Prologue part 2
...
At ten, Regina Mills still doesn't know what she's going to do with her life when she's older.
She's smart and everyone says she's beatiful and she knows she'll amount to something- she just doesn't know what.
It's all blind ambition at the moment. Kinda like waking up from a dream and knowing you dreamt something but not really being able to remember what. And that's okay, because she's ten and no one really expects her to know exactly what she'll do with the rest of her life at ten.
It's a Thursday and tennis practice ended early today and she's home early because of that. She finds her mother in the living room, having a tea party of two or gossiping, she's not entirely sure. There's tea involved and she and her friend are discussing other people's business whether or not it's any concern of theirs so Regina thinks it could be both.
A gossip tea party.
There's a baby fussing next to the woman and she looks loathe to pick it up. Like it's infringing on her time or something.
"I can do it." Regina offers politely and the woman looks at Cora to make sure it's alright then looks at Regina a few seconds later.
"Would you? Please?" Her entire self is sagging with relief and gratitude and Regina just smiles and places her bag neatly by the couch before taking the infant and moving towards the islolated seats at the corner.
The baby is all brown eyed, curly haired, unbothered innocence. He smells like baby soap and baby oil and baby everything. He looks at Regina with wide eyed curiousity and his eyes seem to be endlessly searching her whole face.
She sits still and holds him and watches as he waves a fisted hand hapharzadly around. Making tiny little baby noises that sound both happy and excited at the same time.
She hears his mother saying how he's making her life hell. "I swear I don't even know what sleep is anymore. He's absolutely ruining my life."
And all Regina can think is that those are lies. There's no way this tiny bundle of happiness can ruin anything.
His tiny fist touches her nose and she makes a face, her stares at her for a second before breaking into a toothless smile and kicking his tiny feet.
Regina laughs.
And right there, still in her tennis clothes and smelling of sweat and holding this tiny human that seems so, so alive. Regina knows that no matter what else she'll end up being, no matter what else she does in this world, one day, she'll be a mom.
...
Regina experiences her first real heartbreak at twenty five. It makes all the other heart breaks she's ever experienced, all the times she stayed in her room crying over one boy or another, seem stupid and childish.
It makes any other pain she's ever experienced dim in comparison.
/
She's always been good with lists, it's her thing. When she was younger, Cora would send her to the kitchen to check whatever they didn't have and make a list before the older woman went shopping. She always knew Regina would never miss anything.
By sixteen, she has a short list of what her life is to amount to.
It's short, it's simple, it's precise and most importantly, it's realistic.
Finish school.
Get a great job. (Great Job Regina, nothing less.)
Find a boyfriend. (Preferably a handsome one with ambition)
Make a baby. Make a perfect baby.
Be happy.
She writes the list on a leaf of paper from her notebook that her father got her for her twelfth birthday. She only writes important things on it. And it makes sense because this is the most important of them all.
She carries it with her whenever she moves. It's on her dashboard as she drives to college and the day after graduation, still in her green gown and riding from the euphoria of graduating. Top of her class with honors no less. She kneels next to her closet and pulls the little shoe box there, pulling out the various keepsakes until she gets to the list. Old and with parmanent lines from being folded for too long.
She puts a tick next to finish school and smiles.
She tackles the second part of her list not even three months later. It's mostly Cora's doing that she even gets that internship. But it's Regina's effort and hardwork and her ability to not punch anyone who says she's just a beautiful face who has no business in politics, that gets her to the top.
She's the youngest mayor Storybrooke has ever had and as she sits there on her second day of work, she pulls out the drawer and pulls out her list and with her new expensive, tax payers money bought pen, she puts a tick next to;Get a great job. (Great Job Regina, nothing less.)
Then she drinks expensive scotch and just rolls around in her chair, marvelling in her success.
The third part is a bit hard. Men are either handsome or ambitious. It's hard to find one who's both.
The handsome ones expect things to just come to them because they're handsome and the ambitious ones mainly worked hard to cover the fact that they didn't luck out in the looks department.
