Chapter Text
The worst part about a bad breakup– well, not the worst , Emma amends, because there’s plenty of worst parts to spare– and can she really call it a breakup at all when it had been years of simmering tension that had exploded for only one night?
Anyway . The part that royally (no pun intended) sucks about a bad not-exactly-breakup with the Woman Currently Known As Queen Of Universes is that she’s still everywhere . She dogs Emma wherever Emma hides, and she doesn’t even have to try to do it.
She’s on the TV screen when Emma flips it on in the morning in her nondescript Queens ( ugh , still no pun intended) apartment, chatting with the ladies from The View about the challenges of incorporating democracy into royal charters in Camelot. She’s on a billboard ad on the subway that’s advertising some intra-community efforts between “sister lands” Manhattan and Neverland. There’s a fucking cardboard cutout of her at the drugstore where Emma picks up some Tylenol and a bottle of water and tries to make her headache go away.
Regina is everywhere. Some sadistic soul (and Emma is tempted to blame her mother, who likes to hold up her hands and insist that she isn’t involved in whatever had gone on between them), had decided that Queen Regina should do some branding to help ease the world into accepting the fact that magic is real and is going to bring sporadic crises to the Land Without Magic, formerly. And it’s Emma who’s paying the price.
She buys the Tylenol at the counter, averting her eyes from an issue of Vogue in which Regina graces the cover, wearing a tasteful tiara and holding a fireball. There’s a polished smile on her face that harkens back to the days of Madam Mayor, Royal Pain In The Ass, and Emma’s heart twists in her chest.
“She’s really something, isn’t she?” The cashier gives her a knowing smile. Apparently, Emma hasn’t been averting her eyes very well. “I saw her once in DC a couple of years back. You have no idea the kind of energy she gives off in person. Like… tiny ,” she says, holding her hand up to show Emma. Emma, who is maybe an inch taller than Regina, is offended. “But like a dynamo. You leave that stadium exhausted but so full of purpose. And, of course, totally in love with her.”
Emma manages to lift her shoulders in a shrug. There are a dozen responses on her tongue, ranging from melancholy to cutting, but not one of them makes it out.
The cashier, who is reading much too much into her inability to respond, scans the Tylenol and the water and then grabs the Vogue from the rack after Emma’s tapped her card onto the reader. “You take this,” she says, winking at Emma and putting it into her bag. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh. That’s really not– no, I don’t–” Emma stumbles over the words. “I…” Fuck . She’d had a solid plan for today, one that had involved coffee and work and a call to Henry and determinedly not thinking about Regina Mills.
Typical Regina, upending her day without a single ounce of effort. There had been a time when that had filled her with annoyance, and a time when it had been met with frustration. Then there had been years when that would make her swell with tired affection for Regina instead. This helpless desolation is new to the past four years.
All that Emma needs to do is to toss the magazine into recycling and forget about it. But the cashier can still see her from the window, and so she walks a few more blocks, hurrying along Seventh Avenue in the throng of people until she can almost forget about the magazine burning a hole through her bag. When she can finally breathe again, she pulls out the magazine and flips to a promised interview with Regina Mills.
It’s easy to skim. Emma has stumbled upon plenty of interviews with Regina over the years, and she’s picked up enough from them to see that this is mostly more of the same. Unity between worlds, Regina’s dark past and shining future, magic, blah, blah, blah. Every interview is of a carefully cultivated image, never the Regina whom Emma had known. It’s fine, even if the photos send pangs through Emma.
She turns the page, still the masochist she’d become in Storybrooke, and finds a new question. You and superstar actress Juliana Gutierrez have been photographed getting cozy in the Enchanted Forest. Any chance there’s new love on the horizon?
That does it. Emma crumples the page and then dumps the magazine into a trash can before she can look again. She looks up in an attempt to look casually unbothered, and she comes face to face with a massive billboard of Regina’s smile, hovering over Times Square.
Dammit.
