*TRIGGER WARNING* for some bloodshed caused by a knife (it may be evocative of cutting for some), but it is consensual, oddly compassionate, and used for the purposes of a spell. Also, brief allusion to memories of rape.
Henry had downed Gold's protection potion amidst strident assurances from his adoptive mother that he would not pay the price of this magic: she would. His parents had argued briefly, his birth mother insisting that she could just as easily do so. Charming had - somewhat timidly, Henry noted gleefully as the potion clung to the sides of his esophagus and rapidly expanded from his belly throughout all his limbs - stepped between the warring women, breaking the spell that the fierce contact between their eyes had cast over the entire shop.
"So what's the next part of the plan?"
Both women jumped slightly as the man's voice swept over them. Regina looked away first, trying to force herself to accept that the blonde wasn't trying to take control away from her. Was she?
Emma's words were soft, dancing apologetically from newly moistened lips. "Regina, I'm sorry, but you're going to need to tell me about you and Cora so I can play the part convincingly. We're not going to be able to risk being seen together for a while after this: we've gotta do it now."
For a moment, Emma thought the older woman was going to weep in frustration that she had to reveal her deepest secrets to a woman whom she'd convinced herself was her worst enemy mere weeks ago. But tears didn't come. Regina - ever with perfect posture - straightened her spine more than Emma had imagined possible, regally raising her neck and demanding imperiously, "The room."
To Emma's - and, a bit, to Regina's - vast surprise, Charming, Snow, Henry, and even Gold heeded her command, Snow's face a mask as she guided Henry into the exterior of the shop by the shoulders and Gold trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smirk.
An almost painfully pensive silence arose between the women. Regina inhaled deeply and motioned for Emma to sit on the bed that David had laid upon while under the Sleeping Curse. Emma cocked her eyebrow questioningly and perhaps a little hopefully. Regina rolled her eyes.
"Honestly, Ms. Swan, if you can't be adult about this, I don't know how I can expect - "
"Whoa whoa whoa, Regina. Stop." Emma took the older woman's hands into hers, shocking herself with the gesture. She breathed deeply, shakily. "Tell me what you need to tell me."
To her dismay, the former Queen shook her head. "I don't have the time to tell you. I have to show you."
Emma's brow furrowed in confusion. Regina tried not to reflect on how adorable it was. "I don't..."
"I am going to directly fill your mind with my memories. The process will link our souls momentarily. I will need my own blood to be directly in contact with yours, I'm afraid. The back of your hand will do. And the magic will need to flow two ways: I have never done this particular spell, but if you sit still, remain quiet, and open yourself to me - just as you did to my instructions when you magicked us to Henry - I'm confident that the magic will flow properly between us." Regina relayed all of this with as much forced detachment as though she were merely giving the other woman driving directions. Emma blinked as Regina searched mildly through Rumpelstiltskin's desk for a small knife. Finding one, she sat next to Emma, exuding a false sense of calmness.
Emma eyed the blade warily. She cleared her throat. "And will you... will you see my memories, too?"
"Since I am initiating it, this spell will only work one way, Ms. - - Emma. Are you ready?"
Emma nodded slowly as Regina casually made a cut in the fleshy part of her own palm, reddening the blade. Emma flinched and her eyes filled with compassion, remembering the scalding of the wraith's mark, which had faded but was still scarred onto the older woman's hand. Unbidden, her eyes flooded with tears at seeing this woman bleed.
Regina took note of Emma's reaction with awe. "It's only a bit of blood, Emma," she whispered. To Emma's surprise, the brunette flipped the knife over gracefully and offered it to Emma, handle first, refusing to be the one to cut her.
The blonde grimaced as she etched a small mark into the back of her left hand. The look of pain in Regina's eyes shocked her when she looked up.
"Alright?" Regina asked quietly. The younger woman nodded.
The former Queen took the Savior's hand into hers, placing her own cut palm on the back of Emma's sliced hand. As their blood settled together in a wet union vaguely reminiscent of their cum mingling between each others' legs, Emma felt a jerk in her lower back. Her eyes widened as she felt acutely as though she were being swept away, up and up and sideways and up, then rapidly falling, falling, falling, Gold's shop disappearing in spicules of light as an idyllic country house, complete with a broad pasture and stables, assembled itself, blade of grass by rapid blade of grass, before her eyes.
She didn't need Regina's tightened grip on her hand, light-years away in Gold's shop, to tell her that she was looking at the place where Regina had grown from being a curious infant, to a vivacious girl child, to a passionate tomboy teenager, to a broken young woman, to the Evil Queen.
The next few moments - or was it hours? days? years? - passed Emma by in a blur. Scenes of Regina's life passed before her in a flash, sentences and hours and days and experiences hurtling before her incomplete and fragmented. Somehow, however - she hazarded a chaotic guess that it was the magic of such intimately direct communication - she understood everything that was blazing before her eyes as deeply as though she had experienced them right alongside Regina, as Regina.
