s still eleven,” Emma points out. “He’s trying to understand a lot of complicated stuff about the world and…and the people he loves. It’s not as easy as oh, Regina must be an addict just because he can only grasp that. Magic is a part of you. And I’m not explaining to my kid that his mom wasted away half to death because of his arbitrary demands. He doesn’t need that on his head.”

She ignores the way that Regina’s eyes flash at my kid and chooses to focus instead on the way that Regina pauses, stymied at Emma’s insistence. Her lips thin. “And how do I know that you aren’t doing this to alienate Henry from me?”

Emma almost laughs, sharp and inappropriate, before she controls herself. “Regina, you did that fine all on your own. I’m just trying to keep you alive for long enough to fix it.” And she does genuinely want Regina to stay alive, to manage to get out of this hole where she’s dug herself and claw her way back to normalcy. Even if it does mean that Henry might one day tire of shepherd’s pie and pancakes and return to his other mother and her horrifically hot food, even if she has to fall into some kind of divorced-child arrangement where she only gets Henry on weekends. It’d be good for them. It’s what Regina needs. It might even be what Henry needs. It’s not what Emma needs, but Emma is doing just fine right now. She can be the bigger person.

Regina scoffs. At least, it sounds like a scoff, until it gains some force and becomes a full-fledged choking noise. Emma half-rises from the table, but Regina holds up a hand, and Emma stands still, frozen with dismay. Regina grabs a napkin from the dispenser on the table, and she coughs. Hard. Another cough with so much force that tears spring up in her eyes, and Regina tucks the napkin away, blinks a few times, and smiles coolly as though nothing at all has happened.

Emma stares. After several minutes, she remembers the reason why she’s here. “Teach me,” she offers. “I also have magic, right? So you can show me how to use it…responsibly…and Henry can’t complain if we’re doing it together.”

Regina’s eyes flicker in that way that she gets when she can’t believe that someone might be nice to her, that kind of glowing warmth that makes her entire face change. It’s like its own energy source, like Emma could probably run a marathon after seeing that look directed at her for more than a few seconds. Fortunately, it never lasts longer than that before it gets guarded. “Thank you,” Regina says, her voice hoarse after her coughing fit. “But I couldn’t ask…I don’t need your charity.”

“Not charity,” Emma says swiftly. Even just a flash of that gaze is enough for her to find her confidence, her ease. “I could really use the training. I don’t know anything about magic. I’ll probably blow something up if I don’t get it under control. The station, maybe. Or my car. Or the loft.”

“Tragic,” Regina says dryly. “Do be sure that your mother is in there when it happens.”

“Ha-ha. That was a joke, right?” Emma darts a cautious glance at Regina. Regina watches her, eyebrows raised, no humor in her gaze. Emma nods her head. “Yep. Really funny.” She slaps her hands on the table, her grin stretching across her face in a way that is definitely not forced. Uh-huh. Just two women kidding around on a Monday morning. No homicide in sight. “You’re a riot.”

She stands up, deciding to get out while she’s ahead, and Regina says, “Wednesday afternoon.”

“Huh?”

“Wednesday afternoon,” Regina says again. “My backyard. Don’t bring anything…explosive.” Her lip curls. “Unless it’s your parents, I suppose.”

Emma flashes her the best smile that she can manage. “Can’t wait,” she says, and she reaches out to put a hand on Regina’s arm, rests it there for a moment. Regina’s in a tight little dress today, cap-sleeved so Emma can feel the silky-soft skin of her forearm under her fingers. What kind of body lotion does Regina use to get it like that? She can almost smell it, the faintest hint of sandalwood.

She snatches her hand back.

As she strolls out of the diner, neglecting to order the coffee or breakfast that she’d gone there for, she notices that Regina is coughing again.

There are some people who are born teachers. Mary Margaret, for one. Sometimes she’ll sit down and explain something to Emma– yes, of course the fairies come if you make a wish, and you’ve got to be careful about saying them aloud– and she’s so patient and clear that an five-year-old could grasp it. It’s nice for her that they wound up in Storybrooke and she wound up in the school, Emma reflects sometimes, because she can kind of see the warrior bandit in Mary Margaret but never the queen.

Now, Regina?

Regina is fortunate that no one ever stuck her into a classroom. She stalks behind Emma, a scowl planted on her face, and says, “Light it.”

“Right. Just focus really hard and the wick lights. Sure.” Emma squints at the candle on the patio table in front of her. Tries to imagine a flame popping out of nowhere. It’s not easy with Regina circling her like a vulture around a particularly tasty carcass, but she does her best.

The candle remains unlit.

Regina lets out an irritated scoff. “Useless,” she mutters.

“I can hear you.” Maybe it had been a mistake to arrange this magic lesson. They’d been so close to getting along, to the first shivers of understanding. And Henry had looked dubiously at Emma when she’d mentioned the lesson but only said, you’ll be careful with her, right?

Emma still isn’t sure if he’d meant careful as in make sure Regina doesn’t get drunk on magic and curses us all again or my mom is fragile and needs to be handled with kid gloves. The latter isn’t wrong, exactly. Emma had come here with Regina’s fragility in mind. Whatever Regina might get up to as the big, bad mayor, she feels sometimes as though she’s made from glass, quick to shatter into sharp pieces.

So she had planned to be gentle and encouraging, and that had lasted right up until Regina had switched into her horrific teaching mode. “I’m trying,” she says when Regina lets out another huff. “It might be easier if you weren’t breathing down my neck.”

“Oh, and if an enemy attacks, you’ll ask them to give you a moment for meditation before you defend yourself?” Regina demands, acerbic. “Maybe they can put on some relaxing music, let you go for a walk–”

Emma rubs her temples. “Look. There aren’t any enemies around right now.” Aside from the woman standing next to her, arms on her hips, looking very much like some fantasy of a hot teacher that a younger, stupider Emma might have. “You can’t tell me that dire circumstances are better for concentration.”

“Better for motivation,” Regina corrects her. “It’s how Rumple taught me.”

Ah. That doesn’t surprise Emma. If anyone in the town had to lose their memory of the past, it feels fitting that it was Gold. “Trial by fire, huh?”

Regina ponders. “Maybe this place is too relaxing. Stand up.”

Emma stands, disbelieving. “Too relaxing–” Regina places her hands on Emma’s waist, and Emma stops short. The touch is soft, firm, almost like the start to a dance, and Regina fits against her so well, and what is happening–?

And then, a ripple of purple around them and they are standing somewhere new. Emma stumbles, caught off balance, and Regina holds her steady. “A little warning next time,” Emma says. Her voice is lower than she’d meant for it to be, shaky, and Regina is still standing very close, scrutinizing her face.

“I think,” she says, and her own voice sounds uncertain. She swallows. “I think that you need to feel a more present danger.” Her hands slide forward, now against Emma’s abdomen, and Emma’s brain does that terrible thing where it switches off at the touch of an attractive woman, even one she doesn’t particularly like, fuck–

And then, said attractive, dangerous woman, whom Emma should have recalled hates her and wants their son to herself, gives Emma a little shove.

And Emma topples backward into a ravine.

She falls with a long scream, arms windmilling and the ground rushing toward her. “REGINA!” she bellows, as though this will change anything. For a moment, she catches sight of Regina leaning over the ravine above her, a blur of lipstick and black-rimmed eyes, and then she’s about to hit the ground– purple smoke rises around her–

She lands, very gently, in a heap on the ground in front of Regina, back at the top of the ravine. Regina crouches down, eyeing Emma critically. “You got a bruise.” She holds Emma’s hand by the wrist, healing a spot where her arm smashed into the wall of the ravine. “Anywhere else?”

Emma shakes her head, still a little dazed from the fall. “Are you trying to kill me?”

Regina lets out a little puff of laughter, then looks annoyed again. “No sense of self-preservation,” she says, frowning. “How am I going to get you to activate all that magic if you can’t even do it to save your life?”

She considers for a moment. Then her eyes light up with an idea. It’s a little frightening. “It’s not your imminent death that gets you moving,” she says slowly. “It’s saving people.” And without hesitation, she throws herself off the side of the ravine.

Emma lets out a cry, panic flooding her as she rushes to the edge. Regina drops peacefully, as though she’s already resigned to her fate. Emma has to do something, she has to help, she has to–

She is in the air before she can think about it, but she hasn’t thrown herself off the cliff. No, she’s floating a few feet below Regina, magic warming her entire body as she throws out her hands. Regina lands in her arms, cradled against her, and Emma jolts from the force of the catch. Slowly, she tells herself, and they descend to the bottom of the ravine, Emma flushed with the effort of controlling her magic.

“There we go,” Regina says softly, her eyes on Emma. Emma stares back at her, their gazes locked, flushed with magic and victory. Her whole body feels like it’s humming, like she has been given an infusion of energy that makes everything feel so alive. “Do you feel it?”

Emma breathes. She thinks that she could probably summon one of Regina’s fireballs right now with just a thought, that she could move worlds with a blink. But she doesn’t, because Regina is still in her arms. She feels so small like this, not a legendary evil queen but only a woman, soft and warm.

“Yeah,” she says, trembling with the force of the magic. “Yeah, I feel it.”

Regina shakes, too, but it’s with a cough that wrenches itself from her throat, a hoarse and choking noise like something is struggling to dislodge itself from her windpipe. Emma sets her down, the same panic washing over her again. “Regina? Are you okay?”

Regina bends forward with the exertion of her cough, and Emma pats her back uselessly, worst-case scenarios flying through her mind at a breakneck pace. Regina is choking, and Emma needs to do CPR. Regina is dying, and Emma has no idea where they are to get her to a hospital– had she left her phone in Regina’s backyard, can anyone get to this ravine–?

And then something flies from Regina’s mouth with such force that it smacks into the ground, and Regina pants, her hands moving forward to catch her, and drops to her knees.

Emma sees it on a rock, her eyes narrowing. It’s a clump of carnation petals, their deep red stained rusty with blood.

“I must have swallowed that when I fell,” Regina says hoarsely, staring at the flower, and Emma can only see the back of her head and not her expression.

My friends, there is little misfortune in Regina’s life that she does not expect. It is penance, perhaps, for her to endure it. That is what she tells herself when she first coughs up an entire flower. It is painful to breathe and even more painful to speak, and so she burrows herself in her home and wonders how much more time she will have to train Emma. Emma must protect Henry when Regina no longer can. Emma must protect herself, and Regina has to do all that she can to make sure that Emma has the tools she needs for it.

She does not think about Emma spotting the flower, about what Emma might suspect. Emma didn’t grow up in the Enchanted Forest, after all. Emma has none of the experience to know that the flowers are a concern. Emma will not care enough to ask.

Regina’s fatal flaw, in recent months, is always– always– how she underestimates Emma Swan.

Emma pokes her head into the pawn shop. She doesn’t know exactly what she’ll get. Is Gold’s girlfriend mourning him? Is the place dusty and in ruins? She doesn’t know exactly what she needs. Books, probably. Some old tomes about magic, preferably with an index.

“Books,” Belle says when Emma enters, her eyes shining with enthusiasm. She has cleaned up the pawn shop, moved the counter and changed the lighting so it looks like a nice little curio boutique instead of the lair of some evil mastermind. “Of course we have books!”

“Books are her favorite,” Ruby says affectionately. She’s sitting on the counter, long legs crossed as she watches Belle move through the shop. Belle flushes pink, and Emma notes with some relief that she seems to have gotten over Gold pretty quickly. Good for Ruby, honestly.

“What kind of books are you looking for?” Belle asks, light-footed as she leads Emma toward a bookcase. “Magical tomes? Something about curses? There are loads of those.”

“Uh. Maybe.” Emma squints at the spines of the books. Few have titles. None are in English. “You have anything about…some kind of curse where the person coughs up…flowers?” She feels ridiculous just asking it.

Ruby lets out a bark of laughter. “Oh my god, Emma, who is he?”

Belle elbows her with a frown. “This is serious, Ruby–”

“August? No way. You two didn’t have that kind of chemistry. Archie’s kind of cute in a doofy way,” Ruby says thoughtfully. “Or…what’s his name. From the garage–”

Emma stares at her. “What,” she says.

Ruby strokes her chin, and then her eyes turn wolfish and smug. “Who is she?” she amends, sly. “I had a feeling about you. Is it–”

“It’s Regina!” Emma says hastily.

Belle and Ruby both nod. “Yeah,” Ruby says. “That makes sense.”

“You did say it the other day.” Belle wrinkles her nose. “Forgive me for holding a grudge about my decades-long imprisonment, but I still think that she’s–”

This conversation is spinning out of Emma’s grasp, and she shakes her head, bewildered and annoyed. “Regina is coughing up flowers,” she says, because Belle and Ruby have gone somewhere that Emma can’t– and doesn’t particularly want to– follow.

The other women fall silent, staring at her. “Oh,” Belle says quietly. “I suppose there’s no one who deserves it more. Though I wouldn’t wish that fate even on her.”

“What fate? What is going on?”

“It’s Hanahaki Disease, Emma,” Ruby murmurs. The smile has gone out of her eyes. “It’s an Enchanted Forest sickness. Comes from unrequited love.”

“Excuse me?”

“Flowers bloom in the victim’s lungs,” Belle explains. “They start as seedlings, but if the love continues and remains unrequited, then they spread. Bit by bit, the roots get deeper, and eventually, the victim starts coughing up flower petals. Sometimes more.”

Ruby nods somberly. “There was a man in my village who was found dead on the ground of his home in a bed of bloody flowers.”

Emma stares at them, horrified. She might have laughed at how absurd it is, if not for the fear clawing its way through her. “So Regina’s coughing up flowers because of that? How do we fix it?”

“The person would have to love her back to clear her lungs,” Belle says, and she looks sympathetic, even for Regina. “Otherwise, it’ll just get worse and worse until it destroys her body from within, and she’ll suffocate to death. It’s incurable.”

Emma laughs, a strained noise that doesn’t quite sound like herself. The nausea surges within her, and she wants to scream, to bang her head against a wall somewhere until she can’t think anymore. Regina has an incurable love disease? Regina is dying? It’s impossible. Regina is larger than life, an eternal thorn in Emma’s side. Regina has endured far too much to fade away now. Regina must be in agony right now, struggling even to breathe, and because of…because of some ridiculous sickness that shouldn’t exist in Storybrooke at all, this is the real world–

She thinks about how easily Regina had thrown herself into that ravine and her heart sinks.

“There is a cure,” Ruby points out. “I mean, it’s not great, but it works. They do this surgery where they remove the flowers completely,” she explains to Emma. “Every root, every seed, every petal. And if they get it all, then it doesn’t grow again.”

“But it’s terrible,” Belle breathes. “The victim can never feel love again. Not at all. Imagine Regina without even her love for her son.”

“Oh, we’d be doomed,” Ruby says grimly.

Henry. Emma breathes. “It’s Henry,” she says. “The love. The Hanahaki thingie. It can be platonic, right?” It’s not like Regina is in romantic love with anyone in this town, where she rarely leaves her house or her office and regards everyone in Storybrooke with barely-disguised disdain.

Ruby and Belle shrug. Emma feels a surge of hope for the first time since she’d entered the pawn shop. “Well, that’s okay, then. Henry really cares about Regina. I don’t think it would take much for him to love her– if he doesn’t already–”

“She has to believe it for it to work,” Belle points out. “And they’ve had a rough year, from what I’ve heard.”

Right. Regina didn’t try to kiss Henry after the apple turnover. Regina had claimed that it had been about happy endings and fairytales, but maybe she’d only been afraid that it wasn’t a mutual love. Emma aches for them both, longs to repair their relationship like never before.

Ruby says, her voice guarded, “If it’s even Henry.”

“It’s Henry.” Emma is sure of that, at least. And Henry will not lose his mother, not if Emma can help it.

She thinks of Regina, straining to breathe and coughing out bloody flowers, and she feels sick again.

We both know Emma Swan quite well by now, yes? Here we have a woman who takes her time committing to the things that she fears before embracing them wholeheartedly. Once she has made a decision, she throws her all into them. And fixing Regina’s sickness is no different.

Naturally, Emma finds every reason to stop by Regina’s office and home with Henry. Schoolwork, dinners, even magic lessons where Henry watches the women draw whirling energy into their hands with dubious eyes. The relationship must be healed, because Regina must be healed.

And still, over and over, when she believes that Emma and Henry aren’t watching, Regina coughs out flowers into handkerchiefs. She gets winded easily, and sometimes speaking is difficult. She explains it to Emma and Henry as a magical flu, and they nod sympathetically. Emma keeps her knowledge to herself, wary of how making it public might sabotage it. After all, if Henry knows what is hurting Regina, how will Regina ever believe that he truly loves her?

Regina does not tell them this: that every evening, she stares at her reflection in the mirror and thinks about how she will die soon. That she seizes every visit with desperate need, because it might be her last. That she wakes up in the morning with flowers and blood staining her sheets.

It’s good. Emma thinks that it’s going well. Henry talks about Regina without hesitation now, and he leads her straight toward Town Hall after school like it’s habit. “I have to show Mom my math test,” he says, waving the paper in his hand. “She’ll want to see how I did after we went through the review sheet together.”

“Definitely,” Emma agrees. It’s a good thing, Henry and Regina spending more time together. Good for Regina. Good for Henry. Good for the town’s peace of mind.

Good for Regina. Any day now, Regina might even be cured.

But when they visit, Henry glowing from his mother’s praise and showing her a group project assignment, Emma is less confident. Regina ducks out to the bathroom for a minute, and they can hear the choked coughing, the sound getting worse and worse every day.

Henry bites his lip. “Do you think Mom’s okay?”

“Just a flu.” Emma squeezes his shoulder. “I guess it’s been a lot of years without magic, so no immunities. It’s hitting harder now than it would normally.”

“Right.” But Henry still looks worried, and he hugs Regina when she emerges, colorless and weak, from the bathroom. “I can come over on Sunday, right? Do you need to rest?”

Regina takes a rattling breath. “Of course you can come over,” she says, cupping Henry’s cheek. “We’ll do something fun. It should get me right back to normal.”

It better. Emma clears her throat, an idea occurring to her. “I have to work Sunday,” she says. “You’ll be fine on your own, right?” She’s always here, always watching when Henry is with Regina, and both of them glance at her for approval, for confirmation that this is okay, right? Maybe Regina thinks that Emma is forcing Henry to come. Maybe Henry is afraid to fully love Regina when someone else is around to make him self-conscious.

And Emma is pleased to realize that she does trust Regina to be around Henry now. There have been no blips, no surge of temper or authoritarian behavior. Regina is just a loving mother, albeit one who can summon fire to her palm when Emma annoys her too much. They’re going to be okay.

It’s only a matter of time before Henry asks to return to his big house and his happy routine and leaves Emma behind.

She swallows back the terror that washes over her with that awareness. That’s good for him. Regina is good for him. Emma has been there for Henry when he’s needed her this past year, but he can’t live on a pullout couch in Mary Margaret and David’s loft forever. Not when a picture-perfect home awaits with a mother who loves him so much that she’s sick with it.

She doesn’t actually have a shift Sunday, but she takes one anyway, drives around town aimlessly and hopes for some villain or crime to surface just to distract her. But there’s nothing except for an escaped dog and a fender-bender down near the beach. She stops in at Granny’s to see how Ruby’s doing, then checks on Belle to see how she’s settling in. She wanders the streets and wonders what she did with her free time before she spent it all with Henry and Regina.

Maybe she should get into books. Mary Margaret always has books.

Thankfully, she’s only about twenty pages into a mind-numbing romance novel titled The Bare-Chested Exchequer when she notices that it’s dinner time and she finally has an excuse to go pick up Henry. She tears out the door and into the Bug, and she takes off toward Regina’s house.

It’s already dark out, and the mayoral mansion is dimly lit. Emma squints at it, suddenly panicked– where are they? Did they go somewhere? Did Regina get fed up with sharing Henry and run off with him over the town line?– when she sees a flash of red light in the living room window.

That can’t be good. She throws open the front door, her heart pounding, and a blue light shines bright in her face, nearly blinding her in the dark. “Mom!” Henry shouts. The blue light is emanating from him, and Emma blinks, trying to understand. “Come on! We’re playing laser tag!”

On closer inspection, Henry is wearing a glowing vest, and he holds a laser tag blaster in his hands. Emma lets out a breath. “You have laser tag?” Of course he does. He was the most spoiled kid in all of Storybrooke.

“Yeah, but Mom is–” There’s a noise from behind the couch, and Henry’s vest goes dark. “Sneaky,” he says, pouting. He turns in the general area of the couch. “Can Mom– Emma– Ma–” he finally settles on, stumbling over the words. “Can she play, too? I might actually stand a chance against you with her.”

Regina strides out from behind the couch, cutting an absurd figure in a dress that hugs her perfectly and a bulky laser vest. She looks peaky even lit in red by her vest, but her voice is smug as she says, “If you’d prefer that I let you win–”

“No way.” Henry hits something on his suit and it turns blue again. “Ma, there’s another vest on the kitchen table.” Emma nods, bemused at the scene. “And be careful. She plays dirty!” He launches himself at Regina without a moment’s warning, and Regina dodges, cackling like the evil despot that she once was.

Emma discovers very quickly that Henry was right. He does stand a chance now, but only because Regina takes twisted pleasure in firing her blaster at Emma as often as she can. “Oh! There goes your back,” Regina says smugly from the stairs. Emma wasn’t told that they were playing upstairs.

Reflex makes her swing her blaster around to fire at Regina, but she’s already gone. “Teleporting is cheating!” Emma shouts to no one.

Regina is unrelenting. Emma is knocked out of the game thrice in the first five minutes, and Henry follows soon after. During the fourth game, Emma has a plan. She dodges Regina’s first attack on her and then flings herself at Regina. She’s counting on the fact that the blaster is too big and bulky to be turned around at her.

She doesn’t think through the rest: how Regina is more frail than she looks right now and can’t support her weight; how, when they go toppling down onto the couch, Emma lands right on top of Regina; how Emma has long been disturbingly attracted to Regina in a kind of would kill me but what a way to go kind of way. Very suddenly, she is atop Regina, legs tangled with hers and her hands bracing her up a few inches so she won’t slam into Regina’s weak lungs, and Regina stares up at her with gleaming eyes. The vests are hard, barriers between them, but Emma swallows anyway, her pulse pounding in her ears.