It’s not like she even likes Regina anymore. That night and the aftermath had cured her of that entirely. It’s just muscle memory, really, and the heart is a muscle, too. Years of caring too much about Regina- of obsessing over every emotion hinted at upon her face, of hovering and worrying and the extreme investment that had come with their relationship- it’s instinctive now that Regina evokes all these complicated feelings. It’s why Emma had gotten the hell out of Storybrooke after their fight. She is too often too forgiving when it comes to Regina, and she’s done.
Done means not thinking about Regina while she heads into the office. She’s working a mindless security detail in an office building, long hours and little substantial human contact. The mundane suits her just fine. She’d had enough excitement in Storybrooke to last a lifetime, and she prefers a job where she can smile and greet people and do little more to one with fewer hours where she’d be alone with her thoughts for any given time.
Henry tries to talk her out of her job once a week. “Don’t you want to make a difference again?” he pleads with her, fully grown and still an idealist. “Imagine what you could do with your magic in this new world.”
But she remains obstinate. “I’m not the savior anymore,” she reminds him. “I’m not needed. There are plenty of magic users to spare these days.”
“They’re not you ,” Henry argues.
“Exactly.” She says it with satisfaction and a little relief, and Henry heaves a loud sigh.
“Look, I’m not going to try to push you and Mom to talk again. I get that it’s a...a lost cause,” he admits grudgingly. Progress, at least. It’s taken him years to accept that. “But we miss you. Lucy wants to see you.”
Lucy is always the quickest way to flood Emma with guilt and loss. She has a granddaughter, and she’d missed just as much of her childhood as she had Henry’s. “Do you think you’d be able to come down here for another visit soon? I can maneuver it so I have no shifts next weekend.” Henry doesn’t respond, and Emma bites her lip and tries again. “I’m sorry, Henry. You know I just can’t be around–“ Her. “Home,” she finishes.
“Yeah,” Henry says, subdued. “We’ll drive down Friday. I think there’s a book signing that my agent was trying to talk me into, anyway. J might be able to come, too.” Emma shifts uncomfortably at that. It’s not fair to be so wary of her daughter-in-law, but Jacinda has always felt distinctly on Regina’s side of…whatever their conflict had been. Every conversation they have, no matter how casual and polite, has always felt shadowed by an unspoken presence that keeps them from venturing any closer.
Maybe it’s all in Emma’s head. Probably. “I’d love to see her, too,” she says, her voice light. “It’s been too long.”
Mollified, Henry finally changes the subject to a book he’s been offered. “I told them I’d have to think about it,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s something I’m comfortable writing.”
“What’s the premise?” Emma checks her phone’s clock. Her break is nearly over, but she isn’t ready to hang up yet. Talking to Henry is always a breath of fresh air, a tiny bit of life breathed back into her veins. “Is this another memoir?”
Henry’s done three memoirs now, each one gobbled up by the populace as though they might be able to know Regina a little better through them. Emma has read them enough to wear down the binding of the book. Henry is good , even if his first attempt had crashed and burned. “No. It’s fiction. Another twisted fairytale.”
Ah . Those can be loaded, given their histories. He’d turned down Snow White twice, but he’d written an anthology of short stories that had been well-received. “Which fairytale are you twisting this time?”
A pause. “This editor wants a reinterpretation of Peter Pan,” Henry says carefully. “I’m not sure I want to write that.”
Emma says, “Oh.” She can’t think of much more to say than that at first.
“I won’t do it,” Henry says swiftly. “They’ll offer me something else. They always do. I don’t think–”
“Of course you should do Peter Pan,” Emma interrupts. She twists her fingers around a loose thread on her sweater. “You were in Neverland. You were kidnapped by Peter Pan. Technically, he’s kind of your great-grandfather.” Henry makes a strangled noise over the phone, and Emma bites the bullet. “I hope you’re not turning it down on my account.”
Henry sounds pained. “ Ma ,” he says. He’s taken to calling her that, a name that shouldn’t hurt but still does. There’s a distance between them, and she isn’t the Mom that she’d been for a few brief, complicated, perfect years.
