Title: If You Must Die, Remember Your Life
Rating: T
Pairing(s): Emma/Regina
Show/Fandom: Once Upon a Time
Warning(s): Character death
Here's a disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own anything but the writing.
Summary: Not every love is True Love.
Author's note: This was basically writing therapy for me, some things I needed to get out. It was finished half asleep too, so forgive any mistakes as I wanted to get it up before I scrapped it completely.
If You Must Die, Remember Your Life
Regina's last breath clouded in the cold night air, a warmth brushing against Emma's lips as she kissed her goodbye only to watch as she fell into a permanent sleep, never to be awoken again.
The wailing behind her belonged to Henry or at least she thought it did—maybe it was Snow. She couldn't tell, couldn't bring herself to care, not when she held the limp and unresponsive body of the woman that had once been so full of life and fire and determination. A hard-headedness that just wilted and disappeared as if it had never even existed to begin with.
Now she was just a corpse. And all because it didn't work.
All because, apparently, their love hadn't been True. And how messed up was that—that love could be fated and dictated but when one's heart was truly and irrevocably in it, it didn't seem to matter.
She and Regina were fated, it seemed, just not in the way her parents were.
And she couldn't even look at them in that moment because it didn't seem fair that they could wake one another up from sleeping curses time and time again, yet she couldn't even save the one person she wanted to most with a kiss that had once saved their son.
What the hell kind of saviour was she, when she couldn't do any saving, she thought bitterly. She was the Saviour, a Hero, capital letters and all. Yet those titles held so much weight, a burden she didn't want—a claim she denied over and over again. Saviour, Hero, Princess, she was none.
She was Emma Swan, but she didn't even know what that meant anymore.
Emma vibrated with rage, refusing to believe what she knew to be true. Angry tears fell from her eyes, raining down her red cheeks as she tightened her jaw and shook her head vehemently.
"No."
The rushing in her ears made it impossible to hear her own voice but she repeated the word all the same. "No," and again, "no, no, no." Until it didn't sound like a word anymore and it was just one long mantra of pain and anguish.
Emma shook her head and continued to repeat the word until she was placing her lips, wet and salty from her tears, against Regina's cold and lifeless ones, trying to desperately bring her back even though she knew it would prove futile—she was dead and there was no cure for that.
So they buried her the following day, up on the hill by the stables and underneath the large oak tree while the sun sat high and bright in the sky. One of the most beautiful to date in the small little town of Storybrooke, Maine.
Regina Mills.
Mother. Daughter. Friend.
Emma wondered what Regina would think of her gravestone, terribly simple and ordinary and plain—phrases used on many throughout the world. She wondered if the woman would curl her lip in distaste or if she would nod stiffly and smile tightly because at least they hadn't left her body to rot somewhere like she had done to many villages in the past during her lust for revenge.
And she wondered if Regina would appreciate the single white rose Henry laid upon the stone and how he hadn't moved from his knelt position in front of it until Emma touched upon his shoulder with the most tender of touches at sundown and told him it was time to go home.
Most of all, she wondered if Regina would forgive her because she certainly didn't forgive herself.
She could have saved her, should have been able to, but after the first touch of lips and Regina's state only getting worse, they both realised what it meant. With disbelieving stares—Emma's shocked and Regina's shattering—they understood the finality of the situation.
They weren't True Loves and so Emma's kiss didn't stop the curse that had been placed upon the one person she ever truly loved. She could do nothing but watch as Regina slipped away like she was only falling asleep and not dying in her arms like some dramatic climax of a romantic movie.
Death was never an easy thing to come to terms with and for Emma, it had never been something she had had to deal with. A loner, a drifter, she never had somebody close to her pass away because that would mean actually having somebody close to grieve over and she never had family or friends until Henry showed up on her twenty-eight birthday and tricked her into bringing him home.
There had been Graham, the first time her eyes had ever touched upon a dead body and even then, only having known the man a short amount of time, it had been confusing and devastating and she didn't like it or understand how he could be there one minute and gone the next because it just didn't make sense.
Even now as she stood in the dark bedroom within the mansion of Mifflin Street, eyes raking along the made bed, she thought about how only three nights earlier Regina had been sleeping there and now she was in a coffin and six feet under.
