Cauterize It: Going Home
by Ed108bot
AU Storybrooke. This is a continuation from the world of the story: My Tourniquet by jd4941 and my first story in this series: Let it Bleed. I don't own any of the character from OUAT and in the vein of fanfiction I am borrowing the characters created by jd4941: Zoe and Alexis, as adult characters.
How exactly did Regina and Emma from this story line got back together? This is an attempt to chronicle the steps of their reconciliation.
This story picks up in the year 2055…
Chapter One – It's All in the Asking
She never really liked Storybrooke.
Dressed in black with a wide brim stylish hat and dark glasses, Regina Mills-Jax looked around the town during this most recent visit to Storybrooke. The last time she had come back was five ago. That visit was short-lived, she came and left in the span of three days. Because the town still reminded her of a prison.
The same prison she had been incarcerated in for decades. The dark curse she wielded in revenge only changed the prison of her mother's making for another.
Briefly ihe/i crossed her mind, i Henry…/i
She couldn't wait for her husband and her to leave this place.
She didn't want to come back to Storybrooke but she had pay her respects. Again. She had to say her own goodbyes. Again.
iThey looked so old. Ancient. How much time had passed?/i She wondered. iIt's been over forty years!/i She mentally calculated. Snow White, whose hair finally matched her name, laid in her side of the double wide coffin with a crown of completely white hair. Both her and Charmings faces riddled with deep wrinkles.
In a double coffin laid Snow and Charming, side by side, in death as they were in life. She rolled her eyes at the sentiment. iThey were as annoying in death as they were in life. /iShe ruminated.
She raised both eyebrows when she heard loud sobbing.
She rolled her eyes at Leroy who sobbed the loudest, inconsolable as his brothers handed tissue after tissue, in a futile attempt to stem the tear duct deluge.
After the burial, it was almost a comedy of errors watching the dwarves trying to negotiate the double coffin as pallbearers. Regina could imagine Snow laughing at their plight as well.
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At the gravesite, she looked over to her husband and smiled. They were partners. They were team. She knew one death would visit them, considering he was getting more gray by the years. Her body seemed content to stand still as time marched forward.
She realized she would one day be alone at his funeral.
A tear escaped, followed by another.
Ruby stood next to them and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder when she wiped the tears away from behind her sunglasses.
"I'll miss them too." Ruby said.
While she liked Ruby, considering her a dear friend, she didn't want Ruby's comfort. As Ruby stared longingly at the gravesite, Regina looked at her and noticed she was aging as well.
Everyone was aging all around her! She frowned, blaming her dark mood on the circumstance: yet another funeral.
She hated funerals. There were so many of them after Grannie died, the coffins stretched out like toppled dominoes: the depopulation of Storybrooke.
She hated how the funerals smelled, like burnt sweet wood, flowers and sorrow.
She hated how the funerals sounded, soft whispers of condolences, sniffles, and heavy silence.
She hated how the funerals looked: everyone dressed and behaving formally as stiff and restricted as one does at both like weddings and executions.
Sensing her mood, Jax squeezed her hand and she squeezed back as she wondered where Emma was. Emma was the reason why she attended, why they came: to support her at this time of grief.
She looked over at the twins, Alexia and Zoe, mature women now. Their heads bowed together as they remembered their Gammy Snow and Pawpaw Charming.
They said they spoke with their other mother but Regina hadn't seen nor spoken to Emma at all since they arrived earlier today. She thought she had glimpses of Emma all over Storybrooke: a wild blond mane or the remnants of a plume of dissipating white smoke, indicating Emma may have dematerialized but nothing concrete.
iFine. It's her life./i Regina consulted herself to build up a modicum of detachment.
She looked around at all in attendance: Archie Hopper, Tink, Blue, Ruby, Leroy and the entire town of Storybrooke. The Charmings were still well thought of over the years, even though they left the town for good to be closer to the twins.
But Emma wasn't around having relocated to part unknown overseas and the constant touring with her band. Emma stayed in contact with Jax only.
She spoke to no one else.
Their communications tended to revolve around arrangements to meet the girls. She was gracious enough to include the two younger children in all their outings. All the children would come back hyper and excited by everything they had seen and experienced.
A few time the visits were extended stays: two weeks during winter school breaks, an entire month during the summer. Regina was intensely uncomfortable with any of her children being out of her sight for long but slowly with Jax's support she was able to relax and let them explore the world in the company of Emma.
iIt made it easier dealing with then all eventually going off to college./i She realized.
