In the intervening silence between Emma and Regina, Emma was struck with a sense of loss that cut far, far past the physical frustration of not having their illicit cabin nights. She missed Regina's often cutting (but always searingly insightful) retorts. She missed her dry, crackling asides at a commercial or an acquaintance or just a passerby that shocked Emma into laughter and put a smile on her face days later when she remembered them again. Her wicked sense of humor, no one else in Storybrooke had anything close to hers.
She missed the way Regina would talk about Henry. She missed Regina's more recent habit of telling her long, complicated anecdotes about Henry's earliest years- everyday milestones that until now no one had cared about as much as Regina, but which Emma found endlessly fascinating. Henry's first trip to the zoo, the disastrous first forays into toilet training, the time a cat fell asleep on his lap as a toddler and he held perfectly still rather than wake the animal.
More than anything else, she missed someone who knew her. Ruby sort of did, but it wasn't the same. It was as though Regina could look straight through to her brain sometimes (although she seemed entirely obtuse when it came to reading her heart.)
Whenever she saw a dark-haired woman Emma's heart would skip a beat. The low profile of a Benz seemed to move like a phantom in and out of her rearview. She found herself waking up in the middle of the night thinking she'd heard her phone chime. But Regina stayed away.


"A heart in a box. Its unthinkable." Ruby said, her face white and framed starkly by her hot pink snuggie as she lay on the couch, staring blankly at the TV. "If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it was possible."

She had been crying for the last three hours.

"I'm so sorry, Ruby.I was trying to return the favor and get you a job away from Granny's- no offense, Granny."
Granny, in an armchair flipping through channels, grunted in response.

"Well, you may have cracked the case. There's fingerprints on the lid, apparently." Emma held up her phone. "They're analyzing them now."

Ruby shuddered.

When Emma left she couldn't suppress her feeling of buoyancy. The case was about to close, at least where Mary Margaret was concerned. The fingerprints would exempt her, she'd be released from jail, and then….she slipped into the Game of Thorns flower shop. Sometimes it wasn't about who was right. Sometimes it was just about who was willing to say sorry first.

Emma showed up on Regina's doorstep right around the time Henry was at one of his sessions with Archie. Her hands almost shook as she held the giant spray of pink flowers. She held them in front of her face as Regina slowly approached her own front door, one eyebrow up, and then pulled them aside.

"Boo." Emma said cheerfully, with all the levity she could muster.

"Sheriff Swan." Regina looked vaguely annoyed, but was analyzing the flowers with interest. "Are those…"

"Apple blossoms." Emma said, handing them to her. Regina looked a little amused and smelled one of the pinky-white blossoms.

"They're beautiful. Spring in the middle of winter." She said simply, then glared at Emma. "What do you want?"

"I wanted to say that I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Regina, if I made you feel like I chose my roommate over you the other night. It was a huge gesture for you to ask me to move away with you and Henry. I hope I made it clear how happy that made me before I changed the subject to my roommate. Because while I may be concerned about Mary Margaret's situation and I do want to see it resolved, the person I can't live without is you."

Emma shifted her weight from one foot to the other as Regina stood before her in silence.

Regina looked at the flowers again, touching them lovingly with her gloved hand. "I need to put these in water. Will you come in?"

Emma followed her vaguely humming with excitement.

The blossoms seemed to glow in Regina's stark, rather sterile house. She put them in a large sleek vase and carried them into the living room, Emma trailing behind her.

"So you do want to move away with me." Regina asked, not meeting her eyes.

"As soon as we can, since I think Mary Margaret's case will be resolved soon."

"Oh?" Regina sat on the couch. "What makes you think that?"

"We found a heart with fingerprints,so we have a lead on who the killer actually is."

Regina looked into the middle distance. Emma sat beside her and sighed.

"Look I don't want to talk about that right now, I want to talk about our new place. I want to talk about how to tell Henry, I want to talk about –"

"Did you know-" Regina interrupted her. "That with fruit trees, you can graft a branch of one sort of species onto the tree of another, and the two will combine to bear a new kind of fruit?"