Regina breathes a rattling, choked breath, and Emma says, “Oh, god. I’m sorry. I’m suffocating you–” She rolls off of Regina, then remembers to fire her blaster at the vest, front and back, to finally win the game. Regina just sits there, staring at Emma, and Emma says weakly, “That counts as a win, right?”

Henry tears into the room and whoops at their victory. Regina sits up, unsteady from her fall, and Emma unbuckles the vest for her, knuckles brushing against Regina’s dress. “I really didn’t come here to play laser tag,” she admits. “I was going to pick Henry up for dinner.”

“Oh.” Regina’s lips twitch a few times before she finally manages a thin smile. “We actually made dinner together before the game. I didn’t realize that–” She clears her throat. “Henry, it’s time to go.”

Henry pouts. “Do I have to?” Regina looks startled. Emma’s stomach bottoms out just a little as Henry turns to her, eyes round and pleading. “Can’t I sleep over?”

Regina freezes. Her emotions are so transparent, the longing and amazement lighting up her face, and Emma can’t say no, not when Henry is so close to saving Regina, not when this is what he wants and Emma has no place taking it from him.

She tries to smile. “I’ll pick you up in the morning, okay?”

When she turns from him, Regina is watching her with inscrutable eyes, her face unreadable again. “You didn’t have dinner yet,” she says. “Why don’t you take some of the soup on the stove?” And then, a little teasing, “It’s sweet. If I’d known you were coming for dinner, I’d have made it a little less edible.”

Henry goes upstairs to find pajamas. Regina moves through her kitchen as Emma watches her, flitting to cabinets and drawers to get Emma everything that she wants. She avoids Emma’s gaze when she says, “He must miss sleeping in his own room. In his own bed.”

“Of course he does,” Emma says, and it is easier to be generous, to smile politely past the despair, when Regina is so discomfited by Henry choosing her. When this means that Regina will finally get it, will no longer choke out flowers until her lungs are destroyed. “He misses you.”

Regina doesn’t answer that, but there is a pleased dark tinge to her cheeks, a spark of joy as she departs for the stairs.

Emma eats her soup. It’s good, better than anything that anyone at the loft could cook. Henry will eat much better when he’s back here. Maybe she’ll come for dinner sometimes, a friendly aunt figure, the birth mother who has no right to Henry in the first place–

She has a family now. She has parents, albeit parents who are more like her older (younger) siblings. She can handle losing Henry when he isn’t really lost, when he’s just a few blocks away and drops by the station sometimes. It wouldn’t be fair for her to cling to him, to keep him when Regina has been going through this every day.

But still, she can’t quash the selfish desire to try. To climb up the stairs when she finishes her soup so she can tell Henry that she’ll be back in the morning to pick him up, to return him to their comfortable routine. To kiss him goodnight like she has every night that she’s been home since she’d given him true love’s kiss.

Emma peers into Henry’s bedroom. It’s empty, his clothes left in a heap on the bed. Voices filter down the hall, comfortable and happy, and Emma follows them to Regina’s room.

Henry is tucked into her big bed, snuggled in tight, and Regina is stretched out beside him, above the blankets with her head on a pillow as she speaks. “So what did Jack say?”

“That I was right, and Nick was out. It was the first run I’ve scored all year. We need a better pitcher,” Henry says. “A few of the teachers try, but they aren’t great. I bet you’d be good.”

Regina laughs. “Throwing a fireball is nothing like throwing a baseball. I assume.” She shifts to face Emma. “I’ll bet you’re a decent pitcher.”

“What gave me away?” Emma had liked softball when she was younger, though she hasn’t thought about that in years.

Regina waves vaguely at Emma. “You seem…sporty. Athletic. I’ve seen your arms.” She winces. “I mean…strong. You are, that is. Strong.”

Emma blinks at her. She’s never known Regina to get this flustered. Her arms have been known to do that to some women, but she hadn’t pegged Regina as one of them. “Thanks,” she says, making a fist and flexing the muscle. Regina’s eyes bore into her. Henry looks impressed. “Maybe I’ll drop by during recess one day, yeah? Show the kids how it’s done.”

Henry beams at her. Emma can’t help but stare at the two of them, comfortable on Regina’s bed as though this is a common occurrence for them. They look so much like mother and son, the same color hair and the same body language when they’re stretched out like this. Regina’s complexion is…whatever Latina is called in the Enchanted Forest… but only a little darker than Henry’s, and Emma is positive that a casual onlooker would never even guess that he was adopted.

There really is no reason for Emma to be here at all.

She doesn’t say anything about the morning, after all. She kisses Henry goodbye and then drags herself down the stairs, each foot falling with extra weight as she descends. This is for the best. This is going to be so good for all of them, except for Emma.

“Emma?” Regina calls after her. She has left Henry in her bed, and she strides down the stairs to lean against the wall near the door. “I really…” Her voice is hesitant. “I appreciate you letting him stay here. I know that you had concerns…”

Emma pushes away her first instinct– always to lash out, for fuck’s sake– and forces a smile. “No concerns. Not anymore.” And because she can’t leave well enough alone, she says, “He really loves you, you know?”

Regina doesn’t brush it off, doesn’t get defensive like she had when her own love was in question. Her eyes go soft and wistful, and she says, “I know.” There is sincerity in her voice, and this means– she knows, she must be cured. Emma is so relieved that she almost laughs. “I didn’t think we’d get back here after last year. I didn’t know if I deserved it.” Regina ducks her head. “I know…I know I’ve done so many terrible things. And he was right to leave. You weren’t wrong about that.”

Emma remembers cruel comments, sharp reminders of all the ways that Regina has failed Henry. They feel very distant now. “He’s right to want to come back, too,” she says, because she’s apparently never met a sword that she won’t fall onto. “You really got your act together. It’s been…you’ve been trying so hard. And you do deserve this time with Henry.” She means it. For all of Regina’s numerous faults, loving her son isn’t one of them.

Regina coughs.

It startles Emma, catches her unawares, and she might have thought nothing of it– people cough, it’s normal even when they aren’t dying of flowers in their lungs– except for the way that Regina says, voice strained, “Have a good night, Emma,” and flees to her study.

Emma follows instead of leaving and peers through the half-open door as the hacking begins. Regina is bent over, her small frame heaving from the force of it. She has a handkerchief open in front of her, but it isn’t catching anything yet– nothing except droplets of blood that burst from her mouth as she strains, choking helplessly–

Emma is about to throw caution to the wind and call an ambulance when a rain of petals explode from Regina’s mouth at last, more than she’s ever seen before. Regina chokes and chokes and blood and flowers spill onto the handkerchief, carnations and chrysanthemums and columbines pouring from her. When it’s done, she collapses to the ground as though her legs can’t hold her anymore, and she leans against her couch, her back to Emma.

In her agony, she must not have noticed Emma still there, just beyond the doorway, gaping at her. Emma wants to lurch forward, to check on Regina– she had expelled so many of the flowers, had they torn anything, is she still coughing blood– but something stays her hand, a quiet horror of a realization.

It isn’t Henry. Henry loves Regina, and Regina must believe it at least somewhat by now. If it hadn’t healed her, she should at least be on the mend. And Regina’s Hanahaki only seems to be getting worse, taking root so deep in her lungs that she’s coughing fully formed flowers instead of petals.

It isn’t her love for Henry that’s killing her. But there’s no one else– no one she spends time with, no one who seeks her out, no one who has made overtures to Regina that might have made her fall in hopeless, unrequited love.

No one, except for Emma.

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Chapter 3

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Well, my friends, Emma has just made a discovery that has her reeling with disbelief and suspicion. Be kind to her. Understand, if you will, that Emma Swan has spent a lifetime being unloved and unwanted, and every relationship of hers has ended badly. Understand that she is only just growing accustomed to seeing Regina as an equal instead of the woman who had sabotaged her childhood and fought her for months. Understand that the very idea of Regina loving her so hard that Regina’s life hinges on it is so difficult for Emma to comprehend that she returns home and curls into her bed, nauseous and uncertain.

She replays moments in her head: Regina’s anxious smile outside of Granny’s at the welcome back party; the hard hurt on Regina’s face when Cora had been around and Emma had tried to reason with her; Regina cradled in Emma’s arms as they’d dropped into the ravine. She doesn’t understand why Regina would love her so much that it would kill her, not when they have always been at odds. She doesn’t understand what she’s supposed to do now.

For a few days, she tries to avoid Regina. My dear readers, I’m sure that you can predict how that ends. Henry reports on Regina’s condition with concern at dinner one night– her flu just seems to be getting worse– and Emma eats her pancakes with rigid focus on her plate as Mary Margaret pushes for more details.

Henry is correct. Regina is only getting worse.

It’s the perfect solution, so simple that Regina doesn’t know why she hasn’t considered it before. She wishes that it hadn’t come to her in the middle of a meeting, ten others sitting in the room and Emma right across the table. Emma, whom she hasn’t spoken to in days. She has gotten nods at Granny’s, sharp and formal, and no more friendly conversation.

She must have said something on Sunday that had alienated Emma. Perhaps it is only that Emma agrees with Regina– that she doesn’t deserve Henry’s love, that she has committed too many atrocities to receive her own happy ending.

You’re in luck, Ms. Swan, Regina thinks bitterly, her eyes and thoughts on Emma instead of the town planner’s new initiative. When I die, no one will question if I deserved this ending. And it is in that moment, breathing through what feels like a latticework of plastic at the back of her throat, that the thought occurs to her.

The meeting ends after far too long, and Regina avoids the chitchat and retreats to the elevator and her office. Her steps are sluggish, the strain on her lungs too much to walk quickly. When she breathes, she can feel the roots digging deep into her, a mass of petals obstructing every clear inhalation.

The elevator opens. A woman appears at her side. “Hey.” Emma steps into the elevator with her. Regina brushes against her as she walks in, and Emma takes a swooping step back. Regina tastes sickly-sweet roses against her tongue. “These meetings are such a waste of time, aren’t they? A criminal could be out there terrorizing Storybrooke while I listen to some old man drone on about garbage pickup days. I don’t know why we have to do them.”

“I’m the one who schedules the meetings,” Regina says dryly.

Emma grins at her, tentative and sly. “I know.” She lingers in the elevator as it chimes for Regina’s floor. Regina is about to exit the elevator when Emma blurts out, “Henry says you haven’t been doing well. With your…your flu.”

She lurches out of the elevator to follow Regina to her office, and Regina wants to be irritated, because she has an idea and it might work, and she might be free if people would only leave her alone. Instead, she is awash in tortured affection, in the relief that comes with basking in Emma’s presence once more. Emma is concerned about her, and Regina can breathe a little more easily in that moment. “It’ll pass,” she lies. “I’m just…a little delicate, believe it or not.”

Emma laughs. “Here,” she says, and she opens her hand to reveal two of the large chocolate chunk cookies that had been put out for the meeting refreshments. Regina hadn’t taken one, conscious of the hostile men sitting around her at the table. Emma had eaten two already. “I saw you eyeing these at the meeting. Eat one. It’ll make you feel better.”

Regina closes her eyes as she takes a bite, savors the taste of something other than flowers in her mouth. “That’s it. I’m cured.”

Emma snorts. “I believe it from those cookies.” She hesitates, then puts a hand on Regina’s arm. Regina trembles, hates the touch and loves it with equal measure, and she doesn’t pull away. “Look, is there something that I can…do? Something that’ll help with your flu?”

Regina lets out a strangled laugh. A petal has wriggled its way into her mouth, and she swallows it defiantly with cookie. Is there something that I can do, as though this disease doesn’t hinge utterly on the whims of Emma Swan.

Sometimes she hates her most. She has always felt too much for Emma, be it loathing or something else. Emma brings out every extreme locked within Regina, urges out emotions that Regina had never believed that she could feel, for better or worse. Emma has always held power over Regina: first with Henry, and now with the roots that dig deep into Regina’s core, winding through her lungs and leaving Regina defeated and conquered.

And sometimes Emma looks at her with those clear eyes, the ones that see Regina for who she is and still choose to be kind, and Regina can’t hate her at all.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she says. The smile comes naturally, warm and soft like Regina has only ever summoned for Henry, and Emma licks nervously at her lips. Regina’s gaze follows the tip of Emma’s tongue, and she can feel the flush of heat beneath her skin. “It just needs to run its course.”

Emma frowns, dissatisfied, and Regina wants to scream. A moot point. She hasn’t been able to scream in weeks. “There has to be something. Anything.” Emma paces, a scowl settling onto her face. “I’m not going to let you waste away like this. Henry’s been so worried.”

Once, a mention of Henry’s concern for her might have gotten her through the day. Today, it mocks her, a reminder of the hopeless state that she’s been trapped within. Greedy, greedy, taunts a voice within her mind. You’ve finally gotten Henry back and now you want more?

The flowers struggle to be free, stop up her throat until she’s choking. She shakes, strains against the blockage, and it’s not enough, it’s not working, she’s going to suffocate to death. The wad of flowers is too thick to emerge, and she can’t get them out, can’t do anything but shake with restrained force, spots winking in and out of her eyes, her vision blacking out–

She staggers forward, her head pounding, her breath refusing to come. This is worse than ever before. She’s always been able to cough the flowers out, to let them rip their way through her trachea and deal with the pain after, but there are too many now, blocking her airflow, and she can’t– she can’t breathe–

For an instant, she catches sight of Emma, eyes wide with horror. Ah, she thinks fuzzily, fighting for her last bits of consciousness. There you are.

Arms wrap around Regina from behind, a strange embrace that becomes pulses of movement, pressing against her abdomen. “Come on,” Emma grits, somewhere near her ear, but Regina writhes, unable to speak and tell her– not the stomach, it’s not there–

But Emma seems to figure it out on her own, because then Regina is on the ground, the mass in her throat settling even more uncomfortably in place, the lack of breath leaving her woozy. How long has it been? Thirty seconds? A minute? It feels like an eternity–

And then Emma’s mouth is on hers, pumping in short breaths while her hands work against Regina’s chest, and finally– finally– the flowers dislodge from Regina’s throat. They burst from her the moment Emma pulls away, flooding her mouth until she has to turn over and settle onto her hands and knees to vomit out a bloody mess on her sterile office floor. The flowers pour out, more and more until she’s weak with it, and Emma crouches beside her, gentle hands brushing her hair from her face.

When she is finally done, she twists over to sit back against the wall of her office. She pants for breath, savors every painful inhalation like never before, her face wet and her clothing streaked with blood. Emma sits beside her, breathing hard, and Regina envies the ease with which her chest moves, up-down-up-down as though it’s only that simple.

Emma doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask more questions. She gets up and disappears for a moment, and she reappears with a cup of water and a wet washcloth. Regina drinks gratefully.

“This can’t be…I’m worried, too,” Emma murmurs. She rubs her washcloth over Regina’s brow, along the bridge of her nose, across eyes stained with tears of pain. When she gets to Regina’s mouth, she dabs at the sides of it, cleans the blood that must be gathered at the corners of her lips. “Is it magic that’s doing this to you? What would happen if you crossed the town line?”

Regina leans back against the wall. “I would die, I think,” she croaks out. She thinks about the flowers that have taken root in her lungs, the inherent magical elements of this disease. The flowers won’t grow outside of Storybrooke, maybe. But they are still in her lungs, destroying them, and only her own magic, constantly healing each shredded internal organ, keeps them from doing it instantly. “Magic might be the only thing keeping me alive right now.”

“That’s such shit,” Emma says fiercely. “So the choice is letting this sickness kill you outside of Storybrooke or…or you go through more of what you just did? What would have happened if you’d been alone when it happened? If no one had been able to do CPR?” Her hands shake around the washcloth, squeezing out soiled moisture onto her knees. She doesn’t seem to notice. “You are not going to die.”

Regina offers her a humorless smile. “Everyone dies eventually. I’ve gotten a few extra years in since my last execution.”

Emma’s fists clench, and she gets up, stalking through Regina’s office with her face thunderous. “Fuck this,” she says, and she whirls around. Stalks in the other direction. “Fuck that. Fuck all of it. Fuck!” she snaps, and she slams a fist into the wall. Magic powers her blow, and she leaves behind a burnt dent in the wall above Regina.

She stares at it, then down at Regina, and she exits the office without another word.

When the flowers have been cleaned, Regina remembers her original plan, the idea that had come to her during the meeting. Her issue is that she feels too deeply, that she loves too hard. So if she can just dull it a little, if she can stop herself from loving–

She reaches into her chest and closes her fingers around her heart. But it doesn’t budge, and when she gropes around blindly, she finds out why.

She can feel roots embedded deep into her heart, growing strong and wild across it.

There are no more incidents like the one in her office, not for the next few days. The flowers tear their way through Regina’s chest, but they emerge if she coughs hard enough. She has long given up on collecting them. There are too many now, blood-soaked as they wreck Regina’s lungs and throat so even her magic can’t heal all the scarring, and she gets a migraine when she looks at them for too long, a hopelessness that she hadn’t felt even when she’d been slated for execution back in the Enchanted Forest.

The only thing that seems to be keeping her alive right now is that Emma has stopped avoiding her. Instead, she is always there, an eternal presence at Regina’s side. She brings Regina lunch and they eat together. She and Henry take to coming over for dinner, and Henry asks to sleep over again.

It’s a terrible irony, finally having Henry back in her house just as she fades away.

“You can’t leave him here alone with me,” she tells Emma urgently once he’s in bed. “Please, I have a guest room–” She lowers her voice. “Can’t you stay?”

Emma hesitates, and Regina knows the instant that Emma understands what terrifies Regina: Henry, awakening in the morning, all alone, to find his mother dead in a pool of blood. “Yeah,” Emma says, and she looks pale. “Yeah, of course I’ll stay.”

And so Emma spends the night, and they do the same thing the next night, too. Regina musters all of her energy to flit through the kitchen, putting together a hearty breakfast that Henry gobbles up and Emma hardly touches. “I’m sure it’s great. Everything you make is great. I’m just a little sick of…” She laughs self-consciously. “We eat a lot of pancakes and waffles at home.”

Regina finds her leftover lasagna in the fridge, and Emma devours it happily. They don’t go to Granny’s before the bus stop. “We only went because I knew you were showing up to see Henry,” Emma admits. “I figured it was a safe place for you two to meet.”

A flower claws for release. Regina stares at her. “You didn’t come there to see me.” She couldn’t have. In the first weeks after Mother had died, Emma hadn’t even been able to look at her when they’d entered the diner, let alone carry on a cordial conversation. It had been Henry who had scurried to Regina’s table, his words tentative and uncertain.

Emma shrugs. “I brought Henry. And I wanted to check on you,” she admits reluctantly. “I felt pretty guilty about–” Her fingers tighten on her fork. “I didn’t want to make the same mistakes again,” she says, and she stares at her lasagna. “You’re really important to Henry.”

Regina coughs up flowers, loudly and violently, and Emma springs to action. Her arm is firm around Regina’s shoulders, a napkin open in her hand, and Regina slumps against her and lets the last few flowers emerge.

When it’s just the two of them, they don’t pretend that this will run its course. Emma must have stopped believing that the instant that Regina had nearly died on her office floor. Now, she looks at Regina like someone might look at a sinking ship, her eyes flinty with determination as though she might be able to will Regina back to good health. Now, she is careful and silent whenever the flowers tear their way out of Regina’s body.

Some days are easier, usually punctuated by a little extra time with Emma and Henry. They practice magic, and Regina has Emma help with dinner now, squinting at recipes and yelping when she notices that something is burning. “I need to be taught,” she insists.

Regina shakes her head. “No one needs to be taught to cook. Follow recipes, keep going, and you’ll pick up on what works and doesn’t work by yourself. It’s all practice.” But she shows Emma how to make Henry’s favorite foods, finds patience within herself to endure Emma’s mishaps. Someday soon, it’ll only be Emma who will be able to cook them for him.

Emma decides that she’s going to teach Regina self-defense. “You’ve been training me. I should return the favor. And you punch like a little girl.”

“Little girls are tough,” Regina objects.

Emma smirks. “Some are. Some grew up in castles or…estates or whatever where they never had to lift a finger. Which one are you?” Regina glowers at her. “That’s what I figured.” Regina remembers Emma’s punches. She remembers the way that Emma had thrown her into a closet in the hospital after Henry had been poisoned, had seized her and held the upper hand throughout. Emma is strong, lithe and muscular with the ease of a brawler, and Regina wouldn’t mind seeing Emma display some of that again.

There isn’t much point in Regina learning to defend herself when she doubts that she’ll ever have the opportunity to use it. But she seizes the time with Emma, the shiver of want that ripples through her when Emma appears in a muscle shirt and tight jeans and presses herself against Regina’s back to position her.

“Like this,” Emma murmurs, breath tickling Regina’s ear, and Regina takes in a shuddering breath and tenses her arms.

She’d like to despise Emma now, to resent her for Regina’s own folly. Instead, she shivers at the touch and savors every moment with her, treasures every exchange like a lovesick child. But she is dying of heartbreak, and so she allows herself to be weak.

This isn’t an easy story to tell, just as I’m sure that it isn’t an easy one for you to hear. Poor, poor Regina. And Emma isn’t much better. The image of Regina writhing on the ground as her face turns purple haunts Emma, follows her every waking moment. She springs out of bed in the guest room and peers past Regina’s ajar bedroom door, tracks the even movement of her breath before she can think about anything else. She lets out a sigh of relief when Regina is sitting at her desk at lunch, looking perfectly healthy if not for the sickly pallor of her cheeks and the way her eyes are dark and heavy. Sometimes, she even thinks about Regina when she breathes, a simple, natural motion that she’s taken for granted until now.

When Mary Margaret says, Emma, the flu that Henry describes…it sounds like– Emma cuts her off and changes the topic, because Regina, at least, deserves some dignity. And Emma might not know it herself, but she is beginning to believe that Regina deserves far more than that, too. She has tied herself inextricably to Regina Mills now, and she has no chance of escaping it intact.

But don’t tell her that. She’ll figure it out eventually.

Emma and Henry sleep over at the loft, which is fair and valid because that’s where they actually live, and Regina has gotten more than her share of them. It still stings, and her throat burns from the flowers she’s expelled over the night until Emma calls. “Just checking in before bed,” Emma says, casual and always so concerned, and some of the pressure in Regina’s chest eases.

She lies back in her own bed. “I regret to inform you that I appear to still be alive,” she says dryly.

Emma doesn’t laugh. “How’s your breathing?”

“It’s…” Fine, she wants to say, but she hates to lie to Emma, to conceal anything more from her than the explosive truth that is rooted in her lungs. Emma wouldn’t believe her, anyway. “It’s manageable,” she says instead. “I don’t think I’ll be dying tonight.”