Emma does what she can to try to bridge that gap between them, with near-daily calls and fervent support for his writing career. It’s never going to be enough. “I mean it,” she says. “It’s not my story. It’s yours. If you’re tempted to write…to portray Captain Hook in a positive light, I’m not going to be offended. That was years ago. I haven’t even thought of him in months.” She’s startled to discover that that’s true. Her ex-husband is a distant memory at this point, a bad dream that had marred a few of her happiest years. “Hey,” she says, a thought occurring to her. “Why don’t you write a female Captain Hook? Make her some kind of dashing villainess.”
She can almost hear Henry’s grin over the phone, the way he unspools from his tension. “Now that I can work with. You know I’m most comfortable writing about powerful women.”
“They do say to write what you know,” Emma jokes, and her heart seizes for a moment as she thinks of Regina again. Even when Regina isn’t on every sign around her, she still consumes Emma’s thoughts far too often.
Henry is silent for a moment. “Ma?” he says, and his voice is low. Emma knows what he’s going to ask before he speaks another word.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I just– I have to go. My break’s over.”
She hangs up the phone before he can prod a little more, and she takes a breath and heads back out to the office lobby.
It was always bound to go wrong between the two of them. Emma had known it, had understood it, and had still been utterly unprepared when it had fallen apart. They’d always been too similar, too prone to anger, like two fuses that had only needed to be lit. They’d been explosive when they’d first fought, and they’d only tempered it because of their shared love for their son.
Not each other. Never each other.
They’d kissed more than that one night. It had been a dance with danger, with something forbidden that they’d been unable to resist. Emma remembers their first kiss like sparks of fire, like something dangerous and soaked in resentment and hatred. The curse hadn’t even been broken, and it might have devolved into something more if they hadn’t been interrupted by Mary Margaret.
They hadn’t kissed again until Neverland, when it had been quiet and desperate one night, two mothers terrified for their son. It had been easy, kissing Regina. Comforting. They’d kissed again after saving Henry out of sheer exhilaration, and it had been…nice. Good. Like something had finally felt okay in this topsy-turvy world.
After that, after one last kiss as the billowing clouds of Pan’s curse had begun to consume the town, the kisses hadn’t stopped. They’d always been…tentative, light, like something that could be passed as familial instead of something more. Lips pressed to the corner of a mouth. Their foreheads together and their lips barely grazing each other’s. Regina had found some damned soulmate to date, and Emma had taken that as her cue to finally settle for the man who’d been chasing her.
They’d never quite stopped the kissing altogether when they’d been with other people. It had had the veneer of casualness, of a hello or goodbye like a kiss on the cheek (but they would start on the cheek and then linger just a little too long at the lips). They’d never done it publicly, though. Even as they’d justified them away, they’d known to never be seen.
When Emma thinks back to that time, it’s like scratching at an open wound. Every one of those kisses had been a flash of comfort and agony, a brief moment of respite in the middle of a crisis. Emma had lived for every one, had drawn more strength from them than from anything she could admit publicly. Regina’s eyes on hers, her smile warm, her lips brushing Emma’s…it had kept her going.
God , she’d loved Regina so much. There had been that brief time when she’d been the Dark One and had felt unburdened by their ordinary constraints, when she’d backed Regina against the door of her house and kissed her like she’d meant it. No, no , Regina had whispered against her lips. You won’t want this when you’re…
But she had. She always had, and she’d desperately taken what little bits of Regina that the other woman had offered, every single time. Even as she’d done what she could to appease Hook– even once he’d proposed – she’d still clung to Regina in secret moments, and then had smiled and pretended that they’d never happened at all. In public, they’d always keep a cautious distance, standing far enough apart that they wouldn’t forget propriety for habit.
On the day of her wedding, Emma had told Regina that she’d loved her. The kisses had been longer, more urgent, and Emma had whispered it against her lips when she’d been unable to hold it back. Give me a reason to stay, she’d thought and never said, just before she’d been about to walk down the aisle. Give me a reason to be yours instead .
And Regina had only said, Shh. It’s okay. Go marry him. Emma had borne the rejection with a smile that had stretched painfully across her face, and she’d exhaled. It would be okay. It had always been okay for them before then. Emma’s confession wouldn’t interfere with their relationship.
