When she got home Regina poured a large glass of wine. She dialled Emma's number and stood looking out into her garden with one hand resting on her hip.
"We need to talk" she said as soon as Emma answered
"I know" Emma said "tonight?
"As soon as possible" Regina said "do you need a lift?"
"No" Emma replied, perturbed by Regina's decisive tone.
"Ok, see you soon" Regina said and hung up, not waiting for an answer.
When Henry got home she hugged him extra hard.
"Mom!" Her protested. She hadn't even let him take his coat off.
"I love you so much Henry" she said.
"I know" he replied "I love you too...can you let go of me?" He asked. She did and kissed his cheeky face.
"I've ordered pizza for dinner" she said and his face lit up. "Could you go to your room until it arrives?" Regina asked, he ran upstairs before she could take back the exciting prospect of pizza.
It wasn't long before Emma arrived. She wore a black check shirt and high-waist trousers that Regina thought she probably would have worn herself.
"You look nice" she said as Emma entered the kitchen.
"I had a meeting" she said
Regina nodded. She had a different look for every time of day, it seemed. Regina held the foot of her wine glass as though it was trying to escape. She hadn't seen Emma since she stormed out of her office and did not know how to talk to her now.
"I'm sorry about the way I spoke to you the other day" Emma began
"It's not that" Regina said "though thank you for apologising" she added. Emma's face turned from humility to anxiety. There was another pause.
"Are you breaking up with me?" Emma asked
"I need to tell you something" Regina said, still not looking at her. "I did something and I know you will be angry and I don't expect you to forgive me but I have to tell you, regardless." Regina said.
Emma stood stock still in the middle of the kitchen floor, scared to breathe, her mind raced at what Regina could have done. 'Maybe something to do with Henry or Max or fucking Bobby Feng (like, literally)' she thought. She tried to shake the image of Bobby's smug face from her mind.
"Regina what is it?" Emma asked. Regina sat down at the table and Emma sat next to her.
"I'm not sure where to start" Regina's voice shook slightly but she got it under control.
She had been the mayor of Storybrooke and the queen of the Enchanted Forest, she had done harder things than this, but not many.
"I got someone to find some things out about you" Regina said quickly before she lost her nerve.
"Why?" Emma asked "there's nothing I wouldn't tell you myself" she said, her forehead wrinkled.
"Things you may not even know." Regina said
"Is this Bobby fucking around with you? You can't trust her!" Emma said
"I have no reason to believe she is lying, Emma. She got everything I needed" Regina said sharply, hoping to avoid another argument about Bobby Feng.
"You were found in the woods as a baby" Regina said
"Yeah I know" Emma said, shifting in her seat "in the middle of nowhere, wha-" Regina cut her off
"No. It was outside of a town called Storybrooke." She said
"No, Regina there's nothing there, I looked it up on Google Earth" Emma said. Regina almost smiled at this world's advanced technology and complete lack of knowledge about any other realm.
"I know who your parents are" was her next statement. Emma's eyes widened
"Wha-wh-why would you...?" she stuttered as a hundred questions tried to force their way out of her mouth at once.
"I knew them a long time ago. I knew your mother when she was Henry's age" Regina said, not really worrying if Emma believed her because it was true. Emma sat back, mouth open.
"Regina, what is going on? You're saying...crazy things" Emma said, carefully.
"Yes I know it sounds that way. I don't expect you to believe me straight away but you will because it's true" Regina said. Emma stared at her.
"Where are they then?" Emma asked calmly after a couple of minutes of silence, though her thoughts thrashed wildly around her head.
"Storybrooke. Near where you were found" Regina said
"There's no such place!" Emma raised her voice "it even sounds ridiculous!"
"Yes I know that" Regina replied. They stared at each other again.
"There's something else" Regina said eventually
"Santa is for real?" Emma asked sarcastically
"I found your son" Regina said ignoring Emma's comments.
Emma froze.
"You did what?" She asked in a low, serious voice. Regina didn't reply. "You, you, you have no right...how dare you go and..." Emma stood up, she swept her hair back from her face and held her hands at her temples.
"I, I, I can't believe you would, what possessed you to-" Emma cast around for any answer, any question that made sense.
"It's Henry" Regina cut across her, looking down at the table. Emma's arms fell slowly to her sides.
"What?" She asked
"Henry." Regina said, looking up at Emma "I adopted him twelve years ago in Boston"
"Boston?!" Emma said.
"Yes" Regina said "we lived in Storybrooke for a while but I moved us here and...eleven years later you appeared in that bar and..." Regina trailed off "here we are." She opened her hands and put them back together again.
Emma felt overwhelmed by everything. The lights in the kitchen were suddenly too bright, her clothes too tight, the air too close.