“Don’t you dare,” Emma growls, and there are times when Emma says something in that protective way, with those shining eyes and that note of ferocity in her voice, and Regina really can breathe for a moment. The flowers seem to part, and Regina wonders for a moment if she truly is hopeless, or if there is a minuscule chance that Emma Swan might someday love her back.

It’s impossible. Emma is the shining savior, a woman who is so strong and good that she stands above everyone else in this wretched town. Emma is beautiful and powerful and loved by all, and she would never be so corrupted to fall for an evil queen in the throes of defeat. For a woman so pathetically in love that she is dying from it, a humiliation that she is only glad that she has managed to keep from the rest of Storybrooke.

No one will mourn her, except for Henry. And Emma protects her because Emma loves Henry in that all-encompassing way that Regina does, too. Henry’s life has been hard enough without watching his mother die, and Emma recognizes that.

That’s all this is.

“I’m glad,” she blurts out, because they’ve fallen into comfortable silence over the phone, Regina’s not-quite-death rattle out of sync with Emma’s even breaths. “That he’ll have you. I thought…for so long, I saw you as a threat to our family. But I see now that you were here for when I…”

Emma will care for Henry when Regina dies. Regina is dying because Emma exists. It’s a a conundrum, but she finds that she can’t quite regret Emma charging into Storybrooke and ruining her life.

Emma takes in a whooshing breath. “Look, Regina,” she says, and she sounds stricken. “I’ll see you at Granny’s tomorrow morning, okay?”

There is a morning after Regina sleeps, though she’d almost expected otherwise. She showers to wash off dried blood from where it had pooled against the hollow of her throat. In the shower, she closes her eyes and reaches out with her magic to feel how deep the flowers have gone. Their roots, she can sense, have impaled her heart and moved past it, down to her abdomen and her core, spreading like ivy through every last inch of her innards. The flowers bloom bright and deadly in her lungs, and there is no way to get them out.

There is a surgery, she remembers vaguely. Whale will probably be familiar with it. It would be delicate for her, life-threatening as well at this point. And at the end, if it were successful, she would have lost all capacity for love.

She would rather die in agony than stop loving Henry.

She heals some ravaged passageways in her trachea, feels the flowers wind through them as she towels off, and pulls on a tight black dress that now hangs on her like it’s too big. Granny’s. She has to go to Granny’s, because Emma and Henry will be there.

They’re already waiting for her when she makes it inside, walking as steadily as she can manage. Snow sits at a table with them, making conversation and watching Regina curiously, but Emma immediately disengages from Snow and moves to Regina, a casual hand beneath Regina’s elbow to guide her to her usual seat. “We already ordered,” Emma says quickly. “Sit. I’ll grab the food.”

“It’s a flu. I can still walk,” Regina shoots back, but Emma only rolls her eyes at her and pushes her gently into her booth. Regina sits heavily.

Henry has gotten distracted by Ruby on his way to her, and Regina takes advantage of her solitude to watch Emma. There is something enchanting about the way that she moves, the way she smiles weakly at people who greet her. Emma is eternally awkward in her position as Storybrooke’s darling, uncertain of how to handle it and uncomfortable with adulation, but she is too good to let the people know it.

She walks with a fluidity that Regina loves to see. Sometimes she’s clumsy, especially when they’ve been out in the woods practicing magic, but when she’s at ease, she moves with a kind of swagger, her hips shifting from side to side and a slouch to her step that makes her seem eternally youthful.

She’s also remarkably beautiful. Regina has always thought so, even when she’d wanted her gone. Those golden waves cascading down her back like a lion’s mane, those eyes that gleam like sea glass, the sharp curves of her cheekbones–

“Coffee and apple pie,” Emma announces, those shining eyes crinkling with smug pleasure as she sets the food down in front of Regina and cleanly cuts off Regina’s thoughts. It’s a good thing, because Regina might have started vomiting flowers in public if she’d thought any more about Emma Swan.

As it is, she coughs out a few wads of petals into a napkin. Emma’s gaze turns dark. “It’s fine,” Regina promises her. “This is nothing compared to some of the other episodes lately.”

“That’s really not as comforting as you think.” Emma steals the back crust of Regina’s apple pie. Regina is too busy watching the worried cast of her face to object. “I’ll see you at lunch, okay? Maybe I’ll drop by a little earlier, too. Unless you have a meeting.”

“I have one. It’s with the district attorney. Please do interrupt.”

Emma flashes a grin. “I wouldn’t miss it. Take care of yourself, okay?” She looks troubled as she rises, catching Henry’s arm and pulling him along. Regina watches them go, her heart beating rapidly from Emma’s sympathy.

Her line of sight is blocked suddenly by a flash of hideous white cardigan. Snow slides into the seat where Emma belongs, and Regina stares at her with a mixture of resentment and dread. “What do you want?”

“It’s her!” Snow’s voice is too loud, and Regina glowers at her until she lowers it. The fear and guilt that had surrounded her for weeks after Mother’s murder has faded, and she is back to the shining optimist, gleaming with hope and love and all the things that make Regina want to strangle her. “It’s Emma, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Regina says flatly. “Get out of my booth.”

Snow waves a hand dismissively. “Henry told me all about your magical flu,” she says, and Regina’s blood runs cold.

She throws herself halfway across the table to seize Snow’s hideous, frilly shirt and yank her up. Snow chokes, and Regina thinks viciously, good. At least it’s someone else this time. “Did you say anything?” she demands.

There is so little that is more humiliating than this, the idea that Emma and Henry could know. That the final veneer of self-respect could fade away and leave her vulnerable and pathetic, leave them guilty and blaming themselves for her inevitable death.

This isn’t Emma’s problem. It can’t be.

“No!” Snow gasps, struggling to pull away. Regina releases her, lets her crumple back to the seat. “I didn’t say. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“You didn’t tell a secret?” Regina says, disbelieving. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

Snow smiles, and it’s so fucking sweet that Regina feels bile rise in her throat. “I might have tried at first. But then I thought…you deserve happiness, Regina. Especially now. And I feel as though I owe it to you.” She lowers her voice. “It’s Emma, isn’t it?” she says again. Regina refuses to answer, which is response enough.

Snow takes in a breath. Easily, because all things are so easy for her, because she gets things without thinking about them while Regina is left struggling for her basic needs. Typical. “It’s just…it’s not that farfetched, is it? Emma’s been so stressed about your sickness. When I’m with her, all she talks about is you. How you’re feeling. What you’ve told her. She’s basically been living with you. It’s only a matter of time before she feels the same way.”

Regina croaks out a laugh. “She thinks I’m going to drop dead in front of Henry. She isn’t falling in love with me.” Emma is a savior by nature, so heroic that she can’t help herself. Regina won’t delude herself into believing that she has a chance. “And don’t you dare speak about this to her. I will not let her bear any responsibility for my…for what happens to me.”

Snow gives her a searching look. “So you’ll suffer in silence– with a life-threatening disease– just so Emma doesn’t feel guilty?” She rubs her neck, gaze still on Regina, and Regina wants to snap at her. To curse her, to threaten her, to yank out her tongue to be sure that Snow never speaks to Emma again.

She can’t. Henry and Emma would be so disappointed in her.

“I won’t tell her,” Snow says at last. “I’m going to let this happen naturally.”

But Regina can already see it; Snow pushing Emma toward Regina, without any subtlety, until Emma finally knows that there’s a question to ask. Until Emma understands Hanahaki and its implications, and Regina is frail and weak and needy in front of her, her love made fatal.

She has to do something. She pulls herself to her feet, wheezing as she moves, and she leaves Snow behind with the bill and goes to find Emma.

It’s complicated enough to manage running the town without revealing that she’s wasting away. It’s even worse when she has an added mission: keeping Emma from being alone with Snow. Emma is constantly on the move, between patrols and Henry and hovering over Regina, and it’s a struggle to keep up with her.

But Regina manages. She appears at the sheriff’s station before lunch instead of waiting for Emma to find her, a container of magically heated leftovers in hand. “I wanted the fresh air,” she insists.

Emma frowns. “You shouldn’t be out alone. You’re not…” Her concern makes Regina hack up a flower, which is unfortunate and predictable timing. Emma gestures at it, and she looks very tired. Stressed, like Snow had said.

Regina doesn’t allow herself to hope for anything, but a warmth rises through her regardless, clearing her throat enough that she can take in a single uninterrupted breath. “You’re the only one who treats me like an invalid,” she points out haughtily. “No one else even knows that I’m ill.”

Emma scoffs. “Archie asked me if you were okay. Whale asked me if you were okay, and he hates you. Have you seen yourself lately? You look like you’re wasting away.”

Regina gives her a narrow look. It’s really enough to know that Emma won’t love her back without being aware that Emma also thinks that she’s decrepit. “If you’re going to insult my appearance–”

“Come on, Regina, you know you’re gorgeous.” Emma’s brows are still knit together, fixed on Regina, and Regina has to force away the pleased flush that comes with that. “But you’ve gotten so pale and thin. You don’t look healthy. And I know that you’re having trouble breathing. I don’t want you going out if you don’t have to.”

“The fresh air is good for my lungs.” Maybe it had been, because Regina feels a little less dizzy now, flowers tickling at her trachea without tearing their way out.

And she thinks that that’s the end of the conversation until, when Henry is asleep for the night and Emma is safely away from Snow in Regina’s guest room, Emma lays a hand on her arm and says, “Let’s go outside, yeah? Better for your breathing.”

Somehow, outside comes to mean on the roof, where Emma wheedles Regina into teleporting them. They lie back against the shingles, and Regina breathes in a staggered, painful breath. It’s a little easier outside, after all. Not much.

“I used to know every constellation,” Emma says, staring at the sky. “There was this one group home where I stayed. I was the youngest one there, and the older kids mostly ignored me. But one of them had this big book about the constellations and their backstories, and I used to read it when he was out. I would sneak out at night to find the right stars.” She points. “Antares. Arcturus. And there’s the summer triangle.”

“It isn’t summer,” Regina says stupidly. She’s still caught between the shame and the compassion that wells up whenever Emma talks about her childhood. Her fault. Isn’t it a fitting revenge that she dies because of this woman?

Emma breathes out a laugh. “Right. It’ll be out earlier in the night in a few months. See Cygnus?”

“The swan?”

“My constellation.” She shifts, and her arm moves around Regina. Regina is frozen for a moment, her breath caught in her throat, as Emma turns her slightly. It is easy for Emma to move her– too easy, Regina really is wasting away– but soon she’s been shifted to find another part of the sky. “There’s yours. Cassiopeia. See the W? It always looked like a crown to me.” There is a smile in Emma’s voice, a gentleness that makes Regina want to weep.

She asks past the strain in her voice, “Was she an evil queen, too?”

“Just a very vain one. Beautiful, the stories say.” Emma clears her throat. “She got in a lot of trouble for talking up her kid. Felt like something you’d do.” Her voice is lighter now, more comfortable.

Regina loves it. Loves it when she’s serious, loves it when she pokes fun at Regina, loves it all as long it’s Emma who is beside her, oblivious and caring and so, so good. “Ah, but our child is perfect,” she points out, and something settles within her at the our, spoken so plainly.

Emma laughs again, soft as velvet. “Damn right he is.” She is reflective again, staring up in silence. “Cygnus came and went with the seasons, but Cassiopeia was always there. It was reassuring, I guess. I’d go outside at night in a new group home and find the same crown in the sky, like an old friend. It was a little pathetic.” She laughs again, this time self-conscious, and Regina longs to roll over now on the arm that still lingers behind her, to lift herself up and kiss away the uncertainty on her face.

She is not so foolish or so bold to do it. The moment that Emma pushes her away, she thinks, will be the one that allows the flowers to kill her.

Instead, she says, “We have different stars in the Enchanted Forest.”

“I remember.” Emma’s voice is quiet. “Mary Margaret pointed some out to me. The Fallen Warrior, The Bent Woman, the Dragon Ascending. It makes you wonder if space is different in the Enchanted Forest, too.”

“No one’s sent any rockets there yet. We still hadn’t worked out penicillin before the curse.”

“Kind of feels like they owe you for that.” Emma is still watching the stars, content to lose herself in the blackness of the night, and Regina takes advantage of the moment to watch Emma, to trace into her memory the snub of Emma’s nose, the plump curve of her cheekbones, the strength of her jaw. To memorize Emma’s silhouette and how it lies beside her, as much a fantasy as stories of constellations in the Land Without Magic.

As much a fantasy as gratitude for her curse. “No one owes me,” Regina murmurs, and she feels the bitterness like hyacinths on her tongue. “My curse was meant to wound. To destroy lives. If the land where we emerged was a better one, it wasn’t because I wanted it that way. Just a happy coincidence.”

Emma doesn’t comfort her, doesn’t object to the statement. A part of Regina yearns for the denial, for a moment that will sweep aside her worst actions and leave her without the guilt and shame that creeps up now when she thinks about her past. A part of her is only glad that Emma knows it all and is still lying beside her, staring at the stars.

She has to sit up when her throat clogs up, coughing out a garden atop her roof, and Emma holds her steady so she doesn’t fall. The stems cut into her like a thousand tiny knives, the petals soaked in blood when they emerge, and she chokes them out so violently that blood vessels pop in her eyes.

And throughout it, Emma’s hands are on her sides, firm and unyielding, and she murmurs gentle words in Regina’s ear that only seem to exacerbate the pain in her throat. “Just get it all out. Breathe. You can do this.”

She doesn’t say it’s going to be okay. Emma isn’t one for platitudes.

When it’s over, Regina’s frame is wracked with exhaustion. She uses her whole body to expel the flowers now, every part of her braced for the worst of it and trembling from the force of the coughing. She feels frail now, brittle as a thin-boned old woman, and every movement takes too much energy.

Emma still has her hands on Regina’s torso, just over her hips, as though she is afraid that Regina is fragile enough that she might topple off the roof. She might not be wrong about that, and Regina allows herself to savor the touch of Emma’s hands against her, warm and gentle. It might be the most that she will ever get of Emma, and she is selfish enough to prolong it, to let herself shake with weakness so Emma might give her strength.

How futile it was, struggling to hate Emma Swan. How foolish she was, resisting the flowers that screamed the truth to her until she couldn’t scream it back.

Emma’s voice is subdued when she speaks again. “How much…how much longer do you think you have?”

Even Emma no longer pretends that this will pass in time. Regina shakes her head. It is a small kindness that Emma is behind her, that she can’t see Regina’s face. “Not long.”

“There has to be a cure. Something that can get rid of this.” Emma’s fingers tighten painfully against her side. “You transported an entire kingdom here and wiped their memories. You absorbed an entire curse to bring me and Mary Margaret home. I’ve seen you do impossible things. There’s no way that some stupid magic disease can take you down.”

Regina stares at the town, stretched out below her. At the quiet houses, the lights winking off in windows. At the clock tower and its endless, inexorable ticking. “I searched every tome I have when this began. I broke into the pawn shop and read through all of Rumple’s texts. There’s nothing.”

She sucks in a breath, wheezing and hoarse, and twists around to face Emma. Emma is staring at her, face unreadable and tight. “It isn’t a tragedy,” she says, and she believes it, has reckoned with her own history enough that she knows that it’s true. “If there’s anyone in this town who deserves to die like this, it’s–”

“You’re not dying,” Emma says fiercely, and it’s so different than when she’d last said it, just after the curse had broken. Regina had clung to that like a lifeline, a reassurance that Emma had backed with her life– hurtling in front of a wraith, offering herself as sacrifice in place of Regina. This time, it’s a promise and a decision at once, feels hopeless and full of hope at the same time, and it comes with a determination that might have bowled Regina over, if not for Emma’s hands shifting to cradle her face, to stare at her like a puzzle to solve.

“I love you,” Emma whispers, and a dozen rooted flowers seem to calm in Regina’s lungs, to grow small and lovely at once. Regina breathes, and it is cleaner, her bruised body a little less wracked with pain. Emma moves closer, and a part of Regina is dizzy with disbelief, with the impossibility that is Emma loving her back. “I love you,” Emma says again. She leans in, presses her lips to Regina’s in a sweet kiss, nothing like what Regina might have imagined from Emma, had she allowed herself to imagine. “And you’re not going to die.”

The promise hangs over them as Regina kisses Emma again, this time with as much force as she can handle with her broken body. Emma wraps her arms around Regina slowly, rigid movements becoming more natural as the kiss intensifies. There are no flowers, no gasps for breath, and the stars gleam above them as the world grows so bright that Regina might be blinded within it forevermore.

And so ends our happily ever after, perhaps. No new flowers bloom, though they will take far longer to disappear, as deeply rooted as they are. But we can imagine the joy of the moment, the light that will enter our heroes’ lives. We can believe that this is how it eternally goes.

Or we can continue on with the truth.

My dear reader, it is my solemn displeasure to remind you that Emma Swan is a savior. A hero, if you will. She will do anything to help those who need her, even if that means throwing herself into danger, fighting against powers beyond her, or flat-out lying to save a life.

And here, Emma Swan is lying.

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Chapter 4

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Ah. This has gotten uncomfortable, hasn’t it? But no less for you than for Emma Swan, who has her work cut out for her now. Those flowers are hardly gone now, are still enduring stubbornly in Regina’s lungs. Regina Mills has spent far too much of her existence watching the people she loves being snatched away from her, and she has difficulty trusting in her own happiness.

And that’s just so Regina, we can all agree. Regina doesn’t trust fairytales or luck or destiny. Regina doesn’t trust that any of this could really end with anything less than her own death. Regina doesn’t trust that good things might happen to her.

Regina does trust Emma, which is unfortunate.

Did you expect this to be easy?

In the long run, there are worse people to pretend to be in love with than Regina Mills. For one thing, she’s the most attractive woman in Storybrooke, when you put aside the fact that she had once been a murderous despot. Emma finds herself a little weak in the knees after spending too much time with Regina’s lips on her neck, on her jaw, teeth tugging at her earlobes–

Anyway. It’s a very good thing that Emma is attracted to Regina.

For another, Regina is alive because of it, and that makes this whole relationship worthwhile. Emma will gladly hold Regina and take her on dates and woo her for an eternity if it means that Henry doesn’t lose his mom. There are things that are more important than Emma’s comfort level in a relationship that she doesn’t really want.

It’s not like this is the first time that Emma has pretended in a relationship. And this time, it’ll be easier than ever to be done with it. Emma is difficult, according to her last girlfriend. A pain in the ass, if you ask one of the men she’d dated so she’d have a place to crash at. Emma isn’t good at relationships, and she’s never successfully managed to keep one going for very long. And Regina has standards beyond any of those men and women, is far out of their league. In a few weeks, Regina’s rose-flavored glasses will come off and she’ll see exactly how off-putting Emma Swan is. The flowers will wilt away with whatever fantasy Regina has about Emma that had made Regina fall in love with her.

She picks up Regina’s favorite salad from Granny’s at lunchtime the next day before she heads to Town Hall. Regina brightens when she sees her, rises from her seat and flits across the room to press her against the wall. And that’s not bad, not at all, because Regina does this thing with her tongue that makes Emma drop her salad and wrap an arm around Regina, pulling her flush against her, her teeth tugging at Regina’s upper lip.

Regina’s eyes are still closed when Emma lets her go, and she opens them slowly, lazily. Emma can almost forget who she is when she’s like this, that Regina is a ticking time bomb who is barely on the road to anything resembling redemption and that dating her in any other situation would be a Bad Idea, capital B, capital I. “You dropped my lunch,” Regina murmurs against her lips.

“Mm. That’s on me. I can get another salad for you. I’m getting better at teleporting,” Emma offers.

“No,” Regina says with finality, and Emma doesn’t know if she’s angry, if she’s already realized that Emma is a disaster, until she marches from the room and calls to her secretary, “I’m taking lunch out.”

Emma follows, bewildered, as Regina leads her into the elevator and hits the button. “If you’re going to yell at Granny about the packaging, I really think it’s my fault for dropping the salad,” she says lightly, though she dreads redirecting Regina’s fury to her, as helpful as it might be.

Regina’s gaze sweeps to her, and she looks very amused. “We’re not going to Granny’s. I’m taking you out for lunch.” She takes Emma’s hand as the elevator door opens, leading her out into the street.

Passersby glance at their joined hands. Regina keeps her head high, defiant at their stares. Emma chews on her lip and wonders if, when the Evil Queen dumps the Savior, she’s going to have to do damage control. For now, though, she doesn’t dare let go.

Regina gets winded halfway down the block, her breath rattling in that alarming way that it’s prone to now, and Emma’s jaw tightens. “I thought you were doing better.” You should be healed, she thinks, because her confession of love should have been enough. Regina believing that Emma loves her should be enough. Isn’t that how this damned magical stuff works?

Some part of Regina must not believe it yet, and Emma leans over to brush her lips against Regina’s cheek. Regina takes in a long, cleaner breath, her hands sliding under Emma’s jacket to touch the thin material of her shirt, and she presses her head to Emma’s shoulder. “I am,” she says. “You haven’t seen me hacking up any bloody flowers lately, have you?”

It’s not bad, holding Regina like this. Her curves are soft and her body is warm, and she slips into intimacy with Emma in a moment. She feels fragile and gentle at once, a woman unlike the one that Emma has clashed with before. “I wish it would go for good,” Emma mutters against her ear. “I really thought–” She had thought that Regina might die, that there would be no cure and no way out. She had dreamt of finding her broken body on the floor of her office, her heart still and flowers sprouting from her chest. She had dreaded the day when Henry would find out what had happened to his mother and why, and she had taken the only possible option to save her.

Regina straightens again. “I know what you thought. I also…” She clears her throat. “Well. I’m all right now. Come with me. It isn’t much farther.”

She shows Emma to a restaurant where Emma’s never eaten before. The maitre d’ wrinkles his nose at Emma’s outfit, and Regina ignores it. “My usual table,” she instructs him, and he leads them to a secluded corner of the restaurant, a candlelit table with two cushioned seats opposite each other.

Emma sits, though the maitre d’ looks as though he might recoil at her jeans touching his precious seat. “You come here often?” It’s a surprisingly romantic venue for a woman who’d been, as far as Emma knows, just casually hooking up with the former sheriff from time to time. The sheriff she’d killed, another reason why Emma would have scoffed at the idea of dating Regina if not for the deadly disease.

Regina shoots her an amused look. “Are you jealous?”