Still, she's nothing if not determined. She waits it out and chooses carefully and she redifines her definition of handsome a little and even learns to stand for mediocre ambition.
But even with her compromising and exceptions they always end up disappointing her. Apparently she's too demanding. Too bossy. She's beautiful but all these dreams and ambitions and what not, is she trying to be a man?
Because apparently women are one dimensional creatures who shouldn't want to be more in life than what society deems fit.
"How are we supposed to make a family if you're working all these hours of the day, Regina? You're either going to be a wife or a working class woman. You can't have your cake and eat it."
She stops trying after that.
She's Regina Mills. If she's going to have a goddamned cake she's sure as hell going to eat it.
So she takes the list and crosses off the Find a boyfriend part. It didn't really work out and that's that.
She can still make the other two parts possible.
In her mind, if she makes the fourth part possible, then the fifth will come automatically.
Cora says she's stupid.
"Being a single mother isn't the glamourised walk in the park television makes it out to be, Regina. It's hard and it's tiring and it's lonely."
Regina can admit that Cora has authority to say what she's saying. Henry died when Regina was thirteen. Cora never remarried and for the longest time, it was just the two of them. Her mother's smile dimmed and the lines around her eyes became more pronounced.
But the thing is, Cora wanted the whole family thing. She wanted a baby and a husband and when her husband died, half her dream did too. Regina doesn't want a husband. She just wants a baby.
That's all.
"Do what you want Regina." Cora says when it's clear her words won't change Regina's mind.
And she does do what she wants.
She picks the father to be of her child the way people pick their very first car. She makes sure he's perfect in every way because there's no way she's failing her child before it's life has even begun.
Then she tries making the baby.
And she tries and tries and tries until she realises what she's doing is the very definition of insanity and she visits her gyno. If there's something wrong, she wants to know.
There is something wrong.
He tells her in a monotone voice. Like he's reading a map to a place he doesn't really want to go to. The corners of his voice is laced with boredom as he rips Regina's dream word by word.
"I'm afraid you'll never be able to have a baby, Miss Mills. At least not in the traditional way."
Her insides flip within themselves like a rolling penny and something logs itself in her throat and it's making it hard to breathe right. And the now jagged edges of her heart prick at her chest, hot and unrelenting.
And that's when Regina experiences her first real heart break.
...
Of all the people Regina Mills has ever loved, not that there're that many of them, she loved her father the most.
Cora used to say it's because he let her get away with anything. But Regina always knew that wasn't it. She loved him because he understood her. Because he was her father and her best friend.
She loved him for the way he carried her on his neck when she was six because she was determined to hang those glow in the dark stars in her room.
She loved him for staying out with her almost an entire day, teaching her how to ride her bike because she was determined to learn how to do it on that very day.
He taught her how to bake ten different cakes in a span of one month when she was nine because she was determined that they were going to win that father-daughter bake off that was being hosted at school.
Determined, determined, determined.
"You know what I love about you, princess?"
"No, what?"
"That you never let anything stand in the way of what you want. Never lose that."
Those words are what get her out of her month old funk after her doctor's visit.
She's had three different ones after the initial one and it's true, she can't have a baby in the traditional sense. And for a month, she lets this knowledge control her every mood.
She's irritable.
She's quick to anger.
She fired the pregnant twenty year old second assistant before feeling bad and rehiring her and giving her a pay raise.
She feels a bone deep sadness. The kind that seems to settle so deep it's almost a part of her now. She places a palm on her flat stomach in the mornings. Standing in front of the mirror and wondering what she did in her past life to deserve this.
Until she sees the photo of her and her father on the day of that bake off. Her eyes have bags under them because they harldy slept the previous night. But she's seated on her father's lap and she's holding a huge trophy with Henry's arms up in the air and her smile is so big she can feel her face hurting just from looking at the photo.
"That you never let anything stand in the way of what you want. Never lose that."
She pulls herself out of it after that. She looks into other options and makes calls and goes to meetings of people who're thinking of adopting. She meets a girl. Fiteen year old, restless eyed and scared out of her mind.
"I just want someone to take it away from me. That's all."
