Summary: Once Upon a Time, a series of misadventures in love and patience leads to Emma and Regina's happy mistake. The results, and the reactions, are very mixed. Revised History SwanQueen.
The Story Of Emmalina
Chapter One: Emmina Doesn't Sound as Good
"I… I don't understand."
The beautiful woman that showed up at her door, her white leather gleaming on a lovely Spring day in Storybrooke, smiled innocently, and Snow White had the distinct impression that she lost a competition that she didn't know she was a part of. "Sorry, Mo- I, uh, Mary-Margaret. It's complicated. Took me a while to figure it out myself. And I caused it to happen in the first place." She linked her hands behind her back. "Can I come in?"
With wary eyes, Snow let in the woman who had introduced herself as Emmalina. Reaching behind the door, she grabbed her trusty bow hanging on the coat rack, and took a few arrows out of the umbrella stand.
Emmalina raised her hands, her back still turned to the brunette. Snow hesitated before raising the bow, eying the dirty blond highlights in familiar sheen of black hair.
It was longer, sure, but she remembered when Regina had long hair. It was beautiful.
Now, even more so.
Snow lifted her bow, and with a start, realized it wasn't her bow at all, but rather, a…
"A cupcake?"
The woman turned around, clapping her hands together. "Ah! You remembered!" Her innocent smile was still there, but there was a tinge of amusement in her startlingly familiar green eyes. "At least, I hope you will. I want you to celebrate my new birthday with me. It's not everyday you get reborn, right?"
"I… still don't understand."
"That's fair, I guess. I'm getting ahead of myself. Part of me is so used to long-term plans, but I'm also really spur of the moment, y'know?" She took a deep breath and extended her hand. "Let's start this again. Hi. I'm your daughter. And your mother."
Emmalina sat patiently as Snow White muttered to herself, pacing back and forth in the sitting room, processing her thoughts. Her mind was a new, foreign, and oddly familiar thing.
"Worst case scenario," she said, her voice reaching a higher frequency usually reserved for her birds, "I thought you two might have been dating! But this?!"
"Well, we were dating," She defended herself, "Ever since the curse broke. Technically. We were dating way before that."
"What? When?"
"First night in Storybrooke. You won't get it, but seeing Emma in that tank top and jeans screwed Regina up in a major way."
Snow frowned. "You're right, I don't get it."
"Well, what drew you to Charming?"
"You. You introduced me to him, remember?"
"Oh yeah. I've got to fix that." A notebook swirled into existence in her hand, followed by a feathered quill, and she scribbled something into the book. "We've got a few changes to make to fix everything."
"We?"
"Oh, sorry. Still speaking in plurals. I feel like one person, but, it's hard to think as one, you know?"
"I don't."
She leveled the schoolteacher with an unimpressed stare. "Stupid is not a good look on you, dear."
Snow's jaw dropped in horror at the frighteningly familiar verbiage, before pointing an accusatory finger. "I knew it! You absorbed my daughter!"
She raised her hands again, along with a delicate eyebrow. "I assure you, it was a mutual absorbtion. Absorbing? Absorption… yeah, that's it." She crossed her legs, her notebook and feather quill falling over and disappearing in a cloud of white smoke before it hit the ground. "We fused. Regina and Emma. Not Emma and I, not Regina and I. Emma and Regina. I am someone else. Emmalina."
Snow White didn't want to admit it – the woman before her had explained it quite well at this point – but she still didn't fully understand. "But how?!"
"True Love's Kiss, of course."
"BULLSHIT!"
"Woah!" Emmalina let out a laugh, loud and pure, and –
Snow winced as a bird smacked into her window.
The sound made Emmalina laugh harder.
"Stop!" she cried, distressed. Emma wouldn't have laughed at that… would she?