“No,” Emma says automatically, before she reconsiders. Maybe the right answer– the one that’ll get rid of the last of the flowers– is yes. “Maybe.”

Regina spreads her napkin onto her lap, delicate and lovely. “I used to come here with a handsome gentleman, witty and intelligent. We ate together and spoke for hours. Usually about his day at school.”

Emma narrows her eyes at Regina. “Henry.”

“Henry,” Regina agrees pleasantly, nodding to the waiter who brings them appetizers. This is the kind of restaurant where there’s no menu, apparently, and Emma’s grilled cheese is absolutely going to go to waste, because the food here is so good.

There’s some kind of chicken that melts in her mouth, and potatoes with a flavor like one of the spices that Regina uses, and Emma is hopelessly in love. “It’s a good thing that they’d never let me in here without you, because I would spend my whole paycheck on this restaurant,” she says after the entree. It occurs to her that she probably has been inappropriately excited about the food, but Regina only watches her, a smile lingering on her face as though she finds it endearing instead.

“I’d take you here every day for lunch if I thought that you’d still appreciate my cooking after it.” Under the table, her foot knocks against Emma’s leg, swift and inviting.

“I’ll always appreciate your cooking. Even when you’re trying to kill me by chili pepper. Anything beats shepherd’s pie. There was one week when Mary Margaret and I were out every night and David fed Henry so much shepherd’s pie that he refused to go back to the loft come Thursday. That’s the kind of dysfunction I’m dealing with at home.”

“Well, it’s not unreasonable. The man was a shepherd.” There’s a glint in Regina’s eyes that makes Emma pretty sure that she’s being mocked. “And he didn’t have much time after that to learn how to cook. I’d think you had the most varied skills of the three of you.”

“Nah. Lots of takeout, lots of mac and cheese. I can grill a burger. I had an ex-boyfriend with a grill.”

“An ex-boyfriend,” Regina repeats, slow and stiff.

Now who’s jealous? “That was before I figured out that I was a lesbian. Well. I kind of knew,” Emma admits. “It was just…easier not to be. I was a runaway and an ex-con. It took a while before I could afford my own place.”

Regina’s eyes flicker to Emma, then down. Carefully, she says, “You dated men to have a home?”

“Home is a stretch. A place to sleep, mostly. With…with Henry’s dad, it was just a car.” She stumbles over the admission, the mention of someone she’d rather forget, but the words keep spilling out, coaxed by the dim light of the restaurant and Regina’s still, intent gaze. “My car, actually. He sent me the keys after he ran off and left me with the bag. Guess he felt a little guilty.”

“A little…” Regina’s hand clenches her fork so tightly that it shakes in her grip. She looks murderous, a moment away from hunting down Emma’s ex and crushing his heart in his chest. It’s a helpful reminder of who Emma’s dating right now, and why Emma would absolutely not fall in love with her.

“Hey,” Emma says, keeping her words bright. They emerge smaller than she’d meant for them to. “He doesn’t matter. We got Henry. And eventually I got a better job and my own apartment and I didn’t have to date any sociopaths after that.” She changes the subject with effort. “How about you? Date any really terrible guys?”

“No. I married one,” Regina says dryly. “Not that I had much choice in the matter. We should have dessert,” she adds, so abrupt that Emma snaps her mouth shut and doesn’t ask the followup questions she’d had. “I think this town might implode if it’s without its mayor and sheriff for much longer.”

They’re immediately offered a single slice of cheesecake with two spoons, and Emma eats most of it. Regina savors each bite, slow and careful, as though she’s been trained on how to eat. Most of what Regina does must have been trained: the regal posture, the authoritative stride, the cadence of her voice. Not that I had much choice in the matter, because of course, Regina hadn’t wanted to marry Mary Margaret’s father (and Emma will not think of him as her grandfather because her family is twisted enough as it is), and only now does Emma think about what that means.

Mary Margaret is…five? seven? years younger than Regina, right? And she’s mentioned that her father had had her when he was already elderly. Even the best cheesecake she’s ever experienced can’t stop the bile from rising in Emma’s throat. The pieces of Regina’s past, doled out one bit at a time, tell a story that makes Emma shake with rage and grief.

When they step out of the restaurant, blinking in the sunlight, Emma tugs Regina to her and kisses her, the two of them locked together in the middle of a sidewalk while half of Storybrooke gapes at them. She strokes Regina’s cheek, curves her hand under Regina’s jawbone, and she can’t say any of what she wants to.

Regina presses her forehead against Emma’s, and she murmurs, “Come for dinner tonight. You and Henry. I can’t bear to be away from you for so long.” It’s so endlessly romantic, like a line from a fairytale lover, and Emma wonders, with a touch of wistfulness, what it might be like to be in love with Regina Mills, to let words like that sink into her skin like a balm that will heal her for good.

Killer, she reminds herself. Dangerous. Unstable.

But as Regina walks back to Town Hall, hips swaying with each step, Emma is dizzy with wanting.

We’re all having a good time, I hope? Our heroes deserve some gentleness after all they’ve endured to get to this point. And they still struggle to believe that they can have it. For Regina, the disbelief remains, quieted a little more with each passing day. For Emma, a wall has been erected around her heart, designed solely to keep Regina out of it.

Regina doesn’t know this. Regina only knows that Emma whispers I love you at the strangest times: after a brief coughing fit; when they walk past Regina’s abandoned garden (Regina finds that she has no taste for gardening anymore); when Regina sucks in a wheezing breath. Perhaps, Regina decides, it is reminders of her mortality that prompt Emma’s declarations. Regina has not dared to reciprocate, though Emma doesn’t seem bothered by that.

But there is an odd strain on Emma sometimes, a discomfort that Regina notices and doesn’t understand. There is a hesitance when they speak. There is a hesitance when Regina touches her. And Emma so rarely initiates.

We know Emma’s secret. We know how damning it might be, would Regina grasp it.

We will not say a word.

It becomes habit, eating dinner at Regina’s house. They’d already been doing it before Regina’s recovery, and Henry has settled back into his old home with all the grace and subtlety of an eleven-year-old. “I’m going to pack up some of my clothes and bring them to my old room,” he announces one afternoon, and Mary Margaret and David give Emma beaming looks, the ones they’ve been wearing since Emma had first told Regina that she loved her.

“It’s just so fitting,” Mary Margaret says, a little tearfully. “We’re all family again. And it’s only a matter of time before you follow Henry to Regina’s house, right? That’s what true love is.”

“We’ve been dating, like, three weeks,” Emma reminds her. “It’s not…it’s not that serious.” Maybe that’s how long courting takes in the Enchanted Forest. Emma has no idea. But she’s already getting the sense that her mother is going to be crushed when Regina moves on from Emma.

“It must be a little serious,” Mary Margaret says significantly, and she clears her throat. “You might not know this, but Regina’s recent illness–”

Emma cuts her off before she says anything damning. If she’s ever going to fully heal Regina, Regina can’t suspect for a minute that Emma’s love is inauthentic. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she says sharply. “The only thing that matters is that she’s getting better.”

“Right. Of course.” Mary Margaret chews on her lip. “Well, enjoy tonight. I won’t leave the lights on,” she adds significantly, and Emma stares at her and tries to swallow back her nausea.

That’s a thing that they’ve stopped since Regina had recovered. Emma isn’t sleeping in the guest room anymore. Or in the house at all. After Henry’s bedtime, they usually have a nightcap and talk for a while– about magic, about their days, halting details of their pasts– and then Emma says something abrupt. It’s late. I’d better get back home.

Today, Henry unpacks his bag in his bedroom while Regina and Emma work on dinner. “I can make the cream sauce,” Emma announces, and Regina looks dubiously at her. “I can! You think I can’t follow directions?”

“I’ve seen your paperwork. I know you can’t follow directions.” But Regina lets her try while she works on the salad, dicing vegetables with expert skill. Emma takes her doubt as a challenge, and squints down at the cookbook every few minutes, analyzing the timing– sautéing onions takes much longer than five minutes, thank you very much– and every measurement.

She’s stirring the sauce for the fifth time (every few minutes, says the recipe) when arms slide around her waist and a kiss is pressed to the back of her neck. “I take it back,” Regina murmurs, and Emma’s hand wavers around the mixing spoon. “Turns out you can follow directions. Which raises many more questions about the quality of your work.”

“You sound like my middle school teachers,” Emma says, and Regina laughs against the spot below her ear, a heady vibration that makes Emma shiver. She leans back without thinking, loses the mixing spoon in the sauce and closes her eyes. Regina’s lips feels so good against her skin, heating it with just a touch, and Emma already knows that she’s going to miss it desperately when this ends.

She turns around in Regina’s arms and Regina turns her attention to Emma’s throat, to the space where her shirt dips low and the curve of Emma’s chest begins. Emma lets out a strangled noise, tugging her up, her own hands dropping to cup Regina’s ass and hoist her up. Regina is still too light from the disease, too easy to lift, but there’s a little more of her to hold every day, and Emma kisses her desperately, clings to her and loses herself in Regina’s touch.

Regina wraps her legs around Emma’s waist, resting on her hips, and Emma pulls one arm back to stroke Regina’s side. A strange heat comes over the bend of her arm, a wetness that she doesn’t understand for one dazed moment, until Regina drops to the ground again and says, pressing her lips to Emma’s cheek, “You put your elbow in the cream sauce.”

Emma inspects her elbow. It’s dripping a little. “You didn’t see that part of the recipe? It adds flavor.”

They don’t explain to Henry why they call it elbow sauce for the rest of dinner, and he doesn’t ask, busy filling the room with a description of his day. “I didn’t even know that Celia was copying my paper! But Mr. Davis made us both move to opposite sides of the room for the rest of the test.”

Regina scowls. “That’s incredibly unfair. I’ll speak to the school–”

“Want me to beat him up for you?” Emma offers. Regina gives her a look. “Or I can give him a parking ticket,” she amends.

“I’ll schedule a meeting with the teacher. We can have a conversation,” Regina says, silky-soft and dangerous.

Emma has never been so pleased with the deadly look in Regina’s eyes.

Henry blinks at them both. “Please do not do any of those things.” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I have two helicopter moms now.” But he doesn’t sound all that upset about it. He takes a bit of his pasta with elbow sauce and says, “This is…it’s good, right? Us?” He waves vaguely at them.

And Emma thinks, not for the first time, about what this is going to do to him. She had been so focused on saving Regina, so set on doing whatever it took to rescue her from certain death, that she hadn’t considered at first what effect it would have on Henry. Now, she thinks about it all the time. Henry has taken to their relationship with bright-eyed optimism, quick to accept it as forever, and Emma dreads what might happen when it ends.

It won’t be like before, like divorced parents who bitterly hate each other. Emma is determined not to let it happen. No, Regina will fall out of love with her and Emma will ask, one day, if they aren’t just staying together because of Henry. They’ll part cordially and keep the friendship that they’ve built, co-parenting ably without any awkward tension.

That’s the ideal, anyway. Sometimes, Emma doesn’t know how she’ll ever avoid the awkward tension when she knows how Regina’s lips taste, when she’s sitting opposite Regina and knows exactly how to get her to make that strangled noise that sends bolts of need through Emma’s core. She might not be in love, but she is deeply in lust right now, and that’s going to make it…harder.

It shouldn’t be much longer. They’ve been dating for almost a month, and Emma has rarely managed a relationship for more than that. But Regina, she of the short fuse and deadly temper, has found new depths of patience for Emma. She laughs at Emma’s missteps, eyes sparkling with affection. When Emma is grouchy and unsociable, Regina retorts with a sharp tone but then lets it fade later, pushing it aside as though none of it is a dealbreaker.

Emma is running out of ideas.

After dinner, Henry does homework and then goes out to ride his bike. Emma stretches out on her back on Regina’s lawn, Regina sitting beside her, and works on what Regina calls elemental magic. “You’re not just making the grass grow higher. You’re going deep beneath the soil, finding the place where its magic lies.”

“Grass is magic now,” Emma repeats skeptically.

“Everything has a magical core,” Regina corrects her. “Every person, every living thing, every inanimate object. It’s only a question of reaching in to find it.”

“Right.” Emma shuts her eyes. Regina runs her fingers over Emma’s arm, distracting but nice, and Emma reaches out, feels for that glowing spark that she’s come to identify as an item’s magic.

The ground is alive with it, and Emma touches some sparks experimentally with her mind, prodding at them. Grow, she thinks, Regina’s knuckles sending chills up her arm. Taller. Stronger.

When she opens her eyes, she sees that the grass has remained untouched, but there are flowers near the edge of the abandoned garden that have grown as high as a grown man. Regina stares at them, her face without pallor, and she lets out a strangled cough.

“Sorry!” Emma says desperately. She hadn’t meant to– not the flowers, which Regina regards with dread– and she scrambles to sit, to pull Regina into her arms, reassured by her comfortable weight. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Regina leans against her, and Emma tugs her closer, breathes in her familiar scent and that faint hint of unrelenting florals. “We need to work on your control,” she murmurs, and she kisses Emma and says nothing more about the flowers that sway in the wind like trees outside her living room window.

When Henry is asleep for the night, Emma feels the old tension return, the dread of something that she can’t define. They are back at the dining room table with a candle, the old control exercise that Emma has failed at thus far, and Regina stands behind her, hands resting on her shoulders. “Concentrate,” she whispers. “You don’t create magic out of nowhere, not when it isn’t coming straight out of your hands.”

“It’s easier when it’s coming straight out of my hands,” Emma points out sulkily, and Regina’s thumb brushes against her jaw with affection. “I could light this in a second if you let me use my hands.”

“No hands,” Regina says reprovingly. Something about that sends a bolt of desire through Emma. “You’re creating friction right at the wick. Let the flame grow from it. Imagine a lighter against the wick, or a match…”

For a split second, something orange gleams at the base of the wick, then sputters out. Emma grits her teeth and tries again, Regina’s hands massaging her shoulders to a state of formlessness, of transcendence. This time, the flame stays lit for a split second.

“You can do this,” Regina breathes. “Find that magical core. Fine-tune your energy– don’t overwhelm it, just a tiny bit–”

The candle burns for another second, winking out, and Emma presses harder, pushes until it brightens again. This time, it stays lit for a full ten seconds before it dies, and Emma whoops, letting all of her restrained magic dance free around her. “I got it! Did you see that?”

“I saw it,” Regina says, and she sounds so proud, so pleased with Emma that Emma’s heart races and her skin buzzes with desire. She’s standing before she can think about it, kissing Regina so hard that Regina stumbles backward, and she holds Regina steady so she won’t fall, guiding her out to the couch in the living room.

“Emma,” Regina breathes, and Emma is still high on magic, overwhelmed with the power coursing through her body, and Regina is just so beautiful, her dark eyes burning and her lips red and inviting. Emma presses her down onto the couch, and she kisses her ardently, slipping her hands up the bottom of Regina’s dress until it’s above her waist, until Regina twists around so she’s on top. Her eyes glitter with naked want, and Emma is beneath her, writhing helplessly– she wants this, she does, so much–

And then, she is taken back for an instant, and Regina’s face is replaced by a dozen others, by too many years of being what someone else wanted, her own desires be damned. She lies suddenly still, her body shutting down, and she is gripped with miserable dread, with a sense of being trapped, and Regina is still atop her, kissing her greedily–

Regina, who is so in tune with Emma’s emotions that she stops. “Emma?” She sounds…vulnerable, uncertain, and Emma knows that this will only make the Hanahaki root deeper into her lungs, that Regina will never heal when Emma is still so reluctant, but she can’t seem to force herself to move.

She has done this so many times before, with so many other people who wanted something from her, but Regina’s eyes run over Emma’s stiff body and she sees right through her. Emma can’t hide this from Regina, can’t pretend that she’s all right, and Regina pulls back, pressing a hand to Emma’s cheek.

Regina looks like a demon like this, hair loose and wild and face flushed and her lipstick smudged, like a witch who had crawled out of hell itself to be with Emma. Emma craves her touch, longs for her. Is relieved, regardless, when Regina says carefully, “You can…you know that you don’t have to leave every night. You can still sleep in my guest room, if that’s more comfortable than the loft.”

To Emma’s horror, a sob escapes her throat, sits fat and salient in the space between them. Regina gets up, smoothing down her dress and crouching beside her. When she kisses Emma, it’s on her forehead, platonic and still gentle enough that it makes Emma want to sob again.

Emma does sleep in the guest room, though it brings back horrific memories that she’d rather forget, lying in bed without breathing as though she might better hear Regina gasping for oxygen in the next room. It’s okay. She’s okay, and Regina has been perfectly gracious about her reluctance to go further than kissing.

It’s not really reluctance. She’s fine with it. She might not be in love with Regina, but she’s willing to do whatever is necessary to save her life. And it’s not like sleeping with Regina would be a chore. Regina can do things with her tongue that would–

Anyway. Emma wants to do this for Regina, and she doesn’t know why she keeps freezing up, why she finds a dozen excuses to leave before things heat up, why her face is wet right now as she thinks about it. As she thinks about Regina, asking for nothing and offering all of herself, so wholly in love with Emma for some baffling, absurd reason, despite how little Emma has given her of herself.

Why?

And that’s what makes the least sense of all. They’d hated each other before the curse had broken. Regina had tried to poison her, had sabotaged her and had her arrested, had done everything in her power to chase Emma out of town. When had that become the kind of all-encompassing love that Regina would have died for? How can Regina endure beside her after weeks of seeing Emma for exactly who she is?

She’s climbing out of bed before she can think it over, padding toward Regina’s bedroom in a borrowed pair of silk pajamas, and she knocks lightly on the door.

Regina’s voice is drowsy, heavy with sleep. “Emma?”

Emma slips inside. Regina lies in her big bed, enveloped in a comforter and blinking up at her. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I just…” Emma moves closer, and Regina shifts to watch her. She looks more awake than before, and Emma feels a stab of guilt. “Sorry. I woke you up.”

Regina doesn’t lie to her, which is another reason to feel guilty. “It’s all right. Come here,” she says, and she sits up and pats the bed next to her.

A swoop of anticipation, a stab of fear. Emma climbs into the bed, sits against the headboard beside Regina, and she gathers her courage and says hastily, “You know that I love you, right? Even if we haven’t…” Her voice trails off, and she wonders how difficult it would be now, to seal this lie with a kiss. To touch Regina in all the places she wants to, all the ways that Regina would want her to.

It has never been so hard to pretend before. It has never consumed her to the point that she recoils from the idea of being dishonest with Regina, to push this relationship further when it’s based on a lie–

And Regina must suspect, deep down, or her breath wouldn’t be so ragged right now, her lungs still clogged with flowers.

But Regina doesn’t say that. She only slips her hand in Emma’s, and she lies down again, pulling Emma with her so they can turn on their sides and stare at each other. “I do know that you love me,” she says, and there is nothing but honesty shining in her eyes. “And I know that you have…I understand what it is, to feel as though your body is a tool for others to use. It takes time to unlearn it. To figure out how to take what you want instead of what someone else needs. I may not have always gone about it in the best ways,” Regina adds dryly, but she squeezes Emma’s hand, so tender that Emma wants to sob. “Take your time, Emma. I’ll still be here.”

It’s impossible to look at this woman and see a fairytale villain, a sociopathic witch out to destroy everything in her path. She is dark-eyed affection and gentle smiles, a thumb stroking Emma’s hand and her words eternally understanding. The darkness still hangs over her, a shadow that never leaves her face, but it only makes the fragile warmth of her more acute.

Emma blinks away silly, emotional tears that threaten to emerge, and she whispers the question that she’s wanted to ask since she’d left her room. “Do you love me?”

Regina doesn’t hesitate. “With all my heart.” The truth of it is like a glow, surrounding them and enclosing them into a tiny bubble where only they can breathe.

Emma laughs, wet and frustrated, and says, “Why? How?” It’s been months of Regina loving her, so much that it had nearly killed her, and Regina still…

Regina presses their joined hands against Emma’s heart. “You touched me and I felt magic again,” she whispers. “You loved Henry even when you wanted nothing more than to leave. You fought me for months because you knew that it was the right thing to do. And then you put that aside because you were kind.”

There is a ridiculous urge to fight Regina on every point, to explain that Emma is none of those things– loving and good and kind. That Regina has gotten some skewed impression of Emma that negates all the selfishness, all the anger, all the petty cruelty that Emma knows that she’s capable of. But Regina is still speaking, and Emma throat closes up when she tries to object.

“I was sleeping for twenty-eight years, lost in a prison that I’d built for myself and my son and a town of people I hated, and you crashed into the town sign and woke me up,” Regina murmurs, and she lets go of Emma’s hand to brush Emma’s hair from her face, to cup her jaw with aching delicacy. “How could I not love you?”

Emma has no choice but to kiss her, and it isn’t chaste or sweet. It’s messy, needy, the two of them lying flush against each other as Emma memorizes the taste of Regina’s lips, of her mouth, of her skin. Regina kisses her back just as easily, her hands tangling in Emma’s hair, and Emma has to– she wants to–

She rests her hand on Regina’s abdomen, letting her silky shirt ride up, and Regina kisses her in response, keeps her fingers in Emma’s hair as Emma slides her own hands upward, exploring the shape of Regina. It’s intoxicating. Emma could get lost in this touch, in the way that her hands fit perfectly against each curve, in the movement of Regina’s chest when she pants and how she writhes against Emma with a strangled sound.

And Emma still thinks she might flee if Regina did the same to her, but Regina must sense it, ever in tune with Emma’s needs, because she only holds onto Emma’s hair, tight enough to pull it. Emma gasps at that sensation, buries her face against Regina’s chest, and she moves downward methodically, slowly and carefully, her heart in her throat and her whole body pulsing with need.

“Please,” Regina gasps out. “Please,” and Emma has never before been so electrified to hear Regina short of breath, to feel her shaking beneath her. Please, and Emma descends, and Emma is exactly where she wants to be, and Regina lets out a strangled sob and reaches for her, presses around her, and finally–

Regina arches up and then stops trembling, and Emma lies between her legs, buoyant and confused and a little ashamed. “Come here,” Regina whispers, and Emma doesn’t want her to return the favor, to do the same, though she aches for it regardless. When Regina only kisses her, pulls Emma back up and into her arms, Emma is left exhausted and needy and more content than she’s felt in a lifetime.

She curls against Regina, and feels Regina’s heartbeat against her pulse. It gets slower, more sedate, and Emma knows that Regina has drifted off.

