The family reunion is quiet, but it's like a nice long sigh that ends in breathing new again. Henry has fallen asleep with his heavy, growing head on Emma's lap as she talks softly to Regina and Snow, while Zelena sits at the table with her tea. David comes down the stairs, the lulled Neal now asleep in his crib.
"We've still got his clothes and toothbrush," he says gently to Regina, Emma in the corner of his vision, "He could stay the night."
Regina nods without hesitation. "Yeah. Of course."
David eases Henry off the couch and he is too big to carry and the sight is absurd, just so that laughter bubbles up out of Emma.
It's been three months of absolute stillness, of nothing but routine and somber normalcy that it almost recalls of the empty days under the curse, so it's apt that it should rupture yet again with Emma coming home.
She wishes it were the same for Zelena. Everyone else has come here with open hearts and with a willingness to forgive and apologize. Her damage with Emma, she supposes, must be dealt with privately.
"We should go. You all look like hell," Regina says, patting Snow on the knee before rising.
"Yeah, sure, I'll walk you guys down," Emma offers nonchalantly. She stands in that way of hers with her thumbs hooked in her jean pockets and it betrays her tone, and Regina knows it's because she wants to talk.
Snow and David chime their goodnights. Outside Regina tosses Zelena the keys to have the car warmed up, which she takes wordlessly.
"It's nice to have you back," Regina speaks first, leaning on the doorway entrance of the building.
Emma looks up and perhaps her eyes glimmer, just a little it. "You mean that?"
"If only it means people stop talking to me as if you had died."
They laugh but it is punctuated with a ghost of a grimace. They're silent for a while, with Regina staring at their shoes and Emma picking at something underneath her nails.
"Listen," she finally says, and it's deeper, smoother. "I could stand here and explain myself all night, but … I wanted to say, I want to say, that I'm sorry. Really. I haven't been fair for the longest time, and I'm going to be better. For Henry, for the family I have here –– for Zelena, even. But most importantly for you."
The promise is meant to assure but it makes Regina uneasy, makes her instinctively want to inch away. "Are you still …"––she can see the anticipation in Emma's eyes, and it's probably something she shouldn't touch the day Emma returns, but––"Do you still feel resentful about Robin?"
But Emma's eyes flutter down, and she bears a sad smile. "Love is a decision, and you made yours." She adds, more brightly and with a light touch to Regina's arm with a fist, "I'll get over myself."
There is nothing wrong. Regina's mouth forms the warmest smile. "Goodnight Emma."
"Wait––I have a question."
"Yes?"
"Can I have my job back?"
Regina hesitates, and she might laugh. "Yes, but––in your absence, I may have had to make additions––"
It takes a few seconds for Emma to understand, and then she groans. "You really get your hands in the police force, don't you?"
"Goodnight, Emma."
Regina doesn't even have time to contemplate the approaching days with Emma back once she gets in the car. It's like she's entered a whole new realm of existence. Zelena is slumped down in the passenger seat in a lethargic manner and Regina has to ask as she starts the engine.
"Do you want to talk?"
"Not particularly," Zelena answers short of a sigh, and Regina doesn't really know what else she expected when it's been this song and dance lately. And even when they're lucky, it's been all talking but no saying. "I'm just tired and awaiting reunion with my bed."
The car reverses out of the parking slot and with a change of gear eases onto the gravelly street where Zelena was allegedly pushed down three months ago. The street lighting is piss-poor, and Regina makes a mental note to have those fixed, but somehow the dull yellow light bordering on a distasteful green makes her think of Tinkerbell. Perhaps it's because whenever Regina tries to talk to her, she too refuses to be any kind of enlightening.
"You still haven't told me what happened between you and Tinkerbell," Regina says, and she can see Zelena shift in her seat from the corner of eye. "Neither of you have."
"The same thing that always happens," she grumbles in response. "I drive people away."
She leans away from Regina and onto the door, closing her eyes to mark the end of the conversation.
