A/N: As always, thank you.

Warnings: Some salty language, and some conversation about what Regina through during her time in captivity. Though it's not graphic in this chapter, it does start to get suggestive so if you are in any way sensitive, you may wish to skip this.


STORYBROOKE, MAINE - JANUARY, 2023

When a freshly showered and dressed (she's even put a light coat of make-up on, once again mustering up whatever small amount of shielding against the world that she can) Regina finally comes back down the stairs about twenty minutes, she's using the cane to move about. She had tried to leave Henry's room without it, but almost immediately thanks to her night spent on the couch, her muscles had cramped up to the point that almost all movement feels a bit like someone is trying to ram sharp needles into her skin (unfortunately, she has a distinct memory of this having happened to her so the comparison is darkly apt), and she'd been forced to use the cane for assistance.

Her hand rested around the knob of the cane, she feels old and broken, and there's a kind of deep shame burning harshly in her dark eyes, but she holds her head up as high as she can when she greets David and Snow with a small thin smile that doesn't quite go all the way up. "Good morning," she says as she settles herself into the chair opposite them.

"Good morning," Snow repeats. "Did you sleep well?"

"Well enough," is all Regina will allow for, her expression almost completely emotionless. She doesn't need nor want her former stepdaughter to know that her sleep had been a kind of dark nothingness thanks to the painkillers.

That Snow is looking at her like she already knows this is bad enough.

"Okay," Snow nods before offering up another smile that's surely meant to be comforting. Regina thinks that she should be irritated by this kind of pitying sympathy, and part of her even is, but the exhaustion and the desire not to be alone again is so much more and so she simply lets it go. "Emma told you what we want to…talk about?"

"She did," Regina confirms. Her jaw sets and her eyes harden. "Go ahead and your questions."

"I don't think that there are specific questions," Emma tells her as she puts a cup of tea in front of her. "We just want to know what you remember."

"Why? Exactly? What does what I…went through matter now?"

Emma exchanges a look with her parents, and then sighs. "Regina, after you were taken out of Storybrooke, Gold helped us put up a protective shield around the town to keep outsiders well...out. It wouldn't have kept you from returning because of your magical blood, but it should have stopped mail from you. For ten years, we haven't received so much as an ad from the real world, and then your letter arrives. That's just...it's not possible."

"What are you saying?" Regina demands, her voice deepening with dread.

"We think there is a possibility that your captors were waiting for you to come back home to Storybrooke," David tells her.

Regina can't stop herself from flinching in reaction. It's a small movement, but she's quite certain that everyone had seen it. Just the same, she ignores their worried reactions, and hisses out, "I'm guessing that you have no idea why?"

"Not yet," Emma admits, frowning at the clear fear she sees on Regina's face. "That's kind of why we were hoping that you could tell us what you remember about how you escaped from them."

"You think they let me go so that they could track me down seven years later? Why? They had me and were able to do…whatever they wanted with me. Why would they release me to just to…" She comes to a choking stop, clearly upset to the point of looking as though she's about to break down.

This isn't anger that she's showing right now; this is fear to the point of almost looking like crippling terror, and seeing this particular emotion painted in bright bold strokes across Regina's face is a new experience for all three of the Charming's. Ten years may have passed, but their memories of the proud woman who had refused to let them see anything but the rage brewing inside of her is still vividly imprinted upon all of their memories.

"We'll figure this out, Regina," Emma assures her. "We will figure this out; I promise you that."

"Don't make promises you can't keep."

"I don't."

"No, I suppose you don't," Regina replies with a small sigh. For a moment then, her face contorts into something so deeply agonized that it almost looks like it physically pains her. The expression she's wearing is so raw and hurt that it almost makes both Emma and Snow want to call off this conversation before it even begins.

"Regina," Snow says, and perhaps she means to tell her former stepmother that she doesn't need to do this.

"It's just a simple story," Regina replies, the shake of her voice undermining her words. Her shoulders lift up almost defiantly, and then she starts speaking, slowly and deliberately. "For three years, my every day was wondering what my captors would do to me next. They did every single thing that you could possibly imagine to me and then they did so much more than that simply because they could. The worst of it was the one thing I would have thought would have been the easiest to endure: complete and utter isolation. They would put me in a dark tiny room that was big enough for me to pace and sit down in, but little more than that. They would keep me in there for what must have been weeks at a time with my only contact with anyone being the sound of the flap in the door opening so that one of the guards could push food and water in for me. At first, being in that room was a relief because it meant that they weren't electrocuting me or beating me or doing anything else to me, but I started going…well, you'd think I've been used to it."