Emma doesn’t sleep. She shifts to watch Regina instead, her own heart still pounding. There is the faintest smile still lingering on Regina’s lips, and it sends a new flush of happiness through Emma, unrestrained and all-encompassing.

The guilt is fading away, the weight of her lies turning light and irrelevant. Because she could very easily live like this forever, beside this magical, impossible woman. She could very easily slip into her life and never leave, build her whole future around her.

She could very easily fall in love with Regina Mills.

It’s all right if I jump in here, isn’t it? I don’t think there will be space for me to speak at the end of this. And I would so like to paint you the picture of Regina Mills and Emma Swan, locked together in loving affection with no idea of what might come tomorrow. With no idea that they will be as good as strangers by the end of the day.

Let them enjoy this. They have so few sacred moments.

Emma wakes up in the morning with Regina’s fingers running up and down the side of her hip and her eyes fixed on Emma’s. “Morning,” Regina whispers, voice thick from sleep. “I could get very used to waking up with you in my bed.”

“Mm. I could get used to waking up here,” Emma retorts, and it takes extra effort to pull herself out of it. Only when she hears Henry moving around in the hallway does she get up.

She takes the shower first, massaging Regina’s shampoo into her hair and luxuriating in the pleasure of being enveloped in Regina’s scent. Oh, yeah, she could definitely get used to it.

She kisses Regina a dozen times before they finally make it downstairs, and Henry looks at both of them with narrowed eyes. “We’re going to be late. Did you both oversleep?”

“Must have,” Emma says apologetically.

Henry frowns. “Did you sleep over? I went to see if you were in the guest room, but the bed looked empty–”

“Why don’t we go to Granny’s for breakfast?” Regina suggests brightly. “It’s been a few days, and there’s that bus stop right outside.”

Henry accepts the distraction without question, and he leads the way to Granny’s, turning to rush them and rolling his eyes when he catches Emma pulling Regina in close. “You can have your sappy kissing time later. I want a muffin.”

Emma slips her hand into Regina’s instead, their hands swinging together with every step. She feels floaty today, a heady sort of joy overwhelming her. This is good. She’s falling in love with someone she trusts, there are no villains to fight or threats to their existence, and the world is just a fabulous place right now.

They walk into Granny’s together. It’s the busy morning rush, so they both go to the counter, unwilling to let go of each other just yet. Regina orders a coffee for herself and a bran muffin, and Emma scoffs. “You deserve a treat,” she informs her. “Not a bran muffin.”

Behind the counter, Ruby laughs. “Listen to your girlfriend,” she says, winking at Regina. “She just wants to wine and dine you, bring you flowers and chocolates–” She considers for a moment. “Well, I guess not flowers,” she amends, and Emma’s eyes go wide with alarm. “But chocolate!”

Regina stops. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ruby waves a hand before Emma can make up a lie– I have allergies, I don’t like the florist– and says, “It’s not a big deal. Emma came to Belle, desperate to help with your…condition.” She rounds her eyes significantly.

Regina’s hand drops from Emma’s. “Condition,” she repeats slowly.

Emma finds her voice. “Ruby, no–”

“Yes, Ruby, please explain what you mean,” Regina says, her voice suddenly hard. The words are coming out with difficulty, and Emma is suddenly terrified– not for their relationship, not for her happiness, but for Regina, whose chest is moving rapidly like she’s trying to breathe, like she’s on the verge of a cough–

Ruby glances between them, uncomfortable. “It was no big deal. She just didn’t know what Hanahaki was. But you worked it out! You’re together now, right? All’s well that ends well…” Her voice trails off as she sees what Emma already has, as Regina stands very still, trembling.

Regina is frozen in place, still struggling to breathe, and it’s all falling apart. She’s putting it together; and how could she not, when Emma had obviously pretended not to know what the disease was? When Emma had watched her waste away and then said the magic, healing words? Emma knows what it looks like. Emma had never meant for Regina to know this.

Emma says, “Regina, no, I do love you–” and means every word of it, but it’s too late. The cough bursts forth from Regina’s throat, a cascade of rainbow flowers spilling out to the ground. Every last flower that had bloomed and waited in Regina’s lungs seems to erupt from her now, and Regina coughs and coughs and coughs, her body wracked with the need to expel them all.

And all Emma can do is hold her, hold her tightly as blood-drenched flowers spill around her and Ruby calls for an ambulance. All she can do is sink to the ground with a limp, dying Regina in her arms and a pool of bloody flowers beneath her knees.

Chapter Management

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Chapter 5

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Regina awakens on a bed that isn’t her own. She recognizes the sterile hospital air with a sense of vague dismay. Everything is moving slowly, hazily, and she is too woozy to open her eyes or take in her surroundings. How had she gotten here? She wracks her mind, struggling to remember what had happened to her, but it’s like moving through molasses, trying to piece it together.

She had been at Granny’s, had ordered breakfast. Had made some meaningless small talk with Ruby, and then…she is left with the impression of blinding pain, gasping to breathe, and then nothing.

Around her, she can hear hushed voices. Whale, maybe. Snow. Another voice she doesn’t recognize. “You were able to do it all?”

“The damage was very extensive,” Whale says in a low tone. “Some of those roots went all the way into her limbs. We removed it all, as far as I can tell. But I can’t say for sure. It was worse than any case I’ve seen before. It’s a wonder that she made it this long.”

Another voice, a boy’s, earnest and small. Regina doesn’t know him, either. “Can we go in and see her?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Whale sounds guarded. “Those roots were so embedded that…well, it’s possible we missed something. I think it’s important that you two keep your distance for a while. Let her heal properly without triggering anything that was there.”

The boy speaks again. “What you said before the surgery…will she remember us?”

“No.” Whale sounds confident about that. “Your hold on her was too deep, too tightly wrapped into the roots. She should remember nearly everything else, but there will be a block when it comes to you two.”

The strange woman speaks again, and she sounds so weary, so sad. “She’s alive. That’s what matters.”

Snow lets out a little sob. Once, that might have made Regina quake with the force of her hatred for the other woman. Today, she can’t seem to muster up the strength to care so much.

About anything, really.

It’s Snow who speaks next, hushed and careful. “Is she…do you think she’ll be volatile without those memories?”

Whale laughs, a scoff of disbelief. “Regina? Absolutely not. She’s always been at her most dangerous when she was able to love.”

Some of you must be furious right now. I understand. It seems inhumane, unfair, particularly when we know that Regina insists that she would have preferred to die than to have this surgery performed on her. But she neglected to mention this to anyone else; and, of course, her family made the only decision that they could.

You weren’t there when it happened. You didn’t see the way that the world seemed to crumble around Emma and Regina, or the way that Henry spotted his mother on the floor and let out an unearthly wail. You didn’t watch the paramedics struggling to revive Regina, the way the flowers still poured out of her when they tried to clear her lungs, her body going whiter and whiter with blood loss as Emma tried desperately to keep her alive with only her clumsy and imprecise magic.

You weren’t there when Whale listed their options. I can tell you that there were two: a painful, suffocating death; or a life without love, without even the memories of the ones Regina loved most.

There was only one option.

When Regina awakens next, she feels a little less sick, a little less weak. She breathes in clear, sterile air and opens her eyes. Snow is dozing beside her bed, and she jumps up when Regina clears her throat. “Regina! You’re up!” She sits back down, and she reaches out and puts her hand on Regina’s.

Regina stares at the hand. Snow doesn’t move it, only squeezes Regina’s hand comfortingly. “I don’t know what you remember,” she says carefully. “You were suffering from Hanahaki Disease.”

“Ah.” She knows the sickness, whispered about in gardens outside of castle balls where the girls liked to gossip. They say that Maria has the flower sickness. They don’t think that she’ll make it. She had never quite believed that it was real, that someone could actually die of a broken heart like that. Hearts, she knows, can be torn out and crushed. But she has never seen lungs blossom.

She stares at Snow’s hand, an odd thought flickering through her. She feels nothing at all about it. “I wasn’t in love with you, was I?”

Snow snatches her hand back. “Absolutely not.” She glowers at Regina. “It was…there was someone else. But you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“Of course.” Regina breathes in easily, a deep inhalation that aches only a little at her bruised lungs. “I’ve forgotten them?”

“Yes. And your son. You loved him too deeply. It went with the flowers.”

“Oh.” That thought stirs nothing within her. “I had a son?”

Snow looks as though she might cry.

Regina clears her throat. “Is he being cared for?” It seems the thing to ask. She can’t remember him. She remembers a curse, remembers an alien sort of emotion that spurred her on. She remembers the town and being mayor of it. She doesn’t remember how the curse had broken, or much of anything since.

“Yes,” Snow whispers, and she says no more. Regina understands. It’s the sensible thing to do, sending the boy elsewhere. Especially if she’s just had Hanahaki removed from her system.

Well. None of that matters. Regina leans back and closes her eyes, content with the answers she’s gotten, and she drifts back to sleep.

Her house is large and empty, just as she remembers it. Someone has gone into it while she was convalescing and removed photos from the wall, leaving bare nails behind. The boy’s room has been packed up, too, though some clothes and books remain.

She returns to work. She’s been away for nearly a week, and there’s plenty to catch up on. The district attorney keeps demanding a meeting, the health department is worried about vaccination schedules, and the sheriff has taken all her leave for a month-long vacation out of town with her family. Regina hadn’t even known that people were able to get out of town these days, which just hammers home how poorly she’d been governing when she’d been sick.

She buckles down and gets to work.

It’s satisfying, organizing events and balancing budgets. She likes the meetings, some smaller ones and the monthly one with all the department heads. Her life is pleasant enough, though she notices that it’s bland and meaningless. It’s just how it is after Hanahaki, she suspects. Even her magic lies dormant, untouched and unused, and she can’t seem to muster up the fire she’d once used to summon it.

It’s an odd thing to imagine loving someone so hard that she had nearly died for them. She can’t conceive of how it might feel, that intensity of emotion. There is a vague curiosity when she walks through the streets of Storybrooke, glancing at the passersby and wondering which had been her unrequited love. Presumably, they didn’t even know about it, and never will. There will only be a blankness in the space that Regina’s love once inhabited.

She likes to sit in the boy’s room sometimes and work there. It isn’t sentimentality for someone she doesn’t remember and doesn’t love. But there’s a familiarity to it, a faint fullness that she feels when she spends enough time in the room. Like muscle memory: her body remembers something that her heart no longer can.

She doesn’t think about him too often. Sometimes, she doesn’t think about anything at all, her mind going black and empty in ways that Whale assures her are ordinary. Without your capacity for love, he tells her, there’s just a lot of your brain that’s blocked off. You’ll slowly find new things to occupy yourself with.

He always looks at her with mingled distaste and pity, as though her condition makes her disturbing. She doesn’t really see why.

And he is right. Slowly, mayoral topics begin to fill those empty spaces in her mind. She’s always thinking about how to improve the town, how to build it up into a more efficient, more equitable place. It’s one isolated town running autonomously– the perfect place for everyone to be content and happy. “I think I might love the town,” she tells Snow when the other woman drops by. Snow comes over often, rambling about her day and stopping short when the conversation gets too personal. “I thought I didn’t have the capacity to love anymore.”

“It’s a different kind of love, maybe,” Snow says, offering her a small, sad smile. “But it’s a start.”

A start and a finish, Regina thinks, but she doesn’t share that with Snow. Instead, she sends her home and works on the agenda for the next monthly meeting, which will be happening the next day. She works it and reworks it until she’s finally satisfied, and she strides into the meeting and begins it with easy authority.

As the department heads begin to argue about one of her plans, Regina lets her eyes drift around the room, pausing when she feels a steady gaze on her. She turns, and an attractive woman across the table averts her eyes. Regina doesn’t recognize her. This must be the missing sheriff, returned after a month’s vacation that had David manning the station. She doesn’t look golden-tan from some tropical visit or refreshed from a month spent hiking and touring. She looks tired and pale, and she stares at the table with intense focus.

Regina vaguely remembers that there was an election last year. This woman must have been the one to win it, though she is so far removed from the office of the mayor that they’ve had nothing to do with each other since. She can’t even recall her name.

When the discussion turns to the end-of-school event in the park, Regina points out, “We’ll need a police presence at the event. With all those children around, someone is bound to run off without supervision. Can you make that happen, Sheriff…?” She can’t recall the woman’s name. How unprofessional of her.

“Swan,” the sheriff says. Her voice is lower than Regina had thought it might be, and she speaks with caution. There’s a murmur of confusion in the room, various public servants speaking to each other in low, bewildered voices. The sheriff raises her gaze to meet Regina’s, turquoise eyes dark and deep as the ocean. “Sheriff Swan. Yeah, I can take care of it.”

The meeting turns to beach preparations for the summer, and Swan doesn’t speak again. But Regina still glances at her a few times, curious about this new cog in the machine of a town that she’s run. They must not interact much if Regina doesn’t remember her– but then, much of the past year has gone with her memories, and she’s a recent addition to the government.

She will get to know her. She likes to have her hands in all parts of the government, involved in each department and their workings. So after the meeting, she says, “Sheriff? Would you stay for a moment?”

A flicker of trepidation crosses the sheriff’s face and she nods stiffly. “Sure. What can I do for you, Mayor Mills?”

Regina offers small talk as though it might make up for forgetting Swan’s name. “How was your vacation? You went with your family?”

“Uh, yeah.” The sheriff wets her lips. “We just spent some time in Boston. Went down to New York City for a week. Nothing too special.”

It had been special enough for her to abandon her post for a month, but Regina doesn’t comment on that. She’d like to build some bridges with the sheriff’s station now that it isn’t just David running it. That’s what a good leader does. “I’m sure it was lovely to take some time off. How old are your children?”

There is a hollowness to how Swan looks at her, a shadow deep as a black hole. “Child,” she corrects Regina. “Just my son. He’s eleven.”

“I had a son once,” Regina remarks. From his bedroom, she can only guess that he was a bit younger than Swan’s son. “Maybe they knew each other.”

The sheriff only stands in silence, offering Regina nothing. She’s not much of a conversationalist, and Regina clears her throat. “And your husband was able to take off for so long, too?”

“No husband. I’m…I’m a single mother.” Swan says it like it’s been wrenched from her lips, so reluctant and unhappy that Regina wonders if her husband had died recently. She is an interesting woman. Odd, but sad.

When she walks out of the room, Regina finds herself watching the movement of her legs, of the way that her jeans cling to her ass. And that’s something new. She hasn’t found herself attracted to anyone since her disease, has regarded most people with a bland disinterest. But it’s the recently widowed sheriff who catches her notice, and she thinks that it might be the first step to full rehabilitation from Hanahaki. She even fantasizes, for a moment, about Swan returning to her office and pinning her against the wall, kissing her neck in a spot that sends pleasure rocking through her body–

Well. She turns away from the door, flushed with that strange reawakening of her body, and collects discarded papers from the meeting table. Under the table, she finds a few discarded agendas and a single petal of a forget-me-not.

Regina tosses them all in the trash.

When she tells Snow about the reawakening of her attraction, Snow listens with interest until Regina mentions who had awakened it. “Oh, god,” Snow says, and she paces, back and forth through Regina’s living room, as Regina watches with furrowed brow.

If she thinks deeply enough about this, then maybe it would make sense. But there’s a mental block there, a wall that she can’t traverse where her old memories lie, and she quickly gives up. “This is bad,” Snow mutters to herself. “This is really bad.”

“I think she must have lost her husband recently,” Regina offers. “She called herself a single mother. So it’s not that far-fetched. I might not be able to love, but I can certainly give a woman a good time.” She remembers that much from flashes of her past, women who had watched her hungrily and gasped beneath her. “What’s the problem with Sheriff Swan?”

“The problem,” Snow says rapidly, and then twists around and paces in the other direction. “The problem,” she repeats, and she takes a breath. “The problem is that she’s my daughter,” she says finally, and it all makes a little more sense now.

“Oh.” A spark of humor appears in the dark caverns of her mind, easily obscuring the vague voice that wonders how Regina could have not known that. “So you don’t want to hear all the ways that I would defile her?”

Snow gives her a dark look. “Please do not. Give her some space. She’s…” She pauses and considers her words. “She’s in mourning,” she says at last. “She’s fragile.”

Perhaps a woman capable of love might have heard that and felt some compassion and sympathy. Regina only knows that she thinks about Sheriff Swan far more than is appropriate over the next few days, that she wonders where she might be and peers out her window to watch the sheriff standing outside the station. She stands outside a lot– no one else seems to enter, and she emerges to speak to people rather than letting them come inside. There is something about her that fascinates Regina, and it feels almost natural to obsess a bit. She even lingers outside the eternally locked station sometimes, finding reasons to stand around the entrance, crushing forget-me-nots under her feet.

Sheriff Swan, for her part, shows no interest in getting to know her mayor. Regina approaches her outside the station the next day. The sheriff is leaning against a wall as she flips through something on her phone, and she offers Regina a smile with a warmth that Regina has never seen before.

A moment later, it dies on her face, becomes something plastic and tight as she remembers who she’s speaking to. “Mayor Mills. Can I help you with anything?” Her eyes fix on Regina with that hollow focus.

Regina gets straight to the point. “I’d like to get to know you,” she says. “You’re my sheriff, and I don’t think we’ve ever spent any time together. It’s important for the mayor and the sheriff to have a strong working relationship.”

Swan stares at her, looking vaguely ill at the prospect of having a relationship with Regina. Regina does her best not to be offended. Swan says, “Did you talk to Mary Margaret about this?”

Mary Margaret? Snow, her mind supplies, though it strikes her as odd that Snow’s own daughter refers to her by her curse name. “She thought it was a good idea,” Regina lies. “Why don’t you come to my house for dinner tonight?”

Swan lets out a strangled cough. “I have…I can’t really leave my son–”

“Bring him along,” Regina offers. There are some toys and video games in her house, remains of the son she’d once had, and Swan’s boy might as well enjoy them. “I have plenty of space. Unless there’s some kind of problem?”

“No,” Swan says hastily. “No problem. We’ll be over at six.”

“That’s perfect,” Regina says, bemused. “I always eat at six.” A habit from when she’d had a child, she supposes. It means now that she can eat and go to bed at nine, early enough that she has less time to think around the gaps in her mind all night.

“Right.” Swan moves instinctively, takes a step forward before she seems to take stock of her own movements. She moves toward Regina jerkily, still so very odd, and she sticks out her hand for Regina to shake it.

Her grip is strong and her palm is soft, and Regina’s thumb seems to move across her skin by instinct. Swan takes in a sharp breath, and her eyes catch Regina’s, raw and devastated.

Regina recoils. There is so much emotion in Swan, and Regina is repulsed by it, those alien sensations that she no longer understands. But she keeps her hand in Swan’s until Swan finally drops it, too long to have been polite.

Such an odd woman.

But she arrives at six o’clock exactly, a bottle of Regina’s favorite wine in hand– she must have consulted Snow– and a brown-eyed boy behind her who looks at Regina with wide, interested eyes. “You must be Mr. Swan,” Regina says, smiling at him.

He exchanges a glance with Swan and then offers, “Henry.”

“My father’s name was Henry.” Regina is delighted at the coincidence, some way to connect to this boy. “Why don’t you come on in?”

Henry is at once at home in her house, wandering right to the kitchen with that knack that little boys have for finding food. He glances back at her, and he says, his words careful, “Is it okay if I have an orange?”

Regina blinks. “Go ahead,” she says. “If it’s all right with your mother.” Swan just shrugs, as wan and disconnected as ever. Henry takes an orange from the drawer in the fridge, solemn as he watches Regina, and then he tucks it back into the drawer.

“I don’t want to spoil my appetite,” he says, and he offers her a tremulous smile. She smiles back, puzzled. Henry’s jaw trembles, and Swan pats him on the back and whispers something in his ear. He disappears into the living room, shoulders hunched and face turned away from them, and Regina is left alone with Swan.

Swan clears her throat. “Can I help with anything?”

“All under control here. I didn’t forget how to cook,” Regina informs her.

“Forget,” Swan repeats. She sounds guarded, and Regina glances at her warily. The whole town seems to know about Regina’s Hanahaki. No one questions the gaps in Regina’s memory, and she knows that she’d been hospitalized for a long time. She doesn’t know the details of how she’d gotten so close to death, and she isn’t foolhardy enough to ask, but she supposes that it had been so public that all of Storybrooke had found out about it. They are polite enough– or intimidated enough– to pretend that it had never happened. Only Snow has brought it up. Snow, and now Sheriff Swan.

“You must have been away for the bulk of my illness,” Regina says. She had once been too proud to ever share something as personal as this. Now, her feelings are flat and matter-of-fact. “I was suffering from Hanahaki Disease, if you’re familiar with that?”

Swan looks as though she might laugh or cry. She lets out a strangled sort of noise instead. “Yeah. I know what it is.” She clears her throat. “So you…you forgot a lot, huh?”

“Mostly just the past year or so. It’s hard to say exactly what. There are blocks in my memory, but I don’t really notice them. My mind just…slides over all of it.”

“That must be tough.” Swan leans against the counter as though it might be her only support right now. Regina still can’t make heads or tails out of her reactions, the emotional roller coaster that Swan seems to travel on each time that they speak. It’s something that she’s lost with her ability to love, the empathy and compassion and kindness that must have once come naturally. Still, there is something about Swan’s obvious pain that niggles at Regina, like a bell that chimes over and over in the back of her mind.

 Swan says, “And you don’t feel love anymore?” It’s impolite, aggressive in that way that suits Swan’s awkward swagger, and Regina turns to look at her.

She feels flat and dull beneath Swan’s blazing gaze, as though she has failed to measure up to Swan’s passion. It makes something deep in the black hole of her mind burn, a fire that scorches her if she gets too close. “I don’t feel much of anything,” she says honestly, extinguishing the fire with a thought. “It’s quite relaxing.”

Swan’s laugh becomes a cough, and she squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, takes a breath and glares at Regina as though she has been personally offended. “It’s a lobotomy. What happened to you. You’re like…you don’t feel things anymore,” she echoes Regina, sounding helpless. “What is Regina Mills without her emotions?”

Regina finds herself offended by that, irritated in a way that she hasn’t felt since the hospital. “I’m not a robot,” she says. “I’ve drafted new legislation to improve the town. And I have…I have some other feelings.”

Swan shakes her head, her eyes wet, and Regina tries to think about that and hits a barrier in her mind, impossible to penetrate. “Like what?” she asks, and Regina takes her in, this mysterious sheriff, and really sees.

