Note: I originally wrote this piece several years ago for a Swan Queen Week challenge, but tapered off when I realized how long it was shaping up to be (and how long it took me to get to the actual meat of the challenge). It's nominally Swan Queen, even though I stopped before I got to any good stuff. I'm actually pretty fond of this one, even though it's a bit of a fossil, so I figured I'd put it up!
Emma had been to the Storybrooke Museum of Natural History once before, during Operation Cobra. Henry had reassured her it was one place his mom would never look for them, and even if Regina's spidey senses tingled and she came charging in to wreck their stolen hours, she couldn't possibly object: the museum was educational.
There were a whole bunch of displays of natural wildlife, stuffed deer, fish on plaques, wall signs talking about something something pollution in the ocean something - all a lot of pretty dull stuff. There was an exotic animals section that showed animals from different ecosystems around the world, but the taxidermied dolphin looked like a beat-up, defeated old doll from someone's attic, and the display of unusual birds was losing its luster, the feathers run a little ragged.
"We come here a lot for field trips," Henry confided in her. "There's nowhere else to go."
"That's the most depressing thing I ever heard," Emma muttered, looking hard into the eye of that sad, lonely dolphin and shaking her head.
After that day, she wasn't interested in going back. She passed the building more often than not; it was near the park, close to the docks, not that far from Archie Hopper's office, and Emma had developed a habit of driving by in the cruiser or Bug when she knew Henry's therapy session was ending. Just to make sure he was safe, she reassured herself. She wasn't getting attached to the kid or anything, right?
Then the curse broke, and the "not getting attached" thing, you know, got shot to hell. The Storybrooke Museum of Natural History was the farthest thing from Emma's mind, between running an angry mob off Regina's front porch and trying to figure out where Henry was going to sleep in the suddenly very small apartment that she shared with Mary Margaret - Snow - and now with Prince Charming, too, and... It was all a lot for her head. Two weeks after the curse broke, she went to bed nursing a headache that had begun pretty much the moment she'd laid that True Love's Kiss on Henry's cold skin.
She had thought - and Henry had thought, it always seemed - that after the curse was broken, everything would become simpler than before. Yeah, right.
Her phone buzzed on the bedside table at three o'clock in the morning. She woke up with a little jolt of recognition, started to reach for it, then thought about how much nicer it would be to convince herself she'd imagined it and go back to sleep. Then she remembered, right, she was the sheriff, and people were remembering all the reasons they had to kill each other these days. A savior's work was never done.
She checked her phone.
Come here.
RM
Even though her phone hadn't recognized the number, there was no mistaking the sender. For one thing, "RM." For another, the curt imperiousness of the text message's tone was a dead giveaway. Emma was pretty sure that even if the text hadn't been tagged with a signature, she'd have known who it was from.
Everything ok?
I require your assistance.
RM
At three o'clock in the morning? What could possibly be going on that Regina needed her for? Emma sleepily wondered if this was a booty call.
She and Regina had barely spoken since Emma had run off Whale and his mob, except to fight about Henry. And if Emma thought some of their fights were pretty bad before... These new ones were nearly apocalyptic. The only way she could get Regina to shut up was to remind her that Henry didn't want to be with her, to suggest that he was afraid of being around the Evil Queen, and Emma... She didn't like doing that. It felt further below the belt than even she was accustomed to go.
The last time they'd seen each other was a couple of days before. Emma had stopped by for more of Henry's clothes, and Regina, looking like she was being pulled inside out little by little, brought her a neatly folded stack of fabric that she clutched so tightly Emma didn't immediately reach for it in case they were going to tug-of-war.
"I'd like to see him," Regina had said to her then, very sternly, like she was still Mayor Mills and was issuing an order her recalcitrant Sheriff.
"I'm not sure that's the best thing right now," Emma said, on one hand feeling a kind of conviction in her words, and on the other feeling like who the fuck was she to say something like that, she barely knew anything about kids and now she was supposed to be Henry's mom, deciding what was best for him? "He's still, uh..." She plucked out one of Mary Margaret's teacherly words: "Adjusting."
