A short post-ep for "The Miller's Daughter" because I'm a sucker for a happy ending. I don't own OUAT or this is what would have happened.

She should rip the woman's heart out. It is what she's wanted to do since she'd sat on Mr. Gold's floor clutching her mother's lifeless body and her destroyed hope of having something more. She's wanted to watch Snow White's face contort in pain as she squeezes the life out of her heart. But she is tired of fighting, tired of death, a weariness she sees reflected in Snow's own eyes and so, somehow, they are instead sat together on the sofa and sipping hot chocolate.

"Why didn't you kill me earlier?" Snow breaks the silence with a question Regina had hoped she wouldn't ask and she simply glares at her in response.

"It is not to late for me to kill you if that's what you would like."

Snow shakes her head. "No, that's not what I meant. You've hated me for nearly fifty years and tried so hard to kill me for a long time but why did you wait so long? We lived together in the castle for over a decade and I was just a child. You know that castle as well as I do. How easy it would be for a little girl to have an accident on those steep stairs, to be trampled by a spooked horse escaped from the stables. There are a thousand ways you could have killed me and yet you didn't. You put on an impressive façade, no one would ever have suspected you had anything to do with it. Why didn't you kill me?"

This was even worse than the question Regina had thought she was asking. Silence falls between them for a long moment before Regina replies. "You killed my mother."

"That's not..."

"No," Regina interrupts. "You've said your piece, now you listen to me." She took a deep breath before continuing. "You killed my mother. As good and pure and innocent as you were always supposed to be, you killed her. But it was not something that developed in a moment, was it? That urge, the hatred that could drive you to do such an unspeakable evil. That developed over time. You lost a mother, a father, a daughter's childhood, Johanna. Evil is not born, it's made Snow White. And it is not made in an instant. It is a path of darkness walked by the most broken souls and once you have set yourself down it, it is very hard to turn back."

"Broken souls," Snow echoes softly. "Like you and I."

"I don't think we can count ourselves in the same boat."

"I think we can," Snow insists. "Now more than ever. I will not pretend to approve of what you did to me, but I understand it. Murder is not me and whatever your mother did I will bear the guilt on my heart forever, but I understand now how loss and pain can drive you to do terrible things." Regina regards Snow with new eyes for a moment, as the realises the truth that she has spoken.

"Perhaps," she muses quietly. "Perhaps we are not so different, you and I."

Snow nods. "I don't think that we are. We were not always like this. The woman who saved me that day, she was good, more so that I will ever be. I was only good, only tried to be good, because of my mother, because I knew that's what she wanted of me. You were good despite your mother's attempts to make you ruthless and uncaring." This is the last thing Regina had expected to hear. The Evil Queen, more good than Snow White? A preposterous notion. But there is a sincerity in Snow's voice that even Regina can't doubt.

"I am not good anymore," she whispers softly. Snow shakes her head.

"No, but neither am I. We both allowed our grief to cloud our hearts and let us make the wrong choices. I will not insult you by begging your forgiveness for killing your mother, just as I do not yet forgive you for taking Emma from me but the acts of evil that we both have done do not need to define us. We do not have to let them define us. Maybe there is a way that we can be good again. "

"That is easy for you to say. No-one thinks that you're evil, they think that you're a hero."

"I don't think I'm a hero. I didn't kill Cora in the midst of battle, I murdered her, and I did it in the cruellest way imaginable. I am sorry for that."

"Be that as it may, you still have so many people who love you. I have no one left. What do I have to live for ? What do I have to be good for?"

"Henry."

"He hates me," Regina argues bitterly.

"No he doesn't."

"And how can you possibly know that?"

"Because I don't hate you," Snow exclaims. "Despite all that you have done I have never been able to hate you because I remember. I remember a time before all of this, a time when, pretending or not, you looked after me, you raised me. I remember when you were my mother, a better step-mother than I could ever have wished for, and I loved you more than anything else. I see that same love in Henry's eyes. I know you hated me when I was a child but you love Henry, I know you do. So even though my love wasn't enough, maybe Henry's can be. Maybe Henry's love for you can pull you back. Surely he is something to be good for?"

Love. Love feels like a foreign concept to Regina now. She almost feels as though, in putting that heart back into her mother's chest, she has ripped out her own. And yet, she can still feel it beating inside of her and, at the mention of Henry, she feels it swell. She still has her heart and she still loves her son.

"Henry, she says slowly. "Is something to be great for."

Snow smiles at her, tears in her eyes, and Regina is pulled back through many memories. The smile is one that she recognises from when Henry was young, he got a lot from his mother and a lot from his grandmother, but the memories of that smile go further back than that. It is a smile so full of love and hope and to see it again on the face of this woman, who is all grown up but still in so many ways the little girl that Regina rescued from a runaway horse so many years ago, drags back memories that Regina had thought she had long since banished from her mind. Memories from the early days in castle, before her heart had been so consumed by darkness, when she had been, if not quite happy, content. When she had played Snow's favourite childhood games and they had smiled together and sometimes Regina had even managed to forget that the girl was the cause of her misery.

"You would have been enough."

Her mother's words echo in her her mind and, looking at Snow, she begins to wonder. She had always wanted a child. Had always been so determined to be a far better mother than her's had been. Could this child have been enough?

