AN: This story starts out with Emma/Hook, but this is by no means a CaptainSwan story. Hook is trash. This is definitely a Swan Queen story.
TW- Hook is abusive in this fic, there will also be references to Regina's abuse at the hands of her mother and the king, nothing graphic.
The heat was sinking into the little coastal town in Maine, a sleepy community hidden to this world, and only known by another one. Summer was approaching Storybrooke yet again, and with the new rays of sunshine, the longer days, and the smell of the ocean and the salt on the warm breeze, it seemed to breathe life back into the residents. Everyone was attempting to soak up as much sun as possible while it lasted. Everyone except two, it seemed.
Emma Swan had been trudging through day by day for a long time, for so long she couldn't remember when it started. She was painfully aware of it, but she had no solutions, no explanations, nothing to say about it. She just couldn't come up with a reason why her life in Storybrooke had become so dulled and miserable.
She had her son. A relationship that had been put through many hurdles. Some built by Emma in her own doing, out of fear and deep set insecurities. But they were together, and their relationship was strong, even having survived Emma's brief stint as the master of all dark magic.
She finally had parents, a family like she'd wanted all her life. And they did their best to love her and support her. Sometimes they would go about it in all the wrong ways. And, yes, it stung when her brother was born, feeling once again the girl replaced. But her parents had taken every measure to assure Emma she was their baby too, that they loved her first and always will. She was even starting to come around to the idea of believing them.
She had a boyfriend who loved her. He loves me, right? He says he does, so he must. That's what love is, right? What she couldn't figure out was why that love sometimes felt more like the thorn than the rose. He was just passionate, so passionate it could hurt, but that's how you know the love is true, right? That the even though the person you're with, he messes up, maybe a lot, maybe in ways that really aren't okay, he always comes back. That's how love is supposed to feel, right?
She had a man who loved her. No one could love you, Swan. She had a family. No one wants to keep you, girl. And she had her son. I can't be a mother. So why was she unhappy?
Regina watched the children playing in the fresh green grass. She passed this park every day on her way to work. And every day it filled her with resentment. People laughing, talking, enjoying the blue skies, hugging, watching their children. It made her head ache. Regina Mills knew exactly why she was unhappy.
Robin. Her soulmate, or so she had thought. He was another she had lost. The day he was buried, she had closed her eyes and refused to watch the dirt pile on his coffin as the ground swallowed him up. He was gone, gave his life for hers, and now she didn't know how to live it. Except that she did, and the guilt of that ate her alive.
She had grieved Robin heavily at first, convinced she'd never be given a third chance at love. And it took her a long time and many sessions with Archie to realize why that one word made a difference. Because that's what Robin was after all, a chance at love. A chance. But if she was brutally honest with herself, it was never more than that. She had never loved him the way she loved Daniel. She had never loved him the way she wished she could, not when her heart had belonged to another. Another that she could never have predicted falling for, one she didn't even know she loved until after Robin's death when she didn't feel the mourning of great romance gone. After all, he never tore her attention away from the one she currently loved. Not while he was alive, and now that he was gone, only in the shame over loving another did he restrain her.
But still she mourned him. She cared for him, and she cared even more about his children now left fatherless. But he was a man who tried his best, and tried to be the best version of himself. Except when he was with you, Regina. You were his wrong choice, his bad choice, the choice to become a dishonorable man.
Robin was dead, two children were without a father, one of them being her niece, and Regina was swimming in guilt. And though they had returned from the Underworld with their mission to save Hook accomplished in the end, it tasted sour to Regina. All of this was reason enough to be devastated, and what Regina didn't understand was why she wasn't unhappy about all of that, at least not entirely because of it.
Instead it stemmed from the love that her heart was searing into her ribcage with every beat. One she was sure she wouldn't deserve in ten lifetimes, not after everything she'd done, now including being so ready to move on from her deceased boyfriend so soon after his death. And that was when her guilt started a whole new cycle. Now she would drag through her days, heart heavy, certain she would never receive love in return from the one who she had fallen for, even if she did deserve it.
The sky was clear and the sun was strong, verdant growth had overtaken the town, and everyone was enjoying it. Except for two.