Chapter Text
Your family is standing together, watching as you go, and you catch Henry’s pleading gaze and nod. “I’m driving,” you say without preamble.
Emma’s eyes are dull and she’s staring at the bug as though she isn’t really seeing it at all, and when she responds, it’s with an automatic, “No.”
“When was the last time you slept, Miss Swan?”
The name seems to jerk Emma into a reaction. “Oh. I don’t know. I’ve been busy.”
“You’re in luck, then, because I spent most of last night unconscious in my vault.” You see the moment that registers with Emma, the furrowed brow and the something is wrong that you really don't have time for. As…reassuring as Emma’s concern is, now is no time to be coddled with it. “As the well-rested one of the two of us, I will do the driving.”
“Okay. Fine. Let’s just go.” You watch her with irritation and frustration, equally unwilling to coddle as be coddled but too in tune with Emma Swan to not get a sense of her despair. Emma yanks the door open for you and then stalks around to her side, and she watches you…like she always watches you now, that strange look that you can’t take apart. Desperate and needy like you hold all the answers she doesn’t dare ask.
She slouches in her seat like an angry teenager and fiddles with the radio until you put your hand over hers and it instantly stills. You turn it to a respectable classical station and feel the hand underneath yours, nearly freezing, begin to warm up.
And you drive.
Henry is at home, safe and sound, and you’ve asked Granny and Red to stay the night there. You have a heart in a box in the backseat and Snow is sending you hurried texts, new arguments she wants you to bring up with Emma, and Emma’s eyes are hollow and empty and she’s startling every few minutes like she refuses to sleep.
“Get some sleep,” you order her, and she shakes her head.
“I need to be…if Zelena is armed…”
“It’ll be hours before we’re down there. Sleep.”
Emma bites her lip like she wants to argue, but she leans her head against the window and doesn’t speak for a few long minutes.
And then, “What does light magic mean?”
“What?”
“I thought it was…about intent. That somehow because I didn’t mean any harm, I had light magic.” She keeps staring out the window, watching the woods flash by around her. “Then I thought it was about what my parents did. To make me good.”
You steer the bug around a bend, glancing at Emma as soon as you’re back in a straight path down the highway. “And now?”
“I didn’t kill Cruella out of some noble attempt to save Henry. I used my magic to throw her over that cliff because she called me a hero and I was fucking sick and tired of being everyone's fucking hero.” Her eyes are back on yours and now they’re frighteningly clear. “I know you think I should rise above it all, but I’m just so tired all the time, Regina. I’m tired of being everyone’s anything.”
You’d known that she’d been desperate to come with you from the moment she’d begged to join, before Henry had been taken and things had been…simpler. The red circles around her eyes have lessened since you’d ridden out of Storybrooke and maybe this is all under the guise of helping you with Zelena, but you suspect that Emma really just wants to get away. “Running won’t solve anything,” you point out.
Emma’s gaze flickers to yours and she looks so weary that you murmur, “But…maybe you do need some time to breathe.”
“Yeah.” Emma sucks in a breath and closes her eyes, and you don’t know when you’ve reached the point that your words mean so much to her. You don’t know why it fills your stomach with warmth and alternatively, makes you want to weep. It’s like loving Henry when it had been all pain and so little more than that, and you cling to the steering wheel and smile when she murmurs, “Thanks.”
You hesitate for another moment and then add grudgingly, “The first time I killed was a girl. An apprentice of Rumple’s.”
Emma’s eyes are more alert than they’d been in days. “What did she do?”
“Replaced me.” You're taking a risk, admitting all this, and maybe Emma’s eyes won’t be so bright when they look at you anymore, but Emma needs this more than you need Emma to…be Emma around you. (You think of lunch dates and root beer and kale salad thrust on your desk, of I’m with Regina and I’m gonna get your back while you do this and you don't know what you’ll do if you lose Emma. Not anymore.)
“Rumple had dismissed me. I hadn’t been willing to hurt anyone.” You had never quite understood to what extent he’d orchestrated everything that had followed until you’d been sitting opposite him, chained up in a vault, and he’d spoken of the corruption of Emma as though it had been an everyday event. And you’d remembered Jefferson and Victor and their roles in your loss of hope and you’d finally grasped the final piece of the puzzle that had brought you to lose yourself. “I’d decided to prove him wrong,” you say, and then you tell her about it all.