"You started what?" Snow urges.

"There's very little worse than being all by yourself," Regina tells her. "I had to find ways to keep myself from losing my mind all over again. The first time - back in the Enchanted Forest - wasn't a great experience for me, and well, to be frank, it's at least part of the reason why we're all here in this world now now. I didn't want to feel that desperation and hopelessness all over again." She looks up at Snow when she says this, meeting her eyes. "I'm not blaming you for what happened; you showed me what you believed at the time to be mercy, but my dear, it never was that."

"I'm sorry," Snow replies, swallowing hard against the guilt in her chest.

"I know," Regina says simply.

"How did you know that three years had passed while you were in there?" Emma queries, attempting to get this conversation back on track. There's so much that needs to be worked out between her mother and Regina, but those things will have to wait until this threat is over. All the same, she thinks it's a probably good sign that both of them are willing to step into their past at all; it means that perhaps, when the time is right, they can find their way towards truly reconciling and forgiving each other as opposed to simply letting go of things and pretending that they'd never happened.

For now, though, this is what matters. And this story needs to be told.

"I didn't," Regina admits. "I had no concept of time whatsoever while I was their...guest. I didn't gain an understanding of how long they'd had me until a few months into my hospital stay. Until after I remembered who I was and when I'd been taken. All I knew while I was in captivity was that at some point in each given day, I would fall asleep and then I'd wake up and everything would start all over again. I measured time by the meals that they supplied me with, but since they didn't always do that, after awhile, everything just fell together. It could have been two weeks or ten years for all I knew."

"How did you finally escape?" David asks as he rises to start brewing another pot of hot water. This seems to be his go-to way to keep his hands busy. He keeps casting worried glances over at his wife, but her eyes are on Regina.

"I have no idea," Regina admits with a slight frown as she digs into her memory. "I remember trying to escape numerous times before I actually succeeded in doing so." She laughs, then, an almost sadly hysterical sound. "One day or maybe one night, I don't quite know, one of the guards came into check on me because I'd skipped the meal that they'd provided and then he started…" she trails off once more and shakes her head as if even remembering this causes her great pain.

"Regina," Snow says gently, her hand moving to cover the former queen's.

Regina smiles softly at the contact, but curiously doesn't pull away from it. It almost seems as though she's actually comforted by it. After a moment, she composes herself anew, and then forces herself on. "It's all right; I can do this. He got a bit…free, and I bit him and while he was down, I ran through the door he'd left open. I don't think I got far. I have this memory of being back on the electrocution table after that, but that must not have been what happened because the next thing I know, I'm waking up in a bed at St. Joseph's Hospital in Bangor and they're asking me if I know who I am."

"But you didn't?" Emma asks. "Remember who you were?"

"Not at the time, no. The detectives that I spoke to when I woke up told me that I'd wandered into traffic, and asked me if I had any recall of that. I didn't. And I still don't. Probably a good thing since it seems as though I gave a fair amount of people quite an afternoon show." She chuckles humorlessly at this. "As for my memories, they came back to me quite slowly. Some of them, anyway." She taps her temple with the tip of her finger. "There are still so many things locked away in there, and it's almost always an unpleasant experience to pull them out when they start to surface on me."

"Like the memory of Henry from earlier."

"Yes, but for that memory, I'd go through any amount of pain."

"I know you would," Emma tells her. She doesn't add that she, too, would have done the same. Instead, she says, "During any of the time that the Home Office had you, did they ever tell you what they wanted with you?"

"You mean did they tell me why they insisted on keeping me alive for three years instead of just letting me die?" She shakes her head. "No, and believe me, my dear, I asked. Every single time that I'd wake up after they would beat and whip me into unconsciousness and every time I'd open my eyes after they would electrocute or drown me to the point of death, I would demand that they explain why they kept bringing me back, and every single time, all I got was stares from the doctors and a smile from her." She shivers almost violently when she says this, as if even the memory of theses dark pseudo conversations is painful and haunting to her.