"You know I never thought that Henry's ability to identify a lie was convenient, until now" Regina said, realising that Emma may choose not to accept what she had said, though it was all completely true.
Emma looked pale.
"I think I've lost my mind" she said to herself. "How can any of this be true?" She asked.
Regina didn't really have an answer, she had asked herself the same question and was equally dissatisfied with the answer.
She wondered if she had told Emma too much in one go, if telling her about magic before she asked would be a step too far. She drank some wine but it seemed tasteless. Emma sat back down at the table.
"How could you know my...parents?" Emma hesitated at the word "you're not that much older than me" she said.
"I'm older than you think" Regina said, she thought carefully about how to phrase what she needed to say. Emma waited, she ran her hand over her mouth and breathed deeply.
"You need to understand that you come from a place with magic" Regina said
Emma laughed "like Neverland?" She asked
Regina thought "more like fairy tales" she answered. Emma sighed.
"Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?" she joked.
"Yes" Regina replied, stunned at the example she chose.
"Oh boy" Emma leant forward at the table. "Am I asleep?" She asked "am I high? Are you high?"
"I'm not, and I hope you're not either, you drove here" Regina said. This dose of reality, a glimpse of mundane life again seemed to awaken something in Emma.
"Henry?" She asked
"He's upstairs" Regina said, her heart sank.
"Have you told him?" Emma asked. Regina shook her head
"Are you going to?" Emma asked
Regina sat back in her chair, her legs were crossed and she leant on the table, swirling the wine in her glass.
"I think he has a right to know, but then you also have a right for him not to know" she said
"Now you're concerned for my privacy? That's convenient" Emma snapped
"Would you rather I told you both nothing? Let you live side by side never knowing who you are and where you come from?" Regina asked "it would have been easier" she said, remembering all the times she did the easier thing and that the right thing rarely brought any greater reward.
"There's something else" Regina said in the silence that had followed her last statement.
"Besides fairytales, towns that don't exist and the completely illegal procurement of information about me?" Emma asked
"Yes" Regina said "but before I tell you" she looked up into her eyes like it might be the last time she ever did "I want you to know that knowing how much I have hurt you will never stop hurting me"
Emma's brow wrinkled.
"You are special" Regina said "you threatened to undo what I had sacrificed" Regina looked at her hand and remembered her father's heart beating in it. A tear dropped from her eye
"What I had sacrificed everything for" she said. She wiped her eye and drew a deep breath.
"So I told your parents I would kill you. They sent you away to protect you" Regina said
She looked at Emma's face, having no choice now but to accept that truth she had just spoken. She looked into her troubled blue eyes. She didn't see Snow, she didn't see Charming, she saw Henry. She gulped back the rest of her tears.
At that moment the doorbell rang. Neither of them moved they just looked at each other. They heard Henry fly down the stairs to answer it. In a moment he was in the kitchen with two pizza boxes.
Regina felt like her heart was breaking when Emma tore her eyes away turned to look at her son. She watched her eyes filled with wonder and fear as she observed him, completely unaware.
Emma's head seemed to clear of fog as she looked at him. She knew it was true. She wanted it to be but she could feel it in her heart, too.
Henry sat at the table with a plate full of pizza. He happily munched away for a while before noticing both women were quiet and looking at him.
"Did I do something?" He asked looking from one to the other.
Regina looked at Emma who nodded slightly. It was all she could manage, she felt like she was made of lead. Her limbs were heavy and something pressed hard on her chest.
"Henry we need to talk to you about something" Regina said, and she touched his arm.
He looked at Emma's face. She smiled at him but it didn't seem happy. He looked at Regina and she did the same. He couldn't tell what was happening.
"Henry, Emma is your birth mother" Regina said.
Emma braced for shock, anger, disappointment but none of it came.
"Oh!" Henry said, looking relived "I know" he said and took another bite from a slice of pizza.
Emma and Regina looked at each other and back at Henry.
"What do you mean you know?" Regina asked. He finished chewing.
"I just had a feeling" Henry said. He put his pizza down and wiped his hands on one of the napkins he had brought to the table. "And I borrowed your credit card" he said looking at Regina, slightly scared.
"The one I lost?" Regina asked. He nodded. "So it isn't lost?" She asked. He shook his head at Regina and turned to look at Emma.
"I looked you up" Henry said "it's scary what you can find out about people with a bit of money" he added, as if data protection was his primary concern in this.
"Sorry I didn't tell you" he said "I didn't want to scare you away" Emma laughed at the idea of being scared away by a twelve year old. Henry smiled at her and she laughed harder, even Regina smiled as she watched the scene unfold in front her.
