A/N: An expansion of a prompt from tumblr (sgtmac7). Magic lessons! Spoilers up through 16.
She makes her way up the walk (it's strange, she thinks, reminding herself and knowing and yet somehow still doubting that she's been up this path a hundred times before), climbs the porch, tentatively knocks on the door and then waits, all the while anxiously shuffling her feet. The simple truth is that she just doesn't want to be here, and for once it has nothing to do with the fact that Regina is involved, and everything to do with the reason that she's here. To learn magic. More magic, anyway.
She looks down at her hands and sees just pink skin and lines. Amazing how it is that much magic power is supposedly lurking just beneath the surface. Power she doesn't want, and never has wanted.
She sighs, and waits for a few more moments, and then reaches for the doorknob and turns it. It's oddly unlocked, and Regina really should know better than that considering that there's a crazed witch out to destroy here.
But this is Regina, and even attempting to understand her complicated mind is an exercise in trying to make yourself into an alcoholic.
"Regina," Emma calls out as she enters. "Where are you?"
"In the kitchen," she hears.
"You better not be making turnovers," Emma jokes, and then immediately winces because it wasn't really funny to begin with, but when you add in the whole Henry element and how he's still lost to Regina, it's especially -
"Well, that was entirely tactless," Regina comments dryly as Emma steps into view. "But I suppose it was well deserved." She points to several empty wine bottles that are sitting on the counter. "However, no, I'm not baking."
"Right, sorry." Then, with a curious lilt to her voice, "Were you drinking?"
"No. These have been empty awhile now," Regina replies impatiently.
"What's awhile now?" Emma presses, noticing that one of the bottles still has moisture around the neck of it, like it's just been rinsed.
"What does it matter?" Regina snaps back, her hands on her hips. She stares at Emma, as if challenging her to continue on with this absurd line of questioning. Really, she should know better, though because Emma isn't completely the same, but she's enough so.
"Well, you've been back here in town for going on a few weeks now, right? So is awhile during the last curse or during this curse?"
"Again, what does it matter?" Regina demands, and there's an odd tick in her cheek that suggests to Emma that she's getting too close to information that Regina would prefer not share with her. Or well, anyone, actually.
"You're right, it doesn't. What are these for now?"
Regina lets out a breath. "Practice."
"Am I going to throw them?" She grins, then. "At you."
She's pretty sure that Regina rolls her eyes hard enough to give them both a severe migraine at that. "No, you're going to make them explode."
"I think I like the throwing part better."
"I guess, then, that it's a good thing that I'm the teacher here, and not you."
"Yeah. Okay. What's the point of making them explode?"
"Control. You need to learn to control your magic, Emma."
"I can control it well enough."
A perfectly sculpted eyebrow lifts. "Can you now?"
"I moved the moon."
"With my guidance, and my help," the former queen reminds her.
"Your guidance was put your hands up in the air. I believe that there are a few dance routines from the nineties that start that way as well."
Regina gives her a look that's equal parts unimpressed and utterly annoyed.
"Okay," Emma nods. "I separated Gold and…" she trails off.
Regina lets the silence hang in the air for moment and allows the emotion to run over both of them. She herself feels very little about Neal's loss beyond sadness for Henry, but the grief she sees in Emma's green eyes is so honest and raw and familiar that though her first instinct is to make some kind of derisive comment about the man that she'd never wanted near her son, the part of her that understands what Emma is going through keep her quiet.
Instead, she just waits and watches Emma's face.
Waits and lets Emma decide when to return to the matter at hand.
Which she does with a deep breath and a shrug and then a little funny cough meant to push the darker emotions that she's feeling away. "I don't know how I did that," she admits. "I just willed it so and it happened. I guess that's kind of what happened with the moon in Neverland, too, right? Can I…is that how all magic works? You just will it to happen and it does?"
"Not all," Regina replies. "But some. You already have enormous power inside of you, Emma, but it's all just sitting there until you learn to direct it. And while what you did in Neverland and out in the forest were both quite impressive, they're not enough to stop my sister from killing both of us."
Emma smiles faintly, her eyes flickering towards the empty wine bottles.
"You could leave," Regina notes, tilting her head slightly. "You know that, of course. You could pack up Henry, and leave town and pretend that you never came back. You could stay out of this fight and all will be well."
"I'd know."
"But he wouldn't."
"But I would."
"And yet when this is all over, you're planning to take Henry and leave Storybrooke all over again," Regina states, her voice soft but firm as she stares right at the former sheriff.
Emma's mouth falls open for a moment before clicking shut again.
"Of course I knew, Emma," Regina tells her, chuckling at a joke that is about as funny as the absolute ass kicking that she'd received a few days previous from her formerly unknown about older sister. "As much as you can always tell when I'm lying, I can always tell when you're about to run away."
"I don't belong here," Emma protests weakly, her pale face for just a brief moment contorting into something so very young and innocent and scared.
"You don't belong out there. And neither does…neither does my son."
The words hit Emma hard because even she knows the truth contained within them. Still, it's a lot harder to know you should stop running away then to actually cease doing it. "Would you prevent me – us - from leaving?"
Frowning slightly, Regina considers this question before tapping her chest and saying, "My heart isn't in my chest right now so I'm not completely sure which part of me I'm speaking from anymore, but I think even without it in there, I've come to a place even in my head where I still want to do what makes our son the happiest. Even if I strongly believe that he would be happier here with…" she pauses, swallows and says, "His whole family."
"I don't want to hurt anyone."