The anger that she had been born a girl, from both mother and daughter, the first because it was so much harder to gain power as a woman, the second because she was only allowed to ride as she wished at the risk of being wrapped with tight black belts and hoisted, terrifyingly precarious, into the air, belts stymying the flow of oxygen through her body.
The rage of her mother the first time she was discovered in the kitchen, learning to cook from the servants, with whom she had formed quite intimate friendships, especially with the young daughter of her mother's porter.
The fire-hot slashing of Cora's fury onto the side of Regina's mouth, a thin line above her upper lip splitting open and pouring thick blood onto her bed, a stain which Cora refused to allow Regina to wash out, the better to remind her not to commit such craven transgressions as reading more than befit a woman of her status, in open defiance of her mother.
The first time she made love to a boy, his arms trembling in the loft above the horses' home, hay sticking into her back until he lovingly placed a saddle cover under her warm and eager body, until she flipped him over joyously so she could explore their union and her own desires from a different perspective.
His heart becoming dust in her mother's hand. Her tears, her grief. Snow's betrayal. Her meeting with Rumpelstiltskin, her training, her banishment of her mother.
The wedding, her forced smile, her carefully suppressed mixture of fury and comfort as her stepdaughter wrapped her arms around her new mother happily.
The countless times she didn't want to have sex with the king, but had to do his every bidding.
Her tears, shed often, shed alone. Her desperation when she sent Hook to kill Cora. Her grief at her apparent death.
Love is weakness.
Emma became vaguely aware of the hot dampness of Regina's tears falling onto their hands and dripping into her lap, and with a jolt realized that her face, too, was nearly sopping.
Coming out of the memory exchange and slipping back into the corporeality of Gold's office, Emma could do nothing but stare at Regina. She raised her right hand slowly, tentatively, gently wiping the tears off of the older woman's perfect face. Regina tilted her cheek subtly into the blonde's touch. Emma smiled slightly as the older woman mirrored her actions and removed her tears with the soft pad of her thumb.
The two exchanged no verbal words as they rose, both trembling, without realizing that Emma's hand had shifted in Regina's so that they were holding hands more comfortable, and stepped into Gold's exterior shop to work of the next phase of their plan.
"Emma, how did you imagine we could convince Cora that we believe Regina's guilty?" James' inflection let it be known that he himself had yet to be convinced otherwise, but his desire to show faith in his daughter - even though she had come into the room with red eyes and blood on the back of a hand that was firmly holding the Evil Queen's - forced him to stay his skepticism somewhat.
"We stage a public hearing," she murmured, still reeling from the force of Regina's memories. Regina finished the thought that clung desperately to Emma's throat, refusing to leave. The former Queen's voice was coated in sensual disdain as she addressed her continuation of Emma's answer to the woman who was once the girl she had saved from Cora's runaway steed.
"You need to control your sanctimonious tendencies toward heroism, Snow, and sentence me to death. In front of my son."
"And your lover?" Snow responded evenly, not missing a beat of the women's hand-holding, Emma's insistence on believing the woman, on protecting her. Rage threatened to break the surface of her cool, even accusation.
It took Regina a moment to compose her smirk, but was jarred back to the situation by Emma, pale-faced, murmuring, "Now's not the time to - "
"No, Emma, I think now's exactly the time! Don't think we all can't tell what's going on here. You - you're - " Regina's smirk deepened as Charming looked like he was about to stick his fingers in his ears and start humming, Gold sniggered smugly, and Henry looked at once utterly confused and like Christmas had come early. Snow White searched for the right words to adequately describe precisely what kind of outrage the former mayor was provoking by fucking her daughter.
"Do go on, dear, as we all have nothing more pressing to do than watch you stumble your way through still more accusations about my love life in front of my son, whom I wish to share my feelings with on my own terms, a concept you clearly have never comprehended."
Emma, stirred from her shock by Regina's passion, hopeful at the fact that she'd referred to their twisted, nebulous relationship as a "love life," and angered by how right she now knew Regina was, stepped forward towards her mother, squeezing Regina's hand as she let it go reluctantly. She hoped the anger didn't show through too much; her mother had been a child, like Henry. Children make mistakes. But she killed Daniel. No, Cora did. And that's why we're here, making these plans.
"Look, we all have a lot of catching up and explaining to do. But right now, we need to focus. Seems you'll have no problem planning a mock public trial right now. Henry and I have just gotta prep ourselves to be good little Regina-hating actors, and it'll be all set."
Snow grimaced at her daughter, trying not to think about why she was wearing a gray turtleneck that looked suspiciously like Regina's.
"Come on, we've got a mock sentencing to set up. If Whale's any indication, it shouldn't be too hard to whip everyone in this town into a blood thirsty frenzy."