A/N- Hey all, the first week of college has been brutal, but it's amazing all at the same time. This whole story is becoming closer and closer to home the more I write it, especially now.

Emma and Regina begin to date again, it's expected, and achingly welcome. It's the feeling of coming home at the end of a long trip abroad. When Emma stands in Regina's doorway to pick her up for their second first date, she feels her fingers itching.

She hardly hesitates before pitching forward to greet Regina in a tight hug. The brunette feels inevitable, like the pull of gravity, like falling but knowing that you're going to land eventually.

They date slowly, like the rise and fall of a tide. Emma is still so very cautious, she isn't yet sure that the ocean isn't going to disappear if she feels it stop beating against her toes. She doesn't yet know how to trust in the tide to return to her unless she keeps chasing it along the shore.

As much as it is familiar, it's so different. In the way Regina is so very careful, she holds her arms around her middle like she's trying to keep herself together. In the way that she gives her pieces away to Emma slowly, each one monumental, and Emma cherishes them as the gifts that they are.

Their first sleepover is in their second month of dating again. It's a Friday night when Emma and Regina are cuddling on the blonde's bed, watching some crappy horror movie that they'd found. On the screen, the killer pops out, snapping the neck of an unfortunate victim, and Regina shudders back in Emma's hold.

"Shit." She curses lowly.

Emma smiles and rubs a hand up and down the brunette's arm, "Alright?"

"Yeah."

"Good." They continue watching the movie, and Emma's hand continues tracing patterns on her girlfriend's arm. She moves on, pushing Regina's hair off her neck to begin pressing kisses to the tan skin. Regina hums in appreciation, tilting her head to give Emma more access.

The blonde continues her ministrations and sneaks a hand beneath Regina's top, caressing the soft skin of her flat stomach. That prompts Regina to slip out of her hold and sit up properly.

"I'm sorry." Emma says automatically.

"Don't be, it's just-" She pauses, her speech doing the haltingly painful thing Emma's learned to associate with Regina's world spinning too quickly, "I really want to, to do this with you. I really do. But we have to talk first."

"Alright." Emma reaches over and pauses the movie on her computer, "Let's talk."

Regina swallows, nods, and begins, "I wasn't good last year. Not that I'm good now, but I'm getting there." Emma smiles reassuringly, "I was meeting with Doctor Berry, and that was helping, but then we started trying to find the right meds."

The blonde tries to hide her slight grimace, she knows from Kathryn how difficult the whole process was for Regina, and how much she struggled in those months.

"I was on Prozac for a while, but it made me gain weight." Regina says in this small voice like she's just a kid confessing to her parent, "So I stopped taking it."

"Regina."

"I need to finish." Regina says, knotting her fingers together in her lap, "I thought I could control it with diet and exercise, and if I just tried harder."

Her fingers go from knotting to pinching. She tortures the skin of her right hand just above the wrist, near her thumb as she holds it tight between the nails of her left hand.

"I couldn't do it." She whispers, and from those four words, Emma can tell she's still irrationally angry with herself for not being 'strong' enough.

"Everything got worse, the anxiety, the depression," she pauses a moment, takes a deep breath, to steel herself for the next words, "the eating disorder."

Emma winces in sympathy when she sees the red bloom out from around Regina's nail where she's dug it into her skin. She reaches out, pulls the brunette's hands apart, and holds them in her own.

"It was this horrible cycle, I would get anxious, exercise to get rid of the anxiety, then I would feel so empty, I would feel depressed, and then anxious about the depression." She barked a short laugh, "It's this carousel I couldn't seem to get off of."

Emma continues stroking the brunette's hands, quietly giving her the strength to keep going, "But we've tried some new things, and I think that we've found a good thing, finally." Regina finishes with a smile.

"I just wanted that on the table before anything happens."

"I understand." Emma smiles, "You are so incredibly strong."

Regina shakes her head, and Emma merely pulls her into a comforting hug. Emma thinks of stained glass windows, how the images are so beautiful when the sun strikes them that people forget the window is made up of shards, broken bits.

…

In the following months, Emma sees a Regina she never knew existed.

This new Regina is younger. Her eyes aren't the jaded brown of someone who's seen too much. She smiles gently, like she might break if she stretches too far. On harsh winter evenings, she wears leggings with sweaters that are far too big for her. She curls up in armchairs to read long books that Emma couldn't even pretend to comprehend, and she wears a large pair of glasses with black frames.

Emma loves watching the rabbit twitch of her nose when she pushes them back up her face.

This Regina never fails to shock Emma with her surreptitiously dropped comments. Sound bites that flow so freely from the brunette's mouth and leave Emma stunned and reeling, because this Regina looks across the quad when they are walking around campus, her eyes linger on the tall parking structure, and she says, "There was a night I thought I would jump off that."

...

This new Regina smiles wickedly the night that they had gone out with some friends to a new club that had opened just off the Dartmouth campus. She takes Emma's hand in hers after they'd been dancing all night, neither of them drinking heavily, and leans in to whisper in the blonde's ear.

"Let's get out of here."

Emma doesn't argue as she trails Regina across the crowded dance floor and they catch a shuttle back to campus.

The move from shuttle bus to residence hall to dorm room to Regina's bed is a blur of frenzied movement and laughter from the two women, and Emma scarcely remembers the journey.

She'll never forget the way that this new Regina kisses her reverently when she peels off each layer of clothing between them. This new Regina kneels between her legs naked save for a black thong, with her hair an unruly mane, looking like pure sex, and asks, "Do you want this?"

Emma nods once, and Regina's smile is so far from the wicked grin she sported a mere hour earlier. She rubs her thumb over the skin on the inside of Emma's thigh before she asks quite clearly for verbal consent.

This new Regina never stops teaching Emma, and now is no exception.

A/N- As always, thank you for your kind reviews and continued reading of my ramblings :) I promise the next chapter will be lighter- goodness knows we could all use it!

S/O to Priscila20- you be your Aunt Fanny I was referencing glee with Doctor Berry and Quinn ;)