Swan has changed for dinner from her standard jacket and jeans to a dress, tight leather wrapped around her chest and abdomen and hips. Her hair is golden and lovely, flowing in waves down her shoulders, and her eyes are that captivating green with a hint of blue that had ensnared Regina from the first moment that she’d met her.

Oh, Regina still has feelings, and she moves closer to Swan, stands so near that their breaths mingle. “I can still admire a beautiful woman,” she purrs, and her lips are so close to Swan’s that they nearly brush when she whispers. “I can still imagine what her lips might taste like.”

Swan lets out a whimper, a hitched breath, and Regina touches the side of her thigh, pulling the hem of the dress up with her hand. “Regina,” she chokes out, and her hands rest on Regina’s hips as though they belong there, as though the weight of them is the most natural sensation that Regina has ever felt.

The flames roar to life again. Regina could call her magic to her in an instant, if she so desired. Regina could get drunk on this desire, on the swell of Sheriff Swan’s ass beneath her palms and the press of her chest against Regina’s. Swan tears her lips from where they had nearly met Regina’s, and she pulls her head back, resting it against a cabinet as silent tears slip down her face. But her hands are still clasped on Regina’s hips, and she doesn’t step away from her touch. “I don’t know what it is about you that makes me want,” Regina breathes, and she kisses Swan’s neck instead of her lips, sucks at the hollow of her throat until a strained little moan escapes from Swan’s mouth. “Since the moment I saw you–”

Abruptly, she is pushed backwards, Swan’s hands leaving her hips to press Regina a distance away. She is breathing hard, and Regina lets out a dissatisfied little whine as Swan slips out of her grasp, her heart pounding like she’d been on the verge of a revelation. Swan swallows. “I think it’s time for dinner. I’ll get Henry,” she says, but she darts toward the bathroom instead, and she shuts the door firmly before Regina can speak another word.

We’d have all done anything to be a fly on the wall at that dinner, but I can paint you a picture instead, drawn in baroque shadows with sweeping detail. There, the brown of the table, gleaming clean like it had never been when there had been three eating at it. There, the lasagna and broccoli that Regina had made for her guests, whose tastes she hadn’t known. Here, Regina presides at the head like the queen she is, her face set in a terse frown that she can’t quite justify to herself.

Here, an absolutely miserable Emma, her skin buzzing from Regina’s touch and her heart aching from the emptiness in Regina’s eyes. She wishes she’d never come here tonight. She wishes that she’d stayed in Boston for an eternity, never faced with the reality of this Regina without her heart. She wishes that she had never left, that she could stay beside even this Regina forever.

Here, a serene Henry, who is more content than either of his mothers might imagine. Because Henry’s tendency to imagine that everything might be a fairytale allows him to gain some perspective, to understand the women sitting at the table with him. When Regina smiles at a joke that he tells her, he thinks this is how it starts. Henry Mills has not yet been named the Truest Believer, but he knows with utter certainty that his mother will love him again. There is no other way that this story might go.

Perhaps you see yourself in Emma, wrapped up in self-conscious inadequacy and inner strength. Perhaps you identify with Regina, fire encased in a spiky exterior. But I daresay that it is Henry’s mind that you know best, that it is Henry’s heart that inhabits your chest. In the end, all we yearn for is that happy ending.

Have I ever let you down before?

Regina endures. She remembers her past, even the people she had once loved, though she feels nothing when she thinks of Daniel or her father. It’s strange, imagining herself with so much pent-up grief and rage that she might commit atrocities. The world must have been so much then, clashing colors and crashing noise, instead of the dull watercolors that she sees today.

The only time she’d really felt anything else was with the sheriff and her son, and they don’t return. Regina invites them again, lingering outside the locked station until Swan slips out, and Swan says, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’m sorry.” She looks unhappy about it, at least, a small comfort for the acute disappointment that Regina feels.

It’s a pleasure, at least, to bump into the boy, who always beams at her and waves when he sees her. His vicinity always brightens her day, the colors a little more vivid and the cacophony of noise around her more musical. She finds herself wandering into Granny’s in the mornings now for the chance to see them both, that unfathomable emotion in Swan’s eyes and the uncomplicated affection in Henry’s.

She does not love them. She isn’t quite sure what love is, how it feels or what might spur someone to do something illogical for a sensation in their heart. But she thinks about them: when she’s at her desk at work; when she’s walking through the streets of Storybrooke; when she has eaten dinner alone and has little else to do before bed but think.

Sometimes she finds activities to keep her busy. She takes work home or invites Snow over or jots down the scarce memories of the past year, the ones that make it through the blockage. Mother was here. Did Snow kill her? Before the curse broke, Rumple bound me to a chair in the library. Somehow…somehow I was freed. Town Hall had a fire. I was trapped inside. How did I get out? It’s hazy, and it might have frustrated her if she had some emotions to spare. As it is, recording tiny glimpses of the past soon becomes as dull as the flowers in the garden.

Tonight, she opts to clean. It’s been a long time since she’d last scrubbed the house, and she finds the same satisfaction in a gleaming floor as she does in balancing the town budget. She makes the kitchen shine, then the dining room, and moves on to the bathroom when she pauses.

She hasn’t noticed it before. But tucked into a space under the radiator is a little blue petal. A forget-me-not, she recognizes at once, just like the one that she’d found in her office last week. Like the ones she’d crushed under her feet mindlessly, without any thought to the significance of the flowers.

She lifts the petal, sees the dried, old blood on it, and feels suddenly nauseous. There are gaps in her memory, walls that won’t let her in. She’s not entirely sure that she hasn’t been blacking out since her surgery. But she’s supposed to be cured. She feels cured. She can’t still be…is this a Jekyll and Hyde sort of situation, where she’s blacking out and becoming someone in love? Are the flowers still blooming in her chest?

She tries to take in a deep breath, to reassure herself that she’s all right, but her breath emerges rapid and panicky. This is a new emotion, one she hasn’t had reason for until now: fear, spiking through her. Terror, because she can’t lose control of her body, she can’t waste away again and do all of this all over again–

She needs to speak to someone. She calls Whale, but he is dismissive. “You had a full month of quarantine. And I got it all. I’m a very skilled doctor.” He spends a few minutes talking about his qualifications, how he is somehow simultaneously proficient in various fields thanks to his own experiences, not the curse, thank you very much, and Regina tunes him out, her heart still pounding with this new, unpleasant sensation.

She hangs up and flings herself out of her house, into the cool night air. She can breathe. She knows she can. Does she remember where she’s been tonight? What she’s done? The hours blur, the monotony impossible to track, and she needs help–

Snow. She needs Snow. She remembers the way to Snow’s apartment, and she raps on the door, over and over until the door opens and Sheriff Swan is there, staring at her. “Regina,” she says, and she doesn’t have that stiff, sorrowful demeanor now. She looks as panicked as Regina feels, and she puts a hand on Regina’s back, urging her inside. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” She leads Regina to the couch, sits her down, her hand running over Regina’s arm with absentminded motions.

Regina can hardly get the words out. Snow and David are here, watching her with concern, and she notes them with dizzy half-awareness. Henry sits down on the floor beside the couch, eyes fixed on Regina, and he flinches when Regina says hoarsely, “I think I still have Hanahaki. I’ve been finding flowers– I must black out when they come–”

Swan’s hand leaves her arm abruptly, and Regina feels its absence like an invisible ache. She rises to her feet and storms to the door, slams it behind her. Henry wraps an arm around Regina’s leg, leaning against her side, and he says in a choked voice, “No. You can’t have it again– you can’t–”

It’s odd that he cares so much, Regina thinks, though she hits a wall when she tries to consider why. Maybe this is just what caring does– makes you drown in empathy for virtual strangers.

Swan flings the door open again, storming back in with her eyes on fire. “What was the point?” she snarls. “What was the fucking point of it all then? Why did we– how could we– and now I–”

“Emma,” Snow says gently, “Wait.” She turns to Regina, and she doesn’t look nearly as worried as the others. “You say that you don’t remember coughing up these flowers?” Regina nods. “And your breathing is fine?”

She tries to breathe now, with Henry tucked against her on the floor and Snow’s calmness making the fear a little less all-consuming. “Yes,” she says, and Swan sits back down beside back straight and hands clasped on her knees.

“Then isn’t it possible these are just old flowers? From what I’ve heard, you coughed up an entire botanical garden of them,” Snow says reasonably, and Swan sags next to Regina. “It’s not impossible that you’d find a few that you missed.”

“Oh.” The thought makes sense, and Regina rises, feeling suddenly foolish. “Well. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

Unexpectedly, Henry flings his arms around Regina. It is familiar, like the son that Regina can’t remember must have felt, and she moves her own arms, clumsily and uncertain, to pat Henry’s back. Over the boy’s head, Snow is blinking back tears, as she so often seems to do around Regina.

When Henry lets her go, Regina nods to them all and turns to leave. She’s made it into the stairwell of the building when she hears footsteps pounding against the floor behind her. “Regina,” Swan says urgently, and Regina turns, lets Swan rush into her and pin her against the wall of the stairwell, hands on Regina’s arms and her body against Regina’s. “Regina,” she says again, a sob in her throat, and her chest heaves, choking on her own tears.

The blackness seems to descend around Regina’s mind, her thoughts blank and the walls closing in around her. Swan is so close, her eyes fixed on Regina’s lips, and Regina thinks, please, please–

Swan’s hands move from Regina’s arms to cradle her jaw with painstaking tenderness. Regina is bewildered, aroused, her head pounding and her mind blank. Swan’s eyes are red, tears slipping down her cheeks, and she whispers, “You wouldn’t have wanted this. You would have chosen to die instead. I wish–”

She pulls away with a rush of movement, flees the stairwell without a glance back, and leaves Regina alone with blackness obscuring any thoughts she might have had.

The memories of the night before have faded, except for the terror and Snow’s reassurances. Snow is right. Regina searches her bedroom and finds a few wilted flowers trapped between her bed and the wall. They look far older than the forget-me-nots that Regina had found, but that means very little. Regina had been sick for months, from what Snow suspects.

She still remembers odd sensations from last night, little bits that have slipped through the protective walls that keep her alive: Henry’s arms around her. Swan cradling her face. The words they’ve spoken are gone already, but the touches remain. The rest buries itself somewhere within the dark cages where her old emotions had once lived, wreathed in ivy that can’t grow anywhere else.

She gets a late start, distracted by her search for flowers, and she misses Swan and Henry at Granny’s. It’s a faint disappointment that comes with that, but she can easily brush it aside and head to work. There’s plenty to do, and she can see them another time.

Another time means as soon as she leaves work that afternoon, unusually early for her. She wanders casually down the street, tells herself that she’s just doing some window shopping, and finds herself in front of the station by mere coincidence. She tries the door, but it’s locked. Again. Swan might still be in there– she seems to emerge readily when people knock– but there’s a large WELCOME BACK EMMA!! sign that’s been left over the door window, obscuring whatever might be going on inside.

She knocks on the door, but there’s no answer. “Sheriff!” she barks out, rapping again. “This is government property–”

“She’s not there right now,” says a boy from behind her. Henry has his head tilted as he takes her in. “She went on patrol.”

“Does anyone else have the keys to the station anymore?” Regina had looked for her skeleton key, but it must have been confiscated after the curse. “What’s she doing in there?”

“Nothing. She just needs her privacy these days. At least that’s what she says.” Henry slips his hand into hers, as natural and casual as though they’ve done it a thousand times before, and says, “Can we get ice cream?”

The ice cream is delicious. Regina eats with one hand and keeps her other hand in Henry’s, where he seems to like it. “This is pretty good. Ma wouldn’t let me have much ice cream in Boston, even though we were supposed to be on vacation. She said that it was the responsible thing to do.” Henry makes a face. “I don’t think I like it when she’s the responsible parent.”

Regina licks her ice cream. “Was your father the responsible one?” She doesn’t intend to probe, only asks out of simple curiosity. Swan hasn’t said anything about her husband beyond that she’s single now, but the ever-present grief in her eyes seems instructive.

Henry looks startled. “I don’t have a dad,” he says. “Ma used to tell me that he died before I was born. But when we were away, she admitted that he was just a jerk. I don’t need a dad. My moms are plenty.” He grins up at her, his smile dimming slightly after a moment.

“Your other mother is in Boston,” Regina guesses.

“No,” Henry says hastily. “She’s here. They’re just…split up right now, kind of. Mom made a lot of…of bad choices. But she was doing really great and getting better, and then there was this setback, I guess.”

It’s not difficult to put the pieces together. Perhaps some kind of addiction. It would explain why Swan was so reluctant when Regina came on to her, if she’s waiting for her wife to get her act together and return. Regina feels a flash of displeasure at the idea.

She brushes it away and turns back to Henry. “I’m sorry. That must be very difficult.”

“It’s okay,” Henry says easily. “I’m sure that I’m going to have her back someday.” He smiles up at Regina, and the last bits of dissatisfaction fade from her thoughts. “Want to go down to the beach? My mom and I used to like to go now, just before beach season starts. It’s not as busy and there’s no one in the surf.”

Something beyond the wall weeps and roars. Regina wonders if she had once taken her son to all of these places, if there is just a part of her that remembers what it is to be guided by the whims of a little boy. Perhaps it’s why she goes with Henry without question, pulls off her heels and stockings to leave by the pier and runs after him toward the water.

He’s hitched up his pant legs so he won’t get them wet, but they’re already falling down again. Regina uses her magic instinctively and turns the pants into shorts with a flick of her wrist. Henry isn’t surprised by it; he just looks down and laughs and holds out his hand to her. “I bet my mom wishes she could have done that when I was younger.”

“I haven’t used my magic much lately,” Regina admits. “It’s been harder to call most of the time.”

“That makes sense. Your magic is tied to your emotions, right?” Henry doesn’t wait for a response. “So it was weakened by the surgery.”

“Snow told you about that.” Regina isn’t surprised. Snow has an eternally big mouth.

Henry just shrugs. “You used it for me, though,” he says, and he beams at her as though it’s a great revelation.

They walk through the surf, kicking water at each other and talking about mundane things like Henry’s day at school or Regina’s at work, and they only leave the ocean when the sun is glowing orange at the horizon and Sheriff Swan arrives on the pier, calling down to Henry. “You still have homework!” she calls as they approach, the sand molding itself around their wet feet.

Henry shares a conspiratorial look with Regina. “See? Responsible parent.”

But Swan doesn’t reprove him for disappearing for the afternoon and she doesn’t berate Regina for taking him with her. She only watches them trudging up to her, Henry knocking his foot against Regina’s anklebone with every step. She looks different, and Regina can’t quite put her finger on why until she’s close enough to see her expression. For the first time since Swan had arrived in Storybrooke, her eyes are lighter, the hollowness only a shadow on her face, and there is a new emotion warming her gaze.

Regina would have liked to kiss her, had Swan been amenable to it. Instead, she picks up her stockings and her shoes and returns home, tanned and barefoot and with an emotion that is…if not happy– happiness is locked behind the castle walls that repel her in her mind– then pleased. Content.

She should have suspected that the next day would upend all of that. She can’t remember much of the past year, but she does recall the sensation of constant chaos, crisis after crisis without reprieve, and they’re long overdue for the next.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise when she leaves her office for her lunch break and discovers an ogre lumbering down Main Street, crushing cars and flinging lamp posts around like they’re spears. There are screams from townspeople, a rush of them tearing down the street to escape the ogre. “Ogre!” one of the dwarves is screaming. “Ogre! Run for your lives!”

Regina narrows her eyes at the creature, already doing the mental math of how much it’s going to cost to rebuild after this. The fear that had felt so sharp and overwhelming when she’d seen the forget-me-not petal isn’t present today, when faced with a monstrous creature twice her height. She hasn’t forgotten everything. She is Regina Mills, witch queen of the Enchanted Forest, and she can handle a single ogre.

She steps out into the street in front of it, and a few cowering townspeople let out audible sounds of relief. “That’s enough,” she orders, her voice sharp and authoritative. “You will go no further.”

The ogre stops to blink at her. A growling noise of confusion emerges from its throat, and Regina raises a hand out of sheer habit and tries to call her magic to her.

Nothing comes. What had been so easy with Henry yesterday has escaped her, and she barely feels her magic stir, unimpressed by her call. Come, she says, channeling all of her fear as though it might be enough, but all she gets is a tiny, sputtering flame that dies within seconds.

The ogre rumbles again, its putrid breath filling the air around Regina, and the rumble goes on for a full minute before Regina realizes that she’s being laughed at. And then, a single hand sweeps out and seizes Regina, tossing her into the air in the direction of the ogre’s mouth.

Regina hits the edge of an enormous, fleshy lip and falls to the ground, smashing against the pavement and shredding her dress. She can’t seem to find rage within her– she is too dulled for it, and her magic doesn’t react– and she strains, strains, but nothing emerges from her hands. Nothing climbs up through her core, flooding her body with power, and the ogre kicks her in the next instant. She flies through the air again, slamming into a bench, then kicked against the side of the sheriff’s station, her body bruised and aching and useless, so useless–

The ogre lumbers closer, and Regina can’t move to face it or even to run. She is limp on the floor, frustrated and afraid, and the ogre bends down– grabs her again–

A figure appears out of nowhere in a flash of blue energy. Sheriff Swan, her back straight and her eyes like steel as she snarls, “Let her go.”

The ogre laughs again. Swan raises her hands.

The magic comes as a surprise. Regina hadn’t been given any hint that Swan was capable of it, and certainly not the sheer amount of energy that pours from her hands. It suffuses them, startles the ogre into dropping Regina, and Regina stumbles to her feet at last, staggering over to stand beside Swan– to help–

“I was on the other side of town,” Swan says breathlessly. “I didn’t even know if I could teleport– I was on the phone with Granny– but she said you were there and I just–” She sucks in a staggered inhalation. “Touch me,” she says.

Regina blinks at her, still unsteady from the pain of being flung around. “Is now really the time–?”

“Touch me!” Swan snaps, and Regina reaches out and puts a dubious hand on her shoulder.

It’s as though she’s been supercharged with energy in an instant, like she’s gotten back all of her magic and more. Regina keeps one hand on Swan and, with the other, lets fire flow through her veins until it pours out, blinding the ogre and leaving it howling in pain. It thrashes around, slamming its fist through a car before it hits Regina again, and this time, Regina blacks out for an instant.

She is crumpled on the ground when she returns to consciousness, and Swan is screaming at the ogre, is shouting curses with her hoarse voice until she doubles over, seizing up with fury and despair. Magic streams from her, spinning the ogre around, slamming it against the ground, and she continues even when Snow runs up to Granny’s roof, fleet and nimble even in her schoolteacher’s clothing, and shoots an arrow directly into the ogre’s heart.

It crashes to the ground, the street vibrating from the force of the fall, and there is blessed silence on the street. Regina lays her head down, relieved that the attack is over and she can finally succumb to her injuries in peace, and then there are arms around her, lifting her up as easily as one might a child.

“Regina,” Swan gasps out. “Regina, just try to stay conscious, I just– I can do this–” She stumbles a few feet to the door of the station. Regina lays her head against Swan’s shoulder as she fumbles with her keys, unlocking the station and bringing Regina inside. Regina’s eyes keep opening and closing, and she is on the verge of passing out. She sees flashes of blue– then Swan’s terrified face– and then she is being laid down in a thickly padded office chair and Swan kneels in front of her.

She isn’t crying again. Her eyes are red-rimmed but her face is determined, those green-blue eyes bluer today as they reflect her surroundings, and she lays her hands on Regina’s knees and lets magic wash over them both. “Magical core,” Swan mutters to herself. “What I want to protect. Magical core– there,” and something blazes within Regina, strong and healing. Regina closes her eyes and lets it spread through her body like a cool drink, wiping away her bruises and broken bones and what feels like a concussion.

She exhales, and Swan says, “You’re okay. You’re okay,” and she takes in a rattling breath and rests her head against Regina’s thigh in an intimate, unexpected move. Regina opens her eyes, blinking away the last of the pain-induced dizziness, and looks at her.

Swan kneels upon a sea of blue. They’re everywhere, scattered across desks and chairs and papers and even in the jail cell. They are cerulean and teal and sapphire, and Regina understands at last why Swan has locked the station away, why she hides here and lets no one inside.

The entire station is covered in forget-me-nots, the same that she’d left in Regina’s office and the house and the ground in front of this building.

Swan coughs, a strained hacking that ends with three sky-blue petals floating peacefully to the floor at Regina’s feet. “I know this looks…I know what it looks like,” Swan whispers, pulling away from Regina. She remains on her knees, a safe few feet away.

Regina stares at her, the blackness of her mind threatening to swallow her whole. “You have Hanahaki,” she says slowly. “How can you have Hanahaki?”

“The usual way,” Swan says, wrapping her arms around herself and averting her eyes. “I’m in love with someone who doesn’t feel the same way.”

Regina shakes her head, struggling to comprehend through a stone wall meters thick. Something within it is howling. “I don’t…I still don’t understand love.”

“It’s the stupidest thing,” Swan says, and her voice is clogged with tears and flowers. “Like the world without them feels empty and pointless. Like you can’t imagine your life without them. When they’re happy, you could scale a mountain. When they’re sad, you’d tear the world apart to make them smile again. Suddenly, without meaning it, you’ve bound yourself to someone else for an eternity and you’ll never be free, but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t want to be free, even when it might kill you, because it’s become part of who you are. It’s so stupid,” she says again, and she coughs out another petal with vicious despair.

Regina still doesn’t understand it, but she stares at Swan, and this all makes even less sense. “How could someone not love you back?” she demands. Swan is eminently desirable: beautiful and smart and kind and strong. Even Regina, who can’t feel anything, wants to be in her presence. “It’s impossible. They’d have to be incapable of love to…”

The wall crumbles in her mind, a blinding light tearing through it in an instant, and Regina knows. Swan only looks at her, eyes pained and remorseful, and Regina stumbles forward, her heart pounding like it hasn’t in weeks. In a fluid motion, she drops to her knees in front of Emma Swan and kisses her with all the weak, dulled emotion that she has.

Emma kisses her back, desperate and defeated, and petals pass between their lips, brush against Regina’s tongue and flatten to her teeth. Regina holds her, and more walls crash down violently, leaving her mind in chaos, in a muddled mess of a thousand emotions and thoughts at once. She tears down the rest, faces the darkness and howls give it back, give it back, GIVE IT BACK until she is the Regina who vomited up bloody flowers and loved her son enough to let someone else break a curse. Until she is the Regina who showed up to Granny’s for a party only because Emma had invited her, the Regina who had kissed Emma and believed her, the Regina who had been mighty and heartbroken and furious and deadly and glorious, a woman so ensnared by her capacity for love that removing it had made her dead inside.

