The Pay-off - Chapter 5 - seriousfic - Once Upon a Time (TV) [Archive of Our Own] (Patreon)

http://archiveofourown.org/works/3977032/chapters/9178834

Emma went to sleep with her arm around Regina. They weren’t cuddling, but sleeping next to each other. Emma’s arm stretched out uncomfortably over Regina’s body. Regina fell asleep seemingly ignoring it, but Emma kept holding it out, kept wanting to move closer, hold Regina closer, more securely. She didn’t. Always a minute later, a minute…

She woke up as her arm dropped to the ground. It was early morning, dawn, and Regina had just rolled out from under her arm.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Regina whispered so Henry wouldn’t join them in consciousness. “But I’m glad you’re up. I’m going to go wash before we leave. No need to worry.”

“Kiss?” Emma asked suddenly, feeling like a puppy barking when it saw its owner had food he wasn’t sharing.

Regina smiled unevenly. Leaned in, her lips glancing off Emma’s. Like flint being struck. No sparks. And like she’d hit the end of a bungee cord, Regina was instantly ricocheting back, putting a cordial distance between them. “Just fun, right?”

“Yeah,” Emma agreed. “Might as well while we’re young.”

“Emma? Don’t follow me.”

Emma nodded. Privacy. It was underrated.

Regina left, walking around the steep, wood-furred shore of the ponds. It was full of jagged projections of rock into the body of water, providing plenty of coves for Regina to bathe in peace. Emma sat up, further sleep impossible. She rotated her Regina-arm out of its knotted stiffness, looked out in the direction Regina had gone, then tended to the fire. Well, more like poked the cold ashes with a stick. No sparks there either. Just the husks of the woods they’d gathered, collapsing into grit and gray when she poked them.

Henry yawned coming awake, sounding like Emma felt, contorting his so-fragile body to rip the kinks out of his bones. Not used to sleeping on stiff ground instead of soft bed. Not like Emma. Not like this Regina.

Emma promised herself she’d get him home before he got used to this nightmare.

“Hey,” he called out to Emma, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Where’s Mom?”

“Taking a bath,” Emma said, now drawing idly in the inch-deep ash with her stick. “Which you should be doing, as soon as she’s done. You’re gonna get potatoes in your ears at this rate.”

His little brow did its impression of a furrow. “Your parenting is so weird.”

“What do you expect, I learned it from like ninety foster homes? Awww, just go for a swim. It’ll count.”

Henry cracked his neck until Emma thought it would fall off. “Has Regina been gone long?”

“I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to this stuff.”

“I mean, is she going to be back soon?”

“Maybe! Probably. I don’t know. You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

Getting up, with the furs that had blanketed now serving as a shawl, Henry walked to sit down on the log opposite the one Emma sat on. In the ashes between them, Emma had drawn a couple smiley faces, a couple frowny faces, a few faces with no lips whatsoever.

“Okay, what’s going on with you two?” Henry asked.

“Standard-issue weirdness, kid. It’s not like I was ever really invited over to binge-watch Netflix.” Now there was a scary thought. Regina wanting her to stretch out on the couch, catch up on Pretty Little Liars—maybe her sitting all prim on one side of the couch while Emma laid across two cushions. Regina rubbing her ankle just underneath the cuff of her jeans, testing how high she could—

Emma stamped a dog right between the eyes of one of the little cartoon faces she’d made in the ash. Henry was talking again. “First, there was the standard-issue weirdness. She treated you exactly like she treated me. Then it was like she was making fun of you. You know, busting your balls.”

“My balls?” Emma asked dubiously.

“You know what I mean. And that’s kinda… standard-issue weirdness, yeah. But then, you started being real friendly, and joking around with each other, and acting all… happy. And now you’re acting really guilty for some reason.”

Emma needed to eat something. She needed a bearclaw, which meant either this reality needed to get on inventing donuts or she needed to eighty-six that fucking wedding.

She settled on eating an apple instead. Oh, Regina would fill her pack with those. “What could I possibly feel guilty about? It’s not like I’m friends with this Regina or anything. Lily was like my best friend and I shot her with a cannon because this her was a bitch. It just doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but getting home.”

Henry just looked at her. If he’d inherited her superpower, this would be a really bad time for it to manifest. “Are you two having sex?”

Emma swallowed enough apple to keep a doctor away for a good ten hours. “Whoa! Whoa! I don’t even know what—what’s sex? Is that a thing? That doesn’t sound like a thing, I think you’ve gotten hoaxed by some internet hoaxing. Did you check Snopes about this sex-whatever-it-is?”

“Mom. C’mon. I’m literally as tall as you. I know what sex is.”