Regina realized they hadn't spoken to one another since that bizarre affair with her future self so many years ago. She assumed she would eventually see Emma here but the stubborn woman remained elusive. iI suppose she's with my future self./i Regina guessed.
Although she wasn't quite certain of that because she stealthy interrogated her children upon their return from what she liked to call, iAdventures with Emma./i Her children reported were no strange companions nor dopplegangers of herself hanging around.
While she and Emma hadn't spoken, she did keep track of Emma's exploits.
Emma's band, iBusted Halo and Other Misfits/i produced four alternative rock albums She wasn't a fan of the genre but she purchased all four CDs, downloading them as Zoe showed her and listened to each one, numerous times. While Emma had a rich voice, her favorites were the instrumental songs, composed by Emma herself. The music had a sophisticated musicianship that haunted her at the strangest times. She would find herself humming one of two songs from all the albums when she was absentmindedly doing chores or while cooking elaborate meals.
Then the music stopped. Emma's band disbanded: all communication with Jax ceased.
It was as though Emma ceased to exist. Regina worried that something happened, something terrible. No one she knew had seen nor heard from Emma's, not even her former band mates and their manager.
After six months of nothing indicating Emma was alive and well, Regina was almost ready to send out a search party, when Alexis, home for the weekend, causally mentioned she had lunch with Emma after a particularly brutal Linear Algebra midterm exam.
Regina breathed a sigh of relief and mentally chastised an absent Emma for being overly dramatic.
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To accommodate everyone who attended the funeral, the reception was held in the great hall of the City Hall Building. Regina looked around having spent many years here and it seemed smaller than she remembered.
The room was resplendent with flowers, the background instrumental music was light and carefree, by the stage was a blown up photo of the Charmings when they were younger and a projection of candid photos of them, they family and loved ones showed on the wall above the main stage.
Along the wall was a buffet spread of sandwiches, salads, fruits and an assortment of beverages: alcoholic and non alcoholic, cold and hot.
Ruby noticed her too and observed, "Emma did a great job arranging all this."
Regina didn't think about who arranged any of the proceedings and was shocked to know the elusive Emma found the time to communicate anything of importance to anyone other that the twins. Regina looked at the projected photos: she was surprised to see herself in a few of the photos! Everyone from Storybrooke was in the photos. There were even silly ones with the twins. When there was a single photo of a very young, very happy Henry, she gasped.
Before today, she hadn't thought about him in decades!
The fact that she hadn't aged since Emma broke her curse so many years ago was evident in all the photos. What was most telling was when the photos recirculated, Emma wasn't in any of them.
Ruby asked Regina a question but she was so caught up in her thoughts she hadn't heard her. Ruby asked her again, "Are you two staying overnight or heading back after this?"
"We'll stay overnight. I don't want to be on the road while we're both tired." Regina answered.
"That's good! Emma's sticking around to settle things before she goes where ever she goes." Ruby remarked. "Maybe you and Emma can figure out how come you two aren't aging." Ruby added, as she whispered.
"What are you talking about?" Regina asked.
"Neither one of you are aging. Emma stopped touring because the band was aging but she wasn't. One of her fans thought she was a vampire like out of one of those Anne Rice novels." Ruby revealed like a cherished secret.
Taking it all in, Regina noticed Emma covertly exiting the great hall. Regina exhaled a deep breath, squeezed her devoted husband's hand before letting go and walking out the hall to confront the elusive Emma Swan.
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She found Emma outside sitting on a bench under the apple tree, eating some cookies she apparently nicked from the buffet table inside.
After she approached the woman busily consuming cookies while not acknowledging her presence, Regina noticed she hadn't aged a day for the past forty years.
"Jax was a bit hurt when you abruptly stopped speaking to him. He was worried that he had done something to offend you. He wracked his brain for months wondering what it was and how to make amends." Regina quipped. "I think he missed the specialness of being the only one you would speak with." She added with a smile.
"If your worried about your husband, I think you'll find him back inside." Emma replied after she swallowed a particularly delicious morsel of chocolate chip cookie.
"Why did you disappear? Is it because of this lack of aging issue." Regina asked.
"The girls had grown up. I could speak with them directly. I spoke with your husband over the years as a courtesy, not out of friendship. We are not nor will ever be friends." Emma revealed as she ignored the lack of aging they both seemed to be experiencing.
"Why are you still so bitter?" Regina bemoaned. "Aren't you with iHer/i now?" She asked.
