Note: Hello again! Welcome to Rearranging the Disaligned 2: Electric Boogaloo! Finally we are rejoining our intrepid heroes.
Some stuff to let you know about before we dig in: there's been a big time jump here – we've moved from the mid-beginning of Season 1 to the mid-beginning of Season 2. That's for a couple of reasons, the most official-sounding being that I had to make an Important Authorial Decision for the Sake of the Story, the least official-sounding being that I really, really hate having to just rehash stuff we already know over and over again. That's not fun, that's reading by rote! However, there will be lots of filling in the gaps as we go along as both Regina and Emma think back on the events both before and after their separation.
I'm so excited to be able to share this with all of you – it's been sitting in my head a while and I hope it's been worth the wait! As ever, I am so grateful to you for the time you're taking to read this fic. I hope you enjoy!
After the curse broke, Emma had to teach herself not to trust the urges of her own body. She would find herself waking in the middle of the night, aching for Regina, and she couldn't comfort herself with the usual platitudes about how it's natural to miss and want your ex-wife; she had to remind herself nightly that her desire for Regina, her so-called love for Regina, were just the constructions of a curse. They weren't real.
She'd lie awake on the bumpy earth in Fairy Tale Funland or whatever the hell the forest was called and fight with herself about it, the way desert prophets in the Bible wrestled with their demons. Even when she reminded herself that she'd been magically cursed somehow, that it hadn't been her fault, she got steadily angrier and angrier at her own stupidity, at her own naivete. When in her life had she ever wanted to get married? When in her life had she ever thought she'd settle down? Stuff like that didn't just come out of the blue; Emma had never dreamed of a white dress wedding as a kid, never imagined an all-American two-and-a-half-bath life in her future. If she ever did, it was before she'd figured out that that life was never hers to live.
She'd been so gullible, so easily led; she'd just given into the curse as though it was what she'd wanted - as though she'd been just waiting for someone to come along and take control of her life out of her hands.
Whenever she got to thinking about that little fact, in the dark, creepy nights of Fairy Tale Funland, she would put her arms around her head the way you're supposed to duck and cover from a bomb blast, and she'd stay that way until she fell asleep. Mary Margaret's careworn, anxious expression became permanent as Emma slouched every morning at the breakfast fire and pretended that her disinterest in her food came from missing Granny's egg sandwiches back home.
(It was worse than that, though, Emma realized after a little while. It wasn't Granny's food she missed. It was Regina's. The day she figured that out, she muttered curses to the forest floor and kicked at every rock and root she encountered, and even Mulan gave her a wide berth.)
Mary Margaret - no, it was Snow now, but Emma had trouble saying the name; it was even worse trying to call her 'Mom' - wasn't stupid, and Emma knew that by night three in Funland, her mother'd figured everything out. She just wished Mary Margaret wouldn't look at her with such benevolent, touching empathy. It made her grind her teeth. Comfort and kindness weren't supposed to come so easy; if Emma'd learned anything from foster care, you had to fight to win the right to be loved.
One night, as the embers of their evening fire slowly died, Mary Margaret circled to Emma's side of the camp and sat with her, not touching - knowing with some baffling mother's intuition that Emma couldn't take that - but sitting with her knees to her chest, regarding her with a gentle gaze that made Emma want to squirm.
"You know, I don't think we ever talked about how you came to Storybrooke," Mary Margaret said, batting her eyelashes innocently. "Before Regina wrote you into the curse, I mean."
"You're right," Emma said, determined that if her mother wanted to do the happy family thing, she'd have to deal with the teenage years she missed. "We didn't."
"Would you like to?" asked Mary Margaret, infuriatingly patient.
Emma sighed, resting her hands behind her and leaning back on them, tilting her head up to the sky. She couldn't see much of the stars past the trees, and it suddenly seemed really important that she figure out if the constellations here were the same as at home.