Regina nods her head like she's going to try to understand where Emma's coming from on this, but then her eyes harden and when she speaks, her tone is sharp and unflinching. "And yet you are. You're acting like this is just your choice to make, and that anyone who will be hurt - me at losing my son - are your tick-marks on a piece of paper. If I didn't know better, Emma, I'd think that you were the one without a heart in your chest right now."
"It's there," Emma replies, glancing over at the bottles once again. She can feel a kind of electricity just belong her fingertips, and she finds herself reminded of how many times people have stated that magic is emotion.
Right now, she's feeling pretty damned emotional.
"He's my son, too," Regina reminds her. "And I am trying so hard to be the mother that he has always wanted me to be even if that means letting him go over and over again. I need…Emma, I need you to try to do that, too."
The former sheriff closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, they're gleaming slightly, unshed tears darkening them to a vivid green. "Teach me magic," she requests, her voice trembling. "So that we can beat this psycho sister of yours before she kills anyone else that we care about."
"And then?"
"Don't make me lie to you."
"So you've made up your mind?" Regina asks, swallowing hard.
"Not even close, but if you ask me to promise you right now that I won't try to run back to New York when this mess is all over, you'll make me tell you a lie because I just don't know…I…" she trails off, blinking the tears back.
Regina nods slowly, and she thinks about nights spent in her study alone with a tumbler of whiskey in her hands and little but the silence of her house to keep her company. "Let's go practice, shall we, dear?"
It takes Emma most of the afternoon to finally blow up the wine bottles, and by the time she's got the hang of it, there are shards flying all over the backyard of Regina's mansion, coating the grass with gleaming glass.
It feels good.
It feels cathartic.
Regina watches from the side, her keen eyes intense and thoughtful.
She says very little aside from a few notes of praise or encouragement.
Well, perhaps calling her words a kind encouragement is overstating things just a bit considering that her way of doing so is to insult, harangue and annoy, but either way, it works and Regina is smiling thinly in approval.
"You know," Emma says as she helps to clean up the glass. "Everyone believes that all magic is good for is destroying, but it doesn't have to be."
"No, not always" Regina allows. "But it destroys more than it protects. And sometimes even when the intent is good, it can turn to something awful."
"Like separating…"
"Yes," Regina says gently as she takes the dustpan from Emma. "You used your magic to separate Neal and Gold from each other, and it lead to Neal dying once again. I used mine to remove a long-standing preservation spell that I had put on…and well, it led his second death as well." It's amazing, she thinks, that after all this time and all of these years have passed that it still isn't any easier – even without a heart in her chest – to speak of Daniel.
"I don't want to play god," Emma states, looking down at her hands again.
Regina snorts at that, and then shakes her head. "Were it only so easy. It's not, though. Because whether we like it or not, we don't always get a say or have a choice in the parts that we're picked to perform in the show. You were picked to be the Savior and I was picked to play the Villain."
"We're not the same," Emma insists. "You made your choice -"
"Some of it, absolutely. Some of it, I didn't. This fight for instance. I didn't choose to make my mother give Zelena up and I sure as hell didn't choose the life she chose for me. Or the one that Rumple did. I most certainly made my own bed with my own bad choices along the way, but for once, Zelena's poor and unhappy life isn't one that I'm responsible for."
"No," Emma admits.
"But it also doesn't matter anymore what choices were made or not made because we are here right now. You can leave Storybrooke if you want, and the rest of us will find a way to do what we must, but I know, Emma, that we are stronger together. You said that in Neverland. I believe it now."
"You really don't remember the lost year at all?"
"I don't. Why?"
"Because you seem so different."
"Or maybe you're the one who's truly different now." She chuckles to herself, a wide almost beaming smile on her brightly painted lips as she recalls the triumph of holding Henry in her arms after he'd woken up. "Or perhaps, just perhaps, saving Henry together changed both of us. Hopefully for the better, but I suppose the jury is out on that."
"You gave me a good life," Emma notes. "You gave both of us one."
"I owed both of you a good life. But that was in the absence of this actual real one, which isn't nearly as bad as your head is trying to make it into. You've spent your whole life looking for family, Emma, and now that you have it, you're actually considering letting go of it and losing it all over again. You, not anyone else. If you walk away, that's your choice and yours alone."
"I don't know what to do," Emma whispers, looking down at the shattered glass that's still sprayed across the impossibly green lawn.
"Stop running for once in your life; be the brave and infuriating woman who defeated an Evil Queen and do what's best for our son. Whatever that might be. Think about him before everything else – before even your fear – and do what's right."
"I promise that I will try to do at least that much," Emma replies. And then, because she needs to change the subject to something that doesn't confuse her, she forces a smile and says, "Can you teach me to throw a fireball?"
"Really? You think you're ready for fire? How like a Charming."
"Is that a yes?"
Regina sighs. "Fine, but let me go grab a bucket of water first."
"To put out whatever I light on fire?"
The Queen laughs. "No, dear, to put you out when you try to torch yourself on your first try." She smiles wickedly, then, and winks. "All amateurs do."
"Really? You think I'll be that bad."
"Oh yes. If I were you, I'd lose the jacket. Would hate to burn it."
"You'd love to burn it."
Regina grins, and then turns away, headed towards the house.
"I am trying," Emma says. "To figure out all the voices in my head."
Regina pauses. "I know you are." She then turns around and stares right at Emma, her eyes so dark and intense. "But try listening to the one that has always wanted a family and always wanted her parents instead of the one that believes that a lie that you know to be a lie could ever be enough."
"Which voice is that?"
"I believe I call her Miss Swan," Regina replies, and then turns and moves away, her heels sinking into the soft grass as she walks to the house.
Emma sighs loudly, looks towards the last remaining bottle, closes her eyes, concentrates for a moment and then smiles when she hears it explode.
-Fin