Emma listens in silence and twice you check to see if she’s awake. You find green eyes fixed on you both times, serious and still, and you shiver under her gaze. When you’re finished, she says, “You made your choices.”
“I did.” You don’t deny it, never have. No matter how much you’d been maneuvered and manipulated, you’d been your own person and that had mattered most to you.
“Do you think Rumple wanted Cruella to threaten Henry?” She seems lost in thought, not searching for answers but not shying from them, either.
“Rumple gave me a choice,” you murmur. “Corrupt you or Robin dies. I would say he had some hand in this, yes.”
When you turn back to Emma, she’s staring at you with her mouth half-open and her eyes wide and glistening, and she looks open and vulnerable like the woman who’d once stood at your doorstep a day after she’d come to town and talked about her secret birthday wishes.
You say, stripped raw by her gaze, “There was no choice. I fought back instead.”
“No choice?” she repeats softly, wonderingly. “Regina…”
“Get some sleep,” you order her again, and this time she closes her eyes until her breath is even and her socked feet are curled up under her, her toes brushing against your thigh.
You stop for gas and you see a grassy field beyond the station, open and clean, and you wonder for an instant how Emma would look spread out in waves of green, staring up at fluffy clouds with contentment on her face. You bite your lip like a child and park, leave the car to call Belle and find out that nothing has changed. And you let Emma nap longer, even though this road trip is heading into dusk. When she’s asleep, her face is quiet at last, and you brush stray hair from where it tickles at her nose and whisper, “I’ll be right back.”
You purchase a grilled cheese and a bear claw and remember too late that you haven’t gotten yourself anything. No matter. You’re not hungry. You’re thinking about sisters and soulmates and Emma Swan who’s afraid and hopeless right now in her car and could really use some sugar. You don’t have time to eat.
You shake Emma’s shoulder lightly and, in an instinctive move that’s more nurturing than you’d ever admit to feeling around Emma Swan, you tuck her hair behind her ear. She wakes up, eyes bleary, sniffs, and says, “Are there donuts?”
She is a child. You say, “There’s a little field next to this station.” Your hand is still in her hair, your knuckles soft against her cheek, and she gazes at you like you’re her guardian angel.
“Donuts,” she says again, still waking up and very focused, and follows you from the car. You wonder if she’d be like this every morning, stumbling down into the kitchen with a bird's nest of hair and ratty pajamas and insistence on eggs and coffee before she talks to you or Henry. You don’t know why you’re wondering that. Soulmates and sisters and not Emma Swan being led through a rest stop by the smell of donuts.
She does sit down on the grass almost immediately, hands outstretched, and you pass her the bear claw as you join her. She has it half in her mouth by the time she looks up at you and frowns. “Aren’t you going to eat yours?”
You shake your head. “This is for you, too. Have you eaten yet today?”
She shrugs but takes the grilled cheese, too. “Have you?”
“I’m not hungry.”
She nods, understanding, and ducks her head for a moment before she prods, “Robin?”
You lean back against a tree and sigh. “Robin. Zelena. Marian–“ You hesitate. The complicated emotions get even more complication with the latter two. You know where you stand with Robin. And Marian, Marian who’d said begrudgingly, Maybe you’re not a monster, Marian who’d spoken about family and goodness with such certainty in the Enchanted Forest and gotten through to a grieving you here. Marian who’d never said Maybe you’re not a monster.
“Marian,” Emma repeats, and you have to look away from the earnest supportiveness in her eyes.
“I guess I thought it was…some kind of redemption,” you admit haltingly. “To save someone I’d killed once. Someone who’d meant something to people I cared about.” Roland would have his mother, you’d determined, and saving Marian had consumed you for so long that you’d thought of little else throughout the Snow Queen fiasco. “But she’d been dead all along. Killed by someone who just wanted to hurt me.”
“That isn’t your fault.” Emma curls her fingers around your arm for a brief moment before she detaches, looking embarrassed about it. You tamp down the silly smile at it. “You aren’t responsible for what your sister did. And it changes nothing about what you did for Marian. You didn’t know who she was. You were just trying to save an innocent. A…” Her voice falters. “A helpless person.”
“You didn’t know that Cruella was helpless, either,” you say gently, and Emma recoils. “She managed just fine at taking our son. I would have done the same.” You’d seen Emma standing with her hands on Henry and her eyes blank on the ravine and you’d wished you had, that you’d spared Emma this devastation now. You would have thought very little of killing Henry’s captor.