Mary Margaret kept looking at her, waiting for words that Emma didn't want to come. They spilled out anyway. If she thought about her listening audience - her mother, or Mulan across the way, who was cleaning and sharpening her sword with quiet intensity - she knew that her throat would close again, so she pretended to be talking to the stars winking at her through the canopy of leaves above.
"I was living in Boston." Boston had been good to her, even though the weather was cold, nearly brutal after Tallahassee. "I just... Uh, I was thinking about the kid a lot. About how I'd given him up."
The feeling would come to her in unguarded moments back in Boston, the knowledge of the loss of him, and it would tighten around her like a vise. She had no one; she refused to make friends, knowing the danger. Anyone you let close might dig in too deep, and when they pulled away and left, they'd rip out a part of you as they went.
"I asked someone I knew to do some digging for me."
He was a guy she'd met at work, one of those people she seemed to attract no matter where she went - the ones who trusted her despite barely knowing her, who seemed to answer the call of something inside her. Who looked at her with an ally's eyes even when she offered nothing in return. She'd taken the folder of photocopied records he brought to her and put it high on a shelf in the unused kitchen of her apartment, where she forgot about it for a while - easy to do, since she didn't cook.
For work one day, she had to run down some idiot who'd jumped bail on petty larceny. She'd found him gunning it down the interstate with his two kids in the back seat of his car; he was a single father. The day after she brought him back in, she went and got the folder down from her kitchen shelf and looked at it for the first time.
"I didn't want to, you know, take the kid. I just wanted to see him. To see that he was okay."
That was what she'd told herself, every mile on the drive to Storybrooke, Maine. It wasn't Revenge of the Birth Mother Part IV; it was a check-up, a turn-your-head-and-cough kind of thing. She was barely twenty-six and she had so little; she just wanted to make sure that this small piece of herself she'd sent out into the world had made the voyage without harm, the way she herself hadn't. She hadn't counted on how visible she'd be in a town where no one ever came or went.
"I parked outside the school and just watched for him. I had a picture so I'd know it was him. I just... I don't know how I thought I'd know that he was alright. I thought I'd just understand it somehow and I'd be able to drive back to Boston and not care about it anymore."
She hadn't counted on the kid inheriting her curiosity. She'd spotted him from across the street in a sea of schoolchildren, little and pale, Neal's nose on top of her bony face and thin mouth, and was taking deep breaths, trying to convince herself to start the car again and get gone before someone asked her why she was parked in a school zone, when the kid crossed the street - crossed the street! What kind of six-year-old was he? - and knocked on the window of her car.
She remembered his clothes the most about that first meeting, which she thought had to be pretty weird. He'd been wearing a coat against the Maine cold and it wasn't a puffy patterned one like you saw on little kids; it was a coat like you'd see in a men's catalogue, just in miniature. It was expensive. So were his gloves. She couldn't see his shoes from her seat, so all she really saw was the coat and the gloves, and they were better made than her own.
"He crossed the street and started to talk to me. Asking questions. I don't know where the kid got that kind of courage, 'cause..." Emma trailed off, about to say that he'd been born from two cowards, and took a moment or two before she picked up the story again. "Anyway, I guess they hadn't done the stranger danger unit in his class yet."
"So I'm trying to get him to go back to the other side of the street, trying to get him to leave. And then Regina drove up and spotted us."
Regina had appeared like some kind of malevolent angel, wearing a gray coat and a boxy haircut. She'd put her hand on Emma's car door and stood right there and called Graham to have Emma taken away, every inch of her stiff posture radiating protectiveness, like a dragon with its tail curled around its pile of treasure. Emma had been less scared of the arrest than of the possibility that they'd figure out why she'd come to Storybrooke, why it was Henry she'd wanted to see. She could stand anything, even handcuffs, if it meant she wouldn't be cut open and laid bare like an animal on a butcher's slab.
"She had Graham arrest me. I thought it was weird, you know, that when we got back to the station she was the one who asked all the questions?" Emma shook her head and with it shook the memory away like a dog shaking off water. "Anyway, one thing led to another, and I, uh, I stuck around for a couple of days, maybe a week, and after that..." She closed her eyes briefly. "I guess that was when Regina put me into the curse, because the next thing I really remember is being married to her and living in her house."
