A/N: just a heads up with a trigger warning for a discussion of domestic abuse in this chapter. Sorry in advance if anyone is uncomfortable.

Upon entering the pub not fifteen minutes later, Emma was met with a tearstained Roni waiting by the bar. The woman was silent as she held out her hand for Emma to take before leading her upstairs to her apartment.

The apartment itself was smaller than hers Emma noticed and a little darker, but now was not the time to be gawking around Roni's home, especially when the woman was clearly upset. On the table, Emma saw the same bottle of whisky they'd been drinking the other night when Roni had announced that she had spoken to her sister. The blonde eyed it nervously, knowing that barely a glass of the strong beverage would be enough to inebriate her with how exhausted she was.

Roni pulled her to the sofa, their hands still locked together, before she used her free hand to pour them around three fingers depth of liquor. Finally, she let go of the blonde's hand so that she could hold her own drink and pass Emma hers too.

"To family," Roni cheered bitterly.

Emma raised her glass and took a sip, pulling a face at the sharp taste. Placing the glass back down on the table, she turned to the brunette. "What happened?"

Roni laughed humourlessly. "You mean what didn't happen," she said, hiccupping a fraction, indicating that she was already a little, if not rather drunk. "We got nowhere. I picked her up from the airport and we travelled back in silence. I pulled up here and we came upstairs and poured ourselves a drink. I even brought her favourite up from the bar," she nodded to the bottle on table, "hoping that we could start over, but it wasn't to be. She still so spiteful because Margot still hasn't come back and barely contacts her mother and she blames me for it all. This time she didn't just call me names and blame me, but she brought up things from our past too. About our mother especially."

Emma tensed as Roni mentioned her mother. The brunette picked up her whisky, taking a few large sips before sighing.

"Our mother wasn't a very loving woman," Roni began and already the story sounded like Cora in the past. "She gave Kelly up for adoption because she wasn't married to her father and then she married my father and had me but he died when I was young. Mother changed her mind when Kelly was ten, I was eight, and asked for her back. God knows how she managed it, I thought it wasn't a thing, but mother, Barbara, had a way with people. She could always get them to do what she wanted. Anyway, Kelly was back and she was resentful of me because Mother kept me and treated me like a princess."

A few more sips were taken and Roni's glass was once again almost empty, but Emma didn't think it was wise to keep filling her with alcohol so she subtly nudged the bottle away from the brunette.

"Anyway," Roni continued, "she brought all of that up again which wasn't my fault. I never asked for Mother to keep me. She died a few years ago and her death brought Kelly and I closer together because we were both devastated. She got better and kinder as she got older. We opened this place with the money she left us. Margot was about sixteen at the time and she was twenty-two when she left. She's an adult, but Kelly still doesn't see that. She doesn't want to even though she's been gone almost two years now. I don't know why she bothered coming down here if she still wasn't ready to make up."

At that, Roni let the tears fall once more and Emma's heart broke at the sight. She'd seen Regina cry only a handful of times: when her mother died the first time, when Robin died, when Henry was taken by Pan and when Henry left to go travelling. However, she still hated seeing it.

On instinct, she shuffled closer and wrapped her arms around her, pulling the brunette into her. Roni's body shook with sobs as she clung onto the blonde.

"There's another reason my sister hates me," Roni mumbled quietly into Emma's neck before she pulled back. "I knew I was gay from a young age, or at least attracted to women but when I was sixteen, I met this woman who was breathtakingly beautiful. She was tall, blonde and had dazzling green eyes." Emma swallowed as Roni described her, but surely this had to be a different person because Emma hadn't met sixteen-year-old Regina. "She was called Alyssa, just turned twenty, and we hit it off right away." Roni smiled at her story. "We started hanging out and I was falling for her pretty quickly. Everything about her confirmed my attraction to women. She was my first too, I gave everything to her one evening after a moonlit stroll and she took me back to her apartment and we made love. Everything seemed perfect." The brunette's smile then turned sour. "But one evening, Kelly came home and wanted to introduce us to her new girlfriend. Imagine my surprise when Alyssa walked in with her."

Emma's eyes widened in shock. She had wondered where Roni's story was going but she never expected this to happened. Whoever had cast the curse had really done their homework with casting a back story for all of these characters. With Regina's curse, they couldn't remember their pasts at all. As much as she didn't want to insult Ivy's magic, she doubted she would have been up to the task of creating something this intense if she'd only been magically trained for a couple of years.

