DISCLAIMER: "Once Upon a Time" and all its wonderful characters belong to ABC and Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, etc.. I borrow them only with love.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This angsty little piece includes both Outlaw Queen and past (with a bit of lingering present) Swan Queen. So, basically, it should offend both parts of the fandom equally and make no one really happy. Don't say I didn't warn you.:)
Many thanks for the speed beta go to helenhighwater7.
BY ORDER SUMMER LINGERS
by
Rowan Darkstar
Copyright (c) 2015
It is getting worse. It is getting ugly. It is getting sharp and hard. Emma's hair is growing lighter and her touch is growing colder.
The scent of her magic is nauseating and intoxicating.
Kind of like Camelot altogether.
The castle is enough like Regina's own home in her memory. Enough to make her nostalgic. Enough to make her shaky. Enough to make her turn away her food.
The nights are cool and quiet, the insects through the windows loud and grating. She holds onto Robin a little too tightly. Listens too closely for footfalls in the hall.
She is in her room alone, hiding from the clinging crowds in the late day sun, when Emma comes in, shaking and hot with untapped magic.
"Help me," the savior says.
Less than ten words are spoken before Emma grabs Regina by the ribcage, nails digging into the gold brocade of her gown, and plasters her lips to hers like she is starved for oxygen.
Regina lets the kiss happen, startled into passivity at first, then caught in a trance of haunting memory. She pushes Emma away with a gentle, guiding hand to her chest. "Stop."
"Why?" The childlike desperation in the blonde's thin tone, the aching sense of one more abandonment, one more rejection tear at Regina's hardened heart.
The Queen has gone from being everyone's nightmare to everyone's mother, and some nights she just feels old.
"Because, it's not helping," Regina says, words flat.
"Yes it is. You are. Kiss me. Please kiss me. Help me hold onto myself, hold onto the light."
"Don't you have your pirate for that?"
They are standing close, still a little entangled. They are still a little entangled.
"He loves me, but he doesn't know me. He can't accept that the darkness is here, that it's strong. That part of it is me. He doesn't understand. But you do. You do."
Regina swallows hard, holds Emma's gaze with hooded lids and a knot of ice in her gut. "I do. But I'm not anybody's light, Emma."
"You're Henry's."
Regina closes her eyes and breathes.
Emma wilts to rest on the edge of the chaise lounge, fingers still circling Regina's waist, forehead falling to rest against the Queen's warm breast.
Regina feels her pulse rise and her breath deepen. She doesn't want to face this. She doesn't want to be the savior, real or imagined. She holds stiff for a moment, unresponsive to Emma's clinging touch. Then her hand rises and her fingers cup the back of the younger woman's neck.
"We're doing everything we can to help you," she says, voice deep and scratchy to her own ears. Used up and torn. "We'll fix this. I promised Henry."
"You locked yourself in your vault," Emma says, words muffled in the velvet of Regina's gown. "When you knew the darkness was coming. You trusted me to keep you safe and I let you out. I failed you. I need to trust you not to fail me. Don't let me out, Regina. Don't let the Dark One out."
Regina just breathes. She finds her other hand open-palmed and steadying on Emma's back. "You should go to Killian," she says.
Emma's long fingers clutch Regina closer. "I can't. He can't love me as the Dark One. He sees Emma, and he sees the Dark One, but he can't see us all tangled up together." She tilts her head back, cheek cool against Regina's flesh as she gazes upward. Her eyes are wide and blue and too much like Henry's not to chip away at Regina's walls. "But you can," Emma says. "You could love me, anyway."
"Why do you think that? When I was the Evil Queen, I didn't even love myself."
"But you loved Rumple."
Regina tenses and frowns. Her fingers tighten in Emma's hair. "I never loved Rumple."
"You cared for him. You fought for him. Part of you loved him, I could see it. I could always see it."
"Dependence, familiarity, and love are all deceptively similar responses to twisted situations." She lets the words stand and ring, hopes they echo long after.
"Regina...," Emma whispers, "I'm terrified."
Regina bites her lip and forces the words across her tongue. "Because you like it. The dark."
"Because I love it."
"That...that I understand."
Emma closes her eyes and lays her face against Regina's skin, tucks her nose into the most inviting crevice.
Regina loves Robin, loves him with all her heart. But sometimes, she misses this. Misses the well-tailored suits, the snark and banter of Madam Mayor. She misses the crazy and young and obnoxious savior who blasted her way into her life, through her life (through her heart). Misses this messy mass of blonde waves against her chest, soft breath on her skin. When it was just the two of them (no thief, no pirate) and an ugly little car in the rain, the only ones in Storybrooke who even began to understand each other. Light hair, dark hair, smiles against frowns and their little boy between them when his voice had not yet dropped.
When Emma pulls and tugs and half climbs up Regina to catch her mouth once more, Regina indulges a little this time. For Emma's sake, she says. She lets the sensations wash out and numb her weariness. She is not just feeling her innocent savior. Her tongue tastes a darkness and a fire, an intimately familiar flavor she both runs from and still thirsts for in the night.
When it's too much, and too wrong, Regina edges away and Emma instinctively understands and lets her head fall to the Queen's chest. When Regina looks up, he is there. Standing with a thief's silence in the doorway, watching her through eyes like the ocean. She holds his gaze. There is understanding and there are shadows, there. The two lovers speak for a while without words, Regina's fingers sheltering Emma's fragile frame.
A pained understanding passes through the air like wisps of magic, and for a moment it is all just a tangled up and loving mess of the three of them, holding on to something golden as the world slides through dark passageways and blackened rivers. She wishes everything would just freeze, hold captured in a glass, with Robin's eyes on hers like the beacon of an old soul, with the gentle, sweet breaths against her breast, like baby Henry asleep after a bottle. Like she is something light, something warm, something beautiful.
Like all of this has been with a purpose, and they are not just pawns in an endless web of darkness.
Winter descends on Camelot. She wishes the summer would linger a few moments more.
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