“I was relieved.”
You stop speaking.
Emma offers you the other half of her bear claw and sits up to stare at you. “All I could think was that it was so easy, that our greatest threat for the moment was gone. I killed her and I was happy about it before I was…” She waves at herself. “So much for my parents’ big dreams, huh?” She laughs bitterly until she’s choking on it, hands tucked in and head bowed as though she’s worried about exposing her now.
You lay your hand down on her thigh and she stops laughing, sits still, and her hand lands on top of yours and holds it there. “I know you think I’m a petulant child.” She echoes your remarks from yesterday with a roll of her eyes to punctuate her admittedly fair retort. “And maybe now I’m a hypocrite. But I can’t get over what they did to Lily. My friend.”
Her friend, the one who’d been her greatest regret. I just wanted you to be my friend. You’d seen the video this morning, had memorized the face and promised Mal you’d find her. (She’d looked remarkably like you and not very like Mal at all, but you don’t discuss that now. This is Mal’s loss to address.) “And you were right. I don’t have any place in convincing you to forgive them. Your mother–“
“Is your friend,” Emma finishes off. “And she’s supported you and I know you feel like you have to support her, but all I see is that I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to help the helpless and instead my entire existence has been built on someone else’s loss. I know you don’t understand.”
“Emma,” you say, and Part Two of the Things You Don’t Want To Think About is surfacing again. “I had someone trying to snuff out my existence four months ago, remember? To take her rightful place in my stead. And it wasn’t my fault.”
She rounds on you. “And you’re telling me you never thought about what she’d gone through? When you found out she was abandoned and rejected and…” She bites her lip. “I’m sorry. This isn’t fair. Not with her.”
You swallow hard. “I offered her a second chance, did you know that? I thought I’d gotten through to her. And instead she…faked her own death and found a way to hurt me and people I care about even more.” And Robin, Robin who’s your soulmate and your happy ending, Robin is trapped in a marriage where he has no idea who he’s with. At least you’d known when you’d been…
Emma’s hand leaves yours and she gazes at you through eyes still red-rimmed and pained. She says, “We’re going to stop her,” and her fingers land on your face clumsily, brush aside a little dusting of sugar, and she doesn’t move them away for a long, long time.
You head into the station market to pick up some water bottles and when you emerge, it’s to Emma speaking intensely to a woman in front of the bug. You feel the prickling of discomfort at that, a possessiveness you have no right to, and you’re stepping forward too rapidly as the woman leans forward suggestively and Emma keeps staring at her face and then her wrist again and again.
And then she nods abruptly and opens the bug door for the woman. The woman says something to her and Emma’s eyes narrow, but it’s too late. The woman is in the driver’s seat and Emma's whipping out her gun and you reach her just in time to yank her out of the way of the bug as it careens at you and then around the corner toward the highway.
Emma is breathless and furious and dialing a phone number an instant later, speaking to the highway patrol and reciting license plate numbers while you remember to wonder if her car is even legal at this point before you get angry.
“Yes, it is. I thought she was Lily! She had the birthmark and this is near where we’re supposed to be looking for her and–“
“She was white!” you say, irritated again. “Do not tell me you ‘don’t see race’ because if I have to hear that one more time in Storybrooke-“
“No. I’m sorry.” Emma sags. “This must have been a Gold ploy to slow us down. And I fell for it. I’m sorry.” And she looks sorry, worn down even more, and it occurs to you just how attached to that bug she is. Or maybe she’s just attached to you. (You refuse to think about that anymore.) “I’m sure they’ll find the bug. I have gps on it and everything. But it’s getting dark.”
“We can get to a motel for tonight.” You think about Belle’s heart in a box at the bottom of the car and Rumple sending for it and no, Belle had trusted you, and that leads to thoughts of Gepetto and Robin and you’re drowning for a moment in too many betrayals.
“There’s one up the road,” offers one of the workers at the pumps. “Shouldn’t be more than a ten minute walk.”
Of course, they only have one room left. “Let me guess, one bed, too?” Emma suggests. It’s the first real smile you’ve seen on her face since yesterday afternoon (when she’d lit up over, of all things, getting a video message at the same time as you), wry and too knowing and you mutter, “This isn’t a romantic comedy, Miss Swan.”