"He needs me," Regina said, almost as though Emma hadn't spoken. "I'm his mother." There was a steeliness in her expression that Emma recognized, but some of her defenses had fallen away that day, weeks before, in the hospital, and Emma thought that Regina's armor had been crumbling bit by bit ever since in the wake of losing Henry.
He's not lost, Emma reassured herself. She didn't really lose him. He's just not near her right now.
That's what's best for him.
Even with the hard edges of Regina's expression as she looked at Emma, the cracks were still visible. Emma surprised herself with a pang of sympathy when she saw the veiled vulnerability in Regina's eyes; she shut that down as quick as she could. After all, Regina was the Evil Queen, and was, uh... Evil, and stuff.
(Emma had never been a great believer in good and evil as unyielding categories forever unchangeable, but sometimes it seemed like all Henry and Snow and David could do was talk about stuff like that, good versus evil, trading war stories of fairy tale exploits over dinner in the evenings. It was all too strange; none of it seemed really real to her. She couldn't align Mary Margaret and Snow into one person, and no matter how big of a bitch she'd been, it didn't work with Regina and the Evil Queen either. Real, living people just didn't fit into Disney boxes, right?)
She and Regina hadn't spoken since then, until the text messages that were currently swimming in front of Emma's bleary, exhausted eyes.
What do u need me 4? Emma laboriously texted back.
There has been an incident.
RM
Ah, crap. Emma managed to swing her legs over the side of the bed, tap out an On my way on her phone, and get to her feet without immediate mishaps. She did, however, fall over with a muffled thump when she first tried to step into her jeans, and froze for a second, but there wasn't even a stir in the nighttime apartment. She splashed water on her face in the bathroom, tied her hair back into a ponytail so she wouldn't have to brush it; by the door, she stepped into her running sneakers, not her boots.
108 Mifflin shortly loomed large in the windshield of the Bug. It looked still and undisturbed, though the light in one of the lower level rooms was on, and a light upstairs, in what had to be Regina's bedroom. Emma started up the walk a little too quickly and stumbled, her sense of balance not yet completely realigned. What "incident" had happened? She'd run some stuff through her slightly addled head on the way here: maybe some rocks had been thrown through Regina's windows, or she'd gotten egged and TP'd, or some eager graffiti artists had come at her door again...
But, no, nothing. Emma had to blink a few times to focus her eyes, but it was pretty clear to her that none of that had happened. The windows were all perfect, there were no signs of drying egg on the house's facade or toilet paper dangling from the hedges and trees. The door was immaculate again, no sign of the previous graffiti.
(The graffiti had been a jumble of different things, telling Emma that a group of people had all come up with the idea together and brought their own private grudges to bear; at least two different people had been content to write "Die bitch" on different parts of the door, another one drawing a hideous little caricature of Regina's severed head, but someone else had written some pretty explicit stuff about what the Evil Queen "deserved." Emma wouldn't have been surprised if they'd struck again.)
Then, when she was halfway up the walk and still squinting to make sure nothing had happened to the outside of the house, the front door opened. Regina stepped out, started walking toward her, and then... Past her?
"Hey," Emma said, surprised and, breathing in the smell of Regina's perfume as she walked past, a little more awake. (Perfume at three in the morning?)
"We're taking your car," Regina said.
Emma followed, not knowing what else to do. "Didn't you say there was an incident? Hey? Regina!"
"You don't have to raise your voice, Miss Swan," Regina said, already halfway into the Bug's passenger seat. "I'm right here."
Emma threw up her hands; she wanted to kick something, and settled for one of Regina's hedges. Emma could see Regina rolling her eyes through the car window.
"Okay," Emma said, getting into the driver's seat. "Are you going to tell me what's happening right now?"
"Drive," Regina told her curtly. "I believe you know the way to the natural history museum."
Emma had a sudden thought that Regina had known about the time she went with Henry - had Regina been watching them secretly the whole time? Her brain conjured a Carmen Sandiego kind of Regina who lurked just around the corner that whole trip, peering around to scrutinize Henry and Emma through dark glasses. Emma gave a funny little bark of laughter, too tired to hold it back.
