A/N: This in an AU, non-canon, High School Angst Romance Swan Queen story written in 4th wall breaking style (Emma talks directly to you). Magic with a modern setting. Swan Queen is endgame but other Swan and Queen pairings exist. Also includes Sleeping Warrior, Snowing, and Ruby Slippers. Trigger warnings for mentions of: panic attacks, magical cutting, abuse, drug & alcohol use. Rated Mature 18+ for coarse language, sex, and triggers.
Please anticipate story updates every Sunday (sometimes much sooner or a bit later). No copyright infringement intended. For entertainment purposes only. I welcome all comments, reviews, and thoughts. Talk to me! Thanks for reading!
Step 1. Recognize That You Might Actually Need Help
My name is Emma Swan.
I'm eighteen years old.
I'm good at shooting magic sparks out my hands.
And I'm hopelessly in love.
Her name is Regina Mills.
She's eighteen years old.
She's an expert at flinging fireballs from her hands.
And she can go fuck herself.
The falling hopelessly in love with Regina Mills circus act of my life happened during what was shaping up to be a craptastic year as a senior at Storybrooke Magic Academy and Institute in Maine USA. SMAI is an all girls pre-kindergarten thru first year of college boarding school in a town with actual magic called Storybrooke that I attend through academic sponsorship. Not that some of those facts weren't implied by the school's name.
Sorry, but I have the tendency to over-explain things.
Unfortunately, this is sometimes accomplished with profanity.
I don't envision myself mellowing out soon.
The truth sets you free.
So, in the spirit of speaking the truth about my Regina situation-and to avoid exposing all my mental issues to our 'not judging you but clearly judging you' Headmistress Reul Ghorm - the only woman in existence puritanical enough to wear an ankle-length blue dress with a perpetual bitch-face every single day of her mundane and insignificant life, as if the only two things she allows near her body are especially sour lemons and battery-operated veiny dildos - some things should be brutally divulged to ensure life lessons stick to your brain.
Please observe this eye-roll inducing drivel I heard from Reul eight weeks ago:
"We're not singling you out as a punishment, Emma," Reul said, shifting in her high-back leather chair, summoning a smile so fake I wasn't sure if she was modeling outfits in a clothing store window or suffering from a stroke, "Mr. Gold entrusted this independent study assignment to you for a reason. You just need to believe in yourself."
No, I needed to be anywhere but sitting in front of Reul, fidgeting in a sickeningly bright danger-cone orange plastic chair. A chair, mind you, that caused more discomfort along the muscles of my lower back than seeing Reul's sourpuss face did to my entire mind at 7 am on a Monday, which it was.
Both circumstances royally sucked.
Another thing that royally sucked? A privileged headmistress at one of the best schools for magic in one of the wealthiest magic towns in the world didn't have real problems outside of where to pigeonhole non-normative students like me. She'd never understand how hard it was to be accepted in our society - she always had a place where she belonged or could make herself belong. She always had authority. Power over her own destiny.
She didn't actually care that her decisions meant I would never belong anywhere. Never have a home. Never have a family.
That I was alone.
But, here's what made me truly livid at that moment: I was forced to take a senior seminar in Advanced Principles of Dark Magic & Arcana without having taken any of the prerequisite classes like Core Dark Magic and I knew only one person was to blame for my prison sentence.
The one person I loved most in all the universe.
Regina Mills.
The reason I'd spend an entire year-my senior year of high school!-dealing with that odious prick Mr. Gold. The reason I had to look Reul in her cold brown eyes as she sat surrounded by an endless sea of rule books and student files and sentenced me to a horrid social death. The reason why I'd never be able to 'get by' because people would always know what I was and never want to know who I was.
Regina Mills.
"I don't want anyone to know have it," I explained in a voice conveying all the worry and fear and regret able to be summoned into the human soul, my brow furrowing deep into my face, "And I don't want to take Mr. Gold's class."
The books on Reul's shelves rattled.
I knew it was my dark magic.
She knew it too.
My dark magic always desired destruction.
I knew instantly what was coming next: My Change.
I saw it in Reul's eyes first, the mix of disapproval and repulsion shimmering to a boil behind russet irises. In the way her hands quickly steepled in front of her lips and she became eerily unreadable.
My hands surged with a painful, contracting heat that increased in temperature and intensity as it snaked through my veins. Boiled my blood. Choked my breaths. My temples throbbed from a fluctuation in the magical pressure of the heated blood cocooning my brain, pressing against my skull, inflaming the irises of my eyes. Light crackled at my fingertips; winding out of my hands, coiling in the air like invisible tentacles of energy waving, probing, seeking Reul, its target, its latest sustenance.