Something gathers in Regina's throat and there's an ache between her lungs, but she doesn't press any further. She just wishes that there was something more she could do besides dragging her around to see people she feels uncomfortable with so that Zelena, so capable of such beautiful vibrance, can stop feeling so lonely.
When they get out of the car Regina can see that Zelena had been quietly crying, but this time she doesn't ask. She doesn't even act like she noticed.
And then in the middle of the night, Regina is pulled right out of slumber by the sounds of Zelena screaming.
She bolts out of bed, tries to fight the disorienting rush of blood pulling her down, and fears the worst –– but she finds only Zelena in her room, writhing under her blanket, twisting and crying out.
Regina hasn't had to deal with night terrors since Henry was about four years old, and she'll always be plagued by the memory of her angel baby boy being struck into such a merciless state of fear, but she always knew never to wake him –– but this, there is something so vulgar, that Regina has to wake her up. She has to.
"Zelena," Regina tries gently, letting her hands hover in the space around Zelena's head because now she's almost hitting herself, "Wake up. It's fine. I'm here."
"I don't wan't to go back!" she cries, and Regina has no clue where back is but it hurts, "Don't make me go back!"
"Zelena," Regina presses with her own kind of desperation, and perhaps Zelena had felt it in the depths of her sleep because then she bursts upright and awake, gasping in hungrily for air. She holds out her arms in front of her, rubbing at them incessantly as if to get some invisible substance off of her skin.
Regina immediately conjures her a glass of water which she gratefully takes, and it reminds her so much of the first time Zelena had awakened in the hospital, scared and needful.
Only to clamming up like a shell right after. "Sorry," is all she says, after a few minutes of calming down, looking down at her lap. "And thanks."
"You gave me a heart attack," Regina comments lightheartedly but just above a whisper, "I thought ––" She just takes a long look at Zelena and it hurts her, so, so much.
Zelena remains immobile. Perhaps she's not really awake, but her responsiveness is isolated in the movement of her throat. She is still rubbing her hands, though not as desperately.
"I'm sorry I scared you. It's nothing to worry about."
She hesitates on every other word. "Okay. Okay. If you need me––"
"I know." Perhaps when Zelena finally looks at her, she can see the effects she has, because then she adds with affection: "Go back to sleep, hermanita. I'm fine."
The coffee has just finished brewing when Zelena walks barefoot into the kitchen. She looks brighter, as she does every morning, but she's like a lightbulb from the dollar store, and after sleep is just a new purchase.
"You haven't gone with me to the office in a while. I thought maybe today…"
"Ah, yes," Zelena says, eyes still only sort of open as she pours a copious amount of creamer into her coffee mug, "Bring-your-sister-to-work days. Missed those."
"You don't have to read over drafts of legislation papers, if that is where your qualms lay," Regina quips back, handing Zelena the sugar. "No more than a teaspoon for you."
She adds in two anyway. "Yeah. I'll go."
Regina finishes stirring her own coffee when she looks up to see Zelena staring at her. She can't quite describe her gaze, but it's not threatening, it's not inquisitive.
"What?"
Zelena shifts her weight to her other leg as she walks past her, not without ruffling the back of Regina's hair, much to her annoyance. "Nothing. Since Henry's not here, does that mean I get his serving of Fruit Loops?"
Regina almost has Zelena laughing again. Just as long as she doesn't touch the subject of Tinkerbell or Gold, she has her caught with her vague digs at Snow White and tales of equestrian mishaps when she was a child. She almost has Zelena feeling safe to speak with her on more than just a superficial level, almost has her talking about her mother and how they used to sew together, how speckled with needlepoints her fingertips were by the end of the day.
Almost, but then the front entrance opens and it's Gold with his cane and dark circles under his eyes and his teeth-baring smirk. Regina looks at Zelena and she's paralyzed, and something flares up in Regina's stomach.
"Madam mayor," he greets, ignoring Zelena next to her completely, dropping a manila envelope onto her desk. "I believe you requested these."
She'd do good to grab his cane and hit him, but she'd never hear the end of it from Belle and various gossiping townspeople. He's already at the door when she tells Zelena to wait where she is and rises to walk after him.