Regina's eyes narrowed.
"Sorry," Emma said, and began to drive to the museum, taking Regina's orders without thinking further. She realized what she'd done - obeyed - only when they were pulling up in front of the museum, and she said, again, "Are you going to tell me what's happening?"
Regina looked at her as though seriously doubting Emma's capacity to understand. Emma wanted to reply indignantly, but then remembered that Regina hadn't actually said anything aloud. (Jesus, she was so tired.)
"When I cast the curse," Regina said slowly and carefully, "I brought only what I wanted to bring from our land." Emma first thought that Regina was speaking with such deliberate slowness condescendingly; then she turned the words back over in her head and realized that Regina was trying to get accustomed to talking about a twenty-eight-year-old secret, not making a dig at Emma's brainpower. "Places came across. The well. The stables. The bridge. People came across. And so did... Other things."
"Other things," Emma said.
"Animals."
Emma didn't get it for a second. She looked at Regina, then suddenly, in a jolt of comprehension, through her window at the museum. "Animals," she said. "You mean -"
"Yes." Regina pursed her lips.
"But..." Emma frowned slowly. "All those animals are, you know, stuffed. They're dead. I've seen 'em."
"They're not dead," Regina said. "You might say that, like the rest of the town, they were..." She frowned. "Sleeping."
"Regina, why are we here?" Emma carefully asked, the word "sleeping" rattling around in her head too loudly for comfort.
"I think the animals are waking up," Regina said, and got out of the car.
Emma scrambled to follow her as Regina circled around the car and went straight to the door of the museum. Emma couldn't be sure - she was trying to untangle herself from her seat belt - but she was pretty sure she saw a flash of the key ring Henry had waved around, back when he was trying to prove to her that Regina could get through any door in town. The door was opening now, and the inside of the museum was very dark, even compared to the early morning outside; the door seemed to be opening onto the interior of a deep cave.
Emma decided pretty much right away that that was dumb. She straightened out her t-shirt and followed Regina, who was covered from the neck down by a stiff black coat - not a trench coat, it had two lines of buttons down the front, what was that called? Emma couldn't think of it.
"Uh, look," Emma said as Regina flicked on the lights in the sad little lobby. "Are you really worried about what some thirty-year-old dolphin is going to do? I mean, the most a dolphin can do on land is... Flop."
Regina cut her eyes at Emma, as deliberately mean a statement on her mental faculties as anything Regina could have said aloud. "None of the animals are what they look like, dear," she said. "Dear" sounded about as condescending as Emma'd ever heard it. "Do you really think I'd bring common animals across worlds with me?"
"Dolphins aren't common," Emma objected inanely. "They're really smart." Then she shook her head. "Why did you bring them, anyway?"
Regina hesitated at the next set of doors, which opened, Emma remembered, on a room full of Maine's wildlife. There were deer and mice and stuff in there or whatever, she recalled dimly.
"I had my reasons," Regina finally said, and it was lofty and higher-than-thou as all hell, but Emma could smell bullshit a mile away.
"You just liked having fairy tale stuff right in front for everyone to see," Emma said. "Right? And no one knew but you? So you could feel..." She yawned, and practically heard Regina roll her eyes at Emma's failure to completely hide the dumb face she made. "Superior," she concluded.
"Are you going to help me or not?" Regina snapped, stepping through into the Maine wildlife room. She found the lights there too, switched them on.
"Why are you even doing this?" Emma wondered aloud, following Regina again. "I mean, if a bunch of fairy tale animals are about to cut loose and fuck some stuff up... I thought you'd, you know..."
"Enjoy it?" Regina said. "Dear, I care very much about this town. Despite what you might think."
"Yeah, you care about the town," Emma agreed. "Just not the people in it."
Regina fired a look at her over one shoulder from further into the room. Emma ignored it, started to slowly circle around the exhibit in the middle of the space, which was ringed by a dusty-looking red velvet rope barrier that might have lent the place an air of class way back in the 80s. Frozen in place there was a leaping deer, a dead-looking patch of grass under its hooves. For some reason, there was a rabbit near its hind legs, where a real rabbit would probably be trampled, and a section of tree trunk, shorter than Emma, at the far end of the little dais, meant to suggest Maine's forest primeval or something.
