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“Tell me you’re okay,” Emma says for what must be the fiftieth time tonight. Regina will lose patience with her soon, she’s sure, snap at her that she’s fine, it’s all fine, she has it handled–
“I’m okay,” Regina responds again. She’s wearing black leather and her arms are wrapped around herself as she leans back against a tree, the moonlight shining through to make her gleam in the dark. “Emma, I should get back now. They’ll expect me…”
Emma reaches out and takes her hand, squeezing it, and Regina falls silent. “We don’t have to do this. You have their lead now. We can free August and he’ll talk to us. Operation Mongoose isn’t worth this.”
Regina doesn’t quite meet her eyes and Emma knows, knows there’s something more to this that Regina isn’t revealing. Regina’s been holding something back since this whole undercover mission has begun, and she isn’t lying, but… “Who are you protecting?” Emma’s foot is tapping with nervous energy and she tugs on her beanie a little too hard and watches Regina.
Regina’s hair is flying wild in the wind and her eyes are soft and unreadable, her fingers twisting in Emma’s grip. “I want to find the author,” she says, and Emma reads the lie with ease.
Killian is lurking outside the apartment when she makes it home, and she forces a smile when she sees him. He holds her hand and it’s easy, it’s a relationship where they fit together because neither one of them needs to go any further than what they already are. They’re the present, and the past doesn’t have any bearing on that, no matter what he’s hiding from her.
Holding onto Regina is like finding an anchor at sea and sinking to the ground when you’d been lurching out of balance. Holding onto Regina is like attempting to tame the wind and discovering it can’t be done, and whirling away within it instead. Holding onto Killian is…holding onto Killian. “Hi. I was…” She motions in the direction of the woods. “Regina.”
“Of course.” He heaves a sigh, long-suffering, and she chooses to ignore it. There’s no need to cause friction here. This is her stable relationship. She hasn’t had one of those…ever, really, unless you count the flying monkey. “I thought we could go out once you got home.”
“Oh.” She licks her lips. “I couldn’t. Not with Regina out with them.” But Killian presses it and she goes out to the Rabbit Hole, sits in a booth brooding and misses everything he says until he sighs and suggests they go home.
Henry is curled up in the trundle bed with the book on the pillow beside him. Emma watches him until she falls asleep, her phone wrapped into her palm.
During the day, Regina swaggers into Granny’s with Maleficent hovering somewhere near her shoulder and Ursula and Cruella behind them. Emma watches from behind her cocoa with narrowed eyes that she doesn’t have to feign.
Regina comes over to press a kiss to Henry’s forehead and wish him a good day and he tangles his hand in hers and refuses to let go until she’s backing away and their hands can’t span the distance between them anymore. Emma watches, her heart in her throat.
When they’ve parted and Henry has sagged again, sulking into his cocoa, Emma dares a glance at the counter where Regina is ordering from a reluctant Granny. Regina’s leaning against the counter, her eyes on Emma, and Emma shifts in her seat so the trio of women with Regina can’t see her and offers Regina a smile, bright and false.
Regina smiles back and Emma is momentarily dazzled.
She’s already by the tree the next night when Emma comes, coatless and shivering in the chilly night. Emma takes off her coat automatically and drapes it around her. “Stop that. You’re going to get a cold,” Regina says, motherly even when she looks as though she’s about to have a panic attack.
“What happened to you?” Emma demands. Regina is certainly not okay tonight, and she doesn’t even push off the coat- or Emma’s arm, which slides around her to keep her upright. Regina tilts her head to rest against Emma’s shoulder and Emma holds her tighter.
“I can’t tell you.” But Regina is standing freely in her embrace and she has no bravado to offer tonight. Emma is afraid, for Henry and for herself and Regina, Regina, what have you done? “You’re going to try to pull me out.”
Emma tenses. “Damn right I will. And you’re going to tell me anyway.” They’d talked about this, talked about the risks that come with going undercover and that Regina can’t be on her own for this. She can’t be her own handler when she’s in this deep.
“I’m not going anywhere.” And then, in a lower voice, Regina admits, “I had to…I tortured August.”