As she touched the soft sheets, her eyes watered because the bed was so comfortable and the blankets were warm and Regina wasn't there. She wasn't in the bed, warm and rosy and reading a book. She was still in that damn coffin and Emma wondered if she was cold or if she was lonely.
Wherever she was, she didn't want her to be either of those things.
That was when the heart-wrenching sob came, like it was pulled from her soul and being. And she felt like she couldn't breathe, like she was being suffocated. Her body wracked with her cries, low and deep as her throat became raw with the sounds being made.
She was almost hyperventilating as she tugged the pillow into her arms, but when she inhaled its scent, a fragrance utterly and completely Regina, it almost felt like the woman was right there.
"I'm sorry," she choked out and she opened her eyes as if expecting to see Regina standing there but all she could see were blurs and smudges, her eyes masked with her tears. "I'm so sorry."
The town never was the same. Maybe it was because Regina had been the only one capable of running it or maybe it was because those living in it realised that they didn't want to be buried in a strange and foreign land should their own time come.
So, with a vote, it was decided—they would return to the Enchanted Forest and rebuild their kingdoms and villages and lives. They would focus on a future while never forgetting their past.
Snow and Charming were the last two to enter the portal, eyes tearful yet understanding as Emma stood with a hand on Henry's shoulder. She had thought about it until she couldn't any longer and it just didn't make any sense for her or Henry to return to a land that had never truly been theirs.
But it was her parents land—their home. Originally they had tried to change Emma's mind and then Snow decided that they would stay, but ultimately Emma sat them down with a speech and told them that they would always be her parents, a land away or not.
And it was all so terribly heartbreaking and painful. Charming and Snow losing their daughter again and Emma realising that she was truly meant to be an orphan. Or maybe not, she realised as her hand on Henry's shoulder squeezed. A mother. That's what she was and she would put her kid first.
It took them two months of living in a ghost town before deciding to leave. It hadn't been an easy decision to leave behind the first home they both ever truly had. It was even more difficult now that they knew that once they left, they would never be able to return.
Storybrooke would be cloaked indefinitely with no inhabitants left inside. But they knew it was the right choice, the only choice, really.
Emma packed up the Bug with her and Henry's belongings before they made the short trip to the stables and found themselves at the top of the hill, looking at the gravestone.
She allowed her son time to say goodbye to his mother and stood back a reasonable distance so he could do so. He cried, he even hugged the stone, and she had to look away in fear that she would drop to her knees and never recover.
We're not leaving Regina, she told herself. She left us.
Unfortunately, she didn't believe it, as she could never blame Regina for what had been her fault anyway.
Henry brushed past her and she wondered how much time had passed because the sun was lowering in the sky and Henry wasn't crying anymore. He slipped into the car without a word and she approached the stone, as cold and still as Regina had been in her arms, with a watery smile.
Words failed her, but she had never been much of a talker. Instead she crinkled the corner of her eyes and tilted her head, thumb brushing the smooth stone. She stood like that for minutes, almost willing Regina to appear with a witty remark about leaving town without actually saying goodbye.
Emma didn't want to say goodbye because it felt too final. Instead she focused on what was in her heart and that was, "our love may not have been True, but it was real."
The gentle breeze that touched upon her skin, tickled her neck and pimpled her flesh, told her that her message had been received and she made a silent promise to always look after their son. No videos games before homework and no snacks before dinner. And to always let him make his own choices and have the freedom to pursue what made him happy.
I hope you're happy, she added in her mind.
It was dark when she got into the car and she and Henry exchanged looks, her hand clasping his knee for a moment before she drove. Drove down main street and further. Until the orange line came into her view and then behind her was nothing but road, the town gone—forever.
Back inside the town, the brunette watched from the hilltop as the pair left together, and stayed that way until the sun was replaced by the moon and stars.
Regina walked the cold, empty streets. No lights and bustle coming from inside Granny's, no Archie walking Pongo, no Emma in the police cruiser patrolling the streets. Even her home was devastatingly empty.
This was her curse, she realised, to be stuck in a town she created as her Happy Ending. To be stuck in a world that was neither life nor death and to know that it would be that way forever.
That was what she deserved, she knew it.
The real world didn't have Happy Endings and she never did have an easy time being happy.