Back in the present
Emma got a text from Regina telling her that dinner would be ready promptly at 6:30 p.m. Her first thought was how odd it was to get a text from Regina informing her of what time to be there for dinner.
Then again after last night she was probably lucky the brunette hadn't barred her entirely from her house.
She was still in disbelief over what happened.
The day before Emma had purposely come back to the mansion late. She needed some time to collect her own thoughts, even though she had wanted to be back sooner if nothing else to check on Regina. When she had gotten in, she didn't speak much with Regina beyond asking her how she was feeling.
Regina said she was fine and Emma didn't really feel like pressing her on what had happened in Henry's room. Regina told her that she had watched the videos and was now caught up to where Emma had left off.
"You watched them?"
"Yes. I realized it was silly of me to worry about someone's reaction to something when I don't actually know that person."
"I guess so," Emma replied. "Anyway there wasn't any reaction so you know."
"Yes. Why do you think there was a gap in the videos?"
"I don't know. I was guessing they weren't important."
"Let's hope they weren't anything more than videos of that Emma and that Regina arguing over whether Emma should be told of the circumstances of my future self's death."
"Sounds plausible. So do you want to watch some more?"
"Not tonight," Regina said. "I was thinking tonight we could sit down and start to compile what we know and don't know. Make some sort of order out of this chaos. Perhaps if we do then watching the videos will give us a better picture of what happened to make the future so bad."
You died is what Emma wanted to say, but she didn't. "That sounds like a good plan."
Instead of going to her office, Emma was surprised when Regina merely retrieved a pad of paper and sat on the couch.
"Where should we even start?" Emma asked.
"I think we should just start discussing different points and go from there. For instance, we know that your alternate future self is pregnant but that baby is not a baby exactly, yet neither she nor my future alternate self know it."
"And she believes the baby is Killian's, but again we know that it isn't the case because he's um yeah, well, he's not the father."
"Yes, but I am still wondering how exactly this magic works. It's obviously powerful enough to actually create a life – one of living magic and it needed my soul to do it, so why is my soul still a conscious part of you. My original thought was that since the magic could create a vessel powerful enough to contain the magic of a soul that my soul would already be inside or a part of that vessel. I don't understand how it's merely hanging out inside of you while this vessel inside of you grows."
"That thought process is light years ahead of my magical knowledge. I mean why couldn't your soul just be there? Why does it have to be inside the vessel?"
"If the magic of my soul brought it into being, why wouldn't it be?"
"I don't know, chalk that up under things we don't know."
"This would be so much easier if I had actually paid more attention when the genie translated the spell I gave to Gold."
"Just my opinion, but I think you did the right thing in not doing any of the spells in that book and then hiding it away like that. You said yourself that the book gave you a bad feeling. Where is it anyway?"
"Hidden once more."
She didn't elaborate and Emma wondered if that was because Regina didn't trust her or because she wasn't going to take any chances.
Regina rubbed her forehead.
"Is something wrong?"
"No," Regina said. "This is all very complicated is all and trying to make sense of it is not going to be easy."
"Maybe we are going about it the wrong way."
"How so?"
"Just randomly talking about it. We need more structure to it. It's like an investigation. In law enforcement you do sometimes throw out theories to see what fits, but you only do that after you examine the evidence. That's what we need to do here."
"What evidence would that be?"
"We have plenty already," Emma said standing. "Come on."
Regina followed Emma back to her home office, curious as to where the other woman was going with all of this.
Emma was looking around the room.
"Can I help you find something?"
"We need like something to write on, something big that stretches out. We are dealing with three different timelines here and it might help to map it out."
Not a bad idea, Regina thought. Sometimes the sheriff was smarter than she gave her credit for. She waved her hand and a large, free-standing dry erase board appeared.
"Wow," Emma said.
"Is that suitable?"
"Yeah it's great. Question though, when you do that thing with the magic are you actually like making this board out of magic?"
"It's from the high school, I am just borrowing it."
"Oh."
