Written for Swan Queen Week Jan 2015, Day 5: Soulmates. Originally posted on ao3 in January, posting here for archival reasons. Thank you to Racethewind_10 and Typey for the betas and fixing all my tenses. Extra thanks to Race for demanding that I convincing me to write chapter 2. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

Chapter 1: Regina

It was one of those things that came with the curse and the move to the world without magic, like inherently knowing how to drive or who was president or what season of The Bachelor they were in. It was also one of the things that everyone seemed to know and talk about but couldn't quite figure out that something just wasn't. quite. right.

Because if someone in Storybrooke had the silver glow of numbers on their wrist, they never actually noticed that the numbers were just caught in an infinite random loop, never realized that the TiMERs weren't actually counting down at all.

Except for Regina's. Her TiMER counted down toward her soulmate, and it upset her that it showed any numbers at all.

Storybrooke had existed for just over a year when she breached the town's boundaries and made her way to a nearby city. It was half curiosity and half escapism that drove her out – a desire to see the land beyond her curse's borders and a need to be unknown, unnoticed, for just one night.

She should have known that the only thing she wanted she could not have, because sitting alone at a hotel bar apparently meant she wanted attention, and that apparent desire for company was interpreted in two different ways: either her TiMER was about to go off and she wanted one last fling, or her TiMER was going off so far in the future that she was lonely and looking for casual sex.

The first man to sit beside her was already drunk enough that he thought grabbing her arm and pulling up the sleeve on her sweater was acceptable behaviour. She threw her drink in his face but not until he already announced to the entire bar that her numbers read twenty-six years.

Four men approached with just as much luck before a very pretty woman in her forties slid onto the next barstool. Regina was about to glare at the intrusion but the woman briefly exposed her own wrist. "I get it," she said warmly, and Regina gave her a single nod when she made out that there were still ten years left in her countdown.

They sat in silence for the next fifteen minutes, finishing their drinks and then ordering another, until the woman caught her eye, and with a raised eyebrow, a quirk of her lips, and an incline of her head asked Regina the same question she'd been asked all night.

This time Regina answered with a single nod, and followed the other woman to her room.

"I knew he wasn't my soulmate," Kathryn confessed to Regina about her missing husband. "Neither of our TiMERS had gone off yet, but we both just got so tired of waiting. It was nice to have someone to come home to, even if it wasn't supposed to be forever. It was nice, for once, to just not be so..."

She trailed off and Regina completed her thought. "Lonely."

Kathryn's smile was watery and sad but looked like relief. "But I suppose I'm lonely again." She shrugged. "We did grow to love each other. I think I'd be okay with him leaving if I knew that it was because he met his soulmate, but..." she broke eye contact and instead gazed out the window. "He should still be counting down too."

Kathryn gestured to her wrist, to the numbers that appeared with no pattern at all, and Regina tugged down on her blazer sleeve to cover the twenty-four.

It was not the first time they'd had this conversation.

It wouldn't be the last.

She left Storybrooke again, this time going to a slightly more upscale hotel. Sadly, the price of the Manhattans did not translate to the quality of people at the bar. Perhaps they were a little less brazen, less vulgar, but the meaning behind everyone's inquiry was the same: how much time do you have left?

She bought a specialty watch that trip – one with a wide strap designed to hide the numbers, hide her loneliness, hide that she still had twenty-two years to go.

She didn't go to bed alone that time either, but she was still lonely.

"How do you think the TiMERs work?"

The voice was younger and less jaded than one she would normally expect at such a classy bar and it caught Regina's interest. The young man the voice belonged to was probably only just over twenty-one – even though his body displayed all the signs of manhood, his eyes betrayed his innocence.

He was directing his questions to a man probably in his late twenties not too far from where she was sitting, and she found herself listening to their conversation. "The company says it's all about analysing data, but that never made sense to me."