"What do you think you're doing?" she demands just after the door is shut behind her. "Do I need to remind you of the agreement we had reached the last time you threatened my sister?"
He knits his brow in annoyance, facing her only over his shoulder. "You asked for the transcripts for the last council meeting, and I gave them to you."
"Yeah, I asked for them to be on my desk the day of, not a week later and the one day I happen to have Zelena here."
Gold pivots entirely and looks at her dead in the eye, and Regina hopes he knows better than to even try to intimidate her. "I already told you. I have no intentions to harm her." Then he bares his teeth again, "Even though she deserves it."
"Rumple, I am warning you."
"I spent hundreds of years looking for Baelfire. Everything I did, was to find him."
"You ruined so many lives in your endeavor, including mine," she reminds him, keeping their volume in check for any eavesdroppers. "You have so much more retribution to pay. Don't even start talking about hers."
He eases back, then, chin up and looking down in that way where it all clicks and Regina can feel her entire upper body burn.
"Your love can blind you, my dear. You were blind with your mother. Who is to say it's not the same with your sister?"
How he could ever dare, she doesn't know. "I'm not playing this game with you."
Gold gives her a disapproving tightening of the lips and if only that worked on her anymore.
She goes back inside her office and Zelena's playing Piano Tiles on Regina's iPhone.
"Are you alright?"
Zelena evades the question, sets the phone down. "You know what, maybe I should stay in the house."
Regina hesitates, because it seems more apparent each day that protecting Zelena is like taking care of a flower in winter, then nods with feigned neutrality. "Sure. Sure, I'll take you. Let's go. Emma's shift starts soon, we'll pick up Henry first."
"Okay."
Zelena stops saying yes whenever Regina asks if she'd like to go somewhere, and eventually Regina stops asking.
During a particularly idle day at the office she decides to check in on Emma and Robin, and a dart almost hits her straight in the face. She opens the door at its length to reveal Emma and Robin wide-eyed and mouths agape, and Regina raises an eyebrow.
"I told you it was a bad idea hanging the board over there," Emma mutters to him, and Regina has half a mind to roast the two of them, but she's just walked in on the two of them taking up the late Graham's singular hobby.
"Must be a serious case you're working on," Regina says, arms crossed, and anything else about her would communicate that they have a scolding coming on save for the broadest smile on her face.
"Chill out," Emma says in that particular whine of hers, pulling the darts from the board and stuffing them back into a desk drawer. "We haven't gotten a call yet."
"There is always the existence of something they call paperwork. And Robin, shame on you for letting the sheriff pull you into these work habits."
He shrugs from where he sits and puts his legs up on the desk. "You heard the lass, 'chill out'." A white-teeth smile floods his face and if he were anyone else, she wouldn't be beaming back and something would have been set on fire by now.
Emma sighs when the phone rings. "There we go."
Regina walks to stand next to Robin as Emma takes the call. "How is she?" she asks quietly.
"Lively," he answers her. He looks up at her and she finds no tension. "I wonder what she did while she was gone."
"Well, her old job was finding people and possibly beating the crap out of them and turning them in for money. It must have been therapeutic."
"She's actually very funny. She told me this joke, it's rather good. It goes––"
"Oh, no, please," Regina groans and tosses her head to the side, but Robin keeps on.
"Aw, come on. It goes –– knock knock?"
Regina sighs. "Who's there?"
"Delores."
"Delores who."
"Delores my shepherd, I shall not want."
Regina snorts.
Emma puts down the phone and joins them. "You two better not be talking smack," she quips, and Regina's never seen her smirk at Robin without it being laced with contempt. "Looks like some suspicious activity in the clock tower. Gepetto saw some kids sneaking in or something."
"Right," Robin says, easing himself up from the chair. "Will report to you after––"
"Hold on there arrow man," Emma stops him, putting on her now-worn red jacket. "I'm coming too. If they got the good stuff, I want in, you know?"
She gives Regina a warm look before she goes out the door and Regina is actually stunned. It settles and she says, gently, because good things like these could never last, could they: "She's been homesick. It won't always be this way, I hope you know that."