Except that the kisses had waned after that, as Emma had struggled to hold together a marriage in which she’d been in love with someone else. Hook had resented her for it, had sensed exactly what it had been that had kept her from him. They’d fought and they’d made up and Emma had spent more time silently apologizing for her feelings for Regina, had drifted apart from Regina in her quest to be who Hook had needed her to be. They’d been friends still, but there had been little more comfort, few more moments when it had been just them and their connection had been alive and strong.
Then Regina had left , left for a lifetime with Henry that Emma had missed while she’d been trying to mend her marriage, and she’d returned only to join together whole universes. Not for Emma. It had been the nail on the coffin of Emma’s relationship with Hook, which had been a relief to her. He’d been gone before Regina had been crowned queen.
There had been dancing that night, a traditional ball that had been covered by fascinated media circuits that were just beginning to open up to the idea of what these new universes had had to offer. Emma remembers dancing with Regina, remembers the warmth of wrapping Regina in her arms, remembers her glittering smile and the way her eyes had gleamed in the moonlight. She remembers a quiet moment, the two of them stealing away into the night, and she remembers kisses that had become more and more desperate as they’d pushed away too many years apart.
They’d finally undressed each other with trembling hands that hadn’t wanted to wait, had torn at intricate buttons and lacing in Regina’s master bedroom until they’d been finally together. Emma had lost herself in Regina for the first time, had come alive like never before, and she’d cried and laughed and been at peace for the first time in years.
And in the morning, they’d awakened lying together, legs tangled and Regina’s head tucked under Emma’s chin. There hadn’t been any awkwardness, just rueful acknowledgement that this had all been a long time coming, and then…
Then Regina had ruined it all with four simple words. I’ve always loved you , she’d admitted in a gentle, affectionate tone, and Emma had stared at her in betrayal and loss. Regina hadn’t seen, had expounded on years spent kissing Emma and desperately missing her, had pinpointed the moment that she’d fell in love with Emma to long before Neverland, and she’d gone on and on until Emma had stumbled off the bed and away from her.
Years . Years and years of wasted time, of Regina turning her down more than once, of Emma in a hopeless marriage because Regina hadn’t told her how she’d felt. Emma had begged Regina to give her a reason not to marry Hook. Emma had kissed her like she’d meant it and Regina had never once given her any indication that she’d felt the same way.
Regina had never wanted her until then , until she’d been free of commitments and not under the influence of the Dark One and easy to have. Emma had never been someone Regina would fight for, and Emma had only begun to realize it in that moment.
They’d fought. They’ve always been doomed to fight, had been prophesied to be at war. They’d argued about who’d been at fault– you only wanted me when you wanted to get away from him , Regina had said, and Emma had been livid– and their arguments had risen and risen until they’d reached a fatal crescendo.
Something about being in love that Emma had learned: you know what will hurt the other person intimately, what will destroy them to hear, and you don’t use it because of that very reason.
That morning, they’d destroyed each other, and they’d never been the same.
Emma had stayed in Storybrooke for one miserable year after that, had fought with Regina like they’d once fought during the curse, had made everyone around them uncomfortable and scrambling for a side. They’d been incapable of being alone together, had avoided spending time together. The friendship had broken, but not in one fell swoop. Instead, there had been a year of cracks, each more vicious than the next, until the thing that had been their friendship had been hacked to pieces, irreparable.
On the one-year anniversary of the night when they’d begun their spiral toward destruction, Emma had picked up and left town for the anonymity of New York. Her family had found her, of course– Regina must have helped, albeit reluctantly– and they hadn’t let her disappear forever. She visits her mother and father in the Enchanted Forest, sees Henry and Lucy on weekends, and even writes the occasional text to check in on Robin and Alice. She doesn’t go home, though it feels sometimes like it’s followed her here.
It’s been three years, and Emma Swan still can’t escape the specter of Regina Mills.
The days crawl by until Henry comes. One thing that Emma had searched for in a job had been predictability. She’d spent too many years waiting for the other shoe to drop that it’s a relief to live this kind of ordinary existence, free of excitement or terror. She makes enough money to afford a one-bedroom in Queens in a so-so neighborhood and to support her eating habits. She’s never going to make a splash here, never going to save anyone’s life, and she thinks that it’s probably for the best. She’s been just as good at making messes as she’s been at fixing them up over the years.