And Regina is more than willing.
She lets the excitement wash over her from that very first meeting. She calls the girl every morning and asks if she's okay and schedules doctor's appointments for her. She goes shopping for baby stuff when the baby is hardly two months old and she knows she overdoes it a little. But she doesn't care.
Three months into the whole thing the girl calls her. Hystrerical and her words choked and drowning in tears. Her boyfriend found out. He's the father of the child, she says. And now he wants it. He wants it and he wants her and he's not taking one without the other.
"I'm so sorry Regina. I'm so sorry." She says over and over again until Regina hangs up.
She drives two hours out of town that very day with a trunk full of baby things and she donates it all to good will.
Then she goes home and refuses, absolutely refuses to cry.
...
She doesn't look at the list for years. She just doesn't let herself.
She goes on with her life and her job and it's not fulfiling but it isn't dissapointing either.
Until she gets a call sometime in January and she frowns to find out it's from some agency she hasn't ever heard of.
They apologise. "Must have gotten your name from our sister agency, "they say. "We're still new and everything's jumbled up."
She accepts the apology easily. Not because she understands, but because it's January. She has budgets to make and things to go through and a town to run. She doesn't really have the time to listen to other people's fuck ups.
"But would you be interested?"
"In what?"
So he goes into this long rant about surrogacy and how they've found a great match for her. For a moment, Regina lets herself hope. But the moment is fleeting and quickly crushed. She's not putting herself through that again.
"No thank you."
"Okay. But if you change your mind..."
...
She does change her mind. That very same night no less.
She's in bed in her huge house all alone and suddenly the lonliness hits her like a tornado from nowhere. She remembers the days before that girl called her. Before she was told she's not able to have a baby.
Before.
When she still had hope and when the sight of baby clothes and pregnant women didn't make her feel insignificant and ripped off.
She remembers how exciting that hope was. She remembers how real it was that she could almost taste it. And she wants it again.
She's willing to try again.
...
The meeting is set in a public place months later and Regina takes an entire day off work and even buys a new dress for it and refuses to question her own motives.
She sits alone at the very back of the resturant and fiddles with the corner of her napkin with uncharacteristic nervousness.
She's starting to think she's been stood up when a girl with blonde hair that can't seem to decide whether it wants to be in a bun or not rushes in, panting and breathlessly offering apologies.
"I'm so sorry I'm late. The person who was supposed to cover my shift messed me up." She takes a sit right across Regina and drinks the water in front of her like she has just arrived from the Sahara desert, on foot. "Hi." She says when she's done. "I'm Emma Swan."
...
Emma is hard to place.
Which is odd to Regina because she's good at that. She got it from her mother when she was younger. Talking to people while silently judging them and placing them in a certain fitting box and determining whether or not they're worthy of her time.
At first, Regina thought she was all recklessness and proud carelessness with her undecided hair and her non existent manners.
But then she smiled. And complimented Regina's dress. And said she doesn't have a lot but she'd like to cover at least half the bill.
And now Regina just doesn't know.
"You don't have to do that. I'll take care of it."
"Oh I want to." She nods and looks at the spoons and forks like they're foreign objects that might have as well have come from outerspace.
Regina picks only her fork. The wrong one no less, but the easiest one to use and she smiles softly at her. Emma does the same.
"Let's make a deal. I'll cover this one and you'll cover the next one." She offers although neither of them are sure there'll be a next one.
Emma nods after a minute. Trying to hide the evident relief in her eyes. Her blouse is thin, almost see through from constant ironing. Her hair has split ends and the cut looks home done. It's so easy to tell that she doesn't have the money to cover half the bill.
Yet she's still proud enough not to show that to a stranger. Regina can respect that.
...
It's not until they've eaten and had their plates cleared that they talk about what brought them here. Regina Mills is nothing if not well mannered. You just don't talk business in the middle of a meal. You might ruin appetites and it's never a good thing to ruin a perfectly good meal.
(Words of Wisdom from Cora Mills.)
She starts them slow. Asking where Emma lives.
"Just here in the city." She answers evasively. "You?"