"So..." Emma looked around. There were exhibits in the walls of the room, these behind glass, but nothing seemed to be stirring. She glanced back to the leaping deer, whose beady glass eye was a little unnerving but not actually moving. "Should something be happening?"
Regina was still frowning, her gaze moving carefully from one exhibit to the other. She circumnavigated the deer and headed to the next set of doors. She opened them, and then, in a sudden flurry of motion, incongruous with the normal stillness of the very early morning, was knocked back on her ass by something moving very fast.
"Don't just stand there!" Regina barked as Emma tried to figure out what she was looking at. "Catch it!"
Right, Emma thought. What did she look like, animal control? There wasn't time to grumble, though - that blur of whatever was heading toward the door. Emma launched herself at it and hit something solid, knocking it down to the ground. She locked her arms around a long neck and stared, baffled, down at the thing that was cawing up at her. She jerked her head back to get away from the beak.
"What the hell is this?" she demanded, looking across at Regina.
"It's a gryphon, dear," Regina said, standing up, brushing off her coat.
Emma looked back down at whatever she had tangled in her limbs, just in time to see it peck a gouge in her forearm with that wicked-looking beak. She gave a little yowl of pain - surprise pushed the sound out more than how much it actually hurt - and she slung the whole of her weight across the lean body of the gryphon to keep it down so she could free one hand and grab its beak.
"A little help here?" Emma demanded of Regina.
Regina lifted a hand and made a gesture that Emma didn't understand, until the squirming animal under her suddenly went still. She looked down: the gryphon was ringed by bands of... What, the Force? Was the Force purple?
No, she realized. It was magic.
Last Emma had heard, Regina couldn't do magic, because magic was different here.
She spun to face her, opened her mouth to say something, and was immediately cut off by a curt, "If you'd prefer to subdue him by hand, Miss Swan, be my guest."
Emma slowly climbed to her feet, looking down at the gryphon. It had an eagle-looking head, and wings, but the rest of its body was sort of feline, and she shook her head, not knowing why until she looked again at the gryphon, and harder. She'd been hoping that what she was seeing would somehow make sense if she gave it a second or two. Obviously, it hadn't. The gryphon was still half bird, half gigantic cat.
"Is it... Okay?" Emma asked after a second, wondering at the stillness of the gryphon's gemlike eye.
"Only immobilized," Regina confirmed. "I suggest we see what else has woken up before anything else tries to escape."
"I never liked Night at the Museum," Emma muttered to herself as she followed Regina through the open doors and into the room where all the action was happening.
It was way, way too early to be chasing after a bunch of legendary animals and holding them still so the Evil Queen could use her magic to "immobilize" them, but Emma did it. She found herself scampering after a couple of weird tapir-looking things and scooping them up, one under each arm, only to nearly fall asleep right on her feet when they breathed a strange mist into her face; she dove for and seized in both hands a squirrel with unnaturally long ears that seemed to be chattering in a facsimile of English as it squirmed in protest; when the exotic birds exhibit came alive, she seized a phoenix by its long tail feathers for the fraction of a second Regina needed to cast her spell, and then it dropped like a stone to the ground.
Pretty good, considering that two weeks before Emma might have dismissed an experience like this as a fever dream.
"Is that it?" Emma asked hopefully as Regina made a slow circuit of the room, looking down at the animals as though counting them.
"For this room, yes," Regina said. She didn't even give Emma so much as a "come along" before she was opening the next set of doors and it was starting all over again.
Emma hadn't realized that mythological beasts could be boring until she was catching them one by one, over and over again, pinning thrashing unfamiliar shapes down, holding beaks and muzzles before she could be bitten, listening to the angry squawks and barks and growls and screams of animal after animal. Was this what David felt like when he worked at the animal shelter? Did even the cuteness of fuzzy kittens wear off in the face of the monotony of routine?