“Regina.” She’s still shaking against Emma’s arm and her voice is hoarse and pained and Emma wants to shake her herself. “Is he okay?”
“He will be. It wasn’t…I’m not very good at it anymore. A choice.” She says it firmly. “I don’t want to be good at it.”
And Emma understands suddenly what has Regina so shaken. “But you liked it.”
Regina straightens as though she’s ready to be pushed aside and Emma wraps her other arm around Regina’s back, holds her against her until Regina yields and puts tentative fingers against Emma’s shoulder blades. Goosebumps erupt wherever her fingers trail and Emma holds her tighter. “I’m going to pull you out.”
“I can’t, Emma.” Regina is folded into her arms and Emma doesn’t know if this is okay. Emma isn’t the huggy type but Regina looks as though she’s going to fall apart right here and holding her feels right like holding Henry feels right. Like family and love and all the things that matter and aren’t easy. “I have to finish what I’ve started.”
“Tell me.”
But she doesn’t talk about her mysterious motivations again. Instead, Regina says haltingly, “I thought I was…I thought I was getting better at being… And their world feels wrong. Until it doesn’t anymore. I don’t want to let go.”
Emma holds her breath and releases it. “How do you feel now?”
“I’m afraid.” It’s nearly voiceless and Emma feels it before she hears it, a breath of admission that sends chills down her spine.
“I’m afraid, too,” she echoes, and Regina reaches up to stroke her hair, fingers grazing against her ear until Emma shivers.
Today she’s with Killian outside the station when she hears the roar of Cruella’s car and then another roar, loud and animalistic and fuck, there’s a dragon outside. Emma runs in and fumbles for a sword that they have on hold in the station and runs back outside.
Regina is astride Maleficent, arms at her neck like this is some live-action How To Train Your Dragon and she’s the plucky hero, her eyes sparkling with the energy that had been missing last night and stunningly vibrant like this. Emma hurts and doesn’t know why.
“Step aside, fish-breath,” Ursula says, which is rich coming from her, and a tentacle slaps Killian out of the way. Emma is still watching the sky, Mal landing in a crouch on the street and Regina dismounting.
She’s wearing…a lot of leather, which she’s been doing since this undercover thing started, but Emma hasn’t seen it directed at her quite so potently before. Does she gulp? Maybe a little. She also staggers back because Regina is smoldering, there’s no other word to describe it, and Emma’s only human.
“Miss Swan,” Regina purrs, prowling forward, and Emma notices suddenly that she’s flat against the wall of the town hall building, Regina just in front of her. She thinks she sees the others sweep into the station but it’s hard to say when she can’t tear her eyes off Regina’s. “You don’t mind if my associates come inside, do you?”
“Uh,” Emma says. They’re acting. Right? This is acting, Emma breathless and Regina reaching out to curl her fingers under Emma’s chin. Emma chokes a little and Regina smiles, catlike. Emma’s stomach bottoms out and her legs feel like jelly.
She’s held by her gaze and she can feel Regina’s breasts move against hers as she breathes heavily. They’re frozen in place, Regina’s eyes caught on hers and their bodies flush against each other and a single finger caressing Emma’s chin. Emma tries to breathe and fails more often than not.
“Thank you for your time,” Regina murmurs, close enough that their lips brush with her movement. She’s twisting around a moment later- how long had they been standing there like that?- and joining the others as Cruella honks impatiently from the car. She doesn’t ride away on a dragon this time, and Emma slumps to the ground, wobbly and weak-kneed.
She doesn’t remember Killian’s there until she notices him still sprawled out on the floor, his eyes fixed on her as though he’s seeing her for the first time.
Regina doesn’t come to their meeting place that night and Emma panics, retrieves the GPS tracker she isn’t supposed to use unless there’s an emergency (she’s taken to checking it so often that Mary Margaret thinks that she’s been texting Killian at dinner and has made some displeased noise about it) and follows Regina’s phone to the cabin where they’re keeping August.