Mary Margaret's gaze is tender and hot with outrage on her behalf. "I can't believe she did that to you."
"Yeah, well." Emma couldn't believe herself even as she was saying it, but out it came, "People've done worse to me. At least I wasn't... At least she didn't hurt me, right?" She winced and went to cover her face with her hand, forgetting the dirt of the forest floor stuck to her palm.
As she wiped dirt off her nose, Emma shook her head again. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I don't mean that, I don't. I just - maybe it's a side effect, or something, of the curse. Sometimes I hate her so much. Other times, I - other times, not as much."
She tried to meet Mary Margaret's eyes and found that she didn't like what she saw. Her mother reached over to her and put a hand on her arm, saying, "I understand, Emma," and Emma didn't tell her that that was still what she was afraid of. That above everything else, she was scared of being known. It still felt like rolling over and exposing her belly to a knife.
The next day, as they slogged through the forest, Mulan took point, as she usually did, with Snow bringing up the rear. They seemed to have decided without words that it was better to keep Aurora and Emma between them, to protect the two least warriors of their group. Emma didn't notice until the going became treacherous that Aurora had fallen back and fallen back until Emma was all but kicking her heavy skirts with every step.
"Something you wanted, princess?" she asked, not sure if she could endure another round of probing questions about Storybrooke on this walk.
"That woman you were talking about," Aurora said, over her shoulder. "Last night, by the fire."
Emma gave a heavy, frustrated exhale and silently cursed the entitlement complex of Fairy Tale Funland royalty. It had sure explained a lot about Regina. "I didn't realize I had such a big audience," Emma said. If she'd expected anyone from the other side of the fire to be listening, it would've been Mulan.
"You have a very loud voice," Aurora said curtly, and Emma heard the undertone of "you peasant" in her voice as loud and clear as if she'd said the words. Reminded Emma a lot of her ex-wife.
"Did you have something you wanted to ask me?" Emma asked flatly.
Tension was writ across the stiff line of the girl's narrow shoulders. For a few minutes, they walked on in silence other than their footfalls and their hushed breathing. Aurora said then, "You were married to her."
"Yes," Emma replied, wondering if this was going to be a gay marriage thing, because she didn't even know if Funland had gay people and she really didn't want to have to explain how two women had sex.
"Why would she curse you to marry her?" Aurora asked, and there was something kind of haughty in her tone that Emma really didn't like.
"Listen, princess, I know I'm not exactly in hoopskirts here, but if someone marrying me is so unbelievableto you..." Emma took a few long, quick strides, and Aurora had to scurry to catch up to her, saying, "Hoop - hoop-whats? No, Emma, I'm sorry, that's not what I meant!"
Emma sighed and slowed her pace a little, cutting Aurora some slack. "Sorry," she said eventually, begrudgingly. "I'm kind of touchy right now, I guess."
"I meant," Aurora said breathlessly, her smooth cheeks flushed a warm pink, "that it's not - it's not what wicked witches do, is it? Curse their enemies to marry them."
"I guess Regina's unique among her people or something," Emma said.
"Why would she do that?" Aurora asked; there was a note of genuine, sympathetic curiosity tucked into the velvet of her voice like a jewel. "If Maleficent had done that to me... I... I'd've died," she added, and Emma shivered a little, remembering the black dragon she'd done in under the library, the fear of an enemy too massive and unknowable to be defeated. She thought she heard a little of that fear coloring Aurora's voice now.
"Break my spirit, I guess," Emma said after a long quiet. "Best revenge she could ever have on my parents, you know?"
"She could have killed you," noted Aurora. "She could have cursed you to sleep."
"Are you trying to make a point here or something?" Emma asked, a little more brusquely than she meant; Aurora was unknowingly prodding a deep bruise.