A chorus of demonic voices taunting me to maim.
To take aim with the birch wood silver tipped wand in my right hand.
I could feel my darkness crashing against the protection wards Reul erected in her office. The ones that blanketed the entire campus. It didn't matter. My energy would find a way to break the weaker wards. I was certain. Because it did once before during a time I want to forget.
I had to corral my power; stave off my Change.
Not become the evil I feared. The evil that was the real me. Not immolate and take Reul and the Student Services building up in roaring flames with me.
Reul's renowned pixie dust fueled magic isn't a match against pure dark magic. I don't have a pure form; it's corrupted nonetheless. But, she didn't signal for any guard staff. It perplexed me; she wasn't afraid for herself.
Although I was seized with the pain and near blindness from oncoming my Change, I registered that Reul's eyes had glossed over. Milky white and swollen. As her eyelids blinked frantically, she chanted in an ancient and extinct dialect of Elvish-some of the words familiar to me only because I've heard them before. Whispered solemnly by Regina.
I could feel Reul reaching out to me; her magic calling to me like a siren, urging me to sail toward a plane of pure light. Use the light magic within me to make the itching and the headaches and the burning and the voices inside me subside and disappear.
The irony: the clamoring voices in my head threatening to incite violence from within me and lunge at Reul at that moment were all drowned out by my memory of Regina's sultry voice. Insistent. Strong. Loving. Soothing. A lighthouse built on solid ground near dark and tempestuous seas. Guiding my ship home. Guiding me to Regina.
It also occurred to me that, despite not being a powerful Sorceress, a Shapeshifter or a Dark One, Reul had risen through the ranks of academia to lord over SMAI's students because she could do something terrifyingly amazing: Reach your essence and control it.
Something only Regina was able to do to me. Reul came close enough on her own volition, but I must want her to succeed for it to work completely.
I didn't.
But I also didn't want to prove society right about the real me. The dark me.
I took a deep breath through my mouth, let the room's air cool my burning tonsils and tumble down my throat to dim the fires within my body. I could have avoided all of this if I wore gloves like Regina suggested. Wore the red leather ones she gave me because they matched my favorite jacket. "Swan, don't be an idiot. Wear the gloves."
I had my reasons to forgo wearing them. Ones only people like me understood. Easiest to explain: Gloves kept dark magic at bay long enough for countermeasures like Reul's to take effective shape, but dark magic constantly fighting against barriers made it stronger. Turned it into a seasoned military tactician. Eventually, I would be… invincible?
Alone.
Dead.
When I finally broke through the trance, I was shocked to discover Reul appeared and acted normally. Shuffled papers on her desk. As if nothing magical or spiritual had transpired between us. Her mouth a thin line, Reul wrote something down feverishly on a vellum paper sheet resting on the top of her shuffled paper stack with a blue quill fashioned to look like a winged fairy. She shot me a calm look. I became unwittingly cowed by her eyes, a marionette subject to her whims.
The rattling ceased.
I felt gross. Wanted to throw up. Cleanse myself in holy water or something. Anything.
My eyes burned. Heavy and difficult to keep open. I managed to focus on a small potted bonsai plant perched on her office window sill. Its manicured branches tempting me to curl them around her neck… and it fucking pissed me off that neither of us addressed the proverbial big-eared African elephant shitting bricks in the room.
Reul noticed my anger and unease and simply plowed through her lecture.
"It's not quite that simple," that emotionless Stepford Wife smile of hers resurfaced across her lips, settling on her face like a conquering conquistador, "I've personally reviewed your results from your recent adjusted MAP test and determined this is the best choice available to you."
She magnanimously gave me a moment to allow her words to settle in my mind. Take root in the black soil there. Grow within the residual anger that lingered and nourished me.
Why was I allowed to remain at her school?
Didn't what just happened mean I should be locked up?
Dissected?
What had she really managed to do to me?
It was more than control me.
I felt my body and mind were there in her office but also not there.
Experiencing a horrid time like this one was exactly why I intentionally bombed parts of the Magical Aptitude Test (MAP) to hide my abilities when I took it my junior year at my old school, East Storybrooke High. I kept my wild dark magic abilities a secret for 18 years even though tanking the test meant losing a full-ride college scholarship and a high paying job thereafter.
Dark magic made you a persona non grata, unwanted and unlovable. People in Storybrooke treated you like a social pariah - like dirt - when you have dark magic and come from innercity Storybrooke like me. Your school headmistress had to transform into a literal succubus to drain the edge off your powers. Make you socially tolerable. Keep you in line. Turn you into a caged animal. The MAP test was designed to find dark magic mages and weed them out for a culling. I lied to the world as a matter of self-preservation.