"Can I give you a hug?" Henry asked. They had hugged before, they had hugged since he knew who she was, but for her this was the first time.
She hugged him hard and he grinned at Regina.
"God" Emma said "you were a lot smaller the last time I saw you. Henry Mills."
Emma put him down and looked at his face in a way she never had before. The phone rang and he ran off to get it before Regina could. She sat at the table, her chin resting in her hand as she watched Emma meet her son.
Emma breathed out deeply and looked at her.
"That was a surprise" she said and sat down again. "Pepperoni and mushroom is my favourite" Emma said, looking at the pizza.
"It's his too" Regina said warmly but sadly.
"We still have to talk" Emma said
"I know" Regina replied
"Like about this town and my parents and...stuff" Emma said
"Magic?" Regina asked. Emma sighed and looked concerned.
"Sure" Emma said.
"Do you believe anything I've told you, with the exception of Henry?" Regina asked
"I...think I just...can't" Emma said
"Ok" Regina said
"I mean, magic Regina?" Emma asked "like Harry Potter?"
"You know that's not really a good representation of magic in my realm. Our realm, I suppose" she said
"Yeah I'll ask my mom!" They heard Henry on the phone in the hall.
"Do some magic then" Emma said. Regina raised an eyebrow.
"I'm not a magician, Emma, I don't perform tricks on command" Regina reprimanded.
Emma went quiet. Her elbows rested on the table and she let her eyes rest on nothing in particular while she thought.
She noticed the box in front of her lift, but it wasn't for a moment that she realised no one was touching it. She looked up and Regina let it drop. Regina touched her glass and the wine froze. Emma lifted her eyes and looked at Regina.
"Is this what you wanted to see?" She asked
Emma eyed her warily but made no reply. Regina sighed, then in a puff of purple smoke she was gone. Emma jumped at the sight.
"Woops" Regina said behind her. Emma turned quickly in her chair to see Regina regaining her balance, a couple of feet away from her.
"It's been a while since I did that" she said
"If you can do that, why can't you just summon my parents here?" Emma asked
"You can't just summon anyone, only people you have power over. When I was qu-" Henry rentered the kitchen.
"Toby wanted to know if I could go over at the weekend, but I said I didn't know." He smiled at them both.
"What were you talking about?" He asked and tucked back into his pizza.
"Your mom can do magic" Emma said
"Yeah I know" he replied
"What?" Emma and Regina asked in unison
"You do it sometimes without realising or when you think I can't see" he said to Regina.
"The other day you cut the power out" he said
"That was a light in your room" Regina said
"No it wasn't" Henry said "and I've seen you fix broken glasses, not put them back together, unbreak them"
Regina and Emma talked late into the night. Henry was present for some of it but was sent to bed long after his bedtime had passed.
"What happens next is your choice" Regina said
"It doesn't sound like I have much of a choice" Emma said "if I don't go I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering if I just hallucinated this whole night'
Regina heard the unspoken part of Emma's dilemma too 'what if I'm not crazy and my parents are trapped in this town waiting for me to save them?'
They sat in silence for a while. Regina sat on the sofa with her legs tucked neatly underneath her. Emma sat on the floor, cross-legged next to the fire that Regina had lit for her as another example of magic.
Emma stared at the fire, it was beautiful. She could feel the heat from it. It was real, but it came from Regina's hands. She slowly reached out to touch a flame. One licked her finger and the glowing embers below stung her hand.
She sucked her breath in sharply and withdrew it. She squeezed her hand as if trying to get the heat out.
Regina looked up, not having seen what happened. Emma's eyes were closed and she sighed, holding her bunched up hand to her chest.
"I need to go home" Emma said. She rose and stretched.
Regina got up too and walked her to the door. Emma fiddled with her car keys as they stood in the porch.
'When will I see you again?' Regina wanted to ask 'will I ever? Will you ever forgive me? Will I ever stop being punished for what I did?'
"Ok" Emma said as she opened and stepped through the door
"Emma wait" Regina said and Emma turned back on the step. Regina walked over to her. She looked down into her eyes.
"I'm sorry" Regina rasped, apologising for the night, for not being able to sugar-coat anything for her, for not telling her sooner, for ever telling her, for the curse, for her parents, for the life she stole from her. All off it. Everything. She was sorry for everything she had done and she needed Emma to know it before she left, possibly forever.
Emma looked back at her. Her expression wasn't hard, but slightly dazed and tired beyond sleep. She pressed her lips together, not knowing what would come out if she spoke. She took Regina's aching expression in and left. Regina stood on the steps of her house and watched her drive away. It was cold. She stayed there a while, feeling like she had lost a limb. Wondering how much a heart could take before it just gave in and stopped.