"Oh, relax," she sighed, waving her off, even as she tried to suppress her giggles. "It's just – I've never heard you swear before. In any lifetime. Fairest in the land, my ass." Waving again, in the general direction of the window, she watched with a smirk as the blue jay got up, shook its little beak and flew off. "Now, do you believe me?" She tilted her head, enjoying the look of shock on her friend's face at the small bird's resurrection.
"H-how – "
"Light magic. Like I said, stupid doesn't suit you. Anyway, I can't really tell you exactly how this happened. It's never happened before. There seems to be some criteria that has never been met before, from my studies in the tomb; a criteria that I don't think has been replicated before. Two magically powerful people, a cocktail of light and dark magic, A pair of true loves, and a heart made from true love. So, you're to blame a little bit for this."
Snow took another, deep look at Emmalina as she paused to present herself, her familiar smile and high cheekbones and green eyes and familiar vein in her forehead… wait.
"Your scar… on your lip…"
"Oh," Emmalina suddenly frowned, reaching up to place her finger on exactly where the scar on her upper lip would have been. "Well, supposedly, I'm a mix of all of our best features. So physical flaws wouldn't carry over. Emma loved it, but Regina felt that it reminded her of Cora."
Mary Margaret bit her lip. She knew that anything about Cora was a sensitive topic, so the fact that this woman was so casually mentioning the abuse she took from her mother was uncomfortable in itself, in front of her proxy killer no less, but it gave the entire story some merit. "How did this happen? What triggered this?"
The witch grinned, and her green eyes glimmered. "I don't think you want to get into the gritty details of that. Let's just say we went to bed in a coma-ish type of way, and I woke up this morning as Emmalina. Name pending." She leaned forward on her elbows. "Why would your daughter falling in love with Regina be, in your words, 'bullshit'? Or is the other way around any crazier?"
Snow tried to find the right words, realizing that she wasn't entirely sure who she was talking to at the moment; or rather, which personality may surface. "I just can't see it. Emma's good. Regina's… not."
"Evil, yes, I get it. And they say nicknames don't stick past high school." She sat back in the chair. "Such a hypocrite, saying that you believed all those years that there might be some good in her. Honestly, I thought you would've had problems with the age difference. Regina was thirty-three when Emma was born, you know."
Snow White narrowed her eyes. "I'm aware."
"Oh, let the past be the past," she waved her off again. "I did. Or rather, Emma did."
"What? Why would Emma be mad at me in the first – "
"Do I have to spell it out for you? I haven't been doing that enough this past ten minutes?" Emmalina started to look annoyed. "You didn't abandon your baby in another realm? You didn't rely on a prophecy told by the baddest villain in a millennium and take it as gospel when it comes to the safety of your two-minutes-old daughter?"
"What – I – Regina put us in that situation! We didn't have a choice, Emma!"
"First: don't talk about Regina like she's not in the room. Second: I'm not Emma; I don't think that shortening of our name would really work in this instance. Third: We all have a choice. All of us. I had a long talk with my son about that just this morning, but you know why Emma doesn't regret giving him up for adoption? She knew they were going to take him, anyway. She vetted out a list of potential candidates. She knew she was giving him to someone wonderful, and someone who really wanted a child. She knew he was going to have a better life in Regina. I know this family likes to take leaps of faith and everything usually working out for the better far more than it should've, but come the fuck on! If you were so hopeful about everything, then why didn't you just keep your goddamn baby?"
Snow's lips trembled, taking a step back. Emmalina looked murderous, still seated, legs still crossed, but with a frown she knew all too well. "You speak so much about family and love, but you're really talking about your husband and your son, people you would never part from. And your father. Don't get me fucking started with him."
"Don't you dare – !" Snow started, only to be silenced with another wave.
