Notes: Hello friends, I'm so sorry for my long absence. Life happened, and I took an extended break from writing fanfiction. However, I've decided to take this story off hiatus. There will likely be two more chapters after this one. (And yes, for people wondering, the reason for this story's M rating will likely show up in chapter 5.)

Chapter 4: Midnight Caller

So wrapped up in her thoughts as she's washing her mouth out, Emma almost misses it over the sound over the sound of the faucet. Her head jerks up when she hears it, a tap as faint as it is unexpected at this hour: someone is at the door.

She hears another knock, louder this time, and finally starts moving towards the door, grabbing her heaviest wooden bat on the way. She doesn't know anyone who'd come calling so late in the evening, and she'd heard enough horror stories when they'd moved into this part of town that most nighttime sounds set her on edge. If anything happens to Henry...

No. She can't even think about that.

Treading softly, Emma inches up to the door and crouches down to peek through the keyhole. All she can see are hands – a woman's hands, tan and calloused, with a diamond ring on the left fourth finger – clenching and unclenching around a rumpled telegram.

Regina?

She opens the door in a hurry, stashing the bat against the coat rack beside her. Sure enough, Regina Mills stands before her, still dressed in her Chickadees uniform and looking like she hasn't showered. There are tear streaks in her makeup and down her cheeks, but her eyes are dry now, blank and inscrutable. When she speaks, her voice is a raspy whisper.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to go. I had your address from Henry, and – I shouldn't have come. Forgive me."

"No!" Emma exclaims as Regina turns to walk away. "It's okay, really. Come in."

Regina looks unconvinced. "I wouldn't want to disturb Henry," she stammers. "I... I'm sure it's past his bedtime, and –"

"Kid sleeps like a rock," Emma reassures her, sending up a private plea to whatever deity actually exists that Henry had managed to fall asleep despite his distress. Regina would likely never admit it, but Emma guesses that her concern is less about disrupting his sleep and more about her own ability to face her most ardent admirer when she's barely functioning. "He won't be disturbed. Come in."

Regina hesitates for a moment before stepping through the door, cautiously glancing around the corner like she's nervous she'll find someone else there. She gives Emma a rueful half-smile when her eyes land on the bat. "It's late, isn't it?" she comments, mostly to herself.

"Who could sleep?" mumbles Emma. Since the moment she'd opened the door, she'd been unable to look Regina in the eye, fixated instead on the telegram in her hand. With a slight tremble, Regina suddenly looks down, seeming to remember the reason she's there, and leans against the wall with a sigh that's practically a sob. Emma closes the door behind her. "Want to sit?" she offers.

Whether from grief of indecision, Regina seems unable to reply, so Emma gently takes her by the wrist and leads her to the sofa. "It's a little lumpy," she apologizes, but her visitor doesn't respond or even acknowledge the remark. Eventually, Regina sits, staring off into space, and Emma tentatively eases onto the cushion beside her.

It's a while before Regina speaks again, and when she does, it's not what Emma expects.

"Mary Margaret Blanchard's stance is off. She'd have a lot more power behind her swing if she'd square her feet up a little."

Emma shrugs. Mary Margaret's a solid hitter, even if her form is a bit unorthodox. Regina doesn't seem to expect a response. She continues talking, eyes fixated on the same point on the wall.

"I'm not sure why your manager is having her play first base. Ruby Lucas would be a better choice. Mary Margaret used to be a catcher. My father coached her grammar school team." She finally looks at Emma. "But I suppose Nolan's got you in that role?"

"Ashley pitches best to me," Emma mumbles. "Nolan says she's more confident."

"Oh." Regina nods in understanding, lips pressed together in sort of a pained smile.

Figuring that perhaps talking about baseball is what Regina needs right now, Emma asks, "Do you have a favorite catcher?"

She's not sure, at first, if Regina heard her; her visitor is still staring blankly at the wall, either lost in thought or trying desperately to avoid it. Finally, when Emma's trying to decide whether to repeat the question or just move on, a barely perceptible shudder jerks Regina's neck and shoulders. "No," she replies.

"Does your manager –"

"I don't know what to do," Regina finally grits out, the hand holding the telegram trembling violently. For a moment, Emma thinks she's going to break down, but in a moment, Regina's hands stop trembling, and she sets the telegram on Emma's coffee table.

"I burned mine," Emma offers. It was less an act of rage or grief and more one of necessity – it was winter, her old boarding house had a woodstove, she needed kindling – but there was something satisfying about destroying it. About letting go.

Regina doesn't seem like she's there yet, though.

When she's able to speak again, Regina says, "My mother... she - she wants me to go back to Maine."