Even worse was the fact that Emma couldn't seem to not injure herself. She hadn't gotten a full night's sleep, after all, and was still pretty damn tired; her reflexes weren't exactly at the top of their game, and she kept whacking her shins, landing badly and bruising her ass or her side. Once, she even hit her chin on the floor and saw stars.
Regina, who stayed at the door of every room they went into and calmly did her magic thing from a distance, collected no such war wounds.
"Are we done?" Emma finally said, more tired than she knew it was possible to be, when they'd circled through all of the rooms and back to the lobby, leaving a trail of animals trussed in purple bonds behind them.
"We need to check this one again," Regina said in a tone devoid of sympathy for Emma's plight, walking directly to the doors of the first room again. "I don't understand why nothing's..." She peered inside, reminding Emma vaguely of her Carmen Sandiego fantasy, then stepped through. Emma obediently followed.
The leaping deer was still frozen, and so was his rabbit buddy. The glass-protected woodland exhibits were all perfectly still.
"Maybe you left these for too long," Emma suggested hopefully. "Maybe they're all dead."
"Hmm," Regina replied.
Regina crossed the room to look into one of the still life scenes in the wall; Emma stuck with her pal the deer, squinting into his unmoving face, then squatting to look at the rabbit, who looked as dead as ever. She wondered if she risked giving it a poke to see if it would wake up.
Then something came to Emma's ears which she didn't immediately understand. She thought that it was a tiredness thing - that the buzzing in her ears was the same as when your eyes started to unfocus of their own accord, just a signal that her ass needed to be in bed. She stood up, though, and the buzzing continued, only quieter. She crouched again. Louder.
Was it coming from the animals?
She listened experimentally to the deer's dusty flank, and then put her ear close to the rabbit. Nothing. She looked around the room, wondering... She didn't think Regina could hear it, and there wasn't anything moving in the other displays. Was it really all in her head?
She leaned back down to the rabbit, but, in a moment of inspiration, moved her head to the side and listened to the stunted tree trunk.
The buzzing was coming from inside the tree.
Huh.
"Regina," she started to say. "Is there something -" That was as far as she got before the trunk burst open and a flood of - bees? Was it bees? - spilled out. Emma fell back; her hands came up instinctively to protect herself, and...
The next thing she knew, her face was being slapped. Not hard. The kind of slaps you gave to someone unconscious you really didn't want to give mouth-to-mouth.
"Miss Swan," said Regina's voice. It sounded weird. Sort of... Fuzzy at the edges. Emma swam back out from unconsciousness and started to open her eyes. "Miss Swan, wake up." Another little slap to her cheek. That had to be Regina slapping her. Regina needed a lesson in bedside manner...
It occurred to Emma that the only times Regina ever touched her face had been to hit it. That seemed like a really serious loss at the moment, and Emma didn't know why.
Regina's face came into focus over her. Emma thought maybe it was just an effect of her own semi-consciousness, but Regina's face looked... Different. Nothing had really *changed*, but there was something like... It looked like, almost...
"Your face is glowing," Emma said, and lifted a hand. She poked her forefinger directly into Regina's left cheek.
Regina jerked back. "No, it's not."
"Yeah," Emma said. "I'm pretty sure it is. Hey," she began, a little more loudly, remembering the whole being unconscious thing, "what happened?"
"They stung you," Regina said. She made a vague gesture behind her; Emma tried to follow the movement, and trying to focus her gaze hurt her eyes. Regina had indicated the rent-open tree trunk.
"What was that?" Emma asked. "Bees?" She slowly worked at sitting up, scanning herself for changes. There was a welt on the back of her hand, and, just looking at it, Emma felt something on her neck itch; she touched the spot, felt another welt.
"Of a sort," Regina said after a moment. To Emma, Regina's face was still glowing - no, glowing wasn't *really* the right word for it. There was just something luminous about her, something... It was like Regina's face was holding its own against the light in the room. It was like her skin was an LED screen.
"Were they... Poisonous?" Emma asked slowly, wondering why Regina had the skin of a smartphone.
"No," Regina said in a way that Emma was pretty sure meant "yes." After a moment of watching her, Regina said, "They're not deadly. Their toxin, it..."