But without being the savior– without having people around to help– life has been strangely empty. She has little purpose when she isn’t with her family now, when she isn’t working toward something. There’s nothing to strive for in her everyday life, and as much as she insists that she wants it this way, she finds herself longing for the weekend when it’ll all be disrupted.
Henry doesn’t stay in her tiny apartment when he’s in town. Instead, he gets a hotel room in Manhattan for himself and Jacinda and drives Lucy to Queens to stay on Emma’s futon. “You put up my pictures!” Lucy says, looking up at them with obvious delight. Lucy has sent her paintings, landscapes of her childhood home in another realm and a detailed painting of the Seattle skyline. Emma had ordered the material to mount them as canvases, and they dot her little living room.
There is one of the two of them. Lucy insists that she can’t do faces so they’re sitting together, their backs to the viewer, staring out the window of this very apartment. “Of course I put them up,” Emma says, grinning at her. “They’re going to be worth millions someday. Original Lucy Millses.”
Lucy makes a face, too old now to be charmed by that. “Come on. I’m not even in the top tier in my art class.”
“ Billions ,” Emma amends, and Lucy throws herself onto the couch with a loud sigh and turns the TV to Netflix.
Henry and Jacinda watch them from the kitchen, Henry with warm eyes and Jacinda with an unreadable expression. “It means a lot to her that you put them up,” she murmurs to Emma once Henry has joined Lucy on the couch. Her son and granddaughter are poring over a takeout menu with critical eyes, and Emma has to drag her eyes away from them to respond to Jacinda.
Jacinda always chooses her words carefully around Emma, and Emma can sense it with every intake of breath. “They’re amazing. Of course I’d put them up,” she says, and she has to lighten her voice, free it of defensiveness. “I have extra material, if she wants to make a few more into canvases.”
“That’s very thoughtful. Usually we give–” Jacinda stumbles over her words. “We usually have it done by magic,” she says, her eyes flickering back to Henry and Lucy.
Emma refuses to acknowledge what she’d left unsaid. “She’s great,” she says instead. “They should write and illustrate a book together.”
“They’ve talked about it,” Jacinda says, and this time, her smile is undeniably real. “They want to collaborate on a children’s book of fairytales. Not like the one Henry grew up with.” She shakes her head affectionately. “Henry never really considers branching out from his usual.”
“That’s great. There are so many–” It’s Emma’s turn to stumble over her words as a familiar face appears on the television screen.
Lucy has perked up. “Hey, Realm-Jumping House Hunting ! I didn’t realize they were releasing a new season. Did you know Grandma was hosting an episode for that new apartment complex they’re building in the Land Without Color?”
Henry snorts. “It’s because no one’s going to live there without Mom shilling for it. The buyers want it prepped by Halloween because they think they might make some money off haunted houses, but there’s no way people will willingly choose to move there.” Onscreen, Regina is talking about the opportunities available in a realm where science and magic are enmeshed.
“Researchers have described their work here as a little bit like science fiction. This is cutting-edge technology.” She walks through a spacious but forbidding-looking home in shades of black and white. She’s the only thing in color on the screen, and she has more of a glow than usual because of it. “Don’t let the lack of hue here lead to a lack of you.” It’s a terrible catchphrase, and Regina laughs at it while Jacinda winces, white teeth gleaming as she rolls her eyes. “They made me say that,” Regina says, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she winks at the camera.
Emma can’t watch anymore. “I’m going to– I think it’ll probably take less time if I pick up the food,” she says abruptly, seizing the menu from Henry’s hands. He looks contrite, but Emma turns away before he can say something in front of Lucy. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she promises. “I just need some air.”
She makes it out the door and down the hall before the door opens behind her and Jacinda stands in the doorway. “Emma–” she starts, and then hesitates.
They stare at each other, frozen across the hallway, Jacinda’s gaze piercing and Emma’s defiant. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, not again. Henry used to joke about being the son of divorced parents, back when Emma had first left to New York, and it had always been followed by gentle prodding that had sounded as much like Jacinda as it had Henry.