Regina sighed. "Magic can do amazing things, but there are limitations. I could have used my magic to turn that sofa into a dry erase board, but then we wouldn't have anywhere to sit. The important thing with magic is knowing short cuts – like for instance transporting that here instead of transforming something else into it. That is why this idea of living magic disturbs me. It's an unknown use of magic, at least to me, and I have to wonder what limitations it has. Also why would Gold do this, even in this time line right now, why do this at all?"
"Write those down as questions we have to answer."
Emma turned to the board and picking up a marker she drew three parallel lines – each in a different color.
"The bottom line is us. The middle is the alternate future and the top one is the future that the future me came from. Is it weird that that sentence make sense?"
"In our lives, no, it's unfortunately the norm."
Emma made a dot at the beginning of the bottom line. "This is our starting point, the earliest event that we know happened. It is you getting that spell book. Since we know it's related to all of this it seemed like a good starting point."
Regina didn't disagree and Emma wrote spell underneath the dot.
"You should also put a dot nearby it to mark your future self coming back to the past to warn me to keep the book hidden."
Emma paused before doing it wondering if she should tell Regina now that she thought it was her that went back in time, not her future self. She decided not to interrupt the flow of their working on this and instead made the dot and the notation.
"Now we need to fast forward to the present time when future Emma came back here," Emma said. "I don't really know how much space to leave until we get to this time. How old are you anyway?"
"Irrelevant," Regina growled.
"Yeah, I'll just leave a little extended space," Emma said turning back to the board and making a notation of future Emma coming back in time.
"Actually, you should probably mark one before that to indicate you going to the past."
"What?" Emma said turning toward her. For a moment her heart was in her throat thinking Regina had finally figured it out, but they already had a dot for her going to the past.
"You bringing Marian forward is what created this alternate time line," Regina clarified.
Emma felt relief wash over her, but also a sense of dread at the same time. "You know I am sorry about that right? I didn't mean to hurt you through my actions. It wasn't my intention."
"I know," Regina said quietly.
"It's just. She was going to be killed and I couldn't sit there and let that happen and then Killian was talking about how if we just left her there we could wreck the time line again and …"
"Miss Swan," Regina interrupted. "I don't need a rundown of why you did it."
"I know you don't and I know you probably don't even want to think about it or anything but when all this happened you locked yourself away in here and I didn't come apologize immediately like I should have. I should have tried to mend the fences and I didn't. Then all this happened and even my future self apologized to you when it wasn't even her fault. It's not that I didn't want to apologize, it's just …"
"Just what?" Regina asked when Emma trailed off and was silent for a moment as if to collect her thoughts.
"I didn't want things between us to be like what things were like between you and my mom. Your first reaction to this was to compare what my mom did with telling your mom about Daniel to what I did with bringing Marian back. I didn't know what to do really because I can't apologize for saving a woman's life. I can apologize for it's affect on you though. I really am sorry."
"I know you are," Regina said. "I wish I could say you are forgiven, but as you know I tend to hold grudges." Regina gave her a small smile though.
"Do you think you can hold the grudge less time than it took you and my mom to hash things out?"
"I will think about. For now let's get back to work."
Emma put the dot on for when she went into the past to save Marian. She then moved up to the second line and put a dot on it to indicate the start of that alternate timeline as a result of her actions. After discussing with Regina she put dots on that timeline as well to indicate the custody battle, Regina's murder, Emma's pregnancy and the realization that Regina's soul was inside of Emma.
She then moved up to the top line and again paused but she wrote down future Emma's marriage to Regina and the birth of their daughter Alex. Then at Regina's suggestion she moved back to the middle line where she put a dot to indicate that future Emma ending up in the alternate timeline.
"One thing I have not understood from the beginning of all of this is how the future Emma ended up in the alternate timeline with her memories intact of the her original timeline," Emma said. "And what happened to that Emma from the alternate timeline?"
"The way your future self talked it was like she merely took over that Emma's spot in the timeline. It wasn't like here where there were two of you."
"But why wasn't there two of them there?"
