A/N: because i have too many emma swan feels and also this is as otp-y as swanqueen canonically is, this is for the caesar's palace 'challenge by the dozen,' level one. (one fic about an otp.)
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The first is Neal.
(Or Lily, really, because oh, it could've been, but thinking about that still gives Emma the beginnings of a headache, so. Neal.)
He isn't freedom to seventeen year old Emma, despite what she tells her parents so much later. Over a decade spent cycling through the system had given her enough taste of freedom to flavour the rest of her life. Neal just hands her that lopsided smile, and she's naive enough to take it, along with jail time and a swan pendant and a closet's worth of emotional baggage. But Emma knows where she stands with Neal. She loves him more than any of her future boyfriends, for what it's worth; he pays her attention and doesn't pretend she means more to him than she does and ten years later she still has the necklace locked away in a box in her room, and. Henry.
She can't, won't, refuses to regret Henry. She doesn't regret Neal.
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She meets Walsh in New York, after the second curse is cast. They do the dating thing for eight months or so, and while it's not exactly natural, it feels ... okay. After all, he likes her. He runs a furniture store, he's stable, fairly good-looking, safe - and he's good with Henry, which is all Emma needs, right? His proposal to her comes in the form of a ring crowning an ice cream sundae and replacing the cherry, but she hesitates, balking - one of her talents, right up there with the running away - at the suddenness, the finality.
Henry tries inviting him to dinner - which, well, poor him, because even with Regina's memories she's still lucky to get a dish out unscathed - but she still turns him down eventually. It's probably a good thing, she decides later, since his next move is to morph into one of Zelena's flying monkeys and attack her, but, well. Emma does have terrible luck in relationships.
(She tells Regina about him later, stumbling over words a little because Emma can hold her liquor, thank you very much, but this apple cider is something else.
"Trust you to find the only man monkey hybrid in the state to marry," she says.
"I didn't marry him! Just ... almost."
Regina sniffs. "Thank goodness for that, then.")
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She swears off men a bit after Walsh. They're better as friends, anyway, all of them; Henry has a grandfather to look up to now, which lessens the need for a father figure, and Emma feigns grief for Walsh so that just finding someone attractive no longer becomes a reason to go out with them.
The first time Killian Jones propositions her with a drink at Granny's, Emma turns him down, on principle mostly, because he's Captain Hook and spent an awful lot of time trying to kill her once, and also because he's good fun in small doses but not much else besides. This occurs twice more before she varies it a little and threatens to take him into the station under drinking charges - they'd be false, since he isn't technically drunk, but, well, it's not as if it would be the first time. Regina suggests - privately, of course, informally - that she make it harassment; Emma laughs awkwardly and shrugs and wonders why all her male friends seem to turn out like this.
It seems to be all over for a while, and Emma relaxes. Then one night she pops over to her parents' place for dinner and finds Mary Margaret in polite, well-meaning excitement over the dashing Captain Hook and his interest in her daughter, and she knows it's all over. She also maybe breaks a kitchen appliance in frustration, but nobody can prove that wasn't an accident and anyway it's neither here nor there. Hook bows and flourishes and asks her to one of the nicest restaurants in town, and if she sighs a little before she accepts he doesn't seem to notice it.
(Regina, her days hunting Snow White's unhappiness still perhaps not quite over, is entirely too delighted to hear about the toaster. "I'm sure you could have Guyliner fix it for you, Miss Swan."
"Oh, give it up, Regina.")
Emma's dress is pink, that first night, pink and tight and ridiculous and Regina would probably raise one eyebrow and ask her what prom she was attending if she could see Emma wearing it. But Mary Margaret bursts into tears when Emma comes down the stairs dressed in it and David takes picture after picture and she never attended prom, anyway, so why shouldn't she dress up tonight? Afterwards Hook kisses her at the door and his beard is scratchy against her skin and when he leaves she stands with her back up to the wall and two fists hard against it, breathing and trying to convince herself she enjoyed it (because she did, she did, she did, and even if she doesn't feel much yet, Henry likes him and so do her parents so that's what matters and. She enjoyed it.)
As a boyfriend he turns out to be nothing like anyone she's had previously - that is, he's not a part time flying monkey, and he doesn't run from her at the first sign of trouble. It's the opposite, in fact. Hook's always there, so much so that she wonders whether a well-meaning Mary Margaret might have told him about her abandonment issues and triggered something. She fonds herself taking any opportunity to escape him, and ends up happily spending a fair amount of time with Henry, and subsequently Regina. It's a bit of a haven there, honestly: Hook's been avoiding the mayor ever since he wound up passed out on her porch one night and woke up to Regina in full Evil Queen getup and a fireball in one hand. She's never been able to give, or interested in giving, an explanation, and Emma doesn't ask. After all, if she doesn't admit she's avoiding him, she doesn't have to think about what she's doing.
It gets harder, though. Hook, misty-eyed, tells her she's his happy ending, and to stop him looking expectantly for a response she kisses him, hard. She is the Saviour, here to bring happy endings to all of Storybrooke, and if she's Hook's than she can't leave him, not really. He calls her 'Swan' as a term of endearment and manages to make it seem dirty, but she's his happy ending and that's what she's here for and her parents like him and. It's okay.
(She shivers the next time Regina calls her 'Miss Swan,' lilting the words in the slight accent she has and probably exasperated and also smiling like Emma really is the biggest idiot in the world.)
It's okay.
.
Emma's alone in a dimly lit room, flicking through images on a projector in an attempt to locate her childhood best friend, picked out in dark ink against a faded newspaper's parchment yellow. As usual, she doesn't hear Regina enter, and has to wrestle her heart down from her throat when it jumps as the other woman speaks. "Ain't fate a bitch." She sounds amused more than anything else, which is Regina all over.
Emma starts, then sinks back against the hard back of her chair and scowls faintly, mostly from shock, though a little because no, Emma is not finding Regina saying bitch attractive. She's prone to silent entrances and exits - though not always, not as the Evil Queen - and it's always reliably irritating. And shocking. Emma's heart gets a workout when Regina's around. Because of the shocks, of course. Well, the shocks and the fact that the top button of her blouse is constantly straining. Yes. That.
Regina keeps talking and Emma finds herself answering, a reminder she's good in other ways too: she's not blunt but won't sugar-coat either, and she doesn't mind the excess emotions Emma always finds when she's present; she'll let Emma throw magic and words together at her for hours and then teach her to control it once she's calmed down. Their conversations are sometimes relaxing, sometimes incensing, but they're never mundane, and that beats talking to many of the other residents of the supernatural town.
From Lily, they stray to discussing Robin. "I don't need a babysitter," she points out, slightly as a defence but also because the thought of a roadtrip with Regina is equal parts ridiculous and intriguing to her and this is not even close to what either of them need right now. "I'm okay, Regina."
"But maybe I need you," Regina says. Her smile is wry, but there's no expectant undertone, not with Regina. It's just an offering, just a request.
So it's a confession, not a concession, when Emma smiles back.