Henry hasn’t picked a side in this war, nor has Lucy, and they feel like the only people in the world who still see her and not just Regina’s anger. Jacinda sees something else, and Emma dreads the day that she finds out what it is.
“I’ve got to go,” she says, jerking her thumb toward the elevator. “Tell Henry I fully expect a tip when I get back.”
She leaves Jacinda watching her in the hallway, her eyes searching and very, very sad.
At night, they go out walking through a nearby park before splitting up at the train station. There’s a massive graffiti portrait of Regina on the wall of a convenience store next to the subway entrance. Emma notices it because she can’t help it, because she can never help noticing the images of Regina that follow her everywhere. The graffiti artist had added a crown to hover over Regina’s head, and Henry blinks and says, “Huh. Is that supposed to be…?” His voice trails off.
“I don’t see any resemblance,” Emma says flatly. But Henry holds her tightly before he goes up the steps to the station as though he knows that she needs it.
Jacinda pecks her cheek and smiles awkwardly at her. “Have a good night with Lucy, okay?” Her eyes narrow as she wraps an arm around Lucy to tug her close. “Just be warned– she snores when she’s got a cold.”
“I do not!” Lucy protests. But she does, of course, and her light snores fill Emma’s room. They’re soothing, somehow. Emma’s missed sharing a room with someone. Back when Henry had been a kid, he’d slept in her room in the loft. He’d snored, too. It must not be genetic, though, because Emma doesn’t, Neal hadn’t, but Regina had also…
She bites her lip and stares at the ceiling, willing away thoughts of Regina. That last bitter year had left her scarred, unwilling to even consider working things out. If she never sees Regina again, she’ll be content.
Naturally, her dreams are of Regina, shining in the greys of the Land Without Color, and she wakes up frustrated and irritable. She tucks it away for Lucy, who is spending the day with her. “Have you ever been to the Hall of Science?” she asks. There have been a bevy of trips over the past few years, everywhere in the city that Emma can find that might entertain a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old.
“The place where they dissect cow eyeballs?” Lucy wrinkles her nose. “It was the first place you ever brought me here.” She brightens. “Can we go to the Met again?”
“Definitely.” Henry claims that it’s Emma’s influence that has made Lucy so enthusiastic about painting. Which is hilarious to Emma, who’s never drawn so much as a passable stick figure. But New York is full of art museums, and Lucy has been wandering to them from the start, Emma following bemusedly behind her. “Nothing you want to do without your boring adult parents around?”
Lucy smirks at her. “Spoken like a true Boring Adult.” Emma gasps in outrage. “My dad is doing that book signing today so Mom might wind up joining us anyway. They go on forever .” She rolls her eyes. “The worst part is listening to him complain about how much his hand hurts after. As if I don’t do seven hours of notes in school every day.”
“Wimp,” Emma says, nodding her head sagely. A thought occurs to her. “Hey, if we’re already in Manhattan, why don’t we drop by your dad? We can wait on line like real fans.”
Lucy brightens at the idea, then dims. “Can’t,” she says. “Not for this one.”
Emma’s brow furrows. “Why not?”
Lucy shrugs, unwilling to answer, and Emma waits. Finally, Lucy sighs. “Dad’s agent talked Grandma into doing this signing with him.”
“Oh.” Emma doesn’t know what Lucy knows about…whatever this is. They’ve always been careful to protect her from family conflicts, to make sure that she knows that she has a family that loves her and to keep her out of drama. But from the way that Lucy is peering at her from the corner of her eye, she suspects that Lucy must have a clue. “I didn’t know your grandmother was in New York.”
Lucy shrugs. “She doesn’t come here a lot. Dad says that Grandma and New York City don’t mix.” She peeks at Emma again, through her eyelashes. “But he really meant Grandma and you, didn’t he?”
Emma avoids her gaze. Lucy has her mother’s stare, penetrating and gentle, and she sees too much with those sharp eyes. “It’s complicated,” she says finally. “Your other grandmother and I are…well, some people just don’t mesh, you know?”
