Admiration

Before the curse broke, Emma would play a game with herself, a game she played in her bonds bail person days, she called it who would they be in high school. David was always a jock, Mary Margaret, quiet and bookish, Ruby, well was Ruby and Regina would be queen bee, head cheerleader. After the curse broke, Emma changed the roles, after watching the woman kick some serious ass and seeing the loyalty of her friends or subjects she supposed, Mary Margaret became the head cheerleader and Regina, well she had met Cora, so Regina became the quiet student and later, in her musings, a corporate ball breaker. She let Mary Margaret into the game and inevitably, the conversation as it always had between the two of them, wound its way to curse break, they would bitch about Henry's adopted mother, the formidable Mayor Mills and end up confessing how they liked her shoes and although Emma had no burning desire to wear pant suits she envied the woman's style and confidence. Confessing her corporate business woman theory to Mary Margaret, expecting her mother to agree but she hadn't, sighing she told Emma, "if we had truly lived in this land from birth as our true selves, then Regina would have been a wife and a mother, her job would have been something she was passionate but her family would have been her main drive."Emma had snorted disbelief but Mary Margaret was insistent and quietly told her the full story of how young Snow and Regina had met. A tale she had heard before but this time, Mary Margaret filled in the blanks. "I admired her so much, she taught me about true love, I admired her beauty, coveted her hair and womanly figure, I was all flat chest and untamed curls until I was fifteen" she laughed. As Emma listened as Mary Margaret talked and talked about the young Regina, she remember herself at that age and how desperate she had been for a mother, if she had met the woman Mary Margaret was describing she was pretty sure she would have hero worshipped her as well. Since that conversation, Emma looked for that woman and found her three times, first in the mine pouring her life essence into a blackened diamond, second in the rain breaking a curse and her own heart and lastly suspended in mid air, blinding white magic pouring from her hands.