"Well, I guess since the time line changed entirely that alternate timeline became the new reality and it pulled that Emma into it. When she came back here she traveled through time by her own volition."
"I get that but I don't understand why it was everyone else's reality except hers. She knew that wasn't her timeline. She knew what changed. How did she of all people retain memories of the other timeline?"
"I don't know the answer," Regina said. "It could simply be because of who you are. You are the product of true love, which not only makes you the Savior, but it also infused you with great magic. You seem to constantly underestimate or ignore that part of you. It makes you unique."
"It makes me different."
"Is that such a bad thing?"
"In my life, it's not been that great of thing."
Regina regarded the other woman, wondering what she meant by that. She admittedly didn't know that much about Emma beyond the what Sydney had dug up on her and those were mostly facts. She knew as a kid Emma bounced around a lot, and she wondered if that comment had something to do with that.
The blonde had a surprising amount of depth, Regina realized.
"It looks as if we have all the main points at least mapped out," Regina said. "I wonder …"
"What?"
"In the future Emma and I were married for four years. We had Alex two years in. Now if you consider that we dated at least a year before marriage, we are talking five years passed between now and when that future time line ceased and when she gets pulled into the other timeline. Does that mean five years passed there as well?"
Emma shrugged. She hadn't really thought too much about the whole time thing because it gave her headache when she started to think about it.
She found it interesting that Regina referred to herself in the first person when discussing the marriage to that future Emma.
"I suppose," Emma said finally. "We know that at some point alternate me ends up in Boston living alone. Henry is back here in Storybrooke and so is everyone else that we know of. Except Belle."
Emma looked back at the board. "Ok, so we know there is this other Alex, the vessel in this alternate timeline, and presumably from watching the videos we will get a better idea of when that is. But we also know that Belle dies in that other timeline at some point that we haven't arrived at yet as well," she said.
"Belle's death would devastate Gold," Regina said. "He would literally do anything to prevent that from happening or take revenge if someone is responsible."
"She died in a fire, according to my future self," Emma said. "I don't know that anyone is responsible for that."
"We also know that Emma becomes the Dark One, but we don't know the circumstances of that only that it had to have happened in between the time of her ending up in that alternate time line and coming back here," Regina said.
Regina's phone suddenly went off startling both of them. She looked at it. "I need to take this," she said excusing herself.
Emma couldn't help but wonder who would be calling Regina this late. When she was gone more than five minutes, Emma went in search of her. She walked into the kitchen where Regina was leaning against the island with her back to Emma.
"No," she heard Regina say. "Really, you don't need to stop by and check on me. Now if you want to stop by that is another matter."
Emma detected a lightness to Regina's tone and for some reason it set her teeth on edge. She heard Regina say goodbye a few seconds later and when she turned Emma was standing there.
"Who were you talking with?" Emma asked.
"Just a friend," Regina said dismissively. "We should get back to work."
Regina walked by her and headed back to her office. Emma followed her but the moment they were both in the room, she didn't let the matter drop.
"Was that Robin on the phone?"
Regina didn't answer.
"It was Robin, wasn't it? Why is he calling you this late at night?"
"I don't see where that is any of your concern."
"He's a married man."
"I am well aware of this."
"Then why are you talking to him still? Is he coming over to see you?"
"I think we are getting off topic."
"You can't possibly think this is a good idea. Do you realize for him to come here he would have to sneak away from his wife and child? Is that why he is calling so late because he had to sneak away to make the call? Did he sneak away before to see you in the hospital?"
"Careful Miss Swan, you are dangerously close to crossing a line here."
"You can't start back up with him, you do realize this right?" Emma said as she stepped closer to her.
"No I don't. What I know is that Robin was making me happy once again and then you had to ruin that happiness. He and I are both adults. If you hadn't have messed things up he and I would be together right now."
"No you wouldn't have been."
"Oh really, and why is that?"
"Because you would be with me," Emma shot back and for reasons she couldn't explain she grabbed a hold of Regina and pulled her against her, kissing her.