She peers through a back window and freezes. Maleficent and Regina are inside a room there, and Regina isn’t tied up or imprisoned. No, she’s bare from the waist up, straddling Mal’s lap and her head thrown back as Mal dives at her breasts, grinding up against her as Regina’s lips part to release a groan.
And then Regina smirks down at Mal to say something and Mal chuckles, and Regina raises her eyes again and sees Emma through the window.
Emma raises her phone weakly and struggles not to look down at Regina’s exposed skin. Mal is back at it now, licking the taut skin of Regina’s abdomen, and Regina is watching Emma through the window with stricken eyes. Emma backs away and bolts.
Killian is at the diner at breakfast and Emma isn’t in the mood. She orders pancakes just so she can stab them into a mess on her plate and remind herself, be easy. Be simple. Be good. She’s angry and frustrated and when Regina stumbles into the diner and orders two coffees, she nearly saws her plate in two.
Regina’s eyes are bloodshot and her hair is messy in a way that might have been deliberate on someone else. Another late night painting the town red, Emma guesses. So far, these villains have proven to be about as lethal as some of the kids she’d known in high school, short of the whole kidnapping-a-child thing. And Regina’s their newest recruit.
Killian is talking and Emma’s watching Regina still, in a tight leather top and the little skirt that goes with it, and all she can think about is Regina naked on Mal’s lap and grinning down at her. Well. And then all she’s thinking about is what she’d tortured herself considering last night.
They’d been a team, Emma had thought. Emma had thought they’d been friends. Friends who sometimes looked at each other like there might be more there. Friends who did lunch together and occasionally risked their lives for each other and Emma’s been fighting for this friendship for so long that she hadn’t considered that maybe it had all been about Henry for Regina, and that Regina had only been tolerating her for as long as it had suited her.
Regina hadn’t wanted Emma on this mission with her. Regina might not want Emma at all.
The door to the diner opens. Mal strolls inside, wrapping an arm around Regina’s wait while Granny glares. Emma stands up while Killian is mid-sentence and makes a mad dash for the bathroom.
She presses her palms to the inner edge of the sink and breathes hard, head bowed, and struggles harder to drive all her doubts from her mind. It doesn’t matter. Regina is undercover. Regina is still working with her. With everything else that’s going on, she can’t be distracted by Regina’s love life.
The bathroom door opens and Regina says, face very still in the mirror, “We should talk.”
“Yeah,” she says at the sink. “You didn’t come to check in last night.” She’d paced by the tree for too long before she’d grown uncomfortable with her own intrusive thoughts and escaped home to Mary Margaret's nervous prattle instead. Mary Margaret is less nervous now that Regina’s undercover, but on edge all the same. “You can’t do that.”
“I meant about Mal.”
Emma’s fingers tighten on the porcelain sink. “What you do in your free time is none of my business.” Regina sighs and Emma's knuckles whiten with the pressure of pressing against the sink. “I am…worried,” she says finally, struggling to find the most rational argument she’d had last night. “Making those kinds of emotional attachments when you’re undercover never bodes well.”
“I’m not making any attachments there,” Regina murmurs, her eyes rolling upward a tiny bit. “That’s just…Mal and I go back.”
“You turned her into a dragon for twenty-eight years.”
“The first time I did that, she thanked me.” It’s wry but fond, and Emma turns warily. “It doesn’t change anything,” Regina assures her. “There are more important things at stake.”
“Like what?” But Regina doesn’t answer, and Emma grinds her teeth together and slams the bathroom door behind her when she leaves.
That night at their rendezvous, Regina is shivering again and avoiding her eyes and won’t tell Emma what she’d had to do this time. “Trust me,” she whispers instead. She doesn’t sag against the tree and she still can’t quite stand straight and Emma doesn’t trust anyone anymore. Everyone is lying to her and she lets it go because she’s the one with the trust issues, she’s the one who has to accept them and stop questioning it. She’s been rejected far too many times for being prickly to start it up again with the people who love her now.
Except Regina is equally prickly and Emma feels an odd sort of kinship with her even now, with that terror every time she takes a step closer to her old life. Emma knows that fear, and she puts aside her resentment and holds Regina’s hands in hers, stroking them with her thumbs and saying in an attempt to raise the levity in their clearing, “Another lesbian orgy, huh?”