"Storybrooke. About two and a half hours from here."
Emma seems to think for a bit then she shakes her head a bit. "Never heard of it."
Regina chuckles. "Not many people have. You said you needed someone to cover your shift?"
"Oh yeah. I'm a waitress. In more than one place actually." She smiles wryly. "And I bartend sometimes. It's not as glamorous as whatever it is you obviously do." She motions to Regina's general direction with her head like that will explain her statement. "But it pays the bills and it keeps my kid fed so it's okay."
"You have a child?" Regina latches to that part of the conversation mostly from interest but also from a need to change the subject.
"Yes." Emma's face softens almost unconsciously and a smile plays at the corner of her lips and it suddenly makes her seem a lot younger. More vulnerable. "Henry. He's- he's the most amazing person in this world."
Regina's heart flutters within itself. "Henry? Your son's name is Henry?"
"Yeah." Emma reaches into her bag excitedly, "he's eight and a little too smart for his own good." She flips through her phone and gets to a picture. "That's him." She holds it up to Regina proudly.
He's all shiny eyed and brown haired. Holding a bowl and looking up at the camera proudly with a smile that comes more from his eyes than his lips. Lights up his whole entire face.
"We took that last night. He made his first bowl of salad." Emma explains pulling the phone away and Regina can practically hear the love dripping from her voice.
And she wants that.
She wants to feel that about another person.
"He's a beautiful boy. You and his father-"
"He's not in the picture." Emma is quick to correct. "It's just me and him."
Regina nods. "Sorry. Didn't mean to make any assumptions."
"It's okay." Emma smiles as if to prove her point as she locks her phone and puts it aside. "So- I'm I the first person you're meeting?"
"Yes, and I'm hoping you'll be my last." She puts it out there. Not looking her in the eye.
Emma suddenly looks a bit uncomfortable. "I don't know. It was never my intention to do this. That's not why I signed up. I didn't even think they'd ever call me."
"But you're here." Regina points out. Emma's here and she's showing her pictures of her son and answering Regina's questions so it must mean something.
"Yeah. And you're really nice but-"
"Just think about it. You don't have to make your decision right now. Take your time. I can wait."
The blonde nods.
...
She offers to drive her because Emma doesn't have a car and she's rushing to pick her son.
"I don't want to be a bother."
"You're not being a bother. I'm offering. Come on, Miss Swan. Get in the car."
The drive to her son's school is short and silent and when they get there the children have already been let out.
A tiny person. Henry, runs to Emma when he sees her like he hasn't seen her in a long time. His arms are in the air as he tries not to drop his bookbag as it keeps moving in beat with his running.
"Momma!"
"Hey buddy." She kneels down and he falls right into her arms. "How was school?" She asks, lifting him as they walk towards the entrance.
"Great. We painted today. Mrs. Bean said mine was the bestest."
"It was?" She asks with faux shock.
He nods, bitting his lip in an obvious effort of hide a smile.
Then he frowns a bit and looks at Regina. "Momma," he says in a voice Regina assumes he thinks is a whisper. "There's a pretty lady following us."
Emma turns back and laughs before placing him down. "This is a friend of mine, baby. Come on, introduce yourself."
He looks up at Emma, then at Regina, then at Emma who nods at him.
Then he stands a bit taller. "Hello." Suddenly his voice is deeper and Regina has to try so hard not to smile. "My name is Henry Swan."
She nods and takes the tiny hand in hers. Shaking it like she would an adult. "Regina Mills. Nice to meet you." She tries her best not to treat him like a child and it obviously makes him happy because he turns to his mother and finally cracks into a smile.
"Even her name is pretty momma."
Emma laughs and lifts him up again. Teasing him and making him bury his now red face in her neck.
And something in Regina just clicks looking at them and she knows, she just knows this woman will be the mother of her child.
No matter what she has to do to conveince her.
...
An; another too long for a prologue part. Oh well. The chapters are even longer and I don't know if I should maybe cut them or..idk.
Anyway. Thank you for reading. (And especially for reviewing) Even the ones who don't watch Once but read anyway.