Robin kisses her on the head and rubs her shoulder, then makes his way out. "Emma Swan has a big, good heart, love. I hope you know that."
She does.
And then week later Regina is sitting on a log in the woods, several yards from Robin where he is adjusting Emma's grip on the bow, aiming at a makeshift target pinned to a tree. Whether it is Emma making it up to Regina by befriending him, or making it easier for herself by not despising him, Regina is altogether astounded by the present conditions in which they all find themselves in.
Even if she can't explain it, she likes––loves––everything about it.
"Alright. Now let go," Robin commands, backing away.
Emma's arrow misses the center of the target by a few feet to the left.
"Better than the last, at least."
"Yeah well," Emma eases the bow down, her bare arms shaking slightly from having them so still and controlled, "Why do you use longbow anyway. It's not really modern deputy material, you know what I mean?"
"That's why I use a crossbow now."
"Listen, Hawkeye, if we wanted a crossbow tossing cop then we'd have had Granny as sheriff a long time ago."
Emma sticks her tongue out of her smiling mouth as Robin collects the bow from her, and if Regina didn't know any better she'd say he was smitten.
He goes forth to find the arrows and pull down the targets and Emma sits down next to Regina. She offers a bottle of water and Emma gratefully accepts.
"You're awfully quiet," she says before gulping down the water like she'd been parched for days.
"I like watching the two of you," Regina replies, and when she says it there's a kind of warmth building up in her. "Emma, thank you."
Emma shrugs, gingerly puts the cap back on the bottle. "He's really chill. He kind of reminds me of the one foster brother I actually liked."
"He taught you how to shoot things, too?"
"BB guns. I gave him a scar on the back of his shoulder, actually, and that's why they had me out," Emma laughs to mask the mirthlessness underneath.
Robin returns with the bow and arrows in hand, crunching leaves in his wake and taking a seat on the rock across from them and starts putting them away in their cases. "All six arrows. Last one was tricky, had to climb for it."
"I thought there were seven?" Regina jokes and Robin gives her a mild glare, and she can't help but grin widely. "I could kiss the two of you."
"I wouldn't be averse to that."
"Don't be weird," Emma says, and anyone else would have seen it as a sneer. Then out of the blue, like she'd been holding on to this question: "How's Zelena?"
Regina stretches her legs outward and crosses them at the ankles. "I asked Henry if he wanted to come with us, if he wanted to spend time with us. He said he would've liked to but he thinks he should stay with Zelena since she refuses to go anywhere with me."
"Are you two having a rough time?" Robin asks.
"I don't know," she sighs helplessly. "Something is off. I just wish she'd speak to me about it. I even asked if she wanted to see Dr. Hopper but she shot that down before I even finished the question."
"She's lonely," Emma says quietly, and something about her voice and the way her lines soften tells Regina that she's speaking from a place of knowledge. "Sometimes, suddenly having people doesn't fix that. You could be surrounded by love and still feel alone."
"Maybe we all just need to try a bit harder. It's time we've made proper friends with your sister," Robin offers.
"Yeah, we could do lunch at Granny's, or something. No intense family dinner like last time. Just the four of us."
And if this had been anytime before today, Regina would've refused, but now she can't exactly protest the mixing of Robin and the touchy parts of her life when here she is sitting with him, Emma, and the arrows he taught her to shoot.
"Thank you, the both of you," Regina says genuinely, and the more she thinks about their seemingly small offer the more she might cry at the realization that she needs help with Zelena and she needs it from people she can trust. "I'll see."
She feels the warm palm of Emma's hand on her shoulder. "Don't think this is your fault. It's not."
"I suppose." That's what she'd like to think anyhow.
When the date rolls around, it's to everyone's surprise when it's Emma that engages with Zelena the most. It's a strange thing when Regina thinks about it; three months ago she had told Zelena that going to Emma and to the diner had meant looking for trouble, and now here they are expecting her to find the opposite.