Regina laughs shakily. “I’ll invite you next time,” she promises. And they’re alone in the woods and maybe Regina is sleeping with Mal but she still looks as though she's been without anyone to hold her steady in weeks.
Emma tries, clumsily, awkwardly, to shuffle a little further forward and draw Regina into her arms- she isn’t a hugger, she isn’t good at this, she just wants Regina to be held- and Regina lets out a little sigh that might be a laugh and might be a sob and presses her lips to the corner of Emma’s mouth, just far enough away that it could be benign.
It still makes her throat close up and her heart burn in her chest and Regina hasn’t moved from her, her lips still soft against Emma’s skin, and Emma whispers against them, “This has to end.” It’s too dangerous, it has the strongest woman she’s ever known afraid and vulnerable, and she’s terrified for Regina all the time.
And Regina misunderstands deliberately, dragging her lips across Emma’s cheek until she’s at Emma’s ear and can whisper, “Can it end if it’s never begun?”
And once that door is open, it’s only a matter of days before it does begin, before another argument about this operation gets heated and Regina surges forward and kisses Emma, before Emma’s gasping into her mouth and forcing the words that bubble up down, before they’re arguing fiercely and pulling each other closer and making demands between kisses.
“Tell me who you’re protecting,” Emma growls, sliding tongue and teeth along Regina’s throat.
“I want…to find…the author!” Regina manages, her hands up Emma’s shirt and kneading her breasts.
“You’re lying.” Emma kisses her. “I always know when you’re lying.”
“You told me that once.” Regina twists them around to pin Emma to their tree, a leg pressed between them to Emma’s center. Emma grunts and struggles to remember what she’d been prepared to say.
But she’s even worse at impulse control when Regina is this distracting, and instead of pushing for more, she’s demanding, “And Mal?”
“What?”
“Are you still sleeping with her?”
“You want to talk about this now?” Emma’s fingers are curling down into Regina and her eyes are round and glazing over. “Like this?”
“Tell me. Are you in love with her?”
“Emma.” Regina sighs and Emma presses harder until Regina is writhing around her fingers and kissing her hard and by the time they finally part, Emma can’t remember any of their arguments from before.
They schedule August’s extraction for the next evening, and Emma and David wait fifty feet outside the cabin while Regina guides him outside. The moment he crosses the threshold of the cabin, he’s a little boy again, gazing at them in confusion. “Go!” Regina hisses, and Pinocchio breaks into a run and doesn’t stop until he’s in Emma’s arms.
David lifts him up and Emma holds out a hand to Regina. “Come on. They’ll never believe you now.”
Regina is already shaking her head. “Emma, I can’t yet. I have to watch them and make sure that whatever comes next–“
“Who are you protecting?” Emma demands, frustrated again. David puts a hand on her shoulder and she shrugs it off. “The villains haven’t shown any interest in Henry. Their whole goal is to rewrite the book, and we’ll find the author a lot faster with you with us. There’s no reason to stay here anymore.”
“Emma, please.”
“Is this about Mal?” she snaps, suddenly angry. If this is some kind of desperate romantic act…well. She wouldn’t disbelieve it from Regina. It doesn’t make it any less of a load of shit, though, or hurt any less. “Are you doing this because of her?”
Regina’s face is very still and Emma can’t read it. “You need to take Pinocchio out of here now,” she says. “I don’t know how much longer we have before they return.”
Emma steps forward instead, stalks over to the cabin door, and Regina holds up a hand to stop her. She keeps going anyway until Regina’s palm is gentle against her jacket and Regina says, “Fine. Yes, it’s about Mal,” as her eyes flicker to David. “I’m not ready to go yet.”
And this is a fucking mess because Emma’s shut down everything for this. To have Regina’s back. To help her. And she doesn’t…it isn’t her business who Regina gets into bed with, no matter what had gone on between them. She doesn’t get to dictate her life like that.