She pulls Emma atop her, loses herself in Emma’s touch, and she feels a dangerous stirring within her. The roots may have been removed, but there are still seeds embedded in her lungs, unfed and unwatered, and she has just lit up the sun over them. They open, stretch out new roots, uncurl and rise in an instant, and Regina loves helplessly, unafraid of the consequences.

And Emma’s love hits her like a lightning bolt, jolting through her body with sparking energy and laying waste to the flowers in her lungs. Regina senses Emma’s agony, the roots that have grown wild and forget-me-nots blooming as a garden in her chest, and she sweeps them away with the force of her love until Emma is gasping, sucking in deep breaths and kissing her again, and again, and again.

The flowers fade into scar tissue, ravaging their bodies but leaving them intact, and Emma sobs in Regina’s embrace, so small and vulnerable and needy. Regina holds her tightly, kisses the top of her head and strokes her hair as she might a child, and Emma whispers, “I love you. I love you. Are you really back with me?”

“I’m here,” Regina murmurs, and she feels healthier than she has since the surgery, since before it, the roots fading into her veins until they are strength instead of death. “I love you. I’m here.”

The world trembles with the force of their emotion, and they remain locked together for an eternity.

I know that you love them. I know that you want them to be happy, in the end. But I also know that there is a power to suffering alongside them before they find that joy, that there is a satisfaction to feeling the most visceral of pain and earning that happy ending. It is why we watch them, I think, because they have hurt so much but still find such softness with each other.

And I will not keep you from their softness, that final moment when they find peace. When Regina teleports with Emma– always with Emma, because they can’t bear to be apart for some time– to Henry’s school, when she rushes inside where they’re still sheltering in place from the ogre and sweeps him into her embrace. When he says, laughing, “I knew you would come back to me,” ever confident in his mothers, and Regina cries into his hair. When they all take off for a day and go back to the beach, stretched out on the sand and splashing through the waves and smiling until their faces hurt.

When Emma and Regina sit together as Henry collects seashells and whisper apologies to each other that can never be regrets, not when this is how it ends. I took everything from you, they say. I gave everything to you, they respond. There is shaky talk of curses, of broken childhoods, of mothers. Of a lie that wasn’t a lie at all, and the darkness of the days that followed. I was asleep, Regina says. I was in hell, Emma says. Now, they are golden in the sun.

When, at night, Regina offers Emma the guest room in an attempt to take it slow and Emma says, “I’m never sleeping there again,” and climbs into Regina’s bed. When they rock together, slick with sweat and desire, and Emma trembles beneath Regina’s ministrations. When they wake up sticky and satisfied and kiss in the shower, clinging to each other as though they might never let go again.

When they are happy, and the world conspires to ruin that, because the world is cruel and Storybrooke cannot rest for too long without interruptions. Regina is captured by a vengeful sadist and Emma confronts a figure from her past and Henry is kidnapped to a world that never grows old; and it’s hard, and there are snippy moments and arguments and hurt people lashing out at each other. But throughout it, there they are.

One year from the day that Regina coughed up her first petal, she replants the garden in front of their house. The flowers had been left to wither and die, every last one, even when they’d all agreed that it was a shame to do that to perfectly good flowers and it would be so easy to water them. But there had been a satisfaction to letting them die, to watching them disappear while Emma and Regina remain.

Enough is enough. Regina can’t be haunted by this garden forever, by memories of near-death and what happened next, worse than death. She will plant new flowers, will let them grow strong in defiance of what she’d endured, and she will move on.

Her gardening gloves and her pant knees are both caked in dirt by the time she’s made some headway on cleaning out the garden and rebuilding. Gardening is hard work, especially in the late winter, when the world is warming up but the ground is still tight and packed from the cold. She brushes her sleeve against her brow and enjoys the burn of her muscles while doing something so mundane. Usually, she gets her best workouts while trying to save the town from certain doom. This is better.

“Hey.” Emma is leaning against the side of the porch, grinning down at her. Henry is at a friend’s this afternoon, and Emma had been taking advantage of his absence to set new high scores on his video games. “I brought you something.” She climbs down to the lawn to pass Regina a cold glass, and Regina drinks gratefully. Emma sits down beside her, sorting packets of flowers with vague interest. “I always kind of figured that rich people had other people to do their gardening for them.”

Regina rolls her eyes. “Some rich people have hobbies, darling.” She doesn’t consider herself particularly wealthy; the house had come with the curse and Storybrooke doesn’t have much of a budget for a mayoral salary. But Emma likes to dig at her on this point as though she doesn’t live in the same house, as though she is still a young girl without anything that is hers. “You should consider taking up one or two of those, too.”

“I like running. Strength training. Eating.” Emma ponders. “I’m pretty much a full-time Regina fan. That takes up too much of my time to have more hobbies.” She leans in to kiss Regina, sweat and dirt and all, and gets a streak of brown on her cheek for her trouble. Regina brushes it off with a touch to Emma’s skin that grows slow and deliberate, tracing her finger down the side of Emma’s neck.

Emma presses her down, flat on the grass, and kisses her soundly, her hands roving to places that might scandalize any neighbors glancing out their windows. Regina laughs into Emma’s mouth, swiping her tongue down to Emma’s neck and removing her gloves to slide a hand up the back of Emma’s shirt. Just the touch of her skin is enough to make Regina’s breath hitch, to buck her hips demandingly and wriggle beneath Emma.

Emma waves a hand and the bushes around the house grow higher and wider, blocking them from view as she slips a hand into Regina’s pants. Her fingers work with familiar ease– they know each other so well now, know exactly what sets the other off– and Regina shifts to drive herself against Emma’s hand, to push up Emma’s shirt so she can lick and suck a path up her abdomen, to draw out Emma’s pleasure as Emma coaxes out her own.

They move against each other in the grass, a welcome distraction on a long Sunday afternoon, and Regina kisses Emma, long and slow, when they’re done. “I thought you were just bringing me water,” she says, stretching out in the grass.

“Mm. I can do that next time,” Emma says, grinning, and Regina swats at her and then grabs a handful of her shirt to yank her closer. Emma kisses the tip of her nose. “No? I’m shocked.”

“You’re insatiable,” Regina grumbles, but there’s a stupid smile on her face that she can’t seem to wipe away. She tugs her gloves back on and finds the trowel, and she’s about to plant more when Emma holds out a little flower packet.

“Plant these?” she asks.

“Forget-me-nots,” Regina says flatly. “No.”

“Please.” Emma scoots a little closer, staring at the blue blossoms on the packet picture. “I have all these…I spent so many days hiding out in the station, surrounded by these. I want better memories of them.”

Regina empties the packet into the dirt. Emma leans against her shoulder. She takes a deep breath, long and cleansing, and it’s a comfort, hearing her breathe. Some days, Regina has to remind herself that her lungs are clear. “Did you love me before the surgery?” she asks.

It’s not something they talk about, really, when they fell in love. It’s still too fragile, too loaded a question, and Regina has been afraid of a recurrence of the disease if they speak too much about it.

But today, the garden bed open in front of her and Emma’s comforting presence beside her, it feels like it might finally be a safe topic.

Emma smoothes down some of the dirt onto the seeds. “I realized I loved you that night. When I slept in our bed for the first time. But I think I loved you before then. I was so sure that I would drive you away– that you had made a mistake in falling in love with me, that you would realize that if you spent more time with me– and I was so afraid to let myself fall in love.” She covers the forget-me-not seeds, her eyes somewhere else. “I might have loved you earlier. It sort of crept up on me.”

“It didn’t creep up on me,” Regina murmurs. “It hit me like a freight train.” She slides her arm around Emma’s waist, rests her fingers on the smooth skin beneath her jacket. “You came back from the Enchanted Forest and you just…you talked to me and smiled at me and I was furious. I was so angry, because suddenly, there were all these feelings that I didn’t want– that I couldn’t bear– for someone I could never have. I hated you for it. I hated me most of all.”

She remembers the first petal, hours after they’d had a blow-out fight about Archie on the porch that stands right next to them. She had known what it was at once. She had trembled with her fury, with her hopelessness, with her disbelief that this would be how she’d die: vanquished by the savior, once and for all.

Emma laughs when she admits it. “You do look pretty vanquished right now,” she says, running a hand through Regina’s tangled hair. “But I bet I could do better. Think you’re ready to go another round with the savior, babe?”

She’s still laughing when Regina teleports them in a rush of purple magic to their bed and swallows Emma’s laughter with her kisses. She abandons her afternoon plans for good, and she can’t feel any regret for it.

The flowers can wait. It’s time to live.

[coalitiongirl]

Hello CG. Sorry to bother you, but I just noticed that your hananaki disease SQ fic wasn't available anymore. Idk if someone already ask you that, but will it ever come back? I love your work very much and is always a bit sad to see some of them gone (well it's always a bit sad to see any incredible SQ fic gone, but yours hurts me a bit more because you're one of my favourite authors)

AO3 pulled it down for a month! I am suspended—too many people in the comments talking about buying Markless. :( I don't know why I get penalized for comments, but I guess they have to be super careful about monetizing even when it's not the writer doing it??

They did say that if something else comes up then I'll be banned and all my fics taken down permanently. I'm not sure if it's possible to find and remove every comment that might be objectionable tbh.

I actually backed up everything except the hanahaki fic (I can't download it while it's locked, so I have a less official downloaded copy for now) just in case—when I have a chance, I'm going to add a download link to each fic so there's no risk that the fics will all be gone forever. It's just going to take a while! I'm uploading each to its own folder in Google Drive in all formats, and I just don't have a whole lot of free time. But rest assured that they're all backed up, and in case of crisis, I'll prioritize uploading them!

[coalitiongirl]

I just read Markless (I know, I'm super late to the party haha) and omg I loved it!! I've been a huge fan of your writing for years and you obviously did not disappoint with the book.

I fell in love with the characters and the lore was fantastic!! Thank you for an amazing story <3

I've kind of stalked your blog and saw there was an extra chapter. Is there any way to get it? I'd love to read a bit more from this universe.

Nonetheless, hope to keep reading your stories in the future!

Thank you! I actually have no idea if my publisher ever sent out the bonus chapter—I was supposed to get a copy of the finished material, too, and I never did! So let me just paste the whole thing here so anyone who wants it can access it.

It was just a very light kind of post-story epilogue :)

SUNRISE

Kimya speaks when she dances. Her gloved hands fly with her body, shaping words out of each motion, and it’s poetry, a secret language only for those who have learned it. She sways, and her hands say waves, water, the vast oceans of the east. She leaps, and her hands speak of fish bursting from the seas, landing in a graceful splash as she does. It’s beautiful, natural.

She dances before the people in little performances sometimes, a beloved princess that Dekala has introduced to the people as an adopted sister. They adore her, marvel at her dancing and bring her gifts. She is a palace darling, a talented sensation.

Were she not Markless in Zidesh, she might have been raised to be a dancer.

Dekala feels the anger like a low thrum most days, the dissatisfaction at her own impotence. It has been a year. A year as queen, as absolute ruler of Zidesh, in her palace at Somanchi with all the power of her mighty kingdom behind her. And after a year, the people still recoil from the Markless. After a year, the people still riot when her guards escort Markless into the Merchants’ Circle to sell their wares.

After a year, Kimya still wears gloves in a palace that should be terrified to reject her.

“Patience,” Kalere says from beside Dekala. They stand at a balcony that overlooks the courtyard, a cool wind pulling dust from the ground where Kimya dances. Dekala dips her hand and quiets the wind, letting the sun shine hot and free over Kimya. “Change will only come in time.”

“It has been time. Kimya deserves– all the Markless deserve–” She feels like a petulant child when she speaks like this. But Kalere has been with her since she was young, bright-eyed and dreaming, before the hope had faded from her eyes for so long.

It has returned with a vengeance, and it sticks in her throat when she thinks of the Markless.

“The people see them as an aberration,” Kalere reminds her. “Rejected by the spirits, outside of the natural order of things. To accept them is to flout the spirits, and they will not dare so easily.”

Perhaps it would be different if Dekala believed in the spirits as the people do, as all-powerful creatures who bless and curse their people in equal turn. Dekala isn’t sure if she ever saw them in that way. Certainly not now, when she has witnessed what the spirits might do for a song from the unmarked. When she has seen the spirits change the laws of nature for someone whose palm is bare. And then, there is Kimya. “How can anyone look at Kimya and believe that she is unnatural?”

Kalere lays a hand on Dekala’s back, something that Dekala will only allow from her, and she speaks a name that makes Dekala’s scowl deepen. “Rikard will not succeed in turning the people against you,” she murmurs. “He is a rabble-rouser, and the people crave stability.”

“The people gather around him in Kanezi. They roar at his vitriol.” She is weak. She is a tool of a Markless witch. She is no heir to Zidesh. Dekala expects the curses thrown her way, the doubt and resentment. She is still a queen, reigning nearly alone. But she despises how she must wait, must let this lower noble rant at the masses without stamping out his rebellion in one fell swoop.

You cannot make a martyr of him, Winda reminds her. You can only make him a fool.

It is what she’s meant to remember today, when Rikard arrives at her palace with an entourage of hand-picked sycophants. Winda’s reports speak of a constantly changing council, of a man who is paranoid and quick to rid himself of supporters whom he suspects of treachery. It will work in her favor.

Still, she has to stifle the need to hide Kimya in her quarters as Rikard approaches. It will only arouse the suspicions of the palace nobles toward a girl who has charmed her way out of their judgment until now. When Dekala had kept a Markless at her side, unmarked hand on display to her skeptical nobles, there had been critical murmurs and unease.

Today, Kimya remains with Tembo, safe in the shadows, and Dekala strides toward Rikard with no Markless beside her. The sun shines overhead, blindingly hot, and still, there is the rumble of thunder.

This is diplomacy and battle at once. Dekala meets Rikard at the palace gates, her face cool and steely. Rikard is a light-skinned man with sleek white hair, old enough to be Dekala’s grandfather but with a wiliness to him that she doesn’t underestimate. Two dozen burly, impressive men and women are gathered behind him, all with wary gazes. Beside him stands a girl wrapped in a cloak, hard-eyed and dangerous and with something feral lingering beneath her skin, and Dekala’s gaze skims over her and returns to Rikard.

The girl watches Dekala with hungry eyes. Dekala lets them rake over her with a ghost of a shiver as she shows Rikard to the crowded Royal Square. “It is always a pleasure to meet one of my minor nobles.” Dekala keeps her voice steady and patronizing. “Though I’m afraid I will need to be reminded of your name.”

Rikard stares at her, a smirk light on his face. “I do not doubt that my visit will be memorable enough to ensure that that never happens again.”

“I hope you’ll avail yourself of my hospitality. Perhaps your companions might wish to see their rooms here?” They are more likely his guard, but Dekala doesn’t acknowledge them as such. She knows that behind her, her captain of the guard is sizing up Rikard’s warriors, categorizing each one in his mind. Beside him, Winda is a calming presence.

“How kind,” Rikard says, still smiling. He twists to the girl beside him, lays a hand on her slight shoulder. Dekala’s jaw tightens under her skin. “Nuru, will you escort our friends to their quarters?”

The girl shakes her head, freeing wild waves of hair from her cloak. “I would not have them leave your side.” Her voice is fierce and throaty, and her face is sun-kissed and smooth. She is beautiful but also brittle, built narrowly as though she is perpetually underfed. At the first sound of her voice, Dekala can’t seem to tear her eyes from her.

It takes a moment for her to gather her bearings again. “Please, enjoy our castle grounds. We will speak at dinner.”

A flicker of annoyance from Rikard. But Dekala will not usher him into her private meeting rooms, will not treat him as an equal or a high-ranking noble or anything but an upstart who leans on anti-Markless sentiment to gain notoriety.

Instead, she strides to Tembo’s training room and retrieves Kimya. Her hand shakes as she lays it on Kimya’s back, careful— always careful— to indicate her favor instead of her fear. Rikard lingers in the Royal Square, watching her movements, and Dekala pays him no attention. Kimya signs, I want to come to dinner.

I would prefer that you stayed upstairs, Dekala signs back.

Kimya’s scowl settles upon her face.

***

Kimya attends dinner anyway, too stubborn to hide. She fidgets with her gloves and watches Rikard enter the room with such hostility that Dekala has to reach over and lay a hand on her knee to calm her. Rikard is seated further down the table, a spot of lesser honor, and he looks even more irritated now. He whispers in Nuru’s ear, and she says something dark back.

Both of them glance at the empty seat beside Kimya, one that no one dares to occupy. Dekala is restless, and Kimya senses it, signing questions to Dekala at dinner as nobles murmur and shoot wary glances at their queen’s stiff face. She feels on edge, dissatisfied, and she partakes in little of the conversation until the topic of the Markless arises.

A loaded topic with Rikard about, but Chobal is indiscreet enough to speak his mind. “It’s one thing to let them into the Merchants’ Circle,” he says. He’s a squat man, short and fat, and he is consistently inappropriate. Were he not a cousin, Dekala’s uncle would have cast him from the palace years ago. “But selling homes to them in the Rubber District? Have we fallen so far?”

“I must disagree,” Rikard says smoothly. “Even allowing them into the Merchants’ Circle is too much.”

Dekala molds her face to ice, and she cuts through the conversation. “I visited Kanezi just a few months ago. I found the Markless there eager to learn a trade as well. Should they not be able to ply their wares?”

Rikard’s lip curls. “They should not. Should our merchants contaminate their wares because a child queen has decided to disobey the spirits?”

“The spirits chose me as their queen.” Dekala keeps her voice uncompromising. “They offer us a bounty of harvests and pleasant rains and peace with our neighbors.”

“And we will lose it all if Her Majesty continues to put these abominations into our public life.” Rikard bangs a fist on the table. “I do not live in a palace divorced from the common people and the Markless plague that creeps among them now. I represent the will of the people, and they will not endure these offenses forever.”

Nuru speaks up, her eyes fixed on Dekala. “They hate the Markless.” She cuts through her fish with savage distaste. “They reject them entirely.”

“That is their mistake,” Dekala says coolly, glowering at Nuru. “Call me a radical or a revolutionary, but the Markless are my subjects as well.”

“Yet there are no Markless in the palace.” Rikard’s voice rises. “There are no Markless sitting at your table. Even your vaunted Markless witch is gone.” He stands, turning to the seated nobles. “The queen recognizes what we all know— the Markless bring suffering wherever they go. She only chooses that we should endure it while she is spared.”

The nobles murmur, discomfited, and Dekala knows that she will lose some. That Rikard only says aloud what has been a dissatisfied mumble throughout the palace.

Her kingdom feels fragile, her grasp over it sliding away, and all because of an issue she will not compromise on.

For Kimya. For what is right. For…

She twists to Chobal as though Rikard has never spoken. “If the Markless have the coin to purchase homes in the Rubber District, then I see no issue with it.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Chobal says hastily. “It’s a boon to the economy. We are all very supportive of Her Majesty.” He tips his glass back, his throat pulsing nervously as he gulps his drink down. “Just seems ungrateful, really, for them to leave the slums after all that tax money that has gone to them.”

“The Southern District is still in the midst of reconstruction,” Dekala says pointedly. “I will not restrict the Markless to it. Did you not have a Markless grandson?” She remembers the scandal when she’d been ten, the way that Chobal had hidden away for weeks and emerged twice as round and with drink-glazed eyes.

Chobal’s jaw tightens. “I have no grandson.” And then, as though Rikard’s presence gives him the temerity, “We are not all so confident to keep a Markless at our tables.”

Dekala tenses as eyes swing to Kimya, but they are not looking at her, only the empty seat beside her. Her chest aches, but she only says, “Then you choose to let fear and ignorance rule you.”

Chobal doesn’t dare to respond to that. The dinner lapses into uneasy silence, and Dekala allows it. She will not satisfy these vipers with Zidesh’s good harvests and flourishing trade. They fear her change more than they will ever celebrate her successes, and she will not grovel to the nobles to keep them at her side.

Let them go to Rikard, and damn them all.

***

She takes an evening walk through the gardens, her guards molding themselves into the scenery. Sometimes, they have given her space here, have left her some privacy. Today, they take no chances. There is a ripple of discontent about. Too many stayed after the meal to speak to Rikard. Too many watch her with careful eyes.

Tonight, she feels utterly alone. Once, that had been all she’d ever wanted. To rule alone, to have only her own thoughts for guidance. But now, there is a yawning absence in her heart, a desperate longing for someone beside her. For a voice of reason, of support, of affection. For love, offered freely and without judgment.

Never mind that. She will stand by her convictions even if it is without a companion to lean upon.

There is a rustle of movement ahead of her, and for a moment, Dekala imagines a slight figure, an unmarked olive-skinned palm, a brown-eyed smile that sees right through her. But it is instead pale skin and white hair that she catches sight of, and she stiffens. “You.”

Rikard sits down on a bench, looking up at her with a fox’s smile. Dekala doesn’t see any of his guards. Rikard, it seems, knows that he cannot be killed here without sparking a revolt. “My Queen,” he drawls. “I hope that you will join me.”

Dekala remains standing. “I would not sit beside a man who seeks my destruction,” she says coldly.

Rikard shakes his head. “Oh, hardly, Your Majesty. I have nothing but the deepest regard for your kingdom. For one so young, you have distinguished yourself. And the people truly wish to love you unabated.”

Sweet words, masking the truth. Dekala waits for it to emerge.

Rikard offers it freely. “It is only that you are so vulnerable,” he says, soothing. He slips into a new persona now, an elderly man dispensing wisdom to a child. “You have no king. No heir except for an orphan child with no royal blood. And you persist in provoking the people with your Markless initiatives.”

Dekala’s lips set. “I cannot believe that a mark on one’s palm should decide their destiny. If the spirits have allowed this to happen, then it must be their will. To claim that the Markless are an abomination is to question the power of the spirits themselves.” She wears the skin of the Spotted One upon her shoulders, and she speaks with the authority of the one chosen by the spirits. She will not allow this small-minded man to preach to her.

Rikard stares at her, his smile gone. “Is your Markless lover really worth your kingdom?” He stands, and his words are sharp. “They say that she has left you. That she has departed to Byale, her loyalty bought by King Jaquil instead. Do you believe that your people will respect a girl rejected by even a Markless?”