Now Emma remembered. Back when Regina had given her and the kid brand spanking new memories of being mother and son, she’d helpfully included sex ed, sparing Emma actually having to do it when Henry had just downloaded memories of a strangely polite and well-informed Emma giving him the lowdown. Emma guessed that even if Regina was going to another dimension, she didn’t want Henry anywhere near Teen Mom.

“Still, not an appropriate question.”

“Alright. Have you and Regina been having special grown-up hugs?”

Teenagers. She could no longer blame her parents for sticking her in another dimension until she turned thirty.

Emma threw up her hands. “Why is this suddenly such a big deal? I didn’t get the third degree when I kissed Hook! It’s just I was in prison, and your mom’s hot, and… I don’t know! I guess when we’re not trying to kill each other, I like kissing her! Pile that onto all the other inexplicable weirdness in my life!”

Henry was just openly staring at her. “But you’re in love with Hook. And she’s in love with Robin.”

“Yeah,” Emma said, realizing at some point she’d jumped to her feet. Which were now in the middle of her little dead-fire mosaic. She sat back down. “Yeah. Ain’t we just?”

“Aren’t you?”

“That’s what I just said!”

“No, you said—“

“Stop right there, because I know you’re not correcting my grammar. So you must be…” Emma waved her hands around her head. “You must be, for some inexplicable reason, asking me if I’m in love with your mom. Regina Mills.”

“It makes sense.”

And Emma’s hands came back down. “Really? Me and Regina? She’s tried to kill me. With baked goods. Even if we sorta… kinda… have this connection… she’s bad. She’s a very bad girl—“

“I don’t need to hear this,” Henry said suddenly.

“Not what I meant. And eww. I mean, she’s always going to be kinda ruthless. And I’m possibly literally incapable of being immoral. We’re like Catwoman and Batman.”

“Catwoman and Batman—“

“Yeah, special grown-up hug, bad analogy.” Emma shook her head. The kid was giving her a headache, which was usually a very unpleasant precursor to her being right. “Okay, so in some dumb, opposites attract sorta way, there is—something—of a romanic… dumbness. I don’t know. I have bad taste in men. Why should women be any different?”

“I always sorta thought that you and my mom would get along really well if it weren’t for how I came in-between you. And then all that bad blood you had. If you just met as strangers, you’d see how much you have in common. And now you kinda have.”

Emma groaned. Headache not going away. “Like I said. Romantic dumbness. But I’m with Hook and she’s with Robin…”

“It’s not like you’re married or anything.”

Headache setting up permanent residence in Emma’s skull. “Whose side are you on here, kid?”

“My mom really hasn’t spent that much time with Robin. And sure, you’ve been spending a lot of time with Killian lately, but not nearly as much time as you’ve spent with Regina.”

“Not exactly the same thing.”

“How long did it take you to kiss Regina? This Regina?”

Emma’s jaw dropped. “First off, it is super inappropriate to be asking about special adult kisses of anyone, let alone your co-moms…”

Henry blinked. “What’s a special adult kiss?”

Emma blinked. “Oh. You mean like… a kiss-kiss… yeah… that figures.” She looked away. “Although you should probably learn about a special adult kiss when you start dating. I wish my high school boyfriend had known about ‘em…”

Henry’s shoulders peaked. “How long?”

“Okay, pretty darn fast,” Emma confessed. “But there were extenuating circumstances!”

“There were extenuating circumstances in the real world too. Where you won’t kiss her.”

Emma’s head drifted back. Maybe if she screamed, it would release the pressure. “Hook is my guy, okay? We’re in the damn book!”

“So is all this!” Henry insisted, throwing his arms out to his sides in a very all-encompassing gesture for such a non-tall. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the book was written by a crazy person. Who cares what’s in it? It has every bad thing Mom ever thought about, but not anything about Grandpa and Grandma kidnapping a baby. It’s just… bad writing. You know what comic books do with bad writing?”

“Turn it into a Superman movie?” Emma quipped. Small relief in the sea of headache.

“They ignore it. And they tell new stories.”

Emma got up. She thought she saw what it was. Maybe she wasn’t Mrs. Sensitivity, but yeah, she got it. Henry had his little nuclear family—Regina and Emma and Mary-Margaret and David—all almost under one roof. And now it was breaking up, like a crazy divorce. The Charmings going with Neal, Emma with Hook, Regina with Robin. Regina’s new family even had another kid, a baby on the way! Henry wanted his makeshift, MacGyver family to stay together and Emma’s little flirtation with Regina had put all the ammunition he needed right in his gun.