I hated how Reul made me feel… less like myself. Docile and confused.
I never even told my best friend at East Storybrooke High, Lily, who I always felt most comfortable being around, sometimes even more than Regina - we grew up in the same orphanage and shared the same unfortunate life experiences - because I never wanted Lily to look at me the way Reul did. I wouldn't be able to survive that look dawning across Lily's face, even for a second.
Lily's a Shapeshifter, their lives are government regulated, but even they are treated better than… potential Dark Ones. You are monitored by Storybrooke's local branch of the Department of Magic Safety Enforcement when you possess even an inkling of dark energy (everyone working there is Massengill douchey, chiefly its director, Sidney Glass).
If I wouldn't tell the one person who has known and loved me my entire life that I had dark magic inside me, then, trust me, telling Regina was the most defining moment of my entire life.
Until she told our school officials. Then that moment became the pinnacle of my life's experiences. A colossally shitty one.
So fuck Regina.
And no goddamn thanks to everything Reul had to offer.
"You mean it's the only choice available to me," I leveled at her, not deigning to hide my disappointment and disgust. I absentmindedly began scraping my wand down the length of my left forearm, leaving dry scratch marks in its wake.
Why can't adults just tell the damn truth? 'Emma, you're a caged animal soon to be sent to the slaughter house.' How hard was that to say?
Reul took note of what my wand hand was doing, her eyes tracing every movement, and she jotted something down on vellum paper again. I immediately stopped scratching my arm. No way was I explaining that habit to her or giving her the satisfaction of having yet another reason to "reach me" with her pixie power again.
Most times I don't realize I'm doing the scratching. Sometimes it leaves calligraphic etchings on my arms that take a considerable amount of light magic to heal. Or Regina's touch. The etchings heal instantly underneath Regina's hands.
Reul narrowed her eyes. "The fact that you don't want to do the seminar is immaterial. The fact that you must have proper instruction for your own sake as well as for the safety and benefit of our society is paramount. Many of us in the private school sector have long suspected that pre-MAP and MAP tests given at your old school were horrendously fallible due to administrative fraud. And, unlike your old school, we want you to be successful, Emma."
"How wonderful," I sighed. I didn't have it in me to fight in the long haul. Reul did something malicious to me, I just knew it with every fiber of my being. Because I lived for a fight. It was necessary where I grew up. It was all I ever knew how to do.
"The demerits you're amassing at an alarming rate places the remainder of your senior year in jeopardy as well," she added, watching me intently. Recording every twitch, every breath, and every eye blink. Judging. Assessing.
Despite being ticked off, I had to suppress a smirk. Regina found my demerits from infractions like excessive tardiness and offensive verbal outbursts sinfully sexy; started issuing ones of her own to me for dipping my fingers into her food then licking them slowly in front of her or for biting her ass through her uniform skirt like a rabid dog. I collected more of her demerits than the official ones.
But, worst of all, I also smirked because I knew, eventually, I'd forgive Regina for outing me at school.
Because, like Regina told me once, love made you weak. She is my weakness.
"The truth is," I said, dragging out the words, stalling for enough time to make a new tactic, desperation, seem as sincere as it was when preceded by a smirk. "Mr. Gold hates me." He did. NARCing on another school official was always effective at getting a rise from Reul. She's an asshat hypocrite.
A self-satisfied smile rippled briefly across her face, and she quickly submerged it. Must have remembered I was sitting in front of her trying to worm my way out of a class she was delighted to force upon me because I was 'one of those people.'
"Mr. Gold is your new adviser, Emma. He's taken fiduciary responsibility for you. You must take your academic accountability seriously if you wish to avoid the institutions our government confines citizens when they refuse to receive specialized and documented instruction for their dark magic. Do you understand?" She smugly folded her hands across her chest.
So, so very smug.
My knuckles whitened around the hilt of my wand. I summoned the reserves I had within my light magic to resist showing Reul more of my wild and uncontrollable dark magic-or the underhanded things added to my arsenal through secret lessons with a conniving Regina. So, parts of me were slowly inching back to life! Reul's hold had limits, but was not as weak as I hoped. If she could do this to me, why was she only in the field of education?
Still, choking out a schoolmarm isn't exactly the kind of thing the Department of Magic Safety Enforcement forgives when they arrest you.
"I understand completely, Headmistress Ghorm," I said, fighting back angry salty tears as I ejected myself from her plastic chair and her presence...
Now, my reason for rehashing that meeting with my school's taskmaster headmistress is two-fold. First, I have to say it again: I'm having a craptastic senior year. I need to vent or I will explode. True, I've had some time to process in the weeks since my surreal and upsetting encounter with Reul, but I am still… unsettled. Still… not completely myself.