"What happened?" Emma asked, wanting to get her mind off the curse and back onto the story Roni was telling.

"I had to pretend I'd never met her," Roni continued. "I'd never seen Kelly so happy even though I had no idea she was even into women, but I didn't want to get in her way, but she saw through me, she always can." She sighed. "After Alyssa left, Kelly came into my room and demanded to know why I had been acting so odd during dinner and I confessed that I knew Alyssa. I said I thought we had been dating and confessed that we'd slept together. Kelly had laughed and thought I was lying until the next day when she called Alyssa out on it and she admitted that it was true and that she wanted to be with me. It brought up so much of our pasts with Mother choosing me over her. Their relationship was over and Kelly was so upset that she got ridiculously drunk and a couple of months later, she found out she was pregnant with Margot with a man she couldn't remember. That's when we started to put the past behind us and when Mother bucked up her ideas. We helped her with the pregnancy and raising Margot as best we could."

They were silent for a few moments, each sipping their drinks before Emma asked, "What happened to Alyssa?"

Roni laughed humourlessly. "I ended things and told her to never come back because she wasn't worth running my relationship with my sister. She had said she didn't realise we were sisters because we don't look like each other, but that didn't matter. The damage was done and needed to be fixed. The only way I could do that was to have her out of my life. I needed to concentrate on Kel, so I did." Roni leant forward and rested her head in her hands. "I just miss my sister," she sighed.

Emma put her drink on the table and wrapped her arm over the other woman's shoulder, trying to comfort her as best she could.

"Life is shit and family can be too, but it'll work out eventually," Emma replied as she rubbed the other woman's back. "She's just hurt. People do crazy stuff and say awful things they come to regret when they're hurt."

Roni pulled back to look at the blonde before glancing at their glasses and noted they were empty. Emma went to refuse the second drink, but it was poured before she could. Not wanting to be rude, Emma accepted the glass and took a few sips once more, her head now swimming more than before but she was starting to feel more awake than she had been.

Wanting to distract the other woman, she decided to share her own story.

"I left my ex because he was abusive," she began. She looked up and saw Roni's confusion. "I was married to a man by the time the Lennie was born," she explained. "It's a very long and confusing story. He thought I was still in love with my ex," she twisted the tale so that Regina would be her ex in this, the only lie she wanted to tell, "which was true, I guess, but I didn't realise it at the time." Now she happily sipped her drink, wanting the liquid courage to keep talking. "It happened so slowly I didn't notice. He started asking me how my day had gone, which I thought was normal, sweet even, but every time he asked, he wanted to know more information. Every single detail. Who I'd seen, what I'd said and where I'd been, who else had been around me at the time. Then he started getting physical, clutching my leg tightly when we went out for dinner with friends or even when we saw my parents was his favourite. To everyone else, he was just holding my thigh, a romantic gesture, but they didn't see how tightly he was grabbing me, bruising my skin." She shivered as she remembered taking a shower the next day and saw the five purple intents on her pale thigh. "I was six months pregnant when he first hit me. He seemed so upset after it happened and he promised he'd never do it again. He didn't until after Lennie was born."

Emma then went silent as the scene flashed before her eyes. They had just arrived home from the hospital and she was exhausted. All she wanted to do was feed her daughter and sleep. It had been an emotional day with having to choose between Cora and Snow, but also the fact that she had brought her daughter into the world and couldn't share it with her other mother or with her son because neither of them was there.

However, as soon as the door had shut behind them, Hook flipped. Immediately he accused Emma of cheating on him because Elena didn't look like him at all. When Emma finally told him the truth that she wasn't his, she thought he would turn on her, but he went to lash out at the baby and she threw herself in front of the crib where she'd placed Elena for barely two minutes as she took off her jacket. However, before she knew it, Cora arrived and saved them and she couldn't have been more grateful.

"What happened?" Roni asked quietly. She had no idea that Emma was going to start revealing her dark past that she clearly wanted to forget. Yet she could see that she needed to get all this out and off her chest and she was rather honoured that she was the person she'd chosen to tell.