"Who? Future you? I wasn't going anywhere with her! I'm no more her Emma than I was yours." Emma replied. She wrinkled her nose when she realized she had no more cookies. She was still a bit peckish.
Regina signed. She realized Emma still held on to some old resentments. She thought when her future self interacted with Emma some of the animosity between them had dissipated. She refused to feel guilty for building her own happiness, nurturing the family she always wanted.
"Perhaps if you ate healthier instead of junk food all the time you'd be satisfied." Regina observed to stop the conversation from escalating into painful territory.
"Don't act like you know me! You know nothing about me and how I live my apparently long life!" Emma shot back.
"I'm not the one purposefully staying away, Emma." Regina replied softly.
"I'm not interested in renewing friendships. Besides, healthy living is kinda stupid when it's not like I'm gonna die of old age!" Emma joked.
"That's not funny!" Regina admonished.
"It's hella funny." Emma laughed.
After the one-sided mirth, the silence built a thicker wall between them.
"What happened between us, occurred such a long time ago and you're acting like it was yesterday. This isn't healthy for you nor our girls." Regina lectured from a position of maturity.
"The girls have no clue of any thing negative between us. If they do, it hasn't come from my camp." Emma retorted. She narrowed her eyes at Regina before she added, "When my mother's happiness was built on the charred remains of your own, you became a story book villain. When the same shit happened to me, I think I handled it a whole lot better than you did."
"My happiness was not at your expense!" Regina protested.
"Really? Answer a question: If Ruby's gran never got sick and they didn't need your help at the diner, would you have ever come back to Storybrooke to then explain the existence of the twins? The answer is blatantly clear to us both, you need not say it out loud." Emma replied.
Regina looked away, back at the building wishing she was back inside with Jax.
"I stayed away to protect myself. Your happiness was built on the bricks of my despair, my alcoholism. Which incidentally is why I have been reluctant to be inside. I won't deprive any one of refreshments which are poison to me." Emma revealed.
"You're not an alcoholic." Regina replied uncertain.
Emma pulled out her sobriety coin, holding it like a shield between her thumb and index finger, and spoke, "Forty years clean. That's something for a rock musician when booze and drugs are like everywhere. While you were playing happy families for those first eight years, I was here in this prison you call a town, searching for you, hoping you survived and weren't dead. Hoping the reason I couldn't find you was because once you crossed the town line you lost all your memories. You didn't know who you were and probably wouldn't know who I was when I found you. The drinking was necessary because no one except me wanted to find you. Well, no one who didn't already know where you were. I had to bribe five men to help me comb the woods for you…your body. They only came for one day because my mom insisted. They left me alone to continue looking after the sun set. The drinking stopped the fear that you were being hurt by bad people. The drinking stopped the fear that you were lost and scared. Eight years of drinking because I wasn't strong enough or smart enough or fast enough to find you. Eight years of drinking to forget Henry. I couldn't stand to look at him after what he admitted he did. Then to see that video. What a miserable failure I was! Who wants to face that shit every fucking day? All I needed was another drink and another and another. I hated my folks when they forced me to deal with Henry. The first two years was easy, he was comatose. Didn't eat, didn't speak and I didn't care. Then he was acting out violently, tried to stab his own heart out one day, yelling it was black. I was disturbed but deep down where it really counted: still didn't care. The darkness that you existed in, you externalized it. In me, it festered inside, settling in my bones. So yes Regina, the happiness you got was built on the remains of my dried corpse. Tell me, should I invoke another dark curse in retaliation? You seem to be an expert in that sort of thing. I Should I kill thousands and subjugate the survivors? Who should I hunt and punish? You? Jax? Henry? My selfish parents are dead so there is no conciliation prize tormenting them besides the twins really loved them. Should I continue to punish myself? I suppose in the end I did as you, removed myself from the pain. You didn't want to acknowledge me nor Henry, what he was nor what he did. I get that now. Really I do. So why should I stick around you when every hug, kiss and smiled share between you and Jax is evidence of my complete and utter incompetence as a mother, as a lover and as a friend. Avoiding the pain that is you: imucho/i preferable to drinking again." Emma monologued.
Regina swallowed the tears that formed. She didn't want to know any of that. She tried to shield herself thinking Emma was fine.
Emma stood, stretched then spoke, "I was gonna go visit Henry after all this. He doesn't know Snow and Charming are dead yet. Wasn't up to dealing with him. I've just decided, you can go tell him or not. Its up to you. I'm not going up there today. I'll see him next month. I don't have someone else's misery as building material but I'm going to search for my happiness."
She disappeared in a plume of white smoke.