They probably are.

"Her?" Snow prompts, trying to ignore the impulse she has to react to Regina's words; unfortunately for her, though, her mind is giving her horrifically graphic visuals involving Regina being hurt as she'd suggested, and it takes everything that Snow has to not run over to the sink and throw up into it.

But she figures if Regina can hold herself together right now, well then she can, too.

"I presume she was their leader. She introduced herself to me as their Queen, though I don't believe that that was her official title so much as the one she adopted so that she taunt me with her power over me. She certainly knew who I was, and enjoyed telling me as much. Beyond that, I don't know who she was. What I know is that she was almost always there for the worst of the sessions, and then she was always there to question me when I woke in the medical bay."

"What do you remember about her?" Emma queries.

"She looked to be in her mid thirties perhaps, though I suspect she might be substantially older than that. She was thin and tall, and blonde. And she was English," Regina replies immediately, because though there are some memories that have been dug deep into the crevices of her tortured mind, the one of that horrible woman is not one of them.

"You're saying English because of her accent?" David asks.

"Yes, and she utilized a polished and upper class dialect. Her clothing was also extremely expensive, and I never saw her in the same outfit twice. Her nails were also expertly manicured. She reminded me of me, actually."

An unmistakable expression of disgust races its way through Regina's eyes when she says these words, guilt darkening them for a moment before she forces herself back to something reasonably calm and measured again.

No one needs to ask to know what that expression was all about because they already know the answer; it was about the dark and terrible sins of her own past, sins that seem to weight on her like an hundred gallon drum.

Emma waits a brief moment, lets Regina finish collecting herself, and then asks, "Do you recall if was she present in your last memory – the last one you have of being on the table - before you woke up in the hospital?"

Regina thinks about this for a moment, and then says softly, "She was."

"Do you think you can try to focus on that memory?" Emma asks. She's frowning when she says this, and it's quite clear to everyone that this is the very last thing that she wants to make Regina do right now, but no one says a word in protest because they all know that it's quite likely that those dark and horrifying moments hold some of the answers that they need to try to understand what's happening in Storybrooke right now.

"I can try," Regina answers as she takes a sip from the refreshed cup of tea that David sets down in front of her. The other one was just fine, but he's anxious, and he needs to be doing something to try to help now. She smiles up her gratitude at him for the thought, and then looks back at Emma.

"Do you need us to give you some time alone?" David asks.

The response she gets is immediate and somewhat startling, "No!" Regina almost shouts out. And then, as if realizing that she's perhaps given away far too much of what she's feeling right now, she again forces her face back to what she probably thinks looks like neutral expression (it's more like a sad grimace), and then says in a much quieter but slightly trembling voice, "If it's all the same to the three of you, I've spent a very long time alone and –"

"We're not going anywhere," Snow promises, her hand tightening.

Regina nods. She then closes her eyes for a moment, and just as she had before when she'd been pulling the memory of Henry forward, she focuses on the tiny thread that she can pull on – the visual of staring up from a metal table – and keeps yanking. It hurts like a son a bitch, and there are violent red sparks of pain glowing behind her eyelids as her brain protests her efforts to remember what it clearly doesn't want her to, but she keeps on.

Because if this had all been some kind of game, if they had released her simply so that they could then follow back into Storybrooke for some reason or another, then everything she cares about – Henry – could be in danger.

And she didn't come home to lose her little boy again.

She won't lose him.

So she keeps grabbing on that thread and she keeps pulling and her teeth are grit hard enough that Snow wants to stop this right here and now, but David has his hand on her shoulder, and he just seems to understand that this has to happen. His eyes meet Emma's and she nods in agreement.

But dear does God does this suck.

Former enemy or not, none of them want to see her in this kind of pain.

But then Regina's dark eyes snap open, and she lets out a soft sob.

"Regina?" Emma asks.

"It's not all there anymore," she gasps.

"But some of it is?"

"Yes." She looks right at Emma, again unwilling to see the sympathy and sadness in Snow's eyes; she understands it, though, because whatever hatred had bloomed so fully between them, however much Snow had just wanted Regina to go away, she'd never wanted her to go through that much physical - or even emotional - pain. And even Regina in her darkest days would never have tortured her former stepdaughter to that kind of horrific degree. She'd wanted her simply dead believing that the lack of her existence would have made the agony in her soul less. Absolutely nonsense, of course, but it'd never been about rending the flesh and destroying the mind for Regina or Snow. In its own sick way, both of their fights with each other had always been about healing their broken and deeply betrayed hearts.