Lucy eyes her again. “Yeah. You give up your soul for lots of people you don’t mesh with?”
Emma is deeply flustered. “I didn’t– that wasn’t– that was for the town!” she splutters. She should have expected Henry’s kid to be as much of a smartass as he’d been. Lucy just smirks at her, wiggling a finger around her long hair. She’s getting taller, growing into herself, and Emma’s noticed a lot more boys looking her way today than she had on Lucy’s last visit. Jacinda has been talking about a quinceañera for Lucy for her fifteenth, another milestone toward adulthood.
Emma indulges herself by contemplating locking Lucy in a tower for a decade or two. Maybe there’s something to that, after all.
Lucy is also getting dangerously close to Emma’s height. Emma chooses not to reflect on that. “The point is,” she says, jabbing a finger in Lucy’s face. “I don’t really care what your other grandmother is up to. Sometimes there’s just going to be someone connected to other people in your life who just isn’t a priority to you. I’m glad that your grandma is good to you. I just…”
“She wasn’t good to you. That’s what Mom says,” Lucy says, her eyes intent on Emma. They’re nearly at the station, waiting for the next train into Manhattan. “Not when I’m supposed to hear, but you’d be surprised at what people say when your AirPods are in and disconnected.”
Emma blinks at her. “Your mother… Jacinda said that?” That comes as a surprise. “No,” she says quickly. “It’s not that she wasn’t…we just weren’t good to each other. It’s better that we don’t see each other anymore. We just hurt each other.”
“Hm.” The train comes and they squeeze in, Lucy seated at an end and Emma leaning against the pole next to her. There’s a girl on the train holding a backpack with a picture of Regina emblazoned upon it, and Emma closes her eyes for a moment.
When she opens them and turns back to Lucy, Lucy tilts her head and says, “The tabloids are wrong. Juliana is shadowing Grandma for a new movie where she’s going to play Queen Regina. They aren’t dating.” She considers, her eyes locked on Emma’s, and she adds, her voice grave, “Yet.”
“Lucy–” She’d been through this with Henry already, and she suspects that she’s going to have to sit Lucy down sometime soon and talk frankly to her. She doesn’t care who Regina’s dating or almost dating. That ship has long since sailed, and Lucy needs to understand that.
But not today. Not one of Emma’s precious few days with her family. “Good for her,” Emma says instead, and she turns to stare at the little girl’s backpack again, this time in defiance.
Henry leaves on Sunday morning, and Emma returns to the dull reality of a life she’d chosen. Morning: the train into the city, Starbucks and a muffin, a walk to the office building where she works. Greeting the suited men and women who enter and pretending to remember their names until they sign in. A lunch break spent calling Henry or Snow and chatting for a few minutes before she heads back in. The walk home after dark, shivering in the night air and watching every man who walks past her with wary eyes.
Lucy emails her a picture of her newest painting. She’s tried doing a self-portrait, and it’s not perfect but it captures a certain light in Lucy’s eye. Snow somehow manages to get a package delivered from the Enchanted Forest to Queens. It’s packed with food and some knitting (Snow is trying unsuccessfully to pick up a hobby) and a little wooden figure waving a sword on a horse (Snow’s next attempt at a hobby, much better than the first). There’s nothing in Snow’s package that she needs, but it’s a quiet reminder that Emma is cared for, and Emma blinks back tears and tries the chocolate chip cookies.
There are also a few apple turnovers, and Emma knows at once that they’re Regina’s recipe, and that Snow can’t help but meddle sometimes.
She’s never understood how it could go so badly between them. “Regina tried to kill me, and look at us now!” she’d say cheerily after a particularly vicious fight. “You two have been friends for a lot longer than you’ve been sniping at each other.”
Snow knows about that night after the coronation. They all know: Snow, Henry, David, Jacinda, half of the people who’d been there. Emma and Regina hadn’t been subtle, in the way that two people who are sure of each other had been. But none of their observers grasp why it had still gone wrong, and Emma isn’t volunteering that information.
