AN: An older fic, taking place right after the curse breaks at the end of season one. Just some early ouat characterizations that I was always kind of fond of. I love angsty snow queen conflict. Very light M rating.

It had been weeks since the curse broke. Long weeks that went by fast, and any thoughts or illusions that I had about the curse breaking actually changing anything, was starting to dim with the passing days. Things were different, or course they were, but once the chaos and panic and relief faded, most everyone started to just go back to their daily lives and routines. It had been twenty eight years, and most of us didn't remember much of anything else. But none of it mattered, not really, because I had David and I had my daughter, and we were a family. That was what I wanted—what we all wanted—our happy ending.

And the ever persistent emptiness that I was feeling every day only seemed to affect me, so I ignored it. And I was trying to be a friend and mother to my grown daughter which proved easier than it sounded, and I was a wife to the love of my life, and nothing was hard. Nothing was difficult or confusing or really anything. It was just…nothing. And it didn't make any kind of sense, because it was like a hole inside me that kept growing, one that I didn't know how to fix.

So one day I found myself on the front porch of Regina's mansion. No one knew I was here except Blue, who discreetly lowered the protection spell that surrounded her home. Emma told her it was to protect the former queen from angry mobs and such, because that was what we told her to say, but none of us were that stupid, and Regina knew a jail cell when she saw it. Still it surprised me when she didn't put up a fight, though maybe she did. I wouldn't know. The only people who saw her anymore was Emma and Henry, and neither one of them ever talked about it, so I never asked. But not knowing ate away at me, because I hadn't spoken to her—not at all since the curse broke. I blamed it on the chaos around us, but eventually I knew I was just avoiding her.

I knocked briskly a few times on the door, and I realized that coming here without any kind of plan or script in my head was a bad mistake, but I didn't have a choice. I needed to see her, but I didn't know why.

Once she finally answered, she didn't look too terribly surprised to see me. She actually didn't look much of anything, just a sort of dead expression that was shadowing her face.

"What do you want?" She asked, setting her jaw firmly and looking out into the yard behind me.

"I want to talk." I knew I shouldn't have said that, because she rolled her eyes then, and she always did hate talking to me. Though, after a brief moment, her eyes met mine in a calculated consideration, until she decided that talking to me was a torture she would endure for the simple sake of something to do. And God, sometimes I wondered if the curse really did break, because we were all just still on repeat and empty inside, and so terribly bored.

She moved to the side of the door frame, allowing me to enter. Once we were standing and settled in her living room, I pushed down the nervous and awkward attributes that always shined around her.

"How are you doing?"

Her eyes narrowed slightly at that.

"You have an entire town out there, filled with mindless and pathetic little people, that were only created so you could have someone to 'small talk' with. I am not one of those people. And I know that's not why you're here."

I ran through my possible responses to her bitter and apathetic speech, wondering if I should've been angry and indignant, but I didn't have it in me. I could have lied, came up with some Storybrooke bureaucratic excuse that she would have seen right through, but finally I just decided for honesty.

"I don't know why I'm here."

A condescending sneer graced her lips, and this was a mistake, and maybe one day I would actually stop making the same mistake over and over again.

"Maybe you missed me."

My face fell at that, and hers brightened.

"Did you miss me, Mary Margaret?"

An angry flash went through me at the sound of a name that wasn't real, one that most of them still called me, and I hated the sound of it—But I especially hated the sound of it coming from Regina. I always had.

"That's not my name." I snap, which just made her tilt her head curiously at me.

"Are you sure? When the world sees you a certain way, when you've been that person for so long, perhaps that's all you are." Her eyes faded in its intensity on me, view skirted away from me for a moment. "Perhaps their perception of you is truly the only thing that matters."

"It's not…I'm not her." The words weren't as convincing as I hoped they would've been. And that brought all of Regina's dark intentions back on me with a smirk.