Mal and the others are here now, Regina has her lover, and she's done clinging to a family she’s never truly wanted to be a part of. “Okay,” she says, and takes a step back. Regina doesn’t even have the decency to look at her. Her gaze is still on David and Pinocchio, and Emma twists around. “You do that.”
Regina slams the door shut and David leads the way back to his car, tossing sidelong glances at Emma as Emma stomps through the woods.
Emma doesn’t think much of it when Regina isn’t out in town the next day with her new friends. Okay, yes, yes she does, but it isn’t her business and Regina doesn’t want her worrying about her now- if she ever had.
She sits at her desk and stares at her tracking device, unmoving in the cabin in the woods, and she texts Regina a neutral, Henry wants to see you.
There’s no response, and she’s still sitting there staring at the phone when Killian strolls in. “Morning, Swan.”
“Regina isn’t answering my texts,” she says in response. “I haven’t heard from her since last night.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” he says dismissively, and her head jerks up in outrage.
“Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care,” he says wanly. She glares at him and he says, heaving a long sigh, “I care because once Regina is done with her damned mission you might actually remember that you’re dating me, not her, and we might talk about something other than her for five minutes.” His eyes are accusing and she doesn’t have time for this, for being simple and supportive and happy anymore.
Contentment takes effort for her, and she isn’t content. She doesn’t want to be content, not with Regina missing and Emma terrified and they’re past Can it end if it’s never begun?
“You should leave,” she says blankly. He gapes at her. “Just…go. I don’t have time for you if you aren’t going to prioritize Regina right now.” No one’s been prioritizing Regina, no one but Emma and Henry when he’s allowed, but Emma isn’t talking much to her parents right now, either.
Killian doesn’t stand. “I’ll help you,” he concedes. And then, a moment later, he breaks in with a half-suspicious, half-joking, “Are you sleeping with her?”
She sets down the phone, her heart in turmoil, and maybe she’s done being the sunshine heroine who clings to her boyfriend like he’s her long-awaited true love when everything she feels for Regina is magnified by so much more. “Yeah,” she says. “A little bit.”
His face gets hard and unfriendly, the supportive bad boy with a heart of gold just as much effort to maintain as Emma’s role, and she stands and leaves before he makes a scene.
She hears the sound of something metal being hurled into her office computer and the screen shattering, but her eyes are glued to her phone and she climbs into her car instead of returning.
The cabin is empty. Regina’s phone is on the floor, the screen as shattered as Emma’s computer and Emma’s last text barely visible on it.
She tells her parents and the color drains out of Mary Margaret’s face. She doesn’t tell Henry. Not yet.
Mal is walking down Main Street with focused footsteps when Emma catches sight of her, chases her and sends a wild blast of white magic at her back. Mal whirls around and deflects it a moment later, and then she blips out of sight and reappears in front of Emma. “May I help you? Or were you planning on throwing another sword in my gut?” she demands, lip curling.
Emma stands her ground. “Where the hell is Regina?”
Mal sneers down at her. “She’s your operative. Don’t tell me you lost her.”
The confirmation that they know- maybe they knew all along- has Emma’s fists clenched and magic rising dangerously in her chest. “I thought you were her friend.”
“Oh, I am,” Mal says, serenely dangerous. “Her friendship has always meant the world to me.”
And Emma doesn’t have the patience for this whole…twisted evil lesbian bff thing anymore. Not when Regina’s missing and Mal is this smug. “What did you do with her?” She brandishes her gun and Mal cocks an eyebrow at it, amused. “Tell me!”
“Breathe, girl,” Mal purrs. She waves her hand and the gun ties itself into a knot. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
She vanishes as quickly as she’d appeared and Emma runs to the diner next, her heart tight in her chest.
Regina isn’t in her vault and she isn’t at the author’s mansion or somewhere in the pawn shop, and Emma runs from store to store to store all afternoon, questioning people and searching rooms and hunting the cabin over and over again. She goes down to the pier and finds only Killian there, not Ursula, and that’s a fight she doesn’t have time for either. She even checks the kennel for Cruella and there’s nothing.