She sat down beside him. “Okay. So say I don’t love Hook. And things don’t work out between Regina and Robin either. That still doesn’t mean we’re in love. Well, no—we are. Just not with each other. With you.”

Henry groaned. “Can you please not patronize me? I’m really worried.”

“Worried?”

“That you won’t be happy. You two care so much about each other’s happiness, you just don’t see it’s you. Both of you. Did you even notice how happy you were when you were together? And now that you’re apart, aren’t you miserable?”

Maybe if she shaved her head, she would stop getting these urges to tear her hair out. “Alright, you want me to say it? Fine. If—huge, like, skywriting IF—there were no other considerations, no Storybrooke, no magic, no nothing… if I was browsing Tindr and I saw Regina, I would swipe that. I’d go on dates with her and I’d text her jokes and—“ The sex would be goddamn amazing, kid, you have no idea how many orgasms a woman can actually have. “And we’d get a cat. But she’s seeing someone! I’m seeing someone! And literally the fate of the world—well, this crappy, internally inconsistent world—depends on her seeing that someone! So it really doesn’t matter how much I want to hug and kiss her, because it’s not going to happen.”

“And you think that’s fair to her? Not letting her know how you feel?”

“I don’t feel…” Emma paused. She really regretted giving her parents the Riot Act over lying to her. It left her precious little room to bullshit Henry. “I don’t know how I feel. It’s like you’re asking me if I want to marry her! Your mom, by the way. Which is weird, you’re wingmanning for your mom right now. Weirdo.”

“I don’t know about marriage, just if you want to—eventually—get a cat.”

Emma sighed. Hated this. Hated thinking about nice, normal dates and… oh God… maybe coming home and asking the babysitter if Henry had been good, or finding him passed out over all the homework he’d been doing, Regina giving Emma a little look… adoring and proud and regretting, a little, that Henry had only had one of his parents for so long, he was so Regina it hurt sometimes, and she wanted him to be Emma’s too, to have fun, to crack a smile, to be a kid.

“I want to hold her,” Emma said, because at least that was real. There was some possible reality where that could happen. “And I want her to be happy and I want her to be safe. And if I bring back the other her, she’ll have you. She’ll be happy. And she’ll have magic, so she’ll be safe. And everyone else will be happy, and you’ll be happy—“

“And what about you? And Hook?”

Emma’s heart should not have fallen at the thought. But after the thing with Regina—God, she didn’t even want to name it—this suspicious, straining, trying work she had with Hook seemed pathetic. She had to convince herself, and let him convince her, that it was more than just the handsomeness of his appearance and the desperation of his attraction to her, the hunger that made her too slow to say no.

Regina was effortless in comparison. Emma had to fight for it, but God, she loved fighting for it. She loved letting Regina in. She loved being let in.

Henry read her face. “You just have to tell her how you feel. She feels the same way. I think she has for a really long time.”

Emma shook her head. Her mind was a house of cards and the motion brought it all down. Migraine city. “Don’t give me the ‘be a good person’ spiel. I’m being a great person. I’m giving up what I want for the greater good! That’s noble!”

“Is it easy?”

“No, it’s not—“

“Is it easier than telling her how you feel? Being honest? Being brave?”

Emma paused. “Shut up, you’re like twelve.”

“I just want you to be okay again. Like you were yesterday. You just really seemed like you then.”

Screaming and tearing out her hair had ceased to be tempting options. Now Emma just wanted to lie down on the ground and maybe wait for a bear to eat her.

“What happens after we stop the wedding?” she asked.

Henry shrugged. “Everything goes back to normal.”

“I really could use something more specific than ‘normal’. Will she remember? What if she doesn’t remember, what if I’m the only one who—it’ll be like losing her. And every time she gets angry with me, I’ll know that… Jesus, kid, what makes you think I’ve even in love with her?”

Henry shrugged again. A little, childish gesture. “Because you’re so scared of it.”

“I’m not scared.”

“It’s okay. Everyone’s scared of new things. They can really suck. But sometimes, they’re really great. And that’s why it’s important to be brave.”

“Please tell me I didn’t teach you that,” Emma begged.

“It was on Mary-Margaret’s Platitude A Day Calendar.”

“Oh thank God.”

***

Emma really couldn’t picture Regina bathing in a lake—well, she could, but technically that would’ve counted as frolicking. However, walking around the shoreline a bit, she spotted the clothes Regina had neatly hung up on a tree branch overlooking the water. Yup. That was how Regina would bathe in a lake.

Emma looked out at the water and there Regina was, about twenty feet from shore, waist-deep in the water, her arms hugged around her chest so her fingers gripped her shoulders. Her head was bowed and even from behind, Emma could see the way her shoulder shuffled. She was sobbing.

