A/N: Changed author-note here. Slow-burn character study story. Originally I had planned for 10-12 chapters. It became 32.

This starts off somewhere after The Queen is Dead and goes AU from there. It's assumed Cora threatened Henry and Regina had no choice but to kill her mother in defense of him and this leaves her devastated for more than one reason

-x-x-x-

It goes much like changes tend to go. This one being a gradual slide down a slope filled with obstacles. Though sometimes when she looks back, squinting as she recalls it all, it still comes as a surprise how different everything is right now.

She could have sworn that just a moment ago the hourglass had been full. And now... Now last grains of the sand from the upper half were trickling down below. Without her even noticing it.

It should scare her. Like it used to do. It should make her run. Like she used to.

But looking at the two people talking quietly to each other, while sitting on the swing-set and leafing through a book together; Emma thinks that for once, change isn't such a bad thing. After all it brought them all a happy ending.

Something she wouldn't have thought possible a year and a half ago.

-x-x-x-

The first few weeks after the hastily drawn up truce passed pretty quickly. Uneventfully even, Emma thinks. It is a small miracle all things considered. It's also exactly what the people of Storybrooke needed. Some time to heal, to reflect on things. A moment of calm after the storm had finally passed.

But though the damage is slowly repaired as days ebb away into weeks, the scars will always remain. You just had to know where to look for them.

Even now most people preferred to take a longer route rather than to pass by the former Mayor's mansion. Emma wasn't one of them, but even she hadn't worked up the courage to do much more than stop by in her patrol car every now and then.

She would sit quietly, always under the guise of darkness in the night, and watch as various lights in the house were flipped on and off. Nothing else ever happened. Emma never even saw the woman herself, even on the days when the town was so quiet that she caught herself observing the house for hours on end. She didn't know what she waited for back then. Maybe a part of her had hoped that with the passage of time people would start to forget again. That things could return back to a semblance of normalcy. Or whatever the hell had to pass for a normal in a town full of fairytale characters anyway.

Instead Regina stayed cooped up inside, and everyone else pretty much ignored her. The only people Emma knew of that had some fleeting contact with Regina were Kathryn and Ruby. The latter was definitely the source of a lot more raised eyebrows than the former had been. Ruby had brought Regina dinner once, just once, 2 weeks after Cora's death. In a basket no less. It was a strangely unsettling detail for Emma, knowing just who Ruby's alter-ego was. All she had told Emma was that she and Regina had something in common. It wasn't even a sliver of forgiveness for all the crap that been caused, it was a shared quiet look of understanding. One look before Ruby had taken her leave again, never even having set a foot inside of the house.

It was exactly a monthafter, when she saw her again. Emma was just taking a short walk to clear her head that night, enjoying the fresh salty air that blew in from the sea across the harbor. It helped that it was almost a full moon that night, she enjoyed the ghostly shimmering of the reflection cast by the moon onto the calm waters. It looked rather magical, Emma remembered thinking it seemed an almost fitting setting for something out of a fairytale.

The happy ones anyway.

She didn't know what she was thinking at the time, or what it was exactly that had caused her to look towards the darker part of the pier. Maybe it was the sound of something, or the glinting of an object in the otherwise obscuring darkness.

It had instantly intrigued her, drawn her in, for reasons she hadn't wanted to analyze back then. When she had walked closer she spotted her though. For some reason she knew it was Regina. The clothes were pretty much a dead giveaway if nothing else, arms wrapped around herself and she appeared to be looking towards the sea.

And it hadn't hit Emma until then.

They had spread the ashes there. Cora's. Burning her body had seemed like the most logical thing to do. She was a witch after all, and absolutely no one would've liked to see her returning from the dead like some bad cliched movie character.

Regina hadn't said her goodbyes. She had vanished pretty much right after killing her mother. After protecting Henry. Even the call for a truce in the town-hall the day after Cora's demise, had been sent to Regina with one of Snow's birds. Regina had left just as suddenly as she had arrived, and she hadn't spoken a single word to anyone. Hadn't done anything but sign her name before she went up in smoke again.

Emma recognized the signs of someone crying their heart out, even when muffled, from miles away. The soft shaking of the woman's hunched shoulders just confirmed it. She had taken one step, and another, and then she had just stopped. Her head caught up with her heart that ached to comfort the woman, no matter who she was, what she represented.

The evil queen, the person that had almost doomed her entire family, again.

She clenched her fists to tight balls, wiped a single shed tear away before resolutely turning around and walking back towards the house she now shared with Henry without so much as a single glance back.

-x-x-x-