Secondly, and more important, I sat in front of Reul Ghorm being bombarding by her uppity platitudes and her weird ass magic powers because of someone I love.
Regina was the only person in the world I told about my dark magic. Showed her during a confession of True Love. I imagined True Love meant you didn't need to hide the deepest parts of you. That Regina would understand my fears and accept me because she has dark magic too.
Wrong.
So terribly wrong.
I was stuck in the last place in the world I wanted to be for two hours and thirty-two minutes straight because it was easier for Regina to betray me than it was for her to admit she felt things for me other than unhinged lust.
My situation with Regina is rending the fabric of my soul.
It hurts like hell.
My heart is a hole through which hell is bursting forth.
A literal hell hole, if you will.
Do I want a hell hole where my heart used to be?
Has our sun gone supernova?
But that's my reality, and I should've seen it coming.
The signs were everywhere.
There are always warning signs before a relationship is zipped up in a black bag and carted off to the town morgue. I was too dense to see the signs. Or I chose to rationalize the signs when I spotted them. Or I was too gullible when Regina dismissed the signs as my overreactions.
In my mind, Regina was perfect and therefore perfect for me: Lucent chocolate brown eyes, shrewd and predatory but also wonderfully soulful when set over her warmest smiles...
A soft nose that crinkled under the weight of her judgmental stares...
Rosy cheekbones kissed by voluminous brunette hair that danced in the heated air of her magic...
The vein in her forehead that became prominent and divine when it pulsated under the wildfires of her anger or her desire...
Beautifully shaped lips that parted devilishly to deliver world-crushing insults and world-altering kisses...
The most beautiful little scar traversing her upper lip that roared to life when she felt giddy, mischievous, sexy, angry, scared, free… when she felt anything and everything.
And all the things your eyes didn't see at first glance made me love her most of all: How she laughed with her whole body if she found something I said or did hilarious...
How she held my hand, interlacing our fingers, when she taught me how to conjure a small flame...
How she looked at me so intently some nights I felt my soul reaching out to hug her tightly...
How she molded me out of lumpy clay. Gave me a form. Spoke my name. Made me me.
I want to be alone with her all the time. Know her completely. Every thought on her mind. For her to know me completely. To find me worthy of her. I'm still one sultry look in her narrowed eyes away from being declared medically and legally brain dead. Which is like dead dead. Her intelligence, warmth and beauty-when she displayed them-stop me dead dead in my tracks. Her magic does too, figuratively and literally.
I always need her.
My dark magic always needs her.
So much it terrifies me.
My stupidity terrifies me. I can knock a dude flat on his ass by flicking my wrist, but apparently not comprehend that the person I love is the worst possible person to love until I'm all but buried under her family's mausoleum.
So, I'll do a huge favor for you and never require you owe me one in return. I'm that kinda person. I'll point out the red flags that popped up in my love life in an effort to keep you from making the same mistakes that got me a brand-spanking new hell hole for a heart and a lifetime of living under a microscope lens.
I'll map out the steps for you to take so you can get over your (evil) ex.
If you're already heartbroken, then, well, misery loves company. You'll see yourself in my jump-scare filled horror story of a life.
And if you have any questions before I begin, here's my email:
emma_swan at storybrookemagicacademyandinstitute dot edu
And here is Regina's tutoring center email if you want to harass her on my behalf:
evil_regal_tutors at storybrookemagicacademyandinstitute dot edu
Wait!
Forget I said that!
The confusion and bitterness seeping from the hell hole in my chest temporarily erased my common sense.
Email Regina only for help with Rune writing, Elvish verb conjugating, or Potion decanting. She will not enjoy having her life dragged through our muddy campus grounds in my guide. And definitely not you harassing her.
I have magic at my disposal. It's a fair-ish fight if she comes after me in a murderous rage. You? Instant death by fireball.
Fair warning: This guide will help you get over your (evil) ex but it's also a tale about True Love. However, my point of contention is that, given my experience with it, True Love is a FUCKING LIE.
At this point in your reading, you might be asking yourself: Hey, what does an eighteen year old know about anything?
I'll be frank with you. Not goddamn much given my current situation with Regina and school.
But, what I do know with an unprecedentedly high degree of certainty is UNREQUITED LOVE & HEARTACHE. I can for sure as hell assist you in your struggle with those twin harbingers of doom.
Let's quickly move to Step Two where I show you the colossal fuckups happening right now in my life - nearly all involving Regina - and how to avoid them in yours so you can heal your broken heart and actually enjoy the sound of bluebirds chirping in the trees outside your window at 5:45 am.