When she thinks about it for too long, the emotions rise up and clog in her throat. There had been so much wasted time. So many years spent just believing that Regina hadn’t had any…but instead, Regina, who’d loved so hard once that it had destroyed an entire realm, just hadn’t loved Emma enough to try.
She shakes her head, dismissing that pesky grief that wells up. It’s absurd to dwell on what’s long over, what’s been replaced long ago with anger and bitterness. Storybrooke feels more like a movie she’d watched once and can’t quite remember than a real chapter of her life.
In defiance, she grabs an apple turnover and brings it on the train with her that morning. She won’t be leashed to the past, to people she’d left behind for a reason. She won’t let the past consume her like it used to when she’d been a kid. She can’t.
She finishes the turnover on the train, and stops at the Starbucks across from the train station to grab her usual. Her cup is marked Edna , and she sighs and takes it before she heads down Seventh Avenue toward her workplace.
Up ahead, there’s a bit of a commotion, a camera crew and a man with a loud voice walking up to people. Emma can’t quite make out what he’s saying, but she recognizes him. He’s got some kind of show where he wanders the city, sometimes with celebrities, and asks passersby related questions.
She considers turning at the corner and avoiding him, but she’s already running late, and she can ignore a stranger in New York like the best of them. She continues down the street, eyes focused straight ahead and sending off waves of stay-away as she moves.
The show host doesn’t sense it or doesn’t care, because he finishes his interrogation of the man in front of Emma and makes a beeline for her. “Edna!” he says, reading the name off her cup. “Edna, are you familiar with the queen of all realms?” Emma gapes at him, startled enough by the question that she forgets to ignore him.
The host bounces on his feet and seizes the arm of a woman whom Emma hadn’t noticed before. “Edna, for one dollar, would you tell Her Majesty that this bow tie makes her look beautiful?”
Oh. Of all the idiotic, impossible coincidences…it can’t be. Emma’s mouth goes dry, and she stares in disbelief at the woman that the host has pulled forward. The woman is laughing at the host, rolling her eyes, and she is in fact wearing an enormous bow tie with multicolored polka dots at the top of her immaculately tailored suit. The host turns back to Emma. “Well? She’s beautiful, she’s powerful, she could set you on fire with her mind. Tell her that this lovely bow tie brings out the color of her eyes. Tell her that she’s a vision in circus clown yellow. A dollar is on the line!”
Emma can’t move, can’t speak, can’t think to do anything but stare at the woman in question. And Regina finally turns from the host to look at his latest victim, and she starts so violently that she elbows the host in the gut. “Ow!” he says. “She’s also got a pretty knobbly elbow. You can tell her about that, too.”
Emma ignores him. It had been easier than expected until now, moving on from Regina. Sure, Regina had been plastered all over New York City, but it had also just been images, pictures and videos and never the real thing. Regina playing an artificial celebrity is someone Emma can keep her distance from. Regina, the real deal, is something else entirely.
Regina opens her mouth, then shuts it, a wave of pain crossing her face. Emma hurts to have put it there, even as she hurts to see Regina at all. The host says, “Okay, we don’t have all day, moving on! Let’s go!” He starts toward the next person eyeing him from the other end of the sidewalk, then hesitates when Regina doesn’t move.
Emma swallows. Regina watches her, eyes soft and her stature exactly as small as that damned cashier had described her the other day. Emma doesn’t know how she’d forgotten that about Regina. But then, she’d let herself forget plenty. Regina had been built up to be larger than life in her mind, had been all about the bitterness instead of all the magic that had come before.
She clears her throat, and she says, her voice strangled, “That bow tie makes you look beautiful.” It emerges soft, pained, and deeply heartfelt. Regina could wear a trash can on her head and still look beautiful.
Regina stands still, frozen in place, and even the host is beginning to look uncertain. “Ms. Mills?” he prompts. People are taking notice, are snapping pictures, and Emma still can’t think to take shelter from this sudden attention.
Regina whispers, “Emma?”
The sound of her name from Regina’s lips jolts Emma back to reality. She stumbles back a few steps and then turns on her heel and runs, away from the cameras and away from the street and far, far away from Regina Mills.