They’ve all vanished into thin air and she’s about to cry with frustration as she trudges to their rendezvous point that night when she hears murmurs from their tree.
“Regina!” she breaks into a run, stumbling over leaves and around trees, flashlight out and hope dangling precariously in her chest. “Regina, is that– Oh.”
It isn’t Regina. It’s her parents, sharing guilty looks and matching flashlights, and Mary Margaret says heavily, “We’ve been searching, too.”
“I’ve searched everywhere in town.” Emma paces and then stops, a horrifying thought occurring to her. “Unless Ursula and Cruella took her out of town.”
“We have the scroll.” David holds it up. “If they left, it wasn’t planning to return.”
“Fine. I’ll go after her. I’m going to have to trace where they were before, where they’ve gone on the way here, how they got here in the first place–“ She takes in a long, frustrated breath. “It wasn’t worth it. Whoever she was protecting in the end, they weren’t worth it.”
The panic is building anew like a buzzing in her ears, and she barely hears it when Mary Margaret says, “You.”
“What?”
“She was protecting you,” Mary Margaret admits, and Emma’s eyes fly to her in surprise. “Because I asked her to. Emma, I did something horrible.”
The truth comes in halting words, a story of Maleficent and a lost baby and Emma herself- not a savior of the light because of anything so meaningful as love, but built on the ashes of someone else’s loss. “And we lost you, too,” Mary Margaret says rapidly. “We lost you and maybe we deserved it but I won’t lose you again, and Regina agreed with me. Regina went undercover to make sure you would be safe and never find out any of this.”
She grasps at the one part of that that she can think about right now. Her mind is buzzing like static and it feels like it’s filtering out anything that isn’t about Regina, Regina, Regina is– And she says helplessly, “Regina did what?”
Mary Margaret tells her again, the shame clear on her face. Regina had put herself in this danger for her, to help Mary Margaret keep her secret and keep Emma from ever knowing about the bastardization of good that had made her who she is. Emma’s been running around with seething jealousy toward Maleficent when Regina had–
Mary Margaret sees the devastation on her face and steps forward. Emma holds out a quelling hand. “Stop. Stay away from me right now. I need to…” To process, to understand, to… “I need to find Regina.”
She doesn’t sleep. The sun is already rising in the sky while she’s hunched over her laptop in the backseat of her car, and adrenaline is still surging through her veins. She’s tracing Ursula and Cruella’s paths until now, even Gold’s, and she has a license plate track going for the car. She’ll be prepared when she leaves town.
She closes her eyes for a moment and breathes, Mary Margaret’s admissions coming forward again. Light magic. Savior. True love, magic, magic, magic... For all their assurances about her light magic, it’s still useless if she can’t use it to find Regina.
And why can’t she? She doesn’t have much training, but she knows Regina, has done magic with her before, and there must be pieces of what she’s left behind somewhere within her. Regina using magic is warm and caustic and stunningly vibrant, and Emma can feel it just beyond the edges of her consciousness.
Find Regina, she thinks in one final, hopeless order to magic that has never quite worked for her when Regina hasn’t been with her. Bring me back to her.
She draws in those last little bits of Regina’s magic within her and it blazes to life as it touches hers, lights up like a beacon and she can feel Regina. She’s still inside the town somewhere, she can sense with relief. She’s still present and alive and her magic is like a tug at the back of her mind, urging her on.
She leaves the car and stumbles away from the cemetery where she’d been camped out, following the places that make her heart glow when she turns toward them. Down the road and around a corner, walking through an alley and past a gaggle of drunken dwarves, and suddenly she’s in the main part of town, right in front of the library.
But she’d checked the clock tower, searched the library…and had never thought of the space beneath it where Mal had been kept for all those years.
You're an idiot, Regina would say, and give her a glare and a heavy sigh for it. God, she misses Regina.
She makes it down the elevator in silence and makes it into the cavern when she sees the three of them walking together, Cruella and Maleficent and Ursula, and she scrambles for cover behind a tall pile of rocks.
“We can’t afford to kill her, Cru,” Ursula is saying. “Not now. You don’t think that daughter of Snow’s won’t come after us then? They kill villains in this town.”