Dekala slaps him, quick and sharp. Her ring leaves a bloody scrape across his cheek, and his head drops, a curse passing through his lips. When he lifts his face, there is no rage, only calculation in his eyes as blood drips from his wound. “The people trust me,” he says. “They do not know what to expect from you. When the time comes, do you really believe that they will choose you?”

Dekala turns and strides away. She’s breathing hard, furious and unnerved by the conversation. The people will not turn on her. The people will understand, even if it takes them years. They need only to live alongside the Markless, to speak to them, to see them as neighbors and friends. It will not take too much time for the commoners, who already venture to the Southern District for cheap fabrics and trinkets. It is Rikard who does not know the people.

She is so engrossed in her rage that it takes her several minutes, until she is inside and stalking down a hallway, before she realizes that she is being followed. Her guards have not dispatched her shadow— perhaps they haven’t noticed it— but Dekala has a keen ear for those footfalls.

She walks faster. Her shadow follows suit. She climbs stairs and walks to her quarters, and she turns suddenly, leans against the wall and waits.

Rikard’s girl companion, the one he calls Nuru, stands just down the hall, cloaked in grey and her hood concealing her face. Dekala raises her chin and sweeps her gaze over her. “You are very bold to follow me in my own palace.”

“I’ve been told I’m careless like that.” The girl prowls closer, and Dekala sucks in a breath. She is so beautiful, so wild, and she has full command over Dekala’s attention with just the sinuous movements of her body.

Dekala reaches up to touch her, to clasp her hand over the girl’s cheek and let her thumb brush against her chin, and some of the wildness fades away. The girl’s eyes grow brighter, and she breathes, “Did you not hear Rikard? I am your sworn enemy.”

Dekala strokes her cheek, watches the layers of hatred and anger as they shed from her face, and she says, “You would be surprised at what I will do for a beautiful girl.” She closes the gap between them, kissing her soundly, and the girl gasps into her mouth and presses her forehead to Dekala’s.

“Ruti,” Dekala whispers, and the relief is like warmth flooding her, all at once, after the freezing cold of a Niyarumi winter. “Ruti, it has been too long. I should never have let you leave.”

Ruti presses her lips to the corner of Dekala’s mouth and Dekala shudders with the weight of all the loneliness that she has felt for the weeks since Ruti had first left to Rikard. “Much too long,” she agrees fervently. She pulls her hood back, a mess of dark brown curls falling around her lovely face. “But I couldn’t stand by and watch you undermined by a traitor.” She cups Dekala’s cheek, and Dekala is made fragile, young in a way that only Ruti can make her feel. Like this, she is no queen of Zidesh, controversial ruler who rules with an iron fist. She is only a girl, and the girl who loves her is running her thumb against Dekala’s lips.

She kisses the tip of Ruti’s thumb. “Come inside,” she says. “If you must be his again tomorrow, then I will have you with me tonight.”

Their hands tangle together as they walk into Dekala’s quarters. Dekala rubs at the false mark that Ruti had sang onto her palm, doing her best to remove it, and Ruti whispers, “No— don’t.” She looks at the smudge with discomfort. Dekala tightens her grasp on Ruti, savors the feeling of Ruti’s palm against hers, their fingers entwined. If even a single one of her detractors understood what it is to hold this unmarked hand, to feel the depth of emotion that comes with it, they would never question why Dekala would flout the spirits as she does.

They have grown more reckless with each passing day. There have always been rumors about Ruti, why she lives in the palace and where she spends her nights. With Rikard’s rise, they have drifted from the Royal Square to the people. Theirs is a dangerous dance, and if the kingdom had more than suspicions, it might turn even more people against Dekala.

But it is hard to care about that when Ruti is standing beside her, tired eyes shining with affection. Dekala presses her against the wall inside her quarters, kisses her soundly in front of a dozen servants, and Ruti sighs and presses her hands to Dekala’s shoulder blades, tugging her closer. They are melded into one, are so intertwined that Dekala could forget herself entirely.

Ruti’s eyes drift closed, and Dekala feels Ruti’s exhaustion as though it is her own. Has Ruti lost weight in the weeks away? She feels brittle-boned, as narrow as she’d been when Dekala had first met her. “Kalere,” Dekala says with authority, and the square-jawed woman appears promptly in front of them. “Ruti is starving.”

“I am not,” Ruti protests, but Kalere has already ordered someone down to the kitchens, a mischievous younger servant who winks at Ruti and promises her a treat. “I’m not,” Ruti repeats weakly, and Dekala sits her down inside, at a couch where she can leave her arm wrapped around Ruti’s waist. “I ate while I was away.”

“Not enough.”

“More than I ever did in the slums.”

“The Southern District,” Dekala corrects her. Ruti doesn’t answer. There is a part of Ruti, Dekala has noticed, that remains uncomfortable with her own people. She avoids visiting the Southern District with Dekala, grows silent when Kimya speaks of the orphanages, and talks about Somanchi’s Markless with a disdain that Dekala would expect from Chobal. Ruti is ashamed of her roots, while Dekala only sees their strength.

Dekala clears her throat. “I want that man dead,” she says to her now. “I want him to stop taking you from me.”

“Not yet.” Ruti curls against her, knees up on the seat and head burrowed into Dekala’s neck. “I have a plan.” She glances around the room, wary as she takes in the servants bustling around. Dekala dismisses them all once Ruti has food, and her quarters are finally quiet. The only sound is Kimya’s light breathing from her room as she sleeps.

Ruti detaches herself from Dekala to slip into the room she officially shares with Kimya, and Dekala watches as Ruti bends to press a kiss to Kimya’s temple. She sits down on her bed, rubbing her back in a soothing motion, and Kimya opens drowsy eyes to smile up at Ruti. She is too tired to sign to her, but Ruti kisses her again and whispers, “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

And then they are finally alone.

Dekala’s bedroom is a large space within her quarters, a luxurious space with a dressing room and a room with a tub for private bathing. Her bed is wide enough that she could easily stretch sideways across it without her feet hanging down, and there are a half-dozen pillows spread across its headboard. Ruti looks at it longingly, but she says, “I’m filthy.”

Dekala doubts that Ruti has had time to bathe while spying on Rikard. Her hair is matted and her skin has a thin layer of dirt upon it. “I don’t care. Kalere can clean anything.”

“Mm.” Ruti still hesitates, and Dekala tugs her to the bed, brings her down onto its soft mattress and stretches out beside her to kiss her. After so long apart, it feels illicit to hold Ruti, like a forbidden gift that is all hers. Her hands run over Ruti’s body, familiarizing herself with it again as one might an old friend.

For a long time, they don’t speak.

Dekala had hardly slept last night, first at the failed rendezvous and then after, but she finds herself wide awake now, eyes locked with Ruti’s. Ruti clasps her hand over Dekala’s cheek again, warmth against warmth.

“Tell me more,” Dekala says, her voice hoarse. “About how you plan to rid me of that menace.”

“I think sometimes that you might hate him more for keeping me away than you do for fomenting rebellion.” Ruti laughs. Dekala only stares at her in sullen confirmation, and Ruti leans forward to kiss the tip of her nose. “He trusts me,” she whispers. “He thinks I am a loyal Unbonded who despises the Markless as he does. And, one by one, I have been poisoning him against our greatest threats and replacing them with your loyal followers. He is surrounded by enemies, and he has no idea.”

It’s surprisingly subtle from Ruti. “This wasn’t your plan.”

“You don’t think me capable of subterfuge?”

Dekala’s heart dances with affection for the girl beside her, who can hardly make it through a single royal dinner without picking a fight with Dekala’s entourage. “Not in the least.”

“Fine,” Ruti admits sulkily. “It was Winda’s idea.” But then she laughs. “Winda actually wanted me to surround him with Markless. Can you imagine that? Everyone that man trusts, secretly what he despises. He’d deserve it.” She shrugs carelessly. “I don’t think there are enough Markless here who would be capable of it, though. Maybe if we had some of the ones from Lower Byale come and help.”

She dismisses her own Markless so casually, but Dekala puts it aside to enjoy the night with Ruti instead. For now, she will savor what she can.

***

In the morning, Rikard asks for an audience in the Royal Square. His cheek bears a long, angry scrape, and the cloaked girl beside him does not look at Dekala. Around them are so many people, there for judgment and with offerings for her, and Dekala sets her face into an imperious glare. It is easier to put it on when she thinks about Ruti leaving her again with this cretin.

Kimya sits beside her, as she often likes to. There is much for her to learn about the kingdom, about what is expected of a princess. The people adore her as they never have Ruti, beam at her and bring trinkets for her, and some even sign awkward greetings. But today, Dekala wishes that Kimya had stayed inside, that she would be spared more time with this odious man.

“I only wish to express my hopes that my arguments might have swayed Her Majesty,” Rikard says, loud and clear, and there are some people milling in the Square who listen. “That we may find an accord together. I fear that our people bear far too heavy a tax burden that goes only to those spurned by the spirits.”

 “Hardly a burden,” Dekala says tightly. “The coin you bemoan goes to pay workers, builders and farmers who are working in the Southern District.”

Rikard’s eyes are challenging, the scrape on his face adding something vicious and cruel to his expression. “And how many of them are Markless?” He turns to the people, loud enough that more throng closer. “How many will use this as a reason to enter our Merchants’ Circle, to offer tainted coin to our people?”

“They are my subjects, too,” Dekala snaps. “They will only make our land stronger.” Kimya signs something furious at Rikard, demanding that he show Dekala respect.

Rikard sneers at Kimya rather than Dekala, not bold enough to disrespect the queen any more in front of her subjects. “You install a girl who cannot speak on the throne beside you, and you speak of strength?”

Kimya scoffs, her hands flying wildly in insult. “Enough!” Rikard snarls, and he surges forward and seizes Kimya’s hand before she can sign any more.

She yanks her hand back.

And her glove slips off of it, her unmarked palm displayed before all the people in the square.

Winda starts forward. Ruti stiffens. And Rikard’s eyes gleam in triumph. “Ah,” he says softly. “I had suspected it, but I couldn’t believe that our queen would sink so low.”

The sky darkens, and thunder crashes in the distance. Dekala feels a chill creep through her, a terror that she can’t hide, and she reaches for Kimya just as the cries of outrage begin, as the people shout out bewildered, betrayed questions.

Rikard twists around. “This is what she keeps from us,” he bellows. “This Markless girl would be her heir? A Markless child would judge all of you? The child belongs in the slums, left for dead, and—”

Ruti moves so quickly that Dekala only has time to tighten her grip on Kimya before Rikard is thrown backward, toppling to the floor at Dekala’s feet. Kimya signs in dismay. Another of Rikard’s retinue kicks him, yanks out a sword and holds it at his throat.

Rikard stares up at them, his face twisted into disbelieving horror. “You were hers? Both of you?”

His other guards press around him, yanking him to his feet, and Ruti stands in front of him, her face dark. “She’s our queen,” she bites out. “Who are you?”

“She elevates a Markless beside her,” Rikard protests. “Surely, you can’t abide by that, no matter how well she pays you or how harsh her threats might be.”

In answer, one of the guards— a friend of Orrin’s, Dekala recalls, a man who had been in the palace guard for years before Winda had summoned him away— stands between Rikard and Kimya, protective. Rikard stares at them all, shakes his head, lets out a sputtering, “Traitors!”

And there he is, a babbling man at Dekala’s feet, reduced to a fool. Even her uneasy subjects look at him with disdain, as clear as their uncertainty when they look up at Kimya. Dekala clears her throat. “For an assault of a princess of the royal family,” she says, her voice sharp, “Take him to the dungeons. His judgment will follow.”

The guards drag him away. Ruti remains, still cloaked, and she stands stiffly beside Dekala, as much on edge as Dekala is.

The people whisper to each other, shoot anxious glances at the throne. Kimya wriggles away from Dekala to sit back down at her seat. There is stillness, tension, the Royal Square poised for what might become a riot, what might need Kimya spirited to safety and hidden away again.

And then a woman moves forward, an offering in her arms. “Some of my finest fabrics for my Queen,” she says, her voice shaky. “And…I have also sewn something for Princess Kimya. A dress, for when she next dances before us.”

The smile that spreads across Dekala’s face is too wide, too relieved, unbecoming of a queen. But still, she cannot seem to stop it. “We are so grateful,” she says, and she steps from her throne down to the woman to take it from her personally. “The spirits shall bless your  business and your family.”

The woman bows her head. Another subject takes her place. There is still unease in the Royal Square. But there are also tentative, curious looks at Kimya, and Dekala thinks that Kimya might have done more for the Markless this morning than Dekala has in a year of royal programs.

***

There will be more unrest. Often, the people take their anger out on the Southern District rather than the well-guarded Royal Square, and Dekala arranges for a carriage to take her down there tonight. Her presence will send a message, and she will not hide away and cower in fear of her own people.

She has given them prosperity and happiness. She will not apologize for offering it to the Markless as well.

“Come with me,” she urges Ruti. Ruti has returned to palace garb, a green dress with a white line across her waist. By law, white can only be worn by the royal family, and she tugs uncertainly at her waist.

There is still a smudged mark on her palm, and Dekala presses her lips together and says nothing about it. “I want you with me.”

She has become a starving child, desperate for Ruti’s presence in her life. Every moment without her feels cold and harsh. Every moment beside her is like basking in sunlight.

But Ruti is always reluctant to go down to the Southern District. It has been months. Even today, she hesitates. “I don’t want Kimya to be alone here. Not after today.”

“Kalere would lay her life down for Kimya.” Kalere has, in fact, told Dekala that today. A number of others have informed Dekala the same this afternoon. “There is no reason to stay. I want…” She takes a breath, finds her dignity, and loses it again at Ruti’s gaze. “I want you to see what I’ve worked for. Please.”

Ruti inhales, long and uncomfortable. “It’s…I know you’ve done so much for them. I don’t need to see it.” She worries at her waist, folding green material over white. Dekala watches her, something twisting in her stomach, and Ruti sighs. “Okay,” she murmurs, and she presses a kiss to Dekala’s cheek, quick and daring, in front of a dozen suddenly busy guards.

Dekala takes her hand before she can hide the white entirely. Mine, she thinks, rubbing away at the smudge on Ruti’s hand. Ruti tugs at Dekala’s thumb, but Dekala stubbornly keeps it there.

In the carriage, Ruti is stiff and unhappy, and Dekala slips an arm around her, pulling her close. “What frightens you about the Southern District?” she dares to ask. “Are they not your people?”

And that, she knows, is what terrifies Ruti. A year spent at the palace, and Ruti has separated herself from the Markless of her youth, has come to think of herself as something else. Ruti does not speak of her childhood, does not talk about years as a witch in the Southern District. Ruti avoids speaking of Somanchi’s Markless at all.

Dekala sees it, but she is never certain of what to do about it, to leave Ruti to her misgiving or to press her to speak about it. As bold and familiar as Ruti is, there is this one piece of her that Dekala cannot touch, cannot understand, no matter how many neighborhoods she rebuilds or Markless she speaks to.

Dekala strokes Ruti’s hair, and Ruti lets out a little breath. “I missed you,” she whispers. “Surrounded by Rikard and his people…I had forgotten what it could be, to be cared for.” She is still spiky and abrupt, afraid of losing all that she has.

She is Ruti, and Dekala has carved out an empty space in her heart, just large enough for Ruti to fill it perfectly. When Ruti was away, she felt incomplete. The skies were heavy with thunderstorms for days, and the servants whispered about it when they thought she wasn’t listening. It is the queen’s doing. She yearns for her Markless.

She does not speak of it now, only touches Ruti and feels her heart sing in response.

The carriage takes them to the end of the road outside the Southern District. Once, a royal carriage would have been too large and delicate to make it into the District. But new roads have been laid, wide and flat, to allow for wagons to move easily through the streets. Broken shacks adorn the shiny, new streets, a few with dimly colored signs. Someday, Dekala vows, they will be rebuilt. For now, there are only small businesses established in these broken shops, with modest sales in the Merchants’ Circle.

Change takes time. But there is one thing that Dekala had insisted must be done first.

Ruti stares out the window as they approach it, and Dekala watches as she seems to freeze.

They have reached the orphanage.

It is a busy building, fixed by inexperienced Markless hands and extended to allow for an open field, with children racing around as older Markless smile indulgently down at them. With the scent of freshly baked bread drifting from it into the carriage, and with the hopes of a future as loud as the joyful shrieks from the field.

It remains Dekala’s greatest pride. If Rikard’s followers rise up tomorrow and dethrone her, she will only be grateful that she has gotten the time to create this. That she has done something of consequence in her rule, something that will mean that no Markless child will grow up like Kimya and Ruti did.

She does not share her emotions easily. She does not say things like I love you, like promises of a forever that she still struggles to imagine. She has spent too long forming herself into ice and stone to unmake herself. But this is her love, contained in a building that will be bursting with it for as long as Dekala lives.

She darts a glance at Ruti. Ruti is shaking, her eyes fixed on the window. A strangled sob emerges from Ruti’s lips, then another, and she weeps silently, tears slipping down her cheeks and her trembling arms wrapped around her torso.

Dekala covers Ruti’s arms with her own, and they ride onward without any conversation passing between them.

There is no need for words.

[coalitiongirl]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

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.”

[coalitiongirl]

I’m so jealous of that anon, having all your fics to read it for the first time sounds like a dream come true. I reread them often but I never forget the feeling of the first time I read a fic of yours and then finding out there were SO many more fics to read. Emma Enchanted is also one of my favorites ever

pls 😭😭😭 honestly i love that feeling when i read a fic and want more and there’s just??? so much of it??? lately when i get the sq bug i find myself reading new fic and then going wayyy back and reading things i haven’t read in years and it’s almost like experiencing it again in all its glory. (do i cry again? always)

[coalitiongirl]

I just finished reading slay me weaponless and omg is it the best thing I have ever read you are such a talented writer! I like to think that the ending is how the show canonically ended since you wapped up all of Emma's relationships perfectly in a way the show couldn't and you fulfilled the dark swans true potential and did both in a way that would be the best note for the show to end on (especially since in reality it goes very downhill) but I'm just wondering since you wrote it, what do you imagine happens after the events of slay me weaponless? Is it the start to their happy beginning or do they still go to hell and split Regina in two and have that horrible last season? And if neither, what does happen?

Also that was the first swanqueen fic or yours I've read and was wondering which you recommend I read next since I'm very interested in your work now

Thank you!!! That season was the one when I finally stopped watching the show—actually because of that SQ scene at the well with the dagger. It felt so icky and uncomfortable and nonconsensual and I was kind of like, 'if I'm only watching this show for SQ and this is how they're writing SQ these days, then why would I watch it anymore?' And it always felt a little bit like unfinished business for me, both the plot and the potential for Dark Swan. So I dreamed for YEARS of writing a story that would both give Dark Swan her story and address that scene (and the dagger) in a fitting way.

I think I would leave it to you to imagine what happens next! I definitely don't think 5b would happen, but who knows about S6-7? But as long as there's SQ, all is 👌 .

If you liked slay me weaponless, I think Emma Enchanted will give you some of the same vibes—lots of angst, lots of EF-style setting, and lots of plot!

[coalitiongirl]

Someone I follow made a post about SQ a month ago and I (unwillingly) fell back in love with them because lbr there is no ship like them. Obviously that meant that I had to read one fic just for old times sake and so I went to your ao3 and instead reread ALL your SQ fics. Seriously all of them (and I do have a job, I swear). You are so incredibly talented it astounds me. I just wanted to thank you for your fics bc they truly mean a lot!

I completely feel this ngl- sometimes I’ll see something or think of something SQ and my heart just erupts with emotion and I read fic every night for a month because I love them sm. I’m so thrilled to hear that my fics can be someone else’s comfort SQ!! Thank you!!

[coalitiongirl]

Please come back to social media, you’re the most amazing writer I’ve ever read and I want to know if/when you’ll be putting more work out!

I’ve been SO busy with writing work that probably wouldn’t interest anyone here but I’m actually working on a fic?? Believe it or not?? I’m only like 4k in and I don’t have a ton of free time to write but it’s a gift for the SQSN comments contest winner so I WILL be getting it out to you sometime in the near future!

[coalitiongirl]

copped Markless at a NYPL!! So excited 😆

oh NICE and NYPL my forever boo 💚

[coalitiongirl]

Just finished reading Markless and it did not disappoint! I loved the world you’ve created and fell in live with Ruti, Dekala and Kimya! I can’t wait to read more of what you create in the future.

I'm so HAPPY 😍😍😍😍 thank you!!!!!

[coalitiongirl]

What method of purchasing Markless gets you the most money? Paper, digital, audiobook? A particular retailer?

I want to make sure I am supporting you to the fullest.

That's so nice!!😭 Honestly I think it's negligible (like I get the most royalties from ebook but a print run sale is more meaningful?) but any sale is a great support. Please do what's best for you!!

[coalitiongirl]

hiii! just wanted to ask when should international fans who completed the form to get the additional chapter of markless expect to get it? ☺️ saw you reblogging some posts about people already getting their paper versions so i wanna make sure i don’t miss the email 😅 thanks!

i am not sure of anything!! did you receive it yet? i can send an email and check in.

(i didn't get my paper versions yet, either! i asked for a few extras because i'd like to get some to international readers myself, but we shall see how feasible it is.)

[coalitiongirl]

just finished markless! loved it so much, i'm ngl i cried throughout some portions of the book. can't believe i actually grew to like orrin too. i wished that i got to see dekala's pov of how she fell in love though.

i saw your post about your manuscripts, and i'm so excited for the one about the princess and the big bad villainess. such a cool/unique premise, i can already tell i'll fall in love (well, i already am in love with all your writing regardless...so...lmao)

(also...zahara. whew.)

(are you the same anon as before?? i'm GLAD)

i love that book a LOT and tbh i think y'all will too 😍😭 will it be a million years before it ever goes anywhere?? possibly. my patience vs the publishing world......we shall see who wins.

(my attraction to horrible pirates is very conditional. ouat so robbed us of milah truly)

[coalitiongirl]

Gif maker totally forgot to add the line where she says they're gonna make out I was there behind a tree trust me she totally said that

its true i was the gif maker....ran out of space in the gif tbh :/

[swanqueen-gifs]

[coalitiongirl]

My book club just picked up your book. I hope they like it

omg.....mE TOO 😍🥹

[coalitiongirl]

read this one y’all you’ll thank me later!!!!!