"Oh," Emma replies, confused. "Don't you have to go back anyway? I mean –"

"Not to train. She... I have to go home. After the funeral, she..."

Emma waits patiently while Regina struggles to find the words, although she's growing more and more worried. Is Regina going to hang up her baseball career?

She realizes, of course, that baseball should be the least of her concerns, but –

"She wants me to marry someone else." Regina's eyes are hard, her fists clenched at her sides. "She's been trying since I was eighteen. There's a man – I was... promised to him, but..."

Emma is appalled. "So soon?" she demands.

"I don't know how soon," Regina murmurs, "but I'm not sure how long I can avoid it. She's concerned I'm becoming an old maid, and Emma, I... I don't know how to fight her anymore."

"She doesn't own you," Emma protests, somehow terrified in spite of her conviction. The idea of Regina forced to marry someone she doesn't love – or, if she's being perfectly honest, the idea of Regina marrying at all – causes her insides to twist and turn with anger and dread and something else she can't name. "And neither does he, even if you were promised to him. You get enough from the league that you can live on your own; you don't have to get married if you don't want to."

"I don't want to get married! To anyone...except Daniel." Regina chokes back a sob. "She wants me to quit the league. She never wanted me to be a ballplayer. If...if she gets me back in her grasp..."

"She can't control you," insists Emma. "You can live your own life."

"You don't know her. She can...she has influence in so many places."

Emma sighs. It's true; she doesn't know Regina's mother. She imagines, from what she's heard of the late Henry Mills's early retirement from baseball, that the woman knows how to get what she wants, but Regina is an adult. She's free to choose her own path.

Then again, Emma's never had a mother. Perhaps it's just something she can't understand.

The two women sit in silence for a few moments before Regina speaks again, drawing her knees into her chest, having obviously forgotten that the skirt of her Chickadees uniform leaves little to the imagination. "Emma," she says softly, "I hate to ask, but could I..."

"Sleep here tonight? Of course," Emma replies. "I'm not going to turn you loose in this neighborhood in the dark."

Regina shakes her head. "It's not that. I made it here just fine; I just..."

Her voice trails off, and Emma guesses, "You don't want to be alone?" Regina's eyes fill with tears and she nods, hugging her knees tighter and burying her face in them. Emma hesitates a moment before, slowly, uncertainly – she's never touched Regina before, and she's known grief to make people skittish – she inches toward Regina and drapes an arm over her shoulders. The other woman briefly tenses, and Emma's about to remove her arm, but then Regina leans into Emma's touch, a soft whimper escaping her throat, and Emma squeezes her eyes shut and wishes there was some way to make any of this better.

Emma buzzes with nervous energy as she tosses and turns in her bed, periodically casting nervous glances at the woman beside her. She's unused to sharing a bed with someone: save for a few rough nights with Henry after Neal had left, and a few more after they'd received the telegram, she's been alone every night for over two years. That's not it, though. She knows she'd be less uncomfortable sharing a bed with one of the girls on her team – heck, even a complete stranger.

It's Regina. It's always Regina, something about the other woman that sets her on edge and yet draws her in, completely enthralled. It's her intensity, her beauty, her enigma. There's something about her that's just magical, and Emma's unsure what it is.

But tonight, it's not even that. It's the pain radiating from Regina even as she's desperately trying to hold herself together. It's pain that Emma has no idea how to fix. Time helps, she knows that. Distraction helps, too, but those first few days...

She'd put her own grief over Neal aside very quickly, had buried the pain largely out of necessity. Henry had grieved longer, grieved harder, but he, too, had eventually moved on, never completely healed but better, stronger. Time helps, time heals.

I didn't know where else to go.

She and Henry, of course, had each other. Regina has...

No one, apparently. A mother who's determined to marry her off and force her to abandon her passion. Teammates she doesn't seem to like.

Emma's heart breaks for her.

Regina, for her part, lies perfectly still on the other side of the bed, though her eyes are wide open and she looks about as far from sleep as Emma feels.

"I can sleep on your couch, if this is making you uncomfortable," she finally offers.

"No!" Emma exclaims. "Of course not! You're my guest; I – I can sleep on the couch if you're uncomfortable."

"I'm not," says Regina, so quickly that Emma's taken aback.

"I'm not, either." Emma turns, rolling onto her side, and faces her bedmate. "I just don't know what to do," she confesses. "I – I wish there was some way I could make this better."

"There's not?" Regina asks, forcing a short laugh. "How did you get through it?"

"I..."