“Rumple kills villains,” Cruella corrects her. “Regina kills villains. Those two idiots and their daughter? They left Regina and Rumple alive. We can rid ourselves of Regina and have them distracted and searching for her for days while we find the author.”
Mal is stalking alongside her, her face unreadable, and Ursula sighs. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You think it’s a good idea to keep her around, then?” Cruella challenges. “What other choice do we have?”
They both look at Mal now, their unspoken leader, and Emma thinks she might be imagining the strain in Mal’s voice when she says, “Honestly, I don’t care either way.”
Cruella laughs at that and Ursula rolls her eyes. “Right. Cru, come with me. I’m heading back to the sea before the townspeople wake up.”
They’re back up the elevator in minutes, and Mal paces and paces in front of the old coffin that had once held Mary Margaret after her sleeping curse, stroking the glass with eyes that are softer than Emma's seen them before. Emma waits, her arms shaking with tension and the need to move, to find Regina before Cruella loses patience and kills her.
Mal says, “They’re both here for each other,” and Emma doesn’t realize that she’s being addressed until Mal goes on. “If you have Regina and you can stop Rumple and you threaten them in all the right ways, they’ll gladly ride off into the sunset together.” She smirks. “They may destroy some towns in the process, but that’s not your problem.”
She keeps walking past Emma’s rock as though she hasn’t noticed her, and Emma steps out, Mary Margaret’s words still echoing through her mind. “I find people,” she says.
Mal turns, and for the first time since they’d met, Mal doesn’t look as though she’s considering how to best turn Emma into a toad. “What?”
“It’s what I did. Before I was here. I’m good at finding people.” She licks her lips. “And to be honest, judging from my childhood, I’m exceptionally good at being found by fairytale characters. Who knows if I’ve already met your kid–“
“Daughter,” Mal says stiffly. “She was a girl.”
“Right. So…Regina gets out of this mess and you ease up on the evil thing and maybe get Gold out of town again, okay? I’ll find your daughter.” She says it with as much firmness as she can muster, even if there’s zero material to work with and the whole idea of finding her seems unlikely.
Mal turns on her heel and exits, which is as good as Emma thinks she’s going to get.
As soon as Mal’s gone, Emma rushes to the coffin and pries it open where someone has before and there’s Regina, eyes open and bound and gagged inside. She looks up at Emma with relief and Emma exhales for what feels like the first time in days, sucks in air and feels the tension evaporate from her skin. Regina’s here. Regina’s safe. Regina’s here. She can feel exhaustion and relief in equal measure, enough that she can feel tears rolling down her cheeks and doesn’t know why.
“Hi,” she says, trying for a smile as she unties her. “Long day, huh?”
Regina rips off the gag and breathes, “Emma.” Emma kisses her before she can sit up, caught in the echoes of a moment years ago where her own parents had been in this position, and Regina reaches up to clasp her hands against Emma’s neck and say, “If you ever tell your mother they put me in here–“
“I don’t think my mom gets to pick on you anytime soon,” Emma says fervently, kissing Regina again. This time, Regina manages to climb out of the coffin during, the two of them nearly falling to the ground in the process.
Regina catches them and Emma leans against her, wrapping herself into Regina’s embrace and closing her eyes when Regina’s hands wind around her shoulders to tangle in a loose lock of hair. “Come on,” Regina says, and she’s smaller than Emma, not quite the right height to properly hold or be held by. She’s impatient and she’s prone to mocking Emma and she loves so hard that Emma craves nothing more to be loved by her.
She’s spent so long trying to be what other people had wanted her to be, to want what others had offered- and it had begun before birth at terrible cost and it's continued up until a pirate had sat opposite her and spoken of how he’d changed for her- that it’s staggering now to realize that there’s something she wants. For herself. For Regina. It isn’t easy, but she’s never been good at easy.
“Let’s go home,” Regina murmurs in her ear, and Emma's first thought is of a tree in the woods and Regina leaning against it, fingers in her pockets and Emma in her heart.