None of that had ever happened, but now Snow thinks, maybe when this is all over and everyone is safe and secure once more, maybe it finally can.

Once Regina is willing to meet her eyes again.

For now, though, Snow actually understands – even if she doesn't like it one damned bit – why Regina can only look at Emma. She completely gets why Regina needs the confidence and fight that Emma is offering to her.

"She was there," Regina says. "And I remember her telling the man - I suppose he was a doctor - who had been…working on me that this would be the last…treatment. That was the word they always used. He asked her if I was to be eliminated and she laughed and said of course not, but that I'd no longer be a guest of theirs because they clearly weren't going to get what they needed from me this way." She swallows hard, looking nauseous.

"What they needed from you," David muses. "Do you mean your magic?"

"I always assumed that considering their hatred of magic, that that was at least part of why they abducted me, but as I said, they were never clear about what they wanted. I can recall her telling me time and time again to just let go and give in, but there was never any other demands made."

"As far as your magic, were you able to feel it out there?" Emma queries.

"Inside the compound where they kept me, yes. When they wanted me to, anyway. They had this bracelet that they would put me on that would stop me from being able to use my magic. When it was off, I could, but the only time they'd take it off was when they were trying to use one of their machines to rip the magic out by force. I could feel it then."

"Were they able to take your magic?" David asks.

"I'm not sure," Regina admits. "I haven't felt it since that last day I spent there."

"What about we drove back into town a couple days," Emma presses. "You were sleeping, but did you feel anything at all? Even when you woke up?"

"I didn't," Regina admits.

"Were you expecting to?" Emma queries.

"No, but that's's mostly because though I can remember having used magic and I remember what it did, I don't feel any kind of connection to it, anymore. I don't have muscle memory of it any longer. I don't recall what it felt like or what it tasted like."

"It's been seven years," Snow suggests. "Maybe you're just out of practice."

"It'd been twenty-eight years the last time I'd gone without magic for a long while, and there were still days during that final year of the curse when I would wake up vividly recalling exactly how it felt to have magic humming in my fingers and through my blood. Now…now it's all gone. Like it was never there to begin with. I don't understand how they could have...I don't."

This isn't about magic, she thinks even as she stares down at her hands. Not exactly. Magic had been a kind of drug for her, though control had been the actual addiction. She finds herself not so much missing the magic as fearful of the loss of the mental connection to those memories.

And what's worse for her is the understanding that until now, she hasn't even realized that her connection to her magic had been missing.

If they could take away that, what else did the Home Office take from her?

She exhales, then, because no matter what else they had taken – and she's terribly sure that there's so much more that she'll find out has been stripped away now that she's back in Storybrooke and being faced with her past – they hadn't taken away her memories of Henry nor her love for him. She'd like to think that they couldn't remove those things from her even if they'd tried to, but that would be something of a lie because for a short time, they had done exactly that to her. They'd broken her mind so badly that there had been awhile when she'd forgotten everything including her son.

But she remembers now, and that's all that matters, she tells herself.

She remembers Henry, and she'll never forget him again.

Never.

"So maybe the Home Office doesn't want you to be able to stop whatever their new plan is," David suggests. "With your magic, I mean. If this is some kind of long game they're playing, maybe this is their idea of precautions."

"I suppose that's possible," Regina admits, her words slow and thoughtful as she turns everything over in her mind. "If I can't feel or taste my magic anymore, even if it's still running through my blood, I won't be able to control it. It'd be like I was a novice again; I'd be no help to anyone."

Emma nods her head, then says, "That still doesn't explain why they would let you 'escape' seven years ago and then just wait for you to come home."

"Maybe they didn't have a choice," Snow suggests.

"But if they had an inside person as you believe," Regina argues. "Then couldn't they have assisted their partners in getting back in long ago?"

"Maybe their partners have always been inside," Emma says. "Like sleeper agents just waiting to be activated once you returned to Storybrooke."

"This is insanity," David says. "Why so much subterfuge?"

"I don't know," Emma admits. Her eyes flicker over to Regina. "Over the last seven years, you've been mostly healing from they did to you, right?"