"Right? It could be data analysis if it was just like a dating service and was matching people up, but how do they know when you're going to meet? How did they even figure out what soulmates were?"

Regina rolled her eyes. She had apparently done the research in greater detail than some of the people from this world, those who had undergone the procedure willingly – not that it even seemed like a choice, any more. But people in this world had always believed in soulmates; before the TiMERs they had read tea leaves and studied the stars and looked at auras and paid shamans to play matchmaker. For a world without magic, Regina found this all incredibly gullible. And yet...

"It's not the who that I wonder about," the younger man said. "I trust that. It's that –" Regina saw him gesture to his wrist and he only had about 18 hours left. "It's like I'm going to be hyper aware tomorrow, and I won't have any control over any decision I make. Even though I think I have free will, everything I do will just be bringing me closer and closer to her."

Regina drummed her figures on the bar top and took a slow sip of her drink. It had been a long time since she pondered free will versus destiny, and it wasn't something that she particularly wanted to wade into right now. Not when her own destiny was still twenty years away.

She had almost blocked out the rest of the conversation when the older man finally snapped at the younger, "Well then how do you think it works? Pixie dust?"

Regina couldn't tell if her tears were from laughing or crying.

Most people got their TiMERs at about the time they reached puberty, she learned. It could be a bit before or a bit after depending on how much money was available to them, but for the most part, everyone got one. She had seen how society acted towards those that refused them: disdain, superiority, condescension, and even abuse. It was horrible.

Yet even seeing that, knowing what happened to those without a TiMER, Regina wanted to wish she didn't have one; yet, she did, and so she had to settle for trying to forget it existed it all. Forget it existed, forget that she had a soulmate out there who wasn't her Daniel, forget that hers had been counting down from twenty-eight years.

She clung to the hope that Daniel didn't register as her soulmate only because he had never made it to this realm. That maybe there was someone from this world who could help fill the emptiness that she felt inside. That maybe because she wasn't from this world the rules were a little different. That maybe she could have two soulmates.

Her research had told her that the numbers wouldn't appear on the TiMER until both people had theirs installed, so somewhere out there where time moved properly, there was someone whose countdown matched her own. She tried to picture a person who would have gotten their TiMER before she had hers, who continued to age even though she was here, stuck in time...

It was also extremely possible that her TiMER worked differently because of the curse, because time moved differently in Storybrooke so she didn't have to wait for her soulmate to get their TiMER for hers to start counting. Maybe some things were destined, no matter when a small piece of technology was installed.

She briefly thought of a lion tattoo from long ago and wondered if he could possibly be in her town this whole time and she had just never come across him, but she dismissed that thought. According to the company, there was nothing she could do to speed up the process.

She just had to wait for another eighteen years.

But that was okay. With the curse, she had all the time in the world.

Having all the time in the world, in a word, sucked.

The monotony was tiresome. The power that she exerted over the people of the Enchanted Forest didn't seem to mean as much as it used to. It meant even less when she examined that they didn't choose to obey her; that it was written into the curse.

The adage about the watched pot that never boils existed in her old world too, and she began to hate the numbers that changed on her wrist when no one else's did in this miserable existence.

The next time she went beyond the town's borders, she bought every piece of jewellery, watch, and cuff that she could find to hide the countdown. Apparently she wasn't the only one to want to hide them, as there were entire stores devoted to them – ones that she could wear in the shower, and sleeping, and to formal events... all so that she never had to see the numbers taunting her.

All so that she didn't have to have a visual reminder of how unhappy she was.

(She pretended that it helped. It didn't.)

As much as she despised the numbers, Regina couldn't stop thinking about them and spent far more time than she wanted wondering how the TiMERs worked in Storybrooke.

When she took away everyone's happy ending, so many families were split apart. Sure, there were entire towns and villages in the Enchanted Forest that came along with the curse that she had no qualms with, and so they were mostly left untouched. They continued living their unimportant existences in their menial labour jobs with their families and blank TiMERs. But then there were the people like Kathryn, whom Regina knew had definitely bumped into Fred before, and Mary Margaret who volunteered at the hospital and so must have seen her precious Charming.