After ordering Emma talks about music, and Regina can see how easily bland this conversation could be, but to people like Zelena and Robin, it's like a window to the world; Zelena shyly brings up ABBA, Emma smiles broadly and lists some of her favorites that in reality she only knows because of Mamma Mia. Robin wants to know more about this "Mumford and his sons", and Regina has to talk about how the first song she ever heard was by Donna Summer.
("Why do I have the weirdest image of you terrorizing my mom to Bad Girls?"
"Maybe because it happened at some point, Swan.")
And when their food arrives it's Emma who asks if Zelena would like to try a bit of what she has, and then it turns into four-way sample exchange even though both Regina and Emma have had every thing on the menu at this point.
There's such a warmth in Regina's heart that she forgets to check if Zelena has completely thawed. She forgets that what happens next is an actual possibility that she didn't account for and should have.
The door jingles and Emma, facing the entrance, doesn't think twice about waving to the person walking through it. Zelena blanches next to her and Regina has to turn around, and of course, of course.
Tinkerbell makes eye contact with her and turns around without saying anything and the door jingles again. Regina's afraid to look at Zelena. She's expecting to see her close back up, to see her stiffen in discomfort and bottled rage, but instead she turns her head to see her slacken in resignation.
"What was that all about?" Emma queries, and perhaps it's the final straw for Zelena because then she gets up, puts her coat back on and walks out.
Emma and Robin wear an identical face of confusion and Regina feels like her insides have been wrought.
"This is not happening." She rises from her seat and paces out of the diner, and Zelena had not left less than ten seconds ago and she can't seem to find the back of her retreating head anywhere. Regina tangles her fingers in her own hair and digs at her scalp because she may just go mad.
She goes back in only to pay the bill and doesn't have time when Emma reaches for her arm. She has to shrug off her loose grip because this is not happening, and Regina has had enough.
Regina rounds to the parking lot and finds her car missing, that Zelena had taken it. "Dammit," she almost cries, and in her frustration she begins to run home when she realizes that she doesn't have to. Violet smoke encircles her and the gravel below her feet is replaced by the marble of the foyer.
The cloud clears, and the dark silhouette before her takes the full form of Zelena.
"Don't run off like that," Regina yells, and she feels like she's talking to a child, but even a child would be easier to handle than this. "You didn't have to do that. You could've––you could have been––"
"Oh, what, then?" Zelena screams back, and if Regina weren't so sick herself she would be glad that she is finally getting something out of her. "I could've been what? More compliant to your little games? I can't believe I've been made into such a fool by you."
"What?" Regina freezes.
"Do you get a kick out of that?" she continues to fire, "Do you? Making me feel like I belong and then littering the place with reminders that I don't really?"
"Do you think I had Tinkerbell come by on purpose? I don't even know what is going on with you two, because you won't tell me––"
"But you knew about Rumple." It comes out like a cry, and Regina is still so angry and confused but now she is also hurt––"I told you and you knew and you still––"
"What?" Regina implores. "I still what?"
Zelena decides to stop opening her mouth and Regina is so fed up, so––"For fuck's sake, Zelena, talk to me!"
"You," she shouts back immediately, "You have love all around you. You have Emma and Robin looking at you like you're the bloody moon, idiots one and two adore you now and you have Henry, who would trade nothing over you, and––"
"And you? What do you have from us? From me?"
"Pity," Zelena nearly spits, and now there are violent tears rolling down her cheeks and her hands are held out and shaking but she dares not step closer to Regina, "Because I'm just––I'm an accessory, a pet! I'm cooped up in this place and I can't go anywhere without you or gods know what happens to me, no one even looks at me so much as spits on me and I'll just––I'll be dependent on you for as long as I live. I'll never have a life of my own, I can never be happy here––"
Zelena chokes on a sob and she just keeps backing away from Regina like she'll hurt her for ever opening her mouth.
Regina feels herself pulled down by gravity and anything she could have ever thought to say dies in her throat. Nothing she could say would matter, would pick up the pieces of glass that have shattered between the two of them, so she walks out, just as Zelena did. She walks out and goes straight to the vault.