"Uh, no, I didn't…"

Regina leaned forward and touched the apple blossoms. "I recently had a great deal of my apple tree exposed by a certain rather insane visitor so now might be my chance to see if I can…improve my long-nourished apple tree. If maybe I can make it grow sweeter. I don't think I've seen blossoms like this before. I'd hate to see them fall without knowing what they could turn into."

Emma put her hand on Regina's knee, feeling as always the lightning-like charge when they made contact. "Regina, you have to know, have to be able to feel that I-"

"Hush." Regina said, turning on her fiercely. "I haven't accepted your apology yet, and I need a little more convincing." There was an edge to her voice that was making Emma's knees week.

"Oh? And how can I convince you?"

Regina tapped her leg.


She didn't have her heels. She didn't have any music. Yet somehow undressing in Regina's house as the woman watched in silence was even more atmospherically charged, taking her jacket off, pulling up her white t-shirt, flipping her badge onto the ground. Regina pulled her jean zipper down with her teeth and then started kissing a trail up her stomach as her hands worked to unhook her bra and then her mouth seared the delicate skin between her-

Her phone went off. They ignored it. It went off again. They ignored it.

"DAMN." Emma groaned, moving off Regina. "Sheriff Swan. Fingerprint analysis! Hey, you're done already! So were they on file?"

Emma walked to the edge of the room, padding on bare feet over the gray marble floor.

"They're…a match? A match for Mary Margaret's fingerprints? No. Check them again. You're wrong. …I see. Boston experts agree….well…I just…" Emma felt her face flood with heat. "Alright. I'll be back at the station in twenty minutes." She hung her phone and turned to Regina, her face a mask of horror. Regina looked like she was bracing herself against terrible news.

"Looks like you were right." Emma's face crumpled and she fell down onto the couch and sobbed. She felt embarrassment in the moment, crying like this in front of Regina. God, of all the things- of all the places to be blindsided like this. "She's a- she- God, and I trusted her! I believed in her so much! Me with my stupid SUPER POWER." Emma couldn't hold in the sobs. They were rattling her too deeply. She felt Regina's arms cradle her, silent and supportive.

"Shhh, Emma, shh….its okay."

"I was so, so wrong. Its like…its like I'm just too freaking broken to live in the world sometimes. Its like…I'm just so sick of being wrong."

"It was about Mary Margaret?"

"Her fingerprints were on the box with kathryn's heart in it. How else? How else would that…and I trusted her! And…God its such an awful world sometimes. Its such a lonely freaking can you trust anyone? You know nothing. You never know someone."

"No." Regina said, her voice strong. "No Emma, you know people. You were wrong one time, that's not the end of the world-"

"Don't you get it?! I lived with her. I lived with her night and day and I was so sure I knew her and she was- she was someone else the whole time. And I'm so freaking broken I couldn't tell." Emma found herself clinging to Regina as she cried, a foreign but weirdly luxurious position, being held against Regina's chest.

"Shhh, no. You're not broken, Emma. You're not wrong. Sometimes things look…very dark but…you weren't wrong to care about your friend, whoever she was."

Emma covered her face with her hands, knowing her face was a red, snotty mess.

"I just…I just want to stop my heart from feeling anything ever, you know? If I could just flip a freaking switch."

Regina looked very worried. "If you were wrong about Mary Margaret, would that make you happy? Would that make you believe in yourself again?"

"Me believing in someone is basically like, proof they're a supervillain. Every time I try to believe in someone it goes so, so, so fucking wrong."

"Not anymore." Regina whispered into her hair. "Will you just trust me, Emma? You're so strong, and you have so much love inside you." She kissed the top of Emma's head, her voice stronger. " Its going to get fixed, okay? I promise."

Emma sat up and laughed, partly at her own messy face. "What's so weird is when you say it like that I believe it."

"Then believe this: its going to be okay. You aren't wrong about Mary Margaret. There will be another explanation. You are always right when you love someone. There's never wrong where there's love, okay?"

"Okay." Emma said. "Okay."