But David was in a coma, and while Abigail and Frederick were probably soulmates, did that automatically mean that Kathryn and Fred would be? Was a soulmate even the same thing in this world as they believed it to be in the old one?

Was having a soulmate the same thing as having a True Love?

She supposed that maybe their TiMERs weren't going off because of the curse, because they currently were not who they truly were. Maybe their souls didn't recognize each other.

So maybe her man with the lion tattoo was here in town. Maybe she had run across him already, but with the curse hiding his true identity, but her soul couldn't recognize him. But then that meant...

That meant that her TiMER was counting down to the prophesied end of the curse.

She shuddered.

She then started asking around to find if anyone in Storybrooke matched the description, but everything she did came up empty. She planned a community festival on one of the hottest days of the summer so that she could investigate everyone's arms. She filed a false police report with Graham saying that she had been assaulted in the street, and the only thing she had seen was the tattoo.

And still.

She would just have to be ready if it came to that. It was far more likely that she would venture outside of Storybrooke that day. Besides, she had fourteen years to figure it out.

"Do you think that maybe we were all better off before TiMERs?"

Regina looked up from her fourth drink at the bar. The stranger was well dressed, about her physical age, and clearly at the point in his evening where the alcohol and tiredness gave way to introspection. She finished her drink and motioned for another, sitting back in her chair and giving the man her attention. She had nothing better to do that night.

"Just that..." he trailed off and showed her his wrist, the numbers showing eighteen years to go and on reflex she touched her own wrist, the numbers exposed after her watch strap broke on her way out of town. "Just that maybe if we weren't waiting for a soulmate, we could have found happiness somewhere else. Who says that you can only find happiness with one person, huh?"

"I had happiness," she answered, startling herself with her honesty. "I…" she hesitates – how do you explain growing up in a different realm? "I got my TiMER late, and before I had it, I was in love."

"What happened?"

Her eyes cast back down to her drink. "He died. But I loved him without anything telling me that I should. I loved him in spite of everything telling me that I shouldn't."

"And now?"

"I have a void in my heart, one that cannot be filled," she said, echoing those words lodged in her mind from so long ago. They brought back memories, none of them pleasant. Realizing the silence was growing strained Regina forced her attention back to her conversation partner and continued. "The TiMER says I'll find my soulmate in twelve years. But I don't want to dishonour him, to believe that it wasn't real because a machine told me differently."

The man was silent, and Regina stared back into the depths of her drink before finishing it. She needed to keep her level of inebriation for this conversation to continue.

She was startled when the man spoke again. "I'll be old by the time I meet my soulmate. If she's the same age as me, I'll have lost my chance for a family. I thought that maybe I could find someone who was in the same situation as me, that we could make it work until our soulmates came along, that I could still be a father... but can you imagine what society would do to that kid? We'd be social outcasts. The kid would hate me."

The man was almost passing out into his drink by this point and the bartender cut him off, making a pointed suggestion that he go to his room on his own, but Regina wasn't paying attention anymore. Instead, she was fixated on the one part of the conversation that she hadn't dared to dream about since those first days of the curse. A family. She could still be a mother.

It took two years. Two years of research. Two years of looking into the adoption system in America, of navigating through the stigmas of what happened to babies born from non-TiMERed relationships. Two years of data collection of whether a single woman whose TiMER hadn't gone off yet could even adopt a baby. Two years of her firmly believing that it didn't matter, as long as the baby was loved.

It took two years and getting Gold on her side, but it worked. She got the call – there was a baby available.

She could hear the worry of the woman from the agency over the phone, that maybe because this baby was born from two people who weren't soulmates, she wouldn't want him, that he would matter less to her.

When she held Henry in her arms for the first time, she could say without a doubt that there was nothing in the world that could possibly ever matter more.