"I'm just trying to understand," Aurora replied, slightly hurt. You and me both, Emma silently answered.
Mulan had crested a ridge ahead and was waiting, glancing between the two of them as though gauging the likelihood of mutiny. Emma didn't get what she was so suspicious about until Mulan spoke to Aurora rather than her and asked, "Everything alright?"
"Everything's fine, Mulan," Aurora said, and gave her one of those little smiles that always reminded Emma anew that this was a fairy tale princess trudging through the woods at her side.
When Mulan returned the smile, just barely, Emma decided that she hadn't really escaped the how-do-two-women-do-it conversation - it had merely been postponed for another day.
"Are we stopping?" Mary Margaret asked from behind them, startling Mulan and Aurora. "It's still early. We could get in another few miles."
"No," Mulan said quickly, "we're not stopping," and she turned to lead the way, Aurora close by her side. This time, Emma hung back to speak with her mother, who was smiling knowingly to herself, an edge of nostalgia cutting into the grooves at the corners of her thin lips.
"It's the beginning of another love story, Emma," Mary Margaret said softly as they walked on, her gaze not leaving the pair of women ahead of them. "The forest and the two good souls fighting to survive it." She sighed deeply and made a gesture that Emma recognized, reaching to fiddle sadly with the ring she wore, but the pace they were walking was too fast; she had to drop her hands back to her sides.
"Was it like this, for you and my - for you and David?" Emma asked.
Snow directed that benevolent smile to her now, and Emma felt embraced by it. "A little," she said, "but the forest was different then. It was very... Alive." Snow sighed again. "You couldn't walk two feet without bumping into a gnome or a dwarf or a fairy, a woodcutter, a girl carrying sweets to her granny, a royal in disguise, some kind of traveler." She made that gesture, reaching for her ring, but it died sooner this time, and she held onto the bow slung over her chest instead.
"It might just be that I miss it so much," Snow said, "but that seemed like a time when everything was happening. There were so many important lives being lived."
Emma thought she recognized that longing, that golden tint of memory; she'd heard it from old men, on the street or in their houses or in nursing homes, talking about the good old days when women stayed in the home and civil rights were just a gleam in the eyes of the oppressed. The nostalgia of someone who never knew who bad it was, because they could afford not to see.
"There has to be a reason," Snow said, more to herself, it seemed, than to her daughter, "why our stories made it through. Why people in the other world - the Storybrooke world - know about Red Riding Hood and Snow White and Grumpy the dwarf and Prince Charming and Rumplestiltskin and..." Her voice grew hushed with instinctual fear, her gaze roaming over the trees now as though a dark shape might spring from behind any one. "And the Evil Queen."
Emma looked out into the trees with her mother, suddenly feeling the size of them, the immensity of the dark greenness around her. She felt small, powerless, and alone; not just alone, but lost. She took a deep breath, feeling the low, slightly chill air of the forest entering her, and thought she knew why she'd been thinking so much of Regina here, why Regina prowled, dark and predatory, across the landscape of her dreams every night.
The Regina she'd loved under the curse had never seemed to inhabit Storybrooke or even to inhabit her own clothes. She was living inside herself, in some lonely place that Emma had never been able to reach. That lonely place, Emma now knew, was the forest. As surely as Emma was lost in the forest, Regina was too: pressed in upon by the trees and foliage, by the way the light suddenly disappeared in the cold of the evening, by the living darkness that stroked its fingers over the back of your neck and convinced you nightly that there would never be escape nor rescue.
The difference was that Emma's forest was real, the kind of thing you sawed down to remind who was master. Regina's forest had no master or mistress. Regina's forest was herself. She lived in all the time in the darkness that was her.
Emma's chest ached suddenly, painfully, and she put her hand inside her jacket and rubbed it, as though the hurt were on the surface and not in her heart.
"Are you okay?" Mary Margaret asked, her gaze lighting on Emma again.
"I'm fine," Emma said, missing Regina more with every word, staring determinedly ahead. "I just want to go home."