"I think you are." A look of warning crossed my face, which she ignored. "I think you're that soft and doughy school teacher—that spineless, indecisive, and weak girl."

"I'm not." My voice got louder as hers grew dark and quiet.

"If you weren't then that emptiness would've gone away by now, wouldn't it?"

I froze at that, the air still in my lungs, and it was so true, that it couldn't have just been her being able to read me like an open book. She couldn't possibly know me so well.

"What do you want, Mary Margaret?"

Once again, that title.

My teeth started grinding.

I knew exactly what I wanted.

"Say it." I demanded harshly, and I saw the old spark come back in her eye, just a flicker of life in that deep brown that instantly made me jealous. I had seen the same thing when I was just a school teacher, begging and pleading behind jail bars, being accused of crimes I didn't commit. Not as the person she made me become with her curse.

"Say what, Mary Margaret?" She asked with such a fake innocence, and a mocking tone, and she knew what I wanted, she had the power to make this emptiness go away, but she wasn't going to give it me.

And after everything, I just wasn't going to accept that.

"I'm not leaving until you say it." I stalked over to her bravely, facing off with her, and her eyes searched my face intensely for a moment, before a her mask of stone settled back on her features.

"You have everything you lost," Regina spoke softly and with compassion, as if she wasn't even the one who took it from me in the first place. "Everything you claimed to want so badly, and yet it's still not enough, is it?"

Her hand reached up to brush against my cheek, and I didn't shy away from the touch, I never did. Because despite the violence and hurt of our past, there was still something instinctual inside me that never let me fear her as much as I should. Her warrants out for my arrest, her magic, her guards—I feared those, but when it was like this—just her—

"I know what you want." She whispered, causing me to suddenly realize how close she was to me, and I tried to shake myself out of the daze that her words were luring me into, but her hand was quick to grab the back of my neck and hold me still as I tried to move away. Her eyes flashed dark in an instant, something like insanity, and in that instant I felt us slip back into old roles with new meanings, and it was intoxicating enough to allow her hold on me. "The question is," A smirk grew on her features, as if she could read my mind. "How badly do you want it?"

I was slow to react to her lips crashing against mine, because it wasn't even like a kiss at first—it was like a punishment. Like a slap in the face. Though with the lack of protest on my end, I felt her head turn and her actions gained more footing, as the strong fingers loosened their grip on my neck and cupped my cheek. Once I felt her try to deepen the kiss though, I broke away from her roughly, take a shaky step back, with shock and horror on my face.

"What the hell—"

A dark laugh from her interrupted me, making me question a sanity I knew better by then to question.

"That's what I thought." Just old roles with new meanings, and I'm trying to gather my bearings at the sound of such utter victory in her tone. "Run along to your happy ending, Mary Margaret." She said dismissively, making my blood start to run hot. "Be content that you've finally won." Her smirk never wavered, because she knew that with us—no one ever wins.

But I never would accept that basic truth, the passing years not making me any less stubborn, and that was something Regina and I had in common.

I closed the space between us without thought, running on the desperation that she always brought out of me. Regina responded so quickly to the kiss, that it must not have been a new thought for her, the one I was indulging in for the sake of our petty games. She kissed me desperately, opening my mouth with hers, and it was all I could do just to match her intensity. Though this could have had little to do with me—perhaps she was just starving for any kind of affection, because no matter how much Regina wanted love, she always ended up pushing everyone away. I was not blind to the fact that she crafted this town in her image and still isolated herself in every way. I pushed my body against hers firmly, which I told myself is out of pity more than anything, and she accepted it greedily, wrapping her arms around my pale neck.

Lips broke away to fill the empty sounds of this empty mansion with heavy and ragged breathing. I blinked away the fog, not exactly expecting this to affect me so greatly, and trying not to show such weakness. Regina had no intention of doing the same, already pulling me back against the mouth that looked so enticingly disastrous, swollen and smeared lipstick captured me again.