Emma's voice cracks; she's at a loss for how to explain the truth: that there is no answer. She thinks of lying, but it's too late. Regina's face contorts in horror, and she turns away for a second, her chest shuddering under labored breaths. When she finally rolls over again, she digs her nails into her leg as she lifts her eyes to meet Emma's. "Just... just tonight, can we pretend...?"

"Pretend what?" Emma asks, blinking in confusion. Pretend to be little green men in outer space? (That was always one of Henry's favorites.) Pretend to be on a tropical beach anywhere but here? (Her own favorite during winters in Boston.) Pretend...

Regina exhales, her face twitching, and gnaws at her lower lip. "I need to – my image – I can't... I can't show weakness."

"Your image? How is it 'weak' to mourn your fiancé?"

"We have to... when tonight is over, I need you to forget that it ever happened. Can you do that?"

"I... sure. I can forget," Emma agrees after a moment's hesitation. She can do whatever Regina needs.

Although she can't imagine what, exactly, could be giving the other woman such pause.

"Good," Regina whispers. Then she curls around Emma's spare pillow, squeezing it tightly against her chest, and allows herself to sob.

Emma shakes her head. "I don't understand you," she mutters, and she scoots across the bed and wraps her arms around Regina and traces patterns on her back until Regina's breathing slows and her body sags against Emma's. Forcing her restlessness aside, Emma stays put, waiting and watching until Regina finally falls asleep. Ever so slowly, she lifts one hand to brush a lock of hair out of Regina's eyes and gently touches her cheek, still warm and sticky with tears. Regina shifts in her sleep, stretching so that her body is flush against Emma's, and Emma finally exhales, letting out the tension that's been building in her chest all evening, before drifting into an uneasy and dreamless slumber.

When Emma awakens the next morning, her blankets are rumpled and there's an indent in her mattress like someone else had been in bed with her, but Regina is nowhere in sight. She stands, stretches the knots out of her back (she must have slept in a strange position last night), and convinces herself she was dreaming.

The frown she sees on Henry's face when she enters the living room tells her differently.

"Regina was here last night," he states matter-of-factly.

"You had the same dream I did, then?"

He shakes his head, still frowning, and hands her a slip of paper. "This was on the coffee table."

Dear Emma,
I'm so sorry to have trespassed on your hospitality last night. Thank you for staying with me. Please give my regards to Henry.
All the best,
Regina Mills

"You could have woken me," he complains. "She could have said hello in person."

"She wasn't exactly feeling social last night, kid," Emma replies, running her fingers distractedly through her hair. When had Regina left? And why? Where had she gone? "She needed... quiet. And understanding."

"I could have been quiet! I could have –"

"Henry, please let it go," she says, voice pained. "Regina likes you – she likes you lots – but there are some things... some things adults need to discuss as adults."

He regards her suspiciously, chin set in defiance, until finally his face falls. "Daniel died," he whispers, "didn't he?"

There's no use in lying. "He did," she confirms softly. She braces herself for Henry's reaction, ready for tears, rage – when Neal died, he trashed the entire living room – but he just nods, cool and somber. He's grown up so much over the last year, she reflects, more than she'd ever wanted him to.

"Is...is Regina going to be okay?" he asks. His voice hitches slightly, and Emma thinks her heart might break.

"I don't know," she admits, and she pulls him into her arms, holding him there for a good, long time. His face is pressed against her shoulder, but he doesn't cry. She does: deep, gut-wrenching sobs that shake her entire body and hurt her throat. She cries for Regina the tears she'd never been able to cry for herself, and Henry, for his part, stands there and lightly rubs her back.

She wonders if she should feel guilty about this, about her ten year old son taking care of her, but she lets him do it anyway, lets him hold her and rock her back and forth until the tears are all out and she just feels empty. Reluctantly, she pulls away. Henry looks slightly shell-shocked, but he straightens his shoulders, clears his throat, and asks, "What now?"

What now?

Wiping her eyes, Emma checks the clock on the wall and turns back to her son. "Get dressed for school, kid," she says. "I'll walk you."

"I don't want to go to school. I want to stay home with you."

"Henry, you have to go to school" is on the tip of her tongue, but that's not what comes out. Why should he have to go to school? asks a needling voice in her head. School's not going to do him any good today.

And, on a more selfish note, being alone isn't going to do her any good.

"Fine," she replies. "But only for today, and I want you to read for at least thirty minutes and write something, too."

"Can I write Regina a letter?"

"I'm sure she'd appreciate it, if you wanted to."

"Can I come to your practice?"

Emma sighs. "You've got a lot of nerve, kid."

"So, that means yes?"