Emma swallowed. "He went for her," she whispered, the sound was barely audible. "He realised that she wasn't his. I thought he would go after me for "cheating", but he went straight for her. I don't even know what he was going to do but I cut him off and blocked his view to her. That didn't stop him, he smacked me across my jaw and cut my lip open but still I didn't move. There was no way I was going to let him get to her. His eyes were like fire and he brought his arm back, ready to lash out again but that was when Cora turned up and got us out." She hoped that Roni wouldn't ask how the petite woman had managed to break it up.

"I'm so sorry," Roni murmured as she reached out and squeezed Emma's knee gently. "I'm not surprised you don't want anything happening between us if that's your past. You know I'd never do anything like that and I already adore Lennie."

The blonde smiled softly before resting her hand on top of Roni's, sliding her thumb gently over her smooth skin.

"I know you wouldn't," Emma said softly. "That's not why I'm against this. I meant what I said earlier, I like you too, so much. I've never felt so at ease with someone. I've never told anyone what happened between Killian and I except Cora, but I just felt like I needed to tell you."

"I'm glad you feel so safe with me," Roni replied quietly. "I feel the exact same with you."

Emma looked up and couldn't not see Roni's striking beauty and vulnerability in that moment and with all the emotions that were running high, the tiredness clouding her brain and the alcohol swirling around her body, she was losing the control she'd had previously.

Roni was everything she wanted and needed at that moment and she couldn't control herself anymore and quite frankly, she didn't want to. She was reminded of her first drunken evening with Regina, the night Lennie was conceived. The angel on her shoulder was trying to stop her, telling her that she had other priorities to focus on than the woman in front of her, telling her that this was not the best route to take. Yet the devil was egging her on, telling her that she needed to do this. Everything would make more sense if she just acted on her feelings.

There was another quiet voice persuading her to kiss her, to prove a theory she had long thought but ignored.

Slowly, she lifted her hand from Roni's knee and loosely tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, causing the brunette to shiver, before she continued her hand's movement and threaded her fingers in her hair. She could feel Roni tense before she leant into the touch.

When the brunette didn't move away, Emma felt her confidence grow. Slowly, she leant further forward until she could feel Roni's breath on her lips and before she could overthink what was happening and pull back, she felt Roni's soft lips press against hers, her eyes slipped shut and she felt like she was at home.

A warm fuzzy feeling flushed around her body and she couldn't get enough of her. She laced her fingers further into Roni's short hair, slightly tilting her head to deepen the kiss. Roni's hand on her leg slipped higher up to her mid-thigh, squeezing softly before her free hand slipped into Emma's hair, mirroring the blonde's gesture.

The moment their tongues met, Emma's breath was taken. She had to pull back to regain it. However, when her eyes opened and she saw the lust in Roni's eyes, she was forcefully brought back to reality and she realised what had happened.

Pulling back, she saw Roni's eyes cloud over in confusion. "Emma?"

The way the woman said her name, Emma thought that she could finally remember. It was the same tone she had used all those years ago during the one night they had spent together. There was a tenderness in her voice that made Emma melt.

"Are you alright?"

As soon as Roni asked that, Emma realised she didn't remember. If this was Regina, she wouldn't have asked that. She'd have started either questioning why Emma was there or would have kissed her again, well she hoped the latter.

However, as she realised that Roni didn't remember, another feeling was added to her confusion and lust: disappointment. Her theory was poured down the drain at the fact that her kiss hadn't woken her up because it clearly meant that they weren't True Loves either. True Love's Kiss broke every curse, she knew that, had seen it happened, had been the reason it had happened, yet it hadn't worked now.

Tears threatened to fall as her eyes started to water at the revelation and her heart broke.

"I have to go," Emma blurted. She jumped up off the sofa and threw her jacket on. "I'm sorry."

Without turning back, because she knew she would never leave if she did, she rushed out of the apartment and out the back door, running all the way back home.

As soon as she reached her bed, she flung herself down and burst into tears, sobbing her heart out into her pillow. She hadn't even thought about the fact that she and Regina could be True Loves until Wonderland. When she had started her magic lessons with Cora, she had started reading magic books at her mother's request. In one that she found, she read that two women could have a child together if they were True Loves, it was the only way it would work. She hadn't told anyone that, choosing to keep it to herself, but at that moment, she realised the book must have been wrong. If she and Regina were True Loves, she would have woken up.