"Gets you high?" Emma suggested, waving her hand in front of Regina's face to see if the light would respond like regular light, slip through the cracks between her fingers. She stopped immediately, because watching her hand move made her dizzy.
"Well, yes," Regina said, standing and making no move to help Emma, who staggered up onto her feet and nearly fell back over. It was the same feeling as when she'd fallen over trying to get into her jeans, like she was all tangled up.
Emma swayed. Her vision focused, unfocused. This wasn't like any high she'd had before, since it seemed to be two parts headache to one part funky vision. Was it because the bee-things came from a different dimension? She voiced the question aloud to Regina.
Regina pursed her lips around her reply like it was all Emma's fault. "It's possible, Miss Swan. The toxin is magical. It... Magic works differently here. It must be acting differently on you than it did in the Enchanted Forest. That's probably why it knocked you unconscious. Maybe it's lethal," she added, possibly sounding hopeful, though Emma wasn't counting on any of her senses to report back to her honestly right now.
"Yeah, you'd like that," Emma said. "Can I please go home? Am I done chasing your zoo around?" The bruises on her legs were starting to hurt acutely. Most of her was starting to hurt acutely, in fact, and the welts itched badly. She swatted in frustration at where she'd been stung on her neck, not wanting to go scratching where Regina could see, like it would be admitting something secret.
"Perhaps I'd better drive," Regina said, looking Emma up and down once like she'd look at an old holiday decoration she was sick of and wanted to throw away.
Emma gave her the keys to the Bug. In the passenger seat, her head lolled on the headrest as she tried not to fall asleep. She couldn't really make out the time on the dash, but the lightening gray of the sky suggested five something, maybe even six something. Mary Margaret would be waking up soon, probably, and David. She imagined them brushing off her absence as her sleeping late, when really Regina was dumping her bee-stung carcass in a shallow grave somewhere in the woods.
"Miss Swan?"
"I'm awake!" Emma said, too loud, not realizing that she was raising her voice until it was too late. "Sorry," she said, more subdued. "I'm awake."
"Yes, I can see that. We're here." Regina didn't seem to be tired at all. Damn Regina and her LED skin.
Oh. Emma recognized the apartment building. She wondered how they'd gotten from the museum to here in the space of just a few thoughts about what might take place at breakfast, should Regina choose to murder her and dump the body.
"How are you going to get home?" Emma asked. "Are you gonna walk?"
"No, dear," Regina said. "Can you at least see yourself up the stairs?"
Emma, tucking her keys back into her pocket, looked dubiously at the front door, thinking of the flights of stairs up to the apartment, climbing and climbing. She looked down at her legs, which weren't completely in focus, like anything that wasn't immediately in front of her was too far for her eyes to bother.
Regina sighed deeply and went to hold the door for her.
They made it up the stairs together, Regina with one arm stiffly around Emma. Emma kept stealing sideways glances at Regina's profile, which still had that weird LED screen quality. Not glowing, just internally bright. The utter displeasure written in the alphabet of Regina's tense mouth and furrowed brow suggested that she might just dump Emma at the door, knock, and run, like a kid playing a prank with a bag of dog shit. Which made Emma the bag of dog shit. It kind of made sense, considering the looks of distaste Regina was always sending her way.
When the door of the apartment presented itself before them, Regina took out what Emma'd thought she'd seen before - the ring of keys.
"Hey," Emma said in recognition.
"Not so loud," Regina said, and unlocked the door as Emma used to do for drunk friends, the few times in her life when she'd had friends. Was Regina going to take her up to the bedroom, too, as you'd do for someone piss-drunk? Pull off her shoes, roll her on her side so she wouldn't choke on her vomit? No, much too considerate.
Imagine Emma's surprise when Regina began to guide her up the stairs, shushing Emma about once per second under her breath as they tried to avoid entering the direct sight line from Mary Margaret's bedroom.
"Hey," Emma said again, remembering, as they reached her own bedroom door. "Don't -"
Regina had already opened the door. Henry was asleep in a cot next to Emma's bed.
Emma felt Regina stiffen next to her suddenly and completely.