"We'll see," she replies. Careful to hide the small smile that creeps onto his lips, Henry leans in and hugs her again, and Emma closes her eyes and breathes in his scent of soap and cinnamon even as guilt claws away at her insides because she's not alone and Regina is, she has her son to hold onto and Regina has nobody, nobody.

She wants Regina to have her.

She doesn't even know what she means by that.

It's not until two weeks later that they play the Chickadees again, a double-header up in Portland that has the entire bus abuzz. Word had spread, as it does (this time, through a letter from Ruby's Granny, who has apparently forgiven her after all), and by now the entire league must be aware that the Evil Queen's fiancé had been killed at Normandy. Emma was pleasantly surprised by her teammates reactions; she'd underestimated their capacity for empathy, even for a bitter rival. It was Mary Margaret who'd made a sympathy card – a beautiful singing bird fashioned from colored scrap paper – for the entire team to sign, Zelena who'd thought to send flowers.

But now that they've finished grieving for her, there's only one question on everyone's mind: will the Evil Queen be pitching today?

The "Evil Queen" is always emphasized whenever the question is asked: as they've now realized, whether Regina Mills is physically present at the game is immaterial. Regina Mills is a human woman; the Evil Queen is a persona, a larger-than-life figure who serves a common enemy, a rallying cry of sorts throughout their long training sessions. Regina Mills, at this moment, is someone to be pitied; the Evil Queen is a source of fear and awe.

The most common answer to the question, shockingly enough, is "I hope so."

Emma, in fact, knows the answer, although she and Henry have jointly decided it's none of their business to share. He had written to her almost immediately, and her reply had arrived just a few days ago. "She's not quitting the league permanently," Henry informed Emma, "but she's taking some time off to be with her family." He accepted the news with a heavy heart but claimed he understood.

In a separate note she'd enclosed, addressed specifically to Emma, Regina clarified that "taking time off to be with her family" meant that her mother was forcing her to relearn how to be a lady, to forget about baseball, and to think seriously about allowing her planned-from-birth future husband to court her, once a socially acceptable period of mourning had passed.

I haven't given up, she wrote. I've written to Gold in the hope that he can exert some influence on her. You were right, of course, when you said that she shouldn't control me, but I'm at a loss for how to handle this situation. I don't want to lose my freedom, but I also don't want to lose my mother. She's all I have left, and in spite of everything she's done, I love her. I'm not strong like you.

The letter went on, discussing irrelevant day-to-day things like chicken roasting, asking after Emma's training, and had led Emma to believe that Regina didn't have enough people to talk to.

Finally, the last paragraph said: Every day I'm in this house, I feel that I'm drawing closer and closer to madness. Without Daniel, without baseball, I've lost everything that once gave me a sense of my own identity. Without him, I'm lost.

Regina had written another sentence underneath, but it's crossed out so many times Emma can't even begin to read it. It stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the letter, pristine and written in Regina's perfect penmanship. Emma doesn't know what to make of it. Certainly, mistakes happen, and no one wants to waste paper when it's so overpriced because of the war, but there's something odd about that lone phrase at the end of a letter, so thoroughly blacked-out it may as well have been censored by the army.

Well, she supposes she'll never know.

The bus driver, always a little hard on the breaks, shouts out a warning as they careen into the parking lot, pulling Emma out of her thoughts.

"Were you daydreaming, ma?" Henry asks, head cocked to one side.

Emma sighs. "Something like that. I guess I'd better start thinking about the game, though."

"Won't be a very interesting game," he says under his breath, "without Regina."

Privately, Emma agrees, but she pats him on the shoulder and says, "You never know. Sometimes baseball can surprise you."

As it turns out, it is a pretty exciting game, at least on paper. Without the Evil Queen at the mound, the teams are well matched, trading runs back and forth and managing to engage a crowd that had started off quite subdued. The Belles win in the end, five-four, finally breaking a three-inning tie at the top of the ninth when Mary Margaret hits one out of the park. There's no celebration on the bus ride home, though, no chanting for the heroine of the hour. Mary Margaret, whom Emma fully expected to be pleased with herself, is strangely morose.

"Nice going! That was a great run you had there," David tells her.

Mary Margaret rolls her eyes. "It was gravy," she scoffs. "It's not like I hit a run off the Evil Queen."

David starts defend Kathryn Nolan's pitching skills, but then he seems to think better of it, instead muttering something that sounds suspiciously like "pain in the neck" and sulking for the rest of the trip.

"Hot damn," Ruby whispers, leaning across the aisle to nudge Emma's shoulder. Emma sinks lower in her seat, tossing all of her charm school lessons on posture out the window, and ignores her.