Author's note: this story is dedicated to Angeldream05 who wrote The Perfect Place which inspired this story.

Much love

Jane

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said."

A.A. Milne

Regina Mills is not a morning person. It's not because she is not disciplined, because she is. She is as ruthless with the execution of her day as she was with executing traitors. Nor because she is lazy, because she's not, she's never been scared of putting in the effort or the hours. No. Regina Mills hates mornings because she is only one who knows, in the whole of Storybrook, that no matter how many mornings they wake up or how many nights they sleep, they will always wake up exactly the same, neither better nor worse, young nor old. Neither happy nor miserable.

It took her exactly 17 years and 8 months and 12 mornings to realize that Storybrook and all its miserable residents were not her happy ending. But by then she was as stuck as everybody else. In the town and in time. It turned out that there was a miscalculation somewhere in the curse and there was nothing she could do about it because in all of those mornings she had woken up alone, she had come to realize that she could not move forward as just as much as she could go back. So she procured a child that would grow up, grow old. But she found out that life was cruel and wonderfully inventive, because after about four thousand mornings, that hope for new, different mornings was crushed under the pressure of the hate of an eleven year old boy.

Mornings have thus become the time she needs to get her game face on, the moments she needs to persuade herself that this is what she wanted all along. Mornings are a necessity because even someone as strong as Madam Mayor Mills needs to build up defences and ammunition to get her through one more morning, one more day of thousands of others that will have exactly the same outcome.

But this morning there is something different. Today it is soft and warm and not lonely. Today it feels like what mornings must feel like in the movies Madam Mayor Regina Mills sneakily sees on TV when Henry is fast asleep or on the Hallmark picture postcards sold at the gift shop.

Today the morning is full of promise and abilities and achievement and change and all of that even before she opens her eyes and is conscious of her bed and of her room and of Storybrook waiting outside her window.

This morning feels, in her bones, in each of her cells, in her heart, like what mornings should have felt like for the last 10439 mornings and never did. And that is a strange, somewhat scary new feeling. And Regina does not do feelings well. She tends to panic and like a cornered dog, show her teeth and bite if necessary. But even that is different about this morning. The fight instinct is dormant, fear does not rear its ugly head and she remains still, absorbing warmth through every pore, strength through very limb.

This morning, Regina Mills woke up minus her title, minus her job, minus her history. She woke up even minus her guilt. She awoke with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, with the desire to be happy. The desire to allow herself to be happy.

Because this morning Regina woke up tangled up in willowy arms and legs, with sweet morning breath on her face, pushed to the edge of her bed and uncovered because the comforter had been hogged and dumped on the other side of the bed.

Regina woke up on her 10440th morning in Storybrook feeling like she had finally done something right because Emma Swan had her in a grip so tight like she was never letting her go and no notion of morning protocol or of personal space.

"Happy twenty-ninth birthday, Emma" She whispered against the messy mass of blond curls.

She burrowed into Emma and thought that she could learn to care about mornings if they all came like this one, with peace and change.