She had worn the cuffs for so long that she hadn't actually seen her numbers since she had to fill out her time remaining on the adoption paperwork. She had a general idea, but it wasn't something that she thought about. Not when she had a toddler who liked to run, didn't like to sleep, and was afraid of the dark.

On this particular night he was curled up in her arms in her bed, sobbing about the thunder and lightning and noises that were too loud. And she could have handled it – they would have been fine if the power hadn't chosen that exact moment to go out.

There were candles in the dresser on the other side of the bed and her phone had been plugged in on the opposite side of the room, but Henry only shrieked louder when she tried to move.

It was in a moment of desperation that she yanked the cuff up, letting the silver glow from the device give off just enough light so that they could see each other's faces – and he immediately settled. His sobs were now just gasps of breath and his face was still red but the terror was over.

"Momma," he whispered, his chubby fingers tracing over the edges of between the gadget and her skin with more precision than she thought he possessed. "Pretty."

She chanced a look at the numbers, then – a little more than eight years remained. Henry would be about ten when her TiMER finally beeped, and she briefly wondered how introducing someone new into her life would impact him, how they would react to this town and her child. But she couldn't worry about that now, not when her current concern was if the storm had finally stopped, if the sky would stay quiet enough to let them rest. Instead she let the silver glow sooth him as her other hand rubbed comforting circles on his back until he fell asleep against her.

In the morning the cuff had settled back into place, and she didn't dare disturb the post-storm calm.

Henry should have been waiting for her to pick him up from first grade at the front gates, but she was familiar with his habit of losing track of time. It didn't take long to spot him playing with some other kids his age, and she called out to him.

"Mommy!" he shouted excitedly. "We're playing wedding and I just got married, look!" He extended out his left arm and showed her the oval drawn clumsily on his wrist. "My TiMER went off and so I don't have any numbers, just like when I get my own!"

"You think you've already met your soulmate?"

He smiled widely and nodded his head. "I have you."

Henry was eight when he asked her about the TiMERs. "I know I'm not supposed to ask people this, but how much time do you have on yours?"

She pressed her lips together and hoped he didn't see her freeze. "If it's not polite to ask, then you shouldn't ask." He mumbled his apologies but then she sighed. "I know you're just curious. But the truth is, I haven't looked in a long time. I don't want to know." She could see the confusion on his face so she elaborated. "I find that people have a tendency to fixate on the future instead of enjoying the present. I don't want to miss a single moment of right now with you because of it."

He smiled at her answer, but he was clearly still curious. "How do they work, do you think?"

"How do you think they work?"

"I think it might be magic. Do you think it's magic?"

Not in this world. She smiled warmly at him anyway, recalling those words from so long ago. "I think it might be pixie dust."

There was that tugging deep in her brain again that had existed for the past year and in greater frequency this week that she was forgetting something, but she ignored it. With Henry's recent withdrawal and disobedience, she simply didn't have time to think about it. He was more important. This was more important than whatever task she had forgotten at work or home. She had planned to go outside of Storybrooke sometime during the month for supplies, but she put it off over and over again because she didn't want to leave Henry alone. Maybe that was what was causing this odd feeling.

But Henry had gone missing and she briefly wondered if whatever she had ignored had caused it, if what she had failed to identify had led to this terror that nightmares were made of – but she couldn't dwell on it. She could only concentrate on trying to Get. Henry. Back.

And even her terror got pushed away when a terrible yellow car parked on her street and Henry went rushing past her.

It could have been the relief of having Henry back, or it could have been the surprise at what he yelled about who he had found, but in one instant her head cleared, the blood stopped pounding in her ears, and she remembered what she had forgotten.

She itched to release the clasp on her cuff, to prove that the TiMER wasn't counting down the final few seconds until everything would change, but instead of a denial what came out was, "You're Henry's birth mother?"

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

"Hi."