"No. I dare." She stood, and suddenly Snow was flung into the chair she just occupied. Emmalina paced the floor, stepping in white leather heels, and only then Snow realized that the bright, flawless leather number she wore reminded her of what the Evil Queen would have worn in the Enchanted Forest, with a lot more white and a lot less cleavage. "The fusion isn't a hundred percent yet," she grit, shaking her black tresses about, "Emma thought she had let the past of your abandonment go, but Regina hasn't. Regina thought she let the memories of your father go. Emma hasn't. I guess I'm a little pissed at everything. Soon, I'll have all of this sorted, and we'll be one. I still have the memories of raising Henry in two different lifetimes. And one of them is completely manufactured." She shook her head. "That's love. Taking each other's pain as their own, each other's enemies as your own. Sorry to tell you this, Mary Margaret, but I don't think even half of me likes you right now."
Snow drew quick breaths as Emmalina stalked closer, smirking that damned familiar smirk that she had faced down countless times before, in another time. "Emma wants to hurt you. Regina wants to watch."
She suddenly frowned and turned away, sighing to herself. "But Regina knows Emma might regret it. So Emmalina will forgive you. For everything. It's all in the past, right? New person, new slate. Besides, if you had been a good mom and made sure to keep her in your arms, Emma would have been a baby for twenty-eight years. Henry wouldn't have been born. Regina wouldn't have found her other half. I suppose I should thank you for getting her red herring killed."
She waved again, and Snow found herself able to speak. "Red herring? Daniel?"
"She was sixteen. Of course, she thought that he was her true love. He was the first person who gave her positive reinforcement, other than Prince Henry. Of course, their kisses never broke any curses. In fact, it began Regina's cursed life. Regina and Emma's kiss; now that meant something. It was the beginning of a new life, in yours truly."
"Congratulations."
"Thank you," she grinned, not minding the sarcasm in the slightest. "Because despite your best efforts, you gave us so much in common. I mean, they liked their sexual relationship just fine," she continued, ignoring Snow's disgusted grimace, "and maybe that's all it would've been. There were a few road bumps, of course. Some therapy. Emma almost chopped down Regina's apple tree that one time, after a, um, minor crisis." She grinned fondly. "Emma took one look at Regina's scared face and dropped the axe. After the curse broke, she could have repaired the tree from the one swing Emma did take, but she didn't. She loves it just as much. She admires Emma's strength. Their relationship took a deeper meaning, after that."
Well, she more than 'admired' Emma's physical prowess, but she decided she wasn't going to tell Snow White that.
"Anyway, back to me," she continued conjuring a small throne for herself. "You might have been wondering how this was happening these past five years? Well, I have to be honest, it was easier than you'd think. But not much different than the lie you've believed. Just the Evil Queen and the Savior in love, while trying not to be too pissed off at the rest of the world. And you guys. Man, you guys tried real hard to piss us off. Well, me." She frowned. "I guess, speaking in past tense, us. Yeah, 'us' works. You pissed us off. From the dwarves to the fairies to our extended family."
She sat down on the marble seat and crossed her legs again, folding her hands and smiling charmingly at Snow White. "So where do you want to begin?"
Author's Note: Should be a relatively short story, and a bit of a crackfic, but I'm having fun with this - pointing it out first, this seems eerily similar to what I did with Choices, Choices, what with the making fun with the series as a whole, but more of an homage to the fanfictions I've read than the show itself. Still, a brilliant show, but I am very much immersed in the SwanQueen fandom, and names like SkinnyProcrastinator (We'll miss you!), hunnyfresh, caballlah, SwanQueenUK and many other great authors you can find in my favs at [s dot rihaansfics dot com].
A Special Thank you to the Patrons who helped me get through a shitty time (Alexander S, Ranma, AtomicStryker, and mxwn).
Fair Warning: No BS. As you might have guessed, Pure SwanQueen to the end. So prepare for some serious retconning.
Thank you so much for reading, and you can find the next chapter at my beautiful looking website (link above). And two chapters after that can be read through unsavory, possibly illegal means. *wink*
Please review! It's been a forgotten art nowadays, and we can bring it back. Together. I believe in you.