"I didn't hate you," Regina says finally. "That is why I didn't kill you when you were a child. I had only just begun down the path to darkness, towards what I became. I could have turned back. I should have turned back. I have had little love in my life but from the moment I rescued you from that horse you began to warm my heart and I loved you. Your love should have been enough. I didn't physically have no heart, not like my mother, but after Daniel died I clouded it. I tried to refuse to love anything or anyone because to love, to use my heart, only reminded me of how broken it was. But I did love you. There were times when I forgot to check myself, when I allowed my heart to open and I loved you and, for a moment, it was good. Maybe if I had allowed those moments to happen more," Regina sighs. "I should not have allowed my grief to cloud my heart in such darkness. I am sorry."

Snow stares at Regina in shock. She had not been entirely sure what to expect when she had arrived on the Queen's doorstep but an admission of her love and an apology had been the furthest thing from her mind. Eventually she nods, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

"I am sorry too, for Daniel, for your mother, for everything."

Regina nods back, tears beginning to fill her own eyes. Silence hung in the air between them for a long while and Snow played nervously with the ends of her scarf as she desperately tried to gather the courage to ask her next question.

"When did you stop?" she eventually asks quietly and Regina looks at her in confusion. "When did you stop loving me?" Snow clarifies, looking away from her step-mother.

Regina looks down as she considers the question. Taking a few steps forwards to stand in front of Snow, she takes her chin in her hand and turns her step-daughter's face to look at her as she remembered doing when Snow was a child. "I didn't," she finally tells her. "I have never stopped loving you, not really. I still love you. It's something that I've tried to suppress, to forget, and I've been alarmingly successful but there is still a place in my heart where I can't help but love you. You were a very sweet child, perhaps too naïve and sheltered, but sweet nonetheless, and I always wanted a child. Perhaps, under different circumstances, I could have been a better mother."

Snow regards her for a long moment before sighing. "You were a good mother Regina."

Regina looks at her step-daughter incredulously and Snow smiles. "Okay, so sending me off into the forest to be murdered notwithstanding, you were a good mother. Do you remember when I was sick when I was ten?"

Regina nods slowly, confused by the question.

"My mother loved me very much, but when I was sick she would come and see me from time to time but other than that she would let the servants tend to me. She was worried about getting sick herself, you see, and then getting my father sick and it would be very bad for the kingdom to have the entire royal family in bed and unwell. But you didn't leave with the servants. You could have. You could have done so easily but instead you sat by my bed all day and all night and fed me soup and soothed my fever with cool cloths and held my hair back when I was sick. I remember thinking that I must be the luckiest girl in the world to have been blessed with such a wonderful step-mother. Such a wonderful mother." She is quiet for a moment, thinking over the bitter-sweet memory, before she continues. "And then of course I got you sick."

Regina smiles as she remembers. "And you were still sick yourself and you had no idea what you were doing but you tried to bring my fever down like I had done for you. Only the cloths you used were ice cold and far too wet."

Snow laughs aloud at this. "I shall never forget the look on your face when I slapped that cloth on your forehead."

Regina laughs with her and shakes her head. "I shall never forget how thoroughly you managed to soak everything. We had to move to a different room you made the bed so damp."

It feels strange to them both to be sharing a laugh together after so many years but, at the same time, it feels so very right.

"It worked though, once I showed you how to squeeze the cloths out properly. You brought my fever right down."

"We healed each other," Snow agrees.

Regina nods. "Perhaps we can do that again," she says quietly after a long moment of silence. "I do not expect you to forgive me," she adds, almost as an afterthought.

"Nor I you. But I don't think we need to forgive each other, not yet, We only need to be able to move on and try to make the future better. We've been fighting for so long and I really don't want to fight anymore."

"I don't want to fight with you anymore either. All of this, it was supposed to be good, supposed to make me happy. I thought that hurting you would bring me happiness but it has only ever seemed to hurt me more."

"I thought that killing Cora would bring me happiness but. . .well, I don't think murder or revenge really work that way."

Regina shook her head slowly, deep in thought. "No, I don't suppose they do."

Silence falls between them again but it is far more comfortable than the silence has been before. After a minute Snow breaks it.

"Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow?"

"Dinner? With you and Emma and David? "

"And Henry," Snow reminds her.

"And Henry," Regina agrees. "But Emma and David hate me. They'll try to kill me if I put one foot inside that apartment."

"I won't say that they don't hate you, but they won't try to kill you. Emma was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt once before and she'll do it again, if only for Henry's sake. And David. . . well, David will do as I tell him."

Regina grins slightly at this. "Somehow I don't doubt that that's true."

"So will you come?"

As her step-daughter turns to her with wide, hopeful eyes, Regina remembers all the times that Snow would beg her to come to her tea parties as a child and Regina finds herself as incapable of rejecting her invitation now as she was then. Although, she's fairly sure that Snow's dolls and teddies made better company than David and Emma were going to.

"Okay, I'll come."

Snow smiles and it's a beautiful smile that's full of so much hope and happiness that Regina can't help but return it. "Great! About 7?"

"About 7," Regina echoes with a nod, still not entirely sure that it's the best idea. But she wants to feel good again, she wants to be happy and be loved and with her mother gone her options for people to love are running low. All that remains, is her son and, maybe now, despite all that has passed between them, the woman who is still, in her heart, her daughter. Perhaps, after all this time and all of this pain, they can finally be enough for her and she enough for them.