But the kiss didn't last as long, as my mouth settled against her ear, and I felt fingers run through my hair, trying to grab at once long locks of black. Now there was nothing to hold, nothing to grasp at from our past, except;

"Say it." I whispered against the other woman's neck.

But Regina was stubborn, so fingers in my hair turned into nails scraping skin, and I swore that I could actually feel her damned smirk.

"You'll have to try just a bit harder, dear."

So I did.

I had to.

I couldn't manage as it stood. I needed some semblance of identity, because David was still David, Emma was still Emma, but I didn't feel like anything anymore. I didn't feel anything. I needed something that I was always looking at Regina to give me. I was always the princess because she was Queen, I was a bandit because she labeled me a thief, and I was Mary Margaret because her curse made it so. I didn't know what I was anymore, without her telling me. So I needed her titles—for her to call me hers or theirs, to tell me that I was nothing or everything to her. I couldn't remember it any other way.

So I had no choice. Regina was going to give me what I wanted.

And I imagined that a part of her missed this, the battling and fighting, and even though the armies were gone and the battlefield more intimate, this still had the feel of our old disasters. I, on the other hand did not miss this. I never wanted the fight, never needed the battles—

Yet here I was, fighting for dominance as we made our way towards her bedroom. I was battling with her body because it was easier than trying to get inside her mind. There was only echoes of myself in there, versions of the way she viewed me, and I had tried to make my way through the brush of her insanity for far too long, with far too much loss to show for it.

We were standing in front of her bed, and she was pulling the blouse off of my shoulders, and it was hard to breath or think or focus on anything in light of such fevered attention from her. And for once, her sight on me didn't run red with anger, her hands on my body didn't bruise or break—in this moment, she didn't want me to die—she just wanted me. I never wanted it to stop, for that fact alone.

"Just say it." I whispered, feigning need but meaning lust, and hoping one or the other would get her to cave, as her lips ravaged my throat. But instead her teeth scraped against my neck, making me shake under her touch, and at her dark and quiet laugh, I pulled her away, and pushed her back onto the bed.

"You're so damn stubborn, you know that?" My words were filled with frustration and a darkness that only she could bring out of me, as I crawled on the bed while she moved back with a mocking expression. I grabbed her wrists and pinned them down onto the mattress once my body reached hers. "We could be something more if you would just stop fighting me every inch of the way." I spoke quiet and determined, needing her to know—that this wasn't all there is.

"I don't want more." She said with dead eyes and a smirk, but I knew better. That was always Regina's problem. She always wanted more. It was just more than I was ever able to give her. So after a brief standstill on this line that neither one of us thought we would ever cross—because we were different people then, filled with hope and futures, and now—I crushed my lips against hers and she returned the kiss violently.

And we had sex the way we fought, stubborn and angry. She took everything I gave and never gave anything back—so I took it from her, I took the cloths off of her body, stole the moans and whimpers out of her lips with my fingers trailing down between her legs.

I felt alive again, for the first time in twenty eight years, and it was amazing and painful and felt like everything all at once—it was too much, but it was something—it was everything. And I could tell by her eyes that were shut too tightly, as she finished on my hand—I could tell she felt the same way. It was defeat and victory, pain and pleasure, and rewards with punishment.

But it wasn't enough.

As I collected the salt on her skin with my lips, there was no anger left in me, just this still that came when Regina would stop fighting me for just a moment. This way I would look at her every minute she would allow, and as her eyes opened slowly to mine, I saw her lips curl up into a smile.

Her fingers traced my jaw, as I studied her features with a desperate sort of concentration.

"Regina…" I whispered, voice echoing one of a girl that looked so much like me once, in a land so different than this one.

"There she is." She whispered back, causing my eyebrows to knit in confusion. As she pulled me down to her for a kiss, she whispered against my mouth, "My Snow White…"

I smiled against the kiss, and Regina allowed the small victory and defeat, one I was sure she would recover quickly from.

For that moment though, she said it. I knew she would.

end.