Oh, hell.

“Regina!” Emma called, wading out after her. The water instantly plastered her trousers to her legs like the world’s thickest plastic bag, making her wish she’d disrobed a little before going for a swim, but that would probably have sent the wrong message.

Regina barely acknowledged her cry, turning her head slightly, but resolutely keeping her back turned to Emma, even as the blonde high-legged through the water and murk to reach her, to move a delicate hand toward her, to rest it in the choppy water instead.

“Regina,” Emma said again.

There was something undeniably impressive about Regina looking away from her, pale back subtly muscled, traced with scars, spine held straight, pride in the cast of her head and the set of her jaw. Then she sniffled.

“Can I not even cry?” Regina asked, and somewhat uncharitably Emma thought that this Regina had a leg up on processing emotions over the other one. It couldn’t be for lack of practice… maybe Emma just really had hurt her that deep.

“Admittedly, I don’t want you to.” Emma reached out again, ridiculously relieved when Regina didn’t shy away from her touch, her hand squeezing hard on Regina’s shoulder. “Look, there’s something you should know about me: I’m an idiot.”

Regina made a tsking noise. Emma forced herself on, reminding herself that Regina was still letting her touch her.

“I thought it would be easier if what we had wasn’t that big a deal, because maybe it won’t last. And I guess… maybe it won’t. But it wasn’t just fun to me. It was affection and warmth and love and I needed that. I still do. And maybe you need that too.”

“So now you’re in love with me.” Regina turned around, her arms across her chest not exactly hiding her nudity—more like protecting herself.

Emma put both her hands on Regina’s shoulders. “Your son just spent like half an hour lecturing me and I guess he must get the brains from you. It’s not like lying to people for their own good and hiding your feelings has ever really worked out well for me.”

Regina caught the guilt in Emma’s eyes. “But we’re still going to the church.”

“Yes,” Emma agreed, hating herself for how Regina winced, without surprise, like she’d been expecting the hit. “Because it’s the right thing to do and if it were me who’d forgotten, and you were still you, you’d be telling me the exact same thing.”

“So what does it matter? How you feel? How I feel? It doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything!” Emma argued. “I am not giving you up to Robin and I’m not going back to Hook. I want to be with you, whether it’s for three days or three decades. I love you.”

Emma froze, looking at Regina. The slow, questing look in Regina’s eyes as she delved into Emma’s expression for any insincerity, any sign of a joke, a lie, a manipulation. All she found was more and more truth, Emma beaming it at her, how much she cared for her, how much she wanted her, how much she loved her. All Regina had to do was look for it. All Emma had to do was not hide.

The water swirled, went white as Regina surged forward, body pressed against Emma’s, arms pulling her tight as if to make up for all the times she’d let go, lips finding Emma’s and they were made to kiss, to moan as Regina grabbed Emma by her ponytail and pulled her down to better have her mouth. The water sloshed as Regina leapt partially out of it, legs wrapping around Emma’s body, her weight pulling Emma deeper in, the pond rising around them to cushion and support their bodies.

And then it stopped being so urgent. The kiss lingered, changing, slowing, becoming Regina being comforted by the simple presence of Emma in her arms and against her flesh. It broke. Regina rested her forehead against Emma’s, trying to calm her racing heartbeat. Her whole body was in a state of frenzy, like she was being pursued by the Queen’s whole army with two arrows in her already, but she was calm, she was serene, she had Emma.

Emma relaxed too, twirling Regina in her arms while she giggled at the cliché—yeah, why not?—then pausing to wipe Regina’s tears away. Regina splashed her. Emma feigned dropping her into the drink. They kissed again. Slower. Not trying to find anything out, but just enjoying what was there. Regina didn’t grope Emma (not that Emma would’ve minded), but held her tight. Rested her chin on Emma’s shoulder as Emma kissed her neck.

Emma knew what she was thinking. Three days of this. It would never be enough, could never be enough. But it was so much more than she ever thought she would have.

“Emma,” Regina said gently.

“You better not be asking me to put you down.”

“No. I was just wondering—“ Regina jerked her head to the side. “What’s with the big circle of color?”

Emma looked to one side, then the other. On her left, there was a half-circle of magical energy washing over the land. On her right, another half-circle going in the opposite direction. There was one behind Regina too, and Emma guessed Regina had seen it looking behind her.

True Love’s Kiss. Wait, did that mean Emma could’ve ended this at any time just by kissing Henry’s cheek?

I am such an idiot, Emma thought, as the world broke up from the outside in.

She hung onto Regina until the very end.