"Mostly. I spent quite awhile in the hospital after I woke up, and then once I was on my feet again, I needed extensive physical therapy. And other kinds of therapy, as well," Regina states, frowning a bit at the confession.

"So you went to someone like Archie?" Snow asks gently. She had almost used the term shrink, but had pulled back not wanting to offend Regina or her pride; this new relationship with the former queen is still so fresh and young, and she doesn't wish to endanger it with ill-thought out words.

"Yes. Reluctantly at first, but after awhile I realized that I enjoyed having someone willing to just listen. I don't think he believed most of what I said. In fact, I'm quite certain that he thought that I was quite delusional and had created almost everything I was telling him in my head due to whatever trauma I had suffered during my captivity, but he was still there." She laughs. "He also prescribed me a good amount of medication for anxiety and depression. I refused to take it at first, but there was a time when I started wondering if maybe he was right, and everything I remembered was just some kind of pathetic coping method so I tried his treatment plan."

"You thought you'd created yourself as one of the biggest villains in storybook history as a way of dealing with being tortured?" Emma asks.

And then she winces because damn, that was probably too blunt.

Thankfully, Regina seems more amused by the sheriff's ill-chosen words than annoyed by them. Perhaps it's the old familiarity of how tactless Emma can be that causes her to smile. "Yes," she answers. "Because creating myself a story where I was the hunter instead of the prey seemed logical for a time."

"So what made you realize it was real?" Snow queries.

"I started having dreams of Henry. You have to understand, while I was in that cell of theirs, I filled my days with…him. And even the three of you."

"Us?" David asks.

"All of you spoke to me. Sometimes you would tell me that I deserved what was happening, and that I was getting my just rewards and sometimes it was one of you there to talk and spar with me simply because I needed it to stay sharp, but Henry was always there to beg me to hold on. Even when I could still remember him calling me the Evil Queen, the thoughts I had of him telling me to be strong was enough to keep me sane for another day. He was my rock for almost three years, and then he was just gone."

"I don't understand," Emma states, her brow wrinkling in confusion. "It's totally normal for you to have stopped seeing him after you got out."

"But that's the thing: I didn't just stopped seeing him; I forgot everything about Henry as much as I've now forgotten everything about the taste and feel of magic," Regina answers, and for a moment she looks absolutely gutted. "After I woke up, and there was nothing in my mind that was concrete and real, he wasn't there, either. Even when I remembered who I was, and how to get into the bank accounts I'd hidden out in the real world, I still didn't remember my son. Until one night when I did, and then I knew who I was and that everything I'd thought I done, I had. It was all real."

"And in the past now," Snow tells her, her tone strong and determined.

"You're always the optimistic princess," Regina chuckles, but there's unmistakable humor – and perhaps for the first time even appreciation for Snow's previously thought of as infuriating constant positivity - in her tone.

"Yes," Snow agrees. And then she grins. "Always."

Emma sighs. "And on that note, I think we're probably done for now." She offers Regina a small smile. "You look like you could use a nap."

"So do you, Sheriff," Regina shoots back, an eyebrow lifted in challenge.

"Yeah, but I'm –"

"A lot of time has passed, and thankfully, we're no longer the enemies that we once were, but I think perhaps we still know each other as well as we ever did," Regina breaks in, her dark eyes locked with Emma's green ones. "You're exhausted, but think you have to be the Savior even now because so much has changed but so much hasn't. Well let me tell you, dear, we all have our limits, and I think this town needs you not to be at them."

"She's right, Emma," Snow says gently.

"Fine. I'll get some rest. And Regina will get some rest. And then…"

"And then we'll meet at Granny's for dinner," David says.

"That might not be a good idea," the former queen protests. "Ten years may have passed, but I'm sure there are many who would prefer me gone."

"Well that's too damned bad. They need to get used to seeing you again," Snow replies, her chin lifting up in stubborn defiance. "You're home now, and as long as you want it to be, this is going to stay your home."

"As I said: always the optimist."

"And as I said: always."

"Good."

And Emma – unable to stop herself from letting out a breath of relief – thinks: well at least some good has come out of this horrific tragedy.

Now if they can just manage to stop the Home Office from ruining everything that's worth having all over again.

TBC...