Now the tears had begun, she couldn't stop them. She cried for the woman she had been who had allowed Hook to treat her as badly as he had and not be able to fight him. She sobbed for the fact that she hadn't left with Regina when she went to save Henry alone. Sure, she would have been swept up in the curse with them, but at least they would have been together and Regina would have met her daughter and Henry would have got to know his sister. She wept for the fact that her real mother didn't love her enough to let her be happy in her life and the fact that she could never be the princess they wanted her to be.

Finally, she cried over the fact that she had just ruined her friendship with Roni. Despite the fact she was cursed, she loved their easy-going friendship and banter that they had going and she'd ruined it because she let the alcohol take over her system instead of logic. She couldn't blame Roni if she chose to sack her and never talk to her again. However, just at the thought of not seeing her made her heart ache further.

She wasn't sure how long she cried into the night, but she fell asleep at some point, completely exhausted, still wearing her jeans and jacket.

oOoOo

"Mom?"

Emma's eyes were stuck together with dried tears as she tried to wake up. She could hear worry and confusion in her daughter's voice and had never wanted to be the reason why.

"Mommy?"

Reaching up, Emma rubbed her eyes to help clear them before they opened slowly. Her green eyes were met with chocolate brown as she realised Lennie was lying beside her, already dressed.

"What time is it?" Emma asked. Her head was pounding from tiredness, crying all night and the amount of whisky she'd drank in a short amount of time.

"Just after ten," Lennie replied. "Mom, why were you sleeping while still dressed?"

"I fell asleep before I could change," Emma lied. "I was too tired after the spell."

She hated lying to her daughter, but there was no way she could explain what had happened to her. However, before could continue, Cora stepped into the room and opened her curtains wide, allowing the sun to blare through the glass, burning Emma's hungover eyes.

"Rise and shine," she instructed, her tone left no room for discussion and Emma was already completely aware that Cora either knew or had guessed what had happened the night before. "Lennie, go start some work, your science book is on the table."

"But it's Saturday!" She began to complain but when Cora raised her eyebrow, she sighed exasperatedly. "Fine," she huffed before she headed out of the room.

As soon as she left, Cora perched on the side of Emma's bed and handed her a steaming cup of coffee which Emma lapped up like a thirsty dog.

"What happened?" Cora asked, her voice still stern.

"I fucked up," Emma replied, not beating around the bush. She put the now half empty cup on her bedside table as she slipped up the bed. She took off her jacket and flung it onto the floor before she told her mother what had happened from the night before.

She told her everything Roni had said about her past, even Cora shivered at hearing how similar this Barbara had been to her treatment of Regina when she was younger. When Emma finally revealed that she kissed her, Cora's glare softened when she saw how upset Emma was.

"I started thinking that if I kissed her, she'd wake up," Emma whispered and swallowed. "I read in one of your books that two women could have a child together only if they were True Loves, that was the only explanation I found for how Lennie was conceived. I started to believe it which is why I wasn't letting myself kiss Roni but last night, it was a mixture of needing to feel something after feeling so empty after what had happened with Hook and just wanting to prove my theory right. I thought the moment our lips touched, she'd remember me and we'd have this long, emotional conversation about what had happened in the past and she'd be overjoyed that Lennie was actually her daughter but no. She doesn't remember a thing so clearly we're not True Loves because my kiss didn't work."

Again, Emma's eyes started to water, clearly not cried herself out the night before. She pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, trying to make herself as small as possible.

"You love her," Cora murmured. She had known how Emma felt about Regina for years but had never said it aloud, only ever hinting towards it.

Tears streamed down Emma's face as she nodded. "I do," she confirmed. "I also love Roni because she is Regina and god, that kiss was amazing, but it just didn't work and now I've fucked everything up! Roni will never let me work there again so my position is screwed and once she does remember, Regina will think that I don't want her when I do. My god, I want her." She rested her head in her hands. "What am I going to do, Mom?"

Cora rested her hand on Emma's back, stroking it softly. "First things first, you're going to have a shower to wake up and refresh yourself," she instructed. "Then you're going to have some toast to soak up some of the alcohol I can smell on your breath." Cora pulled a face as she had never been a fan of whisky. "Then you're going to take one of the phials of potion with you at all times in case you bump into Zelena and go to the pub to talk to Roni. The sooner you have the conversation and apologise for running away, the easier it will be."

Emma looked up from her previous hiding space. "I thought you were against anything happening with Roni because of the curse?"

Cora sighed. "I realised recently that love isn't weakness, it's strength."