“Bromance of the century.” She nudges you, unfazed, but heat rises on her cheeks when you gaze at her in reproach. You don’t know what the reproach is for, but she must deserve it.
“It’s a double, actually,” the hotel clerk informs you both, looking rather amused as well. “I can make it a single if you’d like.”
You smile stiffly at him. “That won’t be necessary.”
The room has a door to the outside and two narrow beds inside. It’s better than your vault floor, anyway. Emma is on the phone again, speaking rapidly with the highway patrol. “They’re holding it,” she says triumphantly. “They confiscated a locked silver box from the woman and they’ll drive the bug over tomorrow morning. We got this.”
You sink down onto the bed, relief overwhelming you, and Emma says again, “I’m sorry.”
She’d been saying it every few minutes as you'd climbed the road to the motel, and you’d snapped at her then. Now, you touch her hand with the same relief and say, “It’s okay.”
There’s a real smile, and you don’t know how you could have counted the others when you remember this one, the tentativeness of shots? and see? that’s a start and your mom, she’s a piece of work, you know? And there’s tightness in your chest and your hand is still on hers and she seems to feed off your touch, glow ever more brightly each time your fingers brush her skin.
You’re in a motel room together like some kind of goddamned romantic comedy and Emma Swan is smiling at you and you struggle to remember again, soulmates and sisters, but New York has never seemed farther away.
You flinch away from her and her face becomes…more still, stiff and uncertain, and you purse your lips and say, “I’m going to shower.”
The shower is cheap and grubby but you stay in it for too long anyway, treasuring the time alone where your mind can wander and you hide from it a little less. You’re about to save Robin from Zelena, to be with him without obstacle and finally find that elusive happy ending of yours. You should be ecstatic.
Instead you’re thinking about Emma again, the dead look in her eyes after Cruella. You’re castigating yourself again for not getting there quickly enough. You’re remembering Snow hovering, horrified, and Henry uncertain and Hook running to Emma and yanking her arm. Emma had tugged it out of his grasp and walked, slowly but evenly, out of the woods, Hook still trailing behind her. You’d stayed back to look after Henry and you’d dwelled on Emma Swan until morning.
You wrap yourself in a towel and pull on a t-shirt you’d bought at the gas station with a grimace as you switch places with Emma. Her eyes flicker down to your bare legs and then back up, and she swallows so slightly that you nearly miss it.
She’s in the shower for ten minutes, then twenty, and you’re tapping your watch at thirty and debating going to sleep before she emerges when you hear the gasping from the shower. The door is unlocked and you charge in, unarmed and with no magic, and you’re afraid until you see her huddled on the shower floor, lukewarm water raining over her while she chokes back sobs with sheer stubbornness and shakes and gasps in the cold.
You’re climbing into the shower before you can stop yourself, wrapping your arms around her in the closest thing the two of you have done to a hug since Neverland. “Regina,” she sighs, and dead eyes spark to life when she looks up, her face very close, and then she lurches forward and kisses you.
You kiss her back. You can’t deny that later. You draw her to you, closer still, and she’s still gasping but it’s into your mouth, she rises so she’s naked and pressed to you in your cheap, soaked t-shirt and the water is pounding down on your heads and you’re drunk and dizzy and desperately in l- in something. You have your arms around her waist and her palms are shaking against your shoulders and you kiss her and kiss her and kiss her until the water is cold and your legs are tangled in Emma’s and she cradles your face in her hands like she’ll never let go.
You wind up in one of the beds later, both of you wrapped in towels and Emma in her gas station t-shirt and you in the one she’d been wearing all day. Emma’s still gazing at you with that look and now you’re gaining better understand of what it is. You think you must have a look of your own, just for her.
“Tomorrow you see your soulmate again,” she says, shivering in the towels and blankets, and you tense where you’ve been running your bent fingers along her jawline. “Must be nice. Knowing that your destiny is all neatly packaged up.”
Your temper flares. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Emma shrugs. “You’ll have him back. And you love him. You don’t need to second-guess it.”
You’ve been kissing her for…what, a half hour now? Maybe longer? You don’t want to think about Robin Hood or who you love or your destiny. “I’m going on this trip to save him from Zelena,” you say. “Nothing else is set in stone.” You kiss her again, luxuriate in needy kisses and Emma’s hand in your hair and her hand slipping into your blankets, and she sleeps with her head pillowed against your breasts and you don’t sleep at all, just stroke her hair and wait for the stark reality of morning to come.